Synopsis: You’re the complete opposite of Stillwell, and Homelander despises you for it. It’s only when an incident occurs that leaves cracks in your icy professionalism that the hatred begins to twist into something far more dangerous.
WC: 6068
Category: Slow Burn (kinda), Power Struggle, Canon Divergence, Stoic!Reader, Emotional Manipulation, Reader is Stillwell’s Replacement {TW: Choking, Mentions of Death, Obsession, Blood, Homelander}.
I finally was able to watch the finale. An end of an era. So, in celebration (as if it’s a farewell to his character), I decided to pull an all-nighter and take hours to write up this super long fic LMAO.
And I did actually check the grammar this time. Be proud of me 😎😎
『••✎••』
The sterile glow of the Vought Tower fluorescents always felt a little colder in the executive suite now. You sat behind the broad mahogany desk that had once belonged to Madelyn Stillwell, your posture straight, hands folded neatly over the latest quarterly projections. Where Stillwell had filled the room with perfume, practiced warmth, and the low purr of calculated flirtation, you brought silence and structure. No lingering eye contact. No honeyed reassurances. Just data, timelines, and an unyielding professionalism that bordered on detachment.
The other members noticed immediately.
A-Train still showed up late to briefings, but now he found a meticulously itemized schedule of his mandatory appearances on his chair, complete with suggested talking points. He'd huff, mutter something about "that new Stillwell," but he'd be there.
Queen Maeve had tested you once, in that brittle way of hers, pushing back on a disastrous PR initiative. Stillwell might have soothed or bullied. You simply tilted your head, your expression unchanging, and laid out the social media sentiment analysis, the projected stock dip, and the contingency plan you'd already drafted for its cancellation. Maeve had blinked, then nodded, a flicker of something like grudging respect in her tired eyes. She hadn't tested you since.
The Deep... well, The Deep was The Deep. You treated him with the same distant courtesy you afforded everyone else, which was, in its own way, a form of disregard he was unused to. You neither mocked him nor coddled him. You simply assigned him oceanic conservation outreach events and moved on.
But then there was Homelander.
As you figured, he resented you on a fundamental level.
"You're not her," he'd said in your very first one-on-one. He hadn't used Stillwell's name. He hadn't needed to. He stood before your desk, the perfect picture of American masculinity, yet there was a petulant set to his jaw. The patriotic cape was a slash of violent color against the muted tones of your office.
"I am aware," you'd replied, your tone as even as the hum of the server room. "My name is—"
"I don't care what your name is," he cut in, that blindingly white smile not reaching his eyes. It was a mask, and you could see the screws holding it in place. "Stillwell knew what I needed. She understood the team. She understood me."
He leaned forward, the air thickening with the pressure of him, a subtle thrum of contained power. The lights in your office flickered, a barely perceptible stutter. "You're just a placeholder. A suit filling a chair. Don't get comfortable."
It wasn't a threat. It was a diagnosis. He wanted a reaction. Fear, deference, a crack in the composure. He wanted to see Madelyn Stillwell's ghost flinch in your eyes.
You simply met his gaze, your own unflinching. "I’m quite comfortable, thank you. Your itinerary for the next two weeks is finalized on your tablet. The press conference for the youth center initiative is scheduled for Thursday at noon. I expect you to be familiar with the talking points." You gestured vaguely toward the device resting on the corner of your desk. "If that's all, I have a budget meeting with Ashley."
The dismissal hung in the air, cold and sharp. The twitch in Homelander's jaw was the only outward sign of the tempest you sensed brewing behind those placid blue eyes. He stared at you for another long moment, a predator assessing an unnatural prey, before straightening up. The smile returned, wider and more vacant than before.
"Sure thing," he chirped, all false brightness. "Don't work too hard."
And that became the rhythm of your days: a slow, deliberate game of chess played on a board of corporate strategy and volatile superhuman egos. Homelander would arrive, seeking a crack in your professional armor, and you would respond with schedules, projections, and an unassailable calm. You learned his tells. The slight tightening of his fists when he was forced into a charity event he deemed beneath him. The way the temperature in the room would plummet a few degrees when you used the word "no," however professionally couched.
He despised you for it. Not with the hot-headed anger of a teenager thwarted, but with a deeper, more resentful venom. You were the antithesis of everything Madelyn Stillwell had been. Madelyn had understood the power of the soft touch, of whispered validation. She'd created a co-dependent ecosystem where he was the sun, and she was the most skilled reflector, bouncing back the light he needed to see. She gave him control by making him believe he was in charge of her.
You gave him nothing. No ego-stroking, no covert glances of admiration, no gentle hand on his bicep to soften a directive. He was a line item. The most valuable, most dangerous asset, but an asset nonetheless. In your world, assets were managed, not mothered.
You'd poured over the files Stillwell left behind—meticulously organized, of course—and then gone deeper, accessing archives restricted even to the previous management. You read every psych evaluation from Dr. Park, every interview transcript from his childhood at Vought, every redacted report from mission debriefings. You knew about the lab, the name he'd been given before the cape and the flag had been stapled on, the loneliness that sat at the core of him like a black hole.
You knew it all because your job was risk management, and John was the single greatest risk Vought Tower had ever faced.
This knowledge became your shield. It allowed you to view him not as the god he projected, but as the damaged man he was. It didn't make you fear him less; if anything, the clinical understanding of his volatility made you more cautious. But it sterilized your interactions, stripping them of the personal, of anything he could latch onto and twist. You didn't call him "sir" or "hero." You called him "Homelander," the brand name. You treated the brand with cool respect, and the man with clinical distance.
Until today.
The day had started with the familiar thrum of executive-level anxiety. You'd finalized the "God-U" rollout, a line of overpriced, branded merchandise that would net Vought millions but required a full afternoon of Homelander's time for a photoshoot. You had the memo on your desk, ready to be sent, when the knock came. Not Homelander's sharp, expectant rap, but a hesitant, polite tap.
"Come in," you called out, your attention still on the screen. You didn’t realize how much you’d regret those two simple words.
The door clicked open, and a young man, probably no older than twenty-one, stepped inside. He wasn't a supe. He was an intern; you recognized him vaguely from the accounting department on thirty-two. He wore a Vought lanyard around his neck and carried a cardboard tray with two coffee cups. One of them, the one with "DANIEL" scrawled on the side in black Sharpie, was sloshing over the rim.
"Just... uh... leaving the reports from the last quarter, ma'am," he stammered, placing a stack of binders on the corner of your desk. He seemed too nervous to make eye contact, his gaze fixed on the floor. "Ashley said you needed them."
"Thank you, Daniel. Just leave them there," you said, your attention divided. You were typing a last-minute addendum to the God-U memo, a subtle adjustment to the licensing fees that would make legal happier.
He lingered. The silence stretched, broken only by the click-clack of your keyboard. You glanced up, ready to prompt him, and that's when you saw it in his eyes. A desperate, hungry kind of light. He wasn't looking at you. He was looking past you, at the life-sized portrait of Homelander that hung on the wall behind your desk—the one Stillwell had commissioned. The hero's gaze was directed forward, as if looking over the shoulder of whoever sat in the chair, a constant, silent overseer.
"He's... he's amazing, isn't he?" Daniel whispered, his voice cracking. The words were soaked in a dangerous sort of reverence. "I saw him stop a runaway train last week. The news didn't even cover the whole thing. He saved everyone. He's... perfect."
You saved the document with a decisive tap. Your fingers stilled over the keyboard. The temperature in the room seemed to drop, not from an external force, but from the sudden, cold knot of dread tightening in your stomach. You had seen this look before in the files, in the clinical notes on fringe supporters, the ones that ended up in "risk management."
"Daniel, you can go now," you said, your voice losing its corporate neutrality and taking on a flatter, more authoritative tone.
But he didn't. He took a step closer, the forgotten coffee trembling in its paper cup. "I just want to understand him. To be close. I read everything. I know he likes vanilla frosting, not chocolate. I know he listens to 'Old Time Rock and Roll' before missions. I want to help."
"Put the coffee down and leave, Daniel. This is your final warning." You were rising from your chair, the slow, deliberate motion a product of training and instinct, not panic. You reached for the silent alarm button under your desk—a direct line to Tower Security—but your fingers stopped.
His face was crumbling. The reverence curdled into something frantic, unhinged. "No! You don't get it! You're like her! You just use him! You don't see him!" he shrieked, pointing a shaking finger at the portrait. "You sit here in her chair, in her perfect office, and you look at him like he's a product! He's not a product! He's a god!"
He lunged.
He was clumsy, fueled by fanaticism rather than skill. He shoved your keyboard aside, the clatter a violent, alien sound in the sterile room. His coffee cup crashed to the floor, spilling lukewarm liquid across the polished wood. His hands grabbed for the lapels of your jacket, fingers digging in, pulling you forward. You were faster, more trained. You twisted, driving the heel of your palm hard under his chin. He grunted, stumbling back, but his grip didn't break. He was stronger than he looked, almost as if he were possessed by a manic energy.
The fight was a short. You drove an elbow into his ribs. He yelped and shoved you back against the desk—the sharp edge of the mahogany bit into your lower back, a white-hot jolt of pain. For a terrifying second, he had you pinned, his face inches from yours, the coffee stain on his shirt smelling of burnt beans and desperation. You could see the flecks of spit in the corners of his mouth, the wild, fanatical blaze in his eyes. He was going to hurt you. He was going to mark the place that wasn't yours.
Then, your training kicked in, cold and pure. You stopped fighting his push and used it. You dropped your weight, yanking him off-balance, and slammed his head against the heavy wooden corner of the desk. It wasn’t enough to kill him, or even knock him out, but it was enough.
The sound was sickeningly wet, a dull thud of bone hitting solid oak. He cried out, a choked, gurgling noise, and his hands flew to the back of his head. Blood, shockingly red against the wood, immediately began to seep into the grain. He slid to the floor, dazed and whimpering, the fight gone out of him.
You stumbled back, your breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. A button was torn from your jacket, and your wrist throbbed where he'd grabbed it. The room was a mess. Your keyboard was skewed, coffee was spreading into a dark, sticky puddle on the floor, and a young man was bleeding on your imported rug. Your heart hammered against your ribs like a trapped bird, a frantic, chaotic rhythm that felt utterly alien in your carefully controlled world.
You had Daniel escorted out within three minutes. Tower Security arrived, took one look at the scene—the blood, your torn clothing, the wild-eyed, muttering intern—and understood their orders with quiet efficiency. Of course, you would have to file an incident report, more paperwork, more containment… But for now, the immediate threat was gone and you were alone again in the wreckage of your office.
For twenty seven-minutes.
In those twenty-seven minutes, you did nothing but try to breathe. You couldn't call maintenance yet. You couldn't type on the keyboard. You simply stood there, trying to force your heart rate down, to re-impose the order that had been so violently shattered. The adrenaline was a sour taste in your mouth, the pain in your back a dull, pulsing reminder of your own vulnerability. What were the chances you’d find yourself caught in a confrontation like this? You had prepared for many possibilities: corporate sabotage, blackmail, media leaks. You had not prepared for a deranged fanboy.
And, so, you were just straightening your jacket, fingers brushing the dangling thread where the button used to be, when the door to your office didn't just open, it was propelled inward with enough force to slam against the stopper with a resounding BANG.
You knew immediately who it was before you even looked up.
Homelander.
The golden boy of Vought, framed in the doorway like a vengeful god descending from Olympus. He held a tablet in one hand, and the rage rolling off him was palpable, a shimmering heatwave that made the very air in the room feel thin and electrified. He didn't see the mess at first. He saw only you, standing there, and he was already primed for a fight.
"What in the fuck is this?" he snarled, his voice a dangerously low vibration that made the fillings in your teeth ache. He didn't step inside, just stood there, radiating fury. He tossed the tablet onto a small console near the door; it skittered across the surface and clattered to the floor. "The 'God-U' rollout? I'm not a billboard for cheap plastic shit! This is what I get? After everything I do for this company? A fucking toy line?"
This was the familiar dance—the daily tantrum. Your composure was a fortress, and he was the battering ram. You would normally greet this with the same cool, detached professionalism that had become your armor. You would cite the projected revenue, the brand synergy, and the public's demand for connection.
But you didn't.
Your breath hitched. A small, involuntary sound, barely audible, but in the unnatural quiet of the room, it screamed.
And he heard it.
Homelander's tirade stopped dead. His head tilted, that predatory gaze narrowing as it swept over you, really looking at you for the first time. You knew immediately he was scanning you. The subtle tremor in your hands you couldn't quite still. The frantic, hummingbird flutter of your pulse at the base of your throat. The way your shoulders were squared for impact, not for posture. The faint, coppery scent of blood that still lingered in the air that was masked only partially by the spilled coffee.
His blue eyes, usually so fixed on their own reflection in your polished calm, were now cataloguing everything. The skewed keyboard, the dark stain spreading on the floor, the single, dangling thread on your jacket. The details clicked into place with a speed that was terrifying. The anger in him didn't vanish, but it transmuted. The white-hot, performative fury of a spoiled god cooled into something far more dangerous: the cold, sharp curiosity of a hunter catching an unfamiliar scent in the woods.
"What… happened here?" he asked. His voice was quiet now, devoid of its earlier booming petulance. It was worse. It was the lull before the strike.
You forced yourself to straighten up, to project the authority you were supposed to wield. "A minor security incident," you said, the words feeling thin and brittle. "It's been handled."
You both knew it was code for stay out—a line in the sand. But Homelander didn't recognize lines that others drew. He drew his own.
"Handled?" He finally stepped into the room, his boots making no sound on the carpet. He walked with a predator's economy of movement, all fluid grace and coiled power. He circled your desk, trailing a gloved finger along the polished wood, coming to a halt over the faint, dark spatter of blood. His gaze lifted from the stain to the now-empty space where the intern had been, then back to you. The question in his eyes was not one of concern. It was one of ownership.
"Who was it?" he asked, his voice a low, dangerous thrum.
"Like I said, it's handled." You held his gaze, willing your heart to slow its frantic pace. And of course, he saw it all. Those blue eyes of his were more advanced than any polygraph; they saw the truth in the minute tells of your body. They saw the sweat beading on your upper lip despite the cool temperature of the room. They saw the slight tremor in your hands that you pressed flat against your desk. They saw the way you flinched, an almost imperceptible movement, as he rounded the corner. It wasn't the flinch of someone afraid of a reprimand. It was the flinch of prey that had already been cornered.
The corner of Homelander's mouth twitched. The smile was back, but it was a new kind of smile. A chilling one. A smile that didn't speak of amusement, but of something far more primal. Of something about to be unleashed. He didn't need your words. He had all the information he required from the subtle language of your falling composure. He straightened up, the smile widening, the fury from moments before completely gone, replaced by a dark, anticipatory glee.
"Fine," he said, the word casual, dismissive. "Keep your secrets."
Then he was gone, as suddenly as he'd arrived. The door clicked shut, and you were left in the wrecked silence, the aftershock of his presence lingering in the air like the charged stillness before a storm. The relief was so profound it was dizzying, your body sagging against the desk as the adrenaline finally began to recede, leaving a cold, shaky emptiness in its wake. You had held him off for now.
About an hour or three later, you were trying to restore a semblance of order. You had righted your keyboard, your fingers flying across the keys as you typed up the sanitized version of events for your official report. That was when the news alert popped up on your monitor. A local channel breaking story. You clicked on the link, and the video began to play.
Then the phone call came.
Turns out Daniel wasn’t being taken to a police station or a holding cell. Instead, he was found in a cheap hourly-rate motel room, with his eyes burned out. There was no evidence of anything else. No fingerprints, no DNA, nothing to point to a supe. The official report said it was a tragic case of self-immolation.
But you knew. You knew exactly what had happened, and who had done it.
That was the moment your professional detachment shattered, not into fear, but into a cold, crystalline fury. That was when he got what he wanted. He wanted emotion from you? Wanted a reaction? Oh, he was going to get one.
Since he barges into your office often, you decided to give him the same energy he gave you. You pushed the heavy oak door of your office open and walked into the hallway of the executive suite, your steps purposeful, echoing in the polished marble. You didn't bother with subtlety. You strode right past Ashley’s desk, ignoring her startled squeak, and straight to the door of his private quarters on the top floor of the Tower.
You didn't knock. You used the master keycard you'd been given for emergencies. The lock clicked open with a satisfying, definitive sound.
He was there, standing in the middle of the vast, sterile living room, staring out the floor-to-ceiling window at the glittering sprawl of New York City. The city lights painted him in shades of blue and gold. Like always, he was in that suit, a monument to an image he could never truly live up to. He didn't turn around, but you knew he'd heard you. He would have heard you the second you stepped out of the elevator. He was aware of every heartbeat in this building, but especially yours.
"You're going to need to start paying rent for the space you're taking up in my head," he said, not bothering to turn. His voice was a low murmur, laced with a smug satisfaction that made your blood boil. "I'm getting awfully tired of it."
"You burned out his eyes," you said. Your own voice was surprisingly steady, a stark counterpoint to the storm raging inside you.
At that, he turned. Slowly. The smirk was already on his face, confident, expectant. He was enjoying this. He was waiting for the fear, the cowering, the grateful relief of the damsel he'd "rescued." He was relishing the victory, the proof that he had finally breached your fortress.
"Aww, did the poor little intern have an accident?" he cooed, the mock sympathy a venomous poison in the air. "I hear he was a troubled kid. A real danger to himself and others. Sometimes people just... snap."
The casual cruelty of it, the effortless way he rewrote reality to cast himself as a janitor cleaning up a mess, was what broke something loose inside you. All the weeks of calculated composure, the meticulous management of personalities and risks, the hours spent buried in files that detailed a lifetime of psychological damage—it all coalesced into a single, burning point of clarity.
You took a step closer. The marble floor was cold beneath your shoes. You didn't flinch. You didn't stop.
"He touched me," you said, your voice devoid of any inflection. It was a statement of fact, a piece of data being entered into the equation. "He put his hands on me, in my office. He left blood on my desk."
Homelander's smirk didn't falter, but a flicker of something else—confusion, perhaps, that you weren't reacting with the expected terror or gratitude—crossed his eyes. He had expected you to be weak, a frightened animal he could then soothe and dominate. But you weren't an animal. You were a calculator, and you had just input the final variable.
"And you know what my job is, Homelander?" you continued, taking another deliberate step. The space between you was shrinking, the air growing thick and heavy with unspoken history. "My job is risk management. And there was a risk. A variable. An anomaly."
You were now just a few feet from him, close enough to see the microscopic flaw in the left lens of his suit, the faint, almost invisible scar at the hairline he could never quite hide. You looked up at him, not as an employee to a boss, or a subject to a king, but as one predator to another.
"Anomalies are meant to be corrected," you finished. "I had it under control. I was handling it. But you didn't trust me to handle it. You took it from me. You made it yours."
A muscle feathered in his jaw. The charade was cracking. The smirk was still there, but it was a strain now. He could feel the shift in the dynamic, the ground moving beneath his feet, and he didn't like it. Not one bit.
"Sounds like you're ungrateful," he said, his voice losing its playful edge and hardening into steel. "I did you a favor. I took out the trash."
You let out a short, sharp breath that wasn't a laugh. "A favor? You violated the chain of command, bypassed every protocol I have in place, and committed a homicide that, if traced back, could expose the entire operation. You didn't do me a favor, John. You created a bigger mess."
The name hung in the air between you, a bomb dropped in the sterile silence.
The smirk vanished. Utterly. It was wiped from his face as if it had never been there, leaving behind a raw, chilling blankness. His expression didn't fall into anger, or surprise, or the theatrical shock of a performer whose secret has been revealed. It went somewhere else entirely. It went void. The blue of his eyes seemed to darken, to absorb all the light in the room, becoming the fathomless, predatory cold of the deep sea. For the first time since you’d met him, you were not looking at Homelander, the brand. You were not looking at the petulant god. You were looking at the boy from the lab, the creature who had never been given a name he could claim as his own, and you had just spoken it aloud.
He took a step toward you. It wasn't a threat, not yet. It was a claim—a reclaiming of space. You held your ground, your body a taut wire of tension. You could feel the thrum of his power, the air itself beginning to vibrate with a sub-audible frequency that made the hairs on your arms stand on end.
"You think you're clever," he said, his voice a near-inaudible rasp. The theatrical, all-American baritone was gone, replaced by something stripped bare and dangerous. "You read a few files, think you know me? Think that gives you some kind of power over me?"
"No, John," you said, your own voice dropping to match his, a low, steady counter-frequency. You let the name settle again, a deliberate, precise weapon. "It gives me understanding. And understanding is the basis of control. Something Madelyn understood very well. She gave you a mother. A confidante. She gave you a reflection that told you exactly what you wanted to hear."
Another step. He was so close now you could feel the heat radiating off him, a palpable, nuclear warmth that had nothing to do with body temperature. You could see your own reflection, distorted and tiny, in the perfect blue of his irises.
"And what do you give me?" he murmured, the words a soft, intimate threat.
"Nothing," you replied. "That's the difference between her and me. She wanted to be the one pulling your strings. I don't. I want to cut them."
The silence that followed was absolute. The only sound was the faint, electrical hum of the city far below, and the frantic, trapped beat of your own heart, which you forced yourself to ignore. The air crackled around him, a static charge that prickled your skin. The muscles in his forearms were rigid, the fabric of his suit stretched taut over balled fists. He was a coiled spring, and the only thing holding him back was the sheer, overwhelming shock of your defiance. It wasn't the defiance of a subordinate; it was the defiance of an equal.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the tension broke. A terrible, terrible smile spread across his face. It was not a smile of humor or pleasure. It was the smile of a scientist who has just been presented with a fascinating, unexpected specimen.
"I could rip you in half," he said, his voice a conversational whisper. "Before you could even scream."
"Is that what you did to Madelyn? When she stopped being a mirror and started being a person?" you countered, your own voice dropping into that same quiet, dangerous register. You were gambling, betting your life on the data you'd consumed. He'd killed her not for her betrayal of Vought, but for her betrayal of him. For the ultimate proof that her world did not, in fact, revolve around him. "Or did you burn her eyes out too like you did with Daniel?"
He moved so fast you didn't even register it. Your back was against the wall, the cold glass of the windowpane pressing into your shoulder blades. The impact didn't hurt, not yet. You were too stunned by the sheer impossibility of the motion. If you thought he was close before, he was now in your space. A solid wall of impossible heat and coiled muscle. His gloved hand was flat against the window beside your head, caging you in. His other hand was pinned against your shoulder, not quite a grip, but a pressure point that told you exactly how little effort it would take for him to simply push through your body and into the wall behind you.
You couldn't breathe. Not from a lack of air, but from an overload of stimulus. The sheer, overwhelming presence of him. The scent of sterile, dry-cleaned fabric, the faint, metallic tang of something otherworldly. You felt the thrum of power in the air, not just a vibration, but a tangible force that made your teeth ache, and your vision swim at the edges. You saw him up close: the microscopic imperfections in the pores of his neck, the faint pulse beating there, the terrifyingly human detail on the face of a god.
And yet, you didn't look away. You stared up into those terrifying, empty blue eyes, and you saw the war raging within them. The rage, yes, but something else, too. A flicker of something almost like awe. A predator's respect for prey that doesn't flee.
"Don't you ever say her name to me," he breathed, the words a hot gust of air against your cheek. The "John" had been a declaration of war, but "Madelyn" was an atomic bomb, a reference to the one person who had ever truly gotten under his skin, the one who had proven that even he could be played. The one he had killed not with a blast of heat, but with the slow, suffocating poison of his disappointment.
"I will say whatever I like," you choked out, the words forcing their way past the constriction starting in your throat. Your body was screaming at you to shrink, to apologize, to show deference. You ignored it. "Because I am not her. I am not your toy. I am not your reflection. I am your manager, and you are a multi-billion-dollar asset that is currently behaving like a spoiled child."
His grip on your shoulder tightened, not enough to crush bone, but enough to be a promise. A warning. The pressure was immense, a grinding force that made you feel as if your entire skeleton was about to be compacted into dust.
You held his gaze. "You can break me," you said, your voice a hoarse whisper, each word a deliberate, painful act of defiance. "You can vaporize me. You can turn me into a smear on this very expensive window. But it won't change the facts. You are out of control. You are a liability. And I am the one they hired to fix that."
The silence stretched, a thin, taut wire vibrating between life and death. You could feel the heat building from his hand, a terrifying prelude to the eyebeams. The glass of the window beside your head began to groan, a faint, high-pitched whine as the temperature climbed. You braced yourself, a strange, cold calm settling over you. This was it. This was the risk you had managed for, the final variable in the equation.
And then, he laughed.
It wasn't the boisterous, all-American laugh he gave for the cameras. It wasn't the mocking giggle he used to intimidate. It was a low, genuine, utterly terrifying chuckle that rumbled up from deep in his chest. The pressure on your shoulder eased, though it didn't vanish. The heat subsided, leaving behind a patch of mist on the windowpane. He pulled back, just enough to look at you properly, a fascinated, almost gleeful expression on his face.
"You're something else," he breathed, the smile not quite reaching the chilling emptiness in his eyes. "She was terrified of me, you know. Right up until the end. She thought she had me, but she was always walking on eggshells."
His gaze swept over you, from your defiant eyes to the steady set of your jaw, down to your hands, which remained clenched at your sides, not raised in supplication. "You're not. You're not scared at all. Are you?"
The question hung in the air. It wasn't an accusation; it was a diagnosis. He was peeling back another layer, and what he found beneath fascinated him.
"Let me be clear," he continued, his voice dropping back into that intimate, dangerous register. He leaned in again, his face so close to yours that you could see the dark fringe of his lashes, the flawless skin stretched taut over high cheekbones. "I didn't kill Daniel for you. Don't flatter yourself. I killed him because he touched my things. Because he made a mess in my house. This Tower, this floor, this office... It's all mine. You're just sitting in the chair."
He pulled back completely then, releasing you from the cage of his body. He straightened his glove, a fastidious, dismissive gesture, as if he'd just touched something dirty. "You want to cut my strings? You want to 'manage' me? Go ahead. Play your game. Run your numbers. Send your memos." He turned his back on you, strolling casually toward the window again, the picture of a man utterly in control of his domain. "Just remember what happened to the last person who thought she could."
The threat was explicit, but the dismissal stung more. He was relegating you to the same category as Stillwell. A challenge to be met, an obstacle to be removed. But you were not Stillwell. You had not come here to love him or control him through affection. You had come here to understand him, and in that moment, you understood more than ever. He wasn't a god to be worshipped or a monster to be slain. He was a black hole, a singularity of need and power that consumed everything around it. Your job wasn't to fight the pull, but to calculate its event horizon.
You straightened your jacket, your hands moving with a practiced calm to brush away imaginary wrinkles, a grounding ritual to center yourself. The adrenaline was still a tremor in your limbs, but the ice was back in your veins. "Duly noted," you said, your voice once again the cool, dispassionate tool of your trade. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a mess of my own to clean up. And John?"
He stopped, his back still to you, a rigid line of patriotic red and blue. The silence that followed your use of the name was a victory in itself—a small, sharp crack in the facade of Homelander.
"Next time you take it upon yourself to 'clean house,'" you said, your words precise and cold as scalpels, "try not to leave forensic breadcrumbs a first-year CSI could follow. Sloppy work is bad for the brand."
And with that, you turned and walked out, leaving him alone in the penthouse with the city lights and your words.
The click of the door closing behind you was the most satisfying sound you had heard all day. You didn't run. You didn't hurry. You walked back down the pristine, silent hallways of the executive suite, your heels clicking a steady, unfaltering rhythm against the marble. Every fiber of your being screamed at you, a primal chorus of fear and disbelief. You had just stood toe-to-toe with the world's most powerful being, called him by the name he hates, and accused him of sloppy work.
And you had walked away.
What you didn't know, couldn't know, was that he remained standing there long after you left, a statue frozen in front of the city he ruled. He lifted a hand, not to punch through the glass or to summon a blast of heat, but to touch the spot on the windowpane where your head had been. The faint imprint of your heat was already gone, dissipated into the cool night air. He stared at the spot, a frown creasing his brow, a look of profound, unnerving thoughtfulness on his face. The game had changed. The pieces on the board were no longer moving the way he'd anticipated. He didn't know the rules anymore. And for the first time in a very long time, that didn't infuriate him.
Synopsis: When Nick appears in the dying light with a smile, sad and knowing, you realize maybe the end doesn’t have to be so lonely.
WC: 1185
Category: Heavy Angst, Slight Hurt/Comfort {TW: Mentions of Death, Walkers, Gore(ish), Hallucinations}
Nick is genuinely one of my favorites in this entire show, so I felt inclined to add to the incredibly small fanbase. And me being me, I of course had to start it off with heavy amounts of angst. You’re welcome 🩷
『••✎••』
The world had ended long before the bite on your arm, but the fever made sure you felt it all over again.
You were propped against the wall of an abandoned gas station, the cracked vinyl of an old booth sticking to your back. Every shallow breath dragged sandpaper through your lungs.
Run gone wrong. A stupid, simple thing—just looking for supplies, but the dead had been thicker than anticipated, a tide of rotting flesh you'd barely waded through before one got too close. Its teeth, surprisingly sharp, had grazed your forearm.
Now the fire had started. It crept up your arm, slow and inexorable as a glacier, leaving trails of numbness in its wake. The world blurred at the edges, the dusty smell of the station mixing with something coppery and sour—your own blood.
The fever dreams came first. Flashes of a better world, before the world had gone quiet. Sunlight on a lake. The stupid jingle of an ice cream truck. Your mom's laugh.
Then he came.
He wasn't there, not really. You knew that. The rational part of your brain, the part not yet cooked by the infection, screamed it. But there he was, leaning against the opposite booth, wearing the same jacket and hoodie he'd worn the last day you saw him. His hair was greased back from his forehead, and he had that familiar, perpetually bored look in his eyes, except for the twitch at the corner of his mouth.
"You look like shit." Nick's voice was the same as you remembered. A little rough, a little lazy, but it cut through the fever haze like a knife.
A ragged laugh escaped your throat, turning into a cough that rattled your entire frame. "Thanks, Nick. Always the charmer."
He shrugged, the worn leather of his jacket creaking softly. "Just calling it as I see it." He didn't smile, but he didn't look away either. His gaze was steady, pinned on you, and for a terrifying, wonderful second, it felt real. The illusion was so complete you could almost smell the faint trace of smoke and stale coffee that always clung to him.
"You're not here," you whispered, the words barely audible. "You're dead."
"So are you, if you don't do something," he said, pushing himself off the booth. He moved with that familiar, loose-limbed swagger, stopping a few feet away. He looked down at your arm, at the angry, red-streaked bite mark. "Or maybe it's already too late for that."
The wave of grief was so sudden and sharp that it almost eclipsed the pain in your arm. You squeezed your eyes shut, hot tears leaking from the corners. "I'm sorry, Nick. I tried. I tried so hard to keep going after... after you."
"I know," he said, and for the first time, his voice softened. "I know you did."
You felt a phantom touch, a gentle pressure on your shoulder. It wasn't real, just your brain playing tricks, your last desperate grasp at a connection that had been severed long ago. But you leaned into it anyway, a sob breaking free from your chest.
"I’m so sorry," you repeated, the words a raw, broken thing. "For not being there that day. For not stopping you."
"Hey." The phantom touch tightened. "Look at me."
You forced your heavy eyelids open. The room was swimming, but you could still make him out. His face was clearer now, the lines around his eyes more pronounced, the set of his jaw harder. He looked older than the boy you remembered, but then again, so did you.
"What happened then... that's on me," he said, his voice firm. "Nothing you could've done would've changed it. You know that."
You wanted to believe him, and you knew if he were really here, he'd be right. He was too stubborn, too reckless, too... Nick. But the guilt had been a constant companion for years, a heavy blanket you couldn't shrug off, even now, at the very end. It was filled with the millions of "what ifs," of the alternate timelines where you'd managed to talk him down, where he was still here, still annoying you, still making you laugh with some sarcastic comment.
"What's it like?" you asked, changing the topic to ease the pain in both your mind and body. "Being… you know, dead."
Nick's lips twisted into a wry smile. "Quiet. No more infected. No more having to decide between canned beans and dog food for dinner. It's a definite upgrade."
A genuine, albeit weak, smile touched your own lips. "Sounds like paradise."
"Depends on who you ask," he said, moving to sit on the edge of your booth. His weight didn't make the vinyl dip, but you imagined it did. "It's missing a few key things. People, mostly."
Your gaze found his, and in that moment, you almost forgot the truth in your reality again. You could only see the boy you grew up with, the one who'd held your hair back after your first taste of cheap vodka, the one you babysat during his withdrawal, the one you fought with, cried with, and loved more than anyone in the world.
"I miss you."
The words hung in the dusty air, a confession you'd held close to your chest for years.
His expression softened completely, the bored facade crumbling away to reveal the raw, vulnerable boy underneath. He reached out, and for a second, you could feel the warmth of his hand on your cheek. It was the most real thing you'd felt in years.
"I know," he said, his thumb brushing away a tear you didn't realize had fallen. "I miss you too."
You leaned into his touch, your eyes fluttering closed. The pain in your arm was a distant throb now, the fire spreading to your chest, making it hard to breathe. The world was fading, the edges of your vision blurring into a comforting darkness.
"Stay with me?" you whispered, the words a last, desperate plea. "Please, Nicky. Don’t leave me again."
You were the only one who was allowed to call him that. Anyone else would've gotten a glare, a smart-ass remark, or both. But from you, it always earned you a rare, genuine smile. And you got one now, a faint upturn of his lips that reached his eyes, making them crinkle at the corners.
"I never left you," he whispered back, his voice a warm, familiar balm against your frayed nerves. "You just couldn’t see me."
His hand was still on your cheek as you drifted, the last of your strength seeping away. The fire in your veins extinguished, replaced by a profound, all-encompassing cold. The sounds of the outside world—the distant groan of the infected, the whistle of the wind through the broken station door—faded into nothing. The last thing you saw, before the darkness took you completely, was Nick's face, a promise of peace in the middle of a world that had none.
The world ended for you a second time, but this time with a ghost by your side, just as it had begun.
Synopsis: When you sit beside him on the library steps and share an earbud like old times, the familiar intimacy stirs memories that leave Peter aching with what was lost and what he can never quite reach again. [GIF creds: peterpcrker]
This was originally supposed to be pure fluff (especially with my previous fic 💀), but I just couldn’t help myself… I LIVE FOR THE DRAMA OKAY?? 😭😭
(@superbpoisonpath since you wanted to be tagged for new fics)
『••✎••』
He tells himself it’s just a coincidence. That it doesn’t mean anything. That the seat just happened to be open, that you just happened to sit there, and that the space between you just happens to feel exactly the same as it used to.
Peter sits on the worn concrete steps of the library, the cool stone seeping through his jeans. The world around him is loud—a constant river of students flowing in and out of the brick building, filled with shouted greetings and ringing phones. None of it reaches him. His entire world has narrowed to the twelve inches of stone between his thigh and yours.
You’re rifling through your bag, brow furrowed in concentration. The gesture is so achingly familiar it sends a sharp ache through his chest. You used to do that before every test, bottom lip caught between your teeth, fingers searching for a pen you’d tucked away only moments earlier. He’d always have one ready, clicking it twice before handing it over—a silent ritual.
You don’t look up. You haven’t really looked at him since the semester started. Not in the way you used to. To you, he’s just another face in the crowd.
He watches as you pull out a pair of wired headphones, the thin black cord tangling around your fingers in a messy knot. A half-forgotten song leaks from the small speakers, tinny and faint in the open air. You sigh, that small, frustrated sound you always made when you couldn’t solve a problem—a soft puff of air that was more adorable than annoyed.
Before he can stop himself, he reaches into the pocket of his hoodie and pulls out his own pair of cheap wired earbuds. The cord is frayed at the edges from months of use. His thumb traces the scratched plastic. He hasn’t used them since… well, a while.
He clears his throat, the sound rough and unused.
“Need a hand?”
You jump, head snapping up. Your eyes, wide and surprised, finally meet his. For one fleeting, heart-stopping second, he sees it—the ghost of recognition. A flicker of warmth. Of him. It vanishes as quickly as it appeared, replaced by the polite, blank smile of a stranger.
“Oh. Thanks, but… I think I got it.” You hold up the now-untangled headphones as proof.
“Right. Cool.” He shoves the earbuds back into his pocket, the rejection stinging sharper than it should. He should stand up and leave. Fade back into the crowd where it’s safe, where he doesn’t have to look at you and see everything you’ve forgotten.
But he doesn’t.
His gaze drifts to the little speaker pressed against your left ear. He remembers the weight of your head on his shoulder, the scent of your hair, the way your laugh used to vibrate through his chest when he played you that ridiculous indie-pop song you claimed to hate but secretly loved. The memory is so vivid he can almost feel the warmth of your skin against his.
His brain screams at him. Don’t. Don’t you dare.
His heart doesn’t listen.
“Do you… uh…” He fumbles with the drawstring of his hoodie, the worn fabric his only lifeline. “Do you know what the best song to study to is?”
You tilt your head, a small, curious smile touching your lips. It’s different from the one he remembers—polite, guarded. “I usually just listen to classical. Helps me focus.”
He nods, the motion jerky. “Right. Yeah. Classical.” It was comforting to know that some things hadn’t changed. You being a liar, for one. It was one of your most endearing and infuriating qualities. You always told him you listened to classical when you studied, but in reality, you’d put on a podcast.
“The only thing more boring than my textbook,” you’d once said, laughing into his neck, “is a history podcast.”
Peter swallows hard, forcing the memory down before it chokes him. He shifts slightly on the step, the twelve inches between you suddenly feeling like twelve miles.
“I’ve got this playlist,” he says, his voice quieter than he intends. “Indie stuff. Kind of slow. It’s not classical or instrumental at all, but… It’s got a good rhythm. Helps when my brain won’t shut up.”
He pulls out his phone, thumb hovering over the screen. His hands are shaking just slightly. He hopes you don’t notice.
You hesitate, eyes flicking from his face to the phone and back. There’s a beat of silence—the kind that used to feel comfortable between you. Now it’s heavy with everything left unsaid.
“Sure,” you say finally, polite curiosity winning out. “Why not? I’m kind of stuck on this chapter anyway.”
Peter’s heart twists—half relief, half agony. He scoots the tiniest bit closer, careful not to crowd you, and holds out one of his wired earbuds. The cord dangles between you like a fragile bridge.
You take it, your fingers brushing his for half a second. The contact sends a familiar spark racing up his arm. You don’t react the same way. Of course you don’t.
He starts the playlist. Soft guitar strums fill the space between you, gentle and warm—the same track that used to play in his tiny apartment while you both pretended to study. The one where you’d eventually give up, resting your head on the back of the sofa and telling him stories about your childhood. The one where, for the first time, he realized he was falling in love with you.
You settle back against the step, textbook propped on your knees, but he can tell you’re not really reading. Your head is tilted, listening. A small line forms between your brows as you concentrate on the music. He knows that look. You’re trying to place the song. Trying to remember where you’ve heard it before.
You won’t.
You won’t remember the rainy Tuesday you spent on his fire escape, both of you crammed under a too-small umbrella, sharing this same song through the same tangled earbuds. You won’t remember how you shivered—not from the cold, but from the thrill of being close enough to feel the heat from his skin. You won’t remember that it was the night he almost kissed you, the city lights blurring in the rain behind your head.
Peter’s gaze falls to your lips. He watches them part slightly as you listen, a silent question forming. He can almost taste the memory—the ghost of that almost-kiss, the electric tension thick and sweet in the air. The way your eyes had fluttered shut. The way he had leaned in, every nerve in his body screaming yes, finally.
He remembers stopping. The frantic buzz of his phone with a text from May. The distant wail of a siren pulling him back to reality, to responsibility. The disappointment in your eyes had hit him like a physical blow, one he still felt on quiet nights.
He’s leaning in again now. Just a fraction of an inch. An unconscious pull, like gravity, toward your warmth. The distance between you shrinks from twelve inches to six, to four. The world narrows to the space between your mouths, the soft music the only thing that exists outside this fragile bubble.
Your eyes lift from the textbook and meet his. They’re wide, questioning, a little dazed. For one breathtaking, terrifying second, you’re not looking at Peter Parker, the stranger beside you. You’re looking at him. The real him. The wall of forgetfulness cracks, and he sees a flicker of that same fire from the fire escape—the same hope, the same affection.
But you don’t know why you’re feeling it.
You pull back. It’s not harsh, but it’s definite. A subtle retreat. Your gaze drops back to the textbook, and the wall slams shut again. You pluck the earbud out and hold it out to him.
“Thanks,” you say, your voice perfectly polite. Nothing more. “I think I’ve got it from here.”
Peter takes the earbud back, his fingers numb. The tiny piece of plastic feels heavier than lead. He nods, a clumsy, wordless motion, as the world rushes back in—the laughter from a passing group, the distant wail of another siren, the rustle of you collecting your things.
He watches you stand with that graceful motion he has memorized for years. You sling your backpack over one shoulder and give him one last polite, empty smile.
“I’ll… see you around, I guess.”
“Yeah,” he manages to croak. “See you.”
You turn and walk away, swallowed by the crowd flowing up the library steps. You don’t look back. Of course you don’t.
Peter sits there for a long time, long after your form has disappeared. The twelve inches of concrete beside him feel like a vast, frozen tundra. He looks down at the earbud still clasped in his hand, the cord trailing to the phone on his lap. The song wasn’t finished—he could tell by the faint vibrations in the plastic—but your half of the conversation was over.
All he had now was the silence echoing in his own ear. The silence and his half of the broken piece of technology. It had broken months ago, not long after it happened. He never got around to replacing it. He didn’t need to. The one working side was enough for him when he wanted to remember.
And it still was, even when he shared it with you. Because while you were hearing the guitar and the soft piano, all he could hear—all he wanted to hear—was the memory of the rain on the metal fire escape and the ghost of your laugh.
He told himself it was a coincidence. That it didn’t mean anything. But sitting here now, with the sun beating down on the back of his neck and your scent already fading from the air, he knows he was wrong.
It meant everything.
I DEFINITELY didn’t base the song off cigarette daydreams or anything... I wouldn’t do that
I’m also officially out of drafts/ideas for now. So it may be a bit before I post fics again. Fear not, though; ideas will eventually find me again.
Synopsis: After Peter swings in to save you from a plunge into the Venetian canal, the truth comes out; however, you learn in the quiet aftermath that a hug says more than words ever could. {GIF Creds: steve-rogers }
WC: 1069
Category: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Lots of Fluff, Identity Reveal, Friends to Lovers (if you squint) {TW: Post-Near Death Experience}.
Now I know this isn’t part of the series, but I had this random oneshot idea, and I had to write my thoughts out.
『••✎••』
You stand frozen on the edge of the narrow Venetian alley, the ancient stone archway behind you still dripping from the chaos that had just unfolded. The canal water laps gently at the steps below, calmer now, but your pulse still hammers in your ears like the aftermath of a storm.
Peter Parker is slumped against the weathered wall only a few feet away, his chest heaving. His soaked curls are plastered to his forehead in dark, glistening strands. Water traces slow paths down his temples, mixing with the faint sheen of sweat on his flushed cheeks. His blue plaid shirt clings to his shoulders, the fabric darkened and heavy, the backpack straps cutting into them as if they weigh a thousand pounds. He looks every bit the exhausted classmate you’ve shared late-night gelato runs and whispered museum jokes with these past few days—not the hero the world knows.
But the web-shooters on his wrists give it away.
You never truly believed it until now—not really. But when he’d swung down from the church tower to catch you mid-plummet, when that sticky white thread had materialized from nothing to grab hold of your jacket and snap you out of the air, the truth had hit you like a splash of the ice-cold water that had you almost drowning. And now, as he sits there catching his breath, you’re hit all over again by the surrealism of it.
You take a slow, shaky breath, the faint smell of brine and damp stone filling your lungs. Your heart is still racing, the phantom feeling of falling lingering in your stomach. “Peter,” you manage, your voice sounding foreign and shaky in the sudden quiet. “You…”
You can’t finish the sentence. Instead, you gesture vaguely at the wall beside him, where a faint patch of white webbing still clings to the brick, slowly sliding down the ancient surface like melted wax.
Peter flinches at the sound of your voice and looks up at you with wide, weary eyes. The usual warmth in them is replaced with something raw, vulnerable, and deeply afraid. He follows your gaze to the web, then quickly looks away, guiltily tugging the sleeve of his plaid shirt over the device on his wrist. He doesn’t speak, just watches you, his chest still heaving, as if he’s waiting for you to yell at him for lying, to turn on him for keeping this monumental secret—to do anything but stand there and stare at him like he’s a puzzle you’re only now seeing clearly for the first time.
And maybe you are. Because this changes everything. The boy who had quietly carried your heavy sketchbook when your shoulder ached, the one who had shyly offered you half of his sandwich when you’d skipped breakfast—somehow, he’s also the one who has been saving this city, this world, in secret. Your gaze drifts down to his hands, resting palms-up on his knees. They’re trembling slightly. They’re the hands of a boy, yes—but now you see them as the hands that have stopped cars, that have swung between skyscrapers, that have held the fate of strangers in their grasp.
The fate of you, just moments ago.
Your best friend. The clumsy, brilliant, kind boy you’ve somehow weaseled your way into the heart of. A hero. A secret hero. And he’s looking at you like he’s terrified he’s about to lose you because of it. Something inside you twists, painful and profound, at the sight of that fear.
So you move.
Slowly, deliberately, you close the small distance between you, your sneakers making soft, wet sounds on the uneven stone. You don’t give him a chance to flinch away or build up any more walls of defense. You simply lean in, your hands coming up to frame his shoulders, steadying him—and yourself.
And then you pull him into a hug.
It’s awkward at first. He’s stiff and unyielding in your arms, still coiled with the tension of the fight and the fear of your reaction. His wet shirt seeps into your own clothes, but you don’t care. You just hold on, pressing your cheek against his damp hair, your fingers digging gently into the fabric of his shirt. He smells like canal water and rain and something uniquely Peter—something warm and familiar.
“Thank you,” you whisper, the words muffled against his hair. “You idiot. Thank you.”
For a long moment, he doesn’t respond. You can feel the rapid, unsteady beat of his heart against your chest, a frantic drum that echoes your own. Then, slowly, like the thawing of ice, he relaxes. His arms, hesitant at first, come up around your back. One hand rests between your shoulder blades, the other on the back of your head, his fingers gently tangling in your hair. He tucks his face into the crook of your neck, and you feel the warm puff of his breath against your skin, shaky and uneven.
“Sorry,” he breathes out, the word so quiet it’s barely audible. “I didn’t… I didn’t know how to tell you.”
You squeeze him tighter, your own eyes burning with unshed tears from the adrenaline and the overwhelming, terrifying relief of it all. It wasn’t a betrayal of trust; it was a burden carried alone. And looking at him now, feeling the way he trembles in your arms, you realize just how heavy that burden must have been.
“I’m not mad, Peter,” you say, pulling back just enough to look at him—to see the glistening of his own eyes in the sunlight that’s starting to break through the clouds. “I’m not. Just… next time you swing in to save me from a watery grave… maybe a little heads-up?” You try for a smile, a small, shaky thing that feels like a victory just for existing.
A wet, disbelieving laugh escapes him—a choked sound that’s part sob, part relief. He nods, a small, jerky motion. “Yeah,” he says, his voice raspy. “Okay. I can… I can do that.”
As you stand there, wrapped in the hug you never expected, surrounded by the quiet aftermath of chaos, you know that you’re in this now—all of it. You know, with a certainty that settles deep in your bones, that you’re not letting him carry this burden alone anymore.
Although, as you found out later, he was never alone to begin with. Ned had apparently known since the beginning. The traitor.
Synopsis: A simple conversation in Peter’s apartment turns into a pivotal moment as he realizes the depth of what he has found in you: not just someone who remembers, but a piece of his own history that survived. [PART 1 LOCATED HERE // GIF Creds: milesgmorales]
PART THREE! I have no idea how many parts I’m actually going to make about this, so I’m kinda just winging it for now. Creativity hits when it hits lmaooo
『••✎••』
The hug in the cafe had ended too soon, but it lingered like static on Peter’s skin for the rest of the day. You hadn’t asked a hundred questions. You hadn’t pulled away or looked at him like he was broken. You’d just… held on. And when you finally stepped back, you’d said:
“Text me if you need another one. Or coffee. Or silence. Whatever.”
Then you’d packed up your books, shot him a last, small, reassuring smile, and walked out of the cafe, leaving Peter alone with the salt shaker and a warmth spreading through his chest that had nothing to do with the lukewarm coffee.
He did end up texting you that night. Once. Just an awkward “thanks again” at 7 p.m. before patrol. You’d replied with a simple thumbs-up emoji and a photo of your pet judging a half-eaten ramen bowl. It was normal. Stupidly, perfectly normal. And it kept him going through another night of swinging past the places that used to mean something—Ned’s old apartment building, the bodega where MJ used to steal his fries, the rooftop where he and May used to watch fireworks.
Little did he know that three days later, just as he was sulking about the past once again, he’d run into you again in his own apartment.
It wasn’t even a plan, and he hadn’t texted you first either. You had texted him—ranting, as if you had known him for years. You were near the library, and your laptop had died, and since you seemed so stressed about completing your upcoming paper that was due soon, he’d—with a surge of desperate impulsiveness—offered his outlet. He hadn’t invited anyone to this place, this tiny, subsidized room that was supposed to be for a student but was really just a place to sleep in between patrols. He hadn't thought it would ever happen.
So, in a panic, he’d spent the twenty minutes it took you to get there frantically tidying: shoving things into drawers, using his web shooters to clear the mess of dirty clothes piled by the dresser, and spritzing the room with a borrowed can of air freshener that now smelled like chemicals mixed with despair.
Now, currently, you were perched on the edge of his worn-out couch with your laptop open, murmuring to yourself about a dead hyperlink in your research paper. You weren’t intimidated by the starkness of the room. You hadn’t commented on the single mattress on the floor or the precarious stacks of old textbooks. You’d simply found the outlet, plugged in, and made yourself at home in the quiet space he’d carved out of the world.
Peter stood by the small kitchen counter, pretending to make tea he had no intention of drinking, just watching you. He was struck again by the sheer, profound normality of it. The domesticity. The way you tapped your computer with impatience, the soft sigh you gave when the link finally worked. It was like a scene from a life he’d only ever seen in movies—a life he could have had, maybe, if the world hadn’t erased him.
“Peter?”
He jumped. He still wasn’t used to hearing his name directed at him, especially not from you. He turned, the teabag in his hand dripping forgotten spots onto the counter.
“Yeah?”
You pretended not to notice the drips. “Could you pass me my book? Please? It’s the big blue one.” You gestured to your stack of books near the door.
He grabbed it, the heavy hardcover a familiar weight. Quantum Mechanics and Its Implications. He flipped it over, and a small, printed-out sticky note on the back cover caught his eye. It was a quote, typed in a neat serif font: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein.
Peter felt a dizzying sense of vertigo. He’d seen that quote before. He used that quote.
He remembered sitting in Mr. Harrison’s class, senior year. Flash was making some snide comment, and Peter, buried in a book, had muttered the quote under his breath—a silent mantra for himself. Of course, Mr. Harrison, a massive Einstein buff, had overheard. He’d made Peter write it on the board, a mortifying experience that had ended with him getting a rare, approving nod from the teacher and a week of dealing with Flash calling him “Little Einstein,” along with being sung the theme song of that stupid child’s TV show anytime he walked by in the hall. Man, was he glad he didn’t have to deal with him anymore.
Still, regardless of the memory, it wasn’t a famous Einstein quote. Not really. It was obscure, one Peter had found in a biography; However, the chances of you randomly printing it out and sticking it on your book…
The floor seemed to tilt beneath his feet. He walked back to the couch, movements slow and deliberate, and handed the book to you.
“Thanks,” you said, taking it without looking.
Peter sank into the rickety armchair opposite you, the teabag long forgotten. He watched you read, but in his mind he was back in that classroom. He saw you a few rows ahead, diligently taking notes. He saw you glance up when Mr. Harrison called him to the board. He saw the ghost of a smile on your face as you watched him write—not of mockery, but amusement? Appreciation?
A minor moment in his eyes, a forgettable blip in the chaos of high school. But this sticky note must have been printed later. After. The thought ricocheted around his skull with stunning clarity: you hadn’t just known him. You hadn’t just remembered him. You had proof of him. A piece of him that was now your proof, sitting right there in his apartment, surviving the spell.
And you didn’t even realize.
The room was quiet, save for the soft hum of your laptop fan and the distant wail of a siren. Peter stared at you—at the way the light from your screen illuminated the focused line of your jaw, the way your fingers curled around the spine of the book. He saw so much more now than the quiet girl from history class. He saw a person who had held onto a piece of him, however small, without even knowing its true value. A person who had been handed a cosmic puzzle piece and had simply stuck it on a book because it resonated.
He had been so focused on what he’d lost—Ned, MJ, May, the life that was stolen—that he’d never once considered what might have survived. Not in the world, but in other people. He’d assumed the spell was perfect, absolute. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was like a shattering mirror, and some people, like you, had picked up a shard and kept it?
What if that mirror could be mended? Reverted? The thought was so terrifying and brilliant it almost knocked the wind out of him. He didn’t have the sling ring. He had no idea where Strange was, or if he’d even help. But maybe… maybe he didn’t need the spell broken. Maybe he just needed to find the other pieces of the mirror. The other people who might have their own sticky notes, their own faded photographs, their own ghost of a memory.
He had a lead. A tiny, fragile, tangible lead. Sure, there was the chance that you could’ve just bought a bunch of inspirational sticky notes from the dollar store. But… he knew. He felt it, deep in his bones, in that same place where the tingling of his spider-sense lived.
And truthfully, even if you had just bought the sticky note, he still had you.
He had a friend. At least, he hoped he had a friend.
Peter stood up so abruptly that the legs of his armchair scraped against the cheap linoleum floor. You looked up, startled.
“Everything okay?”
He ignored the question and moved to your side of the coffee table. He didn’t touch the book again. He just sat close enough to draw your attention. Which, of course, worked. You looked at him—really looked at him. He must have looked like a wreck, with his sleep-deprived eyes and trembling hands.
“Did we ever talk? In high school?” Peter started, then stopped, licking his lips. He felt bad asking this, because he genuinely couldn’t remember. He didn’t want to hurt your feelings by not remembering something you might have. “I know we weren’t in the same friend group or anything, but…”
He trailed off, leaving the question hanging in the air.
You considered it, your head tilting to the side as you accessed your mental archives. It was a strange expression, one of genuine concentration, as if you were trying to recall a very specific, long-forgotten fact.
“Not really, no,” you said finally. A tiny pang of relief went through him, followed immediately by a wave of something that felt suspiciously like disappointment. “But… I was aware of you. You know how it is.”
But peter didn’t know how it was anymore. At least, not for the past year. He had spent so long being the only one who knew about himself.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.” He looked away, feeling the familiar sting of being a footnote in someone else’s story. It was an old feeling, one he’d had long before the spell, when he was just a scholarship kid with a secondhand backpack. But now, it was amplified a thousand times.
You must have seen something in his expression, because you elaborated, a small, self-deprecating smile on your lips. “I wasn’t exactly the queen of the social scene. I mostly kept to myself—my books, my music. But I saw people. I watched them. You were… a notable presence, Peter Parker.”
You said the name again, so casually. Every time you did, it felt like a tiny reset button for his soul.
“You were always running,” you continued, your gaze distant, lost in memory. “Literally always. Either to the library, or out of the cafeteria, or down the hall with your backpack half-unzipped. Nice to know why, now,” you added with a dry glance at him. “I always thought you just had terrible bladder control.”
A startled laugh escaped him, a raw, rusty sound he didn’t recognize as his own. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed like that—genuinely, without an undercurrent of grief or exhaustion.
Your smile widened a little at his reaction. Encouraged, you kept going. “You were also one of the smartest kids in our year too, but you never flaunted it. You’d just… know the answer when nobody else did. I remember that day in Harrison’s class, when he made you write that quote on the board…”
Peter’s heart hammered against his ribs. Here it was.
“He was so thrilled to have a kindred spirit in the class,” you said, your voice soft. “And you looked so embarrassed, but you also… stood a little taller after that. I don’t know. It was just a small thing. But I remembered it.”
You paused, then looked down at the book in your lap. You ran your finger over the sticky note, a thoughtful caress.
“I found that quote later, when I was looking up stuff for another paper. It stuck with me. That idea that persistence matters more than genius. Felt… relevant, I guess.” You shrugged, a little self-conscious. “So I printed it out. It’s been on my notebooks ever since. I have a whole collection of them.”
Peter stared at you. At the casual, unthinking way you laid out the evidence. A small thing, you’d said. A memory. A quote that resonated. To you, it was just a personal quirk, a habit of collecting inspirational snippets. To him, it was a holy relic. A piece of a world he thought had been completely atomized.
You had no idea. You had absolutely no idea that your little habit, your quiet appreciation for a moment in a classroom, was the only thing anchoring his existence to the rest of humanity.
He felt a surge of something so powerful it almost bowled him over. It wasn’t just gratitude. It was… awe. For the small, unnoticed ripples a person leaves behind them, the ways in which they touch other lives without ever realizing it. He’d spent so much of his life trying to be significant, to make a big, loud difference as Spider-Man. He’d never once considered the quiet, enduring legacy of just… being Peter Parker.
A legacy you had somehow preserved without even trying.
“Peter?” Your voice pulled him back from the brink of that existential chasm. “You’re staring again. You okay?”
He blinked, focusing on your concerned face. He realized he was leaning forward, his hands gripping the edge of the coffee table so hard his knuckles were white.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice hoarse. “You have no idea how okay I am.”
He pushed himself to his feet, the sudden movement full of nervous energy. He started pacing the small length of the room, from the counter to the window and back. The tiny apartment felt like a cage, and at the same time, like the entire universe was contained within its four walls—all centered around you and your sticky note.
“You know,” you said, watching him with a tolerant, slightly amused expression, “for a guy who can stick to walls, you’re surprisingly jittery.”
“I’m not jittery,” he retorted, a little too quickly. “I’m… processing. You’ve given me a lot to process.”
He stopped by the window, looking down at the street twelve floors below. The evening rush was starting, a river of red and white lights flowing through the concrete canyons. Down there, he was nothing more than a shadow. A rumor. Up here, with you, he was as solid and real as the scuffed floorboards beneath his feet.
He turned back to face you, that single thought crystallizing in his mind with blinding clarity.
“I wish things could’ve been different,” he said, the admission feeling heavier than any building he’d ever lifted. “I’m starting to think I really missed out.”
Your teasing expression softened into something more gentle. You leaned forward, propping your chin on your hand, your forgotten research paper glowing softly beside you.
“On what, a life of petty drama and crippling student loan debt?” you asked, your tone light but your eyes serious. “Trust me, you didn’t miss much.”
“No, not that,” he said, shaking his head. He took a hesitant step closer. “I mean… high school. Being friends with you. Not having my head so far up my own… you know… that I didn’t see the smart, funny girl sitting two rows ahead of me.”
The words hung in the air, surprisingly intimate. He saw the way your posture changed, the slight shift of your shoulders, the flicker of surprise in your eyes. You hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t expected to say it.
You looked down at your laptop for a second, a small, almost shy smile touching your lips before you looked back up at him.
“Peter Parker,” you said, and there it was again—that name, anchoring him. “Are you trying to tell me we could’ve been friends?”
“I’m trying to tell you we should have been,” he corrected, a quiet intensity in his voice. He took another step, now standing right in front of the coffee table. “You’re the only person in the entire world who knows my name. And I never even bothered to learn yours.”
A new silence settled, different from the others. This one wasn’t filled with grief or confusion, but with a budding, terrifying possibility. Peter’s gaze dropped from your eyes to your laptop, and then to the textbook on your lap. Your name was printed in neat block letters on the spine, next to your student ID.
He’d seen it a hundred times in the halls, on attendance sheets, on the spines of your notebooks. But he’d never really seen it.
Because he never really saw you.
But he did now, with a sudden, jarring clarity. He saw everything: the worn texture of your pants, the dent in your favorite water bottle you’d brought with you, the way you’d unconsciously started chewing on your pen cap. It was an overwhelming flood of sensory information, and he had to fight to keep from being swept away.
You didn’t seem to notice his sensory overload. Instead, you met his gaze, your own expression unwavering. “Well,” you said, closing your laptop with a soft click that echoed in the tiny room. “It’s a good thing we have all the time in the world to make up for it, then.”
It was a simple statement, but it felt like a promise. A vow. The words settled over Peter, warm and heavy, like a blanket he hadn’t realized he was shivering without.
All the time in the world. A world where he was real. A world where someone knew him.
Before he could stop himself, he took the final step around the coffee table. He didn’t think. He didn’t calculate. He just moved, closing the last few inches of space between you. He lowered himself onto the couch beside you—not too close, but close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from your arm, close enough to smell the faint scent of your shampoo.
“Is this code for you needing another hug?” you asked, your voice light, but he could hear the slight tremor beneath it.
“No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “This is…”
He trailed off, at a loss for words. He turned to face you, one arm resting along the back of the couch, his body angled toward yours. He could see every fleck of color in your irises, the way the light from the lamp caught the tiny hairs on your cheek. He’d never been this close to you before. Not in high school, not when he’d knocked your books over, not even when you’d hugged him in the cafe.
This was different. This was… deliberate.
“Peter?” Your voice was barely a breath now.
He could only stare at your lips, at the way they parted slightly as you said his name. He felt a pull, an undeniable force that had nothing to do with spider-powers and everything to do with the lonely, desperate yearning that had been clawing at him for a year.
But he knew. He knew that a year of solitude didn’t magically disappear because someone knew your name. He knew that the grief was still there, a raw, gaping wound that would take a long, long time to heal. He knew that you were still a virtual stranger, that he was still a basket case with more baggage than a cargo plane, and this was only the fourth time you had spoken more than two sentences to him.
He also knew, with a certainty that settled deep in his bones, that you were important. Not MJ important, not Ned important, but Peter important. A new kind of important, one that was still forming, still taking shape, but no less vital.
And he knew he couldn’t screw this up. So instead of closing the distance, instead of acting on the impulse that was screaming at him to just feel something real, he reached for the book with the quote on it. Because at the end of the day, it was the thread that connected you. A small thread that was holding him together.
Synopsis: After a chance encounter with the one girl who still knows his name, Peter decides to take a chance and reveal not only his identity, but the cosmic catastrophe that has left him utterly alone. [Part One: Here // GIF Creds: linusbenjamin ]
CONGRATULATIONS, YALL, YOU OFFICALLY CONVINCED ME TO MAKE A PART 2!! As for a whole series with multiple chapters, that’s still up for debate because I’m currently just not that creative 💀
But, with that being said… enjoy the sequel (could also be read as a standalone) with a little bit more comfort and a lot more angst
『••✎••』
The small campus cafe was crowded as usual, the air thick with the scent of burnt espresso and toasted bagels. Peter sat across from you at the tiny corner table near the window, his hands wrapped around a paper cup that had gone lukewarm ten minutes ago.
He’d spent the last couple of days quietly memorizing your schedule—not in a creepy way, just careful observation from rooftops and hallway corners—until he found the perfect window: right after your morning lecture, before the lunch rush really hit. This was the moment.
You were exactly where he hoped you’d be, highlighter poised over notes, earbuds half in, that familiar stack of books balanced on the chair beside you. Sunlight filtered through the glass, catching the edges of your focused expression and making the whole scene feel strangely peaceful despite the storm raging inside his chest.
He’d barely slept since the sidewalk. Two nights of all-nighters—one spent swinging through the city in a blur of red and blue, the other hunched over his laptop and the single physical yearbook he still kept hidden in the back of his closet. The one that should have shown his photo, his name listed under the science club, the decathlon team, even a blurry candid from homecoming. But when he opened it under the harsh glow of his desk lamp, the pages were wrong. Clean. Empty of him.
Every reference to Peter Parker had been scrubbed. Group shots where he should have been standing between Ned and MJ now showed gaps or different faces. The honor roll list skipped his name entirely. Even the faded ink of teacher signatures in the margins seemed to skip over the kid who used to fix the AV equipment. It was like the universe had gone back with a giant eraser and redrawn the year without him in it.
And yet… you remembered.
You’d said his name like it was the most ordinary thing. Like he’d always existed in your world the same way he existed in his own memories. The contradiction had kept him awake, heart hammering with a hope so sharp it hurt. He couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t let you go.
Now, sitting here in the noisy cafe, he could feel it through his spider-sense—the subtle tension in your shoulders, the way your pulse had picked up just a fraction when he approached. Confusion. Concern. A quiet wariness, like you were trying to figure out if the guy from your old high school was having some kind of breakdown.
You were kind-hearted; he could already tell from the soft way you’d checked on him yesterday. Introverted, too—preferring the quiet corner and your books over the louder tables full of laughing groups. And of course, if the organic chemistry textbook wasn’t already a sign in itself, you were intelligent but in a steady, thoughtful way that felt different from his own chaotic, hyper-focused genius.
It’s why he had to be strategic about this. He knew if he started rambling about spells and multiverses and everyone forgetting him, you’d politely nod and find an excuse to leave. He had to start with something he could prove. Something undeniable.
He took a steadying breath and leaned forward slightly so his voice wouldn’t carry.
“What if I told you… the world is different for me than it is for you?”
Your highlighter paused, leaving a small pink streak on the white page. You slid your earbuds out, giving him your full attention. The concern was back, knitting your brow. “Different how?”
Peter’s gaze darted around the cafe before landing back on you. He lowered his voice even more, a near-whisper. “You see that salt shaker over there? Next to the napkin dispenser?”
You glanced at it, then back at him, a little bemused. “Yeah…?”
He didn’t answer with words. Instead, he flicked his wrist in the smallest, subtlest motion. A thin strand of webbing shot out from the web-shooter hidden beneath his sleeve—fast, precise, and nearly invisible in the bright cafe light. The strand caught the salt shaker, lifted it smoothly into the air, and deposited it gently right in front of you on the table.
Your eyes widened. The highlighter slipped from your fingers and clattered onto your notebook.
Before you could speak—before you could laugh it off or call him crazy—Peter leaned in closer, his voice urgent but soft.
“I’m Spider-Man.”
The words hung between you for a heartbeat. Your lips parted, but no sound came out at first. Instead of the scoff or nervous laugh he’d half-expected, you stared at the salt shaker now sitting innocently in front of you, then back at his face. The wariness in your expression shifted—still concerned, still confused—but there was a spark of something else now. Openness. Curiosity winning out over disbelief, at least for the moment.
The noise of the cafe faded into a dull hum.
“Peter… what—” you whispered.
“No one else remembers me,” he cut in, the words tumbling out in a desperate, messy rush. It was the most important part, the core of everything. “No one. My best friend, Ned? He doesn’t know who I am. My… my girlfriend, MJ. She thinks I’m just a random, friendly neighbor. My aunt… May’s…” He choked on the name, the grief raw and fresh as the day it happened. “My aunt is gone, and it’s like… It’s like I was never her nephew.”
Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, hot and stinging. He hadn’t let himself cry about it, not really. There hadn’t been time. There was always a car to stop, a cat to rescue—something to keep him moving, to keep the silence at bay. But now, sitting across from the only person on the planet who knew his name, the dam finally broke.
“I exist. I’m right here. But to everyone else, it’s like I was erased.”
He looked at you then—truly looked at you. Not as a clue or a potential solution, but as a person. A person he had sat behind in history class. A person he’d never bothered to know. A person whose quiet existence had somehow, miraculously, survived a cosmic rewrite.
“I’m sorry,” he added, his voice cracking. “I’m so sorry I’m unloading this on you. It’s just… it’s been a year. A year of… this. And then I randomly run into you, and you say my name like it’s nothing. I just… I have to know. Why you? Why is it you remember when the people who loved me most… don’t?”
Silence stretched for so long that Peter was sure you were going to get up and walk away. He braced for the polite rejection, the slow, careful retreat. He’d scared you. He was a freak.
But you didn’t move.
Instead, you reached across the table, your movements slow and deliberate, and gently picked up the salt shaker. You turned it over in your hands, fingers tracing its cool glass surface as if it held all the secrets of the universe. Your focus was absolute.
Then you looked up, eyes clear.
“Okay,” you said. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t disbelief. It was acceptance. A starting point. “Okay. I believe you.”
Peter’s breath hitched. He stared, utterly poleaxed. That was it? After everything he’d just confessed, after the impossible demonstration… you just… believed him?
“You… you do?” he managed to croak out.
“Kinda, sorta,” you affirmed, setting the salt shaker down with a soft click. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m honestly still processing the fact that you snatched a salt shaker with a… spider-string thingy. But I believe that you believe it. And honestly?” You gestured vaguely between the two of you. “This entire situation is so far outside my understanding of the world that I’m more inclined to believe the weirdly intense guy from my high school is a forgotten superhero than I am to ever understand organic chemistry. So, yeah. I believe you.”
He didn’t realize you were being sarcastic, a little, until the ghost of a smile touched your lips. It was so genuine, so unforced, that it brought back a flood of memories of MJ—of the way she’d looked at the world, at him, with that same dry, sharp humor.
Your gaze softened as you took in his tear-streaked face, the raw grief etched around his eyes. Pity. He used to hate pity, but coming from you, it didn’t feel condescending. It felt like… empathy.
“Do you want a hug?” You asked softly, so quietly he almost didn’t hear it over the hiss of the espresso machine. “You look like you could really use one.”
Peter flinched. Physical contact. It had been so long. His last real hug had been May. Since then, any touch was accidental, fleeting—a bump on the subway, a handshake when re-introducing himself to his best friend. It all felt like being touched through a thick pane of glass.
But you were just… there. Offering. Like the kind of person who gives their umbrella to a stranger in a downpour. It made him wonder why he never really noticed you in high school, why he was always so wrapped up in his own drama that he missed the quiet kindness radiating from the girl two rows ahead.
“Yeah, actually,” he whispered, the words catching in his throat. “That… that would be nice.”
You stood up without a word, walked around the tiny table, and put your arms around him. It was awkward—you half-bent over him while he sat, your books and bag taking up the spare chair. It wasn’t a perfect embrace. But it was warm. And it was real.
He rested his forehead against your shoulder, the worn denim of your jacket scratchy against his skin, and for the first time in a year, the crushing weight of solitude didn’t feel like it was going to break him.
He felt your hand awkwardly pat his back in a gentle, rhythmic motion. He took a shaky breath, inhaling the faint scent of your laundry detergent and old paper from your books. It was grounding.
For the first time since the world forgot him, Peter Parker no longer had to carry it all alone.
Even if you only believed a sliver of the impossible truth right now, that sliver felt like the entire world.
Synopsis: Overwhelmed with grief and loneliness following the loss of half of all life, you reminisce on your life and the memories of your adopted father, while awaiting a sign that he might return home.
WC: 1032
Category: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Angst With a Happy Ending, Post-Infinity War, Adopted!Reader, Reader is Fourteen. {TW: Mentions of Potential Loss, Grief, Flashbacks}
When it comes to Tony, I live for those father-daughter tropes.
『••✎••』
The New York penthouse hummed with its usual low symphony of distant traffic and the faint, ever-present whir of FRIDAY’s subsystems, but tonight those sounds felt like static against the ache in your chest. You were fourteen—fifteen in three weeks—though the milestone felt as hollow as the half-finished robotics project scattered across your desk. Tony had been gone for twenty-one days. Twenty-one days of empty spaces at the breakfast table, of Pepper’s strained smiles, of a world that kept spinning on an axis that no longer felt quite right.
You pushed back from the desk, the chair squealing in protest through the quiet room. Your gaze fell on the gauntlet resting innocently on its charging stand. It wasn’t the full suit, just the hand and forearm—a prototype Tony had let you tinker with, a piece of him you could still touch. Your fingers ghosted over the cool metal, tracing a familiar path you had followed a hundred times before. This was your last resort. A foolish, desperate hope.
Closing your eyes, you focused, pouring every ounce of your will, every scrap of grief and longing, into that connection. Come home. It wasn’t a shout but a silent, resonant plea—a vibration sent across the cosmos. Dad, just come home.
And it was funny, because before the threat of a purple alien and half the population turning to dust, you had never said the words out loud. Tony was “Dad,” a fact as simple and solid as the ground beneath your feet, a title that lived in the space between your ribs—unspoken but absolute. You’d both known. Words had always felt clumsy and redundant, like describing the color blue to someone who could already see it. But now, with the silence so vast, the unsaid felt like a physical weight pressing against your lungs. Come home so I can say it. So I can tell you.
Your eyes caught the dinky drone hovering silently in the corner of your room, its single red light blinking like a patient heartbeat. You’d named it ‘Pip’ after a character in an old book back at the foster home—a scrawny, lost kid who found a fortune. The name felt right.
You had built Pip from nothing—just a rusted box of scraps and cast-off parts—back when all you had was the care system and the ghost of a mother you barely remembered. It was a small, stubborn piece of defiance in a world that had already decided you were nothing. Then came the outreach program. The Stark Industries internship you never should have qualified for. The way Tony had looked at your drone—not with the laughing, dismissive glances you were used to, but with a sharp, calculating interest that saw the wiring, the innovation, the something out of nothing.
He had seen you.
Within a month, you went from foster kid to “ward.” Within six, you were sleeping in this room, in this bed, with the promise of a family that felt too big, too bright, too good to be true.
You had built Pip to prove you existed. Tony had used Pip to prove you belonged.
Of course, he had his moments. Like the time he decided it was a good idea to take a twelve-year-old to a bar in Madrid to watch illegal boxing as a “cultural experience”—and things went, predictably, south. That was your first real lesson in “Stark Branding”: get into trouble, then create a diversion so extravagant and loud that no one remembered you were there in the first place. Pepper was still mad about that one.
Or the time you were thirteen and had been holed up in the workshop for almost two days, surviving on stale Pop-Tarts and pure spite while trying to crack a new coding algorithm. He’d found you asleep on the floor, drooling on a keyboard. And instead of waking you up like a normal human being, he made a 3D model of your face, projected it onto the ceiling, and had it belt out “Good Morning” from Singin’ in the Rain at full volume.
You’d jumped a foot in the air, heart hammering, convinced you were being attacked by some kind of digital ghost—only to find him leaning against the doorway, sipping coffee, wearing that infuriatingly smug grin. You still regretted not throwing a wrench at him.
But then there was the day he saved you from that hot-headed Killian. Or the all-nighter he pulled because he knew your insomnia had been bad that week, and he built you a custom sound system that mimicked the exact frequency of rain hitting a tin roof—the sound you’d once told him helped you sleep.
He was a walking contradiction: a selfish, self-absorbed, brilliant mess of a man who had somehow, against all logic, become your North Star.
The gauntlet on your desk remained inert. The connection you sought was a one-way street, a message sent into the void. You let your hand fall away, a heavy sigh escaping your lips. The silence crashed back in, thicker than before. Defeated, you let your head thunk against the desk, the cool wood offering a small comfort against your forehead.
Twenty-one days about to become twenty-two.
Except little did you know that, within the hour, you would be jolted awake from a deep sleep by a loud, familiar rumble—the sound of a ship entering the atmosphere. You would stumble outside in nothing but your slippers and a ratty old band t-shirt, joining the others who had spent these long weeks with you in the house. There, you would see a ship that looked more like a donut, a rescue pod, and an older, weary Tony Stark who could barely stand.
And you would run. You would run like the world was ending. You would throw your arms around him, burying your face in the torn fabric of his suit and breathing him in. For the first time, the word would finally break free—a choked, desperate whisper against his chest.
“Dad.”
And he—weak and broken but finally, finally home—would hold you as tightly as he could manage. You would feel the rumble of his voice as he whispered back the words you had waited twenty-one long days to hear.
Synopsis: He believed the entire world had forgotten Peter Parker, until the girl he never spoke to in class said his name. [Gif Creds: manny-jacinto]
WC: 1026
Category: Slight Fluff, Hurt/Comfort
First Peter Parker fic in celebration of the trailer drop ✨💃
『••✎••』
His face changed in an instant.
The easy, half-apologetic smile Peter had been wearing—sorry, my bad, let me help—froze, then cracked. His brown eyes widened, pupils blowing out like he’d been hit with a flashbang. The color drained from his already pale cheeks, leaving the faint acne scars and the sheen of nervous sweat stark against his skin. His mouth parted, lips forming a silent what? before any sound could escape.
You blinked up at him, crouched on the grimy New York sidewalk, one hand steadying your precariously tall stack of books, the other hovering over the scattered ones at your feet. The world kept moving—the rumble of the subway beneath the pavement, the wail of a distant siren, the shuffle of pedestrians flowing around the two of you like water around stones. But in the sudden, suffocating vacuum between you and him, all of that noise simply dissolved.
"Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry," he’d been saying just a second ago, a familiar, breathless rush. He’d bumped into you—a classic traffic jam on the sidewalk—and your world had tipped sideways. Physics took over. Textbooks on organic chemistry and literary theory splayed out across the concrete like a fan.
He remembered you. He was sure of it. You sat two rows ahead and one to the left in Mr. Harrison’s history class. You never spoke, but he knew you were one of the smartest kids in the room, your hand perpetually in the air while he was usually trying to calculate if he had enough web fluid for patrol later that night. He’d seen you in the halls—a quiet, focused presence that never seemed to intersect with the chaotic orbit of himself, MJ, and Ned.
You smiled, a small, polite curve of your lips as you both reached for the same copy of The Great Gatsby. Your fingers had brushed.
"It’s okay, happens all the time." You had said, gathering the last book and tucking it into your stack. Then you looked him in the eye, a brief, friendly glance of acknowledgment, and said the words that had just short-circuited his entire nervous system.
"See you around, Peter."
And just like that, the universe tilted on its axis.
You’d pushed yourself to your feet, adjusting your bag, giving him another polite smile before turning to merge back into the river of people on the sidewalk. The moment was over—a simple, forgettable bump with a vague acquaintance from high school.
Except it wasn’t.
Wait.
His lungs seized. The name echoed in the hollow of his chest, a ghost of a sound, but it was the most real thing he’d heard in an eternity. Peter. Not "hey, kid" or "that guy" or the frustrated sigh of a landlord who never knew his renter’s name. Peter. Said with the casual familiarity of someone who had always known it.
A frantic, desperate energy seized him. He couldn’t let you go. He couldn’t let you walk away and vanish back into the faceless crowd, leaving him to wonder if he’d finally, truly lost it.
"Wait!"
He shot forward, a burst of speed that felt more like a spider’s leap than a human’s jog. He caught your arm just above the elbow. It was a gentle touch, barely any pressure, but you stopped instantly, turning back to him with a look of surprise, your brow furrowed. Your books wobbled in your arms.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat in a silent room. He leaned in, not caring that he was blocking the flow of foot traffic, that a businessman had to sidestep him with an annoyed grunt. All that mattered was your face, your confused eyes, and the five letters he needed to hear again.
"Wait," he repeated, his voice raspy, thin. "What… what did you say?"
Your confusion deepened, a small line creasing between your brows. You glanced from his wild-eyed face down to where he was still touching your sleeve, then back up again.
"Uh…" you hesitated, clearly thrown by the intensity of his reaction. "I just said, ‘see you around’?"
"No, before that. The… the last part." He could barely breathe the words out. Please. Please say it again. Let him know he wasn’t hallucinating, that the loneliness hadn’t finally cracked him open.
You blinked, slow and deliberate, as if trying to decipher a foreign language. A flicker of something like concern crossed your features.
"Peter?" you said, his name a soft, questioning thing in the city noise. "Are you okay?"
The world shattered around him.
It wasn’t a question of how. He didn’t care how. Not yet. The sheer, overwhelming fact of it crashed over him like a tidal wave. The weight of a year’s worth of invisibility, of nonexistence, suddenly lifted. Air rushed into lungs that had been starved for so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to breathe. A tremor ran through his entire body—a violent, shuddering release of tension he hadn’t even realized he was holding.
He didn’t answer your question. He couldn’t. All he could do was stare, his grip on your sleeve slackening until his fingers just brushed the fabric of your jacket. He was looking at you, but he wasn’t seeing a college student with a stack of books anymore. He was seeing an anchor. A lighthouse in a fog that had swallowed him whole.
A shaky, disbelieving laugh escaped his lips—a broken sound that held the ghost of a sob. He stared at you as if you’d just handed him the entire universe, piece by precious piece.
You, completely unaware of the magnitude of the moment—of the dam you’d just broken—just stood there. You took in the dazed look, the trembling hands, the way he was looking at you like you were a miracle.
And you just looked… concerned. Worried for the weird guy from your old high school who was currently having some kind of meltdown on a public sidewalk.
"Peter," you said again, a little firmer this time, reaching out a hesitant hand. "Seriously. Are you alright?"
And he was. For the first time in what felt like forever, he was more than alright.
Synopsis: Months after you risked everything to smuggle Bucky Barnes into your life, the two of you have settled into a fragile routine hidden in plain sight. He's still haunted by nightmares and gaps in his memory, but he's talking more, trusting a little, and you're determined to give him slivers of normalcy. Today, that means a simple grocery run.
The feminine urge to make this a oneshot series all about Bucky in those two years of hiding is STRONGGG
『••✎••』
The fluorescent lights buzz overhead like distant wasps, bathing the produce section in a sterile glow. Pyramids of apples and towers of bananas gleam too perfectly beneath them, almost artificial in their perfection. Your cart rattles softly as you nudge it forward, one stubborn wheel catching just enough to make you adjust your grip. Beside you, he moves like smoke—close enough that the sleeve of his henley brushes your arm, yet never quite making full contact. The black cap sits low over his brow, shadowing those storm-blue eyes you first glimpsed months ago in the Smithsonian. His dark hair curls just past his ears, unkempt, and the faint scruff along his jaw catches the light whenever he turns his head. He wears the thin black gloves you bought him, concealing the metal beneath, but you notice the subtle flex of his left hand inside the fabric—a quiet signal that the world still feels too loud, too bright, too present.
You never speak his name aloud here. Not in public. In your mind, though, it beats steadily: Bucky. James Buchanan Barnes. The man you stole from both the government and Hydra because you couldn’t erase the image of him standing before his own memorial, searching for a version of himself he no longer recognized.
The memory surfaces every time the cart rounds a corner, rising like steam from hot asphalt. It had been a slow Tuesday at the museum, the air heavy with floor polish and faded glory. You’d lingered too long by the Captain America exhibit, drawn to the black-and-white photographs and the bronze plaque that read:
Sergeant James "Bucky" Barnes, 1917-1945.
And there he was—alive, impossibly—standing motionless before his section, shoulders hunched inside a worn jacket, eyes fixed on the younger face gazing back from the wall. The same blue eyes. The same sharp cheekbones. Yet the man before the photograph looked as though he were trying to solve a riddle carved into his own flesh. You watched his fingers twitch at his sides, yearning to touch the glass yet holding back, as if he didn’t trust his own hands. Something inside you cracked open in that moment.
You followed him when he slipped through a side exit, heart pounding, convincing yourself it was mere curiosity. You lost him in the crowd for thirty seconds. Then a gloved hand clamped over your mouth, and you were yanked into the narrow service alley behind the gift shop, your back slamming against cold brick. The dull edge of a knife pressed beneath your jaw. His breath came ragged against your ear, his body coiled like a spring about to snap.
In that frozen heartbeat, he spoke—not in English, but in sharp, guttural Russian, the words tumbling out low and urgent, laced with the kind of precision that spoke of decades spent learning languages the way other men learn to kill. You caught none of it except the cadence: clipped commands, a question edged with desperation. One of Hydra’s tongues, you realized later—Russian, the language that had shaped so much of his programming, the one he defaulted to when every instinct screamed threat, recapture, compliance. He thought you were one of them. A handler. A tracker. Someone sent to drag him back into the ice and the chair.
His grip on your arm was iron—metal beneath the glove, vibrating with restrained force—but when your only response was wide-eyed silence, a frantic shake of your head, the confusion hit him like a physical blow. His brows drew together beneath the cap’s shadow, the knife wavering for the first time. Those storm-blue eyes searched your face, really searched, stripping away the assumption layer by layer. No recognition. No orders barked in code. Just a civilian who spoke only English, staring back at him with fear and something else—something soft and unguarded that made his shoulders drop a fraction, the blade lowering inch by agonizing inch.
He released you slowly, stepping back as though the proximity burned. The knife vanished into his sleeve. For a long moment he simply stood there, chest rising and falling too fast, calculating. You could see the gears turning behind those fractured eyes—the quick, brilliant mind that had once mapped battlefields and now mapped escape routes, survival probabilities, the thousand ways this encounter could end in blood. He was piecing it together faster than anyone should: you weren’t armed, weren’t trained, weren’t reciting activation sequences. You were just… there. A glitch in the system. A random variable that didn’t fit the pattern of pursuit.
And in that glitch, something shifted. The terror in his posture didn’t vanish, but it fractured into something more human—uncertainty, exhaustion, a flicker of desperate hope he clearly hated himself for feeling. His left hand flexed again, plates shifting silently under leather, and when he finally spoke in English, the accent was Brooklyn rough around the edges, worn thin by decades of silence and reprogramming.
“Why?” One word. Raw. Like it cost him everything to ask.
You didn’t have a clean answer then. You still don’t, really. But you told him the truth anyway: because the man in the mural looked like he was drowning, and you couldn’t walk away from that.
He’d stared at you then, in that dim alley, with something cracked wider in his expression: not relief exactly, but recognition of a different kind. You weren’t part of the machine hunting him. You were just a person who’d seen too much and decided to act on it anyway.
That was the beginning. You’d given him your address scribbled on a museum map, told him the back door code, promised nothing more than a couch and time. He’d shown up at 3 a.m. two nights later, soaked from rain, silent as death, metal arm hidden under layers of stolen clothes. For weeks he barely spoke—mostly nods, single words, the occasional murmured “thank you” when you left food outside his door like offerings to a ghost. Nightmares tore through him every few hours; you’d hear the choked gasps, the metal fist slamming into the couch armrest hard enough to splinter wood. You’d sit on the floor beside him until dawn sometimes, not touching, just breathing in the same space until the shaking eased.
Now, months later, the words come easier. Not easy—never easy—but they exist. Sentences. Fragments of humor so dry they crackle. Frustration when a memory slips away again, when he stares at his own reflection in the toaster and mutters, “Still don’t know that guy.” But progress is measured in the small things: the way he no longer flinches at the microwave beep, the way he sometimes lingers in the kitchen doorway just to watch you chop onions, like the normalcy of it is a language he’s slowly relearning.
Today is one of those small things made bigger.
You pause at the stone-fruit display, fingers trailing over the smooth skin of plums. You’d read—late at night, scrolling medical sites and survivor forums—that certain fruits might help with neural repair, antioxidants, memory pathways. Plums especially. Blackberries too. You’d laughed at yourself in the dark, playing amateur neurologist for a man whose brain had been rewritten more times than most people change addresses. Still, you’d added both to the list.
You set two pints of blackberries in the cart, then reach for the plums. His gloved hand beats you to it. He lifts one carefully, rolling it between thumb and forefinger like it’s fragile evidence. The motion is slow, deliberate. He brings it closer, inhales once—barely noticeable—and his brow furrows beneath the cap.
“Smells… sharper than I remember,” he says, voice pitched so low it’s almost lost under the store’s ambient hum. Not quite a question. More like he’s testing the observation out loud, seeing if it holds weight.
You nod, keeping your tone light. “They’re supposed to be good for you. For thinking. For… remembering.”
He doesn’t flinch at the word the way he used to. Instead he exhales through his nose, sets the plum down beside the blackberries with exaggerated care, like he’s handling live ammunition. Then, without prompting, he reaches for another pint of each and places them in the cart himself.
The small victory of it—of him choosing, of him adding to the cart without being asked—settles warm and quiet in your chest. You don’t comment on it. You know better than to spotlight progress he’s still learning to trust in himself. Instead you nudge the cart forward again, the stubborn wheel catching once more before smoothing out. He falls into step without a word, close enough now that the heat of him brushes your left side like a second shadow.
The cereal aisle is next, brighter somehow, the boxes screaming color from every shelf. Cartoon mascots grin down at you both with unnerving cheer. He slows without meaning to, gaze drifting along the row like he’s trying to decode an enemy battle map written in sugar and marketing. His left hand stays tucked near his ribs, fingers curled inside the glove, but his right drifts out—hesitant—until the tips brush a bright orange box of something called ‘Frosted Flakes.’ He pulls back almost immediately, as though the cardboard might burn.
“Everything’s louder,” he mutters. The words are so soft you almost miss them over the distant beep of a register. “Even the food.”
You glance at him sidelong. His jaw is set, the muscle ticking once. The cap brim has dipped lower since you entered, shadowing more than just his eyes now—it hides the way his mouth tightens every time someone passes too close. A teenage boy on a phone nearly clips his shoulder; Bucky sidesteps without looking, body angling to keep you between him and the aisle traffic. Protective reflex. Automatic. You wonder if he even notices he’s doing it.
You reach for the plain steel-cut oats—nothing flashy, nothing sweet—and drop them into the cart. “These were around in the forties,” you say casually. “Same recipe, just better packaging.”
He huffs. Not quite a laugh, but close enough that the sound catches in your throat. “Better packaging,” he echoes, dry as dust. “That’s one way to put it.” His gaze flicks to a neon box promising ‘explosive berry flavor’ and his nose wrinkles, just a fraction. “Kids eat this now?”
“Some do. Most regret it later.”
Another almost-laugh—more breath than sound. He picks up the steel-cut oats you chose, turns the canister over in his hands, studies the nutrition label like it’s classified intel. His thumb traces the fine print slowly. You can see him trying to remember if oatmeal ever meant comfort to him, if there was once a version of Sunday mornings that included cinnamon and a cracked kitchen table and Steve complaining about the lumps. The trying shows in the faint crease between his brows, the way his shoulders inch up toward his ears before he forces them down again.
He sets the canister back in the cart. Doesn’t say anything else. But he stays close.
You move through canned goods, dairy, the bakery section where the smell of fresh bread hits like a memory neither of you can claim. He lingers near the sourdough loaves longer than necessary, breathing in deep, eyes half-closed for a second before he catches himself and looks away. You pretend not to notice.
It’s in the pasta aisle that the shift happens.
You’re comparing two jars of marinara—glass versus plastic, price per ounce—when you catch Bucky in your peripheral vision shifting his weight. His posture changes in an instant: shoulders squaring, chin dipping lower under the cap’s brim, the subtle coil of muscle beneath the henley like a wire pulled taut. He doesn’t look at you. His gaze is fixed on a point past your shoulder, down the aisle.
A man stands there—mid-thirties, hoodie up, hands shoved deep in pockets, lingering too long by the endcap display of imported olive oils. He’s not shopping. His eyes keep sliding toward you, then away, then back again. The kind of look that isn’t casual curiosity. It’s calculated. Lingering. The same way the guy in the dairy aisle had stared earlier, but this one feels different—sharper, more persistent. He shifts his stance, takes one slow step closer, mouth curling into something that wants to be a smile but lands closer to a leer.
Your skin prickles. You set the jar down harder than intended, glass clinking against the metal shelf.
Bucky doesn’t hesitate.
He steps forward in one fluid motion, positioning himself squarely between you and the stranger. The cart is left behind, abandoned mid-aisle. His body language does the talking first: broad shoulders rolling forward just enough to fill the space, feet planted wide, gloved hands loose at his sides but ready. The cap still shadows most of his face, but what’s visible—the hard line of his jaw, the unblinking blue stare—carries the weight of a warning shot.
The man falters. His fake smile twitches, eyes darting from Bucky’s face to the way his left arm hangs a little too still, a little too deliberate. You can almost hear the mental math the stranger is doing: sizing up the broad shoulders, the quiet menace radiating off the man who just stepped into his path like a wall coming up without warning. The leer fades fast, replaced by the uneasy flicker of someone who’s suddenly aware they’ve miscalculated.
You couldn’t see his face now that he stood with his back to you, but you didn’t need to. The change in the air was enough.
The stranger’s posture wilted like paper held too close to flame. His shoulders hunched inward, hands sliding deeper into his hoodie pockets as though they might protect him. He took one half-step back—then another—eyes flicking nervously between Bucky’s unmoving frame and the exit sign glowing red at the far end of the aisle. No words passed between them. Bucky didn’t need them. The silence he carried was louder than any threat he could’ve voiced.
After three long heartbeats, the man muttered something under his breath—too low to catch, probably better that way—and turned on his heel. His sneakers squeaked against the linoleum as he walked away too fast to look casual, shoulders rounded, head ducked like he’d just remembered an urgent appointment on the other side of the store.
Bucky didn’t move until the man disappeared around the corner toward the registers.
Only then did the tension leach from his frame in slow, measured degrees. His shoulders dropped a fraction. The coiled readiness in his spine eased. He exhaled once—long and controlled—before turning back to you.
His eyes found yours immediately beneath the cap’s brim. They were still sharp, still carrying the afterimage of that cold precision, but the ice had thawed the instant the threat walked away. What remained was something softer, something rawer—concern folded into protectiveness so tightly you could almost feel the shape of it pressing against your ribs.
His arm rested loosely on the shelf beside your head—not caging you, never that, but close enough that the faint warmth of him cut through the store’s over-conditioned air. The position was casual to anyone watching from a distance, just a man reaching for something on the high rack. But you knew better. You knew the way his body angled itself like a shield, the way he glanced behind his shoulder just once more, scanning the aisle for any lingering shadow before his gaze settled fully on you again.
You feel the question in the way he looks at you—quiet, searching, the same way he used to study your face back in those first weeks when every shadow felt like a handler and every kindness felt like a trap. In the moment, though, your feelings were not your concern.
His were.
So you beat him to the question, twisting it right back before he could voice the worry already carving lines around his eyes.
“You okay?” you ask instead, voice soft enough that it stays between the two of you, swallowed by the low drone of refrigeration units and distant cart wheels.
He doesn’t answer right away.
Instead his gaze drops to the space between you—lingering on the way your fingers still rest against the cool glass jar of marinara you’d set down too hard earlier. The faint tremor in your hand hasn’t quite settled yet; he notices. Of course he notices. Those eyes miss nothing anymore, not the way they used to when the world was still too fractured to hold steady.
His throat works once, a slow swallow. The glove creaks softly as his left hand flexes—plates shifting beneath leather like distant thunder—and then he reaches past you, slow and deliberate, to nudge the abandoned jar back into place on the shelf. The motion brings him closer; you catch the faint scent of rain-soaked cotton and the clean bite of the soap you’d bought him last week, the one that smells faintly of cedar because the label promised ‘calming notes.’ He’d rolled his eyes at the description when you showed it to him, but he’d used it anyway.
“I’m fine,” he says at last. The words come out rougher than usual, scraped raw by whatever adrenaline still lingers in his bloodstream. He doesn’t sound fine. He sounds like a man who just remembered he still knows how to become a weapon in under three seconds flat. “You?”
The question is quiet, almost swallowed by the hum of the freezer cases two aisles over. But it’s there—steady, insistent, the same tone he uses when he wakes gasping from another nightmare and finds you already sitting on the floor beside the couch, waiting.
You meet his gaze without flinching, letting him see the truth of it in the quiet set of your mouth. “I’m okay,” you say, and mean it. The tremor in your fingers has already begun to fade, smoothed out by the simple fact of him standing there—solid, present, choosing to be the barrier instead of the blade. “Thanks to you.”
Something flickers across his face then, too quick to name. Not pride. Not relief. Something smaller, more fragile: the ghost of acknowledgment that he did something right, that the instincts Hydra tried to burn into him can still serve something other than violence. His lips press into a thin line, the barest nod the only outward sign he accepts the thanks at all.
He doesn’t step back right away. His arm stays braced on the shelf a moment longer, close enough that if you leaned forward even an inch your forehead would brush the wool of his sleeve. The position feels less like protection now and more like tether—like he’s reminding himself you’re still here, still breathing evenly, still safe. You can almost hear the internal tally he keeps running: threat neutralized, civilian unharmed, no cameras caught the stare-down, no raised voices, no scene. Checklist complete. Stand down.
Finally he lowers his arm, fingers brushing the outside of yours as he does—accidental, maybe, or maybe not. The glove is cool against your skin; the contact lasts half a heartbeat before he pulls away to grip the cart handle for you. The stubborn wheel protests when he starts pushing, but he adjusts without comment, guiding it smoothly around the corner toward the registers like nothing happened.
You fall into step beside him. The pasta aisle feels wider now, the fluorescent buzz a little less oppressive. He doesn’t speak again until you’re in line at checkout, the cart wedged between you and the conveyor belt. A teenage cashier with purple hair and a name tag that reads ‘Milo’ barely glances up from scanning items. Bucky stands half a step behind you, body angled so he can see both the exit doors and the parking lot beyond the glass. Habit. Survival. You don’t comment on it.
When Milo reaches the blackberries and plums, he pauses, holding up the pint like it’s evidence. “These are really good right now,” the kid says, almost shy. “We just got a fresh shipment this morning.”
Bucky’s head tilts—just a fraction—enough that the cap brim lifts and a sliver of blue catches the light. He studies the berries in Milo’s hand the way he studied the Frosted Flakes earlier: careful, assessing, like he’s trying to decide whether the fruit itself might be part of some elaborate modern trap.
“Yeah?” His voice is low, gravel-rough, but there’s no edge to it. Just curiosity wearing a disguise. “They… help with anything?”
Milo blinks, surprised anyone’s actually asking. “Uh, good for your brain, I think. My mom’s always shoving them at me for finals week.”
Bucky exhales through his nose—almost a laugh, restrained. “Figures.” He glances at you sidelong, the corner of his mouth twitching in something dangerously close to a real smile. “Guess we’re on the right track.”
You feel the warmth climb your cheeks despite yourself. Milo finishes scanning, bags everything with quick, practiced movements, and reads off the total. You pay while Bucky lifts the heavier bags without being asked, balancing them easily in the crook of his left arm. The metal doesn’t creak under the weight; the glove hides everything. To anyone watching, he’s just a guy helping carry groceries. To you, he’s still learning how to exist in the daylight without dissolving.
Outside, the parking lot air hits cooler than the store—early evening settling in, carrying the faint promise of rain on the breeze. Streetlights are just beginning to flicker on, painting long orange stripes across the asphalt. Bucky walks on your left, the side closest to traffic, bags held in such a way that his body stays between you and the passing cars without making it obvious. You don’t point it out. You never do.
Halfway to your beat-up hatchback, he speaks again—quiet, almost lost under the distant rumble of an engine.
“I didn’t mean to… escalate.” The admission comes out halting, like he’s turning the words over in his mouth before letting them go. “Back there. In the aisle. I just—” He stops, jaw tightening. The bags shift in his grip; plastic crinkles. “Didn’t like the way he looked at you.”
You quicken your steps until you’re matching his pace exactly. “I noticed.”
He risks a glance at you then—quick, almost furtive, the way he used to look at doorways and windows in those first weeks. Checking for exits. Checking for lies. Finding neither.
“You didn’t scare me,” you add, softer. “You scared him. There’s a difference.”
He lets out a breath that might be relief or might just be air. “Still.” One word. Loaded. “Didn’t want you to see that part of me.”
You stop walking entirely. He stops too—automatic, like his gravity is tied to yours now. The parking lot lights catch the faint sheen of sweat along his hairline, the way his throat bobs when he swallows.
“I’ve already seen all the parts,” you tell him. No pity. No sugar. Just fact. “You do remember our first conversation, right?”
He doesn’t answer right away again. The bags hang forgotten in his grip for a second, plastic handles cutting faint lines into his gloved palms. His gaze drops to the cracked asphalt between your shoes—studying the oil stain there like it might hold the right words. When he finally speaks, the voice is quieter than the evening traffic rolling past the lot’s edge.
“Yeah,” he says, the single syllable rough, scraped raw. “I remember.”
You knew he hated that memory, hated the version of himself who’d pinned a stranger to a wall with a blade at her throat because trust had been burned out of him long before the fall.
You never blamed him for it. Not once.
He lifts his gaze slowly, the blue of his eyes catching the sodium glow of the parking lot lights like fractured ice beginning to melt. For a second the mask slips completely—raw vulnerability carved into the lines around his mouth, the faint tremor at the corner of his eye that he probably doesn’t even know is there. Then he blinks, and the soldier’s composure slides back into place, though it fits a little looser now than it used to.
The silence stretches long enough that the distant sound of a car alarm chirps twice somewhere across the lot. He shifts the grocery bags to his right arm—deliberately keeping the metal one free, you notice—and takes one careful step closer. Not crowding, of course, but just enough that the space between your bodies feels intentional instead of accidental.
His gloved hand lifts—slow, deliberate, the way he handles everything now that he's aware of the space he occupies, the damage he could do without meaning to. Fingers brush the worn brim of the cap, adjusting it slightly higher—not enough to expose his full face to the parking lot lights, but enough that you catch the shift in his expression when the shadow retreats a fraction. The blue of his eyes softens in the orange glow, less like fractured ice and more like the quiet surface of water after a storm has passed. He exhales once, the sound barely audible over the low hum of engines starting in distant rows.
The cap settles back into place, lower again, but the gesture feels different this time. Less like hiding. More like steadying himself before letting the next words out.
“I remember more than I let on,” he says quietly. The admission hangs between you, fragile as the first frost on glass. “Not everything. Not even close. But… pieces. Enough to know I pointed a knife at the only person who didn’t deserve it.” His jaw flexes, the muscle jumping once beneath the faint scruff. “Enough to know I don’t want to be that guy again.“
You feel the words settle somewhere deep in your chest, heavy and warm at the same time. The parking lot feels smaller suddenly, the world narrowed to the cracked asphalt under your shoes, the crinkle of grocery bags in his grip, the faint cedar scent that clings to him like a promise he’s still learning to keep.
“You’re not that guy,” you tell him, and the words come out steady, certain in a way that surprises even you. “There’s a difference between who you were forced to be and who you choose to be now.”
He doesn’t look convinced—not entirely. The line of his mouth stays tight, the kind of stubborn set that means he’s still carrying the weight of that alley memory like shrapnel lodged too deep to dig out. But he doesn’t argue. Instead he gives one slow nod, the motion small enough that someone passing by might miss it entirely. His gaze drops again, this time to the grocery bags dangling from his right hand, then lifts to scan the lot once more—habit, reflex, the soldier never quite switches off.
You start walking again, slower now, letting the silence stretch without trying to fill it. He matches your pace without effort, the bags barely swinging. The hatchback is only a few spaces away, its faded blue paint catching the first real wash of streetlight. When you reach it, you fish for your keys, but he’s already there—shifting the bags to one arm so he can open the door for you first. The gesture is so automatic, so quietly old-fashioned, that it catches in your throat for a second. He doesn’t even seem to realize he’s doing it.
You slide the key into the ignition but don’t turn it yet. Instead you twist in the seat to face him as he settles the bags carefully in the back, metal arm moving with a grace that still feels almost wrong after everything it’s been through. When he climbs into the passenger seat, the car dips slightly under his weight. He pulls the door closed with a soft click, then sits very still, gloved hands resting loose on his thighs, staring straight ahead at the dashboard like it might offer him the next line of dialogue.
The engine hasn’t started. The lot is quiet except for the occasional car door slamming somewhere far off. You let the silence sit for another beat.
“Thank you,” you say again, softer this time. “For today. For… all of it.”
His fingers curl slightly beneath yours—not closing around your hand, not yet, but enough to acknowledge the touch. “Didn’t do much,” he mutters.
“You did enough.”
He turns his head then, just enough that the cap brim lifts and you catch the full weight of those eyes again—blue gone soft at the edges, the hard precision from the aisle replaced by something quieter, more unguarded. The parking lot lights paint faint gold along the sharp line of his cheekbone, catch in the dark strands of hair that have escaped from under the wool. For a moment he looks almost impossibly young, like the man in the mural might have looked on a good day in 1943, before the war took its first real bite.
“Do you really think it’s going to work?” He asks it so quietly the words nearly dissolve into the hum of the cooling engine and the distant tick of cooling metal from nearby cars. His gaze stays fixed on the dashboard, tracing the faint cracks in the vinyl like they might spell out an answer he can trust. The question isn’t really about the plums or the blackberries. It’s about the pieces of himself he keeps losing, the ones that slip through his fingers no matter how tightly he tries to hold on.
You let the silence breathe for a second—long enough that he finally risks glancing sideways at you. The cap brim has lifted just enough in the dim interior light that you can see the uncertainty carved into the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the way his brows pinch together like he’s bracing for disappointment.
“I don’t know,” you answer honestly. No false promises. He’s had enough of those. “Maybe not the way the articles say—like some magic reset button. But I think… small things add up. A little less fog here, a memory that sticks there. And even if it doesn’t fix anything, it’s still something we do together. That matters.”
He only hummed in response, giving up on the dashboard like it had failed to deliver. The sound was low, almost lost in the quiet creak of the seat as he shifted, but it carried something new—resignation laced with the faintest thread of acceptance.
Truthfully, you were learning what “together” could mean when one of you came pre-loaded with decades of erasure and the other carried the quiet terror of being caught harboring a ghost the whole world wanted either dead or caged.
But if “together” meant grocery runs under too-bright lights, quiet confessions in parking lots, and the slow, stubborn work of rebuilding something neither of you had words for yet, then yeah—you’d take it. Every bruised plum, every half-remembered Sunday morning, every time he chose to stand between you and the world instead of disappearing into it.
For as mundane as it all was, you'd do it all over again if it meant seeing him like this. Seeing him choose the daylight, even when every instinct still screamed for shadows.
At first, Balor thought the new farmer would be a good fit for Mistria. Though you lacked experience, your determination was steadfast. You did not abhor hard work and were always ready to lend a hand with a smile on your face, no matter how tired you were. Such traits were needed for a small rural village, especially after the recent storm. You helped repair the bridge, allowing the Saturday markets to return once more. You even helped Balor deliver goods to Holt and Nora, adding a gleaming gold gloss to Balor’s purse. Yet, when Balor tried to thank you with a meal at the inn, you refused point blank. He wasn’t entirely surprised by the rejection. Most people understood him to be suspicious and secretive, but, Balor realized, you didn’t treat him any differently from the other villagers.
You didn’t grumble when Adelaid asked your help in another task to develop Mistria, even though the task would require a ridiculous number of resources. You didn’t refuse Juniper’s offer to be her guinea pig, even though you passed out more than once from her brews. There was always some artifact for the museum and a bug for Luc. You always gave the villagers want they wanted without asking anything in return. It went against everything Balor did, and he would have avoided you were it not for that one trait. You provided but never participated. Even now, Balor could see that as you drifted around the inn, half listening to the different group conversations. This was your routine. You moseyed around with your drink. If someone roped you into the conversation, you conversed pleasantly, but soon enough, you reverted back to your wanderer state. And you always left when the drink was finished.
You had now made your way over to his table and were watching the game he played with the other villagers. He could feel you standing behind him and a slight chill ran down his spine. Balor turned to greet you, but before he could say anything, a loud clamour snapped both your heads towards the bar. Hemlock was regaling the villagers with the story of how he and Josephine met, and the villagers, now half drunk, happily ate up Hemlock’s tall tales of espionage and escapades.
“Must be nice,” Balor muttered.
You turned to him, confused.
“I never missed much as a travelling merchant. But watching Hemlock, Josphine, and their kids makes one think that settling down might not be such a bad thing”.
Balor turned to you, expecting to hear the usual words of agreement, followed by a slight teasing on whether he has an eye on someone in the village.
Instead your face stilled as you watched Hemlock and Josephine. Then you turned, and in a dull voice spoke, “I suppose”.
You left before finishing your drink.
___
Balor always left your farm for last when he picked up supplies. Six months into your first year, yet still, wild trees and grass littered your farm. One had to walk through a mini forest before coming across a small clearing where your farm persisted, if it could even be called that. It was more of a garden than farm and you only had one cow who spent most of her time following you about the farm.
Balor was surprised to see you sitting on a stone bench, petting your cow. The sun had set, and, like the other villagers, you should have been indoors, in the warmth.
“Evening farmer,” he called out.
You looked at him, nodded, and gave a polite wave, but continued to pet the cow. Balor knew your attention was not on him, but the events of the last game night danced through his mind. Why had you reacted like that?
Balor looked into the bin and saw bushels of wheat, some fall flowers, and a milk churn. The wheat and flowers would sell well, but it was the milk he sought. It had become popular around Mistria with Nora and Josephine competing over it. Even the other villagers wanted some, though most got it through the inn or the general store. Balor was dying to introduce it to the Saturday merchants, and he knew it would sell well outside Mistria. But, he looked up at you, you only had the one cow and didn’t seem all that interested in raking a profit. Again, he wondered if the young baroness and baron made the right decision in bringing you to Mistria. From the quality of your produce, you clearly understood farming, but you barely produced enough to make a profit.
As he hefted the wheat over his shoulders, he turned and saw you had already picked up the milk churn and flowers.
“I’ll help you,” was all you mentioned.
“I suppose, I’ll have to start bringing my cart to your farm,” Balor said, then wondered if it was too obvious a hint. But you just smiled.
The cow followed behind the two of you as you made the short walk to Balor’s cart. As Balor put away your produce, he noticed you peering into his stall, lingering around. The cow was drinking from the stream.
“Anything caught your eye?” he asked, trying to guess what the item was before you could respond.
“No,” you replied.
An uncomfortable silence passed between you two. Balor wondered what could have possibly happened to scramble the tender relations that only recently formed. Were you not allies? When you helped him out, you asked questions, but didn’t prod too much. Either you understood that some topics were best left in storage, or you didn’t care. He assumed the latter and found your straightforward approach a genuine comfort. A comfort that grew when he found himself asking for your advice. An odd request and even odder requestor. Should he comply though? He had a reputation to live up to and a profit to maintain. Though your honest opinion of it being a shady request didn’t deter him, Balor was surprised by your concern for his wellbeing.
Be careful. I’m sure Hemlock and Josephine would miss your presence, not to mention your role play group.
But he had just laughed and supposed it was because of the time and money he spent at the inn. The request kept him busy and away from most people, including you. Yet, he was there Friday night, weary, and a little more wiser. Balor had been focused on the game, but his eyes drifted up every time someone entered the inn. When you finally arrived, he saw how your eyes searched until they singled him out and the quiet exhale as you gave him a grin and a nod which he returned with a wink and thumbs up. As ease settled between you since that moment in the inn. So what did he say to mess things up so fast?
“Balor,” you called, pulling him out of his thoughts.
“Hmm?”
“Hold out your hand”.
“Why’s that?” Balor asked. Though his curiosity was piqued, he couldn’t help but slip back into his guard, waiting to defend.
Not bothering to respond, you held out your hands. They were clean though Balor could see the dirt marks around your fingernails. He could see the callousness beginning to form and the slight tightness of your skin from the dry air. Then his eyes noticed what was encased in your palm. A ruby. It was uncut, but his experienced eyes could tell it would fetch a tidy sum.
“Is this another item to ship? Or do you want me to send it to get cut?” he asked.
“It’s for you”.
Balor snapped his eyes towards yours. They were clear and serious.
“What for?”
“To apologize for my behaviour last Friday. I made you the target of my emotions. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that”.
“You hardly took out your emotions, and ruby seems like overcompensation. Are you planning on repeating your outburst in the future?”
The unexpected ribbing pulled a half-smile and snort out of you, but the tension was immediately cut.
“You didn’t deserve it”.
“Yes,” Balor agreed as he pushed his hair back haughtily. “There are a lot of treatments I don’t deserve. Too bad I don’t get a gem every time it occurs. I would never have to work again”.
You raised your eyebrows as you took in this new fact about the merchant.
“But,” Balor continued, “given the worth of the item, I can only accept this if you plan on showing more emotions in the future”.
“I don’t plan on doing that”.
Balor shrugged, folded his arms, and leaned against his cart. “Then, I cannot accept this”.
The truth was, Balor didn’t want any gift. He didn’t know what he did or said that upset you, so he could hardly accept such an expensive item. Balor knew he was the last person to go poking his nose into someone else’s business. But, he realized, he at least had a reputation. People knew he loved the inn. Loved his work. Loved travelling. Loved gems. They pulled him into community and social events. They relied on him, conversed with him, but also gossiped about him. They got annoyed with him and his secretive dealings and mysterious past. They may even dislike him at times. But what presence did you have in Mistria?
“You drive a hard bargain”.
Balor grinned.
“I’m a merchant”.
He knew next to nothing about you, he knew you would take his offer. Though he held no misgivings towards you, to you, refusal would still put you in his debt. And that, you, a provider, could not accept.
You let out a deep sign and placed the ruby on his cart.
“I’ll try. Take it or leave it”.
As you walked towards your cow, Balor called out, “Why don’t you start with telling me what upset you?”
You turned back to him with a cocky grin. “Sorry, the agreement was to show my emotions, not explain them. You’ll have to try and lure me in again, Mr. Merchant”.
Balor laughed and watched you until you disappeared back into your farm. This would be his most interesting deal.
Synopsis: After everything, the Wheelers' basement seems to be the only place left to breathe some nights. But when you climb through the window at two a.m., you don’t expect to find someone already there—curled on the couch, holding the letters he wrote her: the girl he lost and can’t stop missing.
I saw Finn in a robe and immediately knew in my angsty heart what needed to be done. That being said, I really need to chill out on the angst. All my ST ideas have only been that so far 😭
『••✎••』
The basement window sticks the way it always does—warped wood, swollen from years of Indiana humidity and secrets pressed into its frame. You have to lift it slow, inch by inch, holding your breath like the house itself might wake up and scold you for still needing this place.
Cold air slides in first. Then your hands. Then you.
Your sneakers land softly on the concrete, a sound so familiar it almost hurts. The basement smells the same as it always has—dust and old cardboard, something faintly metallic, like pennies rubbed together. The dehumidifier hums in the corner, steady and imperfect, never quite doing its job but trying anyway. You shut the window behind you, easing it down until it clicks into place, sealing you back inside the dark.
This is where sleep happens now. Or at least—this is where it can.
Your nightmares don't follow you down here as easily. Maybe they get lost among the old board games and forgotten bike parts, tangled up in memories of dice clattering and flashlights held under chins. The basement still feels like a pocket outside of time, untouched by the things that crawled out of the ground and tried to tear your world open. It's where you learned how to be strong. Where you learned how to sit still with fear and call it normal.
You toe off your shoes and pad forward, already picturing the couch—its sagging middle, the way the springs protest if you shift too fast. You've slept there so many times it feels like borrowed ownership. Like the basement recognizes you now. Like it expects you.
But what you didn't expect was the silhouette already there.
At first, it's just a shape on the couch—long limbs folded in on themselves, shoulders slumped forward. He's wearing something oversized, striped fabric draped awkwardly around him. His dad's old robe, you realize distantly. The one that always smelled faintly like aftershave and coffee grounds, like adulthood and routines that never quite fit.
Mike Wheeler looks smaller like this.
Curled into the corner of the couch, knees drawn up, dark hair falling into his eyes in uneven strands. The lamplight catches the edge of his face, softening it—rounder somehow, younger. Like the boy who used to sit cross-legged on the floor and argue about campaign rules with a fierceness that felt like faith.
But faith got burned away in the end, didn't it?
He doesn't hear you. Too lost, maybe. His hands hover over something in his lap—something delicate, something folded too many times. Letters. You can see the creases from here, the way the paper buckles in on itself like it's trying to hide.
Your throat tightens.
You know those letters. Everyone knew about those letters. The ones he wrote on lined notebook paper with a ballpoint pen that smudged when his hands got too sweaty. The ones he folded into thirds and tucked into envelopes, hoping they'd find her somehow, even when mail to Lenora Hills felt like throwing paper into a black hole.
Those were the days when hope was still a currency you could spend.
Now they're just… artifacts. Relics from a life before she became only a memory. Before her death hollowed out the corners of Mike's eyes and left behind something else—something restless and raw. You remember sitting with the group—with him—for hours after it happened. He didn't cry. He didn't speak. He just sat there, hands in his lap, knuckles white. And you thought—if you could just reach out, if you could just tell him something—
But you couldn't. Because you didn't have the words either.
The silence between you now is heavy. You don't want to startle him. You don't want him to know you saw this. This private grief, laid out like evidence.
Mike shifts, fingers brushing over the ink like he's trying to feel her presence through the page. His breath catches, just a little. And that's what does it—that small, quiet fracture. You can't leave.
Your feet move before you decide to move them. One step forward. Then another. The concrete is cold under your socks, and you can feel it seeping into your bones, but you keep going, slow and steady, until you're standing just behind the couch.
He still doesn't notice. Too focused on the letters. Too lost in the past.
You reach out, fingers hovering just above his shoulder. The air feels thin here. Electric with all the things unsaid.
"Mike," you whisper.
He flinches, whole body tensing like he's been shocked. His head jerks up, eyes wide and dark. For a second, you don't recognize him—the panic in his face is so sharp, so unguarded. Like he thought—maybe, just for a second—that she was back.
Then recognition dawns. The panic softens, but not by much. His shoulders slump again, heavier this time.
"Oh—" he breathes, like the sound gets stuck halfway out. "It's… it's you."
You let your hand drop from where it was hovering. "Didn't mean to sneak up on you."
He shakes his head too fast, fingers tightening around the letters. "No. It's— I'm fine. Seriously."
You know he's not fine. And he knows you know.
Mike looks down at the letters again. At her name—El—written in his own messy cursive. The sight of it is like a punch to the gut. You remember the sound of her laughter in this room, the way she'd tilt her head when she didn't understand something, the way Mike used to look at her like she hung the moon.
But the moon burned out, and now he's left holding ashes.
"You're still reading those?" you ask, careful to keep your tone light. Like you're talking about a book. Like this is normal.
He shrugs, like it doesn't matter. "Sometimes. Just—when I can't sleep."
And that's when you realize—you're not the only one coming down here for refuge. You're not the only one who can't find peace upstairs, in beds that feel too soft and too quiet after years of noise and danger. This basement—this space—holds more than just your nightmares. It holds his too.
"It's okay," you say softly. "I get it."
His eyes flick up to yours. Something unspoken passes between you—a recognition of shared pain, of the kind of exhaustion that doesn't go away with sleep. Of the way the world keeps moving even when you're stuck in place, replaying endings over and over again.
"I didn't know you came down here," he says, his voice rough. Hoarse from disuse, maybe. "My mom would murder you if she knew you were climbing through our window at two in the morning. How—How did you even get here? Did you walk in this cold? Are you nuts? You're—"
"Mike," you cut in gently. "It's fine."
His mouth snaps shut. But there's a flicker of something else in his expression—concern. Real, solid concern, cutting through the haze of grief. And it's such a relief to see. It's been so long since anyone looked at you like that—like they care, not because you're one of the Party, one of the survivors, but because you're you.
You sink down onto the couch beside him. The springs groan under your weight, but it's a familiar sound. Comforting. Like coming home. The space between you is small—just enough for the letters, just enough for the ghost of a girl who used to sit here too.
"Nightmares," you explain, picking at a loose thread on the couch cushion. "Same as you, I guess."
Mike nods, like he understands completely. "They get worse when you're alone."
"I know."
Silence again. But this one is different. Softer. Warmer. Like the hum of the dehumidifier has changed pitch somehow, like the dust motes have settled into patterns that make sense.
Mike shifts, folding the letters carefully and tucking them back into their envelope. He sets it on the end table, next to a half-empty glass of water and a worn paperback with the spine broken in the middle. Like he's been here for hours, just… waiting.
You look at the letters one last time before he puts them away. "Do they help?" you ask. "Reading them?"
Mike's knuckles brush against yours as he pulls his hand back. The contact is fleeting, barely there, but it sends a jolt through you anyway. His eyes find yours, dark and deep and full of things you don't have names for.
"I don't know," he admits. "Sometimes I think… if I read them enough times, maybe it'll bring her back."
"But it doesn't."
He shakes his head slowly. "No. It doesn't."
Your fingers are still close to his—so close you can feel the warmth radiating from his skin. The air is thick with all the words you've never said to each other. All the moments you let slip by because there was always something more important, some monster to fight, some life to save. But now—
Now there's just this. The quiet. The calm. The two of you, sitting on a couch that's held too much history.
You sit there for a long time, not moving, not speaking. The only sounds are the hum of the dehumidifier, the distant creak of the house settling, the steady rhythm of your own heart beating in your chest. You can feel the exhaustion settling into your bones, the kind that comes from too many nights without sleep. But it's different down here. It's a softer kind of tired. The kind that might actually lead to rest, if you let it.
Mike leans forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. His shoulders are shaking, just a little. And you know—you know he's not crying. Not yet. But he's close. He's so close to the edge, and you want to catch him. You want to wrap your arms around him and hold him together, the way he used to hold everyone else together when things got bad.
You reach out, slowly, carefully, and rest your hand on his back. He tenses for a second, then relaxes under your touch. His breathing steadies. The tremor in his shoulders subsides.
You can feel the warmth of him through the thin fabric of the robe. The steady rise and fall of his breath. The solidness of him, real and alive and here.
"Mike," you whisper, and your voice is so soft it's barely audible. "It's okay to not be okay."
He doesn't answer, but you feel him shift, turning toward you. His face is inches from yours. You can see the dark circles under his eyes, the faint growing stubble on his chin, the way his hair falls into his eyes. He's so close you can feel the warmth of his breath on your cheek.
Your hand is still on his back, rubbing slow, steady circles exactly like how your mom used to do for you when you were little and had the flu. A simple, comforting motion. You've done it for him before, in the hospital waiting room, after Starcourt, but this feels different. There's no crisis now. No immediate danger. Just the lingering aftereffects.
His eyes find yours, and they're so full of pain it makes your chest ache. But there's something else there too. Something you haven't seen in a long, long time. Something that looks a lot like hope.
And then he's moving, shifting until he's facing you fully, one knee brushing against yours. The couch springs creak in protest. The space between you has vanished. Your hand slides from his back to his arm, fingers curling around the striped fabric of the robe.
"Do you ever…" he starts, then stops. His tongue darts out to wet his lips. "Do you ever think about what it would be like if… if none of it ever happened? The demogorgons, the Mind Flayer, Vecna… any of it?"
You swallow. "All the time."
"Sometimes I wonder what we'd even be," he continues, his voice low and rough. "Normal kids, I guess. Going to school. Complaining about homework. Trying to get tickets to see some dumb movie."
"Maybe," you say, your thumb stroking the sleeve of his robe. "But come on, even in a world without monsters, we'd still be us. We'd still find ways to be weird. D&D would still be a thing. You'd still be overanalyzing every movie you've ever seen."
A ghost of a smile touches his lips. "True."
"And I'd still be…" you trail off, suddenly aware of how close he is. How you can count the individual lashes framing his dark eyes. How the air between you feels thick and heavy, like the moments before a storm.
"You'd still be you," he finishes for you. His gaze drops to your lips, just for a second. But it's long enough for you to notice. Long enough for your hand to tighten on his arm without you meaning to.
The hum of the dehumidifier seems louder now. Or maybe it's just the blood rushing in your ears. Either way, it overshadowed all other sounds. It filled the spaces in between your breaths, making them feel like punctuation in a story neither of you knew how to end. You're thinking of all the times you've been this close—pressed back-to-back in a dark hallway, hands brushing as you passed a flashlight, shoulders bumping as you crammed into a crawl space.
All the times proximity seemed like necessity instead of choice.
"I miss her," Mike whispers, and the words are so honest they're almost unbearable. "But sometimes… sometimes I think I don't even miss her the most. I miss—"
He exhales hard through his nose. "I miss who I was when she was here. I didn't— I didn't second-guess everything. I just… knew what to do. I was—"
"—Brave," You finished for him, nodding, because… again, you understand. You understand him completely. "And you still are, Mike. You’re Mike the Brave. Monsters or no monsters, it doesn't matter. That's still who you are."
"Is it?" he asks quietly. "Because some days it really doesn't feel like it."
"Good thing I'm here to remind you then," you say, and there's a teasing lightness to your tone that surprises you. But it feels right. This banter—this easy back-and-forth—it's been a long time.
Mike huffs a small laugh. "Yeah. Good thing."
His fingers find yours, lacing them together. His hands are cold, but the touch sends a wave of warmth through you. His thumb traces patterns on the back of your hand, slow and deliberate.
"You always know what to say," he murmurs. Then, quieter: "I never do."
"I'm just paying attention," you say softly. "It's not that hard when you care."
"Right," he says, but the word is heavy with meaning. He leans closer, his forehead nearly touching yours. "You care."
"I care," you agree, because it's the truest thing you've said all night. Because you do. You've always cared. You cared when he was worried about Will, you cared when he was pushing everyone away, you cared when he was pretending to be fine. And you care now, sitting with him in the quiet corner of the basement, both of you haunted by the same ghosts.
His free hand comes up to cup your cheek. His thumb brushes against your skin, leaving a trail of heat in its wake. A part of you wants to pull away. A part of you wants to laugh it off, to make a joke, to stand up and say something like, "Well, that's enough emotional vulnerability for one night. I'm gonna go crash on the chair."
But the other part—the part that's been sleeping on this couch, the part that's been climbing through windows at two a.m., the part that's been carrying so much for so long—wants to be close to him. Wants to feel the warmth of someone who understands. Someone who's been through the same fire.
So you lean into his touch instead. You tilt your head slightly, meeting his gaze without flinching. His breath hitches.
"I care about you too," he says, so quietly you almost miss it. "A lot."
And then the lights flicker.
Just once, just a brief stutter of illumination—enough to make you both freeze, your bodies tensing in unison. Old habits die hard. Flickering lights never meant anything good in your world.
Mike's hand tightens on yours, his eyes darting toward the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Your heart pounds against your ribs, adrenaline flooding your system.
But then the lights steady again, casting their warm glow over the basement. The hum of the dehumidifier continues uninterrupted. No strange whispers. No temperature drop. No shadowy figures moving in the periphery of your vision.
Just an old house. Just faulty wiring. Just a reminder that even in a world without monsters, your bodies still remember to be afraid.
Mike looks back at you, and you can see the tension in his jaw, the way he's still on high alert. But you also see something else—a flicker of something that might have been disappointment. Or relief. You're not sure which.
"Sorry," he says, pulling back like he's embarrassed. "I just—yeah. Force of habit."
You nod, because you get it. You really, really do.
"It's okay," you whisper, even though it's not. Even though you're sitting here in the quiet, the ghost of a moment hanging between you, and all you can think about is how close you were to something else. Something… more.
"I should… I should probably get some sleep. Before I say something stupid," he mutters.
"Right," you say, because you don't know what else to say. "Sleep. Good idea." You pull your hand back from where it rested on his arm, the sudden loss of contact leaving you feeling cold.
Mike stands, stretching with a groan. He looks down at you, and there's an unreadable expression in his eyes. Regret? Apology? You can't tell.
"I'll, uh, keep my mom from finding out you're down here," he says, pulling the robe tighter around himself. "She'll wake up in a few hours anyway."
"Thanks," you say, your voice barely above a whisper. "For, you know, not freaking out that I was basically breaking into your house."
He offers a small, tired smile. "Yeah, well. We're even. You didn't freak out that I was having a borderline emotional breakdown at two a.m.."
"That's because I was too busy having my own," you say, and the honesty surprises you. But it feels right. It feels like the kind of thing you're supposed to say at two a.m. in a basement that's seen too much.
Mike lets out a soft laugh, and it's such a genuine, surprising sound that it makes your heart swell. "Fair enough."
You watch as he walks over to the stairs, each step slow and deliberate. He pauses at the bottom, turning back to look at you.
"Get some sleep," he says, softer: "For real. Okay?"
"You too, Mike," you say, and you mean it. More than you've ever meant anything.
He nods, then starts up the stairs. You listen to the sound of his footsteps fading away, the soft click of the door at the top closing behind him. Then you're alone again, with the hum of the dehumidifier and the lingering scent of him on the couch cushion beside you.
You lie down, pulling the afghan that was left out over yourself. It smells like dust and Mike's dad and a little bit like him—something warm and familiar and comforting. You close your eyes, expecting the usual strain to keep them closed.
But for the first time in a long, long time, you fall asleep quickly.
Synopsis: After one forbidden party and a sleazy encounter later, you're suddenly trapped in Billy Hargrove's Camaro
WC: 2243
Category: Slight Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Teen!Reader (Reader is Fifteen + Steve’s Younger Sister), House Party {TW: Underage, Smoking, Alcohol Mention, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment—Not By Billy}
I definitely feel that Billy would listen to Foreigner.
『••✎••』
The first thing you notice is the noise.
Juke Box Hero is blasting so loud the car doors rattle with it, bass thudding through the seat and into your ribs like a second heartbeat. The second thing is the smell: cheap pine tree air freshener battling with stale cigarette smoke and something else, something sharp and metallic that you think is just… him. Billy Hargrove.
You’re staring at your hands, clenched so tight in your lap that your knuckles are white. Your jean jacket feels scratchy against your skin, your t-shirt suddenly too thin. Every nerve in your body is screaming at you to get out, to throw the door open and roll onto the pavement, but you’re doing at least fifty down Maple Street, and that seems like a poor life choice.
"You gonna hyperventilate all over my passenger seat?"
His voice cuts through the guitar solo, low and rough. You flinch, a full-body jerk you couldn’t stop if you tried. You risk a glance at him. He’s got one hand on the wheel, the other propped on the windowsill, tapping a cigarette against the door frame. He’s not looking at you. His profile is sharp in the dashboard lights, the curve of his jaw, the way a stray curl of blond hair falls against his forehead. He’s wearing that worn denim jacket over a black t-shirt, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, showing off the wiry strength in his forearms.
"N-No," you manage to get out, the word barely audible over the music. You clear your throat. "I’m fine."
He scoffs, a quiet, humorless sound. He finally turns his head, just for a second, and his blue eyes catch the light. They’re not angry, which is somehow worse. They’re just… assessing. Cataloguing. Like you’re a bug he’s thinking about crushing.
"Right."
That’s it. He looks away, back at the road. The silence, other than the rock music, stretches. It’s thicker and heavier than any quiet you’ve ever experienced with Steve. With your brother, silence was comfortable. It was a shared space, filled with unspoken things. This silence with Billy Hargrove is a void. It’s a void where you’re pretty sure you’re about to fall in and disappear.
You hate that you’re in his car, not that you had much choice. When Billy Hargrove pulls you away from the wall you were using as a lifeline at the party Steve had warned you to never go to, you hadn’t exactly been in a position to argue. The guy who'd been cornering you had looked like a predator, and Billy… Billy had just looked bored. But he’d looked at you, a flicker of something in his eyes you couldn't read, before he’d stepped between you and the other guy. "She's with me," he'd said, his voice leaving no room for argument. And then he'd grabbed your wrist, not hard enough to bruise, but firm enough that you knew it wasn't a request, and led you out to this monstrosity of a car.
He flicks the cigarette out the window, a brief orange comet in the dark. He reaches forward and turns the volume down, just a notch. Not enough for conversation, but enough that you can hear yourself think again. It feels like a concession, and you have no idea what to do with it.
"Which way to King Steve’s castle?" he asks, and the nickname is laced with that same familiar venom you’ve seen him aim at your brother a hundred times.
You swallow, your throat suddenly tight. "Left on Jefferson. Then… It’s the big house on the corner. The one with the stupid birdbath."
A small, almost imperceptible smirk plays on his lips. "Stupid birdbath. Got it." He takes the left a little too fast, and you’re pressed against the door. You don’t make a sound. You just brace yourself, your fingernails digging into the worn vinyl of the seat.
You can’t help it. Your mind replays every interaction you’ve ever witnessed between him and Steve. The shove in the hallway. The sneering comments at basketball practice. The way Billy looks at him with a kind of focused, predatory glee, like a wolf that’s picked the weakest-looking sheep from the flock. And yet, here you are. Steve’s little sister, in his car. A contradiction that makes your head throb.
You risk another look at him. The streetlights paint stripes across his face as you drive. There’s a tension in the set of his shoulders, a rigid line to his spine. He’s driving like he has somewhere better to be, but he’s the one who offered. He’s the one who pulled you away from that creep at the party. Why? The question hangs in the air, unanswered and unanswerable. You’re not stupid enough to ask it.
"It’s… It’s just up here," you murmur, pointing a shaky finger toward the familiar silhouette of your house. The lights are on in the living room, a warm, welcoming glow that feels like it belongs to a different planet.
He slows down, the engine of the Camaro rumbling ominously as he coasts to a stop a few houses down. He doesn’t pull into the driveway. He just idles at the curb. The silence now is absolute, the radio turned down to a low hum.
You fumble with the door handle, your hands shaky. "Thanks. For the ride. And… you know." The and you know hangs there, a clumsy offering of gratitude for whatever it was he did back at that house. You still don’t have a word for it.
He doesn’t answer right away. He just looks straight ahead, at the illuminated window of your house. "Your brother know you’re out playing dress-up with the Hawkins High rabble?"
His tone is flat, back to that dismissive, acidic edge. It’s almost a relief. This you understand. This is the Billy Hargrove you watch from a distance, the one who makes Steve’s jaw clench and his hands fist at his sides.
"I’m fifteen," you say, a little more heat in your voice than you intended. "I don’t need his permission."
Billy finally turns to look at you, and the intensity of it pins you to the seat. In the dim light, his eyes are like chips of ice. "Fifteen," he repeats, the word rolling off his tongue like it’s a joke. He leans over, not close enough to touch, but close enough that the smell of him—smoke and something warm and spicy—invades your space. He braces one arm on the back of your seat, boxing you in. "You know what guys like that—the one I pulled you off of—do to fifteen-year-old girls who play dress-up?"
Your breath hitches. You can’t look away from him. The air in the car feels thick, charged with something you can’t name. You shake your head, a tiny, almost imperceptible movement.
"Call yourself lucky I was bored tonight," he says, his voice dropping to a low murmur that’s more terrifying than any shout. He’s so close you can see the faint stubble on his chin, the way a vein pulses in his neck.
Then, just as quickly, he pulls back. The spell breaks. He slumps back into his own seat, the casual indifference snapping back into place like a rubber band. He turns the music back up, Foreigner wailing through the speakers once more.
"Get out," he says, staring at the steering wheel.
You don’t need to be told twice. You practically fall out of the car with how eager your trembling body is to escape. You almost trip on the curb, your sneakers scraping against the pavement. Before you can reach the passenger door and slam it shut, you risk one final glance over your shoulder. He’s already watching you, not in that predatory way from before, but with something that looks almost like… expectation.
"Hey," he calls out, his voice barely audible over the music. You freeze, your hand on the cool metal of the car door.
He doesn't look at you. He just reaches into the glove box, and for a terrifying second, you think he's going for a gun. But instead, he pulls out a slightly crumpled pack of Marlboros and taps one out. He sticks it in the corner of his mouth, but doesn't light it.
"Don’t let me see you at a party like that again," he says, the words muffled by the unlit cigarette.
You have no idea how to respond. Are you being warned? Threatened? Saved? All three at once? You just nod, a jerky, uncoordinated motion. You suspect any word you try to form will just die in your throat.
He gives a short, sharp nod back, a dismissal. That's it. The conversation is over. You turn and walk away, not looking back again. You can feel the Camaro's engine rumble as he revs it once, a final, aggressive roar that seems to echo in your bones. Then the tires squeal as he peels away from the curb, leaving a cloud of acrid smoke and the fading sound of rock and roll.
You stand there on the sidewalk, in the space where he just was, and you can still feel the thrum of the bass in the soles of your feet. You watch his red taillights disappear around the corner, a final streak of color in the otherwise dark, quiet street.
Your legs feel like jelly as you make your way to the front door. You fumble with your keys, your fingers refusing to cooperate. When you finally push the door open, the warm, familiar smell of your house hits you—the clean, simple smell of home you didn’t realize you missed. It feels like stepping into another world.
Steve is in the living room, sacked out on the couch. The TV is on, some late-night movie playing silently, the screen flashing blue and white light across his face. He's half-asleep, head lolling to the side, but he stirs when he hears the door.
He squints at you, one eye still mostly closed. "Hey. Where'd you sneak off to?"
Your brain goes blank. You can't exactly say, Oh, you know, just got a terrifying, tension-filled ride home from your mortal enemy after he threatened some sleazeball at a party I wasn't supposed to be at. That's a conversation you're not equipped to have. Ever.
"Just... learning a lesson in humility, I think," you finally say, the words coming out in a rush.
He snorts, pushing himself up to a sitting position, scrubbing a hand over his face. "God, you sound like Mom. You get stuck talking to Mr. Clicks?"
Mr. Clicks was the history teacher with the prosthetic hand. A fate worse than detention.
"Yeah," you lie, the lie feeling smooth and easy. "After-school special in the making."
Steve seems to accept this. He's sleepy, and the world is simple for him right now. He flops back down. "Well, you're home. He can’t force you to write an essay about the Teapot Dome Scandal from here. Night."
You nod, even though he can't see you. "Night, Steve."
You turn and head for the stairs, your feet silent on the plush carpet. But as you put your foot on the first step, Steve's voice, clear and sharp this time, cuts through the quiet.
"Hey."
You freeze, your hand tightening on the polished wood banister.
"What's that smell?"
Your heart drops into your stomach. Pine. Smoke. Something else.
"Smell?" you ask, trying for innocent and probably landing somewhere near 'caught with my hand in the cookie jar.'
"Yeah. Smells like... a forest fire in a cheap bar."
You force yourself to turn around, to face him. He's sitting up again, fully awake now, his brow furrowed. He's looking at you, really looking at you, and you feel like a specimen under a microscope.
"I passed some guys smoking," you say, another lie, another brick in the wall you're frantically building between you and him. "The wind must've blown it my way."
Steve squints at you, but he seems to let it go. He's too tired to connect the dots that are screaming at you. The dots that spell H-A-R-G-R-O-V-E. But you know. And the knowing is a heavy, cold thing in your gut.
"Okay. Well. Go wash it off. It's gross."
You nod, mutely, and flee up the stairs. In the bathroom, you lock the door and lean against it, your breath coming in ragged gasps. You look in the mirror, and it’s at least half a minute before you recognize the person staring back at you.
Your hair is a mess. Your eyes are wide, a little wild. And when you lift the collar of your t-shirt to your nose, you smell it. The pine tree, the stale smoke, and that other thing, the sharp, clean scent of Billy Hargrove’s cologne, clinging to you like a ghost. You feel a dizzying sense of unreality, like you've been to another planet and brought back an alien artifact.
It is at that moment you know. You know that your life has split into two distinct timelines. There is Before, where Billy Hargrove was just a dangerous, loud-mouthed jerk from California who tormented your brother at school. And there is Now, where a small, traitorous part of you is thankful he existed.
okay so lets talk about Joker asking for his call when he is left at the interrogation room
okay, so what if his call were Y/n???
like he made some mistake and he left some untied bussiness that may lead Batman to her, and he wants her to get tf away.
Or maybe that call is to tell Frost to take her away of sth
His Lighthouse: Phone Home (LedgerJoker x f!reader)
Phone Home - Oneshot
yeahhhhh Chaos is getting later and later with filling these requests. I honestly lost count when this one was sent. Anyhoooooo! This screamed angst to me anon so hehe Chaos does hope I didn't ruin your request. My writing is so sporadic, even I don't know what I'm working on. I broke line and everything 🖤✨
IF YOU SQUINT! this is a part two of Two Weeks Is it short? YES! Am I happy to post it? YES! Chaos hopes you enjoy!
Concrete floors and four matching decrepit walls colder than the arctic had all seen better days. Nothing good has ever been locked inside and if Jim Gordon had his way, no evil will ever escape.
Maybe this was too easy of a defeat. Maybe it was a trap because for all intense purposes, The Joker was actually behaving after surrendering.
He remained suspiciously quiet since they tossed him inside an interrogation cell a little before midnight. One poor cop stood inside guarding the door, two more were stationed outside. And for added precaution, Batman was in the vicinity should Joker try an escape attempt.
This time, Joker was not breaking out.
As if he was putting up a fight. The clown sat dejected on the floor mumbling to himself every odd minute or so. The speakers in the room picked up soft, stupid stupid stupid and the rare phrase, I’m sorry from Joker’s lips before he would groan and halfheartedly bang his head against the already chipped subway tiles.
Joker had zero energy to put on an act. He was used to being captured, it kept Batman on his toes and gave Gotham City the illusion that they were safe. Joker saw it as unavoidable time apart from his Bunny until a means of escape arose, (and one always did) however this time, things were different.
Joker made a mistake. He walked right into the trap his enemies crafted, and it would cost him greatly. This time around, the GCPD had enough evidence to ship Joker off to a maximum facility halfway across the world.
A new building in a foreign country with seasoned security personnel trained to handle [redacted] individuals. Joker would have to study their mannerisms and find a crack in their resolve before planning an escape; something that would take who knows how long.
Long enough for him to miss his Light and for you to go insane. In all honesty, Joker didn’t care where they were shipping him off to. His concern was focused solely on you.
He left you this afternoon with a tender kiss, a morbid joke, and with the promise that he would return at dawn.
You sent him off with the reminder that tomorrow was date night. As if he could ever forget. Joker planned it down to the second because he wouldn’t miss a moment with his Light for the world. But now Batman made Joker into a liar.
Joker wasn’t coming home for a very long time and with your severe separation anxiety—you would lose it if he didn’t break this news to you personally. Joker refused for you to find out the hard way via television.
Or worse, not at all.
He was cruelly reminded of when two weeks apart almost destroyed you. The multiple security alerts, the colossal damage to the apartment. The horror of finding your bedroom door open and seeing you in such a state haunts him to this day. In a matter of two weeks, you turned into a suicidal wreck because you thought Joker abandoned you.
He could only imagine what months apart could do..
He never wanted to find out. There were now strict protocols in place to prevent that aftermath from ever happening again. Joker and his Loyal three knew your limits and always planned accordingly.
If Joker was needed out of town for longer than two weeks, arrangements were made to bring you along. If not, then mandatory check-ins and weekly, (if not daily) phone calls kept you sane. Your wellbeing was Joker’s top priority. Your happiness was his only aspiration in life.
He would gladly accept any torture if it meant his Light remained happy.
If Joker didn’t notify you of his indefinite absence, you would overthink yourself into an early grave. But…. if Joker did contact you, it would be like drawing an arrow directly to your front door. Batman would be a fool to not take the bait and capture Joker’s greatest weakness.
Joker would lose you forever… He’d lose you by not warning you. Was it worth the risk?
He’d been stuck inside this concrete box all night. If Joker was lucky, you would still be asleep with the bedroom curtains drawn so as not to allow the morning dawn to shine in your eyes. You would sleep in (because J wasn’t there to wake you up) thus buying him some time. But not enough.
You’d wake up and check your phone, automatically doom scroll when you noticed Joker was not lying in bed beside you and break down when you read the latest news report.
His Bunny was smart and would quickly put two and two together. The charges against him meant a tighter prison—far far away to fit the crime. There would be no end to the river of tears you’d cry, and Joker would be unable to wipe them away.
He had to do something before the transfer paperwork was finalized and any chance at communication vanished. He already wasted enough time mulling it over. No matter the risk, Joker had to let you know.
Joker nodded once to himself before locking eyes with the cop guarding the door. The staring contest was brief given that Gordon made it very clear.
Do not engage with the inmate. Do not let him entice you. Yet Detective Gerard Stephens couldn’t help his eyes from scanning the room and landing on the pathetic clown once more.
His appearance was disheveled with a dark, unchecked aura surrounding him. The hues of purple and green mixed ominously with the dried blood on his hands. Just looking at the freak made the officer’s skin boil. They went through great lengths to nab this clown. Six good men were lying in the morgue and dozens more were in the infirmary, but The Joker looked as if he could care less about the casualties. To him it was just another night.
And that fact was made perfectly clear when Joker opened his mouth. “Mm. I want… my phone call. I want it. I want iT! I want my phone call!”
Did this freak seriously think he deserved that courtesy? Stephens had to take a deep breath to calm his ire. Do not engage with the inmate..
“No.” was his stiff reply. If only that were the end of things.
Joker hated being ignored but good thing he knew how to handle the cops within the GCPD. There was only so much time left before he left his longtime friends in Gotham. Might as well poke at some old wounds as a parting gift.
“Why noT? Every… uh inmate.. gets a phone call. I want mine.” When that didn’t get a response, Joker pulled out all the stops. “How many of your friends have I killed?”
It was small reaction, but officer Stephens cracked and Joker smirked knowing what came next would be a piece of cake. Man, he was gonna miss Gotham.
The Major Crimes unit was a bustle of energy even this early in the morning.
Multiple cops were loitering around handling files, finalizing paperwork, or simply shooting the bull until their shift was up. Many were in full celebration mode—pouring alcohol in their coffee when backs were turned and laughing up a storm.
The Joker was apprehended last night and for once, they had enough dirt to lock him up overseas. There was no way the clown was breaking out of an international prison and so a lively air was felt all around. Promotions were bound to pour in and with it, bonuses for a job well done.
Perhaps it was too premature to celebrate because the cheerful air was sucked clean out the room when Stephens rounded the corner being held hostage by none other than The Joker.
Joker honestly couldn’t hear a thing with everyone screaming at him.
Put it down, take it easy, drop the weapon, let him go now. I got a shot! Drop it on the floor! Put it down, drop the weapon now!
What was he supposed to do first? Eh. He had his own agenda anyways. There was no real need to listen. An officer asked Joker his demands and the room finally plunged into silence.
Everyone waited with bated breath to hear the reasoning behind this daring escape.
“Sorry, what? No. I just… I just want my phone call.” was all Joker said.
It seemed too benign; clearly another stunt to break out of GCPD holding, but all Joker wanted was to send a message to his Light no matter the risk.
The police officers gathered around all exchanged looks of apprehension. What harm was one phone call? The Joker had one of their own by the neck, a bead of blood trickling down Stephens’ neck as the seconds passed.
There was no time to call for backup.
A cop tossed a cell towards Joker, and he caught it one-handed, mock shushing the detective complaining about the pressure on his neck.
For a moment Joker contemplated calling Frost to activate the protocol on his behalf. It would fix the security risk and calm some fears, however. Joker knew if you didn’t hear from him, you’d think the worst and be on suicidal watch by lunchtime.
Joker had to take the risk and phone home himself.
He knew the number by heart and he held eye contact with a cop as the phone rang and rang.
You were still asleep. Silly girl. Joker could picture you patting the bed sheets and rolling your eyes to answer the phone, even if it was an unknown caller at the crack of dawn.
Dating a wanted criminal taught you to always answer unknown callers. 99% of the time it was your J. And this time wasn’t any different. You yawned out a hello and waited for his latest excuse.
Clearly, he was running late and missed welcome home morning cuddles. You had half a mind to scold him, but the tone in Joker’s voice caused a chill to run down your spine.
“Hi.. I left the uhhh Light on at home. Can ya make sure ta turn it off for me?”
“W-What?” You had to stop and remember the correct wordings for secret messages. Joker had drilled so many into your brain it was all so confusing. You feared this one the most.
Lights Out was the second highest security procedure.
When it finally clicked what was happening, Joker heard the wet sob bubbling in your throat. “Yes, I-I’ll turn the lights off.”
“Good that’s.. that’s good. Heh I can’t risk a high Light bill since I’ll be away for a while.”
You read between the lines and bit back a wail.
I’m sorry Bunny but I won’t be coming home for a while. Take care of yourself while I’m gone.
You had to be strong and reply, “How long?”
Joker growled as the cops visibly got impatient. Can’t they give him so time to tell the love of his life he’ll be gone indefinitely?
He won’t get to see your smile the first thing in the morning or kiss you right before bed. He’ll miss your home cooking, the sound of your nails tapping away at your laptop. The sound of your laughter when he made a stupid joke… Joker would miss all the comforts you created and labelled home.
His heart was breaking hearing your muffled sobs on the phone. This was tearing you apart and yet, you were so brave. You had to be for the long days ahead.
Joker wished he had the answer to when he’ll be back. You deserved the truth even if it killed you.
“Dunno. Just.. wait for me, yeah?” Joker hoped that you would. Something about this capture felt permanent.
Everyone was so confident about this international transfer being the end of his career. It wouldn’t be like Arkham Asylum—in for two weeks tops and back into your arms in record time. Who knows how long planning a foreign escape would take. Who knew if he could escape..
That uncertainty was felt through the phone. If Joker didn’t know the answer, then it was virtually impossible.
“Of course. I’ll be here waiting every day. I… I um..” You laughed through the tears, causing Joker to crack a somber smile. After all this time you still couldn't say it.
He didn’t care if the whole precinct was listening. His voice dropped and wrapped you up in soft cashmere. “I know Bun.” I love you too.
A prolonged pause dulled the conversation. You pretended that Joker was lying beside you, and Joker imagined he was holding you close one last time. Saying anything more would be too suspicious (like randomly saying Bun wasn’t eyebrow raising for the already shocked police officers).
Joker was, dare they say, docile with whoever was on the receiving end of the line.
Was he saying goodbye to someone? Surely not, this was The Joker for Pete’s sake! and yet no one dared to rush him off the phone. The scene was too shocking to disturb.
Nevertheless, all good things have to come to an end, and you didn’t get upset that Joker abruptly hung up on you. You knew that he wasn’t alone. He couldn’t say what he truly wished to without outsiders discovering your relation to him.
Joker could never be his true authentic self without others exploiting it. It just wasn’t fair.
He couldn’t even afford a proper goodbye. You sat up in bed for the longest bawling your eyes out. Joker risked your safety to warn you of his upcoming absence.
You had to accept that he would be gone. You knew Joker would do everything in his power to return to your side. Your job was staying strong so he would have something to come home to.
The first order of business was clean-up. You broke the burner phone into pieces and extracted the SIM card before tossing it down the toilet. You watched it swirl, while thoughts of Joker circled your brain in like manner.
The days ahead would be long and trying indeed, and you weren’t entirely sure if you were strong enough to live through them.
You've never had a father. And it left a bigger impact on you than you would ever like to admit, but after meeting your sensei, suddenly the yearning becomes too much that it turns painful.
The worst part? You don't think he cares. And it's tearing you apart. You're becoming a burden, and so what other choice do you have then to get rid of yourself?
𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬:
angst, violence, suicidal thoughts, cursing, depression, reader has no father, reader is a loner, lots of hurt, fluff, comfort, self-destructive habits, physical pain, mental breakdowns, panic attacks, gore, dissociation, Alice in Wonderland disorder, character death.
𝐓𝐚𝐠𝐬:
Dadzawa x gn!reader, potentially romantic!Shouto x reader?
he’s not your friend, you don’t talk at all. but every time he sees you struggling in class he helps you. albeit very rudely—snatching your notebook from you and scoffing about how easy it is while he scribbles away.
“watch an’ learn how it’s done, loser !” he’d scoff, hunched over your papers, scratching down so aggressive and quick you worried he’d tear a hole through your fractions. yet when you received your papers back (meaning; when he’d chuck them back at you before ignoring you completely,) you noticed his handwriting was surprisingly careful—it trailed off a bit towards the ends of sentences and the words dragged downwards, but still careful nonetheless.
and every time he’d just scoff when you tried to thank him, always waving you off.
“whatever.” he said between gritted teeth, batting his hand at you like you were a fly. but his cheeks and ears would go beet red and soon enough he’d be tucking his head into his elbows.
you weren’t friends, but bakugou always picked you to be on his team during PE. he’d look back at you often when he was running for the pacer test, despite you already being out, like he had something to prove. he’d look away quickly after, but afterwards he’d sit against the wall suspiciously close to you. he’d try to wave off your compliments quicker than he could catch his already uneven breath. he’d cough and sputter on his water bottle when you complimented him for holding out so long like you’d insulted him.
“w-worry about yourself ! crap—!“ he’d say in between wheezes, stomping off to his other friends.
you weren’t friends with bakugou. you didn’t really have friends. that’s why during class outings, you always sat alone in the bus. it hurt a bit (a lot) but you at least didn’t need to fight for the window seat, and you had space to place your backpack.
until of course, a thud on your lap makes your eyes snap open, snapping you out of your reverie. bakugou shoved it out of the now empty seat, unceremoniously plopping it onto your lap and crashing backwards into the seat next to you. arms crossed and looking as displeased as he usually did when he was anywhere near you. (but you suspected that was perhaps just what his face looked like.)
“…did the teacher make you sit with me ?” you ask quietly.
bakugou clicked his tongue, he does that quite often.
“No.” he leans further back into his fuzzy seat, his feet dangle lazily and one of them knocks against yours. his eyes stay fixed on his feet as he nudges your foot once more before pulling it back.
“s’just too loud in the front. you at least know when to shut up. so…” he trails off.
bakugou isn’t your friend and doesn’t talk to you the whole bus ride. but he lets you have the window seat. and he sits next to you on the way back as well.
and you really like that.
you aren’t unfamiliar with bakugou, you aren’t friends and you didn’t talk at all. but you wondered often why he’d do these things for you. why he’d stick around you, why he’d help you despite acting like it was tiring. why he’d call you names but yell at anybody else who did.
“..are we friends ?”
it’s early morning and everyone is getting ready to start the day, so it was still quiet enough for him to hear you.
you’re proven correct when bakugou’s spins so quickly you think you hear his back crack.
due to this month’s seating order change, he’s sitting in the row in front of you now. and despite you both not being neighbours anymore bakugou turns around every 5 minute break to check your notebook for you.
“makin’ sure your dumbass remembers what i’m spendin’ my precious time teachin’ you.” he’d say, already snatching it from you.
he’d just put his bag down when you asked him what was, to you, a rather innocent question. but based on the look on his face it wasn’t. at all.
you start getting nervous, subtly, desperately trying to hide it. should you not have asked ? would he find you weird for asking ? maybe this kind of thing was supposed to be unspoken, even with someone like bakugou who always seemed to speak his mind wether you asked or not. (which you didn’t most of the time.)
“why’re you askin’ me that ?” he asks, rather quietly. he doesn’t look angry like usual as he inspects you, waiting for a response.
you swallow, poking and prodding at your fingers. “because..well..”
you draw a blank.
technically speaking, you don’t have the qualities to be a friend of his. most of bakugou’s friends are louder than you. and funnier (debatable. you sure didn’t think so. he seemed to find them funny— to make fun of, perhaps, but still.)
and despite all he did for you, you didn’t hang out often outside of class. you didn’t do like in the tv shows; hanging out after class, eat lunch together, you don’t know any of his hobby’s or favourite food or favourite colour, either. you didn’t leave the classroom often during recess and if you did you’d usually find some place to be alone.
so no, bakugou shouldn’t be your friend. but—
“i’d…i’d like us to be…” you whisper meekly.
you hope your feeble mumble got drowned out by the sounds of your classmates. and you start to think so when he doesn’t respond.
the teacher signals everyone in class to quiet down and you take the opportunity to get away from his gaze, reaching down to grab your notebook from your bag, mortified at his uncharacteristic silence.
your eyes tried to steady themselves with today’s exercises. but you’re surprised to see a hand—his hand—reach in and shuffle around in your pencil case. his chair uses your desk as support while he leans as close as possible. so close you could probably count his lashes.
“gimme one. forgot mine,” he says casually. snatching a purple pen he deemed good enough with a non committal grunt. when he looks back up at you—he’s still scowling and you worry hemight flat out tell you what you feared; that no, you can’t be friends.
instead, he huffs and uses your pen to smack your forehead. and for the first time since he’d ripped your notebook out of your hands and showed you how it’s done you see him laugh. it’s small and it’s mean and it’s at your expense.
“sure, whatever.”
and then he turns around.
the teacher drones on but you’re frozen in autopilot, writing down words you don’t remember. your eyes keep darting upwards, to the slight glimpse you have of bakugou’s hand. him, using your pen.
when you look down at his feet completely by coincidence, you can see his pencil case sticking out, untouched.
despite him not being your desk buddy anymore, this view isn’t so bad, you think.
Synopsis: After a flawless springlock test claims another innocent soul, William Afton slips into the frostbitten quiet of home—only to confront the one inefficiency he can't engineer away: you, his wife.
WC: 2175
Category: Slight fluff (If you’d call it that) [TW: Afton, Mentions of Blood + Death]
It’s honestly still crazy to me how it’s been two years since the first movie. And now that the second one is out, I cannot wait for the third 🔥
『••✎••』
The clock on the dashboard glowed 2:57 a.m. as William Afton guided the sedan into the driveway, the engine's low rumble fading into a stifled gasp. Hurricane, Utah, slumbered beneath a thin December frost, the neighborhood's sodium lamps casting elongated shadows that clawed at the picket fences. He lingered there for a moment, engine off, the silence amplifying the faint drip from the undercarriage—coolant, or perhaps something thicker. His hands, still encased in the thin latex gloves he'd swiped from the parts room, flexed against the wheel. Phantom itches prickled his cuticles, as if the night's residue clung there, invisible yet insistent.
From the glove compartment, he retrieved a rag, along with a half-empty bottle of hand sanitizer that reeked of artificial pine. Scrubbing came first, always. The motions were habitual: thumb over knuckle, nail under nail, the fabric darkening with nothing visible but everything weighed. Blood doesn't show on black gloves, he thought, not for the first time. Nor on the soul, if one believes in such quaint machinery. Tonight's work had been meticulous. The springlock prototype—his little symphony of compression and release—had performed admirably in the dim glow of Freddy Fazbear's back office. A test subject, small and trusting, had triggered it just so. The snap had been clean, the gurgle brief. By now, the suit would be stowed in the safe room, its new occupant settling into eternal vigilance. William allowed himself a thin smile in the rearview mirror. Progress. Always progress.
But the house loomed ahead, its porch light a beacon of mundane persistence. This was his decompression chamber, the one space engineered for silence and solitude—no audits, no breakdowns, no pint-sized variables demanding calibration. Inside waited the one element he'd vetted meticulously: you, his wife, selected not for passion's fire but for your precision-matched restraint. No clinging vines, no probing questions that tangled like faulty wiring. Caring, yes—disgustingly so, in a way that defied his every metric. How could someone navigate the world with that unchecked sweetness, offering it freely without ledger or leverage? It was inefficiency incarnate, a flaw he couldn't dissect or replicate. But it served: your boundaries were ironclad, your retreats graceful. No added friction to his already groaning list of contingencies.
He tucked the rag away, peeled off the gloves, and stepped into the cold. The front door yielded without protest—oiled hinges, his doing—and the warmth of the foyer enveloped him like a poorly fitted suit. Oil and metal lingered on his skin, faint but persistent, a cologne no shower could fully exorcise.
The spill caught his eye first: a crimson smear arcing across the kitchen tile, shards of glass glinting like scattered teeth under the pendant light. Wine, by the look of it—cabernet, from the bottle still upright on the counter, its label curling at the edges. The irony coiled in his chest, sharp as a tack: he'd orchestrated traps that ensnared the immortal essence, mechanisms designed to bind agony in brass and fur, yet here was the evening's true catastrophe. A glass tipped by careless fingers, its contents bleeding into the grout like an accusation. But it was contained—your doing, no doubt. He'd clocked the signs on entry: the faint clink of porcelain from the sink, the measured rhythm of your movements. Not panic, just methodical correction. No escalation. Good.
And there you were, of course, on your knees by the sink, sponge in hand, your robe cinched tight against the chill seeping through the old windows. Your hair fell in loose waves over one shoulder, catching the light as you scrubbed in tight circles, brow furrowed in that subtle pinch he knew signaled self-directed irritation, not distress. A recipe gone wrong, perhaps, or the neighbor's dog digging up the tulips again. Banal fractures, handled solo.
You didn't look up immediately—another marker of your calibration: space given freely, interruptions minimized.
"William," you said finally, voice even as you straightened and set the sponge aside. No surprise, no reproach. Just acknowledgment, like noting the time on a wall clock. "You're even later than usual."
He closed the door behind him with a deliberate click, hanging his coat on the hook. The fabric was heavy with the day's secrets, but it looked ordinary enough to the naked eye. "Inventory ran long," he replied, tone neutral, pitched to the low register that signaled fatigue without inviting dissection. "Fazbear's way of keeping us honest."
You nodded, wiping your hands on a dish towel with efficient folds—no lingering glances, no push for details. He appreciated that, in the abstract, your emotional radar was sharp enough to detect the static in his voice, the fractional delay in his step, but you filed it away, never weaponizing it. It was why you'd been the choice—predictable in your unpredictability, sweet without the saccharine cling that would demand he pretend more than he budgeted for. How does she do it? He wondered, not for the first time, the thought laced with clinical disdain. Dispense warmth like it's infinite, holding boundaries like they're sacred. No tally, no transaction. Disgusting. Inefficient. Yet it buffered the edges of his downtime, this house a neutral zone where problems didn't compound.
"I see you found the mess," you said, gesturing to the tile with a wry half-smile. "Tripped on the mail stack. Nothing major—I'm… I’m handling it. You should get some rest."
The offer hung there, unobtrusive—an exit ramp, not a detour. He knew the subtext: your way of clocking his exhaustion without probing, respecting the invisible line where his "work stress" ended and your concern began. No tea ritual, no hand-holding overtures. Just permission to disengage. It was almost... restful.
"Already half-done?" He tilted his head toward the damp patch, now mostly cleared, the shards contained in a dustpan by the trash. A probe, light—testing if the spill masked something deeper, like the bill stack he'd glimpsed earlier, or the way your shoulders had squared off last week over a forgotten errand.
You shrugged, light as air, tucking the towel into its drawer. "Enough for tonight. No point in perfection at this hour." Your eyes met his briefly, a flicker of something unreadable passing through them—amusement? Fatigue? Or the quiet vigilance he sometimes caught in the curve of your jaw, as if you were cataloging him right back, not with suspicion, but with that infuriating patience reserved for puzzles that refused to snap into place.
He held the gaze a beat longer than necessary, dissecting it like a schematic under fluorescent light. No accusations lurked there, no shadows of doubt cast by his tardiness. Just you, steady as the metronome he'd installed in the workshop to time springlock calibrations. It was disarming, in its way—your ability to look at him without demanding the full blueprint of his fractures. Most would pry, peel back the layers until the wiring sparked and smoked. But you? You offered a mirror instead, reflecting only what he chose to project: the tired engineer, the dutiful husband, the man who fixed leaky faucets on Sundays and remembered your preference for chamomile over Earl Grey.
"Perfection's overrated," he murmured, stepping closer to the counter, his fingers drumming once against the granite—a tic he couldn't quite suppress, the echo of tension coiling in his veins like overheated wire. The air between you carried the faint tang of fermented grapes and lemon cleaner, a domestic alchemy that clashed with the phantom metallic bite still ghosting his tongue. He leaned in, ostensibly to inspect the cleanup, but really to gauge the heat radiating from your skin, the subtle rise and fall of your robe's collar. Close enough to note the faint freckles dusting your collarbone, like errant solder points on a circuit board. Close enough to wonder, idly, what it would take to map them with something sharper than his eyes.
You didn't flinch or fill the silence with chatter. Instead, you reached past him for the dustpan, your arm brushing his sleeve in a graze so incidental it might have been engineered—though he knew better; your touches were never calculated, just offered like spare change to a beggar. The contact lingered a fraction too long, or perhaps that was his imagination, the night's adrenaline sharpening his senses to absurd acuity. "Coffee?" you asked, voice soft as the frost outside, pivoting toward the pot with the grace of someone who'd long ago learned to sidestep his sharper edges.
He caught your wrist before you could turn fully, the grip light but unyielding—thumb pressing into the pulse point where your heartbeat fluttered like a trapped moth. Not possessive, not yet; just a tether, testing the give in the line. Your skin was warm, alive in a way that mocked the cooling mechanisms he'd just fine-tuned in the safe room. "No," he said, the word low and deliberate, laced with the gravel of unshed secrets. "Something stronger."
Your brow arched, that wry half-smile returning like a safety valve releasing pressure. "At three a.m.? Really?" But there was no judgment in it, only the gentle prod of familiarity—the kind that came from two years of shared silences, of mornings where he'd wake to your side of the bed empty, the scent of pancakes wafting from below like a truce flag. You didn't pull away immediately, letting the moment stretch, your eyes searching his face with that quiet intensity he both craved and resented. What do you see? he thought, the question a splinter under his nail. The grease smudged at his temple from wrestling the suit's hydraulics? Or the vacancy behind his irises, the hollow where empathy should spool like loose wire?
Finally, you twisted your wrist free—not with force, but with the fluid ease of water finding a new path around stone. "Cabernet's off the table, unless you want to join the floor mosaic." A beat, then softer: "Scotch, then. Neat."
He released you, watching as you moved to the sideboard, the robe whispering against your legs like a conspirator. The bottle emerged with a clink, amber liquid glugging into a tumbler with the precision of a chemist titrating acid. No flourish, no ritual; just efficiency wrapped in care. She measures me out in sips, he mused, accepting the glass with a nod that bordered on gratitude. The first burn hit his throat like liquid solder, grounding him, chasing the phantom itches from his cuticles. You poured a finger for yourself—defiance or solidarity, he couldn't parse—and leaned against the counter opposite him, mirroring his stance without conscious effort.
The spill had all but vanished, save for faint ghosts lingering in the grout—traces he'd no doubt erase later, dutifully playing the part he'd tricked himself into embracing. The tiles gleamed pristine beneath the light, mocking the mishap with their unmarred sheen, as if no catastrophe had ever dared to touch them. But William understood accidents for what they truly were: rogue variables slipping the leash—a stray bolt undone, a palm extended too freely. He drew deeply from the glass, the scotch's smoky peat weaving through the low hum of his disquiet like smoke through fog. "Rough night?" you offered, the words a whisper of silk, cast like a lure across a glassy pond. Gentle, unyielding in its subtlety—an open door he might step through or shadow away from, depending on the night's capricious tilt.
He considered lying, spinning the inventory yarn tighter, but the fatigue in his bones rebelled. Or perhaps it was the way your fingers curled around your own glass, knuckles pale against the crystal, a silent echo of his earlier scrubbing. Vulnerability by proxy. "The suits," he said instead, vague enough to evade, specific enough to satisfy. "They're... temperamental. One wrong compression, and everything springs apart."
Your lips parted on a soft exhale, not quite a laugh—sympathy, maybe, or the recognition of metaphors unspoken. "Sounds like marriage." The quip landed light, self-deprecating, your eyes crinkling at the corners in that way that humanized you, stripped the clinical sheen from his observations. It was a crack in the facade, yours or his, he wasn't sure: a moment where the engineer's cold calculus warmed under the friction of your orbit.
He chuckled then, a low rumble that surprised even him, the sound foreign in his chest like a gear slipping into uncharted teeth. "Touché." Setting the glass down, he closed the distance again, this time with intent—his hand finding the small of your back, fingers splaying against the robe's thin barrier, pulling you into the neutral zone where his shadows could pool without spilling. You leaned into it, head tilting to rest against his shoulder, the weight of you a counterbalance to the night's excesses. No words, just the shared rhythm of breaths syncing like synchronized pistons—inhale, exhale, the world narrowing to the kitchen's hush and the frost-laced window beyond.
In that suspended quiet, with your warmth seeping through his shirt like a solvent dissolving residue, William allowed the rare indulgence of stasis. Progress could wait until dawn; for now, this—this inefficient, boundary-blurred tether held the mechanisms at bay. The springlocks in his mind clicked shut, not with a fatal snap, but a tentative lock. And as your fingers traced idle patterns on his arm, oblivious to the stains they skirted, he wondered if inefficiency wasn't the flaw he'd pegged it for. Perhaps it was the variable that kept the whole damn machine from flying apart.
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