#I have a whole plan for which piercings I should get together for optimal sleeping positions

[trans-xianxian]

very obsessed w my own eyebrow piercing I'm already like I Need More Of Them

[trance-griff]

Kyoka Jiro x Kaminari Denki Part Two

Word count (pt.2): 1716

Warnings: None, just fluff.

Part three 

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Kaminari Denki woke up that morning groggily, throwing off the blanket to the side, a hand reaching down to scratch his exposed stomach before sitting up with the loudest yawn- running his fingers through his yellow locks- before drooping his shoulders, head-turning to the digital alarm clock.

Eight-Thirty AM.

Today was the day. The highlight of his high-school life about to begin the moment he steps out of the building; he couldn’t wait to meet up with the rest of his buddies and classmates. The arcade, karaoke, and beach called out to him and he quickly jumped out of bed. “Come on buddy, new day, great day!”  Grabbing his mobile- he scrolled through the group chat of class 3-A, the class president is the first to be up and greeting everyone a good morning, affirming whether they were all awake, he was already radiating authority and optimism this early in the morning.

As expected from the class president, the emergency exit guy.

Everyone seemed to be active in the group chat, expressing their excitement even Todoroki had gone about explaining what pair of swimming trunks to take. ‘The red one… Or the blue?’ with Bakugou replying with ‘Live up to your name you half n half bastard!’

It caused Denki to snort, skimming through the chat, giving replies of his own as he sauntered about the room, running his fingers through disheveled strands and picking whatever item needed for today- lazily prepping his duffle bag- until he noticed something off. Everyone on the group chat was online except for one particular person. Kyoka Jiro.

Now that Denki thought of it, she hadn’t been very excited for the trip, avoiding the topic as a whole, not to mention she in general just wasn’t herself. On edge is how he would word it. He wasn’t very book smart, but Denki was always quick to notice these things, being socially intelligent and all. Without hesitation he pressed the green call button, waiting for the call to get through as he pressed the device to his ear and plopped himself on his bed, back against the wall. The two weren’t best friends per se, but they were still close and understood each other on a different level, he respected and admired her.... maybe a little too much, but he wondered if she felt the same way.

“I doubt it…”

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Kyoka Jiro was in deep sleep when the buzzing of her phone woke her from her slumber, with squinted eyes she couldn’t believe the name displayed on her phone and perceived it as her in a dream, deciding to roll to her side comfortably, the blanket huddled up under her chin- not until the buzzing started to annoy her that she checked her phone with a frustrated sigh and realized it was indeed Kaminari Denki calling. She rubbed her eyes and pinched herself now fully aware that she was not dreaming. “Heck?”

But why would he be calling?

Deciding to stop overthinking, she sat up and answered her phone with a lazy hello, covering up her stutters with a yawn or an annoyed sigh, a hand reaching up to play with her dark strands. “Oh! Jiro! Morning~!” There was amusement laced in his voice, Jiro flinched, having just woken up, she didn’t need to hear Denki’s energetic voice so early…

…

Wait… What was today…?!

Drawing her curtains open, she was met with the piercing sunlight, cursing under her breath as she shielded her eyes momentarily, the room now bright enough for her to glance at the clock mounted to the wall. “Shit…”

She could hear laughter on the other side of the line, inciting a groan from her. “You totally forgot, didn’t you?” The female was tempted to snap, but bit her lip and instead smiled at his joyous hilarity, her chest swelling up as she pressed the device closer to her ear. “Yeah, yeah. It’s not funny, y’know?” She breathed out, fully awake and aware of her surroundings, she still had time to get ready and leave to meet up with the girls, they agreed to meet up at Tsuyu’s place which wasn’t too far. Stepping to her closet, she shuffled around to pick out her clothes with Denki still chortling in the background. “Can’t help it, it’s not like you to be late or forgetful.” He wasn’t wrong, with how anxious she was about today, she ended up sleeping quite late because of a certain person invading her thoughts, little did she know he would be the first she’d talk to, and it helped ease her mind; miraculously. Maybe because she didn’t have to /face/ him at this very moment.

“I guess. A-Anyway, thanks for calling… to uh wake me up…” She trailed off, cursing under her breath for her awkwardness, she could hear him exhale, picking up on every sound that was emitted by him, her cheeks red as she patiently waited for him to respond. “Uh… yeah! No probs. See you soon?” Denki had more to say, she waited for him to say more but time was passing by and she needed to get ready. “Yeah… Later.” After hanging up, Jiro stared at her mobile before leaning her head against a wall, the shirt she had picked out earlier; clenched between fingers, before realization dawned upon her, why didn’t she ask him when she had the chance?

Why did he call…? More like, why bother calling in the first place?

Knowing she wasn’t going to get her answers, Jiro continued with her day, following her morning routine, and was soon out hurrying towards Tsuyu’s place greeting the females and explaining her tardiness, excluding the part where Denki called her. She didn’t want to be teased, and Mina would definitely talk loudly about it.

“You’re here now, that’s what matters!” Hagakure exclaimed, patting the other’s back.

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The class finally gathered at their meeting point, the lot of them assembling like that caught a lot of attention so by default they split into groups, some deciding to go shopping instead of the arcade, some had other plans, they promised to meet up again with Tenya Iida throwing in instructions, hands moving in all sorts of ways. “I think we’ll all be fine, Iida…” Izuku Midoriya assured with a sheepish laugh, a hand behind his neck, causing the class president to relax and adjust his glasses. “You’re right, Izuku. Alright! You’re all dismissed!” Everyone mumbled their complaints, they weren’t on a class trip, they didn’t need any babying. “Hey, Hey! The arcade’s right there! Let’s go!” Mina was dragging Jiro towards the direction of the arcade, only to realize the rest of the females weren’t tagging along.

“I get terrible migraines with all the lights; I’ll sit this one out.” Momo explained, lightly rubbing her head with a sympathetic smile, even though it was her idea to go to the arcade and gain an experience of a lifetime, meanwhile Uraraka gestured towards Midoriya with fidgety hands, unable to look at anyone directly in the eye. “I- Maybe I should just check on Deku!” And ran off towards the direction of the freckled boy, Hagakure had disappeared in thin air (No pun intended) Mina explaining she saw her walk off with Ojiro earlier and nudged Jiro with a wink. “They’re cute together, right?” Jiro only laughed sheepishly. “Probably…” and Tsuyu? She simply idled with Tokoyami and Shouji, lounging with them silently, the arcade was not her sort of thing.

Jiro felt betrayed, she certainly didn’t want to spend time with the obnoxious group, knowing full well Denki was there, her stomach churned and she clutched it, despite their short call earlier, all the nerves in her body tensed, this is why she was avoiding this dreadful day, she was stuck with him and Mina did a good job keeping her around. “Oh, Jiro!” She was greeted by the yellow-haired individual, wincing and avoiding his gaze, she was sure he would bring up their previous interaction but surprisingly he didn’t even mention it, not even subtly. “Can we go already?!” Katsuki’s voice boomed, no one flinched at his brash behavior, even Jiro who blankly stared at him, the temperamental bully stormed off on his own while Kirishima ran behind his friend. “Wait up, man!”

“Then hurry the fuck up!” And everyone followed, increasing their pace to catch up to the ticking bomb of a man, at least someone was looking forward to the arcade. As they made their way inside, music and neon lights flooded their vision and hearing, the adrenaline rushing through them and Jiro grinned, the colors of the neon lights reflecting against her skin, the pink and orange and blues called out to her; for a second forgetting all her worries, as much as she liked instruments, the arcade was also her go-to place, she wasn’t a gamer so to say, but now and then she’d spend time playing video games. “Ready to kick some butt?!” Mina challenged the group, running in the direction of the counter to get started with all the games. They were all pumped up, Jiro only stared at them from a distance, a little too shy to open up, as she was lost in her thoughts; once again, a nudge to the shoulder brought her back, Denki purposefully bumped shoulders with Jiro, catching her attention and staring up at him, immediately freezing on the spot. “W-What do you want?” She questioned irritably. “Ready to get your butt kicked?” His confidence radiated as he grinned with his teeth exposed, Jiro responded by straightening her posture shoving her hands into her pockets. “Losers treat winners.”

With a little nudge to his shoulder, Jiro was instantly reminded of their previous interactions, interactions that didn’t involve her getting panicked or flustered around the ball of energy, when things were ‘normal,’ when her feelings were undiscovered and their bond was purely playful and ordinary. This one-sided unrequited love pinched at her chest causing frustration but, just for today… She would enjoy every moment and lock up the feelings that hindered her. These were memories being made for them to keep as they grow older and pursue adulthood and no way would she ruin today because of a one-sided emotion, it wasn’t like Kyoka Jiro at all.

[gold3nladybug]

Let's build a Legacy Deck

I do a lot of thinking about magic; you've possibly realised that, since I post long diatribes about what the game means to me on a somewhat regular basis. However, I'm not really very... let's say creative in how I approach the game. I'm not looking to explore new ground, I'm mostly trying to be as good at this game as I possibly can be. I'm pretty competitive, but my motivation isn't really winning - it's more about improving.

Legacy is a beautiful format. Not just the cards themselves, but the complexity, diversity and unbelievable skill ceilings that you can strive to attain playing these cards. I always feel like there is so much more I can learn, so many things I can improve. The level of mastery that could be achieved with these cards is seemingly endless.

So it is only fitting that we start here:

Mercadian Masques is the best Brainstorm. Don't @ me.

Now, beyond that, it's actually not that easy to branch out too far. There is a very real, very challenging financial barrier to playing this amazing format (and indeed all non-rotating formats share this problem to some degree). I own a handful of blue duals, and that unlocks a certain subset of the format for me. I bought them over the course of a year or so, and they were much, much cheaper than they are now. I doubt I'll ever be able to justify buying more, and since I don't have the quantity of duals necessary for some decks, and I own zero Tropical Islands, that subset actually isn't that large. I also don't really own any of the cards to play non-brainstorm decks - no Death & Taxes, no Eldrazipost, no Lands, no Quinn the Eskimo (yup, that's a real deck name. Give it a google, its delightful).

So, I own Tundras. That means that in Legacy, I'm pretty much always playing Miracles. My collection supports that. But that isn't really where I think I wanna be right now

Beautiful.

Stoneblade has had a bit of a renaissance recently, putting up good finishes at a high level because someone recently decided "I think I should play Death's Shadow in Legacy" and almost won the Pro Tour. Decks that play white mana have a pretty solid answer to that, and Stoneblade's ability to switch strategies between defender and aggressor is really valuable. I loved Miracles with Sensei's Divining Top, but the deck was a problem, and without that card it can't always claim inevitably. You need to win the game somehow, and Batterskull is a pretty solid somehow. But it can't do it alone.

Here's the rest of the team.

Snapcaster Mage is a ridiculous magic card. There are a lot of good instants and sorceries, y'all. In a format like legacy, though, playing the full four copies can sometimes be a liability, especially if you don't have cards like Lightning Bolt that can let you convert excess mages into a noncommittal, one size fits all kinda spell. All the cards I have are pretty specialized, and Snapcaster Mage can be all of them. Absolutely wild. I hear Tiago Chan, the winner of the invitational that led to this card, became a professional wrestler.

Wild.

Jace, the Mind Sculptor set the gold standard for what a Planeswalker could be. It feels like a privilege to be able to play with this card sometimes. One thing that I find interesting, is that in my experience I am vastly more willing to +2 Jace as my main plan than others. I get that Brainstorming is awesome and all, but the elevator going up is pretty cool too. It doesn't create numerical advantage, but using Jace's fate seal can create a lot of qualitive advantage and also let's you use an ability that wins the game. I'm a fan.

Vendilion Clique, though, might just be one of my favourite magic cards. It does a whole lot of very cool things, the most important of which to me is create informational asymmetry. This game would be a lot easier if you knew all the cards your opponent had, and usually that means you have to play cards like Thoughtseize. But that card is gross. Also, don't sleep on using Clique to send one of your own cards away, especially if that card is an equipment that you can find with your stoneforge mystic.

Lastly, we have True-Name Nemesis. This card isn't always good, but when it is it's the best card in your deck. If creatures attacking or blocking matters in a game, there is no card that does either that is better for its cost than TNN. My copies are the only cards in my deck that are altered or signed, and I normally like having things be really consistent in my constructed decks, but you can see Zack Stella's beautiful signature. Can you blame me?

So that is how I'm going to win. How am I going to not lose?

Death's Shadow matches up so poorly against Swords to Plowshares, like damn. My pick for the most outrageous removal spell of all time, even with Assassin's Trophy coming down the pipeline, Swords to Plowshares solves so many problems. A lot of this post is just me gushing about these cards, and I understand that might not be the most engaging thing to read, but I really do just love so many of them.

The rest of these spells are broadly about patching holes up. One of the amazing things about Brainstorm is that you get to see a lot of cards each game, so having a few discrete answers to unusual problems can pay a lot of dividends. Council's Judgment and Enginnered Explosives can answer weird permanents that might otherwise beat me, and Supreme Verdict (though sometimes weird in a deck that wants to put creatures on the battlefield) will occasionally just bail you out. And while it might sound funny, it really is relevant that it is blue sometimes.

This is also the best counterspell art. Still don't @ me.

Force of Will is a bit of a weird card, because in a perfect world I wouldn't even want to play it. It is clunky, puts you down cards a lot of the time and is a massive hassle to play for retail. But also, sometimes Force is the only thing standing between you and rampant degeneracy. People play Belcher in this format! It is the glue that holds the format together.

And then we get to this, and I start to question if I actually know what I'm doing. Sometimes I make these really calculated choices, trying to eke out the smallest possible advantage. Other times I think to myself "yeah, that seems right" and this is one of those times. Flusterstorm is a really powerful, versatile piece of interaction that comes with inbuilt protection and scales throughout the turn. Great with Snapcaster Mage, but absolutely worthless some of the time. People play Chalice of the Void in this format!

Spell Snare is hyper specialized, but it does a lot of things that Flusterstorm can't. There are a legion of incredibly powerful, diverse threats that exist at 2cmc in this format; Baleful Strix, Hymn to Tourach, Tarmogoyf, Sylvan Library, enemy Snapcaster Mage, Counterbalance, Exhume, Infernal Tutor, etc, etc. Snare stops them all cold, but only them.

Spell Pierce is the middle ground, the bridge between two entirely different points of view. It's kinda boring, but its pretty okay at standing in for both of the other's jobs. Spell Pierce never wins employee of the month, but I hope it knows I appreciate it.

One last spell in the main deck, and its Search for Azcanta.

X marks the Spot! I play with checklist cards almost exclusively for any DFC cards that I use, even if I'm 100% sure the sleeves I'm using are completely opaque. It is way better to be safe than sorry, and I also like not needing to actually take my card out of the sleeve to flip it when I can have the real card off to the side in an inner to place on the board when I need it.

Once, when I was playing two Azcanta in a standard deck, I asked my teammate if I should have two Azcanta sleeved, one flipped and one not, because I couldn't actually have two in the same state on the battlefield. They looked like they wanted to slap me.

After that is just lands, and you probably don't want to see that...

Who are we kidding, the lands in a legacy deck are beautiful

I'm really proud of my legacy manabase.

This is also one of those examples of those really calculated choices, optimising for the smallest possible advantages. It turns out that you're only allowed to play four Flooded Strand, and after that NONE of the fetches get both basic Island and basic Plains. Normally this means a couple of Scalding Tarns, or whatever other blue fetch you have a few copies of, but why not extract the tiniest, most infinitesimal fraction of an advantage. What if they Pithing Needle Scalding Tarn? What if they're monsters who cast Surgical Extractions on random targets to see if they getcha? Well you're not going to get me, because I have insulated myself by playing three different blue fetches and an Arid Mesa.

Otherwise, Karakas is a lovely tech land against any sort of reanimator strategy, while also unlocking all sorts of fun play patterns with Vendilion Clique. Wasteland is playing in a similar space, being a low investment singleton that can be really good in some matchups, but I don't know if I like it. I might play an extra basic over it, we'll see.

But wait, I hear you asking, why are you playing Volcanic Island. You don't have any red cards!

Entirely fair question.

All the way from the sideboard, red cards.

As you might have gathered, there are some pretty amazing blue cards in legacy. I'm not one to let people just get away with playing blue cards. It's a little weird to have a 2/1 split of red blast effects, but it's just one of those micro optimizations. Sometimes they'll have a meddling mage naming Pyroblast, you know? Also, on my wishlist is a black border red elemental blast of some description. My pyroblasts just look so much prettier.

Also I guess I lied about TNN being the only signed card I play. But again, just look at Franz Vohwinkel's signature. Impossible to turn it down.

The rest of the sideboard is pretty easy to break down. A Hydroblast, because we can't let people get away with playing red cards either. An extra Flusterstorm, because it's just a fantastic card that usually gets better after sideboard. People usually have pretty good spells in their decks, and stopping Flusterstorm from countering those spells can be pretty challenging. Disenchant is a pretty good hedge a lot of the time, for a similar reason. People tend to have some high impact enchantments or artifacts kicking around, so I usually want a cheap way to fight that available to me. Containment Priest and the two Surgical Extractions are a concession to the speed and power of reanimation strategies, that also happen to have some really good splash damage against other really powerful strategies. I kind of want to make room for a Rest in Peace, but for now these will serve. Monastery Mentor is just one of those cards that, in a post sideboard game where a lot of the removal is gone and Pyroblasts imperil the battlefield and stack, can take over a game with extreme speed and quickly end it. It could also be something like a Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, but there's value in dodging Spell Pierce.

So the only part of this that might be a bit weird is the Spell Queller, Counterbalance package. My thinking is, coming from Miracles, that Counterbalance is sometimes an exceedingly powerful card. And sometimes it's pretty janky. It's hard to truly cut it from the main deck there, because it helps enable so many of the soft synergies in the deck (revealing for Predict, making all the cantrips that much better, finding spots to crack fetch lands for extra value), even though the times that it's bad it is so bad. But here, I've almost got the same amount of cantripping and deck manipulation as I would in Miracles, but my main proactive gameplan is strong enough that I don't need them in my main deck. It's a perfect card to slide into the sideboard, where I can access it both as a value engine for blue pseudo-mirrors and a desperate tool to fight combo as well.

Spell Queller was a card I considered for Vendilion Clique's spot for a long time. They are approximately as vulnerable as each other in the context of the format, but eventually the inability to profitably play it for value proactively gave Clique the nod. But the other main three drop I play kept me thinking about it. When it matters, TNN is exceptional. But when it's bad, there's nothing you want less; True Name feels like such a brick if your opponent is doing something degenerate. It's an easy swap in those situations for this powerful reactive spirit. Like Mentor, dodging Flusterstorm and Spell Pierce is a huge deal in winning counter wars while also transitioning into an aggressive stance. So many important cards are vulnerable to being quelled, and I'm honestly quite excited to play with it.

So... there you have it. That's my legacy deck. It's not perfect, and I'm sure before too long I'll end up putting Terminus back in here and going back to Miracles. It's hard to change decks in Legacy, and not just because of the price. These cards really do feel special, like you're playing with important pieces in the history of a really great, really important game. I hope I get to keep playing Legacy for a long, long time.

[scoobydoominuscoobydoo]

Part Two

“Someone that has a strong connection to you. A kind of emotional tether.”

When an average day for you is being tormented by some sort of terrifying creature that has the habit of chasing you with the (assumed) intent to harm; you tend to get jumpy.

Even if the terrifying creature always ends up being made of some sort of silicon that hide the face of a loser who had nothing better to do than mope.

After the gang had solved their first legitimately dangerous case together Daph couldn’t sleep a wink. Same with the second and the third and the fourth.

The constant chases, grotesque creatures popping out of the darkness of some sort of abandoned building. Her somehow always being the first to get grabbed.

It became way too much way too fast. 

Day after day she realized how selfish people can be, how quickly these people became convinced dressing up in a costume and hurting people was their only option.

How could she trust anyone that was outside of the van with the funky paint job?

She had no idea how Fred could look so many people in the eye and trust them, she admired how his faith in humanity hadn’t collapsed after seeing how evil it could be. She believed that was one of the reasons why she loved him, his ability to trust people. 

It had taken a while, but she was able to believe in people again. She wasn’t totally sure how she had done it, forcing herself to trust in people wasn’t exactly the easiest thing.

It wasn’t waves of therapists her parents threw at her.

It wasn’t listening to thunderstorms and drinking coconut water.

It wasn’t even stress eating that helped.

She figured if it worked for Shaggy then it could work for anyone.

But then she remembered Shaggy wasn’t “anyone,” he was far from being anyone.

He didn’t care what others thought about him, he wasn’t afraid to admit his flaws and his issues. He was a coward and proud of it. If he had a problem with something he would lay it all out on the table.

That was something Daph couldn’t imagine doing. Her stress was always layed out in a hinting manner, one that nobody bothered to pick up on. So instead she’d scream into a pillow for a few seconds until she felt like she could smile at normal people again.

Of course that was replaced later on by her new belief that people could be inherently good. That definitely made her happier.

The chases, the grotesque creatures, getting captured. It all was now met with her undefeated optimism. That was also added to the fact that they had all gotten a lot better at what they do, so the chance of something going wrong was at an all time low.

It felt nice to be able to outsmart people who deserved to be reminded how stupid they were.

But that didn’t mean there weren’t smart bad guys out there. Smart bad guys they were bound to run into eventually. And eventually those bad guys would outsmart the mystery solvers.

“I keep running through the plan over and over in my head a-and there shouldn’t be any faults to it.” Fred was pacing back and forth while he rubbed his forehead, maybe trying to get his brain to turn back on. Maybe trying to pull it out of the state of panic it was in.

“Freddie, thi-this isn’t your fault. That guy got the best of us, right Scooby?” Daphne was sitting on the back of the Mystery Machine, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. Scoob didn’t move from where he was laying and nobody had been able to coax him out to talk or move or…..anything.

Velma had remained silent in the front seat, pretending to be busy looking for the keys to the front door to Daph’s vacation house in the glove compartment.

But Daphne knew she was distracted, since she had pulled out the right key three times then put it back in the compartment.

The gang was trapped in an unsettling, uncomfortable silence.

That silence continued until Velms said, “I found them….” Nobody responded, they all just got up and headed towards the fluorescent purple house.

A few minutes later they were all sitting in the safest room in the house, the sauna. 

Daph was leaning against the door frame as everyone else took a bench, Scooby still shoving himself into a corner. Fred had let out a sigh before turning to Velma, “Okay let’s lay out our situation, figure out our next step.”

Velms nodded slowly before looking down at her lap.

“Right, so exactly two weeks and four days ago Eli McElroy the famous chemist was perfecting his formula which he believed would be capable of turning common geological objects into gold.” She paused and fidgeted, “He…..He was then found dead with the formula gone as well as his eyes.”

Daph hugged herself, inhaling loudly through her nose. Listening to it now, it was stupidly clear they had been over their heads from the very beginning.

Fred then stepped in and continued, “We were able to look at the security footage and it showed a masked figure leaving the lab….which matches up with McElroy’s time of death.”

“We deduced that the um….the victims eyes were taken as well for some sort of retinal scan.” Velms took off her glasses and began to wipe them with her sweater with a vigorous force, “But when we inquired about that the security guard said there were up to ten different areas in the lab that required a retinal scan, McElroy having access to all of them.”

Daph jumped in, “We had interrogated all of the staff and there was no single motive or suspect provided.” The more they unpacked the events, the stupider they began to sound.

Fred nodded, “Then Shags made the observation that we shouldn’t figure out who the culprit is but where the culprit is trying to get to.”

Everyone fell silent again. They should have just told that to the police.

“And so, “ Velma finally broke the silence, “After looking into McElroy’s research I made the deduction that he had created a new element that when mixed with certain types of limestone could convert it into a sort of metal. Most likely copper.”

That information alone could bring in millions of dollars. And it was now in the hands of a bunch of kids. It would probably get them killed if things went wrong.

Daph shifted her weight from one foot to the other, not wanting to continue. But Velma still opened her mouth, “Anyway we found out through one of the other scientists that the element was being held in a cooler in Sector 7, one that requires a retinal scan.”

She put her glasses back on and took a deep breath.

Before she could say anything Fred said it for her, “And so we did what we always do, had Shag and Scooby wait as the bait and eventually lead the culprit towards the rest of us.”

“And that was the stupidest thing we had ever done Fred!” Daph snapped at him, her hands falling to her sides as her voice quivered.

Fred and Velma looked at her in shock, she had been totally calm and optimistic on the ride here.

“I…..I know Daph-I just-”

“Fred this guy killed somebody and cut out their eyes out, this is absolutely nothing like the other times.” He avoided her eyes since they were now narrow and totally cold, “Those guys were committing delightful pranks compared to this psychopath!!”

Velma stood up, “Daphne, cool it we’re not gonna get Shaggy back if we start getting mad at each other.”

Daph scoffed, she felt a lump forming in her throat, “We would still have him if we had just called the damn police and not taken this matter into our own stupid hands!!”

She knew they always took Shag for granted because he was always the first one to suggest getting professionals involved, and she used to just brush him off too.

But now it was different, he could be in serious danger.

Like the life threatening kind. His eyeballs could be getting scooped out of his head at this very moment. And it was just killing her to think about that.

Her lower lip was trembling, “I think we should get one thing clear right now.” She took a deep breath, knowing she’d burst into tears if she didn’t stand her ground, “We do not ever, ever, put each other’s lives in jeopardy. We’ve been doing that for years with Shaggy and Scooby and we didn’t even bat a fucking eyelash!”

Fred and Velma looked at one another and then at their feet.

“We’re best friends and I actually do care whether we make it through this life together! Alive and well!”

For the first time in the five hours Shaggy had been taken, Scooby actually turned around and looked at her. His eyes were tired and he actually looked like a dog for once.

Daphne didn’t know if he was sending gratitude or comfort because she found that she was way more upset about Shag being kidnapped than she previously thought.

She was about to ridicule her friends further but found that she couldn’t say anything without breaking out in horrible sobs.

Normally when Daph cried she had no problem sharing that experience with everyone she knew. But the idea of her crying right now made her feel like she was giving up on Shag, on the idea of saving him.

And that wasn’t even and option.

So without saying anything else she left the sauna and trudged slowly towards the entry way to the house. Hoping nobody would follow her, she backed against the wall, letting herself lean against the purple striped wallpaper.

She took a few deep breaths but nothing was getting rid of the lump at the back of her throat.

The last time she had seen him, he was covering up his terror with chuckles and random puns. And she had just patted him on the back and told him he’d be fine. And then he gave her this smile that told her that her words meant something to him.

And the last she had heard from him was an ear piercing scream.

The last she had of him was the walkie talkie they had given to him. A whole lot of good it had done. 

Every time she blinked she saw that smile, every time she held her breath she heard that scream, every time she moved she felt the walkie talkie in her back pocket.

But that was nowhere near as perfect as Shaggy being right there in front of her, nothing could compare to that.

She felt herself slide down the wall, but she wasn’t totally sure since her eyes were stuck shut, hoping that she could keep the tears trapped inside. What if he was hurt? What if the culprit wasn’t a hostage type of guy?? Oh God, how did they know he wasn’t already dead?

He couldn’t be dead, he just couldn’t.

Daph couldn’t handle anything if he was gone, she needed him. He helped her where Fred and Velma couldn’t.

He was the reason she searched for the good in people. Why she was still sane.

Hot tears streamed down her cheeks and she could do nothing to stop it, she just let it happen. There was no point in her bottling it all up, that was what had caused her distrust in people when she was younger.

She knew getting it all out now was Shaggy’s best chance.

Daphne wasn’t sure how long she had been crying but was quickly pulled out her misery when she heard foot steps.

She opened her eyes slowly and it was like she had been holding her breath the whole time. Her eyes felt wet and hot and stung as the air hit them. It took her a second to process all the bright purples and pinks and greens and grays. 

After a couple seconds attempting to handle the waves of color she spotted Velma and her favorite orange turtleneck.

Her lips felt dry as she sternly said, “What is it?” She didn’t mean to sound hostile but it just came out like that. Velma raised an eyebrow at her attitude but said nothing about it.

“I think Freddie and I have figured out where he is.”

When she heard this Daphne stood up quickly, having to lean onto the wall after realizing her legs had turned to jelly.

“W-Who? Shaggy? Or uh-the the um…. the culprit?” It was taking her forever to gather her thoughts and she didn’t even know what words were coming out of his mouth. She must have looked desperate to hear the answer because Velms walked over and placed her hand on Daphne’s shoulder, “Both Daph.”

“You see McElroy’s colleague, Danny Sheppard, had been having a dry streak when it came to his projects and discoveries because the lab wasn’t properly funding him.” Velma pushed up her glasses as she walked by the police men and motioned toward the cuffed culprit

He gave her a scowl but said nothing, like the smart guy he was he wasn’t going to admit to anything.

Fred jumped in and crossed his arms, “After some digging he found out that it was because his budget was being swapped for a much smaller amount. While his original budget was being given to McElroy and his experiments.”

Velma sent him a smirk and Daphne continued, “That was enough to convince Sheppard to quit and find employment at another lab. But before he could quit he accidentally stumbled on confidential information which revealed McElroy’s current project and top priority.”

“A formula that turned certain types of limestone into gold.” Velma had walked back next to Fred and was now leaning against the squad car, “His initial plan was to just steal the formula and claim it as his own discovery.”

She looked over at Fred and he nodded, “But after he had killed McElroy and stolen the formula he had found that the formula required an element of McElroy’s own creation held in a confidential location.”

It was Daph’s turn to jump in.

“And that was Sheppard’s greatest mistake.”

She saw him flinch at those words but still he said nothing.

“You see that was how we learned he was the culprit. Only McElroy and his lab assistant knew the location of the element. So there was no way that Sheppard would have been able to tip us off about where the criminal would be headed.”

This case had unwound like every other except it eerily didn’t end with “And I would have gotten away with it too etc. etc.”  But to be fair this guy was different from the other weirdos they had caught.

Daphne let out the long breath she had been holding in, they had caught him.

But then she remembered something and ran over to the squad car where the officers were about to shove him.

He looked over at her slowly, she could feel the hatred but knew he wouldn’t risk threatening her. “Where did you put him?” The police raised an eyebrow at her statement, the fact that their was a hostage adds a lot to the case against him.

Clearly he knew this because he responded with feigned ignorance.

Daphne’s brows furrowed and she grabbed the collar of his shirt, she wasn’t afraid to punch his lights out, “Tell me what the hell you did to him!!” Before she could put him in a proper choke hold Velma and Fred had dragged her back.

She kicked and struggled but she didn’t wanna do anything to hurt either of them so she let them push her back.

Helplessly, she watched as Velms and Fred both tried to get information about where Shaggy was out of him, but he just wasn’t budging.

Daph let out a huff and crossed her arms as she looked over at Scooby.

He gave this hopeless look and she returned it. They weren’t getting anywhere, and since Fred and Velma weren’t letting her beat the information out of him they had no clue where Shaggy is.

It then occurred to her that they hadn’t even searched the whole house.

Without saying anything, she made her way through the open front door and started to look in any spot she could think to hide a 6′0 person.

The closets, the huge freezer in his back yard, the bathtubs, the attic. At this point she was even checking under the beds and there was still no sign of him, she could feel panic setting in but she chose to ignore it.

He’s not dead, he’s alive and well and in a few hours he’ll be back to complaining about how hungry he is even though he just ate. She was beginning to get desperate, opening the kitchen cabinets even though she knew it didn’t do any good.

She felt the tears returning.

He should be here. She should be able to find him. She should be able to save him!!

She tripped on a rack of shoes by the front door and fell to her knees with a loud thud. Not bothering to get up she looked down at the floor, she could see her tears falling on the hard wood.

She had lost him she couldn’t find him.

She had no idea what she was gonna do now. How was she ever gonna laugh again if she knew that she had let him fade away?

Her tears fell fast and she only got angrier with herself, with Fred for putting him in danger, with Velma for letting Fred go through with it. Any second now a group of cops as well as her friends would come in here and wonder why she had been tampering with potential evidence and see her crying like a baby.

Right when she decided she didn’t even care anymore she spotted something out of the corner of her eye.

It was a doorknob just sticking out of the wall.

No clear reason why it was there but it was all Daphne had at this point.

Slowly, she got back to her feet and took a swift peek out the open front door. Fred and Velma hadn’t seemed to notice her absence, neither did Sheppard or the police present. But Scooby seemed to send her a quick glance before pretending he hadn’t seen her.

Not wasting any time, she dashed toward the doorknob. She wasn’t sure exactly how to approach this so she started by turning it.

Locked. Of course it was.

She moved her hands and let her fingers find the edges of the door. She had no idea how she didn’t find it before, now that she saw it clearly hidden in the wall.

There was no way she was gonna waste any time searching for a key when it was her last chance to find him. She flipped her hair behind her shoulders and took a step back. Taking a deep breath she quickly lifted her leg and sent a front facing kick into the door.

She watched as the door flew inwards, the lock still stuck in place.

Normally she would have been proud of how well that was executed but her heartbeat had picked up and she was already running down the flight of stairs behind the door.

Her hands ran along the wall for some sort of light switch.

But by the time she had reached the bottom of the stairs a string hit her in the face.

She ignored that fact that she had almost screamed because she thought it was a spiderweb for a demon spider from hell and pulled on the string with such force she was surprised it hadn’t broken off.

The second the light came on her eyes found a pair of baggy brown pants and a matching pair of long legs to go with it.

He was still in one piece, he didn’t even look that battered, there was just rope around his wrists. Slowly, he looked up at her, his eyes were tired and disoriented. Probably from being in a pitch black room for several hours.

“Daph? Like, I…I haven’t finally gone crazy have I?”

She let out a combo of a giggle and a sob as she hopped into the basement and ran over to him. 

Not sure whether to hug him or untie him, she found herself just staring at him. He was okay, he was alive and he was getting out of here.

“Oh please be in no hurry to save my life Daphne just tied up and dying.” She giggled again and leaned forward to untie him. Once the ropes were off she saw his raw and red wrists and his shaking hands. 

She grabbed them quickly and held onto them tight, afraid he would get snatched away again otherwise. 

“Please never do that ever again.”

“Do what? Get kidnapped by a damn eyeball scooper?” He tightened his grip on her hands, the shaking stopping.

She smiled at him, hearing footsteps above them signalling that Fred and Velma had found out she was in the house. 

Neither of them did anything, they just sat there in blissful silence hand in hand until Scooby came flying out of nowhere and pushed all three of them into a hug. 

She was so glad to hear that laugh again. 

[vitaevandal]

Illuminated

Genre: Fan Fiction (Divergent) Pairing: Eric x OFC Warnings: Adult themes Rating: Mature Disclaimer: This a strict work of fiction, I own nothing except the original characters and the plot line.

A/N: This is based on a request I received from @murmelinchen on my old blog @feminamortem that I can’t repost since I deleted it like a douche. The prompt was a one-shot of Eric and reader/OFC going on a moonlit walk. Here you go.

(I also apologize for not remembering who asked to be tagged in this besides @thihaf. Don’t let me do anything stupid like delete a blog again.)

Eric blindly paced back and forth through his living room, his fingers alternating between pinching the bridge of his nose and raking his usually impeccably styled hair into manic spikes. The relentless buzzing of the usual gathering of Dauntless in the Pit was pummeling his ears like a bass drum, making it impossible to think, so he’d fled to his apartment to clear his head, where the oppressive silence seemed to convolute his thoughts even further.

Typically on Thursdays she’d meet him at his apartment after her shift at one of Dauntless’s many tattoo parlors for their semi-weekly fuck; they were in mutual agreement that neither was looking for anything resembling a relationship, and the arrangement was uncomplicated and comfortable. They rarely wavered from this routine, and if one or the other couldn’t make it, they’d gotten to the point in their ‘liaison’ where they would at least do the other the courtesy of letting them know. So when she hadn’t shown up at the usual designated time without so much as a text, he knew something was amiss and headed straight for the parlor. Lucas, the one who handled piercings, was there alone, breaking down her station. His visage turned into one of dread as Eric, visibly upset, demanded, “Where is she?”

Lucas shrugged his shoulders, continuing when Eric’s glare intensified, “I really don’t know. She seemed kind of off all night, like real agitated, and when I asked her what was wrong she said she wasn’t feeling well. So I said I’d clean up here when we were done and as soon as she finished up her last client about an hour ago she practically bolted out of here. Maybe try the infirmary?”

Eric was surprised to find his annoyance had become tinged with worry. As he made the trek towards the infirmary, he became even more unsettled by the foreignness of such a feeling as concern for another person’s well-being. As he neared the hallway leading to the clinic he caught the sound of two voices speaking in hushed but frantic tones, one of which he recognized as hers, holding a conversation that was most likely not intended to be overheard. He halted abruptly before he rounded the corner and held back out of sight, holding his breath and listening intently.

“How could I have been so stupid?” She spoke lowly, but the alarm and anger in her voice was still evident. “Thinking it’s nothing but a touch of the flu. This honestly never even crossed my mind, not once. I thought we were being careful, I really did. But obviously not enough!” Eric chanced a peek around the corner and saw her slumped against the wall, one hand clutching a small paper bag, the other pressed against her forehead, before retreating back into the shadows. “I can’t even process this, Gina. What in the fuck am I going to do? Do I even tell him? How do you tell Eric of all people something like this?”

He heard the other girl exhale loudly and pause before replying, “Don’t panic. It won’t do you any good, what’s done is done. And maybe you don’t have to tell him, at least not yet.”

“Are you kidding me? This isn’t exactly something I’ll be able to hide! He’s going to find out eventually. And no matter how this plays out, he should know, he needs to take responsibility! I...Gina,” she whispered, as her voice began to break, “my entire life has literally just been ruined. This changes everything.”

Eric felt paralyzed as he attempted to digest this exchange. He was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of suffocation, of being trapped inside a bubble where the oxygen was growing short in supply and his surroundings were muted and distorted. His brain moved in hitches and spurts as he pieced their mutterings together.

“...a touch of the flu…thought we were being careful…what’s done is done…has to take responsibility…”

She was pregnant. And it was his.

A cold sweat sprang up through his pores as this fact clicked into place, and Eric went into panic mode. He had to get out of there. He needed time to think before she confronted him, and he was in no way fit to feign ignorance for her.

So here he was, making a blind trek through the landscape of his apartment, replaying the illicit dialogue over and over in his mind, attempting to catalogue his many reactions. Eric did hail from Erudite, and his position as a leader was not entirely ill-gotten; so despite a rather conflagrant temper, the union of his natural intelligence and militaristic conditioning had produced an ability to maintain logic, composure, and clarity in the most disastrous situations. Without actual conscious, choreographed thought, his brain began to disentangle the threads of the situation with the detached yet swiftly calculating adroitness of a born strategist. He’d knocked her up. While he could cling desperately to the hope that it wasn’t his, he had little reason to doubt that it was, so he wasted no time in entertaining that romantic notion and instead simply accepted it as an unassailable fact. One that needed immediate damage control, the top priority of which was unquestionably self-preservation.

While they had never discussed such a hypothetical, he believed he knew her well enough by now to confidently predict that she would not have an abortion, and besides, he operated by the creed of, “Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.” His first concern: how would the berth of fatherhood affect his leadership position? There were no rules in place regarding marital or dependent status, so there was no immediate threat to his career per se, but the burden that having a family would place on his time would undoubtedly skyrocket his already considerable stress level. Eric prided himself on prevailing over adversity, so while this was not exactly a challenge he would have sought out, he had no fear of this thwarting his ambitions. But on the personal level? A family would end life as he knew it. He’d never had to be accountable to anyone, never been in a committed relationship so never had any qualms about sleeping around. Never anyone besides Number One to look out for, never anyone for Eric to take care of besides Eric. A family would mean a practical and emotional onus unprecedented for him, and the question wasn’t whether he could be ready for such a thing, because there was no question about it - this was happening, he had to be. The question was just how miserable the rest of his entire fucking life was going to be. And that’s when it hit him.

Or rather, didn’t hit him, because the waves of anger and petulance and despair he expected to flood him never came. There was no outrage over the end of his old life. There was apprehension, there was fear, but could that really just be how his ingrained personality was translating...excitement? Optimism? At what he realized he was beginning to see as the onset of his new life?

True to his nature, resoluteness took hold quickly as he vowed to, at the very least, give this whole thing a shot. He was, after all, brave; he was Dauntless.

***

“Take a walk with me.”

“A walk? Where?” A bemused expression crossed her features before turning to one of trepidation.

“Navy Pier. For once it’s not hot as fuck in August, I think we should get out.” Eric looked at her almost beseechingly, which only made her warier. While his proposition was, as always, a command rather than a request, the uncertain and hopeful expression that accompanied it was altogether alien for him.

She paused briefly as she considered the opportunity this might afford her. He seemed to be in a pleasant mood, which could lend her an advantage in this situation. This nighttime excursion out of the compound also lent them the privacy she hoped for when she broke the news. She quickly changed her countenance to one of eagerness.

“Alright. Ready whenever you are.”

It was a rare evening on which Eric was not burdened with any extraneous leadership duties, so they set off immediately without him having to clear his schedule with any of his fellow leaders or his own assistant. They exited the compound unbothered through the seldom-used maintenance doors at the east end, leading to a path too narrow to accommodate vehicles, therefore of little use to anyone coming or going from the premises, Dauntless or otherwise.

Eric was right; the typical late summer humidity was absent from the night air, and a gentle breeze whispered against their skin like silk. Eric felt his conviction oddly fortified by the balmy weather as they started side by side down the pathway, a restive electricity seeming to pass between them. The moon was full that evening, a coin of iridescent silver that illuminated the unobstructed trail before them but whose light stopped short at the trees on either side of them, creating an atmosphere that was intimate rather than grim. The walk to the pier was short, but he didn’t want to wait until they reached their destination to broach the subject of their relationship; he would be fooling himself if he said he was entirely undaunted by the prospect of voicing and therefore solidifying his new receptiveness to the idea of commitment, but knew that every second he waited was cowardice on his part. He cast a sidelong glance at her and took a deep breath.

“Look, I know we’ve called what’s between us casual these past few months, but I think we’ve lied to ourselves long enough, don’t you?”

She turned to him with a look of genuine shock over what he assumed was his defiance of her assumption that she was a temporary toy to him.

“What are you saying, Eric?”

He tentatively took her hand in his, his gaze on her this time remaining steady. “I’m saying, we both know there’s something more there. Something worth pursuing. I’m saying I want us to be exclusive. I want there to be a future for us.”

Now she seemed positively aghast. A silence hung between them as they reached the ferris wheel, and he pulled her toward the steel supports that formed a rudimentary ladder along its sides. The moonlight glinted softly off of the metal, but their surroundings were mostly dark, throwing the nearby lights of Erudite into a relief that looked almost like stars, blazing brightly before they extinguished for all time. “Come to the top with me. The view will be worth it.”

He didn’t see the whirlwind of emotions that flitted across her face as he guided her to begin the climb before him, too intent on ensuring he was prepared to catch her if she slipped. They reached the top car without incident and she was again caught off-guard by his tenderness as he delicately gripped her waist when she swung first one leg and then the other into the gently swaying car. As she sat down and waited for him to join her she shook her head almost imperceptibly, attempting to clear away the momentary fog that this new Eric was perpetuating. She silently pledged to remain unflinching in her confrontation.

Instead of sitting beside her he slid sideways to the edge of the car and remained standing, looking out contemplatively at the ruins of Chicago. Bathed in the incandescent lunar glow, its eeriness, in that moment, transformed into a melancholy beauty.

“I heard you talking to Gina after you left the infirmary. I know you’re pregnant,” he whispered. “I have a responsibility now, to you and our baby. I can’t promise I’ll be perfect, but I can promise that I’ll try. I think you want this as - “

She cut him short as she shrieked, “You what?”, causing him to start and turn to face her. Her features were twisted with what could only be described as unadulterated rage. “You brought me here to tell me that you accept that you fucked up by knocking me up, that you’ve resigned yourself to being a ‘family man,’ like you’re doing me some kind of fucking favor by staying with me? You ruined my life, Eric! No man will ever touch me again thanks to you. You don’t have a fucking clue what you did to me, do you? DO YOU?”

It happened so quickly, he didn’t even have time to scream. Her arms pistoned out and connected with his chest, and as he toppled over the edge of the swinging car, he could just make out the last words anyone would ever speak to him before he struck the pavement some 200 feet below.

“You gave me herpes, you asshole!”

***

She was numb as she clambered down the rungs of the ferris wheel, only sentient enough to wonder if her volatile emotional state that persisted throughout the day had just caused her to hallucinate what she’d just done. She then caught sight of Eric’s inert form, his limbs bent at impossible angles, a growing pool of blood matting his flawless hair. She drifted over to it, noting his grotesquely misshapen skull, but nonetheless crouched next to him and searched for a pulse. Feeling only stillness beneath her own clammy fingertips, she breathed a sigh of relief and her lips curved into a grim smile. It stayed upon her face until she reached the maintenance door they had exited from earlier unnoticed.

Those damn factionless, she would utter later that night to Gina as the whole of Dauntless raised their glasses in tribute to their fallen leader. Eric should’ve known it wasn’t safe to go wandering out into the city alone at night. Arrogant bastard.

[ninavale]

Silver Curse Part 1

Based on this

So ok, I did the thing...tho I have a question gentle readers is this enough for pt.1 or should I add the part with Qrow letting them in on magic stuff and them all figuring out the thing? Or is it better dealt with in second part?

Please answer in replies 

Tagging 

@motherfuckingagentwashington

@sssn-neptune-vasilias

@sunwukxng

@dreams-of-atlantis

@nerdgasrnz

Team RNRJ was on the road again, on their long journey through the sunny country roads of Anima.

“So, how long till the next village oh fearless leader?” asked Nora, directing her question to Jaune. Of course. Ruby couldn’t help but smile. Nora looked up to the boy so much! It was truly heart-warming. She wished she had a helpful teammate like this with her too, someone who would always take her side like Yang used to,...the sudden memory of her sister caused the smile on Ruby’s face to vanish. The last time she had seen Yang, she has been apathetic and broken, looking out of the window into the leafless forest.

‘It’s all your fault’ said a small voice in her head ‘Had you went back to Beacon with everyone you would have saved Yang and stopped Blake from leaving too. Your sister wouldn’t have lost her best friend’

She bit her lip, feeling tears fill her eyes, but she quickly wiped them away. She couldn’t let her friends see her like this. They all already had too much grief and sadness of their own to deal with. Ruby could be childish and awkward but she wasn’t nearly as daft as to not notice the situation. So she smiled and laughed as much as she could, determined to be the source of optimism and a pillar of strength to everyone around.

‘Keep playing your role’ she told herself ‘if you repeat it long enough it will become true’

They continued their journey for another stretch of the road when suddenly Ruby felt a bit dizzy and then a sharp pain pierced her head. She couldn’t help but hiss and stop.

“Ruby?” she heard and saw Jaune and Nora turning towards her

“What happened?” asked the blonde knight, turning around and coming back to her, concern written all over his face

“It’s nothing,” she said” just a sudden headache. I didn’t sleep much last night”

“Maybe you shouldn’t stay up so long,” said Jaune“ You’ve been taking patrols every night for some time now. I’ve told you I can take over, so can Ren and Nora. There is three of us, plenty of people to change during the night for everyone to get decent amount of sleep”

Ruby stiffened at the words. There was a reason she took every sentry and usually stayed up all night watch over the camp. Ever since the Fall of Beacon, she has been having nightmares, or rather a nightmare. It was always the same. Black void, with specs of white light on the edges and Pyrrha’s echoing, distant voice asking Cinder if she believed in destiny, and then her own scream. And it wasn’t just that either if it was only bad dreams she would have coped with them somehow. After all, it wasn’t like she never had nightmares before; but there was another thing. She had been sleepwalking too lately. Luckily it started when they still were at the village, performing their Grimm hunting missions; waiting for their gear to be repaired and collecting their supplies; so when she wandered about it was usually her room or the corridors of the inn. There was little danger in that, the only thing she risked was the owners or other guests seeing her and looking at her funny, but in the wilds? With Grimm on the loose and bandits and even regular wildlife? She couldn’t afford to wander off. It would put not only her life but those of her friends’ in mortal danger. And she was responsible for them, she dragged them here in the first place. However, she couldn’t tell them the truth either, because she didn’t want to worry them and because of her resolution. That’s why presently she smiled as brightly and innocently as she could.

“Thanks,” she said “but I’m fine, Jaune. I just don’t sleep well outside. I always worry about rain and stuff like that. I’ll get my sleep in the next village. It’s not that long way from here, right?”

“No, it’s not” agreed Ren, who had been silent all their way “but Anima is big, we will be on the road more often than in a village, and we won’t always stay in an inn long. You need to sleep, Ruby”

“I will get sleep” she repeated, feeling her anxiety levels rise. She had to convince them to let it go, she didn’t want them finding out and she didn’t trust herself to keep facade when confronted directly. She was never good at lying like that “I really will, I just didn’t feel like it lately but when I feel tired I will sleep”

“You promise?” asked Jaune. She nodded her head, still smiling

“And we expect you to keep it” added Nora “or I’ll knock you out with my hammer,” she said, pulling out her upgraded weapon to emphasize her point.

Ruby chuckled at that

“I promise,” she said “cross my heart and hope to die”

They seemed to have bought it because Jaune and Nora smiled and Ren nodded, although there was a strange look in his eyes, he said nothing and Ruby decided to ignore it. Ren was someone who respected other people’s privacy, he wouldn’t ask nor comment if she didn’t want to talk about it. Without further ado they moved on, keeping their eye on the map, with Jaune telling them about the time he spent in the village on trips with his family. Ruby was glad for it and even joined the conversation offering a friendly jab or two, it distracted her from her dark thoughts, and her headache and served as further proof to her teammates that she was alright. However fate seemed to have different plans, as she felt a sudden change in the air, she couldn’t truly explain it but something was off. Her headache previously ignored returned with vengeance, the throbbing becoming too strong to ignore. In the same moment, she heard Ren and Nora stop and she heard a gasp coming from the latter.

“Guys...” said the girl in an uncharacteristic, almost scared tone. Ruby felt chills running down her spine as she slowly lifted her head to see what it was all about. Her eyes winded and her heart shattered to tiny pieces when she saw the smoke and ruins before them. That was all that was left of Shion village. Hearing a strangled sob on her side, she slowly turned her face to Jaune, almost too afraid to check his reaction. After all, he knew this place and probably some people in it too if he visited it so often. And her feeling wasn’t wrong. The boy was pale as a sheet and a picture of utter shock before he dropped the map and rushed forward with her, Ren and Nora at his toes. Ruby looked around, her eyes desperately searching for survivors.

‘Please let us not be too late’ she begged whoever was in charge of the world ‘please..’

But all she could see were empty, ruined houses and ashes...then she heard Ren calling out. She turned her head in that direction and saw her friend standing next to an armored man with light-brown hair, propped against some stones. He was clearly injured...

“A Huntsman!” she couldn’t help but gasp, as she joined her friends, coming closer to the sole survivor. She arrived just in time to hear Jaune ask the man, the most nurturing question.

“Who killed all those people?”

“Bandits” answered the Huntsman, his voice was weak and rough. There was blood dripping from the corner of his mouth, a sight which made Ruby slightly nauseous and even more worried about his state “a whole tribe...with all the panic...” he couldn’t finish as his body shook with a violent cough. Ruby barely heard Ren’s words, as he finished the man’s statement. She turned around looking at Nora and Jaune, both of whom had anguish written all over their faces. Ruby knew what she had to do.

‘Be a tower of strength’ she said ‘keep them hoping. Come up with a plan. You’re the leader, you can save this man if you all work together. He’s still alive as long as he breathes there is hope’

“Alright,” she said, with far more composure than she really felt “we can get him to the next village and try to find the doctor there!”

It seemed like her example worked because a flicker of hope appeared in Jaune’s eyes.

“Alright” he agreed, with new determination and strength “me and Nora can take turns carrying him there”

“I don’t think he’ll make it,” said Nora, shaking her head in a surprising amount of realism, causing Ruby to flinch. It seemed like her powers of optimism were waning...she couldn’t even inspire people...

“He’ll have to,” said Jaune. Well at least he was on her side...maybe with his words Nora’s spirits would be raised, but to make sure Ruby also joined in

“If we get going now, our chances will be better. I can run ahead and look for help!” she said, some of her despair seeping through her voice. She was wild to save this man’s life. At least this one if there were no others. But her pleas fell on deaf ears as Ren’s somber voice broke the silence. She knew that tone and she knew what it told of before she even turned around, but it didn’t lessen the blow when she saw the body. Her eyes welled up with tears. He was so young...and he fought like a hero to save this place

“Should we bury him?” asked Nora, again displaying realistic thinking as well as compassion. She was acting much more like a leader should, keeping a straight head and thinking of the right things.

“We should leave. It’s not safe” cut in Ren with uncharacteristic tension in his voice, as he passed them, causing Ruby to shiver. Ren never used to behave like this, he was always so calm and in tune with everything; and now he was stressed out and even annoyed, angry and bitter. And Nora was gloomy and not like herself, as she followed him with worry in her voice. The last time Ruby saw them like this was after the Fall of Beacon when Pyrrha and Jaune were still missing. Unable to comfort her friends, and understanding that they probably are a better comfort to one another anyway, Ruby turned to Jaune.

“It will be ok,” she said, now trying to convince herself as much as him. But her words seemed to have no effect on the blonde, as he sighed deeply and brought his hand to his face.

“I’m just...tried of losing everything,” he said. The utter defeat in his voice, caused her to withdraw her hand and look away. She felt tears sting her eyes, and a new wave of guilt came over her. But there was no time for tears. Ren was right there was nothing for them in this place, so they buried the Huntsman, making him a makeshift tomb out of stones and rubble that laid around; and after a minute of respectful silence, they moved on.

**

Ruby laid curled up in her sleeping bag, her back facing the campfire they have set up. They had moved far enough from Shion to safely settle a camp, and Ren has taken the first watch. Ruby didn’t protest, she was too tired, by what happened earlier to argue. But despite her tiredness, she couldn’t fall asleep. Now that she had no patrol to distract her from her own thoughts, she could not help but go back to  Shion and the strange ways her friends behaved. She couldn’t help but take the blame. Jaune’s words echoed in her head.

‘I’m tired of losing everything’ And that statement wasn’t exactly wrong either, at least in Ruby’s mind. Because Jaune lost a lot. He lost his dream and Pyrrha- his best friend and partner, who also was in love with him...and he lost all possible futures with her; and now, today he lost a part of his past, a place of happy memories. And all of this was her fault. Because she dragged him there to see this, and she failed. She wondered why and how he managed not to hate her and lash out at her? And for that matter how Ren and Nora didn’t do the same, especially as unlike her and Jaune they didn’t even have any family or home to go back to. Beacon was all they had, JNPR was all they had. And they lost it and all because of her. If she only had been quicker! If she ran faster she would have saved Pyrrha, if she was faster she would have saved Penny and stopped the match between her and Pyrrha, and the Fall would never have happened in the first place! Because there would be no death to bring panic and Grimm. She was a speedster goddammit! She wanted to be a hero who arrived on time and she had means to do it! And yet she was too slow and came too late to do anything! And there was the silver eye power too! Why did it come too late as well? Why didn’t it come when Penny died so she could freeze all the Grimm that came? Why couldn’t she do anything when it really mattered? Why couldn’t she save those she cared about? She had everything every hero could dream off at her fingertips but she still failed!

‘You are no hero’ said the same nagging voice in her head ‘you are not worthy of the power, you are not worthy of being compared to your mother! Summer Rose would have saved everyone! But you? You didn’t! You are a failure and it’s all your fault! All of it! And instead of owning up to your mistakes on your own you selfishly took your friends with you, the very people you failed! You let all that happen to them and you put them in even more danger, exposed them to even more bad things! You don’t deserve them coming with you! You don’t deserve their kindness!’

She shut her eyes, trying to will the voice away and grit her teeth to prevent a whimper from escaping her lips.

‘But...I can still make it up’ she argued back ‘and...and...Mercury stopped me...and...and I didn’t know I had this power...I don’t know how to use it’

‘Excuses’ hissed the voice ‘you know the truth’

‘No’ she protested

‘Yes’ answered the voice angrily ‘it is your fault! You are no hero! You are just pathetic, naive child! Ozpin was wrong to name you a leader! Weiss was right the first time! He made a mistake!’

She shook her head, repeating to herself it wasn’t true but more she did it the louder the voice became and the pain in her head begun to awaken again, becoming stronger and stronger. She felt as if Nora’s hammer was banging on her skull...and it was so incredibly hot too...has she moved closer to the fire? She grit her teeth harder, trying not to scream...she couldn’t scream, she couldn’t let her team know how she felt. She had to be strong! It was going to be ok, it was going to be ok! But the voice was merciless constantly repeating that it was her fault, that she should have died instead of Pyrrha, that it should have been her who lost her arm, that it should have been her in bloodied pieces on the arena.

“Ruby?” she thought she heard someone say...or call she couldn’t really tell. She couldn’t even recognize who was calling her, was it Ren? Nora? Jaune? Pyrrha? Yang? Penny? Someone else? Was it even a real voice or was it some strange fever dream? Then to make things more confusing someone else, a much maturer voice joined in calling out for her but it all drowned in cacophony of a shrill ringing sound that at some point joined in and the voice screaming it was her fault, and the sounds of burning city and Grimm and dying people....it was too much...too much!

Ren stirred in his place when he heard a muffled gasp behind him, he reached for his weapon not knowing wherever it was Grimm, bandits or a bear. It was neither but it was still disturbing because his eyes fell on Ruby. The girl was tossing and turning, mumbling something incoherently. She seemed to be in a great deal of pain as her face was twisted in a grimace and there were tears in her eyes and she was gasping for breath.

“Ruby?” he asked, concerned, turning to her fully “Ruby, are you alright?”

He got no answer, just more mumbling, tears, and tossing. Slowly, he came closer determined to help her somehow, use his semblance on her if she had a nightmare or if, she had a fever bring her temperature down before they set off and found a village with a doctor. Ruby flinched again before suddenly tensing. He came closer and reached out to her to check her temperature but withdrew his palm almost at once when he felt it burn. He looked down and his eyes widened. There was a mark on his hand! His aura has been broken in that place! He looked down at Ruby. This defiantly wasn’t a nightmare or simple fever. It was something much, much worse!  He turned around to wake Jaune and Nora, but before he could even utter a word Ruby’s eyes shot open and she let out a horrible scream, and a wave of heat hit him, sending him flying, tearing his clothes and leaving small marks on his skin. It felt familiar somehow...This woke up Jaune and Nora as well. They reached for their weapons as they looked around, scanning the area for the enemy. Then they saw Ruby. Jaune ran up to her, but before he could do anything he was suddenly pushed away but a man, whom Ren recognised as Ruby’s uncle, who turned out seemingly out of the blue. Without the word, Qrow kneeled down by his niece.

“Ruby?” he asked, his voice filled with panic “Can you hear me? Kiddo? Little petal? It’s Uncle Qrow...it’s alright, I’ve got you, ok? It’s gonna be alright, I promise...just say something. So I know you can hear me, ok kiddo?”

There was a tense moment of silence, Nora, Jaune, and Ren himself looked at Qrow with wide eyes, thousands of questions running through their mind, but they were too stunned to ask them; their minds too slow to catch up with everything that happened.

“Kiddo?” Qrow’s voice grew progressively desperate “kiddo, please for the love of God....”

Ruby mumbled something under her breath and turned in his arms but it seemed that her exhaustion finally caught up with her as she suddenly went limp. Ren and his two teammates held their breaths for a moment, scared that maybe the worst has happened and Qrow seemed to think it too, if only for a brief moment because he visibly tensed and Ren felt another wave of despair and fear coming out of him

“R-Ruby?” asked the man, his voice shaking “Rubes?”

Another moment of silence, but then Ruby moaned, the pitiful sound clearly audible in the deathly silence around. She then opened her eyes and seemed to have said something but it was unclear what as her voice was too faint, but it had to be Qrow’s name as the huntsman nodded

“Yes, I’m here kiddo, and it’s gonna be alright,” he said in a strangled voice, hugging his niece tightly.

Ren, Nora, and Jaune looked at each other in silence. Ren could sense Nora’s questions, he knew she wondered whenever they should demand answers or make themselves known in a more gentle way and give Qrow his time. Jaune however, seemed to have reached his limits.

“What the hell is going?” he asked “what happened to Ruby? What are you doing here? How did you find us?”

Qrow tensed again, as if ready to snap but eventually, he seemed to have decided against it as he took a calming breath

“I was in the area,” he said “and as to your other questions...I don’t really know”

“How can you not know?” Jaune wasn’t buying it...

“I don’t,” said Qrow through gritted teeth. Ren stepped forward, pushing Jaune slightly behind

“Let me handle this” he muttered “Sir,” he said out loud “Mr...Branwen, we know this is difficult for you, to see Ruby like this. I’m not saying we’re in the same situation because we cannot know how it is for an uncle to see his young niece suffer from unknown illness. None of us has been there, but we do care about Ruby and we would like to know what ails her. If you know something, anything...we can then piece the things together and figure it out”

Qrow sighed

“Alright, kid,” he said, getting up with Ruby in his arms “but we need to get my niece to safety first”

That was a fair point, they couldn’t stay out in the open like that with an unconscious and possibly gravely ill team member. They would be an easy target for Bandits not to mention Grimm. With that, they gathered their belongings and set off again.

[wingedashley]

Falling for you

(Notes: This fic is 4K words long. Shoutout to @myrastuff for helping with editing, and for creating this superhero AU in the first place.)

Alice Song woke to the soft beeping of her watch’s alarm.

She took a deep, shuddering breath and blinked the sleep out of her eyes. She’d fallen asleep resting her head against the window by her seat, and on any other day the view would’ve taken her breath away. Cruising 85 kilometers above the ground, the shuttle just barely skimmed the edges of outer space. So close to the Kármán line, the upper half of the sky was black as night despite the harsh glare of the sun. She could see the curvature of the Earth dipping into every horizon.

But today wasn’t about sightseeing. She had a job to do.

She shifted in her seat, straightening her back as she stretched her arms and legs. The shuttle’s interior was dark and quiet, sparse but still surprisingly cosy. Her mid-flight nap hadn’t left her cramped and sore like on a regular airplane, where the upholstered seats weren’t designer-made for style and comfort. The soft hum of the shuttle’s engines reverberated through the small space, its automated lights still calibrated for broad daylight. She smiled. That’s what you got for flying without a human pilot, she supposed.

As she stretched, a holographic window opened up a few feet from her face, projected from the shuttle’s ceiling. The plane’s soft spoken AI chimed through the speakers.

“Incoming call from-”

“Put her through.”

It would take a few seconds for the call to connect, enough time to freshen up. After all, it wouldn’t help to give Juliet the wrong impression. With practiced ease, she detached her brain’s chronology from the rest of her body and compressed it, accelerating her mind’s eye in tandem to gloss over the span. She blinked, and blinked again.

By the time Juliet’s office sprang into view before her, she’d been awake for hours.

By the time Dr. Juliet Godsmith extricated herself from the ongoing soiree, the sun had started to set on the horizon. She breathed a sigh of relief as she stalked through the labyrinthine halls of the company office towards her private lab, the click-clack of her cane slowly drowning out the sounds of laughter and music from somewhere behind her.

Of all the times for a crisis like this to happen, it had to happen now. She should have been handling this herself; her mistake, her neck on the line to fix it. But that would put the whole company on the line in the process, and probably end up getting her killed as the icing on that cake. It had to be Song, fighting her battles and saving the day. A proper superhero, for all she seemed set on denying it. Her plan was ludicrous, but it was the best one that either of them had.

By the time she made it to her office she was already breathing heavily, exhaling sharply as the door slid closed with deceptive softness. “Security level to maximum, Aurora,” she spoke to the AI as she settled herself in, resting her cane against the desk as a dozen holographic displays opened in a panoramic array before her. “Run this operation on the burner rig, I want all records wiped as clean as we can get them.”

“Yes, doctor Godsmith.” The AI affirmed it had completed the action with a short, mechanical chirp.

The overhead lights came on gradually, replacing the dimming daylight from the floor-to-ceiling one-way windows with her own perfectly replicated blend of artificial sun. The tender reds and oranges of twilight mixed with the artificial afternoon to cast her office in a riot of warm colours. All of which stood in remarkable contrast to the shadowy shuttle camera feed projected onto the central display before her.

Song was brooding in the passenger seat. Piercing blue eyes glared out at the sky below, her pitch black hair blending into the darkness behind her. Gone was her cocksure grin, the happy spark behind a perennial smile. For all her too-young-to-die posturing, she looked very… mortal. Juliet sighed.

“Aurora, add reminder for tomorrow, 9 am. Review personal privacy filters on camera AI, update recognition algorithm.”

“Yes, doctor Godsmith.”

She closed the feed with a wave of her hand, leaning back into the oversized office chair. Song did this every few weeks, there was no need to feel this nervous.

If she had any more time… well, it didn’t matter. There wasn’t any time left at all.

She opened a call to the shuttle, clasping her hands before her and leaning forward on her elbows. She smiled, and it didn’t feel all that fake at all.

Juliet’s face popped onto the stream, all prim and cunning and perfect. She was wearing a full-length sequined gown, and a smug little half-smile that told Alice she’d invented something that would disrupt another million-dollar industry… or impressed another supermodel.

Let’s not think about that.

“Party went well, I take it?” said Alice.

“Is going well, I hope. We’d better make this fast, or they’ll be fresh out of hors d’oeuvres before I get back.” Juliet’s smile widened into a grin as she leaned back in her throne-like chair, tapping on a keyboard off screen. “Are you ready?”

“Born ready.” Alice grinned. She stood from her seat, stepping closer to the open space by the bay doors to begin her warm up routine. The holographic window followed her… not that she minded. It wasn’t every day that she got to do calisthenics in a skin-tight plugsuit, let alone in front of little miss Stark herself.

Juliet, for her part, seemed far more interested in some readouts floating in her side screens. Poo. “On an unrelated note, I took your request for swim goggles and whipped up something a bit more… fashionable.”

Alice could hear the clack of manicured nails on a keyboard as a hidden compartment opened in the wall with a pneumatic hiss. It was a visor, a single ear-to-ear screen designed to fit across the bridge of her nose, between two large over-the-ear headphone pieces held together by a strap. Same colour and size as the one Juliet wore, except for the ear covers. Fashionable, indeed. She lifted it from the compartment, pulling it over her head to adjust it in place on her face. She smiled, it still had that heady newly-replicated smell.

Whipped up indeed.

Juliet piped up, directly in her ears this time. “If you do find a way to break this one, could you try to bring it back in one piece? I could use the test data. It’s hard enough building a sensor suite that can survive the G forces you put out, let alone one that can wirelessly communicate through all your… temporal folding.”

Alice had to laugh. Juliet always made it sound so frightfully gauche. The visor’s insides lit up after a quick boot sequence, mapping an augmented reality display into the shuttle around her. Her eyes flicked across the visual keyboard as she filled in her login details.

“And what about my… other request?”

With the clack of a keyboard through the visor comm, a second compartment (how many did this damn shuttle have?) opened behind her. Alice turned to look at it, and stopped. She stepped up to it with more than a little trepidation, before pulling out a device she’d only seen on TV. Modelled in museums.

“Really, I should be making you something custom-fitted, but it’s been years since I played with this sort of tech and I was having difficulty with the…” Juliet cut herself off ahead of the technical explanation, conscious of the time. “Anyways, it was easier to convince a few world governments and one admiral that they owed me a favour. I hope you don’t mind something secondhand.”

It was a smooth disc of chrome, with a series of glowing blue rings embedded inside. Like a comic-book arc reactor. Leather straps hung from its sides, a surprisingly oldschool harness for such an incredible piece of technology. Courtesy of its last user, she supposed.

The visor mistook her hesitance for confusion, and layered diagnostic data over the machine:

97% MATCH CERTAINTY: Prototype Soltech egomorphic field reservoir. Last seen…

She dismissed the window. Impulse’s field projector, custom built by Dr. Godsmith herself. She squelched the automatic pang of jealousy.

The device was synonymous with the late superhero, and ever since she’d inherited his powers she’d always wondered when she’d get her hands on something like it. Even now, held at arm’s length, she could feel her field slipping and sinking into the device. Filling and feeling it out like it was meeting an old friend.

She shivered.

“It’s… thank you, Juliet,” she muttered, before slipping it onto her back and tightening the straps around her chest. Impulse always wore the damn thing on his chest, and it certainly made for a pretty striking heroic silhouette. But for the next 30 minutes, the less blinking lights she had pointing forward, the better.

Besides, it clearly wasn’t designed to fit across breasts.

It normally took a bit of effort to stretch her field to something new and foreign on her person. It was still licking at her visor, assimilating the device over long minutes. But the ring pulled at her, drawing her aura into it like a black hole, twisting and coiling it around its core. She stepped up to the starboard bay doors, stretching her face in a mock yawn as she tested the airtight seal around the visor’s screen.

“Song…” The inventor’s voice wavered for a moment, until she restarted with more conviction. “Alice. You know you don’t have to do this alone. It’s the best plan we have now, but that doesn’t mean it’s the optimal solution. We can figure something else out, I’ll handle any fallout. I’ve dealt with worse.”

Alice looked down at her feet, and saw the Earth projected below the shuttle’s floor on her aug display. Drexler’s lab was marked on the ground below, to her left, along with the curving ballistic trajectory of her projected route onto the site.

“Me going in alone gives you the highest plausible deniability, and I can improvise a high speed exit strategy without worrying about anyone else slowing me down. Going now means we can solve this before it becomes an international crisis.”

Alice looked forward, staring through the doors at the void beyond. She grimaced.

“And of course you’ve dealt with worse. We wouldn’t have powers if we hadn’t dealt with worse…” Her voice faltered. “… It doesn’t change a damn thing.”

I couldn’t be there for you then. But I sure as hell can be there for you now.

She could practically hear Juliet smile.

“Fine.” said Juliet. “Though I have to ask, when did you become an expert in breaking into secure military facilities?”

“Since when did you start building tech that could end the world if it fell into the wrong hands?”

“Mmm, touché.”

They faded into a companionable silence, the visor’s clock ticking down the final few seconds before the shuttle arrived at the drop window. She briefly considered leaving her now-obsolete watch behind, but decided against it. As much as she’d fought to not do the jump in a bloody space suit to keep her weight down, a few grams wouldn’t kill her.

And, well… she ran a thumb over its screen nervously. The thought of being without a working timepiece was too difficult to bear. Never again.

“Alright,” Juliet’s voice through the visor broke the silence, “it’s showtime.”

The bay doors flashed green as they waited for Alice’s signal. She checked her harness, flexed her fingers in her suit. Her visor was comfortably saturated in her field at this point, and it had completed the software handshake with the projector on her back. Which, in turn, had finished absorbing as much of her field as it was able. Ideally, optimally, she’d want to hyperventilate before this next bit… but it really wasn’t all that necessary.

Besides, in the off chance that she actually died, she really didn’t want that to be Juliet’s final memories of her. She smirked.

Taking a few deep breaths, she hit the bay door controls. She made sure to exhale sharply as the shuttle’s interior explosively decompressed. As much as she’d have loved to hold her breath, the vacuum would’ve ripped it right out of her chest anyway. She felt her saliva bubble away as the insides of her mouth froze.

To her pleasant surprise, her ears didn’t so much as pop. Thank you, Juliet.

She stepped forward, to the lip of the void. She felt her lungs and heart slow, her power deftly scaling back the speed of her metabolic processes in tandem with her mammalian diving reflex. Her eyes drooped, arms spread wide by her side, as she fell forward into the cold sky beyond.

Juliet tapped her fingers against the desk in nervous anticipation. Now began the wait.

At Song’s altitude, she’d take almost 10 minutes to reach the lab. Her desk’s holographics were dominated by a volumetric display of the atmosphere between the shuttle and the landing zone, Song just a blip on a parabolic track. A side screen showed a camera feed of her receding further and further away from the shuttle.

Juliet clenched her teeth. Any lower, and the spaceplane would drop out of the ionosphere and risk detection. Song was plummeting into this absurd, half-formed plan at terminal velocity, completely alone.

She glanced at another side screen, the internal feed from Song’s visor. It depicted a sharp cross section of the girl’s face: her unfocused blue eyes. Her fingers tapped harder, she bit her lip.

Sod it.

“Aurora, hook me into the company satellite mainframe.” It barely took her a minute to coordinate every Solnet satellite in the hemisphere to train their sensors on the girl. Her windows shifted as a new volumetric display took center stage, a perfectly triangulated 3D reconstruction of Song in free fall. She’d have to scrub a lot of mainframes after this whole mess was over.

She looked… angelic.

Without an atmosphere in the way, the sun burned bright on her skin. Her hair floated in a soft wave behind her, utterly ethereal. And oh god, her in that suit… Juliet tore her eyes away, flushed. Form fitting, ideal for speed, of course Song would insist on it. Impulse always had, and Juliet was starting to realize what his legions of fans had seen in the damned thing. Thank you, aerodynamics.

Wait.

She snapped her focus back to the visor’s screen. Song’s eyes weren’t unfocused anymore. They were tracking something on the ground below with the focus of a hawk.

“What do you see?”

Juliet’s voice felt tinny and distant in Alice’s ears. She scanned the ground again, straining her eyes through her torpor.

Shit.

In lieu of trying to type out a text message with her eyes, she fragmented a new timestream for her visor and carefully decelerated it. Show, don’t tell: the slower anything moved in relation to normal time, the faster the subjective frequency of any waves. All she had to do was pull the visor’s cameras down the EM spectrum juust far enough to-

“Oh,” said the voice in her ear.

Song’s eyes were incredible, even by metahuman standards. They were one of the many adaptations her body had been pushed through to adopt Impulse’s powers. She could see radiation ranging from gamma rays all the way down to, say, radio waves.

There were three radar installations below her, ringing Drexler’s lab. Scratch that, four. She could maybe risk falling past one. But with that many triangulating together, probably on high alert, she didn’t stand a chance. And that wasn’t even the worst part.

“They’re SAM sites. Surface to air missiles. You could probably take one direct hit with that projector online, but you can’t take four.” A pause, an intake of breath, “I’m pulling the plug. We’re aborting the mission.”

Juliet sounded panicked. Which made sense, there wasn’t really an exit strategy for this leg of the mission. If Alice had to guess, Juliet would force the shuttle out of its thermosphere cover and probably risk the world’s most one-sided dogfight to buy her a few minutes.

Alice grimaced. Not if she had something to say about it.

She splayed her arms and legs out in a spread eagle, before reaching out to the field enveloping her body to clock it down.

Time slowed. Every nerve, every atom throttling to a crawl. The world around her exploded into blinding blues and purples as high frequency light overloaded her sluggish retinas. She felt warm, the air spiking in subjective heat and pressure to her slowed skin. She felt her stomach sink as her drop to Earth suddenly accelerated. A kinematic illusion, her brain playing catch up with her subjectively faster trajectory.

But for all the things that sped up around her, gravity did not.

The earth spun beneath her, far faster than it ever should. But she still fell with the force, and speed, of a single G, relative to her own pocket of time. Her visor struggled for a long second to recalculate her new trajectory… one that plateaued over the lab to land in the ocean well beyond it. Her face broke into a smug grin with the sharp intake of breath from the other end of the com.

“Well then. That’s a neat trick. Didn’t realize you could slow your fall like that.” Alice listened in a happy daze; Juliet’s voice was wonderfully, gloriously, legible. No speed up at all. Somehow, the inventor had built a machine that could package her voice perfectly across compressed time. She always hated having to keep her auditory nerves running at a different rate than the rest of her, it was such a debilitating experience.

With the boosted atmospheric pressure, she decided to finally open her mouth and inhale a few, deep breaths. Some of that daze was feeling a bit too literal.

Juliet was speaking again. Blinking the fog away from her mind, she tried to pick up the thread of the conversation she’d lost. Audio compensation or not, there was no fixing the fact that Juliet was literally in a faster timestream than her. Her messages came thick and fast. Something about the view being spectacular?

“- will bring the shuttle around and pick you up from your new landing zone. I trust that you can swim.”

She almost rolled her eyes, until Juliet paused, left her hanging on her words like she hung in the air. Even with her mind running a bit faster than the rest of her body, a second of silence was a worryingly long gap in realtime.

“…Don’t worry about Drexler, or the transponder. Don’t worry about diplomatic incidents. Just come back safe, Song.”

Practically a whisper, it almost felt like an admission. To what, she didn’t dare guess. She had to focus on what came next. Slowing down was always the easy part.

She’d been tracking the sweeps of the radar beams, putting together a map of how they intersected, the transient gaps and windows. But everything moved so dizzyingly fast, her crawling nerves struggling to keep up with the shifting sensor net.

She felt her mind fragment, executive functions slowing further and further as her planning functions endlessly accelerated. Her vision narrowed. Blood rushed to her head. Tinnitus keened in her ears. A dull pain settled between her eyes-

There.

Like a bolt of lightning down her cortical stack, she felt the raw certainty of a route found, a plan committed. Her mind telescoped back in on itself as she heard her lungs draw a deep, shuddering breath. She was drifting right above the installation, the SAM sites forming a perfect ring of interlocking death.

What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?

“… Song?” Juliet was talking to her. “Song? The visor doesn’t have much of a biometric suite, but your-”

Tyger Tyger, Juliet.

For a single dizzying moment, everything clicked into place. Alice reached the laboratory’s zenith. The radar beams finished sweeping directly over the installation, to return to scanning their surroundings.

She let go of her power.

Her body snapped back to real time, the world dropping back to chilly normality as every particle in her body sprung back into action. And then she kept on pushing, driving her temporal momentum forward as she clocked her entire self up.

The world was dark, redshifting into a red and black hellscape. The world was cold, chilling to near absolute zero.

The world was still.

She couldn’t breath, the air frozen in time around her. She couldn’t see the SAMs, her eyes shifting frantically to adapt to the grim red sun. She hung in the sky, frozen for a gut wrenching moment, her momentum reduced to negligibility.

And then she fell.

She pulled her arms and legs tight against her sides as she picked up speed, dropping like a javelin through the frozen sky. Her power was red lightning in her veins. The world was a shrinking cage of radio waves, flanked on all sides by the invisible eyes of an angry god. She felt herself break the sound barrier, stabbing out of the stratosphere like an orbital strike.

A dozen seconds into her breakneck descent, she heard Juliet’s delayed gasp in her ears. She laughed with aching lungs.

Welcome to my wonderland.

The laboratory grew in her vision as she felt the shockwave of compressed air stretching against her finally ignite. Fire scorched her sight, seared the caked frost from her visor. Countless warning windows exploded across the edges of her vision, which she ignored for the only readout that mattered: altitude.

500 meters from the ground and dropping, she decided to prime the projector, slid her eyes across the ring’s controls, and-

ERROR: RADIO BLACKOUT. Potential causes: active jamming, spacecraft re-entry, ionospheric anomalies…

No. No no no.

The emergency release. She’d seen it in the museum, briefly noted it when she picked the thing up on the shuttle. Teeth clenched, she whipped her left arm behind her back to grab for the switch.

Her arm had only extended from her profile for a microsecond, but a microsecond was all that the angry sky needed. The sudden asymmetry to her profile whipped her into a tailspin. The burning, freezing night spun her end-on-end as she flailed for the release.

So that’s why Impulse always wore this thing on his chest.

The altimeter kept draining.

In a handful of terrifying moments, she found the latch, grabbing and holding on to it for dear life. With a silent scream, she clocked up as hard as she could with every iota of power she had left, and clocked her mind further still.

5 meters

The world collapsed into darkness, her eyes failing her completely, her breakneck fall suddenly slowing to a lethargic sink. She couldn’t tell up from down. It felt familiar… like diving.

Like drowning.

3 meters

She screwed her eyes shut and pulsed her senses through her field. It caressed the edges of her temporal bubble, tracing a thousand soft fingers against walls of frozen sky.

With a slow spin she righted herself, orienting against her wake. She extended her feet to help cushion the landing. She splayed her right hand before her, fingers outstretched.

(1 meter)

Her fingers and feet touched the roof of the laboratory. They sank into the concrete like it was dust in the wind.

Two knuckles deep, she flicked the switch.

The field stored in the projector blasted through her body like a shockwave, pumping down her legs and arms to dig deep into the concrete. She felt her power stretch across the rooftop, licking down at the load bearing supports. The effect was immediate, the concrete hardening and absorbing the shock of her descent. Dust became rubber as her momentum scattered into her field.

And like a wire snapping, she whipped back to realtime.

The world gasped back into light and warmth as she slammed into the flexing rooftop. Her fragmented mind was still a step ahead of her body, watching with dispassionate curiosity as the shockwave rippled away through the ground beneath her.

It rippled up her body too, her bones and limbs twisting and warping far beyond their breaking points, held together by the aftershocks of her field. The wave rippled through her skull and she struggled to hold onto consciousness, shivering as it passed up through her hair.

And then, finally, it was over.

Her brain crashed back into realtime all at once, following the rest of her. For the first time in far too long, she was all in one piece; even the minor instinctive temporal eddies that wormed their way through her metabolism had all collapsed in sheer exhaustion.

It was a surprisingly nice day out. The sun was high in the sky, and all she could hear was birdsong from the nearby forest. No surface to air missiles, no foxy geniuses, nothing. Only the soft chime of her visor rebooting broke her from her reverie. She laughed, gasping for breath, and rose from her three-point landing.

Cheeks flushed, flakes of cement scattering from the grooves she’d dug into the ground, Alice stood tall, turning back to look up at the sky and straight into the eyes of her audience.

She winked.

[doctor-who-hears-a-horton]

To Live A Better Life

Rating: Teen and up

Chapter: 8/?

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7

Summary: Rose Tyler has been the secretary to the CEO of Gallifrey Inc. for nine years, and she’s ready to move on with her life. But when Mr. Smith proposes something less than practical in lieu of her resignation, what will she say?

Read it on AO3 here!

NOTES: Thank you all for being patient with my sporadic updates. I really, REALLY appreciate you sticking around

It was a long day.  Her hands and legs were bound, but she was so tired.  She wished she could lay down and go to sleep.  The boy next to her was really stiff, like he was scared.  

The house they were in was dark, a little house on the edge of the street that had been abandoned.  She had never been in it before, but now that this lady was claiming to be her mother, was this going to be her new home?  She didn’t want to live here.  She looked up at the boy with worry, feeling her face crumpling.

“I want to go home,” She said.

The boy looked down at her, wild hair all around.  He was at least a couple years older than her, and had a very sad face.  He reached into his pocket with his bound hands and pulled out a little caramel candy.  “Here,” he said, handing it to her.  “Don’t cry, have this.”

She couldn’t help but smile at the prospect of something sweet.  “Thanks,” She said softly, and unwrapped the candy before putting it in her mouth.  

“Is it good?”

She nodded, smiling up at him.  Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if she would be with this nice boy the whole time.

Rose woke up at ten am, which was the latest she had gotten up in a very long time.  She lay in bed and grinned up at the ceiling, enjoying the calm of not having to sit up in a blind panic and get ready to leave.  She was truly free to do whatever she wanted for a whole day.  She’d start by laying around for another hour.

At about noon Rose was finally up and about, hair and makeup done and plans to go to a nice cafe with her mother.  She was finished with her makeup when she heard a knock at the door.  Frowning, she went to answer it, and was completely shocked to see Mr. Smith standing there, grinning at her.

“Sir, this is my day off,” she blurted out.

“Ah.  Yes, it is.  Well, I was thinking you might want to do something exciting, so I thought I’d come and spend the day with you.” It was oddly nice.  Too nice.  Rose hated that she was so suspicious of him.  “Sorry, Mr. Smith, I have plans to meet my mum.”

“Oh, well, that’s alright, perhaps I could come along?”

Rose winced. “No offense, Mr. Smith but I need the day off. Completely.  Not to say I don’t like you, cause I do.  But if you come with me, I’ll feel like I have to.... Do my job all day.”

“I don’t want that,” he waved his hand dismissively.  “It won’t be an inconvenience to you. I should like for us to be friends, seeing as how my offer still stands.”

She knew what offer he meant, and she had to refrain from rolling her eyes at him.  He really was beating a dead horse.  “Mr. Smith, I believe I’ve told you my opinion on that particular matter.”

He frowned.  “I thought you’d be a bit more excited to see me, Miss Tyler.”

She clenched her fists at her side briefly.  “It’s my day off,” she said lamely.

“Yes, and it would be a grand time if we spent it together, don’t you think?  The office can go without me for one day, I should think.”

Rose frowned.  “I’m not sure about that one, Mr. Smith.  You’re very much needed at the office, at all times really.  You can barely take days off.”  She knew she was just trying to convince him to go away, and she felt a little bad about it, but she really didn’t want him to come with her.  Mr. Smith had a tendency to make everything about him, and she wasn’t under any illusion that ‘her’ day off was going to be any different.  

He pursed his lips, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Well, I think it would still be nice.”

“I’m meeting my mum,” She repeated.

“Then let me take you to dinner tonight,” He said, relenting a bit.  “To say… To say that I’m sorry for everything that’s happened.”

Rose blinked. “Did you just say you’re sorry to me?”

He blushed. “Don’t make me say it again.”

“Have you been talking to Jack?”

“Why, did he say something?”

She bit her lip to keep from laughing, having received her answer just through that. He blushed even darker and shot her a dirty look.  She crossed her arms over her chest, wanting to tease him a little more, but also knowing that it wouldn’t really benefit her to do so.  Besides, a nice fancy dinner wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

“Alright, I’ll allow you to take me to dinner then,” She relented.  “You can pick, but don’t order for me.”

He nodded, looking far happier than she thought he had ever looked.  “Brilliant.  Alright, I will.  I’ll come by around seven.  Be ready.”

And just like that he was back to his normal self.  He nodded curtly to her and disappeared from her front porch, heading back down to her car.  Rose stood in her doorway for a few more moments, not sure what to make of this.  Was he really trying to apologize?  Or was this another elaborate way to try and get her to marry him?  

Blowing out her cheeks, she closed the door and went back to finish getting ready to meet her mum.

*****

“I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re getting away from that miserable man,” Jackie said as the two of them looked at their menus.  The little cafe Rose had taken them to was not really anything special, but Rose was a big fan of it.  

“Well, he’s not all the way miserable,” she said softly.  “He’s been… Decent, recently.  I think he’s trying to make it right before I leave.”

“He hasn’t tried to make it right with you for nine years,” Jackie pointed out, then took a long, hard look at her daughter.  “You haven’t been sleeping.”

“I have,” Rose protested.

“No, you haven’t.  And it’s no use lying to me, I’m your mum.”

Rose bit her lip and looked back down to her menu.  “Well, I’m still having the nightmares.”

“Oh, Rose.”

“No, it’s alright,” Rose said, “It really is.  I’ve just been thinking about it a lot, and I really want to find the boy that was trapped with me in there.  He has to be out there.”

“Just because he said he’d come see you after it all happened doesn’t mean he could’ve actually come, Rose.  You were both just kids.  And besides, that theme park was built over the apartment site.  You remember.”

“Yeah,” Rose acknowledged. “I don’t know, I just thought maybe… It’s just a stupid dream.”

Jackie smiled softly. “It’s not stupid. I just want you to be realistic.”

“I think I am.  But to have someone around who had the same experience I did might help. Maybe I’d stop having the nightmares.” She said the last quietly, as though she was just slightly embarrassed by the whole thing.

Jackie reached over and squeezed her daughter’s hand.  “Oh, sweetheart.  Then, if it’ll make you happy, then keep looking.

***********

Rose was back at her flat hours later when she heard a knock at her door.  She knew it was Mr. Smith, but she wasn’t sure if she was actually ready to spend an evening with him.  She’d agreed for the idea of free dinner, and was afraid he’d try to turn it into something more.

When she opened the door and he stood there with a bouquet of purple roses, she knew she was right.

“What’s all this?” She asked.

“An apology.  I’m told I’m not good at those.”

“I’d assume Jack mentioned that to you?”

Mr. Smith wrinkled his nose.  “Well, that’s hardly the point, I should think.”

He was right.  She was honestly being a little too hard on him.  Blowing out her cheeks, she took the flowers.  “Thank you,” She said, smiling at him.  “You can come in while I put them in water, if you want.”

He nodded and awkwardly followed her into her flat, shoving his hands into his pockets and looking around quite nervously.  She let the silence hang over them, not feeling uncomfortable in the slightest, even though she could tell that he was.  

“They’re lovely,” She said, “How did you know I like roses?”

“I thought people might not give them too often because of your name,” he said, “I wanted to be different.”

Rose nodded, realizing she would’ve been foolish to expect a different answer.  “Well, thanks,” she said, laughing a little.  

He nodded, not saying anything, and it settled over her that he might see this as a date.  Despite her stoic exterior towards the man itself, she felt her heart trip over itself.  He was being kind, after all, kinder than usual.  The optimism in her wanted to believe that he might be a better person before she actually left the company.  Besides, he was quite good looking.  It wouldn’t be a horrible night.

“I’ve got us reservations at a restaurant downtown,” he said finally, looking at her with piercing eyes.

“Where?” She asked cautiously.

“Bad Wolf,” he said, daring her to question his choice.

She had to stop herself from physically gasping.  Bad Wolf was incredibly expensive, she hadn’t been there in her entire life.  “Oh, I’ve… I can’t say I’ve ever been there,” she said, forcing a professional smile.

“Well, you’d never talked about going there, so I assumed that was the case,” Mr. Smith replied, “I wanted to give you a different experience.”

It would certainly be different.  One hundred pounds different, really. Rose immediately found herself panicking. She would have to try to pick the cheapest thing on the menu, and then she’d have to act like she belonged at such a place. She was good at faking it, being Mr. Smith’s secretary often meant that she had to pretend to fit in in places that she didn’t necessarily belong.  

“The car’s waiting,” he said blandly after a few moments, and she realized that she’d been staring off into space, or rather, into the flowers she’d set in water.  

“Alright,” She said hesitantly.  She followed him from her flat and to the car that was parked outside her building, engine already running.  She’d ridden in his chauffered car before, but she realized when they approached the vehicle that that wasn’t going to be the case.  He’d simply left his engine running outside her flat.  

“Mr. Smith, that’s not very safe,” She tutted at him, heading towards the driver’s side.  He stopped her with a gentle hand on her arm.

“I’ll drive,” he said softly, almost nervously.  Rose peered up at him, shock evident in her eyes.  He lifted a shoulder.  “It’s your day off.”

So it was.

He was a good driver, but Rose had to admit that if she didn’t have to, she probably wouldn’t either.  He looked very focused, hands at ten and two, eyes fixed on the road. She wondered when was the last time he’d really laughed.  She couldn’t remember, and she’d been around him for nine long years.  She cocked her head a little, regarding him carefully.

“You don’t have to do this just for me,” she said softly, “You can have fun too.” “Who said I wasn’t having fun?”

“Nobody had to say.  You look very… Stoic.”

He huffed and looked to her and then back to the road.  “I simply tend not to wear my emotions so obviously, Miss Tyler.  It’s a sign of weakness.” Rose lifted her eyebrows. “You should know by now, Mr. Smith, that I don’t think of you as weak, and you cracking a smile every once in a while wouldn’t make me think you as such.”  She didn’t know why she was so determined for him to have a good time, but she had a feeling he’d continue to be miserable unless somebody pointed it out to him. Not that Jack hadn’t tried, because she knew he probably had, but maybe hearing it from more than one person would do it.  Well, she could hope, at least.

“Oh, well… That’s always nice to hear, Miss Tyler.  I will miss your words of encouragement.”

She jolted a bit. It was the first time he’d brought up her leaving without making it a game, without asking her to stay or suggesting he marry her.  It was resignation.  He was doing this, today, because he wanted to.  She wished she could suss out what that meant, but she wasn’t sure she ever could.

“You know, Mr. Smith, I think I might miss giving them.”