#tabby fics

The mattress dipped softly next to you as the sheets were pulled back, the night air seeping to your bones before it was replaced with warmth. You blinked sleepily, still tucked in the cocoon of dreams, until the familiar weight of an arm slid around your waist and pulled you into a chest you knew better than your own heartbeat. The scent of leather, pine, and something unmistakably Steve filled your senses–and just like that, you were awake.

“You’re home,” you whispered, voice hushed with disbelief and relief as your fingers curled instinctively around his forearm. His lips brushed your temple, rough with weariness. “Didn’t want to wake you,” he murmured, his voice soft and gravelly from exhaustion, but filled with so much tenderness.

You turned in his arms, pressing your forehead to his and cupping his cheek, your fingers carding through his beard. “I don’t care if it’s 3 a.m. or 3 p.m., I always want to wake up to you.” His eyes searched yours, blue and warm and a little glassy, and then he smiled–that small, crooked smile that only ever belonged to you.

“I missed you every second,” he whispered, pulling you impossibly closer until there wasn’t an inch of space between you. You could feel his heartbeat, steady and strong, grounding you in the moment. “Home didn’t feel like home without you,” you added as his nose brushed against yours.

You tucked your face into the crook of his neck, letting the steady rhythm of his breathing lull you, content and whole again. “ Promise you won't leave for so long next time,” you mumbled sleepily.

“I won’t,” he promised, sealing it with a kiss to your hair. “I’m right where I belong.”

Outside, the world spun on, but in your little corner of the night, everything was still. You belonged here–tangled up in limbs and whispers–with the man who would cross oceans just to return to you.

Just before you drifted off completely, Steve’s voice came low and sleepy, his lips brushing the crown of your head. “I don’t care how far I have to go, or how long it takes. I’ll always find my way back to you.”

A soft smile curled on your lips, your body relaxing fully in his hold. “And I’ll always be here. Lights on. Bed warm. Heart yours.”

He exhaled, the sound content and full of love, and together you both slipped into sleep–fingers interlaced, wedding rings shining like quiet promises in the moonlight. No goodbyes, no missions. Just two hearts, steady and safe, finally home.

Tygra clambered through the smoking wreckage of the mechanical monstrosity, carefully avoiding fractured saw blades, felled trees surrounding the field of battle like crumbled coliseum walls. They would have to do some explaining to the Warrior Maidens later.

Inter-species parlay held no corner of Tygra’s mind as seconds felt like hours in search for his fair furred, recently reacquired, and not-so-little brother.

“Bengali! Bengali, answer me!”

A response came in the form of a startlingly loud bang beneath his feet, then another, and another, until at last a white clawed fist bearing the Hammer of Thundera emerged from the robot’s chassis. Without hesitation the architect reached his arm down to pull the blacksmith from out the billowing debris. Bengali would not take his hand, but instead, with raw power rather than grace, claw his way out on his own, pointedly avoiding the helping hand.

“That was incredibly reckless of you, why didn’t you wait for me?!” The elder brother & ThunderCat asked incredulously.

Unsettled and unsatisfied by the silence, Tygra quietly moves to assess his brother for injuries, much to his dismay and frustration, Bengali flinches away irritably.

“I’m not a cub Tygra!” He snarls.

A bit difficult to accept, considering his present behavior, Tygra grimaced internally.

They had been bickering all mission, and he could not for the life of him parse the reason. It had been such a tremendous relief for them to see one another alive and well when they rescued Bengali and the others from Mumm-Ra.

Yet the weeks since then had been, strained, despite Tygra’s best efforts. The undead magician’s near successful attempt to lead the ThunderCats to betray one another for fear of the other side having turned against the Code had not helped things.

He cursed his absence, wondering whether his input may have tempered the anger of his more quick acting comrades. Fearing he too would have been deceived and made to think his brother a traitor by “Jaga’s” word.

He may not be a traitor, but he was certainly being a pain at the moment! Tygra scoffed to himself as Bengali gradually shrank into the distance.

“Maybe not, but you have been acting like one!” He calls behind an already moving Bengali.

Receiving nothing but a flippant growl in reply cut past the quick of anger and into desperation. Did he not care about his own life?!

He swiftly caught up to his brother and placed a hand on his arm.

“I could have lost you, again.” Tygra pleaded.

Again his earnest attempt to reach out is rejected as his hand is knocked away.

“Then I owe you a disappearing act!”

It took much of Tygra’s self-discipline to not allow his shock and confusion bleed into anger, with only limited success.

“Now, what is that supposed to mean?” Tygra spoke coldly, raising a skeptical brow.

Tygra moved in front of him, not permitting him to look away. Tygra had backed down from this fight one time too many. They were in all likelihood, the last members of their Clan, and he would not allow something so fragile as silence continue to divide them.

A flash of regret crossed blue eyes before vanishing back into the dense fog of Bengali’s lately stormy temperament.

“Nothing.”

“Bengali…” Tygra warned, crossing his arms.

“We would be even.” Bengali spoke through gritted teeth.

Even, even?! By what measure? If he was referring, crudely he might add, to their having believed one another dead, that would only count as once.

“I would prefer that you elaborated. If you please.” Tygra growled involuntarily as he spoke.

“Losing Thundera was not the first time that I lost you.” Bengali spoke for the first time without anger, plain as driven snow.

Tygra felt his stomach drop, both eager and fearful as to what he suspected he might hear. That all his regrets whenever his brother had come to mind before their miraculous reunion were in fact, justified.

“…What?” He breathed.

Bengali’s reaction mirrored Tygra’s, taken aback by his brother’s confusion and dismay at this accusation. It occurred to Tygra then perhaps his brother too had been clinging to something as intangible as regret.

To further Tygra’s surprise, Bengali smiled and sat down, he tentatively followed suit, Bengali let out a deep sigh, bracing himself to dig up unpleasant memories.

“All of my life, I was expected to measure up to you, take to all subjects like a fish to the sea, for the old powers to awaken in me. When they never did, well, the only person who wasn’t… disappointed, was you. Then you left, for that, that hall of mystics or whatever it was called.”

The dismissive nature with which Bengali hand-waved such a sacred place was no surprise to Tygra. Bengali had always been rather blithe about such things. Though it rang with the hollow bitterness of loss now.

This much of the story Tygra could recall in part, not so much what Bengali had endured but the expectations put upon himself. Expectations he was only too eager to rise to, and surpass, despite not knowing where they would lead.

The unintended havoc caused by his untrained powers of illusion, being sent to the Hall of Mystics for training felt like a punishment at the time despite their parents’ pride. Bengali was a cub then, hardly the twins’ age, if that. He could see Bengali in this way in his mind’s eye as though it were yesterday. Realizing suddenly that it was now closer to yesterday for him than it was for Bengali, who was now a decade older than he should be, or rather Tygra was a decade younger.

“Bengali, you know very well what happens to children burdened with the old powers that go untrained. I had to leave.”

“I know! I know… I would’ve followed you if I could have, but no. Instead, I poured myself into silver and steel, the things I was good at, I excelled! I worked in the smithies of King Claudus’s great armory! Still, all I heard was ‘Tygra the architect’, ’Tygra the mystic’, ‘Tygra the ThunderCat’! And I thought surely the second son of the Tiger Clan could become a ThunderCat at least! Neither King nor Lord looked my way, not once.”

There was no venom in Bengali’s voice as he rattled off Tygra’s various monikers but Tygra felt himself shrink away from each one. So many journey’s to the palace, to Cat’s Lair as it had been on Thundera. Yet he too overlooked his own brother, as he suspected perhaps Jaga had done.

Bengali had a warrior’s spirit after the war had ended, or so they had once hoped. Leaving the young noble to carve no place for himself in battle as Panthro had. Their world had greater need for reconnaissance and subterfuge than open battle. It was mere luck and the clever invention of his invisibility that permitted him the status of ThunderCat.

Yet the time for open warfare, or more accurately, a desperate continued attempt to stave off Thundera’s extinction had arrived. A stewardship to which Tygra felt Bengali was better suited for than he.

“You are a ThunderCat now.” Tygra reassured.

“From slim pickings.” Bengali chuffed with self-derision.

“If I’ve come to trust anything in my time here on Third Earth, it’s the heart in that boy and the wisdom of the Eye, both have deemed you worthy. It no longer matters whether it was true in the eyes of our Elders. Lion-O, is Lord of the ThunderCats now, and he anointed you.”

“So, I have at least earned his trust.”

Bengali seemed more relieved by this than anything else Tygra had said. The events of Mumm-Ra’s last attempt at sabotage still fresh in both their minds. The implication left by Lion-O perhaps being the exception hung heavy in the air.

“I trust you.” Tygra insisted.

“Do you?”

Bengali gestured backwards towards the no longer smoking war machine felled by whip and hammer a hundred feet or so behind them. Tygra couldn’t bring himself to respond, they both knew he’d allowed worry to blind him to the competence of his kin.

“… I ended up missing it, you know.” Bengali continued.

“Missing what?”

“Being compared to you. On Thundera, your name was all I’d ever hear. Then, all of the sudden, I rarely heard it again, no one knew you, remembered you except for me. The last of the Tiger Clan… or so we’d thought!”

Bengali laughed despite the fleeting heaviness of misplaced grief. Exuberantly shoulder checking Tygra hard enough to threaten his balance for a moment. Tygra couldn’t help but chuckle, that was going to bruise later but he wouldn’t dare stop the flow of long-awaited clarity for all the Treasures of Thundera.

“There were times where I felt it should’ve been you, you’ve always taken better to the old ways of our Clan better than I could. I have no gift for history, let alone the old powers! Who was I to preserve our people?!”

“Bengali, you shouldn’t say such things-!”

“I didn’t, I just thought them. It doesn’t matter who it should have been, I was there, I’ve done my best to remember.”

“You always have.”

Tygra had always believed Bengali was hardier to the slings and arrows of failure than he could bring himself to be, however stubborn and overzealous his brother could be.

“I couldn’t keep hating you, especially after learning you were alive! But the anger? It’s still here, it’s never left. So I bring the hammer down on Mutants and machines that deserve it.”

There was a grimness to that anger, a loss of innocence, he had watched it creep up on Lion-O over the past year in real time, much to his dismay. Tygra found he could not see the black and silvery white Tiger kitten he’d left behind at all.

“…You’re right, you are no cub, and, I am sorry.”

“For what?”

“I didn’t know. I was so, preoccupied, with my duties, my obligations… I didn’t spare so much as a second thought to speak with you! Not in all those years, and I hadn’t dared hope you were…”

“Alive, no, why would you? If it’s makes you feel any better, I didn’t want to talk to you, I was still furious!” Bengali let out a boisterous laugh.

That did not make Tygra feel better, actually.

“Oh… I see.”

Bengali softened a little, the desire for guilt on his older brother’s end had long since passed, especially upon learning that for all his intelligence, he had been clueless to Bengali’s feelings on the matter entirely! Here he had thought all this time Tygra had known and simply had not cared. He had only his own stubbornness to blame.

“I wouldn’t have listened. You’d have had better luck talking to a wall.” He added.

“That much I do know!” Tygra laughed, “I’ve- we’ve lost so much time. There is so much that I have missed.”

“We’re together now, that’s good enough for me.”

Bengali punched Tygra’s shoulder jovially, a long and bitter journey he feared would never see an end at last resolved. He rose to his feet and took Tygra with him.

“Ow.”

“Did I bruise you?”

In the coming years she would learn to mitigate the damage to her body caused by the visions thanks to Lynx-O’s direct tutelage. Though unlike her peers with similar abilities, she could not easily command them and her bursts of power were still largely involuntary. She continued to be somewhat isolated from the student body, by her own will rather than by rejection. She permitted no one closer than an arm’s length, though she’d grown more sociable and even popular within the student body. As memories of her early days faded with each graduating class. She did however make one true friend her own age, Tygra.

When Tygra arrived, even through her own pain and trials of adolescence, she recognized a kindred spirit. A gentle, intelligent, furiously independent, anxious and reclusive young man. Having no desire to watch someone so like her suffer as she had, took him under her wing, growing close with him despite her efforts. The two thrived together for several years. Everyone thought they were inseparable, including Tygra. Yet a restless homesickness was growing ever more powerful in her heart.

With time she came to have her own ambitions and desires, all of them as far from the world of Mystics and from the powers and their source which robbed her of her innocence. Whatever it was she needed, she would not find it at the Hall of Mystics. Only Lynx-O was able to decipher she intended on dropping out, Cheetara fled the school without saying goodbye. Determined to reconnect with the Cheetah Clan and become a Courier Guard like her mother before her.

She was accepted into the ranks of the Courier Guard with enthusiasm thanks to the remnant crusaders from Plundarr and the insidious Fanged Cabal which had conspired to kill the Lady Seka in the Valley of Snarfs only a few short years before. Cheetara was as happy as she thought she could be, still old wounds persisted and she continued having trouble allowing herself to be close to anyone. When she learned that Tygra had also come to Thazera, she resolved to apologize and reconnect with her childhood friend.

However fate had other plans when the tremors began, nightmares of Thundera’s eruption returned with a fury and a deep pain that she had not experienced since childhood. At first she fled home, fearing she’d gone mad, but as the earthquakes worsened, she gathered herself and delved deeper into the vision rather than resisting it. Emerging convinced that Thundera only had a mere few days before oblivion. She returned to Thazera and was truly believed.

When the Mutants took advantage of Thundera’s tumultuous final days as millions of Thunderians attempted to flee for safety, she found herself escorting the heir of the Lion Clan to the Thazeran flagship. Reunited with Tygra only to watch his brother Bengali & her mentor Lynx-O perish as they fled. Her heart heavy with guilt and anger at not having been believed as a child, and struggling to believe in herself.

Made a ThunderCat under the most desperate of circumstances. Emerging onto a new world with a dear childhood friend, a man who only knew her from stories and she of him, and a gaggle of motherless Thunderkittens. She would not foresee that for all of the incomprehensible grief, horror and isolation Thundera’s destruction had brought upon them all, she would grow closer with this strange new family and be less alone than she ever had been upon her now destroyed home.