#you want a healer how bout you go fuck yourself
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I just think he'd be the best possible tutorial-mascot character
King would never tell me to go to bed
#the owl house#toh fanart#toh king#persona 5#all out attack portrait#you want a healer how bout you go fuck yourself#you get Psy/Melee and you LIKE it#his upgraded persona is literally the Titan skeleton just stomping you into the ground#WEH
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I’m looking for someone who can crack Amy Dallon open for me, and lakesbian thought you might have ideas! Everything about her is so interesting: being a body manipulator who brands herself as a healer, being a kid with the weight of the world on her shoulders, being raised by a woman who resents her, falling in love with her sister because she’s never felt like she belonged to the family. But when I think about the mindrape and the fleshpuddle, I bounce right off. They’re so over-the-top evil actions that I can’t conceive of a theory of mind for a her. So…thoughts about Amy?
to start with thoughts: i like amy. i like her a lot even! probably top 5 characters in worm to me. i think she's probably one of the most homophobic characters ever written and i also think she's incredibly tragic and compelling
to begin with, the first bit of mind control was, for all intents and purposes, an accident. victoria hugs her, amy's overwhelmed, and in the heat of the moment essentially literalizes her desires by making victoria like her. she's instantly remorseful and offers to fix it, but victoria's horrified and runs away. there's a lot of discourse surrounding the degree to which it was or wasn't accidental, but to me, the fact that she Immediately regrets it and that the text describes it as a semi-conscious reaction puts it pretty thoroughly in the camp of 'didn't mean to do this'. imo, if you were to Remove powers from the situation, it would be the equivalent of amy going in for a kiss -- she's overwhelmed and her guard's down from how emotionally bruised and battered she is and she does something rash, only powers make everything worse and more extreme and it turns into that whole clusterfuck instead. so, like, is amy accidentally or mostly accidentally making victoria like her back okay? obviously not, but i do think its an understandable Mistake to make
with the second bout of mindcontrol, its obviously dicier. not accidental, to start with, but while fucked up and wrong, there Is a rationale. amy wants victoria to be okay. victoria might die or be permanently disfigured because of her injuries by crawler. victoria won't let amy heal her because of how disgusted and angry she is at amy. obviously its better that victoria's healed, so amy decides to do what's best for victoria against victoria's wishes. (worth noting that taking it upon yourself to Do What's Best for someone else against their express desire is exactly what victoria did when she hugged amy despite amy's warnings) so amy mind controls her again, harder this time, and convinces herself that she's going to fix victoria's body And Then turn off the love effect. it's fucked up, unjustifiable, and wrong, but i think you can See how amy comes to make that decision, through a combination of a genuine humanitarian argument (victoria needs to be healed or she might be disfigured forever) and self-delusion (i'll not only be able to do this in the state the city's in, but i'll fix victoria's mind when i'm done)
and then there's the time when she turns victoria into a car. years down the line metatextual information and ward confirm it to be an instance of literal, rather than metaphorical, rape on amy's part, but i don't think that was the intention in worm and it's not my preferred interpretation (i think it's an insane idea that wildbow, who with his own words said he wouldn't depict rape in worm more explicitly than what the implications of heartbreaker's power portray, would write it as rape and then spend an insane amount of screen time focusing on amy and her story after that point while continuing to portray her broadly sympathetically). whatever the case though, it's an instance of amy going through with a gross violation of victoria's mental and bodily autonomy. the facts of the in-universe power mechanics remain the same whichever the interpretation -- amy, frazzled and traumatized, couldn't fix victoria anymore, her power not making the correct adjustments to her form.
amy convinced herself that she would spend some time with victoria while she licked her wounds and then remove the mind control and let her go, but she couldn't even fix her back into her old shape. it is an evil act. it's fucked up. but it's not... out of nowhere, you know? it's a culmination of amy's obsession and self-delusion and the lingering mental health crisis that's been hovering over her all book finally coming to a head, making her fall down a rabbit hole of self-justification that says that it's alright that she does this and that because it means she can fix victoria only to end up being wholly unable to fix her At All, and in fact only making victoria Worse
so like. i think amy does fucked up things to varying degrees of culpability and "forgivability", but there's definitely Reasons for why she did them, even if they're fucked up or not very good
by the time we get to ward there's no qualia whatsoever though lol she's just an evil devilspawn
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Sweetest of Exiles - One
Summary: When Oberyn Martell travels to Essos for exile, he found more than he anticipated when he first lays eyes on Pero Tovar, his brother-in-arms in the Second Sons mercenary company. While Pero is a bit resistant to his Oberyn’s overt charms at first, the Prince always gets what he wants. When the Second Sons are hired to rescue a wealthy merchant’s daughter, Oberyn learns there is much more to the grumpy sellsword. And Oberyn doesn’t mind sharing–especially when the merchant’s daughter smiles at him like that.
Pairing: Oberyn Martell x Pero Tovar, (past) Pero Tovar x F!Reader (No Y/N), future--it is a surprise.
Rating for this chapter: T for mentions of blood, guts and gore...magic. My overuse of italics.
Word Count: 5k
A/N: I wrote most of this drunk (or buzzed). I am still riding my red wine high so I almost apologize for the nonsense. If you have any questions about the ASOIAF lore/geography that I’m mentioning, please send me an ask or a DM! I’m always happy to ramble about this series.
(thank you to my love, @starlight-starwrites for the absolutely gorgeous banner. I love you.)
Or read on Ao3 here!
CHAPTER ONE: The Mercenary
Oberyn had always wondered what he looked like when fucking someone. He had looking glasses set up in one of his lover’s rooms so he could try to catch a glimpse himself. But his unrelenting need to keep his partners satisfied always won out over his curiosity.
But then the gods seemed to have a sense of humor when they sent him away from Dorne after he might-have-killed Edgar Yronwood. The Citadel and Oldtown had entertained him for a moment but it soon bored him and he set off across the Narrow Sea to Essos. While the Second Sons mercenary company welcomed him and his sword arm, his eyes were firmly trained on the man toward the back of the company with the scar down his face.
His face.
And well, his time away from Dorne just became much more interesting.
**
It had taken almost an entire year of not-at-all subtle flirting and propositions and nearly losing their lives time and time again before Pero found himself tumbling into the Prince of Dorne’s bed. The Prince was definitely persistent, Pero would never admit that his charms—his annoying charms—had worn him down instead of Pero’s selfish desire for release while the company was too far away from any sort of willing woman and his hand just wasn’t cutting it. But the Prince had been attentive—willing to let Pero wrap his scarred and rough hand around his throat when he was pressing him into the threadbare bedroll in the quiet corner of camp.
The prince felt good—and he knew how to make Pero feel good.
It was infuriating—he wanted to strangle he smug smirk right off the prince’s face but he knew that the Prince was only capable of enjoying when someone’s hand was around his throat. But he had to admit that he had finally found a true friend (and not just release) with the man who looked strangely like him.
It had been nearly two decades since he could speak with someone as openly as he did when he was alone with the prince in their tent.
But his mind still drifted—to years ago. To his life before finding coin in the service of the Second Sons.
“You make the moon shine brighter, Pero.”
It was childish of him, stupid, to still think of her all these years later. Surely she had forgotten him. They had just been children—he had just been a third-born son of a disgraced lord from Valysar and she had been… she had been everything.
“You are pensive, Tovar.” The prince’s voice cut through his reverie.
He had thought the prince asleep—spent from a long day’s ride and a quick, near-desperate fuck as soon as their shared tent was erected. “It is dark, princeling. You cannot see me.”
Oberyn chuckled. “I know your brooding silences from your angry quiet.”
“You think a great deal of yourself, don’t you?” He grumbled, rolling his eyes despite the dark.
“I believe you think a great deal of me, as well.”
Pero sighed.
“Tell me what weighs on your mind.”
“Nothing that concerns you. Go to sleep.”
Oberyn laughed. “I will find out what has you brooding.”
“Do not hold your breath, princeling.”
He only laughed.
Pero was not sure when they had both fallen asleep but they were both woken by a frantic yell outside their tent. The prince’s knife glinted in the dimming moonlight and Pero had never let his hand leave the hilt of one of his smaller swords as they charged outside. They expected an ambush—a retaliation from the Tyroshi they had just pushed back on behalf of Lys—but instead, they found a disheveled man, bloodied and bruised and desperately limping toward their camp, frantically waving his hands above his head, shouting something in the Myrish bastard Valyrian dialect.
Pero sheathed his blade as he finally started to realize what the man was babbling. “Calm yourself, man.” Pero said, stepping in front of Oberyn.
The man nearly collapsed as he reached them, big, brown eyes shining in the moonlight. “They took her. They took her—I barely escaped.” He continued to jabber and Pero mostly listened—having heard desperate pleas from hundreds of men and women over the years of his service in the mercenary company—the man’s story consisted of being surrounded on the road to Myr by a group of religious zealots. The story was not an unfamiliar one. The Free Cities were known to erupt with pockets of violence; the causes ranged from trade disputes, claims to land, religion, and everything in between.
Pero had heard it all.
But then the man opened his mouth, blood drying on his chin, and said, “but they took her—they wanted her.” And a name pushed by the man’s bruised lips—a name he hadn’t heard in years.
Before he could stop himself, Pero reached out and grabbed the man by the collar of his tunic and hauled him to his unsteady feet. “Tell me where.”
**
The captains deliberated for only a few short moments before refusing to take the charge.
The fact that the woman was Qohorik had negated the fact that the Myrish magistrate who had fought his way to their camp had promised a princess’ ransom and promised that her father, a prominent merchant, would double it for her safe return. The Second Sons had been humiliated generations ago at Qohor and had not taken any bounties or contracts from the city or its inhabitants since then.
The Second Sons gave the magistrate—Orestes, his name was—some water and a bit of feed for his exhausted horse and then told him to leave. They would not go.
And Pero was an angry man. He had wrath in his blood since he was a boy, tempered only with bouts of relief and quiet. But this had sent him into a near rage with how flippant they captains had been when they had delivered their decision. Of course, he had not mentioned that the woman Orestes had pleaded to be rescued had been…her. Or how he knew her. Attachments like that were frowned upon, even by mercenaries. Soft hearts made easy targets.
But as the sun set the next day, Pero knew what he had to do. Even if he was alone. He packed his bare essentials, mostly worried about his sack of coin and weapons, and then pushed out of the tent-
-only to be met with the smirking face of the princeling. “Come, I have a surprise for you.”
“I do not have time for this.”
“Yes, you do,” Oberyn said with a broadening smirk as he turned away, leading Pero further away from camp as the moon continued her climb up into the inky sky. And why was Pero following him? He had to leave. He had to find that stupid magistrate. He had to-
There were about two dozen Second Sons, including one of the company’s healers, waiting at the tree line with their packs and mounts. Oberyn’s smirk reached its peak as he winked over his shoulder at Pero who only scowled in return. The Magistrate—Orestes—was standing with them, looking more than a little out of place with his rumpled fine clothes, now stained with dirt and blood. But he offered a tentative tilt of his head when Pero stepped up to the group with Oberyn.
“What did you do?” Pero hissed.
“I formed my own mercenary company,” Oberyn replied with a roll of his shoulders. “I know you are brighter than this, Tovar.”
If possible, his lips formed an even thinner line.
“Do not pout. We are going to save the damsel and get paid.” There was a cheer from the small band of men—both Tovar and Orestes were the only ones who did not seem to enjoy it. But soon they were on their way, each step taking them further away from the strange safety of the Second Sons and into the wilds of Essos.
**
Orestes, Pero found, was fond of speaking to anyone who would listen. His voice was pleasing but Pero preferred the quiet in most instances. But, he supposed it was necessary to learn just how he had ended up fleeing to the Second Sons in a desperate plea for help.
Orestes and his companion had been traveling from Qohor to Myr—and Pero tried very hard to not grind his teeth every time Orestes referred to her as ‘my lady’—to allow her to see more of Essos and to return Orestes to Myr after his year-long residency to Qohor that had been in the name of strengthening trade routes and agreements.
(“But, of course, I found myself more entranced by the city and its people than my fellow magistrates’ mandates that I was told to quickly solidify.” He sighed, the sound only a lovelorn man could make and Pero could not stop the grinding of his teeth at that.)
But on the road between Volantis and Myr, a group of heavily armed, religious zealots had slaughtered their small band of traveling companions and guards and took her and Orestes captive in a plot to gain the knowledge her father was keeping secret.
Her father, Lord Ollo, had been one of the famed smiths in Qohor who still knew the secrets of re-forging Valyrian Steel. The famed metal had become a treasure since the Doom and those who could work with the fickle and strong metal were regarded as lords and wielded their power like nobility, too. Travelers from all across Essos sought him out for new weapons, armor, and the occasional piece of jewelry from bits of Valyrian Steel and he had gained a reputation for being excessively secretive but the best at his trade. His wife was a noble woman and had raised his status with their marriage while providing her with the lifestyle on par with princesses.
But Pero knew all of this. He had seen it firsthand. He had supped with him and felt his lady-wife’s fingers tug at his boyishly poorly cropped hair with a fond smile. He knew that their home, an imposing fortress deep in the Forest of Qohor, always smelled of fire and metal and drying flowers.
It smelled…like home.
Well, it had. For a time. A long time ago.
And Orestes never needed to know that—never needed to know that the only reason he had a small band of mercenaries at his call was because the Prince knew that the woman, whose name he could not even say aloud, meant something to Pero.
For all his pride and well-earned arrogance, Oberyn was a good man, Pero had to admit. (He would never actually say this to Oberyn, his ego was big enough without the extra fodder.) And he would have to find a way to repay the prince-who-had-everything in some fashion. Pero’s pride would not allow this kindness to be left unpaid.
Orestes went on to explain that the zealots thought attaining the knowledge of Valyrian Steel would allow them the proper way of sacrificing in order to satiate the supposed blood lust of some old, stupidly named god. They hoped to trade her for Lord Ollo’s knowledge.
“But you seem to know my lady,” Orestes said, turning in his saddle to look Pero straight in the face. “Do you?”
“Is she your lady?” Pero asked in return, ignoring Orestes’ question and how his stomach turned at the thought of her being alone with a group of men as delusional as the band of zealots. Thankfully, they were nearing where Orestes said he had been held captive—less than two days’ ride from their camp but they had set their horses upon the trail with haste, cutting time from their journey.
Orestes’ answering smile was small. “No. But I am blessed to know her and I will never forgive myself for leaving her behind.”
“But she told you to, didn’t she? Told you to run and not look back.” The words were out of his mouth before he could bite them back and his ever-present scowl deepened.
“You do know her. Indeed, she told me to run as soon as I was able. But not to Myr—she told me to run west.” He paused and shook his head and Pero barely caught the confusion coloring the Magistrate’s features. “I had thought the prince was jesting when he said you knew her. I am in your debt, it seems.”
“Just pay the fee you promised.”
“Of course! I would not dream of-”
“Good.” Pero dug his heels into his horse’s side and urged the animal into a faster trot. “You will keep your head, then.” Orestes said something else but Pero had already galloped away to Oberyn’s side at the front of the group. “What have you said to the magistrate?”
“Nothing of consequence.”
“Do not lie to me, princeling.” Pero scarcely noticed the men behind them slow their horses’ pace to give them room. Their relationship—if it could even be called that—was an open secret to most in the Second Sons and some of those who followed Oberyn into this new company were also willing to indulge themselves in each other’s bedrolls if the time called for it.
Oberyn only laughed. “I did not know that your obvious reaction to a lady’s name was a secret needing to be kept.”
“What else have you told him?”
“Nothing. Just as you have told me nothing. But I have still called the men who were loyal to me and the promised coin to save this woman you have kept like a secret.” Oberyn arched an eyebrow, a look Pero knew meant Oberyn was daring him to argue. “She will be safe. The Magistrate will be on his way and our pockets will be filled.” Oberyn’s dark eyes sparkled in the growing sunlight. “And I shall meet this lady of yours. She must be a sight to behold to warrant such attention.”
“She…” The words died on his tongue. How would he even try to describe her? How childish would he sound to a prince for harboring such affections for his childhood love after all this time? “She warrants much more than any man could ever give. Including the Magistrate.”
Oberyn huffed but a smile tugged at his lips. “We are nearly there, Tovar. You can make the polite introductions.”
**
Night had just started to fall, painting the sky a violent shade of orange, when Orestes had announced that the ruined castle was just over the next hill.
Pero felt his chest tighten for a moment, a shot of adrenaline he had not felt as strongly since he was a new recruit to the Second Sons facing a small horde of Dothraki.
They crested the hill and Pero saw the broken remains of a once-grand castle. A single window was lit with the dim light of a candle just as the sun disappeared behind the stone, making it look like it had absorbed the red light and bathed in an inky black.
Defense of the castle was nearly impossible with its location and the small band of mercenaries quickly surrounded it, ready to drive inside when suddenly….the door, large and rusted, opened and a single man rushed out, screaming something in what Pero thought to be Old Ghiscari and covered in…blood.
Pero turned to look at Oberyn who seemed to be waffling between amusement and confusion at the sight. He waved a hand, silently commanding two men to secure the fleeing zealot—quietly, if possible.
“It is too quiet,” Pero said as he turned back to the castle after watching the screaming man be brought to his knees and a dirty rag shoved between his lips.
Oberyn agreed. “Surely a band of zealots would make more noise. I’ve been told they’re fond of chanting.” The prince slid closer to the ruined castle, staying hidden behind the rolling hill and scattered boulders for cover.
Pero watched him move, knowing the prince had an innate talent for hearing the smallest noises—whether it be from a rabbit or a sneaking assassin, and would trust whatever his judgement was.
“If anyone is left, they are not moving.”
Pero nodded, ignoring the umpteenth time his chest clenched, and signaled for the rest of their band of men to press forward. Step by step, they neared the castle and spread out to find different entrances. Orestes stumbled in the loose dirt to stay near Pero and Oberyn and Pero grimaced when Oberyn nudged him in the side, silently telling him to allow it—at least for the time being.
Closer and closer, they crept until they Pero was able to curl his hand around the edge of the door and peel it open just enough for him and Oberyn to slip inside. Orestes tripped over a loose stone as he followed.
And Oberyn had been right.
The castle was quiet. Unnaturally so.
The grip on his swords tightened as the small group pushed further into the dark ruins. Torches were scattered and burning out in their holds on the wall, casting even more shadows against the crumbling stone. He heard the soft footfalls of his fellow mercenaries coming in through the east and west entrances but it gave him little comfort. They were alone.
Alone.
His next step made a splash and he looked down to see the toe of his boot submerged in a dark puddle. He reached out and grabbed a torch from the wall and let the dying flames shine near the floor.
It was blood.
He raise the torch just enough to light the end of the hall and sighed.
“How interesting,” Oberyn said as he glanced over his shoulder.
Blood pooled between the broken stone and drip-drip-dripped from some unseen source to puddle in the corner. Bodies were crumpled along the path and Pero turned to pin Orestes with a look. “These men were the ones who slaughtered your guards and took you captive?”
Orestes looked down at a body and seemed to bite back a gulp. “Yes.”
“It looks like they put up quite a fight.”
“It looks like they were ripped open,” Pero corrected before pressing forward. “What did this? Did they do this to each other?”
“I’ve never seen a group more cohesive than them,” Orestes said. “They never contradicted each other or spoke out of turn. They had a singular mentality, it seemed. I would not believe they turned on each other.”
“Men turn on each other all the time,” Oberyn said. “Even without cause.”
They continued forward, Pero leading. He was not sure where they were going, but he knew—instinctively—that he needed to keep moving. If another person or creature had found the castle before they did, what hope did she have? Would he find her like this, too? Reduced to a bloody corpse? Would that be the last chance he would have to see her?
But they walked on, further into the dark, catching glimpses of the rising moon in the half-collapsed windows until they turned and saw the outline of a door, lit by a dim, orange light. Without a care, Pero pushed forward, hilt of his sword still in his hand as he pushed the door open and his grip faltered.
For the first time in nearly two decades, Pero let his swords fall from his grasp.
In the corner of the small room, huddled near a solitary candle, was a woman. Not just a woman—her.
Chains wrapped around her ankles and wrists and angry, deep cuts spanned the length of her legs and arms and her fine dress had been reduced to rags. He barely registered Oberyn calling for the healer as he stepped to her side and quickly knelt down. The locks on the chains were easily undone and his roughened hands carefully prodded at the broken skin.
“Pero,” she whispered, the name sliding by her chapped lips. Her head sagged and Pero moved just enough to let her forehead rest against his shoulder. “You’re here…” her voice was rough and raspy, like she had been screaming for hours. And perhaps she had.
“I’m here.”
The healer came in, arms filled with supplies, while more than a few of their company stuck their heads into the room to see their charge. Oberyn quickly moved them back and shut the door—Pero would thank him for it later.
“Look at me. Look at me, Petal,” Pero said as the healer tutted as he looked over her wounds before uncorking a bit of firewine.
Her unfocused eyes slid to him as the healer set to work. A cry broke her chapped lips as the firewine started to spill across her legs.
Pero reached out and kept her head still, gaze on him, as the healer continued. “Just me, Petal. I am here.”
“Pe-Pero.” The name was stilted on her tongue. “Please—it hurts-” a scream tore its way out of her throat but Pero held her steady even as his chest clenched.
“I know. But it will be over soon.”
Tears gathered in her eyes and slid down her dirty cheeks as her hands shot out to grab at his armor; he could feel the heat of her touch sliding and blooming warmth through his thick tunic. But he kept her focused on him even as the healer muttered about needing more wrappings.
“I’m here, Petal. I’m here.”
**
“This is my fault,” Orestes whispered.
The company had settled into the ruins as a camp for the night, finding the rooms (where there wasn’t blood or any bodies) more comfortable than the outside ground. Pero, Oberyn, and Orestes were the last three to retire from the roaring fire they had made in the remnants of the great hall.
Pero agreed but kept that to himself. “How?”
“We travelled by Myr weeks ago. But I could not bear to part from my lady’s side—I convinced her, selfishly, to let me take her to see Volantis, Lys, Tyrosh. She had marveled at everything Norvos and Braavos had offered—even Lorath had made her wonder like a child. I wanted to give her more of that, to show her all I could.”
“And then you were set upon by zealots. Probably followed you from Dagger Lake.”
Orestes shook his head. “Our party never neared that pirate hive. The closest we came to it was when she insisted on seeing Valysar. That little town of no consequence.”
Oberyn, only briefly, touched Pero’s back and he knew the prince meant it as a comfort at the mention of Pero’s former home. Orestes did not notice it.
“But she was adamant and refused to tell anyone why. But she all but disappeared for an entire day once we arrived and would not speak of her adventures—the little box she had procured never left her side and was never opened.”
Pero almost smiled at that. She had not changed—in that respect, at least.
Orestes yawned and stood from the rickety chair. “I must retire for the night. Please alert me if my lady calls for me.”
Oberyn hummed an agreement while Pero felt his face curl into a sneer as the magistrate left the hall.
“He certainly holds a candle for his lady, does he not?” Oberyn mused as soon as Orestes was out of earshot.
“She did not ask for him once,” Pero said before reaching forward to grab the jug of terrible wine left on the table and took a large gulp.
“But she’s asked for you? Hm?” Oberyn asked, snatching the jug from him. “And you’ve yet to introduce me. I am almost insulted.”
“She needs rest, princeling.” He had made sure she was comfortable in one of the largest rooms and was happy to find that her trunks, filled with her belongings, were still intact and made sure she received them before he had let her rest for the night, making sure to let the rest of the company know that she was not to be disturbed.
“I’m sure she does.” He took a drink. “But she has also been trapped, alone, with men who meant her harm for nearly a week. You were the first friendly face she saw—do not think that I misheard her. She called for you. Pero.”
“You could walk in there now and she would not be able to tell the difference.”
Oberyn tutted and Pero stole the jug back. “I believe she would.”
Pero nearly startled when Oberyn reached out and grasped his wrist, keeping him from draining the rest of the wine. His grip was firm but gentle and a hold Pero knew well. “I thought people in Essos were more willing to indulge themselves in matters of the heart and flesh. Do not be stupid.”
And somehow…that worked. Pero slipped into her room and found her sitting on the small bed, wrapped legs atop the thin blankets and a book on her lap. In the warm candlelight, she looked almost healthy. Like she was not covered in healing salve and he didn’t know there were long, angry cuts hidden by wrappings and her thin nightgown.
She looked…so much like the girl he had left behind decades ago.
Pero remembered Lady Daeryssa smiling down at her daughter, flowers twisted into her braids.
“You are special, my star. Like me.”
“Like you, Mama?”
Daeryssa nodded and grabbed the small, blue rose she had Pero fetch just that morning and pressed her thumb against one of its thorns until blood bloomed on her skin and started to trickle down her skin. Her face was serene and Pero could not look away. Her bloodied fingers pulled the petals from the rose and she carefully pressed them against her daughter’s forehead, sticking them to her skin with blood. Words he didn’t understand slipped by her lips as she pressed another petal and then another to her daughter’s face until she stripped the flower bare.
“You will be magnificent, my star. Your trials will be hard but you will always rise above.”
“Come in,” she said, setting her book aside.
Pero did as he was told and blindly set his hands in hers as she reached out for him, letting her tug him onto the edge of her bed. “How are you?”
“I will heal.” She smiled as if nothing had caused her pain and his chest hurt. “I brought you something.” She leaned back just enough to retrieve a small box from the mess of blankets.
The box was nothing spectacular, made from a polished dark wood with a simple latch and did not weigh more than his dagger. “How did you know we would see each other again?” He asked.
She only smiled and pressed the small box further into his grip. “Open it.”
And he could not tell her no. He unfastened the latch and felt his face crumple as he looked inside. His mother’s handwriting, still beautiful and tilted, drew his eye first. He grabbed the thin bit of parchment and unfurled it.
My dear boy-
I love you more than words can say. You have saved us.
The rest of the letter was filled with anecdotes, telling Pero how the coin he had sent back home kept their family afloat and settled his father’s debts, allowing his mother and brothers to stay home and retain their titles and livelihoods. He had saved them. His mother had written it at least three times in her short letter.
But I still wish I witnessed you grow into the man you are today. Come home. You are always welcome.
He quickly let the letter curl in on itself again and shoved it back in the box, knowing she was watching him, face serene and almost unreadable. He reached into the box again and let his fingers brush against something cold and smooth. A shuddering breath pushed its way out of his lung as he pulled out a small, carved wooden wolf that fit in his palm. He raised it up to press the well-worn wood against his lips, just once, before placing it gently back into the box.
“You met my family.”
“I did,” she said. “They were very kind.” She paused. “And they smile so often. I almost didn’t believe you were related to them.”
He huffed. “You never let me have a moments’ peace, Petal.”
“You were the only peace I knew as a child,” she responded.
Pero sat with her for hours under their tree after her mother had disappeared and the petals remained on her face, only falling one by one after the sun had set, leaving little bloody thumbprints across her skin. He tried to press them back onto her skin without success, and she only giggled at his attempts, leaning into each of his touches and letting him try and try again.
She collected all the petals as they fell and Pero had given up on trying to re-stick them.
“What are you doing?”
“Practice.” He watched her reach out and scratch her palm against the broken bark of the tree, slicing open her palm in a single movement.
He squawked and moved to grab her hand but she curled her fingers into a fist, crushing the petals against her bloodied palm. She took a single, long breath through her nose and then unclenched her fist. The petals rose from her bloodied hand and floated up into the air as if pulled by invisible strings. They swirled around the pair before, with another long breath, she let them fly away, disappearing into the thick of the forest.
She laughed then, a light sound that had blood rushing to his cheeks for a reason he could not explain or pinpoint at that moment. All he could mutter as she looked at him, eyes twinkling and a giggle still on her lips was…”petal.”
“Why did you leave?” She asked as he tucked the small box away into his tunic.
Pero froze. “I had to.”
A/N: please let me know what you think! I hope you guys like this! there will be three chapters.
#oberyn martell x reader#pero tovar x reader#oberyn martell imagine#pero tovar imagine#game of thrones imagine#asoiaf#game of thrones#the great wall
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MAHI Prompt: Needed No More
[ Using the words: DON’T, UNSEEN ]
[ back at it again at krispy kreme boys- things aren’t necessarily slowing down, but they aren’t as fast or stressful as before... for now. In this down time, I’mma introduce my newest character because I hate myself and want another one. ]
The Five Part “In the Dreams of Ashley” series is done! Go read the others here!
{Prelude}
{In the Dreams of Ashley: The Wind}
{In the Dreams of Ashley: The Fire}
{In the Dreams of Ashley: The Water}
{In the Dreams of Ashley: The Earth}
[ Content Warnings: Death, oblique drug mention ]
[ When (because I fucked up the timeline and need to get it straight lmao): Before the WoL’s infiltration of Castrum Centri ]
====
“Ash, yer needed ‘gain.”
“Ugh… can’t they just… I dunno, give us the information? This is so much work…”
“Then why in th’hells did you sign up for this! Get yer arse out there, lazy whoreson.”
“Yeesh, calm down, calm down…”
Ashley was never the type to work fast, everyone of his team knew that; but when they needed an expert, they always turned to him. For some reason. Plenty of other experts out there, plenty of more willing people. He needed to make money somehow, though.
He stood himself up, snuffing out whatever he was smoking this time (they’ve stopped guessing, at this point, it seemed to be the one of the definitions of entropy); then took his good sweet time stretching, joints cracking here and there.
“We don’t really got much time, buddy. Airship’s leavin’ soon.”
“Slow’s the name of the game, buddy. Go too fast and you’re like to mess it up.”
“I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout th’job, I’m talkin’ ‘bout th’godsdamned airship! Th’fact that we gotta rely on ye’ is a fate crueler than torture… gettin’ inta this sorta job, never sober.”
“Sober enough to know that you are about to miss your airship. I can get there myself if I gotta, but you’re not rushing me.”
The man did just that, he let out an annoyed huff and joined the rest of his group to shove them towards the airship landing - while Ashley quietly gathered up his belongings, throwing the packs onto his back. The last of his smoke was stuffed into a repurposed flask as he meandered his way to the bar. One last request, of course, a drink for the road. And then, to join his team.
In the opposite direction.
No, instead, he left towards Black Brush on foot. While he was never given the information of where they were going, he knew the general direction of where the lead they had gotten was. He took this time to enjoy himself, drink a little - stop by the next bar for another - then took himself into the North.
==
“Whu- how in th’hells did y’get here ‘fore us!”
“Honestly, I’m more surprised that he didn’t teleport here.”
“Eh. Too much effort.” Ashley took his place… beneath a tree, shutting his eyes for a moment.
“Says the guy who walked here from Ul’dah! Right through a damned Imperial Castrum! The one we’re supposed to be surveying, too.”
His eyes opened again, taking the time to reflect over his current team. Infiltration was their game, and they would’ve appeared to have been the least qualified for the job.
A heavily set, heavily clad beast of a Highlander - Hunter - sporting a massive axe that, honestly, he could’ve swung with one hand. Never the best with people, yet he oozed “you can trust me with your life”.
Colette was an Elezen woman tasked with keeping them alive, not the best healer in the world, but she had a handle on things when they got rough. She’d rather keep her nose in books than the world around her, but she was the most attentive than the rest of them… not including himself, of course.
Then there was Ruta, an Auri woman from Hingashi - she was the real stealth behind the whole operation. In fact, they wouldn’t have called on him if they thought she could get it done. The fact that they thought she couldn’t was worrying enough. Both she and Colette entered the group as a couple, and there could’ve never been a better pair.
“Ugh.. okay. Fine. I’ll lead us in.” Not even two minutes of rested eyes before he got up again… even more stretching, much to the dismay of Hunter.
“Gods above, yer gonna be th’death o’me.”
“Nah, worse. You’re gonna deal with me for the rest of your very long life.”
“Great. Sounds like a helluva time.”
Hunter slammed a palm on his back, forcing him forward. All in good fun, found-family is like to mess around - and after years of working together, it was hard for any of them to not smile or joke around. Even in the face of danger or on a job.
==
“Ruta, wait!” Ashley called out a whisper to the woman as she took the lead, staying low and out of sight - mostly out of sight. Wisps of her hair were caught as she moved, giving a few soldiers some confusion and a need to investigate. She, thankfully, made it out of sight - with the rest like that as well. When she peeked back at her group, Ash narrowed his eyes and scowled… but he couldn’t really say much.
“You two, stay here - and do not fucking move.”
It was rare that he ever seemed so urgent - that’s what caused both Colette and Hunter to stay still and quiet, to wait for a motion to call them over. Ash poked his head out from around the corner, watching and processing. He took in the amount of time between each patrol, which way the security and cameras faced, when they turned- he moved the moment he knew it was safe, keeping himself low to the ground as he set himself beside Ruta.
“What in the hells are you thinking, you could’ve gotten yourself killed.”
“But I didn’t. You can see better from here anyways - so call them over.”
“And get them killed too? Piss off. I’ll get them over here safely, thank you. No wonder they called for me…”
Again, he waited with his head around the corner. Just two ticks before it would be ready, he held up one finger, then beckoned one of them over. It was Colette first. They needed her most to keep them from being injured. She ducked her head down and quietly tipped her way over to them - immediately scolding Ruta as well, when she was safe to.
Ash took to watching again.
“Swivin’... they’re in the middle of a shift change. That’s- that’s real bad for us, right now.”
He turned his attention to where the next soldiers were pouring from, where he might be able to find an opening. When he did - and gods, did it feel like an eternity - he beckoned Hunter over. The man was getting impatient, but there was no room for that in this job. He was surprisingly silent for a man dressed in heavy armors… but it was the catch of his pauldron against a wall that set everything in motion.
Ashley could see the outcome from a malm away. And it ended in Hunter standing his ground against a rush of soldiers and machinery.
“Hunter, dammit, get over here! We can face this as a group- we’re better together, now get your arse over here!”
“N’ get y’killed too? No way, get th’information we need n’get out - I’ve got this.”
“Like hells you do!”
“Ashley! Come on- just listen to him!” Ruta tugged on his belt, forcing him back. “You’ll get us caught if you keep yelling like that.”
“Hunter, I’m gonna kick your arse when we get outta here…”
“Lookin’ forward t’it, buddy.”
The real end came when they turned to head the opposite direction. Fear never showed itself to him, not usually. Maybe fear of getting his behind handed to him on a rusty platter by Hunter, or his hair and ears tugged on by Colette, or Ruta stealing his smokes-- never fear of getting caught, or killed, or failing a job. But that fear was there now.
And Colette was the first to fall.
On immediate sight was a bullet to her head.
“Colette!” Ruta tried to reach for her, but it was he that pulled her back and away.
“Ruta you need to run, now! Get out of here!”
“No, no! I won’t leave her!”
“She’s dead, Ruta! It doesn’t matter if you leave or stay, so you need to leave!”
This was the problem with having a romantic relationship with someone on your team, he had always figured. The pain of possibly watching them die.
She didn’t listen. …Then she was next.
There was no way of her escaping three imperials on their tails. He did what he could and ran for Hunter again.
He, much to Ash’s relief, was able to hold himself well. Beat up and bloodied, sure, but alive enough to keep fighting.
“Ash! I told y’t’get outta here!”
“Colette and Ruta are down, we need to get outta here!”
“What-”
“Don’t question, go!”
There was no more questioning - while he and Hunter always butt heads, the man wasn’t stupid. Now wasn’t the time, and he could see that. That’s all it took for their boots to hit the ground towards the exit. They seemed in the clear to get out of there, so close they were, even as the gates began to close. It was as if all of their accrued bad luck came into play in one moment.
With another fire of a gun, Ashley found himself face first into the metal road; his foot was the victim, and standing was going to be hells.
“Ash, get yerself up!”
“I’m tryin’! Shite, gods, get to the exit!”
“Like hells!”
Instead of watching him struggle, Hunter scooped him up into his arms to run twice as fast towards freedom - only to realize those few seconds cost them greatly in terms of time. Ash had little time to really comprehend the situation. Right after he had been picked up, he was thrown - forced to roll through the gates, watching them close just before Hunter could make it. The last he saw of him was a smile and thumbs up.
The next sounds he heard were the poor souls who thought they could get close to the hulk… and then silence.
==
“Were you able to get any information?”
“...No.”
“I thought you were supposed to be the best.”
“Karma decided to compromise our positions.”
“Not blaming your own failings?”
“...You said it yourself, we were the best. It was… a series of unfortunate coincidences.”
“Coincidences don’t get information.”
“Yeah, I coulda told you that. Now, are you gonna keep berating me while I’m grieving, or am I free to leave?”
“Guess we’ll have to find someone better than the best, get out of here.”
“Thank gods.”
#prompt#history will be written#about: Ashley Tucker#if people like these stories i might finish making him in game#"orz i'm torn about how he looks lol#all i know is that i want him to be garbage#there's a little hint to the outcome in this one ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿#that's the same kinda hint in one of Amosis's prior prompts#not necessarily related#but still the same kind of hint#virtues and vices
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“listen to your thoughts”
shout out to the god beings not only nurturing their god genes; also spreading truth and knowledge to the youth ‘bout what it all means. i got pulled away, i still exist within a hectic day to day however this seed simply must be spread.
here it is my two cents; listen with an open mind and then you decide what your inner truth is.
every definition society has written about what it means to be successful, accepted, even morally good are just distractions you can’t “visualize” because they’re ingrained in the way you conceptualize. i know that sounds strange, you see the things they don’t say, and/or label “fiction/fake/stay away” are answers to questions they don’t want to explain. they (& who the fuck is they anyway? they make your hell comfortable, so you found - contentment? and caved. so as their dreams went from pictures to reality, we?- scribbled on our paintings and took our place within this insanity? perpetuating stereotypes, ALL THE -ISMS, inequality, and innocent victims steadily die, because their hatred stained our minds. i’ll tell you a secret “power lies in the compliance.” the natives of this land, were too “peaceful” at the time to keep it. who the fuck is anyone to tell you who to be? or who you are? or what it is that you deserve? who is anyone to condemn you or even idolize your worth? NOBODY IS SUPERIOR DUMMIES. if you here, we all chosen in this realm for something. we are all one. you can’t be better at being me than me, and vice versa. your dreams are yours. YOUR CONFIDENCE, your DREAMS, YOUR VOICE, YOUR CHOICES- they are YOURS ALONE. when you enter this world you have to trust your senses as a baby, because you don’t naturally understand this language; or at least how to verbally communicate with it.
pop quiz : what’s society’s favorite thing to do to the youth?
answer? CRUSH THEIR DREAMS, teach them “discipline” and “obedience”. navigate their paths so they are fit their labels and view the rest of the world like that.
minorities are the majority. no one talks about that tho. the physiques of our black queens, they couldn’t copy to a T. so they redrew “beauty” so we wouldn’t fit the definition. colorism further dividing the unity we existed in. cause there’s this crazy misconception that “light skins” have it best; except we don’t cause in the end they treat us just like they treat them. the only difference is, we were their jestures, their entertainment. our humiliation satisfies them, something dangerous. we’re the guinea pigs, we’re the bastards, we’re the “mistakes” that weren’t mistakes until you saw our pigmentation. our thick curly hair and the magic we contain. envy beloveds, is a terrible thing. and reflections we love to to condemning the aggressors; it’s 2021 at this point are we any better? all this turmoils make y’all bitter. y’all keep telling them to change. they want y’all to fight so they can keep doing the same things. keep making you the villain, and taking your humanity away. change your ideology about everything. look into everything. take what hits, resonates and fits your ideal existence. if you believe in magic, you can do anything be persistent.
be original. be weird, it means authentic and eccentric. they coated their amazement with a tone of isolation, this cold negative connotation. don’t speak out, don’t stand out, they wanted to keep us caged in. athletes don’t have to dumb, nerds aren’t awkward at all, everyone can be friends, just takes a little respect that’s all. fuck your parents. fuck their ideas and their wants for you. if you want for you, why live your life based off of others? you owe no one anything. if you take advice and things go wrong, whose fault is it?
yours. why? because they ADVISED, can’t a soul make you do shit in this life. so only do what you want to, you’ll find more fulfillment, or at the least a lesson in growth. because no matter who you tryna please, the weight is all your own. so why not let it be your own?
money is nothing, if your times truly valuable. you shouldn’t do shit for money, cause you’ll hate the conditions of your routine environment that constricts your growth and then you can wilt away entirely. wealth and fortune are obtained by the bold, whether heinous or innovation it’s the risk the passion behind a dream one can’t not indulge in. if you wouldn’t die for what you’re doing, for how you’re living change that shit.
if being you makes people you thought you had leave, thank your ancestors and guides for the cleansing of your space. you have to love you like you love whatever you believe in. if your creator made you as you are, why you letting someone who has no idea what your purpose is, deter your focus?
ever heard of body dysmorphia ? they got society in a soul purpose dysmorphia. got warriors, philosophers, healers, teachers, leaders, builders, hunters, farmers etc., “magic” capabilities they got you convinced are just make believe, yet so a man thinketh so is he. you still w me? so look, maybe it’s hard, maybe it’s on the side of the unpopular opinion. matching energy ain’t what’s in, maintain your shit and balance will align with it. CONFIDENCE CONFIDENCE CONFIDENCE. away with putting ourselves down, self criticism is not self bashing.
really it’s the influence the outside seems to have on people. i got beat on and bullied because i’m a nerd an athlete and i’m pretty. i don’t “condemned” for disagreeing with certain interpretations and meanings within religion because they contradicted the things “followers” were being. in the end, i defended myself by any means, even got the congregation viewing the world like little ole me, i saved and kept saving the souls shelled up in the “outcasts” the “rebels”. even some souls in the pawns tainted and evil. because when i speak, you feel my meaning. i’m the poster child for every ounce of “difference” they’re trying to label “abomination” now, and still somehow i’m America’s favorite flower child. i am the voice for the weak, and the scared, and those who still don’t have courage to share, for those who think nobody cares; maybe they don’t, sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t, for those who feel nothing but anger, just rage; for the wanderers who don’t know whether they can effect change. you can do anything, YOU WANT TO DO. people die for no reason, they die with regret, they die after a life they never truly lived. honestly, for god sakes people just fucking live. as you see fit, make mistakes learn from them. network and connect with neighbors. don’t hate ignorant strangers.
create a force field for yourself, meditate and visualize the energy around you. keep all negativity and leeching energy away. remind yourself you are as you are perfection. everyday. and then just be okay?
a.
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“An Avenger”
Chapter 3
Work Drabble - Avengers AU
Characters: Mutant!reader, Tony, Bucky, Steve
Word Count: 815
************
“So?”
You sucked in a shuddering breath as he wrapped the bandages around your wrist, further up your forearm. “I-” you looked away as he looked at you, “you ever? It’s like when you are walking and suddenly you can’t breathe?”
“Like the world swallows you up, but there’s the screaming in your head no one else can hear?”
You looked at him, “yes…”
“And the way they look at you,” he placed medical tape over the end of the bandage. “Why- why don’t you just heal yourself?” he asked sitting against the counter opposite you.
You looked around the kitchen, “nice place you got here.”
“Deflecting,” he growled at you.
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Then why are you here?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
“I just,” you licked your lips, shoving away the image of Bucky’s disapproving glare. Hateful words, the ache that was ingrained deep in your bones, anger darkening your soul. “I just…” you shook your head, “I should go.”
He caught you as you stood, arm wrapping around your neck, pulling you in, your hands falling against his chest, his hand buried in your hair, “we will always be here. You don’t have to kill yourself for us, we won’t judge you or expect everything from you.”
“Nnmmgh!”
He sighed, listening as you whimpered, fighting the sobs that had torn your soul, the pain that wracked your body. “You’ll let them kill you? We’re not so bad… nobody asked you to be a superhero dummy.”
But you deserved this, you couldn't even save one small child- “can I..?” you buried your face in his chest as your voice broke.
“Just fuckin’ cry, I won’t say anything.”
And as you stood there in his embrace, he didn't, his familiar presence a soothing balm to your soul. The broken sobs leaving you breathless as you leaned into him, fingers curling in his shirt.
Criminals, villains, the bad guys, these were the ones you had left, they were the ones that had smiled as you declared that you were going to be a good guy, a hero.
They were the ones that opened their doors, readily welcoming you back into their homes.
**
"She did it on purpose!"
You flinched as Tony pushed you behind him, Steve pushing Bucky backwards, "c'mon Buck, what did we talk about?"
"ITS HER DAMNED JOB!" He cried out, "you could've done it sooner, but you left me out there injured! DO YER DAMNED JOB ON TIME!! BE EFFECTIVE!!"
"Do you think you're the only one out there?!" You cried angrily from behind Tony, "there are also civilians out there that had been injured, I cannot be expected to follow you around, making sure that you stay in prime condition- don't be an ignorant fuck!"
Tony snorted, turning and catching you round the waist, "she has a point, she's not your personal healer."
Bucky growled as Tony stalked away with you in his arms. Glaring at Steve who had pushed him back, "WHAT?!"
"Buck… you are going to get along with her. She has these powers and I don't understand why you hate her so much."
"Steve! She keeps dropping the ball, first that kid, then today! She needs to step up or back off, we don't need her around."
Steve chewed on his bottom lip, looked at Bucky with disappointment. "Losing that kid hit bad huh?"
Bucky scowled, turning away from him and cursing, "ya don't know what your talkin' bout Stevie. That mutants gotta learn to be better!"
"Like Wanda?"
Bucky whirled around, "you cannot compare Wanda to that-!" he exclaimed motioning towards where you and Tony had disappeared.
Steve shook his head, “what is it with you and her Buck? Why won’t you tell me?” Bucky shook his head, “fine, you're grounded, no missions until you can say something nice, apologize and learn how to work effectively with the team.”
“It’s not me, it's her!!”
Steve shoved Bucky backwards, “ya heard me, effective immediately, I’ll figure out who will take over your missions you got coming up. Deal with it!”
**
Tony followed you out, once he sweet you down, hurrying to catch up as you made your way down towards the car lot, “where are you going?”
You shook your head, “I have to get out of here for a while,” you stopped as he ran to the other side of the car, “please… just, I need some alone time away from here.”
Tony sighed, leaning over the roof of the car, “you break it, you bought it.”
You nodded, smiling tightly as he stepped back, letting you climb into the car and watched as you drove out and away. “FRIDAY keep an eye on her, if she gets into a wreck let me know and be ready to have a med unit deployed."
“Of course Tony.”
“Thank you sweet thing.”
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Forest Nymph | Geralt of Rivia pt 1
Hi this is my first fanfic so take it easy on me!
Warnings: slight gore
Going into town was dangerous. If anyone found out who or more importantly what you are, they would kill you. Maybe they’d stake you up to a post and burn you. Or they could tie you to the back of a horse cart then drag you face first around town until your mouth fills with mud and shit and your flesh gets torn off your bones. Maybe they’d simply beat you to death.
Either way it didn’t really matter. If the people of Asenguard found out that you are the dryad, the forest nymph who is destroying their farm land, the first thing they would do is torture and kill you.
So, understandably, going into town is not an often occurrence. A trip once every three or four months does more than suffice. You bring rare herbs and spices to trade for coin. The local healer is especially fond of you. She is a warm soul. One of the few good humans left, with no second motive in her kind eyes. She simply wants to help others.
“Oh Briar!” she exclaims excitedly, having watched you walk down the narrow path to her warmly lit cottage “I’m so glad to see you! I was getting low on juniper berries.” She holds her hand out for the pack with childlike excitement. She’s the only human who knows what you are.
“Come in for some tea.”
“I’d like that.” She’s the closest thing to a friend that you have
The conversation stays light however you can tell there’s something on her mind. She keeps giving you concerning looks. Looks that say something is wrong.
“Is there something going on Thea?” She purses her lips and takes in a deep breath before sighing.
“Things have gotten a lot more tense these past few months. The farmers are… well they’re angry. Really angry. They’re talking about hiring someone to find the thing wrecking their land. A Witcher” Her worried eyes never leave yours. She is serious.
“I’ll be fine Thea. I always have been.”
“I mean it. Something has changed,” She paused for a moment. “The air is different. I can feel it in my bones.”
She’s right. You know it and yet its easier to pretend that nothing is changing.
“Look I’ll be safe, check my back, everything is going to be just fine.” She simply sighs in response, but what else can you do? Leave? That’s not an option. The Asenguard forest is a part of your soul. “I need to go, finish my errands.”
“Of course.”
Thea hands you a bag of coins before you leave. It is heavier than normal. You shoot her a disapproving look.
“Just take it. Keep me in mind.”
“Thank you.”
Downtown is busier than normal. People are bustling about their business. Some shoot each other dirty looks; others eye the crowd suspiciously. People don’t trust their neighbours, let alone the dirty scoundrels on the streets. Theft is rampant throughout the town.
You keep your cloak pulled far over your head. Long leather gloves pulled up to your elbows. If anyone were to see your skin, the first thing they would notice is how eerily pale you are. In the moonlight your skin glows silver and bleeds a deep emerald green. Despite this harsh skin tone, you don’t appear drained, if anything you radiate light. Your hood also hides your ears. Their pointed tips only merely poke out of your hair, but they are still noticeable. The towns folk would immediately know something is off.
The fabric shop you enter is small and crowded. Upper class women go in with their children to buy buttons and fancy ribbons. Items that most towns folk can only dream of owning. You simply need a new needle and some thread. And a couple arms worth of leather. It will come in handy for when the temperature starts to drop in several weeks.
A couple women talk to the shop keeper. They speak in hushed tones, but their excitement is loud and clear.
“Have you seen him?” A lady in a blue dress and matching cloak asks.
“He’s so handsome! The things I would let that man do to me.” Another in a pink dress replies. They laugh in unison as if what she said is the funniest thing in the world. You dread these encounters.
“My husband says he will finally kill that wicked demon in the forest.”
You freeze at her words. They really did hire a Witcher. And he is already here. Here to hunt you down and eviscerate you, leaving your entrails for the wolves. The women are oblivious to your reaction. They continue their petty gossip about the Witcher and his bard, who apparently, will be easier to lure into their promiscuous trap than the Witcher. You cringe at the thought.
You gather your items quickly and pay with the coins Thea generously gave you. The only other stop you need to make is to the silver smith. There are less women in the more industrial part of town. Their tongues may be sharp but at least they pose no physical threat. Men like to hang around the smith’s shop and drink their ale. It has made for some uncomfortable encounters in the past.
“I want to pick up an order for Briar Woods.” The man behind the counter eyes you suspiciously. His expression said women don’t belong here. But you already know that much.
“The dagger?”
“Yes.”
“You got coin?” The alcohol on his breath wafts through the stale air. You place the amount you counted out on the way here onto the counter. He slides it into his pocket before disappearing behind the storage door. The dagger was more expensive than you had expected, but it is worth it. A bow and arrows are good for long distance, but you need something that will help if hand to hand combat is necessary.
The door to the shop opens behind you and someone slips in the same time the smith comes out from the storage room.
“Here.” He drawls, handing you the dagger, “Don’t cut yourself sweetheart.”
Bile rises in your throat. You turn around without thanking him and go to leave the shop.
“Didn’t expect to see you here, Witcher.” He says to the man waiting behind you. “Bout time you showed up.” Suddenly you become aware of the towering mass of muscle and armour behind you. Your heart skips a beat at the realization.
“I Just want my sword sharpened. That’s all.” His deep, gritty voice fills the room.
I need to get out! You think. Your heart starts racing faster than it ever has before and your mouth runs dry. He’s right there. At that moment he turns around to glance at you. Can he hear my heart? Leave! Move your legs and get out!
Once you force yourself out of the shop you run. It doesn’t matter that people shoot you strange looks, you run faster than ever before, all you can hear is your heartbeat rapidly pulsing in your throat; you run until the forest swallows you whole. There’s no way you can hide from a Witcher, let alone beat him in any sort of combat. You are utterly fucked.
“Who was that?” Geralt asks the silver smith.
“No clue. Don’t remember seeing her before.” The smith answers nonchalantly.
“Hmm.”
Geralt has been getting a lot of pressure from the King of Asenguard to at least go and look for what is causing damage to the farmers’ crops. The farmers, apparently, would not leave him alone. Geralt honestly didn’t give a damn about their crops; however, the King offered a persuasive amount of coin just to look into it. After all, coin is coin.
Outside the building a sing song voice rings through the air.
“Toss a coin to your Witcher, oh valley of plenty, of valley of plenty” Geralt groans annoyed at Jaskier, the bard’s entrance.
“Well hello Geralt! Have you gone to the alehouse yet?” He burped, “There must be something special in the water!” He chuckled to himself. Geralt glared at him stone eyed. He was drunk before the sun had even gone down.
“They love us here! They already know all the words to my song.”
“Hmm”
The Asenguard forest stretches hundreds of thousands of miles across the province of Nazair, with endless hiding spots, and yet, you can’t find a single one. Nothing is good enough. Your new friend, the dagger, doesn’t give you any reassurance either. Despite this, you haven’t given up hope. Maybe he won’t even come looking the optimistic side of your brain thinks, however you know that is extremely unlikely.
It’s a full moon tonight. You can at least better your chances by finding somewhere dark. Somewhere where your skin won’t radiate back the bright moonlight. Normally you loved the moon and would spend the nights dancing with her, but not now. Not tonight when her bright embrace might get you killed.
There are several cave systems throughout the forest with only one of them being close enough that you can make it before it gets dark. You prefer to spend your nights up in the trees and don’t know the caves well, however this one likely has two or three entrances. Despite this, the thought of getting lost or trapped crosses your mind, it is always a possibility.
When you finally reach the caves, you are surprised to find a small pond has formed near the entrance that was not here the last time you were in this part of the forest. The sun is just starting to set. Every nerve of your being is on edge. You feel as though you are tingling with electricity. A swim in the pond would be really nice right now, just to take the edge off. After all, it is still light out, you still have time.
You set your cloak near the edge of the pond on top of a large patch of moss. The moss is soft and comforting under your feet. The patches under your feet slowly turn greener and healthier. That is part of being a forest nymph, things grow around you. You let the dark dress slowly drop off your shoulders onto the moss as well. The water is cool and comforting as you wade in. The ecosphere accepts you as one of its own. Dipping your head under water, you reach to the bottom of the shallow pond and let your hands sink themselves into the smooth clay-like mud. A warm energy escapes from your hands, with it a soft green light flows into the dirt. Almost out of no where a shoot comes out of the ground where your hands lay. Then another and another, dozens of Lilypad shoots are conjured out of the ground and reach for the surface of the water where they then blossom in an array of colours. When you break the surface of water, you are surrounded by the sweet and subtle smell of lily flowers. Finally, you are able to relax.
That doesn’t last long when out of no where you hear a horse’s footsteps out in the distance.
Shit! You think, if I can hear them, then they can definitely hear me. You quietly wade out of the water as to not create any disturbance. Your veins fill with adrenaline as you reach for you clothes and pack. Slipping the cloak on with nothing underneath, you quickly make your way to the entrance of the cave, not noticing the dagger which still lay on the moss. Suddenly they don’t seem so familiar. Going in doesn’t feel like the best option anymore, but the sound of hooves coming closer means you don’t really have much of a choice.
It takes your eyes a minute to adjust to the dimly lit cave. Your eyes are fully dilated, but not just because of lack of light. Fear fills your entire body. It pumps through your veins and heightens your senses. Every muscle feels stiff, and yet you are ready to jump at any noise. You need to move further in the cave system. The rocks are damp and covered in moss and lichen. The air is thick and musky, making it hard to breath. Or maybe its your current state of panic that’s making it hard to breath. Neither seem to be helping. You step carefully around lose rocks. If one were to tumble, you’d be done for. Dust and small pebbles start to fall from the ceiling of the cave, suddenly, you can hear hooves right above your head.
You reach for the dagger which had been residing in the pocket of your cloak only to find it missing. No! Oh, please not this, anything but my fucking dagger! The bow and arrow packed away in your bag will have to do.
Geralt has been riding around the forest for the past three hours looking for any signs of what could have happened to the farmers land. There appears to be an invasive species of vines growing around the edges of the crops where the tilled land meets the forests edge. Set there to warn them from coming any closer. Honestly, he doesn’t care much for the farmers. They’re destroying the forest for more fertile land because they don’t care to take care of what they already have. Senseless fucking humans if you ask him. But its an organic economy, he understands that much. That town relies on those farmers to feed them, or they all die, which is cause enough to look into it, and the coin of course.
They don’t stop until Roach needs to drink, and lucky enough, there happens to be a pond nearby. Geralt unmounts from Roach to stretch his legs. When he approaches the waters edge to splash his face, the pendant around his neck starts to faintly vibrate. Magic has been used here. Until this point, he didn’t think anything of the lilies in the water, however there is an unusually large amount of them growing for such a small pond.
His senses become more aware as he scans the area lit under the bright moonlight. Something catches his eye, a slight glint coming from a small metal object in the moss. A dagger. A freshly crafted dagger to be specific. It doesn’t even look used.
Geralt’s mind flashes back to the silver smith’s shop earlier that day. The girl who was leaving just as he arrived was picking up a dagger. One very similar to what he is now holding in his hands. He pockets the dagger and unsheathes his sword off of his back. Something is off.
A dark shadow near a clump of boulders catches his attention. A cave. As he gets closer, his pendant starts to vibrate more prominently. Something is in there, but what? Not many creatures can conjure that specific type of damage onto those crops. The first thing that comes to his mind is a witch.
“Come out. I’m not going to hurt you!” He calls into the entrance of the cave
The Witcher’s voice echoes throughout the walls of the cave. The hairs on the back of your neck are fully raised in fear. He is lying. He has to be. Maybe he doesn’t even know if you are in here. Yet, you find yourself doubting that thought.
“If you don’t come out, I’m coming in.” his voice echoes again. Silently, you raise your bow and aim it at the mouth of the cave about a hundred meters away. Still close enough to have accurate aim, but at the same time, your view is obscured by rocks and the bulging walls of the cave.
After a moment of silence, Geralt steps foot into the cave only to have an arrow whizz past the side of his face. It is so close he can feel the movement it causes in the air around him. Suddenly, he no longer feels obligated to honor his previous offer.
You quickly load another arrow and aim. Your hands are surprisingly still. The Witcher ducks down out of view. He uses the boulders to his advantage and creeps closer to you. This isn’t going to work for much longer, especially when you can’t see him. You break into a sprint going deeper into the tunnels. Sharp rocks nick at your skin, but none of that matters right now. Right now, you need to find the other exit. Wherever that may or may not be. The tunnels branch off into different, narrower tunnels that twist and wind causing any sense of direction you once had to be lost. The air is becoming impossibly thick to breath, and you can hear the Witcher’s footsteps closing the space behind you.
If things couldn’t get any worse, your tunnel starts getting impossibly narrow, your only escape running out. Your last shred of hope crushed. You can’t make it any further, the tunnel runs out. There isn’t even enough space for you to shoot an arrow. You are truly defenseless. At the hands of a bloodthirsty Witcher. Fuck
Unless…One last spark of hope flickers in your mind. You bury your hands in the dirt and push all your energy into the ground. A green light fills the air and shoots come flying out of the ground. You pour all of your remaining energy to making these small vines reach the top of the cave. The vines quickly thicken and form thorns as they grow larger and larger. Finally, they filled the entire space, just as the Witcher reached you.
You collapsed, exhausted, but safe. You were completely drained, trapped, and likely about to be murdered, but for now you are safe.
Geralt stops outside of the thorny wall, impressed with what he just witnessed. She conjured a thorny wall of protection out of nowhere with incredible speed. This is not the work of a witch, but what?
“What are you?” He asks, slightly out of breath. You don’t answer right away, too consumed with your exhaustion.
“Why?” you sigh
“I haven’t seen that type of magic in a long time.” The threatening tone in his voice seems to have disappeared, which only sets you more on edge. Of course, it has, he has you trapped here, exhausted and without any food or water. At this point growing anything more is simply not an option.
“I’m a Dryad,” You finally give in. “and you were sent here to kill me, right? The towns people couldn’t stop talking about you today.” Tears finally found their way down your cheeks.
“Hmm” he mumbled. “Well no, technically I haven’t been sent here to kill you. The king wanted me to find out what was damaging farmers’ crops, but I’m guessing once I tell him he’ll want you dead.”
There it is. You think.
“So that’s what you’re going to do?”
“That depends,” He pauses, “Why’d you wreck the land?”
“Why did I wreck the land?” You laugh, “Those farmers are the ones destroying the land. They don’t take care of it properly, rob it of its nutrients, then fuck off and cut down more of my forest. I’m only trying to save the forest. Otherwise they’ll continue until there is nothing left.” Your voice cracks and tears intensify. All you ever tried to do was the right thing, and now… Well look what it has gotten you. The Witcher hummed in response, offering nothing.
Then you hear him pick up his sword.
“What are you doing?” you ask as the first slash hits your thorny wall of vines. “No! Please No!” You beg, but the slashing continues. Your vines wither at the abuse and you don’t have the energy to fight back. All you can do is curl up in the corner in fear of what comes next. Until finally, it stops.
You look up to see the Witcher has resheathed his sword and holds his hand out to you.
“You’re not going to kill me?”
“No.” He shakes his head. His golden eyes glow slightly in the near dark cave. Your shaky hand meets his, and he helps you up.
“What’s your name?” You ask.
“Geralt of Rivia.”
“I’m Briar of Asenguard.”
---
Pt.2 is out! Thank you all for the positive feedback!!!
https://sunonyoreface.tumblr.com/post/613171373679034368/forest-nymph-geralt-of-rivia-pt2
Pt.3
https://sunonyoreface.tumblr.com/post/613415372067143680/forest-nymph-geralt-of-rivia-pt3
Pt.4
https://sunonyoreface.tumblr.com/post/613676968381136896/forest-nymph-geralt-of-rivia-pt4
#the witcher#the witcher imagine#geralt of rivia#geralt x reader#the witcher x reader#the witcher fanfic#jaskier#pt1#pt2
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Why I hate seeing the Uchiha logo on Sakura’s shirt/why I don’t ship SasuSaku
DISCLAIMER: I’m not shitting on anyone’s ship. I get it. You love them. You do you booboo, I’m just here to speak my truth. Don’t come at me with comments shitting all over the things I love. You have your opinion and I have mine.
If you are a SasuSaku shipper and you read past this point, you have no one but yourself to blame for your anger!
I’m probably gonna rant a bit, so I’ll start with the bottom line. Sakura and Sasuke’s relationship is one of the most toxic relationships I’ve ever seen.
Unrelated (but kind of related): All the female character are written pretty shitty, and that adds to this whole mess.
Part I [Young Love]:
Okay. I get it. She’s all for Sasuke and he doesn’t give her the time of day. We love a queen that gets hers in the end. The problem is that Sakura’s core personality traits are based off of her obsession. Her wants. Her flaws. Her essence as a [non] person is completely defined by Sasuke’s character. This is even verified when Kakashi asks them about themselves and Sakura literally gives [giggles] Sasuke for every answer.
When they’re tested with the bells, Sakura shows no ninja prowess whatsoever. She shows no skill beyond hiding in a bush. The only time we really see her moving/thinking/talking, is when it’s to ‘rescue Sasuke’. She even refers to him as ‘my Sasuke’ a dozen or so times. Seriously, it could be a drinking game.
During the chunin exams, we see a little more of a backbone from Sakura. But even as she struggles to make herself be seen, she really only wants to be seen by – you guessed it – Sasuke.
When Sasuke gets extra angsty [YOLO style], and tries to leave the village, Sakura tries to go with him. Think about that. Sakura tries to leave the village. Her home. Her family. Her friends. Everything! She does this because the idea of becoming a criminal is more appealing than being left behind by Sasuke.
But you know what? I’ll excuse it. She’s only thirteen at this point. She’s entitled to make stupid choices in the name of puppy love. We’ve all been there, man. And sure, at thirteen all love feels like true love. You know what girl? I forgive you.
Part II [Personal Growth]
At this point, Sakura’s whole character arch is defined by the people that leave her. And I could forgive this – almost. Enter Tsunade. I love Tsunade. I worship Tsunade. She is probably the one female character in the whole show that is as well integrated as the men [if we ignore the fact that her whole backstory is revolved around them]. When Sakura started training with Tsunade, I knew there was about to be an Eye of the Tiger montage. Sure enough, my girl comes through. Come Shippuden, Sakura is kicking ass and taking names [literally]. Better yet, she found her niche in medical ninjutsu [insert joke about how females always play the healers]. She’s got chakra for days and the control of a saint. Piss my girl off? You ‘bout to lose a lung.
Yes, Sakura’s still insecure when it comes to her place among the others, but can we blame her? She had demi-gods as teammates. But it’s different now. Sakura knows she’s a badass. She’s fully aware that her control and strength are something to be proud of. She uses those years of neglect and training to help her comrades!... and chase down Sasuke.
By the beginning of the 4th war, this bitch has lost her damn mind. At this point, Sakura and Naruto have been searching for Sasuke for the last 3 [or so] years. All this time, Sakura is under the impression that she’s in love with him. The times from when Sasuke left to the end of the war, are some of the most defining years in a person’s life. At 13-17 is when a person’s personality really starts to develop and lay out the foundation for the adult they will be.
Part III [All’s Fair]
Now, I’m not saying that Sakura didn’t hold a certain level of love for Sasuke her whole life. It’s very possible. However, there was no way it could be a romantic love. Think about who you were when you were twelve. Now think about who you were at seventeen. Did anything change in that time?
Sakura could not have been in love with Sasuke because she didn’t know who he was. They hadn’t been in contact in years! She had the memory of who he had been on a pedestal, and without him around to alter that image, it became more and more idyllic. By the time Sasuke returned [at the end of the war], Sakura was still in love with the idea of him.
She had put their relationship and romance in the forefront of her mind all of her life. It had been her driving force and defining mindset. When this crazy ass bitch [ily gurl] activated her seal and literally jumped on a pike for her boys, it was the most badass thing she’d ever done. And when she was done with that? She got upset that Sasuke hadn’t noticed/cared. She was fighting for her friends, her family, her village, her life… and all that confidence she had gained was brought down by the fact that the boy she thought she loved didn’t notice.
Part IV [In Which Sasuke Cares… Allegedly]
Remember when Sakura finally got Sasuke to notice her? When he overcame his terminal broodiness and admitted that he was touched that she never gave up hope in him? When he kissed her goodbye with the promise of returning and being worth all of her unfounded love and attention?
Oh… right… that never happened.
I mean… he tapped her forehead like Itachi did to him that one time… Same thing I suppose.
Okay, okay… I might be being a little harsh. I’ll concede that it is a genuine act of affection for Sasuke. But… a minor one. Alright, our broody boi doesn’t like PDA… Still, we’re given no indication that they talked about their feelings before this goodbye. That’s backed up by the fact that she asks to go with him – something she would have done before now if they had. Legit, Naruto got more of a goodbye than Sakura did [two dudes, chillin’ in the woods].
To the best of everyone’s knowledge, Sasuke only stayed in Konoha for about a year after the war. Now, depending if you follow the manga or anime, some of that time might have been in jail. My point is, that a year or less was spent in the village after several years of Sakura loving him from a distance.
At this point, she very well might have learned about the older Sasuke. She might have decided that she did still love him [doubtful on a realistic level]. But then he leaves. We’re not sure for how long, but if we look at Boruto, it’s common for him to leave for long periods of time.
Once again, Sakura is left behind with her memories of the man she thinks she loves [because without a functioning adult relationship, there’s no way to be sure].
Part V [Sakura Achieves Her Nightmare Dreams]
Let’s step into Boruto for this next part. We flash forward to all of our beloved characters in their adult years. I know what you’re thinking ‘Oh! I’ve missed so much! They’re all so grown up!’. Hahaha, don’t worry. They’re not at all the same people.
Since the series is based on the children, we’re forced to fill in some of the blanks ourselves. Sakura – the best medic nin in Konoha. The woman whose strength rivals that of her mentor’s. The woman who mastered the Seal of 100. The woman who grew into her own as a character, even if the driving force was a boy - is living her best life as… a housewife? I mean... maybe?
We don’t know this for sure, and a lot of us hope she runs the hospital or something [because we want all good things for our girl], but have you noticed that she doesn’t wear a headband? A ninja one that is. The girl who worked hard to not be left behind’s whole adulthood is… the woman left behind.
Even if it can be argued that she achieved her goal… has she? Yes, she wanted to be Sasuke’s wife and baby mama since waaaaay too young of an age to be thinking about that shit, but like this? We know from the fact that Sakura fainted when Sasuke came home that he’s rarely there. This means that she probably raised their daughter alone. Even now, she can’t just leave because Sasuke’s always away.
If you think I’m taking libraries with filling in the gaps, I refer you to that one time her daughter basically asked if they were really married. And if you think I’m exaggerating Sasuke’s absence, I refer you to that time he almost killed his fucking daughter because he didn’t know what she looked like!
Let that sink in.
Part VI [In Summation]
Sakura was a girl that grew up with a false ideal of love. She obsessed over a person that didn’t exist and carried that falsehood into her adult life. When presented with everything she thought she had wanted her whole life, Sakura jumped on the chance because it was the logical move. In gaining everything that she thought she wanted, Sakura lost any personal growth that she had gained by the absence of her obsession aka Sasuke.
Sasuke, who had ignored her as a child, tried to kill her as a teen, and barely acknowledged her beyond using her to revive his clan, can’t be bothered to even appreciate her. Even as he leaves again as an adult, he says goodbye to their daughter [again, with an oh-so-affectionate poke], but simply walks away from Sakura.
The truth is that given the way she blushes and faints around him still, Sakura doesn’t know him. She’s still in love with an idea of the man that grew from the boy she had been obsessed with all her life. She wears the Uchiha symbol on her back as a reminder that she did it. She got the guy! True love wins again! I mean… maybe? He’s fucked her at least, so…
There’s a chance that Sasuke loves Sakura. I think he loves her for loving him. At the very least, we know he’s fond of her… I assume.
Sakura was a character that was used to further the plot of a man. Even as an adult, she’s left to sit and pine as the boys go off on their adventures. She’s a woman that’s stuck in a hell of her own creation – even if she loves her daughter and the things that marrying Sasuke has brought her.
There’s ‘getting the guy’ and being trapped in a toxic idealized relationship. How you choose to see this one is up to you.
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Reposting this Jaskier sickfic now that it's all done and together
Geralt cast another glance behind him, eyeing his bardic companion. He had noticed over the course of the day that the usual near constant chatter and song behind him had petered out into nothing but the sound of Roach's hooves. The quiet wasn't unwelcome, necessarily, but it was starting to get worrisome.
"Nothing of note to compose about today?" He asked, watching Jaskier. The bard looked tired and wan, scuffing his feet as he walked. He jumped at the sound of Geralt's voice, and it took him a beat longer than it should have to reply.
"Not particularly, I suppose." And the fact that he left it at that and didn't say anything more was more worrying to Geralt than anything. Geralt let them walk for another ten minutes or so, long enough that Jaskier wouldn't immediately think that their stopping was because of him. If he assumed the stopping was because of him he would have vehemently insisted that he was fit to continue, and as far as Geralt could tell, he looked half ready to drop.
"Say we set up camp here for the night?" He said, tugging Roach to a stop and hopping down.
"Isn't it another few hours to dark?"
"Maybe an hour, but this place seems secure. I could use the rest."
Another worrying thing was that Jaskier didn't protest or ask anything further, just nodded and went about setting up camp with relief written on his face. Definitely something strange afoot. Geralt made a note to keep watch of him without making it obvious that he was doing so and began to unhook and spread out their bedrolls, tightly side by side as always. As soon as camp was made and a campfire was crackling merrily in the center, Jaskier bid a rather quiet goodnight to the Witcher and curled up wrapped around himself. He was asleep within minutes, and Geralt sat awake for some time, half watching him and half lost in his own thoughts. Eventually after the sun died completely he lay down himself.
Some time later, what must have been hours but still long before dawn, Geralt's heightened senses caught some sort of sound, some movement, and he snapped awake, staring into the darkness, lit only by the dying embers of the campfire. Jaskier had risen and was stumbling away from their camp in what seemed like a hurry. Geralt took up a lantern from their bags and, without even bothering to lace his boots, started out after him.
"Jaskier?" He called. Jaskier didn't respond, didn't seem to have heard. He braced himself on a tree some 20 feet from camp, bent over double and pressed one arm across his stomach. He finally caught sight of the light of Geralt's lantern and tried to straighten himself, as if afraid to lose dignity. Geralt shook his head.
"If you need to vomit then vomit," he said, "best get whatever it is that turned your stomach out of your system."
Jaskier shook his head. Geralt wasn't sure if he was denying his need to throw up or telling Geralt to leave, but he fought against his own body for another few moments before losing the fight and retching hard. He bent in half with the force of it and Geralt moved around behind him and pressed a hand between his shoulder blades, an uncharacteristically tender act as he rubbed the spasming muscles there. Jaskier dry heaved a few more times and then brought up everything he'd put into his system since the day before, dropping to his knees with the force of it. Geralt braced a hand around his stomach, half in comfort and half fearing that he'd fall forwards into his own sick if someone didn't hold him up. Tears streamed down Jaskier's face and he gulped for air around the heaves until they finally subsided. He went limp and Geralt caught him and pulled him back into his lap. Jaskier's head fell bonelessly against the Witcher's chest, and Geralt pressed a light touch against his sweat-soaked forehead.
"I think I'm ill." Jaskier's voice was horse and spent. His skin was so pale it was almost grey.
"Are you also prone to understatement?" Geralt asked, but there was none of the typical harshness there. He moved his hand from Jaskier's forehead to the back of his neck. "You're warm. Did I not tell you that the pheasant you cooked was still raw at the bone?"
Geralt regretted his question as the bard further paled, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth and closing his eyes. "If it was the food why aren't you sick?" He asked, not opening his eyes.
"Witcher constitution," Geralt mumbled, still smoothing little circles across Jaskier's stomach almost subconsciously as the bard leaned into him. "Takes a lot to take me down. Do you think you're done trying to turn yourself inside out for now?"
Jaskier didn't look much better but he nodded and tried to rise. His legs wobbled beneath him and Geralt caught him and kept him upright. "Let's get you laying down before you fall down, then." He didn't pick Jaskier up even though he could have with little effort; he wanted to afford the man some modicum of dignity.
"You didn't tell me you were feeling ill," he said, once they were both back. Jaskier didn't answer and his eyes drifted closed. Geralt guessed the conversation could wait until later, when he could properly scold Jaskier for hiding the fact that he was unwell. "Don't sleep yet, I need to get some water in you first."
Jaskier shook his head again. "Probably just throw it back up."
"And then you'll drink again." Geralt pressed the cantiene against Jaskier's lips, helping him to sit up, and when he felt like he'd gotten an appropriate amount of fluid into the bard he capped it off and let him lay down again.
"Sleep," he said, "and get well. I'll be here if you need me." He set to rifling through his bag, looking for herbs to make a soothing tea and watching the rise and fall of Jaskier's chest as Jaskier slept on fitfully.
Geralt found the proper herbs he was looking for in his satchel, perhaps a bit stale but maybe of at least some comfort. He rekindled the fire with the thought that it was going to be a long night and then tied their kettle over it, heating water from the stream they'd set up nearby. Jaskier was tossing and turning in his sleep, struggling to fight off the extra blanket that Geralt had tucked over him and then shivering in the night air. His face was stark white except for two points of flush high on his cheeks from his growing fever.
The water was coming to a boil as Jaskier shot awake again, fighting to get away from his bedroll but making it no further than to turn and vomit to the side, entire body trembling. Geralt made a low noise of sympathy in his throat and moved to his side again, leaving the tea to steep for a moment. Jaskier, still hunched over and trembling, reached out a hand towards Geralt and Geralt caught it, giving it a little squeeze of comfort. He vaguely remembered a pressure point that was meant to relieve nausea and he tried to find it on Jaskier, somewhere just below the pulse point of his wrist. Whether it helped or whether the bout was over Geralt wasn't sure, but Jaskier let himself collapse back down onto the bedroll. Geralt found a cloth and dipped it into the cool water of the stream, wringing it out and bringing it back to Jaskier.
"Will you sit up for me?" He asked.
"Don't want to," jaskier mumbled, his voice wrecked, but he sat up anyways, watching the Witcher with fever-bright eyes that didn't quite properly track anything. Geralt lay the cloth across the back of Jaskier's neck and then sat down behind him, giving him something to prop himself up on. It was almost alarming how quickly Jaskier had gone from walking alongside him to barely even able to hold his own head up. Geralt figured he would take off for a healer if Jaskier wasn't looking any better by morning's light, but there was no use trying to travel in the dark.
"I made you tea," Geralt said, producing the cup. "Spearmint and a few other things. Should help settle your stomach. Get some fluids in you at least."
Jaskier took the cup and pulled it in close to him as if trying to absorb the warmth. Geralt could feel the heat radiating off of him and wondered how he could possibly be feeling cold.
"Just little sips. Don't throw up on me."
He was almost hoping for a snarky answer back by then, something to let him know Jaskier would be alright. What he got was a little nod and Jaskier taking a microscopic sip of the tea as if to test his body's reaction and then a slightly larger one.
"I'm sorry," jaskier said, almost letting the cup fall. Geralt caught it for him and righted it before it spilled.
"Sorry for what?"
"All of it. Slowing you down. Making you take care of me."
"Hmm." Geralt pressed the cup towards Jaskier's lips and Jaskier took another sip. "You couldn't make me do anything if you tried. I'm taking care of you because-
I love you, he thought. I want you to be okay, he thought. You're worrying me, he thought. He let his words trail off.
Jaskier always knew what he meant.
The next time Jaskier woke up it was with tears in his eyes and his breath hitching, coughing out a "fuck, Geralt, it hurts, make it stop, please."
"Your stomach?" Geralt asked, though he didn't need to with the way that Jaskier was curled around himself, fists balled up and pressed into his middle. He'd gone from worry to some sort of gnawing panic that clawed at his own insides like an animal.
"Come here." He helped Jaskier lay down in his arms again, hoping a change of position might help, and started rubbing the knotted, spent muscles of Jaskier's abdomen. He felt helpless. Monsters, he could do. Wounds, he could patch up. Fever and sickness were another thing.
"Can you do the thing you did earlier?" Jaskier mumbled, face pressed into Geralt's chest.
"Mmm?"
"You did something to my arm and it made the sick stop, for a moment."
Geralt found the pressure point again with the hand not over Jaskier's stomach, glad to have some sense of control in the situation.
"Go back to sleep, Jaskier." He said when he noticed the bard's eyes growing heavy again. "I'll still look after you."
Somehow Geralt's ministrations lulled Jaskier and he fell asleep, entire body curled up in the Witcher's lap.
At some point Geralt drifted off as well, and the next time he awoke it was to the morning sun. His heart stopped for a moment before he realized that Jaskier was alright, looking wan and more sick than he'd ever seen him but still breathing, the most important.
"Feeling any better?" Geralt asked, running the pad of his thumb over Jaskier's cheek. He was almost certain he'd never committed a gesture so tender before, not to any lover or friend.
"A bit, I think." Jaskier sounded exhausted. "Feel pretty weak. Not sure I'm up for much travelling today."
"You spent the entire night trying to rid yourself of your internal organs and you think I'd make you travel?" And then, as if to prove again that he was going soft, he pressed his lips against Jaskier's forehead, testing for a fever that way. "You're still too warm.
The slightest smile crept across Jaskier's lips at the gesture. It still looked too pale, too thin. Geralt brought some cold, clear water to his lips and Jaskier sipped at it.
"Geralt?"
"Mm?"
"Are you okay?"
"I told you it takes a lot to make me ill."
"Not like that. You look... haunted."
Humans lived for so much less time than witches. This human in particular always seemed to be getting tied up into messes. Just travelling with Geralt was a mess waiting to happen.
It was terrifying. Gerslt pushed it aside. Jaskier was fine, he was probably over the worst of it and he'd be on the mend and any further worry was useless, especially in the situation at hand.
"Don't worry about me, focus on feeling better, bard." And he pulled Jaskier close to him, and thought, this time he is okay. This time he will be well. And he finally let his own body relax.
#witcher fanfiction#geralt x jaskier#jaskier#geraskier#witcher whump fic#the witcher#geralt x dandelion#sickfic#whump
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thinkin’ ‘bout final fantasy
I go by Not The Author for exactly the reason that I ain’t no expert on any given work of fiction, but I do like to make connections what make me seem smart: an illusion, haphazardly crafted by incident accident and supplemented by precocious pretentiousness. All the same, here are some fun thoughts I had that you might also enjoy!
I do have a point, that I do get to. I feel like I should say that ahead of time, all things considered. Like, I can appreciate if you can’t appreciate a shaggy dog story? But there is a point to all this.
...Eventually.
Spoiler Warning:
Final Fantasies 1, 6, 7, 7R, 13 and 15
Content Warning:
Discussion of death
Cussin’
Length warning:
5621 words
13 sections
16 digressions
Let’s dig in.
- - - - -
Final Fantasy 1 was not my first Final Fantasy experience, but I think it was the first I ever played by myself? The remaster for the GBA, came bundled with FF2 on the same cart, which I played briefly but did not complete and do not remember, except that it had Cid.
FF1 doesn’t have a Cid, but I really loved the narrative anyway, straightforward as it was, because it was very specifically about spitting in the face of an uncaring god who would doom the world for a laugh. Take these chains that bind us to darkness and, though we be forgot to history, strangle with them that selfsame darkness to bring an end to its tyranny.
((it is a terrible curse, to love time travel. so many grand expectations, so few ever met. play ghost trick, chrono trigger, radiant historia, majora’s mask, outer wilds. have you any recs yourself, lemme know! I digress.
((I digress a lot, as I may have mentioned. they’ll be noted in parenthetical, like this.))
This is the foundation upon which Final Fantasy is built, and while any student of architecture could tell you of many and varied perfectly valid construction techniques, it resonates. Grappling with an immutable past to course-correct an uncaring future is, too, an apt description of personal growth; a theme as universal as being alive. And I, as an impressionable youth, ate that shit up.
((I assume I was young, at any rate. my love for time travel, be it era-spanning or moment-stretching, is, I suspect, not entirely coincidental to my terrible temporal memory.))
And that was the tale of the studio, too. Final Fantasy was so titled because, the story goes, the developers knew they would shutter if it didn’t make bank. Staring your imminent demise in the face, knowing your fate is doom, and giving it your all, all the same.
And then they made another twelve, plus two-and-a-half MMOs, and god knows how many mobile games and spin-offs, and now the Fantasy is that there could ever be a Final one. so say I: life parodies art.
((the half-an-MMO is FF14 1.0, which no longer exists and is a fascinating tale, a rally against bleak futures all its own. I’ll [link] Noclip’s three-part documentary covering the developer’s side of things, because that’s the one I’ve seen. there’s plenty other material to hunt down, though, if you wanna.))
- - - - -
Final Fantasy VII is a game about fate, too. Particularly Death, that most ultimate of fates. Tragic, to be sure; preventable, or at least delayable, in many cases; necessary, at times, for the growth of something new.
Unrelenting. Unstoppable. Inescapable.
Death, and the fights against it, take many forms. There are the fascist death squads that hunt down your ragtag band and any dissent against their cruel masters, but these will only truly stop by cutting off the hydra’s head and building an entirely new society; eight dudes and their dog, faced with a corporate private military, can survive but never win. There are such disasters as do slay that hydra, be they natural or man-made. There’s the space alien and the apocalypse it ushers. There’s literal illness and injury, physical or otherwise. There are the deaths of loved ones, friends and family, that lead to some subtler deaths within those that survive them. The deaths of relationships, by neglect or abandonment. The ideological deaths we inflict on ourselves, accepting ever-growing lesser evils in the name of some impossible ideal.
Every day, the person we were becomes the person we are, and soon, the person we are will give way to someone new, and this, too, is a sort of death. In this sense, we tally Cloud’s deaths at least five: failure to become a Soldier and rebirth in shame, the massacre of Nibelheim and rebirth in grief, arrival at Midgar and rebirth in delusion, his cratering at the Crater and rebirth in nihilism, and his death and rebirth in the Lifestream of Mideel.
((you could prolly hunt down another two if you wanna be cheeky, but I lack the knowledge, motive and patience. frankly, this whole thing is to create a leading line of logic and probably isn’t, uh. academically ethical? or whatever the term is. I’m not necessarily wrong, but I’m definitely scuttling nuance. oh well!))
Now, I say “rebirth,” because that’s how deaths of identity more-or-less work. There’s usually some new identity waiting in the wings to take over. And rebirth is itself a notable theme, inasmuch as it is one outcome of death. But death is oft more final than that, and what people do in its imminence and wake is key here, too. Wutai’s collapse into an insular tourist trap. Avalanche’s vengeful fervor, in general and post-plate drop. Bugenhagen trying to pass his knowledge on to Red. The whole party’s ongoing post-traumatic depressive episodes.
Ultimately, death is the inescapable fate of all things. It’s what we do, in light of that, that makes us who we are.
- - - - -
Final Fantasies 13 and 15 are the only modern Final Fantasies I’ve beaten, and I bring them up because both deal very prominently with fate and death, and as Square’s most recent mainline FF titles, Remake can’t exist without comparison to them. Here’s what I remember:
Final Fantasy 13 was a game I enjoyed. The stagger system mixed up my casual FF tradition of Get The Big Numbers by putting a prominent UI element onscreen that says You Can’t Get The Big Numbers Unless The Bar Is Full. Suddenly there’s a natural-but-enforced ebb and flow to combat built in, where you gotta juggle chip damage, survival, and crowd control while keeping resources enough to burst down a staggered foe, but maintain situational awareness to swap back into survival mode if you’re not gonna down your enemy, all in something close to real-time. Very obviously a direct precursor to the combat of Remake. I didn’t realize the depth of it, but it was still super fun.
People at the time didn’t like the linearity of the game and, I can see that in retrospect? I think it’s closer to, there weren’t breakpoints, there wasn’t variety. It was cutscenes, combat, and the stretches of land between them; the only real thing for the brain to get a workout on was the combat, and eating only one kinda food is gonna make that food taste bland.
((I didn’t mind, but I like idle games, and, also probably had depression around then. Take that how you will.))
The story, though, I loved. You got your uncaring gods forcing mortals to do their increasingly-impossible bidding, cursing them to agonized unlife if they take too long, and with blissful, beautiful death if they succeed. It sucks! And here you have a ragtag band of incidental idiots trying to rebel against a system that, actually, wants them to? Like that’s the plan? Have mortals kill god and summon the devil to destroy all life, because god, doesn’t.... like life anymore?
((The lore gets more than a little impenetrable, and I remember bouncing off it a couple times. The throughline of God Sucks And Makes Zombies was good though.))
The biblical parallels are obvious, and if they weren’t, the final boss’ design will clue you in, god that’s a good design. hang on I can add pictures and already tossed a spoiler warning, here, look at this:
(per the Final Fantasy Fandom Wiki [X])
That’s literally The Holy Trinity But A Sword The Size Of A Building. It’s perfect.
Anyway, I love this game, because the heroes win, which is what God wants, so in winning, they lose, as was fated to be, right? Fuck All That, say the lesbians from space australia, as they turn into satan and, as satan, stop God’s shitty metal moon from crashing into space australia and destroying all life.
((this awakened something in me, though, as is becoming a theme, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. actually hold up I’m gonna rewatch that sequence.
((yeah okay wow on review that was aggressively cheesy and had a whole bunch of weird emotional whiplash that just leaves a super-bad aftertaste. I don’t really like it as an experience, but big bazonga lesbian satan with arms for hair is still a look-and-a-half.))
The whole thing is not entirely unlike if meteor was also Midgar, and there’s more than a few points where I went, hang on, are they trying to evoke 7 here? “Lightning” is ex-military and bad at emotions, Sazh is a black dad w/ guns and emotional trauma and I love him, quirky pink healer girl who might be an alien is here, the game starts on a train and leads into a robot bug fight; obviously it’s not one-to-one but the connections are there for a brain like mine to make, and only more prominent for the fact that FF7 was the more satisfying game.
((I cannot speak to 13-2 or -3; 13-2 was fun up until the enemies were abruptly 30 levels higher than me, more or less a mandate by the game for me to do all the side content, which I was not on-board with. I skipped 13-3 entirely, especially when I learned the whole game is on a timer. did not and do not need that stress in my life.))
- - - - -
But okay, FF13 was “too linear” and wasn’t doing super great. Enter Final Fantasy Versus 13, by which I mean enter Final Fantasy 15 actually, we don’t need any more of this 13 crap. And once again, I enjoyed it! ...Right up until it was bad.
Final Fantasy 15 was not a finished game, and we know this for certain now, because all its DLC was to make it a finished game. At the time, though, there was uncomfortable and inconsistent story pacing, only one playable character, relatively sparse combat mechanics... but it was open-world, and hey, that’s what you wanted, right? open, non-linear environments? I picked it up because, Teleporting Swordsman With a Motorcycle Sword. I am of simple pleasures, and those are they.
Of the little I remember, one point that’s stuck with me is the sequence following the Leviathan fight. See, we’ve been talking about fate and destiny and how Final Fantasy likes to spite them. Here in 15, our main man Noctis doesn’t want the destiny he’s been burdened with, to Become The King and Save The World from the Coming Darkness, or whatever. He’d really rather be doing, anything else? like hanging out with his buddies or actually getting married or, I dunno, grieving the death of his father. Nope! You don’t get to do that. Go find the ghost armaments of your dead ancestors so you can ~saaave the wooorld!~ I would have been in college around then, so, eminently relatable.
Now, on this journey, you meet a guy called Ardyn. He’s the sort of character that was built as an attack on me personally: sleazy, charming, possessing airs of casual familiarity with people he’s never met, kinda helps you out in tight spots, and also, by the way, vizier to the empire that killed your dad and wants you and your friends dead too. But not in the “secret good guy” way, he just likes fucking with you! he’s perfect.
Right up until the Leviathan fight.
See, Lunafreya, your betrothed--
((I’m so mad about this stupid, stupid garbage. I love Lunafreya on principle, but the game doesn’t bother to give her screentime. you only ever hear about her incidentally, which can be cool if you then meet the character and get to compare/contrast what you’ve heard, but the initial release only has her show up for this one chapter, and your party doesn’t really get to interact with her that much.))
Your betrothed is here and she’s some symbol of the peoples’ hope, right? she’s got light magic or something, and can actually commune with the gods. the gods are on your side, but you can’t actually understand a word they say, but she can, and that’s sick as hell. anyway.
You lose the fight against Leviathan, because you’re a shitty emo teen who doesn’t know how to use your ghost swords, and she got beat up earlier when Levi got all pissy at being summoned. And then Ardyn shows up in his magitek dropship.
Now earlier, Ardyn had Luna as his captive, completely at his mercy, and right now, he who would be king of kings, destined to save the world from darkness, is clutching at rock in a hurricane, beaten, wounded and dying.
Of the two, which do you think he stabs to death?
if you thought, “the protagonist, which will allow him to win, and subvert Final Fantasy’s themes of defying fate by having the villain be the one to do it, forcing everyone else to scramble for some alternate solution and deal with the fallout,” congratulations! You win disappointment, because that idea’s cool as hell and they didn’t. fucking. Do it.
((Ardyn, before this, had given me major Kefka vibes, and thinking on it now, the world descending into darkness in the 15 we never had could have played with even deeper parallels to FF6... but I never played 6, and that FF15 doesn’t exist, so... I’ll leave that analysis to better scholars.))
now, with the benefit of hindsight, that was never going to happen. too long in development hell, game had to ship, had no time or budget for mid-game upheaval. but at the time? made me lose any interest I had in Ardyn, made me mad at the developers for passing up on fulfilling the themes their series had explored in past, made me almost stop playing the game. I’m still mad about it for crying out loud!
((thinking about it gets me tensed up, coiled, with that sort of full-body thrum that’s best conveyed with letters that jitter around. best I can do here is bold italics, but it doesn’t have the right energy. it’s a fleeting feeling, but when it’s here? god. given the men that wrote this scene I would fight all of them and win.
((inhale...
((exhale...
((and move on.))
We, the player, never really meet Luna, so there’s no real... impact, no substance to it. It’s sad, but impersonal. villain kills damsel to inflict manpain on hero. that’s it. we’ve seen this song and dance before.
But kill Noctis? The character the player’s been controlling all this time, who they know intimately? Now it’s personal. Now your party members’ grief is a mirror to your own. And now you get to play as Luna, maybe? give the game time to flesh her out, have her bond with your old companions over their shared grief, and maybe use her connections and public speaking skills to rally the people of the world, in a perhaps-vain attempt to resist the oncoming darkness, while simultaneously using that public-facingness to drive her to hide her own fear and hopelessness...? That’s a complex character ripe for drama and tragedy right there! And then her, at the head of a story about people coming together to solve a global calamity themselves, rather than await their appointed savior?
Even then, but especially now... You can see the appeal, right?
- - - - -
Lemme step back and zoom out for a moment, because there’s one more kind of Fate to discuss before I finalize my thesis. Yes, I promise, there is a point besides being mad at FF15, this is still ultimately about Remake. Bear with me a little longer.
See, Remake’s premise is that it’s not quite FF7, but that itself is predicated on Remake being essentially FF7. Certain things must be in the Remake series, or it will cease to be the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series. The developers have gone on record saying as much, that they’ll still cover the thrust of the original, and that makes a lot of sense from a development standpoint. Building on an existing framework saves loads of time, and lets them focus on details as they have in Remake.
((I think they've already set up an in-universe justification for this, too. The party may have defeated the Whispers at Midgar, but the Whispers are the will of the planet. The only way to truly defeat them would be to defeat the planet itself, which: kind of the goal of the villains!
((a bit ironic, because the villains are the Whispers’ means to keep manipulating events. Remake backends a very large portion of the plot, and I don’t think Rufus seeing the Whispers is a throwaway detail. The party chases Sephiroth by chasing Shinra in the original, so even if the party has shaken free of the direct influence of the Whispers, manipulating Shinra should in turn manipulate the party.
((on top of which, Rufus prizes power, and the power to change or control fate-- something both the party and Sephiroth have seized-- would be as enticing as anything.))
But this begs the question: How much of Final Fantasy 7 is necessary before it stops being Final Fantasy 7? Do you need all nine characters? The Weapons? Rideable chocobo? Breedable chocobo? What about locations? Can you drop the Gold Saucer? or Mount Condor? or Mideel? How many minigames am I holding up? These are necessary questions, but so is this:
“Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?”
- - - - -
Now, the phrase “emotional impact” is necessarily kind of nebulous and subjective, so lemme dig into that a little bit.
The first significant chunk of the original FF7 takes place entirely in Midgar, which is one huge city. Every screen is densely packed; movement is typically constrained to narrow corridors and industrial crawlspaces. The whole world is deeply claustrophobic and visually hostile, by design.
This is FF7 for the first few hours, before a motorcycle chase deposits you outside city limits, and then... you hit the world map, and everything changes. The world is rendered in three whole dimensions, now! (Then, a technological marvel in its own right.) There’s a sky! There’s a horizon! Grass, mountains, the ocean!
Boundless, terrifying freedom.
From a mechanical standpoint, there’s only one real destination, an A-to-B with random encounters before a small enclosure with an inn and shops, no real change from what you’ve already been doing. But the mood? Everything’s fresh and new, now. Everything’s an unknown.
So, how do we do that again, two-and-a-half decades on?
Let’s say, something like this: Remake 2 starts with Cloud and Sephiroth en route to Nibelheim. For new players, this provides immediate intrigue: why are these mortal enemies hanging out in a truck? how did they get here, where are they going? For veterans, it’s familiar: oh, we’re in the flashback sequence.
For both, it provides mechanical familiarity. We just finished last game hanging out in Midgar, a bunch of town squares with shops and cutscenes connected to hazardous corridors. Well, Nibelheim’s a town with shops and cutscenes, connected to a monster-filled anthill and capped with a reactor. We know this. We’ve done this. We can do this again.
And when the flashback ends, we’re in Kalm. Another town, maybe with sidequests this time; Midgar looming in the distant skybox as a reminder of how far we’ve come.
And then you leave Kalm, and the camera zooms out, and out, and out...
Remake is essentially 7, and you can’t have the impact of 7′s world map reveal if Remake isn’t functionally open-world too. Square has plenty of experience with open environments, however successful their more recent attempts have been; I’m confident that the have the ability, at least, to craft an expansive world that feels appropriate to FF7.
((I’d like to take a moment here to talk about FF14, which mixes both compact twisty dungeons and wide-open overworld zones, and is necessarily wildly successful to still be operating as an MMO... but though I have played it briefly, I don’t claim knowledge sufficient to go in-depth. The point is, Square not only can make a game like that, they have, and are, and apparently possess non-zero competency. I have worries, but I’m not worried, if that makes sense.))
So, can you recreate a given kind of emotional impact? Yeah!
Can scenes from the original Final Fantasy 7 be rendered into a new context, more-or-less as they were? Absolutely!
Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?
- - - - -
Aerith dies.
If you opened this post and didn’t know that, well. There were spoiler warnings up at the top, the game’s more than two decades old, and the spoiler itself is basically a piece of pop-culture, up there with space dad and wizard killer. There’re probably plenty of people who know next-to-nothing about Final Fantasy 7 except that Aerith dies.
Everyone knows because, at the time, it was so big a thing. This was a title that Square hyped to heaven and back to push JRPGs into mainstream western markets, and it worked. And this was before major death was so common and arbitrary as it is today; even now, Game of Thrones and its ilk are a relative rarity. The death of a protagonist or love interest wasn’t a new thing for games, or any media really, but usually you knew it was coming, or it served some purpose. Aerith’s death was sudden, arbitrary, you’re almost immediately thrown into a boss fight so you don’t even have time to process it right away, and it’s the first stone in an avalanche of other pointless arbitrary tragedy. It’s an obvious narrative setup for the endgame confrontation with Sephiroth; instead, Cloud has a breakdown, Meteor happens, and now there’s an entire Disk 2.
Fandom has always been fandom, even before the continuous immediacy of the modern internet, but... people wrote letters to Square, and got sad on message boards. There’s an entire subset of forum signatures, back when those were a thing, that you could sort as “people fucked up over Aerith dying.” And again, this was the world. Not just Japan, or Asia, but everyone.
((Or, everyone with the finances to have a PS2 and/or an internet connection. Gaming as a pastime remains way expensive, whether played or watched. But you know how it is.))
And that’s the problem with answering that question.
See, FF7 is a lot of things, but for better or worse, it is defined by Aerith’s death. It’s one of many factors, but you can’t... leave it out, right? or it wouldn’t be FF7 anymore.
Aerith dies in FF7, and everyone knows it.
- - - - -
But Remake has promised, repeatedly, that things will be different this time. Everyone is coming together to defy fate, and Cloud in particular is here to keep Aerith from dying. Bodyguard jokes aside, Cloud repeatedly has flashbacks (flashforwards?) to Aerith’s death and the events leading to it. When he meets her in the church, when they cross into Sector 6, twice in the final battle. Hell, the very first time they meet, Sephiroth taunts him about not being able to save her. Even from a metatextual standpoint, since everyone knows Aerith dies, that’s like, The Most Obvious Fate To Change.
If, after all that, Aerith still dies? It’s not just tragedy, at that point. That’s the developers, actively lying to the player about their intent in making this game series. That’s frustrating, and immersion-breaking, and when said death is likely to still have one or more entire sequels to come after? maybe not great for sales! I know I didn’t bother buying the complete edition of FF15; I couldn’t bring myself to care enough about a game that set up this cool possibility, and then just, failed to deliver on every count.
And, Remake is being made for two audiences. I’ve said “everybody knows Aerith dies,” but that’s not really true, is it? It’s been 23 years, after all. Remake could well be someone’s very first Final Fantasy experience. That’s why they’ve been telegraphing Aerith’s death so hard. Not everyone knows, but at least everyone can guess. Is it fair, then, to this new audience, with potentially no knowledge or understanding of the legacy of this flashy new action game, to foreshadow tragedy in the future, have everyone come together to say, We’re Going To Stop This, and then... not? Is that good writing? Is that satisfying? When this is a multi-game and potentially multi-console investment of time and money, is this, as a newcomer, a story you’d want to keep playing?
And then on top of that, it’s 2020.
I don’t mean that in the current-year-fallacy, “we’re better than this now” kind of way. Rather, the way I felt about Final Fantasy 15 is even more relevant now. People, in real life, are realizing that the powers-that-be are failing them, have failed them, have been failing them for far longer than twenty-three years. The people that already knew that are actually showing up for each other, to spite what felt and feels like inescapable fate and finding that, together, they might just be able to ruin God’s day.
Game development is, of course, its own whole beast, and projects in motion tend to stay in motion; deviating from a plan takes time and money that Square may be unwilling to spend. But, under current world circumstances: is making a game where the hero sets out to save one specific person from their fated death, and following that with a game where that one specific person dies anyway, aside from everything else, a good business decision?
- - - - -
So... Aerith, shouldn’t die, right...? But, FF7 requires Meteor, and so requires the Temple of the Ancients and the Black Materia. And, Meteor can only be stopped by Holy, so FF7 requires the Forgotten City.
FF7 is a tragedy. FF7 demands blood.
...Hey, actually, hold that thought. How come Cloud can remember Aerith dying in the first place? He’s not from the future, right? He’s got a connection to Sephiroth, who is from the future... and Sephiroth can manipulate his memories...? but, why would Sephiroth let him, or make him, remember that?
Hey, how come Zack is alive, but like, in the “narrative scope” sense? Wouldn’t his presence circumvent Cloud’s delusions about the Nibelheim incident?
Hey, how come Cloud had multiple big climactic Sephiroth confrontations at what’s essentially the end of the prologue, including one that mirrors the very end of the original FF7? Shouldn’t that still come at, like, you know. the end?
Hey, how come--
- - - - -
Remake has these... Callbacks? Refrains? Like my favorite, when Sephiroth throws a train-- you know, The Fate Metaphor-- at Cloud, who absolutely shreds the thing. Or, for a more direct example:
And it frequently uses these to show that people are changing, that things can change. You know, the whole Running Theme the game has going on.
Sephiroth gets a refrain, too.
At the start of the game (give or take a reactor), in his first real appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, makes sure Cloud hates him, and tells Cloud what he wants.
At the end of the game, in his last appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, tells Cloud what he wants, and makes sure Cloud hates him.
Structurally, these encounters more-or-less bookend the game; thematically, it doesn’t exactly indicate change. Barret may or may not have come around on Cloud, and his admission that Cloud is important to him after all is, itself, important. Cloud, on the other hand, was always going to defy Sephiroth. He stands resolute, now, ready to fight rather than flee, but apathy was never on the table.
Now, Sephiroth’s whole Thing is psychologically manipulating Cloud to get what he wants, and as part of that, what Sephiroth wants is usually not what he says he wants.
All throughout the original FF7, Sephiroth riled up Cloud so that Cloud would pursue and defy him, culminating first in the Black Materia incident, and then again in the Forgotten City. None of the Sephiroth clones could survive the trip through the Northern Crater, so Sephiroth had to lure Cloud, with the Black Materia, to him, and then also convince Cloud to give up the Black Materia of his own accord. Mind control, memory manipulation and illusions were involved, but if Sephiroth could maintain those indefinitely, he probably just. Would have done that instead. Way easier,
The point is, in Remake, in addition to all the intermittent retraumitization sprinkled throughout the game, Sephiroth goes out of his way twice to directly ask Cloud, “hey, you hate me, right?” And, as part of that question, he tells Cloud, “this is what I want.” And Cloud? He hates Sephiroth, and will do his damnedest to keep Sephiroth from getting what he wants.
So. What does Sephiroth... say he wants?
- - - - -
One last aside before we cap off: This post would not exist without the valiant efforts of one Maximilian_dood. His devotion to the series kept myself and many others engaged and excited and, frankly, hopeful, in the leadup to the release of Remake, and his correlations between the rest of the FF7 series and Remake were enlightening and entertaining.
and had he not the gall to identify defying fate as a device to make aerith’s death more tragic, I would never have been angry enough to write this.
((I know, I know. Gaming and streaming and lit analysis are all hard individually, and I don’t begrudge losing one for the other two. And it was a first playthrough! I might have seen these lines sooner than some, but collating all this info was certainly not instantaneous. And Square can be hack writers at times-- see again my rant on FF15-- so even then, I can’t discount the possibility.
((but, still.
((Really?))
So, while I would like to believe that I have, by now, made my thesis on Remake’s narrative direction abundantly clear, here it is spelled out anyway:
- - - - -
At the bottom of the Forgotten City, at the shrine on the pillar in the lake, Cloud will find Aerith, who believes her fate immutable.
Sephiroth will descend, and Cloud will sacrifice himself, that Aerith should live.
This is Sephiroth’s plan.
- - - - -
Hey, thanks for reading this far! With my conversational tone and rambling tendencies, I’d have preferred to make this an audio post or, god forbid, a video essay, but I got a keyboard, and that’ll have to do. Diction is important to me, as the capitalization, italics and use of punctuation may have clued you in on, so... maybe you’ll get a dramatic reading sometime in the future? but, don’t bet on it.
Feel free to riddle me with questions, or point out inconsistencies with this big ol’ thing! I’m not exactly an expert, and I’m sure I glossed over, heavily paraphrased, completely forgot, intentionally ignored and/or aggressively misrepresented some stuff, but I love learning and teaching esoteric bullshit about The Vijigams. On that note, anything that sounds like it should be sourced is sourced from “I heard about it on social media or in a stream or youtube video one time, but if I actually had to hunt it down this whole thing would never see the light of day, and it has already been like three months,” which isn’t to excuse my lack of due diligence, but I do, lack diligence, so, tough.
Oh! but the Remake screens all come from [here]. Don’t care much for that splash screen, but, I Get It, so, whatever.
There were some other things I wanted to touch on but couldn’t really find a spot for. FF7 Remake as a metaphor for its own development, for example. Or, some of The Possibilities, like how Cloud’s death could very literally haunt Aerith, or how Remake sets up a more fleshed-out Midgar revisit that Cloud’s death specifically would make infinitely sadder.
On that note, if it was not yet obvious, I love speculation, and if they do go this direction, it’ll probably be their justification to go completely... off the rails? Remake only has to be FF7 until it doesn’t, after all. If there’s some wilder implications youall see for like... I dunno, a Jenova more fully-regenerated from also having Cloud’s cells back, getting into proper Kaiju-on-Kaiju battles with the Weapons, or anything like that? Feed me your brain juice, etc.
And, once more, for the road: this is interpretation; subjective, opinionated, and very much in denial of any kind of author-ity. Nor is this a claim on how things should be, or an assertion that this would be good or bad. Everything ultimately rests on Square's narrative design team and, we’ve touched on them already.
((but, for your consideration: I’m smart, and right))
Here’s hoping, whatever happens, we get the game we deserve.
thanks for coming to my ted talk, have a great day
#In This Essay I Will but for real this time#but hell if that's stopped me before#ff7 remake#blatant speculation#ff7 remake spoilers#ff7 spoilers#ff13 spoilers#ff15 spoilers#I dip into spoiler territory on more but these ones get a deeper dive#also if any of y'all know how to get images screen-read-able please lemme know#the screenshots are to point out that the game itself does do these things#but I don't wanna content-lock anybody out of my bad garbage#also also if the wordcount didn't clue you in:#long post#posting this right now immediately listening
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Chapter 2: The Moment
Table Of Contents
pairing: draco/fem-y/n
word count: 2.6k
warning(s): swearing
a/n: pls read the note at the end for imp. info
taglist: @acciodracoo @drawlfoy @war-sword @lilyreachelcassidy @socontagiousimagines @andreasworlsboring101 @morsmordre-crucio @1teen1dream @strwbrykiwi
Y/N went home that night knowing much too much more than she was comfortable with. She hadn’t stood in that office for much longer, instead soon being sent out to sort out her affairs. All she knew was something, something incredibly limited in supply and absolutely secret had been taken. A fucking time turner, of all things.
She’d stared at Robards with shock as he’d even said that very word, wondering if this was some stupid joke. The last time she’d even heard of one of those was when she’d been forced to read The Great Tragedies of the Second Wizarding War for her Modern Wizarding Conflicts class at Auror Training. The entire stock of Time-Turners, which had been located in the Time Room in the Ministry of Magic, were rendered useless during the Battle of the Department of Mysteries in 1996. While they weren’t "destroyed" per se, due to the way one of them fell when their counter was knocked over, the entire stock was trapped in an endless loop of falling over, un-falling, and then re-falling, in an endless cycle for all eternity, and were thus unable to be used. So, how the actual fuck did someone manage to steal one of them? And why would they think Draco Malfoy was capable of doing so?
She was barely out of his office, staring at the paper in her hands while those very thoughts swirled around her head when the very person she was just not looking forward to meeting at any point in the near future. Draco Malfoy.
She saw him in the distance, clutching and staring down at his own sheet of paper in frustration. She gulped and acted instinctively, stretching the paper as wide as she could over the front of her face and briskly walking as fas0t as she could without attracting his attention. She stiffened up considerably and leaned forward, trying to make herself look smaller than she actually was. She stared down at the floor, watching Draco’s expensively shoed feet clicking down the floor. Black leather dress shoes with the laces done up nice and tight. Fancy.
But then his footsteps slowed and he came to a stop a couple dozen steps in front of her, him tilting on his feet for a second as the bottom of the left leg of his trousers rolled up the slightest bit. God, he had some skinny ankles.
“Y/N?”
Oh, fuck.
She froze for a second, holding it up the paper before slowly bringing it down and folding it again. She brought her gaze up and met his own, piercing and pale. She realised how very suspicious she must have been looking and she gulped. And then, she realised how very extremely awkward this situation was. Wake up with no memory of what happened the night before in someone’s bed, then be rude to them, then get partnered with them in some top secret mission, and lastly, blatantly avoid them. Her cheeks felt hot.
“Yes?” Her voice was shakier than she’d hoped it would be.
“... What’s this about?”
“I-I… it’s for another mission.”
“Yeah, it says that on the note. But… what mission, exactly?”
“... It’s a secret.”
“Not for us… come on. I know you must have just been to Robard’s. What did he tell you?”
“He told me that- there’s um… been a robbery.”
“So we’ve been pulled together to investigate some petty theft?”
“No… it’s more like, official.”
“What?”
“Something’s been stolen from the Ministry.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I… we aren’t supposed to know yet. He didn’t tell me what it was.”
She pressed her lips together tightly and shrugged. He stared down at her, clearly not convinced. He tilted his narrow face to the side and raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, really?”
“Y-yes.”
He squinted over at her suspiciously, then sighed. He brought his hands into his pockets and shook his head before just pausing.
“You can tell me, you know. We’re supposed to start working together as is, I really don’t see why you can’t tell me what he told you.”
“It’s… he told me to keep it a secret for now.”
“But I’m your partner. We’re supposed to-”
“I think you should go ask Robards yourself, okay? I don’t know if he wants me to tell you.”
“Y/N.” His nostrils flared the slightest bit. “Did you request this?”
“What?”
“Did you ask for us to be set up together? Is that wh-”
“No! Of course not.”
Fuck, she didn’t want to sound as rude as she did right then.
“I-I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to be assigned with you! Yeah.” She smiled but her lips soon turned down at seeing Draco’s own expression. He was just staring down at her, features still up in a slight sneer.
“Okay…? Are you alright?”
“Uh- yeah, of course. I’m just fine.”
“Are you sure the… um… that you’re… all clear now?”
“I’m pretty sure, yes.”
Oh dear god, why did he have to bring that up? She was trying very, very hard to forget about it, now that she was going to have to work with him. She’d slept in his own bed (and there was the slightest possibility they’d slept together too), been rude to him and now they were going to have to work together all day everyday for a while! That too on a mission as high-demand as this one. (WHY COULDN’T THEY ASSIGN AN ACTUAL TASK FORCE TO THIS CASE AGAIN? Oh, right, because of the Goblin Colony attacks in Scotland. AH. How tragic. Fuck.)
“Well. Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, um, be seeing you, I suppose.”
“Yeah.” He waved politely, quickly skirting off towards Robard’s office.
Y/N quickly regained her senses and began to walk again, but not back to her cubicle for there was no way she could speak to Ron without imploding in on herself, but to the nearest washroom. She got in in a rush and locked the door behind herself. She looked at herself in the mirror, cheeks much redder than they were the last time she’d seen her reflection.
How was one supposed to deal with this? How were you supposed to work with the prime suspect to solve the case? What the actual fuck? Why did they pick her to do this again? Why didn’t they fucking pick Dawlish? Why was it her? HELLO?
Surely, if it really was Draco who’d stolen said artifact, he would get to hiding it, wouldn’t he? He might even run away from the country. Or better yet, with the nature of the product, he could just go back in time and make it so that no one ever caught wind of his doings and he could just continue as is. Maybe that’d be a good course of action. She could stick with Dawlish and everything could just continue. WHY DID CRIMES IN THE TIME REALM HAVE TO BE SO GRAVE AND POSSIBLY LIFE DESTROYING? Merlin, Y/N wanted to scream. For many hours.
But then again. This was… work. She wasn’t supposed to moan and complain. She was supposed to take the blows as they came. One by one. Sigh.
She stepped out of the bathroom, breathing slowly. Doing every little thing her Healer had told her about preventing anxiety attacks. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.. Wait. It was Draco again and he’d already spotted her. He was clearly narrowing his sights and getting ready to pounce on her. Fuck. Fuck. It was him who’d done everything, wasn’t it? And now he was going to obliviate her! Oh my god! She reached into her pocket and drew out her wand, pointing it at him. Draco paused, eyebrows furrowing.
“What are you… doing?”
“Oh- um- nothing! Nothing at all. Aha. Just um… practicing stances, you know.” She put it back into her pocket and gulped, gritting her teeth in frustration. Today seriously was going from bad to worse.
“Alright. Um. Why didn’t you tell me before? It really wasn’t such a big deal. Nothing was stolen, I think you misunderstood.”
“I just- Um. He told me not to-”
“We’re supposed to track down a centaur. The old Divination professor.”
“Oh. Yeah, right. Right.”
“Yeah. So. Yeah.”
“I… we should probably research a bit about him.”
“Well, um, definitely. I was thinking I’d look into specifics and that maybe you could try and look for more about centaur habi- I mean, colonies in Europe.”
“Yeah-yeah, sure. I could do that.”
“Okay then. Be seeing you.” And he was off again.
Good. So she was all alone with that information. It was just her who knew about it. Well, and Robard. What the fuck? Why would they expect her to know how to do all this by herself? She put her hands on her face, muffling a very soft scream into them.
***
Y/N was sat in Hermione’s living room, taking slow sips from her cup of peppermint tea as she stared out the window. She’d rushed there straight after work, Ron in tow. She’d told him she wanted to tell the both of them together. And she had. And they were staring at her in absolute surprise.
“So. He thinks you’re supposed to-”
“Yes.”
“You’re meant to be investigating him while you work with him?”
“I- yes, I suppose I am.”
“Well, you can’t let him know, can you?”
“Of course not!”
“Right. So,..”
Hermione looked at Ron, face still slightly green after her bout of sickness. She was sitting on the sofa opposite Y/N’s, bundled up in a few blankets while Ron curled an arm around her and she leaned into him. She looked very much like a baby. A bushy haired, paler than usual baby. There were a few books on the table beside hers, indicating how badly Hermione was trying to catch up with her reading, even while sick. Gosh.
“Well. You have to be casual.”
“Yeah, Ron. The thing is, that’s not very easy.”
“Oh, right. Right.”
He looked over at Hermione and made a face, a suggestive sort of expression. And she tilted her head before soon realising…
“Oh, you slept with him?”
“No! I- well, yes. But not. Not like, sex. I just-”
“Oh my god, Y/N, how could you! With Draco Malfoy. Who even kn-”
“‘Mione… “ Ron pouted over at her, shaking his head.
“Okay, okay, sorry. Whatever. Lapse of judgement, I suppose.”
“Majorly. And I didn’t have sex with him!”
“Well. Regardless. You can’t be super uptight around him, or he’ll figure it out.”
“Actually. You know, that might be a good front for you to act a bit more awkward in front of him.”
“You’re right.”
“But… don’t you think you should clear up what happened?”
“I should. I think.”
“You should just talk it through with him!”
“Hermione. It is not that easy.”
“But why isn’t it? It’s not like you like him that way, do you? I thought you disliked him.”
“Yeah, I- I don’t like him. Definitely not in that way.”
“Then why don’t you just ask him: what happened? Can we stop this?”
“I… I mean, I could try. I need to make peace with this… entire thing somehow.”
“Well, go for it!”
Y/N shrugged again, leaning back into her seat. She finished up with the last of her tea and set it away, staring at the couple for a few seconds before trying to change her expression to something a bit more satisfied and a lot less confused.
***
Somehow, that night, Y/N managed to gather her senses (and an appropriate amount of the Draught of Peace) for long enough to compile some notes about centaur habitats. The Forbidden Forest in Scotland, the Wychwood Forest in England and the Hoia-Baciu Forest in Romania. There. Oh, and the Black Forest in Germany. Huh. All varying amounts of spooky.
She’d put them together in a file and was standing by Draco’s own cubicle (which was stupidly elegant, by the way. And I mean, of course it was.), shifting her weight and balancing herself on the balls of her feet, awaiting his arrival. She stared down at her folder again, sighing as she awaited his arrival. Very hopefully, he wouldn’t shock her as he always seemed to do. Besides, she was a lot more confident this time. Thankfully, she noticed him stepping out of the elevator and waved over at him, lifting her folder. She was for some reason glad to see that he was only carrying along a slim briefcase.
He smiled at her, albeit reluctantly, and soon arrived. “Good morning.” He set his briefcase on his desk and then looked at her folder. “Oh… so, that’s all you did?” Wow, what an unnecessary comment. She handed over her folder to him and he set it beside his case, now beginning to open it up. And he undid the clasp, and… voila! A thick, thick binder full of as many sheets of paper as she could even count at once appeared. Goddamn illegal Extension Charms.
“Wow! How long did you spend on that?”
“Eh… all of last night. I tried to put together every record where Firenze’s name was mentioned.”
“There are that many?”
“You’d really be surprised. And I mean, it’s been a very long while since he was last seen by his colony. Almost an entire year. And the circumstances of his disappearance have been so mysterious, they actually ‘deigned’ to contact us. That’s quite literally what someone from his colony, um, Bane? He wrote this in his official complaint. The Centaurs generally sort matters like this out themselves.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
Y/N nodded slowly, forcing on a smile as the silence between them began to grow awkward. Could he really have stolen from the Ministry? Right now, he just seemed like a right nerd. Not a sinister mastermind. But then again, taking an object out of an eternal loop of falling was no simple-minded task. She sighed and put her hands in her pockets, thinking about how best to bring the situation back down to normal.
“Y-you know… I-I can’t help but notice things have been a little awkward between us since the whole…?”
“Hmm. Yes.”
“ I… I kind of wanted to… you know. Clear things up a bit. Figure out what happened.”
“Well, nothing really happened, as far as I can remember. I was also a bit…” He made a cuckoo sign with his finger.
“Oh. Okay. We were both quite drunk then?”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“But we didn’t like… together?”
“Definitely not.”
“... I hate to be suspicious and whatnot but, how are you so sure?”
“I… I just know, alright? There’s just a way I do.”
“I’m- Okay, I suppose I won’t insist on that point. But… I just wanted to kind of clear the air a bit, you know?”
“I do. And… I suppose I understand that.”
“I’m sorry I was so weird that day.”
“‘S Alright. Um-”
“Do you want to explain Firenze to me then? My research is kind of… cut and dry. Not hard to figure out. But yours seems very complex.”
“Oh, sure. I-I just need to clear out this one little detail I’ve found with you first.”
“No problem. Go ahead, I suppose.”
“You had him for Divination, if I’m not wrong?”
“ Yes.”
“Well, the thing is… one of your classmates. Lovegood. She’s been linked to him several times over the past few years. She’s the only human the centaurs named, had been familiar with.”
“Oh my.”
“Yes. Something about… stargazing patterns or summat’”
“Sounds like it makes sense…? Luna loved doing that, if I’m remembering right.”
“You see, it’s been months since she’s contacted the Ministry as well, though no one’s contacted her as yet. She’s supposedly gone on a Magizoology assignment, tracking down gnomes. I have a theory… their disappearances aren’t just coincidences.”
Wait a second. Disappearances. Time turners caused people to disappear from their current timelines, didn’t they? And Luna was a Ravenclaw, after all…
a/n: yes, this story was very slightly inspired by cursed child. but no, there is no separate plotline involving voldemort and bellatrix’s love child trying to bring her father back. (YUCK!) also i am v sorry to disappoint but i am going to postpone this story up till april/may. my last posts for this fic haven’t been receiving much attention and it’s my final semester of school so the workload/studying is just getting a bit too much to juggle writing and planning alongside if i’m getting little attention for it.
#draco malfoy#draco malfoy x reader#draco x reader#draco#hp au#draco imagine#draco malfoy imagine#hp imagine#angst#currents
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his protector - chapter 4
summary: “you no longer hold the status as my first knight.” that felt like a knife in her heart, but riza had expected it. harsh, but she knew the consequences of her actions and would accept them wholeheartedly, because it was for the king’s own safety. “you’re no longer a part of my court. get the hell out.”
rated: t | words: 2464
read chapter 3 | read on ao3 and ffnet
“Al?” a voice called in the distance.
Beside her, Alphonse relaxed. “It’s just Edward.” Riza could hear the grin in his voice.
When they broke through the trees, Riza took in the sight of the young man before her. His long hair was tied back in a braid, his fringe being tugged across his eyes in the gentle breeze. He looked slightly nervous, shifting his weight from foot to foot, no doubt anxious to see his brother was all right.
“Edward?” Riza asked, confused. What was he doing here?
“Hey, Ed!” Alphonse called happily, disregarding the fact that the enemy may still be nearby.
Edward’s mouth parted in shock, then he strode purposefully towards them both.
“What happened?” Edward demanded. The young man didn’t even know Riza, but he still looped his arm around her shoulders and helped she and Al walk further to safety. Riza was touched by his concern.
“Nothing for you to worry about,” Riza interjected before Alphonse could reply. “Right, Al?” she added forcefully.
“He already knows, Riza.”
“Why?” she demanded. She didn’t need to drag another poor soul into her quest.
“Relax,” Al reassured her. “We need him, and Edward was more than happy to offer his assistance.”
“Al,” she warned. That wasn’t the point.
Riza gasped in pain, a sudden bout of it shooting up through her spine and down her legs. She lost her footing and stumbled forward, squeezing her eyes closed tightly.
“Easy,” Edward soothed. As they lowered her to the ground, she didn’t miss the worried look the two of them shared. “It’s all right. I don’t mind.”
Riza sighed. She lowered herself onto her stomach on the grass. She couldn’t even sit down. It put too much pressure on her lower back. She would fucking kill the man who struck her there.
“We need the manpower to teleport all of them back,” Alphonse explained. “I can’t do it by myself.”
“Teleport?”
“We can’t ride back with this many people. Plus, now, you’re in no condition to travel.”
Riza felt like pinching the bridge of her nose. He was right, but she hadn’t wanted to get anyone else involved. Hell, she hadn’t even wanted to get Al involved in the first place. Now they had his brother too. It was another added stress onto her because if anything bad happened, Edward had a wife and two children at home waiting for him. It was another piece to add her already mounting pile of worries.
“We do it now, then,” Riza replied. Alphonse opened his mouth to argue. “The sooner its done, the sooner they are out of our hair. Transport me to the courtyard and we’ll be announced to the King there.”
“You need a healer though,” Alphonse argued, undeterred. “Winry is really good with long lasting healing spells. We can take you there and deal with the prisoners ourselves.”
“The courtyard,” she replied, tone firm. “I need to present the prisoners, Al. They won’t let you in because they don’t know you. For all they know, you could be launching an attack.”
“You need a healer.”
“Courtyard,” she ground out. “I want this over with.”
“Riza,” Alphonse cried in frustration.
Edward cast his gaze between them both as they argued, looking uncomfortable at being caught in the middle.
“You can barely stand!” Al continued. “How are you going to do that?”
“I will manage,” she replied, trying to keep her tone even. She’d managed to press herself up onto her elbows to speak more comfortably with him.
“No, you won’t,” Alphonse argued. “Do something for yourself for once and let your body rest.”
“I need to finish this –”
“I won’t let you.” Alphonse challenged her. His fists clenched by his sides as his anger finally shined through. “You owe the King nothing after what he did to you. Winry can take care of you while we transport the prisoners.”
“This isn’t about that, Al, and you’re treading on dangerous ground here,” Riza warned.
“Why? Because I care? Because I don’t want to see you hurt anymore? He exiled you, Riza. Why do you so desperately want to go back to him?” His cry carried across the quiet grassland.
Riza narrowed her eyes at him. “You know nothing, Alphonse.”
“Al,” Edward warned, leaning forward to try and stop his brother.
“No, I don’t. So why don’t you enlighten me?”
Riza drew her shoulders back as her torso peeled up from the ground, coming to a rest in a much taller position on her elbows. She eyed her partner, noticing how his expression faltered as her cold eyes settled on his.
“I want this to be over, Alphonse. I want to be done with this whole charade. Then, I won’t be putting the lives of innocent teenagers in danger for my own personal quest. This has nothing to do with the King, and you know it. This has progressed so far beyond that now. The only reason I’m going back there is because the only person who can put them on trial legally is the King.”
Riza lifted her chin, the words pouring out of her mouth, unable to stop. The dam was broken, letting loose everything.
“Then, this job is over, and not left to someone else to pick up the pieces and get hurt. Then,” she added, fixing him with her stare as his posture finally relaxed and his anger and frustration disappeared. His arms hung limp by his sides. “I can disappear and stop hurting and disappointing all the people I care about, seeing as that’s all I’m good for.”
Alphonse had no reply for her. Edward looked even more uncomfortable now and kept his eyes on the ground.
Riza managed to lift herself off the ground, gripping on tightly to the tree next to her. Her nails dug into the bark, threatening to crack underneath the pressure. Alphonse didn’t verbally protest. However, he didn’t step forward, but pause, his arms outstretched as if wanting to help, but he was keeping himself back.
“The sooner this is over, the sooner I’m out of your hair,” Riza finished.
“Riza –”
To his credit, Alphonse sounded extremely guilty, but she’d had enough of that argument for now. She limped back to the compound, one hand pressed against her lower back in an attempt to stifle the pain, but more than ready to initiate the transport of their prisoners. Movement was agony, but Riza pushed through. She’d been through worse and she meant it when she said the sooner this was over, the sooner she’d be away from everyone she cared about, unable to hurt them or put them in danger anymore.
Now she’d calmed down, Riza hated she’d had that outburst with Edward there. She didn’t know him, and that wasn’t her style. However, Alphonse’s pressing had drawn it out of her. In a way, he was an expert at drawing out the truth from her. He should go into court. He’d be able to tell the liars straight away and would probably be able to push them to get them to admit to their fraud no problem. He was the dream advisor.
“Riza, wait –”
The sorrow in Alphonse’s voice almost broke her heart, but he’d started this. She was in too much pain to fight with him anymore.
“Get the prisoners ready for transport,” she ground out, her body limping as she walked.
Alphonse was silent, then walked ahead, obviously at a much faster pace than she was able to move. His head was bent, his posture defeated as he moved. Hesitantly, Edward followed close behind him, probably eager to get out of this mess and back to his family.
* * *
The teleportation was rough. Riza was left gasping as they landed in the courtyard of the castle. The people let out cries of surprise as they appeared suddenly, not expecting a large group of people to appear out of nowhere, the majority of them in chains.
“What – Knight Hawkeye?” the guard at the main door asked, baffled by their sudden appearance.
“Just Hawkeye now,” she corrected him. Despite the flair of pain in her back, Riza’s tone was strong. “We require an audience with the King.”
“Um, I, uh…”
He obviously didn’t know what to do.
“We come with prisoners for him.” The restrained men shifted behind her, grumbling angrily beneath the masks Alphonse had put on them with his magic.
“Um, right this way,” he gestured inside the castle. The guard led the way. It was agony to try and keep up, but Riza forced herself too. Her breaths were gasping at various moments, but she kept them quiet. Just get through this, was the constant mantra through her head.
“Your Highness,” the guard announced, entering the throne room.
With dismay, Riza noticed court was in session. The groaned internally. She didn’t need an audience for this.
“Knight Hawkeye has arrived with prisoners for you.” He obviously hadn’t gotten the memo she wasn’t welcome here as a knight anymore.
Finally, Riza brought her gaze to the King. He was frozen in his throne, eyes boring into hers. Riza met it steadily, but when gestured forward by the guard, she turned to nod at him, and walked forward to approach the dais. She could feel the King’s eyes on her, searing her skin. Whether it was in anger or not, Riza couldn’t tell. She was tired. She didn’t care anymore. Once this was done, it was done, and she’d disappear, unable to fail anyone else she cared about.
Once in place, she met the gaze of her old friend, feeling very out of place.
“Your Highness, I have brought you the men who orchestrated the plan for your attempted assassination.” A murmur rippled through the crowd of the court, surprised gasps accompanying the noise as well. “My partner and I tracked them to the outskirts of the neighbouring Kingdom and witnessed them discussing the plan to kill you and take the Kingdom as their own.”
“Step forward.” His tone was controlled and offered none of the warmth she’d experienced from him in the past.
Riza did so and couldn’t stop wincing at the pain in her back. The pressure alleviated as she shifted her weight, but as soon as her foot hit the floor, it returned with a vengeance. Roy’s eyes lingered on hers for longer than they should of before he spoke once more.
“What are your crimes?” the King asked the men. They were unable to speak, so Riza answered for him.
“Your Highness,” she addressed him, the title feeling heavy on her tongue. After everything that had happened, it was strange to address him in such a way. It felt… odd. Not like she didn’t deserve to do it anymore, but it was certainly different. She truly felt the weight of the title, as well as his gaze, upon her. It was formal, a tone she hadn’t used with him in years. Despite being in love with him, he was her best friend, and now she stood here before him on the opposite side of it all. She no longer belonged by his side; he’d made that much clear. It was a strange feeling, a sorrowful one, to be left on the outside of it all.
“He was part of an organisation plotting to kill you. My partner and I overhead and can confirm the plan. They’ve tried to kill me twice.”
The King’s eyes flashed and moved towards Riza’s, away from the criminals. They bored into hers, before dropping to her body, then back to the criminals. He was assessing if she was hurt.
“His group murdered an informant of mine’s family, simply because I survived the first attack.” Riza swallowed. Admitting that out loud would never be easy to stomach. Her survivor’s guilt returned with a force.
A murmur broke out through the throne room and Riza shifted, the noise unsettling her. It felt like every person in the room was judging her for that revelation.
How dare she survive?
She caused that family’s death. Despicable!
The words weren’t spoken, but Riza could feel eyes searing her skin. She kept her gaze forward, resting just above the King’s head.
“That’s all,” she forced out, feeling the weight of their judgement threatening to suffocate her. Riza stepped back, wishing she could disappear.
“Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” the King replied. He motioned irritably for the crowd to silence, and the volume of the murmur dropped almost immediately. “These are very serious crimes, and I do not take the attempted murder of one of my subjects lightly.” His eyes moved to behind her, glaring at the men she’d brought in. “This will be investigated completely.” His eyes flicked back to Riza, piercing her own. Riza held his gaze steady, her back throbbing in pain. She wanted out of there. She needed out, or she’d crack. “Thank you, Hawkeye.”
He sounded so sincere that she let out a shaky breath. With a nod, she turned on her heel and left the throne room as guards descended on the prisoners.
It felt like her lower back was threatening to break in two. The pressure there was taking her breath away as soon as she was at the door, Riza dived to the left, pressing a hand against the wall to try and keep herself upright. Her head was bent as she gasped for breath. She wasn’t going to get out here. She wouldn’t be able to make it.
“Riza?”
Her eyes squeezed closed, tears threatening to spill over. Alphonse sounded so worried about her. He had been since their argument in the forest. Riza had been cold and unforgiving. It would be easier to leave him if they weren’t on friendly terms, right? It had broken her heart to do it, but his worry and concern was breaking her heart all over again. He was such a sweet boy and didn’t deserve or need to be lumped with someone as terrible as her.
“Are you okay?” It was Edward who asked her this time.
“Fine,” she choked out. She was anything but. It was all becoming too much. She needed out. No, what she needed more than anything, was something for her back.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Alphonse reassured her softly. “We’ve got you.” His hands gripped her upper arms firmly, effectively helping her stand. “Where do you want to go?”
Riza lifted her eyes to meet his. His face was full of concern that she didn’t deserve. Not after how she’d treated him recently.
Alphonse nodded at her request and a blinding white light enveloped them both. Riza felt her body relax as the wall disappeared from beside her, but Alphonse’s grip kept her upright.
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We Do Have Reputations
Pairing: Hurley/Sloane
Words: 3.7k
Rating: T (for suggestive language and description of injuries)
Light Angst/Hurt and Comfort
Read on AO3
((Imma keep it real with you chief, this is just an edited/expanded version of the fic I wrote for that ask meme lol))
Hurley rounded the corner into the alley and saw the blood black and bright as motor oil in the nighttime. She had been expecting and dreading it.
"Shit, Sloane." She didn't remember until a moment later about using real names out in public, and she couldn't bring herself to care even after she did. She ran forward to where Sloane sat slumped against the wall and slid to a stop on her bare knees.
Underneath the black, beaked racing helmet, her breathing came out ragged. She brushed away Hurley's hand when she carefully tried to lift the bird mask away. "Alright, Curls, I'd say you're the healer of our team, yeah?" Her hand rested on her belly, over the spot where the thin wooden shaft stuck out of her. "Do I leave this in me or pull it out now?"
"Sloane, you need a fucking hospital," she hissed. "I'm taking you."
"Oh, and you're going to check me in there, Lieutenant? That'll look good."
"I'll just drop you off and go if that's what you want! I'll be anonymous."
"No. They could still figure out who I am there, even without the mask." She pushed herself up slowly against the brick wall with one hand. "Besides, I'm not even that bad."
"Sloane..."
"I'm not! Just..." Behind the helmet's dark visor, it was difficult to tell whether she was making eye contact. But she turned fully toward Hurley for the first time all night. "Just help me out a little now, alright? Then I'll take care of myself afterward, I promise."
She tried to give Sloane a glare that she couldn't sustain for long. In the dark, it would be hard to see her disapproval anyway. Hurley finally relented and let out her held breath, though it left her feeling no more relieved. Drops still fell from Sloane's stomach now and again. "If you're going to run, you should take the bolt out. You might bleed more, but it's better than risking more internal damage while you're moving around," she murmured. Then she paused and placed a hand over Sloane's, where it rested over her gut. "Would you...would you rather do it yourself or should I..."
"Could you?"
For a long time, Hurley took in the cold air and just kept taking it in. It made her shiver as she wrapped her hand firmly around the tail end of the crossbow bolt. She kissed the only exposed part of Sloane's skin that she could reach, where her neck met her collarbone, and then she pressed her forehead gently against her chest there, mingling their cooled sweat. Then she removed the serrated arrowhead the only way that one could when one was without magic-induced anesthesia, surgical tools, and time.
Sloane barely kept herself from screaming. As it was, the sound strangled halfway up her throat and the air came out as a gasp. "Sorry, sorry, shh..." At once, Hurley tore the fabric from the bottom of her gi--first-aid kit wasn't as easy to reach--and started to press it against the wound. She imbued it with what healing ki she could, but a few seconds of contact would never be enough. Harm was an instance; mending was a process.
Sloane was almost doubled over, coiling her body around the wound like she were shielding a child in her lap. Briefly, she shook against Hurley but still stood. She shouldn't have had to. It might have been absurd, but she wanted Sloane collapsing into her, wanted to take on all her weight. "I know it hurts. I'm sorry. I'm..." She swallowed hard. "I'm so sorry..."
"No, it's fine," she croaked. "I asked you to do it."
"Well, you didn't ask for this! I'll kick their asses for you, alright? They're not getting away with this."
Sloane simply took the fabric from her hands and pressed it to her own stomach as she began to move away. "We'll talk later, okay? I'll get--shit."
Hurley heard it, too, a second later. The click of crossbows being cocked and footsteps rushing down the street. Without another word, Sloane took off running and disappeared around the bend.
That left her to turn around and face her troop of fellow officers as they came into view before her--bows drawn, and by the gods, she was going to report every one of them later for aiming a weapon without a target in sight. "Hold your fire!" she blurted.
Only when they all stopped and stared at her blankly did she realize that she should probably justify that, along with the panic that pitched her voice upward.
"Ah...these are apartments along this alley. All of them, I think. I'm not going to have stray bolts going into folks' homes while they sleep!"
It wasn't a good lie. She would've known that even if she hadn't seen the confused glances they gave each other. There was a reason she liked to leave the lying to Sloane when they were on the verge of being discovered. But anyway, her officers were meant to listen to her whether they believed her or not. "The Raven's still running. Took off down Hoopoe Street in the direction of Town Hall. You both, head west and see if you can cut her off!" And like that, she sent them off in different directions, none of them the way in which Sloane had gone. Later, they'd talk around the water cooler at the office about how the thief had slipped off again, how they'd practically had her in the bag before she'd just vanished like shadow passing into darkness.
Hurley followed them, but she wasn't with them. She thought of Sloane running on rooftops, stark black up against the moon, hair waving behind her. For a moment, she thought, again, of saying, Fuck every last one of you. Or else saying nothing to them, ever again. She considered how easy it would be to slip away herself, just to fall back from the group until the darkness took her away from them entirely, to leave her badge on the militia's doorstep and become a second silhouette coursing alongside the Raven, in the moonlight for all to see. And then she stopped, because if she thought too hard about it, she'd think of all the reasons it wouldn't work, and she didn't want the fantasy to deflate just yet.
She couldn't, however, make herself stop thinking of the possibility that Sloane was not running now, could not run now.
It was difficult, when she got back to the office in the wee hours of the morning, to convince her superiors that she was simultaneously too hurt to perform the rest of her shift and not hurt enough to be immediately sent to an ER. The signs of a scuffle with the Raven helped, though--she hadn't even thought to point out her torn clothes until someone mentioned it. Maybe they saw the worry showing through her shaken, shaking self and mistook it for a rare bout of concern for her own safety. That probably helped, too.
While she filled out the most perfunctory of reports, she attempted to put some of her training to use by looking at the situation for what it was. She had once watched Sloane walk off the racetrack with shrapnel in one thigh and a burn on the other, giving the crowd an overdone bow on the way out. She was no stranger to this. At this point, neither of them were. True, at the races, medical help was usually nearby, because it had to be. Sometimes it was very close indeed. Nobody had seen it, but after the Raven had walked away under her own power, she had gotten to a quiet place out of the sun and leaned on the Ram, who got to work on the gashes. The Ram wasn’t there now.
The safehouse that Sloane had set up for herself sat on the second floor of an empty apartment building that had been slated for demolition for three years. It was after moonset and not nearly soon enough that Hurley made it to the paint-chipped door on foot, having stepped around the places where she knew the invisible Alarm spells had been set, and rapped out the special, encoded knock signaling that it was her.
There was silence from the other side. She began to wonder whether Sloane had gone elsewhere, or whether she had been able to go anywhere. Both her actual apartment and the garage they shared were much farther away from the spot where everything had happened last night, so it wouldn’t have made sense for her to run there, but then, almost half a night had gone by. Already, Hurley had wasted so much time trying to get the militia off her back without them suspecting how urgent it was. She might not have been quick enough.
She was just preparing to knock again when she heard shuffling from deep inside. It must have gone on for a couple of minutes before the door finally creaked open. Through the crack slipped a hand clutching the shining, gold-painted horn of her familiar ram mask.
She blinked at it. "Why--"
"Just put it on!" Sloane's voice hissed from inside.
Hurley obliged and stepped through to see—thank the gods—Sloane, standing, still in the helmet that enclosed her whole head. She opened her mouth to speak, but she didn’t have the chance to get out a sound. Without a word, and without allowing for a chance to ask how she was feeling, Sloane turned. Hurley had come with the energy of Healing Hands tingling in her palms in case she needed it, but Sloane seemed to be walking better already, upright if a little slow and limping. She was walking away just fine.
Sloane was a good actress, Hurley reminded herself. She was pretending not to care. That didn't mean she might not have also been angry about being shot by people under Hurley's command.
"You know, Raven, I think I recall you being the one who wanted to keep this on the down-low." The call came from the living room, slathered in mock-sympathy. "Just between us and all that. Wouldn't want word getting back to the other racers that you weren't in top shape."
"Yeah, well, you're shit out of luck, because it's no one you can gossip with here. It's just my partner."
That word again. It was the only one she had ever heard Sloane use to refer to her, at least in front of anyone else. "Racing partner" is what she meant, of course. Hurley wasn't sure if she intended for the plausible deniability about what sort of "partners" they were aside from that. But no other word like "girlfriend" or "lover" had been used by either of them, not out loud. The question had been, after maybe the third instance of supposedly "no-strings-attached" sex, Hey, so is this just what we’re doing now? and the answer had been, Looks like it. It had seemed simple and natural. They hadn't been any more specific about what “this” was at the time.
"Oh, I know who it is."
Hurley pushed past the old woven rug that hung in the doorway to come face-to-face with someone who looked as though every part of them had been stretched out. They were human, tall and narrow as the gap between jail bars, with long arms full of measly muscles and straight hair down to their knees. There was smile on their face and a shine in their eye. "Well, hello, Ram! You clean up alright. I'm used to seeing you covered in dirt." They said this as Sloane sat down in front of them. They laid hands back on her bared belly, where the wound had begun to close up and her muscles looked tense.
Hurley took one look at Crane and then glanced back Sloane's way. "Raven, seriously?"
"What? They know what they're doing!"
"Why, thank you! I’m extremely talented," said the person who, though they hadn’t won a race in months, could easily clinch the award for Shadiest Cleric on the Racetrack, and Most Likely All of Goldcliff. (Honestly, maybe they were lying. They could have been some bizarre kind of warlock.)
"They're going to bleed you dry at best and might make it even worse if it suits them. You know that, right?"
"Excuse me? I think you'll find that I'm doing a fine job stopping her bleeding, no thanks to you. And it’d be bad for business if word got around I was hurting people who paid me."
"Hey, I didn't ask you to come and watch," Sloane said with a half-shrug, as though entirely unbothered one way or the other.
She was a good actress. But that, quite frankly, was a little much. Hurley chewed on the tip of her tongue until it just barely began to hurt. It was bad enough, she thought, that she wasn't the one doing the healing right now, that someone else was putting their hands on her. She could, just barely, watch strands of this asshole's foreign magic slither like worms into Sloane. But to imply that she'd ever choose not to be by Sloane's side was adding too much insult to injury.
On the other hand, it wasn't like this was anything new. Given how many racers engaged in worse illegal activity on the side, most rivals were loath to show their faces to one another, let alone share personal details that could be used against them. For her and Sloane, that had always meant keeping their closeness under wraps, in front of criminals and law-abiding citizens alike. Which was to say, everybody.
Finally, Crane stepped away and let Sloane run her hand over the spot that had just healed. "See, now, you're good as new! Be back to eating shit on that racetrack in no time. That'll be 700 gold, my dear."
"That's a funny way of saying 300 gold," Sloane responded at once, putting her jacket back on.
“Do you think I make house calls in the middle of the night for fun?”
“I think you’re out of your mind. I could have bought three healing potions for that much.”
“Ah, but you didn’t!”
Seeing where this was going and not especially keen on a five-minute-minimum bargaining session over how much Sloane's actual life was worth, Hurley stepped forward to drop a sack of coins into Crane's hand. "That's 650, alright? Now please leave."
"Ram, fuck's sake, don't give into them like that!"
"Aw, very sweet of you, sheep."
"Fuck you," Sloane said. A selfish part of Hurley hoped that was for her.
"So it's true, then?" Crane's grin stayed smug, but it was no longer satisfied. There was something new in the way they held themself. The way their head tilted as though trying to see from a different angle, the little bounce in their knee as they stood there. Behind those thin, grinning lips, it was clear, they salivated for an answer. "What they say about the two of you, I mean."
"They say a lot of things about us. Now kindly fuck off out of here." Her tone was flippant, but the skin stretched taut over her knuckles as her fist kept tightening at her side. She had one arm outstretched toward the door, and that was held stiffly, too.
But she might have just said yes. There weren't many these days in the racing scene who didn't at least suspect, and these were people who would wear their "lucky" boxers for two months straight if they thought it would let them win a race or outrun a cop. If they had a suspicion, any inkling of what might give them even the barest advantage, then they were acting on it already. Sloane lost nothing by confirming what everyone already thought they knew anyway.
As for what the pair of them stood to gain? Admittedly, Hurley wasn't quite sure. Maybe freedom, or maybe just a way of knowing that they'd been free all along. Free to share their victory kiss out in the open, drenched in sweat and the sun and the clamor of the crowd and each other. They didn't always have to crash together rough and quick as they ducked down a shadowed alleyway after a race.
"Sure, sure." They sneered. "I was just wondering if I could tell everyone that I heard wedding bells."
Her fingers uncoiled only to snap to the handle of the dagger at her thigh. Her shoulders were forward, the ruff of feathers around her collar seeming to puff out like the neck of a frilled lizard. She walked at them quick enough to startle them back a step, the black beak of her mask inches from their eye. Hurley had seen her like this before, this posturing. There was a time when she might have fallen for it herself. That was before she knew to look for the quickening of Sloane's breath, the way her whole body stiffened as if bracing for a blow. She almost felt like ruining it. She felt like saying, I see you bluffing. She felt like saying, You’re full of shit. She felt like saying, You don’t have to do this. "Crane, if you fuck me over--"
"Alright, alright!" Their hands were up in front of them. "Fantasy Jesus Christ, you woke up on rather the wrong side of the bed, didn't you?"
"I got shot."
"And you're a very bad sport about it." They spun on their heel and raised their hand without looking back. "Happy trails, you two."
Sloane slumped as soon as their footsteps had faded completely. She was stable now, and the only blood left in the room had long since dried to shit-brown, but exhaustion pressed down on her like a hand on the place where her neck met her spine. Hurley saw it and had the thought, as though it had been whispered to her without warning, One of these days, I'm going to make you honest.
As soon as she sat on the couch, Hurley joined her, trying to ignore the springs pressing up against her under the ratty upholstery. "Sloane?"
Sloane turned her way. This time, when she tried to lift the raven mask away, she wasn't prevented. For the first time since yesterday, she saw bright green eyes underlined by dark crescents, looking her softly all over. Sloane also didn’t flinch when she reached out toward her face—Hurley had always understood why she hadn’t liked hands coming near her, but she’d said that she wanted to break herself of the habit anyway, and it seemed that she had. She brushed aside the strands of hair that had been plastered to the side of her face by sweat since last night, rubbed lightly at the indents in her skin that had been left by the mask. She closed her eyes slowly when Hurley ran a thumb over her cheek, and she turned her head to the side when Hurley tried to get a better look to see if she was okay, and this was how Sloane loved her, by giving way to her like this. And this was why she loved to be loved by Sloane, because she relented for no one else, because she let herself be moved by no one else. This belonged to Hurley alone.
Though that didn’t mean it had to always be behind closed doors. Would it be such a bad thing if people knew the way those eyes fixed on her? Would it be so bad if, when they were out in the wind, people saw her brush Sloane’s hair aside to get a better look at them?
Of course it would be, for plenty of reasons.
"What are you lookin' at?" Sloane finally murmured with a small, tired smile. "I know I look like shit."
"I'm sure I do, too. We both haven't slept."
“Rough night, huh?
Hurley snorted. “I think I should be the one saying that to you.” In the growing light just before sunrise, she could see what she hadn't before, the smaller cuts across her chest and over her arms. Nothing big, but there, and red. "They missed all of this."
Sloane raised her brows a little. "I didn't ask them to take a look."
"You shouldn't have to ask." Hurley stared her down on purpose as she said it, to make sure the words stuck out to her.
It was unclear whether they did. She glanced away and scratched at her hairline. After seeming to think for a moment, then, she said, "Well, they would've charged me more for that, I bet. Speaking of which, I guess this means I have to pay you back."
"You're an ass," Hurley said just before kissing her, slowly this time. Sloane placed her hands over Hurley's where they rested against her damaged chest, keeping them pressed there. Hurley had her eyes closed, since she didn't have to look to feel the way the warm healing magic flowed from her fingers and into Sloane's body. She could sense the cuts closing one by one.
If she could help it, she’d always give Sloane a reason to be honest. She'd be the reason Sloane hummed to herself when she worked on the engine and laughed with her mouth wide open. Hurley would be the reason she felt safe enough to lean forward and rest her head on someone’s shoulder and doze at dawn in a run-down old apartment, the way she was now.
And it didn't have to be now, but Hurley saw forward to a time when the two of them clasped hands out in the desert noonday, out where people couldn’t ignore the flash of her black hair as the sun sparked off it. Where people couldn’t ignore how proud she was of this woman and being chosen by her. Not now, but one of these days, something would give. One of these days, they wouldn’t be able to contain themselves anymore.
#hurley#sloane#hurloane#taz balance#taz#the adventure zone#the zone cast#taz hurley#taz sloane#taz fanfic#fan fiction#hurt and comfort#light angst
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Title: A Dragon’s Magic
Chapter 16
Pairing: Kacchako
Rating: M
Word Count: 5,706
Summary: Uraraka Ochako has always believed in dragons, though she was constantly told they were long since extinct. Now an adult and professional mage, she’s ready to help her parents as a healer for their village. The last thing she expects is for her beliefs to become a reality, but when a dragon attacks her village, she learns there’s more to magic than she ever could’ve realized.
Read on AO3
Thanks to @its-love-u-asshole and @amaisenshi for reading this ahead of time.
"I'll kill him," Bakugou hissed, clenching his fists hard.
Ochako felt her chest tighten a bit, and she reached over to gently cover his hand with her palm.
"Katsuki, let's not jump to any conclusions," she said. "We haven't even tried following Kaminari yet."
"If he's doing something shitty, I will fucking kill him," he growled.
Ochako rolled her eyes. She knew this was a fight she mostly likely wasn't going to win, but she wished he would calm down, for her sake. She wondered if he had felt any of her emotions; the bond was supposed to work both ways, however, she hadn't had any intense reactions to anything. Not yet at least.
Bakugou however, was a giant mixed bag of extreme emotions, so Ochako was having an interesting experience so far.
"Do you really think he would do something harmful? He loves Jirou, right? I'm sure he wouldn't want to hurt you guys or her..."
"How the fuck do you know?" he growled, stomping up the path. The two were headed into town, knowing they would soon be following after the blond.
Ochako rolled her eyes. "I don't know, I'm just trying to not be immediately angry. You're making it difficult though." She growled, the anger boiling in her chest. She could tell this bond was going to take some time to get used to.
"What the fuck ever. I should just kill him on the spot!" he snapped.
"Don't do that," Ochako sighed, rubbing her forehead. "I think we need to see what's actually going on. If he is stealing magic, maybe... he has a good reason!" She couldn't imagine what said reason would be... but she wanted to believe Kaminari wasn't the type to just steal from everyone for no reason.
Bakugou halted his walking, immediately turning around to face her. "There's no good reason! Do you see what he's done?! Do you see how many fuckin' dragons have lost their goddamn minds?!"
Ochako frowned, stepping towards him to touch at his chest. "Yes. Katsuki, I do. I understand why you're upset! I really, really do," she continued. "I know this is partially because of your father."
The night previous, they'd slept at his house and Bakugou had spent a good deal of time outside, speaking to his father. It was interesting, how calm Bakugou was around the man, especially compared to his mother.
"It's got nothing to fucking do with that!" he snapped.
Again, Ochako felt her chest clench and she winced. "K-Katsuki..." she grumbled. "Your anger isn't just your own now," she whispered, squeezing his hand. Tears glistened in her eyes, the pain in her chest tight. It seemed to grow worse and worse with every bout of anger he experienced and she prayed he could keep it under control. "For my sake… please," she whispered.
He froze, staring at her intensely, his red eyes narrowing before turning away. "Whatever," he scoffed. "Let's get going. The others are waiting for us in town-"
"Katsuki!" she snapped, interrupting him. "You don't have to hide your emotions." Sighing, she walked closer to him and stepped in front of him. Lifting her hand, she touched over his bare cheek. She hated to say she missed the scales being there, but it was still so bizarre seeing him without them.
"I'm... not fucking hiding anything. And you look like you're in pain. I never would've done this whole fuckin' bond shit if it was just going to..." He trailed off, his eyes unable to look at her.
She sighed, and turned his face, pulling him down into a soft kiss. "I love you, Katsuki," she whispered. "I don't want you to hide your emotions. I want you to be honest with me. Tell me you feel sad about your father. Let yourself be angry if you are, I don't want you to stop being you," she giggled. "Trust me, if you stopped being angry, you wouldn't be the same Katsuki I fell in love with. I just... don't want you to jump to conclusions."
He groaned, wrapping his arms around her. "You're an idiot," he said, pressing his forehead against hers. "I don't want you to feel tense because I am."
"It's okay," she smiled, nuzzling her nose against his. "That's kind of what we signed up for," she said softly. "I mean, it was bound to happen at some point. And I'm sure you'll be feeling my emotions too, whatever they may be."
"Yeah," he said, grabbing her hand. He pulled her fingers to his mouth. "It feels pretty fucking warm in my chest right now."
"Maybe because mine feels so full of love for you," she smirked, standing on her toes to kiss him again.
"Gross." He clicked his tongue, but kept his arms wrapped around her, pulling her close.
"I don't mind feeling what you're feeling, even if it severe anger. I just... in this situation... I know how eager you are to find a solution because of your father, but nothing will ever get solved if you don't think things through," she said softly.
"Yeah, yeah, I get it," he grumbled.
"We're going to figure it out. We'll help him and all the dragons."
"I know..." he sighed. "You're lucky we have to go meet them right now." His eyes trailed down her body, his hand brushing over the curve of her ass. They hadn't done anything last night since they'd spent the evening at Bakugou's parent's house.
Her chest was warm and she felt a rush down below, her core heating up. "K-Katsuki!"
"Don't lie, Cheeks," he teased. "You liked it, I can tell."
"S-Shut up!" she said, shoving him gently. "Y-You're right! We have to meet Jirou and the others!" She started to walk away, hating the soft chuckle he let out behind her.
"Take your own advice, Ochako," he snorted, walking beside her. "You shouldn't be fuckin' embarrassed. You're my mate."
"True," she muttered. "E-Either way, we don't have time for that." She cleared her throat, looking at the red that colored his cheeks.
"Later, when we kill Kaminari we can celebrate," he said.
Ochako scoffed. "Okay, that's a weird thing to celebrate. We're not going to be killing him, I promise."
"That's what you think," Bakugou growled.
The two continued to make their way towards the city. Ochako really didn't want to jump to any conclusions, but based on what Mirio and Tamaki had told her and Kaminari's bizarre actions, he did seem somewhat guilty... But why? What reason did he have for stealing the magic? She didn't know him very well of course, but she couldn't imagine Jirou falling for someone who was selfish and horrible.
When they arrived at the clearing in the center of town, Ochako saw Todoroki standing with Yaoyorozu. His hand was stroking over her arm and she nodded quickly, her tail swaying back and forth. The two were far closer than they were letting on, and Ochako was happy Todoroki seemed to be comfortable around the girl. She'd never seen him acting so openly affectionate with someone.
"Good morning!" Ochako called out, waving her hand and the two of them jumped, Todoroki pulling away from Yaoyorozu.
"Ah, morning, Uraraka," Todoroki said, bowing his head.
"It's good to see you two! Did you rest well?" Yaoyorozu asked.
"Mhm. Katsuki's parents were generous enough to let me stay," Ochako smiled.
"'Course they were! You're my damn mate!" Bakugou snapped, folding his arms over his chest.
"It seems someone is in a good mood this morning," Todoroki mused, humming softly. He adjusted how his bracelets sat on his wrists and glanced towards Yaoyorozu. It occured to Ochako she actually had no idea where Todoroki was sleeping. At first she had assumed the library, but...
"I'm always in a fuckin' good mood, Half and Half. Fuckin' idiot," he growled.
"L-Let's get going!" Yaoyorozu stammered, stopping the two boys before anything could escalate further. "Kyouka is probably waiting for us by her place."
Ochako nodded, following after Yaoyorozu, knowing the two boys wouldn’t be far behind.
As they headed down the main path, Ochako glanced at Yaoyorozu. The girl looked to be on edge, her hands clenched close together as she stared at the ground. "Uhm, are you ok Yaoyorozu?" she asked.
"Ah, uhm... I apologize, Uraraka," she said, brushing her scaled fingers over her ear. "I just... I... I'm worried about Kaminari and Kyouka and... I supposed I'm a little scared of what we might discover today."
"Don't worry," Ochako smiled. "No matter what happens, we're going to figure it out together."
Yaoyorozu nodded, a forced smile pulling across her lips. "I just hope... for Kyouka's sake, that nothing bad is happening."
Ochako nodded silently, continuing down the path. The two girls had been friends for so long, it was only natural Yaoyorozu would be concerned for Kyouka's happiness. However, something in Ochako's gut made her think Kaminari wasn't the one doing this.
Or maybe it was just what she wanted to believe.
She had always assumed whoever was taking the dragons' magic was probably some giant monster. A creature of immeasurable strength they would have to fight an intense battle against... not one of Bakugou's childhood friends.
Stopping outside of Jirou's house, Yaoyorozu knocked on the large wooden door. "Kyouka! We're here!" she called out quietly.
Jirou was quick to open the door. "Hey. Come in."
Jirou's hut was small, but very similar to Bakugou's parents’ place. It had a small kitchen towards the back, a small seating area with a fireplace and a tiny hallway which led to the two bedrooms. "My parents... they were forced into the dragon forms long ago," she said. "I just... hope they come back once we figure this all out."
"They will," Yaoyorozu said. "I feel the same way about my mother."
"Katsuki's father too," Ochako nodded.
"Oi!" Bakugou growled. "Stop sharing my business."
She rolled her eyes, ignoring him. It was stupid to hide something they were all going through.
"So, what is our plan? We don't have any idea where we're going. If you'll have to transform to follow him..." Ochako muttered, tapping at her chin.
"I would assume that to be the case," Todoroki muttered. "When Yaoyorozu and I were attempting to track the magic, it didn't lead us to anywhere on the island. The source isn't here."
"If that's the case we need to be careful about transforming," Jirou muttered, her eyes falling on Yaoyorozu. "You... don't look good, Momo."
"E-Eh!? N-No! I could handle it, I swear!" she said waving her hands back and forth.
"I could give her magic," Todoroki stated bluntly. "It shouldn't be a problem."
Ochako smirked, she had a feeling Todoroki just wanted to see Yaoyorozu in her dragon form. Ochako doubted the girl had shown him yet.
"If anything, Katsuki and I should be able to give magic to you both as well," she nodded. "It’ll be okay."
"True," Jirou said. "Now... I don't know where Kaminari goes, but he probably won't notice us if we trail him. I'm... really familiar with his scent, so we should be able to stay decently far away from him. I don't want him to notice mine. Or any of ours."
"Knowing that idiot, he wouldn't notice even if we were right fucking behind him!" Bakugou hissed, folding his arms over his chest. "I'm gonna fuckin' kill him."
Jirou froze at those words, her fists clenching by her side. Ochako pressed her teeth into her lips, she couldn't imagine how the girl must feel. Ochako would be devastated if Bakugou ever betrayed her. "Jirou, I promise we won't-" Ochako began.
"No!" she snapped, turning to glare at Bakugou. "If this idiot really is stealing all our magic I will be the one to kill him."
Oh. Well that hadn't been the response Ochako was expecting.
Next to her, Yaoyorozu giggled and gently touched at Jirou's shoulder. "I don't think there will be any need for anyone to kill anyone."
"I fuckin' hope not!" Bakugou snapped.
Jirou sighed, glancing out the window. "It doesn't matter, the sun is almost completely risen and Kaminari will be heading out. He always leaves around now," she said, heading to the door. "Stay behind me."
The group nodded and followed Jirou out of her house.
They made their way around the back of the houses on the main street, walking down small alleyways as they avoided being on the main street. Jirou stopped by a house which rest towards the gate of town, right near the place they had first landed.
The group sat in silence for a moment, waiting for something to happen. As if on cue, Kaminari stepped out of the house. He had a long cloak on and he glanced around, making his way down the street. Immediately, he made his way for the gate, heading towards the forest.
From what Ochako could see, the boy still didn't have any scales. Not like the rest of them. There was a glimmer of something on his cheek, but... she couldn't quite make out what it was.
Jirou nodded, waving her hand to follow him as the group slipped out of the town and into the woods.
"Maybe he won't be transforming," Yaoyorozu said softly. "Maybe he's doing something to block the trail."
"I don't think so," Todoroki whispered. "That would be extremely complicated magic."
"There's no way Kaminari could handle that," Jirou admitted.
"Maybe you're all not giving him enough credit," Ochako hissed. "Maybe he's been playing dumb this whole time just to fool you all!"
The entire group turned to look at her, confused by her strong outburst.
"Definitely not," Jirou said flatly.
"No. Sparky's just a fuckin' moron," Bakugou snorted, shaking his head back and forth.
"Shh," Jirou hissed, pressing her finger against her lip. "Okay..." she muttered, turning her nose up as she sniffed at the breeze. "This way."
There was a roar from deeper within the woods, and group turned to the sky, seeing a bright yellow dragon soaring upwards, moving quickly to make his way above the clouds.
"That idiot," Bakugou hissed. "Let's get moving."
"Yes, we need to shift," Yaoyorozu said nervously. "Todoroki... you can ride on my back if you wish," she nodded.
The three dragons stepped away from Ochako and Todoroki, giving themselves enough space to shift.
Jirou's body lurched forward, a roar slipping from her throat. Her long purple ears grew even longer, her face shifting into her dragon form as purple scales shimmered over her skin, her wings folding out from her back.
Yaoyorozu took a deep breath, tilting her head back as her tail grew longer. Her claws elongated and the black scales began to cover her entire body, her back arching as she shifted into her dragon form.
"She's... really beautiful," Todoroki whispered, the words slipping from his mouth without him thinking about it. He was obvious enamored by her and Ochako couldn't blame him.
Of course, Ochako couldn't really take her eyes off Bakugou. Her chest grew warm, as the magic which coursed through her and Bakugou immediately began to rush into his body. Every time he shifted, he looked so magnificent, the golden scales covering over his body, glistening in the morning sun. His snout was long, his wings folding out from his back as he clawed against the ground, letting out a loud growl.
She sighed, clutching at her chest for a moment. She panted heavily before falling down to one knee. The magic had rushed out of her fast, and though she didn’t feel drained, her chest felt tight and her body momentarily weak.
"Are you okay, Uraraka?" Todoroki asked, gently touching her shoulder.
Before she could respond, Bakugou let out a long growl, the roar vibrating against the ground, he huffed, smoke rising through his nostrils as he stepped towards them, about to nudge her away from Todoroki. Ochako shook her head. "Katsuki! Stop!" She rolled her eyes and stepped back from Todoroki. "I'm fine, Katsuki is just... clingy, now that I'm his mate. A lot of our magic is released when he transforms so it always feels like a big rush," she giggled.
"I-I see," he said, stepping back from Bakugou, who huffed again.
Behind him, Yaoyorozu flapped her wings, making her way to Todoroki. Of course, his gaze turned to her, reaching his hand out to brush his fingers over her snout. "You really are beautiful, Momo," he said. "I knew you would be."
Jirou let out a long growl, pushing herself off of the ground. Ochako knew the girl was right, they didn't have any time to lose. They couldn't allow Kaminari to get too far away lest they lose his scent.
Nodding to each other, Ochako climbed onto Bakugou's back, while Todoroki did the same. She pressed her hands against Bakugou's back.
'Okay, Katsuki. Let's do this.'
Bracing herself, she waited for Bakugou to push off, launching himself into the air as he and Yaoyorozu followed after Jirou. They pushed above the clouds and Ochako looked around, expecting to see Kaminari but he was nowhere to be seen. Probably for the best; if they could see him, he would be able to see them, which was what they wanted to avoid.
Jirou however, did seem to be locked on his scent and she zoomed forward.
They flew above the clouds for awhile, Jirou leading the way. No wonder Todoroki and Yaoyorozu hadn't been able to track any of the magic. It seemed to Ochako they were flying far away from the dragon's home. How had no one noticed him leaving for such long periods of time beside Jirou?
After a decent amount of time, Jirou stopped again, her wings flapping. She flicked her tail back and forth, glancing behind her. Ochako nodded, wrapping her arms around Bakugou's neck as much as she could. She knew they were about to dive under the clouds and she was prepared to find whatever they would underneath.
The group made their way lower, and Ochako was surprised to immediately see a large mass of land, filled with trees. In the center was a large lake, surrounded by what appeared to be a large village. There was a mountain which sat on the edge of the land, taking up a section of the island. It was a place Ochako was unfamiliar with, and as they drew closer, she realized they were heading away from the village, towards a large cluster of trees. Probably for the best, since dropping down into a heavily populated area couldn't be good for the dragons.
As they landed, Bakugou let out a large huff and Ochako slid off his back, allowing Bakugou to shift back into his human form.
Jirou and Yaoyorozu however, stayed in dragon form and Ochako clutched at her staff, nervous she would have to use magic to help.
Jirou let out a roar as she shifted back, panting heavily. Her ears were still elongated and her tail and wings were still showing, but she was back to herself.
"Momo!" Todoroki called out. "Please calm down!" She was moving her head back and forth quickly, her body trembling. Pressing his hand against her chest, Todoroki's fingers began to glow and he sighed, glancing at her. "Don't worry... I'll give you magic."
As her black body began to glow, she started to shift down, her tail still showing and her face and arms covered in scales, she fell against him and Todoroki held her, the two of them panting heavily. "T-Todoroki..." she gasped. "I'm sorry... Are you okay?"
"Why are you apologizing?" he asked, stroking over her cheek. "I told you I would give you magic if needed."
"I-I know but... still..."
"If... either of you need more, Katsuki and I can help," Ochako smiled.
"I think we're okay..." Todoroki said, still holding onto Yaoyorozu as she regained her footing.
"Jirou, do you know where this is?" Ochako asked.
"No," Jirou said, glancing around. "I've never seen this place before."
"Is Kaminari definitely here?" Yaoyorozu asked.
"Mhm," Jirou nodded. "I took us further away, but he landed on this island not too long ago. Let's go."
The group followed after her, trudging through the forest. Both Ochako and Todoroki were unfamiliar with this stretch of land as well. Though neither of them had ever traveled much before this, neither of them had ever heard of a city surrounded by a lake. Normally human cities traded with each other and this one seemed to be completely off the radar. Maybe it wasn't even a human village.
Walking forward, Jirou came to a clearing by the lake. It was close to the mountain, a large waterfall dropping into this section of the water. Off in the distance, Ochako could see Kaminari climbing onto a rock, sitting by himself.
"Get down," Jirou muttered, kneeling behind a few of the larger bushes.
"What is that fucker doing?" Bakugou hissed. "I'll fucking kill him."
"Shh," Ochako whispered and covered his hand. "Let's just watch before we do anything like that..."
Kaminari stayed still, looking down at the water until a small figure started to approach. Immediately Kaminari stood up, bowing his head. The figure was short, coming up to Kaminari's waist. His eyes were large and he had purple hair with what looked to be large round balls stuck to the top of his head.
"Who the fuck is that?" Bakugou snorted. "I'll kill him." He began to stand up, but Ochako placed her hand on his chest, stopping him immediately.
"W-Wait," she gasped. "We don't know who he is or what he's doing."
"I've never seen a creature like that in my whole life," Todoroki muttered, staring at the small child-like creature.
Kaminari and the other boy began to talk. For a long while, it almost seemed as if they were only talking and just spending time together. Maybe they were just friends and this had nothing to do with the magic.
"I don't know if they're going to do anything with magic," Yaoyorozu admitted. "Maybe this was a wild dragon chase."
"Maybe..." Jirou whispered, her eyes looking hopeful. "Maybe we were wrong and I should've just trusted him..."
"Wait," Ochako hissed, watching as the purple-haired boy yanked one of the balls from his head. "What... is he doing?"
The group watched as the look on Kaminari's face turned to distress, and he pressed his hands together, seeming to beg. The small creature jumped up and bat Kaminari on the forehead and shook his head. Kaminari's body deflated and he held out his hands. The purple-haired creature handed the ball to Kaminari. The two of them stood still and Kaminari held it in his palms. Even from this distance they could all see he was breathing heavily, lightning began to spark from his palms, the energy rushing into the large purple ball. Magic was seeping through Kaminari and rushing into the purple ball. The boy placed it in a bag, taking it back. He pulled another one from his head and they began to repeat the process.
"S-So Kaminari... is taking the magic," Yaoyorozu stammered. "If he pours enough energy into those balls everyday, it would be enough to deplete all our conjoined magic. This has been going on for several months now... no wonder everyone is draining so fast."
"Let. me. kill. him." Bakugou growled, attempting to stand up again, but this time even Todoroki helped to hold him back.
"No. I'll kill him," Jirou snapped.
As she also began to stand, Yaoyorozu stopping her. "Kyouka! No! We have no idea how powerful that creature is. We also don't know if Kaminari is on his side or ours, we are in no condition to fight! We need to wait to confront him."
"Fine," she hissed, glancing at Bakugou while he still struggled against the two humans.
They turned their gaze back to the scene, the boy placing the balls into a large bag he brought with him. This was not what any of them were expecting and Ochako had no clue what it meant. Where was the boy taking the magic? Was he using it? Technically he could eventually give some of it back. The problem was... the dragons weren't given enough time to replenish the magical energy as the current was getting drained daily.
After a few more laughs were exchanged, Kaminari and the purple haired boy parted ways. The purple haired boy waved and trotted off, heading back in the direction of village from where he had come.
The second he was out of sight, Kaminari plopped down onto one of the rocks, looking tired. He covered his face and shook his head back and forth. In the sunlight, Ochako could see the scales that covered his arms and his cheeks. Obviously, whatever he was doing was starting to affect him too.
Now that he was alone, Jirou yanked free from Yaoyorozu and stood up, running towards the rocks. "Kaminari Denki!" she screamed, using her wings to push herself up and tackle him to the ground.
"E-EH K-Kyouka!?" he yelled back, his eyes widening as he looked up to see the girl just in time to be tackled to the ground, falling backwards off of the rock.
"Kyouka!" Yaoyorozu called, dashing out after her.
Bakugou let out a long growl and he stood up, letting his wings out as he flew to their side too.
"So much for being discreet," Todoroki muttered as he stood up with them. He and Ochako rushed forward, praying Jirou and Bakugou wouldn't murder Kaminari before they could talk to him.
Jirou had Kaminari pinned to the ground, her claws digging into his shoulders. He hissed and winced, growling as he tried to breathe. "K-Kyouka... Please... s-stop!"
"No!" she yelled, her jaw snapping right by his chin. "Fuck!" she snapped. "What the hell have you been doing!? Giving all our magic to that... that purple freak!?"
"W-Wait... Kyouka... you don't understand. Please..."
"What don't I understand!? I trusted you, Denki! I trusted you! I mated with you!" she snapped. Ochako could see the way her hands trembled against his shoulders, her body shaking. She was holding back tears, trying not to cry.
"I'll fucking murder you Sparky if you don't have a goddamn good ass reason as to why you've been draining our fucking magic," Bakugou snapped. Scales appeared on his fingers, his nails morphing into claws and Kaminari swallowed.
"I-I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I swear I didn't know... I didn't mean to I mean... I..." he gasped. "P-Please I'll tell you everything!"
"I'll give you 10 minutes to tell us 'everything'," Jirou said, pulling herself back. Ochako could tell she wanted to believe in her mate. She wanted him to be innocent, even if everything they had witnessed proved he wasn't.
"I won't even give you that long," Bakugou snarled. Ochako wrapped her arm around his, her chest feeling tight. She couldn't blame him for being angry right now, not when Kaminari looked incredibly guilty.
Kaminari sighed, pushing himself up. "I-I didn't expect it to get this bad..." he whispered.
"Start. Talkin'." Bakugou growled, pulling Kaminari up by the collar of his robe.
"R-Right!" he muttered. "I..." He took a deep breath, looking at the five before him. He rubbed his forehead. "No matter what I say I'm going to sound guilty."
"Just speak!" Jirou yelled, turning away from him yet again.
He swallowed and nodded. "His... his name is Mineta Minoru... we're friends. I think." Kaminari let out a long sigh. "I don't really know... what we are anymore.
"I met him when he washed up on our shore. He was small and cold and had fallen overboard during a storm on the way back to his village. Apparently something went wrong with his boat. A-Anyway, he'd never seen a dragon before. You-You know... like most people," he chuckled. "He didn't believe I was one and he teased me a bit, but then I shifted for him. We were laughing and hanging out and he was telling me about how his island had so many pretty girls," Kaminari said, laughing. He froze and turned towards Jirou. "N-Not as... pretty as you, Kyouka."
A shy smile pulled across his lips, but Jirou scoffed. "Keep talking."
"I offered him a ride to his village. I knew he couldn't stay on our island and so I took him back. He asked me about magic and I explained I could use as much magic as I wanted. He was jealous because... humans can't do that," Kaminari said, looking towards Ochako and Todoroki. "Y-You guys know this!"
"Mmm..." Todoroki hummed.
"S-So I... gave him some," Kaminari sighed. "He really wanted to impress some of the girls in his village and I wanted to help. I-I mean I told him how long it took for me to impress you Kyouka," he said.
"So you stole all our magic to help this little shit get girls?!"
"No! Well, yes, but no!" he said. "H-He needs it! If he doesn't use magic, everyone will know he's a fraud. B-But it's not what you think!" Kaminari waved his hands. "H-He knows about our problem... I-I told him I couldn't keep draining the current to continually give him magic. But he's working on a solution to fully replenish the current and keep his magic."
Todoroki frowned. "Kaminari... that's impossible. The only way to replenish the current is to stop using and draining the magic. Currently, you've taken so much for him daily there's no time for the current to gain magical energy and build back up. With how much you take and how much the dragons need, there's no way you can give him magic and replenish the current."
Kaminari's eyes widened. "W-What? N-No... he's been working on a solution... a way to transfer all the energy back into the current. That's why we've been gathering the magic and putting them into the balls, eventually we'll have enough that we can-"
"No," Todoroki said. "I've been researching your kind for quite sometime now, if you keep doing this the dragons will run out of magic and it will be impossible to replenish the current."
"W-What?" Kaminari's face paled, his eyes widening.
"Denki, have you ever seen where he takes the magic? What he's doing with these balls of pure energy?!" Jirou asked, glancing at the rest of them.
"Uhm... No?" Kaminari muttered and covered his face. "T-Trust me I've felt so guilty for the past few weeks! I know the problem keeps getting worse and worse and I know Mineta wants to help! He's really planning something!"
"He's planning on stealing all your magic. Maybe he doesn't realize that if you deplete the magical current, all magic for dragons will disappear. Did you understand that, Kaminari?" Todoroki asked.
Kaminari's cheeks were bright red. "...No... I-I'm sorry... I... this is probably the dumbest thing I've ever done."
"Damn right it is!" Bakugou yelled, gripping his shirt. "You fuckin' moron! He tricked you!"
"B-But!" Kaminari gasped, gripping at Bakugou's arm. "I-I swear..."
"Katsuki!" Ochako gasped. "Let him go."
"This is why I hate humans! They're greedy and shitty and fuckin' awful! Dragons left humans behind for a reason! This is the reason!" Bakugou snapped. "They're selfish! Horrible fuckin' selfish shits! I can't believe you fell for it!" He tossed Kaminari aside, letting him fall to the ground.
"W-We just have to ask for it back," Kaminari said, coughing as he sat on the ground. "I-I meet him here everyday. S-So... tomorrow we can come back and ask him to give it back!"
"I doubt it'll be that easy..." Todoroki muttered.
"I doubt it," Jirou agreed, glaring at Kaminari. "I knew you weren't the smartest dragon. It never bothered me. It was cute and endearing," she began. "I knew that, but I never thought you'd be this idiotic." She sighed and shook her head. "I know you did all this because you're too damn kind-hearted and selfless. But you're an idiot, and I... I can't even look at you right now."
"K-Kyouka..." Kaminari sighed and ran his hand through his hair. "I-I'm sorry..."
All of them glanced down. It wasn't an easy situation, they were going to have to hope Mineta had some of the magic left. If they could take that back, and with Kaminari stopping, the current could gather more energy and replenish itself on it's own, ultimately fixing the problem, even if it took a few months to solve. Hopefully it hadn’t been depleted beyond repair...
"Tomorrow I... I promise we can get stuff back... I don't know if he ever really believed me when I told him how dire things were getting," Kaminari said. "With everyone here I-I can show him! He's not a bad guy... he wouldn't keep the magic for himself. I know he was trying to help-"
"Shut it, Sparky! Do you know how many fucking dragons are suffering because of this?! WHy the fuck wouldn't you stop at the first sign of something going wrong?!"
"I-I don't know... I thought... in the long run... we were going to get more magic out of it..." he admitted. "I-I really thought I'd be helping in the end..."
"Idiot!" Bakugou snarled, and swung his foot angrily against the rock. "Tomorrow!" Bakugou said, thrusting his finger into Kaminari's face. "If he does not agree to give back the magic. I'll rip his head clean off, and you'll be fuckin' next!" He slammed his fists together and began to storm back to the woods, obviously needing to blow off steam.
Ochako didn't want to stop him, knowing he needed to unwind alone. She could hopefully talk him down later, but admittedly, she didn't blame him. Tears glistened in Kaminari's eyes and though he had been nothing but a moron, she could tell he felt bad, especially when Jirou wouldn't even look at him.
Ochako sighed, praying tomorrow Mineta would actually give them as much of the magic back as possible.
#kacchako#uraraka ochako#bakugou katsuki#bnha#boku no hero academia#fantasy AU#a dragon's magic#this fic is outta hand
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Not so bad
*So this takes place right after the second chapter, starting at like 2am or so lol
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“Fu-ck! I can't-” a gasp, “I can't catch a goddessdamned break-nggh!”
And it was this- as strange as it was- that woke Logan out of his exhausted slumber.
Only slightly confused and a bit more than peeved, the demon stood up-body only wobbling slightly- as he headed towards the maker of the reverberating noise.
It shouldn't have been a surprise that Remy chose the room closest to his own- considering how loud the other's moans were-but what was surprising; the door was open. Logan's brow arched.
Bit of an exhibitionist are we?
Without much preamble, Logan simply waltzed into the room.
He was expecting to either see an embarrassed or lustful fae sprawled out before him, possibly both. For which he had some choice comments, that would include quite a few foul words, under the pretense of getting Remy to shut up-or at the very least be less noisy when dealing with himself- but the sight before him had his words dying in his throat.
True the fae was sprawled...on his side at least; his pale wiry frame and milky skin- speckled with tiny scales- was exposed before him, unhindered by neither shirt nor pants, as said items of clothing were thrown onto the floor in a heap, his shades somewhere along in that mix. The only saving grace to his modesty were some thin, cheap and faded boxers. That of which were barely hanging onto his thin hips- they were slowly dipping lower with each ragged breath that Remy took.
The fae was panting, eyes squeezed shut, chest heaving; as sweat plastered his hair to his forehead and rolled down his face. Both his hands were digging into the bed sheets-
“nghh”
Logan frowned,
at himself.
Here he was about to chastise the poor fae, when he himself was at fault for ignoring his senses. There was no scent of lust, nor pleasure, instead the entire room was clouded with agony and pain. Something he should have noticed from the moment he woke.
Remy's back bowed one second, then arched the next, his thin body shuddering as a tremor of pain ran through him. Pain no doubt coming directly from his wings.
“nggh”, another groan left him.
Logan bit at his lip, he could actually see the spasming of the feathery, streamer like limbs. How the muscles of it rippled and coiled...ever cramping and tightening.
It stopped for a moment, the fae’s entire form sagged and he huffed in relief-
Only for it to start up again.
The demon winced in sympathy, the spasms in Remy's wings had restarted so violently that it literally tied some of the free moving feathers into knots- and with each tremor the muscle pulled tighter...
“nghh”
Making up his mind Logan moved closer to the bed.
Remy's eyes snapped opened.
“Shouldn't you be asleep?”
The demon blinks, he has no doubt that his own hair is a mess and his current clothing is nothing if not rumpled but he did not expect the fae to speak so clearly, despite being in obvious pain.
How long has he endured this pain to be able to do so?
“I was”, he started after a beat, “ but your sounds woke me-”
Remy sits up at that.
“Oh I'm sorry”, he winces, “I'll just keep my mouth shut and suffer in silence-”
Logan isn't sure if he means that literally or sarcastically at this point.
“Go back to sleep Logan, you're swaying”
“I am not, I'm standing perfectly still, you however are swaying-”
“Oh- hey, what are you…?! Let me go!”
“Calm down, and lay on your stomach-”
“Like hell! What are you-?!”
“I'm trying to help you!”
Logan huffs, still pushing the fae down on the bed, “you need to sleep and I need you to shut up”
“Oh sure, it's a win-win for everybody, eh? It doesn't make a difference boo, my wings have been doing this shit for a while-”
The demon rolled his eyes, still pushing down, “then this will ease the pain, relax and let me help you”
Remy groans but let's himself be pushed down, hell knows Logans grip is painful, and he sure as fuck doesn't need anymore pain right now.
Remy near screams when Logan touches his wings. They were still spasming of course, but the demon somehow managed to separate the individual mess of the tattered, tangled mesh of his feathers back into its proper three pairs.
It's been a while since he could see the small of his own back. He was so used to having his wings hidden, worse yet when he was branded; especially considering that one of the brands was smack dab on the left side of his center wing and the closest to his spine. He felt that burn for ages after it was made. He never let anyone touch them after that. So when Logan runs a finger through the now visible crease of his spine, he shivers, feathers puffing- as tangled as they were-thoroughly unused to the feeling.
Usually he could separate his feathery wings on his own, not completely because of the atrophy but he could do it on his own. Just...not when they were like this, never when they were like this and now they were knotted-goddess it hurt.
He squeezes his eyes shut and he swears the grip he has on the sheets might tear them.
“Shh, it's almost over, only two more are still tied together”
Logan was being surprisingly gentle, but each slow pull of the ever-so-slowly-loosening-muscle was sending volts of hot agony throughout his body.
Logan winced as Remy cried out again.
The fae's eyes were shut tight, but that didn't stop the reflexive tears from slipping through them.
The demon pulled the bridge of the tied feathers as gently as he could- wincing once more as Remy's pained whimpers echoed out at the action. He pulled, once, twice, three times more before the last knot finally gave way. Now loose enough, he easily moved the cinched feathers away from each other.
That was it, no more knots.
Remy sagged in relief, giving his wings a tiny tentative flap. They weren't spasming anymore- well for now that is- so he wouldn't complain. He could sleep with his wings now at least.
“Thanks”, whispers the fae hoarsely.
It only takes him a second to realize that Logan hasn't moved and instead still held on of his feathers between his fingers. The demon had a pensive look on his face, one that unsettled Remy down to his stomach.
“This isn't only caused by the atrophy, is it?”
Remy shook his head, “nah, it's the everyday wear n’ tear, plus the overuse of the glamour and the-”
“And the brands?”
A rhetorical question. He stated it as fact, growling as he did so- the fae could only nod.
Flinching a bit, Remy started to sit up, only to be pulled onto Logan's lap and pushed back down again.
The fae blinked, eyes wide and body near frozen in terror. Did Logan expect ‘repayment’ for helping him?
“Is there anything else that could cause your wings to behave in such a manner?”
Remy swallowed thickly.
“Uh-um… I did kinda get slammed into a wall by a demon today so-”
Logan didn't say anything,he just gave a non committal “hmn”
“...or- or if I sleep on them wrong I guess? Come to think of it that's probably what happened...”
The fae trailed off, really not liking the demon's vacant stare. What was Logan going to do to him?
The demon still didn't say anything, his brows furrowed and his pensive look grew more intense.
Sleep on them wrong?
The wall was definitely his fault but...when he charmed Remy…
Was his placement of the fae in the Taxi also at fault? What about the chaise?
He had been tired and for as gently as he assumed he had placed Remy down, both times could have counted for the spasms of his wings.
And no doubt the brands burned onto him...
His fae should not be in pain at all.
A small whimper cause him to blink out of his thoughts, the fae in his arms was trembling. Without thinking, he brought Remy closer to his chest.
“I promise, no more pain shall befall your wings. I am no healer but I'm sure they can make a full recovery, especially now since you won't need to use your own energy for a glamour”
“...ok…”
Logan's brow arched. Remy's voice was soft, barely a whisper...nothing but lingering pain and fear glazed the room. The demon instantly assumed that the fae's wings were still sore- well that was nothing he couldn't fix.
He grabbed a pillow from behind him and placed it opposite his lap, before sliding the still shaking Remy onto it. Leaving his torso and legs over the demon's. With fae prone like this, it was easy to access his wings and even easier to see all the damage the poor, abused, appendages went through.
“I'll remove the kinks and bends from your feathers, so you can rest easy. Tomorrow we'll get some food into you, and possibly find a healer. I need you healthy-”
Remy simply nodded…
“This...this isn't going to be like one of those happy ending massages...right?” A weak chuckle punctuated the fae's question. But the thought still lingered and it left a bitter taste in the back of his throat. It's not that the demon wasn't attractive...it was just...he didn't...he didn't want too. But he made a deal, he'd have to regardless. He shuddered, it would be easy, wouldn't it? All he had on was a pair of boxers-
“If you mean a happy ending in you having less back pain and me actually getting some sleep then, yes-”
Remy couldn't help it, a sudden bout of laughter bubbled out of him, “that's not- yeah, ok. Sounds...sounds good hun”
He was worried, about this guy doing something like that? It was still a possibility sure but just that reply, that simple bit of little naivete in that answer...he could trust Logan not to hurt him.
The demon had no idea what he had said was so amusing, but the scent of fear had dissipated so he'd take it as a win.
“Good, then do brace yourself. While I doubt this would be as painful as before, I'm quite sure that it would still feel rather uncomfortable”
Uncomfortable couldn't even begin to cut it.
Remy groaned as Logan's deft fingers pinched, rolled, rubbed and squeezed at the muscles beneath his feathers. It didn't hurt per say but it sure as hell didn't feel good.
The best way he could describe it was when your leg fell asleep and you'd have to stand on it. The staticky, pins and needles like sensation made him squirm.
It was Not a good feeling.
Sometimes the sensation would run down his leg, causing it to twitch, or it felt like heat at the back of his neck. He had bit his tongue once or twice, the influx of tactile information his wings were getting- he was practically overloaded. His toes curled and his fingers clenched the sheets harder. It hurt, but it didn't.
Goddess, he hated the feeling.
To make matters worse Logan wouldn't give him a break to catch his breath or adjust. The demon just kept moving. Slowly unwinding and detangling feathers from each other and then pinching and squeezing them to remove the bends and kinks.
While Remy's wings could be described as feathery streamers, they did not necessarily act like streamers, they were made muscle after all. The kinks and bends-after being squeezed and pinched this-way-and-that to promote circulation- would disappear without a trace; leaving a happy feathery muscle in place.
Too bad the sensation of getting them like that was God-awful. Damn it's really been forever and a half since he properly groomed them.
One particularly hard squeeze from the demon cause Remy to help, his left leg kicking out involuntarily.
“You need to stop squirming”
“Sorry, I can't...I can't help it. I just- it feels so fucking weird-”
“Elaborate”
“It hurts but it doesn't? Pins and needles like...kinda? Just worse, a lot worse”
“Hmm, the nerve endings must be shot. Here”
The demon grabbed the fae's arms and placed them straight, next to his head”
“...what- what are you doing?”
Logan didn't answer, instead, he was running two fingers up and down between the space of Remy's wings, practically on his spine.
The fae squirmed.
“Hush, just lay still, I'm looking for it-”
“Looking for what-?!”
Logan, seemingly finding what he was looking for, pressed down.
Crck!
“Oh~”
Remy's wings drooped, they completely went lax, and so did the rest of his muscles- fuck that felt good.
“Glad it did-”
Remy hummed, only just barely caring that he had accidentally spoken aloud.
Logan nonchalantly moved his fingers up, pressing down on certain areas along his spine…
‘Crk!’
‘Crckk!’
‘Crk-pop!’
“Mhngh~”
Whatever the hell the demon was doing, Remy had no fucking clue, but he was certain that he almost never wanted him to stop. Still, he was known to be the curious type…
The fae's tongue felt rather heavy for some reason, but he tried speaking anyway. “ t'was that?”
Close enough.
“Those were pressure points, it should help restore some proper circulation to your wings, lessening your so called pins-and-needles”
“ ‘n ya doit ‘gain?”
Logan chuckled, it was rather amusing to see the spitfire fae like this, eyes half-lidded and body lax. His slurring words only added to the demon's amusement.
“I can do the rest if you'd like?”
“Mhm, plz”
Logan just chuckled some more.
Starting from the tense muscles in the neck, shoulders and the free area around his shoulder blades. Paying keen attention to the fae's more abused right side, Logan slowly worked his way down Remy's back. Nimble fingers moving in a small circular motion as they pressed slowly and deeply into the tissue, the tight knots and strained muscle didn't stand a chance and really neither did the fae.
Pleased hums and small moans spilled from Remy's lips as his muscles and joints cracked and popped in relief. His moans soon grew louder without him ever being conscious of it. All he knew was that the fingers pressing gently on his spine were making him feel like mush. Happy sleepy, fae mush. Good mush.
'Crrk'
'Crakk'
"Mnngh~"
The Demon meanwhile, simply chuckled, Remy was just about sinking into the bed.
Considering how tense the fae was, the impromptu massage went on for a while, enough that by the time Logan finished, Remy was practically on his way to sleep, that of course didn't deter the demon.
He continued where he left off with the fae's wings. He hated to leave things half done after all.
His wings were so used- scratch that, he was so used to pain-that the moment Logan touched Remy's wings, the fae jumped, tensing and shocked out of his sleepy state.
He hadn't expected the demon to continue with his wings, he had thought that Logan had only wanted him to shut up and sleep so that he, could actually get some sleep. It truly surprised him that the demon was grooming him.
He hadn't groomed his wings proper in so long and he can't even begin to tell you when last he had been groomed. He had forgotten how it felt like...
The demon above him raised a brow.
“Still pins and needles?”
Remy shook his head, chirping out a small ‘no’, he exhaled, willing himself to relax again...Logan wouldn't hurt him...it was just grooming.
Goddess he hadn't been groomed in ages.
Logan watched as the fae resettled, he was no fool. He knew very well that the wings of a fae were sensitive and vulnerable, so Remy allowing him to continue, especially since he was no longer in pain, was a sign of tentative trust.
He had never groomed anyone before but the premise was simple no? Separate, detangle and remove the kinks and bends, besides, the wings he held most definitely needed it.
With patience he wasn't usually known for, he gently pinched and rolled the bent feathery muscle beneath his fingers until it straightened. Would massaging it bring better results?
Shrugging internally, the demon grabbed a single feather and tried just that…
“Mnn~”
Massaging it worked better than he expected, kinks and bends filled away much faster and the feathers practically detangled themselves as they puffed up.
“hnm~”
Oh and Remy seemed to enjoy it, very much, quite frankly, if the fae sank any lower into the mattress, he'd fall through the bed.
Rolling his eyes, in, what was no doubt, fond amusement, the demon continued to groom his fae.
Remy's wings were clean, just a mess. Likely from only ever washing them in a shower and patting it dry with a towel. Even atrophied as they were, the demon could still feel the strength beneath it. While fae wings were usually fragile, it didn't mean there weren't a few with power. Something in his chest swelled with pride, that even at his weakest, his fae's wings were rather strong. All he needed was a proper grooming and a healer.
The healer would be found tomorrow, he make sure of it, but for now he'd continue the grooming.
Logan found the methodological movement very calming. He had originally expected himself to grow bored with the tedious action but it had the opposite effect instead. A plus, was the litany of pleased hums and moans from his fae, a nice filler for background noise.
The demon continued.
And by the end of the high hour, soft, puffed feathers were open, laying neatly- separated by the junction at the spine- on Remy's back. Not a bend or kink to be found. Remy's wings were beautiful, even with the tears, scratches and burns- those the healer could fix with ease- but right now they were absolutely beautiful...and puffy.
Honestly it looked like a baby chick with its newly coat of downy feathers. It was rather...cute.
Though he knew they would easily tangle again if he left them all ‘fluffed’ like that.
Gently he ran his hand down them to smooth it out. Marveling at its softness. Sure he had been holding them for over an hour or so but only now did he get to freely run his fingers through them. Slowly smoothing them as he went-Remy didn't seem to mind it.
Speaking of-Logan leaned down to listen closer- indeed he was, the fae was purring.
Actually purring.
The air in the room was doused with the taste of and sleep. A slow sugary flavor that the demon usually found too sweet and cloying. This time he was pleased to find it more of a honey and lilac than sugar and caramel.
How amusing.
Grinning and peering over the newly groomed wings, Logan could see Remy fighting with his eye-lids, literally nodding off.
“Go to sleep little fae~”
Remy sleepily chirped out a response and it took a moment for Logan to realize that he could not, for the life if him, understand what the fae had said. So far gone was he, that Remy had slipped back into a mother tongue, the actual chirps-and what sounded like a whistle- where absolutely lost on the demon, but nonetheless amusing.
“Shh, we'll figure it out tomorrow. Sleep~”
That seemed to placate Remy enough, he chirps out something else but quiets down quite quickly after that. The fae's eyes finally fluttered shut, body completely lax as he falls into a deep sleep
"Remy?"
He gets no reply, but the purring grew louder.
For some reason that makes Logan smile.
The demon continues to stroke the soft feathers of his fae's wings.
Smoothed out and as neat as they were, it was very easy to view their lovely colors. The dark gradient of purples, blues and greens was definitely unique but quite fitting for Remy.
He'd bet they'd be even more beautiful if they were unmarred. A protective growl escaped him as his fingers traced over the brands on his fae.
He would find a way to remove them, the burns and tears would be healed, but the atrophy… it would take quite a bit of physical therapy for Remy to be able to fly. Still, he had no doubts, his fae would manage.
By the looks of it, if Remy's wings were fully healed, they probably would have been able to be used as additional arms as prehensile as they were…
That brought an idea to his head, some beings were able to use their extra limbs as weapon...if fully healed, Remy would well be able to use his wings as whips, quick and powerful ones…
Yes, a healer would definitely be found post haste.
He liked that his Fae was strong-
Remy's purring upped a notch
-and soft.
Bonus:
When Remy woke up he was warm, very warm and very comfortable.
He blinked sleepily, still not fully awake yet and stretched a bit; wings flaring out and fluttering a little- ohh, that felt good~
What felt even better was the gentle petting of his wings. It was nice...soothing enough...to put him...right back... to sleep…
Wait.
Remy almost jumped, thankfully his memory of last night kicked in, or he would have probably hurt himself.
Logan, in what looked like dead sleep, had one arm draped around his waist.
The hold was not tight at all- yet still secure enough that if Remy had accidentally jumped out of his arms, the strong muscle would have likely left a bruise on his thin frame. His other arm was splayed across the fae's back, softly brushing down his feathers.
Remy had to wonder if he had been fussing in his sleep for the demon to be petting him even as he slept.
Either way it was... nice.
And he probably couldn't move anyway so why not go back to sleep and enjoy a bit of pampering? After all he couldn't tell you when last he was ever this warm or even had a proper bed. If the Demon wanted to cuddle who was he to deny that?
The Fae decided that things could be worse, Logan was...different.
But not so bad.
When Logan woke, he was warm-
And there was a purring Remy on his chest.
The fae had apparently made himself very comfortable, his ear pressed against the demon's heart, likely lulled under by the steady slow beat.
With Remy this close, the bags under his eyes seemed prominent. The Demon bit at his lip, the sun was already up, meaning that they were to find a healer today, but looking down at his peacefully sleeping fae...maybe they could wait till later.
Logan sighed, still running a hand through soft feathers. His fae was going to be a handful, he was sure.
But for now, in his current circumstance…
It was not so bad.
Nyx: I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS, THANK YOU (Dont ask how I managed this, it was a long process :P)
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Hey moddy how bout a vaderwan fic where Obi-Wan is an omega and Anakin is an Alpha
This went Obikin instead of Vaderwan. But I’m sure I’ll have some Vaderwan in the same vein at some point. (If I can get Acquisition finished off, I won’t feel like I’m repeating myself by jumping to some other Vaderwan stuff.)
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Obi-Wan recognizes the signs of heat as soon as they start.Though they’d happened only once before in his life, they were hard to forget.That was the day his world took a turn and the latent gene that had once helpedensure humanity’s continued existence switched on and he found himself longingto curl up in his master’s lap. He had thought puberty had been bad. By thetime Obi-Wan came to Qui-Gon, he was too far gone into his heat for thesuppressant medications to work and had to suffer through the fever of hisskin, the arousal that flooded through his veins, the bone deep ache forsomething he couldn’t place.
He’d vowed that he wouldn’t be caught unawares again, andbegan keeping two sets of medications on his belt so he could hide one in whateverquarters they were given or, if the mission called for mobility, in whatevertransport they were assigned.
Of course, when you’ve been abducted and lost your utilitybelt and had your transport blow up, that puts you in a rather tight spot, evenafter the rescue comes.
Which is why Obi-Wan is currently Force locked inside sparsequarters on the Resolute, trying and failing to meditate. The problem isn’t him.Or it isn’t only him. It’s the presence of his former padawan standing outsidethe door, as he has been for the last hour. Obi-Wan can feel Anakin’s frustration, his agitation and beneath it, asimmering arousal.
A handful of years prior to his Knighting, Anakin had cometo Obi-Wan complaining that he didn’t feel well, but it was nothing more than aslight fever and general malaise, so Obi-Wan sent him off to classes. It wasn’tuntil Obi-Wan arrived at the healers to collect Anakin after he’d gotten into a brawl with another padawan that the problem was revealed. Anakin hadpresented as an alpha. A more common occurrence than Obi-Wan’s ownpresentation, though still relatively rare.
Obi-Wan became extra vigilant about his suppressants.
He managed to keep his secret from Anakin for five years.
Anakin had just walked into the war room when Obi-Wan feltthe faint tingling deep in his belly, the tightening of his skin. He finishedhis report with Admiral Yularen and attempted to slip from the room withoutalerting Anakin.
As he neared the door, Obi-Wan watched Anakin’s spinestiffen, pulling the man to his full height. His head turned so quickly Obi-Wanwas sure it was going to wrench off his neck.
A wealth of emotions flooded Anakin’s eyes: disbelief, joy,anger, need, betrayal, want. The wantObi-Wan had been aware of for years. Once upon a time, he’d thought SenatorAmidala would become the focus of Anakin’s attention, but his former padawanhad made his attractions quite clear.
Obi-Wan tried to ignore them.
As Anakin turned toward him, Obi-Wan threwdignity aside and fled. But he knew Anakin would follow. He felt the hot pulseof possessiveness along the remains of their training bond, just as he rushedinto his temporary quarters and engaged the locks on the door, shoring them upwith a little help from the Force.
And now here he stands, or sits, rather. On the edge of thebed, arms looped around his waist, listening to Anakin prowl outside his doorlike a Hrosma tiger. Obi-Wan rests his face in his hands.
“Master.” Anakin stops pacing and takes a breath.
“No.” Obi-Wan’s voice is slightly muffled.
“Let me in.” Anakin holds his palms against the door. He canoverride it. If he needs to. But he’d rather Obi-Wan let him in. Still… Hepulls the cover off the lock panel.
“I will not.” Clearer now. Obi-Wan’s moving closer to thedoor.
“Obi-Wan.”
“Anakin…this isnot the kind of thing I want to share.”
“But it’s exactly the thing you need to share.” Anakin presses his face against the door. Oh. Anakin can smell him: familiar soap,black tea and spiced honey, and a warm musk that makes Anakin’s throat tighten.“Obi-Wan…I can help.”
Obi-Wan makes a half-sputtered choking noise that resemblesa laugh. “The last thing I need is…help.”
“I’m sure you’ve done this alone, Obi-Wan. You know you can. But youdon’t have to. Look…how perfect is it that the two of us werebrought together? How completely unlikely it is for an alpha and an omega tomeet, let alone know each other as well as we do?”
“Anakin, you didn’t even know I had a designation untilnow.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re rare, Obi-Wan. And you, you’reeven rarer. I can’t help but think—No.I know the Force brought us together.”
“The Force or Qui-Gon Jinn,” Obi-Wan mutters.
“Force.” Anakin lets his head fall against the door with asoft thud. “Do I need to tell you how good you smell to me? How much I want totouch you, taste you? Feel you over me, under me, all around me. Obi-Wan?”
There’s a muffled sound behind the door, half sigh.
“Obi-Wan,” Anakinsays. Then, “Please. Please let mein. I won’t… You know how I feel. I know you know. I’m not exactly subtle. Iwant you. I’ve always wanted you. And I think… I think you want me too. And Iwish—” He sighs. “I wish you’d just let yourself have something you want. Andput us both out of our karking misery.” Anakin laughs shakily. “If you’re in heat andI’m in a rut, who’s going to be lead the charge against Ventress?”
The silence is heavy, expectant. Then Anakin hears the lockdisengage.
Obi-Wan stands in front of the door, barely realizing he’smoved. He can feel Anakin on the other side. Can smell him. Warm spice and thefaintest hint of mech oil. Obi-Wan could bury his face in that scent. Press hismouth against Anakin’s throat, run his tongue along his clavicle, bare his ownthroat for Anakin—
Obi-Wan shivers.
“Obi-Wan.” Anakin’s voice is a low rumble and Obi-Wan’sbelly clenches, warmth spreading down between his thighs, making his cocktwitch. He feels himself grow slick, the sensation still strange but not nearlyas unpleasant now that Obi-Wan may actually have a use for it.
“Please…” Anakinsays.
And moments later, Anakin’s words – they couldn’t bothafford to be compromised and Obi-Wan did want– had him disengaging the lock and opening the door.
“Obi-Wan?” Anakin says, voice rough with surprise, witharousal.
“You’re right,”Obi-Wan says, voice steady over his shuddering breath. He can’t quite meetAnakin’s eyes, looks somewhere in the vicinity of his left ear. “I—“ He cutshimself off, frowns.
Then Anakin’s there, slipping into his personal space aseasily as he always has, closing the door behind him. “It’s okay. You don’tneed to explain. Just…tell me this is okay.” Anakin’s hands cup the back ofObi-Wan’s head, fingers tangling in Obi-Wan’s hair and tilting his head back.Anakin’s eyes are on his mouth.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan says, watching the way Anakin’s eyes light upand then grow dark as he leans forward and kisses Obi-Wan soundly.
The kiss is the opening of a floodgate and Obi-Wan losestrack of time and action. The next moment, he’s naked, on his borrowed bed,with Anakin lying before him, shirtless, still in his boots with his trouserspushed partway down his hips to reveal a thick erection.
“I need to fuck you,” Anakin rasps.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan says. It’s the only word he can seem to sayright now.
Anakin pulls Obi-Wan astride him, tugging off his tunic,pulling his trousers down and arranging him as if he were little more than aliving doll. He draws long fingers over his hip and along his ass, one fingersliding into the crevice and over his slick opening, then slowly inside.
“Oh Force,” the words are barely a whisper, “you’re so readyfor me,” Anakin says.
Those words send a pulse of heat through Obi-Wan evenas Anakin gathers him close, grips his hips and steadily pushes into him untilObi-Wan’s firmly seated on his lap staring down at Anakin in surprise. He wouldbe lying if he said he hadn’t expected to be rolled onto his belly as Anakin buried histeeth in the back of his neck.
“Later,” Anakin groans, shifting and setting a pace that ohso quickly drives them toward climax.
Obi-Wan’s eyes widen as Anakin presses deeper into him,swelling until all Obi-Wan can focus on is the fullness of his body, therhythmic pulses of Anakin coming deep inside him and the rush of orgasm boththe thought and feeling triggers. Obi-Wan’s muscles clamp down around Anakin, amating drive from long ago, pushing his body to do what it…actually isn’tdesigned for anymore.
He doesn’t even need to touch himself. The orgasm tearsthrough him, leaving him breathless, grasping at Anakin’s slick shoulders. Andthe mess he leaves across Anakin’s belly and chest is enough to make Anakingroan and grip his hips as he releases inside Obi-Wan once again.
“I never…” Anakin coughs. “I never imagined what this couldfeel like.” He eyes Obi-Wan. “Come here.”
Obi-Wan allows himself be pulled close, head bent to restagainst Anakin’s clavicle. He relaxes under the soothing strokes to his back,his hair, his temple.
Anakin will stay locked inside him for some time. Upwards ofhalf an hour, even. Or, that’s what the articles say. It’s the strangestfeeling for Obi-Wan to lie there, on top of his former padawan, and to feel thesudden pulse and blossom of warmth between his legs, the wetness seeping outaround where he and Anakin are joined when he’s too full to handle anymore.
By the time Anakin is able to slip out of him, Obi-Wan isaroused again. Not the desperate drive to mate of earlier, but his normal, veryhuman arousal.
Anakin looks Obi-Wan in the eye and grins before pushing himonto his back and settling between his thighs, draping Obi-Wan’s legs over hisshoulders and taking his cock into his mouth before Obi-Wan can register theidea.
Anakin’s mouth is hot and lush and just the right amount oftight around the sensitive tip and it feels like mere moments before he’scoming again, tangling his fingers in Anakin’s hair as his back bows and theworld around him vanishes.
Moments later, he feels a gentle kiss against his hip and thenAnakin is sliding up next to him, pulling him into his arms. For a momenteverything is safe and warm and right.And that’s all he needs for his tired body to give in to the exhaustion that’sbeen pulling at him since well before he was rescued.
When Obi-Wan wakes again, minutes or hours later, the heatis burning through his belly. This time, Anakin, waking mere moments afterObi-Wan opens his eyes, puts him on his belly, pushes his legs together andfucks him slow and deep until Obi-Wan comes, pressed tight to the mattress andshuddering as his own semen soaks the sheets around him.
That feeling feeds through to Anakin who groans, bitesObi-Wan’s neck and comes, pushing so deep into Obi-Wan that he can’t help thescreaming sob that comes out of his throat as Anakin swells inside him.
“If you could become pregnant,” Anakin says in Obi-Wan’s ear“I think this is the one that would’ve done it.” And it’s such an Anakin thing to say that Obi-Wan letshis head fall the mattress in a useless attempt to hide his laughter
“O-Obi-Wan,” Anakin says and thrusts hard enough to makeObi-Wan gasp and quiet as he feels Anakin twitch hard and himself grow wetter.“I don’t think now’s the time to laugh at me. You’re going to be enough of amess as it is. You were still so slick and open from earlier,” he finishes,warm breath teasing across Obi-Wan’s ear.
“Force,” Obi-Wanmutters, or tires to mutter. It comes out as more of a croak.
“How long do you think the heat will last?” Anakin lays histemple against the back of Obi-Wan’s head.
“Ah. Literature gives a range, but a standard day or so seems…probable.”
“Meaning you don’t know?”
“…No.”
Anakin snickers against his hair, warm breath makingObi-Wan’s scalp tingle. “That’s fine. Iwant you to myself for at least two more days.”
Obi-Wan hums and tries to shift his legs to a morecomfortable angle, the weight of Anakin and Anakin’s trousers, amazingly, still downaround his knees making it physically impossible. “At least that will give ustime to get you out of the rest of your clothes.”
#obikin#obi wan kenobi#anakin skywalker#alpha anakin#omega obi wan#swfic#alpha!anakin#omega!obi#obixani#star wars#star wars: the clone wars#star wars prequels#sw abo#queued post
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