"dc is darker" "marvel has more fantasy" "dc is mystery and marvel is sci fi - " all of you are wrong. dc comics is when a man has black hair and blue eyes. marvel comics is when a man has blonde hair and blue eyes.
I just finished Lost and idk what to do with myself now. These early 2000s shows always be hittin’ different. Also, can someone tell me why the last fanfic on here of him was posted in 2023?!? That’s actually criminal 😭
『••✎••』
The island had a way of stripping people down to their barest truths.
It took away jobs, titles, homes, routines… It burned off the carefully constructed identities everyone had brought onto Oceanic Flight 815 and left behind only the things they could no longer hide.
For Jack Shephard, that truth was simple: he couldn’t stop fixing things. People. Problems. The jagged edges of a world that refused to stay whole. Even here, where the rules of civilization had dissolved into salt water and jungle rot, he carried the weight like a second skeleton. Every death on the beach felt like his failure. Every argument, every broken bone, every terrified glance from the others—it all landed on his shoulders because he let it. Because he needed it to.
And then there was you.
He’d noticed you early on, not because you were loud or demanding, but because you were the opposite. You carried your own quietness like armor, watching more than you spoke. You had a way of finding the tasks that kept you on the periphery—mending a fishing net, checking on the fruit stores, always useful, but never center stage. You didn't ask for help. You didn't seem to want it.
That, of course, made you a puzzle. A challenge. Something to be… understood. And for Jack, understanding was the first step toward fixing.
It started small. He’d make a point of walking past your shelter. "Everything holding up okay?" he'd ask, his voice that easy, practiced doctor's tone. You'd just nod, offering a small, tired smile.
"It's fine, Jack. Thanks."
But it wasn't fine. He could see the way you favored your ankle sometimes, the subtle wince you tried to hide when you thought no one was looking. He noticed the dark circles under your eyes that weren't just from the sun or the stress of the crash. You were carrying something heavier than survival. He was sure of it.
The day he found you sitting alone near the treeline, staring out at the ocean with a hollowness in your eyes that even the bright island sun couldn't touch, he couldn't stop himself. He'd been looking for you, actually—a flimsy, manufactured excuse about needing someone to sort through some salvaged medical supplies on his mind.
He sat down a careful distance away, giving you space. "Tough day?"
You didn't look at him right away. You just kept watching the waves, the rhythmic shush-and-roar a counterpoint to the silence. "They're all tough days, aren't they?" Your voice was soft, raspy from disuse.
"Yeah," he agreed, leaning back on his hands. "They are." He let the moment stretch, content to wait. He was good at waiting for the right opening.
"Your ankle," he said finally, gesturing vaguely toward your foot. "It's been weeks. Still bothering you?"
You sighed, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of years. "It's just a sprain, Jack. It gets better, it gets worse."
"You should let me take another look at it. Maybe I can…" He trailed off, realizing he was about to offer to fix it. The words hovered in the humid air, an unspoken promise he made to everyone.
You turned your head then, and your eyes met his. They were a tired color, and in their depths, he saw not gratitude for his concern, but a deep, weary resignation. A wall. And it infuriated him, not out of anger, but out of frustration. He was trying to help. Why wouldn't you let him?
He pushed. It’s what he did. "I just want to make sure you're okay."
That was the catalyst.
A flicker of something—sadness, maybe, or annoyance—crossed your face before it settled back into that careful neutrality. You shifted, pulling your legs up tighter, a clear physical barrier between you.
"You don't have to fix me."
The words weren't an accusation. They weren't even angry. They were quiet. A statement of fact. And they landed with the force of a physical blow.
Jack froze. The script he'd been following in his head, the one where he diagnosed your problem, offered a solution, and you looked at him with that relieved, trusting expression he craved—it evaporated. All that remained was the harsh, humid air and the weight of your gaze, which wasn't accusatory at all. It was… understanding. As if you could see the very machinery behind his helpfulness and were simply pointing it out.
"I…" he started, but the words caught in his throat. What was he supposed to say to that? I know, but I want to? That would only prove your point. I'm not trying to fix you? It was a lie, and you both knew it.
You saved him from the struggle, looking away again, back toward the endless water. "I appreciate the concern, Jack. I really do. You're a good doctor. A good man." You paused, the silence stretching again, but this time it was different. Charged with a new tension. "Save the energy, okay? There are people here with actual bullet wounds and infected gashes. I'm just… tired."
Tired. It was such a small word, but he had a lot of history with tired people. He saw it in the faces of the nurses who worked double shifts, in the patients who'd fought too long for a losing cause. Even his ex-wife had worn that same kind of bone-deep weariness, right at the end.
He thought you were just being stubborn. Another survivor with trust issues, another piece of island chaos to be managed. He told himself that as he stood up, the sand clinging uncomfortably to the sweat on the back of his neck. Arguing was always proven useless with you, so he instead gave you a clipped, professional nod. "Alright. If you change your mind."
He didn't look back as he walked away, but the feeling of your quiet, observant gaze followed him all the way back to the cave. He tried to focus on inventory, on sterilizing needles, on sorting pills—the tangible, solvable problems. He could handle those. He could wrap a wound, set a bone, calculate a dosage. The outcomes were predictable, quantifiable. Success or failure. Clean.
But your words weren't a clean problem. They were a knot in his gut that wouldn't untie. He replayed them over and over. You don't have to fix me. It wasn't a rejection of help. It was a rejection of the very premise of his approach. You were seeing past the doctor, past the leader, straight to the man who needed to be needed to feel like he was worth anything.
He realized then, with a cold, dawning clarity that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the raw, untended parts of himself, that he didn't know how to do it. He didn't know how to simply care for someone without also trying to control the outcome. To love—because isn't that what this was, the terrifying kernel of it all?—without the need to repair. For him, the two were tangled up in the same desperate, tangled root system.
He thought about you, sitting there by the ocean. Alone. Not because you were pushing people away, but maybe because you were waiting for someone to just sit with you in the brokenness, instead of trying to plaster over the cracks. He had been trying to hand you a bandage when what you needed was just a witness.
The realization didn't come with a solution. It didn't make him feel better. It just hollowed him out, leaving a space where the familiar, comforting urgency to fix had always been. And in that hollow space, something new and uncertain began to grow. A question.
If he couldn't fix you, what, exactly, was left to offer?
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: After finding Helen’s old recipe book, you decide to surprise John with breakfast for Father’s Day, but of course, surprising an ex-assassin isn’t the easiest thing to accomplish. And unfortunately for you, he’s not particularly pleased with the result.
WC: 3479
Category: Heavy Fluff, Slight Angst, John!POV, Found Family, Grumpy + Sunshine Trope, Reader Is Around 14-15 Years Old, John Being A Dad {TW: Drugging (Not Out Of Malicious Intent), Mentions of Murder/Death}
I know Father’s Day isn’t for another month, but John gives me such girl dad vibes, and I just had to write about it.
『••✎••』
The house was quiet in the way old houses are when they think no one's listening—creaks swallowed by thick walls, the low hum of the fridge in the kitchen below like distant breathing. John Wick woke to none of it at first. Just the headache. A slow, insistent hammer behind his left eye, spreading like spilled ink across his skull. Not the sharp crack of a concussion, not the burn of a hangover. Something duller, chemical. Familiar in a way that made the hair on his forearms stand up before his mind caught up.
He didn't move. Not yet.
The bedroom smelled the same as always: faint gun oil from the night before, clean linen, and something else. Something sweet and burnt, like toast pushed too far. His gun was on the nightstand, right where he remembered leaving it, but the carelessness of it—unsecured, while he slept like a stone—was a warning bell clanging in the silence that only he could hear. Years of conditioning screamed at him. He never slept this deep. Never.
His hands went to his neck, feeling for puncture marks, but all he found was skin, clammy with a sweat that wasn't from exertion. The last thing he remembered... nothing. A book, maybe? The lamplight on the page, the weight of it in his hands. Then this. This void. This unnatural, forced stillness in his limbs, the heaviness in his head that made even lifting it a chore.
A different fear began to creep in, colder than the thought of intruders. He pushed himself up, the room tilting slightly before settling. He ignored it. He moved with a grim efficiency, checking the magazine in the pistol—a full clip, untouched—and chambering a round with a soft, lethal click that was the only real sound in the room. He padded across the hardwood, bare feet silent, checking corners, the empty bathroom, the shadowed space behind the door. Clear.
His next thought was you. Your room. He was at your door in three long strides, the gun now tucked into the waistband of his pants from habit as much as necessity. He didn't knock, only eased it open a fraction, then wider when he saw the empty bed, sheets thrown back in a tangle. You were an immovable object on weekend mornings, a lump beneath the covers until well past noon. Even as late as he’d apparently slept, you should still be there. This wrongness was piling up.
Then came the noise.
A clatter from downstairs. Loud. Metallic. The unmistakable sound of a pan hitting the tile floor, followed by a muttered curse that was definitely yours.
He was moving before the echo even died, fluid and silent despite the fog in his head. He took the stairs two at a time, gun back in his hand, every nerve humming. He cleared the living room, the dining nook, every shadow a potential threat. He rounded the corner into the kitchen, ready for anything—
—and then he saw you.
You were on your hands and knees, muttering under your breath as you swiped at something on the floor with a dishrag. Your back was to him, your movements clumsy, rushed. In front of you, the stovetop was a disaster zone. A pan sat askew, egg sputtering messily over the sides. A bowl was tipped over, spilling what looked like shredded cheese onto the counter. The air was thick with the smell of burnt butter and cooking eggs.
He saw you, unharmed, completely absorbed in your chaotic mission, and the tension drained out of him so fast it left him dizzy. The gun was holstered in his waistband, the motion so fluid and practiced you wouldn't have even registered he'd been holding it.
You wouldn’t have noticed his presence either if it wasn’t for the sudden jolt of pain that flared in his head, causing him to lean against the doorframe with a quiet groan. You froze, spinning around, the rag dropping from your hand.
You looked like a deer caught in headlights, and when your eyes met his, you didn't have to say a word. He saw it. The guilt. The panic. The plan that had gone spectacularly, obviously wrong.
That wrongness from before snapped into focus with crystal clarity, because now he remembered something from the night before, a fleeting image of you handing him a glass of water, your smile a little too bright as you’d wished him a good night. He never took anything from anyone, not even water, without checking it first. Except you. He trusted you.
He straightened up, ignoring the throb behind his eye, letting the silence stretch, letting the weight of it press down on you. If he wasn’t so wrung out, he might have even managed to look angry, but the drug had leeched that away. He had to settle for something far more dangerous: disappointment.
“What did you do?” His voice was rough, low. Not a question. An indictment.
You flinched, picking at a loose thread on your apron. “I... I made you breakfast?” It came out as a squeak. A weak offering.
“The headache,” he continued, stepping further into the kitchen, his eyes scanning the mess, then landing back on your face. “The sleep. What was it?”
“Just... something to help you sleep,” you mumbled, your gaze fixed on your shoes. “You're a light sleeper. And I'm... well, this.” You gestured vaguely at the culinary crime scene surrounding you. “I didn't want a gun in my face the second I dropped a spoon.”
The logic was infuriatingly, endearingly stupid. And he was about to tell you so, to lecture you on the hundred different ways that could have gone wrong, on the fact that he sleeps light for a reason, on the sheer, unmitigated danger of rendering yourself defenseless like that, of rendering him defenseless. But then he saw it. On the counter, peeking out from under a flour-dusted towel. A small, worn notebook, its pages yellowed with age.
He moved toward it slowly, and you didn't stop him. He picked it up. The cover was blank, but inside, in a looping, elegant script he hadn't seen in years, was a list. A recipe. And at the top, written in the same graceful hand, were the words: “John's Favorite.”
Helen's handwriting.
The breath he didn't know he was holding escaped him in a long, silent rush. He looked from the book to the disaster on the stove, and then to you, who was watching him now with wide, apprehensive eyes. And he understood. Every burnt piece of toast, every spilled ingredient, the whole insane, desperate plan. It wasn't about the noise. It was about this. About this book you'd found, about the recipe you'd tried to recreate.
“I...” he started, and had to clear his throat. He looked back down at the book, at the recipe for a mushroom and cheese omelette that Helen had perfected, that he hadn't tasted in... God. Years. He hadn't even known this book existed. “You found this.”
You nodded, your lower lip trembling slightly. “In a box in the attic. I just... I wanted to... I know it's not the same.”
He looked at the omelette sizzling in the pan. It was lopsided, slightly brown on one side, cheese leaking out like a wound. It was a mess. It was nothing like hers.
But it was there.
He put the book down carefully, reverently, on a clean patch of counter. He turned back to you, and when he spoke again, the anger was gone, replaced by a bone-deep weariness that had nothing to do with the drug in his system. “Why? Why go to all this trouble?”
You looked down at your feet, then back up at him, and for the first time, you looked less like a criminal and more like a child who was desperately hoping they hadn't broken something irreplaceable.
“It's Father's Day,” you said, your voice barely a whisper.
The words hit him harder than any bullet. Father's Day. A day that had never existed in his world. It could’ve, maybe. If things had been different. If she'd still been here, if they'd had a chance... but that path had been closed off long ago. He'd locked it himself, buried it under so much death and violence he'd forgotten the key. It was just another date on the calendar, another ghost to ignore.
But in that moment, as he stood in a kitchen that smelled of burnt butter and a desperate attempt at normalcy, he realized that for you, it wasn't. It was still real. And in your world, he was the closest thing you had.
The day he saved you, the day he took you in, he hadn't been thinking about fatherhood. He'd been thinking about debt. About a promise. About a life that needed protecting from the one he'd made for himself. He was a weapon, a tool, a ghost. Not a parent.
Clearly he wasn’t a very good one, either, if you thought drugging him was an acceptable solution to a problem.
He gestured towards the stove with a slow, deliberate movement. “Turn it off.”
You scrambled to obey, twisting the knob with a clatter. The sizzling died down, leaving only the hum of the refrigerator. The silence that followed was heavy, charged with unspoken words.
“Sit,” he said, not unkindly, pointing to a stool at the kitchen island.
You sat, your hands folded in your lap, looking like you were awaiting sentencing. He leaned against the counter opposite you, the ache in his head a dull thrumming now. He had to get this through your head. He had to make you understand.
“Do you have any idea what you did?” he began, his voice low and even. “What could have happened?”
You started to speak, but he held up a hand, and you closed your mouth.
“Whatever you gave me, it put me out. Completely. Someone could have come through that door,” he nodded towards the front of the house, “and I wouldn't have known. Not until it was too late.” He paused, letting that sink in. “You seen the news lately? You know the kind of people who are still looking for me? They don't knock. They don't care if there's a child in the house. All they care about is settling a score. And in that state, I couldn't have protected you. I couldn't have protected anyone.”
He could see the shame in your eyes, the way you were shrinking into yourself. Good. You needed to feel it. But then he saw something else. Defiance. A spark of it, buried under the guilt.
“We were safe,” you mumbled, so quietly he almost didn't hear it. “I made sure of it. I locked the doors. I was awake.”
“That's not the point!” The words came out sharper than he intended, a crack of thunder in the quiet kitchen. He took a breath, reining it in. “You can't. You can't ever do that again. You hear me?”
You looked up at him, your chin jutting out just a little. That spark flaring brighter. “You slept for eight hours.”
He stared at you. The non-sequitur threw him. “What?”
“Eight hours,” you repeated, a little louder this time. “I checked. You haven't slept for eight hours since I've known you. Probably longer.” You looked him straight in the eye, and your words were a direct hit. “You probably had the best sleep you've had in a long time.”
The silence stretched again. He had no answer for that. Because you were right. He hadn't realized it until you said it, but it was true. The drug had forced a level of unconsciousness on him that was a foreign country. A stolen moment of peace he hadn't even known he was desperate for. He couldn't remember the last time he'd woken up without a phantom pain in his shoulder, without the echo of a gunshot in his memory. This morning, all he had was the headache. And even that was fading.
He looked at the omelette sitting cold in its pan. A mess. A failure by any culinary standard. An insult to Helen's memory.
And yet.
He thought of the hours you must have spent, poring over that book, deciphering her handwriting, trying to mimic a love you could only know secondhand. He thought of the courage it must have taken to spike the water of a man like him, to risk his anger for the sake of a surprise. He thought of the quiet desperation in your voice when you'd said, “Father's Day.”
He sighed, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of every life he'd ever taken. He pushed himself away from the counter and walked over to the stove. He picked up the pan, looked at the sad, lopsided creation within. And then he did something that surprised you as much as it surprised him.
He grabbed a fork from the drawer, stabbed a piece of the omelette, and put it in his mouth.
It was… fine. A little bland. The cheese was clumpy. The mushrooms were slightly undercooked. It tasted of effort and burnt butter and a clumsy, unwavering affection that he hadn't realized he was starving for.
He chewed slowly, swallowed. He looked over at you. You were watching him, your whole body tensed, waiting for a verdict.
“We're going to have a talk about boundaries,” he said, his voice still serious. “A long one. You're going to promise me, on your life, that you will never do anything like that again.”
You nodded, your eyes wide, a tear finally escaping and tracing a path down your cheek. “I promise.”
"Good," he said. He took another bite. He wasn't hungry, not really, but he ate it anyway. He ate it because it was the only way he knew how to say what he couldn't bring himself to say. That he saw you. That he understood. That in the middle of all the darkness, all the blood, all the grief, this ridiculous, burnt omelette was the realest thing he'd touched in years.
Dog finally trotted into the kitchen, drawn by the smell of food and the strange quiet. He looked at John, then at you, then back at the floor, where a small pile of shredded cheese still lay. He sniffed at it, looked up at John for permission.
John gave a short, almost imperceptible nod. Dog promptly began to clean up your mess with quiet enthusiasm.
It broke the tension. You let out a watery laugh, swiping at your eyes with the back of your hand. “He's a better cook than I am.”
“He has lower standards,” John said, finishing the last of the omelette. He put the empty pan in the sink. The silence that followed was different now. Softer. Less like a void and more like a space. A place where something could be built.
He leaned against the sink, watching the way you'd finally relaxed your shoulders, the way you were now trying to subtly wipe down the counter with your sleeve. It reminded him of the day you met.
Aurelio had called him in for a favor. And given everything that he did for him, it was the least John could do. Aurelio never did ask for much.
Of course, John had assumed it was going to be about a body. It was always about a body. A clean-up, a disposal, a message sent.
Instead, he had found you. Huddled in the back office, knees pulled to your chest, not crying, just… staring at the wall with a vacant expression that was far more unsettling than tears. Turns out, you were the lone witness to a deal gone sour. A child in the wrong place at the wrong time. You were a loose end.
And in their world, loose ends get cut.
Aurelio found you in the aftermath, huddled behind a stack of tires. He’d hidden you, kept you safe while he figured out what to do. And what he did was call John. Because John understood loose ends. And because John, for all the lives he had taken, was the one person Aurelio knew if he asked to protect a life, he’d do it. No questions asked.
Granted, you weren’t in immediate danger anymore. The ones who had been there were taken care of, thanks to John. But in this life, any day could be the wrong day, in the wrong place.
Aurelio had told him he'd find you a new life, a safe house somewhere, far away from all of this. He told John he didn't have to make it personal.
But John had looked at you then, at the sheer, stubborn refusal to break, and he'd seen something he hadn't seen in a very long time. A spark. A future that hadn't been extinguished. And he knew he couldn't just drop you off and walk away. He’d already given up one future. He couldn't bear to stand by and watch another be snuffed out.
So he took you home.
He had no idea what to do with you. The quiet, empty house that had been a mausoleum of memories was suddenly filled with the small, living sounds of another person. The creak of a floorboard at two in the morning when you got a glass of water. The thud of a book being dropped. The quiet murmur of you talking to yourself as you did your homework.
He'd given you a room, a key, a set of rules. He'd taught you basic self-defense. How to fire a pistol, though he hoped to God you'd never have to. How to be aware of your surroundings. How to look like you belonged, even when you felt like you didn't.
He thought he was preparing you for the world. But in reality, you were remaking his. Slowly, piece by piece. Daisy would’ve been the first, he supposed. But she was gone before she could truly teach him. Then Dog, a silent, loyal anchor. Then you. You, with your ridiculous television shows, your constant questions about the mechanics of a car, your insistence on leaving the lights on in every room you entered. You, who saw a semi-retired assassin and somehow saw a dad.
He looked at you now, scrubbing at a stain on the counter with a ferocity that suggested it had personally offended you. And he felt something shift inside him, a tectonic plate of grief settling, revealing a new, unfamiliar landscape beneath.
“It needs salt,” he said.
You stopped scrubbing and looked up at him, your brow furrowed. “What?”
“The omelette,” he said, gesturing with his thumb towards the now-empty pan in the sink. “Helen always used a little more salt. And a pinch of paprika.”
A slow smile spread across your face, tentative at first, then brilliant. It was the first real smile he'd seen from you all morning. “I knew I forgot something,” you said, your voice light with relief.
He watched you for a moment longer, the smile still playing on your lips, the way your shoulders were no longer hunched around your ears. The headache was gone, replaced by a feeling he couldn't name. It was close to peace. Close to contentment.
He pushed himself away from the sink. “I'm going for a walk,” he said, the words feeling strange in his mouth. A walk. For no reason other than to walk. He hadn't done that in years.
You nodded, your smile softening. “Okay. I'll... I'll clean up in here.”
He turned to leave, but stopped at the doorway. He didn't look back at you. He kept his gaze fixed on the hallway, on the sliver of morning light cutting across the floor.
“Next year,” he said, his voice quiet but clear. “Wake me up. Normally.”
He didn't wait for an answer. He just walked away, the sound of Dog's claws clicking on the hardwood floor as the dog trotted after him. He didn't need to look back to know you were smiling. He could feel it all the way down the hall.
You were still getting grounded. For a week. Minimum. But right now, as he stepped out into the cool morning air, the sun on his face, he felt lighter than he had in a very, very long time. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, the world outside the walls of their house didn't feel like a threat. It just felt... like a Sunday. A quiet, ordinary, perfect Sunday. And for a man like him, that was the most dangerous feeling of all. Because that meant he had something to lose again. And he’d be damned if he let anyone take it away again.
Especially before he could teach you how to properly make an omelette.
Synopsis: You confronted him expecting an explanation, but instead found the ghost of the man you once loved bleeding beneath the trees while the world burned around him {GIF Creds: bombsights}
WC: 2247
Category: Slight Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Old Flames Rekindled, Reader Has Time Manipulation Powers, Slight Slow Burn [TW: Not Proof Read, Mentions of Blood, Profanity, Arguments]
Yup, I wrote a fic because I’m lowkey obsessed. Crazy what 5 minutes of screentime can do.
『••✎••』
You’ve loved Robbie since the cracked leather seats of smoky backroom bars in the 1950s, when Vought still pretended to be something noble and the Cold War felt like it might actually end in fire. He was Bombsight then—cocky test pilot turned supe, reddish-brown leather suit always smelling of jet fuel and aftershave, laughing too loud over cheap whiskey while the other heroes postured for cameras. You fell for him the night he dragged you onto the dance floor after a mission gone sideways, his hand steady on your waist with a strength that would’ve killed a normal person.
“C’mon, dollface,” he’d grinned, voice warm with that old New York edge softened by too many hours in the cockpit. “World’s ending anyway. Might as well spin.”
Your first kiss happened in the alley behind that bar, rain soaking through your coat, his mouth tasting like smoke and bourbon. He’d pressed you against the brick like you were the only real thing left in a world full of Vought lies, murmuring against your lips, “You and me, sweetheart. We’re the ones who last.” You believed him. You let yourself believe him, even as you hid the true extent of your powers—time manipulation that let you reverse wounds, fast-forward decay, or freeze moments like this one—because Vought collected weapons, not people.
You two burned hot and jealous for years: him resenting how easily you could undo time’s damage, you hating how unbreakable and reckless he stayed, flying headfirst into danger like it was his only religion. You hated each other almost as much as you needed each other. Then life, Vought’s rotations, and your deliberate fading into the background pulled you apart. Decades passed. You buried the old feelings under layers of cynicism.
Until now.
You stand in the sterile halls of Vought Tower, heart hammering as you freeze time around Soldier Boy. The world goes silent and gray, Homelander’s distant voice cutting off mid-rant somewhere down the corridor. Ben’s eyes widen slightly when he realizes he can still move—your power never worked perfectly on the originals. He’s older, harder, fresh from cryo and betrayal, but that same swagger remains.
He doesn’t flinch. That was always his gift—taking the impossible in stride and turning it into something he could own. His green eyes lock onto yours, scanning the face that hasn’t aged the way it should have, the subtle lines you could never quite erase without drawing attention.
He knew.
“Relax, sweetheart,” he drawls, voice low and rough like gravel under boots. The corner of his mouth ticks up in that familiar half-smirk, the one that used to make Robbie clench his fists in the bar. “I got no intention of selling you out. Yet.”
He steps closer, frozen particles of dust hanging between you like tiny stars. His gaze drops briefly to your hands—still slightly trembling from holding this bubble of reality tight around the two of you—then back to your eyes. There’s a flicker of something genuine there, old and complicated. Respect? Curiosity? Maybe even affection, buried deep beneath decades of betrayal and survival.
“Figured you’d still be around,” he admits quietly, a rare crack in the armor. “And I’m willing to bet that flyboy fucker is still sniffing around too.”
Ben’s head tilts, studying you like he’s cataloging every change, every similarity. He’s assessing you the way he always did—looking for weaknesses, leverage, anything to tip the scales. And judging by the way his smile widens slightly, he’s already found what he needs. He’s always been an opportunistic bastard when it came to getting what he wanted.
And that’s how you ended up here—staring down at the man you once loved, wrapping a wound on his shoulder while the sky lit up with two identical beams of red light. It was official. You were fucked. Astronomically, cosmically fucked.
Soldier Boy’s deal with you had been simple: he’d keep quiet about your powers and your past with him if you gave him intel on Robbie, and given Homelander’s recent… meltdown, you couldn’t risk exposure. Not now, not with so many pieces in play. You’d spent decades hiding, and you weren’t about to let your carefully constructed life crumble because a 1940s fossil recognized your face.
So, of course, the minute you unfroze time and Soldier Boy slipped away, you’d gone straight to Robbie to give him a heads-up. At first, you thought he’d heed your warning—he was invested in giving V1 to Golden Geisha anyways—but seeing him now, wrapping a handkerchief around his bleeding shoulder against a tree, you realized he in fact had not.
“What did you do…?” you ask, trying to keep the tremor out of your voice as the smell of burnt sugar wafts through the air. You move closer, your shoes crunching on the fallen leaves. “What the hell did you do?”
He didn’t look at you, but you didn’t need to see the expression on his face to hear the resignation in his tone. “What I had to.”
You stop a few feet away, the crisp air catching the hem of your coat. “What you had to? I told you—I warned you about Ben, about them coming for the V1. You were supposed to protect it! To keep it out of their hands!” You could feel the heat of your own anger rising, old frustrations bubbling to the surface. Decades of watching him make the same reckless choices, and now… this. “And you, what? Made a deal with the devils behind my back? All so you can bleed out on the grass like a dog?”
Your words hit harder than any punch, and you see it in the way his shoulders tense. Robbie finally looks at you, and the raw emotion in his eyes—hurt, defeat, exhaustion—shocks you into silence. He looks old. Not in age, but weary. Tired of the fight, tired of running, tired of everything. He looks like a man who’s been carrying a weight for so long he’s forgotten what it feels like to stand straight.
“Don’t you dare,” he starts, voice strained as he presses the makeshift bandage tighter. “Don’t you stand there and pretend this is the same as before. That this is about being reckless.” He pushes himself up from the tree, his movements stiff with pain. “This isn’t about glory, or Vought, or any of that bullshit we used to swallow. I’m tired, alright? I’m tired of living as a ghost, of watching the world spin on without me, of being a permanent relic in a museum I never asked to be in.”
He takes a step closer, the space between you charged with years of unsaid things. “So yeah. I made a deal because he offered me the one thing you would never have given me. A chance to finally be done.”
“Well congratulations,” you shoot back, the words dripping with venom. “Looks like you got your wish.”
“Don’t be a smartass,” he snaps, his patience fraying. “You think I wanted this? To end up in the middle of your pissing contest with Soldier Boy and Homelander? To have to choose between two different versions of hell?” He gestures vaguely at the sky, at the distant sounds of chaos. “Don’t forget, you’re the one who brought him to me. If you weren’t so careless—”
“Careless?” The accusation hangs in the air between you, sharp and sudden. You take a step back as if struck. “You want to talk about careless? You, who jumps into every fight like it’s your last chance to prove something? You, who never learned that sometimes the smartest move is to not make a move at all?”
“I was protecting—”
“No,” you cut him off, your voice dangerously quiet. “It’s like you said. This isn’t about protecting anything. This is about you. About your ego, your need to be the martyr. You’re not tired, Robbie. You’re bored.”
He flinches, and you know you’ve hit the nerve—the one he’s been nursing for years, the one that’s fueled every reckless decision, every near-miss, every self-destructive impulse. You can see the old fire in his eyes, the one that used to draw you in, but now it just looks like desperation.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you,” you say, your voice barely a whisper. “I know you better than anyone. And I know that you would rather burn the world down than admit that you’re scared of being left behind in it.”
You’re both breathing hard now, the silence that follows your words heavier than the one you’d created with your power. You can feel the old familiar pull, the way you always get drawn into his orbit, the way he always manages to get under your skin. For a moment, you think he’s going to argue, to throw more words back in your face. But then he just looks at you, really looks at you, and the anger in his eyes is replaced by something else. Something you haven’t seen in a long, long time.
“Maybe you’re right,” he says, the admission costing him something. “Maybe I am scared. But you know what? So are you.”
He takes another step closer, so close you can feel the warmth coming off him despite the chill in the air. “You’ve spent your whole life hiding, running from what you are. You hide behind your control, your careful little plans, but you’re just as trapped as I am. The only difference is, I’m finally doing something about it.”
If this was back then—back in the fifties, in the alley behind the bar—you would have hit him. Or kissed him. Maybe both. Probably both. But you’re not the same person you were then, and neither is he. The world has changed, and so have you. The realization is a bitter pill to swallow, but you force it down anyway. You’re tired of fighting the same war, tired of being the only one who remembers the promises made in the dark.
“You’re wrong about me.” You say it, but the words ring hollow, even to your own ears.
“About which part?” he asks, a ghost of that old smirk on his face. “The part where you’re hiding? Or the part where you’re trapped?”
“No,” you say, shaking your head, trying to clear it. “You’re wrong about me not giving you an out.”
You reach out then, your fingers brushing against the rough fabric of his jacket, right over the makeshift bandage on his shoulder. He doesn’t pull away. You let your power flow, a gentle, familiar warmth spreading from your fingertips. It’s not a full reversal—you wouldn’t do that to him, not again—but it’s enough. The bleeding slows, the torn flesh beginning to knit together under your touch. It’s the most you can offer him, the most you’ll allow yourself.
“I would’ve given you anything, Robbie,” you whisper, the words a raw, open wound between you. “I would’ve done anything for you. All you had to do was ask.”
The look in his eyes then is a punch to the gut, a dizzying, gut-wrenching mixture of regret, longing, and something so raw and vulnerable it takes your breath away. For a second, it’s like the decades have melted away, and you’re back in that alley, the rain soaking through your clothes, his mouth on yours, the world fading away until it’s just the two of you. Just you and him, and the promise of something more.
But then he blinks, and the moment is gone. The hard mask is back in place, the weary resignation settling over him like a shroud. He lets out a soft sigh, a quiet, resigned sound that’s somehow worse than any argument.
And you realize you can’t bear it. You can’t stand here, in this godforsaken field of trees, with the ghost of the man you used to love, and watch him self-destruct. Not again.
You pull your hand back as if his skin is on fire, the sudden loss of contact leaving you feeling cold and empty. You turn away from him, unable to look at him for another second. “I have to go,” you say, your voice tight. “I have to get back before—”
“Before what?” he asks, a hint of that old defiance back in his tone. “Before they realize you’re gone? Before they figure out you’re not the perfect little Vought soldier you pretend to be?”
“You found peace with dying. Good for you.” You turn to face him, and this time you let him see everything—all the anger, the hurt, the years of loneliness, the desperate, aching need to matter to someone, to anyone. “I haven’t.”
Before he could say anything, convince you to stay, you fast-forward just enough to put distance between you and him. You don’t go far—just to the treeline, far enough that you’re out of sight but not so far that you can’t still see him through the gaps in the leaves. You watch him stand there, a solitary figure against the backdrop of the burning sky, looking lost and broken.
You know eventually you’ll go back—back to him, but for now you stay watching him, your heart aching with the familiar, bittersweet pain of a love that never quite died. You stay until the red light in the sky fades to a dull, angry glow. You stay until he finally turns and walks away, disappearing into the shadows.
He considers himself quite an agreeable man. It doesn't irk him when Samwell asks him about girls as though he's the resident expert. It doesn't irk him when his socks go missing — he's sure the others nick them because they don't have enough of their own for warmth. It doesn't irk him when new recruits come in, each less voluntarily present than the last, only to be bullied by order of Thorne.
But there is something. One minor thing. It is how everyone else around him has not yet questioned your presence. The logical thing would be to send you to King's Landing, to save you from the fate of the Rangers of the Watch — death by freezing. But you have not said a word since you came — again, to Jon, this is no reason not to get you back to civilization — and the rest of them said that until you spoke and explained why you were even this far North, there's no need for them to send you to the King. "What if it's an assassination attempt? What if this is a ruse to get escorted into the kingdom?" The logic is both sound as well as absent.
"If you think yourself King, boy, then I will have to remind you of the oath you are going to take. If you presume to escort her to King's Landing, we will not stop you. But you will be branded a deserter. And you know what we do to deserters."
And so, Jon had to sit there and watch you take your dinner with them. A separate table, of course, because they all claimed to be gentlemen. He doesn't blame them. They haven't seen a woman in ages. He understands why they do not want to let you go free so quickly. Sam himself, cannot tear his eyes away from you, and he'd once claimed to have thrown up in fear after making eye contact with a woman.
"She's wearin' too much, eh?"
He's not sure who says it ─ safe bet it's Pyp ─ but all he can think about is that it's the opposite. You're not wearing enough. It's too cold for a delicate woman, whose hands were so unblemished, it was clear she couldn't even be fit for begging. However, he doesn't do much about this, besides leave one of his coats hanging on the latch of your door — a modified storage room that was overrun with rats, but still the only room fit for a lady.
The next morning, the coat was gone, and none of his brothers of the Watch were wearing it, so he considered it a mission accomplished. But Jon had never been an observer, not since leaving Winterfell. Everyone there thought he had been, and they'd been partially right. He'd observed the wrath of Lady Cat when he passed. He'd observed Arya's love for the sword. He'd even observed the turmoil in his father's face when the King had come to ask him to be Hand. But he had changed, since being out here. So, he knocks at the storage room — your chambers, if this had been a true castle — once. Twice. No response. You do not leave, as far as he's observed, so he presumes you are in there. "May I come in?" He's not sure if he should add a 'my Lady' after that. He decides if he had to, then you would tell him.
You do not respond, so he goes against all of his upbringing and presses two fingers against the door until there's a creak. "Are you decent?" It's idiotic, but he feels as though he has to ask. Again, no response. You could be dead. You could be unconscious. He opens the door further. You're alive and awake, and across the room, huddled in a corner with his coat. That's a bloody relief. "Are you deaf?", he asks, gently shutting the door behind him. He doesn't mean it to sound insulting. He's just realised you haven't spoken to anyone since you were found fainted out in the snow a couple days ago, and you might very well be. Perhaps that is why no one was getting anything out of you. Not that they wanted to, anyway. They seemed to quite enjoy having a lady unaccounted for in their midst. Gave them something to ogle at.
You shake your head.
"So you can understand the common tongue."
You nod.
"Are you mute?"
He spots the way you hesitate. It's a tell. He kneels down on one knee before you — from where he stands. He doesn't want to move closer and have you scared of him. "If you are present enough to calculate whether it is wise to speak or not, then you have the presence of mind to give me your name, at the very least, if not your story and why you seemed to have resigned yourself to letting the wolves get to you, that day."
There's a moment where you clutch his coat tighter around you, your eyes on the dusty floor. Then you give him your name. Only your first name, the one those closest to you may be deigned to use. You do not look up. He picks up on the frostbitten hoarseness of your voice.
"Common or Titled?", is his next question.
You do not answer. He huffs, grunting a bit as he settles down opposite you, elbow resting on his knee as he looks you over. You stick out like a sore thumb in the harsh Northern cold. "Were you prepared to die that day Samwell found you?"
Once again, you do not answer. He keeps zooming out of his area of specificity of questioning, trying to get vaguer and vaguer, finding something that you will answer, but he is running out of significant queries. So, he settles on something else. "Do you know who I am?"
He doesn't expect a response to this, but appreciates you having the decency to shift your eyes from the rat nibbling on something in the corner back to his own. You shake your head.
"I am Jon Snow.", he informs, extending his hand out to you, some snow falling from his gloves.
You look at his hand long enough for his muscles to heavy, but not enough for him to retract it, before you take it. As he observed. No blemishes on your hand. No jewellery. No— gods! No anything.
He pulls back swiftly enough to startle you, before using his teeth to tug at the tops of one of the fingers of his gloves, pulling it off before pulling off the other ones. "Here. We are starved of gear here, as ironic as it may sound. It is what each man has brought with him, I'm afraid. These are men's gloves, so they are thicker. They will warm you.", he tells you, placing them in your hand.
You accept them, and he watches you put them on with rapt attention. These are clues to your identity, these are more tells, these are—
"Thank you, Jon Snow."
So you had not only come from civilization, you were well-mannered. His mind did not leap to nobility, yet, but it was quite possible you'd grown up in their midst. Perhaps a servant girl. But your hands...
"As I was saying. I am Jon Snow. I am related to Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell. Do you know of the Starks? Of Winterfell?"
"How?" Of all the questions.
"How am I related? I...", he trails off, taking a much-needed long breath. Even strange women who may not even be from the Seven Kingdoms inadvertently have to make him remember his place in this world. "Am his son."
A slight furrow to your brow, and then your freshly-gloved finger points at him. "Jon Stark." Ouch. But this is good, this means you know how titles work. More clues to this puzzle of you.
"Jon Snow. I am illegitimate."
Your head tilts at that. Okay, he was getting further and further away from the nobility hypothesis. Though, the word illegitimate is not as common as the word bastard. "I'm not his. I mean, I am his. I am not his... legit— I... I am his bastard.", he explains, rather agitatedly, though he attempts not to show it to you. He didn't have a particular hate for the term, in itself. He was shrewd enough to know that sometimes a word is just a word, but gods did it hurt like hell to get out of his unyielding throat. "If you know of Winterfell and the House Stark, then you must know where you are."
"The Wall."
"Correct. And we are the Night's Watch. We protect the realm, and all those in it. Of the Seven Kingdoms. With me? Or do you already know all of this?"
You nod.
"So I will skip the history lesson.", he says, with a tiny laugh. "You are part of the realm, yes? We were right in protecting you?"
Once more, you nod. He is getting tired of this, honestly. He reaches for a gnawed-through and empty sack of grain, picking at its frays. "You know, the Wall is no place for a lady. Especially one as... unacquainted with the harshness of the North as you are."
"I am Northern."
He looks up, then. You do not seem to be cursing at yourself internally for divulging this information, so it seems it has not simply slipped out. "Winterfell?"
"No." He's glad you had the good sense not to simply shake your head at him again. "You are not a wildling, and you are not from Winterfell, but you're Northern. Dreadfort?"
"Does it matter that much?"
He genuinely does not have an answer to that. "We need to get you home, my lady. Safe and warm in your own bed."
"What of my needs? 'Protect the realm and all those in it'. What of the wishes of those in it? Do you discard those?"
That is the most he has heard you say in the past two days and he regrets that this tone of yours is directed at him. He briefly thinks no one else would have so humbly received such a bathing in goodwill as this little scoff of yours. You're lucky it's him you're snapping at.
"You do not mean to tell me you wish to stay at the Wall?", he asks, with a little snicker of derision, but it's entirely dark. "What, and join the Night's Watch? Or do you just want to stay and be our maid?"
"Watch yourself."
"Are you higher in station than I am, to command me?", he bites back, as he narrows his eyes at your face. It's usually in times like these that someone's pride kicks in and they expose what treatment they think they should be getting for their title. You do no such thing. "Doesn't matter. Here, we are all stationless, and titleless. So I will ask again. Do you just want to stay and be our maid, or will you tell me why you do not want to go home?"
You do not, safe to say. He tosses the destroyed sack onto the floor as he storms out, slamming the already-rickety door behind him. He can only breathe properly once he's out, and breathe he does, exhaling slowly, quickly, and then all at once. He didn't remember women being this stubborn, opaque, this... disagreeable. His half-sisters were lovely. His father's wife, maybe not so much, but she had her reasons. You, did not. No matter what reasons you had for being here, you had no reason to speak to him in the way you just had. No one else here had tried to speak with you without using the words 'darling' or 'sweet pea' or other things that Jon considered condescending and unbefitting for a lady.
That night at dinner, he makes a decision. A very Stark decision, actually, for all the Snow he keeps saying he is. This decision did not come all at once, it built, the entire afternoon and evening after this interaction, and he realized your game quite quickly. It was the game he'd play, had he been a lady all but trapped in a fortification of this size, surrounded by burly men (and Sam) most of whom were thieves, outlaws, and even rapists. And hence, came the decision. At dinner, he stands, not with finality, not with pomp, or with intent to make others see what he was doing, but simply, quietly, as subtle as the sun outshining the stars to indicate morning, and grabs his plate, his bread, his stew. And he begins to walk.
When he sits by you, the entire room quietens. You stiffen. He sucks at his teeth, eyes on his stew as he hands you his bread offhandedly, as though you'd been fast friends to whom this bread-sharing was a childhood ritual. You gingerly accept. Well, not accept, but take. Which, for now, is enough. He watches you sidelong as you place his bread next to yours. You nod in gratitude. He feigns a struggle to reach the drink on the other side of you so that his mouth is shielded by his exaggeratedly outstretched arm as he speaks to you. "What will they do if they find out you spoke with me? You do not want all the men here crowding you in order to try talking to you, do you?"
He actually does take the foul-smelling ale away from you, lest you drink that and vomit like one of the richer lords — more sheltered than him, but less adaptable — had the first night he had arrived at the Wall.
Jon watches your face for a reaction. Your chewing slows, and you meet his eyes, followed by a subtle nod. The corners of his mouth curl downwards, as he replicates your nod, stuffing his mouth with bacon so that no one can tell whether he is talking or chewing. "I will come back tonight."
You do not have to nod, then. You've got no choice.
"You dare!"
He's honestly got no time for this nonsense. The crowding of men he'd threatened you with seemed to have come to torture him, now.
"You dare to act all humble about your looks and your prowess when even the deaf and mute have fallen for you?"
"Samwell—"
"No, no, he's right, isn't he? You sat by her like you was a married couple, sharin' bread and all that! What are you playin' at?", scoffs Pyp, shoving his shoulder.
"Listen, all of you, I—"
"What did she say? What does she sound like?"
"She's deaf and mute, Pyp!", corrects Samwell.
"Didn't mean her voice."
"I was being polite! Alright? I was raised that way! That ale was not meant for a lady to digest, and one slice of black bread is not enough for a lady, either!", he cries, hoping it will get into their thick skulls that he is one of them, but not in this matter.
"Let's hope one man is not enough, either."
The raucous laughter that follows is one more thing he'll add to the short list of things that irk him. He shakes his head as he shoulders past the rest of them, drowning out questions and insinuations as he leaves, choosing instead to sit out at a post so he can stare out at the white of the North.
Once he's sure all the lads are asleep, he creeps down to the store-room with a lamp in hand. He doesn't knock. You're staring out the window. He closes the door. "Ready to talk?"
"That was cruel."
"I know all of these men. They won't lay a finger on you."
"It was cruel."
His jaw clenches, and he looks down. He can faintly make out the outline of the sack he'd thrown in a fit of rage earlier. "I know."
"No apology?"
"Not yet, no. Not until we speak. Properly, not in the breadcrumbs of information you have been giving me."
"Why can I not just stay? I am not bothering anyone."
Jon huffs out a laugh. "What benefit would we have from keeping a woman here? You are simply an extra mouth to feed. Every man out there will have a purpose. Steward, Ranger, or Builder. What are you? Why are you here?", he asks, slowly moving to lean against the wall right next to the window, so that he may see your face dully illuminated by the moonlight.
"I wanted to go beyond the Wall."
He's not sure if you can make it out in the moonlight, but his eyes widen, and he places the lantern down. "You're a wildling?"
"No. I'm a Northerner." Yes, you told him this.
"Right, but you wanted to go beyond the Wall. Where the wildlings will tear you up and behead you. In that order."
"I have my reasons."
"I'd love to know what they are."
You hesitate, once more, and he decides that's enough prying for now.
"I have training in the morning."
"That's not healed."
"Beg pardon?"
You nod over at his elbow, covered up in layers and layers of insulation — opaque insulation, so he hasn't the foggiest what you're talking about. "That. I can tell by how you hold it. If you have clean cloth and boiling water, I can dress it."
"You're a liar and a healer, then, how exciting."
Your face softens for a split second, and then turns harder than he's ever seen it before. "Or you can let it infect and you can die a horrible, painful death as it eats you up from the inside. It is, after all, your decision.", you declare, turning back to the window.
"For someone desperate to get out of the Seven Kingdoms, you keep looking quite a bit in their direction.", he comments, but he doesn't wait for your reaction, or for your retort, instead stumbling around in the dark for the infirmary stores of clean(ish) cloth, kept —for space purposes — right here next to the food.
He sheds his layers one by one, watching for the injury as soon as he sheds the last one. "Will I be able to swing my sword?"
"I thought you were from Winterfell. Do those at House Stark not teach basic combat treatments?"
"They do, but I did not know simpler methods than herbs existed to dress a wound. I thought ointments and pastes were needed.", he responds, gruff and annoyed.
"Do you even know what an infection is?"
"Yes. I do." Though he knows this is not the case now, as a child he used to picture it as a conniving little creature that crawls into wounds and then creates havoc in every organ in the body.
"Then you should be more terrified of walking around with an open wound like that.", you scoff, yanking his hand to you as you dip the cloth into boiling water he's found from the kitchens.
"Were you a healer, then? In the Seven Kingdoms?"
"Something like that."
"You have to say something. It does not have to be rational, just the truth. Was it a bet? Were you suicidal because the one you love loves another? Were you simply curious?", he presses, his eyes on yours as yours run over his wound.
"How will it help? I hear you all talking. I will be sent right back to the Capital so they can identify me, so how will—"
"I can make sure it doesn't happen. A valid reason can help me give you anonymous asylum at Winterfell, but for that, I need to trust you!", he cries, gripping your shoulders so you look at him, and see how serious he is.
"I don't want asylum! I want to leave the Seven Kingdoms! I don't belong here!"
"And you belong beyond the Wall? With wildlings and wolves and gods know what?"
"There are kingdoms out there, I've heard tell! And besides, anything that isn't in this realm, I will be happy with!"
He stares at you for a good long while after that, the furrow in your brow, the determination in your eyes, the set of your mouth. "You will put your faith, place all your trust in whispers of a possible civilization beyond the Wall, but not one drop of that trust in me, a tangible, honourable man right before you?"
"Do not move enough to shift it too much. Use this arm less.", you mutter, gently pushing away from him as you stand to clean your hands.
He looks down at the bandage, shaking his head in sheer exasperation as he stands abruptly, shutting the door behind him with force that causes it to echo through the dark halls of Castle Black.
You're alone a moment, before his head pops in through the gap of the door. "Thank you.", he mumbles, eyes on the floor before he leaves once more. You smile despite yourself.
He returns the next night and torments you some more in attempts to piece together the life you had before you had decided the snow could engulf you. You, in disobedience, ask about his. He tells you about his father. His half-siblings. He tells you about Arya and her prowess. He tells you about Bran's climbing. He tells you about his Uncle Benjen. He tells you about Theon. You do not tell him anything back. He hands you another pair of gloves (after noticing that these ones have been bitten through by these freakishly strong-toothed rats) and leaves.
The night after that, he sits across from you as you speak of the kingdoms you have heard that exist beyond the Wall, upon his request. He pictures them, in his mind's eye, overrun with wealth and prosperity and true joy, and knows of them to be stuff of fiction. Kingdoms, he thinks, cannot benefit everyone in them. According to what you have heard, there is a kingdom where dragons still do exist, and coexist with the people. He's sure Bran would love this for before his sleep. "And what would your role be in these kingdoms? Queen?", he asks, smiling in the night.
"That is the beauty of being lost, is it not? You can create new roles, instead of fitting into whatever has been passed down from generations. You can be what you wish to, not what others tell you you are.", you whisper, the sound of your voice nearly floating out the window to mingle with the snow. But he catches it.
His eyes fix on your profile in the delicate glow of the lamp. "Is that what you were running from? Expectations?"
"All that I have described, and that is your take-away. It is impressive, how your minds work, the Night's Watch."
"But you were running?"
You gently roll your head toward the window once more. "Of course. No one ends up at the Wall by chance."
"Are you being hunted?"
"In a way."
"Am I allowed to know by whom? Is it someone of power? Someone I might know?"
"It is definitely someone you know."
You do not say it as though it is someone he has spoken to or met, you say it as though it is an abstract entity, a concept, rather. "The King?"
The scoff of derision you give out before sitting up is enough to make him adjust posture, as well. "His wrath? His lust? His Justice?"
"That does not exist in the Seven Kingdoms."
"I find the King's Justice to be very fair."
"We do not need to agree on everything, Jon Snow."
"Whatever you are running from, whatever has happened, I guarantee you, this is no place for a woman."
"Then what is?"
He frowns at the question, tilting his head as you run your fingers over the dressing of the wound you'd addressed three nights ago. "I suppose... her home. Or her husband's."
There is a moment of silence that he despises, because usually, it is followed by a dismissal, and he will have to resolve himself to coming the next night to scoop up more pieces of your life from these fractions of yours.
But when you look up at him, fingers back in your lap like the bandage had scorched you, he realises there is more to come.
"When men commit crimes — or at least, are accused of such — they are sent here, so that they do not die at the hands of the executioner, so that they may have a place in this world, whether they like it or not. What of women? Where do we go?"
"You were framed, you say?"
"Accused. Framed implies a crime had actually occured."
"What was it?"
He knows that would have pushed too far, and he curses at himself for asking it anyway, because it has invoked the silence you seem to constantly present him with. The one that he hates, because it implies the absence of your voice, telling him of a life foreign to him, but oh-so-familiar. "Sorry. But this... is still no place for a woman. Especially not one like you."
"One like me?"
"You are of a soft life. Your hands tell me as such.", he begins, gently taking your hands in his. Normally, he wouldn't. Normally, you'd have slapped him. But these were not normal circumstances. "Adaptability is a skill, and one you clearly possess, but adaptation without cause is simply unnecessary."
"I have not harmed anyone. Emotionally or physically. Directly or indirectly."
"I believe you."
Your lips part. In disbelief at being believed? Perhaps. In the retention of unsaid words? Possible. In surrender to your exhaustion? Likely.
"I will be back tomorrow."
And so he was. It nears a week since you have been amidst the Watch, and only one night — your first — had you been alone. Only one day — your first — had you been seated alone. Jon introduces you to Samwell and Pyp and Ghost. He doesn't know what else to do. He cannot quite bring his father here, and Uncle Benjen was out being the best Ranger there ever was, but he's sure you would get along swimmingly.
The night that solidifies the week's mark of your arrival, he lays down beside you as you pick at your fingernails. His own fingers find your shoulder. Jon has become bolder. He has learnt what touch can do for someone else. He used to think touch was an action. It was something that happened, leading to either war or pregnancy. But he'd learnt that it's an experience. It can intimidate, it can mitigate, and it can elucidate intention. It can calm, it can stir, and it can console, which is a function he required, with you. So, he no longer hesitates to touch, but he is smarter than to underestimate its power and fragility.
"You know you will have to go.", he reminds you, with all the gentleness that you deserve.
"Thorne does not seem to have an issue with me being here. I am not that big of a mouth to feed."
"Thorne does not have an issue for now, because his higher-ups are not here. In three days' time, we will have to take the Black. Our oath, for which his superiors will come to witness. He will have you gone by then."
You turn to face him, arms crossed at your chest as you rest your shoulder on the stony floor below. "Why do you believe in the King's Justice so much?"
"It is present for a reason. If it was unfair, it would not prevail."
"Injustice is prevalent in the land. Me being accused of a crime I am innocent of, and being disowned by my own family is unfair."
"Yes, it is. I have no objections to that. You ran from social ruin, then?"
"I ran from being honour-killed by my family, yes."
Honour-killings. He wasn't even aware they did that anymore.
"And you ran to the Wall because you thought we'd let you through?"
"I'd hoped."
"We are sworn to protect the realm and its inhabitants. I have told you this. We would not willingly subject one of them to the brutality beyond the Wall, no matter how much they beg.", he says, blinking as his eyes adjust to the light in the room enough to form a softened — albeit vague — impression of your face right before him. "Why not Essos? Past the Narrow Sea? Why northbound?"
"I followed the star. North. Ended up here. Haven't reached the star, so I needed to get through the Wall."
"It is no place for you.", he repeats, the thousandth iteration of the same sentiment. "Such beauty", he breathes, pausing for an immeasurable moment before softly placing his knuckles on your cheek in a manner that one would think he were returning his sword to his sheath, "Such fragility, it needs preservation."
"I am not fragile.", you respond, to which he brings two of his knuckles under your chin.
"Aye. But ice is. It cracks with no effort. And if you stay out here, that is what you will become. Both figuratively and literally. Do you understand me?"
You pull away, then, looking beyond him.
"Before Thorne tries to find your identity, you will do as you wish and create a new one. The anonymous asylum in Winterfell is still being offered.", he informs, deciding that is enough touching for now. He does not want to do anything to break the already gossamer-thin trust you have for him. "Accept it. And do what I say, nothing less and nothing more."
The next morning, Castle Black is silent at mealtime, which is rare. But Jon stands with you, not sits, and it seems to shut them all up very quickly. "I have pieced together her story."
Thorne narrows his eyes, disbelief etched between the creases of his eye. "Have you, now?"
"She is of Winterfell. Wandered too far. Was chased by bandits and kept running. She did not know this was North. Did not know she was nearing the Wall, when she collapsed."
"And you speak for her, do you? Is this your way of saying she is now spoken for? Are you married? No ceremony? How romantic."
His words cause the room to be bathed in snickers and Jon wishes he could punch the audacity out of him. "She was traumatized by the incident. She has limited speech. This is why it has taken me a week to piece together what would have taken anyone else an hour."
Thorne stalks closer to you, one step at a time, intimidating, as though you have insulted his mother, before he leans down. "Is this true?"
You nod.
He straightens slowly, a scowl creeping in as he turns on his heel. "Very well. You will need a rider to accompany you to Winterfell. I will ask the Lord Commander to assign you the strongest for protection."
"Samwell.", you say.
Jon pretends to look curious, surprised, as well. He hopes he's convincing enough.
Thorne stops. Smiles. Turns. "What?"
"Samwell.", you repeat, pointing at Sam.
"The pudge? No, he offers no protection."
"Samwell."
"I said no. In good conscience."
"Samwell."
"Ser, I think her comfort is paramount—"
"And why not you, Snow, since you are such fast friends?"
"Samwell is the one that found her, she may feel safer with him."
Thorne ignores him, pointedly. "Why do you not trust him, girl? Has he misbehaved? Do you know him, from Winterfell?"
You shake your head. "Samwell."
"Why the pudge? Why not Jon Snow, from your place?"
"Samwell.", you repeat, trying your best to look distressed, confused, even, by his refusal to acquiesce to your request of Samwell's accompaniment.
Thorne once again narrows his eyes at you, as he asks Sam, "You up to it, boy?"
"Yes, Ser."
"Alright. Come with me to get the assigned leave from the Lord Commander."
Later that night, Jon knocks at your door once more, and you don't respond. However, this time, he knows that means you are at the window. "You did well.", he says, gently closing the door behind him. "You did."
"I was worried he would not approve Samwell."
"I knew he would. You were convincing."
"I wish it were you. You know Winterfell better."
Jon nods, leaning against the wall next to the window once more. "It is best this way. They could accuse me of anything, if I come with you. It would have seemed far too convenient, for a girl to be from exactly where I am from, at a time where my Uncle is not there to corroborate the declaration, and be of limited speech, as well, as you have chosen to portray.", he tells you, reaching out so that his thumb may rub little arcs on your jaw.
"They will say you did it so you could visit home?"
"Among other things, yes. It is safer this way. I trust Sam, and you should, too.", he informs you, smiling. He hasn't done that in ages, but he's also realised there are ways to foster comfort without touch, as well. This is one of them. "Who are you to ask for?"
"Robb Snow."
He grins a little wider, now, at that. "Robb Stark. The true Stark brother."
"You are Eddard's son. You are a true Stark."
"Perhaps in one of your kingdoms across the Wall.", he says, earning a small smile in return. He hands you the letter he's written. "This goes to Robb Stark directly."
"What will I do there? In Winterfell?", you ask, taking the rolled-up parchment. "What role will I have there?"
"You will learn from more experienced healers, and grow your knowledge.", he says, moving closer to you so that you are both bathed in the same moonlight. His voice lowers so that only you, him, and the stars could hear. "And as for your role, you can create a new role, instead of fitting into whatever has been passed down from generations. You can be what you wish to, not what others tell you you are.", he declares, parroting what you had said about the alleged kingdoms that you had once been desperate to run to.
You nod, and he brings his lamp up near your face, the silver of the moon and the gold of the lamp forming shadows on your features that he would ride for decades chasing.
"You will make Winterfell interesting.", he comments, his eyes dancing between yours. "I cannot wait to hear of it."
"Will you do it? Take the Black, I mean?"
"If not, I am a deserter."
"As am I. There is not much to regret deserting in the Seven Kingdom's, in my opinion."
"I will regret deserting the Night's Watch, though. These are my brothers, now."
"Noble.", you remark.
He laughs softly at that. "I try to be. Don't your people have an oath, too?"
"Healers? Yes."
"Will you take it?"
"It might not be in your best interests for me to take it. I may have to resuscitate one of your enemies.", you tell him, solemnly.
He leans closer, in mock conspiracy. "I do not have enemies. Only Ser Thornes that I may want to see slip on a banana peel for satisfaction."
He has made you laugh. He is glad. "Tell me finally. Are you from Dreadfort? Or further south, but still North?"
"I am a Northerner. That is enough. Running northbound led me here, to you, to the Wall. The North is all I need."
It is surprisingly heartfelt, this declaration. Frustrating, but heartfelt.
You look at him — really look — as though he has brought the North Star down for you with no effort at all. "Thank you, Jon Snow.", you tell him, reaching up to hold his face, just as he had been holding yours only a moment ago. "I will be forever grateful."
"Not a second thought about it.", he replies almost immediately, waving the gratitude off with a gentle glint of his eyes, one that you are not sure how exactly he controls on command.
And then, you lean up, as though finally realising that your hands are holding his face. He cannot seem to tear his gaze away from your eyes. Your lips, as well, but that will take years for him to admit. Guilt gnaws at him. "This is not why I helped you."
"I know. I know that." It is interesting, you think, that he cannot fathom that you do not think of him as an opportunist. "I know your intentions, Jon Snow."
His muscles shift just so, in his face, the subtlest hint of a nod. He doesn't seem to know what to do with himself, and it might be endearing, if you were also not so serious, so terrified, but so courageous either.
You do not close your eyes until the very last moment, until you can ostensibly feel that your lips have brushed his, feather-light, barely there, but real. He, however, only opens his eyes when this happens. He is not sure what happens to the lamp in his hand, not sure how it ends up safely on the windowsill, or how one his hands ends up holding a lock of your hair behind your ear and the knuckles of the other gently rub at your cheek as they did the first night he had learnt that touch could heal just as herbs do. He is not even sure how he makes it back to his own bed that night after the dizzying affair of kissing a woman, nor how he makes it up the next morning at the first spill of sunlight into the room to see you and Sam off to Winterfell.
But he does.
This not-knowing, he'll add to the list of things that irk 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.
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