dance of the sugar plum fairy (and other nutcracker things):
Riven pauses before nodding, grabbing his swords and tossing one to her, a pleased look on his face when she catches it with ease. “What did she want?” He asks and Musa shrugs, getting into position. “Wanted to know if I’d be busy this weekend. It’s Nutcracker season.”
Riven gives her a look, one that reminds her that not everyone practically grew up in dance studios, that she’s the one who knows the stress of Nutcracker season like the back of her hand.
- or it’s nutcracker season and musa finds herself paying a favour and healing a little bit more
Thinking about that time gap between s1 and s2 that Riven and Musa got to be around each other enough for her to call him ‘Riv’ at the pub!? Like, they were being way too casual for that to be the first time they hung out since the ‘red flag’ debacle. Which calls for a deleted scene drabble during that time period, me thinks..
...I may have gotten carried away.
———
Musa’s been with Sam long enough to recognize that despite her lips currently searing a path down the side of his throat, it’s not his low groan echoing off of the walls of the greenhouse. He hears it too, puts some distance between them by pushing against her shoulders. “Dad?”
Her heartbeat speeds up even more at the thought of being caught mid-make-out by her boyfriend’s father and her Professor, but to her it sounded more like they’re not the only couple to realize the greenhouse is one of the few places in the school unoccupied after eight pm, so she pulls her hands from underneath his shirt and steps away, towards the door separating the classroom from the infirmary.
It’s slightly ajar, and she pulls it open all the way to reveal Sky’s friend Riven. He’s sitting on one of the beds, torso twisted to allow the meager light from the lamp on the bedside table to illuminate his arm. The armor-plated vest of his new uniform is next to him on the covers, a dark liquid saturating a large section of the torn sleeve around his bicep, which he is palpating with his opposite hand, his face scrunched up in discomfort.
“Oh, it’s you,” Sam spits from behind her, and she frowns at his tone. Riven’s pretty much an asshole by definition, but he hasn’t actually said or done anything yet.
“Delighted to see you too, Junior,” Riven retorts, then nods his head at her. “Red Flag. Not normally one to cockblock, but I’ve got a bit of a situation here.”
There’s a gauze pad, a rolled bandage and medical tape lying in his lap, but he’s clearly a hand short to be able to apply it by himself.
“Sounds like a you problem. Let’s go, babe.” Sam grabs her hand and pulls her arm back, but she resists his tug.
Riven’s eyes flick from her face to his shoulder, then back to her. The now third-year Specialist is hard to miss around the school, but they haven’t spoken one on one since their spat during Training Day last year. Ever since Sky and Bloom have made it official, though, there are rare days when he isn’t hanging with Beatrix and Dane and instead tags along with his roommate, and she’s been spending more time with Bloom while Terra takes up shifts in the greenhouse, so they’ve been part of the same conversation a couple of times.
It’s how she knows it’s his pride that prevents him from asking, not the hostility she can feel rolling off of Sam. She aches to take it from him, settle him down, but she won’t risk it in front of Riven.
She sighs, “Sam, he’s injured.”
“I can see that. Bitter pill, isn’t it, a taste of your own medicine?”
“You know what, Wallflower—”
“Stop,” Musa commands, not sure how all of her time with Sam lately keeps spiraling into this — him wound up in all the wrong ways, her feeling everything but the absence of chaos.
“I’ll meet you back in your room,” she mutters, closing her eyes in preparation for the disappointed sigh she knows is coming. It does, and then she feels the warmth of him retreat, senses his thundercloud of emotions drifting away as he steps through the outside wall.
Riven has the common sense to only raise a suggestive eyebrow at the display. She crosses the distance and lowers herself onto the bed behind him.
“Things are… tense, with Professor Harvey and Rosalind,” she defends her boyfriend’s actions in spite of herself, then quickly deflects. “Can you get this shirt off?”
He grabs the collar of the lycra half-zip and pulls it over his head. She takes over at his shoulder, helping the fabric down his arm, careful to avoid the sizable open gash right where the Alfea logo is positioned on the sleeve. His eyes follow her movement, his head tilted sideways.
“Andreas?” she asks.
“Got it in one.”
She quickly rubs her hands together before resting her fingers on his skin, carefully prodding. She registers the way his body instantly loses just a little bit of its tension. He is still on guard, still rigid, but his shoulders lower half an inch, and his skin moves under her fingertips as his muscles uncoil.
“Well, I’m not a Harvey, but I don’t think it’s deep enough to require stitches.”
“It’s not. Just help me bandage it and you can get back to the guy you were planning to undress.”
She tears open the sterile packaging and positions the gauze over the wound, securing the edges with strips of tape. “Pretty sure that’s out of the window for tonight.”
He hums, amused. “Doesn’t have to be. Just say the word.”
The brash frivolity is just what she needs. “What, three is a crowd, four is a party?”
Riven snorts in surprise, twisting his body further to look at her, and the side of her mouth pulls up into a smirk as she envelopes his arm to circle the bandage around it.
“You’re wasted on him,” he murmurs in a low voice.
Her face falls, and she gives a sharp pull on the loose end of the bandage, causing him to grimace, before tucking it underneath the layer below. “You don’t get to judge him.”
She stands up, looking down on him for once. “You sided with the people who are turning this school into some kind of totalitarian military camp. You’re not as dumb as you act sometimes; you can’t be surprised that people didn’t take kindly to that.”
“You don’t understand,” he bristles, and she turns before he can see her eyes go purple. She can’t hold off the wave of indignation, mixed with a desperation that should be out of place, but is awfully familiar to her instead. She’s known that his overconfidence is a mask for his ache to belong for months, senses it every time he’s even remotely near.
“No, I don’t,” she confirms, moving towards the door. “But for what it’s worth, if you ever decide you want to tell your side of the story, I would try to.”
Riven and Musa are out in a mission for the Solarian crown and he gets cursed. Except breaking the curse is impossible, because Musa doesn’t love him…Right?
Happy birthday Mo!!
I don’t wanna look at anything else now that I saw you
I don’t wanna think of anything else now that I thought of you
I’ve been sleeping so long in a 20-year dark night
And now I see daylight, I only see daylight
“Who now has a death wish?” he whistled, moving forward with hands outstretched to catch her in case she fell, “you’re going to get bitten by some super rare scorpion, Musa! And then what? We’re nearly six hours away from civilization! Get down from-”
“I’m wearing gloves, Riv!” She exclaimed and he looked up.
“And no panties apparently!” He shouted back and Musa didn’t stop, albeit she did raise her hand in the air, middle finger up.
Riven gets cursed by a magical jewel and he must act on his deepest desire in order to break it and live (aka rivusa fuck or die with feelings)
Musa/Riven | Explicit | 21380 words | 2 chapters
Favorite Quote: The entire fucking fic.... Like I my favorite quotes are spoilers and I can’t type them here because I want you guys to react to it in the context of the fic. So yeah, read the fic.
If you like hurt/comfort fics with a lot of feelings and internal struggles and pining, and also fuck or die and amazing smut, you should should read this fic!
READ IT HERE
So I have to start with a disclaimer, Jo, the writer of this fic, is my best friend in the whole world and was the one that got me into writing fics and into making gifs and the whole fandom world. So I might be a little biased with everything she does - even if I think I’m not.
I also followed the creation of this fic, reading it multiple times before it was finished and giving her my 2 cents about it (And making a gif for it). Jo hasn’t written a Rivusa centered fic in a while and I was trying to keep a chill head while internally screaming with excitement that she was writing one - If you aren’t aware, I’m I like Rivusa a bit. Just a little bit.
This was a birthday fic for @gossipqueen2000, another amazing writer and fellow rivusa-stan (totally recommend her fics btw), and Jo first asked Mo what she enjoyed most in fics so this gift would be perfect. I’m not 100% what was in that list because that was a private conversation but boy am I happy with whatever Mo said because the final result was EXPECTACULAR.
This fic. THIS FIC. Ugh, where to even start?
Jo has a way of writing that not only sets the scene perfectly but takes you back and then into characters heads in a way that’s not tireing or confusing or that breaks you out of the plot. Everything happens in the perfect pace, fits right where it needs to fic and flows easily, you could read 100 pages of her writing and feel like you read only 10.
What I also love a lot about her writing, and something I think I struggle a lot with, is showing characters emotions, what they really feel in a way that isn’t “he was sad”, “he was angry”.
You could feel Riven’s love for Musa, not only the romantic love, or the physical lust he has for her, but the true, real love, because of little things like how he knows to keep her ID and her card in his wallet because she has a bad habit of not carrying one, or how he knows the lyrics to her favorite songs- which he also knows not to sing along because she hates when people do that. Details like this, details she adds at just the right place at the right time, show you so much more than what is said, shows the reader characters habits, their history. It gives their feelings depth and it makes it all just feel more real.
And the whump! Jo can write whump. The same way she writes love she writes pain and its so detailed and hurts it makes your heart squeeze. I don’t read a lot of the fics she puts out and I’ve apologized to her tons about it but because she loves hurt and whump and my heart is very fragile, I cry about the most littlest things and when I read a whump fic of hers it literally ruins my day because its all so real and raw and my mind just can’t stop thinking about it.
And the smut... oh boy oh boy... Jo says she’s not really a fan of writing smut but she’s amazing at it, with just a perfect dose of kink mixed it to make it spicy(er). And the smut in this didn’t dissapoint. After reading about, what 19k words of hurt/comfort you finally arrive at the smut and you yell FINALLY! and its HOT!
The plot, which maybe should have been the first thing I talked about but oh well. The plot is... what other word can I use that isn’t “perfect” or “amazing” because I think if Jo were to beta this post she’d say I used these words too much already... The plot is genius (?)
But seriously, Jo could have taken a trope like fuck or die, which is usually straight to the point and PWP, but made it just that, quick and easy. But no, she created a whole intricate universe, a whole detailed backstory, ten years of pining, before she delivered on the prompt. And then instead of making it so they resolve the issue right away, she draggs it over a few days, makes Riven taste the power of the curse, makes him prepared for death as much as he can be because he thinks there’s no way out of it. She makes you yell a the computer/phone screen because RIVEN YOU ARE SO FUCKING STUPID.
I think if I say anything else I’ll be spoiling the fic too much for those who haven’t read. So read it.
And while you’re there check out Jo’s other fics, only a few are rivusa because her main ship is skloom but I 100% recommend them. All of them.
First a speed AU my hearts still broken by young Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock not getting together in irl not to mention the fact that I wanted to see more of them in speed!!
Second, a thousand and one night AU with riven as the jealous Sultan and Musa as Shaharazad!!!
Plsplspls!!🙏🙏🙏
........... im not gonna do the 1001 nights one sorry lovey
"ARE YOU ACTUALLY INSANE?!" Musa shrieks, as Riven all but rolls inside the moving bus she's riding. She cannot even imagine anyone being this crazy over catching a bus, why didn't he just wait for the next-
"Musa, hi," Riven's cracks a smile, his tense face melting, before he immediately goes back to seriousness, "alright, I'll need everyone to stay calm."
"Calm!?" a lady sitting behind Musa scoffs, "you just invaded our bus!"
"Ma'am," Riven sighs, "... there's a bomb in the bus," he says gently, as if his tone is somehow going to change what he's actually saying. Musa lets out a nervous chuckle, thinking he's lying...
But all she feels from him is honesty.
... Two years since Alfea, two years since she last saw him. And it had to be like this.
titsay
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vaporwave
theartofmadeline
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izzy806
blakekathryn
jbbartram-illu
turnnoffyourmind
