#“anon”:you can call me moss or crow-!

[katytheinspiredworkaholic]

We can ask you anything? Niiiicccce 😊 In that case I would like to ask if you have a little snippet of your Southern Discomfort Story for us 😁 Only if you have one and if you want to share it. Thank you!!! ❤️

I would love nothing more, Anon ❤

The chapter still isn't finished, or beta'd, so please forgive all spelling/grammar mistakes, but I made it a long one for you.

(CW: language, mentioned minor character death, murder, prejudice of religion/witchcraft)

Fandom: The Walking Dead

Pairing: Rick Grimes/Daryl Dixon

Status: On-going AU

Word count of snippet: 1,405

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Southern Discomfort: Possessed

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Chapter 17:

(Working titles:

The House that Built Me

OR

Arsonist’s Lullaby)

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There was no sign of Daryl outside the trailer. Rick broke out into the midday sunshine and spun in all directions looking for the familiar head of dusty brown hair. 

“DARYL!” he hollered loud, the sound carrying over the side of the cliff and bouncing about the quarry. There was no way the redneck hadn’t heard him, but he didn’t emerge and Rick’s nerves seized in a kind of panic he hadn’t felt in a while. Hopelessness and uncertainty crept over his skin hotly, smothering to the point it was difficult to breathe. Calm the fuck down Grimes, think: where would he go? What was he looking for? What direction is it from here?

“He left the truck,” Dale said behind him, leaning out the open door of the RV, and also scanning the trees for anything that might resemble the young Dixon. “You got the keys?”

“No,” Rick rasped, checking his pockets on reflex as he said it. But he knew Daryl had driven, had stuffed the keys in his back pocket like he always did. Merle would kill him if he left them in the visor, begging to be lifted by a tweaking drifter or some stupid local kid. 

If Daryl didn’t take the car, he’d gone through the woods. Where was he headed?

“What’s the closest road, cutting through the swamp?” Rick asked, chucking his backpack in the bed of the truck and scrubbing at his face to wake himself up. Fucking focus, Grimes. 

“There’s the main tractor road just South of us,” Dale told him, stepping out onto the gravel and walking up to the panicked deputy. “It cuts right to the backwoods turn-off-”

“-by the entrance to the Greene farm, I know where he’s going,” Rick said in a rush, turned and ran for the swamp. Pushing past the barrier of humidity and entangled branches, and slipping in between the trees with an urgency that wrapped around his chest like vines. His footfalls found the rhythm that used to run through his blood, thundered against the ground in time with his racing heart, panted breath steady but quick and pushing him further faster. Farther. Deeper into the wilderness as wet and hot as he ever remembered from his childhood. Damp and clinging to his skin and clothes, seeping into him and trying to all-encompass the man who had escaped it for six solid years. 

Every inch of the swamp looked the same, flying by him as he tried to gain as much ground as possible in the direction he hoped would lead him straight to the turn-off road. Once he did, he could make it back in less than 20 minutes if he kept running. Or - if he kept going the same way Daryl did, as the crow flies and through the dense forest - he could make it in 10. 

Breaking out of the treeline on to the tractor road was like jumping into a river, cold and chasing breath from his lungs, but Rick didn’t stop his momentum. Crashing back into the woods on the other side of the road, and picking back up the pace he didn’t dare to abandon. He hadn’t been checking for signs that Daryl was going the same way. Even after all the weeks and months of tracking lessons from years ago, where Rick spent more time looking at Daryl than the ground, Rick knew he wouldn’t be able to pick up any trace with his head still spinning like it was. Reeling from what they heard, from Daryl’s outburst, and from his quiet crumble into whatever trance had captured him back in Dale Horvath’s RV.

Everything was so fucked up, Rick hadn’t in his wildest dreams even come close to guessing the truth.

Dale hadn’t wanted to say everything outright, shame and guilt of his failure turning his words into sparse descriptions. He’d focused on the parts that were important to him: the case driving him into the ground, his wife’s cancer, how he couldn’t get anyone to talk to him about what happened. That everyone knew, and no one would speak of the events leading up to the fire. But Rick was putting the facts in neat rows, and plucked out the important parts to them - to him and Daryl. Even as he ran like his life depended on it.

Daryl’s mother used to do what Daryl did now, but for the whole town. The good people of White Oak, honest-to-goodness Christians that they were, would never admit they had something like Trisha Dixon at their beck and call. To fix their problems, bless them with some supernatural amount of good luck, or who fucking knew what else - but as soon as the fires destroyed half the town in 1979, they turned on her.

Rick didn’t understand that part. The older man had said that the fires continued in 1980 and no one knew why, unnatural fires that didn’t start because of a draught or a lightning storm. That was why they turned their backs on her, the superstitious pricks probably thought that it was God trying to punish them for accepting a heathen pagan. But it couldn’t be just that.

Would they really go that far? After the church burned, would that have been the final straw? Rick could see a vast majority of the picture now, the horrifying truth of what was dragging this godforsaken town down into the depths of hell, but there were still pieces missing. 

What would convince a whole town of God-fearing people to burn a woman in her own home? 

Like it’s the damn Dark Ages. What did they think they would accomplish? That’s what Dale had said, and Rick felt cold fear trickle down his neck. This wasn’t the 1800’s, they couldn’t just ‘burn the witch’.

Good God, that’s exactly what they did.

Rick was going to throw up. He stumbled into a tree, hitting it hard and bracing himself as his heart hammered right up into his throat and he retched - bent over and trying to breathe. Fuck, he couldn’t stop, he had to keep moving. He couldn’t lose Daryl. Rick pushed himself off the moss covered trunk, put one foot in front of the other laboriously, and continued until his rhythm found itself once more. 

He had to get to Daryl, he had to get him to pause and fucking talk to him! Neither of them could do this alone, and Rick would fight tooth and nail before he let Daryl push him out again. Rick couldn’t even figure out what their next move should be, not until he knew where Daryl’s head was at. What he was focusing on in all this. Rick had his facts, but Daryl had a decade worth of lies and betrayals to sift through, and a dead mother who hadn’t died by her own hand - shit, that’s what everyone had been telling him for years. He had always said his mother burned down their house, fell asleep in bed with a lit cigarette, that she liked her wine a little too much. 

Those aren’t the words of a 7-year-old boy. 

That was what a grown up would say, to explain an accident that wasn’t an accident. The whole town knew. That meant all of them were guilty. No one had told Daryl what happened even as an adult. They had ostracized him his entire life, and it wasn’t just because of the bullshit prejudice that ran like a vein through the whole county. Rick bet they all couldn’t even bare to look at Daryl Dixon as a child, knowing what they did. 

His whole life, Daryl had thought everyone hated him on principle. For being a Dixon. For being white trash. For who his father was and who he was supposed to turn into. But it hadn’t been that, not entirely. They had all lied to him, everyone in town, the teachers at school, his neighbors, his Pa, his brother- Merle.

“Fuck,” Rick cursed out loud and began to run again. He’d cut right past the turn-off road and was still in the swamp, the trees all looking the same until they didn’t. He knew this corner of the woods like the back of his hand. “DARYL!” he shouted, the sound barely passing the few trees around him, muffled by foliage and damp. Then he saw movement ahead, and hope quickened his pace.

“Daryl, slow down!” 

[mad4turtles]

One Piece ~ “Who Let the Choppers Out?”

To the lovely anon who requested a ‘army of Choppers’ fic, here you go! Sorry to keep you waiting, and I hope you like it. It’s a little short, sorry, but I liked the way it ended XD

 “Sanji, can I have one of those sweet apples please?”

The cook couldn’t hold bck the smile that crossed his face at the beloved voice of their little doctor, their youngest crew mate, and he turned from washing the dishes to the reindeer in question. “Knock yourself out, buddy,” he said, and the way the kid’s face lit up like a sky full of fireworks warmed Sanji’s heart as he plucked an apple from the fruit bowl and handed it to Chopper.

“Thanks, Sanji!” Chopper giggled, already crunching on the apple as he trotted out of the kitchen, his satisfied munching fading as he shut the door behind him. Sanji smiled in that direction for a time before returning to the kitchen, plunging his hands into the soapy waters to finish of the last few dishes left from breakfast.

As much as he griped and bitched about the amount of noise and mess the idiot trio were prone to make on a daily basis, not even Sanji was immune to the childlike innocence and kindness of their reindeer doctor (and all of them were infinitely blessed to know that hadn’t changed much even after two years apart), and more often than not he would treat the kid almost as good as he treated the lovely ladies of the crew – almost. He wasn’t sure if it was the big brown eyes that did or the fact that he was just that much younger than the rest of them that he couldn’t help it. Chopper was a lot like Luffy in that regard…

“Hiya, Sanji!”

Sanji blinked, perplexed, and turned to look down as Chopper entered the kitchen again. The little guy was beaming up at him with all the warmth in the world, hooves behind his back, the picture of innocence. Oddly enough there was no trace of the apple he’d taken, and those were the sweet apples; Chopper loved sweet things, liked taking his time with them, and to see it gone so quickly was a little odd.

Hm. Oh well, Chopper was probably peckish, needed to peel his sweet tooth a little before lunch. Sanji didn’t mind, as long as he didn’t make himself sick in doing so.  

“Hey, Chopper. You’re back quick,” Sanji said, drying his hands on the towel he’d placed on the counter beside his growing pile of clean dishes. “You need something else, bud?”

Chopper tilted his head, fuzzy brow raised. “’Something else’?” he repeated. “I haven’t been in here since breakfast.”

Sanji’s brows furrowed. “…you were literally just here, like, three seconds ago.”

Chopper blinked. “I was? Oh, that’s strange. I don’t remember coming in here...” he trailed off, eyes darting to the side in thought.

Sanji frowned, just as confused as his little friend but for, apparently, vastly different reasons. “Well, you were. You feeling okay?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah I’m fine!” Chopper replied, back to his chipper self in an instant as he rocked back and forth on his hooves. “It’s nothing, probably just one of those things where you walk into a room and forget what you were gonna do, right?”

Still a little mystified but glad nothing was wrong, serious or no, Sanji chuckled and smiled. “Yeah, I hear you. You want another apple then? You finished the last one pretty quickly.”

At that, Chopper’s eyes lit up like one of Franky’s radical beams. “Oh yesyesyesyes, please!” he squeaked, and Sanji couldn’t fight the grin as he handed the furry bouncing ball of joy another apple. The reindeer munched on it happily, trotting back out the door with a wave and a “Thanks Sanji!” before disappearing from the galley again. Sanji watched him go and shook his head fondly.

Chopper was a weird one – hell all of them were weird, like captain like crew after all – but Sanji knew they would never get enough of him.

He’d just turned back to the counter to put away the dishes when the doors of the galley burst open, cracking against the wall and making Sanji nearly jump and drop a whole stack of plates – thank god for his incredible reflexes. He opened his mouth to shout at the rude intrusion but stopped short when he looked down to find –

Chopper was back. Again.

This time however, the teen was panting fiercely, eyes wide and electrified with anxiety as his arms flapped wildly at his sides. “Sanji, Sanji I gotta ask you something, something really important!”

Sanji blinked again, slowly setting the plates down safely. Now he was worried. “What is it, Chopper? You finally remember what you came for? You’ve been in and out of here, like, twice already.”

Chopper froze mid flap and he blanched, his mouth falling open. “I –I was…here…already?” he stammered, a hoof slowly rising to hover over his mouth in what looked like growing horror. “Was – Was I really here a few seconds ago?”

Completely and hopelessly confused beyond hope, Sanji looked Chopper straight in the eye, and nodded very slowly. “Yes. Yes you were. Twice.”

A high-pitched squeak escaped the reindeer, and his eyes enlarged to an almost humorous degree. “Oooohh nooooo,” he wailed quietly, and to Sanji’s horror his eyes started pooling with tears. “What have I doooone ~?”

“Chopper,” Sanji knelt down in front of Chopper, hands gently grasping the kid’s shoulders. “What’s wrong? What did you do?”

Chopper sniffed, and he well and truly looked like he was about to start sobbing and Sanji wasn’t entirely confident he could deal with a sobbing Chopper right now. “I…I-I…I was w-working on m-my r-rumble balls a-again, a-a-and there w-was an explosion and I…and I –“

“SANJI GET OUT HERE RIGHT NOW!”

Both the doctor and the chef jumped in fright at Usopp’s frantic call from the galley’s doorway. Said sniper was out of breath, sweating, his hat askew and his thick, black mane of hair free from its band, fingers gripping the doorway enough to almost splinter the wood. “W-we’ve – we’ve got a situation here!” he cried. “It’s – it’s crazy, it’s impossible and I barely escaped with my life –“

“I’m kind of in the middle of a situation right here, Usopp!” Sanji barked with a nod down to Chopper, still sniffling under Sanji’s hands. “Unless it’s a raid or something what could you possibly need me for –?”

“There’s an army of Choppers outside!”

Sanji stared at Usopp. Usopp, still panting a little and pale as a dead man, stared back.

Sanji’s eyes drifted down to the Chopper he held, lingered for a moment, and then returned to Usopp.

“You’re kidding.”

Usopp shook his head, swallowing thickly. “I’m really not. There is a freaking Chopper Army out on the deck right now and Sanji I physically cannot deal with this –“

Scooping up a tearful Chopper – one, apparently, out of many – Sanji bolted to the door, nearly knocking Usopp over in the process, and the cook charged to the deck praying to every god out there that Usopp was pulling his leg…

Only to skid to and unsteady stop seconds later, his visible eye popping from its socket and his jaw slack as a flat tire. He stared. And stared. And stared.

“What. The. Hell.”

Sanji couldn’t believe what he was seeing, didn’t want to believe it and yet there it was, clear as daylight and sure as the sky was blue and the ocean was wet.

There were at least twenty-nine Choppers milling about the deck. Twenty-nine Choppers, not including the one Sanji had tucked in his arms against his chest blubbering about ‘explosions’ and ‘chemicals gone screwy’ and ‘I’m so sorry I messed up’, which meant in total, there were Thirty Choppers on board the Thousand Sunny.

Luffy had gathered a good few of them together, ten at least, and was crying with laughter as they pounced and bounced and attacked him with hugs and affectionate nuzzles; the captain was writhing on the grass with mirth, so unbelievably happy under the masses of Chopper clones that the sight was almost cute if not for the fact that there was more than one Chopper.

Franky was surrounded by at least three of them, climbing all over his armored self and crowing with excitement over the ‘super’ robot guy; said guy was grinning madly, striking his signature pose.

Nami was surrounded by five Choppers nearby the figure head, all of them bouncing and pleading with Nami to give them some of her tangerines or show them some tricks with her Clima-Tact, and the poor young woman was clueless as to what the hell she was supposed to do, looked downright disturbed, and she looked every which way to find someone to back her up.

With their combined efforts, Brook and Robin managed to put six of them to sleep – Brook was playing a soothing version of Bink’s Brew on his violin, and Robin sang along, using her angelic voice to put the reindeer clones under within seconds; she held two of them on her lap, the others piled around her feet like kittens, and the raven-haired archaeologist didn’t seem all that fazed by the whole ordeal.

And then there was the moss-head, sleeping under the shade of the tree, surrounded by the last few Chopper clones; one of them dozed peacefully on Zoro’s lap, another on his head, leaving the others to either doodle on his face with Usopp’s painting set or read a book beside him. Sanji noticed two of them were eating apples.

Sanji stared at the scene laid out before him, various Chopper sounds – be it laughter or excited shrieks or snoring or otherwise – reaching his ears, and the only thing he could say, the only words he could physically conceive to describe the sheer insanity that had happened upon their ship in the middle of nowhere on the seas of the New World was –

“I’m gonna need more sweet apples.”

[laylawolfwind]

Would you tell us more about the story of the birds along your walks?

You bet your ass I can cause it’s still something I am trying to figure out and maybe some peeps can help me out. So sit down and listen to my story of how I think I accidentally brought some kind of cryptid/spirit/demon home with me.So I lived north of Timmins (Ontario) for most of my childhood and I was always surrounded by nature, I was always outside and we had lots of trails I could wander on endlessly and my mom never really cared where I went only that I took my bear mace and was home before dark.When I was about 10 I found a dead crow on one of my walks. It was laying in the middle of the trail I was walking on that went to a hunting camp so I scooped it up (I thought it was sad just laying there in the sun) took it to a shady little spot slightly off the trail and was gonna leave it there. I was super into mythology at the time and remembered a coin was required to pay the toll of Charon the ferryman. So I ran home, grabbed a handful of foreign coins from my coin collection and hauled ass back to the bird. I left the coins on the bird (one on each partially outstretched wing, three on the body and one in the beak) and picked some chicory flowers to lay around the body. Then I carried on my merry way and thought nothing else of it.After that I started finding more birds. They were always slightly off the path, or in the backyard under a bush, or somewhere not quite in my path yet I always managed to spot them. I started taking them to the same place, a little patch of particularly mossy and damp land that a creek split around making a little island but the creek wasn’t much I could step right over it to get to this spot. It had big trees and a fence cut through the middle (a deer got stuck trying to jump it once, I had to go get my step dad to put it down though because by the time I found it it’s belly was all opened and it was almost dead already) BUT ANYWAYS I used to bring my birds I found there. Random flowers would be laid with it, and random foreign coins. If it’s any significance the coins were mostly European of some sort and the flowers usually chicory or ditch lily. I think the lilies were technically tiger lilies? We called them ditch lilies lol. But I would always bring them here as it wasn’t far from my home. I moved out at 16 and moved to Kingston to live with my dad.As usual, a dead bird popped up on the driveway. Mom scooped it up with the shovel and tossed it in a garbage bag. That’s when stuff started happening at home.Mom found one of the chickens up in a tree, a branch stuck right through it pinning it to the tree 7-8ft up the trunk. The creek I mentioned before went absolutely rancid. Everyone assumed somewhere upstream either the beavers mucked something up or something big died and was spoiling the water because all the fish, frogs and life just disappeared. No more herons, cattails were just dead reeds. Some scary shit. The fiddle heads stopped growing across the road when they used to grow for 2-3 months past their usual season. Purple Loosestrife took over EVERYTHING. Choked out all the lilies and chicory and other flowers. A tree fucking fell on the house, huge cherry tree. She started losing chickens in the night (she assumed it was raccoons), she started hearing screaming and my step dad shrugged it off and told her “rabbits scream when they die, a coyote must’ve got one” plus she had a scary encounter with raccoons showing rabies symptoms twice. Animal control scooped them away she didn’t hear much from it but they’d start dropping those rabbies vaccine pellets more often. She started sending my little brothers out with walkie talkies and they had to check in every 30min and couldn’t go out of the walkie talkie range alone. She was feeling it. She knew something was up but I never really told her about the birds so I guess it’s kinda my fault?Plus I left home on bad terms so I had no contact with her and knew NOTHING about all this happening until we started patching things up. I went up to visit for two weeks and a bird hit the window while I was walking to the house. I scooped it into the garden and did some visiting before I told her I wanted to go explore the old trails I really missed nature from living in the city. She made me take a walkie talkie and told me the rules and I laughed, I thought she was just paranoid.So I take the bird to it’s usual spot (it was a boat tailed grackle) and the usual ritual takes place. I had a few quarters and there were some flowering strawberry plants so I made due. The moss was dried up, the creek smelt disgusting, but the trees were still relatively healthy. Not covered in boils like the ones in moms backyard anyways. I sat for a moment with the bird, and saw one of the old coins on the ground and like a goddamn idiot….. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. I went back to mums, had a good visit, heard of all the plights of the local area with wide eyes, and went home a few weeks later.Mom tells me the Purple Loosestrife barely came back after a particularly tough winter and the fiddle heads were there for harvest time come spring. Her chickens are healthy, raccoons are being normal little pests but only mucking with the compost. The boys still have to take walkie talkies lol.And here I am, finding dead birds almost everyday and too fucking scared to take this coin out of my pocket and I take it with me everywhere. It’s harder to take the birds to a specific location so now I just leave a coin or two on the birds body. If no one is looking I will try and move it to a grassy patch but it’s the city and there are always people watching. I also take a feather from each bird and I intend to take the pile of feathers to the grassy patch nears moms next time I visit.I did run onto the road once between traffic to grab a chickadee, I walked past it but felt nauseous down the road and turned around. I found a robin on the side of the road royally screwed up but still alive and sat with it in my hands till it died telling it of all the lovely things it will see in the summer if it gets better. I laid that one to rest in a random garden since it was 6am and no one would see me. Idk I have lots of “I found a dead bird” stories and I feel people shouldn’t have this many “I found a dead bird” stories lmao.It’s not so much crows and starlings now it’s pigeons and small songbirds. But still, I keep a tally and since January 1st I have found 15 dead birds wherever I go.So there you are anon, a not-so-brief telling of my uncanny ability to find dead birds thanks to some kind of……. non-human?