#“I Feel Cold”

[dangraccoon]

I Feel Cold

Week 1 ~ "I feel cold" ~

Word Count: 615 Content: sibling bickering, pre-epilogue, adult (early 20s) Omega, older (40s) CF99, Tech survives, but is partially paralyzed, Omega is a good sister, Crosshair is a brat, panic attack, nightmares

@clone-wars-winter-challenge

Omega could hear her brothers bickering as she entered the house. She slipped her muddy boots off at the door and hung her soaked yellow jacket up as Batcher excitedly greeted her.

“I didn’t say I don’t think it could work,” Hunter grumbled, feet propped up on the living room table as he reclined in his chair. “I’m saying that it would be tricky.”

“Obviously, it was your tone that implied doubt of Tech’s brilliant plans,” Omega smirked, slightly mimicking Tech’s voice–much to his chagrin–as she leaned over the back of Hunter’s chair to peck a light kiss to his cheek.

Tech scowled, pulling his datapad from the side pocket of his repulsorlift chair. “The plan would be somewhat easy to execute; if Echo–”

Hunter sat up suddenly. All three of them suddenly focused on the stairs.

“It’s Crosshair,” he said. He grunted softly as he started to lift out of his seat.

“I’ll go,” Omega offered, waving him off. Hunter nodded with a grateful smile.

She squeezed Tech’s shoulder as she passed, his shaking hand tapping her’s lightly.

Omega took the stairs two at a time–a habit she’d picked up from Lyana–and dropped her bag at the door to her room. She poked her head into the door across from her’s, affectionately rolling her eyes as she was met with Wrecker’s snoring.

She tiptoed down the hall, skillfully evading each spot she knew would creak and groan. She came to Crosshair’s door, and pushed it open, cringing slightly as it whined on its hinges.

It didn’t wake her youngest brother, however, as he continued tossing fitfully in his bed.

She sat on the side of his bed, gently pressing her palm to his shoulder.

“Cross?” she whispered. No change. “Crosshair, you’re having a nightmare.”

She gently shook his shoulder and he gasped as he woke, sitting bolt upright, his breathing rapid and shallow.

“It’s alright,” she soothed, hands providing steady pressure on either shoulder. “It’s just me.”

“M-Mega?” he finally whispered, eyes finding her in the dark.

“I’m right here,” she answered, pushing warmth and comfort into the soft words as much as she could. “It was just a nightmare.”

Crosshair’s breathing didn’t slow. “I-I can’t–” he coughed harshly, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

“Easy, easy,” she said, holding his flesh hand in hers and rubbing small circles between his shoulder blades with the other. “Can you tell me three things you can see?”

Crosshair blinked in the darkness, nodding towards each item. “Cu-curtain. Lamp-p. pr-prost–hand.”

“Good,” she smiled. “Three you can hear?” 

His breathing finally began to slow as he strained to listen. “Wrecker,” he scoffed, making her chuckle. “Rain ou-outside. Can hear Hun’er an-and Tech.”

She nodded, finally feeling the tension starting to slip from him. “Feel?”

“I-I feel your h-hand. Feel the rug, under my feet. I feel…cold.”

She smiled. “Well, that’s what happens when you leave your windows open during the rainy season,” she playfully nudged his shoulder as she got up to close them. 

“Didn’t used to be a problem,” he griped, wrapping his comforter around his shoulders. “Getting too old.”

“Oh, hush,” Omega laughed, placing her hands on her hips. “You’re still my little brother.”

Crosshair scoffed. “You’re still just a kid.”

“Woah!” she protested as she plopped back down onto his bed. “I graduated to ‘teenie’ five years ago!”

Crosshair shook his head. “That was a mistake; it’s gotten to your head.”

“Alright,” she grumbled, but her lips were still pulled in a wide smile. “Time for bed, grandpa.”

Crosshair dramatically clutched his chest as he let her push him onto his back. “You wound me, darling sister.”

“I would never, dearest brother.”

Next Week »

Thanks for reading! - River

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[inkskinned]

she's singing in another room and my dog is asleep at my feet. my grandma asked me why i haven't found a man yet and i laughed. oh, you know. i like my house clean.

my girlfriend is also my man is also "my partner" if i'm in a professional setting. yesterday we went to a ren faire and a man mimed at me - you're together? and at my delighted nod, his baffled, you're gay? made me laugh. a woman with rainbow hair said i love the two of you together. you're both so beautiful it's absurd.

my dad introduced my partner as my "..... friend. or whatever" the other day. he knows we're dating. in the same way, i was never able to get my sister's husband to stop saying that's gay like it's 2008. he still uses the word fa***t, and my sister's defense of him has always been well, he's just kidding.

my lover and i dance to old music in a tiny kitchen. we judge new music together and take food critique very seriously. we watch love is blind before we fall asleep and agree that if they had a queer season, it would be bloody but also make for excellent tv. of fucking course queer people would know someone for only 2 weeks and agree to get married. what are you saying.

at a bar with friends, a man puts his hand on my wrist. got a boyfriend? and yes, i do have a boyfriend, she's amazing. i am texting her while i wander around a gas station named after geese. i am visiting a swing state for a wedding. in the candy aisle i overhear: she's actually like a lesbian it's disgusting. two teenage girls with packaged sandwiches in their hands, giggling. no literally, like. i'm not, like. okay with her being there while we're all, like, naked and changing.

my girlfriend and i tailgate, drink gin and cider out of cups. from the frat group beside us, a man corrects himself with one of his friends: bro, i mean, nonbinary entity, and it makes everyone around him laugh, myself included. he razzes his friend the same way i would have killed for at 19 years old - like nothing happened, he continues: you apply sunscreen like an alien. he does a little sassy (and fairly accurate) dance interpretation of the motion. his friend is laughing so hard they're crying.

i am lucky, i live in a safe neighborhood in a safe state. my masc passenger princess comes up from DC. i drive her for an hour to where all the leaves are a violent arrangement of color. we walk along the trails, letting autumn into our blood. in this part of the state, there's a lot of pickup trucks and trump signs. when we chastely kiss before getting into the car, i accidentally make eye contact with a woman holding her child's wrist. she looks disgusted. she looks fucking pissed.

two hours later my girl and i are eating dinner on a patio, soaking in the last warmth of new england sun before the chill of winter sets in. we are giggling and trying to talk through plastic vampire teeth. at another table, i see a young woman sit up straighter. i watch her watch us. she blushes and takes her partner's hand from across the table. shy, like the taste of evening has just become something deeper.

it's worth it for this moment, i think. my lover is still humming the same song she's been singing for four days straight and i don't want to kill her for it. her guitar is beside my bed. her toothbrush is in my bathroom. in a few moments i will make us lunch. we are lucky enough to have found each other. it is lucky enough to be in love.

[sergle]

ALSO IMPORTANT TO NOTE, people dropping mad mad sums of money on gfms and charities and stuff are extremely impressive but that DOES NOT MEAN that putting like $5 towards someone's fund or any good cause is any less valuable, a lot of crowdfunding is about momentum and those single digits add up super fast, you do not need to be Rolling In The Dough to make someone's day!! moving the dial at all is extremely positive!!

[heartorbit]

MWAH!

[somewhereincairparavel]

"jason is a knockoff watered down percy" NO hear me out, jason actually parallels annabeth immensely, sharing SO many similarities with her personality, not percy, in this essay I will-

edit: my full analysis is out now! here

[keferon]

Empurata!Prowl tries to actually communicate for the first time

What if he wants to say something but he can’t. What if he has no voice to speak, no face to emote, no hands to write. What if every attempt to communicate a message is essentially a puzzle of wit and creativity and yet, the first thing he goes through all these troubles for. Is to say “I love you”?

Don’t ask me how did they get in this room. I have no idea. They escaped the battlefield somehow haha

Next->

[atlas-hope]

guess who rediscovered the feral ford tag

[t0bey]

“Reunion at Dawn”

happy 5th anniversary, three houses!!!

[lunarw0rks]

john “big stretch” price

simon “make it fit” riley

soap “just the tip” mactavish

kyle “give me one more” garrick

[firstfullmoon]

William Fargason, “I Have Lost Faith”

[rosevrauer]

gemma consistently being depicted in nature with new flowers in bloom as in springtime, her clothes implying warm weather. the town seemingly in a perpetual snowy winter. the mammalians nurturable rearing baby goats in a manufactured green glade, evoking the turn of the seasons and new life. the mammalians nurturable having worked with ms casey. the project mark s. is working on concerning ms casey/gemma being called 'cold harbour'. much to think about

[shepscapades]

3. Cold Reactor — Everything Everything

We made the mountain bigger Though we had forgotten why It's a dream I'm in with you It wakes me in the middle of the night I love you like an atom bomb, but I've become a cold reactor

Ugh I listened to this song an insane amount this year (naturally, since it’s number three)!! These drawings are a little sneak peek at a dbhc PMV/animatic project I started several months ago that I recently picked up again! It started (and still is) on mumbo’s playlist as a “looking back on Season 8” kind of song, but the more I listened to and thought about it, the more it quickly became a “all of dbhc season 8 retrospective” :]

[ridleymb]

When I had the idea of drawing toxic yuri and a warm comic about siblings for Christmas at the same time

I chose to draw both🙂

[butterflyscribbles]

I see a lot of fics n such where the parents are taking care of the trio when they’re ill but I propose the alternative…

[wasyago]

Falls in, i would love to hear about this decked out/failed cave exploration au pls pls pls already i am Bewitched

hehehe [in tango's voice] sighh i suppose...

really im very tempted to just let it sit and not tell anything, because it's so fun seeing people theorize and point out details in the notes. but yeah i guess i shouldn't gatekeep it, its a fun au!

i do want to state in the beginning that it was a one-off thing and i have no plans on continuing it or drawing more for it. if you do tho? feel free! (not asking for fanart by any means, but giving the green light if anyone was wondering)

well

-------

Pet crew were a group of cave explorers. They're no experts by any means but they were no amateurs either! (ignore the fact that they're not wearing any PPE, i didn't want to draw it, ok--) And recently they've been excited about mapping out a new cave system they found, completely unexplored according to their research.

Tango, always a big lover of his plans and spreadsheets, presumably decided to go in alone ahead of time to sketch out at least a rough draft for a map, so they had an idea of what they're going to be dealing with.

But see, this cave is not an ordinary cave, no matter how pristine and untouched it looked. It is one gigantic organism of unknown origin, and a hunrgy one at that, the air inside it is filled with little cells or spores that, when inhaled enough, start taking over the body and corroding it to the cave's will. Killing the host in the process.

So, obviously, after spending some time in the cave by himself, Tango did get some cells in him. Not enough to be noticeable, but enough to give him a headstart on the corruption when the group went in for a proper dive some days later.

The first symptoms of undergoing the change are pretty standard: light fever, weakness, dizziness — easy to mistake for a flu.

Which is exactly what Tango did. Of course, going caving with a flu is not a smart thing to do either, but the group has been planning this trip for so long, delaying it even more because someone was slightly under the weather would've been foolish!

The cave started off with a big drop, requiring a rope to be set up, and then sprawled into a system of tunnels. Tango and Pearl were very excited to find an entrance to some ancient tombs a couple of hours into the dive. There were stairs leading even deeper underground, which turned out to be an entrance to a bigger cave system, with a huge frozen lake in the middle and an entrance to abandoned mines.

Further symptoms include skin turning pale, graying hair, eyes starting to shift color to red. Previous symptoms remain and intensify.

Tango had always been pale, he had blond hair too, and in the dark it was hard to notice the white streaks in them. The pink cheeks were easily passed as a result of being in the cold. Pearl did express some concerns about Tango's well-being when he started to fall back a bit, but he dismissed it as just him getting tired. By that point Pearl seemed to also have some "frost" in her hair.

After the hair have fully turned white, the tips start to switch color to an unnatural blue. Skin eventually loses color completely, turning gray. Fever intensifies as body desperately tries to fight the infection.

At that point it was impossible to deny that something was wrong with Tango. There are no mirrors underground though, so to him it was just his flu getting out of hand. Guilty of hiding his illness, yes, but nothing critical. The blue hair however were not normal, and the other two were freaking out a bit more than Tango would've hoped for.

They had an argument.

Etho snapped and hit Tango to beat some sense into his stupid head.

By that point Pearl was clearly looking bad too, and Etho's own hair were apparently turning white. They were all feeling terrible, physically and mentally. They decided to head home.

As previously stated, the cave is in fact alive and can sense when something that belongs to it is trying to escape. In an effort to stop it, the whole cave system comes to life. Old animal carcasses rise and start walking, small screeching creatures begin patrolling the tombs, the ice melts and the cave blooms in dangerous ways.

When the crew exited the mines into the second level of the cave system, it was apparent that the way back would be a lot harder. By that point Tango was struggling to stand and Etho had to drop his equipment to carry him. But the fever and the dizziness were making it hard to move fast, the changed layout of the cave was difficult to navigate even with their map, and the way to the surface was still very and very long. It was obvious they couldn't make it out....

Unless they were willing to make some sacrifices.

Etho isn't proud of his decision, but leaving Tango was their only option! He and Pearl still had a chance to escape if they moved quickly, but Tango was just too far gone, he couldn't-- Etho couldn't carry him to the exit, he was getting too tired, and if they all stuck together it would get all three of them killed! Was it not better for at least two of them to survive instead of-

They had another argument.

Pearl stubbornly insisted on taking Tango, so Etho had to lie to her and say that they will come back once they scout out the way. Etho couldn't force himself to look at Tango though, if he did he would be met with this knowing look and he just couldn't bear it. Tango cried when they were leaving.

After the body succumbs to the fever it stays dead for a short period of time, while the rest of the changes set in.

It took a miracle for both Etho and Pearl to reach the tombs, but the hard part came after. Etho did everything in his power to convince Pearl to leave with him, he said they will come back later when they're better prepared, he said it was too late to help Tango, he said it was Tango's own fault, he said many bad things, none of which were enough to change Pearl's mind. She turned back and Etho didn't follow her.

He ran through the tombs and the caves alone, losing his eye to a monster he saw all too late. It was painful and it was disorienting, Etho doesn't even remember how he got to the initial drop they went down, he was panicking and only moving forward because of adrenaline and instinct. The ascend was a fever dream, Etho doesn't know how he didn't fall to his death then.

Through the rush of blood in his head, Etho heard the faint sound of Tango's voice. Too cheery for his feverish condition, and much, much closer, a lot closer than the place they left him to die in. He did not hear Pearl. The sound stopped when it was right under him, and he felt a light tug on the rope he was hanging of. And nothing else happened...

Etho emerged from the cave into the cold night, stumbling over his own feet, too tired to run. Their van was parked over by the entrance and Gem was already waiting for him. Him — shaking, bloody and alone.

...

The body reanimates again, now obedient to the cave's will. It is no longer alive but it is not dead either, frozen, stalking through the tunnels in a mindless haze.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The dog days are over.

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