For my New Year’s resolution I’ve decided to stop writing on Tumblr! I tried it, and it was fun, but after a while all the environment did was stress me out, so I’ve decided to take care of myself and stop altogether. I’m leaving all my already finished works up, since it feels pointless to delete them. I’m continuing with new works on AO3, and would be honored if you kept up with them over there! You don’t need to have an account to read and give kudos :)
Thanks for everything, and farewell!
My AO3! | Death Note Masterlist | Obey Me! Masterlist | Miscellaneous Masterlist
words: 4.4k
warnings: 18+. MINORS DNI. pitfighter!abby, catalina island au, reader & abby broke up, vi cameo teehee, blood, violence, self-destructive behaviours, one mention of ow*n, probably out of character idk i'm rusty, typos i'm sleepy
She pretends not to feel it at first. Goes about her usual routine at the Catalina Island Firefly base. Doesn’t sleep, barely eats, but acknowledges neither the exhaustion nor the hunger. Focuses on training, patrols, resources. Looks away when your paths cross. Brushes Lev off when he asks what happened. It’s not a wall she’s built. More an iron cage without a door, nobody allowed in or out.
But the ache of missing you still seeps through the cracks.
Then she overhears rumblings of secret fights held in a warehouse just off base. She’s seen more bruises than usual recently, but chalked it up to training injuries until now. And when she asks about it, her fists ball like she’s already in the pit. Only recently has she gotten all of her old muscle back, and she likes the sound of living, breathing punching bags. It’s reckless, and she’ll have to be careful not to harm her opponents so much that the Firefly leaders begin to notice the injuries, but the idea of fighting, letting all of her anger out, sounds a hell of a lot better than staring at her ceiling, trying to forget the sound of your voice, all the while knowing your shirt is still under her bed because giving it back would mean it’s really over. She’s in purgatory. Shut down.
Maybe this will wake her up.
By the second week, she’s the reigning champion. She fights every night. Nobody beats her, but they do batter her. She likes it — the physical pain builds, builds, builds, until there’s no room left in her broken bones for missing you. Lev notices the bruises. She is a bad liar, but good at shutting down. She knows she’s cruel to make him worry, but he’s getting older now. She convinces herself he doesn’t need her the way he used to.
You notice, too. You have to bite your tongue to keep from asking what happened, knowing it’s not your place.
She fights again. Again. Again.
By week four, she’s accepting the drinks offered to her by those winning money in her favour. She goes to sleep and wakes up drunk, or at least foggy. It helps with the pain, so she doesn’t stop.
You can’t bear it. You barely recognise her. It’s Lev who convinces you to break the radio silence between you, eyes big and round and pleading. “I’m worried about her. Please. I can’t get through to her, but you can. I know you can.”
“If she wanted to talk to me, she would,” you insist.
His fingers curl around your forearm tight. “Please.” His chin wobbles. “She’s going to get hurt.”
Your chest lurches with the sincerity of it, and the fear.
More than that, the guilt, even though she’s the one who ended things. Maybe you should have fought harder, but you weren’t in the habit of chasing people when they cast you aside. You needed her to love you, let you love her, and she couldn’t. Always so stoic, always so focused on her duties. She could shut you out for weeks, and, fuck, it hurt. You wanted to be patient, but in the end, you found yourself begging for a speck of attention, a second of her time.
“Maybe this is as far as we go."
“What are you saying?”
Her expression had shuttered, features made of impenetrable steel. “I can’t give you what you need.”
A lump filled your throat. It took eons to clear it for long enough to choke out, “Then why take it this far? Why string me along this long?”
She had the good sense to dip her chin with guilt, turning away from you in increments: one foot twisting, then the other, until you’re staring at the slabs of muscle on her back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.”
You’d been falling in love with her. Her lack of care, of emotion, of anything, shattered you to a million pieces.
But like her, you’re a soldier, so you didn’t let it show, instead grabbing your belongings from her room as hastily as you can. Pants and shirts and gun all shoved into your backpack. “No. No, you shouldn't have.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, but her voice was flat. She’d checked out at the first opportunity, and you were a fool for not seeing it sooner. “It isn’t anything you did—”
You scoffed. “Spare the cliches, Abby. I don’t need to fucking hear them. You don’t want me, I’m gone. I’m just sorry we both wasted so much time.”
She hadn’t argued, hadn’t given you the reassurance you’d needed so badly to hear. She’d let you go, and you hadn’t spoken to her since.
“Do you know what, exactly, is going on with her?” you ask Lev.
He shakes his head. “Just that she’s gone every night, and she comes back a mess.”
It’s likely nothing to do with you at all. She's tormented by far worse things than you and your brief flame. Still, it’s Lev. It’s Abby. You nod and placate him: “I’ll try. No promises.”
His grateful "thank you" dislodges something inside you.
That evening, you catch her heading down the corridor where both of your rooms are stationed. Since she looks right through you, don’t beat it around the bush, grabbing her arm with rough abandon. Her eyes are glassy and glacial as they meets yours, but there are cracks. Under them, you see a question shimmer.
“Lev is worried about you. Whatever you’ve got going on, whatever hole you’re digging yourself into, stop it. Now.”
Her lip curls with something akin to a sneer, and as she yanks away, the stench of vodka wafts over you. She’s already drunk. Up close, you see purple smatterings over her jaw, her cheek. She rubs the place your hand had clamped over, revealing split knuckles. She’s been fighting. You’d bet anything that it’s connected to Simon’s two missing teeth, which you noticed the day before, and Leo’s broken arm the day before that.
“Did he ask you to say that?” she responds tersely.
“Yes,” you hiss. “For whatever reason, he thinks it might make a difference, and I wasn’t about to break his heart. Are you?”
Her lips purse as she looks you over like she would a stranger. The braid she usually keeps so neat is falling apart at the seams, just like the rest of her. “He doesn’t need to worry.”
“No?” You cock your head. “So the split knuckles and sour breath… All normal, right?”
“It’s none of your business,” she grinds out.
“This isn’t you,” you protest with an equal amount of vehemence. You hate that your emotions crack through, hate that you’re practically pleading, but the shadows in the hollows of her cheeks and under her eyes scare you. She’s never, not once, succumbed to her demons before. Never touched a drink, never been reckless, knowing that she has to be responsible for Lev if not herself. All of this is new. Was there something else, something you missed, when you were dating?
When she says nothing, you sigh and try another tactic, softening as you inch closer. Your fingers ghost over the raw skin on her hand. “Maybe it makes me an idiot, but I’m worried about you.”
The barrier seems to gain another layer of reinforced metal as she jolts away, all but glowering at you through hooded slits. “Don’t be.”
She walks away, leaving you alone and no closer to fixing this.
Only when her figure has retreated completely do you let a jagged breath gutter from you, stomach tying itself in knots.
You still love her, despite your better judgement, despite your pride, despite your heartbreak — and this is an abandonment far worse than the one previous, because it isn’t you she’s left behind. It’s herself.
The next night, you go to a fight. You hadn’t believed the rumours to be true, believing that surely your peers had better survival instincts than to bet on each other’s aggression for sport. But depravity rears its ugly head in every community you’ve ever been a part of, so of course the opportunity was taken.
You just never thought Abby would be the first to raise her fists.
The warehouse is dank, the pit a square in the middle of the rotting third floor marked out by masking tape and lit by floodlights powered by a generator. Rations are traded for beer and moonshine, bets are placed in the currency of rota duties and rare supplies. You’re surprised at just how many of your own friends come down to watch the bloodshed. If they kept it a secret, it was likely because they knew their star fighter was a sore subject for you.
It makes you angry to think of them all drunkenly cheering her on every night, enabling this.
You worm your way to the front of the crowd, Simon muttering an, “Oh, shit,” beside you.
“What?” You raise a brow. “Surprised I didn’t want to miss out on the fun?”
“Don’t even think of reporting this,” he warns. “It’s the only fucking excitement we get.”
You mock zipping up your lips, turning your attention back to the ring with folded arms. A patroller named Vince quietens the roaring audience to announce the first fighter: Violet, a tattooed fisherwoman you know only because she brings home enough salmon and cod to feed the entire base. She’s lean, tall, almost as strong as Abby, and twice as fierce as she warms up with swift jabs into the air. The cheers make it known that she has people rooting for her.
And then the reigning champion is introduced. Abby Anderson. She enters the pit with far less flamboyance, that same steely gaze you bore the brunt of yesterday dragging over the crowd as she secures the blood-stained wraps around her knuckles. Acid builds in your throat. Why is she doing this?
And why is she swaying like she doesn’t even care about winning enough to stay sober?
It only hits you then how bad this is. Lev had every reason to be terrified for the woman who has dragged him through hell. With hunched shoulders, she already looks defeated, and you find it hard to believe that her raw strength was enough to get her here. There is no will there, no determination. Just a withering shell letting her body speak for her, and even that might not be enough. She’s lost muscle recently.
You can’t let her do this — but by the time you step into the pit to go to her in the opposite corner, a countdown has begun and Simon is dragging you back. “She’s fine. She's never lost a fight.”
You rear back. “She’s drunk.”
“Never stopped her before.”
Suddenly, you hate everyone in this room, her included. After everything these people have survived – everything she has survived – they’re willing to ruin their bodies over a sadistic little sport?
The fight begins before you have time to process it, blows thrown on both sides. You wince when Violet’s fists collide with Abby’s jaw in an audible thump, leaving blood to trickle down the corner of her mouth. Abby snarls as she wipes it away, a new scorn rising in her all at once. She hits back twice: once to Violet’s cheek, the other to her chin. When Violet stumbles back, nose already busted, Abby drives a boot into her toned stomach.
You’re relieved: it’ll be over quickly. Except Violet snaps to attention, throwing daggers as she rights herself. The women are all primal fury as they hit and parry. After moments of catching their breaths with light jabs, Violet swings, sending Abby tumbling across the pit, towards you. She spits blood, unaware it’s your shoes it lands right next to. Her freckles are crimson now, too.
You can’t do this. You can’t watch this. She’s destroying herself. The worst part is the slimy grin she gives whenever she’s hit, like she enjoys the pain.
Soon, blood is staining her teeth. Violet is in worse shape, but it doesn’t make you feel better. Part of you wants to leave, find a way to claw the love you have for her out of your chest so you never have to feel this nauseating devastation again.
Another part of you — the strongest part — wants to stop this. Now.
That part of you wins out.
You elbow Simon in the gut as he tries to stop you, marching into the pit and just barely missing Violet’s swings. You ignore her, wedging yourself between the fighters and catching Abby’s wrist before she pummels into you instead of her opponent.
“Stop it. Now. Please,” you beg.
At first, her expression is blank, like she doesn’t recognise you at all.
“Get out of the fucking ring!” Violet orders from behind, shoving you towards the edge. The referee joins, all of them grappling to usher you away, but you latch onto Abby, cupping her jaw.
“You’re going to get yourself hurt. I need you to stop. I’m begging you, Abby.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” she whispers, breath all heady whisky and sourness.
“Get the fuck out of my way!” Violet is screaming, and then you’re thrust aside like you’re nothing more than a featherlight obstacle. The crowd catches you as you stagger into them, and you whip to wreak vengeance —
But Abby gets there first, knocking Violet to the ground with more carnal fury than you’ve ever seen in her before.
There are cheers and boos, complaints it wasn’t a fair fight, but your ears ring loudly enough to drown them all out, because you don’t know who this woman is. Her chest heaves ferociously, fists balled tight as knots, teeth bared like a wild animal.
She looks at you, and it wavers. All of her wavers, right down to her powerful stance.
Without waiting for the ref’s verdict, she storms away, disappearing behind a smog of angered onlookers.
There is nothing you can do but follow.
Abby marches out of the warehouse still brimming with rage, your crumbling expression imprinted on the back of her eyelids. As soon as she hits the weed-infested concrete, she doubles over, vomiting bile mixed with the blood she can still taste. She likes it, that metallic tang that drives thoughts of you away — but not tonight. Tonight, she can’t escape you.
Why are you here?
“Abby—”
She flinches from your touch like she would barbed wire, thrusting you back, though she just knocked a woman unconscious for doing the same. She had no idea that sort of strength lived in her. She’d hurt people before, but she’d never wanted to rip them apart, not until she saw the other fighter lay their hands on you.
Your eyes are shimmering, the same way they did when she sent you away. It winds her more than the strongest of fists, causing her to bend over and cough up another splattering of foul acid. Her stomach hurts, and she doesn’t know if it’s from the retching or the punches she was dealt.
Or from you, for being here, seeing her like this. She isn’t proud of who she’s become in your absence. She just didn’t know where else to put all of the feelings she didn’t want to feel. The grief that came with knowing she’d never be able to open up and give you the love you deserve. She is not whole, and you were supposed to realise that and walk away before she had to make it known.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she demands.
“I’m trying to stop you from destroying yourself!” you scream back. Never, not once, have you raised your voice before: not at her, not at anyone else. It pierces through her with a razor-sharp edge, and she knows this is the fight she won’t survive.
“It’s none of your fucking business what I do—”
“Fuck you, Abby!” You shake your head, tears rolling down your cheeks. “You don’t get to do this! You have no idea how lucky you are to have people who love you, people who want to keep you here! Why are you trying to ruin it?” And then, in nothing more than a fragile rasp: “Why do you push us away?”
She bites down on her swollen lip, turning to unravel the wrap around her knuckles before the blood soaks all the way though. She barely feels the sting, adrenaline and liquor still pumping through her and casting her beneath an overwhelming, contradictory veil of confusion and clarity.
“I’m not doing this with you,” she spits out, because she can’t, and why can’t you just see that? Why don’t you understand that she can’t give you the power to ruin her?
“No. No, I’m not letting you pull this shit anymore. Whatever’s wrong, whatever has you acting like this, you tell me. Or you tell Lev. You tell someone and you figure out a way to live with it without burying yourself in the process.”
It amazes her that you can still care about her after the way she treated you. Her braid slips into disarray as she scrapes back her hair, spending extra time digging her palm into her forehead, where a steady pulse has been roaring for weeks.
There is nothing that she wants to tell you, or anyone else, so she throws down the bloodied bandages and begins to walk away.
You don’t let her, pushing her back into the wall and pinning her there. “You aren’t like this,” you say, voice hoarse and desperate. “You don’t hurt people for fun. You don’t fall apart.”
“I’m not falling apart—” Her spine cracks against the wall as you prevent her from leaving again, forcing a thick gulp from her.
“Bullshit.”
“I’m warning you,” she says lowly. “Get your hands off me. Now.”
“Or what? You want to punch me instead? Will that make you feel better?”
Just the thought causes disgust to contort her features. She looks away to avoid your gaze, but she can’t pretend the warmth of your digging palms isn’t burning into her like the first shred of hope she’s had in a lifetime. They also maim, their razor edge reminding her of how little she deserves you. How terrible she is for putting you through this, all because she can’t bear to let someone in after all the loss and tragedy and trauma she’s faced.
“Go ahead,” you’re saying. “Do it. You wanna destroy something, destroy me.”
“Stop it,” she hisses.
“No, Abby. I promised Lev I would get you back, and I’m not going back on it.”
The muscle in her jaw feathers as regret, guilt, self-loathing all surface. She remembers why she fell for you. You’re stubborn as fuck, more of a fighter than she’ll ever be. A force of nature, but with a heart so golden it almost blinded her.
“What do I have to do,” she utters cruelly, “to get you away from me for good?”
The blow lands the way she hoped, your strength wavering for just long enough for her to free herself.
“What is wrong with you?” you whisper. “What happened to you?”
She doesn’t have an answer. Not really. She realised she was falling for you one minute, and images of Owen lying in a pool of his own blood flickered through her mind the next. She caused that. She was the reason her friends died, the reason Lev lost his sister, the reason they were imprisoned in Santa Barbara for three months, surviving things that neither of them could put words to even now.
All of it came down on her at once, bricks of exhaustion and terror and self-hatred erecting a wall between you. If she let you love her, she would disappoint you. And you? You walked away so easily.
She wished that were still true, because this was harder. This was torture.
Your tears gleam in the moonlight, every emotion on full display now.
“You broke my heart,” you say. “You’re breaking Lev’s heart. I understand that I don’t matter to you, but doesn’t he?”
Abby’s long upheld resolve is almost in ribbons. She’s so close to buckling. “I’m just blowing off steam—”
“You’re killing yourself,” you say. “And you’re killing me. And the worst part is, you don’t seem to care. About anything. Was all of it a lie before? Were you just pretending? Because I don’t recognise you. I don't know who this is.”
When she says nothing, you thump your fists against her puffed out chest again. “Fucking say something, Abby! Did you ever care about me? About anything?”
Her fingers shackle your wrists as she sways under your heavy fury. You deserve to feel every bit of it.
“I hate you,” you mutter. “I hate you for doing this to us. I hate you for doing this to yourself.”
She closes her eyes, but the tears still come. She’s powerless in the face of them — the face of you.
You yield immediately, arms going slack in her grip.
“Abby,” you breathe. She knows it’s her last chance to keep you, and fuck if she wants to. She can’t quite remember why she was ever stupid enough to let you go.
Her tears are wiped from her eyes, only for more to take their place.
You edge closer, stomachs pressing together: yours soft, hers hard. You cup her jaw like before, only this time, she lets you, trembling and broken as she is. Because of you. Because it was only ever a matter of time before you ruined her with that big bleeding heart. She knows how lucky she is that she gets to see it. Most people don’t.
You let her in, and she couldn’t return the courtesy, but now, you’re tearing through the bars and she thinks maybe it’s inevitable that you climb into this cage and rearrange the furniture.
“I know this isn’t how you want things to be,” you’re saying gently. “I know. So stop. Look at me. Talk to me. Don’t keep making me beg. Don’t keep pretending you’re someone else.”
“You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t want to fix something that I broke.”
“I’m not going to sit here and watch you suffer. I love you, Abby. I don’t want to, but I do.”
Resigned, she presses her forehead against yours. “I don’t want you to, either.”
“Tough shit.”
“I… I don’t think I can love another person.”
“I’m not asking you to. This isn't about me anymore. I’m just asking you to go home to the boy who needs you.”
“I mean…” She’s stammering, tongue heavy, mouth cotton. “I mean… I lost so much.” Her voice cracks. “And it was my fault. And so is this. This is my fault.”
“So make it right.”
Her hands knot into your hair, drawing a gasp of surprise from you. “I thought letting you go was the right thing. You made me weak and I can’t be weak. Not ever again.”
“Abby, you’re not making sense. Please, just let me take you home.”
“I lied,” she blurts. “I lied to you. I pushed you away. I’m a mess. And I’m angry. I’m so, so angry. About what happened to me, to Lev, to my friends, my dad. I didn’t want you to see that side of me. I wasn’t ready.”
Only then does she see your mouth part with understanding. She is telling you that she loves you, in her own fucked up way.
You are listening, despite the fact she deserves nothing but hatred from you.
“You walked away so easily,” she continues. “I didn’t think you cared.”
“I needed to protect myself,” you admit. “You hurt me.”
“I’m sorry.” Her gaze bores into you all at once. “There are things I couldn’t tell you. I wanted to run from them.” Her fingers knot tighter in your hair. “I’m so angry.”
“Abby,” you say. “Let me take you home.”
She nods slowly. Mutters, “I’m sorry,” one last time.
This time, you say, “I know,” snaking your arm behind her back to keep her upright as you trudge back towards base.
When you get into her room, you force her to sit, quick to grab a damp cloth from the bathroom to clean her up. She’s a mess. Worse under the dim, bare lightbulb. She’s shuddering, too. You think maybe you’d rather her be a cold-hearted fighter again than whatever this is.
You promise yourself this is all it will be. You’ll clean her up and go, and tomorrow, she’ll fix things with Lev and all will go back to the way it was — before you fell in love with her, that is.
Only it doesn’t go quite like that. Her hand curls around yours midway through dabbing at the congealed blood under her nostrils, stopping you from continuing. “Stay tonight.”
You almost snort. Like hell will you put yourself in the position to be crushed by her again. She’s drunk and beaten, likely won’t remember or care about this in the morning.
“No.”
“Please. I know I have no right to ask, but I want you to stay.”
“I can’t.” You work to keep your expression aloof with the same ice she’s shown you over the past few weeks. “I’ll clean you up and I’ll get you back on your feet, but I’m not going to put myself in this position again.”
You want to believe that what she said before is true: that she’s sorry, that she pushed you away to avoid letting you in, that none of her behaviour was about her feelings for you, but you can’t stop waiting for her to harden again.
You move to her knuckles, tutting at the ruined skin there. “Pitfighting. Jesus, Abby. What were you thinking?”
“That I deserved to hurt,” she confesses quietly.
You hum, brushing the stray strands of hair from her face. “Go to sleep.”
She leans back, head hitting her pillow, but her fingers still lace through yours. You can’t summon the strength to pull away, not when her touch is as gentle as it used to be. There she is. Your Abby, not this new monster you met.
For her, you go back on your word. You stay. Not in her bed, not even close to her, but she’s long asleep before your hands untangle. The last words she utters as her lids close, a patchwork of yellows and blues and purples on her face, are, “‘M sorry.”
“I know,” you say in reply, pressing your lips to her torn skin. Maybe there’s no way to fix what she broke, but you’re willing to try if you can just keep her here with you — because you still love her. You would even if she continued to fight you for days, weeks, months.
the thing that I can't stop noticing about commercials for chatgpt and other ai shit is that they can't even seem to come up with creative or interesting shit to do with it. like everything that they show people using it for is stuff that you could already do if you had, like, any friends or the ability to use any search engine
i want to remind our fellow femmes that our femininity is not defined by how straight people (especially men) define femininity.
you don't have to be skinny, or white, or clean shaven, or cis, or covered in frilly clothing from head to toe to be femme. you could go out in sweatpants and an oversized shirt 90% of the time with no makeup and still be the prettiest femme on the block.
i hope my femme queens, princesses, knights, and little creatures stop limiting themselves in their femmeness. you are GORGEOUS and POWERFUL so keep being a fucking DYKE that REJECTS GENDER ESSENTIALISM!!!!!!!!
is it just me who thinks that Hiccup is great disability representation especially for when the first movie came out? I mean they don’t make his prosthetic his entire identity or make it seem pitiable. They also don’t make it forced and it fits in with the story and with his dynamic with toothless. As a person with a disability I just think it’s pretty cool
