pairing ➴ arthur morgan x fem! reader
summary ➴ the boundaries of your relationship with arthur have always been irrepressibly blurred — this morning, just one razor-edged nightmare sends him straight to your bed.
cw ➴ arthur pov, canon-compliant, hurt / comfort, mutual pining, piv sex, dom / sub dynamics, breeding if you squint, based off this ask ! maybe the most cliché thing i've written sorry lol, but i'm back ♡ smut under the cut
wc ➴ 2.4k
when it comes to licking wounds, arthur considers himself more than proficient. in laving enzyme-laced saliva over lacerations and abrasions, in drooling biocatalyst bandaids over bumps and bruises. both figuratively, and literally; it rings true now most of all, the tip of his tongue tracing the bloodied innards of scar-tissued cheeks. and he's never been a sucker for self-pity, but, he feels stuck. he's been staring at the flimsy ceiling of his tent for god knows how long. inebriated through the catatonic cocktail brewed up in the tight, throbbing bounds of his skull, knee-deep in the stagnant ponds of sleep deprivation. just as murky as the olive-green swamps of saint denis. the hard heels of his palms rise to rub at dry, bloodshot eye sockets.
his head hurts. nightmare, night terror, sleep paralysis — he's not overly fond of any of the names. he just wishes they'd stop. needs them to stop. it's been long enough, the sizzling, buckshot-burnt hole in his shoulder is just another knurled scar now. arthur doesn't much like being cosied up in cruel old cotton country either, neighbouring with all the moonshine-swilling, inbred bastards; spinning a pretty yarn with his shimmering, silver deputy badge, and an equally as glittery tongue. chasing yankee gold and decaying dreams. and the heats been bothering him like a rock stuck in a horse hoof.
clemens point isn't all bad, though. the lazy days are few and far between, most of them spent with you. whenever he had the chance to whisk you away. offered to teach you how to play poker by the pronghorn hide tables a couple weeks back, to which you promptly assured him, you already know. robbed him blind to make up for the brazen presumption, beamed at him the whole way through. paired with the weight of your head over his denim-clad lap, an afternoon nap. impromptu, passed out by marigold-cloaked spindly trees at the sun-dusted edge of camp, his thumb tracing lazy circles on the nape of your neck.
spun you around under a star-soaked, candied violet twilight when you asked him to dance, too. told you he had two left feet, flushed a furious petal-pink, but indulged your coquettish request anyways. arthur wished he kissed you, then. he would've, if he wasn't so worried about giving you a whiskey-laced regret. he drank too much. and when he passed by that big old orchard on the way home, to bring you back cherries for breakfast; you were melt-in-your-mouth beautiful laying on your tummy in the sweet grass, with ruby-lacquered lips and tacky fingertips, tongue darting out to lap up tart juices trickling down your wrist.
would you suck him off like that? lick a kittenish, slippery path up the thick shaft of his cock? arthur would be gentle with you, he's sure, wouldn't force himself down your tight throat or tug at your hair harshly. he'd have plenty of ways to show his gratitude, after. hook your plush thighs over his shoulders, suckle a messy mouthful of your syrupy pussy and stuff his fingers inside knuckle-deep. make you sing for him. he doesn't know much, when it comes to you — he just knows he's bigger than you. stronger. could cup the backs of your knees and pin them to your chest without breaking a sweat. wouldn't let up until you squirmed sorely to get away, oversensitive, salted beads clumping on your bottom lashes.
he rises from his cot on uneven footing, forgoing a shirt, not so much as splashing his face with water. squinting at at the golden-sweet, swollen sun, trickling her luminous syrup into champagne-coloured clouds. just after five am, if he had to guess. early enough for camp to be entirely still. dawn starts to dilute the glaucous sky. he gulps back a big breath, citric dandelion and swamp air on his sinuses, and grimaces. huffs a virulence-dipped sigh. he could relieve one of the guards, could start on chores early. and still, he harbours a puffy predilection for your bed. he should let you sleep. he wants to, he does. you make it so hard.
arthur knows he's running on ravenous instinct over logic, when wandering to the sun-bleached flaps of your tent. dulled and disoriented, he just knows he misses you. not in the way he's missed anyone else before. it doesn't sting like scraped knees or fishhook-pricked fingertips, it aches abysmally, a flea-eaten, maggot-riddled cavity carved jagged in his chest. as vexatious and incessant as a swarm of insatiable fruit flies. swollen larvae rooted in the ravines of his ribs, making the muscles of his heart feel bloated, bulbous. clogging his adrenaline-fatigued arteries with muck. its a coffee-brown bruise to have a crush, and he dons the dappled contusions like fawn fur.
his forearm sweeps the cream canvas wide open without so much as a word, spilled sunlight warming the spotted skin of his back before the fabric flutters closed again. intruding. your name froths from his chest, fizzing out shotgun-fast, a shaken up beer bottle. messy, out of his control. you're sleeping, still. fists tucked under your jaw, in your little lace chemise. you look real pretty in it. plucked right from a fable, like a princess. something straight out of one of the faded storybooks strewn around camp. arthur's lips curl into a subtle, small smile. could've made your fortune off it in another life.
he should go. why can't he just go? works his weighted indecision around his teeth like clumped chewing tobacco. swallowing the acidic scald of his bruised pride, arthur slips in your bedroll beside you, your back flush to his chest. you stir, then, shimmying softly against his sinewed muscles.
“'s jus' me.” he mumbles thickly, waterlogged words muffled by the mess of your hair. you're warm, nothing like the muggy, heavy heat. a welcome weight anchored to his front.
but the comfort is gone as soon as it came, you roll to lie flat on your back, sluggish shells of your hands rubbing slowly at your weary eyes. “hi,” you scrunch your nose affectionately, blinking at the blankets pooled around his hips and his bare form; sun-spotted from the tenacious ferocity of lemoyne heat, freckle smeared, bronze-tipped broad shoulders and tanned, brutish arms. without his well-worn embellishments; his hat, his holsters, when he's not the brawn, the brute or the enforcer. when he's just arthur. heart-achingly human.
a dozy, drowsy smile dimples your cheeks. your voice is light, but it still manages to carry a sing-song softness. “can't sleep?”
god, you're so good to him. he grunts throatily, propping his weight up on corded forearms, clearing the coarse block in his sleep-coated throat. he decides a simple answer is for the best. “bad dream.”
something in your demeanour shifts, he notices, a knowing kink forming between your brow. your shoulders slump with a short exhale, you lean up, and kiss him. slot your peach-tender lips over his for a short second, then slouch back on the bedroll with a quiet thud. makes him wide-eyed and stupid. arthur draws in a bated breath, wincing at the delicate, lightning-bolt heartbeat pulsating under his pectorals.
you give a pitchy gasp when he closes in on you again. the bridge of his nose bumps back on yours, calloused fingertips cupping your jawbones and digging into the flesh firm. he panics, briefly, of coming off too strong, of crossing a burnt, singed line by matching your winsome affection with an aggressive appetence. but you just whine over his wet tongue, and it's so, so sweet, on his bullet-shocked eardrums.
resolve as frayed the work-worn ends of his lasso, and amorous in his advances now, arthur's hungry hand clamps over your bare thigh. asking silently, squeezing a trail upwards, to the little divot between your leg and clothed cunt. the taut tendons in his arm screech from the suffocating embrace of self-restraint. rumpled sheets ruffle together as you spread them wide, rocking your waist up in waiting. he fumbles clumsily through the slick-damp fabric, swiping two thick fingers through the slippery mess. you're soaked, all strained breaths and trembling thighs, as he kisses a sloppy, honeyed path down your neck.
mouthing at the flats of your collarbones, pressing the heat-cracked skin of his lips between your heaving tits. he pushes into your drooling hole with his ring finger, slowed, swallowing a bitten off-moan when he works you up to take two. a shuddering breath gets lodged in his throat, caught like a rabbit's paw in a snare trap. you're soft, scathing around his driving digits, knotting his abdomen into lecherous twists.
and it's cloyingly better than any ill-imitation he imagined up before, all the lonesome sooty, shadowy nights when he fisted himself furiously into his mattress. hooking the hard pads of his fingers into your soft walls, he curls up greedily, wringing another sequence of watery whimpers out of you. arthur wants to devour you whole, wolf you down like strawberry syrup. there's a sore, simmering desperation etched into the chalk of bones, zipping through his calcium-thick skeleton; his cock swells, throbbing fervidly at the leaky tip, your glossy beads trickling into his open palm.
he's huffing, now, can hear the dulled, heavy breaths echoing out in between your pitchy pants. pumping, forcing his entire forearm with the drive of it. your flittering fingers cinch around his wide wrist, thumbing the bulging, baby blue veins, catching on the keloid-shaped, sawtooth battlefields carved into his metacarpals.
“arthur, arthur —” you hiccup a hurting, torn wail, tugging lightly at the burnt-sand strands on his scalp. prying his lips off your shaky sternum, snaking your trembling hand to cup his blood-warm crotch. “just fuck me.”
he hisses a tangled breath out between his teeth when you squeeze, stroking the hard, hot outline of his cock. quick to serve your whiny plea, he hooks both thumbs into the crumpled crease of his waistband, wrangling it down to settle around his mid-thighs. you writhe, angling your sweet, swollen cunt up to meet his swaying shaft. jesus, do you always sound like that? cinnamon-sweet and dizzying pliancy, all for him? arthur should be taking his time with you. would, if he were a different man. less mauled and mangled, maybe. his ruddy, dribbling tip taps your puffy clit, he lubes himself up with your dewy slick as much as his blistering impatience will allow.
the blunt head of his cock catches on the glistening rim of your cunt, feels your arms loop shakily around his shoulders as he sheathes in. a slow, languid push, and he groans, tender and tortured; arthur's sought out the comfort of a soft cunt a couple of times, a no strings-attached fuck. the ones where he wiped the mess of spend from his stomach shame-faced, palmed a crumped billfold into the clasp of a disenchanted working girl, left in haste. left feeling worse than he did before. he's no stranger to one night stands, but none of them felt like this. maybe it's different because it's you.
it is different, because it's you. you've seen him at his worst. and you're shuddering underneath him, sweat-shimmering skin, glossy-eyed and dumb. breathily begging him to move, to fuck you like he means it. swinging your calves around the small of his back, love-locking him in place. raking red-hot lines down his tense, flexed traps, while he stuffs his cock in deep. slides his stocky, thewy arms underneath your back to fuck you all that harder. pumping his hips sloppily into your heat, rolling two fingers rough over your puffy, slippery bud. it doesn't take you much, arthur realises smugly, a responsive, sweet little thing like you, to bow your back, clench and convulse helplessly around his swelled base. drooling milky dew over the seam of his heavy balls, soaking the chestnut curls stippled over his skin.
he lowers his head again, planting clustered kisses against your sensitive skin, clumping together like honeycomb. your cheekbones, your chin, your cupid's bow, your temples, your jaw, the bridge of your nose. pecks your forehead last. warm and sticky, pollinating every plane and ridge of your pretty face with lust-sweetened adoration. he hears your teeth clink together once, shuddering in oversensitivity. with shaky syllables, you part your spit-shined lips. “inside.”
it's so, so simple, just one airy word. lands like a loaded gun. still manages to cinch his lungs together rattlesnake-tight, sends an aching spasm down his blanketed cock.
“sweetpea,” he gasps a guttural groan, brows pinching together painfully. adam's apple bobbing and beading with sweat, arthur clasps his hands over your flushed cheeks, buttercup-soft, the tightened muscles in his tensed jaw whirring like steam train gears. slowing his thrusts into shallow, shy bucks, forcefully clenching the hardened muscles in his stomach. “you ain't thinkin' proper, you — i shouldn't.”
“i am,” you stutter through the twitchy aftershocks of your orgasm, fluttering lashes and helpless babbles. he watches with rapt, bumblebee buzzing attention as you struggle to steady your trembling tone. nudging, nuzzling your face into his open palms, cooing a promise. “i want it, i want you — i want all of you, arthur.”
moonstruck, arthur stares at you with sequinned, celadon irises. all the vertebrae in his spinal cord stiffening, the rapturous, gooey pool in his pelvis rupturing — he barely breathes a hoarse moan before flooding your tight, tender insides, shoulders crumpling inwards with carnal pants while his cock spurts out warm, wet pulses. the cracked, callous skin of his palms hugging the meat of your hips, massaging the fat in a too-tight grasp. pounding your sappy pussy, filling you up with silky ribbons, your slick clinging a sticky film to his fuzzed thighs.
he's sure to avoid swathing you in his muscled mass, releases a drawn-out, abrasive sigh, all the way down from his stomach. doesn't bother pulling out just yet, though. brackets his arms around your skull, fingertips stroking at the sweat-damp curls by the crown of your head. you're quiet. sealed eyelids, almost as if he never woke you in the first place. silent besides the shaky succession of uneven inhales, and it forces a flurry of treacherous tar-black anxieties to bloom in his head.
and you giggle, gentle and girlish, smoothing out the self-condemnation imprinted into his face, sugaring sex-soaked air. makes his muscles melt at the tensed tissues, uproots a dry, wheezy chuckle of his own. breaks a toothy grin over his face. “i think,” your voice faint and flimsy, arthur's head cocks in keen curiosity as you swallow a short breath. you wear the same drowsy, dreamy smile from earlier. your breath fans out against his lips, lullabied words dribbling down like warmed milk. wrapping your wrists around his neck again, whispering a creamy, crushed-velvet confession to his ear. “i think i'm in love with you.”
summary ༺๑ˊ- robert likes your eyes. you don't like eye contact.
pairing(s) ༺๑ˊ- robert robertson x female!reader (gender-neutral)
cws ༺๑ˊ- established relationship, lots of kisses, oral f!recieving, edging themes, lots of coaxing
requested? ༺๑ˊ- yes/no
n/a: my autistic ass ate this rq right up. it got long
"why do you keep doing that?" robert leaned back against the counter of his kitchen, crossing his arms expectantly as he eyes you up.
"doing what...?" you murmured, gazing into his eyes for a split second before looking back at what you were doing. you didn't even realize how little you looked into his eyes.
"that."
you quickly glanced back up at up, before tearing your gaze away. robert chuckled, shaking his head fondly. god, you were so cute.
"look at me," he purred, tilting your chin up with his pointer-finger. you didn't, just looked down at his forearm. he smiled.
"you keep looking away." robert analyzed, his voice particularly gentle, his hand moving to brush his thumb over your cheek, which was warm to touch.
"just... i don't know. it's weird." you muttered, still looking away. "looking into my eyes is weird?" he inquired playfully, kissing the corner of your mouth. "am i that ugly?"
a small giggle emitted from you at his question, shaking your head as you gently 'hit' his arm.
"i guess i just... can't." a sigh spilled from your mouth, looking to the other side now. robert let out a hum, moving to kiss your cheek.
"you can. let me help?"
"okay, y- yeah. fine."
you were sure you were going to die. this was going to kill you. and he's barely done anything yet.
"c'mon look at me, baby." he whispered against your skin as he kissed down your sternum and onto your soft stomach, looking up into those hesitating eyes of yours.
you reluctantly peeked down at him, feeling your cheeks grow hotter as he was already looking right at you. "there you are, pretty." he cooed, slowly travelling lower.
he finally reached the waistband of your underwear, hooking his fingers underneath.
you got excited, tilting your head to the side.
you looked away.
"nuh-uh," robert hummed, releasing your underwear with a small snap, chuckling as it made you twitch and huff at him. "why'd you stop?" you grumbled, furrowing your eyebrows slightly at him.
"is it a crime to want to see your pretty eyes?" he sassed, pressing a kiss beneath your navel, mouthing against the elastic, nosing at your skin.
"i hate you." you murmured, but managed to gaze down at him again, your breath hitching as he finally hooked his fingers into your underwear and slid it down your legs, tossing it somewhere on the floor. a problem for future him.
"yeah? do you, now?" he smiled, kissing at your inner knee and kissing up your inner thigh as he moved to get closer to you, eventually ending up on his stomach between your legs. his favorite place.
as his kisses grew closer to the apex of your thighs, you subconsciously closed your eyes, like how you normally would do.
he stopped. again.
"fuck, robert!" you groaned in frustration, only to be met with his wide grin. you were going to kill him. "it's not my fault, pretty. you knew the rules." he kissed right above where you needed him, an almost apologetic gesture.
he reached up, intertwining his fingers with yours, squeezing your hand comfortingly. "c'mon, you can do it," he coaxed softly.
you obliged, meeting those big brown eyes, pupils blown out with lust. lust for you. you whined, your hips twitching.
robert chuckled softly, holding your gaze as his lips moved down. he pressed the flat of his tongue against your wetness, before licking up. he moaned. fuck, he'd be happy if this is how he died. buried in your thighs.
you stared at him with wide eyes as his half-lidded gaze lazily stared right back, the tip of his tongue massaging circles into your clit.
his freehand rested on your lower stomach, gently pressing into the skin. you whimpered, throwing your head back.
again, he paused.
"robert, please! i can't do it!" you complained, begging for some sort of reprieve. some mercy from his cruelness—when in reality his only rule was for you simply to look at him. well, "simply looking at him" wasn't very simple for you.
he planted kisses into the patch of sensitive skin where your pelvis met your thigh, humming. "do you want to cum?"
"well, y- yeah, bu—"
"then you gotta look at me, sweetheart." robert chuckled, nosing at you affectionately.
it took a few long seconds for you to hype yourself up, finally leering down at him yet again.
"hi, sweetie," he smiled, his mouth quick to resume his ministrations, wanting to reward you for being so good for him.
you held his eyes in your gaze as he lapped at you, his brown eyes twinkling in the dim light as he lost himself in you.
he looked so perfect. felt so perfect.
he squeezed your hand as he took your clit into his mouth, suckling gently as his tongue flicked against it, watching as your eyes rolled back.
he didn't mind this time. he knew you couldn't control it when he made you feel as good as he always did.
he went back to massaging your lower stomach with his freehand, little circles amplifying the growing heat.
"i- i think i'm close," you gasped out, thighs beginning to tremble over his shoulders. robert's eyes crinkled slightly in satisfaction.
without much warning, you came into robert's mouth. robert groaned, not letting up as he kept lapping at you needily. like he was the one getting pleasure from this instead.
the post-orgasmic sensitivity began to wrack your body as he kept sucking at you, pushing at his head. he laughed, finally pulling off.
"do you like eye contact now?" he asked, nuzzling into your thigh, looking up at you half-lidded eyes, his lips wet and slightly puffy.
"no." you huffed. robert bit your thigh playfully, making you swat at him.
"one day." he whispered, planting a final kiss to your thigh.
SUMMARY: it's been three years since you've seen robert. your break up wasn't going to go down in history as being the most amicable but was else could you expect after spending all those years together? but despite the souring end of your relationship towards the end, and all the years that have passed, there's something still there. lurking under the surface of all the hesitancy and skepticism. is the spark worth tending to? or will you both burn?
PAIRING: robert robertson x hero! afab!reader, slight robert robertson x invisigal
CONTENT: childhood friends to lovers, to exes to..lovers? multipart series, reader has a hero name (Lume, Luminara), reader has a background and some trauma to be uncovered, loss of a parent, slight description of an unnamed illness, reader does not have a relationship with their mother, slow burn, slight canon/timeline divergence eventual smut, mild angst (for now), robert can be a bit of a dick, no use of Y/N, pronouns used: they/them, little to no description of body type, and no description of complexion
WORD COUNT: 10K.
a/n: welcome to the series! super excited to have this out and see how you all enjoy it. this is my first gn/afab reader so if there's anything I missed in here please point it out to me! along with any missed tags as well! I hope you enjoy and lmk what we're thinking so far! all banner creds are in the tags, and more detailed credits at the end of the work!
An infinite amount of thoughts run rampant in your mind at any given moment. It wards sleep away from you half the nights of the week, it distracts you from your daily routine, and slowly takes more and more away from you every passing day. You fear that you may never be able to find a way to silence them. But the one that always manages to push itself through the crowd to make itself known is: whether or not your father would be proud of you.
You were on the edge of eighteen when your father passed. The man you knew, larger than life and full of energy, was taken away from you far before he died. In the end, he was bedridden, thin, and paled, but he still managed to find the energy to show how much he loved you every time you came to visit him. Your logical mind tries to undo all the damage that’s been inflicted upon you by saying, Of course, he would be proud of you. That your hiatus from hero work doesn’t erase all the good you’ve done - the work, the blood, sweat, and the tears you put in this life; that despite it all, you’re still a hero. Logically, you know that he would be. But you still can’t find it in yourself to believe it.
The third anniversary of your hiatus is approaching fast. In three months in six days, it will mark three years since you’ve been active in hero work. The thought always weighs on you heavier whenever it gets closer to the date, but that doesn’t mean you don’t sit with it every day. And with the anniversary on the rise, it also means that the news articles recapping your career, your task force, and questioning whether or not you’ll ever return to hero work will flood your feed and newspaper stands in no time. You think that you’ve learned to hide the fact that you’re on the verge of drowning very well, but everyone in the office has learned how to tell exactly when it finally sinks in for you.
Blonde Blazer brings you coffee and, coincidentally, can’t finish her breakfast pastries. Galen offers to pick up the random dispatcher position that opens up when he can tell you’re really down. His attempts at being nonchalant, the shrug, and his “More work makes it easier for me not to watch the clock. Honestly, you’d be doing me a favor, Lume,” are weak at best, but you like to let him believe he got one over on you. And Chase ups the ante on how often he hounds you about hiring another official dispatcher for the Z-Team. You know he means well - you know that they all mean well. But you can’t take on another person to look after right now. Especially when you know just how likely it is that within a week, you’d be in the same position you are right now, taking over as dispatcher instead of assisting Blazer in teaching your rehabilitating new heroes.
The sun reflecting off the glass windows of the SDN building hurts your eyes, but still, you take the moment to let it warm your skin. You’re tired of carrying this weight. You feel it in your bones, in the deepest part of your soul. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to shake it; it clings to you. It’s attached itself to you in ways you didn’t even realize, embedded itself, and taken root so deep you feel as though you’ll feel it forever. You didn’t know just how much being a hero had become such a fundamental part of how you viewed yourself until you weren’t one anymore. Your hero costume feels like just that. A costume. Days like these, you feel like you're masquerading, playing make-believe, and imposing yourself on the people who are the real heroes. But in the end, what did it matter? Your watch still dings as it ticks to your clock in time, you’re still expected at work, and maybe despite it all, in the technicality, you are still-
“Luminara!” The young girl who mans the front counter sends you a bright smile and a big wave, “Good morning!”
She’s a sweet young girl, a sophomore in college who only works about three days a week. You still remember the first day you met her. Her eyes lit up, and her mouth parted as you walked in the door. She introduced herself with shaky hands and an even shakier voice. She told you that she was a big fan, that she had even met you once when she was about seven years old. That she still has the picture on her nightstand. She’ll never know just how much that moment meant to you. Or how, after that encounter, you locked yourself in your office and cried for almost an hour. Her eyes are still just as bright the first time you met her as she looks at you now. Maybe even brighter. She looks at you like you’re still a hero. It twists your gut into a knot. And you still can’t place whether it ignites something in you or drags you deeper into the abyss.
Nevertheless, you greet her the same way, passing her the Red bull and the granola bar you packed yourself for lunch. She tries to refuse it, but you’re already at the elevators, waving her off with a smile.
You sigh as the doors slide shut, thankful that you’re the only one inside. It gives you the time to mentally prepare yourself for the day. The management of the villains turned heroes, especially the Z-Team, the hovering. You don’t have the luxury of being able to feel bad about yourself. Not here and not today. It’s not fair. To your colleagues, to the members of the Phoenix Program - they deserve you at your best. So that’s what you’ll do. No matter how hard it is to distinguish the fire in your mind, you will be the best you can be for them. A few short moments later, the elevator dings, and you open your eyes. The doors slide open, and Chase stands at the ready just outside, hands locked behind his back.
“Well, well,” he says, “real gracious of you to finally show your face.”
“Chase, it’s 8:06,” you reply.
All Chase does is huff through his nose and begin his regular track of following after you.
“Still late. Another minute and I woulda called in for a wellness check.”
You’ve known Chase since you were a child, still notching your height on the doorframes in the house you were born in. Your father was a busy man before his illness stole his life from him. He was California’s top hero and a part of the Brave Brigade, so the majority of his time was spoken for. And your mother had other places she would have rather been than be at home raising you. So in came Chase. The youngest member of the Brigade and the unwilling babysitter of both you and Robert. Half of your childhood was spent with the two of them, bouncing back and forth between your and Robert’s houses, driving Chase up the wall with your antics. Chase likes to tell you that this is your karma. Payback for all the years you spent on his heels, driving him crazy with the thousands of questions you badgered him with. And he tells you that he has a lot to pay back.
“Har, Har. Another year and I’m buying you a Life Alert, old man.”
“Fuck you,” he says, “Always were a little punk.”
You smirk and swallow down a chuckle. He’s always been so easy to piss off.
“And yet, who’s following who?”
Chase grumbles in his acquired old man fashion, but still follows you down the hallway. You would find it odd that he didn’t have a quick quip up his sleeve to throw at you. Had you not known him as well as you did. Chase likes to have the last word. Unless he has something else he wants to bring up. You know that it’s coming. Because at this point, it’s routine, teetering on the edge of being a comedic bit. He asks you whether or not you’re ready to give in. You tell him no. He rants and he raves about how you’re too fuckin’ stubborn for your own good. How you’re gonna run yourself into the ground. You think that’s what your father would’ve wanted? For you to work yourself to death inside of a sad, gray fuckin’ cubicle? All good points, in his defense. But you still tell him no, that you don’t do sidekicks and wander off to find some work to occupy you. Which is never hard at SDN.
“Don’t even start.”
He lets out a grumbled sigh, and you hear the pitter-patter of his feet pick up pace as you near the cubicles.
“You know it’s time, kid. You can’t keep going like this. And I ain’t gonna be around forever to take care of your sniveling little ass. Shit! I’ve spent too long doing it already! So why don’t you stop being a pain in my ass and give this old man a break, huh?”
You force yourself to chuckle. Because if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.
“Chase, really, I’m perfectly fine! I got it all managed!” Your head cranes over your shoulder to look at him as you round the corner. “And like I always say, I don’t do sidekicks-”
The sight makes you rebound into a full stop, Chase nearly crashing into your back at the sudden cease in movement. The cubicle you mentally prepared to sit at for the entirety of your day is filled. A man sits in the chair you bought out of pocket, clad in an SDN distributed button-up that looks to be about a size too big, hunched over the desk, pressing randomly at the buttons of the dispatcher monitor. But it’s not the fact that there seems to be a new Z-Team Dispatcher that stumps you. It’s the familiar stature, the body language, the fluff of auburn hair. For a moment, you sit in denial. A lot of people have hair that color. A lot of people are lean, a lot of people slouch, and a lot of people poke and prod at things they’re unfamiliar with. And even though you try to convince yourself that you’ve just seen someone who happened to look like him, you feel it in your gut. It’s not a wonder, it’s a fact.
You don’t need him to turn around; you don’t need the confirmation. You just know. Because you’ve learned everything there is to know about him. You learned the arch of his neck, the part of his hair, the curve of his shoulders. The tips of your fingers tingle at the phantom memory of how he felt against your skin. You remember everything about him. Every freckle, every burn, and scar. Every bump and ridge, and missing piece. You retained every lesson given about his body, his silent language, his soul. No matter the size of the room or the number of people who filled it, you could always find Robert. It was strange, really. The gravitational pull that tethered the two of you to each other. The one that is clearly still alive because, unprompted, Robert turns in the swivel chair, takes the headset off, and turns to you.
And for a moment, it feels as though the world stops spinning. Everyone else in the room seems to blur out of frame, and it’s just you and Robert left. You, Robert, and the halo the traitorous sun casts upon him.
It’s been three years since you’ve seen Robert. Three years since you’ve seen him stand to his full height, see his lips part and his eyelashes flutter. Three years since you’ve heard his voice, and when you finally do, it hits you straight in the gut.
“Lume.”
And it’s utterly world-shattering. Hearing him call you by the name the public refers to you by and not your name. You see it form on his mouth before he takes the moment to correct himself. It sounds awkward and clumsy. Hesitant, almost. And above anything else, it sounds wrong. You can’t recall if there was ever a time he’s ever called you by your hero name outside of the public eye.
“I didn’t know you worked here.”
It’s been years since you last spoke, more than the sad excuse for a text that you were angry to receive, and the pathetic drunken voicemails that you hoped he never listened to. How could he have known? There’s no way that he could have. You doubt Chase told him-
Chase.
At least the motherfucker has the decency to look a little sheepish as you turn to him, eyes flickering from you to literally anywhere else in the room. You and Robert differed in many ways, but one noticeable way was that while Robert lost touch with Chase after his father died, you grew closer to him. You talked on the phone frequently, texted regularly, and sent birthday and holiday cards every year in the mail. It was Chase who convinced you to get back out there, ten months deep into your hiatus, the one who told you about the mentorship role opening up at SDN. He’s done so much for you, you don’t believe you’ll ever be able to repay him. But all you want to do right now is send the old pruny bastard flying out the fucking window.
You force a deep, hearty breath out of your nose and point your first two fingers in his direction.
“We’re talking about this later.”
“You’ll have to catch me first.” Chase doesn’t spare a second as he scurries off to his neighboring cubicle and squeezes himself close to his desk, “This body can be fast when it wants to be.”
“You’re lucky I waited this long!” Chase adds. “I ain’t got the time to sit around and wait for you to come to your fuckin senses. So take the fuckin’ help, kid.”
Your body feels like it’s vibrating with the amount of emotions that swirl through you. Your skin heats up, and your heart bangs itself around in its cage inside your ribs. In the years passed since you’ve seen him, you’ve come to believe that if the time ever came that you did cross paths again, you wouldn’t feel this way. You imagined that you’d see him and just feel a sense of nostalgia. That by the time you saw him again, Robert would simply be a boy you grew up with. A man you shared similarities with. A part of your childhood you’d always hold dearly. Not the ex you spent almost a year mourning the life you built with him in your head, not the man who left you in such a state after the breakup that you spiraled downwards hard. So hard that you scared people. That you’d see him and your stomach wouldn’t squeeze, and your skin wouldn’t tingle. And it makes you so angry. That your own body revolts against you just at the sight of him. Even after all this time. Even after all the destruction.
Those eight years come rushing back at full force as you take him in. The nights on the couch. Wearing his old, tattered sweat pants and sharing a beer you couldn’t stand the taste of. Robert asleep on your chest, his fingers indenting in your shirt as they flexed on your waist like he was scared to lose you in his sleep. The nights where you fought in your kitchen, on opposite ends of the island, when both of you were at the ends of your ropes, and they were no longer adult conversations or you and Robert versus the problem. When they turned into you versus Robert, screaming matches and insults that ended with you crying yourself to sleep in your bedroom and Robert lying awake on the couch, unable to sleep due to the sound of your sobs reverberating off the walls.
Robert rubs at the back of his neck in an anxious habit. There’s a look on his face that’s a mixture of hope and hesitance, and the question you’d been dreading tumbles out of his mouth.
“It’s been a while…how have you been?”
You don’t know how to answer that.
Should you be honest? Tell him that you’re tired? That you’re stuck in what feels like a constant state of fight or flight, that you spend half of your time reckoning with the fact that you don’t know if you’ll ever have what it takes to be a hero again after what happened to you, that going the trauma you did and your breakup right after the other changed you on a fundamental level? That seeing him now for the first time in three years, now working at the same place you do, makes you feel things you don’t know how to explain yet. Or do you smile at him, be polite, and tell him you’re doing fine?
And despite the mask you have on, he can tell.
“Loaded question, I know. Probably isn’t the best thing I could’ve said. Sorry.”
He lets out an awkward chuckle, but your heart still squeezes at the sound.
“It’s fine, Robert. Have you met the Z-Team?” You ask.
His eyebrows pop to his hairline, then he blinks and sputters,
“I, uh- No, not yet,” he scrambles to take his seat and put his headset back on. “You’ve worked with them before?”
He looks up at you for your answer. Flashing those soft brown eyes at you, his lashes brushing his cheeks as he blinks. It makes you want to run your fingers through his hair, feel him lean into your touch, and have him kiss your palm. It’s instinctual. An instinct you thought you’d shaken years ago. And you decide at that moment that it’s better not to look directly at him.
“You can say that. They’re definitely an acquired taste.”
“They’re a gaggle fuck group of jackasses if that’s what you mean by an acquired taste,” Chase calls over the wall.
You can’t help but chuckle at Chase’s commentary. As much as you want to be professional, Chase’s words held some truth. Robert will definitely have his hands full with this lot. But in the plethora of dispatcher shifts you had with them and the few lessons you had with a few of the members, you’ve managed to form an odd sort of bond with them. Which Chase thinks is troublesome, seeing how many times they’ve been such a pain in the ass that their dispatchers quit before the week was up. He believes it to be a ploy so that Blazer will get so fed up that she’ll have no choice but to put you as their dispatcher full-time. And Chase “will be damned if you spend any more time in this fuck ass cubicle with these no-good-shitty-ass-hero-wannabes.”
“Well, you know me,” Robert says, “I’ve always been one for a challenge.”
Robert’s eyes flick up to you again, a sly smirk pulling on his lips. You’ve always been so infatuated with Robert’s eyes. They truly were the window to his soul, ever expressive. They shine and crinkle in the corners when he’s happy, fade and blacken when he’s angry. And they shine just like they are now when he- Yeah. You definitely shouldn’t look directly at him.
For a second, you find your exterior softening. Your shoulders dip in towards your chest from the curved position of leaning on the desk, and you can feel your lips try to tick up in the corners at his implication. But then it hits you all over again. How things ended, how it took him seven-and-a-half weeks to reach out after the breakup- as if you hadn’t begun to build a life together. As if that life wasn’t ripped away from you, as if it wasn’t his choice.
You stand to your full height once more and step back. And then that displaced look on his face returns.
“Good luck on your first day, Robert. Don’t let them push you around. They respect that.”
The wheels on the swivel seat drag against the floor as he pushes himself out from the desk, straining to follow you until you’re out of his line of sight.
“Lume, wait a sec-”
You make the conscious decision to keep moving. And start to believe that is how you’ll navigate this new area with him. Not lingering, and always moving. Maybe in the long run, this will be best. You’ve hurt each other enough over the course of your lives, and until you’re sure being around Robert won’t hurt you more, you’ll keep moving.
JULY 16th, 2022. THREE YEARS PRIOR.
“And so, effective immediately, I will be going on an indefinite hiatus from Hero Work.”
Prior to this announcement, the room had been pin quiet. The occasional click of a camera or pop of a water bottle sounded, but not one person in that room had made a noise until now. The gasps are loud, they fill the air, and strike you straight through the heart. A woman in the front row covers her mouth with the tips of her fingers, a man in the far right corner bows his head and takes his wide-rimmed glasses off to rub at his eyes. The disappointment is evident. There’s shock, and fear, and grief written all over their faces. Reporters look around the room for answers that only lie with you and murmur amongst themselves.
They react to your announcement like death. They’re grieving the kid of the Brave Brigade member who followed in their father's footsteps, the one who grew into the shoes they laid out to fill and earned their place amongst the new top heroes of California. Your father made a legacy for you, made space for you in the legend that became a household name, and you’re hanging it up. Because if you’re not around to soar through their skies and keep the streets safe as you have been for the past decade, Luminara is as good as dead.
“I could never thank you all enough for the endless amount of support and opportunities you’ve given me. And I hope, despite my decision, you can still look back on my efforts to keep the citizens of Los Angeles safe with pride.”
You can feel the tears begin to burn behind your eyes, and a strangled cry tries to crawl its way out of your throat. The tears you must furiously blink away irritate your head injury, a deep, hidden pain underneath the gauze the doctors carefully bandaged around your forehead. You clear your throat and push yourself to finish.
“Thank you all for being here. I will not be accepting questions at this time.”
Then the crowd erupts. The cameras flash until the room is white, and reporters shout your name. Your team scurries to usher you away, your publicist taking your place behind the podium to take over where you left off. Your manager, the same one you’ve had since you were seventeen, takes you under his arm and tells you that you did good. But it doesn’t feel that way. You feel your failure every time you move, the stabbing pain in your back, the sting of your head injury, the scrape of your bones. You’ve only just announced that you will no longer be taking part in being a hero, and you already feel as though you’ve lost a piece of yourself. It makes you want to pull away, push your publicist out of the way, and take it all back. Shove the words back down your throat and rip your bandages off to prove you’re okay. But you know this is the decision that must be made. And that hurts the worst.
For the past ten years, you could always say that you knew what tomorrow had planned for you. You’d wake up early, just as the sun begins to peak over the mountains, and prepare yourself to be Luminara. Sore through the Californian skies and protect the city you’ve called yours since you were young. But now…you don’t know what tomorrow holds for you. All you know that is waiting for you is an empty house and a fridge full of booze you can’t drink.
Your team escorts you into a nearby break room, depositing you in a hard plastic chair and pushing bottled waters and muffins in your direction. They talk amongst themselves, attempt to talk to you, but it all sounds so distant. You want to respond, you want to answer whatever questions it seems like they’re asking you, but all you can manage to do is stare wordlessly at the crack in the wall and try to fight off the breakdown you feel building under the surface.
“Excuse me, Luminara?”
A hand comes down on your shoulder, and you nearly jump out of your skin. The meek young intern who has seemingly been calling your name much longer than necessary quickly removes her hand as she feels you flinch under her touch.
“You got a text,” she says.
“Oh,” you murmur, taking your from her outstretched hand, “thank you, Amber.”
The brightness stings your eyes, but it only takes a blink for you to adjust and read the notification.
Robert
You doing okay?
Robert
I just saw your press conference.
Robert
I’m proud of you.
The first emotion you feel after days of embarrassment and grief is anger. Your blood rushes, and your chest tightens. He’s proud of you? After everything that happened, he has the nerve to tell you he’s proud of you?
-
“You’re a fucking hypocrite.”
The clock is close to ticking to your second hour of this fight. A fight you’ve had a countless amount of times by now. Dinner is abandoned on the table, Robert’s chair is still pulled halfway out from where he stood in attempts to flee the return of this conversation. You don’t blame him for wanting to run from having this argument again because you don’t want to have it either. But the difference here is that you’re willing to have difficult conversations to save Robert from himself. You refuse to grow accustomed to the bruises and gashes on his skin. You refuse to allow him to continue to ignore the fact that his unorganized plans to find Shroud will end with him getting killed. It isn’t a matter of if anymore. It is a matter of when. You’ve woken up from too many nightmares of burying him, alone in a bed that’s still made up on his side. Too many nightmares of having to speak at his funeral, once as Luminara and once again as who he truly knows you as. Of having to throw dirt on his casket and only having pictures on a mantle and distant memories to remember him by.
“How am I a hypocrite? Please, tell me! Because all I’m trying to do is make sure you don’t push yourself somewhere you can’t walk away from.”
He stands on the opposite side of your kitchen island, lit by fluorescent light. His molars grind against each other as his chest continues to stutter with angered breaths.
“You sit there and get on to me about losing myself?” He gasps out an angry chuckle and stretches his pointer finger at you. “You’re in the same boat as me, sweetheart. How many nights have you spent at headquarters?-”
“That’s different, and you know it!” you interject.
“How many nights did I have to make sure you’ve eaten? How many times do I have to tell you to give it up and get rest, just for you to tell me you don’t have the time to rest? But I do it, and it’s a problem?”
You let your head fall into the comfort of your palms, fingers rubbing and pulling at your temples. Your ears are ringing, and a migraine starts to build at the base of your skull. It’s been months since things between you and Robert followed the normal way of life. Quiet nights spent tucked into one another on the couch, falling asleep still sticky with sweat but too exhausted to shower, waking up to a kiss on the forehead and a cup of coffee on the nightstand had all been replaced with this. Leaving for work before the other has come home, if they have at all. Notes left on counters about Beef running low on food with no loving sign off, arguments in the kitchen you danced in, laughing into his neck as he spins you.
It’s been so long that you can no longer pinpoint exactly when this all started. You don’t know if it was the first time you found Robert on the brink of exhaustion, eyes ringed with dark circles, and fighting sleep to the death just to follow one more lead. Or the first time you found Robert sewing up a new gash in your guest bathroom at 3:52 in the morning. But you’re tired. All you need is for this task mission to be over and for Robert to at least try to understand where you’re coming from. That’s all. Just one clean break, where you two can start fresh and put in the effort to getting back to being okay again.
“These are two entirely different circumstances, Robert. They can’t be compared,” you sigh.
“They’re not, though! You’re fighting against the goddamn Syndicate,” He huffs out your name in a tempered growl, “You’ve got no clue what you’re up against. You think just because you have a few extra hands than I do that you can take down one of the most powerful villain organizations like it’s easy? You’re going in just as fucking blind as I am.”
His voice doesn’t raise in volume but grows weighty.
“The only difference between you and me is that I dedicate my time working to successfully complete my mission. You do it because if you stop running, you’ll actually have to sit with all your loss, and all your mistakes. And you can’t fucking stand it the idea that maybe you’re not as perfect as the billboards have made you out to be.”
The anger and frustration falters. It’s true that in the months you’ve spent going in circles, running round 2’s and 3’s of the same argument, that you’ve grown accustomed to the way things unfolded. You’d bring it up, Robert would huff and bare his teeth like a cornered animal. You’d try to clarify your reasoning, hands outstretched in offering that was up to him whether he wanted to take or bite. Despite believing you had your walls built high enough now in preparation for what would inevitably take place, Robert is able to pierce through them. He always had. Just never like this before. Never has Robert pierced your soul like this before. Never has he been armed and chosen to wield it against you. The soft brown eyes you’ve spent half your life gazing into, watching irises gleam, and pupils expand, have hardened- the beautiful highlight of gentle expression extinguished and replaced with a look of anger you’ve never seen directed at you before.
“You like to forget that I know you.” He says. “And I know you’re a fucking hypocrite.”
-
You feel the material of your phone creak under the clench of your hand, the pathetic thread of messages taunting you through the screen. For a moment, you consider letting the message sit forever unanswered in your phone. Because eventually, his name will shift downwards in your messages, sit at the bottom forever out of sight. Eventually, the memories won’t haunt you, you won’t replay every fight, every smile, every late-night postcoitus come down where all you did was lie wordlessly in each other’s presence, tracing shapes onto the other person’s skin. You consider taking a deep breath, shutting the damned thing off, and handing it back to Amber. But something else takes over you, and before you know it, your fingers are frantically typing at the screen.
I have a skull fracture, two broken vertebrae, and just told the country I might never keep them safe again, so I’m doing fan-fucking-tastic, Robert. Thanks so much for deciding to reach out.
You get no reply. And you can’t decide whether or not that makes you content or sends you deeper into anguish.
APRIL 2025. PRESENT.
A lot of things have transpired in the last few months that Robert had not been expecting.
He wasn’t expecting to get blown up, fall hundreds of feet out of the sky, and spend four months in a medically induced coma. He wasn’t expecting to get jumped or rescued by Blonde Blazer, of all people, and spend the night with her at a hero bar. He wasn’t expecting to walk away at the end of the night with a new job and a chance to be Mecha Man again, and he absolutely was not expecting to now be your colleague. Or employee? Underling? He wasn’t exactly sure about your position or the hierarchy at SDN just yet, but he’s now sure he will be seeing you for eight hours a day, five days out of the week.
He still remembers the last time he saw you. Unexpecting, and angered by the lack of resolution in your relationship, and drained from your undersupply of rest due to your task mission. He remembers seeing your smiling face on half the billboards in the city, hearing your voice on the ads that played in every app he opened, or on the TVs of restaurants and electronic stores he passed by. There were times he found himself standing in place, letting it play in its entirety, simply gazing. He remembers seeing your press conference on the news. He remembers reaching out to you afterwards, and he remembers instantly regretting it. But time passes, as it always does, and that memory gets lost in the log of the million other regrets that he has. In the end, your name had been added to that list more than he’d care to admit.
The day goes by slowly, the clock seems to lose its pace, and Robert can’t stop looking at it. And he can’t stop looking for you. He tries to keep his mind preoccupied, to keep his focus on dispatching and not on you, but the task proves more difficult than he remembers warding off the thought of you being. You’re in the same building as him. For the first time in three years and that fact keeps biting away at the back of his mind. He just needs a glimpse, he thinks. Then he could center himself and try to get the team through their first shift of the day with the least amount of casualties that he could manage. He could get by with just a glimpse.
He breathes in deeply through his nose, his leg bouncing as he rubs harshly at his face. Chase was right. These guys are a gaggle fuck group of jackasses. They mock him, they don’t listen and refuse to take their job as heroes even remotely serious. Now, he understands why it’s been so hard to fill this position. The team laughs over the comms, cackling about yet another shitty joke about his name and about how Invisigal saw him in his underwear. So he takes the second. He puts his microphone on mute and dials down their volume. And like an angel, you appear just as he glances up.
You round the corner, your face relaxed, teetering on the edge of looking tense to the average person. Someone must call your name because your face pulls into the well-practiced, softened look you wear to make sure you seem approachable. But your expression melts and your eyes warm, a smile pulling on your lips once you recognize the caller. The sun hits you at just the perfect angle that makes your skin glow. And as creepy as it may sound, as you speak to the person whose name he’s yet to learn, he takes the perfect moment to admire you. Not on a magazine or through the pixelated screen of his phone, but through the lens of his own eyes. The curves of your face, the shine of your eyes. The way your suit hugs your figure. The dip of your waist and the apex of your thigh that shows through the gap in the latex. A sight Robert no longer has the right to admire so blatantly as he is now. Not after how he left things. But he could never pull his eyes off you.
“Listen, I get admiring from time to time, but this is starting to get fuckin’ weird.”
Robert jumps.
Chase is leaning over the divider, arms half folded and chin jutted down in silent jest. Robert doesn’t know how much Chase knows about your breakup. But if the interactions they’ve shared since he’s been is any hint, it doesn’t seem like he’s holding any grudges. Or, with some god-like strength, you chose not to tell him exactly what happened. He knows that you were close enough to Chase that you would. He can remember all the times he’d come home from work to follow the trail of your joyous voice into the bedroom to find you on a call.
He’d kiss your forehead in greeting, then leave to shower before joining you in bed. You’d still be on the phone by the time he came out, laughing and recounting stories to whoever obtained your attention through the line. Leaving Robert to mouth at your neck and rub at the skin of your stomach to try and steal it back, just to find out the person you’d spent three hours on the phone with was none other than Chase. Even through all the hardship you faced towards the end, inside and outside of your relationship, that was one thing that never changed for you.
“I wasn’t staring,” Robert says, adjusting the headset right again, “I was thinking.”
“Yeah?” Chase goads, “Thinkin’ bout what?”
“I…am not required to answer that.”
Robert attempts to fake his focus on his dispatching, enjoying the seemingly rare moment of silence over the line when Chase’s voice travels through the air again.
“Still single, y’know.”
“What?”
Chase says your name softly, and it sounds like a song, as he nods in your direction,
“Still single. If you were wondering.”
The sentence lands heavy. Stupidly enough, that hadn’t even been a thought that crossed his mind. Even now, with the question he originally didn’t have now answered, it sparks something in him. You were a vision, a miracle on two legs. You were kind and generous to a point that if you weren’t stopped, you’d give until you had no more. Anyone would be lucky to have you. And at one point, he was that lucky person. But now he was…well. He didn’t know what he was to you anymore. Was he simply an ex? The guy who broke your heart after eight years spent together? Was he written off as simply a childhood friend you lost touch with because that was easier to explain than the mess of what your relationship turned into? Or was he something else? Something new, unconfirmed whether it was something good or bad.
“Listen, I don’t know how much you two talked about…what happened, but I don’t think that’s ever gonna be a possibility,” Robert says. “Like ever.”
“Didn’t need to.” Chase replies, “I was there to witness the worst of it.”
Robert’s heart sputters. It wasn’t as if he’d never thought about it. He did. Often. And even if he was stupid enough to believe that you were doing fine, he got the evidence to prove that you weren’t. Six 8-minute-long voice memos you sent to him, drunk, over the course of your first two weeks apart. The six voice memos that added up to roughly an hour would forever be ingrained in his mind. He can time every sob and sniffle, he deciphered every befuddled murmur, he listened to every curse of his name. He knew you were bad - because he was too. But Robert had not been okay for so long that it was hard to tell when he got hit with another blow. He was used to not being okay. He knew things were hard for you, but he never thought you’d be in a place where you needed help getting out of. And he never thought he’d be the one to put you there.
“Wasn’t good. Drinkin’ a lot.” Chase says.
Chase looks at you with a cocktail of emotion. A look he’d deny ever having on his face, but he looks at you with such pride, and fear, with love and hope all wrapped up into one. Robert and Chase have always been close, but Robert always saw Chase as the cool older brother he always dreamed of having. Somebody to talk to, to look up to. Somebody who would be there for him. Chase looks at you like a parent does as they admire the child they’ve watched flourish into adulthood.
“Kid’s strong though. Came back in the end.” He states. “Who knows? Maybe you'll both come back in the end.”
From across the room, you laugh, angelic and sweet. And he wonders if the person you’re speaking to feels the same warmth flood through their chests at the sound. He doesn’t fight the smile that appears on his face, but it falters as your eyes drift to him. Your brows cinch in confusion as you find him already looking at you, and Robert quickly pulls another half-assed grin and sends you an awkward wave. Which you return, just as unsure as he was.
“But what the fuck do I know?” Chase says, “Maybe they fuckin’ hate your guts and think you’re an emotionally constipated cocksucker who needs to invest in a good therapist to work through the long fuckin’ list of issues you’ve got going on.”
Robert’s face scrunches, and he flinches back at the statement,
“Was that something that was said?” He asks, “That sounds way too specific to just come up with on the spot.”
Chase only shrugs.
“Private information. Not at liberty to confirm nor deny.”
The thought had appeared to you earlier this morning, but it decides to revisit you during lunch. If there is a God, it’s obvious to you now that the guy really doesn’t like you.
You imagine somewhere beyond the sky and the clouds, he laughs at your strife and torment, weighing out which would be the funniest option to fan the flames with to watch you struggle even more. This one is especially cruel, though. Somewhere deep in your mind, you began to believe you may never have to see Robert again. You’d never have to feel the swirl of emotions in your gut, never have to relive all those memories over again. But this isn’t a passing moment. You don’t see him in the corner of a coffee shop; you don’t get the choice to speak to him or pretend you never saw him at all. He’s here now, and there’s no way around it.
Though the air in the building has shifted for you, those around you stay the same. People still wave to you as they pass in the halls, make conversation at the vending machines, and you do your best to keep up. But it’s hard. Your mind strays, retracing your steps to find its way back to every encounter you’ve had with Robert. Recent and former. Your chest grows heavy at the fact that you’ll now have more experiences to add to the list that your mind rewinds again.
A hand wraps around your clad wrist, and you halt in your step. You don’t need to turn to know who it is. You knew that it was only a matter of time before Robert sought you out, ever the diplomat when he wished to be. You knew the conversation was coming; you just wish it didn’t have to be so soon.
“Hey,” he breathes, “can we talk?”
You roll your lips and take a look around the hall. This isn’t the place to have this conversation. But you don’t have much of an option- especially if you want to limit as much interaction with him as possible.
“Let’s go somewhere private.”
His fingers drag across your wrist as he lets you go, the feather-light touch fading slowly as you lead him down the hall to the first conference room you can think of.
You let him in first, let him take a seat in whichever chair he chooses, as you lock the door and close the blinds. Dread sinks over you, head to toe, goosebumps erupting over your skin as you pull the chair out on the opposite side of him. You’re still close, less than three feet away, but any closer is dangerous.
You don’t know where to start. You don’t know if you should speak first or let the awkward silence swirl through the air until Robert mulls over what he wants to say. You don’t know if the conversation will simply skim the top or if Robert believes that you’ll get to the bottom of everything that’s happened between you and come out people reborn. But you don’t have it in you to delve that deep. Not here and not today.
“So..” you trail. “How was your first shift?”
Robert blows a huff of a chuckle out of his nose,
“It was, uh, something,” he answers, “definitely something.”
His chair is angled towards you, pulled out from the head of the long table to close the gap, elbows resting on his knees, folded over. His presence doesn’t take up as much space as you remember. You wonder when he learned to make himself smaller.
“How many times have you dispatched them?” He asks.
“More times than what was in my job description.” You chuckle. “It’s hard for them to keep a dispatcher.”
“Yeah. I can see why.”
For a moment, the air is lighter. You share a soft laugh at the now shared experience of the chaos of the Z-Team. He looks at you through his eyelashes and his cheeks round with a smile. But then it all comes crashing down on you once again.
“Listen, Lume.” he starts. “I can’t even begin to apologize-”
You decide at this moment that you can’t. You believed that you’d have the strength to resolve this here and now, and move forward with a new slate. But the fear takes hold of you and drags you back.
“Robert, let’s not do this. Not right now.”
“I just want to-”
“I know what you want to do.” You say, eyes softened and smile pained, “Just not right now.”
His chest falls, and he drops his head. Your chest sinks at the disappointment in his posture. You’ve always hated the dejected stance on him, always hated when you hurt him. But this time you don’t extend your hand. You keep it tucked to your chest and don’t offer the chance to be bitten.
He nods and finds your eyes again.
“Okay,” he says. “How do you want to move forward?”
Yet another question you have no idea how to answer. But you have to, nevertheless.
“I have too much going on right now for things to be difficult in another part of my life,” you start. “I don’t know how things are going to progress from here, and I don’t know how either of us will feel in the future. But right now, I think the best way is to keep what happened outside of the office. Start fresh for now.”
He takes a moment. Letting your words really ruminate before he decides what he wants to say. Then he nods again.
“Alright. I can do that,” he replies. “Just know whatever you need, I'm here.”
The statement stuns you. It’s been a long time since you viewed Robert as someone you could rely on. But it would be nice to be able to feel that way again. You send him a soft smile and nod,
“Okay.”
“You weren’t as hard to find as I thought you’d be.”
Chase turns to look at you and then swears, with a snap of his fingers. He pulls out a chair in defeat and plops down into it. It was always so funny to you when you got the upper hand on Chase. It’s not often, but the victory is sweet every time.
“Let’s get this over with.” He says.
You pretend to think, finger tapping obnoxiously on your chin,
“Nah. I think I’ll wait. Drag it out a little longer.”
You sit in the chair beside him at the small rec room table and slide him a Crunchbar. A peace offering that he hesitantly accepts. He looks at it like you poisoned it, keeps his eyes trained on you as he grabs it like he’s waiting for you to launch yourself at him. Once it’s in his hands, he tears the wrapper open and breaks it in half, sliding the side still in the wrapper over to you.
“This’ll be good for you, kid. You need the break. And Robert will be good.”
You know that. You know that you’re overworking yourself, and you know that Robert will be a great dispatcher. But it doesn’t ease the sting. You lean slightly to take the candy bar in your hand.
“How’d the day go?” You ask.
“As good as it could go for those shitheads,” Chase says, “Flambae lit a park on fire, Sonar fangirled in front of his hero and made a goddamn fool of himself- now, that was some funny shit - and Invisigal rocked Robert’s shit.”
You stop mid-peel of the wrapper and almost choke on your breath. The other two instances you could predict. That was all in the realm of normal for the Z-Team. But what was that last one? You clear your throat quickly and ask for clarification.
“I’m sorry- What happened?”
And Chase tells you as if you had simply asked what the time was.
“Invisigal happened.” He says, “Didn’t listen to what Robert told her to do - big fuckin’ shock there- they had it out right here, and she punched him.”
Before you can truly register the thought that’s formed in your head, you’re up and out of your seat, phone in your hand, and on the way to the closest conference room.
“Where the fuck are you going?”
The door is left ajar in your leave, and you still have no idea what exactly is that you’re going to say when you type out your message.
Team Meeting in 5. Conference room B.
The team is already there when you arrive, which still surprises you. You’d like to say you know exactly how you earned their respect, but you don’t. It all happened before you had a chance to notice their change. One day, faith for you was born. And it showed. This gives you hope that the conversation that is to be had will go well.
The small chatter that filled the room ceases, and they greet you all in their own personal manners. They smile, and all break out into the regularly chosen pieces of dialogue after a new dispatcher is selected. They tell you the new guy sucks, that he’s nowhere near as good as you are, that they want to talk to Blazer about making you their official dispatcher. Except for Invisigal, whose line of sight is strictly trained on the mahogany of the table. She chews on the inside of her cheek and takes a quick peek at you from the corner of her eye before she quickly looks away again.
Insecurities lie deep within Visi. It wasn’t something that was hard for you to figure out once you really observed her. And you made the effort to try to help her work through them. But Invisigal has to want the change for herself. She has to make the conscious decision to do good and choose the right decision. And punching your dispatcher, no matter how angry they make you, is not the right decision.
Punch-Up is the first to ask,
“When are ye comin’ back?”
You take a quick breath and hope that as you begin to speak, the words will come to you.
“I fully understand that the last batch of dispatchers you all have had has not been especially to your liking.” You start. Your tone clear and firm. Half of the room has the smarts to realize that this meeting isn’t like the others. This isn’t a meeting to simply see how they behaved and how they thought the new dispatcher was faring.
Because you already know. There are no little white lies they can tell you about how, yeah, they fucked with the new guy, but it’s all in good fun! The day went well either way. Something has happened, and you’re already aware of it. And you’re here to set the record straight. Flambae takes his feet off the table, Mal and Prism share “oh, shit,” looks across the table, and Visi still has yet to look at you for more than a split second.
“And I know that we all work well together as a team. But when I got hired at SDN, I was not hired as a dispatcher. I was hired to be a mentor. I was hired to connect with you all and teach you how to be the great heroes I know you all have the power to be.”
“What’s this about, boss?” Sonar questions, ears twitching as he pushes himself off the wall he leaned on.
“I’ve gotten word about a few things that have happened on today’s shift. And I don’t care about you giving the new hires a run for their money. If they can’t stick it out, then they’re not the right dispatcher for the team. But what I do care about is keeping you all on the right track.”
The group is rag-tag. They’re disrespectful and hard-headed. But you’ve managed to earn their trust and their respect. And you will forever be grateful for that fact, and you would never consciously do anything to jeopardize that. And you can see it in their face that they understand that. So you choose your next words carefully.
“And some of the behaviors I’ve learned about today are something I never want to hear has happened again.” You say.
Invisigal’s posture deepens; she leans her body away from you and bows her head further in the opposite direction. She doesn’t like criticism. This is something you’re aware of. But the only way she can grow is if she accepts that she made the wrong decision and learns from it.
“Robert was a great hero. And he’s good at what he does. And yeah, he can be a bit of a prick sometimes, but so can all of you-”
“That is true,” Punch-Up interjects.
“But he’ll do good by you. All you have to do is give him a chance.”
The room looks at you apprehensively. Faces scrunched in reluctance and eyes clouded with uncertainty.
“I’m not telling you that you have to trust him just yet; that’s something he has to earn from all of you. Just like I did. So all I’m asking of you is to keep trusting me.”
The room grows silent. The team looks amongst themselves as each of them tests the waters, waiting for somebody to make the first decision. Prism is the first to answer.
“Fine. I still think he’s a bitch.” Prism says, “But if you think he’s got what it takes. I’ll give him a shot.”
And it’s not long before the rest of the group gives a nod and soft murmurs of agreement. One by one, they all leave their seats and begin to file out of the conference room. You give Golem a pat on the arm and turn to keep Visi in your sight. She doesn’t go invisible, she doesn’t push Flambae out of the way to dash out of the door. She simply comes to a stop in front of you, face artificially stern but eyes gleaming with despair.
“Well, go on,” she spits. “Just yell at me so I can leave.”
“I’m not going to yell at you.”
Her brows furrow and her head twitches to the side. She doesn’t believe that you’re not here to berate her. And that makes your heart sink. You want the best for her. But she also has to face the consequences of her actions.
“I believe you have what it takes to be a hero.”
Despite the disheartened look she wears, her eyes still spark.
“You have it in you to do infinite amounts of good. But there is only so much that I can do for you before it comes down to you. You have to want this for yourself, and you have to not let your anger control your decisions.”
You reach out and touch her shoulder, and you smile when she allows you to.
“You don’t have to be a villain anymore. But I can’t let this slide without any repercussions.” You say. “If I hear of this happening again, it will be on your permanent record. Am I clear?”
A moment passes. Then she nods.
“I understand.” She says.
You give her a squeeze on her arm and move out of the door. But before she gets too far, you call out to her.
“I believe in you, Visi. It’s time you start believing in yourself.”
She doesn’t say a word, but the dispirited look on her face shifts into something softer, more hopeful, and her lips twitch like she wants to smile. And then she vanishes.
Once you’re sure she’s gone, you flop into one of the empty chairs and finally take the moment to rest. While you didn’t plan for today to go smoothly with all that was already happening, you had no idea this would be the way things went. You sigh and throw your mask on the table, fingers rubbing and prodding where the migraine lurks under the surface.
Life as you once knew is changing course. You’ll have to learn a new routine, a new way of thinking, and a new level of professionalism. You could never have imagined this would be the way you and Robert would meet again, and you could’ve never imagined you’d struggle with it as much as you are. The thought makes your heart beat haphazardly and makes your head spin. It’s involuntary, and that’s what makes this so much harder. You can’t fight against a threat you can’t predict, a threat you can’t control. The weight is crushing, you can feel your collarbones start to creak, and your knees bend under the mass you try to carry. The seams crack, and the stitches tug, and you fear that it’s only a matter of time before you completely crumble. You don’t know what you need, you don’t know what can stop it before it begins. You let out a deep sigh and curl your fingers into the soft skin of your palm. Your gloves protect you somewhat, but you can feel the curve of your nails dig crescent indents in your skin.
The clock on the wall strikes 5:15. Your day is over. The office slowly empties, and you finally register the ringing of the alarm on your watch. You press a button, and it silences. The chair squeaks as you stand, and you take in one more deep breath. Despite the obstacles in the way, your day didn’t completely crash and burn. You finally got to do the job you were hired for, you got to mentor and teach members of the Phoenix Program, you didn’t burst into tears in the bathroom, and you didn’t wring Chase’s neck like you wanted to this morning. So, maybe that means there’s hope for tomorrow.
You don’t know what the future holds for you now that Robert is inserted into your daily life again. You don’t know whether or not the road leads to you and Robert crashing and burning and hurting each other more than you already have. You’d be stupid not to believe that it wasn’t an option on the table. But there is another option, where you both don’t crash and burn. Where something happens, and that something is good. Whatever that may be. But that’s a bridge you don’t have the energy to cross yet. But whether you’re ready to take that step or not, that bridge is in sight, and one day you’ll be right in front of it.
Damian is the one who pushes Jason Todd to finally marry you, fyi. Gives him such a heinous stink eye when Jason says he’d “like to, one day. it’s just currently not feasible because…” blah blah blah Damian stops listening.
Doesn’t even argue with him for once, his disgust so obvious—just brushes it off with a shrug and then a, “you do not love them enough, then. That’s all.”
And lo and behold, two weeks later, you have a ring.
jason todd would absolutely fuck the stress outta you.
drabble | smutty | october masterlist — MDNI
if you’d complain about your head hurting or your obnoxious professors, he would shush you with passionate, heated kiss and a hand stretched around your waist. he wouldn’t give you the chance to move from his grip. he’d back you into the bedroom and keep you there until you couldn’t think about anything but him.
until the only theory you could recall was the one of him between your legs, and the conclusion was always an undeniable truth— he fucking owned you.
after a stressful day, you came home to jason sprawled out on the couch. his shirt nowhere to be found, your eyes trail shamelessly over his exposed skin and the curves of his hard abs. now that he was so comfortable around you, he would have his Y shaped scars on display that he knew you loved and its reminder of what he’d survived. he’d gesture you over, already knowing the day you’d had and silently undress you, letting your mind take a break from the copious amounts of information you’d jammed into it trying to cram for an exam.
rough calloused hands would work gently and diligently, up and down your torso, stopping at the curve of your breast.
and he was always so eager to keep you and your big beautiful mind busy.
now you’re his pillow princess, laying on your back as the man chiseled from the gods is over you, pumping his heavy length with slow and deep rigour. you’re a moaning mess beneath him while his hands palm at your plump breasts, tugging gently on your nipples, just the way he knows you like it.
“jason, oh my— holy fuck babe,” grasping at his back as if it could ground you from how he was fucking you.
he leans down and kisses you gently, like it could make up for how deeply he was reaching into you. kissing your cervix like it held all the secrets and answers to his prayers.
“shh baby, just let me make you feel good.”
already lifting your legs over his shoulders and into a mating press, hitting spots you didn’t even know was possible. he removes your hands from his back and kisses the back of them before putting them over your head, making you grasp at the pillows. you’re crying out from pleasure, the weight of your day already forgotten.
the pace was sickeningly delicious, his hands spanning up and down your torso. leaning back down over you and mouthing at your breasts.
because after all— jason todd was a titty man.
“jay, fuck—” a hand goes over your mouth.
“i don’t want any words from you. i don’t want you to talk, just feel okay?” punctuating his words with a hard thrust and a soft smile.
the juxtaposition of his actions make your mind turn to mush as he rearranged you from the inside. it didn’t take long til you came allllll over him, the wetness driving him further as he chased his own high. he picks up the pace, kissing you harder as he groans beautifully into your lips. you’re swallowing them wholeheartedly, a mumbling mess as your eyes roll back and he works you through your high and into a another one.
he spills with a soft moan, continuing to pump into you like he just couldn’t help himself. collapsing and laying his weight over you. burying his face in your neck, breathing you in while placing wet kisses there.
after a minute, he lifts his head.
a lazily knowing smile lingering over his handsome face as the white tufts of his hair stick to his sweaty forehead.
he re-adjusts and maneuvers you onto your stomach, the wet kisses now turning into soft bites at your shoulders.
“now, lemme fuck you silly mmhm?”
a/n: just did a midterm and idk a demon possessed me and i wrote this in like ten minutes so ignore the spelling mistakes…
tags: asshole friend!wade, (sorta soft) roommate!logan, baker!neighbor!reader, flirting, mutual yearning, immature humor, wingman!wade, light angst, oral sex, swallowing, fingering, v. light ass play, unprotected PiV, appearance of The Claws, what’s a refractory period
Your eccentric neighbor Wade may drive you up the wall, but you’re willing to put up with it - if it means he’ll introduce you to his new, grumpy-looking roommate.
so yk how for toothless (httyd), they modelled his movements after a cat? yeah i think in ultraman rising they took a toddler, put her in a mocap and BOOM they have Emi. LOL
back on my CoD brainrot but its also missing lara croft hours…. what if i made a crossover fic LOL.
like imagine the 141 just being called in by laswell n next thing they know mythical and fictional monsters and deities are VERY real and now they have to work with a rich archeologist (and Y/n?!?!???) to make sure the world doesnt end 😭😏
also
johnny encountering the lochness monster would be pretty funny
OORRRR makarov is just working alongside Trinity for whatever reason and team lara and 141 encounter (and fight) each other but then theyre like “wait we’re on the same side arent we” and cool action shit ensues 😁😁😁
mb gang im just rambling but i love them all so much <3
