author's note: this is so so long and hardly anything happens. heres hoping i write part two. cheers. this is an oc story technically, but i barely describe her tbh. she's got long brown hair with a white streak a la valaar targ, and some burn scars on her face.
@wynnerwynner @ichorai be proud of me please
Ashford Meadow was a beautiful lot of land, and Viserra thought that if there was one thing the capital lacked, it was a valley so lush and spacious as that in front of her now. Viserra could never ride so freely in King’s Landing as she did on the way to Ashford, and her mare was all the happier for it. The brown and white beauty was a racehorse, presented to her by her father, who was blessed with two sons and two nephews before she came along. He doted on her freely — she might’ve had every horse in Westeros and her own stable house if she wished it so. It was a true lapse in judgment on his part, for a racehorse requires vigorous exercise and land enough for it to fly without abandon, whereas Viserra was permitted to ride but thrice a week, and at no faster than a gentle trot.
A princess of the realm, the only princess, ought to have been able to do as she pleased without any of her father’s guards to refuse her. She should not have had to elude her septas or sit idly through her lessons with her eyes and mind adrift. And she certainly should not have needed to trick her guard before the sun had seen fit to rise. Viserra had mounted her horse with his unneeded aid and set off from the inn where they slept before the sun had risen. She packed her things away early in the night and promised a golden dragon each to the little dark-haired stableboy and his sister for their help. The boy would saddle her horse for her before dawn, and the girl would give up a dress and shoes to her. The dress was a drab brown and tied at the front rather than the back, as she liked, but it suited. She carried her own dress in a sack slung across her back, the Targaryen crest tucked safely away. Viserra knew that Renou, her escort, would be rising to break his fast as she crossed this valley, and would startle to find her room empty upon his daily rousing of the princess. Viserra’s laugh tinkled in the air just thinking of it — At the rate she travelled at, the princess was sure to reach Ashford Medoaw a great deal sooner than Renou. In fact, she might be so lucky as to meet her cousins’ travelling party, which had left the capital an entire day-and-a-half before she. No one would refuse her again, not if she could prove her skill as a rider and see herself safely to the tourney. Her father would have no defense against Viserra's undying wish — to be rid of Renou. He was a dry and dithering dolt of a knight. He followed orders all day and prayed through the night. He ate no roasted potatoes with his poultry, and was so pious that he denied himself even the herb-crusted loaves presented at her royal father’s table. He had no stomach for gaiety and no mind for conversation. Renou was a fine enough man and a perfect knight on parchment, but he was a shit companion.
Now, having broken from the stone road, with nothing but rolling green ahead of her, Viserra’s horse picked up speed. Before long, she had left her escort so far behind that he had no hope of catching her without abandoning her wheelhouse. She whistled past the treeline beside her, the long length of whatever hair had fallen from its twist trailing in the air behind her, slippery ribbons of Targaryen white mingling with brown. This is what flying must feel like, she thought gleefully. Rivulets of water beaded out of the corners of her eyes, and her hips ached with every rise and drop of the horse beneath her. Soon enough, it became too much to keep her hips fixed to the saddle, and Viserra stood in the stirrups at half-seat. From this position, it felt truly like flight, and for a moment, Viserra thought what it must feel like to have a dragon beneath her than a horse. Viserra had no mind to slow. If her guard caught up with her, it would surely mean a week within her rooms at Ashford, forgotten from the festivities of the tourney. Kilo ran faster without the weight of her directly on her back, and Viserra wrapped her knuckles more securely in her reins — perhaps Kilo rode too fast.
Dunk’s makeshift camp was a sorry one. Or Ser Duncan, he should say. It consisted of the measly beginnings of a fire and a bed made from the roughspun cloth of his cloak. He’d eaten as much salt beef as he could stomach. But at the very least, the grass surrounding him had dried considerably since the week’s rains, and the sky was clear above him as the sun rose over the horizon. The impending daylight cast a hazy orange glow across the valley, the very last of the night’s shadows shrinking away in the light. Fire bugs began to flicker away from the marshes little by little, and Dunk watched them contentedly. They would rest now and greet him again at dusk. He sat on his cloak, whetstone in hand, meticulously caring for a blade that didn’t belong to him. A knight, Dunk thought. Who was he trying to fool? He made even a sorry hedge knight, with no shrubbery to guard him from last night’s wind and leftover rain. It was becoming harder and harder to believe that entering the lists was a good idea. Dunk had no coin and no coat of arms. He had no squire to bark at and no pavilion to raise. What lord would take him in his service? What lady might trust him to protect her?
A scream cut through the valley like a knife, and the whetstone dropped from Dunk’s hand. It was a sharpened shriek, a swinging blade in the silence of the valley. He stood hastily, casting his eyes into the valley beyond his camp. The light was beginning to dim, but there along the treeline of the wood which lined the valley, was a rider atop a horse. It was the rider who had screamed, a woman unused to the speed of her steed. She cried out again, but this time Dunk could make out words.
“Help me!” she yelled, faintly across the glen, and Ser Duncan sprang to action, fumbling with the reins of the horse he knew to be his fastest. He was in pursuit of her within a few moments. As he caught up to her, Duncan could see more clearly the woman he was trying to help. She had hair that was long and brown, with strong arms that gripped the reins of her horse tightly. She wore riding clothes — a doublet and trousers, with black boots that had turned brown and green along the bottoms as her mare kicked up the Earth while she ran. Ser Duncan leaned to his left with great difficulty, struggling to keep his horse on the path while reaching for the woman’s reins. Though he had hold of her now, the mare didn’t slow, instead changing directions toward the low marsh Dunk had been gazing on minutes ago. If Dunk didn’t halt her, then the four of them would slide face-first into the mud.
Dunk did his best — He held fast the reins in both hands and pulled hard, and just as the horses’ hooves met the squelching wet grass, they halted sharply. Chestnut reared back, but the mare in Dunk’s left hand drew up quick and harsh. Her rider hadn’t braced for it and was sent flying from the horse.
In a stunning display of inelegance, Viserra flew forward in an arc and landed on her back, soaking the whole of her posterior body in muck. She lay in the marsh for a moment, her eyes cast to the sky. The mud of her new surroundings soaked her, and Viserra knew that the pretty embroidery on the back of her doublet and the dragon emblem she had emblazoned on it would be lost to the world forever. More than that, she was winded and rapidly sinking into the marsh. How embarrassing. What sort of rider was she? She flailed, hopeless until she sat herself up, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come. Viserra looked up to catch sight of the man who helped her, then looked up further still when she could not glimpse his face. This man was tall. Taller than Visera had ever seen, and when he clambered off his horse to her aid, he looked taller still. He bent down, his boots submerged in the mud, to help her to stand. Viserra’s hair fell in muddy clumps, sticking on her neck and down her back, across her shoulders, and past her waist. He offered her a tentative hand, unbothered by the mud. He hauled her to her feet effortlessly, all but lifting her from the mud to drier ground. When breath returned to her, she wheezed to him, “Thank you.”
“Are you alright?” he asked her. “I’m sorry, I had not meant for your horse to throw you!” Viserra had never seen this man before, not in King’s Landing and never in Ashford. Perhaps he meant to watch the tourney.
“Better you throw me into a swamp than Kilo cast me against the stones,” Viserra murmured, looking up at him. She wiped at her forehead, where rivulets of brown water had begun to roll into her eyes. How mortifying. “I’m in your debt…,” Viserra paused for him to offer his name.
“Dunk, “ He offered as Viserra finally brought herself to peel away from his hands.
She repeated his name with a small scoff. “Dunk?” He startled.
“Ser Dunk.” He nodded at her. Viserra had regained her footing and smiled at him. The impropriety of his character made sense. It seemed a hedge knight had rescued her from her own foolishness, a gentle man from humble beginnings who had no experience dealing with royalty. Just as she had never seen him, this Dunk had never seen her. It occurred to her that without ever sighting the dragon embroidery on her back and the flash of white under her brown hair, thoroughly concealed by the mess of her accident, it could be that he might never come to know her at all. “At your service.”
She made for Kilo, who had mellowed since their jaunt, and allowed Viserra to take her reins. She had a mind to get moving. Were her guard to reach Ashford before her, her father would never allow her to travel unaccompanied by the royal court again.
“I suppose you make for Ashford, then, Ser Duncan.” She walked as cleanly as she could, covered in filth, and he joined her, his own rein in hand. Her clothes clung to her uncomfortably. Now that they were still, they saw one another clearly in the rising sunlight. Ser Duncan was tall, yes, but that was not all. He had a strong face and ginger hair that hung over his brow. The hands that had helped Viserra out of the muck were broad and tanned. They were the hands of a boy who had grown up outside of a lord’s halls and beyond the confines of just one city. Though he was mighty, Ser Duncan stooped at his shoulders and used a tender hand against the neck of his horse. Still, Viserra considered the courage of this hedge knight’s action. He was a man who could not help being noticed, despite his efforts to diminish himself.
Ser Duncan had no idea he stood before a princess. She was shorter than he, the top of her head reaching the middle of his chest. She was eye-to-eye with his sternum and craned her neck drastically to meet his eye. With her face tilted so, the sun cast its brilliant light across her face. Serra’s skin was smooth in the light, and though she was soaked in marsh now, Dunk knew she must’ve been a fresh-faced girl unaccustomed to outdoor work. Her hair was long and draped across her shoulder, drenching the brow-orange of her riding doublet. Her eyes, honey brown, squinted against the morning sun. Only one aspect of her appearance shocked him: Behind her left eye, there was a collection of scars, vicious burns that touched her hairline and disappeared behind her ear.
“I am,” he said to her, pausing in much the same way she had when she wanted his name. Viserra considered a moment. She rather enjoyed the impropriety of this hedge knight, but if she gave her true name, she was certain he would turn to a knight the same as Renou. The gods will surely forgive her small mistruth.
“I am called Serra. There is a path not far from us, I believe. I also travel to Ashford.” Dunk seemed shocked.
“Alone?”
Viserra huffed at him. Now Ser Duncan must never learn her name, she decided. What role was it of his to judge her?
“Yes, alone,” she stated, facing him. “Is that a problem?” Duncan stared at the rider before him. Her face, which was sweet like wine a moment ago, had soured to ale under his gaze. Even the scars of her high face seemed to shadow themselves. She narrowed her brows, matching the challenge of her lifted chin. It was almost endearing to him that the girl was so sure of herself despite being covered in filth from her fall. When he did not respond, Serra stopped and faced him head-on with her hands on her hips.
“Er, no!” he placated her. “I was only asking, I’m sorry to offend.” Serra was not calm.
“Good! And I am not offended.” She snatched her fallen rein and walked on, casting a glance over her shoulder when Ser Duncan did not follow. His gaze was narrowed on the rather deep puddle she had fallen into. There was a mass floating about it, soaked through with mud.
It was her sack, she realized suddenly. If Dunk caught sight of the dress in the bag, the pretty red and purple dragons embroidered into its finery, he would doubtless insist on delivering Viserra to Ashford himself.
His boots, ruined already, entered the puddle again, and he stooped to grab hold of it. Viserra hurried to the puddle, eager to receive the bag before he could pry it open. As he straightened, the bag fell open, too heavy with the weight of water. Her dress fell out of it with an undignified splash, and her shoes followed one by one. Ser Dunk lifted the dress from the mud, holding it by the shoulders to unfurl it. Though muddied, the dragon-like design of fine crystalline beads glinted in the light. The pair spoke at the same time.
“Before you say anything — pardon?
“Gods, I’ve cost you your job — what?”
Viserra held her breath. “Do speak first, Ser Dunk.”
He raised the dress in his fists miserably with a great look of regret. “Your fine work is spoiled. I should never have interfered with your horse, Serra. The old man, my old master, used to tell me my hands were too hard and large for the gentle care of a horse, and he was right. Your lady will surely withhold her fee for your beadwork!”
It seemed to Viserra that her dishonesty had been forgiven, and she would require no more lies either. Ser Dunk thought she was a seamstress! A plain woman carrying a fine dress for her Lady, awaiting full payment at Ashford Tourney. She surged forward for the dress, groaning absurdly.
“My work,” she wailed, holding it up in her arms. Her anguish was dramatized, but not altogether unreal. It had been very difficult embroidery, and she had been proud to wear a dress of her own hand. “My Lady will be most displeased!” Dunk helped her wrap her soiled shoes in her soiled dress, then slide them into the soiled bag. Dunk looked sufficiently remorseful, a sign that her identity was as unclear as she desired. “Ah, well, what can be done now?”
“But, won’t you miss your payment? Surely a dress this fine would have won you food for a week, maybe more.” This startled her — surely a dress for any royal would have won its maker more than only a week’s worth of food. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish as she thought about what to say.
“I have some savings,” she lied lamely, throwing the sack across her shoulders. The back of her dress was freshly dampened. “I assure you, I will eat well. The path, Ser?”
“I’ll see you to the path,” he said, unsure that he should let her depart alone, or even that he wanted to travel alone himself. “But my camp is behind, and I cannot leave my armor.”
“Very well,” she hummed, pleased that he did not insist on accompanying her. This hedge knight was a fast learner. But after a moment, she wondered if she ought to be offended. What sort of knight would not accompany a lady?
But I'm not a lady, she realized. I am a fool seamstress who fell from her horse. Embarrassment seized her. Better that he leave her at the path as a friend than prolong her humiliation, which was sure to double when they reached Ashford. A filthy princess who needed rescue from a hedge knight. She continued quietly, and Ser Duncan followed.
“You’re very talented,” Ser Duncan said suddenly, and when Serra looked at him with confusion, peeling at the dirt on her neck. “Not your riding. That could use practice.” Viserra laughed, surprised. What joy to be insulted by a friend. “Your needlework.”
“Oh,” she said in surprise. “Thank you … my lady is a good woman. She’ll surely commission me to make another dress.”
They had reached the path sooner than Duncan would have liked. “Would you make one for me?” he asked hastily as Serra prepared to mount her horse. He had no wish to miss his chance to see her again. She stopped with one leg raised into the stirrup, left awkwardly dangling from the saddle. Ser Duncan sprang to her assistance. He placed both of his hands tenderly on her hips and lifted. He had not expected her arms to fall on his shoulders. His ears grew hot as she settled on her saddle and smiled at him, and they seemed on fire when she spoke.
“A dress?”
“No!” Dunk tried again raising himself brazenly. Now that she hovered above him, he had no need to stoop. “Perhaps you might fashion me a tunic for my mail. I mean to enter the lists at Ashford. I’d be honored to wear your thread on my sleeve.” Dunk filled his voice with the gallant tenor of a knight.
Serra’s smile sweetened, and she kicked her horse into gear. She steered Kilo’s gentle cantor in a circle around him. Every which way he turned was the beautiful girl who emerged like a fairy from the marshes of Ashford Meadow. The fairy sang out with mirth.
“I believe that is known as a favor, Ser Dunk! There is no need to pay for one of those.” Dunk spun slowly as she cantered around him, emboldened.
“Then may I ask the honor of your favor, milady Serra?”
There was glee writ across her face when she finally distanced herself from the noble hedge knight. “Meet me tomorrow in the square, Ser Dunk. There at noon, I will deliver your favor!”
Kilo garnered speed as Serra guided him up the hill and to the treeline. She cast a look behind as she disappeared in the bramble toward the path, blessed by the sight of Ser Dunk at the bottom of the hill, gazing after her.
"wolf in sheeps' clothing versus sacrificial lamb " ...
.*~.* part one
word count; 3k
authors note: this series is pretty slow going because its the middle of the semester and ya girl is super employed, but fret not, you will get chapters at some point. but, one thing about me is that i get carried away and tend to write long ass chaps so im sorry. i dont plan of stopping, though, so. thats also why they'll take so long. anywhooo. this is part one! a lot of exposition going on a lot of... heh.. tension.. enjoy. again, super not edited. i promise true plot will pickup soon
If Nell had ever looked down the barrel of a gun before, then she was sure she must’ve hated it then as much as she hated it now. The cool October wind was frigid on the back of her neck, gooseflesh raising over the exposed sliver of skin under her hairline and her hands. Her neck was twisted, and her eyes strained as she stared at a man with his finger on the trigger of a shotgun pointed right at her, with another man standing behind him.
“Don’t shoot me, “ she said immediately, pulling her hands from the doorknob. “I need to get inside.” The gun didn't move as she straightened up. “Is this your room?”
“The hell do you think?” he said, gesturing for her to stand.
Granted, she shouldn’t have been lurking, but she’d already knocked on the door a few times — It was now or never. Nell had pulled into the parking lot of the motel only ten minutes ago, and when the greasy-looking guy at the front desk finally left her alone, grunting at her half-cocked excuse of needing to pee, she slinked down and around the building to room 117.
The trip to Jericho was a nightmare, and Nell had spent the better part of three weeks on the road. By the time she finally reached California, Nell had tried just about every method of getting around, legal or not. She’d started off hitch-hiking and made it a state or two before turning to jumping cargo trains. Somewhere around Nebraska, Nell started hanging off the back of eighteen-wheelers — she didn’t make it far that way. It was too open and too loud, so Nell was grey with exhaustion when she halted at a truck stop outside of Las Vegas. Her clothes were nasty, grey, and green with midwestern mud and sticking uncomfortably to her pits and spine. Her hair was still unwashed, slicked into the same braid she’d been pulling it into since she’d started travelling, so when some stupid motherfucker left his motel-room door open on his way out to breakfast, she snuck inside, blocked the door, and showered. She ran her clothes through his laundry machine while she did, grateful for the appetite that kept him busy for over an hour.
That guy was stupid through and through, she learned, when he left the door to his ugly old Lincoln open, too. She and the car were gone by the time he ambled out of his room again for lunch. Now that Lincoln was parked just a few feet from her, with the plates pried off of it.
With her hands held up by her ears, Nell stood up and turned to face the gunman. He was a head or so taller, with close-cropped hair and a stoic face, and the one behind was making the same face as the first. He was stern, but he was so boy-ish, even Nell thought it just looked wrong on him.
“Okay,” she said. If this was the gunman’s room, then that meant that he’d know about the note in her jacket. “So you’re John?” The men shared a look, and the one with the gun stepped closer.
“What did you say?” Nell took a step back when he did, trying to move out of the gun’s line. He followed her with it. She considered pulling her own shotgun from her shoulder duffle, waiting on the ground, unloaded, but they wouldn’t have needed to know that.
“Are you John? Winchester?” Nell repeated, becoming less sure by the second. “Can you..” She was looking at the gun now instead of him. “Can you put that away now?” The boy from behind strode forward and lowered the gun with a large hand and the mutter of a name. Dean. Not John. Great.
“No,” he said, holding his hands up like Nell was some kind of spooked animal — maybe she looked spooked. “I’m Sam, and this is my brother, Dean. You’re looking for John Winchester?”
Nell avoided the question. “I think this is the wrong room,” she tried, moving to walk around them, ready to drive away in her stolen Lincoln. Dean stopped her but didn’t raise the gun again.
“Hang on,” he said, softer now, but still serious. Closer now, he didn't look so much stern as confused — worried, even. “How do you know John?”
Now lies a new problem. Was Nell really going to share her predicament with two strangers? Strangers to her, maybe, but they seemed to know the name on her note, Nell reasoned with herself. She could show it to them and cross her fingers for a helping hand, and get one. Or maybe they’d point that gun at her again and tell her to hit the road. Nell’s mouth was dry with indecision, and she felt like a fish out of water under these two new stares. Looking back at them, the taller one waiting for her to explain and the shorter staring at the cross around her neck and the watery way she gazed at him, Nell took a chance.
“I really wouldn’t say I know him,” she said. “Or anybody, for that matter.” Sam nodded at her, an encouragement to continue. “I woke up in a barn, a month ago, in New Jersey. No memory, and this in my hand —” she pulled the shotgun from the duffel on the ground beside her and held it up. When they tensed, she surrendered it to the taller boy. “It's not loaded.” Sam took it from her and inspected it. He caught sight of something on the butt and turned to show his brother. They shared a look before flipping the gun to show Nell.
“You’re a hunter?” Dean asked her, gesturing to a symbol carved into the stock of the gun — a sun, with a star tucked inside. A pentagram. A reminder. Protection.
“No,” she murmured, brain swimming in water. “Maybe. Is that what you are?” Dean huffed and shook her head. He pushed past her.
“Lady, you’re not making any sense, and frankly, I’ve got other things to worry about.” He knelt in front of the door just as she had minutes ago, and began to jimmy the lock. He’d had enough of the strange-looking girl getting in his way.
Nell scoffed. “Don’t you two know John? You’re breaking into your pal's room?” The lock gave way, and the door swung open. Nell followed both boys into the motel room after scooping up her bag from the concrete. “Some friends.”
“He’s not our friend,” said Sam. “He’s our Dad. How do you know him?” The room was poorly lit, even with the ceiling lights on, and Nell came to find that it was because the windows were covered edge to edge by newspaper clippings, pictures, and maps. So were the walls. The three of them looked around the motel room in equal parts awe and confusion.
“I told you,” said Nell. “If I knew your Dad, then I don’t remember how. All I’ve got to go on is this.” Nell pulled the note from her pocket and passed it to Dean, who had moved away from the window of maps. He unfolded the note, and Nell flinched when it tore along the folded edge under his grip. Her hand darted out untinkingly and held his still. “Careful!”
Dean looked at Nell when her hand touched his, halting his movements. She unfolded the note herself with a huff and laid it open in his palm. Dead raised it to read it, then turned to show Sam. It seemed like what one brother noticed, he had to share with the other. “This is Dad’s number. It’s missing the area code, but it’s his. You’ve got no idea who gave this to you?”
“None. And as far as I know, your father is the only one who knows why, so when’s he getting back?”
Nell slept in her Lincoln again that night while the boys told themselves ghost stories in their father’s motel room.
God, she thought. The sun was in midmorning position, and Nell’s stomach was growling incessantly. Missing. That was just her luck. Nell traveled however many thousand miles to meet a guy who hadn't been seen in months, not to mention his sons were even weirder than she was. They’d pressed her as they studied the room, asked if she was sure she didn’t remember anything. They asked if she’d ever tried guessing at the numbers and calling John, and she had to turn out her pockets and say, “I don’t have a phone to make any calls with.” In the end, she’d left them alone to discuss their woman in white — whatever that was.
Nell wondered if it really was so far-fetched — ghosts. Maybe she was a hunter, like the boys had guessed. At any rate, they recognized the symbol on her gun, and it wasn’t like Nell had anything else to move on. She startled when the motel room door swung open and Dean lumbered out. He was bowlegged, she noticed, and wondered what he’d look like running with legs like those. She watched him shrug on his jacket, and as he tugged on the left sleeve, he caught sight of her in her ugly stolen Lincoln. He had only just taken a step toward her car when the whooping scream of police sirens announced themselves, and two cops fell on him like flies on honey.
Nell watched him smile brightly and get arrested, and it occurred to her that her car had no plates. She could be next. Nell shrank down as low as she could while still keeping eyes on the situation. When the cop who wasn’t holding Dean came back from their father’s room without Sam, she figured he’d made a break for it. She caught sight of the taller brother hopping the fence around the side of the building and knew she was right.
Nell had never made a phony 911 call before, but there's a first time for everything. She finally caught up to Dean after he broke out of jail. Nell had turned up to the sheriff’s station on foot and peered in through the window to find Dean’s cell in a baggie on the sheriff’s desk but no hunter in sight. She’d slipped in and out of the building and swiped the phone before hoofing it.
Where would I go, she asked herself as she wandered the street in the dark. If I’d just broken out of jail, what would my first move be? If she'd had a brother, then the first thing she would have done was call him, and with no phone, Nell figured that the payphone she’d passed on the way to the station would be her safest bet. The night wind ripped at her long sleeve as she hustled back the way she came.
She found Dean hunkered down in that red and grey glass box with a brown book tucked under his elbow, doing his best to hide his face from anyone who might be looking. Nell knocked on the plexiglass twice and waved at Dean with his cellphone. He swung open the door and, to her surprise, yanked her inside with him.
The phone box was small for Dean in there all on his own, so Nell crushed up against his chest as he snapped the door shut behind her. Pushed up against Dean, she might have been grateful if the action wasn’t so invasive. The post-Halloween chill was brutal for a girl with no coat and holes in her socks, and Dean ran hot. Her fists rested against Dean’s chest in an effort to preserve the space between them, and the sheer warmth of him seemed to melt her palms to rest flat. Nell prayed that she didn’t stink.
“I guess my idea worked, huh?” Nell craned her neck to make eye contact, trying not to breathe too heavily with her mouth. Dean huffed a laugh.
“Fake 9-1-1 call from a stranger. I guess you’re waiting to hear a ‘thank you’?” Dean plucked the cell from her lax hand. Nell raised her brows.
“More like an apology — you held a gun to my face!” Dean dismissed her with the click of his tongue like a jackass. “I’m serious! Do you make a habit of shooting pretty girls? “ she accused.
“I’m not sure. How often do you break into motel rooms?” Nell’s jaw hung in offense. She did it more than the average person, of course, but Dean didn’t know that, and he didn’t know how hard the road from New Jersey could be without a car or an eight-foot-tall brother. Or a loaded gun, for that matter. “And who told you you’re pretty anyway?”
That one was a lie, Dean admitted to himself. Nell was pretty, if a little strange-looking. Her hair was dark and dirty, but it was long and curled around her ears. She’d been on the road for weeks, but she didn’t smell bad, more like bathroom hand soap and dust. She smelled old. On top of everything else, her eyes were huge, bug-like, and dark brown, and blinked so seldom that he thought maybe Nell had some kind of problem. She was weird, and he wasn’t sure if he trusted her, but he knew she was pretty. Dean stared at her big bug eyes as the phone box fogged with his body heat around him. He watched her eyes shift from playful to irritated in about half a second, and he knew his smartass mouth had gotten him again.
Nell’s hands fisted again, and she pounded on his chest, huffing out a “Jackass!” and pushing the door open with her back. She waited outside the booth while Dean used his cell to call Sam, the thick brown book tucked under his arm.
The boys had solved whatever was plaguing Jericho that night. Dean had swallowed his mistrust of her after his phone call and told her that Sam was in trouble. He needed a lift, so Nell struck a deal.
“If I drive you,” she bartered, “then you have to let me come with you to find John.” Disagreement was on the tip of Dean’s tongue, but before he could spit it at her, Nell continued. “Please — I have nothing, and no memories, okay, I need them back! And if you and your father really are ‘hunters’ or whatever, then I'm betting on you both to help me get them back.”
This weird-looking girl was begging him to find his father for her, to help him, even. He wanted to tell her that he was trying, and all he could do was follow what little clues he had, but his luck was shot, and it always had been. There was nothing Dean could have done for her. He would have argued it if Sam’s life wasn’t on the line.
“Deal,” he said, resolved to deal with the consequences of that bargain later. “Where’s your car?”
He’d hated her Lincoln and had complained about the suede seats more than any other person on his way to a ghost-fight ever would. He shut his mouth when she gunned it and even patted the hood when all was said and done, and Constance Welch had returned to her children in the house she was afraid to set foot in.
Nell had no trouble believing in the brothers’ occupation after that. She watched those ghost kids melt to water in front of her eyes, and Constance flicker out of existence with a shocking and terrible scream in the ruined foyer. If she had to hunt ghosts with Sam and Dean to find John and get her memories back, she’d just have to get used to it.
Nell waited by the guys’ car as they approached, ready to go, her bag over her shoulder, and narrowed her eyes when Dean sent her a grimace. Dean broke the bad news when he reached her, Sam in tow.
“What the hell do you mean, ‘you won't take me with you’,” she snapped at him, “We had a deal!” Sam hung back apologetically and let Dean take the lead.
Sam did feel bad, but at the end of the day, they’d be doing her a favor by leaving her out of it. Sam knew firsthand what hunting with Dean was like, and sure, maybe Nell could have learned to handle it. But John? John was no cakewalk, and he’d give Dean hell if he knew that he'd brought on a liability.
“Look,” said Dean, trying his best to show how sorry he was. Sorry in more ways than one — he thought it might’ve been cool to have a girl in the car 24-7, even if she was strange, just to be able to say it. Yeah. I met a girl in Cali, and she begged to hit the road with me. We’ve been together ever since. It called to him, but the idea of a dead weird girl, or a beaten-to-a-pulp-on-a-hunt weird girl, snapped him out of it. “What we do is dangerous, alright? It's tough, and it takes us everywhere. You should hang back around here, okay? I'll give you my number, and I'll tell you when I find him, I promise.”
Nell wouldn’t have it. “You promise,” she mocked. “You promised to bring me with you if I helped Sam! Your word doesn’t mean anything to me. I need to go with you.”
Dean shook his head and pulled a little notepad out of the pocket of his leather jacket. He scribbled something on it and tried to give it to Nell.
When she crossed her arms and refused to take it, he rolled his eyes and grabbed one of her hands not unkindly and pushed it between her fingers. “My number,” he said. “You call me if you ever need anything.” Dean hoped that this made up for lying to her. And he hoped that the offer to lend her a hand was a ‘thank you’ for saving sam’s sorry butt, too. She scowled, and watched the brothers get into the car. Dean made it into the drivers side and shut the door as Sam rounded the car.
“Believe me,” the taller boy said. “The less you’ve got to do with Dad, the better. Dean will call you.” Their car drove away, a great rumbling across the quiet California night.
“I promise,” Nell repeated. “Believe me,” she mocked in Sam’s voice. “Fuck that.” Nell threw her shoulder duffel into her ugly Lincoln and drove off after the brothers’ car, keeping on their tail through the night.
"wolf in sheeps' clothing versus sacrificial lamb " ...
.*~.* prologue
.*~.* nell crawford finds herself alone in new jersey, with nothing but a bag, a gun, a note, and no memories. 'jericho, ca', it reads. '---057.1504', it reads. 'john winchester', it reads. desperate for her memories, nell finds her way to jericho and joins two brothers on their mission to find their father, and her history in the process
word count; 558
authors note: supernatural fanfiction in the big two-five is kind of crazy, but i need to engage with my hobbies before i die. this can be read as x reader if you so choose, but its more fun for me to write like this. ongoing series spanning several seasons. ambition will be my doom. not edited, we die like illiterate scribes.
Nell could only hear the electric hum of a slushy machine when she walked into that barren gas-mart on the outskirts of town. Her bag hung heavy on her left shoulder, and the strap was sure to leave an ugly red strike against her skin. She blinked under the fluorescent lights, a jarring shift from the gentle light of dawn filtering through the windows behind her.
The mart was empty, other than a long-faced, teenaged employee with stringy brown hair and angry red zits on his face. He turned away from her the moment she made eye-contact with him. Nell was filthy, and there was blood on her jeans and all over the shotgun in her bag, weighing her shoulder down. She heard the slushy machines grind to a halt as she pushed open the bathroom door.
The bathroom of the gas mart was worse off than she was with dull cinderblock walls and a spider-web full of flies abandoned in the corner. Not even the spider could stand to stay in there, so she washed the morning dirt off of her face and the blood from under her nails, without worrying about the state of the sink when she was through. When she returned to the storefront with damp hair and a clean face, it was still empty, except for that same acne-faced kid behind the counter, only now he was shoving half-assedly at the slushy machine, fighting to resume its electric buzz.
“Excuse me,” she said, her voice dry, and rotten from disuse. She gestured to the stack of cups behind the boy and he handed her one, along with a lid and straw. She filled it with raspberry half-way, before patting at her pockets for money. There was no cash in her bag, not eve a wallet, she knew that, but she needed something to drink before she keeled over on the linoleum. So she pulled her cup from the spout and handed whatever she had. A fistful of nickels and a one-dollar-bill in exchange for half of a cup of raspberry slush was pressed into the kid’s hand and Nell turned to leave. Her hand brushed the door when the boy spoke up.
“This isn’t money,” he objected, and Nell turned. She may not have remembered what happened to her, why she was there, and who clubbed her so hard over the head that she could barley breathe, but she knew what money was. The kid held up the dollar she’d given him. Nell’s eyes widened and her lips parted around the straw between them, dry. To her surprise, he was right, and the paper between his fingers was bright yellow, now crumpled, but once folded up neatly. Nell returned to him and studied the paper between his fingers, a folded note stained red, brown, and black, with furrowed brows.
Was this hers? She had no memory of any note, but then again, Nell had no memory at all. She surrendered her slushy to the boy — Devon, she observed from the nametag pinned on his orange vest — and took the note from him. It was damp, but Nell wasn't sure why. She unfolded it gingerly, careful not to let it tear. The boy had returned to his register by the time she’d pried it open. A phone number, illegible now, and a name. A town? She approached the boy at his register.
“I can’t give you a drink if you can’t pay for it,” he said, shaking his head.
“I don’t want it,” Nell said. “I have a question. How far is Jericho? California?” She laid the note down on the counter so the boy could read it.
the abuse and humiliation Greta Thunberg is going through at the hands of the Israelis needs to be put in context with the dehumanising torture Palestinian prisoners are put through on the daily: the fact that darling Greta can be blindfolded and forced to crawl and kiss the Israeli flags - despite her international popularity and the protection her own government should guarantee her - is only possible because Israelis are allowed to beat, humiliate, starve and rape Palestinians to literal death without anyone stopping them.
synopsis: the storm gave you powers that came with a cost—every time you used them, they broke you from the inside out. when you nearly die saving johnny and franklin, he destroys himself searching for a cure.
requested by anon
The first time you fly, the sky does you the kindness of answering back. Not with words—just a feeling that moves from your shoulder blades to your ribs, a steadying hand you didn’t know to ask for. You hang there above the river with the wind pushing your hair into your mouth and the city glittering like it’s finally in on the joke, and you laugh because it feels like a secret you’re not supposed to tell.
Johnny is a bright blur just off your right, carving lazy figure eights like a show-off who knows you’ll forgive him. He grins so hard you can feel it from six feet away, a grin that lives at the intersection of relief and awe. He loops closer until you could kiss him if you reached, so you reach, and he laughs into your mouth, heat skimming harmless as a summer day across your cheek.
Back on the roof, you land too hard and crack a paver with your heel. Ben looks up from a sandwich the size of a small child, eyebrows climbing. “That’s comin’ outta Reed’s grant,” he says, then points at you with the corner of his rye like a toast. “Nice stickin’ the landing, kid.”
Sue hugs you in a way that feels like physics first and arms second, invisible pressure adjusting around bones that don’t bruise anymore. “Slowly,” she murmurs into your hair. “New sky.”
Reed tries for clinical and fails. His mouth can’t stop smiling. “Subjective assessment?”
“Gravity answered me back,” you say, giddy and breathless.
Behind you, Johnny laughs like that’s the only answer he’ll ever accept.
The days after the mission taste like discovery. Strength arrives like another language you already speak. You steady a teetering bus with one hand. You catch a dropped I-beam like it’s a baton in a parade. Your skin forgets how to split; knives turn apologetic. Flight is worse—better. You thread thermals, follow updrafts, learn to read the city’s heat as if it has paragraphs hidden in the air.
At night you dream in wide-angle shots and wake with your palms still buzzing. Johnny runs warm beside you, the human version of a fireplace, and if you straighten your arm you can feel the sunburn in him that never truly fades. Sometimes you both wake at three and stare at the ceiling until one of you gives in and starts telling the other about the stupidest thing that happened that day. The ceiling doesn’t answer back, but the shape of his shoulder does. He pretends not to worry because you pretend not to worry, and you both accept the lie like a blanket.
It starts small, and you let it. The taste of pennies for half a second after you dismount from an unusual angle. A tremor you’d blame on caffeine if you still needed it. Reed calls them anomalies and logs them with a frown he tries to keep friendly; you wave them off and swallow water and refuse to think about the fact that you no longer ache the way normal bodies report their days.
The first time you cough blood, it’s a thread on your tongue that disappears in the sink before you can admit it happened. You rinse too long, palms braced on porcelain, head bowed like church. When you crawl back into bed, Johnny rolls toward you, still pretending to be asleep, tucks you in like he’s been deputized by gravity, and says nothing.
Reed is very careful when he says the thing he has to say. He sits where his height looks least intimidating and thumbs away something on his tablet that isn’t news, just the pretext to soften the moment his mouth makes an angle it doesn’t want to.
“Your cells,” he says, gentle like a man lowering a vase he loves, “are doing something unprecedented.”
You roll your wrist so the light hits the thin white scar there, the one that used to prove you were made of the same mortal nonsense as everybody else. “That’s the point, right? We’re the brochure.”
Reed half-smiles. “Yes. And.”
Johnny is very still in the chair beside you. He’s never very still. He’s an edge-of-his-seat person by nature. He is the person edges were designed for. Now he’s got both hands around a paper cup he hasn’t touched, jaw set like he’s auditioning for stoicism and failing.
“Your invulnerability,” Reed says, “is doing the cruelest possible thing. It’s protecting you from feeling damage that still happens. Microscopic tears. Microfractures. Organ stress that doesn’t register because the nerves can’t argue with the shield. Any normal body would respond by forcing you to rest. Yours gives you a pass.”
“How bad?” you ask, because measured pain feels safer than the kind that arrives without a number.
“Cumulative,” Reed says, which is a scientist’s way of saying water on rock, erosion, inevitable if unchecked. “If you operate within measured thresholds, the mechanism that repairs keeps pace. If you continue at current intensities… we will have to talk about time in a way I don’t want to.”
Johnny finds his voice and it’s not the one he uses for reporters or crowds. It’s the one he used when you broke your shoelace in the lobby and he crouched to fix it like that was always going to be his job. “Say it,” he says to Reed, but looks at you.
“If you keep pushing,” Reed says simply, “you will shorten your life in measurable steps.”
The room goes bare. You hear your own breath and the hum of a machine that’s always lived under the floor. Sue reaches across and fits her fingers over your knee. Ben, on the periphery, squeezes Johnny’s shoulder until bone complains.
“Okay,” you say. The word is steady because it’s too small to wobble.
“Okay you’ll listen,” Johnny says, “or okay you’re about to do what you always do and smile and then go run into a burning building while I watch?” His voice frays on the last word. He isn’t a man who cries in rooms; he’s the man who goes outside, sets himself on fire, and laughs until he can breathe again.
“Both,” you say, because lying feels wrong when the people who love you are looking right at you.
The first fight happens on the roof two nights later because of course it does. You saved three men from a stairwell that decided to audition as a chimney and came home smelling like soaked ash and relief. You tug your hair out of your collar and tell yourself the ringing in your ears is just the wind you threaded.
“You promised,” Johnny says when you land, and the night takes a step back from all that heat.
“I promised to try,” you say, and sound tired, which is either progress or cowardice.
He laughs once without humor. “You think I didn’t hear you in the shower?” He steps closer and then stops himself like he walked into glass. “You think I didn’t see you pressing your hands against the tile like you had to remind them to be steady?”
“It was a bad staircase,” you say, reasonable to the point of cruelty.
He looks at you like he’s cataloguing the first time he will tell a story about how you almost died. “I am going to scream,” he says in a voice that doesn’t rise. “I am not going to scream.” His hands shake. He puts them in his pockets as if that will quiet them. “You keep skipping the part where you’re a person I love, not a public utility.”
That lands. It lands because he never weaponizes love and now he has, against himself more than you. You touch his jaw, thumb catching on the nick he missed with the razor, and he breathes like he’s just been permitted to again.
“I hear you,” you whisper. You do. You hear him even when you don’t obey.
You try to be boring. You say no to calls you could answer in your sleep. You sit cross-legged on the rug and teach Franklin how to tell a good crayon from a bad one. You let Sue make soup like it’s a ceremony and eat every spoonful and learn the taste of being taken care of without protest. You let Reed measure the air around you as if it has a grammar. Ben drives you to the hardware store to buy a plant you will definitely kill and tells you that survival is ninety percent stubbornness and ten percent good dirt.
And then the world asks for something nobody else can give, because that’s the world’s favorite party trick.
A crane seizes. The operator panics. An arm swings, catches scaffolding, people scream. Physics stops being an essay and becomes a fact you can’t argue with. Johnny is two blocks south trying to coax a ruptured gas line into deciding not to explode. Sue is already holding a different building together. Reed is three minutes out and narrating angles you can’t see. Ben is sprinting and apologizing to pedestrians he plows through.
You go.
You are careful. You take men in pairs, set them down where the street will be kind. You mutter irresponsible promises—“you’re okay, I’ve got you, you’re okay”—and try to mean them like a spell. You do not listen to the part of your chest that has begun to complain in a polite voice. You do not listen to the way Reed says your name like a taper being pinched out.
The arm swings back unexpectedly and taps you between the shoulder blades in a way you might call friendly if it didn’t turn your teeth into bells. You put the last two men down and then your knees argue with the ground and the ground wins.
Johnny gets there before you fall all the way because he is a man who outruns what hurts him and what hurts you. He lands too hard, doesn’t care, scoops you up without asking. “Hey,” he says, voice oiled smooth. “I’ve got you.”
“Reed,” you manage. Which is redundant. Reed is in your ear and on your shoulder and already disassembling a machine with his mind.
“Favorite number,” Johnny says, panic translated into patter. “Capital of—”
“Your apartment’s a mess,” you say. It buys you exactly enough normal for him to breathe.
The lab is clean in a way that makes you want to dirty it with joy, just to prove you can. You blink and there is the ceiling you hate and love, and Sue’s hand is on your knee, grounding and unflinching, and Ben keeps touching the corner of the gurney like the furniture’s a talisman. Johnny doesn’t let go of your wrist even when Reed needs both of you to; he steps to the other side and takes the other one.
You sleep because your body finally insists. You wake to Johnny and Reed arguing across you like cliffs.
“Use me,” Johnny is saying, reckless with purpose. “You need heat profiles? You need tuned frequencies? I can hold whatever pitch you want. You said her body reacts to me—”
“What I said,” Reed answers, exhausted and exact, “is that your thermal output triggers a particular response. You running yourself ragged is not a protocol.”
“Watch me,” Johnny says.
You should tell him no. You tell him no. It doesn’t stick. He’s in the lab at three in the morning with his shirt off and goggles pushed up like a cartoon of a scientist, forearms red around the flame where it licks his skin beyond armor, teeth set while he holds a band of heat so narrow it might as well be thread. Ben is behind him with one hand hovering like a spotter at a gym. Sue leans in the doorway, too tired to pretend she isn’t scared, knowing that pretending would scare him more.
Reed is the one who makes the leap you can’t. He looks at Johnny and then at you and then at the horrible dance of your numbers and says, “If we can shepherd her through the resonance bands—if we can keep her from hitting the frequencies that shear tissue—we can let her be who she is without paying in interest.”
“And you want Flame Boy here to be the shepherd,” Ben says, half proud, half appalled.
Reed adjusts his glasses and hides his smile because he likes it when Ben calls Johnny that and pretends he doesn’t. “He can hold a stable thermal pitch with more precision than any machine we can build fast enough.”
Johnny blinks. “Am I… a metronome?”
“You’re a lighthouse,” Sue says, stepping in so he doesn’t have to make a joke to survive the compliment. “And she can steer by you.”
You want to tell him no because you’ve already let him do too much and what if he burns himself down to the version of himself he’s afraid is underneath? You want to tell him yes because you’re suddenly greedy for living. You hold out your hand instead. He takes it like he’s signing something.
The first run is terrifying because it works and because it hurts him. It isn’t the bright, hungry fire that makes crowds gasp. It’s a pale, precise band of heat tuned to the frequency your cells listen to when they’re deciding whether to destroy themselves. He holds it in his hands as if he picked up a hot wire and agreed to smile through it.
“Now,” Reed says, and you move. You force yourself to be careful inside your own skin in a way you’ve never had to be. Johnny holds the line and you can feel him shiver through your bones. Sue stands at your head and talks nonsense like it’s poetry. Ben counts under his breath. The numbers on the screen go up. Repair indices rising, micro-tears knitting instead of opening. For the first time since the storm, the bill doesn’t arrive.
Franklin wakes up from his nap, sheds his babysitter like a coat, and barrels into the lab, hair up, clutching a dinosaur that might be a crocodile. He brakes when he sees Johnny’s hands trembling and you in a suit. His small face folds.
“Are we okay?” he asks.
Johnny makes his mouth do something bright. “Buddy. We’re so okay we’re gonna need celebratory pancakes.”
Franklin peels a glitter star from a sheet and sticks it dead center on Johnny’s bare shoulder like a medal. Then he looks at you, very serious, and puts a crooked moon sticker over your heart. “For luck,” he says.
You try to keep it quiet after that, to keep saving your life something you do in a room where only the people who already love you can see. The corridor holds. It widens by degrees. Your days stop tasting like pennies and start tasting like coffee again. Johnny sleeps some nights. Sue starts reading a book with chapters instead of journal abstracts. Reed forgets to scowl for whole minutes at a time. Ben takes Franklin to the aquarium, points at a giant turtle, and tells him, “See? Slow and tough wins more often than you’d think.”
And then the day arrives that will not be reasoned with.
It starts with a silly errand—Reed’s idea of a family day. Franklin has been promised a pretzel from the vendor outside the museum with the dinosaur he can name and you pretend you don’t love that he says al-lo-sore-us like it’s someone he went to preschool with. Johnny holds your hand because he always does; Sue has an arm hooked through Reed’s. Ben walks a step behind with a cotton candy he swears is for a child and eats like it’s a personal enemy.
A sound under the street goes wrong. It is the kind of wrong that makes birds stop midair and turn. Johnny swears reflexively. Reed’s face goes still. Sue says Franklin in a tone that could hold a bridge.
The first boom lifts the corner of the block. The second makes an old brownstone sigh and then forget how to stand. A gas main—one of a thousand problems the city keeps putting off. Fire slithers up from a crack like a hand. People scream the way people do when noise is the only thing they can control.
“Field,” Reed says, and Sue is already pushing, humming with the effort of grabbing a building with invisible hands. “Ben—”
“On it,” Ben grunts, moving before his sentence finishes.
Johnny squeezes your fingers once—stay with me—and let's go to flame. It jumps off him like it’s been impatient for an excuse. He’s a bright streak over the mouth of the street, writing fire where it will choke oxygen before it can do worse.
Franklin’s small hand slips, because life is a comic strip gag until it isn’t. He ducks backward when someone barrels forward, trying not to be in anyone’s way, and now he is in everyone’s way. He looks so tiny on the museum steps you think your heart might decide this is the moment it finally refuses its job.
“Franklin!” Sue shouts. Her field throws a translucent shoulder into the crowd to slow it. He freezes like a kid who knows the right answer is to go still and wait for a grown-up.
Johnny is already diving. He can’t help it. He’s a magnet for the part of a disaster where someone is about to get erased. He shuts off heat as he goes so he doesn’t scorch, hits the steps running, scoops Franklin with a practiced one-handed scoop that says he has done this more times than anyone counted.
And then the brownstone gives like bread under a knife.
You don’t think. There is no corridor. There is love and momentum and a shape your body has learned, the shape it takes when it makes itself a door. You shoulder into the falling edge of the building and catch it on your palms and hear your bones complain at a frequency no one else can hear, the human parts of you holding up a mistake a century old. Heat pushes at your back, the wrong kind, old gas and dry wood and history. Johnny twists so Franklin’s head is under his chin, curls around the boy, trusts you without looking—like he always has, like he always will.
“Out!” you shout. Sue hears. Reed hears. The street hears, maybe. You take a step backward with the building on your hands and something in your chest unhooks from something else you always assumed would be there.
“Don’t you dare,” Johnny says, and it’s exactly the tone he used the first time you leaned over the edge of the roof to see if you could touch rain.
You take another step. Ben is suddenly there on your left shoulder, shoving at what you can’t see, swearing in a register that shakes a stop sign. Reed is at your right with a tool he didn’t have a minute ago, welding a beam to something that still thinks it’s a foundation so it will remember. Sue’s field is a net under everything, trembling.
You get Johnny and Franklin past the edge of shadow and throw the building backward like a man throws a punch when he knows it won’t win but might distract long enough for someone smaller to get away. You float for one bright second because your body still remembers how to do that. You see Johnny look up at you, mouth open like a prayer, Franklin’s fist tight in the fabric at his collar. You think about how soft the hair is at the back of Franklin’s head when he falls asleep on your lap. You think about the way Johnny says babe like he invented the word.
Then your chest becomes a house with no walls. The ground takes your legs out from under you. Johnny is there because he’s always there, but you’re already leaving. The edges of the world go soft, and then the middle does too.
“Auntie?” Franklin says, small and breaking. Johnny makes a sound you’ve never heard him make. Sue says your name like a field collapsing. Ben clears a path through people who already wanted to get out of the way and makes it bigger than it needs to be because he doesn’t know how not to overdo it when it’s you.
“Stay,” Johnny begs, voice raw. He has you in his arms and you’re ridiculous—your head lolling, your hands limp—because you are always the person who holds, not the person who gets held like this. “Baby, stay with me. I swear, I swear, I’ll—”
He does not finish the promise because even he knows that the only thing worth promising is the one you can’t.
The lab is a white box around the worst version of all the conversations you’ve been having. Reed has the chamber ready because he is a coward and a genius and prepared for the day the worst thing happens. Sue’s hands shake when she pulls your hair out of your face and they stop when she sees Franklin watching. Ben stands like a wall that refuses to let the room move.
“We need amplitude she cannot tolerate,” Reed says, and his voice is the thing that saves him from breaking. “We need duration you cannot hold—”
“I can hold it,” Johnny says. His eyes are fox-bright, red-rimmed, unforgiving. “I’ll hold it ’til sunrise if I have to.”
“Johnny,” Sue says, not big sister, not field commander, just a woman whose child watched someone he loves fold in half, “if you go down, I will not have the hands to hold them both.”
Ben steps in until his chest is to Johnny’s back and sets his hands where Johnny can feel them and not be offended. “I got you, matchstick. You go out, I’ll plant you like a fence post and you can keep doin’ your thing from the floor.”
Johnny laughs once, ugly and grateful.
They strap you in. You float in the part of a room where people decide. You stare at the lights not because they’re beautiful but because they are ordinary. Johnny steps into the ring that measures his heat like a song. He looks at you and the grin he gives you is a translation of don’t be afraid into a language you have always spoken together.
“Stay with me,” he says, and you are sick of how brave you have to be to answer, and you answer anyway. “Always,” you say.
Reed’s voice counts down. Sue’s hand is on your hair, steady, forgiveness already folded inside whatever comes next. Ben leans in and says some stupid joke about you owing him five bucks and you love him for making space.
Johnny lights.
It isn’t spectacle; it’s devotion. He holds a narrow band of heat so steady that the room hums sympathy. It scours his skin in the places where he can’t armor himself with flame, turns the edges of his hands into geography that will blister later, but he doesn’t wobble. He stares at the readout and at you and at nothing at all, jaw set, breath in a pattern you’ve felt under your hand a thousand times.
You move because you have been asked to live. Your body is a hallway with fragile glass on wantonly spaced shelves. The corridor is there if you treat it with respect. Your cells listen to Johnny’s pitch and choose repair over ruin. You can feel the choice like a tide going out. Pain arrives like a bill and then gets paid quickly by something other than you.
Halfway through, you make a sound you don’t plan, a small animal noise. Johnny’s hands twitch and don’t. Ben’s grip tightens on his shoulders until one day the bruise will surprise him in the mirror.
“Don’t stop,” you say. It’s barely sound. He nods like you shouted.
He doesn’t stop. He holds and holds and holds. There are tears in his eyes and he is not ashamed and he is not proud; he is busy. He is the boy who runs toward the thing everyone else runs away from, and he is the man who learned that sometimes running is staying.
The last minute is work. There are no metaphors. It is a pulley, a beam, a bolt, a steady hand, a stupid song Franklin likes, a stupid sticker on your chest, a promise into a forehead, a please please please said into a shirt. You are too tired to be moving and you are moving nonetheless. You are being saved and you are saving yourself and you are saving each other, which is the only way this ever works.
When it ends, everything fails quietly. Johnny’s light goes out like a good man closing a door behind him. The chamber sighs. The screens keep shouting until Reed acknowledges them with a laugh that has no humor and nothing but joy, the kind of joy that has to go through grief to get here.
“Repair indices are up,” he says, voice wrecked. “They’re up. The loop is—” He can’t finish. He doesn’t have to.
Sue makes a noise halfway between a sob and a laugh. Ben lets his head fall forward onto Johnny’s shoulder, which would decapitate a lesser man. Johnny sways and then lets himself go; Ben lowers him by handfuls like he is something rare.
“Hi,” you say, because occupying the smallest word is the only thing that makes sense. Johnny crawls the last two feet on his knees and drops his forehead to your sternum and laughs into crying into please.
“You did it,” you tell him, and he shakes his head against you like it isn’t true or like it only is because you made it true first.
“We did it,” he whispers. He tips his head enough to look up, eyes ridiculous with relief and devotion and the specific kind of pride that doesn’t keep score. “I’m gonna be insufferably humble about this for at least fifteen minutes.”
“You’re burned,” you tell him. He shrugs, winces, grins.
“I’ve had worse at Coney Island,” he lies. Ben snorts so hard it rattles the bed.
They keep you, of course. Reed writes protocols and then writes protocols for the protocols because he is so grateful to have something to boss besides fate. Sue cries in the stairwell and then comes back and reads you half a chapter of a book about a woman on a boat who survives without being a metaphor. Ben teaches Franklin to shuffle cards without bending them; Franklin cheats by being adorable.
Johnny sleeps on a couch with his arm over his eyes and his bandages hanging loose and wakes every time you shift like he’s got a string tied from his ribs to your ankle. In the greenhouse at dawn, he lets you kiss the corner of his mouth while the plants pretend not to look. “I wanted to fix you like an engine,” he says, low. “With fire and hands and cussing. And when I couldn’t, I—” He taps his chest, right over where your palm fits. “I thought I’d break from not being able to do anything.”
“You didn’t do nothing,” you say. “You did everything.”
He nods, the kind of nod that means maybe he will forgive himself next week if you remind him. He slides his pinky around yours like you’re twelve. “Marry me,” he murmurs. It’s not a gesture; it’s not a kneel—it’s a pledge, his voice raw as first light.
“Yes,” you say, easy as a breath. “Soon.”
“Soon, babe,” he echoes, and you can hear the hours he wants to count and doesn’t.
Your first flight after feels like starting over. You don’t punch the sky. You raise your hands and let the air pick you up the way a current will when you step into a river and stop fighting. The corridor hums. Your body answers. You pay attention, and it pays you back.
On the roof, Reed pretends to look at his tablet but his mouth is trembling around a smile. Sue stands with her arms crossed, pretending not to be holding her breath. Ben chews on a bagel and mutters, “Don’t show off,” in the exact tone of a man begging you to. Franklin, in his dinosaur pajamas, waves a hand-lettered sign that says GO AUNTIE in slanted letters.
Johnny cups his hands around his mouth and shouts, “That’s my girl!” like the whole city should hear. The jogger on the next block does, the pigeons scatter, and you laugh until your chest aches.
You land lighter than you left. Johnny catches you anyway, palms secure at your waist. He kisses your temple like he’s saying grace. “Proud of you,” he says into your hair. It lands all the way down your spine.
Franklin tugs your sleeve, eyes huge. “Do you have to save everybody every time?”
You crouch so you’re eye to eye. “No,” you tell him gently. “That’s why there’s four of them. Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny. They take turns.”
Franklin’s forehead scrunches. “But… what about you?”
You open your mouth, close it, and smooth his hair with a smile that hides more than it shows. “Me? I’m just here to help when I can.”
Before you can stand, Johnny drops into a crouch beside you, fire still faint in his eyes like it never really leaves. He laces his fingers through yours, stubborn and sure. “No, babe. Five. Always five. You’re ours.”
Franklin lights up, triumphant. “Six if you count me!”
Sue kisses his hair. “We absolutely count you.”
Ben rumbles, “Seven with Herbie, not that I wanna,” and somewhere in the building a small robot makes an offended beep.
You try to laugh, but your throat burns. Johnny just squeezes your hand tighter, like he’s daring you to argue. “All of us,” he murmurs, close enough that only you can hear it. “Always.”
You’ll never be exactly what you were the first day the sky said yes. You’re something better for having almost been lost. The corridor inside you hums—a path, not a prison. When you step into it, it feels like a promise you keep with yourself and with him.
You and Johnny start collecting ordinary. Groceries. Bad movies. A cheap rug that sheds and turns the apartment into a dog you don’t own. Arguments about pineapple on pizza (you: absolutely not; him: loudly yes so the delivery guy will judge him properly). A list on the fridge titled things we’ll do when we’re eighty that includes more jumping than is reasonable. Reed builds you a wearable that purrs when you’re within range and complains when you drift. Sue leaves tea where you’re about to be. Ben tells strangers at the deli that he saw you throw a building; Franklin corrects him: “She caught it.”
Sometimes a siren tricks your old instincts. Heat ghosts along your shoulder where Johnny isn’t touching you yet. He watches your face, calibrating, always ready to hold the pitch if you decide to go.
“You good?” he asks, soft.
You think of a boy with a glitter sign, a woman who held a street, a man who held a frequency until his own skin burned and refused to let go. You think of a lab with terrible lighting and the only miracle you believe in: people refusing to let each other fall.
“Yeah,” you say. Sometimes you add not this one. Sometimes you say I’ll take the next. Sometimes you say come with me. He always does.
On a spring evening that smells like wet concrete and new leaves, you take your small flight up. Johnny cups his hands and shouts, “That’s my girl!” Reed smiles into a coffee he claims is his last. Sue pretends to be unimpressed. Ben pretends not to cry. Franklin tucks his hand into yours on landing like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Stay with me,” Johnny whispers sometimes, for no reason at all.
“Always.” you answer, for every reason that matters.
The sky, which has learned to make room for you, does it again without charging extra. The city keeps its secrets and gives you just enough light to get home by. You and Johnny walk back to a life that is, against the odds and in defiance of every terrible statistic, yours. And when you sleep, your body hums not with a debt coming due but with the simple fact of surviving into morning—a song you don’t have to sing alone.
during a mission, seeing you in danger caused the void & sentry to show up.
soft spot | @/https-bobreynolds
watching a comfort movie with his girlfriend unexpectedly led bob to a terrifying confrontation with an ancient being who happen to be his own dark entity’s girlfriend.
Introductions Are in Order | @h3catee
Bucky asks a favor of you and ends up getting you entangled with one of Valentinas ploys.
A Moment of Peace | @/h3catee
After a few months of living with the New Avengers you have found solace in the quiet moments and Bob couldn’t agree more.
Honey | @strkly
after being off the grid for a while you return to society and meet up with your old friend bucky barnes. unexpectedly you run into someone you never thought you would see again. your high school boyfriend robert reynolds.
something sweet | @/strkly
bob spents a lot of time rethinking the past between you and him. he gets jealous. maybe the old feelings still laid below the surface.
Misunderstanding | @/strkly
you and bob were inseparable. until he begins to ignore you and you have no clue why. when you’re injured after a mission gone wrong you’re finally able to find out why.
reader wakes up in the middle of the night and gets jumpscared when she sees Void standing right beside their bed | @gay-dorito-dust
If I Believe You | @em1i2a3
Velour and Velcro | @/em1i2a3
You have a hobby of drawing and designing things in your spare time, one day Bob stumbles across your sketchbook and discovers something surprising.
Detonate | @/em1i2a3
Move in day is happening at the Thunderbolts/New Avengers Compound, and Bob is having a hard time dealing with the changes.
Never Let Me Go | @/em1i2a3
On a day off, the team arranges to go to a farmers market to do a bit of R and R. But what happens when Bob has an unexpected encounter with a ghost of his past?
Telescope | @/em1i2a3
On a whim, Bob decides to give himself a haircut and immediately regrets it, so you step in to help.
𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐆𝐎𝐎𝐃 𝐒𝐈𝐃𝐄 | @cosmictheo
bob loves you so much that he slowly begins to transform into a house-husband for you. and he loves it.
𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐋𝐘 | @/cosmictheo
it's the first time you're wearing your new suit as an official (new) avenger and bob is a little too excited about it.
reader taking care of bob during a depressive episode | @lovebugism
you like taking care of bob on his bad days. he isn't quite sure why
Fever Dreams and Quiet Things | @arkofangels
When Bob’s cold leaves him a feverish, sniffling mess, the Watchtower’s noise becomes too much. He finds refuge in your care—tea, gentle touches, and quiet comfort, soothes his aches. You tend to him without hesitation, his presence a warmth you cherish as much as he does yours
Post Meridiem Confessions | @coffee-with-bucky
It’s during that particular time of day when the afternoon begins to wane and the evening slowly seeps into the horizon. It’s when the team wasn’t up to their elbows in missions, a reprieve — a weekend maybe, where time leisurely slowed down. A beautiful yet quiet respite that allowed game nights, shared dinners with the team, or in this case the simple act of spending time together. A moment for you and Bob.
𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐍𝐎𝐑𝐌𝐀𝐋 | @wynnerwynner
everyone but bob and y/n seem to know that they like each other.
Alone Together | @callsign-swan
For the last few years, Tony's daughter has been living out in the tower basement. She doesn't realise when Valentina buys the tower, not until she's being choked out by Sentry (turns out Sentry is a really sweet guy called Bob, who knew?)
Sneaking Around | @/callsign-swan
Bob doesn't mean to be sneaking around. But he can't help it. He's got a secret, and he wants to keep it that way. Too bad he's best friends with Yelena Belova.
“𝖠𝖽𝗆𝗂𝗋𝖺𝗍𝗂𝗈𝗇” | @ang3ltine
Being recruited by Valentina as part of the new Avengers (z) team was never part of your list of agendas. Yet here you were, doting on an awkward brunette.
𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 | @/ang3ltine
"𝐔𝐧𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐫 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠" | @/ang3ltine
Bob was asleep for God knows how long, now that he has the chance at a better life. Who better to show him than you?
𝘚𝘶𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘳 𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 | @/ang3ltine
A get away from the city turns into something more special when the boy you had been crushing on, finally confesses.
psyche series masterlist | @gyugraphy
After the catastrophe in New York-when the Void tore through the city-the Thunderbolts know it can't happen again. Bob Reynolds doesn't need another collar or containment spell. He needs help. Enter her: a psychiatrist with an unusual gift, capable of stepping into the mind itself. No one expected her to reach him-least of all, him. "You're just going to leave me the moment it gets too hard, aren't you?" he says. She meets his gaze, steady and unshaken. "I've walked through nightmares to get to you. I won't walk away now."
Mr. Oblivious | @ofstarsandvibranium
Bob is sometimes oblivious to the fact that people find him attractive and/or like him. One of those people includes you.
truth will set you free | @sergeantbuckybarnes
You are injected with a truth serum during a mission, and when you return to the Watchtower, you must avoid Bob in order not to spill your feelings for him, but this causes Bob to believe he has done something to upset you.
miss possessive | @/sergeantbuckybarnes
Valentina’s new assistant becomes too fixated on Bob for your linking, and it seems that she needs a reminder that she has to keep her hands off your man.
if anything | @eyelessfaces
no one wants to talk about how close you came to dying, everyone walking on eggshells until bob finds out what really happened and asks why no one trusted him enough to tell the truth; you both know the reason involves your mutual feelings.
touch starved!bob | @/eyelessfaces
before dusk | @/eyelessfaces
As big of a place the Watchtower was, living as a fresh couple surrounded by a whole team of trained soldiers still made it feel a little tight and was inevitably bound to strip you off any kind of intimacy – Ava’s fake gagging whenever you and Bob were up close when she entered a common area never failed to ruin the moment, and Alexei’s well-meant but clumsy reminders for you and Bob to use protection in front of the whole team during dinner made it everyone’s turn to fake gag. So when Bob brought up the subject of going away for a few and the idea of it started to bloom inside your mind, you knew there was no turning back – the prospect of having Bob all to yourself for a couple of days was too exhilarating to consider chasing it away.
look what the cat dragged in | @/eyelessfaces
you get bob a cat for emotional support; the cat adopts you as parents and is undeniably bound to bring the two of you closer.
Pool Day | @moon-fics
The team decided to request a pool, not thinking it would be made. Now, they have a pool.
Let Me In | @scarletmika
Sometimes, when two broken people find each other, they become each other's comfort through the hurt. You became Bob's, and as much as you tried not to let him in, he became yours too.
I Just Feel You | @/scarletmika
Bob Reynolds was broken, and he knew that, but he was trying. He was trying to be better, to control himself. But like Stitch had said: broken, but still good. You were beginning to make Bob believe that he was, in fact, still good.
Only Good Thing | @/scarletmika
There was so much Bob regretted, so much shame riddled through his past, he didn't know what he'd see in his own shame rooms. He hadn't been prepared to see you around every corner, to be reminded of the way he'd left you behind in an effort to be what you deserved.
Kiss Me Again | @/scarletmika
A crush isn't a problem, and when that crush becomes love, it's usually a good thing. For Bob, it terrifies him, because he'd managed to fall in love with a literal Goddess. Why would a Goddess choose a broken man like him?
Kiss Me Forever | @/scarletmika
Bob never expected to fall in love with a Goddess, or have her fall in love with him, too. But even when you're capable of showing him the entire galaxy, you're the only thing he wants to be looking at.
Destiny or Not | @/scarletmika
As The Darkhold foretold Wanda Maximoff's destiny, The Book of Vishanti foretold your own. You just didn't know how much of that destiny was intertwined with Bob Reynolds, until the day you met him in the vault.
The White Witch pt. 1 Pt 02 Pt 03 | @/scarletmika
Bob knew who the Avengers were, who you were; he grew up watching them save the world time and time again. Now, he was one, but none of that could prepare him for what it would be like to meet you, or the instant connection that seemed to flow between you both.
terms and conditions (apply) | @endofthelinegang
you storm back into Avengers Tower when Valentina de Fontaine dares to relaunch the team—with Bob Reynolds, the unstable Sentry, at its core. Old secrets, god-like power, and a name that still echoes through the halls collide in a confrontation that could tear everything apart—again.
The S*x Talk | @webslinger-holland
Since Alexei has reunited with both of his daughters, he feels obligated to fulfill his fatherly role to them which includes a safe sex talk.
Being the Hero | @/webslinger-holland
Being stuck in the bunker forces everyone to work together in order to get out. And one of them ends up kinda being the hero.
Mama’s Boy | @everydaydreamer
Spending a peaceful morning with your son and husband.
Calling Bob by his full name | @/everydaydreamer
Sentry falls before bob | @pleasantlycrazyworld
Delicate | @flowersforbucky
“I know that you’re trying not to kiss me and I give you permission to just do it.”
fooled around and fell in love | @/flowersforbucky
you've never been one for commitment, and your teammates know it. when you and bob start seeing each other, it takes them by surprise and makes them worry about how he'll react to the heartbreak that they expect to follow. what they don't understand - you've never felt like this about anyone.
more than a friend should | @fireinmoonshot
Bob didn't quite count on himself being starstruck by seeing you in a dress for the first time. You didn't count on yourself forgetting how to breathe when you saw Bob in a suit. But when you both have to get through a black tie event, the only way to do it is by getting through it together.
Control | @/fireinmoonshot
Bob always waits for you to come back from missions, but when you don't come back one day, his powers start to get a little out of hand.
Unreal | @/fireinmoonshot
Bob offers for you to share his room while your room in the Watch Tower gets renovated... there's just one problem – he didn't think about the fact that he'd have to share a bed with you.
the complete knock | @sunsburns
you’re only here to try and understand why bucky’s suddenly gone off the rails and joined a new team, leaving you, sam and joaquín in radio silence. the last thing you expected was to find comfort in a stranger. a kind stranger named bob.
the complete knock (ii) | @/sunsburns
joaquín convinced you to stay in new york as a chance to regroup... and maybe look into who the hell this bob guy is. and just when things could not get any worse, john walker finds you both under the ruse of wanting to talk.
Sea Otters & Hand Holding | @pagesfromthevoid
4 times the team tries to get Bob to go out + 1 time he goes out himself
"hands off" | @/pagesfromthevoid
BE MY BABY | @castielthinkr
cowboy like me | @goldenlikedayl1ght
you get a text from an old friend and think.. you could do worse than a book club.. with some benefits.
Espionage | @violetrainbow412-blog
a quiet morning on the Watchtower turns into psychic people-watching when Jean, Yelena, and Ava decide to “check in” on their teammates. It’s all fun and teasing, until Jean sees something she wasn’t meant to: Bob, deeply in love, living a secret life no one expected.
Shadows Beneath the Light | @/violetrainbow412-blog
Valentina contacts you to conduct a complete team assessment regarding the mystical arts. But when Bob's turn comes, it turns out he needs more of your help.
Wrapped around you | @/violetrainbow412-blog
Bob has a secret lover in the city, and that night he feels the need to sleep in her arms.
Let them see | @/violetrainbow412-blog
you and Bob are forced to attend an event hosted by Valentina, where more is revealed than you would have liked.
Something Special | @blank-potato
You’ve been the live-in doctor at Avengers Tower for a year, and Bob wants to get you something special to celebrate. Unbeknownst to him, that something special turns out to be a sex plant.
Loving You Is Easy Part 2 | @/blank-potato
You and Bob are indifferent to each other, never seeming to mesh. But when you lose your memory, something new blooms between the two of you.
that's what i like | @/blank-potato
You love everything Bob does, and he doesn't seem to notice.
I Love The Girl With Magic Ways Part 2 Part 3 | @/blank-potato
When training with Bob goes awry, you come face-to-face with The Void, and he's interested in you; he wants to know what makes you tick.
didn't mean it | @upl0aded
maybe it was time to address the ‘possessiveness’ in your relationship.
The Lighthouse | @hanginginthevoid
you’ve always been drawn to bob. at first you think it means something, but then you remember that yelena’s also always been drawn to bob. and its obvious that he prefers her over you.
Home Is Where The Heart Is | @ilovemilestellersmustache
Wanting to feel more included Bob decides to help on a mission but in efforts to protect you he injures himself leaving him with amnesia. Your boyfriend not remembering isn’t the biggest problem because he’s always going to find you again, even in a hundred lifetimes.
Eternal Sunshine | @/ilovemilestellersmustache
Bob has come to the terms he likes you, he’s perfectly fine with the dynamic you two have going on, just friends. But when the guy on the team who gets on his nerves constantly decides he wants a flirty dynamic with you, his calm facade falters leading to a crabby, sassy and mean Bob.
Second Times a Charm | @/ilovemilestellersmustache
After a small dog escape, Bob meets you and doesn’t end up exchanging details with you. Thinking it was just meant to be a one time thing till Maisie your dog brings you back together and eventually starts a relationship. But the Thunderbolts are suspicious when Bob lately has been in a too good of a mood so they all decide to track and investigate it.
Just a Tuesday | @/ilovemilestellersmustache
Bob’s decides he can’t take the silence in between missions all alone so he ventures around New York and stumbles across a flower shop with the most gorgeous owner he just knows is his soulmate. Problem? He accidentally says he has a girlfriend, and is now finding ways to still see her at the shop.
Seasons | @abbysbenchpr
three times you and bob are almost walked in on and the one time you are
Peace in the Darkness | @theonewiththefanfics
Bob knows Y/N isn't one to go back on her words. So when she doesn't show up to go through with their plans, he starts to worry. Luckily for him, Yelena knows how to break-and-enter. And doesn't mind invading her personal space.
Doctor Bob | @skeltnwrites
It's the middle of the night, you're bleeding out in the bathroom, and refusing to let Bob take you to an actual doctor aka Bob learns how to stitch up a stab wound
Short Circuit | @honeybadgerwritings
Bob helps Y/N train to control her powers under pressure. But when frustration gets the better of her, their sparring session turns tense.
synopsis: after a girls’ night out, johnny picks up a very drunk you who can’t stop calling him her “shiny husband.”
Johnny never really slept when you were out on girls’ nights. He’d tell you he would—“Go, have fun, I’ll see you in the morning”—but the truth was, he couldn’t relax until you were home. Not because he didn’t trust you—he trusted you more than anyone—but because he didn’t like the space in the bed when you weren’t in it. So he’d pace around, scroll through his phone, half-watch something on TV, until the hours crept later and later.
So when his phone buzzed that night and it wasn’t you but one of your friends asking if he could come get you, Johnny was already shrugging into his jacket before she finished explaining.
The bar was crowded, neon lights buzzing, music thumping. But he spotted you instantly—you were slouched in a booth, cheeks flushed, your laugh a little too loud. The second you caught sight of him, you lit up, scrambling to your feet with all the grace of a baby deer.
“Johnny!” you squealed, stumbling into him. He caught you easily, strong arms steadying your weight as you immediately started peppering his face with kisses—sloppy little smacks to his jaw, his nose, his cheeks. He couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled out of him.
“You came,” you said, kissing the corner of his mouth before grabbing his face in both hands. “You’re the best boyfriend ever. My husband. My shiny husband.”
And Johnny—Johnny Storm, cocky, arrogant, smug Johnny Storm—giggled. A giddy, boyish sound that he tried to hide by tucking his face into your neck, grinning like a fool. God, he loved when you said that. He couldn’t wait for the day it’d be true.
“Alright, baby,” he murmured, kissing your temple. “Let’s get you home.”
You clung to him as he scooped you up bridal-style, ignoring your squeal of protest that you could totally walk. Your friends cheered you on as Johnny carried you straight out of the bar, shaking his head but smiling like you hung the stars.
What none of you realized was that paparazzi had been lurking outside, waiting for the perfect shot. And well—Johnny Storm carrying his very drunk, very giggly girlfriend in his arms? Yeah, they got plenty.
The car ride home was a blur of your rambling.
“Johnny, I love your nose.”
“My nose?” he asked, amused.
“Mmhm. And your eyeballs. They’re like a swimming pool. Can I swim in them? You’d get me floaties, right?”
He bit back laughter, squeezing your hand. “Of course, babe. I’ll get you the best floaties.”
You sighed dramatically, turning toward him with glassy eyes. “You’re sweeter than pancakes. And puppies. And fries. And you know how much I love fries.”
Johnny’s heart squeezed. He lifted your hand and kissed your knuckles, smiling softly. “That’s serious love.”
Back at the apartment, he eased you out of your shoes, coaxed a glass of water and Advil into your hands, and tucked you into bed. You tugged at his shirt until he slid in beside you, and then you were right back to peppering his face with kisses, giggling as you went.
“I love you the most,” you whispered, your words heavier now, sleep tugging at them. “You’re gonna be the best husband.”
Johnny laughed again, helpless and lovesick, pressing a kiss to your hair. “You’re gonna kill me, you know that?”
You were already asleep before he got the answer. And he lay awake a while longer, smiling like an idiot, your words replaying in his head.
The next morning, you woke with a pounding head and the sun stabbing through the curtains. Johnny was already up, leaned against the headboard with his phone in hand, a glass of water and Advil waiting on the nightstand.
“Morning, Mrs. Storm,” he teased, setting his phone aside.
You groaned, flopping onto your back. “…Did I say that?”
“Oh, yeah. About twenty times. Called me your shiny husband.”
You buried your face in your hands. “Kill me.”
He chuckled, prying your hands away to kiss your knuckles. “Don’t worry, I liked it. Loved it, actually.”
You peeked up at him through your fingers. “…Really?”
“Really,” he said softly, brushing hair from your face. “You have no idea how much I loved it.”
You tried to smile, but he was already grinning, mischief sparking in his eyes. “Oh, and by the way? You told me you wanted to swim in my eyeballs.”
You smacked his chest. “No, I did not.”
“Exact words,” he said smugly. “Asked me if I’d get you floaties.”
You groaned, hiding in his chest. “I hate myself.”
He laughed, kissing your hair. “Don’t. It was adorable. Also—you told me I was sweeter than pancakes and puppies. And that you love me more than fries.”
You gasped softly. “Okay, wow. That’s… that’s big.”
“Biggest compliment of my life,” Johnny said, smirking. “I might frame it.”
You swatted him again, but your lips were tugging into a smile. “Thanks for taking care of me.”
“Always,” he murmured, tilting your chin to kiss you gently.
Later that afternoon, when you finally braved your phone, you realized why Johnny had been smirking at it all morning. Paparazzi shots of him carrying you out of the bar had exploded online—him holding you bridal-style, your arms looped around his neck, your face buried against his chest.
The internet had thoughts.
“find you someone who looks at you the way johnny storm looks at y/n 😭”
“he’s literally HUSBAND material???”
"heLLLOOOO???"
“the way he carried her out like she was made of glass STOPP”
“y/n calling him her husband drunk and then THIS happening… universe is trying to tell us something 👀”
“JOHNNY STORM GIGGLING WHILE SHE KISSED HIS FACE this is why i believe in love”
#JohnnyStormHusbandMaterial trended within hours. Fans made edits of the paparazzi photos set to sappy songs, spliced with interview clips of Johnny talking about you. Someone even made a meme comparing him carrying you to a Disney prince, complete with sparkles.
You groaned, tossing your phone onto the couch. “We’re a meme.”
Johnny slid an arm around you, pulling you close with a smug grin. “Correction: we’re relationship goals.”
“You love this, don’t you?”
“Baby,” he said, kissing your temple. “I haven’t stopped giggling about it since last night.”
By the evening, it wasn’t just fans blowing up your phone. It was family.
Sue had texted first: “Johnny, explain why my morning coffee is being interrupted by you trending worldwide with the hashtag #HusbandMaterial.”
Then Reed, ever the scientist, had followed up with a dry: “Statistically, it appears you and Y/N are the internet’s favorite couple. Congratulations.”
But the real trouble came when Ben barged into the living room at the Baxter Building later that day, holding his tablet like it was evidence in court.
“Well, well, Mr. Husband Material,” Ben said, his gravelly voice booming with laughter. “Care to explain why I just saw you carrying Y/N outta a bar like you were straight outta The Notebook?”
Johnny groaned, dragging a hand over his face. “Ben—”
“Oh no, don’t you ‘Ben’ me,” the Thing barked, practically wheezing with amusement. “Look at this one! Look at your face, you’re smilin’ like a lovesick teenager. And her callin’ you husband? Ohhh, I’m never lettin’ this one go.”
Sue leaned against the doorframe, smirking. “To be fair, you do look very prince charming in those pictures.”
“Shut up, Sue,” Johnny muttered, cheeks burning.
Reed peeked up from his work, ever the calm observer. “I believe the term is ‘whipped,’ Johnny.”
That earned a round of laughter from the entire room, and you, sitting on the couch, only made it worse by chiming in sweetly, “He is whipped. My shiny husband.”
Johnny’s head snapped toward you, eyes wide. “Babe—!”
But it was too late—Ben nearly doubled over with laughter, pounding the wall with his massive hand. “Shiny husband! Ohhh, this is rich. Kid, I’m gonna be callin’ you that for years.”
Johnny groaned again, hiding his face in his hands while you leaned against him, grinning like the devil.
Later that night, after the teasing had died down and the Baxter Building had gone quiet, you and Johnny curled up together in your shared room. He was unusually quiet, running his fingers up and down your arm as you lay against his chest.
“You know…” he murmured finally, voice soft, “I really wouldn’t mind if you kept calling me that.”
You tilted your head up at him. “What, shiny husband?”
He chuckled, that boyish giggle slipping out again. “Yeah. Just… husband.” His eyes flicked down to yours, suddenly earnest. “Because one day, I really want to be.”
Your heart squeezed, and you pressed your lips to his jaw, smiling against his skin. “Good. Because one day, I really want you to be.”
He exhaled, a little laugh of relief in his chest, before kissing you slow and sweet, like he was sealing a promise neither of you had to say out loud anymore.
And somewhere, still trending online, was #JohnnyStormHusbandMaterial—proof that maybe the world already knew what you both did.
synopsis: the fire burned out, and she wonders if she’s just what’s left.
The box shows up because Sue is on a cleaning tear.
She texts the group chat a photo of a mountain of labeled cardboard stacked in a Baxter Building corridor—REED’S LAB JUNK, BEN’S WORKOUT TAPES, JOHNNY’S “DO NOT OPEN.” Ten minutes later, a courier knocks at your apartment door with one of those boxes and a note in Sue’s tidy handwriting: You live with him, therefore you own half this hazard. Love, your sister-in-law.
Johnny is in the shower singing off-key to a playlist you made him months ago. The kitchen smells like the coffee he forgot on the counter and the cinnamon candle you lit to bully the place into feeling like morning. You tell yourself you’re just going to move the box out of the hallway before he slips on it and breaks something you cannot pronounce. You tell yourself you’re not nosy; you’re helpful.
The tape peels back with a papery sigh. Inside, there’s the comfortable chaos of his twenties: charred racing gloves, a pair of novelty sunglasses with flames cut across the lenses, a wrinkled congratulatory letter from the New York Fire Department (“Please stop dropping by unannounced; we have procedures”), a Monaco Grand Prix badge on a lanyard stiff with salt. Beneath—because of course—there’s a shoebox that rattles like seashells.
You hesitate. The shower turns off. If you set this down and walk away, today can be ordinary.
You don’t set it down. The lid slides off. Polaroids look up in overexposed summers.
He’s younger in them by edges, not years—shoulders golden, jaw rough with sleep deprivation and bravado, grin loose, eyes that color you know better than your own hands lit like a dare. And her. The ex you’ve never met but have met everywhere: in half stories Ben starts and stops with a laugh, in the way Reed says “back when we were all idiots,” in Sue’s soft warnings that carry the lightest weather alert.
In one photo she’s half on his lap at a rooftop party, hair lifted by a July wind, a plastic cup sweating against his thigh. In another she’s on his shoulders in a crowd, his hands cuffed at her calves, his mouth open in a yell you can hear. In the last one in that handful, he isn’t looking at the camera but at her, and the look is reckless devotion, unedited.
Your stomach drops an elevator floor and does not stop at the next one.
He loved her, you think, and the word arrives like a splinter under the nail.
Water stops. You slide the Polaroids back with the careful fingers of someone repacking an injury, fold the tape over the seams, push the shoebox deeper into the shipping box until it is swallowed by cardboard. When Johnny pads out of the bathroom with a towel low on his hips and the steam still clinging to his hair, he smells like your shampoo because he ran out of his and you buy yours in bulk anyway.
“You open the Sue Bomb?” he asks. His smile is damp and ridiculous. He kisses your cheek from behind and fog breathes over your ear. “I swear if there’s another pair of those flame shades, I’m starting a museum.”
“Didn’t touch it,” you say, and your voice sounds like it has gone through customs.
He doesn’t notice. He’s counting a new cluster of freckles on your shoulder, fingertip pressed to each tiny sun, murmuring the numbers like a spell. He asks about pasta night, about that volcano documentary you added to the queue because he once said the word lava like it was a love letter. He holds up the colander like a trophy, and when he turns the stove on he does it carefully—the way he learned to after the first time you flinched from a pilot flame.
Every good love story is about fire and what it learned to do with its hands.
You have pasta. You fall asleep with your face tucked into his T-shirt while a narrator explains magma and time. You wake in the shadow hour with a knot in your chest that feels like a fist learning to close.
In the morning, Sue apologizes for the box while you stir cream into your coffee at the lab kitchen island. She’s in athleisure and stern competence. “I should’ve filtered,” she says, one elbow braced, watching you with a sister’s tenderness and a scientist’s precision. “He was a whirlwind. We all were. If anything in there makes you uncomfortable—”
“It’s fine,” you say quickly. “I’m an adult.”
She hums. “Adults have feelings too.”
The question escapes before you mean it to. “Did he love her more?”
Sue’s expression softens in that way of hers that is both honesty and mercy. “He loved her loudly,” she answers. “He was twenty-two and allergic to silence. Loud can look like more.” She pauses. “Sometimes it’s just louder.”
You nod like she has handed you something before you figured out where to put it.
Franklin, five and solemn in a cape and one sock, barrels in with a drawing that is eighty percent orange scribbles. “Auntie, this is Uncle Johnny doing big fire,” he declares. Then he leans his head against your leg. “Are you sad?”
“I’m okay,” you say, because that is an answer children understand. “I’m just thinking.”
He considers, then removes his cape and ties it around your waist with a ritual air. “Now you have powers,” he says, satisfied, and runs out again, hollering about cereal.
You carry that line—loud can look like more—around all day, a coal in your hand you forget is there until it glows through the skin.
At night you doomscroll. You know better. You do it anyway. A fan account has stitched together a timeline of Johnny’s great romances like an unsolicited press kit. Monaco, Miami, a kiss in the rain outside a club that burned down a year later. The comments are miniature dioramas of certainty: They were endgame. Look at the way he touched her face. He’ll never love like that again. He used to be a myth.
You stare at the photo of his hand on her face, and it is a hand you know at the molecule. The gentle, practiced way he unclasps your necklace when you’ve fallen asleep in it. The steady pressure between your shoulders when you can’t quiet your breath. The way he threads your fingers with his when cameras blur your edges and you need the truth of skin. You set the phone down as if it might bruise the table and go brush your teeth until the gumline flares.
When you slide into bed, he’s sprawled on his stomach, hair a riot, mouth open on a sleep-breath. People think chaos is who he is because they see the flare; you know the warm, ridiculous center. He says your name in his sleep like he’s counting himself home.
It doesn’t matter, that sensible voice says. It doesn’t matter that he sleeps like you are a prayer if daylight once taught him other liturgies.
Days rearrange themselves around the doubt. You begin moving in careful arcs, like there are bruises in the room you don’t want to bump. Johnny notices in the way of someone who has learned to watch for smoke. He asks what’s wrong without saying those exact words, because the last time he tried you cried over a burnt garlic bread and laughed for ten minutes because grief sometimes picks the silliest costume.
“What if we get out of the city this weekend?” he offers. “The Cape? We can steal Ben’s convertible and pretend we’re eighty.”
“Maybe,” you say.
“I miss you,” he says, plain, unperformative, and the honesty throws your blood off-balance.
“I’m right here,” you answer, and you are—physically there in the kitchen, sleeve pulled over your hand, a pale dusting of flour across your wrist from rolling out pie dough for Sue because she claims baking is your love language and she is greedy—but part of you is still bent over a shoebox inside your chest, counting ghosts.
Ben finds you in the gym trying to outrun feelings. He hands you water and says, “Everybody talks about Johnny like he’s a bonfire. Newsflash, bonfires go out if you feed ’em only wind.”
You blink sweat into your hairline. “Was that…for me?”
He sighs. “He used to be all flash. Didn’t know what to do with stillness. Then he met you and now he goes home. Saves fuel. It ain’t less. It’s more on purpose.”
Something inside you twists. “Ben,” you say, quiet, “have you seen the photos?”
“Kid,” he says, and his voice drops the gravel for a second, goes soft. “I was there for a lot of ‘em. You know what those nights had that yours don’t?” He gestures vaguely. “Police lights. The next morning we did damage control. Johnny thinks you like your mornings unmarred.”
He walks away, leaving you with an ache and a bouquet of new questions.
On Tuesday, there’s a mission that isn’t a mission so much as a tantruming energy grid near the river. Routine until it isn’t. Johnny misjudges a leap in a chemical gust and drops, not far, not deadly, just enough to make your heart punch your ribs like a fist. He pops up grinning, easy, sheepish. “I’m okay,” he says, and Reed hums calculations while Sue’s forcefield flickers like a held breath.
You want to yell. You want to hold his face and say, Do you know the cliff edge I live near? Instead, you dust soot from his cheek and say, “Careful,” and your voice breaks on the hinge of the word.
Later in the car, he’s quiet. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t,” you lie.
He stares out the window. “I used to scare people for sport,” he says, odd and rueful. “Made me feel immortal. It’s stupid. It’s not who I want to be anymore.”
“Who do you want to be?” you ask, and it is a sincerity and a plea.
“The guy you don’t have to worry about,” he says immediately, then winces. “I mean—not ever, I know who I am—but the guy who comes home.” He glances over. “The guy who deserves you.”
Your hands, ordinary and startling, rest useless in your lap. They look like they could hold a box and not open it.
You don’t fight that night. You don’t speak. That’s the problem.
On Friday, the team hosts a small donor gala, which is to say Reed practices smiling at a mirror, Sue weaponizes a pair of heels, and Ben threatens to install a dress code for “tech billionaires with ugly shoes.” You wear black and quiet confidence and a lipstick shade that short-circuits Johnny’s brain.
“Marry me,” he says absently, the way he always does when you get out of the car. Then he grins to take the edge off because it’s a joke and a plan and the future and the present, and you smile like you always do while something raw and private rubs thin beneath the humor.
Inside, someone you don’t know asks if you met Johnny before or after the Monaco phase. The question is a chandelier—pretty, brittle, likely to fall. You excuse yourself for water and find a hallway where the building hums like a seashell. There’s a framed photo from five years ago catching the light: Johnny laughing on a balcony, a champagne flute tilting in his hand, his ex in white that’s not a wedding dress but reads like a promise anyway. The past looks lit. You want to pull the frame down. You want to be reasonable. You want to stop wanting anything.
“Hey.” His voice, behind you, careful.
You jump. Johnny leans in the doorway, tie askew, a bruise like a thumbprint along his jaw from the grid tantrum. He reads weather, always has. “Walk with me?”
You climb to the roof, where the city lies open like a living map. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, the thing he does when he doesn’t trust them. He looks at the sky like he is asking it to keep a secret.
“You’ve been gone,” he says, not accusing, only aching. “And you haven’t gone anywhere.”
“We’ve been busy,” you deflect.
“Try again,” he says gently, and unfairly, the gentleness is what makes you tremble.
You fold your arms. The wind tugs a strand across your mouth. “I found the photos,” you say, because to bleed is sometimes the only way not to drown. “In the box. And the internet helps if you want to hurt yourself for free.”
He blinks. “Photos?”
“I saw the way you looked at her,” you continue, and the words scrape like gravel. “Reckless. Loud. Like the world was ending and good, let it. And I—” breath catches, “—I feel like I get what’s left. The after. I get the quiet because someone else got the fire.”
He flinches like your hand slipped and cut him under the ribs. “That’s not—”
“I know you’re not cheating. I’m not accusing you of wanting her. It’s not that. It’s that I looked at those pictures and thought, if I hadn’t met you—if I’d chosen someone else—I wouldn’t know what it’s like to measure myself against a ghost. I think I’d be happier.”
The wind takes the words and smears them over the skyline. He goes very still. For a beat something in his face totally empties, like a building’s lights flickering out in a grid collapse.
“Someone else,” he repeats, not like a question but like he is testing the edge of a blade. “You could’ve loved anyone else.”
You weren’t trying to hurt him. You did anyway. “Johnny—”
“No, wait.” He laughs, but it breaks in the middle. He’s always been the flame who thought he could control the air. Right now he looks like what happens when you realize the air can leave. “I have lived so sure it was me. That it was…inevitable. You and me. Like gravity. But it wasn’t. It was a choice. Your choice.”
“It was,” you whisper, because you won’t lie to make this easier.
“And I…God.” He drags a hand through his hair; the wind frays it and he doesn’t care. His voice dulls into honesty. “I’ve been arrogant. I moved through us like love was a thing I deserved because I wanted it enough—because I’d already paid for it in stupid, public currency. I forgot you had options that didn’t include me. That you could have taken your mornings and your laugh and your patience and handed them to anyone who hadn’t already burned himself out.”
It is a strange, devastating relief to see your pain reflected back at you from his face. He looks knocked out of orbit. “I don’t love you less,” he says, each word deliberately placed. “I love you quieter because I finally learned how not to set everything on fire. I save my fuel for you. For years. For boring afternoons. For you. And I was so sure you could feel it that I didn’t say it. That’s on me.”
You swallow hard. “It looked different.”
“It does,” he admits. “With her, it was theater. With you, it’s home. With her, I wanted an audience. With you, I want to live a very long time and forget to look up at the balcony because I’m busy fixing the leaky sink with you.” He takes a breath that shakes. “I know the photos look like more. They’re louder. Loud isn’t more.”
“I don’t want to be the safe option,” you say, and the words are smaller than what you mean.
“You’re not safe,” he says fiercely, stepping closer. “You’re the risk I wake up and take every day. You’re the choice that scares me because losing you would be…absolute. It could’ve been anyone else, and it wasn’t, and I am so terrified you’ll wake up and decide to fix that mistake.”
“Johnny.”
“Tell me what to do,” he says. There’s no bravado left, just a man with his hands open. “If you need public, I’ll be public. If you need story, I’ll tell it. If you need me to drag that hallway photo down with my teeth, I will. If you need me to say I was a fool, I’ll write it across the sky until Reed complains about light pollution.”
You want to laugh, and it hurts too much, and you laugh anyway, one sound that is mostly a sob. “I don’t want theater.”
“What do you want?”
“To stop feeling like I arrived after the party and everyone already ate.”
He exhales on something like a prayer. “The party ended because I got tired of never going home. Then I met you and the best room in the world was a kitchen with a light left on for me. Stay,” he says, and he very rarely begs. He begs now. “Stay and let me prove it in ways that never go viral.”
You move first, because staying still hurts. You step into him and he meets you without a check to make sure the air permits it. His hands come around you, not caging, holding. He puts his mouth to your hairline and says, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” like he is learning your language and wants to be fluent.
Belief feels like standing barefoot on ice that doesn’t crack. It hurts. You stand anyway.
He walks you down with his hand hooked in your back pocket. In the hall he stops at the framed photo and looks at it as if it were an artifact from a country he doesn’t visit. He doesn’t touch it until you nod. “Take it down,” you say, not vindictive, just necessary.
He lifts it off its nail. Reed appears with a step stool like a helpful ghost. “I’ll put this in storage,” he says in a tone one reserves for radioactive isotopes and sentimental objects. You love him fiercely for the unremarkable verb.
The gala continues. Johnny isn’t louder but he is deliberate. He introduces you three times as “my person.” Each time, something in your chest unclenches a millimeter. He doesn’t tell old stories. He tells new ones that are stupid and specific: how you once convinced him to try a farmer’s market tomato and he wrote a sonnet about it in the Notes app; how you read every plaque at museums and he has learned patience in small type; how you always get sad in the last ten minutes of a movie because endings feel like practice grief.
On the way home he drives, and at a red light he brings your hand to his mouth. “I’m going to mess up,” he says into your knuckles, honest like the wind. “Hopefully less. Quieter.”
“Do you still have that folder?” you ask, surprising yourself. “The one with the pictures of me sleeping.”
He blushes. It’s absurd that a man who can become a star still burns under your gaze. He hands you his phone. There you are, asleep at thirty angles. In one your mouth pouts like it’s dreaming of sugar. In another your hand fists in the sheet as if bracing against a fall. The dates skip seasons. He didn’t start loving you last week. He didn’t fall by accident.
At home he sets Sue’s box on the table and opens it up. He doesn’t hide the shoebox. He lays the Polaroids out like a curator providing context, then one by one he puts them back in and writes across the lid, in thick marker: ARCHIVE. His handwriting is ridiculous and careful.
Then he opens a second box. This one is new, glossy, too much for cardboard. Inside are your artifacts. Ticket stubs. A napkin from a diner where the waitress called you “honey” and he pretended to be jealous for an hour. The place card with your name from Sue and Reed’s anniversary dinner with the micro-jokes he penciled on the back. A printout of the first email you sent when you stayed over, subject line Here’s my Wi-Fi password because he forgot to ask before leaving, followed by your silly password that includes a fruit and a curse word. A grocery list in your hand with strawberries underlined twice and in his below: don’t forget the good kind.
“This one’s ongoing,” he says, as if you couldn’t see that.
“Why didn’t you show me?”
“I was saving it for some perfect day,” he admits, sheepish, a boy who has learned the dangerous chemistry of keeping. “Didn’t realize the days in between were starving.”
You put your palm over the box. You have an impulse to apologize to the girl in the Polaroids for taking the rest of the story. It’s stupid. You don’t.
He cleans the kitchen when he’s anxious, so when you come back from the shower your counters are gleaming, three mugs lined in a row like little soldiers. He wraps you from behind and sways you in silence, no music, just the percussion of the building. He murmurs “marry me” into the back of your neck like the joke it started as and the plan it wants to be, and you don’t answer. You turn and kiss him long and steady, not a cinematic thing but a kitchen thing that tastes like toothpaste and mercy.
In bed he offers his hand and the soft, stubborn fact of himself. Before he switches off the lamp, he glances at the wall to look at the shadow your bodies throw. He shifts almost imperceptibly, adjusting you like you’re art.
“What are you doing?” you ask, despite yourself.
“Improving composition,” he says, serious. “Want us to look like a knot.”
You roll your eyes and feel a laugh that wants to be a cry and let it be neither. You sleep with your ear over his heart. When you dream, it isn’t in Polaroid colors. It’s the warm square of a kitchen light left on. It’s a child’s cape tied around your waist like a secret superpower. It’s a roof wind and a man who learned winter’s discipline for his summer.
In the morning Franklin stands on the mattress wearing both socks and the cape again. “Uncle Johnny says pancakes,” he announces, then peers at you. “You’re not sad now.”
“I’m not sad now,” you say, and it feels earned and fragile, like a glass you will have to learn how to carry.
Breakfast is a circus. Ben pretends to complain about sticky counters while letting Franklin captain his shoulder like a pirate. Reed appears to fix a thing that doesn’t need fixing because peace makes him itchy. Sue moves through the room like gravity. Johnny flips pancakes with wrist flourishes and only sets one on fire, which everyone agrees is progress.
At some middle of it, you catch Johnny watching you—not the sitcom of happiness, not the performative ease, just you, with that shoreline look. He mouths I love you and you mouth it back, and it costs nothing and everything and is, for the first time in days, simple.
Later, he nudges you into the hallway. The blank space where the old frame hung is filled with a new photo: your apartment window at dusk, your silhouette in profile laughing at something off camera, the little plant you forgot to water doing fine anyway. He took it without telling you. You would’ve protested then. Now you press your palm to the glass. You don’t ask when he took it. You can tell by looking.
“It’s not a movie moment,” he says carefully. “It’s just…us.”
“Good,” you say. “I’m tired.”
He kisses your temple like a yes.
Time doesn’t turn into a montage. Some days you still catch your eyes on a shiny past like a magpie. Some days his fear shows at the edges, a man who learned that choice cuts both ways. But there’s a new thing in the house, a shared, steady declarative. He starts saying the quiet parts out loud. You start believing him before the quiet has to yell.
On a Tuesday, the energy grid behaves and the afternoon is yours. You take the terrible convertible to the Cape and he keeps both hands on the wheel like a man protecting cargo. On a Wednesday, Reed asks an intrusive question about long-term plans and Johnny says, cheerfully, “Kids, plural,” then blushes and recovers and squeezes your knee under the table until it becomes a promise shaped like pressure. On a Thursday, a gossip site posts a throwback of him and the ex and the comments light up with mythology, and you watch them for too long before you put your phone face down. He sees. He doesn’t lecture. He brings you tea exactly the way you like it and sits beside you and watches nothing with you until your nervous system comes back.
When it rains, he is tender with the pilot light. When you’re sick, he is precise with your tea. He keeps a folder marked Insurances and one marked Us and updates both with the same reverence. He texts you a picture of a ring he hates and then a ring he hates less and then a ring he likes and then, “Ignore me; I want to get it right,” and you reply with a photo of a tomato because you are mean and he writes a poem about it in his Notes app like punishment.
It comes back around to a roof because that’s where you break each other and where you fix. There’s nothing formal about the evening, just a quiet sky, Ben and Sue arguing gently about where to put a planter, Reed checking the weather for fun, Franklin marching in circles with a cardboard sign that says SAVE THE BEES because he has a new passion every week.
Johnny leans into you and steals some of your body heat like a thief caught red-handed. He looks different than the man in the Polaroids without looking less. He looks like somebody who learned how to keep the flame and a family simultaneously.
“I keep thinking about it,” he says softly. “What you said. That it could’ve been anyone else.”
You tilt your head. “Why?”
“Because it has to stay true for me to love you right,” he says, and that startles you with its wisdom. “If I forget you chose me, I start treating your love like weather instead of a gift. I start thinking I can go quiet, and you’ll just know. I don’t ever want to go quiet again.”
“I’ll get insecure sometimes,” you say, because honesty has to be two-way or it curdles. “There will always be photos I haven’t seen yet and stories Ben forgot to tell me and fan edits that make pain look like cinema.”
“I’ll get scared sometimes,” he answers, matching you. “Of losing you to someone who never had to unlearn what I had to unlearn. We’ll say it when it happens. Out loud. Deal?”
“Deal.”
He rests his forehead against yours until the rest of the roof fades. “I love you like the slow part of a song,” he says, a little embarrassed. “Like the part that’s not on the radio. The part you only hear if you stay.”
“I’m staying,” you say. It doesn’t feel like surrender or an audition. It feels like a decision you can live inside. It feels like the difference between louder and more.
He breathes out and it sounds like relief and a prayer and the end of a long run. “It could’ve been anyone else,” he whispers, as if saying it wrong might make it true. “But it wasn’t.”
“No,” you say, and it is the cleanest word you’ve used in months. “It was you.”
Somewhere behind you Franklin yells about bees and Ben yells about honey and Sue shouts “Do not encourage him,” at both of them, which, given the evidence, is not effective. Reed announces rain in thirty-two minutes. You believe him. You believe yourself. You believe Johnny.
When it finally comes, the rain is the good kind, a rinsing. You and Johnny stand there as it beads on his eyelashes and dots the shoulders of your jacket and makes the city smell like a promise kept late. You put your hand out and the drops pool in your palm, this small, quiet proof that the world is not a past tense.
He takes your hand and kisses the water from it like an oath. “I’m glad you didn’t pick anyone else,” he says, not theatrical, not for the record, just for you.
You smile the kind of smile that belongs to nobody’s camera. “Me too.”
I cannot believe this doesn’t have more engagement… Iris, your writing is absolutely beautiful. I feel like I’m reading poetry. The way you can describe a scene so perfectly while not over-detailing the setting is a talent very few have. I am so excited to check out more of your work!
//hi i know this is the pot calling the kettle black but.
"matt murdock who fucks you so hard and makes you cum" "matt murdock who is a sex god" IM TIRED OF IT. BRING BACK YEARNING.
matt murdock who does not believe in soulmates until he meets you.
matt murdock who learns you, who memorizes you-- your favorite foods, your hatred of certain textures, the last color you painted your nails, the things that make you tick, the way your breathing changes when you've had a long day.
matt murdock who finds himself distracted when he hasn't heard from you, wondering if you're doing okay.
matt murdock who sends flowers to your office, just because.
matt murdock who goes from bachelor with only beer in his fridge to keeping the pantry fully stocked with snacks for whenever you get hungry.
matt murdock who feels his skin start to burn when you give him the gentlest of touches-- a caress of his arm, a hand on his shoulder. it drives him crazy.
matt murdock who is intoxicated by the mere sound of your voice, learning all the different tones you take in various situations, the way your voice softens when talking to anyone you deem a baby (cats, dogs, kids, drunk foggy), or the way it hardens when you're dealing with someone you find annoying (clients, assholes at the bar, etc)
matt murdock who gets drunk with his best friend one night and leaves you 27 voicemails, ranging from twenty seconds long to fourteen minutes, all rambling about how much he loves you.
matt murdock who spends months trying to hint that he likes you, buying you lunch, asking if you need anything, always pouring your coffee just the way you like it, asking if the book you finished was good and letting you ramble about it for twenty minutes.
matt murdock who has the biggest, fattest, most disgusting crush on you.
matt murdock who blushes whenever you enter the room.
matt murdock who yearns. yearns for you.
and yeah, also, he fucks. of course. get yourself someone who can do both. get yourself someone who makes you cry from overstimulation AND spends hours kissing literally every inch of your skin because he can and he wants to.
get yourself someone like matt murdock, who can only be described as head over heels in love with you.
synopsis: following the fall out of the avengers, steve rogers needs somewhere to stay. knowing it'll only be a night and feeling in debt to sharon carter, you set aside your grievances and agree to have him stay with you.
request: no
warnings: no y/n, i use "she" once otherwise it's completely (correct me if im wrong) nondescript, swearing, mentions of blood and needles, angst, fluff, secret relationship, happy ending
wc: 4.5k
an: playing around with a new theme hehe i hope it looks good! this is also my first time writing in second person. i feel like i used "you" way too much but idk maybe i'm just not used to it 😭
no one asked for this and i rarely see steve imagines anymore but i had an idea while listening to griff back in jan and it just fit steve's character so well so i had to write it.
my requests are open and i am unemployed y'all so puhlease send me something 😩
“Hello?”
“Hey,” Sharon sighed into the phone. “I need a huge favour.”
Your brows furrowed at your wooden coffee table. “Uh, it depends.”
“You seen the news recently?”
So much had happened in US politics in a matter of a week. SHIELD founder Peggy Carter passed away at ninety-five; the UN presented a document that regulates the Avengers and any superhero-related activities; the UN was bombed and the King of Wakanda died in said bombing, including dozens injured if not missing; the Winter Soldier was apparently responsible for the bombing; Captain America and half the Avengers were arrested, and the Avengers Tower was officially on the market.
The first time you saw Steve Rogers get arrested on behalf of his childhood best friend was in a museum when you were twelve. A video interview with one of the Howling Commandos recounted the time Steve offered himself up after he’d ordered them on a rescue mission without higher permission. The second was a year after you’d started seeing him as a patient following coming out of the ice. He was being gunned down on national television for trying to save his best friend. Those in the infirmary took the evident terror on your face as the feeling many of them were experiencing, but they were deeply mistaken. Your coworkers, your patients, didn’t know Steve had become the person you went home to most nights. Your relationship was kept a secret for your safety and for both your sanities, but in that moment, you wondered if the secrecy was a bad decision. The third time was three days ago, when James Barnes’ arrest warrant was publicized after the UN bombing. You hadn’t been surprised when he was apprehended for attempting to reach Barnes before the government could. You worried about him, but you reminded yourself he wasn’t yours to worry about anymore. He hadn’t been for a long time. You had the thought that maybe he’d be safer now, finally stop making risky decisions. There was no coming back from this.
Then Sharon called.
“You still in that flat in Thirsk?” the agent asked.
“Yeah,” you leaned on your knees, anticipation making you anxious, “why?”
“Cap… kind of needs somewhere to hide.”
Your spine straightened like you’d been punched in the back.
“No,” was all you could manage as the memories threw themselves at the locked door in your mind.
Sharon Carter was the closest thing you had to a friend. She’d started as a patient, one of the many agents who often found themselves in SHIELD’s Washington infirmary. She was charismatic but to the point, calculated but emotional, and you found yourself enjoying her presence. Eventually, she’d start calling on you rather than going to the infirmary.
“Look—just hear me out,” she pleaded. “One night, max. He just needs somewhere with Wi-Fi and food to book a hotel. It’s tourist season so it’s not exactly like he can walk in and get a room. Hey, what if I bought you that window AC you’ve been saving up for? I will buy it for you. I’ll even get you one with heating—just because you’re such an amazing friend who does really nice things for me…”
Your fingernail came up to your teeth, but there was nothing left to chew on so you were forced to nibble on the peeling skin around it.
It had been two years since you’d seen Steve. He’d left you broken and confused. Sharon once asked if you’d ever find it in yourself to forgive him, but you weren’t sure how to do such a thing. You weren’t even sure you wanted to. You had ample reason to be angry and it had gotten to the point where you forgot what life was like before you were angry.
“Sharon, this is kind of a lot,” you rubbed the aching muscles in your shoulders.
“I told you it was a big favour,” you could almost see her sheepish grin. “He still thinks about you, you know?”
Your back hit the couch, and you stared at the popcorn ceiling. The red light of the smoke detector blinked mockingly.
“He regrets it,” she added in response to your silence.
You raised a brow, “Oh and he told you this?”
“No, but he asks about you. He wants to know you’re okay. He gets that sad, kicked puppy look in his eye whenever I tell him the same thing.”
She’s fine, is what you instructed Sharon to say. He didn’t need nor deserve anything more.
You looked at the time on the stove. It was almost mid-afternoon. You’d be starting dinner in a few hours.
“One night,” you finally said. “That’s it… and you owe me that HVAC unit plus another favour.”
“Anything for you.”
***
Hot chills ran across your body as someone knocked at your door. You stared at the slab of wood, food half-chewed in your mouth. Maybe if you waited long enough they’d leave. The second rap of knuckles forced a sigh from your nose. Your cutlery clinked against your plate and you swallowed. Your socks padded against the tiles as you headed for the door. Through the peep hole, you saw a man with his hands on his hips, a blue baseball cap concealing the nervous look you knew was on his face.
Your thoughts became rapid fire. Memory after moment replayed all at once in your mind. Years of pent up anger and lack of closure set your skin ablaze, twisted your lungs. You wanted to scream or punch him, but when you opened the door and were met with his familiar eyes, an ache settled in your heart and you felt yourself beginning to cower.
Steve’s eyes roved over you. Not much had changed. You were slightly older and slightly more tired, but he looked at you like you were a whole new person. He couldn’t seem to grasp the fact that you were in front of him. Maybe it was because he was somewhere else entirely.
“Hi,” he breathed.
You held the door with a white-knuckled grip, “Hi.”
After what seemed like years of staring at one another, Steve spoke up. “I’m sorry to just show up like this.”
“I invited you.”
“Right,” he directed his bashful half-smile hidden behind the bill of his cap to the floor.
It was a beautiful smile then and at just the glimpse of it now, you felt yourself melting all over again.
“I hope I’m not intruding,” he said.
“Who am I to deny Captain America the shelter he so rightfully deserves?” You said the words before they could process in your mind. Whether they were meant as a jab or a joke, you couldn’t decide.
You could tell it had hurt him by the way his brows furrowed, but his lips formed a polite smile.
You opened the door wider for him. Steve took off his shoes, setting them neatly by the entrance, then looked around the small apartment.
“Nice place,” you heard him say as you headed for the table.
You didn’t reply, feeling a little too irritated to trust you’d say something respectful in return. You picked up the dish between the knife and fork you’d already set out for him and began spooning the extras you prepared at the counter. When you turned, he was waiting for you on his feet. You bit back a comment about being ever the polite man as you set his plate back on the table. The moment you pulled out your chair, he did too. You picked at the remains of your meal, face schooled in painful nonchalance at the corn.
“I’ve missed your cooking,” he admitted.
You nodded, brows twitching. Steve quietly shovelled mouthfuls of shepherd’s pie into his mouth. The food turned to sludge in your mouth by the time you remembered to swallow.
“You look good.”
Your eyes finally found his. He was watching you, trying to appear friendly. You looked him over. His white t-shirt was a little too tight and covered in dirty scuffs. There was a new scar peaking out from his brow and a healing cut on his bottom lip. He was slightly more muscular than the last you saw him. He was fitting into the new world nicely.
“You look like shit,” you observed.
Steve sighed, his shoulders sagging. “I’m trying to be nice,” he said softly.
“Sharon got me out of Washington, that’s why I’m doing this. I owed her. You made it clear a long time ago there was nothing I had to offer. You don’t need to try to be nice or anything just…” Your hand waved in dismissal, trying to quell the years of frustration finally getting its chance to strike.
Your chair scraped against the tile. As you rounded the table to take his empty plate, you noticed a red blotch a couple inches from his heart. You pushed aside the thin fabric of his shirt, your fingertips brushing his warm skin making him tense. A small jagged line had been sliced into his chest and someone with precise hands had stitched it back up, but there was fresh blood seeping from one end of the wound.
“Your stitches broke,” you murmured, then finally picked up his plate. “Go to the bathroom in my room. I’ll fix it.”
“You don’t have to,” he said despite rising.
“It’s my job,” you replied with your back to him.
When you finished rinsing the dishes, you found him exactly where you’d instructed him to go. He was sat on the lid of the toilet and had taken off his shirt. You did your best not to stare as flashes of sacred nights rapped on your mental door. You’d locked those memories out a long time ago, but sometimes they managed to slip through the cracks. Ignoring the aching in your heart, you took the first aid kit from the medicine cabinet.
In silence, he watched your concentrated face as you sterilized the wound and instruments. Ever since you met him, he’d pretend like he couldn’t feel the sting of an alcohol wipe. Out of the corner of your vision you noticed his knuckles turn white in his lap as you unlaced the old stitches.
“I’m sorry,” he broke the silence.
“I don’t want an apology,” you responded quietly.
“Then what do you want?”
Your eyes caught his, needle hovering over his open wound. Your gaze strayed to his lips, but only for a moment as you’d caught yourself.
The truth was, you didn’t know what you wanted. You wanted him and you wanted him to never speak to you again. You wanted him to hold you, tell you he was sorry until you forgot the meaning of the word, and you wanted him to leave in tears with regret evident in his posture.
Steve’s tough exterior was broken as you pierced the needle through his skin, his hand shooting out for the sink ledge. His brows lowered, the corners of his eyes creasing.
In a moment of sympathy, you decided to distract him from the pain. “How’s Fury?”
“Dead.”
“That man once walked into the infirmary with almost his entire arm hanging by the muscles of his shoulder,” you mumbled, pulling the string taught. “Dying by bullet wound is not his style. I don’t think he’d trust the Avengers in anyone else’s hands, anyway.”
Steve hung his head, his forehead inches from resting on your shoulder. You had the urge to cup the side of his neck, to press your lips to the thin skin just before his ear.
“He’s been somewhere else,” he replied through gritted teeth. “I haven’t seen him for almost a year.”
“How’s the team?”
A sigh left his lips at that. “I’m sure you’ve seen the news.”
“I did,” you fastened the string, clipping it with the small scissors. “I saw that panther kicking your ass.”
Steve chuckled to himself, “Yeah, I’m sure you enjoyed that.”
“Is he the one who gave you this?” the pad of your pointer finger traced around the wound.
“Uh,” he looked down at your touch and swallowed. “No… that was Tony.”
“Must’ve been some disagreement.”
He didn’t say anything, but you could tell by the crease in his brow that what happened was eating away at him. You wished you could run your hands through his hair and he’d wrap his hands around the backs of your legs, pulling you in as you told him everything would be alright. By the way his fingers furled and unfurled, you wondered if he wished for that, too.
“I’ve missed you patching me up.”
Your eyes caught his, those blue eyes gazing deeply into yours. You flashed back to sitting on a balcony, smiling lazily as he traced patterns in your thigh; Steve pulling the bedsheets over you as you shivered against his chest, his arms snaking tighter around your middle.
You blinked, coming back to reality, coming back to the bloody needle and fresh stitches, the open medicine box on your counter. Silence ensued again and this time, you didn’t have the awareness to be bothered by it. You couldn’t stop thinking about the amount of times he smiled as you cleaned his wound or handed him a bandaid.
“So…” Steve said against the slow dripping of the tap, “you seeing anyone these days?”
Your tongue darted out to your bottom lip. “I was.”
“Can I ask what happened?”
You shut the lid of the box a little too hard and stared at the blue and white cross. “I kept picturing him as someone else.”
You put the first aid kit back where it was without sparing him a glance.
“You get the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
He said your name, beginning to protest, but you cut him off.
“I’m trying to be a good host, just sleep in the bed for God’s sake. I’ll survive a night on the couch.”
The time on the stove read almost eleven o’clock. With work, you’d usually be in bed earlier than this, so the weight of the day was heavy on you. You’d shut the door to the bedroom on your way out, then shut the lights in the living area. You maneuvered easily through the shadows toward the couch, picking up the mess of the blanket and lying down to close your eyes.
You lay there awake for what felt like hours, in an uncomfortable state of half-sleep. When you finally opened your eyes again, you found you weren’t the only one up.
Steve opened the bedroom door, pausing as the hinges omitted their usual creak, then continued toward the front door. As you watched him slip on his shoes, a familiar ache bloomed in your stomach. The old wound was reopening, the dark hole expanding. The pain scraped against your bones and sent hot shivers across your skin. Your eyes stung and you had to hold your breath to keep from breathing too heavily.
Steve put his hand on the knob, but didn’t twist.
“I’m going for a walk,” he said into the darkness. “You’re welcome to join me, if you’d like.”
You didn’t move for a moment, wondering how the hell he even knew you were watching him, but then you remembered who he was. He could probably hear your heart beating, let alone the unsteady rhythm of your breath. With your throat still constricted, you got up and put on your own shoes.
It was quiet on the darkened street aside from your shoes crunching loose pavement on the sidewalk. Somewhere, a dog barked and drunken teens laughed.
“I heard about Agent Carter,” you nodded, brows furrowed at your wellies. “I’m sorry.”
Steve nodded solemnly at your side. “She’s in a better place now.”
When you first met Steve, when you were just a nurse at SHIELD and he was freshly out of the ice, his mind had been on Peggy Carter. Then you cracked some jokes, distracted him with questions as you poked him with needles, you saw the other in the SHIELD lobby in Washington D.C., and it seemed like he started to find ways for you to cross paths. Peggy Carter had gone to the back of his mind, instead his thoughts being filled with you. With the encouragement of his neighbour, he worked up the strength to ask you out.
Sharon had invited you to drinks with some other SHIELD members and, too many shots in, you had no choice but to go home with her. Steve had caught you leaving her apartment early the next morning. You’d stopped dead in your tracks, hair a mess and jacket slung over your arm. After what felt like minutes of awkward conversation, he abashedly asked if you wanted to try a coffee shop down the block from work sometime. It had become a regular place for you two. It’s where you grew to know him as more than the historical figure. It’s where you grew to love him, deeper than you’d ever loved anyone.
“Do you like it here?”
You almost snapped at him, told him to stop with the niceties, but a part of you ached to tell him. “Yeah,” you replied, sucking in a breath as you mulled over your words. “I do,” was all you offered.
“You still a nurse?”
You nodded, pursing your lips at the pavement. You flinched as a rain drop hit you on the hairline.
“Yeah, I work in the, uh, the medical centre just up the road.”
A knot formed between your brows as you debated on giving him more. You had been in Thirsk for several years now and despite that, you found it hard to make friends. A personal problem, rather than cultural. Everyone seemed to know each other and working in a small enough town, it was difficult to feel like it was okay seeing some of your patients outside of working hours. You had gone out with someone who was originally from Thirsk, his family still living here, but he had moved on. You’d caught him during one of his annual visits. It was supposed to be a one night stand but after realizing his family lived only a couple doors down from your apartment, you couldn’t help but bump into him. It felt like history repeating, and you tried to ignore the ache.
You thought you could make it work. Maybe he’d be good for you, but you thought of Steve any time he touched you. Every time he did something, you compared it to what Steve would have done or had already done. It wasn’t fair to him, so you’d called it off. You had been reluctant to let anyone in again after that.
“The town is small and it’s different from Washington,” you found yourself admitting. “It’s not bad. The people are nice and the weather’s an adjustment but…”
“It’s not home.”
You blinked at the streetlight. “Yeah.”
Silence ensued, eating away at your nerves. When Steve finally spoke, you quickly wished he hadn’t.
“You said something earlier…”
There was a steady fall of rain going now. Not the kind to get you soaked immediately, but not the kind where you wouldn’t want to be out in it for long.
“You said that I made it clear you had nothing to offer,” Steve continued.
You averted your gaze to the darkened red brick house, forcing him to look at the back of your head. Your tongue ran across your top teeth as you shook your head.
“It’s not important,” you said.
“It is important,” he emphasized. The way he said your name, like the most sacred thing, like a plea. It crushed your chest.
“No, it’s not,” you shook your head again, attempting to pick up the pace, leaving him a short ways behind in the process.
“I can understand why you feel that way,” he tried to keep up with her. “You deserve to be upset with me.”
You found yourself whipping around, the sudden jerk of your physical movement and exclamation of your words stopping him in his tracks. “You left without saying goodbye. You left like I didn’t mean anythingto you!”
“I left because I didn’t want you to get hurt!” he pleaded. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself knowing I led the bad guys right to you.”
“That’s such bullshit.”
He said your name with such sorrow that it felt like your heart was breaking all over again. You stared at his slumped figure, the wet hair sticking to his forehead, his clothes clinging his skin.
“I waited…” you searched the sky for words, throwing your arms up uselessly, “so long! I waited so long for nothing. I couldn’t even visit you in the hospital. Do you know what that was like? I watched you fall to your death on live TV and then I couldn’t visit you in the hospital. Then you go and leave the god damn country without so much as a goodbye!”
Your voice had grown, echoing off the houses on either side. You heard the slide of a window opening, and you spun around, putting a hand to your mouth as you tried to calm yourself down in a manner of seconds.
Willie’s dark outline, an elderly man who you saw regularly around the neighbourhood and in the medical centre, stuck half-out the window. “For fuck’s sake, it’s half past two in the mornin’! What the bloody hell is goin’ on down there?”
“Sorry, Willie,” you squeezed your eyes shut, fighting the headache that pulsed with every drop of rain. “Go back to sleep.”
“Christ,” he said your name like you scared him half to death. “You sure? Don’t need to me to give the coppers a ring?”
“No, no, good night Willie,” you waved him off. “Sorry to disturb your eight hours.”
“Right, I’ll let Doctor Burke know you’re the cause of my raised blood pressure,” he teased, though his tone was rather exhausted. “Just give a shout if you change your mind. I’m sure I’ll be up for the next hour or so.”
“Yeah, night Willie,” you said again, wishing you could escape this moment.
You had managed to live a quiet life in Thirsk and you wished to keep it that way. There was a sort of loneliness that had grown inside you over the years. It was suffocating, almost debilitating. It had gotten to the point where you were afraid if anyone even mentioned the Avengers around you, that you might explode in a tsunami of recollections and unrequited emotions.
When the window slammed shut again, you still couldn’t bring yourself to face Steve. Your clothes were beginning to stick to your shoulders, your damp hair only adding to the weight of your head.
“I didn’t like leaving the way I did,” Steve said. “I didn’t—That’s not what I wanted but after everything that came out of Hydra, everything that happened, I wasn’t… I wasn’t sure who to trust. I didn’t know if you were one of them or not.”
It was like a slap in the face. The impact of his words landed and they landed hard, almost enough to knock you off your feet. You turned with fisted hands, anger and upset swelling in your chest.
“I waited weeks for you,” you said, throat constricting. “I—I told you things about myself I never told anyone else. I tried new things for you, I gave you parts of myself I didn’t know I had. I had to leave my home because I couldn’t escape you. I can’t go back to Washington, Steve. My dad doesn’t know why I won’t come home. He loved you, they all did.”
You fought the years of emotion threatening to spill, all those tears you’d shoved down because he wasn’t worth it. It was not worth it to cry over a man, but it was Steve. Steve was everything. He still is everything.
Steve watched you, darkened hair sticking to his forehead, rain or maybe tears dripping from his jaw.
“I thought we were okay,” you said. “You told me we were okay.”
You put a couple more inches between you two and hid your face by turning your gaze to the sidewalk that would lead you to the medical centre. Footsteps approached, stopping a few feet from you. You wouldn’t let him see you cry, so you wiped at your cheeks furiously, managing to slow the onslaught of tears, but the anger and hurt hung heavy. It wrapped around you like a wet blanket, silently suffocating you, leaving just enough room to survive the moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said against the sound of raindrops on tiled roofs.
“Let’s just get through the rest of the night.” You swallowed thickly. “You can leave in the morning and we don’t have to see each other again.”
“I don’t have to go.”
When you looked at him he had that sad, kicked puppy look in his eyes. It took everything to not burst into tears. The sadness he felt was the same as yours, you realized. He was feeling your pain just like you’d wished for years, but now that you were witnessing it you wanted to take it away.
“I’m sorry,” he said your name with the same conviction.
Steve’s hand cupped your cheek. Your jaw threatened to tremble as you were reminded of the softness of his touch. He was warm, just like he’d always been. He was the one bit of warmth you lacked in this town.
“I thought you loved me,” you said.
“I did—I, I do,” he stammered. “I do.”
You couldn’t help it when you set your hand on top of his. Your fingers squeezed his and he squeezed back with mirrored fervour. Then he leaned down and kissed you. It was gentle and full of love. Steve held your face with both hands, one of yours still gripping his fingers and the other on his middle. So many things had happened, so many things had changed, but his kiss was still the same. It was like being welcomed home and you stepped through the doors without hesitation.
When you were both out of breath and longed to be closer, you pulled back. Steve’s breath fanned over your face, his shoulders hunched as he gazed into your eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I can’t say it enough to make up for what I’ve done, so let me stay. We can try again, if you’ll have me. If not then I’ll leave. You won’t have to—”
You kissed him again, effectively cutting him off as your fingers brushed the hair at the nape of his neck. Your forehead pressed against his and you buried yourself in his embrace, feeling your bodies fit together like puzzle pieces.
“I’ve missed you,” you said.
Steve’s head raised to press his lips against your temple. He sighed against your skin and replied, “I’ve missed you, too.”
All of you that are saying riri is out of pocket, should have known better, is a pos, blah blah blah shut your mouth for a second and consider what I have to say
It is SO CLEAR which of you guys have not experienced trauma, ESPECIALLY the kind that alters your brain chemistry to the point where you don’t recognize yourself anymore. You don’t understand her nor the things she’s going through, that’s why you don’t like her.
She isn’t a badly written character, she isn’t lacking relatability, she isn’t boring, she isn’t one dimensional. She is complex, she is morally grey, she’s an antihero. She is in fucking pain.
At the end of the day if you still don’t get it and complain about the smallest things like someone referring to Tony Stark as “that Tony guy”, maybe (just a wild guess) you’re just racist. Please do some self reflection and come back to reality before you say or do some real dumb shit
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