Daniel’s thoughts spun into a hurricane around him. Fear anger resignation acceptance determination and no, no, no, that was not how that was supposed to go. Richard felt the grip on his shirt tighten, lift up as Daniel raised himself higher. “You said you trusted me. More than anyone else?” a pause, and in it Richard’s heart felt like it might fail him. He nodded once. “Fine. Then you’ve got to trust me now and stop punishing yourself for me. I’ll decide—I’m the one you hurt, right? I’m the one who gets to decide how I feel about you,” Daniel pulled him up higher, shirt bunching up tight under his arms. Richard had to raise up onto his toes, Daniel's grip doing nothing to loosen the gravity of the situation. “And if I decide that I still want to love you? There’s nothing you can do about it,”

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

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

Particular Interests:

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

2. Closing Remarks:

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

3. Drops Down:

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

4. What Goes Up:

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

5. Memory Lane:

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

6. Anonymous Sources:

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

7. Doctor's Notes:

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

8. The Hero Question, Rephrased:

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

9. Here and Now:

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

10. Self Care:

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

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

Fandom: Fallen Hero by @fallenhero-rebirth

WC: 946

45. relieved kisses

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

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

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

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

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