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itsagrimm · 5 months ago

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He Who Comes from under the Water

Chapter 12 - To Watch a Witch Burn

CN Ivar, witch hunts, sexism, patriarchy, murder, arson

Cultural Context notes

witch hunts were a thing??? Not a huge phenomenon in eastern Europe tho.

Yes, I am back. Felt like writing.

Not beta-read by the still wonderful qq aka @daisies-and-lavender-sideblog as I needed to publish this and be done with this chapter instead of dragging it around even longer.

2,8 k words

Masterlist

I made a playlist for this series. Enjoy.

Night cloaked the world under its dark spell, making way for the rising moon. Since time immemorial, the moon had wandered the sky, watching from above how kingdoms rose and fell, how people lived, how history was made. And very shortly after that immemorial moment long ago when the moon started their celestial hike, they learned how boring eternity was.

If the moon could sigh, they would. As their large lunar eye passed the dark lands below, there was nothing new to see. Always the same old spectacular robberies, coven meetings, lovers secretly reuniting.

Same old, same old.

The moon was about to metaphorically sigh again when their sight fell onto a familiar little wooden house below.

The house of the bride of that little guy.

What was his name?

King of ponds?

Prince of Piss?

It was so long ago.

The moon could not remember but he did remember that the Bride was human and to marry a Vodyanoy. A human and a Vodyanoy!

The moon remembered just a night ago how they had talked. It felt so long now as if months had passed.

The house looked different than how it had just a night ago.

The top floor was wet as if it had just survived a flood. Peeking through the broken window the moon caught sight of an equally dishevelled and chaotic bedroom.

Kids these days.

The front door opened and the Bride and her Vodyanoy stepped outside. They looked happy. She even wore a Kokoshnitza. Armed with the axe, the Vodyanoy looked around, before nodding to his bride and kneeling down. With a shy smile the bride stepped closer, adjusted a mossy blanket around her shoulders and giggled as her fiancé lifted her up to carry her away into the woods.

Looks like they have talked and resolved their differences, the Moon noticed.

But what now? Curious and excited, the Moon watched as they made their way through the dark forest, peeking through the branches and leaves to catch glimpses of the Vodyanoy and the bride in his arms. After a far too long and unentertaining hike (if it was up to the Moon) they arrived at the lake in which the Vodanoy had started to construct a new castle.

Looks a bit like a beaver lodge, the moon mused, too modern architecture. It’s missing columns.

Quickly, the Vodanoy carried his bride over to a little boat, setting her down and pushing her out into the open water as he swam around her like a dark threatening shadow under the water’s surface.

Smart to sleep out on the water where there is no bigger threat than the Vodyanoy himself.

The bride saw nothing of the dark, scaled, and clawed shadow circling her little swimming sanctuary like a cat a mouse. She took off her hair piece, snuggled into her blanket, and closed her eyes, falling asleep shortly while her fiancé lurked right under those few thin pieces of wood separating her from the deep dark water.

That’s it?

The moon would have killed for something more interesting. Their eyes wander over the little boat with the sleeping bride, the dark water and finally the Vodyanoy himself – dark and dangerous and unlike any groom to a human bride before.

With narrowed eyes the Vodyanoy blinked up, meeting the moon's curious eyes.

“You are up.” The little princeling spoke.

“Of all the things you could have said, little one.” The moon huffed. “Of course I am up. I am the moon. I have nowhere else to be but up.”

The Vodyanoy shrugged, causing little waves to circle around him, and smiled.

“How are you, friend?” The princeling said with a mouth full of sharp teeth ready to break and gnaw bones. “I suppose I have to thank you. Your advice that I should talk with the Bride was a sound one.”

The moon hummed, staring down at the peacefully sleeping Bride in the embrace of water.

“I can see that. I am glad. What now?” The moon responded, eager to hear something, anything interesting.

“What now.” The Vodyanoy sighed. “She has my heart as I have hers. But she is still destined to die and I am not. It feels like winning a game of cards only for the table under it to crumble immediately.”

“Because she is a human?”

The Vodyanoy curled around the boat like a cat.

“Yes. I don’t think she minds it much. But I do. She will be gone one day and I will still be here. Always be here.”

The moon stayed silent for a moment, considering its words.

"You are hardly the first groom asking himself if they are making the right decisions. If you two are willing to give this marriage a try, why not gamble it? You might regret not doing so." The moon commented and paused. "But if there is a way to help you, let me know. It's awfully boring up here. You are one of the few who bother talking to me. I would love to return a favour."

König sighed, more waves running in circles from his enormous dark body in the water.

"Baba Yaga, the honourable witch, said I must sacrifice something I hold dear and give it to my Bride to save her." The princling said. "But I have nothing I care about that I could give her. Or am I wrong? I do not know. If you have the answer, dear moon, please do tell so I can save my Bride."

The moon thought about the witches' words. But nothing came to the moon, that was very illuminating.

"I am afraid I do not know. But I'll tell you prince of -"

"König. King of everything from under the water. Pardon the interruption."

The moon paused.

"Maybe you should give her your pride and title. Just marry her and then she should be safe?"

König yawned.

"Wouldn't that be too easy?" The king wondered, yawing again.

"U-hm."

The moon did not feel too bright about that.

"Maybe… Let's not risk it." They suggested. "For now, I can keep guard. Maybe a good night's sleep will help you figure it out yourself?"

The Vodyanoy sighed.

"Good night then. Thanks for keeping watch, Moon."

The little king of everything from under the water closed his eyes, cradling the little boat with his bride in to keep it from flooding out of reach and the Moon gazed away.

No dangers were on the face of the lake. The rivers and ponds laid calm and undisturbed, a great lull covering the early summer night.

The forest was less so. A fox made his way back to his den. A nightingale sang her song. A group of nearby villagers gathered in the darkness among their little houses in a nearby clearing.

The moon paused.

Armed with torches and pitchforks the villagers gathered as if ready to march.

Lovely! Exciting! The moon could not help but think with curiosity and concern. But where do they go?

A man was there, among the crowd. He was holding a torch, raising it high as he spoke with command.

“She is cursed!"

More villagers flooded out of houses, grabbing whatever tools they might find.

"And all that comes with her is cursed too!” A man called loudly over the supportive murmur from the crowd. “For too long we have waited and watched as monsters have started to creep around our village! As order has started to erode! We must bring an end to this before she kills us too! Think of the children! Think of the women!”

“Aye, Ivar! Tell them!” Someone shouted through the night.

“Think of the order of the world!” Ivar continued. “We have allowed a cursed girl in our midst. We were kind and patient. Oh, how benevolently we have tolerated her wickedness, have we not? Was she not allowed to live in the house of her family despite being unmarried and unbound against our custom?”

More supportive shouts sounded through the air.

“And her fiancé? Was she not seen naked with this stranger at the river? Improper and concerning! What will our wives and daughters think if they learn of the cursed girl roaming free? If they are not taken away by the monsters stalking through the night brought in by this witch!”

“Witch!” Another man stressed, shouting with hatred dripping from the maw. “She is a witch!”

“And a liar!”

“And a curse!”

“And unmarried!”

“I would never allow for a girl like that into my family!” A woman added loudly. “She is a stain. No boy from our village should be burdened with her.”

“There is just one way left!” Ivar shouted over the crowd. “We must kill her before she kills us!”

A grim silence befell the crowd.

The moon stared intently at the mob, waiting for judgement to fall. Like a witness to an execution waiting for the axe to hit the neck.

“Yes. We must kill the witch.” The woman finally stated solemnly. “We must kill the witch before she hexes our sons.”

“Before she tempts our daughters and wives.”

“Before she seduces our husbands.”

“Before she kills us.”

The man Ivar nodded and the crowd nodded with him.

“Yes, we must kill the girl before the girl kills us. In haste! We must act now.”

In gruesome fascination the moon watched, wondering about the poor girl who was supposed to be so powerful that she could threaten a whole village, summon monsters, and confuse the hearts of men and women alike.

Should I do something? The moon thought to themselves before realising a more pressing question. Can I do something?

While the moon was an excellent witness at night, they discovered it made for a lousy guardian to be up in the sky and unreachable for most.

I am sure this has nothing to do with the little king and his bride. The moon hoped and watched as the crowd shared pitchforks and torches among themselves, as mothers and wives whispered and joined with their husbands and sons to go kill some girl, as someone was hushed who dared to ask how a powerful witch could be killed by just some lowly peasants.

The Moon stared unblinkingly, wondering what was about to happen.

I am sure she will get away. The moon wished, feeling dread creeping up at the horizon.

Silently observing the moon saw how the mob made their way in muted order to not spook the girl-witch. Through gardens and under branches of leaves. In unjustified loveliness the night air caressed pleasantly over the crowd of the murderers to be.

If she were a witch, they would never stand a chance to harm her. The Moon thought to themselves, thinking back to the time when someone thought it wise to insult Baba Yaga.

Maybe… The moon thought regretfully. Maybe the little Vodyanoy could… If I get him to wake up…

In horror the moon realised that the mob had made its way to the house of the bride before relief overcame them.

“She is not home! No one is home!” One of the villagers cried out from the broken bedroom window after making his way through the house. “The upper floor is nearly destroyed. It’s strange! It’s all wet like after a flood.”

“That must be magic!” Someone else cried. “Get out while you can!”

“She must have fled. We need to find her.” Ivar declared. “Lads, take torches and check the forest.”

No one moved.

“The forest? Are you mad, Ivar? That’s where the monsters roam. If she went into the forest, she is dead or a monster herself.” The woman from before spoke. “I will not send my sons to death to find a corpse or become one.”

“But what if she returns?” Ivar replied.

“Let’s make sure there is nothing to return to for her.” The woman replied calmly. “You said it yourself, old teacher – all that comes with her is cursed too. We must torch the place, Ivar. We must burn the stain away.”

“No, think of the house!” Ivar tried.

“What? Want to live in this cursed place? Want to eat fruit from this gruesome grove? Or work the land and choke on what would grow from it? The witch is dangerous, and we must wipe out anything that is left of her before she can afflict us.” The woman declared. Her eyes were dark in the night and her face was cut wolfish by the fluttering shadows cast from the torches. “Go on, boys! Burn it. Watch your fingers. Be careful.”

Her command broke the tense silence and the moon watched as young men started to search for firewood, hay, anything that would help them burn the house.

I must wake König. It's his Bride's house. The moon realised as they watched how the first flames tingled up the wo

oden walls.

Hey! Hey! Wake up! The soft call barely made the Vodyanoy stir.

Ivar, the old teacher stood and watched as the house burned without any witch in it. He grumbled about waste as he stood and observed the fruit trees being felled and the grains being trampled.

“It is better that way, Ivar.” The old woman spoke as she stepped closer, friendly rubbing over his shoulder. “It is a temptation. I have seen how you eyed the girl. How you have taken stock of what you saw she had. But no more. None of it is anymore. We are not thieves. Our anger is righteous. This fire is our defence. And it burns to keep you from becoming what you teach our boys not to be.”

Ivar shrugged her hand off.

“We could have used the house.” He sighed as they both watched the burning house. Someone had started singing like it was a peaceful bonfire. A girl danced and the moon watched how someone carefully hid a silver spoon in their pocket.

Wake up! You need to wake up!

“The garden, too.” Ivar continued his musings. “And the fields. Winters are hard. Don’t be superstitious, Anna. No one would have choked on the grain or been killed by a girl-monster lurking in the forest. Why did you do that?”

Anna sighed.

“Oh, you know why, Ivar! That little girl - a witch? Cursed? Commanding monsters? Please, you don’t believe it yourself.” The woman shook her head. “But she was becoming a problem. We both know. And I could not watch her get what so many women did not get before her."

"I don't understand, Anna."

"Of course you do not." She spit out bitterly.

Ivar stretched his hands out as if warming his fingers at the fire, mulling over Anna's words.

The man Ivar stayed silent and they watched the fire as the roof started to collapse, as the smell of burned fabric and shattering cups filled the air.

“Do you think we will see her again?” Ivar broke the silence.

The woman shrugged.

“If she is smart, no.” Anna replied. “She is just a girl after all. If she comes back after seeing her house burned to a cinder, my boys will take care of her like they would a proper witch.”

Ivar nodded and stepped away.

“Glad we agree on that, Anna.” Ivar said, “I still disagree on all that waste, but I am glad I can count on you keeping the peace with me.”

Anna smiled before waving her sons to her and turning to go. It was late in the night.

The Moon watched unblinkingly, a silent witness to an uncommitted murder as the village people started to tire and retreat to their own unburned, safe little houses.

It had been an eventful night after all and the Moon was not sure if they were glad about it for once. Their eyes wandered back to the lake with the half-build castle.

For a moment the Moon considered trying to wake the little king and the bride again. But then what would it help except having the Vodyanoy storm off and getting himself killed in the glimmering ashes of the burning wood house now?

No, they would figure out soon enough, the moon thought bitterly.

XXXX

I think I lost my original tag list. sorry. message me if i fucked up.

@thesinsoflust @kdkj122920 @die-prophetin @lillianastuff @1234ilikecowsthanyoumore @fatedeniedhope @queensidillasworld @agspgrwasb @silelda @unlikepoltergeist @matcha-flavored-cake @blvkwondaland @diamondnightdreamer @brooklyn-1918 @thorns-x @icepancakes @sizzlingsaladpeach @peachymonsters @blackrockshooter780 @cl3rks @king-thunderstorm @hosshihusshi @id0nthaveidea @perilous-pasta @lothiriel9 @berryjuicyy @asmohunny @amatis-gray @blubumblebee @ofmenanduhhhwellmen @c00kied0ugh44 @quesowakanda @moonlitmoonpie @ktmjoslin @globalmilk03 @interactive-brain @dark-rosy-amaranthine @quietlyignoringyou @hey-assbutt35

#grimmwriting #könig #könig cod #könig mw2 #könig call of duty #call of duty #he who comes from under the water #hwcfutw #vodyanoy

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rambleonwaywardson · 3 months ago

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Clegan Astronaut AU - Part 13

Masterpost Read on AO3

AU Summary: the boys as modern day NASA astronauts. Taking place in 2025, Bucky is about to head to the moon as mission commander of Artemis III while Buck is CAPCOM at NASA. Established relationship (obnoxiously in love).

Author's Note: Every week I think "this chapter will be shorter," and every week it is longer. There was a time when I would have looked at 11k words and split it in two, but now is not that time. You get it all in one go. Plan your time accordingly.

---

November 21 Lunar South Pole, Starship

It might have been better if Bucky didn’t dream. More merciful. A blissful unawareness, nothing but a deep, uninterrupted sleep full of nothing and no one and nowhere. Maybe he wouldn’t feel so afraid, if he didn’t dream. Or maybe dreams are the only thing keeping him from drifting away forever.

He dreams about the moon a lot. Bounding across that wide open nothing, staring up at a never-ending universe full of stars. The stuff of his childhood fantasies. We’re all made of stardust, Gale likes to say.

He dreams about the rover crashing down on him, smashing him into the ground as they both skid down a sandy slope. He dreams about the sudden inability to breathe, the explosion of pain in his leg. He dreams about Benny’s voice in his ear before everything went dark. If he could wake up, it would be one of those dreams where your eyes shoot open at the end, the breath pressed in a rush out of your chest.

He dreams the most about Gale.

Gale’s smile, his laughter, his voice. He dreams about pulling into their driveway and seeing Gale through the window, dancing with the dog. He dreams about Gale throwing the bouquet at their wedding, grinning in exasperation as he covers his eyes. He dreams about Gale looking over at him as they fly their plane out over the water. He dreams about Gale handing him coffee in the morning when they’re both only half dressed and half dead to the world.

And he dreams about Gale, his face worried, looking down at him with tears in his eyes. He looks scared, and Bucky doesn’t even know why. He wants to know why. Needs to know why so he can make it go away. He wants to reach out, to say something, anything to make it go away, whatever it is. He wants to brush Gale’s messy hair back away from his face and hold his hand against his cheek and tell him that everything is alright. He wants to take away all of the pain.

But he can’t.

He can’t move a muscle.

—

“Rosie? Are you awake?”

Curt lays in his hammock in the middle of the Starship cabin, looking out the window at the star-filled sky beyond. He is the epitome of alone. The moon is not a different planet, it’s just a moon. One lonely moon orbiting the little miracle that is planet Earth. But the moon itself is 2,160 miles wide at its equator. It is 6,786 miles in circumference. A vast expanse of dust and rubble marked by impact basins billions of years old. 260 degrees Fahrenheit in full sun and -280 in the darkness. Nothing about this place is welcoming. An astronaut’s Everest. And yet it is peaceful in the strangest of ways.

Empty. Imposing. Beautiful.

Lifeless.

Except for him.

Scattered across the lunar surface are the remnants of the few voyages half a century ago that dared to step foot on this alien terrain. A flag here. A camera there. Another era. Another age. The same dream.

And even still, Curt is but an invisible, lonely speck at the southern pole, existing along a boundary of dark and light that parallels this strange liminal limbo of life vs. death. Just him and the stars and a world that wants to kill him with every heartbeat, nothing but a fancy tin can separating him from an end that would claim him in a single breath.

He supposes that being alone, the only conscious human being on an entire planet, would make most people feel lonely. It doesn’t, though. He doesn’t feel lonely up here. It’s not the being alone, really, that has lodged this tense, shuddering ball of anxiety in his chest. It’s the fact that he isn’t. The fact that there is someone else beside him fighting for breath, and he doesn’t have a say in whether or not that breath is drawn.

He doesn’t expect an answer when he reaches out into the radio silence. He doesn’t know what time it is, but Helen’s been on shift for a while now, so he’d guess around 12am GMT. He’s surprised when there’s a soft crackle on the other side of the radio transmission, and Rosie says, “Yeah, Curt. I’m awake. So’s Alex.”

Curt throws his legs over the side of the hammock and climbs out, turns the music back on – Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day – because he can’t stand the silence all around him. Maybe it’s the quiet that makes it hard to sleep. The quiet that’s too loud. Or maybe it’s the loudness inside his head that keeps him up. He wishes he could turn down the volume on his own thoughts, turn those off instead. He feels crazy. Like maybe this is all just a weird fever dream. But he’s experiencing all of it in frightening technicolor, and even though he doesn’t feel lonely, he is so, so alone.

I walk a lonely road, the only one that I have ever known.

He wanders over to Bucky, who is laying still and quiet on his cot. He opened his eyes for just a moment sometime after that seizure, when Curt had to adjust the IV in his arm and accidentally let it tug at the sensitive skin. But not again since.

“What are the odds of another seizure?” Curt asks now.

Rosie is quiet. Curt can imagine him rubbing the back of his neck as he thinks about what to say and how best to say it. How to let Curt down gently.

My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating.

Curt strokes a wayward curl away from Bucky’s forehead, hating the way Bucky feels clammy beneath his touch. Then he rifles through their med bay supplies while he waits, looking through the medications they have packed away.

“I don’t know, Curt,” Rosie finally says before going into what Curt calls his doctor voice. “Sometimes, traumatic brain injuries can cause seizures. It just… happens. It doesn’t mean he’ll have another. It doesn’t mean he won’t. Since it’s only been a day or two, it was an early seizure. They’re less likely to indicate long-term epilepsy. If he has another, the odds of him developing epilepsy increase. If he has one over a week from now, it’s almost guaranteed.”

He sighs. “So, I don’t know. All we can do is take this one step at a time.”

Curt looks over at Bucky again, at the bandage around his head, the splint on his leg, the shallow rise and fall of his chest. He thinks about how unfair it is that Bucky has to rely on him to keep him alive. Curt took the same medical training as all the other non-physician astronauts, but he’d hardly trust a single one of them, much less himself, in this type of emergency.

It’s not fair.

“I wish you were here Rosie,” he confides. He hates the way his voice sounds thick and strained. “I don’t… I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

“You’re doing great, Curt. Really.”

Curt frowns, takes a deep breath. He looks down at his hands and shuffles through the medications he has available once again, skimming over their names. The lead weight in his chest rests heavy on his lungs when his fears are confirmed: the one he’s looking for isn’t there.

Curt: “Rosie?”

Rosie: “I’m still here.”

Curt: “We had anti-seizure medication on ISS. I’m not seeing it here.”

Silence.

Rosie: “I advocated for it to be included on Artemis. It was a whole debate. You’ll have to ask Houston.”

Curt doesn’t like the sound of that at all. Another score for NASA’s backpack problem: medications. They have a far lower mass restriction and far less storage capacity on Orion and Starship than they do on the station, and therefore they could bring far fewer supplies. Rosie was involved in the task force that determined which medical supplies were necessary for a lunar exploration mission, but he was only one person among many. And many of the others had never even been to space. In the end, did anyone really think an astronaut was likely to have a seizure during a mission that lasts only a month or less?

Curt rubs a hand over his face, dreading the answer.

Curt: “Helen?”

Helen: “Working on it.”

They wait, Curt fidgeting impatiently, his frustration building up again.

Far From Here by Marianas Trench is playing in the background. It feels alright but that’s a lie that’s always near, sit around and blame the one that put you here.

Helen: “We do not have anti-seizure medication on board Orion or Starship.” She sighs, and she sounds like she hates to be telling them this. “It was decided that a seizure was not a likely complication on a short-term lunar sortie.”

Bingo.

Rosie: “Fuck.”

A disbelieving laugh pops out of Curt’s mouth. He can’t help it. Because what the fuck?

Helen: “I’m sorry, Curt.”

Curt: “So… if he has another seizure. If he keeps havin’ seizures. We can’t do anything?”

Rosie: “No.”

Curt: “That’s… that’s… Yikes.” Curt laughs again, shaking his head. “That’s a fuckin’ yikes.”

His mouth twists into a sour, resentful smile as he holds an arrangement of fucking useless medications in his hands. His laugh turns from shocked to bitter as he lets the meds tumble carelessly back into their storage box, and he runs a hand through his hair. He hasn’t slept in… he doesn’t know how long. The flight surgeon probably knows, but Curt doesn’t give a damn. He’s felt this feeling of dread weighing him down ever since that seizure.

And now he’s told that it’s something that could happen again. Could happen multiple times. And if it does, he can do nothing. All he can do is hold Bucky down, make sure he doesn’t choke, and hope for the fucking best.

Laughter just keeps bubbling up out of his chest in an angry, sordid, deranged sort of noise.

Helen: “Curt? Are you okay?”

Curt shakes his head, rubbing his eyes. He can’t stop laughing.

“Yikes,” he says again. “Yikes yikes yikes yikes yikes.” He claps his hands together as he says it, and he leans over, hands on his knees. Slowly, he eases himself to the floor, so he’s sitting with his head leaning back against the cot. He presses his fingers to his mouth and chuckles into his hand. “Fuckin’ yikes, guys.”

Helen: “Curt?”

He doesn’t care what Mission Control has to say. This whole situation is a mess. A mess that could’ve been avoided, even if it couldn’t have been planned for. He’s exhausted, he’s angry, and this is absurd.

Helen: “Curt, do you copy?”

Curt: “What the fuck? What the fuck NASA? What the fuck!”

—

Nassau Bay, TX

Gale hasn’t checked his email since before John’s accident. He knows it will be filled with “thoughts and prayers” and questions from the media even though they know they should be contacting Marge. He knows reading a single email with the words “We’re praying for you and John” or “What does this mean for the Artemis program” will be enough to make him scream and throw his laptop across the room. And anything else, any other email about literally anything else, he can’t think about right now. Because he still can’t accept the fact that the world continues to turn.

Anyone who really needs him has his number. And anyone else can cut him some damn slack.

He managed a few hours of sleep after his home emptied out last night and left him alone again. Except for Marge, who has, without asking, taken up residence in his guest room until further notice to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid or generally stop breathing since he can’t seem to remember to do that on his own.

He didn’t manage to fall asleep until around 11pm, and his eyes shot open again, jostling him out of a nightmare he can’t remember, at 2am. Vague visions of a mangled body, a casket, the expression of pain stretched uncomfortably across his husband’s face flashing in his mind. Bucky’s pained scream in his ears. Or was that him?

He’s sleeping in the living room again, on the couch that he’s nearly too tall to fit on. He tried to go back into the bedroom, but he couldn’t. The bed is too big, the blankets not warm enough, the memories too painful even as they drift away. He tried to sleep again, too, he really did. He tossed and turned and squeezed his eyes closed and tried to remember to breathe. In, out, in, out… in. in. in. in. out.

He buried his nose into the pillow case that mercifully still smells like John. He thought about their wedding, about strong arms wrapping around him, a soft smile, gentle lips, bright eyes crinkled at the corners with all the joy that John carries through their life.

But he couldn’t do it. He’s exhausted, and yet he feels wide awake. He wonders if he’ll ever sleep again. If he’ll carry on like this, plagued by a nightmare he can’t navigate his way out of, or if one day his body will simply collapse under the weight of this grief that he can’t control.

It’s all too much.

So he turns on the light, grabs his laptop off the coffee table, and he opens his email for the first time in over two days. He stares at his inbox numbly, and he presses his wedding ring to his lips as he fights the urge to slam the laptop closed again. He scrolls through uncountable messages, deleting most of them on the spot regardless of who they’re from or what they want. There’s one, though, from yesterday afternoon, that stops him cold.

When he sees the sender’s name, he does slam the laptop closed. His heart rate skyrockets, his whole body going stiff. He looks around the room at just how alone he is. It’s dark outside. Marge is asleep. Benny is on shift. The dogs, even, are asleep.

He takes a deep breath and squeezes his eyes shut before slowly opening the laptop again. With shaking fingers, he clicks on the email.

Gale,

I know these may be hard to look at right now, but I do hope, if you choose to let them, they can make you smile.

I’m thinking of you, and I pray that John makes it home.

XO.

His fingers are trembling so bad that he can barely click the link at the bottom of the email. But he swallows thickly and fights to breathe, blinking the tears out of his eyes when the page opens.

Their wedding photos.

It feels so long ago now, the way Gale struggles to remember parts of it. Like his mind simply won’t allow him to find comfort in the memories of the best day of his life.

How has it only been a month, and already the world threatens to take his husband away from him? He feels sick. Sick at the thought that this life can be so cruel. Wondering what he did to deserve this. He feels sick at the memory of the day he proposed. The very reason that drove him to spit out the words he’d been kicking around for years already.

We should get married, he said, all that time ago. We should get married, he said, terrified that something would happen. If they were bound by law rather than just by name, he would get a say in John’s fate, should John have no say himself. He would get a key to the room where NASA keeps their secrets from the world, even if he got himself booted from Mission Control. He would be guaranteed a place at the table of John’s life if his life came under threat somewhere up there, too far away.

We should get married, he said, praying to God that nothing would happen.

But here they are. Something’s happened.

You knew the risks, he thinks to himself, biting down too hard on his lower lip.

You always knew the damn risks. You knew the risks of space travel. And you knew the risks of John Egan. Don’t act for a second like you didn’t.

He wouldn’t trade it, though. He wouldn’t change a thing. If he could go back a thousand times, he would still attach himself at the hip to John fucking Egan. He would still fall for that smile and that laugh and those wild curls. He would still follow him to the ends of the Earth. He would marry him a million times over. No matter how it ends.

He blinks rapidly as he stares at the computer screen.

The cover photo is the one taken right after their kiss. Gale, in bright white, is leaning back in John’s arms, laughing in a way that makes his nose scrunch and his cheeks turn pink. John, in his black tux, is grinning from ear to ear as he holds Gale by the waist, eyes locked on his new husband. Pepper and Meatball are at their feet, Pepper standing with her front paws on Gale’s thigh, wanting to join in, as Curt tries to keep Meatball from knocking John over.

God, did he ever feel that happy? It seems too far away now.

He hovers his mouse over the button to enter the gallery, but the thought makes his head spin and he can’t bring himself to do it. He glances around again at the empty, lonely room. He’s never had so much trouble with being alone before. Now it makes nausea rise up in his stomach, makes a fearful feeling settle over him, He rubs a hand over his eyes and picks up the laptop, padding quietly down the hall.

He hesitates outside the door, one hand holding the laptop and the other raised to knock. He feels like a little kid who can’t sleep, going to his parents because he had a nightmare. He only made that mistake once or twice, quickly learning that all he could expect was his father yelling at him to get back in bed.

Maybe he shouldn’t.

None of them are getting much sleep right now; it’s not just him. If Marge is asleep, he shouldn’t wake her. She has no obligation to chase away the monsters under his bed.

He drops his fist and takes a step back, wincing when the corner of his laptop bumps quietly against the wall behind him. He’s a grown man. If he can’t sleep, that’s his problem. If he feels like his chest is too tight and he can’t breathe and his hands are shaking and his head is spinning just because he got back the wedding photos he paid for… well, that’s his problem, too.

But it’s Marge. Marge, who has always been there for him. Marge, who let him hide in her bedroom when they were just kids because he was too afraid to go home. Marge, who would hold him close and try to make him laugh and tell him everything would be alright even when they were both too young to know. Marge, who has gone out of her way for 20 plus years to make sure he knows he is never, ever alone.

He steps forward again and raises his hand to knock. Lays his hand flat against the door instead. Takes a deep breath. Closes his eyes.

No. No. She deserves to sleep. He shouldn’t worry her. He should-

“Gale?” Marge asks softly. “I know you’re out there, darling. Don’t act like you’re not.”

Warily, Gale opens the door, unsure if he feels guilty that he woke Marge or relieved that she woke up before he could talk himself out of it. He stands in the doorway, unsure of why exactly he came here, what he’s supposed to do now, what he expects her to do. But Marge sits up and turns on the bedside lamp. She takes one look at Gale’s face, and she frowns before forcing a weak smile. “Come here,” she says.

He walks further into the room to sit down on the bed. He hears paws click-clacking down the hall, and Pepper wanders in, followed by Meatball. Marge urges him to scoot back to lean against the headboard next to her, and the dogs hop up onto the foot of the bed. Meatball crawls up to rest his head on Gale’s leg. Pepper whines quietly as she watches him, forlorn. Meatball is familiar with them leaving. Buck, Bucky, Benny. They’ve all been on the station for months at a time. Pepper, though. Pepper’s just a baby, really. She’s only been part of their family for a matter of months. This is strange, for her, having one of her dads gone for so long. She knows something is wrong, but she doesn’t know why he isn’t coming home.

Gale’s heart breaks that little bit more every time she stares at him with those sad, confused eyes.

Marge presses herself against Gale’s side and leans her head on his shoulder. “Couldn’t sleep?”

Gale shakes his head. “It’s not…” he sighs. “It’s not fair.” And damn does he feel like a whiny child. But it’s not. It’s not fair.

He opens his laptop again and turns it back on, handing it over to Marge. She looks at the screen. “Your wedding photos.”

“Mmm.”

“Have you looked at them?”

Gale bites nervously at his thumbnail and shakes his head.

“Do you want to?” Marge asks. They’re both just staring at the screen, at the beautiful, beautiful photograph inviting them to look at the rest.

Gale’s breath stutters before he says “I don’t know.”

“Can I…?”

He hesitates. Then he nods.

Marge raises an eyebrow in question, but she clicks the button. When the page loads, the screen is filled with a gallery of vibrant, fairy-tale-esque photographs that make Marge gasp. Gale holds his breath.

“These are gorgeous,” Marge says. “Look at you!” The first set of photos are of Gale and his attendants getting ready in the bridal suite. Bright whites and navy blues. Sunlight streaming through the windows. Gale looking at himself in the mirror, running a hand through his hair or nervously adjusting the sleeves of his tux. The girls with their perfect flower bouquets. Gale and Marge sharing a moment in front of the mirror. His attendants raising a glass to him as he smiles, ready to marry the love of his life.

There are photos of the groomsmen going on a wild goose chase, sprinting down the hall after Pepper when she stole the rings. A picture of Marge stepping out of the bridal suite and looking horrified. A picture of Brady tackling Pepper in a heap on the floor, the others trailing breathlessly behind them.

Then there’s photos of the groom’s suite. “Oh, look at John,” Marge sighs, a soft smile on her face as they reach the first row of pictures of him. But when she looks at Gale, his brow is wrinkled as he bites at his lower lip.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “No.”

He can’t do it. He can’t sit here and look at these. Not now.

Marge puts her hand on his. “Okay,” she says. “It’s okay. We don’t have to.”

“I can’t.” Tears are welling up at the corners of his eyes, his whole body still and on guard for the next thing that tries to tear out his heart.

Marge closes the laptop and sets it on the bedside table, and then she pulls him into a tight side hug. “It’s alright, honey.”

“I can’t,” he says again, choking on the breath that won’t fill his lungs. Can’t what, he doesn’t know. But he can’t.

“Just breathe, Gale. You don’t have to. You don’t have to.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, hating the way his throat feels tight, the shakiness of his voice. He’s so tired of crying. He’s so tired of trying not to cry. He’s so tired. He’s shaking so bad. He can’t stop.

“Breathe, honey,” Marge says, stroking his hair. “In and out. Come on.”

Gale tries to match his breathing to hers as she guides him gently through it, but he keeps choking on air, rogue sobs breaking through and wracking his bones.

Marge shushes him and holds him close. She’s been holding him up for the last two days. Listening to him fight against his own emotions, on the constant verge of breaking down, toeing the line until he can no longer stop himself from tipping over. As if he thinks he isn’t allowed to feel these things. As if he thinks feeling them is a last resort that he’s being continually driven to, every loss of control a mark of some sort of failure that no one else can see.

“You shouldn’t hold it all in, Gale,” she tells him. He thinks about the fact that he fell apart in her arms that first night after the accident, in front of the TV with Maggie’s drawing in his hands. And he crumbled in her arms yesterday, after the seizure. She continually pulls him back from some sort of edge, keeping the pieces of him held together with scotch tape and a determined kind of love. Isn’t that enough?

As if she can read his mind, she says, “It doesn’t matter how much you think you’re allowed to hurt. You need to let yourself feel all of it, hon. You can’t hold it in forever.”

But it hurts so much. It hurts just as much to let it out as it does to hold it in. He presses the ring to his lips and bites at his knuckle until it hurts and now that he’s crying again he can’t fucking stop. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever stop. He can’t breathe. Doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to breathe again.

But John needs him to keep breathing. He has to keep breathing. He has no choice.

Marge holds him and rocks him and presses her lips to his hair. She doesn’t let go even when it feels like they’ve been wrapped up like this forever. But finally, he settles again.

“I’ll have to look at them eventually,” he mumbles, sniffing quietly as he feels tears drying on his face. “I… I wish I could…”

“It’s alright,” Marge says again. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Maybe tomorrow, things will be better.

John has been unconscious for 2 days. 48 hours. 2,880 minutes. 172,800 seconds. It feels like so much longer.

172,800 seconds that Gale hasn’t felt whole.

But.

Maybe tomorrow.

—

Benny looks at the list of songs he’s been provided. Among them, So Far Away by Avenged Sevenfold, What a Catch Donnie by Fall Out Boy, Gun Dogs by TOVA, Therapy by All Time Low, Before You Go by Lewis Capaldi, PIECES by Daughtry, Miserable at Best by Mayday Parade.

Now Buck by nothing, nowhere.

“I’m not okay, I’m not alright, I need a break, I need a light,” Curt is singing. “I gotta keep it a buck, keep it a buck.”

The singing has become increasingly angry over the last couple of hours. Helen warned him that Curt was getting agitated.

“Buck, Curt, really?” Benny asks.

“Didn’t really think of it like that,” Curt admits before he continues on. Feel like this every day, shit kinda suck.

“Curt, we’d really like you to get some sleep.” Benny runs a hand through his hair, fighting back his own yawn. Smokey has been relentless in pointing out that Curt has basically not slept in 48 hours, and the effects are becoming obvious. “We’re concerned-”

“Oh you’re concerned, are you?” Curt scoffs.

“Yes, Curt. You need to sleep.”

Curt changes the song to Fuck You by Lily Allen and lets it play for a while before turning off his coms without another word.

—

Curt kneels next to Bucky’s cot, resting his forehead on the thin mattress. He squeezes his eyes shut against the dizzy feeling in his head and tries to catch his breath.

He knows Benny is right. He needs to sleep. He’s driving himself crazy up here. He has half a mind to turn his coms back on and apologize to him, but he’s just so goddamn angry. Not at Benny. Just at NASA. Just at the world. Just at everyone who gave Bucky shit and hoped he’d die up here. Just at himself.

Not your fault, he tries to remind himself. Not your fault.

He pulls himself to his feet and walks back over to the console, picks up his tablet. Having a playlist running through his head and assaulting his ears at all times is what’s keeping Curt from thinking about his situation on a constant loop. It’s the only thing keeping him from crumbling to pieces. But he can’t think at all. He feels all sorts of mixed up, like he’s somewhere between tipsy and a panic attack but not quite veering towards either one.

Chasing Cars is playing. If I lay here, If I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world.

For once, he needs the quiet. He turns off the music. He turns on his coms.

“What if he dies in my sleep?” he asks. It makes sense and yet it doesn’t, and his head feels fuzzy, everything coming at him just a little too slow and a little too fast all at once.

“He won’t,” Benny says.

“You’ll wake me up if anything changes?”

“Yes.”

Curt knows, if nothing else, he can take Benny at his word. “Fine.”

He ensures he isn’t on VOX but keeps his coms on just in case. He looks over at Bucky, and for a second he’s unable to look away. He can see the rise and fall of his chest, knows his heart is still beating. He knows his friend is somewhere in there.

“Stay alive for me, okay?”

—

He wakes two hours later to a master alarm and just about falls out of his hammock, tumbling to the floor on his hands and knees. He feels around for the push to talk button on his coms. “Benny?”

The alarm turns off. Curt slowly rises to his feet, glancing around the dark cabin in terrified confusion.

Benny: “Sorry Curt. You weren’t waking up to our transmissions.”

Curt: “So you decided to give me a heart attack?”

Benny: “Worked, didn’t it?”

Curt: “Fuck you.”

Benny: “We think he’s awake.”

Curt freezes, trying to comprehend that statement.

Benny: “Can you check?”

Curt isn’t sure if he responds, maybe giving some sort of noncommittal noise of acknowledgement as he fumbles around to get the cabin lights turned on. He approaches Bucky’s cot slowly.

“Bucky?” he says, almost scared to look. But he stands over the cot and grips the edge of the mattress between white-knuckled fingers.

Bucky is looking at him. His breathing is irregular, eyes wide. His fingers twitch.

“Eyes open, Benny,” Curt says.

Rosie must have woken up, too, because his groggy voice comes over the coms in response. “Heart rate?”

“Elevated,” Benny replies. “He seems to be under stress.”

No fucking shit, Curt thinks. He realizes he’s still white-knuckling the cot.

Rosie: “Try talking to him, Curt.”

Usually, when he talks to Bucky, he keeps his coms off, feeling that NASA – the whole world – doesn’t deserve to listen in. But now he knows they need to hear. He switches his coms to VOX.

Curt: “Hey, Bucky. It’s, uh, it’s about 9am GMT, up here on the moon. November 21st. Surface Mission day six. 4am Houston time.”

He doesn’t know what the hell he’s supposed to say. He’s been talking to Bucky offhand over the past day or so, but suddenly he feels all out of conversation starters. He sighs and takes Bucky’s hand in his own, nodding at the fact that it feels warm.

Rosie: “Keep going, Curt.”

Curt rubs his thumb over Bucky’s knuckles. He looks at Bucky’s wide blue eyes. Wonders what they see. He forces himself to smile.

Curt: “You scared the shit out of us yesterday. God, John. Not cool. If you could, like, not do that again, that would be great. We all took it pretty hard… Buck took it pretty hard. Don’t worry too much about him, though. We’re all worried about him. That’s for damn sure. But he has a family down there. He has Marge, and Benny, and Pepper and Meatball. Harding, Dr. Huston, Croz. We’ve got eyes on your boy, don’t worry. They’re tryin’ their best to take care of him while you’re gone.”

Benny: “Heart rate is stabilizing. It’s working, Curt.”

Curt: “Our uh… our plants are doin’ good, too. I haven’t checked on them or nothin’ – they got me locked up in here lookin’ after your ass. But they’re growin’. We’re growin’ plants on the moon. If you wake up, I might even get to go harvest some of them before we go. But… well, it’s alright if I can’t.” His throat is starting to feel tight, and it’s getting harder to keep his voice steady. He takes a shaky breath.

Curt: “It’s alright if you need… All that matters... Fuck. You just keep pushing through, alright? Just… yeah. Whatever you need to do, Bucky. It’s alright. You do whatever you need to do. I-I’m here. I’m here.”

Suddenly Curt can’t keep the tears out of his eyes and he reaches his free hand up to wipe at them. “I’m here,” he whispers.

When he drops his hand again, though, he notices the way Bucky’s eyes flick down, tracking the movement. Curt raises his hand, and Bucky’s eyes follow slowly.

Curt: “He’s uh… he’s tracking my hand motion?”

Rosie: “That’s good, Curt. How’s his motor response?”

Curt cocks his head. “Sorry I have to do this,” he mutters to Bucky. Then he presses down hard on the nail bed of Bucky’s middle finger. Bucky twitches, pulling his hand backwards the littlest bit. A small grunting noise grates its way out of his chest. Curt repeats with Bucky’s forefinger and gets the same result.

Curt: “Responsive to pain. He flinched away and kinda grunted a bit.”

Rosie: “Try asking him to squeeze your hand.”

Curt takes Bucky’s hand in his again. “Can you squeeze my hand?”

Nothing.

Curt: “Go on. Think about all those times you’ve wanted to sock me in the face and put it into this, okay? Squeeze my hand.”

Nothing.

Curt: “Not responsive.”

Benny: “That’s alright. This is good. This is progress.”

Rosie: “How are his vitals?”

Benny: “Staying stable.”

Curt didn’t have a chance to turn any music on after Mission Control scared him awake. The silence filling the cabin feels so loud, and it weighs on Curt, but he lets it wash over him. He stands there watching Bucky until his eyes close again. But he wonders if he imagines the feeling of Bucky’s hand ever so lightly squeezing his own.

—

Within Gale’s first hour of Red Shift, Bucky starts seizing again. He feels like his own heart has stopped, his own lungs, his own muscles. His own nervous system is shot as he listens to Dr. Huston count the seconds. Ten. Twenty.

“Just hold him steady, Curt,” Gale says. Because it doesn’t matter how he feels. He has a job to do, and his job is to keep this crew alive. His job is to work them through this. His job is to be okay even when nothing is okay.

It doesn’t matter that he wants to jump right off the face of the Earth at the mere prospect of John not coming home. He can do that on his free time, if Marge will take her eyes off him for more than ten seconds (she won’t). Sometimes, though, in the last 24 hours, he’s wondered to himself if it would be worse for John not to come home, or for him to come home in a body that will never again do what he wants it to do. If it’s between death, and living a life that is so limited compared to the way Bucky Egan has always thrown himself at the world, what would he choose? If he was given the choice.

A second seizure. Dr. Huston warned Gale that if John had another seizure, it may not stop at two, or three, or four. It may not stop, ever. Not to mention the fact that the longer he takes to regain full consciousness, the more likely it is that there will be more damage than they can even anticipate. He warned Gale that, while they are seeing promising signs of him waking up, there are plenty of cases where a patient never recovers past this minimally conscious state. Open eyes and a pain response bring hope, but not enough to stand on.

He’s trying to prepare Gale.

No longer is he preparing him for the potential of Bucky not returning home. Instead, he’s preparing him for the potential that if he comes home, he may never be the same John Egan that he was.

Gale will love him anyway. He will never stop loving him. Bucky could push him away, spit in his face, shove him off the face of the Earth himself. It doesn’t matter. Gale is incapable of not loving him.

So if he comes home, he’ll take what he can get. He won’t complain. He won’t wish for better or for more. He will hold John together himself if he has to. He will pick up the pieces no matter how badly his own hands shake. He will grieve the loss of who John was before, but then he will wrap his arms around his husband and cry into his shoulder, and he will have to be dragged away if anyone ever tells him he has to let go.

It’s not himself that he’s worried about. He will love his husband in any shape or form.

Today, he’s grieving more for the pain that John will feel if he comes home and can no longer live the life he’s spent his whole life chasing. No one knows what that will look like.

Gale worries that, at minimum, it’ll mean no more flying. And for John, no more flying is like no more breathing. He needs to be up in a plane or on a spacecraft in the same way that he needs oxygen in his lungs, iron in his blood, Gale in his arms.

Gale is still grasping at the wispy tendrils of hope that dare to believe that John will wake up, but simple consciousness is a far cry from the whirlwind that is John.

If he surpasses minimal consciousness, if he wakes up and walks and talks on his own, it’s still not a guarantee. If his leg doesn’t heal right, he may never be cleared to fly. If the seizures don’t stop, he will not be cleared to fly. If he has lasting impairment to any part of his brain or his nervous system or his body, he will not be cleared to fly. And even if he walks away with none of that, if he develops any post-traumatic stress, he will not be cleared to fly.

And if he walks away with none of that, it will be nothing short of a miracle.

Gale isn’t so naive as to believe that he alone will ever be enough of a reason for John Egan. He knows his husband. He knows Bucky’s restless soul, never satisfied to sit by while the world turns around him. He knows Bucky was not born to keep his feet on the ground, because Gale wasn’t either.

So if Bucky did have a choice, what would he choose?

Thirty. Forty.

It doesn’t matter. None of them have a choice. Gale is going to bring his husband home if it fucking kills him. So when Curt tells him that Bucky is seizing, he works him through it. He keeps his voice as measured as he can even when he feels the way his heart is fighting not to tear away the stitches that keep trying to mend it back together. He presses his wedding ring to his lips and forces himself to breathe, and he works through it.

Fifty.

Sixty.

Gale: “You’re doing alright, Curt. You’re doing alright.”

Curt: “He won’t stop.”

Gale hears the panic rising in Curt’s voice. The very reason he can’t afford to panic himself. Curt’s on VOX so he doesn’t have to worry about turning his coms on and off while his hands are busy keeping Bucky in place, and in Mission Control they can faintly hear See You Again playing in the background. It’s been a long day without you my friend, and I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again. .

Gale: “It’s gonna be okay. It’s normal for a seizure to last a couple minutes.”

Curt: “Seizures are not fuckin’ normal, Buck.”

Gale: “You got me there.”

Curt: “How long has it been?”

Gale: “Seventy-two seconds.”

Curt: “Fuck.”

Gale: “Take a breath, Curt.” Ironic. Hypocritical.

Curt: “We don’t have anything stronger than water to drink up here, do we?”

Gale: “That’s a negative, Curt.”

Curt: “Double fuck.”

Gale: “I’ll buy you all the beers you want when you bring my husband home.”

Please. Bring him home. I don’t care if he’s different. I don’t care how hard our life could be. I don’t care. Just please.

Bring him home.

Curt: “Yes you fuckin’ will.” Gale barely has time to laugh and wonder if he should be laughing when Curt’s voice comes through again. “He stopped.”

Ninety.

Gale: “That’s ninety seconds.”

Curt: “Felt a hell of a lot longer.”

—

Curt wants nothing more than to collapse on the ground, his own body tense and sore from holding Bucky on the cot. But he doesn’t have that luxury. He sets to work settling Bucky into a more comfortable position. He cleans him up, checks his IV, checks his head wound, checks the splint on his leg. Check check check.

He’s shoving a spare pillow beneath Bucky’s foot in a pathetic attempt at elevation when he hears it. He stops, one hand on Bucky’s wrapped ankle and the other holding the pillow too tight. He wonders if he imagined it. But then he hears it again.

A weak, gravelly voice trying its damnedest to get his attention.

He looks up at Bucky’s face and finds those blue eyes staring back at him. He watches Bucky’s lips try to move, try to shove out whatever it is he needs to say. His eyes are wide, his brow scrunched in discomfort. Curt wonders how much pain he feels. How much fear. He wonders if any of this makes sense. If he remembers. If he sees Curt when he looks at him, or if Curt’s no more than a stranger.

Bucky’s fingers twitch where they’re curled limply against his lower belly. Then his wrist. His whole arm. Curt worries for a second that he might start seizing again. Bucky’s head jerks to the side the tiniest bit. He blinks, looks Curt right in the eye.

“Fuck.”

That Curt can make out, even if Bucky’s voice won’t quite work with his brain. He can’t stop the amused raise of his eyebrow, the way the corner of his mouth quirks up the littlest bit, the way his voice comes out as a relieved laugh. Because that’s John. That’s John fucking Egan.

“Yeah, bud,” Curt agrees. “Fuck.”

—

Gale is sitting on a chair in Marge’s office, waiting for her to finish kindly yelling at someone over the phone about waiting to release the planned magazine article about his and John’s wedding until the other groom is home safely.

“I don’t care what your deadline was. No. No. I’m talking, sir. I don’t care what your deadline was. How will it look to publish an article about their wedding when one of them is in critical condition? To publish that article while one of the grooms is grieving over his husband.” There’s a brief silence. “No. No sir, that is not a good look for you.”

Gale bites his lip against a laugh as he stares blankly down at his phone. Everything about him is exhausted. He feels like he can barely move or think. But at the same time, if he doesn’t occupy himself with something, he feels the anxiety rising up and up and up.

After the seizure, John had wanted to speak. He wasn’t quite there, but he tried. It made Gale’s heart do all sorts of weird things. John woke up two more times after that. Once, he stayed awake for almost 20 minutes and seemed alert, though agitated. Curt had to gently hold him down when he tried, albeit weakly, to lash out with his right arm, jostling the IV. His heart rate had spiked, his breathing irregular, and Curt noted that he looked “terrified.”

But once Curt started talking to him again, he started to calm down. He was able to blink on command and even weakly squeeze Curt’s hand when asked, but Curt couldn’t tell how aware he was.

He woke for the third time of the day just about an hour ago, managed to mutter the word “fuck” again, and passed out after just two minutes.

Gale rubs a hand over his eyes and bites his lip as he thinks about it. Thinks about his husband confused and in pain.

“Okay, sorry about that,” Marge says as she stands up from her desk chair, still typing something on her laptop. “I got them to hold it until we know John is home safe. Honestly, it’s better for them anyways. Then they can include something about the trials and tribulations of marriage, for better or for worse, whatever.”

She aggressively taps the send button on one last email and slams her laptop closed, looking up at Gale. He’s still staring down at his phone, chewing on his lip. “You’re gonna break skin again if you don’t stop that,” she warns him. By the time his shift was over, his lower lip was red and bloody from how much he’d worried it. But he just shrugs. He absently flexes his bad hand, letting the tight skin pull at the scabs over his knuckles, as if to drive home the point. I don’t care.

Marge walks around her desk and swats gently at his hand, a silent cut it out. Then she looks at his phone screen.

“You made it further.”

He’s still at the beginning of the photo set, hasn’t even made it to their first look, much less the ceremony or the reception. He’s been looking at this single photograph for what feels like hours, but really was only about half the time Marge was on that call. It’s a candid photo of John in the groom’s suite. He’s looking in the mirror, a nervous smile on his face as Rosie secures one of his cufflinks. That wayward curl is hanging over his forehead, his cheeks a little pink and his blue eyes wide as he looks at himself.

Gale wants to stroke his thumb over the photo, but knows that will only make the page scroll on, and he’s not ready to see another one yet.

“He was so nervous,” Marge chuckles. “Rosie told me he kept dropping the cufflinks because his hands were shaking so bad.”

“Really?” Gale asks. Bucky? Nervous? About marrying Gale.

He finally releases his lower lip and runs his tongue over it. He can taste blood.

Marge nods and puts a hand on his shoulder. “He loves you so much, Gale. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if, somehow, that alone brings him home.”

Gale squeezes his eyes shut and turns off his phone. He can see the photograph in his mind, and he wants to burn that image of John into his memory. When he opens his eyes, he looks up at Marge, and she offers her hand. He takes it and lets her lead him out to the car.

—

Jackie has closed the Hundred Proof for the night, kicking out any and all paying and non-paying customers who are not affiliated with the Artemis 3 mission, no matter how many scowls and curses it got her. It’s nearing 6pm, so it’s early to be closing a bar, but anyone who takes issue with it can kindly fuck off.

Tonight, the Hundred Proof is a gathering place for the weary NASA crew just trying to bring their men home. It’s an open bar. The TVs are pointedly tuned to anything but the news, which can’t get enough of John Egan and the fight for his life. Exhausted men and women gather around the pool table or the dart board or sit, huddled together, around tables, conversation levels varying from loud and boisterous to quiet and somber.

When Marge opens the door and Gale trails in behind her, he feels dizzy, on edge, but he follows Marge to a table, where Croz, Bubbles, and Sandra are already nursing beers. He nods to them, mutters something by way of greeting, and stands beside the table, his hand clutching the back of a chair. All around him are the people he works with every day. Much of Red Shift is already here. Some of Blue shift is filing in. People are talking and playing and drinking, snacking on bar food.

His eyes dart around the room as he tries to remind himself to breathe, locking on the smallest details. The sounds and the visuals assault his senses, overwhelming him. Too loud. Too bright.

A beer here, a cocktail there. A glass of wine.

The condensation on the outside of Croz’s beer can, drops of water rolling down the side onto the wood tabletop.

Clark taking aim with his pool cue, the sound of a clean break, heavy resin balls clacking against each other with a loud crack that rings in Gale’s ears.

The sound of laughter. The sound of silence. People sipping on their drinks.

One of the Blue Shift flight controllers that he doesn’t know all that well flirting with Jackie across the bar, leaning lazily on the bartop with a lazy grin, in the same way Bucky used to do to him in college, when he was still trying to convince Gale to go out with him.

Behind the bar, astronaut portraits arranged across the wall. Buck and Bucky. Bucky and Buck. Wide grins, American flags in the background, space helmets tucked under their arms. Side by side. Always side by side.

Gale feels bereft, missing a part of himself.

Music plays over the speakers. Elvis. A little less conversation and a little more action please…

Gale can remember Bucky obnoxiously singing that song when he wanted Gale’s attention, grabbing his hand and dropping to his knees like he was begging. Gale would roll his eyes and try to shake him off, but in the end, when Bucky got back to his feet, he’d pull Gale into his arms. And Gale would fall right into him. Again and again.

Gale is so tired. His mind is fuzzy and his heart is breaking and his phone weighs heavy in his pocket, taunting him with those wedding photos. It’s warm in here, and it’s noisy, and God he could use a fucking drink.

He hasn’t slept. He’s barely been eating. He’s living off coffee and granola bars and pure adrenaline and grief. He can’t think straight. There’s so many people everywhere and they’re laughing and they’re talking and he can’t imagine how that must feel.

Gale doesn’t drink. Everyone knows that. Some champagne on his wedding night. An occasional glass of wine. A sip from John’s cocktail. He comes to this bar and he drinks water or soda or some virgin thing Jackie concocts for him. The thought of drinking usually makes him feel sick.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Bucky gets drunk. Marge gets drunk. Benny gets drunk. And really he doesn’t give a damn. He’s never been worried a day in his life that Bucky would raise a hand against him. Bucky, like his father in so many ways. But not a thing like him in the ways that count.

But when it comes to Gale, himself? He can’t stand the idea. He can’t stand the idea that he could be just like his dad. He can’t stand the idea of losing control, of taking out his anger and misery on someone who doesn’t deserve it. But damn does he understand the need… he wishes he could get drunk, just so he didn’t have to feel like this anymore.

Gale Cleven has only been drunk a handful of times, and the truth is, he’s nothing like his father at all. Gale is a happy drunk, if anything. He’s affectionate. Bucky told him once that he was a cute drunk, and it made Gale blush even as he reprimanded himself for drinking in the first place.

One time in college, he woke up after a party only for his friends to present him with a notebook chock full of detailed sketches of a fighter jet. And not just any fighter jet, but one that didn’t exist. And not just any fighter jet that didn’t exist, but one that was physically and technically viable, complete with almost all necessary design specifications to build a sky-worthy aircraft.

Yep. Gale Cleven is the type of drunk that lays across his boyfriend’s lap with an engineering notebook and designs a whole-ass functional airplane that could very well be submitted to the Air Force for review.

Gale drinking is about the least dangerous thing in the whole world. But it doesn’t matter. The thought still makes him sick. And the screaming thoughts clanging around in his head are compounding on one another. The noise and the people and the need for a drink and the disgust at himself for wanting a drink and the sadness and the fear and the exhaustion and the lack of food and…

“Gale?”

There’s a hand on his arm.

“Gale?”

“Buck?”

“Take a breath, hon.”

Oh. Right.

Gale suddenly becomes aware that his chest is burning, his face hot. He wonders how long he’s been standing here, not breathing. Drawing oxygen into his lungs, he blinks and tries to come back into himself. Marge is staring at him with unfiltered concern. Croz, Bubbles, and Sandra are watching him. Benny is watching him. When had he gotten here?

He reaches a hand out to rest on Gale’s other shoulder, but Gale steps back, causing both Benny’s hand and Marge’s to drop limply away.

“You good?” Benny asks.

No. They all know he’s not good. But he could also be worse, at this point. He could be worse. Things could be worse.

So Gale nods.

“We don’t have to stay,” Marge tells him. “We can go home.”

Gale shakes his head, looking around at the flight controllers crowding the bar. Friends. The same people who were in his home last night. The same people he trusts, quite literally, with his life. He should be able to handle being here.

“Just…” he grits his teeth, flexes his bad hand, feeling the sting that’s fading but still undoubtedly there, grounding him. “Someone get me a soda so I don’t order something I’ll regret.”

Marge nods and heads off to the bar, and Gale finally takes a seat beside Croz. Only belatedly does he realize that Benny, who is about to trail after Marge, isn’t alone.

“You brought the dogs?” Gale asks. He means to laugh a little when he says it, but he just sounds tired.

“Yep,” Benny says.

“Are you allowed to do that?”

Benny looks down at the dogs and then over at the bar. “Jackie! Can I have Pepper and Meatball here?”

“Do they like beer?” Jackie asks.

Benny shrugs dramatically. “Why don’t you ask ‘em?”

“Don’t give my baby girl beer,” Gale warns him.

Jackie gives Benny a look, but rolls her eyes fondly. “Just don’t let them on the furniture.”

Benny smiles at Gale, eyebrow raised, and holds his hands out as if to say there we go.

Gale does laugh this time and shakes his head, reaching out to scratch Pepper’s ears, then Meatball’s when he inevitably shoves his way in between. “You two are lucky dogs, you know that?”

—

How Do I Live Without You is playing. How do I live without you? I want to know.

Curt is singing along dramatically, sliding his way around the cabin in his socks, using his glorified capri-sun of a water packet as a microphone. He slides over to Bucky’s cot and points at him, moving his shoulders in slow motion to the beat. How do I breathe without you, if you ever go?

Bucky’s eyes are closed, his breathing slow and shallow again. He hasn’t woken up again as long as Gale’s been off shift. Curt managed another hour of sleep here and there throughout the day and is feeling slightly less deranged, but only slightly. He’s still mad as hell, but got tired of being mad as hell. So he’s back to rocking out alone on the moon.

As the song comes to an end, he stops and stands at the end of Bucky’s cot, sipping at his water packet. “Gonna make me dance on my own, Bucky?”

Rosie: “Hey Curt, Alex has an idea.”

Curt jumps at the sound of Rosie’s voice. He’d forgotten he left his coms on VOX for the express reason of annoying Mission Control, so Rosie and Alex can also hear him if they bother to tune in.

Curt: “Oh yeah? What’s that?” He sips his water again, thinking about how it’s a lot more fun in zero gravity, when he can make the droplets float like bubbles.

Alex: “Play Can’t Help Falling In Love.”

Curt pauses mid-sip, the little straw pressed between his lips. He looks at Bucky’s face, soft in sleep, and thinks about how agitated he’s been every single time he’s woken up.

He thinks about Buck and Bucky, holding each other close alone on a dance floor, Gale beautiful in white. Bucky singing along, spinning Gale around before kissing him softly.

He wonders if that “uck” noise Bucky has been making was “fuck” after all.

—

Gale is leaning his hip against the side of the pool table, watching Sandra beat the shit out of Benny at eight ball, the dogs laying at his feet, when his phone rings. He sets his glass of coke down on the edge of the pool table. Marge has been checking in on him throughout the night and has continued to go to the bar for him any time he needs a refill so that he isn’t tempted to order anything stronger.

When he shoves his hand into his pants pocket to grab his phone, one of the bandaids across his knuckles rips off, causing him to grimace as a scab breaks free and specks of blood well up on the skin. He frowns when he sees the contact on his phone screen – Helen.

“Helen?” He says, pressing his phone to his ear with his right hand while he tries to re-stick the bandage across his knuckles with his left. He can’t keep the edge of panic from bleeding into his voice, and everyone around the pool table freezes. Sandra and Benny rest their cues on the floor, and Bubbles, Marge, and Croz stop laughing at whatever joke Croz had been telling. They’re all staring at him.

“Buck?” Helen doesn’t sound panicked. She doesn’t sound worried. She doesn’t sound sad. But the deep pit of anxiety doesn’t lift from Gale’s chest. “I need you to come back to Mission Control.”

“Why?” Gale worries his lip, ignoring Marge when she smacks him lightly on the shoulder in admonishment. With his left hand, he’s rubbing his thumb absently over the surface of the silver wedding band.

“Just come,” Helen insists. “Now.”

—

When he shows up at JSC, barging through the door of Mission Control, he’s not alone. Trailing behind him is Marge, Benny, and two huskies. Harding is there, standing next to the Flight Director, and he looks up in alarm when he notices the two dogs.

Gale is still in the same clothes he wore to work, slacks and a white button down. The top two buttons of his shirt are undone, the tie lost somewhere in Benny’s car after he couldn’t stop pulling at it in worry. His hair is a limp mess from running his hand through it all day, and he knows he has dark circles under his eyes from a lack of sleep and proper nutrition.

He knows he looks crazy.

He feels crazy. He’d been putting the pieces of himself back together ever so slowly tonight, trying his damn best to feel some semblance of normal, and Helen’s call had shattered all of that. His breathing is unreliable at best. His heart rate is erratic. His body is tense at the same time that he feels weak. And he can’t keep the threatening tremor out of his voice when he stares back at Harding and motions to the dogs.

“You told me to come immediately,” he says, even though Chick hadn’t said a word. He runs a hand through his hair again. “I was out. I was with Benny. I’m not allowed to go anywhere myself ‘cause they’re worried I’m gonna get in an accident or hurt myself or somethin’.”

Gale knows he looks just about distraught at this point. He’s losing energy. He’s so fucking tired. Tired of it all. “We had the damn dogs,” he concludes, motioning dramatically with his hand. This is, perhaps, the most animated anyone in this room has ever seen him. “So. Now I have the damn dogs.”

Harding blinks before raising his hands up in surrender. “Fine. A happy welcome to the damn dogs.” Then he points to Helen.

Gale turns on his heel and marches past a slew of startled flight controllers until he gets to the CAPCOM console.

Helen is smiling at him. Smiling.

Gale feels tears welling up and he doesn’t even know why yet. It’s all too much. Whatever it is, it’s too much. Today is too much. Marge, standing behind him, flicks him on the shoulder to remind him to breathe.

“He’s asking for you,” Helen says.

The whole world spins, the ringing in his ears fading in and out. He opens his mouth to say something, but he isn’t sure what.

Helen hands him a headset. “Curt put a comcap on him. He can’t really say anything yet, but he’s awake. He’s been saying your name. He got pretty agitated about it, really. We thought maybe you’d like to just talk to him, though. Let him know you’re here.”

Gale’s heart isn’t beating right. He takes the headset carefully, putting it over his ear. He looks at Benny and Marge behind him. At the dogs settling quietly on the floor at his feet. Pepper nudges at his left hand, as if she’s telling him to go on. As if she finally understands where John is and that Gale needs him.

“He needs his husband, Buck,” Helen says.

—

Bucky worries that he’s dreaming. He’s been thinking that a lot recently. Whatever recently is. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. Curt told him it’s surface mission day six. He doesn’t know if it’s still day six.

His leg is enough to make him want to close his eyes and go back to sleep. He’s in excruciating pain, and he can barely even make a sound to express that. He can’t tell anyone. He can’t formulate the words in his brain. He can’t make his lips move. He can’t make his throat work.

Pain. That’s all. Pain.

Curt’s here. Bucky isn’t alone. Curt said he’d be here.

He keeps talking about Gale.

Bucky wants Gale. He needs Gale.

“Hey darling.”

Bucky’s breath catches, making a weird choking, gurgling noise in his dry throat. He knows Curt is standing somewhere next to him, but he can’t quite turn his head enough to see. His head hurts.

“They tell me you’re awake up there. I’m not on shift now, it’s about 9pm here in Houston. So it’s 2am your time. But they thought maybe you’d like to hear my voice. Said you’ve been askin’ for me. So I’m here. With Marge and Benny. Even the dogs. You should’ve seen Harding’s face when I walked into Mission Control with a dog on either side.”

Pepper. Meatball. Pepper. Meatball.

“They miss you, you know. I miss you. I miss you so much, John.”

Don’t cry, angel. Don’t cry.

He can hear the tears in Gale’s voice, though. He thinks about Gale’s tendency to hold his breath when he’s upset. Breathe, baby. Breathe for me.

He hears Gale take a deep breath. Good.

“Y’know, I got our wedding photos back last night. I can’t bring myself to look at ‘em. Every time I reach the pictures of you in the groom’s suite, I just… I can’t. I don’t know if I should without you… But it’s alright. We’re, uh, we’re gonna get you home, okay, darlin’? You’re gonna be alright. It’ll be alright. You just gotta stick with us.”

Gale is drifting into his western drawl, the way he does when he lets his guard down. Bucky wants to reach out to him somehow. Reach across the moon and the stars, hold Gale close, tell him it’s all gonna be okay. Tell him not to be scared.

His lips move, but he can’t make the sounds.

Don’t be scared, angel. Just breathe. I’ll see you soon. I’ll see you soon.

“Please, John,” Gale whispers. “I love you. I love you to the moon and back. So just, make sure you come home.”

Bucky thinks he smiles. He feels like he is, but he doesn’t know if his mouth is doing the right thing. His eyes close. He can’t keep them open anymore.

And all of a sudden, he’s back to not knowing if he’s dreaming or not. The last thing he hears is Gale saying “I love you” over and over again, trying not to cry. But Bucky is drifting somewhere far away.

I love you, he thinks. I love you.

…

Part 14

#“fuck”#I love you to the moon and back #Gale “I’m fine” Cleven #spoiler: Gale is not fine #no one is fine #but they are doing their best #clegan astronaut au #clegan #mota #masters of the air #gale cleven #john egan #buck x bucky #bucky egan #buck cleven #clegan fic #mota fic #gale buck cleven #john bucky egan

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zsnes · 1 year ago

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next time on riverdale archie and friends go into lunar orbit to retrieve the lance of Longinus-- unknowingly playing into hiram lodge and mister sourberrys plan of starting the third impact... but not if jughead and jellybean can come up with a way to stop him

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jedineedlove · 3 months ago

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The Four Symbols

"According to the archaeological evidence, the concept of the Four Symbols may have existed as early as China’s Neolithic period (some 6,000 years ago). This is based on some clam shells and bones forming the images of the Azure Dragon and the White Tiger that were found in a tomb in Henan." "I Ching (易經), a Chinese divination text also known as the Book of Changes, traces the roots of the Four Symbols back to the beginnings of the world. It alleges that they were bred from the famous ring of yin-yang (陰陽), which instils order upon the chaotic spirit of Taiji (太極)."

Four Guardians, Four Gods, Four Auspicious Beast

Each corresponds to a quadrant in the sky, with each quadrant containing seven seishuku, or star constellations (also called the 28 lunar mansions or lodges; for charts, see this outside site). Each of the four groups of seven is associated with one of the four celestial creatures. There was a fifth direction -- the center, representing China itself -- which carried its own seishuku.

The four Symbols hold significant symbolic meaning in cosmology and culture. They represent harmony and balance od the universe. The represent the harmony and balance of the universe. Each symbol governing a specific direct , season and set of elements. The symbols are associated with the five elements theory, which is crucial in traditional medicine , Feng Shui, and astrology. The also represent the cyclical nature of time, as they are closely tied to the Chines zodiac and the twelve Earthy branches.

The Four symbols paly a significant role in Shines astrology particularly in the Chinese zodiac, each symbol is associated with the specific year within the 12-year zodiac cycle, along with the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water) The combination of the symbol and the element determines the characteristics and destiny of individuals born in the particular year. The four symbol also influence their astrological systems, such as the Eight Characters (BaZi) and the Four Pillars of Destiny.

I thought I compare the LMK versions of them to the real mythology.

Vermilion Bird: Symbol of the South

Vermilion Bird aka Phoenix or Zhuniao, is the symbol of the southern direction. It is associated with the season of summer and represents the element of fire. It is the symbol of rebirth, immortality, and prosperity. It is also often associated with love, beauty, and passion.

Color- Red

Time of Day - Midady

Appearance: said to have chicken’s head, swallow’s chin, snake’s neck, fish’s tail, and five-color feather. ;or A mythical bird with colorful plumage and radiant feathers.

Its seven mansions are the Well, Ghosts, Willow, Star, Extended Net, Wings and Chario

Black Tortoise: The Symbol of the North

The Black Tortoise aka Black Warrior, Xuanwu is the symbol of the northern direction. Associated with the season of winter and element of water. Believed to bring protection and longevity. It is also associated with knowledge and wisdom and the control of water.

Color- Black

Time of Day- Midnight

Appearance: A giant tortoise with a snake wrapped around its back

Its seven mansions are the Dipper, Ox, Girl, Emptiness, Rooftop, Encampment and Wall.

Azure Dragon: Symbol of the East

Azure Dragon aka Blue Dragon or Qinglong, representing the easter direction. The ruler of the sky and is associated with the season of spring, the element of wood and is believed to being harmony and good fortune to those who embrace its energy.

Color: Blue- green

Time of Day - Dawn

Looks – serpent like body, deer-like antlers, fish-like scales and eagle-like claws.

The Azure Dragon as it is said that when the seven mansions in that area (Horn, Neck, Root, Room, Heart, Tail, and Winnowing Basket) are joined up, they form the shape of a dragon

White Tiger: The Symbol of the West

White tiger aka Baihu, is the guardian of the western direction. Associated with the season of autumn and the element of metal. Believed to represent strength, courage, and protection. Its is also associated with the celestial guardian of the west a powerful deity known as Xuanwu

Color- White

Time of Day- Dusk

Appearance: a creature with a tiger's body and lions' mane.

the White Tiger, and its seven mansions are the Legs, Bond, Stomach, Hairy Head, Net, Turtle Beak and Three Stars.

it was held to be the God of War. In this capacity, the White Tiger was seen as a protector and defender, not just from mortal enemies, but also from evil spirits.

A symbol of force and army, and so many things entitled White Tiger in ancient China are related to military affairs. For instance, the white tiger banner in the ancient army and the white tiger image on the Commander’s Tally. In the Han Dynasty, the White Tiger was usually carved on the stone relief of a tomb door, or on the lintel of a tomb passage with the Azure Dragon, to ward off evil spirits.

This puts a lot together and I'm impressed with the details that the show animators and designers put into their character designs.

Also..

Yellow Dragon: Symbol of Central

Yellow Dragon aka Qilin the symbol if the Central direction, and is associated with the season Midsummer and the element earth.

Color: Yellow

Comparing them they share the colors with the stones and the yellow dragon (central) seems to correspond with the jade emperor's yellow stone. Once again love the show details.

Nearly forgot about this and left it in the drafts wanted to post this then completely forget them.

#sun wukong #lmk #jttw #chinese mythology #mythology research

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monstrous-femme · 22 days ago

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Tagged by @annieofhearts

I'm tagging @ivanhoe-dont-do-it @runawaymarbles @galwithalibrarycard @yxlenas @landofvinesandmonoliths @flowersandstarlight and @queerbird

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teratocrat · 1 year ago

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A single yellow dwarf, unremarkable, of about 1.0218 solar masses. And in its corona, dancing aurora-dragons, ribbons and feathers of nine-colored light, singing and reciting poetry to each other and hitching freezing rides on the asteroids and comets that swing close enough to the star to leap out onto.

One small, dense planet, frosted over with incandescent stormclouds that snow lead flakes onto the slopes of volcanoes whose calderas are choked with galena coral reefs, the bones of colonies of radiation-tolerant extremophilic microorganisms, and where sulfur-swamps coat the lazy tideless beaches of the planet's only ocean, stirred and tilled by people like lanky bundles of black ironstraw, who heap their storehouses high with xanthous dried fusegrass.

One larger, much cooler planet, the calcite gleam of its moon hidden from the surface much of the time by cloudcover. warm, shallow, mildly acidic seas of lavender mucous, tentative marshes of weeping fuschia ferns, translucent lapine blobs with probing antennae that could be eyes or ears or questing tongues, and in the middle of the deepest ocean, a massive gelatinous thing, a superorganism like a rose with its stem plunging down into the volcanic baths of an oceanic rift, a mind from whom all other minds on this planet came and to which they occasionally return, eager to share their stories.

One rocky planet, bitterly cold and with the merest wisps of atmosphere clinging to it. Lifeless, all its water burned off it by baleful solar glare, the vast horizon-spanning saltpan seafloors bone-bare under the violet sky, and its moon hanging above like a clenched fist of black basalt.

An asteroid belt, scattered diamond motes of ice and stone and clay and metals, with three dwarf planets in its embrace, and the largest of them bearing a banner of silver and midnight, a unicorn guarding some alien tree.

A planet one might almost mistake for Earth, for all its snake-necked tortoise-camels and gold-feathered tigermen, for all its gleaming pentagonal ziggurats of diamond and steel, its three space elevators anchored in the emerald forests that girdle the equator, the capital of an interplanetary empire founded at the mouth of an immense river lazily piling hundreds of tons of silt a year into delta marshes, its vast ports berthing wide, flat-bottomed barges hauling iron and salt and sand and cinnabar, barrels of fish and wine and oil and perfumes, tigerman janissaries and scholars and poets and wizards, all tallied and accounted for in the lightning thoughts of supercomputers domesticated by bureaucracy. spaceplanes like silver songbirds or leaping fish ferrying the nobility (who disdain regular shuttle flights from the tips of the space elevators as base transportation for commoners) from the surface of the planet to its moon above, or to any number of gleaming stations in high orbit.

A gas giant, pale as pearl streaked with delicate pink and green pastels, skirted by dozens of captured child-moons, many of them bearing the same unicorn banner, some of them mined for this or that rare earth element, cities buried under the shielding crust of a scant handful, and two of them habitiformed enough to support imperial hunting grounds - managed grasslands or forests full of imported game - and hunting lodges of squat domes and towering spires, mirrored labyrinthine greenhouse-gardens and treasure-vaults of platinum jewelry set with nebula-gems snatched from their condensation-nests in the gas giant's depths.

Another gas giant, the blues and purples of a ripe plum blushing from clouds of midnight-black marbled with gold, icy rings slicing through swirling lunar orbits, merchants and mercenaries and privateers gliding from port to port in their sapphire-hulled ships, out where the empire scrabbles to find purchase. hollowed-out asteroids house cylindrical farms or monasteries of fatalistic leonine faiths or the huddled bodies of wound-down murine clockwork eunuchs, commissioned to advise and amuse some tiger-empress whose phoenix standard had long since faded into obscurity by the time the founder of the unicorn-banner dynasty first rallied soldiers to his cause.

An Earth-sized ball of grey-green ice, glassy smooth surfaces broken up by cryovolcanoes pumping volatiles up from a sooty core to rain down again in miserable pattering drizzles of methane through ammonia blizzards.

An ice giant, the immense azure sphere its inward neighbor might have been were it not for the vagaries of fate as involved in early star system formation, accompanied by seventeen bitterly cold moons whose tides have woven something enormous and ponderous of thought out of the inner sea of supercritical fluids.

a dozen or more dwarf planets of packed stone and ice, swinging through the outer black clouds on vastly elliptical orbits, witnesses to tumbling nickel-iron visitors and alien probes relaying streams of blurry photography and other observations back to some unknown homeworld as they fall endlessly through interstellar space.

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mo-nee-ta · 3 months ago

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Eva Heinemann and Lolita's Rita

Before Dolores, there was Valeria. And after Dolores, there was Rita (Rita? Lolita! Again, HH is a sly beast.)

And who’s exactly Rita? She has only one chapter (like Valeria), but this is enough to get a picture of her.

She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of Humbert’s, she’s an obvious placeholder for Lolita.

She has a drinking problem:

I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk.

There is no earthly reason why I should dally with her in

the margin of this sinister memoir, but let me say (hi, Rita — wherever you are, drunk

or hangoverish, Rita, hi!) that she was the most soothing, the most comprehending companion that I ever had,

She’s divorced three times and has a rather turbulent love life:

When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband—and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant—the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate.

She's circling back again and again to the place she’s actively trying to avoid, Grainball City (where her brother is the mayor):

She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainballward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the floodlit drive that encircled it—"going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a Goddamn mulberry moth”

Unstable mood and behaviors:

Then one day she proposed playing Russian roulette with my sacred automatic; I said you couldn’t, it was not a revolver, and we struggled for it, until at last it went off,touching off a very thin and very comical spurt of hot water from the hole it made in the wall of the cabin room; I remember her shrieks of laughter.

I lodged there (...) while Rita whom I preferred not to display vegetated—somewhat indecorously, I am afraid—in a roadside inn where I visited her twice a week.

In the silent painted part where I walked her and aired her a little, she sobbed and said I would soon, soon leave her as everybody had (...) and started to cry again (...) we drove on to New York, and soon she was reasonably happy again high up in the haze on the little terrace of our flat.

She’s trying to help Humbert find Lo and Quilty which gets her into trouble:

I told her I was trying to trace a girl and plug that girl’s bully. Rita solemnly approved of the plan — and in the course of some investigation she undertook on her own (without really knowing a thing), around San Humbertino, got entangled with a pretty awful crook herself; I had the devil of a time retrieving her—used and bruised but still cocky.

She’s put in jail (for stealing another woman’s clothes):

Then she vanished—more humanly than her predecessor had done: a month later I found her in the local jail.

She was très digne, had had her appendix removed, and managed to convince me that the beautiful bluish furs she had been accused of stealing from a Mrs. Roland MacCrum had really been a spontaneous, if somewhat alcoholic, gift from Roland himself.

She has no permanent place of residence, wandering from place to place.

Now let’s have a look at Eva Heinemann.

Obvious drinking problems:

Divorced three times, turbulent love life, also abandoned by a cavalier servant (or rather: she let him abandon her):

She's circling back again and again to the place she’s actively trying to avoid, Düsseldorf (where her father was a hospital director):

Unstable mood and behaviors:

She’s trying to find Johan on her own which gets her into trouble (and is still cocky afterwards, like Rita):

She’s put in jail (for public drunkenness):

She has no permanent place of residence, wandering from place to place.

And while she isn’t a placeholder for anyone, she tries to turn the gardener and Martin into Tenma substitutes (which basically means Tenma’s her own personal Lolita, let me howl with laughter for a minute here, because this fits perfectly the obsession with an idea of someone that is so crucial in both Lolita and Monster. Also! In chapter 25 of part I of the novel, HH buys clothes that would turn the tomboy Lo into his fantasy girl Lolita).

And let me add here one thing: Rita is very often overlooked in discussions about the book, which makes all these similarities even more fascinating. Hi, Rita, hi! We can see you.

#monita #naoki urasawa's monster #monster manga #research #eva heinemann

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graphicpolicy · 2 years ago

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It's time to check in for your moonlit stay the the Lunar Lodge

It's time to check in for your moonlit stay the the Lunar Lodge #comics #comicbooks

Dark Horse Comics presents Lunar Lodge, a new series full of horror, drama, comedy, love, action, romance, and mystery from writer Tyler Marceca in his comics debut and artist Mirko Colak. Brian Valenza joins as the colorist with Frank Cvetkovic lettering. Marriage ain’t easy, especially when your spouse is hiding a monstrous secret. Just ask Rob Moreland, who knows things aren’t great lately…

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#brian valenza #comic books #Comics #dark horse #Dark Horse Comics #frank cvetkovic #lunar lodge #mirko colak #tyler marceca

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frostmarris · 9 months ago

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upheaved and beholden

Shisui/Sakura | Unseelie & Fae Hunter AU

summary: Boggarts and banshees, tricksters and omens - Sakura knows that not all Unseelie are feral, evil beasts. But the moment a fae decides to pass over into this realm and injures, abducts, or kills, she will take it upon herself to make sure they can never harm another human.

Leave it to one annoying (handsome) Unseelie to make a real mess of things and spirit her away.

additional tags: Medieval Fantasy AU, Fae Hunter!Sakura (as in a Hunter of Fae), Unseelie!Shisui, fae stuff but more like the "steals children and eats the people that get lost in the woods" fae rather than tiny pixies and fairy dust fae, BFFS Sakura and Ino, BAMF Sakura, enemy to annoyance to lover

notes: my gift for @flinchingly for the @shisakurodeo server's Lunar New Year exchange!!

completed 12k oneshot but I'm sooo into this fic that I may write a follow up in the future ahdkfhsk

Enjoy!

Another arrow whizzes by her ear, disappearing somewhere far behind Sakura. She keeps her eyes pinned to the rider in front of her, unwavering in her chase and clicking her tongue to urge her horse forward as she and her target round a corner. The trees, numerous and thick on either side of the old trading road, block her view for just a few moments before she can see the trail ahead of her once more, the sun sitting low in the horizon ahead.

The horse she's been following for the past fifteen minutes, however, is now riderless. With the saddle empty and Sakura's instincts screaming, she drops backward in her own seat, narrowly avoiding a spinning hatchet as it appears from the treeline to her right. Slicing through the air horizontally, the small axe - the late afternoon light catching and shining off the sharp blade and casting a momentary shadow over Sakura's face - is quickly lodged in a tree trunk on the other side of the road with a solid ker-thunk.

Had she remained upright for a second longer, the hatchet would have instead struck her neck.

And, judging by how deeply it was now stuck in the tree, likely have taken her head clean off.

Lip curling, Sakura's attention focuses on the darkened trees where the attack had come from and she pulls hard on the reins. Her horse slows and she's leaping from her own saddle before he fully stops. She continues her chase on foot through the trees, catching sight of a flash of blue ahead of her as her target tries to escape. It's cloak stands out in the greens and browns of the forest, but she's losing daylight and the darkness of the forest certainly won't aide much in her hunt.

If she loses the fae-creature now, she'll likely never find it again.

#shisaku rodeo #shisaku lunar new year #shisaku #shisui/sakura #bamf sakura #thirrinfic #thirrinwrites

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wordsandrobots · 3 months ago

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Wishing on Space Hardware: Trivia and the cutting room floor

Having finished the single longest writing project I've ever done, I find myself with a number of bits and pieces left over.

To be fair, I also invite you to contribute to the pile by letting me know if there are any extra scenes you'd like to see based on my truly excessive amount of Iron-Blooded Orphans fanfic. The ask box is open for that and anything else you'd like to prompt me to write about.

However, there remains a bunch of stuff that never made it into the final story and a lot of little details I feel are worth commenting on. So as I luxuriate in not having to spend the week editing chapters any more, I thought I'd share a couple of quick lists regarding the process and what got cut out of it. For posterity, at least.

Spoilers for the fics, obviously, and since they're post-canon, spoilers for IBO as well (go watch it if you have not, it is very, very good, hence the 656,000 words I wrote as a direct consequence [not counting the essays. Jeepers, I'll have to tot it all up some day and get the grand total).

Ahem. Anyway. Trivia!

First up, I must publicly credit penitence_road (on Tumblr as @stillness-in-green)’s excellent IBO fics for inspiring one of the major threads in WoSH (I've mentioned this in author notes but the debt cannot be overstated). The phrase 'Almiria's Adolescent Apocalypse' lodged in my brain and became a mission statement. I did try to steer in a completely different direction regarding the specifics (hence why Todo is very much not a part of the core gang), but the main thrust was all about taking that description and seeing how I could flesh it out. (Go read these fics, my goodness.)

Second, there are, of course, mythology gags referencing the wider Gundam franchise sprinkled liberally throughout. Some I've already called out in author notes, but I believe managed to reference Gundam 79, Zeta Gundam, Gundam ZZ, Char's Counterattack, Gundam Wing, Turn A Gundam, Gundam SEED, Gundam 00, and Reconguista in G in more or less explicit ways. See if you can spot them all!

I named Skoll and Hati with specific reference to their roles in the Poetic Eda. That is, I thought of them as 'the moon-hunter Gundam' and 'the sun-killed Schwalbe', respectively, in reference to their rolls harassing the Arianrhod Fleet (formally the Outer Lunar Orbit Joint Fleet) and destroying the Ahab reactor factory. But also they reflect their pilots' temperaments, with Skoll 'the mocker' being flown by Embi and Hati 'the hater' by Lin.

Spaceships Baldr and the Váli were named in a similar fashion, for their connections to Ragnarök (Váli is Vidar's brother, another of the gods who survive the final battle), and I chose to describe the finale as 'Ragnarök' in the first place because in the sagas, it represents a renewal of the world, rather than a complete end. Quite apart from the Norse influence on Gjallarhorn's whole deal, the cyclical nature dovetailed nicely with what I was trying to do with the story.

I had a very near miss with Skoll in that I wrote it as being based on ASW-G-15 Eligos, named after a demon that took the form of a handsome knight who can see the future. Some months later, the IBO-G app would reveal ASW-G-16 Zepar, the very next Gundam in the sequence, whose namesake's appearance as a red-garbed soldier seems to have been muddled with Eligos in some of the sources I checked. I am really quite relieved I didn't have to rework anything there, but it was close!

Visually, the deconstructed Char-clone that is Almiria's gang channel aspects of other iterations of the trope, with Asher obviously replicating Montag, Embi settling vaguely in the region of Quattro (that is, a more civilian-mode masked man), and Almira assaying McGillis in a way that probably lands not a millions miles from Rau. But I was primarily thinking of Relena's Sanc Kingdom outfit for her, so the 'general's' coat is a lot fancier.

The media-savvy ally to Victor Handa in Revolution for Beginners... is the same cameraman who filmed Kudelia's pivotal broadcast at the conclusion of Season 1's Dort arc. Those events seemed like they would have consequences for the journalists involved and in Hajime's case, that involved being swayed fully over to the workers' movement.

I invented Alessio as a character to counter-balance Iverson and ensure I had some non-villainous non-binary rep. That I picked the stoutest background character model I could find was not unrelated to this, though it's also an *interesting* model, especially coupled to the ones around him/them in the big group shot.

Doc Chaifin, meanwhile, just sort of happened. Sometimes characters do that.

I wrote a significant chunk of the sex scene (well, post-sex scene) in To Catch a Falling Star while sitting in a car park, waiting for my partner to come back from an appointment. This was mainly because the fic was absolutely consuming my brain and I'd discovered the joys of using a mobile phone to write notes (I put off getting a smart phone for a long, long time).

With respect to the Calamity War recording segments of Eugene Sevenstark and the Hesperus Treasure, my working head-canon is that Agnika Kaieru had a science/engineering background. Or, well, I think he moved in a social circle full of scientists and engineers before getting started on the war effort. I also have this notion that his parents at least were part of the corporate class, distinct from the aristocratic class from which people like the Bauduins and Fareeds emerged. But I never sat down to work it all out in full, as that wasn't required for the story.

Regarding Hesperus, I kind of fudged a lot to get the story to work. I'd sort of assumed Radonitsa Colony was a post-War construct rather than something pre-existing, which isn't really supported by the Urdr Hunt game. So the idea of it being a composite of different space platforms bolted around a space elevator terminal is perhaps a bit of a stretch. I still like it though, the basic concept of doing archaeology on space stations.

There's a lot of stuff I did in the moment, to get an individual fic to work, that I was later able to basically repurpose as long-term plot-points. I didn't actually intend for the 'There are three things you need to know to understand what comes next' bit to set up the salvager ship in the finale, or the pluma in Let Sleeping Angels Lie to set-up for what the McGillis faction would do with the leftovers of Season 2's events. But having those things set up gave me some wonderful 'ah ha' moments as I marshalled the overall plot. If nothing else, I got quite a rush out of realising both Gaelio's weaponised wheelchair and the beach house's lethal defences were there to use.

...try not to think too hard about how excited I got figuring out a convoluted assassination method. I'm certainly going to try not to.

The plot really kicked into gear for me with The Ares Affair. Up to then, I'd been coasting on character interactions and fix-its. But then all the consequences suddenly coalesced in my brain and I went, 'oh, this is what we're doing, is it?'

In addition to the playlists I've already put up, grown-up!Almiria's theme is Bach's Polonaise in G Minor on the harpsichord because it is *precisely* what you'd get if you pitched Rustal Elion's theme higher and more playful.

I still have no proper explanation for why A New England stuck in my head so hard when I was writing th first few fics. But I'm glad it did because it gave me a killer series title, if I do say so myself.

I tried extremely hard to make sure everyone in the anime cast got some kind of moment in the spotlight or at least a mention. Think I did a pretty good job on that front, overall.

And to wrap up on that point, yes, the narrator who occasionally addresses you directly is a character from the show. I'd be terribly interested to hear if any of you've worked out who. (It might not be strictly guessable, since there isn't anything gesturing at it per se; I just imagined it being their voice and it kind of fits, thematically.)

Now let's open the door to the cutting room!

The big one is that when I originally planned out the plot of Revolution for Beginners and Polyamory for Dumbasses, a key part of the uprising in the Dort Colonies was going to be the hackers allied with Ride knocking out the nearby Ariadne beacons in order to blind Earth to what was happening. Gjallarhorn would then have analysed the computer virus they used, and that would have been the basis for them messing about with the Network in the final stretch of fics. In the end, there simply wasn't enough room to fit any more threads into that fic and the more I thought it over, the more I decided this would be weighting the balance of power wrong. It'd be too much of a flat-out win for the colonists. Joshua's appearance on Ariadne One -- which had been intended to set things up for the beacon-hacking -- remained, just recontextualised as a clue to who was responsible for the attack in Frozen Sunlight, and a small bit of character development for this OC. I repurposed the remainder of this plot as a way to tie Ride's arc into Almiria's (she taps him for the hacking resources as a result of them messing with Ariadne One's sensors instead) and made 'Höðr' an entirely Gjallarhorn project.

The delay to the release of the Urdr Hunt mobile game drastically changed the opening to arc 4 and had knock-on effects for how the grand finale worked. Because I thought I'd have more to work with in terms of plot and characters of the game when it came time to do the writing, I'd assumed I'd be able to work in appearances from Urdr Hunt's cast. I'd planned a much bigger pay off to the idea of Radonitsa Colony's tourist board trying to get the Martain Chairperson to visit, which was that Atra and Akatsuki would have gone alone with Eugene and Sri. The whole 'let's pretend we're here to assess the facilities on behalf of the Martian government' would have been more than a passing joke and instead been a full-on cover story, with Wistario and the his friends scrambling to put on a good show. This would, I admit, mainly have existed to set up a rather dumb gag whereby Sri and Akatsuki would have been the only ones not distracted by Nanao Narolina's everything in a room full of straight male or bisexual adults. But with the delayed release of the game, I needed a drastic rethink, hence bringing in Zaza and having the whole adventure take place with the Urdr Hunt characters off-screen (I even made it vague as to whether they were the ones running the colony, just in case I needed to swing it as someone else taking over following a tragic or failed ending). Ultimately I am very happy this happened, since I didn't especially gel with the protagonists of the game and it gave me greater opportunity to play with my beloved manga cast. But it did mean my idea of having both spin-off heroes come to the rescue at a dramatic juncture never materialised.

This proved to be single biggest alteration to my plotting for the final arc, too. Initially, the escape from Earth was going to be a lot more dramatic. For one thing, I was planning for the whole 'Yamagi gets left behind' element to happen in orbit, with Shino and Eugene actually present. Some sort of ship to ship transfer going wrong, people going adrift in space, that kind of thing. For another, I had the idea of bringing both Gundams Astaroth and Hajiroboshi into play, for a proper 'fight our way through the blockade' moment. Wistario was going to swoop to the rescue as the shuttle broke atmosphere, there'd be pursuit, and I'd wreck as many cop cars Grazes as I could get away with in some protracted chase sequence before we got to the big NOOOO moment. Yeah. But obviously without knowing Wistario's real personality or situation post-game, I didn't have enough material to work with and plans changed. For the better, I think, given the characters moments it allowed me to have and given that Wiz's character is one of my least favourite parts of IBO's extended media. But yeah. I was aiming for a proper team-up, the kind where you could have different people's theme music kicking in as they swooped into view, and it was not to be.

History of a Catastrophe. Oh boy. As I noted at the time, this one got away from me a lot in terms of length. I ended up cutting three complete scenes in an effort to contain the sprawl. The first to go was one focused on Ville Klaassen, (main?) villain of the Moon Steel manga, who I'd already had cameo in Of Obsessions and Erotemes. I wanted to gesture more towards a conclusion for the manga's story, extending from what I'd laid down previously, but ultimately that was too low a priority to justify adding to the word count, so out it went. Given the alternating structure of this fic (it switches between what is broadly 'Julieta's strand' and 'Almiria's strand), that meant cutting a later scene as well and I opted to ditch a brief cutaway to Embi, mainly because it just repeated stuff I'd already establish in A Handful of Rusted Petals. And possibly because of this cut, or because I'd just mucked up the ordering at some point, I also had to get rid of a scene between two of Gjallarhorn's high command that, while cute from an office politics point of view, didn't really contribute much else.

Actually, since these are all quite short, I might as well put them in here so you can see what you weren't missing!

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P.D. 327 – In the middle of entirely unrelated events; Gjallarhorn branch office, Prague

“I'm sorry, is this a bad time?”

Ville Klaassen pushes his briefcase and hat across the desk, out of sight of the terminal screen. “Not at all. I'm just in the middle of preparing for a business trip.”

The Police Bureau officer's eyebrow twitches. “Hopefully this shouldn't take up much of your time. I'm calling regarding two cases you worked on in the aftermath of the McGillis Fareed Incident.”

That explains the highly-secured channel, which demanded Ville confirm he was alone before it would establish an encrypted link. “Oh yes?”

“I'm specifically referring to events at Research Station AD-5, and the investigation into the Fareed Charitable School.”

“The Alaya-Vijnana research? Of course.” The murdered scientists, the destroyed data – evidence of a zealot's self-mutilation turned to so much ash and broken glass. “What of it?”

“This is your official notification that information on these cases has been deemed deleterious to the public good and will henceforth be restricted to category five clearance.”

Interesting. The research Ville can understand, but a school –? Oh, that's right. Those rumours concerning Lord Iznario's predilections. “I was only peripheral to the second investigation. I wouldn't even have been on the ground for the first, had internal affairs not been so short-handed.”

Clearly the exact details of the involvement are irrelevant. “Please sign the forms now being sent to your inbox to confirm you have received this notification. Since you only hold level four clearance, you are not permitted to discuss the indicated cases unless ordered to do so by a superior with level five clearance or above. I am additionally required to run a remote-access search on your Gjallarhorn-issue devices to purge any data pertaining to these cases.”

“Remote access?” Ville asks, a drop of sweat forming at the top of his spine and seeming to fall right the way down it. “Now?”

“The scan must be run as soon as is viable.” There is an overly-deliberate pause. “Do you object?”

Such a rookie error. Ville curses himself inwardly. “Naturally not.” He casts a glance at the pad on the other side of his desk, still displaying the surveillance feed from this morning. “Will you need to scan my personal devices as well?”

“I am not authorised to do so, since under level four clearance, you will not have been permitted to take personal copies of relevant information.”

“Forgive me, I merely wished to be certain.” Opening the security menu on the terminal, he checks his settings. Shouldn't be too much of a risk since he isn't amateur enough to conduct his outside dealings using work equipment. “Please go ahead.”

“Thank you,” says the officer once the progress bar has run its course. “No excisions required.”

“I try to keep things tidy.”

“Please sign the forms promptly. Good day.”

Doing as instructed, Ville wonders what will become of the staff and 'students' of the school. They must surely know plenty of juicy details that would be deleterious to Gjallarhorn's good name… on any other day, he'd consider stretching feelers in that direction, just to see what he might find…

The pad twitters. Fresh footage of two people on a street corner, a skinny blonde with a crutch beside a big, white-haired man, both huddled in cheap anoraks.

Ville snarls, grabbing his hat and dialling furiously. “Nanao,” he snaps as soon as the comm connects, “the Warren boy and his employer's pet thug are right outside the building! I cannot have them causing a scene here. Where the hell are you?”

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P.D. 327 – More than two years after Tekkadan's last battle; Chryse, Mars

First time Embi takes Fly-Away, he doesn't stop giggling for four hours.

He floats on a cloud of painlessness, the ghosts and memories lost somewhere way below him as the vapour swirls happily inside his head. His brother is dead. He's constantly surrounded by the people Elgar died for. And right now, he doesn't care. About any of it! It feels so good!

Crashing afterwards sucks. Not getting the shakes bad. It just stinks to be stuck with all the usual feelings. He has fucked-up nightmares about carrying Elgar through the desert, a dead weight clinging tight to his back. Barely gets through the day without starting a fight. Tries to punch Hirume for asking what's wrong.

The solution is obvious. Embi gets some more Fly-Away and the second time is even better.

So it becomes a pattern. Get the money to buy what he needs to make things a little less shit for a while. Burn through that. Rinse. Repeat.

Everyone keeps telling him he needs to find something to live for, right? He guesses this is it.

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P.D. 329 – Some time later; a private dining room at The Blue Horn, Vingolf

The Director General of the Inspection Bureau sniffs, as he is wont to do whenever he wishes to delay speaking. “Lord Iznario's death is being ruled misadventure. As… anticipated.”

The Regulatory Chief of Staff eyes him from across the table, fingernails digging ever so slightly into the white cloth laid between them. “Indeed it is.”

There is a heavy pause, the kind filled with common understandings that cannot be said aloud.

“You don't think…”

“I wouldn't know.” The Chief of Staff adjusts her forks. “That falls in your purview, not mine.”

“The Police Bureau is… not my bag either. Unless there's evidence of misdemeanour, the investigation is beyond our scope.”

“Is there? Evidence?”

The Director General fiddles with the cuffs of his tunic. “Seems the old man just muddled his tablets and didn't care about watching his diet.”

“The Seven Stars always thought they were above mere mortals.”

“Yes. Yes…”

Another, heavily pause.

“Convenient, at least,” concludes the Chief of Staff. “One less remnant of the old order, hanging around.”

The Director General coughs. “You know I'll be retiring in the new year? Lord – I mean, Commander Elion has some up-and-coming young fellow picked out to replace me.”

“I heard. Is he up to the job?”

“Mm. Probably. Didn't… get much say in the decision.”

“How democratic.”

“Hm.”

A waiter glides into the third silence, bowing obsequiously. “Madam, sir? Your entrées.”

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As I said, nothing especially mind-blowing. I also had a slightly different opening to the segment featuring the pluma, which I again cut for length, but that I rather liked, as a conceit.

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Can a machine remember?

It is possible for a machine to record. Pluma ASW-A-H-011_sub:27 can access data on its previous combat deployments at any time, to support its tactical algorithms. It can return the dimensions of the space freighter it disabled on its last activation, the topography of the desert it traversed during the battle before that, or images of the colossal detonation that led to it becoming buried for ERROR: UNABLE_TO_SYNC years.

But that is not remembering as you would understand it. Memory is imperfect, riddled with loss of clarity and skewed by emotional prejudice. A machine records raw, uncaring facts, free from conscious understanding of why they occur. Even if it performs tasks based on the patterns it detects, even if that performance resembles intelligence, it is most likely nothing more than a cascade of hollow logic, as insensible to wider context as a pebble dropping into the sea.

These, then, are the facts.

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On the subject of aborted starts, here is something I sketched for a putative 'Wistario segment' of the Arc 4 opening story, which as discussed never materialised:

Wisterio Afam is having a bad day. That is to say, he's not having a good day. In the grand scheme of things it probably doesn't count as truly terrible given that nothing is presently on fire and as far as he knows the colony isn't being attacked right this minute. He personally is being assailed from all sides but that largely seems to be on the scale of a cosmic joke whereby all his carefully laid plans are coming apart at the stitching.

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And finally, just because I thought it was clever at the time, a reprise segment from Love, Death and Cannoli that I again cut for length, but that would have repeated the echoing memory trick from To Catch a Falling Star chapter 11, with Yamagi recalling lines of dialogue with Shino that were (mostly) from my fics rather than the anime:

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Suns turn into black holes if they get too big and die. So it is with his feelings. Gravitationally crushing.

I don't want perfect. I want you.

What a dumb thing to say.

(There's something wrong with me.)

But isn't it better to be wrong together than apart?

Do you think if we're both worrying it's our fault, that's a sign of something?

At least there are similarities in how they're screwed up, for whatever comfort that is.

(You're here and you're – you're mine.)

And Yamagi will hold on with hands and teeth and everything he's got.

Jeez, you're so uptight sometimes.

He can be fierce too, if it's necessary.

(Of course I want to be out there with you.)

Right to the very end.

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I've a few more partial scenes in my planning document, but they're mostly things I reworked for the actual posted versions, rather than cutting entirely. Stuff like some of the flashbacks Shino has to his pre-Tekkadan days were originally in different places and the conversation between Yamagi and Ordsley wound up requiring a lot of changes as the story developed. I think that about covers all the major deviations from my original outline.

Oh, except for Gundam Paimon. I swear I meant to figure out what to do with that thing, eventually, but in the end it just remained hanging on the wall. Ah well.

#wishing on space hardware #fanfic #my fic #gundam #gundam ibo #gundam iron blooded orphans #g tekketsu #tekketsu no orphans #notes #writing #a peek at the process #there's probably a bunch more stuff I could have listed by this is all I can think of for the moment

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