#This boy can fit so much trauma and body horror!

[are-uwu]

Here comes the boooy~

Ok, here are the basics of my Werebeetle au! (The name will make more sense below, so hear me out).

It all starts some time after the events of the movie, the Reyes house had been rebuilt and now everyone, but especially Jaime can carry Berto's mourning in peace, right?.

Unfortunately this is not the case when Booster Gold and the Justice League arrive at the door asking Jaime (or rather forcibly recruiting him) to help them destroy Brother Eye.

We don't know exactly if it was the desperation or the admiration of seeing his "idols" that made Jaime agree to help them. In the hope that maybe in return they could help him learn more about his powers, find out exactly where Khaji came from (Khaji Da when he was attacked by the green lantern the files or memories of his past were corrupted or deleted. therefore like him and like everyone else they have no idea what the Reach is). Hell, they may even be able to help Jenny find out what happened to her dad!

That mission could not fail in any way, could it?

Imagine Jaime's terror when he tries to escape from the explosion and see his heroes, escape and leave him to his fate to die alone thousands of light years away from Earth, his home and especially his family and girlfriend.

It was a night of absolute terror for Jaime. For the Reyes and Jenny family it was a year of anguish and despair. During that time they tried everything to find Jaime. Joining brigades of searching mothers and fathers (necessary context, Here in my country, Mexico. Unfortunately there has been an increase in the number of missing persons due to organized crime and the negligence of the authorities to attend to the complaints of the families looking for their missing persons. Therefore these same families founded their own search brigades and travel all over the country and do not rest until they find their relatives dead or alive.), missing persons posters, aerial search the bugship and of course. To confront the Justice League in order to receive answers, which they refused to give.

So you can well understand the sea of tears they all were when one night a tired, wounded and trembling Jaime landed in their backyard, but they didn't count that later on there will be an event of changes that will hit Jai both physically and emotionally.

You will see. The strong emotions of panic and trauma caused an unexpected reaction in the Khaji Da code where Jai's DNA would mix and this mixture would cause Jaime's body to go through certain very notable changes for him and his family and not only his body. What would happen if not the same armor would go through many changes in the future. In this part I was inspired by the symptoms of the werewolf when he is going through the first symptoms of transformation. That's why this Au's name is Werebeetle. (I already have some diagrams made of these physical changes and their explanations. So bear with me).

If you came here, I thank you for your attention and support!

[kurah]

"Maybe it had something to do with your sins while alive. Some kind of karmic retribution, perhaps?"

[sacrilegious-skeletal-scribe]

on the inevitability of ghosts and house fires

it’s going to hurt me going to kill me the sky has laced its fury with the subtly of holy bodies and i should not have seen it

i do not know it’s name but i do not think it would be incorrect to call it god

a god

i don’t think there are any words that get closer to what it is, not ones ever spoken to human tongues

definitely not ones in english

just as well that the fear is coming in rounds, a pendulum swing to trace a great staring eye

not looking at you

looking at everything you could possibly imagine, staring into the whole world at once, a rock crawling with ants, and i at the top of the pile

hollowed and found wanting heaving convulsing praying praying praying praying

just as well i cannot speak once my tongue sieves through the chicken-wire terror, shifts past the lead plate and sobs

speaking words of anguish and confusion because there is something in the sky and the rest of the ants won’t look you in the eye if you start screaming in public

panic is hard to process when a jaw wires itself back shut as a safety precaution

when electricity and fire pitch a fight like you’ve never seen before

it is to watch the sky unmake itself and be turned from the end of the world with a pat on the head and a glass of water

there is blood and brain and soft earthen wax and you you you you melting out of your ears

it assures that you wouldn’t understand if you were allowed to look at it, anyway

it opened a sea above us and drowned me like a house fire

something consuming and entire, a crematory for safety and peace

it rides a horse made of teeth

and it makes death’s steed look flushed, beyond color and light, immediate, absolute, without mercy

nothing personal, kid. 

it is fear because there is nothing alike to it on heaven or earth

it is something horrific and lashing and rippling under the surface area a sea of clear liquid

a flesh without pigment, the clear of animal eyes, it is insect and equine and human 

and it sees you

but that’s not what tears at psyche, the little square peg glancing off the triangle smile eating at your liver

it is the sudden, unprompted understanding 

a lighting bolt, a long heaved threat dissolving the handcuffs as it eats your wrists

that dirt is the creature, that sunlight is the creature, that air and lungs and skin and teeth are no more removed from that terrible god than its exposed blood

and it knows I’m here

my family is in it and you are in it and the tendrils batter my doorstep not out of calculated malice but furious, unyielding unconsciousness

a dog kicking at fleas, biting until it’s muzzle is stained with blood and ligaments

a tapeworm, a child, a pox, a thing a thing a thing 

there’s something in your body skittering and screaming and feeding off you

it has been invaded and it wants its parasite out

tears meet saliva and vomit on their way to my kitchen floor

i cannot say i feel differently 

i cannot say anything

there is a god in my throat

in our eyes in our muscle in our meat our teeth our brain our veins god god god god god

but that’s how we got here, isn’t it

[justherefortua]

finished the young blood book! Though it’s definitely YA rather than as mature, it gave me a lot of nostalgia for the post-S1 fics where people thought they were goin gto be ported to childhood, and I thought the little details and the way the characters were characterized was actually really good! I loved how many parallels there were to canon and the further elaboration on the day to day life of the Umbrella Academy (and Viktor)

I wouldn’t take the book as a 100% canon source, but here are some disconnected small details that I enjoyed: SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT

- Twice trying to wrangle the hargreeves is referred to as “herding cats”, which is very accurate

- Grace custom sews their outfits and adjusts them for each member 🥺🥺🥺🥺 Luther gets a new one every time he grows, Diego has secret compartments for his knives, Ben has tentacle openings, Viktor’s looks a little too big on him

- I could definitely see how this Luther turns into S1 Luther but also he’s such a good guy. He just wants to help people and receive hugs

- Diego;;; my goodness. He loves his mom and also very much has a black and white view of justice. This is when he figures out he likes all black utility gear rather than the uniform

- Allison )::: allison )::: It’s so weird to see her feel out of place among other girls considering she grows up to be a famous actress but I think it was a good moment, as well as foreshadowing for her whole issues with the rumors

- Klaus is so vibrant here. He learned how to hotwire a car (They call Hargreeves’ car Hermes) at 12 from a ghost, regularly sneaks out of the house through the sewage system (the siblings refuse to do this) and is the life of the party

- Five was mentioned and acknowledged a couple times and every time it made me go ): The revelation that Ben had a daily check-in with Klaus asking about whether he could see Five or not and always believed Five was out there somewhere destroyed me. My crumbs ): oh ):

- Ben is my favorite character so I’m so glad he gets a POV here and an actual voice! He definitely has a good heart but also definitely doesn’t fall into the solely “shy and totally passive” stereotype <3 also im just happy for content of umbrella ben i miss him

- Viktor!!! He isn’t sure if Mom claps for his violin because of if he’s actually good or. He’s very lonely but the kids do include him a little bit which is lovely. Definitely some parallels to S1 canon. Also! Some Viktor trans moments where he ruminates on that for a little bit without knowing the actual cause, the mirror line has relevance here. I thought it was handled nicely but obviously I can’t speak on experiences that aren’t my own.

Other misc details:

- Ben gets calmer under high pressure situations and therefore becomes pretty good at pool despite never having played

- Klaus likes to jump from roofs for the fun of it and just thinks his body is extremely resilient to head trauma. Klaus. Klaus no. 😭

- Diego uses “Boy Scout” as a insult for Luther, who doesn’t mind because Boy Scouts are supposed to be dependable

- Diego has always been pretty good at dancing

- The Umbrella Academy never stick around to clean up after themselves on missions

- Ben and Viktor can fit together in the passenger seat

- Favorite meals: Ben likes PB+J and potato chips, Klaus likes bubblegum ice cream, Diego likes roast beef, Luther hamburger and fries, and a hot dog for Allison (though according to her it hasn’t been her fav food in years, and also she forgot Five’s favorite and Viktor’s favorite)

- Klaus listens to heavy metal (to drown out the ghosts), Allison likes pop music

- Viktor learned how to drive one year before this book, taught by Pogo. He has his license! Klaus knows how to drive too but he drives much more recklessly lol

- Allison once had a solo magazine cover and she can’t remember whether she rumored for it or not (foreshadowing)

- Ben has never told anyone that the tentacles hurt when they come out ())):) [BODY HORROR TW] They are also literally slithering under his ski, he can feel em with his organs, and the skin is tender where they come out

- Allison knows CPR. and uses it after one of the siblings has a near death experience 👍

[wilcze-kudly]

Siblings in turmoil; the Katara+Sokka /Bolin+Mako comparison

So after making this post about the interesting parralels between our two favourite pairs of siblings, I wanna play around more with the parallels and similarities between them. Mind you, this will not be a one to one comparison, since both pairs of characters are simply much too different from one another to perfectly fit into one archetype.

This post serves more to compare these characters, their respective dynamics. You know. For fun. Because overanalysing traumatised children is fun now.

I think the set of similarities that jumps out at us first is the one connecting to Katara, Mako and their respective losses.

I mean, it is very obvious. Kid witnesses horrific, violent death of parent(s), keeps a dead parent's belonging around their neck, acts as their other sibling's parent to some degree.

If we look to the other corner, Sokka and Bolin have some surface level similarities. They act more as comic relief, and seem less affected by their circumstances than their siblings. They also somehow are incredibly popular with the ladies (and guys). It's that ole autistic rizz.

Mako and Katara's losses are the, let's say, centrepieces of their characters. To some extent, the pain and horror they went through as children, guide them through life and influence how they see the world and how they make decisions. You know, as trauma does.

Both of these characters had to step up and fill a void left in their and their siblings' lives.

Katara is on multiple occasions described as "motherly", which does make sense. Katara's loss of her mother impacted her tremendously, and it most likely shook her family dynamic to the core. Therfore, Katara takes on certain maternal characteristics. She also fulfills the chores that a mother would in a traditional household.

It is important to note that Sokka also takes on a typically parental role with Katara. However, rather than filling a void left by a mother, he fills the void left by a father. Hakoda and the men of the village leaving was not only very traumatic for Sokka, but also a very heavy shift for the rest if the village. Sokka being the only man, even only teenage boy leads to him not only taking on this role in his family but also the 'leader, chief, provider' role that men traditionally took on in their environments. This is still emblematic in how protective Sokka is of his companions, often even shielding them with his body, putting himself in harms way.

In Bolin and Mako's dynamic, however, Mako takes on both parental roles. To some extent. Where Sokka and Katara still had a certain amount of adults who could take care of them, Bolin and Mako were completely alone. This leads to Mako's care of Bolin being more focused on literal survival than emotional wellbeing.

Korra: [Side shot; unsure.] So, why is Bolin running around with the Triple Threat Triad, anyway? Mako : [Uncomfortable; evasively.] Well, we ... we used to do some work for them back in the day. Korra: [Dismayed look on her face.] What? Wha- Are you some kind of criminal? Mako : [Defensive and angrily.] No! You don't know what you're talking about. I just ran numbers for them and stuff. We were orphans out on the street; I did what I had to do to survive and protect my little brother.

Now, Bolin is the outlier in this group. Rather than stepping up into a caretaker role, Bolin seems almost intentionally like a child. This may seem counterproductive to Mako and Bolin's survival, but I'd argue that Bolin acting in this hapless, childike role is very important to the brothers' codependent dynamic. While it would seem like the better option for the brother's to both be able to be independent, the leader/follower dichotomy they have may actually have felt safer and more direct for them. Also, by being more easygoing and cheerful, Bolin is able to support Mako emotionally.

I can even make an argument of Mako infantilising Bolin, and stifling Bolin's growth (not deliberately or consciously, of course) because of the comfort this type of relationship brings.

It's also important to note that Bolin's behaviour also had the added benefit of endearing the brother's to people. The whole reason they became pro benders is because Toza took a shine to Bolin and whem the brothers were kidnapped by the Red Lotus, Bolin immediately pivots to trying to befriend them. When you combine this with the fact that the brothers probably lived off of the kindness of strangers as children, his demeanour starts to look like a behaviour learnt in order to survive.

Katara and Sokka aren't nearly as codependent as Mako and Bolin. They do both parent one another to some extent, Sokka has unconsciously replaced images of his mother with Katara. While on the flipside, Sokka often tends to try and steer Katara's actions, not unlike an overbearing father would. Katara, unlike Bolin, however, doesn't take direction well and will often outright disagree with or even mock Sokka.

Sokka: [Camera closes in on Sokka and Katara next to each other.] I know you all wanna fly, but my instincts tell me we should play it safe this time and walk Katara: [Leans forward at her brother and smiles.] Who made you the boss? Sokka: [Points his finger at his chest; to Katara.] I'm not the boss, I'm the leader. Katara: [Amused.] You're the leader? But your voice still cracks!

Both Mako and Katara have strong caretaker instincts. This is mainly how they express affection. You can see this not only in their relationships with their siblings. Another their romantic relationships with Korra and Aang respectively. The difference here being that Aang is quite receptive and willing to reciprocate Katara's caretaker type love, whereas Korra has different needs in her relationship. It's honestly quite fun that Korra's first love interest has a very similar love language to Aang's wife, and Korra and Mako braking up is a very good way to differentiate these two Avatars even further.

So that's it, Mako and Katara have a lot of similarities and Sokka and Bolin have some as well. That's it case closed. Except not so because we I'm here to disagree with myself.

Where Katara and Mako differ, is how well in tune they are with emotions, both their own and those of others. Katara is very, very open about her anger. She's very quick to escalate conflict and she feels emotions very strongly. A stark comparison to this is Mako's very avoidant approach to conflict.

This, once again makes sense with their environments. Aside from the loss of family, Katara has had a huge amount of her culture stripped away from her, a wound made even more painful by Katara being the only waterbender in her tribe. She's also just a naturaly passionate and determined person, I think. While, for Mako, anger and conflict usually could mean that either he or Bolin are going to get hurt, especially at the time when they were running with the triads.

Now, the main thing setting Bolin and Sokka apart, is also the thing that ties Sokka and Mako together.

Mako is... cynical, very jaded by the world. His pessimism and distrust of others shows how broken down he was by his difficult childhood, growing up around dangerous people.

Sokka is similarly jaded, as we see at even the beginning of the show, with his stark oppositon to fun and potty breaks.

Where Mako and Sokka come together, is that they were both tasked with protecting their family members, with Sokka also having to step into that role for the whole village. For them their rolee of protectors force them to always consider the worst possible outcome and any potential danger.

Sokka: I'm coming with you.

Hakoda: You're not old enough to go to war, Sokka, you know that.

Sokka: [Desperately.] I'm strong, I'm brave, I can fight! Please, Dad!

Hakoda: [Lays a hand on his son's shoulder; grimly and sadly.] Being a man is knowing where you're needed the most. And for you right now, that's here, protecting your sister.

Contrasting Mako and Sokka's pessimism is Bolin and Katara's powerful optimism. Hope is what drives these two forward, as well as their huge compassion for others, both human and animal.

Mako: What are you doing? Are you trying to get us in trouble with Shady Shin? Bolin: No! I just ... Maybe I'm not as mean as you! Maybe I just can't turn my back on people when they're down!

This often causes arguments between the respective pairs of siblings. Mako and Sokka wanting to protect their siblings from danger, while Bolin and Katara's need to help others draws them into risky situations.

Katara : Well, what was I supposed to do? Sokka: Leave! Do nothing! Katara: [Angrily.] No, I will never, ever turn my back on people who need me!

The difference between Katara and Bolin, of course is that Katara is able to stand her ground for her strong morals, while Bolin, due to his upbringing, is much more "go with the flow".

But it is still a very interesting and compelling comparison, the younger sibling, full of hope and kindness, and the older sibling who shields them from danger.

I really enjoy these two pairs of siblings, and they easily make for some of my favourite dynamics in the show. I like that while they have certain overt similarities, there's much more to this comparison than meets the eye on surface level.

I think Sokka and Katara's relationship is incredibly wholesome, yet rather deep, watching them both mature side by side is very satisfying, if not a little sad. Bolin and Mako's relationship can be frustrating, but also fascinating. You can tell that they mean everything to one another, despite how dysfunctional their relationship can be.

Avatar has a knack for writing wonderfully complex siblings and the main two pairs of siblings are no exception. This is one of my favourite aspects of the show.

Anyway, that's been me telling you that these two pairs of siblings have both similarities and differences. Glad you sat through the stupid rant. Tune in next time for when my dumbass tells you that the sky is blue and the grass is green.

Bye bye

[aceass1n]

Continuation of this

CW: body horror, kinda graphic descriptions of violence, slight psychological horror

(My friend and I came up with this together—she wrote pretty much the whole first half and I did the second half ish)

Do you know how an eye works? Till does—in graphic detail. They did not sedate him when the needle entered his eye. Nor any other time, for that matter. He thinks they liked the screaming.

(Within the eye's black hole is a retina, a hungry creature capturing all the light that enters. There is a pigment there that can be fixed in place, like a flower pressed into a bookmark. Rhodopsin, they call it in his fugue-like, broken memories. Under the right circumstances, the seygein drone on above him, you might be able to cut open the eye, soak it in an alum solution, and save the image forever and ever. Manufactured immortality. It is something they read in the human books—a fascinating, primitive trick.)

Hidden in the foxhole labyrinth of the resistance's base, Till's mind drifts. There is a name he cannot recall, though he reaches for it in dreams, wanders long through darkness.

(A blank slate. A black hole.)

He dreams of laboratories, of a face he sees in pieces, like sheet music scattered across the floor.

(In the most successful experiment, they used a rabbit. It was fixed to face a window for hours and hours until it was the only thing it saw. Then they cut off its head.)

He obsesses over the face, draws it over and over. When he shows Mizi, asks, begs for some answer, any answer—she makes such a terrible expression that Till almost gives up.

But he is so, so close. He dives into dreams, into memories, plunders their depths with singular determination. The steel of an operating table. The harsh leather chafing his wrists. Cold metal on his neck, and white light flooding his eyes.

Everytime, he sees a little more.

Everytime, he stays a little longer.

One night, the metal is gone. Till could not tell you why, but he turned to his left and—there. A black-haired boy. As if fashioned out of the darkness and shadow, Till sees him, face blank, open. Till drinks in the image of him, stares and stares and stares until the segyein rip out his eye and cut it open. They were waiting for him to do this—he knows it instinctively. He was waiting, too. As the dream slips away, soft as a lover in the night, they show it to him, the face carved in his eye.

He wakes up screaming.

A few days later, Mizi asks him at lunch—cautiously, as if afraid her words will break more than the silence alone: "Do you remember—"

He cuts her off. The name rises through his ragged throat, hoarse and ugly and raw.

"Ivan," he says. "How did I—"

Mizi shakes her head. She reassures him, says it's not his fault, says amnesia is a typical effect of trauma. He takes in her words, tries them on for size.

He holds on to them all through the meal, up until someone calls for Mizi and she walks away with a concerned backwards glance.

Then Till runs to the bathroom and throws up, over and over, until he is empty. Hollow. A blank slate.

The pieces come back to him slowly. They stay a little longer each time.

He never manages to get Ivan's eyes quite right, but the rest of him—the rest of him he gets right in bits and pieces, fits and starts. Half remembered smiles and whispers of words.

Thank you, he hears Ivan say, over and over and over. A ghost lingering at his shoulder, an afterimage flickering in his periphery. Thank you thank you thank you—

And one day, he hears: Live.

It doesn't much matter if it's real or imagined, if Ivan actually said it to him at any point. What matters is that it's Ivan's voice, finally clear after so long—it was in his former actions, it was his most ardent wish, broadcasted through everything he ever did. The sun shines so that flowers may bloom, so that the foliage might grow thick and verdant. Who is Till to deny his sun anything, after all this time?

(A hand in his. Red skies at dawn. The click of a collar.)

So Till lives. He lives, and lives, and lives. He learns to fight—properly this time. He learns to shoot, learns to strategize. He becomes the resistance's second best fighter after Hyuna.

Live, Ivan's ghost whispers to him, tender as his touch, warm as the first whisper of sun after a long winter. Live.

The resistance wins. The resistance wins because Till cannot bring himself to do anything but fight in Ivan's memory, to triumph on behalf of the sun that burned itself out in an attempt to free him from his shackles.

He is free now, even if it's a decade or so too late. He should've left with Ivan back then. He should've known the sun wouldn't lead him astray. But he cannot change the past; he cannot undo what he has already done.

What do I do now? he asks Ivan's ghost one day, sitting on a roof in a newly liberated city.

Live, Ivan whispers, one last time. Just live.

Till tilts his face back. Closes his eyes as the rays of the sun—the real one, the the aliens never let their human pets see—wash over him. For the first time in a decade, the space beside him is empty. Bereft of even an afterimage.

"Thank you," Till says into to the wind—to the city, to the blue sky and crisp air, to a boy who stayed too long in a place that didn't deserve even a second of his time for another boy who didn't deserve even an ounce of his devotion. Words long overdue, but ringing true nonetheless.

"Thank you for granting me all of your devotion."

(my friend and I did come up with a prequel kinda thing focused on the rescue and mizi—maybe if this does well I'll post that too)

[gloomstalkertav]

Summary: In which all of Act II is summed up in one angst-riddled chapter, and no tieflings are spared the horrors of canon.

Part 6 of 10

Warnings: Slaps roof of chapter: This bad boy can fit so much angst! TW: trauma flashbacks, semi-graphic descriptions of canon character deaths and not exactly canon but not not canon character deaths, and super unhappy sad times pretty much all the way around.

Word Count: ~8.2k

View story masterpost | Read on Ao3

“Listen —” 

But instead of saying anything more, Alfira snatches up her tankard and takes her first real drink of the interview: a long, slow, fortifying draught. When she sets it down, her cheeks are flushed, her eyes overbright, but her voice is strong and steady as she resumes:

“Listen —” 

But instead of saying anything more, Alfira snatches up her tankard and takes her first real drink of the interview: a long, slow, fortifying draught. When she sets it down, her cheeks are flushed, her eyes overbright, but her voice is strong and steady as she resumes:

“I know this part will be hard. For me, too. I don’t like to think of the Shadow-Cursed lands any more than I can help, but … it’s an important part of the story. Tav’s story. Personally, I think it’s where she sort of … came into her own as a hero. I saw a lot of her at Last Light and she was … different, somehow, than she was at the druids’ grove. Older, almost. More sure of herself. Like she knew what she was doing now. In fact, the only time I think I ever saw her panicked was when she found out you were missing.”

Alfira’s eyes flit to Zevlor’s, but his are fixed on his tankard — the contents of which he's barely sampled, nor does he allow himself to do so now: penance for the little shiver of satisfied pleasure he feels at hearing of Tav’s concern. Not that a few sips of weak ale will make a difference. Zevlor knows there’s not enough alcohol in the Elfsong to dull the pain of what he must remember next.

“Anyway,” concludes Alfira, shrugging on a brisk, business-like tone, “none of us would have made it out of that place alive if it weren’t for Tav, and we’re doing this for her, so…” The bard reclaims her quill, dips it in ink, and shakes her parchment out in front of her: her sword and shield against the trial ahead. “So, all I really need to hear is her part: how she rescued you from Moonrise. You don't have to talk about what happened when we … when you were captured. Or about being tortured or whatever else that cult did.”

The privacy curtain ripples. Alfira starts, but the dusky tail and leather boots visible beneath the velvet hem are already hurrying past. She jumps again at a sound from across the table: Zevlor clearing his throat to speak.

“Torture—”

But his voice fails. He swallows hard and closes his eyes. And when he starts again, it is not for Tav, though it is Alfira's picture of the hero she became at Last Light that lends him strength. It is for Alfira herself, and every other tiefling outcast he betrayed: another sort of penance, and one long overdue.

“Torture,” says Zevlor at last, “would have been a blessing I did not deserve.” 

Yet he longed for it. For whips or racks or needles or knives. An enemy to fight, a punishment against which to rage. But his tomb-like prison was too narrow for Zevlor to lift his arms any significant degree, let alone assault its translucent sides, and the shrouded figures that occasionally wandered across his limited field of vision did not spare him even a passing taunt. 

His was the suffering of utter stillness. The hell of frozen inaction. A doom befitting his crime...

… Screams. A spray of red, bright in the darkness. The metallic scent of blood. The thud of falling bodies all around while he stood passive and unmoving, hypnotised by the voice caressing his mind: promising power, purpose, a place in Baldur’s Gate, the realisation of every fantastic possibility he craved—

Zevlor ripped his mind free of the unbearable memory, and, in a futile effort to keep it at bay, shook his head until his neck ought to have ached. But sensation did not exist inside his prison. He felt neither hunger nor thirst, heat nor cold; his body registered no physical pain. How long had he been trapped here, fading in and out of nightmare? It felt like an age — like a lifetime had passed since he’d made the decision to lead his people through the fringes of the Shadow-Cursed Lands, since the cultists had ambushed them, since he’d heard his own voice command their surrender — but it might only have been years, perhaps mere tendays. The dim, red light outside his prison never changed. There was no way for Zevlor to mark the passage of time. Avernus had been the same...

…The blood-red sky broken only by the crackling lightning of the black Companion. Elturel’s clock tower toppled - time another blessing the gods had revoked. Life reduced to short bouts of restless sleep between the swinging of his sword, the bracing of his shield, the holding of the line against demons and devils and the risen corpses of his own fallen friends. A fight for survival he feared would never end. Perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps the ascent and all that followed were nothing more than fevered dreams: his exile from Elturel, the road to Baldur’s Gate, the struggles at the grove, the fight against the goblins, Tav—

Zevlor’s mind resurfaced blearily. He could not guess at how long he’d been under. But outside his prison, shadows shifted in the weak, red light and muffled echoes filtered through.

“… those without the tadpoles?”

“Let them rot. The Bonedaughter wants more bodies.”

“Surely a few more wouldn’t go amiss? In case the Harpers and those bloody rogue True Souls find their way down here?”

“General Ketheric says not to worry, they’re no longer a threat. He has the Duke and the Nightsong, and he’ll be…”

The voices drifted away, leaving Zevlor once more at the mercy of stillness and silence and stewing madness, his only small comfort the knowledge he would, at least, be permitted to die. He wished it would come soon. Death would be infinitely better than the hells inside his head. He tried vainly to rally his thoughts, to pick through what he had heard — minutes, hours ago? — for useful meaning, but the words drifted anchorless through his brain, swallowed into the roiling sea of distorted memory…

“…wants more bodies...” But there were too many bodies already: his platoon of Hellriders, the soldiers for whose lives he was responsible, lay dead in heaps at his feet. Or were they his fellow refugees? Blank faces blended. The lifeless eyes all looked the same. He no longer knew which hell he was in. “…bloody rogue true souls…” True Soul. That’s what the Absolute offered him. Her honeyed voice enveloped the sounds of people — his people? — fighting and falling; her visions subsumed his sight. He saw himself entering Baldur’s Gate not a beggar, but a leader, a conqueror, a paladin once more; toppling that godless city by the river and rebuilding it in her holy image: a second, better Elturel, a home for his displaced people, and a worthy offering to any beautiful, raven-haired tieflings who would one day make their way there. Until the voice slithered away and the golden vision vanished, leaving him to cruel hands and cold chains and dying screams that rent his soul as he was dragged into the dark. “…said not to worry…” Tav’s face smiled up at him, silhouetted in the grove’s flickering torchlight, her hand warm on his arm. “We’ll figure something out. Don’t worry. Zevlor?”

Even in memory, her voice carried a tangible clarity. Zevlor blinked back to hazy consciousness again. But Tav’s voice remained.

“Zevlor? Zevlor!”

The roll of his name in her accent, strangely muffled though it was, was an undeserved comfort. As was the vision of Tav that swam into focus before his eyes: slightly wavering, but distinct, like a reflection seen through water. Was he dreaming again? He must be. Only this was not a memory of Tav he could place. She wore armour Zevlor did not recognise, her dark hair held off her face by many intricate plaits, and, though she still carried her rapier, a short sword dangled at her other hip. The steel of the two mismatched blades glinted in the dim, red light. She stretched out a hand to touch him and hit translucent barrier instead.

Tav was standing outside his prison.

Which meant madness had claimed Zevlor at last. Or death. Perhaps the gods had conjured an image of her to guide him to whatever plane waited beyond. Charitable of them, he supposed, though they might have made her look less horrified. Unfamiliar lines of fear and anguish broke like lightning across her storm-coloured face as she pounded with both fists on the barrier between them.

“Zevlor! Can you hear me?”

The thuds reverberated around Zevlor like rolls of thunder, disrupting his precarious mind’s attempts to grasp her words. One thing alone was clear: Tav could not get to him, divine emissary though she must be. Was the prison preventing his soul escaping his body, somehow? Zevlor tried to relax, to release, to follow her voice, but both it and her reflection were fading back into red shadows. Panic rattled in his brain. Little though he deserved even the sight of Tav, he could not stand to lose it. But new figures were parading past his prison now: another, taller tiefling; a slight, pale elf; two men, one sporting purple robes, the other curling horns Zevlor thought he must once have seen. The man turned his head towards the prison, and Zevlor recognised the stone eye: the Blade of Frontiers.

These were Tav’s companions, he realised, or some of them at least. Was it ... was it possible they were truly here? Had she come to rescue him yet again? Or had his sanity finally shattered? Zevlor’s vision flickered as the dark maw of delirium tugged at the edges of his mind, threatening to drag him under. He struggled against it. Muffled voices overlapped in argument — but were they real or in his head? — until Tav’s rose above them—

“I don’t give a tuppenny fuck how many mind flayers there are, Astarion, I am not going to let him die!”

—and all Zevlor's fragmented thoughts were extinguished by a hideous crush of sound. Pressure engulfed him. White steam obscured his sight. He toppled forward, his arms abruptly free but too slow to break his fall, and hit the ground face first. Pain radiated from the base of his horns to the back of his skull. Heartbeats he could once more count pulsed loud in his ears. He lay still for several of them, un-thinking, simply breathing in and out, lungs greedily accepting his ragged gasps of rank air. Then someone tripped over his prone legs. Zevlor grunted in discomfort, automatically lifting his head. And the world outside his body impressed itself upon his newly-woken senses.

It was chaos.

Shouts, the twang and hiss of arrows, a sulphurous smell of what must be some infernal magic, and the unmistakable thunks of steel striking flesh filled Zevlor’s mind. No. His ears. This fight was not a memory. It was happening here, now.

On instinct, he rolled to his side — clumsily; his body more cumbersome than he remembered — in time to see four taloned feet attached to a something his brain could not name scuttling straight for his face. He braced his hands against squelchy ground to push himself up and away, but his arms refused to bear weight. He threw one across his eyes, steeling himself for the gouge of claws that never came. A light splat of liquid hit Zevlor’s vambrace instead. He lowered it, and watched a thin rapier retracted from the top of what his eyes insisted was a four-legged brain. Then boots he did not recognise kicked the thing aside, and a tail he did brushed the limp end of his own as Tav lowered her weapons and crouched next to his face.

“Zevlor! Can you move?” she yelled over the clamour — a bellow, the breaking of glass, and the crackle of flames, close enough for sweat to bead on the back of Zevlor’s neck. “Come on, you've got to get u-ah!”

The word ended in a cry. Tav dropped hard to her knees, both blades tumbling to the ground. The edge of the short sword missed Zevlor's bare hand by a breath, and only because he succeeded in struggling to a seat: some hidden vestige of strength igniting within him at Tav’s distress. Her eyes were squeezed shut; she clutched her head as if struck from behind by a pommel. But the enemy levitating slowly towards her wielded no weapons, apart from whip-like tentacles and the razor-sharp nails of its outstretched hand.

A mind flayer. Zevlor knew the monster instantly, though he’d never seen one before; nor would it have held any particular terror for him — he'd met plenty worse in Avernus — were it not for the tentacles wriggling purposefully towards the back of Tav’s bent head. Zevlor found himself suddenly on his feet, the fallen short sword in his hand, with no idea how he'd accomplished either and no time to think of it now. He swung. Tav’s sword, sharp — but slighter than he was accustomed to — missed the meat of the tentacles and sliced the outstretched tip of one instead. Distraction enough. The mind flayer stumbled as its feet touched ground. Its small, orange eyes locked on Zevlor’s, shrieking its indignant rage — not into the shrouded air between them but directly into Zevlor’s head. He could feel the creature’s consciousness grate against his, then twist and contort, becoming less a shriek than a song: an enticing stream of notes that wrapped themselves tenderly around his thoughts, coaxing, cajoling, commanding him to lower his blade.

"Enough!" Zevlor heard himself shout, voice cracking with long disuse. "My mind is my own!"

He gripped the pommel of the sword until his knuckles popped, lifted it over his head, and brought it down on the creature’s neck where it erupted in a fury of radiant sparks — a ghost of the holy power Zevlor once commanded — and passed cleanly through rubbery flesh. The mind flayer's body toppled first. Its severed head followed, tentacles still twitching. Zevlor merely adjusted his stance and swung again. And again and again, riding the surge of familiar power until the last sparks of divine wrath were gone, and there was no coherent form left to aim at, and the silver blade of the borrowed sword was black with alien innards. Blinking drops of the same noxious fluid from his eyes, Zevlor swivelled, searching for more enemies to smite, but the battle around him was dying an equally swift and bloody death.

A few paces away, a second mind flayer corpse lay charred and smoking. A third hung pinned by arrows to a wall, uneven and spongy as the chamber’s ground. Near this violent tableau, the pale elf was bent double, tugging salvageable arrows from more fallen, oozing brains; while across from him, just visible through the smoke and dim, red light, the Blade of Frontiers and the other tiefling — Karlach, Zevlor’s brain belatedly prompted — helped another figure clamber from an eerily steaming pod. Zevlor blinked at this, his sword arm faltering as his brain made another connection, then whirled in place. An identical pod loomed behind him. His prison. The narrow, sensation-less, time-less tomb he'd been trapped in for who knew how long, where he had been so sure he would die. Where he would have died, if not for...

Zevlor let the short sword fall from his fingers as his eyes sought Tav, but she was already on her feet, tripping over bits of pulverised mind flayer to meet him. Her cobalt eyes sparkled with tears that might have been lingering headache or joy; for she was smiling: the exact smile she'd offered Zevlor in his every memory of her. A wave of dizzy unreality shuddered through him. He wet his blood-flecked lips, almost afraid to ask:

“Are you real?”

His voice was a croak he barely recognised. Tav's, too, was unusually distorted as she answered through what sounded like both laughter and a wild sob.

“Yes!�� She tore frantically at her fingerless leather gloves to cup Zevlor’s gore-streaked face in clean, bare hands. “Yes, I'm real. I'm here. And you're here. You're alive. You're alive,” she repeated, as if she, too, found this miracle hard to grasp, and ran her fingers desperately over his face to prove it: her thumbs tracing the sharp, infernal ridges of his cheeks, the base of his horns, the outline of his ears, her long nails tangling in the loose, unkempt strands of his hair.

“Alive,” Zevlor echoed, hardly aware of his words or anything else that wasn’t the blissful feel of Tav’s skin against his. “Hells. I - I didn't think I was going to make it. But how did you … how—”

“They told me you were taken.” Tav's face was so close to Zevlor's he could taste each of her rapid, shallow breaths. “But when we rescued the other prisoners in Moonrise, you weren't with them, and none of them knew where you’d gone. I looked everywhere, all over the shadowlands and that whole bloody tower and I couldn't find you. I was afraid—”

She broke off: whether unwilling to name her fear or because she, like Zevlor, had become aware of footsteps behind her, he wasn't sure. Careful to do nothing that would dislodge Tav’s mindlessly stroking hands, he threw a glance over her shoulder and watched her companions tromp into view: the pale elf and the wizard from one direction, Karlach and Wyll from the other, supporting between them two new figures whose grimy, tattered tabards proclaimed the insignia of the Flaming Fist. Hope welled in Zevlor’s parched throat. If Tav had rescued prisoners, and more were alive down here, then surely that meant there was a chance…

“The others. The ambush,” he whispered against the skin of her wrist, unable to look her in the eye as he asked, “Did you find them? Did they survive?”

It took Tav a second too long to respond.

“Don't - don't worry about that now,” she stuttered, her hands sliding slowly from his face. “There’ll be time for stories and - and explanations later. First, we need to get you out of here. All of you,” she added, turning to the two new arrivals; and the loss of her warmth and her ominous non-answer left Zevlor abruptly shrunken and cold.

Battle, and the ecstasy of reuniting with Tav, had driven the memories which had haunted his imprisonment temporarily from Zevlor’s mind. They caught him up in a breathless rush — screams; that spray of wet red, bright in the living shadows; the sickening scent of spilled blood — and escorting them was a new, unconsidered horror: how Tav would react when she found him out. What would she say, how would she look at him, when she realised she had spent all that time searching for, not a victim of the cult, but a villain every bit as much to blame? Guilt, grief, and pure selfish panic washed over Zevlor so palpably he swayed. Voices rose and fell around him, but they sounded strangely distant, as if he were once again a prisoner in a pod.

“I’m sorry — you want us to climb back up that wretched hole we just spent an hour climbing down? And what — leave a note with one of those brain things asking Ketheric to pretty please pause whatever he’s planning with the Nightsong until we get back?”

“Astarion’s not wrong. Finding and stopping Ketheric has got to be our first priority, surely?”

“I’d say destroying the Absolute deserves a slight precedence.”

“And finding Zariel’s asset. Wyll’s not becoming Kyton food on my watch, soldier.”

“And we are - mmph - we’re not going anywhere till we find the Duke. I heard one of those cultists saying Ketheric’s got him somewhere below. If I can just - arrgh - borrow a sword...”

“Not to rub proverbial salt in a very literal wound, but as you can barely lift yourself, I’m not sure how you expect to lift a sword.”

“It’s that or fall on one when we return without our - urgh - charge!”

“Enough.”

Tav’s command was quiet, almost careless, and all that was needed to snuff out the other voices. Including those in Zevlor’s head. He blinked away the intrusive visions and refocused on Tav, who had reined in her frantic joy and replaced it with an authoritative calm: comfortable on her face, and as inherently comforting to see as the first hint of wisteria sunrise after an endless-seeming stretch of night.

“Gale’s right.” She addressed the unhappy female Fist doing her damnedest not to lean on Karlach. “Neither of you is in any condition to go running after Ketheric. But that’s where we were headed before we found all of you, and,” - her eyes drifted in Zevlor’s direction before snapping back - “finding him is the priority right now. If the Duke is really down there, you have my word, we’ll do everything you would have done and more to bring him back.”

Tav held the Fist’s gaze until the woman grudgingly relented, or was simply unable to stand any longer — she nodded once, then slumped against Karlach’s arm. That settled, Tav turned to Zevlor.

“Can you help them out of here if I tell you the way?”

A task. A mission. An actionable item to occupy his body and distract his mind.

“Of course,” he agreed without hesitation, and threw himself immediately into the job at hand.

While Tav and her companions collected themselves and their gear, Zevlor picked a careful path across oozing pieces of mind flayer to Karlach, and helped her transfer the Fist’s arm across his shoulders. His own muscles, no longer cushioned by adrenaline, wept at the added weight. He ignored them; his body deserved far worse punishment than this. He waited only for the second Fist to gather his comparatively steady feet underneath him, then set a laborious pace across the oddly fleshy ground. Tav hurried ahead of him, ordering her companions on in the opposite direction while she herself showed Zevlor the way out.

“Through there. Stay to the right,” — she indicated a passage every bit as dim and unpleasant as the room he was to quit — “and you’ll come to a dead end. You’ll have to climb for a bit, but Shadowheart and Lae’zel are standing by at the top. Call up, and as soon as they can hear you, they’ll help. And here. Take this.” She tucked her short sword, hastily wiped clean of ichor, carefully into Zevlor’s belt. “Just in case.”

Zevlor paused, resting the Fist’s dead weight against the ground, and shook his head. Loose hair fell past his horns, tickling his face; he swiped his free hand uselessly across it as he protested:

“You’ll need that more than I.”

“It won’t make a difference,” Tav insisted, fumbling something from around her wrist Zevlor could not see in the darkness; but he understood what it must be when she closed the short space between them, stretched on her toes and gathered the limp strands of hair from his face, fastening them behind his head. “We threw all the steel we had at Ketheric before and barely scratched his armor. I don’t think swords are going to win us this fight. It’ll have to be speeches.” Her lips twitched as she dropped her hands. “I’ll get it back from you if I manage to pull it off.”

Tav's tone was light, but, as she leaned back to inspect her handiwork, her calm assurance flickered. And for a moment, she was simply staring at him: her cobalt eyes wandering his face, as if memorising its every sharp angle; clearly worried she was seeing it, all of him, for the last time. In a way, Zevlor thought, she was.

“You will,” he said in lieu of farewell, and it rang with bittersweet surety.

For he had no doubts whatsoever. Tav and her companions would defeat the General, the cult, perhaps the Absolute itself — nothing seemed beyond her anymore. But when she returned and discovered the part he had played in his people's destruction, Zevlor was equally certain she would never again look at him like that: with such tender care and concern and, he'd once allowed himself to hope, love.

Ale dribbles down Zevlor’s constricted throat as he takes a few clumsy gulps. But this draught seems less fortifying than the first. On the contrary, he feels distinctly ill. His fingers tremble again as he replaces the tankard on the table. He wonders if Lakrissa can have put something in his drink. He’s noticed her colourful hair bob by the privacy curtain more often than strictly warranted while he's talked.

Ale dribbles down Zevlor’s constricted throat as he takes a few clumsy gulps. But this draught seems less fortifying than the first. On the contrary, he feels distinctly ill. His fingers tremble again as he replaces the tankard on the table. He wonders if Lakrissa can have put something in his drink. He’s noticed her colourful hair bob by the privacy curtain more often than strictly warranted while he's talked.

“So,” prompts Alfira, “I… assume you stayed at Moonrise after that? I mean, none of us ever saw you at Last Light.”

Despite her efforts to sound gentle, unpressing, Zevlor can tell the bard is eager to move the story on; to put the Shadow-Cursed lands behind her for good. But the awful memories he's already been forced to relive and the ones still ahead, not to mention the ale now churning his stomach, have shaken Zevlor's resolve. He imagines refusing to speak; leaving the interview here. Simply rising from the rickety wooden chair and walking out of the Elfsong's open doors into the night. Even with Lakrissa's help, Alfira could hardly stop him.

But something does. An innate sense of duty, an ingrained commitment to justice, the almost physical need to atone for his failures in some real if negligible way, keeps Zevlor bound to his seat; just as it had at Moonrise Towers those many months ago.

“Yes,” he sighs, “I stayed at Moonrise. At least, until Tav returned.”

“Zevlor?”

A voice he knew without thinking roused Zevlor instantly from a slumped and unrestful doze. Harder to identify were his surroundings.

He was seated at a long wooden table, a sword that wasn’t his laid out on the bench at his side, in a room that, in spite of its expensive windows and intricate tapestries and paintings obscuring the stone walls, had the cramped spartan beds and unmistakable stale odour of military barracks. And the memory came sidling reluctantly back. This was the cult's barracks in Moonrise, where the githyanki, Lae'zel, had assigned him to sit after leading the three rescued prisoners from the top of the ruined tower. Zevlor uncurled his spine, and hissed in discomfort. His back was stiffer than he could ever remember it being, every muscle in his body fiercely cramped. The result of tendays of disuse, followed by battle and a painstaking climb out of that mind flayer hell. And he supposed sitting hunched over and unsupported for the last few hours had not helped.

He shifted on the bench again, more gingerly, and the blanket one of the Harpers had thrown over the sticky, gore-slick armor he'd refused to remove slipped down his arms. Zevlor snatched at it automatically, but faster hands beat him there. They arranged the itchy wool more securely over his shoulders, then removed the empty plate and tin cup he’d knocked over in his doze to a spot further down the table. He dropped his eyes to the ground and watched as boots still splattered with blood and worse stepped around him to retrieve a fallen chair. It was lifted and set right at the head of the table beside him, and a creak of old wood informed Zevlor that Tav had sat down.

Neither spoke. Zevlor did not know for how long; he was out of the habit of counting time. Nor could he interpret Tav’s silence with his eyes still locked on the smooth stone floor. He contemplated asking how her mission had fared, but if she was here she had obviously succeeded, and pleasantries only delayed the inevitable: the moment she would broach the subject, and he would have no choice but to explain and to watch her wisteria face grow stormy with disappointment and disgust. He dreaded it more than he had his own death in that pod.

But when Tav did speak, it was only to ask, “Have you slept at all? I mean, actually slept? Laid down? You can’t get a real rest like that. If you don’t fancy any of the cots, you could try Ketheric’s bed. I’ve seen it, it’s quite grand. And he won’t be needing it anymore.”

Zevlor knew the younger woman well enough by now to recognise her babble for what it was: nerves. Though what she had to be nervous about, he could not fathom.

“Or, if you’d rather, I can have someone draw you a bath? Or find you something else to wear, at least, if you want to get out of—”

Unable to bear another second of sweet considerations he did not deserve and could not accept, Zevlor interrupted, his voice a hopeless rasp, “I know I don't deserve to ask, but ... will you tell me if the others … if any of them survived?”

Tav hesitated: one second, then two. Then—

“Some of them,” she admitted. “Rolan kept the children safe, and they and a few others managed to escape and find refuge with the Harpers. A few more were captured and brought here to Moonrise Towers where we rescued them. They’re all at Last Light Inn together. I can take you there. Now, if you like.”

Zevlor winced, tail spasming under the blanket, at this offer, but did not bother it with a response. Instead, he asked, “Who didn't?”

Her pause was longer this time. Too long. After a minute, Zevlor raised his eyes enough to watch Tav’s bare hands twist together in her lap. She had shed her unfamiliar armor, but, he assumed by the sweat stains and the distinctive wear on the knees of the dark cloth trousers, was still in the soft kit she had worn underneath.

“I … I don't know if that’s the best… or if this is the right time for…” Her hands flexed convulsively as she struggled for words. “I mean … does that really matter right now?”

Zevlor sat up, letting the blanket rustle to the floor, and, at last, looked Tav in the face. It was thinner, he noticed in the candlelight, the infernal ridges of her cheekbones more prominent than when they had first met in the grove. Her modest horns, too, were more obvious now her wild hair was plaited down. What had her own road here been like? Had supplies run short in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, or had tendays of battles and the worry she had wasted on him carved those hollows in her cheeks, drawn those new lines along her brow? He wished he could ask. He wished they could have a different conversation — the sort of heart-to-hearts they’d had what felt like a lifetime ago. But Tav’s heart no longer belonged anywhere near his.

And when Zevlor opened his mouth, his words were not for the friend he was soon to lose or the lover he would never have, but the leader he knew would understand:

“Would it matter to you? If it were your companions, the people you were responsible for — would you need to know?”

Tav had no argument for this. She held Zevlor’s gaze a few seconds more, then swallowed hard, nodded once, and began to recite:

“Asharak … Elegis … Kaldani … Ikaron …Okta … Guex…”

She said each name alone, giving every abruptly-ended life the same solemn space and weight. Zevlor set his shoulders and received them all, stoically. Until Tav came to, “Tilses,” when a guttural noise bubbled horribly in his throat and hot tears appeared fully formed and without warning in the corners of his eyes. He covered his face with a hand, motioning Tav on with the other. He could hear the hint of tears in her own voice as she continued, but she did not stop until she finished her list with, “Locke … Komira,” then, after a beat of sober silence, added:

“I went back for the … their bodies after we, well, neutralised the Shadow Curse — that part’s hard to explain and it isn’t important right now. Anyway. Halsin helped me, and we brought them to Last Light and … and buried them properly. So there’s a place to pay respects, if … if that’s important, too.”

Gratitude enveloped Zevlor: a more substantial blanket than the one crumpled at his feet. He had no intentions of insulting the dead by intruding on their resting place, but there seemed little point saying this to Tav; she would understand soon enough.

“Thank you,” was all he croaked into his hand.

Tav did not reply in words, but the shuffle of boots and a groan of wood sliding over smooth stone indicated she had moved her chair closer. Zevlor knew without looking what she was going to do — the same thing she had always done — and also knew how abominable of him it would be to accept her comfort. But his will had been weakened by sorrow and tears, and the memory of Tav’s frantic hands on his face, in his hair, burned bright in his mind — and other parts of him over which he had even less control. He could not move. He could not abstain from the feel of her fingers: warm, soft, and blessedly, in spite of everything, alive. But they had only just brushed the back of his hand when a rap of knuckles on wood and the creak of the door behind him brought Zevlor’s moral dilemma to an end.

He sat up. Tav, too, straightened, and let her outstretched hand fall to her knee as she peered around Zevlor to the door.

“Tav — oh, you found him, then,” came a vaguely familiar voice that sounded almost as dismal and lost as Zevlor felt. “Good for you. But do you know where the Nightsong went?”

“I think she’s still, uh … catching up with Isobel somewhere.” Tav’s eyes flicked to Zevlor’s as she said this, and, for reasons mysterious to him, a blotchy, storm-cloud blush crept across her cheeks. She returned her attention hastily to the visitor. “I know you need to speak with her, I haven’t forgotten. If she’s not back in a bit, we’ll go look for her together. Alright?”

The voice made some murmur of subdued agreement, but Zevlor was no longer listening to it. He pressed his fingers to the inner corners of his eyes to clear them, then rolled his sore shoulders and steadied himself for the debrief he could put off no longer. Tav had her own people to attend to. He had already wasted far too much of her time.

“I owe you an explanation,” Zevlor began hoarsely the moment he heard the creak and snap of the re-fastened door. “You’ve heard some of it already, I’m sure, from the others. That I … froze, or broke, or some other lie, that is kinder than the truth.”

“Cerys said you surrendered,” Tav inserted, expressionless, into Zevlor’s pause for breath.

His eyes squeezed shut of their own accord, but he wrenched them open and fixed his gaze determinedly on Tav — or, at least, a point on the stone wall beyond her left ear.

“We were ambushed by cultists,” he explained: a flat and efficient report. “We had little hope of defeating them in that damned darkness, but then ... then I heard her. The Absolute. Their false god. Whispering promises in my mind. I would be a paladin again. With a god’s purpose, a god’s power. Everything I needed to protect my people. Everything I needed to—” He stopped short. He would not downplay his failures for Tav, but she did not need the sordid details of the Absolute’s temptation, surely. He cleared his throat and resumed, “And all the while, the cult tortured them: the very people I fancied I could save. They fought and ran and died around me, while I imagined myself their saviour. By the time I regained my senses, it was too late.

“So,” he concluded miserably, “Cerys is only partially right. I did not just surrender to the Absolute. For a moment… I welcomed it.”

His final confession echoed off the room’s stark stone walls and high ceiling, then faded slowly away. And still Zevlor sat, awaiting Tav’s verdict, tail flicking in increasing agitation. He could not bring himself to look at her directly. Instead, his mind raced with visions of the form her building outburst would take: her pretty face screwed up in righteous anger … or soured in subtle revulsion … a babble of unrestrained distress spewed between tears … or her voice sharpened to a knife point as she delivered some scathing rebuke...

Zevlor flinched at the justified fury of his imagined Tav, until the one across from him said at last, all quiet, cautious sympathy:

“It sounds like you were being enthralled. You can hardly blame yourself for that.”

And her defence of him was so unexpected, so ludicrous, he laughed. Or almost laughed. The sound crawled from his throat raw and flayed.

“It would be nice to think so,” he said bitterly. “But whatever these monsters twist us into, I believe it begins in us.”

“Alright, but … don’t you think it says more about you that when you were back in your right mind you chose not to join the Absolute, whatever it offered?”

Tav’s voice remained infuriatingly gentle and measured. Her head was cocked very slightly, hands open on her knees, as if approaching a skittish colt, or a small, stubborn child. Zevlor frowned at her. But was saved from attempting any sort of response by the frenzied creaking of the door and a bang as it hit the stone wall.

“Tav, are you in — yes, you are! Ah, and Zevlor too. Glad to see you made it out.” Zevlor gave a very slight nod of acknowledgment at this, but did not turn round. “I do apologise for such an ill-mannered interruption, but, Tav, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. It is essential I speak with you at once.”

“Gale, is this life or death essential, or a really great story essential?”

“Both.”

The word practically vibrated with the wizard’s clear excitement; one which Tav just as clearly did not share. Her mouth worked in poorly-repressed frustration for a moment, then, apparently deciding it would take longer not to humour him, she sighed through her nose and pushed from her chair, bending to murmur, “Two minutes, I promise,” in Zevlor’s ear as she passed.

He did not reply. For once, Zevlor was grateful for Tav’s departure. He waited until he heard the door swing shut and the wizard’s energetic monologue start up behind it, then slumped forward onto the table, and dropped his head into his hands. He closed his eyes: grief-sick and aching, confused and, somehow, more unhappy than if Tav had just hit him.

It had never occurred to Zevlor that Tav might make excuses for his failure. Could her fondness for him stretch so far as to be willing to overlook such heinous crimes? Or was she in denial? He had considered her a pragmatic, highly competent leader, and impolitic loyalty was not a quality such a leader could afford. But, as memories of Tav at the grove played out across his eyelids, the obvious thought struck Zevlor’s admittedly debilitated brain that while Tav was a leader, she was not a military commander, or any sort of soldier at all. She was, he supposed, more than anything else, a bard. A lover of tales, and the people who inspired them. A hero who preferred speeches to swords. A magician who, when outcomes appeared immutable, pulled new possibilities from thin air — or private trunks. A musician who found the hidden notes of good in nearly everyone she met — violent gith, hot-headed apprentice wizards, archdruids seduced by shadows — and plucked them to the forefront of their individual songs.

That's what she was doing now, with him, Zevlor realised: spinning his failures, the truth of his baser nature, into a story with which he could live. And he loved her for it. Affection and admiration for Tav swelled, warm and invigorating as a bonfire, in his chest…

…and was extinguished the next second by a cold, dark wave of guilt and grief.

The metallic scent of blood. The bodies at his feet. Their last living sights their own leader, unmoved by their pitiful screams—

Zevlor's head shot up from the table. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision, but the scene was seared across his mind, not his eyes. He knew he would never escape it, nor should he. His peoples' deaths would weigh forever on his conscience, their blood permanently stain his hands. Nothing even Tav said could absolve him of that.

“I’m sorry.”

Her voice made Zevlor jump; her words, press his hand to his mouth, worried he might have been speaking his thoughts out loud. If he had, Tav did not acknowledge them further, only transferred her short sword from the bench to the table, then took its previous place. Beside Zevlor. She perched on the edge of the bench, one leg curled underneath her.

“I suppose this means you don’t want to go Last Light, then? Find the others and lead them on to Baldur’s Gate?”

Her sudden brisk tone, and the now multiple voices issuing from under the firmly closed door, led Zevlor to guess Tav expected additional interruptions at any time. He eased his sore body around on the bench to face her.

“Would any of them trust me to?”

It was a rhetorical question. Even Tav could not argue in its favour. Which did not stop her trying.

“Of course they would. I mean, they will. When they understand what really happened. When you explain—”

“No,” and Zevlor himself was surprised at the steel in his voice. “I won’t make excuses. I cannot make amends. It would be foolishness for any of them to trust me again, when I’ve let them down so many times.”

“Alright,” Tav conceded unexpectedly. “I still think many of those points are debatable, but if it’s too much for you now, I understand. So… will you come with me, then? With us?” It bore all the trappings of a casual, throwaway question, but Zevlor did not think he was mistaking the nervous excitement that whispered underneath. “I can't pretend it won't be dangerous. Even with Ketheric dead, we've got more enemies than ever, not to speak of the Absolute itself which is what we’re truly after, but … I could use another blade for what's ahead.”

“Only if you can trust it won’t be buried in your back,” retorted Zevlor grimly. “If it comes to a fight with the Absolute, I would be less than useless to you. Its already swayed me once before.”

“Well, actually,” said Tav, with the air of a Three-Dragon Ante player revealing their winning hand, “we've got a sort of protection against that. It's hard to explain. Gods, everything is now, when did it all get so complicated? But anyway, if that's what you're worried about, you'll definitely be safer with us.”

Tav's mouth curled, anticipating its own smile, so sure she would hear the answer she wanted; the answer Zevlor wanted to give. It would be so easy to say yes … to accept Tav's amnesty, her forgiveness … to join her cause: his new purpose the Absolute’s destruction, his new place at her side.

Everything the Absolute had tempted him with in the first place.

Zevlor closed his eyes again, and, this time, sought that wretched memory out. He forced himself to watch the bodies fall, bodies he could now name. Asharak. Okta. Guex. Tilses. He had entertained temptation before, and it was they who had paid the price. He had failed them. He could not let himself fail Tav.

“No,” said Zevlor, loud enough for the word to bounce off the stone walls; a hundred refusals in his voice. “I can't risk it. I won’t risk it happening again.”

An odd hush made the room seem larger and emptier than before. Zevlor realised the voices outside had fallen silent. As had Tav. He could not even hear her breathing. His eyes found her face without his permission, and she could not have looked more surprised or devastated if he had spat in it. Her tail drooped to the floor.

“Zevlor.” Her voice was delicate and trembling as the fingers she reached out and rested tentatively along the edge of his jaw. “I trust you.”

It took every ounce of Zevlor's self-control, and more he did not know he possessed, to turn his head, dislodging Tav's hand.

“I wish I shared your faith.”

For seconds that recalled the timelessness of his prison, the two of them sat in the dissonant wake of this exchange; together, but, it felt to Zevlor at least, wholly separate, disconnected, for the first time since they had met. Then another importunate rap at the door knocked a groan from Tav. There was a pain in it Zevlor thought too visceral to stem from the interruption alone.

“Yes, alright, I'm coming,” she called, and her words, too, contained a disproportionate grief. She uncurled slowly from the bench, then stood for a moment, as if unable to tear herself away. From the corner of his eye, Zevlor could see her face flit around the room, searching for something: a new angle or untried manoeuvre, perhaps. “Look,” she said at last, “you’ve been through something unspeakably awful. Months worth of awful, in fact. You need to sleep, really sleep, and … we can talk more about what to do when you've had some rest.”

Zevlor knew it was useless to argue. Nor did he have the energy left. To deny Tav — to deny himself of Tav — had drained the last of his strength. He could barely lift his arm to grip the hilt of the short sword and slide it along the table towards her.

“Here,” he said simply, then, “Thank you,” when Tav's slight wince made his heart ache.

“Keep it,” she said just as baldly. “You left your sword at the grove. I’ve got to go deal with … everything. But if I don’t see you before, I’ll come find you in the morning.”

Two abrupt and equally bemusing questions furrowed Zevlor’s brow. But Tav had already walked away. He had time to call out only one of them after her:

“Is there a morning in this place?”

Her hand on the doorknob, Tav turned as she wrenched it open, and offered Zevlor one last smile.

“There will be.”

“And there was, of course,” Zevlor finishes. “I saw it from the ruins of the town beyond Moonrise. I waited until most in the tower had settled to sleep, then slipped out around the side. I stayed there until - until I saw Tav and the others leave.”

He stares into his tankard, light-headed and slightly nauseous: from its contents, or the memory of watching Tav and her companions trek across the ruined road. He had recognised the pale elf lifting his arms to embrace the newborn sunlight, and Karlach's boisterous laugh, and Tav, walking alone, slightly ahead of the rest of her party; and though he could not make out details of her face, he had thought her aspect unusually sober.

“If I'd only followed her then,” Zevlor laments, “or listened to her before, perhaps things would have been ... well...” He sighs heavily. “It doesn't matter now. I thought I was finally doing the right thing. I didn't understand I was really doing what I'd always done: running from my shame ... indulging my own pride.”

“But you do … you do understand now, don't you?” Alfira ventures tentatively. “I mean, that none of it — what happened to us — was your fault?”

Zevlor shakes his head. Which isn't an answer.

“Some strategies work in theory,” he muses after a minute's contemplation, “but fail when enacted in actual battle.”

Which is hardly more of one.

“Yes, well,” interjects Lakrissa's voice as the privacy curtain suddenly parts, “strategies and battle plans are all well and good, but you can't win a fight without food. Armies marching on their stomachs, and that,” and she pushes a bowl in front of Zevlor. “Roveer's closing up the kitchen for the night, but he had a bit of pudding left over.”

Zevlor stares into the bowl. It's filled to the brim with generous slices of some sweet-smelling loaf soaked in syrup and dusted with sliced almonds, almost too decorous-looking to eat. Nonplussed, he catches Alfira's eye. By her blank expression, she's every bit as bewildered as he. Zevlor lifts his gaze at last to Lakrissa. But all she says by way of explanation is:

“Alan's ale on an empty stomach's enough to make anyone sick. And, I reckon you've suffered enough.”

[pikmininaplane]

Fine whatever nobody asked but here’s how I would rewrite SAO if I had a say in the matter

Aincrad:

– Have the arc be its own season. Let it last the whole 24 episodes!!

– Have some more early Aincrad/pre-beater episodes showing Kirito already struggling to fit in with the others before the reveal. Underline how the whole beater thing is a way for him to both reinforce the others’ cohesion and go do his own thing no matter how detrimental it is to him. Hell, the Re: Aincrad manga has a few chapters about both a floor 1 experience and another first meeting with Asuna and it's really good!

– See the side stories from Kirito’s POV. Don’t switch to Silica’s and Liz’s POVs at random, have Kirito hear about them and seek them out or smth. Also please stop making all the girls have a crush on Kirito... maybe leave that to either Sachi or Liz? And Asuna ofc

– Make the characters from the side stories appear again!!! Have the leader of the Moonlit Black Cats survive, show up again later and have Kirito deal with it! Show Kirito returning to Liz to take care of his weapons and armor! Have Silica appear during the slice of life portion? Idk just spitballing ideas. Also Agil side story I'm so serious why does he get so little screentime

– Show the stuff that's mentioned in later arcs too! Have an episode/part of an episode dedicated to that expedition where they neutralized the Laughing Coffin players so it's more impactful when it's mentioned again in Phantom Bullet! Have Yuna and Eiji (from the movie) show up in the background or in minor scenes! The world is your oyster!

– Show Kirito’s time in the KoB and how he struggles to fit in with such a massive structured guild and would much rather do his own thing. Maybe have a fun dynamic with Asuna being above him hierarchically?

– Make the slice of life cabin part longer and have Yui show up at the very beginning of it. Have them go on nice fun adventures to give the viewer time to get attached to her and eventually get maximum heartbreak

– Setup the Heathcliff reveal more. Have Kirito notice more and more inconsistencies during his time in the KoB. Have people around the game whisper rumors about how his health bar never goes too low and how he might be a cheater. Have Asuna praise him, too – make him an important figure to her before the myth gets falsified

– I’m fine with the duel being the way it is just give it its own episode

Fairy Dance:

– Also have the arc be its own season!!

– Ok hear me out. I actually think the Kirito & Suguha plotline could work if you, y'know, removed the incest. Show that the two of them used to be close before SAO happened, but that two years of absence drove them apart – maybe have kendo be a thing they used to do together, but now Kirito's still in rehab and too weak physically to resume. Show that Suguha got into ALO because she wanted to understand what had driven Kirito to VRMMOs, in an attempt to get closer to him despite everything. Have them meet in the virtual world and have Leafa find an actual friend in Kirito, someone she can finally confide in about her brother (and maybe other stuff, too). Have the details get more and more precise until Kirito finally realises who she is and doesn't dare tell her the truth but distanciates himself from her nonetheless. Have Suguha feel abandoned by her one friend, only to find out that he's actually her brother and feel shocked and betrayed. Make them reconcile!! The identity shenanigans can work it doesn't have to be gross

– Give that boy trauma!! Show that despite there being a chance that he will find Asuna in ALO, he is legit scared of diving back into VR and getting stuck in another world again. Show that the other world feels alien in a whole new way, now that his real body is weak and his virtual body feels different. Maybe touch on the horror of controlling another body than yours and being unable to move your real body a bit? As a treat?

– Build That World! ALO has such an interesting setting, with its nine races and references to Norse mythology, but we only ever get to see three of them (Cait Siths, Sylphs and Salamanders) in this arc and one of them is overtly The Bad One. Switch it up!! Show more of them!! Get into the geopolitics of it all!! I genuinely cannot believe that there isn't a single major Pooka character in the entire show. Why create nine races if you don't show them off?

– Actually here's my pitch for a fully reworked plot: Kirito arrives in this new world, reunites with Yui etc, and drops directly in Alne. After finding Leafa and getting explanations from her, he goes to conquer Yggdrasil right away, but gets fucked up by the creatures inside and victory seems impossible. He then remembers something: Agil, the one person from SAO that he managed to find in real life (along with comatose Asuna), told him he could find him in the game if he needed help.

Kirito and Leafa therefore travel to the capital of the Gnomes to find Agil, and accidentally get involved in some kind of local conflict (maybe the Gnomes and Spriggans don't get along so well and he unknowingly steps into a wasps' nest?), but manage to resolve it with Agil's help and happen to get in good terms with the Gnome leader.

Agil then tells them that he heard some of Kirito's old allies have started playing ALO, too, but they're all members of different races, and suddenly their quest becomes a journey throughout the map to visit the different nations and find all of their old friends. They go and find Silica, Liz, and Klein in their respective nations, and, on their way, meet new allies in the other nations, befriending new (or returning?*) Imp, Pooka and Undine characters. Finding his old friends allows Kirito to get a new perspective on full diving – they all returned to it despite their trauma for a variety of reasons, but ultimately it was healing for them, and it can be for him too.

They also keep accidentally (or voluntarily) getting their nose into the other nations' business (acting as an intermediary for those of them that are in conflict, finding lost reliques and settling old feuds, solving interpersonal problems) and getting the various leaders' support, until finally they decide to try taking on Yggdrasil again, this time with all the races' combined support, making it a game-wide event.

Same thing as the original from here on out, Kirito finds out the quest wasn't supposed to be doable but still gets past the door, he meets up with Asuna, they defeat the villain, get the seed, happy ending!

– Speaking of Asuna, screw making her a damsel in distress. Instead of being held captive in a cage and abused by her fiance, have her stuck in a nightmare of her own. She's getting experimented on in her sleep, and that reflects in the game as, idk, some kind of unending series of trials and enemies that she has to go through everyday. She's still stuck and unable to contact people, but at least she's active and she keeps having cool fights! Also, no tentacles, by god no tentacles

– Her fiance can still be a creep but maybe dial back the sexual abuser thing and dial up the mad scientist aspect instead. He can still be possessive whatever. Oh, and move the wedding deadline to like a month away or something, just so the plot has more room to breathe

Phantom Bullet:

– I don't actually think I'd change that much about this arc? I actually think it's the best arc in the series. I mean the BoB could hypothetically be made longer, with more enemies and all, but I don't really think that's necessary.

(– Actually scratch that make Kirito transfem. Slash half joking :))

Calibur:

– Just edit it out? It doesn't really add much to the plot. All it does is give Kirito Excaliber and introduce Sinon's ALO avatar, so uh. Not much to say

Mother's Rosario:

– I also don't think I'd change that much about it because damn this arc made me cry buckets. Maybe use the additional episodes from deleting Calibur to flesh out the other Sleeping Knights, outside of Yuuki and Siune? Also have the whole gang show up to hold back that one guild, not just Kirito and Klein, what on earth were they doing back then

– Wait actually. Don't make Asuna a healer. I'll never understand why Asuna was turned into a healer when she was literally a skilled swordswoman in SAO. Have her fight in the front!! Make a cool duo with Yuuki, drawing direct parallels to when she fought by Kirito's side!! She Would Not be an Undine I'll tell you that much

[curiouselleth]

Be He Foe or Friend: Silmarillion choose your own adventure fic!

How Can We Heal?: Finrod in the Halls of Mandos, but the Halls are kinda torture and super traumatic.

Veil of Starlight: Elured and Elurin survive and Elured is Gil-galad.

What We Became: from the wolfmadness AU. The blood of Sauron's wolves drives people mad. Sauron experiments with the little king who dared to challenge him (Finrod).

Requested fic; was initially requested about 2 weeks ago, just started writing it.

Raistlin is Eru: crackfic, exactly what it sounds like, Raistlin destroyed the world, got a second chance to make a new one. He is Eru, and I saw some interesting connections between Raistlin's past and actions and possible Eru motivations and they blended and made sense lol.

Redeemed Sauron encounters re-embodied Finrod & Celebrimbor one-shot: this one is just what it sounds like lol

Powers AU: as soon as the Noldor re-unite in beleriand the start developing powers, powers based off of their experiences, skills, and environments. Nothing super flashy - except when they first appear and in times of distress and such. So most Noldor who burned the ships get fire powers, and most who crossed the helcaraxe have ice, cold, or water powers. Right now I think I'll have about 1/6 of the elves NOT get powers, for no particular reason.

Feanor!Curufin: Feanor dies, doesn't know if Amrod survives or not, and begs and begs the valar and Namo to let him return to try to save them, and fix his mistakes. Finally they relent, with conditions. But by then it has been a long time, and he is sent back to the second kinslaying into Curufin's body as he dies. One of the conditions; he cannot straight-out tell anyone he is Feanor.

High King Finrod: what it sounds like, Finrod survives, goes to Balar, when Gondolion falls he becomes High King because Gil-galad is too damn young for this. Particularly focusing on when the hosts of Valinor and Finarfin arrive. I need the angst and shock and horror.

Finrod at the first kinslaying: so much more angst then it says on the tin. He is there, protecting the Teleri. Just protecting. Not fighting back offensively. He encounters Caranthir, but Caranthir is blind with the rage of battle. And nearly kills Finrod, before Aegnor and Angrod arrive and beat him back, rescuing Finrod. Finrod almost dies. Then when he is fighting Sauron, Sauron's spells do not just re open trauma and mental wounds. But that one.

Morgoth Wins AU: There is A Lot here. I wrote 1336 words just summarizing what I want in it. But it starts with Morgoth offering the Feanorians a deal they can't refuse. And cities fall by their sword on his behalf. *slaps fic idea* this bad boy can fit SO much angst in it.

[winter-angst]

How would the hydra husbands react to figuring out they love/are attracted to each other?<3

Idk what kind of relationship you see them having 😭

(Warning, a bit lengthy)

I can see Brock being instantly attracted to Jack bc as much as he tries to cram down his same sex attraction it rears its head constantly. Of course he denies this to himself, saying he just appreciates a healthy, fit body. (But, oh, his eyes are pretty…) He keep it to himself, forcefully tells himself “he’s just on the boys”. Brock tries to keep a distance but Jack is everything that Brock could ever want as a partner. He’s confident, works in the same field with an unpredictable schedule that would leave others feeling neglected but Jack actually gets and respects it, he always has Brock’s back in and out of the field, shows Brock respect but is also not afraid of contradiction when he feels like Brock is making a bad decision. So they start to hang out more, and Brock finds himself falling in love which is as exciting as it is distressing.

And Jack has finally met someone who can handle himself in high stress positions, has similar stances on life, and is highly competent. Of course he also notices that Brock is attractive. He’s content to let things remain as Brock wants them to be because he enjoys spending time with him (and he loves his job and doesn’t want to risk demotions; and, of course, he enjoys spending time with Brock even if it is only platonic).

But, after Jack saves Brock’s life, Brock feels indebted and decides to push the boundary of comradely relationships and asks if Jack wants to get drinks together after an op. And Jack is startled but quick to agree. They both go home, get cleaned up, and meet up. And it’s during that night that they both realize they each have a magnetic force pulling them together. Jack realizes that not only does he find Brock attractive but that he wants to know him more personally; to see what the man is like behind the scenes.

So they end up making plans to meet up together at the end, something that becomes a trend. They move from team mates to friends. And, the more time they spend together, more. Brock decides to playfully flirt in a pointedly “no homo” way but it quickly proves to be a poor mask to his actual feelings. And Jack quickly picks up on this but goes with it, unwilling to push Brock beyond what he’s comfortable with.

Eventually Brock confesses his feelings, probs after having way too much to drink, and Jack calmly says he feels the same way which stuns Brock. Jack takes him home and they don’t talk for a few days, Brock having a mini meltdown of disbelief because he knows it’s dangerous for job not to mention he’s being more open that he ever has been.

But on like the third day of Brock hiding in his apartment Jack shows up a the door with takeout from their favorite Chinese place and Brock just silently lets him in, waiting for Jack to tell him that what they’re doing is dangerous but Jack firmly tells him he doesn’t care. And by the time Brock is packing the leftovers into his fridge they’ve agreed to try the whole “relationship” thing, with the understanding that it’s very lowkey because neither wants to risk higher ups finding out.

And, as for their relationship Jack becomes Brock’s conscience and ultimate force when it comes to personal conflicts. And Jack loves to take care of Brock, happy to come over and help him clean because he’s chronically messy and yet gets overwhelmed by it. They grocery shop together and Jack helps Brock comes to terms with his food issues (personal hc, sorry lol) and Brock embraces this new way of life with Jack. He soon can’t imagine life without him.

Who else will tuck him into bed after drinking too much? Who else would he call after a nightmare about the horrors he’s seen in the field or trauma of his chaotic childhood? How can anyone else make him feel as important and loved as Jack does?

Brock absolutely becomes co-dependent but Jack embraces that responsibility, focused solely on ensuring that Brock is well cared for and always feels loved and supported regardless of what he’s going through and what mood funks he finds himself in. Even when Brock gets in his head about their relationship, feeling like he’s taking more than he’s giving, Jack is quick kiss him on the forehead and tell him just how much he loves and cares about him and how he doesn’t want to be anyone else ❤️

[iihauntedmuffinii]

A Breath of Fresh Air (The Boys Fanfic)

SUMMARY

Daphne Bennett is a psychiatrist for kids in the foster system. She relies on her powers to help her clients unlock their traumas and emotions in a safe space. Unlike most superheroes, her powers come with a price. She is losing control of her body's health and mental state and sadly, her usual tricks aren't working. When the fluctuations in her powers are too painful she decides it's time to try and find a cure. A cure that she thinks resides center focus on The Seven. Through odd circumstances she is placed near the famous superhero team and their loose cannon of a leader, Homelander.

I have a Spotify playlist associated with the story, so if your interested, and don't care about chapter title spoilers I recommend checking it out.

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST:

CHAPTER TWO: Feeling Too Much

I awoke with pain throbbing in my head and my body felt like it had been beaten to a bleeding pulp. I blurrily look down at myself to see I had been dressed in a hospital gown, and the IVs were jutting out of my arms like a horror show. That was only a minor nuisance in comparison to the group of doctors looking at me through a viewing window. I jerk away from my intruders’ stares trying to pull my IVs out, only to finally notice my arms and legs were chained to the bed.

“Where am I?” I yell out trying to sound strong, but my wispy voice comes more as a strained whimper. The doctors keep jotting their notes down only inciting my ire. I scream at them as they leave the window–the only sight I can see from the outside world now. The empty dark window keeps me company as I wait in my hospitable bed for the entire night.

The interchangeable white lab coats flicker in my life for what felt like a blur. Endless and not distinguishable from day and night. The drugs that were injected into me, the endless tests that drained me to near exhaustion, and the torture to test my endurance were all done by indistinguishable white coats that drained my humanity every day.

“Where am I?” I ask one doctor another day when I'm more lucid. She does not bat an eyelash as she injects me with a green liquid substance I couldn't name. I faint, my instant reaction to the drug. I don’t know if that is what was intended when given to me.

A blur of time passes by me that I cannot decipher. The same pattern of torture continues as I succumb to the reactions of being a lab rat to these so called “doctors.” One shot of mysterious liquid had me breakout in hives and hear a murmuring buzz in my ears. A lab doctor asked me to manipulate his current mood another day. Without thinking properly on what would be the repercussions, and the drug cocktail they’ve been injecting me with everyday might have had a hand in what happened next. But maybe that was all an excuse  to lash out, I don't know.

He burst out into a fit of giggle dropping his clipboard abruptly and falling, face flat on the hard shiny floor. He wouldn’t stop laughing even as the guards dragged him off to who knew where. An inkling of guilt itched at the edge of my brain. Without enough time to think on it a nurse scurries in to quickly drug me. I don’t know if that was a blessing or not.

More days blurred past and more tests were given to me. It felt like my life was someone else's and this current existence was all I knew. Tests were given sporadically to me throughout my time in this zombie-like state. I manipulated emotions, thoughts, and memories. The more they make me experiment on people the more I fear my own powers. My parents’ faint whispers of worry have morphed into disdain and judgment in my mind. Throughout it all I did not ponder enough on who was holding me captive in the first place. Which, thinking like a normal functioning human you would presume I would have. But, on a more coherent night I finally gained enough to think on it. Having that in mind my curiosity and pain fuels me to take my life back. To come up with an escape plan.

So, I decided to fight by measuring the time I was the least loopy and then I would strike. They were giving me drugs between night and morning, and I struck at the brisk hour that was 4am. When the first doctor appears that morning to give me my breakfast of a drug cocktail. All different from the last. The first scientist to go down convulses on the floor in uncontrollable sobs, the sobs echoing into the halls. They did not relent until I forced every single person who entered the room to shake into sobs so hard they were coughing up blood. I would not stop until someone took me seriously or no one was left to stop me from leaving.

“I will speak to whoever has me captive here and bargain for my freedom.” I dryly rasp out looking directly at the camera in the corner. The doctors’ sobs echo in my bare bones of a hospital room, a concert of human pained echoed everywhere around me. It made my stomach twist painfully into knots, but I held my glare on the camera. Determined to not show them any weakness.

“Let my doctors go and I will speak with you about your…predicament.” A dry, serious voice I could not recognize comes through the speakers. I let the scientists go all at once, staggering slightly from the over usage of my powers.

“You have five minutes before I mind control someone you love to murder you.” I bluff, not caring if I sounded heartless, as long as I sounded believable.

A few minutes of silence later; a tall lanky black man in an impeccable pinstriped gray suit gracefully strolls into the bare white room. The convulsing doctors writhing on the floor sobbing in pain seemed to not phase him a bit. His piercing eyes pinning me down like a creepy portrait in those mystery novels. I gulp loudly, nervously moving back and forth, not taking my eyes off the unknown enemy. But recognition came suddenly and with abandon.

“Wait, your Stan Edgar. The Stan Edgar, Ceo of Vought Co!” I exclaim loudly, confusion laces in my voice and expression.

“Your family is being closely monitored at this very moment, Miss Bennett. So, I would be careful with whom you threaten your powers with, as I have much bigger fish than you to worry about.” He does not beat around the bush. My face freezes with surprise before I glare at him, not holding back my disdain. He looks cool as a cucumber. The rumors about him seem to be true.

“What you don’t understand is that I can make you kill yourself at any moment if you don’t do what I say.” I threaten harshly, not recognizing myself in those my words.

“I wouldn’t be so sure. I have stated before; I have your family and friends in the palm of my hands. They will be killed if you do something to me, you understand?” He states giving me no real room to bargain anything. He thinks I’m no monster.

“O-okay, don’t hurt them. How about this, I will do something for you anytime, anywhere. Just let me go.” I could feel his cold stare travel across my body judging every movement I made like a puzzle trying to fit all the pieces together.

“No, you have much more potential than that deal grants. What I have decided is that you will be my guard dog.”

“Guard dog?”

“Publicly, you will be The Seven’s super therapist. But to Vought you will be the leash that tethers all these heroes’ sanity back to the company, and reminding them of their best interests.” He stated, not batting a single eyelash. He was stiff as a board not moving an inch and his hard cobalt stare did not deter anytime he spoke. This was no bluff.

“In my contract I want, with my compliance, to be written as a requirement that my family and friends will be unharmed." I firmly state trying to hide my trembling hands behind my back.

“You will be given a contract with those stipulations included; first, you will get cleaned up before coming upstairs to sign.” He leaves with a quick turn, turning his back to me as if there still wasn’t a sobbing doctor laying in the corner of the room. How exactly do I get ‘cleaned up’ in this rotten white empty space of a torture chamber? With that thought a dozen more doctors in white lab coats surrounded me all coming in with an assortment of different weapons pointed towards me.

“We will escort you to the bathroom, miss.” One of a dozen told me, but for the life of me I could not figure out who said it.

I haven’t seen a bathroom for what felt like years, finally I can clean myself like an actual human being. No more bedpan and no more whore baths. I was pushed out of my white jail cell and forced to twist around a bunch of white halls that purposely disoriented the senses. No specific person from what I could tell was directing me. We passed so many white doors before one of the doctors forced me to a stop with a shove. I hurriedly bask in the cleaning process, first throwing myself into the cold little shower.

They all stood outside, waiting with bated breath for the end of it. Cleaning my body and hair for what felt like the first time in months I rejoiced, taking my sweet time. I got out after my fingers began to turn pruny. Getting out I see they left me with my old white blouse that had blood on it and my pencil skirt that looked torn on the sink’s countertop. I guess it was better than a hospital gown. I braided my hair to get it out of the way, but the cold damp wet strands laying on the nape of my neck only chilled me further.

The army of white lab coats swarmed me, pushing me towards our destination. I didn’t brace myself for their rough handling of my person as they dragged me to an elevator. I continued forward in a blur not feeling in control of my body. As if I was disassociating, something I've never experienced before.

The halls were large and I'd even call it ostentatious were it not for some of the more elegant choices in the furniture. The large wooden door, the only one to be on this floor it seems, was opened for me by a petite woman that wore a similar outfit to myself, only obviously clean and polished. The doctors left one by one like ant armies marching off in a uniform line to their queen. I gulped loudly, my dry throat feeling even drier as I was left alone with one of the most important men in the world.

“Come in, Ms. Bennett.” A simple welcome never made my heart stop before, and without my powers I would be able to presume this dangerous man is used to affecting people this way. A sheep in wolf’s clothing. I try to casually sit with some grace, with as much grace anyone could when you previously threatened their loved ones. Stan Edgar smiled at me as if he didn’t just threaten my loved ones as well. I stumble slightly as I sit center on the velvet blue loveseat across his desk.

“Now that you're fit for the company we can discuss our negotiations further.”

“Negotiations? This would be a negotiation if I wasn’t being held hostage.”

“I digress, because of your current predicament I hold most, if not all the power in this dynamic. You should know this by now. So, here is your contract and you have not much more say in the matter.”

“Bullying me into submitting? Probably has worked for you from the beginning of your career, but I’m no victim.”

“But your family, friends, and precious reputation as a reputable therapist is at jeopardy here, Miss Bennett.”

“Well, I see these so-called “negotiations” are over. I will sign but the contract must include my end of the bargain. I will not cooperate further if this is not agreed upon.”

“Of course, read your contract thoroughly and you will see this is included.” I glare daggers at him as I try to decipher his emotions and thoughts. His aura did not show itself nor did any of his emotions, and pushing any further was out of the question. He was not an easy person to read.

"I don't have much of a choice." I spit out.

“Everyone has a choice.” He smiles down at me smugly. I bite my tongue from insulting the man as I sign my name away to a corporation that could destroy me and everything I love. Without further fanfare he called his secretary in  to walk me out.

“Wait, before I go you have to tell me how long I’ve been here?” I asked before the secretary could shove me out, and she looked like she really wanted to.

“A week and three days.” I freeze in place as my thoughts scramble all over the place, reacting like an old broken computer. Error. Error. Before I could ask more the assistant pushed me out of Mr. Edgar’s office.

I enter the fancy elevator feeling numb from head to toe. The ice queen of an assistant was still as a statue beside me, not giving me a glance. If I couldn’t sense her trepidation like a thick fog I would think she was a robot. The aftertaste of lukewarm tap water bubbled up my throat, an annoying reminder of my powers. The drugs have kept my powers from me for so long, it's actually kinda nice to feel like myself again. Wanting to mute and control my powers didn’t equate to me wanting to be in a constant state of fogginess. So, the experience did help me realize one thing; having my powers was a better option than becoming a zombie.

I make this realization as the secretary with no name or introductions walks me out into the lobby. People are everywhere and my senses go haywire. I push myself to gain control and use my standard methods. I stand still completely and begin my breathing exercises. The secretary’s pointy hands dig into my shoulders to get my attention, but I ignore it.

I look up suddenly to a confident Homelander marching towards me with a graceful strut. The presence of his chaotic and tumultuous energy thrums loudly in my ears like a drum with an odd beat. A rhythm I can’t seem to get out of my head. I try to suppress the feeling as I step behind the ice statue that is Stan Edgar’s assistant.

“And what do we have here in our midst?” Homelander’s voice booms across the lobby, presenting himself as playful. His act didn’t feel genuine in the slightest. Those crystal blue eyes crinkled in a way that only further showcased his charming dimples, which all his posters displayed proudly. The uncanniness of it made goosebumps run down my arms and the hair on my neck stand straight up. The chill that ran down my spine did not evade his sharp eyes, and his glaringly white smile grew even wider and more sharp with the long pause of silence that settled between us. “Running away without my permission?” His sudden question within our mutual silence made me flinch back, his amusement only grew more apparent on his face. The assistant interrupted our odd battle of wills, our coup d'etat, if you had to surmise.

“Under Sir Edgar’s direct orders Mrs. Bennett will be escorted out to get her bearings straight, and will return not too long after.” The ice in her tone did not go unnoticed between either one of us. Homelander glared daggers at the petite blonde as she pushed me gently towards the exit. “I will be seeing you early in the morning, won’t I Ms. Bennett?” Her smile is sharp as it is bright.

“Of course Ms…?”

“Good.” She does a quick turn back from where we came from, Edgar’s office, without another word. I quickly turn all of my hyper focus onto Homelander, his body language screams immediate discomfort and annoyance, obvious in the way his body holds himself tight and upright. He noticed my prolonged stare and this seemed to push his edgy and defensive feelings into my brain harder. His discomfort made me want to scratch my tongue off. What I need to focus on is bringing him to my side--not his mood swings, which includes all the other supes I interact with from here on. I can’t have these superheroes see me as anything other than helpful–if an annoying–option to  destress in a healthy way. If that was even possible for some of these people. I can’t be their enemy, cause if I am that means I’m as good as dead. Including the possibility of them targeting my family.

“So, you already have Edgar under your thumb, don’t you?” He gets into my personal space, no one looks my way to see my obvious discomfort nor his threatening tone. A work environment used to abuse if I ever did see one.

“Mr. Edgar has hired me under extreme circumstances, from what you can already guess. I think you will eventually see this as a benefit to The Seven, Sir, if I do say so myself.” I gently try to say without irritating him further. He growls under his breath as his eyebrows scrunch further up creating an extremely fierce scowl that would haunt my dreams.

“To the benefit of Stan Edgar more like. Stealing our secrets in the disguise of “self-help,” makes me want to vomit.” His burning whisper of threat chillingly crawls down my spine and takes hold of my heart, and it won't stop aggressively beating. I know he can hear every quickening thump in my chest, but I can't look away from his cold stare. He wouldn't look away, and in my stubborn childishness I didn't look away either. Trying miserably to calm myself down--as if to win some sort of competition between us, but I don't know when it became this way. I could just decipher a hint of something other than bravado and cold hate from Homelander, something that tasted like yearning.

“You may not like that I invaded your headspace–and by accident might I add–but I saw that you needed my help. And probably everyone else on this superhero team does too, and I don’t think anyone, like your fanbase, would be mad publicly knowing that. It could even help grow your personal outlooks on certain situations–” Homelander cuts me off with a firm hand abruptly thrust near my face, palm open. A strike if just a few inches closer.

“Thank you Ms. Walt-fucking-Disney I really needed a pep talk about how much I fucking needed therapy. Thank you, you’ve won best therapist of the year award! Do you want to know what you’ve won?”

“I understand it will be hard to earn your trust after the way we first met, but I promise I take my job very seriously.” I try to put all my sincerity in my voice as I could.

“You’ve won my ‘Me Not Giving a Shit Award,’ Ms. Bennett.” He pushes his face close in my space looking me straight in the eyes. Him hunched over me with his large body was a threat between the two of us, unsaid but heard.

“I’m sorry Mr. Homelander for invading your personal space without your consent and I wish I could take it back, but I can’t. I will work hard in helping you and your team to redeem myself in your eyes.” I bow my head looking back up to see if there was any hint of approval beneath his icy blue stare. They only reflect back an empty coolness I could not quite decipher, but it tasted bitter.

“We will see how long you will last.” He huffs, a snort of derision blowing heatedly in my face as if he was some kind of bull.

“Homelander!” Queen Maeve appears at his side out of nowhere. Not even a hint of her usual stormy aurora gave away her presence, only making me nervously pick at my nails not knowing what to do with my hands. “We have to get to the shoot for the Saving America campaign at 10, or did you forget?” She drapes her arm across his shoulders, seeming to get a thrill of adrenaline from irritating Homelander. Her closeness was causing a storminess to take over his thoughts, or maybe it was from interrupting his line of questioning. Either way I was thankful for the distraction.

“I know Maeve. I’ll be there in a bit, I have more to discuss with our newly appointed “therapist.”

“What? Therapist?” Maeve asked out loud, confusion written all over her face. Homelander’s glare was intense and seemed to emanate heat. With that intense stare down Maeve turns away with a shrug and leaves me to my demise. Who knew Queen Maeve, known for her helpfulness and bravery, wasn’t so helpful. Probably all marketing.

“Now, when we come back from set I want you back in this building so we can discuss this whole therapy session thing. If you're not back here by the time my shoot is over I will find you...” He trails off as his eyes flicker about watching his surroundings. The sweet spicy taste of excitement tingled on my tongue, his thrill by his demands given to me gave him a sense of dark pleasure. The thought and feeling made me freeze in place like a rabbit caught in a trap, right before its unwitting end. I won’t bend to it, I already have to bend for Stan Edgar, I’m not bending for Homelander too.

“I have an official document given to me by your boss himself. I will be returning tomorrow early in the morning to be briefed for the public and the team, no earlier no later. Ergo, my contract does not include bowing to the whims of any superhero, that includes you.”

“It’s in the smallprint, you just gotta read between the lines Ms. Bennett. Be here or I will find you, got it?” He threatened with his usual charming voice. I could hear the charm being replicated dozens of times in his commercials, usually selling something sugary, unhealthy, and overpriced.

“It’s not in my contract.” I weakly state unknowingly, shaking my head defending my stance, my bouncy golden curls finally dry enough to spring hitting my cheeks without realizing it. His smirk just grows aggressively wider, taunting me with his too sharp canines.

“I guess we will see.” With that he turns away with a dramatic twist in his cape, making me think he so with such flare on purpose. Prone to dramatics then. Meaning if I didn’t show up he may be making good on what he promised, in a dramatic fashion, might I add.

Something to worry about, but before I fret over that I need to try and contact my family...No matter how life threatening it seemed to be I needed to reassure them that I was alright. The lobby was silent, a rush hour dispersed including the heroes themselves. I finally had the energy to leave the extravagant lobby in my well worn and now shoddy clothes. Stumbling out into the city feeling like a stranger in a place I once called home.

I hold my bag’s leather straps in a tight white knuckle grip, and my heart sped up to a degree I couldn’t control. I felt like I couldn’t get enough air, as if I was drowning in a sea of people. The pushing crowd threw me around as I stumbled across sidewalks and store fronts. I trip near a wooden and well worn bench in middle of a busy sidewalk, finally forcing myself to sit. Looking back and forth I find myself far away from the Vought headquarters, at least far enough away for me to not see any visual signs of them.

I force my shoulders to relax and force my breathing to a slow, normal pace. I decide, finally, to look through my non-expensive leather bag. There all of my things lay as if I wasn’t kidnapped not just a minute ago, nothing different to showcase what I went through. I look through each of my inner pockets to find my slick new phone intact with its cute blue glittery case sparkling innocently back at me.

I see over a hundred messages and voicemail notifications on my phone’s home page pop up with a blearing light. The most coming from my parents, Olivia, and my workplace. I start with the most recent voicemail from my mom’s cell phone, my hands start to shake with anticipation.

“Hey, honey I wish you got back to us instead of your new employer THE STAN EDGAR, CEO for The Vought Corporations. The company that establishes super heroes, honey! You know that you can’t be involved in that community, for your own sake. They are dangerous and your powers cannot be used for their gain. Mr. Edgar called us personally to tell us of your new “employment.” That this radio silence is because of an extreme vetting practice that Vought is widely known for. Mr. Edgar even enthused about how valuable you would be as superhero therapist for The Seven. As I’ve surmised, this situation you're in is not an easy trap to escape. But sweety, please come back home and we can escape town together. We know people, okay we can figure it out! You don’t have to do what they’re saying because they have big fancy lawyers, okay? Honey, I don’t want you mixed up in that…” Mom’s voice quivered and stuttered out before continuing. “Please call me back once you can. Love you.” She finishes not mentioning anything about Dad, and that only made me worry more. I move on to Olivia’s most recent message trying not to dwell on my mom’s fear filled voicemail.

“I know I got you those tickets, Daph; I saw you faint in the middle of idle! You’re lucky you scared me only half to death with worry. I was just glad I was contacted by Vought. You getting this job is a huge win for you, even if you have to deal with that superhero nonsense, it'll be worth the paycheck. Call me when you're done with your “super serious company vetting.” Love you, bye!” Olivia’s chirpy voice coming through the speaker gave me an instant dose of calmness. The millions of texts spanning the timeframe of me disappearing to the Morning Cup of Joey showing gave me an example of their wide range of emotions that Olivia and my parents went through. The amount of texts in my phone were more than I’ve ever had before, makes sense, with the doom of it all. I’m glad that at least's Vought’s excuses of “extreme vetting” helped calm them down. And apparently a personal call from the Stan Edgar was good as gold, the bastard.

“Hello, Dr. Bennett, we are glad to hear about your recent successful career promotion in your field. We are sad to see you leave but are happy for you and your future. Your severance and insurance package will be sent to you in the mail. Your families have been assigned another therapist and have been given notice since your sudden departure. We are sorry again to see you leave but happy to see you thrive, good day Dr. Bennett.” The sweet as syrup voice rang from the phone with a bland tone only an A.I. could replicate. I realize it's my assistant’s nasally voice Ms. Sydney Regis’s. I stuff my phone back in my bag glad to never hear that lady’s voice again, trying to look on the positive side of things.

To look on the positive side of things after being held against my will for over a week, to be forcibly removed from a job I loved, and be anxious for the safety of my family and friends at all times cause now I’m the therapist of a bunch of superhero brats! But I’m going to try and stay positive. Cause that’s what a Bennett does, stay positive while in the middle of a shitstorm. That’s what my father always said, so I’m going to do that, things could always get worse.

“Honey, I’m so glad you called. I was worried sick for you! Tell me everything and please honey for god’s sake tell me the truth.”

“Hey mom.” Is the only thing I can think to say, just happy to know she’s okay

“Gosh, it is so good to hear your voice. Mr. Edgar’s call was enough to tell us you are in deep doo-doo, sweety. I mean so deep that we might have to dig you up and scram out of here, if you get what I’m saying?” She not so subtly implies over the phone and silence held between us for just a moment. I can’t help but roll my eyes and give a deep sigh, this was no school board she could talk her way out of. I can’t let them get into the middle of this because of me and my problems. My powers and actions are already targeting them. I can’t have it get any worse for them.

“No, mom. I-I am doing great…the job offer they gave is generous. So generous I couldn’t pass up the job right then and there. So, everything is...great.”

“Honey, I know when you're lying to me. Even on the phone.”

“I’m excited to be a part of this public campaign for promoting therapy and making it more acceptable for people to pursue. I will not only be helping The Seven but also people all around the world.” I say with as much passion as I possibly can out of my already drained being.

“Just promise us to make time for family once in a while, okay?” I can hear in her voice a sense of resignation.

“I promise.”

“Oh, and your dad wanted to say hi,” She chirps before I can threaten to hang up. I can't help but lovingly roll my eyes at their usual routine. I focus on the receiver as I hear my father’s voice grumble what I barely decipher as a hello. “Okay honey. Just remember we're always here for you. Love you.” The receiver dies and the call ends with a final note that makes my heart skip. I hope I keep my promise to see them soon. Before second guessing myself I call Olivia next.

“Oh my god how are you doing Daph? Are you okay? Say something only I would be able to decipher as SOS?” The last bit sounded like a joke but I couldn’t help but latch onto that thought, but not even strong Olivia can fight against Vought.

“I’m just tired from all of the conferences I’ve been through. They make every new Vought employee jump through a million hoops. I guess that’s why we get paid the big bucks.” I fake a happy voice, sounding too cheery and high pitched in my ears, but I hope nonetheless that she goes along with it.

“Wow, I’m so happy for you Daph! A dream job falling right into your lap after such a dramatic exit with Homelander. It’s gotta be one of the most interesting job interviews ever! Have you talked to any of them? Are they all like how they are on TV?”

“I haven’t really talked to any of them yet. I also can’t really discuss any of them anymore because now they're my clients.” I awkwardly remind her of that bit about my job.

“Ugh, somehow Daph you always take the fun out of any situation you're in. I swear I’m glad something interesting is finally happening to you to spice up your life.” If only she knew how much my life took a nosedive.

“Uh, yeah I definitely needed a change in routine.” Just not this type of change.

“Yeah, I’m happy for you. And since I got you this job through my amazing connections, you owe me a lunch date. Since you can afford it now, big boss lady, you can pay for the fancy dinner!”

“Alright it's a date, how does Friday night sound?”

“Perfect, 8:30 and I will send you the google map location. I have better taste than you when it comes to dining out, so my pick.” She huffs that last bit. I swear I could hear her hair flip through the phone.

“I don’t mind. I’ll call you later when I’m more settled into my new job.”

“That better be soon.” She demanded.

“Promise. Bye!” I hang up before she can get me to break down and spill all my feelings at her. I sigh through my nose in a very unattractive huff before I force myself to stand up straight, wobbly more like–but firm against the crowd of rushing people; and decide finally to leave the solace that was that bench. Getting up and walking across the busy streets; I blurrily walk all the way to my dingy apartments.

As I walk up the gray stair in my stale surroundings I can’t help but start to break down. I very quickly fixate on my current life threatening predicament. Not my future threat, no, no, my current threat. Which is the, motherfucking Homelander, superhero to all of America! I weakly open my apartment door only to see an even worse disaster at my feet. A complete mess. Precious photos strewn throughout my apartment were shattered on the floor, but not unsaveable. All of my furniture collected with devotion throughout the years were broken and thrown across the open floor plan. All of my flowers and plants strung across the ceiling with fairy lights were thrown all over the floor with no care.

My absence was noted in my neighborhood, obviously. Looking around I could see my door was bashed into and my lock decimated. I don’t know how I didn’t notice that sooner! Some things were missing from my apartment, but most of it was completely trashed. I guess it wouldn’t be a usual break-in without a few missing heirlooms, right? Luckily I kept all my prized family heirlooms in a safety deposit box linked to my family's bank. A few pieces of art were missing including my TV and BlueTooth Bose Radio, luckily I had my laptop on me when I got kidnapped. I’m still trying to look on the positive side here, somehow.

I start cleaning up the debris one piece of ruined wood at a time, trying not to ponder on the unique pieces of furniture lost forever. Because if I do I think I will start to cry, but I won't. I will not be beaten by this, and I still need to be on my A-Game from now on. Knowing this is going to be a big endeavor in cleaning up, I decide to turn on my laptop, laying nice and snug in my leather purse. I place it on the end of my bed–one of the only pieces of furniture that wasn’t broken, and keep my attention to the screen as I start to clean. I put on the news randomly, not thinking too hard about it.

“A Recent news report has broken out about our newest member in the Seven, and for the first time in history, revealed through an Instagram live! Our new member is none other than Stormfront herself. For the first time ever the team will have an equal number of men and women. Today is a great day for womankind." The cut quickly goes into an edit of a cute spunky woman with a short brown bob gloating over none other than Homelander himself. The background seemed to be at a working set from the brief angle I can see in the Instagram Live.

“Hi. I'm in The Seven. Replacing Translucent. God bless his soul. Ink's barely dry but, yeah, reporting for duty. f*ck, yeah!” The chirpy voice of Stormfront casually reveals this sensitive info to Homelander and Queen Maeve. Queen’s Maeve’s mouth dropped, not able to form a response.

“No, I don't think that this is... It's not true. I don't know anything about this.” The red head I briefly saw yelling at the receptionist what felt like years ago stammered out. She reached her shaky hands out as if to shield Homelander from the information. His facial expression was obvious to everyone, including Stormfront. He looked like he could burst from the seams and split into a million pieces. A sharp smile and dead stare gave all who were viewing it a good idea that he wasn’t happy. Including her Livestream’s chat.

“Wow. Well, Stormfront? Who delivered the good news?” He grinded his jaw as he delivered that question, masking it with a painful looking grin.

“Oh, uh... Mr. Edgar, the big guy?” She holds the camera on his face, knowing a reaction was brewing underneath the surface. Stormfront wanted to rile him up for some reason and I couldn’t fathom why.

“Wonderful. Great. All right!” He turns around abruptly, walking away. “Great!” He shouts back out one more time as if trying to console himself.

Stormfront points the camera back at herself, a smug turn of her lip and the pleasure twinkling in her eyes told me enough. She was a troublemaker. Trouble for me if that was the end of his shoot and expecting me to deal with his tornado of feelings. Or worse, threaten my family and friends because he couldn’t trust me and wasn’t willing to listen.

“Well, I think this is going great.” She chuckles lightly before the feed ends and the news hosts are back on screen.

“Announced just this afternoon, isn’t that exciting Matthew?”

“I know I’m excited Diane.”

I tune out the news hosts and start gathering all my collected garbage to be thrown out through the trash chute, and for some of the bigger boxes I throw them out back in the sketchy alley. I do all of this in pilot-mode. I have no fucking idea how I’m going to win over a super hero who has plenty of reasons to make my situation worse. After that reveal on Stormfront’s Instagram Live he is now more angry than where he left me. His anger is violent and a visual red cloud resided above the surface and fogged his thoughts, and I know I can't read his mind but there is a brokenness to it that most individuals didn’t have. An imprint of pain that even someone as weak as me can see.

I stop dead in my tracks, standing alone in the dark scary alley a brilliant idea bursts from within me. A miracle of an idea that might save me if I act on it fast enough. I saw into his mind so I have an edge over him and he may want to get rid of me because of that, but that’s also to my advantage. I saw a brief snippet of memories between him and Ms. Stillwell. At the time I chose to try and ignore everything that spewed forth from his mind as I blurrily traveled through his mindscape, but some of it leaked through my well trained mental walls.

The conglomeration of his memories that stemmed from Madelyn Stillwell’s presence in his life, the root issue I barely touched on in his mind, was blurrily still stuck in the back of my head. The memory of him stealing her breast milk out of her fridge was one of the first that I found looking deeper in my head. One image of him arguing with her about not being true to himself and being forced to spew out lies about his past. More images blurrily come to me giving me a migraine that had me physically shaking. Consciously unaware my eyes were rolled over and my nose was bleeding as I writhed violently on the dirty alley floor. Just away from sight from the everyday person passing by, behind the dumpster just a few feet away from my apartment. A horrible memory vividly took over my mind like a tidal wave I’ve never experienced before.

Homelander pondered a baseball in his hands before throwing it so far he could not possibly fathom the consequences of how fast and far the ball is going. Watching it fade in the distance Madelyn as always walks onto the scene thinking she can fix everything. Or so he's always experienced.

“That is gonna kill somebody when it lands in Boston.” Madelyn steps up into the barn entrance taking her jacket off casually. As if this was a casual conversation with him.

“Look, I heard what happened. I am so, so sorry.” She quickly stepped closer to him, touching his arm. He turns away taking a few steps to distance himself away from her.

“What kind of place did you grow up in?” He asked, stone faced.

“Well, I moved around a lot, so, uh, it was a bunch of condos.” She huffed, putting her hands on her hips, seeming to steel herself for what he was about to say. He slowly walks back beside her decidedly staring at the beautiful field beyond them.

“So, what if I took you to a house you'd never seen before, full of photos of parents you never met, toys you never played with, Hardy Boy books that you never read? And then I asked you how much all that fake fսcking bullshit meant to you? How would that make you feel?” At that last question he finally looks back at her, and not to her surprise the stare is full of bitter resentment. Cold and unabashed in his cruelety.

“I wouldn't like that.” Without any prompting Madelyn stands closer beside him, shoulder to shoulder. She reaches out once more and takes his arm in both her hands. “I'm really sorry about the blanket. It never should have been there, and Randy Set-Dec has already been terminated. But right now... we need to finish that tour and to show how down-to-earth and ready to serve you are. And I need you to tell the mother story. Please.” She places her head on his chest invading his personal space as well as using her body to tempt him with the right answer. An obvious move Homelander understands, but can’t seem to shake anyway. “Please do it for me.” She begs and slowly starts to rub his crotch back and forth. He takes one weak exhale; that was that.

“It was actually my mom who dragged me along to my first Little League practice, and, uh, pretty soon after that, I-I just loved the game more than anything else in the world. So every year she would bake me a birthday cake in the shape of a baseball diamond. And... oh, I got to tell you, it was perfect. Perfect. Everything, down to the last minute details. Just like her.” He was standing what felt awkward to him, but on camera it made him look authentic. At least that’s what the director said before the end of the shoot.

“Cut. Perfect. So great.”

“So we're done?” He’s asked tight jawed with piercing eyes that seemed to communicate a yearning to murder.

“Uh, yes.”

“Great.” He says with a grimace, walking away from the others trying to get some space away from the crew’s prying eyes. A moment away to recuperate and hopefully through the utmost effort be truly appreciated by Madelyn for once. Anger just rising above the surface he walks across the beautiful fake porch of his fake childhood home to cool off, and he sees something in the corner of his eyes.

There is a bin to the side of the house with a bunch of other props, and there was his blanket. The thing that started it all. He instinctively, without realizing it, reaches his hand out towards the insipid object. Slowly unwrapping the blanket with meticulous precision a memory that he held back for years came to the surface.

He was stuck back in that awful room. Isolated in that bare white empty space with only this blanket and a human shaped target to keep him company. Mr.Vogelbaum would visit, sometimes with another scientist, and sometimes without–to play peekaboo with him.

He’d use this very blanket to play with them. The only hint of warmth he would receive, well other than his female handlers. But that was not something he wanted to reminisce on, nor does he want to remember that room or his blanket. Homelander, no John at the time loved Vogelbaum like a father, but he was no father. He would make Madelyn repay him for doing this commercial, that’s for sure. Homelander’s memories start to fade away as I come back to reality on the dirty alley floor. I feel empty and alone trying to recover my muscle spasms, pain in places I’ve never experienced before. Including my bitten tongue that was bleeding profusely. My mouth tasted of my own blood and I wobbly turned my body over so as not to choke, before puking all over the alley. The putrid puke lay steaming in the alley way just nearby my discarded and broken furniture.

A few tears fall down my face before I clumsily try to wipe them away, forcing myself to stop crying. Stop thinking.

Homelander’s memories still swirl around my brain like a chaotic blender, with no buttons to press to make it stop. They are dark and are filled with hate that my body shakes with my own resigning anger. As if I could start throwing things at anyone who even took one weird look at me. This anger and bitterness tasted cold and hot as if burning coals were shoved down my throat. A form of torture that could not be described made me wither and shake in pain. I get up wobbly and lean against the grimy garbage bin just to stay on my feet.

I’ve never experienced such a vivid vision of another’s memories before. Just like I can’t really read people’s thoughts, only an impression of what they're thinking. I can’t really see people’s memories, well not until now. This has never happened before, well until my power’s rapid increase in fluctuations and my bump in with the Seven. Or at least two of the seven. The threat of being The Seven’s therapist not only comes with the disadvantage of dealing with super powered people with emotional problems, but also the effect of it. These super powered people with personal issues has the powers to make my life a living hell--my family and friend's lives a living hell, and I couldn't bare the thought of that happening at all!

That decision made and promised to myself in the dark alley on a nice summer evening I stumbled back in my creaky gray apartment building and back up to my floor. Where my broken and trashed apartment lay clean clothes and soap. Looking at the time on my broken Victorian clock I see it's already 5pm and my heart stops. Homelander is possibly already back at Vought hunting me down.

I don’t know if the hunt would entail him firing me, hurting me, or my family and covering it up by Vought. Stan Edgar was the master of the operation, but from my memories and impressions I have of the situation, Homelander is my shock-collar. He may also be the reason why I have this and put in this circumstance, for all I know! It didn’t matter in the end, because my family and friends were at risk of a superpower corporation willing to do anything to get what they want. I am not going to get crushed under them like a bug.

I run to my bathroom’s medicine cabinet and take some meds for my powers, not dampening completely like the drugs did in the Vought Labs, but kept me from feeling unhinged when without them. The meds that’s helped me survive in the modern world and will help me out in dealing with Homelander too. I quickly spruce myself up longingly looking at the shower before deciding to ignore it. I don’t have enough time so I for-go what I want and quickly put on a pencil skirt and blouse. I grab my bag and phone before locking my doors and rushing out, more like limping out, but I was trying my best.

I get a cab and get to Vought in record time running through a still busy lobby. The young receptionist was watching videos on her phone of the hero Stormfront from what it looked like, ignoring the people walking by.

“Um, excuse me?”

“Yes?” She takes one dismissive glance at me before continuing to watch Stormfront on her phone.

“My name is Daphne Bennett. I’m the therapist assigned to The Seven and I wanted to know where my office was placed?”

“Sign in here and I was told by Donna you wouldn’t be needing that space till tomorrow?” She watches videos while talking to me and handing me a clipboard to sign-in, seeming to not need an actual answer to her question. She chews her gum obnoxiously as she does this all and gives me a tiny note that shows my office number and floor level as I give her back the clipboard.

“Thanks, Ms?” She ignores my attempt for a name and continues to watch her videos. I sigh before I trudge inside the elevator. Looking back at the small paper I realize something that makes me freeze in place. That the number written down was the same as the level famously known around the world to be where the Seven’s meeting room lies. Great, immediate access to their emotional chew toy, that’s me! That was a harsh thought and I try to compartmentalize that to deal with later.

I reach the top floor and begin my journey down the intimidating halls. The paintings depicting the heroes are dramatic and looked like they were hand painted by a master oil painter. The busts sculpted for each of the seven were so life-like their pores were visible on the surface of the marble. Nothing was left not wanting, so to speak, when it came to decor. I always preferred a little more nuance but I still appreciated the work that was put into it. Even if it is a bit ostentatious.

I walk into my new office–my name on a plaque of this large door and the wooden ornate furniture makes my heart sing, it almost makes up for my trashed apartment I walked into earlier. I take out my grandmother’s tin full of cookies I made before I was kidnapped, just a tad stale. But I preheated them in the oven before rushing off, and not forgetting my milk and cream. I set up my few pieces of china I still had left in my home and filled the cup half with milk and cream. Sadly, there was no place to heat it up unlike my old office.

A let down for sure. I place the warm cookies on my china platter as well as placing the cup of milk to where Homelander would be facing my desk. The scene set up hopefully for him to willingly accept my help and my apology. The more memories that surface from our shared connection makes me think he is not as forgiving as the media portrays him. My mother’s scared voice on the voicemail rings back in my head, a chilling warning.

I cough uncontrollably, grabbing my father’s old handkerchief from my purse. Blood drops stain the eggshell colored cloth, something hard to clean out. I dazedly place it back in my purse out of view, wiping my mouth and hiding any evidence. Just as I shoved my purse under my large wooden desk a woosh sound and breeze brushed past my back.

“I’m surprised you didn’t run.” He sounds bored not seeming up for the conversation even though he’s the one who asked me to be here.

“Did you want me to run?”

“That feels like a question a shrink would ask.” He bites back, setting his hands on the desk, standing over me. I was sitting in my too big office chair in my too big and too fancy desk while Homelander was thrilled to make my space feel even more claustrophobic. I can taste the spicy sweet taste of excitement running through him. An unusually pleasant aftertaste for such a threatening situation, unfair really.

“Hah, well I am one if you want to get down to the nitty-gritty of it.” I reply back forcing myself to sit up straight and stare him dead in the eyes. He smiles and I can’t tell if it's genuine or not.

“You’d think I would trust you after your oh-so-charming introductions. No, I would have every right to melt you down to your bare bone for what you did. But instead you're a Stan Edgar spy!” He growls, his voice growing more erratically loud as he rants. The red storm clouded him and his aura and not even my medication and abuse could make me not see it. The anger and humiliation was evident in his storm filled cloud of despair. So many different emotions flash on my pallet I can’t grasp them all. The taste makes me want to puke but I force myself to swallow my bile down.

“I’m sorry. I have some milk cookies here if you would like any by the way. I made them from my great-grandmother’s recipe, passed down generations on my father’s side.” I push my china platter towards him. He looks dumbfounded at the cookies and small china glass filled with milk and cream. He decides to sit and pointedly only takes the small glass of milk. He doesn’t touch the cookies. The storm starts to quell and his face slowly relaxes, not as tight and wound up as it was from the get-go. So much anger bottled up is an explosion always waiting to happen.

“You smell like blood.” He states, not looking at me but his head turned as if watching the view outside my window.

“What? It’s not polite to point something like that out–wait, how do you know that?” I ask, stupefied and a large smirk crinkles across his face before he leans in slowly towards me. “Wait, no nevermind I don’t care how you know that. If you must know, I'm on my period.” I fumble with an excuse

“No you're not.”

“How do you know that? Ugh, wait no, don't explain! I fell, I’m clumsy, okay!” I exclaimed quickly, again not wanting to know how his weird intrusive powers work.

“You fell?”

“Yeah, it was a bad fall. Still have scrapes and bruises to show off to my superhero co-workers.” A small quirk of an actual smile flickered before falling back to a blank face.

“You don’t have super healing?”

“No, I didn’t really win the superpower lottery when it came to its coolness factor.”

“Or a usefulness factor.”

“Ah, yes, I used to think like that too. When I was younger I felt the burden of my powers were too much and I didn’t want to be around anyone for a long time. I was an angsty teenager who couldn’t see the benefit of it and only saw the pain. To put it shortly I learned through getting past my own barriers and reaching out to people was a bonus not a burden. My powers may not be flashy or be able to save a whole city from an active nuclear bomb, but I can help take a panic attack away.” I shrug nonchalantly as he dismissively plays with one of the hand puzzles laying at my desk.

“Are you done yet?”

“Well, no, I am also a licensed therapist hired to help you guys. I know this is some kind of test and I'm willing to show you that I’m here to help?”

“You were hired here to dismantle my authority over The Seven and control us if we ever get “out of character.” He dismisses glaring daggers at me, a dark cloud almost thundered over him, to cloud his thoughts with anger. He shoves himself farther into the back of the sofa chair, a grimace stretching across his face.

“My notes are coded in a way that only I could decipher them, something I’ve developed when studying for my doctorate. Stan Edgar doesn’t know I code all my notes–and he will never have the cipher because it is not written down. It was written in my contract that I as a Doctor who promised to withhold my client’s best interest cannot converse about my clients outside of our sessions.So, with all of that in mind can we start now?” He gulps not blinking as he directly stares back at me, I do not look away.

“What would I even talk about?”

“Anything you want to talk about.”

“With you? No, not really.”

“What about the transition of a new member on your team, how is that going?” His body goes very still, as if paused in real time. His cold stare gives me chills.

“That media whore can go to fucking hell. She is not one of the seven.” Homelander’s chilling emotions rattle my bones and his emotional tidal wave tastes cold and bitter.

“Is it because she was hired on without your permission?”

“Partly.”

“Did you feel embarrassed for the way she told the world, including you and your team?” I asked another question, more pointed, his eyebrow twitched. He snorts and then huffs anger tensing his shoulders.

“Yes.” He bites out staring me down, not willing to look away. I do instead by taking one of my own cookies on a platter, enjoying the familiar taste.

“I’m sorry she did that to you and the team. Did it feel horrible to not have control over something so important to you?” I ask another question, maybe not delicately enough with the way he squeezed the wooden puzzle in his hands. It looked like it was ready to explode in a million wooden slivers ready to slice our skin to ribbons.

“She did it to provoke me and boost her numbers. And my number took a hit because of it!” His need to be in control of his image and not being seemed to set him off just from talking about it, and that is concerning on a lot of levels. Specifically to the people around him. He lets go of the puzzle and to my surprise takes a cookie and eats it in one bite. Delight clear on my face he pointed glare. Heat vision is almost a threat if I look too closely into his thoughts.

“Well I know what it's like when mucking up introductions–meaning our situation,” I point between us smiling shyly at his still present icy glare. “And wanting to move forward in helping each other. She might want to help you in her own way. She just may not have started that best way. You might just make an ally, or two.” I say with an eyebrow raised as he continues to scarf the cookies, not willing to be shamed it seemed.

“Interesting thought, but to ally with her would require her to not ruin my reputation.”

“Like I said, first introduction flops happen. Her being on The Seven because of Stan Edgar could also mean she could be a strong superhero. And a strong superhero is always a good ally to have.” I shrug at that, not willing to divulge my opinion–or my own agenda–any more.

“You know what?” He stands up abruptly walking towards the door as if to leave on that question, but he stops.

“What?”

“You're not as dumb as you seem.” He turned back towards me with a wide smile that seemed to just break from his stony exsterior.

“I’m a doctor, Homelander.” I say not able to hide my exasperation in my voice. He smirks, getting a kick out of my obvious annoyance.

“Oh, and by the way doctor, your cookies were quite stale.” I sigh even louder and more pointed at that, actually getting a chuckle out of him.

“So, are you going to give me a–ah I mean Stormfront a chance?” I ask as he turns the knob of the office door to leave.

“I’ll give her a trial run.” He does not turn to see my relief evident on my face. “Oh, and good luck with the social media frenzy that will be your day tomorrow. Have a great night.” He yells out as he leaves the office and the halls my door swinging back and forth from his dramatic exit. The tension in my muscles finally released and my heart even out, finally. Being in the same room as him has begun to feel like walking on tightrope, and no net underneath to catch me if I fall.

The reminder about tomorrow has my blood go cold and my body starts to sweat profusely. I never signed up for this. I don’t want to be on TV and I don’t want to be known around the world as some superhero psychologist. I don’t want people to know about my powers. I haven’t even told Olivia yet. I slump in my too large office not feeling up to walking to my trashed apartment. Looking longingly at the large white sofa in the corner of my office and a chair blanket I combine the two to make my makeshift bed. It may look desperate and sad but I don’t care.

I also might just be a bit desperate and sad.

______________________________________________________________

Check out my fic on AO3 if you guys are interested in being updated on my most recent posts!

[flownwrong]

Ten Characters, Ten Fandoms, Ten (haha no) Tags

more tag games! I was tagged by @prince-of-elsinore forever ago and just got around to it. thanks elsi!

1. gerri kellman, succession

stone cold bitch, smartest person in the room, crazy hot lady, probably the single most entertaining character for me to watch in the whole show. what can i say, she's just neat.

2. tim gutterson, justified

he don't miss MY HEART! deadpan, competent, and secretly a disaster. what more to want in a character. i love this boi, not one boring second on the screen.

3. harry du bois, disco elysium

no gifs for this one, but there's something wonderful about a character who's both been wrecked by life and poor choices to the point he completely lost sight of meaning or purpose AND is put in a clean slate position when he can experience the world and very intense events around him with childlike wonder. the way i played him was an (un)healthy combo of falling into old patterns and choosing to turn to light and open himself to it whenever he can, and he turned out to be an extremely cathartic vessel in this story and in my own processing.

4. charlie kelly, it's always sunny in philadelphia

my favourite rat boy. i appreciated how despite being the pinnacle of insanity he is also one who delivered most of the poignant, truly emotional points in the whole show for me. probably my favourite actor/part combo too. gj both charlies

5. casca, berserk

if we take the pre-eclipse arcs, she is actually one of my favourite women to be written by a man. a surprisingly deep figure that swerves away from cliches every time she approaches them, making choices when nobody expects her to choose for herself. "nobody lies their way into a body with this many scars," indeed.

6. jocelyn carter, person of interest

the counterweight of mundane in an otherwise very not mundane setting, a display of being a human with boundaries and restricted possibilities among people who move and operate on an entirely different plane, an overall bulldozer of human perseverance in the face of something incomprehensible. she's an all around good egg.

7. misato katsuragi, neon genesis evangelion

[claps misato on the back] this girl can fit so much trauma in her. her unique place in the story of cracking facades all around resonated most with me, layers and layers revealed and stripped off her persona to the point where there's a very real, struggling and lost core left that has to step up and take responsibility or perish. even as everything falls apart around her, she commits to moving further and further, and i loved watching it.

8. david ward, i am in eskew

not much of a character at all, but a magnificent device to explore the feelings of total alienation, detachment and otherness both through his place in reality and his place in unreality. he doesn't fit in either but he makes important choices in the face of the latter, patching up holes in himself even if he can't ever get whole again. a kind of alice in wonderland but horror experience.

9. francis crozier, the terror

very high on my list of extremely flawed characters you come to love not because they get rid of the flaws but because they learn to shed them in the face of harrowing experiences to uplift and help others. does not help at all that he's portrayed by king jarred harris who embodies this development perfectly. a++

10. sidney freedman, m*a*s*h

i forced myself to not cheat by picking hawkeye, but then it was no competition because sidney is by far the rarest kind of character i get to see. like how often do you get a psychiatrist/therapist on screen that doesn't cringe you out and oddly resonates with how you wish to see healing and help represented, all that despite being from a 50 year old show and using methods of its time? there's so little stigma or distance to be found around sidney, and so much acceptance and belief in people he tries to help. i want to carry this with me in my work if my becoming a therapist plan pans out.

i am Not Sure anyone in my circle escaped this, but in case someone did, i would love to see @blueniverse42's, @thegoodthebadandtheart's, @andreydaddanos's and @harpernovakaine lists!

[mister13eyond]

Do you have a tag for your one shots and/or more writing pieces about Diavolo & Doppio? :"-) I really have to say I appreciate the way you portray them both & how their weird quirks match together. It's more then just the typical big mean top and little twink boy stereotype.

Also if you ever resume roleplaying, please mention it 🙏

Ahhhh thank you so so much!! That's an honor to hear? I definitely think these two have such a rich possibility to be such delightfully weird little men, and to enable each other in some ways- they've spent their whole lives covering up for each other, and it's a mutually protective relationship, so I don't think either of them has ever felt the need to hide their weird quirks when it comes to each other, you know? Who can love you better and more unconditionally than the person who's lived inside your heart your whole life?

I don't have a set tag yet- I should probably change that!! I'll have to go back and add it to my previous drabbles/headcanons, but for now here's links to the ones I remember/can find:

Domestic DiaDop ft cooking

Slightly Better Dads Pink Family

Doppio Infodumps About Insects

Caring For Each Other While Sick

As well!! I also have some work on my AO3- i will bashfully admit a lot of it is NSFW, but I'll mark which is NSFW and SFW here:

He'll Find Him Waiting Like A Lonesome King- future NSFW, but SFW if full of Sexual Tension right now. Diavolo begins scheming a way to see Doppio, if only for a little while.

i'm gonna kiss you (like the sun browns you)- NSFW, explicit; fluffy, transmasc diavolo & doppio; stone top diavolo & lots of gender euphoria & body feelings & loving yourself via loving your trans partner t4t magic

double. - semi-NSFW; non-explicit, but delves into sexual awakening & exploration during their mutual puberty & will eventually contain some non-explicit Donatella/Solido. A study on how Solido Naso became Doppio & Diavolo; warnings for religious trauma, dissociation and all the gnarly canon-compliant contents of Diavolo & Doppio's backstory

they fit together like two hands- SFW! A quiet, peaceful little study about a post-separation Diavolo and Doppio making their way through their daily life, knowing that they'll never really stop dealing with paranoia, dissociation or mental health crises- but helping each other through them, because it's still better when not carried alone.

that's the kind of love (i've been dreaming of)- NSFW; explicit! tooth-rotting fluff and kink all rolled into one. post-separation, diavolo struggles to sleep because he can't keep his hands off Doppio. Doppio comes up with a simple solution: diavolo can do whatever he wants to him while he sleeps.

Also BONUS! If you like my work, check out the gothic horror AU tag, where I leave my art and thoughts about my DiaDop Gothic Horror AU. And if you REALLY liked it, all the works are arranged into a pay-what-you-want PDF on itch.io!

WHEEZE and that's all the DiaDop I have properly written out!! Thank you SO so much for the kind words anon- I love these two a lot! It's fun just taking them at face value as a babyfaced twink and a big mean goth, sure, but the reason I'm so drawn to them is how much depth you can read into them, the ways they have much more possibility beneath their surface... I just love them a lot a lot! ;0; and if I ever start another RP blog up, I'll 100% share here so y'all will know!! Thank you again!!!

[anendoandfriendo]

(Context)

3, 9 (mostly the second halves) and 10? :D

Congrats, y'all, it's your system and your system specifically who has unlocked The Infodump, and specifically because of this combination of asks. Get infodump'd lmao.

3. What’s your system name if you have one, and how did you choose it?

Pffft. This one isn't very creative lol.

Anyways. Our system name is Rusanya (short for "The Rusanya Collective," which happens to be short for "The Rusanya[n] Collective/Federation of Subsystems and Sidesystems" lol) and we actually came up with it when we were much smaller than this on the assumption we would not stay as small as we were as "a" system at the time. We had to have been like....twenty-five people, at maximum, back then.

~ Hailey (Admin), 🏔, Nagisa

9. How long have you been a system and/or known of your system? and 10. How did you discover your system? What was the process?

We will just answer these together as they kind of segway into each other honestly. We've been a system since birth and, well...we think we've just never had the words to describe it we guess. There's a lot of things that kind of point us in that direction. We have talked about it several times in many places, but if we may do a quick review for the class:

We could "see ghosts" in preschool through first grade that may have actually been headmates. Which is further proven by Ricky never being in our yearbooks for elementary school, like, at all.

WE FUCKING FORGOT ABOUT CHRISTOPHER WHEN WE FIRST POSTED THIS OH MY GOD so like Christopher was this like, extremely immature middle school boy who we swear to god was literally just out there to hurt us when we were in preschool. Blonde dude with bright blue eyes and a buzzcut iwrc LOL. The teacher would always pull him to the side to "talk to" Christopher about the bullying but their responses made no sense in the context of the things Christopher would say to her. Like, that seems very blatantly plural to us especially since he was one of the most clearly autonomous folks in the little system group we had at the time in our headspace or whatever.

Also from first grade: we went from BBQ sauce being spicy and burning our tongue once to it not being spicy at all, like, literally, as it was as soon as the teacher stated there's no way for it to be spicy. Which sort of makes us think we were already either splitting by then or just straight up had multiple selves already and we just never fucking thought about it. Like, we didn't know that was Not Normal. We did not have any spectacularly traumatic events that we can recall in our life until late middle first grade to very late first grade, and this was an incident from maybe our first month or so being in first grade.

The projection thing happened a lot at home too, but it was one specific squirtle (pokemon) instead of Christina, Kelli, and Ricky, and they really just seemed to like dance? Or stereotypical mariachi bands? Anyways, that squirtle and then Christina and Kelli kind of fused into one individual, while Raymond and Ricky stayed their own separate people.

Raymond has described before the unintentional process of creating a second person to control the body when it left the realm of our consciousness. Many times -- it's actually a little horrific how much this man remembers of our childhood and how well everything he as said thus far fits together with Just Everything.

Our fascination with like, "possession" and stuff that was similar to it through a conceptual lens, even though we HATED horror movies.

Our first trauma-based incident where we can discern an actual person coming from it was late elementary school. "Late Elementary School," here means fourth and fifth grade, specifically fifth grade. There were certainly things before that but nobody had really split off from us at that point. We can literally figure out where Silva came from, and possibly Grapefrost, down to the time period because of it. Grapefrost has a literal clay mask they made of herself in fifth grade of elementary. Like, we have been around for Forever. We just had zero clues.

Our first soulbonding experiences were likely in middle school. We had very weird obsessions with "what if X character were in OUR WORLD???" and even had this Secret Thing where we would let them "see through my/our eyes," which in all honesty is probably how we learned to switch. Like.

We literally learned to switch without the help of other systems. That probably sounds absolutely insane to plurals these days, but even back in the early 2000s, 2010s, unless you were like, explicitly aware of plurality -- which was often assumed to be heavily medicalized and called MPD; maybe DID and DD-NOS later on -- honestly we think this is kind of a miracle. In that nobody noticed and in that we learned two switch in the first place. (Insert comment here about "kids these days" but like, in a positive way.)

We actually ended up running into the concept of endogenic systems specifically in high school. And then subsequently forgetting about it LOL. We made an account specifically to ask a (now-defunct) tumblr blog if "curious singlets" could follow to learn to be better allies LOOOOL. Nobody creates a tumble account solely to send a question like that unless they were already endogenic, sorry. Meanwhile we also had Gon and Killua from HunterxHunter projecting themselves in the middle of our speech classroom and the rest of us trying our best to not get distracted, and thought this was just what everyone meant by having characters running through your head.

We don't exactly know where this lies in the spectrum of our timeline yet, but there was definitely a one-time event where a SHITTON of plural stuff happened all at once: we were on the swings at the park at [REDACTED] -> we were sitting there and we were talking to ourselves internally while on the swings. some people near us has been talking about the USian flag for some reason. -> not only did we have a whole discussion about how fucked up the us is internally, as a system, we had several Hetalia fictives who had just been Sick Of This Shit(TM), with the This Shit(TM) being sick of their canon and how its unfolded just in general as well as "in realtime" as we jokingly put it these days. So someone LITERALLY sent out little aura strings to bring them back to our system, because why the fuck not? -> Anyways, our headmate Ghost switched to front right after that and gave their piece on the USian flag just to be informed that discussion was "five minutes ago," and it took literally EVERYTHING in us to not have an Autistic meltdown and scream at them that they were lying. We don't normally look at or even think about body language if we can help it but there was just...an atmosphere of confusion from these people even when we pushed it even a bit that was Very Different than our experiences with gaslighting, so we just...did not push it more than that. We think this is maybe when some of us made that promise to never be separated again as a system? But like everyone who lives here in our head is very aware of the promise regardless of if they were there or not back then haha. Like it's a whole discussed and disseminated thing.

When we were teeny tiny little things we though Yu-Gi-Oh! was fucking stupid as a premise because we just thought Everyone Was Like That(TM). We fucking despised it and avoided it like the plague because it was uncomfortable how much of a caricature it felt like things were, but, y'know. Toddlers and elementary schoolers probably can't explain that very well.

The reason we were thinking about Yu-Gi-Oh years later was because we once again ran into the system community at university and started doing some basioc looking-things-up. Sysmedicalists and anti-endogenics in particular were extremely uncomfortable for us to look at. We mainly just ignored them tbh.

When writing our university essays in our earlier years, some of us would literally type in different colors, fonts, and use different brackets when giving ourselves input on rough drafts. Yeah, sure, that's totally a thing singlets do arewerite????

Pretty sure the reason we found out we were a system was because Nagisa from Assassination Classroom decided to talk back to us about our headcanons, actually, at least from this fronter's perepsective. Which is fucking funny because soulbonding isn't even inherently plural, but there's a large association between the two and whoever was fronting at the time just went: "HOLY SHIT THAT'S POSSIBLE??" because, if we recall correctly, we found the idea of soulbonding alongside/close to a mention/discussion of endogenic systems. Like if it wasn't right next to each other, then we must have looked at one first and then the other in quick succession and then something clicked. If we ever find our exact trail ever again, we will definitely try to put it back together again.

We think we came out online about a year or so later, and offline followed a couple of months after that to a degree. We are now pretty blatant about it. Online we make it a big deal and offline we don't like, make it a huge thing unless you're a fuckign fed, but like, we don't try to hide it either lol. :3

Anyways, hopefully this was insightful? We hope so at least.

[jangmo-othewarrior]

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to...

Random Headcannons about Specfic Character's Heartless Stemming from an AU I have Never Posted About!

(This is under the notion that, for some inexplicable reason, a special Heartless is capable of amplifying any darkness found within someone's heart, so that those with even a little bit of darkness would still create a strong Heartless. Also none of them are explicitly darklings because I like myself some symbolic, abstract monster designs.)

*taps mic*

Sora (who is here and alive btw) has those eldritch horror tentacles he had in that one section of Xehanort's boss fight sprouting out of his back. I just think they're neat.

Roxas is very nobody-like, surprisingly. It makes sense once you consider the fact that replica bodies can't create nobodies. Xion is in the same boat, their bodies are kinda just layin there.

Aqua is constantly melting and dissolving into puddles on the floor, appearing as a large spot of black-blue. She can also move incredibly fast like this. However, it also seems to cause her Heartless... pain.

Lea is really spiky. And on fire, but that was obvious. One noticeable thing is the tear tracks constantly running down his face, which never seem to stop.

Riku is a large bat-dragon-thing. He also has shackles and broken chains on his ankles and wrists. The chains have been mending themselves, however. Whenever he notices, he attacked them relentlessly until they appear beyond repair. The cycle begins anew afterward.

Terra obviously has some elements of the Guardian in his design, but just making him the Guardian again sounds boring to me so obviously I need to give him more trauma.

Kairi evades becomign a hearless due to her heart having no darkness, but she just can’t get what she did for Sora at the end of KH1 work for any of them, and this just makes her feel even more useless.

Xion is a puppet, literally. Her final boss form from the end of Days gets a darker recolor while being held up by strings connected to one of those wooden-puppet-control-thingies. Roxas doesn't like to look at her.

Riku is technically a Heartless and a Nightmare? None of them are Emblem Heartless but he's got the Nightmare symbol between his wings.

Lea is the second largest of the bunch, and has two chakram-looking things circling him at all times. Xion and Roxas fit neatly under him, and like to hide under there.

Aqua gets as much trauma as Terra because the Wayfinder Trio is my favorite so I put them through pain. Her color scheme is very Anti-Aqua :)

Sora is very fast, and he skitters around like a cat. He is also very spiky.

Ven may not of had his heart dragged out of him by the weird heartless, but he is definitely not having a good time. He didn't even recognize Terra and Aqua.... at first. (I swear I love the Wayfinder Trio with all of my heart)

Roxas resembles a... weasel? Ferret? Something like that; no one can put a finger on it. He also has samurai swords, because yes.

Terra is seemingly made up of rock and soil, and it is primarily held together by the bandages left behind from his Guardian form. He is also the largest out of all of them, a little over half the size of that one really big KH2 Heartless boss in the Pridelands. (I can't remember it's name.)

All of the Seasalt Trio Heartless have their number somewhere on their bodies (XIII, XIV, etc.), the Wayfinder Trio Heartless have thier armor represented in some fashion, and the Destiny Trio all have a paupo fruit inscribed on themselves somewhere.

And Isa (who dodged the entire encounter by not being a keyboard wielder) is just trying to keep Ven and Kairi safe after all of this shit goes down. He doesn't have the time or the energy to get into how he is feeling right now (and boy howdy, is it nothing good). After all, the three of them were...

...Those that Remain.

[a-lil-bi-furious]

6, 17, 29?

Thanks so much for asking! 🥰

6) Favorite title you used

"These Old Wounds, They Still Speak" just fit with the fic perfectly and also allowed me to use some lyrics from one of my favorite artists, Jake Scott!

17) Your favorite character to write this year?

My boy Scott <3 I just love him endlessly and love thinking about him and trying to get inside his cute lil tormented head

29) Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?

Not to beat this fic to death by mentioning it in every answer 😅but I didn’t write much this year so...from These Old Wounds, They Still Speak:

Scott prods just below his left ribs for a bullet hole he knows won’t be there. His finger slips through the hole in the blood-stiff fabric of his t-shirt—potentially the only evidence he was shot at all.

He can feel a small indentation left in the skin and feels a brief wave of relief it hasn’t completely disappeared. The last vestige of a wound that almost killed him.

He can’t help but trace over the one wound that actually did.

Thoughtfully, Scott shifts his hand to the space below his sternum, positioning his fingertips over five invisible holes. Another wound long healed over, torn open by one poisoned bullet.

I felt like this part hit just right, pulling all that Scott was experiencing together with him being lucid enough now to let it sink in — the trauma of being injured and the horror of never having physical scars to show for the suffering, and the tension between knowing Theo is now someone Scott trusts but the visceral reminder of how it felt to be torn open. His body remembers, and old wounds can reopen, especially when they never healed right in the first place. 

(Send me 2022 “Ao3 Wrapped” asks!)