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Well that's a loaded question lol but yes...? I've been in a rollercoaster of a time right now but I'm trying to be more productive lately which CKW really helped swing things back and I hope people have been enjoying the Will Graham fic that was 12k words long.
(Trigger warning for SH)
I'm still trying to find a gender clinic so I can get access to more testosterone, the dysphoria has me wearing my binder 24/7 through all the heatwaves (it hit 90 degrees where I'm at) which has been horrendous but it was also part of the reason why I wasn't posting
But I have been sober! I've been keeping everything together which I'm proud of myself for despite all the stress
I will also be opening requests on July 3rd a day after my birthday! (I'm so nervous) But for requests I want to focus on Fanfics over matchups since that's what I want to be known for and also I want an audience of trans people like myself since I write for male readers over all the straight women I've been getting in my inbox
That sounds picky and a little selfish? But it's just want I prefer
Nevermind... After writing this I relapsed, literally four months down the drain how embarrassing. The thing is I did it on the front of my hips/V-line and let me tell you that is HURTS, my pants are also snug so it presses right up on it
This was not the update I wanted to give and I'm sorry to disappoint... Giving up that four months is really depressing me out right now
But to wrap things up I will be opening fanfic requests on the 3rd and try to be active again
Warnings/Triggers: Self-harm and Self-destructive behaviors, Graphic Blood and Violence, Mental health struggles/persistent trauma, Institutional cruelty and abuse, Psychological manipulation and gaslighting
Part One: Here
Word Count: 12986
It had been weeks since your last encounter with Will Graham, and every passing day only deepened the frustration gnawing at you. It wasn't supposed to end that way. He wasn't supposed to escape. The entire meeting had been carefully arranged, every detail controlled, every variable accounted for, or so you had believed. Yet somehow, despite being strapped to a chair, half-conscious, and entirely at your mercy, Will had survived. Worse, he had slipped through your fingers and returned to the FBI with enough pieces of the puzzle to make your life considerably more difficult. Since then, they had been relentless. Every news report, every police bulletin, every rumor whispered between law enforcement agencies carried the same message: they were looking for you. The pressure had become impossible to ignore, forcing you to disappear into the cracks of society like a wounded animal. There were no more elaborate displays. No more carefully arranged victims left beneath monuments or inside museums. No more nights spent wandering through the ghosts of history searching for the perfect stage. Instead, you hid.
The public loved it. The murders had stopped, and people interpreted silence as safety. Neighborhoods that had once locked their doors before sunset slowly returned to normal. Parents stopped checking on their children three times a night.
News stations shifted their attention elsewhere, eager to chase fresher tragedies. The fear that had hung over entire communities began to fade, replaced by relief and the comforting illusion that the nightmare was over. People slept peacefully now, secure in the belief that someone had driven the monster away. They celebrated their return to normalcy while you suffered through the consequences of it. You bounced from abandoned warehouses to cheap no-tell motels that smelled of mildew and stale cigarettes, never staying anywhere long enough to become comfortable. Every unfamiliar creak in the walls sounded like approaching footsteps. Every car that lingered outside too long became a potential surveillance team. The with was almost worse than the paranoia.
To fill the endless hours, you turned to the only thing that had ever truly held your attention. History. Ancient battles, maritime disasters, failed expeditions, forgotten kings, execution methods, archaeological discoveries, you consumed it all. The flickering television became your only companion as history channels played on repeat from morning until long after midnight. Narrators spoke endlessly about empires rising and collapsing, about tragedies that had become exhibits and catastrophes that had become tourist attractions. You watched every documentary available, memorized every reenactment, and absorbed every fact the programs offered, but it never satisfied the craving. Television was sterile. Safe. Distant. It reduced the past to images on a screen and voices coming from speakers. It lacked the weight of reality. It lacked the smell of old wood inside a century-old museum, the sensation of standing beneath artifacts that had survived generations, the quiet reverence that settled over historical sites where thousands of lives had been forever frozen into memory.
The withdrawals were becoming unbearable. History wasn't merely an interest anymore; it was an addiction. You found yourself flipping channels obsessively, searching for something new, something stronger, something capable of scratching an itch that only grew worse the longer it went untreated. Program after program blurred together until they all became meaningless noise. The documentaries stopped feeling educational and started feeling insulting, offering pale imitations of the experiences you truly wanted. You missed the displays. You missed running your fingers across glass cases protecting objects older than entire nations. You missed reading plaques detailing disasters and massacres while imagining the people who had lived through them. You missed standing in places where the past still felt alive, where history lingered in the walls and floorboards like a ghost refusing to leave. The FBI had effectively cut you off from your supply. Museums had tightened security. Historical landmarks were monitored. Collections had been relocated or temporarily closed. Every place that had once welcomed visitors now treated them with suspicion because of what you had done. It was a sensible response. It was also infuriating.
The truth was simple and impossible to ignore: you didn't want to watch history anymore. You wanted to touch it. You wanted to walk through it. You wanted to lose yourself inside it. The old tragedies called to you from beyond locked doors and police barricades, and every day spent hiding only amplified the temptation. The present had become suffocating. Cheap motel rooms, abandoned buildings, and endless television broadcasts felt hollow compared to the richness of the past. Somewhere beyond the FBI's search radius, beyond the warnings and patrols and surveillance, history was still waiting. Ancient disasters still sat preserved behind glass. Forgotten stories still lingered inside monuments and museums. The past was still there, just out of reach, and the longer you stayed away from it, the more desperately you needed to return.
The past made you calm. That was the sick joke of it all. Most people spend their lives trying to escape old wounds, bury old memories, and move beyond the things that hurt them. You spent your life chasing them. The ache of PTSD never truly left; it lived beneath your skin like an old infection, flaring whenever it pleased, turning quiet nights into battlegrounds and ordinary sounds into threats. The therapists had called it trauma. The doctors had called it a disorder. They all had names for it, prescriptions for it, treatments for it. None of them understood that the only thing that ever dulled the ache was more of it. You felt safest surrounded by familiar pain. Historical tragedies, old battlefields, disasters preserved behind museum glass, places where suffering had become permanent and immortalized. Standing among them made your own hurt feel organized. Understandable. It was easier to breathe when surrounded by the ghosts of other people's misery. Their pain drowned out your own.
Being cut off from that comfort was driving you into a slow, ugly spiral. Every day felt wrong. Every hour stretched too long. The restlessness settled into your bones and refused to leave, turning stillness into torture. You found yourself pacing motel rooms for hours, wearing grooves into stained carpets while documentaries droned from the television. Sometimes you sat perfectly still for so long that your muscles cramped. Other times, you couldn't stop moving. Sleep became irregular. Meals became optional. You stopped eating without really noticing when it happened. At first, it was practical, less time spent in public, fewer chances to be recognized, but eventually it became something else. The hollow feeling in your stomach started to feel familiar. Comforting, even.
Hunger hurt, but it was an old hurt. A childhood hurt. The kind you understood. The kind that made sense. Being full always felt wrong, like wearing someone else's clothes. Hunger was familiar territory. Hunger reminded you of years spent surviving rather than living, and there was comfort hidden inside that memory. So you skipped breakfast. Then lunch. The entire days. Sometimes your stomach twisted itself into knots so painful you had to hunch over, but even then there was a strange satisfaction buried beneath it. At least it was something you could feel.
The worst habit was with your hands. You barely noticed when it started. A finger rubbing against a rough patch of skin. A thumbnail catching on a hangnail. Something small to keep yourself occupied while the television flickered in the background. Then it became routine. Every moment your mind wasn't distracted, your fingers found their way to your hands. Picking. Scratching. Tearing. The tiny imperfections became impossible to ignore once you found them. A loose piece of skin needed to come off. A scab needed to be flattened. A rough edge needed fixing. Except you never fixed anything. You only made it worse. Day after day, your fingertips searched for new places to destroy. Skin peeled away in ragged strips. Scabs were ripped open before they could heal. Cracked flesh split wider under your nails. Blood became a common sight, dried in dark stains along your knuckles and beneath your fingernails. Eventually, your hands looked terrible. Angry red patches, open wounds, cracked skin, half-healed scabs layered on top of older scars. They looked diseased. Ruined. You would occasionally catch sight of them while changing channels or reaching for a drink and stare for a moment before looking away again. The damage barely registered anymore.
The blood wasn't what interested you. Blood was pretty, sure. There was a reason museums dedicated entire exhibits to violence. Human beings had always been fascinated by blood. But it wasn't the sight of it that kept your fingers moving. It was the burn. The sharp sting that followed when fresh skin met air. The flare of pain when a wound reopened. The way damaged fingertips throbbed whenever they brushed against fabric or touched something hot. That feeling anchored you. It cut through the haze that had settled over everything these past few weeks. The sting was immediate. Honest. It didn't ask questions. It didn't require interpretation. Every small injury gave you a brief moment of clarity before the emptiness returned and the cycle started again. Pick. Bleed. Burn. Repeat.
You knew it was getting worse. Somewhere beneath the restlessness and obsession, a rational part of your mind recognized the pattern. The pacing. The starvation. The ruined hands. The inability to focus on anything except the next opportunity to reconnect with the past. It all pointed toward the same conclusion. You were unraveling. Slowly, steadily, and with increasing speed. The frightening part wasn't that you were losing control. The frightening part was how little you cared. Because every day spent hiding felt like suffocation. Every day spent away from the places that grounded you made the craving stronger. The hunger in your stomach wasn't enough anymore. The sting in your fingertips wasn't enough anymore. The documentaries weren't enough anymore. Nothing was enough. You needed something real. Something old. Something haunted. You needed history the way an addict needed their next fix, and with each passing day, the need grew sharper, louder, more desperate, until it drowned out almost everything else.
The cycle was making you reckless. You knew it, even if you refused to admit it whenever the thought surfaced. The boredom, the isolation, the constant craving for something that could quiet the noise in your head had worn away the caution that had kept you alive for so long. Nights became increasingly difficult to endure inside motel rooms and abandoned buildings, and eventually you found yourself wandering again. Not through museums or historical sites, they were watched too closely now, but through dimly lit streets and forgotten corners of towns where people drifted through life unnoticed. You would watch them from a distance, studying the way they moved, the choices they made, the expressions they carried. Some looked exhausted. Some looked lonely. Some seemed so disconnected from the world around them that they barely appeared alive at all. The old compulsions would creep back in then, whispering in the back of your mind, convincing you that there was meaning hidden beneath the surface waiting to be uncovered if only you looked deeply enough.
That search had always ended the same way. The brain. The great mystery trapped inside every human skull. The source of thought, memory, identity, suffering, love, fear, and every other thing people spend their lives pretending to understand. You had spent years pulling them apart, examining them with obsessive attention, convinced that eventually you would discover something that everyone else had missed. Some hidden defect. Some visible scar left behind by trauma. Some physical proof that could explain why one person became a hero while another became a monster. Yet every examination ended in disappointment. The differences were never as dramatic as you wanted them to be. Fold after fold of soft gray tissue. Complex, certainly. Beautiful, even. But ultimately frustrating. After enough time spent searching through them, your conclusions had become increasingly cynical. People built entire philosophies around the importance of the human mind, yet whenever you looked closely enough, all you found was flesh. Delicate flesh, complicated flesh, but flesh all the same.
The disappointment never got easier. You would stare at the remains of another failed search and feel the same hollow frustration settle over you. Whatever answers you were looking for were never there. The brain stubbornly refused to reveal its secrets. Eventually, the remains became little more than another problem to solve. In the early days, you treated the process with a strange sort of ceremony, but repetition had stripped away much of the novelty. Sometimes you dispose of everything immediately. Other times, you found yourself lingering, staring at what was left as though an answer might suddenly appear if you looked long enough. It never did. The silence that followed each disappointment felt heavier than the one before it, another reminder that your obsession continued to produce nothing except more questions.
What fascinated you more were the flowers. They appeared without fail. Wherever the remains ended up, something seemed to flourish afterward. Wild patches of color emerged from neglected soil. Flowers grew thicker, brighter, healthier than those around them. You started noticing the pattern by accident, then found yourself returning to certain locations just to check. There was something strangely beautiful about it. Human beings spent their lives terrified of death, yet nature accepted it without hesitation. Everything became nourishment eventually. Everything returned to the earth. Flowers bloomed where tragedy had ended, indifferent to the suffering that came before them. They simply grew.
At first, you only watched them. Later, you began collecting them. A handful of blooms gathered from a roadside ditch. A bouquet cut from an overgrown field. Carefully wrapped, anonymously packaged, and mailed to places connected to people who were gone. It felt appropriate in a way you couldn't fully explain. A final transformation. A reminder that something had continued after the ending. Yet the reactions rarely matched what you imagined. More often than not, the flowers were rejected. Left untouched on porches. Thrown away. Abandoned where they wilted beneath the sun. Families wanted grief to remain grief. They wanted clean endings and simple answers. They didn't want reminders. They certainly didn't want beauty attached to tragedy.
You found yourself thinking about that more than you should have. The flowers would sit untouched for days, slowly losing their color, and you couldn't help feeling a strange disappointment each time you saw them. It was as though the dead had been discarded twice. First by circumstance, then by memory. The flowers had never been intended as an apology or an act of kindness. Even you knew that. But watching them wither on doorsteps felt symbolic of something larger, a refusal to acknowledge that anything remained after loss except emptiness. Perhaps that was why the sight lingered with you. Because despite everything you had done, despite all the damage left in your wake, some irrational part of you still searched for meaning in the aftermath. And just like your endless search through the human mind, you rarely found it.
You had to be good. That was the deal you made with yourself every morning when you woke up in another unfamiliar room and every night when you failed to sleep. No killing. No displays. No museums filled with police. No bodies left beneath monuments. Just patience. Just survival. It sounded simple enough until the craving started digging deeper. The need for that familiar burn had never really gone away; it had only changed shape. Every day spent hiding fed it. Every hour spent trapped in cheap motel rooms and abandoned warehouses sharpened it. The itch beneath your skin had become unbearable, demanding relief from somewhere, anywhere. Your fingers were already ruined from picking at them. Hunger had lost its edge. Even the old documentaries had become background noise. You needed something stronger, something immediate, something that could cut through the static filling your head. That was how you ended up at a bar. Not because you particularly enjoyed drinking, and certainly not because you enjoyed people, but because alcohol promised a familiar kind of pain. A legal one. A socially acceptable one. The kind nobody called the FBI about.
The place wasn't particularly memorable. Dim lights. Sticky floors. Old wood polished by decades of spilled drinks and careless elbows. The sort of establishment that existed in every town across the country and looked exactly the same no matter where you went. You stood at the bar rather than taking a table, partly because it made leaving easier and partly because sitting still had become difficult lately. The bartender noticed you almost immediately. It wasn't a busy night. Only a handful of patrons occupied the scattered stools and booths, most of them focused on conversations or sports broadcasts playing overhead. Service was fast when there was nobody around to compete for attention. "What can I get you tonight, sir?" he asked, already reaching for a glass. You ordered bourbon. Nothing exotic. Nothing expensive. Just something strong enough to remind your nervous system that it was still capable of feeling something besides frustration. The bartender poured it into a heavy glass with far more ceremony than the drink deserved before sliding it across the counter. You wrapped your fingers around it and immediately appreciated the weight. Solid. Real. Reliable.
You weren't interested in conversation. The bartender seemed grateful for that. People always wanted stories from bartenders, wanted them to play therapist, comedian, or drinking companion. You wanted none of those things. You lifted the glass and took a slow sip, letting the bourbon roll across your tongue before swallowing. The burn arrived a second later, spreading down your throat and settling warmly in your chest. There it was. Pain. Small, controlled, and temporary, but pain all the same. For the first time that day, some of the tension in your shoulders loosened. You took another sip and turned your attention toward the televisions mounted above the bar. Most displayed sports. Men running across fields. Crowds cheering. Statistics and scores scrolling endlessly along the bottom of screens. You couldn't imagine caring about any of it. One television, however, showed the news. Normally you ignored those too, but a familiar phrase caught your attention in the captions crawling across the screen. The report was old enough to have lost its urgency but recent enough to remain relevant. The FBI. A serial killer. A successful operation. Public safety restored. The words practically wrote themselves.
You watched the report with growing irritation as the anchors recycled the same narrative everyone else seemed desperate to believe. Law enforcement pressure had forced a ruthless killer into hiding. Communities were safe again. Citizens could rest easy knowing the threat had been neutralized. Neutralized. You almost laughed at that. They spoke about you as though you were a frightened animal chased back into the woods by superior hunters. As though the killings had stopped because you were scared. The absurdity of it made you scoff into your drink before taking a much larger swallow. The bourbon burned harder this time, but it wasn't enough to drown out the annoyance. They misunderstood the situation completely. You weren't hiding because you were afraid. Fear implied weakness. Panic. Poor judgment. You had stopped because continuing would have been stupid. Every historical site worth visiting had police crawling over it. Every museum had security.
Every investigator in the country was paying attention. No one with functioning brain cells would continue operating under those conditions. That wasn't fear. That was patience. Strategy. Survival. The distinction felt obvious to you, yet the people on the television smiled confidently while congratulating themselves for victories they hadn't actually achieved. The FBI hadn't beaten you. They hadn't cornered you. They hadn't even found you. They had merely made the game inconvenient. The thought should have been comforting, but as you stared into the amber liquid swirling in your glass, you found yourself wondering how much longer patience would remain enough. Because beneath the alcohol, beneath the irritation, beneath every rational argument for staying hidden, the craving was still there. Waiting. Growing. And unlike the people on the television, you knew it wasn't gone.
You were halfway through your second glass when someone occupied the stool beside you. At first, you ignored them. People sat next to strangers in bars all the time. Most of them wanted conversation, some wanted company, and a depressing number simply wanted someone to listen to whatever disaster was currently ruining their life. None of those things interested you. Your attention remained fixed on the amber liquid swirling lazily inside your glass and the muted televisions hanging above the bar. It wasn't until the familiar voice spoke that your grip tightened almost instantly around the drink. "A bit odd to be drinking on a weekday like this, don't you think?" The tone was unmistakable. Calm. Confident. Annoyingly smug. The kind of voice people used when they believed they had already won. Slowly, you turned your head and found yourself staring at Jack Crawford. Of all the places he could have found you, he had chosen a bar. Somehow that felt insulting. The irritation hit immediately, crawling beneath your skin like an insect searching for a place to burrow. You buried it the best you could, forcing your expression to remain neutral while your knuckles whitened around the glass. "It's five o'clock on a Saturday somewhere," you replied before finishing the rest of your bourbon in one swallow. The burn barely registered anymore. You set the empty glass down with a sharp clink that echoed louder than you intended.
Jack wasn't amused. He never was. The joke rolled off him without leaving so much as a dent, his expression hardening almost immediately. "You know you can't keep running around, right?" The certainty in his voice made you laugh under your breath. Not because the statement was funny, but because it was absurd. The sheer arrogance required to say something like that while sitting beside you was impressive. "It's honestly funny how you think you can catch me." A small chuckle escaped your lips as you leaned back slightly on the stool. "Really, Jack. Every time we do this, you act like you're one breakthrough away from putting me in a cage." The bartender wisely found something else to do at the far end of the counter. A few nearby patrons had started paying attention now, sensing tension without understanding its source. Jack either didn't notice or didn't care. "I have the place surrounded. You're not getting away." His eyes never left yours as he spoke. "At least answer me this. Why Will?" That question finally earned a genuine reaction.
The laugh that burst from you this time was loud enough to turn heads throughout the bar. It wasn't a pleasant laugh. It came out sharp and manic, carrying far too much amusement for the situation. A couple sitting several stools away exchanged nervous glances before quickly returning their attention to their drinks. You couldn't help yourself. Of all the questions Jack could have asked, that was the one he chose? "He didn't tell you?" you asked between fading chuckles. "I didn't scramble his brains that much, did I?" Jack's jaw tightened slightly. The reaction was subtle, but you caught it. You always caught it. "He told us everything, but I—" "Then why are you asking?" you interrupted before he could finish. The humor vanished from your voice almost instantly. One moment you were laughing, the next your expression had gone completely flat. "As I said, I was a fan of his work." You turned the empty glass slowly against the polished wood of the counter, watching the reflection of the overhead lights distort across its surface. "And he was getting in my way." The answer was simple. Honest, even. "That's all."
Jack didn't seem convinced. That wasn't surprising. People like Jack always believed there was some deeper explanation hidden underneath every answer. Some tragic revelation. Some grand motive waiting to be uncovered. They spent so much time searching for complexity that they often overlooked the obvious. You could see him studying your face now, searching for something beneath the words. Looking for cracks. Looking for a lie. What unsettled him wasn't the answer itself. It was how quickly your demeanor had changed. One second you were laughing hard enough to draw attention from half the room, and the next there was nothing. No amusement. No irritation. No visible emotion whatsoever. The shift was sudden enough to make even Jack hesitate. For a brief moment, neither of you spoke. The televisions continued flashing silent sports highlights overhead. Glasses clinked in the distance. Someone laughed from the other side of the bar. Normal life continued around the two of you while the silence between you stretched tighter and tighter. Then you tilted your head slightly and offered him a small smile that never reached your eyes. "You came all this way just to ask me about Will?" you asked softly. "I expected better from you, Jack."
Several states away, far removed from cheap bars, FBI investigations, and the man who seemed determined to haunt both of their lives, Will Graham found himself standing on the balcony of a beachfront resort wondering how exactly he had allowed this to happen. The ocean stretched endlessly before him, painted gold and orange by the setting sun, waves rolling lazily against the shoreline while tourists laughed somewhere below. It should have been relaxing. That was the entire point. Beverly had practically forced the idea on him the moment he was discharged from the hospital, arguing that he needed rest, sunlight, and several weeks away from crime scenes before Jack inevitably dragged him back into another nightmare. At the time, Will had been too exhausted to argue. He'd signed whatever papers had been shoved in front of him, nodded through conversations he barely remembered, and somehow found himself here. Now that his head had finally cleared enough to think properly, he regretted every second of it. The scenery was beautiful, sure. The sunsets were objectively stunning. Every evening, the horizon exploded into colors that looked more like a painting than reality. Unfortunately, none of that changed the fact that he felt like he was slowly losing his mind.
Being tortured was one thing. Recovering from it was something else entirely. Most people imagined recovery as a straight line, a gradual climb back toward normality. Will had discovered it was more like wandering through fog while everyone around you insisted the path was obvious. The physical injuries had healed faster than expected. The burns on his temples were gone. The headaches had become less frequent. His muscles no longer twitched uncontrollably at random moments throughout the day. Yet his brain still felt wrong. Sometimes he'd forget why he'd entered a room. Sometimes words slipped away in the middle of conversations. There were moments when his thoughts seemed to lag behind reality by a fraction of a second, forcing him to mentally catch up to things everyone else processed automatically. The doctors assured him these symptoms would improve. They had charts and scans and reassuring smiles to support their claims. Will wasn't convinced. He had felt his own mind unraveling in that cellar. He remembered the sensation vividly. The electricity. The confusion. The way thoughts had shattered apart faster than he could hold onto them. Knowing that doctors called it temporary didn't make the memory any less disturbing.
The hospital hadn't helped much either. Everyone acted as though surviving should have made him grateful. Instead, he spent weeks trapped in a bed beneath fluorescent lights while machines monitored every aspect of his existence. Nurses appeared constantly. Doctors appeared even more often. Every time he managed to drift into sleep, someone seemed determined to wake him up again. Questions. More questions. Follow-up questions to questions he'd already answered. How was he feeling? Was he experiencing dizziness? Memory issues? Headaches? Anxiety? Nausea? Could he rate his pain on a scale from one to ten? The attention was well-intentioned, but after a while, it became exhausting. Every beep from a monitor made sleep feel temporary. Every knock on the door felt like another interruption waiting to happen. Then there was the medication. Pills for pain. Pills to help him sleep. Pills to address side effects caused by other pills. Half the time, he wasn't sure whether he felt exhausted because of what had happened or because someone kept handing him enough medication to tranquilize a horse. By the time he was finally discharged, he wanted nothing more than silence.
Unfortunately, silence proved just as difficult to live with. The ocean outside his balcony doors was peaceful, but it couldn't drown out his thoughts. Every quiet moment left room for memories to return. He remembered the cellar more often than he cared to admit. Sometimes it appeared in dreams. Other times it arrived uninvited while he was eating breakfast or walking along the beach. A smell. A sound. A random thought. Suddenly, he was back in that chair. Back beneath dim lights. Back listening to that voice calmly explaining things no sane person should ever explain. The worst part wasn't even the pain anymore. Pain was easy to understand. Pain ended. What lingered was the conversation. The things that had been said. The things left unsaid. Will had spent his entire career trying to understand monsters, and for the first time in years, he had encountered someone who genuinely unsettled him. Not because they were unpredictable, but because they weren't. There had been a purpose behind everything. Logic. A deeply damaged, horrifying kind of logic, but logic nonetheless. That realization sat in the back of his mind like a splinter he couldn't remove.
Maybe sleep would help. The thought had been circling his mind for most of the evening, returning again and again despite the fact that Will knew better than to trust it. Sleep had become unreliable long before the cellar. Before the kidnappings, the murders, the profiling, and every other terrible thing his career had dragged into his life. Rest was something other people seemed capable of finding naturally. For Will, it was more of a negotiation, a fragile agreement between exhaustion and whatever demons happened to be waiting for him when he closed his eyes. Still, it was worth trying. There was no point in driving for hours tonight. No point in pretending he had somewhere important to be. Jack had already made that decision for him. The memory of the conversation lingered unpleasantly in the back of his mind. He couldn't even remember most of the details anymore, only fragments. Jack's serious expression. Concern disguised as authority. Something about getting too close. Something about stepping back. The words had blurred together before eventually becoming meaningless background noise. Will hadn't argued. He hadn't really listened either. Being removed from the investigation should have bothered him more than it did. Instead, he mostly felt tired. Tired of being watched. Tired of being questioned. Tired of everyone deciding what was best for him while pretending they were asking his opinion.
The room was quiet as he crossed it, illuminated only by the soft glow of a lamp near the bed and the faint moonlight filtering through the balcony doors. The distant sound of waves rolled in from outside, steady and rhythmic, as though the ocean itself were breathing somewhere beyond the glass. It should have been soothing. Most people would probably find it comforting. Will barely noticed it anymore. His thoughts were too loud. The bathroom light flickered on as he stepped inside, filling the space with a pale brightness that immediately drew his attention toward the mirror above the sink. Instinctively, he looked away. It was a habit he had developed years ago without consciously deciding to. Most people checked their reflection dozens of times throughout the day. They adjusted their hair, straightened their clothes, and reassured themselves that they still looked like themselves. Will had never understood the appeal. Looking into a mirror always felt strangely invasive. There was something deeply uncomfortable about meeting his own gaze. He spent so much of his life climbing into other people's minds, imagining their thoughts, their motives, their fears, that the idea of turning that same scrutiny inward felt exhausting. Dangerous, even. Some days he wasn't entirely convinced he knew what would be looking back at him.
He reached for the faucet and turned it on, listening to the rush of water filling the otherwise silent room. The stream ran cold almost immediately. Will stared at it for a moment before cupping his hands beneath the flow. The water pooled against his palms, crystal clear and painfully cold against skin that still felt warm from the humid evening air. He lifted it to his face and let it splash across his features. The shock was immediate. Tiny droplets clung to his eyelashes and ran down his cheeks. More followed as he repeated the motion, allowing the cold to wash over him again. For a few brief seconds, the sensation managed to overpower everything else. The lingering headache. The restless thoughts. The memories that seemed determined to follow him wherever he went. Water streamed down the contours of his face, catching briefly in the rough stubble along his jaw before continuing downward toward the sink. He rested his hands against the edge of the counter and lowered his head slightly, breathing slowly while the last traces of moisture slid across his skin.
For a moment, he remained perfectly still. The water continued running. The mirror remained in front of him. Eventually, against his better judgment, his eyes drifted upward. His reflection stared back. He looked older than he remembered. Not dramatically older, just worn down in subtle ways that accumulated over time. The dark circles beneath his eyes seemed deeper than they had a few months ago. His expression appeared permanently exhausted, as though fatigue had become a physical feature rather than a temporary condition. Even the scars left behind by recent events seemed less noticeable than the damage hiding underneath. The doctors had assured him his brain would recover. Friends assured him he was healing. Yet standing there beneath the harsh bathroom lighting, Will couldn't shake the feeling that some part of him had been left behind in that cellar. Not broken. Not destroyed. Just altered in ways he couldn't quite define. His reflection offered no answers. It simply stared back at him with the same tired eyes, equally uncertain of what came next.
The resort brochure had promised peace, relaxation, and a chance to reconnect with nature. What it failed to mention was how difficult it was to relax when your brain refused to stop working. Families walked the beach below. Couples watched sunsets together. Children splashed through the surf while their parents pretended the world wasn't full of terrible things. Will watched all of them from his balcony and felt strangely disconnected from the scene, like he was observing another species rather than participating in the same reality. Somewhere out there, the man who had strapped him into an electric chair was still alive. Somewhere, he was thinking, planning, hiding. Jack was undoubtedly chasing leads. Beverly was probably checking her phone every hour to make sure Will hadn't vanished into the ocean. The investigation hadn't ended. It had merely paused. Everyone wanted him to recover, but recovery implied there was something waiting afterward. Will wasn't sure he believed that anymore. He stood there until the last traces of sunlight disappeared beneath the horizon, staring out across the darkening water while an uncomfortable certainty settled in his chest. The resort could keep him busy. The hospital could monitor him. His friends could encourage him to rest. None of it mattered. Eventually, the case would find him again. It always did.
It took Will several more days before he finally left the resort behind. He spent most of that time doing exactly what everyone wanted him to do and none of what they expected it would accomplish. He walked the beach. He slept when he could. He stayed away from crime scenes, case files, and FBI phone calls. The ocean remained beautiful. The sunsets remained beautiful. Neither managed to fix anything. By the end of the week, the isolation had become just another kind of noise, and the moment he was cleared to travel, he packed his things and drove home. The trip itself blurred together into long stretches of highway and radio stations he barely listened to. He expected to return to the same stagnant situation he had left behind: an active investigation, a frustrated Jack Crawford, and a killer still somewhere out there leaving the FBI chasing shadows. Instead, he had barely stepped inside the Bureau before the entire picture changed.
"What?" The word left him before he could stop it. "When did this happen?" Genuine surprise was rare for Will these days, but he felt it then. Not because he thought you were untouchable, but because getting caught seemed so unlike you. Everything about your behavior suggested someone who planned several steps ahead, someone who understood consequences and avoided unnecessary risks. More than that, Will had spent enough years working alongside the FBI to possess a healthy skepticism toward their efficiency. Cases got solved, yes, but rarely as neatly or as quickly as people liked to pretend. Yet here he was, walking beside Jack through the familiar halls of the Bureau while agents moved around them carrying folders and coffee cups as though nothing extraordinary had happened. "A week ago," Jack answered. "While you were away." His tone carried that frustrating blend of matter-of-fact certainty and restrained patience that always seemed to emerge whenever he spoke to Will. "A week?" Will repeated, turning his head toward him. "And nobody thought to tell me?" Several agents glanced in their direction before quickly looking away. The argument wasn't loud, but people knew better than to eavesdrop when either of them sounded irritated. "You were recovering," Jack said. "That was the priority." Will let out a tired breath through his nose. "You mean you decided it was the priority." "I made a judgment call." "Without asking me." "Because I already knew your answer."
The conversation continued as they moved deeper into the building, neither man sounding particularly angry, but neither willing to give ground either. It was an old argument wearing a new disguise. Jack believed protecting people sometimes required making decisions for them. Will hated being treated like a problem that needed managing. Eventually, he dragged a hand through his hair and looked away, already exhausted by the discussion. "How did they catch him?" he asked. Jack hesitated just long enough for Will to notice. "He practically handed himself over." That answer only made Will frown. It didn't fit. Nothing about it fit. Before he could ask more questions, Jack continued. "There was a trial." "A trial?" Will repeated. "It didn't go anywhere. His lawyers argued diminished responsibility and severe psychiatric instability. The court accepted the evaluation." Jack's expression darkened slightly. "He's not going to prison." For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then Will asked the obvious question. "Where is he?" Jack's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "A psychiatric facility." The answer landed heavily. Will immediately knew which one. The realization settled into place with uncomfortable ease. "It was the same one I was held in, wasn't it?" This time Jack didn't answer immediately. The silence itself confirmed it. Will stopped walking. Around them, agents continued moving through the hallway, but neither man paid attention. Jack eventually sighed. "Will—" "It was." "Yes." The admission hung between them. Will stared at the floor for a moment before looking back up. "Of course it was."
Jack already knew where the conversation was heading and seemed determined to stop it before it began. "Now, Will, we both know it wouldn't be a good idea to visit him." His tone wasn't forceful. If anything, it sounded almost weary, as though he'd already had this argument in his head several times before Will ever returned. "You're still recovering." "I'm recovered enough to drive across three states." "That's not the same thing." "It is to me." Jack folded his arms. "You're too involved." Will actually laughed at that, though there wasn't much humor in it. "I was kidnapped, tortured, and nearly had my brain turned into scrambled eggs. I think we're past worrying about professional distance." "That's exactly my point." Jack's voice remained calm, but the tension beneath it was becoming harder to hide. "You don't need to be around him." Will looked away briefly, his gaze settling on the far end of the corridor before returning to Jack. There was no anger in his expression now. Only something quieter. Something far more difficult to argue against. "Do you know what they do to the patients there?" he asked. Jack's face changed immediately. The question caught him off guard.
Will recognized the look because he'd seen it before, people assuming they understood institutions like that because they had read reports and reviewed procedures. They knew the policies. They knew the statistics. They knew everything except what it actually felt like to live there.
"Will—"
"No." His voice remained calm. "Do you?" He stepped closer, not aggressively, just enough to ensure Jack couldn't dismiss the question. "Do you know what happens when someone decides a patient isn't cooperating? Do you know how quickly treatment becomes punishment?" The memory surfaced uninvited. Locked doors. White walls. Endless evaluations disguised as conversations. The feeling of everyone around you deciding who you were while insisting they were helping. "They'll spend months trying to figure out what's wrong with him." Will shook his head slightly. "And when they can't get the answers they want, they'll stop listening." His gaze hardened. "People like him don't get treated in places like that, Jack. They get studied."
If there was one thing you learned during your stay at the facility, it was that prison and a psychiatric institution were only separated by marketing. The walls were cleaner. The staff smiled more often. They used words like treatment and rehabilitation instead of punishment. Yet every locked door sounded exactly the same. Every schedule felt equally restrictive. Every day blended into the next until time itself became meaningless. You hated it almost immediately. The food was the first offense. Somehow every meal managed to be simultaneously bland and offensive, a culinary achievement you hadn't thought possible before arriving. Most days you barely touched it. Hunger was easier to tolerate than whatever mystery substances they insisted on serving. The staff worried about your appetite, which you found amusing considering how little concern they showed for anything else. Every few days someone would sit across from you with a clipboard and ask if you were eating enough. You always gave a different answer just to see if they noticed. They never did.
The other patients were somehow worse than the food. Being forced to share space with them felt like an insult. A surprising number seemed convinced they belonged in the same category as you, which was perhaps the funniest thing about the entire facility. They would approach you during recreation periods, trying to establish some kind of camaraderie. Some wanted to swap stories. Others wanted validation. A few seemed to view themselves as criminal masterminds despite possessing all the sophistication of a brick. Listening to them talk was exhausting. Most of their crimes had no artistry, no purpose, no thought beyond impulse and opportunity. They killed because they were angry. They killed because they were greedy. They killed because they enjoyed it. Then they got caught because they were stupid. That was the entire story. No symbolism. No meaning. No understanding. Just violence followed by consequences. Every conversation left you feeling vaguely disgusted. These people weren't monsters. They weren't masterminds. They were animals pretending to be profound. You quickly learned to ignore them. When they spoke, you nodded occasionally and waited for them to run out of words. Most eventually wandered away in search of a more receptive audience.
The guards were more interesting. Not all of them. Most treated their job exactly as expected. They monitored. They escorted. They filled out paperwork and counted the hours until their shifts ended. One guard, however, genuinely hated you, and that made him infinitely more entertaining than everyone else in the building combined. You never learned whether it was something specific about your case or simply your personality that got under his skin, but once you noticed the irritation, it became impossible to resist. There wasn't much to do inside the facility. No museums. No investigations. No meaningful stimulation whatsoever. If the universe insisted on trapping you inside this bureaucratic nightmare, then you were going to make your own entertainment. The guard quickly became your favorite hobby.
It started small. A casual comment here. A sarcastic observation there. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to make the vein in his forehead twitch whenever he passed your room. Once you realized how easy it was, things escalated naturally. During meals, you would call out to him in the most cheerful voice imaginable. "Hey, sweetheart." The first time you did it, he ignored you. The second time, he glared. By the third time, you could practically see his blood pressure rising. Other days you invented new nicknames. Chief. Officer Handsome. Big Guy. Captain. None of them were particularly creative, but creativity wasn't the point. The point was watching his jaw tighten every time he heard your voice. Sometimes you called him over for no reason whatsoever. He would stomp across the room expecting a complaint or request only for you to smile and say, "Never mind, I forgot." The look on his face afterward was always worth it.
One afternoon, boredom struck particularly hard during lunch. You stared at the sad excuse for a meal in front of you for several minutes before deciding you disliked its existence. The tray accidentally-on-purpose slipped from your hands and crashed onto the floor. Plastic containers exploded. Lukewarm food scattered across the tiles. Several staff members sighed in unison. The guard looked ready to commit a felony. You were temporarily moved while employees cleaned the mess, which had been your goal from the start. The change of scenery lasted all of ten minutes, but ten minutes was ten minutes. "Oops," you said as two attendants escorted you away. The guard muttered something beneath his breath that definitely violated workplace conduct policies. You laughed the entire way down the hall.
The more irritated he became, the more fun it was. Every reaction felt like proof that at least one thing in this miserable place remained under your control. The doctors analyzed your behavior. The psychiatrists asked endless questions. The courts had locked you away and assigned labels to your condition. Everyone wanted something from you. Information. Compliance. Improvement. The guard, on the other hand, wanted only one thing: for you to shut up. Unfortunately for him, that was the one request you had absolutely no intention of granting. So whenever he passed your room, you'd straighten up in your chair and offer him your brightest smile. "Good morning, sunshine." Sometimes he kept walking. Sometimes he swore under his breath. Occasionally, he stopped long enough to tell you exactly what he thought of you. Those were your favorite days. Because in a facility full of people pretending not to be broken, he was one of the few honest ones. He hated you, and unlike everyone else, he wasn't afraid to show it.
You had always enjoyed finding people's limits. Everyone had one. Some snapped after a single insult. Others endured years before finally breaking. The guard had lasted longer than most, which almost made you respect him. Almost. The two of you had spent weeks dancing around each other, each interaction another tiny cut against his patience, another test to see how far you could push before something gave. Then he looked directly at you and said, "I hope you rot in hell." Apparently, today was the day. The words had barely left your mouth before you saw it happen. Not anger. Not irritation. Something deeper. The kind of rage that bypassed thought entirely. One moment he was standing outside your room, the next he was unlocking the door with trembling hands. "Oh?" you asked, still smiling. "And why is that?" The answer came immediately. "You're the one who killed my father." The accusation hung in the air for a moment. Under different circumstances, maybe it would have meant something. Maybe it would have stirred guilt, sympathy, recognition, something. Instead, you found yourself searching your memory and coming up empty. There had been too many faces over the years, too many names, too many people reduced to details and fragments. "Who...?" you asked honestly before snapping your fingers. "Wait, don't tell me. Was he the one with the weird tie?" The guard's face darkened further. "No? Right, right. Then it had to be the guy with that ridiculous hair. I remember that being a nightmare to shave off." "Andrew," he said through clenched teeth. "His name was Andrew Sullevin." The name rolled around in your head for a second before something finally clicked. "Sullevin..." You tilted your head. "Oh, right. I remember now." Then you shrugged. "Not really. I mostly remember seeing the name on your mailbox when I dropped off flowers. There was some of him mixed into the soil." Your smile widened slightly. "Did you keep them? Or did they end up dying on the porch like most of them do?"
That was the moment something broke. Whatever professionalism the facility expected from its staff evaporated instantly. The guard crossed the room so quickly you barely had time to react before a fist tangled itself in your hair. Pain shot across your scalp as he yanked your head backward hard enough to make your neck protest. "Oh, there it is," you hissed, still unable to resist. "There's that famous bedside manner." The response earned another rough jerk that nearly pulled you off balance. The corridor outside seemed strangely empty as he dragged you into it. Whether the other staff were looking the other way or simply too slow to intervene, you couldn't tell. Your shoes scraped across the floor as he hauled you along with little regard for whether you could keep up. Every time you stumbled, he used it as an excuse to yank harder. The rational part of your brain recognized that this was a terrible situation. Another part, the reckless, damaged part, found the entire thing darkly fascinating. Here was the proof you had been looking for. The facility wasn't different from a prison at all. All it took was enough pressure for the mask to slip.
The ride downstairs was a blur of harsh fluorescent lights, slamming security doors, and your increasingly colorful insults. You called him every name that came to mind. Some were creative. Some weren't. None of them slowed him down. If anything, they only made his grip tighter. The lower levels of the facility felt colder than the rest of the building, quieter too. The air carried the sterile smell of disinfectant and old metal. You recognized the area immediately. Treatment rooms. Observation rooms. Places where difficult patients were taken when doctors decided talking wasn't working. The irony wasn't lost on you. For weeks you had listened to professionals describe these rooms as therapeutic environments. Now you were being dragged toward one by a furious guard who looked seconds away from committing a crime. The hypocrisy was almost beautiful.
The room itself was exactly what you expected. Bright lights. Bare walls. Stainless steel surfaces polished to a dull shine. Clinical. Impersonal. The kind of place designed to strip every situation down to mechanics and procedure. Unfortunately for the facility, procedures were no longer being followed. The guard shoved you toward the metal table with enough force to send a jolt through your ribs when you collided with it. You tried twisting away, more out of instinct than any genuine hope of escape, but weeks of skipped meals had left you weaker than you liked to admit. Hunger might have felt familiar, but it wasn't particularly useful during a struggle. The guard outweighed you significantly and had the advantage of pure adrenaline. Within moments your wrists were pinned down. Then your arms. Then your legs. Thick restraints tightened around you one after another until movement became impossible. The metal beneath your back felt ice cold even through the thin fabric of your clothes.
By the time he finished, his breathing was heavy and uneven. Yours wasn't much better. The room fell silent except for the sound of both of you trying to recover from the confrontation. You stared up at the ceiling lights for a moment before turning your head just enough to look at him. Your scalp still burned where he'd grabbed your hair. Your wrists already ached against the restraints. Yet despite the circumstances, despite the vulnerability of being strapped to a table by an angry man with every reason to hate you, a small smile slowly crept across your face. "You know," you said, your voice rough but unmistakably amused, "for a place that's supposed to help people, this is starting to feel very familiar."
The smile disappeared the moment the machine rolled into view. It wasn't subtle, either. One second you looked annoyingly pleased with yourself, still riding the satisfaction of getting under the guard's skin, and the next all of that confidence drained away. There were some things you could joke about and some things you couldn't. Electroconvulsive therapy happened to sit firmly in the second category. You recognized the machine immediately. There was no mistaking it. Unlike the crude device you had once used on Will, this was a professional-grade unit, the kind found in actual hospitals and treatment centers. Modern. Expensive. Built by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Under normal circumstances, it wasn't supposed to be frightening. Patients were anesthetized. Monitored. Protected. Entire teams of medical professionals stood by to ensure everything happened safely. You knew all of that. You had spent enough time obsessing over treatments, institutions, and psychiatric history to know the procedure better than most. Unfortunately, none of that knowledge was comforting when the person wheeling the machine toward you wasn't a doctor. He wasn't following procedure. He wasn't interested in treatment. The fury simmering behind his eyes made that painfully obvious.
For the first time since arriving at the facility, genuine unease crept into your chest. You tried hiding it behind sarcasm. Behind indifference. Behind the same smug expression that usually carried you through every uncomfortable situation. None of it worked particularly well. The restraints suddenly felt tighter around your wrists. The metal table felt colder against your back. You became acutely aware of your own heartbeat. Fast. A little too fast. The guard noticed it too. You could tell by the slight change in his expression. The satisfaction. The realization that he'd finally found something capable of rattling you. "Come on," you said, attempting a laugh that sounded weaker than intended. "You don't actually know how to use that thing." The guard didn't answer. He simply continued preparing the equipment. That silence was somehow worse. Words could be argued with. Threats could be mocked. Silence left room for imagination, and imagination had always been one of your least favorite enemies. A thin sheen of sweat had started forming along your temples despite the chill of the room. You hated that he could probably see it.
The headpiece in his hands looked harmless. Almost laughably harmless. Just another piece of medical equipment among dozens of others. Yet your eyes remained fixed on it as though it were a loaded weapon. Memories surfaced uninvited. Hospital corridors. Evaluations. Discussions held behind closed doors. Doctors speaking about treatment options while pretending patients couldn't hear them. The old fear clawed its way back into the present, dragging years of unpleasant associations behind it. You shifted against the restraints without realizing it. The leather straps held firm. The movement earned a faint smile from the guard. Not a pleasant smile. The kind people wore when they finally felt powerful after spending too long feeling powerless. "Funny," he muttered while adjusting something on the machine. "You're a lot quieter now." You opened your mouth with several responses prepared, each more insulting than the last, but none of them seemed worth saying. The room felt smaller than it had a few minutes ago.
Several states away, unaware of any of this, Will Graham stood beneath the harsh fluorescent lights of the FBI morgue staring down at a body from an entirely unrelated case. The victim lay motionless on the examination table while technicians moved quietly around the room cataloging evidence and discussing findings in low voices. Normally, the work helped. Details gave his brain something productive to focus on. Patterns were easier to understand than people. Unfortunately, his concentration had been drifting all morning. He found himself rereading reports. Double-checking observations he would normally process instantly. His thoughts kept wandering elsewhere before he could stop them. The lingering effects of recovery, he told himself. Fatigue. Nothing more. He was studying a wound pattern along a victim's arm when the morgue doors opened behind him.
Several miles away, in a building that smelled faintly of disinfectant, formaldehyde, and stale coffee, Will Graham stood beneath harsh fluorescent lights examining a body that had absolutely nothing to do with you. The morgue was quiet except for the occasional hum of refrigeration units and the low murmur of conversation between specialists working nearby. Normally, the atmosphere helped him think. Death had a way of simplifying things. The dead didn't lie. They didn't manipulate. They simply waited for someone patient enough to listen. Will had been doing exactly that for most of the afternoon, his attention fixed on evidence from an unrelated case while trying very hard not to think about everything else. It was working, at least temporarily. The familiar routine of observation and deduction occupied enough of his attention to keep more troubling thoughts at bay. That fragile peace lasted right up until the morgue doors opened and Jack Crawford appeared.
Will didn't look up immediately. "If you're here to tell me to take another vacation, save your breath," he said while continuing to study the body in front of him. The lack of response made him pause. When he finally glanced over, something in Jack's expression immediately caught his attention. It wasn't panic. Jack Crawford didn't panic. But there was tension there. Concern. The kind that only appeared when something had gone very wrong. Will straightened slightly. "What happened?" Jack stepped further into the room, his jaw tightening before he answered. "I just got a call from the facility." The words landed with surprising weight. Will felt it immediately. A small shift somewhere deep inside his chest. The same instinct that had warned him about countless killers before they ever acted. "What kind of call?" he asked. Jack hesitated for only a second. "There was an incident." The morgue suddenly felt much quieter than before. Will stared at him for a moment without speaking.
Around them, technicians continued working, unaware of the conversation taking place several feet away. Finally, he set down the file he had been holding. "An incident," he repeated carefully. "Jack." There was something in his voice now. Something sharp. "What happened?" Jack exhaled slowly. "A member of the staff attacked a patient." The answer should have brought relief. Facilities dealt with altercations all the time. Staff members lost their tempers. Patients lashed out. Reports were filed. Suspensions followed. End of story. Yet neither man seemed willing to treat it that casually. Will already knew why. There was only one patient Jack would have come downstairs to tell him about personally. The realization settled into place before the words even left his mouth. "It was him, wasn't it?" Jack didn't answer immediately. He didn't need to. The silence said more than enough.
It didn't take long for the FBI to descend upon the facility. By the time Will arrived, the entire building had fallen into a state of controlled chaos. Alarms echoed through the halls in endless shrill bursts while security personnel rushed from one wing to another, shouting over one another as they attempted to regain control of a situation that had clearly spiraled far beyond anything they had trained for. Patients were being locked down. Medical staff were clustered together in frightened groups. Bloodstains marked sections of the floor where fights and panicked evacuations had occurred. The entire atmosphere felt wrong the moment Will stepped through the front doors. It wasn't simply the disorder. Institutions like this always carried an undercurrent of tension. This felt different. This felt like a chain reaction.
Like one terrible decision had collided with another until the entire structure began collapsing under its own failures. The facility director hurried toward him the second he spotted the FBI credentials, already launching into a defensive explanation before Will could ask a single question. "I didn't know," the man insisted, sweat beading across his forehead despite the cool air inside the lobby. "I never authorized anything like this. Nobody informed me. I didn't give the order." The excuses continued spilling out faster than Will could process them, each sentence sounding more desperate than the last. Normally, Will might have listened. Normally, he would have tried to understand exactly where things had gone wrong. Tonight, he couldn't bring himself to care. The director's guilt or innocence wasn't what mattered right now. "Where is he?" Will asked. The question cut cleanly through the man's rambling. For a brief moment, the director simply stared at him. Then he pointed down a hallway. Will was already moving before the explanation finished.
The deeper he went into the facility, the worse things looked. Security doors hung open. Medical carts had been overturned. Staff members pressed themselves against walls whenever armed agents passed by. Every face he saw carried the same expression, a mixture of fear, confusion, and disbelief. Whatever had happened here had happened quickly. That realization unsettled him more than the visible damage. It suggested a complete collapse rather than a gradual escalation. The reports Jack received hadn't contained many details, but they hadn't needed to. Will already suspected what he would find. The signs had been there long before the attack. He had recognized them the moment Jack mentioned the facility. The moment he learned where you had been sent. Places like this liked to believe they could fix people. They believed every problem had a treatment plan and every patient could be managed if given enough medication, enough observation, enough time. What they never seemed to understand was that sometimes they weren't dealing with broken people. Sometimes they were dealing with damaged ones. And damage had a tendency to spread when mishandled.
Eventually he reached a secured wing where several agents stood guard outside a reinforced cell. Their expressions immediately told him whatever waited beyond the door wasn't going to be pleasant. One of them moved to stop him before recognizing who he was. The hesitation lasted only a second before the agent stepped aside. Through the reinforced window, Will finally saw you. The room beyond was brightly lit and almost completely empty. You stood near the center of it, pacing lazily across the floor as though none of the surrounding chaos concerned you in the slightest. Dried blood stained your clothes and smeared across your hands.
A jagged piece of rusted metal hung loosely from your grip, carried more like a toy than a weapon. Yet it wasn't the blood that caught Will's attention. It wasn't even the weapon. It was your face. For weeks, he had replayed conversations with you in his mind. Every word. Every expression. Every subtle shift in tone. The person standing inside that room looked familiar, but something fundamental had changed. The sharpness was still there. The intelligence was still there. Yet it felt disconnected somehow, untethered from whatever restraints had once kept it organized. When your eyes found him through the glass, laughter immediately bubbled from your throat. Not amusement. Not joy. Just laughter for its own sake. Endless, uncontrolled, and unsettlingly genuine.
You pointed the rusted metal toward him the moment you recognized him. The movement was casual, almost playful, but your grin widened as though spotting an old friend. "Detective!" you called, your voice carrying easily through the room. More laughter escaped before you continued. "There you are." Your shoulders shook with another fit of giggling that seemed impossible to stop. "You know, I should've killed you when I had the chance." The words should have sounded threatening. Instead they emerged with the same strange enthusiasm someone might use while reminiscing about a missed opportunity. You lifted the bloodstained shard slightly higher and aimed it directly at him. "I wouldn't be here if I did." Another burst of laughter followed. Will remained still on the opposite side of the glass. Around him, agents shifted uneasily. Some tightened their grip on their weapons. Others exchanged worried glances. None of them truly understood what they were seeing.
Will did. That was the problem. He studied your face in silence, watching the unfocused energy behind your eyes, the erratic shifts between amusement and agitation, the complete absence of the calculated control that had once defined every interaction he'd had with you. Whatever happened in that treatment room had done more than hurt you. It had stripped something away. Something important. The realization settled heavily in his chest as he stared through the reinforced glass. The person inside the cell still looked like you. Still sounded like you. But the careful boundaries that once existed inside your mind appeared shattered, leaving behind something far more unpredictable than either the FBI or the facility had ever anticipated.
The laughter didn't stop. If anything, seeing Will standing there only seemed to fuel it. You paced across the small cell with restless energy, your boots leaving faint bloody prints across the floor as you moved. The rusted piece of metal swung loosely from your hand while your emotions shifted so rapidly that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the next began. One second you were grinning so hard your cheeks hurt, the next your expression twisted into something uglier. The manic amusement slowly gave way to frustration, and frustration quickly grew into anger. "But best believe I won't be making that mistake twice!" you shouted, pointing the bloodied shank toward the reinforced glass separating you from the hallway. "No. No, no, no. Once I'm out of here, you're dead. You hear me?" The words echoed through the room as your voice climbed higher. "Dead!" Another laugh burst out immediately afterward, loud and uncontrolled, as though even your own threat amused you.
"I mean it, detective!" You slammed the piece of metal against the wall beside you. The impact rang throughout the cell. "You should've stayed home! You should've stayed on your stupid little vacation!" The outburst dissolved into more laughter, then more muttering, your thoughts clearly running faster than your mouth could keep up with them. Through the glass, Will watched in silence, unable to look away despite every warning bell ringing in the back of his mind. This wasn't the same person who had calmly dissected conversations and manipulated every interaction to their advantage. The intelligence was still there, buried beneath the surface, but it had become tangled in something unstable and volatile. It was like watching a machine continue running after critical parts had been ripped out.
Before Will could fully process what he was seeing, a familiar voice cut through the noise behind him. "Will." Jack's tone carried an urgency that immediately drew his attention away from the cell. When he turned around, he found Jack moving quickly down the corridor with several agents close behind. The situation elsewhere in the facility had clearly deteriorated while he'd been standing there. "We need to go." "What?" Will asked, glancing back toward the cell where you were still pacing and laughing to yourself. "Now." Jack didn't slow down. "The commotion triggered a riot." For a brief moment, Will simply stared at him. The words took longer than they should have to register. Between the attack, the facility, and what he had just witnessed through the glass, his brain felt slow to catch up. The decision was made for him before he could argue. An agent gently but firmly guided him away from the observation window while security personnel rushed past in the opposite direction. Somewhere deeper in the building, alarms continued screaming without interruption. The sound blended with distant shouting until it became impossible to tell one from the other.
As they moved through the facility, Will finally noticed details he'd overlooked on his way in. His attention had been so focused on finding you that the surrounding chaos had barely registered before. Now it was impossible to ignore. The place looked like a war zone. Hallways were littered with overturned carts, broken equipment, and abandoned medical supplies. Several security doors stood half-open where mechanisms had failed or been forced apart during the confusion. Staff members hurried patients into secure rooms while others attempted to contain fights breaking out between increasingly agitated groups. Blood stained sections of the floor. Not enough to suggest a massacre, but enough to indicate things had gotten far beyond anyone's control. Every few seconds another alarm joined the chorus of noise echoing throughout the building. The facility's carefully maintained image of order had completely collapsed. What remained underneath was panic. Pure, contagious panic.
The further they traveled toward the exits, the more obvious it became that the entire institution had been operating on a fragile illusion from the start. The doctors, administrators, and security personnel had all believed they were in control because the patients allowed them to be. The moment that illusion shattered, everything else followed. People ran. People shouted. People made mistakes. Will watched a nurse struggling to calm a sobbing patient while two guards sprinted past them toward another disturbance. Further down the corridor, a maintenance worker stood frozen beside an overturned desk, staring at the destruction as though unable to comprehend how quickly it had happened. The entire facility felt unstable, like a building already beginning to collapse while everyone inside desperately pretended it could still be saved.
By the time Will finally reached the exit, he found himself looking back over his shoulder one last time. The sound of distant laughter still lingered somewhere in the depths of the building, buried beneath alarms and shouting voices. He wasn't even sure if he had actually heard it or if his mind was filling in the gaps. Either way, the image remained burned into his memory. The blood. The rusted weapon. The manic grin. The way you had looked at him through the glass. Outside, emergency vehicles crowded the entrance while flashing lights painted the night in shades of red and blue. Yet somehow, standing there among agents, police officers, and terrified staff members, Will couldn't shake the feeling that the real disaster wasn't the riot. It wasn't the attack. It wasn't even the facility itself. The real disaster was still locked somewhere inside those walls, laughing.
After that, everything seemed to happen at once and yet somehow blend together into a meaningless blur. Reports were filed. Meetings were held. Psychologists were consulted. People made decisions on Will's behalf while assuring him it was for his own good. Only a few days after the riot, he found himself removed from the investigation entirely. Officially, it was for his mental health. Unofficially, nobody wanted him anywhere near the case anymore. Not after the kidnapping. Not after the torture. Not after what happened at the facility. Every conversation carried the same underlying message: go home, get better, stay away from this. Will was too exhausted to fight them. Then came the news that made everything worse. You had escaped. During the riot, one of the other inmates had apparently unlocked your cell in the confusion.
From there, the trail dissolved into chaos, conflicting witness statements, and security footage that somehow managed to miss every useful angle. By the time authorities regained control of the building, you were gone. Completely gone. The irony wasn't lost on Will. The FBI had finally caught you only to lose you inside the very institution meant to contain you. There had even been discussions about witness protection after learning exactly what you had threatened before the riot. If Will had formally reported everything. If he had spoken up. If he had admitted how specifically you had fixated on him. But he never did. Whether it was stubbornness, curiosity, or something he couldn't quite name, he kept most of those conversations to himself.
So he stayed home instead. Days became weeks. Weeks threatened to become months. His house slowly settled back into its familiar routine, though nothing truly felt familiar anymore. The dogs remained a constant presence, always nearby, always content with his company regardless of how distracted he seemed. They didn't ask questions. They didn't offer advice. They simply existed, and some days that was the closest thing to peace he could find. Most evenings ended the same way. Will would sit in front of the television with the volume low, pretending he wasn't waiting for something. Every breaking news report caught his attention. Every mention of an unidentified body made his stomach tighten. Every time his phone rang unexpectedly, he felt a brief surge of anticipation before reality inevitably disappointed him. Yet the calls never came. The murders never started again. No gruesome displays appeared in museums. No bodies were discovered in historical landmarks. No anonymous flower deliveries arrived on grieving families' doorsteps. Nothing. It was as if you had vanished from existence the moment you escaped. The silence should have reassured him. Everyone else certainly seemed relieved. But relief was not what Will felt.
The absence bothered him far more than any new murder would have. He understood violence. He understood patterns. He understood obsession. What he didn't understand was inactivity. It didn't fit. Nothing about it fit. You had spent months constructing elaborate crime scenes and chasing an obsession so consuming it practically defined your existence. Historical locations. Symbolic displays. Carefully orchestrated messages. Then suddenly there was nothing. No escalation. No replacement behavior. No visible attempt to continue what had consumed you for so long. The question gnawed at him constantly. Had you gone back into hiding? Were you injured? Recovering? Planning something larger? Every possibility only led to more questions. What was your game? What were you waiting for? Why disappear completely after making such a dramatic escape? Will had spent his career solving puzzles created by damaged minds, but there was something uniquely frustrating about a puzzle that refused to provide new pieces. He hated uncertainty. He hated incomplete pictures. Most of all, he hated not knowing where to look.
The realization of how deep the obsession had become arrived quietly one Saturday night. There was no dramatic revelation attached to it. No sudden epiphany. One moment he was sitting at his kitchen table, the next he was staring blankly at a wall and wondering how long it had been there. Empty coffee cups cluttered the surrounding surfaces. One sat directly in front of him, though the smell rising from it made it obvious coffee hadn't occupied that mug for hours. Maybe days. The liquor burned less than it used to. His eyes drifted across the room, following a maze of photographs, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, maps, timelines, and strings connecting details that may or may not have meant anything. Every available section of wall space had been consumed. There were photographs from crime scenes. Facility reports. Witness statements. Medical evaluations. Newspaper articles documenting your capture and subsequent escape. Pages covered in Will's handwriting were pinned between everything else, filled with theories that contradicted one another depending on what day he had written them. Looking at it from a distance, the display resembled the work of someone chasing a conspiracy. Looking at it up close was somehow worse. Because Will recognized every single piece.
He sat there for a long time simply staring at it. The liquor rested untouched in his hands while the realization slowly settled into place. Nobody had asked him to do this. The FBI wasn't involved. Jack wasn't feeding him information. There wasn't even an active investigation anymore. Yet somehow he had filled an entire wall with evidence concerning a person he was supposedly no longer chasing. A person who hadn't committed a known crime in months. A person who might not even be in the same state anymore. The thought should have concerned him. Instead, he found himself focusing on a different problem. The wall still wasn't complete. There were gaps. Questions without answers. Entire sections built on assumptions rather than facts. Somewhere out there, you were doing something. Thinking something. Planning something. Will could feel it. The same instinct that had guided him through countless investigations refused to let the matter rest. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed a tired hand across his face, only to stop halfway through the motion. Because for the first time all evening, another possibility occurred to him. Maybe the reason he hadn't found any new clues wasn't because you were hiding. Maybe it was because you didn't want to be found. And somehow, that possibility bothered him more than all the others combined.
Tags: Second Person POV, Post-Canon, Post-Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Slow Burn, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Yearning, Found Family, Co-Parenting, Grief and Mourning, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Domestic Fluff & Angst, Force-Sensitive Reader, Tanalorr as a Sanctuary, Cal Kestis Needs a Hug, We're raising a child together now, Shift from pining to partnership, Open Ending/Hopeful Ending
Jedha’s dust had barely settled in their lungs before the galaxy tilted on its axis. One moment, Cal Kestis and you were sharing a quiet, breath-held glance across the Mantis’s common area, a silent conversation of almosts and not yets. The next moment, alarms screamed, blaster fire painted the ancient stones, and Bode’s betrayal carved a wound so deep it seemed to swallow the stars themselves.
Before, it was all stolen moments. Lingering looks that lasted a heartbeat too long, fingers brushing when passing a tool, only to snap back as if scorched. You’d make an excuse, checking for a cut, comparing calluses, just to hold his hand, and then the heat would rush to your faces, the contact broken with a nervous cough. You both knew. Friends don’t stare like they’re trying to memorize the flecks of gold in someone’s eyes. Friends don’t lie awake in their bunks, the narrow corridor between you feeling like a chasm, aching with the unsaid want to bridge it. But the Empire offered no room for softness, no time for revelations. The want was a luxury, a secret flame banked beneath the urgent survival of the day.
Then, Jedha erupted. Cere’s alert, the crushing realization of their compromised sanctuary, and the frantic flight, it all blurred into the stark, unforgiving moment in the Archives. Bode’s blaster. Master Cordova falling. The fight that chased them across the stars to Tanalorr ended not with peace, but with a child’s trembling hand in yours and the weight of a dead man’s daughter in Cal’s arms.
Kata.
Suddenly, the delicate, unspoken thing between you and Cal was buried under the immediate, monumental task of keeping a little girl alive, helping her breathe through the grief. The hands that ached to intertwine now busied themselves with preparing meals, mending torn clothes, and building a makeshift crib. The longing glances were redirected, softened, into watching over Kata’s fitful sleep.
To the group’s surprise, especially Cal’s, you slipped into the role with a natural grace you didn’t know you possessed. While Greez fretted about nutrition and Merrin weaved gentle, magical tales, you became a pillar of quiet routine. One evening, as Kata fussed in your arms, you settled into a chair, a flimsy plastic storybook in one hand. With the other, you gave a slight, focused twitch of your fingers. A few of her colorful toy tooka-cats, left on the table, stirred. Then, they lifted, beginning a slow, waltzing rotation in the air above her, glowing softly with a gentle nudge of the Force. Her crying hiccupped to a stop, wide eyes following the dancing toys. Your voice, low and steady, began the story of the Lost Star-Turtle, and by the time the turtle found its constellation, Kata was asleep, her breath even, cradled against your chest. Cal watched from the doorway, his own heart a tumult of grief and awe, the sight stirring something profound and painful in his chest.
The days bled into weeks on Tanalorr. The immediate dangers faded, replaced by the rhythm of caregiving. But the space between you and Cal, once charged with potential, now felt vast and filled with the ghosts of what could have been. The unspoken thing had not vanished; it had been pressurized, packed down into the quiet moments after Kata was finally asleep, when the Mantis was still save for the hum of the ship’s systems.
One such night, deep into the ship’s artificial cycle, found you both in the lounge. Greez was long in his bunk, Merrin meditating in her quarters. Only the soft glow of the console lights illuminated the space. The silence was a solid, tangible thing, stretched tight over years of friendship, months of unvoiced desire, and weeks of shared, devastating parenthood.
It was Cal who finally broke it, his voice rough from disuse. “You’re good with her,” he said, not looking at you, his gaze fixed on the starfield outside the viewport. “Really good. I… I didn’t expect it. I didn’t know you had that in you.”
You leaned back in the chair, the leather creaking. “Neither did I. It just… felt like the only thing to do.”
“It’s more than that,” he said, finally lifting his gaze. The exhaustion there was profound, but so was a raw, vulnerable curiosity. “You were a natural. The way you used the Force… not as a weapon, but as a comfort. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched Cal’s lips. “The mobile was a good trick. She loves that.” He paused, the silence returning for a long moment, heavier now. “Maybe… maybe you could show me? Sometime. How you do it. How you’re so… calm.”
“Anytime,” you said, the words feeling both like an offering and a lifeline thrown into the chasm between you. “It’s not about being calm. It’s about focusing on her, so you don’t have to focus on… everything else.”
The truth of that hung in the air. Everything else. Cordova’s death. Cere’s sacrifice. Bode’s betrayal. The Empire still out there. And this… this tangled, aching, beautiful mess of feelings between the two of you, now woven inextricably with the care of a child you were raising together.
Cal finally turned his head, his green eyes finding yours in the dim light. The gold flecks were muted, shadowed by exhaustion and sorrow, but the intensity was the same as all those stolen glances. “That’s the thing,” he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper, as if afraid to wake the ghosts or the little girl sleeping down the hall. “When I focus on her, I see you. Teaching her to stack stones. Reading to her. Making her laugh. And it… it confuses me.”
Your heart hammered against your ribs, a frantic echo of all the times his hand had almost found yours. “Confuses you?”
He looked down at his own hands, scarred and capable, now often holding a child’s smaller one. “We… we never talked about it. What we were. Before. I thought we were friends. But friends don’t…” He trailed off, the old, familiar shyness resurfacing, but tempered now by a weary, hard-won honesty. “Friends don’t feel like this. And now, with Kata… it’s all different, but it’s also the same. I still look at you and I…” He shook his head, frustration bleeding into his tone. “What are we?”
The question, finally voiced, seemed to vibrate in the very air of the lounge. It wasn’t just about romance anymore. It was about partnership. Family. A bond forged in war, tempered by loss, and now given shape by the silent, sleeping child in the next room. You thought of the desperate want to kiss him that had haunted you on Jedha, a want that now felt both distant and immediate, transformed into a deeper, more terrifying need, the need to build a life, not just steal a moment.
You took a slow breath, the answer forming not as a declaration but as a shared truth, pulled from the heart of your confusion. “I don’t know what we were,” you said, meeting his gaze fully, the unspoken years of longing laid bare. “But I know what we are now. We’re the ones who get up when she has a nightmare. We’re the ones who decide what she learns, how she grows. We’re… her fathers. And maybe…” You reached out, slowly, giving him every chance to pull away. Your hand didn’t go to his cheek or to intertwine with his fingers. It settled on his forearm, a solid, grounding touch. “Maybe we start from there. And we figure out the rest… together.”
Cal looked at your hand on his arm, then back up at you. The tension that had held him rigid for weeks seemed to seep away, replaced by a profound, exhausted acceptance. He didn’t move into your touch, but he leaned into it, his own warmth meeting yours. The desperate, passionate kiss you’d both imagined in the shadows of the Mantis would have to wait. It was not the time. But in its place was something new: a pact, a foundation. The future was a tangled, painful, uncertain thing. But for the first time that night, you were holding it together.
The air in the collapsed arena tastes of ancient dust and ozone, illuminated only by a steady, defiant blue and a seething, hungry red. Two Padawans who lost everything when the galaxy tore open: one who clung to the light and the memories of Jaro Tapal and one who reached into the void and forged their grief into a weapon. When Cal Kestis faces his dark reflection, the duel becomes a deadly, exhausting debate of philosophy and plasma. But as the blades clash and the words run out, the truth becomes unavoidable: they are too perfectly matched to win and too broken to save themselves.
“You took your grief and made it a shrine. I took mine and made it a weapon.”
A shadow and a light, destined to clash in a forgotten ruin until there is nothing left but the echo of two bleeding kyber crystals.
The air in the collapsed arena tasted of ancient dust and ozone. Shattered tiers of seating rose like broken teeth into the gloom, and the only light came from the two blades that carved the darkness: one a steady, defiant blue, the other a seething, hungry red.
Cal Kestis stood, his breath a steady rhythm against the pounding of his heart. Across the circle of rubble, you stood, a mirror twisted in a dark reflection. Two sides of a single, scarred coin.
The parallels were a cruel joke of the Force. Both of you had known the warmth of a master’s guidance, only to have it snuffed out before your eyes. As Padawans, you had each felt the universe tear open, leaving you alone in the chilling silence that followed. That was where the paths diverged. In his moment of absolute loss, Cal had grasped for the light, clinging to the memories of Jaro Tapal, choosing to honor rather than avenge. In yours, you had reached into the void and found a colder comfort. The pain wasn’t something to overcome; it was a power to be wielded. You fell, not with a scream but with a grim acceptance, while Cal rose, battered but unbent.
“This doesn’t have to be the way,” Cal called out, his voice echoing in the vast space. His blue blade was held in a defensive guard, its light casting long shadows behind you. “The pain… I feel it, too. It doesn’t have to define you.”
Your laughter was a short, sharp sound. “Define me? It forged me. You took your grief and made it a shrine. I took mine and made it a weapon.” You ignited your crimson lightsaber, the sudden, violent glow painting the ancient walls the color of a bruise. Where Cal’s light was a beacon, yours was a warning. The two illuminations met in the middle, blending into an eerie, shimmering purple that danced across the stone, a visual testament to your intertwined destinies.
You were his shadow. He was the Jedi who inspired hope on the Mantis, the beacon Merrin, Greez, and Kata looked to. He was the light everyone preferred, the proof that goodness could endure. And every time someone looked at him with trust, every time his name was whispered as a symbol of the Rebellion’s hope, it was a silent indictment of your choice. It enraged you. His very existence denied the validity of your path.
With a guttural cry born of that fury, you struck first. A powerful, overhand slash meant to cleave his defense and his righteousness in two.
Cal did the opposite. He didn’t meet fury with fury. He flowed sideways, a leaf on the wind, his blue blade redirecting your momentum harmlessly into the ground in a shower of sparks. It was the essence of your divergence: you attacked the obstacle; he moved with the energy.
The duel became a deadly debate. You circled, blades clashing in bursts of sizzling light and screaming energy.
“Join me,” you hissed, parrying a swift jab. “The Empire offers strength, not hiding. Together, we could burn the past that hurt us and rule the ashes.”
“Rule?” Cal shot back, spinning away from a vicious sweep. “Is that what Master Yulen told you? To seek power over others?” He saw you flinch at the name. “Her death was a tragedy, not a lesson in tyranny. Honor her by protecting life, not dominating it!”
“You protect nothing!” you roared, pressing the assault. “You run, you scavenge, you delay the inevitable! The dark side is the only truth in a galaxy of lies!”
Back and forth you went, a vicious cycle of words and blows. You tried to convince him of the power of surrender to emotion. He tried to reach the Padawan he knew still existed beneath the rage. But the arguments were as locked in stalemate as your sabers. Every philosophical thrust was parried by a lifetime of opposite experience.
And you were equally matched. You knew his Form, the echoes of Tapal’s teaching in his moves, just as he could still see the ghost of Yulen’s graceful footwork in yours. He was stronger in the living Force, drawing resilience from the crumbling world around him. You were fiercer, drawing on a well of pain that seemed bottomless. You were two halves of a broken whole, perfectly balanced in conflict. A blow that would disarm a lesser warrior was met. A Force push was countered by a barrier of equal strength.
The fight did not become a contest of victory but one of attrition. Sweat stung your eyes. Your muscles, once fueled by adrenaline and rage, began to burn with simple exhaustion. Cal’s breaths came in ragged gulps, his movements losing their fluid precision. The brilliant purple glow on the walls flickered with your weary strikes.
Back and forth. Lunge and parry. Accusation and invitation. The purple glow on the walls flickered and swirled like a storm. You were trying to convince him of the liberating truth of power. He was trying to convince you of the resilient truth of compassion. Both arguments fell on ears made deaf by experience.
You broke apart, putting ten meters of shattered ground between you, both leaning on your knees, sabers still lit but drooping toward the floor. The arena was silent save for the sound of your labored breathing and the hum of the kyber crystals, one grieving and one bleeding.
You looked at him, this mirror-image, this living reminder of the road not taken. He looked at you, the ghost of his own worst possible future. In that moment of shared, utter exhaustion, there was no hatred. Only a profound, devastating sorrow for the other and for the coin that could never be whole again.
The path to convince the other had led only here: to a standstill, in a forgotten ruin, with two Jedi too strong to beat the other and too broken to save themselves.
His strengths were your weaknesses. Your patience was thin, your anger a fuel that burned bright but fast. His weakness was your strength. His care for all life, his reluctance to cause harm, was a chink in his armor you exploited time and again, forcing him into desperate defense.
He fought to save you. You fought to awaken him.
An hour passed, then maybe two. The purple light on the walls never wavered, a testament to the deadlock. Sweat sheened both your faces, your breath coming in ragged gasps. You were both strong enough to keep up with the other, and in doing so, you were only tiring each other out, draining the galaxy of two of the last Jedi for no gain.
Finally, locked in a crackling saber bind, faces inches apart, you both realized it. The words had run out. The arguments had circled back on themselves. The blue and red blades hummed against each other, the purple light throbbing like a sickly heart.
“You can’t win,” you panted, the dark side offering a last reservoir of bitter energy.
“Neither can you,” Cal breathed back, his light sustained not by anger, but by a weary, unshakeable hope. “This… this just ends with us both empty.”
The coin, suspended for so long, finally began to fall. The two circles, blue and red, glowed beneath your feet, not as beacons of victory, but as grave markers for the paths you had chosen. The shadow and the light, each defined by the other’s existence, are destined to clash until one can no longer cast the other.
Cal Kestis X Jedi Reader (Day Five Prompt: "You want me to do what?")
"Quick, kiss me."
He blinked, the panic in his eyes shifting to pure, unadulterated confusion. The red-headed Jedi stared at you as if you’d just suggested levitating the entire wall. “You want me to do what?”
A Coruscant dead-end, a squad of approaching stormtroopers, and a very flustered Cal Kestis. What could possibly go wrong?
Tags: Second Person POV, Reader-Insert, Fluff and Angst, Coruscant Underworld, On the Run, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Only One Bed's cousin: Only One Dead End Alley, Kissing for Cover, Mutual Yearning, Quick Thinking, First Kiss, Post-Order 66, Hurt/Comfort, Soft Cal Kestis, Idiots in Love, Open Ending
The lower levels of Coruscant smelled of ozone, recycled air, and despair. The endless hum of speeder traffic was a constant, oppressive drone overhead, but down here, in the shadowed canyons between monolithic towers, the sound was muted, replaced by the distant echo of bootsteps, Imperial bootsteps. You and Cal had been moving like ghosts for days, a pair of wanted specters haunting the undercity. Cal Kestis, with his shock of ginger hair and the telltale hilt of his lightsaber hidden beneath a ragged poncho, was a beacon for every stormtrooper patrol. You, a fellow Jedi on the run, knew the feeling all too well.
The strategy was simple: keep moving, never stay in one place for more than a few minutes, and use the teeming masses as a cloak. You’d ducked into a dozen little shops: a droid parts vendor, a stall selling questionable meat skewers, and a dimly lit tapcaf playing tinny holographic music. Each time, you’d linger just long enough for the white-armored patrols to clank past the transparisteel windows, their helmeted heads swiveling in mechanical unison. Cal’s tension was a live wire beside you, his hand never straying far from his concealed weapon.
“Just another couple of spacers down on their luck,” you’d mutter, pulling the brim of your own hood lower. Cal would nod, his jaw tight, his bright green eyes scanning every exit.
But the net was tightening. A routine patrol had somehow turned into a coordinated sweep. You could hear the amplified voices echoing down the alleyways. “By order of the Imperial Security Bureau, halt for inspection!” They were corralling you, herding you away from the main thoroughfares and into a labyrinth of service alleys.
Your breaths came in short, sharp gasps as you ran, Cal right on your heels. The alley narrowed, the walls closing in, covered in grimy pipes and flickering emergency strips. You took a left, then a right, hoping for a cross-passage, a maintenance hatch, anything.
Dead end.
A high plascrete wall, stained with years of runoff, loomed ahead. The only features were an overflowing dumpster and a single, flickering glow panel that cast everything in a sickly yellow light. Behind you, the methodical, marching footsteps grew louder. A squad. Maybe two. There was no shop to duck into, no crowd to blend with. It was just you, Cal, and a wall.
Cal spun, his back to the dead end, his eyes wide with a panic he was trying desperately to master. “We’re trapped,” he breathed, his hand moving to his poncho. “We have to fight.”
Fighting meant blaster bolts, lightsabers igniting, and an immediate alert to every Imperial within ten levels. It meant capture, or death. There had to be another way. Your mind raced, discarding possibilities as fast as the bootsteps grew closer. And then it landed on the one thing a Jedi wouldn’t think of, the one thing the Empire’s faceless enforcers would overlook.
You turned to Cal, the plan crystallizing in an instant. “Quick, kiss me.”
He blinked, the panic in his eyes shifting to pure, unadulterated confusion. The red-headed Jedi stared at you as if you’d just suggested levitating the entire wall. “You want me to do what?” The incredulity in his voice was almost louder than the approaching stormtroopers.
There was no time for debate, for gentle persuasion. The first white helmet was about to round the corner. With a roll of your eyes that was equal parts exasperation and fondness, you closed the distance between you. You placed a firm hand on his chest and pushed him back against the cold, damp wall.
He let out a soft 'oof' of surprise, but before he could protest further, you captured his lips with your own.
For a second, he was rigid, frozen in shock. Then, instinct, or something deeper, something you’d both been too busy running to acknowledge, took over. His body relaxed against the wall. Your other hand came up, tangling in the soft, ginger strands of his hair, holding him close. The kiss deepened, a desperate, convincing performance that quickly blurred the lines between act and authenticity. You could taste the faint tang of the ration bar on his lips and feel the rapid beat of his heart against your palm. His own hands, usually so sure and capable, fumbled for a moment before settling on your hips, gripping the fabric of your jacket. You could feel the rapid beat of his pulse where your thumb brushed his jaw. The world narrowed to the warmth of his mouth, the slight scratch of his stubble, and the quiet, desperate sounds neither of you fully stifled.
The boot steps rounded the corner and halted.
You didn’t pull away. You poured everything into the kiss, the fear, the exhaustion, the unspoken camaraderie of shared survival. You explored his mouth, a silent promise and an apology all at once. Cal, after his initial shock, responded in kind, his hands coming up to grip your arms, not to push you away, but to anchor himself.
From your peripheral vision, you saw the glow of white armor. You heard a muttered, electronically distorted voice. “Ugh. Just a couple. Move along.”
A gruff laugh. “Get a room, you two.”
The bootsteps resumed, fading back down the alley the way they came, moving on to hunt less romantically preoccupied prey.
It took another long moment after the sound had completely disappeared for you to break the kiss, pulling back just enough to rest your forehead against his. You were both breathing heavily, though not from the run this time.
Cal’s eyes were wide, his face flushed beneath his freckles. The alarm was gone, replaced by a dazed, vulnerable wonder. He searched your face, his lips still slightly parted.
“That…” he started, his voice a hoarse whisper. “That was…”
“The only thing I could think of,” you finished, your own voice not much steadier. Your hand was still in his hair.
He didn’t move to dislodge it. A faint, incredulous smile touched his lips. “It was a good think.” He paused, the smile fading into something more serious. “A really good think.”
You didn’t move from the wall, from the circle of each other’s arms, hidden in the shadows of the dead end. For the moment, the galaxy and its wars felt very far away. The only thing that felt real was the warmth of him against you, the ghost of the kiss still on your lips, and the unspoken truth now hanging in the air between you: some things are worth stopping running for.
Tags: Morally Grey Reader, Enemies to…?, Angst and Action, Bounty Hunter Logic, Canon-Typical Violence, Gritty, Bittersweet, Pride vs. Profit
The blaster felt cold and familiar in your grip, a counterweight to the heat of the chase. Cal Kestis had been a ghost, a whisper in the Outer Rim. The name had been a thorn in the Empire’s side for months, and now, a personal itch between your shoulder blades. But you’d made a career out of silencing whispers. Jedi were slippery, all instinct and premonition, but you knew their tricks. You’d hunted their kind before. You knew the tells: the unnatural stillness before the storm, the way the air seemed to thicken around them. That knowledge had let you get close, close enough to leave a scorch mark on his shoulder, close enough to force him to leap from a moving freighter. You’d learned to move against your own instincts, to breathe when every fiber screamed to act, to be still when everything said run. That was how you’d gotten close on Nar Shaddaa, leaving a scorch mark on his shoulder. That was how you’d cornered him in the Bracca scrapyards, forcing him to leap from a moving freighter. He knew your name, or at least, he knew your reputation. You were a real threat.
That’s why it tasted so bitter.
You found him not by your skill, but by Imperial incompetence. A patrol had gotten lucky, triggering a mag-containment field in a Coruscant under-level. He was suspended upside down, twenty meters above a roaring river of speeder traffic, his arms pinned to his sides by the crimson energy field. His lightsaber, that infuriating blade of pure defiance, lay on the walkway just below him, useless.
You stepped into the dim light, your boots echoing on the permacrete. He twisted to see you, his expression shifting from frustrated struggle to grim recognition.
“You,” he grunted, the blood rushing to his head.
“Me,” you said, your voice flat behind your helmet’s modulator. You kicked his lightsaber, sending it skittering over the edge. It vanished into the traffic below. “Looks like the Empire’s finally doing something right. Pity I can’t take credit.”
Cal managed a tight smile. “Sorry to spoil your fun. I know you prefer a more hands-on approach.”
You walked a slow circle beneath him, looking up at the trapped Jedi. “I’ve chased you across five sectors, Kestis. Burned through enough credits in fuel to buy a small moon. And this is how it ends? A freebie?” You spat the word. “I’ve put down two of your kind. One on Taris, one on Dantooine. They all have that same look right before the end. Like they see something you don’t.”
He was silent for a moment, the only sound the howl of the traffic wind. “And what do you see?” he asked.
“A job,” you said simply. “A reputation. And a freebie hanging in front of me.”
That’s what it was. You hadn’t outsmarted him, hadn’t outfought him. The Empire’s dumb luck had done the work. You hated freebies. They diluted the brand. A bounty hunter was only as good as his last earned capture.
“So, what’s the play?” Cal asked, his Jedi calm firmly back in place, a mask over the precarious reality of his situation. “Collect the easy credits? I’m sure the Imperials will be along soon to save you the trouble.”
You stopped, tilting your head. The mag-field emitter was a standard Imperial issue, humming on a console to the side. It would hold him until a transport arrived. Or until it was shut off. The fall was… considerable. The traffic was a continuous, deadly blur. A survival rate? Near zero. For anyone else. For a Jedi? Not zero.
Your reputation was built on confirmed kills, not deliveries to an Imperial cell. Your name was feared because you finished the hunt yourself.
A cold calculus ran through your mind. Distance to the traffic: 20 meters. Speed of average speeder: 300 kph. Probability of impact: High. Probability of Jedi using the Force to mitigate the fall: Also high. But it wouldn’t be a clean escape. It would be a desperate, brutal struggle. And it would be your doing.
“Still don’t like Jedi,” you stated, your voice cold. “But I hate freebies more.”
You raised your blaster, not at him, but at the humming console. “A real hunter,” you said, almost to yourself, “catches his own prey.”
You fired.
The console exploded in a shower of sparks. The crimson field flickered and died.
Cal dropped like a stone.
For a second, he was just a falling shape against the neon-lit canyon of the city. Then you saw it, a slight shift in his posture, a focused exertion. The Force cushioned his plummet, turning a fatal drop into a controlled, though still violent, descent. He slammed onto the roof of a passing cargo hauler, rolling with the impact before scrambling to find a grip. It wasn’t enough to stop the fall, not from that height with no leverage, but it slowed him, just enough to alter his trajectory from a fatal plunge onto permacrete to a crashing, rolling impact onto the roof of a passing freight hauler.
You leaned over the railing, watching as the hauler carried him away, shrinking into the river of light. He looked back once, his figure small and distant. You couldn’t see his face, but you knew the look. It wasn’t gratitude. It was the acknowledgment of a debt to a different kind of law.
You holstered your blaster. The chase was still on. The score was still unsettled. But your reputation, the reputation of a hunter who valued the hunt above the prize, was intact. You turned and walked back into the shadows, the roar of the traffic fading behind you. The game was still being played. And you never played for free.
You turned from the edge, the taste of the encounter bittersweet. No bounty. No clean win. But your point was made. You weren’t the Empire’s garbage collector. You were the hunter. And next time, it would be on your terms.
Tags: Fluff, Romantic Comedy / Fluff and Humor, Banter, Sarcasm, Suggestive Jokes / Innuendo, Cal Kestis is a Dork, Cal Kestis is Smug, Nekkos (Star Wars), Learning to Ride a Nekko, Reluctant Reader, Boyfriends, Established Relationship, Cute, Lighthearted, Game Mechanics As Plot Points
The humid, earthy scent of Harvest Ridge Barn hung heavy in the air, punctuated by the rustle of dried fodder and the low, rumbling gurgles of the creatures stabled within. You stopped dead in your tracks, crossing your arms tightly over your chest as you stared at the bipedal, feathered anomaly standing a few paces away.
"What in the Force is that? I'm not getting on that," you said, your voice flat with absolute refusal.
Cal slowed his pace, turning back to look at you with that familiar, patient grin tugging at the corner of his lips. "It's a Nekko," he explained, gesturing toward the creature as they walked deeper into the barn's shadow. "And we need them if we have any hope of ever making it through at least half of Koboh. The terrain out there isn't exactly built for a casual stroll."
You let out a heavy, dramatic groan, rolling your eyes toward the rafters. "That has to be an over-exaggeration. We have the Mantis. We have legs."
"Okay, maybe just a little," Cal admitted, chuckling as he approached a stall and gently led a striking, white-feathered Nekko out into the main walkway. The creature shifted its weight, its large eyes blinking curiously at you. "But we really do need one for where we're going. The mud slides and steep ridges ahead will swallow you whole. So just bear with me here, will you?"
You stared at the massive bird-like reptile, then at Cal's hopeful expression. Defeated, you threw your hands up in mock surrender. "Alright, fine... but I still don't know how to operate these things. Do they come with a manual?"
"Which is why I'm going to teach you," Cal said softly, his expression softening. He stepped closer, extending his hand toward you. "Come here. They don't bite... at least, not from what I've seen so far."
You hesitated but stepped forward, letting Cal take your hand. His grip was warm and steady as he guided your fingers toward the Nekko's beak, allowing the creature to take your scent. It let out a soft, trilling breath against your skin.
"See?" Cal murmured, looking from the creature to you. "You two just need to trust each other."
"This is easily one of the top ten worst creatures I've ever seen," you muttered, though you didn't pull your hand away, reluctantly allowing the Nekko to finish sniffing you.
"Well," Cal teased, leaning in a fraction closer, "you don't have to like it in order to ride it."
A wicked smirk flashed across your face. "Funny... the same thing could be said about you."
Cal’s cheeks immediately flushed a faint pink. He let go of your hand, waving you off with an embarrassed scoff. "Hey! Just... just get on the thing already, will you?"
Amused by how easily you'd rattled him, you stepped up to the Nekko's side. Cal shook off his fluster and stepped in close to guide you, placing your hands on the base of the creature's thick neck. "Right here," he instructed, his tone turning serious again. "And try not to yank its feathers, or else they'll yank you off. I found that out the hard way."
You carefully adjusted your grip, trying to find a secure hold without provoking the beast. "Okay... how do I get things going—"
Before you could even finish the sentence, the Nekko suddenly jolted forward, taking a brisk stride out of the barn. Luckily, Nekkos aren't exactly known for high-speed sprinting, but the sudden movement still caught you completely off guard. You gasped, gripping the feathers a little tighter than intended as you swayed in the saddle.
"There you have it!" Cal called out, a laugh bubbling in his chest. "Keep steady!"
"Easy for you to say!" you yelled back.
"Keep steady," Cal encouraged, rushing over to his own Nekko and quickly hopping into the saddle to catch up with you. He pulled up alongside your trotting mount. "They sort of... know where they’re going. You just have to guide them with your knees and a little bit of intent. Think ‘forward,’ and it’ll go forward."
You gripped the reins tightly, your jaw clenched. “I was thinking ‘stay still,’ and it completely ignored that,” you grumbled.
Before you could master the art of mental telepathy with your overgrown bird, Cal suddenly spurred his Nekko onward. With a burst of surprising agility, Cal’s mount launched itself into the air, gracefully leaping right over the tall barn gate blocking the path.
Your eyes widened in pure horror. "What the—! I'm not doing that!"
You had no idea Nekkos were even capable of clearing obstacles that high, and frankly, you had zero desire to find out if you were capable of surviving the landing.
Noticing your panic, Cal turned his Nekko around on the other side of the fence. His voice carried across the yard, calm and reassuring. "You can do it! Just give it a running start. Trust the Nekko; it'll handle the rest!"
Sucking in a sharp breath, you nudged the creature with your heels, urging it into a clumsy trot. You steered it closer and closer to the wooden barrier. Your heart hammered against your ribs as the fence loomed large, but right at the last second, the Nekko coiled its powerful legs and hopped cleanly over the fence, landing with a heavy but stable thud on the dirt road.
The creature slowed to a gentle trot, moving over to where Cal was waiting.
"See? Perfect form," Cal praised, offering you a bright, proud smile. "Though... you know..." He pointed a finger slightly to the left, a sheepish grin spreading across his face. "...there was actually a latch on the gate door we both could have used."
You froze, looking at the perfectly functional, unlatched gate, and then back to your boyfriend.
"What? So you made me do all of that for nothing?!" you cried out, incredulous.
"Not nothing," Cal smirked, shifting in his saddle as he turned his Nekko toward the open wild. "At least now you learned how to leap for later."
You rolled your eyes so hard it practically hurt, settling deeper into the saddle as you followed him down the trail. "I am so just staying on the Mantis next time."
The Mantis hummed around them, a familiar, grounding sound that usually felt like home. Tonight, it felt like a fragile shell holding back the vast, cold silence of space. You stood in the common area, the last one to board, watching Greez fuss with the galley and Cere share a quiet, weary look with Merrin. The air was thick with an unspoken exhaustion, the kind that came not from a fight, but from a rescue.
You’d stayed behind with Greez, your stomach a tight knot of worry the entire time they’d been gone to extract Zee. When the ramp had lowered, Cal emerged first, his usual vibrant energy utterly drained. He didn’t launch into a rambling debrief, didn’t crack a joke about another close call. His eyes, usually the color of a Kashyyyk sunset, were dull and shadowed. They scanned the bay, bypassing Cere’s assessing gaze and Greez’s relieved sigh, and locked directly onto you.
Without a word, he crossed the space and pulled you into a hug.
It wasn’t his usual quick, one-armed squeeze. It was a full, silent collapse into you, his arms banding around your shoulders with a desperate, almost fearful strength. His face buried against your neck, his breath warm and unsteady. You held him, one hand coming up to cradle the back of his head, your fingers threading through his ginger hair. You could feel the fine tremor running through him, a vibration of spent adrenaline and something deeper, something raw.
Just as suddenly as he’d initiated it, he broke the embrace. He didn’t meet your eyes, just gave your arm a faint, apologetic squeeze. BD-1, who had been clinging to Cal’s shoulder, gave a soft, concerned whistle and then hopped nimbly onto your own, his little head nudging your cheek. Cal did not explain, just turned and walked stiffly toward the back of the ship, disappearing into the corridor that led to the crew bunks.
You were about to follow when BD-1 trilled urgently. A small, blue holographic recording sprang from his projector. It was shaky, taken from his vantage point on Cal’s back. You saw the flash of blaster fire, the grim set of Cere’s jaw, Merrin’s green magick flaring. And then you saw it: not an Imperial shuttle or a prison transport, but a small, battered escape pod, its hatch forced open. The design was pre-Empire. Republic.
Your breath caught. Cal had told you about it once, in the dead of night after a particularly bad nightmare had shaken him awake. The escape pod. The one he’d used as a child to flee the burning Albedo Brave after Order 66. The one that had become his tomb and his salvation, floating in the dark for years before Bracca. He never talked about it in daylight, but in the vulnerability of night, the memory sometimes leaked out, the cold, the silence, the crushing loneliness.
Now you understand. The mission to save Zee had forced him back into a coffin of his past.
You waited, giving Cere and Merrin time to settle Greez and a grateful but shaken Zee. You gave Cal a few minutes of false solitude. Then, you made your way to the back.
The bunk room was dim, lit only by the soft glow of the ship’s running lights from a small viewport. Cal sat on the edge of the lower bunk, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. He heard you enter and didn’t look up.
“Hey,” he started, his voice rough, aiming for casual and missing by a parsec. “Sorry about that. Just… a long day. Got a bit space-happy for a second there. Didn’t mean to…”
“Cal.” Your voice was quiet but firm, leaving no room for his deflection.
He finally lifted his head. In the low light, he looked younger and older all at once, the freckles across his nose standing out against skin pale with fatigue. But it wasn’t just his face you were reading. As a Jedi, your connection to the Force was a constant, flowing river, and Cal was a familiar, bright current within it. Usually, his presence felt like a warm, steady flame. Now, it was a sputtering ember, choked by the cold ash of remembered terror, guilt over showing weakness, and a deep, profound sorrow that had been stirred up from its long sleep.
You didn’t need the Force to read him, though. You were always good with that kind of thing: the slight tension in his jaw, the way his eyes darted to the floor, the defensive hunch of his shoulders. The Force just painted the emotional truth behind it in vivid, heartbreaking colors.
In the dim light of the bunk room, you found him. He was sitting on the edge of his bunk, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. He didn’t look up as you entered, but his shoulders tensed.
“You don’t have to play it off,” you said, leaning against the doorway frame, not crowding him but not giving him an escape route either. “BD showed me the recording. I saw the pod.”
“I’m sorry,” he murmured; the words rushed, practiced. “That was… a lot back there. Just tired. Adrenaline crash, you know? Didn’t mean to…” He waved a hand vaguely, already trying to build the wall, to sweep the terrifying vulnerability of that hug under the rug.
You didn’t say a word. You simply sat next to him, the mattress dipping under your weight. The space between you was charged, but not with awkwardness. With the Force.
And in the Force, Cal Kestis was an open wound. You didn’t need to be a Jedi to feel it; your connection to him had always granted a unique clarity. But now, it was a torrent. The cold, metallic taste of the escape pod door sealing. The deafening roar of the facility collapsing around him. The stark, lonely silence after the pod’s engines faded. And beneath it all, the old, familiar terror, the ghost of Bracca, of the Scrapper’s Fate, of watching everything you know vanish into the void, leaving you utterly alone.
He was still talking, a soft stream of excuses about mission stress and fatigue, his voice a fragile shield against the storm inside him.
You reached over, your hand covering his where it gripped his own knee. His words faltered and died.
“Cal,” you said, your voice quiet but unwavering in the humming stillness. “Look at me.”
He hesitated, a Jedi Master reluctant to face a truth he couldn’t outrun. Slowly, he lifted his head. His eyes, usually the color of a Kashyyyk sky, were shadowed, haunted.
“You don’t have to play it off with me,” you continued, your thumb stroking the back of his tense hand. “I felt it. I saw it. BD showed me the pod.”
He flinched, a barely perceptible tremor. The last brick in his wall crumbled. “It felt… exactly like before,” he whispered, the confession tearing itself from him. “Everything was coming down. And there was the pod… and I just… I had to make sure they got out. Even if…”
“Even if it meant you didn’t,” you finished softly.
He nodded, a single, jerky motion. The brave face was gone, leaving only the exhausted, scared man beneath. The ginger Jedi who carried the galaxy on his shoulders but was still, in his heart, that young padawan who’d lost everything.
“You’re not there anymore,” you said, turning to face him fully, your other hand coming up to cradle his jaw. Your touch grounded him, pulling him back from the edge of that memory. “You’re here. On the Mantis. With Greez, and Cere, and BD.” You leaned forward until your forehead rested against his, a Keldabe kiss as intimate as any embrace. “With me. You came back. To me.”
A shuddering breath escaped him, and he leaned into your touch, his eyes closing. In the Force, the raging storm began to slowly, gently, settle. The cold fear warmed, replaced by the steady, resilient pulse of your presence beside him. He didn’t need to say he was scared. You already knew. He didn’t need to apologize for his silence. You’d already heard everything he couldn’t say.
Out of all the men in JJK, I think Kento Nanami would suit you surprisingly well.
At first glance, people might assume you'd need someone loud, energetic, and constantly pulling you into adventures, but your profile actually points toward someone dependable, emotionally mature, and capable of balancing out your tendency to overthink. Nanami is exactly that. He's calm, patient, intelligent, and incredibly reliable, the type of man who doesn't just say he'll be there for you; he actually shows up.
You strike me as someone who needs emotional safety more than excitement. You're kind, caring, and deeply loyal, but you also have a sensitive side that can become overwhelmed by anxiety and overthinking. Nanami wouldn't judge those moments. If you had a panic spiral about something small, he wouldn't tell you to "just stop worrying." Instead, he'd sit beside you, make you tea, listen carefully, and help you work through the situation logically without dismissing your feelings.
One thing that stands out is your love for quality time and gift-giving as a receiving love language. Nanami is absolutely the type who remembers things. Mention a dessert you wanted to try once? He'll bring it home a week later. Talk about a book you've been wanting? Suddenly, it's waiting on the table for you. His affection isn't flashy; it's consistent.
Your playful, talkative side would also slowly emerge around him. Once you felt comfortable enough to tease him, you'd discover that Nanami secretly enjoys it. The image of you joking around while he gives you that tired "Really?" look feels very fitting. He'd never admit it openly, but he'd find your cheerful energy refreshing after dealing with curses all day.
The relationship trope here would be "sunshine slowly melting the stoic" mixed with "acts of service as love."
Resident Evil: Leon S. Kennedy
For Resident Evil, my pick is Leon S. Kennedy.
Leon checks almost every box of your ideal type: confident, funny, charismatic, supportive, loyal, protective, and able to make people laugh even during stressful situations.
You have a lot of interests and hobbies, and you're naturally curious about the world. Leon would genuinely enjoy that. He's the kind of person who would happily listen to you explain personality types, Harry Potter lore, conspiracy theories, or whatever random topic currently has your attention. Even if he didn't fully understand MBTI, he'd still sit there listening because he enjoys hearing you talk.
What makes this pairing work especially well is how your strengths cover each other's weaknesses. You dislike poor communication, coldness, and people who don't understand you. Leon is incredibly approachable. Despite everything he's survived, he remains warm and compassionate. He knows what it's like to struggle internally while trying to stay strong for others.
You also mentioned that you're shy at first but become funny and talkative around people you trust. Leon would be patient enough to wait for that side of you to emerge naturally. He wouldn't pressure you to open up immediately. Instead, he'd slowly earn your trust through consistent kindness.
I can easily picture your dates together. One weekend you're exploring an aquarium, the next you're trying new foods at a festival, and another day you're spending hours at an arcade competing against each other. Your competitive streak would absolutely come out during arcade games, and Leon would find it adorable.
Something else I think you'd appreciate is Leon's sense of humor. You specifically mentioned wanting someone who can make you laugh and doesn't take every joke seriously. Leon's playful sarcasm fits that perfectly. He'd help pull you out of your overthinking spirals by making you laugh when you're stressed.
The biggest relationship trope here would be "golden retriever boyfriend × overthinking sweetheart." He'd provide reassurance when your anxiety starts talking louder than your confidence, while you'd remind him that life isn't only about surviving; it's also about enjoying the small moments.
Between the two, Nanami is the more stable and calming match, while Leon is the more adventurous and playful match. If I had to choose the strongest overall compatibility based on everything you wrote, I'd give a slight edge to Leon S. Kennedy because he matches both your emotional needs and your ideal partner qualities almost perfectly.
The air on Bracca was a permanent, corrosive soup of ozone, rust, and despair. It was in that grey, metallic hellscape that two ghosts found each other, though neither knew the other was a phantom. You were just another scrapper, a face among the thousands, hauling power converters and patching hyperdrive cores on the skeletal remains of Venators. Cal Kestis was the quiet, red-haired kid with quick hands and a nervous glance over his shoulder. You worked as a team, a good one. Your efficiency was born of a shared, unspoken understanding: move fast, draw no attention, and survive. You’d cover for him when he’d zone out, staring at a piece of machinery as if listening to its ghost. He’d take the heavier load when your own focus drifted to the distant, mournful hoots of the Mantis shuttles, your mind wandering to a past of temple spires and silent meditation halls. You both hid it: the Force-sensitive tremor in your hands, the instinct to reach out and sense a foreman’s mood before he spoke. You were two Jedi, hiding in plain sight, each protecting their secret from the galaxy and, tragically, from each other. You shared rations in the shadow of a gutted cruiser, talking about everything but the one thing that mattered. It was a fragile, desperate peace.
It shattered when the Second Sister came. Rumors of a Jedi lurking in the scrapyards spread like a toxic leak. The Purge Troopers descended, and in the ensuing chaos, you were separated. Cal, fleeing for his life, saw you from a distance, cornered by a squad of stormtroopers before a black-clad figure descended. He had to run. He told himself you’d escape; you were clever; you were strong. He spent years believing it, clinging to the hope that you’d made it to some far-off corner of the galaxy.
A decade passed. Cal had accepted he’d never see you again. He’d rebuilt himself, found a new family on the Mantis, and fought the Empire in the shadows. Then came Bode’s betrayal, a wound that cut deeper than any lightsaber. Chasing the traitor to the heart of the Imperial fortress on Nova Garon, Cal’s cover was blown. Alarms blared, red light bathed the sterile corridors, and he ran, a cornered Jedi in the belly of the beast. He rounded a junction into a vast, deserted observatory, its viewports showing the cold tapestry of space. And there, blocking his path, stood an Inquisitor.
The figure was tall, clad in the familiar, terrifying armor of the Empire’s Jedi hunters. Cal skidded to a halt, his hand flying to his lightsaber hilt. He was exhausted, grieving, and out of options. This was it. Then, slowly, deliberately, the Inquisitor raised their hands and removed their helmet.
Time stopped.
It was you. Older, hardened, with a severe haircut and eyes that held a galaxy of pain, but you, a cold, sickening shock, worse than Bode’s betrayal, worse than anything he could have imagined, flooded Cal. His breath hitched. “No…”
A grim, joyless smile touched your lips. “Hello, Cal.” Your voice was deeper, etched with a bitterness he didn’t recognize. You ignited your lightsaber, not the single blade he might have expected, but a double-bladed staff that erupted in a violent crimson scream. “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.”
“What… what happened to you?” Cal managed, his own blue blade springing to life almost reflexively.
“You left,” you stated, the words flat and final. “The Second Sister found me. She didn’t kill me. She… showed me the price of hope. Years, Cal. Years in a cell, with the machines, with the questions. They broke me down, piece by piece, and rebuilt me into this.” You gestured at your armor with your free hand. “The Twelfth Brother. They offered power to replace the weakness you abandoned me to.”
“I didn’t abandon you! I thought you were dead!” Cal pleaded, his heart hammering against his ribs.
“Your thoughts mean nothing,” you snarled, the red light of your saber casting demonic shadows across your face. “Only your actions. And your action was to run.” You leveled your blazing weapon at him. “Now, we finish it.”
Reason was a language you no longer spoke. You moved first.
You lunged, your double-bladed lightsaber a crimson whirlwind. The blade spun, a blur of incandescent fury, forcing Cal to parry and weave, each block a jarring shockwave that vibrated through his bones. Your attacks were a torrent, a relentless assault designed to break him. You used the environment, shoving a toppled console with a Force shove that sent debris hurtling towards him. Cal, with a flick of his wrist, deflected the larger pieces with his saber. He pushed back, his blue blade seeking an opening in your frenzied offense. He feinted low, drawing your crimson blades down, then surged upward, his saber slicing towards your exposed flank. You twisted, the hilt of your weapon catching his blade with a screech of protesting metal, the impact forcing him back.
You spun your saber, a whirling vortex of death, and brought it crashing down. Cal ducked beneath the descending blades, his own saber a defensive arc that met yours with a blinding flash. The dark side fueled you with raw power. You lashed out with Force lightning, crackling tendrils of energy illuminating the observatory. Cal, with a surge of concentration, erected a Force shield, the lightning arcing harmlessly around him.
Burning with cold malice, you lunged again. But Cal was a strategist. He saw an opportunity in your overwhelming aggression, a brief moment of exposure. With a burst of speed, he closed the distance. He didn’t meet your blades head-on. Instead, he spun, his blue saber a blur, and with a precise, surgical movement, he severed one of your crimson blades.
You staggered back, shock on your face. The loss threw your rhythm off. You lunged with renewed ferocity with your remaining blade. Cal parried, then, with a powerful Force push, sent you stumbling backward, your balance broken. In that instant, he saw his chance. He propelled himself forward. Your crimson blade met his blue one, but this time, Cal’s blade, driven by righteous fury, sliced through your remaining weapon, then continued its path to your chest.
But it stopped. A hair’s breadth from your heart.
A choked gasp escaped you. The crimson light sputtered and died. You stared down at the severed hilt in your hand, then at Cal, disbelief in your burning eyes. He held his saber steady, its blue glow reflected in your wide, pain-filled gaze. He could end it. For the Rebellion. For his safety. For the galaxy.
He deactivated his blade.
The sudden silence was deafening. You stood there, defeated, weaponless, breathing heavily.
“It’s not too late,” Cal said, his voice thick with emotion. He extended a hand, not in attack, but in offer. The memory of Bracca, of shared rations, of silent, mutual protection, flooded him. “We’re stronger together.”
You looked at his hand as if it were a poisonous serpent. A low, hollow chuckle escaped your lips, a sound devoid of any humor, filled only with infinite weariness and cynicism. “Together?” you repeated, the word tasting like ash. “You still believe that fairy tale? Look at me, Cal. Look at what they made me. What you let them make.” You dropped the broken hilt. It clattered on the floor, a final, pathetic sound. “There’s no ‘together.’ Not for me. The light… it’s a memory. A distant, painful echo. It’s far, far too late for redemption.”
You took a step back, your augmented hand twitching. “Just leave. While you still can. Before I remember that my orders are to bring you in, dead or alive, and that I have nothing left to lose.”
Cal stood frozen, his offered hand hanging in the empty space between them, a bridge to a past that was irrevocably shattered. The man before him was both the friend he’d mourned and a stranger forged in Imperial darkness. The Twelfth Brother turned, his back to Cal, a silent, absolute dismissal. The choice was made. The path back was closed. All Cal could do was heed the warning and carry the weight of one more loss into the endless fight ahead.
hihihi!! may i pls get a matchup for bleach, dc, and marvel? im 21, bisexual & use she/her pronouns:) personality wise, im very dramatic, i get excited easily, and am a bit overly sensitive i’m an infj & cancer, & i try my best to be optimistic no matter what. im a big fan of my own personal space bubble though!! i love anything soft or cute, especially animals!! im kinda scared of bugs though, but i still always try to take them outside. i tend to be a bit bossy and unreasonable when it comes to something i’m interested in. plus i get really moody and irrational sometimes when it comes to something i want (im very stubborn lol). i also really like going for walks, shopping, yoga, gardening, baking (even though i’m dreadfully awful at it), and reading. i try to see the best in everything & everyone, though i can’t really tolerate it if somebody is overly cruel or rude to the people i care about. i have a very “do no harm, take no shit” mentality :) for my appearance, im 5’2 & have fairly long light brown hair. my eyes are hazel, im fairly pale with a few freckles sitting across my face, & my cheeks are perpetually rosy andjfjjek. my style ranges from pretty soft and girly to an adam sandler rip off (it’s lovely). but mostly i really like dressing up even if i’m not going anywhere. i also really like to do makeup, both on myself and others. also since i’m on the shorter side, i like to wear platform shoes since being tall makes me feel cool!
please & thank you!! have a nice day <3
Bleach Match:
Jushiro Ukitake
You strike me as someone who needs a partner who can handle big emotions without being overwhelmed by them. You're dramatic, excitable, sensitive, stubborn, and optimistic all at once, and Ukitake would absolutely adore that about you rather than see it as a flaw. The biggest appeal of this pairing is how safe it feels.
You're someone who wants to see the good in people, and Ukitake is genuinely one of the kindest souls in Bleach. He'd never make you feel like you're "too much" when you're excitedly rambling about something you love or having a dramatic moment over a minor inconvenience. If anything, he'd find it charming.
There's also a hilarious dynamic where you march into a room in platform shoes, fully dressed up for absolutely no reason, and Ukitake just smiles and tells you that you look beautiful. You'd probably end up filling his house with plants, baked goods that occasionally go wrong, and various cute animal-themed decorations. And somehow he'd love every second of it. The trope here is "gentle soul × dramatic sweetheart."
DC Match: Zatanna
This pairing feels like a romantic comedy. You both have dramatic energy. The difference is that Zatanna knows she's dramatic and actively leans into it.
Imagine the two of you getting ready together for events, experimenting with makeup, discussing books, shopping for clothes, and somehow turning every normal outing into a grand adventure. Zatanna would love your optimism. Meanwhile, you'd admire her confidence.
One thing I especially like about this pairing is that Zatanna has a nurturing side beneath all her theatrical flair. She's compassionate and emotionally mature enough to understand your sensitivity without treating you delicately. She'd encourage you to stand taller, wear whatever makes you happy, and take up space unapologetically.
Marvel Match: Wanda Maximoff
This one surprised me, but the more I thought about it, the more I loved it. Wanda is intense emotionally, while you're emotionally expressive and deeply empathetic. You'd understand parts of each other that many people miss.
Unlike some of Wanda's more reckless relationships, your optimism would ground her. Meanwhile, Wanda would make you feel seen in a way that few people can. She'd remember every small detail about you and your favorite flowers, favorite snacks, favorite books, favorite makeup products.
Your relationship would be surprisingly domestic. Gardening together. Baking together (even when things go horribly wrong). Taking evening walks. Curling up together while reading. The trope is "two soft hearts learning to be gentle with themselves."
It's no bother; I've just been in a writing slump, is all.
Naruto Shippuden Match
Sai
Most people would probably expect a louder or more traditionally romantic answer, but Sai feels like one of the strongest matches for you. At first, the relationship would be surprisingly awkward. You're shy around new people, and Sai isn't exactly known for having perfect social skills. The two of you would probably spend a lot of time sitting in comfortable silence before either of you fully opened up. Yet neither of you would feel pressured by that silence. In fact, it would become one of your favorite things about him.
What makes Sai such a good fit is that he understands what it's like to struggle with your own self-worth.
You mentioned dealing with self-hatred and self-doubt, and Sai spent much of his life believing he was incapable of forming genuine connections. He knows what it's like to feel emotionally disconnected from others and even from yourself. Because of that, he wouldn't dismiss your insecurities or tell you to "just think positively." Instead, he'd quietly stay. That's the theme of your relationship with Sai: quiet devotion.
You believe love means staying through difficult times, and Sai would embody that perfectly. During your bad days, he wouldn't force you to talk. He'd simply show up with your favorite sweets, sit beside you, and let you know he was there whenever you were ready.
Your acts-of-service love language would also fit him perfectly. Sai notices things people overlook. He'd remember which books you've been wanting to read, bring you tea before you even ask, and somehow always know when you're pushing yourself too hard. Meanwhile, you'd bring warmth into his life in a way he desperately needs.
Your playful sarcasm, curiosity, and laid-back nature would help him experience the lighter side of life. He'd secretly find your mood swings adorable because you'd go from being annoyed at something trivial to completely fine twenty minutes later.
The relationship feels like late-night walks beneath the stars, sharing desserts, sitting together while reading separate books, and quietly healing each other's wounds without demanding perfection.
Sai wouldn't ask you to become someone else. He'd simply help you learn to see yourself the way he sees you. And in his eyes, you'd be someone worth loving from the very beginning.
Kagurabachi Match: Hakuri Sazanami
If Sai is your calm and gentle match, then Hakuri is your "you accidentally became each other's reason to keep moving forward" match.
The thing about Hakuri is that beneath his awkwardness and insecurities is someone who desperately wants to protect the people he cares about. Sound familiar?
Both of you struggle with self-doubt.
Both of you tend to be harder on yourselves than anyone else ever could be.
Both of you keep moving forward anyway.
That's why this relationship would feel so natural.
Unlike some stronger personalities in Kagurabachi, Hakuri wouldn't overwhelm you. He'd give you space when you need it while still making sure you never feel alone. Your quieter moments would never make him uncomfortable because he's someone who understands uncertainty better than most. The trope here is "two people learning their worth together."
You'd become one of the few people capable of calming him down when he's spiraling into self-criticism. Whenever he starts doubting himself, you'd gently remind him of how far he's come. The funny thing is, he'd end up doing the exact same thing for you.
Whenever your self-hatred starts creeping in, Hakuri would become surprisingly stubborn. He'd remind you of every kind thing you've done, every person you've helped, every reason you're important to him. And because he's being completely sincere, you'd find it difficult to brush off. Your relationship would also be incredibly sweet.
You like stargazing, late-night walks, birds, and quiet moments. Hakuri would adore all of that. Some of your favorite dates would be simple ones: wandering through the city at night, sharing snacks, talking about random things while watching the stars overhead.
You'd also have a teasing dynamic that grows stronger over time. Once you're comfortable around him, your playful and sarcastic side will emerge, and Hakuri will become the perfect target for your jokes. He'd pretend to be offended. You'd know he's not. And somehow it would become one of your favorite forms of affection.
What truly makes Hakuri your match, though, is that he understands the kind of love you described.
Not a love built on grand gestures.
Not a love built on perfection.
A love built on choosing each other every day.
On staying.
On protecting one another.
On becoming stronger because the other person is there.
The kind of love that quietly says:
"You don't have to carry everything by yourself anymore."
hello!! if you're interested at all, I would love to do a matchup trade w you over on my blog! here's my matchup information hehe tysm! for fandoms, could I have a matchup for mha and marvel please?
general info: ellie | 18 | she/her | asian-american | enfp/2w3 (and sometimes infj depending on the day haha) | male match please!
interests:
i'm a huge fan of anything outdoorsy, especially if it's at night! stargazing, road trips at night, beaches at night, swimming at night, nighttime runs, campfires---literally anything. especially if it's followed by late-night takeout hehe
but I'm also def a morning person! most days the only reason I stay up late is to study (i value education a lot and see it as a privilege! i think systematic education is the primary issue, but learning in and of itself is a huge huge huge part of my life), so if i had it my way i'd wake up early to go on runs and watch the sunrise on the regular 🙂↕️🫶
writing, reading, creating, singing, guitar, piano, violin, musical theatre---i love love love storytelling, no matter what form it comes in
it's also for the above reason that I love going to see live performances of musicals and going to the movie theatres (or mb it's because i love sitting in dark rooms with snacks and it's illegal to talk to me… both both is good)
i also love teaching! i used to teach preK-8th graders at an art studio and it was the absolute best omg
I am. a HUGE foodie I love baking I love cooking + I love eating!! literally my dream day is one of those food festivals followed by us going home and watching a movie together while eating and rating the food haha
MASSIVE fan of deep talks and convos at night!! but also someone I can laugh with until my sides hurt
personality: i'd like to consider myself a positive and welcoming person! I think my motto is to understand that things have an infinite amount of room to get better, and I try to be the person that i needed when i was younger without expecting anything in return. i'd also like to consider myself relatively funny. comedy that lands without making others a butt-end of the joke holds a lot of weight for me! being non-judgmental is also a huge part of my personality, and i really value being surrounded by people who don't gossip & refrain from seeing things in black and white. i used to have like no spine whatsoever, but i've been able to shun away my people-pleasing tendencies over the years! I have some off-days where they come back, but they tend to stay at bay
appearance: i'm roughly 5'7", slightly athletic build, black hair that i normally do the half up-half-down look for, i wear clip-on earrings chronically (my favorite are a pair of moon earrings with star dangles on the bottom)! i wear glasses with clear rose-ish frames occasionally, and i love wearing long, navy blue skirts on days when I feel like life is getting repetitive haha
love language: for giving it's definitely words of affirmation!! for receiving I would say I am a total loser for acts of service (and physical touch)
likes:
this was actually originally a list of dislikes but I changed it to likes because I felt like I was complaining BWAHAH OKAY but I guess on that note! I love being surrounded by positive people or people that have a lot of resilience. I really admire people who are just genuine & educated abt the world around them, but are still willing to continue trying
active listeners. oh LORD oh am on my knees for active listeners. people who make eye contact, smile, nod, address what you're saying, that truly make you feel heard?? OUUUGH suddenly the wedding rings are in my pocket
people who know when to speak softly and who know when to cheer loudly. ough. perfection
someone who communicates oh YES PLEASE
I also go through depressive episodes on the occasion that lead me to isolate against my own will, and it makes it really hard for me to feel up-to-par to how I should talk to others. being w someone that sees and acknowledges that difficulty before trying to fix it is so appreciated!
people who stand on business. people who are angry on behalf of other people, people who give advice to others not to feel better abt themselves but from a genuine place of kindness and empathy
songs: anything by noah kahan. ough. i think the qualities abt his music that I admire the most is that he's incredibly self-aware and articulate, just insane at making music, is an incredible storyteller, and is equally humble as he is kind. the lyrics in every song tell such a special story
random facts:
i love singing/songwriting! i've been doing musical theatre since i was 8 and it's been an incredible decade so far of being able to make music, play music, and perform with my non-biological family on-stage
warm, flowery jazz songs are my fav songs to sing!
i love love eating frozen fruit with peanut butter I don't know how relevant this is but I adore it
my older sister is my best friend and i'd do anything for her
i don't get outwardly angry often---i think working with kids for the past few years has helped me hone that! but i have a lot of weird ugly anger inside from growing up in a tense household that i'm still working out how to handle. it normally processes itself by making me cry haha but i'm def working on it!
cinematherapy is a gold mine of a YouTube channel. ough omg they have lovely film and psychological analyses on movies/shows that I listen to on a regular basis
my favorite color is leaves in the sunlight (not exactly lime green but not exactly forest green either but also not yellow-green,, oh man it makes me so happy)
if you are interested in doing a trade, feel free to look through my blog for the overall guidelines! thank you so much for your time <3!
For My Hero Academia:
I honestly think you'd be a fantastic match with Shoto Todoroki.
At first glance, this pairing might seem a little unexpected. Shoto is quiet, reserved, and often struggles to express what he's feeling, while you're someone who thrives on connection, storytelling, teaching, and making others feel welcome. But that's exactly why it works so well. You aren't the type of person who demands people open up immediately; you give them room to exist as they are. Shoto has spent most of his life feeling like he needed to be useful or strong rather than simply loved. Being with someone like you, who values kindness, communication, and emotional honesty, would be incredibly healing for him.
The trope here is very much "sunshine meets winter morning." Not sunshine in an overly bubbly sense, but in the way sunlight gradually warms a room without forcing itself inside. You'd be one of the few people who could get genuine laughter out of him regularly. Not because you're trying to fix him, but because your enthusiasm for life is infectious. The first time Shoto sees you excitedly rambling about a musical, a book, or some random fact you learned while teaching kids, he'd probably just stare for a second before realizing he's smiling.
One of my favorite things about this relationship is how naturally your love languages fit together. You give words of affirmation so freely, and Shoto desperately needs them even if he'd never admit it. He'd remember every compliment you've ever given him. Every "I'm proud of you" would get filed away in his brain forever.
Meanwhile, Shoto is the king of acts of service.
You mention liking people who notice your struggles before trying to solve them, and Shoto absolutely would. During your depressive episodes, he wouldn't overwhelm you with advice or force conversations you aren't ready for. Instead, you'd wake up to find food in the fridge, tea already prepared, your favorite blanket folded neatly nearby, and a simple text asking if you wanted company. No pressure. Just support. The relationship also has a surprisingly playful side.
You love deep conversations, but you also love laughing until your sides hurt. Once Shoto becomes comfortable around someone, he has a very dry, unintentionally hilarious sense of humor. Half your relationship would consist of you saying something ridiculous and him responding with complete seriousness, only for both of you to burst out laughing thirty seconds later.
The late-night drives would become a staple of your relationship. You'd drag him out to beaches at midnight or quiet overlooks to watch meteor showers. He'd never admit it, but he'd start looking forward to them. There would be countless nights spent sitting on the hood of a car, sharing takeout, discussing dreams, books, family, and the future while the stars stretched overhead.
The thing that would make the relationship last, though, is that you both carry burdens quietly. You're someone who often takes care of everyone around you and sometimes forgets yourself. Shoto understands that feeling better than almost anyone. He'd be one of the few people capable of recognizing when you're trying to smile through exhaustion. When you're giving too much of yourself away, he'd gently remind you that you're allowed to rest too.
For Marvel, my pick is Peter Parker (adult Peter, post-college).
This relationship is basically the embodiment of "friends-to-lovers with endless banter and mutual admiration."
Peter would absolutely adore you. Not in the dramatic soulmate-at-first-sight way, but in the way someone slowly realizes they never want to spend a day without hearing your voice.
You both share a deep curiosity about the world. Peter is a scientist at heart, while you're someone who genuinely values learning and intellectual growth. Conversations between you would last for hours. One minute you're discussing literature, the next you're talking about education reform, then somehow you're debating whether aliens would appreciate musical theatre.
And Peter would absolutely attend every show. Front row. Loudest applause in the room. Possibly embarrassing you in the process.
One thing Peter would love about you is your compassion. He spends so much of his life helping other people that he rarely lets himself receive help in return. Meanwhile, you're naturally nurturing without expecting anything back. The difference is that unlike many people in Peter's life, you wouldn't put him on a pedestal. You'd treat him like Peter first and Spider-Man second.
You'd also challenge him in ways he secretly needs. Peter tends to shoulder responsibility alone and blame himself for everything. You're someone who believes people deserve understanding and grace. Whenever he spirals into guilt, you'd be there reminding him that being human doesn't make him a failure.
Meanwhile, Peter would absolutely worship your creative side. He'd keep every poem. Every story draft. Every random idea you scribbled down at 2 a.m. The man would have folders dedicated to your work.
The trope here is "golden retriever genius falls hopelessly for the storyteller."
He'd bring you coffee when you're studying (and probably forget you don't like certain drinks at first, then spend weeks memorizing your exact preferences afterward). He'd listen to your thoughts about books with genuine fascination. He'd encourage your dreams without ever making them feel unrealistic.
Most importantly, Peter is someone who never stops trying. And for someone who values communication, resilience, kindness, and deep emotional connection as much as you do, that's exactly the kind of partner who would make you feel safe enough to love as deeply as you naturally want to. The relationship feels like late-night diners, shared playlists, forehead kisses, study sessions that turn into conversations about life, and falling asleep on the couch after watching a movie you were both too invested in to stop talking about. A relationship built on friendship first. The kind that still feels exciting ten years later.
From🌊: OF COURSE NO PROBLEM! I HAD NO IDEA IT WAS PRIVATE; I COULD'VE SWORN I MADE IT PUBLIC.. ANYWAY HERE!!11
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11tPrb-nXOObiYreTfZ_dG5uukLx3WUpckohI03v3A-c/edit?usp=sharing
In case it still doesn't work, here's the full thing! (or you can just read it from here...):
Basic info
Pronouns
They/Them
Gender & Sexuality
Fem presenting (still kinda questioning tbh) & Omnisexual
MBTI & Zodiac
INFP & Virgo (September 18th is my birthday <3)
Personality
The good/positive!
I’m a super emotional, affectionate, and deeply caring person. Once I get attached to someone, I care about them *hard.* I get close to people pretty fast if I feel safe around them, and I’m naturally very supportive and attentive emotionally. I tend to pick up on people’s moods really easily, so I’m usually the type to check in, comfort people, or notice when something feels “off.”
I care a LOT about emotional connection, loyalty, and feeling genuinely close to people. I’d always rather be kind and understanding than technically “right.” I’m very much a feelings-first kind of person.
I’m also really imaginative and expressive. I love humor, dramatics, creativity, storytelling, and being playful/silly with people I’m comfortable around. I can be pretty chaotic sometimes, but in a fun way. I SWEAR. A lot of my humor and energy is honestly just me being naturally goofy (and using it as a defense mechanism.)
Under all the chaos though, I’m honestly just mostly chill, and loyal! (to a fault..)
Neutral Traits
I’m kind of a mix between a dreamer and a realist. I believe really deeply in meaningful connections and love, but I’m also aware that people can leave or things can fall apart suddenly, so part of me is always trying to protect my feelings. (even if I’m not very good at it… :,D)
As mentioned, I get emotionally attached pretty easily if someone makes me feel safe, understood, or wanted. I really value closeness and quality time, even if we’re literally just sitting together doing nothing. Just existing around someone comfortably means a lot to me.
I can also be very dramatic/playful in the way I talk and act sometimes. I joke a lot, exaggerate things for fun, and use humor constantly, especially when I’m nervous or vulnerable. (If it's REALLY bad then I'll just be quieter than usual.)
Flaws / Struggles
I overthink. (Like… *a lot.* )Especially with people I care about. I tend to worry about being annoying, too emotional, replaceable, or secretly unwanted even if nobody actually says that.
I also struggle with people-pleasing if I’m really attached to someone. I hate conflict with people I care about, so sometimes I’ll stay quiet about things that hurt me just to avoid ruining the moment or friendship/relationship. Along with bottling things up for way longer than I should because I hate feeling like a burden.
But if things build up for *too* long, or someone hits a sensitive topic carelessly, I *can* snap suddenly. Not because I’m trying to be mean or wanting to be mean, but because I’ve usually been holding everything in for way too long already.
I’m also really sensitive to emotional coldness, manipulation, guilt tripping, apathy, or feeling abandoned/ignored. Those things affect me pretty deeply. (Though it won't cause me to leave until I feel like there's no absolute way to fix/solve these said problems.)
Me being in a relationship..
When I like someone romantically, I get VERY attached emotionally versus if it's platonic. I’m affectionate, clingy in an… interesting way (think of me as a ferret or a dog!) protective, and super devoted to the people I love.
My main love languages are physical touch and quality time. Small things genuinely mean everything to me, late night talks, sitting together quietly, sharing music, playing games together, checking in on each other, laying together, or just existing in the same space comfortably.
I love feeling close to someone. I want a relationship where we can talk openly, comfort each other, be stupid together, and genuinely feel safe around one another!
At the same time though, I can get anxious if I feel emotional distance or inconsistency from someone for an extended amount of time from who I’m attached to. Reassurance means a lot to me even if I don’t always ask for it directly.
Hobbies & Interests + Likes & Dislikes
Video games
Designing / character design
Reading
Roller skating
Voice acting
Music
Paranormal stuff
Folklore & urban legends
Creative writing/story concepts
Anime (duh)
Likes
Blue & red (MAINLY blue)
Heavy rain
Cold night air
Beaches/the sea
Music
Horror/paranormal stuff
Folklore & creepy stories
Emo & scene fashion
The 200s in general
ELA & History
RANCHH <33
Dislikes
Toxicity
Guilt tripping/manipulation
Emotional apathy
Dishonesty
Feeling abandoned or unwanted
Math
HOT weather (I get overheated easily)
Everyone talking at once loudly
Mayao.
Alignment + extra
Chaotic Good / Neutral Good
I care way more about kindness and intentions than rules or appearances!!
I'm fine with having a girl as a match but I would prefer an dude <3 (DW I STILL MY LADIESS)
I have a cat named Cleo (full name Cleo patra) she's an calico and she's super duper amazing!! I prefer it if the person doesn't mind cats, especially MY cat or else..
>:(
I LOVEEEEEEEE Ponyo and studio gibilis movies in general :3
I wrote all of this super late so sorry if my grammar started to die out… (was getting tired and lazy gulp.) I hope you have a lovely day/night !11 <33
JJK Match:
Kento Nanami
I know a lot of people expect flashy answers like Gojo, but Nanami is honestly screaming your type.
You need consistency.
Nanami is consistency.
One of your biggest struggles is emotional uncertainty, wondering if you're annoying, if people secretly don't want you around, if you're being "too much." Nanami's biggest strength as a partner would be that you'd never have to guess where you stand with him. If he loves you, you know he loves you. No games. No mixed signals. No disappearing for three days and pretending it's normal.
Your goofy, dramatic energy would honestly become one of his favorite things. At first he'd stare at you with the most exhausted expression imaginable while you dramatically flop across furniture complaining about life. Three months later he'd be hiding a smile every time you did it.
He's also surprisingly nurturing beneath the serious exterior. The type who notices you skipped lunch and suddenly there's food in front of you. Notices you're overthinking and quietly asks what's wrong. Notices you're exhausted and practically orders you to rest.
The biggest green flag?
When you have those moments where you've bottled everything up for weeks and finally explode emotionally, Nanami wouldn't get angry. He'd sit down and listen. And then he'd help solve the problem. Plus your cat Cleo would absolutely adore him.
Honkai: Star Rail Match: Gepard Landau
This man was built in a laboratory specifically for people with attachment issues. Gepard is loyal to an almost ridiculous degree.
You describe yourself as someone who gets attached quickly when you feel safe and understood. Gepard naturally creates that safety. He's dependable, emotionally sincere, protective without being controlling, and genuinely values commitment.
The reason I picked him over someone like Dan Heng is because Dan Heng's emotional distance would probably drive you up a wall.
You need reassurance. Gepard gives reassurance naturally. Not because he's overly romantic, but because he's incredibly steady. You strike me as someone who loves little domestic moments more than grand gestures.
Late-night talks. Listening to music together. Walking near the beach. Existing in the same room doing separate things. That's Gepard's entire relationship style. He'd also absolutely spoil Cleo. The moment your cat chooses to sleep on him once, it's over. That's his cat now too.
Your playful chaos mixed with his earnest awkwardness would create some genuinely adorable interactions.
BSD Match: Doppo Kunikida
This one surprised me while I was thinking about it.
Most people would immediately jump to Dazai, but Dazai would trigger half your listed anxieties. The disappearing. The emotional evasiveness. The constant uncertainty.
You'd spend way too much time wondering if he was serious. Kunikida, on the other hand, gives you something you desperately need: stability. He's responsible, dependable, and deeply caring beneath the grumpy exterior. Would he understand your dramatic ferret energy immediately? Absolutely not. Would he eventually become hopelessly fond of it? Unfortunately for him, yes.
You'd be that person who somehow ends up scribbling doodles in his notebook.
You'd annoy him.
He'd lecture you.
You'd keep doing it.
He'd secretly start expecting it.
What makes him a strong match is that he actually values kindness as much as you do. Under all the rules and schedules, Kunikida genuinely wants to help people and do the right thing.
Your Chaotic Good energy and his Lawful Good tendencies create that classic "golden retriever meets exhausted office worker" dynamic. And when you're anxious? He's very much a "tell me what's wrong so we can fix it together" person. Which is exactly the kind of partner an overthinker usually needs.
Honorable Mentions
JJK
Yuta Okkotsu: probably your runner-up. Sweet, empathetic, emotionally attentive.
Satoru Gojo: fun chemistry, but his chaotic schedule might make you anxious.
Honkai: Star Rail
Dan Heng: amazing emotional depth, but you'd need patience with his reserved nature.
Jing Yuan: surprisingly good match if you like a teasing, emotionally mature partner.
BSD
Atsushi Nakajima: incredibly sweet and emotionally understanding.
Osamu Dazai: strongest chemistry, worst for your anxiety.
Overall Winner
If I had to choose just one from all three franchises?
Kento Nanami.
You have a huge heart, but you also carry a lot of fears about being unwanted, replaceable, or too emotional.
Nanami is the kind of person who quietly proves, every single day, that you're none of those things.
hihi i saw you were doing matchups and wanted to know if i could have one for dcu and/or mcu if that’s alright!
gender/preferences: i’m a girl w she/her pronouns and i’m bi with a preference for men. also i am 20 so no minors pls
hobbies: theatre, gaming, i’m very much a homebody but love talking and hanging out w people i would just prefer it’s at my apartment lmao. i like pretty much any craft but especially crochet an artsy project with step by step instructions HATES to see me coming.
personality: i’m straightforward but very sarcastic. i’m studying elem education rn so i’m really into teaching and learning as well. i also lowkey get ragebaited EASILY and will argue with anyone no lie (esp men) i still try to help people whenever i can friends or otherwise but i do have a horrific temper at the same time. my friends tell me i’m funny and i like to believe them. i am also very off-putting at first to people when i realize i like them romantically so a matchup would ideally be patient AS HELL. i also have an insane amount of trouble w social cues so that would require even more patience lmao. i would also love it if they had a sense of humor too! i really like laughing and joking around w people im close with
wow i’m rereading this and sorry that it’s so long omg. thank you for getting thru that whole thing and i can’t wait to see what you come up with if you get the chance :):)
Marvel Match:
Matt Murdock
Matt is the kind of person who would absolutely survive your sarcasm, your accidental mixed signals, and your tendency to argue with people for sport.
In fact He'd probably argue right back.
Not in a toxic way, more in a "we've somehow spent forty minutes debating something completely irrelevant and now neither of us remembers how it started" way.
You strike me as someone who needs a partner who won't be intimidated by your personality. You're outspoken, witty, passionate, and not afraid to call people out when they're being ridiculous. A lot of people might misread that as being difficult.
Matt wouldn't.
He'd recognize that beneath the sharp tongue is someone who genuinely cares about people.
As a teacher-in-training, you're drawn toward helping others learn and grow. Matt dedicates his entire life to helping people too, whether through the law or as a vigilante.
You'd both have a strong sense of justice, though your methods might occasionally clash.
Why It Works
He's patient enough to handle your difficulty with social cues.
You're funny enough to pull him out of his perpetual angst.
Neither of you backs down from a debate.
Both of you care deeply about helping people.
He'd appreciate that you say what you mean.
Matt is also surprisingly good at seeing through walls people put up.
When you get awkward around someone you like and accidentally become off-putting?
He's one of the few people who would realize:
"Oh. She's not annoyed with me. She's nervous."
And then he'd find it incredibly endearing.
Relationship Dynamic
You'd be the sarcastic gremlin.
He'd be the exhausted man trying to maintain order.
Neither of you would succeed.
Your dates would honestly be pretty simple:
Cooking together.
Watching movies at home.
Staying up way too late talking.
You crocheting while he listens to you rant about something that annoyed you that day.
And somehow those quiet moments would end up meaning the most.
DC Match: Dick Grayson
If Matt is the patient lawyer who understands your heart, Dick is the patient golden retriever who refuses to let you stay grumpy forever.
This matchup feels ridiculously natural.
You like people.
You enjoy talking.
You enjoy making people laugh.
You enjoy spending time with friends.
You just happen to prefer doing all of that from the comfort of your own apartment.
Dick would absolutely be the type to show up with takeout and immediately make himself comfortable on your couch.
Why He'd Love You
Dick spends his life surrounded by dramatic people.
You'd be a breath of fresh air.
He'd adore:
Your humor.
Your creativity.
Your passion for teaching.
Your willingness to stand up for people.
The fact that you're genuinely kind despite your temper.
Why You'd Love Him
Dick is absurdly patient.
You could miss every romantic signal he throws at you for six months straight.
He'd keep trying.
You could accidentally come across as annoyed when you're actually interested.
He'd figure it out eventually.
He grew up deciphering the emotional disasters known as the Batfamily.
Your social awkwardness wouldn't even make the top ten list of confusing people he's dealt with.
Relationship Dynamic
Your relationship would feel like being best friends first.
Lots of inside jokes.
Lots of teasing.
Lots of laughing until your stomach hurts.
Dick would also be one of the few people capable of talking you down when your temper gets triggered.
Not by telling you to calm down.
By making you laugh before you fully commit to the argument.
Homebody Compatibility
This is another huge reason I picked him.
Despite his adventurous lifestyle, Dick genuinely loves having a place that feels like home.
A night in with takeout, movies, and random conversations?
He'd choose that every time.
Runner-Ups
Marvel
Peter Parker: Shares your humor and loves making people laugh.
(resending this, in case tumblr ate my first ask. my tumblr was really weird about this for me, so i always make sure to resend now. please disregard if you already saw the first request. sorry about this!)
hello!! i've been reading your matchups and i love your writing style! so, i thought i'd request one of my own. i'd like a my hero academia and an avatar: the last airbender matchup, please. adult version, please, but you can start with the original timeline if you think of a scenario in which we met. only if you're not too busy, take your time.
i'm female (she/her), mbti is infj. romantic preference for boys.
i'm proactive and sharp academically, top of the class type. and my curiosity helps a lot with this. people often call me smart, mature, diligent, and kind. i have a quiet confidence to me and often don't care about what other people may think of me, as long as i'm not hurting anyone and i'm happy. i have a huge sense of internal authority. still, i try to be considerate of others and ask for input if my decisions will greatly affect them or if i'm a leader in the situation. i am also a very emotionally sensitive person and cry a lot, for better or for worse.
i'm extremely introverted, very meticulous and diligent, and may seem intense, but my face brightens up whenever i see my loved ones. i often accept things graciously and have a "que sera sera" mindset, but i also overthink and need lots of time to warm up to people (unless i really click with a person, then i become crazy immediately). i'm the type of person to get angry for other people but not myself. i tend to unconsciously people please due to my ability to anticipate people's needs and put others before myself. i also tend to get stressed and burnt out because i carry too much to make others happy (comes with eldest daughter responsibilities, lol).
around the people i love, i'm witty and like to make them smile. i love to sing, listen to music, and read. i'm also a hopeless romantic. i feel intensely and love hard, even if it may not seen on the outside. i believe in deep connections and dating for marriage. in relationships, i would be extremely loyal to a fault, but if my trust is broken, i'd likely shut them out and ignore them.
i like animals, punk and rock music, soft and cold blankets, nature, matcha, and good weather. i dislike condescending people, being blamed for things, going out unexpectedly, and petty conflict. my music taste is pop-punk and rock.
thank you so much for your time! i hope you'll be able to get to this. have an amazing rest of your day!!
Your MHA match:
My Hero Academia Matchup: Shoto Todoroki
You and Shoto have the kind of compatibility that develops slowly, quietly, and deeply.
A lot of people see Shoto as emotionally reserved, but beneath that calm exterior is someone who cares intensely about the people he loves. Similarly, you're someone who feels things deeply but doesn't always wear your heart on your sleeve.
The biggest reason I pair you with him is that neither of you would pressure the other to be someone you're not.
You strike me as someone who carries a lot of responsibility. You're academically driven, conscientious, and naturally take care of others before yourself. Shoto would notice that.
