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The Study: Michael “Robby” Robinavitch x Reader - ExWife!AU
Summary: Robby finds out the truth about what happened in Seattle.
Companion piece to:
The Neurologist - Robby doesn’t think much of Jack’s friend The Neurologist…
Cuffs - Robby makes a discovery when a pair of handcuffs malfunctions at a crucial time.
The Blues (NSFW) - You and Robby spend your first wedding anniversary in New Orleans.
Bed Rotting - Robby starts to blow up his life after you return to Seattle.
The Voicemail - Robby puts the final nail in the coffin of your marriage when he leaves THAT voice mail.
Divorce Papers - Jack gives a couple of home truths to Robby after he finds out he signed your divorce papers.
A Fucking Nightmare - Robby’s worst nightmare comes true when his ex-wife shows up as a guest at Dana’s vow renewal ceremony.
Regrets - Robby can’t help but think about his regrets after seeing his ex-wife for the first time since he signed the divorce papers.
Unread - Robby turns to Jack when you don’t respond to his message
The Call - Robby takes the plunge and decides to call you, leading to a surprising revelation.
Shepherd - Robby’s world is turned upside down when he receives a call from Derek Shepherd.
Husband Number Two - Robby gets into it with the man vying for the role of Husband Number Two in your life.
The Road Trip - Robby makes a decision that brings the two of you closer together in the wake of your concussion.
The Lightning Field - Robby reminisces about a past vacation while the two of you make plans of your own.
Robby isn’t used to be being to being pampered.
He isn’t used to being exfoliated within an inch of his life or massaged to the point where the knots in his shoulders unravel, leaving him standing tall instead of stooping the way he usually does. His back’s the best it been in years, and he feels relaxed for the first time in God knows how long as he trapses around your shared hotel room in The Coeur d'Alene Resort wearing a white robe and fluffy slippers that feel like they were made for his feet.
You’re curled up on the second queen sized bed, your head propped up on your pillow as he picks up the acai bowls you ordered from room service. You look preoccupied as you flick through the channels on the TV, your skin glowing after your facial, your belly full of brain food.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look this happy.” You tell him as he deposits the bowls on the room service trolley and pushes it back outside your door.
“Now we both know that’s not true.” He remarks pointedly, padding back into the room. “I’m just not used to this kind of self-care, I guess. Aromatherapy, singing bowls and scented oils have never been my thing…”
“Until now.” You point out as you pat the mattress alongside you.
He has a perfectly good bed of his own five feet away, but he settles alongside of you, his back resting against the headboard. Ted Lasso plays on the TV. It’s your comfort show, something he’d often find you watching on the nights you couldn’t sleep, usually around your father’s anniversary.
“There’s something I want to get off my chest.” You say fiddling with the remote, turning the volume down on the T.V. Robby angles his body towards yours, giving you his full attention. “I fucked up… when I left… I shouldn’t have gone to Seattle. I should have stayed in Pittsburgh with you.”
Robby’s dark eyes crinkle at the edges as he shakes his head vehemently, searching for the words to alleviate your misplaced guilt. “I understand why you had to, what happened to your father… The problems I had… they stemmed from something a lot deeper than you moving to another city. You were just… collateral damage, and I wish it was different, I wish I hadn’t been so messed up, so broken but… it wasn’t on you. It was on me for not getting help sooner, for not admitting that I was struggling.”
Your hand reaches out for his, clasping it tightly. He’s faced enough of his demons to know that he maybe he isn’t the one that needs grounding right now, that maybe you’re the one that needs comfort.
“I should have been there for you. I knew what it was like after those shifts were, the really bad ones. I shouldn’t have left you to cope with them on your own.” You say softly, your gaze meeting his.
There’s a sadness in your eyes that’s been dogging you ever since he turned up last night. He sees it every time you look at him, and it makes his heart twist because he feels it too. Every time he thinks about the phone calls he ignored, the texts that went unanswered, the time he stood you up at the airport. In his darkest days he’d convinced himself you didn’t give a shit about him, that you’d started a new life without his baggage but now it occurs to him that you carried it too, that you took some of the broken pieces of him with you to Seattle and you tried to hold them together in your own way.
You draw your knees up against your chest, releasing his hand so you can wrap your arms around them. You look so small right now, so defeated and he understands that this isn’t just about him, that there’s more going on with you underneath the surface.
“I think my mother was right, about how I let dad’s death control me.” You admit as your chin rests upon your knees, your gaze fixated on the sun as it sets across the lake outside. “I was so obsessed with finding a cure for what killed him that I blew up our marriage. I wasted years of my life…”
You trail off with an upset sigh, burying your face against your thighs, shrouding it from his view. You don’t get like this. The world doesn’t fall out from underneath you the way it does for him, you don’t regress into yourself or drown in depression. You combat everything, come up with plans, execute them… you don’t have existential crisises.
Not until now.
There’s a reason you wanted to get away from Seattle, why this road trip couldn’t wait.
“Vivi.” Robby murmurs, his palm smoothing over your back. His palm rubs the space between your shoulder blades, trying to sooth away the tension. “What happened with the study?”
Silence.
So, he waits. His hand making those gentle, calming motions over and over again, maintaining that same reassuring pressure until you feel safe enough to talk.
“It was working.” You tell him, finally lifting your head. You face tilts towards him, and he can see the desolation in you, the heartbreak that comes with having everything you’ve worked so hard for snatched away. “The medication was helping people, we were making real progress but then Derek’s wife Meredith…she had a friend who was a veterinarian called Finn. He’d been a football player during undergrad and started exhibiting symptoms of CTE years later.”
It’s the way it goes with CTE, it’s a progressive neurodegenerative disease that often doesn’t show symptoms until decades down the line. The medical study was for a new form of medication that was meant to alleviate some of the symptoms like confusion and memory loss. There’d been tentative results about it helping to regenerate some of the diseased tissue in lab rats so you’d been very excited about the prospect of there being a possible cure on the horizon or at the very least something that slowed down degeneration.
He’d been excited too. The study was cutting edge, something that could potentially change the landscape not just for CTE but for other neurological issues further down the line.
“We were seeing positive results, so we moved into the next phase which was a blind study to evaluate the effectiveness and side effects. Some patients would be given the medication and others a placebo. The envelopes were sent to us and stored in the pharmacy. I went in to do the final count the night before we were to dispense the medication, and I found Meredith switching the assignments. Finn was assigned the placebo…”
You trail off, running your hand through your hair, shoving it back away from your features as your mouth sets in a grim line as if there’s a sour taste in your mouth.
“She begged me not to tell anyone, to let the trial go ahead and honest to God, Michael, I went home that night and I couldn’t stop thinking about dad. How I would probably have done the same thing if there was potentially this drug that could have saved him…”
It’s a horrible position to be in. To have that level of empathy, to have experienced the realities of what happens when someone doesn’t get the help they need and then be forced to make that terrible choice.
It breaks Robby’s heart, knowing what you had to do.
His arm drapes around you, drawing you into the shelter of his form. You curl into him, tucking yourself into his warmth, taking solace in the only man who has ever understood you on that fundamental level.
“I ended up telling Owen, and instead of letting me make the decision he reported it. Now I’ve been banned from conducting further trials and the study has been moved to Boston so the patients we were working with… they can’t get the help they need because they don’t have the resources to go back and forth.”
What Owen’s done… it’s completely undermined your entire career. If you had been the one to go to OHRP and the FDA, your reputation would have been untarnished but as it stands you look like you were complicit in the tampering for not reporting it immediately. The groups you’ve spent years fighting against like NFL can twist this against you, invalidating all the hard work you’ve done fighting battling the medical misinformation they’re spreading regarding CTE.
That man he’s destroyed you.
He’s taken the pieces of everything you’ve worked for and ground them up into nothing.
“Oh Vivi.” Robby whispers into your hair, gathering you up even closer. You hide your face in his chest, and he can feel your tears soaking into the robe as your ribs stutter against his. “I’m sorry sweetheart, I’m so fucking sorry.”
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Owen is such a misogynistic prick. How can you claim to care about someone, then torpedo their entire career when they confide in you. I hope Owen’s bad deeds catch up to him, he deserves whatever’s coming for him.
Morpheus/Dream of the Endless x gender-neutral!Reader
Summary: Morpheus may be okay with just giving up and dying, but Lucienne certainly isn't. Luckily, she isn’t alone.
Word count: 2.5k
A note from the author: Interestingly, out of all of the POVs I've written in for this fic, Lucienne's head was the hardest to get into! Y'all, we only have three or four chapters left—can you believe it?
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Official String of Fate playlist
The Dreaming is facing the most dire of straits.
The realm has been in danger before, of course. Time and time again, from vortexes to unruly gods to imprisonments, the Dreaming has been on the brink of ruin. Time and time again, salvation has come at the hands of the Dreamlord himself.
The difference between those times and now? The Dreamlord. More specifically, the Dreamlord’s drive. Every other time the realm has faced trials and hazards, Lord Morpheus has fought. For honor, for duty, for his kingdom and his people. The Dreaming is his masterpiece; those who inhabit it, his faithful charges. Every aspect, from the tallest of mountains to the smallest of ants, was created by his hand. To see it fall would be an abhorrence, something he could not bear.
At least, those were his feelings. Before today, Matthew could have said with absolute certainty that Morpheus would take his sister’s hand before willingly letting the Dreaming suffer any permanent damage. Before today, Nuala thought this realm to be far safer than Faerie. Before today, Lucienne figured that eternal job security was a given.
Such assumptions have changed as the peaceful life that Lucienne expected to settle into after a prolonged period of upheaval has been thrown into disarray at the hands of a woefully uninformed mortal. Morpheus had made up his mind—there was to be no contact unless he was specifically asked—and Lucienne, with thousands upon thousands of years of experience on her side, chose not to argue with him. She wanted to, of course. Wanted to curse and call him all manner of names and tell him to stop being so noble and think about himself and his own wants for once.
But she did not, for she knew that it would fall on deaf ears. Facing a life without his soulmate, Morpheus has resigned himself to sickness, to death, and that is that. So instead of saying what she wanted to say, she kept silent (and how many times has she done that in the centuries that she has been by her lord’s side?) and offered him her hand. Too weak to even muster enough power to transport them to his chambers, she walked the halls of the palace with him once more, as they had done so many times before, while trying fruitlessly to forget that this would be the last. It was a minor miracle to even make it to his chambers with how quickly his condition had deteriorated over the preceding hours, but she dutifully completed this final, heartwrenching task for him, forever his faithful first raven.
And now…now, there was nothing to do but wait. For what, she is not sure. There is not exactly a precedent for how a realm such as the Dreaming functions when its sovereign dies a slow, agonizing death. Will the effects of the bond sickness start to manifest throughout the land, cracks and craters and quakes like those left in the wake of a vortex? The rain has already started in earnest once more, and she warily watches the water track down the windows. Or would there be no notice that Morpheus died until suddenly they were meeting a new Lord Dream?
Lucienne is not sure that she wants to serve under a Dream who is not her Dream—the one whom she knows better than he knows himself at times, who can annoy her to no end with his stubbornness and his moods and his pride, who she loves as the only family she can remember. She has half a mind to just up and leave the realm like countless dreams and nightmares did during the century with their ruler missing, the thought of having to pledge fealty to another Lord almost unbearable to her. But she cannot leave; she cannot abandon Morpheus in his last days or hours or minutes, however long he may have left.
Besides, Matthew has only just reappeared after his angry departure earlier, insistent that Lucienne, Mervyn, and Nuala meet him in Lucienne’s office. He’s a determined raven, to be sure, but the frenetic energy that grips him as he herds them all into the room is new, and it piques her attention enough to quell her anxious thoughts.
It seems she’s not the only anxious one, as Matthew hops on the table in front of his friends, unsure of where to begin. Mervyn, impatient as ever, speaks first. “There better be a good reason for this. I was settling my affairs.”
Nuala looks at him in confusion. “‘Affairs’?”
“Finishing up the projects I’ve been putting off so I can die with a clean conscience.”
Lucienne sighs, already tired of the maintenance man’s dramatics. “Matthew, why have you called us here?”
He seems surprised that such a question has been asked. “Because we’re going to do something, right? We have to do something. We can’t just let Morpheus die because of a misconception!”
“I know you haven’t been on the job for long, newbie, but when the boss makes up his mind, there’s not really any changing it. His little human dumped him, and now he doesn’t want to live anymore,” Mervyn says matter-of-factly.
Matthew’s beak, already open to form a retort, snaps shut before he abruptly speaks. “Wait, why is he being so stubborn about this? I get not wanting to risk pissing off his soulmate even more by showing up, but it’s life or death now. Humans especially understand that.”
“Lord Morpheus, first and foremost, is a noble being,” Lucienne begins, smiling sadly. “He takes great pride in his rules, his promises. He made an oath, one that was very clearly built on a great amount of suffering. Did you ever find out what truly happened that night?”
Matthew nods. “I went sleuthing yesterday, before I saw…that. Talked to Hob, because dude knows everything. Apparently, there was a kidnapping attempt by Loki and Puck. No clue how either of them found out, but they did, and Morpheus came to the rescue. Which kicked off the fight, which kicked off the separation, which kicked off this shitstorm we’re in now.”
Nuala grows very still next to Mervyn, the whole group looking at her curiously when a choked squeak escapes her.
“Nuala?” Lucienne questions, dread growing in the pit of her stomach.
It takes the faerie a moment to muster up enough courage to speak. “I—I believe I may be how Loki and Puck came to know of Lord Morpheus’s relationship.”
“You?” Matthew says sharply.
“I told my brother, in a moment of…sadness. Weakness, I suppose,” Nuala admits, cheeks burning. Her friends are all far too smart for them not to know why Nuala would be sad about Morpheus finding his soulmate. “I swore him to secrecy, I promise, but he—he must have let it slip to Puck. And now…now…”
“Now we’re all going to die. Thanks a lot!” Mervyn snaps.
“I am so sorry,” Nuala whimpers, eyes screwed shut.
“Mervyn, calm down,” Lucienne warns, her words doing little to quell the rage brewing in them all at the hand that the Fates have dealt them.
“No! I’m being serious! These two idiots and their stubborn pride are going to bring about the end of the Dreaming.” Cigar smoke curls in the air like smoke from a chimney as he continues to take heated puffs, clearly just getting started on his rant. “Not the Old Gods, not some secret order, but a lover’s spat. I don’t know about you guys, but I like being alive! And, y’know, who even is this punk mortal who thinks that it’s okay to cheat on a soulmate just because they’re on a break?”
“That’s what I’m trying to explain; there was no cheating!” Matthew interjects.
Lucienne furrows her brow. “I thought you saw—”
“Yeah, there was kissing, but there was also an entire conversation I had leading up to that, and a whole lot of context missing, and nobody is letting me explain what happened!” he bemoans.
“Then explain it to us,” she invites.
“Thank you,” Matthew says gratefully before taking a deep breath. “I want you guys to imagine not knowing any of the shit that we do—gods and demons and magic and other realms—and finding out in a way that puts you in grave danger at the hands of beings that are clearly wielding some crazy power. Then, imagine that the person you’ve been dating—a person you’re really liking!—shows up when it shouldn’t be possible that they know what’s happening, wields even crazier power that puts the other guys’ to shame, and tells you, ‘we’re soulmates and you’re supposed to love me forever!’”
Hmm. Lucienne supposes that this would be hard to digest, were she human and unaware of what she currently knows. A glance at Mervyn and Nuala shows that they are also seeing the merit of such an argument. Still, this does not explain turning away and seeking comfort from another after learning all that you have learned recently. “And as for what you saw last night?”
“This whole ‘fate’ thing is really fucking with the kid’s head, okay? The question of if there’s any form of choice or free will available to people once you know that there are three ladies and a guy with a book that can control all of that is a lot to grapple with.” That’s an oversimplification, but Lucienne lets it slide. “I’m not saying that getting drunk and kissing some rando to try and have control over some part of your life is an effective coping mechanism. I’m just saying that I’ve been there, and I get it. Plus, it was an instant regret. There was a lot of crying and apologizing—I actually felt really bad for the poor schmuck who thought he had a chance; you could tell he was not expecting that at all.”
“As a former mortal, you do not think that this is an overreaction?” Nuala asks.
Matthew laughs harshly. “Hell no! If anything, I think Morpheus’s soulmate is handling this really well. It’s only been a little over a week since all of this went down. That’s, like, nothing in human romance time. One time in college, this girl I was seeing claimed she was Mormon, but the church was letting her split her missionary work into summer breaks, so she would be unreachable in Costa Rica all summer. Come to find out, she was doing some missionary…with a guy at his beach house on the Jersey Shore.”
He says this as though it is meant to be funny—to humans, perhaps, it would be. As it stands, everybody in the room simply stares at him awkwardly as he chuckles to himself.
“How do you know that Lord Morpheus’s soulmate loves him, then?” Lucienne steers the conversation back on topic.
“Besides the hysterical crying after kissing another guy? I’ve been in love before. All I had to do was have a single conversation to see how hopelessly in love with Morpheus the kid is. The issue now is how we get two of the most stubborn creatures in existence to talk when one of them is content with dying rather than breaking a promise and the other is in major denial.”
As a rule, Lucienne tries her hardest to steer clear of Lord Morpheus and his…liasons. Every single one of his relationships has had the negative effect of making her life more difficult—whether it be during the relationship, when passion and new love mean he inadvertently shirks his duties, or after, when the realm is flooded and he stands in the middle of it, moping pathetically (though she would never say that aloud) and once more shirking his duties. She let her guard down when Morpheus and Calliope got together, assuming that multiple decades, a marriage, and a child would equal forever. That turned out to be one of her worst miscalculations, and she paid for it dearly for years in the form of both running the realm and trying to make it look as though it still had a functioning lord who hadn’t absconded to some forgotten skerry to grieve all that he had lost.
To bring you two together would be uncomfortable on both a personal and professional level. Propriety dictates that librarians do not get involved in the love lives of their sovereigns, as that would be forgetting oneself. There are very few of his former lovers that she has actively disliked (Queen Titania will never grow on her), but at the end of the day, they all break his heart, and somehow, against her will, she is the one to pick up the pieces. It is best to stay as far away as possible when Morpheus is in love, and hope that the damage when things inevitably end is minor.
But there is no ignoring his emotional state this time. Morpheus will die if there is no reconciliation, and Lucienne would very much like that not to happen. So she puts aside her discomfort at involving herself in one of her lord’s relationships and starts to think about how best to put an end to this separation.
“What about Death? She seems to be one of the only ones who can regularly talk sense to Morpheus,” Mervyn suggests.
Lucienne shakes her head. “The Endless do not meddle in each other’s affairs unless asked.”
“Gee, where have I heard that before?” Matthew mutters sarcastically under his breath, and Lucienne pretends not to hear.
“Death likely is extremely concerned, but she cannot help us, and it would be a great offense to go around Lord Morpheus and ask.”
“What if we take matters into our own hands?” Nuala posits hesitantly.
“Go on…” Matthew prompts warily.
“We can go to the Waking and, as Mervyn said, ‘talk sense’ to Lord Morpheus’s soulmate! If it’s a matter of being in denial about being in love, then both Matthew and I, as beings who have been in love, can help work through that.”
Everybody turns to look at Lucienne expectantly, and she realizes that, even though this is a good plan—the only plan—her loyal friends would not act unless she permitted it.
“I cannot leave the Dreaming,” Lucienne begins carefully, “nor can Mervyn. We are creatures of the Dreaming, and here is where we are meant to remain. You two, however,” she looks to Matthew and Nuala, “are not. Matthew is given express permission as Lord Morpheus’s raven to travel between the realms as he sees fit. Nuala is of another realm, and as such is not beholden to the same laws as the rest of us. There is nothing stopping you from traveling to the Waking and attempting to make Lord Morpheus’s soulmate see reason.”
Nuala clasps her hands to her chest gratefully as Matthew caws. “Faerie do not fail,” she says seriously, given a quest for the first time in ages, “and, though I reside there no longer, that still rings true.”
“We won’t let you down, Loosh!” Matthew assures before turning to Nuala and beginning to etch out a plan. Lucienne stands from her chair and goes to the window, suddenly feeling a bit woozy.
If this goes right, then they have saved the realm. If it goes wrong, then they have just committed treason. May the Fates forgive them for meddling in the affairs of soulmates.
May Morpheus forgive them for meddling in his affairs.
I mean, I don’t think going and talking to Morpheus’ soulmate is truly treason, seeing as Morpheus dying would have an effect on everyone in his realm. They’re simply nudging things in a specific direction is all.
summary: you nurse gwayne back to life again when the war leaves him for dead, and he finds himself in no hurry to be rescued from you. (5k)
characters: gwayne hightower / fem!reader
contents: strangers to lovers, hurt/comfort, domestic fluff, mutual pining, canon divergent, not proofread, cw for mentions of blood and injuries, smut 18+ (MDNI): sub!gwayne, unprotected sex, premature ejaculation, face riding (this man has been through enough i just need someone to take care of him okay)
( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )
Gwayne’s heavy eyes open first to a low, timbered ceiling made of clay and dry-rotted oak — certainly not the ornately embellished stone of the Red Keep, which would’ve suggested that Daemon’s army had won in their ambush and had since taken him hostage; but it wasn’t the sagging canvas of a war tent either, which also meant that no green army had yet come to his rescue. This place, wherever this place was, was small and warm and heavy with the scent of a home-cooked meal and the coppery tang of his own blood.
The hurt returns to him as slowly his consciousness does. His body aches in a way that tells him, a bit more clearly than his own memory could, that he had been long in the dying not too long ago. All of his bones feel rusted shut and heavy; each breath feels like gravel in his lungs and blades against his ribs.
“Where am I…?” Gwayne wonders aloud in a near-inaudible rasp, almost lost beneath the crackle of a fire and the soft hiss of a pot simmering somewhere close.
His heavy head lolls on the thin pillow beneath him. The cushion propping up his stiff neck smells like something floral and sweet, like a woman. As his eyes scan the room, he finds that this quaint house, if it could even be referred to as such, is made of only one room — there’s a dining nook crowded in the corner by the window, a cluttered living area in the opposite corner by the hearth, and apparently a sickbed in which he languishes now.
Through the haze still clinging in his vision, he spots a figure dressed in tatters stirring at a pot with practiced hands — sleeves pushed up to the elbows, faded skirts flowing just below the knee. You do not startle at the sound of his voice, nor do you turn to look at him right away as you crush a handful of dried rosemary into the bubbling water before you.
“Starry Hill,” you answer plainly, as though you were talking to an old friend rather than a half-dead ghost in your bed. You turn slowly over your shoulder and watch confusion twist at the man’s handsome features — (he’d studied every keep, holdfast, and port in Westeros his father told him to, and yet he’d never once heard of this one). “And no, you haven’t heard of it before.”
The grin is evident in your voice as you turn away to wipe your palms off on a rag. You catch the man’s glassy blue eyes darting around your home — over the crooked shelf of clay jars, past the mismatched chairs around the ancient dining table, and towards the narrow window where dim orange light falls in slanted rays. He cannot yet tell whether it’s dawn or dusk, and the notion disorients him further.
“Apologies for the mess, my lord,” you sigh. “If I’d known I was going to be housing a Hightower for three days, I might’ve tidied the place up a bit first.”
Gwayne’s auburn brows furrow slowly as his face twists in a deeper confusion — both at the thought of having spent three days unconscious in this place, and at the ease with which you seemed to know his name. His house. His blood. “How… How did you know I was a Hightower?”
Your head turns lazily on your shoulder to flash the man a narrow-eyed, almost pitying sort of look. Your gaze falls across his flaming copper hair, the aristocratic slope of his nose, and the inherited Hightower beauty that not even war, nor three days on his deathbed, could manage to take from him. Even halfway ruined, the man still looks like something bred for portraiture. And it would, perhaps, be so easy to tell him as much.
“Well, you were wearing the sigil all over your armor, to be fair,” you deadpan instead and turn back to your cooking.
Only then does Gwayne realize that the heaviness of his armor is long gone from his frame. All of his clothes, in fact, are gone — the pale canvas of his bare chest is on display now, carved lean from a lifetime in the training yard, and now sporting a square piece of plaster across his ribcage. Beneath the heavy quilt thrown over his legs, he can feel a pair of baggy trousers riding low on his hips that do not belong to him.
Which means you had to have undressed him; bathed him; patched up his marred skin. The thought alone is dizzying.
Panic wraps its hands around his throat as he rises onto his elbows, grimacing at the ache it puts in his side and somewhere deep in his bicep — where a linen cloth has been wrapped tight.
“How did I get here?”
“Your guess is as good as mine…” you huff without looking away from the pot ahead of you. “You’re the one who showed up half-dead on my doorstep, if you’ll recall— So I think I have more questions for you than you have for me, in truth.”
Gwayne’s eyes go glassy and distant as he strains to recollect the events that led him here.
He remembers Ser Criston’s words about a death march, and the sudden screeching of his horse when the first volley of enemy arrows came flying every which way. He vaguely remembers his mare rearing up and tossing him onto his back against the heavy forest floor, and the way the world erupted with the shouting of a hundred men or more all at once. But he does not know what became of any of them now.
“I need to leave,” he announces at once.
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” you wince as you watch the man fling the quilt from his body, visibly toned from years of knighthood but still pale from his lingering brush with death. “Not on that leg of yours— I’m still not sure I set the bone just right.”
Gwayne’s jaw clenches tight as he swings his legs over the side of the bed. His tired muscles pull taut in protest, though it doesn’t hurt him nearly as badly as his left shin does when his bare feet hit the ancient floorboards. A white-hot pain sears from ankle to knee; his chiseled face screws tight as he chokes on a scream.
He doubles over in agony and digs his trembling fists into the thin sheets of the down mattress, struggling to take stock of his injuries.
There’s a plaster just below his knee and a sickly yellow-green bruise blooming just below that, from where the bone came through when the weight of his horse fell on top of him, perhaps. There’s a hot, pulsing feeling beneath the plaster on his right arm — a small but concentrated signature that must’ve come from an arrow. And the length of the shallow scrape along his ribs suggests that it came from a kiss of an enemy blade.
All of it is dressed now in clean linen, from the same kind hands stirring supper across the room from him, entirely unbothered by his suffering.
“Seven fucking hells…” you groan, more to yourself than to him. “I forgot the bloody potatoes.”
Gwayne blinks wildly at your passing figure as you trade the wooden spoon in your hands for the dark, beaten cloak hanging beside the door. “P-Potatoes?” he stammers in response, because he can think of a thousand issues much more pressing than potatoes.
“Yes,” you nod, sliding your arms through the thick woolen sleeves gone soft and shapeless with age. “You can’t have rabbit stew without potatoes. It ruins the whole dish— I’d think you’d know that, as a pretty little lord and all.”
He perks slightly at the mention of it — of food, and of the thought that some other man must surely live here to have killed and skinned the meat for your stew.
“Where is your father?” he calls to your retreating form.
There’s a certain edge of command in his voice that tries to surface past the wavers of pain. He attempts to assert some Hightower authority in the walls of your home, despite being half-dressed and hunched over the edge of your bed and completely at your mercy.
“Or a husband, perhaps? Someone I can speak rationally with.”
“No father… No husband…” you sigh and tie the top of your coat, which is a size or three too big for you. “You can speak rationally to me, if you wish, though I fear your current hysterics might render conversation somewhat impossible… But I require no thanks for saving your life, to be sure.”
Your words carry a certain bite that pierces him straight through the chest; the devastating reminder of a debt he has not yet had any sense to acknowledge.
The door opens with a high-pitched creaking sound; the cool breeze that rushes in tells him that the day is ending rather than just beginning. You pause at the threshold, hand on the frame and hood half-raised
“If you’re going to leave, at least remember to shut the door behind you,” you tell him, detached but not totally unkind. “I don’t want the smell of supper bringing the animals down from the hill.”
The door screeches and clicks behind you, punctuating your leaving. The little house — smaller than his bathing chambers back in Oldtown — goes very quiet and very still with your absence. The eeriness unnerves a distant, boyish part of him that wishes most desperately for your return. The rest of him, however, wants nothing more than to be rid of this place entirely — from the strangeness of it and of you most of all.
Gwayne grits his teeth and hauls himself not-quite to full height. He’s doubled over and bracing his white-knuckled grip on the ancient wooden bedframe as he hobbles the short distance towards the door, fighting through the screaming ache shooting up and down his left leg. He makes it not even five steps before it gives out on him completely.
He crumples to the unforgiving ground in a graceless heap of limbs and injured pride, catching himself on instinct with the arm sporting the throbbing arrow wound going down.
He lies there, groaning and writhing and choking down cries of frustration with his cheek pressed to the cold floor. The sound of his ragged breaths fills the small, empty house as he watches the sunset dip low past the window, quietly waiting for the sound of the door to open — and for your presence to follow.
It opens at last; three minutes or three hours later. A silken breeze rushes in alongside you, as you enter with a basket of potatoes and other vegetables on your hip. You falter in the doorway at the sight of the man sprawled out on your floor, a crumpled puppet with all of its strings cut clean.
A strange, satisfied smile creeps across your face as you swipe your hood back with your free hand. “Well…” you croon lowly. “What do we have here?”
Gwayne lifts his heavy head. He looks up at you with watery blue eyes through the strands of wild auburn hair hanging over his brow. He loses every ounce of his composure in that moment, turning into a doe-eyed and pleading thing as his wet gaze peers at you from beneath his lashes.
“Please…” he rasps. “Help me…”
He doesn’t learn your name until the second day. He does not stand on his own until the fifth. And he does not bathe himself unaided until the seventh.
You do not coddle him for any of it. You clean his wounds and change his bandages twice daily, and scold him for flinching at the sting — telling him that he’d spent too many years being pampered by wetnurses and that was precisely why he healed so slowly. But, after that first week, he learned to walk the length of your small home without his leg buckling underneath him; though he still requires the cane you’d fashioned for him out of a stag’s antler if he plans on taking more than a step or two.
“Here. So you can stop looking like a newborn calf every time you cross the room,” you’d said when you gifted it to him. “It’s starting to get hard to watch, if I’m honest.”
He is, if he’s being entirely truthful with himself, entirely unused to being spoken to this way. The ladies of his acquaintance back in Oldtown — the soft, sweet-voiced daughters of high lords and ladies — would never have dared to call him hysterical to his face or handle his wounds with such unromantic efficiency. They never would have laughed, as you had, at the sight of him crumpled on the floor.
You’re nothing at all like the ladies he grew up with.
You swear like a dockhand; you name your goats like they're your kin; you wear your dead parents' old clothes without a trace of shame and speak of your own life with a bluntness that would scandalize every septa he'd grown up with. It should, perhaps, trouble him a great deal more than it does.
Gwayne knows he could’ve and likely should’ve left days ago. He suspects that you know it, too. Tumbleton was not far from here, you told him, and his kin held the fortress now — a real castle with a real maester to tend to him — rather than this strange, sharp-tongued woman with rough hands and a rougher sense of humor. But still, he does not go. He tells himself that it’s his leg; that the roads were surely not safe yet and that he’d be long in the dying should he cross Daemon’s army a second time.
So he stays, and he makes himself useful to you in the waiting, in whatever small ways he can manage. He could not do much, at first — he could not chop firewood or carry water; he could barely carry himself, in truth — but he could mend a fence while seated, and feed the farm animals while leaning on his cane, and shell the peas you bring in from the garden for supper.
Gwayne quickly discovers, to his own mortification, that he takes a strange satisfaction in it all. This was not a life meant for knights, certainly not one meant for a Hightower, but yet he can picture all the rest of his days playing out exactly like this — utterly unremarkable, but his just the same.
It has been three weeks since his arrival, give or take, and his days feel less like exile now and more like routine. He sits propped on the pillows after his bath, milky-white skin glimmering from your homemade oils, with nothing but a pair of borrowed trousers covering his lower half.
You sit on the edge of the bed beside him and redress the stubborn wound on his arm that refuses to heal — the worst of his injuries he came here with, Gwayne insists; a nerve-deep pain that he swears he can feel when he’s dreaming. But even still, weeks into the habit of tending to him, you are no gentler about it than you were that very first night.
“Ow—” Gwayne winces when you press too firmly against the wound. You catch his elbow before he can draw it away and urge it back into place with an unsentimental force.
“Stop squirming,” you scold and continue to dab the homemade, herb-flecked ointment onto the irritated skin.
“It hurts,” the man insists.
“It hurts because you’re squirming.”
Gwayne attempts to glare at you as you reach for the linen cloth on the table beside you. The playful frown softens with a soft smile despite himself. “Has anyone ever told you that your bedside manner is just extraordinary?”
“All the time…” you lilt back and slide the fabric around his arm, tying it off with one particularly harsh tug. “Usually right before they tell me that they're feeling much better and no longer require any of my help.”
“Well…” Gwayne croons, pale eyes glittering in the dancing candlelight. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you wanted me gone…”
You glance finally up at him from beneath your lashes, at the handsome knight sharing your house — with bright copper hair gone soft from his bath, and bright blue eyes a little too earnest for someone meant to be teasing — the kind of man that belonged in the fairytales you’d read as a child; not in your own home in your own bed.
Something in your sharp expression finally gives, like The Wall finally weeping after the first warm day of summer.
“You’re the prettiest thing I’ve seen in years, Ser Gwayne,” you hum lowly. “So if you haven’t realized by now that I’m keeping you hostage here, then I fear you haven’t been paying attention.”
A breathy laugh shakes his toned stomach, and the scar along his ribs no longer pulls to do so. He’s fairly certain that you’re jesting, but even still, he doesn’t think he’d care all that much if you weren’t.
“I find that…” he trails slowly off with a squinted look in his pale eyes, as if the realization were hitting him the moment the words fell from his mouth. His melodic voice carries a sort of airiness in it despite the soft confession. “That perhaps I wouldn’t mind it. Being your hostage… Staying here. With you… I don't think I'd mind that at all…”
“Well… That’s a very dangerous thing to say to a woman with nothing to lose, Ser Gwayne,” you murmur, propping your fists on either side of his waist as you lean in close to him — until he can smell the lavender soap on your skin and count the flecks of firelight in your gaze. “Your army has surely presumed you dead by now… No one will come looking for you here… So if you do not wish to be kept by me, the door is still open…”
Something in his chest flares hot at your words, at the thought of being kept by you.
“For how long?” he teases with an arched auburn brow, pink lips curling into a slow smile.
Your eyes flit away and back again. “…Roughly the next ten seconds.”
“Well…” he lilts as his hand lifts slowly from the blankets to cradle your jaw, urging you that much closer. “That seems like plenty of time.”
He leans off the pillow to press his mouth to yours. His nose smushes into the side of yours as his plush lips slot with your softer ones. Your tongue darts between them with little warning and a degree too eager, swiping against his like velvet on velvet. Gwayne exhales a heavy sigh through his nose at the taste of you — like supper and wine and something foreign that he chases with each languid kiss.
You kiss him long and slow, like biting into the sweet skin of an apple, and shift on the mattress to straddle his waist. Gwayne’s free hand shoves the quilt down his thighs to accommodate you upon them. Your fingers rest around his neck like a collar as you grind your hips over his, up his lap and down again. A groan rumbles like thunder in his throat.
His hands dart instantly for your waist, knotting his long fingers in the skirts pushed up to your thighs, as he pulls off of you with a quiet smack. “Don’t,” he hears himself plead.
“Why?” you pant, blinking back at him with heavy eyes.
“It’s been…” His adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “A long… long time.”
Your lips curl into a grin before your head ducks down again. Your mouth smears along his pulse in a sloppy kiss. “Three weeks isn’t so long, is it?”
A laugh sounds in his throat. You feel it rumbling against your mouth. “The war’s been going on for a lot longer than three weeks, my dear…”
“Don’t tell me Ser Gwayne hasn’t taken his fair share of whores on the road,” you quip against the milky white tendon of his neck.
He smiles with his nose in your hair. “Not many whores on the battlefield, I’m afraid…”
“Oh, you poor thing…” you croon as you pull slowly back from him, more gentle with him now than you were when he was half dead on your porch; though there’s still a playful air about you that he doesn’t yet miss. “No wonder you’ve been so uptight… You’ve just been looking for a little… release, haven’t you? Spit—”
Gwayne’s eyes widen as they flick between your expectant face and the hand you hold under his chin. Despite his obvious diffidence, he ducks his head and spits a glob of saliva onto your palm — and watches with held breath as your fingers dip under the hem of his trousers. They wrap around his cock, laying half-soft on his thigh, and use his spit to work him the rest of the way hard. He feels like heavy velvet in your fist.
His dizzy head tips back against the wall with a quiet thud. Your quiet giggling melts with his pleasured groan as he hardens slowly in your fist.
“I’ll bet you’ll cum the second I tell you to,” you laugh.
Gwayne nods slowly, adam’s apple moving in his long throat as he fights to keep his lidded eyes open. His breath catches in his chest when your thumb swipes over the sensitive tip of his cock.
“I’ll bet you’ll do anything I tell you to… Won’t you?”
Gwayne nods again, jerking in your fist at your words.
“Oh…” you huff a mixture of a contented sigh and a devilish laugh as you squeeze him harder in your fist. “I am going to have… so much fun with you, Ser Gwayne…”
He has little time to ponder the weight of your words when you shift on top of him again. You pull your fingers from his trousers and tuck the hem beneath his heavy balls. His eyes snap open to find you urging your dress skirts further up your thighs. He’s left mourning the warmth of your touch only for a moment, before your hand slides between your bodies once more to guide the drooling tip of his cock into your already weeping confines.
He’s long and slender — not nearly as thick as the butcher’s son in town who’s been tending to your needs for years, but an inch or three longer still — and made of meandering veins you can feel when you pierce yourself upon him. Your head tips back to exhale a moan at the ceiling, mouth curling into a lazy smile as you adjust to the length of him.
Gwayne chokes on a groan in his throat when your hips sit flush with his again, fingers clutching mercilessly at the plush of your thighs hard enough to etch bruises on the skin. The sound turns into a strangled whimper when you clench absentmindedly around him, warmer than velvet and drooling something fierce.
“I can’t…” the man whines, chiseled features twisting into a pained sort of look as he shifts his hips under your weight — trying to chase his pleasure and run away from it all at once. “I— I can’t— Seven fucking hells…”
You smile down at him when he tries and fails to get the words out. He misses the amusement flashing across your face with his eyes squeezed shut, hard enough to make white stars speckle behind the deep black of his eyelids. You clench around him again, just to hear him whimper for you again.
“Can’t what, my lord?” you coo to him, with a gentleness he didn’t think you were capable of before now. Your hands smooth up and around his neck until your fingers twist in the short auburn tendrils at the very nape of it. Chills erupt down the length of his spine in their wake.
“I don’t wanna cum yet,” he protests through gritted teeth. “’S too soon—”
“But I want you to cum,” you tell him, and punctuate your command with a calculated roll of your hips. You tighten around him once more when your clit brushes the coarse, dark-auburn hair above his cock. You swallow his subsequent groan in a sloppy kiss, more tongue than mouth, and run the tip of your nose along the bridge of his after. “And then… after I’ve milked your cock—”
“Fuck…” he swears, though it comes out more like a sob.
“—I’ll let you clean me up with your mouth,” you continue.
A moan tears through his throat at the thought — of pressing his mouth to your cunt until his nose is smushed against your clit, of lapping at the mixture of pleasure leaking out of you like honey, of your hands in his hair pushing him further into your pussy. He bursts at the thought, losing himself completely as he draws you into his bare chest with two strong arms wound up and around your back.
Gwayne hides his flushed face in your neck as he hugs you against him, meeting your thrusts with weaker ones of his own. He buries each of his pitiful moans into your pulsepoint while his cock jerks wildly within your unforgiving confines— spitting ropes of warm cum that your clenching cunt milks from him.
“I’m sorry,” he hears himself say as he shudders just against you. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry… Seven hells— I’m sorry…”
You pet at his wild hair as he comes down from his high, whispering murmurs of praise in his ear as the pleasure ebbs from his trembling body. “There you go… Good boy… That’s it— Give me all of it…”
Gwayne pulls his face from your neck once he’s fully spent. His trembling hands reach for your face again, cupping your cheeks between his calloused palms to meet your eyes with his wide, wet, and pleading ones. “I’m sorry,” he whispers again. “Let me make you feel good— I want to make you feel good.”
“I know,” you coo to him, almost sympathetically so. “On your back.”
Gwayne’s auburn brows knit softly together, but his body obeys like it was designed to submit to you. You remain straddled against him as he descends back onto the pillows. He watches down the bridge of his nose as your hands smooth up his milky white torso — past the fine trail of hair on his lean stomach, over the healed scar on his ribs, and towards his heaving chest.
Your eyes stay locked with his heavy ones as you shift your weight above him, inching up up up. You cage your bottom lip between your teeth as you reach for the hem of your skirt. You drag the heavy fabric of your dress up and over your head. Gwayne has little time to admire your bare body before you’re straddling your knees on either side of his face. His mouth waters instantly at the sight of your glittering pussy as it descends over his mouth — he curls his arms around your thighs to pull you further in.
He groans when the taste of you hits his tongue — a sweet-salty mixture of your combined pleasures — and you feel the vibrations of the sound from your cunt to the top of your spine. You keep one hand braced on the wooden headboard and your other woven through his silken auburn locks, guiding his mouth along your cunt.
“Yes…” you sigh when his mouth meets your clit. “Right there…”
Gwayne moans again at your praise and does everything in his power to make you give it to him again. He focuses on the bundle of nerves — lapping his tongue against it and suckling it between his lips. You make a noise for him he’s never heard before, a high-pitched cry that swells across the quiet room. “Keep going,” he hears you whimper when his mouth wraps around your clit. “Fuck yes, keep going like that—”
Your fingers twist hard in his hair as your hips grind down over his tongue. He moans when you give the strands an especially harsh tongue, and the sound makes you tremble on top of him. You cum for him with a strangled cry, and Gwayne sighs through his nose when a mixture of his cum and yours drops onto the velvety pad of his tongue.
He laps at every ounce of it with an eagerness that you can hear, a chorus of panted breaths and muffled suckling sounds.
He doesn’t stop until you’re shoving him away by the crown of his head.
You exhale a heavy breath and sit back on your haunches, resting your ass over his chest and propping your weight along his ribs. Your heavy eyes rake over his face — cheeks flushed red, pale eyes glassy with desire, pink lips swollen, chin glittering with your cum, hair wild from the pillow and your fingers alike. An angel carved from in.
A lazy smile tugs at the corners of your mouth as you shake your heavy head down at him. “You’re not going anywhere, Ser Gwayne… You understand that, right?”
“Gwayne,” he corrects, glittering lips curling upward. “Not ser.”
“You’re not going anywhere… Gwayne.”
“I’m glad to hear it, in truth…” he confesses on an exhaled breath. “I was starting to like it here anyway…”
Summary: It's time for Dana to get real with the ghostwriter.
SET AFTER:
Sassy - Dana's world is turned upside down when a face from her past appears at PTMC.
Choir Girl/Wild Girl - Dana's world is turned upside down when a face from her past appears at PTMC.
The Ghostwriter - The past collides with the present when a ghostwriter turns up, hell bent on learning what happened in New York all those years ago.
The Knock At The Door (NSFW) - Dana's dreams of her time in New York are interrupted by an unexpected knock on the door at three in the morning.
Lavender - Dana reveals the truth about her marriage leading to a complicated moment.
The ghostwriter is a problem.
One that you wish you could eliminate as you sit across from her, foot tapping against the leg of the table. She ignores your glare and focuses on Dana with a hunger in her eyes that makes you want to slap the plum coloured lipstick from her mouth.
You get it though, even forty years on, Dana Evans is something else.
“So, your plan is to blackmail us into telling our story.” Dana summarises as she toys with the battered cigarette carton between her fingers. It’s scuffed, falling apart. Something she keeps on her in case of emergencies, and this… this certainly warrants an emergency.
“Blackmail is such a horrible word.” Giselle says, her phone sitting on the table between you. She taps her finger on the screen, bringing up the picture of that kiss. “At least by talking to me you get to control the narrative.”
“Who the fuck is going to care about two women who used to be in a band forty years ago?” Dana barks out a laugh, deftly sliding a cigarette out from the carton. “You hoping to send it to People magazine? I’m sure they’d be real interested in a couple of nurses that are hot for each other.”
You bite back a smile, this… this is why you started calling her Sassy all those years ago.
“Hm.” Giselle says, her tattooed eyebrows almost meeting in the middle as she turns the phone screen around so you can see your hands threading through Dana’s hair, her body pushed up against yours. “Does your husband know that you fuck women?”
It’s a low fucking blow, but its water off a duck’s back as Dana withdraws a cheap lighter from the cigarette carton. “That’s never been a secret.”
“But your daughters don’t, and the people you work with, what about your church?” Giselle persists as Dana places the cigarette between her lips.
“I gotta hand it to you.” Dana picks up the lighter, the flame flickering as she brings it to the end of her cigarette. It catches and a plume of smoke twirls from the end as Dana takes that first drag. “You got a set of brass balls on you.”
Giselle glances at the bartender, but he’s too engrossed in solving today’s Wordle to give a shit about Dana lighting up. “Mac’s a friend.” Dana tips her head towards him. “He doesn’t care about me smoking in here.”
She blows a stream of smoke into Giselle’s face to make her point. The other woman coughs into her hand, and Dana smiles in that feral way of hers before she taps off the ash into the other woman’s glass.
“I have spent the last forty years playing by other people’s rules.” Dana informs her, taking another drag and holding it for long enough that Giselle starts to shift impatiently in her seat. “I’m not going to live my life dancing to that tune anymore. You want to publish the photo, send it to everyone in my life go ahead but you’re not getting my story, that is between me and her.” She tilts her head towards you. “And maybe someone with ethics if we decide to tell it but that certainly won’t be you after I call your publisher.”
“They want this story just as bad as I do.” Giselle says, sinking back into her seat. There’s a tightness to her shoulders, a slight waver to her voice. “It won’t change a single thing.”
Dana huffs out a wry chuckle as she stubs out the cigarette on the screen of Giselle’s phone. “I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?”
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just like, if there's a history at your institution of disabled kids not being able to make it you realise that's your fault right. like why don't you fucking do something about it. i guess they tried to do something about it with me and it failed so they let me go. crazy. nice work. why should we try to do any better.
only 5% of people with adhd who go to college finish a degree. FUCKING. FIVE!!! PERCENT!!!!!!!!!!!
that should disgust and enrage you.
if any other demographic of students had a 95% failure rate, we would be demanding reform and studies to understand why that’s happening
when i was at my first university, trying to get accommodations for my ADHD, they just kept asking me what accommodations i wanted, and refused to answer when i would ask what was available to me. how the Hell am i supposed to know what i can have? what’s available???? also, i don’t know!!!! i’m an adhd sufferer, not a fucking disability expert for the fucking college, unlike you, DISABILITY EXPERT WHO WORKS FOR THE COLLEGE.
but because the us is OBSESSED with making sure no one gets anything “”for free””, she literally would not tell me what my options were until i broke down in tears and asked her why she was refusing to help me. and then she did a big sigh, like i was fucking up her entire career by *checks notes* asking the disability center in my university to help me, a disabled student
at the second uni i went to, i tried to explain to a dean that i was literally two gen eds that had nothing to do with my degree away from graduating and that i was burnt out and broke and exhausted and suicidal and i just needed to be able to finish my degree without the gen eds. and this. fucking. guy. looked me right in my face and said in the most patronizing tone he could muster “if you can’t handle it, then maybe college just isn’t for you.” keep in mind that up until that semester, i had been an honor student who made Dean’s List every semester and didn’t get below Bs. if it hadn’t been for my mental breakdown, i would have graduated cum laude, maybe even summa cum laude.
but this dean of students looked a disabled person right in the face and said well i guess you just can’t do it, short bus
Pulled these from a couple articles really quick but yeah the statistics are not kind. I remember writing a scathing essay about my issues with ADHD and college as part of an assignment for academic probation. I got back an email calling me entitled and lazy. Somehow, this thread helps me feel a lot better. I still have about a semester of school unfinished that I’m unsure if I’ll finish but… yeah. Makes me feel better to know it’s not just me.
PSA: The Job Accommodation Network maintains a searchable database of accommodation suggestions for a wide variety of disabilities.
The full database can be accessed here and the ADHD page is here. The full database can be filtered by disability, by limitation, by work-related function, by topic, and by accommodation. Many of these accommodations are applicable to academic settings as well as the workplace.
Here are the section headers for ADHD accommodations ideas to give an overview of what the page contains - this post would become Do You Love the Color of the Accommodation if I attempted to list them all here
The ADHD page linked above also includes case examples and strategies for determining what sort of accommodations might be necessary. More broadly, the JAN website as a whole is a treasure trove of information related to the Americans with Disabilities Act and resources for both individuals and employers.
The head of disability accommodations at my college just kept ablesplaining to me that “accommodations are to level the playing field, not give you an advantage,” and that her job is to “protect the school’s rights” rather than help disabled students. The only accommodations they would offer me were 1. extra time on tests, and 2. an alternative test-taking location - neither of which I needed. I ended up getting (most of) what I actually needed by unofficially asking the individual professors, but it should have been legally protected.
Dang. I feel better about spending 9 years knocking about college. Admittedly, I emerged with many degrees instead of just one, but the one I needed for later work life was the one that I struggled to get.
as someone with ARFID i really couldn't care less about the distinction between "picky eaters" and "genuine eating issues." if you are an asshole to someone you see as "just picky" i will never, ever trust you. i've lived through the trauma of being shamed and humiliated for my eating needs.
frankly i think a LOT of "picky eaters" have some kind of sensory problems– autistic or allistic– and shame is never useful. i don't fucking care how annoying you think we are. if you've never lived through the humiliation of being the only one not eating at a dinner table, or having to choke down something disgusting you already know you hate because other people insist you don't know your own body, or getting a hunger migraine in a house full of food because none of its edible to you? you don't understand how awful it is to have food issues.
whenever i see people draw this distinction between being "just a picky eater" and "having a real problem" all i think is, who does this serve? most people don't even know ARFID exists. there are so many undiagnosed autistics, or just people with a variety of issues that aren't officially diagnosed. why do we need a medical label in order to be treated with respect and compassion? why did i need to be diagnosed as autistic for my family to realize the abuse they put me through for years because of my eating habits?
it's such an easy habit for neglected groups to fall into– the idea that a medical diagnosis can save us. that by appealing to the medical/psychiatric industry, we can be protected from abuse and given basic respect and resources. but the truth is that it should never have come to this in the first place. dignity doesn't come from an abled doctor telling you that there's a medical reason for your symptoms. it comes from being a person. once you accept that you need a Good Reason to have your needs respected, you doom yourself to neglecting and abusing those who have your same struggles because they aren't lucky enough to access medical recognition.
tl;dr solidarity with all "picky eaters" stop guilting people for having varying food needs, if we make you irrationally angry that's YOUR problem not ours, and abolish "children's menus" & replace them with simple-food / small-portion menus for people of all ages
Hi Mae! I didn’t know you wrote for Carmy, he’s my FAV! Could I trouble you for a slightly angsty sic fic where read is sick? Ty!
For sure! Thanks for requesting babe <3
Carmy Berzatto x fem!reader ♡ 797 words
You're asleep when Carmy comes into the office. The kitchen has quieted to just the hum of the refrigerator, everyone else gone home. Your cheek smushes against your arm where it's laid across the desk.
Despite the din you must have slept through all night, something about the sound of Carmy taking off his apron rouses you. You sniff discontentedly, your eyes opening in stages, bleary and then turning sad fast, a pinch in Carmy's gut.
"Hey." He crosses his arms, surveying you.
"Hey," you say back. And if your cracked lips and general dishevelment weren't enough to solidify his impression of you, your voice would do it. "Is it…are we closed?"
Carmy chews the inside of his cheek. "Yeah."
Maybe it's a good thing you fell asleep, so you didn't come out of the office to find him during service. It was a little mean, telling you to sit here and wait for him while knowing he wouldn't come until the night was over, but if Carmy told you he was sending you home you'd have gone in a huff, and he didn't want you going by yourself. You're too sick to stand up for long, much less take the L all the way to your place.
Carmy wants to take you back to his, where he can keep an eye on you. Make you soup or something.
He asked you to wait so that he could see you home himself. Mean, but not without cause. Intent counts for something, right?
You've figured him out now, anyway. Your brow scrunches into a frown. "I thought you were gonna come get me."
"I am getting you."
"I mean earlier. I could've worn a mask or something."
Carmy scoffs before he can stop it. You both know a mask isn't enough to keep food safe from germs even in a pinch, but beyond the fact that Carmy wasn't going to let you contaminate his kitchen he also wasn't going to let you run yourself into the ground trying to work while you're sick.
"We don't have to talk about this right now," he says.
"I could've helped," you insist.
"Not really." He doesn't sugarcoat it. He sees that you know it, too, in the awful way guilt twinges in your brow. "And you didn't have to. Ebra was fine taking over your station."
"You didn't need to stretch Ebra when I was just sitting around in here."
"You shouldn't have fucking been here in the first place—" Carmy's voice rises, and he catches himself, biting his cheek hard. "Sorry. I'm sorry, but you know you shouldn't have."
If anything, you look guiltier. "I tried to—"
"I know, I know." Jess was supposed to cover for you tonight. You texted Carmy yesterday, let him know that you weren't feeling well and wouldn't be in tonight. He was going to stop by tomorrow morning to bring you groceries and sudafed and shit. But when Jess pulled out at the last minute, you didn't tell Carmy about that. You just showed up, and he was as surprised to see you as you were to be benched upon arrival.
He hates that he's created this environment where people are so reckless with themselves. He tries hard to correct it. Maybe Carmy can admit privately that he tries his hardest with you.
"Look," he breathes out, slotting his hand along your face to hold your cheek. You're as warm as he thought. "You can't see yourself right now, but you look fucking miserable."
Some of the guilt in you fizzles. "You're not very good at flirting," you say without bite.
"I know. But it's true. Just come home with me, okay?"
"I take it back." You blink slowly. "That was really good flirting."
As you consider the offer, you really begin to look like you might fall asleep. Carmy thinks he might get his way if he just has to carry you home. "I have sudafed," he adds to sweeten the deal.
You sniff as though reminded of how sorely you need it. "I don't want to get you sick."
"I'll be fine."
"You're not reassuring me, Carmen."
"What can I do to reassure you?"
You think about it. "If I get you sick, you can't work, either."
Carmy sucks his teeth. "Okay."
"Really?" You look surprised for a second, but then your eyes narrow. "Are you lying?"
"You'll come with me if I agree?" he asks, exasperated, like he doesn't love you so much it makes him want to tear his hair out.
"…Yeah. If you really mean it."
"Then I really mean it." Carmy buries a kiss in your hair, reveling in how quickly you soften again. He scrubs his hand up and down your back. "C'mon, let's go home."
Hey so a small thing that literally everyone who sees this is capable of is correcting any “used to” statements about native people in this country.
“Native people used to live in this National Park” No. They still do.
“Native people used to tell these stories-” No. They still do.
“Native people used to use this plant as a natural remedy-” No. They still do.
Better yet, familiarize yourself with the tribes local to you. Odds are, they do not yet have federal recognition. You can still read the stories they have to share, you can share their ongoing battle for recognition with others, you can sign petitions and spread the word to others to do so as well. But do something.
Just a reminder that the Chinook Indian Nation was one of the very few tribes to be recognized and then have that recognition rescinded. They've been fighting to regain recognition ever since, and you can find out more about how to help them no matter where you are at ChinookJustice.org.
70+ tribes have lost their federal recognition since the 1800s for various reasons that mostly boil down to treaties and policies that prioritized termination of tribes and “integration into American society.” Many tribes are also unrecognized as separate from a larger tribe, meaning they can access benefits by enrolling in the recognized tribe but by doing so weaken the chance of their own tribe ever gaining recognition because the government only recognizes one tribal affiliation per person (also screwing over the many people with ancestors in multiple tribes). And since they have no support, they struggle to continue as a community to practice their traditions and consistent community, which is a (hard to prove) requirement for regaining that recognition
Find and learn about the people near you. My closest tribe is one of those that lost their federal recognition thanks to legal nonsense. I regularly hear people around here calling them “pretendians” while at the same time they’re barred from many activities like educating others at schools and public events due to their lack of recognition. Yeah, there are people out there faking things, but there are also many people who have been fighting for recognition for decades, and with a little looking and listening it’s not hard to learn the difference
Tags ✢ post-Dance, grief/mourning, arranged marriage/political marriage, enemies to lovers, falling in love, eventual romance, eventual smut, angst with a happy ending
Wordcount ✢ 3,360
Summary ✢ Jacaerys is crowned king as his mother perishes from her wounds shortly after retaking the Iron Throne. He makes a match with you, the last daughter of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower, to secure peace and rebuild the Targaryen dynasty.
Series Masterlist
Chapter Three ✢ We Light the Way
Night frost was still clinging to the windows and hindering the hinges of the doors when the young Lord Lyonel Hightower crossed the gates of the Red Keep atop his horse. He had left the inn on his last rest before reaching the capital early in the morning, and arrived before midday had risen in the sky, although the sun could barely pierce through the thick white clouds.
Snow was expected any day now, and he had written to you from the Roseroad to say he hoped his business in the capital would not take too long, so that he might return before the storms came from the Northern lands.
You were waiting for him on the balcony overlooking the inner courtyard when he crossed it in decided strides, his green cape floating behind him with a flourish. Your gazes met as you turned towards the staircase to meet him, and your heart picked up.
Nearly half a year had passed since you had set eyes on him—the last time you had seen him, he had been no more than a boy clutching the skirts of his step-mother, and now he was a young man at the head of a powerful house with powerful armies.
“Cousin,” Lyonel greeted as though you both remained unchanged since your parting, and embraced you like a sister.
“It is good to see you, cousin,” you replied, clutching him tighter for a moment, before releasing him.
As you stepped away, you noticed his eyes were raised to the staircase behind you, and as you turned to follow his line of sight, found Jacaerys standing at the very top of it. He was dressed in different clothes than you had seen on him so far. When he usually wore black these days, save for the lining of his cape, he now wore a crimson cloak draped over one shoulder, the crown of Jaehaerys sitting neatly atop his curls.
“Lord Hightower,” he called, making his way down slowly, content to make his guest wait at the bottom of the stairs. Two kingsguards were escorting him, right wrists resting loosely on the pommel of their swords. Lyonel said nothing in return, but you felt him tense beside you.
As Jacaerys came to face the new lord of the Hightower, he was stricken with how youthful of appearance he was—he was still very much a boy, barely two years younger than himself and yet appearing more juvenile. He looked very much like a Hightower, with bright red hair and light eyes, and the arrogant attitude that came with his father’s reputation.
“It is good of you to answer my call,” Jacaerys added when it became apparent he was not going to receive a formal greeting.
“I admit my surprise when on the way to the capital, we learned that my cousin had been crowned as queen,” Lyonel then said, crossing his arms. “I will be blunt, I am only here to see her.”
“The war is lost and over, Lyonel, let us keep the peace,” you placated, a hand on his arm, and he relented, following without a word when Jacaerys led him to the Council Room, and took the seat he was pointed to, across from the Hand’s chair where you sat.
Jacaerys saw Lyonel’s eyebrows raise when he then spoke, no doubt surprised at the subject he chose to address first. “It is my understanding that you’ve petitioned the High Septon to authorize you to marry your father’s widow,” Jacaerys said.
“Indeed,” Lyonel said, frowning.
“It is an unusual request,” he commented, and it was obvious Lyonel wanted to laugh in his face.
“I doubt a Targaryen would find it so strange as to notice it,” he said with an unpleasant sneer, and it took Jacaerys a second to understand there was a second meaning to his answer, which he chose to ignore. It had been his understanding that Lord Ormund had been a pious man, deeply motivated by his faith, and he did not know what to make of such a proclivity in the son.
“I was also told it was refused,” Jace continued, and Lyonel’s mood soured visibly.
“Which is disappointing, as the union has already been consummated,” Lyonel replied, crossing his legs at the knee and leaning back into his chair. “Lady Sam is with child.”
Your eyes widened at the news and you swallowed uncomfortably, but Jacaerys remained impassible, his face smooth as marble, his eyes fixed on Lyonel. “I might be able to convince the Septon,” he said calmly, as though none of the situation troubled him.
“And if you were not?” Lyonel pressed back.
“I would legitimize any child you would have with her,” he answered without a second thought.
Lyonel seemed to consider the proposal for a while. “Lady Sam advised me to come, she thought you might be sympathetic to our cause,” Lyonel admitted. “What would you ask of me in return?”
Jacaerys glanced at you then, a silent assent. “We ask that you disband your banners,” you requested, crossing your hands atop the table. “Some of your garrisons are still stationed along the Roseroad and the Mander, causing tension.”
Lyonel had a strange look in his eyes as he looked upon you, then glanced at Jacaerys suspiciously before he turned his gaze back to you again. “They have been waiting on my orders, no more,” he defended, uncrossing his legs so he could lean forward.
“We ask that you send your men home, and make a declaration of peace,” Jacaerys intervened.
Lyonel’s face darkened then, and Jacaerys thought he saw something familiar in the set of his jaw and the line of his brow—an authoritarian look he had seen many times on the face of his grandsire’s Hand.
“While your husband plays a pleasant tune, and my wife encourages me to fall into rank, I need to know, can I trust his word, my queen?” he asked, and Jace noticed something unspoken passing between the two of you, an understanding stemming from years as children together, raised under the same roof.
You swallowed but nodded. “The king has not broken any of the promises he’s made me so far.”
Lyonel stood then, sharply, forcing Jacaerys to mirror him. “Consider it done,” he said, but before Jace could reply, laid out his terms. “On the condition that my cousin is safe and treated properly. Let one thing be clear, Jacaerys, is that House Hightower is not loyal to you, but to our queen. One word from her, and we shall declare against you.”
Jacaerys extended his hand despite the threat. “I expected no less,” he said, gritting his teeth when Lyonel reciprocated, his grip unnecessarily tight on his wrist as they sealed their words—for the time being.
Jeyne Arryn made it to the capital a mere few days following Lord Lyonel’s arrival, and she immediately regretted that Jacaerys received him personally, without waiting for her counsel.
She faced the same slight displeasure from the men of the Small Council, no doubt slighted that none of them were chosen as Hand, and instead would have to take orders from a woman. Jacaerys supposed that endorsing the rightful queen was one thing, but obeying a woman chosen among other candidates was another entirely.
Still, Lady Jeyne took it in stride, and did not wait to be settled in the Hand’s Tower to take over the Small Council meetings and surveying what had been done so far. “Do you believe Lord Hightower to be trustworthy?” she inquired at supper the first night, after Jacaerys had recounted the meeting to her.
Jacaerys had chosen to host her in one of the dining halls instead of his own quarters, wary of allowing anyone in his quarters these days. He had started to wonder if he might also requisition one of the empty royal bedchambers to move his desk into, loathing the sight of it as he laid in bed, reminded at every second of the sheer scale of the work that awaited him.
“No, but he needs something from me and his wife apparently endorsed my mother,” he replied, to which Jeyne gave a surprised hum, spearing a braised plum on her fork. “Furthermore, he will not go against the queen’s direct order.”
“His loyalty is with her, then,” Jeyne concluded, then seemed to think on the issue for a moment. Across from her at the table, Cregan Stark was observing her with interest, seemingly pleased in what he was seeing in her. After a while of silent contemplating, she spoke again. “The Hightowers are vassals of House Tyrell, and while their lord is a babe, I heard the regent Lady Margaery is a sensible woman.”
“Do you mean to order the Tyrells to settle their banners?” Jacaerys inquired.
Cregan set his knife down at the suggestion. “She was not impressed by dragons in her lands, she refused to declare all throughout the war, I doubt forcing her hand is the way to treat with her.”
Jeyne did not smile nor frown, simply continued to cut into the sweet, caramelized fruit being served with the braised meat. “I shall write to her, woman to woman, and to Lady Sam as well,” she said, her voice as even as always. “We cannot trust Lord Lyonel’s word alone.”
Jacaerys was slightly reassured by the prospect, but his worries resurfaced when Cregan cleared his throat and addressed him. “Your grace, I could not help but notice that you gave leeway to the queen to socialize with her cousin, unsupervised,” he said carefully, and Jeyne tilted her head at the comment.
“I would not trust the queen to that extent,” she immediately replied.
A bright flare of irritation burst behind Jace’s breastbone, and he pushed his plate aside, his appetite soured. “It was the council’s idea that I wed her and now you tell me to be wary of my own wife?”
Cregan frowned at the display of temper, but Jacaerys supposed he was used to it by now. “She is a Hightower. She was raised by Lord Hobert and then Lord Ormund,” he replied, keeping his voice calm but firm. “Lyonel is more of a brother to her than Aegon or Aemond ever were.”
Jacaerys rose from the table then, startling the young page that had been waiting on him with a pitcher of fresh, dark wine ready to be served. “Out,” he snapped to the boy, who obeyed and scurried out, closing the door behind him. Pacing the room under the attentive eyes of his councillors, Jacaerys struggled to keep his temper at bay. “Do you think she would so easily betray me? Why encourage me to take a queen you know you cannot trust?”
Cregan rose as well then, while Jeyne kept to her seat, swirling her cup of wine slowly. At her feet, one of her lanky dogs crossed its paws and huffed as though it could understand the topic being discussed.
As he had done many times over, Cregan came to him and soothed his frustrated pacing with a hand to the shoulder, and Jace nearly regretted how disagreeable he had been then. “Trust is to be earned, your grace, and she will earn it by doing her duty,” he explained. “The sooner she bears you a child, the better.”
Jacaerys looked aside then, removing his hand with a sharp shrug of his shoulder. “I am aware of that,” he said in a tone that suggested no further comment would be tolerated, and Cregan took a step back in subtle deference. “Now if you’ll excuse me, Lady Jeyne, I shall see to my brothers,” he said before making his way towards the door, leaving his new Hand and his most trusted sword alone.
Alicent was already dressed for the night when you came to visit her that night, sharing a cup of tea as had become your ritual when you did, sharing wisdom in the quiet hours of the evening, when the troubles of the day kept you from settling.
“I have not been allowed to meet with Lyonel,” Alicent lamented as she tightened the belt of her night robe before sitting down across from you, the steaming tea between you on the small table. “He was a babe the last time I saw him and now he rules our house.”
You replied nothing to her lament, instead asked the question that had plagued you since Lyonel’s arrival and your discussions in the garden, reminiscing of your childhood, and in which memory your cousin had promised to raise his army if you so wished, uncaring for the pact he had made with Jacaerys.
“Why did you send me to ward with the Hightowers?” you inquired, and your mother looked sad then.
“I bore the king three Targaryen children,” she explained, and in those words you could feel the weight of decades of selfless service to the crown. “I wanted you, my last, to be a Hightower.”
“Well I am not. Lord Hobert was kind and I bless his memory, but Ormund never let me forget that my blood was tainted, that I would only be worthy of the Hightower name if I dedicated myself to the faith,” you replied, feeling now familiar frustration rise in you. It was your constant companion these days, and you could not determine the root of it so you might tear it from the ground and burn it.
Alicent seemed remorseful then, but you had no use of cold regrets. “I spent a decade praying for forgiveness, forced to reject my own blood until I was called to make use of it again,” you continued, remembering the letter Lyonel had received, ordering him to send you back to your king. “I am not a Targaryen but I am not a Hightower either. I don’t know that I belong anywhere.”
Alicent reached across the table to take your hands into hers. “You are a Hightower, by temperament and by upbringing, but also by blood. You are my daughter,” she assured you. “And now you are the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.”
“Am I?” you murmured, looking down at your knees. You hesitated to confess the truth of your position, but in the end, you allowed the truth to escape you. “The marriage is unconsummated.”
The cooling tea was definitely forgotten then, Alicent now more awake and incensed than she had been a minute ago. She shook her head, sighing in despair. “You cannot allow it to remain as such. As long as you are not married to the king, our position remains fragile,” she explained, even though she did not need to. “As long as he has not bedded you, he can replace you in an instant.”
“I am aware of that, mother,” you protested.
“Then you must go to him now,” Alicent urged you, rising and pulling you along, leading you towards the door. You looked aside when your mother reached for your robe, undoing the first few clasps and pulling the collar of your nightgown further down on your chest. “The sooner you give him a boy, the sooner you will obtain what it is you seek.”
You wanted to protest that what you sought did not rest in the hands of a husband you had not chosen, but you knew your laments would fall into deaf ears. Instead you nodded, compliant as you had been taught, and walked out into the cold hallway, following your memory without conscious thought until you came upon the king’s quarters.
However, your endeavor was stopped by the kingsguard that stood at attention in front of the heavy doors. “The king is not in his quarters, my queen,” the man said.
“Where is he, then?” you asked. So preoccupied by the matter at hand, you instantly thought of him in the arms of another—you had heard the rumors regarding his affection for his cousin Lady Baela—betraying you as you had feared the first night of your marriage.
While he had assured you of his intent to keep you as his queen, you wondered if perhaps it was a facade to appease the Hightowers for the time being, and now that he had their allegiance, although fragile, he would cast you away.
The guard was quick to soothe your sudden worries. “The king is in the nursery, your grace,” he said, pointing to the room across the hallway.
Slightly curious, you thanked him and made your way to the children’s quarters, from which a bright light was coming, spilling into the hallway. For a morbid second you wondered whether it was the room your nephew had lost his life in, but the question was chased away from your mind when you entered and took in the sight that awaited.
Jacaerys was sitting at the foot of a large bed where two boys were huddled together, their little heads resting side by side on the pillow, their white hair sticking into odd spikes, still wet from a bath. The king held a closed book on his lap, and while you could not see his face, you could see in the downturn line of his shoulders that he was not in a cheerful mood.
“I know that I am not your father, and that I will never replace him,” he was telling the children, his voice thick with emotion. “As I will never replace our mother, but I will do my best by you.”
The older-looking boy glanced over his brother’s shoulder then, and Jacaerys turned, catching you before you could step back into the hallway. “Forgive me, I did not mean to interrupt,” you defended yourself immediately, but instead of anger, it was exhaustion that spread over his face.
“Stay,” he said, twisting to glance at the other side of the room. Across from the boys’ bed, Jaehaera slept in her own crib. The nurse that sat with her rose when you approached, and you took her place, sitting in the rocking chair. The little girl was deep into slumber, clutching a doll made of cloth and an embroidered blanket—at first glance you thought they were flowers, but upon closer inspection, you noticed they were butterflies.
“She’s my niece and yet I am a stranger to her,” you commented, unsure why you were saying this out loud, to Jacaerys of all people.
Nonetheless, he seemed touched by your confession, and in the soft light of the nursery, you found he looked quite different than you had ever seen him—gone was the arrogant, self-assured young king who had met with your cousin. Instead he looked years older than his years, and weary beyond them.
“Would you like to raise her?” he offered. “There has been talk of sending her to ward with Lord Lyonel, but I would keep her here, with you, if that is what you wished.”
“Perhaps I should,” you answered, aware that it was not an answer.
For a while the both of you remained silent, looking upon the children the war had spared, and the utter devastation of it seemed to dawn on you. Orphans, they were, their respective parents dead in the pursuit of the throne, and once again you thought there was no justice to the whims of the Gods, leaving babes without mother nor father, left to carry a legacy of bloodshed and kinslaying.
When Jacaerys spoke again, it was as though the words came straight from your heart. “I am aware that our marriage is based on hatred, but the children are innocent in all this. May we leave the quarrels of the past behind, when it comes to them?” he asked. “They need serenity after what they’ve been witness to.”
There was only one thing you could answer then. “Of course.”
After that Jacaerys spoke to you no more, instead turning back to his Aegon and Viserys, and the book he was holding, opening it on his lap and letting the large pages fall on either side of his legs. You nearly started when he started to read what you supposed to be High Valyrian, and you suffered that you could not understand a word of it.
Author's Note ✢ Dividers by @zaldritzosrose. Chapter four will be posted in two weeks, on August 1st.
Series taglist ✢ @chaotichereticcavern @galactict3a @qtmoonies @multyfangirl @obsidian-gold1239
Summary: Dana reveals the truth about her marriage leading to a complicated moment.
SET AFTER:
Sassy - Dana's world is turned upside down when a face from her past appears at PTMC.
Choir Girl/Wild Girl - Dana's world is turned upside down when a face from her past appears at PTMC.
The Ghostwriter - The past collides with the present when a ghostwriter turns up, hell bent on learning what happened in New York all those years ago.
The Knock At The Door (NSFW) - Dana's dreams of her time in New York are interrupted by an unexpected knock on the door at three in the morning.
Darts have always been Dana’s game, even before New York.
She likes the rhythmic thunk as they sink into the board, the force and dexterity it takes to land your shot. Playing darts, it makes her feel in control, something she very much craves after the events of last night.
“I didn’t know you still played.” You say, setting a glass of Malibu and lemonade down on the table beside her.
Dana hasn’t drunk it in years, but when that sweet coconut scent hits her nostrils, it takes her back to simpler times, ones when it was just the two of you in the green room after a gig, your lips on hers as she licked the taste from the inside of your mouth.
The chemistry between the two of you still simmers underneath the surface of her skin, a mixture of old feelings and new wants. You’re looking hot tonight in that Camp Funtime white crop top that Debbie Harry used to wear. Your leather jacket hangs over the back of the chair, flat metal studs imprinted into the collar and cuffs. And those jeans… they’re the original Levis you wore back on stage in New York, she can tell from the rips. The Doc Martins are new, a rich cherry red she covets.
“Yeah.” She sighs, answering your question as she picks up the Malibu, taking a sip from it. The crisp, refreshing bite erupts on her tongue, and she remembers how she used to roll one of the ice cubes from her drink around her tongue before she went down on you. “It helps me get out of my own head.”
“I get that.” You say, leaning back on both palms against the table, watching her launch the next dart. It hits the bullseye head on. The E.R and the Burns Unit have similar burnout rates, the shit you both see, it’s enough to send a sane person running away screaming. “That something you need right now? To get out of your own head?”
She could lie to you, tell you everything was hunky-dory in her world but truthfully she’s sick of putting on a façade.
“I have a disgraced priest currently living in my spare bedroom, and a husband that would rather sleep with him than me so… you tell me.” The truth spills out her, and she takes a gulp of Malibu to chase away the bitterness on her tongue.
You pause, crossing your arms over your chest as you process this new information. “So Benji’s…”
“Gay.” Dana submits, walking up to the board to retrieve her darts. “You know the reason I came back to Pittsburgh was because my mom was dying. What you didn’t know was her final wish was to see me married off.” Dana plucks each dart, wrenching them out as she thinks back over her mother’s manipulation. She’d been twenty when she’d received that news, and at the time it had been unfathomable. “Benji was from a nice church family who didn’t want to send him to one of those camps. They thought we could straighten each other out and it worked for a while… we had three beautiful daughters but… he was never in love with me, and I was never in love with him.”
Her eyes flicker up to meet yours, outlined with smoky eyeshadow that accentuates them. They’ve always been expressive, but right now she can’t tell what you’re thinking so she continues as she resets for her next shot, lining up her stance.
“Benji and the associate pastor have been having an affair for the last couple of years. He told me I should too when it started, that he wanted me to be happy...” The first dart sails through the air, thunking into the board. “Father Neal turned up on my doorstep at three in the morning last night because the parish priest had seen them together. He’s been issued an ultimatum by the church. He either leaves Benji and goes on a mission to Kenya to repent, or he’s excommunicated.”
“That’s terrible.” You say picking up the next dart off the table and handing it to her. Your fingertips brush and electricity sparks through Dana’s nerve endings like the Fourth of July. “Do you know which way he’s leaning?”
“Benji and him are waiting for me at home to ‘talk things through’ but I can see the writing on the wall.” She throws the dart and it sails through the air, striking just the right spot to score the points she needs for the 501 game she’s playing. “We had a good run but… life’s too short not to love who you want to. What kind of example would we be setting for our daughters if we stayed together because it’s what we’re used to, because it’s what feels safe.”
“Things have come along way since forty years ago.” You acknowledge, running your hand through your hair.
It falls across your features like a waterfall and for a second Dana chides herself for wanting to reach out, tuck it behind your ear but then she remembers, she can do whatever the fuck she wants now that her marriage is on fire so she follows through with the action, her thumb smoothing over your cheek. Being this close to you again, it’s like no time has passed at all, you both have a few more wrinkles, and you certainly have a few more tattoos but those feelings they still flow like a current between you, daring her to make the next move.
So, she does.
She does what she’s been dreaming of doing for almost forty years.
That kiss… it’s everything she’s been missing in her life. It’s hope, its fire, it’s a passion that burns so bright it threatens to consume everything in its wake. She can tell you feel it too from the way you moan against her mouth, your tongue dipping into hers, exploring her in a way she hasn’t been tasted in years.
A flash goes off, startling you both. You pull away to find Giselle the Ghostwriter standing there, phone in hand as she snaps another picture.
“It appears you were lying.” She says, lowering the device. “You knew where Sassy was all along.”
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The Road Trip: Michael “Robby” Robinavitch x Reader (Ex!Wife AU)
Summary: Robby makes a decision that brings the two of you closer together in the wake of your concussion.
SET AFTER:
The Neurologist - Robby doesn’t think much of Jack’s friend The Neurologist…
Cuffs - Robby makes a discovery when a pair of handcuffs malfunctions at a crucial time.
Bed Rotting - Robby starts to blow up his life after you return to Seattle.
The Voicemail - Robby puts the final nail in the coffin of your marriage when he leaves THAT voice mail.
Divorce Papers - Jack gives a couple of home truths to Robby after he finds out he signed your divorce papers.
A Fucking Nightmare - Robby’s worst nightmare comes true when his ex-wife shows up as a guest at Dana’s vow renewal ceremony.
Regrets - Robby can’t help but think about his regrets after seeing his ex-wife for the first time since he signed the divorce papers.
Unread - Robby turns to Jack when you don’t respond to his message
The Call - Robby takes the plunge and decides to call you, leading to a surprising revelation.
Shepherd - Robby’s world is turned upside down when he receives a call from Derek Shepherd.
Husband Number Two - Robby gets into it with the man vying for the role of Husband Number Two in your life.
You’re upset.
Robby can hear it in your voice as he pauses outside your hospital room, his phone in one hand, typing out an update message for Jack, and a wholewheat egg wrap in the other, great brainfood for a concussion.
He’d left you dressing this morning to go in search of breakfast and now you’re apparently reaming folks out. Over what he can’t tell, he can only hear the frustration in your heart, the anger. Both things that are absolutely terrible for you in your current condition.
He pushes open the door to find you standing across from Shepherd and Owen. Your hip is cocked, one hand resting upon it. Two fingers of the other are rubbing at the space between your brows as if trying to ward off a headache, something very common with your type of head injury.
“What’s going on?” He says as he steps inside the room, slipping his phone into his back pocket. It vibrates once, Jack asking for more details, no doubt.
Owen huffs, his arms crossed over this chest, the left side of his mouth twisting up in distaste at Robby’s presence. “I thought you would have disappeared by now.”
It’s a dig, a kidney blow that’s meant to disarm him because yeah, Robby did disappear from his marriage, he owns that. The point is he’s here now, and he’s the one standing in your corner, not these two fuckwits you’ve been working with for the past few years.
“I don’t do that anymore.” He states, handing you the breakfast wrap. You take it gratefully, biting into it with an aggression he’s only witnessed on those nature shows he puts on at night to fall asleep to.
Owen scoffs, rolling his eyes and it takes everything in Robby not to react, because this isn’t about him and the ‘feud’ him and Owen seem to have. It’s about you, the woman who is so pissed off she’s practically vibrating.
“I was just telling Viv she won’t be taking her road trip.” Shepherd palm scrubs over his jaw as he shakes his head. “I’m sorry Viv, I just don’t feel comfortable clearing you to drive or flying just yet.”
You look like you want to throw the wrap at him. But instead, you stay silent, chewing with the quiet intensity of someone who is clearly plotting a murder.
Robby gets it. You’re a Type A personality, highly organised, very time orientated. This move to Pittsburgh has a lot of deadlines, including your employment date, picking up the keys to your new apartment, being there when your shipped items turn up. And then there’s the road trip.
The two of you always talked about taking one but then the study had come up and the marriage had collapsed…
This time around it was meant to be a break, something that you were finally doing for yourself after being in the service of others for so long. And now that’s crumbling around you too.
“Look Viv.” Owen steps forward, his voice softer now as if approaching a skittish animal. You look at him with similar eyes, like you don’t know whether to scratch him the fuck up or run. “I know you have to be out of your place by the end of the day. I’ve got plenty of space at my condo, why don’t you stay a couple of days…”
Your shoulders sag, the mental exhaustion of this whole situation physically weighing you down. You tilt your head away, blinking quickly and Robby realises there’s a very real possibility that you’re about to cry.
And he fucking hates it.
“I’ll drive.” Robby says softly. His hand skates along your upper back, palm rubbing gently between your shoulder blades to sooth away the stiffness that grips your entire body like a taut guitar string ready to snap. “I need to head back to Pittsburgh anyway. You can still make the road trip, do all the things you want to, and…” He casts a glance at Shepherd who watches the exchange passively. “They’ll be a doctor on call to keep an eye on you every step of the way.”
“That’s acceptable to me.” Shepherd says, his lips pursing together into a grim line as he steps towards you. “I know how much you want to get out of here after what happened with the study. I’ll get your discharge papers sorted out and then you can be on your way.”
The weight of those words hangs in the air between the two of you, an undercurrent of tension that Robby’s been picking up on ever since he received that phone call.
“It’s been a pleasure working with you Dr Robinavitch.” Shepherd holds out his hand for you to shake.
You don’t take it, instead you tuck your own hands into the pockets of your own jacket, the ultimate snub to his gesture. “I don’t think I can say the same Dr Shepherd.”
It’s Shepherd’s turn to look away. “I really wish-”
“Wishes won’t help the people that were on that trial Derek.” Your voice is harsh, cold. A tone Robby’s never heard from you, not even at the lowest points of your marriage. “If you could get those discharge papers…
He nods before pulling away, heading towards the door. Light floods in as he opens it, stepping out into the corridor as Owen follows after. The redhead pauses in the doorway momentarily, his shoulders tightening before he glances at you over his shoulder. “I really can’t change your mind?”
“No.” You say resolutely. His shoulders slump as he closes the door behind him, leaving you and Robby caged in together.
“I know you must have questions-”
“You don’t have to tell me.” Robby holds up his hand to cut you off. He gets the feeling you’ve been forced to have a lot of conversations you don’t want to over the past few weeks. Right now, he can tell you’re tired, overwhelmed, that there are a million things running through your head, each one bumping against each other to take priority. “Not until you’re ready.”
You swallow hard, nodding your head.
“I just want to go home.” You tell him, and he knows you’re not talking about your Seattle apartment. He can see your desperation to leave this city, it’s in the way you wring your hands as you look up at him. “I fucked up my entire life for this job Michael…”
You use the back of your wrist to wipe away the salt from your cheeks and Robby can’t help but reach for you. His arms wrap around you, drawing you into the shelter of his body. You fit against him the way you always have, like this is the one place you belong in this world. You cling to him, your fists curling into his t-shirt as his lips brush over your hair.
“We both fucked up.” He whispers, closing his eyes and savouring the press of you against him. “What happened between us… it’s not all on you.”
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Summary: Tim is aware that a vigilante known as Spider is beloved by New York, and that his girlfriend cancels a lot of dates. When he finds Spider unconscious in a Gotham alley, he begins questioning what he knows both about the vigilante and his girlfriend.
A/N: I have very little practice writing for Tim, so apologies if he's OOC! I love him, though, and I plan to write more for him in the future!!
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“I,” you begin as you lean back to dodge a punch.
“Have,” you continue, twisting into a roundhouse kick that catches Hyena’s jaw.
“A… date!” you conclude.
Panting for air, you look down at the unconscious foe, tapping your toes against the bipedal killer. Sirens are approaching quickly, so you have to leave behind the villain you thought was from a time when you were lacking both common sense and spider sense. Now you have one of those. Most days.
“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” you murmur, aiming your extended fingers toward the looming roof of the New York skyline. “Or bothering Firestorm?”
Swinging high above the crowded city streets, you shoot a web with your left hand as you unlock your phone with your right. Someone once told you texting and swinging was a bad idea, but you assured him you’d never crash into a building (like some people have). You’re very late, you find, as expected.
“Please don’t hate me,” you whisper as the dial tone trills in your ear.
“Hey,” Tim greets. He yawns, then asks, “What’s up?”
“I’m so sorry,” you begin, pulling yourself up to sit on a rooftop. “I got caught up at work and traffic heading out of the city is awful. I don’t think I’m going to make it.”
“No worries,” Tim replies. “Reschedule for, uh, Saturday?”
Dropping your head back, you close your eyes against the setting sun and think. There’s a fight in Hell’s Kitchen late Friday night, and a new ride is opening at Coney Island Sunday.
“Saturday works,” you answer. “I’m really sorry, Tim.”
“Hey, I get it,” he assures you. “I love you.”
You pinch your eyes closed tighter, guilt weighing down your chest. “I love you.”
“Oh, I found something cool to show you. I’ll come to you Saturday?”
“Sounds good. Thanks, Timmy.”
Tim pulls his phone from his ear and squints at the video that resumes playing. The spider vigilante stealing the hearts of New Yorkers has gained a lot of popularity on social media. Jason even stumbled upon a fanfiction someone wrote about the Spider beating Batman in a fight — he’ll never admit he read it, but if he did, Tim might have found it entertaining. He saves the video to show you the comments your neighbors are making, then turns his comms back on.
“Yo, Replacement!” Jason barks. “Stop flirting and give B some backup!”
“What makes you think I was flirting?” Tim questions as he stows his phone in his belt.
“Because we warned you against a long-distance relationship,” Dick answers. “And now every free moment you have is spent on your phone.”
“Your girlfriend is from a different planet,” Tim deadpans. “Hypocrite.”
“New York City is not long distance, Grayson,” Damian scoffs. “One can hire a civilian driver, pay a meager fee, and be in the city in less than two hours.”
“How do you know that?” Batman rasps.
“Uh… Raven informed me of the details,” Damian mutters. “Perhaps I should give my attention to Killer Croc.”
“Perhaps,” Bruce agrees. “And if you choose to take a trip to New York, don’t Uber.”
“Steal a car,” Jason agrees.
Bruce’s sigh seems to shake the very foundation of Gotham before he utters, “No.”
“I’m going to New York Saturday,” Tim offers. “We were supposed to meet tonight, but she got stuck in the city.”
“Again?” Dick, Jason, and Barbara, safe in the watchtower, ask.
“I’m not going to fault her for cancelling dates at the last minute when I’ve missed just as many because of this,” Tim counters.
“No, just…” Jason exhales heavily, then asks, “Don’t you wonder if there’s something she isn’t telling you?”
“I love her,” Tim defends.
“That’s not an answer, Tim,” Barbara points out softly. “It’s okay to want answers.”
“I always tell her it’s fine,” Tim replies. After a breath, he admits, “But, yeah, I’m getting suspicious.”
“She’s not the type to cheat on you,” Dick adds. “And as someone who has had my fair share of relationships while hiding part of my own life from them, I’d suggest you have a mature conversation before it’s too late.”
“Suspicious how?” Barbara inquires.
“I can’t justify asking her questions when she doesn’t know I’m Red Robin,” Tim decides, putting an end to the conversation. “When there’s something to talk about, we’ll talk about it.”
“Well, if you’re back on the clock, maybe you could come help me get out of Pammy’s vines,” Jason suggests.
“Call Harley,” Barbara jokes.
Jason’s voice is so soft it’s nearly inaudible when he says, “She sent me to voicemail.”
Surprisingly, the Friday night fight didn’t end in the bloodshed you expected. When the former mayor’s Fisk Shipping company was announced as one of the event’s sponsors, you expected the worse. But Hell’s Kitchen was quiet… as quiet as it gets, at least.
So, you stumble into your apartment just after 1 a.m., eager to get some sleep but excited to see Tim tomorrow. It’s been nearly three weeks since your last date. You had several scheduled in that time, but you were late to the first and he’d already left for a family emergency, then you cancelled the next two. The simple fact of living in a different city than Tim does complicates things, but the suit you don, and the powers and responsibilities you have make it even more difficult to maintain a secure relationship. Yet Tim has never been anything but understanding. That doesn’t make it any easier to sneak around and lie when you love him.
You’ve just pulled your mask off when a blue light flashes in the bedroom entry behind you.
“Shock it!” a familiar voice exclaims before the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor thuds.
“Hi, Miggy,” you greet without turning.
“It’s Miguel, kid,” he grumbles, pushing up to his feet. “Year?”
“Same as last time.”
“Any reason I should be here?”
Shaking your head, you move to face him. His mask is off, the gloves of his suit torn. The left side reveals a simple gold band on his ring finger.
“Actually,” you decide, putting on your best friendly smile.
“No,” he interrupts. “I don’t like when you do that.”
“You don’t like anything,” you argue. “It’s not going to put anyone in danger.”
“You saying that scares me.”
“I need some advice,” you confess. “I… I’ve been seeing someone, and I love him. I do. But I also really love helping people.”
Miguel drags a hand down his face, then asks, “This guy seem bothered by the constant excuses?”
“How do you know I give him excuses?”
Miguel simply looks at you, because he knows exactly what you’re dealing with. Even when he’s been around other spiders, there have been things he couldn’t — or simply wouldn’t — share.
“He’s really busy too, so I think he understands and it works out. So far, he hasn’t acted suspicious… not to my face at least.”
“There’s this novel idea where you meet in the middle,” Miguel says. “You tell him what he needs to know and ask the same in return.”
“What if… What if he doesn’t like what I tell him?” you whisper.
“Then you dodged a bullet.” Miguel shrugs and counters, “Maybe you won’t like what he tells you. But you won’t know until you stop letting your situation control you.”
“Right. Well, he’s coming here later today, so I guess I could consider your advice. Wait, why are you here?”
“No clue.” He points over his shoulder but doesn’t have to ask.
“Couch is all yours,” you answer. “There’s leftover pizza in the fridge or the Thai place around the corner is still open. Thank you, Miggy.”
“Whatever, kid,” he grumbles, rolling his shoulders as he walks out of your room.
You decide to take Miguel’s advice under consideration for a while longer. When you open your door to see Tim holding a bag of food and a box from your favourite store, you decide you would rather have the mature conversation in Gotham. That way, Tim doesn’t have to find his way home knowing that you have been lying to him for the entirety of your relationship.
“Are you free Friday?” you check after the door is closed and everything he was carrying is stowed on your counter.
Tim checks his phone quickly, then nods.
“Can I come to Gotham? I’ve been wanting to go to that diner again.”
“Sure,” Tim agrees. “They just added a new dessert menu.”
“I should move,” you sigh dreamily.
“Then who would give me excuses to buy overpriced chocolate on 7th Avenue?”
Wrapping your arms around his waist, you kiss his shoulder and whisper, “You could still do that for me.”
“How kind of you.”
Nearly a week after Tim had to cut your evening in New York short because his brother called, you make your way to Gotham. You’re three hours early, but it seems like a nice buffer to actually ensure you make your date this time. It’s getting late, but the heavy clouds above you blot out the sun, making it seem closer to dusk than it is.
Walking through Newtown, which separates one of the most crime-ridden areas of Gotham from the bridges, you look at the businesses lining the streets. It seems as if someone is trying to make this side of the city more welcoming than it once was. You pass by a glass blowing shop, then stop and incline your head toward the alley on the other side of the street. A familiar tingle buzzes at the base of your skull as your heart rate increases.
Carefully, you cross the street, as if you’re interested in the seasonal menu of a mom-and-pop ice cream parlor.
“No, no, please,” someone pleads in the alley.
“Just hand it over!” another voice demands.
A single glance around the corner confirms that you sensed something. Three large men have a defenseless girl who looks to be several years your junior pinned in the alley. She’s clutching her bag to her chest as tears streak down her cheek.
“Let’s do this one more time,” you murmur to yourself before slipping into the shadows.
When you emerge in the alley, you’re in your suit and looking to make this fight as short as possible. Without making yourself known, you shoot a web toward the man who appears the be the leader. It wraps around his ankles and allows you to pull his legs out from under his. His face collides with the damp asphalt, which muffles his pained groan.
“Who is that?!” the other man demands, turning and revealing a knife in his grasp.
The third man inches forward then, becoming visible to you. Riddler, you recognize from all the posters around Gotham. He narrows his eyes at you and spins the small cane by his side.
“I spin a silky web so neat, to catch the bugs I like to eat, with eight long legs I creep with pride, in dark corners I like to hide,” he calls. “What am I?”
The man you knocked down clambers to his feet and pulls a heavy crowbar from the wall behind him. Maybe, you realize, this isn’t a fight I shouldn’t have picked on my own.
“You are a crazed lunatic,” you answer. “I am a spider.”
The next web you shoot connects Riddler’s co-conspirators by the shoulders, temporarily rendering them incapable of fighting.
“Get out of here!” you tell the girl as you move toward Riddler.
She obeys your command and runs out of the alley. The odds of her sending someone to help you seem slim.
“You should go too,” you tell Riddler. “While you still can.”
“It is worldwide, but once only a spider could weave one,” he says. “Gotham is no place for spiders.”
The others separate themselves, and you rock your weight back onto your heels. Of all the times for Miguel to not show up unannounced.
The sun set hours ago, and Tim needs to get ready to meet you at the diner for your date. But Jason needed ‘a minute,’ so Tim is covering Newtown briefly. He leaps from one rooftop to another, slowing when he sees something in the alley beneath him. Tim drops to one knee and realizes that the lump he saw is a person.
He lands soundlessly in the alley and approaches the individual cautiously. When he’s close enough to make out details, he stops.
“What are you doing in Gotham?” Red Robin mutters, lifting New York’s spider vigilante’s arm, which falls uselessly back to her side.
He’s seen enough videos and read enough stories about the spider to know that, by all accounts, she’s good. But that doesn’t explain why someone who can carry their own against New York’s biggest and baddest is lying unconscious in a Gotham alley.
“That’s not good,” Tim muses softly when he sees blood darkening a sleeve of Spidey’s suit. “B, I’ve got a situation in Newtown.”
“I left for five minutes!” Jason groans.
“The spider from New York?” Tim begins. “She’s here.”
“Doing?” Bruce inquires.
“Nothing. She’s hurt, unconscious.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Me too,” Jason offers. “You need someone who doesn’t trust anyone about anything if this girl wakes up.”
“She needs to get patched up, not be interrogated,” Tim argues, pressing his thumb to the side of Spidey’s neck to check her pulse.
“If I’m lucky, there’ll be time for both.”
Your mask is firmly in place when you wake, but someone is prodding at your arm and the damp concrete that you landed on has been replaced by a dry sheet beneath you. You jerk upright, ready to fight Riddler and the two goons he had with him. They won’t get the jump on you again, and you know to protect yourself from whatever it was Riddler used against you. Though you remain unsure why he had a weapon that powerful and chose to mug an unarmed girl.
“Oh,” you mutter when you realize you are face-to-face with Batman and Red Robin. Glancing toward your now-bandaged arm, you see that Red Hood is lurking in the corner with his arms crossed.
“What are you doing in Gotham?” Batman demands.
Red Robin steps forward and lays one hand on your shoulder while the other circles your wrist. He directs your arm up, then toward your chest.
“Who are you?” Red Robin inquires.
You look at your wrist where he’d touched you, convinced you’ve felt his touch before.
“Um, most people call me Spider,” you offer, dropping your voice. “It was supposed to be Spider-Girl or something, but the whole thing never stuck.”
“What are you doing in Gotham?” Batman asks again. “Who brought you here?”
Red Robin moves behind you, rubbing the blade of his palm down your neck and to the base of your spine. You had no idea the bats had medical training. The idea of Batman sitting in a lecture hall makes you smile beneath your mask, but then Red Robin spreads his hand against your shoulder.
Suddenly, you’re no longer in Gotham being interrogated. You’re in New York, looking up at billboards in Times Square with Tim Drake lingering at your side and whispering comments in your ear. Red Robin’s touch seemed familiar because it is.
You glance at Red Robin, searching his face. What’s visible certainly looks like Tim Drake.
“You come into our city announced, pick a fight, and find yourself unprotected and vulnerable,” Batman says. “Justify that.”
“I didn’t pick a fight,” you defend. “I saved someone. It’s what I do.”
“It’s what you do in New York,” Red Hood interjects. “Why are you here?”
Glancing up, you realize that you’re in a real cave. There’s got to be a way out because there’s a way in.
Pretending to stretch your shoulder, you aim your hand toward the rafters and murmur, “Maybe I was never here.”
Just as a spider disappears from its web in a breath, you leave Batman, Red Robin, and Red Hood alone, with no idea as to where you are. They search the expanse of the cave, shine a spotlight along the rafters, but find no trace of you.
“Well, I doubt she’ll be back,” Jason decides. “Now that she knows we’re here and we want answers.”
“But why was she here at all?” Bruce wonders, removing his cowl. “Who took her down in that alley?”
“It’s suspicious,” Tim agrees. “Gotham isn’t exactly a destination, so I doubt it was a convenience thing.”
“She said she saved someone,” Jason remembers. “Any reports of crimes in that alley tonight?”
Bruce falls into his chair at the Batcomputer to check, leaving Jason and Tim behind him to speculate.
Tim’s phone chimes, and he reads the text from you quickly, then locks his phone. Then, when he truly realizes what you said, he opens it again.
“What?” Jason asks.
“My girlfriend cancelled our date,” Tim mumbles.
“The date that’s supposed to start in… seven minutes?” Jason sighs, then checks, “You suspicious enough to talk about it yet?”
“She’s been acting weird,” Tim says, moreso to himself than to Jason. “She’s been late or cancelling dates the whole time we’ve been dating. I never really thought about it, because I’d call them off last-minute too when Batman stuff came up.”
“Okay,” Jason drawls. “And?”
“But I’m pretty sure someone had slept on her couch before I visited her in New York last weekend and she didn’t say anything. And… and there’s something about the Spider.”
“Found it,” Bruce announces. “Store at the end of the alley has surveillance.”
He presses play on the video, showing Riddler and two unfamiliar men cornering a young girl.
“When did Riddler get a team?” Jason wonders.
“After Joker taunted him for working alone,” Bruce answers flatly.
The video shows the moment Spider steps out into the dim light in the alley and pulls the first man off his feet.
“Ooh,” Jason murmurs. “That hurt.”
“She saved the girl,” Tim muses when she runs out of the alley. “So, she wasn’t lying about that.”
They quiet as the video continues. When Riddler lunges toward Spider, she reaches both hands out and grasps his upper arm, flipping him over her shoulder. He pulls something out of his blazer pocket, slams it against her arm, and then Spider collapses. Riddler ushers the men out of the alley, though they clearly want to take advantage of her unconscious state.
“Wait, whoa,” Tim interrupts, slapping the back of Bruce’s chair lightly. “Go back?”
“Wondering when Riddler took up purse snatching?” Jason jokes.
Bruce drags the mouse until Tim tells him to stop. In slow-motion, they watch Spider grasp Riddler’s arm, then how she staggers back as she tries to fight off whatever he did to her.
“It’s a variant of the Joker toxin with traces of Scarecrow gas,” Oracle says through the comms system. “Other than that, her bloodwork looks fine.”
“He injected it?” Jason questions.
“He’s prepping for something big,” Oracle suggests.
“I know who Spider is,” Tim admits, staring at the paused video. Spider’s hands are on Riddler’s arm, one hooked beneath his tricep and the other manipulating his forearm. Tim has been in the same hold on more than one occasion, but he’s never actually been tossed like Riddler was. He had no idea before now that it was a possibility.
“What?” Jason exclaims. “Who?”
“I have to go,” Tim murmurs, moving toward the staircase that leads to the manor.
“Where?” Jason calls. “To do what?”
“Watch videos of Spider fighting that green guy in New York!”
Bruce turns and watches Tim go, then asks Jason, “Do you know who she is?”
“No.”
“Then perhaps you should consider updating his world’s okay-est detective trophy.”
“Sure,” Jason deadpans, “I’ll get right on that. Maybe I’ll be the demon spawn a new sword, too.”
Tim spends the next twenty hours watching every video of Spider he can find online. Running on adrenaline and caffeine, he’s more convinced that he’s right about her true identity. So, he travels to New York and stakes out on the roof of a building that Spider seems to frequent.
Less than an hour later, you lands on the edge of a roof and straightens when you see you aren’t alone.
“Uh, hello,” you greet, waving awkwardly at Red Robin, who you’re pretty sure is also your boyfriend. “Look, if this is about last night—"
Red Robin interrupts you and says your name. Not Spidey. Your actual name. Tonight, he’s speaking like himself, not using that raspy tone you assume he learned from Batman. He sounds like Tim Drake, and your stomach twists at the idea this will be the last time you hear him say your name.
With a heavy sigh, you pull your mask off. “Tim, I’m sorry,” you begin.
“Don’t bother,” he interrupts, causing your heart to drop to your stomach. He pushes his cowl back and smiles, calming the building storm inside you. “Call it even?”
“You’re not breaking up with me?” you check, clutching your mask in your hands.
“Are you kidding!? The Spider and Red Robin are unbreakable.”
“The Spider and Red Robin just met.”
“I’m not breaking up with you,” Tim promises, taking your hand. “And I have an idea for how you can beat that Goblin guy.”
You open your mouth to ask how he knows about the villain and your fights but then remember you’re talking to Tim Drake. What little he doesn’t know he can find quickly.
“It’d be nice to have someone in my corner,” you reply. “Teach me how to fight Gotham rogues, too?”
“Sure. Then we can switch cities and freak everybody out,” Tim suggests.
You laugh, then lean forward and kiss Tim’s cheek before you put your mask back in place.
“Who are we fighting tonight?” Tim inquires.
“It’s been pretty quiet so far,” you say. “Oh, if you could figure out how to keep Miggy from spawning in my bedroom when he time travels, that’d be great.”
Tim nods, following you toward a fire escape, then catches your wrist to stop you and yells, “Time travel?!?”
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