Rem

OH MY GOD THIS IS THE GREATEST THING I'VE EVER SEEN, ACTUALLY MADE MY DAY

I love it, it's so Orca oh my God.

Happy New Year, and thank you for this, genuinely the greatest thing ever.

You got her silly smile.

Andrei knows that eventually his role went from captain to lapdog. He knows what people think of him and he makes no move to correct it.

Vladimir Makarov is building an empire around them, and all he asks is that his name be stamped on the leather of Andrei's collar. That Andrei rolls over and fetches when he's instructed to.

That he acts at the man's beck and call, pull the trigger and move along. Step aside when your master is talking and hang onto his every word, tilt your head at him as your gaze follows his every moment, and your tail bats off the floor quietly as it wags.

Let him scruff you when you act too rabidly, let him muzzle you and get off on your snarling, Trot back to him with a bloodied maw and let his lips twitch at the sound of your collar jingling as you drip crimson on his best leather shoes. Enjoy how gently he scratches behind your ears as you lick them clean.

Andrei knows he lives to serve, but it was he who bared his neck for the collar.

I'm gonna need you to take that judgmental tone and rethink it because I have a block button and I'm petty enough to use it.

Driving lessons are expensive, as are cars, and I truly don't go out that much. Fuck do I need to drive for. I like cars for two things: playing my music during a drive and being able to take my shoes off.

Coincidentally, you caught me on the day I'd been throat punched by both, and thus, I am at my best to write this. Genuinely, of all days to receive this ask, it was the day I found myself pondering how my father takes up 1/4 of a page in my family photo album, and then I sat down in the shower for a while.

John can't listen to any recordings of his voice; it makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He sounds like his father. When he barks orders at people, he sounds like his father. Only his voice is followed by the whir of a bullet, not the cracking of a belt. He refuses to shave his face unless necessary because only after he grew a beard did he stop seeing Sr. in the mirror.

Ghost looks more like his mother than his father. On the best of days, it's his saving grace. On the worst of days, he avoids mirrors and winces when he catches his reflection on a screen. He sees women of a similar height and hair colour to his mother and hesitates for just a moment, the word mum stuck in his throat. Grown men can scream in his face, and it means nothing to him. The disappointed tone of a woman older than him makes his hands shake.

Nikolai is at the age where most people just assume his parents are dead. He doesn't know, he'll never know, he'll never want to know. He's detached from the idea of having parents. It's a foreign concept in his mind. He isn't sure if he looks like either of them because he can't remember their faces as well as he used to. It's meaningless to him. He isn't the son they expected him to be, therefore, he won't claim the name of the son they wanted. He tells people his parents are dead, a cancer of some kind. He doesn't care for their sympathies.

Kate's parents are dead; they have been for a while. She doesn't think of them often and when she does, it's typically with love, but she doesn't forget the fact that they missed the best parts of her life. However, their death pushed her to get where she is today, so without the loss, she wouldn't have that life. It leaves her conflicted, and she won't talk about it, but she grieves the moments they missed. She'll drink to their memory, or her sorrow. She decides which depending on how little is in the bottle.

Not a moment goes by where Farah doesn't miss her parents. She doesn't seek replacements in those around her; she never could. But she braids her hair, and she grieves the beauty her mother held. She offers someone kind words of reassurance and feels her father's arms around her, promising her safety so long as he lives. She makes decisions to protect her people and ponders what her parents would say of her fate and that she subjected her brother to. Her passion for her people is sacred because her tone echoes that of her parents.

Rudy has never known how to act around male authority figures. He was orphaned so young that he has no memories of his parents. He grew up in an orphanage with women who did their best with what little resources they had to save their children from the drug-riddled fates they had seen many follow. He trusts women; if a woman gives him advice, then he's likely to follow it. He grew up with women. When grown men tell him things and expect things of him, he stares back at them blankly. They place a hand on his shoulder, and he gently nudges it away. They have nothing to offer him. Men trying to take authority over him, especially in a parental type of context, antagonises him. He grew up without a man in charge, and he's survived until now; he doesn't need anyone to try and start at this point in his life.

I was so confused at first, I was like what car? I can't drive. I've never posted a car until I realised what you meant and that I'm just old mentally.

I did, I do apologise that I have yet to answer. I've just been busy/drunk whenever I intended to properly get into writing it.

I also wanted to ask my best friend about retainers because she has one, but the day I intended to ask, we both got drunk off our tits and I completely forgot.

I will write it, I just wanna ask someone with a retainer what it's like before I try and write about it and end up writing fucking nonsense lmao.

I did, I promise.

This is all I have to say on the subject.

John doesn't consider himself a pessimist, but he's not naive enough to ignore the fact that with a career like his, he could lose everything in seconds.

The blur of a bullet could be all it takes to render his flat a hollow shell of what it once was. It could be all it takes to leave one side of his bed cold and empty. One quick pull of a trigger could leave him standing, with his chest a cavernous hole of anguish and cancerous disconsolation, making decisions over a body that he can't picture crammed into an urn.

An entire life worth of pain, fury, adoration, and nostalgia crammed into an infinitesimal vessel of brass, unbefitting of the man it carries.

The knowledge burns deep in his chest, scorching his bones and reducing his organs to a pile of ash he can feel creeping up his throat. The embers of his heart, forgotten inside the cage that holds his fear, cannibalistic and grateful. Eating away at his every joyful moment and clawing away at his conscious in the dead of night. A disease, festering in his flesh and rotting away at any part of him deemed hopeful.

Cowardice under a diagnostic label.

He can see it tearing through his veins as he prepares his arms to push away the cherished and admired who rest a hand on his shoulder.

He can feel it bubbling away like acid in his throat, burning away at the delicate tissue and rendering him a pusillanimous cadaver, gargling the blood that pools in his mouth in a frantic attempt to cease the words being pulled from his throat, like a fish hook dragged up his esophagus.

A body beleaguered because ingallantry is hereditary and he is his father's son.

He cradles the memory of Nikolai's knuckles brushing over his cheek, sheltering his face from the sunlight that burns through his valarous facade as he sits alone and ponders how giving up everything to avoid losing it left him at the same destination that he'd been retreating from.

Orca, a year ago.

Andrei knows that the first thing he should be doing is heading in for a shower, but when Commander Makarov beckons him, he follows.

He's sweat soaked, blood splattered, and he's half certain that he reeks.

And yet the minute Makarov's door is closed, the commander is on him like a bloodhound. Sniffing at his neck, licking the salt tinged skin and nipping behind his ears.

Suddenly, a shower can wait.