#hntf

[pheemuru]

you should read my comic (its really short i swear...)

[ladyshivs]

@mercuryisfronting tagged me in this lovely game, thank you!

The rules are: post the beginning lines of your most recent 10 published fanfics and then tag 10 people.

I'll post in order of most to least recent, but forewarning that I haven't published anything since 2023 😳

Particular Interests:

Stupid. Beyond stupid. It was reckless, brain dead, what the actual fuck was she thinking? Agreeing to this. Voicing any of this. Admitting to these particular interests. And stupid, fucking, charming, smug ass, piece of shit eating grin Salvatore fucking Anzetti. Had nodded. Prick. He’d nodded and said he understood. That he saw what she getting at. What she wanted, even when Lydia couldn’t make herself put voice to the urges. Fucking depravity. It made sense he’d be into it. He was already such a skeevy little pervert—she caught him bragging about seeing Argent naked during his debut at the gala.

2. Closing Remarks:

It wasn’t the most humiliated he’d ever been. But it was getting its own special asterisk for being one of the worst times that he’d done to himself. Still. There wasn’t enough energy left in him to be resentful of Mia for getting him a bottle of water. He shoved roughly a hundred dollars in unmarked bills into her hands for it, anyway, to save what little face he could.

3. Drops Down:

“What did they do when they,” the rest of the sentence dissolved. Syllables and vowels. Language that sublimated cleanly into ether. Meaningless exhalations tempered by the constriction of meat. Clever consonants. Richard even made some of his own. “They took me into surgery,” restraints snapped into place, their echoes snapping at his eardrums. For his own safety. For hers, more than anything else. If he could just take a few steps back into his own head and watch this unfold—it would be easier to keep her safe.

4. What Goes Up:

Overhead, thick clouds, wound tight with rain, began to unspool themselves out over the open ocean. They failed to block out the sun entirely with their thinning bulks, but the light they did let through was weak in comparison to a moment ago. “So,” a quiet step forward. The silence passing. “They named you Sidestep,” recounting and. Nudging. Faint and soft and every edge of every syllable bleeding edge sharp. Ready to cut in and cut deep to get to the core. Every spider silk thought in her mind sharper than obsidian when it wanted to be. Sticky and lethal.

5. Memory Lane:

“Did you know where you were running to?” “Do any of us?” Pause for effect. The smooth curve of her mouth tilting downwards. The tilting of her mind, slipping away the urge to roll her eyes at the melodrama. He bent first. “A bit,” Under his legs, the bench creaked slightly as Richard shifted his weight forward. Elbows on knees, hands holding each other out ahead of him. Right hand, right fingers, wrong sensations. Trembling like a shut-in being forced to give a speech. Mia’s attention briefly took it in, briefly noted it down before coming to press on the bruise harder, only to be stopped by the bouncing of his knee. Heavy sigh.

6. Anonymous Sources:

There was a cool breeze, doing its best to try and mingle with the salt heavy, back of the mouth, fish flavor of the air of the wharf. It was having better luck with messing up the woman’s hair. She sat with her back to Richard, shoulders forced low and out of her ears. Trying to look controlled. Calm. The tape recorder in her purse was almost reaching the end of side A and would have to be flipped. Recorded over to erase the seagull chatter and wave static.

7. Doctor's Notes:

The mind across the table was faded and blurred by the time he arrived. Not taking any chances, now that she knew for certain. Not that he could blame her. Multiplication and division, real and imaginary numbers numbers numbers. At least she wasn’t washing it down with whiskey this time. But rather a. Two. Two glasses of what appeared to be iced tea, one that she had been sipping at while she waited for him. She wasn’t glaring either.

8. The Hero Question, Rephrased:

A chill ran up the length of Richard’s spine, settling just at the base of his skull. The fingers of his right hand were slightly colder than his left, a side effect of the damaged nerves, still doing their best to recover. Or so they said. Echoes of the words reverberating around the ice sheet of his skull—dangerously thin in areas hidden beneath massive snowdrifts on every side. Maybe in a few months, they said. Maybe in a few months of hard therapy, he’d get some of it back. Back from the dead. Enough to hold a pen, perhaps even more.

9. Here and Now:

They had to scoot that stupid stool back until Richard could rest his back against the wall. A kindness, meant to help keep the muscles in his lower abdomen. And thighs. And calves. And fingers. And jaw. From clenching too tightly. From bunching up high and trembling while Daniel tried his best to kiss away the tension in his neck, tongue trailing the pathways of scars like a man on his morning walk. He knew the dips and curves and hard stops. Where the pavement was crumbling. Knew where to be a little firmer to wake up the stubborn nerves buried beneath flinchy scar tissue. A hint of slick teeth, pressed against the unsubtle evidence of how shaky Richard’s fingers had gotten on that occasion, helped slide a moan up and out of his throat.

10. Self Care:

There was tapping. Soft and steady. Tap. And then a half second delay before the. Pap. The moth soft animal of Daniel’s thoughts, pressing out of rhythm against Richard’s brain. Curious but unhurried, incongruously lazy for how quickly their wings fluttered. Carried on a blistering wind that slipped in between Richard’s shields. Was allowed to slip between his shields. Checked at the gates and then waved through with a sidelong glance.

I'll tag @creepycreepyspacewizard, @starrypawz, @antigonick, @heartbreakincident, @glitchy-npc and anyone who would like to!

[ladyshivs]

45 or 53 for the kiss promptssss

Thank you for the prompt! This one got a little away from me, but it's a portion of Chapter 62 of HNtF: Markings from Daniel's perspective

Fandom: Fallen Hero by @fallenhero-rebirth

WC: 946

45. relieved kisses

There had been a long and empty ocean between the blood leaking through the joints of the Mad Dog armor and the recovery bed at SRMC. Longer than Daniel cared to admit; he’d made a small point of pride out of working on his patience. It hadn’t helped here.

Richard was still out cold. Daniel knew that recovery from the various procedures he’d had could take anywhere from minutes to hours, depending on how his body tolerated them. It would tolerate them, though. Richard had a knack for that. He’d wake up soon—he’d wake up, and see that he was in a hospital. That he was exposed and injured and trapped and he’d be reactive and terrified and Daniel had made sure they removed the breathing tube as soon as the nurse so much as hinted it might not be necessary.

She’d almost tried to gently explain something—maybe that because he wasn’t next of kin, wasn’t power of attorney, wasn’t medically trained—but Daniel hadn’t been willing to hear any of it. They had said the injury didn’t affect his airways. To Daniel that meant Richard didn’t need the tube, and, he warned, if they left it in long enough for him to wake up with it still stuffed down his throat, they were going to have significantly bigger fish to fry. Kraken-scale traumatized psychic fish, but Daniel kept that part to himself.

Better for everyone if they took it out while he was still unconscious. Eventually the staff agreed, only nominally running a test or two to make it look like he hadn’t intimidated them into doing it. Not that he’d meant to intimidate them, but before he realized it, he was nearly sinking his molded plastic chair through the linoleum. It had already cracked slightly at the joints.

But that had been hours ago, and now he’d been called into the hallway, speaking in hushed tones to the doctor who was giving him his own care instructions.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had to take care of stitches,” Daniel said for himself, unable to stop from looking back over towards Richard’s room. At least Ortega was in there now, taking the place of two nurses who had gone in to check him and run vitals. The doctor to his side coughed gently and politeness slammed into his sternum. Daniel pivoted in the air. “Thank you, I’ll be sure to follow up with my own doctors back in Los Diablos if I have any questions,” he wouldn’t. He knew how it would go, itching and tight, then plasticky smooth. That it was on his face would take more adjusting to—seeing it in the mirror. It already pulled the corner of his mouth oddly.

Richard had nearly died trying to keep him from getting it. Had kept that blade from sinking through his face instead of merely across it and had nearly died for his trouble. And all Daniel’s brain could bring a highlighter marker to was the paralytic fear of seeing Mad Dog rushing at him again. Shrieking at the sight of that red and brown and black and desperate: it was coming to kill him. Coming to finish what he had started and beat him into a bloody pulp on the floor of the place that had birthed it. Except it had been to save him, even as, for a split second, reality had shifted. There had been a nauseating slip of perception that even his well honed sense of vertigo couldn’t...

His voice. Richard’s voice, weak and cracked but Daniel knew the sound of it too intimately for it to be confused with anyone or anything else. Awake. Daniel nearly brushed the ceiling.

Every other thought in his mind was violently clamped down on. Vacuum sealed, double wrapped and chained away, buried deep in the bowels of his mind. Unneeded and unnecessary. Richard was alive, awake, and that was all that mattered in the moment.

He knocked on the door jam but didn’t bother waiting for the invitation. Distantly, he knew Ortega was in the room. It didn’t matter in the least. Richard was alive and saying his name through five hundred feet of gravel, face crumpled and bruised and cracking under the weight of it.

There was nothing he could say, nothing to be said, nothing his mouth could fathom doing beyond pressing down against Richard’s cracked lips and kissing him like a dying man.

Alive. Alive and talking and saying his name and Daniel only felt the tremble after it had passed through him. The pitiful, uncontrollable shaking relief in his lungs. Alive, awake, okay. He’d done it. He’d been quick enough—he’d forced himself past his limits to the point where it had actually threatened something inside him. But he’d done it. Not quick enough to keep Richard from…but quick enough to keep Richard’s dumb, reckless, selfish, stupid, suicidal, idiotic impulses from getting himself killed.

His hands had done the work of coming to cradle Richard’s face. Of holding him still long enough to breathe into the touches and the shaking between them. Richard managed to be gentle when he prodded Daniel’s left cheek in the space after the kiss. It may have lingered, but whatever was going on Richard’s head was starting to sidle into his own and it didn’t feel like an accident.

Relief to mirror his own. Desperate relief that he, Daniel, hadn’t been hurt worse. The hand on his cheek slipped back into his hair as Richard urged him back down, into a kiss that only held love for him. Daniel did what he could to send it back in spades.

[ladyshivs]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[ladyshivs]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[ladyshivs]

For roughly the next week or so I will have minimal internet access.

To keep my blog feeling active and daisy fresh, I have queued up my Fallen Hero fanfiction series HNtF, and some fanart for said series.

I will be tagging things with HNtF for easy tag blocking.

If you’ve never read it before, I humbly hope you’ll give it a read and enjoy!

[ladyshivs]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

The queue begins! Reminder, if you want to block my links for the next week or so that they’re scheduled for, the tag is: HNtF

[ladyshivs]

Going to have minimal internet for a little while coming up in roughly a week, so I’m going to have a queue running of How Not to Fall links, as well as some artwork.

If you’re not interested in seeing these (or they get annoying) I’ll be tagging everything HNtF for easy tag blocking