( ・o・)ノ

by ravenlilyrose 
Will Riker would spend hours walking the halls of the Enterprise-D late at night when the lights were dim and there were no children running around. The only people around were the officers who were on the night shift that day and the occasional other like Will himself, who suffered from insomnia. They would always nod in Will's direction, but no one approached him, not until Deanna inevitably found him, summoned by the disquiet and unsettledness she'd felt from his mind, and took his hand, leading him gently back to one of their quarters and sitting him down with a mug of something warm.

by zombie_honeymoon 
Hidan hated the way he could no longer fall asleep without being knocked out in some way whether it be through the use of alcohol, drugs, or (his favorite) someone literally knocking him out—tactics he relied on only when truly desperate for sleep.
Before being trapped in that hole, he had taken for granted the way he used to be able to fall asleep anywhere and anytime, but now his mind refuses sleep, out of fear, he’s decided, that he’ll wake up only to find himself still trapped under all that dirt.
Sleepless nights are passed with prayers that lull him into a meditative state where he gets some rest at least, and when he can’t bring himself to pray to his god, who left him fucking buried alive for so long, he’ll read and know that Kakuzu would have gotten a kick out of seeing that.

by ernest 
Something must be done, because Brutus has not had a full night’s sleep since he heard what the soothsayer said about the Ides of March; after them, the whole city is kept awake by strange and terrifying dreams.

On the battlefield, he and Cassius both crave death thanks to a combination of guilt and honor; they desperately need to sleep but any attempt would only be a pale imitation of a state they’ve dreamed of enough to be a memory.

There are no clocks in the Roman Empire, yet one tolls him into the presence of a ghost who has always been larger than life and promises to meet him once more; none of the musicians he has made to stay awake with him can recall seeing Caesar just now, so he has mercy and sends them to bed.

by paxilam 
"Insomnia, amnesia, what's the difference, they both sound the same anyway!"

"Well, one you can't sleep, the other you can't remember," punctuated Jet, along with a low mumbling sigh.

Faye jumped on the yellow couch with little elegance. "I'm wide awake, with you and your tiny tree aaaat 3:28 in the morning, and you know already I have no memories so, again, what's the difference?"

Jet froze momentarily. Shit. "Just wait until I finish, I'll cook us a snack without Spike knowing."

by theseatheseatheopensea 
You are my loved one, he had said. And it was true--it will always be true. Now, without him, there is nothing left and no place to go--no place but the cold ice, the frozen sea, the sad, empty world out there.

by raisedbymoogles 
Author's note: (follows from this fic, wherein Optimus Prime is secretly a vampire. ....typing that out made me both extremely embarrassed and extremely pleased at how ridiculous that phrase is. Fic has melted my brain and I love it.)

He'd had to make a detour to avoid a Decepticon patrol, and another due to a collapsed bridge. So he was already a bit lower on fuel than he would have liked for the amount of road between himself and Iacon.

Main tank empty. Reserve tank 17%. Primus, let it be enough.

His prayer echoed in his spark, unheeded. He was on his own.

Reserve tanks at 3%, and Optimus had all but forgotten his destination, mindlessly rolling forward without regard for stealth or cover until a barrage of laserfire stitched the road before him and a rough voice yelled for him to surrender.

Surrender. Sluggishly, he turned the thought over in his mind before deciding, not today.

He transformed. His weapon stayed stowed - he didn't need it. Mechs were emerging from the alleys around him, emboldened by his seeming acquiescence and the fact that they were armed and he was not. With a hunter's patience, he let them get close.

Megatron's got a slag of a price on your head, Prime. We'll never run out of fuel again-

-get on your knees, I said get on-

-what the scrap, what's wrong with his MOUTH-?

Optimus lunged. The first one broke apart in his hands, spraying sparks; the second got bowled over by one half of the first. The thing-that-was-Optimus showed no mercy nor hesitation, until at last exhaustion made him have to let the survivors run -

Reserve tank, .5%.

- all but one.

"Primus," the unfortunate whimpered as his helm was grabbed and cranked back.

At that, Optimus finally found his language module. "Primus can't hear you." And he bent to feed.

by ernest 
“You were better have a bad epitaph after your death than their ill report while you live,” Hamlet said once, and poor Polonius gets both – he is a wretched, rash, intruding fool who for his whole run as Julius Caesar believed that his was the role of the tragic hero.

“Leave wringing of your hands!” snaps Hamlet while his mother tries to feel for a pulse – he felt his blade drive home and knows that the old man is beyond both prayer and medicine. He tries to imagine his uncle’s body in place of this advisor, the same way he replaced the proper king, but for some reason the thought doesn’t make him feel any better so he changes the subject and urges Gertrude to confess herself to heaven.

by silveradept 
It's not actually that difficult— all he has to do is pull just so and everything will be just as ephemeral as all the people have been in his life: the father who couldn't bother to be there, the mother whose soul was placed in a living machine, the drunk who couldn't take care of him, the secret agents, the wispy girl, endlessly cloned, a shadow of a shadow of a shadow.

And in the middle of all of it, radiating fire, fury, and pain (she just slapped him, how did he not notice), the one thing in the universe that steadfastly refused to abandon him, that demands he do more than slide into nonexistence and take everything with him.

"Shinji," she says, remembering the name he'd forgotten (and forgotten that he had forgotten), "destroy the world all you like, but not like this, not like the wimps and cowards who want you to give up, instead of going out in a blaze."
by ernest 
Pearl looks at her phone so she doesn’t have to pay attention to the man screaming about the apocalypse; she’s too old for revelations or memories, she just wants to pretend to be a soldier fighting a bear in a game that has no stakes because it isn’t real. Just as she selects the sword her phone flies out of her hand and she follows it over the edge of the platform, trying to believe those weren’t claws digging into her back.

When it becomes clear that she cannot climb, she chooses instead to let the train rip through her.


PMMM, any, looking back

Arcane (2021 Netflix show), any, “Siblings: your only enemy you can't live without.”

Naruto, any, secret kunoichi society

Naruto, Sakura Haruno, she's Chiyo's disciple instead of Tsunade's


 
"Those who leave their comrades behind are worse than scum", their sensei had said, before disappearing completely from her life once the boys had left the team.

Tsunade had barely taken a look at her, barely heard her plea disguised as a willfull vow, before laughing her out of the Hokage's office.

In another world, Sakura Haruno would put in years of sweat, sleepless nights spent reading and grueling dawns training, all culminating on the second coming of a legend - in this one, she was the first one of her promotion to die.
She’s a living cemetery. It’s only natural her body and creations are a shrine to all the broken pieces of her past—

(it’s all her fault all her fault her fault hers herfaultherfault because you’re a jinx and they were right about her she knows it's true)—

or perhaps she’s just a collector of macabre memorabilia; her enemies would certainly point the flaunting of such detestable trophies out as proof of her depravity and madness, if they knew the significance behind them. Jinx can ignore them all, as long as the ghosts that haunt her stay undisturbed.