#I wanna call this ship Poison Metal

[jackels-in-space]

╔⏤╝MAKE A TRADE: PART 1╚⏤╗

Renata Glasc was a wanna-be Chem Baron and was becoming a pain in the ass for Silco's business. He sent Sevika to negotiate a deal to bring Glasc Industries and bring it to heel. Sevika didn't know what to expect but she didn't think it would lead to this...

Also posted on AO3 W.C: 3.7 Tags under cut off - no smut but still reference sex

Tags: Former Sex Worker!Sevika (it's just mentioned at the end), Shimmer strap, sex as part of business negotiations? Imma be real this is just yapping the smut happens in part 2. flirtation, top!renata, switch!sevika

Renata Glasc and her budding empire were situated in the deepest part of Zaun, spreading across the lowest levels capable of housing life. It meant that the Grey was prominent and anyone wanting to visit Glasc Industries had to have a high-quality respirator.

Sevika didn’t like wearing the masks. It felt too claustrophobic, making her skin itch and her heart rate spike now and then. Add in the thickness of the smog, the fact that she had to cover all of her skin because of the Grey and the tiny laneways of Old Zaun, Sevika was not having a good time.

Shrouded in permanent night, Glasc Industries was a toxic lighthouse in the dark, tubes of neon chems lighting the way to the main office. There were plenty of workers moving about, equally covered, masked and goggled up, and none stopped the Right Hand as she moved towards the heart of Zaun’s lowest industrial complex.

An outsider, like a Piltie, would have thought that the choice to go so low, so deep that you were almost touching bedrock, would be a detriment to business and yet, there it was strong, powerful, a testament to Glasc’s identity.

Sevika sighed, the noise being altered by the respirator as she pushed a door open with her glove covered hand. There must have been some sort of seal because it required a fair amount of effort to open it up and then…there was another door, just as heavy. Renata really was making an effort in deterring people from coming to her office.

The inside of the main building was less derelict than its outside but just as dark. The receptionist area had grey tiles darkened by pollution and age, the walls that were probably a lavish purple wallpaper now black, and any metal now an oxidised copper or tarnished iron. It was probably one of the nicer looking places down this deep, especially with the collection of noxious plants and tubes of circling chemicals.

“I’m here to see Glasc,” Sevika grumbled out, resting her arm on the countertop as she looked down at the receptionist.

The theory that there was a seal on the door must be correct as the receptionist, wearing a far more stylised mask, had her arms bare as she wore a short-sleeved, buttoned up shirt. There was a long coat hung up on a coat rack off to the side.

The little redhead looked up from her bookkeeping, her eyes widening slightly before nodding and putting her pencil down.

“Of course, Ms Sevika.”

She picked up a telephone, holding it with one hand to her ear as she quickly dialled in a number.

“Ma’am, Ms Sevika is here to see you,” the receptionist said efficiently, pausing as she waited for her boss’ answer. “Of course.”

The phone was put down and with the same hand, she indicated to a hallway on Sevika’s left.

“If you could take the elevator to the sixth floor, please. Her office isn’t hard to miss. Sorry I can’t show you, Ms Sevika. Someone’s got to man the desk.”

Her head jerked down to the table and Sevika quickly looked over and down. She huffed out a laugh, the noise rattling because of the respirator. Two guns sat in easy reach.

“Shit, you get a lot of trouble then?”

“Ain’t my place to say but uh…if you wouldn’t mind…could you bring it up with Ms Glasc?” the redhead asked and the twinge of the muscles under her eye implied a shy smile.

Sevika gave a non-commital grunt and nod of her head before walking over to the elevator. 

Renata Glasc wasn’t even a Chem-Baron but the power and technology she was amassing might as well have made her one and that…that was a threat. Glasc Industries was in partnership with Madame Margot and her Vyx’s before shimmer had been brought to market, the range of aerosolized chem’s being a key interest to the Rapture Walk. Why Silco hadn’t extended a hand of business to the woman, Sevika had no idea, because now Finn and Smeech were having a hissy fit of Renata’s exclusivity.

So, of course the best option was to just outsource their tech from Renata.

Sevika was here to make a deal as Ms Glasc had refused to go out to Silco and seeing the guns the receptionist had, the Right Hand could only assume that someone had been attacking her industry (probably the shitheads Finn and Smeech.)

The elevator dinged when she had reached the sixth floor and she slid open the protective grating. 

Renata was waiting for her, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. She was as tall as Sevika, if not taller by a small, miniscule amount that Sevika would rather ignore. Her hair was black with two sections starting to become white at the roots already and her eyes had a semi-permanent pink ring around the pupil from shimmer usage (the drug had only been on the streets for a year so how much had this woman consumed?) A blue-black blazer was thrown over her shoulders in such a casual manner that had the Right Hand’s eyes twitching in suspicion; she was hiding something, probably a gun.

“Glasc,” she acknowledged, stepping out of the lift.

“It’s Miss Glasc,” the woman bit back, her mask adding a slight rumble.

“Mhm,” Sevika hummed out, not fazed by the biting correction.

Many people had tried to instate some sort of rank or title upon themselves and the only one that had managed to make it work was Margot but does Sevika call her madame? Fuck no. The only person that has earned her respect was Silco and as such he gets to be called ‘sir’ and ‘boss’.

“Not very polite, are you, dolly? Exactly what I expected from Silco’s little hound.”

Sevika had to momentarily look away and grind her teeth, biting back the urge to punch her. After a moment, she rolled her eyes back to Renata and shrugged, feigning boredom.

“We gon’ do business or not?”

Renata looked Sevika up and down, one of her eyebrows raising in appreciation before nodding and pushing off the wall. Her arms uncrossed themselves, and rested by her sides as she walked. The Right Hand’s eyes were immediately drawn to the industrialist's left arm. 

Talons that were similar to her own glinted in the artificial light. They looked cleaner, a silver metal instead of Sevika’s copper plating, and seemed to faintly glow with pink-purple chemicals.

“You got a good piece there,” pointed out Sevika, trying to suss out who Renata was.

Was she like Margot and Reni, where the odd compliment helped with negotiations?

Or is she like Finn and Sevika’s gonna have to beat her down as violence is the only language she speaks?

Maybe she’s like Chross and Smeech: opportunists?

Sevika followed her as they walked towards Renata’s office.

Renata took her blazer off, folding it over her right arm. It meant that her purple waistcoat and sleeveless shirt were shown off and that she had a complete prosthetic from shoulder to finhertips. There was a hint of burn scars on her shoulder blades peeking from the edges of the waistcoat. Sevika could imagine the now-healed wounds spanning across Renata’s torso. 

The industrialist flexed her bionic arm and the glow of shimmer became more prominent.

“Why, thank you. I’m sure you recognise the design?” 

The Right Hand did. It was very similar to hers. On instinct, Sevika rubbed her prosthetic over the poncho. It was a year and she still didn’t know how she felt about it.

Renata spotted the motion, her head tilted to the side to watch the other woman from the corner of her eye. 

“How’s it treating you, sugar?”

“It’s…fine…” Sevika gritted out, lying. 

It wasn’t fine and it seemed that Renata knew that, somehow. There was a pinch in the eyebrows and the respirator shifted as if she too was grinding her teeth. 

The other woman clicked her tongue as they entered her office, the noise sounding unnatural from the muffling effect of her mask.

“Sit down,” she instructed, indicating a pair of chairs in front of a solid looking desk. 

The trip down to the lower levels had admittedly taken it out of Sevika. The combination of reduced oxygen and excessive clothing having made her hot and bothered and not in a fun way either. She slumped down into the chair, legs splayed out and her head tilted back in exasperation. It was probably overly relaxed for a business deal but within the first few minutes of meeting, it seemed that Renata had some sort of respect for Sevika and honestly, vice versa. Perhaps it was the fact that both had lost their left arm, a tale that neither would explain to the other. 

Renata moved about, the clatter of tools making Sevika’s ears perk up. She was in the process of lifting her head when Renata, with such ballsy confidence, sat on the edge of her desk, one foot on the empty chair, the other between Sevika’s legs, the toe of her boot coming close to Sevika’s core. 

If Sevika was a lesser woman, she’d screech and cower away, demanding to know what game Renata was playing but she wasn’t; she knew what the other woman’s aim was. So, she raised her head and lifted an eyebrow, keeping her breathing and heart rate slow. 

Renata leant forward, her elbows resting on her thighs and Sevika spotted a screwdriver in her right hand. The respirator did make it hard to read Renata’s expression but the relaxed eyebrows and half-lidded eyes implied some sort of attraction. 

“Take your poncho off.” 

“Why?” Sevika replied, putting in an effort to sound indifferent. 

“I made that arm of yours. I want to see how it’s holding up.” 

“You…you made my arm?” 

“Silco didn’t tell you? Hmpf, funny that.”

Sevika didn’t say anything afterwards, reaching to unclasp her poncho and pulling it off. Immediately, the loss of the extra fabric started to cool Sevika down. She sighed in relief as she tossed the red cloak to the side. 

“You can take your respirator off too, doll.” 

The Right-Hand raised an eyebrow, suspicious. 

“I know what business you and Margot have, Glasc. I ain’t trusting you or your air.”

The industrialist merely rolled her eyes and reached up to take off her mask. It hissed slightly as the seal was broken. 

She was an attractive woman with the respirator on and she was stunning with it off. Her lips were full and a soft, dusty pink colour. There were smile lines, but they were more likely formed from smirks than actual smiles; Glasc didn’t seem the type to really smile. Sevika couldn’t help but watch the way her tongue darted out as she lifted the screwdriver to hold in her mouth.

The other woman’s eyes lit up with glee, or was it smugness, when she caught the brawler staring.

Janna, she’s as bad as Margot.

Renata shifted so she was nearly off the edge of the desk and reached for Sevika’s hand, lifting it with ease. Her hands were steady as Sevika relaxed her shoulder muscles, letting the arm be twisted around as much as the joints allowed it to. She was analysing the metal work.

Then, Renata tugged on the prosthetic, her body deceptive about how much strength she had. Sevika was pulled forward, near enough face planting into Renata’s chest if she hadn’t quickly placed her other hand on the desk, between the industrialists’ legs.

Yeah, definitely another Margot.

“What are you doin’?” Sevika demanded, trying to get her arm back when she looked up at Renata, the shimmer glow of her eyes was brighter. “How? There wasn’t enough time for you to knock some back…”

Sevika’s eyes widened when she saw part of Renata’s bionic arm raise up and fill up with sloshing shimmer, the pink-purple chem casting a glow on the sharp angle of the industrialists cheekbones. So, that’s how Renata had been consuming enough shimmer to cause the colour change but then…why wasn’t she sprouting tumours like the rest of the poor fucks that had been chugging the chem the moment it was for sale?

Whatever process that was happening was cancelled, the shimmer draining and the vial that had raised settle back into the main body of the arm.

“It’s a prototype I’ve been testin’, sweet cheeks,” Glasc stated after taking the screwdriver out of her mouth. “I know this arm intimately so there should be space to put in a distribution unit unless you want a whole new arm?”

“How much is that gonna cost me, Glasc, hm?”

“Well, with the tech Silco wants from me…” She paused, having located a screw in the shoulder platting of Sevika’s arm. “And this upgrade as well as the specialised shimmer for it…’bout three percent share in the business and two-hundred units of condensed shimmer a month?”

“Fuck off.” Sevika tried to pull out of Renata’s grasp, but the woman had found a way to disable Sevika’s arm and when the Right-Hand looked down, she saw the chems used to power her prosthetic dripping down her claws and onto the ground. “The fuck did you do?”

“Just unplugged a cable. Don’t worry, doll, when we’re done with making a deal, I’ll put it back together and reinstall the chems. Free of charge.”

“How generous of you,” Sevika gritted out, her eyebrows furrowed in annoyance.

She was back to grinding her teeth, forced to be in proximity with someone more annoying than Finn and more fucking manipulative (and, admittedly, more attractive) than Margot.

“Mm, very generous,” Glasc purred. “I don’t do acts of charity. Only for pretty girls like you.”

Pretty isn’t the usual descriptor people used when talking about Sevika’s body; brutish, strong, even handsome were the usual words thrown about but never pretty. Not since she was younger, inexperienced about the world and doing a job so far from where was now.

It caught Sevika off guard.

“Fuck you,” she bit back, the only decent response she could come up with.

“You could though, I would prefer fucking you.”

The lecherous grin the industrialist wore felt both predatory and sinful. The tip of the screwdriver that had disabled Sevika’s arm was dragged up her neck, following covered glowing, blue scar tissue to her cheek. The slight sharpness of the tool combined with how sensitive the scar tissue was, it made Sevika shiver.

Her back momentarily arched and her jaw dropped for a moment as she hissed or groaned as the head of the driver pressed down on a sensitive area on the meat of her cheek, sending a spike of something through her body. She had managed to desensitise the brunt of her healed wounds, but her face and neck were the two areas she just…couldn’t bring herself to touch. The rest could be hidden away but those scars…

The other woman was watching, studying. Renata knew all too well the healing process of scar tissue, how impossible it felt to return to normalcy after the loss of a limb. Sevika’s long sleeved top made it hard to judge how much of her torso had been affected by whatever caused the blue spiderweb, but Renata assumed it was a fair amount.

Sevika was vulnerable, obviously touched starved (Renata was the same, spending years in isolation before letting someone touch her after the fire), and it was a vulnerability Glasc was going to take advantage of. Always thinking on her feet, Renata could switch up a plan. She was originally going to strong arm (metaphorically) into the deal she had mentioned but then…well…she didn’t expect the Right Hand of the Eye to be so fucking hot.

When Silco had contracted her to build an arm for his second-in-command, he hadn’t mentioned what or who Sevika was and because Finn decided to be a little bitch and attack her factories, Renata hadn’t had an opportunity to find Sevika and suss her out.

From rumours, Glasc knew the woman to be a loyal dog, willing to take control of situation. Janna’s tits, she did more of Silco’s work than Silco himself so that meant Sevika had a very interesting set of skills. Renata would need those later and thus the long-term benefits outweighed the immediate.

She smirked as she put the screwdriver down. The foot that was between Sevika’s legs (the entire position was just a slight tease of pleasure) moved as Renata used that leg to hook Sevika in. The industrialists mechanical hand dragged up Sevika’s arm, talons scratching through the long sleeve top as Renata made her way to grasp at the longer sections of Sevika’s hair. Her organic hand cupped the other woman’s scarred cheek, her thumb swiping across blue scars.

Sevika gasped again at the overstimulation, Renata’s leg only helping to deepen the arch. They were so close, just what Renata wanted.

“So pretty,” she murmured, angling her face down to brush their noses. “You’ve not let anyone touch you.”

This was about creating a biological connection, binding the two women together in hormones and emotions so that they had something to last them years.

“Glasc, what are you doing?” Sevika asked, justifiably suspicious.

They were so close that every moment of their lips could be felt.

“I want to offer a new deal.”

“Okay?”

Renata tightened her grip.

Sevika wasn’t a fool. This was a similar tactic Margot had used before and always failed.

“I have this prototype for the Rapturewalk that needs testing…help a girl out and I’ll settle for two percent and a hundred-fifty units every four weeks?”

Sevika rolled her eyes.

“You want me to fuck you just to get a better deal?”

“No, I want us to spend a good night together. The better deal is just me showing how generous I can be,” purred Glasc. “Besides, testing the shimmer strap with someone other than Margot will really piss her off.”

The air seemed to have left Sevika’s lungs as she pulled back as much as she could with Glasc’s grip on her.

“I’m sorry. The fucking what?”

-/-/-/-

Having her arm disabled was about as worse as not even having it on. She had to use her long sleeve shirt to tie it close to her torso, so it wasn’t swinging uselessly by her side. Even with her poncho on to cover it, those close to her had noticed it (and the fact she was only wearing her chest bandages and a ripped-up tank top) and tried to question her about it. She only waved them off as she headed up to Silco’s office.

Her boss immediately spotted the issue, turning his attention from reports he was reading to Sevika. His eye was getting worse.

“I take it Glasc Industries will be a problem?” he coldly asked, hands folding neatly on top of his desk.

Sevika slumped down on a couch, her legs splaying open.

“Glasc is a piece of work, but I managed to score a good deal for us.”

She twisted her neck, feeling it crack and release tension.

“And what does she want?”

“I managed to haggle it down to two percent share and seventy-five units of highly concentrated shimmer every three weeks.” Sevika leant forward, unbottling one of the finer quality liquors Silco had in his office and pouring a solid amount into two glasses. “In return, it’s what we agreed upon; Glasc handles most of any necessary technological development, and she gets to keep her business with Margot. I get my arm fixed up too even though the bitch was the one that fucked it up in the first place.”

As she was talking, she had stood up, using her fingers to carry the two glasses over to the desk. Silco accepts his with a nod, watching his Right Hand as she leans against the desk.

“Seems disproportionate…there’s something else, isn’t there, Sevika?”

He was taking a sip of his drink when Sevika spoke:

“I’ll meet her at Babbette’s in two hours and will be assisting her in developing her shimmer line of sex toys for Margot.”

Silco chokes. He tries to cover it up but the sting of small amounts of alcohol going into his airway caused him to cough. Sevika just looked down at him, finding a small amount of humour at seeing her usually stoic boss frazzled.

“You good, sir?”

Silco had put down the glass, rubbing at his throat and waving off her concern.

“I feel like I should be asking you that, Sevika.” Even in a moment of complete embarrassment, he still managed to sound like he always did; in control. “Are you comfortable with such a deal? If you aren't, I'm sure we can come up with something else.”

Sevika sighed and took another sip of her drink.

Admittedly, it had caught her very off guard, experiencing a flashback to the past when her father had died and she had nothing left, nothing to get her by as she rebuilt her life.

Sex was just sex to her, nothing special. Being a sex worker for half a year when she was eighteen wasn’t an issue and Babbette was probably the best person she could have been working for. Probably why, when Sevika and Renata had finished coming to an agreement about what would be happening, she had suggested booking a private room in the brothel.

Besides, since the accident…somehow it felt…nice that Renata wanted her. The industrialist understood the struggle of losing a limb and how much it fucks with everything going on in her head.

“Appreciate your concern, sir, but I’m fine with this.” She meant it. “I know it’s setting up for something down the line. Could’ve helped her with her Finn issue but she chose me instead. That implies she’s planning something and if getting into her bed means getting the drop on her in the future, then I’ll do it.”

“No-one can deny your loyalty to the cause, Sevika. If she causes you any trouble though, deal with it in whatever way you deem necessary; no matter what the clean-up will look like.” Silco raised his glass in a salute. “So, tell me about this Finn issue of hers.”

[theinsanecrayonbox]

Sabretooth War part 3

Well…it’s better than the first two, and you know why I think that is

Lavalle seems to be helming this one. I went back to check Part 2 and yeah

Percy helmed the first two (and they had a diff artist interesting). So I’m wondering if they’re just gonna switch off issues.

Also

Arkady is once again Sir Not Appearing. Then again, almost all of these characters don’t appear in this issue, so idk what to make of this section anymore. But it’s weird right, that the rest of the X-Force cast AND the guest characters are here, but not him.

Anyways, story time. Geeze let’s see if I can remember because I read it last night but my phone refused to let me post about it, and this story does not have particularly great staying power…

We open on the Team X flashbacks as the previews told us. Savage and Camo call Vic out on not being a good leader

Wait he’s got metal bones again?? Would’ve been nice to have SEEN that happen instead of being TOLD about it. Also Savage knows Weapon X? I would’ve thought being Savageland lady her works might not have had one…huh. But wait, this is alternate reality adamantium; does it work the same, have the same poisoning effects, is that why Vic isn’t using his brain because the metals are rotting it away?? Is that where the adamantium coils came from? Did you melt some of alternate Red’s coils for your bones?? Boy what an uninteresting line of questions glad we skipped that story beat /sarcasm

Uh…what happened next…I think we followed Victor to bed?? Quinten’s head is in the jar like Headpool; it’s Orchis tech that apparently took a long time to learn how to use properly (again great job not showing us a good story). Vic takes a nap…Quinten makes a psychic call…to the Pit Gang

ARE YOU KIDDING ME! I was again JOKING about the whale jumping!! WHY is this a thing??? And oh look I was right, it doesn’t save the story.

Wait you guys had reality hopping too? HOW? WHY?? Yeah ok, we got screwed out of a whole miniseries for this gorefest didn’t we. Two boats reality hopping, earning character development, screwing up so many timelines, THAT’S an Exiles storyline, not…this. Argh.

Pit Gang is annoyed that they have to go back to work, but decide to do it anyways in a scene after the next bit, but I’m just summarizing it now because really, I don’t wanna focus on these guys longer than needed, they really are a distraction from the main focus.

Back with the SabreSquad, Savage and Camo are conspiring

Uhg gross. 1) that’s still a terrible retcon for Laura. 2) you actually are a clone because the respawn team made a second you (you) when the original you (Talon) was thought dead in the Vault, plus you have metal bones. 3) oh geeze they’re using alpha/beta/omega language, uh…not my fault (please don’t be my fault) (*I know it’s not really just laugh at the bit*)

Savage rips Laura’s jaw off, because we needed some ***sExY vIoLeNcE**{tm}. But hey, this and ripping into Camo earlier were the only gore fights this time, so it isn’t as bad as the others (so…Percy is the pointless gorehound…that seems to track). Oh and as a lady who suffers from scruff, Savage having some works fine for me; it was weird she was so smooth before, but I agree some with the tags that she needs some more muscle bulk and a bit of height.

Anyways, after torturing Laura it’s more conspiring to overthrow Victor time

1) No Camo you weren’t there when they fought Graydon, we have no idea where you came from. You might’ve been on the ship awaiting decapitation sure, but you didn’t escape and help beat up Graydon with the others. Lavalle wrote that part, how’d he forget?? 2) well we know from April solicits how this subplot will end, thanks marketing spoilers! 3) Pretty Boy really did have the braincell huh, cause this isn’t a good plan

We kinda bookend the issue with another Team X flashback as Vic is dreaming. He wakes up, Quinten head is also dreaming? It plays some sort of a map that Logan doesn’t like? Idk, but Vic is all “haha lemme derail what little plot there is and go do that instead next time” The End

Overall this issue was better than the previous 2, but it’s still not good. It very much feels like we cut out an important storyline just to do this, and yet now we are already bored of this and are cutting it short to switch to something else completely (gee I feel Ike I’ve said that about Percy storylines before). The flashbacks, though nice and will probably have a forced pay off eventually, feel out of place in this story format. There was less over the top gore and more focus on characterization so that’s good. But then we cut away focus for the Pit Gang and that kinda stalled things out; we already have too large of a cast of characters not getting enough focus (some completely forgotten) and this just adds yet another group that we’re not really gonna care about because they aren’t either of the title characters.

This whole thing is just confuzzling. Still gonna keep with it, but man, it’s still not going good.

[jade-eclipse-lithium]

Carmen Sandiego, the greatest on earth, present you a blog filled with Carmen Sandiego content!

I am Carlos Valdez, Jade, Eclipse, Carman Sandiego’s twin. Child of Dexter Wolfe and Carlotta Valdez. Adoptive child of Shadowsan-sama and formerly all VILE faculty.

Isabella and Carlos were brought to the Isle of VILE, as babies by Shadowsan, raised among thieves as Black Sheep and Jade.

Doctor Bellum always had her crazy plans so she took a baby and weaponized it, filled it with deadly science.

Black Sheep and Eclipse, Lambkins, one joined the academy naively, one was already on the dark side.

Note:

The squad at school include Graham, Antonio, our big brothers figures, me and my twin, Lambkins, lastly Ginger who didn’t graduate from last year.

He isn’t really Ginger but nobody knows his name and he is cool with the nickname i gave him.

While Black Sheep hangs around the campus, i go to assassinations or assistant missions. A more active Cleaner.

Back to narrative:

After escaping from VILE, they steal from them as the same person, Carmen Sandiego. When apart is “A” instead of “E”, Carman Sandiego.

By Eclipse who was a faculty-in-training, Cleaner-in-training, he knew all the dirty things he needed to know.

The Twin still sees Shadowsan as their father, Carlotta Valdez who was dragged into this madness as their mother, Hideo who was also dragged into this madness as their Uncle.

Narration done:

I’m not actually he/him. Biologically i am non-binary but someone gotta man up be-twin.

Also VILE has too many girlbosses i mean there’s a coach that could snap you in half and two lesbians.

I haven’t even count Tigress, Paper Star specially my sis, not to mention Lady Dokuso who dad “had a toxic relationship with”.

I’m pretty sure that was a joke about she uses poisons too much and it got on dad’s nerve.

Also, quote Professor “Shadowsan don’t really wanna get laid”

Main reason i prefer addressed as a boy:

That would make me gay but not in a way. I could hang with the gang at the bay. Hang with the girls and slay.

The true reason?

I walk on my father, Dexter Wolfe’s path.

Profile:

Carlos

The very first name i was given, simple birth name from my father, Dexter Wolfe

Jade

VILE gave me this name because i have beautiful green eyes and i like the shiny jades

Lamkins

When i am with Black Sheep, we are one as “Lambkins” but not at the same time for the “s”

Eclipse

Codename when i was recruited as Doctor Bellum’s bioweapon, VILE’s finest soon-to-be Cleaner+Faculty

Carman Sandiego

When i am on caper alone, i refer myself as Carman Sandiego and dress as Fedora the Explorer

Carmen Sandiego

When me and my sister are together, it is hilarious to see the look on people faces when they see two Carmen Sandiego.

Shadows

When i am with Shadowsan, my dad and idol 5ever since we use shadows as our cover and we both have shadows in our names

The Cleaners

When i am working with the other two Cleaners, Vlad and Boris to clean up messes, or to assist on missions, capers, or simply when we mess around

Crowley

Moose Boy, Otter Man, Neal The Eel, Dash Haber, my babysitter when i was younger call me because i hold grudges.

Appearance

Identical twin with Carman Sandiego, so basically the same

Can adjust height due to adjustment of metal bones

Can change the colours of my skin and eyes due to i am a cyborg

Normally 🟢, strong emotions/kill mode/trigger words 🔴, sad 🔵

Six fingers, so double thumbs up, double finger guns and double middle fingers with just one hand

Fangs that can tear metal off

Weaknesses

Anything can be if you try hard enough

Trigger words, lose control of myself

Highly functional sociopath, put the hot in psychotic

Dolls, they are TERRIFYING

Nap, eat too much, it’s a bad habit

“Vile” and wide issues that can’t be called “issues” cuz they can’t be fixed

Here We Ship

Jean Paul/ Le Chevre 🏳️‍🌈 Antonio/ El Topo

🏳️‍🌈 Jeantonio 🏳️‍🌈

“Some French guy” and “dear boy”

Carman Sandiego ❤️ Ms. Julia Argent

“Jules” and “my head is in the game but my heart isn’t”

❤️ Carulia ❤️

Countess Cleo 💚 Saira Doctor Bellum

“Saira” and “Keeping the crown warm”

💚 Cleobellum 💚

Jade/ Eclipse ❤️‍🩹 Mime Bomb/ Ginger

❤️‍🩹 Ginade ❤️‍🩹

“Snitched on my sister” and “heart fingers”

[sonic-blue-moon]

Sonic: Blue Moon - Prologue (Part 2)

It was a long flight from the ceremony near the city hall for Sonic and his friends, and the sun had now faded into what now would be considered to be nearing the twilight of the day. The looming spike of metal floats menacingly above the city, casting a shadow upon the citizens and streets below.

“We’re nearing the Egg Carrier!” Tails shouted from the cockpit of the Tornado. “We should have been fired at by now, the ship would have sensed us at this close of a distance. What is he planning?”

“Something not good. And from here, I would have seen at least some robots coming to stop us or at least defend the ship. But…I don’t even see one of them.” Knuckles shouted from the wing he was holding on to, the wind almost deafening his voice.

“Relax, guys! Whatever Egghead is planning, we’ll stop like it like we always do. This is just another day for us.” Sonic said, displaying his ever-present cocksure and optimistic demeanor.

Both the echidna and the fox looked at Sonic’s grinning face being cast near the setting sun, almost like he was a character from a storybook or a fable. Finding the silver lining within them, they both smiled as well.

“What would we do without you, Sonic?” Knuckles asked, chuckling a bit as he did. “I’d rather not find out.” Tails spoke up.

“And speaking of finding out.” Eggman’s voice spoke out from the intercom system in his flying machine of a ship “I’ll make this easy for you idiots. There are two entrances on the port and starboard sides of my fortress. Try not to split up, or else one of you may regret it.”

Now Sonic and friends, upon hearing this blatant mentioning of where to enter Eggman’s flying base, were looking at each other, as if silently asking each other ‘He can’t be serious, can he?’

“I don’t like that. It’s bait to get us to split up.” Tails mentioned, clearly showing worry in both his expression and his voice.

“Or maybe he wants us to think that and is trying to make us stick together to make it attack all of us.” Knuckles said, his warrior instincts switching on.

“So gang, pick your poison. Are we grouping or splitting up?” Sonic asked, clearly wanting things to move on.

The two thought for a moment.

“Split up.” Knuckles said simply, as for Tails he spoke up next. “I wanna stay together. After all, who knows what’s down there and we’re better as a group.”

Great. A tie, just what Sonic needed. For him to be the tiebreaker. Either way, he may doom them all to some kind of fate he won’t be able to see.

“….Split up.” the blue hedgehog said simply.

Knuckles smiled while Tails was shocked by this clear display of hubris and ignorance.

“What?! Sonic, use your head. We are much better if-“

“I made my choice. We are splitting up. I’ll go in alone and Knuckles will cover you.” Sonic said suddenly, looking at Tails with a less-than-pleased look.

Tails were stunned and just went along with the choice of his best friend.

Finally, they came up on the giant, hulking base floating above Station Square.

“We’re coming up on the port side deck.” Tails notified. With that, Sonic jumped off the Tornado and landed on Eggman’s ship.

“Don’t get yourself killed down there!” Knuckles called out as Tails went around to pilot the plane to the other side of the ship.

“Just protect Tails until we meet up!” Sonic shouted back.

As the plane dived to be under the ship and climbed up to be obscured on the other side of the ship.

“Okay. Get in, find a way up to Egghead, beat him up and his machines, and go home. Just like normal.”

He rushed into the ship, finding the scariest thing he could have found. Almost nothing at all. No Badniks or guard bots of any kind on the ship. It was like Sonic was in some kind of horror film now.

“Geez, I know this is a big place. But couldn’t Senior Huevo make a janitor bot and clean the place up a bit? It’s all dusty.” Sonic commented as he went through the floor after the ship.

But as he did so…he felt a need to…slow down and take in the sight. And in his mind, he probably shouldn’t have. As he saw dozens of Egg Pawns scattered and broken up into pieces. Along with almost hundreds of other kinds of bots he made.

“Chaos, this is…like his whole force of bots. Wiped out by something far more intelligent than a grunt or a simple machine. This thing went berserk.” Sonic said, looking at the hideously torn-up scrap strewn all along this one single floor alone.

Then a really bad thought crossed his mind. He normally would have seen Eggman gloat and boast at him from one of the screens he had, or from the intercom. Which was now decidedly wrecked and ripped from the walls of the ship like it was nothing. For once, he was actually at least wanting to hear that fat genius’ banter now, as decidedly less humorous as it was compared to Sonic’s.

“Wait. So no intercom, how did we hear him? And there were no forces to prevent us from getting because there weren’t any to send out.” Sonic said aloud, the gears turning in that spiny head of his.

He went up to the next floor up, the same carnage as the one below. And he checked almost every floor as well. Each one like he didn’t leave that same floor at all. This went on for several minutes before he saw a sight that he did not foresee.

On one of the upper floors, was Eggman. Slumped over in a corner…not dead, but very much not okay. Sonic rushed into the room and went over to his side.

“Robotnik. Hey, are you okay?” Sonic asked with genuine concern. Robotnik spat up blood and looked over to the sapphire-shaded pain in his side.

“So…it took for me almost dying in my ship for you to actually care for me and use my proper last name again. How poetic. What…no…egg puns this time?” Robotnik quipped to Sonic, coughing and sputtering his words out.

“Who did this to you?” Sonic asked, his brow furrowed in deep thought.

Suddenly, it was like a bad memory resurfaced in Eggman’s mind. “Sonic. Tell me you didn’t come here alone,” he asked, sounding visibly panicked. “No.” Sonic answered, “Tails and Knuckles are here. On the other side of the ship. Gotta say this thing is more colossal than your previous ones. It’s like three aircraft carriers fused.”

“Wait! They’re on the other side of the ship?!” Eggman inquired loudly, going to cover his mouth.

‘Okay yeah, something is up here.’ Sonic thought, no longer concerned for Eggman’s health…but now just wanting answers.

“Okay, man. Just tell me what happened here.” Sonic said bluntly, his face looking more stoic and less emotional.

“The full story is too long to tell, so here’s the short version. After you injected that dumb video into my system…it hooked up to every bot I had here. So I ran my code to debug them and thought that was that. Turns out…Metal Sonic, being as smart as they are…went crazy. And hadn’t grasped the concept of “earworms” yet.

“Get to the point.” the hedgehog barked out harshly.

“Okay. Look, that video of yours made him bash his head into the side of my ship. And soon…he knocked out a chip that was…vital. Not to him, but for everything around him.” Eggman sputtered out, coughing out the words now. His lungs not doing so well at this point.

He leans in, as so Sonic’s face would be reflected within Eggman’s goggles.

“His inhibitor chip,” Eggman said grimly, smiling for the first time. Showing off finally all the teeth he lost that were dislodged from the gums in his mouth, blood oozing and dripping from his lips like a leaky faucet that hasn’t been fixed in a long time. Sonic looked on and suddenly felt a wave of dread and genuine horror full his body as he left the doctor behind. Hearing his iconic laugh reverberate throughout the metal halls of the ship.

“Dear Chaos, I hope everything is okay for them,” Sonic said loudly, bringing up his communicator. “This is Sonic, come in.”

No response.

“This is Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles.”

But as he was making his way to the other side of the ship, he saw something that made Sonic trip up and skids harshly upon the metal floor.

He gets up, to see a skid mark the lengths of his lower legs from the kneecap down were bruised and battered. And…goes into a room, only to see Knuckles’ communicator smashed to bits, and near the doorway was Knuckles…smashed up, his signature fists were broken into tiny sprinters of bone and musculature, and coming from his cranium was a tiny line of crimson red blood that almost blends with his fur, if not for the white pattern on his chest…Sonic would not have known he had just lost a friend.

The Master Emerald now, since forever has no guardian to protect it. Knuckles is dead, having died a warrior’s death.

One down…two to go.

[lunarblazes]

i made a desertduo playlist and then decided to be a nerd and write explanations for all the songs! like a nerd!

playlist link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5ZGylutQpyTbgX7MY7Lrzz?si=t8_kBwBHSYG5kxTvZoIrTQ&dl_branch=1

QUICK DISCLAIMER: i am aware that a lot of these songs may have or imply romantic connotation! i would really really like it if these were not read as though those romantic connotations carry over to scar and grian. even if we’re just talking about the third life characters, i would prefer not to ship them or imply romance between them on this post. thank you so much and keep reading if you’d like to see the playlist analysis!

and now that that’s out of the way, PLAYLIST TIME!

•

passerine- the oh hellos

“you were the song that i’d always sing/you were the light that the fire would bring/but i can’t shake this feeling that i/was only pushing the spear into your side again”

this song really just... firstly, it’s one of my favorite songs, and the line i chose there pushes home the sort of terrified devotion i think the desert has. plus there’s a fun line about the cold wind blowing in from the north in the ending bits that i think very much fits their conflict with the red army, and a lot of legally obligated flight imagery that i need to have in every possible song because i’m a fuckin nerd.

•

no children- the mountain goats

“i hope that our few remaining friends/give up on trying to save us/i hope we come up with a failsafe plot to piss off the dumb few that forgave us”

i will admit that no children isn’t a perfect fit, but the general vibe of sort of defiant pessimism and betrayal fits very well with them! it’s very triumphant in its death, and i think that is very desertcore, because what’s more triumphantly dead than being the last duo left alive?

•

skulls- bastille

“when all of our friends are dead and just a memory/it’s always been just you and me/for all to see”

okay like this entire song is SO MUCH DESERT VIBES? LIKE SO MUCH. if i were to ever make an animatic for them i’d do it with this song. “a match is our only light, it’s day of the dead i’m indiana jones, yeah,” “i hope you can make me laugh six feet under when we’re bored of each other,” “i don’t want to rest in peace, i’d rather be the ghost that annoys you,” IT JUST KEEPS GOING. i think this song would work well with any third life duo, honestly, but these two in PARTICULAR just because of how it ended with them literally ‘buried’ next to each other, and again, the chaotic death vibes.

•

freaking out- mystery skulls

“i just keep out of my tongue/til all you want is done/and you just wanna leave me, oh yeah”

this song is a very third life grian song to me in particular! it could be my bias because of my little headcanon of grian burning on his red life, but seriously, this song is very reminiscent of the back and forth of loyalty that grian has with scar. the above line is sort of representative of the betrayal on red, and of course grian’s life debt.

•

night running- shin sakiura

(this song is in japanese! these lyrics are the rough english translation i found on google.) “someday we will stand at this place once again/for sure we will stand up again and again/we will watch it will the end/i want you to live freely”

this song is actually the ending theme for the anime bna, which i adore, and i just added it on a whim before looking at the translated lyrics. but um. holy hell the lyrics hurt me because they’re about running in search of someone, running for no reason, looking for something, and it just really hit, because the desert never really had a goal! they didn’t expect to survive, they were trying to survive, but what was their longterm goals? nothing. so that sort of endless search felt fitting for this. plus the song is a parallel for the two estranged best friends of the show so! perfect.

•

summer nights- siames

“it’s summertime/singing al green in your car/heading to a party/and the night air feels alive”

okay again, i will admit this song is mainly on here because i absolutely love it, but i also do think it fits well. it’s also about healing/estranged friendships, with a very distinct feeling of nostalgia for a happier time. maybe for a time when this was all a game, when there was no blood or betrayals on their hands. little canon divergent, but it’s fun for me, so into the playlist it goes!

allies or enemies- the crane wives

“are we allies or enemies/this will be the death of me, this will be the death of me/all’s fair in love and war but i can’t fight with you anymore”

. i just. points to that lyric. it literally led to both of their deaths. are they allies or enemies? it also fits with scar still wanting grian to be his friend even after he’s no longer indebted with the line “what happens now? do we have another go, do we bow out?” another very good animatic song that i’ve considered heavily. i listen to this playlist a lot

•

burn him down- kitsch club

“you must destroy, oh you must destroy, beyond all recognition/you gotta burn him down, you gotta burn him down, beyond all recognition”

this song just has a lot of fire and arson and high energy vibes. my little war criminals look at them go

•

rose- the oh hellos

“what's true is like a sickle/it'll cut you to the middle/your rose is without a thorn/but no, my mouth don't taste of metal/from the pot here to the kettle/i think we got a lot we gotta learn”

this one is like the exact opposite vibe of burn him down. the oh hellos are so poetic and this song just... feels like the healing potions after a battle. many of the metaphors here fit, i think

•

lone digger- caravan palace

“hey, brother, what you thinking/that good ol' sound is ringing/they don't know what they're missing/(they call it lonely diggin')”

okay this song is straight up just a dance song. i added it because i like it and also for some reason it feels ominous to me? i’ve got no idea why, it’s seriously just a club song, but it’s a banger and it’s in this playlist because i said so

•

feed the machine- poor man’s poison (suggested by my friend argonaughtkeene!)

“somethin’s goin” on, just look around/fear is on the rise, and there’s blood all over the ground/let’s all just blindfold the poor, we all know what’s in store/ we got ‘em now, just break ‘em down a little bit more”

this song is a VIBE for both desertduo members. there’s parts for both of them. it’s ruthless, gritty, very maniacal, perfect. listen to it and you’ll immediately understand why i added it.

•

sweet tooth- scott helman

“i hold hands with cosmic entities/i’ll take this two-ride if i please/i got this sweet tooth baby, yeah i got this sweet tooth baby/i exploit my opportunities/some broken hearts, some cavities”

sweet tooth is super upbeat and bright with these strangely dark lyrics? like i’m pretty sure it’s about addiction. in any case, i thought the “i hold hands with cosmic entities” very funnily fitting for both of the desert boys. it’s a banger!

•

necromancin’ dancin’- bear ghost

“when i’m necromancin’, everyone’s dancin’/nobody can stop me, i dare you to try/the dead are infused with insatiable groove and they’re coming for you, there’s nowhere to hide”

necromancin’ dancin’ just. bastard vibes. there’s not much more to say it’s just huge villain song vibes. i adore it.

•

crazy = genius- panic! at the disco

“if crazy equals genius/then i’m a fucking arsonist/i’m a rocket scientist/if crazy equals genius/you can set yourself on fire/but you’re never gonna burn, burn, burn”

i. yeah. y. yeah. more bastard vibes. also shoutout to an artist i saw (i think it was strifesolution?) who made a desertduo piece to this song because i have not stopped thinking about it ever

•

sweet bod- lemon demon

“i’m diggin’ up your coffin/and pouring out the contents/your sexy, sweet solution/is ripe for distribution”

you know how i said freaking out was a grian song? this one is a scar song. it’s my favorite lemon demon song and also it has the total macabre capitalism vibe that third life scar NAILED. more bastard vibes good for him <3

•

drunk- the living tombstone

“feel so much better than usual/i feel indisputable, oh/but now i’m feeling so beautiful/don’t wake me up from this spell i’m under, if i’m still breathing/i know that i will be ugly when i feel like myself again, oh/but right now i’m feelin’ so beautiful”

the descent of this song, starting off with a polite gathering and ending with a gasping drunk in the parking lot gazing at the stars that he can barely see? yes. yeah. mhm. i used a line from this song for a fic, actually, it fit so well.

•

oh no!- marina

“one track mind, one track heart/if i fail, i’ll fall apart/maybe it is all a test/cos i feel like i’m the worst so i always act like i’m the best”

bubbly pop track about false confidence, the ruthlessness of the pop industry, and the influence of the media? you know why this is here. it vibes. it rocks.

•

do it all the time- i don’t know how but they found me

“we’re taking over the world/a little victimless crime/and when i’m taking your innocence/i’ll be corrupting your mind/no need to cry i’m only doing everything i want to do because i do it all the time”

EVEN MORE BASTARD VIBES! SOMEHOW THERE IS MORE! this playlist is half villain songs and half heart-wrenching ballads and that’s the real desert experience i think.

•

the phoenix- fall out boy

“i’m gonna change you/like a remix/then i’ll raise you/like the phoenix”

BATTLE SONG BATTLE SONG! i’ll be honest i partially chose this song because i am a huge sucker for phoenix grian imagery in particular, but it’s also just a very good war song for them. villain song no 18372948 except this one originally had a hero vibe and now it’s changed specifically for them?? wild. their power

•

the other side- the greatest showman

“right here, right now/i’ll put the offer out/i don’t wanna chase you down, i know you see it/you run with me/and i can cut you free/out of the treachery/and all you keep in”

scar and grian’s desert monopoly conversation went exactly like this canonically because i said so fuck you <3

•

icicles- the scary jokes (suggested by my friend demizorua!)

“icicles don’t soften when they die/so why should i, why should i?/oh, icicles don’t soften when they die/they sharpen into sabers and they stab you in the eye”

this song actually has specific parts for both grian and scar! my cool epic friend mx demizorua pointed both of them out to me and i adored it so much. it’s a very spiteful song, just like the desert boys. also it feels vaguely murderous. perfect

•

problems- mother mother (suggested by my friend demizorua!)

“i’m a loser, a disgrace/you’re a beauty, a luminary, in my face”

literally this entire song fits them. particularly their relationship with the flower husbands, to me, honestly— the whole “when we meet at the pearly gates/you’ll get the green light/and i’ll get the boot in the face” reminds me a lot of them hdksjdks

•

tongues and teeth- the crane wives

“i know that you mean so well/but i am not a vessel for your good intent/i will only break your pretty things/i will only wring you dry of everything”

h. yeah. this song is literally gaslight gatekeep girlboss and i attribute it to the desert for that reason alone. songs to commit murder to!

•

you’re nobody til somebody wants you dead- saint motel

“you’re nobody til somebody wants you dead/and the list, it grows, and grows, and grows/it grows, and grows, and grows/and grows, and grows, and grows/until it’s everyone you’ve ever known”

this one is very self-explanatory. enemies pogchamp

•

curses- the crane wives

“there’s a fire in my brain and i’m burning, love/oh my, oh my/keep running to the sink, but the well is dry/oh my, oh my/every word i say is kindling/but the smoke clears when you’re around”

okay again! this one has two very specific parts for both of them. grian’s the first verse, which is above, and scar’s the second verse!! i really do like my fire imagery for these two don’t i? well, i blame them for having a fuck ton of tnt on them at all times and literally burning their enemy’s banners as a final act of defiance.

[cloudstarcats]

Icarus (And in the End)

There is a cliff Roman visits when he needs stillness. It is a cliff where he goes to try and grow. Where he tried to achieve more. where he changes where he decides, "Does Thomas still need me?"

Fandom: Sanders sides Ao3 link

Warnings: Roman angst, negative self talk, things get sad

(Inspired heavily by the song "Icarus" by Bastille. I recommend you listen to it before reading)

In the Imagination, there is a cliff. The cliff stands above an ocean, and from it, you can see the entire imagination.

Roman’s castle, his small towns, the hut and cave of the Dragon-Witch, the cove of shells made when Thomas watched Ariel- where an underwater kingdom would come up to talk and trade and live with a seaside village, a city of bird people, an elf outcropping.

You could see Remus’s tower, his kingdom of orcs and people whose eyes glowed red, blue, rainbow, whose sky was changing constantly, the cities of plague, the train station and industrial district of Hades town, the salon filled with men and women Roman swore were succubuses, his grotto of poison plants and sunlight, the Naga cave for Janus, the graveyard for halloween, and days on.

You could see the borderlands, the large castle in the center that housed two flags- a green flag that looked torn apart by war and a red flag that always looked pristine, almost metallic. The city that spanned below it, the crest on the gates that faced the Cliff- a shield with a sword facing point to the ground behind it, a castle of three turrets and a large tower in the shield’s design, a crown holding the shield and sword and all of it together.

Roman loved the cliff. Loved the fresh air, loved watching the world from here- because it didn’t feel like he was watching it from the eyes of a god, a creator, as one would assume from the height advantage. He felt… small. Small and real and distanced in the land he and his brother made. He loved watching the merfolk in the coves, the Kraken playing with the smaller mers, the pirate ships that docked and invaded and traded, the bustle so quiet and muted. He loved the sun shining against him, loved the rain when it poured or drizzled, the sunsets, the sunrises, the twilights and magic hours and golden hours and everything in between.

The cliff is the place he went for stillness, for quiet, for when he couldn’t name the feelings in his chest, for when he didn’t know what to do. It was the place he went to grow, the place he went to achieve more, the place he changed at. It was the place he went when he and Remus had split. It was the place he went after Thomas was heartbroken, before Patton came to comfort him.

So after the newest episode, after he had apologised to Janus and left before receiving a reply, after he had walked for what felt like hours and nothing at the same time, he stood at the cliff.

When he and Remus were young, they gave themselves many different things. Additions, traits, dyed hair and colored eyes, in the Imagination anything was possible. Remus had liked the red eyes he already had, and so he let them shine the color of blood, much to Roman’s amusement when they started to actually bleed- which his twin fixed right away.  Roman had green eyes and he kept them, but he made them more vibrant- to match Remus’ new costume.

“What next?” Remus asked, hanging from their wardrobe by his knees, in the bedroom that once held a large bed and now held two bunk beds. He tilted his head and Roman shrugged, huffing out a breath.

“I don’t know! Ughhhh this is so annoying~!” Roman whined, flopping down into a pile of plushies they’d both added to, groaning. Remus watched him and giggled, then his eyes brightened and he squeaked.

He dropped off the wardrobe and jumped on Roman, making him let out a muffled “oof-”. “I know! Wings! And tentacles and hands and everything we could put on our backs!” The older creativity grinned, eyes shining.

Roman pushed Remus off him and rolled over to look at him. “Tentacles?” he asked, and Remus nodded, eyes sparkling as he nodded up and down. “Yeah! Like a Kraken! Can we make a Kraken?”

Roman shrugged. “I guess, I mean the lake is empty..” he mumbled. He glanced at the glass door that led to a balcony. “You could make it an ocean- it would fit better,” he suggested.

Remus nodded and waved his hand.  “Yeah yeah, I can do that later-” he waved, standing up and walking to the large mirror on the wall, twirling around and eyeing his back- wearing a black shirt with puffy sleeves and silver accents and a green sash tied into a bow at the back- a mirror image of Roman’s version in white, gold, and red- only Roman’s sash wasn’t tied in a bow and he didn't have puffy sleeves like Remus.

“Right now- I wanna have tentacles!” he grinned and snapped his fingers. Eight green tentacles appeared on his back, shiny and an emerald green- flecked with gold, matching Roman’s eyes.

Roman gazed at them, eyes wide. “Woah… bro they look perfect!” he grinned, popping up to poke them. “Woah! They’re squishy! But not slimy..?”

“Should they be?” Remus asked, and Roman shrugged. “In that case- I think I’ll make them slimy later, it’s your turn now!” he smiled at Roman and spun around to look at his brother.

Roman blinked and shrugged, looking down. “Oh uh… I don’t think tentacles would look so good on me,” he sighed. Remus tilted his head as Roman thought a bit, and looked outside at the lake- soon to be ocean- and saw a flock of birds.

“Do wings!” he exclaimed, and Roman looked back up, Remus smiling widely at him. “Bird wings! You’ll look like an angel!”

“But I don’t want white wings!” Roman whined, pouting. “They're not… enough. I want them to be eye catching and shiny and cool like your tentacles!” he explained, and Remus hummed, plopping down to sit on the floor.

“What if they were… gold?” Remus asked, tilting his head to the side. Roman paused and thought a moment before nodding.

“You're smart, Re-Re,” he hummed, looking at him with a smile, and he snapped his fingers. A pair of golden wings appeared on his back, feathers soft to the touch, but still sleek and shiny metallic.

“Woah! They're so shiny!” Remus breathed, eyes sparkling as he got up to touch the feathers, running a hand through the feathers with a rather gentle touch. He grinned wider and Roman giggled at the contact.

“Ah! They’re ticklish, Re!” he whined, and his brother’s grin morphed into one of delight.

“They are?” he asked, and Roman backed away, laughing as Remus crept towards his twin, eyes sparkling as his hands and tentacles raised. “So if I-”

“Remus~!” Roman screamed and laughed, running away to avoid his twin as they two ran around the room- Remus trying to catch and tickle his brother while Roman laughed and stumbled around with his wings, attempting escape. The two didn’t stop laughing for hours, and Roman was caught. By sundown, both had fallen asleep in Remus’ top bunk, a pile of limbs and tentacles, two golden wings draped over them both like blankets as they slept.

Roman gazed at the ocean, the view beyond, thinking of that day. He shifted his wings, the same gold of years passed. Pristine, shiny, regal like a statue- a prince.

“You’re my Hero.”

He ignored the tears gathering in his eyes.

“Thank god you don’t have a mustache Roman, otherwise, I wouldn’t know who the evil twin was!”

The princely figure swallowed, he could hear the others calling at him, yelling for him to come down, but he steeled himself and looked past and up to the sky, at the sun. A breeze rustled his feathers, missing his hair. As it left he exhaled slowly, eyes closing for a moment as a tear tracked down his face, dropping to the ground quietly.

He would do this. For Thomas. Always for Thomas.

On the ground, the group watched Roman spread his wings, the gold of his feathers reflecting the sunlight around him, making him look like a shining statue, too incredible to be real.

“Roman! Stop-!” Virgil screamed, eyes widening as he saw what was to happen before the others, and he started to run, as if that could stop the inevitable.

It did not stop a single thing. Roman jumped off, ignoring the screams, the only noise was the wind in his ears, his wings beating as he flew. The sun shone on his face and he reached out, wings gliding across the air, the wind rushing in his hair and through every feather, and for a moment it was good. For a single, perfect moment where Virgil’s lungs couldn’t dare let out a scream, where Patton’s eyes gazed upon Roman’s face, heart stopping, where Logan could see the yearning shining in Roman’s eyes, even from a distance, it was good. In the mindscape Janus could feel a stillness, and he paused, turning his head, a tug in his chest, and Remus paused what he was doing in the living room.

“Remus..?” Janus asked, seeing the other side pause, the crazed look dying in his eyes like a fire burning out.

“...something is wrong,” he said softly, in a tone that scared Janus- because it was soft, scared, wounded, dead. He looked up and his morning star fell to the floor- a soft thump, no explosion, no nothing- and he swallowed. “I.. I can feel it. In my chest,” he whispered, hand rising to grip at his top- and he looked away. “Roman.”

Janus felt his heart stop. “Roman…?” The ego. The thing Janus meant to protect. He could feel it curl in his chest, like vines growing around his lung, not invading them, but a presence- a weight where there was none before.

The two sank out and went to the imagination quickly, leaving an empty living room with a morningstar lying on the carpet, an unnatural stillness filling the air.

~~~

It was a small stutter. An inability to go on. An insecurity.

As he drew closer to the sky- to the shining sun- his wings failed. Stuttering to a stop, frozen in time like something had hit them, he was struck from the sky. His lips parted and he stared up at the sun as he fell towards the ocean under him, feeling his tears leave his eyes. He closed his eyes, smiling weakly at the sky before he plunged into the sea back first- Virgil's strangled scream following.

“No! Roman-!” He screamed, pushed to a sprinting pace as he raced to the cliff’s edge, tugging his jacket off before he dove into the sea below.

“Virgil-!” Patton screamed- following the other and reaching out for him, but Logan pulled him back  and into his chest, feeling Patton breakdown against him, his shaking sobs rough against his chest. Logan only stared, rubbing Patton’s back, the cold tears trailing down his face unfelt- he was numb.

In the water, Virgil swam down, trying to catch up to Roman’s rapidly sinking form. When he first dived in he was scared he’d miss the prince’s form, that Roman would sink to the bottom and Virgil would fail. He realised, as he swam down, this would not be the case.

Roman was too bright, too magical, to ignore as he sank down. The sunlight filtering through the darkening abyss below them caught on his wings, reflecting golden sunlight that swam across his face and made the water glow around him- as if he radiated pure gold and sunlight. His wings cupped him, his hair framing his face and floating across his skin, nearly covering his closed eyes. His lips were parted, and Virgil could see the last bubbles of the air that followed him as he fell down slip away- just as a bubble of air left Roman’s lips.

Virgil’s heart raced and he kicked harder, hand reaching out for Roman’s form like Roman’s had reached for the sun only moments ago, unable to entertain the idea, the mere thought, of Roman dying here. Not now, not ever, he couldn't allow this, he couldn't allow Roman’s grave to be here, his death, his early death- he couldn't.

Virgil reached, desperate, tears disappearing in the water surrounding them. He wouldn’t allow it.

In Roman’s mind, he remembered when Remus left him. He remembered when he didn’t speak to him, when he ignored him and glared. Remembered how he said he hated Roman, how he shoved him away when he got closer, when he tried to talk to him. How he was crying but he left anyway. How he left Roman alone in their childhood room, a room meant for the two of them, his gold wings dull and eyes filling with tears as he gripped a paper in his clenched fist. Remembered looking at the drawing he’d made for Remus, and later going to the side of the mind Remus claimed, scared and alone, and slipping the drawing carefully under the door of a tower that loomed above him like a warning to stay away.

Roman remembered leaving this morning, remembered the odd looks at him in nothing but his usual attire, no sword, when he told them how he was going on an adventure. Remembered Patton’s worry over his lack of equipment- but he didn't need it where he was going. Even when he said that, Patton’s face did not relax, and Logan’s brows knit together as he attempted to understand where Roman meant to go. Remembered leaving the room and sighing softly, pulling out a letter he then slipped under the door. Remembered waiting, why did he wait, till someone took it and he heard the paper be unfolded before he left, turning his back, wings fading into existence.

Logan led Patton to the shoreline, the beach, for stability. Logically- the only way he could think, his emotions overwhelmed and not yet processing; logically he knew when Virgil came up, he had to, he had to, that he would swim to the beach.

In the water, a hand grasped Romans shirt. On land, eyes watched the water, and two minds let themselves hope.

Quiet filled the world for a moment, only the sounds of the shore and the stillness of the air and Patton’s soft cries could be heard. That was before Virgil burst out of the water, a loud crash and a gasp, dragging up with him a familiar head of brown hair and two limp, golden wings, trailing behind and filling the water with sunlight that didn’t belong.

~~~

Virgil swam towards shore, dragging Roman’s limp form with him. The prince’s lips were tinted blue and his skin was pale, a faint bluish purple tone to his fingers. Virgil kicked harder, gasping for air with the effort of dragging them both to shore from the cold waters. His legs burned, like his lungs, holding his breath so long had hurt more than he expected.

As he got closer to shore, Remus and Janus appeared from the woods nearby. Remus ran into the water, meeting Virgil halfway as he helped the other drag Roman’s unconscious form to shore. They pulled him up enough that the water only just touched his feet on the bigger waves, spreading him out so his wings had room; they dripped water and the gold was dull, no longer reflecting the sunlight as brightly as it did below the waves.

Patton and Logan stumbled over with help from Janus, whose face was ashen and eyes just a bit wider than normal. Patton kneeled besides Roman, holding his hand, Logan next to him, eyes still wide and almost unseeing, a hand on Patton’s shoulder as the moral side cried softly.

Remus moved to hold Roman’s head in his lap, eyes wide as he stared at the other- his unnatural silence disturbing and heartbreaking. He didn’t tear his eyes away, tears beginning to form in his eyes. Remus never cried, they would realise later. Then again… Roman had never looked so dead before.

Virgil looked at Roman’s limp form, face screwing up in anger and sadness. Hot, angry tears filled his eyes and he took a shaky breath. He gripped the fabric of his shirt, swallowing thickly.

Janus looked to him and bit his lips, eyes troubled and brows furrowed. “Virgil..” he said quietly, but the other cut him off.

“No,” he hissed. Virgil took a shaky breath. “Wake up, you idiot!” he snapped at Roman, glaring at the prince’s form. “Wake up you dumb, stupid, annoyingly sing-y idiot-” with every word he moved to hit Roman’s chest with the side of his first, but the actions were desprate and not meant to hurt like an attack, “-Wake up!” he sobbed, anger fading to show sorrow.

Janus reached out to touch Virgil’s shoulder as the anxious side cried, but Virgil slapped his hand away, eyes wide and red, his eyeshadow trailing down with his tears. Janus drew back and watched Virgil stand up and walk to a tree, shaking. The anxious side screamed and punched the tree, making Patton and Janus  flinch in sync at the loud thuds that followed.

Remus gazed down at Roman and bit his lips. “...Wake up,” he whispered, voice fragile, unheard by the rest of their small family. “...I can’t… I can’t lose you..” he said quietly, tears starting to roll down his cheeks as he bowed his head more, closing his eyes as sobs began to build in his chest.

Then Roman moved. His chest convulsed and he coughed, and Remus’s eyes shot open to see his brother struggling to expel the water filling his lungs. Remus quickly helped Roman to roll over, and Patton let go of Roman’s hands as he turned. The prince coughed out the water, left panting as Remus carefully rolled him back to his original position, eyes wide. Virgil had heard the coughing and rushed over, kneeling besides Roman again with wide eyes.

Remus bit his lips. “Ro-Ro?” he asked softly, and Roman looked up to his twin, vision swimming and fading at the edges.

“..Re…?” he mumbled, voice raspy.

Remus smiled a little and nodded. “Yeah,” he said quietly. He sniffled a bit and drew Roman up, hugging him tightly. “Don’t do that again, you idiot,” He whispered, closing his eyes.

Roman nodded a little, and slowly managed to wrap his arms around Remus, wings curling around the other weakly. Patton moved closer and gently hugged the two twins, and Roman looked up, brows furrowing.

“Pat..” he whispered, and the moral side smiled sadly, nodding.

“I’m here kiddo,” he whispered. “We all are,” he murmured with a gentle smile, reaching out and petting Roman’s hair, watching with a gentle smile as he melted, nuzzling into the hold.

Logan came up and hugged Roman as well, Virgil and Janus following, till Roman was wrapped in the warmth of everyone’s arms. The Prince sniffled softly, and he closed his eyes, relaxing. Feeling safe, Roman let himself fall into unconsciousness, secure in the thought that he was safe with his family.

~~~

When the group did return home to the mindscape, it was quiet. Remus took care to hold his twin, whose wings were wrapped around the other carefully, and Remus didn't complain despite the wetness of his twin. Patton held Virgil’s jacket, walking with the anxious side as he took care to check on his hands, which were bleeding. Janus and Logan walked together, both quiet, keeping an eye on the group. Janus would glance at Logan, and his eyes never lost their worried look despite the fact Roman was no longer sinking and instead in the arms of his brother.

Patton and Remus helped to get Roman cleaned off and into warm clothes. The prince didn’t wake up as they worked, and Remus carried him to bed, curling up with his twin. Patton got a few blankets, and watched Remus start to card his finger’s through Roman’s feathers, grooming the golden wings.

As the two took care of Roman, Logan went to make them all some food, soup, while Janus helped to bandage Virgil’s hands. Virgil was quiet and didn’t speak at all, and the mood was morse. When the food was done, the three joined Patton and Remus in Roman’s room to eat.

As they ate, they talked. Remus told them about what happened when he and Roman stopped being close. Patton confided that he felt horrible for the split. Virgil murmured about his suspicions of Roman’s struggle. Janus talked about what might have caused their issues. Logan worked through a list of what they could do. At the end, they decided to set up a schedule to watch the Prince and make sure he recovered, and none of them felt comfortable not watching over Roman. The prince was weak, and at best they could all assume that whatever had happened had exhausted him, and he’d be sleeping for a while. So they started their daily rotations.

Every few hours and every night it was someone new. When Logan sat with Roman, he would read poetry to him in a quiet voice, calm. Other times, he would sit there quietly and hold his hand, tears slowly working their way down his face. Whoever switched with him wouldn’t bring it up, but when he returned to the common room, Virgil would hold out an arm and let Logan curl up next to him, and put on a documentary about the coral reef. Usually, Patton was next to check on Roman, and would spend his time reading books, talking about cooking, baking, telling dad jokes to a quiet room. Sometimes he would trail off and crawl next to Roman, petting his wings and holding his hand. Sometimes he fell asleep like that. When it was his turn to switch, he’d be woken up and would go back to the kitchen, quiet. Logan usually helped him bake, and Remus would help make Patton smile again.

Virgil usually went next, and he’d mostly spend his time sitting on the bed or the desk, listening to music. Even if he looked relaxed, his posture was just a bit tense. He never closed his eyes too long, and every so often he’d check Roman was breathing. When it was his time to switch, he’d leave the room and go to the couch to put the documentary back on. Janus followed next, and he was quiet as he sat with Roman, for ten minutes at least. Then he would talk, talk about the sky, tell small stories of dumb lies, talk about how sorry he was for what he said, how sorry he was to mislead Roman, how sorry he was he failed- for not doing his job and protecting Roman. Sometimes he wouldn’t even sit by him, he’d curl up next to him into his side and warmth, falling asleep.

Remus was last, and he always spent the night. He would curl up next to him and let his tentacles curl around Roman, he would groom his feathers and mess with his hair. He would talk about the day, talk about the ideas that came to mind, talk and talk till he fell asleep curled around his brother.

Recovery was… slow. It took a couple of days, days filled with worry and a house that was just too quiet, too still. The morning that Remus woke up to see Roman’s green eyes staring back at his was the day things began to get better.

That was the day Roman was basically attached to Remu’s side, wings curled around the other as he was carried around from his room to the commons for some food and cuddles. That was the day Roman and Janus apologised, and Janus promised that when he nodded, he was confirming that yes, Roman was Thomas’s hero, no matter what. That was the day Roman let the others pet his wings as he cuddled Remus, who was warm like a furnace in comparison to Roman’s slight natural chill, and melted at the contact he’d avoided for ages. That was the day that Roman was reminded he was loved.

The day after was the day Remus and Roman moved back to sharing a room, the day Remus teased Roman and they ended up running around to the others amusement, laughing and hiding and ending up on the top bunk, Roman laughing as Remus tickled him till they both fell asleep for a midday nap. That was the day Patton and Roman made dinner later that night, and they all curled up on the couch for a documentary, and Roman went to bed feeling loved.

The day after, Roman and Janus talked wing and scale care, and Roman felt loved. The day after, Logan and Roman discussed Roman’s wings as well, and Logan asked if he could fly high enough to see the stars, so they did, and Roman felt loved. The day after, Virgil, Roman, Remus, and Janus spent a day doing face masks and their nails and telling spooky stories before they fell asleep in a pile of pillow, blankets, and golden wings; and Roman felt loved. And the day after that, and the day after that, and the days that followed- Roman felt loved.

And yes, they argued, they fought, they had bad days. There were days Roman and Remus couldn’t stand each other, days Janus pushed a button, days Logan and Roman got in furious debates and screamed till their throats hurt, days Virgil would glare and hiss and Patton wouldn’t know an answer and they would all fight, days everything felt awful and bad and Roman wondered if they still loved him.

But even on those days Remus would slide into Roman’s bottom bunk and they’d cuddle all night, Janus an Roman would talk and have self-care spa days, Logan and Roman would spend hours writing poetry and finalizing stories, Virgil and Roman would talk about Disney movies and criticize the classics in their onesies, Patton would make cookies and talk to Roman and they would sit and cuddle. Despite everything, they would always remind Roman they loved him, and in turn he would as well.

And in the end, recovery took a while. Roman would have bad days, they all would, but Remus was never shy to remind him that he loved him, Janus would offhandedly drop a time for secret meeting (aka, their spa time), Logan would ramble about his wings, Patton would give him an extra hug, and Virgil would offer a small smile, quiet and solitary but it carried the meaning. “You good?”  And Roman would smile back. “Yeah. I’m good.” In the end, they were there for him, they were his family.

And in the end, Roman was loved.

[tsuki-here]

So I finally decided to write a tfp oneshot; I didn't really want to write anything multi-chaptered since I probably wouldn't have time to finish it, sooo I did this instead. Might try writing some other oneshots in the future, if I find the time. I haven't been able to write anything in months, so it probably ain't that good haha

Title: Hamaka

Characters: Starscream and Knock Out

Word count: 1,696

Pairings: Mentioned Breakdown/Knock Out, somewhat implied Starscream/Knock Out if you wanna interpret it as more than friendship

Summary: It was unfortunate when the minutes blurred into hours, the words came to a halt, and Starscream felt he had perhaps overstayed his welcome. He stood and made his way toward the door, mumbling about having something to do, only glancing back when he heard the other bot call his name.

---------

He strode down the hall of the Nemesis with a forced air of purpose; body tensed, wings up, head held high, and face set in a grim, focused scowl. Not a single other soul was present in the hallway, so it seemed to all be a show for no one, but he knew better. There were cameras everywhere.

Turning the corner, he finally reached his destination and activated the panel to open the massive door in front of him, not daring to look back and see the trail of blue spatters that marked his path through the ship.

The instant the door slid shut behind him, Starscream let the facade drop. Wings fell, shoulders slumped, and an exhausted sigh escape him as he trudged to the examination table near the back wall of the room, ignoring the red optics that were already assessing his injuries from across the room.

This was one of the few places without a camera; Knock Out had made a big scene about 'doctor-patient confidentiality' when Soundwave had tried to install one cycles ago. After enough ranting and dramatics, Megatron finally caved just to shut him up. Soundwave installed one just outside the door instead, and even if the medic wasn't happy about it, he didn't push his luck on getting it removed. The walls were soundproof anyways; only when the door opened was the spyware liable to pick anything up.

With a quiet hiss, Starscream perched on the edge of the table as Knock Out gravitated to his side. He mumbled something inaudible about the Autobots, and the doctor gave a vague nod of understanding and pretended to believe him.

A few metallic clicks sounded somewhere just out of his peripherals as Knock Out's hand turned into a welding torch and he got started on mending any of the wounds that were bleeding. "You really ended up in bad shape."

He hadn't expected much more than that; consoling wasn't something the other bot excelled at. In fact, Starscream was surprised the response was so mild. No sarcasm or mockery that he was accustomed to when visiting the medbay, no prying for information with insensitive questions. That didn't mean he wouldn't make use of his own snarkiness. "Is that really your professional opinion, doctor?"

There wasn't an immediate response, and a period of silence elapsed as Knock Out continued his work, patching each and every open wound and split-open metal until no more energon trickled down to collect in the puddle on the floor. Starscream managed to get through the painful part of the procedure by gritting his teeth and waiting it out, until finally the blowtorch disappeared with another series of clicks. He closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief as the sound of receding footsteps reached his audio receptors.

He realized he must have zoned out for a moment; next thing he knew, the red bot was at his side again, this time with a rotary buffer, and was nudging his arm away from his side with a gentle hand to get better access to the scuffed and dented armor there. Starscream complied to the wordless instruction, lifting his limb out of the way as the buffer spun to life with a soft whirring noise and began it's work smoothing out any unsightly marks.

In the span of a few minutes, the Seeker felt himself relaxing and his wings returning to their normal positioning rather than hanging miserably as if made of lead. This was one of the few things that could be looked forward to these days, it seemed, even if the relief was only temporary.

"So, are you going to tell me what really happened?" Knock Out finally spoke up again, moving on to work on his right wing and lightly tilting it up. "Must have been pretty serious if Megatron left you in this condition."

Starscream rolled his optics. There it was. Knock Out could never get through one of these sessions without saying something insensitive. His words were always barbed and laced with poison, in such a stark contrast to his handiwork, which was always carried out with such care. It made him wonder if it was some window into the doctor's life - pre-war life - anyways. Despite how much Knock Out talked, he never really said much. At least, nothing that mattered. All of the cycles he'd known the medic, and he knew nothing of his life before the war or why he'd joined the Decepticons, anything even remotely personal. And on top of that, he was near impossible to read. He knew how to guard his emotions, and he had no obvious body language to go off of, such as how he had his wings that often reflected his inner emotional state. Had he been kinder, back then? Or was he reading into something that held no meaning at all? "It's none of your business."

Knock Out merely hummed in acknowledgement and kept any further questions on the matter to himself, continuing his work with slow, methodical movements of the buffer. "If you say so."

Despite being quite the extrovert, Knock Out usually preferred to provide a type of company that was almost feline in nature. Simply being in the same room, talking about nothing, fixing up any blemishes- Actions doing all the communication because words just didn't fit his style of serious self-expression.

He wasn't really ready for the procedure to be over, and the internal sense of dread came bubbling back up nearly instantly when Knock Out stepped back and the buffer came to a halt. Being fixed meant he had to leave, had to return to difficult decisions and scrambling to stay alive. Had to risk ending up right back in the medbay if something went wrong, and that was if he was lucky.

Normally he would stand immediately, test his limbs and joints to make a show of ensuring the medic did his job correctly before excusing himself typically without any thanks. This time, Starscream stayed where he was as Knock Out returned his tool to its rightful place, hoping not to be asked why he lingered. The medbay was the one place he could relax, and expect a degree of comfort and understanding; it was safe.

[But no, that wasn't quite right, because the room had nothing to do with it, the room was nothing. The medbay wasn't safe, Knock Out was safe. It's such an important distinction, one Starscream still struggled to fully comprehend because trust was usually deadly in his experience.]

And safety was so rare and precious here, more valuable than any gem or riches one could ever hope to fathom.

It was no wonder, then, that the troops were drawn to the medbay for similar reasons as he was, all like moths to a dazzling light. The vehicons were all nobodies, created simply for the purpose of being bodies to throw at the enemy. They were mostly neglected and treated as tools, or at best, just ignored and deemed irrelevant, so a doctor's visit was as good as it got. Even if Knock Out didn't particularly care about the soldiers, he still treated them as living beings when he tended to their injuries, not to mention they got to be the center of his attention for those brief few minutes.

In fact, Starscream had an inkling that some of the vehicons' rather common injuries from the energon mines weren't quite as accidental as they claimed. He had no doubt at least a few of them had a little crush on the doctor and just wanted an excuse to visit the medbay to get their paint jobs fixed. He couldn't say he blamed them; Knock Out glowed like a flame on a starless night.

After a few moments passed, he felt the medic's gaze on him once again, and braced himself to make some excuse of why he hadn't left yet, though the question never came. Rather, Knock Out stated, "At least the war can't drag on for too much longer, with the limited resources left. We'll be able to return to Cybertron soon, I imagine."

The change in topic was welcome, anything to distract from the reason he was there to begin with, not to mention to focus on a more hopeful prospect.

[A part of him recognized Knock Out chose the topic with a level of subtle deliberation, specifically to get his mind in a better place. The automobile was never too concerned with the fate of Cybertron; he'd grown too fond of Earth over the years, Primus knows why.]

The conversation meandered from there, drifting like a raft lost at sea between topics and non-topics, words that hardly even made sense and were just there to fill the void.

It was unfortunate when the minutes blurred into hours, the words came to a halt, and Starscream felt he had perhaps overstayed his welcome. He stood and made his way toward the door, mumbling about having something to do, only glancing back when he heard the other bot call his name.

"Be careful," was all Knock Out had to say, but there was a tone of concern and hurt in his expression that Starscream wasn't sure he'd ever heard or seen before.

[Because Breakdown was dead and the doctor was still grieving for his conjunx, in his own internalized way, and there wasn't much left he had to care about now.]

He didn't know what to say or what he even could say to ease the other's worry, and just turned away. The medbay doors slid shut behind him, and the sudden, oppressive isolation was like a physical blow that required a moment to recover from before he started down the dark hallway, this time without any limp or biting pain. His path of blood splotches still remained, the glow of the energon having dulled with the passage of time, like an eerie breadcrumb trail beckoning to him. He followed, vaguely aware that it was luring him back into the vicious cycle of war and violence he'd grown accustomed to over the millions of years, and with every step, further away from home.

[twokinkybeans]

Hello! I absolutely love all of your stories! I have a request, can you do a Starker story where Peter and his class go on a field trip to stark tower? I don’t really mind what happens there I just really want to see the ship. If you can thanks so much 💗

THIS GOT OUT OF HAND SO HERE IS CHAPTER 1/3!

Tower Excursions - Chapter 1: Science Rules

(Read it on AO3)

Summary: Peter is 9 years old. Parents still alive. Still friends with Flash. They go on an excursion to Stark Industries, right before the events of Iron Man 2. Side note: Tony is not romantically/sexually interested in Peter until chapter 3, when they are in an established relationship. Warnings: Even though Peter and Flash are still friends in this chapter, Flash is already bullying him. Other than that, not much, tbh?

Rating: Mature (just to be sure for later on lol).

I hope you enjoy! -Lien

...

“Mister Thompson, you’re old enough to know you shouldn’t stand in a driving bus, please take a seat,” the young teacher sighs while tightening the pony tail on her head. They’re nearly at Stark Tower now, so obviously it was difficult for most students to keep their cool. They all showed it in their own way. Flash got even more talkative and jumpy, something Peter never understood. They’re best friends, have been since kindergarten, and they know each other inside and out. When excitement hit Peter, he turned more inward, like a star waiting to implode, as opposed to Flash’s bomb waiting to explode. They were opposites, yet it fit. Obviously, the school wanted to go to Stark Tower to get them interested in science and technology, something both Flash and Peter already kind of were. However, anybody who cared even the slightest, was more excited to get a glimpse of Tony Stark. Of Iron Man. The metal hero. Even though the chances were slim, they couldn’t help but bounce on the bus seats. Because, what if… The class was going to go and do some kind of interactive walk through the building’s public spaces, with one special look inside a child-friendly lab. Erica had quietly asked how they would be able to get inside a dog and Mrs. Marie had to calmly explain that a laboratory and a Labrador are two very different things. … About two hours after they arrived, they’re in the child-friendly lab. During the tour of the building, nearly everyone forgot about Tony Stark. The place itself is wonderous and gigantic. It’s filled with moving gadgets and displays of future technology. The famous Arc Reactor gets promoted on pretty much every banner they pass. The students were allowed way more than they were at Oscorp two weeks earlier. Stark Industries sure sparked the kids’ interest in science and technology, as was the goal of this trip. Most of the other students were involved in the interactive tests, but Peter had seen all of that fairly quickly. He wanted to know more about the science behind it- he didn’t just want to watch it happen. Peter was all over the place. He’s wearing his dad’s favorite “Science Rules” cap – he was allowed to borrow it for the day – and bounces from desk to desk, asking endless questions that the pedagogically trained scientists answered accordingly. Some seemed surprised by Peter’s brightness, but the young boy didn’t really notice as he was usually quickly distracted by the next shiny project someone else was working on. With a short: “Thank you, bye!” he made his way to the other scientists in the room. “Peter, check this out!” Peter rushes towards Flash, who called for him. The boy has his face pressed against a glass balustrade that looks out over four levels of open space. “What is it?” Peter asks as he mimics Flash’s pose, pressing his open palms and his nose on the surface. “Are you blind?!” Flash exclaims, nodding at the ground floor, two floors below them. Peter follows his friend’s gaze and gasps when he spots him. “Tony Stark!” Both kids immediately waddle their feet in their place, not daring to look away from the legend who is having a casual chat with a red-haired woman. Peter and Flash giggle with delight, but eventually fall silent. “We should go say hi,” Flash whispers. “We- We can go say hi!” “As if! I’m not going down there,” Peter replies, not taking his eyes off Tony. “He’s probably super busy.” Peter is startled when he notices Flash reaching out for him. The boy grabs Peter’s father’s cap from his head and swiftly tosses it over the balustrade. “Flash! No!” Peter shouts as he stands up straight to reach over the fence in an attempt to grasp the cap. When he fails, all both kids can do is watch the hat fall and fall and fall and it seems to take forever before… Thunk. Flash’s face pales and he runs off, leaving Peter – who is frozen in fear – behind. The boy is stuck, clutching the balustrade with both hands as he stares wide-eyed at how Tony Stark picks up the cap that hit his shoulder on the way down. He reads the words that are on it and then looks up, making eye contact with Peter. The boy is so caught up that he barely notices security freaking out around Tony for what happened, but the man dampens the situation by raising the cap above his head and pointing at it with his free hand, nodding up at Peter. “This yours?” … Peter took the blame. He didn’t want Flash to get in trouble and so, both he and Mrs. Marie get taken to a separate room by security. The woman chuckles nervously, certain that she screwed up for losing track of Peter, and that she’ll never be allowed back in Stark Industries. Peter just feels massive guilt for inconveniencing so many people. After a minute of scared silence, the door opens. “But, sir-“ “It’s alright.” Peter perks up at the voice he has heard on TV so much. He turns, jaw slack, as he looks up in awe at Tony Stark, wearing his cap. The man’s attention turns from the security guard to Peter. “Mister Stark, I am so sorry-“ Mrs. Marie stands up and squeezes her hands together, bowing her head in shame. “Don’t worry about it. If I didn’t want things like this to happen I wouldn’t have opened my labs to youngsters.” Something about Tony’s words seems off, like he was frustrated that she distracted him from why he was here. “You can go, I wanna talk to the boy. Alone.” “Tha- sir, that’s highly unorthodox-“ Mrs. Marie protests, but one stern look has her press her lips together. “Just wanna talk about the cap.” Tony shows a tight smile and gestures at the door. “Besides, I believe you still have three hours left to keep an eye on your other students during this excursion.” Mrs. Marie rushes out after quickly thanking Tony for not being in trouble. He leaves the door open and sits down in the desk chair opposite Peter. “Richard Parker?” Tony says casually as he places his feet on top of the desk and cocking his head. He takes off the cap and shows the little label with the handwritten name inside of it. “Tha- ehm…” Peter stutters. “My dad,” he pushes out quickly. “Huh,” Tony says with a curt nod, turning the cap to look at the front again. “Smart guy. Had a couple chats with him a while back.” Peter’s eyes widen in shock. “You know my dad?” “I mean, he’s not in my phone’s contact list, but we’ve had some talks at conventions before.” Tony puts his feet down and leans forward. His elbows rest on the desk. Peter frowns slightly when he sees some dark lines in Tony’s neck. Are those his veins? “Which has me wonder if you’re bright as he is.” “I’m nine,” Peter retorts without thinking. Tony snorts surprised and can’t help a chuckle. “You sure are.” The man seems to ponder for a bit and then he tosses the cap on the desk. “Tell you what, kid.” Peter swallows, scared that this is the hour of reckoning. As much as Tony doesn’t seem angry, Peter is still afraid that he will get punished for what happened. “You get to ask me one question.” The boy frowns again, so Tony quickly continues. “If it’s a good one, you get your cap back and you can go.” Peter opens his mouth, immediately knowing what to say, but Tony raises his index finger, stopping the kid from talking with just a gesture. “If it’s a great one, I’ll give you a tour of the place myself.” Peter immediately wants to ask what the difference between a good and a great question is, but realizes that would be an immediate throwaway of the one question he is allowed to ask. The stakes are high, he can’t screw this up. He licks his lips and takes a breath. His head bows down to look at his fiddling fingers and then back up, noticing the faint glow coming through Tony’s dress shirt. “I read somewhere that the arc reactor uses cool fusion to regulate temperature…” Tony’s eyebrows shoot up surprised. “But I- when we went to Oscorp two weeks ago, we talked about nuclear energy and there someone said the most ideal element to use for cool fusion is palladium.” Peter swallows. “If that is in your body… How do you keep it from poisoning you?” The man’s jaw tightens and his expression sterns. “Still working on that,” he mumbles, nearly quiet enough for it to go past Peter. Peter blinks. Once. Twice. Did he just ask a question even Tony Stark himself has no answer to? No sound is made for a full minute. Peter can hear his heartbeat thump between his ears, though his breathing is slow. “How old did you say you are?” Utter disbelief seeps from Tony’s words. “Nine, sir.” “Jesus Christ.” “Does that mean it was a great question?” This time, it’s Tony who blinks. Once. Twice. “Yes, kid.”

[today-only-happens-once]

Scutum

Title: Scutum

Word Count: 9424

Summary: Sci-Fi AU. Roman sees the weapon first. The rest is just instinct. Found family. Platonic Logince, Platonic LAMP/CALM. Features Cartoon Therapy characters + Remy/Sleep.

Warnings: cursing (a lot woops); whump/angst/hurt/comfort; violence a la sci-fi/sci-fi weapons; science stuff that’s like 10% research and 90% made-up; sci-fi colonization stuff; passing mention of drunkenness; poison/being poisoned; feelings of guilt and misplaced blame and stuff like that; talk of death and dying; Elliot is briefly a little bit of a jerk but they’re anxious/traumatized and also kinda young so they’re doing their best; injury and blood; let me know if I forgot any.

A/N: Have some sci-fi escapist found family hurt/comfort. This took forever, wow. Several weeks and three drafts later and here we are. Glad it’s done! My huge, undying thanks to @creativenostalgiastuff for all of her help as my beta for this fic and answering my many, many questions and dealing with my general self-doubt. First time writing sci-fi. Would love to know what you think! <3

…

Captain Logan Sanders scrubs a hand underneath his glasses and leans his head back against the glass of the circular window. The metal of the spaceship—affectionately coined Foster by the ship’s medic, Patton Hart—creaks with a dull groan. The captain usually uses the window in the ship’s armory when he needs a moment alone, as its size allows Logan to comfortably lean up against the glass and look out into the “void of space”, as their pilot—Virgil Shea—tended to describe it.

Their relations officer and navigation coordinator, Roman Prince, usually hated looking too long at it. Logan had the feeling it made him feel lonely, or homesick. Maybe both.

Logan doesn’t mind it, though he also wouldn’t have necessarily called it a “void”. Billions of stars and the occasional swirl of color meant a certainty of life that existed out there. The universe is always teeming with it, and Logan finds a greater comfort from this distanced reminder than the crowded, bustling bazaars that Roman seemed to thrive in.

Logan hears the door swish open, his head swiveling over towards the sound. The light that floods into the room illuminates the dusty iron walls and the shelves of weapons—phasers and guns lined up beside one another, boxes of ammo on the shelf above—and Logan sees a familiar figure silhouetted against the light.

“Hey, Captain,” Kai Dwyer greets, unfazed by the sight of Logan sitting in the window.

“Kai,” he replies, pushing himself up to his feet off the window ledge. He grimaces slightly as he stretches his back, having forgotten how stiff the metal makes him when he sits too long.

Kai grabs a clipboard off the wall adjacent to the door. “Thought I’d do a quick inventory check before we dock.”

Logan frowns. “Are we close?”

“Virgil said we were still a few hours out. But I wanna be thorough. Make sure I know everything we need before get on planet.”

Logan inclines his head, rolling his shoulders to shake off the lingering stiffness before he crosses towards the door. “Acceptable. Carry on.”

Kai gives a small mock-salute. “Roger that, Cap’n.” The door slides shut behind Logan.

Foster is an old ship. Even to someone unfamiliar with the schematic, it’s evident in the grated flooring, the worn metal walls and beams that hold it together, the way the pressurizer hummed on occasion. Newer models tended to be sleeker, more streamlined, and generally brighter than the dark iron walls that adorned Foster’s interior.

Logan would never admit it—even to his own crew—but he trusted Foster more than he trusted other ships. Logically, he knew it was ridiculous. In the vast majority of cases, Logan believed that newer generally meant improved. But when it came to Foster, Logan had never even considered trading it in for a newer model. Instead, if something needed fixing on the ship, then Logan would consult Virgil and their engineer, Remy, to give Foster the needed updates. The ship was as much a part of the crew as any of the rest of them and it had gotten them through it’s fair share of close calls. As far as Logan was concerned, Foster had earned the loyalty of the crew.

But of course… that an inanimate object could earn loyalty didn’t make logical sense. So Logan kept that particular sentiment to himself.

Logan hears a familiar sound of the door swishing open down the short pathway and sees Roman duck out of his room. The relations officer is wearing his white and red armor suit, and Logan arcs an eyebrow when the officer meets his gaze.

“Hey, Specs.” Roman gives a small salute that echoes Kai’s a moment ago. Logan rolls his eyes.

“Greetings. Might I inquire as to why you’re wearing armor? My understanding is that we’re about to dock for a benign venture.” Logan pauses. “Unless you know something I don’t?”

“What? Oh.” Roman glances down at himself as if he’d forgotten what he was wearing. “Sorry to disappoint, Logan. Patton wanted to check the monitors in the suit, so I’m supposed to wear it around for a little bit. Make sure the readings are all right.” He bounces on the balls of his feet. “I’ve gotta say, Kai’s upgrades to the armor are pretty cool. Check this out.”

Roman stretches an arm out to his side, and Logan has barely registered that his palm has started to glow when something bright shoots out from it and Logan throws an arm up to protect his face.

A moment later, Logan lowers his arm to see a glowing hole through one wall of the ship. Through that hole, Logan sees the med bay and Patton staring out at them with wide, startled eyes. Picani is standing on the other side of the med bay, a ukulele in his hand, having just startled out of the chair he was sitting in. Logan clenches his jaw, turning a frustrated gaze at Roman before he hears the metallic clang of footsteps climbing up the ladder and the unmistakable voice of the ship’s primary engineer.

“Girl, you better not have busted a hole in my ship again!”

At the end of the hall, Remy García’s head pokes up with a glowering look as he pulls himself up onto the top layer of scaffolding. His dark goggles are pushed back into his hair, and he’s got streaks of grease smudged across his forehead and along his cheek.

“Your ship?” Logan asks, crossing his arms over his chest. His comment goes ignored as Remy stalks down the pathway and Roman starts stammering out either an apology or an excuse.

“You’re lucky you didn’t punch a hole straight through the outer shell or we’d all be dead.”

The intercom announces its presence with a familiar click and faint static before Virgil’s voice chimes through, echoing slightly off the metal walls. “Yeah, Remy and I might’ve fixed the damage from last week but we’d rather not test it while we’re floating through the great abyss of space.”

Roman’s holding his hands up in surrender. “It was an accident!” He glances through the hole in the wall. “Sorry, Patton. Sorry, doc!”

Patton waves. “It’s okay!” he calls from inside the med bay.

Picani chuckles and waves as well. “Nobody’s hurt!”

Remy sighs and looks to Logan. “That won’t be the cheapest fix, Cap, and we maxed on the budget for ship fixes last time we docked. That pirate gang did a number on Foster.”

Logan pinches the bridge of his nose. “Roman, it’s coming out of your pay.”

Roman opens his mouth as if to argue, then closes it before nodding. “No, yeah. That’s fair.”

Remy gives Roman one more glare before turning and heading back towards the ladder that descends to the lower deck. Logan is about to head to the bridge when he hears Roman say, “I mean… you gotta admit that was pretty cool.”

“I will admit no such thing,” Logan replies dryly as he heads in the opposite direction of Remy. “At some point, I’ll have peace and quiet on my ship again.”

“I wouldn’t be sure of that!” Roman calls after him brightly.

…

“We’re probably about 3 hours out from docking, Captain.”

Elliot—Virgil’s co-pilot—makes the announcement as the door to the ship’s bridge swishes open. The corner of Logan’s mouth quirks slightly, always impressed by Elliot’s ability to know who was coming through the door without looking. Anytime Logan asked them about it, they merely shrugged.

Foster’s bridge is relatively small. Green, red, and blue dots of lights cover both walls above a row of seats with harnesses for emergency cases. Each dot of light was information about how Foster was functioning, and Logan scans both walls quickly. Everything seemed to be operating efficiently.

“Understood,” Logan replies to Elliot.

A few feet past the emergency seats along the walls are the two pilot chairs, occupied by Virgil and Elliot. Virgil flips a small metal switch, then glances over his shoulder at Logan. Virgil had been the last person to join his team when Logan was first recruiting—Picani, Kai, and Elliot didn’t join until a few months ago. Logan had been uncertain when someone whose call sign was “Anxiety” responded to his flyer in search of a pilot. But word on the street had been that Virgil was the best of the best, and Logan was running low on potential candidates that measured up to his expectations.

Virgil had more than proved the rumors. Logan owed his life to him and his piloting skills more times than he cared to admit. The entire crew did.

“So why exactly are we docking in Vannaheim?” Virgil asks. “Not that I’m not, like, totally jazzed to be going to a planet that’s 99% desert.”

Logan crosses the short distance to stand between the two pilots chairs. “Vannaheim’s dune pattern is being impacted by gravity shifts that they can’t explain. We’re there to take some observations and perhaps help their scientists develop a solution.”

Elliot glances at Virgil, then snorts at the look on his face. “You’re just mad because you can’t wear your hoodie.”

Virgil points a finger at them. “I can, and I will.”

“You will do no such thing,” Logan interjects with a pointed look. “I will not have one of my best pilots suffer heat stroke.”

“It’s my aesthetic and I like to suffer.”

Logan shakes his head, looking out above the ship’s controls to the window that spanned in front of the pilot seats. It was a similar view to the one Logan had been enjoying a moment ago in the armory window, with the addition of Vannaheim in the distance—a small, red and orange planet that was approximately half the size of Earth. Hot and dry, but slightly higher oxygen levels than were present in Earth’s atmosphere.

Logan had been to Vannaheim six years ago when an old friend of his, Corbin Wright, had requested his help with developing vegetation alternatives given the arid biosphere of the planet. He’d been concerned at the potential ecological ramifications should they introduce flora and fauna that were not native to the planet. Instead, he and Corbin and a few other scientists spent a few weeks researching the native vegetation and fauna and determining what options were most compatible with human nutritional needs.

The effort had been met with some resistance from a minority of the colonists on the planet. They formed something of a resistance group—called themselves the ‘Retribution’, which Logan still thinks is a bit excessive—that started with some minor disagreement at community meetings, but quickly devolved into accusations that their ‘way of life’ was ‘under attack’. Which was ridiculous. Logan left as things continued to escalate, knowing that his presence on the planet was likely to only heighten the tensions. It was Logan’s original idea, after all.

When Corbin reached out about the gravitational shifts, he’d said tensions had remained after Logan left—even reaching moments when Corbin worried it would turn violent—but that things seemed to have mostly settled down in the recent weeks. Logan had asked if Corbin was sure that Logan returning wouldn’t have an adverse effect on the peace in the colony.

One way to find out, Corbin had replied dryly. Logan didn’t find it particularly comforting.

…

Two and a half hours later, Logan is passing by the med bay when the click through the ship’s intercom perks his ears.

“Heads up. We’re T-minus 27 minutes until we’ll be pulling into dock.” Elliot’s voice is distorted slightly by the static hum.

It clicks off in the same moment that the doors to the med bay swish open. Patton steps out, looking down at a chart that’s projected flatly from the gauntlet on his wrist. He glances up and smiles.

“Heya, Cap.”

Logan arcs an eyebrow. “Greetings. Everything satisfactory?” He inclines his head to the chart Patton had been looking at.

“What, this?” Patton glances back down. “Yeah. Just going over the charts from the new suit readouts. I was gonna have you try yours on before we docked, but Roman’s little… surprise earlier did some damage to the chest plate as I was downloading the software.” Patton laughs. “Kai said he can fix it, but not before we dock. I did manage to salvage your helmet, though. Ya have a minute?”

Logan follows Patton through the entryway into the med bay. Perhaps “med bay” was a bit of a gracious term for it. The room was relatively small, with two gatch beds fixed to one wall, and a variety of medical equipment and read-outs that Logan only vaguely understood how to use. The room was well-equipped for as small as it was, but Patton was also the only medical doctor on the ship.

On the left gatch bed, Logan sees black armor with blue accents—and the half-melted chestplate. It resembles, in style, to the white and red armor Roman had been wearing earlier.

“I updated the heartrate monitor display, plus the one for oxygen intake,” Patton is saying behind Logan as he minimizes the chart he’d been looking at and moves to a monitor on the far wall. “I also added a body temperature gauge and a toxin sensor since you can never be too careful, y’know?”

Logan nods, lifting the new helmet and inspecting it. The exterior of the helmet looks the same as before Logan had turned it over to be updated. A dark visor shields the face, the rest of it black with dark blue accents. It matches the damaged suit that sits in pieces on the gatch bed.

“Ya like it?” Patton asks. Logan looks over his shoulder at the doctor, who had stopped what he was doing on the monitor to look expectantly at the ship captain.

Logan glances back. “It appears to be the same helmet.”

Patton grins. “Looks that way. It’s cooler now, though. I also added in some ecological monitors. Simple stuff, at least for now. Atmosphere make up, surface temperature. Working on some other stuff, but that seems like enough for a prototype, don’tcha think?”

“I suppose it does make sense to limit variable additions when testing new technology.”

“Try the helmet on for me? Oh, and you should probably take your glasses off. Kai made sure the display will adjust for your vision.”

Logan obligingly slips the dark armor helmet over his head. He reaches up to his temple on the outside of the helmet and presses in. There’s a high-pitched blip and Logan’s vision goes from dark to a bright, staticky blue. Logan instinctively shuts his eyes against the blinding onslaught.

“Yikes!” Patton yelps, and Logan senses him suddenly standing beside him. A slight pressure on his left temple, a quiet blip, and Logan’s vision goes back to black. “I’m sorry, Logan. Not sure why that happened. I’ll have Kai take a look.”

Logan slips the helmet back off. “Not to worry, Patton. I’m confident in Kai’s engineering capabilities.”

Patton gingerly takes the helmet from Logan’s arms and sets it back on the gatch bed in front of them. “Yeah, but still. We were so close to all of you getting to try the new suits!”

Logan rakes his fingers through his hair to pull it back under control from its disheveled state. It was always a mess when he took his helmet off. He slips his glasses back onto his face. “Nevertheless. Roman and Elliot’s test runs on Vannaheim should still be adequate in assessing whether the new software you’ve developed will serve its functional purpose adequately.”

Patton gives Logan’s helmet a sad pat. “Yeah, you’re right. Well, thanks for giving it a shot, Cap! Good luck down there.”

“Your luck is unneeded, but appreciated. Thank you, Patton.”

…

The blast of arid heat stings Logan’s eyes slightly as Virgil lowers the ship’s docking track. Logan smiles politely at Corbin—slightly aged from the last time he saw him, but unmistakable regardless—and the two other individuals that stand with him. Roman and Elliot linger closely behind him as Logan descends the ramp and shakes Corbin’s hand.

“It’s good to see you, Logan,” Corbin greets with a faint smile. “Allow me to introduce you. This is my partner, Sloane. And this is Valerie.”

Logan shakes both of their hands, thinking idly that Sloane’s evident excitable energy rivaled that of Patton’s. Valerie has her dark hair pulled back into a high ponytail, which isn’t necessarily a surprise given the heat. The orange and yellow sands stretch into rolling dunes in the distance, unheeded by the small colony network they’d docked in. A bright blue sky stretches above them, and Logan sees Elliot slip on a pair of sunglasses out of the corner of his eye. Roman squints and brings up a hand to shield his own vision.

“Rainwall’s gotten bigger,” Logan remarks as Corbin leads them from the dock and further into the colony.

The last time Logan had been here, it had barely been a few temporary settlement structures—really just glorified tents, in Logan’s humble opinion--cohesive enough to call a colony network but only barely. The structures look more permanent now, and there are certainly more of them. Pathways between them are not paved but are certainly worn enough with foot and vehicle traffic, and Logan is pleased to see that they put his prior suggestion of solar panels to use. The roofs of nearly every building—most of them white and domed structures of varying sizes—are covered with them.

There’s a gust of wind, kicking up the sand and dust at their feet. Logan turns his face into his shoulder to keep from inhaling. Roman coughs behind him. “Oh great,” he says with an air of drama that makes Logan roll his eyes. “This planet is going to ruin my hair.”

“You get used to it,” Valerie says.

“I definitely do not want to get used to it.”

The corner of Logan’s mouth quirks. “We could return to Dal’tera, Roman.”

“I thought we agreed to never speak of Dal’tera again.”

“You and Virgil agreed to never speak of what happened on Dal’tera again. I made no such promise.”

Although Logan doesn’t turn around, he can feel the way Elliot’s gaze flickers between Roman’s face and the back of his head. “What happened on Dal’tera?”

“It was four years ago—”

“Which is why we are leaving it in the past!” Roman cuts in insistently. “Unbelievable. The lack of trust. First, Kai disables the cool blaster-thingy on my suit, now my own captain is betraying my trust.”

The accusation is empty and with a certain familiar affection underlying the dramatics, but Logan holds his hands up in mock surrender regardless. “To Kai’s credit, you did damage the ship less than half an hour after having the technology made available to you,” he says, and Roman makes an affronted noise behind him.

“It was an accidental—”

Elliot interrupts him, sounding amused. “Did you just call it a blaster-thingy? Really?”

Logan glances over his shoulder in time to see Roman look down at his armored hand. “I don’t know the name for it.”

“It should be named something cool.”

“Yes, I agree. Perhaps we should come up with some options to run by Kai when we return.”

As they pass one of the vegetation fields, a pair of colonists wave at them from a distance. Logan sees Sloane wave enthusiastically in return out of the corner of his eye. Corbin lifts a hand in a more subdued greeting. A pair of children cut out between the buildings in front of them and barely dodge Logan and Corbin at the front of the group, shrieking with laughter.  Behind him, Elliot and Roman chat about potential names for the new technology that Kai had inputted into the suit.

It’s a familiar thrum of background noise as they make their way through the settlement. The excitable chatter and increasingly ridiculous suggestions for naming technology makes Logan vaguely grateful that Kai tended to name his own tech rather than leave it to those two. Regardless, Logan is content to let them chatter away. Especially if it kept their attention occupied as they navigate through Rainwall.

As much as the colony had grown since Logan had last seen it, it doesn’t take them too long to reach the far end of the small town. They’re led to one of the white domed structures at the far end of the network of buildings and worn pathways. Corbin inputs a four-digit code into the keypad beside the door, and Logan hears a lock click before the door swishes open.

…

Logan feels the beanbag hit the back of his head for the fourth time and doesn’t even bother to turn around.

“Sorry, Captain!” Roman says, also for the fourth time.

Logan, Corbin, and Valerie had been pouring over data spreadsheets, charts, graphs, and notes regarding the anomaly in Vannaheim’s dune pattern for the past three hours. Roman and Elliot both had tried to assist for the first hour and a half, but while they were extremely bright and intelligent people in Logan’s opinion, neither were particularly practiced or well-versed in theoretical physics or planetology. Elliot’s understanding of piloting had been helpful briefly in identifying some smaller anomalies in the gravitational shifts in the planet’s atmosphere, but that was about the extent that their expertise could help.

The pod—as Sloane had been calling the one-room building they were in—was small and simple on the inside, but certainly functional. The couch and table towards the front of the pod had been pushed against the wall to make room for the game that Roman and Sloane had started with a beanbag that Sloane happened to have handy. Towards the back were several computers, and a few chairs. Corbin sits in one, scanning over the contents of the most recent read-out, and Valerie sits in the other. Logan stands and paces in the space between them and the game of beanbag. There were a few unpacked crates blocking part of the pathway, having previously housed brand-new computer parts.

Roman sheepishly jogs the short distance between himself and the beanbag at Logan’s feet, snatching it up. Logan opens his mouth to say something when Elliot cuts him off, sitting up a bit from where they’d been lounged against the couch.

“Did you guys hear that?”

Logan frowns, but it’s Valerie who speaks up, looking up from the tablet in her hands. “Hear what?”

But then they do hear it. It’s distant, but rapidly getting closer. Shouting. Someone screams. And—

“Was that phaser discharge?” Sloane asks, his face draining of color. Elliot scrambles to their feet, crossing towards Logan and further away from the door.

“Corbin, take Sloane and get out of here,” Logan says immediately. “Valerie, you too. Get somewhere safe.”

The shout is right outside the door. Corbin grabs for Sloane and yanks him back behind him as the door swishes open, fumbling to pull the phaser out of the holster at his belt.

Logan barely has time to register that the strangled cry from Roman is his name before he feels a weight slam into him, sending him crashing to the floor just as phasers go off. Logan doesn’t know who fired first, his ears ringing slightly and Roman, a heavy weight, on top of him.

“I knew he’d come back!” a new voice—grating and sharp and a little hysterical—shrieks. “I knew fucking Logan Sanders couldn’t keep his distance! You’ve ruined our way of life one too many times you fucking piece of—” Corbin fires his phaser, a streak of green light slamming into the figure’s chest. Even through the chaos, Logan can see the switch set to stun.

“Roman,” Logan grunts as he shoves his relations officer off of him, “what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Roman rolls off him with a tight grimace, an arm wrapped around himself. He doesn’t answer and he doesn’t sit up, and it’s only then that Logan sees the skin of Roman’s waist—a sickly green and black—exposed between his fingers and broken armor.

Logan’s mind kicks into overdrive, the shouting between Corbin, Valerie, Elliot and the intruders overlapping with exchanges of phaser fire fading into background noise.

Logan goes to reach for his comm at his belt before he realizes that it’s been shattered into pieces. Parts of it are melted, apparently having taken some phaser damage. Unusable. Logan changes tactics immediately, pulling the identical equipment piece off Roman’s shoulder and clicks in.

“Foster Crew,” Logan says, clipped and urgent. “Come in. We have a Code Black. Repeat: Code Black. We need immediate assistance.”

“Fucking shit,” is Virgil’s instant response, muffled from static. “What’s your location?”

Logan looks to Elliot on his left, who is staring at Roman with wide eyes having heard the call go through the comms. “Elliot,” Logan says. “Send our location.”

They blink quickly and nod, pressing a button on the gauntlet on their armor before firing another round of their phaser. It cracks against the wall. Elliot ducks back behind the create as the corner of it splinters into shards with a ricocheting crack.

Logan reaches for the wound on Roman’s waist, but Roman won’t move his hands. He’s pale, already with a thin sheen of sweat, and when his eyes flutter open, Logan doesn’t miss the glassy look in them, nor the way that they don’t seem to focus.

“Roman. Hey.” Logan taps his face, then pulls Roman’s hands away. “Look here.”

“Cap?” Roman’s voice is distant. Hazy. Confused.

When Logan yanks Roman’s hands away so that he can better assess damage, Roman makes a noise in the back of his throat that doesn’t sound fully human.

Logan doesn’t respond. The wound isn’t just phaser damage, from the little Logan can see. Phasers didn’t generally turn skin into that green-black mottled mess. There appears to be several tiny puncture wounds. Toxin, Logan thinks, and reaches for Roman’s comm again. He helps Roman sit up and lean against the crate behind him.

“Patton. Come in, Patton.”

Corbin is shouting something from where he’s taken cover against the wall on the opposite side to Logan’s left. He fires twice more.

“Roman’s vitals are all over the place,” Patton answers without having to ask what Logan needed to know. “Toxin levels are elevated and climbing. What’s happening down there?”

“Virgil, what’s your ETA?” Logan says instead of answering. He’s on autopilot, his mind racing. He can barely keep up with his own thoughts. Flashes of green phaser fire streak overhead and leave scorch marks on the white walls of the pod.

“Two minutes but it looks like you guys are pinned down. We’ll do what we can. Might be two and a half before you guys can get out.”

“Is anyone else hurt?” Logan asks to the open air.

“Not yet,” Corbin replies, ducking as another round of phaser fire hits overhead. “They’re Retribution though. No mistaking that.” He aims again, fires a few more rounds. Logan hears something heavy slump to the ground. Roman grunts and leans his head back against the crate he’s propped up against. His breathing is fast and shallow.

Despite himself, Roman gives Logan a pained smile. “I got pretty good reflexes, huh?”

“This situation hardly classifies as a testament to your reflex speed.”

“Virgil always said….” Roman grimaces. Shudders. Tries again. “Virge always said he was fastest but I could give ‘im a…. a run for his money.”

Logan frowns. “Your speech is slurring.”

“Sorry.”

Roman starts saying something about the last time he was drunk—Logan was there; they’d been celebrating Virgil’s birthday—but Logan has mostly tuned him out. His mind is still spinning. Toxin-equipped phasers were new technology to Logan. He’d heard there was potential for it, but he hadn’t looked much into the tech or its development. For it to be possible, then they’d need access to existing natural toxins. Synthetic ones wouldn’t pair as well with the phaser tech and would risk overloading or overheating the weapons. What natural toxins existed on Vannaheim?

More than one, from Logan’s memory. It had been a subsection of his research when looking into native vegetation options from the planet six years ago.

“Logan? Come in. Logan?” Patton’s voice over the comms not only interrupts Logan’s sprinting thoughts, but also causes Roman to cut off his slurred, barely coherent speech.

Logan grabs the device. “Here.”

“Roman’s getting worse. I think he’s panicking, ‘cuz his heartrate is through the roof, but that could also be the toxin. Do you know what it was?”

“I don’t. If I were to guess, based on the damage and situational factors, I’d probably assume it was a hemotoxin or necrotoxin but without more information or the ability to run tests, I cannot be certain.”

Virgil’s voice cuts into the conversation. “T-minus one minute.” Even distorted from the static, Virgil’s voice sounds strained in its own right. “Fuck, I’m going as fast as I can, Logan. Tell Princey he’s not allowed to die before I have the chance to kill him myself for being an idiot.”

Roman scoffs, but it’s weak and pained and sounds a lot more like a cough. “An idiot?” he demands incredulously.

“Message received,” Logan says dryly before setting the comm down. “Roman, take a deep breath.”

Roman sucks in a breath—shaking and thin—and winces. “Ow. Shit.” Roman’s arm wraps around his torso and he tosses a shaky smile to Logan. “I can’t believe I’m really gonna die having never beaten you at chess.”

It’s Elliot that answers him first, their voice tight and strangled and desperate. “You’re not going to die.”

“You’re not going to beat me at chess,” Logan adds. He can still hear shouting outside the pod. Roman gives a breathy laugh before his eyes unfocus again, blinking owlishly. Logan sets a firm, grounding hand on his shoulder. “Focus. Roman, tell me five things you can see.”

“Tell me five things you can see.” Roman blinks hard, then looks around uncomprehendingly. “Where… am I?”

“Vannaheim,” Logan replies smoothly despite the way his chest clenches. He cannot panic. Logan takes a breath.

Roman makes a face. “I hate Vannaheim.”

“Because the wind messes up your hair. Yes, you’ve told me.”

The door swishes open and Logan grabs Roman’s phaser from its holster and fires a shot. It cracks against the wall of the pod slightly to the left of the intruder. Logan had left his phaser on the ship. An oversight on his part. Deal with it later, Logan tells himself firmly.

“A prince has got to slay,” Roman says, his words slurred. He takes a breath that seems to tangle in his lungs, and wheezes out a cough.

“You’re wearing a uniformed suit of armor,” Logan finds himself saying. Wasn’t enough to protect him, something hisses in Logan’s mind. Logan shakes his head quickly. He’d deal with that thought later. “If you’re that worried about your appearance, wear the helmet.”

Logan estimates that it’s been about twenty seconds since his last communication with Virgil and Patton. They hear the door swish open. Valerie fires. There’s a startled cry and the door closes.

“I like the—” Roman cuts himself off with a clench to his teeth, his body visibly shuddering. He curls around himself, his head nearly pitching straight into Logan’s chest. The captain catches Roman’s shoulders, holding him steady until the trembling is back to a more manageable level a second later. He guides Roman to sit back again.

Roman’s head leans back to thump gently against the crate, his brow pinched. “Logan… you’re shaking.”

“Falsehood,” Logan replies distractedly, trying to tune in to the conversation Corbin and Valerie are having on the opposite side of the small pod given the lull in combatants. They can still hear the fight raging outside. Someone screams. Pounding footsteps.

Sloane is typing frantically into one of the computers. A second later, there’s a click by the door. “Doors are locked. Should at least slow them down,” he says.

Corbin glances back at Logan, his chest heaving in an attempt to catch his breath. His jaw sets when his eyes flicker to Roman slumped against the crate.

“You’ve gotta get out of here,” he says. “Valerie and I will cover you. As soon as Anxiety gets here, make a break for it. They’re not here for a war. They’re here for you.”

Logan opens his mouth to reply but Roman’s strained, slurred speech interrupts him. “Logan… give m’ th’ phaser.”

“Why?”

Roman’s brow furrows together like he thinks the answer should be obvious. “Figured I’d take a few of ‘em down with me while… while you two…” He grimaces again, but Logan gets the picture.

“No.”

Roman levels a look that would be a glare if his eyes would stay focused on Logan. “Be logical, Captain.”

Logan doesn’t deign the challenge with a response. He just stares at Roman—the sheen of sweat, the shallow and rapid breath, the way Roman can’t seem to support the weight of his own head—and then looks back at Corbin. “If we flee and they’re here for me, it’s not impossible that they’ll give chase.”

“We’ll ground as many as we can,” Valerie says, quickly adjusting some calibration on the phaser in her hand.

“Captain,” Roman insists, but Logan ignores him.

“Virgil will just have to shake the rest,” Logan says grimly.

“T-minus five seconds. Incoming.” Virgil’s cracked, staticky voice breaks through the comms on Elliot’s and Roman’s shoulder.

“Speak of the devil.”

“Let’s move,” Logan says, crossing back to Roman.

He figures that offering a hand to help Roman stand up wouldn’t be enough support, given that Roman seemed barely capable of holding up his own head. A fireman’s carry? Seemed excessive, at least for the time being. Perhaps Logan would default to that should Roman lose consciousness.

“’m gonna slow y’ down.” Roman’s voice is quiet, and it takes Logan a moment to decipher what he said given the way the words run together.

Logan crouches down and takes Roman’s arm, wrapping it around his shoulders and bracing one hand against Roman’s armored chestplate. “Think you can stand up?”

“Not lis’ning.”

“Answer the question, Roman.”

Roman swallows. Shudders. His arm tightens around his waist. “Yeah.”

“Three. Two. One. Up.” Logan stands, bracing most of Roman’s weight into his side. Roman nearly pitches into the floor, but he manages to get his legs underneath him and though Logan can feel him shaking with the exertion of effort, Roman is standing.

Progress.

“I’ll wait to unlock the door until you guys are right in front of it,” Sloane says and if there’s a bit of strain to his voice—if he casts a long glance at Corbin—well, Logan doesn’t say anything about it.

“Logan,” Roman says. “Lemme… lemme st…” Roman spasms, and nearly pitches right out of Logan’s grip. His hand on Roman’s chest is the only thing that keeps Roman from tumbling to the floor.

Logan goes to take a step with him—he can see black bleeding up through Roman’s neck like spilled ink and it tightens something in his chest—but Roman doesn’t move. Logan gives Roman a sharp look, opens his mouth to explain that they didn’t have time to waste, but there’s something fiery and bold beneath the haze of pain and poison that clouds his gaze.

“’m not worth—”

“It’s not your decision!” Logan cuts him off sharply. Furious. His gut twists against what he knows was the rest of Roman’s sentence. Roman releases a breath that would sound annoyed if there wasn’t a bit of a hitch to it.

“Doors opening in three. Two. One.”

Corbin and Valerie duck out first, and it’s a mess of dust and wind as Foster’s engine roars overhead, touching down as close as it reasonably can. Logan hears the reverberating pops of phaser fire exchanged somewhere in the cloud of dust. Streaks of green light criss-crossing in the sand-clogged cloud around them. Corbin yells for them to go. Elliot fires off a few shots of their own, sticking close to the two of them to fill in the gaps of phaser coverage left between Corbin and Valerie.

They run.

Or, as best as they can manage. It’s barely a loose jog, really, with Logan having to support most of Roman’s weight. But Roman manages to put one foot in front of the other and from his strangled breathing and how hard he’s shaking, Logan knows it’s about all Roman can manage to do.

Logan estimates that the distance between the pod and Foster is about a hundred or so meters. At the rate they’re moving, it should take them about twenty seconds to reach the docking ramp that Virgil lowers as soon as they touch down. Maybe less than that, if they can push the pace a bit more.

It takes ten seconds before Logan feels bright heat rip through his upper right bicep. Warm liquid spills down his arm.

“Captain!” Elliot yells, alarmed, over the chaos.

“I’m fine,” Logan grits out. “Go! Go!”

Patton meets them on the docking ramp, his eyes wide, and takes Roman’s other side to help Logan get him the rest of the way up. Elliot fires their phaser twice more as the ramp closes before ripping their comm unit off and calling into it.

“Virgil, punch it. We’re gonna have tails.”

“Fuck. Everyone accounted for?”

Logan grabs Roman’s comm. “Affirmative. Get us out of here.” Logan braces himself, and Roman, for the shift as Virgil lifts them off and takes off.

Roman sways.

Patton reaches for his wound. “Ro—”

The navigations officer collapses. Logan grunts as he and Patton both catch him before he crumples entirely, the effort tearing at the wound in Logan’s arm. Bright, hot pain ripples down his arm and up through his shoulder. Logan clenches his teeth against the sharp cry that tries to tear up his throat.

“Roman!” Elliot steps forward, but Logan holds up a hand, trying to get his breathing back under control from the fresh wave of pain.

“No, Elliot. Pilot with Virgil.”

“But I want to help!”

His arm is throbbing and Logan glances down at it, noting with a certain level of detachment that it just looks like a normal graze. No sign of toxin damage. “Help Virgil,” Logan tells them firmly, leveling a steady gaze that leaves no room for argument.

Elliot’s expression darkens before they turn and head towards the cockpit.

“I gotta get Roman to med bay,” Patton says quietly. “And get you patched up too.”

“I’m fine,” Logan says, helping Patton hoist Roman up from his half-collapsed state on the floor. “Just a graze.”

“But still.”

“It’ll heal, Patton.”

“Logan.”

Logan’s jaw snaps shut. He gives a single, stiff nod in return.

…

The next several minutes are frantic.

Patton and Logan carry Roman to the medical bay and Patton immediately pries Roman’s suit off him to get a closer look. It’s a flurry of movement as he hooks Roman up to various machines to read off information about his vitals, extracting some of the toxin from his system so Patton can run different tests on it separate from Roman’s body, all of which is made more challenging by the frequent shift in g-force as Virgil and Elliot try to lose the ships that had followed them off Vannaheim.

Logan is still on autopilot. He doesn’t stop moving. Logan helps Patton as much as he can, and it’s not until Patton is very gently helping Logan into chair to bandage his wounded arm after Roman has been fully equipped that Logan realizes the warm liquid that he’d felt down his arm was his own blood. Logan stares at Roman on the gatch bed with numb detachment and lets Patton clean and wrap the wound in his arm. It’s while Patton is tying the knot on the bandage wrapped around Logan’s bicep that Virgil clicks on over the intercom.

“I think we’ve shaken the last of them. Status update on Princey?”

Logan and Patton exchange a glance. Patton offers a sad smile and slight lift to his shoulders. Logan stands from the chair and walks to the intercom on the wall. He presses the button, waiting for the click before he speaks.

“No change. Did we take any damage?”

It’s Remy’s voice that answers him. “She’ll hold together, but Foster’s warp drive is out of commission until we can dock and I get some parts. What the hell was that all about?”

Logan swallows and leans his head against the wall for a moment. A damaged warp drive meant that getting to the next planet would take a bit longer than originally planned. He glances over at Patton, whose lips press into a grim line. Logan swallows before he answers over the intercom. “It appears that some prior work I did on that planet in an effort of sustainability warranted a minority of individuals harboring some… hostility.”

Behind him, Patton is peering at the monitors with Roman’s vitals. “Seems like more than just some hostility.”

“And we’re sure Wright is gonna be fine down there?” Virgil asks.

“Reasonably,” Logan replies. “Their hostility was directed predominantly at me.”

“And yet Roman—oh, wait. Hey, Cap, you might wanna come up here. We’ve got a message inbound from Vannaheim.”

Logan sighs. “I’ll be right there.”

Logan isn’t sure what to expect. He can’t fairly say that he is surprised. It made sense that they would attempt contact, especially given that they had successfully evaded their trail. And expecting the message to wait certainly wouldn’t have made sense—they’d be out of signal range within a few minutes. Logan considers, briefly, letting the message go unanswered. But there couldn’t be any harm in talking, right? Perhaps Logan could even appease them enough to quell some of the hostile action that could—had, did—put innocent people in harm’s way.

His arm throbs. Logan looks over his shoulder at Roman, prone on the gatch bed. Pale, except for the side that got hit being a smattering of mottled green and black. The black bleeds in curling tendrils across his chest, up his shoulder, his neck.

Patton catches him staring and gives him another one of those sad smiles. “I’m doing what I can for him, Captain.”

Logan swallows and nods. He squeezes Patton’s shoulder on his way out.

He tries very hard to not look at the hole through the wall that Roman had blasted earlier today. Instead, he focuses on the weight of his measured, calculated footsteps against the grated scaffolding. The very faint and yet oddly familiar, comforting scent of iron that lingered on the inside of the ship despite Patton’s best attempts to fix it. He counts in his head how many steps it takes from the door of the med bay to the cockpit.

The answer is eighteen.

The door swishes open and Virgil cranes his neck around. Elliot doesn’t even show signs of having heard the door opened at all.

“Ready, Captain?” Virgil asks, his finger poised over one of the buttons in front of him.

Logan steadies a hand on the back of Virgil’s chair and nods. “Yes.”

The screen in front of them blips on and Logan stares in surprise as Corbin, Sloane, and Valerie’s faces fill the frame. “Hey, they made it!” Sloane says brightly. Logan can still feel tension pulling his shoulders taught.

“Barely,” Elliot says, so quietly Logan almost doesn’t hear it. Logan sees Virgil glance at them, his brow furrowing.

“How’s Roman doing?” Valerie asks.

“We’re working on it,” Logan says.

“You mean Patton’s working on it,” Elliot cuts in.

“Yes,” Logan acquiesces. “I do mean that. Our ship’s medic, Patton Hart, is doing what he can. How are things there?”

“Our earlier assumptions proved accurate,” Corbin replies with a shrug. “They followed you. The ones that didn’t were angry, but hostility tapered off once they realized they were outnumbered and that you were gone.”

“I apologize for bringing you under some fire. That wasn’t my intention.”

“It’s not like you could’ve known,” Sloane says with a dismissal wave.

“We’re about to lose signal,” Virgil says quietly.

“Hey, keep us updated about Roman, will you?” Corbin asks.

Sloane and Valerie both nod. “We’re just as worried about him as you are!”

Elliot mutters something under their breath that Logan doesn’t quite catch, but from the suddenly furious look Virgil shoots them, perhaps it was better that he didn’t. Logan assures them that they will let them know as soon as there’s any change to report. Virgil cuts the feed and flexes his grip around the ship’s controls.

“What the hell was that?” Virgil demands suddenly. For a moment, Logan frowns in confusion before he realizes that the question was meant for Elliot and not himself.

“Forget it,” Elliot replies with a quick glance to Logan.

“Bullshit,” Virgil shoots back. His grip on the controls look too tight to be comfortable. “You’re not good with confrontation. Fine. But you don’t get to sit there and make passive-aggressive jabs at our captain after the shit-show we just dealt with. One that he got you out of, I might add. What’s wrong with you?”

“Okay—” Logan says, placatingly, but Elliot interrupts him.

“What’s wrong with me?” they demand, waving a hand towards Logan. “What’s wrong with him? He doesn’t seem phased in the slightest! Roman was shot trying to protect him and he just acted like he didn’t care—”

“Because that’s his fucking job!” Virgil turns a glowering look onto Elliot.

“Virgil,” Logan tries, bewildered at the argument, but they both seem to have forgotten that Logan is even there.

Virgil continues, tearing his gaze back to the stars stretching in front of them. “He’s the Captain, Elliot. It’s his job to make sure shit gets done, and that is especially true when one of us gets hurt. Logan doesn’t fall apart during a crisis but don’t you dare suggest that means he doesn’t fucking care.”

Elliot is silent. Logan doesn’t know what—if anything—he should say. Virgil heaves a sigh and rakes a hand through his long bangs. “I mean, shit. Look, I know today has been a lot. The past two hours have been a lot. And you haven’t been with us very long. But if you don’t know anything about our Captain, know this: Logan speaks how he cares in his actions. All you have to do is pay attention.”

Logan blinks. He forgot sometimes how closely Virgil watched other people, including himself. He’d noticed it in the beginning when Virgil had first joined, but Virgil had mostly dismissed it and said it was an “anxiety thing”. Logan didn’t know that he believed that, but over time, Virgil’s steady, watchful gaze had become less unsettling and more comforting. Until Logan forgot entirely just how much Virgil paid attention to the people around him.

Elliot sighs. They don’t look up, but Logan hears their words regardless. “I’m sorry, Captain. I was… unfair.”

“It’s understandable,” Logan replies, surprised at being suddenly addressed. His mind is still reeling. Too full of information that is racing through his mind to fully process the argument that just ensued.  “Take a breath, Elliot. Get some rest.”

“I…” Elliot looks like they want to argue, but they seem to change their mind. They stand up and look to Virgil. “Are… you good?”

Virgil glances at them, and something softens in his expression. “Yeah, kid. I’m good here.”

Elliot nods absently, then disappears through the cockpit doors. Virgil glances over his shoulder at Logan. “You should get some rest too, Captain.”

“I’m fine.”

Virgil sighs. He doesn’t press him.

…

Days go by. Patton manages to get Roman to stable vitals and Logan thinks he can hear the collective sigh of relief across the ship when the announcement comes over the staticky intercom. But Roman doesn’t wake up, and Patton tells them that he isn’t sure when—or if—it’ll happen. Logan spends most of these days in the med bay, doing what he can with his scientific knowledge to assist Patton’s tests on the toxin. Kai joins them for short periods of time, putting his knowledge of weapons and tech to some use in the long hours.

They manage to come up with an antidote somewhere around what would be a little past two in the morning Earth-time of the second day. It cleanses Roman’s system of the poison, but damage had been done. It was difficult to ascertain exactly how much.

Logan doesn’t sleep much. He thinks Patton notices, but whenever the doctor tries to bring it up, Logan shrugs him off. His usually rigid circadian schedule had been disrupted by bad dreams that echo with Sloane’s pale face and Elliot’s shaking hands and Roman’s strained words. The last words he’d gotten out. I’m not worth—and every time, Logan wakes up before Roman can finish the thought. So Logan gets enough sleep to function, and he spends the rest of his time in the med bay and around the ship making himself useful.

All the crew find time to stop in on occasion as the days press forward. Virgil and Elliot take shifts. Picani makes sure that Patton and Logan are eating, and sometimes sits and talks to Roman’s unconscious form. Patton does that too—talk to him. Whenever he gives Logan an update with a new chart read out, he speaks as if Roman can hear him.

When Logan eventually asks him about it—if he thinks Roman can hear them—Patton lifts a shoulder and replies, “I don’t know. I hope so. And it helps me to talk to him anyway, y’know?”

Logan tries it when Patton goes to bed that night. He sits in the chair that Remy had grabbed and set beside Roman earlier that day and listens to the way the silence of the ship at this hour seems to echo against the old metal walls and bracing. Foster had been quieter in general in the past several days. Less laughter. Less teasing. Less… vibrant.

“That’s your fault, you know,” Logan says quietly, looking at Roman. “As much as I always complain about your insufferable noise level, I’ll admit I had grown… accustomed to it.”

Roman’s face is still startlingly pale, but it had lost the sickly sheen of sweat. He breathes evenly. Regularly. Logan listens to it for a moment, grateful that it at least wasn’t the shaking, shallow wheezes it had been on Vannaheim. The black-and-green stain on Roman’s skin had mostly faded. He’d have a scar, Patton said, on his waist where the initial hit happened. But the rest of it should go back to normal in a day or two.

“Now the quiet just seems…” Logan sighs. He listens again as the ship groans. “It seems heavy. Though you’d probably mock me for the use of the chremamorphism. Ordinarily, I’d qualify it with literal or figurative, as I know that silence cannot carry a physical weight, but…” Logan breaks off. It feels like a literal weight, hanging over the ship like a fog and darkening the iron walls. Weighing on the shoulders of those who move within the space.

Logan sighs. Scrubs a hand across his eyes under his glasses with exhaustion. “There’s something that has been bothering me, Roman. Something that I need to say to you.”

Logan leans forward. Bows his head. “You tried to tell me that you weren’t worth the risk of getting you to safety. Which is, honestly, bullshit. I don’t leave my people behind, Roman. You, of all people, should know that. And you… you shouldn’t have taken that shot. That was meant for me.”

Logan wonders, now that he’s said it aloud, if the weight on his shoulders from the silence is really the weight of his own guilt. Poised over his head like a pendulum on the verge of snapping.

Bearing Roman’s weight on Vannaheim had not felt this heavy. Logan realizes suddenly that his hands are shaking. He clasps them together in front of him between his knees.

“I’m the Captain,” Logan says. “It’s my job to keep you all safe, and I let you down. That’s on me. And… I am sorry, Roman. I am sorry for my shortcomings as a leader and as a friend. Because if you felt unworthy of being saved, I’m afraid I have failed in both responsibilities.”

A voice from the door to the med bay startles Logan. “It isn’t your fault, L.”

Logan looks over his shoulder towards the sound and finds Virgil leaning against the entry way. Logan blinks in surprise. He hadn’t even heard the doors open. Virgil just watches him with a quiet, unwavering gaze, even if there’s something a little softer in his eyes than Logan is used to seeing.

“Virgil,” Logan greets, pushing his glasses further up his nose and standing. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Virgil shrugs a shoulder, glancing to Roman. “Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d check in on Princey.” He pauses, his gaze flickering back to Logan. “And you, too.”

“I’m fine.”

“He doesn’t blame you for what happened,” Virgil says, stepping further into the medical bay and letting the doors swish shut behind him. He’s got his hands shoved into the pockets of his purple plaid-patched hoodie.

Logan shakes his head. “But I do. I should have been more vigilant.”

“Weren’t you the one who taught me that dealing with ‘I should have’ is a dangerous and unproductive thought pattern?”

Logan hesitates. He can’t argue with that. He remembers the conversation from years ago. “Roman shouldn’t have been put into that situation.”

“He did it to protect you.”

“I didn’t ask him to do that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“But—”

“Logan,” Virgil cuts in, tossing his hands up in exasperation, “All of us? On this ship? We’re a family. You didn’t ask for that, but it happened. You are not the only one who cares about other people on this ship.”

“I know that.”

“Then know that any one of us would do what Roman would do if meant protecting you. We look out for each other.” Behind him, the door swishes open again but Virgil doesn’t even turn around. “We protect one another. All of us. You protect us, we protect you. That’s how this shit works.”

Patton steps into the med bay in a cat onesie. His pajamas. He pads quietly into the room, tugging the hood off his head. “Virgil’s right, Cap. We’re a family here. Like it or lump it.”

“And while this may be your ship,” Virgil says as Patton crosses to the monitors on the wall. “We don’t plan to go anywhere any time soon. You’re stuck with us.”

Despite himself, Logan cracks a faint smile.

“Yeah,” croaks a voice from the gatch bed that makes Logan whirl around. “Couldn’t get rid of us if ya tried, Cap.”

Roman’s eyes are open and glinting with something that Logan can’t quite decipher in the dark. Amusement, but something softer too. Patton gasps and rushes over, helping Roman sit up a bit more and grabbing the glass of water with a straw that he’d been refreshing each day for this very event. Roman takes a grateful sip and leans his head against Patton in silent gratitude. Patton smooths his hair with a gentle pat before helping Roman lean back in the bed again.

“How do you feel?” Virgil asks.

“Like I was shot.”

Virgil snorts.

Patton asks him a series of questions that are a bit more pointed—“Any dizziness, Roman? Do you know who I am? Do you know where you are? Are you feeling nauseous?”—and adjusts some of the machines to accommodate for an awake patient. Roman is a bit slow with his answers, and a bit slower still for the orienting ones, but he answers them accurately and cracks a few jokes in the meantime, and Logan just watches, feeling some of the tightness in his chest ease a bit.

When Patton makes a joke and the ship hears Roman’s laughter for the first time in almost a week, Logan thinks maybe he’ll finally be able to sleep through the night.

 ...

Tags: @helloisthisusernametaken, @ren-allen, @quoth-the-sparrow, @princelogical, @random-pianist, @ravenclawicecream, @erlenmeyertrash, @milomeepit, @at-least-seven-pretty-potatoes, @rileyfirstname, @pinkeasteregg, @sassy-in-glasses, @vigilantvirgil, @generalfandomfabulousness, @lacrimosathedark, @thepoolofthedead, @monikastec, @heir-of-the-founders, @yourworstnightmare999, @artistictaurean, @kanejandkruge, @cdragontogacotar, @damienswifeolicitydallysgirl, @angst-patton, @savingshae, @noneed4thistbh, @awesomelissawho, @unikornavenger, @bopthesnoz, @spiralofsilencetheory, @finger-gunsss, @crownswriter123, @swlotakulady34, @gaylotusthatexists, @analogical-mess, @dolphidragon, @flix-net, @narniasfinestavengingsociopath, @friedlieb-ferdinand-runge, @bibbidy-bobbity-booyah, @procrastinations-my-middle-name, @theburntesttoast, @monroig, @secretlyawyvern, @puddinglec4t

[typhonserpent]

The Masked Qunari

Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition Rating: General Genre: Romance Pairing: Dorian/The Iron Bull Summary: Dorian is rescued by a mysterious Qunari during a trip to Seheron and years later runs into his rescuer again.

This is a gift for @kerowyn202, who wanted something to happen in the future-that-wasn't to make Dorian think differently of Bull. It’s a part of the Adoribull holiday gift exchange. If you want more delightful Adoriubull fluff like this, should definitely check out other works in the collection and follow the @adoribullholiday for future Adoribull related events.

✦ My Writing Tag ✦

✦ AO3 Link - Please leave me a comment! ✦

Halward pinched Dorian's shoulder.

"Don't doze off." Halward snapped, glancing down his nose at the boy.

Dorian bit back a sigh and straightened his back. The top of his head barely reached his father's shoulder. Halward's hand was slightly raised as a warning. At 14, he still had a child's height and a rounded face. His grandmother occasionally commented that he was due for one more growth spurt.

Halward thought that bringing Dorian along on a business trip might make him more engaged in his studies. Maybe if Dorian saw firsthand the efforts that the Magesterium made, he’d be more interested in one day taking Halward’s place.

It wasn’t going too well.

The man at the desk droned on and on, pointing to spots on his map. He was some sort of army captain, or general, or some title that sounded important. He may as well have been speaking another language. It was all words that Dorian recognized, but when he tried to pay attention, it didn’t string together into anything coherent.

The man moved a flag from one spot to another, and Halward's hand lowered as he leaned in. Dorian tried to follow suit. The flags were on a spot labeled "Southern Seheron Peninsula".

The man continued to talk about battle strategy and planning.

Dorian's eyes wandered towards the movement in the corner of his vision. There was a tear in the tent, and a bit of loose fabric was waving as a gust of wind picked up. Dorian shivered, and glanced back at his father, who was pouring over the map at this point.

He looked back at the tear. Surely the Imperium could afford tents that weren't torn to house a meeting with a Magister. Didn't the draft bother anybody else? As the wind died, a small cloud of smoke crawled into the tent.

He glanced back once more to ensure that his father was paying attention to the map, and tip toed closer to the tear. Lowering himself to all fours, he saw a pair of boots walk past, obscured by a milky-gray sheen.

It wasn't smoke. It was fog.

Thick fog.

Suddenly, a hulking gray figure tore through the tent, ripping it from its stakes and toppling the walls. The fog rushed to surround them, filling Dorian's surroundings with white and making his eyes water. He heard a fireball being cast - his father’s spell. Laying on the ground, he opened his mouth to call, "Father!" and fell immediately into a coughing fit.

Covering his mouth, Dorian made it to his feet and looked around to see almost nothing between the fog and his watering eyes. He could hear footsteps all around him, spells being flung, metal meeting metal.

He was encased in muscle and swept off his feet. In a flash, the fog that surrounded him was replaced by the bulk of arms and a torso. He looked up through reddened eyes. He was being held by a Qunari with broad horns, wearing a mask and goggles. The Qunari took one look at Dorian, and swore in qunlat.

"Vashedan. You're not -"

Suddenly, a second figure came up behind them, forcing the masked Qunari to duck and swivel, letting go of Dorian. Dorian stared in horror as the masked Qunari disappeared into the fog. Dorian tried to call, "Wait!" and was again overtaken by a coughing fit that brought him to his knees.

There was metal on metal, grunting, shouting, and one of the voices was distinctly that of the masked Qunari. A few seconds later, the Qunari again encased Dorian in his bulk, this time with a few streaks of blood on his chest and the axe sheathed at his back noticeably bloodied.

"Hey, you okay?" The Qunari asked, and Dorian could sense some form of comforting smile behind the mask.

"Cover your mouth. Do not talk. Keep your eyes closed." The Qunari said.

Dorian was lifted off the ground, cradled in the Qunari's arms as he was forced to make himself blind and mute. He concentrated hard on focusing on anything other than the battle around them. The warmth of the man who held him, the slightly metallic scent of his skin, the tightness of his muscles. In any other scenario, Dorian might have blushed.

The air around them grew cooler and less thick, and the Qunari shouted, "Hey!"

Dorian heard the sound of boots thumping on wood. A dock.

"Maker's breath!" Dorian recognized that voice. It was the first mate of the ship they'd rode in on. Dorian was gently placed on his feet, still frozen, and opened his eyes in time to see his rescuer disappear into the fog. The first mate put a hand on his shoulder.

"Hey easy, kid, you're safe now. We'll get word to your father that you're here and then we'll ship off."

Dorian's eyes were still glued to the spot where the masked Qunari had disappeared to. There was no reason for a Qunari to save a 'vint, and there probably never would be.

When Halward returned, they shared an embrace, and Dorian was still thinking about the man who'd rescued him.

- x - X - x -

To say that Dorian didn't think highly of Bull would be an understatement.

When they'd met, it was at the bar at Haven. He was enjoying a book he'd borrowed from Leliana over a glass of swill disguised as red wine when a massive hulk of a Qunari arrived. A bloody wild boar was slung over his back, and he was surrounded on every side by various companions that Dorian would soon know as the Chargers. They were hooting and hollering as Bull threw the boar onto the ground, making Dorian's wine glass rattle and swish its contents over the side.

He glared over his book with a curled lip as Bull loudly demanded that the boar be roasted and served to the bar patrons, which elicited loud cheers from everyone other than Dorian. When the feast began, Dorian kept to himself and watched in disgust as Bull loudly gulped and slurped fatty roast meat.

The next day, they traveled to Redcliffe, and the horseback ride there was made all the more intolerable when Bull brought some of his leftovers from the night before.

Dorian rode beside him, trapped in between two lines of Inquisition soldiers on the narrow road, trying to keep his eyes forward while he listened to Bull loudly finish off one of the boar's legs. Occasionally, Dorian flicked a crumb off his shoulder.

"Fasta vass, do you ever chew with your mouth closed?" Dorian snapped.

"Only when there's not a prissy 'vint judging how I eat breakfast." Bull replied, brandishing the bone like a wand.

Dorian rolled his eyes and spent the rest of the ride in tense silence. When they arrived in Redcliffe, he made himself scarce until it was time to ambush Alexius.

He knew Alexius would pull a desperate stunt to maintain power, but he wasn't expecting to be flung forward in time. The next time he was close to Bull would be with a set of bars between them. He gazed into the jail cell where Bull refused to meet his eyes.

As much as he didn't care for Bull, nobody the pain and suffering associated with red lyrium poisoning.

They had no words to exchange with one another. If all went well, Dorian would be able to go back and ensure this future would never happen.

In the courtyard, underneath a sky of green where the veil took over the sun and clouds, Dorian saw a demon's claws a moment too late to put up a shield. His braced himself, preparing for the worst, when he was encased in muscle and swept off his feet. Bull's arms cradled him and took the full force of the demon's claws against his back, just before it was put down by one of Leliana's arrows.

"Hey, you okay?" Bull asked, and Dorian could see a pained smile spread across his face. He was trying so hard to seem kind and calm, despite a wound at his back and the battle around them.

Dorian blushed. He could smell the slightly metalic scent of Bull's skin, could feel the tightness of his muscles, and was brought back to being 14 years old. Bull picked him up and carried him to safety, just as he'd done so many years prior.

There was no more room for exchanges after that. It all happened so quickly that Dorian was barely aware it had happened at all.

When they returned to the present, and Alexius was being carried away in chains, Dorian was left standing next to Bull while the Inquision soldiers filed out of the chantry.

He looked up.

Bull was digging something out of his ear with his pinky.

"Bull?" He asked.

"What? My ear itches. Got a problem with that now?"

"Can I buy you a drink?"

Bull froze like a cornered deer, blinked, and very slowly turned to give Dorian an incredulous look. He glanced the mage up and down, found no signs of trickery or sarcasm, and raised a single eyebrow.

"It’s not often someone manages to surprise me, ‘vint. If this is about some fade shit you saw back there, I don't wanna hear it." Bull grumbled.

"It's not. I promise."

"Alright. I’m not gonna turn down free booze."

[imaramennoodle]

Hey guys! Here’s part 1 for the kotlc the 100 au.

Tags (lmk if you wanna be added to the taglist): @vibing-in-the-void @everyonehasthoughts @clearlysokeefe @never-ever-too-many-fandoms

Part 1:

Sophie Foster sat bolt upright as the door to her cell clicked and slid open. Her eyes widened as she caught a glimpse of her mom standing behind two guards.

Sophie’s mom, Edaline Foster, was the head doctor of the Ark. She was also part of the council. And when the council was involved, things hardly ever ended well.

A gaurd marched in and slapped a pair of handcuffs onto Sophie’s wrist. She gasped.

“No! I’m not eighteen yet! I still have another year!” She struggled to escape. It was no use. Sophie was going to die. They were probably skipping the retrial and getting rid of all the criminals now, to save air. Sophie knew that they were running out. That had been why her dad was killed, because he had tried to tell people what was happening.

On the Ark, anyone who committed a crime, even the smallest one possible, like getting into a fight, was sentenced to death. If they were under the age of 18, they would be in prison until their eighteenth birthday, when there was a retrial to see if the criminal was guilty enough to be sentenced to death.

Sophie was marched outside of her cell. She twisted against the handcuffs and the guards holding her arms back.

She felt a needle go into her neck and started to feel dizzy. The last thing she saw was her mom whispering words that she couldn’t quite make out.

-

Sophie’s eyes snapped open. It was dark.

As her eyes adjusted, she realized that she was strapped into a chair, next to a girl with long, shiny black hair. Around them, there were others, all also sitting in chairs, confused.

A voice spoke over some kind of loudspeaker. It was Chancellor Endal. “I am sure that you are all confused about what is happening. My answer is this: All one hundred of you are being sent to the ground,”

There were surprised gasps and a few people started yelling about how they would die the moment they reached the surface.

“... on Mt. Weather,” the chancellor continued, “You will find enough supplies to last you three months. Good luck, and may we meet again.”

There was a click, and everyone was silent. Then, there was the sound of something powering on, and their tiny ship shot off of the Ark.

A boy with strawberry blonde hair had unbuckled himself from the harness and was now floating around the ship.

“What are you doing!” Sophie yelled, “That’s dangerous!”

The boy grinned.

“Hey, aren’t you the one that wasted a month’s supply of oxygen on an illegal spacewalk?” Sophie said.

He held up a thumbs up. “That’s me! Glad to know that I’m known everywhere.”

Suddenly, the ship went almost completely dark, the only light coming from a few emergency lights scattered around the ship.

Then, they crashed.

Sophie stood up and searched for the boy who had been floating around. If he was hurt, she was the closest thing that they had to a doctor. Sophie had been training to be one before she was arrested for knowing that the Ark was running out of air.

The boy had stood up and was now brushing off his shirt.

“You shouldn’t have done that. You could have died.”

He shrugged. “So what? When they sent us down here they basically sentenced us to death.”

A boy yelled something from near the huge door. Everyone’s heads turned to look at him.

A soft voice broke the silence. “Tam?” The girl who had been sitting next to Sophie elbowed her way towards the boy.

The boy’s face lit up and he pulled her into a hug. Sophie vaguely registered them as looking really similar to each other.

“You’re the Songs!” said someone from somewhere behind Sophie, “I’ve heard about you!”

“Yeah,” said the girl, who didn’t look very happy about it.

“Do you wanna be known for something else?” asked the boy.

“Like what?”

“Being the first girl on the ground in a hundred years.”

With that, the boy pressed the red button to open the door. It lowered down, and the girl uncertainly stepped onto it, and then onto the ground.

She stood in the sunlight for a few seconds before yelling, “We’re back!” at the top of her lungs.

Everyone took this as a sign to run out of the ship at once.

Sophie was the last one to leave. She picked up a map on her way out and made her way towards a ridge, where she held the map up and looked between it and the other mountains.

“Why so serious?” asked a boy with messy blond hair and a wrinkled shirt who had snuck up on Sophie.

“That’s Mt. Weather,” Sophie pointed to a mountain on the map, and then to the actual one, “They dropped us on the wrong mountain.”

-

Sophie was not happy to see Wylie. She hadn’t even expected to see him. He was the chancellor’s son, so he must have done something pretty serious to get sent to the ground.

Sophie was busy helping a girl bandage her broken arm when she first saw Wylie. He tried to apologize to her, but she just ignored him and walked away. After all, Wylie was the reason that her dad was dead and that she had been in prison for the past year.

She finished bandaging the girl’s arm. “You should be fine for a couple of days,” Sophie said. The girl smiled and walked away, leaving Sophie alone.

Fitz, a boy who Sophie had seen a couple of times in her Earth Skills class, wandered over to her. “You know where Mt. Weather is, right?”

Sophie nodded. “Yup. It’s just over there.” She tried to point towards it, but it was blocked by a group of trees.

“Great. Can you come with us to get some supplies from there?”

“Sure?”

Fitz led her to a small group that consisted of Dex, the boy who had floated around the ship, Keefe, who seemed to be Fitz’s best friend, and Linh, the girl with a brother.

Sophie unfolded the map and looked at it. “I think we have to go that way.” She pointed towards the forest, and the group set off for Mt. Weather.

They had been walking for thirty minutes before they got to the river. It looked perfectly normal, except there was no way to cross it.

Keefe pointed to a sign across the river that read ‘Mount Weather’ in large letters. “Look!”

Everyone turned to look at what he was pointing at.

“How are we supposed to get over?” asked Fitz.

“That’s easy,” Linh said, “We swim.”

She took off her shoes and socks and started to get in.

“Linh, no. You can’t even swim, and if you could, we have no idea if the water’s even safe. You could get radiation poisoning,” Sophie said, grabbing her arm and holding her back.

Linh twisted away. “I read somewhere that it’s human instinct to know how to swim, and besides, it doesn’t look too deep and I can see a couple of fish. I’ll be fine.” She jumped into the water.

“See! It’s perfectly fine. I’m not dead yet.”

Something dark slithered just under the surface of the water, behind Linh.

“Behind you!” yelled Keefe.

Linh didn’t pay attention until it was too late. The thing must have grabbed her leg, because she was yanked under the water and started trying to get away. Sophie’s eyes widened.

Keefe jumped in to try and get the thing away from Linh.

It must have worked, because after a few minutes, the splashing stopped and Keefe started pulling Linh towards the shore.

Fitz reached over and helped him pull her back up.

Linh coughed a couple of times and sat up on her elbows. Sophie sighed in relief. They had only been on the ground for a couple of hours, but four people had already died and Sophie would do pretty much anything to keep the rest of them alive.

Dex was standing a couple yards away. He called everyone else over. “We could probably swing across on this vine,” he said, “It looks pretty sturdy.”

“Who wants to go first?” asked Keefe. Nobody answered, so he shrugged and grabbed onto the vine.

Keefe got a running start, then jumped up onto the vine. When he got the the other side he let go and yelled “I made it!”

Sophie smiled at Keefe just before something came out of the woods behind their small group and hit him just under his ribs. Keefe collapsed

It was a spear. There were other people on the ground. 

-

Edaline Foster was in the area of the Ark where they were monitoring the 100 through metal wristbands that tracked things like blood pressure and heart rate.

A few of the many screens had gone dark, showing that someone was dead. Edaline scanned the remaining screens and let out a breath when she found Sophie.

Grady Ruewen, another member of the council, who also happened to not like Edaline very much, appeared behind her. “You’re needed in medical.”

Edaline nodded with a tight smile and walked back towards her job. Elwin, her assistant, went up to her.

“There’s a girl here who wants to know about the quarantine in the prison. Says she wants to see her boyfriend.”

The council hadn’t told people about the mission to the ground and had instead said that there was a virus outbreak in the prison and that nobody could visit anyone.

A girl with long brown hair pulled into a ponytail was standing in the waiting area. She walked up to Edaline.

“What was there an outbreak of?” the girl asked.

“Strep,” Edaline answered, “and no, there is no way for you to visit your boyfriend. It’s very contagious.”

“Really? Then why did I see a guard that was stationed there walking around just a few minutes ago? What did you actually do with my boyfriend?”

Edaline sighed. “You’re in engineering, right?”

The girl nodded. “Youngest zero-g mechanic in the history of the Ark. I’m Biana, by the way.”

“Good. Come with me.”

Biana rolled her eyes and followed Edaline.

Edaline led Biana towards an unused area of the ship, where the escape pods were kept. They hadn’t been used in a hundred years, but Edaline figured that Biana would be able to help her.

“Why did you bring me here? All that’s here is a couple of rusty old pods.”

“Because you’re going to help me get to the ground.”

Biana just looked at her. “Are you crazy? The ground isn’t supposed to be survivable for another 100 years!”

“I’m not supposed to be telling you this, but your boyfriend’s on the ground, along with 99 other criminals. My daughter, Sophie, is with them.”

Biana stared at Edaline for a minute. “You’re serious. Is Dex ok? Is the ground seriously survivable?”

“I don’t know, but right now, this pod is our only chance of getting down there. Can you fix it?”

“Yeah, but I’ll need a lot of new parts. This thing is ancient.”

“I can get the parts. Just worry about getting it to work.”

-

Sophie and Dex were the first to make it back to the clearing where the drop ship had landed. They were followed by Fitz and Linh.

Tam ran up to them. “What happened out there? Where’s Keefe?”

“We were attacked,” Dex said.

A few other people, including Wylie, had wandered over.

“By what?” Fitz asked

“Not by what, by who. Everything we thought we knew about the ground was wrong,” Sophie said.

“What do you mean, everything we know is wrong?” Tam asked.

“There are others out there. People. They threw a spear at Keefe and we don’t know if he’s alive or dead.”

“But we’re still gonna look for him, right?” asked Fitz.

Sophie nodded. “We’ll go tomorrow. Right now, we need to focus on finding food and setting up tents.”

-

Edaline was standing over Chancellor Endal, trying desperately to save his life.

One of the guards had found him laying in a hallway after being shot in the chest, and her and Elwin had been doing surgery on him for the past thirty minutes.

“He needs more blood,” Edaline said.

“We’ve already used more than we’re supposed to-“

“I don’t care!” Edaline said, cutting off Elwin, “We just need to make sure he lives long enough to see his son again.”

Elwin sighed. “Whatever you say.”

After they had finished, Edaline was sitting in the waiting area.

“How is he?” Grady, who was sitting a few feet away, asked.

“I don’t know. I hope he’ll be fine. I don’t want to deal with you as chancellor for any longer than I need to.”

Grady raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. He was the acting chancellor, in case Chancellor Endal died or wasn’t able to be chancellor before the next election.

“We think we’ve found the person who shot him,” Grady said after a few minutes.

“Who?”

“Tam Song,” Grady said, holding out a tablet with a picture of a boy on it, “His sister, Linh Song, was sent the the ground along with the rest of the hundred, and he’s been reported missing from his job as a janitor.”

“So what, you think he shot the chancellor, snuck onto the drop ship, and went to Earth with them?”

Grady nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly what we think.”

“You really think that a seventeen year old kid could have pulled that off?”

“Yes.”

Edaline stood up and left the waiting room. 

Biana was tinkering with the control panel of the pod when Edaline walked in. “Finally! I need a few new parts.”

She stopped talking when she saw Edaline’s face. “What happened?”

“Nothing. We just need to get this to work as fast as possible. What parts do you need?”

[raggydraws]

What do you think of 🐺🔥🌋, which is also wolf, fire, volcano

Oooo immediately thinking of a Dragonborn or a Genasi. A red/gold Dragonborn or if you wanna push it, a black Dragonborn who's acid breathe is more like poisonous volcanic ash plumes? For the Genasi, fire obviously (but you could also stretch it a little with an earth Genasi), but more resembling a volcano with black skin with Lava cracks and long, flowing magma hair? Or perhaps a Genasi who runs a little hotter and their flames burn blue instead? Which ever you'd like anon!

The volcano makes me think blacksmith but the wolf makes me think outlander or ranger, but I think a blacksmith would be very interesting even if it is kind of obvious for a fire based player character. But that dose leave the class open, blacksmith makes me think of someone who made their armour or weapons but that doesn't really incorporate the wolf in anyway.

I think the classes that would best fit would be the Knight (as a class, not the background) because at lv1 you can spend 8 hours bonding with your 'favored mount' and it can be a dire wolf so long as it's at least a size class larger than you are. As a knight you could have them as a blacksmith who was shipped out to war, possibly just from being the eligible age or just from not being able to keep up with the other blacksmiths. They can either desert and join their adventuring party to escape the war or they can be a lone survivor of a battle and join the party to get back home and relay the news back to their kingdom. Or you can have them as a knight who is just sent out to do a lot of odd tasks and meets their adventuring party along the way, whichever you prefer. If you go with a deserter, you can make them an egotistical coward or maybe an ashamed washout, I could see the Genasi purposefully burning low to keep any attention away from them only to get really 'fired' up in battle. Hehe. If you go with a lone survivor, they probably have PTSD from it and will be very hard to through to at first but eventually open up and become very protective of their party, possibly falling into the 'sacrifice yourself to protect your friends' trope, which isn't a bad thing but can be an abrupt arc ender. Or you can be a knight sent out on ridiculous task after task who's getting fed up being bossed around with barely any pay or recognition, and you could possibly have the noble they work for in the party as well for interesting character interactions!

Another class I think would fit is the Artificer, again playing into the building things with your hands and creation, plus if you and your dm agree they can also have a proficiency in firearms and that can perhaps play out in your backstory! Like, your blacksmith pulls a Percy de Rolo and accidentally invents guns and are on the run trying to keep it out of the wrong hands or they're trying to perfect their design before they paton it. You call your firearms "The Wolves of the Mountain" or something along those lines to keep thhe wolf motif as well! Also a big Ole Dragonborn being very careful with their hands and creating intricate machinery sounds really cool and can play into their personality as well. Big, burly and kind of scary looking but kind and eccentric, gentle and precise with their hands. Probably a big Ole softy with a pension for shooting people on sight cause they're excited about their new toys and can't help themselves.

And finally, a Beast Wrangler Ranger is the finally class I think would fit, you can have a dire wolf companion and still have the blacksmith background in the form of making your own bows and arrows, and making your own armour as well! Plus your favored terrain could be mountains, volcanic or otherwise. Although I think this one might not as interesting just from this little drabble, you could make the ranger and their wolf the lone survivors of a volcanic eruption and now they go around the world to warn others of impending doom from unsuspecting mountains. This could be a hardier character, possibly one who's very familiar how cruel nature can be but still hopeful that they can help other people, plus they're probably a dog person!

Name: Sometimes along the lines of Forge, Kinder, or Spark something that's not a regular name but feels like someone who works with fire and metal. Or you can name them after a famous Volcano or Lupus/Lupin for more wolf imagery.

Race: Dragonborn (Red, Gold or Black) or Genasi (Fire or Earth)

Class: Knight (Order of Honor best fits I thinks), Artificer (Either Battle Smith or Forge Adept) or Ranger (Beast Wrangler)

Background: Blacksmith

(Also I'll be linking the Knight as a class and the blacksmith background in the replies of this post in case you want to acutal build these characters!)

[self-proclaimed-chaotic-good]

Survivors of Unfair Choices (9) | FirstOrder!Poe Dameron x Reader

Words: 1345

Warning: SW-verse typical violence, minor swearing

A/n: I’m a bit behind in writing and although I try to type out a few chapters in advance, I just wasn’t feeling it the past month or so. Again, I am grateful for my readers and the people who comment on it. Just know that I do read them and appreciate every one of them, even though I don’t comment back. I always feel bad when I’m unable to and I don’t know why I’m sometimes just not in the mindset to fully show my gratitude through replying and I don’t want to keep repeating the same thing over and over. Also, I want to let you guys know that there might be a indefinite break in a few weeks as I am moving again.

-

The plan was to release the poisonous gas again and hide. Rey and Finn quickly ducked under a grate with BB-9 while BB-8 insisted on being with you, hiding in the cockpit with a blaster held up at the ready. A familiar voice began to fill the corridor, followed by a guttural sound. You shifted your position to see two figures lift the grate where your two companions were.

“Wait,” you said, stepping out from hiding, BB-8 following close behind.

They swung their blasters around until they recognized you. “Kid?” the man asked in surprise.

“General,” you addressed him with a small smile. You slid your blaster back in its holster and approached them.

“I told you to stop calling me that. You with these guys?” Han asked, waving a blaster at them.

“Yeah, they helped me fly the ship,” you said, helping them out. BB-9 used a magnetic arm to help hoist themselves up. “In fact, Rey was the one flying.”

“You?” Han asked Rey, who nodded, “Where’d you get this ship?”

“Niima Outpost,” she said.

Han raised an eyebrow. “Jakku? The junkyard?”

“Junkyard! Thank you!” Finn said pointedly.

“Anyways!” you said, trying to get to the point.

“Told you we should have checked the Western Reaches,” Han said to Chewbacca before turning back to Rey, “Who had it? Ducain?”

“Guys,” you pleaded, giving Chewie a pleading look. He patted your head, having missed you.

“I stole it from Unkar Plutt. Who stole it from the Irving Boys. Who stole it from Ducain,” Rey said.

“Who stole it from me!” Han said, clearly upset. “Well, you tell him that Han Solo just stole back the Millenium Falcon for good.”

Rey’s jaw dropped as Han made his way over to the cockpit. “This is the Millenium Falcon? You’re Han Solo?” You sighed, rubbing your temples.

“Isn’t he a war hero?” Finn asked Chewie who shrugged.

You followed Han and watched as he looked around with a small smile on his face. How long has it been since he’s seen this ship? You hated to break the nostalgia, but there was no time.

“Han, we need to get back to the Resistance. BB-9 has the map,” you said, walking up to him. He shook his head. “The map to Luke Skywalker.”

Han looked up from the console at the mention of his old friend’s name and frowned. “Is that why you’re out here, kid?”

“Yes, and we need your help. Please, Han.”

He sighed, having avoided going back there for years. His eyes landed on the ring hanging around your neck and tilted his head towards it. “Who’s the poor person that met your high standards?” he said with a smirk.

You rolled your eyes. “Would you be surprised if I said he’s a pilot?”

“Of course he is. Does Leia know? Do I know who it is?”

“Um…” A metallic crash sounded down the corridor.

“Don’t tell me a Rathtar has gotten loose,” Han said, hurrying out of the cockpit.

You blinked at the spot he was just standing in. “What? Rathtar? Why is everyone in this ship a disastrous wreck?” And suddenly you missed the peaceful bliss of that planet, with you, Poe, and your little droids.

-

Poe took in a deep breath once they landed on Yavin Four where a small group of Resistance members were stationed. Ohn Gos had given him a small bag of basic supplies for the road and wished him luck. Poe thanked him and made his way over to the village cautiously. This will be the first time he would encounter Resistance members after defecting, if they’d believe that he had.

Being surrounded by the tropical greenery were bringing back memories. He remembered the force-tree that his parents planted outside of the house. He remembered flying with his mother in her ship and learning how to fly. He remembered when she passed. He remembered when his father went to work and never came back, then the news of him being caught up in an attack. Then his grandfather got sick. When Poe joined the fleet, he received the news that he also had passed. There was no one left but his fleet squadron with him.

Then the First Order got them, too.

“You better hold it right there,” a voice calls out.

Poe stops in his tracks and slowly raises his hands up. Three figures emerged from every side, surrounding him with blasters. One man stepped up, wearing an orange and white uniform, the symbol of the Resistance on his vest.

“What’s a First Order officer doing out here by himself?” he asked.

Poe sighed. “Look, pal, I’ve left the First Order, alright?”

The man scoffed. “Just like that, huh?”

“Well, it’s not as easy as it looks,” Poe said, taking a step forward. They all shifted in their stance, raising their blasters again. “Let’s just say that I finally found something worth fighting for and I’m looking for them right now. Your Commander (Y/n) (Y/l/n).”

Their eyes narrowed. “You took our commander,” the man said.

“I helped (Y/n) escape, but we got separated leaving the Finalizer. I know how to find her, but I need a ship.”

A woman walked up to them and whispered, “We need to notify the general about this.”

The man nodded to her, then turned back to Poe. “How can we take your word for it?”

“I’m outnumbered, aren’t I? You can take me as a prisoner if you want. If my sources are correct, your commander managed to find BB-9 again who has the map everyone’s looking for.”

“So we take you with us to find them, then you’ll know of the map’s location, too.”

Poe sighed, losing patience. “You wanna cuff me? Search for any trackers on me? Do it.” He stuck his hands out in front of him and placed his wrists together.

“Come on, Snap,” the woman said.

The man grimaced, but lowered his weapon, signaling for the others to do the same. He pointed at one of them to search Poe before turning away. He paused for a second, before turning his head. Poe waited expectantly as the person searched his person.

“That ring… they think no one’s seen it, but I managed to get a glimpse of it. I don’t think they got it before that mission. They kept saying that they weren't alone, but we all assumed they were talking about BB. Now that I think about it, you were the last one to see them that time. It’s far fetched, but…”

“Let’s talk once we start looking for them,” Poe said as he was pushed forward.

“He’s cleared,” one of them said.

“Thanks, L’ulo. Come, Dameron. We’ll wrap things up here and head back to base,” Snap said.

This was not how he thought his plan would go. He thought that he would be able to get the Tie-Fighters distracted long enough for you and FN-2187 to escape before he could join you and then follow you to wherever your mission took you next. He never thought that he would be arriving at the Resistance base without you. Certainly, not in a U-Wing surrounded by your squadron’s watchful gaze.

He kept his chin up, focusing on planning his next move. If he was allowed access to any of their ships, he could continue to track BB-8, then find you. Or maybe they would take the tracker off of him and search for you themselves. He needed to prepare for all those possibilities. While the Resistance is no longer an enemy, they’re not his friends, either.

“We’re here,” the woman, who introduced herself as Jessica, said.

She answered a commlink and identified the ship before lowering the U-Wing onto the runway. The other members of the squadron prepared for landing, gathering their belongings before standing up. Poe stood as well and waited until the ramp lowered.

“Stick close to us,” Snap said, grabbing his things before moving next to Poe.

“Where are you taking me?” Poe asked.

“To see General Leia.”

-

Taglist:  @megzdoodle @psychoticobsession @thescarletknight2014 @marrypuffsstuff @theoralpha @daniellajocelyn @badwolf-212 @gleigh42 @ella-solei @roserrys

[gardeningintrests]

Earth is space Australia- weather and seasons part 1 because i need sleep

what do the Aliens think about our weather conditions? what do they think about seasons? most importantly, can they withstand the pressure the weather gives them? if I'm sure enough, weather changes will make the Alien go crazy, i think that they can adapt seasons but not quite sure about he weather, and it only become an issue when climate change is hitting us in the ass as well. 

so I kind of think that maybe the Aliens Home Planet usually is like a setting that is permanent, so once they came to Earth to either study us Terrans or just observe the life of average humans. 

so here is the...… story I might be writing about how Aliens might react to weathers and seasons on Earth. This story might be long though. so hold your weird human appendages hands and lets settle it!

and a lot of ssssss so I'm writing with red lines underneath words.

“Whatssss isessstes like in syour HomeWorld?” Audrie an on board Snake-Like Alien asked a nearby Human-Eugene who is currently packing up to have a small vacation on Earth with other humans since its almost Christmas and about time to go home.

“oh you wanna know?” “Audrie wantsses tsu know how Terransss livee in such weird Planet.” 

it just so happens that Kallos, the Dragon-Like Alien passed by. 

“how bout we go find out? I mean, Miss Audrie has ancestors at Earth called Snakes right??” said Kallos with a huge grin on his face.

Audrie turned her head 180 degrees and looked Kallos dead in the eye. Human-Eugene didn't even bother as Audrie scolded Kallos about how her species is fairly different from the so called “snakes” on Earth. 

Okay so for people who wants to know the difference, here:

Audrie’s kind is known as Pythons ( Reticulated Python, go ask Google for more info) they are 10 times larger than an average snake (or  Reticulated Python whatever suits you) and due to its large size, its difficult for the Pythons to move fast or strangle its enemies, they are a bit more “fat” so moving into small places and close rooms are just what they NOT needed. their head is like a snake head (well obviously) and they have more teeth then normal snakes. Pythons don't need to hibernate, they just eat to refill their energy or smth. 

the commander was doing usual patrol, as he saw...the Snake and Dragon, beside them is a very uncomfortable Human packing his bag preparing to land in a few hours. and due to the great work attitude Human-Eugene has given off since ‘pick-up’ (what they call it when they recruit new crew members)  xe had to go and help a bit

“what's with all this noise, officer’s?” three of them immediately frozen in place as they heard the commanders voice. 

“oh, uh.. Audrie wasss tellingz sstupids Kallosss here how Audrie’ss kind are different from Terransss Earth ssnakesss!” “im sorry okay? sheesh..”

thank the lord Captain has stopped them both. thought Eugene.

for a moment, Eugene suddenly jolted upwards. there was something rattling behind him, he turned to find Audrie’s tail poked him and he asked what Audrie wanted which to she responded with:

“Isss Terranz going to tell Audrie about how Earth iz like?”

due to the fact that the commander was there and Eugene didn't want to disappoint anybody in front of the commander so he said yes. but he would only show her after he is don't packing his stuff.

“which Galaxy Station are we going to stop at next?” asked Eugene. apparently, Spaceships need refilling with energy like how cars on Earth needs to refill oil. and like longgg rides when were travelling to far placing of the country, we need to stop at Rest Areas. but the Galactic Space Travel Traffic Alliance had made their Rest Area a bit more...Interesting than our normal Rest Areas.

they have a lot of activities to participate at the Rest Area, that also serves as a gas station for Spaceships but how bout calling them Energy Refill station instead. you must be asking, why is there like a whole sort of activities that kind of serve as a amusement park in the middle of space and most importantly at a Rest Area?

(note: i have no fucking idea what the Rest Stop at Rural Highways is called and i searched it on google and it seems that its called a Rest Area)

well Spaceships require a large amount of energy that can be found in decomposing bodies or waste of Aliens, so its kind of like a waste reducing order(????) so the Galaxy ends up too much waste produced.

at the next 3 hours, they are gonna be stopping at that specific Rest Area and then Human-Eugene has everything planned to tell the Crew members of his ship about Earth, he somehow got the other 3 Humans involved and they are now currently laughing like kids planning on stealing some candy from a drawer their mother stored all the candies in at the cafeteria.

the Aliens who have passed by are terrified.

finally they reached their destination. they first  went to get some supplies restocked, and check in for a Stay-Overnight-Pod(something like a hotel but for Space travelers) their energy restocking is in line after the first 2 get theirs energies restocked and they cant sleep at the ship because its gon have a power shut down for cooling and safe travel.

they all had separate rooms except the Humans, they somehow can sleep together in one room without being worried about a sudden ambush of their own species(Aliens tend to loose their self control at some times and can end up hurting their crew)

when they unloaded their stuff, they headed to the main lobby which the meet up.

“are you all ready?” Human-Eugene said to all the Aliens of his Crew.

note: there are only three kinds of Alien Species on Eugens ship, and all of their Species names are all according to their own Scientific names

Snake-Like Species {Pythons}

Dragon-Like Species { Draco Vulgaris }(D.V.)

Plant-Like Species {Plantae}

there is currently 15 aboard on the ship, 4 humans, 5 Plantae’s, 3Pyhtons and 2 D.V.’s

the ship name is MoonShine(because of the metal they used to build this ship are the ones from Wellioan (Plantae Species metal) that somehow shine  under the moons( yes i know moonshine is a poison but its interesting aye?)

(i feel like i am giving you all a lesson about science and animals rather then letting y’all read a story)

everyone or everylien (get it? oml so cringe xd) basically every Alien on board on MoonShine had heard the news about the Humans bringing them to a places where they can physically experience the weathers of Earth.

“so considering your question about Earth, Audrie. Us humans have planned that we would show you the basics first : weather.” most of them got confused. what is weather?? is it a natural habitat of a fauna on earth? is it a name of one of the highly respected humans?? oh how curious were they but little did they know...what whole bs are weathers.

they reach a place, its a weird circular room. soon one of the humans, Human-Heloise noticed the confused looks of their crewmates. Heloise told Eugene and then they ask the most obvious question.

“you do not know what a weather is, am i right?” said all of the Humans at once that spooked the already confused Aliens. “-sigh- welp, guess we have a huge explanation to do”

~after explaining cuz im LAZY AS FAK~

“and that's about it!” said Human-Eugene with a proud looking face because for once he does not need google to help him explain everything and he can do it themselves.

“SO YOUR SAYING- THAT THERE ARE WATER FALLING DOWN FROM THE SKY CALLED RYAN-” “its rain-” “THEN IF THE RAIN IS TOO HEAVY ITS GONNA CAUSE FLOODING AND THEN THERES ELECTRICITY COMMING FROM THE SKY CALLED THINDER-” “no its called thund-” “AND THEN THERES WHEN DAYS HAVE NO CLIDS-” “clouds-” “ AND ENDS UP HEATING OVER 40!!! 40 DEGRESS CELCIUS HIGH!! THATS HALFWAY BOILING-”

the humans are a bit stressed at this point, their crew are from outside Planets ofc...

after a good 20 minutes of calming down, the Humans start to proceed the show their fellow friends what its like to experience those so called “weathers’

first was...Average Day, simple and straight foward. like many of the planets permanent setting. the Aliens seem to have gotten fascinated by the beautiful view of flower fields and high mountains. then moving on to cities and villages.

(note this device they are using is kind of like VR but you don't need the headset and it feels like your really there)

second was...Rainy day, normal raining and the windy blows. they are standing at the balcony of some sort of...home? the Aliens did not pay attention to their surroundings, they were enjoying the breeze of the wind and the sounds of the pouring rain. its somewhat peaceful for them. 

but then suddenly.... something clicked...

no one really realize it but something broke, but it didn't matter.

now for this third one

its midnight wtf, i will be continuing these tomorrow, i need sleep

[crypticalwitch]

Dr. Hide, The Mechanisms, and a New friend.

The story of Dr. Marie Hide, Her small crew, and how they all met. The Story of my Mechsona crew.

Warnings-death, Poison, ask to tag.

Dr. Marie Hide was raised on stories of the Mechanisms. She would sit and listen to her great grandmother telling tales of a Man of copper singing tales of the past, tales of a man with a heart of metal being passed a baby and panicking, of Women with Wings or Minds of metal. 

She fell in love with the tales from the stars,and no matter how many times she was told to stay planetside for her own safely, she would look to the stars, the old warped disks her Great Grandma left her playing. The singers voice haunting as they told their one man audience the tales of Gunpowder Tim and Ashes O’Reilly. 

So, it wasn't much a surprise to herself or her family when she became an Engineer, and a Doctor, and a Pilot. and She headed off to the stars, gathering her own tales to be told. 

And then she found it. A very old file, something that took months upon months to update and break through all the passwords and safeguards to get at whatever was hiding in the file. and boy was it something.

A very old file, full of things written and made by the Mechanisms, Not the ones who her Great Grandma told her about, the ones whose voices filled Dr. Hide’s speakers when she was alone in the engine room, but the real ones. The immortals from all over the stars who played deadly pranks and who held a mini war over something called an Octo Kitten. Whatever the hell that was. All written by Dr. Carmilla and Raphaella La Cognizi.

But the most exciting thing, was the blueprints and instructions for Mechanization, Immortality developed by the Doctor.

It wasn't a hard decision for Her to make. She already couldn't walk, what was the worst thing that could happen. But first, she would need someone to do the procedure, since she really didn't want to be conceness for her legs to be cut off and guts scooped out.

So she built Jekyll. It was programed with hundreds of medical procedures, as well as what they’d need to do the whole mechanization process, if lacking in preprogrammed personality. 

So waking up with the ability to walk was interesting, and the first thing she got to do with her new skill was clumsy run and steal a ship with her unemoting companion.

The pair wandered, gathering more stories of their own, both ones they were involved in, and not always in their little junker ship, nicknamed “Borealis”.

Borealis tended to break down, stutter and never quiet be as safe as it should, but for a new immortal and her Robot companion, whose personality was only just starting to develop. It was home, if barely big enough.

When they landed on Pistil, Dr. Hide had only planned to make a fuel stop, until she heard from one of the local merchants that a warlord was making quick work of the planet, maybe she had extended her stay for a few....years, much to jekyll’s chagrin.

and She really wasn't expecting to find someone with her legs injured beyond belief. She was face down in the dirt, long grey-blue hair splayed out in long loose curls, her legs down to bone and blood.  

so Hide brought her back to the makeshift lab. Patching up the mysterious woman was easy enough, however, waiting for her to return to the waking world was a nightmare.

When she did, she cried, scared and alone. Now, the good Doctor is not really savvy with emotions, so having a panicking, sobbing, stranger on her table, was not her ideal situation. To make everything so much better, Jekyll had just walked in, and stood staring with its lack of eyes.

“Jek, now is not a good time.” She had hissed, rubbing the back of the woman.

“The Police are here.” It had said.

“fucking hell.” Dr. Hide had shoo’d the police away, who simply wanted to know who lived at the house. When she had returned, the woman had calmed down, and was wiping her tears away with a cloth given to her by jekyll.

She had introduced herself as Carcei Wisteria, the teamaid of Emperor Ivalace. Dr. Hide didn’t quite know what that meant, but was happy enough to support her.

Carcie was on her way to get a very specific flower to make tea with. something that would be VERY HARD WITHOUT HER FEET. So Hide offered her help, Pulling out her old wheelchair and offering her help carrying the flowers and seeds back to her home.

Carcie had (Reluctantly) accepted her offer, and the pair took a three month journey to find these flowers, a gorgeous plant nicknamed “Selene's Prayer”.  

For months after meeting and befriending the woman, someone Hide quickly grew to admire for her silver tongue and for her sharp mind, Hide would not know why Carcie wanted Selene’s Prayer, until one night, late in Pistil’s seasonal cycle, when plants dried and what chill that constituted Pistil’s winters was just beginning to set in, gathered over warm tea and surrounded by the smell of drying earth and burning silverwood, Carcie wove her tale.

Carcie Wisteria had been born Carcie Forsythia, and had trained under a noble of Dandil, the once name of the kingdom before it became territory of Peat. She had quickly became a gift to the Empress, Magnola, and even quicker became her High Teamaid, a position of high honour and status.

Magnola was apparently fond of Carcie, and often took her to peace talks and trade negotiations. Which is how she met them, a otherworldly seeming person who chose their name as Odyssey Velium.

Odyssey was tall, dark, freckled, with short dark red hair and smoky violet eyes that shone like a sunset. They was a similarly high ranked dressmaid to the former Emperor of Peat, a kindly older man by the name of Prairifire and one of Dandil’s strongest Allies. Carcie fell in love near instantly, and apparently Odyssey felt the same way, and the pair began a whirlwind relationship over letters. 

The years went on, the pair only seeing each other in person when Empress Magnola and Emperor Prairifire met up for tea, their love affair remained a secret. until one of the more Enterprising Teamaids discovered Carcie’s letters from Odyssey, and outed her relationship to both rulers. 

The pair believed themselves to only had a few hours together before their verdict handed out and they would be separated. 

and they were given their rulers blessings to be wed.

Odyssey was gifted to Magnola as a dressmaid, and they were engaged, choosing their family name to be Wisteria.

A few months passed, the kingdoms Alliship stronger than ever, before Emperor Prairifire died,and his War mongering son took the throne, and a new treaty needed to be written up.

Carcie just happen to be late to the Congress, her maids having made a near unrecoverable mistake with the petals, and she arrived just in time to see her Queen, her court, and her never to be partner slaughtered.

As was customary, she was taken as a prize, and made to serve her loves killer the same tea she would to her queen, as he took over the land she loved.

The petals of Selene’s Prayer, it turns out, were a horrific paralysis agent, as well as a hallucinogen. and a strong one. When mixed with the right Poisons, it would lead to a painful and terrifying death. One Carcie intended to give to the entire court as she watched.

Hide had only one thing to say after that.

“after the revenge, what will you do?“

“Probably be put to death, why?”

“wanna join my semi-immortal band of space pirates exploring the galaxy?” When Carcie said nothing, Hide continued, “i could just replace your feet with a mechanism like my lower body and Bam! Unkillable!”

“your kidding.”

“nope!” To demonstrate, Hide put a knife through her hand, and then showed the skin kniting itself back together.

“holy shit your not kidding?” Carcie puffed up “WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THAT WHEN WE FIRST MET!”

“DO YOU WANT BE STUCK LIVING WITH SOMEONE WHO DIDN'T ASK TO BE IMMORTAL AND IS ANGRY WITH YOU FOR ETERNITY? I'D FEEL SO GUILTY! plus it kinda hurts for a few weeks after”

the pair laughed.

“Mari,” Carcie said, 

“Oh wow, using my first name! this is serious.”

“Mari.” Carice narrowed her eyes, “I want you to promise me something if i go through with this.”

“ok?”

“Promise me we’ll steal a bigger ship than Borealis after my revenge.”

“HELL YES!” Hide laughed, “so when is this going down?”

“Tomorrow.” Carice said,carefulling sipping her tea as Hide suddenly choked,

“TOMORROW SHIT I GOTTA GET A GOOD SEAT!” Hide threw a hug around Carcies shoulders, “Can't wait to see your magnum opus of vengeance, if Jekyll asks i'm following my family's footsteps!”  

“see ya Hide!”

 Sunrise came, and Carcie got to work. She dismissed her Teamaids for the day (”you’ve all worked so hard lately, and you deserve a break!”), and set to work brewing her poison. 

When the court downed the tea, the poison took quick. The paralysis only took hold of a few but the hallucinations were strong and maddening and within hours, the branches of the meeting hall were covered in madness and gore and horror. And standing in the middle, survivors would later say, stood Carcie, her mourning veil cloaking hazel eyes that had long hardened to earth and moss.

and dropping from an over head branch, was Hide, casting impressed eyes over her work.

“Were grabbing more of those seeds right?”

“mhm.”

“were taking all of your seeds aren't we?” 

“and the dry flowers.”

“sounds good!”

----------

WOO! That was fun! 

If you have any questions about my Crew, please ask! My ask box is open and Id love to gush or expand on the universe. also ask me to tag

[teacupfulofstarshine]

LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP: CHAPTER 4

((alright y’all, here we go. the long-awaited chapter 4. i hope you like it~))

chapter 1 // chapter 2 // chapter 3// read it on ao3!

(tw: panic attack, anger, electricity, injury mentions, blood mentions, fight mentions, minor angst, mild anxiety)

word count: 7112

“What do you want to know?”

Thomas watches the way the merman shakes on the lab table.

“Are you cold?” he asks. Logan blinks at him. “You’re shaking. I know you’re probably scared, but the table can’t be super warm, either. Do you want a blanket or something?”

Logan tilts his head suspiciously. “What . . . what is a . . . blanket? Does it hurt?”

“No,” Thomas says, and it hurts his heart that Logan thinks he’s going to be hurt here. He knows that it’s probably the most rational thing for him to assume, but he hopes they can convince Logan they mean well. “It’s . . . it’s a soft thing. We drape them over ourselves to stay warm, and we use them when we sleep, too.”

“It is cold here,” Logan admits. “If you do not mind, I – I think I would enjoy one of those blankets.”

Virgil hurries out of the room and returns quickly with a red-and-gold plaid blanket. It’s thick and warm, and he’s painstakingly careful as he drapes it over Logan’s shoulders and tucks it around his body. “Better?” Thomas asks.

Logan sighs shakily and curls into the blanket. “Better,” he agrees. “You . . . must have other questions for me, I imagine?”

“You’re surprisingly fluent in English,” Virgil says, clicking the tape recorder he keeps in his pocket on. “I didn’t think you’d speak this well.”

Logan looks at him as though he’s stupid. “Of course I speak this language,” he says. “My kind speak the language of whatever human civilization we happen to live near. We need to understand what your fishermen are saying if we’re going to avoid getting netted and killed. Not . . . that it always works.”

“We’re not going to kill you,” Thomas says. “We just want to know how to help you.”

“Put me back,” Logan says immediately. “Put me back in the ocean. Let me go back to my pod, they’re probably worried sick I –”

He looks at them and clamps his mouth shut. “Pod?” Thomas asks. “As . . . as in a family unit? You – you have a family?”

“Of course I have a family!” Logan snaps. “What, did you think I was some kind of monster roaming around the ocean on my own sinking ships and eating sailors?”

“What –”

“Don’t play dumb with me! I know exactly how humans think! They think we’re monsters! When they catch us, they take us apart to study us or they put us on display and kill us slowly or – I don’t know if they eat us or not but I wouldn’t put it past you!”

“Okay, calm down time!” Virgil says. “We don’t think you’re a monster. We wanna study you, yeah, but we don’t have to vivisect you to do that!”

“What does that mean?!”

“We aren’t going to cut you open,” Thomas says softly. “We’re scientists. We study the ocean and the creatures that live in it. We rescue animals that have been hurt by other humans.”

“You mean you steal them.”

“No, I mean rescue. We bring them here, we patch them up, and we let them heal in a safe environment where predators can’t get them. And once they’re strong enough to survive in the wild, we let them go. We release them into the ocean, where they belong, because keeping them here longer than we have to would be cruel.”

Logan is still glaring suspiciously at them, but there are tears brimming in his eyes. “I – I don’t – I want to go home,” he demands. He doesn’t sound nearly as scary as before. “I want to go back to the ocean.”

“You’re not strong enough to survive that journey,” Thomas says. “You were poisoned by that net, and it tore you up pretty badly regardless. You aren’t going to be healed enough to go back for at least two weeks.”

“That – I – n-no, you – I can’t – th-they’ll be so s-scared,” Logan whispers. “They’ll think something happened to me. I – I have to go home. Please.”

Thomas looks at his hands. “I . . . I’m so sorry, Logan. We can’t let you go home yet. If we do that, it . . . it would be opening you up to all sorts of dangers that -”

“You think I don’t know how dangerous the ocean is?!” Logan snarls. “I grew up there! I spent my childhood frolicking around the depths of the Marianas Trench! My idea of fun was to taunt a shiver of sharks and get them to chase me because I knew I outpaced them easily! I’m a hunter! There are plenty of dangerous things in the ocean and I am one of them!”

His chest is heaving, eyes narrowing, tail twitching. Thomas inhales sharply, preparing to say something, but then he catches the scent in the air. It’s sharp and metallic, almost coppery but not quite. He knows this scent. It’s almost . . .

Electric.

“Virgil, get down!” Thomas yells. He grabs Virgil and tackles him down to the ground, rolling away from the metal chairs and the metal lab table and the metal everything. Logan screams, tail slamming against the table as electricity crackles down his entire being. It leaps out from the circular patches of scales on his arms, it arcs across his tail, it crackles at the corners of his eyes as he screams.

“Let me go!” he wails. “Please, let me go back to them! Let me go! I don’t want to be here! I never wanted to be here! Let me go back to them!”

The electricity fizzles out, and Logan’s hands find their way up into his hair. He grabs at it, pulling it much harder than Thomas would prefer as he screams. “Let me go! Let me go, let me go, LET ME GO!”

“We can’t do that!” Thomas calls. He curls his body protectively over Virgil’s, shielding as much of him as he can. “We can’t let you get hurt any more than you already are!”

Logan shrieks again, and Thomas claps his hands over his ears, because that is not a human noise. It sounds like the scraping of a rusty ship’s hull against rocks as it crashes in a midnight storm. It sounds like the wind howling through a wild November hurricane. It sounds like the power and fury of the wildest ocean depths, condensed into one long, never-ending noise.

Eventually, however, it does end, and when Thomas finally uncovers his ears, he hears not the shrieks of some long-dead sea monster entity, but the muffled sobs of a broken man. He cautiously rises up onto his knees, peering over the edge of the table to see Logan, slumped over the cold, hard metal, face buried in his arms. His entire body shakes with sobs, and Thomas carefully reaches for his shoulder. “Logan -”

“Get away from me!” Logan roars. He throws his head forward, snapping a mouthful of gleaming fangs, and Thomas barely manages to avoid those fangs sinking into his hand. “I want to go home!” His entire body is tense, preparing to launch himself off the table, but he’s shaking from the force and wincing from the pain.

“Virgil, can you please go into the kitchen and make some tea?” Virgil looks at Thomas as though he’s just asked him to set the lab on fire and leave him there.

“Doc, are you sure -”

“Yes. I got more teabags, they’re in the cabinet above the stove.”

Virgil cautiously edges away from Logan, who glares at him until he leaves. Once the lab door slams shut behind him, Logan’s gaze snaps right back to Thomas. Thomas carefully lifts his hands up palm-out.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You hurt me when you took me away from my family!”

“We didn’t set that net,” Thomas says, soothing but firm. “We found you on the beach, poisoned and dying. I’m sorry that you got caught in it, and I’m sorry that you’ve been stolen from your family. I promise that Virgil and I will get you back to them as soon as we possibly can. But we run the risk of killing you if we release you back into the ocean as you are.”

“I’ve spent my entire life in the ocean! It can’t kill me, it can’t hurt me!”

“You can barely move right now.” Logan bristles, and Thomas hates himself for being so callous but he needs Logan to understand the severity of the situation. “There’s no way that you would survive on your own. Even if you can defend yourself from predators, you’re exhausted and you can barely move. How are you going to hunt? How are you going to feed yourself?”

“My pod will -”

“How are you going to locate them?”

“I - I can call for them!”

“Sure, but what if they can’t hear you? The sound will only travel so far. If they can’t hear it, you have to move, but your mobility is extremely limited. It would be better for you to wait until you’ve healed more. I’m sorry that you have to be here, but you do.”

Logan screeches loudly. Thomas covers his ears and hunkers down to wait it out, but he can’t completely block out the noise. It’s a horrible noise just on principle (like grating metal, like nails on a chalkboard, like steel wool fibers pulled apart and dragged across a cheese grater, like a badly out-of-tune piano, like the death shriek of a hellish creature, like a car wreck), but there’s more to it than that. The noise is horrible because it’s the sound of a heart breaking, shattering into pieces.

The screech goes on forever and it lasts only a moment. By the time Logan has stopped screaming and Thomas’s ears have stopped ringing, Virgil is lurking near the staircase. He’s wearing his wireless headphones to muffle the horrible noises. Thomas smiles, balling his fists to hide the shaking, and motions for Virgil to come in.

Logan is shivering, pulling the blanket tightly around himself and curling up to avoid looking at them as best as he can. Virgil’s footsteps are hesitant and shuffling, less of a step than a drag of his foot across the linoleum floor. He carefully sets the tray down and looks at Thomas, hesitantly pulling one headphone away from his ear.

“Is . . . everything okay, Doc?”

“Yes, Virgil, everything is fine.”

Thomas sips at his tea, watching the merman carefully. Logan very pointedly stares at anything he can see that is NOT Thomas or Virgil, clutching his arms so tightly that Thomas worries he’ll leave gouges in his arms. “I’m sorry that we have to keep you here,” he says. “But you have my word that once we’ve confirmed you’re stable enough to survive, we’ll release you into the ocean.”

“How am I supposed to trust that?” Logan snaps. He doesn’t look at them.

“The doc would never lie to someone,” Virgil spits, defensive, but Thomas shakes his head a little.

“He’s allowed to be upset. For all he knows, we kidnapped him.”

“We did not! We would never -”

“Virgil, how would you feel if you woke up injured and isolated in a strange place and were then told that you weren’t allowed to go home for quite some time? I know I would be terrified.” He turns his gaze from Virgil to Logan as he speaks. “I would want to go home as soon as possible. I would want to be freed immediately, and if I wasn’t, I would lash out at anyone who tried to keep me confined, even if they said they only wanted what was best for me. How would I know they were telling me the truth?”

“I . . . I guess you’re right . . .”

“Logan,” Thomas says softly. “I understand that you’re upset. It’s okay. It’s a perfectly natural and valid response to the situation that you’re in right now. I just want you to understand that Virge and I, we’re going to take care of you. We want you to recover and we want you to get home safely.”

“How am I to trust that?” Logan says softly. “I know what humans think of those like me. We are rare, exotic creatures to be kept on display and shown off like trophies. We are not capable of real thought or speech, despite our tremendous ability for ‘mimicry’. What if I never see my family again?”

“Why don’t you tell me about them?” Thomas prompts. “You don’t have to be super specific, but talking about them may make you feel a little better . . .”

Logan’s eyes flicker towards him, although they focus on his feet rather than his face. One hand comes away from clutching the blanket to gently touch the odd band of lighter-blue scales coiling around his upper arm.

“I . . . I suppose . . .”

*~*~*~*~*

Sunlight filters through the water. A red blur darts around in front of him, weaving with ease through seaweed that would tangle in his fins and ensnare him. “Stay where I can see you, Roman!” he calls, but the smaller mer doesn’t listen.

Finally, he catches up, taking a detour above the seaweed, almost panicking when he hears crying. He sends out rapid distress clicks, but when Roman answers back almost immediately unharmed, he calms down a little (but not much).

“I found someone!” Roman calls back. “He’s crying and he’s all alone, I think he might be lost!”

He swims closer, listening, and he picks up on the sobs only a few more seconds after Roman does. “Hello? Are you alright? You don’t have to cry, we’re here to help you! Did you lose your pod?”

“I . . . I do not . . . I do not have a pod,” the stranger sniffles. A few quick clicks confirm that there is a second mer, slightly smaller than Roman, sleek and streamlined with his hands pressed to his face. “I am all alone.”

“Do you remember what happened to your pod, little mer?”

“I do not have a pod,” he repeats. “I - I have never had a pod. I do not . . . I do not remember what happened to me. I woke up near this reef, and I was alone, and I cannot remember ever not being alone. I . . . I think that I have always been alone.”

He feels the water disturb as Roman fidgets, rustling his spines and trying to decide if he should reach out and comfort the strange mer with touch. “You’ve . . . always been alone?” Roman asks softly.

“Yes,” the mer says. “I . . . that is not normal, is it?”

“No, little guppy, it’s not,” he says. “But it’s okay, you don’t have to cry! You can come with me and be part of my pod if you want!”

He can see the mer freeze, fidgeting a little with his hands and looking up at him instead of down at the sea floor. He starts to uncoil, just a little bit. “You . . . you want me?”

“Of course, guppy! Roman here used to be part of another pod, but when we found each other he was all alone too! Now he’s part of my pod, and he’s not alone anymore!”

“It’s really great! We’re a small pod, but we’re a great pod! I like us much better than my old pod,” Roman says, puffing his chest out proudly. He hears the other mer giggle a little, quietly.

“Do you want to join our pod, guppy?” he asks, soft and gentle as though he’s cradling a sea otter pup in his palms.

“Wh - really? You really want - I can join - you - really?!”

“Of course! I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t want you to join us!”

He’s close enough to the other mer to see when his face breaks into a wide grin. “I would love that! I - I’ve never had a pod before, how do I join?”

“Tell me your name.”

“Logan. I - that’s the only thing that I remember. My name is Logan.”

“Welcome to the pod, Logan.” He reaches forward, carefully wraps his thumb and index finger around Logan’s upper arm. He concentrates on Roman, the only other member of his pod, and hears Logan gasp when all of his scales light up. Roman grins proudly at his side as the blue scales on his arm begin to glow.

When he pulls his hand away, there’s a band of light blue scales wrapping around Logan’s arm. “Whoa! How did you do that?”

“Easy, guppy. I’m magic.”

“He’s an elder mer!” Roman boasts proudly. “He can do all kinds of cool, neat stuff that we can’t because he’s magic! That’s our podmark! It means you belong with us now!”

“And it shares a little of my magic with you,” he adds. “I age differently than regular mer, so now you age differently, too! I didn’t ever want to lose my pod, and now I never have to!”

Logan smiles shyly.

“I’ll race you!” Roman declares, turning and pointing out into open water. He sends a click out, waiting for the echo to show him the shape of the rocky cliff that Roman is gesturing to. “I bet you can’t beat me!”

“I bet I can!”

“You’re on!”

He feels Logan take off, and he’s slicing through the water like a shark. Roman doesn’t even start swimming, so completely stunned and in awe at Logan’s speed. “He didn’t tell me he could rocket around like a sailfish!” he complains.

“You didn’t ask, guppy,” he chuckles. “You’d better start swimming, or he’s going to beat you for sure!”

“Never!”

He lets them swim for a minute longer, carefully sending out echos to check their progress. Logan is absolutely going to beat Roman to the cliff, even without the head start he’d accidentally received. With a soft bubbling huff of laughter, he swims off after them.

---

Roman is dizzy. Where is his pod? What’s happening? All he knows is that one minute, he was swimming along after his dad and his brother, and then he was suddenly slammed into the sea floor. He pushes himself up, flaring his spines defensively.

There are orcas surrounding him, gnashing their teeth as they circle above him. The largest one is battle-scarred, tail swishing menacingly, and as Roman puffs his spines out, the large orca slams its tail at him. So that’s what knocked him down.

Roman swims up, looking for his pod, but he can’t find them. They must not have realized that he’s been caught. His head is still spinning like a whirlpool with the force of the blow, but he has to fight. He has to get out, he has to get back to his pod.

One of the orcas lunges towards him, and he twists, slamming his spiky tail into the orca’s body. It howls in pain and jerks forward, yanking him through the water and straight towards the gaping maw of another orca. He quickly yanks his tail away, shouting a word his dad would never approve of as a few of his spines are ripped away. Even though they’ll grow back, his heart still pangs at the sight of his beautiful spines embedded in such a monster.

Two of the orcas rush him at once, and he quickly barrel rolls away from them, firing his spines out as he dives through the opening. He shrieks as one of the orcas snaps and catches his tail in their jaws. Pain explodes up through his side as he slashes his arms around and stabs his elbow spines directly into the orca’s eye.

“Get off of me!” he roars. The orca lets go with a yelp as Roman floods his gills with water and screams his pod call into the water. The orcas around him make angry noises, and not for the first time Roman wishes his dad was here. His dad speaks orca, he could get these awful creatures to leave him alone. And his dad is big, he would be able to tail-slap the orcas into the abyss.

The orcas, angry at Roman fighting back and angry at him calling for help, swarm him. He doesn’t have enough spines to fight them all off, and he drives his elbows into them at every opportunity but it’s not enough. There is pain everywhere as they bite at him and tail-slap him, and soon enough he’s sinking back to the sea floor.

The water around him clouds with blood, and the orcas begin to circle in a more hurried frenzy. The ones he’s speared are beginning to sink from the poison in his spines, slowing down as it invades their brains and slows them down, but that hasn’t helped him. If anything, it’s spurred the other orcas into a frenzy.

Roman calls for his pod again and again and again and again, desperately praying to the Goddesses of the Seven Seas that his dad shows up to save him before the orcas eat him.

“Roman?!”

Roman jerks his head up, hearing a response to his pod call, but quickly realizes that it’s Logan swimming to his rescue. “Logan, no, get out of here! Go get -”

“I’m not leaving you!” Logan skillfully weaves through the orcas and swims down to grab Roman’s forearms. “What happened?! Are you hurt?! No, that’s a stupid question, you’re obviously hurt, what can I do?!”

“You can get out of here!” Roman hisses. “You can go get dad, he can fight off these monsters and you’re faster than I ever could be!”

“I’m not leaving you!” Logan repeats. “What happens if they get to you before I get back? I just got this pod, I’m not abandoning you!”

Roman is distracted by the sight of one of the orcas growing impatient with waiting. It dives down, mouth open, teeth glinting and sharp, and Roman knows that it’s going to sink its teeth into Logan’s fins and hurt his baby brother and he will not let that happen.

“Logan, get down, now!” he snaps. Logan jerks his head up, turns to see the orca. But he doesn’t move; instead, he positions himself in front of Roman. “What are you doing, you kelp-brain?!”

“GET AWAY FROM MY BROTHER!” Logan roars. Roman gasps as the dark rings of scales all over Logan’s tail and torso and arms begin to glow, so brightly that Roman is forced to close his eyes. The water around them gets suddenly warm, and then there’s a burning all over Roman’s body that leaves him stunned and paralyzed. He can barely keep his eyes open, and the last thing he sees is the illuminated silhouette of his enraged baby brother.

---

Logan blinks awake, feeling strange motion around him even though he is not swimming. He opens his eyes and realizes that he is being held in someone’s arms.

“Dad . . .?” “Shhh, guppy,” he soothes. “It’s alright, you’re safe now. I’ve got you.”

“But - but Roman, he - they - I -”

“He’s safe too, guppy. I have him.” He is shifted, carefully, and Logan realizes that his dad has him cradled in one arm and Roman in the other. “He’s lost quite a few of his spines, but they regrow after a few days. It’ll be painful cause he’s lost so many . . . but he’ll survive. We’re going back to our cave so I can patch him up.”

“Wh . . . what happened, Dad? I remember finding Roman, I remember turning to see the orca, I remember getting angry . . . but nothing else . . .”

“You have a gift,” his dad says, and he sounds proud. “You have been blessed by the Goddesses of the Seven Seas. They have given you the Burning Light.”

“Wh . . . what?”

“The rings on your body emit a Burning Light. It travels through the water and stuns everything in its path. Few mer are gifted with the Burning Light - you are blessed, guppy, truly.”

“I just wanted Roman to be safe.”

“And he is, guppy. He most assuredly is.”

*~*~*~*~*

“Burning Light?” Virgil asks, rapidly scribbling down notes.

“We later learned from overhearing human sailors that the humans refer to the blessing as ‘electricity’,” Logan says. “It allows me to hunt, and to protect my pod, although that is not my primary job. That belongs to . . . to my brother.”

“Roman, right?” Thomas says. “The one with the spines?”

“Yes,” Logan murmurs. “He is my older brother. He and my father . . . they are the only family that I have in this world. They are my pod. And now, I have been taken from them, and . . . and I do not know if I will ever see them again.” One hand comes up to touch the light blue band of scales around his arm, what they understand now to be a mark from his pod.

“I promise that you will,” Thomas says. “We just want to make sure that you’ll survive when you go back to the ocean. You’re injured, and you can barely move.”

“I am aware.”

“I promise that as soon as you’re healed, we’re going to let you back to the ocean,” Thomas says. “We don’t want to keep you here any longer than we absolutely have to. But I cannot, in good conscience, let you go to your death.”

“I . . . I suppose I can appreciate such a sentiment,” Logan sighs, “although I am still fundamentally opposed to remaining here. I . . . am sorry that I attacked you earlier. I was distressed, but . . . that is not an excuse.”

“Hey, no, don’t do that,” Virgil says, snapping his head up. Logan’s eyes widen slightly at the fire in his voice, a fire Virgil hadn’t meant to put there but doesn’t bother to suppress. “For all you know, you’ve basically just been kidnapped by your greatest enemy. It was a perfectly legitimate response on your part. And the doc and I are fine.”

Logan blinks. “I . . . thank you, Virgil.”

“No problem.”

“May . . . may I make a request?”

“What kind of request?”

“I - I would like to go back into the water now,” Logan says, looking away from Thomas and Virgil nervously. “I dislike when I am not at least partially submerged.”

“Well, you can’t go back into the big tank until we flush it out and bring in clean water,” Thomas says. “You were peeling your bandages off, so the water’s contaminated, it’s got your blood in it now. And we have to rewrap the bandages that you peeled off . . .”

“What about the turtle tank?” Virgil says. He refers to the large, flat, cylindrical tank where they keep smaller sea turtles and rays when they’re brought in for recovery. It kind of reminds Virgil of the touch tank at an aquarium, and it’s not an ideal place to keep Logan permanently but it could be a good solution for the time being.

“Hmm . . . That could work,” Thomas says. “Logan, would that be alright with you?” “You . . . care what I think?” “Of course we do.” Thomas smiles gently. “We want you to be comfortable while you’re here.”

Logan looks painfully surprised, and Virgil can’t stop his mind from wandering to what kinds of horrible, torturous things the poor merman thinks they’re going to inflict upon him. “I . . . tell me again what you are proposing?”

“We can’t put you back into the big tank because the water has your blood in it, and you could get sick if you sit in that. And we need to rewrap your bandages, too. But we have another, smaller tank that we can let you sit in so that you’re in the water at least a little. Virgil will rewrap your injuries while I flush out the tank, and then you can go back in the water, okay?”

“That . . . that seems adequate.”

“Okay then,” Thomas says. “Can we pick you up, Logan?” 

“Yes,” he says, “although I would prefer -”

Logan stops talking before he finishes his sentence, but Thomas refuses to let him. “What is it, Logan? You’re allowed to tell us what you would prefer.”

“I . . . would prefer if . . . if you held my tail, while Virgil held my . . . the rest of me.”

“You - you really would?” Virgil feels his face heat up as Thomas shoots him a distinctive blackmailer’s grin before smiling kindly at Logan again.

“Of course we can do that,” he says. “Virgil, is that alright with you?”

“Y - yeah, of course it is,” Virgil grumbles, glaring at him. When he looks at Logan, however, his anger evaporates as the merman reaches out and gently touches his upper arm with one hand.

“Thank you, Virgil. I greatly appreciate it.”

“Yeah - I - um - y - no problem,” he mutters, feeling the heat spread through his cheeks and his ears and his entire face. Logan removes his hand from Virgil’s arm, and Virgil feels the spot where it was begin to tingle and burn from lack of contact. Before he can properly begin to process what that might mean, however, Logan reaches up and locks his arms around Virgil’s neck.

Virgil barely manages to remember to breathe, but after only a few seconds of short-circuiting he remembers how his arms work and scoops Logan up. He’s faintly aware of Thomas next to him, gathering Logan’s tail into his arms and wrapping it carefully around his shoulders and waist to keep it off the floor, but all he can focus on is Logan.

Logan’s arm presses against the bare skin of Virgil’s neck, and it’s slightly rough and scaly but also surprisingly smooth. His hair is damp, with little beads of water running down his face, and Virgil swallows hard as he watches a single drop run down the pale column of Logan’s neck. His eyes are framed by small, glittering, dark blue scales, but even their beauty cannot compare to how pretty Logan’s eyes are. It’s like staring straight into the depths of the ocean, frightening but mesmerizing all at the same time.

“Earth to Virgil?” Thomas asks. Virgil snaps his head up and looks away from Logan, towards his boss. “Are you ready to go?”

“Wh - I - y-yeah, I - sorry, boss, I got distracted. I’m ready, I’m sorry. Are we moving now?”

“Just waiting on you, Virgil. On three?”

“On three. One . . .” “Two . . .”

“Three!”

Virgil and Thomas both lift up at the same time, managing to hoist Logan up off the table. Logan shifts a little, apparently still slightly unnerved by the idea of being lifted around, and Virgil tries very hard not to think about how he’s basically carrying Logan bridal style. Instead, he pushes up onto the balls of his feet and begins to take slow, careful steps backwards, glancing between Thomas and Logan and his destination over his shoulder.

“Thank you,” Logan says softly, and his mouth is right next to Virgil’s ear. Virgil is proud of the way he doesn’t even flinch a little, even as his heartrate rockets up to truly dangerous levels.

“N - no problem.”

Virgil carefully lowers Logan into the tank, keeping his hands under Logan’s armpits to hold him upright while Thomas disentangles himself from Logan’s tail. It slithers neatly into the water in one shimmering, fluid motion, and Logan carefully lays back, submerging himself completely in the water before poking his face up above the surface.

“Better?” Thomas asks.

“Much.”

Thomas heads off to the big tank, and Virgil pulls a roll of bandages out of his pocket. “This might sting a little . . . but I promise I’m not trying to hurt you. I just wanna keep you safe.”

Logan sighs, wincing as he shifts his tail so that Virgil can see his arms. Tenderly, Virgil pulls out a cloth and begins to carefully wipe at the exposed injuries. Logan hisses at the sting, flinching just a little, but he doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t bite Virgil, either, which causes Virgil to breathe a massive sigh of relief.

After all the injuries are wiped down and clean, he begins to bandage them. Some of them are small enough that he can simply cut off a small piece of bandage and plaster it down, but some of them require wrapping lengths of bandage around Logan’s arms and torso.

Virgil keeps his touch as light as possible, applying as little pressure as possible, since there are bruises around the injuries. Logan flinches and winces but keeps his face stoic, watching Virgil with a careful, calculating, almost eerie intelligence. Virgil pretends that he doesn’t notice the way Logan is looking at him, the way Logan is studying him.

He very much notices.

He finishes bandaging Logan before Thomas finishes flushing and filling the tank, so he turns to pick up his sketchpad before realizing that he probably shouldn’t be drawing Logan without his explicit consent. “Hey, Logan?”

“Yes?”

“I - do you care if I draw you? I usually draw the marine life that we bring in, cause it’s good practice, so I - I just figured that I should ask you for permission before -”

“What is . . . draw?” Logan asks.

Virgil hesitantly opens the sketchpad and turns it to some of his previous drawings - starfish, sea turtles, jellyfish, sea urchins. He flips through them slowly, watching Logan’s eyes widen and mouth open as he stares at the drawings.

“You . . . created these?” “Yeah,” Virgil says. He pulls a pencil out of his pocket and quickly sketches a flower in the corner of a page. “There . . . I kind of had some . . . some drawings of you already . . .”

Logan is quiet. “May I see them?”

Virgil blushes, tucking the pencil behind his ear. “Um . . . Y-yeah, yeah, I - here, here you go . . .”

He carefully shows Logan the sketches he’s already done - Logan curled in the tank, asleep, rough guess sketches of Logan’s anatomy, close-ups on some of Logan’s fins and the band of light blue scales around his upper arm. He deliberately doesn’t turn the page to the final drawing, which is a close-up of Logan’s face that he spent an embarrassing amount of time on.

“You . . . created these images of me? But . . . but why?”

“Some of the drawings I do get sold for textbook illustrations, some of them are for research purposes, some of them are just practice for anatomy. But most of them are just . . . for fun. I like drawing.”

Logan blinks. “Does . . . drawing me require any specific action on my part?”

“Nope. You don’t really have to do anything at all.”

Logan studies Virgil’s face very carefully, and Virgil studies him back. He doesn’t know if he’s going to be allowed to continue drawing the merman, but his mind is already thinking in artist terms. How should he shade Logan’s irises? How should he capture the delicate facial scales? How should he accurately represent the gossamer-thin fins that replace Logan’s ears, the hair that floats around him like a feathery halo in the water and plasters itself to his forehead in the air, the curve of his chin and the slant of his nose and the bright life that gleams in his eyes?

“You may continue to draw me,” Logan decides, finally. “On one condition.”

“What’s the condition?”

“I would like to be able to see the drawings when they are done.” Logan suddenly averts his gaze, looking away almost adorably. “If . . . you do not mind showing them to me.”

“Of course I don’t,” Virgil answers immediately. “I’m more than happy to show them to you. They’re of you. Thank you, so much, for letting me draw you.”

Logan smiles, and his entire face lights up, and Virgil is so, so gay.

Before his soul can completely leave his body, Thomas calls that the tank is full, and Virgil is setting his sketchbook aside and helping Thomas carry Logan back to the tank. They do their best not to throw him into the tank, but he still sinks in the water without much grace due to his injured tail.

“He must coil like that because he misses his pod,” Thomas comments, watching the way that Logan curls up to sleep.

“We can’t keep him away from them, Doc,” Virgil says.

“We can’t release him yet, Virgil. He can’t even swim. If he goes back into the ocean, the scent of blood will attract predators galore. He’ll never survive, and he won’t ever see his pod again.”

“Yeah, but look at him,” Virgil argues. Logan is coiling up, slowly and painfully, and he looks objectively miserable. “He’s never gonna be happy here, Thomas. We don’t want him to suffer, but he’s gonna suffer if he’s alone.”

“So what are you proposing, that we go find his pod?”

Virgil smirks. “Well, actually . . .”

*~*~*~*~*

“You . . . you wish to what?”

If Virgil thought Logan’s eyes were pretty before (and he did), that’s nothing compared to watching his face light up as hope slowly unfurls its banners. He tears a chunk out of the fish and shoves it into his mouth as Virgil explains his idea.

“We don’t wanna just let you go back into the ocean when you’re injured and can’t swim, cause that would basically be a death warrant for you and we don’t want that. But you’re clearly miserable without your pod, so - so I thought that maybe, we could go and find them? We could bring them here to visit you, let them see that you’re alive and okay, and then they’ll know where you are and they won’t panic. And once you’re all healed, you can go back to the wild with them.”

“I . . . you are truly willing to help me?”

“We don’t want you to be miserable,” Thomas says. “And your family must be worried sick. I know that if anything ever happened to Virgil and I didn’t know where he was or what had happened, I’d be distraught.”

Virgil feels something strange welling up in his chest when Thomas says that, something like pride, something like love, something like acceptance and warmth and family. Instead of expressing these sentiments, he elbows his mentor gently and mutters, “Yeah, yeah, doc, don’t get sappy on me” while smiling and staring at the floor.

Logan grins, flashing his mouthful of fangs, but Virgil can’t see this as threatening. He can’t see it as anything other than incredibly endearing. “I - this - thank you, thank you so much, that is - this is more than I could dream of.”

“The only problem is that we don’t actually know how to find your pod,” Thomas says. Logan doesn’t appear deterred in the slightest.

“When we are not in the same place, we have a call that we use to find each other,” he says. “I could attempt to teach it to you and then -”

“Slow down there, bud,” Virgil interrupts. “We don’t have the same anatomy that you do, there’s no way that we could replicate a noise like that.” He hates to say it, hates to watch the way the hope in Logan’s face dies, but he can’t let it live if it’s false.

“We couldn’t make it ourselves,” Thomas muses, “but what we could do is record you making the call and broadcast it from the boat using the sonar equipment.”

“Could we reformat the sonar to do that?” Virgil asks. Thomas grins, sharp and intelligent.

“We absolutely could.”

Virgil grins back, and they both look at Logan, who’s cautiously smiling, hope beginning to creep back into his features. “Alrighty then, Logan. We’re gonna find your family.”

*~*~*~*~*

Thomas anchors the boat a few miles offshore and carefully prepares the sonar equipment. They’d had to record about ten different trials of Logan’s pod call before the merman had deemed it satisfactory, but he’d been so excited about seeing his pod again that Thomas hadn’t minded that much.

Out here alone, with Logan still in the lab and Virgil keeping him company, Thomas lets his mind wander to more pessimistic options. Even with the recording of Logan’s pod call, there’s no guarantee that he’s anywhere near Logan’s pod. There’s no guarantee that they’ll find the pod today, or tomorrow, and there’s no guarantee that even a fully healed Logan released into the ocean will ever find them again.

He shakes his head to clear the negativity; he can’t afford to think like that. Logan is desperate to see his pod again, and Thomas can’t let him down. He carefully hoists the sonar speaker into his arms, heads to the side of the boat, and lowers it down into the water.

Thomas has already decided that he will spend an hour in this location before he moves on, and he’ll advance five miles into the ocean every time he moves. He sits down at the monitoring equipment and presses the button to begin projecting the call out into the water.

He has plenty of busywork reports to occupy himself while he’s waiting for something to happen, so he does. His eyes flick back and forth from the sonar screen and the reports he’s filling out, not sure what exactly he’s looking for but feeling his optimism fade every time there’s nothing on the screen.

And then the screen explodes.

Thomas can feel the hull of the boat itself vibrating as the sonar detects something - someone - responding to the signal. He’s quick to shove the busywork away and pull up the sonar display, and gapes at what it displays. Something is quickly approaching, close to the surface and roughly the size of a medium shark, but that’s not what’s concerning.

What’s concerning is the other thing approaching from deeper waters, larger than the largest whale (the largest creature, full stop) that Thomas has ever seen. Suddenly, the signal gets fuzzy and distorted before completely warping out, and something thunks down onto the deck.

Thomas stands up, turning to see a mangled speaker on the deck. It’s covered in tooth and claw marks, crushed and crumpled and ripped like a tin can, but what’s scariest is the red-and-white spine the size of Thomas’s arm speared cleanly through it.

Dimly, Thomas realizes that perhaps summoning the pod of a lost and injured merman without having said merman immediately present might be a mistake. That’s the only realization he has time for before something explodes up out of the ocean in a spout of seawater. Thomas scrambles backwards, but not fast enough; whatever it is tackles him flat on his back and pins him to the deck. His head slams painfully into the deck, and the air is knocked out of his lungs, but Thomas can’t focus on that. He can only focus on three things.

The first thing is the gleam of furious eyes and the glint of razor-sharp fangs, bared above him. The second thing is the feeling of something sharp pressed close to the soft, vulnerable skin of his throat. The third thing is a single phrase, hissed out in a strangled, terrifyingly irate voice.

“What have you done to my brother?!”

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