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captain-mj · 1 year

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does selkie!soap know that ghost is a changeling? if not can we have him figure it out?

Yes! I absolutely fucking can! Continuation from this post

Soap looked at his husband, watching him carefully. Ghost had eaten twelve pancakes. Not eggos. Eggos would be reasonable. Twelve, full sized pancakes.

To be fair, Ghost had been the one cooking them, so it wasn’t that noticeable to anyone else. They all had large appetites. Big men, big muscles, bit metabolisms.

But Soap was watching Ghost make more for himself and he was clearly trying to make it seem like he hadn’t eaten that much. It was odd.

His husband. What a funny phrase to be able to use now. Anyway. His husband was odd.

He poured more syrup on his pancakes, he made chocolate chip for Soap, blueberry for Gaz, strawberry for Price and from the looks of it, plain for himself. Ghost ate in the kitchen, probably to keep them from seeing his face. It wasn’t unusual, but Soap couldn’t help but wonder how often Ghost was using it to hide his odd eating habits.

The next was simpler. Ghost’s gloves had torn. His hands looked normal but very pale.

“Guess you don’t get out in the sunlight much, huh LT?”

“Not really.” Ghost rubbed his hands together gently.

Soap tossed him again and turned away, only to hear it thunk against the floor. He looked backed to see Ghost just staring at it.

“I’ll stick to knives.”

“There’s a lot of people. I’d feel better if you have a gun.”

“Do you have one with a grip?”

“What? No.” Soap stared at him for a minute and Ghost relented. He picked the gun up and followed him.

It wasn’t until later that he finally got to put the gun down and Soap saw them. Everywhere the metal had touched his hands were burns. Severe ones. In parts, especially where he’d have it pressed hard to his palm, the skin had started to bubble and crack.

Ghost noticed him staring and dropped the gun. “Ironic. A sniper who can’t actually touch it. S’why I wear the gloves...”

“Ah...” Soap thought of the steel and therefore the iron in the gun. His whole not human theory was starting to make much more sense.

It was such an odd topic to bring up, but they were on it and Soap was determined to use it.

“Yeah, personally I grew up Roman Catholic. Got the baptism and everything.” According to his dad, who had laughed about it, his mom had begged him not to, worried it would kill Soap or make him human. According to his mom, his dad had jumped at the idea that baptism might make him human. It did neither of course. “What about you, LT?”

“My mom was Protestant, but I never was baptized. She stopped taking us before I was old enough to do it.”

“Why?”

Ghost paused, glancing around. No one was really focusing on them so he shrugged. Soap had noticed that although the bond effected him in the usual ways, the world revolving more around Ghost, him always being aware of Ghost, feeling Ghost’s presence around him at all times, yada, yada, it had also affected Ghost, which was interesting. It made him a little more open with Soap. Just Soap. If that sent a thrill through him, no one needed to know.

“My mom took me and Tommy every Sunday. My dad occasionally tagged along. One day, one of the patrons caught me stealing an extra piece of the communion bread. This lady made it fresh and it was fucking great. They told my dad and he hit me with a bible so hard it knocked me to the ground. Right in front of everyone. My mom stopped taking us to church after that.” Ghost told it all to him quietly. “I had liked going, even though I didn’t believe in it. Always felt insincere, but it made my mom happy.”

“Oh.” Soap stared. “How old were you?”

“I think I was seven.” Ghost hummed and looked away. “Never got baptized. Probably good thing. They always heated the holy water up.”

Soap prepared himself for the joke of “boiling the hell out of it” but after a moment he realized Ghost was sincere.

The holy water burned him.

Soap suddenly had a vague idea of what he was.

Soap had a heavy suspicion at this point. He had a feeling he knew exactly what Ghost was, so he decided to do a little experiment to see.

Before he left that morning, he turned his shirt inside out and then slipped his hoodie over it. The only exception being creatures that had to notice.

Ghost stared at him for a moment before he simply turned away and ignored him. Soap tried to get his attention and Ghost just wrinkled his nose and turned away from him.

Gaz gave them an odd look and Soap just smiled awkwardly before stepping away. He fixed his clothing and tried once again to strike up a conversation.

Immediately, Ghost actually talked to him. It was his usual rather quiet amount but it was definitely there.

“Why did you ignore me?”

“What are you talking about MacTavish?”

“Right now. You ignored me.”

“You weren’t talking to me a minute ago. You need to go to the medics?” Ghost seemed genuinely concerned.

“Nah, probably just dehydrated. I’ll go grab a drink.” He smiled at him and stepped away.

Gaz looked at him. “I think Ghost is going a tad crazy.”

“Nah, think he’s fucking with me.” Soap covered for him.

Gaz didn’t look like he believed him but he dropped it.

“Johnny, why are we on a secluded beach in the middle of the fucking night?” Ghost had followed him though. In his civvies, the soft hoodie and sweatpants clinging to all the right places. His mom didn’t warn him how bad marriage would feel at first. Or more, how bad one sided marriage would feel. He wanted to attack Ghost. Throw himself at him and claim his husband in every way he could.

“Simon. I need to talk to you about something.” Ghost turned towards him. Soap vaguely put the face he remembered from Los Almas over the ski mask. He was glad Ghost went with this instead of the plastic mask and balaclava. That day, the kohl makeup had run all the way down Ghost’s face, covering his cheeks and his nose. His hair was shaggy and curled oddly, sticking up all over the place. It had been shoved down as if to cover his ears and it felt in his eyes. Despite clearly being cut into a buzzcut recently, it looked like it hadn’t worked too well. Soap had wondered at the time if it had been unfinished and he had to rush it.

Now that he knew he was a changeling, it made more sense. Their hair tended to grow unnaturally fast and choppy.

“What do need to talk about Johnny?” Ghost seemed worried. He glanced at the coat around Soap’s shoulders.

“I... I know you’re not human.” Soap decided to start there.

There was a beat of silence.

Then Ghost laughed. There was a slightly bitter edge to it. “Oh, fuck off, Soap. You know, out of everyone, I never expected that shit from you.” He started to turn away from him.

“I’m not either.” Soap thought he was playing coy. It made sense, Soap would never admit it so easily and this Ghost. King of not saying shit about himself.

“MacTavish,” Ghost looked at him, “you may be experiencing psychosis. Sometimes men on the battlefield...” Soap stared at him, hearing him like he was muffled through more than just his mask.

Did Ghost... not know?

There was no way Ghost didn’t. He hid away all his oddities. Been so careful. There was no way he didn’t at least expect it.

“Have you ever heard of a selkie?” Soap interrupted.

“The seals that turn into humans. Yeah, I guess.”

“I need you to understand I’m not... I’m...” Soap sighed. “Just. I need you to trust me for a just a minute, okay?”

Ghost stared at him for a long while before nodding slightly. “Okay.”

Soap slowly slipped his coat off and then started to undress. He kept his eyes downcast, but he could feel Ghost’s eyes on him. Scanning over him with growing alarm.

Soap wrapped his coat around him before he shucked off his underwear.

“Johnny.” Ghost said softly and there was something there that Soap needed a lot more time to unpack.

“Trust me.” Soap said softly. “Just... could you turn around for a minute?”

“You’re willing to undress in front of me but not do... whatever you’re about to do?” Ghost sounded... amused. It made butterflies in his stomach.

“It’s unpleasant.” Soap said softly. Ghost finally turned around him.

His coat fused with his skin and the transformation was... unpleasant to look at it. His fur laced with him and he sorta fell to the ground, luckily able to muffle himself so it didn’t startle Ghost.

There he was. A harbor seal. He barked and Ghost turned around slowly, staring at him.

Ghost continued to stare. And continued. And stared.

Soap slowly rolled over to his expose his stomach. He couldn’t exactly talk, but his dogtags, which he had clearly been wearing, were around his neck now.

Ghost slowly moved closer, touching the chain and reading the name. He didn’t move, staying crouched over him.

Soap could see the ring of gold around his pupils again.

“Oh.” Ghost said softly.

The transformation back was much easier and faster. His snout seemed to wrinkle before splitting and he poked his head out, shaking his head. It looked like he had just had the coat over his face, but Ghost knew better.

“Take your mask off.” Soap muttered against him, the coat splitting down his chest to go back to a more coat like shape. His bare chest was out but he was smart enough to cover his lower half.

Ghost stared at him even longer and Soap knew for a fact he hadn’t blinked the entire time. He reached up and pulled Ghost’s mask off for him.

There was Simon.

Oh.

Oh God he’s incredibly hot.

Simon hadn’t put the make up on so Soap was treated to his freckles. They were... He sat up and grabbed Simon’s face who didn’t seem that surprised by it honestly.

They sparkled. They weren’t like a human’s at all. One, they were mostly shaped like stars instead of just dots and fleck. Two, they were a stunning gold color that reflected the moonlight.

Soap reached up and ran his hands through Ghost’s hair. It was just like before, spiky and uneven despite clearly being freshly trimmed. His ears were pointed like an elf, too severe to look normal.

“When the body modifications came out, I just blamed it on that...”

“Do you... know?” Soap spoke gently to him but he couldn’t keep his hands to himself. His husband was right here.

“No. I don’t... know. I didn’t even know there were other things like me. Thought I was just... wrong.”

“I think you may be a changeling.” Soap admitted. “I may have... tested it. A couple of times, trying to see if I could figure it out.”

Ghost glared at him and he went to take his mask back, but Soap stopped him. “Johnny... Please.”

“Simon.” Soap said softly, pulling him a little closer and Ghost finally slid to his knees instead of crouching. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Simon looked at him and suddenly stiffened. “When I took your coat.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t... You didn’t purposely do anything.” Soap reassured.

“But I did do something.”

Soap sighed. “This isn’t... the conversation I wanted to have tonight... What do you know about selkies?”

“Take their coat and you can control them. That’s it.”

“Pretty accurate. It’s a little more than just control though. When someone holds my coat, there’s an instinct under my skin. A desperation to please is the best way I can put it. It’s a survival tactic to keep from being punished according to my mom. You do what you can to keep your master happy so they don’t strike out at you.”

“Have you...” Simon was touching him now. Holding his face and putting his arm around him. “Been...”

“Twice. Once when I was 12 for two months and once when I was 17 until I turned 19. The first one was by a kid my age and it wasn’t... nothing happened. People usually get concerned.” Johnny smiled at him.

“And the other one?”

Johnny shook his head. “Another day. Please.”

“Another day.” Simon promised. “But what did I do?”

“You gave it back. The way you did it... You pick it back in my hands. You didn’t let me grab it.”

“Is that bad?”

“We’re married. Kinda. It’s not legally binding, of course. It can be ignored. Even broken.” Soap mumbled the last parts. It hurt. He’d like to blame it on his coat. That it was making him a little crazy. But he knew it wasn’t just that. The idea of being rejected by Ghost was... He cared a lot for Ghost and it had nothing to do with being not quite human.

Ghost was staring again. “Since the hospital. That was weeks ago.”

“Yeah. I suppose it was. Look, I can tell you how to break it.” Soap felt Ghost’s mouth on his and the arm pulled him closer, right against his broad chest.

“I haven’t been a very good husband to you.” Ghost joked, but there was a layer of stress underneath it.

Soap shrugged. “I haven’t been a very good bride.” He leaned in closer.

“Would you... like to be?”

“If you’d have me.”

Ghost huffed. “I’d be an idiot not to.”

“Good. Although, you are going to have to court me. My mom is not very impressed with you right now.” Soap got up.

“You talked about me to your mom?” Ghost was scrambling to get up and follow him.

“Of course. Had to tell her some Brit married me. She was worried.” He flashed him a smile and tossed him his mask.

“How the fuck do I court you?” Ghost tugged it on and followed him. He gathered up Soap’s clothes, watching him twirl around barefoot on the beach.

“Figure it out.”

“Can I have your mom’s number?”

“Why the fuck do you need that??”

“To ask her how! Also I want your mom to like me.”

#Johnny Soap Mactavish #Simon Ghost Riley #Soap Cod #Ghost COD #Soapghost #Ghostsoap #Soap x Ghost #Ghost x Soap #Macriley #Call of Duty #Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 #Selkie Soap

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vgtracy · 2 years

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I posted 42 times in 2022

3 posts created (7%)

39 posts reblogged (93%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@gordonthesquid

@scott-flyboy-tracy

@the-allie-gater

@ok-kayo

@selene-tempest

I tagged 29 of my posts in 2022

Only 31% of my posts had no tags

#gordonthesquid - 12 posts

#thunderbirds are go - 11 posts

#thunderbirds - 11 posts

#virgil tracy - 5 posts

#the-allie-gator - 5 posts

#thunderbirds fanfiction - 3 posts

#scott-flyboy-tracy - 3 posts

#gordon tracy - 2 posts

#rp - 2 posts

#scott tracy - 2 posts

Longest Tag: 28 characters

#dunno if it will go anywhere

My Top Posts in 2022:

Who in your life are you grateful for?

My family.

Ever, ever so grateful.

We have faced so much, but we have always faced it together.

My earliest memories are of my mother, father, big brother and little Johnny. I have always had their company and I know for that at least I am blessed. The terrible two came along a little later and turned our world upside down one by one, but I don’t love them any less.

::clears his throat and looks down::

Time has taken a lot. Mom. Dad. But we have also gained Kayo and Brains.

Mom and Dad…they may not be with us anymore, but they are in here…::thumps his breastbone with two fingers::

::that hand forms a fist as his eyes look down a little and grow distant:: I carry them with me.

::looks up again:: But I am grateful for the time I did have with them. Nothing can take those moments from me.

I have my family. We have each other.

And I am ever so grateful for that.

-o-o-o-

22 notes - Posted January 13, 2022

Clay

This one is entirely @janetm74 ‘s fault because she sent me this picture - https://sylvanthorn.tumblr.com/post/672819253903310848/mennyfox55-alfarer%C3%ADa

This fic is Warm Rain, but long into the future. It doesn’t go anywhere and is just a moment, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

-o-o-o-

“Okay, honey, hold it just like this…” He positioned his hands over hers and arranged her fingers so they smoothed the spinning clay just right.

He nudged the speed on the pottery wheel with one foot to a touch slower than usual and the lump of clay gradually began to round under their combined pressure.

Her hands were so small, still a little pudgy in youth, but she was growing so fast he feared he might blink and miss something important. His memory wasn’t as good as it used to be, but he knew enough and revelled in teaching his little Bea.

She giggled and squirmed in his lap. “It feels funny.”

A smile. “It is soft so we can shape it and make something.” He peered down at her in his lap. “What would you like to make?”

She twisted her lips up in thought, but didn’t let go of the spinning clay. “Can we make a bowl for Great-gran?”

Virgil’s grin widened. “Of course.”

“Can we make a purple one?”

He thought back to his studio supplies. “I think I have some glaze that can do the job.”

They were outside on the patio of the old villa, not far from the pool. Virgil had kept a lot of his studio equipment in the main house. It gave him an excuse to wander over and harass various brothers at whim.

Today Kay was down in Auckland and he had some time to himself with his Bea. She had inherited his art interests and combined them with her mother’s curiosity.

In other words, she peppered him with questions on a regular basis.

All of which he loved to answer.

Today’s was about crockery and he had the equipment. It was a good an excuse as any to play with a little clay with his daughter.

She giggled again.

“What is it?”

“My hands are all gooey.” Another chortle. “And so are yours.”

He let out a laugh. “All part of the fun. Now, let’s make Great-gran a bowl.”

He guided her fingers to the centre of the lump of spinning clay. She exclaimed in wonder as he triggered the beginning of a hole in the centre of the mass. Her jaw dropped as they widened it together and the lump became vaguely bowl shaped.

“Now we put one hand on the inside and one on the outside and gently…gently, we can’t rush this…thin the clay out.”

A little more expertise was needed for this and, if he was honest, it had been quite a long time since he had played potter. But the memory was there and he made it work.

Memory, after all, was everything.

There was definitely something about soft clay under his fingertips that sparked more, but this with Bea? This was making memories.

He became aware that they were being watched only gradually, Bea taking up all his focus, but the quiet approach of his eldest brother registered before Bea looked up, grinning. “Uncle Scotty!”

“Hey, Beahive. What have you convinced your daddy to do today?”

Virgil couldn’t help but smile at the flickering mischief in those blue eyes.

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26 notes - Posted January 13, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Cherry

The wine was sweet. A little too sweet if he was honest, but he was open-minded.

The woman across from him smiled a little nervously and took another sip before clearing her throat. “So, Mr Tracy, thank you for inviting me.”

Virgil smiled over his glass. “My pleasure.” It was his turn to take a sip. This was usually Scott’s gig. Virgil wasn’t one to wine and dine anyone.

Not that he couldn’t be the suit in Tracy Industries. He had no problem with that, it was just that usually he was talking to other engineers and brainstorming, not taking them out to expensive restaurants.

But Lila was different. Or he hoped.

She joined the New York office early last year and had caught his eye during one of their crisis meetings.

Crisis meetings were specialist sessions Virgil held himself when a rescue involved faulty infrastructure. Faulty infrastructure that needed an immediate solution that Tracy Industries might be able to provide.

International Rescue saved the day. Tracy Industries saved the future.

The first time he met her, she had been yelling at him across a holocomm from the other side of the Pacific plus at least one continent. She had called him out in front of everyone.

It was morning in New York. It was also morning on Tracy Island…3am the next day, and Virgil was on his last straw after a very long rescue involving a bridge collapse that should never have happened.

She had far too much energy and was calling him out on both stress and financial calculations.

And she was right, which derailed him even more.

But all through that, she was wearing a bright cherry pink lipstick that set off her chestnut hair just perfectly. Her lips were distracting. They were the perfect colour.

“Mr Tracy?”

He shook himself, both in the past and the present, and took another sip of wine.

Definitely too sweet.

He cleared his throat. “I felt I owed you dinner after my poor conduct last week.”

She blinked before smiling a little nervously and looking down at her lap. “I think I’m lucky I didn’t get fired, shouting at you like that.”

Virgil put the wine glass down. “You had every right to say what you did. I was at fault.” Was it bad that he was happy she was wearing the same lipstick today? That he was quite mesmerised by her nervous smile?

He wasn’t one for physical attraction much. Sure, he looked, who didn’t? But the true lure was intelligence and personality.

If he was honest with himself, Lila’s outburst had reminded him more of family than anything else. Telling him he was being stupid when necessary.

It didn’t happen very often, Virgil was far from reckless, but there were times where his passion overwhelmed his sensibilities and took him a step too far.

This had been one of those times.

The team at Tracy Industries knew him as a Tracy. Sometimes Virgil wondered if Scott and their father had accidentally created some kind of cult with their workers. Their employees were often devoted to them in ways that Virgil didn’t quite see anywhere else. It spoke of far too many pedestals.

But then there were the team members like Scott’s executive assistant who pushed the employee/employer relationship to its boundaries by either yelling across the Pacific or alerting International Rescue that they had a situation in their own villa and could someone please put Mr Tracy to bed now?

So Lila.

At 3am.

With cherry red lipstick.

Had inadvertently joined a select group of Tracy herders in being the first one willing to yell at Virgil Tracy.

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28 notes - Posted May 11, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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chisheya · 3 years

Text

hanahaki disease [niragi x reader x chishiya] highschool au!

Summary: love is reckoned to make us powerful; not susceptible - as much as i tried to convince myself that. as much as i tried to stay strong; tough and heroic, enough to risk it all and let my emotions surge on the exterior. strong enough to be crushed yet again, to love and be loved again - knowing my fragility.

i’ve known the agony and lament sufficiently enough that it demolished my sanity, left my soul burning away, gradually fading into ashes and disappearing like dust under the moonlight’s breeze. and the funny unfunny part is - i wish i had told him, perhaps one day i will.

‘‘I have loved you since I first laid eyes on you. My love bloomed like a flower in my chest.’‘

Tag list: (if you want to be tagged, let me know because the previous post got deleted for some weird reason lol)

Word count: 2.5k

The sun's soft twinkles crawl over house rooftops, and in an early hour, despite it, it still felt like a chilly morning. Early as it is, the neighborhood was caught up with parents rushing with their children, some going to work, some even rushing late. Thankfully, the riots of youngsters were vetoed by the sound of Supermassive Black Hole by Muse playing through my earphones. I was deliberately walking down the alley on my way to school, gripping the hem of my uniform and cursing to myself that this skirt was of no use to at least keep my legs warm.

The reckless gust reaching from my left side provoked me to jump out of my skin, revolting me from my daydream.

‘’God's sake-’’ I turn my head only to see Chishiya standing next to me, with a smirk on his lips. The sudden view of him caused me to blush, as my brain screamed oh-look-your-crush. Although you could rarely see this guy smiling and being friendly, his agenda was incompatible. Clever, crucial, and cunning as he is, he always had a special place in my heart. Why, you ask? I'd love to know that too... Maybe because he has been my friend since forever.

''You must be that cold, huh,'' Chishiya says sarcastically. ''Y-yeah.'' I murmur, ''anyway, again one of early practicals at the hospital today?'' ''Correct.''

''Yikes,'' I add, clicking my tongue, ''good luck.''

''Have you decided if you'll stay here in Tokyo?'' Chishiya pops a question, clearing his throat, as his face remains immersed on the boulevard in front of us. ''Huh, what do you mean?'' I add, looking up at him, wishing he'd look back at me. But he never does...

''For university.'' ''Oh, that,'' is all I say, before taking the next few seconds to think what to proceed with, ''yeah, Tokyo - I guess, still not sure yet.''

''It better be Tokyo or I'm disowning you.'' He says in a stern voice, delivering it with a smirk as he quickly runs his hand through my hair, resulting in becoming a mess.

''Hey!'' I chuckle, about to return the favor but he succeeded to grab my wrist and stop me just on time. Shucks.

Chishiya and I have been friends since childhood, as our dads have been friends since their early school days as well. He's in his third year in med school and I'm about to graduate in less than a month and enter university in few months. Not to mention, living close enough in the same neighborhood visiting Shuntaro's family every Sunday for dinner was a ritual that my dad, Aguni, and I couldn't stop doing. My mother has had enough of Tokyo so she decided to leave for England. Yeah, pretty simple...it has only been dad and me since. Not like I regret staying with dad, and if there was the father that would win The Dad of the Year award, it would be him. Playing cards meanwhile drinking wine was a post-dinner ritual for our dads, later through time, Chishiya joining them as well. In most cases, I'd end up just observing how they play and anticipating who's going to win. From Aguni being the best to, Shuntaro's dad, a few years later as Chishiya evolved enough his cunning games he beat them in it. He became a card game master, no jokes.

I didn't notice it has come for the time for us to go different paths, as my school was in the complete opposite direction.

''So,'' I murmur, stopping and turning to face him, ''I guess time to say goodbye.''

''Good luck, kid.'' He says, giving me a soft smile. Ah, if he only knew how something so insignificant and minor to him has such a consequence on my heart. But he never will though. As I know, what we are and what we are not.

I just smiled as I watch him turn his back on me and leave first. He always leaves first. I stayed few more seconds as his figure slowly fades of to distance I get ready to go my way.

⋞ 〈 ⏣ 〉 ⋟

After the last class, I choose to go to a nearby library to catch up on some assignments. The library is a soft of the enormous coffee shop yet one can stay all day and feel good even if one buys nothing at all. That's the discrepancy. It is a place of welcome for everyone rather than for "customers." This is not a money-nexus venue yet a love-nexus space, and that makes it a real treasure in this city.

I was relinquished and dazzled by the book in front of me, until the moment someone’s voice yanks me out of my thoughts.

''Since classes are over, want to grab lunch?'' I feel a hand placing softly on my left shoulder as a soft boyish voice peaks behind me.

''Niragi,'' my lips stretch in a smile as I embrace my best friend in a hug, ''of course, you mind if Chishiya tags along as well?''

''Oh,'' he mouths, providing it with a vague look, as I feel him stiffen up a bit and breaking the hug before proceeding, ''Chishiya..too?''

''Yeah!''

''Sure,'' he says, providing it with a soft smile, ''definitely..''

''Great, I'll let him know then.''

⋞ 〈 ⏣ 〉 ⋟

Niragi and I walked after school side by side, on the way to Shibuya where we agreed to meet up with Chishiya. As we have arrived early, we stand by a big poster advertisement. I gently lean my back onto it, facing the industrious avenues of Shibuya wandering with people. Niragi, leaning as well, right next to me.

''So, have you decided? Is it going to be Tokyo or London?''

''Hm,'' I murmur as his question breaks me out of my trance, ''regarding studies?'' He nods.

''Honestly, not sure,'' I hesitate, before proceeding, ''but I'd love to stay in Tokyo.'' This was not a lie, but London on the other hand, was just an excuse in case my health gets worse. An agreement was made with my dad that it'd be best to stay there with my mom and focus on getting better.

''Tokyo.'' I sigh, still caught up thinking what if I have to end up having to go back to London. What do I do then? And more importantly, what do I tell them? The minor, simple thought of lying to the people I deeply care about stings.

''And you?''

''Tokyo,'' he says softly while looking down, smiling - as the thought if he had something that binds him to dwell in this city, ''I already got accepted in for game engineering.''

I knock him softly on top of his head, standing on my tippy toes. Though he was portrayed as the delicate and sweet guy he is, he was taller than both Chishiya and me.

''Ouch,'' he exclaims as his hand rests on top of his head, my action catching him off guard, ''why did you do that?''

''Why haven't you told me, little idiot?''

''I planned to,'' he giggles, a wide smile as I've never seen scattering across his delicate features, ''I was waiting for you to confirm you got in your desired major as well.''

Yeah, I have, Niragi. It's just that I might not even be able to go because of my health. The phrases, the verdict, that I desired I could have mouthed out. But I couldn't, not now. Not when we're about part ways, and the way I want to remember these recollections is by them as their happy-selves, us cycling through alleys of Tokyo, eating noodles in the park during chilly nights, by city lights as the background noise of crickets was vetoed by our laughter. The recollections, moments I'll protect in my psyche permanently.

I just remained silent, looking at my friend as he was smiling and looking off to distance till he started waving to someone. I shift my gaze only to see Chishiya's figure approaching us, hands in his pockets as usual.

''Hello there, peasants.'' Chishiya teases, as he finally approaches us.

''Excuse me, lord Shuntaro.'' Niragi scoffs at him, crossing his arms.

''So where will we head to?''

''Whoa, Morizono, not even embracing your friend in a warm hug and you're already talking about eating,'' Chishiya says falsifying pain in his voice, ''I'm hurt.''

''Chishiya,'' I let out, rolling my eyes at his statement, ''I know you don't do hugs.'' I proceed, nudging his forearm slightly, hoping that the warmth I felt growing in my cheeks wasn't showing.

''Fuunji or Ichiran Shibuya?'' Niragi says, clicking his tongue.

''Fuunji,'' I mutter, at the same time as Chishiya adds, ''Ichiran.'' Our eyes met instantly as we both realized our choices were different.

Do I have to mention that I'm probably already blushing? No, because heck - yes I am.

Oh boy, here we go. Let him have his way, Y/N.

As you always do.

''You know what, let's go to Ichiran,'' I exclaim, looking in between my best friends waiting for them to agree.

''Ichiran it is,'' Niragi exclaims.

A little while later, our food has finally arrived. The moment it lands on the table, Niragi digs at his sweet and sour soup and pulls out all the cubes of carrot. I don't say anything, I really couldn't care less about table manners and there's always something interesting going on in his head. Chishiya calm and collected as he is, starts eating at a slow pace. After swallowing his first bite, he breaks the silence, ''we must go somewhere to celebrate your birthday, Y/N.''

''I'm not sure-''

Niragi peeks up at me with sticky fingers in his mouth. Meanwhile, Chishiya adds, through the mouthful, that I could just about make out the name "Kyoto."

As my mouth was full of food as well, I just nod seriously.

"That's a great idea, Chishiya. I never thought of that." Niragi grins, still with the fingers in his mouth, then he scoops them up and lines them neatly next to his stocking.

Chishiya holds out a cup of soju, "for Y/N." Niragi's hand comes over and snatches it up, his grin as wide as his cheeks will stretch, and scatters back.

Chishiya and I just exchanged looks, laughing at his silliness.

We drank soju, we were already merry and full, we told the most terrible of jokes. That was us. Casual, informal, yet caring enough to make the time we spend together joyful.

⋞ 〈 ⏣ 〉 ⋟

After grabbing lunch with Chishiya and Niragi, I headed straight home. The thought of visiting Kyoto for my birthday with them was still bouncing on my mind. The thing is, how to bring it up to Aguni? Hm? As loving and fond as he is of both of them, the thought of sending his only daughter away with two boys on a trip probably sounded far away from a brilliant idea. Sigh, I guess it'll take a lot to convince him.

''Dad, I'm home!'' I exclaim, meanwhile closing the doors behind me and taking off my shoes in the hallway.

''Someone's back home early, huh?'' Aguni says chuckling, as he plants a soft kiss on my forehead.

''Yup, something smells delightful,'' I say, meanwhile slapping my hands in excitement and taking my seat.

''Ah, you sneaky,'' He adds, taking the seat as well across me, ''it's your favorite - pad thai chicken wok.''

''So,'' I began, meanwhile randomly picking food with chopsticks in my plate, ''I have a question.''

''Yes?'' Aguni murmurs, mouthful, gazing up at me. ''So you know that my birthday is next week...'' I say awkwardly, placing my chopsticks gently on the table.

''Of course, how would I forget my daughter's birthday?'' He scoffs, butthurt that his daughter thinks he's that forgetful.

''No, of course not.'' I chuckle, ''but I did want to ask you something, uh...''

''Go ahead, silly.''

Just say it. Now or never. And I do - ''I've been thinking of visiting Kyoto with Chishiya and Niragi-''

''Not happening.''

''But-''

''You? On a trip? With two boys?'' his voice stern as he glares up at me, causing me to swallow, ''you must be out of your mind to think I'll let you, Y/N. Boys your age are wild.''

''No, there's going to be more of other friends...too, from school.'' I start, slightly panicking as I was also trying to think of the ways to get him to approve, ''not just Chishiya and Niragi, although you know they're my closest friends.'' I proceed further, looking around the food on the table, as I noticed he has almost cleared out his plate, and yet there was still chicken left in mine. Splendid, a perfect way to bribe him now.

''Plus,'' I mutter, as I start taking out the chicken from my plate, putting on his, his eyes now fully focused on that chicken, ''I know you trust them enough to protect me if anything happens, right?'' I grin, awkwardly.

''Only because they are aware who's your father and someone not to mess with.'' He adds, still not convinced enough, but still taking the small pieces of chicken with his chopsticks.

''Uh, yeah,'' I murmur, as I watch him, eating up those last few pieces of chicken as if they are his last, ''beside your protectiveness, what do you think?''

''Y/N, you've forgot one thing.'' Aguni says with a serious tone, placing down his chopsticks.

''What?'' I question, acting dumb. Expecting him to answer, he just remains silent and gives me an even worse glare now, ''doctor's appointment,'' I add, ''come on, it doesn't have to be next week as well. Just check with them if they can postpone it.''

He preserves silent, still staring up at me with a serious look on his face. Sigh.

''A trip with my friends is more important. Not to mention, it's our last as we're all parting ways soon because of university.''

''To you. But to me, your health is more important Y/N.''

''I...understand, dad,'' I sigh, looking up at him, falsifying a smile, ''but look at me, I'm feeling fine. I've never been better.''

''Same as you claimed in the past, until it happened again and I was close to losing you forever.'' He asserts, this time his voice louder than before.

''Dad...cheer up,'' I exclaim, as I reach out my hand, placing it on top of his, ''it's...just because it happened then, doesn't mean it will happen again.''

''You don't know that. Your condition is serious-''

''I'll take care of myself. Alright?'' I murmur, squeezing his hand, ''please, can I go?''

''Alright, alright. Under one condition, take care of yourself and as soon as you get back we're going to the doctors. Promise?''

''I promise.'' I holler, lunging from my seat to hug him before storming off to my room. As soon as I shut the door behind me, I lean my back on it.

There was an eerie sentiment I felt within, a good sort though - just not sure for what exact reason yet. It felt like it was the calling card of an adventure, paths awaiting, what will transpire. Whatever was ahead could be a great challenge, and there could be tears, but it was an exploration to take and so I smiled. The inklings would come, perhaps when I’d least expected it, so I’m ready to take this leap of faith.

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makeste · 3 years

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BnHA Chapter 303: And What, Pray Tell, Is a “One For All”

Previously on BnHA: The Todorokis (really just Enji) looked at their children and went “how can we screw up all four of them in uniquely different ways” and proceeded to do just that. Touya was all “just because practicing how to set myself on fire better hasn’t worked to win my dad’s affections YET doesn’t mean it will NEVER work”, because child logic. Turns out setting oneself on fire real hard isn’t so effective at winning affections, but is actually incredibly effective when it comes to burning oneself to death, so there’s that. Back in the present day, the Todorokis basked in their various misplaced (again, except for Enji) feelings of guilt, and were all “anyway but get over yourself already Enji, you still have to do something to stop this kid”, and Shouto was all “I’ll help too”, and Enji was all “(╥_╥)”, and Hawks and Jeanist were all “[surreptitiously listening in from outside the door]”, and that’s basically where we left off.

Today on BnHA: Hawks and Jeanist are all “mind if we join you on this family journey?” and proceed to stroll in uninvited with their puns and their perceptive insights. Hawks is all “so to sum everything up, we’re fucked, but at least you have us here to help you out! by the way, no clue why I’m the first person to ask this in three hundred chapters, but wtf is One For All.” We then cut to Deku, who’s still all “[(－－)]z”, and All Might, who is all “I’m just going to ignore the extremely loud racket going on right outside this room.” Which, btw, is happening on account of Bakugou, who is all “(╬◣Д◢)” as Satou, Tsuyu, and Mineta cart him away. Anyway so that’s a lot of antics, and also it looks like Hawks has gotten tired of the Todorokis refusing to put the pieces together on their own about OFA and so he is fast-tracking that shit. And meanwhile Deku is chatting it up with the Vestiges exactly like we all thought. And now we have to wait another whole week for updates on all of this. This really is not fair.

omfg lol

“our bad, we were kind of accidentally listening in on purpose.” like I said last week guys, no fuss. it’s a tradition

OMG

I am absolutely fucking floored. Hawks literally said that so casually that it’s impossible for me to rewrite it so as to be even more casual. that’s literally what I would write in the “today on bnha” section. in fact I probably will write that

(ETA: just for laughs I tried it and it really worked.)

a couple more things to point out about this panel:

“TOP 3” omg yes. more like “top only” at this point, honestly. interested to see how that goes

Hawks’s phone is freaking the fuck out about something, calm down there

I know this is a standard Jeanist hair-fixing gesture that he does all the time, but I can’t help but form hypotheses about this being a stress reaction because Hawks’s hair is making him internally freak out. Hawks, if this man tries to get you alone with him and some hairspray and a comb, please for the love of god do not listen to him. get out of there and call the authorities

omg Shouto’s face

okay confession, I wasn’t really sold on the whole “Shouto has a schoolboy crush on Hawks” thing until exactly now, when I became 100% sold on it. that is adorable

and heck with it, gotta show Enji and Rei’s reactions here as well because lol

“omg my son who’s not my son, and he just overheard everything about me being a terrible shitty father and person overall, oh and plus my actual-son set him on fire and called him out on a national broadcast. I’m just gonna stare at him baffledly.” versus Rei, who is all “hmm, who are these people”

so Hawks is all “I got released from the hospital after one day for some reason so I made Jeanist drive me around places while we talked about life” but uh, heyyyyy, what’s Rei doing

okay, uh

SO FUCKING FORMAL OMFG. “SORRY MY KID TRIED TO BURN YOU TO DEATH, APPARENTLY HE DOES THAT” REI NO IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT

HAWKS IS ALL “I’M JUST GONNA LAUGH SINCE THAT’S MY DEFAULT RESPONSE TO BEING PROFOUNDLY UNCOMFORTABLE”

let me tell you a secret Hawks, it’s my default response too. ahahahahahahaha oh thank god Jeanist is helping her up -- AND MAKING A JEANS PUN, OF COURSE. IT’S BEEN ALMOST THIRTY SECONDS. MY MAN WAS DYING

“WTF IS ILLEGAL DENIM” he’s talking ‘bout them counterfeit jeans, Rei. Antoine Bugleboy knows

THANK YOU JEANIST!! OUT HERE ASKING THE RELEVANT QUESTIONS

damn straight. we’re not gonna sit around waiting another 300 chapters for this information on this man’s watch

now Hawks is telling Endeavor he used to watch videos of him all the time, and calling him his “childhood obsession” I can’t

OH MY SWEET STARS AND MOONS

1000% CANON. “SO CLOSE...” ARE YOU SERIOUS. YOU REALLY PUT THAT THOUGHT BUBBLE THERE AND EVERYTHING. “GOOD MORNING EVERYONE, SO JUST IN CASE YOU WEREN’T ALREADY AWARE, TODOROKI SHOUTO IS NOT ACTUALLY STRAIGHT.” HORIKOSHI KOUHEI I AM LITERALLY DUMBFOUNDED. THIS IS AMAZING

and meanwhile that look on Hawks’s face while he casually-but-not-really-casually-at-all asks this question. that phone app better be using his actual voice. I’m not sure I could take this scene in the anime at this point if it was like Alexa talking or something

that look in his eyes is basically saying that so far, based on the information he has absorbed up until this point, Hawks is prepared to view his former childhood obsession as a flawed but changed man. however I get the distinct feeling that depending on Endeavor’s answer now, he would be willing to drastically shift some of his opinions on him

(ETA: this is maybe my favorite panel in the entire chapter. the fact that his question isn’t addressed to anyone in particular, but his eyes are zeroing on on Endeavor. and the way his leaning-on-Shouto pose manages to be simultaneously nonchalant and yet ever-so-slightly protective. there’s so much going on in this one question and gesture and I’m mildly obsessed with it.)

however, Rei is all “that was me” and ONCE AGAIN WITH THE FACES IN THIS CHAPTER holy shit

Hawks definitely did not see that one coming sob. it’s so fun watching him frantically recalculate his ideas about this family every two seconds

DAMN IT HORIKOSHI I UNDERSTOOD THE PARALLELS ALREADY, YOU REALLY DIDN’T HAVE TO DO THIS

yes, Hawks, you get it. it’s not exactly the same, but it’s close enough. though unlike your shitty parents, Rei and Enji are at least trying

OKAY I SERIOUSLY CANNOT WITH ALL OF THIS

fljkdlaskfjlwkjl okay we’re doing the bullet-points breakdown here

first of all, the fact that poor little Shouto’s heart is still thumping away at this proximity and all he can think is “CLOSE” all intelligently as he stares at him with that face omg

and meanwhile Horikoshi has these STRATEGIC BANDAGES WRAPPED AROUND HIS CHEEKS TO HIDE ALL OF HIS SHOUJO BLUSHING omfg. SENPAI NOTICED YOU SWEETIE!!!

HAWKS YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY ZERO OBLIGATION TO WASTE ANOTHER SECOND OF YOUR LIFE WORRYING ABOUT THESE TWO ASSHOLES WHO NEVER SPARED YOU THE SLIGHTEST BIT OF REGARD OR CONCERN IN THEIR ENTIRE LIVES. THE NICEST THING YOUR MOM EVER DID FOR YOU WAS BUY YOU A $2 ENDEAVOR PLUSH FROM THE DISCOUNT BIN TO KEEP YOU QUIET, AND YOU WERE SO AWED BY THAT ONE ACT OF SORTA KINDA APPROXIMATE KINDNESS THAT YOU SHAPED YOUR ENTIRE WORLDVIEW AROUND IT. PLEASE LET ME PICK YOU UP IN A BIG HUG FOR JUST A SEC, YOU DESERVE THE WORLD AND YOU WERE ONE THOUSAND PERCENT JUSTIFIED IN LEAVING THEM IN THE DUST THE SECOND THAT YOU COULD

but all that said, he immediately recognizes that Shouto would also have had cause to do the same in his situation, and yet hasn’t. and so he has that much more admiration for him all of a sudden, which is just super sweet, and fully appropriate. Shouto does deserve props. I’m choosing to take this as an “it takes a lot of strength to be able to forgive, and people who choose to do that even though they’re not obligated to are really amazing" type of thing, as opposed to “people who don’t forgive other people who severely wronged them are bad.” and if I’m wrong and Hawks’s line here is meant to be seen as actual failing on his part, well then fuck that, but we’ll move on

SO NOW, DOWN TO BUSINESS!

I am so, so curious as to what kind of strategy Hawks has for this (if he even has any), so I’ll just be quiet now and read

so Hawks is summing up basically what we already knew -- that Tomura and his inner circle (curious that there’s no mention of AFO, because if Hawks doesn’t know about him, that implies almost no one does) are still on the lam with a few PLF stragglers and some High Ends; that a bunch of prisons have been “liberated” (I assume this means all of the inmates escaped, so if that’s the case then where’s Kurogiri??); that the HPSC is fucked; and that heroes are resigning all over the place, and so civilians are taking matters into their own hands

OH DAMN!?

does this mean we’ll actually see some international heroes?? I will LOSE MY DAMN SHIT omg

(ETA: apparently people who paid more attention to the first BnHA movie than I did recognized the silhouettes as belonging to some background characters from Two Heroes. so maybe they were just cameos and they’re not actually new characters who are soon to join us lol. oh well.)

anyway so Hawks agrees with the other Todorokis that Endeavor has no choice but to fight

awww

DON’T WORRY ENJI THEY’VE GOT YOUR BACK. WITH YOUR FLAMES, AND JEANIST’S PUNS, AND HAWKS’S BOYISHLY GOOD LOOKS, THE THREE OF YOU CAN DO ANYTHING YOU SET YOUR MINDS TO

so Enji is very pertinently asking why they’re standing by him in spite of the... [gestures vaguely to everything]

oh my lordy lord

Shouto you had better do something to combat this soon, or this man will sneak past you on my favorite character ranking after all. his face. his cheeky lil finger gun. the fact that he sums it up so fucking simply. “if someone is trying to do the right thing, I want to support them.” exactly. exactly

(ETA: and one last thing I love but forgot to mention, which is the fact that Hawks calls it a team-up despite the fact that he is clearly in charge.)

meanwhile Jeanist is all “as for me, at this point I just straight up don’t give a fuck”

I can’t handle how fucking cool this chapter is you guys

so Hawks is all “you good?” at Enji. and Enji...

if anyone needs me, I will be building myself a discourse-proof fort made entirely out of problematic characters. I don’t even care. I will go on living my life very happily in here

lol at Natsu being all “BUT DON’T THINK THIS MAKES US FRIENDS”

I’m living for this weird and no-doubt entirely unintended implication that Natsu and them all are gonna join in the fight with the rest of them. I mean, they do presumably all have very powerful ice quirks. and Natsu has medical training on top of that, and Fuyu is skilled at getting eight-year-olds to behave which could be a useful talent for dealing with Tomura hahaha I kid, but I’M JUST SAYING. who needs hero licenses anyway

OH SHIT FINALLY SOME DISCUSSION OF AN ACTUAL STRATEGY. even if it’s just a PR strategy

WHAKLHL

and now for some reason we’re flashing back to Natsu and Fuyu’s attempts to navigate through the media crowd outside the hospital

well I guess this is why I’m not the mangaka. if I were writing this I would have done something trite and predictable like using that “One for All” line as an excuse to cut to Deku!! as opposed to this entirely unrelated scene!!

seriously though why do we need to see this lol

no one in this crowd has ever heard of Alexander Dumas huh. or even the popular 2007 Disney Channel original movie, High School Musical 2

so now there’s an entire page of Hawks saying they need to know what One for All is, and Endeavor having one of those patented Todoroki WHOOSH realizations lmao look at this

just wait until this man figures out that one of the scrappy new interns he took on three months ago was actually the main character all along

SKDFIOHWIERLKSJGLWLK!!

NOW IS PROBABLY A GOOD TIME TO ASK MYSELF WHY I CHOSE THIS CHARACTER WHO KEEPS DISAPPEARING FOR SIX OR TWELVE OR FORTY CHAPTERS AT A TIME TO BE MY FUCKING FAVORITE. WELCOME BACK SON PLEASE DON’T SCREAM YOURSELF TO DEATH YOU STILL HAVE A HOLE IN YOUR TORSO

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

(ETA: can we just take a moment to appreciate how Bakugou even got so close to Deku’s room in the first place though. in this giant hospital with no idea of where to even go. does he have Deku Radar or something.)

YOU SIX ARE OFFICIALLY ON MY HIT LIST!! SPARE ME YOUR GOOD INTENTIONS!! MY BAKUDEKU REUNION KEEPS GETTING POSTPONED WEEK AFTER WEEK!! YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE HEROES WHERE IS YOUR CONCEPT OF MERCY

(ETA: btw just to be clear, I’m not actually angry lol; it makes total sense that they don’t want this rampaging feral toddler who was still in his own coma all of fifteen minutes ago to come and start screaming at the other coma child until he tears all his stitches out. if there’s anything we Bakugou fans should be familiar with by now, it’s being patient.)

also, Tsuyu wrapping her tongue around Bakugou’s still-healing torso wound absolutely can’t be hygienic at all. also wait is that Inko??

(ETA: pretty sure it is her. she got all of one line smdh.)

Iida is all “thank god Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight pulled through, I thought for sure he was a goner back there”

for the record this is actually really sweet to see how relieved he is. he’s one of the few people who saw the original injury close up, back when he was still at the battlefield and unconscious, so I imagine it really did freak him out quite a bit

JIROUUUUUU

“sometimes I just like to stand here and tug on my imaginary suspenders, what of it”

how come you guys get to loiter around Deku’s room but Kacchan doesn’t. god fucking dammit. AND WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN

I BET KACCHAN COULD WAKE HIM UP FROM HIS COMA WITH THE POWER OF RIVAL INTENSITY!! BUT NOOOOOOOO, [is dragged away back to my fort]

OH MY GOD!?!

"this seems to be an entirely normal and above-board situation that we have just stumbled onto”

I see Jeanist comes from the Iida Tenya school of respectfully using people’s full names

Jeanist becoming one of the main characters is the best thing to ever happen to this series

EXCUSE YOU, IIDA

BUT I’M SURE HE’D MAKE AN EXCEPTION FOR KACCHAN THOUGH!! [elbowing my way back out of the fort] HAWKS, PLEASE --

DON’T GO ALL OMINIOUSLY PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER ALL ON YOUR OWN GODDAMMIT

“there’s absolutely no way this angry wriggling shoulder burrito kid here could answer literally all of my questions, so I’ll just ignore him”

OH MY GOD WE’RE FINALLY CUTTING BACK TO HIM BUT THE CHAPTER IS ENDING

[jumps up, throws a folding chair at Iida and the rest of the gang, and then runs]

oh my god. actually this chapter was awesome. but I’m so fucking mad at this cliffhanger though lol

at least we got a couple of answers! and some hints and teases! poor Deku looks so worn out even though he’s asleep dlwkjl my little green baby. and is it just me or is his quirk activated?? All Might’s all “I can feel it” as if it isn’t obvious just looking at him, why are you trying to be all mysterious dude

anyway! so at least we finally have confirmation and a date for those vestige antics at long last. looking forward to meeting Mister The Fourth next week so we can finally ask him “hey dude, what the fuck”

#bnha 303 #takami keigo #hawks #todoroki shouto #todoroki enji #endeavor #best jeanist #todofam #bakugou katsuki #class 1-a #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha

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blanknamed · 3 years

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trial and error pt. 3 [senku x reader]

I had a lot of issues writing this chapter for some reason. I think I ran out of creativity for a good few weeks so I kinda struggled trying to keep Senku in character. I really just wanted to get the third chapter out though so I hope you like it!

SHIPPING: SENKU X READER

PREMISE: [Name] had always known Senku was a little bit of an oddball but that’s what made him so interesting to her as children. Now in the Stone World, he’s only even more interesting what with his claims about shooting up to a million years worth of technology back, but some things never change with him; specifically on the concept of love. As a way to get him to think about it as something other than “disgusting feelings” she proposes for him to think of it differently, though it seems to be going in a direction she never expected.

PART ONE - PART TWO - PART THREE

{–*–}

CHAPTER THREE: FINDINGS

He was standing near his base by the time [Name] was done. From the looks of it, he had tried to dress up as well, even if it looked like the littlest effort was made. His hair stayed as big as it was, but what seemed to be a makeshift bowtie was settled on his neck (albeit lopsided, but [Name] didn’t really expect much from him in the first place).

“Jeez, who dressed you up, the local village boys?” She asked once she was within hearing range with Senku.

Scowling, Senku only shook his head. Flicking the strip of rag around his neck, he said, "Chrome and the bumbling fools of guards obviously haven't gone on dates before."

"I don't think you have much room to talk. Besides I’m pretty sure that was obvious," [Name] replied humorously, remembering when Ginro couldn't even look her straight in the eye during her and Senku's first few months at the village. "Why would you ask them of all people anyways?"

Senku raised his eyebrow, as if finding the question peculiar. "Who should I have asked?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe the married men in the village?" [Name] suggested, watching as Senku furrowed his brows even more. Giggling, she shoved his shoulder. "So much for being a genius. What, were you so nervous to go on this date with me you forgot something as simple as retrieving data from the most obvious people?"

Senku rolled his eyes. "I'm busy with other things--saving the world from going back another thousand years in society, being one of them.” He reasoned as he turned his head away from her.

[Name] only laughed at him, pushing him to forward so they can start walking towards the woods. “Let’s just get this date other with, shall we? You didn’t forget to plan, I’m presuming?"

“Of course I didn’t. Do you take me for some idiot or something?” Senku asked as he peered at the younger girl, who only gave him a knowing look. Instantly, he shook his head. “No don’t answer that. It was a rhetorical question.”

“Oh, I don’t know…” [Name] trailed off. “Remember when you were so caught up in one of your projects you ended up putting too much laundry detergent in your washing machine?”

That day had been burned into her memory--it had probably been the only time she’d seen Senku visibly panic over something so mundane. They were helplessly watching the washing machine shake violently and become a soapy mess in it’s little area for almost an hour until Byakuya came home to a disgustingly sweet smelling hallway and two elementary school children covered in bubbled up laundry detergent from head to toe.

“Don’t remind me; I smelled like laundry detergent for two months.” Senku muttered.

“It was funny, though. Definitely took thoughts away from my dad and brother.” [Name] replied happily. She didn’t need to turn her head to see that Senku had immediately spun his head toward her at the mention of her father.

A warm silence followed between them, no doubt Senku was thinking of something to say--should he say something about it? Should he brush it off? Senku had known [Name] enough to know that, while he never took anything like emotions too seriously, she wasn’t exactly emotionally attached to much either. He didn’t doubt for a second that [Name] thought about her family during those late night preparations she partook with him when Kohaku or Chrome couldn’t stay up past the 20th hour like they did.

He also didn’t doubt that she had done the same thing he had done once she thought her family over--understand the probabilities of seeing her mother and finding her father and brother’s grave were most likely slim and choosing to focus the task at hand: saving the world from total chaos at the hands of Tsukasa and his wildlings. So, she kept it silent, just like she always did.

Should I even mention anything about that? He wondered to himself as he helped her walk down a narrow junction between some large trees. They’d known each other long enough to understand each other without much verbal communication. Even after not having much contact once Senku entered middle school along with the whole thousands of years of being petrified in time, they still had a weird connection with each other. Maybe that was why he decided to free [Name] of her stony confindes; no one else could read his mind or understand what he’s thinking like she does.

Whatever route he took, it wouldn’t be awkward, he finally concluded when they reached the river. He let [Name] hop on the rocks that stood above the water before following suit. “Right, that was the day they got into that car accident.” He stated once they reached the other side.

[Name] hummed. “Mom was stuck at the hospital all day and wanted to take me with her; I couldn’t bear the smell there. It was too clean. So I went to your place thinking you might need something since you’re so useless--OW!” She rubbed her head as she glared over at Senku, who looked the other way, acting as if he hadn’t just slapped the back of her head so hard it made her hair flip over her head. “Anyways, I thought you needed me for something and apparently you did, but I don’t think an eight year old could have done much if a ten year old couldn’t do anything except stand around and watch the mess. It was funny, though. Mom and I laughed about it after a few years.”

“Glad to know my endless suffering and pure shock brought joy.” Senku said sarcastically, though [Name] could pick up the light heartedness behind it.

Elbowing him lightly so he can turn to look at her, [Name] smiled at him. “Well just so you know every time I think of the dad and brother, I also think of you with a bubble beard right after.”

Senku, for a moment, felt something turn before he wrinkled his nose. “Did you just family zone me? During a date?” He asked disgustedly. It was his turn to get a slap on the back of his head.

“Seriously? That’s what you took away from that?” [Name] asked, irritated. She decided to look forward as they kept walking, however it seemed as though they walked mindlessly through endless amount of trees. “Where are we going anyways?”

“Just a few more feet. There’s a clearing close by; I think you’d like it.” Senku said as he nudged her forward.

[Name] covered her eyes as she began to notice leaves becoming lower and lower to the point that she had to duck and sometimes even squat to get through some spaces. Man, if I knew this would happen, I would’ve worn something besides this kind of dress, she thought reluctantly as she watched the ends and edges of the dress get dirtied. Still, she persisted as she had been curious as to what the clearing had looked like. She hadn’t gone so far in terms of exploring for the past few weeks; winter was coming and Senku needed every available person possible to help prep the village for the freezing season. She spent hours lining and sewing furs onto their cloaks and coats to the point that she left little prick marks on her hands permanently.

“Okay, we’re here.” Senku announced once they both managed to stand again. Shaking a few leaves away from her head, [Name] looked up to see a green clearing, like Senku said. However, he never said how… Ethereal it was. Wild flowers, ones she vaguely recognized to be new versions of flowers from the past, spread across the spanse of the field. Lightning bugs flicked and glowed every now and then, being the main source of light besides the makeshift lantern Senku was currently crafting beside her.

“Whoa,” was [Name]’s only response. “Don’t tell you found this last minute just for a date, Senku.”

A snicker followed right after. “No. I found it a few months ago when trying to collect foxtail millet for the noodles. Let’s keep walking, though. This isn’t what I wanted you to see.”

It’s not? [Name] thought as she let Senku lead her further past the clearing, walking around the flowers as best as possible. The walk was silent, which surprised [Name] since Senku sometimes never did keep his mouth shut when it came to his little experiments. Could it be he's taking this date more seriously than she expected? She let that thought cross her mind as she watched him walk ahead of her. Not possible. If anything, he might just be keeping things a secret since I'm the test subject. [Name] thought to herself. Why would he even take this seriously in the first place?

"Look I know this is a date and all, but could you not glare at me?" Senku finally piped up, looking at his companion warily. "You look like you're about to plot my murder?"

"Who said I haven't already?" [Name] quipped, finally shaking herself from her thoughts. "Anyways, where did you take us, Casanova?"

She laughed as she watched Senku's face scrunch up in disgust at his nickname. He opened his mouth, ready to spew an insult before he stopped himself, staring at the shorter girl. Sighing, he just waved a hand forward. "Look above you."

"Above…?" [Name] questioned as she craned her neck. She sucked in a breath as she looked at the lightened sky above her. Of course, she's had plenty of nights where she stood outside to marvel at the stars and sky--she had never seen it so bright pre-petrification. She had thought that was the brightest and clearest she'd ever seen when she was in Senku's observation tower.

That is, until today.

"It's so… So…" [Name] started, but couldn't quite put her words together. She felt Senku brush up against her shoulder as he finished for her.

"Beautiful." He complimented as he stared up as well.

The sky was littered with various shades of purples, pinks, and blues. There wasn’t a coud in sight, which allowed the stars to litter across the dark plain above them. Faintly, she can make out certain constellations, pointing out the ones she wasn’t too sure to her companion, who nodded in confirmation to all of them.

"Who knew we'd get to see the sky as non-polluted as this." Senku said as they continued to keep watch over the sky.

"You took the words right out of my mouth." [Name] laughed. "I thought the observation tower was something else, but you really outdid yourself here, Senku. I didn't even expect you to walk this far without having you get carried by Chrome or something."

"Killing the mood." Senku replied, flicking her forehead, though [Name] made sure to take notice of his shortened breath he tried to hide. She pretended to feign ignorance even further when she let him walk behind her, catching his breath behind some bushes and then shuffling around until he finally brought a basket out.

"Suika should've given better instructions on where to find this thing." The spiky haired scientist said. "It looked like it got buried under a bunch of dirt instead of sitting plain out in the open like she said."

Senku opened the lid, raising an eyebrow as he pulled out two bowls of his notorious green ramen, wrapped tightly in large leaves to keep it from spilling. With it came a makeshift picnic blanket (though, it just looked like old scraps of dresses sewn together over the years; no doubt Suika had asked one of the older village women if she can borrow it). Together, they worked to keep the blanket down, placing heavy rocks at the corners to keep it from flicking upward since the wind picked up a little stronger from where they placed themselves.

"This ramen tastes gross." Senku groaned once he settled down, though it didn't stop him from continuing to eat it. [Name] only rolled her eyes as she ate it herself (though she did have to agree with Senku; the ramen was gross, but she put up with it anyways), basking in the windy air.

“I’m surprised you haven’t said anything yet about the information you’ve gathered for this date,” [Name] said. “Usually you relay the data to me once you get it all down."

“Can’t exactly tell the subject about the data I’m gathering about them.”

“Oh but you’re dying to tell me, aren’t you?” [Name] pushed. Truth be told, she was more curious on just how exactly he thought of the experiment. Sure, she had been the one to suggest it, but she had zero idea on what his plans are--what were his variables? Was he gathering information? Was he including numbers or was all of this just pure observation? There was no doubt in her mind that someone was observing them as well; most likely Kohaku since she’s better off at hiding and watching without being noticed once.

“Maybe. I’ll tell you after I’m done with this whole experiment.” Senku replied as he took a sip of the water packaged with them before handing it off to her. [Name] took it graciously, taking a few sips as she thought about his wording.

Quirking up her eyebrow curiously, she asked, “Wouldn’t that be tonight?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” Senku confirmed. “You think one night will determine this whole thing? It might take more days actually--a few weeks even. I’ll gather all my information, relay it to you, and then confirm whether or not love is just a construct of emotions for me. Which it will be, from the information I’ve gathered.”

[Name] watched him in disbelief. There was no way she actually heard that correctly. Weeks? How’s that going to work? Would I even last a few weeks managing to go on more dates with this idiot? She questioned. “Wha-- I-- Don’t you have a grandiose plan that requires all your time and attention?”

She only received a shrug as an answer. What the hell does that even mean? She questioned herself as [Name] watched Senku stretch. He was the one repulsed by the idea of going on a date. Why would he extend this to weeks? She let herself wonder, pulling all the probable possibilities as to why he decided it so suddenly. Sure, Senku was right about not being able to gather enough information from just one date, but he could have easily just done one or two more nights of their little experiment dates instead of presuming it down to a matter of weeks.

Finally it finally hit [Name]: he was hiding something. What it was exactly, she’s not entirely sure, though she knew Senku was probably planning something stupid that could most likely put him in danger, or worse killed, which in turn would cause her to intercept and talk him out of it. He was probably using this date shenanigans to distract her from his death inducing plans.

Squinting her eyes at him, she decided to hold back on her on findings. After all, if he isn’t bothering to tell her what he’s gathering on her, she’ll do the same. Instead, she sighed, opting to make it seem as if she should have known. “You’re unbelievable.” [Name] replied.

“Oh, I know. That’s what gets you on your toes right?”

PREVIOUS PART - NEXT PART

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alienaiver · 3 years

Text

Half the Battle, pt. 1

Kuroo Tetsurou x gn!reader

find part two here!

warnings: slight angst about childhood/parents fighting/divorce, one (1) bottle of wine is opened, someone is betrayed in Mario Party, NOT beta-read! apologize for any mistakes! (lmk if there’s any warnings i missed!)

wordcount: 5.5k

content: soulmate AU, mild angst, fluff, post-timeskip but slight canon divergence (i haven’t read the manga yet so this is loosely based off of their canon timeskip lives), gender neutral reader, reader is a video editor, reader is bad at eye contact but the details as to why are vague/up for interpretation!

notes: this was made for @gg9183 ‘s wonderful birthday event, a soulmate collab! (go read the other wonderful works!) happy birthday once again, gray!! this was meant to be a 2k one shot but.... plans and inspiration changes sometimes, right? 🥺 so this ended up as a 5k part ONE lmfao i hope thats alright w u!!! part2 will be up asap, i promise!! i hope you enjoy this!!!!

—————————

Not meeting his soulmate was fine, Kuroo often found himself thinking. The odds of finding your soulmate’s way too low to be realistic anyways, he supported the thought. It’s illogical to spend so much time fretting about it, he finally added for good measure.

Soulmates were a natural part of life, always had been. But with the big wide world filled with over seven billion people, meeting yours wasn’t completely unheard of. But given the powers of soulmates even existing, it wasn’t unrealistic to also believe that some kind of fate would pull you towards each other throughout your lives so that you would meet each other. Kuroo however, prided himself in not caring about soulmates. His life was rich enough. People explaining their feelings about “something being missing until they finally meet them” was incomprehensible to him.

Kuroo had lived for 29 years without being able to see color. And you know what? His life was damn well fulfilling enough. He had a beautiful apartment, an economy that flourished, an adorable cat named Cucumber and good people around him. What would he really need a soulmate for? He could ignore his friends comments on how wonderful the world was in color, if only he would just start looking for his soulmate, how much meaning it gave life. Just because the people in his closest circle had all magically met theirs – not to mention how many of them had already met in Goddamn high school, Kuroo scoffed and was always able to move on.

Even though a lot of people actively made eye contact with everyone they met, even people on the street, to make sure they would meet their soulmate, Kuroo kept his eyes down. He wasn’t insecure, come on, he was perfectly happy! He just didn’t need to be late for a meeting because he got eye contact with some stranger, you know?

His life was in perfect balance as is.. Until yesterday, of course. It had turned out there was mold in his apartment complex so they had to evict it for a month while a crew would go through everything to remove it. He didn’t want to go to his mother’s place, that was too far from his work, but he wasn’t in the mood for a hotel, that was way too expensive, so he turned to his best friend of many years with the biggest set of puppy eyes he could muster and the prospect of making every dinner while he lived there.

“Fine… but don’t get in the way,” was all Kenma had to say.

And so Kuroo spent his last weekend in his own apartment packing things down to make it accessible to the cleaning crew. Cucumber hated other cats with a passion so he couldn’t bring him to Kenma’s, where three cats already happily lived, so his mother would pick him up tomorrow afternoon.

He sat on his couch, scrolling his phone mindlessly with Cucumber on his lap who had been stressed with all the packing down, sensing something was up. He was being extra cuddly towards Kuroo who, honestly? Didn’t mind at all. He loved when Cucumber was in mood for cuddles, though it wasn’t very often. He had been told his cat was orange and while he didn’t have a measure for what that color actually looked like, he was happy with his gray cat.

His mother was supposed to arrive any minute now, so he should have gotten up and put the cat in his carrier but it was easier to get him in it if you had two pair of hands. He scrolled through Instagram, reaching a photo put up by Tsukishima of his soulmate, the light-haired manager of their high school volleyball club, with a tooth-eating grin on her face and proudly showing off a ring on her finger, the caption said, This smile makes me wanna brag. Kuroo could physically hear the provocative tone of his voice, knowing he was one of the first in his circle of friends to actually plan a wedding. Kuroo clicked his tongue with a smile on his face and double-tapped to like the picture.

He didn’t know if it was the combination of that post and the fact that his mother was on her way but memories of his parent’s wedding flooded his mind. For a lot of people, weddings felt obsolete in the face of the whole “you already got your soulmate and you know this” thing, so a lot of couples were happy not getting married but just being together. But there was also the benefits of marriage in the practical sense, so some people did anyways, some hosting parties, some not. His parents weren’t married when he came to, but after he turned five they decided to do it so he would be protected by both of them, in case of any emergency.

It had been a small wedding, only the closest family and friends but Kuroo was vivid, so excited about being part of that whole romantic ordeal, even helping his mom find a dress and everything. He had been a huge and important part of the wedding – if he did say so himself. Everyone had been glowing at the day, the food was delicious, there was laughter, song and cheers and everyone had brought so many presents – even some for little Tetsurou, who had been very excited about his new train tracks.

But when Kuroo was seven years old, it wasn’t as romantic anymore. His parents were fighting a lot, he wasn’t entirely sure why or about what because they would never tell him about it, no matter how much he asked. When he tried to listen in, the words he heard didn’t explain anything to him because even though they were yelling at each other, the important words were always whispered, as if they knew Kuroo was listening in.

When he was eight his mom had come into his room, hugged him and with tears in her eyes and said that they were going to move away.

“Where are we going?” he asked simply, no emotion to be read on his little face. He was exhausted from his parents being this way – they were soulmates, right? Why did they fight like that?

“To Tokyo, just you and me, my love.”

That’s when he met Kenma. He had been very closed-off and shy back when they met, he reminisced. He had been a regular kid when he was younger but the way his parents split up – his soulmate parents – had closed him off pretty bad, so it was a miracle he met Kenma and started opening up again.

Kuroo smiled to himself bitterly before scratching Cucumber’s ear. He supposed this was also why he wasn’t interested in his soulmate. So many people had romanticized the whole soulmate ideal so a lot of people forgot that relationships still took work, took effort and just because they were made for each other, didn’t necessarily guarantee that they would stay together. His mom and dad didn’t officially talk anymore, but when he asked his mom as a child whether or not she still saw color, she said that she did. He also found long letters in her bedroom when he was nine, letters from his dad, so he supposed they still talked together, though Kuroo wasn’t let in on it – nor was he particularly interested. And he definitely we wasn’t interested in ending up in a relationship with someone who would end up not wanting to put in the effort for the relationship to flourish.

After Cucumber had been picked up by his mom it was time to leave for Kenma’s place. He carried the last boxes of valuables down to his basement and locked them in before trekking down to the subway with his suitcase and sports bag.

_____

You were late for work, so you scrambled to pack your things. It was Wednesday afternoon and you were supposed to meet in at 3PM, because that was around the time that Kodzuken had planned to finish his recording, he told you yesterday. You were a video editor and had met Kenma through your old part-time job in his favorite convenience store quite a few years back, back when he had first bought his house when he was 24. You remembered talking to him about video games in the store since you also played some, and after a good while of polite customer service and talk about new games, you had started hanging out outside of work as well. When you had then told him you were actually a freelance video editor but just didn’t get many jobs, he had almost instantly hired you to do his YouTube videos for him and general editing and set-ups of his streams. I know video games, not recording equipment, he had told you so many years ago.

Your original thought had been wary, because working for a friend might get messy but Kenma cared a lot about keeping it professional when you were on the clock, which you appreciated very much. In his house, down by his game room, there was a room next door with screens and all the best editing software just for you to play with. Your pay was higher than average for such a “simple” but regular gig but when prompted about it, he simply shrugged and told you it wasn’t up for negotiation and no one was being treated unfair – and who were you to go against such a good pay for a job that you loved doing and wanted to do full-time? With Kenma being a famous streamer and gamer, he often made lots of different videos for various sites so your job hours resembled a nine to five job, easy, even if the hours were off from the more conventional jobs and you usually came in later in the day and sometimes finished off late in the evening – some of his videos had a time limit for a release date of a game, so there was also days where you were extremely busy and scrambling to get the video done right for a release of a game.

As you closed your bag and ran out the door towards the subway, you checked your phone for any updates. If he’d finished early, he would’ve texted you about it, so you put your phone in your pocket and hurried towards his house.

When you arrived you immediately rang the doorbell before catching your breath, you were used to Kenma spending a few minutes before reaching the door and opening it, so when the door opened almost instantly you took a step back before looking up. The one opening the door was taller than Kenma and in a loose dress shirt that was unbuttoned at the top - that’s all you saw before your eyes darted down to your feet.

“...Hi! I’m uh… Where’s Kenma?” was all you got out while fidgeting with your purse strap, it certainly wasn’t his boyfriend Hinata opening the door today.

“Oh, hey! You must be his video editor, right? He told me about you!” The man said, pointing to himself with his thumb,

“I’m Kuroo Tetsurou! Kenma’s childhood friend! Sorry to intrude, I’ll be living here for the next month, I promise not to get in your way!” As he finished his introduction, he moved aside so that you could enter. As you took off your shoes you heard Kenma’s feet shuffling towards you, “oh hey, welcome, you’re early,” Kenma said with his usual deadpan expression but you could clearly hear the teasing in his voice.

“At least I’m here now, right?” You smiled back, instantly relaxing at the sight of your boss and friend. You turned to Kuroo again, bowed and introduced yourself before taking off your coat and putting it on a hanger, while Kenma and the guy named Kuroo seemed to bicker a bit about whether or not Kuroo should answer the door while he lived there.

“I’ll go set it up, have you transferred the video files to the hard disk?” you asked Kenma as you moved towards ‘your’ office, sending Kuroo a polite smile while keeping your eyes on his neck.

Eye contact was hard for you, it always made you extremely uncomfortable and you didn’t really have any before you felt comfortable with the person. Your mother had often scolded you, saying you’d never find your soulmate at this rate, which you always acknowledged with a hum or a simple yes without starting a discussion.

You honestly weren’t sure whether or not you cared for a soulmate. Your biggest argument to wanting to find one was so that you could see colors, because it’d help your career. Kenma already had his soulmate, so he was the one deciding the color scheme for his videos and helped with the color-related editing, which worked fine as of now, but you would probably appreciate to be able to do it yourself. You had also spent some years coming to terms with your struggles with eye contact and accept that this was just how you functioned. If you missed your soulmate in a random supermarket thanks to it one day, well, you’d be none the wiser, so you felt sure you’d survive without one, but you also couldn’t deny that the sound of a soulmate sounded really nice and comforting. That someone out there existed to fit you, that you were born to love someone who was also meant to love you. You were sure that finding your soulmate wasn’t a dance on roses, it was sure to still be hard, frustrating and maybe even painful sometimes, but you also couldn’t just have all the good, there was a balance that was sure to exist within soulmates as well.

After hours of going through the raw footage from his video game play and slowly editing while watching it, you popped your shoulders and stretched your arms for a moment, yawning as you did so. Your hours were always a bit intense, but that couldn’t be helped when you had six hours of raw footage to work with. Looking at the clock you saw that it was 5.30PM which meant that soon Kenma would wake up from his pseudo-sleep (which was more like a nap in your opinion) to look at your process and ask what you wanted for dinner.

Soon after a soft knock was heard followed by the door opening slowly, Kenma standing in sweats and a hoodie with bags under his eyes, “do you like hotpot?” he asked, and you smiled at him, “sure, are you cooking tonight?” he yawned while he shook his head, “Kuroo is. He insists on a ‘fulfilling meal’, whatever that means.”

You giggled before beckoning Kenma in to see some of what you’ve done so far and making minor adjustments along the way. “Now, something smells delicious and I’m thirsty,” you stated after the two of you had talked a bit about the rest of the video’s plans. As you went towards the kitchen you could hear the sound of of a nameless tune being hummed, pans sizzling from something being cooked and kitchen utensils being used.

Inside, the table was already set with plates and prepared ingredients lying ready for the pot that Kuroo was just about to put on the table. It seemed he had made an endless supply of different side dishes and really put in a lot of work for it, so you looked really forward to eating it and it smelled delicious. You grabbed a glass from the set table and went to the sink to get some water and just as your hand reached it, Kuroo had extended his hand as well to the sink and you accidentally touched.

You both recoiled as if you had been burned and you couldn’t stop the gasp that accidentally left your lips. A feeling was rushing through your body you hadn’t experienced before and you immediately apologized to Kuroo and went back to the table, foregoing the water. You didn’t notice how Kuroo was frozen in place from when he touched you before Kenma called out to him and he immediately started moving again.

You ended up eating shortly after, Kuroo serving the food and talking animatedly about him and Kenma’s childhood, making you laugh quite a bit at their (or more, Kuroo’s) antics and their volleyball days. Kuroo was the type of person to make you relax in his presence and have fun which you didn’t even notice until you got home later that evening and really thought about what a great time you had had. You found yourself surprised by how easily you clicked with Kuroo, a total stranger. It must be his charm, you thought to yourself before going through your night routine. You had to come back tomorrow and finish work, after all. You estimated the video would take you a few more days to finish but that would end up fitting well with the weekend coming, so as you went to bed you felt yourself more relaxed than you had in a while.

_____

“What are they like?”

It was Friday and it seemed you had finished Kenma’s video and therefor you weren’t here for dinner – for the first time in a few days, which did let down Kuroo just a tiny bit. He had talked a lot with you during dinner preparations when you came out from the office and during dinner as well and while you did answer all his questions (which, he admitted, there were quite a few of them) and follow up with your own for him, it still felt… off… talking to you – and Kuroo didn’t like not knowing why. “What do you mean?” Kenma asked, taking another bite into his mouth.

Kenma swallowed a piece of meat before looking up at Kuroo who was stabbing his plate with his fork in what seemed like a useless purpose. He knew he was being a little weird but meeting you was weird, even though he had no reason to explain why.

“I mean, is this how they usually act?” He didn’t even know what that question meant or why he was even asking it, nothing made sense! But he had a desperate feeling that he needed to get to know you – he was afraid of what that implied and what suspicions he needed to hold onto, but he was sure it was his gut telling him you were dangerous for Kenma to be around – that had to be it! Kenma was his best friend, his childhood friend, it had to be a gut feeling meant to protect him!

“Who knows, they’re being more polite than usual, I think. But that makes sense,” Kenma replied calmly before adding, “I mean you are a stranger who’s really intent on being social with them over our dinners, they were a bit shy as well when I met them,”

Kuroo nodded and finally took a bite of his own food. He didn’t notice Kenma’s raised eyebrows or the questioning look that was sent his way, so Kenma decided to let the subject rest.

Not seeing you today felt weird to him too and he couldn’t help the irritation building up inside him – you had just met a few days ago and only in the evenings when he was done with work and ready to make dinner – and yet, the thought of you kept invading his mind. He had gotten through work today thinking you were going to be there for dinner so when he came home and found out you wouldn’t be there, the first seed of irritation had been planted – why was he suddenly looking so much forward to seeing you? Had it been like this yesterday too? Why was it suddenly important that you weren’t there? He ended up sitting in front of the laptop in the guest room for the rest of the evening, the document left open and completely untouched.

Kuroo, however, didn’t let the subject rest in his head for the rest of that evening. Hinata was in town, having time off after a big game yesterday so Kuroo was left to his own devices – which really wasn’t a problem considering he had to make the paperwork for a promotional deal for a meeting Monday morning that he had procrastinated making – which wasn’t like him at all, he usually never pushed assignments to last minute and he then realized the reason he wasn’t done yet was because he had spent so much time over the dinner table with Kenma and you, talking even after dinner had been done for a while. You always offered to help him with the clean-up so you also spent some time talking there, drifting off to various subjects far passing the cleaning duties and sitting down again with a glass of water.

He enjoyed your company, it felt... easy, somehow, the sensation that something was off was there but it didn’t really settle in his stomach until every time after you left, as if it was left to grow a bit from a small sensation to a problem, which worried him – Kuroo prided himself as an impeccable people-reader, he was captain for both the volleyball team in high school and college, he knew how to act around business relations so well because he could read them so flawlessly – so the feelings he got from you was unsettling and unreadable and it took some control away from him – and Kuroo always felt uneasy when he wasn’t in control.

____

Kuroo heard your name and almost got whiplash from how fast his head moved towards Kenma, “what?”

“I asked if we should invite them? To game night? Being three is a little annoying in Mario Party.”

“Oooh, that’s a good idea! I’d love to see them again!” Hinata happily exclaimed before taking another bite of the lasagna Kuroo had prepared tonight. It was Saturday and Kuroo had been in a daze the entire day, first at the office for a quick meeting with his boss about a potential partner he might be able to reel in soon and then doing his laundry at Kenma’s and continuing to try and make the stupid paperwork but ultimately failing before he had to make dinner.

“Isn’t it a bit late to invite someone? I mean, they could have plans already...” Kuroo tried, knowing what a pain it could be to be asked to something an hour before it happened and he didn’t want to let you go through that – that’s what he tried to tell himself, at least. In truth? He was a bit afraid of seeing you again, afraid of his potential reactions, since he had spent his entire Friday in a stupor just thinking about you. His thoughts didn’t mean much for Kenma and Hinata though, who was already texting you to ask. “Oi, no phones at the table, have you parents taught you no manners?” Kuroo chided and Hinata immediately shrank back and apologized – Kuroo smirked, yea the Chibi-chan still had respect for his seniors. But he was quickly pulled back to thoughts about you by Kenma’s phone lighting up again, “they’ll be here in an hour. They’re asking if they should bring anything?” Kenma looked up to gauge Kuroo’s reaction, having noticed something about his friend had been off the past few days. He immediately made a funny grimace before turning it into a smile. “Yea, they can bring a bottle of white wine, if I have to beat you all at Mario Party, I would very much like to be a tiny bit buzzed,” Kuroo said, and Hinata looked at him with wide eyes, “you drink wine!? So grown up!” Hinata exclaimed, to which Kenma just muttered, “or just an old man…” Kuroo didn’t hear that though, too busy to fidget with his hands under the table, suddenly feeling nervous that you were showing up.

Hinata plopped down between Kuroo and you with a controller in hand, “I’m gonna beat you all in this Mario Kart!” to which you laughed loudly, “good luck since we’re playing Mario Party.”

“Huh? Is there a difference?” Hinata asked, making Kuroo belt out a loud laugh as well, holding his stomach, “you just told us you’d beat us but you don’t even know what we’re playing!” Kuroo couldn’t contain his laughter for a bit until he noticed how you were looking at him and instantly retracted his laugh, sitting up straight with a cough, and apologizing for being loud, which confused him to no end. He had never been self-conscious of his own laugh! He knew it could be obnoxious and loud, but he also liked it himself, and-

“That’s a really cute laugh.”

The comment earned you the stares of the century from the three other people in the room, with Kenma in genuine shock – he wouldn’t say he disliked Kuroo’s laugh, just that it was… special.

“Uhm… Uh. Thank you?” Kuroo could feel that his blush went all the way to his ears but he hoped that the light in the living room wasn’t bright enough to catch it. “Yeah uh! Sure! Mhm,” you awkwardly coughed a bit as well before reaching for your glass of wine.

You had brought a bottle of white wine for Kuroo on the promise that you’d get a glass too, saying he was your first friend who also liked wine. The word ‘friend’ had dumb-founded him and he’d just answered “you can have it all,” to which you had laughed and said it’s fine with half, you weirdo.

The game was about to begin but Kuroo was still sitting stuck on the fact that his laugh was cute – cute? Had anyone else found it cute before besides Bokuto and his mom? He wasn’t sure – he sure couldn’t pinpoint them right now anyways. He tried to shake it off and focus on the game, though quite a bit of time was spent explaining the rules to Hinata who apparently had thought they were just playing Mario Kart.

When you were 12 laps into it, it seemed that you were set to win with your four stars and 121 coins. Kenma was right behind you with three stars and Hinata and Kuroo had been left in the dust with zero stars. You had stolen Kuroo’s first (and only) star early in the game, so he was plotting his vengeance in quiet but was getting afraid that the game would end before he could do anything to you – but just as his hopes were at the smallest during the last round of the game, you were put in the same team as him in the last mini game.

Kuroo had a wide smirk when you cheered and said, “this’ll be easy then!” because no, it would not be easy for you. If he had to go down in order to take you down a notch, then so be it. He’d rather Kenma win than you did with stolen goods!

The last mini game was “Tow the Line” where two players were put in a sewing box shaped with nine dots as a grid and two players tied together with a string and the objective was to make the shape with the string as shown in the middle of screen. As soon as the whistle sounded, Kuroo lowered his hands and stopped using his controllers, all with a big grin on his lips.

“Kuroo, what the fuck! Get moving, we’ve started!” you yelled at him as Kenma and Hinata won the first round, signaling the next round began, Kuroo started whistling and looking away from the screen, to which you got up from your seat, “fine, I’ll just take your controller and do it myself!”

Kuroo put his arm with the controller behind him, “nah-ah-ah! You’re not winning this, fiend! That’s what you get for stealing my star!” He grinned up at you with his eyes closed as you stood with your hands on your hips, “come on man! I stole that star in the fourth round! Kenma stole a star from me as well!” you tried, “maybe he stole the one that was yours, who knows! Get over it so we can win!”

But as soon as you’d said that, the third round had just been won and you sighed and flopped down on your seat again, “not cool Kuroo, not cool. I’ll remember this!”

You both laughed as the game made ready to announce the winner, Kenma and Hinata entertained by your antics.

“You can’t avenge something that I avenged in the first place! I only did it because you did me wrong, you know!”

“You can’t use logic on me, it doesn’t apply!”

To no surprise, you won the entire game, even winning one of the two bonus stars given at the end of the game.

After the last sequence and a bow from you there was a quick break before you decided to play some Mario Kart for Hinata’s sake, since his argument was that he lost due it being Party instead. You played quite a few hours and after another toilet break you had switched places with Hinata so Kenma could cuddle up against him. You yawned, drinking the last of the wine in your glass and said, “I should head home, I have a friend coming over for lunch tomorrow.”

Hinata and Kenma both started to get up to say goodnight but you waved at them with a smile, “I can walk out myself, it’s fine!” But Kuroo had already gotten up from the couch as well, so you walked with him towards the hallway where you put on your shoes. There was a comfortable silence between the two of you, which Kuroo noted and scowled a bit - he might have only known you for less than a week but for some reason he felt like it had been a lot longer, like you were old friends – it felt strange, to be so close with a stranger. He didn’t know anything about you, really. He knew your name, your job and how you liked some of your vegetables and which meat was your favorite, he knew you also loved cats but didn’t have one (he couldn’t remember if he knew why) and he felt pretty sure he would recognize you in a crowded area – why it was so intense, he was unsure of, he hadn’t tried meeting someone this way before. It had also seemed like having this game night had made you considerably more relaxed in his presence, even joking around with him instead of being polite, which made Kuroo somewhat giddy, though it didn’t really make sense to him as to why.

“I hope you had fun,” Kuroo said awkwardly, as if he had been the host and scratched the back of his head.

“Yeah, I did! I’m sorry I stole your star, though,” you laughed, buttoning your jacket.

“Nah, no worries, as they say, all’s fair in love and war, right?”

You giggled and picked up your bag from the dresser while Kuroo opened up the door for you. As you exited, you turned around with a bright smile, “well, thanks for toni-”

Everything ended up a blur, too bright, too much, too noisy, too… colorful? Kuroo was still looking into your eyes as all that went through him, completely blindsided. As he took a proper look, he could see that you looked just as surprised as him, your eyes wide but still never leaving his either.

“Is… Is this? Are you? Is…” You asked after what felt like both days and milliseconds, I could stare at them so much longer, he thought to himself, the colors only making your face more clear to him. Had you really not had eye contact at all? Had you seen each other for several hours – more than a few times, without looking each other in the eyes at all? Kuroo was more baffled by this happening so late than the fact that it was happening.

He was about to say something, anything, when you promptly turned around, nervously yelling, “I-I uh, I gotta go! Goodbye!” as you hurried out of the driveway and down towards the subway.

“W-wait!” Kuroo belatedly and unhelpfully yelled out as you turned a corner, too late. You were gone. A hand was dragged down his face as a sigh left him, what the fuck had just happened? He obviously needed to talk to you about this, but he also needed to gather his thoughts about all of this, so he slowly closed the door and went back towards the living room, greeted by Hinata and Kenma who looked up at him curiously, “why did you yell?” Hinata asked with his head tilted.

“I think I just found my soulmate.”

#haikyuu!!#kuroo tetsurou x you #kuroo tetsurou x reader #hq x reader #waaaaah im so nervous about this!!!! i basically cranked it out in less than 24hrs ngl.... i had 1.5k of beautiful words before i came u #P WITH A WHOLE OTHER PLOT!!!! :-)#if any of u get the ref of the title i love u and we need to play mp together lmao <33333 #also kenhina and tsukiyachi is mentioned!#both reader and kuroo r A MESS #stay tuned for part 2!!!!!!#nohr.writing #half the battle series #im gonna dig a hole real quick to hide in hehehe #honestly im not sure this is entirely coherent i had so much.... i wanted to force into it im afraid some of it feels out of place but!!!#here we go!! face the fear lmao!!!!

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pink-flame · 3 years

Text

Promises Kept - A WFW Missing Scene

Soooo...I let it slip earlier to @mamirugbee that in my original plot outline for We Found Wonderland the scene where Luke finally wins the ring was there. I ended up not writing it because I thought that would be too much angst on top of everything else and you all would riot. But she wanted it and I love her so I wrote it. But then I got distracted with other angst on the way to that angst...so you also get the immediate aftermath of Julie leaving. Oops. It's 2 for 1 night for WFW angst! Just remember I WAS ASKED FOR THIS. Love you, Jenni. 💜

Luke held it together pretty well for approximately three days.

After watching Julie disappear right in front of his eyes, while he smiled...smiled to show her he would be ok...he had sunk to the ground, very much not ok. He had stayed there, just outside the garage doors, dizzy and sick to his stomach while the reality of the situation washed over him until finally the change in light alerted him to the fact hours had passed. He realized somewhere vaguely in the back of his mind through the haze of mental static that the rest of the guys would be home from school soon. He didn’t want them to see him like this. He didn’t want to be the one who had to tell them what had happened, didn't want to see the hurt in their eyes or even worse the sympathy. His instincts were screaming at him to run away from the situation, to escape like he had escaped his parents’ house when their smothering attention and rules became too much. The urge to grab his acoustic and walk out and never come back was strong, his fingers clenching and unclenching at his side as he turned the idea over in his mind.

In the end it was never really an option.

He couldn’t leave his friends.

He couldn’t leave his band.

He couldn’t leave his parents, not again.

And most of all he couldn’t leave the life Julie had almost sacrificed everything to make sure he got to live.

He had promised her a lot of things. That they would make things work somehow. That he would win her that dumb ring. That he would help her reconnect with her dad. That it would always be him and her, Luke and Julie, in it together against nosy bandmates, and questionable record labels, and the looming possibility of being separated by thousands of miles (back when that had seemed like as far apart as they could get).

And he had promised her that he would take care of their friends, and follow his dreams and do his best to be happy.

It turned out that the one promise he had made her that every inch of him was screaming out in protest against might be the only one he could actually keep.

So he would.

Luke unclenched his palms and placed his hands flat against the pavement outside the garage doors. He took a deep if shaky breath then pressed them into the firm surface until he managed to haul himself to his feet, his legs protesting as he forced them to move through their stiffness. He just had time to drag himself into the bathroom and splash cold water on his face before he heard the telltale sounds of his friends approaching, their boisterous voices carrying from all the way down the driveway. He emerged back into the studio, purposefully turning away from the doors in a desperate bid to buy himself a few extra seconds to compose himself before he had to explain Julie’s absence.

“And then I said if a platypus is a mammal where’s their nipples cause that’s how mammals feed their kids, right?”

“Reggie, I don’t know what made you think we want to hear this conversation…”

“Oh come on, Bobby, where’s your intellectual curiosity. Go on, Reggie.”

“Right, so then Mr. Gleeson said they don’t have nipples. They feed their babies by basically sweating milk through milk gutters.”

“Ok...I take it back, Bobby was right. I now know way more than I ever wanted to.”

“Luke, will get it. Hey, Luke! Guess what I…”

Luke turned slowly to face his friends and watched their faces fall as they took in his tight expression. Apparently his efforts to school his face into a neutral mask had failed epically. Luke realized his hands were shaking and shoved the offending appendages into his pockets hoping that would hide the effects of his runaway emotions.

That also seemed to be wishful thinking.

“What’s wrong?” Bobby asked bluntly, taking half a step towards Luke before stopping short when he saw the way he flinched. “Oh.”

“Luke, I’m…” Alex swallowed hard and glanced away for a moment seemingly fighting with his own emotions. “I’m so sorry.”

Reggie was the last to speak, the panic stealing over his face like a punch directly to Luke’s chest.

“Where’s Julie?”

When Luke didn’t answer right away he asked again, shaking off Alex’s attempts to place a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Luke, where’s Julie?”

“Home,” He answered simply, his voice steady despite the emotions still raging inside of him.

He knew what he had to do now.

He had to honor Julie the only way he could, by helping his friends be ok.

“What? No,” Reggie protested, looking back and forth between his friends as though expecting someone to tell him it was a joke. “She wouldn’t. Not without saying goodbye.”

“She didn’t have a choice,” Luke told him gently. “The portal just appeared and she...she ran out of time.”

“Ok, ok,” Reggie ran his fingers through his hair roughly, leaving pieces standing up in all directions. “We can go to the ghost club, right? We can get Willie to help us get into Caleb’s dressing room and we can go find her.”

“That’s a good way to get killed by an evil ghost,” Bobby pointed out.

“We’ll figure it out,” Reggie insisted.

“Reg...we don’t even know...we don’t know if Caleb still trusts WIllie or not. We haven’t seen him since that night.”

Luke could hear the pain in his friend’s voice and he hated it. Alex might not have had the time to develop the same deep connection with Willie that Luke had with Julie, but he knew his friend had seen flashes of that potential in their stolen moments. The fact that Willie had been missing in action since he tried to help them save Julie weighed heavily on Alex. Luke could see it. He just couldn’t do anything about it except be there for him as much as he could.

He was going to need Alex too.

He was going to need all of them.

“Reggie, even if we could do that she didn’t want us to. She didn’t want us to leave our families or our dreams or our lives here. She fought so hard for us to have them. We have to live like it’s now or never, for her.”

He managed a small, sad smile hoping it would calm Reggie’s rising agitation but it seemed to have the opposite effect.

“Don’t quote your lyrics at me, dude,” Reggie snapped, once again brushing off Alex’s attempts to put a comforting hand on his arm. “You’re supposed to be in love with her. How can you just let her go without a fight?”

Luke felt like his throat was closing up as Reggie’s words hit him like a slap in the face. He knew his friend didn’t mean it, not really. He was just hurt and scared and mourning the loss of the little sister he loved.

It didn’t make it hurt any less to have his own doubts and guilt thrown back into his face though.

Before Luke could come up with anything else to say to comfort him, Reggie reached up to wipe at his eyes and spun on his heels, stomping out of the garage and down the driveway.

Alex shot Luke a worried look before nodding after their friend.

“I’ll check on him. I’ll be right back, ok?”

Then he was gone and Luke and Bobby were alone in the garage.

Bobby was looking at Luke like he was some kind of wounded animal and Luke wished he would stop because the longer his best friend looked at him like that the more tempting it was to totally break down. And he couldn’t do that and keep his promise to Julie. So he would hold it together. He would.

“I’m not going to ask if you’re ok because that would be a stupid question,” Bobby said, crossing the garage to sink onto the couch before patting the seat next to him expectantly.

Luke hesitated for a second or two before sighing and sinking down next to Bobby, the urge to tap his foot or drum on his knee overwhelming though he fought it down. He didn’t need to give Bobby more ammunition about his mental state. Not that he needed it.

“Look, I’m going to miss her too,” Bobby cleared his throat before reaching out to pat semi-awkwardly at Luke’s knee. “And I know it’s going to be worse for you. But I’m here for you. We all are. So just...don’t run, ok?”

Luke could have laughed at that if his mouth had seemed to remember how. His friends really did know him too well. Still. He had already ruled out that course of action.

“I won’t,” He promised.

And he didn’t.

What he did do was dive headfirst into trying to make sure their lives would go on like Julie wanted. He was there waiting when Reggie processed his feelings enough to feel bad about his outburst and showed up at the garage in the middle of the night and pulled Luke into a tight hug that lasted a long time. He was there when Alex wanted to talk about feeling anxious not knowing for sure if Julie had made it back to her time and what she had found there. He was even there when Bobby admitted that he missed Julie but he missed Queenie too and he wasn’t sure that the band was ever going to be as close as they once were. Luke did his best to reassure them all, checked in on his mom, and started calling around trying to book them a gig even though they had hardly any songs they could use and none of the bookers he spoke to seemed particularly interested.

He forced himself to tell bad jokes, and offered to go get pizza and suggest busking so they could refill their food fund.

He did all of that for three days until it was like the adrenaline he had been running off of ever since Julie disappeared into a hole in the ground finally wore off. On the fourth day he knew his friends noticed that he was quieter than normal though none of them said anything, just exchanged mildly worried looks. On the fifth day he lost his appetite, picking at the leftover pizza that Bobby had warmed up for him and refusing the variety of junk food his friend then hauled out to the garage. On the sixth day he slept most of the day, drifting in and out of fitful dreams. He had only emerged for a couple of bathroom breaks and was back curled under the blanket he usually left unused when his friends showed up after school, their worried looks no longer mild.

The 7th day was a Friday but they didn’t go to school. Instead they staged what amounted to an intervention, hovering around the couch (he didn’t bother folding it out now that the possibility of Julie crawling in next to him was gone) and refused to stop staring creepily at him until he sat up with an annoyed huff.

“Don’t you have school?” He muttered, pulling the blanket more firmly around his shoulders despite the smothering heat.

“We’re not going,” Reggie said, reaching out and yanking the blanket away from Luke in on quick movement.

“Hey!” Luke protested.

“We’re worried about you,” Alex said ignoring the way Luke was suddenly looking anywhere but at his friends. “You pretended nothing was wrong and then you crashed hard.”

“You’re depressed,” Bobby said bluntly, because of course he did.

He was annoyingly accurate and to the point at all times unless he was hiding his meaning in some obscure literary quote of course.

“I’m not,” Luke tried, feeling strangely exposed without the weight of the blanket. “I miss Julie...a lot, ok? But she wanted us to live and I’m living.”

“There’s living and there’s living,” Reggie countered, dropping down next to Luke to sling an arm around his shoulder. “And Julie would want you to be living, you know what I mean?”

“We don’t expect you to be ok,” Alex broke in quickly. “Just for you to be honest about what’s going on with you. You’ve been there for us the past few days now it’s your turn.”

“I’m fine,” Luke tried one last time, though his argument sounded half-hearted even to his own ears.

“You haven’t showered in a week,” Bobby pointed out, the softness behind his eyes easing the harshness of his words as Luke forced himself to look up and meet his friend’s eyes. “Come on, rinse the smell off and then we’re taking a field trip.”

Luke groaned but forced himself to stand and cross the distance to the bathroom, his bones aching like he had spent years in bed, not hours. He hardly remembered the shower but when he reemerged some indeterminate amount of time later his hair was dripping and he admittedly smelled a lot better. He still felt a bit like he was walking through a heavy fog though, like some slight, almost undetectable force was making each one of his steps just that little bit more difficult. He thought it might not be the weight of something slowing him down at all but the absence of something. It was like he had forgotten how to do everything right without Julie next to him. Walking and eating and breathing. He knew he had done them all before he ever knew her but that didn’t make them come any more naturally now that she was gone.

Still.

He had promised her he would try.

So he let his friends steer him out of the garage, let them lead him down the sidewalk, Alex and Bobby buffeting him on either side and Reggie walking in front, chattering away and peering back every few seconds as though afraid Luke would bolt if he didn’t keep him in his sight. Luke for his part just shuffled along, grunting out a response when asked a direct question and keeping silent the rest of the time. Apparently the plan was to head to Reggie’s house. His mom would be at work and she had bought him this brand new video game console called a Playstation that the boys were all dying to try out. That newly separated parent guilt was apparently good for a few things, like letting Reggie have ice cream every night and expensive gifts. Luke was pretty sure that none of them were particularly in the mood to play video games and were putting on the enthusiasm for his sake. He appreciated it. He just couldn’t match it.

But once they were actually in Reggie’s room, crowded around the little television he got for his last birthday, Luke had to admit he did feel a little more like a human being. He even caught himself laughing as he watched Alex and Reggie squabble over the second controller as Bobby clutched his above the fray. Reggie grinned when he saw Luke’s brief smile and shoved the controller they had been fighting over into his hands.

“Here, you try!”

And he couldn’t stand to see Reggie disappointed, not when he had seen him so hurt so recently. So Luke did try. And he let himself enjoy it. And he let himself tune out and pretend that there wasn’t someone missing.

He did such a good job at pretending that it wasn’t until they had left Reggie’s house several hours later in order to keep his mom from knowing they had skipped and headed for the ice cream shop that the gaping absence all came crashing back.

Because right around the corner from the ice cream shop was the arcade.

And right inside of the arcade entrance was a claw machine.

And inside of that claw machine he could only assume there was a purple plastic ring that would now never sit on his girl’s finger.

He couldn’t explain why his feet carried him towards the arcade but they did, seemingly without any specific direction from him.

“Luke....” Alex’s worried voice called after him but he didn’t pause until he was standing directly in front of the damn game that had been haunting him for months.

And there it was. The ring. Mocking him from the exact spot it had been in all along.

Apparently his friends had caught up to him by then because when Reggie spoke up it was from directly behind him.

“You’ve got to let that thing go, man,” His friend said carefully. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Luke found himself understanding Reggie’s initial reaction to the news about Julie’s departure because all of the sudden he was angry. He wasn’t just angry, he was furious.

He brought his fists down in tandem on either side of the joystick, feeling the reverberation up his recently healed arm and had just enough time to wonder if that was the smartest idea before words were bursting out of him unbidden.

“It matters,” He said fiercely, ignoring the way Reggie flinched slightly. “It matters. She matters. She matters to me and she’s gone and I said I would give her that ring and I didn’t and now I can’t and...and...it just matters, ok? It just does.”

Alex and Reggie both stared at him, eyes wide with worry seemingly unable to land on something helpful to say as they watched him finally implode. The silence stretched and Luke was just about to kick the machine just to have something to fill the gap and give him another chance to externalize the storm brewing inside of him when Bobby stepped forward calmly.

“Here,” He said, his voice calm and even. “Go ahead.”

He held out his hand and Luke instinctively stuck his out to catch whatever Bobby was trying to hand him. He folded his fingers over the mystery object to keep it from falling to the ground, before uncurling them carefully to examine it.

It was a quarter.

Luke looked up sharply expecting to see sympathy or something worse on Bobby’s face but all he saw was that look his best friend gave him when they were disagreeing on a song or when they couldn’t agree on what toppings to order for their pizza. Or maybe more like when Luke had wanted to use those fireworks for pyrotechnics or when he had suggested a book club as a viable gig. Like he didn’t approve of what Luke was doing but also like he was going to be right there behind him, letting him know he was an idiot and then helping him anyway.

Somehow it was exactly what Luke needed.

So he didn’t say anything else, just swung to face the machine and deposited his quarter in the slot before he could think better of it.

The game came to life as he swung the joystick jerkily to the right, not letting himself think too hard about the exact aim as the claw hovered over the ring in it’s plastic container. He slammed his hand down on the button to drop it probably harder than was strictly necessary but it felt good to have an excuse to hit something. The claw dropped and clutched it’s mechanical arms around the plastic container. Luke tried not to react, afterall he had gotten this far many times before, but the weak arms always released the ring long before it could actually make it to the prize shoot. But even as that hopeless thought crossed his mind the claw was rising, taking the ring with it and this time it didn’t drop back to its former spot. This time the ring remained locked in the claw’s embrace until it tumbled down into the prize shoot leaving all four boys to stare at the machine in surprise.

“Did that just…” Alex started.

“You did it,” Reggie practically whispered, disbelief clear in his voice.

Luke for his part just stared at the claw machine that had once again gone silent and still as he tried to process what had just happened. He had been so angry a minute ago and he could never win the ring and it didn’t matter because Julie was gone...Julie was gone...but it did matter and now he had won the ring and...did he really just win the ring?

Once again it was Bobby who broke them all out of their stupor, stepping forward and reaching through the metal flap to retrieve the ring, pressing the plastic container insistently into Luke’s shaking hands.

“You did it,” He said simply but firmly.

“I did it,” Luke echoed, his voice slightly choked.

“You said you would and you did,” Bobby continued. “It’s ok, Luke. You did it.”

Luke was very aware that Bobby was talking to him like a small child and he wanted to be offended, he really did, only he felt like a small child. Like nothing made sense and all of his emotions were too big for him. He had tried for so long and so hard to win that stupid ring, had seen it as a metaphor for how he felt about Julie, how he would do anything for her, how he wanted her to know that as intrinsically as she knew her own name. He had tried so hard and it had never worked and now she was gone and the very first time he tried, the first time, and he had done it.

Luke felt tears pricking at his eyes and did his best to fight them down.

“Luke…” Reggie started, his own eyes looking suspiciously wet.

Luke couldn’t bear to hear what Reggie was going to say or to make eye contact with any of his friends when he felt on the brink of breaking into sobs. He spun to face the machine again only that didn’t seem to help. His vision went blurry and his throat went tight and the next thing he knew he was breaking down into sobs. He tried to stifle them in a fit of embarrassment but there wasn’t much point. The tsunami had started and all he could do was ride the wave and pray he was in one piece on the other side.

He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the claw machine, the soothing temperature doing little to slow the tears rolling down his face or the hiccuping, painful sounds that were emerging from his mouth. The ache in his chest was almost unbearable but it was matched by the sharp pain in his hand as he clutched so hard at the ring’s plastic container he was sure it would leave an angry red outline when he finally uncurled his fingers.

He loved her.

He loved her so much.

He loved her and he was never going to see her again and he won her the ring and she was never going to know it.

He was so alone.

Only he wasn’t.

Because suddenly there were warm arms wrapping around him from every direction, cheeks pressed against his shoulders and the top of his head, soft words of comfort being spoken in three different voices.

“It’s ok, Luke.”

“Let it out.”

“We’re here.”

And he did.

He had promised Julie they would do their best to be happy. He intended to keep that promise. But today all he felt was pain. And that would have to be ok too.

And it was.

And they were.

Not all at once.

Not for a long time if he was being honest.

But slowly and steadily genuine smiles, and laughter began to work their way back into their lives. They didn’t talk much about Julie at first. It hurt too much. But eventually Reggie brought up a story about her over pizza and soon they were all chiming in, recounting their favorite moments with the girl who would always live in their hearts even if she could no longer live in their world. After that they brought her up often and it hurts but it also heals.

Luke took to wearing the ring around even though it was too small for all of his fingers except his pinkie and often got stuck even then. Bobby didn't comment on the way his finger was starting to turn as purple as the ring itself, simply handed him a black cord one day for him to string it on and brushed off Luke’s rush of thankful words. After that Luke wore the ring on a cord around his neck, dangling down to thump gently against his heart as he walked, the cool plastic a constant reminder of what he lost but what he gained too.

He wasn’t living the life he would have chosen for himself but he was living the life Julie had chosen for him. He hoped the two would come together eventually. He had to have faith that they would.

Eventually he sat down to write a song for her and ended up with a poem instead.

Eventually he had the idea of sending her a message through time, a box filled with all of the things she had loved and left behind, all the ones that would fit in a small box anyway. Eventually he pried the teddy bear version of himself out of Reggie’s reluctant fingers to go inside. Eventually placed all of their carefully selected polaroids inside too.

And eventually he slid a purple ring off of the cord he wore it on, placed it carefully back into its original container and left it for her to find with a lingering kiss pressed to its surface.

Eventually.

But first.

He lived.

Tag list: @futurearchaeologyprof @moreflowersthanweeds @chickwiththepurpleguitar

#we found wonderland #missing scenes #juke #jatp #luke patterson #sunset curve #angst #all the angst #my fics

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ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is · 3 years

Note

Hello, Em! I was wondering if you would mind helping me find my type? I’ve narrowed it down to the Si-doms (slight margin of error for the IFP types, but I don’t see enough evidence for Ne or Se to be sure), but from there I’m having a hard time determining which fits better. I feel weakest when I don’t have much structure, and at work, I can be a bit of a pain because I’m always asking for clarification on new tasks. In college, I always felt like the vague assignments where the instructor (1)

doesn’t actually tell what they want were the worst. Most people see me as the logical one in the group. I think part of why I’ve maintained that image is that most of my family (especially my mom’s side) has never learned how to deal with their emotions well, so they try to always joke or become sarcastic. I’ve always gotten along with my dad’s family because I never feel like I’m being used as some sort of verbal target practice. I’ve never been good with expressing how I feel and prefer to (2

show it through actions. Whenever I’m dealing with family, I’m always honest (or else just quiet), and even when I’m talking to someone I don’t know well, I have a hard time softening the blow. I try, but it’s not something that comes easily. I’m typically relieved when someone else can take over dealing with people because I hate having to deal with people when they get upset. I typically take a quick dislike to people I think are too dramatic, but as long as they’re nice I can get over (3)

it fairly quickly. One of my favorite things about my boss is that he always asks how I’m doing when I come in in the morning and he always willing to jump in and cover shifts if he thinks someone’s not feeling well. I also have a difficult time with people who jump into things without thinking. One of my major issues with my mom is that I sometimes feel like I’m having to constantly re-plan things around her last-minute decisions. One of the things that my dad always points (4)

out as a weakness is that I’m too nice to people. I have a really hard time saying no to people, and I can be really easy to guilt trip. I’ve been pulled into a lot of things I really didn’t want to do because someone else talked me into it. A few years ago, I went with a group to an amusement park, and I got dragged along on things that I hated, all because my cousin asked. Even on the occasions when I have stood my ground, it’s taken a huge toll on me to know that I’ve disappointed someone (5)

I’m often torn between what others say about me and what I actually think. Every time I rediscover MBTI I get sucked into this endless loop of trying to somehow make sense of all the things others have said about me, what I think, and how it fits into the system. I was trying to pick a college major, I was constantly asking others what they thought would be a good choice, because I genuinely didn’t know what I wanted. I knew things I didn’t want (marketing psych, which I felt were mercenary) (6)

but I was torn between what I felt I ought to do (something that helped others) and what I was really interested in (history). I never thought of myself as good with people, but most people I know tell me that I come off as very sweet and likeable. Maybe not warm, but approachable and unintimidating. I tend to come off as studying people and waiting to judge them, even though there are some things where I just say NOPE and it can take years for me to change my mind. (7)

I did that when I first met my sister’s now husband. I thought they were rushing things and I was pretty upset over how much my sister had changed after they met. I’m still warming up to him, but he seems harmless. I’ve never been one to share my feelings with other people, but it can be so helpful to at least see them written out. I typically will have a decent idea of what I feel, but writing it down helps me really understand it and see when I’m really just being silly. Thank you!! (8)

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

Hi anon,

This absolutely sounds like ISFJ; I would rule out the Fi-Te axis completely given the emphasis on what other people want and their opinions and I suspect the only reason you considered high Fi was the commonly-found, but in my opinion incorrect statement that Fi users are more private with their emotions.

Your conclusion of high Si seems right; you have difficulties with spontaneity and prefer clear, specific instructions, and prefer to observe before making up your mind though can be very slow to change it, and this post has a lot of very concrete examples.

As mentioned the strong emphasis on what other people want, at times to the exclusion of what you want, and placing a high value on social niceties seems clearly like Fe. Not all high Te users are sarcastic but I've found a lot of them (myself included) are at least very comfortable with it/don't mind a little verbal target practice as long as they can return it to sender. ISTJs (and other TJs) are also typically far more comfortable turning down requests from others and tend not to rely on others quite as much for personal decisions or self-assessment, especially since it sounds you're either towards the end of your college career or shortly post-college and would probably have at least some capacity to use tert Fi if you had it.

One thing I've thought about a lot regarding FJs and being "the logical one" is that I do think self-assessements are sometimes erroneous, but also, especially if you're in your early-to-mid-20s and especially if you have a more spontaneous friend group, an ISFJ very well might be the logical one. Maybe not in the academic sense of logical, but in terms of common sense and making decent life decisions, yeah, an ISFJ will probably outdo most ENTPs even if the latter's Ti is higher, because a lot of behaviors motivated by Si and Fe (caution, consideration for the feelings of others) are smart things to do in terms of like, living life. It's less "logical" than "reasonable", but that's a pretty nitpicky distinction on my part. Plenty of deeply logical people are actually wildly unrealistic, because people don't behave logically, so the actual reasonable thing to do is, well, behave like an ISFJ and take past behaviors and relevant context and how people might feel into account.

#mbti #isfj

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deadmunds-ghostbee · 2 years

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WOT are your thoughts/predictions for mary? i love her sm as she already is in the book, and she’s one of the best parental figures in the series, but given what they’ve hinted on as her backstory for the show, i’m kinda curious if she’ll have an arc of her own 👀

Ahh hi I’m so glad we have this Mary Sharma safe space to discuss her 😌💜

I think given the fact that even Newton has an arc, if she doesn’t have something it would be nothing short of an atrocity that I would waste no time gathering a mob to storm Netflix HQ for.

I have so many thoughts.

aanyway RANT BELOW ⬇️😄

We know Lady D is taking a strong interest in supervising kathony + Edwina activities. And since we didn’t see Mary at the ascot (from pap pics) it is interesting because last season the moms play that huge part of guiding their girls through the market. Without her being there it spurs a couple of thoughts:

Namely, how soon has it been since her husband died? How much is she still grieving? What is her relationship with society? She must have loved the man to run away from her life, but did she really hate the constraints of society? Or was okay at navigating and dealing with it?

The biggest question mark about her is why would she lead her daughters back in an environment she ran away from? The most obvious reason is necessity bc of lack of wealth, but surely Edwina could find just as good as good of a match with just as much money from where they came from? How soon has her father, the earl died (if all that stuff they edited out of her bio still rings true) and how fraught was that relationship?

I’ve also seen people mention that she might have a sister in the ton with a daughter but this cast of characters is so large idek how they’d handle all that 😆

Since it’s been years since the scandal how much of the ton will remember her/it? Is it an impediment on Edwina finding a match? She went to that ball so clearly she shows up to society events so she isn’t trying to hide but I can see her being nervous about it given the circumstances.

So I would say my best guess about her is

1. Grief (a HUGE recurring theme this season I’d think bc Kathony and deadmund and the fact that pens dad just died) hopefully she has her moments with Kate and Edwina about this. More on this later.

2. How SHE feels about this proposed “head over heart” dichotomy since she seemed to follow her heart and is now dealing with the consequences. Charitha mentions pressure to marry well or be perfect—where does that come from? Both Edwina and Kate seem dead set on her getting a love match, which I assume they want bc of the good relationship between Mary and their father. I would characterize her as being encouraging for them to find love but it presents an interesting repeating of history for her.

ALSO since there’s been a lot of talk of Edwina’s powerful storyline, whether Edwina goes gay or is involved with a man (Theo sharpe watch ur fuckin back I stg) it would probably very closely parallel what Mary has already gone through, abandoning what’s conventional to have what she wants. So maybe her and Edwina relationship will be really big in later episodes while Kathony are fucking!!

Now these are both very vague things. A lot of internal conflict and not much to do since it seems Lady D and QC are taking such a large interest in the Sharmas on the market. Of course she’ll be there for it, but I think there’s something else they could mine for her.

In my rants I’ve often wondered how/where Violet plays into all of this? It seems like her and Daph are gonna have a sit down and be like okay Daphne will take care of Anthony (a good choice actually bc I don’t think Vi and A could actually manage this with their relationship at the moment.) and Violet will take Eloise.

But what is Eloise really like on the market when it seems that she will mostly be playing mystery with LW and maybe (?) wrapped up in some activism thing?? That’s such a downgrade than Violets role last season imo.

The connection here I think is that a loss of Edmund and Mary with her husband will really connect them. And Violet will be old enough to remember a scandal if it happened. So maybe I’m clowning a bit but I’d like to see a relationship forged between them! But that also goes for the other older women too! The main thing that really ties all these different matriarchs in the ton is their relationship with grief, losing their husbands, and taking their own initiative. Portia will have to basically fend for herself and the girls (🤪🤪🤪) and deal with that loss. The queens is losing her husband even tho she’s literally in front of him and she’s compensating by using people as playthings. Lady D has been great on her own for a while it seems, but she once lost people she loved too and built herself back up. I think it would be a FLAGRANT oversight if they didn’t consider these connections in some way. Especially since the older women are the backbone of this show. The rest of the cast varies a lot talent-wise and the show would fall apart without them.

So for Mary’s arc is still very blurry to me but taking all of this I expect it to be very involved with her scandal, Edwina, and something with the other mothers. Also kate too ofc but that relationship im seeing less to really develop there.

This answer was probably way too long/analytical and I may be clowning a bit as a Mary stan, but I have faith that the writers won’t just discard her. The other older women had too much to do s1 to completely let Mary fly by the wayside when all this material is here.

Thanks so much for the ask!! I’d been wondering the same thing myself and writing it down crystallized it for me! Fuck I love themes and arcs 😩

#bridgerton #bridgerton season 2 #Mary Sharma

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personuhh · 3 years

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okay so awhile ago you posted something about Yosuke (crazy, right?) and in the tags I believe you mentioned something about how you don’t like Yosukes parents? Could you elaborate? bc I have not stopped thinking about it since you mentioned it (sorry this is so vague my memory is horrid skjdjfjgj)

OYSUEJGHHBKEJHDSGVDH oh my god okay SO. At first I just got ~vibes~ from him... like, I couldn’t quite pin down what made me think he had abusive parents, because obviously he never says anything to indicate it explicitly, but then I started noticing... small things.

I don’t want to say outright that I think they’re abusive (physically or verbally) and I also don’t think that Yosuke hates them, or necessarily even sees anything wrong with how they treat him, but I do think that their behavior has severely impacted Yosuke and led to a lot of the negative traits he displays.

To me, the most telling example is this conversation where he talks about Teddie being praised by his parents for being “thoughtful” very pointedly in front of him. It seems to be a reoccurring thing where they compare him to other people (primarily Teddie) and make him feel inferior. Yosuke’s a bit of a pushover, and frequently gets taken advantage of monetarily, and in this case he’s caved and lent Teddie a significant chunk of his savings for their trip to Tatsumi Port Island... only for him to spend it on presents to suck up to Yosuke’s parents which makes Yosuke look unthoughtful. Yosuke clearly sees it that way, even if Teddie hadn’t intentionally planned it out from the start as such (he calls Teddie “surprisingly shrewd”).

Yosuke gets told off either because a) he didn’t want to fight back/argue, and instead just took a passive stance instead of telling his parents that he was the one to lend Teddie the money in the first place, and thus didn’t have any left to buy them gifts, or b) his parents think so little of him that they don’t believe him at all. He specifically says he doubts his parents understand, which makes me think that he did try to explain the situation.

There are also several instances of a large Junes event being Yosuke’s responsibility, or at least of him thinking that he has to scramble to make things work, like the Junes concert, where he says he’ll have to move away if it doesn’t pan out; maybe this is his own thinking, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was something his dad said to scare him into helping, especially considering he MUST know that Yosuke is friends with Rise, or the time during the summer where he calls Yu and begs him to help out. Yosuke isn’t a manager, but he’s still got all the responsibilities of one, and even tries his best to work out other employees’ problems as well (look at his SL).

The Junes concert in particular really sent up some red flags for me, especially because Yosuke says this.

“Awfully nice for some reason”?

Yosuke’s got terrible self-esteem, there are countless times where he’s shown to be overwhelmed and embarrassed by completely genuine praise from his friends. In one of the drama CDs he mentions that he intentionally doesn’t try his best in school because he doesn’t want to disappoint himself by doing poorly while also knowing that he gave his all. It really makes me think that his parents just have an abysmally low opinion of him, and he’s adopted that same view of himself.

There’s also several scenes where he talks about his parents finding his porn (or Teddie showing it to them) and in his SL he says his mom “read the title out loud to [his] family” which on top of obviously indicating his family is pretty conservative about that kind of thing, also means he’s had to learn to be secretive with them to some extent. In Arena, Yosuke’s mother goes as far as burning the porn Teddie finds. Even if it's meant to be humorous, Yosuke's property is still being destroyed.

Now these next few things are more... abstract and can definitely be argued, but personally I still find them important to point out when discussing the topic.

Yosuke obviously struggles with toxic masculinity, and similarly to Kanji, feels like he needs to be the ideal, strong man that protects the weak, etc. Even without looking at specific dialogue, you can tell that Yosuke’s been raised to think he needs to be a “real” man, that displaying more “feminine” behaviors is a sign of weakness; because that isn’t just subtextual, it’s something he very visibly displays, it’s part of his arc. He can’t mourn and cry, he has to get revenge (because he couldn’t protect Saki at the time and he watched helplessly as she died, it makes it his fault), he says hugs are for girls (a common sentiment, but he had to learn it from somewhere), and any time he slips up and reveals his actual feelings, he has to overcompensate, let everyone know that he’s just your average teenage boy who’s definitely interested in women. Yosuke’s not the most masculine guy, he likes fashion and cares about his appearance (the bar is so low) and I’d bet that if he were given space to explore his interests without any expectations, he might actually find he’s into stuff that goes against what he’s been taught. He admits to liking crossdressing, then walks it back; not because he’s ashamed of it (on the contrary, once he realizes people found him cute, he openly brags about it), but because he thinks he SHOULD be ashamed of it.

It’s why he feels so threatened by Kanji, who completely takes him by surprise when he realizes his outer appearance and interests don’t match up. Now Yosuke’s got to compete with Kanji over who’s the manliest, show that he’s not like Kanji, because Kanji’s already accepted that side of himself, and it totally goes against everything Yosuke’s been taught to think is “normal”.

So then we look at lines like this.

On its own it’s nothing special, but it’s not just the slogan itself, it’s the way that Yosuke specifically says that his dad is still saying it. Combining this with what I mentioned previously about Yosuke’s behavior, and a few other tidbits, like Teddie mentioning that he watches violent war movies with Yosuke’s dad, it definitely makes me think he’s the type of guy who’d try and push Yosuke into being more masculine, being a traditional, unshakable, unemotional man.

Lastly, there’s the recently identified album on Yosuke’s shelf in arena, and what do you know, one of the songs on it (The Chain, by Mr. Big) has these lyrics...

In my mind, I see Yosuke’s mother as an incredibly controlling, strict woman who expects her son to be utterly perfect, and even when he’s good, it’s never good enough. Yosuke’s father is busy with Junes, and while he isn’t around the house too often, Yosuke sees him at work quite a bit, large and in-charge, not allowing anyone to see weakness, he leans on his son because he can’t bring himself to ask for help. Yosuke’s left to pick up the slack, and he’s taught by example that relying on others is cowardly, that being intimidating gets you further than being “nice”. Even though Yosuke obviously goes against this, he can't fully commit for fear of standing out and disappointing his parents, and that makes him passive; he ends up being a pushover, and neither of his parents are happy about that. He’s a “disappointment” to them, it’s one of his defining traits that everyone loves to bring up. It's something that's shown to really get under his skin, but he can never do much more than get angry, because he truly thinks he is a disappointment, he doesn't think highly of himself, even if he protests.

Maybe I’m reading into all of these things a little too much, but... I don’t know, I’ve said it before, but I just don’t see how half of Yosuke’s personality would have been shaped by anything other than his parents being Not Great.

#ada's writing #yosuke's parents #yosuke hanamura #yosuke appreciation #WHEW. THIS WAS A LONG ONE.#i literally spent like 3 hours on this and i still couldn't find most of the examples i wanted to lol #mentions of abuse #mentions of neglect #official-redhood #ask ada #ada's analysis #yosuke meta

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worryinglyinnocent · 3 years

Text

Fic: Safe and Sound

Summary: After discovering the horrific truth of Tucker’s experiments, Mustang faces a race against time to get Nina to safety and away from a life in a government lab. Out of ideas, he calls in the Elric brothers, independent alchemists of the people whom he knows to have an interest in human transmutation, and more specifically, reversing it.

Determined to do what they can for her, Ed, Al and their mother provide a safe home for Nina, and over time, they work out how to help her back to her normal state.

Rated: T

Safe and Sound

“It’s a mess, sir.”

Roy looked out of the window at the rain teeming down outside the Tucker home. Hawkeye’s blunt summation of the situation hardly did it justice, but he couldn’t think of a more apt term to use. He turned to Tucker, who still seemed unable to see what he had done wrong in the name of scientific advancement, and he felt the anger begin to burn through his veins once more, even hotter than when he had first entered the place and realised with sickening horror what Tucker had done, and what he must have done two years prior as well.

He strode across the room, grabbing the front of Tucker’s shirt and lifting him bodily out of the chair he had been sitting in whilst Fuery had recorded his statement and confession.

“Colonel.” Hawkeye’s voice was sharp, and Roy glanced over at her. She was kneeling in the corner, next to the chimera (Nina, her name was Nina, she gave him a flower crown the last time he was here), who was watching the scene with wide eyes.

“Don’t hurt Daddy,” Nina pleaded in that low, uncanny, unreal voice, slow and pained but every bit in earnest. The anger in Roy’s blood roiled afresh, and his grip on Tucker’s shirt tightened.

“Lieutenant, get her out of here. Take her out the back way and get Havoc to sneak her into HQ.”

“Daddy…”

“Come on, Nina,” Hawkeye coaxed. “We need to go now. We need to get you somewhere safe.”

“Daddy…”

“Colonel Mustang needs to talk to your daddy, Nina. Come with me. Are you hungry?”

Hawkeye guided Nina out of the room. Once the door was closed and he could no longer hear the lieutenant’s soft cajoling, Roy sank his fist into Tucker’s face. It did not make him feel any better. He hadn’t expected it to.

He let Tucker back down into his chair, leaving the room as Fuery completed the final bits of paperwork.

He needed to work out what to do about Nina. If anyone got word of her, she’d be locked up in a lab and experimented on as an alchemical freak of nature for the rest of her life. He needed to keep her safe, and if there was the slightest chance of getting her and Alexander back to normal, then he had to pursue it.

Roy was not in his area of expertise here. Human experimentation, bio-alchemy, the many varied and illegal and impossible forms of human transmutation - none of that had ever been in his remit and he had never had any desire for it to be. He ran a hand through his hair, desperately trying to think of a solution. Smuggling her into HQ was only a temporary measure and not a perfect one at that; there was still so much that could go disastrously wrong. He needed to get Nina out of sight and out of mind as soon as possible, hiding her away where the military would leave her alone.

A thought struck him and he moved through the house towards the telephone, dialling Falman at headquarters.

“Falman, can you find out if the Elrics are still in town?”

“Yes, sir. On it.”

Roy had first come across Edward and Alphonse Elric four years ago, when news of a couple of young but extremely talented alchemists researching human transmutation and Philosopher’s Stones had come to him through the state alchemist grapevine. With the military always interested in those with an interest in the alchemic taboo, Roy had been despatched to take a look at the lay of the land as regarded the Elrics, and potentially recruit them.

He hadn’t reckoned on their being quite so young, just eleven and ten years old, and he absolutely had not reckoned on their mother. Trisha Elric was a tiny, frail-looking woman with perpetually pale blue-tinged lips and a constant cough from the Frontline Flu that had almost killed her in ‘04, and she was a force of nature who had told Roy in no uncertain terms that her sons’ interest in Philosopher’s Stones was highly personal and that there was no way in hell they were becoming state alchemists despite the research opportunities it would afford them.

Roy had reported back that the Elric brothers were a dead end, and had left them in peace to follow their own research, whilst still keeping an eye on them every time they came to Eastern City to the large library there.

With their secretive nature, their no-nonsense mother and their persistent interest in human alchemy, Roy held out the tiniest hope of Nina’s best chance being with the Elrics.

Hell, anything was worth a shot at this stage.

“Sir?”

“I’m listening, Falman.”

“The Elrics are still in town, sir. They’re in a guesthouse by the station.”

“Thank God. Get someone to try and persuade them to come to HQ.”

“Will do, sir. And, erm, Ms Elric?”

“She’s here too?”

“Yes, sir.”

Roy sighed. “Probably best if she comes too.”

“Yes, sir.”

He hung up, winging up a prayer that this hunch would pay off.

“So…” Ed stretched out his legs, uncaring for who in Eastern Command might trip over them as they waited for Mustang to make an appearance and tell them why they were there. “What do you think the Bastard Colonel wants us for this time?”

“Edward.” The sigh that his mother gave was a long-suffering one rather than showing any real disapproval, and he could see that she was trying very hard not to smile.

“What? You call him the Bastard too!”

“Not in his place of work, I don’t.”

“Officer Falman was really quite apologetic when he picked us up,” Al mused. “Maybe something’s gone terribly wrong and they need us to fix it. You know. Someone outside the military.”

Mom raised an eyebrow. “If that’s the case, they’d be better off picking anyone other than you two. You’d hold it over them as blackmail material for the rest of their lives. Honestly, I don’t know where you got your devious streak from. It wasn’t your dad, which leaves me with the uncomfortable conclusion that it must be from me.”

“Where do you think Dad is right now?” Al asked. “It would be just our luck if he chooses this weekend to come home and we’re not there. I can imagine him going over to Granny’s: ‘Pinako, I swear I had a wife and two children when I left but I appear to have misplaced them.’”

Mom laughed, but Ed didn’t respond. Although he now knew the full story of why Dad had left, the fact he’d left in the first place still rankled even now, and he knew that he would continue to view his father with mixed emotions until the man himself was back in the flesh and could answer for his own actions. Still, that hadn’t stopped him and Al from setting out on the current quest that had occupied them for the last four years, namely finding a way to get Dad back to normal so that when he did return, he and Mom could live a vaguely ordinary life together.

“I’m really sorry about all this.” Falman appeared in the corridor again. “It’s just that we’ve got a bit of a… situation.”

Ed raised an eyebrow as they got up to follow him, deciding to reserve judgement. Falman led them into Mustang’s office, where the rest of the team was clustered around the colonel’s desk with nervous expressions.

“Ok… Anyone want to tell us what’s going on?”

Mustang came over. “We have a situation that requires some discretion.”

Mom snorted. “You picked the wrong two for that.”

“I think when you see what we’ve got, you’ll agree with me.”

Intrigued, Ed approached the desk and peered under it.

It looked like a dog, on the face of it, although it appeared to have some kind of mane of long dark hair, and there was something about the eyes and mouth that didn’t look quite right.

“Chimera?”

Mustang nodded.

“I’m guessing the majority is from a dog, but what’s it fused with?”

Mustang didn’t get the chance to respond before the chimera spoke, a soft, desperate whimper.

“I want Daddy.”

Ed’s blood ran cold. “Someone chimerised a human child?”

“Yes.” Mustang’s voice was deadly serious. “This is Nina Tucker. Her father decided to create a chimera capable of human speech. He’s in jail now.” He gave a heavy sigh. “If anyone gets wind of this, she’ll be shut up in a military lab for the rest of her life. We’re giving out that Tucker’s chimera didn’t survive the transmutation to try and buy us some time. This is the reason why I wanted you to see her. I know that you two are probably the leading state-independent researchers of human transmutation right now. If anyone can help her, you can.”

Ed looked at Al, who was staring at Nina with sad horror, and then at his mom, who was having a coughing fit. Falman brought her some water.

“Mom? You ok?”

She nodded, before slowly, deliberately, getting down on her knees and shuffling under the desk.

“Hey Nina,” she said gently. “My name’s Trisha. How old are you, honey?”

“Six.”

“You’re scared, huh?”

Nina nodded. “Want Daddy.”

“Your daddy can’t come, honey. He did something very, very bad, so he has to go away for a while.”

“A very long while,” Ed muttered.

“Don’t be scared, though,” Mom continued. “We’ll look after you, me and Ed and Al.” She reached out, carefully brushing Nina’s hair out of her eyes. “It’ll be all right, I promise.”

She was just being Mom. In her eyes, Nina was just a scared little kid. Mom didn’t see the alchemy or the implications. She just saw someone who needed a family to keep her safe.

Ed crouched down beside her. “Hi Nina. I’m Ed, and this is Al. We’ll get you sorted out, don’t worry.” He had no idea where he would even begin, but he had to do something to help her out.

Nina looked at Trisha.

“You… Ed Mommy?”

“Yeah, I’m Ed’s Mommy. Why don’t you come with us now, and we’ll take you home, somewhere nice and safe and quiet.”

Nina nodded slowly, and Mom looked up at Mustang.

“I’ll look after her,” she said. “She’ll be safe and off the grid in Resembool. I can’t say we can help her, that’s up to the boys to decide what they’re prepared to try and what they’re capable of doing. But I’ll look after her, and in return, you make sure that the monster who did this never sees the light of day again.”

Ed was beginning to see why Mustang was scared of Mom.

The frenetic logistics of getting Nina home with them without being discovered by the military at large took a while to sort out, and Trisha couldn’t rest easy until she was safely behind her own front door. Winry and Pinako had been brought in on their secret, it would have been near impossible to keep it from them.

Actually looking after her proved to be just the same as taking care of any other child - she was just a little larger and more unco-ordinated. From the moment that she had seen Nina and decided that no matter what, she was going to take care of her, Trisha had not really given any thought to the difficulties that might be involved in caring for a chimera. At the end of the day, Nina was a little girl and Trisha intended to treat her like one, even if she didn’t exactly look like a little girl.

She required a little more concentration than the boys had done, because whilst she could speak, full sentences were difficult simply because of the shape of her mouth, so articulating her needs wasn’t as simple as it could have been. But she would eat at the kitchen table with them if one of them spoon-fed her, and she loved to watch the boys practice their alchemy and listen to the bedtime stories they would weave her.

Occasionally the odd trait that was definitely dog rather than human would forcibly remind Trisha that Nina was two beings in one now - most notably she preferred to sleep curled up behind the couch in the living room rather than in a bed - but generally, Nina was the daughter she’d never had.

“Dad could fix her,” Al said one evening whilst they were sitting around after dinner. Nina was dozing, her head in Trisha’s lap. They’d taken to braiding her mane to keep it out of her eyes, and she’d decided on blue ribbons today. Trisha stroked the silky ends through her fingers. “I mean, he’s a Philosopher’s Stone, he should be able to do anything, right?”

“He probably could,” Ed agreed. “The difficulty would be finding him and explaining the situation. We haven’t known where he is for ten years, tracking him down now to break off from his quest and come home to un-chimerise a chimera wouldn’t exactly be the easiest solution.”

“Yeah.” Al sighed. “I guess it’s back to the drawing board and Dad’s books. I don’t really recall any of them talking about chimeras, but then, we weren’t really looking for any information about them.”

Trisha coughed, startling Nina out of her doze, and she looked around for a while.

“Big brother Ed?”

Ed grinned. Trisha was surprised at how quickly Nina had decided on Ed as a surrogate big brother, but he was definitely the person that she seemed to have latched onto as her link into the family. Ed was Big Brother. Al was usually just Al. Trisha was Ed-Mommy. (Occasionally, when she woke up crying from nightmares, she was just Mommy, and Trisha would hold her as close as she possibly could.)

“Hey Nina.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

The grin dropped as quickly as it had appeared on his face.

“Your daddy had to go away, Nina.”

“No… Ed-Daddy.” Trisha followed her sight-line over to the opposite wall; she was looking at her and Van’s wedding photo on the mantel.

“Oh. He had to go away too.”

“He did bad?”

Ed snorted, and Trisha laughed.

“I think that depends on who you ask, honey. No, Ed and Al’s daddy didn’t do anything bad. He’s travelling around the country at the moment. Ed’s daddy is a very powerful alchemist and there are some things he has to do to make sure everyone is safe. It’s sad that we don’t see him, but he’s the only one who can protect us. All of us.”

“Oh.”

They fell into silence again, until Al spoke up from the floor where he was sitting in the middle of a sea of books.

“Maybe if we knew how Tucker did it in the first place we could reverse engineer it.”

“I guess.” Ed sighed. “I’d be afraid of making it worse, though. Sometimes I’ve thought about asking her if she can remember what happened, but I don’t want her to relive what was probably a very traumatic experience.”

“Exactly,” Trisha said. Nina’s head was resting in her lap and drowsing again. “It doesn’t matter if you can’t help her, boys. No one is expecting you to. You’re already giving her the care and love and safety that she needs, and that’s all that matters. If we do get a little girl and a large dog out of this, then that would be wonderful, but right now, Nina’s wellbeing takes priority.”

She thought about the picture that Mustang had sent her, along with a packet of documents from the Tucker household that might be useful - birth certificate, medical records and the like. A sweet little girl and a huge, goofy-looking dog. She stroked one of Nina’s front paws sadly. Although she was mostly aware of her changed shape and size, there were the odd little moments where she forgot she didn’t have hands, and it always distressed her. Trisha wanted nothing more than for the chimerisation to be reversed and for Nina - and Alexander - to live normal lives, but if that wasn’t to be, then Trisha would just take care of the chimera for as long as she needed it.

They’d settled into the routine of having Nina with them remarkably quickly, and Al was pleased by just how easily she’d become part of the family. It was very clear that Ed was her favourite, but he didn’t seem to mind that at all. It was strange, Al had never really thought of Ed as being particularly good with kids, but then again, they had never really come across all that many over the course of their research. He completely doted on Nina though, and whenever she and Mom had been making flower crowns, he would always wear the one Nina picked out as his without any complaint.

Although he was used to Nina being around, it was still a surprise to see her bounding out of the house towards them as he and Ed made their way up the hill having been to see Winry in town.

“Ed! Big Brother Ed! Ed! Daddy’s here!”

Al looked at Ed, Ed looked back at Al, and they both started to sprint up the hill. Nina’s father was still in jail in Eastern City, there was no way he should be in Resembool, it had been given out that Nina was dead, who had spilled that she was here…

Al barrelled into the kitchen with Ed hot on his heels, and both of them stopped dead.

“Oh.”

It wasn’t Tucker. The man standing in the kitchen hugging Mom tightly was their own dad.

There was the click-click-click of Nina’s nails on the floor tiles behind them.

“Ed-Daddy,” she said proudly.

So that was what she meant.

Eventually, Mom let go of Dad and he turned to them. It must have been just as much of a shock for him to see them now, considering how small they had been when he had left.

“I’ve been gone so long,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise how long I would be. I’ve missed so much. I’m sorry.”

“I…” Ed seemed to be having trouble taking it all in, and he shook his head. “It’s so weird. I’ve rehearsed this moment for years and now it’s here and I have no idea what to say.”

Al stumbled as Nina butted his legs and peered around him.

Dad looked at her, curious.

“I see our family has grown whilst I’ve been away. Hello there.”

“This is Nina.” Ed moved closer to her protectively. “She’s our little sister.”

“Big Brother Ed!”

Dad looked from Nina to Ed to Mom and back again.

“I’ll explain later,” Mom said.

“It’s ok. I think I know what’s happened.” Dad came over, crouching in front of Nina and offering her his hand. She tentatively placed her paw in it, and he shook it gently. “It’s nice to meet you, Nina.” He smiled. “You’re like me, aren’t you? Made into something different by alchemy you had no say in.”

Al knew at that moment that he didn’t have to worry about his father not accepting Nina or not being prepared to help her.

Much later, once Nina was asleep on her cushion behind the couch, and once Dad had explained everything that had happened over the last ten years - and before that - in his own words, and once Ed had stopped yelling at him, and once Nina’s situation had been explained, Al voiced the thought that had been at the forefront of their minds ever since Nina had come to live with them.

“Dad, can you help her?”

Dad didn’t reply for a long time, his brow furrowed in thought, but Al’s heart leapt to his mouth as he eventually nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “I think I should be able to, but it’s the kind of thing that I’d only get one shot at. It would have to be perfect first time, because if I get it wrong, it’ll just make it worse.”

Al looked at Ed, and then at Mom, who nodded.

“I think it’s worth the risk,” she said. “She’s the sweetest darling just as she is, but I can’t imagine what kind of internal distress she’s in, and I think she’d be happier if she was back to her old self.”

“In that case, I will do what I can.”

It took a couple of days for Dad to work out exactly what he would need to do, during which time Al was incredibly conscious of the fact that although he had come home now, he had not come home for good and there was still a lot of work that he had to do around the country in order to be prepared for the Promised Day coming and everything that would happen then. He still couldn’t quite get his head around the scope of it all, but it was a reasonably valid excuse for leaving them for so long. If something went wrong and it ended up backfiring on Dad, then what would happen to them all then? It would all be for nothing if they were doomed into a massive transmutation circle in a couple of months anyway.

Eventually, Dad announced that he was ready, and Al ventured into the study. All the furniture had been pushed back against the walls, and the most complex transmutation circle that Al had ever seen was drawn on the floor. Dad was kneeling in the middle of it, tracing out all the lines to make sure that there were no breaks.

“This should separate her out into two separate entities again,” he said. “The souls should be able to provide the power needed for it.”

Mom brought Nina into the room, and she shied away from the circle, hiding behind Mom’s legs.

“Scared,” she said. Al couldn’t really blame her. The last time she’d seen a circle this large and complex drawn out on the floor was probably the time she was chimerised in the first place.

“It’s ok, honey. I’m right here. This will make you feel a lot better, I promise.” She stepped into the circle. “Come on, Nina. I’ll be right here with you.”

“Mom, are you really sure that’s a good idea?” Ed asked. “Considering everything that could go wrong?”

Mom looked at Dad, who would have to be inside the circle as well in order for it to work.

“I trust you,” she said simply, and she sat down, holding out her arms for Nina.

“Scared,” Nina whimpered, but she padded across the floor and curled up in Mom’s lap.

Dad looked up.

“Step out and close the door,” he said. “This could get disturbing to watch.”

“But…”

“Edward.” Dad’s tone was non-negotiable, and Al dragged Ed out of the study, shutting the door behind them. Ed continued to grumble for a while, but then bent down to watch through the keyhole.

There was a deafening crack of alchemy, and bright red light flared out below the door.

The light was blinding, and Ed couldn’t really see much after Dad plunged his hands into Nina’s chest. The alchemy was roaring in his ears and he couldn’t hear anything useful, so he was forced to step back from the door and just hope that everything would be all right.

It seemed to take forever. It was the kind of thing where once it was started, it couldn’t be stopped until it was done. It wasn’t a job that could be left half-finished whilst Dad took a break to get his breath back. He imagined what it must be like, having to separate out two souls and two bodies into two completely separate entities and not leave anything mixed up.

He was glad it was Dad doing it and not him. He glanced across at Al.

“Do you think they’re all ok?”

Al shrugged, but his expression was just as worried as Ed knew his own was.

“I guess all we can do is wait and see and trust Dad.”

“Hmm.” Ed didn’t trust his father with a lot of things, but when it came to alchemy, he couldn’t think of anyone he could trust more than Dad with something like this.

The alchemy roared louder, and Ed could see sparks under the door.

“That’s it. I’m doing something.”

“Ed, don’t be stupid, what on earth can you do?”

“I can do something!”

“Ed!”

Suddenly, everything was dark and silent. For better or worse, it was all over. Ed looked at Al, and after a moment, Al nodded.

Ed flung the door open...

“WOOF!”

...and was immediately bowled over by a very large, very shaggy dog. He could hear Al laughing above him, and he took that as a good sign. Finally managing to dislodge the mutt long enough to sit up, he peered into the room.

Dad was flat on his back, drenched in sweat (or possibly dog saliva), and breathing like he’d just run the Central City marathon, but Mom was still sitting in the circle, and in her arms, clinging on for dear life, was…

“Nina, honey,” Mom said softly. “You can open your eyes, it’s all over now.”

Nina opened her eyes and looked around the room.

“Al. Big Brother Ed. Alexander!”

She rushed over on slightly wobbly legs, throwing her arms around each of them in turn with the longest and most exuberant hug being reserved for the dog. Ed supposed he could understand that, he’d been her closest and longest friend, after all.

Mom got to her feet and held out a hand to pull Dad up, slipping her arms around him and going in for a long kiss.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“Thank you, Ed-Daddy!” Nina did not let go of Alexander, who seemed content to be hugged for as long as necessary, but she was beaming at Dad. “You’re right, I feel much better now.”

Dad smiled. “You’re welcome, Nina.”

“Come on, Nina.” Al was trying to shepherd her out of the room, and considering how gooey and love-eyed Mom was looking, Ed was happy to leave his parents to smooch in peace for a while.

“Let’s get some cookies for you and Alexander. It’s a good job we keep dog biscuits here for Den when Winry brings her over.”

They left the study, Ed closing the door behind them, and the four of them made their way into the kitchen.

Nina had always seemed to be remarkably content considering what had happened to her, but seeing the sheer joy in her face as she was able to hold a cookie and feed herself again was wonderful.

“What do you think happens now?” Al asked as he poured milk for him and Nina. “The colonel asked us to take care of Nina and help her if we could, and we’ve done that now.”

“I guess everything just stays the same as it was before.” Ed snaffled another cookie. “Nina doesn’t really have anywhere else to go, so we might as well just keep looking after her. What do you say, Nina? Do you want to stay here with us?”

Nina nodded. “Yes. I like it here with you.”

“I don’t think Mom and Dad would have a problem with it. I think Mom feels outnumbered by us sometimes and she’s enjoyed having another girl in the house.”

Nina just giggled, and then gave a theatrical sigh as Alexander found his way into the box of dog biscuits and got his large nose stuck in it, running around the kitchen with it over his face like a muzzle.

“Alexander!”

Ed laughed. “Well, I think that the latest new arrival might take a bit of getting used to, but I’m sure Mom won’t mind him either.”

(They were all so absorbed in chasing the dog around the kitchen that none of them noticed the flash of red alchemic light under Dad’s study door again.)

To say that everything surrounding the Promised Day had been one big frantic mess of alchemy, planning a highly organised and highly secret coup, and learning the most extraordinary things about what had been going on in the world for the last few centuries would be an understatement, but at the end of it all, Roy was simply glad to have made it out of the other side unharmed. There was an awful lot of work still to do, but with the immediate threat gone, they could take their time a little more and not have to worry about the entire country potentially being made into a giant Philosopher’s Stone at a moment’s notice.

Speaking of Philosopher’s Stones, though… Roy thought of Hohenheim. It was a small world, after all. He had been surprised to find out that their independent benefactor who had been working behind the scenes to stop Father and the homunculi for over a decade was the Elrics’ father, and moreover that he was the reason for their intense interest in human alchemy and Philosopher’s Stone research, but having met him, everything made a lot more sense.

Everything was also a lot more confusing, but Roy got the impression that someone like Hohenheim just created confusion wherever he went, without necessarily knowing why or indeed intending to.

All of that explained why he was now on a train to Resembool to go and see the Elric family for himself, because after the dust had settled and Father had been defeated and Hohenheim had vanished off as suddenly as he had appeared, going back to his family for good now, a single thought had pushed itself into Roy’s brain and refused to leave.

Nina.

She had gone with the Elrics months ago and they had promised to do what they could for her with their knowledge of Philosopher’s Stones. Now that they sort of had one to hand, surely something could be done? Or would it be impossible to undo Tucker’s work?

Roy made his way up the hill towards the Elric home, repeating the journey he’d first made five years ago when they had first come into his sphere of knowledge. He hoped that Trisha wouldn’t chase him down the road with a shoe as she had threatened to do on that first occasion.

“Hello, Colonel.” He was pleasantly surprised to find her out working in the garden but still rather wary of the fork she was holding. “What brings you here?”

“I… I was actually wondering how Nina was getting on.”

Trisha smiled. “She’s doing well, Colonel. She’s settled in nicely. It’s as if we’ve always had her. Van and I would be happy to adopt her if you’re willing to sort out the paperwork for us.”

There was something different about Trisha, Roy thought. She seemed stronger, more vibrant, and her lips were a normal pink colour rather than the blue tinge he’d grown used to seeing on her. Something or someone had healed her lungs.

“Colonel? You’re staring, sir.”

“Oh. Yes. Right. Yes. I mean, of course. I’ll get the paperwork as soon as I get back.”

“Excellent. Everyone will be so pleased.” She stood up, brushing down her apron. “Do you want to step in for a while, get your breath back after tackling the hill?”

“Erm, all right.” He stepped through the gate and followed Trisha up the path towards the house. The door opened before they got there.

“Mr Mustang!”

A large white shape bowled him over and started licking him voraciously, and he heard a familiar little giggle from the doorway.

“Hello, Alexander,” he finally managed.

Nina was standing in the doorway with Ed, who was smirking in the way only Edward Elric could smirk, and Roy knew that he’d lost all dignity in Ed’s eyes - if he’d even had any to start with.

“You did it,” he said, looking from Nina to Alexander and back again.

“Well, Dad did most of the work,” Ed said. “But she’s safe and happy here.”

Nina nodded. “I have big brothers now! I never had them before. I’m kind of hoping for a little sister too. Maybe now that Ed’s Daddy is back and Ed’s Mommy is well again I’ll get one.”

“Oh no.” Ed threw his hands up. “We are not thinking about that at all.” He sighed. “Thanks, Nina. Now I need brain bleach.”

“Ed, Nina, are you going to let the colonel in through the door?” Trisha’s voice called out from inside the house.

“I don’t know.” Ed looked down at Nina. “What do you think? Shall we let him in?”

“Yeah. We might need to get him a towel for Alexander’s drool though.”

Roy rolled his eyes as he got to his feet, following Alexander into the house. It was good to see Nina happy and thriving with a new family, who she seemed to have accepted readily as her own. It was good to see Trisha no longer suffering the after effects of her illness, and it was good to see the Elric family all together once more.

He hung back in the kitchen doorway, watching them all for a moment, very much feeling like the outsider that he was until Trisha pulled him in to join them.

Considering that the state alchemist programme had been little more than a device in which to form potential human sacrifices for Father’s plans, Roy had no idea if it would be continuing into the future, but the thought still remained in his head even as Ed was showing him back to the front door an hour or so later.

“Edward?”

“Yes, Colonel?”

“You and Al, and your parents... don’t ever stop doing what you’re doing. Using alchemy to help people, and taking care of those who’ve been wronged by it.”

Ed grinned. “Oh, we don’t intend to, Colonel. You’ve got my word on that.”

Roy felt a sense of peace as he made his way back to the station. As long as there were people like the Elrics in the world, he could hope that everything would be all right in the end.

#FMA: Brotherhood #FMA Fanfiction #Edward Elric #Alphonse Elric #Roy Mustang #Nina Tucker #Nina lives!#Trisha lives!#Everyone lives!#Nina and Alexander get back to normal!#AU #canon divergence #Fic: Safe and Sound

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ramblingsekai · 2 years

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Ok moving away from An’s dad, do we actually know anything about An’s mom? “But I thought you weren’t in love with An’s dad and was gonna stop talking about him”

First off, I’m not in love with An’s dad. Second, I will keep talking about him so long as he’s relevant to VBS’s story. And this time it’s not even really about him.

Anyways, back to An’s mom. I know she’s alive. That’s already like more info than some of the other characters’ parents. I know An’s parents own a house that I assume is away from Weekend Garage (darn you P5 for skewing my thoughts bc I just automatically at first thought oh they live like above their cafe or something when I first saw Weekend Garage). And I’m pretty sure her parents are still together. I only vaguely remember like a toss away line from a card story mentioning that she was waiting at home for them or something.

This time I’m making headcanons.

Since we know like almost nothing about An’s mom, I like to think that she ended up influencing one of An’s other notable traits in game which is that An is actually really fashionable and good with clothes. So I like HC-ing that An’s mom is like a trendy fashion designer who has an interest in street-style fashion(I know nothing about fashion if you can’t tell already). Maybe she met Ken at Vivid Street by going there for inspiration at first and then falling in love with Ken while he was performing and still trying to make a name for him and his band. Maybe she also travels a lot for work which might be why we never hear about her and why she doesn’t stop by Weekend Garage a lot. Also, just an observation, but An kinda looks nothing like Ken. I think their eye colors are the same, but other than that they don’t really look that similar so I guess An looks more like her mom in general. Since this is anime, I guess An’s mom would basically look like grown-up An with a different eye color. Even though they look the same, I also kinda like to HC that An got more of her personality from her dad. Maybe An’s mom is a little stricter with An about her grades and stuff, but come on, she married Ken, so she’s also probably laid back as well since I feel like Ken wouldn’t be so supportive of An if his wife didn’t like An’s dream. But if there’s one thing I’d like to imagine, it’s that An got her kindness and go with the flow attitude from her dad, but her bubbliness and her straightforward attitude from her mom. So maybe An’s mom is the one to put her foot down on certain things, like grades, making sure she doesn’t stay out too late, would give her tough love if An ever went to her about her doubts we see in the event stories, and maybe even tease the rest of VBS a lot too.

Omg but can you imagine. I feel like she’d basically mom the rest of VBS too since Ken basically adopted them. She’d straighten out their clothes and fret over their health and just be like “Ken you can’t give too much caffeine to teenagers, it’ll stunt their growth.” And like can you imagine how flustered Toya and Akito would be over having Ken’s wife/An’s mom just flit around asking questions and giving clothing advice. I don’t even know if Akito would be able to decide on which face to show her. Like he tries to do his polite act around her, but eventually she just goes “Akito you don’t have to be weird and put on a mask around me” or something and Akito just drops the act. Ofc he’s also like omg how did she know, but An’s mom would just know. I also like to think that she’d try to help Toya out too, but I’m not really sure how she’d be able to help out differently than Ken. But omg, the real good part. As soon as she sees Kohane, she just teases the heck out of her. Bc An would definitely gush about Kohane to her mom so ofc she’d embarrass her daughter by heckling her daughter’s girlfriend. And then she drops the whole “so you’re dating my daughter huh” act and asks when is the wedding.

omg I did it again. I swear I did not intend to write another mini-essay about a character who isn’t even really mentioned, but I adore An and VBS so ofc this happened. Anyways, gimme your thoughts and perspectives. Hell, I’ll take any crumbs of info on An’s mom at this point.

#an shirashi #ken shiraishi #mom shiraishi #project sekai #i swear i'll post about the other characters #but i have ken brainrot today so i gotta get it all out #project sekai headcanons

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chickwiththepurpleguitar · 3 years

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It is I, here to Officially Request™ absolutely chaos All Named Characters Molina Family Board Game Night because honestly? The chaos needs to be freed.

THERE'S SO MUCH CHAOS I'M NOT SORRY.

Have the official sequel to this fic because when @screamin-amuseum requested the first part as "the whole gang + boardgame" I took that to mean All Named Characters playing board games and so here's that continuation. It's so unnecessarily long. It's so unnecessarily angsty??? TW for mentions of Trevor with an eating disorder, nothing graphic though.

I don't know what else to say. This is really chaotic. I can't write scenes with more than two people in them and yet this fic has 13. Hope you all enjoy.

Read on ao3 here:

Unfortunately, the Molinas’ extensive board game collection does not actually include Pretty Pretty Princess (it was just a tad bit before Julie’s time).

But on the bright side, she knows someone they can borrow it from. Even if Luke’s not happy about it.

“Why’d you have to invite him?” he complains the second Julie gets off the phone with Nick.

“Because—” Julie barely spares Luke a glance as she passes him on the way to the living room. “We’re borrowing his little sister’s board game.”

“So? That doesn’t mean he has to play it with us!”

Julie rolls her eyes. “Luke, are you seriously still jealous of him?”

Luke lets out an indignant squawk. “I am not jealous . I just don’t like him!” He poofs out and back in again to cut Julie off in the doorway, and she stops out of instinct, never quite sure these days if she’ll end up walking through the boys or into them. “Julie, in case you’ve forgotten, we’re talking about a kid who was literally possessed by Caleb five minutes ago. And you want us to hang out with him? You want to bring him into your house? Where you live? To play Pretty Pretty Princess? ”

Julie gives him the most exasperated look she can muster, trying to ignore the smile threatening to tug at her lips. “Luke. First of all, Nick’s already been to my house, so that argument is invalid. Second, he’s not possessed by Caleb anymore, and the fact that he used to be is only more reason for us to offer him some extra friendship, I’m sure he needs it. And third, I already invited him, he’s on his way, and not even your pouting and puppy dog eyes can change that, so don’t even bother trying.”

Of course, Luke immediately breaks out the pout and the puppy dog eyes, but Julie doesn’t let herself so much as look at him. She pushes past him and continues through to the kitchen, shaking her head in amusement as Luke’s annoyed grumbling fades out behind her.

Her dad’s at the kitchen counter, just hanging up his own phone. He turns when Julie enters and offers her a small smile. “Takeout’s on its way. And your tía’s coming, with her own set of dice, so be prepared for those to be loaded.”

Julie giggles. “Well, I called Flynn and they’re gonna bring some sodas and snacks, and Nick’s bringing Pretty Pretty Princess since the boys were so excited to play it. It’s still cool that he comes, too, right?”

“Of course, mija.” Her dad looks at her for a second, and then away, busies himself with wiping down the perfectly-clean counter. “Did you, uh… Did you maybe want to invite Carrie to join us?”

Julie sighs. “Dad, you know me and Carrie aren’t friends anymore.”

“No, yeah, I know.” He scrubs harder at an invisible speck of dirt. “I just thought it might be a nice gesture.”

Despite everything, Julie finds herself considering it. Sure, she and Carrie are still decidedly not friends , but… they’re not quite enemies anymore, either. It’s hard to be enemies with someone who helped you save your shared ex-love interest from an evil jazz-singing magician ghost. Carrie knows about the guys now and didn’t expose Julie and the Phantoms as a fraud, and she hasn’t been as actively mean to Julie and Flynn at school the past few months.

Maybe someday, the three of them will be able to reconcile, officially. Julie might even want to. But that doesn’t mean she’s ready to have Carrie in her house so soon, doesn’t mean she wants to include Carrie in their first family game night without her mom.

“Maybe another time,” she says, offering her dad a soft smile so he knows she means it.

He smiles back, and there’s more relief and happiness in his eyes than Julie would’ve expected under the circumstances, leaving Julie to wonder why her dad would care about her relationship with Carrie Wilson so much.

An hour later, everything’s all set up, and all the guests—ghost and human alike—have arrived. They’re all spread out across the various couches and floor space in Julie’s living room, all ten of them—Julie, her dad, Carlos, Tía Victoria, Luke, Alex, Reggie, Willie, Flynn, and Nick. The four ghosts are all sharing one couch, the four Molinas another, while Flynn and Nick lounge on the floor across the room because the ghosts still make Nick a little uncomfortable (though Julie’s unsure if that’s because of his stint with Caleb or because Luke won’t stop glaring at him).

Knowing Game Night, the seating arrangements won’t stay as they are for long, as the various games require space or privacy or the occasional team-up. Julie’s certain by the end of the night, her friends and family will all be mingling and getting along.

Since there are so many of them, they can’t follow the usual Game Night rules—everyone picks one game and they play through them all. If they tried, they’d be here all night, and half of them have to go to school tomorrow. So instead, the plan is this: Everyone’s name will go in a hat. Whoever wins each game picks a name out of the hat, and that person gets to pick the next game. They’ll play a total of five, or until midnight, whichever comes first.

The only caveat to this strategy is that they’re playing Pretty Pretty Princess first, and since that was technically Alex’s choice, his name’s not going in the hat (a fact Alex seems perfectly fine with).

Game Number One isn’t nearly as much of a disaster as Julie kind of expected it to be. It’s only a four player game, so they play in teams of two and three: Luke, Reggie, and Julie playing for the purple jewelry; Alex, Willie, and Flynn playing for the pink; Nick and Carlos for green; and Dad and Tía for blue. The only fight that breaks out is when Luke takes the black ring on purpose and then refuses to put it back the next turn; otherwise, the teams work together surprisingly well.

Somehow, despite Reggie’s earlier insistence that Alex is a PPP master, the adults win, and then they insist on splitting their winning jewelry between them even though it’s all sized to fit five-year-olds.

Just as Dad and Tía are celebrating their victory, and Julie and Carlos are having a telepathic brother-sister conversation about how their aunt must have rigged it, the doorbell rings.

“Ooh, I bet that’s the pizza,” Dad says, hauling himself to his feet. He keeps one hand on the tiny plastic crown on his head so it doesn’t fall off.

He looks ridiculous, between the crown, the singular clip-on earring, and the ring just barely stuck on the end of his pinky finger, but Julie manages to hold back her laughter as she stands and says, “I’ll help carry.”

Her dad beats her to the door, only because Reggie holds her back and tries to convince her not to let Luke have any pizza (to which Luke gives another indignant squawk and immediately starts bickering), so by the time Julie catches up with him, Dad’s already got the front door thrown open, and whatever’s on the porch to greet him has left him staring, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and pale.

Like he’s seen a ghost or something.

“Dad?” Julie starts to say, but the word dies in her throat as she steps into view of the open door and sees none other than Carrie Wilson standing on her front porch.

Carrie looks nervous, and just as pale, as she stares back at Julie’s father, a clutch purse held in her white-knuckled hands.

Carrie says something, quietly enough that Julie thinks she might have imagined it, that sounds suspiciously like, “Hi, Papi,” and then her gaze flits behind him to Julie and her eyes widen. She clears her throat, straightens her shoulders, says louder, “Mr. Molina. Julie.”

“Hi, Carrie,” Dad says after a weirdly long pause, startling like he’s been struck. “What are—I didn’t—” He breaks off and glances at Julie over his shoulder, his expression screaming, I thought you weren’t going to invite her!

I didn’t! Julie shoots back, then trains a painfully plastic smile on her definitely-not-a-friend-but-not-quite-an-enemy. “Carrie, what are you doing here?”

“Sorry to interrupt, I—didn’t realize you had company…” She glances toward the driveway next to the house, where Nick parked his car. “I can leave.”

“No, don’t—It’s okay,” Dad assures her, a little too quickly for Julie’s liking. “What’s—did you need something?”

Carrie shifts her weight awkwardly from foot to foot, looking back and forth between Julie and her dad like she wants to ask Julie to give them some privacy. Julie just plants her feet and crosses her arms over her chest. Like hell is she gonna leave Carrie alone with her dad when he’s already acting weird and she still has yet to tell them what she’s doing there.

Julie doesn’t even remember the last time Carrie Wilson stepped foot on the Molinas’ property. It’s all too weird, like Julie’s stepped out of Family Game Night and into some strange, confusing alternate universe.

“Um… Okay, so, Dad and I were at this dumb charity event at Schaefer’s, and on the way back, our car broke down.” Carrie waves a vague hand toward the street. “Gerald—our driver—called someone, but Dad doesn’t trust mechanics, and I think it’s supposed to storm later, so…” She trails off, blushes, and adds, “We were only a block or so away so I thought…”

Julie’s not sure she’s following. Her dad must catch up quicker because he says, “Oh! Oh, well—well, you’re welcome to wait out the storm here, we’ve got food coming, we’re having a little game night. Why don’t you join us?”

He turns to look at Julie, almost as an afterthought, his gaze somehow pleading and apologetic at the same time.

Whatever frustration Julie might feel at his eagerness to let Carrie interfere with their lives despite knowing how Julie feels about her is quickly snuffed out by the look on her dad’s face, and the equally anxious look on Carrie’s.

Julie doesn’t like this. She doesn’t think putting her, Flynn, Nick, and Carrie in a competitive setting together is a good idea. She really doesn’t think putting Luke, Alex, Reggie, and Trevor Wilson in a competitive setting together is a good idea. She can think of very few scenarios in which this whole night doesn’t turn into a complete and total disaster.

But reconciliation has to start somewhere, and she does, deep down, want to be Carrie’s friend again someday, wants even more to help her boys get their bandmate back.

She takes a slow, deep breath, prays she won’t regret this, and says, “Of course, Carrie. Come join us for Game Night.”

Carrie visibly relaxes, something like a real, genuine smile fluttering around her lips. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll, um—I’ll go get Dad. He wanted to wait in the car, in case you guys… turned us away…”

Awkward silence falls, and Julie can’t understand why her dad looks so sad all of a sudden, but before she can think of how to ask, Carrie spins on her high heels and starts back down the porch steps.

The second the door closes behind her, Dad says, “I’m sorry, did I overstep?”

Julie sighs. Her dad’s always been particularly good with boundaries. And she thinks part of him might miss the days when Carrie was over more often than not, playing dolls and singing with Julie and Flynn. So Julie can’t be mad. “No, it’s okay. But you get to tell the guys the pizza’s not here yet, and the guy who stole all their songs is.”

His eyes widen in horror, only adding to the absurdity of his bejeweled look, and Julie stifles another laugh as she heads back to the living room.

All things considered, it’s not nearly as much of a trainwreck as Julie thought it might be. Flynn loudly declares that she will not be on a team with Carrie under any circumstances, and the guys don’t take the Trevor news well , exactly, but a sharp look from Julie and a badly whispered promise from Willie to do some serious ghost pranking later keep them from actively pitching a fit about it.

When the Wilsons and their driver Gerald arrive, the tension in the room grows so instantly thick and awkward that Julie’s worried someone might actually explode. Carrie breaks it by stalking confidently into the room and plopping herself on the floor between Nick and Carlos like she belongs there. Gerald soon follows, claiming a chair next to Tía Victoria, and smiles politely at them all.

Only Trevor remains hovering in the doorway, pale and shaky, taking deep meditative breaths as his eyes rove across each person one at a time, lingering a little too long on Julie’s aunt, skipping over Luke entirely. Finally, he swallows, winces like it hurts, and says to Julie’s dad, “I didn’t realize you still did these.”

Julie frowns, unsure what that’s supposed to mean exactly, but her dad offers up no explanation, just waves Trevor over to sit on the couch with him. Luke lays a gentle hand on Julie’s knee, leans in close to whisper, “Hey. You okay?”

She gives him a grateful smile, nods. “Fine. How about you?”

Luke shrugs, glances over at Trevor, who’s still very purposefully not looking in their direction, and winks at Julie. “Let’s just cream this guy, shall we?”

And so, Game Night continues.

The three new guests’ names get added to the hat, and Victoria shuffles them around before pulling a slip of paper out.

“Carrie,” she reads. “You get to pick the next game.”

“Oh, no, that’s okay,” Carrie tries. “I just got here, someone else can pick.”

“Come on, Care,” Nick says, nudging her encouragingly. “Them’s the rules.”

“Your name came out of the hat,” Julie agrees, attempting a smile. It’s the closest she can get to a peace offering. “Pick a game.”

Carrie scans her face a moment, like she’s searching for any hint that Julie’s being mean or ingenuine. She must not find any, because she says, “Okay,” and gets to her feet, brushing invisible dust off her skirt. She peers into the game cabinet for a total of about five seconds before she says, “Oh my god, you still have Monopoly with the credit card readers? We are definitely playing that.”

“Dibs on banker!” Carlos shouts and jumps to his feet to dig the box out of the cabinet.

Julie grins at her little brother’s enthusiasm, and when she catches Carrie’s eye, her smile doesn’t fade.

Maybe they can do this. It’s as good a first step toward reconciliation as any, she supposes.

The pizza arrives while Carrie and Carlos are setting up the Monopoly board, so Julie and her dad bring it in and set up the stack of boxes on the kitchen island for easy access. The ghosts immediately descend on the food like a pack of rabid animals, Luke grabbing four or five slices at once and starting to stuff them in his mouth before Julie shouts, “Plates, boys! Plates!” and he deflates, grinning bashfully at her.

Once everyone who wants pizza has gotten some (Gerald takes a slice, Trevor and Carrie don’t—Julie remembers vaguely that the Wilsons were never big fans of take-out in general), they work out new teams, which leads to less bloodshed than Julie expected but takes way longer than it has any right to. Finally, they figure out a breakdown that everyone’s more or less happy with, despite now having an uneven number of players: Trevor, Gerald, Dad, and Tía; Carlos, Luke, and Reggie; Alex, Willie, and Flynn; and Carrie, Nick, and Julie.

It’s a chaotic game for sure, but no one outright attacks each other, so Julie counts it as a success. And her team wins, so.

The rest of the night goes like that, one game after another. Julie picks Willie’s name, Willie picks Mario Kart, Carlos wins. Carlos picks Gerald’s name, Gerald picks poker (“Oh my god, my driver’s a gambler,” Trevor sighs into his hands), and somehow Flynn smokes them all. For the last game, Flynn picks Luke’s name, Luke picks Candy Land because he’s actually eight years old, and Flynn and Carrie manage to eke out a victory despite being on the same team and bickering the entire game.

Luke and Trevor, also on the same team, don’t say a single word to each other, but Julie doesn’t miss how a smile tugs at Luke’s lips when Trevor makes a joke about Lord Licorice looking like their high school English teacher.

Gerald gets a call just as they’re finishing up and informs them that the broken down limo’s been towed away and one of his colleagues is there with a fresh car to take the Wilsons home.

“Perfect timing,” Dad says, clapping his hands together. “I’ll walk you out.”

Once they’re gone, Nick and Flynn soon follow. Julie thanks Nick profusely for letting them borrow his sister’s game and convinces him to take some of the leftover pizza home to his family. Tía kisses them all goodnight (including the ghosts, which leaves Reggie grinning and the rest of them bright red), and then she’s out the door too, and Carlos heads up to bed, and Willie poofs out, telling Alex they’ll catch him later, leaving just Julie alone with her Phantoms.

“That was actually really fun,” she says, leaning back into the couch.

“Next time, I think we should choose teams at the beginning and stick with them all night,” Luke suggests, slinging an arm around her shoulders. “More fun that way.”

Alex plops onto the couch on Luke’s other side. “But if we play Pretty Pretty Princess again, I’m not playing on your team, bro.”

“Yeah, man,” Reggie agrees, snuggling up under Julie’s arm. “We coulda won that game if you’d just put the black ring away. ”

“It made me look awesome!” Luke insists.

“And the purple one didn’t?”

Alex lets out a dramatic sigh as Luke and Reggie break into an argument over Julie’s head. She just rolls her eyes and tries not to giggle too audibly, though it’s hard when her boys are so lovingly silly.

When she looks up, her dad’s lingering in the doorway, watching the four of them and playing a little nervously with his hands.

Julie frowns, catches his gaze, and mouths, You okay?

He nods, smiles, but looks from her to the three ghost boys cuddled up next to her and back again. Julie instantly catches his meaning.

“Hey, guys,” she says, loud enough to be heard over Luke and Reggie’s bickering. They shut up right away. “I’m gonna help my dad clean up. Can you go wait in the studio for me, and we can rehearse a bit before I go to bed?”

“Oh, yeah,” the boys say, and “Yeah, sure, Julie,” and they all hug her and wave goodnight to her dad before disappearing with a gentle displacement of air.

Julie gets to her feet as her dad joins her in the living room. He sets his phone on top of the game cabinet and plays a Celia Cruz album her mom liked.

They work in companionable silence for a while, other than the music, counting all the cards and tokens and jewelry pieces to make sure everything’s accounted for and gets back into its proper box.

As Julie’s wrapping up the Mario Kart controllers, her dad says casually, “You have fun tonight?”

“Yeah,” she says, and finds she means it. “Yeah, you know, it wasn’t quite the same as playing with Mom, but I still had a really good time. Thanks for letting everyone come over.”

“Thank you for being such a good sport about Carrie. I know she wasn’t exactly part of your plan for how the night would go.”

“No,” Julie agrees, shutting the game cabinet. “But I kinda liked having her here. Although—can I ask you something?”

Dad grabs his phone to pause the music. “Of course, mija. What is it?”

Something’s been nagging at her all evening, but now that Julie actually has the opportunity to ask about it, she’s not quite sure how to put her question into words.

Finally, she manages, “When Mr. Wilson first got here, he said something like… like he didn’t know we still had game nights. But I don’t remember him ever playing with us when Mom was alive.”

Her dad doesn’t answer for a really long time. Julie knows him well enough to know she needs not be concerned—her dad, much more than her mom, has always needed to really take his time and think before he says anything, especially anything important. Finally, he sighs and says, “Honestly, mija… I’m not quite sure what to say. It’s not really my story to tell.” He sits on one of the couches and pats the cushion next to him. Julie joins him, hugging a throw pillow as she waits patiently for him to continue.

“Do you remember, when you were really little, Trevor and Carrie used to live with us?”

Julie’s mouth drops open. “What? No. When?”

“Only until you were about six,” Dad explains. “But for a while, we had a house together, the five and then six of us, once Carlos was born. Your mom and I, and Trevor, we all kind of raised you kids together.” He elbows her teasingly. “You used to call Trevor Daddy.”

“I definitely don’t remember that,” Julie says, eyes wide in horror.

His smile fades, face turning serious. “I think Carrie does,” he says softly, and Julie remembers when Carrie first got here tonight, how she called Julie’s dad Papi , so quietly Julie thought she’d imagined it.

“Anyway,” he continues, “before all that, before Trevor was even… Trevor … he lived with your mom and me, and he was going through a really rough time, had a lot of trouble with food because, well…”

“Because food killed his best friends…” Julie realizes.

“We used to play board games with him, after dinner, when things were hard. It kept him distracted, made it easier to keep things down. That was the real start of Molina Family Game Night.”

“Huh,” Julie breathes. “Well then, next time? I want to invite him and Carrie for real.”

Taglist: @whenweremarried @sunsethimb0s @pink-flame @penguin0613 @fighttoshine @sunsetcurvecuddles @apples-bees @reggiescrookedteeth @brightattheorpheum @queenmolina @jandthephantoms @lexilucacia @sapphossidechick @acnhaddict @shrimp-colours @sunset-bobby @lenacarstairspotterstewart @conversationaltreestump @burntchromas @shellydominique

#jatp #julie and the phantoms #jatp fanfiction #reggie peters #my fics #fanfiction #luke patterson #julie molina #ray molina #carlos molina #alex mercer #willie nolastname #flynn nolastname #nick danforth evans #carrie wilson #trevor wilson #tia victoria

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mochegato · 3 years

Text

Pixie Spy

Things are once again fucking crazy right now and I thought maybe a bit of an escape might be good?

Chapter 9

Chapter 1 Chapter 8

“Are you sure this is safe?” Jason looked up and down the street, staring in wonder as the world around them had been put back together. If he hadn’t been here himself, he would have never believed they had just experienced a series of devastating tornadoes. Buildings that had collapsed were put back together. Cars that had flown through walls were back in their parking spots. Walls and sidewalks that had been painted in blood were now back to showing only their regular dirt.

“Yes,” Manon said in an exasperated tone, as though it was something a child… well, a child even younger than her, should know. “The ladybugs mean the fight is over and everything is set back to normal.”

“Yeah, okay smartass. I’m new to this. Watch the attitude,” he grunted at her.

“What does ‘smartass’ mean?” August asked, looking up at him curiously.

Jason clamped his eyes shut and groaned. Marinette was going to kill him if she found out he taught one of the kids she watched to curse. “It means nothing. It’s an American word you shouldn’t use. In fact, never use that word. You don’t want to be like an American, right?” he rushed out. Desperate to change the subject he turned back to Manon. “Just like that, everything is fixed?”

“Just like that.” She nodded at him.

He shook his head and looked at the kids for a few seconds. “So… any idea how to contact your parents?”

“I know my mom’s number and you can take August to Marinette’s place. She’ll know how to get ahold of his parents. Duh.” She rolled her eyes at him as she pulled out her phone and called her mom. Jason huffed at her but nodded. Right. The brat had a point.

“Manon!” He heard yelled from down the street. He whipped his head toward the sound. That was incredibly fast for her mom to find her. When he found the source he smiled. Marinette was racing toward them.

“Marinette!” Manon exclaimed in a relieved voice and ran toward her. As soon as Marinette reached her, she grabbed her into a hug. Manon hugged Marinette back just as tightly, starting to shake.

Marinette looked over and motioned for August to come over too. “And August! Are you guys okay?” She gathered him up in a tight hug, too. “What happened to you guys? Did you find somewhere safe to stay?”

August latched around her neck and started crying. “It was terrible! I heard Daddy…” He started crying harder unable to finish the sentence. Marinette nuzzled into his head and bounced him as much as she could while still holding onto Manon. She whispered hushing noises into his hair.

“That must have been terrible, August. I’m so sorry you had to experience that. We will give him a call and let him know where you are so he can come and give you a hug himself.” August nodded as he sniffled, keeping his head firmly nestled in her neck.

Jason frowned in concern for August and Manon. They had both been a lot less emotional a few minutes ago. Jason had thought August was fine but as soon as Marinette appeared, it was like all his walls broke down. Even Manon was acting differently now. She was a lot more sullen and quiet than she had been seconds ago. As soon as she was safe in Marinette’s arms, her bravado was forgotten and she started shaking from the experience.

“I’m sorry, Marinette.” August whispered to her. “I’ll be stronger. I don’t want to become another akuma.” His tone was so broken, Jason’s chest squeezed in response.

Marinette immediately stopped bouncing him and made him look her in the eyes. “Nobody is strong all the time, August. You have a right to be upset. You have a right to be angry. You have a right to be scared. You do exactly whatever it is you have to do to survive and keep yourself safe and okay. However you deal with it is okay. If you need to cry, you cry. If you need to yell, you yell. There is no wrong way to respond.”

“But what if I get akumatized again?” He looked at her with watery eyes.

“Then Ladybug will save you. And she would never, never be disappointed in you, August. None of us would ever be.” Marinette reassured him, holding him as tightly as she dared.

“Right,” Manon whispered as she shifted so she was hugging him too.

Jason felt his chest tighten again. He could not fathom the pain the kids have had to go through, everyone in Paris had to go through. He couldn’t begin to comprehend how much guilt Marinette and everyone on her team must carry with them each day, knowing the people of Paris were experiencing this. He didn’t care what he had to do, he was going to help Marinette no matter what he had to do. If her team decided he couldn’t be in Paris, he would set up a place right outside Paris and help from there. He wasn’t going to let them deal with this alone.

He walked into the position Manon had just left and to add his support. He gently placed his arm around Manon and August and pulled Marinette into his chest. He leaned close to her ear and whispered, “You did good out there… and with them. You’re amazing.”

She leaned into his chest and said “Not good enough” so quietly, Jason almost missed it. She relaxed into his chest and fought off the tears in her eyes as well. He rested his chin on her head and pulled her even closer. “Yes, it was,” he reassured her quietly.

After a few minutes like that, she pulled her head away just enough to look up at him, eyes glistening with gratitude. “Thank you for watching out for them. Thank you for protecting them.” Jason gave her a soft smile. He reached up and stroked her cheek with his thumb. Marinette closed her eyes and leaned into his touch.

August looked between the two of them a few times with an interested look. “Are you two in love? Are you going to get married?”

Marinette’s eyes shot open and she straightened up, leaning away from Jason. Jason grinned at him, but Marinette’s face turned bright red. “You’re too young to ask questions like that.” Marinette said a few octaves higher than was natural for her.

Manon grinned mischievously at her, “But I’m not.”

Jason laughed loudly at her and ruffled her hair. “I like you, kid.” Manon gave him a proud smile.

“No. No ganging up on me.” She gave Manon a mock glare. Manon stuck her tongue out at Marinette. “And, I think it’s time to call your Dad, August. You’ve already called your mom, haven’t you, Manon?” Manon gave her a nod. “Good. Excuse me just a minute.” She handed August to Jason. August instantly leaned his head against Jason’s shoulder, as though Marinette’s approval made Jason trustworthy, and in a way, Jason supposed he was right. If she trusted him, he must be, right?

“And maybe when you’re done you can tell me why he gets treats and I don’t!” Manon gave Marinette a look that exactly mirrored her mom’s expression when she caught an interviewee in a lie. The look she gave that meant she knew she had caught them.

Marinette opened her mouth to say something but snapped it shut quickly when she couldn’t think of what to say. She turned to Jason and stuck an accusatory finger at him. “What did you do?” She demanded.

He grinned wider at her and threw his arm around Manon’s shoulders. “She deserved to know the truth. It’s going to take 10 cookies…” Manon coughed lightly. “…15?” He looked down at Manon. She nodded at him. “15 cookies next time to make it up to her.”

She glared at him for a few seconds. His grin never wavered the entire time. Finally, she threw her hands up. “Fine. Compensation cookies it is.” She walked away to call August’s Dad. “But they’re going to be ones he…” she narrowed her eyes at Jason, “… helps me make.”

Jason opened his mouth to retort but was cut off by Marinette turning away to speak to M. Provance. He settled for grinning lovingly at her back and squeezing Manon’s shoulders in triumph with his one armed hug.

After a few moments Marinette returned to take August back in her arms. Jason handed him back gently. August curled into Marinette’s neck with a sad sigh. “Your Dad is just a few blocks away. He will be here in just a few minutes okay?” She asked August quietly.

August nodded, keeping his head nestled in her neck and his eyes closed. “And what are the plans for you, Manon?”

She shrugged at Marinette, “I’ll be fine. I’m just going to walk home.”

Marinette nodded at her with an understanding look. “Okay, as soon as August’s Dad gets here we’ll walk you home.”

Manon rolled her eyes and let out an exasperated breath. “I’m fine. I walk home alone all the time. It’s not that far. I’m not a baby,” she snapped at Marinette.

“That’s because you keep ditching the people your Mom sends to pick you up. And, you know that doesn’t do anything to change my mind, right?” Marinette gave her a deadpan look.

“Okay fine, whatever.” She crossed her arms and looked away with a significantly softened expression.

“You know what? No more time with Chloe. I have to deal with this,” Marinette motioned vaguely over all of Manon, “enough. I don’t want to deal with it from you too.”

Manon tried to stifle the grin that snuck out. “Like you can stop it.”

Marinette watched her, eyes narrowed and lips puckered to hide her smile. “One less cookie for each flippant response.”

Manon gasped and looked back at her with wide eyes. “You wouldn’t!” Marinette smirked at her. Manon turned to Jason with a huff, “You, get your woman she’s acting crazy.”

Jason laughed raucously for the first time in a really, really long time, enjoying the playful but supportive and loving banter. He held up his hands in desertion. “You’re on your own. I wish she was my woman, but I know better than to try to interfere even if she was.”

Manon huffed again as M. Provance came running up to them. “August!” he exclaimed reaching out for him. “August, I was so worried. How are you doing? Did you stay safe?”

“Yeah, Daddy. Marinette’s boyfriend found me and Manon and I stayed with him.” August said quietly.

“Oh thank God,” M. Provance sighed gratefully. After looking over August to make sure he was okay he turned to Marinette and Jason. “Boyfriend?” he raised an eyebrow at her with an amused smile.

Marinette opened her mouth resignedly to respond but Jason cut in first. “Good Day,” he answered with a charming smile. “Jason Todd. Pleasure.”

“Pleasure to meet you. I didn’t even know you were dating, Marinette.” M. Provance looked to Marinette with a kind smile.

“Neither did I,” Marinette muttered under her breath, giving Jason a playfully annoyed look.

Jason eyed her face and deciding she wasn’t actually upset with him, pulled her closer to his side and grinned wider. “Oh, it’s quite new.”

“Well, I wish you both good luck.” M. Provance nodded to them. “But August and I should be getting home. Your mother will be worried sick until she can hold you,” he said to August, holding him closer.

“Oh, since you’re only a few blocks away from my apartment, can you walk me home too?” Manon asked innocently.

“Of course, dear,” M. Provance smiled at her putting a hand behind her shoulder to bring her into their group. “Thank you again, M. Todd and Marinette. Have a good night.”

“Yeah, have a really fun date,” Manon smirked at them.

They watched the trio retreat before starting to head back to Le Grand Paris Hotel. As soon as they were out of hearing range Jason leaned over to her, still pulled close against his side. “The morve might be mouthy, but she has some good ideas.”

Marinette looked at him in utter confusion. “What the hell is a morve?”

Jason furrowed his brow. “A morve,” he reiterated like that would help her. “You know, an annoying kid. Morve.”

Marinette let out a quiet chuckle. “A brat?”

“Ahh… yes. Sorry.” He rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment.

“You should apologize, how dare you call Manon a brat? I’m the only one that gets to call her that. I’ve earned that right after six years of fucking torture at her hands. You don’t get to just waltz in and start claiming the term.” She bumped her awkwardly hip into his thigh. Damn tall people, she grumbled to herself.

“No, I meant…” Jason started apologetically.

She smiled kindly at him. “I know what you meant. Your French is really good. One or two unknown words doesn’t change that. I’m not expecting you to start reading Hugo in the native language.”

“Ooh, that sounds like fun actually.” Jason’s eyes opened wide in excitement at the thought. He instinctually started looking to see if he could find Notre Dame, despite being nowhere near it. “Reading Hunchback in the native language on the steps of Notre Dame? That… I might have to do that. That sounds amazing.”

Marinette raised her eyebrows at him, processing the new information. He was fluent enough to read Hugo in French. He liked reading Hugo. He considered reading Hugo exciting. There was so much there to investigate and focus on. Was it bad that she already decided on the name of their first son? Yeah, that might be a bit early for that. She needed to think of something before her mouth started running again and told him. Because that’s what he did to her, made her admit things she knew better than to say out loud. She decided instead to focus on the more prevalent and safer question. “How fluent are you?”

“I’m a bit rusty, but I should get close to fluent after a few days. It was one of the things that got drilled into me during training.”

“Batman drills French into the Robins?” Marinette asked incredulously.

“No, not Batman…” Jason trailed off, not wanting to discuss his time with the League of Assassins yet. He didn’t want to give her another reason not to trust him so if she asked, he wouldn’t lie. But that didn’t mean he wanted to discuss it either. It wasn’t his favorite part of his history. Not that there were many good parts to choose from. But when trying to convince someone you wanted to help and you weren’t planning on fucking them over, keeping the League out of the discussion was generally the best course of action.

Marinette eyed him curiously. She could sense his apprehension talking about his past. She didn’t know much about it, but she knew it was dark, likely not something he enjoyed discussing. “So you’re a literature nerd or just a Hugo nerd?” She teased him instead, looking over at him playfully as she walked.

Jason chuckled at her, silently thanking her for changing the subject for him. “Both. Hugo, Verne, Austen, Shakespeare. I love all of them.”

Marinette nodded. Hugo, Jules, and Jeanne, both for Jane Austen and Jeanne d’Arc, the former Ladybug. Two boys’ names and one girl’s name taken care of. She could almost picture the kids running around… “Cover story!” She cried out instead. “Um…” she covered her mouth embarrassed, chastising herself for not only indulging in thinking about their future kids but crying out so loudly and unexpectedly. “I meant,” she continued at a quieter level. “What is your cover story going to be while you’re here, if you stay?”

He looked at her questioningly. He might not know her well, but that was odd. “Well,” he started cautiously, still watching her carefully. “My family’s cover story was vacation, so I guess I’ll continue with that line. Or I can say I’m investigating opening a branch of WE here if you need me to get into any stuffy business offices. The Wayne name opens a lot of doors.”

Marinette nodded. They hadn’t needed that before, but who knows where a future investigation might lead them. But that reminded her of another issue they needed to discuss. “Speaking of names, how close do you think your family is to figuring out mine?”

Jason considered the question. “Close I think. Constantine gave them more clues when you two were talking than they realize yet. Plus, they’ve already started running your picture against National ID’s. I can try to keep them out once they do, but I don’t know how successful I’ll be. Dick will try to listen, but will ultimately do what Bruce tells him to do, like the little fuck boy he is. Tim will fight against Bruce if we give him a reason to, but it’ll have to be a fucking hell of an argument for him to side with me over Bruce and Dick.”

Marinette scoffed at him. “Yeah well, good luck with that search. The magic should have kept the cameras from being able to get identifiable, comparable picture. Even after it was dropped the glamour should have still worked.” She looked over at him with a devilish grin. “They think they’re comparing a picture. They’re not.” She looked up and noticed where they were. “And here we are, Le Gran Paris Hotel.”

Jason smiled down at her, stepping close again, not pulling her into another embrace, but making his interest clear. “You could come up and check out the room.” He offered with a devilish grin. “It has a great view.”

She grinned knowingly at him. “All the penthouse rooms are almost identical, except for Chloe’s. I can't tell you the number of times..." she almost said ‘I accidentally swung into one of these rooms instead of the clubhouse by mistake.’ But he didn't know about the clubhouse and Marinette wasn't sure yet if he ever would "... I've been in one," she finished instead. Not a lie. She'd been in them a lot. Not what she meant to say, but not a lie.

“Oh yeah?” Jason asked waggling his eyebrows. “Do tell.”

“Calm down, Romeo. Nothing as fun as you’re hoping. One of my best friends’ dad owns the hotel. She has a penthouse room and we stay in them sometimes.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Jason responded innocently. “I assumed it was something like that. You know, school trips, spa days, girl’s nights…”

Marinette scoffed. “No you didn’t.” She moved closer to him so their fronts were lightly touching and she had to lean her head almost all the way back in order to look in his eyes. Her devilish smile returning. “Plus, if it’s a good view you’re looking for, maybe I’ll take you to the top of the Eifel Tower sometime.”

“I don’t know, Pixie.” He wound his arms around her waist. “I don’t think anything can beat this one.”

Marinette blushed deeply and buried her head in his chest. “Okay, Casanova,” she finally said after a few minutes enjoying Jason’s arms around her and his nose buried in her hair. “I need to get ready to meet with my team to talk about you. I’ll let you know what they say.”

“Will you argue for me to stay?” He asked her quietly, keeping his arms lightly wrapped around her. If this was going to be one of the last times he was going to get to hold her for a while, he wanted to make it last.

She nodded at him. “I won’t force them to agree, but I’ll make a case for you.”

“Okay,” he whispered pulling her closer for a few moments before letting her go, possibly for the last time.

<><><><><>

Ladybug landed gently on the clubhouse balcony, the only sound announcing her presence the recoiling of her yoyo string. She took a deep breath and steeled herself for the oncoming conversation. This was going to be a hard conversation and they wouldn’t know what the right answer was until Hawkmoth was defeated or they failed spectacularly… in other words, died. She didn’t know how she felt about Jason staying… no, that was a lie. She knew how she felt. She could feel it in her bones. She wanted him to stay. She just didn’t know if it was because she thought he could help or because she would miss seeing his lopsided smile. She took another steadying breath.

Before she could reach for the door, it swung open, just barely missing hitting her in the face. She was met with Nino’s amused smile. “Didn’t want to come through the front door?”

“Didn’t want to take the chance of him seeing me in the hallway,” she answered calling off her transformation. “I don’t want to give him more clues than he already has if we decide we don’t want him to stay.”

“Are you going to be okay if that is the decision?” Nino asked cautiously.

Marinette peeked around him into the room to see who else would hear her answer. It wasn’t like she didn’t know she was going to have to say the same thing to the rest of the group, she just needed to know how prepared to be right now. “Where’s everyone else?” She asked instead of answering.

“Chloe and Adrien aren’t here yet. Alya’s in the bathroom. So you only have a few minutes if there’s something you want to say uninterrupted,” he responded knowingly.

She smiled at him. He was always more observant than people gave him credit for. And always willing to offer a safe place for the people he cared about, whether that be physically safe, mentally safe, emotionally safe, or all three. The perfect turtle. “I’ll be okay with the decision,” she confirmed with a sigh. “I’ll miss him. God, I’ve only spent a total of about three hours with him and I’d miss him so much already.”

“That far gone for him already, huh?” Nino asked with a soft, guilty look in his eyes.

She looked up at him sheepishly, “I decided on names for three of our kids today.” Nino chuckled at her, shaking his head. Yeah, she was that far gone. She gave him a weak smile. “And it isn’t like I wouldn’t be able to see him ever again. There’s always after we take down Hawkmoth, right?”

He gave her a sad smile and pulled her in for a hug, resting his head on hers. “Yeah… right.” He hated it. He hated that she had to keep putting her life on hold for this fight. Both she and Adrien did. He saw the toll it was taking on them, repeatedly giving up parts of themselves. Adrien couldn’t escape his father’s sphere of influence because he couldn’t leave Paris. Every aspect of his life was controlled and dictated as far as his father knew.

Marinette had already turned down numerous internship offers and university scholarships. Giving up enormous opportunities. They both have had to give up on relationship after relationship before they could even start. Can’t really build a relationship if you have to leave every date with a crap excuse. And now she had finally found someone she felt passionate about, someone who could understand her in a way nobody else had been able to, someone she actually started to consider a future with, something she hadn’t done in years, and she had to walk away from that too.

And she did have to walk away, not just for them and Paris, but for herself. They couldn’t allow someone like him to stay. He was well trained, violent, ruthless, knew her identity, and someone for whom Marinette already cared deeply. Which meant someone for whom Ladybug cared deeply. Which meant, when he became akumatized, and it was a when not an if, he would be the perfect weapon. He would destroy Ladybug, them, then Paris, and then possibly the world, depending on what the wish was.

“You two going to stay out there all night?” Alya asked, leaning against the doorframe. Her eyebrow was quirked watching them. She knew something important had just happened, just not what. And despite dying from curiosity, she wouldn’t ask. She wasn’t going to push Marinette on this one. She would trust that Nino had helped and she would keep an eye on Marinette to see if she seemed like she needed more.

Marinette looked over at Alya with exaggeratedly wide eyes. “Oh no, she caught us.”

“Oh no, what will we do?” Nino played along.

“Alya, I’m so sorry. We didn’t want you to find out this way.” Marinette pled with her, hand over her heart in regret.

Alya rolled her eyes and gave Marinette a wicked smile. “Well, you are his free pass so…”

Marinette bolted up straight and made a face, quirking her lips to the side with a scrunched up nose. “I don’t think I like this game anymore.”

Nino laughed as Alya came over to him and curled into his side. “Who said it was a game?” She asked innocently.

“Alya!” Marinette groaned, making Nino laugh even harder.

“You started this,” he reminded her. “And also, thank you for that response.”

“Really?” Marinette gave him a deadpan look. “You wouldn’t respond the same way?”

“Of course not. I should only be so lucky.” He smiled smugly at her with a gentlemanly bow, removing his hat to hold it over his heart.

“Oh?” Marinette quirked an eyebrow and looked over to Alya who held her hands up disavowing her involvement in the situation. Marinette started walking slowly over to Nino, swaying her hips ever so slowly. Alya suppressed a smile and slowly backed away from Nino, leaving him to his fate. “So the idea of kissing me, of touching me…” she brought her hand up her stomach ever so slowly, just barely making contact. Nino gulped. “… tongues touching, fingers and hands going…. everywhere,” she breathed out the last word, just a few inches from his face.

Nino scrunched his face and backed away with a groan. “Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Fuck, dudette, put away the atomic weaponry. It’s wasted on me anyway. I get what you mean. No offense, but it would be like kissing my sister.” His whole body shuddered in disgust at the thought.

Marinette laughed loudly, leaning on Alya for support, which was a poor choice really considering she was laughing just as hard. They fell onto a patio chair together, still laughing hard. Nino shook his head at them but couldn’t stop himself from laughing too. “You two are terrible.”

“You asked for it, honey. This is your fault,” Alya pointed out, still laughing.

“Are we doing this thing or are you guys planning on screwing around all night long?” Chloe called out. She didn’t even bother looking at them as she plopped into an arm chair and opened a magazine.

“Oh, no. No screwing around. We decided.” Marinette responded with a grin, making eye contact with Nino who scoffed and shook his head again, making Alya laugh again.

“There’s a story there,” Adrien commented, walking to the seating area with a few snacks. “But you’ll have to tell us later. Right now, we have a more important conversation we need to have.”

Marinette, Alya, and Nino’s carefree, bright smiles were replaced with serious expressions, ready to have the heart wrenching conversation they needed to have. Marinette took a deep breath. “Right into it then,” she said in a resigned voice.

“Best way to handle it,” Adrien said sympathetically. She nodded at him to let him know she understood. “Why don’t you tell us what happened.”

Marinette sighed and sat on the arm rest of the arm chair opposite Chloe. Nino, Alya, and Adrien sat on the couch, staring up at her expectantly. “There isn’t much more to tell than you know already. He came into the bakery, waited until everyone was gone and came up to talk to me. He didn’t know I was Ladybug when he came in. He came to find me. Me, me. He said he’s alone. The rest of the family doesn’t know my name let alone who I am. He doesn’t know who you all are. He didn’t tell his family some of the things I said while we were dancing so they don’t have as many clues on where to look as he did and he got help from someone who isn’t going to help the rest of the family.”

“Constantine?” Adrien asked darkly.

She shook her head, “No, someone who saw me change dresses. As far as I know, Constantine is still avoiding the bats.”

“So, if he didn’t know your identity until he was talking to you, just how exactly did he figure out your identity while you were together?” Alya waggled her eyebrows at her.

Marinette rolled her eyes at Alya while Adrien and Nino giggled at the suggestion and Chloe gave an annoyed huff. “Apparently, insults aren’t covered by the magic glamour.”

“I think you mean flirting,” Adrien responded automatically before thinking about what she said and paled slightly. That was concerning news. Insults and nicknames were his thing. Insults for akumas, nicknames for his friends. It’s what he did. If that was all it took to expose their identities…. there were likely A LOT of Parisians who actually knew his identity. “Wait, really?”

“That’s ridiculous, utterly ridiculous. If that were true, everyone in Paris would know Chat’s identity,” Chloe scoffed. Alya and Nino cocked their heads to the side in unison and nodded. She wasn’t wrong.

Tikki spoke up timidly from her spot on the coffee table. “It isn’t the insults that aren’t covered.”

Marinette’s eyes widened as she thought about what Tikki was saying. “Oh God, you aren’t going to say it has something to do with soulmates or something, are you?” she asked apprehensively.

“Why the Hell would you be afraid of that?” Chloe questioned her incredulously. Seriously? Only fucking Marinette would think that was a problem.

Tikki floated up to the center of the room, rolling her whole body instead of her eyes. “No, that doesn’t exist. People are capable of being a whole person all on their own. They don’t need someone else to complete them. Just because someone can fit with you perfectly, that doesn’t mean they were designed to or always will.”

“No, she means he’s spent time in the Lazarus pits,” Plagg explained, extremely unhelpfully as he shoved a piece of cheese easily as big as him into his mouth.

Trixx squealed and flew over to him. “No way! Seriously? That is amazing.”

Wayzz looked between Plagg and Tikki with concern. “Are you sure?”

Tikki nodded at him solemnly, “I could feel it on him.”

The humans in the room looked from one to the other to see if anyone knew what that meant, but there were no signs of recognition, only confusion. Nobody knew exactly what the Lazarus pit meant but judging by the kwamis’ somber responses, except for Trixx, who liked chaos, even more than Plagg at times, it wasn’t good.

Finally Alya was the one to ask the question on all their minds, “What is the Lazarus pit?”

Tikki sighed and looked down guiltily. “The Lazarus Pits were a result of a wish a couple hundred years ago. A villain got the Ladybug earrings and Black Cat ring and wished for eternal life. The pits were the result. They can bring good physical health to anyone who bathes in it.”

Marinette stared at Tikki absentmindedly. Someone had made a wish. Someone had gotten their hands on both miraculous and made a wish. It had happened. The monks had lost at some point. That… made her feel better? A little bit. The monks had failed. Even with all their experience and knowledge, they had failed. She hadn’t failed that badly… yet. So she was doing a good job, a better job than the experts on it.

Oh, no. That was bad. If the experts had failed, what chance did she have? They had hundreds of years of experience and knowledge. They could actually read the texts and had texts to use. She started breathing more rapidly running the words Tikki had said through her mind again… and again… and again… Wait… “Physical health?” She looked up at Tikki questioningly.

Plagg cackled next to her, doing excited summersaults in the air. “Good catch, Pigtails.” He grinned maliciously. “Physical only. Everything else deteriorates more rapidly. Once can drive someone insane and repeated dips… you’ll wish for death.”

Marinette looked at Plagg horrified. “Jason…” she whispered out like a breath. If the Lazarus pits traumatized someone so badly mentally whenever someone used them, how badly had Jason suffered? Was he still suffering? How badly had he suffered physically to use them in the first place?

“Yeah, yeah, that’s completely terrifying and all but what does that have to do with the miraculous glamour?” Chloe asked sharply, trying to hide her concerned look at Marinette.

“Another side effect,” Plagg grinned maniacally. “People who’ve been dipped aren’t as susceptible to the miraculous magic. So if they’ve ever been dipped, or even spent a long time around them, they can never wield one. The more exposure, the worse the effects. You have to be human to wield the miraculous and every dip strips a bit of humanity away.”

Nino nodded along as he spoke, “So they can use the results of the wish, but if they do, they do so at the expense of ever being able to use it again.”

“Exactly,” Plagg grinned.

“So what you’re saying is Jason was exposed and because of that, even if we let him stay, he wouldn’t be able to help us or protect himself with a miraculous?” Adrien summed up with a sigh.

Tikki shot a furtive look to Marinette to check on her, “He wouldn’t be able to wield one to fight alongside you or protect himself.”

Marinette looked over at Tikki curiously. “That means he wouldn’t be as susceptible to becoming akumatized, doesn’t it?” She could feel everyone’s eyes on her as she spoke.

“That’s what I’m hearing,” Chloe threw in a little too casually to be as uninterested as she acted.

“If the miraculous magic isn’t as effective against him, then Hawkmoth’s draw won’t be as powerful. It should be easier for him to resist. It would also mean if there was another illusion based akuma, he should be able to tell there was something off about it, right?” She looked over to Plagg.

Plagg puckered his lips considering what she had said. “That sounds right.”

“That is right!” Tikki exclaimed happily doing a few flips in the air before sobering and stilling in the air. “He can resist Hawkmoth more easily than others, but not be able to defend himself.”

“But it isn’t definite, right?” Alya interjected. “It makes it easier but…” she took a deep breath and looked at Marinette sympathetically. “But this is a bat, and a violent one at that. This is a man who likes to push his way through people and situations with little to no regard for the consequences. This is someone that voluntarily jumped into the pit to heal himself, knowing the price. Are we really so sure he would resist?”

“You don’t know how he ended up in the pit!” Marinette exclaimed quickly. “We don’t know how it happened or why. And you don’t know that he doesn’t consider the consequences of his actions.” The picture Alya was painting absolutely contrasted with the image of Jason Marinette had constructed. Every interaction she had with him, every word, every inflection, every move, every reflex, every roll of his eyes, every twitch, every smile, every promise, showed Marinette that he could and would resist the allure of easy power and easy solutions, even if it hurt him to do it. The information about the Lazarus pit did concern her, but she refused to condemn him until she heard from him. He deserved a chance to explain.

“From all the research you sent me, it sounds like he is very efficient and a strategic planner. Just because you don’t like his actions, doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought them through.” Chloe added apathetically, pretending to focus on her magazine again.

“Yeah, Chloe, we know how you feel about this,” Alya snapped at her.

“And we know how you feel about it. Before we even started discussing it, you decided. So how about we have a real conversation about this,” Chloe snapped back, slapping her magazine closed. “Or actually let’s skip the conversation and the gut wrenching possibilities that either decision is wrong and just agree to let him stay.”

“Chloe, we’re going to discuss this even if you’ve decided,” Nino sighed.

“Why? Tikki already given her consent. Plagg will do whatever she tells him to do.”

“Hey!” Plagg interjected but was ignored as Chloe continued. “Trixx is going to be excited about the potential havoc. And Wayzz will recommend caution, but not say no. So all the kwami's are on board.

“I say yes. Marinette will say yes because she knows deep down she wants him to stay because it feels right. Adrien will say yes because she said yes. Then it's just down to you two. And we both know Alya is not going to say no because despite how worried she is, that boy put a ton of effort into finding Marinette and Marinette likes him. And you're not going to say no because everyone else says yes and you know how much Marinette has sacrificed already and you are not about to ask her to sacrifice more. So why are we even talking this?”

“I am worried about this!” Alya stood up annoyed. She was not going to let Chloe steamroll them with reason and logic. Alya had reason and logic too, damn it. “And with good reason. We can’t trust him!” she cried loudly. “We have no reason to. All we have to go on is what the bats and Justice League have done in the past, how they’ve handled situations they decided to ‘help’ with. And their track record is shitty. Absolutely, without question Godawful. If we let the Bat family into Paris…” Alya cautioned them.

“Those akumas came meditation room fast,” Nino reminded them. “Less than a few minutes in costume and the akumas were already on their way.”

“We aren’t talking about the Bat family,” Marinette cut in. “Just Jason. Right now, we’re only discussing Jason. I don’t trust the rest of the Bats yet and I don’t know that I would ever really trust Batman completely. Which is another point for Jason. He doesn’t trust him either. We can’t hold the actions of the Justice League against Jason. And we can’t hold the akumas against him either. There were four bats there and the three others looked a lot more emotional than Jason.”

“I don’t know what scene you were watching,” Nino commented calmly. “Jason looked pretty emotionally invested.”

“Yeah,” Chloe scoffed, “invested in finding his fuck buddy.”

“I am not… we have not… just… shut up unless you’re going to say something helpful.” Marinette stuttered out.

“That was helpful.” Chloe rolled her eyes. “Unlike the other bats, he wasn’t angry, he was emotional because he was worried about finding Marinette… so he could fuck her.”

Marinette’s already red face turned burgundy. She opened her mouth a few times to respond, but just collapsed back in the arm chair with her head in her hands. “Thank you,” she mumbled out through her hands.

“You’re welcome,” Chloe responded smugly, settling back into her seat.

Alya was getting annoyed with the direction the conversation was going. Every time she made a point, Chloe would sidetrack them. “Back to the fucking point,” Alya growled out, “if he got akumatized he’d be a perfect weapon.” She started ticking off her points on her fingers. “He’s incredibly well trained, better than all of us combined, better than any of the bats.” One finger up. “He’s familiar with magic and how to push it.” Another finger up. “He has training and experience with creating battle strategies based on using magic.” Third finger up. “He’s strong, probably the strongest bat.” Another finger up. She hesitated staring at her thumb. There were so very many reasons, why couldn’t she think of it now?

“He knows who Ladybug is,” Nino supplied for her. Alya looked around smugly and put out her thumb as well. “He knows who Ladybug is and how to hit her so it hurts. He can hit Marinette where it hurts the worst, cause permanent damage,” he looked at Marinette sympathetically as he said it. The most pressing reasons for him not to stay were because of her and they all knew it.

They stared at each other for a few moments, nobody sure what to say before Marinette finally spoke up. “You said Jason was great at strategy so he would be too powerful as an akuma, but a few minutes ago you said he would become an akuma because he rushes into things without thinking. So which one is it?” Alya stared at her uncertain.

“Because him knowing my identity is only a problem if you assume he will become an akuma. You all know my identity and it hasn’t been a problem. In fact deciding to reveal ourselves to each other has only strengthened us. And he,” she vaguely motioned toward the other side of the hotel where Jason’s room was, “has more tools to repel it than we do. And all the reasons why he would be too dangerous to us are also reasons why he would be dangerous for Hawkmoth. Plus adding in his detective experience. We need a detective. Even if he doesn’t fight with us, he can investigate while we fight and go to school. None of us have had the chance to focus on this full time and he can and he has the experience to know how to do it properly.”

“All of that is what is called an asset, but he’s exceptionally risky which makes him a volatile asset, but an asset none the less. You have a higher probability for significantly greater gains with a volatile asset than a regular asset.” Chloe added. “It’s more likely to skyrocket.”

“Or plummet,” Adrien pointed out. “The point of a volatile asset is that it is just as likely to go up as down and there is no way to predict.”

Chloe’s eyes sparkled like he fell into a trap. “Unless you have luck on your side.”

Adrien nodded in deferment. “What does your gut say about Jason, Marinette?” Adrien turned to her with searching eyes.

Marinette considered the question. What did her gut say? Ignoring all the pressures and desires, what did her instincts say? Separating desire from instinct… so the question isn’t ‘does she want him to stay,’ the questions are ‘does she trust him,’ ‘does she think he wants to help,’ ‘does she think he can help,’ ‘does she think they will be able to use his help,’ and ‘does she think he will make the situation in Paris better.’ And the answer to all of those questions is the exact same one word answer. “My gut says let him stay. My instincts say he will help us finish this.”

“Then I say he stays.” Adrien shrugged.

“Just like that?” Alya looked at him exasperatedly.

“Just like that.” Adrien nodded. “I trust Marinette’s instincts. I always have and they have never steered me or any of us wrong.” He looked over and noted Nino and Alya’s expressions. “It means something,” he continued, passion filling his voice. “It means something that she met him at the gala. Of all the people she could have met, she met him, she met not only a bat, but that bat. The one bat, I assume, that has some kind of immunity to the miraculous magic.”

“Coincidence, dude. That is all coincidence and Constantine. You said Constantine admitted to planning all of this.” Nino sighed out annoyed. “I means Constantine is a good manipulator.”

“No,” Adrien answered back quickly. “I mean, yes, he is. But, no that isn’t what it means. Constantine set up the scenario, but there was no way to know she would catch a Wayne’s attention, let alone Jason’s. It was what he hoped for, but he was relying heavily on Ladybug’s luck for things to turn out the way they were meant to. And just think about it,” he leaped up to pace in front of them with a new realization. “Think about the lucky charm!”

“Trackers,” Alya supplied confused.

“No!” Adrien grinned like he just solved a puzzle and everything was suddenly clear. “The lucky charm was Red Hood. Tikki could have given us trackers herself but she didn’t. She sent Marinette to Jason to get the trackers. I don’t think that was just for that battle. I think it was for the war.”

“Dude!” Nino said in awe. “That’s really good.”

“We need a vote from everyone. Yes or no on whether we let him stay. If we decide he can stay then we need to agree on how much to tell him.” Marinette said carefully. “I vote yes.”

“I vote yes,” Adrien smiled at her popping a grape into his mouth and settling into the couch. “Chlo?”

Chloe looked up from her magazine with an annoyed expression. “I thought the right answer was pretty clear.”

“It isn’t that easy Chloe.” Alya’s voice was strained.

“Isn’t it? I’m sorry let me make it that easy. I say we let the hot boy she wants to bang stay.” She looked at their shocked faces, all except for Marinette whose face was bright red and mouth was gaping. “Oh, I’m sorry. Is it even more complicated than that? Let the rich, hot boy she wants to bang stay.” She paused and looked between them again. “No? Even more complicated? Let the rich, hot, hero boy she wants to bang stay.” She looked at them again waiting for someone to say something. “Seriously? Fine. Let the rich, hot, hero boy she wants to bang and who wants to bang her stay.”

Nino looked at her with a bit of confusion and concern. “Are you feeling okay, Chloe?”

“It’s not like she’s ever going to find anyone else like that again.” She sniped, turning back to the magazine.

“Ah, there she is,” Nino said nodding as he looked away with a sigh.

Alya looked between the two of them and let out a weighty sigh. “Fine. I say yes too. I trust your instincts too. You are Lady Luck for a reason. We can use a little bit of a shakeup. Hopefully, this is the right kind.” She sat down and leaned against Nino, praying they were making the right decision. She looked back up at Marinette with a foxy glint in her eyes. “And if he helps you get lucky as well…”

Marinette groaned and threw the arm chair pillow at Alya’s head. Despite the pillow actually hitting its mark, Alya started laughing raucously, followed quickly by everyone else, including Marinette.

“That just leaves you, Nino. No pressure, you’re allowed to say no.” Marinette assured him.

“I say yes, too.” He nodded at her with a smile. “How else are you going to use those kids names you came up with?” Nino grinned cheekily. He knew exactly what kind of a havoc he was wreaking and couldn’t wait to sit back and watch it happen.

Chapter 10

Brat in French is morveuse or morveu (according to Google Translate). Jason just missed the ‘u’ or the ‘use’ at the end.

The English ‘Jane’ and ‘Joan’ both translate in French as Jeanne.

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#maribat #jasonette #Pixie Spy

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