Summary: When you wake up from a terrible dream fueled by insecurities, Loki helps you - and convinces you to - talk it out.
Pairing: Loki/Female Reader
Warnings: Lots of talk about self-doubt, but nothing really more serious than that. A bit suggestive towards the end but nothing explicitly sexual. And of course the angst, though done in service of the fluff.
Word Count: 4.5k
A/N: So. It’s been.... Awhile since I’ve written anything then, hasn’t it? I honestly don’t have a good explanation for that except that life has been kicking me in the ass mental health wise, things were hard for awhile, and I’ve only just now been able to get back into the swing of writing. I wrote this because I love the ‘reader wakes up from a nightmare and character comforts her’ trope, and needed some angsty Loki fluff in my life. Hopefully those of you who also need that that can take comfort from this!
“Tell me about it,” He says. His arms are wrapped around your torso. His body is warm, his voice molasses-thick and drowsy from sleep. You feel his legs tangled up with yours, with the white linen sheets, hopelessly -
Hopeless. That’s how you feel.
He shouldn’t have to be here with you. He shouldn’t have to know you. He shouldn’t have to wake up to you weeping. Not him, you think, as he shifts around you, propping himself up on one elbow with a languid, tire-induced elegance that defies all explanation.
Not him, you think.
Not Loki.
He has changed, so much, since you met him. Become - not a different man, you would never want him to be that, but a kinder one, a softer one, an almost tamer person than the jagged-edged, growling, sardonic man who used to stalk around the Tower at three a.m in the morning, eyes narrowed, looking for a fight.
He has told you, multiple times before, that you have no reason to fear him. He has said it with the drape of his frame over yours, the brush of his fingers over your cheekbones, the loving, kindly looks he throws you when you wake with him in the warmth of the gathering dawn; you can’t count, anymore, how often you’ve woken to find Loki watching you with some gentle, ineffable caring, stroking and sifting and braiding your hair with feather-light touches.
He has told you, also, with his words, with the firm, silken caress of your name on his tongue. He tells you, all the time, that he loves you. That he isn’t going to leave you. That he doesn’t wish you any harm. It’s times like these, when the moonlight filters against his pale, bright skin and silvers the shine of his long, dark hair, when you most wish that you could believe him. When you yearn that Loki were telling the truth, that he really wouldn’t leave you, once he realized how inadequate you were.
But then you would blink, would feel, truly feel, his touch on you, and fight back the keen urge to jerk away from it. In your experience, that wasn’t the way these things worked.
Besides, you couldn’t tell Loki what you had been dreaming about. It didn’t matter what he said - if he knew, for even a moment, what your mind made him do while you slept, it would shatter his heart into a million pieces. You refused to be responsible for that, on top of everything else that you had made him sacrifice. Loki would never forgive himself. Neither would you.
With a huff of frustration, you tried to pull out of his grasp, put some space between you, but Loki’s arms only tightened. You had hoped that he might forget about this, go back to sleep; unfortunately, the look on his face told you instantly that you were wrong. Your attempts at diffusing the situation had caused him to wake up fully, and now he was staring at you with a gaze that could only be described as concerned - forehead creased, lips pursed into a worried frown.
“Shit,” You muttered, under your breath, “’M sorry, I didn’t mean to -“
“It’s no trouble,” Says Loki, in a tone that you are sure is meant to be placating. Still, it cuts you to the bone - how deeply Loki cares for you, when you know that, rightly, he shouldn’t.
You grapple for the right words to say, the ones that will make him leave you now, before it’s too late and you hurt him even more. Perhaps the Asgardian can read your mind, because the next thing you know, his lips are pressing soft kisses into your hairline, and his hands are smoothing over your back, pausing to dance soothing, pressured patterns onto your skin with cool fingers.
“My darling. Are you sure that you’re alright?”
He’s calling your bluff, and you know it. You’re not alright, not even close. Yet you push the darkness down, forcing the angry, roiling, howling thoughts that rip and tear at your fragile self-esteem as far away from here as you can manage. Somehow, you’re already aware that even after your best efforts they still linger much too close to the forefront of your mind, threatening to pour out of you in a wave of salty tears that you try to blink back hastily.
“Right,” Says Loki, evidently drawing his own conclusions. He sighs as he looks down at you.
His body is still twined with yours, pressed to the length of the mattress. He is only leaned on a single joint, but it seems to you that he’s looming over all of your small weaknesses - you can almost hear him stand and leave, whisper a cruel torrent of vile, true comments into the shell of your ear. I’ll never want you, you stupid girl. You were only a waste of my time.
He will leave you. He will. You’re certain.
You shut your eyes, and steel yourself for it; instead, though, Loki surprises you, as he is so wont to do. You visibly and audibly flinch as he brings his fingers up to trace a warm line from your tear duct over your cheekbone, then down, under your jaw, with two fingers. They turn, then, swooping cold and steady around the curve of your neck; his index pressing sure and solid into the fearful running-beat of your pulse, and he tsks.
“Look at you,” He says, low and quiet. His voice is unbearably fond. “Your heart is racing, and yet you insist that all is well - what am I going to do with you, little one?”
The usual, sweet jolt of hearing him call you that - an inside joke from the years when he sniped at you every time you ran into each other, snapping at the youth and folly of your species - is lost on you, your mind honing in, instead, on what had preceded it.
What am I going to do with you, little one? What am I going to do?
“I think,” Loki says, in a careful tone, “That you’ll have to tell me what you were dreaming about. In fact, I’ll have to insist.”
He is teasing you, you realize. Trying to lighten the mood. It only makes you more furious at your past, at your insecurities, the wariness that your blood pumps through your body with all of that rich oxygen.
“I’m sorry,” You tell him, not knowing what else to say. “Loki. I’m sorry I’m like this - I’m sorry that I’m so - I’m so -“
“Hush,” He says. Soft, still, but sharper. Harsh enough that it makes you stop, momentarily halting the dark spiral of your thoughts. “Stop. I’ll have no more of this talk. You should never feel badly for being yourself - I wouldn’t be here, without you.”
He means it literally, in more ways than one. You have saved his life, before - he is adamant about that, though you don’t know why, when it was an accident, when you’re nothing like him at all. You don’t have super-powers. You possess no seidr, no mind-control, no extraordinary strength. You aren’t a particularly skilled fighter. You’ve gone on only one one mission with the Avengers, and then because you were, to quote, ‘Average. Unnoticeable. Good at blending in and not getting caught’.
If you had ever saved Loki’s life - and he was adamant that you had, had screamed at him to move from a bullet on that mission, though you cannot exactly remember; the battle had stolen the wind from you, and your mind had fuzzed out the edges afterwards - then it wasn’t because you were special. It was because you were the exact opposite of that.
Beyond all that, though, it is the honest truth. Loki wouldn’t be on Midgard, save for you. Wouldn’t be in New York, save for you. He could have everything and anything he desired - he was a royal, a prince of Asgard, a god. And he had settled. Had weighed his whole life, his whole legacy, and, for you, found it lacking.
It was so far from fair that you nearly laughed, but the sound that actually came out of your throat was of a different kind entirely, somewhere between desperate whine and frightened whimper.
“Breathe, love,” He tells you. He keeps his thumb pressed to your pulse point, but allows his other hand - the one on your back, slick with anxious nightmare-sweat - to roam. His touch is as graceful and self-assured as ever, as if he were trying to push the confidence with which he makes each movement into you, to fill up all the empty, self-hating parts of you with his strength and his love and his there-ness.
“Tell me about it,” Says Loki, “The dream.”
And you do.
Your voice is shaky, to start, but by the time you’ve finished it’s evened into a sob-hitched, stilted rhythm. You can’t process how many emotions have flickered, pranced, leaped across Loki’s face. There was anger, and nervous anticipation. Quiet, intense, concerned concentration. White-hot fury. At times, a shame you knew he shouldn’t be feeling caused his head to hang low and his nails to tighten, digging into your skin against his volition.
Behind and beneath all these things, though, his love for you was lain bare - there was so much sorrow in his green eyes. Unshed tears turned their surfaces glossy, made them shine like coins, emerald and gold in the solitude of your shared bedroom.
In the face of his tender insistence, you spilled every ounce of the nightmare out, flooding the floor around you, turning your bed into an island of solace amidst the stormy, smoking sea of recollection. You told Loki how the dream had begun, the same way that it always did:
With you, coming home to find him gone. His deft glances and small, caring motions and the very force of his grounding presence cleaved from you, leaving not even a word, a note, of Goodbye. No semblance of an explanation for his absence.
You spoke of how, in the next moments, the walls of your house ripped apart, tearing at the seams into a miasma of snarling wind and torrents of steely, acidic rain. How you burned where it hit your skin, the flesh where it landed blackening under the unrelenting tidal wave of its destruction until you were nothing more than a charred amalgamation, a sick thief of your parents’ love, an amateur and unwanted excuse. The floor bled away, became a checkerboard, a stark plane of whites and blacks. Around you, above you, in front of you: mirrors.
Around you, above you, in front of you: Loki.
In the dream, you couldn’t look at yourself, and he couldn’t look at you either. His voice dripped like venom out of forked fangs into the cracks of your bleeding soul, a burst plum on a concrete sidewalk.
He told you that you were worthless - that you would come to nothing, that his time with you had been a waste, that you were something pitiful. He told you that you were a facsimile, a failure of a girl. The words dug in with startling precision, thorns in your side, spilling your blood thick and scarlet. They were the ripping teeth of wild dogs, the sizzle of a hot brand blistering your chest. You started to cry, and your tears were dying stars, mercy at the hands of a betrayer. You little traitor, dream-Loki said.
He laughed at the dirge of your pain.
And the checkerboard floor flexed underneath you. The gone walls screamed and groaned, crackled like an army of wraiths. There was hell in his eyes - they flashed ruby red. His fingers on you were ice, but the scars on your body were fire, a cacophony of syncopated agony that he would not let you forget or escape.
Now, though -
Here, in this room, in this bed that you share, slick with fear, your heart beating like a pride of cicadas -
His hands run interference on your galloping panic. They are warmer, always warmer, than you expect, what with him being Jotunn, but cooler, too, for the slowness of their sweeping way. You are crying still, and maybe Loki hated you for that - he should do, you think. What are you, to him? What could you ever be? There is a silence that stretches, tense, as your mind, subsumed by remembering the dream, returns to the world of the living.
“I’m sorry,” You’re spewing out, somewhat nonsensically; you feel rushes of cold breath on you. “I didn’t - You’re not - I don’t know why I’m like this.”
It seems the right thing to say, the guilt rising in you steadfastly. But Loki will not have it. He is pulling your face back up to him. Tracing your cheek with his thumb, again. The tears that have fallen from you are reflected on his own skin - you could feel them, you know, if you tried. Taste them, and they would taste bitter.
The only thing left for you to do is wait.
“Y/N,” He says, “Little one. Darling. Surely you must realize -“
He breaks off, staring into the distance over your shoulder, at the joint of the door on its off-bronze hinge, the patterns of shadow the moonlight casts onto the walls. You hear him sign into the blue darkness. He removes his hands from your body to run them through his hair, and you mourn the brush of his fingertips against you.
“No,” He says, “Not that. Not that. How to make you understand -“
“Understand what?” You ask him. Your voice sounds frail to your ears.
“That these thoughts,” Says Loki, gesturing slowly but with some urgency at you, and then at the rest of the space, “These thoughts inside your beautiful, beautiful head - aren’t your fault.”
“Oh,” You say. You can’t parse it - when you consider the sentiment it runs iup against your carefully cultivated sense of self-preservation, the instinctive need to blame yourself for all that is wrong with the world. Better that than start arguments; better that than risk being alone. You feel you’ve been alone enough for a lifetime.
“You don’t believe me,” Loki says. He laughs to himself, a dry sound. “I should have known. What - will I have to trick you? Play some little game? What’s going on in that puzzle box, sweetling? What’s the root of all this?”
You hear his voice warm in the night as he settles into the familiar territory of mischief, eyes glinting, can see the gears twisting behind them - How best to convince, to twist her words back at her?
Though you’ve grown accustomed to nearly all of Loki’s ticks and habits during the months of your courtship - and he always, always calls it courtship, despite how antiquated a notion it seems; courtship, he says, is what they call it on Asgard - you’ve never quite gotten your sea legs for his perpetual scheming.
Oh, you trust him implicitly - whether in conversation or pleasure, he makes sure that your participation is worth your while - but it makes you uneasy, throws you off your game. Perhaps that, too, is a part of it; you belatedly realize that in your attempt to prepare yourself for what he’s going to say, your tears have fully tapered off, and your breathing has calmed.
Realizing it, you scowl, hoping that it will convey your annoyance at this, your distaste at having been had.
Loki smirks, and ruffles your hair - This is who I am, love. Doesn’t it please you?
“I hate you,” You tell him, “You know that?”
“Mmm,” Says Loki. He’s pulled you into the hazed alcove of his shoulder, nose buried in his inky hair, pressed against his shirt, the sharp bone a surprisingly comfortable pillow. You can feel the sound reverberate through you, the rough purr of his contented exhale, and know without looking that a smug grin is plastered across his face - can tell how pleased he is with himself through the hum, at what quick work he’s made of your sadness.
Still, he isn’t done.
Now that your mood has improved, Norns willing, it’s time to collect on his payment - he will have this discussion with you, glean the information he needs, by whatever means necessary.
His arm tightens around you. His hand snakes upwards to tangle in your hair, not enough to hurt you - Loki would never dare hurt you, unless you asked him - but just enough to get his point across: Listen. Pay attention, or be damned. The choice is yours.
In the end, the joke is on him - his voice is rarely ever so serious as when he speaks again, and you’re tugged to it like a moth to the flame.
“It isn’t me that you hate,” He muses, sensual and cajoling and a little bit sorrowfully wistful, “Would that you did, it would make my job much easier. No,” He says, “I think your hatred lies closer to home.”
“Like yours doesn’t,” You find yourself hissing - you don’t know where the hiss comes from, and are horrified with yourself, but it seems appropriate, somehow. Loki prefers when you’re committed to your counteroffensives; it makes the challenge so much more delicious, to him.
“Ah,” He says, “But unlike you, I know how to come to you about it. When was the last time I hid from you? The last time you allowed me to feel badly about myself?”
Your gaze lowers, chastised. He tuts.
“I don’t want this,” He cautions, “To turn into something it’s not.”
“Then tell me,” You say, “What it is.” You smile. You’d like to imagine you flash your teeth; love the way he rolls his eyes, like, Well, if you say so.
“This,” He says, “Is me helping you to feel better about yourself. I would hate for my beloved to be weighed down by all of this - doubting. It seems positively dreadful to me, an utter waste of resources better spent elsewhere.”
He pulls you back a safe bit, stares you down while he says it, and holds it for an instant that lasts, bearing his gaze into you. You don’t back down from it. This is a threat and a dare and a promise, and the familiarity of it re-lights the fire of your confidence - Loki has set a challenge for you.
You square your shoulders, fully awake now, refusing to be the first one to break. You do it at the same time, as you should do everything - you are laughing, suddenly and fiercely, and Loki is sighing sternly at you after his own chuckle, waiting ’til your giggles subside to admit:
“I was worried about you.”
“I know,” You tell him, “I’m -“
“Yourself,” He says, “And thank the Norns for it. But so very foolish, sometimes. Do you want to talk about it, now, or will I have to hatch some plan of leaving to force your words?”
“No,” You say - you know that it betrays you, but can’t hold it off. It replaces any We already have, I told you about the dream, right?. Your eyes go wide, and your fingers claw at Loki’s sleep-shirt, which you realize now is wet at the collar, your doing. “No, don’t - Fuck, Loki, please don’t leave me, I can’t -“
“Ah,” He says. Sounds anguished, as if he hadn’t known it already. “So that’s what this is about. You think you’re unworthy of me.”
“I think lots of things,” You tell him. Defensive. He shakes his head, stern look returning.
“You’re not,” He says. Casual, as if it means nothing, costs nothing, for him to say. Then louder. Firmer. “I love you. I chose you. I want no-one and nothing else save for you, and I did not come lightly into that decision.”
“That’s -“
“Preposterous?” Loki asks. “Mm. But I see it in you. I am the God of Lies, remember? You do not have to tell me the truth - “
“But you’ll know.” You say.
“But I’ll know.”
You swallow, your throat dry as you assess your options. The look in his eyes says you shouldn’t be, and maybe they do call him Silvertongue for a reason, because you feel yourself relaxing into the hold of him and his seriousness, your overworked, nightmare-soaked fear dulling to a slight, warm buzz.
Realistically - well, realistically, Loki would be in Asgard right now, if he wanted to be, no matter what you said or did, so you might as well let yourself get soggy with his tender affections, take him up on his offer to unburden yourself of the weight you feel you’ve carried so long. The need to be perfect for him, for the world, and the keen understanding that when it comes down to it, you aren’t.
“I’m not perfect,” You say, as if that explains everything.
With anyone else, you would need to say more, but you know Loki gets it, can feel it in th kiss that he brushes onto your cheek, then your jaw, moving to skim his hands down your sides, over your taut, nerve-tensed skin. Something about his gentleness gives you the strength to press onwards, drinking in his care like a starved animal, like leaves in the sweet summer rain. “You say that you love me,” You stumble, “And it’s - hard to understand that, sometimes. I mean. You could have anyone that you wanted.”
“Little one,” He says, with a huff. You narrow your eyes at him, and he raises his hands in a placating gesture before settling them back on your thighs to rub circles against them. “I’m not saying you’re wrong,” He tells you, arching an eyebrow and shooting you his patented smirk. “But shouldn’t it tell you something that I’m here with you, that being true?”
This time you scowl, true and fierce.
“I’m trying to be serious, Loki,” You tell him.
“And yet you say things that I can’t take seriously.” He says. Hums into the encroaching dawn light. “It’s five in the morning, and you woke me up sobbing. And even still, you are perfect to me. The only way in which you aren’t is in your humanity, and that’s the best part of you - I doubt that I would ever be able to love someone who was utterly flawless. It’s no fun being around perfect people, if there even is such a thing. Certainly, no one who held that as their standard would ever be able to love me -“
Your mouth opens quickly, nostrils flaring, already forming the first sounds of vehement opposition, but Loki silences you with a look.
“That,” He says, nodding towards your set jaw, “Is exactly how I feel, when you insist such things about yourself in front of me. It wounds me - How could you ever think you’re anything other than precisely what I need? How could you not be proud of yourself?”
“I’m not - not proud of myself,” You say, half-heartedly. “Most of the time. The rest, I just -“
“It’s okay,” Loki says. “We’ll work on that. It gets better.”
“And the bad nights?” You ask him. He smiles, honest.
“That’s what I’m here for,” He tells you.
He says it kind, and insistent, leaving no room for argument. There’s not a single part of you that doesn’t believe every word - a dangerous decision, some people might say, trusting the Liesmith, but the heart wants what the heart wants. And what your heart wants is for Loki to keep looking at you the way that he’s looking at you, and never stop; to wake up next to him every morning, to have a place to call your home in his lean litheness, his sharp wit and sweet trickery.
You’re a fool, you think, to not realize that he would make this talk so devastatingly supportive. You can feel yourself fallling into an ever-burgeoning self-confidence, and though you know it takes more than a night, and are well aware he knows it too, the way that he speaks, continuing to murmur sugared, assentive nothings into your sleep-messed hair, the sweat-salty heat of your once-shaking skin, convinces you that he’s right -
You really don’t have to be perfect. There are lots of things about yourself to be proud of, above and beyond those which pulled Loki to your side, all those months ago. Your tongue reaches out to lick your lips, and you catch how his eyes darken when he sees the comprehension dawn in your face -
“There,” He says, “That’s how you should feel about yourself, all the time.”
“You’re really not going to leave me?” You ask him, but it isn’t earnestly, now. There is no fear in you, of that. This is Loki you’re talking to.
“I never would,” He tells you, “But even if, for some reason, we were parted, you would thrive. There is so much life, so much wonder, in you. You don’t need anyone’s approval as a condition of loving those qualities. Only your own. You know that, yes?”
“‘Yeah,” You say - and you do believe it, can’t not believe, when he says it like that, that come hell or high water you will be fine, no matter what life throws at you. “You’ll stay with me, though?”
“Oh, Y/N. I couldn’t stay away from you if I tried.”
“It’s a shame,” You say. Let your grin spread from ear to ear, allow him to see just how much you mean it, how much this conversation has helped you, a new and different challenge. When he rolls you onto your back, grumbling something about Minx and insatiable in a hot exhale, you know that you’ve won.
“A shame,” He says, nipping at your collarbone - then adds, in that low, admonishing tone from earlier, “A necessary shame.”
It might be, you think, as he kisses his way down your body, as you pull him upwards and tell him, I’m tired, can’t we just sleep?, as he calls you a Tease, but of course, whatever you’re comfortable with; as you abide him a slow, languid kiss that tastes all Loki, all mint and smoke from dark-grained wood and the tart sting of fresh raspberry juice, all glittering lake in wooded glade, all sage fire in mid-winter; as he groans your name into your mouth like nothing else has ever, or will ever, belong on his tongue -
No. It will be. It will.
“Hey Lokes?” You ask, as the sleep gets it hooks back into you, threatening to lull you under. “Thank you. For - Reminding me who I am. I know I don’t need you for that, but… that doesn’t mean I don’t love you for it. Doesn’t mean it doesn’ help.”
“Shh,” You hear. Distantly. Softly. “You’re welcome,” He says. “Go to sleep, love. Pleasant dreams this time, alright?”
“Alrigh’,” You mutter, eyes drifting closed.
His hushed, appeased laugh is an ocean breeze on a wooly gray evening; the dew and the amethyst of it ushers you completely back into your slumber, and stand gate at the door of your dreams so that this time, your demons can’t enter.
And when you wake - entirely too late in the day, lax in the loose, sleep-heavy grasp of his arms - you know in the core of your very soul that your lover has spoken no lies.
Summary: It’s been a long time since things have gotten this bad. Loki, returned from his latest mission, lets you know that, with help and support, you can overcome the worst of things, and makes sure you know that he’ll be there with you to get you through it, each and every day.
Pairing: Loki/Female Reader
Warnings: Reader in this fic struggles with eating disorders. Thoughts and feelings related to these(specifically to anorexia and bulimia), are made throughout the fic, especially those that, in my personal experience, people with these disorders experience. I cannot stress enough that this will be discussed/referenced/talked about, sometimes explicitly(Though not graphically) and sometimes implicitly, so please be aware of that and know that it’s OK to take care of yourself and skip this one if that would be triggering to you!
Word Count: 3.1k
A/N: I want to preface this by saying that there are a LOT of people, both here and on AO3, who have made some amazing Loki/reader oneshots where the reader is struggling with mental health and/or physical health issues, that really provide a sense of warmth and fluff and support to people who may be going through those things themselves, and I’ve taken a lot of comfort in those fics over the course of the pandemic(I’ll be shouting out a couple of them in the tags!). I want to acknowledge that these exist, and that they’re awesome and have partly inspired my own writing, before talking about this little project I’m embarking on.
Because, while I have gotten a lot of comfort out of many of those pieces of writing, there are definitely some things which I feel like aren’t talked about as much in pieces like these which I have gone through, and which a lot of other people have gone/are going through, and…. I figured that maybe I could take a crack at trying to provide that hit of fluff for people dealing with those things, if I can, and hopefully use my own experience with them to do it in as respecful and accurate a way as possible.
All that being said, the first oneshot in this little project is going to be dealing with a pretty heavy subject, that being eating disorders. The reader in this fic does struggle with eating disorders - specifically anorexia and bulimia. I will not be actively describing anything too graphic about these disorders in this fic, except to highlight through implication and some sparse details that this is what’s happening here, as well as show some of the inner thought processes of the reader, but there definitely is enough in here to show that that’s what’s going on, so if anyone would be triggered by that, please take care of yourselves and give this one a pass! Also, I will further disclaim that there are many types of eating disorders, and everyone’s experience with them is different. In this oneshot, I wrote based off what I know to have been true during the time in my life when I struggled with the same conditions, and I really tried to make the fluff and support as kind and encouraging as I possibly could. If for ANY REASON there’s something that I did badly at, or something that’s disrespectful, anyone reading this may feel more than free to let me know and I’ll do my best to fix it! I don’t want this fic to be a place where anyone feels hurt or disrespected, that isn’t my intention at all, and if I make a mistake in that regard for any reason whatsoever, I would really appreciate knowing so that I can correct it!
Anyways, after that extremely lengthy A/N, just… please know, if you’re going through something like this, that you’re not alone, that help does exist and is out there, and that you are seen and heard. And take this Loki fluff, because honestly, there can never be too much of that in the world!
You know that he worries about you. Even before his latest, three-week mission, you know that he worried about you. In the mornings, as you pour your coffee, you watch him watch you with careful nonchalance, gaze boring into the back of your head, slight furrow creasing his eyebrows, frown pulling small at his lips. He dresses early, because he wakes early; it is a battle, most mornings, for you to get out of bed. And so what, if you take your coffee with more creamer than is necessarily normal - it has to last you a long time, this coffee. You need the sugar of it, to get you to that clean pain. It is sharper, more real, than any scalpel, any knife that Loki keeps concealed by his armor; all that fine Asgardian leather, green and supple and him. It gives you back the control that you lack. Lets you be the person that you would be.
It’s not that you’re afraid of your body, but you are ashamed by it; cannot fathom, even now with his gaze on you, that Loki could love somebody so dreadfully overweight.
Today, though - Today, you had thought, you had hoped, that it might be different. You don’t know why you have that hope, but it brims up in you; a physical need, a visible yearning, for you to be enough for once. Someone that Loki can stand to look at. Someone that Loki can love. He is looking at you now like he’s seeing you for the first time, and you flinch from the frown that creases his piercing gaze, unable to bear how it roves up the planes of your body; silhoutted in the light coming in through the window, you can feel each ounce of fat that stretches over your sinew, cartilage. (You know that Loki hates your body - He traces it sometimes like he’s probing you, trying to find where your bones are. You wish that you could call him on it, and know that you never could).
You stand at the counter, and turn from him; rummage in the cabinet for your coffee mug with shaking fingers; you almost feel like they’re rubber. Blue and cold, like his Jotun skin, but you know that it isn’t enough. Pins and needles prick at them - you can almost convince yourself that it’s only your guilt and shame, but you cannot hide from the pain suffusing Loki’s voice when he speaks.
“Darling,” He says, on a shaky breath, “We need to talk about this.”
“I know -” You tell him - you know that you can’t run from this, anymore. He knows how you look, how nothing you do is fixing it. And now, he’s going to leave you. “I know, Loki - I tried, Loki, I’m so sorry -“
The agony that wells up in you threatens to overwhelm your ability to speak, and you feel your knees buckle the second before you fall. Your kneecaps slam against the cupboard underneath the sink, your head hitting the edge of the counter as you slide down hard to the floor. It hurts. But every part of your body hurts, these days. It’s as constant as your worthlessness. And something else, too -
He is there, on the floor with you, in less time than it takes place to blink, pulling you hard and desperate into his arms; you don’t understand why, and you try to wrench yourself from him, sobs bubbling up and spilling out from your tightly shut eyes. You can feel the bruises starting to form on you, a lump throbbing at your temple.
“Love,” He is saying, “Y/N, sweetheart, come back to me. Come back to me, darling, please.” He is stroking your hair; you feel his fingers at its strands, thin and brittle. God, you think, how pathetic you are - you can’t even keep yourself pretty for him, for this god and all the sacrifices that he’s made. You cry harder, unable to stop your own wailing. When you finally do, you’re exhausted - it takes everything out of you.
“Loki,” You say, on a wretched whine, “I’m so cold.”
“Hush,” He says, “You’re alright. You’ll be warm soon - We’ll sort it, darling, I promise.”
You don’t know how to tell him that it isn’t something you can sort, but somehow you know, deep in your heart, that Loki understands. Still, his voice is so sweet, and the shudders that wrack you begin to halt in the steady hold of his embrace; the tender brush of his fingers over your skin. You feel like you can look at him, now, so you do it, sucking your bottom lip into your teeth to steel yourself for the cruel things you’re certain he’ll start with. But Loki’s gaze isn’t angry at you, not full of fury or disgust. They sparkle with unshed tears and concern, emerald in the daylight. It takes you a moment too long to realize all that pain, all that worry, is for you; when you do, though, you flinch away. Feel Loki’s fingers drop from your hairline to your cheek, then your chin, tilting your head up so that you can’t run and hide.
“I’m losing you, love,” Loki says. His voice is low, and steeped in sorrow. It is his turn to look down, with guilt and shame, and you feel a pang blossom, raw and red, in your heart. He sighs, and straightens his shoulders. He is filled with some new resolution, some new determination you can’t wince away from.
“I need to know,” Loki tells you, “How long this has been going on. I need to - I need you to tell me why, love. I can’t bear to see you like this.”
“I can’t,” You say, blinking back a fresh torrent of tears, “Tell you why. It’s not - I can’t - I don’t know.”
But you know, and Loki does, too. It’s the god of lies, holding you - of course he can tell that you’re lying. It is something other, and runs deep, this bone-y reluctance. A complex game of mental gymnastics. How could you ever tell Loki about the control that it gives you, the desperation with which you used all your calorie-counting and aching restraint to regain the love that you lost? The nights bent over toilet bowls; the way that, sometimes, you empty stomach made you dig your nails hard into your palms ’til they bled, to stop yourself from crying out at the pain. And he loves you - the part of you that craves his affection, that yearns to burrow fast and fierce into Loki’s embrace and spill all your secrets to him, makes sure to remind you of that.
“Y/N,” Says Loki, soft and tender, yet infused with a note so harsh that you would wince, if you could. “You can tell me anything. You need to.”
You notice things, now, in the face of his determination. You notice that Loki is looking at you like he’s in physical pain, and that there’s something sticky and red on the pads of the fingers that brushed up against your head.
“I’m bleeding,” You say. It comes out soft, horrified.
The frown that creases Loki’s face would bring you to your knees, if you weren’t there already.
“It’s just - a thing that I do,” You tell him, too ashamed to look at his face as you reveal it. “You don’t have to worry about it.”
“That’s not enough for me, love.”
Loki’s lips are pursed tight, and the wound in his eyes has hardened to steel. The you part of your body - the fleeing part, the one who knows how to survive - seizes its’ chance and you duck out of his embrace, with far more strength than you had possessed in what felt like, potentially, years. Scrambles, backwards, like a cornered animal, over the tile floor, before heaving itself up to standing. It faces Loki, and its’ breath comes in stabbing-sharp. It is hard to remember that you have to call it ‘myself’. You feel older than you were, yesterday, and you cannot, quite, get air to come into your lungs. That’s not enough for me, you hear your lover say, ringing in your ears like a hyena’s howl.
You’re not enough for me, love. Your fingers spasm, clutching the sides of the kitchen table white-knuckled. You wonder, fleetingly, what Loki would do if you died. The thought makes you cry out in pain, a whimper ripping out from a throat rubbed fingernail-raw, but Loki does not move to stand.
“Come back to me,” He tells you, spiked with sorrow and need. And, perhaps for the first time, you admit it - to yourself, as much as to him.
“I don’t - I don’t think I know how.”
He smiles the smiole of someone who’s seen his own pain, faced his own lashing demons, and you pause to take him in fully, this god who says that he loves you, the man he is trying to be. You catch on hixs eyes, those bright emerald coins, his hair like the feathers of crows. His high, pale cheekbones, and his silver-tongue cut like glass. The pads of his fingertips, slender and cold, tender and fierce on your skin or the hilt of a dagger. You breathe in the smell of him, parchment and iron; peppermint tea and the smoke from a lorn, crimson fire. Wet leaves, after a rain. You feel your resolve start to waver.
“Well,” He says, all thoughtful, all trickster, “Sitting down, I believe, would be a good place to begin.”
The teasing lilt of his voice - an act that he is putting on, and all for you, always for you - cajoles you, coaxing you to lever your elbows and slide back down onto the floor, your weary legs feeling unimaginably grateful. Loki shoots you a new smile now, light and proud. He beckons you, with a cock of his head and a slim, fond gesture, to him - Of a sudden, the tiles beneath you seem like a desert, an ocean. You feel the weight of your emptiness. It laughs at you, its’ white teeth filed and barred. In your head, your failure is heavy; a hot and cackling creature with seven-foot claws pressing down on your chest, restricting your matchstick limbs. You are lost to the unyielding insistence of it, trapped in the maw of its cage, and Loki’s words, when they come, sound as far away as the shores of a country ancient and foreign.
“I was hardly gone,” He is saying, but you cannot answer him. “How could it have gotten this bad?”
It is that - that sadness, that fear in your lover - that breaks you, and you take the thing at a clumsy, terror-steeped sprint, not caring how wretched you look, so long as you can reach him - So long, you finally let yourself think, as there is something left of you for Loki to hold in his arms. Your body hurts worse than anything. You feel every scrape and bruise and chill on it; the pins and knives working at oxygen-starved nerves, and the gnawing clamp of your hunger, a brand pressing into your gut; and you know that Loki can’t save you. But maybe, just maybe, you can find some way to save yourself. And his fingers are there, going up to your hair, thumb rubbing at a hollow cheek and catching the salty dirge of an errant tear.
“It gets better, you know,” Loki tells you. He gets you onto his lap; you feel his heartbeat under your palms where you clutch tightly at his shirt to hold yourself up. A steady, thrumming proof that he is alive. And when he says it, you get the sense that, somehow, you’ve always know it, this whispered secret he’s weaving into your soul. “If you get proper help for it. If you want it to.”
He speaks casually, but there is a weight to his words. Miraculously - you’re not quite so sure how - you find yourself able to meet them.
“I want it to,” You tell him. “I didn’t, before - “ And here his eyes widen, and he shakes his head like you’ve shot him - “But I do. I want to -“
“Alright, love,” He tells you, running a soothing hand down over your side, past the hard planes of your collarbone, “Alright. It’s okay. You’re such a strong person- It’s going to be hard, for awhile, but I know that you can get through this. I’ll be right here with you, darling. Right here, by your side.”
“You will?” You ask him, voice cracking, hardly daring to hope that despite all this, he would stay. He chuckles, sadly, as if your thinking it hurts him, and he is deadly serious when he tells you,
“Y/N, of course I will.”
Somehow, though he’s the god of lies, you don’t doubt his words for an instant. You nod, and the nodding takes effort. Yet you are certain he understands what you mean.
“So,” Says Loki, “Can you - Tell me about this?”
You have to think, for a minute. Can you tell Loki about this? You know that he’s telling the truth, that he isn’t going to leave you. Still, you’ve never been this vulnerable with him before, not even in bed, and the fear in you won’t be put to rest so easily. You shake in his hold, and realize, with a frigid shock, how you must look to him - how badly you are hurting him, and how badly you’re hurting yourself, by keeping your feelings inside yourself and leaving your body to rot. You know, now, that Loki will help you through this - that he will be there, kind touches skirting the bad days; warm, mischevious smirks smoothing the wrinkles of your persistent self-doubts. There was a time when you needed to do this - there will, probably, still be days when you feel like you need to do this, to get a firm hold over your life, and keep the jackals at bay. There are other words to keep yourself safe, though. Loki’s breath in the dark is more home to you than anything you’ve ever had, and his open waiting, here in the daylight, makes you brave enough to speak.
“Maybe… Over lunch?” You offer. You bite your lip and hold out the query, a silky pearl in your hand. For one moment, Loki seems to consider; after all, he is the trickster, and a man not given to acting rashly, or stripping the drama from his complicated schemes. If this is a scheme, you think that you might forgive him - Later, when his lips are on your frame, when you’re there with him, again. His lips twitch into a grin so affectionate and proud that you know- you know - that if you seek proper care and really want to get better, you’ll get through the days that feel like walking on broken glass. You’ve done so much for me, that grin tells you. Let me do this for you.
He reaches out, and takes the pearl. You hardly recognize the man who rained hell down on New York, who snorts and jabs with sarcasm at every word that comes out of Iron Man’s mouth.
“Breakfast?” He counters, shooting a pointed glance at the microwave clock. It is a dare and a promise - a challenge, but never a trick. It tastes like honey on your tongue.
“Fine,” You say, “But you’ll have to cook.” Some kind of joy is creeping its way into you. Your voice, you find, barely trembles.
“Midgardians,” Lok says, with an eye-roll - a friendly, loving glint in his eyes that refuses to fade. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who burns water.” The joke prods your tender, new understanding, reassures you that he is still Loki; that he isn’t going to treat you differently, like a child, just because you’re suffering. The smile comes full onto you, and you wriggle, stretching your arms over your head and yawning, exaggerated for effect to add to the banter.
“I never said that I couldn’t cook,” You tell Loki, “Just wanted you to do it.”
“Mm,” He says, “And what will you be doing, then, while I cook?”
You chew at your lip, and choose to answer before your nerves make you panic.
“Finding the right words,” You admit, laying the truth bare to him.
His hands are wending through your hair now, and his lips are unberarably gentle on yours. He tastes like embers and ink. That sweet, slightly metalic tang that you’ve come to associate with his magic; cinnamon, tinged with steel. He kisses you for a second or two, before pulling away, but you could live in those seconds - Unfold it, like a blanket, and let the care of it warm your thin, freezing bones, if Loki weren’t here to show you that, with the right help, you can learn how to do it yourself.
“Finding the right words,” Loki muses, vaulting himself up to stand in a movement that’s unfairly graceful. “I’d much prefer yours, to be honest.”
He holds a hand out, and you take it, letting him pull you up. The floor, underneath you, feels solid. The sun is coming through the clouds, and out there in the wide world you can hear bird-song, the low, sugared sway of the breeze. There is something else there, too:
You let it wrap its tendrils around you, and you decide that it’s hope.
Summary: When things go south on a mission, you have to confront more than just the sketchy town, cartoon villains, and one-bed hotel room you’re forced to share with Loki. You have to come to terms with not only the consequences of being captured, but also the God of Mischief’s feelings for you - Because for all that he might be an asshole, sometimes, he really does have a heart. Written for the Picture Is Worth A 1,000 Words 6k Follower Writing Challenge by @startrekkingaroundasgard
Pairing: Loki/(Female)Reader
Warnings: Descriptions of injuries and medical treatment, as well as discussions of the inevitable mindset around sacrificing oneself for the mission that I feel like being part of the Avengers would entail. Also swearing, because at its core, this story started out as a bit of a crack! fic.
Word Count: 7.8k.
A/N: So apparently when I have mental breakdowns they result in me writing crack-fic that takes a 180 veer into angst and fluff for absolutely no reason. For the sake of the crack-fic, in this timeline Loki was forced to help the Avengers take down bad guys directly after the end of the first Avengers movie, so… Is that a confusing plot hole I didn’t know how to account for except by making this AU? Maybe. Did I do it anyway?…. Yeah. This really was meant to be a crack-fic about Loki and the reader confessing their feelings set in the bizarre world of meme culture, I didn’t realize there were going to be feels in it until it was three in the morning and all of a sudden this happened. That being said, your girl went there, so enjoy!
“Oh, shit,” You say, as you take in the grimy hotel room. The walls all smeared in what looks like dried blood, the putrid smell of rotten eggs, a crack-screened television with a fine dusting of some suspiciously white powder. And, of course, “There’s one bed.”
“Hmm?” Asks Loki, turning towards you, briefly, from unpacking. He had dumped his suitcase(Magically plucked out of a chaotic liminal space) unceremoniously on the bed’s scratching, pilling coverlet without so much as a second glance at the rest of the room. And why do you need a suitcase, anyways?? You wonder. It isn’t like we’re planning to be here that long. In fact, you hoped with every fiber of your being that you’d be here for as little time as possible, because this town might actually be the sketchiest place you’ve ever seen in your life; no small feat, for a bona-fide member of S.H.I.E.L.D.
You’ve kicked alien ass on a mutated purple Mongolian death-worm three thousand feet over New York City. You’ve run reconnaissance to rescue debatably-magical items sequestered away in an ancient cave labyrinth plastered in paintings and untranslatable runes, gunfire and what could only be described as the baying of hellhounds in the near distance. You’ve fist-fought a gigantic hive-mind robot in a field of artificially sentient feral steel suits - You’ve even survived Tony’s parties.
Yet none of those scenarios hold a candle to this fucking town.
And Loki, the asshat, seems utterly, competently - no, maniacally - unfazed.
“There’s one bed,” You repeat, into the air.
“Ah,” Says Loki, straightening.
“You don’t see that problem with that?!”
“Should I?” He asks you, walking across the room in long, graceful strides to stand in front of you. He wears the same expression he always wears, amused and indifferent, but this time with the addition of a single, elegantly-arched eyebrow. You drop your head, refusing to meet his somewhat-curious gaze. It physically hurts, how attractive Loki is. Not for the first time, you curse whatever god decided that you and him would once again be mission partners - in this case, you belatedly realize, and choke back a thick laugh, said god is, unsurprisingly, Thor.
If you survive this, you make a note to beat his head in with Mjolnir. As it is, you are here in this room with Loki, with perhaps twenty IPP agents and a reckless poisoner dogging your every move, and there’s a high chance that you won’t live long enough to navigate whatever the hell sleeping with your crush-who-has-murdered-men. Ok, so ‘murdered men’ isn’t entirely accurate. More like ‘caused the murder of men inadvertently through his schemes’. It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, right now.
And what about Loki? He is still staring you down, like you’re some wind up toy moments away from going off. Funny, that, you think. If ever there were a time to not have a mental breakdown, it would be here, with him. You’ve crossed a lot of moral lines in your life, but you will be damned if you let Loki Laufeysson see you cry. Loki is graceful. Composed. Sarcastic. Lithe. Rolls his eyes at almost every statement that comes out of somebody’s mouth. But he is, also, beautiful. Shockingly comforting, in his own nihilistic way. You don’t know what it says about you that you find comfort in statements like, Try not to die, you know that I hate funerals. Part of you - most of you - doesn’t want to. But it gives you strength, somehow, to shrug off the day and ground your flailing mind in evading Loki’s calculated manipulation. I won’t show you my weakness, you think to yourself. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
“No,” You tell him - too quickly, he’ll pick up on that - “You’re right, you shouldn’t. It’s fine. We have - a lot to deal with, is all.”
Loki nods, seemingly accepting your answer, but his eyes are still narrowed, watching you like he’s calling your bluff. You talk right past that look - have to, to keep yourself sane, to not think about the one bed that looms large over this entire conversation. It doesn’t even look like a comfortable bed.
“We have two days,” You say, to stop yourself thinking of it. And, also, to talk your way through your disarmingly disjointed thoughts. Loki nods. It would really help if you said something, you think. Swallow the thought, hot and thick, down your throat. What’s the point of a mission partner if you can’t even soundboard off them? “The Pink Cobra could strike anyone, anytime. The IPP is planning something in New York - “
“Isn’t everyone, these days, planning something in New York?”
He sounds regretful, and for half a second you want to offer him the reassurance that his very presence offers you. But you are sure he doesn’t know what he does to you - with his words, with the sidelong glances that you’ve felt linger on your form far too long in the heat of a fight. If you didn’t know any better, you would say Loki worries about you.
“We have to shut him down,” You say. Focus on the Pink Cobra, because honestly, that’s easier. “Find out where he manufactures. Not get poisoned,” You add, at the end.
“Yes,” Loki says, tone dripping with sarcasm, “We should certainly try not to get ourselves killed. Failing that, I suppose, we can at least request that no one in H.Y.D.R.A gets autopsy access.”
“Loki?” You ask. Rhetorically. “You’re not helping.”
He smirks at you, then. He knows.
“What do you propose that we do then?” He asks, taking a step towards you, getting so close that you can feel his hot breath. “About the Pink Cobra?”
“Find him.” You say, fumbling, blush rising high on your cheeks.
Tonight?
One bed?
You are screwed.
***
When you were a kid - think really little, Capri Sun pouches and still believing that true love wasn’t complicated - your father told you that every story needed a good supervillain. You aren’t sure if the Pink Cobra counts as a good supervillain, but he’s the least confusing one that you have to deal with - and, as far as villains go, a fine enough challenge to face. He’s like a madman out of some high fantasy novel, with dark eyes and a sable-sewn cloak and a penchant for poisoning. He is adept in all the arts of the woman’s murder; he has a keen grasp on the side-effects of arsenic and camphor and tansy and cyanide and strychnine. He’s been found to have dropped crystal phials filled with belladonna and ricin while fleeing a scene. If all else fails, he’s more than practiced with daggers.
In other words, he’s the kind of villain that none of you, with your flying suits and telekinesis and super-strength, are anywhere near prepared to waylay.
The plan, as far as team Avengers is concerned, is easy:
You and Loki. This town, where the webs of his manufacturing production and the few glimpses of information that Thor has totally legally excavated out of his captured minions has led to. Two days until some undefined grand attack bears down on the city you live in. Two days to find the Pink Cobra and kill him. The more time passes with no headway, the more you think that this is an impossible task, but you know what Tony would say. We have our best minds on it.
The thing is, you aren’t sure that that’s true. The minds that have been set to this task are you and the God of Lies. It’s hardly the best they could have come up with, considering your track records. Actually, you take that back - Loki was a good choice for this mission, because, not three hours after arriving in this hellhole of a city, he seems to have somehow developed the ability to read minds. More specifically, yours. And that could prove stunningly useful.
The scene, as it stands: Loki, sprawled across the lumpy bed, three pairs of crisp white shirts, a plaid scarf, and a full set of Asgardian battle armor neatly hung in the mothball-infested closet, flicking through channels on the grain, cracked television with an apathetic expression and one arm thrown haphazardly over bent leg. Propped up in such a way that he could jump or spin or parry at a moment’s notice, yet perfectly, devastatingly languid, leafing through Nick Fury’s dossier on the Pink Cobra. He looks at you like a god, you think, and then remember. He is one.
You, on the floor, because on top of all the other things this hotel doesn’t have, like two beds, there isn’t anything even resembling a desk, shifting through a glowing, holographed file archive from headquarters that barely runs on your severely outdated laptop. It’s a point of pride to you, keeping the laptop - not because it’s good, but because it’s survived five years of being an Avenger, which is something not even all the Avengers can claim to have done. You’re also fairly certain that Tony’s attempts to update the firmware had infested it with some sort of renegade virus. Elevated above your screen, the files are split into two groups, the sum total of everything that you know about both of the groups that are avidly trying to kill you.
There’s the wealth of information containing the Pink Cobra’s poisoning sprees, but those aren’t the files that interest you, and you know that Loki’s not much interested in them either. That honor falls to the fanatics at the IPP, the Imminently Predictable Psyops organization, which you know even less about than you do about the Pink Cobra, chief among which the fact that they need a new name. Imminently Predictable Psyops?, Tony had said, when you’d finally apprehended one of their proxies. What do they think this is? Some type of ARG?
What you’ve gleaned, from months worth of studying the network, is that they operate as a sort of cringe-oriented death cult intent on ‘reshaping the universe through meme agents’. They’d been on S.H.I.E.L.D’s radar for a long time - upwards of a year - before anyone at team base learned they existed - which, you can almost hear Loki saying, was a failure in the extreme. Currently, it was your job to obsessively worry over whether they were going to send ‘meme agents’ to bust through the door of your seedy hotel room and off you both. You hated - truly loathed - how casually Loki was taking it all.
He’s acting like nothing was wrong with this situation, when, in fact, you’re ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure that this night will end up with one or both of you dead. It is, to say the least, disconcerting.
Kill switch, the holograph files read. Cross-referential Neil Cicierega acoustic weaponry. Your mind sees the words, but doesn’t comprehend them, and you run a hand up to rub at your bleary eyes with annoyance. You risk a glance upwards; on the bed, Loki scans page after page after page with disinterested nonchalance, punctuating the flipping over of each document with a noncommittal hum; as if to say, I understand you. As it to say, This could be worse. You try to slip into that mindset. Certainly, things could be worse.
Actually, though? Not really.
Because, for all the world, the holo-file in front of you just said ‘Pepe The Frog Chaos Banking Laser Initiative’.
“What the fuck does that even mean?!”
“Sorry?”
You whip your head around. Loki, raising an eyebrow. Damn that - perfect - eyebrow.
“Sorry,” You echo back at him, rubbing your eyes again, perversely glad for the break, even if it is this awkward. “I … said that out loud, didn’t I?”
“Marginally,” He tells you. “Yes.”
“Sorry,” You - well, it’s not a whine, not exactly. You’re tired, and there’s no way you’re going to sleep tonight, so you feel like your tone’s justified. “I didn’t mean to do that. I think I’m just - this is. Completely nonsensical.”
“Show me?” He asks, and you snort. He could totally just look up, but -
“Do you have a P.h.d in memes?” You ask him, and, before he can answer, “Because unless you have a P.h.d in memes, I don’t think you’ll be able to help.”
“You’d be surprised,” Loki says. Vaults over the bed with the speed and grace of a panther, filling the air with a cringing wheeze as the rusty springs bend underneath him, and landing in front of the holo-file, pushing you aside slightly to get a better view. When his fingers brush against your side, cool and firm, you flinch.
“Tired,” You offer, when he shoots you a momentarily concerned look. “Just. Need to sleep, later, I think.”
But Loki is already scanning the file, and when he looks up, not five seconds later, you want to hit somebody. Preferably, you think, him.
“I would assume,” Loki says, “That they’re using time travel in order to obtain and store monetary value by way of a Pepe-the-frog inspired laser array.”
“Oh,” You say. You blink once. Blink twice. Still have no idea what that means. “Right.”
“Do you not know your memes, love?” He asks you, smirking. And oh, if you don’t feel things.
“I don’t go on the internet, much,” You tell him. “Too busy, you know, trying not to get killed.”
Loki shrugs. Sidles away from the file. The groan and squeak of those springs tells you he’s back on the bed, giving you some well-needed space, but you can’t bring yourself to look.
“You can sleep,” He says, “If you want.”
“Ha!” You yelp/choke/embarrassingly bleat out into the room’s stale silence. Underneath the rotten eggs, you catch a whiff of bong-water. “No.”
“There’s a bed,” Loki says, cocking his head pointedly and patting the lumpy covers.
“Yeah, that’s - kind of the problem.”
“Why?” He asks you.
“You - really?”
“I was only asking,” Says Loki, re-focusing his attention on whichever Pink Cobra document’s next in the folder. “If you aren’t comfortable telling me - I merely thought, seeing as you were tired, you might take this opportunity to rest.”
“Yeah,” You tell him, “Of course, that’s - nice of you.”
It comes out stilted. Patently off. If he notices, he doesn’t say.
“Are you going to - um. Do you need help, with the rest? The ones I have seem kind of hopeless. I mean,” You say, when he doesn’t look up, “I don’t think that we have to worry about getting demolished by trans-dimensional Agarthian wormholes.”
“Of course not,”” Loki says, scoffing and incredulous, gaze, you are sure, on his page. “If they wanted to kill us, they’d send someone with a gun.”
In reality, it’s several someones.
***
“You jinxed it,” Is the first thing you tell him, when the men leave you. They’ve thrown you into a one-room warehouse, rickety shelves stacked with cartoonish tubs of green goop and mildewing boxes filled with grenades and machine guns and what appears, at second-glance, to be twelve-fingered latex gloves. You’re tied wrist to wrist, ankle to ankle, and your throat feels uncharacteristically parched. Fear, you tell yourself. Apprehension. “Can’t you just - use your seidr to magic us out of this?”
If you could see him - which you can’t, because you’ve been tied back to back - you’d swear that Loki was glaring.
“Do you - do you have a plan?” You ask, after a moment.
“I’m working on it,” He says.
“That’s all?” You say. “We were dragged out of our drug-dealer’s hotel room by a bunch of robed men with guns and the only thing you have to say is ‘I’m working on it?’”
“I’d get it done faster,” Says Loki, “If you wouldn’t interrupt me.”
“Ok,” You tell him, “No interrupting you. Got it. That’s - Alright.”
Unfortunately, not interrupting him is easier said than done, because without the sound of your voice, you are left to your thoughts.
The men had broken in nearly immediately after Loki’s glib, sardonic retort to your worries, shooting the glass out of the room’s already half-smashed-in window and kicking the door in simultaneously. A bit much, isn’t it?, Loki’d asked, and you had wanted to smack yourself on the forehead. Really not the time, you had hissed, but Loki hadn’t seemed to hear you. Do you do this with everyone they send you to assassinate?, he had asked, instead. The men had been dressed in long, billowing cloaks of bright red, embroidered with orange snakes framing a picture of Beaker from the muppets with early 2000’s emo hair. Chaotic meme agents, you had thought to yourself. So that’s what they’re supposed to look like.
You hadn’t picked up, until now, on the snakes.
“They’re working together,” You say, when you can’t stand the playback of Loki being disarmed after spinning and tossing his silver daggers at the men, of the men kneeing him in the balls and twisting your arms behind your back, holding a gun to your head to stop you from trying to fight. Waking up in the back of a van that smelled like microwaved fish. Being tossed like garbage onto the floor of the warehouse, painted in bruises and cuts from the small pieces of glass that had dug their way into your skin. “The IPP and the Pink Cobra.”
“Obviously,” Loki says. Sharply.
“Did Tony not -“
“Stark,” Loki practically growls, and, ok, you’re not losing it but that did make you jump in your skin, “Is an idiot. He wouldn’t know how to connect the dots if they were presented to him in a Buzzfeed Unsolved episode.”
“That’s - You had that on Asgard?” You ask him, momentarily distracted. You wish that you could see Loki’s face, and are very glad that you can’t.
“That isn’t the point,” Loki says.
“I know,” You tell him. You’re scared that your voice is trembling. Scared that he can tell, even though he’s not facing you, how badly your fingers are shaking. Scared that he knows your worst, biggest secret -
That, despite being an Avenger, you are anxious. That, despite him being Loki, despite him being here, and wonderfully, infuriatingly himself, he cannot help you, this time.
You are going to die, covered in cuts and abrasions, on the floor of a meme network’s headquarters, at three a.m in the morning. They are going to come in with umbrellas that shoot poison darts or the ex-presidents Point Break masks and mow you down, and Loki has no fucking plan. You feel the ropes tighten where they’re knotted, itchy and fierce, and you have to fight to keep yourself from whining in terror and nerves. Whining isn’t what Loki needs right now. Whining’s not going to save you.
What is going to save you, you try and remind yourself, is Loki. If you can shut up. If you can let him decipher what needs to be done. If he can figure out some way to do it before the blowtorch-wielding robed vigilantes or some disincarnate meme god comes back and draws their electronically-sharpened fingernails across your throat hard enough to split skin and sinew, send waves of blood down the front of your shirt like a river of sweet, thick red honey and toss your corpse in a ditch by a highway and -
“Y/N?” It is foggy, barely-heard. Posh. “Y/N!” Louder, this time. There are fingers on your wrist, bent backwards to grip you. Squeezing, insistent and there. “Breathe.”
Fuck, you think. You’d started to hyperventilate. To shake, with a full-body tremor that forecasts a great, unstoppable wave of sobbing panic. And Loki had noticed. “I need you to trust me,” He says. “Trust me to get us out of this. Can you do that for me, darling?”
He has never called you darling before, but God how you’ve wanted him to. You feel like you’re being stabbed in the heart - because there is no way he means it, no way that this is anything other than a desperate and cruel attempt to get you to calm down. Something that belies how obvious you are. How needy you are. How pathetic. And yet -
And yet, he doesn’t say it meanly. He speaks like he cares about you, and in the face of your impending death, you want to think Loki cares. You’d let him say anything, do anything to you, right now. More than that, though, more than any of that - as you think back to meeting him, to your blossoming late-night friendship and twitchy banter and the quiet moments you’ve shared with him in-between battles -
“I trust you, Loki,” You tell him, and feel your breath quiet in you. Feel yourself growing still and calm with the certainty that Loki will do as he’s said.
That you will survive this.
That -
“Good,” Loki says. Not relieved, but determined. Leaving you no room to argue.
“So what do we do?” You ask him.
“Nothing,” Says Loki, and you can hear his wide grin.
“Nothing?” You ask him, gawking.
“Nothing,” Says Loki. He gives your hand a tight squeeze.
And then the Pink Cobra walks in.
***
This will end badly, you think. It’s about the only thing that you can think, preoccupied as you are with -
It might be easier not to -
Fuck.
The thing is - and you really do try not to move, not to groan, not to scream - the thing is, you thought that when Loki said he had a plan, that said plan wouldn’t involve you being collateral damage for a LARP-er who’d most likely broken out of an asylum. I wish that we could be back in that shitty one-bed hotel room, you think to yourself, and - alright, not the best timing, but it rips a laugh out of you, spiraling and unhinged, before you feel the Pink Cobra, resplendent in coral cloak and villainous swagger, slug you one in the jaw. It hurts worse than you’d thought it would - you’ve never really gotten injured on missions, you’re usually good at talking yourself out of things, which is why the Avengers keep you around. You can speak any language, as long as you’ve heard it once, and your customary daily awkwardness can shift into persuasion like flicking a light-switch on.
Usually, though, you had an opportunity to speak, and weren’t rendered speechless by -
Loki, if you’re being honest. How much you want to kiss him. How much of an asshole he is. Trust me, he’d asked you. Can you do that for me? The Pink Cobra’s grip is sharp and bruising on your side; he’s slipped his fingers up your shirt and is pressing the point on your side that threatens to make your knees buckle, making bile rise up in your throat, driving you wild with the aching need to flee. He has one hand clasped over your mouth, now that you’ve quieted, and you can feel something - pain, and a pill - pressed snugly into his palm. He will force it down you, you know, if Loki so much as sighs wrong.
You’ll never trust him again.
You wish that you knew what the time was. If you end up dying at 4:20, you’re going to throw fists with somebody in hell.
You wish, also, for aspirin. Avengers training has left you woefully unprepared for the reality of getting punched in the face. You can already feel your jaw starting to swell, taste an egregious amount of blood. You’re pretty sure that the force of the blow knocked a tooth out.
What strikes fear into you, though - a fear somehow deeper than the absolutely bone-chilling, blood-curdling knowledge of what the Pink Cobra might do to you - is the look you’d seen on Loki’s face in the seconds after he’d grabbed you, before it fell into practiced, amused apathy. He’d gone white, and his eyes had blown wide. His fingers had spasmed with anger.
He’d looked as scared as you feel.
And you have no idea why.
It isn’t like you’re anyone special. Not any more than the rest of the team. Less so than most of them. You aren’t a god, like Loki and Thor are. You don’t have stealth-assassin training, like Bucky, or super-strength like Steve. You can’t seamlessly pilot mechanical suits over the New York skyline like Tony, or use a crossbow like Clint, or beat thirty people in single-hand combat like Nat, or change into a nitro-fueled rage machine like Bruce.
You can’t do anything, much.
Except, apparently, die.
You squeeze your eyes shut, not letting yourself look at him. You won’t let Loki’s disinterested face be the last thing that you see. It makes the Pink Cobra’s words all the worse, when he speaks. His voice is dark and sick and timbered, and you feel maggots crawling over your skin as he slots you closer to his body, tightening his already painful grip on you so that you can’t move even an inch away from his tensed, coiled muscles.
“So,” He says, “You are superheroes? How long did it take me, to apprehend you? Ah - three and a half hours? Tell your boss-man, do better next time.”
“I’ll pass it along,” Loki says. His voice sounds different. You can’t place why. Still won’t look.
“You won’t,” The Pink Cobra says. You can feel his shoulders rise, then fall. Feel him smirk. You love Loki’s smirk - secretly delight in drawing it from him, sometimes - but the Pink Cobra’s only fills you with yet more terror. You’ve pursed your lips tightly shut against the intrusion of his hand, but when Loki speaks he forces your bruised, bleeding jaw open and shoves the pill into your mouth. The pain of your injury tears through you like white lightning and you thrash, trying to escape. A keening sound claws its way out of you, fevered and anguished, and you feel your hands, still bound up in ropes, trying in vain to push off and away. The man behind you sighs, and then aims a swift kick at the back of your knees, which sends you down before you can so much as yelp. Your knees hit the floor, and he’s holding you by your hair now, twisting it so hard that you’re almost sure he’ll scalp you. He’s pulled something - too big to be be a knife, some kind of shortsword?! - Out from beneath his cloak, and is pressing it up against the column of your throat. You feel the weight of the capsule between your teeth heavily now, and realize what it means in the split-second before the Pink Cobra bends and whispers, Your choice; stale and rancid into the shell of your ear.
Next, he addresses Loki.
“You’ll be wanting to know what our plan is,” He says. Our, you think. We were right. “Hmm? I know how you people are. Always wanting to know. Tell me this, Mischief Man. What will I get, if I tell you? What price are you willing to pay?”
You know what this is. You know it like the ache in your heart when Loki brushes you off. Like the safety you feel in his arms. You open your eyes. Take in Loki’s face - he’s trying to hide, but you know, you know how he feels. You know what he’s going to choose.
And you know that you can’t let him choose it.
“You’ll let her go,” Loki asks, “If we let you leave here?”
“The thing could be managed.”
No, you think. No, Loki, don’t! Whatever the Pink Cobra’s going to do, whatever the IPP’s planning, knowing’s worth more than your life.
“One thing I want to know,” Loki says. He’s twirling a knife of his own, a slim silver number he keeps on him at all times, and you feel the blade on your own throat start to dig in - not enough to draw blood, but enough for you to feel it. The threat of it. The promise of it, and the coldness of the gleaming metal. “You and the IPP? How does it fit?”
“You want information from me?” The Pink Cobra asks. Lets his blade bite you, just barely, and the strength it takes for you not to scream is more strength then you’d known you possess.
“Yes,” Says Loki. “It’s not like I’m asking for much.”
He meets your gaze. You meet his. You hope that he cannot read it. His eyes are so worried, so desperate, you nearly break down.
“I suppose,” The Pink Cobra says, “That you’ve earned it. Getting here - getting this far - it must have been no easy task. Fine. There is no Imminently Predictable Psyops organization. They were a - what do you call it? Red herring? A scent of blood for the shark.”
“You fabricated them,” Loki says. “Why would you fabricate them?”
He is losing his composure, you can tell. You will never be ready for this. He will never be ready for this. You hope that he will forgive you, and you know that he never will, and you swallow the pill in your mouth.
“Because it was fun,” The Pink Cobra says.
And then your body knows pain.
***
“He didn’t think I would do it,” You say. Your mouth feels thick, clotted with blood and shock, and your body is one raw, gaping wound, but the giddy feeling of victory has begun to course through your veins. Pure, unfiltered adrenaline. You had waited for the moment of death to come, and it hadn’t. The pill is fake, your mind had screamed. But there’d been one thing left, that might work. You had breathed as slowly as you possibly could, forced every muscle of your scared, writhing body into single-minded limpness, rolled your eyes backwards into your head, drew one last breath in, and fallen. Twitched, for a few seconds, like a rag-doll. Then made yourself still.
Loki had slit the Pink Cobra ear to ear, beaten him within an inch of his life as he bled out, screaming like a man deranged. He’d left him a wet, bloody mess on the floor, and the blood had run down the not-quite-steady plane of it, pooling around you and mixing with the blood from your jaw, from the evening’s earlier glass cuts, from the deep, burning stab wound the Cobra had got on your arm.
You breathe, and your body knows pain.
You look at Loki, and your body knows pain.
He is shaking. Visibly shaking. His hands are clenched into fists at his side, and he looks as pale as bleached bones. His eyes are shot red - he had sobbed, when you fell, and a howl had torn through his body. You don’t know what to do, what it means, what the hell even to say to him. His cheeks are tear-stained, his breaths ragged.
You blink, and your body feels pain.
“We won,” You croak out. “Loki, we won.” It hurts worse than anything you’ve ever felt in your life. “I think he broke one of my ribs.”
You don’t mean to say that last part, but you do, and you are the one crying now, because it feels like he probably has, and you can barely even stay awake through this pain. It feels like the Hulk is pulling you limb from limb. Like all of those nightmares you’ve had where Loki decided to leave you - to go back to Asgard, and never speak to you again.
Stupid, you think. He won’t, again. Not after this.
Loki still hasn’t spoken. He’s looking at you, and his eyes are wild. Desperately, jaggedly roaming your body. His fists twitch with every new part of your body they land on.
“That bad, huh - Oh, fuck.”
And just like that, the tension leaves Loki’s body. The dam that had held him firmly in place is broken, and he’s running towards you with none of his usual grace. Dropping down by your side. He hoists you, and you hiss, and the tears won’t stop coming, so you bury your face in his shirt, nose pressed at the crisply ironed collar. Don’t care that it’s bleeding, because Loki’s here now. Holding you. Keeping you real. He’s got one hand stroking your hair and his touch feels right, nothing like the Pink Cobra’s, and he’s whispering: You brave, precious, idiot, how dare you, how dare you throw your life away like that?!
“It worked,” You exhale - it’s the most you can manage. You would laugh, if it wouldn’t shred you to pieces. Loki cradles you fiercely, hands grasping at the sweat-and-blood soaked fabric of your shirt, running over you as if he doesn’t believe you’re alive. “It - hurts,” You get out. Barely. “Loki, it - I can’t -“
“Don’t,” He tells you. His voice has gone brittle, choked with thorns. “Don’t talk. Don’t - Don’t ever do that again. Do you hear me? You will never do that again.”
If I need to, I will, you think. And you wonder if that’s why you’re here. Wonder if that’s why you’re strong. You wonder, and hurt, and believe. Feel the strength of him, clutching you like you’re the only thing in the world, taking in greedy lungfuls of your weeping, your need for his touch.
You can’t talk, anymore. It hurts too badly. But you surge, upwards, up into where he’s holding the back of your head, pressing your forehead into the dark, warm space under his jaw that smells like smoke and peppermint. Loki is taller than you are - you fit right into the curve of his neck, and his long curls curtain you in a bubble of warmth and content.
“Promise,” You say, but it comes out unintelligible, and Loki’s hands are running, so gently, over your skin.
“What was your plan?” You ask him, forcing it out of your body.
“Hush,” Loki says, “Later.”
There might not be any later, you think. Not like this.
***
In the hotel room, an ocean of scattered pages and ceiling mold and blessed privacy, you balance, cross-legged, on the bed. The wind blows wet and cold from an earlier rain through the busted out window. You have managed this out of sheer stubborn-ness, because it is the most that Loki allowed you to do. You’d passed out, twice, on the journey back - he had magicked you there, though it had taken a considerable amount of effort that you weren’t sure you really deserved - and had immediately propped you up on the pillows and stooped to ruffle through his suitcase, emerging not long after with binding tape, cat-gut thread, and a needle so sharp you could feel it slicing your flesh. You had opened your mouth to protest, but Loki had silenced you with a glare that could fell Director Fury. So you had gone quiet, and caved, letting him kneel over you on the distinctly lumpy mattress and begin inspecting your wounds. It had taken a few tries and a Please to convince him to let you sit on your own, and it hurt much more than the manner in which he’d arranged you. You were starting to, slightly, regret it.
“You don’t have to do this,” You say, pulling it from bleeding lips. He shushes you with a harsh, stern tut. “You’re not my mother,” You tell him.
“You could have died,” Loki says. There’s a snarling undercurrent to it that you can’t even start dissecting. “What were you thinking?” He asks. It is easier, though still painful, for you to answer him - he had used nearly half of his Thor-limited magic reserve to perform a basic stasis spell on your injuries, but the spell wouldn’t last forever. You’ll need stitches, he’d said, choking it out like he was the hurt one when he’d seen the number the Cobra’s blade had done to your arm.
“I’ve had worse,” You say, grinning weakly.
“Are you lying to me?” He asks you, with the tone of someone who’s distinctly not in the mood for joking.
“I thought,” You say. Steel yourself. “I thought you weren’t going to do what needed to be done. So I - Did it myself.”
“What needed to be done.” Loki says, enunciating every word.
“We couldn’t let him walk away,” You say, meeting his eyes. Emerald, clouded with fury. You don’t let yourself flinch from that anger. You don’t let yourself run from your choice. “You know what he would have done.”
“I don’t,” Loki says. “I know nothing. I know - I know that you think that your life means so little I wouldn’t care if you were gone. That I could - Live, without you.”
That’s… different.
“And I know,” Loki continues, “That I told you to trust me, and I meant it.”
“I do,” You say. There is no hesitation. “I trust you - Loki. Of course I trust you. It’s not - it wasn’t -“
“Stop talking,” He snaps. Gentles, when you jerk your head away, blink back a fresh wave of tears. “You need rest,” He says. “And - This is. This is going to hurt.”
You nod.
“Best get it over with, then.”
“You should keep your eyes closed,” He says.
“No! I want - I need to look.” You bring your eyes up to your arm, which he’s settled onto bed’s chewed, scratchy quilt without you realizing, but Loki tilts your head up with a barely-there graze of his fingers, achingly gentle to avoid aggravating your swollen jaw. He holds your gaze for a long time. Doesn’t look mad, anymore.
“Are you sure?” He asks you. Like all of this could be over with, if you wanted.
“How bad it could it be?” You ask back.
The injury is horrendous. You’d thought - honest-to-God, you’d thought the pain was terrible, but you weren’t ready for what your arm has become. The line of the wound runs in a craggy jigsaw from just under your shoulder to the tip of your elbow. Small wonder you can’t move it, can barely think through it at all.
“Y/N?” Loki asks, “Are you -“
“Fine,” You say. Blink, and your body knows pain. Try not to let how scared you are show, when you look back up at Loki. The Pink Cobra’s dead. You shouldn’t be scared, anymore. “It’s really bad, isn’t it?”
Loki sighs. Long and low and sad.
“Will I have to - “
“Bite,” Loki says, and shoves something - the sleeve of his shirt, crusted in blood which you realize, sickeningly, is yours - into your mouth. “It’ll help.”
It doesn’t, but he holds your hand through it, hushing you through the pain with furrowed eyebrows, thread and needle flying deftly through skin, air, skin again. His fingers move precisely, deliberate, quick, and when, on one stitch, you audibly whimper, he pauses to lean down and press a soft, utterly unexpected kiss to your hairline. You are unable to fully express how much it means to you, so you do the next best thing and kiss him yourself, pressing him back once he’s finished the last of his stitches and breathing all the the words you can’t say into him. You press every fear and gratitude and lingering nerve into the warmth of his lips, wending your fingers through his dark hair despite the pangs of agony still thrumming through every inch of your body. Your face hurts, but the kiss is all you’ve ever needed and more, and Loki is so, so gentle with you, pulling away with creased eyebrows and a look of genuine concern.
“I wanted to,” You tell him, mustering all of your strength. “It didn’t hurt.”
“Stop,” He tells you, voice cracking, “Stop lying.”
“I’m not,” You say. “I wanted to, Loki, I did.”
“And you wanted to -“
“No.” You are vehement about it, for a broken-ribbed, broken-jawed, freshly-stitched person coming off the high of his teeth and his tongue. “Not that, I swear, never that.”
“Why did you do it, then?” Loki asks. He has steepled his fingers under his chin, and his narrowed eyes pierce through you to the soul. You couldn’t lie to this man, you think, if your life depended on it.
You know that you have to tell him, this time. Really tell him. You don’t.
“”Why didn’t you use your magic?”
“You know why,” He says, and you do. You’d remembered it as the white pill turned to white powder in your gums, as the Pink Cobra’s knife had carved its way into your flesh. Thor had put a set limit on it, as condition of Loki’s release - Proof, he had said, We can trust you. Loki had thought to save it for later, that you wouldn’t need him right then. He had thought you’d talk them out, to safety.
You’d failed him.
“You didn’t,” He tells you, voice raw. He goes to grip your chin, to force you to listen to him, but with a glance and ill-concealed wince at your purpled jaw he thinks better of it. “You think that you failed me? You let yourself be - be beaten and stabbed - just so people you’ve never met in your life wouldn’t die, and you call that a failure?” He runs a hand through his hair. Bites back a snarl. Drops your arm. “I need you to listen to me,” Loki says, “Very, very carefully. You’re going to tell me why now, love. And then we’re going to fix it.”
You raise an eyebrow. Worse than he does, you’re aware.
“Sleep,” He amends, with a pointed look at the bed underneath you, “And then we’re going to fix it.”
“There’s only one bed,” You tell him, “And I feel like I just got run over by a truck.”
Loki huffs, a puff of warm air that you feel, from how close he still is. A grin twitches at the edge of his lips. It sets off sparks inside you.
“I thought -“ You say. Shake your head, and restart. “You would have let the Pink Cobra attack. You would have let him just walk away, and I couldn’t just - let that happen.”
“Enlightening.”
“No,” You tell him, “I mean it. I couldn’t - I’m not - I’m not worth more than anyone else. We’re the Avengers. It’s our job to save people, Loki.”
He’s regarding you carefully, eyes still narrowed, all vestiges of softness gone from his face. When he opens his mouth, it’s to close it. Form thoughts. Discard them. Exhale.
“My mother once told me,” He finally says, “That I would never know what it meant to be human until I found the person who made me want to bleed the world dry. Take all of its’ suffering, all of its’ cruelty, and leech it out of the very fabric of time, just to keep that person from anguish, from harm.”
“I don’t -“
He holds a hand up. You still.
“She never said they would infuriate me,” Loki says. “She never said they would make me laugh, or smile, or question my sanity on a regular basis. She never said that they’d try and get themselves killed, and that I’d have to watch, and that I would feel like my heart was being ripped from my body and torn to a bloody pulp; that I would make the sky rain blood and fire at the sight of it alone. But she was right about one thing - Many things, but also this. She told me that it wouldn’t matter. That I would - love you - anyway.”
“You don’t,” You say, not daring to hope. It’s an automatic retort.
“Foolish girl,” Loki chides, and you blink back fresh, stinging tears. How long have you wanted to hear Loki say that to you? How many sneaky looks have you stolen in the heat of your missions, just to see his smart mind and tricky magic at work? How many nights have you sat up together, sequestered from your insomnia in a bubble of hard-earned banter and peppermint tea, fighting the tight, coiling urge to push aside your steaming mugs and pull him into your needing?
He could not - he can’t - feel the same.
“Loki,” You say, stumbling over the words, “You can’t - This is - This is me we’re talking about.”
“Is there anyone else here,” Loki asks you, “That I could be talking about?” He seems nonchalant, now, as if this - this cruel fucking joke, when you already feel you’re on fire - is merely a fact of his life. “We’re going to leave this excuse of a town, and get you - proper care. Fix it. Because I will not, on my honor, watch you suffer in pain. But first, you’re going to sleep.”
“There’s only one bed,” You tell him, and feel your resolve as it shatters. You cling to the statement like it’s the last remnant of the girl you were and the woman that you’ll never be, “And the shower doesn’t work. And I’m covered in blood.”
But when you look at Loki, his eyes twinkle, mischievous.
“Will you stay with me?,” You ask him, biting your lip.
“You astound me,” He tells you, and rolls his eyes, and it feels - it feels normal. Good. A tender heat unfurls in your heart like orchid petals in the sun, numbing the persistent ache in your ribcage. “To even think that I would do anything else.”
Later, you will ask him why. Why do you love me?, you will ask, and Loki will hum, low in his throat, curled around you just like this first night; your back pressed into his chest, your legs tangled up hopelessly, his fingers tracing nonsense patterns onto your spine in the dawn-light’s syrupy gold. Because, he will tell you, trailing a line of soft kisses up the scar on your arm - an ugly thing, but it functions, mostly, and only ever seems to hurt on the days when he isn’t there - I was given no choice.
But if you’d had one?”, You will ask, and spin around, propping yourself on your elbow.
You tempt me, He’ll tell you, baring his sharp teeth. Shouldn’t you know better than that?
You will lie there, next to each other, not needing a single word. Because you will know. Because he will have told you, a thousand times, a thousand ways, exactly how he feels about you.
Tonight, though, isn’t that night. It takes a moment to get settled in his hold, and the rain spits and drums against what glass remains in your window, slicking the carpet with dark, greasy splotches. It figures, you think, that even the rain in this city has the smell and the texture of oil. You feel like a bag of bones, stretched too thin. But safe, in his arms, in a way that you’ve never felt, before now. Loki is with you, you realize. Wrapped around you like a traveler’s cloak, the comforting weight of a slim, balanced blade at your side in a fight. He is cool, around your afraid. Warm, where his clever fingers whine and needle their way through your skin to your heart.
Summary: When you get hurt, the Master heals you, and some true things come to breaking.
Pairing: Dhawan!Master x Reader(But like. Also it’s sad, so. Be warned.)
Warnings: Just. All the angst.
Word Count: 1k
A/N: So.... Yeah. This is a depressing fic. I feel bad about that kind of but I just felt the need to write this. I’ve had some things going on in my life recently... I got kicked out of my house and my boyfriend turned out to be a bit of an abusive person that I had to get away from, so honestly I just haven’t been in the headspace to write anything happy lately. Hopefully that will change soon, but until then, here’s some (probably trash lmao) angst for you guys. I hope you’re all doing well and staying safe during the pandemic.
“Slow,” You hear, as your eyes blink groggily open. Everything’s white, and everything hurts - phantom chills and aches are rippling over your body, your throat is raw and cracked, and when you hastily attempt to sit up, your ribs feel like somebody’s stabbed them, hard and repeatedly. They hurt so badly that you don’t notice the Master at first, his hand steady on your shoulder, pushing you back down onto -
Onto a hospital table.
“What -,” You say, and wince, a cough torn out of your dry, burning esophagus.
“Shh,” The Master says, concern tempered with anger. What did I do?, you wonder, trying and failing to take in the way that he looks through the haze of your pain. Oh, God, what happened to me? The Master holds a cup of something cool to your lips, and tilts it back for you. Water, you register, cool and refreshing, soothing on your reddened nerves; you just about manage a sip, and a small, exasperated smile crosses the Master’s lips. You catch the tiniest hint of anger on it, nowhere near that which he usually displays, and shudder. The shuddering, even, hurts.
After a moment, the Master runs his hands through his hair, tugging at it with a degree less restraint than you’re used to, emits a sharp, stuttered sigh, and turns his gaze up to you.
“You have questions,” He says, in a tone that signifies he has no intent of actually answering them.
“What happened to me?” You asked. The Master stood, and, with no preamble, began pacing.
“You almost died,” He bit out, the words cruel on his tongue. “Anything else that you’d like to know?”
“What did you do?” You find yourself asking him, trying, and failing, to sit. You feel like a desert, as blackened and bruised as a plum, and a painful shiver wracks your frame as you think about how you must look. The Master has put the water cup down, with more force than should be necessary, and is making himself busy at a series of monitors blinking in rapid-fire Gallifreyan; somehow, even knowing how furious he is, the script still looks as beautiful and as mysterious to you as he does - all lonely, and separate, and dangerously, elegantly alluring, the threat and the promise of something far older and more terrible than the fleeting beat of your heart.
“I stopped you from dying,” The Master says, “Obviously.”
Yes, you find yourself thinking, as your now-adjusted eyes take in your surroundings, But how? You have never seen the hospital wing before, and it strikes you, somehow, as wrong, for the shape of him against everything that could go wrong, his immaculate precision knocked that much off kilter - you notice that he is shaking, and that his movements, fierce as usual, have taken on a frantic and desperate need to avoid standing still. He says nothing, but his silence rambles, clumsy in the white room with its rows of bioscanners and IV needles and bags of 51st century saline vaccum sealed in mauve plastic. It nags at you, when you see it, and his voice comes back to you from a night long ago.
“The universal signal for danger,” You find yourself whispering, even though it hurts you. Afore you, the Master goes still, every muscle suddenly taut, and his voice when he speaks sounds as raw as your parched, blistered throat.
“I don’t want you here,” He says, pushing more vitriol into it than you could possibly have imagined, his knuckles going white from their grip on the edge of the monitor screen which he had been flicking through.
“Master -“
“I should’ve just let you die, love,” He tells you, “And then it would all be done with. But no - I had to let you live, just so I could watch it sixty years from now. Rassilon. I ought to kill you myself.”
“I won’t die,” You say, and it hurts, but you mean it - you find that you cannot be dead, when you’re near him. Cannot bear missing a moment of his soft-spoken, merciless chaos, drawing you into the orbit of him like the pull of a flame at a moth. The saline bags are half-knocked over, and the room has not been cleaned in what looks like days - and, for a second, you almost think that you could mean something to him. You wonder what it would feel like, for the Master to slide a knife into your heart, to feel it break and bleed and stutter inside you, but somehow you can’t wonder how you know that he wouldn’t dare.
“I’m sorry,” You find yourself saying, and he screams - howls, to the sky, and the ship, and a God you’re not sure you believe in -
“It wasn’t your fault!”, Spinning on his heel and pushing the monitor away from him with such force that the glass nearly shatters. “It wasn’t your fault,” He says again, and blinks, and sees once more to see you - small, and frightened, but not of him; of the things that he flees from, when he writhes, sweating and shouting, under the covers, on those rare nights when he deigns to sleep. You’ve never woken him up from his nightmares, but you know the look of them too well, and you are sure, as you meet his gaze, smoke and chocolate spiked with anguish and fear, that you will have one tonight, if he isn’t there by your side.
“Then tell me,” You say, feeling calmer, you think, than you should, for your knowing of him, and your staying. “Tell me whose fault it was, Koschei.”
“Mine,” The Master tells you, looking at you like a dare, or a bet. Love me after this and you’re a dead woman, it says, and you take some comfort, then, in how much he’s kept hidden from you.
“Then fix it,” You tell him, too sure that it will be the death of you; that it is the right thing to do.
Hello all! I just wanted to pop in here and update everyone on the lack of a presence on this blog for awhile. I have been super busy with the start of a new semester and also just going through a pretty major writer’s block episode due to some other at-home reasons.
That being said I do hope to get back into writing for here as soon as possible, and I hope to be able to get over my mental writer’s block hurdles and other issues and be able to do that soon. I am not abandoning this blog, I just wanted you all to know that. I will be back with more writing, I’ve seen you guys’s asks, I just need some time to work through a couple of things.
I hope you all are staying safe and healthy, and I look forward to updating this blog with more writing content for the fandoms that I write for soon, including those for requests that I have received!
Summary: The Doctor returns from prison to find that you’ve moved on it the worst possible way.
Warnings: None
A/N: This isn’t as Dhawan!Master-y as I’d hoped but here you go woo :)
It’s good to see the fam again, she supposes, even if Yaz shoves her away and Ryan stares at her like she’s a stranger.
“So!” She says excitedly, hands on her hips. “Where’s Y/N?”
There’s a silence.
“Well?” She prods expectantly, and they all glance at each other nervously.
“Well Doc, the thing is…” Graham scratches his head, “You might wanna go to her flat and see her for yourself.”
That’s fine by the Doctor, not an issue at all. It’s only one hop in the TARDIS and she leaves Jack with the fam while she sets in the coordinates for your place. The TARDIS lands with a toll of its cloister, and she’s at your front door in seconds.
She knocks on it first, in the polite human way, and there’s no answer. She frowns.
Just go in Doctor, she won’t care.
That’s rude Doctor.
Shut up Doctor.
She swings the door open and steps into your hallway. It smells the same and she can hear voices chatting in the kitchen.
“Y/N!” She calls, opening the kitchen door. “I’m…”
The words die in her throat.
You’re there alright, looking just like you always do, standing with a mug of tea by the sink and at your kitchen table is… the Master.
Summary: On the streets of London, you find a notebook. And you see the Master, there in the darkness. He teaches you how to be God. Doctor Who x Death Note crossover.
Pairing: Dhawan!Master x Reader, minor/implied Dhawan!Master x Thirteen
Warnings: Death and descriptions of death, darker tone, and liberal reinvention of some of the main mechanics of how Time Lords and Death Notes work.
Word Count: 1.4k
Prologue
A/N: Wanted to get the first chapter out today since yesterday’s prologue was super short, and also didn’t have much to do with Death Note. This chapter will serve as set up for the whole premise/jumping off point for this story, and I will be posting the second part later this week, where we’ll finally get to see the Master and the Death Note in action! Hope that you all enjoy.
Part I - Midnight
You were almost twenty-one years old, the very first time that you saw him. It’s always better to start at the beginning, he’d told you, once - So, when you think your life over, and the lives of the ones who have died, you do your best to go back to that sweltering night with the Doctor, all of those long years ago, when you were only a child, and Kira only a ghost. You were twenty years old, threaded over with Cyberman nightmares and faded Silurian scars, your mind full to bursting with visions of Davros and creatures you could not remember, and the Doctor had worn a man’s face and tuxedo, black pockets lined with red velvet; sharp eyebrows, and, somehow, a much sharper tongue.
You had never known him to be scared, before, but that night - hot with threat, and with foreboding - he had been, and as you had wound your way through grimy nightclub back alleys, he had cursed under his breath.
“Don’t touch anything,” He had told you, in that way that he did; the one that reminded you what, exactly, he was, and how human you’d seemed to him. You’d followed him silently, knowing not how to argue, or what he was funning away from, and the world had seemed to exist behind you - some alternate plain of muddled dimension to which you’d no longer belonged, hurtling towards its doom. You had heard a drum beating, then, loud in the night air, and frantic, matching the thrum of your pulse.
“It’s my last chance,” The Doctor had said, collapsing onto his knees in a labyrinth of busted cartons and dirty brickwork. “Rassilon,” He’d said, “I’ve failed you.”
You hadn’t known what he’d meant when he’d said it, but the lights from seedy massage parlors had spilled out of open windows, yellow and filthy on him, and you had seen he was crying, suit pants smudging with dirt.
“Go back to the TARDIS,” He’d told you, “Now,” He had said, “That’s an order,” When you’d opened your mouth to protest. The tears had gleamed on his cheeeks, and your bones had ached in raw terror, but he had been the Doctor, yet, and eep in your heart, you had known.
The way back, it had been harder. You hadn’t remembered where the Doctor had parked, and the night’s shadows had lengthened, reaching out for you with sharp and steely fingernails, tearing at your calm like thorns. There was a time when such things would not have frightened you, but it had been long past by then - You had known the Doctor too long, and too well, to ever truly feel safe. Sometimes, when you’d closed your eyes, the intricate lines of the Pandorica’s coding would flash, neon, onto the screens of your eyelids, and the piercing pain of the handcuffs punched new marks into your wrists; for a moment, it was easy to see the universe, and when you had, it was on fire, the sound of harsh laughter afore you, the Doctor nowhere in sight.
That night, caught in the web of your fear for yourself and your worry for him, the only thing that you’d really seen had been the notebook, black leather corners poking into the caustic flourescence of spill-over lights, sinister letters cutting into your mind as it had beckoned to you. You had stared at it for a moment, feeling some dark, foreign emotion suffuse you, and despite feeling eyes on your back, you had found, when you turned to look, that you’d been completely alone. Your feet, your gaze, had gone frozen.
What would the Doctor do?, You had asked yourself, in that instant of nerved time, suspended, as if you could ever have known. You’d taken one step forwards, then another, and the front of the notebook had swung into bright and clear focus, written in a lattice-work of circular motions that you had been unable to decipher. A new fear’d come over you, then, as your traitorous hand had reached out for it against your will, and a voice in your head that shifted and changed had said, frowning, This isn’t right. You’d seen one last glimpse of the Doctor as you’d first known him, when you were stupid, and young - Spiky hair untameable, coat tails flapping as he ran; a man who sat in front of monitors all night long, never needing to sleep, and took thirteen sugars in his tea - before your fingers brushed the skin of the notebook, feeling the slick, supple leather. The world had unfolded around you, and the dead things had metastized into unloved, solid forms. Somewhere to your left, through the din of a million people squandering their fragile, soon-ending lives, you’d heard a stone angel weeping, pouring its vitriol into the churned, bloodied earth.
You’d felt him, before you’d seen him, a shape in the darkness too near you. All of your bad dreams, and every pani; each jump at an unexplained noise, and you had imagined what he must look like - yellowed and crumbling bones, black eyes and long, tattered robes, ripped full of holes by the pleading, scythe a devastating harbinger fashioned from polished and rippling metal. You’d imagined how his voice would sound, and wondered, Why me, Doctor? Why now?
“Oh,” Said the Time Lord whom you would know as the Master, “This is going to be fun.”
*
The being whose name is written in this notebook shall die.
If cause of death is specified within six minutes and forty seconds, such a death will occur. If time of death is unspecified, the chosen being will die of a heart attack, or nearest equivalent, after forty seconds have passed in the current causal nexus.
A being who uses the Death Note can go neither to Gallifrey, nor to Skaro, upon the moment of their death.
*
He’d told you that it was a Death Note, and you had not looked at him.
“You can’t go back to the TARDIS now, love,” He had told you, with that too-human,m too-cold, too-amused tone in his voice. “If you want to see the Doctor again, I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”
“Who - who are you?” You’d asked, hand still clutched in a vice around the notebook, its front cover soft and warm. His cruel smirk and glinting gaze had been audible in the silence; you had not turned around.
“If you must know,” He’d said, “I’m a Time Lord. You may call me the Master.”
A wave of revulsion and shock had torn through you, and in it, you’d told him, “You can’t be,” From somewhere far outside your body. “You can’t be a Time Lord, the Doctor said they were all gone.”
“You’d heard, and felt, his malicious grin widen, your ears picking up on the sound of the night breeze rustling fabric.
“Rule number one,” The Master had told you, “The Doctor lies.”
“No,” You had said, “Not to me.”
“Mm,” He had told you, dripping with anger and spite, “Is that what you think about him? Do you think that he cares about you? The Doctor has lived for a very long time, love. He knows better than to care. Still, I have to applaud him for getting his hooks into you. It really is an impressive feat, considering you’ve found my Death Note.”
“Who are you?” You’d asked him, voice cracking, limbs shaking, night cold. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Me?” The Madter had asked, with a twinge of steely amusement, “Consider me to be… a friend. That’s not the right question, you know.”
“Sorry?”
“Who I am. That’s not the right question. You should be asking who you’ll be.”
“Who will I be, then?” You’d asked him, and his voice had gone low and deceptive, silky as a stranger’s touch.
“Look at me, love,” He had told you. “Look at me, and I’ll tell you.”
You still remember how he had looked, when you think back on it all now. How he had been beautiful, all dark eyes and purple jacket, lapels embroidered with gold. All rough sideburns and inky, mussed hair, every joint and muscle deadly, elegantly poised.
“Y/N,” He’d said, and nothing had been in his eyes but the sight of a planet aflame, a symphony of drums beating and shattering glass, “With my help, you’ll be a God.”
Summary: On the streets of London, you find a notebook. And you see the Master, there in the darkness. He teaches you how to be God. Doctor Who x Death Note crossover.
Pairing: Dhawan!Master x Reader, minor/implied Dhawan!Master x Thirteen
Warnings: Death and descriptions of death, darker tone, and liberal reinvention of some of the main mechanics of how Time Lords and Death Notes work.
Word Count: 207
A/N: I recently finished a Death Note rewatch, and immediately had this idea. It was going to live rent free in my head forever until the lovely @flybi91 bestowed on it the highest honor that any suggestion for a fanfiction could get, that being Pepe the Frog, and now I am bound by the power of meme to actually write this and nobody can stop me. But that’s okay, because I goddamn love this premise and I hope that y’all like this story! Casual reminder that this is not canon compliant with anything from Death Note or Doctor Who, although it strongly includes elements from both, and that this is just the prologue - the actual chapters for this story, of which the first three are already completed, will be much longer than this. That being said, please enjoy!
You meet her outside on a clear day - or, you think, passably clear, though the sky is brimming with gray clouds that carry the promise of rain. She wears her hair to her shoulders, and looks at you like she’s sad, so really, she’s not changed at all. When he sees her, he snarls, a harsh sound that that no one else hears, and the beat that he tapes with sharp fingernails on his suit pants momentarily ceases.
“Y/N,” She says.
“Doctor.”
The first raindrop comes out of a predictable nowhere, and her name tastes like ash on your tongue.
“It’s good to see you,” The Doctor says, and he laughs, a cruel thing you can’t quite get used to.
“She says that to everyone, love,” He says, and the weight of your knowing him burns. And oh, but you remember - you solved too many cases with her not to. The thought of them all pains you, now. You remember her as she was in the nameless days, when the worst thing that she had to worry about was the war between Davros and Lumic. When she sounded, and looked, like a man.
“Y/N,” The Doctor says - “Kira” - “I think that we need to talk.”
Summary: We’ll be safe here, Katherine had said. Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.
Pairings: Elena Gilbert/Elijah Mikaelson(Endgame), Elena Gilbert/Damon Salvatore
Chapter: 1/5
Warnings: Pretty dark and very AU. Deals with issues of sexual harassment and attempted assault throughout the story, as well as lots and lots of death because it’s TVD, what did we expect. If any of those things bother you, feel free to skip this one.
Word Count: 11k
A/N: This fic is probably one of my favorite pieces of fic that I’ve ever written. It took me a super long time to write, and since it holds a special place in my heart I thought I could crosspost it over here from my Ao3 starting this week as a sort of break in between other oneshots and ongoing asks that I have. I hope that you all enjoy this fic, even if it is a quite angsty read.
11
There’s a town in Virginia where the sun never sets. This is the legend she holds. And this is the hair that falls down her back; it is long, like a rippling waterfall. Thick, like her sister’s, not braided. A suitcase is lying beneath her; it’s latches gleam silver and bronze. Once a cat lived with them, a lithe gray cat with rust-colored stripes and eyes like a forest in summer. Katherine had let her name it, and she had been young, so she’d called the alley cat Monday. Because that’s when we found him, she’d said. By Wednesday he had been dead. Things will be better for us, Katherine’d told her, as they buried the cat in Uncle Ric’s garden. I hope that you understand that. Someday, she’d told her, You will.
Elena wonders if someday is yesterday, today, tomorrow. Rolling underneath them like the road. The car smells like metal, and the air is too hot. They’re in the South , Katherine told her. Virginia. It makes her want cold lemonade. We’ll be safe there, Katherine had said.
Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.
19
She sits on the edge of his bed. He doesn’t look like he did he was a kid - that’s what she thinks of him, then. She wishes that she’d grow his hair out again. She thinks it looked better that way. In person, it probably would. There is whiskey inside her, vervain. Katherien’s idea, and she’s kept it. There’s no point in goading the shadows. And he gives her everything, anyways, so long as it’s not what she wants.
After all, he had let them leave early.
They had broken the rules on the ride to the old boarding house. He had thrown her into his arms and just ran, kicking his shoes to the dark of the beckoning woods. The forest, she’d been told to call it, back in the days she was young. It had been raining, and so she had opened her mouth. The rain in Virginia fell loud, like an ancient drum beat in the sky, but she had still heard the sound that his fangs made when he looked too long at the place on her neck where her pulse, like the rain, beat a rhythm. I should go, he had told her, tossing her onto the bed. Fine, she had said, But I won’t. And still, she is not a liar.
“You didn’t leave,” Damon says.
He smells, also, like whiskey. Other things, too, she thinks now - because she is thinking about it, and knows that he’s going to let her. He smells like cherry wood, the way that the leaves will tomorrow. She is smiling, now, like a fool, and she knows that he thinks she’s so young. That’s how he says it. You’re so young, Elena, too young.
Everyone’s too young for him.
“Of course I didn’t,” She tells him, “I think that we need to talk.”
“We don’t need to talk,” Damon says, “You,” He tells her, “Need to sleep. “
“I’m not five,” Says Elena, and he looks at her then like the very first time that they met(I know your secret, she’d told him. Katherine told you, he had said.) - as if she is beautiful, rare, and more than a bit of a fool.
“Will you sleep if I stay?” Damon asks.
“What if I don’t want to sleep?”
“Elena -”
“Shut up,” She tells him, “And touch me.”
She flinches away from the soft, calloused pads of his fingers, and Damon stills to hold her while she cries.
11
The house isn’t theirs, but Katherine says it will do. Who owns it? She’d asked her, and Katherine had shaken her head. The woman was pretty. Carroty, red over white. Her neck had snapped like a pencil in somebody’s fist. But before Katherine did it, she caught the words that she said. Jenna, she’d told her, Thank you for keeping her safe. She takes the top bedroom, with the pretty, bright curtains and the lamp that casts dim, yellowed light. And Katherine comes to tuck her in, her lips and her chin stained bright crimson.
I love you, she’d told her, I’m sorry that we had to leave.
I want to be like you, Elena had said.
No, Katherine’d told her, You don’t.
12
Elena gets nothing but getting strange looks she wears like blue jeans and the notes that she passes to Bonnie. The Bennett’s are witches, Katherine’d said, but she hadn’t said it unkindly, as if Elena should stay away; so when Bonnie’d told her she knew when the pop quizzes were, the girls became, suddenly, friends. Elena likes Bonnie’s father: He lets her talk to her mother as much as she wants to, and makes them real food for dinner, not like Katherine, who thinks she can make something edible out of rabbit meat, mayonnaise, and jelly. You look good, Bonnie tells her, the first time she looks in a mirror. Do you want me to give you a haircut?
When Elena gets home that night, Katherine slaps her. People will notice you now, she says. So that night, for the first time in years - though how could she say that, honestly? - Elena Pierce made the pillowcase wet with her tears. Below her, Katherine drank.
14
Stefan is gossamar, soft lines that she knows can kill. She hates the way he pretends that he doesn’t know what he wants. Hates all the sweaters he wears. She knows that he looks at her strangely and will not attempt to say why. Once he tells Katherine that he knows she’ll look just like her, when she’s grown - Unless you turn her, Stefan had said, and at that, her sister’d gone silent. So when it’s suggested that she take the job Stefan offers - cleaning the boarding house, cooking them meals - Elena finds herself hesitant. But Katherine’d told her she needed to do this. It was important for her to know what to run from, she’d said. Important to know her own weakness. Not that she’d needed it, really. Katherine didn’t control her. It was easier to remember that she wasn’t human, now that the others were gone. What others, Katherine would ask her, whenever she started to falter. I’m your family now.
Then I want a different family, Elena would think to herself.
(She wishes it wouldn’t be Stefan.)
The Salvatore boarding house is the oldest building in town. They’re a founding family, Elena remembers, lifting the candented knocker. It hits like a dull metal ring. She wonders how long he’ll make her wait; and she looks at the house as she does it, tracing the remains of people that she can see holed in the walls. There are dreams in the chocolate shutters. Hopes in the long ropes of icicles hanging off of the roof. How many people have lived here? She wonders of, And how many of them stayed dead? (Everyone dies, Katherine’d told her. Sometimes it just doesn’t stick.)
“What are you waiting out here for?” Asks a man in the black leather jacket. He has higher cheekbones than Stefan does. His eyes are too blue for his face, but maybe, she thinks, just maybe not too blue for winter.
“Will you let me in?” Asks Elena, and the man who is not Stefan blinks.
“Who are you?” He asks her, his voice dropping low, “And how do you know about me?”
“I’m Elena Pierce,” She tells him, “My sister said it’s polite.”
“Do you live with her?” He asks, “Your… sister?”
“Yes,” She tells him, nodding, “Katherine.”
“By all means, then,” He tells her - and does she imagine the tremulous pain in his voice when he says it, the way that his knuckles clenched tight, the way he’s turned white like the corpse he’d once been on the road? - “Elena. Come in.”
18
Before Mystic Falls there was Boston. Before that, Poenix; Salt Lake. Before all of that there’s a time that she can’t remember. When, she supposes, their parents were tehre, not just staring up out of the blurred, tattered photograph lines. (Grayson Gilbert. Founder’s Day, ’95.) She isn’t allowed to look at her mother - Katherine’d told her that she hadn’t wanted them there. That’s why they spent their time moving. Elena feels restless just thinking about them, those years full of their days and hours, when, on the flip of a dime, Katherine would drag her away. Before they had stayed with Alaric, Elena’d not minded it. But there is one version of her that knows all that she’s left behind, and knows that it’s still in the two-room apartment where they had stayed those slim months. Alaric had told her she looked like her mother. He’d never once hit her for daring to ask for her name.
17
“You’ll never offend me,” She tells him - not just because she’s compelled. It’s your fault, she reminds herself, You who offered to try. Damon, as always, resisted.
“You’re lying,” He tells her, “I know the place you were raised.”
He doesn’t, she thinks, but Elena won’t ever say it. He hadn’t been there when everything was uncertain; eating and sleeping and feeling as if she were loved. He wasn’t there when Katherine said what she was - because, unlike him, she had never needed to hear it. Without new instructions, she feels what the compulsion is. It’s the sweetness her sister says comes from taking a fresh pull, like his fangs have sunk into her mind. It’s making her weak in the knees.
(Also, she wants to kiss him, which, again, she won’t say.)
“Can I think about it?” She asks.
Damon looks downwards, in shame. Stefan says this isn’t like him, that even when they were children, Damon was never ashamed. He says it’s something Elena brings out, which she doesn’t like thinking of. And though she knows that it is wrong, she’s glad that she’s made him feel guilty. It tells her just that he cares. It hurts when she feels Damon pull from her, worse than when she was compelled. Is that what it’s like? Thinks Elena, Being immortal? Suddenly, she wants to ask. But Katherine once told her that you never asked things of them. We don’t lie, Katherine told her, And we don’t like to sugarcoat things. So before you ask something of our kind, know if you’re ready to break.
Elena’s not ready to break, but she does want to fall into Damon; feel his arms come up around her and make the whole world seem alright. It isn’t his nature, she tells herself, turning her head from his gaze. She cannot stand seeing that look on his face, anymore. It’s her least favorite Damon, apart from the Damon who’s sad.
“I’m sorry,” He tells her, after an infinite moment, “For -”
“It’s my fault,” She says, and it is. She was the one who had askd him to do it. She’d wanted to know what it felt like, the power her sister so loved. The one that drove her to kill.
“That’s not what I meant,” Damon says, “I’m not saying sorry for me, Elena. I’m saying sorry for Katherine.”
The room is hazy with cigarette smoke and the vestiges of last night’s whiskey. Damon always drinks whiskey. It’s amber and honest, like him. A little bit dangerous, too.
“Why would you need to do that?”
“Because you’re not meant to be here,” He tells her, “And Katherine already knows.”
“She wants me safe,” Says Elena. She sees him grow guarded, shift on his laurels, retreat. His face is more beautiful angry, especially if it isn’t Elena who’s caused it. His eyes go that one shade of blue that she likes. The night’s coming out in full splendor, and she realizes joltingly that she has been here all day. Katherine must be so worried. “She said that it has to be this way.”
“Do you believe her?” He asks.
“She’s my sister,” She tells him, and sees a wince creeping up. Damon is young, for a vampire. Pretty, too, for a man. If Elena believed he could feel things she’d almost be sorry for him. But Katherine proved long ago that some things are known and not felt. Love, she had told her, was one. Was that why she’d asked him to do it? Or was it because of how badly she’d wanted to feel like a part of Katherine’s world? Elena cannot rightly say.
Someday, though, she wants to try.
“She isn’t your sister,” Says Damon. “Don’t try and say that again.”
She feels the compulsion come over her then like a wave. It seeps straight into her bones. She understands, now, why Katherine does it. There’s no other feeling like this. Nothing she knows can compare. You don’t really love him, she thinks.
“I have to call Katherine,” She tells him, punch-drunk and reeling from it, “She thinks I went over to Matt’s.”
His scowl tightens like that, and his quickness makes her too sure.
“Does she believe you?” Asks Damon.
“No,” Says Elena, “That would be stupid of her.”
There, in the dark, Damon grins.
17
She cannot remember the last time that she felt at peace. It must have been when she was younger, before. Before she met Katherine, perhaps. Before Katherine heard about her. It isn’t important now, thinks Elena, staring at what could be her. The stake was placed well, at the very core of her heart. It’s beating was slow to begin with, but now, she knows, it is silent. No one moves forwards to pull the wood out of the body, and so Elena does, shaking. Katherine feels no different dead than she had when she was alive - but then again, Elena remembers, she never knew Katherine alive. No one knew Katherine alive. She looks like another dead girl, but also, she looks like the woman who let her pick radio stations, who let her take Advil with chamomile tea when she had to stay home with a fever. Who taught her how to be safe in the world, if she wanted to know what being alive really meant. Katherine, thinks Elena, You’re not supposed to be dead.
(I already was, She can hear Katherine say.)
“You alright?” Stefan asks her. He says it the same way that he had once told her that nobody needed to know.
“No,” She tells him, “I’m not.”
Stefan doesn’t accept it, but she doesn’t think that’s a problem.
“Where did you learn it?” She asks him, “Staking one of your own?”
“Damon taught me,” He says.
“Where did Damon learn?” Asks Elena.
“Your sister,” Says Stefan, “Let’s go.”
15
“She took you away from your parents,” He says, and now everything is a struggle.
“We don’t’t have parents,” She tells him, “It’s always been Katherine and I.”
“Katherine,” Damon says, “Turned me. How do you still not believe that?”
“Because,” She says, “It’s not true.
Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.
14
“How old are you?” Damon asks. His eyes are a hooded cacophany. He smells of allspice and leather, the alcohol that he prefers. Elena’s never had alcohol, Katherine says she’s too young. And so she tells him,
“Eighteen?”
He throws his head back and laughs.
“Nice try,” He says, “Try again.”
She brushes him off. Surely his brother is somewhere, waiting for her to show up.
“You do know that he doesn’t want you,” He says, “You’re a child. You’re -” He seems to choke, then, strangely, on air. “How do you know about Katherine?”
“She’s my sister,” She tells him, “Why wouldn’t I know about her?”
“Look,” Says Damon, “What are you here for again?”
“Your brother asked me to clean.”
“We have maids for that,” Damon says, and pushes a fifth of vodka her way, “We’re starting with this. If you hate it - which you should - then your sister shouldn’t get angry.”
Elena stares at the liquid. She takes a gulp and chokes - properly, not like he had. It burns.
“That,” Damon tells her, “Is how your sister made me feel.”
“What did she do?” Asks Elena.
“I’ll tell you,” He says, “When you’re older.”
Elena looks down at her fingers, laced in her lap and painted in blue, and finds that she thinks she can wait.
16
Katherine looks like the devil. That’s what Elena hears Tuesday. She is wearing the jeans that her sister found inside the trunk, the long-sleeved shirt that hides all the places she’s bitten. Elena combs her hair straight. She still isn’t used to feeling it graze at her shoulders as soft as her sister’s fangs pierce. School’s far enough that Elena leaves early; Katherine said she should walk.
And then Damon tells her,
“Get in.”
He drives something classy, she knows, and he’s stopped right there in the street.
“Elena,” He says, and she closes her eyes, “I’m not going to compel you. But we don’t take these things lightly. Get in.”
“How did you know?” She asks him, eventually, “That I-”
“You looked scared,” He says, scowling, “Like I used to look when she -”
“When she what?” Asks Elena.
“Forget it.” He sneaks a glance at her and she flinches from what she can see. He’s looking at her affectionately, almost tenderly, and he, too, has woken up early. She cannot smell drink on his breath. “Elena,” He asks her, more gently, “Why don’t you wear vervain?”
“Katherine won’t let me,” She says, and finds her hands moving of their own accord to the edge of her sleeve. In the mirror, his jaw goes tight.
“I see,” Damon says, “I’ll be talking with her about that.”
“You don’t - It’s fine,” Says Elena, “I mean. Katherine’s my sister. I like to be useful to her.”
She feels when he slams on the brakes. It hits her as if she’s been slapped.
“You’re not being useful,” He snarls, “You’re a child, and you’re being used. What the fuck does she think she’s doing?”
“I - I don’t know,” Says Elena. She can tell that she’s going to cry, and fights to keep in the tears. “Can we - I can’t be late, Damon.”
“You can’t be with her,” Damon says, “So I’m -”
“No,” Says Elena, “I want to be with my sister. I don’t want to see you again.”
“That’s too bad,” Damon tells her, “You do work for us, Elena.”
“I work for your brother. Not you.”
She notices then that he’s stopped them because they’ve arrived, and all of her cohorts are streaming in through the glass doors. That’s the tide she will swim with. She wonders which ones of them Katherine will kill when she’s bored.
“Thank you,” She says, “For the ride.”
“You’re polite,” Damon tells her.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” Asks Elena.
“I’m a vampire,” He says.
“And?”
“And you need to go.”
“Will I see you again?” Asks Elena.
Damon considers, cocking his head towards her. She sees something in him that she can’t define, even more than the glint of his fangs.
“You ask,” Says Damon, “I come. I’m easy like that.”
Elena smiles and slides herself out of the car. She catches one last look at Damon before she closes the door.
17
Sundays are their day. Elena tells Katherine that she is still working, though both of them know it’s a lie. It’s been months since Katherine was burned, and the scar still falls fair on her skin. Sometimes she feels that they haven’t spoken since then - and when she thinks about that she suddenly, blindingly, hates him. (And, to a lesser extent, wishes that it would burn her.) So Katherine lets her go, and she walks through the slow, dappled sunshine to get to the boarding house door. Elena still knocks after all of this time. You don’t have to do that, he’d told her, sometime when she was fifteen. I want to, Elena had said.
On Sundays, the city is empty, holed up in kitchens and church. There is only one church in Mystic Falls, and Elena has never gone in it, but Matt told her once - before we kissed, thinks Elena - that church is a place to quiet. But the quiet unsettles Elena. Vampires move in the quiet, the dark, shadowed places that normal people cannot see. On a good day, when their fangs are stained red, they can move without making a sound. He asked her to go when his sister was found, and Elena’d politely declined. But she thinks of them, walking; sitting in pews made of leathery wood that could splenter through Damon and stay. Sinking onto butter-smooth benches to pray for the souls of the fallen. Don’t waste your breath, she’d wanted to tell him, Hell is real, and all of us go there someday. But the words, like God’s name in Katherine’s throat, wouldn’t come out of her mouth.
When the city is quiet, Elena can make her way faster. She could probably walk with her eyes closed, with how much she goes there of late. Things are better, now that school has let out. She no longer has to pretend that she’s ever fit in in this town. Not until August comes back. And Damon will let her in, whether she asks him or not. The door is already open when Elena halts at the threshold. She has barely cleared her throat before he is there, a smirk crossing over his face.
“Damon,” Elena asks, “May I?”
“Polite,” Damon says, and she frowns. It’s so hard to tell what really offends him - but she need not have worried, for Damon’s hand catches her wrist, and when she looks up a smile is splitting him open. His teeth are perfect, as pearly and straight as a white-picket fence.
“May you what?” Damon asks. This is a part of their game - he likes to see how long it takes for Elena to finally surrender. Of course, with Damon, it’s never exactly a game. More like the threat of revealing the way that he feels, which she thinks she can see in his eyes, in the scarce moments he lets his guard down. She remembers, in them, that she could be Katherine’s twin, with how closely she looks like her. But it makes sense, thinks Elena, We’re sisters. She knows that he doesn’t believe it, but Elena knows she wouldn’t lie.
“May I come in?” Asks Elena.
“I thought that you’d never ask.”
“Damon.”
“Fine,” He says, “I invite thee.”
There’s old magic in it. When Elena’s foot crosses, she feels it. The boarding house welcoming her. Not many people would ask, Damon’d told her, That makes you one of its own. Elena can feel it singin her blood; the boarding house wants to protect her. It wants to give her a roof of strong timbers, a warm place to sleep when it’s cold that isn’t inside Damon’s room, not that she’s ever been there. Trailing her hand on the flowery wallpaper, Elena whispers an apology, hoping the halls will forgive her. She goes for the thin silver chain before Damon can ask her and throws it off onto a chair. The vampire only glares.
“I won’t wear vervain around you,” Says Elena, “So please, Damon, don’t ask me to.”
“You’ve grown complacent,” He says.
“Funny, isn’t it? For someone who grew up with Katherine?”
“I never said that,” Says Damon.
“No,” Says Elena, “You didn’t.”
She wonders if this is the reason he loves her, because she refuses to not be herself, despite the danger it holds. She’s drawn like a moth to the flame of his taunting; she’s only a challenge, to him. But that’s the problem with knowing him: She would rather be only a challenge to Damon than nothing to Damon at all. Don’t love me, Elena thinks, Fear me. Fear me like Katherine does. It isn’t quite daring that pushes her onto her toes, but then, thinks Elena, it isn’t quite caring that makes Damon kiss her like that, like the whole world is ending and everything that could matter to him is lying there just out of reach. He is drowning his loss in a gamble that looks like the woman he loved, when loving was something he did. They won’t talk about this tomorrow - they never, never do - but that’s too fine with Elena. The first thing that she ever learned about Damon was that she could take only that which he would give. The rest he would keep for himself.
Still, she could drown in this touch. His hands are always so gentle on her, and his lips so unyielding, that Elena can’t help but respond. He’s too old for her - Younger than Katherine, she thinks - but it just makes him that good at knowing, so that, when he pulls her away from the doorway and presses her against the wall, she prays for a moment he really has lost his humanity. The world would be better, she thinks, without morals cropping up everywhere. Leave it to Damon to make her feel living and worthless all in the space of a breath.
But this time - this time - Elena won’t let him escape.
“Teach me,” She tells him, “I want to learn how to fight.”
Damon sucks in an inhale.
“I don’t care,” Says Elena, not waiting for his interruption, “I know what you think about me. I could never hurt your kind - not since I grew up with Katherine, and let her do - hell knows what and compel it. But Damon, that’s why I need you to teach me.”
In the end, thinks Elena, it doesn’t quite matter if Damon says yes or says no. She only hopes that he knows she is desperate and wanton for something that isn’t his ichor-silk body, grasping for hers in the dark
20
She is twenty for the rest of the world when she learns who Isobel was. It’s not who her birthday’s supposed to be, thinks Elena. She’s supposed to be outside, not puking in Alaric’s sink because she can’t bear to transition. Not that Damon’s been helpful - it’s his blood that’s in her, she knows, and she’ll never be able to look at him. So instead she vomits the not-blood and feels the fangs pushing their way through her gums like a writhing worm burrows through loam. I don’t want to do this, she thinks to herself. It’s not what I want, anymore.
(But you need it, says a voice in her head that sounds too much like a Salvatore’s.)
(You need it, Elena, so drink.)
“I can’t.” Says Elena. They make their way in when she says it, and she tastes her own blood in her mouth, as cold and as lifeless as she is. “You killed my mother.”
“She’s no more dead,” Damon tells her, “Or living, than either of us. And you do need to drink now, Elena. It’ll only get worse if you wait.”
“I’m not killing somebody for you.”
“You don’t have to,” He tells her, “You’ll leave the killing to me.”
“You know what,” Says Elena, “I don’t think that I will.”
He raises an eyebrow at her, and she knows what he’s thinking inside. That this is what Katherine must have bene like when she turned. This is why she was her sister, not the mother they don’t share.
“Are your really going to do this?” He asks her. He’s bent low, and his jacket is off, showing the arms that she can’t. Stefan once told her they’d heal, but Elena knows better than that. Everything Katherine’d touched died - including, ironically, her. She’ll wonder about that, someday. “Because once you do this, Elena, you can never go back.”
(Why did you do it? She wants to ask Damon.)
“Who do you think I should kill?”
16
“I want to stop school,” Says Elena.
“Do you?” Asks Katherine, “And why do you want to do that?”
“Because. It feels too mundane.”
“Too mundane?” Snaps Katherine, “If you wanted a bite, sweet sister, you only needed to ask.”
“That’s not-”
“It’s well enough,” Katherine says, “I’ve waited for you, did you know that? My whole life, I’ve waited for you.”
Her sister has a way of speaking like knives sheathed in velvet. It’s driving Elena to fear. If Damon were here, he would tell her how to get away. But Elena cannot run from Katherine. Family is family, forever. Isn’t that what everyone says? When Elena was younger - in the days before Mystic Falls - she dreamed of her dark reflection, falling out of a warped mirror to pierce her throat and leave her dead where she lay. But now she sees it for what it had been. It was a memory, all. A memory of her sister, of Katherine, moving like she’s moving now.
“Relax,” Says her sister, “Be still. I promise you that it won’t hurt.”
“You’re lying,” She tells her, fleetingly, grabbing for straws. “When Damon drinks from me it hurts.”
Everything in her goes still.
“Damon Salvatore?” Katherine asks.
“I love him,” She says - she doesn’t know if it is true, and she hopes that it isn’t, but it seems like the right thing to say.
She does understand, though. It’s just that she’s never felt it.
“You don’t know him like I do,” She says. She coughs from deep in her ribs, which she notices, finally, are bruised. They will be purple tomorrow, and if she is lucky - if it is Sunday - Damon will bite his wrist and force it into her mouth while he presses his lips onto them. “He’s good,” She tells Katherine, “And pure. To me, if not anyone else. And that’s better than you think him capable of. He’s more human than you are. You’ll never be human like him. How many times did you do it, Katherine? How much have you taken from me?”
“My sweet sister. I’ve taken everything.”
No, thinks Elena, Not everything. You cannot take what I am. And neither, she knows, can Damon take what she is. She says it - not out of knowing what loving feels like, but because she knows he’d never try. He has only stayed with her once, and that was because she had asked. (Though she can’t honestly say that she doesn’t dream about Damon, every night he isn’t there.)
“You have no claim over me.”
“And what will you do about that?”
“I’ll go somewhere else,” Says Elena, “I know there are still people here who wouldn’t let your kind in.”
Katherine hisses, recoils.
“You don’t honestly think that,” She tells her, “You know that there isn’t a door in this town that would not yield from my need.”
“You don’t honestly think I’ve forgotten the lessons you gave?” Elena shoots back, “You want everyone here to love you, but there are still some who remember. Their doors won’t yield for you.”
“And who would those be?” Katherine croons, “The Founders? They’re too scared of me to refuse.”
“Then I’ll do it myself,” Says Elena.
A pendant hangs from a thin silver chain on her neck. Touching it, she finds it warm.
17
He sponges Katherine’s blood off of her with a rag soaked in water and brandy. It’s easier, he said, than showering. Besides, he doesn’t want her to fall. He works the sponge with a firmness on her, and, when she squirms under it, he does not correct her behavior. It’s too soon, thinks Elena, To feel this way about you. Every time that she closes her eyes she sees Katherine, lying in front of her, dead. The moonlight made her olive skin look pallid. Elena thinks she’ll be sick, but her limbs are too cold. Her chest is too weary to heave. And her hair, her clothing, is sticky with Katherine’s blood. She wonders why he doesn’t drink it.
He drags the sponge over her stomach, down past her thighs. He swirls it around her ankles, staining the once t-shirt pink. The alcohol stings where it hits her, though Elena’s not bleeding. Still, she whimpers, and Damon presses a kiss onto her.
“I’m sorry,” He tells her. She doesn’t know if he’s speaking to her or himself.
“It isn’t your fault,” Says Elena, “It was -”
“Stefan’s,” Says Damon, and, when she looks down in shame, “Elena, do not say you think that it’s yours.”
“It is, though,” She tells him, “It is.”
“Someday,” He tells her, “I’ll ask you to say why that is.”
“But tonight?” Asks Elena.
“Tonight, your sister is dead. And you - Elena. I need you to tell me. Tell me that you’ll be alright.”
“It was Katherine,” She says. She knows it sounds plaintive - yet it was Katherine. It was. And before she knows how to stop all the words, Elena is giving it voice. “I was - I have this memory, Damon. I was seven years old, and we were living - with somebody else. Somebody who knew our mother. There was a park at the end of the street, back by the senior center. We went there, sometimes, so Katherine could be alone. And she - she would push me on the swings. I remember her pushing the swing, and - and smiling at me. She told people I was her sister. Then she - she - It is my fault, Damon, okay?”
Damon doesn’t look at her. But she feels him do something that also makes noise. His chest is moving, up and down and up and down again. But that isn’t right, thinks Elena, You don’t need to breathe, you’re a -
“You’re crying,” Elena says, “Aren’t you? Did I -”
“It isn’t you,” Damon says.
“It’s Katherine,” Says Elena.
“She was your sister,” He tells her, “That’s more important right now.”
It is, she realizes, looking at him. Damon is worried about her.
“I -”
“It’s okay,” Damon tells her. His voice is a little bit hoarse - because really, it’s not in the slightest. But neither of them need to say it. Not when they already know.
“You should probably stop,” Says Elena.
“Why?” Damon asks her.
“Because,” She says, swallowing, “I think you might hate me tomorrow.”
“Elena,” Says Damon, “You just lost the closest thing you ever had to a family. How could I hate you for that?”
She blinks. Gathers the courage to do it. Just do it, Elena. Just do it. But love isn’t easy, and there are far too many kinds. Who’s to say that the kind she feels now could ever suffice to save her? What will it mean if she tries? (I didn’t come here for Katherine, Elena. I’ve only come here for you.) (My sister says it’s polite.) (I’ll tell you when you’re older.)
“I want you to tell me,” She says, “Or I want you to make me forget.”
“Excuse me?” He asks her, “What do you mean, ‘make you forget’?”
“I mean,” Says Elena, “Compel me. Just like you do with the women. Make me forget that I ever knew someone named Katherine. Let me be happy, or let me know why I can’t be. That’s why you’ll hate me tomorrow.”
“You’re right,” Damon tells her, “I would hate you for that. What will you do if I don’t?”
“I don’t think that you want to know.”
Damon’s eyes flash like coins on a string in the sun.
“What the hell - “
“It means that you don’t want to know,” Says Elena, pushing herself from his hold. Her skin’s erupted in goosebumps. She can barely keep herself up. And Damon is Damon, so Damon. Why is he always so Damon? (Katherine turned me. How do you still not believe that?)
“I don’t think you want this,” He tells her.
“How would you know what I want?”
“I knew her,” He tells her, “Your sister, better than you ever did, and you have to trust me when I say you’re nothing like her. This - this is something that Katherine would want you to do. That’s how I know that you don’t.”
“Fuck you,” She tells him, “Fuck you, Damon, you have no clue what I want.”
She is backing away from him, feeling the floor shift for her. But then it pushes, and she falls her way onto it, trying and failing to catch herself. Katherine felt this, thinks Elena. She fell just like this when she died. But Damon was not there to stop it, the way that he has done for her. She is an inch from the floorboards or less. Close enough for their dust to tickle her nostrils and force her, almost, to sneeze. Damon is strong - as strong as Katherine was, but not in a way that will make her accept. There is no acceptance, she thinks.
And Damon Salvatore knows it.
“I’m older,” She tells him, “I’m older.”
“You’re grieving,” Says Damon, “You know I won’t do this to you.”
“Which one?” Asks Elena.
“Either,” He says.
And it comes to her, then, like his smell comes to her in her dreams; the press of him on her in ways that she knows she can’t want.
“Then Damon?” She tells him, “Do both.”
85
They go to bars in the summer. In every city there’s nothing to do but roll down the windows and feel the humid mid-morning. Elena isn’t a daylighter - she didn’t want that, she’d told Damon once, and he had agreed with her on it. She got in too much trouble anyways, Damon had told her, without making dares with the sun. So instead, Elena Pierce watches. The world moves too slowly, now that she knows how to run. (You’ve been running for 65 years, thinks Elena, What do you have to lose now?). She cannot tell him how close she has come to sticking her hand through and feeling the way that it chars. She is too ashamed to admit that she wishes that she could do something, anything, that Damon wouldn’t forgive her.
She thinks he forgives her too much. Remembers the way that he took her, pried her fangs out of the corpse. Remembers them digging together, the way that his muscles had worked, how good it had tasted, how much she had wanted to share.
(Don’t worry, he’d said, We have time.)
16
She is sixteen years old when Stefan first tries to kiss her. She doesn’t know what she should say. Any girl would be happy with Stefan - he is brooding, melancholic, colored of caramel and cream. But Elena wants thrill and a rush, not the way Stefan’s hands feel. She hadn’t been looking at him when he did it - she’d been bent to the stove, attending an omelette that, by now, will have burned.
“Careful,” He’d told her, “You’re getting too close to the burner.”
“I know,” She had told him. It was an effort to keep her voice neutral - Stefan has always unnerved her far more than Damon could do. He couldn’t control himself well. All the years that he’s spent avoiding make him too prone to violence. And he does not like to stay still. He’s restless, like Katherine is. He’s needy and clingy, impatient, and none of it is a show. He is, also, aggressive. It hides in him like a snake with leisurely canines, ready to strike at the first sign of wariness, doubt. Though how her cooking could ever be perceived as wariness, she cannot honestly say. Still, he backs her into the oven, and the lip of it digs into her skin to leave a red line. She can’t put her elbows down; the burner is still going hot.
“Elena,” He says, “I’m sorry for being this - thing. But I only have eyes for you.”
And he only has lips for her. He is going onto her neck, and she still hasn’t pushed him away. As if she could, thinks Elena. Stefan’s a vampire, just like her sister. Katherine showed her again yesterday what it means to be human and weak, and Stefan is showing her now. His hands are too cold - he doesnt’ like holding hot cups. He likes to pretend he can breathe.
“Elena,” He says, “Let me do this. No - open your eyes. Let me do this.”
“I don’t want it,” She says. Her eyes are too shut for compulsion, but she feels him prowling at her, trying to find his way in. His fingertips are on her eyelids, trying to push them apart. Elena was frozen, but now she is not. You can fight us the way we fight you, Katherine’d said, the only time that she’d asked. Elena remembers and bites. Stefan’s blood tastes too sour, like limeade that doesn’t have sugar. It’s hard for her to choke down. But she keeps her teeth locked in his arm and hears him yowl, just like an animal, wounded. Soon the pressure is gone. Elena tumbles, slides to the floor. Her shirt-sleeve is torn, and she sees the scars that Katherine’s left, peppering up her like freckles and star charts pulled taut. There is somebody hovering over her, and Elena sighs out in relief. It’s Damon, she thinks, It’s just Damon. Damon’t can’t hurt me, he wouldn’t.
But in the next moment, Elena regrets thinking that. He’s tilting her chin to him sharply, with more force than she had imagined. He doesn’t ask anything of her, but Elena can see what he’s careful with. Damon is furious. Angry like she hasn’t seen. It’s flowing off him in waves, perfuming the air with something she thinks might be need.
“It’s alright,” Says Elena, “You can let go of me now.”
Damon nods curtly at her.
“I’ll fix it,” He tells her, “I’ll deal with him, ‘Lena, okay?”
Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.
(Katherine calls her that.)
49
Elena still drinks human blood when she carves her name into the rail. It’s a handsome wood railing, and Elena’s fangs are too sharp. It’s a tradition, Katherine once told her, when she decided Elan should know, that you write your name down in wood on the stairs of the places you leave. The pain of the splinters piercing the essence of deadness is more benediction than gift. It’s thanking the houses for all of the suffering you’ve put them through - funny, she thinks, that it takes its’ shape in fierce maiming. Katherine had said it was hurt, and, for once, she’d been honest.
Elena feels like somebody’s stabbing her gums. Her mouth goes sandpaper dry, and her body convulses with the struggle of keeping her focus. She wishes that she could run. I’ll need them sharp, thinks Elena, I shouldn’t be doing this now. The railing still bears other names - though not, Elena knows, Katherine’s. She did not leave here by choice, and, again, wasn’t wrong.
Elena has seen names before, a long time before they came here. Isobel Saltzman, crudely done in in the North Stairs of Alaric’s complex. She must have been young, then, and not had control over it. That’s the only thing that explains how the letters had jumped like arirhmetic, twirling and twisting into what wasn’t quite English because of their irregularity. She wishes that she had a picture of it - more than this memory, fickle and coarse, of the mother that she should have known. Parents want better, Katherine’d once said, For their children. Elena can’t know if she has succeeded, but she can give this to Isobel:
She will carve her name here so that it can be read. So that every person who comes to this place will know that it once belonged to a girl named Elena, who used to write journals and think she’d be somebody else. Who was never allowed to be innocent, never allowed to be free. She will trap a part of her soul in this house; and, when in decades, it crumbles, she will come to the forest she knows will reclaim it and carve it again on a tree. So that her past, however it was, will never be left behind.
Her mother would have been proud of her, thinks Elena. But it isn’t what Katherine would do.
6
When Elena is six, she overhears Alaric talking to Katherine about her. It isn’t the first time that she’s heard the name, but it’s the first time she takes interest. She wants to cling onto Isobel like she’s Katherine. She remembers no one but Katherine and Alaric, the woman they stayed with in Phoenix who had a long cornflower mane. The first voice she knew was Katherine’s voice, and Katherine’s voice is a steel one. Full of conviction to be what she needs for Elena - or, she’ll think later, herself. Katherine is warm, like a blanket. Katherine is soft, like the snow. Katherine is where Elena belongs, but Isobel’s who she wants.
17
“Both,” Damon tells her. “You think that I should do both.”
“Yes,” Says Elena, “I think that you should do both.”
“I could kill you,” He tells her, “You do realize that, don’t you? I could snap your neck without blinking.”
“You could,” She says, “But you won’t.”
“Wouldn’t I?” Damon asks. “Don’t be so sure about that. Have you any idea how you look?”
“No,” Says Elena, “So tell me.”
“Elena,” He tells her, “Please. Don’t make me do this.”
“My sister is dead,” Says Elena, “Can’t you just do it for her?”
“For Katherine?” He tells her, “For Katherine? Why on Earth would I do it for Katherine? Katherine tortured me for a hundred and sixty-five years. I don’t owe Katherine anything.”
“Do it for me, then,” She tells him. “You know, since I’m on my own now.”
“Is that what you think?” Damon asks her. His voice has gone into a frequency she can’t decipher, brimming with hesitance, longing, and - yes, she catches it - sadness. Not for himself, but for her. Sadness that he cannot save her. But you can, thinks Elena, You can.
“I loved her,” He tells her.
“I know,” Says Elena.
“Does that bother you?” Damon asks.
Elena breathes in the boarding house. Feels the walls that have given her shelter telling her it’ll be fine. Thinks about how the floor became soft that one day she was sixteen, and every single day after. (Thinks about Damon’s hands on her body. His lips on her body. His lips on her lips. His tongue on her bruises. His deft fingers braiding her hair.)
“No,” Says Elena, standing up straight to look at him right where it hurts. “That doesn’t bother me, actually. Not if you don’t anymore.”
Damon kisses her, then.
Elena thinks that it’s lovely.
15
Elena is fifteen when Alaric moves into town. Katherine, as always, knows first. He’ll be teaching you history, Katherine had said. I don’t want to hear you went near him. I’m hardly you, Elena had thought. I don’t like to chase people down. But she knows that her sister is right. Her palm is clammy, knocking on his office door. She can’t tell what she’ll be more in trouble for: Skipping class, or visiting Alaric after.
(She hasn’t asked Damon about it. Can’t really tell why it matters. It doesn’t, she makes herself think. It is almost like self-compulsion.)
“Mr Saltzman?” She asks, through the door. It’s laced through with tonic, a mixture of vervain and garlic that nearly makes Elena laugh. “Would you mind it if I came in?”
“It’s fine,” Says Alaric. He is scrutinizing an essay when Elena tears on the doorknob - which, too, is redolent with vervain, heady and slick as black oil. “Katherine?” He says, seeing her.
“Elena, actually. The garlic’s a nice touch, I think.”
She hadn’t realized how nervous she was until now. To see him again, the man who had once been - not her father, exactly, but not really anything else. Alaric’s house was the longest, ’til now. She still doesn’t know what that means. They never talked much back then - Katherine kept them apart. But she’d always felt Alaric’s eyes on her, watching her like a father would watch his young girl. Like he thought that she’d be someone, someday, who wasn’t just walking dead. She never said thank you for that, and she knows that she shouldn’t start now. If Alaric loved her, he knows.
“You’ve grown up,” Alaric says. Time is going, again. It ticks by like buzzing mosquitos. “You look… more like your sister than I’d expected.”
“I get that a lot,” Says Elena, “People thinking I’m Katherine.”
“Really?” He asks her, “Like who?”
Elena looks back at the door.
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Of course,” Says Alaric, “I’m sorry. I just - I thought it was a coincidence.”
“Why?” Asks Elena, “If you - if you knew about us?”
“Because,” Says Alaric, “I’d hoped that you’d gotten away.”
Elena can’t fathom what that means.
“From what, Mr. Saltzman?”
“From Katherine,” He tells her, “Your sister.”
“Right,” Says Elena, “Right.” And then - though what possesses her now she can’t say - “I did. Katherine’s not with me right now. She doesn’t know that I’m here.”
“Oh?” Says Alaric, “Is that going to get me in trouble?”
“Not if I leave and go back.”
“That seems unfortunate,” Alaric says.
“That’s why I think… I think that I won’t,” Says Elena. “I have somewhere else I can go.”
Alaric raises an eyebrow.
“I have friends,” She says, “Friends who aren’t - like she is.”
“But you don’t want to go to them, do you?”
Alaric’s smiling just like a father would smile. Like Elena’s father had smiled, if he was a father at all. He wears the same ring as Damon. It doesn’t suit him as well.
“No,” Says Elena, “I don’t. Do you know the old Salvatore boarding house? That’s where I want to go.
(You remind me of her, says Alaric, letting her off at the curbside. Your mother. I’m sure that she’d love you, you know.)
21
This is the deal that they’ve made: Damon lets her ask what she wants to, and, in turn, she doesn’t ask him why she feels he had wanted her dead. No holds barred, he had told her, and Elena had found herself hating herself in that moment, hating her sick, pity body for daring to make Damon weak. I’d do anything for her, she’d heard him tell Alaric, when, to her best guess, she had barely just woken up. They’d been too far away, and that’s how she should have known. But all she had been was relieved.
They don’t talk about staying, or Stefan, or the myriad things that Elena knows they still need to. They do not talk about Caroline snarling, her pretty pale skin going veined. They do not talk about whatever it means to be sired, and she gets the sense that Damon would stake her if she even so much as asked.
(Katherine, she thinks, would have loved it.)
14
“I don’t even know what you want me to do,” Says Elena. It seems like what Katherine’d call prescient. Ergo, thinks Elena, a ruse. Work is always worse when Stefan’s home. He makes up meaningless tasks to keep Elena there later; it’s only when she insists that her sister is angry he finally allows her to go. She wishes that it was as easy to leave as it was to come in; that, by saying it, she could find herself outside his door, and safe from the leer that she sees on his face when he thinks that she isn’t looking. Damon had warned her about it, and she wonders, if she told him, what he would do. They’re brothers, Elena reminds herself, then, And Damon was right, you’re a child. I’m sure that it’s nothing. It must be. These are the lies that she tells herself, on the nights when she thinks she won’t sleep.
(They are always, always, always punctured by the sound of Katherine’s fangs.)
“Have you done the upstairs yet?” He asks her.
“Twice.”
“Third time’s the charm,” Stefan tells her. “I’m going out to get food. Do you want me to grab anything?”
“No,” Says Elena, “I have to be home by dinner.”
“I’ll call her,” He says, “You can stay.”
“I -”
“It’s fine,” Stefan tells her, “Honestly. I don’t want you to go yet. I’ll even pay you for it.”
He flashes a grin that she wishes he wouldn’t and darts out the door like - well, she supposes, just like a vampire would. She uses his leave of absence as an excuse to check the time. If the Salvatore’s weren’t as allergic to clocks as they seem to be to mirrors, it might even be easy for her. But the only clock Elena’s seen is inside Damon’s room, and something about it seems wrong to her, as if, by looking, Elena’d be breaking his trust. She wasn’t lying to Stefan, though - she does need to be home by dinner - and the windows are too high for Elena to look without grabbing a chair from the parlor. She doesn’t want to clean this floor again.
So, with a gulp of nerves, she pushes aside Damon’s door. She is seized by the urge to stand there and wait, like she does when she gets here for work, and discards it. This matters, she thinks. More than a vampire’s privacy. Never mind that he hasn’t yet let her clean it.
Damon’s room is impeccable. That’s what she latches onto. Everything has a place. It looks like he’s lived here for centuries, and he hasn’t even lived two. The bed is large enough for whoever he wants to be with him, and, for an instant, Elena envies him that. Though it’s been made as if he’d never used it, she knows that he’s shared it before. It’s just the way she thinks that Damon is. The clock, consequently, is carved out of fine bone or ivory, with swirling Roman numerals done up in some sort of faux-cursive. Elena has to squint to make out the numbers.
“It’s five thirty-six,” Says a simmering voice from behind her, “So much for polite then, Ms. Pierce.”
“I’m not Ms. Pierce,” Says Elena, “Katherine’s the one who’s a Pierce.”
“I thought you were sisters.” Says Damon.
“We are,” She tells him, “It’s just that I’m not a Pierce.”
“Mm. And - Why did I find you sneaking into my bedroom?”
“I needed to know what time it was,” Says Elena. “Why don’t you have other clocks?”
“I wasn’t aware that we needed them,” Damon says. “Why don’t you have a smartphone?”
“My sister’s insane,” She tells him. She can tell, then, that she’s caught him by surprise. He wasn’t expecting Elena to joke. He was expecting her, she realizes, to be scared. It makes her immeasurably happy that she isn’t.
“I live with her,” Elena reminds him, “You can’t intimidate me.”
“You’re fourteen,” He says, “I’m a hundred and seventy-nine. I can intimidate you plenty.”
(Not as much as I do, thinks Elena, Seeing as I look like Katherine.)
“What did you need the time for, anyways?” Damon asks her, “Weren’t you finished with cleaning an hour ago?”
“No,” She says. “Your brother told me to redo all of the rooms. His exact words were ‘Third time’s the charm.’”
“Oh,” He says. “Carry on.”
“Bastard.”
She says it under her breath, but not quite enough he can’t hear it. He’s staring at her incredulously, and Elena can feel herself blush.
“Elena,” He asks her, “Did you just call me a bastard?”
She’ll clean. The faster she cleans, the sooner she can get the hell out of this house.
“I didn’t know that you swore,” Damon tells her, “Does Katherine know about that?”
“Leave me alone,” Says Elena, “I have to be home by dinner.”
“You’re working,” Says Damon.
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
Elena sounds - frightened. She doesn’t know why. There’s nothing for her to be frighened of, not when she’s in Damon’s room, and he’s blocking the doorway just like it’s not even there. This is the life she was raised for, she thinks. This is why her sister wants her strong.
“Does Katherine -”
“No,” Says Elena, “She doesn’t. It’s not like I know when Stefan will keep me out late.”
Somehow, she thinks, it’s not what he’d wanted to ask her.
“I can give you a ride,” Damon says, “Or - I can call your sister and tell her that you’re staying here?”
“You would do that?” She asks him.
“No,” Damon tells her, “But Stefan would. They have history - didn’t you know?”
Elena laughs, and it feels, for once, like it should.
19
When Elena turns nineteen, she’s faced with a chilling dilemma. You can leave now, Alaric tells her. It seems like it’s worse than it was when all she had known was the year that she missed because Katherine messed up her schedule, the days that she used to spent wondering if it would be worth it to gather her home in a box and ride out into halcyon sunsets. But she was a child back then, and these days, she isn’t a child. These days, she’s not even a sister. She wonders how he doesn’t know that, when everyone else seems to know.
There is nobody left here for her. None of her people, anyways. Bonnie met someone in Salem and left to go practice her craft. Caroline will not be thought of. Vicki’s in rehab and Matt went away on a scholarship. Tyler is probably dead. Stefan, she thinks, ran away - though Damon could always be lying. It is only him and Alaric, and the phantoms that she could have had.
But Elena can’t make herself leave.
She got high for the first time here, with Matt Donovan at the very edge of the woods on a clear summer’s night when she should have been doing her homework. It was just after Katherine had died, and the first time that they ever fought - You have to be careful, he’d told her, Do you know what I’d do if I found out that you’d gotten hurt? The worst part was that she had known - he would have been disparate, inconsolable. He’d have turned his humanity off. And she’d kissed a boy here, the first time. Not Damon, but some boy who’d come in from Georgia on tour with his band. It was the ’30’s Decade Dance. She remembers the dress that she wore, but not the feel of his lips. (Because, she thinks, they weren’t Damon’s.)
She lost someone here for the first time. Felt her heart break here the first time. Wished she could die here the first time - and, soon after, the second. Learned what it meant to be scared here. Learned what it meant to be free. Taught herself how to mourn and to shatter. Tasted vervain and showed herself how to breathe.
And Elena knows, with a knowing that’s more than just knowing, that she cannot ever leave. Where else, she thinks, does the air smell like parchment and death?
16
The Gilbert’s are an old family, Caroline says. An old family new to town. There is loss in their family, Caroline says, and so she watches with interest. Grief drives a great many things. She meets Jeremy on a Sunday, when everyone might well be dead. Only the stoners come out on the holy day, and she thinks that it makes its’ own sense. Better drugs than a stake, thinks Elena, wondering if he’s met Katherine. She’ll be late for their day, but she couldn’t care less about that. Because the truth is, she’s seen him, and feels so glad that she thinks a human, for once, is pretty. Katherine would want her to do this. Their mother would want this for her. So Elena slows down on the sidewalk and lets him run into her.
“I’m sorry,” He says, “Do you - Do you want any pills or anything?”
“Forward of you,” She tells him. He does look sorry, though.
“Yeah, well, why not?” He says. “I don’t that I’ve met you yet.”
“Elena Pierce,” She tells Jeremy, watching the way his eyes move. They’re drinking her in like he tihnks that she’s pretty, too. Jeremy’s tall, for a boy, and his sweatshirt looks gray and soft. She wishes that she could feel it. Elena’s aware of the way she must look. Clean, put together, and hiding. Why else would someone be out? “I don’t do pills,” She tells him, “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Jeremy says. “What do you do, then, Elena?”
“I’ll tell you later,” She says.
(That evening, Damon gets mad.)
20
“I need to know who I am.”
“Before,” He asks her, “Or after?”
“Why would I want to know after?”
“The same reason, Elena, that you know I can’t tell you before.”
Because I won’t do it, he does and does not say. Because you won’t drink if I do.
(Is this what’s become of us, Damon? She thinks, Can I even trust you at all?)
“No,” Says Elena, “I’m sorry, but I need to know. Who is she, Damon? Who’s Isobel?”
“Didn’t you know? She’s your mother.”
15
Elena cannot change most things, but she can look forwards to some. History class with Alaric, she lets herself look forwards to. He doesn’t ask her hard questions, lets her reside in her hands, and, for that, she is grateful. With Alaric she doesn’t pretend that she hasn’t grown up with Katherine. He wouldn’t ask that of her, anyways. He tells her that it would be wrong, which Damon says is a pithy excuse for humanity. When she comes with the Teacher’s Aide form, Alaric hardly blinks.
“What is this for?” He asks her.
“What do you think it’s for, Alaric?”
He lets her do that - call him Alaric, and not Mr. Saltzman. I’m practically family, Elena, he’d told her. For God’s sake, just call me my name. She can’t understand why he doesn’t take God’s name seriously. Maybe he says it the same reason she says it for. Because they are human, and can. That’s what this is for, thinks Elena. The manner in which we’re alive. Needing to talk about that.
“I have a free slot,” She says, “And I’m tired of dipping with Bonnie.”
“The Bennett girl?” Alaric asks, “Are you close?”
“She’s a witch,” Says Elena. “Katherine wants me to know her.”
And wasn’t that unexpected - how Katherine had pulled her aside in the foyer to tell her that they should stick close. I may need her powers, she’d told her, You will not fail me on this.
No one can fail you, Elena’d thought fleetingly. No one would so much as dare. Bonnie once told her that they were best friends, and Elena had choked on her bile.
“Christ,” Says Alaric, shaking his head like he’s clearing a migraine away. “You do know what TA’ing entails?”
“How hard could it be?” Asks Elena.
“Well,” Says Alaric, “It depends on the level of favoritism.”
“So for me you’ll make it easy.”
“No,” Says Alaric, “For you, it’ll be what you need.”
“You don’t know what I need,” Says Elena. The words taste sour and foreign.
“Maybe I don’t,” Says Alaric, “But I guarantee you don’t know either. Just give it a try for me, will you?”
“Okay,” She tells him, “Okay.”
He signs his name in a bittersweet flourish. The paper’s more salmon than pink.
“You start on Monday,” Alaric says. “And Elena? Please don’t be late.”
57
She meets Isobel in a parking lot outside of Macy’s. Elena is older than her mother is, but she knows that she’d gotten turned younger, and she wonders if that makes her sad. Isobel looks like Elena had thought that she would. Stern. Apathetic. Indifferent. She can hear by the beat of her heart that she’d never wanted a daughter. Thank you, she thinks, to no one and nobody else, For making this easy on me.
“Isobel,” She says, “My name’s Elena. I’m sure you remember which one.”
“And for a minute I thought you were Katherine. My, how alike you two are.”
“Only in look,” Says Elena.
“And species,” Isobel says.
“Yes,” Says Elena, “And that.”
16
“How do you know you’re in love?”
“Where is this coming from, ‘Lena?”
“Don’t call me ‘Lena,” She tells him, “Can’t you just answer the question?”
“I don’t know. You know you’re in love when it feels like you’ve just gotten staked while you’re hyped up on out-of-date bourbon.”
“Doesn’t it only get better with age?”
“Yep,” He says, “That’s the whole point. Seriously, though? What’s going on in your head?”
“What’s going on,” Says Elena, “Is that I think you’re flirting with me.”
“I don’t mean anything by it.”
This much, she knows, is true. He doesn’t like her like that. And, if he does, then he keeps it quite well concealed. That is Damon’s prerogative. He has taken it upon himself to be lonely, at the expense of giving Elena as much as he thinks that he can. Afternoons talking like real people do, instead of those known to the damned.
“Doesn’t sound like it to me.”
“Cut the crap, Elena. Who have you fallen in love with? Do you need me to kill them for you?”
He is searching her face for a signal, a sigh, that she’s wandered into new danger. Damon scares her sometimes when he’s like this, looking at her like her life is just one more book to read. (Call of the Wild, Jack London. Let me guess, Wuthering Heights?)
“It’s nothing,” She tells him, “It was only a hypothetical. Only a theory,” She clarifies.
“You know,” Damon says, “Most things are theories, until they get proven as true. Hypothetically, who have you fallen in love with?”
“Yeah, like I’d ever tell you.”
“You’ll tell me,” He says, “Give it time.”
She opens and closes her mouth. Thinks about after-school ‘studying’ sessions, the way that the graves look in sunlight. (Gray and Miranda. My parents.) The feeling of hands on her own. Watching him draw in carefully thought-over lines, glancing up now and then with a wonderstruck grin on his face to make sure he was getting it right.
So I’m rewatching Death Note and goddamn it why do I really want to write a Dhawan!Master x Reader fic where the reader has a Death Note, the Master is her Shinigami, and 13 is the detective trying to shut down her murders???
I love your writing so much!!!(´▽`ʃ♡ƪ). Could you do something dhawan master x reader. They're cuddling and he's just shocked that she loves him. She knows that he's killed people, blown up planets, and how much he hates humans. But she still loves him and feels safe with him
The Cold Fears(And Desperate Hopes) - Dhawan!Master x Reader
Summary: The Master has insecurities. When they get the best of him, you help to put them to rest. Based on the above ask.
Pairing: Dhawan!Master x Reader
Warnings: A bit angsty, and potentially the slightest bit OOC.
Word Count: 1.4k
A/N: So I’ve never actually written something from the Master’s perspective before, and I apologize if this is OOC at all. That being said. This prompt. Yes. Hope that you all enjoy, and thanks again to the above anon for the ask!
You tell him, sometimes, that you love him; and the Master, he stops and he stares.
In his dreams, you are a hollow creature, stripped of your bright, gleaming humanity, an angular, sobbing wreck in the solar of the Panopticon, weeping tears of hot blood; in his nightmares, you dance in fields of red grass, long hair down to your waist, haloed in gold and in needing. Your dress is pale silk to your knees, and your body is soft in his arms, and your smiles are galaxies; your laugh a cool, rushing river, your warmth inescapable. He tells you to run and you kiss him. Your lips taste like green, growing things.
He runs them over like coin tricks long-practiced as he goes through the motions of piloting. He hears your feet in the hallway, and, for only a moment, he sees you just as you are -
A network of arteries, an amalgamation of bones, knit together with sinew and muscle. A clockwork heart wrapped in thin skin as paper and thrown down into a universe that you could not hope to understand. The sum of two decades, the woman he loves, all bright eyes and keen paradox. All formed of stardust, all frustrating compassion, fragile uncertainties covered in leggings and sleeves. He wants to shake you until you get it -
That he is a bad man, and loves it, despite the way you make him weak. That you should run from his sharp-toothed grins and be somewhere else, somewhere that does not make your kindness cruel, as he knows that it will, one day, be.
“Where are we going?” You ask, and he hears, in your voice, you are young. He sees a girl in a scarlet gown, and hears a dying child, drums. The sky is full of diamonds. The Doctor would think that, he’s sure. And he snarls, and hopes that you will be afraid, go back through the same door you came in. Back to your safe, human life, far from the grip of a madman.
“Master?” You ask him, and he knows he’s been silent too long. You tell him you love him, sometimes.
“Bed,” He says, without thinking. He goes to a room deep in the heart of the TARDIS. Because you are his, you follow, and your lovelorn grin makes him wish for the cymbals and snares that Rassilon put in his mind, for the anger and wanting to kill that wlil always be too familiar a comfort, no matter how much you beg him.
“Cuddling?” You ask, when you’re on the bed like he wants you, snug in his grasp, ensnared in him so that you can never leave. Never be somebody else’s. His precious girl, his undoing. The sharpened edge of a knife.
“I’ve burned planets,” He tells you, marveling at how easily the words come out. They will hurt you, he knows, and he likes it, the sweet, sharp rush of the swelling self-loathing, the aching desire to wound. “People - your people - I’ve turned them to dust.”
“And now you don’t,” You say, as if that’s all there is to it - Rassilon, you stupid girl - as if he is some, some - god, to you. He wishes it would matter if he told you that he shouldn’t be; he remembers a god, and in his head his skin crisps and blackens, just like the planet he made, and the lies that he passed off as truth. The Master’s fingers twitch on the bedspread, his fingernails sharp on your skin. He feels them scrape across the curve of your back, raising goosebumps over your skin like neon signs in the dark. His ship dims the lights, and he wonders if it, too, is a traitor, like everything else Gallifreyan. It will not listen to him. Neither will you, the Master realizes, as you snuggle into his arms, burying your nose in his jacket like some small, frightened thing.
He turns his head and sets his jaw. He cannot, will not, see you frightened.
“I went to the end of the world, love,” He says, when the silence becomes a bane, and the sound of the drums ghosts over him like a low ache. “To the very last people, on the very last dying world. And you know what? They were pathetic. Did I ever tell you that?”
You are quiet, but you pull back, and he growls as you slip from his hold. You should not be able to break it, he thinks. Not nearly that easily.
“Y/N,” He tells you -
“Shut up.”
There is no anger in it, and he cannot resist a sneer. You humans, he thinks, and the way that you try. If you wnat to hurt his feelings, to rage at him, then you could at least have the decency to do it right, instead of whatever this is. He remembers, then, being human. The cold fears, and desperate hopes, that kept him from sleeping at night. He wonders what any of yours are. Whether or not you would tell him, if he chose, one day, to ask. He knows that he wants you to, and he knows that it will destroy him, and he’s drawn from his thoughts by the feeling of you, all around him, the pads of your fingers drawing circles on him through his coat. He isn’t cold, anymore, and a shudder through him makes you smile, even though you can’t see him.
It feels like the sun on his face.
It feels like your blood on his hands.
It sounds like, he thinks, I forgive you, and he laughs, a huff of anger, at it. So what, he thinks, If you forgive me? That was never the point. He should have said it then, instead of thinking it now -
He should have said so many things.
Maybe he’s saying them now.
You are his Confession Dial, and he lets the words pour out; forces himself not to care if they drown you. It used to be simple, not caring. It used to be freeing, and good.
Now it is nothing at all.
“You don’t know who I am, love,” He tells you.
“Master,” You say, “I don’t care.”
You should, he thinks, and feels tears well up in his eyes. Love is a foreign emotion, a planet that he has not seen; he has a bad habit of killing those, of soaking their soil in vitriol, in laughing as it all ends, and yours will come sooner than most, delicate thing that you are. He is a black hole, and his ship is the event horizon. He looks at you, and you are already dead. Blinks, and you have been buried. Blinks, and you are kissing him.
You taste like sweet caring. Like joy and slow sadness, the one he did not leave behind. You feel like Arcadian summer.
“I love you,” You say, when it’s over, and it is over too soon.
“How?” He asks, but it does not seem right, and you’re shaking your head.
“Because,” You tell him, “I do.”
“Well,” He says - and it sounds so human on him - “So do I.”
He wants to take you to Gallifrey - the thought rises in him, unbidden, an urging so strong and so fierce that he lives in it, for a time.
A pity, he thinks, as he looks in your eyes, and knows what he’s willing to do, and revels in how you’ll change for him, and force him to change for you, and nips and hisses and bites his love onto you, and gets caught in it like seeing the Doctor again, and hating and loving and yearning for her in a way that he knows, now, was nothing -
Every Bright Shade of Crimson - Dhawan!Master x Reader
Summary: In the aftermath of killing someone, you ask the Master a question. Based on this ask by @supermegapauselouca: Could you write something with this prompt “How many more innocent people have to die?” “What would you do if I didn’t come back?”
Pairing: Dhawan!Master x Reader
Warnings: Again, a bit dark and angsty. Description of violence and discussions of self-guilt and self-hatred.
Word Count: 957
A/N: Thank you to @supermegapauselouca for the request! This fic is pretty short, and pretty angsty, but it turned out to be one of my favorite imagines to write? I really enjoy writing darker, angstier stuff, so it was nice to get a prompt that allowed me to jump in and explore that, and I hope that you all enjoy it!
“How many more innocent people have to die?”
You still remember asking him, how the salt wind had scoured your skin, and took your voice down with it into the desert, carrying it away to burn, like the slavers and the slaves, their blood as thick as honey where the sun baked it into your clothes. He had been there, but you had not been able to face him, only heard his long and low sigh behind you. He’d stood perfectly, horribly still.
“They weren’t,” He had finally said, as if that made it any better. Bile rose up in your throat. “Nobody is. Don’t you know that by now?”
Mutely, you’d shaken your head; fingers twitching, mind numb. He had kissed you on dying worlds, before, blood and death in the air, but it had never been on your hands, before, and you’d been unable to forget the look on the young boy’s face when the bullet hit home, twisted in fear, shock, and anguish. You hadn’t even known his name.
“How do you live with it, Master?” You’d asked him. Your voice had sounded far away, and you’d seen him approach you from somewhere outside of your body, his hand settling on your shoulder in a gesture that you’d barely felt.
“Everyone dies,” He had told you, “And everyone sins. That’s how I live with it, love.”
He had said it too harsh, and too final, but it had been soft, underneath. You’d wondered if that was for you, and had known that you didn’t deserve it.
“I can’t forgive myself,” You had said - to the desert, and its rolling red sandhills, painted in every bright shade of crimson, every black shade of worry and sad; to the suns and the sky and the woman you’d no longer been - to no one in particular. “Master, I -“
“Koschei,” He’d told you, snaking his free arm around you, pulling you close to his side. The warmth of him hadn’t reached you, then, but later, as he tucked you into bed and set a glass of water at the bedside table, casting concerned glances at you now and again as he walked to turn out the lights; later, you would remember how it had felt, as if nothing could hurt you, anymore. As if, from your thoughts and your fears and your agonies, the million things that could fell humans dead without mercy, you were safe, in his there-ness and needing.
“You did what you had to do, you know,” He had said, almost conversationally, as he’d led you back to the TARDIS. Your feet had gone anywhere, everywhere, that he wanted them to go, and you’d known that it would be like that forever, as long as you weren’t asleep. You’d have nightmares, you’d thought, distantly, and you had been right.
You wake up from them, still - images of the boy pleading, begging you through choked sobs to let him live, he hadn’t meant to hurt you, and his blood and your blood in a puddle on the floor of the alien bazaar, so that all his pains were yours, so that the hole in his chest was a hole in your chest, ripping you into pieces - but the Master is there, when you do, dark hair and purple coat rumpled from whatever it is that he does when you aren’t awake. Reading, you think. Making plans. And you hear your voice from far away again, as he takes you in and you take him in, and he lowers his lips to your own, tasting of smoke and of vitriol, of tea and old ink and betrayal; and the universe, for a glimmering time, the causal nexus to which you are doomed, is a beautiful plane, and whole. You feel the silk sheets. The rough of his coat and the scratch of his sideburns. The heat of his living skin. His fingertips spill over you, painting soft marks on your body. They take the place of the nameless boy as you adjust to him, there, in the shadows.
Your bedroom becomes a sacred place, and your heart and your soul become his.
“What does it mean?” You had asked him, that day, feeling the wind lashing at you, the salt pellets embedding deep in your skin, and the dull throb from where the young boy had cut you swelling through your red, raw nerves, mixing with the horror, and with the guilt. You had not known if you were asking about death, or living, or him. You had not been certain that there was any difference.
The Master had said,
“It’s my name.”
“What would you do if I didn’t come back?” You had asked - on a whim, on a pang, on an anger. Somehow, you had needed to know. He had gone rigid, for just a moment, and a torrent of rage had coursed through him, so strong and so sharp you had felt it. Everyone dies, you had thought to yourself. And everyone sins; even you.
“You won’t ever leave me,” He’d said. “So it doesn’t matter, love, does it?”
“If I did, though -“ You’d asked him, a frantic note rising, bursting out from your throat.
“You won’t, love,” He’d told you, so firm and indomitable that it had been easy for you to believe him, haloed in the TARDIS lights.
I love you, Koschei, you’d thought to yourself, covered in blood that was yours and was not yours, lost in his keeping of you. You had not known who you’d be tomorrow; had known, less, who you’d been today.
Everyone dies, You had thought to yourself. Everyone dies, but I love you.
With a snap of his fingers, the doors of the TARDIS had closed.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all my readers! I hope that despite how crazy everything has been, that the holidays have brought some light into your life!
As for me, I am currently working on getting two Dhawan!Master x Reader fics from my asks finished up, and editing a response to an Elejah ask. All three of those should be up for you guys sometime this weekend/next week!
He Takes You To Horrible Places - Dhawan!Master x Reader
Summary: You reflect on your relationship with the Master. Based on this ask by @supermegapauselouca: I could make a picture with the song “Sleeping at Last - Chasing cars with S/O fem x Dhawan!Master, where reader asks the master “If I lie down here, if I just lie down here, Would you lie with me, And forget the world?” this is one of the parts located in the music. thanks
Pairing: Dhawan!Master x Reader
Warnings: A bit dark, as that was what came across for me from the song, but nothing triggering.
Word Count: 1k
A/N: Thank you to @supermegapauselouca for the request! This turned out to be a bit more angsty than I originally thought it would be, but I had a really fun time writing it, and I hope that you enjoy it!
You are not quite yet used to it. It is barely enough for you - but you do not know how to say it, so you run through battlefields, instead.
He takes you to horrible places, and somehow, you do not mind. Violent insurrections and military coups. Tsunaims, volcanic eruptions. You still remember the first time you met him - he showed you the end of a planet that could have been yours, if things had gone differentlyl had grinned at you, manic and awed.
Isn’t it beautiful? He’d asked.
You had tried looking away, but the Master, he had not let you.
Look at it, he’d said, and you’d looked. Below you, a black hole had swallowed a million lives with indifference, shooting off tendrils of scarlet and gold as the atoms were scattered and gulped. You’d felt a shudder come over you, but deep down, you’d understood. The sky had been ablaze in every pretty color you’d dreamed about as a girl, and his voice penetrated you slowly as he reached down to take your hand, unresisting, in a gesture less kind than insistent.
Do you see it?, He’d asked you. That’s how you’re going to end, love. It will be. The best thing that you ever do. Unless, of course, you think you can do better.
His smirk had dared you, and you’d felt the deaths fill you up; felt them as keen as your own, whenever it might come to you.
Travel with me, He’d said, and you’d shaken your head at him, pulling away from his grasp. The Master had growled, briefly, running a hand through his dark hair.
You’re human, He’d said, You’re always looking for the answer.
The answer, You had repeated, and the Master had launched into it; a certifiable speech that left you quaking, and weak.
The answer. What it all means. The purpose of your measly lives. I’ll tell you something, Y/N. Human life? It means nothing. The only thing that it means is whatever arbitrary value you assign to it, and Rassilon knows that you’re absolutely horrid at that. You place your bets on happiness. Contentment. Safety. You tell yourself that other people define them, and then - Oh, and then - You let them! You can tell yourself that you’ve done something with your life all you want, but what good is it, if you live it for somebody else? Do you know how many years you live? In your time, sweetheart, you’re lucky if you get eighty. Why would you waste them like that?
He had been a whirlwind, talking, pacing a hole on the floor of the TARDIS grating.
Don’t call me sweetheart, You’d said. I’m not your -
No, He had told you, You’re nothing.
And with that, he had spun away, leaving you to your lonesome. It had been far too long since you thought about things that way. You’d known that you were not supposed to; it was wrong, you thought, to be so selfish. To live only for yourself. The weight of your years had howled at you out of the cold, empty vortex - the ones that were dead and buried, and the terrible, uncertain ones yet to come - but inside the Master’s ship, it had been warm, and the low snarl of the ship, a constant, unwavering threat, had seemed, to you, almost friendly.
You’d found him in the library later, drinking a cup of steaming, smoky tea. You had smelled it on his deep purple jacket. In the air, it had mixed with the fumes from old spines and yellowing parchment, suffusing you with loneliness.
You’re going to listen to me, He had said, not looking up from the novel that he’d been reading, cover embossed in swirling, grid-like gold circles that had been impossible to make out. If you want your life to have meaning, you should travel with me. See the things that nobody else gets to see. Be the person they can’t.
You’d opened your mouth to say something, and the Master had glared at you over the top of his book.
You don’t need them, He’d told you. You don’t need anyone.
You had not believed him, back then. These days, though, it is different. When you wake in the morning, he is there, writing or tinkering halfhazardly with something, scowling and cursing under his breath, looking away as if he hadn’t been watching you; as if the sturdy, firm pressure keeping your nightmares at bay had not been his unyielding touch at your side. When you move to kiss him, he halts you to start it himself, pulling you close to his body; you feel the double-beat of his heart, and underneath it all the maddening pulse of a drumbeat, spreading through your morning limbs. His fingers snake up to your temple, and you open yourself to him, showing him all your secrets; all the hateful thoughts you have of him, so fleeting of late that they were hardly even there at all. He soothes them with nipping, brusining bites at your bottom lip, down the smooth expanse of your neck. He paints the wilderness of your form with everything fierce and alive, and you know, as a soft mutter bades you Relax, love, that whether you have eight years or eighty, for all of them, you will be his.
“Forget about them”, He tells you, when you are coming down, panting, sweat sheening on your skin, the TARDIS lights dim and cool, his gleaming eyes bright-dark and daring, “We have each other now, hmm?”
If I lie down here with you, You wonder, If I just lie down here, would you lie with me?
The Master sits up, and you feel his absence, stabbing you like a knife.
I love you, you tell him sometimes, on the rare nights when he is asleep, and you wake from a keen, aching memory with the touch of him all around you, his warm breath up against your ear. In the empty room, it echoes, but his fingers tighten in your nightshirt when you say it, no matter how quietly you whisper.
I love you, you think, as he stands to ready the TARDIS, shooting one last grin at you.
If you get this, answer with 3 random facts about yourself and send it to the last 7 blogs in your notifications, anonymous or not! Let's get to know the person behind the blog!💕
I decided to post this as an answer on my general blog, for everyone to see, just because that seemed a bit easier and more accessible. That being said, here are three random facts about me!
1. Favorite Music: I listen to a lot of music - it’s something that helps me a lot with writing and also with managing depression, which is something that I’ve always struggled with, as my house isn’t usually the best environment - so I always jump at the chance to talk about what songs and artists I’m currently vibing with. My all-time favorite artist would have to be Hungarian folk band Muszikas, and my favorite song is ‘Leaving Darry Quay/Eleni’, off Marta Sebestyen’s 1996 album Kismet. Sebestyen is the lead singer of Muszikas, and I would highly recommend anything she’s done solo or with other musicians - she’s a really, really good artist.
2. Patronus: It’s been a long time since I was super into the Harry Potter universe, but there’s still enough of that person left that jumps at the chance to let everyone know that I’m Slytherin, and proud of it. My Patronus, conversely, is an albatross.
3. Origin: Something that a lot of people don’t know about me - even super close friends - is that I was born in Soldatna, Alaska. I moved when I was two down into the continental 48, so I don’t remember much about it, but my parents have a lot of crazy stories, and I hope to get back there someday, to see the place where I come from!
So now that I finally have time to write on a more consistent basis, I am going to start doing requests on this blog. I can’t promise that I’ll get all of them out the same day, but I will do my best to get out requests in a timely manner for the pairings I write for (i.e two to three days).
It’ll take that long because I try to spend a lot of time making sure that the characterization is as on-point as I can get it, which can sometimes be stressful.
That being said, I am currently taking requests for:
Dhawan!Master x Reader(Doctor Who)
Simm!Master x Reader(Doctor Who)
Elena Gilbert/Elijah Mikaelson(TVD)
Sansa Stark/Sansa Clegane(Game of Thrones)
Severus Snape/Lily Evans(Harry Potter)
As these are the pairings I have written before and feel comfortable writing in terms of characterization and quality. If anyone has requests for any of the pairings above, please send me an ask on this blog, and I will get it out for you as soon as I can!
