#fafiction

They think Buck is just the 'fun uncle' and actually Chris very much makes it known to Buck he sees him as a second dad, and both Buck and Eddie KNOW they love eachother like that, and are aware they're on the edge of Something MoreTM.

And... no one has a clue. They dont know Buck is in Eddies will. They dont know Buck only has non perishables at the loft, and all his favorite clothes are in eddies closet. They dont know that Eddie is Bucks power of attorney, medical proxy, and next of kin until the lightning strike.

They all think its Maddie, even Maddie thinks its Maddie, Bucks parents think its them for whatever fuckin reason, and Eddies just standing in the corner, kinda majorly injured buthes not paying attention to that (he also got hit by lighting and ppl like to ignore that like he wasnt LAUNCHED off the truck), very traumatized, thinking about what buck would want if it came to that. Thinking about how Buck put his will and legal documents in a box next to Eddies in their closet.

And Eddies still starking at his hands in shock when the doctor comes out and asks for bucks next of kin, and when Maddie stands and everyone follow behind her, he doesn't hear anything until the doctor says he needs tk speak to an Edmundo Diaz.

Summary: Losing everything was the last thing on her list. She’s the rat hiding in plain sight, trading secrets to keep her father alive. Careful. Quiet. Invisible. That’s how she survives. How she keeps him breathing. No one is supposed to notice her. No one ever does. Until Leon.

Chapter Index

a/n: wow… thank you all for the amazing support. i can’t even begin to express how grateful i am to you all. i had an great morning reading through everyone’s comments, it made me smile SO hard. so, here is chapter two, as promised (i’m already working on chapter three… kinda jumped the gun but i promise it's gonna be…intense. stay tuned for more!!) now, for the real question. how does one create a chapter index???

Chapter Two

The next morning felt wrong. 

The rain had tapered off sometime before dawn, leaving the city wrapped in a damp, suffocating warmth that clung to your skin the moment you stepped out of your apartment. It followed you all the way to the DSO headquarters, settling into your clothes like a layer you couldn’t peel off. Even now, seated at your desk, you could feel it – sticky, uncomfortable, crawling under your collar. 

The office was a different beast than it had been the night before. Phones cutting in before the last call ended, voices stacking over one another without warning, the constant sound of fingers striking too hard against the keyboards. Nothing moved smoothly. Everything felt slightly erratic; it was as if a bomb had been sparked somewhere in the building, and everyone was trying to prevent the explosion.

And underneath all of it, there was the same thought that repeated in your mind.

This was your fault.

You tried to keep your head down and turned your attention toward the monitor blinking back at you. A mess of inventory logs and supply requests clogged your screen. Digits blurred together as your eyes skimmed over them. Your fingers tapped the keyboard like a metronome. The motion was an old habit. The sound used to comfort you into the late hours of the night while you helped students cheat their way through finals. It had been easy money – a way to manage the bills while your mother was out gambling the rest of it away. Your family was always oblivious to the fact that their daughter was building software, and you carried that like a chip on your shoulder. You knew they cared in their own way, but it was never in the ways that mattered. You learned early on not to rely on that. Your intelligence was the only thing you found solace in. You took pride in yourself, and that was all you needed, really. You knew you couldn’t change the world, so you just tried to keep the lights on.

But Umbrella didn’t care about your intentions; they only saw you as another cog in their machine. And they damn well made sure you didn’t forget it.

“I’m telling you, Jacob. The report came in late.” A voice cut through the anxious air. You could hear his annoyance.

Your fingers paused for half a second. Just half. 

Someone else chimed in, “No, not late. It was delayed. Like it got stuck somewhere in the system.”

A chair squeaked loudly across the floor three desks over. Someone cursed under their breath. 

“Since when does that happen here?”

“It doesn't."

Jaw clenched, you tried to keep your expression neutral. You leaned slightly closer to your screen, as if your work suddenly required your full attention. 

“The field team was already pulling out by the time the update reached them,” another voice added, intense and serious. “Command’s pissed.” 

“Yeah, no kidding. Someone’s gonna get chewed out for this.”

A soft tap vibrated against the side of your cubicle. You looked up to see the red-haired girl from yesterday leaning against the partition, a paper coffee cup balanced neatly between her hands. Up close, the red of her hair caught more gold than copper under the harsh overhead lights, the color uneven in a way that looked real and not dyed. You could tell that she tried to tie it up away from her face, but it wasn’t nearly holding as well as it had before. A loose clip sat somewhere near the crown of her head, doing its best to manage the strands that were already slipping free. Her bangs clung to the sides of her temples from the humidity, and a streak of black mascara rested slightly above her cheekbone. Her bright, green eyes fixed on you in a way that seemed alert. She was curious in a way that didn't feel invasive at all.

“Hey,” she said, offering a kind smile. “You made it through your first day.” 

There was a lightness to her voice, like she expected you to laugh. 

You returned the smile, but more measured. “Barely.” 

She let out a soft, amused chuckle, easing onto one hip. “I’m Mara, by the way. I realized I never actually introduced myself yesterday.” 

You gave her your name in return.

She glanced past you, her gaze fixating on the clear plastic container on your desk. The chocolate cupcakes were still there, untouched, the frosting starting to look stiff and waxy. 

“So,” she started, tilting her head in a playful, knowing look. “I’m guessing you aren't a fan of the welcome committee’s taste in snacks?”

Something in you shifted, quick and involuntary.

“Oh, no. It’s not that,” you began, forcing a sheepish, slightly embarrassed look across your face. “I’m actually just…kind of picky. I only eat dark chocolate. Like, the really, really bitter stuff. Milk chocolate has always been too sweet for me.” It was a simple lie. 

Mara let out a mock gasp, pressing her hand to her chest as if you'd just confessed to a crime. “Dark chocolate? Like the eighty-five percent cacao stuff that tastes like dirt?” she teased, her grin widening. “You’re one of those girls. I should have known.”

You managed a small, genuine smirk. “It’s an acquired taste.” Placing your hands in your lap, you fidgeted with the lining of your skirt.

“Clearly,” she began, taking a sip of her drink, which, based on the smell, was mostly caramel syrup and milk. “Well, more for the rest of us vultures. Though with the way today is going, I think most people are going to need more than a sugar high to stay conscious.”

She leaned a little closer against the partition, her head motioning towards the back offices where the hushed, urgent voices were getting louder. The brightness in her face faded, just for a second. “Something is seriously wrong today,” she murmured. “Comms are lagging, reports are hitting the server out of order…it’s giving the superiors a collective migraine. They’re acting like they’re looking for someone to blame for a twelve-minute hole in the universe.” 

Your fingers stilled on your thighs. Twelve minutes. That confirmed it. It had begun. You didn't look at her, keeping your eyes fixed on a stray coffee stain on the carpet instead. 

“I.T.’s probably already on it,” you replied, trying to keep your voice from shaking. 

“They better be,” Mara rolled her eyes, straightening up to adjust the clip slipping in her hair. “Management is pacing the halls like they're hunting for a damn scapegoat. Honestly? Just keep your nose down and stay ‘new.’ It's the safest place to be when they start looking for someone to chew out.”

A sharp, uncomfortable pang settled into your heart. It wasn’t just the lie about the chocolate anymore. It was the fact that she was being kind to the person who was making her life a headache. You opened your mouth to say something – to thank her, maybe to offer an actual response that you weren't trained to say beforehand. But before you could reply, a red notification blared in the center of your screen.

Minor delay detected in communications routing. I.T. has been notified. Continue operations as normal.

Your breath left you slowly. They saw it, but they didn't understand it yet. Not really. Around you, the room started to settle. The frantic energy from a few minutes ago simmered down as people read the same message, reassured that it was all a technical explanation that they didn't have to spend any brainpower thinking about.

Mara groaned, the sound of her springs protesting as she slumped back into her chair. “As long as they don’t make us redo anything, I don’t care.” 

Your eyes were still fixed on the message. The clock was ticking now. 

How long would it take for someone to realize it wasn't a routing error? 

The message faded from the screen after a few minutes, filed away and ignored. The system moved on.

You could tell that the room didn’t completely go back to normal, though. There was still a jaggedness clouding the air. People were huddling in the aisles, voices low, their eyes darting to their monitors every time a notification chimed. The DSO was never a calm place to work, and the tension settled in, stretching tightly across everything…like fabric pulled too far, one wrong touch away from tearing. 

You could hear Mara spinning slowly in her chair, dragging her heels against the floor to keep herself moving in a lazy circle. “If they make this a whole thing, I’m transferring,” she joked. “This is above my pay grade.” 

You let out a quiet laugh, “Let me know how that goes.”

It came a little too easily, the back-and-forth. You bit the inside of your cheek, trying to pull back from the conversation. You didn’t like how natural it felt.

Across the room, a supervisor snapped to his feet, rushing towards the back offices with a file gripped awkwardly between the sweat pooling underneath his armpit. His steps were quick, an unmistakable knot in his brow. The door swung shut behind him, the frosted glass trembling in its frame.

The room dipped quieter in his wake, and people strained their necks just enough to listen in without making it obvious. Through the door, voices slipped, barely audible enough to catch.

“…they escalated it.”

“Already?” another man said, in disbelief. “It’s been...what, an hour?”

“Yeah, well, it’s not just here. It’s hitting every department now.”

Your pulse stuttered beneath your sleeve. Of course it was.

“…who are they sending to get to the bottom of this?” the third one asked.

There was a pause. Just long enough for it to settle into your bones.

“You already know who they send for this.” 

The words landed like a slick of oil on top of saltwater. No name was given; none was needed. Everyone understood who he meant. 

The realization settled over the room in that same, insidious way, like cold threading through the walls. No one spoke. But you could feel the nervous energy drawing taut as a tightrope.

Your fingers pressed lightly into the fabric of your blouse, the texture registering without comfort. It was too soon. The timeline you’d built in your head was running ahead of you.

You underestimated how fast they would escalate.

You’d misjudged how quickly the system would register the inconsistency, how fast it would stop treating it as background noise and as something worth following instead. Or maybe they’d been watching closer than you accounted for. But you knew they couldn't trace it back to you. You had made sure to program the bug to trigger in the morning when you weren't in the office. It was the perfect alibi. 

Your gaze dropped back to your desk. The monitor washed everything out again, pressing into your eyes as you refocused. The logs flickered for a moment. Unstable. More delays. Red-flagged entries. They were stacking now, bleeding into each other, forming something horribly messy. 

This was my doing. My responsibility. 

You let the thought sit there too long. Your fingers hung over the keyboard, not quite committing to it. Just as you placed your hand on your mouse, you felt a presence walk right up to you. Not intense, not encroaching, yet the surrounding air shifted anyway, like the room had adjusted itself to make space for it.

As you looked up, it hit like déjà vu.

It was the same intrusion into your space. That same, undeniable pause in the air before anything was said. The faint interruption of your focus, like your attention had been nudged without consent. The angle of someone standing too close to your desk, like distance didn’t apply to them. It was all too familiar. 

It just wasn’t him. 

A different agent stood there instead. Older, worn in a way that didn’t look temporary anymore. Wrinkles were chiseled into his skin like a name on a headstone. His uniform sat slightly rumpled at the shoulders, like it had been pulled on too many times in a hurry. You noticed how the badge on his chest glimmered every time he moved. Everything about him was weathered except for his tactical vest, which was brand new and didn't seem to belong to him. His eyes moved between you and Mara without any urgency. He had already decided this didn’t require much of him.

“Intake?” His voice sounded hoarse. 

You watched as Mara straightened up, her carefree energy vanishing in a clean snap. “Yes, Agent Buchanan.”

He nodded once, already looking past her toward the next cubicle. “They want a few of you upstairs. Now.”

“Upstairs?” Mara’s voice caught on the first syllable, a small laugh trying to form and failing halfway through when he didn’t respond.

He didn’t elaborate. He was already moving down the row, his steps fading as he disappeared between the aisles. Your hand stayed on the mouse, unmoving, the cursor frozen where you’d left it. This wasn’t routine. They were pulling the people who were logged in when the “hole” appeared, along with anyone who might’ve seen enough to explain it.

Mara’s mouth hung wide open, her attention landing on you like she hadn’t figured out what else to do with it. “What just happened?” 

You rose without hesitation. “Guess we’re going upstairs,” you said steadily.

The words left before you could hold it back, settling somewhere under your ribcage. You tried to keep your emotions even, but it didn’t quite take. Not fear exactly, just the sense that things were already in motion, and you were no longer the one in control. 

The walk across the main floor felt different now. The usual background noise of the office had faded out, leaving everything oddly exposed. 

Inside the elevator, the doors slid together with a soft seal, and it started to ascend. The motion was smooth enough to feel wrong, a subtle pressure built behind your ears as the floor numbers climbed beyond your clearance. No one spoke. The space felt tighter the longer it moved, and the atmosphere felt thick with each passing level. Mara shuffled beside you, the faint, uneven tap of her foot the only sound breaking through.

When the lift chimed open, the floor beyond felt unfamiliar in a way you couldn’t immediately place. Everything was stripped down to function. No loose papers, no scattered objects, nothing left sitting out longer than it needed to. Glass panels divided the space into long, deliberate sections, broken only by frames of engraved metal.

Each step forward landed too clearly, like it belonged to the room more than it belonged to you. 

A woman in a navy blue blazer approached. The jacket sat structured on her frame, clean at the shoulders, the fabric holding its shape as she moved. Thin-framed glasses rested low on her nose, and she adjusted them once as she looked everyone over.

“Intake?” she asked. 

She didn’t wait for a reply. “Follow me.”

She led the group down a corridor lined with screens built into the walls. Each one cycled through streams of data and refreshed without pause. Their glow shifted in intervals, reflecting across the tile in waves as you moved past. Agents were already debriefing in closed rooms along the way, their conversations audible but not meant to be part of yours. You noticed the guns strapped at their sides, too casual to be comforting. People in black suits moved through the space with purpose, never slowing, never looking twice. Everything here was deliberately uniform.

She stopped outside a set of reinforced double doors.

“We need you to walk through the logs you were all processing,” she said, her voice flat and controlled. “No guesses. Just the facts.” 

She opened the doors, stepped aside, and gestured inward. “Inside.”

One by one, the group crossed the threshold. You followed them into a sprawling, well-lit conference room. The environment mirrored the outside – less lived-in, stripped of whatever normalcy you were used to, replaced with something controlled. At the center of the room, a cluster of computers sat neatly on top of a mahogany table. In the far left corner, a humidifier hummed beside a lone fern.

The temperature dropped enough to register against your skin. It didn't just feel colder, it felt empty. Like the room had been hollowed out of everything comforting. Every breath you took felt shallow. The crisp, filtered oxygen hit your lungs with a metallic edge that made your heart pound too loud in the stillness.

And at that moment, you felt it. 

A sudden pressure settled at the base of your skull, turning the blood in your veins into lead. 

Because even before you turned around, you knew.

They keep accidently bumping into each other, then apologizing, then shuffling around, then bumping again, fighting to be under the stream. They wash each other's hairs. Grace helps Simon wash his arm and the part of the back he can't reach anymore. Grace blurts out some random comment about Simon's body, he isn't trying to be judgmental or anything he just saw something so he said something. Simon knows he doesn't mean anything by it, but he will be thinking about it for ages.

They shuffle (again) from inside the shower to grab their towels and dry. They don't immediately put their clothes on, they sort of just sit around with the towels. They awkwardly talk about something (the weather, the color of the tiles, what the towels are made of) just to have an excuse to be around each other longer.

maybe like he’s got 24 hours to solve a case but it was on short notice so now hes gotta do a it while out of it

maybe throw in some shassie

Ok so I just read some drama in the Bullseye fandom. Like, what the actual hell. I only found out about it because of TikTok. I don't use Twitter, so this is so bizarre to me. I think most of you guys probably know about this; therefore, I won't talk about the overall situation. All the situations mentioned during the drama are just as equally important as the one I am raising here, but as a fanfic writer, I feel like this is something that needed to be said in the fanfic community.

Guys don't hate on fanfic writers. Any fanfic writers.

I understand as a reader, you might have different tastes in literature. Hell, I can't say I myself enjoy all types of fanfics either. I have talked about my dislikes for reading fanfics that cause their characters to stray from the original source material. And that's my take as a reader. But as a writer…

Please understand we humans grow and learn over time. Just because you view a fanfic as ill-written or you dislike a certain genre of fanfics. Please don't hate on the writers. I believe every fanfic writer, at some level, adores their work as any artist would adore their art. They put their time and effort into such creations, and it's not right for us as humans to judge something another human adores.

Also, just because you are a fanfic writer doesn't give you the right to judge other fanfic writers' work because frankly, we are all learning. We are all developing our writing skills at our own pace. Just because you have a platform and a large following doesn't give you the right to act with no digital etiquette.

Personally, fanfic writing has such a meaningful place in my heart; I find it to be an art where I can explore my favorite characters and connect with people who like these said characters at the same time. I believe it is the same for most people; maybe it could even be more meaningful for them.

So my take is, yes, I understand in this day and age it's so easy to hate on the internet since all we do is type a few words, but understand there's a human who will be viewing those words. It's a person who will feel those words behind the screen.

So take a pause, read the words you have written to yourself as if they were being said to you; feel it before you click send. Because to hate is easier than to be kind. Especially with the state of the world we all are going through. It would be best if everyone could learn to be kinder. Thank you.

Taglist: @braindead-raccoon , @sleepystaarr , @nbhrhn, @junyrosess, @jheelam-23-08, @teasippindragon, @umsan733, @justalover-gurl, @avocad0ess @bellispunk @whorrorbellee @rporter19 @actuallyazriel @urdarkestsecrets @finalgirlmp3 @hellscagee @dexishot05 @saltea-coffee @i-shall-be-the-possum1 @juliecherrybomb @madglyphrefuge @tvdumarvelhpsimp @foggyturtleknightangel @snowwythegloww @ultraviolence44 @kkkkisworld @libertywrites1 @itsneagain36689 @marytvirgin @sawendel@cpuffz@slowlylosingfaith @akiyhara 

 @denguevirusconnoisseur @eclecticfashionbookszipper @mariayjws5 @witchygirl01 , @bethany2002 , @spicydonut25 @avengersinitiative2012 @msrogers @mirabilis-polaris @denguevirusconnoisseur @perpetualmess 

After waiting for so long… Chapter 11 is finally out.

And as an extra, here’s my drawing of Ominis.

This chapter and this art go hand in hand.