#But perhaps I can have enough self discipline now

[amerasdreams]

I am never, ever letting myself be manipulated or controlled by anyone.

no matter how vulnerable I may seem i am never letting anyone tell me what to do that is against my will or interests or something forced on me or something I don't think of and consider 1st.

Never, ever blindly following.

Being myself.

Thinking for myself.

This is good.

[csuitebitches]

Mentality, Discipline, Emulating your Ideal Self 

I’m starting a new series called Chic Girl Mentality. I’ll cover all sorts of things that you need, and perhaps a reality check or reminder or two. 🤍

Discipline is sexy. Discipline is one of the sexiest things you notice in a person. 

What makes discipline so sexy? Why is a person who is consistent with their habits, goals, achievements so attractive?

No one is born naturally fit with a six pack, your talents and intelligence will 100% go to waste if you don’t hone them continuously - you need to be disciplined to be your best. 

Discipline is hard. 

It’s also what helps us overcome hardship. 

Going from overweight to a healthy body; working on your confidence; upskilling yourself, getting a degree- these are “hardships” that one overcomes. 

And the only way to overcome is to be disciplined and work towards your goal. 

When other people - or even yourself - see the work that goes in for you to be you, the first trait that jumps out is resilience. 

Resilience shows mental strength. Mental strength shows dependability. Because it shows you’ve overcome hardship. 

Discipline also means that you have a standard. You have a certain level of self respect, you respect yourself enough to look after yourself. 

Sexual discipline, for instance. That’s the first thing I look for in a man. Sexual discipline relays a lot of information- the level of being impulsive, respectful, “in charge”, in control of themselves and their emotions, behaviour, etc. 

Which is why disciplined people are perceived as more likely to be successful- it shows you’re proactive, you’re tenacious, etc. 

And that’s exactly how it culminates into confidence.

This is how you build confidence. 

Only when you are disciplined towards your goals, will you achieve them - and achieving them will give you a sense of satisfaction and “yes I did it! Even though it was hard!” - it creates a sense of security and self reliance. 

You’re seen as put together, mentally strong and capable, you’re seen as dependable. 

Whether friend or partner, you will - if you have a healthy state of mind - always gravitate towards people who are dependable. 

Dependable people are secure. They’re secure about themselves, their decisions, they can overcome mistakes or bumps in the road. 

Disciplined people are also perceived to have a very strong level of self control. Controlling your impulses is one of the most difficult things to do as a human being. Whether it’s binge eating and drinking, watching brain-rotting shows, lazing around - they are examples of you not having self control. 

Self control and discipline go hand in hand. No one really enjoys working out or eating clean or studying for their betterment, but self control allows you to do these things. It shows how much you trust and value yourself. Making the decision you know is wrong for the sake of being comfortable shows that you do not have self control, you are not secure, you are not safe and you are not dependable. 

How you treat yourself shows other people how you treat others. Now, you could have personal issues but still be sweet as sugar to everyone you meet - however, this is a ticking time bomb. You’re overextending yourself. Overextending yourself does not show your authentic self! And why do people connect to one another?- because they feel that the person in front of them is “real”, authentic. 

Discipline is sexy, ladies. Remember that. 

[kannouo]

Gentle "Parent"ing

fandom: obey me pairing: demon brothers x gn!reader warnings: none summary: how the brothers react to an mc who coddles their younger siblings. prompt by @satansbiggestkinnie: I LOVE YOUR WRITING SM I'M YOUR NO1 FAN >:3 SO UHH HEAR ME OUT: A MC who's just the opposite of Lucifer when it comes to being an older sibling!! They looooove their little siblings and they show it!! A little too much since they're "famous" for being a total coddler and giving their lil siblings a buuunch of affection!! (Me-coded fr) (Also what if they're little siblings are annoyed at that and the little brothers in OM especially Satan is just.. FLABBERGASTED.) A/N: tysm for the kind words, this was really sweet to read in my inbox ;-; you didn't specify if you wanted all the characters or just the brothers, but i ended up only writing for the brothers as you mentioned both lucifer and the younger brothers. sorry if i got this wrong. also,,, this kind of turned into "how the brothers would treat your younger siblings" at some point lol.

LUCIFER

• As a man who is big on family, he was definitely happy to meet yours. Perhaps even eager, but he'd never admit that.

• He usually wouldn't be the type to stress all that much over meeting the family — he's confident enough in his ability to be cordial and agreeable for just one evening — but the added presence of his brothers changes his entire attitude. He does everything short of giving them an actual script to rehearse just to make sure they don't screw something up. He cares immensely about first impressions.

• Is somewhat relieved when your younger siblings turn out to be a laid-back bunch.

• Maybe a little too laid-back for his liking.

• Now, Lucifer loves his brothers. Absolutely he does. And he's known for going along with their antics from time to time for the purpose of bonding. But his style of discipline can hardly be described as gentle or understanding, and he sort of experiences whiplash when he sees you fussing over your siblings like toddlers.

• You're doing... everything for them. Some seem happy to let you take the wheel, but others (specifically the older kids, some in their teenage years) seem annoyed at your insistence on cleaning up after them.

• If you have any siblings that are still children, he notices how they seem to just hang off of you. They want attention and playtime from you 24/7 and it honestly gets on his nerves, but don't worry, he won't do anything. He knows they're just kids.

• Still, I can imagine him being their first experience with proper discipline outside of your parents. He once put one of your youngest siblings in time-out for wasting their food by spilling it onto the table or throwing it, and after you found out you glared at him, picked up the child responsible and started going on about how "Lucifer is just grumpy and mean" and they "don't have to listen to him".

• "MC, they need to learn not to play with their food somehow—"

• "Look at their little faces! Just leave them be."

• Warns you repeatedly about how they're going to grow up to be spoiled brats if you keep coddling them like this, but it's up to you if you listen to him or not.

• Also, don't let him fool you. He may not be particularly fond of or good with children, but he's just as weak to their pouting.

"Why are your eyes red?" Lucifer turns his head to look down at the small child before him, who stared right back. "It's weird." Children were always strange to him. His presence struck fear into the hearts of most, but children seemingly lack that sense of self-preservation that adults have, making them a mix of brave and... well, dumb. "I was born that way," he replies simply, and the child nods in understanding. "And you shouldn't call people 'weird'. Would you like it if someone said that about your eyes?" "No." The child shook its head and Lucifer nodded and reached down to pat the kid's hair. "Exactly."

MAMMON

• The week leading up to meeting your family were the most stressful days of his life. Not only were his own nerves acting up, but Lucifer's constant lectures on how to act weren't helping.

• What if MC's family hates him? What if that's a dealbreaker and they can't be together anymore? Will he spend the rest of his life chasing this feeling just to find that there's no-one who will love him like that again as he whittles away his time thinking about how he let the love of his life get away and—

• He overthought it. The kids love him.

• Mammon is actually really good with kids, if not kind of a pushover. Teenagers also tend to like him for the "rebellious vibe" he's got going on, and the fact he's easy to talk to (and make fun of). The only problem is he gives in to anything they want way too easily, and for that reason you two can't be left alone to babysit. Everyone else will come back to find out you bought an entire bouncy house.

• He, unlike Lucifer, totally gets why you coddle your siblings so much. He's prone to doing so himself, mainly with Belphie, and also has literally no perception of how humans age or what level of basic ability they're at. He treats your teenage siblings like toddlers.

• "Shouldn't we cut up her food so she don't choke?"

• "She's 16, Mammon, she can chew."

• Mammon also seems like the type to get straight-up bullied by children. You have absolutely walked in on him having been forced into a "princess tea party" with a fake tiara on and messily-done makeup on his face from your sibling's attempt to doll him up.

• Is the victim of every toddler's rough-housing phase (if you know you know). They literally jump on him and start wailing on him with their tiny baby fists. It's not like he can fight back, they're kids, so he just lays there and screams for help.

• Will later come crying to you about how he got fucking mugged and beaten by a 3 year-old. Is absolutely appalled when you take the kid's side.

• "That little shit took my money!"

• "He's just a baby! He doesn't know what he's doing! And don't swear!"

• Catch him and your sibling glaring at each other whenever they think you're not looking, because the child absolutely acts like an innocent angel whenever you're around, and you buy into it completely. Even if you didn't, you don't have it in you to punish him.

"What ya doin'?" Mammon approaches the kid laying on the floor with their schoolwork scattered on the ground in front of them. They lean to the side so Mammon can take a look at what they're writing. "Huh. Ya can spell yer name already? Nice." They give him a strange look. "...I'm 10." "...Oh." ...MC's boyfriend is weird.

LEVIATHAN

• Levi... uh... doesn't want to be here.

• It's not that he doesn't want to meet your family... well, yeah, that's exactly what it is. He's absolutely convinced they're going to hate him. Why would he leave the safe abode of his room just to go mingle with some normie kids?

• I can't imagine he's very good with children, and teenagers scare him. So, catch him hiding in a dark corner.

• He does like simply watching you go about your day with your family, though. It's an insight into your daily domestic life he never thought he'd get, and it's just really nice to him. He'd never admit he was watching if you confront him about it though.

• But... your tendency to coddle your siblings makes him jealous. Obviously.

• I mean, it's not like he wants to be treated like a child. But they get away with everything. How come his older brothers don't treat him in that overly-affectionate, loving way? Thinking about it, he'd probably hate if they did... But still!

• These stupid kids are taking away your attention, and the way you talk about them like they can do no wrong and remind them how much you love them at every opportunity is making his chest burn with envy. The only reason he isn't summoning Lotan is because it's your house and that would be rude.

• Reassure him that just because you love your siblings doesn't mean you love him any less.

• Also, if any of your siblings are into anime or at least interested in it, he's more likely to come out of his shell a little. He'll discuss any shows they've watched with them (because he's watched literally everything) and give them recommendations. Child-friendly of course.

• Keep him away from any siblings going through a "mean teen" phase. They will make him cry and you will have to talk him down so he doesn't go all demon form crazy on an actual child.

One of the kids in the house makes their way up to Levi, who is slumped back on the couch with his knees up. Levi looks up at the kid, then at his phone, then at the kid and at his phone again. He feels a bead of sweat form. Is this child judging him? "Do you have games on your phone?" They suddenly ask and Levi blinks. Damn, the meme is real. "Uh..." He clears his throat. If he doesn't let the kid play, then they'll hate him. And if the kid hates him... MC will hate him too! "...Y—yeah. You wanna play...?"

SATAN

• So, although I think seeing you treat your siblings with such overbearing affection and love comes as a bit of a culture shock to him, I don't believe he'd be super surprised that some of them have a negative reaction to it.

• He hates baby-talk or being treated like a child to any degree. He'd probably lose it if one of his brothers did something like offering to complete any kind of work for him, because it implies he isn't capable of doing it on his own. There's that scene of him in Nightbringer threatening Lucifer for force-feeding him breakfast when he wouldn't eat, and the text conversation where he tells you he wants to kill Asmo because he's been baby-talking him all day.

• He completely understands your urge to coddle your siblings, but he also understands their frustration in response to it. Will probably try to explain why you should ease up on it a little, but recognises it isn't really his place to decide.

• Kids and teenagers actually probably like him well enough. He has a short temper and isn't the best person to deal with kids when they make a mistake, especially when it's with something he considers second nature by now, but he's the type to talk to kids like they're adults and take the things they say completely seriously.

• Also encourages rebellion in the older kids because he thinks it's funny and relates hard. Probably joins in, actually.

• That being said, they aren't exempt from discipline by him, and he'll absolutely argue against you letting them off so light.

• "They need a time-out, MC."

• "They're just playing! Aren't you?" They both nod and Satan glares down at the little liars.

• "They were hitting each other and nearly broke the TV."

• Little added headcanon: Satan does not need to be forced to partake in kids' tea parties or games. He will do it willingly, but will deny it to the grave if he's walked in on. He gives me girl dad vibes.

The youngest toddler in the house waddles up to Satan with a toy phone in hand, holding it up to her ear to mimic what she's seen the adults around her do. The child then holds the phone out for Satan to take. "Bababa." Satan responds with a nod as if he understood the gibberish perfectly and takes the toy phone from her little hands, holding it up to his ear to take a pretend phone call. "Yes? Yes... mhm, mhm..." He murmurs, then looks down at the little girl before him. "Mm, she says she will not be attending unless there is baby food at this function. No? Okay." With that, he takes the toy away from his ear and holds it back out for the child to take, which she does, followed by another sentence in gibberish. "Banguguu..." "Yes, I handled it."

ASMODEUS

• Lmao he's even worse.

• Asmo is great with kids, but doesn't particularly... like them. I mean, he thinks they're cute and absolutely hosts mini fashion shows with your younger siblings. But he could never take care of one full-time because while they can be adorable, they can also be gross.

• That being said, he too is the overbearing coddler type. Not just with your siblings, but with his own too, even his older brothers. All it takes is them acting a little more affectionate with him than usual for him to fold and give them anything they want. Your own family is no different.

• He had no concerns before meeting your siblings. After all, he's just naturally so loveable — why would he need to be worried? In his mind, your siblings not liking him didn't even register as an option.

• He really didn't need to worry though, because he was right, teens and kids alike do love him. He's the perfect person to share and talk about drama with, as well as doing their makeup and recommending products. And princess tea parties? Playing with dolls? Of course he'll join you, dear!

• I wasn't joking about the mini fashion shows. He goes out, buys a bunch of clothes in your siblings' sizes and has them come with him so they can try all of them on. He takes so many pictures (he's always in the frame though).

• Joins you in being completely unable to discipline your siblings even if they clearly need it. If your younger siblings find your behaviour annoying or frustrating, then Asmo is absolutely intolerable.

• ...Kind of wishes you would coddle him like you do your siblings. I mean, he's clearly cute enough to deserve it!

"And then— get this," Asmo nods at the teen's words and leans forward a little to show his interest. "We found out, nobody could find her because she was sleeping with Jackson's brother." Asmo lets out a dramatic gasp, pausing the nail painting for a moment. "Really? As revenge?" "Yeah, 'cause he cheated first. Apparently she was going to just leave him, but wanted to make it hurt." "Serves him right."

BEELZEBUB

• Another guy who is big on family, and really wanted to make a good impression on your siblings because of it. He worried a little too much over it though, because well... he's Beel. The biggest thing you actually have concerns about is whether he'll raid your entire fridge. You know for a fact your siblings are going to love him.

• Beel is very blunt and straightforward, and so are kids. This works out for him because it results in most kids immediately being fond of him.

• Lets any younger kids hold on to his arms and dangle off of him because he's so tall. Will even give them a piggyback ride just so they can experience what it's like to be over 7 feet tall.

• He also doesn't really react much to how you coddle and fuss over your siblings. He's used to acting a similar way with Belphie, so it's hard to say he notices anything different about the way you treat them. Similar to Mammon, I feel like he also has difficulty keeping track of what humans at different ages are and are not capable of doing.

• Covers the ears of a whole ass 17 year old when he hears any swearing.

• Beel will absolutely ask you for stories about your siblings just so he can hear the way you talk about them. He knows they're probably not innocent little angels like you make them out to be, but there's just so much love in the way you tell stories of when they were younger that he can't help but listen and nod along.

• "There's the handsomest boy in the world!" You coo as you play peekaboo with your baby brother. There's silence from beside you for a moment as the child laughs in delight. You look over and Beel is just... staring at you.

• "...You too, Beel."

• ":)"

"Um, I don't think I can finish this..." He looks up at the child next to him, seeing how they poke at their food. Although the idea of being a picky eater is somewhat foreign to him, he doesn't want to force them to eat something they don't like. "It's fine," he says before covering his mouth when he realised he was talking with his mouth full. "You can give it to me." "Really?" The kid looks up at him and then slides their plate over to him. "Thank you!" Honestly, they're the one doing him a favour...

BELPHEGOR

• ...Does he have to?

• He loves you, he really does. But meeting the family means he'll have to work to keep his attitude, body language and exhaustion in check and it just seems like... a lot of work. Especially if you have a lot of siblings. So much talking.

• Belphie doesn't really like kids, but you know how when you're very young, you tend to gravitate towards the cool, quiet and closed-off relative more? That's essentially what happens here. Your younger siblings adore Belphie for some reason even though it's very clearly not reciprocated.

• As for the coddling aspect... yeah, he's used to it.

• He receives that kind of treatment from most of his brothers and doesn't particularly enjoy it per-se, but as the baby of the family, knows how to use it to his advantage to get extra privileges. When he finds out from watching you and your siblings that "acting cute" works on you as well, expect him to start doing it to get you to clean his room for him.

• On that note, he does also understand the annoyance with it. He also hates things like babytalk or being coddled constantly, he finds it tiring. He probably won't bring it up like Satan would, though. He doesn't care.

• Insists he doesn't like any of your youngest siblings but you will find him asleep with them curled up on his chest a couple times at least.

• Also a victim of toddler rough-housing because he's always laying down, so he's an easy target.

"What?" Belphie groans as a pair of tiny toddler hands repeatedly pat his face to get his attention. Finally opening his eyes, he's met with the evillest grin he's ever seen on a kid this young, followed by the little shit grabbing a chunk of his hair and yanking it. "Ow..." Belphie huffs and tilts his head away, holding the toddler back with one hand. "...You're lucky MC loves you," he mutters, then glares at the child when they immediately follow up with a slap to his arm, as if they heard him. "Stop it." The kid then manages to shuffle onto the couch, now trying to climb on top of Belphie to continue beating him. It doesn't hurt, but it's a hassle. "MC..." He calls, too tired to deal with this. "Come get your baby. I'm trying to sleep..." "They're not my babies, Belphie..."

[mellowsadistic]

Changing Her Hobbies

Your girlfriend may well have some hobbies and interests that you don't approve of. Perhaps you're worried being into football is making her hang out with the wrong crowd, or maybe you think chess is just too grown-up for a silly little thing like her. Whatever the case, the solution is simple. Just tell her she doesn't like those things anymore, and give her a new list of things she likes to do in their place.

Be firm, as she's likely to get very fussy over this. She might complain that she's the only real authority on herself, or insist that it's impossible for her to start liking something just because you've ordered her to. If that happens, just spank her bare bottom over your knee and remind her that you're her Daddy and you know best. Enforce her new hobbies with a strict discipline program and she'll soon learn to engage in them with a smile.

I promise you the results are worth it. I know a man who used this strategy to radically alter his girlfriend’s personality. He loved her very much, but he was sick and tired of her bad attitude and refusal to accept her place as his inferior. He put it down to the kind of activities she liked to take part in, so with a firm hand and a bit of patience, he changed them to better reflect her immature nature. Here’s a before and after of her hobbies:

Things she used to like:

Playing guitar

Reading classic literature

Trying on stylish clothes

Going clubbing with her friends

Having debates about politics

Playing hockey

Going out for romantic dinners

Things she likes now:

Playing with dolls

Watching Disney channel

Running around naked

Doing the housework

Wetting herself for attention

Practicing ballet

Sucking cock under the table

It was a difficult transition for her. She’d always been a bit of a tomboy, so it wasn’t easy for her to adjust to playing with Barbies and prancing about in a tutu. It wasn’t easy to get used to stripping off all her fashionable clothes and going streaking around the house in the nude periodically either, like a toddler with no concept of modesty. Nor was she keen to spend her time watching TV aimed at tweens when she wasn’t scrubbing the floors, making dinner, or doing the laundry. It was especially hard for her to learn that she liked to give frequent blowjobs (she insisted she hated them for the longest time), and she was in complete denial about her desire to regularly pee her pants for attention. However, with enough corrective punishment, she eventually learned to accept her true self.

These days she pouts at the suggestion of going out partying, but bounces up and down with excitement at the thought of mopping the floor. She has no desire to play guitar, and reading anything more advanced than a picture book would bore her to tears, but she can happily spend the whole afternoon glued to her favourite cartoons or prattling away at her baby doll, rocking it in her arms and changing its nappy (and hoping Daddy doesn’t follow through on his threat to put her in nappies because of all the ‘accidents’ she’s been having). She never talks about politics anymore, partly because she has no idea what’s going on in the world since her Daddy banned her from reading the news, and getting involved in rough and tumble sports like hockey would just be silly for a sweet little pirouetting princess like her. It’s much more fun to put on ballet performances for Daddy and her dollies. Modelling the latest trends is a thing of the past for her too; in fact, it’s a struggle to keep any kind of clothes on her since she’s always wanting to be Daddy’s little nudist - why wear a cute pair of jeans when she could just go bare-bottomed instead? And why would she want to go out to a fancy restaurant for a romantic meal when she could just serve Daddy his dinner herself before crawling under the table to suck his dick while he eats?

Sometimes she slips up. She looks bored while playing with her dolls, or casts a longing look at a guitar in the window display of a music store. She might go too long without wetting herself or forget to smile while she's doing the polishing. When that happens, her boyfriend is always quick to reacquaint her bottom with his hand, or even the paddle. A 'fake it till you make it' policy is important to enforce here. Make your girlfriend pretend to enjoy her new hobbies, and eventually, over time, she'll learn to like them for real. And if not, don't worry, because you won't know the difference!

[darkstarofchaos]

It is finally time to talk about Megatron and Starscream.

Spoilers for Transformers EarthSpark under the cut.

So to start, it's fascinating to me that people are only now complaining that Megatron's characterization isn't consistent. I've thought it was inconsistent ever since episode 8, and it's only after episode 21 that I finally feel satisfied with his portrayal.

Way back in episode 3, Bumblebee asks Megatron what he would do if his troops weren't listening to him. Megatron's answer was, "When I commanded legions of Decepticons, my strategy was always intimidation. A little brute force, make a show of my weaponry, that sort of thing." He also mentions a "signature move" called the Turbo Twister, and while the details of what that is are lost to an explosion, it's pretty clear that he was using violence to keep people obedient.

Compare that to episode 8, which he spends complaining that Optimus has no problem locking up Decepticons despite not trusting GHOST. He doesn't want to use excessive force on the Cassettes when fighting them, rejects the use of devices that trap bots in their altmodes, and generally just doesn't like how the Cons are being treated. At the end of the episode, Optimus allows Megatron to let the Cassettes go, and Megatron tells Optimus that, "Perhaps your leadership style is not so different from my own."

Um. Excuse me, sir, but did you or did you not advocate for violence as a means of controlling your troops?

That's a blatant contradiction, and honestly, Starscream's "You don't know the real Megatron," sums up my problem with Megatron's redemption perfectly: we don't know the pre-redemption Megatron. We don't know what he was like when he led the Decepticons. We don't know why none of the Decepticons joined him when he allied with the Autobots. We know nothing about pre-redemption Megatron. Nothing beyond his own, cheerful anecdote about how he kept his troops in line through intimidation, and a later remark in episode 16 that, "A human soldier showed more compassion for my people than I did" (note that there is no contradiction between Megatron's self-assessment and his approach to disobedience).

Except now, thanks to the newest episodes, we do have something else. We have Starscream's assessment, and he describes Megatron almost the same way Megatron described himself: "The ruthless tyrant who ruled over us with fear and intimidation." Starscream did not say anything Megatron himself hasn't been telling us, and yet it's only now that Megatron's behavior gets labeled a contradiction?

But that's not why it's being called contradictory. I know it's not. So let's get to the heart of the issue: it's not just any Megatron who hears that Starscream has escaped and Does Not want him roaming free. It's a redeemed Megatron. It's a Megatron who argues against Decepticons being kept in cages, has a human partner, and shows nothing but patience in dealing with the Terrans.

It's a Megatron who, on learning that one of his most troublesome soldiers has escaped, falls straight back into old habits.

We have no direct evidence that Starscream was as rebellious in this continuity as in others, but I think it can be inferred. Megatron described intimidation as his approach to dealing with disobedience, and Starscream starts to treat Hashtag the same way when she refuses to obey him - then backs off when she calls him on it. So we know Starscream wasn't very obedient, and that he was "disciplined" often enough that he outright tells Megatron he doesn't feel safe with him ("Nowhere is safe if it's with you").

This matters because, when Megatron hears about Starscream's escape, it's not just some Decepticon. It's a mech Megatron could never properly control, who probably ignored orders and did his own thing constantly. Starscream isn't just an escaped Decepticon: he's a bot Megatron has been controlling with violence for who knows how long. And when that bot is no longer contained, Megatron slips back into unknown years' worth of learned behavior. Because he never had an opportunity to unlearn it. How could he, when Starscream has been locked up and Megatron didn't have to think about him?

But he doesn't stay in that mindset. Yes, he attacks Starscream on sight. But he backs down when Hashtag intervenes (he's already lowering his weapon before she's even said two sentences in Starscream's defense), and he makes no further attempt to capture Starscream. Quite the opposite: at the end of the episode, he extends an offer of safety, and when Starscream rejects that offer, Megatron just... lets him go. Just like he let the Cassettes go back in episode 8.

Megatron's redemption wasn't somehow undone because he made a bad decision on impulse. Not if all it took for him to change his mind about Starscream was seeing him try to save Hashtag from the Dweller. If anything, it showed that Megatron is committed to his new ideals. Even if he slips up sometimes, he isn't going to return to his old ways. And I don't know about anyone else, but I needed that.

I have spent the entire season doubting Megatron's redemption. It didn't feel like redemption; it felt like the writers just wanted a nice Megatron, and his old mindset could be handwaved as, "Well, he was bad once, but he's good now". Seeing him default to old behavior, even just a little, connected the Megatron we know and the one we only hear about in a real, tangible way. And at least to me, that makes his characterization stronger.

Of course, there's still that contradictory comment about Optimus' leadership style being "not so different" from Megatron's. But I don't think a single line of weird dialogue is worth getting worked up over.

[sovereignjojoz]

Distraction

Pairing: smoke/Tomas x reader, I don’t even know if I can tag this Bi-Han x reader because it’s not, but just know Bi-Han has complex ambiguous feelings towards the reader that even I don’t know?????

Summary: The grandmaster disapproves of smokes lover for some reason unbeknownst to them, so he tells them to end it. Two endings.

Warnings: angst but there’s also a separate comforting ending, one mention that reader wears a dress, self-loathing reader in the angst part.

Notes - this was going to be more angsty originally I just couldn’t picture a meaner scenario, because smoke is too nice so I just lessened the angst to something bittersweet (cry) (I want to write something gut wrenching) anyways might write something for syzoth/Bi-han next idk. Requests are always open!!

Bi-Han, the ever stoic Sub-Zero, found himself in an unexpected dilemma, and it was all Tomas’ fault.

Or more specifically your fault.

Recently, Tomas had gotten a lover. Although some may think otherwise the grandmaster was not adverse to such things so long as they didn’t become a distraction.

You were a distraction.

You couldn't be more different from the warriors of their clan. You were like a breath of warmth in the icy corridors of the Lin Kuei compound, bubbly, kind-hearted, and devoid of combat prowess, you stood out like a flower in a field of snow.

While smoke was smitten with your gentle nature and somewhat naivety, Bi-Han couldn't shake off his disapproval.

Your unfiltered presence felt like a disruption to the disciplined order of their lives, a stark contrast to the solemn silence that usually enveloped the Lin Kuei.

Even now he could hear Tomas trying to hush up the sound of muffled laughter and giggles from the other side of the compound, was a place of komat and violence really a place for laughter to make home?

The grandmaster often tried to keep his distance as a result hoping that the incompatibility of you in their lifestyle would become increasingly clear, yet it had been months and it seemed as though you had no intention to leave Tomas’ side.

He didn’t understand what Tomas saw in you, of course your exterior beauty was clear to all (although Tomas wasn’t one to judge on appearance alone) but you were a non fighter. Bi-Han likened your presence to a fragile glass sculpture delicately balanced on the edge of a precipice, it was as though you needed a box to protect you from the harshness of the compound as it seemed as though a mere wispre could shatter your delicacy - and they were never one for whispering.

Perhaps Tomas could be considered the box you sought out, a sanctuary where you could retreat from the harshness of the world and cocoon yourself in layers of protection, so not to mar your fragile heart.

Yet was Tomas considered capable? Many occasions he’d returned home bloodied and bruised, wracking your heart with grief where you should have been finding solace. Sniffles and sobs lined the walls of the corridors while smoke tried his best to be comforting. He knew how this song and dance played out, a few forlorn touches whilst being patched up then the distress would cease (and in its place came the sound of affection).

Such a cycle will be futile for the one who is considered soft hearted, would it not? With enough pressure even resilience can shatter.

He supposed that was the good thing with his younger brother, he never put pressure on you which is why you were always able to be somewhat resilient and converse freely with him.

He was a firsthand witness to this many times and coincidentally one of those many times he overheard you two freely conversing was currently taking place.

“Tomas please don’t,” you begged loudly, and pouted willing him to look you in the eye.

When it came to many things Tomas was strong willed, but you were his one exception, you’d leave him inexplicably weak “pretty, you know I have to, water is quite literally gushing out of the chamber you stay in.” He countered as he pulled you along behind him.

You made a dismissive gesture with your hand, “But you know that is no issue to me, in fact it will just be like sleeping on a water bed.”

Tomas chuckled heartily, “you’re funny you know baby. Okay then it’s not an issue with you but it is an issue with me, can’t have you getting sick.”

You tried to hold him in place by hugging him, “my immune systems is top notch you know!” But he just threw you over his shoulder with ease and continued walking. “Besides can’t I just sleep with you?”

He felt your smaller fists pound on his back urging him to let you down, it was akin to a marshmallow pounding on wood. “You know I would love that but the grandmaster forbid us from sharing a room because of last time.”

You rested your face on his head sighing, “it was your fault, you were the one who squealed.”

He pinched your hip lightly, although it was enough to make you involuntarily yelp. “Let’s not forget who bit me.”

“Hey you knowingly signed up for that when we started dating.”

He flashed you a smile as he threw you down on the couch and brought out an imaginary key to lock you up with.

You gasped betrayed, “I know I know, ‘m sorry! I didn’t want to have to resort to this but your presence is too captivating, just give me three minutes my angel then I’m all yours.”

You relented beckoning him to go on so you could brood whilst you waited for him, the grand master watched this whole debacle go down and decided to make his presence known.

His presence startled you leading you to jump up upon his entrance, “good evening grandmaster.” You palmed at your dress in a state of nervousness.

The tall male eyed you up and down, “where is Tomas.”

“Smokey-” a disapproving frown crept onto his face, you cleared your throat, uncomfortable, “Tomas just left.”

He clicked his tongue, annoyed. “Yes that is evident, to where.”

You bit your bottom lip “he, um, went to the bedroom to fix a broken tap.”

His eyes flickered to you, a harsh glare almost making you want to flinch, “everything in the lin kuei compound is made to perfection, how did it break.”

You took a couple steps back as his proximity slightly intimidated you, “we shared a bath together a-and I must have splashed around to much, I’m really sorry grandmaster please don’t blame smok-”

“Enough.” His glare was enough to silence your nervous rambling. “Sit. I’m going to speak to Tomas, do not disturb us.”

It seemed as though you wanted to say something but you held yourself back deciding to sit down like he instructed you (good choice).

When Tomas heard footsteps approaching he initially thought nothing of it, thinking you had tired of being by your lonesome and wanted his attention again.

Then he heard the heaviness to the footsteps, those weren’t your delicate footsteps.

He used his vestment to wipe the sweat off his brow before answering the door.

“Grandmaster.” Tomas greeted.

Bi-Jan forced his own entry into the room, locking the door behind them, tension hanging thick in the air.

Smoke tried to read his expression his but it was unreadable, although it seemed like a form of inevitable confrontation was about to occur based on the face he was currently making.

“Is there anything-?”

“You are becoming reckless Tomas.”

Smoke furrowed his brows in confusion, he had no idea what the grandmaster was referring to. “What?”

“You broke a tap.”

Tomas rubbed his nape sheepishly, “technically you could say that, but I’ve already fixed it.”

Bi-han stepped closer to smoke, “It is beyond unacceptable.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Do we tolerate mistakes?”

Smoke had a lingering suspicion this issue ran deeper than the tap, of course Bi-Han would be displeased about his broken tap however he seemed to snappy for the issue to just be about the tap.

“We don’t but [name] didn’t mean to-?”

“Answer.”

“No?”

“Yet irregardless of that you did not show up to morning training.” A look of recognition flashed across smokes face, “as your grandmaster that will not be tolerated. You must end your relationship with [name].”

A look of disbelief overcame Tomas’ face. “What? Where is this coming from, why would I do that?” He asked, hurt seeped in his voice.

Bi-Han pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled, “[name] is a distraction and a liability, if [name] were here now your focus would slip and you would struggle to focus on anything else evidently shown by the way you missed morning training.”

“That was my own decision.” Tomas answered defending you from Bi-Hans criticism, “[name] only asked if I would join, I was the one who said yes full well knowing about the training. If anyone is to blame it’s me.”

“It doesn’t matter Tomas. The fact you even said yes proves how far gone you are. [name] is not a warrior nor a medic but a weakness, an attachment to you that makes you vulnerable and puts us all at risk.”

Tomas’ jaw clenched in frustration, “Grandmaster please excuse me but you have no right to judge. You do not understand what you are talking about, [name] is not my weakness.”

“You are being selfish in your pursuits Tomas. Perhaps if she were a warrior there would be room negotiate but someone so tenuous is pitiful.”

“Then forgive me for being selfish grandmaster but I will not relent.” Tomas turned sharply on his heel to exit the room.

Angsty ending

“You will. If you dare to disobey me then take your stuff with you because you will no longer reside here.”

Tomas stopped in his tracks, his hand shakily hovering over the door knob.

He knew he had no more room to argue but he wanted to, more so than ever since it was a battle between his head and his heart.

Tomas threw his head back, exhaling angrily through his nostrils, then he pulled opened the door brashly and stormed out.

He rubbed his hand over his eyes, cursing under his breath.

“Smokey?” He saw your head appear into his view from around the corner, “is everything alright?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?” You wrapped your arms tightly around his middle hoping to comfort him, “you seem tense?”

Smoke said nothing and just pulled you close with a desperate longing that was almost too tight. There's a sense of safety in the closeness as your breaths synchronise with his. You frowned pitifully and pulled his head down to your shoulder, gently caressing his hair.

“It’s okay.” You kissed his cheek.

“It’s not.”

“You can tell me what’s the matter?”

He lifted his head up trying to maintain his composed mask, “Bi-Han wants us to break up.”

Your shock lead your grip to loosen on him however he reacted quickly putting it back where it once was.

“Oh.”

He ran a hand through his ashen hair, “don’t worry, we’re not breaking up I’ll just deal with the consequences.” He spoke attempting to give you a reassuring smile but it came out more wry.

It was quite hard to process your current emotions but you were trying your best, “what are the consequences?”

“I’m out.”

Shock painted your face, “you can’t do that this is your whole life, you love it here.”

He brought your hand to his face, “I also love you.”

“I know.” You sniffled and tried your best to wipe the unruly tears that slipped out of the corner of your eyes.

You sighed. “He hates me, right? I must have done something again and now he’s had enough of me, it’s all my fault, I-I’m so stupid-!” You hit your head twice before smoke caught your hands and held them together tightly.

“stop it.”

Despite your hands being bound, you got past him and manage to wrap your hands around his blade, “what if I just cut my hair or if I talk less, I’ll change whatever he wants, I’ll study everything and become more proper…I’ll do anything to make him like me more for you-” smoke tuned out the rest of what was being discussed as he felt you trying to pull the blade towards your hair, he knew irrationality was getting to you. You tried your best to overpower him yet you knew it wouldn’t be possible, he was a warrior you were nothing.

The blade flicked out of your hand and made a small gash on your cheek, but the wound stung more from your saline tears than the actual sharpness of the blade.

His thumb wiped the blood and tears off of your soft skin, “it’s okay, you’ll be alright and I don’t care what he think I like you how you are, I never want you to change.”

“Well that would be good if the grandmaster didn’t hate current me that you love. Why does he hate me, he probably has a good reason anyway…All I want is to be with you…nothing else. but I’m not going to hold you back regardless.”

Smoke purses his lips. He had no answer for you, he couldn’t quite wrap his head around what the grandmasters peculiarity with you was or where this sudden snap came from, he didn’t want to doubt his grandmaster but he felt like there was more to this so called ‘dislike’ if he could even call it that.

His head was a mess.

“There is no good reason.” He didn’t answer your question, instead he just pulled you close into his embrace.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault Tomas.”

“Yeah but still, it’s not fair. You shouldn’t doubt yourself like this thinking it’s your fault and our relationship shouldn’t be ending. Period. I should be able to do something but…If only things could have been different.” Or the grandmaster could have understood instead of being an arrogant ‘know-it-all’, “then…” the words died out on his tongue.

Your lips sadly turned upwards as you stroked his cheek, “but they’re not so there’s no time for lamenting, so I guess this is goodbye Smokey.”

As you took your hand away from his cheek he immediately felt the loss of warmth, replaced with a coolness he didn’t think he’d ever be forced to get used to.

But at least his heart was ignited one last time seeing you smile, even if it was in sadness and not long lasting, it would be a while before he let that smoke fizzle out.

“Goodbye sweetheart.”

Comforting ending

Before you were even aware of what was happening to you, a tug of your hand was pulling you forward leaving you stumbling to catch up with your feet.

“Tomas? Where are we going?”

He continued walking at a brisk pace, not stopping till you were outside the compound, “just for a walk, need to let some steam off.”

“You need to cool off some smoke?” You joked laughing at your pun.

That managed to crack a small smile from him, “and Bi-Han wants this to end,” he muttered under his breath.

You tilted your head at him in a curious manner, “what?”

He stopped beneath a tree, decorated with soft glistening snow on top of the wooden branches. He tuned towards you and squished your cheeks together before giving you a soft kiss. “Don’t worry.”

“Okay!”

You couldn’t figure out what it was but he was heavily concentrated on something in the distance right now, his face was clouded by a far a way look till he abruptly turned to face you. “Hey, do you want to get married?”

You gasped surprised, “really? You’d marry me!”

Smoke grinned enthusiastically, “would I? Of course I would!”

You jumped on him to excited to contain yourself making him stumble backwards before he steadied himself and you, “okay! It would probably only take me like two days to find a dress and we could just go down and sign the documents unless you wanted to have a big official thing but I’m not sure how that would-”

He pinched your lips while laughing to silence your rambling, “how about now?”

“But we have nothing I-!”

He cut you off once more, “we don’t need anything, just us, it will make it special! sure it will be informal but only us two will get it!”

“Here look,” he grabbed your smaller hands in his larger coarse hands, “[name], may I be forever yours.”

“Yes, you may Tomas.”

He grinned and pulled his face towards you, giving you a tender and lasting smooch. “Now we’re married!”

“You hit him lightly on his shoulder, “you were meant to wait for me to repeat it!”

He pulled you down to the floor, making you sit on his lap, “M sorry, ‘m sorry! I couldn’t wait.”

You sighed content, laying your head on top of his muscular shoulder, “it’s okay, you have forever to make it up to me.”

His lips curled upwards as he rested his head on top of yours.

Yeah, forever sounds nice.

[klemsk-a]

TL;DR

S2a undermines the concept of redemption so badly it makes me want to cry.

Megatron changing for the better is interesting because it’s complicated. He used to be a warlord, a tyrant, people suffered directly as a consequence of his actions. Unfortunately ES fails to show us these consequences. The closes we have are Starscreams words and that is far from showing us anything.

There are no flashbacks, no actual conversations. Nothing but the present and most of it is from childrens perspective.

This lack of nuance is frustrating. For all we know Megatron might’ve acted exactly the same, but changed factions therefore he is a good guy know.

And this “autobots = good, decepticons = bad” morality is so on the nose in s2a it’s actually kind of pathetic.

The new season needed a villain, and all the hatred for cybertronians apparently evaporated (everybody else just had a change of heart ig and the only 2 people who actually disliked them are dead) and the cons were “always” bad so it doesn’t matter.

It allows the writers not to think about Megatron and problems accompanying his redemption because his victims are terrible so… it’s all fine, don’t worry 👍.

Perhaps it isn’t this way and I majorly misinterpreted the show.

The existence of the chaos terrans really makes me doubt it tho. It also makes me incredibly mad.

Aftermath literally comes into existence, has no idea what’s going on, who is everyone and they’re all fighting. So he does too. And immediately gets called terrible, basically the evil version of the terrans.

WHAT KIND OF MESSAGES IS THAT?

That because you aren’t from a perfect family you’re evil? That is what I got out of it.

Terrans = whole Emberstone = good

Chaos terrans = broken Emberstone = bad

For a show about acceptance and empathy that is a terrible plot point 😀

The episode with Aftermath and Jawbreaker (was extremely boring imo but that’s not important) gives you the impression they’re going to further develop Aftermath. Have him questioning orders and thinking about his choices. But no, he STOLE the entire water from a cave in one tank (how did he even manage???)

Spitfire is an even worse example.

On her first day alive, she gets told that if she wins a race she gets to go on an autobot mission.

She wins, by endangering Alex, and they tell her she won’t get the reword. It’s all understandable but the writers clearly don’t know anything about raising children or children in general.

Yes Spitfire did a bad thing and has to be taught that her behaviour was bad. No they cannot be mad at her for not immediately understanding and agreeing with them. That’s why children (especially toddlers) are infuriating. They don’t know better so you have to teach them, but they will find a loophole to help them get what they want (obviously depends on a child but we are rolling with Spitfires personality). Now depending on what they’ve done to get to it you either reward them or punish them. Because they don’t necessarily understand what they did wrong, even if it’s obvious to you, it can be hard to explain in a way that satisfies a child.

Spitfire lashing out and attacking Twitch is common for kids who believe that someone got something they deserved. It’s especially common if a kid has problems with aggression.

That could’ve been an interesting character development and a good message. Sometimes children won’t be easy to deal with (as all the terrans are, sure they can make bad decisions but ultimately they don’t cause much problems), sometimes they have unpleasant personalities or behavioural problems but it doesn’t make them evil. Being there and loving a child isn’t enough to raise them, discipline is needed and so is patience.

But no.

Aftermath and Spitfire are chaos terrans so they are evil by proxy. Too bad lol.

Twitch and Thrash needed to learn everything. So did Nightshade, Hashtag and Jawbreaker. There was a great deal about self discovery.

Aftermath and Spitfire already have alt modes (at least Spitfire I don’t actually remember Aftermath) and they are just terrible, no good people.

Case closed, problem solved.

Oh. And then they died so…

Unlucky 🤷‍♀️

Redemption in media, especially kids media is important. It sends a message that you can in fact mess up in life, make a couple (hundreds) of mistakes and still come out on top.

But redemption is earned, and it can be (and often is) hard to changed for the better (as opposed to changing for worse).

You shouldn’t change for those you have hurt but so it won’t happen again, so you won’t hurt others again.

Some will come back, some will not.

It IS important that you try nonetheless.

Because no matter what explaining isn’t excusing and no one is born evil.

This show is so FRUSTRATING to me because I cared, and still do obviously (I wrote two versions of this but accidentally deleted the first one so had to write one again).

I really hope S2b will be back on track about acceptance and redemption.

I think Starscream deserved better but sincerely hope they (autobots) will get a hold of him, and him and Megatron will actually talk.

At least let Starscream have his father-daughter relationship with Hashtag, please 🙏.

[deathbxnny]

Hi hi hiiii

I believe I've already sent this request to you. But that was around when you decided to purge your requests and go on the mental health break (no judgements on my end, ones mental health is more important than anything on the internet), so I figured I'd redo the request if you're cool with that!

Might I request something platonic with the leading lady trio of HI3rd. Basically them (seperately) with a younger sibling!reader (in the case of Bronya, maybe younger sibling figure?) who they discover is a herrscher, and they (younger sibling!reader) is all freaked out because they aren't sure what's going with themself. What is this "voice", why does it want them to hurt the people around them?!

Onee-san(s) halp!

Could be drabble, could be headcannon, whichever you feel like doing more.

Oh, and btw, might I offer you some water in these trying times? 🌊🌊🌊

Hello there, Anon! I don't mind you resending the request at all, and thank you for understanding! I love your request and hope you'll like this! Also, thank you for the water!<33

Content: slight angst, fluff, this is Pre-Sirin awakening again for simplicity sake, child reader, main trio are older sister figures, sfw

Reader has no set pronouns!

((Not fully proofread))

《Kiana Kaslana》

Kiana was stunned, when she found out that you were a Herrscher. The signs were there, but perhaps she had just hoped for your sake that it wasn't true. But alas, seeing the sheer panic on your face made her determined to help you as much as she could. She had sworn to take care of you ever since you first got here and this revelation wouldn't change that.

Once she fully understands the situation, she begins trying to calm you down, fully understanding and relating to how you feel. She most likely will ask Himeko for help, if her words aren't enough. She just wants you to know that you aren't alone and that you being a Herrscher doesn't make her love you as her little sibling any less.

She tells you to come to her, whenever the "voice" is being mean or trying to make you do bad things, so she can "kick it's ass". In reality, she'll just take you somewhere nice to distract you, so the Herrschers power over your mind wears off. She tries her best to help you with the knowledge she has, even if her methods may be chaotic or immature. But seeing you smile or laugh as a result always makes it worth it.

《Raiden Mei》

Mei is calm and collected, when she sees the fear on your face and realises what you really are. At first, the thought of having to take you down, if the Herrscher took over, scared her, but she didn't let it overpower her senses. Instead, she helped you contain it and reassured you, that she'd never let it take over you. She gives you a warm hug, her mind trying to remember if there were any signs. Perhaps she just didn't want to think about the possibility.

Either way, she doesn't visibly treat you differently. If anything, she coddles you more than she already did, making you warm meals and taking you out for some training exercises outside every day. She wants you to learn how to self-discipline yourself so that you never let the Herrscher in you win.

Whenever you need emotional help, she'll be there to calm and love you. She listens to your concerns, quells your fears, and tries to come up with solutions to your problems. If you just need to be held, then she'll be there for it too, of course. Doesn't matter for how long, either.

《Bronya Zaychik》

Bronya didn't know what to do. She wasn't good with emotions, nor did she particularly ever calculate something like this ever happening. The possibility never crossed her mind and now that it has, she found herself freezing up for a moment to process the situation. Your screams for help make her quick to act once more however, as she simply pulled you into a hug, quietly trying to convey that she's there for you.

She doesn't treat you any differently and instead comes up with solutions around your issues. She tries accommodating you the best she can, although that makes her lack the emotional side you'd need from her. Bronya tries her best however to listen to your worries and fears, so that she can quell them in the best way she can.

Ultimately, she simply makes sure you know that you can rely on her. She'll save you from yourself when the day comes, if she really has to. But for now, she just wants you to hug her and cry it out, whilst you let her handle everything.

Alrighttt! I hope this was okay for you and that you liked it, Anon! Thank you again for your request and patience!<33

[yestrnight]

slime brainrot anon, back again with another, shorter rot for ya. bc the first one got too long

shrinking yourself to tag along with alhaitham to work! cw for: dubcon, exhibitionism, kink discovery, i do not know how his job works so i just guessed lol

at first, you simply chill in his belt-pouch thing (it's a fanny pack but mihoyo won't admit it), sit on his shoulder or head, or roll around on his desk until you eventually get bored and slide down into his pants.

he tries his best to get you out, but sticky and slippery as you are, you persist, so he eventually resigns himself to his fate. it's going to be a long day when each step of his makes you shift around his cock. at least his belts and sashes cover up the evidence.

in an unfortunate turn of events, alhaitham is forced to walk much more than usual that shift. while he usually sits at his desk, he now has to pace laps around the archives sorting and organizing tomes.

and to make matters worse, you've escalated from simply wrapping yourself around him, to actually moving and teasing him.

the poor scribe is trying his best to keep the shaking of his legs, and the noises that threaten to slip out to a minimum. but after some time, he's stumbling as he walks, using the walls and shelves for support.

eventually, he gets oh so close, having to stop and lean up against a bookshelf, gripping the shelves while he tries in vain not to buck his hips into nothing. and alhaitham bites his lip, breathes in, and out, tries to keep level, but he can't help the quiet, low, breathy moans that slip out, and the way his head tips back and his eyes roll up into his skull.

luckily, the archives are usually quiet. unluckily, one of his superiors has ambled in, looking for a specific file.

and alhaitham can't decide if it's luck or unlucky that you've slowed your pace, but not stopped.

his self control is almost, almost strong enough to keep from breaking. hey, he made it pretty far into the ordeal, you have to give him that.

alhaitham's not exactly the religious type- far from it, but he thanks all of celestia that the unknowing sage is turned away, absorbed in the sound of their own one sided conversation. and that he's able to keep quiet enough when he cums in his pants, only letting out one, hitching intake of breath as he grips the shelves so hard he almost dents them, mouth open in a silent moan, convulsing, nearly collapsing.

for a sage, his superior is pretty stupid. chalking up the scribe's somewhat debauched appearance- his flushed face, labored breath, and slight tremble to fatigue, recommending him a cup of tea and a break before sauntering out.

he does end up taking a break, watching you gurgle happily in slime form while you bounce around his office, and he just doesn't have it in him at the moment to discipline you.

because he's too busy thinking about why in the hell being secretly fucked in front of one of his bosses felt so good.

extras!! cw for: implied dom character (but it's vague enough,) mild objectification, slime cum, aphrodisiac

letting one (or several) of your masters actually be in control for once, by using you as a fleshlight

it's obvious that fucking them brought you some level of enjoyment, but were slimes actually capable of bona fide sexual pleasure?

apparently, they are. and your masters are drinking up your adorable reactions to having your slime gspot? prostate? erogenous zone??? massaged by their cocks.

and apparently, slimes can also cum. if this sweet smelling, viscous material you're gushing counts.

in a moment of poor impulse control (some might claim scientific curiosity), they find out that it tastes as sweet as it smells. and- ah, they'd be regretting that decision if their minds weren't clouded by an almost unbearable desire for more.

their judgement may be a bit skewed right now, but perhaps a few more rounds wouldn't hurt... actually, fuck it. they need more.

it's bound to be a long day, and night, for the both of you.

isn't it always though? hey, at least this time, they might actually be able to keep up with you.

super excited for part two of the series :)

actually feeling really horny for slime reader so i'm gonna satiate myself with this masterpoece in my inbox <3

ahhh haitham being fucked wide open in front of his boss <33 and subby slime reader being used as a pocket pussy for their masters :(( they're so cute fr

[lunaroracleofvenus]

🌺what sweetness should you invite into your life right now🌺PAC

what does your higher self want you to seduce, create and invite into your life right now? This is just in time as we shift into the new year. divined with source, Aphrodite and Hekate <3

PILE ONE

Pile one you might be going through a bit of instability or scarcity at the moment. Spirit says seek forgiveness for any role you had in your current circumstances, as well as forgiving what may be out of your control. You are being called to take appropriate responsibility, so you can change what you can.

Strong money themes are in this pile. Your higher selves are calling you all to invite more abundance and stability at this time. Perhaps there’s an abundant idea you have in your head at the moment, you’re being called to work on that now. Perhaps there are some abundance rituals you thought of.. spirit is saying now is the time. abundance rituals can look like drinking cinnamon tea, putting bay leaf in your wallet and more. spirit also wants you to appreciate whatever abundance exists in your life right at this moment.

You are also being called to learn more about finances, and build more stability and security with that. This can be done through financial literacy. Learning about finances and growing discipline.  This pile definitely has the power to create what they want, and attract who they want.

There’s another message here about beauty and self worth. Beauty wants you to see it more, in yourself and your surroundings. This pile has an aura of sensuality and seduction.  It wants you to take a more assertive approach to what you want in the financial and romantic areas of your life. go after the guy you have a crush on, make that dating profile, and pray for love. this is your season of harvesting the love you desire.

555

what you need - ashley sienna

Sensual seduction - snoop dogg

PILE TWO

This pile is being called to evaluate what is truly important to them at this time. It is not about winning, it is about being true to you and what you desire and love. what is truly bringing you joy and ease?

There might be a large urge to transform at this time. The sweetness that you should invite is aligned with your potential, beauty, fortune, and truth. This pile feels like a revenge glow up. The need to transform, getting what u want, and stunting on those that thought otherwise about you. truly physically and mentally inviting more beauty and abundance.

You need to invite a higher self concept. A self concept that is aligned with knowing your beauty, worth, and alluring the fortune that belongs to you. the ability to believe you are blessed by Aphrodite. that you walk with a beautiful sway, and your face is graced by the gods.

Your independence is also very highlighted in this pile. I can not  emphasize the transforming energy of this pile enough. You need to center yourself more, and focus a bit more on your potential, self esteem, and money. The energy that wants to be called in is very golden, with specs of blue in the eye area. I think the blueness represents wisdom, and seeing and knowing your truth. 

“See her, need her

God I love her features

Her sweetness, your weakness

Make heaven on venus

That's me, baby

God I am so happy

That you made me

Blessed by aphrodite”

222

Aphrodite - ashley sienna

Sorry, not sorry - tyler the creator

PILE THREE

You are being invited to co-create with the universe your desired life. Inviting scenarios that are truly in alignment with your hearts desire, and creating them.

There is a lot of pink and red in the coming aura of this group. Pink is connected to love, and the heart chakra and red is a root chakra color. i think the pink and red is prominent because your next season can be filled with love, security and stability, if you invite it in. if you plant the seeds, and allow it to root itself in your life, mind and heart.

The sweetness being called into your life has to do with being present, and patiently co-creating with the loving universe. To be present in that way is deeply feminine. There is a lesson of an intricate balance of surrender but also intentional desire and creation. You are also being called to be more intentional about what you do in your present routine as this is creating/manifesting your future self/reality.

 but yeah, this pile is being called to truly tap into feminine energy. The quality of yin is the feminine energy i am referring to. Feminine energy is connected to sensuality, pleasure and your ability to receive.

111

The present is woman - Toni Jones.

One of your girls - Troye Sivan

[csuitebitches]

Step out of your comfort zone. I refuse to associate myself with people who fear stepping out of their comfort zone yet only complain about stuck in it 24/7. It’s exhausting to have such people around. Both extremely nice people-pleasers and chronic-complainers are nauseating to be around.

Yes, it’s difficult. Yes, it’s challenging. Yes, it requires sacrifice of either time, money, energy or certain other things you enjoy doing. The world is not all-accepting and all-loving. But if you can’t take that one baby step for yourself without getting flustered about how people will see you/ hate on you/ make fun of you then perhaps your dream isn’t worth pursuing and you should just stay in your current situation then.

Having self control, self awareness of your right and wrongs, and enough love for yourself to do right by yourself is extremely important. That’s what makes someone - regardless of whether you like them or not - go from nobody to somebody.

If you’re one of those people who are going to read this and think “but not all people have the same privilege 😡” “not all people are on equal footing 😡” what do you want me to do? Dance on your head? If you’ve chosen to accept your circumstances then good for you. Just say that you’ve accepted victim mentality and relish in the position you’re in.

Sometimes I look at my grandfather and I can’t believe how lucky I am to be born in this generation. I have the world’s knowledge at my fingertips - majorly for free. I can watch videos and listen to podcasts and learn about other cultures and thought schools. I can learn how to figure out and solve my own problems regardless of the medium of learning. I can start learning any foreign language today if I wanted to. I can connect with people anywhere in the world. I am so incredibly lucky.

Stop viewing the world in a negative lens to justify your foolishness and stupid actions. Start practicing self control - that is the ultimate form of self love. Learn to be discerning. Start disciplining yourself. If engaging in all these vices around you isn’t helping you - overconsumption of social media, online shopping, porn, wasting time, not being focused, dating stupid people, having stupid friends- then it’s time to ABSTAIN.

If reading this has hurt your feelings, congratulations, you’re the target demographic. Now get to work and focus on yourself and your priorities. Only you can get yourself out of the rut you’re in.

[evilminji]

For once! Purely BNHA! Because I CAN NOT stop Pondering It!

Quirk: Transfer.

Vague name, right? Well it would have to be. Because NO ONE would believe a Self Insert, even in a world of Quirks. They wouldn't WANT to believe. Because? The prospect would be horrifying and terrible.

It's far easier to say it's "Quirk Related Neurosis".

Because "no, no, you silly child! Your Quirk can't POSSIBLY have grabbed a random soul from another dimension, which it now holds, as the ONLY thing powering your body! You can't have died, with all the trauma and loss that entails, only to be shoved into the body of a toddler! Silly baby, such wild imagination! Maybe your Quirk 'transfers' memories, too!"

Except NO, asshole. They are the one with the metaphorical arm here. THEY are the one who would know which way it does and does not "Bend". But trying explaining a something to someone who doesn't want to hear it. Something that makes them uneasy, that is outside of their world view.

That touchs on the random, unfeeling, chaos of the Universe and how it relates to their soft and supposedly sensible lives. What do you MEAN sometimes Bad Things happen to good people? What do you MEAN sometimes, even if I do everything "right" and take every precaution, terrible calamities can occur?

That I could Die?

That my very Soul could be ripped away from it's rightful rest, too some far off land?

That can't happen! That's not FAIR. It's not RIGHT. Crimes are Illegal! You can't be telling me that sometimes people DONT uphold their duties! Abuse their power! That things are unfair and injustice can strikes, no matter HOW safe I think I am!

That's Scary!

I'd rather believe you were wrong.

That things Make Sense and there are Rules I have to follow. That I am Safe and you are just a liar. Bad things happen for a reason. Bad people are bad BECAUSE they are evil and bad. Let's not think about this any more. Let's talk about TV shows and take-out.

What a terrifying Quirk.

To be held, at the nonexistent mercy, of the Universe's randomness and decay. Reliant on the compassion and understanding of Others, to cope with what has occurred.

Because while the Universe is uncaring, your fellow man SHOULD be. Bonding together against that great and frightful void. Making sense of it all. The compassion of stardust and all that. Children born of this universe, who in turn look back and observe it. Yet? To them you are either mad... or a liar.

Do they hide it fast enough? Do they even think too, in time?

Or is their's a childhood being told "your past is nothing more that hallucinations and stolen memories" before being fed pills, for illnesses they do not have? Do they doubt? Break down and believe. After all, everyone around them is telling them their memories are false.

Not to trust their lying mind.

Children have so few rights. Madmen even fewer.

Do they lie? Smile, nod, and agree with whatever the doctors say? Do they know their mind or does this destroy them? Perhaps... they are lucky. Good doctors and better care. Long talks and learning to cope, with no one believing. After all, hallucinations don't "go away" just because you know they aren't real.

Why would their memories?

A childhood never quite forgiving the ones who locked them away. Being treated as "insane". Being alone. Not sure if you WANT to "make friends" but trying anyway. Because humans are social animals. Because you know what an alarmingly intelligent and self disciplined child, who ALSO happens to be notably asocial, looks like to people.

A life of fear and lies.

The chronic, extreme, stress, and what it must do to their health.

Does Transfer grow with them? Most Quirks do.

What a terrifying childhood. To know, one day, it could just... quit. A straining muscle that finally gives out. The Quirk that binds you into this body just... running out of strength. Letting go.

Maybe grabbing a different soul.

After all, no one ever said YOUR soul was special. And no one believes you. So no tests have ever been done. And that hold? How strong, you must wonder, IS it?

Do they drift? In and out. Does their body suffer, from stress and a soul barely bound to it? Poorly transfered, by an Infants first manifestation? Why was it a SOUL? The first thing they Transfered? Was it based on need? Or was it always meant to be this way?

Can the Transfer other things, now? Or still just themselves? Still nothing but Souls? Is it even a transfer at all?

And what happens if it stops? Or gets copied? Influenced in anyway? Do they have a moral obligation to avoid those they know could be potentially killed by them? Who could potentially kill them by accident?

And, oh! Oh the QUANDARY of children! Quirks are GENETIC. Any mutation or variation of their Quirk? Will bring about ANOTHER. Do they have that RIGHT? Too kidnap another soul? Even if it's just to no longer be alone? Too condemn them to live when they may not wish too?

Their whole bloodline would be Self Inserts. No guarantee they'd be from the same universe! But they would be Reincarnations just like you. Born into a Story. One you KNOW, by nature, can never be peaceful.

Because a peaceful world is not an interesting Shonen Story.

Just as Batman can never truely win, just as the day never truely stayed saved, so too will this world forever decend back into chaos. So a new Protagonist can rise to meet it. What RIGHT would you have, to knowingly bring an innocent person into such danger, trapped in the body of a child?

I ponder the Self Insert Quirk.

How horrifying and numbing it must be. How crippling, the terror that, this? Is merely the beginning of a Tale that will destroy them. To be inserted into story's they long ago forgot, again and again, with no way to stop it. Forever.

Damned to be set dressing in another's grand campaign, even as they slowly go insane.

What a horrifying Quirk.

The Self Insert Quirk: Transfer.

@hdgnj @hypewinter @nerdpoe @the-witchhunter @lolottes @babbling-babull

[terrence-silver]

Okay but like past twig and John having a sleepover with tiny da eun and watching her over the summer they would be the best caregivers with her

---

Realistically, I think Terry Silver would hate that. 😬

Not the spending time with John Kreese bit in whatever capacity said time might be spent, but the fact that there's this little kid there...taking up all the damn attention. And he doesn't like sharing. He wants to be the focus. He wants him and John to be the focus and them hanging out. Sure, he charmingly tolerates her for John's sake (and for their Sensei's sake) because John seems taken with her and Terry, he follows John's lead, always, doing everything to appease his friend, but at the same time it's like a clear distraction for the two of them, the adult men, to actually go and do adult men things while out in Korea. They survived Vietnam, for god's sake! They're going through some of the most torturous, backbreaking training known to man under this Master. They've earned their leisure and their fun. Terry's thinking a night out, hookers, blackjack, cigars, some unhinged underground sex club somewhere, down in some nearby city where they preform the craziest things and booze and he'll undoubtedly insist on paying the entire bill for all of these activities too, because why not, but here's this little girl John's playing house with and mothering. Oh, he's a caregiver alright, it is just that Terry thinks John should, you know...stop. It's like, first it is Johnny Lawrence being his hyperfocus back in the States and now it's Kim Da Eun in Korea. They could go out into the jungles of Borneo and Terry swears John would found a pet project for himself there too and there he would be, good, devoted friend that he is, entirely indulging him in it. If he wants to adopt, he should've just said so. Terry knows some people who know some people who can make all the right calls. Sheesh. And what's worse, Master Kim Sun-Yung might just agree with Terry's sentiment and think Da Eun has no business taking up his student's time because this isn't a kindergarten, this is a dojang --- they're his acolytes and not her play-dates, nannies and friends --- leading to punishment possibly ensuing for the little girl. Children with children. Men with men. Keep the two separate is what Master Kim Sun-Yung could say. If Terry discreetly rats her out (which he just might if it means this whole summer camping nonsense is put an end to) he thinks it is well deserved and Terry's convinced it was well deserved too seeing as how this kid downright got in the way of everything, mainly John and him. Master Kim doesn't consider John that good of a student not based on skill, but perhaps due to this lingering softness that should just die already. And it definitely does die by the 80's --- we know that. Terry doesn't have it. That's why he's the actual star golden boy of the dojang. He's duplicitous, he tells on people, he schemes, he's cruel, he's slithery, he's so disciplined and self-content about it he's almost too rigid at times and these are, ironically, top notch Cobra qualities their Master appreciates even at the expense of his own grandchild.

Because Silver knows the creed and ways of things around here.

A little too well, I might add. Takes to it like a fish to water.

He just stands by and blankly watches Da Eun get flogged by her grandfather, even going as far as trying to stop John from intervening. That man doesn't give that many damns for that girl. Perhaps he was only ever just nice enough to warrant Da Eun wanting to fly in to to States decades later, but even that, by the looks of her, she did begrudgingly. First thing she does is ask for John. Woman wasn't at all tremendously pleased to see Terry. Sure, she and her goons immensely respect him and bow to him, but there's no visibly grand warmth there.

But, like, not that we'll ever know for sure, but I feel there's an obvious reason Kim Da Eun likes John Kreese much better in later years and it is the clear fact he was somehow, in ways we'll never see, more genuine towards her. Kids have a way of sensing this. And the adults later on carry this realization forth with them through life. John liked her and Terry was only pretending to, and in fact, probably not even pretending that hard. He never once interacts with her as a child and possibly cordially ignored her and was only ever that typical, artificial manner of faux-polite for the Master's and John's sake. I could be reaching with the characterization but I feel, somewhere deep down, in the vaguest of ways, Kim Da Eun remembers.

Not that Terry dislikes Da Eun, he probably only ever liked her around because John liked her around (And anything for John, right?) but that is probably simultaneously the reason he didn't like her around too much.

[readythefanons]

Kim voice lines + chill music

this one doesn't have a theme really it's just Kim voice line + chill music. That makes it more aligned with the original vision of the DE audio project, which was intended to be, like, music to play in the background while doing other things.

duration: 4:58

Put together in Audacity.

Kim voice lines from GrandFrance on YouTube (link)

Music by Johnathon Horner from Pixabay

More voice lines+music from the DE audio project

If you enjoyed this, please let me know :)

transcript below the jump

I don’t know. I’m not a philosopher.

(sigh) Right.

Maybe we should circle the building first and look for another way. The building has seen enough mistreatment.

There used to be seven stave churches on the coast. Les Sept Soeurs they call them -- The Seven Sisters. Only one remains. The rest were burnt in the Revolution, or used for building materials.

It's Dolores Dei.. "The old woman was right. This is the Dolorian Church of Humanity in Martinaise. Or the Small Pinewood Church in some records.

I've noticed that, yes. And I must say I find it troubling.

It’s been a long winter, long and cold.

Interesting question.

Justice, union, prudence, and force.

I think you can gauge what they want you to think of them from that.

Love, compassion, self-discipline.

They're not all that bad. In my twenties I considered myself a moralist. A blue forget-me-not, a piece of the sky. But the years have changed that. I don’t know what I believe in now.

You will have to look elsewhere for opinions. The Moralintern are a fact. I try not to have opinions on facts -- until they change.

No, there’s nothing else. I just haven’t gotten a lot of sleep these past few days.

Interesting.

This is one of those times where you're just going to keep talking no matter what I say, isn't it?

Alright, detective. Your turn.

No need to be melodramatic.

Then the world will turn away from you and leave you behind.

Mmhm. We have a real museum here. Of battles, wars…

I don't know who died here, lined up beside that horrible wall. It could have been any of the parties involved in the Revolution. Perhaps the ones executed here were the loyalist-conservatives -- killed by the communists at the start of the civil war. It could even have been the employees of the Feld R&D Center down the coast, as their building was taken over by the revolutionaries.

Nothing for us to do here. Let’s move along.

I don’t know.

That’s my position: the abattoir.

And… was it all worth it?

The subject of humanism is too abstract for me.

It’s alright. Don’t worry about it.

Hm. Let me think about it.

In Elysium. Behind our eyes. Like all human beings, detective.

It all seems unreal, detective. In actuality, the pale is no more unreal than, say, water. Or death.

It’ll come to you sooner or later. Is that secret enough for you?

After life, death. After death, life again. After the world, the pale. After the pale, the world again.

Who could say it’s not true?

It’s a… mystery.

The world is what it is. So am I.

Okay, and something happened in that brain?

I’m listening.

You did well.

I’m glad to see you’re stable. Keep it that way.

You know, detective, there's... something admirable about that, in its own way...

I’ve never heard of a species like that… The nervous system could be spread out like that… Over the extremities, like a cuttlefish.

I think you should back away from the unstudied species now.

Like a water strider… only… I’ve never seen anything like that in my life... Maybe it has left some proof.

[suzannahnatters]

Ok so I wrote a whole steampunk trilogy about these two bejewelled idiots

so let me tell you about George V and Mary ("May") of Teck.

From the photo - woman dressed like a wedding cake, man wearing the Milky Way - you might think that this is a picture of privilege.

Well, yeah. You're right. Mostly.

Her name was Princess May, and she was Europe's least eligible spinster.

Although she was of royal blood, May was descended from a "morganatic" marriage - her grandfather on her father's side had married a commoner - in fact, a countess (gasp!) - on condition that their children would not inherit his small German duchy. May's two aunts never married, because no self-respecting German prince would be seen dead in a ditch marrying the offspring of a mere countess. May's father got lucky because over in England, Queen Victoria was struggling to cope with her cousin, MARY ADELAIDE. Mary Adelaide was fat, thirty-two, unmarried, more popular than the queen, and completely uncontrollable. Under the circumstances, the discovery of an unattached prince too beggarly to be picky was an absolute godsend. The English were too broadminded to care about the countess, and nobody else (as someone joked unkindly) would "venture on so vast an undertaking."

The marriage was happy, but extravagant. By the time May was 16, the family was so deeply in debt that they had to run away from England to avoid their debtors. For the next two years they lived in Italy, where May was able to get an excellent education in art history, languages, singing, and painting.

After returning to England, May took an interest in visiting the poor and collecting funds for charities. Serious, diligent, and intelligent, May hoped that one day she would have an important role to play in the world…but how? She was not royal enough to marry into royalty, but she was much too royal to marry beneath her.

It was Queen Victoria who decided to play the fairy godmother. One day, quite unexpectedly, she invited May to join her at Balmoral. Several days later, Prince Eddy also arrived. Eddy was Victoria's grandson, third in line to the throne, and thus (if you overlooked the affairs with married women, and the scandals, and the venereal disease, and the sub-zero IQ) the most eligible bachelor in the whole British Empire. In Victoria's opinion, what the future King of England needed most was a good, smart, steady wife. She'd already tried to arrange several other matches for Eddy, including one with Princess Alix of Hesse (who would go on to marry Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, a match which would in no way help to precipitate a violent revolution and end in a hail of bullets, blood, and diamonds), but all of them had failed. Now, she thought May would do.

Perhaps May thought it was her only chance to achieve lasting financial security. Possibly she agreed with Victoria that the future of the British Royal Family depended on Eddy marrying someone with half a brain. Maybe she even hoped for love. When Eddy proposed, May accepted.

Just weeks before the wedding, May was staying at Sandringham for Eddy's 28th birthday celebrations when he came down with influenza. The next day, he developed pneumonia. Five days later he was dead.

More than a hundred years later, we can be excused for looking back and feeling that both May and the whole British Empire dodged a significant bullet there. To Eddy's family, it was a crushing tragedy. One who mourned him was Eddy's younger brother, a steady, hard-working, unimaginative naval officer named George. Prince George was not just dull as dishwater and nearly as badly educated as his brother, he was also significantly healthier, smarter, and more disciplined. Now, with George taking Eddy's place as heir to the throne, many immediately began to think that George should take Eddy's bride as well. After all, Queen Victoria had already gone to the trouble of vetting and approving May, and why should all that work go to waste?

Among those who thought so were May's own parents. When Eddy's family went on holiday to the south of France to grieve in peace, May's parents packed up their daughter and followed. George dutifully called on the family, and over the next few months, as May travelled around Europe, she and George corresponded via letter. Emotionally constipated as he was, George had grown used to writing heartfelt notes to his deaf mother. May was also painfully shy. Signs were against them, but the two managed to become engaged in 1893 after significant prodding from both their families. Shortly afterwards, they exchanged these hilariously awkward letters:

MAY: I am very sorry that I am still so shy with you. I tried not to be so the other day, but alas failed, I was angry with myself! It is so stupid to be so stiff together and really there is nothing I would not tell you, except that I love you more than anybody in the world, and this I cannot tell you myself so I write it to relieve my feelings.

GEORGE: Thank God we both understand each other, and I think it really unnecessary for me to tell you how deep my love for you my darling is and I feel it growing stronger and stronger every time I see you; although I may appear shy and cold.

The rest, of course, is history. George married May in 1893 and in 1910 they succeeded to the throne as King George V and Queen Mary of Teck. In between ruling the colonies with a rod of iron (George), amassing a small fortune in fabulous diamonds (May), and wearing some of the era's most luscious fashions (both) the two of them remained as deeply in love as ever. When George took a dive in a newfangled invention named a submarine, May, standing on the Portsmouth quay, could not repress a passionate effusion of concern:

"I shall be very disappointed if George doesn't come up again."

ALSO May had a dollhouse that was a miniature copy of their home! The library contained VERY TINY BOOKS by literary luminaries such as Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling! AND over the bed in the main bedroom there was a tiny sign hanging - "May George? - George May." I'm sorry but I love them. I'm not sorry at all for all the grand silly fun I had writing them both in Miss Sharp's Monsters. Though I'm afraid that at no stage was the real Princess May impersonated by a clever clockwork automaton containing a bomb intended to blow up Queen Victoria. I made that part up.

[solivar]

Annual Repost: I Heard the Bells

It's Christmas Eve and the former members of Overwatch celebrate as only they can: with unexpected gifts from lonely exiles, assassination attempts, and world-hopping heroics.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their old familiar carols play And mild and sweet their songs repeat Of peace on Earth, good will to men

The packages arrived within hours of each other, in cascading order, earliest time zones first, on Christmas Eve. And, for a miraculous change, nothing -- no deficiencies of local air or ground mail delivery, no perfidious intent-thwarting issues of back-ordering or selling out, nobody failing to be where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there -- managed to screw a single solitary bit of it up. He watched it all come together as the delivery notifications popped up on his tablet, from the vantage of a cheapass hotel room in Fredericksburg while he waited for it to get dark enough and late enough to complete the last stage of his self-chosen mission.

Within sixteen minutes of the first delivery, his phone chimed with the tone he’d assigned to Genji the very instant he’d found out his former partner in twentysomething angst had shacked up in a Nepalese monastery with an omnic spiritual adviser. It was a gong. The most obnoxious gong available in open source sound files. Hearing it now brought an extremely satisfied little grin to his face, a grin that stretched a fraction wider with each new, unique text notification tone.

Really. It was almost as good as being there.

***

Dr. Angela Ziegler desired nothing more than sleep. She longed for the soft, cool embrace of her pillow as she desired absolutely nothing and no one else for years. The terrible, heavily bleached hospital sheets she and everyone else slept on called to her with the sweetest of siren voices. The door to the suite she shared with the two other doctors -- an infectious disease treatment specialist and an epidemic disease control specialist -- with whom she was coordinating the establishment of the world’s first teaching hospital interfacing all of their disciplines lay but a few feet away and she had, at that very moment, been awake so many hours in a row that she was perfectly willing to abandon a lifetime of heartfelt pacifism if someone would try to prevent her from reaching it. So close.

“Angela!”

And yet so far.

“Yes, Kate?” Katherine Solaja was an amazingly gifted young woman, afire with the desire to help others, a quick study and a steady head under pressure, and generally Angela was grateful to have such a talented young physician working with her. At the moment, however, she was firmly resisting the urge to introduce her resident to the truest meaning of the term ‘defenestration’ and then offer the last fifty-two sleepless hours as her defense when someone came to arrest her. Perhaps they would be kind enough to handcuff her to her bed and wheel her out that way.

“You have got to come down to the office. Something just arrived for you with the late mail drop-off.” Angela found her hand in Kate’s uncompromisingly energetic grip and, before her weary brain could formulate a coherent objection, she was being pulled down the hall and into the elevator.

“Kate,” Angela began.

“I know you’re tired, Angela. But I’m serious. You need to see this.” Kate was grinning, dark eyes shining with glee.

“What could possibly be so -- “

“Trust me. You’re going to want to see this.”

The elevator doors hissed open and Angela again allowed herself to be dragged along, into the labyrinth of offices that occupied the hospital’s lowest floors, her own inclusive, which seemed to contain entirely too many people for that time of day. Entirely too many, and most of them loitering in the vicinity of her own neatly arranged workspace, which at the moment contained a desk, three floor to ceiling bookshelves, a potted ficus, a tiny holotank in one corner, approximately the entire senior medical advisory staff, and a cylindrical object approximately three feet around and four feet tall, wrapped in silver paper neatly stamped down its side with air mail shipment codes.

“What in the name of God is that?” Angela asked, completely flummoxed.

“That’s what we’d all like to know.” Kate nudged her gently forward. “Like I said, it came in with the late mail. Go on, Angela, open it open it open it.”

“It’s -- “ Slowly, Angela’s weary mind put the pieces together -- the lateness of the day, the lateness of the year, the unexpected late delivery. “Oh, dear. It’s Christmas Eve, isn’t it?”

She found herself collecting a series of pitying looks and, gathering the remains of her dignity about her, she stepped forward to examine the object. Not just silver paper, clearly -- it was a far heavier gauge than simple paper, wrapped in an overlapping scallop design that came together at the top beneath a medallion of what was probably not sealing wax but which artfully resembled it nonetheless. Fortunately, she had absentmindedly stuck a clean scalpel into her pen case earlier that day; it slid beneath the edge of the seal and disengaged it without damaging the seal itself. She palmed it into the pocket of her lab coat as the wrapping unfolded itself, expelling a burst of intensely cold air and releasing a genuine flurry of impossibly tiny snowflakes as it did so, glittering briefly in the artificially dry air of the hospital complex’ air conditioning. The entire assembly took a sudden breath, some ooohed, others ahhhed, there was at least one squeal that Angela suspected came from Kate.

The little Christmas tree contained inside the package was utterly perfect in every way, its blue fir branches glittering with a hint of frost, strung with beaded golden and crimson garland, hung with impossibly tiny and perfect blown glass ornaments, the angel atop it bearing a rather suggestive resemblance to her Valkyrie suit as occupied by she herself. Piled at its base were a selection of equally tiny and perfect individually wrapped presents, all of them tagged with her name in a hand she knew well.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” Kate murmured as Angela bent down and retrieved one, opening it to reveal an orb of dark chocolate molded in the shape of a Christmas ornament. “You do have a secret admirer.”

Angela handed her the tiny gift box. “No...not an admirer. A brother.”

At that moment, her phone buzzed for the first time, and continued to do so steadily for the next three hours.

***

WickedCuteButDeadly: Oh my God. OH MY GOD.

DeathFromAbove: Are you kidding me? You too? Is is a tree? He sent you a tree, didn’t he.

WickedCuteButDeadly: HE DID. IT’S SO CUTE I WANT TO DIE. AND -- look, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t have a good number for him, the last time he called me was, oh, maybe three months ago wanted to be sure he had a good snail mail addie for me, and I spent two hours chewing his ear about Em and how we met and how wonderful she was and how happy we were AND HE SENT US A PREPAID RESERVATION CARD FOR A COUPLES WEEKEND AT THIS SWANK SPA HOTEL IN PARIS AND THE NUMBER I HAVE FOR HIM IS NO GOOD ANYMORE AND I KNOW AT LEAST ONE OF YOU HAS TO KNOW HOW TO GET IN TOUCH WITH HIM. Ange, it’s you, isn’t it? It has to be you, you’re his DOCTOR.

DeathFromAbove: My tree is covered in miniature planes from the dawn of aviation to the present. I’m afraid to open any of the boxes. My heart can only take so much.

WickedCuteButDeadly: Do it. You know you want to, Fareeha.

DeathFromAbove: … DeathFromAbove: … DeathFromAbove: …

DeathFromAbove: This is not okay. I can’t stop crying.

WickedCuteButDeadly: ????!!!!!!

DeathFromAbove: You remember that huge old erector set I had as a kid? The one my father got me for...I want to say my tenth birthday? I lost it in one of the moves sometime before I went away to college and I swear I only told him about it once and he found it HE FOUND IT. I’VE GOT IT SITTING IN MY LAP RIGHT NOW. I don’t even know how he knew I was going to be in Vancouver for Christmas this year, I only finalized my plans two weeks ago!

WickedCuteButDeadly: Angie, please.

DeathFromAbove: Angela, you have GOT to tell us.

SantasLittlestHelper: I don’t know how he remembers ALL THEIR NAMES and all their favorite candies. I’m their FATHER and I don’t remember all that at the same time.

***

Angela fell asleep with her phone still vibrating next to her on the bed, having given away far more of Teuscher’s wonderful champagne truffles than she actually ate herself and without receiving a reply to the text she sent to the one contact number she had.

***

The inner rooms of the monastery were, it was generally agreed by all residents and visitors, far warmer than the outer chambers -- the milled stone walls were paneled in ancient, fragrant wood, hung with the heavy woolen draperies woven in the radiant iris pattern of the Shambali order dyed in brilliant hues of saffron and emerald. They captured the warmth of strategically placed high efficiency solar powered ceramic heaters and the more traditional charcoal braziers and the banks of votary candles in the memorial shrine dedicated to Tekhartha Mondatta, kept it close for the succour of the monastery’s handful of entirely human residents. Most were postulants to the order, men and women who had come from all corners of the Earth, drawn by the offer of all-encompassing inclusion and acceptance that lay at the core of the Shambali philosophy. Some were tourists -- the monastery opened its doors to the curious as well as the dedicated, provided they were willing to respect the customs of the order during the course of their stay. Only one was a professional assassin.

The assassin occupied one of the outermost of the inner chambers -- it was cooler, markedly so, but also significantly less likely to result in being forced to interact involuntarily with another human being, particularly the sort of human being likely to seriously strain his minimal tolerance for idiocy. (There were a number of wealthy tourists on hand at the moment, forced by the weather to wait for the next stage of their pre-packaged Journey Of Enlightenment, and they were growing gradually less enamored with the pursuit of spiritual evolution and union in the soul of the world with every passing day, most of which were exceedingly cold. The monks tolerated them because the tour companies always donated generously on top of the standard fees, the novices tolerated them because they could always claim to be functioning under vows of silence in order to escape unsatisfactory conversations, and the assassin tolerated them, barely, because there were simply not enough places to hide all the bodies -- the snow piled at the bottom of the cliff would, after all, melt eventually.) He had arrived at the end of autumn, just ahead of the first snows, greeted with an excess of enthusiasm by his brother -- a student of Tekhartha Zenyatta -- that many considered equal parts ill-advised and adorable, and, after a lengthy private interview with the elder sibling serving as abbot that season, was permitted to stay. He selected a room on the same corridor as the chambers his brother and the mendicant Zenyatta occupied when they were in residence, and thereafter he was an enticing mystery to the rest of the monastery’s inhabitants, a phantom within its walls, nearly invisible unless he chose to be seen and he almost never allowed it. The cooks saw more of him than the monks, for he would occasionally take his meals in their company, and the security team that patrolled the plateau on which the monastery sat, who occasionally witnessed the feats of physical prowess he indulged in during his personal exercise regime. The best chance anyone else had of seeing him was on one of those rare days when he made use of one of the public chapels or meditation rooms, rather than retiring to the privacy of his own chamber.

It was therefore a matter of some note when, one morning just at the edge of dawn, when no one but the earliest-rising novices would be stirring, he emerged from his quarters dressed in a manner that would not have looked out of place in a painting of the Heian imperial court, carrying a small rolled silk case in the crook of one arm. Word of this astonishing sight -- rendered even more astonishing by the sharp contrast with his decidedly untraditional hair and even less traditional piercings -- made the rounds from novice to support staff back to novice and from there to more than a few monks while he was still crossing the courtyard to the dokhang. By the time he set foot on the first of the five staircases he would thereafter climb, the prayer hall was at least half-full of novices, monks, and three sleep-groggy tourists, most of whom shamelessly watched him in his progress, for reasons ranging from wildly irrepressible curiosity to absolute prurience, for no one could deny the sight of him at that moment was one of the most glorious to be found on the mountain. At the top of the fifth and final staircase, he retired to one of the uppermost meditation chambers, politely declined the offer of a senior monk to bring him anything that he might require to effectuate his devotions, and slid the door shut.

***

It took twenty minutes to grind the ink to his satisfaction and another twenty to make certain that it was warm enough in the vicinity of the plate for his chosen medium to remain in its liquid state. The upper meditation rooms were, in general, fiercely cold at the best of times and today the cold was particularly penetrating -- the wind was light but constant, dry enough to suck the last lingering traces of moisture out of any exposed skin, and with a certain cutting edge to it that suggested the weather might be about to make one of its unpredictable high altitude changes. The pass leading up from the next nearest village had only just been cleared enough to allow passage the evening prior; below in the courtyard, the tourists were making good their chance at escape. At the moment, the sky was a pure and perfect shade of blue that reminded him of his dragons’ scales, the snow-capped Himalayan peaks that ringed the monastery’s high plateau shone savagely in the thin winter sunlight and undulated away in a manner that reminded him of their coils as they flew, and he wanted nothing more than to capture the image in silk and ink. The exceedingly traditional multiple layers of heavy winter clothing simply meant he could do so without freezing to death while in the best painter’s vantage point in all of Shambali.

He rendered the faint, nearly invisible filaments of windbourne snow curling away from the saw-backed ridge of the mountains in the palest, pearlescent shades of gray, the bones of the mountains themselves in a darker wash, a wider stroke. The snow itself was nothing more than the pure white of the silk on which he painted, it existence delineated in washes of ink that established the shape of the snow line, the jut of stone and ice in slightly darker shades. It was soothing, to create so, allowing the brush to dance and the ink to sing in a way that he had not for years, having neither the leisure nor, if he were being honest with himself, the desire. Painting had given him great peace and joy as a child, and even as a young adult; as an adult, with violence and death as his closest companions, it seemed nearly obscene to engage in such pleasures, the perversion of an art of which his hands were no longer worthy. He still did not feel worthy, precisely, but now his own absence of virtue seemed to matter somehow less, enough that he could lose himself in the serenity of drawing his brush across an unblemished length of silken canvas, allow his thoughts to vanish into the concentration needed to compose each stroke, to contemplate nothing but the image taking shape before him. His spirit was as still as the surface of a lake on a windless day, tranquil enough that, when the dragons stirred within him to watch what he was doing, it disturbed him not at all and, for the briefest of instants, his awareness became theirs and theirs became his --

Something sent a ripple of dissonance through them -- through them and into him, jarring his concentration and, very nearly, his arm, and it was only intensely disciplined reflexes that saved the stroke from complete ruination. For an instant, the insides of his skull were a jumble of perception and emotion not his own -- a flash of something silver, a flash of something green-gold-crimson, a breath of cold, surprise childlike delight a sudden stab of sorrow so intense it brought involuntary tears to his eyes and made Tombo keen softly --

Hanzo blinked the tears -- not his own -- out of his eyes, set his brush carefully aside, and briefly considered the stairs before deciding that swinging over the window ledge, sliding down the secondary roof, and climbing down the side of the dokhang was altogether more efficient, particularly once he shed a few layers of clothing. Fortunately, most of the tourists had already departed the courtyard; also fortunately, those that were left contented themselves with gawking and did nothing to impede him as he crossed the distance between the prayer hall and the monastery’s living quarters at a dead sprint. The cluster of human and omnic novices gathered in the dormitory’s central common hall was too small to be called a crowd, no more than a handful really, but they effectively screened the source of the distress that had cried out to him. Fortunately, they also knew, to a being, that it was generally best to get out of his way.

“Genji?”

His brother sat cross-legged in the middle of the common room floor in front of what looked, to his eye at least, like a fully decorated albeit miniature Christmas tree -- branches somehow frost-coated despite the relative warmth of the room, tiny ornaments glittering and, unless he was seriously mistaken, that was a Pachimaru sitting on the top, where an angel or a star ought to be. It was. A Pachimaru. Genji’s head was in his hands and his shoulders were quivering silently and there was a box sitting open on his lap. And not a single one of any of those things made the slightest trace of sense, taken individually or together, and so he knelt, and carefully placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder, firmly resisting the urge to shake something resembling an answer out of him before he was ready to provide it on his own.

It took some moments before Genji was ready to speak and, when he did, his voice was not steady, synthesized or not. “I -- My apologies, aniki. I did not mean to disturb you. But I...was not expecting this, in any way.”

“You did not disturb me.” Softly. “What has happened? Why -- “

Silently, Genji showed him the package. Inside, nestled carefully in a mass of impact-resistant wrap and neon green tissue paper, were a pair of hand-held game machines, one black with green fittings, the other black and red. Perplexed, Hanzo looked up and found his brother’s eyes swimming again with unshed tears and, before he had even the slightest chance to construct a reasonable interrogative about either, Genji’s head was resting in the crook of his neck and his shoulder. He did, at least, know what to do about that, and wrapped his brother close. It seemed to be the correct choice, for shortly thereafter Genji began to speak again, softly. “When I was...first recovering...the initial neuromechanical attunement was...complex. I could not walk reliably for weeks. I was confined to the medical research complex at Watchpoint Geneva for much of it. I was losing my mind from the boredom -- I was not yet allowed access to anything and then...one day...someone found out about it and decided enough was enough. And brought me these.” A pause. “Well, probably not these particularly since these are much newer but...the same thing. Something to distract me. To help with something that...simply made me feel better.” He could hear the smile, tremulous though it might be, in his brother’s voice. “I can imagine that Cole would think a monastery on the top of a mountain in the middle of the winter would be the very definition of madness-inducing boredom.”

“Cole?” The word itched at the back of Hanzo’s mind, familiar for no good reason that he could name.

“Cole Cassidy.” Genji pronounced that ridiculous surname with the ease of long familiarity. “A comrade in arms and a very dear friend.” A flicker of expression crossed his face, a welter of emotions mostly visible in his expressive eyes. “I have often wished -- “

“Cassidy.” Hanzo knew he was mangling it, and the uncontrollable twitch at the corner of Genji’s mouth confirmed it. “Are you certain this came from him?”

“It is extremely likely. He knew that Zenyatta and I would be here through the winter and his Christmas gifts in the past have been…” Genji gestured eloquently. “Not quite as elaborate as this, but always well-meant and heartfelt. He cannot be with us, and so instead sends the best that he can give.”

“Why?” Hanzo caught the tiny package Genji tossed at him and opened it to find it contained higashi, carefully shaped in the form of snowflakes, tinted blue and silver, and he decided in that instant whatever faults the absent friend might possess, bad taste was not among them.

“Not all of us joined, or left, with a clean slate.” Unspoken: Overwatch. “Cole attempted to wipe his clean but circumstances conspired against him, then and now. He -- “

It clicked into place then -- suddenly and all at once, he knew where he had heard that name before, and in what context, and he forced his face empty of expression. “Genji.” He reached into the innermost pocket of his clothing and drew out his tablet, thumbed open the lock, scrolled through the most recent half-dozen of his contracts, made his selection, and handed it to his brother. “Is this your friend?”

Genji’s brows knit momentarily. “How -- ?” He looked, and read, and the last of the color fled the scarred skin of his face.

“Someone attempted to hire me to kill him before I came here.” Hanzo replied.

***

GreenCyborgNinjaDude has joined the conversation.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Does anyone know how to contact Cole?

DeathFromAbove: LET ME GUESS. He sent you a TREE and EVERYTHING UNDER IT made you cry like a two year old?

WickedCuteButDeadly: I DID NOT CRY. We both cried, it’s not the same thing if everyone’s crying all at once.

DoNotHassleTheHoff: A case of the finest Schwarzbier, a currywurst sampler, and two tickets to the Hasselfest tribute concert next year. Tears were shed. MANLY TEARS.

SantasLittlestHelper: He remembered the names of all my children AND my wife AND somehow knew that I needed a new portable thermal anvil. I suspect a conspiracy.

DeathFromAbove: And Angela isn’t answering her phone --

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: My friends, please. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. Do ANY OF YOU have good contact information for him? The number I had now belongs to a very pleasant young woman who did not appear to speak any of the languages I know.

DeathFromAbove: Not I.

SantasLittlestHelper: Alas, no, or I’d have used it.

DoNotHassleTheHoff: Nein.

WickedCuteButDeadly: I was trying to get someone to cough it up earlier. Still think Angie’s our best bet but she’s not picking up or answering texts.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: This is bad.

WickedCuteButDeadly: What’s the ish, Genji?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: I have unfortunately excellent reason to believe that he is in danger. MORTAL danger.

DeathFromAbove: … WickedCuteButDeadly: … DoNotHassleTheHoff: … SantasLittlestHelper: …

WickedCuteButDeadly: SPILL IT.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: An...acquaintance...here in the monastery witnessed the arrival of my present and recognized Cole’s name when I spoke of him, and indicated to me that he was offered a contract on Cole’s life before he came to Nepal, but ultimately declined.

DeathFromAbove: An ACQUAINTANCE? At the MONASTERY?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: It is a very long story. But I have no reason to doubt him or consider his information in any way not credible. The request came through a contract broker my acquaintance has worked with more than once in the past -- I have seen enough of the negotiation to know that, whoever made the request, they knew enough of Cole’s service with Blackwatch to extend specific warning of his abilities. And they seem to know where he is going to be tonight.

WickedCuteButDeadly: TONIGHT?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Yes. The contractor seems to believe he will be at Arlington National Cemetery tonight.

WickedCuteButDeadly: IT’S CHRISTMAS!

DeathFromAbove: I’m pretty sure anybody willing to put out a hit on someone isn’t really going to care about that, Lena.

WickedCuteButDeadly: I KNOW that but -- it’s the PRINCIPLE of the thing! And at

DoNotHassleTheHoff: Gabriel’s grave. He is going to visit Gabriel’s grave.

DeathFromAbove: I’m trying Angela again. Is there anybody in the eastern United States right now? ANYBODY?

WickedCuteButDeadly: If we took off from Gibraltar RIGHT NOW it would take us at least eleven hours to get there -- we couldn’t cruise at commercial air altitude -- and we can’t take off right now, I’d have to fuel up for a long-haul flight and run preflight checks and

DeathFromAbove: I’m closer and I’m still not close enough, Lena. It’s not your fault. Angela, please, please pick up.

***

Genji was distraught. That, alone, was astonishing -- Genji, as a young adult, had been charismatic, effortlessly charming to all except the eldest and most hidebound members of the clan, almost casually lethal with everything from blades to the edge of his tongue, and as utterly self-absorbed as it was possible to be. Hanzo, then, had thought he could count the number of people his brother actually cared about on the fingers of one hand, if that, and rarely considered himself among the number.

Hanzo, now, had more than one reason to reevaluate his judgment. He had not anticipated, when he made his decision to follow Genji to Nepal and make the attempt to reconcile all that had passed between them, that he would witness his brother in fear for the life of another. It occupied the precise space between bewildering and heart wrenching and Hanzo, for the first time in a long time, had no idea how to react.

“There must be something that can be done,” Genji muttered, on his sixth pass around the perimeter of the dormitory common room, now cleared of random bystanders by the order of the abbot, who had sent senior monks to shoo them back to their own neglected tasks. He was dialing another number that could, in theory, be used to contact Dr. Angela Ziegler who, it seemed, could be anywhere from Zurich to some godforsaken war zone without even the most basic communication service; the woman did not, apparently, even take holidays off and she was, in the estimation of all, the most likely to know how to reach Cole Cassidy. Thus far, no one had managed to raise her.

His brother was, at most, sixteen seconds away from literally climbing the walls in his anxiety, for which Hanzo could not at all blame him. A discreet nibble around the edges to his intermediary had yielded the information that the contract was no longer available -- not cancelled but accepted and closed to further interested parties. That was, in his estimation, no good news whatsoever, given that he had been directly and personally approached for the matter. His particular skills, areas of expertise, and reputation placed him among fairly rarified company in the loose and not especially friendly society of freelance killers-for-hire; he could think of three who could reasonably be considered his equals and only one his superior and none whom he would wish to bet against in matters of life or death.

Genji uttered a number of uncomplimentary things under his breath in Japanese and came to a halt, folding into a place at his side, deliberately and carefully setting down his phone between them. Hanzo rather thought he wanted to throw it, either against the nearest wall or off the side of the mountain, and that impression was confirmed an instant later as Genji flexed his hands, his wrists, flicked weapons from beneath the armor his forearms, between his fingers, and then back into their housing, nothing about the gesture bleeding any tension from the set of his shoulders, the length of his body. “Hanzo.”

“Suzume.” He rested his hand on Genji’s shoulder and could not miss the shudder that passed through him.

“Please tell me that he will survive this.” It emerged as a whisper, barely given voice at all.

It was on the tip of his tongue to utter a comforting lie. He was spared the necessity of making it sound convincing by a soft chiming, almost as of bells, and an equally quiet voice. “My apologies, Shimada-san. It was not my intention to interrupt.”

Genji took a ragged breath. “Master.”

“Tekhartha.” Hanzo inclined his head slightly in greeting. “No apology is necessary, and your company is welcome.”

It was only a slight overstatement; Genji found his deepest comfort in the companionship of his mentor, and comfort was what his brother needed more than anything but a solution right now. Tekhartha Zenyatta, hovering in the doorway yet, bowed from the neck and floated to Genji’s side. In his wake, the senior Shambali monk acting as the monastery’s abbot also entered the hall and, if it were possible for machines to look thoroughly and utterly uncomfortable, Hanzo would have used those words to describe his posture, the set of his spine.

“It was not my intention to interrupt,” Zenyatta continued in that same perfectly modulated voice, the one that he adopted when he was strenuously controlling the urge to allow the direction of his thoughts to show in his tone, “but I feel that I must do so. It has been brought to my attention,” out of the corner of his eye, Hanzo swore he saw the omnic abbot actually flinch slightly, “that we have at our disposal a means of reaching your friend more swiftly than we thought.”

Tekhartha Zenyatta turned what had to be the most heavily weighted look Hanzo had ever witnessed between two omnics on his brother, the abbot, who responded with a low, deep bow -- to Zenyatta, to Genji, and, peripherally, to himself. When he spoke, his voice was also a carefully expressionless tone. “Some months ago, after much discussion among the elder siblings in residence here in Shambali,” the faintest hint of reproach colored residence, Hanzo thought, “it was decided that we required a more reliable method of transport into and out of the monastery in the event of an emergency -- physical danger to the community in the form of attack, or an inability to resupply by our ordinary methods due to weather. We therefore entered into a contract with the Vishkar Corporation to meet our needs in this regard.”

“What Brother Dzasatta is trying to say,” Zenyatta cut in, coolly, “is that the monastery is now equipped with an active short range telestation.”

“What.” It was not actually a question and Genji surged to his feet in a sinuous motion that, only barely, remembered to turn into a bow. “Brother Dzasatta, may we -- “

“Yes. Yes, you may.” The poor abbott sounded as though it gave him enormous pain just to say it and Hanzo could not help but wonder how many arms Zenyatta had to twist, and with how much enthusiasm, to achieve that permission. “We have already calculated your route. Our telestation is not powerful enough to reach the United States directly -- you will have to transit in stages, from here to Tehran, Tehran to Istanbul, Istanbul to Madrid, and Madrid to Washington, DC. The arrangements have already been made but you must depart soon.”

“Thank you, elder brother.” Genji bowed again, lower this time, and then turned to him. “Aniki, I must -- “

“I know.” Hanzo rose. “Give me a moment to change and retrieve my case and I will -- “

The force of his brother’s embrace lifted him entirely off the floor.

***

Columbarium Court Nine would, in any other place, have been a cemetery all by itself, a long fully walled quadruple rectangle of elegantly designed and expertly tended landscaping, the perfectly flat-cobbled lanes between the niche walls kept clear of snow in the winter and leaves in the autumn and blowing blossoms from the flowering trees in the spring, the marble benches discreetly placed just so in the central memorial garden, around the fountain, for mourners to sit and collect themselves, before or after or both. Since it was sitting in Arlington National Cemetery, it just happened to have the distinction of being the largest of several of its kind, originally part of an expansion intended to extend the useful life of the cemetery, and then expanded twice more in the years since its construction, home to sixty thousand inurnment niches, about half of which were in use. By day it was the very image of martial, commemoratory solemnity, row upon row of variegated gray stone walls faced in gleaming white memorial plaques, surrounded outside in row upon row of headstones and monuments and, in at least a few places, something vaguely resembling a serious attempt at security fencing, mostly around the places where, paradoxically, people were supposed to enter the grounds.

Cole Cassidy had been to Arlington National Cemetery exactly once by daylight and the occasion still resided under the heading of the Worst Day of My Life in his memory, only dragged out and examined under duress or too much terrible whiskey in the middle of the night or some combination of the two. Subsequently, he kept his visits confined to those hours when he was distinctly unlikely to encounter another living being -- well after official closing time, far after dark, and he never bothered hopping one of the more properly fency fences while it was possible to jump off the top of the last metro train of the evening, over the significantly lower backend fence along the tracks, and walk the rest of the way under the cover of night and the thin copses of trees still left standing along the perimeter. It was particularly possible that night: bitter cold and dark, the moon a brushstroke crescent hanging low in the west, the rest of the sky an empty arch of light pollution that offered no help to unenhanced eyes. He had a flashlight clipped to his belt for the parts of the walk that lay outside the nimbus of the security lamps scattered along the main thoroughfares, routes he generally avoided, in any case -- the grounds weren’t patrolled, but there was always a full guard complement on station, rotating on and off watch at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier through the night. And, once he was inside the outer wall of the Columbarium, through the arch of the ungated gate, he had no need, could find his way to where he was going without eyes if necessary.

Overwatch had its own monument, plunked down on one of the plots set aside for the memorialization of future disasters, immediately next to the significantly larger one dedicated to all the victims of the Omnic Crisis, civilian, military, and otherwise. One of them was, in fact, a columbarium in its own right, laid out in the form of the organization’s insignia, Morrison’s nonstandard gravestone beneath which his ashes were interred dead center, and every former member of Overwatch who had also first been a member of the American armed forces had the at least theoretical right to be buried there. In practice, “anyone” included a specific exclusion, for the obvious reasons, particularly when the six layers of international and domestic bureaucratic fuckery involved in the decisions related to who got to rest where could veto each other and reject requests for reconsideration until Hell froze over solidly. The Marine Corps, by way of contrast, had authorized Silvia Reyes’ request on behalf of her late brother without hesitation -- Major Gabriel Reyes had, after all, saved the entire goddamned world while still technically under their colors and, even if the rest of his service record was so classified God himself wasn’t rated high enough to access it, that was something they never forgot for one minute.

Gabe’s niche was in the newer segment of Court Nine, in one of the alcoves at the far end of the whole structure, a quiet and secluded little spot equipped with its own sculpted marble bench and a little patch of garden around the base of a wide-spreading sakura, currently winter bare, a bit of ice clinging to its corners. The plaque wasn’t quite centered in the back wall but it was at least still mostly aligned with the bench, more or less at eye level, polished white marble incised with his name and final rank, Omnic Crisis, two dates nowhere near far enough apart, You Are Not Forgotten. Silvia and Lorena always came in the summer, on his birthday, to make sure the plaque was tended and to lay flowers; he always came at Christmas, by mutual agreement, to lay the wreath.

The wreath, this year, was tiny, a braided confection of evergreen and holly made by the same former client who’d constructed the trees, strung through with strands of beaded garland in black, white, red, and came with a hook small enough to hang on the lip of the plaque. He fussed with it a bit until it looked just right. “Been awhile, shizhé’é’. Got quite a bit to catch you up on.”

The glass and the bottle wrapped up in his pockets had come through the jump-off-the-train-and-roll routine without a scratch, fortunately, though both were warmer than they’d been when he set out. He cracked the seal and a scent more in common with summer filled the cold air, cherries and almonds, the liquor clear as it poured, the kirschwasser he’d developed a taste for while living in Switzerland. It wasn’t sweet, which Cole had always thought completely defeated the point of drinking something that tasted like cherries, and he had never gotten even slightest buzz from it, because there wasn’t a booze on Earth strong enough to overcome his super-science-enhance metabolism, but he’d loved the flavor and thus the cemetery caretakers had acquired an encyclopedic collection of fine European lifewaters over the years. He left both the glass and the bottle sitting on the bench next to him.

“You remember how I told you last year that Ylva was pregnant out to here and we were all making bets on when she’d pop? Well, she didn’t make it two weeks past New Year and guess what? They finally did it. Gabriel Matthias Lindholm.” A smile curled one corner of his mouth. “I understand he’s already a precocious little troublemaker who escaped his bassinet Mission Impossible style before he was eight months old so your legacy is in good hands.”

Somebody wasn’t moving as quietly as they could have -- that was an unmistakably distinct scrape of boots on stone. Cole reached down and unclipped his spurs, tucking them into a pocket.

“Lena finally stopped dodging long enough to actually get asked on a date -- they moved in together last month. And, yeah, it was the one Angie spent two years trying to set her up with. Two years. You’d think she’d have eventually given up but noooo.”

He unclipped a stun grenade from his belt, thumbed it over to maximum yield on the flash, minimum on the bang, and deactivated the micro electromagnetic pulse generator entirely, because he didn’t need even minor twitch issues with his arm right now. The yahoo -- or, more likely, yahoos -- dithering on just the other side of the alcove wall weren’t likely to dither for much longer and so he set the timer for fifteen seconds, boosted himself up the outside wall with just a slight gravity anchor assist, waited for them to round the corner, dropped into the alcove they had just vacated, and shielded his eyes. The detonation wasn’t quite as impressive as it would have been if he’d left everything cranked as high as it could go and, even so, it was more than sufficient for the purpose to which he’d put it -- the pair of would-be assailants, one big, the other bigger, staggering around the alcove in visibly disoriented anguish were wearing night vision gear. Cole indulged in an infinitesimally tiny amount of pity for perhaps a tenth of a second before he introduced Big’s head to the edge of the alcove partition wall with force sufficient to break a few of the more delicate bones in his face and robbed Bigger of the remains of his senses and the free use of his jaw with a firmly to-the-point left. The echoes of the grenade’s sonic component were still propagating across the rolling fields of the cemetery as they hit the ground and if that didn’t poke a stick into the honor guard relief quarters and swish it around a few times, nothing would, and that gave him little time to work.

Big was carrying a heavy shock baton, one of the new school tasers hung heavy enough to work on an omnic or a cybernetically enhanced human, and a pepper-box muzzled sidearm whose ammo looked more like a reinforced hypodermic needle than a standard flechette. Bigger had one of those, too, and another baton, and a couple cylinders he knew for a fact were area-of-effect neurodisruption ordnance. “This is a goddamned cemetery. And it’s Christmas. You couldn’t wait for me to walk out?”

He tossed both the flechette guns and their extra ammo over the far wall, with the hope that they would meet their end under the wheels of a passing truck or at the very least not end up pointed at him. He slid both shock batons through his belt, the taser in the pocket not containing his spurs, and briefly considered the neurodisruptor grenades before the quiet hiss of static caught his attention. Bigger had a still-active comm in his ear and a bit of attention lent to it gave him the knowledge that his present companions were not alone (too much to ask for), there were at least six other teams of two positioned at strategic points (the entrances/exits, the major cross lanes), and two of them were being sent to investigate What the Hell That Was. Cole cheerfully decided he knew what he was going to do with the neuro grenades.

The best and worst aspects of the Columbarium were one and the same. The pathways were wide and open, particularly the main thoroughfares running through the midline and up both sides, easily traversed when searching for a grave, obstruction-free fields of fire in the admittedly not planned for instance of the place turning into a combat zone. The niche walls themselves varied in altitude, from little more than waist high (good enough for cover in a pinch) to the overhead gate caps at least ten feet off the ground (perfect platforms for enfilading fire). Staying low yielded some advantages, but not enough. Cole detached the night vision goggles from Bigger’s face and used the last of the charge in his gravity anchor to retake the high ground, hugging close to the outside wall as he put healthy distance between himself and the initial point of contact, scanning across the visible territory through the night vision goggles, careful not to look directly at any of the security lights.

There was the team he arbitrarily chose to call Dumbass One and Dumbass Two, approaching from the central memorial garden in staggered order. From what he could see, hunkered down in the shadow of one of the enormous memorial trees growing along the Columbarium perimeter, Dumbass One was carrying a flechette gun at the ready and Dumbass Two had a taser in hand, both had a baton, arguing for organization and standardized equipage, and yet no recognizable insignia. He swept the upper levels, found no one hanging out up top with him, or at the very least no one visible. He moved, quickly, because D1 and D2 were about to discover the present he’d left sitting on the trussed-with-their-own-MOLLE-webbing colleagues in Gabe’s alcove. The subsequent involuntary screaming was, indeed, music to his ears and also helped cover the largely unintentional noises he made jumping between outer wall and niche wall and then scrambling up to the top of the gate.

Something was going down at the far edge of the enclosure beyond the central garden -- he caught a flicker of movement between the walls, there and gone again before he could properly focus on it, a strangled, choked-off cry in the distance. Beyond that: headlights coming down one of the internal access roads, a hoverjeep no doubt carrying a team of honor guards off rotation coming to investigate the brouhaha, which officially made cutting and running the least morally defensible of his options -- if he hadn’t been there, neither would Dumbasses One through Twelve, and whoever was in that vehicle would be spending a long, boring winter’s night freezing their asses off or recovering from the same, not in danger of strolling into the middle of a fight with opponents armed to, at the very least, mess their central nervous systems up good and proper.

Fortunately, it looked like D1 and D2 had been the team assigned to cover the central garden, with its low enclosing wall and an exit into the rest of the cemetery on each side, and no one else had moved in yet to replace them. Or, if they had, that team hadn’t made it yet; he waited, tensely, feeling acutely exposed in his present perch while he watched for his most recent victims’ backup to arrive and received nothing for the effort. Whatever was going on at the far side had migrated to the east, close to the furthest gate; he could hear, just at the edge of range aided by the Columbarium’s acoustics, the faint thwipthwipthwipthwip of semiautomatic flechette fire. Running footsteps, approaching quickly, and he dropped flat against the top of the gate, watched arbitrarily assigned Dumbass Three and Four running down the narrow corridor between the outer wall of the Columbarium and the inner wall of the garden, foregoing the exit and sprinting almost directly towards him. He unclipped a second stun grenade and lobbed it as they came in range, flash and sonics both fully engaged, pulled off the goggles and covered up.

Dumbass Three was having trouble keeping on their feet, blind and deaf and off-balance after catching a face full of less-lethal ordnance. Dumbass Four was clinging helplessly to the edge of the garden wall. Cole dropped off the side of the gate, landed in a roll, came up swinging with one of the shock batons, and caught D3 under the chin; the impact was almost disconcertingly satisfying as was the solid thud as they landed in a senseless heap. “Seriously. Christmas. In a cemetery. What is wrong with you people?”

D4 collected a sharp blow to the gut and folded, which he found somewhat surprising, before he realized they were already wounded, ballistic armor smeared with tacky blood and something long and thin jutting out of the shoulder joint. An arrow. An arrow that had cleanly pierced armor specifically designed to prevent just that eventuality. Of all the evening’s surprises that was, he decided, probably the most surprising thus far.

The distinctive pop of military standard-issue small arms fire joined the second round of echoes and the ongoing flechette thwipping and he filed armor-piercing arrows, provenance unknown under things to investigate once he was closer to the action. He took a moment to make certain D3 and D4 wouldn’t get back up without assistance and ducked into the garden corridor, keeping low and moving quickly. Up ahead, the sound of caps popping grew more frequent and more widely spread. On the far side of the cemetery, the Old Post Chapel’s belltower began sounding the hour in low pealing tolls and, beneath it, he heard the sharply echoing bark of a rifle firing, from above and behind.

***

“That may have been one of Cole’s stun grenades,” Genji remarked in an undertone, as they crouched together in the deepest available pool of shadow, watching as armed and armored individuals took up station at strategic points throughout the cemetery.

A moment before, an intensely brilliant flash lit the far southern end of the Columbarium and a not insignificant portion of the sky above it; even as far away as they were, Hanzo was still blinking after-images out of his eyes after a single unwary glance. More worrisome were the echoes of the detonation, which would no doubt be audible for some distance. “I suspect, then, that he has made contact.”

“No doubt.” Once again, he could hear the smile in his brother’s voice and it was not a kindly one. “Shall we make the odds somewhat more even?”

“A moment.” Hanzo closed his eyes, pressed the tips of two fingers to his brow, and silently bespoke Zentatsu and Mizuchi, where they coiled within his flesh and soul, begging the aid of their clarity of vision. When he opened them again, it was as though the night had fled, replaced by a flat and shadowless stormlight that dispelled the advantage of darkness. He murmured his thanks and turned an unkind smile of his own in Genji’s direction. “Right or left?”

“Left.” Genji was up and over their concealing wall with a speed that exceeded even his own dragon-enhanced vision, little more than a flicker of motion briefly silhouetted against the sky.

He waited for the soft but unmistakable sounds of Genji introducing himself to the pair guarding the southern entrance before leaving the alcove himself, clinging close to the outer wall until he drew even with the next team, one to a side along the midline thoroughfare, crouched and waiting for something to come in their direction. Neither saw him, dressed to blend into the darkness and indistinct in a way that deceived the eye, even one equipped with night vision enhancements; he climbed the wall and slid forward on his belly to observe them at closer range. Ballistic armor, including what looked to be a military-grade helmet, night vision gear, communication equipment. Their sidearms looked too boxy for a silencer or flash suppression, and they were both carrying a baton of some kind. His curiosity itched, and he scratched it by firing a scatter arrow directly between them, flechettes radiating out from the point of impact in multiplying waves. The one closest to him fell with a howl of anguish, pinned to the ground; the further fell silently, with at least two slender shafts jutting from their throat. Hanzo dropped behind the howler and gave him peace and the world silence. He gathered up the gun and the baton and made good his escape before the running footsteps he heard approaching could reach his position, retreating to a spot atop the outside wall where he could both watch the pathways and examine his acquisitions.

The gun was a flechette pistol, which explained the boxy design, but the entire thing felt heavier than the weapons of that type with whom he was acquainted. He ejected the magazine and then a clip of the darts, found them to be substantially beyond standard, a projectile hypodermic flechette, reservoir filled with a clear liquid. He snapped a picture with his phone, making certain to catch the serial number engraved on the side of the dart, and sent it to Tekhartha Zenyatta, on station with their getaway vehicle. Tekhartha, please identify if possible.

The baton was also modified -- weighted normally enough, sufficient to break unenhanced bone and pulverize unenhanced flesh, but also equipped with a shock generator heavy enough to overcome omnic, or cybernetically enhanced human, neuromechanical surge protection. He reached up and keyed the comm. “Genji, be careful. At least some of these creatures are armed with weapons that can harm you despite your armor.”

“Thank you, aniki.” Genji sounded slightly breathless and Hanzo glanced back in the direction he had come, concerned. “Be aware that our friends have brought more reinforcements than we originally suspected and also a team from Fort Myer has arrived to investigate.”

“Do you require my assistance?” Hanzo tucked the pistol into a jacket pocket and slid the baton into his belt, half-turning as he did so.

“No.” And now it sounded as though he were breathless with laughter. “I have the situation under control. Find Cole -- if any proper soldiers reach him first, we may have to do something...regrettable.”

“As you wish.” He slipped his bow off his shoulder and nocked an arrow, arming the scattershot as he did so, and sped along the top of the outside wall as quickly as he could without compromising his balance. To his right, the midlane remained clear as he passed a second set of internal gates, to his left, something flickered in the corner of his eye, movement.

Hanzo stopped, spun, and snap-fired -- connecting, to his annoyance, with nothing. The arrow passed cleanly through empty air and came to rest somewhere amid the field of gravestones opposite the Columbarium and the access road running between. He remained in place for a moment, intensely still and watchful, waiting for whatever he had glimpsed to show itself.

Behind him, someone screamed. It was a brief, abortive, choked off thing followed shortly thereafter by a storm of semiautomatic flechette fire -- it sounded like more than one gun -- and running footsteps rapidly approaching his position. He nocked another arrow and waited, drawn to the ear, and loosed the instant the first target crossed into view. The arrow punched cleanly through the shoulder joint of their armor and they stumbled, half-falling and half-dragged by their partner as they both fled. A gust of something, a dark mist moving against the faint breeze, flowed down the midlane in pursuit and Hanzo followed as swiftly as he dared.

Ahead, the night dissolved into another intense burst of light, one he was spared by the grace of the dragons, and far more intense burst of sound -- loud enough to make his ears ring, even at a distance, not enough to affect his sense of balance. He leapt across the outside lane to the top of a niche wall, ran its length, and dropped into the midline, attempting to get a better look at what was going on up ahead. The garden wall was low enough to see over, barely, as he ran in that direction and he caught intermittent glimpses of a scuffle taking place before the gate that opened into the southern end of the Columbarium, someone ducking into the corridor passing the front wall of the garden, the muzzle-flash from atop the gate and the report of a single high-caliber gunshot.

Hanzo went over the garden wall even as the shooter dropped from the gate, its form slim and sleek and dark in a manner that suggested engineering rather than armor. He crossed the garden at a dead sprint, arrow already on the bowstring, and as he came through the gate, he fired point-blank at the shooter’s center of mass, once, twice, before he rolled out of the immediate line of fire, explosive heads that knocked it back and forced it to give up the shot it was about to take. Its target lay in the garden corridor, a pool of blood spreading across the paving stones, shuddering helplessly in a way that suggested a seizure in progress. He came back up over the wall, the last of his explosive arrows nocked, just in time to find the shooter regaining its feet -- an omnic most definitely, nothing purely human, even an armored human, would have shrugged off those hits that quickly -- reaching for a cylinder at its hip, hurling it at him. Hanzo fired to intercept it at the peak of its arc and dove flat; the neurodisruptor pulse spent itself on nothing as it triggered in midair and he rolled to his feet, reaching for a scatter arrow.

The shooter fled across the narrow court separating the garden wall from the gate, and regained its previous perch in a single prodigious leap. To his surprise, it did not turn back -- did not even attempt to do so, leaping to the top of the next niche wall and sprinting across the rows in long, loping strides. He watched until it vanished out of immediate view, dropping below the level of the walls, and then turned his attention to its target.

He was scruffier than the pictures in the file sent along with the contract information, his beard and hair longer and less tamed, but still recognizable as the man he had nearly been hired to kill. His upper left chest was a mass of blood-soaked cloak and shredded outer jacket, the wound itself concealed in layers of clothing, but the shooter had clearly not missed. And he was seizing, his muscles spasming convulsively, the tension half-lifting his back off the ground, face contorted with pain, desperate sounds that were almost words coming out of his mouth. Hanzo knelt at his side, caught his face between his hands, and, with an effort that he felt in his own flesh, Cole Cassidy forced himself to meet his gaze and rasped out, “Arm.”

Cassidy’s left arm was a known cybernetic enhancement and at that moment it lay at his side, unmoving, fingers locked in an involuntarily contorted claw. He felt along the edge of the skull plate and found the switch concealed there, popped open the diagnostic panel, reading red across the board with multiple neuromechanical system failures, and pressed the emergency disengage switches in sequence. The joint sealed and locked, the arm itself disengaged with a series of audible metallic clicks, and the muscular convulsions slowed almost immediately, finally stopped entirely as Hanzo lifted him, gathered him around the chest, and bodily pulled him into the garden, behind the fountain basin. It wasn’t the best possible cover but it was still better than none and it allowed him to prop Cassidy up as he sliced away the blood-soaked over-cape and the heavy suede-and-fleece jacket beneath. With both gone, the blood flowed freely across the ballistic armor he wore under them, armor that had been broken from beneath by a high caliber, high velocity armor-piercing round that punched through it completely, taking a divot of flesh and bone and muscle the size of a large man’s fist with it. Hanzo saw, amid the mass of pulped flesh and shattered bone, strands of broken neuromechanical control wire, the feedback from which must have caused the seizure. Cassidy coughed, and wheezed, trying to draw enough breath to speak and another pulse of blood flowed out of the wound, frothed with air bubbles. Hanzo hit the disengage switches on the remaining shoulder joint and both side panels, lifted the armor away as gently as he could; the sounds that escaped his patient were completely involuntary.

Hanzo reached up and activated his comm. “Genji, I have him but he is badly injured. We are in the central garden.”

Cassidy’s throat worked silently for a moment as Hanzo opened the pouch in which he carried his own medical supplies, inadequate though they might be to this task, and began searching for something large enough to serve as a proper compression dressing. A little sound escaped him as Hanzo pressed one of the sleeves of his own jacket over the site and bound it as best he could with knots and a length of sterile bandage wrapped around to keep it in place.

“Genji?” He croaked.

“Yes.” Hanzo slipped out of his own coat and wrapped it around Cassidy as best he could -- the man was broader across both chest and shoulders than he, but he had no other means of warming him, and silently cursed the lack of an emergency blanket among his gear.

“Shimada.” It took all of his breath to properly aspirate the syllables and Hanzo pressed a hand to his chest.

“Yes.” Gently. “Be still. Save your strength and your breath. He will be here soon and we will...make certain you are properly cared for.”

He was in no way certain that was true. He knew, from many years of long experience, what a sucking chest wound looked like, suspected mordantly that the heavens would not favor making this one clean or uncomplicated, knew that the longer it took to bring him comprehensive medical attention the greater the chance of his death from shock or cardiorespiratory collapse. Knew also that saving this man’s life greatly exceeded his skills. He pressed close to his unwounded side, the best to share body heat, resting one hand against the curve of his throat to monitor his heart-rate (high, fast, with pain and adrenaline), watched the shape of his chest for signs of a collapsing lung.

Cassidy took three ragged breaths, in and out, and rasped, “Who?”

Hanzo glanced up, found dark eyes hugely dilated with pain fixed on his face. “Hanzo. At your service. Please, do not speak.”

He looked, for an instant, like he might try to argue that point -- and then his gaze shifted upwards, and his lips parted in a pained, more than slightly bloodstained smile. Genji landed almost precisely at his side, soundless and apparently none the worse for the evening’s exertions. “Cole.” “I just told him to save his breath,” Hanzo remarked, with some asperity.

“Heya...li’l brother,” Cassidy wheezed. “Long time...no see.”

“Perhaps I should save mine.” Hanzo flicked a glance over his shoulder. “Pursuit?”

“Napping.” Genji held up one of the flechette pistols with the tip of one finger, the gesture a thing of ineffable disdain. “Experimental sedation rounds -- the serial number you sent my master matches a lot stolen from a cargo hypertrain last month. I summoned assistance for the soldiers, at least, and my master should be here -- “

A sleek, nondescript sedan pulled up immediately opposite the garden entrance, the rear door cycled open, and the driver’s side window came down, Tekhartha Zenyatta peering owlishly out at them. “Please hurry. Another group of soldiers has been deployed and I suspect we should make good our departure before they arrive.”

Together they lifted and together they carried, Cassidy biting down on his gloved right hand to hold in any sounds of pain, and in such a way did Hanzo find himself sitting in the car they had stolen upon their arrival at Vishkar’s Washington DC telestation with a bloody cowboy propped against his chest. Fortunately, there was an emergency blanket in the vehicle’s First Aid case and, perhaps even more fortunately, the wrapper was large enough to lay over the worst part of the wound with enough whole flesh around it to tape it in place. One of Zenyatta’s spheres joined them in the back and hovered over Cassidy’s chest, shedding warm and soothing golden radiance as it did so. The desperate edge to Cassidy’s breathing eased somewhat, his head fell back against Hanzo’s shoulder, and his eyes flickered shut as exhaustion claimed his senses. Hanzo kept a hand wrapped around his wrist, fingers on the pulse-point. “Where can we take him?”

He could feel the helplessness in Genji’s gaze as he looked back at them. “I...do not know. If we take him to the hospital…” The thought trailed away into things that they both knew would happen. “I am going to message Lena for their ETA and then we can -- “ “My student,” Zenyatta was behind the wheel of the vehicle, carefully navigating them through Christmas Eve traffic. “Something is...happening.”

“Master?” Genji looked up from his phone, perplexity clear in his tone.

“Something is attempting -- “ A pause, a brief burst of sound that Hanzo was tempted to call a gasp. “Something has ejected me from the vehicle’s control systems.”

Hanzo’s hand flew to the manual door latch, only to find it locked. Genji swore, short and explosive, as he made a similar discovery, and all of Zenyatta’s spheres chimed a single high-pitched tone of alarm. Then, the vehicle’s onboard sound system activated itself, and the console navigation panel flickered, flashing a lurid electric purple overlaid with a stylized white skull icon, its nose an inverted heart; the voice that came over the speakers belonged to the vehicle’s GPS navigation system. “Whatever you do right now, do this one thing: do not panic.”

“Who are you?” Hanzo demanded, reaching up to steady Cassidy’s head where it rested, as the vehicle maneuvered through traffic at a rather higher rate of speed; a sign for hyperlane access sped past on the right.

“Consider me a contractor.” A warm little chuckle in the navigation system’s sexless contralto. “I’ve been hired by a not exactly neutral third party to make sure you and your cargo make a clean getaway and reach a place where you can hunker down in reasonable safety. So, if you want my advice -- and, I assure you, you want my advice -- don’t entertain any heroic foolishness for the next couple hours, sit back, and enjoy the ride. So long you make sure the dumbass vaquero doesn’t bleed to death or hack out a lung, we’ll be golden, and the rest will be up to you once you get where you’re going. Agreeable?”

“If it were not agreeable?” Genji growled.

“Oh, well, in that case,” The navigation system replied cheerfully, “I’d pulse some sonics through the vehicle’s entertainment system that would render you all unpleasantly senseless and you’d still go where I’m taking you, only you’d get there with a skullfucking headache and maybe a dead cowboy. Seriously, the speakers in this thing are incredible.” Hanzo felt one, just behind his back, vibrating at a decidedly threatening pitch. “Your pick.”

“Agreed,” Hanzo snapped, before Genji could intervene. “Where are you taking us?”

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. Seriously...just relax, and make sure he doesn’t die. All I ask.”

The vehicle peeled off onto the hyperlane, headed west.

*** GreenCyborgNinjaDude: We have him but he is severely injured.

DeathFromAbove: HOW severely? We’ll be leaving for the airport in a minute, btw, might be without good service for a bit while Dad and I are on the road.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: It would be best if my master describes it, he is monitoring Cole’s condition.

PeaceLoveAndBalance has joined the conversation.

PeaceLoveAndBalance: Greetings and thank you for permitting me access.

ATHENA: You are entirely welcome, Tekhartha.

WickedCuteButDeadly: What’s the word? Winston, Em, and I are inbound and we’ve got one of those mobile life support pods loaded in the passenger compartment. Incidentally, I hope nobody’s carrying too much gear.

DeathFromAbove:...Weren’t those experimental?

PeanutButterIsLife: They’re significantly less experimental than they were. Tekhartha?

PeaceLoveAndBalance: Briefly, he was shot from behind by an individual using a sniper rifle, firing high caliber, high velocity ammunition. He was hit between and to the left of the first through third thoracic vertebrae, just above the upper edge of his ballistic armor. He has suffered significant injury to both the trapezius and pectoralis major muscle groups, the brachial nerve plexus including the neuromechanical attachments to his left arm, the left scapula, the left clavicle, the left acromioclavicular joint and ligament, the glenohumeral ligament, the second rib and costal cartilage, and the upper left lobe of his lung. He was respiring abnormally when we found him but has responded well to our efforts to treat that particular injury and his lung is not in danger of collapsing at this time. He has, however, lost a great deal of blood, which we have no means of replenishing, and he is still bleeding internally -- slowly, I can personally assure that much. But we are maintaining him in a state of shock, at best, and he requires more care than we can provide in our current circumstances.

WickedCuteButDeadly: I hear you. What’s your present position?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: That...is an excellent question. We are not entirely certain ourselves.

WickedCuteButDeadly: What.

DeathFromAbove: I’m with Lena. What?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Our vehicle has sort of been hijacked.

WickedCuteButDeadly:... DeathFromAbove:... PeanutButterIsLife:... ATHENA:..

DeathFromAbove: Explain this to me using small words and diagrams.

PeaceLoveAndBalance: As we were departing the Washington DC metropolitan area, an external force ejected me from our vehicle’s navigational systems and seized control. It was not...violent, per se, but it was extremely swift and thorough and brooked no resistance on my part. We have been proceeding under its control since.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: We’re travelling through the mountains west of the city, heading south.

WickedCuteButDeadly:... DeathFromAbove:... PeanutButterIsLife:... ATHENA:...

PeanutButterIsLife:...Are you saying that, in addition to everything else, you three have been KIDNAPPED? By parties unknown? Is that what you’re telling us?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Sort of? Whoever they are, they helped us get away -- in fact, they told us they were hired by an interested third party to make sure we got away and would reach a safe place for your arrival. Admittedly, we do not know where that is yet.

WickedCuteButDeadly: OKAY, THEN.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: I am so sorry, Lena.

WickedCuteButDeadly: No no no, don’t be sorry. I made certain all the fuel tanks were loaded to capacity before we left and the backup solar cells are fully charged. Just...lemme know your final coordinates as soon as you’ve got them out and we’ll...figure things out from there!

DeathFromAbove: You are going to owe her all the booze, Genji. The GOOD stuff. And me. All of it.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: I am poignantly aware of that, yes.

MercyMercyMe has joined the conversation.

MercyMercyMe: I’m sorry, everyone, I just woke up -- it has been a terribly busy last few days. What is going on?

***

In the front seat of the car, Genji uttered a sound that, even synthesized, could not be mistaken for anything but a moan of absolute despair. Zenyatta reached over and laid a comforting hand on his student’s shoulder; he leaned into the touch in a manner that suggested he had forgotten, for at least a moment, that they were not alone in the vehicle.

Hanzo declined to remind them, partly watching the scenery as it passed, mostly attending to his charge, who was drifting in and out of consciousness and occasionally making sounds that were almost words. Cassidy was, at the moment, still and silent and the view outside the window consisted entirely of dark, dense forest with occasional glimpses of overcast sky, the leading edge of a storm according to his phone’s weather app. Even more occasionally he caught a glimpse of ruddy light pollution staining the bottom of those clouds, though at present is was oppressively dark, the road lined in stands of enormous evergreens that screened the view as effectively as a wall. A glance at his phone showed him they were still heading generally southward, now tending somewhat more west; the road wended along the side of a heavily forested mountain, one of a dozen twisty lanes they had followed since leaving the hyperlane an hour before. They had, in fact, only remained on the high-speed, fully-automated-vehicles-only interstate long enough to put a hard burst of distance between themselves and the city and turned off as soon as pragmatically possible -- not the least, he suspected, because the hyperlanes were heavily monitored by law enforcement.

Their navigator had, in general, declined to explain their thinking, ignoring questions in general in favor of switching through a series of radio stations exclusively playing Christmas music and actively refusing them access to a newsfeed. Hanzo managed to find one on his phone, displaying luridly melodramatic streaming text suggesting that a left-wing domestic terrorist cell was clearly responsible for desecrating America’s most hallowed cemetery on the very eve of Christianity’s most important holiday, and he clicked it off, satisfied by the lack of immediate association with Cole Cassidy’s rather too notable name.

Cassidy chuckled softly, the sound more cough than laughter.

“You should be resting,” Hanzo murmured against his ear, and slid the phone back into his jacket pocket.

“Ears...popped.” Several slow, shallow breaths. “Woke me up.”

They were, Hanzo had to admit, changing altitude, climbing higher into the mountains and, it seemed, slowing as they went, as though their unseen navigator were searching for something. They found it quarter of an hour later, the vehicle slowing almost to a stop, then turning off onto an unmarked side road that went deeper into the forest and higher onto the hill. The antigrav generators whined in protest, the entire frame shuddered the incline steepened and in the headlights Hanzo could see that the road itself was entirely unpaved. Cassidy’s body tensed with every jolt, and Hanzo held his arm and head as steady as he could; even so, by the time they reached their destination, he was soaked with pain-sweat and shivering uncontrollably, tiny, choked off sounds clawing their way up his throat.

“And we are here.” The navigation system informed them. “Wait just a moment annnd…”

In the forest ahead, lights appeared -- low-power security lamps, lining a path through the woods.

“Follow the path. Your destination is at the top. I’ve unlocked the doors and turned on the power. Once you’re inside, I’ll activate the security perimeter.” The door locks disengaged. “Rápidamente.”

It took some time and quite a bit of careful maneuvering to get Cassidy out of Hanzo’s lap and into Zenyatta’s, the monk more than capable of holding him and floating at a decent clip despite their differences in size. Hanzo took the lead, bow in hand and at the ready, and Genji took rearguard, covering their tracks as snowflakes began drifting through the winter-bare canopy. It was, fortunately, not a far or strenuous climb, the path opening into a small clearing, the bulk of which was taken up by a compact two-story cabin. A light burned on the porch next to the door, and in the window athwart it; as promised, Hanzo found the door unlocked and a puff of air warmer than that outside greeted them as he opened it.

Hanzo resisted the impulse to ask his companions to wait outside while he scouted, choosing to err on the side of bringing Cassidy into the relative warmth before he lapsed even more deeply into shock. There was not, in fact, much to scout: immediately inside the door, to the right, a kitchenette and dining nook, a security panel gleaming luridly purple against the far wall; to the left, a sitting room separated from the rest by a low counter, equipped with heavy wood-frame furniture, a flat-panel holotank mounted in the wall. Down a short hallway: a bedroom, equipped with two sets of bunk beds and a single cot; a bathroom, sink, toilet, shower; linen closet full of pillows and blankets sealed in plastic. A steep, narrow set of steps having more in common with a ladder than a staircase led upwards to the second floor, which was more of a storage space, stacked front to back with storage bins, their contents neatly stamped on the the visible end: provisions, cold weather gear, warm weather gear, small arms, ammunition, medical supplies…

Hanzo seized that one and dragged it to the top of the steps. “Genji, please assist me with this.”

His brother appeared and took one end of the case as Hanzo eased it down, then carried it into the bedroom, where he and Zenyatta had already transferred Cassidy to the cot, propping him up against the rear wall with a half-dozen pillows behind him and at least two blankets thicker than reflective foil spread over his legs and chest. The lights were pale and mounted in the walls and showed all too clearly how terrible his color was under the dried streaks of blood, eyes closed and sunken into nearly bruised hollows of flesh, his chest heaving with the effort it took to breathe and fresh blood welling beneath the bandages. Zenyatta cracked open the medical supply case and began extracting useful items; Hanzo left him, and his able assistant, to the task of tending Cassidy and prowled back into the kitchen, to the security monitor.

“The perimeter is armed and active.” The security system’s voice was close kin to the navigation system, though slightly deeper. “Write this code down.” He fetched a yellow legal pad and a miraculously functional pen from one of the kitchen drawers and scribbled down the alphanumeric sequence that crawled across the screen. “That’s the deactivation code, one-time use. Punch it in when your rescue crew arrives. Otherwise, don’t touch this panel unless I tell you to do so. And, just so you know, I drove the car off the side of the scenic overlook just up the way. You’re welcome. Thermostat controls are in the hallway but I suggest you let the heater work on its own curve, it’s running off the solar batteries in the attic. So are the lights. For the time being, you should make yourselves comfortable, let me keep an eye out for any pursuit, and get in touch with the rest of your friends. Not necessarily in that order.”

Hanzo, shivering slightly from the chill in the air and covered from neck to knees in the dried blood of a man he hadn’t actually tried to kill, could find very little to argue with in that.

***

A search of the kitchen cabinets yielded both a six-cup coffee maker and a teakettle, stirring within him the hope that, somewhere, there was tea to be had. It also yielded cups and bowls and plates, the sturdy microwavable ceramic sort, wrapped in plastic to keep away dust and mice -- not that there was much evidence of either, leading him to suspect that their unseen rescuer/captor/host made some effort to maintain the place on a regular basis. A trash receptacle and cleaning supplies hid in the cabinet beneath the sink; he opened the tap and was rewarded with water that ran clean almost immediately, which he used to fill the kettle. There was no proper oven, but the microwave mounted above the four-burner stovetop, and the stovetop itself, were high efficiency models clearly designed to play nicely with a house mostly powered by solar cells.

The provisions cases were stacked four deep and contained blocks of freeze-dried coffee, vacuum sealed packages of tea bags, assorted flavors of electrolyte-replenishing drink mix, and two dozen boxes of calorie-and-nutrient dense military surplus food sachets. A canvas sack hung on a hook at the top of the stairs and to it he added a package of tea and a box of snack sachets. The cold weather gear boxes contained an astonishing quantity of clothing vacuum sealed in plastic in a variety of sizes, each individual package containing, per its label, thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, fleece lined trousers, and a hooded sweatshirt. He selected one such package in a size that seemed a reasonable fit for himself and a second, two sizes larger, in the name of hope. Further to the back were the cases he hadn’t bothered with once he located the emergency medical supplies, and those consisted of more household goods. The cases labeled bathroom contained vacuum-wrapped towels and washcloths and hospital-grade toiletries, the sort one could use with or without water, and he added some of each to his bag.

He supplied the bathroom and paused outside the closed door of the bedroom, hesitant to interrupt. The worst of the muffled sounds of pain, of Tekhartha Zenyatta’s voice modulated to a low, soothing pitch, had faded away a quarter hour before but he did not wish to distract either the monk or his brother if they were in the midst of something dangerous, or delicate.

“Damn you.” Genji’s voice, even muted through the door, was fierce, taut with emotion. “Why did you not contact me? I would have come for you, I would have -- “

“I...know.” Softly, gently, and it silenced his brother more effectively than a shout. “I...know...you would’a. You’d hide me...in the middle of a place...full of unarmed pacifist monks.” Cassidy made a sound somewhere between a cough and laugh; it was, he thought, one of the most terrible things he’d ever heard. “That’s not...taking cover, li’l brother. That’s...taking hostages.”

Hanzo made his way back to the kitchen, and turned on the heat beneath the kettle. The tea package, once unsealed, released a tolerable aroma; he placed a bag in two mugs, opened a vacuum-sealed washcloth, and ran water that began tepid and finally turned genuinely hot into the sink basin just as the kettle sang and his brother emerged into the sitting room. He applied the boiling water to the mugs and watched as Genji paced the close confines of the room, every inch of his body tightly drawn, gloved to the elbows in the drying blood of a man who called him little brother.

“Genji,” He put perhaps a bit more command in his voice than was, strictly speaking, necessary but it achieved the desired result -- his brother stopped and looked at him. “Come here.”

Genji hesitated, fractionally, then did as he was asked; Hanzo pulled out a chair for him, and went to work with the fresh cloth and the hot water and a bit of soap, scrubbing the blood from the joints of his hands and the surfaces of his armor.

“You do not have to do that,” Genji protested softly, but did not pull away, the tension in his shoulders and arms and wrists slowly loosening.

“Quiet.” Hanzo replied, also soft. “You must contact your friends. I retrieved our coordinates from my phone’s GPS system.” He dried his hands and handed the towel to Genji, slid the legal pad across the kitchen table. “Drink this.”

He set the steaming mug down at his brother’s elbow and Genji reached up, detached his faceplate for the first time since they left Nepal, and looked up at him with reddened eyes. “Is it any good?”

“It is completely awful.” Hanzo admitted, having taken a sip himself. “But it is warm.” He slid a thumb across his brother’s scarred cheek, wiping away the remnants of moisture. “Contact them. That will also help.”

And, so saying, he gathered his own vacuum sealed package of clothing and retreated to the bathroom, his eyes burning for no good reason he could name.

***

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: I have the coordinates, Lena.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude sent WickedCuteButDeadly a Private Message.

WickedCuteButDeadly: Okay, you’re...on the top of a mountain on the edge of Shenandoah National Park. Lemme see if I can get a good satellite overview…It’s a cabin? A little cabin? And there’s a clearing a bit over, just big enough to manage a VTOL landing and departure, I think.

DeathFromAbove: THINK or KNOW?

WickedCuteButDeadly: Know, know, it’s definitely know, trust me I’m a trained professional.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Message me when you begin your approach. There is an active security perimeter of some sort -- I do not know precisely what defenses might exist and I would prefer not to find out the hard way.

WickedCuteButDeadly: Jeez, what is it, a survivalist bunker? We’re about five hours out, should be getting there sixish local time. Also, since it’s past midnight there, official merry Christmas, Genji.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: And to you, Lena. To all of you. And to answer your question...I am not sure? Our navigator brought us here, permitted us entry, and activated the perimeter. The storage space is full of military surplus supplies -- including medical supplies. My master managed to stabilize Cole somewhat more completely but

MercyMercyMe: Tekhartha, are you monitoring and can you give me a more complete report?

PeaceLoveAndBalance: He is resting at the moment. When he is awake, he is still mentally alert and aware of his surroundings, but he is growing more frequently drowsy. Fortunately, there were large injury biotic-impregnated bandages, air-seal drape, and a decompression catheter in the emergency medical supplies, which has helped a great deal. I think he is in significantly less danger of developing tension pneumothorax.

MercyMercyMe: Sehr gut.

PeaceLoveAndBalance: ...Unfortunately, I suspect that he may have sustained internal injuries that are beyond my ability to detect or treat. We did not retrieve the bullet that struck him, because it overpenetrated significantly, but the force of the impact shattered the left clavicle and the second rib, and I fear that their fragments may have behaved in a manner similar to a fragmentation bullet. I suspect he is accumulating blood in the pleural cavity.

MercyMercyMe: Lena, if you can fly faster, you will wish to do so.

WickedCuteButDeadly: Headwind’s working against me right now, Angie, but I’ll punch it as hard as I can. We might be coasting into Gibraltar on the fumes.

MercyMercyMe: I will be leaving the Oasis within the hour, flying directly into Gibraltar International Airport.

ATHENA: I have activated your medbay access credentials and a vehicle will be awaiting you at the terminal, Dr. Ziegler.

MercyMercyMe: Danke schoen, Athena.

DeathFromAbove: Still getting my arrangements in order, but at least I’m in the airport. And, uh, not to distract us all from horrible things we can’t do anything about but...have any of you taken a look at the news? What did you lot DO?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude:...I feel as though I should defend my honor. What is the news saying?

DeathFromAbove has posted a link.

PeanutButterIsLife:.... MercyMercyMe:.... PeaceLoveAndBalance:.... WickedCuteButDeadly:.... ATHENA:...

GreenCyborgNinjaDude:...I assure you, I did not kill eighteen people on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, and I am fairly certain that neither did Cole.

PeanutButterIsLife: What...happened to them? They look

MercyMercyMe: Withered. I have seen reports on this before.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: The ones in black were with the shooter. Guarding the entrances and exits, patrolling the paths. They were carrying flechette pistols loaded with sedative needles and shock batons -- a few had neurodisruptor grenades. Less-lethal armaments that would allow them to slow or disable him. Hanzo engaged the actual assassin at relatively close range, an omnic sniper of a design he did not recognize, nor does he know personally of any omnic

DeathFromAbove: WAIT. WAIT ONE MINUTE.

WickedCuteButDeadly: Did you just say

MercyMercyMe: Hanzo. Your BROTHER. THAT Hanzo.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude:...This is a very long story.

***

Peeling off his bloodstained clothing had the immediate effect of making Hanzo feel more human. The shower, kept warm rather than hot, helped even more and had the additional salubrious effect of waking him up. His body very much wished to believe it was still in another time zone, likely on the opposite side of at least a few hours sleep, a weakness that his mind could not afford to indulge under the circumstances. The fresh clothing completed the process of renewal and he was privately astonished at how comfortable the underclothing was, sleek and close-fitting and soft against the skin, the charcoal gray pants and dark green sweatshirt a bit loose on his frame but warm nonetheless. He tied his still-damp hair back in a loose queue, hung the towels to dry, gathered up a few items he thought might be helpful, and stepped across the hall to the bedroom, knocking quietly and opening the door at Tekhartha Zenyatta’s quiet, “Come in.”

The monk hung in midair beside the cot, long-fingered hands laced together in his lap, spheres rotating slowly around his shoulders and chiming gently as they did so. In the bed, Cole slept at what seemed to be peace, chest and shoulder swathed in bandages, each breath accompanied by a soft, high-pitched note from the decompression catheter. He was still a bit bloodier than Hanzo could imagine being comfortable.

“I have water and cloths,” He murmured. “If you think it would do no harm.”

“I think it would be a relief, when he next wakes.” Zenyatta bowed over his hands. “If you would be so kind.”

Hanzo fetched a basin of warm water, a dry towel, and a handful of fresh washcloths and set to work slowly and with care. It took a bit of scrubbing to get the worst of it out of his beard and hair and what was left of his chest hair -- they had sheared most of it away around the site of the wound to help the air-tight drape adhere more securely. The skin beneath was unhealthily sallow rather than the warm golden-brown of his files, for which he chose to blame the extremity of the blood loss, but at least his lips had backed away from the edge of cyanosis.

“Do you think he will…?” Hanzo asked, not quite sure how to phrase precisely what he wanted to know.

“Survive? It is...not impossible. Our friends are still some hours away and his wounds are grave -- but his will to live is also enormously strong.” Zenyatta replied quietly. “He has promised Genji that he will try.”

And this man would not break his word to a brother. Hanzo bowed himself out, taking the bath things with him, depositing the lot in the shower next to his bloody clothing.

Genji was still sitting at the kitchen table when Hanzo returned, this time with his head pillowed in his arms in a manner that suggested he had, recently, been banging it against a solid object. Possibly the table, in fact. He rested a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Genji? Is everything -- “

Genji wordlessly held up his phone; Hanzo accepted it and scanned the conversation still displayed. “Ah. Well. It was only a matter of time. In fact, it was only a matter of a few hours -- better they know before they arrive than have it be an unpleasant surprise once they are here.”

Genji lifted his head. “Who are you and what have you done with…” His voice trailed off and his eyes widened. “Hanzo. Where did you find that?”

He handed the phone back and glanced down the length of his own body. “One of the cases upstairs is full of vacuum-sealed bags of clothing -- I assumed it was military surplus, like the food. Why?”

His brother reached out and caught hold of his shirtsleeve, drawing his attention to the patch sewn to the shoulder. “Because that,” He replied, “is the organizational insignia of Blackwatch.” A complicated expression crossed the visible elements of his face. “This is...this must be...a Blackwatch safehouse.”

“How can you be -- “ Hanzo cut that question off before he could finish it; it was foolish, and fatuous, to question his brother’s experience in that regard. “Who could have known of this place’s existence? It has been maintained, possibly regularly resupplied.”

“I do not know -- Blackwatch functioned under...numerous layers of operational security. Its agents likewise.” Genji scrubbed a hand down his face, thoughts visibly racing. “When Overwatch disbanded, more than a few were arrested and prosecuted, even more turned to the mercenary trades -- I cannot think of anyone who would -- “ He trailed off again. “I do not know.”

“I am not certain that I -- “

The security panel sounded a rising-falling trill, and the visual display flashed luridly purple. When it spoke, it sounded remarkably human, and almost surprised. “Movement on the outer perimeter.”

They crossed to the display together, jostling one another’s shoulders as they crowded close. The inset screen flashed once more, then cleared, showing the layers of the perimeter monitoring, which fully encompassed the entire crown of the mountain: contact at the outermost edge, in the middle of the forest rather than closer to the road, and the security system voice made a sound that was almost a snort of annoyance. “Probably a deer. Or a bear. There are bears around here, right? I bet it’s -- “

The motion-activated optical scan cameras came online. The thing that crouched low in the leaf-mould was neither a deer nor a bear. Its shoulders and hips were canted at unnatural angles, its limbs abnormally thin and tipped in long fingers for tearing, long toes for gripping, its head a sleekly predatory mass of sensor modules mounted above a mandible that had more in common with an insect than a human attempt at a mouth. Its gun was not, as Hanzo had originally thought in the heat of the moment some hours before, a separate weapon, but mounted to its shoulder assembly. As they watched, it skittered past the camera into the snowy dark.

“Well.” The security system remarked. “Not a bear.”

***

It took ten minutes to screw together eight more arrow shafts from the supplies he carried with him at all times. He fitted them with his remaining four explosive heads, since the assassin had not enjoyed receiving them on their last meeting, and the rest with bodkin-point armor-piercers. He still had three scatter arrows remaining from his original preparations for the mission, and two sonics, and he debated with himself and Genji the merits of swapping them out for something more immediately lethal.

“Leave them.” The security system suggested, and in it he heard the synthesized sound of distinct irritation. “Even the motion detectors are having trouble locking on this thing and the infrared isn’t picking up a heat signature at all. Any ninja tricks you can bring to the table to help us see it are all to the good.” A mutter. “The inboard stealth rig on that thing must be insane, I just upgraded the perimeter monitor equipment up here six months ago.”

“Can you tell which direction it is moving?” Genji asked, flicking his wrists, rolling blades through his knuckles and back into their housings.

“Barely. Plotting the actual motion detector hits and the presumed hits, it looks like it’s trying to circle around from behind.” The security panel display flashed up a topographic map of the area with the assassin’s projected path marked in red, the confirmed perimeter detection hits marked with little skull icons. “Ground’s slightly higher, woods a little denser. It could squat there and just wait for you to come out.”

“Or we could, in theory, position ourselves to intercept it.” Hanzo observed, sliding the last of the replenished ammunition into the quiver.

“If you circle around the other way and haul ass, yes.” A second path sketched itself into place, this one in electric purple. “Keeps the bulk of the hill between you and easy line of sight, trees as a screen, and it’ll bring you out slightly above and behind -- unless it brings you out in exactly the same spot which, admittedly, it might.”

“Then we should make haste.” Hanzo slung the quiver across his back and tested the tension of the bowstring.

“Agreed.” Genji snapped his blades back into place and went for the door.

“Wait just one second.” The security system said.

“Were you not the one just telling us to hurry?” Hanzo asked, with some asperity.

“Yeah, yeah, I just didn’t think you’d hurry that fast. Men of action, I approve in general, but let’s think this through, okay?” The security panel flashed again and pulled up a captured image of the assassin. “This thing...doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before, which means it’s either really old and been on mothballs long enough that any extant references to it have been expunged from the entire record of human events -- not particularly likely -- or it’s so new that even my many, many sets of eyes and ears haven’t caught wind of it yet which is -- and I hate to admit it -- somewhat more likely. What do we know thus far?”

“It is not infallible.” Hanzo replied. “It missed a clean killing shot on a target whose back was turned to it. It is also willing, clearly, to disengage if it perceives the present tactical situation does not favor its success. Heavily armored and armed, but that does not appear to impede its physical speed or maneuverability and its reflexes are inhumanly swift.”

“And I can think of one person here right now that can counter all of its advantages, and you’re not him.” The security system responded flatly.

“I will not permit my brother to face this thing alone.” Hanzo snapped.

“I don’t think he should.” The security panel literally flashed in irritation. “Do you think leaving the one least capable of putting up a fight in case something goes catastrophically wrong with this plan here alone here is the best idea? With, I might add, the target who is incapable of defending himself?”

“...You have a point,” Hanzo admitted, after a long moment of silently wrestling with himself and a number of unworthy impulses, most of which involved doing violence to the security system’s display.

“Thank you.” He rather suspected that the security system was withholding the sort of commentary that would lead it to collecting rapidly propelled ballistic weapons in its display. “Do you concur?”

“My master and I have reached the point where we function well together as a unit.” Genji admitted, his tone carefully even. “And he possesses skills capable of leveling otherwise uneven fields. I shall ask him.”

His brother slipped soundlessly down the hallway, returning a short time later with Zenyatta floating in his wake. The monk examined the plotted route laid out on the screen, conferred quietly with the security system, and rejoined them where they waited in a tense and awkward silence in the sitting room. “I will join you, my student. It seems prudent to stack as many odds as possible in our favor in this situation.” Hanzo received the impression that, were the monk’s faceplate more mobile, he would be smiling a rather dry smile. “I shall leave an orb here -- it can function outside my immediate presence for some time and Cole will likely require it far more than we.”

They stepped out onto the porch together, the boards dusted with a half-inch of snow, far more piled on the steps and in the clearing and the air still full of gently drifting curtains of white. Before he could step away, Hanzo caught Genji by the crook of the elbow and pulled him closer. “There are not enough hours left in this day for me to describe all the ways in which I loathe this plan.”

“I am not surprised.” He could hear the wry smile in his brother’s voice and only barely resisted the urge to shake him. “For what it is worth, were Cole capable of objecting he would no doubt be doing so loudly and with great enthusiasm.” Genji leaned forward, pressed their foreheads together gently. “Protect him.”

“I will permit no harm to come to him.” Hanzo, with enormous reluctance, released his hold.

“I know.” Genji collected his teacher with a glance and together they vanished into the snowfall.

Hanzo watched until he could see not even a last lingering spark of his brother’s lights. Only then did he step back inside, lock the door at his back, and turn his attention to the security system. “What can be done to make this place more secure?”

“The door and the windows are fitted with blast proof shutters that deploy in approximately six seconds once panic mode is activated. The walls and roof and foundation are reinforced against impact and bulletproof within reason but I’ve got no idea how they’d stand up against whatever ammunition that thing is firing.” A pause. “There are antipersonnel weapons mounted at strategic points around the outside of the cabin -- solid light turrets. They run on their own independent power system but they have a relatively short operational life and I’m not sure how well they’d work against an omnic.”

“I...see.” There was enough warm water left in the teakettle to make one cup of weak terrible tea and so he did, in order to give his hands something to accomplish while he thought. “Is there some means that I could use to monitor the perimeter cameras from the bedroom? I do not think he should be alone and I do not wish to be blind.”

“Check your phone.”

He thumbed the screen open and found a new icon on the homescreen, a little purple skull that winked at him as he touched it. A screen opened, split, and split again, showing him six views of snowy forest, darkness, undisturbed ground cover. “...Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I didn’t even poke around. You’re welcome for that, too.”

Hanzo sighed, supposed he deserved that for even asking, gathered up his tea and gear and carried them all to the back of the cabin. It was perceptibly warmer in the bedroom than elsewhere in the building, a fact he attributed to the absence of windows and possibly to the presence of Zenyatta’s sphere, which hovered over the cot in which his charge slept, shedding pale golden light and chiming gently to itself. At some point, either Zenyatta or Genji had made both of the lower bunk beds; he chose the one next to the door, placed one of the pillows between his back and the wall, set his bow and quiver in easy reach, and turned his attention to his phone. A bit of fiddling showed him more than the camera feeds alone, returning information about the location of his brother and the monk as they swiftly made their way through the forest. The tea, as it turned out, was terrible enough to lack anything resembling soothing qualities and Hanzo found himself hunched over the phone in his lap, only barely resisting the urge to pace as the point of convergence with the assassin’s presumed route grew ever closer.

“What’s...wrong?” The sound of another’s voice, even soft and breathy as it was, startled him so badly he jerked upright hard enough to slam the top of his head into the bottom of the upper bunk. “Heh. Sorry…’bout that.”

“I did not realize you were awake.” Hanzo slid off the bunk and went to his side. “Are you well? Do you require anything?”

“Well...as I’d expect.” The corner of his mouth twitched slightly, not really a smile or anything close to it. “Mighty thirsty. Something to...drink’d be nice.”

“Of course.” It took only a moment to retrieve one of the canisters of electrolyte drink from the storage room. He found a handful of squeezable sports bottles hiding in the back of the cabinet holding the coffee cups and returned with one, juice freshly mixed, to find Cole still awake and eying his phone where it lay on the bed with obvious interest. “Here. Let me help you.”

“Much...obliged.” Hanzo, in truth, did most of the work of holding the bottle steady while he swallowed; the mere act of moving, even a little, seemed to extract a high price in pain from him and a thin sheen of sweat broke out on his brow. “Ambrosia. Thank you...kindly.”

He set the bottle aside and settled on the edge of the cot. “Are you warm enough? There are more blankets.” He paused, considered the closed box of medical supplies sitting on the upper bunk. “There may be painkillers but -- “

“Nah. Talked with...Zen.” That there and gone again not-smile. “Can’t risk...blood thinners...right now.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “What’s...wrong?”

“Nothing with which you should concern yourself.” Hanzo offered the bottle again and Cole obediently drank down a few more sips.

“Liar.” His head fell back in the pillows.

Hanzo considered, sighed and retrieved his phone. The man had the right to know. “The assassin that shot you has somehow managed to follow us, if not locate this place exactly. Genji and Zenyatta have gone to intercept it.”

Cole blinked up at him. “It?”

“An omnic, of a kind none of us have encountered before.” He opened the screen and pulled up the security display.

Genji and Zenyatta’s icons were stationary, having reached the optimal point of potential contact. Hanzo opened the camera feeds and scrolled through them until he found one that offered at least a partial glimpse of them, lying in wait, snow falling steadily around them, and showed it to Cole. “The perimeter has visual and motion detection monitors for several miles surrounding this place. If it makes it past them, I will still see it coming in time to take action.”

It was, he thought, only a small lie and hopefully a comforting one. Cole stared up at him, expression still and dark eyes unreadable, and then nodded slightly. “...Thanks.”

“You are welcome.” Hanzo stood and pulled the blankets a bit higher over him as he shivered. “Rest. If anything happens I will wake you.”

He did, eventually, rest; Hanzo took up station on the floor next to the cot, listened to the slow, labored rhythm of his breath and the small, pained sounds that escaped him when he was too unaware to stop them, cycled through the camera feeds in sequence. Occasionally he caught glimpses of foliage still in motion, masses of snow falling from branches overhead, even hints of animal life, but no sign of the omnic. Genji was circling slowly outward from the stationary interception point, while Zenyatta kept watch from there, and Hanzo activated his own comm to listen in on their quiet, to-the-point conversation, his nerves slowly winding tighter as no contact was made.

When the perimeter contact trill sounded again, it was nearly a relief. All the other open panes on his phone closed and the registering point of contact opened, along with its coordinates on the perimeter itself. It was with a jolt that Hanzo realized the contact was deep inside the perimeter, less than a quarter mile from the cabin itself, and a second, stronger jolt as he beheld what caused it: enormous, bulkier around the upper body and the thighs, with a muzzle more lupine than insectile, hands more claw than finger and feet more in common with paws than human extremities.

“Oh, damn.” The security system realized what they were looking at more or less simultaneously.

Hanzo reached up and triggered his comm. “Genji. There is more than one.”

On the screen, the omnic beast leapt away, bounding through the forest in ground-eating strides. Hanzo made certain the laces of his boots were secure, pulled on his gloves, slipped quiver and bow over his shoulder and sprinted for the door. “Lock the cabin down behind me!”

It was snowing more steadily now, the wind from the west rising along with it. At his back, the blast shutters slid shut over the door and the windows and as he swung up onto the porch roof, the comm unit in his ear crackled with the security system’s voice. “Lockdown complete. Unlock code is quarry down.”

“Understood.” The snow was eight inches deep on the flattest parts of the roof and the footing was treacherous at best but the false chimney at least provided a windbreak and a place to wait unseen for his target to break cover.

Beneath his skin he felt the dragons shiver, coils winding tight, aroused by his tension and their awareness of the storm, creatures of the tempest that they were. They gifted him with that awareness without even a plea and, for a moment, he was one with the wind as it sloughed through the pines frosting the rise, sent curtains of snow falling in waves across the clearing, dusting the metal flesh of the creature waiting in the deep shadow of the woods, falling on his own back and shoulders as he drew an arrow and set it to the string. Now that he knew where to look, he could see its contours, a mountainous shadow beneath the pines, the sensor arrays that made up its eyes gleaming redly in the dark. It was on those pinpricks of red that he fixed his focus, adjusted the arc of his fire to account for the wind, and, drawing to the ear, released an armor-piercing arrow at its head.

It sat, immobile, until the instant before contact -- and then it moved, the shot passing through empty air and embedding itself in the tree beneath which it had sheltered, breaking cover and crossing the ground between itself and the cabin with horrifyingly explosive speed. Hanzo fired again, a scatter arrow a handful of feet in its lead and was rewarded with an inhuman howl as a spray of flechettes peppered its face and chest. Significantly less rewarding was the reaction: a leap that carried it a dozen feet above the peak of the roof and sent him scrambling to avoid being beneath it as it came back down, its claws raking inches deep into the false chimney’s stonework and the solar panelling that made up the roof cover under the force of its fall and weight and strength. Hanzo skidded backwards down the steeply angled upper side of the roof, the beast in pursuit, reaching for him with taloned hands, jaws lined in metallic fangs the length of his fingers agape.

He fired directly into that yawning maw at point-blank range and barely half-draw, the armor-piercing point punched cleanly through the back of its skull even as it slammed into him, talons raking down his right side ribs to thigh, momentum bouncing them off the porch roof and over the side. The landing was not a graceful one for either of them, the beast clawing at the back of its head, clearly wounded but not mortally so, Hanzo barely managing to turn it into an impact-mitigating roll, ribs and hip and leg howling protest as he did so. Even so, the distance he gained was not enough and when the creature lashed out, backhand, it caught him in the chest with force sufficient to drive every pascal of air from his lungs and send him flying, skidding to a halt a dozen feet away, bow skidding across the snow, skull ringing from its impact with the ground. For a moment he could do nothing but lay there, chest heaving as he struggled to breathe, black explosions of pain and oxygen deprivation going off behind his eyes as broken bones ground together in his chest, his own blood reddening the snow. He heard, at a vast distance, the sound of the antipersonnel turrets firing their hard-light beams, the screech of tearing metal as its talons disposed of them, the resonant impact as it rammed its weight into the blast-shielded door. Heard the blast shield begin to bend, to fail.

It took almost all of his remaining strength to make it to his knees, to limp-crawl across the length of snowy clearing separating him from his bow, to extract an arrow from the quiver. The omnic creature had the top of the blast door bent outwards and was in the process of tearing it out of its recessed housing as he pushed himself to his feet, spat blood and dragged in a searing breath, took aim in the loosest sense of the term with shaking arms.

The shot he fired lit the sky for miles in a flare of lightning-stroke white and stormcloud blue, left partially molten and barely-identifiable bits of omnic monstrosity scattered for a quarter-mile in all directions, and swallowed down the last of his strength in mind and body, the price that neither he nor his guardians could avoid paying. In his mind, he heard them keening distress even as they killed for him, even as his knees folded beneath him and the snow-covered earth embraced him in its soothing cold. He could feel them writhing beneath his skin, trying to force his battered flesh to move, to get to his feet, to his knees, anything that would allow him to save himself. Felt their efforts fail as his battered body refused to respond; he was losing blood, too much and too rapidly, his aching bones broken in too many places to hold him up.

Felt, instead, something else moving him: strong hands rolling him over and catching him beneath the armpits, dragging him across the snow and up the porch steps, propping him against the outside wall beneath that relative cover as it completed the demolition of the blast door. He could not lift his head, or offer any meaningful resistance -- could only barely open his eyes enough to perceive, through a haze of pain and blood-loss and exhaustion, a blur of misty and indistinct darkness, coils of shadow and a smudge of bone white where a face should be, as claw-tipped hands reached for him again.

***

“Genji. There is more than one.”

His brother’s voice, in his ear, had been calm, even, not even remotely surprised and had planted a seed of fear in him -- fear that sped his heart and tightened his insides and he had been the one stalking an unseen omnic assassin through a darkened forest in the middle of a snow storm. That fear had blossomed into outright terror was Zentatsu and Mizuchi lit the heavens in a soundless burst of unleashed power that dissolved the storm above them and sent a keening wail of distress echoing through the bond they shared with their sister into the depths of his own being. The omnic assassin taking up station a half-mile away, attempting to lock onto Cole’s heat signature through the walls of the cabin, had shortly thereafter met him at something other than his most serene and merciful.

“Go,” Zenyatta told him, gently. “I will bring what is left back with me. Hurry.”

Hurrying was not the term he would use to describe the speed he made down the side of the mountain, straining his cybernetically enhanced reflexes to their utmost, barely touching the ground until he reached the edge of the clearing itself. Where there had clearly, obviously been a fight. Pieces of...something...lay scattered across a wide area, the snow around them melted from the heat that had attended their dismemberment. The front wall of the cabin looked as though it had been mauled by an angry bear with claws capable of cleaving solid stone; the door frame was twisted out of true, and the door itself damaged. The steps and the boards were smeared with blood.

His heart skipped a beat and his internal autonomic control systems activated, attempting to adjust his rate of heart and breath, even as he wanted to begin screaming and not stop. The blood trail continued inside and down the hall, already tacky and drying, into the bedroom. He followed it, fighting down the fear threatening to engulf him entirely, and opened the door, bracing himself -- for the sight of his brother’s bloody corpse, for both his brothers’ bloody corpses -- and stopped on the threshold.

Hanzo lay unconscious on one of the bunk mattresses, laid out on the floor next to Cole’s cot, wrapped in biotic-impregnated bandages from mid-chest to nearly his right knee, covered in an impressive and spectacular array of cuts, contusions, and bruises. Situated at strategic points to maximize their efficiency and power, four high capacity biotic emitters covered them both in overlapping spheres of reparative energy. Even as he stood, stunned, Cole opened one dark eye and whispered, “Don’t...know when...he got here...but I think...he won.”

Genji nodded and whispered back, “I think you are correct. Rest. The others will be here soon.” And, so saying, he closed the door.

Zenyatta was brushing the snow off his shoulders as he entered the sitting area, still feeling slightly too overwhelmed to express the storm of emotions swirling within him in words. His master, of course, understood, rested comforting hands on his shoulders and held him silently as he shook under the force of it.

“Sparrow,” His master murmured, once the worst had passed, “What is that?”

Genji lifted his head and followed the direction of Zenyatta’s gaze. Sitting on the kitchen table, next to his phone, were a number of curious objects. A potted plant, its foliage such a deep red as to be nearly burgundy and the pot itself wrapped in metallic golden paper, sat in the middle of the table. Next to it, on the right: Cole’s hat which, Genji realized with an inward pang, had not been with them earlier -- he could not remember picking it up, or even seeing it during those few chaotic moments before their escape in Washington. Next to it, on the left: a package wrapped in plain, satiny red paper and tied with a golden bow and ribbon.

“I do not know,” He confessed and, at that instant, his phone chimed.

***

WickedCuteButDeadly: You there, Genji? We’re on our inbound leg, less than an hour out. What’s the situation?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: I will deactivate the perimeter momentarily. We have had, I confess, some excitement.

DeathFromAbove: Define ‘excitement.’

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: The assassins found us.

WickedCuteButDeadly:... DeathFromAbove:... MercyMercyMe:...

PeanutButterIsLife: There was more than one?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Yes. We were...not aware of that ourselves until only recently. I can, however, say with some confidence that the threat has been emphatically neutralized.

DeathFromAbove:...In a lot of tiny pieces?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Yes. But Hanzo is injured -- I do not know how severely. Someone attended him before I could arrive and...this is the strangest thing…

WickedCuteButDeadly: Come on, don’t leave us hanging here!

GreenCyborgNinjaDude:...Whoever it was left a present.

DeathFromAbove: A present.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Yes. And Cole’s hat which, frankly, I believe we accidentally left behind in Arlington.

DeathFromAbove: So, the lot of you were, as of this reporting, possibly rescued from horrible death and/or maiming by Santa Claus. This is officially the strangest Christmas ever and I remember that one time someone accidentally dropped an experimental hallucinogenic crowd-control weapon at the base Christmas party in Geneva.

PeanutButterIsLife: And I’m still sure that wasn’t any kind of an accident.

MercyMercyMe: In any case, I will automate another medical bay here at Gibraltar to receive your brother when you arrive.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Thank you, Angela.

WickedCuteButDeadly: All right, you lot, touching down in fifteen. See you soon, Genji.

***

The team completed its landing, loading, and dust off in reasonably good order -- not as good as if they’d spent a couple months running behind-lines extraction drills but faster than his most pessimistic estimation when it came to their potential level of rust. He watched from a reasonably safe distance as the VTOL fans lifted the vehicle above the treeline and then high enough that, when Oxton stood that fat-assed ungainly thing on its tail and punched the afterburners the exhaust didn’t actually light anything on fire. It arched across the sky more gracefully than it had any right to, for a plane shaped like that, and vanished into the high, thin overcast, only just beginning to turn crimson with the oncoming dawn.

Red skies on Christmas morning. It seemed, at that moment, rather fitting considering the storm that was about to break on a number of people who should have known far, far better than this.

“You are such a sap when it comes to him, old man.” A voice that belonged to neither a navigation nor a security system informed him through the inboard comm built into his mask. “Someone’s going to figure that out and use it against you one day.”

“Possibly.” Probably you, the voice of brutal honesty replied in the back of his mind. “But not today.”

Notes:

Special thanks: to JoAsakura for graciously permitting me the use of Tombo, Zentatsu, and Mizuchi; to p1ratew3nch, Katschy, JoAsakura, and smol-sarcastic-snek for cheering me on. Maps of Arlington National Cemetery can be found here: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/ I strove to accurately depict the layout of Columbarium Court Nine while simultaneously playing fast and loose with its future size. The playlist I listened to while writing it can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/user/1248796996/playlist/4V2iZNGpYfGjniPw7szR0i Reinhardt Wilhelm owns a vintage collection of David Hasselhoff albums on vinyl. Search your feelings, you know this is true. More of my fannish ramblings can be found here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/solivar and here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/companerosdearmas