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relationships-world · 4 years ago

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Relationship rewrite method

https://relationship.healthbrzee.com/

read following points:-1) Unlock His Love with The Power of Conversational Storywhen does he think of you? When your name pops up on your man's phone, what do you think goes through his head? Is he excited to talk to you? Does he feel compelled to respond right away? Does he read your texts but then leave you waiting for a response until most of the day has passed? Or does he completely ignore the messages? The truth is, A LOT is going on in his mind when it comes to you. Memories, emotions, anticipation of the future (is this going to be a good interaction or a bad one?)... All these things flash through his mind in the blink of an eye. And his response (or lack thereof) is more of a gut feeling than a well thought out decision. The same is true when it comes to how he views your relationship in general. If you're having a hard time getting through to him, chances are he feels bad about the relationship. It probably isn't a conscious thing, but a bunch of factors make him instinctively feel like the relationship is more a source of pain than pleasure. We'll get into this more in a minute, but at the end of the day, "pain VS pleasure" is the ONE factor that determines whether he wants to be with you or not. In other words, if he has a gut feeling that your relationship is a source of pain, then no amount of logic, convincing, or begging will change his mind. His mind is already made up--from the inside out. We need to change that. We need to make him instinctively feel drawn to the pleasure of a relationship with you. If you can accomplish that ONE thing, he will be the one chasing you. So let me show you how I've helped women all over the world pull it off. watchvideo presentation2) The Movie Trailer Method.Your mind is an anticipation machine. The human brain is marvellous and complex, but its most amazing feature is its ability to experience the future before it arrives. In fact, getting what you want in life really comes down to one simple thing: The ability to see the future in your mind's eye before it actually happens. This skill, above all else, separates those who get what they want in life from those who don't. Why is this skill so important? The answer is simple. The more detailed your mental map of the future, the easier it is to see which paths to take to reach the outcomes you desire. The more detailed your mental map, the more powerful you become. Like a master chess player, you can anticipate traps and sidestep them before they fully form. You can also try out dozens of moves in your mind's eye before choosing the best one. But I'm talking about real life, not a game. People who learn to use this skill live charmed lives. Everything just seems to unfold in their favour. Is it luck? Is it magic? No. It's simply an enhanced ability to play out various possibilities in the mind's eye and recognize the choices that will bring the most pleasure and the least pain. But here's the tricky part. Seeing the future is not like skipping ahead to the last page of a book to see how the story ends. Your future is not a single, linear path. Rather, there are a hundred different ways your future could unfold. Changing just one variable in your life can have a cascading effect on every other variable. Things can get confusing fast. It's hard to anticipate how all the different variables will interact. Fortunately, I have a solution. It's like a shortcut that gives you most of the benefits without the headache of trying to anticipate how every little thing will interact. What is this solution? It's knowing which variables to focus on. Knowing where to focus your attention is the key to getting more of what you want in life. When it comes to relationships, there's one variable I want you to focus on. I want you to become an expert at noticing this one variable. And I want you to learn how to manipulate this variable so you can have the relationship you want. Ready? Okay, here it is: I want you to become an expert at triggering the right kind of mental movie trailers other people have playing in their heads. We are all running mini-movies of the future in our mind. People do it automatically all the time. They don't practice the skill intentionally. They even take it for granted. Most never bother to question the super quick movie trailers that pop in and out of their thoughts all day long. That's good news for you! Because it gives you a tremendous advantage when trying to change the way someone feels about you. The fact is, no one's in the director's chair. No one is controlling the mini-movies that blip in and out of your man's mind. Since no one is directing this movie, you can waltz onto the set and change the storyline. And you can do this anytime you want. Why These Mini-Mental Movies Matter So Much Have you ever received a social invitation and immediately decided you have no desire to attend? How does that happen? How is it that you instantly know you don't want to go? Simple. In a fraction of a second, you played a mini-mental movie of the entire experience. Actually, that's not quite right. It wasn't the "entire experience". In reality, it was more like a movie preview. Just little clips showing the highlights. And like a good movie trailer, each clip pulled at your emotions. You saw a super-speed version of what it would be like to accept the invitation. You pictured yourself feeling bored. You picture yourself walking back to your car when it was over, wishing you had spent your free time doing something else. Your mind created a mini-movie to help you make a decision. It happened lightning-fast, and mostly outside your consciousness. But you were left with a distinct FEELING that turned you off to the idea. Your mind is remarkably good at this. It's the process by which we decide what we want. If you are a person who struggles with anxiety, you may not love this feature of your mind. You may prefer to be more like a cat who is blissfully at peace with the present moment, not concerned about things to come next year, next month, or even tomorrow. Neuroscientists who study the concept of memory tell us the marvellous ways our minds encode, store, and retrieve life experiences. As we learn, we generate increasingly complex and accurate models of the future. You could say the purpose of our memory is to allow us to predict the future. If I remember that chocolate cake tastes better when it's moist, my brain anticipates a better experience when I choose to eat it now rather than letting it grow stale. However, if I remember that chocolate cake is my weakness, I may cut the serving in half and put the other half out of sight to remove the temptation, using better judgment for my health. If a large dog chased me on my way home from school as a child, I may still anticipate negative emotions from the idea of approaching a large dog even twenty years later. Here's my point. Memories give us the ability to anticipate what is coming next: pleasure or pain. You may not see where this is going yet but stick with me. These concepts are critical to understanding. They are simple concepts, but things I need to remind you of, to "activate" your mind so they will be fresh concepts as we dive into the foundational methods of this course. 3) Human MotivationHumans are motivated by many things. But almost all motivation comes down to either the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain. Your ex's decisions are no different. He is motivated the same way. But how does he know which decisions to make to pursue pleasure and avoid pain? Memory. His memory creates the movie trailers he uses to "see" the future. His brain is an anticipation machine. It is automatically making judgments about what he should do next to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. The reality of your current situation is that the movie trailers his mind is playing are showing him potential pain or a lack of pleasure in being with you. We've got to change that! Now for some good news and some bad news. Bad news first: We cannot go back in time and change his memories. But the good news: We can alter his feelings about the future without changing memories from the past. Certain trigger points cause people to re-evaluate old memories in a new light. Basically, we're going to change the theme of the mini-movies in his head that affect his feelings about your relationship. We're going to change the soundtrack. Change the lighting. Selectively choose clips that highlight the fun, the exciting adventure he could have if he chooses to make you the most important person in his future. Allow me to provide a few examples to get us on the same page. We are talking about "aha" moments that change his perspective. The memories have not changed, but the way he SEES them can change dramatically. Here's an example from my own experience: I was once hired as a consultant for a company that provided relationship advice. The owners of the company were highly complimentary of me. During our work together, my self-esteem began to inflate considerably because of their frequent recognition of my "unusual talent." It was nearly six months later when I discovered their long-term plan to sell me their entire business (at a highly inflated price). This dramatically shifted my perspective! Suddenly, I replayed all the discussions about my talents for running such a business. At the time, I had been surprised they would admit I could run the business as well - if not better - than they could. Now, looking back, I see the ego-stroking as false flattery designed to make me want to buy their business. That eye-opening moment changed my view on our relationship and the game I was involved in.4) True Actions and IntentionsI'll offer another example. Jane Austen's novel "Pride and Prejudice," (which has been made into multiple movies over the years) tells the tale of Elizabeth, a young woman who can barely stand the sight of Mr Darcy. Throughout the story, Elizabeth is under the impression that Mr Darcy is proud and selfish. This is based on several reliable things she had seen and heard. However, at the end of the story, Elizabeth discovers she was wrong. She had misunderstood the actions and intentions of Mr Darcy. Suddenly, she recognizes his true valour and goodness. She sees that he is more interested in the well-being of others than his own reputation. In the end, it wasn't Elizabeth's memories that changed. It was her understanding that changed. It shifted in a way that caused her to anticipate great pleasure from being with Mr Darcy in an intimate relationship. And of course, they lived happily ever after as a married couple. 5) Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It: Your mission is to tamper with the anticipation machine running in your ex's mind. Specifically, your mission is to change the mini-movies that play in his mind when he thinks about spending time with you. You're going to get those mental trailers to work in your favour. There is no other way. You have no chance of restoring your relationship unless he seeks a relationship with you as a path toward pleasure, absent from any level of pain that would cancel out that pleasure. Fortunately, The Relationship Rewrite Method was designed as an answer to this complicated problem. This system helps you find a way to be the leading lady in your life. To convince your ex - not only to let you play a part but also to make you his star. You see, a memory is just a form of anticipation based on past experience. Most people think of memory in the form of stories to be remembered and shared. That is what psychologists call "declarative memory." But there is another kind of memory called "implicit memory." Implicit memory is the kind you use when you get on a bicycle and instinctively recognize (or remember) how to balance. Implicit memory is not something you can put into words. You just know how to ride a bicycle. Declarative memory can be transferred to another person in the form of a story. But you can't transfer the implicit memory for how to balance on a bike. In other words, your ex can tell his friends, "First she did this, then I said that and then we got into a big fight." That's declarative memory. Implicit memory cannot be transferred using words. He cannot transfer the memory of what it feels like to kiss you. Your job is to change the implicit feel of the mini-mental movies that automatically play when he glances down at his phone and sees your name. We have to start small and gradually rebuild his gut-level emotional reactions to you. It's possible that seeing your number come up on his cell phone causes an instant twinge of anger mixed with fear and regret. Those are implicit memories triggering the wrong kind of response. The fights or strained relationship that led to your breakup may still dominate the mental movie that plays in his mind when he considers picking up the phone to talk with you. We need to change that mental trailer so your name brings the same excited anticipation Hollywood tries to create with a really cool movie preview. We're going to rewire his expectations and help him see a new future with you. By the way, are you enjoying this free report so far? If so, you would love my relationship course. It has laser-targeted advice in a 6-step formula to win back the affections of your ex and make him yours for good.Use the Power of Story to Touch His Emotions"Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." ~ Chinese proverb 6) The human brain is wired for story. Lisa Cron, a highly-acclaimed writer, wrote an entire book on the subject. Hailed as a "story guru," Cron has explored the brain science behind the power of stories. She teaches other writers how to hook the human mind from the very first sentence. There is something special about how a story causes the human mind to pay attention. Cron proposes that from the earliest times, humans have transferred information primarily through a story. Stories are so memorable they can be used to transfer wisdom and knowledge from one generation to the next. Stories prevent humans from making the same mistakes as those who came before them. Stories also shed light on the way humans persevere and succeed in various circumstances. Perhaps the most powerful way a story can be used is as a tool for changing someone's opinion. Stories don't require effort to pay attention. Our minds are designed for stories. We naturally focus when someone transfers information to us in the narrative form. In Paul Smith's book, "Lead with a Story," he makes the case that business leaders can "captivate, convince, and inspire" using stories in the workplace. Smith relays hundreds of instances about influencing the minds of others by telling a simple story instead of relaying facts and information.7) The Power Of Stories Smith and Croon have recognized the power of stories to transfer knowledge. But here's what I want you to understand. Stories make it easier for you to influence people. They are more effective than trying to convince people with arguments, logic, facts, or begging. I have experienced this firsthand. I once attended a fundraising event for people living in the impoverished nation of Burkina Faso. I was unmoved by the statistics presented on how many children go hungry and how many families lack the basic necessities for good health. Then the presenter told the story of two little girls who had been struggling together to survive the hardship of their lives, I was suddenly hooked. I understood their plight on an emotional level. I immediately cared enough to take out my wallet and sacrifice what I could to help with the relief efforts. Think for a moment about the variables of a court case. Think of all the factors that determine if a defendant will be found guilty or innocent by jurors in a trial. Experts work diligently to narrow down the list of variables to those that will have the most powerful influence on the outcome of the trials. Can you guess the number one factor that influences the jury's final opinion of a defendant? Experts tell us it's not the facts of the case. They say it's not the evidence presented. Rather, it comes down to who tells the most believable story. If jury members can picture themselves in a vivid story and imagine the events unfolding the way the defendant claims they did, they will find the defendant "not guilty." If the prosecuting attorney tells a more convincing story, the defendant will most likely be found "guilty." How can I use this information in my everyday life, you ask? Here's how: we will craft a special kind of story to influence your ex's perspective. Stories evoke emotion and change minds.I want you to tell your ex the story of your relationship in a way that causes him to automatically begin to root for your relationship. Did you ever see The Italian Job, The Saint, or Ocean's Eleven? All these movies are about thieves trying to pull off big-time heists. They are stories about criminals. And yet, as you watch these movies, you begin to root for the criminals to succeed. You want them to get away with the loot and live happily ever after. Doesn't that seem strange to you? Why do we root for thieves to succeed at stealing other people's hard-earned resources? It's because their life experience was presented to us in the form of a story. The protagonist is the hero figure in a plotline - the person about whom the story is written. There can be more than one protagonist in a story, as there is in William Shakespeare's classic story, Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet, we root for the relationship of this young couple. Sure, we care about Romeo and we care about Juliet, but the relationship itself becomes as important to us as either character. As you read or watch Romeo and Juliet, do you find yourself wishing they would just forget about each other? Don't you want them to put their own safety first and move on with their lives? After all, if you really cared about Romeo and Juliet, wouldn't you advise them not to put their lives in peril by pursuing the romance further? Of course not. That's not what you root for. (It's not what I root for either!) We want them to be together.9) We root for the relationship! We see the beauty of life unfolding in the way they discover one another, and our hearts want them to be happy. We understand the risks they take to breathe life into the new passion they discovered through love at first sight. Here's the point. By making your relationship itself the hero of the story, you can cause him to root for the relationship. Do you remember Allie and Noah from Nicholas Sparks' novel-turned-movie, The Notebook? The story of their relationship was a powerful tear-jerker. As an 80-year-old man, Noah reads to his wife, Allie. She has developed Alzheimer's and does not remember, yet she roots for the characters in the story of her own life as Noah reads from her journal. The story Noah reads to Allie is powerful. It is so powerful we pay money to participate in this story by going to a heater or purchasing the book. Using the power of story is only one of 6 powerful steps that will help you reconnect with your man, even in the worst situations. Bring him back. Save your relationship. Get the happiness you deserve. Always on your side, James Bauerhttps://relationship.healthbrzee.com/

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the2020romanceproject · 5 years ago

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Review: The Wedding Date

(Or: Maybe I should only read the first half of romance novels from now on?)

Book two of my year of romance was Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Date! I was excited about this one, since I had actually heard of it before I started reading romance, and also it has fake dating which is always gold. And I did enjoy it...up to a point. More on that below. :)

First, a summary: Alexa is chief of staff to the mayor of Berkeley. Drew is a pediatric surgeon in L.A. They get stuck in an elevator together when Drew is in San Francisco for his ex-girlfriend’s wedding to his med school classmate. Drew was supposed to have a date for the wedding, but she cancelled, and on a whim he asks Alexa to go with him instead as his pretend new girlfriend. She says yes, and they have a great time at the wedding and fall in bed afterward and have great sex. Drew secretly changes his flight to leave later in the day on Sunday, and they spend the day together. They’re both hesitant because they know the other person isn’t looking for anything real here—Alexa in particular knows Drew doesn’t do relationships—but they keep reaching out to each other, and Alexa goes down to L.A. to stay with Drew the next weekend. There’s a brief blip where she texts him to ask if he’s sleeping with other people and he makes a joke instead of answering seriously and she cancels their next weekend together; then he runs into her (very conveniently) when he’s back in SF for a conference and they fall into bed again. Then there’s a more serious blip where she meets a bunch of his exes who let it slip that he broke up with each of them around the two-month mark when it seemed to be going really well. Alexa gets upset, refuses to let Drew say anything about his intentions because she doesn’t want to be hurt, and sneaks out of his apartment in the middle of the night to fly home early. Drew realizes how much she means to him and flies up to L.A. to support her at a hearing for the at-risk-youth arts initiative she’s pushing for, and the two of them happily reconcile (and the initiative passes). He shows her the job offer he got from his mentor at a San Francisco hospital, and she tells him yes, she wants him to move here. There’s an epilogue a year later where he takes her back to the elevator where they met and proposes.

I feel like I spent my last review talking entirely about why the book fell apart in the middle for me. This book also fell apart in the middle, but I’m going to start with some things I liked/noted about it, so as to not spend ALL my time complaining about shortcomings. :)

Things I really liked:

Chemistry. Alexa and Drew are both super charming. Their back-and-forth was really enjoyable to read. It was a big part of what got me into the book: I wanted to see these two charming people grow to like each other. All the thing where they’re at the rehearsal dinner and wedding and enjoy touching each other were really nice to read.

Tropes. This one had such good tropes! Stuck in an elevator together! Fake dating! Anything with plausible deniability, where they’re acting like they really like each other but each one thinks it might not denote real interest, is just the most fun. This one gave up the plausible deniability aspect way sooner than I would have expected, but still: great tropes.

Race. Alexa is black and Drew is white. I am also white, so my perspective here is not informed by personal experience, but I really liked how this was handled. Alexa does experience some microaggressions and outright racism—not from Drew—in ways that felt realistic to me. Drew doesn’t try to explain away any of the racism, which made him seem like a good potential partner to her. There was also a thing where he failed to understand a thing in her past that was impacted by race, and when she explained it he listened and accepted his ignorance. She was still concerned that he’d like her less for having made him aware of his privilege, which felt like a very sad and real fear. Overall, it felt like racial dynamics were allowed to come into the text in nuanced and organic ways that kept Alexa from being a token POC. (Jasmine Guillory is a POC herself, so I’m not surprised that this is handled well, and there are probably other things about it that I as a white person didn’t even pick up.)

Body type. Alexa is curvy! She’s embarrassed about it! But Drew loves it! As someone who fills out the top of a cocktail dress pretty well myself, I really appreciated both sides of this: the realistic body issues from someone raised in a society that valorizes thinness, and the way the text kept affirming Drew’s attraction to her. There’s a racial component to this as well—lots of skinny blond girls in this book—but it was something I was able to identify with even from my different societal context.

Things I noted/was surprised by:

How soon they had sex. At some point I’ll stop being surprised by this in romance novels. I’ve read a lot of fake dating stories, and written some, and I would have expected the charade to go on a lot longer before they had actual sex that couldn’t at all be explained away by the fake dating scenario. The purported fakeness of it is the fun part! They both think the other one isn’t interested for real, while their own feelings continue to grow! Why would you cut that part short?? As soon as they kissed and admitted to each other that they wanted it for real, the tension dropped from a ten to about a two. This book got a decent amount of mileage out of that lower level of tension—more on that below—but it’s so surprising to me that it didn’t keep the much more interesting and trope-y tension going longer.

Consent and power dynamics. This book was super good about consent: Drew made sure to check in about what Alexa wanted, and it was played for sexual intensity, where he clearly got a kick out of hearing her say it. But it was very, very one-sided. There was no implication that Alexa needed to check in with Drew on what he wanted. This wasn’t a surprise, exactly, but it did stand out to me, since I don’t read a lot of het (and honestly this is a big part of why—I don’t want to encounter gendered power dynamics in my leisure reading). Consent felt like a thing the woman had to give the man. I’m not saying this is a problem, necessarily; just something I noticed.

Sex scenes. The sex scenes almost faded to black but not quite. Maybe they faded to gray? I felt like I knew pretty much what sex act they were doing and when, but they weren’t described in any real detail. It was an interesting compromise, like the book was trying to give us a clear sense of their sexual relationship without any real titillation. I wonder if this is a genre thing—I’m not sure this book was published strictly as romance—or if it’s just Guillory’s style.

Romcom careers. They’re chief of staff to the mayor of Berkeley and a pediatric surgeon. Those have GOT to be two squares on the romcom career bingo card. I’m teasing a little, but I think this kind of character background serves an important role: we have to know that they’re accomplished, valuable people, so that when they feel rejected or insecure we can revel in it—look, they feel like I once felt! But it’s unjustified and they’ll end up happy!—instead of actually questioning the characters’ worth. Fanfiction usually gets over this hurdle by writing about characters the readers already know and respect and love, or, in the case of RPF, writing about people who are for-real successful and famous. Romance novels have to introduce us to brand-new characters, and one of the easiest ways to make us feel sure that these characters are worthy of our respect and of the other character’s love is to give them prestigious and intellectually or creatively rigorous careers. I’ll be interested to see how many other instances of this I run across.

Two points of view. It strikes again! Do all romance novels include both points of view? I don’t hate it, necessarily—but it does decrease the overall tension. You don’t get caught up in one character’s desires as strongly when you’re seeing both POVs.

Immediate attraction. Another thing I should probably stop being surprised by. Both Alexa and Drew are very physically into each other as soon as they meet; he has trouble not looking at her breasts, and there are so many narrative references to her wanting his touch, wanting to move closer to him, etc. To be fair, I think I’m pretty far toward the “not attracted to complete strangers” side of the spectrum, so I might not be the best judge of this, but it did feel a little over the top. I suspect this was an attempt to make us really want these two to be together. I think it was trying too hard—a more genuine reserve would have been more compelling to me, where they like each other but don’t immediately want to jump each other. Also, they’re going to a wedding together as fake dates! You don’t have to try that hard to make us interested!

Food as comfort. This was such a strong recurring thread in this novel. Alexa has a sweet tooth, and Drew is always getting her doughnuts; they get a lot of very satisfying takeout. It gelled for me with the thing where a lot of the satisfaction in the novel came from the comfort of “oh, this person is touching me; oh, they like me back.” Comfort instead of angst.

Subplots. One of my questions in approaching this genre was whether romance novels needed to be more novel-like than fic—i.e. whether they needed to engage with a plot beyond the romance. This does have a very slight B plot (Alexa’s youth initiative, which is connected to her difficult relationship with her sister) but it’s VERY slight. The book has an even less prominent subplot about one of Drew’s patients who develops cancer. Alexa’s subplot resolves, whereas Drew’s is only backdrop. Drew’s in particular is used the way I’d use a subplot in fic: it’s included to provide an excuse for scenes with or about Alexa, or to affect Drew’s mood in ways that reflect or influence the romance plot. It serves the romance instead of being an independent plot in its own right.

Okay, so those are my observations. Time to dig into the thing where this book lost me in the middle—much like the last book I reviewed, but for entirely different reasons.

I’ve already talked about the drastic drop-off in tension after they slept together. That actually was not what lost me this time. This novel managed to build enough of a rapport between the two characters that I was invested in their relationship becoming real. To be clear, I would have preferred that the fake dating trope go on longer and create opportunities for actual longing. But this novel wasn’t so much about longing; it was about that delightful feeling when you like someone and you reach out tentatively and they meet you in the middle. It was the very, very gentle tension of, “Maybe we could hang out today?” “Sure!” over and over, as a relationship builds. It was fluff-adjacent tension. Super enjoyable, the way a warm bath is enjoyable. I wasn’t dying to get to the end or anything, but it was nice.

I did wonder, about halfway through, how the heck this book could possibly keep going like that. And it turned out it couldn’t. That was when it introduced: the Misunderstanding Plot.

Don’t get me wrong. I love a good misunderstanding plot. But they are hard to do well. They work best when they feel unforced and genuine, and don’t make either of the characters carry the idiot ball. Like, say, if Drew and Alexa hadn’t had enthusiastic sex where they talked about how much they wanted each other, and they were still under the impression that it was a fake relationship, it would be very easy to have the other character accidentally confirm that and drive a wedge between the two of them. Or if one of them was starting to think it WAS real, and then they overheard the other person confessing to someone else that it was totally fake. (Don’t mind me; just thinking about ways I might write it.)

The problem with this one was that they were basically just dating at this point, so in order for drama to arise, the characters had to act badly in ways that felt forced and off-putting. They’d known each other for a week and a half; things had been happy and a little giddy and chill between them so far. Then Alexa texts in the middle of the workday to ask if Drew is sleeping with anyone else. (Because that is the perfect way to initiate an important relationship conversation, obviously.) He makes a joke, because he is clearly also very good at this, and they don’t speak to each other for a week and a half.

Guess which one of them this makes me like more? That’s right! Neither!!

Look. I like characters who are stupid about their own feelings and blind to other people’s. But I also like characters who, when they know about the other person’s feelings, are very, very considerate of them. Drew was not—and Alexa compounded the problem by being confrontational with the question and then abruptly pulling back as soon as she didn’t get the magical easy answer. In short, it made me think that they were bad for each other.

They recover from the texting thing when they just so happen to run into each other (I mean, I can’t throw stones, I’ll buy the coincidence) and are happy to see each other, and apologize, and everything’s fine. But by this point the novel had lost me. I had been enjoying the happy dance of “Does s/he like me? Ooh, s/he does!” but only so long as it lasted. They didn’t have a strong enough core after a week and a half to get through the badness of those texts. They were happy again, but I wasn’t invested. I was mostly reading so I could write this review.

Then, fascinatingly, the book won me back.

It was a very specific passage that did it. On page 190 of the paperback, Alexa talks in the narration about how she wouldn’t admit this to anyone other than herself, but ever since that first weekend with Drew, she’d imagined him in bed with her every night as she fell asleep. And I was sold. I mean, it was still very gentle tension. But! A thing the character wanted that she wasn’t getting! I could be into this again!

And then...well, this is already super long, so I won’t go into all the details of the misunderstanding that ended the book. It had a lot in common with the text message fiasco: Alexa felt insecure, got upset that Drew might not be into her, and refused to engage with him about whether that was true. (Okay, it was actually more egregious than the texts, in that she wouldn’t let him speak.) Her getting upset made sense, but her refusing to let him speak when he was clearly trying to felt SO forced.

The funny thing is, there was actually a seed of potential real conflict there: Drew hadn’t really admitted to himself that he wanted a long-term thing with her. He could have told her that. He could have done anything, really, to indicate that and create a real conflict. (Also tricky to handle without him coming off as not actually interested—but doable, I think.) As it was, he didn’t call her his girlfriend at a party—which, it had been like a month, and they hadn’t discussed it privately, so it’s totally appropriate not to throw the term around in public yet!—and...that’s it. Everything else was just her fears, and the very cowardly way she handled them. I guess that’s relatable? But it felt so engineered. It didn’t so much make me dislike her as make me annoyed with the text for twisting her response so that they couldn’t have the very short conversation that would have cleared everything up.

In fairness to Guillory, a friend who’s read the whole series tells me she does better with misunderstanding plots later. But I’m really, really excited to read a romance plot that doesn’t lose me halfway through.

Next up is Red, White, and Royal Blue. I’ve been told this was basically written for me, so I’m hopeful. Fingers crossed it sticks the landing!

#romance novels #reviews #jasmine guillory #the wedding date #romance meta #fanfiction meta

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stillthewordgirl · 5 years ago

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LOT/CaptainCanary fic: (I Don’t Believe in) Destiny (Ch. 5 of 11)

Leonard Snart is back, finally pulled from the timestream where he's spent the last four years. But he wasn't alone, and the repercussions of that will echo through the Legends, the Time Bureau, and beyond.

And maybe, just maybe, they'll bring everything around full circle.

Can also be read here at AO3 or here at FF.net.

Ch. Five: Somehow We Find Each Other

People come and go, times change, and John will always be John. Sara shakes her head, though she also smiles, and glances at Leonard. He looks a bit nonplussed—and a little intrigued, fancy that—but shakes his head too, glancing back at her.

“Interesting fellow,” he drawls, crossing his arms. “Old flame?”

“Something like that.” Sara sighs, stretching, feeling her spine crack—and Leonard’s interested eyes on her. When she relaxes, she holds out a hand to him and—after a moment, in which she sees the old Leonard, the cold-hearted one whose preferred armor was to pretend not to care for anything, flicker behind his eyes—he takes it.

She’s living in the captain’s quarters now, and any trace of Rip is well and truly cleared out. Any trace of Ava—maybe not so much, although Leonard won’t know that. Probably.

He glances around the comfortable space, rolling his shoulders and clearly all too aware that he’s on this ship now without a single possession to his name. Mick had packed up his things, once, but Sara has no idea where they are—except for the one sweater hanging in the back of her closet, which she intends to keep.

“Nice,” comes the drawl. “Sure you wanna share?”

Sara considers him. “I know,” she says finally, picking up a comb from the bedside table just to have something to do with her hands, “that I might have overstepped there. But Mick was right; there’s not really much other space right now. We can get a room ready for you, but I figured until that...”

Her voice trails off. Damn it. Leonard’s not the only person here who wants someone beside him in the night right now.

“Not what I meant.” He steps closer, eyes dark, and studies her in return. “I’m not her, Sara.”

Mick’s been talking. And even after all this time, he’s too damned perceptive, and it stings. “That much is obvious,” Sara snaps back, regretting it immediately.

“Listen, Len...” She runs a hand over her face. “Ava and I were done, that way, long before I even knew you were alive. And I’ll always care for her, but we want different things...and I’m not always OK with some of the things she’s willing to do.” Testing on magical creatures, rebuilding the Oculus...becoming a Time Master?

A deep breath, and she looks up at him. “Yes, I’m sure I want you here. Not just because I know you’d prefer to have someone near you. I would too, but you’re not...not a substitute. You’re you, and I missed you. So...”

Her words run out, and Sara looks down at the comb in her hands, then sets it down again. When she looks back up again, Leonard’s taken a few steps closer, still watching her intently.

“Well. Everyone’s pretty busy right now, too busy to worry about clearing out a room for one long-lost crook,” he says after a moment, reaching up to just barely brush her jaw with his fingers. “So, we bunk together for now.” A pause. “And maybe, we decide we want it to stay that way. But no pressure.”

Sara closes her eyes at the touch. “No pressure,” she echoes, knowing already that it is what she wants. But he’s right, too. There are too many other things to worry about, and they’re both a bit emotionally strung-out at the moment.

“Still.” Leonard’s voice is barely a whisper, and Sara desperately wants a shower and a nice long nap, but that voice is doing things to her, and so is the arm that carefully snakes around her, an anchor, pulling her close against him. “Doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it.”

The nap can wait.

“We need him back!” Druce actually has the temerity to raise his voice at her, the bastard, glaring and learning forward in a way that’s hard not to take as a threat.

Ava glares back coldly, folding her arms and remaining seated at her desk, just barely flicking a glance at the two guards behind Druce. They should, she thinks a bit distantly, be stepping forward in case the “prisoner” needs restraint right about now. But they’re not. That’s...odd.

“And we’ll get him,” she says calmly, ignoring that problem for the moment. “But right now, they’re blocking the time couriers, and we can't track the ship. That won’t last forever. We’re watching for them.”

Druce sniffs. Something’s changed, Ava thinks, something besides Snart’s appearance and escape. The former Time Master has gone from penitent, to matter of fact, to openly demanding.

So, she reaches for the upper hand again. “Perhaps it would be easier,” she points out, tone implying his own fault in this matter, “if we knew precisely what he stole. Perhaps we could obtain it separately.”

What you say he stole.

Now, where had that thought come from?

“That will not be possible.” Her tactic works somewhat, though. Druce hesitates, and then his expression drops into something a great deal more rueful. “It is...” he says slowly, “rather hard to explain.”

“Try me.”

For a beat, she thinks he will. But then Druce shakes his head again, though at least he seems wholly more reasonable. “I will,” he says calmly. “But not yet.” He bows his head. “May I return to the library, Director Sharpe? It all has to do with my research on how to fix this.” The look he gives her might be sincere. Might. “I should have it all worked out soon. And then, then I will tell you everything.”

Ava studies him, not happy with the matter. But she has a funny feeling that pressing this won’t go well either—and Snart is, after all, an admitted thief. Why should she doubt that he’d stolen something?

Len, Sara had called him.

“All right,” she says, nodding. “Please do.” A pause. “I will update you if there’s anything new.”

“Thank you, Director Sharpe.”

The oddly reticent guards guide him out, and Ava waits a beat or two before slumping back in her chair, just a little. She’s missing something, she thinks, staring at the spot on her desk where a photo of her and Sara once sat. How can she feel like she’s losing the upper hand over a man with no followers, no weapons, and no way out of this time? And why does she feel like she needs the upper hand, given that he’s trying to help, to provide the Time Bureau with a tool it desperately needs?

She closes her eyes, thinking of Druce’s description of how the Oculus can control time, tame it, turn it from a chaotic and tangled mess into something ordered. Linear. Controllable. How can that be bad? There’s so much over the past few years that could have been fixed so much more easily...

She’s not sure how long she sits there, thinking...or maybe dozing, just a little, it’s been a long few days...when there’s a rap on her door, which then opens.

“Director Sharpe?”

Gary hasn’t been much on active duty since the whole possession thing, but Ava trusts him enough to make sure he’s the person who’s keeping an eye on the bureau computers and the “blip” that is the Waverider in time. They can’t see precisely when and where it is, at the moment, but they can see that it’s there—and they’ll see where it finally ends up, eventually. The ship can’t shield from them indefinitely.

And Gary—he has his own connections with the Legends. He’ll report to her, and her alone. She wonders, again, why that’s a consideration that’s been nagging at her.

“Yes, Agent Green?” she asks, falling back on formality. “What is it?”

Gary sidles in the door, closing it firmly behind him, and approaches. There’s a mix of consternation and worry on his face, and Ava stands up, suddenly concerned.

“The Waverider, it...” He gulps. “Well, it sort of vanished.”

“I know we weren’t able to track...”

“No.” Gary holds his hands out. “Vanished. Poof. No blip. No sign of, um, destruction or trouble, just...gone.” He stares at her. “Director. What does that mean?”

Ava stares back. She runs through all the trouble she’s known the Legends and the Waverider to get into, and what they might be doing with their newest passenger.

She has no answers.

“I have no idea.”

The Refuge, from above, looks just like Sara remembers it. She wonders, briefly, if young Rip might still be there—or if her, Leonard, Mick or Ray’s childhood selves might be.

Gideon had been close-mouthed about where and when and how the Refuge was, even now, and Sara can’t quite blame her. She doesn’t really understand how the hidden complex and its time-isolated environs work, and right now, that's not really her focus.

The android version of Gideon demurs when invited to leave with the rest of them, and Sara, pretty sure she knows why, doesn’t argue. Some of the others—especially Charlie and John—show an inclination to hide in their rooms instead of going, but Sara ousts them anyway. She’s not sure why, but she feels like this is the sort of thing the Legends are going to need to face as a team—even if it’s a different team than it’d been on their last visit.

The path is the same, the house is the same, even the faint, happy yells of children are the same. Sara takes a deep breath, inhaling the same scent of flowers and greenery as she leads the Legends toward the entrance. She feels Leonard’s arm bump hers, and she gives him what she hopes is a reassuring smile. It feels wrong, to be here without Rip.

But they need to know more, and this is the best thing Sara could think of.

As they approach, a tall figure appears at the top of the stairs, just like before, and Sara halts, the others stopping with her. Mary Xavier gazes down at them, her face stoic and calm for a long moment—before her expression breaks into a smile.

“Hello, my Legends,” she says. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Like before, Mary promptly ushers them into the house and into the parlor, but this time, they’re not immediately plied with tea. Leonard watches, a touch bemused, as the woman scans them all, then nods to herself as if marking them in her memory.

“All right,” she muses. “Ms. … pardon me, Captain Lance, Mr. Snart, Mr. Rory, and yes, Dr. Palmer. Please come with me. My office isn’t really built for more, but you can report to the others.”

She briskly turns to those others before anyone can either think to take offense—or flee. “The rest of you, enjoy the house and grounds...and the kitchen. It’s fully stocked, of course, Ms. Tomaz.” She winks at Zari, then nods to Nate and Nora. “Mr. Heywood, Ms. Darhk, you may enjoy the library. There is, of course, a great deal of history, but also a few intriguing grimoires, Ms. Darhk. Nothing too dangerous, of course. But intriguing.”

As Nora blinks at her, she turns to the uncomfortable-looking Charlie. “My dear shifter, there’s a music room you might like to see, but, please—take care. Some of the things are rather old. There’s a full music library too, and I believe you’d enjoy that.”

Then, she turns to Constantine, who looks just as uncomfortable but who is just as clearly trying to conceal it under an insouciant smirk and a cigarette dangling from his lips. In a blink, though, the cig is gone, tossed into a wastebasket, and the mistress of the Refuge and the warlock called the Hellblazer consider each other for a long moment.

“Oh, my,” Mary says after a moment, though there’s amusement in her tone. “You’d best come with us, then. Less likelihood for trouble.” She claps her hands, and turns away, leading the bemused group of five Legends toward the stairs and upward as the others mill about.

The office is small, lined with shelves filled with books and other interesting objects, including an odd tool that looks a bit like a screwdriver and curiously draws the eye. Leonard’s fingers twitch, but he has a distinct feeling that if he tries to steal anything here, he’ll most certainly regret it. Instead, he parks his hip against a wall, folding his arms, right by the chair that Sara promptly takes, backing up her role as the current captain of the Legends.

Constantine drops into the other chair with a huff, slouching into it and putting his feet up as if to broadcast his irritation at being here. Mary Xavier rolls her eyes at him, then looks at Mick, who’s studying the shelves, and smiles.

“Hello again, Mr. Rory,” she tells him, giving him a smile. “I can tell you, at this meeting, that I enjoy your books very much.” The smile turns a touch sly. “There are copies in the library, although I do keep certain ones away from the children.”

Mick blinks at her. “Uh,” he manages. “Thanks.”

Mary glances around. “I do wish Gideon had come to the house,” she says with a sigh. “But...she’s afraid she’ll see young Michael, I’m sure.” She shakes her head, then moves behind the desk, takes a seat, and studies them.

“Well,” she says after a moment, “I knew you’d be coming. But the question is, is it not, why?”

She stops, waiting for a response right then and there, with an air of listening that’s more than the surface question seems to call for. Leonard hears Sara take a deep breath and glances down at her, noting the concern and worry on her face—but also the determination.

“How,” she says, carefully, “do we break the Time Masters’ loop without breaking time?”

Mary considers her—and then she smiles.

“Now,” she says with satisfaction, “that’s the right question. There are many smaller questions within it, of course, but that’s the right question at this time.” She nods. “There’s so much I could tell you, and we could get bogged down in it for days, but that’s the point of it all.”

“Then...there really is a loop?” Raymond blurts out. “Druce is right? He’s supposed to create the Time Masters from the Time Bureau?”

Mary glances at Mick, who shifts uncomfortably. “There is,” he says shortly, glancing at Sara. “Sorry, Boss. I didn’t get a chance to say back on the ship, but I matched a few people in the Time Bureau records with Time Masters.” He shrugs. “Travis O’Connell...Liri Lee...Ryder...Rayak...Jia Chén..." A shadow crosses his face. "Walker Gabriel. Couple others. With Druce, that’s more than half the High Council.”

Mary inclines her head. “Yes,” she says simply. “None of the High Council passed through my doors as children. They all came from the Time Bureau. Everyone since, however, has been brought to me by the originals, to raise up to become new Time Masters.”

Leonard glances at Sara again. The look on her face is blank and careful, but she nods. “What about Druce?”

Here, the other woman hesitates, just a little. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “I suspect he found himself a traveler in time through some other means, first. Before wrangling this loop to his advantage.” A pause. “He is...very old. Not older than me, of course, but old.”

Leonard eyes her, wondering, but Sara clears her throat. “ ‘Zaman’ is ‘time’ in Turkish,” she muses. “I don’t know about ‘Druce.’ ”

“I believe it to be a bastardization of a word for ‘druid’ in a very old Celtic language,” Mary tells her. “But when I first encountered him, he called himself ‘Archontas.’ ”

Constantine finally speaks. “ ‘Lord,’ ” he points out. “In Greek.”

Mary inclines her head. “Yes,” she acknowledges. “The grandiose adopted name of a child who grew up with, and as, nothing.” She sighs. “Whatever else he has been, he has always insisted on turning similar children into new Time Masters, giving them the power they never would have in their original homes. I have always wondered about that.” A shake of her head. “But enough of that. We were talking about time loops.”

She sweeps some of the books on her desk to the side—Leonard notes at least one by Rebecca Silver there, to his amusement—and pulls a large pad of paper toward herself, picking up a pencil with her other hand.

“The Time Masters, who have also been called the Linear Men, talk about ‘preserving the timeline,’ as if there’s only one true way for time to flow,” she says, drawing a flowing line around the borders of the top sheet. “Part of that is control, of course. They believe they’re more well suited than any others to determine what the so-called ‘proper’ timeline is.”

She studies the simple drawing, then looks back up at them. “Of course, not only are they rather misled in their drive for control, they’re not quite right about time. They look at time as a line, a singular pathway, when, actually, it’s more like...”

Mary pauses, a slight smile lingering at her lips. Leonard waits, glancing at Raymond, but when the other man doesn’t speak, he sighs, thinking about what the object on the bookshelf had reminded him of.

“...a big ball of, oh, wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff,” he finishes for her, drawling the words. “Right?”

Mary’s eyes crinkle at the corners as she smiles at him. Raymond makes a startled noise and glances at him, as does Constantine, the latter with an appreciative chuckle. Mick grunts, and Sara merely lifts an eyebrow.

“Correct, Mr. Snart,” Mary says, inclining her head to him. “It’s not really set, and it’s not meant to be contained, not really.” She pauses. “Are any of you familiar with the concept of Hypertime?”

Raymond just about bounces in his chair. “Oh! Oooh! It’s like a…a web of timelines, right?” He glances around at the others. “Well, it’s sort of just a theory, but it’s an interesting one. It holds that there’s not really one true timeline, just like Ms. Xavier said.”

Mick snorts. “We know there are other Earths, Haircut,” he says. “Skirt’s from one of ‘em. Leo, too.”

Skirt? Leonard wonders briefly.

“No, it’s not quite the same as the Multiverse,” Raymond starts, but Mary looks up a hand, looking amused.

“Dr. Palmer, you’re correct,” she says, “but if we start getting into that…well, we’ll be here longer than we really should be.” Raymond makes a disappointed noise, and Leonard hears Sara chuckle quietly before she leans forward.

“So, what are you getting at?” she asks, in a clear bid to help Mary steer the conversation back. “This…Hypertime?”

Mary gives her a smile. “Well,” she continues, “think of Hypertime as the aforementioned ball of timey-wimey stuff. Timelines branching and reconverging and so on. Not the separate Earths of the Multiverse, but real in their own way nonetheless.” She pauses. “The temporal computer that the Time Master call the Oculus isn’t a bad thing, in and of itself. It allows for study and for pinpointing true problem spots and clearing up tangles. A window, not a weapon. But the Time Masters—as you know, they used it to control, and to bend people’s lives to their will.” She shakes her head. “And that…that never works out fully as the people doing the controlling think it will.”

There are no strings on me. Leonard smirks a little, and he thinks he sees her wink as him.

“So,” Mary continues. “In fact, perhaps the Oculus should exist. But the Time Masters…” She nods, once, in the silence. “Break the chain,” she says, and it’s almost a command. “Find a crack in what’s supposedly meant to happen. One little crack is all you need to start it.”

Raymond sits up straight. “But won’t that ruin everything? Rip won’t recruit us if there’s no Vandal Savage, no Time Masters.”

Constantine nods. “One little crack…that’s caused a lot of trouble,” he says laconically. “Broken nations. Worlds. More.”

Leonard feels a chill run down his spine as he glances at Sara. Despite everything…he doesn’t really want to undo the past five years, doesn’t want to go back to what he was. He glances at Mick, who looks blank. No, Mick wants to do that even less, if possible.

“But that’s the point, in a way. Of Hypertime. If you do this right...” And for some reason, Mary’s watching Leonard intently here, and he shifts uncomfortably. “...you’ll unmoor the time going forward from the past. Separate it. Time will move on as it will. And the past is another country.”

“They do things differently there,” Mick murmurs, unexpectedly. Mary nods. Constantine hums thoughtfully. Raymond sighs. And Sara and Leonard look at each other before looking back at Mary.

“But…how?” Sara asks intently. “Do what right?”

But the older woman shakes her head. “I’ve said enough. It’s up to you now, my dears.” She stands. “Too much and I…I risk controlling too much myself. And I cannot do that. I cannot interfere to that degree.”

Sara opens her mouth to retort, but Leonard—who has certain admittedly ridiculous suspicions—does first.

“Why did you agree to work for them?” he asks, regarding her. “The Time Masters. If you disagree so much with what they are.”

Mary sighs, then gives him a small smile, as if she knows precisely what he’s doing. She probably does.

“I’ve been through enough war. Someone needs to care for the children,” she says quietly. “To teach them. I knew that, in time, that could change everything.” She nods. “And it did. One of those children, Michael Carter…Rip Hunter...became the man who brought you all together.”

#LOT fic #captain canary #I don't believe in destiny #legends of tomorrow #sara x leonard

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fightevilandthengetblownup · 5 years ago

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FIC: Then You’ll Be Sorry

—

Ten years was not typically a long time for him. It was a bat of an eye, or a few days vacation topside, or even just a blip on the overall radar of his existence thus far. Not as short as some other demons perspective of the time, and no where near as long as a silly little human’s perspective of it.

But dealing with her? The decade since he’d nabbed her from the rack had been almost an eon for him.

“What is all this, Jo?” Crowley found himself growling in distaste the moment he entered the woman’s room - when did he start thinking of it as her’s and not his, he didn’t know for sure but there was no way he wanted it back in it’s current condition. “You have a count to three to explain why there are streamers all over these hallowed walls.”

“Well, ya see,” The blonde span about on the ladder she was standing on, pressing the end of a string of fairly lights into the walls of the room with what looked to be an iron nail - and how in Hell did the little human manage to get a hold of iron in Hell? Crowley was going to have to begin doing more thorough inspections of what she got up to and whom she spoke to at this rate - before tugging and pulling the lights into place. There was a mischievous and devious look on her face as she looked down the ladder at him that would have filled him with dread if he hadn’t grown accustomed to her flights of fancy over the last decade. “Tems thought I should throw a little party, you know.”

“This is Tems idea?” He didn’t stop the incredulous look upon his face from growing even as he waved a hand to steady the ladder for the girl with his powers as she slowly clambered down. As she drew the ladder away, Crowley wished he had a drink in his hand. “And what exactly was this party for, darling?”

“It’s been ten years since you finally came to my calls and decided to save your hide!” Joanna’s face was a slightly redder tone than normal, the only part of that smug, shit-eating-grin upon her face that seemed to be out of place. As she moved down and around the room, the fairy lights she seemingly had covered over the ceiling caught the light on the crystals of her dress, the one and only thing that seemed in place from the wardrobe he had so carefully curated for her over the years after one too many fights about the assault on his eyes that were her flannel choices. “So Tems thought I should celebrate, given it is such an unusual occasion for someone to get off the rack early, after all.”

Crowley definitely needed a drink for this. He could feel a headache beginning at the corners of his mind just thinking about it. It couldn’t have only been ten years with the nightmare that was now bouncing around the room from wall to wall, over the settee and around the bookshelves. Had to have been longer, he was certain of it.

Pouring out a glass, his glass in the glasses he’d always kept in this room felt strangely rhythmic the way that they were never moved in all of her changes, of his Craig, Crowley let out a loud groan as he watched the blonde jumping about the place in a flow of grey and red chiffon.

She was up that ladder again, this time trying to hang a band of pink peony flowers - again, where was she getting these things? - along the top of the bookshelf. He could spot other clumps of them about the rest of the room, a vase full on almost every flat surface and wreaths and bands of them atop each other high surface like the other bookshelves and the canopy of her four-poster bed. Jo was reaching precariously as she flung the corner of the band on the final shelf. “So us gals were goin’ to hang out a little - I made sure to cross both of ‘em off of your schedule for the rest of the week, so you can stop your poutin’, and added that fool Declan in instead so maybe you could have some fun rakin’ him over some hot coals-“

"How many times must I tell you, you do not have the right to change the schedule of-”

“Maybe I’d believe it if I didn’t write half ya fuckin’ schedules for you anyways, hmm?”

“If I had it my way, you’d be strapped up on some rig with some demon working you over right now, Joanna.”

“And yet I remain unaffected!” The blonde chirped back cheerfully to his darkly growled words.

It drove Crowley mad that no matter how crass or disturbing his threats were that she would let them wash off of her like water off a ducks back. It was to do with power, and it drove the King of the Crossroads, and one time King Of Everything, round the bend that he did not often hold it where the pretty hunter was concerned.

“Regardless of that, whom is it you have so deigned to reorganize my schedule regarding, dear?” Crowley asked as he sank into his chair and watched the blonde bounding about the room like the overly energetic monster she was. “I am assuming this includes my best demon given it was her suggestion, correct?”

“And your other up-and-comer too.” Jo replied as she fussed with a section of flowers on the desk near the drinks trolley with what seemed anxious energy. He had not seen her this fazed since the time he’d spotted that wine-guzzling bastard accompanying her through the halls last year but that had been an entirely different energy than was filling the room now. “Bela and Tems, and I think I heard that Ruby’d made a jaunt down here if you promise not to try and side track her.”

“Ruby? Really?”

“You better not still be holdin’ shit against her right now-”

“You do not dictate what I do or do not do in my domain, Jo. I may be kind enough to give you some leniency due to your particular circumstances,” Crowley snarled the words back at her, fingers drumming against the crystal as he flicked his other fingers up throwing the girl back against the nearest wall like a rag doll. The glare he got in response was in no way different to the looks of distaste he was used to from the other whenever such acts had happened before. “However this may come as a shock to you - but you are not in control here.”

There was a scoffing sound from the blonde that crawled under his skin as he stood from the chair and moved towards her. Jo’s head was tilted away from him but there was that annoyingly cocky smirk on her face he knew too well and he could feel the heat rising inside him, the desire to wipe that look from her pretty face boiling up.

As the girl opened her mouth to talk, the demon found himself waving his hand again - silencing her and wiping that blasted look off her face as well. At the same moment, every flower in the room set alight burning and smoking around the confined space. There were flames crawling across the walls from the shelves and licking at the lace canopy of the bed. Flaming, charred petals fell down upon the coffee table and desk, as the smell of smoke began to fill the space as the fairylights flickered on and off in the surge of power. If there was the scent of burning flesh as well, it would smell like the pits again.

“Now that I’ve taken care of those tacky flowers-”

“Phurhknuu!” Crowley felt his own smirk form in return at the sour look upon the girl’s face.

“Sorry, Joanna, couldn’t quite understand that, want to try again?” The demon found himself laughing at the snarl he got in response, moving towards the other. Her jaw was jutted out stubbornly however, and Crowley approached slowly before gripping tight on her offending chin. “As I was saying, those have been taken care of, and now-” There was a wave of his other hand before the chalice appeared from the desk in his hand. A swirl of the thick red blood and the next moment the voice of his assistant bubbled out. “Lola, be a dear and schedule both the lovely Tems and Bela for the next three months.”

There was a strangled noise of disagreement from the blonde, but he simply slid his hand up over her mouth, smearing the red lipstick up as he twisted the skin lightly, as the other demon’s voice simpered out, “Of course, your Lola will organize this right away.”

“And dear, if they disagree - it will be retraining with the hounds for the next year.” That got a surprised noise through the thick blood as well as a hissed noise from beneath his hand. Crowley could see the displeasure building on the blonde’s face as he waited for the “Yessir” before throwing it away - blood splashing upon the opposite wall as the chalice clattered to the floor. “Now, have you learnt who’s in control here yet, Joanna?”

The blonde snarled back, and snapped her teeth out at his fingers before she seemed to realise he’d returned her voice back. “Oh fuck you, Crowley!” Joanna hissed, scowl firmly on her face.

“That doesn’t sound like you’ve learnt anything yet, dear.”

“Shove it up your ass, you dick.”

“Still doesn’t sound like it-”

“You can’t fuckin’ control me like this you asshole. I’m not one of your fuckin’ demons to push around, Crowley,” The hunter snarled the words out at him, and from the corner of his eye he could see her hands twitching to pull back from the wall and reach for him. Probably to take a swing, that was always her first point of call, but was unable to move more than an inch from the wall. “You’re not my fuckin’ husband, and you ain’t my fuckin’ dad! You can’t control me like this!”

“You’re right, little Joanna. I’m not your daddy or your husband, darling,” Crowley moved his hand along her jawline to tug her head upwards by her hair, fisted at the nape of her neck with a harsh jerk. He could still see the defiance flashing deeply in her eyes and smirking back, the demon felt that heated anger boiling up again. “But I am your King, and you will learn to treat me as such.”

---

“And exactly what is it?” The words were somewhat hissed out, a bite behind their meaning clear as Jo shuffled her feet awkwardly.

“Why, dear, it’s my newest find.” The host replied, the hand not currently holding his typical glass wrapping around her bare shoulder with a tighter grip than she was used to. It was something she had noticed about the demon - when he spotted something that interested him or he thought held worth, he would hold onto it for it’s worth - and Jo felt the uncomfortable nature of having suddenly been dragged into something settle heavily into her stomach. She had spent time over the last few years with the older demon, usually playing card games or chess where in the game was more metaphorical than real as the Prince tried to worm out of her her secrets or as he would sometimes say ‘hidden value’; but never had the times she’d been invited to his quarters had it been ever more than the two of them and the two dark shadow demons that followed his command. “I found her a few years back, just wandering the halls would you believe? A little soul freely walking the halls of Hell.”

“Interesting, I’d not heard we had a vermin problem lately. Perhaps someone should get onto that.” Jo’s eyes darted across to the demon that spoke as she was coralled into the room further by the hand on her shoulder, quickly running an evaluating look over the other as her hunter skills kicked in to assess the situation she now found herself. The dark skinned demon held himself in a way that set her hackles up already, as he sat back calmly on one end of a lavish leather couch - one arm spread across the back cushions while the other stacked and restacked five golden coins upon the arm rest beside him. “Can’t have too many scurrying about like cockroaches unchecked.”

“You think I’d find something there are multiples of, Mammon?”

“I think you over estimate the worth of.. it.”

“It has a name, you know.” Jo found herself snapping back, arms crossing under her chest, without meaning to. She was supposed to stand back and observe, maybe make informed choices of when to interact after getting the lay of the land, but somehow thirteen years in Hell had yet to ingrain any patience in her.

“And it also speaks.” The tall, elder looking demon that had been hanging about near the so-called Mammon cut in over her as she’d opened her mouth to respond, a sardonic twist to his lips. “Does it do any other tricks, Vassago? Have you toilet trained it? Taught it to sit on command? Pouring your wine for you?”

“That would be the one thing he would desire from a little pet, isn’t it?” The only other woman in the room spoke, breezing past Jo with an elegance that made her want to beg the woman for lessons in how to make her own dresses flow like there was a windmachine following her around. The woman stopped momentarily to pin the greying demon with a somewhat icy look at the scoffed noise she had gotten in response. “Where did you go and pluck this one out from now, you old thief?”

“I told you, Gremory, found her wandering the halls around here.”

“And exactly what was a human soul doing wandering the halls and not over in the pit then?”

“That’s the real mystery, dear. Such a valuable little thing to have gotten out before turning, wouldn’t you say?”

“It is unusual.” Mammon answered sharply, his dark eyes raking over her with a speculative look. “Tell it to answer.”

“Again, I’ve got a fuckin’ name, you know.”

“That’s not relevant, roach. Now, how come you are not still in Lilith’s playpen?”

“My name is Jo Harvelle.” Jo found herself shrugging her shoulder and freeing herself from the grip on her arm, and if she’d bothered to look would have noticed the almost bemused smirk on the older demon’s face as she stalked towards the one speaking to her. She thought she recognised the name - not much to do in Hell but read and learn, and when she got back to Earth, she sure as heck was going to be the best demon hunter the world had ever seen after all those books Crowley and Vassago alike allowed her access to - and found herself pursing her lips as she approached the demon. “And if you want to know anythin’ about me - then you’re goin’ to have to address me correctly, you poncey bastard.”

Next second she was on the ground, face smushed to the mahogany floorboards that made up the flooring in this description of Hell. Vassago had decked the space out to his taste it seemed - or rather, Jo thought, he had barely lifted a finger given how her room had looked when she’d taken it over from Crowley in the first place - and now she was getting an up close and personal view to the quality workmanship of the floors.

Tilting her head slightly, she could see the almost bemused look upon the demon who’s powers were flexed upon her crushing down like a ton of bricks on her chest as well as what she thought might have been an almost adoring look for a split second upon the stiff lipped British demon that was still standing behind him. Vassago crossed through her line of vision to take a seat on the arm chair nearest her between the coin-clinking demon and herself, before gesturing at the gorgeous older blonde woman to sit as well. The sheer lack of movement to assist or distract Mammon from his flexing made her grit her teeth, growling quietly to herself as the pressure grows while the demon smirks.

“Oh that is much better,” Gremory quipped as she sank into the chair beside the host, crossing her ankles right in front of Jo’s face that felt like too sharp a move to be accidental. “How do you put up with it’s insolence, Vassago?”

“Usually she is quite well behaved-”

“Oh like you know what that phrase means.”

“You still hold that against me, love?”

Jo could hear a sound she was sure was a loud sniff from the other woman, and found herself biting down on a snort of her own at the bickering between the two. At the very least it distracted her from the pain of the force pushing her ribs down hard over her knees where she was bent up and squashed to the floor still.

“Regardless of that, Mammon, if you could release my little trinket-” Hearing the demon finally speaking up - even if it was in such terms that would usually make Jo roll her eyes or snap back at the idea - the blonde couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief as the pressure let up enough to allow her to sit up on her knees slightly more comfortably, though she was barely able to lift her head or shift from a disturbingly subserviently bowed position. Looking about, she caught the demon she’d grown to know’s eye carefully before receiving a tiny nod in response. “-Much appreciated. She definitely requires a little more training before I add her to the long term collection, wouldn’t you say?”

“I had thought you were thinking to replace your coldfish bed finally-”

“Not now, Naberius.”

“Oh? Don’t like the speculation that your old news, Gremory? I mean, the thing is a pretty little blonde like you used to inhabit, back in the day.” The British demon - Jo recognising the name as another Marquis from her reading, and from the look of it, quite a sourfaced one at that - replied as he cocked an eyebrow towards the glowering blonde demon. He moved almost catlike around to sit on the other end of the couch the Prince was occupying, and sat with what Jo thought was a little bit more show than the move needed - like a bird settling into a nest and ruffling it’s feathers far too much before settling. “Perhaps that is what it is doing off of the rack. You did say halls, right Vassago?” The demon waited for a knowing nod from the now smirking Prince, before adding cruelly. “If it were these halls, then clearly Lucky the Leprechaun is resorting to the trash as well as the filth from next door.”

“What was that?” An Irish voice cut through the room, and Jo found herself turning her head towards the entryway to see two more demons’ legs entering the room with equally commanding strides. The voice was unfamiliar and she couldn’t recognise either demons’ styles as any of those she had crossed paths with in the years she had been in Hell. She tried to tilt her head to look through her hair at the pair but that was too hard an angle to achieve as her shoulders were still forcefully slumped forward and a weight still sat upon her neck. “Why must that fool be discussed every time we gather?”

“Careful there, Naberius, you wouldn’t want to infuriate your fellow Marquis would you?” The blonde demon responded after another haughty sounding sniff filled the room as Jo could see the two newcomers sink into the two spare armchairs across from what she thought was an old married couple from the little bickering she’d heard thus far. Gremory appeared to wave a hand before smirking and adding in a fake whisper. “If he thinks you’re talking about that little monster, he might not stay in the funny human form - might even suggest you boys take it outside like a real dog on bird fight.”

Jo felt a chill run down her spine at the words, goosepimples blooming on the bare skin of her back in an obvious fashion, as she caught a growl from the other side where the new arrivals were. Something about the suggestion, the wording, the concept of hearing anything about him made her push up harder again at the force still pressing against her with an audible groan. There was no other ‘little monster’ that was connected to Crowley, and that whoever had arrived had a connection to him - Jo’s stomach twisted sharply at the idea she might possibly be able to lay eyes finally upon the demon that had done the other so wrong so long ago - and clenching her hands into fists of the flowing skirts of the dress she wore that day and drawing blood on the crystals that were littering it.

“There now, friends, we should be better than such squabbles. Mammon, we’re supposed to be having a good time - not letting humans get under our skin,” The only familiar and even sometimes friendly voice cut through the tension as if to distract from the flickering starts of a fight, and as Vassago rose to his feet - Jo felt the pressure on her back lifting almost completely from her shoulders as he flung a hand wide. “Besides, what would it look like to let some little girl get any sort of reaction from such basic words?”

For her it was a long moment before she recovered from the struggling against the power forcing her downwards, to jerk into an up-righted kneeling position - eyes going straight to the two unknown men’s faces with the fury from that time surging through her. Neither were familiar, neither looked particularly interesting or like the vision she had had in her mind of the demon she planned to torture to the brink of insanity if she ever managed to locate and get her hands on them. One was a strikingly interesting looking man who was reclined in an armchair with what she thought was far too much style over substance from the look of him; while the other was a little rougher looking and was staring down the sneering woman rather than noticing anything else at that moment.

“There’s a human?” There was a thick accent to the new man nearest her’s voice as he spoke, something Scandinavian or European but she couldn’t work it out any clearer than that, as he turned his attention about the room as if searching for a sign. Jo bit down on the corner of her lip to stop from smiling at the theatrics now that the pressure was off of her neck and the coin-counter was determinedly keeping from looking at her as he had before. “Ah! There it is. What is another human doing off the racks?”

“Another?! I’ll have you know this one is a unique collectors item, Furfur-”

“I think not. I saw three of them just last year in old Lilith’s quarters-”

“You saw no such thing-!”

“Of course I did. Bit worse for wear than your own perhaps though.” The demon replied casually, shifting in his seat as he raised a brow across at the spluttering host with a tiny, almost imperceptible twitch of his lips. Jo wasn’t sure if the name made sense to her, but she was sure he’d be listed somewhere when she got back to her room to read up on this next demon with a scowl. Next second, her scowl transformed into a look of shock as she looked towards the other newcomer as Furfur added, “You recall seeing them, don’t you Amon?”

“There’s not supposed to be humans running free in Hell,” The words were practically growled out from the Marquis as he tilted a head curiously across the space towards their host for the event. Jo could barely hear any of the words as the itch as to what had struck a chord with her about the demonness’ words clicked in her mind. Struggling to her feet immediately, a flush growing across her cheeks and neck at the fabric swishing and catching around her legs so unlike anything she knew the other had ever seen her in, the blonde felt slightly woozy as she stared straight at the demon she’d never seen without the black, thick fur. “What have you done to find this one, Vassago?”

“For the third time - she was brought here by that pompous joke of a demon Crowley, and I just thought to...”

“Liberate her for yourself?”

“Yes, thank you dear, perfect. I just thought to liberate her for my own collection of interesting items.”

“Why did he-” Amon’s words cut off immediately as Jo finally found her eyes meeting his dead on, a strange look upon the strange face shifting as the sole demon that truly knew her in the room finally noticed her. Her blush got deeper at the slight tilt of the Marquis’ head and the tiny crease that formed between his brows as he stared back at her. There was a long, tense and quiet moment, for her - though she was sure there was someone talking from the dull sounds of voices she could hear but not take in - before the demon jerked out of his chair sharply. “What is she doing here?”

“Does nobody listen to me when I speak?” The host’s voice held a tinge of frustration as he sank back into his armchair and if Jo had looked she would have seen him rubbing at his worn temples with a sigh. “What does it matter what she’s doing here? I’ve decided to keep her for now while I uncover why the girl got removed from the rack so early-”

“You mean you don’t know? I would think it was fairly clear what that fool took her for.” Gremory replied, twirling her own wine glass between one hand and gently swirling the contents. “Or has it been that long for you?”

“You know he’d never dare without your consent, Gremory.” The Dane’s words got a triumphant and smug look from the blonde, while the host sank deeper into his seat with a weary sigh.

“Why does it matter to the Marquis though what it is doing here-” Mammon’s voice cut over the other’s with the telltale clinking sound of his coins continuing to pile and stack over themselves. “Amon, what does it matter to you?” There was a pause as all five demon’s turned towards the now standing demon as he continued to pin Jo with a perplexed frown. “Amon, Marquis, what-”

“What are you doing here?” The man let out a wolfish growl as her stepped towards her, and Jo found herself stumbling back a step away from him as he approached, hands tugging and holding her hemline up just enough to avoid stepping on it as well as be prepared to flee at a moment’s notice. “Why aren’t you-”

“Demonic? Crowley likes his existence too much.” She found herself replying quietly as she took another two steps back at the approaching demon’s bulk, feeling very much as if she was staring down the monstrously sized wolf she was used to rather than just a rather tall man. There was a harsh growl in response to her words that had her stumbling back again, tripping over her skirts as she whispered out quietly, “I... I’m waitin’ for him-”

“Ah, ah, ah, Jo, don’t go sharing secrets I don’t want out.” The timing of the voice, laced with amusement was impeccable to always arrive at the worst possible time for her. Over the bulk of the Marquis’ shoulder, she could see the bemused smirk of the Scottish demon standing in the now open doorway to Vassago’s stolen domain. “Besides, I doubt the dog would be particularly interested in your tall tales.”

“I am very interested, actually.” The words were gritted out, and Jo couldn’t help but think the flash of fury across the demon’s face as Amon ran an eye over her again meant something may have been misinterpreted as he drew closer to her. “Since where does a Crossroads demon have the right to remove souls from the pit, Crowley?”

“Since now, Marquis.”

“The Leprechaun thinks he is above the heirachy it seems-” The cold tone from the couch came like a whip, Mammon’s eyes focussed upon the interloper with a disdainful look. “As if a little term from a group of cowards validates him in some way.”

“Perhaps he is still spreading for the first one after all?”

“Gremory, dear, you may have just struck on the truth-”

“Isn’t that the Marquis’ area of expertise?”

“True to that, Amon what say you? ...Amon?”

Jo barely heard a word of the bickering and snickering demons as she found herself staring up at the glaring seventh demon’s face as he stared her down. It felt like the concept of hell being hot and sweltering finally made sense under his glare, a trickle of sweat rolling down her open back as the blonde tried to restrain from blurting out all of the questions she had - how was he doing, what was he doing, where was he, why hadn’t he come for her yet.

“What are you doing here, how come you’re not turned yet?” Amon’s voice was exceptionally quiet under the sound of the bickering behind them, and Jo felt herself sucking in a breath as the demon’s yellow eyes flashed between her and where Crowley had moved another step into the room with a speculative look on his face. “What are you doing with him?”

“Crowley took me down for- I told him that Gre-”

“Don’t say his name.”

“I.. I’m waiting for him, and Crowley just.. took-”

“I saw an opportunity, Marquis,” The King of the Crossroads seemed to appear at her side, as if he had known immediately the pair left unobserved by the bantering demon group would talk and talk of something that Jo knew the other would not appreciate. She felt her implorying stare shifting into a furious glare as a hand spread across the bare skin at the base of her back, thumb rubbing almost possessively across her skin. “And little Joanna is a fantastic piece of ass, I mean entertainment in the mean time, isn’t that right darling?”

Jo opened her mouth to snap back at him, only to be interrupted by the sound of a barked laugh from the group behind them. “Oh Vassago, you really have been lying as much as myself, haven’t you?”

“I’ve no idea what you mean by such a claim.”

“Attempting to pass off Crowley’s flavor of the month as if it is anything special?” The Dane asked with the blankest of looks as he surveyed the glaring trio, eyes moving from Jo’s face to those of the demons on either side of her with a considering look. There was something a little too know in his face, and the way he quirked a brow up at the tall Irish-formed demon made Jo shudder, before slapping a hand out at the stroke of the fingers against the line of her dress after it. Furfur appeared to stare down the seventh demon as he spoke aloud to the group, “Perhaps that is the truth of all your so called finds though, Vassago. After all, how valuable can one really call an artwork by some little human who’s name no longer exists in the world, what is the worth of some jewel that can be recreated through science these days. What is the worth of some little girl that a known man-whore has taken on?”

There was the sound of a sigh, and Jo could feel her lips twisting at the familiarity of Vassago’s frustrated noise from the demon - he made it often enough when Jo would dance around or deny him an answer as to why she was removed from the rack, after all. “From what I have discovered, it’s more flavor of the decade than month, Furufr.”

“Really? You’ve kept to one for a decade, red-eyes? My my, perhaps you’ve gone native.” Naberius’ voice cracked out, and Jo could see the way Crowley’s eyes flashed for the briefest second to their black depths in reaction to the call, before the other added sharply. “And such a dull choice of one from the look of it.”

“Oh that is it!” Jo snapped out sharply at that comment. Shaking her head though, Jo gave her own sigh before jerking away from the grip of the Crossroads King and tall wolfish demon. “You know what? It’s really not necessary my bein’ here for you all to speculate upon my existence.” Shaking her head again and brushing past the demons near her, she barely restrained herself from stomping a foot as she looked at the Danish demon with a scowl. “I am not a flavor or anythin’ like that, I am not dull or boring, and I am not a trinket, a cockroach or a plaything. What I am is sick of you all.” As she hissed the words out, Jo found herself turning her gaze to each of the assembled and sitting demon lords, as if her words would have any impact or anything but trouble for speaking up.

There was a short second, before Jo found herself struggling for breath as if a force grabbed her around the ribs tightly and was beginning to boil her from the inside, and the next moment she was standing in the centre of her own room as Crowley moved to pour himself a drink from his drink cart.

“Wha-”

“What happened?” The other asked, swirling the brown liquid in his glass with a small smirk. “What happened was you were about to be obliterated by one, or maybe it was more than one, of those elitist fools, darling. You almost got yourself splattered across my walls and I would hate to have to put you back together again, Jo.”

Jo found herself gaping for a moment before she moved to sink down in the seat beside the other with a sigh. She’d not gone there expecting anything that day - Vassago had said something about his wife being around and wanting to show Jo off to her, but she did not expect the sheer number of demons, the sheer power that would fill he room, and especially not the wolf-in-human-clothing to be there.

There was a quiet moment as Crowley sipped his drink, before she grabbed the glass from his hands and polished off the liquor herself with a hiss - thinking over how strange it was to feel more comfortable with the King of the Crossroads than with his best demon friend.

---

#au stories #jopov #crowleypov

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shinobicyrus · 7 years ago

Text

Monster Heart

A late, late entry for Ectober Day 6 because I am bad with deadlines. Decided to do ‘Shipwreck,’ with a bit of a sci-fi/horror theme. Warnings for squicky alien biotechnology.

Computers aren’t known for their sympathy. Just efficiency.

The shipboard AI pitilessly shocks Valerie back into consciousness like it’s turning on just another machine. Her whole body locks rigid like a muscle spasm, heart pounding and drowning in stims as her mouth gasps agape with a throat that can’t scream and intake oxygen at the same time.

Eventually, the agony subsides and she slumps in the cockpit’s heavy-gee couch, body and brain swimming in exhaustion and a chemical cocktail sharpening her nerves into a raw razor. Training helps her keep her last meal down instead of getting into her helmet. The suit would eventually clean it, but never thoroughly enough to get rid of the smell.

MAD-E pipes up in that calm, motherly voice its programmers thought was soothing. “Welcome Back, Lieutenant Gray!”

Valerie is unsoothed.

She’s painfully aware of every sore, aching inch of herself. Each inhale presses down hard on her chest, but she manages to rasp: “Status.”

“Emergency landing maneuver successful! We have touched down on Nova Ventura with only thirty-four percent damage to-”

“What happened?”

“On the twenty second of July, at approximately zero-three hundred hours standard, coded orders from the-”

“To me, you glitchy pile of-”

“Of course, Lieutenant,” MAD-E says agreeably. “I’m afraid you sustained life-threatening injuries on impact, despite the forced landing countermeasures. You were put into emergency stasis until the pod’s medical program and your internal nanites could repair the damage.”

That would explain the splitting headache, yeah. “How long was I out?”

“Stasis was initiated thirty-six hours, twenty seven minutes ago.”

“Good thing I get paid by the hour.” Valerie raises a palm and brings up the holo-displays with a thought. The walls of her pod buzz to life- most just showing black and three-dimensional scrolling text the computer diagnostic is spitting out. Her fingers tap at the controls and she’s given another error notice. “I can’t raise anyone on comms.”

“Communication with the Hartmann and other support elements was cut off thirty-three hours, thirteen minutes ago.”

A cold claw of dread squeezes something in her chest. “Cut off?”

“A signal of unknown origin is interfering with communications and long-range sensors. If there are still friendly elements in this system, we have no way of contacting them- or even ascertaining if they are even there.”

Valerie slumps in her gee-harness, suddenly feeling worlds heavier. “So we’re on our own.”

"For the moment, Lieutenant.” It goes for soothing again.

Like hell.

Valerie sweeps aside the mess of diagnostics and accesses the hatch controls. “Lieutenant,” MAD-E says, chiding. “I do not recommend egress at this time. Forced-Landing Protocol states-”

“First Lieutenant Valerie M. Gray, Lexic: Red Nine-Two-Four Slash-Wolf-Vee. Override Code: Shut Up and Do The Thing.”

“Override Accepted.”

Either the Hartmann and her entire wing were debris up in orbit, or the battle is still dragging on. Both options mean there are still hostiles in-system. Maybe even on the planet with her. Staying put in a tin can like a good little regulation soldier strikes her as a profoundly bad plan.

The pod floods with hissing mist as the pressure equalizes and hatch finally blows open. Valerie’s helmet visor immediately darkens so she isn’t blinded by the rush of natural light.

Crashing at Mach-3 and laying in a death-coma for thirty hours would give anyone sore legs. Valerie still manages to climb out of what’s left of her fighter. She’s outside, her pod resting in a crater-bed of cracked insta-crete on the rooftop of some building. There’s an entire city skyline behind her, fresh nanofactured towers barely a few years old glittering like diamonds in the shine of an alien sun. One of them has a hole in it, clean as a gunshot, lining up where Valerie’s pod had finally come to a rest.

“Damn,” Valerie whistles. “Any landing you can walk away from.”

From the quick briefing they’d all gotten before dropping in-system, estimates had Nova Ventura at around fifty thousand colonists. Not bad for a fresh terraform on the rim.

Walking down the street, sidearm ready in her hand, Valerie didn’t find a single person left.

Everywhere the juxtaposition of life: lights, scrolling holo-advertisments, parked cars, half-finished meals spoiling on outdoor cafe tables; but no people. No indications of a struggle. A dropped bag here, a crashed groundcar there. Hell, the worst damage in the city was caused by Valerie when she crashed.

There hadn’t even been a distress signal. It took days for people to figure out that something was wrong. The Hartmann just had the luck of being the closest ship that could investigate.

She almost jumps straight out of her suit when a shop’s automatic door slides open at her presence, raising her gun at cheerful holograms. Re-purposed pop-songs for last year’s fashion lines echo down the hollow streets. Valerie chuckles a little to herself, tension leaking as she lowers her pistol. The outer colonies were always behind on the trends.

“Mads?”

“Two-point-six kilometers ahead,” it reported, no irritation at being asked for the sixth time that hour.

MAD-E had reported when Valerie made it down to street level that there were signs another ship had crashed. Residual radiation from engine wake, unusual EM readings...the great big collapsed building Valerie could spot from the roof.

“Still no contacts on motion, heat, or biometric sensors,” MAD-E reports.

“Any change upstairs?”

“My attempts to cycle through all military and civilian bands remain unsuccessful.”

“Great.”

Valerie decided to keep her helmet on. MAD-E had said there were no detectable bio-chemical agents or radiation. Yeah, real assuring- no telling what the hell happened down here.

Normally, hiking the streets of a completely habitable colony would have a literal walk in the park. Fresh off a patch-job on her bones, head, half of her internal organs, it feels like barely holding together with nothing more some little robots and teeth-grinding stubbornness. Even with the the suit picking up the slack every breath is effort, every step is a fresh ache on a somewhere she didn’t even know could bruise.

Machine efficiency, of course. MAD-E didn’t care how uncomfortable Valerie is, only that she’s functioning.

Three blocks from the crash, street signs and wall screens flash warnings in a flurry of different languages and universal symbols for ‘get the hell away from here.’ Even without any people the city’s automation is still trying to respond to the emergency of a spaceship crash downtown. All citizens were advised to vacate the area with assurances that emergency personnel are ‘being dispatched.’

Too bad there’s no one left. Poor dumb computer’s probably trying to figure out why the slow response time.

Danger! Peligro! Achtung!

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you.”

She steps over the emergency barricades that have sprouted up from the road, ignores the persistent warnings (Zorgema! 危険!) and passive-aggressive holographic legal notices about failing to respond to municipal instructions during an emergency situation. A path of destruction carves right through the main thoroughfare, flattened groundcars practically embedded into pulverized insta-crete. Long furrows swipe across building faces like scratches from enormous claws.

There’s less dust and smoke than Valerie expects- maybe cleaned up by municipal nanites that are supposed to keep the air clear. The crash site ends at an intersection, crashing into a building when it ran out of road. Valerie’s boots crunch glass shards and pulverized road as she heads towards it.

She almost slips on something and loses her footing. Swearing, she lifts up her boot and sees a glowing greenish fluid- like she stepped in a broken glow-stick.

“The fuc-”

Oh.

Oh shit.

A surge of adrenaline rushes through her, spiced with dread and danger. Her pulse pounds in the narrow confines of her helmet. The canyon of the buildings press around her, menace at every angle.

Le Danger! A sign says. Valerie agrees, but still approaches the end of the road, pistol raised.

(It’s not enough, just a measly little peashooter. She needs to be strapped in, enclosed in her cockpit pod- grip tight on the control yokes)

“I should have stayed in the pod,” Valerie mutters.

“I would agree, but I have been prohibited from speaking about the Forced Landing Protocols.”

Bucketfuls of lambent green stains smears down the street, a path for her follow. The air is thicker at ground zero, clogged with dust, but its still enough for Valerie to make out the shape of the ship.

It’s enough to recognize it: the blurry, blown-up images on her displays. An elusive sensor profile. A black shape against a blue sky, blurring past when Valerie slammed the air brakes in an ill-advised maneuver.

Valerie’d seen enough crashes to piece together what had happened. Hit the street skidding until a bad angle twisted it into a rolling tumble, stopping only when it crashed into the side of a building. Laid out on its side like a beached whale.

No, smaller than a whale, but the comparison is too accurate. The thing looks more like a dead animal than a shipwreck- cracked iridescent black plating like a bug’s chitinous exoskeleton. The sickening bend of its fuselage reminds Valerie of cracked bone. More green fluid pools beneath it, fed by a steady drip.

"Jesus, you guys are ugly up close.” Valerie tells it.

Dogfights were for fantasy sims and anachronistic biplanes. Most engagements were hundreds if not thousands of kilometers away, the enemy just green blips and sensors ghosts on screens. Never with her own flesh eyes. Never close enough to reach out and touch.

Not that Valerie would actually walk up and poke the goddamn alien ship. That would be beyond stupid. She was a combat pilot- screened, trained, and tested. A veteran of a three-dozen combat missions- a goddamn professional.

...she also has no idea what to do now. She doesn’t think she’s ever heard of anything like this happening, before.

After weighing her options, Valerie decides to hunkers down and observe the thing from a presumably safe vantage point behind some rubble. Watching it for for any signs of activity.

No heat or energy fluctuations. Nothing on the EM band save the slowly dissipating particle trail from its engine wake. No activity coming from it at all except the slow and steady drip of green fluid on the broken insta-crete, pothole puddles vaguely glowing like a cartoonish caricature of ancient nuclear waste, because how stupid had nuclear-age humans been before space colonization, right?

An hour goes by. Two. Still nothing on comms either, that makes over twenty-one hours of radio silence. Valerie cleans her gun five or six times, suggests MAD-E try one trick or another that it has probably already tried before, but will do again anyway if only to humor her. She tries to weigh all the worse-case scenarios she knows are horribly likely with all the less-grim reasons why she couldn’t get a hold of anyone friendly. It doesn’t really help.

Maybe they really were all dead, and she’s the last survivor.

(Drip drip drip, the ship bleeds)

That still wouldn’t explain why everything was still being jammed, if the battle was over and done with. If the enemy won, why weren’t they sweeping for stragglers, or coming to collect their fallen buddy? Was that even something they cared about? Rescuing wounded, collecting their dead?

Fucking aliens. They made no sense. No declarations, no demands. Just death and a dozen outer colonies scared shitless from the horror of humanity’s first real glimpse at an unknown that nature never intended them to meet.

It’s not lost on her how much the wreck almost resembles an old DP-4 starfighter. As though they tried to make their own cheap knockoff by...growing it, or something. Used to be they took less conventional forms. The classic squiddies: amorphous, protean things that swam through space and captured ships with their tendrils. Or those sharp angled fast-movers that were like the skeletons of winged, alien predators.

Others were immense and asteroid sized- impossible geometric shapes that fizzled out sensors and gave pilots vertigo if you tried to look at if for too long instead of shooting it. No two were ever the same, each one a species all their own.

Now there were these new...ship-shaped ones; no one had answers, but everyone had a theory. Are they adapting to human tactics? Or is it all just single-celled mindlessness, evolutionary mechanisms reacting to new stimuli without any real intelligence or malice? For all they knew, the whole damn war is an gigantic misunderstanding between two races that were so different it’s impossible to understand the other. The death toll just a side-effect of bad communication.

Valerie doesn’t care for that last theory.

A practiced flick of her eyes summons the clock in the corner of her helmet display. Hour three and still nothing from the wreck. Maybe it really is dead, and Valerie’s gotten herself skittish over what amounted to giant roadkill. The slowly building restlessness that’s been building since Valerie woke up, the ingrained military need to do something accumulating in her like itch, all the maddening for being ignored.

...oh hell, she’s gonna go poke it, isn’t she?

A growl escapes between her teeth- half determination, half berating herself. She checks her sidearm again, as it would do shit against that thing’s hull if it did try to pounce. Still, it was a security blanket. A 5 millimeter security blanket.

Valerie steps out of cover, gunsight trained on the bogey, still inert and dripping. Minds her footing to avoid the worse of the smears of green fluid that still show no sign of drying up.

Closer. Closer. This is what it must have been like for some ancient ancestor, stalking up to a mammoth as it slept. Roar, I am woman, Fear my pointy stick, giant sky-monster.

Just an arm’s length away, now, and so far Valerie isn’t dead. Clearly, the gods have blessed this hunt.

Up close she can see the damage (wounds, she almost wants to say, but doesn’t): holes piercing the hull, fist-sized and larger that could only be hits from a fighter’s kinetic guns. Valerie raises up her hand and feels the edges of one of the bullet-holes.

(Grip on the yokes, thumbs on the toggles, threading the needle at mach six.)

Valerie feels a swell of satisfaction. She might have gotten shot down, but she sure as hell didn’t go down alone. “Bullseye, you alien fuck.”

Touching the thing’s hull, Valerie feels a vibration from deep inside, shuddering through her suit right down to her bones. Like a purr without a sound- the low reverberation notes of some great undersea thing, immense and mourning.

HolymotherofstarspangledChrist that thing is still alive.

Valerie springs back like she’s been burned, gun raised on instinct. The hand is still tingling, her grip numb and insubstantial. The need to be airborne hits her like a phantom ache. Grip on the yokes, thumbs on the toggles, flick a switch so she could shred it apart with her cannons.

She waits for the feeling to come back to her hand. “Mads? What was that?”

"Please specify.”

“I just felt something from inside that thing. Like...like...a vibration, or something.”

“I did not detect any variances in the ship’s hull.”

“So it’s just a coincidence it did that when I touched it?”

“There is no indication that the vessel has the capability to perceive individual lifeforms of your size, were it operational.” MAD-E’s reply is even and calm, but Valerie friggin’ hears the ‘lol look at the dumb human’ in its tone. “I can only theorize it was psychosomatic, perhaps an adrenal response to being in close proximity to something you have instinctively registered as dangerous.”

If it was alive before- if a thing like this could even qualify- did that make what just happened its death throes? One last whimper before it was finally spent?

Well...its engines are still cold. It’s not going anywhere. She ain’t gonna scurry off like a dog running from a cleaner bot. Enough jumping at nothing. Time for morbid curiosity cleverly disguised as critical intelligence gathering.

A few cautious, gingerly steps in the slick green mess of whateverthefuck, Valerie's boots slide like she’s skating on grease. Easy Gray, don’t want to fall ass-first in the alien juice- be embarrassing on the footage playbacks.

The biggest...wound is at the neck of it, broke like two halves of a snapped twig still stubbornly hanging onto each other. Probably happened when it first crashed into the street nose-first. Now there’s a gaping hole- cracked hull and gooey insides like an egg.

The...shell is scraped all to hell with the world’s worst case of road rash. It also looks more...melted at the mouth of the wound. Heat from entering the atmosphere...or maybe it was a sign of it slowly repairing the damage? Healing itself? This was way above her paygrade.

Still: know your enemy, like The Lance would say. He loved to throw out proverbs like that from those ancient books of his.

“Okay squiddy, let’s get to know each other a little.” Yeah, perfect. Let’s stick our head in the probably-but-maybe-not dead alien ship creature thing like a disposable side-character in a horror sim. Why the fuck not.

Oh hell, her jumpsuit is even red. Foley would have a goddamn field day.

Needing both hands for this, Valerie holstered her gun gripped the sides of the hole, and hoisted herself up into the belly of the beast.

¡Cuidado!

If this thing was...alive, its insides weren’t anything like dissection in science class. She’s in a cavity lined with a white fibrous membrane filled snaking tubes like veins and thousands of hair-thin strands branching off in every direction. It’s a twisting, coiling mess that reminds her of fungal closeups under a microscope. A marriage of biology and architecture.

Jesus. This is officially the most disgusting thing she’s ever seen. The record has been set for all-time, never to be surpassed. Why is she even doing this again?

“This is very exciting!!” MAD-E chirps.

“You want to trade places? Be my guest.”

“If only!” it replies with disturbing sincerity. “I will have to be satisfied with purely vicarious observation.”

“Yeah, guess I’m just born lucky.”

She decides to follow the snaking cords- some as thick as her arm, others thin as straws from a fizzy-bottle. More than a few were torn and leaking new and exciting fluids, white and snotty. Follows their route further into the main body of the ship-thing.

The cords and wires terminated at the base of the neck, right before the main body of the ship. Some kind of round...organ....sack? Big enough to wrap her arms around; a semi-solid translucent mass like an egg without a shell, layered in an iridescent film like oil on the surface of a bog. All of the sharp white hair-like things and the tubes were feeding into it.

“The hell?” Her emergency pack has a med-kit, she takes it out and waves a bio-scanner at the egg-sack. It was designed for finding cracked bones or dangerous pathogens- not amateur xeno-biology. Whatever. Close enough for government work.

“Mads?”

“The scanner is detecting electrical signals coming from the unknown mass, too complex to be random discharges.”

“Is it...a control unit, maybe? A brain?”

“Unknown.”

"Great,” Valerie mutters.

It doesn’t quite...move, but beneath that sticky membrane is a hint of swirling viscosity. Like a squirming bacteria or a dollop from her dad’s antique “lava lamp” he insists is “cool.” As if lava is supposed to be cold.

So, like a moron who has already peaked at ‘huge idiot’, Valerie slowly stretches out her hand and lays it flat on the thing’s surface. It’s...surprisingly firm, soft but not a lot of give. It’s hard to get much sensation through her gloves.

Then the shadow of another hand touches hers from the fucking inside of it.

Valerie screams and pulls away so sharply she slips on green sludge underfoot and falls backwards out of the hole, landing hard on her back onto the goop-stained pavement below. Not as rough as her earlier landing, but it’s a rude reminder. She lays there for...a while, panting hard and swimming in the agony like a pulled muscle- but everywhere.

She waits out it, mind still reeling because: “What. The. Fuck.”

“Lieutenant Gray, are you alright?”

“What the fuck was that?!” She never thought she’d be grateful to have MAD-E with her- ever- but having something to talk to that could at least talk back...Well, if anything she’s got a newfound appreciation for those stupid programmers or whoever the hell thought up having a computer-nanny momming into her ear.

“You saw that right? Tell me you saw that.”

“Image recorders captured what appeared to be-”

“There’s...there’s a fucking person in there!”

“Based on the dimensions of the hand, that would be a likely conclusion.”

“Marvel of technology, you are.” Getting up felt like high-gee in basic again. Pushing past the pain, Valerie climbs back up into the hole and crouches in front of the egg sack thing again. The thing with a fucking person inside it.

Oh God. Is...is that what happened to the colonists here? To the crew of all the ships that vanished on the Periphery, the people in the orbital space stations and asteroid habs? There were never any remains- no bodies to recover. Just dark, gutted, and exposed to hard vacuum. Were they all ripped away, processed, shoved into the guts of a monster-ship to be used against their own families like parts?

“Lieutenant Gray, your heart rate is elevated.”

She has to. Needs to. Not just...stand there...gawking. Rummaging through the crash kit doesn’t yield a whole lot of options to work with: extra clips, repair tools, med kit, nutrient packs, a deployable lean-to.

Tycho Station was a floating cloud of debris ten trillion miles away and this whole colony’s gone Croatoan, like old spacers whisper about over engine-room moonshine. Valerie is going to save one goddamn person for once.

“Lieutenant, I am recommending you have your suit administer a mild sedative.”

The repair tools? No, those were designed for patching up ships, the plasma torch would probably hurt whoever was in there. Wait. A standard combat knife. Whose bright idea even was that? She flies fifty billion dollar star fighters; a knife is goddamn neolithic. Still, there’s a satisfying shnk as she yanks it from its sheath.

By now, MAD-E’s probably figured out what she’s planning. “Lieutenant. I don’t think-”

“Shut up and just keep recording.” If she’s going to play amateur alien dissection, might as well have some documentation. Yeah, nice home movies. Put that on the net, she’ll be a star.

The knife’s a carbon composite, manufactured by industrious little nanobots on the cheap, shaping the blade down to the nanometer. There’s barely any resistance at all when she stabs it into the oily membrane. She put too much force into it, expecting more resistance. She’s already wrist-deep in it, has to pull back her arm to try again. There’s some suction- like it’s almost try to pull her into it. Yanking her arm free, she goes at it with a lighter touch. More precise. At least pretend she knows what the hell she’s doing.

Distantly, Valerie knows she should be disgusted by this. Crawling into some alien thing and carving her way through it like a burrowing carrion eater. She’s goddamn Jane the Ripper, striking fear into all the little aliens. If the Hartmann’s really gone and this thing’s buddies come to find a crazy goo-covered human with a knife, at least they’ll have a story to tell.

She remembers herself, gets tangled in the fungal cords like a mess of wiring. Yanks the knife free and starts sawing instead- less hack, more scalpel. Don’t want to shank the person she’s trying to rescue by mistake.

No commentary from MAD-E, obeying her order to letter. Just her own grunts and heavy breathing filling the helmet, the wet scraping noise of the blade meeting white tissue, the hiss of suction as the membrane splits open like a mouth.

“I-I don’t know if you can hear me in there,” Valerie starts babbling, “But just...hang on, okay? I’m almost- I think I’m almost through. We’re getting you out of there, Okay?” Goddamn it, just a little bit more.

(There hadn’t even been a body, at her mother’s service. Just the artifice of an empty urn. No one to say goodbye to.)

She slices through something big. Green water the color of rotted limes hits Valerie full-on like a floodbreak, rushing past her and escaping the hole behind her to pool outside, as if it wasn’t a mess already.

And just like that, Valerie finds them.

Their skin matches the soft issue of the ship’s innards: washed-out white like antiseptic bleach. At first she doesn’t understand what she’s found until she hears a soft gasp. They try to move- a pale, painfully thin arm lifts towards her, reaching. Valerie grabs it and they recoil, struggle, try to pull away, but they’re so weak it’s hardly any effort at all to hold on.

She tries to pull, almost loses her grip. Their skin is slick, covered in more of that oily, goopy crap.

“It’s okay! I’m not trying to hurt you! I’m getting you out of this, okay?”

More of those cords and wires get in the way, like they’re tied up in- oh. Oh God. It takes a minute to fully process what it is she’s seeing: that shit is...fused to them. Like they’re plugged into the goddamn ship. Jesus, as if this isn’t already enough of a horror show.

Whatever this crap is, it wasn’t made to be sturdy. Just thrashing around on their own is enough to snap and tear some of the tangle. It has to hurt too, with how pained mewling their gasps are getting as more of the mess breaks off.

Fuck it. Time to rip off the galaxy’s nastiest band-aid. Valerie hacks away at the thickest of them, simultaneously fighting the nausea in her throat. The knife has to go back into its sheath messy- she needs both arms to get a good grip under their armpits and pulls back with all the force she can muster. They continue to thrash limply, probably too confused to understand what’s happening to them.

The legs are the last to go, too-white and slick. Valerie watches them slide out of what’s left of the ruined egg sack with a final sucking sound until all of them is free. Almost falls backwards on her ass, again.

It’s a pain to climb out of the hull. Everything's been washed in more gross alien goop and Valerie needs both arms to hold onto them steady. Leftover green stuff patters from the edges of the hole onto the ground like dripping rain.

“There we go, I got you. It’s okay. You’re safe now, alright? I got you, I promise.” Dammit, is she even doing this right? Talking to shell-shocked civilians- nevermind victims of alien abductions- wasn’t exactly covered in flight school.

She looks down to check her footing and- oh. She’s a girl, thin and frail looking in Valerie’s arms. Her skin is caked in an oily film of greenish spume, giving her a sickly pallor. Pieces of those cords and wires still dangle off her skin like hangnails. Her hair is an oily rope hanging heavy off her limp head, washed-out white as the rest of her.

Boots back down on solid ground- the girl is spasming pathetically in her arms, barely any trouble. She’s so damn light, Valerie doubts she even needs the nanites in her muscle fibers to carry her.

The girl makes a choking sound and coughs, hacking up more of the gooey crap.

“That’s it, let it out.” Valerie coaches her. “Try to breathe.”

It becomes obvious that’s she’s not, though. It doesn’t sound like choking anymore, more like a desperate wheezing of someone slowly suffocating.

“What’s wrong?” Valerie instantly feels stupid for asking. The girl’s gasping like an asthma attack, squirming like she can somehow wrestle air into her lungs.

Valerie puts her down on the least uncomfortable-looking patch of gooey road and fumbles with the med-kit’s scanner. “What’s wrong with her?”

Shut-up order officially rescinded, MAD-E syncs with the scanner and starts pouring over the data it’s pulling from her. Come on, come on, if it could put Valerie back together again it should be able to help her, too.

“The patient’s lungs are dangerously underdeveloped,” MAD-E is unaffected even as the girl imitates a suffocating fish. “She needs a proper medical facilities with the ability to augment or stimulate their growth.”

“We don’t have ‘proper facilities!’”

“Working. The medical kit: second row, third vial from the left.”

MAD-E walks her through preparing the dosage. This, Valerie can do. She keys in the proper delivery ratio into the injector gun, then presses the business end on the girl’s chest.

Valerie warns, “Sorry, this is gonna hurt.” and fires.

From the looks of it, it does. She jerks and goes rigid, whimpering while the dose of nanites goes straight to her heart. Valerie hovers over her with the scanner while they start being distributed through her entire circulatory system, oxygenating her blood directly to compensate for her weak lungs. Within a minute, her breathing isn’t nearly as labored.

“That was only a temporary measure,” MAD-E says. “She will need another injection in four hours, or her respiratory condition will deteriorate.”

“Temporary is good. I can work with temporary. Set a reminder for me.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

Breathing easier, the girl hugs herself and shivers. Right, one problem solved, on to the next.

The survival kit has what she needs. Valerie places a fist-sized disc on the girl’s bare back, still pockmarked with angry green wounds from where the cords had been torn loose. They’re all over her; arms, her legs, the prominent ladder of her ribcage. Valerie pushes a button on the disk and watches the material flatten and spread itself over the girl’s skin until forms a simple white and black jumpsuit. Not nearly advanced as Valerie’s flight-suit, but enough to regulate her temperature, monitor her vitals, and is a touch preferable to nudity.

There’s also a heat-reflective blanket, which Valerie expands and drapes over her. Even asleep she instinctively wraps it around herself and curls smaller into herself.

MAD-E reads the data from the jumpsuit. “Her vitals are holding steady for now, Lieutenant. I think this is a good opportunity for you to get some rest as well.”

The last thing on Valerie’s to-do list is to sleep within 10 klicks of a goddamn alien monster ship, dead or no. But seeing the girl wrapped in her blanket flips a toggle in Valerie’s head, like the weight of everything that had happened since she’d woken up six hours ago finally settled into her, like gravity-sickness.

Guess her body isn’t counting being in stasis for thirty-six hours as proper sleep.

First step is a proper camp. The girl doesn’t stir when Valerie picks her up, blanket and all, and sets her a few more meters away from the crash, back near the rubble piles Valerie used as cover before. Not much of an improvement, but at least they’re not completely out in the open, anymore. She lays out a few thumbnail-sized security sensors around the perimeter and sets up a UV lamp in the middle for when it starts to get dark. There, now all they need are those marshmallow and graham cracker ration packs the brass won’t approve for inscrutable reasons.

Sitting is a more complex maneuver than Valerie remembers. Maybe carving her way into a giant alien corpse-ship was a thing that you shouldn’t do while recovering from a near-fatal crash. Maybe not. The universe may never know. Her only blanket is currently being hogged by the new addition. The crash-kit also has the deployable lean-to, but the idea of getting that damn thing unfolded properly is a task she should have thought about while she was still on her feet. This nice pile of rubble she’s got her back up against will do just fine.

With a final what-the-hell, Valerie also pops the seals of her helmet and gets her first breath of fresh, un-recycled air since she was planetside three months ago; is immediately filled with regret and something else that makes her nose crinkle.

Oh. Right. The dead gutted space monster-ship. What an amazing smell she’s discovered.

Inaction looks to have been a signal for her entire body to start clamoring with a vengeance. Food not being a thing she’s had in technically two days, her stomach starts growling. Wonderful. The flavors are all universally bad, so it doesn’t much matter which ration pack she picks from the survival kit. Those hard-working little nanites floating around in her have to get their energy from somewhere.

She breaks the seal and starts sucking up flavored nutrient-gel through the nozzle. There was no escaping the slimy-goop bullshit today. Of course she could have just had the suit inject her with an infusion instead, but MAD-E would probably raise a fit about it being reserved for massive blood loss and other medical crap.

Valerie keeps slurping on her goop-dinner, watching the strange girl she pulled out of an alien ship sleep. Even scrunched up fitfully her pale face is ethereal in the lamplight; the shallow rise and fall of her assisted-breathing a pattern Valerie finds reassuring.

The packet falls half-deflated onto Valerie’s lap when she finally falls asleep.

Valerie doesn’t realize she’d dozed off until a noise wakes her. She’s reaching for holster before she’s even half-awake, faltering when it registers that its the tell-tale siren-call of the heat blanket, crinkling loudly like a crackling fire.

The solar lamp had turned itself on when the sun set, casting soft light over their little makeshift campground. At the edge is the shape of the wreck, a looming dead presence like the bones of some primeval beast. Valerie shivers from a half-dissolved dream: a hunting shadow slithering over a field of stars, the red glow of her emergency cockpit lights, the fear of being buried alive in a universe’s worth of nothing.

She breathes deep and almost welcomes the bracing rot. At least it wakes her up.

The girl is already awake herself, sitting up and wrapped in her blanket like an extra-large ration pack. Most of that gunk from the ship’s innards looks like it’s finally dried off into a tacky, flaked mess. Her snowy hair is stained and matted in crusty clumps.

She doesn’t acknowledge that Valerie had woken up at all. Too busy examining her own hands in the lantern-light with a peculiar fascination.

“How are you feeling?”

The girl looks up at the sound of Valerie’s voice and-

It’s like being back up in the sky again, seeing streak of green plasma blur past her ship in the corner of her eye. Never saw the one that hit her engines and sent her in an uncontrolled spin- tore her out of the sky.

Her eyes are bright, luminous green. As piercing as those shots, impossible and strangely beautiful.

“Lieutenant.” MAD-E says.

A wire of tension unspools in her. Valerie is surprised to find her hand tight around the grip of her gun.

Valerie finally grasps the edges of her mistake, slippery for all the alien goopsnot. That isn’t the glowy-eyed, thousand yard stare of young civilian still reeling from the trauma of a violent abduction.

“What is hell is this, Mads,” it’s a demand, not a question.

“Underdeveloped lungs, muscle atrophy, deficiencies of vitamins D and K, calciu-”

“I’m talking about her fucking eyes.” She hisses, because they’re still goddamn staring at her.

“Based off the limited capabilities of the medical scanner, I cannot definitively-”

“MAD-E.”

“There were anomalous results from her genetic scan. I noted several unknown variations and genesets that do match any known human genome.”

Valerie could almost swear she felt her insides go still- breath, blood, and all. Just a few steps away the girl’s otherwordly eyes blinked, uncomprehending.

“Furthermore,” MAD-E goes on blithely, as if she hadn’t already dropped a fucking bombshell. “Despite the subject’s decreased bone density, her skeleton shows no detectable traces of breaks, stress fractures, or microfissures that would be present for a human in her age range.”

That...shouldn’t be possible. Even with nanites or collagen regeneration, there was always going to be scarring. Signs of damage and healing. Of...of...living.

Unless.

“How old is she, Mads?” Valerie asks quietly, eyes never leaving the girl.

She looks like she could be any average college co-ed. Skinny like someone raised in low-gravity, but not stretched out. Even the hair is pretty tame compared to the crazy augs some people did, but those eyes-

It’s not just the glowing. It’s the wide-eyed, naked bafflement of everything she’s looking at. Clueless as a kitten.

“Her telomeres have been altered, making the margin of error for any estimate-”

They-

They fucking grew her.

Had she ever been outside of that ship, before now? Even sitting up she was swaying unsteadily from the strain of her own weight. Forget walking, standing is probably beyond her at this point.

In the sky, it’d been a different story. Like trying to outswim a shark. A creature made for the Black. Picking off Valerie’s wingmates one.

By.

One.

Something in Valerie’s body language makes the...girl (the pilot, the heart of that monster) tilt her head, quizzically. Almost birdlike.

The gun’s out of its holster, sitting in Valerie's lap next to the unfinished ration pack. She never thought about its weight since the first time she had to pick up a gun in basic. The density. The complexity of so many moving parts just to fling a few grams of bullet faster than a pair of glowing alien eyes could see coming.

“Do you remember what it was like when you were in that thing?” Valerie gestures at the dark husk overlooking them with the gun. The alien-eyes remain fixed on her, captured by the sound of her words but deaf to the meaning. “Did you realize what it meant, when you shot those other ships down?”

She’d burned her engines past red and still couldn’t reach them before their radios let out an garbled scream and a burst of static that meant Orion and Hotshot hadn’t had time to eject. No waiting it out safe and cozy in stasis. Only the hard vacuum and the wreckage of their birds for company.

The girl doesn’t answer. Keeps watching Valerie with those bright, ghost-light eyes as though Valerie was the most perplexing puzzle. Keeps sitting there, wrapped in the foiling cape of her blanket. Like she’s waiting for Valerie to keep going.

Benign only in ignorance, she tells herself. If she understood the noise Valerie was making with her mouth, if Valerie told her that she’d been the one to bring her down, would that blank, soft face contort with a twisted snarl and try to lunge at her, atrophied muscles be damned?

No. She’s just grasping for any excuse to finish off the last living piece of that Thing that killed her wingmates. Leave her body in a puddle of goo next to her corpse-ship like they were floating cold in their own wreckage.

"This would be a lot easier if we were both back up there, instead of down here,” Valerie tells her.

A chime from her helmet on the ground beside her. “Lieutenant.”

Valerie stands up sharply, pistol still in her grip. Crosses the distance between them and stands over her.

The girl blinks up at Valerie. Her breath rasps.

Valerie crouches down in front of her and prepares a new dose. The weight of the injector in her other hand makes her feel titled. Off balance.

(Grip on the yokes, thumbs on the toggles, flick a switch and )

To her credit, the girl doesn’t even flinch. She puts her hand up to the injection site on her neck, grasping at her own steadying pulse. Valerie can almost hear the connections are being made. Basic animal cause and effect.

Valerie holsters her sidearm and lifts injector a hair higher. “That should keep you for a bit. You’ll need another injection in a few hours.”

The girl opens her mouth. “Jeck-shun” Her tongue stumbles on the syllables.

Valerie freezes in the middle of packing the kit back up. “...yeah. Jeck-shun. Close enough.”

“Klo Seenuff.”

Goddamn it that one actually makes Valerie burst out a surprised laugh. The girl tilts her head again at the unfamiliar sound.

Valerie stands up, considers the speculative look on the girl’s face. She turns around and walks back to her side of the camp and eases herself back down.

“You’re lucky I have a thing about strays.”

“Luh-key.”

“You have no idea.”

“Eye-Deeya.”

“You still recording this, Mads? Riveting stuff going on here.”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” it pipes up from Valerie's helmet.

She frowns with concentration. Valerie's tempted to almost call it adorable. “Loot..ten. Ant?”

“Congratulations, you officially say it better than Dash.”

“Dha-sha.”

Valerie sighs. “What am I going to do with you?”

Surprisingly, she doesn’t answer. Maybe it’s the tired resignation in Valerie's voice.

Whatever. Ultimately, the question was moot. A decision will be made all on its own, with or without Valerie's input. All there is to do is sit around and wait to see who drops out of the sky first.

The sky. Valerie cranes her head up. The stars grow thicker here, on the edge of settled space. Diamond dust overflowing on a black canvas. She’d almost forgotten why she enlisted all those years back, before the Amitié Mission vanished, before Elmerton Station and her mother’s empty urn.

Danny was right. It really is everything, up there.

A movement at the edge of her vision. The girl was looking up too, transfixed at the starry dome over their heads.

“Like the stars too, huh?”

“Stars.” She mumbles, barely blinking.

The crash must have knocked out the power on this block- the UV lamp is a lonely circle of light surrounded by indistinguishable dark. Their own little Island on a seas of stars.

It’s like something out of a bad sim: a pair of unlikely castaways alone on a conveniently habitable planet. Then again, in all likelihood, the two of them probably are the only people left on the entire planet- alien weirdness notwithstanding.

Valerie points at a thin white streak. “Look, a shooting star.”

“Shoot.”

“No, a shooting sta-” A blast of thunder shudders down from above, a long echo grumbling through the empty city spires. The girl squeaks with surprise, but Valerie shoots to her feet. There is not a single stormy cloud up there, and the shooting star is getting larger.

“Something’s just hit atmo...” Valerie dives for her helmet and put it back over her head. “MAD-E!”

“Three distinct shockwave events.” MAD-E reports.

She clenches a fist. “Profile?”

It takes four long, agonizing seconds for MAD-E to deliver its verdict. “One Riptide class shuttle and a fighter escort. They have already breached the stratosphere and are decelerating. Most likely vector is towards Nova Ventura.”

“Yes! Hell yes!” The weight of the past two days slides off her shoulders from the tide of sheer elation. “Hail them.”

“Working...I am unable to raise them on emergency channels. There is still interference from the jamming signal.”

Shit. That means there were still unfriendlies around. Without comms or sensors any of search-and-rescue op would be risky at best, hugely dangerous at worse. Someone up there must really like her.

The pilot trades off between glancing worriedly at the sky and back to Valerie rummaging through the crash-kit. “Loot-ehn-ant?”

“We are out of here, bright-eyes,” Valerie points skyward. “Take a look up there, that’s our ride.”

The shooting star from before has grown in size, flaring with the heat-bleedoff from a steep entry.

“Shoot.” the girl says again.

For once, Valerie appreciates the neurotic preparation of the nerds who designed the crash kit. Flares were ridiculously low-tech, but without a way to signal the ships, the only other option Valerie has is sticking out her thumb.

They ignite with an angry hiss, throwing dark green light that make the shadows dance. Lighting every single one, Valerie tosses them down a few meters down the road to mark a good LZ.

The escort fighters do their flyover first, the rumble of their own engines lags behind after they pass. Valerie watches them circle in a holding pattern with a tinge of envy. Down the road, the lights of the shuttle come toward them, following the same route the alien ship made on its way down, if less crashy.

Spotlights orbit around the crash sight, settling over them and the ship. The visor of Valerie's helmet compensates automatically, but the the girl flinches and hides her head under the flaring surface of her blanket.

Engine backwash blows gales of dust as the shuttle’s thrusters pivot, leveling it out and slowly easing it down on the broken road.

“Strange,” MAD-E remarks. “I am not receiving any IFF transponder signals from the shuttle, even at this range.”

“Can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want to broadcast their position,” Valerie replies, more focused on the decent of the shuttle’s gangplank.

The girl is outright trying to hide under the heat blanket at this point, frightened by the noise the strange ship. Valerie goes to her and lifts up a corner of the blanket. Two panicked, neon green eyes peer at her.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to hide. You’re with me, I’ll take care of you. Promise.”

“...pra-miss?”

“Yeah. Promise.” Valerie holds out her hand. The pilot looks at it, incredulous. Slowly, her pale, thin fingers lightly touch the glove of Valerie’s suit. Valerie grasps it as firmly as she dares before letting go and standing up. Should probably warn the SAR team about this so they don’t spook the-

A swarm of boots drum down the gangplank. Not Search and Rescue medics, but two full squads of troopers geared head to toe in bone-white armor sweep the landing zone. Their rifles are primed and ready- as though they were expecting an ambush from every corner.

Valerie raises a hand. “Evening, fellas. Glad you could finally join us. Not to sound ungrateful or anything, but-”

None of them even look her way, their full-faced helmets betraying nothing. Sometimes she’ll see them glance at one another, a nod here or a minute motion there that suggests they were talking to each other in a way Valerie couldn’t hear. Probably all sharing scrambled, short-range comm.

One squad breaks away and starts marching her way. “Finally. Hey guys, can anyone tell me what’s going on upstairs? I haven’t been able to get through to-”

They march past her like she was invisible, guns raised and cautiously approaching the crashed alien ship.

“Don’t worry about that thing. If it wasn’t dead on-impact, it definitely crashed after I-” She trails off, because a four-man team just formed a semi-circle in front of them and have all trained their guns on her. No, not just her.

“Loo-Ten-ant?” The girl huddles in her blanket anxiously.

Valerie steps in front of them, blocking most of their shots. “Whoa, whoa hey now, safety those things. The hell are you-”

“Stand down, Lieutenant Gray.”

Two of the soldiers part without breaking their sight lines. A pair of men in the plain, unassuming white uniform of the Observer’s Office step through the gap. Their hair is shaved even shorter than regulation length to the point of baldness and their eyes are hidden under black specs.

“Finally, some human contact.” Valerie snaps. “Can someone explain to me what the hell is going on?”

The first Man in White motions at the girl hiding behind Valerie’s legs with a gloved hand. “Please step away, Lieutenant.”

“Loo-ten-ent?” She asks quietly.

“Listen-” Valerie pulls off her helmet- one of the solider tenses and raises his rifle a little higher before. “I’ve been down in this creepy-ass colony for the past forty-six hours. The whole city is empty, I haven’t been able to raise anyone on comms, I’ve got no idea what’s going on up there-”

“The situation is under control,” The Second Man says coolly.

“What does that even mean? What happened to the Hartmann?”

“Relax, Lieutenant. The battle’s over. The Hartmann is intact and station-keeping in high obit about the planet’s southern pole.”

Valerie exhales. “Thank God- wait. That doesn’t make any sense. How are we still being jammed if the enemy is-”

It’s like crashing all over again. First the hit, losing control as the world spins.

“It’s been you,” she breathes. “The squids haven’t been jamming comms. It’s been you the whole time.”

The First Man in White starts reciting: “Under Special Directive granted to the Observer’s Office by Director Masters and the Ecumene Council, this area is under quarantine.”

The second man continued. “Lieutenant Gray, you are hereby ordered to report for a full debrief. All footage starting from when you came out of emergency stasis will be confiscated and classified Above Top Secret, including the full contents of your Virtual Intelligence Asset.”

MAD-E starts to say, “I would be happy to assist however I can. However, I-”

“Lexic: White Zero-Six-Three Over Specter-Kay.”

“Confirmed,” MAD-E responds obediently, then, apologetically to Valerie: “Their credentials are valid, Lieutenant. The orders are legal.”

Years of military discipline keeps her mouth fixed in a firm line. “...what about her?”

“That,” The Man in White nods first to the wreck, then to the girl. “And that are to be taken into custody.”

“Step aside, Lieutenant.” The cold edge in the second’s one voice is as subtle as a knife to the throat.

A gloved hand motions one of the troopers to stow away their weapon. Valerie watches them move towards the girl and is very aware that the other three still have theirs leveled at her. She’s standing in political black hole, where scruples get devoured and crushed beyond recognition. It wouldn’t be hard to sell that one lone, relatively skilled but ultimately insignificant fighter pilot had been shot down and died in the crash. Too much damage to the pod on impact, full stasis and life support failure. Her father would get a flag, a posthumous medal, and an empty urn to put beside his wife’s.

Valerie does nothing as the trooper grabs the girl. Hears the frantic crinkle of the heat blanket, the weak grunts and a shout.

“Loo-ten-ent? Lootenent!”

Valerie can’t even tell her she’s sorry. Not now, not with those hidden eyes watching.

The trooper walks past. Valerie feels a desperate tug on the sleeve of her flight suit and she has to keep her eyes locked on the Man in White. It’s the only way to keep her expression from betraying her.

Another four man fireteam escorts the trooper carrying the thrashing girl to the shuttle, where a pair of medics wait at the gangplank and administer a sedative that reduces her to a ragdoll in seconds.

Jeck-shun, Valerie thinks. “What’s going to happen to her?”

“That’s outside both of our paygrades.” The other Man in White snorts. His partner shoots him a look- probably the first damn show of emotion she’s seen from either of them since they landed.

Valerie looks past them and watches the girl be carried up the gangplank and vanish into the shuttle. Valerie can’t hear what any of them are saying, but their body language speaks volumes. None of them seemed confused or alarmed at the sight of ghostly pale, glowy-eyed girl being dragged from the site of a crashed alien ship. Certainly not as bad as Valerie had taken it, when she found out.

Her heart jumps at another sonic boom. More ships entering the atmosphere, probably bringing in the personnel and equipment they’ll need to start preparing the main body of the wreck for transport. Half the troopers have already moved from securing the scene to setting up tripods for high-powered lights and portable generators. It all plays out with the clockwork smoothness of a routine well-practiced.

Crossing her arms, Valerie looks right into the image of herself in the lens of the Man in White.

"She’s not the first you found, is she?”

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megaphonemonday · 7 years ago

Note

prompt: Mike/Blip/the team's reaction to the video of Ginny's dunk into the pool.

This is a kind of/sort of prequel to right between the ribs from Mike’s POV. Both fics can stand alone, though.

it’s sinking in | ao3

Mike rolled into the clubhouse later than he’d been in weeks. If his hangover of pretty epic proportions weren’t sufficient as an excuse, the fact that he’d spent last evening in the company of first his pissed off pitcher and then his ex-wife plus her current fiancé—in the house where Mike had once dreamed of starting a family—more than made up the difference.

That he’d also had to drive all the way back to La Jolla from the dinner party from hell, painfully sober and replaying the way Rachel’d lingered in his arms, smelling so familiar and like everything he’d once wanted, hadn’t helped. Maybe if he hadn’t had those two interminable hours to himself, mulling and obsessing over every detail of the night and how he couldn’t seem to keep even one woman in his life, Mike wouldn’t have gotten home and immediately raided his bar to drown his sorrows and uncertainties.

But he had, and now he was stuck nursing both an ugly hangover and the usual parade of regrets.

And a few new ones.

Stalking through the bowels of Petco, sunglasses firmly in place even in the low lighting, Mike tried to shake Amelia’s parting shot to him, but his mind was like an echo chamber.

You know, your head wasn’t really in it, anyway. You should figure out where it’s been.

Well, he knew the answer to that. With Rachel. It was why he’d gone over there, after all.

Wasn’t like Ginny’d miss him from her ridiculous party with all her fawning fans, anyway. In fact, she hadn’t seemed to miss him, or their evening chats or their morning workouts or their ability to exist in the same space, at all.

Which didn’t matter because Mike still wanted Rachel back.

She was the only one he could want. Back. She was the only one he could want back.

With great effort, Mike shut off that train of thought and tried to start coming up with retorts for all the ribbing he was bound to endure the minute he walked into the clubhouse, late and clearly worse for the wear. It wasn’t that he’d stopped loving his grand entrances, but maybe he could admit that showing up with more than enough time to suit up and stumble onto the field before BP was helping his game. It’d been a while since he’d cut it so close. The sudden reappearance of his old habits was bound to stir up some shit.

Which was why it was more than a little bizarre to walk into the clubhouse and have his presence go completely unnoted. Never mind the comebacks he’d crafted that now had no outlet. He was their captain, god damn it! His arrival should mean something.

That was definitely not the case today. His team of lazy losers all had their noses practically glued to their phones and tablets, either couched out at their lockers or gathered in little knots around the clubhouse.

All of them but one.

Blip sat with his back to the room, shoulders hunched and a worried pucker denting his forehead as he methodically rolled a bat between his palms. He didn’t even look up at Mike’s approach.

Not until he huffed a grouchy, “Hey,” that was.

That startled the center fielder out of his thoughts and got him to at least acknowledge his friend and captain. Rather than say anything about his tardiness, though, Blip demanded, “Man, where’d you disappear to last night?”

Taken aback, Mike lied, “Had to pick up some of my stuff from the house,” and threw his bag in his locker and dropped his sunglasses on a shelf. He couldn’t help but wince at the glare from the overheads. God, he definitely should’ve taken more aspirin this morning.

Blip seemed doubtful, but was apparently willing to let it slide, which was absolutely a first in their friendship. What the hell was going on today? “Well, we could’ve used you,” was all he replied, like that made any sense, and went back to warming the barrel of his bat.

Mike just rolled his eyes, slumped into his chair, and started unbuttoning his flannel. Used him for what? No one at that party was remotely interested in his presence. Certainly not whatever “we” Blip meant.

“Yo, Lawson!” called… someone.

Honestly, he was too fucking exhausted to care who it was. Still, he grunted his acknowledgement, continuing to change out of his street clothes and get ready for warmups. Was it too much to wear both eyeblack and sunglasses? Considering the way the soft incandescents in here were stabbing into his brain, the San Diego sun was going to be murderous.

He almost missed the follow up question in his deliberations.

“You seen what Baker got up to last night?”

What?

Mike swiveled his chair around to face the room as a whole. If Stubbs, who must’ve been the one to ask considering how close he was, startled back at the forbidding frown on his captain’s face, that wasn’t high on Mike’s list of priorities.

“What d’you mean, ‘What Baker got up to?’ She was at her party.”

“Nah, man,” replied Sonny, from all the way across the room. “Girl went rogue.”

Suddenly, Amelia’s texts last night, long after he’d left the Nike shindig, made much more sense. He’d ignored both the, Have you seen Ginny? and the follow up, ??? five minutes later in favor of trying to pick apart his wife’s fiancé. Now, he wished he hadn’t, and not just because he hadn’t managed to ruffle any of David’s feathers. He should’ve realized something had actually gone wrong if Amelia was actually reaching out to him.

Not that he would’ve been able to do anything if he had. Certainly not with how pissed Baker’d been at him last night. After she walked away from him on the step and repeat, she hadn’t let herself come within five feet of him all evening. And it wasn’t like she’d’ve taken his call, not if the past week had been any indication.

Okay. Maybe she’d been pissed for longer than just last night.

Still, that didn’t do much to ease the guilt settling in his gut. He could’ve tried to call.

(He had, in fact, stared at Ginny’s contact information in his phone for a long time last night. Had been this close to calling her, begging her to let him back in. But, moody and drunk as he’d been, he hadn’t been stupid. Mike still knew she wouldn’t pick up. He’d tossed his phone away and opted for more bourbon.)

Sweeping his gaze around the clubhouse, it wasn’t lost on Mike that everyone was very interested in his response. The next chair over, Blip was very still.

He played it cool.

“Rogue, huh? Now this I’ve gotta see.”

Immediately, three phones were shoved in his face, all with the same video cued to play.

Mike took the closest one and watched the scant minute of footage: all the way from Ginny bouncing eagerly on the mini trampoline, her quest for shoes, the grinning banter with someone off camera, the superhero leap and dunk, her burst through the surface of the water, crowing, “What else you got?” before falling back, a feral grin on her lips.

He watched it all.

(Right up to her clambering out of the pool, nimble fingers already reaching around to tug down the zipper of that god damn, dress. That dress that clung even more stubbornly to her after its impromptu soaking.)

He flung the phone back at its owner before he could see more and tried to come up with something, anything, to say that didn’t hint at the roiling in his gut which suddenly had nothing to do with last night’s drinking.

“Well, boys, looks like Baker can wipe the floor with you on the court, too.”

His (weak) joke seemed to open the floodgates. Immediately, the clubhouse filled with excited chatter that Mike made himself wade through.

“Told you! Girl’s got mad hops!”

“She’s killing it on twitter. There’re at least three trending hashtags devoted to that dunk!”

“Kinda funny she couldn’t find a pair of Nikes, though.”

From what Mike could tell, the team consensus was largely positive. The few holdouts on the Ginnsanity front could admit that she knew how to blow off steam like a real major leaguer. The rest of the team was absurdly proud of her poolside antics. Her dunk was their dunk. It didn’t matter that this was all the press would ask about today and probably for the rest of the week. With one leap, Ginny’d proven she had the balls to hang with them.

Mike, however, wasn’t so sure.

In the nearly two months that he’d known her, he’d come to realize that Ginny’s calm, unflappable facade wasn’t just an act. She wasn’t a robot, felt things acutely, in fact, but she was pragmatic, too. Why waste all this energy losing her cool at every slight provocation? Sure, she knew how to stand up for herself, but most of the time, she picked her battles wisely. Better to buckle down and prove that she deserved every opportunity that came her way. Let her success speak for itself.

But that Ginny was nowhere to be seen in the video he just watched.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t the same person, though. It was still Ginny Baker, just gone off the rails.

Which was when it occurred to Mike that maybe they’d been heading to a blowout like this for a while now. Maybe Ginny could be calm and unflappable because she’d known there were people who had her back. She had her friends and the team. She had him. She had Amelia.

But maybe that was hard to believe when he and Amelia suddenly had each other.

Fuck.

Without a word, Mike pushed to his feet, fully intending to set the record straight.

“I doubt she wants to see you, dude,” came his center fielder’s voice. When Mike turned, Blip had his arms crossed over his chest, a frown on his face.

“I’m her captain,” he rumbled. “Doesn’t matter if she wants to see me. She’s gonna.”

Blip’s eyes narrowed and he came in close, though it was more likely an effort to keep anyone else from putting their nose where it didn’t belong than an intimidation tactic.

“She’s already had a long day, Mike. She doesn’t need anyone ragging on—”

“I just need to know she’s okay,” Mike interrupted, trying to tamp down on the indignation burning in his chest. Like he’d actually go rub her nose in whatever bad decisions she’d made last night. Like he could judge. “That’s all.”

Blip evaluated him for a long moment before offering him the barest of nods and stepping away.

Still, Mike was fully aware of the other man’s eyes on him as he stopped outside Baker’s door and knocked.

It was a good thing, he told himself, that Ginny had such good friends on her side. He’d feel better, though, when he could count himself among that number again.

#Anonymous #bawson #bawson fic #pitch #pitch fic #i wrote something #i have a lot of questions #mostly about how ginny's dress was just left outside #did she just strip down by the pool?#my gut says yes

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porthavenhq · 4 years ago

Photo

Welcome to Porthaven, Ellie! We can’t wait to meet Tristan Morello!

Please look over the acceptance checklist and submit your blog within the next 24 hours. If there is a problem or a prior obligation and you need more time than provided, just message the main and we will gladly extend!

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* 　OUT OF CHARACTER　 *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

Name: Ellie Pronouns: She/Her Age: 21+ Timezone: EDT Activity Level: I have work from 9am-5pm - I lurk during that time, maybe post if work is really slow. My evenings are usually free though. I’ll be on and post at least once a day. Taking into account (sometimes sudden) muse drops, I’d probably give myself a 5/10. Triggers: N/A Anything Else: I’m so psyched for this RP! If you need any help with lists or anything like that, feel free to ask (I enjoy cultivating and updating lists for some reason) *shrug face*

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* 　CHARACTER INFORMATION　 *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

Name: Tristan Morello Age: 07/21/1997 Gender: Male FC: Marlon Teixeira

Character Biography

The story of Tristan’s birth and subsequent abandonment was unremarkable. His father was a businessman, in the States for only a few days at a conference. There, he met Tristan’s mother: a charismatic, enigmatic beauty. Allured and intrigued by each other, the fling was over as soon as it had started: dinner, drinks, and a night neither of them have much of a memory of. With no father in the picture and her own career in mind, Tristan’s mother made a decision: she would carry the child, but that was all. Within hours being discharged from the hospital and not wanting to go through the time-consuming wait and process of an adoption agency, Tristan’s mother drove out of state, left the infant outside of a police department, and then promptly left. It wasn’t half an hour before the baby’s cries attracted the officers inside. They searched the area for an hour or so before contacting Child Protective Services. With nothing except the infant’s clothes and blanket, CPS named the child and had a physician look him over to officially give an estimated DOB. Unsurprisingly, the doctor told them that the baby was only a few days old. After some investigations which turned up nothing, Tristan started making his rounds in foster homes.

As with any system, Tristan was placed in good homes and bad homes. Homes that obviously were in it for the stipend; homes that truly wanted him to feel safe and wanted. However, all of them were merely temporary solutions. As a child, he was told that each home was a “new start”. Despite social workers telling him this wasn’t his fault, as a child, Tristan felt as though he was always doing something wrong and that’s why none of the fosters would adopt him. He felt as though he had to keep reinventing himself to be a more loveable, ideal child, even though he didn’t have quite a grasp on what either meant. By the time he was ten, he was starting to experience a flimsy sense of self from all the changing personas of what he thought a good, adoptable child would be.

There was one beacon of hope for him. When he was eleven, he was placed into a home of a couple who seemingly couldn’t have children of their own. For two years, it seemed as though his dedication to cultivating an ideal child had paid off. They seemed to love and adore him. He felt safe and well cared for. As his third year with them approached, Tristan started to seriously think (and hope) that they would end up adopting him. However, he let his hopes get the better of him: the couple ended up conceiving. As the pregnancy went on, the prospect and preparations for their biological child slowly started to push Tristan out of the picture. Of course, Tristan did his best to keep face and keep up his performance, but there was little he could do to win back their full attention or affection. He didn’t know what he had done wrong. It just got worse when the child arrived. With their attention on a newborn, teenage Tristan started to get lost in the shuffle, which stung, especially from them.

Tristan realized that all his careful cultivation had been in vain. He had tried his best and had still failed. He found himself unable (or perhaps a combination of unable and unwilling) to articulate why he was feeling so hurt. So, angry, jealous, and no longer held back by wanting to present as an ideal, adoptable child Tristan tried “being himself” and doing what he could to focus his foster parents’ attention back on himself. He started hanging out with the wrong crowd at school, started playing hooky, and hanging out on the streets. His grades dropped, he got into a few fights, stayed out late, and was even found with a cigarette on him. Of course, his attempts at getting the couple focused on him again worked the opposite way he wanted it to, and the couple ended up returning him to the system. He didn’t realize until later that he did more harm than good to both himself, the family, and their relationship.

Back in the system, Tristan kept getting shuffled from home to home, now more frequently as he had given up trying to be good. Sinking into bitterness and cynicism, he became hard to handle and started to reject any idea that he would ever get adopted out of the system. Being “unadoptable” weighed on his mind, but he was unwilling to go back to being good only for his efforts to backfire on him again. He had learned his lesson and wouldn’t be taken in as the hopeful fool ever again. His destructive habits continued, slowly getting more severe until he finally became of age and got thrown out of the foster care system itself.

Ill-equipped to deal with life outside the system, Tristan promptly found himself homeless. Not that he cared, his time on the streets with “friends” had prepared him (to an extent) for this. His times roaming the tougher side of town had given him street smarts and resources that polite society usually rejected. Through connections and his own charm, he built up his own network that spanned a few towns and began couch surfing in exchange for labor. Other times, he was able to get small, part-time, or odd jobs. In some ways, he’s still a foster child being shuffled from house to house. Sometimes it’s a place on the street, but he puts himself there through his own resources and cunning. He doesn’t stay anywhere for long, just long enough to finish a job, satisfy his own desires, get enough money for food, and find his next connection. He doesn’t commit to anywhere or anyone. He knows what a mistake that is.

He’s known about Porthaven since being a child and has always been intrigued by the area’s acceptance of Mystiques. Finally, his network and his wanderings have brought him into town. Only time will tell if the people and places, like all others, will be temporary. Tristan’s not optimistic. More than likely, it will be yet another blip on the map. An X and a cross-off on a list. Another town for a few hookups, maybe a scam or two, a buffet, a small job…

Yes, Porthaven will be just another town to leech off of. Right?

Headcanons

One of Tristan’s favorite meals is spaghetti and meatballs. He also favors Olive Garden breadsticks.

Tristan likes hanging around places with trains (yard, tracks, stations) and the roofs of buildings.

Skills Tristan has picked up from drifting and just living his life have been: street smarts, juggling, lock picking, skateboarding, climbing, parkour, and flipping objects into their hands using their feet.

Tristan gives himself a new, street name for every home he’s lived in or town he’s drifted in and out of. Some of his nicknames include Milo, Mike, Fritz, Boris, Butch, Homer, Dan, Rags, and Bozo. This has not helped with his vague sense of roots, self, or identity.

While trying to be a productive member of society and not starve, Tristan has worked many odd, part-time jobs including landscaping, handy work, cleaning, cashier, pet sitter, and waiter.

Tristan tries to find college towns if he can. Why? There’s usually some event with free food. All he has to do is act like a new commuter or transfer looking to get involved in campus activities.

Most of Tristan’s trists are well calculated. He uses hookups mainly for his ego, a fleeting sense of “love” and being wanted, and food. He knows his goals going in and doesn’t see it as much as manipulation as survival. Still, he does derive some amusement from watching the upper class or others desperate for affection play into his games. Besides, the older he gets, the more he thinks his foster parents saw his foster home shuffle as a game. No one was committed to him. Why should he be committal to anyone?

Tristan relishes in his freedom. No more foster parents telling him what to do as if they had any hold on him. No more system moving him around. He can go anywhere and do anything. His constant moving means limited consequences. The more he drifts and sees the world freely, despite his limited means, the more settling down becomes something to dread.

As someone with a sometimes limited supply of food, one of Tristan’s biggest pet peeves is food waste. While he doesn’t outright beg, he uses food banks to his advantage and is not above dumpster diving near restaurants or watching people throw out food and then taking it for himself after cutting off parts that look bitten off of.

Despite his inner turmoil and (self)destructive tendencies, Tristan doesn’t act all that bitter outwardly. Sure, one could get “bad boy” vibes off of him, but he still acts pleasant and care-free. In that way, he is still playing a role. Only, this time around, he acts less like an ideal person and more authentically (whatever that means for him for the time being). This is for survival now, not adoption.

Tristan’s greatest fear and greatest hope are intertwined: he hopes to find a family and people who love him unconditionally with no pretenses. However, he gets in his own way and uses relationships selfishly since he is terrified of being and becoming attached, loved, and vulnerable and fears that rejection, abandonment, and being used will follow soon after he’s lulled into a false sense of security.

#phqacceptance

0 notes

imagine-that-haikyuu · 8 years ago

Note

akkaksisjjdu /sobs now that I know you're cool w soulmate aus I gotta do this. you know that soulmate au where whatever you write/draw on your skin appears on your soulmate's skin? can you write one for tsukishima? 🌚🍟

are you sure about that, anon????? also, i have to apologize because thisisn’t exactly what you asked for but many elements in this resembled what wasalready in what I had written for the soulmate!au and decided in the end thatthey should be combined (unless you also requested soulmate!au)

but i’ve mentioned before that i took a differentapproach to this and i have a lot of notes about this that i think are relevantbut this would get long and i cannot just put some of them here and others in the tags, so i’m probably going to put them in the separatepost so anyone interested in them can read my notes about it

since i’m combiningtwo requests here, it makes sense that this is long, i suppose

EDIT: the notes are here

There’s a logic to everything in life; the worldfunctions as one large system made up of smaller systems. Tsukishima Kei knowsthis much to be true, and from a young age, his way of thinking molds aroundthis line of thought.

Also at a young age, Tsukishima met his soulmate.Everyone went on about how he was one of the lucky ones, about how rare it wasfor someone to find their match before they turned ten. He wasn’t so sure aboutthat.

His mother had taken him shopping at a department store onthe day he met you. He was five-years-old. When he got restless, she droppedhim off at a play center to keep kids occupied under supervision whiletheir parents shopped. You were there too, seated at a brightly-colored plastictable with two other kids. They happily colored away, the markers squeakingwhen pressed too hard to the page. Your page was already full, however coveredin words both real and nonsensical for the sake of rhymes, and with no freshpaper in sight you decided to make your arm your new page.

There wasn’t any point in coloring if there was nothingelse to draw on, so Tsukishima made his way over to the bins of toys across theroom. It was only when he reached for one of the dinosaur figures from one ofthem that he noticed black lines appearing on his forearm. In the next fewmoments, the lines came together and he recognized the kanji enough to know itsaid, “sky.”

Even though his glasses never remedied his peripheralvision, only a quick glance out of the corner his eye was enough to catch thatyou were drawing on your skin with a black marker. That, and the word rhymedwith the words you had written on the page that he saw before.

At first, he liked the little drawings and writings thatwould appear on his arm during school. Sometimes, he drew or wrote somethingback. You two had lots of play-dates since your first meeting, but somethingabout this form of communication was a little thrilling. It reminded him ofwhen Akiteru would puncture the bottoms of paper cups and thread a stringbetween them so they could whisper to each other and still hear each word withperfect clarity. Sure, anyone could see what was on his skin if it was visible,but whatever was there was only meant for him.

The novelty gradually wore off.

It first started when he was eight, and had to dress up for aformal family event. That afternoon, you decided to cover your arm from wristto elbow in an aimless stained-glass pattern. With paint, of course. The colorsbled onto the sleeve of his white button-down. Tsukishima had to wait while hismother called yours to have her wash the paint off your arm. It didn’t matter,though. The shirt couldn’t be salvaged after that, and Akiteru had to lend Keihis sport jacket to hide his stained sleeve.

From there, you didn’t draw or paint on yourself anymore.In fact, the only time either of you’d see mysterious markings on your skinwould be accidental. You’d find the tips of your fingers a muddy turquoise whenTsukishima got paint on his during art class. He’d wake up on a Sunday morningonly to find doodles on his face because you were the first to fall asleep at afriend’s house the night before.

In middle school, you began writing. It started withwords at first, and then sentence fragments. Tsukishima often found themscrawled along his arms. They were almost always some strange, abstractdescriptions and often disjointed in nature. After sometime doing this, you called him.

“What do you think?” you asked.

Tsukishima stared down at his arm and read the words overagain. There wasn’t any point in trying to understand them; he never would.They didn’t follow any line of logic as far as he was concerned.

“I don’t get it,” he said. After a huff, he added, “Whatare you doing?”

“I’m writing a poem! I found this book in the library andit was really weird and a didn’t make sense, but I kind of liked it. I wanted totry and write like that poet.”

He looked down at the words again, brows furrowing.“Couldn’t you just write it down on paper?”

You hummed. “Well, the only paper I had on me had mynotes on it from class and I didn’t want to forget it. And…”

“And?” he urged when your voice trailed off.

“And, we haven’t talked or seen much of each other in awhile,” you sighed. “It seemed like a fun way to reach out to you.”

The first part was true. While play-dates had been aregular thing in the past thanks to your parents, those kinds of arrangements were unnecessary once you moved up to middleschool: you both were old enough to make your own plans, granted you wouldstill have to ask permission beforehand.

Now that you weren’t little anymore, Tsukishima concludedthat the two of you were just too different. At age five, every whimsicalfantasy you had as a kid was normal at the time. At age eight, those absurd“what if” questions you’d ask him were normal. At age thirteen, these thingswere not normal. Even if you were trying to be funny or cute with them, itwasn’t coming off right.

For the past few months, he wondered exactly how you hadended up being his predetermined match. It could have been a blip in thesystem. It wouldn’t have been the first time; there’s billions of people inthis world, after all. While the idea of soulmates is inherently romantic, thereare plenty of reasons at why someone’s soulmate wouldn’t necessarily be who they’dend up with.

But even then, they’re supposed to be the person whounderstands you the most. Whether or not you understood him didn’t change thefact the he didn’t understand you. To Tsukishima, you were a box full of puzzlepieces from completely different puzzles and he couldn’t put you together even if he tried.

“Kei, did you like the poem I wrote for you?”

That enthusiasm that you would have normallyhad when you’d ask that kind of question wasn’t there. You weren’t askingbecause you wanted to boast something you were proud of and wanted your pridestroked a little more. It was quieter and more concerned. Maybe even a littlescared.

He didn’t answer your question at first. If he wanted tobe honest and say no, you’d probably ask him a lot of questions after about whyand he didn’t feel like answering them. If he wanted to lie, it wouldn’t matterbecause the fact that he hesitated before answering said enough for him.

He decided to not to answer it at all.

“I have to go now, ___,” was all he said before hangingup the phone.

Two years go by. High school begins. Attendingseparate middle schools only exacerbated the idea that you were incompatiblewith each other. The distance made it excusable to not bother trying to figureit out. But going to same high school and being in the same class on top ofthat made it painfully obvious how even being in the same room did nothing toforce either of you to address this.

Finally, one day after summer break, you wrote a word uponyour wrist again for the first time in a very long time.

The word you wrote was, “edges.” A week later the word, “hammer”appeared on his arm before lunch. He decided he was just going to end it there.

Tsukishima approached your desk and spoke to you for the first time in years.The much higher voice you were used him having was gone. The almost bored tonereplaced the brightness it once held from his childhood–although it startedfading not long before you two stopped talking. Even though he’d been called on plenty of times to answer questions in class, you still couldn’t adjust to it.

“Please stop writing arbitrary words on us. I’ve gottentoo many questions about whether or not I really had ‘edges’ tattooed on myforearm last week. Even more when I bothered to explain it.”

You looked at him rather stone-faced, but then turnedyour attention out the window. After taking a deep breath, your expressionshifted, looking more forlorn than anything.

“They’re not arbitrary,” you mumbled. “They’ll make sensein the end.”

You couldn’t see his face, but you took his silence as amark of confusion.

“You remember the first word I wrote, right? The firsttime we met?”

Of course, the word “sky” couldn’t leave him. How manypeople swooned over it when they found out that was how you two found eachother? Well, he supposed it could have been something stupider, like one ofthose words you had made up that day. He answered affirmatively in only a word.

“Good. And you also remember last week’s word. Rememberthis week’s word too. I don’t know when the next important words will come tome, but don’t forget them when they do.”

“Is this supposed to be a game or something? What are youdoing?”

“I’m writing a poem.”

The conversation sounded awfully familiar.

“If you want to write a poem, that’s fine. You can dowhatever, but stop writing it on me.”

You reflect on his words briefly, and your lips tugupwards into what could be a smile. “Do you mean ‘on’ as in physically on or‘on’ as in ‘about’?”

Tsukishima’s eyebrows knitted together. If circumstanceshad been different, he might have laughed at that and teased you about that beinglame play on words. Instead, he begrudgingly gave in. “We’re getting nowhere. Just do whatever and I’ll roll my sleeves down until yourdone with this.”

He turned to go back to his desk.

“After you memorize each word, right?”

This question also went unanswered.

However, he was not immune to the white bear problem:when one tries not to think about something, they inevitably are forced tothink about it. Such was the case whenever a word appeared on him. Either way, it wasn’t particularly bothersome or difficult forhim to memorize one word at a time in a list of unconnected words. The factthat they would appear in sporadic intervals, but never less than a daybetween them sometimes, helped in that way.

The inconvenience was that it had to show up somewhere onhis body. There wouldn’t be any warning from you either. One night he went tobed and woke up to find a new word scrawled across one of his wrists. By thebeginning of October, you wrote the last word you wanted him to remember. That was it for now. Assuming the words hadcome to you in the order you intended, he couldn’t string together anythingcoherent from them.

Sky. Edges. Hammer. Light. System. Black. Tick.

“Well, those are only the key words from it. One day, I’llshow you the rest,” you explained.

“One day” came in about eight. His hand was bandaged and a little bloodystill from the match earlier that day, but the words appeared well enough belowthe edge of the bandages for him to read each word clearly. Maybe Akiteru told you whathappened and helped you figure out where on your arm you should start writing.

No. You had been there to watch. He didn’t know for sure,but it felt exactly like something you would do. He rolled his jacket sleeveback down so his teammates wouldn’t see, but uncovered it when washing his handsin the bathroom. Only the first word, “sky” was contained in the four lines oftext.

On the bus ride home, seven different lines appearedwhere the first for had been. “Edges” and “hammer” showed up in them, and afteran hour or those lines were scrubbed off and replaced by the next set. Thiscontinued until nightfall.

Tsukishima stared at the last set of words on hisforearm. For the first time in a very long time, you had written something tohim that made some sort of sense. There was still a clear attempt at the abstract, but it was accessible enough. It was a small one, but he smiled. This wasthe first time you made him do so in five years.

The next day your doorbell rang. It was unexpected but at thesame time, expected too, that you found Tsukishima in the doorway when youanswered it. Neither of you said anything, but you let him in. You lead him to siton the walkway outside like you used to do before the chasm between youappeared. You’re not sure how much time passed—it was at least ten minutes, youwere sure, or it felt like that—until you finally spoke up, voice quiet.

“I asked Takeda-sensei one time if he knew anything aboutincompatible soulmates,” you started. Abrief glance in his direction was enough to see the almost undetectableconfusion on his face. “Well, it goes without saying that Modern Literature ismy favorite subject and he’d become my favorite teacher. I bring my poems tohim to workshop a lot.”

“Oh,” is his only reply. It wouldn’t have been hard forhim to figure out, but he never gave it any thought until then.

After a brief moment of silence, you continued, “He saidit was uncommon but also not unheard of. That there are times that thingsbetween soulmates just don’t work out, sure, but also that not every set of soulmatesis matched up for the same reason. Sometimes you’re not paired with the person whounderstands you better than anyone else, but rather the person who forces youto think in a different mindset and to look at things other than how you wouldhave on your own. They’re the person who looks at your first draft and asks ‘Well,what if you did this instead?’ because they think it will push you into creatingsomething spectacular. They may not be yourother half, but they are the person who ends up bettering you.”

There was another long silence between you two, but not as long as before and certainly not as tense. With a soft laugh, you placed your palms behind you on the walkway and leaned back onto them.

“It took us a while to figure that one out, huh, Kei?”you asked. “It was something sosimple the whole time.”

You glanced towards Tsukishima again, to find his gazefixated on the ground. His arms were crossed loosely in front of him, elbowsagainst his thighs to prop him up while he leaned forward. The hand injuredthe day before, rested on top of the opposite arm.

“It…makes sense,” he said. “Your poem was still somethingyou would write, but I was able to grasp most of it. Maybe because I knew aheadof time that it was going to be about me, or maybe because you tried to make itobvious.”

“Yeah. But it won’t come together the same way if someonewho didn’t know anything about you read it. Writers aren’t supposed to tell youexactly what they want you to get from their work, but I’m starting to learnthat there’s someone I need to make exceptions for.”

“But this is only the first draft,” he said. “You’remissing a lot from the third system that I’d have to fill you in on. Afterthat, there’s a fourth system and it’s just starting now.”

He smiled. It wasn’t the big grin you remembered seeingas a child, but you can’t remember the last time you saw him smile at all. Inturn, you beamed right back at him. Whether or not you were lucky to have foundeach other at such a young age was moot. Maybe it took too long for either ofyou realize that you’d have to work at this, that it wasn’t going to clickinstantly. Most people around your age were only first meeting their soulmatesnow, so maybe it wasn’t unusual that it would take around ten years to findyourselves at square one along with them.

And that’s okay.

~*~

You said to meonce, “The world is systematic”That may be true butI remember youcame to me from the sky.Your wings weren’tarms, no feathers on your back.

The first system:We started withoutorder only to be sculpted by edgesFrom the worldaround us, left out in the sun to bake and take shape.

I know that ahammer came down on you—Not a hammer really, but a dimming light(with an albatross around his neck)—andShattered what youknew yourself to be.

I didn’t see it, didn’thear the noiseAnd only learnedwhy from the hushed voicesOf the stars thatsaw it all and from the light himself

There weren’tdirections on how to put you back together.It wasn’t my placeto anyway.System number twobroke downQuietly,In the same wayfireflies float at night.

System three washalf-working when you found it.It went somethinglike this:

You’re worriedyou’ll get stuck in the rain, or take a shower,Only to find thewater running off your body turns black.This is not a badsign and you know this.You know there’smerit in being a well-oiled cogAs long as the clockneeds you to tick tick tickThe problem is theimages of unused gearsPiled high in theback of your mind when the firstGraying dropletsstart pooling at your feet

Because systemthree can be fixedBut not by you, youdecided.You decided thisbefore you knew of it.Maybe it didn’thave to be system three.It could be thetenth system, the twenty-third,All broken too, butyour mind was already made up.

And from a listwithout order, this is what it tookTo change that:The sunThe stars who sawyou shatterA flock of crowsA cat and an owlThe dim lightthat’s starting shine again and trying to put system two back together (the albatross flewaway)An eagle

To you, this ispainfully obviousBut I did forgetone:

A firefly circlingaround the moon

Now it’s learning howto turn the unpredictableInto logic and lines,it can comprehendFind gaps in the process, anticipate them tooBe the cog that stops the stuttering hands of a clock

To shine again and fly with the wings that were missingWhen you fell from the sky before meNo. That’s not right.They had always been there.

System number four is still a work in progress.The cogs understand they don’t meshBut they want to.Especially as the clock stutters again,When fingers first intertwine,When arms first embrace the familiar unfamiliar body,When lips meet for the first time.

This is normal for the fourth system.The cogs understand they don’t mesh.But they find that they can file their teethRe-shape them just enough thatEven a drop or two of oil will turn the wheel with ease.

They’ll make up for lost time.

#haikyuu!!#haikyuu!! imagines #haikyuu!! scenarios #tsukishima kei #soulmate!au #request #admin rachel lauren #and now i can never write a soulmate!au ever again #jk jk #i like doing them #anonymous

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essentialise · 5 years ago

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How To Become Mindful and Find Peace in 2020

Here are my musings on how we can become mindful, find peace, enjoy the present and breakthrough our limits. With extracts from ‘Mindfulness’.

“Meditation is a tool to achieve post-meditative mindfulness. Regardless of how we get there, either through meditation or more directly by paying attention to novelty and questioning assumptions, to be mindful is to be in the present, noticing all the wonders that we didn’t realize were right in front of us.”

DON’T BE DETERRED BY FALSE LIMITS – BECOME MINDFUL

“When we think of resources being limited, we often think of our own abilities. Here, too, our notion of limits may inhibit us. We may push ourselves to what we believe are our limits, in swimming, public speaking, or mathematics. However, whether they are true limits is not determinable.

It may be in our best interest to proceed as though these and other abilities might be improved upon so that at least we will not be deterred by false limits. It was once assumed that humans could not run the mile in fewer than five minutes. In 1922 it was said to be ‘humanly impossible’ to run the mile in less than four minutes. In 1952 that limit was broken by Roger Bannister. Each time a record is broken, the supposed limit is extended. Yet the notion of limits persists.”

Limits.

We want to become mindful of how quickly and easily we set false limits for ourselves. This is the essence of Ellen Langers “Psychology of Possibility.”

Here’s another brilliant blurb capturing the point:

“Research like these vision studies highlights the dangers of setting limits for ourselves. For instance, I’ve asked my students: What is the greatest distance it is humanly possible to run in one spurt? Because they know the marathon is twenty-six miles, they use that number to start and then guess that we probably haven’t reached the limit, so they answer around thirty-two miles. The Tarahumura, of Copper Canyon in Mexico, can run up to two hundred miles. If we are mindful, we don’t assume limits from past experience have to determine present experience.”

Running two hundred miles in one spurt. Running a mile in less than four minutes when doctors tell you it’s physically impossible. Running 250 (!) marathons in one year.

These are all difficult but not impossible.

Much like the story Joe De Sena shares in his great book Spartan Up of the guy (Göran Kropp) who rides his bike from Sweden to the Himalayas, summits Everest without a guide or extra oxygen then rides his bike back to Sweden.

Crazy difficult but not impossible.

Back to you.

What limits do you set for yourself?

Now a good time to stretch those a bit?

Here’s one way to help with that:

“HOW DO I DO IT?” VS. “CAN I DO IT?”

“In contrast, a process orientation . . . asks ‘How do I do it?’ instead of ‘Can I do it?’ and this directs attention toward defining the steps that are necessary on the way. This orientation can be characterized in terms of the guiding principle that there are no failures, only ineffective solutions.”

Two Big Ideas I want to dive into here.

First, notice the difference between these two questions:

“How do I do it?” vs. “Can I do it?”

One is focused on the process, the other on the outcome. Which do you think is more mindful/ more helpful?

Let’s try it right now. Think about a challenge in your life.

Got it?

Ask yourself, “Can I do it?!”

Note your thought process.

Now ask yourself, “How do I do it?”

Note your thought process.

Which is more empowering? (Huge difference, eh?!)

Second, when we become mindful and embrace the process orientation, we remember this guiding principle: “there are no failures, only ineffective solutions.”

Here’s what Tal Ben Shahar has to say on the subject: “When we hear about extremely successful people, we mostly hear about their great accomplishments—not about the many mistakes they made and the failures they experienced along the way. In fact, most successful people throughout history are also those who have had the most failures. That is no coincidence. People who achieve great feats, no matter what field, understand that failure is not a stumbling block but a stepping-stone on the road to success. There is no success without risk and failure. We often fail to see this truth because the outcome is more visible than the process—we see the final success and not the many failures that led to it.

When I acknowledge that fulfilling my potential must involve some failure, I no longer run away from risks and challenges. The choice is a simple one: Learn to fail, or fail to learn.”

How’s your mindset?

Can you see that there are no failures, just ineffective solutions?

Here’s to approaching our challenges with a process-orientation and seeing results as simply data that guide us on our quest!

And, here’s another insight to help us become mindful and embrace that!

EVERY OUTCOME IS PRECEDED BY A PROCESS

“A true process orientation also means being aware that every outcome is preceded by a process. Graduate students forget this all the time. They begin their dissertations with inordinate anxiety because they have seen other people’s completed and polished work and mistakenly compare it to their own first tentative steps. With their noses deep in file cards and half-baked hypotheses, they look in awe at Dr. So-and-so’s published book as if it had been born without effort or false starts, directly from brain to printed page. By investigating how someone got somewhere, we are more likely to see the achievement as hard-won and our own chances as more plausible.”

Genius. Want to stress yourself out?

Here’s a simple recipe: Negatively compare yourself to someone you admire by focusing on where they’re at today while imagining they got there effortlessly then conclude that something must be wrong with you because you’re feeling a bit incompetent and nowhere near their level.

Welcome to the limited, outcome-focused, fixed mindset.

To relieve that stress, focus on the PROCESS that everyone goes through to attain mastery. Focus on getting a little better each step of the way rather than trying to prove you’ve got it from Day 1.

That’s the growth mindset. That’s where the magic is.

As Carol Dweck tells us in her classic book Mindset: “People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower.”

Here’s to celebrating the time and effort involved in cultivating the flowering of our potential!

BECOME MINDFUL OF DEPRESSION

“A mindful approach to our health is particularly effective for ‘chronic’ conditions. For example, consider depression. When people are depressed they tend to believe they are depressed all the time. Mindful attention to variability shows this is not the case, which itself is reassuring. By noticing specific moments or situations in which we feel worse or better, we can make changes in our lives. If every time I speak on the telephone to Bob I feel worthless, for example, the solution may be obvious.”

This is a big one.

A key part of Langer’s work on mindfulness is bringing attention to variability.

We’re mindful when we see the variability in our lives. We’re mindless when we don’t. With depression, we often mindlessly think we’re *always* depressed. But that’s never the case.

There are times when we feel pretty good and times when we feel much worse. We want to notice this variability. By bringing mindfulness to our experience of depression, we can do more of the things that are associated with feeling good and less of the things that tend to go with feeling bad.

The Dalai Lama captures this wisdom nicely: “One begins identifying those factors which lead to happiness and those factors which lead to suffering. Having done this, one then sets about gradually eliminating those factors which lead to suffering and cultivating those which lead to happiness. That is the way.”

Not complicated. And, whether we’re depressed or not, the same rules apply to our lives. There are times when we’re more on than others. By bringing mindfulness to days when we’re ON FIRE, we can replicate those behaviours to make that a more consistent experience. And, of course, by being mindful of moments and days when we’re just not quite on, we can bring mindfulness to those experiences and thereby reduce the blips.

Put that together, have fun doing it day in and day out for decades and who knows what you’re capable of?

Hint: It’s indeterminable. But a LOT of fun to explore, eh?

Here’s to optimizing and actualizing while becoming mindful!

WORK VS. PLAY

“Trying to remain mindful in all that we do may seem exhausting. In many talks I’ve given over the years, people shudder when I say we should be mindful virtually all the time. They think it’s hard work. I believe that being mindful is not hard, but rather it may seem hard because of the anxious self-evaluation we add. ‘What if I can’t figure it out?’ Anxiety causes stress, and stress is exhausting. Mindfulness is not. Being mindful allows us to be joyfully engaged in what we are doing. Time races by, and we feel fully alive. It can be physically strenuous, but also great fun. We did a study in which we had two groups of people do the same task: rate cartoons. One group was introduced to the task as work and another as play. The first group found that their minds wandered, and they clearly were not having fun. The group who approached the very same task as if it were a game enjoyed the entire experience.”

Hah! We’ll start with the end.

Same task. Two scenarios. One group is told they are doing “work” and the other is told they will be engaged in “play.” And… The play group has a heck of a lot more fun.

Two things: 1. That’s nuts. 2. How do you approach what you do on a day-to-day basis?

Way before scientists were studying this stuff, Walter Russell had this to say: “There should be no distasteful tasks in one’s life. If you just hate to do a thing, that hatred for it develops body destructive toxins, and you become fatigued very soon. You must love anything you must do.

Do it not only cheerfully, but also lovingly and the very best way you know-how. That love of the work which you must do anyhow will vitalize your body and keep you from fatigue.”

He also tells us: “A menial task which must be mine, that shall I glorify and make an art of it.” Imagine THAT approach next time you’re doing the mundane.

That’s How to Become Mindful 101.

So is this gem from Thomas Sterner in The Practicing Mind: “Try this the next time you are faced with doing something you define as not enjoyable or as work. It doesn’t matter if it is mowing the lawn or cleaning up the dinner dishes. If the activity takes a long time, tell yourself you are going to just work on staying present and process-oriented for the first half-hour. After that, you can hate it as much as usual, but in that first half-hour you are absolutely not going to think of anything but what you are doing. You are not going to go into the past and think of all the judgments you have made that define this activity as work. You are not going to go into the future anticipating when it will be completed, allowing you to go participate in an activity that you have defined as “not work.” You are just going to do whatever it is you are doing right now for half an hour. Don’t try to enjoy it, either, because in that effort you are bringing emotions and struggle into your effort. If you are going to mow the lawn, then accept that all you need to do is cut the grass. You are going to notice the feel of the mower as you push it, how it changes resistance with the undulations of your front yard. You will pay attention to cut as wide a path as possible, not sloppily overlap the last pass you made as you gawk at the neighbour across the street washing their car. You will smell the cut grass and notice how the grass glows with green in the sunlight. Just do this for one-half hour of the activity. You will be amazed. Once you experience how the activity as mundane as mowing the grass is transformed, you will have the motivation to press on, because the potential effect this could have on your life and how you perceive it will become apparent to you.”

Here’s one more thought from Dr. Stuart Brown—one of the world’s leading thinkers on the science of play. He tells us: “Finally, and perhaps most important, work that is devoid of play is either boring or a grind. We can get pretty far through sheer willpower, and some people have prodigious powers of perfectionism, self-denial, and suffering. Ultimately, though, people cannot succeed in rising to the highest levels of their field if they don’t enjoy what they are doing if they don’t make time for play. Having a fierce dedication to grinding out the work is often not enough. Without some sense of fun or play, people usually can’t make themselves stick to any discipline long enough to master it. People always say that you can reach the top by ‘keeping your nose to the grindstone,’ but as sports performance specialist Chuck Hogan observes, this is not true. People reach the highest levels of a discipline because they are driven by love, by fun, by play. ‘The great performers perform as they do, and do so with such grace because they love what they are doing,’ Hogan observes. ‘It’s not work. It’s play.”

Back to you.

What can you do to reframe your work as play a little more today?

TIME TO BE MORE MINDFUL

“The more we realize that most of our views of ourselves, of others, and of presumed limits regarding our talents, our health, and our happiness were mindlessly accepted by us at an earlier time in our lives, the more we open up to the realization that these too can change. And all we need do to begin the process is to become mindful.”

Mindlessness vs. mindfulness.

The choice of how we navigate our lives is up to us.

Let’s be mindful of that and choose wisely as we playfully embrace the process of pushing the limits of what’s possible!

Feeling enlightened? Download my ebook for free, for a limited time only at: 80 Ways To Find Your Purpose

The post How To Become Mindful and Find Peace in 2020 appeared first on Life Coach Preston | Business Coach Preston | Essentialise.

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