#(i definitely remember him having it broken in the slat fight) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dindooku · 4 years ago

Text

rating: E (swearing and violent themes)

word count: 6,572

tw - not explicitly said but can be interpreted as at suicide

And you thought that suddenly waking up on a planet in another Galaxy, only to be accompanied by a space wizard…a Jedi…was the greatest thing ever. Oh no… you were wrong. Granted, that was all great and everything, but it was no match for the fact that you were granted a lie in — a grand one at that.

You can’t remember the last time you let your body wake you up, not an incessant alarm clock or the hailing of bullets. It was weird, but definitely not un-welcomed.

You rolled over to face away from the wall, yawning and grumbling as the hands of sleep slowly lifted their trance. Slowly blinking open your eyes, you suddenly jolt up, remembering where you are, then crying out a curse at the now, new forming lump on the top of your head from the ceiling you’ve just head-butted. “Fuck—,” you mumble as you slowly roll out of bed, lightly rubbing your hand at the sore spot on the back of your head. You take a glance at your watch, 11:13 AM. Jesus, I really must've been tired. Placing your feet on the floor, you flex your toes and submit to the urge to stretch, grumbling again as the aches and pains of years of warfare click and pinch your body. You decide to wrap yourself up in the blanket Obi-Wan had given you as you trudge out into the front room.

But, it was empty, no sign of life. Surely Obi-Wan would’ve told you if he was going out, or leaving you? Either way, you make your way over to the fridge, hoping to find some scraps to munch on.

A sandwich catches your attention, and you quickly wolf it down without question. If it was Obi-Wan’s, you’d just make him another. He’d understand.

Peering around the room again, you test your voice, “Obi-Wan?” Nothing, “Obi-Wan, are you here?” Again, silence. Assuming he’s gone out, you decide it's probably best you get some fresh air, you’ve never been one for sitting around and doing nothing, so you quickly get dressed into a fresh set of clothes and head out into the temple.

Although you’d never been to a Monk temple or anything grandiose like that, you could only assume that this is what it would be like. The halls were quiet, but the occasional patter of footsteps or rage of children laughing broke the silence and tickled that sense of security that so deeply hides away in your chest. You aren’t used to being so…relaxed. For years your body has been on high alert, always assessing, reassessing, waiting for someone to attack you, to hurt you — yet here... you don’t even have to give defending yourself a passing thought. It’s just, completely and utterly calm, serene, balanced.

Before you know it, you’ve paced the halls for the last half hour and now you are stood outside some set of what appears to be... Dojos?

Glancing around again to make sure no one is watching, you gently place a hand on one of the doors, slowly edging it open. You chance a peek inside, but to your satisfaction, it is empty. You quietly step in, making sure not to make any noise as you close the door behind you. Stepping into the room, it is clear that it is some sort of training area, and upon further inspection your suspicions are correct. Around the edge of the room lay different pieces of equipment, which look like obstacles of sorts. You glance back around the Dojo, basking in the natural light that is pouring in through the high windows. The simple, creamy white walls are sturdy, but don’t feel overbearing, or claustrophobic — like before, it's just peaceful in here.

Letting your gaze roll over the room, you come across a cupboard in one corner. Making your way over, you make note of the soft floor beneath you, the cushiony fabric lightly hugging the soles of your feet, dreamlike. Reaching into the cupboard, you’re quickly met with the familiar array of weapons, although these are…different. Surrounding one edge, an array of combat and throwing knives sit comfortably among one another, along the other sits small staffs and odd-shaped objects you’ve never seen before. But in the middle sits a familiar sight, an odd, metal cylinder. Picking it up, you eye it for a second. It's constructed of metal and is about a hands length or two long. Along the bottom sits black, corrugated slats, and as you look up, a stainless steel-like tube makes up the main body to the top where it thins dramatically into a golden copper colour but is then fanned out into a large flat disk. In the centre of the cylinder, sits a red button. And, if you have ever learnt anything from horror or sci-fi movies, is that you should definitely not press the red button.

So what do you do?

You press the red button.

Instantly the room is filled with a violent blue and the electric hum of raw, static energy. The moment chills you to the bone, and the shock of such a marvellous, beautiful object stuns you. You absolutely, 100% could not have guessed that was what the red button would do. And, as if the inner child was pulling puppet strings within your mind, you slowly back up and wave the funny looking laser sword in front of you. The majestic hum of the blade tickles your eardrums, and you can’t help the intoxicating smile that is now riddling your face, scrunching at your forehand and around your eyes, the emotion of happiness and utter awe broadcasted by your innate reaction to such a feat of beauty.

You are transfixed.

But, you should know better, because as you turn around Obi-Wan is staring right at you — and he too is struggling to fight the fantastic grin gracing his face.

“So I see you’ve found my lightsaber,” he mutters.

“This..this is yours?” You whisper, still not taking your eyes off of the mesmerising blue blade.

“Yes, all Jedi have them, they’re called lightsabers. Unfortunately, I must ask for it back,”

“Yes, yes of course, sorry…I—I shouldn’t have touched it, I just, it—” you stutter out, trying to find a reason as to why you touched his stuff other than it looked cool.

“It’s quite alright, Darling, no need to panic,” he chuckles, reaching around you to switch it off so he could place it on his belt, “but I do believe we have some training to do, so…” he trails off, walking over to the cupboard to place the lightsaber back onto its stand, as well as removing his cloak, placing it neatly on the floor. He walks back over to you and places a hand on your shoulder. “Are you ok, my dear?” He asks, genuine concern now threatening to take over his grin.

“Yes…yes, I—I’ve just never seen anything like it. Its—,”

“Beautiful. I know,” he mumbles, giving your shoulder another tight squeeze to reiterate his point, “But, right now, I need to see you fight,” he says, quickly stepping back and getting into a ready position.

“…Fight, you want to, to fight me?” You ask, not quite sure whether he is joking or not.

“Yes, Dear. Loth-Cat got your tongue?” He chides, a smidge of sarcasm lacing his words.

Oh, ok, he wants to play.

“Are you sure? I don’t want to hurt you,” grinning back, you take a step back and calm yourself, standing broad and powerful.

“Hurt me? You could never, darling I’m a Jedi—”, But before he could finish his sentence, you’ve landed a nice, heavy thud of a kick to his chest, which sends his falling onto his back. That's odd, he thinks, I should be able to feel when she’s about to do something, I…what? Obi-Wan is visibly confused, and so you stop and crouch to the ground instantly, patting down his chest to make sure you weren’t too heavy-footed to start off with.

“I—I'm sorry, I shouldn’t have done that,” you say, panicking a little as you pat him down, checking for injuries or any broken bones.

“No—no, it’s me, I--I got distracted,” he mutters, still slightly put out at his inability to use the Force to predict your actions.

“No, I shouldn’t have—” but before you could finish, he’s gripped you by the ankles and is rolling you onto your back. Instantly you roll onto your front and scramble forwards, turning around as you both ready yourself into your respective fighting stances. Again, Obi-Wan lunged at you, but this time you dropped down, kicking your right leg out to trip him from behind. As he fell he grabbed your collar, bringing you down on top of him so that now you were straddling his hips. But, niceties aside, you were in full combat mindset and you were out to win — your body had trained for this for years, and every move was now muscle memory, you were practically a war machine now, designed and manipulated to kill.

So, you braced to the side, jumping back up again to the other side of the room. Obi-Wan followed suit, except — wait. His belt was gone, where…you had it. You had your right hand wrapped a couple of times in a loop, and your left was tightly gripping it as if it were a whip. And that's exactly what you intended to use it for.

Flicking your right wrist, you shot the harsh leather belt out, cracking it just a few centimetres away from the skin on Obi-Wan’s forehead, only then pulling it back, snapping it taut. The toothy grin that pinched at Obi-Wan's eyes didn't put you off like it should've, and instead had the complete and opposite effect, shooting a wildfire of intense heat surging to your core. You were enjoying this way too much, and by the looks of it... so was Obi-Wan, though he'd never admit it. So, you'd use this to your advantage, cracking the belt a couple more times, letting the buckle ting and snap at the pull of your wrist. It kept him at bay for a few moments, but only briefly. Eventually, he lunged forwards, aiming to land a punch as he bound towards you, but you twisted to the side, wrapping his wrist in his own belt. He twisted around, not hesitating to throw a punch to your right cheek. You should’ve expected that, you did just threaten to whip the man, but nonetheless, the thrill of a hard punch to your jaw woke you up. No stupid mistakes. The anger at your mistake was now bubbling, so you quickly wrapped the retreating hand he’d used to punch you into the belt, binding his wrists to yours. He let out a sarcastic chuckle as the realisation hit him — but so did you, both of you reaping the benefits of your...interaction. The smirk on your face grows a little wider now, the true fun only just beginning.

You shifted your weight harshly to the left, throwing him in a 180 to disorient and gain momentum. You then dropped to your knees, only to then twist and bring your entwined wrists above your head and then yanking hard, down over your right shoulder, bringing him onto his back; his head now facing you as his body was strewn away from your thighs. You quickly unwind his wrists, forcing the belt down over his neck to strangle.“Tiger got your tongue, Master?” The satisfaction in your voice over the play on words was clear. Oh, you loved proving people wrong, especially when they pretty much do it for you.

He gently patted your wrist to tap out, and you released him from the hold. Choking a little, he sits up and crosses his legs as he turns to face you, encouraging you to follow suit and do the same. You now both sat cross-legged opposite each-other, knees just lightly touching.

“Where did you learn to do that?” He asked, rubbing slightly at his neck, still grinning despite the discomfort.

“I—I had to learn it myself. In the army, you see, I was the only women in my training battalion, so I was always pitted to fight and train against men, who, if you take a look at me, were typically a lot larger and stronger than me — physically. So, to give myself a fighting chance, I had to play their weaknesses to my advantage,” you said, smiling a little towards the end.

“Go on,” Obi-Wan encourages.

“Well, typically the men would think that they’re going to win, simply because I’m a woman and they’re bigger or stronger than me, but I’m a lover of physics, so I used that to my advantage. They weren’t especially quick or agile, and often they relied on their brute strength to win fights — that's only so good if you can actually land a punch,” you say, harbouring an infectious smug grin as Obi-Wan realised what you were saying.

“Smart girl,” he says, returning your smirk with an equally fictitious grin of his own. And at the use of his words, you blush a little, ducking your head in an effort to hide your quite clear arousal at the specific concoction of praise.

“Yes, well, I figured if I could avoid their punches and use their own weight against them, the odds were in my favour, you could say I would have the high ground... So, like when I took your belt, I used your momentum against you, which A, — means you end up on the floor or out of place, and B, — I use minimal energy to do so, harbouring your efforts to suit mine. It’s all just simple mechanics, really,” you joke, but pleased with your explanation.

“Good…again,” Obi-Wan says. And with that, you both spend the afternoon training, learning from one another, morphing and smelting your own techniques with his, and vice versa, to a point where you were working in complete unison.

_____

“Master Kenobi, you’re needed immediately in the Council Room, it is urgent—,” comes a voice, a smaller younger creature of sorts as they burst into the training room, catching you both off guard. They’re panting as if they’ve just finished running a marathon.

“Yes, yes, of course, I’ll be there right away. Thank you,” he commands, instantly retrieving his cloak and lightsaber from the cupboard. You follow his movements with your eyes, waiting for his instructions. He walks to the door and is halfway out when he stops, turning towards you.

“Well, come on! We can’t leave them waiting!” He says, waving his arm in a beckoning way to hurry you up.

_____

“Skywalker, you are to accompany Master Kenobi and Amy to the Mid-Rim planet to resolve the escalating tensions,” says Mace Windu.

“Go, you will,” Yoda confirms.

“Yes Masters, although, are we sure it is safe for Amy to be travelling with us?” Anakin asks.

“Trained, is she not, Master Kenobi?” Yoda asks, turning his head towards Obi-Wan.

“Yes, she is. It was evident from our training today that her skill set is…unique, and I feel as though the 501st and 212th will greatly benefit from her direction and expertise,” Obi-Wan assures.

“What do you mean unique, Master?” Anakin mutters, not bothering to hide the smirk on his face. And if looks could kill, Anakin would be facing an early grave as the sharpened daggers of Obi-Wan’s glare was enough to puncture even the most protected of souls.

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan starts, cursing the younger man with just the use of his name, “Amy is very skilled in combat, and I feel as though she has more to offer us than what we can offer her,” Obi-Wan punctuates.

“Yes, I am quite keen to see this style of fighting myself, Obi-Wan,” Mace says, rubbing his chin in thought, “Maybe even an incorporation of Vaapad could be organised,” He adds.

“I can ask, although I am sure there will be no objection, Master Windu,” Obi-Wan returns, nodding slightly at the offer. He knows Vaapad would be incredibly beneficial to not only your own fighting style but also that of Windu.

“Midichlorian count, know she does?” Yoda asks, changing the subject to something of more gravity.

“No, I—I have not broached that subject yet. Her energy in the force is something I have never experienced, Masters, as I am sure you can sense it too. I feel as though if we inform her of her abilities, we may not be able to offer the right support or, the fact of the matter being, we do not know what powers she does have,” Obi-Wan says gravely.

No one truly understands what is causing your disturbance in the Force to be so…unruly. They understand that the force is not necessarily embraced on Earth and that the human race is not Force-sensitive. But that does not explain your unique signature. It is not like the usual signature a Force-sensitive may harbour, which is outgoing and pure. Their signature reflects their emotion, their current state of mind. For Obi-Wan, it curls slowly in a smooth, milky cloud of crystalline and sea foamy blues, caressing his form with every breath. However, yours is almost…reversed. Like the light isn’t radiating out from you, but into you — as if you’re sucking in and absorbing the energy as you move. You’re not a vessel to the force, as one would normally expect, instead, you are a drain. And even though the Jedi are encouraged not to feel fear, it is unspoken among the Council members that their unease is not uncalled for. You are dangerous, unhinged, and they haven’t the faintest idea what to do about it.

“Talk to her, you must, important her understanding, it is — only problems it will cause, secrecy will. Trust you Obi-wan, she must,” Yoda says, and the council room is silent. Everyone is contemplating the potentialities of this arrangement, but if anyone were to calm and train the unpredictable nature that is Amy, then it is Obi-Wan; the great negotiator of the Republic.

“Yes, Master Yoda, I will see to it that we have this discussion. To add…what are we to do of her training? Must we teach her the way of the Jedi? She will have to face trials, and as we all know, she is not attuned to the Jedi way,” Obi-Wan asks.

“Hmm…” Yoda ponders, his ears dropping and his attention shifting elsewhere, deep in contemplation, “Meditate I will, future uncertain, it is,” He says. And with that, he bashes his stick to the ground and the meeting is adjourned.

_____

You’re waiting anxiously outside of the council chambers. You couldn’t necessarily hear what was going on inside, but the general energy was…stifling. It was tense, and more than one person was obviously displeased with the current situation. But, as the doors to the chamber swung open, it was quite apparent who was causing the tension.

Anakin and Obi-Wan storm off down one of the corridors, and though you know it is rude to spy in on conversations, you only wanted to see if there was any way you’d be able to help. That and the fact that you just couldn’t help yourself, the SAS recon training made your skin itch with the need to gather intel, so, you silently watched from afar, keeping enough distance to make sure they couldn’t see you, but just close enough so you could listen in.

“What kind of nonsense is this, she is not trained in the form of Jedi, she will get killed out there, Obi-Wan!” Anakin boomed, his frustration clear.

“She is more than capable of handling herself, Anakin, trust me when I say that she will not be easily intimidated,” Obi-Wan instructed, placing a hand on Anakin’s shoulder, bringing them to a halt just next to a pillar.

“Yes, Obi-Wan, I understand, but she has no idea what she is getting herself into, she’s from another Galaxy for Maker’s sake! Think master, if she is to come with us, she must know,” Anakin demands. Know what?

“Anakin, I know. I do not feel comfortable bringing her along with us on this mission either, but her skill set is unmatched - she has experience beyond her years and her expertise could be game-changing!” Obi-Wan pleads, shaking the hand that is gripping Anakin’s shoulder.

“Game-changing yes, but she isn’t a Jedi, Master—how can we trust her?” Anakin whispers, he knows he is asking dangerous questions, but he cannot rid the fact at hand, you’re dangerous, and he doesn’t want to trigger a chain of unfortunate events which, he feels, the two of them will not be able to control.

“Anakin, please, she must come with us. This is a test of sorts, we must see what she is capable of so that we can react accordingly. Keeping her locked up in the temple will not solve the problem, only make it worse. We must realise her potential before it becomes unhinged,” Obi-Wan mutters. Unhinged…potential? What are they on about?

“Master, with all due respect, I do not feel comfortable fighting alongside a ticking time bomb,” Anakin snarls, his brows furrowing at the idea.

“Anakin, I do not appreciate your tone. She is not as dangerous as you are making her out to be, your ill-received emotions will only make things worse. You must have faith in me, young one. We must trust in the Force, she was brought to use for a reason,” Obi-wan insists, lining his voice with a bit more force this time, making sure his point comes across.

“I suppose you’re right Master…but that doesn’t mean I am comfortable with this, she still has—negative potential,” Anakin whispers, removing Obi-Wan’s hand from his shoulder and turning to step away, “I just hope you’re prepared to do what is necessary if she were to Fall, Obi-Wan,” Anakin mutters before completely turning away and leaving Obi-Wan alone in the hallway. His shoulders slump, and you notice that this is the stance of a beaten, conflicted man.

Without wanting to startle him, you slowly make yourself known to the outside world as you cautiously step into the hallway, bringing Obi-Wan’s attention to you.

You can practically feel the tension rolling off of him, and if the look on his face didn’t say anything, you knew that Obi-Wan Kenobi was in need of a hug. You slowly strode up to him, maintaining the soft, but stern eye contact to make sure that he stood in place and just as you were within reaching distance, you grabbed him, pulling him into your arms and wrapping him tightly in your presence. You tucked your head into his chest and listened to the slowly decreasing beat of his heart. He tripped back a little, and a small gasp left his lips, but just as quick as he had moved back, he moved twice as quick into your embrace, tucking his head down and into your shoulder.

Obi-Wan knew this was wrong. He knew he shouldn’t be seeking console in others, and that as a Jedi he should release these feelings of anger and frustration to the Force, not rely on the comfort of others. But it just felt so good to be in your arms, and for you to be in his. He’d not felt the warmth of a hug in too long, and since Satine, he never trusted himself to ever let go if he found himself in one again — and he supposes now that he should have listened to himself because, as time slowly moves on, his resolve on letting go of you is quickly wearing thin. He chastises himself for being so open and flirtatious, for insinuating plainly devilish intentions, intentions he is not sure he will ever be able to allow to come to fruition, intentions he wants but knows he cannot get.

“Obi, talk to me,” and that just about cuts it. The sweet, muffled voice grabs him by the heart and corners him — the empty, hollow shell of his capacity to care and love others is now being forced open and the sand timer has started ticking. He knows now it’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when. And that realisation alone terrifies him. He can’t lose another, he can’t go through that pain again. Too many times has the sand vial been broken, and too many times has it been hurriedly repaired and glued together, only for the missing pieces to allow sand to trickle out and collect in pools, sinking into hollow feelings of despair and loneliness. But now, you’re here, and the tighter you squeeze, the less sand falls from his grip. And so, he understands, it’s you that is keeping him together, it’s you that is allowing his version of time to return to normal, to reverse the entropy of darkness threatening to consume his soul.

“I—I feel so conflicted Amy,” Obi-Wan mutters.

“I, I think you know what you need to do, and I think you know that you need to be a bit lighter on yourself, to trust your instincts a bit more,” you say, trying to reassure him that his feelings are not invalid, “Sometimes, Obi, following the rules isn’t always the right thing to do. We learnt this the hard way on Earth, we all flocked like sheep to cater the needs of those who demanded it, instead of looking at the bigger picture and fixing the problem at hand. You are a wise man Obi-Wan, and I have complete faith in whatever decisions you make, you must let go Obi-Wan, let go of the feelings that plague you so new ones can heal you,” And you punctuate your meaning by squeezing just that little bit tighter.

Obi-Wan sighs, you were right. He had to let go of those past feelings and focus on the bigger picture. Grieving is a natural part of life, but the whole purpose of grieving is to feel and let go. Holding onto the past will only suppress the future, and he knows what he must do, he knows what is right, he just hopes that he has the strength to do it.

You tug on Obi-Wan a little tighter again, before letting go. You move your head from his chest, but bring your gaze back up to him, holding onto both of his biceps, you sigh, “I’ve never been one for politics Obi-Wan, but I have spent my fair share working under those that rule. You have a choice in this, I did not have that luxury. Do what feels right, do what brings you comfort, do not sacrifice your own needs for the needs of others who would not return the favour to you. Sometimes... you have to be selfish.” You finish.

Obi-Wan lifts his head and just stares at you. Everything you said was exactly what he needed to hear, exactly what he’d been telling himself but refusing to believe. But, because the words came from you, unprompted and honest, he must do his duty and believe them. Yes, he must do what feels right. But what he feels right now is definitely not what he should be thinking, as his attention finds itself upon your lips.

He’s drawn like a ship in a Tracta beam, he can’t look away. He wants so badly to kiss you, to take that pretty mouth of yours for himself. He wants so badly to show you how he feels, to show his hidden, deep desires to seek pleasure in you.

And you gaze up at him, following his attention and realising that he too is thinking what you’re thinking. Your heart is practically soaring right now. Never have you fallen so hard for someone, ever. You are just under some sort of spell, both of you frozen in time and not wanting to crank the lever to start it back up again; like entropy has met its equilibrium.

That's when you find yourself leaning up, pushing slowly on your tiptoes to meet the invitation of his lips. Except you can't, because Obi-Wan has stepped back, and has decided that now of all times is to fiddle with his belt and reach into his pocket and turn on his communicator.

Hurt doesn’t even begin to cover it.

You get the hint. He doesn’t want anything to do with you. He just wants to wind you up, make you believe he wants you, and then leave you hanging, each and every time. Well, you’re not falling for it again. You know your way back to your quarters, and you know its best if you just leave without saying anything, making your way back to the privacy of your bedroom to seethe there.

But you don’t. You’re pissed.

“Fuck you.”

Obi-Wan freezes mid-conversation with Cody, who was just prepping the ship for departure tomorrow morning. His gaze cuts to you, eyes now alight with something you’ve never seen before, a darkened, slow-burning fire that all but fuels your own anger.

“Pardon?” Obi-Wan replies, sternly, almost inaudible. But you hear him all right.

“I said, Fuck. You.” And you punctuate each and every syllable.

“Excuse me, Cody” Obi-Wan says, and closes the top on the holo-projection, although his stare has not left yours throughout this whole interaction. Your heart is thumping now, to the point you fear it may actually pop out of your chest and run down the hallways due to the stress. But you're not backing down. You’ve been in some of the most dangerous, stressful situations one can imagine, and you didn’t back down then, so there's no way in hell backing down now. But, before you have time to counter, Obi-Wan has grabbed you by the arm and is hauling you down the corridors of the Jedi temple. You protest but punching and pushing at his grip — but its unrelenting, and the two of you just scramble against each other until you are yet again at the door to his quarters. The door slides open and he yanks you in, and just as the door closes you let all of your unbridled rage rear its ugly head. You twist out of his grip and kick him into the wall, bridging a few feet gap between the both of you. He recovers and goes to grab you again but you stop him dead in his tracks.

A feeling you’ve never felt before, something foreign, but…intelligent, alive, and very, very powerful. It's coursing through your veins now and it’s almost blinding you, and the familiar buzz of static clouds your mind and brings dark spots to your vision, but you hold out, you’re not done yet. You throw a hand out in front of you, splaying your fingers and forcing your palm in his direction, channelling all your anger and hurt in his direction, pushing him back up against the wall. Obi-Wan gasps as he is shunted back, the air in his lungs knocked out from the sheer blunt shock of your reaction.

Next, you grip your hand into a tight fist, and slowly begin dragging it towards you. Obi-Wan begins to choke, not from strangulation, but instead from the agonising pain of the force within him being torn and ripped from his control. You hold him there, in this complete state of distress, teetering on the edge of both yours, and his own self-control.

“Don’t ever touch me like that again, do I make myself clear?” You growl, your voice wavering and flickering a harrowing tale of hurt and anger.

“Y—yes…” Obi-Wan breaths out, struggling against the lingering pressure on his chest.

“If you don’t like me, Obi-Wan, stop leading me on. It is cruel.” Snarling this time, your emotions twist into excruciating hurt, the power you harbour intensifying and magnifying the bleeding ache of rejection.

“It's not that I do—don’t like you…I—Jedi are not…attachment is forbidden” he chokes, and just like a switch, the rage dims and Obi-Wan drops to the floor, gasping for air. He clutches his chest, but the pain is not the lack of oxygen, but more so the sudden influx of the Force surging back into his body. Like pins and needles in a leg, or a cramp, the feeling that returns is not unwelcome, but it is painful to say the least, even if it be temporary.

And that's when you realise what exactly you’ve just done. The guilt is unparalleled. It doesn’t matter if it is forbidden or not, it's the fact that he said no, he pulled away, and that your initial reaction was to act like a spoilt child and throw a tantrum, a dangerous, uncontrollable tantrum. The rage from before has slowed its pace, and now the heavy, leaded guilt sinks you to the ground. You have never reacted like this before. You’ve always had a close relationship with anger, but you’ve never let it rule you; normally you would embrace it and use it to your advantage, only to let the emotion slip away when the time had passed. But for some inexplicable reason, the moment he rejected you, you saw red.

“I—I’m, sorry, Obi-Wan, I’m so—sorry, I don’t know what that is, I’m so so sorry, please—,” You mutter out, still stuck in place. You gaze down at your hands and flex your fingers. Never have you done anything like that. But that isn’t your main concern right now, Obi-Wan is. You did this, this was your fault, now fix it. “Please, let me help you, I—I didn’t—,”

“Darling, it's ok, just, please…manage your emotions. I feel I am partly to blame for this too, I—I must explain myself,” Obi-Wan assures as he pushes himself up off the ground, brushing down his garments as a nervous response to the tricky situation he now finds himself in. He looks up at you and immediately his heart sinks. Your eyes are red and puffy, cheeks stained with tears, and you’re visibly trembling. He knows he owes you an explanation for his behaviour at the very least, “Why don’t we go and sit down on the sofa and talk this out, hmm?” He says, bringing an arm out as he cautiously steps forward, ushering you over to the sofa. You both sit, except you take extra care to sit on the opposite side of the sofa, leaving as much space as you can between each-other. You don’t want to hurt him again, and now you don’t even trust yourself to keep a tap on your own emotions.

You tuck your hands underneath your ribs and wrap around yourself, curling in. You feel so small now, so weak and miserable, it’s embarrassing. This whole situation is a complete and utter fucking mess, you’re a mess, your life is a mess. But you’re broken out of your self wallowing by a gentle hand, a lifeline, courteous of the ever-generous Obi-Wan. He pulls the closest arm out from its grip around you and pulls, slowly encouraging you over towards him until eventually your head is resting on his lap and you’re laying out along the sofa. One of his hands sits along the upper part of your waist, where his thumb leaves small, comforting circles on your trembling ribs, whilst the other slowly soothes your hair in gentle, passive strokes.

Eventually, you’re calm enough to reason, and Obi-Wan breaks the silence.

“It is forbidden for Jedi to have attachment… attachment leads to feelings of anger and jealousy, and therefore to the Dark Side," Obi-Wan starts, but you cut him off.

"You don't have to explain yourself, it's ok, no means no and I'm sorry I read things wrong, and I apologise for my language, it was most rude of me to address you like that, especially whilst you were mid-conversation," you sniffle, trying your best to hide the cracks of nervousness in your words.

"Amy, it's...it's complicated. I accept your apology, although I am sure Commander Cody found it quite amusing--," but before he can comfort you, your heart drops. Oh shit.

"C--commander?" you mutter, hoping that you just heard Obi-Wan wrong and you didn't just swear in front of a senior ranking official.

"Yes, Commander," Obi-Wan reiterates.

Oh, Jesus Christ. You've really blown the boat out on this one, what a fucking idiot.

"I am so sorry, Obi-Wan, I--," you stop, not wanting to dig yourself into a hole you can't get out of. Maybe you should take Frankie's advice and just keep your mouth shut, "so much for a great first impression," you mutter out loud. You've completely blown it. The room falls silent now, and you slowly allow yourself to revel in the calming touch of Obi-Wan. You get it, he's just being nice, being the gentleman he has been born and raised to be -- but deep down you don't want things to be that simple; you want him to want you, you want these small actions and personal moments to have an ulterior motive; to be for you because he feels for you, not because it's the right thing to do, but because you want to feel worth something, to feel like a possession and not an object. You've been nothing but a number, a tool in the rigorous machine that is violent politics for over a decade now. You forbid yourself from luxuries like a social life or sentimental connections, but you're not home anymore, you're in a completely different Galaxy. But life is never fair you reason; because even though you're ready to start letting someone in, they are not even remotely interested in returning the gesture. It hurts, but when has life ever been anything but painful for you? Looking back on it, what has your life been? You spent all those years 'doing good' and serving others, only to never have others do good for you; what's the point in living life if it isn't even yours to enjoy?

Life is just a vicious cycle of hurt and regret, and now more than ever you wish you pulled your own trigger all that time ago.

Obi-Wan has been quiet for some time now, and, now you focus again on your physical body, you notice his hands have stilled, resting peacefully on your head and shoulder. You chance a look up to make sure he's ok, and you're glad you did because Obi-Wan's head was leaned over onto the side of the arm of the sofa, completely passed out from sleep. You couldn't help but smile at his peaceful form; a couple of unruly tendrils of golden strawberry blonde hair tickling his forehead, and the painful lines of stress melted away, giving in to the smooth, tranquil blanket of serenity. He truly was a masterpiece, and he didn't even know it. You knew this man didn't reciprocate his feelings to you, through either his own decision or that of the Jedi rulings, but it didn't mean you had to be cruel, so, you just relaxed, fully indulging in the company of one another in the seclusion of his apartment, away from prying eyes and judgement.

You could go through the hurt if it meant you could have more moments like this -- this was worth it. He was worth it.

#star wars #obiwan kenobi fanfic #obi wan fic #obi wan needs a hug #obiwan kenobi #obiwan fanfic #obi wan x oc #obiwan #obi wan fluff #obi wan fanfiction #ewanfuckinmcgregor #ewanmcgregor #ewan mcgregor

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writinginstardust · 6 years ago

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Love Me Not?

Pairing: Kaz Brekker x reader

Request: @x-avantgarde-x asked “Oh, hi! I wanted to request a Kaz X fem reader six of crows oneshot. After having broke up with Inej long ago Kaz and the reader start to build a relationship together, but Inej and Kaz remain having an amazing relationship, and whenever Inej is at Ketterdam they spent a lot of time together. This makes the reader really insecure and self conscious, and eventually Kaz and her have a conversation where she ends up opening to him.”

Warnings: minor injury

A/N: took a bit longer than planned due to a variety of reasons i’m not going into but here it is. it’s set several years after the end of Crooked Kingdom fyi. hope you like it darling! :)

Word Count: 2730

They'd broken up. They hadn't worked together. They weren't in love anymore. These were all things I knew but all certainties I struggled to believe as I watched Kaz and Inej embrace on the docks. They looked happy, so damn happy to see each other again after Inej had been away at sea for so long, and I felt an unpleasant tugging sensation in my stomach. I knew exactly what that tug was but it was ridiculous and i refused to name it. I wasn't even sure I had any right to feel it.

Kaz and I had never given a name to our relationship but we were more than just friends, much more. At least, I'd thought we were. Maybe he wasn't really over Inej even after almost two years. Maybe I'd read too much into every interaction and kind word. Maybe it was always meant to be Kaz and Inej not Kaz and me. Maybe that's why he'd never kissed me.

I pushed down my doubts as they walked towards me, arms slung around each other comfortably. It was a strange sight to see. When they'd broken up Kaz had still been somewhat uncomfortable with affection and contact. He could do it, I'd seen him and Inej hug and kiss and hold hands enough to know, but it hadn't felt natural for him. Seeing the ease compared to the last time they'd been this close was jarring. Knowing much of it had been thanks to my help wasn't an entirely pleasant feeling.

I plastered a smile on my face as they finally reached me and Inej pulled me into a hug. There was so much comfort in that embrace and it eased the ugly emotions clawing at my heart. She was one of my closest friends and i wasn't going to let anything spoil our reunion. Not the wind in the harbour chilling me to my bones, not the lingering stench in the air from who knows what, and certainly not my own insecurities.

“(Y/N), it's so good to see you! It's been too long. I can't believe I missed you by one day last time I came back.”

“I know, it's been far too long. I've missed you.”

“I've missed you too. We need to catch up tonight when we're done with whatever Kaz is dragging me off to do.” Well that was new information. He'd told me nothing about any plans with Inej so presumably I wasn't invited. It hurt to say the least.

“Absolutely, and none of the boys are allowed to join us. I need a break from them all.”

“I bet you do. The offer to join the crew still stands you know.”

“It is tempting sometimes but I'm not cut out for life at sea.”

“I'd have thought a little seasickness is easier to put up with than Mr. Grump over here.”

“I am not grumpy.” Kaz interjected with an eye roll.

“We weren't asking you. Anyway, let's get going, I need to get away from whatever this stench is.”

Inej kept us busy with stories from her latest voyage as we walked through the streets of the barrel and I had to admit I was a little in awe of all the things her and her crew had achieved. I could definitely understand why Kaz might still have feelings for her and I wished I could be anywhere close to how amazing she was.

When we reached the Slat I said my goodbyes and got a wave and smile from each of them before they dived right back into conversation, almost as if they'd immediately forgotten about me. Rather than going straight inside I watched them continue on their way for a bit. They were laughing and joking and touching each other casually. It was like they'd never even broken up.

With a defeated sigh I opened the door and walked into the chaos of the Slat. Someone, by the looks of things, had decided to start a fight. Whether it was amongst the members of the Dregs or someone from another gang had come to start shit with us, I didn't know. I just knew I was so not in the mood for it. I very nearly left them to it, they'd give up eventually, but they'd already caused enough damage and Kaz might kill me for letting them get away with it.

An elbow caught me in the stomach and a second in the eye and my my bad mood overflowed. I climbed onto one of the tables that had yet to be broken, an unloaded pistol in hand, and let off a couple of shots. Everyone quickly stopped in their tracks at the sound.

“Alright you rotten lot, I don't know what the fuck you think you're doing but you better knock it off right now!” I yelled, fixing them all with my deadliest glare. It rivalled some of Kaz's and I was very proud of it. “I don't give a shit who started this or why, Kaz and I will deal with that later, but you are all going to clean this mess up now. If it's not done by the time Kaz is back there will be hell to pay for all of you.” I moved to climb off the table and a few of the guys started to protest. “Don't start. I am not in the mood to deal with all of you today so if you want to keep your teeth shut up and get to work.”

I stormed off through the crowd, slightly pleased that everyone moved out of my way with no prompting, and headed up the stairs. I was more than ready for a nap. I paused half way and looked back down at where everyone had, thankfully, started to clear up.

“Oh one more thing,” I yelled down, everyone immediately turning their heads to look at me. “Keep the noise down. Wake me up and I might just kill you.”

It was long past dinner when I woke up, the protests of my empty stomach finally becoming impossible to ignore. I was a little surprised no one had woke me earlier, and by someone I meant Kaz. Then I remembered. Inej. Clearly they were still out doing who knows what. A stab of hurt and irritation hit me but I wisely chose to ignore it in favour of finding something to eat.

I found Jesper and Wylan in the Slat when I headed downstairs and did a double take. It was a rare occasion that they came around here anymore.

“(Y/N), hi!” Wylan grinned and waved when he saw me walking over.

“What're you doing here? I thought you'd be out with Kaz and Inej. We've been waiting for you all to get back.” Jesper gave me a quick hug and pulled up a chair for me.

“Thanks. Honestly, I've got no idea where those two are, they went off somewhere after we met Inej at the harbour.”

“You didn't go with them?” Wylan seemed surprised.

“I wasn't invited.” I shrugged, pushing down the hurt that tried to force its way up, and changed the subject to something much more important. “Have you guys eaten yet? I'm starving.”

“We haven't, you want to go get something?”

“Please.”

We left the overcrowded Slat and headed to one of Wylan's favourite restaurants, one I normally wouldn't be able to afford but wished I could. It was handy having a rich Merch friend sometimes.

I felt my mouth watering the second the scent of food met my nose and I couldn't wait to try whatever was making it. My appetite left suddenly, however, and was replaced by nausea when we entered. Kaz and Inej sat in a secluded corner eating and laughing and generally looking every bit the couple they'd once been, though admittedly a little fancier.

“I'm...I'm just...going to go. You two have a nice time.” I couldn't tear my eyes away from Kaz and Inej as I said goodbye to the boys and hurried away before I embarrassed myself doing something stupid like crying.

I went straight to my favourite waffle place and ordered my ‘I'm sad’ size stack which I drowned in syrup. That was where Kaz found me 20 minutes later. How, I wasn't sure, but I suspected Wylan or Jesper had picked up my feelings more than I'd intended.

“I wasn't aware you'd turned into Nina since this morning, should I be concerned about you stopping my heart anytime soon?” His voice came from behind me but I couldn't bring myself to turn and look at Kaz right then. Really I just wanted to be left alone but of course I wasn't going to get what I wanted.

“If only. Don't worry, you're safe from that particular end.”

“Good.” He walked to the other side of the table and sat down facing me, a concern so rarely seen written on his face. “Who gave you that?” His voice had hardened as he caught sight of the bruise blossoming around my eye.

“I don't know. They were having a fight in the Slat earlier and I got caught a couple of times before I could put an end to it.”

“Are you alright?” He reached out to brush his thumb over the injured patch of skin and I winced slightly before giving him a quizzical look.

“I'm fine, I've had worse. When did you become such a mother hen?”

“I haven't, I wouldn't care about pretty much anyone else.”

“I'm surprised you care so much about me.”

“Of course I care about you, why do you think I wouldn't?” He seemed genuinely surprised and a little bit hurt at what I thought. I didn't have an answer for him so I remained silent but that only seemed to concern him more. “(Y/N), you know how much you mean to me.”

“Do I though Kaz?”

It was his turn to be silent this time, unsure with how to proceed. He was far from the best at talking about feelings and this conversation was clearly tough for him. In the past I'd take pity and brush it off, change the subject and leave whatever it was unresolved but doing so was the problem, the reason this talk was even happening. I was tired of being uncertain and tired of letting Kaz not deal with his shit, we weren't kids anymore and this time we were going to talk it out.

“Do I?” I asked again. “Because as far as I can see I mean no more to you than Jesper or Wylan or anyone else you call a friend, even though your uncharacteristic worry right now would say otherwise.” I paused for a second, this was the tricky bit to actually vocalise. “I'm no one special, to you or anyone, not like Inej. She's amazing and talented and just so much better than I could ever be. I know I'm useful and one of only a handful of people you trust but I also know I'm replaceable. So I'm wondering why exactly you seem to care so much. Why you seem to care at all.”

He was silent for a little while longer, seemingly frozen by some emotion I couldn't figure out. I took a few more bites of my waffles while I waited for a reply.

“Is that how you really feel?” I nodded and he buried his head in his hands with a muffled curse. “(Y/N)..., none of that is true. None of it. You're not replaceable, you're so special and you mean more to me than anyone. I wouldn't be the man I am without you, surely you know that?”

“I know I've helped you a lot but anyone could ha-”

“No. There's no one else who could've done what you did, and some people did try. You're the only one I trusted, the only one I let my walls down for, the only one who wouldn't give up on me.”

“Inej wou-”

“Do you really think any of what Inej and I had would have happened without everything you did for me?” That was probably meant to make me feel better but it didn't really. Well actually...one word did.

“Had?”

“What?” He looked taken aback for a moment but it didn't take long for him to catch on. “Is that what all this is about? You think I still have feelings for Inej?” I focused very hard on my waffles suddenly.

“Well, don't you?” Kaz sighed and muttered something about being bad at this under his breath before scooting his chair closer to me and making me look up at him.

“(Y/N), I promise you, there's nothing between us anymore. Nothing. I thought that was obvious, that my feelings for you were obvious. I guess I'm just not the best at showing it.” I was a little surprised at just how tender he was being and, as he took my hands in his own and rubbed soothing circles with his thumbs, that surprise froze me in place. “Listen, I'm sorry if I've made you feel like you're not important to me because you are. You...are the most important thing in my life and I really thought you knew that. I'll do a better job at showing it from now on.”

“So you...uh, how...do you feel...about me...exactly?” I still wasn't entirely sure and, even if I thought I had an idea, I still needed him to say it.

“Well apparently it's obvious to everyone except you, but I love you (Y/N).”

“You do?” I could feel a smile working its way onto my face but I had to be absolutely sure.

“You know, when someone says ‘I love you’ it's usually polite to say it back.” He rolled his eyes but he was smiling too. “But if you need me to say it again then yes, I love you.”

“I love you too,” I said through a grin, so happy at the unexpected twist this evening had taken. The surprises weren't over though, I realised, as Kaz hesitantly moved one of his hands to rest against my cheek and his face to within a few inches of mine. He leaned in slowly, clearly nervous and unsure, and I stayed still to let him have the control I knew he needed.

The kiss was gentle and tentative, softer than anything I'd normally associate with Kaz but all the more magical because of it. He pulled away after a moment but only barely and flicked his eyes up to mine briefly before dropping them back to my lips and closing the distance again, a little more confidently this time. It was perfect. This time when we broke apart it was from a lack of air and as I caught my breath, a question formed in my mind.

“So...if you've felt like this for a while...how come you never kissed me before?”

“I didn't want to mess it up.”

“Well you definitely didn't mess it up. I'd even go as far as to say you did good.”

“Just good?”

“We can work on it.”

“I'm okay with that. Are you alright now?”

“I am. You can go finish having dinner with Inej if you want.” And I meant it. I was okay with their close friendship now I knew how Kaz felt and that friendship is all it was.

“No, it's your turn now. She's desperate to spend some time with you and from the sounds of it I've got to go instill some fear in some of our fellow gang members.” He smiled and squeezed my hand. “Go have some fun and come see me after, I'll wait up for you.”

“Okay. I need to pay for these waffles first though.”

“Don't worry, I've got it. Now go.”

“Thanks, I'll see you later.” I gave him one last kiss and practically skipped out the door. It felt like a weight was lifted. I knew where I stood with Kaz and it was better than I'd imagined, I finally got to spend time with one of my best friends, and the man I, perhaps foolishly, loved would be right there waiting for me when I came home. Everything was just a little bit brighter now.

Tag Lists: (send an ask if you want to be added!)

Everything: @wonderfilledness

Grishaverse: @thats-so-bucky

#Kaz Brekker #kaz brekker x reader #kaz brekker imagine #kaz brekker fanfic #kaz brekker x you #six of crows #six of crows imagine #six of crows fanfic #soc #soc imagine #soc fanfic #reader insert

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momentofmemory · 5 years ago

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fictober - day twenty

Prompt #20: “You could talk about it, you know.”

Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe - Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Netflix Marvel (Daredevil)

Warnings: Religious Imagery

Characters: Peter Parker & Matt Murdock, Quentin Beck (mentioned)

Words: 2177

Author’s Note: set immediately post the spider-man: far from home mid credits scene (so, spoilers). this is a stand alone, but assumes peter & matt have met before and so could live in the same universe as my day 16 fill.

>>Heartbeats on Pier 81

Peter’s face is broadcasted over all of New York, and losing his secret must feel a lot like dying to his mind because Peter sees his life flash before his eyes. Unlike death—and he would know—it’s not the past that he sees, but all the futures he’d hoped for disappearing.

He doesn’t remember much of what happens next. MJ tells him to run, so he does; Happy texts him that May is safe, so she is; a man throws a rotten tomato at his face, so he swings higher. He keeps swinging, as fast and as high as he can, until he leaves Queens and its familiarity behind. He doesn’t stop until he reaches the edge of Hell’s Kitchen, and only then because when he drops onto Pier 81 he runs out of buildings to leap on.

Peter walks all the way to the end, anyway, then hops over the chain rope fence that separates the walking area from the edge. With nowhere further to go, Peter slumps down and lets his legs trail over the side, greyish water snapping at his feet.

The pier’s not in the shape it once was, thanks to the Blip. The wood creaks ominously under the force of the river’s tides, chains hang limply on the deck instead of around cargo or attached to moored boats, and warehouse-sized shipping containers sit in various stages of rust and disrepair. The important feature in Peter’s mind, however, is that there’s no one around.

He hasn’t had a chance to install Karen in his new suit yet, so it’s quiet as he checks his phone and discovers seventy-three missed calls, one of which is from the New York Times, and a notification informing him that #SpideyParker is trending on Twitter.

Peter looks out over the Hudson and drops his phone into his lap without unlocking it. After a moment, he pulls his mask off and breathes in the unique smell of algae, salt, and diesel oil that only a river running through New York can create.

The tide is high, so the river is flowing out to the north. In a couple of hours the tide will lower and start flowing south, and then a few hours after that, back to the north again. The Hudson’s weird like that: consistent only in that you know it will change.

Peter’s always identified with it in that respect.

He’s not sure how long he stares at the water, thinking about everything and nothing, but it’s still not quite dusk when a lithe shadow drops down behind him. His Peter Tingle doesn’t so much as fizzle, so he doesn’t bother turning around or reaching for his mask.

Not that the last part matters anymore.

It’s probably not healthy, but after Mysterio he’s started relying on sight less and less, so he knows who his visitor is from the sound alone.

“I didn’t know it was legal for Daredevil to be out in the daytime,” he says, the crinkle of leather in Matt’s costume instantly recognizable. “There goes the internet conspiracy that you’re actually a vampire.”

Daredevil hums noncommittally, then lowers himself to the ground beside Peter.

“Spider-Man’s in Hell’s Kitchen, so it seems like a lot of theories are being broken today.” He drops one leg over the edge, bending the other in front of him and resting his elbow against it. “Thought I’d join in on the fun.”

“If you’re looking for fun, you could definitely do better.”

“True, but I’m guessing you can’t.” Matt hesitates. “If you want, I thought you could… Talk. About it.”

Peter leans his head back against a wooden post and closes his eyes. “You know?”

“I’m blind, not deaf.”

It’s stupid, because he knows the news is everywhere by now, but hearing it from another super hero makes it feel so impossibly real.

Matt shifts beside him. “Even if I were both, though, Foggy contacted me the second the broadcast went live. He’s pretty determined we’re going to be your legal team.”

Peter huffs out a laugh, running his hands through his hair. “Isn’t that a conflict of interest?”

“His best friend’s a lawyer that spends his nights bloodying his fists on criminals’ faces. I think our firm crossed that line long before you came along.” Matt tilts his head, probably listening to something seven blocks away or something, then carefully takes off his own mask. “But legally speaking, no. None of us have any reason to oppose your case. If anything, you could argue I have a vested interest.”

“Oh.” Peter bites his lip. “Even after…”

He trails off, looking at Matt’s face. He’s seen it before, of course, during the many times he dragged Ned down to the firm to get help with civics homework, but there’s something different about seeing him fully suited up without mask.

It feels honest, somehow—like all of him is on display, but in a good way.

Peter’s own exposure doesn’t feel so good.

He doesn’t know if Matt can tell he’s been staring, but the other man clears his throat. “After what, Peter?”

There are so many things Peter could say about what he means by after. The all-consuming terror he feels for the safety of his family and friends, now that his identity is exposed. How he’d thought he finally had his life back together, only for it to be ripped away so completely and utterly he no longer knows whether he can even go home anymore. The way people looked at him with naked fear or unbridled anger, and how he’s so afraid he’ll never be their Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man ever again. That he never asked for it, but he technically really does have access to a billion dollar surveillance network, and it’s probably super illegal and wildly unethical.

But it’s Daredevil he’s talking to, not May or Ned or Happy or even Tony, so he says the one thing that’s been eating away at him for days: the one thing only another vigilante could understand.

“I killed him.”

The words feel disgusting sliding out of his mouth, like his throat and lungs are coated in tar instead of air.

“I didn’t mean to,” he adds, suddenly desperate to let Matt know he didn’t, he didn’t, “but the drones were firing everywhere and I had to stop them, and I—I wasn’t paying attention to where the blasts were going as long as they weren’t hitting me.”

He chokes off, unable to continue. He’s terrified to look at Matt’s face now, afraid of the horror he’ll see.

But Matt just turns the Daredevil mask over in his hands, fingers running almost reverently across the seams. “I think it would be helpful if you started over from the beginning.”

It feels like sucking mud out of his chest at first, but slowly Peter reveals everything that had happened in Europe: Nick Fury showing up in his hotel room, the glasses and Stark’s legacy, the mind screw he’d gone through in Berlin. The train, the fight in London, the fake story Mysterio had created—the one he’d told to Peter, and then the one he’d told to Times Square. Quentin Beck’s body lying on the bridge, pupils constricted and lungs frozen and heart silent.

“…I can’t even bring myself be sad that he’s gone,” Peter finishes, staring into the lens of the mask in his hands so he doesn’t have to look at Matt. “I just feel guilty it had to be me.”

Daredevil doesn’t say anything at first, and Peter thinks he might drown in shame.

Finally, the other man clears his throat.

“As a lawyer,” Matt says, placing his mask on the pier between them, “I can say unquestionably that what you’re describing would be considered self-defense in a court of law. Any jury worth its salt would clear you of charges in under an hour.”

Peter swallows. “And as a fellow vigilante?”

Matt turns his head towards the river, tongue darting out briefly as if to taste it. “Did I ever tell you about the time I threw myself into the Hudson?”

Peter blinks at the apparent non sequitur. “You went in there willingly?”

Matt snorts. “Not exactly. It was early in my career, before I even had a suit. It was the first time I took on Fisk.”

Peter stills—Matt didn’t usually like talking about anything to do with the ex-mob boss.

“I was… angry. Stupid,” Matt says. “Fisk killed someone I cared about, but I wasn’t really interested in justice. I just wanted something to punch. So I tore through a bunch of his men until I found one that knew something; got directions to a pier where he might be at. Pier 81.”

Peter starts in surprise, and suddenly the abandoned shipping containers he’d passed seemed to have a lot more weight to them.

“It was a trap, of course.” Matt’s fingers ghost across his lower abdomen, so lightly Peter thinks he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.

“And that’s when you jumped in the river?”

“No.” A sigh, and Matt’s hand drifts back down to the wooden slats. “No, that’s when I killed Nobu.”

Peter—Peter doesn’t understand.

Everyone in the New York super hero circle knows that Daredevil doesn’t kill, and Spider-Man more than most. It’s the one thing Matt’s warned him about constantly; always telling him to be wary of his strength and his temper, of the immense importance of giving someone a second chance, and that no matter how evil a person may seem, there’s still a spark of hope in there that he has no right to stamp out.

It’s one of the reasons Peter looks up to Matt so much, despite his brutality, because it’s a mindset none of the other vigilantes or even Avengers share.

“No—no who?” he says, voice strangled.

“Nobu. Nobu Yoshioka.” Matt ran his teeth over his lower lip. “He was a member of Murakami’s faction of the Hand. He also had a kyoketsu-shoge that he was very good at using. …I should probably be dead because of it.”

Peter pales, thinking of all the scars he’d seen on Matt’s torso in the past. He doesn’t like where this is going. “…Why aren’t you?”

“It was a lot like what happened with you and Mysterio, actually.” Peter flinches and looks down at his hands, red in the light of the sunset. “We were fighting; well, at that point I was mostly just trying to survive. I deflected one of his blades without paying attention to where it would ricochet, and it shattered a lamp above him. The sparks caught his robes on fire.”

A shudder runs through Peter, equal parts sympathy and horror. “You couldn’t have known.”

“No, I couldn’t have,” Matt agrees. “I also found out later that he came back to life, making it a moot point.”

Peter’s stomach attempts to turn itself inside out at the thought of having to face Mysterio again, but Matt seems to notice his discomfort.

“Don’t worry. My priest says I can’t recommend that method as a standard way of finding absolution.”

Peter offers him a shaky laugh, and Matt continues.

“I didn’t murder Nobu by any legal definition that night,” he says, “but I went into the situation with a lot of hate, and with the intention of killing someone else. I think that made me more of a murderer than any physical action I could’ve taken.”

He turns towards Peter, his eyes staring vacantly just over Peter’s shoulder. “I don’t think that’s a sin you’re carrying.”

Peter bites his lip, wanting to believe him but unsure how. “But I didn’t try to save him.”

“Clinton Church has confession hours right about now if you’re seeking penance.” There’s a smirk in Matt’s voice, and Peter can’t help but roll his eyes at the man’s persistence. “But if not…”

Peter looks up expectantly.

“If not, then I would ask you this: why don’t you want to kill?”

“Because that’s not my call.” Peter doesn’t have to think about it. “And because I think there’s always the possibility of redemption, for anyone.”

“Anyone, huh?” Matt tilts his head, then smiles. “Your heartbeat is steady.”

Peter frowns, then his mouth widens into an oh.

Anyone means him, too.

Peter pulls his legs up and rests his head on his knees. “Is using your human lie detector skills to make a point really all that ethical?”

“Foggy’s not here to stop me, so yes.” Matt picks his mask up. “But I don’t need it to prove your heart’s in the right place.”

Peter stares at him, expression suddenly so fishlike he’d blend right in with the Hudson.

Then he rapidly yanks his own mask over his face to hide the blush creeping up his neck. He coughs and blinks as the eye lenses readjust to the fading light. “Is that uh, is that your advice as a lawyer or as a vigilante?”

Matt laughs and shakes his head, sliding his mask into place. He stands and offers Peter his hand.

“It’s as a friend.”

#fictober19 #peter parker fic #daredevil fic #mcu fanfic #ffh spoilers #peter parker #matt murdock #tw: religious themes #both matt and peter have really specific opinions on killing #so this was fun to explore #memsfic

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shihlun · 7 years ago

Text

Chris Marker - Sans Soleil / Sunless

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.

He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?

He wrote me that in the Bijagós Islands it's the young girls who choose their fiancées.

He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity—the lack of affectation—of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn't dead, only run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

He didn't like to dwell on poverty, but in everything he wanted to show there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model. A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts, of Koreans. Too broke to afford drugs, they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk. This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the glories of the center city, a character took his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads. Luxury for them would be one of those large bottles of sake that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead.

I paid for a round in a bar in Namidabashi. It's the kind of place that allows people to stare at each other with equality; the threshold below which every man is as good as any other—and knows it.

He told me about the Jetty on Fogo, in theCape Verde islands. How long have they been there waiting for the boat, patient as pebbles but ready to jump? They are a people of wanderers, of navigators, of world travelers. They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding here on these rocks that the Portuguese used as a marshaling yard for their colonies. A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people. Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?

He used to write to me: the Sahel is not only what is shown of it when it is too late; it's a land that drought seeps into like water into a leaking boat. The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival in Bissau will be petrified again, as soon as a new attack has changed the savannah into a desert. This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten, with one exception—you win—Japan. My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts; they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.

He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning of the 11th century, in the Heian period. Do we ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents; the emperor's court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.' One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.' Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming; I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.

He wrote me: coming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon's list, of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all. Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya. The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work—Japanese style—like a madman. It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'

He described me his reunion with Tokyo: like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket immediately starts to inspect familiar places. He ran off to see if everything was where it should be: the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store, which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers. He was told that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars; the producers shuddered before them. He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passers-by and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful. Everything interested him. He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant or about the results of the Daily Double asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done in the last sumo tournament. He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly on television to teach goodness to children. These simple joys he had never felt: of returning to a country, a house, a family home. But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.

He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wire she shows her veins. They say that television makes her people illiterate; as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets. Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to read—these yellow men. I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku. The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope ten centuries before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines, victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship. Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls. The entire city is a comic strip; it's Planet Manga. How can one fail to recognize the statuary that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central? And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers, pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.

At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.

The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute whose sound can only be heard by whomever is playing it. He might have cried out if it was in aGodard film or a Shakespeare play, “Where should this music be?”

Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of 'action cooking.' He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures and his way of mixing the ingredients one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts common to painting, philosophy, and karate. He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed in his humble way the essence of style, and consequently that it was up to him to use his invisible brush to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words 'the end.'

I've spent the day in front of my TV set—that memory box. I was inNara with the sacred deers. I was taking a picture without knowing that in the 15th century Basho had written: “The willow sees the heron's image... upside down.”

The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye, used to Western atrocities in this field; not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure. For one slightly hallucinatory moment I had the impression that I spoke Japanese, but it was a cultural program onNHK about Gérard de Nerval.

8:40, Cambodia. From Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge: coincidence, or the sense of history?

In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive and incommunicable sentences: “Horror has a face and a name... you must make a friend of horror.” To cast out the horror that has a name and a face you must give it another name and another face. Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty of certain corpses. Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty. One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples long familiarity with suffering, that requires that even pain be ornate. And then comes the reward: the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises; absolute beauty also has a name and a face.

But the more you watch Japanese television... the more you feel it's watching you. Even television newscast bears witness to the fact that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things. It's election time: the winning candidates black out the empty eye of Daruma—the spirit of luck—while losing candidates—sad but dignified—carry off their one-eyed Daruma.

The images most difficult to figure out are those of Europe. I watched the pictures of a film whose soundtrack will be added later. It took me six months for Poland.

Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes. But I must say that last night's quake helped me greatly to grasp a problem.

Poetry is born of insecurity: wandering Jews, quaking Japanese; by living on a rug that jesting nature is ever ready to pull out from under them they've got into the habit of moving about in a world of appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable, of trains that fly from planet to planet, of samurai fighting in an immutable past. That's called 'the impermanence of things.'

I did it all. All the way to the evening shows for adults—so called. The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips, but it's a coded hypocrisy. Censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show. The code is the message. It points to the absolute by hiding it. That's what religions have always done.

That year, a new face appeared among the great ones that blazon the streets of Tokyo: the Pope's. Treasures that had never left the Vatican were shown on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.

He wrote me: curiosity of course, and the glimmer of industrial espionage in the eye—I imagine them bringing out within two years time a more efficient and less expensive version of Catholicism—but there's also the fascination associated with the sacred, even when it's someone else's.

So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of Hokkaido? At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum, a chapel, and a sex shop. As always in Japan, one admires the fact that the walls between the realms are so thin that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue, buy an inflatable doll, and give the goddess of fertility the small offering that always accompanies her displays. Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems of the television incomprehensible, if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible only on condition of being severed from a body.

One would like to believe in a world before the fall: inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation. Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain, the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture, share in the same cosmic innocence.

The second part of the museum—with its couples of stuffed animals—would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it. Not so sure... animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship, but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation. And even without original sin this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost. In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society, the rift that separates men from women. In life it seems to show itself in two ways only: violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy—resembling Sei Shonagon's—which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word. So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts—against which the fathers of the church invade—becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things, to a melancholy whose color I can give you by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi: “Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied.”

He wrote me that the Japanese secret—what Lévi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things—implied the faculty of communion with things, of entering into them, of being them for a moment. It was normal that in their turn they should be like us: perishable and immortal.

He wrote me: animism is a familiar notion in Africa, it is less often applied in Japan. What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart? When they build a factory or a skyscraper, they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land. There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses, and even for rusty needles. There's one on the 25th of September for the repose of the soul of broken dolls. The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon—the goddess of compassion—and are burned in public.

I look to the participants. I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots had the same look on their faces.

He wrote me that the pictures of Guinea-Bissau ought to be accompanied by music from the Cape Verde islands. That would be our contribution to the unity dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.

Why should so small a country—and one so poor—interest the world? They did what they could, they freed themselves, they chased out the Portuguese. They traumatized the Portuguese army to such an extent that it gave rise to a movement that overthrew the dictatorship, and led one for a moment to believe in a new revolution in Europe.

Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.

This morning I was on the dock at Pidjiguity, where everything began in 1959, when the first victims of the struggle were killed. It may be as difficult to recognize Africa in this leaden fog as it is to recognize struggle in the rather dull activity of tropical longshoremen.

Rumor has it that every third world leader coined the same phrase the morning after independence: “Now the real problems start.”

Cabral never got a chance to say it: he was assassinated first. But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on. Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism: to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion, temptations of power and privilege.

Ah well... after all, history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated.

My personal problem is more specific: how to film the ladies of Bissau? Apparently, the magical function of the eye was working against me there. It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde that I could stare at them again with equality: I see her, she saw me, she knows that I see her, she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible to act as though it was not addressed to me, and at the end the real glance, straightforward, that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second, the length of a film frame.

All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men's task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible. African men are just as good at this task as others. But after a close look at African women I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.

He told me the story of the dog Hachiko. A dog waited every day for his master at the station. The master died, and the dog didn't know it, and he continued to wait all his life. People were moved and brought him food. After his death a statue was erected in his honor, in front of which sushi and rice cakes are still placed so that the faithful soul of Hachiko will never go hungry.

Tokyo is full of these tiny legends, and of mediating animals. The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers of what was once the empire of Mr. Okada—a great collector of French paintings, the man who hired the Château of Versailles to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his department stores.

In the computer section I've seen young Japanese exercising their brain muscles like the young Athenians at the Palaistra. They have a war to win. The history books of the future will perhaps place the battle of integrated circuits at the same level as Salamis and Agincourt, but willing to honor the unfortunate adversary by leaving other fields to him: men's fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.

Like an old votive turtle stationed in the corner of a field, every day he saw Mr. Akao—the president of the Japanese Patriotic Party—trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony against the international communist plot. He wrote me: the automobiles of the extreme right with their flags and megaphones are part of Tokyo's landscape—Mr. Akao is their focal point. I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko, at this crossroads from which he departs only to go and prophesy on the battlefields. He was at Narita in the sixties. Peasants fighting against the building of an airport on their land, and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow behind everything that moved.

Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo. Once upon a time I saw bonzes pray for peace in Vietnam there. Today young right-wing activists protest against the annexation of the Northern Islands by the Russians. Sometimes they are answered that the commercial relations of Japan with the abominable occupier of the North are a thousand times better than with the American ally who is always whining about economic aggression. Ah, nothing is simple.

On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor. The Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung—kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean gestapo—is threatened with the death sentence. A group has begun a hunger strike. Some very young militants are trying to gather signatures in his support.

I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle. The demo was unreal. I had the impression of acting in Brigadoon, of waking up ten years later in the midst of the same players, with the same blue lobsters of police, the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners and the same slogan: “Down with the airport.” Only one thing has been added: the airport precisely. But with its single runway and the barbed wire that chokes it, it looks more besieged than victorious.

My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the present don't change, then change the images of the past.

He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.

What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it. It was a generation that often exasperated me, for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth. But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.

I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle. Concretely it had failed. At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world could have been won only through the struggle.

As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains in the name of revolutionary purity, while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives. Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists, including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom. But it carried with it all those who said, like Ché Guevara, that they “trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world.” They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity, and their generosity has outlasted their politics. That's why I will never allow it to be said that youth is wasted on the young.

The youth who get together every weekend at Shinjuku obviously know that they are not on a launching pad toward real life; but they are life, to be eaten on the spot like fresh doughnuts.

It's a very simple secret. The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it. The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the thirteenth floor of a building after having tied her hands, because she'd spoken badly of their class team, hadn't discovered it yet. Parents who demand an increase in the number of special telephone lines devoted to the prevention of children's suicides find out a little late that they have kept it all too well. Rock is an international language for spreading the secret. Another is peculiar to Tokyo.

For the takenoko, twenty is the age of retirement. They are baby Martians. I go to see them dance every Sunday in the park at Yoyogi. They want people to look at them, but they don't seem to notice that people do. They live in a parallel time sphere: a kind of invisible aquarium wall separates them from the crowd they attract, and I can spend a whole afternoon contemplating the little takenoko girl who is learning—no doubt for the first time—the customs of her planet.

Beyond that, they wear dog tags, they obey a whistle, the Mafia rackets them, and with the exception of a single group made up of girls, it's always a boy who commands.

One day he writes to me: description of a dream. More and more my dreams find their settings in the department stores of Tokyo, the subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city. A face appears, disappears... a trace is found, is lost. All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake I realize that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth the presence concealed the night before. I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine, or if they are part of a totality, of a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection. It might suffice to pick up any one of the telephones that are lying around to hear a familiar voice, or the beating of a heart, Sei Shonagon's for example.

All the galleries lead to stations; the same companies own the stores and the railroads that bear their name. Keio, Odakyu—all those names of ports. The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams, makes a single film of them—the ultimate film. The tickets from the automatic dispenser grant admission to the show.

He told me about the January light on the station stairways. He told me that this city ought to be deciphered like a musical score; one could get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details. And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo: overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there: rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing—as different and precise as groups of instruments. Sometimes the musical comparison coincided with plain reality; the Sony stairway in the Ginza was itself an instrument, each step a note. All of it fit together like the voices of a somewhat complicated fugue, but it was enough to take hold of one of them and hang on to it.

The television screens for example; all by themselves they created an itinerary that sometimes wound up in unexpected curves. It was sumo season, and the fans who came to watch the fights in the very chic showrooms on the Ginza were the poorest of the Tokyo poors. So poor that they didn't even have a TV set. He saw them come, the dead souls of Namida-bashi he had drunk saké with one sunny dawn—how many seasons ago was that now?

He wrote me: even in the stalls where they sell electronic spare parts—that some hipsters use for jewelry—there is in the score that is Tokyo a particular staff, whose rarity in Europe condemns me to a real acoustic exile. I mean the music of video games. They are fitted into tables. You can drink, you can lunch, and go on playing. They open onto the street. By listening to them you can play from memory.

I saw these games born in Japan. I later met up with them again all over the world, but one detail was different. At the beginning the game was familiar: a kind of anti-ecological beating where the idea was to kill off—as soon as they showed the white of their eyes—creatures that were either prairie dogs or baby seals, I can't be sure which. Now here's the Japanese variation. Instead of the critters, there's some vaguely human heads identified by a label: at the top the chairman of the board, in front of him the vice president and the directors, in the front row the section heads and the personnel manager. The guy I filmed—who was smashing up the hierarchy with an enviable energy—confided in me that for him the game was not at all allegorical, that he was thinking very precisely of his superiors. No doubt that's why the puppet representing the personnel manager has been clubbed so often and so hard that it's out of commission, and why it had to be replaced again by a baby seal.

Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine. To please me he puts in my best beloved animals: the cat and the owl. He claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory, and imagination. Mizoguchi's Arsène Lupin for example, or the no less imaginary burakumin. How one claim to show a category of Japanese who do not exist? Yes they're there; I saw them in Osaka hiring themselves out by the day, sleeping on the ground. Ever since the middle ages they've been doomed to grubby and back-breaking jobs. But since the Meiji era, officially nothing sets them apart, and their real name—eta—is a taboo word, not to be pronounced. They are non-persons. How can they be shown, except as non-images?

Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence. For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time is contained in the Pac-Man. I didn't know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him that he was going to conquer the world. Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment. And he tells us soberly that though there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper.

He was pleased that the same chrysanthemums appeared in funerals for men and for animals. He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno in memory of animals that had died during the year. For two years in a row this day of mourning has had a pall cast over it by the death of a panda, more irreparable—according to the newspapers—than the death of the prime minister that took place at the same time. Last year people really cried. Now they seem to be getting used to it, accepting that each year death takes a panda as dragons do young girls in fairy tales.

I've heard this sentence: “The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner.” What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die is surprise. What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity, as if they were trying—in order to understand the death of an animal—to stare through the partition.

I have returned from a country where death is not a partition to cross through but a road to follow. The great ancestor of the Bijagós archipelago has described for us the itinerary of the dead and how they move from island to island according to a rigorous protocol until they come to the last beach where they wait for the ship that will take them to the other world. If by accident one should meet them, it is above all imperative not to recognize them.

The Bijagós is a part of Guinea Bissau. In an old film clip Amilcar Cabral waves a gesture of good-bye to the shore; he's right, he'll never see it again. Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later on the canoe that was bringing us back.

Guinea has by that time become a nation and Luis is its president. All those who remember the war remember him. He's the half-brother of Amilcar, born as he was of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood, and like him a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC, which by uniting the two colonized countries in a single movement of struggle wishes to be the forerunner of a federation of the two states.

I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters, who had fought in conditions so inhuman that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers for having to bear what they themselves suffered. That I heard. And many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly—even if inadvertently—the word guerrilla to describe a certain breed of film-making. A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates and also to bloody defeats on the ground.

Amilcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war, and not only in terms of military conquests. He knew his people, he had studied them for a long time, and he wanted every liberated region to be also the precursor of a different kind of society.

The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters. The social democracies fill the People's Stores. May the extreme left forgive history but if the guerrillas are like fish in water it's a bit thanks to Sweden.

Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguities—he knew the traps. He wrote: “It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and storms, with people who are trying to cross it and drown, but they have no other way out, they must get to the other side.”

And now, the scene moves to Cassaque: the seventeenth of February, 1980. But to understand it properly one must move forward in time. In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison, and the weeping man he has just decorated, major Nino, will have taken power. The party will have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy. We will learn that behind this ceremony of promotions which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle, there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness, and that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion, but the wounded pride of a hero who felt he had not been raised high enough above the others.

And beneath each of these faces a memory. And in place of what we were told had been forged into a collective memory, a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history.

In Portugal—raised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau—Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life against the dictatorship wrote: “Every protagonist represents only himself; in place of a change in the social setting he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image.”

That's the way the breakers recede. And so predictably that one has to believe in a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes through mercy or calculation to those whom it recruits: Amilcar murdered by members of his own party, the liberated areas fallen under the yoke of bloody petty tyrants liquidated in their turn by a central power to whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup.

That's how history advances, plugging its memory as one plugs one's ears. Luis exiled to Cuba, Nino discovering in his turn plots woven against him, can be cited reciprocally to appear before the bar of history. She doesn't care, she understands nothing, she has only one friend, the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror. That has a name and a face.

I'm writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.

Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector. Madness protects, as fever does.

I envy Hayao in his 'zone,' he plays with the signs of his memory. He pins them down and decorates them like insects that would have flown beyond time, and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time: the only eternity we have left. I look at his machines. I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.

He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.

In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage to all the film's locations: the florist Podesta Baldocchi, where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak—he the hunter, she the prey. Or was it the other way around? The tiles hadn't changed.

He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline. It seems to be a question of trailing, of enigma, of murder, but in truth it's a question of power and freedom, of melancholy and dazzlement, so carefully coded within the spiral that you could miss it, and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space in reality stands for the vertigo of time.

He had followed all the trails. Even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead, whom she should not have known. He followed Madeline—as Scotty had done—to the Museum at the Legion of Honor, before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known. And on the portrait, as in Madeline's hair, the spiral of time.

The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared had disappeared itself; concrete had replaced it, at the corner of Eddy and Gough. On the other hand the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods. On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines that measured the age of the tree and said, “Here I was born... and here I died.”

He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted. The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree, outside of time.

The painted horse at San Juan Bautista, his eye that looked like Madeline's: Hitchcock had invented nothing, it was all there. He had run under the arches of the promenade in the mission as Madeline had run towards her death. Or was it hers?

From this fake tower—the only thing that Hitchcock had added—he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love, finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it. Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time, a zone that would belong only to him and from which he could decipher the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay, when he had saved her from death before casting her back to death. Or was it the other way around?

In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film I had seen nineteen times. In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film. That summer I had met three children on a road and a volcano had come out of the sea. The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon, in this corner of Earth that resembles it. I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction: the landscape of another planet. Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away. I imagine him moving slowly, heavily, about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles. All of a sudden he stumbles, and the next step it's a year later. He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border along a sea bird sanctuary.

That's for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories? That's just it, he can't understand. He hasn't come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

Naturally he'll fail. The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one. He has chosen to give up his privileges, but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose. His only recourse is precisely that which threw him into this absurd quest: a song cycle by Mussorgsky. They are still sung in the fortieth century. Their meaning has been lost. But it was then that for the first time he perceived the presence of that thing he didn't understand which had something to do with unhappiness and memory, and towards which slowly, heavily, he began to walk.

Of course I'll never make that film. Nonetheless I'm collecting the sets, inventing the twists, putting in my favorite creatures. I've even given it a title, indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless.

On May 15, 1945, at seven o'clock in the morning, the three hundred and eighty second US infantry regiment attacked a hill in Okinawa they had renamed 'Dick Hill.' I suppose the Americans themselves believed that they were conquering Japanese soil, and that they knew nothing about the Ryukyu civilization. Neither did I, apart from the fact that the faces of the market ladies at Itoman spoke to me more of Gauguin than of Utamaro. For centuries of dreamy vassalage time had not moved in the archipelago. Then came the break. Is it a property of islands to make their women into the guardians of their memory?

I learned that—as in the Bijagós—it is through the women that magic knowledge is transmitted. Each community has its priestess—the noro—who presides over all ceremonies with the exception of funerals.

The Japanese defended their position inch by inch. At the end of the day the two half platoons formed from the remnants of L Company had got only halfway up the hill, a hill like the one where I followed a group of villagers on their way to the purification ceremony.

The noro communicates with the gods of the sea, of rain, of the earth, of fire. Everyone bows down before the sister deity who is the reflection, in the absolute, of a privileged relationship between brother and sister. Even after her death, the sister retains her spiritual predominance.

At dawn the Americans withdrew. Fighting went on for over a month before the island surrendered, and toppled into the modern world. Twenty-seven years of American occupation, the re-establishment of a controversial Japanese sovereignty: two miles from the bowling alleys and the gas stations the noro continues her dialogue with the gods. When she is gone the dialogue will end. Brothers will no longer know that their dead sister is watching over them. When filming this ceremony I knew I was present at the end of something. Magical cultures that disappear leave traces to those who succeed them. This one will leave none; the break in history has been too violent.

I touched that break at the summit of the hill, as I had touched it at the edge of the ditch where two hundred girls had used grenades to commit suicide in 1945 rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans. People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch. Across from it souvenir lighters are sold shaped like grenades.

On Hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned, shredded in a frame of fire. The code name for Pearl Harbor was Tora, Tora, Tora, the name of the cat the couple in Gotokuji was praying for. So all of this will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.

Off Okinawa kamikaze dived on the American fleet; they would become a legend. They were likelier material for it obviously than the special units who exposed their prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria and then to hot water so as to see how fast flesh separates from the bone.

One would have to read their last letters to learn that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers, nor were they all swashbuckling samurai. Before drinking his last cup of saké Ryoji Uebara had written: “I have always thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally. It may seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime. We kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say, except to beg our compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams. In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetized metal that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier. But once on the ground I am a human being with feelings and passions. Please excuse these disorganized thoughts. I'm leaving you a rather melancholy picture, but in the depths of my heart I am happy. I have spoken frankly, forgive me.”

Every time he came from Africa he stopped at the island of Sal, which is in fact a salt rock in the middle of the Atlantic. At the end of the island, beyond the village of Santa Maria and its cemetery with the painted tombs, it suffices to walk straight ahead to meet the desert.

He wrote me: I've understood the visions. Suddenly you're in the desert the way you are in the night; whatever is not desert no longer exists. You don't want to believe the images that crop up.

Did I write you that there are emus in the Ile de France? This name—Island of France—sounds strangely on the island of Sal. My memory superimposes two towers: the one at the ruined castle of Montpilloy that served as an encampment for Joan of Arc, and the lighthouse tower at the southern tip of Sal, probably one of the last lighthouses to use oil.

A lighthouse in the Sahel looks like a collage until you see the ocean at the edge of the sand and salt. Crews of transcontinental planes are rotated on Sal. Their club brings to this frontier of nothingness a small touch of the seaside resort which makes the rest still more unreal. They feed the stray dogs that live on the beach.

I found my dogs pretty nervous tonight; they were playing with the sea as I had never seen them before. Listening to Radio Hong Kong later on I understood: today was the first day of the lunar new year, and for the first time in sixty years the sign of the dog met the sign of water.

Out there, eleven thousand miles away, a single shadow remains immobile in the midst of the long moving shadows that the January light throws over the ground of Tokyo: the shadow of the Asakusa bonze.

For also in Japan the year of the dog is beginning. Temples are filled with visitors who come to toss down their coins and to pray—Japanese style—a prayer which slips into life without interrupting it.

Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal in the company of my prancing dogs I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.

As we await the year four thousand and one and its total recall, that's what the oracles we take out of their long hexagonal boxes at new year may offer us: a little more power over that memory that runs from camp to camp—like Joan of Arc. That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo, and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly.

At the end of memory's path, the ideograms of the Island of France are no less enigmatic than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of the new year. It's Indian winter, as if the air were the first element to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies by which the Japanese wash off one year to enter the next one. A full month is just enough for them to fulfill all the duties that courtesy owes to time, the most interesting unquestionably being the acquisition at the temple of Tenjin of the uso bird, who according to one tradition eats all your lies of the year to come, and according to another turns them into truths.

But what gives the street its color in January, what makes it suddenly different is the appearance of kimono. In the street, in stores, in offices, even at the stock exchange on opening day, the girls take out their fur collared winter kimono. At that moment of the year other Japanese may well invent extra flat TV sets, commit suicide with a chain saw, or capture two thirds of the world market for semiconductors. Good for them; all you see are the girls.

The fifteenth of January is coming of age day: an obligatory celebration in the life of a young Japanese woman. The city governments distribute small bags filled with gifts, datebooks, advice: how to be a good citizen, a good mother, a good wife. On that day every twenty-year-old girl can phone her family for free, no matter where in Japan. Flag, home, and country: this is the anteroom of adulthood. The world of the takenoko and of rock singers speeds away like a rocket. Speakers explain what society expects of them. How long will it take to forget the secret?

And when all the celebrations are over it remains only to pick up all the ornaments—all the accessories of the celebration—and by burning them, make a celebration.

This is dondo-yaki, a Shinto blessing of the debris that have a right to immortality—like the dolls at Ueno. The last state—before their disappearance—of the poignancy of things. Daruma—the one eyed spirit—reigns supreme at the summit of the bonfire. Abandonment must be a feast; laceration must be a feast. And the farewell to all that one has lost, broken, used, must be ennobled by a ceremony. It's Japan that could fulfill the wish of that French writer who wanted divorce to be made a sacrament.

The only baffling part of this ritual was the circle of children striking the ground with their long poles. I only got one explanation, a singular one—although for me it might take the form of a small intimate service—it was to chase away the moles.

And that's where my three children of Iceland came and grafted themselves in. I picked up the whole shot again, adding the somewhat hazy end, the frame trembling under the force of the wind beating us down on the cliff: everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said better than all the rest what I saw in that moment, why I held it at arms length, at zooms length, until its last twenty-fourth of a second, the city of Heimaey spread out below us. And when five years later my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film he had just shot in the same place I lacked only the name to learn that nature performs its own dondo-yaki; the island's volcano had awakened. I looked at those pictures, and it was as if the entire year '65 had just been covered with ashes.

So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself staged the working of time. I saw what had been my window again. I saw emerge familiar roofs and balconies, the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day, down to the cliff where I had met the children. The cat with white socks that Haroun had been considerate enough to film for me naturally found its place. And I thought, of all the prayers to time that had studded this trip the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji, who said simply to her cat Tora, “Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you.”

And then in its turn the journey entered the 'zone,' and Hayao showed me my images already affected by the moss of time, freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence of those moments swallowed by the spiral.

When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light—Japanese style—so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters.

I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid. I walked alongside the little stalls of clothing dealers. I heard in the distance Mr. Akao's voice reverberating from the loudspeakers... a half tone higher.

Then I went down into the basement where my friend—the maniac—busies himself with his electronic graffiti. Finally his language touches me, because he talks to that part of us which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls. A piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not, or is no longer, or is not yet; the handwriting each one of us will use to compose his own list of 'things that quicken the heart,' to offer, or to erase. In that moment poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in the 'zone.'

He writes me from Japan. He writes me from Africa. He writes that he can now summon up the look on the face of the market lady of Praia that had lasted only the length of a film frame.

Will there be a last letter?

Comparative Cinema > No 3 (2013)

#chris marker #sunless #sans soleil #full text #script

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hillywooddestiel · 7 years ago

Text

Walls Chapter 4

Characters: Dean x Reader, Sam, Cas, Unnamed Men of Letters agent, mystery characters

Warnings: Canon typical violence, bit of angst maybe

Word Count: 1.7k

Description: Cas joins the search for Y/N, bringing in an old agent from the BMoL. Meanwhile, the mystery captors use new methods to psychologically torture Y/N.

A/N: This part kind of jumps forward a bit to Cas helping. This whole story is supposed to be set about a year after season 12 so I’m saying he’s alive now. There a a few developments in this part so brace yourself. Enjoy xx Masterlist

Catch Up! Part 3

Story:

Dean’s POV “He’s been gone too long Sam! They must have got him.” I pace around the map room agitatedly. “Dean, just calm down. He’ll be back soon.” Sam repeats himself for the hundredth time. I know that Cas hasn’t really been gone very long in my head, but with everything going on I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if he got hurt too. Surely grabbing some scrawny guy in a suit off the street in a surprise attack should be a quick in and out job.

Legs jumping, I take a seat at the table and down the last of my coffee. I’d rather it was a glass of whiskey but, as Sam pointed out a week ago, we’re of more use to Y/N sober. A whole week now she’s been gone. She must hate us. I hope she doesn’t think we’ve given up.

Crash! Sam and I jump up, guns raised as we follow the noise. “Get off of me! Let me go- mmf.” A stranger’s voice yells before being muffled. We share a look before rounding the corner to the kitchen. Cas hovers over an annoyed looking kid brandishing his angel blade. The kid is tied to a chair and gagged. “Cas? Why’d you kidnap some teenager? We’re supposed to be looking for the Men of Letters. Or what’s left of them.” I snap. The kid flinches a little but Cas remains still. “Dean, he is Men of Letters. Or was. They don’t exist anymore. He’s told me the truth so far.” He states. “Well he obviously hasn’t. The man that took Y/N was Men of Letters. And he was clearly pretty active!” I shout, banging my hand on the table as the kid jumps again.

“So what are you then? Lookout? Or do you just make the teas?” “Mm ffmm mrrr frrr mff mrrff.” Our guest mumbles through his gag. Sighing, I remove it so he can give us a straight answer. “I said, I was just the new guy! I’d just passed my exams when they recruited me for paperwork. Please don’t kill me!” He wails in his British accent, trembling in his chair. “So, you don’t work for them anymore?” I relax a little on him, standing in a more neutral position. “No sir. No one does. Communications went dead as soon as you guys blew up the base here in the US. A week later, everybody was dismissed fully from duty. Even the agents, everybody! The Men of Letters don’t exist anymore sir.” “Don’t lie to me kid! I know you’re all still out there.” I lose my cool, getting up close to his face. He starts to cry. “Please, I’m telling you the truth! Please don’t kill me.” “Shut up will ya? Cas, take him to one of the old cells.” Cas nods, zapping himself and the blubbering kid away.

Your POV Argh! A harsh zip of electricity through your body breaks you from your sleep. No, not again. You think, rolling over on the bed and getting comfy again. Oww! You’re shocked again, this time with more volts. “Leave me alone!” You shout to the darkness, hoping someone’s at least listening in. Instantly, you feel the sharp pain again, only it lasts a lot longer and is a lot more painful. The shock is so strong, it makes your muscles go rigid. Fine. You get up as the sparks dissipate. The room is still enveloped in darkness. That is until the lights all flash on.

Stunned by the sudden brightness, you stagger a little, eyes stinging. When you regain the power of sight, you see the room opposite is different again. Not the normal white cell, not the motel, but what appears to be an old barn. And it’s huge! There’s a large door frame opposite you, a few rotting planks are the only remnants of the door. Beyond it, you glimpse a night sky. Other than that, there’s only darkness; a stark contrast to the surgical white on your side of the line.

Sam’s POV The boy screams again. And ‘boy’ is the correct word. He can only be about 19, maybe 20. I feel awful letting Dean pound him for information but, this if for Y/N. I have to keep reminding myself that the Men of Letters have done much worse to me.

“I don’t know anything, please! It’s been almost a year now, they’re still gone. Please stop!” He howls. It echoes through the corridor as I make my way to the cell. When I reach the door, I can hear Dean pacing on the concrete floor. It stops when I knock. “Dean, can I speak to you for a minute?” I call in. The door opens as crack and he sticks his head out. “What?” “In private!” He groans but obliges by joining me in the hallway. “Look, Dean, I know that you’re hurting and that this is a really hard time. But, have you even considered that maybe he’s telling the truth. You know, about not knowing anything. Maybe he’s just not involved in all of this, this time. Maybe some of them are meeting on secret.” Dean stares at me blankly. “He’s lying Sam! He has to be. What else do we have to go on?” He adds hopelessly. I can see tears forming in his eyes. “We’ll find a lead. I know we will. And we’ll find Y/N.” I say with as much confidence I can muster. We will find her!

Your POV The faint sound of yelling comes from through the slats of wood. Is that… Sam? Well this is a first. Sam’s hops over broken planks into the barn, closely followed by Dean. The both shine their flashlights around. “Wait for me!” A female voice calls after them. It seems both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. A short figure in a leather jacket takes the same route into the barn as the brothers. Well this is also new.

“Guys, can you show down next time? I’ve only got little legs!” She shakes one foot comically, a grin of pure happiness on her face. You remember this. You remember this night because that was you, making silly jokes to see the boys smile. “Sorry Y/N/N. I already have to slow down for Dean!” Sam cracks up laughing at his own joke. “Bitch!” Dean gives Sam a playful shove. “Jerk!” “Jackasses!” She joins in. They all look so happy and carefree. When, in reality, your lives were anything but.

“Sorry to break up the fun!” A dark haired women dressed all in black appears making the three of them jump into action. With a wave of her hand they all fly backwards into the wall. “Tut tut tut! You should know better by now. So, who wishes to die first?” The demon flashes her onyx eyes before looking to you. “Ladies first, I think!”. A knife appearing in her hands, she swaggers over to the woman, a malicious smile on her face. “NO!” Dean suddenly yells, the demon turning to him. “A volunteer! How noble…” She coos, “How stupid!”

Dean gets up, assuming a stance ready to fight. He lunges at her. She steps aside with ease. Going in for another attack, he runs at her with the demon blade. She trips him up and he staggers to the side, missing her by yards. She laughs at his failures, only taunting him more.

Dean bends over to catch his breath, rage burning in his eyes. Giving one final push, he barrels towards the demon, determined to kill her. The demon blade is gripped tightly in his hand. He stops abruptly upon reaching her. You see her knife protruding through his back, blood seeping into his jacket. “No! That’s not how it happened. No…” You cry, watching on in disbelief. Sam was supposed to wake up and kill her first, ending this whole thing. Dean didn’t die. He’s not supposed to die! “NO, CHANGE IT BACK! PUT IT BACK TO HOW IT WAS!” you yell, seemingly to no one. You start feeling groggy. “NO, NOT AGAIN! PUT IT BACK TO HOW IT WAS!” you fight the drugs to remain conscious. Only you feel something cool enter your veins, pulling you to sleep.

Dean’s POV “We tracked you down from many lists of people registered by the Men of Letters. A lot of the others were dead ends- literally! So why aren’t you? What are you hiding?” I get in the kid’s face, spittle covering his features. He trembles, sweat beading on his forehead. “I don’t know anything!“ “Yeah, you keep saying that. How about changing the record?” “I’ve told you all I can, sir. I did filing, I was practically a secretary. They never told me anything important. When they let us all go, I moved back to London and got a normal job. I never heard anything about them again until the man in the trench coat kidnapped me!” The kid whimpers before shooting out some blood.

I’m about to leave the room when Cas flies in. “Sam tells me you’ve been torturing the man.” He sounds kind of angry but it’s always so hard to tell with Cas. “I told you he was telling the truth, Dean! There’s no more information to get out of him.” “Well he’s all I’ve got Cas! He’s my only chance of finding Y/N…” I turn away so he doesn’t see the tear that’s about to fall. “Unless you have any bright ideas.” “I may have one,” I jerk my head back around to face Cas again. “I could enter his memories and find out everything he knows, even things he doesn’t remember. It might yield some results.” “Okay, let’s do it!” “Dean, this will be very dangerous. He might be left permanently affected-” “I said, let’s do it, Cas.”

??? POV “And how has she been responding?” “Very well. Her memory alteration results were remarkable. Definitely something to explore further.” “It says in your report that the elder Winchester proves to be a sore spot for the subject. Can you elaborate?” “I believe she may have harboured feelings for the man that have gone unexpressed. A ‘crush’ if you will. Using his face in the simulations has given us stronger results from the very beginning.” “Good… Good…” She turns over another page in the report. “Well, this all looks very promising. Is the team ready?” She looks up from the papers to me for a moment. “Yes ma'am, they’re waiting for your instruction.” “I see no reason to keep them waiting. It’s time we move on to phase two.”

Part 5

Tags:

@dslocum89

@spectaculicious

Published by @hillywooddestiel 21.07.17

#supernatural #spn #dean x reader #dean and reader #walls #spn fanfic #spn fic #angst #hillywooddestiel

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therisingtempest · 8 years ago

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{drabble} An End

alternate ending to this drabble by @airanddarkness for the evilverse; the italics in the beginning are taken directly from her drabble; I MADE IT WORSE :D

“I forgive you.”

At first, the words didn’t register but when they did, muscles that hadn’t been used in far too long came to work and Airn smiled and he felt tears burning on his cheeks as they rolled from his eyes. He clutched her hand tighter, but a bout of coughing made him withdraw from the unmoving queen again, only to latch onto her hand once the coughing was over.

“End it,” he begged her hoarsely, “Finish it. If you believe me, finish it.”

She didn’t move at all until his pleas became a low hum, then she leaned in and caught his mouth in a kiss.

No matter how many times she had taken him to her bed after he had been imprisoned, she had never kissed him, and this one was warm and soft, just like the ones she always had for him before. When it finished, her forehead touched his and they both opened their eyes at the same moment, darkness on sea green –and fuckin’ tides, if that wasn’t completely reversed– and he could see now that Mab was weeping silently.

“You must go,” she said instead, whispered it against his lips.

His heart surged and then plummeted. Go? Where was he supposed to go? The fleet sat at the bottom of every sea, his ship was debris, his queen and crew were dead. Even Mag Mell was a ruin. The island itself had died, her heart poisoned. There was no one. Nothing. Freedom meant nothing anymore. Because that was precisely what he had.

Freedom. And nothing. Except her.

“Mab,” he croaked.

But her breath on his lips in the form of command was the last contact she gave him, withdrawing, standing from the bed. Some fiery ancient temper made an attempt at surging through his blood, but he was just too numb for it. Too dead inside. There was no point even in this. Passion and freedom—what were they but dead things? Like that boy he'd carried up from the surf where his mother had flung him to the rocks to spare him Mab's Plague. Just dead things.

“There is a ship of pure white that the Fomoire once gifted me. Take her and leave.”

She would not look at him, gazing instead at the door to his cell, which swung open at her words. And she looked through it as if he'd ceased to exist. Was this it? He'd endured long enough and satisfied her wrath and this was his reward? This was so much worse than any death she could grant him, even the slowest.

“Mab—”

“Leave.”

And then she was gone.

Gone.

Airn sat blinking in the empty room, trying to decide if she'd been there at all. Was this a dream? Or another illusion meant to make the next level of torture worse? He wasn't sure it would work. Funny, she'd broken him early on and he didn't think she'd realized.

The plague had been enough. Watching Zafi draw his rattling last breaths had been enough. Forced into witnessing the destruction of his Tempest had been enough.

He'd been a husk when she'd found him on that beach. The Last Fomoire. And the last vestiges of his soul had withered at the little illusory shows of ships dying, displayed for him between her visits. Nothing she did to him could top what she'd already done. Could erase the images and sounds, the memories of death and fire that branded his mind.

So he could only assume it'd been for her entertainment alone. This cycle of pleasure and pain. The contrast of soft and hard, warm and cold, endlessly, over and over. It had been easy to endure, after everything. Torture was an annoyance at best. It was the lingering unanswered question that had truly driven him mad.

Did this make her feel better?

Hah. Even after all of this, he still wondered at her feelings. Perhaps because his own were too intense to handle. He felt if he remembered too much he'd disintegrate. Dissolve into sea salt and blow off in the wind. That would've been a good end. Maybe it was time to give in. Except it hurt too much to remember.

Renner withering. Zafi forgetting his name. Genevieve drooling on her dress.

Airn grit his teeth, hunching over slightly, eyes squeezed shut. He only had to wait. The illusion would pass, taking with it the memories. The ice would return and he'd be numb again. He opened his eyes. Lifted his head. He studied the open door, but it still did not close. It took him several minutes to stand. His body hadn't walked under its own power in... How long had it been since she last came for him? Long enough for his hair to grow out again. A year? Centuries?

It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

The halls were quiet. Empty. Open. Airn's feet would not budge from the threshold. He could hear Fearghal as though his captain stood behind him, murmuring in his ear. A captain must never be unsure. Well, he wasn't a captain anymore. What would Fearghal think of that? Of what he'd become? Imagining the grief and horror in clear grey-blue eyes, twisting handsome features, Airn let out an audible gasp, sagging to his knees.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry, captain. I'm sorry I destroyed everything.

His eyes blurred with tears, the first he'd shed since watching the Tempest die. He gripped the doorway until it creaked. Eventually, he dragged himself back up. Put one foot forward and then another. The floor was frigid. Everything was frigid. He'd never be warm again. It'd sunk into his bones. Even those moments she'd pulled the ice back and allowed him warm water and soft touch, it hadn't eradicated the chill from his heart. Everything felt lukewarm in comparison.

Before he could take another step, the world warped around him. This was it, he thought. The part where the illusion ended and he woke encased in ice for the umpteenth time. But instead, he found himself outside, still standing, now with the familiar dip and sway of a ship's deck beneath him. He nearly moaned at the sensation that lit through atrophied muscles at the realization. He looked down and saw pure white wood, untouched. Unused.

He also caught sight of his skin. Or perhaps focused on it at last in the light of day—even light so grey and dull as that in Winter. The scarring word Traitor repeated over every inch of his body, branding, mangling all the ink he'd once had, twisting meaning and passions and remembrances into blurred nothingness. Swirls of black ink on sickly pallor.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

He was hollow. Cold. A frozen shell. Everything had been wiped clean, down to his very essence. He was a shambling corpse of mutilated skin and raped soul.

The ship was deserted—likely her mistress's doing—but she jolted under his bare feet. She recognized the blood of those who'd made her. He wondered how often her guardians had sailed her. If they did at all. Or if she'd sat here in dock as a symbol of alliance and then later as a symbol of betrayal.

Had they hurt her, too, for his failure?

He reached out, almost reverent, and stroked the rail, ignoring the shake in skeletal fingers. Still smooth as the day they'd handed her over to the unseelie. Queen Mab's Revenge the cold ones had named her. Even back then, when everything had been peaceful, he'd thought it a strange choice. Especially for a gift to strengthen an alliance. He should've known then. He should've known.

This is what you get for dealing with sidhe.

After a brief check, everything about the ship appeared pristine. No obvious graffiti or damage. Definitely none of the woodrot that had sunk into the fleet’s skin from Mab’s Plague. Moving like a sleeper, sluggish with unpracticed motions that had once been his entire life, Airn cast off.

He had to lie down after, amazed at how weak he'd become, how active muscle had shriveled and degraded to sinewy gristle. His mind told him to move and his body protested that it could not, being thin and frail as paper.

This ship was smaller than the Tempest, but she still needed a full crew to sail her properly. At the very least, one strong Fomoiri at the top of his game. Airn was neither. He grit his teeth and closed his eyes, refusing to look at the clouded grey sky of Winter. He could feel it weigh down on him like this whole fucking land was trying to smother him. What exactly was he doing this for? What purpose was there in fighting?

“...just like Tam Lin.”

His eyes opened. Voices. Near. On the docks? He rolled, crawling—and that was an optimistic word for it—dragging his decrepit body by his forearms to the rail, peering between the slats. Two guards stood close on the boardwalk, voices soft, clearly thinking themselves alone.

“Your harem boy's mad. The Fomoire are dead. Her Majesty would not keep one for... No.”

“She is.” The first insisted. “He wouldn't tell me where in Boreas, but he's washed the man's wounds himself. Cleaned him for Her Majesty to touch. Then back to the cell. Too young to remember Tam Lin, but when he described it, I knew. You remember.”

“Of course I remember,” the second snapped, stepping to the side, clearly wishing the conversation over. “But that was an example. Would she not make an example of the Fomoiri who betrayed her as well? Airn Rhymer is dead.”

Airn did not hear the rest. He looked out across the snow-white ship deck, lost in thought. Mab repeated torture strategies? Unbelievably, he felt insulted. She couldn't even bother being creative with him? Find some way to destroy him at his essence? No wonder the torture had felt strange and off-the-mark. It hadn't been meant for him in the first place. His teeth grit and he felt that foreign fire in his chest again. It wasn't passion. It wasn't lust. Something new. Something he'd never felt before.

Hatred.

Airn Rhymer is dead.

“Wasn't the Iron Bastards' ship here?”

He turned his head again. Did they not see the ship? They stood practically in her shadow, if the Winter sun had been strong enough to make a shadow. He hadn't dropped sail yet and they couldn't have drifted out of sight if he could still hear them. Airn reached up and gripped the rail, hauling himself to his knees, leaning heavily, staring straight at the two soldiers as they cast their gazes about, past and through him. The other shrugged.

“Vhox must've taken it out.”

She's not an it, sidhe trash.

And suddenly he had purpose. It locked a cold hand around the new surging flame in his chest. Rescue. This would be two prisoners of war escaping together. To what end? It didn't matter. Dying together on some deserted beach would be better than wallowing here. Here with the people who'd destroyed everything. Who could do nothing but destroy.

Even the churning waves against the young ship's hull did not alert the two on the docks. They went back to their talks and Airn stopped remembering they existed. The flight from the port was laughable. No one glanced at them. No one stopped them. Maybe he really was already dead. Maybe this was his last voyage before he met Balor and Tethra and Rionach.

He closed his eyes. He gripped the helm and rested his forehead there.

Heading, captain. Where we off to?

“Doesn't matter, Zafi,” he mumbled, eyes still closed, head still bent.

The horizon, then?

He nearly choked on the lump in his throat. “Aye. The horizon.”

Home, he wanted to say. Take me home. But then he remembered the burning buildings. Ancient warships made into taverns and drinking halls, all afire. The Great Hall. The arguments. The fights. Little ones chasing each other across lords’ paths because they were the best of them but they were still just adults. Rionach's wry smile. The impatient twitch of Zafi's wings. Renner's laugh. Niamh's hair flashing in the sun. Ceana's lips...

They made land at the Old Home. Éire. This was not what he wanted, Airn tried to tell his first mate, but Zafi was not there. The deck lay empty. The ship creaked as if nervous. Airn stroked the helm and disembarked. He walked for a time, realizing only miles inland that the sea air had given him some life back in his lungs, in his legs. He stood in the middle of a field for half a day and imagined ruins. Tried to remember landmarks from the Histories. Places where their cities would have stood.

He waited a long time. As if some nubile Fomoiri girl would rise from the flowers to help him rebuild the race. As if there was some purpose here. He waited until his legs shook and he had to sit in the dirt and then he waited a bit longer. No one was left. No one was coming. He had his freedom, but it was all but ash without the home he loved, the people he'd lost.

He hadn't really escaped Winter, he realized. It was all around him. Empty, grey, cold. It had swallowed the world.

He climbed back on the ship. He let the sails drop full. He stroked the unfamiliar wood of an orphan ship and thought, You and I are all that remains. They sailed across maelstroms the size of continents, through storms that lasted months. The ship fought them through. She was young yet. Strong and determined. She could carry them both. Airn still pulled line and manned the helm when he could manage, but mostly he spent his time soaking the wood of the ship in words and tears.

He told her stories of Mag Mell, the home she'd been too young to remember, all through day and night. Until his voice became a croak again and he flashed back to nights of bitter cold and ice crawling down his throat. He told her of the eternal sea and the stars they could join and sail forever with Malach and Balor and Rionach. He cried again. He told her of his ship. His love. His Tempest. The way her sails shimmered in the sun. The pride in her figure.

He told her his legends. Those about his own fame. He laughed, mad and unhinged, at the fruitlessness of it all. He'd spent his whole life ensuring the immortality of his name in the legends and now there was no one left to repeat them. Not even his final cataclysmic mistake. He never should’ve suggested leaving Mab alive. Never should’ve let softness into his heart where sidhe were concerned. If they’d only killed her, perhaps in secret, saved their subtleties for dealing with the fresh young ruler to follow her. But he’d petitioned for sleep on the basis of a fancy and lost everything he’d ever truly loved.

Airn Rhymer is dead.

He shivered at night, in the dark, even on the balmiest of seas. He slept on the floor of the cabin. The bed was too soft. It hurt. The orphan ship warmed against his skin. Held him when he cried with her sounds and swells. He had nightmares of empty beaches, filled with millions of chairs. All of them empty but for him. No matter how long he shouted or wandered through the seats, there was no one else. And the sea always rose and washed the beach clean as if nothing had ever been there.

He always drowned in the end.

Years could have passed. One day he walked out of the cabin and saw only stars. He could feel the urgency beneath bare feet. Boldness laced with fear of the unknown. She should've had a proper captain, he thought. She should've had a crew to love her, to cradle her body. Dozens of palms pressed everywhere on her inner hull when the seas went rough. More than family. Something deeper. She should've learned what it meant to be Fomoire. She'd deserved so much more than life as an offering to those who hadn’t cared anyway.

Airn found the mainmast and stroked pale white wood. Where had she taken them? He could feel it, the edges of it. Finality. Closure to everything he'd been wondering. An end without turning back. The child had listened to his stories.

“I always wanted to be a legend, you know,” he murmured, leaning against the mast, aligning his body with her spine. “It drove me through so many storms. So much pain. I told myself I could survive anything so long as, in the end, I was famed.”

The ship surged a bit. Stardust sprayed up against the prow. Airn chuckled.

“There's only you and I now. If we stay here, no one will know our story. No one will look up and tell the tale of the last Fomoire. No one will know.”

She sailed on, quiet but steady, star stuff hissing against her skin.

“Aye,” Airn whispered, voice cracking. “We'll know.”

He looked back at the cabin, past it, to the field of stars behind them. Nothing behind, nothing ahead. No fame. No Tempest. Ag ardú anfa was dead, the legend of him erased from existence. That man had witnessed the end of the Fomoire and gone to the Depths with his love. It was only his body that had trudged on a little while longer.

It would've made a grand story, he decided, if anyone had known to tell it. Grand and sad.

If anyone had known, if anyone had looked up and seen the new stars in the sky, pointed up and asked their elders what that one was, they might've told the story of the orphan boy and the orphan ship. The man who came from nothing, dared everything for love, and lost. A walking storm who'd charmed a blizzard, but whose heart, in the end, would always belong to the sea.

They might've told of his passion, his indolence broken by sudden bouts of fierce loyalty. They might've detailed his swordsmanship, his mastercrafted vessel, his adoring crew. They might've even told how he was the very last of the proudest race. The oldest surviving race at the the time of their genocide. And how he'd sailed away, in the end, quiet and empty. The last Fomoiri on the last Fomorian ship.

But no one knew.

#drabble #v; faerytale gone bad #airanddarkness #long post #rape tw #genocide tw #depression tw #mutilation tw #child death tw #((most of these are for mentions of the triggers not specific instances but BETTER TO BE SAFE))

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