#fcrrous

“That’s very flattering, sweetie, but won’t that spook the poor ghost boy instead? He looks kinda skittish. I've never kissed a spirit, though, let alone one so cute — is that even something a living person can do?"

Although she has curiosity to sate, Mao decides to settle for a more accommodating solution — kiss his face instead. That should be less frightening for him, shouldn't it?

Her question is bittersweet, burnt and molten sugar that has begun to soldify and cling onto everything that stumbles through it, laps at it, filling his mouth with a pure and innocent intention but leaving him with a taste that has him grimace, eyebrows drawn together in pain. It is also sharp as the edge of his blade, slicing through undead flesh with almost unbearable pain because he knows the answer, knows what she wants to hear and what he is going to reply; it hurts enough that he has to shut his eyes to banish the image of her soft stare ( is she expectant? Hopeful? Is she blind to the misery he embodies? The one that follows his every step? Or is she simply wonderful enough to discard it all, to see past the reality and become enarmoured with an illusion of how he used to be? ).

He stalls his answer, gingerly, nearly hesitantly reaching out to hold her hands in his, leaning down to press his forehead against hers, gaze still hidden to not grant her insight on the quiet notes of despair he feels rising within him. A sigh wants to escape him but his lips are etched into a firm line and he only speaks once it leaves him through his nose, eyes opening but still refusing to look at anything beyond the ground and the promise of hell beneath. " There is nothing more that I want than for you to be happy. ", his confession begins, tracing circles into the warm skin of her hands as his scowl deepens the more words he whispers between them. " You deserve a good life, a peaceful life. A life worth living. " He could never be selfish enough to trap her within his arms forever, even if her touch is divinity, even if she is the last sliver of paradise he has. No, he would rather burn for eternity than risk her falling into the same anguish he has succumbed to. She deserves better than that.

Pavel Chekov has been a member of Roscosmos for eleven months, four weeks, and three days. Sixteen, they had deemed, was too young -- even for someone who had, at interview, solved the mathematical theorem which had allowed the agency’s failing satellite project to revive itself. Without the use of a calculator or computer.

On his seventeenth birthday, they relented.

He has not been into space, though he longs to. He has not made any real friends, though he longs for that, too. He is too different, too inexperienced, too young. No matter how capable he may be, there is a reluctance to accept that he finds weighs heavily.

But then there had been this. 

( Somebody has asked to interview you for a new project.            What project?    The details are classified.            Where is the project?    It will be based in America. )

America. Not quite space, but a whole new world nevertheless.  

He’s nervous. Without any details on the project -- on what they’re looking for, on why he has been requested or who has done the requesting, there’s little by the way of preparation he can do. Effort has been made in shirt and jacket -- a little too big, mother’s words still padding them out, you’ll grow into them, Pashenka, you’ll be tall like your father. Now that he’s here, a little early to the agreed time and place, there is no place for nerves. He does his best to tuck them away.

          he doesn’t catch it at first, because he doesn’t anticipate for there to be anyone else tinkering in the lab at the wee hours of the morning. by all common conventions known to the faculty and staff, the computer labs were a privilege to be reserved ONLY for the most brilliant of campus assets, or the most unabashed brown-nosers. tony was, by this measure, a man belonging to both camps. which granted him 1 am visits to the lab facilities when he so wished. it worked in everyone’s favor; he publishes a NEW RESEARCH PAPER, and the university receives another crowning accolade. 

           it took a second time to be called by name before he’s properly jerking away from the computer monitor, bearing a face lit aglow by the blueish tint of a CRT monitor that he’s had switched on. he won’t admit to being SPOOKED when he found another set of eyes staring right back at him. 

Fingers reach out for the proffered glass, dance around the curve of it, unsure whether or not to pull the glass closer, to lift, to drink. It looks like expensive stuff ---- no surprise there, from what he knows, but it’s jarring. He watches the news, he doesn’t live under a rock. He knows all about the Tony Stark that the world gets to see.

But he’d half expected to be offered a beer, to be smacked upside the head with an engineering text book, for all their summer glory days to warm his blood. Instead, he gets scotch and the man from the magazines. Not his.

     “ --- I’m a carnie and a thief,” he says, quoting Tony’s favourite descriptors of him. Fond, once. “With half a college education. What do you think happened?”

What happened was this: argument over morals, over something Clint didn’t quite understand the full heft of but felt certain that there was a right side to. A hand outstretched, an invitation to step over the line on the sand, to be a better man than a father. A refusal. An empty dorm room, an education abandoned, a return to an old life, to striped tents and two shows a day. Misunderstandings and bad luck and a string of people he shouldn’t have been mixed up with. A brother, a mentor, fresh betrayals.

stop telling everyone im in love with you it's cramping my style :C

Rhodes is gross tho