#almost everything i speak is under so many layers of irony

[ape-of-no-state]

i wish i had a hand and/or feet fetish maybe then i could learn to draw those well 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 uoooh 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[eqt-95]

19 46 48? :D

Thanks for the ask sides!

19. Top 5 favorite books? (the nerve!)

Edit: i just realized i only listed 4. apparently i don't know how to count

I'm cheating and instead of listing my all-time 5 favorites, I'm naming 5 that fall under the same theme: varying narrative structure. I adore when the story structure becomes it's own character so much. This is in the order that I read them (all are works of fiction):

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski This is a narration inside of a narration and none of those narrators are reliable. I love it. If you ever read it, you MUST get the physical book. Reading it is filled with footnotes and formatting chaos and the experience is a labor of love. It reads with authority yet nothing makes sense. It has a quality of being sourced yet none of the sources exist. It's magic.

Breakfast of champions - Kurt Vonnegut The narrator is omnipotent. The narrator is omniscient. The narrator is a character. Let me repeat that: THE NARRATOR IS A CHARACTER.

Vonnegut gave this book a C, and I disagree. There was something a bit mundane about the story, yes, but the story-story is never the real point with Vonnegut - it's about all the small themes and satire and dark irony and obscure lines that are bingeable and slurpable and chewable and leave you mulling it over and bring you back to chomp down again and again (imo).

Heartburn - Nora Ephron This isn't the most outrageously obscure style, but I can't not include Nora Ephron, my beloved. If you like When Harry Met Sally, this is that on steroids. The narrator spends most of the time speaking to the reader; filling them in with her inner thoughts and comedic turmoil over her failed marriage. The funny bit? It's also supposed to be a cookbook, so recipes are randomly interspersed.

A Visit from The Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan Disclaimer: I read Manhattan Beach before this and I was so turned off that I almost didn't read Goon Squad. I am STOKED I ignored myself.

The narrative style of this book was pure genius to me: each chapter is a different character. This isn't revolutionary, but what feels revolutionary is that: 1. each character's perspective never repeats 2. each chapter is written in the style of that character (POV, prose, everything) and 3. everything is connected but the chapters are not sequential. They all build onto each other from different points in time to establish a world/web of links.

The cleverness and layering of the narration style was, for me, the story. It was in the way the author crafted each character with a unique take and perspective and set of motivations that really drew me in. There was the realness and pettiness and aspirations of the characters paired with the 'how does this all fit together' at play. So many layers and the author spoon-fed NOTHING which made me read more intently. It became a game: I wanted to build a mental map of all the relationships and felt a jolt of excitement when another link was made.

Bonus recommendation: Candy House is the sequel. It has the same qualities (I actually started reading this one first by accident, and the funny thing is that everything would still make total sense if read in the wrong order). Candy House introduced some concepts that I wasn't as fond of, but still absolutely worth a read.

46. Who is your favorite author?

Oooh, this is hard. Can I cheat and say I haven't found my favorite author yet? I've tried for years to pretend Vonnegut isn't my favorite author, but it's Vonnegut. 100%.

48. What line has stuck with you for years? "All this happened, more or less." Speak of the devil. This is the first line of Slaughterhouse-Five, and it's a line worth reading again once you've finished the book.

[marzipanparty]

Round 3 is already starting out hot! I pretty much wrote almost everything I have about Step 1 Mai, and I don’t have much for Step 2 Mai since I want to hold off until the part comes out, so I’d like to share some old art and development! They’ve gone through a bit of revisions, so I’d like to share some of my notes :) Under the cut since it’ll be really long LMAO

Since their first design, I’ve always wanted Mai to share their Mẹ’s hair color and tried as hard as I could to get it as close to it in the in-game customizer. Then later, to my relief, the developers released an option to have the exact color LOL But in Mai v1, pink was their main image color, and when Tamarack’s Step 2 designs were released, it became clear that her main image color would be pink as well. Which there’s obviously nothing wrong with that! But I already wanted to redesign Mai and also personally challenge myself in making her distinct from the rest of the cast in OL2.

So Mai v2 was born, and I was very frustrated LMAO The sketch just wasn’t working out and while I really like the outfit I drew, it was missing the very distinctly autumn vibes the rest of the characters had. It didn’t have any layering of clothing pieces and since it was a very simple outfit, I was also having a hard time finding a new image color and it just felt too plain. So our current version is born!

Already a huge improvement in my opinion! Mai definitely looks more dressed for autumn, and all the layers they’re wearing made it a lot easier to play around with colors. Their new main image color is this sage-y desaturated green, the same as the scarf that has stayed consistent throughout all their designs (and now their skirt)! I also got to keep pink as an accent color, which fits their spring theme without it being the main color. The yellow color also fits in with another part of their spring symbolism (which I’ll explain later), with it also being a color of fall! There are still minor details I wanna fix about their design, but Mai v3 is pretty much the finished thing!

Aah… she’s always been a skittish one haha… BUT!!! You can see a small difference! Mai has a mole on her neck! It’s still there I just haven’t had a chance to show it on her current design. ALSO!!! Her name! Originally Mai’s full first name was “Mai Hiền”, the “hiền” meaning “gentle”. But it could also be interpreted as “meek” and “pushover”. It was supposed to be a bit of cruel irony given how much she struggles with her anxiety. But ultimately I thought that it was a little too mean, so I changed it to “Mai Hồng” LMAO (small note: I’m not fluent in Viet and I googled for many hours to make sure her name was as accurate as possible, but I ofc could still be wrong).

Speaking of “hồng”! I ultimately chose hồng/pink,rosy to make the distinction between the type of plum blossoms. Pink plum blossoms are the ones she’s named after her eye color. But there are also yellow plum blossoms (and what Mai in her name specifically means) that are very significant in south Vietnam for “Tết” or vietnamese lunar new years! There’s also Vietnamese folklore of a young girl who bravely fights a monster to defend her village but unfortunately dies. The gods take pity on her and reincarnate her into the yellow plum blossoms! Super relevant in Mai’s personal journey in finding confidence and bravery in herself!

But yea that’s all I have! Thank you if you actually read all of this, I know it was a lot LOL. And thank you for helping Mai make it this far in the bracket!!! It really means a lot to the both of us!

Descriptions under cut!

Mai Hong Lee:

Mai Hong is anxiety incarnate; they worry over everything and anything. They just want to make a good first impression bc they’ve never had close friends, but more often than not they overthink on what to say and end up missing their chance or talk themselves out of things. Tamarack and Qiu’s insistent and unwavering personalities absolutely obliterate this wall tho.

I made Mai spring themed to emphasize how out of place they are in the autumn setting of Golden Grove. In Vietnamese, “Mai” is means “plum blossom” (to reference the plum color hair they share with their mom) and “Hồng” means “pink/rosy” (to reference their eyes and plum blossoms).

Since Mai is Vietnamese, they call their mom “Mẹ” (pronounced “meh”).

When Mai first met Qiu, they thought they were going to get arrested for trespassing on his backyard. And when they first met Tamarack, they screamed so loudly when she popped out of the leaf pile that Qiu also yelled (mostly bc he was surprised how loud they could scream).

Mai tends to be a literal thinker and quite reasonable for her age. It tends to make her a bit of a wet blanket though (another reason she’s never been popular), so she keeps quiet about how she feels. But she’s also very observant and considerate with a good memory, so she does very well in schoolwork.

On school their first day of new school, when Mrs. Murray called them for roll call, they froze up trying to decide how they should say hello. When Qiu and Tamarack both very publicly spoke up for them, they were frozen again from mortification and embarrassment, but also from being so moved they’d defend her like that.

To help calm her anxiety, Mai’s mom has taught her to describe the things around her in deep detail. Bc of this they’re really good at describing and explaining things to people.

Mai likes to draw, it’s very meditative for them! When they grow up, they would probably become a scientific illustrator, mostly drawing plants.

Mai’s bandaid on their nose from from an incident from her last school! There was a girl who would go out of her way to hang out with Mai, but also talk down to her and make Mai do everything for her. She was like Mai’s personal bully, but also her only friend so they never spoke up or retaliated against her. On Mai’s last day at school, the girl had sneaked a pair of adult scissors from the teacher’s desk to use for a craft the class was doing. The girl and another student got into a fight about her using the scissors, and the girl yanked away the scissors to keep the other student from taking them. Mai, who was standing quietly behind the girl trying to decide what to do, was slashed across the nose on accident. It was a small but deep cut, and Mai started bleeding very quickly. Both of their parents were called down, and Mai thought about how she should probably feel good now that this girl has gotten in big trouble for hurting them. But when the girl’s mother arrived, Mai saw her mom fly into a rage and yell and berate her heavily, and they just couldn’t feel anything but sad for her. The girl said sorry to her and Mai said it was okay, and that was the last time she ever saw or talked to her.

Mariana:

So I was reading articles about tamarack trees a while ago, and I came across this interesting fact: "Look for black spruces (Picea mariana) wherever tamaracks grow. They are the true partners of the swamps and bogs. Both do quite well in cold, wet habitats, and neither can stand the shade of other trees." And I thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be cute if we make a black spruce-inspired MC to pair with Tamarack?" And thus I present to you… Mariana Grahn. Her first name came from the scientific name of black spruce (Picea mariana), while her last name means —guess what—spruce. She presents herself as a calm and obedient kid to the grown-ups, but is actually pretty mischievous and a true partner in crime of Tamarack. Often gets herself and her friends away with trouble because of her image as "the good kid."

[rainydaydream-gal18]

(The Bad Batch) Crosshair x Reader: Chilly

Warnings: blizzard, cold, Crosshair being grumpy for thirty seconds, some cuddles, and some kissy-kissy.

   Your teeth chattered and body shuddered in futile attempts to warm itself.  Even though the fire your rescuer had built emanated warmth, you hadn’t felt much of a change in the last several minutes laying in the cold sleeping bag beside it.  The rickety ice-fishing shelter was a haven from the snowstorm outside, but you weren’t out of the woods yet, so to speak.

  Getting lost in a blizzard during a mission sure had its downsides.  You were fortunate that Crosshair had found you when he did.

   Speaking of the man, you glanced up as Crosshair ducked into the doorway, pulling the wooden door shut behind him.  He removed his helmet and set it down on the icy floor before throwing another log onto the fire.  The roar of its flames was so pleasant.  An ache settled in your cold hands as you let them hover in range of the warmth.  You almost didn’t notice how Crosshair started removing his armor.  Almost.

   “Cross, w-what are you d-d-doing?”

   Without looking at you, he unbuckled the last of his armor until he was just in his blacks and boots.  “I commed the others to report that I found you.  Tech said you were exposed to the cold for too long.”

   “Sure f-feels like it,” you muttered.  “What d-d-do we do?”

   “We need to get you warm.”  With expression gruff, he climbed over until he was right beside your sleeping bag and peeled back the cover.  His intense gaze watched you expectantly.  “Take off a few layers.”

   “O-okay.”  This time, the stutter wasn’t from the teeth-chattering.  You reached up a cold hand to the collar of your heavy coat, fingers fumbling around the zipper.  The action was difficult as it was with your hands being numbed from the cold, but having him watch you like a hawk didn’t help.

   “Quickly,” he snapped.

   “Sorry, i-it’s a little hard to move.”

   He sighed, but despite his earlier display of impatience, his hand was gentle as he pushed yours away and set to work on removing your coat.  He helped you shrug your way out of it. You were able to pull the sweater off over your head, leaving you in the tank top and pair of leggings you had underneath your gear.  Goosebumps bloomed along the bare skin of your arms, and another shudder racked your body.

   Crosshair wasted no time in climbing into the sleeping bag, pulling the cover up over the both of you, though he hesitated when you drew closer to his lean form.  You were desperate for warmth at that point, but you didn’t want to make it too uncomfortable for him.

   You peeked up at him shyly from where your head rested against his chest.  “M-mind if I…?”

   “Do what you need to.”

   You shifted to tangle your legs with his and breathed a sigh of relief.  Your one arm wrapped around his torso, hand accidentally brushing a patch of skin left exposed by the hem of his blacks riding up.  He jolted from your ice-cold touch with a hiss.

   “Sorry,” you mumbled.  Your heart began to thud wildly when he reached for your hand and tucked it under his blacks to place it on the hot skin there.  “Thank you,” you breathed. Crosshair fidgeted for a moment as he got used to the temperature.

   Neither of you spoke, so you listened to the soothing sounds around you as your body began to heat up.  The campfire crackled and snapped nearby.  It cast shadows on the old walls of the shelter.  If you listened hard enough, the howling winds outside could be heard.  What fascinated you the most was the steady drumming of Crosshair’s heart inside his chest.  His breathing hadn’t slowed, signalling that he wasn’t completely relaxed.

   You hated the thought of making him uneasy.  Over the time you’d spent with the Bad Batch, the snarky sharpshooter had grown on you.  Well, he wasn’t always snarky.  He sometimes acted like that when it came to newcomers, or once in a while he’d throw in a sarcastic remark to tease his brothers.  Most of the time, he was just quiet.  You had learned to read his body language, and you could tell at the moment that something occupied his mind.

   “You okay?”  You were finally able to stop the chatter of your teeth.

   “Next time, report back to the ship when you’re told,” he grouched.  “We didn’t know what to do when we lost connection to your comm.  Hunter nearly had a heart attack.”

   That was Crosshair code for, “I nearly had a heart attack.”

   “I tried,” you argued.  “My comm was broken, remember?  I couldn’t hone in on the ship’s signal.  My tracks were snowed over, and I got lost.”

   Crosshair went silent again for a moment as he brooded over it.  There really hadn’t been much you could do after escaping the snow beast other than remain where you were and hope the others would find you.  So that’s what you did.

   “Perhaps next time you should let one of us come with you,” he said curtly.

   He did have a point there.  Maybe if you hadn’t gone off alone in the first place, things might’ve turned out differently.  But you had insisted that you didn’t need to be watched.

   Oh, the sweet irony.

   Crosshair huffed, seeing that he had won the argument.  His chest rose and fell with the action.  As much as you wanted to be irritated, you didn’t have it in you.  Not while you were laying in his arms with your face buried in the shoulder of his blacks.  Guilt seemed to be the only emotion other than relief that you were capable of at the moment.

   “I’m sorry.”

   The apology was quiet, laced with humility as you abandoned your pride and simply let yourself be grateful.  Crosshair had braved the snowstorm to find you, after all.  He was doing everything he could to make sure you were safe, allowing you to cling to him with ice-cold hands and feet by the fire.

   He shifted a little, draping an arm around you.  Despite the fact that you were already pressed against him, the action felt more intimate.  He was finally holding you in return, actively helping you to get warm.  You took it as his way of accepting the apology, and fortunately, he didn’t stay on the topic any longer.

   “Are you doing any better?” he asked, glancing down at you.  His eyes didn’t hold the same irritation as before.  They even softened a bit as you met them.

   “Yeah, much better,” you said.  “It’s nice to be able to feel my fingers again.”  You flexed the digits experimentally against his skin, and Crosshair’s breath hitched.  His arm had subconsciously tightened around you.  The unexpected reaction piqued your interest.  This time, you let your hand run just a little farther up past the hem of his blacks.  Crosshair inhaled suddenly.

   “Does that bother you?” you murmured, glancing up to try and read his expression.  Though his face showed the same indifference it usually did, his eyes met yours with smoldering intensity.

   “No.”

   Without breaking eye contact, you did it again, letting your hand roam farther up his side.  You felt the expansion of his ribcage as he inhaled deeply.  As it contracted, you released a breath that you hadn’t realized you’d been holding.  For several minutes, the two of you stayed like that.  Your palm smoothed across the length of his side, fingertips brushing over a few prominent scars.  Your skin had gone from cold to warm to searing in Crosshair’s arms.  Did he feel it too?  Did he notice the pounding in your chest?  His heart had picked up its speed.

   He studied your expression like a hawk as his hand came up to brush your shoulder.  It was a light touch, delicate, as if he was testing the waters.  His eyes flickered to the spot before returning to your gaze.  The tension was unmistakable.  

   Unavoidable.  

   Irresistible.

   Crosshair took in your reaction; how your eyes fluttered closed and how lips parted slightly.  You were completely at ease with his touch, and you could feel that he had finally relaxed into yours.  With eyes shut, you felt his hand run down the length of your arm.  His warm breath fanned your face.

   “Cross,” you sighed.

   Both of you had pulled the rubber band as far as it could go.  With your utterance of his name, it finally snapped, and his mouth was on yours.  Heat exploded in your chest at the realization that he was kissing you.  The hand that you let linger at his waist clenched around  his blacks.  Crosshair shifted to lean on his elbow, bracing his other arm beside your head on the pillow, as he kissed you harder.  He could appear cold, calculated...but his kisses weren’t.  They were scorching.

   When you separated, so many questions flew through your mind as he gazed at you.

   Was this a dream?  Why, oh why, did his lips feel so warm and good against yours?  Was this a slip-up, or did he feel for you the way you felt for him?

   Only one way to find out.

   “I care about you, Crosshair,” you confessed.  He didn’t withdraw from you or give a look of annoyance, which was a good sign.  It was only when he leaned in and pressed a kiss to your forehead that you fully understood.  You beamed and nuzzled farther into the crook of his neck as he got settled on his side again.  The sleeping bag had become a cocoon of warmth, though his arms still encircled you for good measure.

   His heartbeat had gone steady.  His breathing slowed.  And you relished the minutes of peace until the storm cleared and the others were sure to find you.

[pet-genius]

Severus Snape and Godric's Old Stuff

How Severus got the Sword to Harry, from his point of view, as I imagine it:

It felt like it was many moons ago that Severus had put the Sorting Hat on and pleaded with it to give him the Sword of Gryffindor.

‘Well, this is a surprise,’ it told him. ‘I don’t normally find myself on the heads of full-grown wizards.’

If Severus had ever felt ridiculous, it was at that moment, especially because he felt an actual grudge against the ragged old hat rear its head. The hat, apparently, sensed it, as it shifted atop his head, but chose not to address this. ‘How may I help you, Severus?’

‘I require the Sword of Gryffindor.’

‘If I am not mistaken, and I hardly ever am, I put you in Slytherin. Only a true Gryffindor can pull the sword out of me.’

‘Of course good old Godric would make such a self-serving hat. For your information, I intend to deliver the Sword to a Gryffindor. I have no use for the blasted thing. If I could deliver you to him, I would have, but it will give away too much.’

‘I sense that you are upset with me, Severus,’ the hat replied. ‘Care to tell me why?’

Perhaps it was the fact that he was wearing a hat that normally only graced the heads of 11 year-olds, but he felt very much like a petulant child.

‘Because you put her in Gryffindor! You had to put her in the same stupid house as Potter and Black and the whole lot of them, and she….’ he did not finish his sentence in his mind. If the hat wanted to know, the hat was welcome to ask.

‘I stand by it. She was a Gryffindor if there ever was one, Severus, and you know it. Courageous, chivalrous, outspoken. She would not have done so well in another house’

‘I guess that makes me a coward, then,’ Severus thought, knowing full well he was being petty in the extreme, ‘not that I would call being murdered at 21 doing well, exactly.’

‘A coward, you are not. But you were and remain a quintessential Slytherin. Very easy to sort, you were. And it seems to me that you did very well for yourself, indeed - are you not Headmaster? Are you not the Dark Lord’s second in command?’

‘I never wanted any of this and you know it.’

‘You can’t lie to the Sorting Hat, Severus. All I say is what I see in your head.’

He sulked under the Hat. It was true - there was a time he would have given anything and everything to be the Dark Lord’s second in command; the only difference now was that he already had.

‘It was not so long ago that I sorted her son.’

Severus sulked some more.

‘I know you despise him; I know you see only his father in him.’

‘Wonderful, another sermon about the Amazing Harry Potter. Spare me. I have Dumbledore’s portrait for that.’

‘I wish I could show you he has a lot of his mother in him. He too is courageous, chivalrous, and outspoken. But you should know, I almost sorted him into your house.’

Severus almost choked. ‘Excuse me?’

‘He begged me not to. I later realized it was Tom Riddle’s fragmented soul I was responding to - yes, I heard Dumbledore tell you about it - but it is not necessarily the only reason. He has been cunning. He has been resourceful.’

‘Cunningly nearly getting himself killed every other week.’

‘Even so, I take it that it is him to whom you will be delivering the Sword.’

‘Precisely.’

‘I recognize that if I do not help you get it to him, I might have no one left to Sort next year. I can do it, for the benefit of Hogwarts. But the enchantment requires that you demonstrate extreme valour.’

Severus raised his Sword-less hands. ‘So I am a coward, then. And yet you Sorted Pettigrew into Gryffindor. How about the fact that I lie to the Dark Lord constantly, at the risk torture and death? How about the flagrant betrayal of him, before he fell? How about the fact that I have not killed myself yet?’

‘That will do, Severus.’ And the Sword fell into his hand.

As he extracted it from behind Dumbledore’s portrait, much later, Severus remembered his excruciating conversation with the Sorting Hat - he was glad it didn’t turn out to be a complete waste of time to get the Hat to cough it up to him.

‘Headmaster! They are camping in the Forest of Dean! The Mudblood -’

‘Do not use that word!’ Severus admonished the portrait.

‘- the Granger girl, then, mentioned the place as she opened her bag and I heard her!’

Dumbledore saw fit to remind him of the conditions under which the Sword must be taken - as if he could forget. That he did tell Severus, but tell him what in Godric’s name Harry needed the Sword for - Heaven forbid. The portrait also found it important to warn that must not let himself be seen “after George Weasley’s mishap”. It was good, Severus reckoned, that he already knew he must not be seen. George Weasley’s ear? I killed you and you think it is George Weasley’s ear they will be concerned about? But then again, Severus thought, what could he expect of a wizard who got himself cursed in so ridiculous a manner in the first place? “Don’t worry,” he said coolly. “I have a plan.”

The school was positively deserted - almost nobody stayed for Christmas this year. Only those who had absolutely no place else to call home remained, and thankfully, Rubeus Hagrid was one of them. Severus made his way to Hagrid’s hut. He did not bother with pleasantries.

“I require a thestral, Rubeus.”

“I will never help yeh, not fer me own life,” the Groundskeeper spat at him.

“Your life? Your life, Hagrid? You are not important enough to kill. Fetch me a thestral, or else, Hagrid.”

“Or else what, ye cunning, murdering…”

It was not exactly a question, but Headmaster Snape dignified it with an answer nevertheless. “Or else I will fire you and hire your old friend and Death Eater Macnair to teach Care of Magical Creatures. In a manner of speaking.”

Hagrid had no choice but to obey, muttering “‘course, he can see the thestrals, the student torturing, death eating traitor” to himself all the while. Hagrid seemed disgusted with himself, but for a change, Severus was not. This was the best Christmas break he has had in a long time.

Of course he could see the thestrals - he was no stranger to grief. He mounted one of the skeletal, winged horses and the useful creature brought him to the Forest of Dean. He dismounted the thestral and immediately ordered it to fly back to Hogwarts, and Hagrid.

Severus delighted in the irony of having to create a situation for Potter to demonstrate his courage, and he wondered if Granger would be clever enough to understand where the Sword must have come from.

He found a pond that had already frozen over, cracked the thick layer of ice to throw the Sword in the water, and as he watched the Sword submerge and sway from side to side as it sunk, he cast a quick freezing charm.

The rest of the operation depended on Harry - and that thought made Severus shudder more than the shivering cold did.

[bxllafanficc]

A world without heroes

Summary: Loki is imprisoned after the sudden attack on New York and with that, rest of the earth. And while you always thought you would have your lover's back, you find yourself unable to forgive this one. It's time for you to decide when enough's enough.

Pairing: Loki Laufeyson x reader

Sidenote: This was inspired by the song "A world without heroes" from KISS. I just immediately though about a moment where reader would be thrown into a deep sea of darkness after finding out the major betrayal lingering beneath many layers of Loki Laufeyson's charismatic persona.

The cold surface of the bulletproof glass is supposed to have a large impact on your wrist as the two objects collide. It's supposed to hurt but it doesn't. The glass is meant to stand and for you to give up. You're meant to lay off and calm down; meaning, stop slamming your fist into the cell like if it was going to break if you just willed your way through.

They say that if you want something enough, you possess the power to do anything. But what do you want to such an extent? More importantly, what does he want? What did he really want? Has he ever wanted any more than a throne to sit on? Or was there something more to it? Did he even know what it really meant? And if so, did he realize the consequences of his actions; not just by the billions of lives he would have destroyed, but his family, yours and especially his own as well.

A part of you wants to believe that he was under some kind of control; that he wasn't really conscious these past days. All the lives he already stole, you want to think that if he had a choice, he would've spared them. You want to believe it all so badly. You want to throw all your common sense away and just collapse into his arms. Give him a tender kiss and gaze into his eyes with lingering warmth like you used to. To forgive and forget.

But the common sense stays where it should be. You can't. Because the past days he's been imprisoned, he's confirmed every action. He doesn't even defend anything; thinks he doesn't need to. Rock-hard believing his decision was the right one to make when he really had no right.

And your eyes are no more tender and soft; but clouded and swollen, piercing through the pair of eyes on the other side of the glass. And your mouth is not tasting the sensetion of sweet lips. Only the salty wetness of your tears pooling like mad rivers.

Your chest feels heavy and about to explode. You need to scream; feel like that's the only solution to relieve the pressure. You almost feel like you're being choked. Choked on love, choked on hope, air, trust, literally everything your life has contained so far.

And the man in front of you doesn't seem to understand how your world is seemingly falling apart before him. The pure confusion in his eyes is twisting your stomach and your feel like throwing up.

"I thought I knew you."

Your sobs has quieted down. Before, you weren't able to speak very well. You just had to wait the storm out until it came rushing back ten times worse next time.

"You do, darling. You always have."

Calm as a snake and laid back. He doesn't even seem to realize that every word spoken will matter in the following moments of actions where you will decide both your fates for him.

"Did I, really? How can you look me in the eyes and say that with your disgusting pride!" You spit at the glass; aim at his feet but it doesn't seem to faze him a tiny bit. You want to bring out a reaction from him, cause maybe then, you would get some sense of honesty out of him.

"My disgusting pride? The world we're living in is disgusting and twisted. How can you even compare midgardians brutality and greediness to Asgards prosperity and beauty?"

You don't want to hear this talk again. Only a couple of years ago, you would have ignored it as just one of his endless bitter rants and thought nothing more of it, not knowing that he was actually planning to find an end to his irritation.

"(Y/n), darling, You have agreed with me on this! We agreed that humans are short minded, only good for the cause of starting a war between their own race and assassinate each other. Their petty little lives are doomed anyway."

You can't even process the amount of irony and hypocrisy seeping through his sentences. You want to scream at him. You want to hold him. You want to cry, give him a piece of your mind. But you want to fall asleep in his arms. You miss his embrace so much. Endless tiredness since he vanished, only to find he's become a monster.

Your fists attempts to break the glass once again, aiming at his perfect eyes. Those damn eyes. The same eyes you used to adore. You still do. Torn between what you want and what you should do.

"You had no right! Who are you to choose who gets to live and who doesn't?! Why should you be any different from the humans?"

Your words are no longer contained into normal conversation. Only now, Loki seems to actually start realizing the weight behind your rage.

"I did it for us, love! For you. How am I supposed to give you everything if I'm just a mere god, son of a bastard and feared of my own people. Is that the man to give you everything? Is it?"

You don't even know where the thought process of this has sparked in his mind. Never have you asked anything unusual from him, just endless trust and honesty. You have always supported him when no one else would and when nobody wanted anything to do with him. A shoulder to cry on or an ear for venting. You've heated him up with your warmth when he was feeling cold and kissed him back to health countless of times. You used to be his. In return you only asked for trust and honesty. And the funny thing? In the end, you got none of that.

"I never wanted the world, Loki! I wanted you! Couldn't you see that you were enough?"

"Why do you care about the midgardians so much? What have they done for you? Have they given you flowers when you were sad? Have they kept you company at nights where you were haunted by nightmares? Did they do any of those? Because I recall it was me who stood by you all those years!"

Why is he suddenly so angry? It makes no sense to you. When he for once speaks from his real thoughts, anger and frustration is still the feeling behind it. Even if he got his plan to destroy earth through, it wouldn't stop his burning hate.

"You speak like they are nothing but soulless objects, pawns for you to manipulate when you feel like it!"

"They need a group of unstable mutants to protect them from dangers! A bunch of heroes that they don't even really like sometimes. The heroes gets the blame of the catastrophe happening even if they are the one fighting it! Is that a society worth fighting for? Their beloved little heroes are nothing but fools."

"Everything is worth fighting for. You don't know these people, do you? And as for the people, the heroes are a beacon of hope; a sign to stand strong and come together!"

You stand quiet for a second. Your fist lowers itself against the hard surface.

"Against people like you."

You don't want to see him anymore. Heard enough. Ready to go. You've made you decision. Because how could there ever be a change to this man? When he's been hiding his true nature behind your back for so long? Did you even know who you loved? Could you even call it love?

"Did you ever love me? Or was I just being fooled this entire time?"

Concern is now displaying on him for real. Maybe he's realize where you're going; what you're about to say.

"Why would you ask that? I love you more than anything! (Y/n), please understand this! I'd do anything for you!"

"Then tell me one single moment, just one, where you've spent time with me and thought 'I could be satisfied with this. I don't need power. I'm good with what I have'."

You heart is aching with anticipation. It's almost fatal. You don't want to know but he must realize it himself before you can finish.

And you can really see how he's trying. He's trying so hard for you, he thinks. He probably thinks he's tried doing everything for you; when he really just needed not to do anything at all. And just like you guessed, there comes no words. He knows you'll see if he's lying and knows you're right. But you don't ever think he will ever regret his attack for the right reasons. Nor for you, to get you back. No, you'll never accept that.

"I can't live like this, Loki. Can't you see you're breaking my heart?"

"I didn't mean to-"

"No. You didn't mean to do it, right? That's what you're gonna say... But I've heard enough. You have made a decision. And it's about time that I make mine as well."

The realization hits him almost instantly. And all the traces of his usually calm manner were gone in an instant. He's no longer standing with hands clasped behind his back. But they're clawing and pawning at the glass keeping the two of you apart. Loneliness is the one fatal emotion he hasn't dared himself to feel for years with you by his side. But now when it all might be taken away from him in a matter of seconds? How is he supposed to react?

He's begging, pleading, punching and screaming. Sobbing and begging even more. His silvertounge can't save him now. Nothing can save him now from the unruly fate. A path he himself had laid out beneath his feet.

"Please, (Y/n) I love you! I don't want to be here alone!"

...

"Please... It's cold and dark. I can't breathe without your warmth! Just.. Please!"

You can't stand to hear any more. His pleading is too much and you've stayed enough.

Your heart feels like it's being torn in half by your own hands as you turn around, the cold of your back hitting him in the deepest depths of his despair. And it sets him off.

You're going to leave him. The only purely good thing in his life is going to leave him. Where is he going to get his hugs? It doesn't matter because they won't be from you. Is he even going to remember your face when time has passed? Will he even remember your laugh, smile or your goofy little moments together? Will you find somebody else? Forget about him and move on.

Loki doesn't want you to move on; doesn't want you to move at all. He's ready to do whatever it takes to get you to stay.

And he would, if there wasn't a thick wall between you, keeping him from you no matter how hard he slammed it or how loudly he screamed at you.

Pleading became despair and despair led to threats; the only solution left to try.

He knew it was wrong. Wrong to threaten a loved one, especially you. But he would never accept his fate knowing that he hadn't tried anything in his power to make the only thing left for him to love slip past his hands.

But a tiny part of him knows that you won't hear him. Won't listen to him like those late summer nights under the moon on a cozy blanket, you tightly wrapped into his embrace with a content smile on your face.

Or the time when a sudden attack of sorrow and anxiety hit him in the middle of the night and you held him close to your chest while whispering sweet assurances for him to fall asleep to.

You had been his anchor to the real world.

You were the only thing to keep him sane enough.

But it wasn't enough in the end.

You had been his hero.

But not even a hero could save someone's world sometimes.

Especially when he was the one ruining it.

His love.

(Y/n)

[flappypineapples]

Escapism Ch. 4

Anna cleared a path hastily through the main room of the Hell Ruelle while Matthew trailed behind her carrying a limp Cordelia in his arms. The looks they were shot ranged from concern to mirth but Anna didn't have time to dwell on that now.

She quickly climbed into the carriage barking orders to take them to the Institute as quickly as possible.

Matthew clambered into the carriage after her handing up Cordelia to Anna for support. Once inside the carriage without thinking he hastily gathered her back into his arms, holding her across his lap and propping her head up on his left shoulder.

He robotically reached up and placed his fingers under the crook of her jaw feeling her pulse. Weak but holding on. Her lovely skin was turning a sickly beige color now.

He fumbled around in his jacket pockets looking for his stele and only finding his flask.

"Damn it!", He cursed at the flask and tossed it unceremoniously to the floor.

When he looked back up he found Anna leaning forward to place an iratzi on Cordelia's arm. Matthew cursed himself for not having the foresight or responsibility to remember to take it out of his green jacket from earlier. All he remembered was the stupid flask.

"Matthew." He looked down and watched what must've been her second or third iratzi sink into Cordelia's skin like a name written in water.

Matthew cursed again, it seemed it was all he was good for. He couldn't protect her or James or his family or himself all he could do was curse and drink and pray.

Anna urgently rapped on the roof of the carriage, "We need to go faster!" She leveled her eyes with Matthew, "Cordelia is strong, stronger than the lot of us."

The carriage lurched forward picking up speed.

"And we are not giving up on her now."

Matthew nodded but barely heard her over the pounding of his own heart. He leaned forward to press his face once again into her hair, taking in the scent of patchouli and lavender.

He let out a small whimper.

"God not again. Cordelia please breathe. Please forgive me. I only wanted to bring you into my world to share my love of it. You love things like I like them I know you do, I see it in your eyes when we walk together. I may be poison but I never meant for it to touch your lips."

Matthew mumbled whispers unintelligibly into her hair for a few antagonizing minutes before it seemed he himself couldn't even stand his own voice anymore and he resided to listening to her shaky breath against the hard sound of wheels on brick.

-----------

The carriage stopped short in the courtyard of the institute. Matthew, however did not wait for this full stop to swing the doors open and start shouting for help. Luckily a servant had been in the entrance tending to the witchlights when they'd arrived. He ran out and quickly gauging the situation rushed to help Matthew transport Cordelia to the infirmary.

Hearing the rucuss Tessa came rushing down in her dressing gown followed by a hastilly clothed Will clutched a half doused witchlight.

"By the angel what is all this rucess. Anna what is happening?" Will shot a confused look at her and then a look of horror as he watched Cordelia be carried hastily away.

Anna quickly approached them.

Will looked tired, a thick layer of concern painted on his face, his wife Tessa was concerned but controlled, forever poised in the face of danger.

"Matthew Cordelia and I were out tonight when she collapsed. I suspect some kind of poison. Iratzis don't seem to work. We must call the silent brothers she's fighting now but by the angel even the fiercest warriors tire."

Tessa quickly nodded to her husband. She went after the men to the infirmary while Will went to signal the brothers.

 

---------

Lucie came running like a thunderstorm down the hallway; stricken concern sunk into her face. She looked as if she had been deep in a chapter or dream, her hair a mess and a quickly drawn dressing gown tied around her. Her feet were bare but Matthew could still hear her pounding his way.

She had stopped short seeing Matthew there in the hallway and the closed door that served as a clear sign neither of them were welcome in there with the brothers. Without thinking twice she threw herself toward his grabbing him by the shoulders, her eyes barring into him.

"Daisy, my Daisy", she choked out "What's wrong, is she going to be okay". Clearly she had appeared in such a hurry no one had explained the full situation to her.

Matthew must have betrayed some of his own fear in the face of her question for she pushed him away and started head surely for the door.

"She needs me there Math! I'm her parabatai, I can make her stronger, make her better!" He quickly caught at her arm keeping her from yanking the door nob off the already locked door.

"Lucie the Silent Brothers are in there with her now you know there's nothing you can do. Everything you try to do will only get in there way." Matthew cringed at the harshness of his words and amended them quickly. "She's strong, she's going to get through this okay." Matthew sounded as sure as he could muster.

Lucie turned toward him quickly brushing off his hand like it burned her. "And exactly what is this." She said gesturing to the door. Her anger was obvious and glaring but Matthew doubted it had anything do with him specifically.

He ran his hand over his face lazily, suddenly very tired. "Anna suspects she may have been poisoned, some sort of demon sourced poison so thats why iratzis didn't seem to work." He leaned against the wall and slid down it crouching there and letting his head fall into his hands.

Lucie felt her anger towards him start to melt away. She had to admit she hadn't seen many things touch Matthew so much since he had started drinking and building stone castles between the world and his heart but this was touching him now. Cordelia had touched his heart someway like she had touched Lucie.

Lucie walked over and sat down next to him reaching up an arm to sling around his back as she leaned into his side.

"You're right Matthew, she's been through much worse than this. Plus she's my Cordelia, strong and resilient. Some poison won't be the thing to take her down." Now it was Lucie's turn to muster up assuredness.

Matthew ran his hands through his hair for the thousandth time this hour. He let out a frustrated groan and dug his head between his knees. He reached yet another time for a flask that wasn't their, forgotten on the carpet of the Lightwood carriage.

He was crouched now outside the infirmary door next to Lucie. Lucie, dear and loyal Lucie who had comforted him in time of her own distress and now was trying to convince him that none of this was his fault and that she would be alright. It all fell on to numb ears though.

He had poisoned his mother, murdered his sister and now had led yet another person he loved to the same sickness. She had trusted him, put her night in his hands and he had played the wrong move.

Checkmate. It seemed no matter what move he made he could never escape his past.

--------

Alastair had gotten the news about Cordelia promptly after she was delivered to the Institute. Will had sent a servant to ride over and alert the family to the situation best they could. Alastair had regrettably not been sleeping that night. He had been staring blanking at what seemed like his hundredth letter. Well no not letter, almost letter. No matter how hard he tried he couldn't find the right words to right Thomas.

His desk was littered with failed attempts and hastily crinkled up wads containing apology after apology. Sometimes he let his apologies drone on further to hopes or words of endearment, but he smudged the ink quickly before his words left a mark truly. But they just left behind another failed attempt at redemption.

He felt as if he was caught in a huge game of chess and Matthew had wiped out his king. Matthew was staring down a checkmate while Alastair had done nothing more than cry.

The pounding at the door jolted him out of his trance though. He took once final look at his most recent attempt and quickly bunched it up, tossing it heavily to the floor. Looking out the window he had seen the cress of the Institute and knew then and there something way wrong. The Layla was in trouble.

He threw on a waistcoat that had been slung over the edge of his bed and quickly made his way downstairs.

He flung open the door as the servant was walking up the walkway. Before they could open their mouths to speak Alastair blurted out, "What's wrong?" He had come so fast down the stairs he was out of breath and it came out as a fast and breathy order.

The servant hesitated breifly before telling him that Cordelia had fallen ill and they suspected some kind of cultivated demon poison to be behind it.

He tore out of the house not bothering to wake up his mother. Any moment longer spent away from his sister's side may be a moment too late. She would find out in the morning one way or another. He hopped into the back of the Herondale carriage as it quickly took of towards the Institute. He bathed in the irony of a Herondale carriage and Herondale servant aiding him of all people in his time of need be he didn't let himself dwell on it long. He simply didn't have the emotional strength.

--------

To say Matthew Fairchild was tired would be an understatement. He wished for nothing more than to thunk his head back on the wall and fall blissfully into the escape of sleep like Lucie. Lucie sat with her legs out infront of her and her head propped up against Matthew's shoulders. Matthew on the other hand was wide awake and itching to know what was going on in there. He was also itching to find out where James was. Mrs. Herondale had left moments ago to hastily fetch him from the townhouse he and Cordelia had been residing in the past couple months just a few moments earlier. She had first stopped in to check on Matthew and Lucie shooting Matthew a right and sympathetic smile and Lucie a look of pure motherly worry.

Finally given time to think about it he wondered why on Earth James had been with Grace tonight. Matthew was under the impression that James intended to stay faithful to Cordelia during their arrangement. James was nothing if not loyal and the thought of him betraying Cordelia's trust filled him with a sudden flush of anger. James was the unknowing catalyst to this whole situation yet it was Lucie and him sitting outside fretting over his wife. Though the marriage itself was fake James obviously cared for Cordelia as a close friend. None of it made any sense. But then again, Matthew amended, not much James had done in a long time has made much sense.

His train of thought was interupted by heavy and swift footsteps on the carpet. Expecting it to be James's dad he simply let his head hang again. Not wanting Mr. Herondale to see all the plain emotions of anger and worry he knew were clearly plastered on his face. The hasty iratzes he'd applied earlier had done their job and now Matthew had no safe guard of inebriation to cushion the blow of everything around him.

No alcohol to shield his emotions.

The footsteps stopped abruptly infront of him in a very un-Will Herondale like manor. Matthew raised his eyes and was met by an extremely disheveled and angry Alastair Carstairs. His chest rose and fell quickly as he looked from the closed door to Lucie asleep next to Matthew to Matthew himself, dressed in evening clothes. His necktie was now untied and stuffed half heartedly in his best pocket. His shirt was untuck and his waist coat draped open revealing a wrinkled dress shirt. His hair was rumpled and flattened down and his eyes were clear as glass.

"Are they with her?", Alastair blurted out suddenly. "The brothers I mean." For being someone who seemed to have a very urgent and angry demeiner about them Alastair had no trace of blame or disgust in his voice when he spoke to Matthew. Only a thick drawl of concern.

"When they brought Layla- Cordelia in did they say how long they'd be? Did they say anything about her condition? What happened? Who was she with?" His words spilled out of him in a very not Alastair way. Matthew hesitated to meet his eyes, scared that one look from Alastair and he'd know exactly how Matthew felt for his sister.

But he did, he mustered up the bravery and met his eyes.

"She was with me and Anna. They suspect someone slipped something in one of her drinks and that it might have some sort of demonic origin and that's why runes wouldn't work for her."

Alastair looked halfway between confused and raging as he asked, "You were with her? Where were you?".

Matthew took a deep breath, fixed his eyes warily on the wall across from him and explained Cordelia's odd entrance into Anna's flat and how she had wanted them to take her to the Hell Ruelle again to lift her spirits. He of course left out the part about James being unfaithful and he and Cordelia themselves being unfaithful to James in turn.

When he finished his tale he shifted his eyes back to Alastair. For once he didn't look angry, just incredibly tired. He didn't quip back or accuse Matthew for being a careless drunk that had let his sister be hurt. Matthew had been ready, been expecting it, and now for it to not come it almost felt even more concerning.

No what Alastair did instead was walk to Matthew's side and sit himself next to him against the wall. Neither of them said anything they just stared ahead. Waiting.

Matthew saw Alastair shift slightly at his side and glanced toward the man. He saw that Alastair had began to tear up. He watched him hastily wipe them away and bury his face in his hands. For the first time Matthew didn't feel anger toward Alastair. What he felt instead was much more uncomfortable. It was a sort of pity verging on the feeling of recognizing how gray of a person Alastair truly was.

Alastair raised his head and turn it towards Matthew meeting his gaze. They both pretended like he had not seen Alastair cry and that Alastair in turn did not see how completly vulnerable Matthew was right now worrying over his sister.

"When we were little she used to go up to the case where father would keep Cortana and talk to the sword for hours." Alastair smiled, "She'd drone on about her most recent letter from Lucie or the new weapon she'd learned about in lessons. But most frequently she talked about how one day when Cortana was free and in her hands she'd be a hero like father."

Alastair hissed out a harsh breath before continuing. "My father is a drunk, Fairchild. Cordelia never knew that though. I spent my whole childhood hiding bottles and feigning that father was just ill when he was stuck in bed the morning after dragging in from a bar at 3 am. I spent my childhood making sure she had one, one where she could love her father like I never could."

"When I came to the academy there were question I couldn't answer. People asked me what was wrong with my family that we moved around so much and why my father was constantly sick and of course the unspoken but clearly intended why was I darker than the other boys, different."

He flicked his gaze from The door to wall again and continued. "I learned very quickly that the only way to keep myself from being bullied and the rumors about my family to stop was to start and stress rumors about others. To fake interest in all the devious gossip of young boys at the academy. If I could diverge attention away from my mother and Cordelia, our family maybe I could survive."

He turned his head fully to Matthew again and locked eyes with him, "I was miserable out of my mind. And then you came along and you didn't have to do anything to get them to like you or leave you alone. All you did was smile and everyone would eat it up. I was so jealous of you and Thomas and hell even Herondale."

He emphasized the last name with a flick of his wrist as he with drew himself back and continued his staring match at the wall.

"He had a charming and present father who loved him all of you do. All I wanted was to look like you. And have people love me like you. I was jealous."

"I did horrible things because of that jealousy. Jealousy makes fools of us all. Those actions haunt me every single day of my life. They're things that I am trying my best to make up for. And that's why I'm telling you this." He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

"I'm ashamed of my father. I've done everything in my power to distance myself from him and bury his true nature under layers and layers of smiles and charm. But I am absolute rubbish with my words."

He opened his eyes and winced. 

"I'm ashamed of myself."

Alastair ran his hand through his hair and pulled at it anxiously. "The hundred smeared and crumpled up letters to Thomas that litter my desk and floor only seem to prove how much of a coward I still am. I don't expect immediate forgiveness from you Fairchild I simply wish for you to understand."

He turned toward Matthew.

"I was a scared and foolish child then but I am no longer that boy and I am trying my very best to be a man to be proud of. A man that would make Thomas forgive me." He seemed to choke a but in his words towards the end but he covered it up by suddenly clearing his voice. Matthew thought it odd that he and James were Herondale and Fairchild and yet Thomas to Alastair was just Thomas. 

He looked tired but most of all he looked like a man deprived of joy. Like someone had knocked the bite out of him completly.

Matthew was at a complete loss for words. He let his mouth open and close multiple times trying to come up with the proper thing to say in this situation but failed.

Luckily Matthew was saved from his reply by the infirmary door swinging open and brother Enoch stepping out.

Alastair shot up from the ground and let his face be taken over by pure worry as he waited to here was Brother Enoch had to say. The only thing that kept Matthew too from shooting up was the still very sleeping Lucie on his shoulder whom he didn't wish to disturb at the moment no matter how famous of a heavy sleeper she was.

She is doing much better. We were able to extract the poison with little long term damage. She is very lucky, any longer and perhaps we would not have been so successful. 

Matthew paled and thanked the angel silently that Anna had been such a pill to the carriage driver.

But she is tired. She asked for you however. He turned his robed head toward Alastair and nodded. She is ready for you when you are available.

With that Brother Enoch walked silently down the hallway as another brother silently slipped through the door and followed him.

Without another word Alastair entered the room, quietly closing the door behind him.

Matthew was left reeling in the hallway. Had that really just happened? He felt as if he hallucinated the whole encounter and if not for the distinct lack of alcohol in his body he'd blame it on being pissed out of his mind.

But no, Alastair had beared his soul to Matthew, trusting him with extremely private information and for what? Forgiveness? He couldn't understand it. How this man's truth seemed to save him when Matthew's truth would only damn him further. They all had albatrosses and perhaps he thought, speaking on his would free his neck of the bird's heavy pull like it had seemed to do to Alastair.

And it did Matthew realized. Alastair sharing his mariner tale had helped Matthew realize this bit who was the catalyst for his damnation was not a malicious devil but complicated and sad. He was far from forgiving the situation as a whole but understanding Alastairs perspective had atleast laid the groundwork.

Perhaps everything was a little less black and white than Matthew had allowed himself to believe.

[thesandersarchives]

Dreams/Nightmares

A brilliant, wonderful anon ask on my main blog made me think about the canon characters meeting their Sanders Archives selves, soooooo... here we are! Mild warnings for bugs (maggots), body horror, suffocation, vomiting (mentioned only, not described), and panic attacks.

The first thing Logan sees once he realizes he’s dreaming is--well, technically speaking, it’s not a ‘thing’, it’s a man. He doesn’t look like Thomas in the slightest, not like any Side he knows, but somehow Logan knows that this tall, long-haired man is him. And then this other-him turns, and Logan sees his eyes. Or more accurately, behind his eyes.

It’s infinite. Beautiful, if Logan were prone to poetic language. An entire universe of knowledge, inside this man’s mind, and Logan is envious, until the other-him opens his mouth.

“Don’t. Don’t wish for this, don’t seek it out.” There’s a pleading, desperate edge to his voice, and it prompts Logan to look closer. He sees himself, helpless, doomed to watch horror upon horror upon horror and unable to look away, unable to intervene, unable to save the people he cares about as they fall deeper and deeper, and all the while, he’s being watched himself, a specimen under a microscope and nothing more, nothing more--

Logan wakes with a start in his own bed. He switches the light on almost immediately, reaching for his favorite novel to give him a sense of familiarity, comfort, control. When he does eventually return to sleep, he hopes he won’t dream of those eyes again... -------------------------------------------------

Virgil is no stranger to fear, nor nightmares, but this one is the worst he’s had in a while. He doesn’t know exactly what’s chasing him through these twisting corridors with dizzying patterns on the walls and carpet, but he knows that somehow that fractured, twisted monster-thing is him. If he weren’t panicking right now, he’d be able to appreciate the irony that even in his dreams, he’s his own worst enemy.

Eventually, he stumbles, falls--he tries in vain to crawl around a corner, but cold, spindly fingers close around his ankle and drags him back

“I’m sorry,” His own voice, layered over with static, comes from behind him, too close for comfort. “I don’t want to do this, I don’t, I really don’t, I’m sorry--”

Static roars in Virgil’s ears, and he wakes with a gasp, launching himself out of bed and into the hallway before his brain catches up--but it’s not the hallway from his dreams, the adrenaline from the chase is already fading, though he’s still trembling.

Shakily, he staggers downstairs for a coffee. He’s not getting any more sleep tonight. --------------------------------------------

Remus usually has weird lucid dreams, so it’s no special occasion when he finds himself in a basement crawling with maggots. He’s pretty sure he’s already had a similar dream, actually, which is frustrating. He hates repeating himself, hates the thought that he has the capacity to be boring and predictable like Roman.

Nevertheless, he’s having a maggot dream, and he’s determined to enjoy it even if it is a repeat. He strides up to the largest cluster of wormy-squirmy deliciousness, and reaches out a hand. Just before he makes contact, something barrels into him with an incoherent snarl, knocking him flat on his back.

“Leave us alone.” The person above him hisses, voice echoing. His face and what little Remus can see of the rest of his body are covered in holes, which seem to house more of those lovely maggots. And somehow, that’s not even the most interesting thing about his appearance. No, judging by the mustache and the wild look in his eyes, this person is supposed to be him.

Suddenly, the other-him leaps back and away, like he’s been burned, muttering apologies and clutching at his head. More of the crawling mass swarms towards him, covering his feet and legs, going up and up and up while Remus grows uncharacteristically nauseated at this half-mad, helpless version of himself.

He wakes with a shudder, and scrubs a hand over his face a couple times until he’s satisfied that there aren’t any maggot-holes, before rolling over and going back to what he now knows is going to be a fitful sleep. --------------------------------------------

Roman doesn’t often have dreams like this, quasi-realistic, bland dreams of the back of his own head hunched over a book, but perhaps this is meant to be some kind of precursor to something more interesting. With that in mind, he approaches, and gets just close enough to see himself lift a gnarled, mangled hand to turn a page.

He gasps, and just that small little noise is enough to alert his other-self, who stands--tall, taller than Roman thought humanly possible--and snatches the book away. He turns, and Roman looks into a face that is and is not his own, a face that is indescribably wrong.

He takes an involuntary step back, horrified at the sight, and watches the other-him’s wrong face twist into something resembling dismay. He starts to speak, but Roman doesn’t hear--he’s already running. He can distantly hear bones creak, flesh shifting, and he doesn’t look back, no matter what horrifying things he’s seen Remus do, this is worse, so much worse, he’s so much worse--

Roman wakes tangled in his bedsheets, damp with sweat. He heaves himself out of bed with a heavy sigh. His mouth is dry and there’s bile rising in his throat. He needs a glass of water, and he needs it now. ----------------------------------------------

Patton doesn’t have lucid dreams often, but when he does, they’re rarely set in his room. Although perhaps this isn’t quite his room, but it feels like it could be... If he’d transformed into a giant video-game frog and destroyed the place, at least. The whole place is a pile of rubble and dust and remnants of old memories that Patton dimly recognizes.

At the center of the wreckage is a man--at first Patton thinks it’s one of Thomas’ friends, but as he shuffles closer, he realizes that it’s him--well, a version of him, anyway. Covered in dust and dirt and looking bone-tired, waist-deep in a pile of old books and soil.

Patton rushes forward to try and pull him out, but the other-him shakes his head. “No use for it, buddy. I’m in too deep.”

He tries for a grin, but it falters, and he lapses into a coughing fit, sending dust swirling up into the air as he sinks deeper, deeper, dirt spilling from his mouth. Patton’s stomach lurches. He looks back down at his other-self’s dirt-smeared, still-smiling face. 

“Don’t you worry, everything’s fine.” He says, and Patton hears a loud, deep groan before the roof caves in and falls down on top of them both, blocking out the light, the air, everything, and the breath is stolen from his lungs--

Patton kicks off his duvet as soon as he wakes up, stumbling in his haste to reach the bathroom before he throws up. -------------------------------------------------

Janus tries to hide his surprise at the sight of--well, not exactly himself. Himself if Thomas was a few inches shorter, with a slightly more angular face and lighter hair. Himself without scales, with normal human eyes. He used to look a little bit like that, years and years ago, and he finds himself wishing--

“Not the truth, I’m afraid. At least, not anymore.” His other-self says, letting his features melt into a half-scarred face before it morphs into more familiar scales. “Sorry to disappoint.”

He looks impossibly old, for a moment, and there’s a flash of something sad and defeated in his eyes before they cloud over into mismatched mirrors, and just as Janus comes up with a question in his mind, the other-him answers.

“A long time. And mostly alone.”

Janus can’t fathom what he’s been through, what it would be like, and he doesn’t want to. The idea of spending who-knows-how-many years completely on his own sends a chill through him, too close in his mind to the few years he spent in the dark until he found his way to the other banished Sides. He steps forward, for once at a loss for words but determined to offer some form of comfort nonetheless, but his other-self gets there first.

“It’s better this way, and I’m well used to it by now. So you just sleep, no more dreams for you tonight. I’m not built for prolonged socialization, and it’s dangerous for you to linger.”

With that, he puts a hand against Janus’ chest and pushes, gently, until Janus tips back, falling into blackness.

He’ll wake, a little later, with tears drying on his pillow and the inexplicable urge to tear his gloves into little pieces burning in his mind. ---------------------------------------------------

Thomas didn’t expect to meet a new Side in his dreams, but apparently it can happen.

This one seems more like him than the others so far, somehow, but he looks downright miserable. And no wonder, with the cold dampness permeating this dreamscape. Thomas waves his hand in a Roman-esque flourish, manifesting a coat, which he drapes around the Side’s shoulders.

The Side stiffens, turning to look at him sharply, before scoffing and turning away.

“I should’ve guessed.” He says wetly, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand. Thomas isn’t quite sure what does it, exactly, but suddenly something clicks into place and he realizes that this isn’t a Side--it’s him.

...Except it isn’t, quite. He’s seen enough reflections of his own face to know that he’d never hold himself like that, never set his jaw that way, never harden his gaze and shut his emotions away like this other-Thomas is doing.

He gets the feeling that this Thomas doesn’t want to talk, so he merely sits down and wraps an arm around the other-him, waiting for the man to settle into the touch. They stare out into the fog in silence, and Thomas dimly registers other-him leaning against his side before the fog blots out everything else, and he wakes up with the light of dawn leaking through his curtains, a fuzzy, cold feeling in his head, and a dull ache in his stomach like he’s been punched in the gut.

He summons his Sides, all of them, the need to see them and be with them greater than his exhaustion. They all look as worn-out as he feels, even Remus. He sighs, and spreads his arms. “Bring it in, guys. We’re going back to sleep.”

They fall surprisingly easily into a cuddle pile, and Thomas soon drifts back into sweeter dreams with his Sides sleeping peacefully around him. They’ll talk about what they each saw in the night once they wake, but for now, it remains in the past, a fleeting nightmare and nothing more.

[wearthegoldhat]

Familiar Old Soul

I was driving up the 5 with a friend one evening and I felt like Milo in his little car after the phantom tollbooth, completely transported, winding through the most surreal miles of effortless bucolic beauty, hills of brassy grass glowing under gradients of a summer sunset that surely lent California its nickname. It felt especially surreal after a regular work day in the city. And I learned many interesting things about my friend during that drive up.

I will first tell you that my friend is an interestingly small-sized person. In fact, he looks exactly like an otherwise healthy full-grown man, whom someone has resized by clicking the corner of his bounding box and dragging inward while holding down shift. I learned later that this is because he suffered calcium deficiency as a child and his parents didn’t know until it was late, not late enough for Rickets, but late enough for his knees to be weak and the doctor to tell him to stop hiking. He would sooner die than stop hiking though. He just carries a pair of trekking poles with him every time he goes. (He told me he read this description of himself and laughed until his stomach hurt. He also said it was the best part of the whole thing I wrote so if you want you can stop reading now.)

My friend is fascinated with America in a way that helps me remember again how bewildering America is, how her peculiarities must be explained to those who didn’t grow up here. In a weird way, it felt like talking to my father, but a younger version of him, when he was still impressionable and eager, reading John Steinbeck in the library in Warwick as the snow fell outside.

I had to explain to him things like “identity crisis” and “teenage angst,” for these things do not exist the world around. I said things like: America is a country that makes sense of herself through movies, media, ads, and entertainment. Mental health is an epidemic because self-sufficiency is the highest order of the land. Young people begin early on to ask questions about themselves, who they are, where they belong, how are they different or the same as everyone else, and this often ushers in a very troubled brooding period, toxified by the unrealistic ideals modeled by movies, media, ads, and entertainment, the mediums through which Americans make sense of themselves. And they must do this alone, to each his or her own. Teenage angst is a time of deconstructing, testing boundaries, asking questions of every body and every system in sight. Most people grow out of it eventually, but not everybody does (some people are left deconstructing everything for the rest of their adult lives).

He had to explain to me things like how, where he grew up, his family could populate a small town. 200+ people, a network of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, whom he could call for help at 1am and they would not be obliged to, but obliging in coming immediately to help. He explained to me how he wouldn’t mind living with his family forever, how he always wants his mother to be around, how he travels from home to home, staying over, and on hot nights everyone sleeps on the roof together under the stars. He was able to articulate a tremendous happiness and peace of mind knowing his family is there for him. Identity crisis and teenage angst are far from people’s lived experience.

He had to explain to me how he took the train into the city every day for work. How people hang off the sides, which sounds fun until you know how fast those trains move, how people die from falling off all the time. He told me he learned from experience to know how to get on and get off at your stop amidst the massive crowds that you cannot push past. How he learned to just sleep during the ride because he was propped up on all sides by tightly packed human bodies. How the men on his train started to recognize him after awhile, and became his buddies, sharing food, and playing instruments together, saving space for him and pulling him in above the throng (what is friendship, after all, but pulling one person from out of the crowd?)

At the same time, he had to explain to me the kind of shame he feels when he lies to his parents, because sometimes he has to lie to his parents, because the girl he loves is below his socioeconomic standing and they just would not understand. To them there is too much risk that she would take advantage of him. So the only way to love her and to love his parents at the same time is to lie. But when he is in America he is beholden to no one. The way he explained it, it almost seems like he hikes every weekend, summiting literal mountain after literal mountain, merely as a natural implication of the freedom afforded in America. You are free, therefore you hike where you have not hiked before. That’s his version of doing whatever the hell he wants. And so he is caught, somersaulting between the highest amplitudes of difference between the best and worst of both these two cultures.

And then he told me about his friend, who worked for a government agency building roads. They would build crap roads on purpose, so that they would be funded to build them again next year, and the next, again and again, repairing and rebuilding the roads because that makes easy money. (I’ve heard a version of this story several times in the different countries I’ve been to.) But his friend is an honest fellow and this did not sit well with him. He went to the top to speak up: you build bad roads on purpose, you hire based on nepotism. And they told him, why are you complaining? Are we not paying you enough? Are you unhappy with the way we treat you? And they tried to offer him a pay raise. But he would not back down into the resigned corner of the contented whose pockets are lined. So one day on his way home from work they hired some people on the street to take care of him. He was shot dead at 35.

Now my friend says, I tell you this story because I’m interested in this kind of thing too, I want to go back so I can help build better water systems. He is working in water systems for California, and studying to be licensed as an engineer. It is not enough for him to have made it to America, to have made a better life for himself.

He told me, melmo, we are the kind of people that hold on, even when it’s past when everyone else has let go, and we want to return, and want to give, and to not give up. It is not good for us. But it is how we are.

I smiled because I have not known him for long, but he is a familiar old soul.

At the end of our journey we stopped at burger king and I made him order the impossible burger. He’s never eaten beef before. Are you sure it’s not beef? He asked, eyeing the menu suspiciously. It’s meatless meat, I say, shrugging, scientists made it, I add for good measure. I watched as my friend took his first bite of the closest thing to beef he’s ever eaten. This is good, he said, with a very curious expression on his face. I try to understand the moral implications of this moment: me convincing a friend, who has lifelong convictions to abstain from beef, to eat something made to taste as much like beef as possible as a substitute for the actual beef that this country consumes insidious amounts of.

I decided there were no moral implications, so I settled for enjoying the possible layers of irony that I could not comprehend, with my impossible burger and onion rings on the side. 

[fromthedeskofelizabeththird]

Bone China

So, @bat-yo-us​ submitted this ages ago, but I hit writer’s block with it, since (imo) there’s no way Jumin would touch Rika with a barge pole, let alone his ween, after learning what she did to V. So this is what came out of that. MC is the idiot, not him dfgfdfgd 

No I am not over That After End. Yes this is a vent fic :’)

Jumin x MC | Mystic Messenger | Warning: contains depictions of bodily harm and dead bodies | No smut, just pain

~*~

When he thought of MC, many things came to mind.

Jumin recalled her sense of humour; her ability to laugh out loud at even the most minor of things. A single phrase in a magazine had her in stitches, a cat video on the internet left her shoulders shaking with silent laughter.

He remembered her hair too; a shade that glimmered radiantly in the morning sun. Sometimes he laid beside her, watching as it went from one equally beautiful shade to the next. She used a shampoo that smelled sweeter than his and left perfume behind on her pillow. When she wasn’t there, his head would find it, enveloping himself in her scent where he could not her.

He remembered her favourite wine, her favourite shoes. He remembered the way she positioned her phone in the crook of her neck as she prepared breakfast or buttoned her shirt.

He knew her better than anyone and there was still so much he had left to discover. He did not know her inside out, did not know her completely. She indulged his curiosities with a smile, never questioning the more obscure examples. When he thought of her, it was her patience that often came to mind, explaining her opinion on things he did not understand.

He wanted her face to be the last thing he saw; her hair to be the last scent he ever knew.

It seemed a cruel irony that she should be gone so soon. That two words could erase her so completely.

“No survivors.”

In that moment, he fell cold, her voice a distant memory and her scent on the pillow rapidly fading. The more he cast his mind back to her, the more difficult it was to remember her as she was. He still had her clothes but could not imagine her in them.

In almost every sense, she was replaced by other things; fire and ashes and mysterious castles belonging to ghosts. Her name on his lips felt more foreign than “Mint Eye”, the sympathetic tones of medical practitioners all over the country at his pathetic attempts to describe her.

He did not know how to explain her, could not try and contain her in something as primitive as words. The doctors, increasingly apologetic, had never known her as he had. Within weeks he visited every Jane Doe in the county only to find that not one of them had her smile. Many of them did not recognise him at all.

His friends and family reminded him of the same thing: that he had a good deal to remember her by and she had loved him dearly when she loved him at all. He could not accept their kindness however; could not see beyond ashes and the graves left behind. Wherever she was, he could not go.

‘No survivors’ lingered at the back of his mind and imagination, far more so than any of her jokes.

Sometimes he hated her for going somewhere he could never follow. She had kissed him so sweetly the last time he ever saw her and it filled him a rage that he could not explain. If it was to be their last kiss, why had she never warned him? Why hadn’t she told him to hold her tighter, to bury himself in her body and take all of her in?

In the end, he hated himself most of all. So many things came to mind when he recalled her, yet he could not grasp a single one in detail. She was the one who left, but he was the one who forgot.

A sad irony, for that singular detail haunted him far more than any aspect of her.

~*~

One year ago

“Don’t you think this is a little...excessive?”

MC paused from icing the cupcakes in front of her, a hint of rose coloured frosting on her cheek. Despite his criticisms, Jumin couldn’t help but smile and reach to brush it off.

“This class is going to be hard for them,” she said, “I want everything to be just right.”

MC was almost too kind, an obvious fact even to people who didn’t see her as often as he did. She was the type to apologize when other people walked into her; to hand over the last slice of cake or offer up her jacket. She put her heart and soul into helping the RFA even before she knew them well. She had researched charity after charity for the party and convinced everyone to attend, likely because her sincerity practically bled through each of her emails. Jumin had no doubts that if he had not so openly expressed his disgust with Sarah and Glam Choi, MC would have shrugged off any hope of pursuing him.

She felt too much and couldn’t bring herself to hate anyone-a fact that had become only too apparent in recent weeks. Rika and her other acolytes had finally gone to trial, having spent the best part of three months in varying stages of recovery. The Mint Eye catastrophe had proven to be so widespread and deliberately vague even to its followers that individual charges ranged from fines to several years in jail. Rika herself was jailed for life, with other high profile members serving twenty year sentences. Many acolytes had suffered such extensive damage to body and mind that they were sent to recover in psychiatric wings instead of jail, which was the reason for MC’s sudden burst of inspiration. She was determined to help the victims make a full recovery and have all of the support they needed to make a successful return to society.

How exactly that correlated to cupcakes, Jumin wasn’t sure, only that she had insisted on attending one of their group meetings. He wondered if anyone present would guess or even believe she had baked and iced them all herself. Likely not, but recognition-as she frequently repeated-wasn’t her ultimate goal

“I was thinking the other day,” she said, examining her handiwork, “how long it must have been since any of them met. They spent so much time in the castle, at meetings and prayer...meeting again like this will be difficult, but it’s the right thing to do. No one understands their experiences more than they do…”

She reached for her cake tin with a weak smile.

“I can’t understand them or take away their suffering, but at least I can give them something sweet to look forward to.”

Jumin sighed, both in awe and exhausted by the kindness of his wife; the love in her heart that he hoped would never be stolen.

“Just...be careful.”

~*~

Nine months ago

“I want to see Rika.”

Jumin paused, wineglass millimetres from his lips.

He had taken MC to dinner at one of his favourite restaurants, having noticed a shift in her mood, which he almost automatically attributed it to her frequent visits to the support group. Hearing the extent of Mint Eye’s activities and intentions had not been easy on her and she had poked and prodded at her steak since its arrival in front of her.

He had had a number of guesses as to what she was thinking, but the words she actually blurted out were the last he might have guessed.

He didn’t know how to respond and lowered his glass to the table, ultimately making the most obvious observation.

“Rika is in jail.”

“I know.”

“A high security jail.”

“I know.”

She set aside her fork and reached for his hand across the table, stroking her thumb against his almost automatically.

He knew what she was going to ask and the answer he was obliged to give. His family were influential, but not above the law.

“No.”

“But, Jumin…”

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for his wine. “I can’t.”

“Can’t... or won’t?”

~*~

Seven Months Ago

Things were different between them after that.

MC still hummed as she baked; still curled her hair and put on smart dresses when she visited the recovery group. She still chatted to him and laughed, though in an increasingly halfhearted fashion. They had once been perfect, but now their relationship was a broken vase-immaculate from a distance, but irreparably cracked close up.

She spent more time than usual at the support group, leaving at the same time that he departed for work and returning much later. She rarely took cupcakes or food anymore, instead packing notebooks and drawing paper.

He wondered what on earth was going on at the group meetings that kept her away from the house for so long. Whatever it was, it left dark circles under her eyes.

He discovered the truth by accident-a phone call he almost talked himself out of making. MC was late home and he had organised a chef for dinner. He dialed MC’s cell phone and sent multiple texts, though received nothing in response. After much consideration, he dialed the number of the community hall, only to end up with far more questions than answers.

The leader of the support group was perplexed by the very idea that MC might be there, as she had not attended any of its meetings for well over a month. Jumin apologized several times before hanging up the phone, dismissing it as a miscommunication when he knew for a fact it was anything but.

Several months ago he might have been concerned at the prospect of infidelity, but this was arguably worse. For the first time in over a year he couldn’t decide on a logical plan of action. Surely it was all a misunderstanding and MC’s lies were perfectly innocent. Perhaps she had not meant to deceive him at all and would soon come forward with a reasonable explanation.

He watched every time she applied her lipstick; every time she packed up her purse ready for the support group and went so far as to invent activities she had taken part in. He watched and waited, ready for her to speak up and prove her innocence.

She never did, though, and he rubbed off the lipstick smears she left on his cheeks as if they were unwelcome layers of paint.

~*~

Five Months Ago

“MC, you’re being illogical!”

He should have seen it coming.

No.

He did see it coming and refused to believe it.

Barely a year into her prison sentence, Rika’s sentence came under appeal.

He had read the newspaper with shaking hands, dialing and redialing V’s home number with little luck. With any luck he would still be enough of a recluse that the news had escaped his attention. He never answered, though, and Jumin buried his face in his hands every time he got through to voicemail.

MC stayed quiet about the revelation, mumbling her goodbyes as she returned to group meetings. Jumin pretended he didn’t know that those group meetings didn’t exist.

Their final confrontation was an accident in the end. He had spent the day on the phone to his lawyer, who was more than a little skeptical of the prosecution’s chances in court. They had a new eyewitness and testimony that had never been there before.

He knew it was MC without asking and spent the rest of the evening helping himself to glass after glass of wine. He was almost certainly drunk when MC returned home and knew that he should retire to bed before saying anything he would regret. The alcohol overrode his reason, though, and he smiled weakly as she hung up her coat.

“How was the support group?”

“Busy,” she sighed, crossing the room and planting a kiss on his cheek. “We went to a recruitment drive and-“

She paused at the realisation that he shrank away from her lips, too repulsed by the knowledge that she was lying to him to accept any ounce of affection. Perhaps her kisses were lies too.

“MC,” he said, rubbing his temples, “I know...about the support group.”

“What do you mean?”

She couldn't hide the alarm in her voice and that only made it worse. Had she believed him to be so naive and out of touch with the world that he wouldn’t notice the court case?

The idea left a bitter taste in his mouth. He had believed her, after all, for longer than he cared to admit. She was a kind, gracious person who he had trusted to be honest and speak out for the unfortunate, but her naive heart was clearly a weakness too. No one with a rational mind would speak out for a cult leader. Only innocent fools would read the long list of Rika’s crimes and conclude she did not deserve to be punished.

For the first time he saw MC for the fool she truly was.

“I spoke to them. You haven’t gone to the support group for quite some time.”

MC chewed at her bottom lip; facade slowly slipping. In the end she gave a heavy sigh.

“She was wrongfully jailed,” she said, without bothering to say who. “You know it just as well as I do.”

“MC,” he said.

“No! She suffered a terrible sickness and trauma! She needs help and sympathy, not years behind b-“

He got out of his chair to set aside his wine, wishing that he couldn't hear...that he could just close his eyes and go to bed and erase the betrayal. MC followed him and reached for his arm.

“Jumin,” she said, “please…”

She wasn’t crying but he could hear it in her voice- the same way she got choked up over advertising campaigns that featured emaciated children.

“Please…”

He dragged his arm from hers and she stumbled, eyes wide at the gesture. They had never argued before, never disagreed. He had always accepted her kisses and touches, and he could see the growing horror in her eyes at the realization that their relationship was shattering around them.

“MC,” he said, “you’re being illogical!”

“But-“

“No! How can you claim to advocate and support people with traumas and illness while absolving a person like that of any blame? How could you sit in those support meetings and not see the impact of her actions? Aren’t her victims just as tortured as she claims to be?”

“Jumin…I heard about her past...she wasn’t always like this. There was a priest and-“

“Her victims were not always like this either. Do you mean to forgive this priest too? Are they beyond judgement?”

“Ju-“

“Don’t you agree that if the priest had faced judgement, things might have been different now?”

She bit her bottom lip, eyes welling with tears.

“Jumin, she wasn’t in a position to...no one believed her!”

“Answer the question.”

“Well, no.”

“Why not? What if he showed up here now and told you his father beat him? Would you forgive him then?”

“That’s different! She-she couldn’t help herself! Why can’t you understand?”

Jumin shook his head and walked towards the bedroom, meaning to end the conversation there and then.

“You loved her once,” MC whispered, “don’t pretend you didn’t. Why can’t you show her any compassion now?”

He sighed and turned to her, chest tight and hands clenched into fists.

“She lost the right to any kindness from me when she blinded my friend.”

“J-“

“When she lied to the entire RFA, who trusted her so deeply.”

“But-“

“When she preyed on the vulnerable and weak.”

MC shook her head, a bitter smile crossing her face.

“You really are cold, after all.”

“Perhaps,” he said, keeping a level tone to hide how much her observation stung, “but I am also the acting head of the RFA and it falls to me to protect its members. I cannot stop you from pursuing this or showing her mercy, but if you do so I’ll have no choice but to view you as a potential threat to our organisation.”

She blinked in surprise.

“A threat? Me? Jumin-“

“You have a choice now,” he said. “You can protect Rika or the RFA, but not both.”

He smiled sadly, recalling MC’s good heart and willing her to choose correctly.

“Choose soon.”

~*~

Present day

“This way, Mr Han.”

The coroner’s assistant led him into a dimly lit room and reached over the autopsy table.

No survivors.

He had heard it clearly, yet it didn’t feel real.

“When you’re ready.” 

He gave them a swift nod, sucking in a deep breath when they reached for the sheet.

Since her disappearance many months earlier, he had visited every hospital and left no corner of the city unturned. He missed her laugh and gentle touches and refused to allow that argument to be their last. She might still see sense if he phrased things properly; he had to believe she wasn’t so good and innocent that she would willingly put herself in danger.

He had to believe that she would choose him at the end of it all.

It took an explosion to uncover her and a second castle. It belonged to a previously disbanded cult, built alongside the first as a contingency plan. The acolytes there were more desperate than the others and lined the grounds of their home with explosives. Their leader did not hesitate to have them pull the trigger to hide her sins, regardless of who or what remained inside. She held onto her convictions even at the end of everything.

No survivors.

They returned to that fact far more than any others.

Everyone, from media outlets to police officers, called the explosion a tragedy but Jumin knew otherwise. He had seen it coming the moment Rika’s bright smile graced his television screen as she thanked her lawyer and the courts for allowing true justice to prevail. 

The lawyer’s body was one of the first they found, identifiable only by his fillings. They found Rika’s body in bed, unscathed by the explosion and dosed on poison.

None of the story so far had shocked him, from the mangled remains of acolytes to the rubble at the scene. Even now, as he stood before the final body, he knew exactly what he was going to find. They had found this one in the same room as the Saviour, untouched by fire. She had not died from smoke inhalation or burns, but hands at her throat. 

This body was far more intact than any of the others, which if anything was worse. She appeared to be smiling in her sleep, hair shorn by a clumsy set of scissors and only bruises at her throat to prove otherwise. There was a smudge of blue on her cheek in just the same position she once had frosting.

“Sir?”

The assistant had taken note of his contemplation.

Jumin took in the body’s collarbones; far more pronounced than when he had draped necklaces over them. MC certainly hadn’t been eating as well as before. There had surely been no one to take her to dinner.

She was not MC anymore but a broken doll, as lifeless and transformed as a china vase reassembled in the wrong order. If he listened closely, he could still hear the shatter; could see the cracks in her ghostly skin.

He looked up at the coroner, the silence of the room deafening on his senses.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know them.”

[girlmeetsliv3]

Purgatorio: Prologue

Warning: The following story contains mentions of suicide, depression, anxiety, manipulation, abuse, and vivid descriptions of abusive acts. The behavior and mindset of the characters in this series will be incredibly yandere and toxic. This is a work of fiction and doesn’t represent the character of bangtan seoyandan. Enjoy ~~~

Min Yoongi had never had a truly pleasant experience in life. Since he could remember he had been plagued by self-doubt, anxiety, and a pessimistic view of life. As a child this had caused him to be isolated from everyone else, constantly being considered weird and creepy. Which only contributed further to his situation. Yoongi came to learn the true meaning of happiness in high school, after constantly skipping class and picking one too many fights he was given detention. He found it more of a hassle than anything else, he didn’t really have a social life, but he would much rather lay in bed wallowing in his own self-pity, than cleaning a storage closet with a bunch of dumb kids. Those dumb kids would become his life support. He wondered if it was possible to experience so many emotions – to feel like he was flying in the sky able to touch the heavens. He flew too close to the sun.

           It happened slowly, and it crept up on him without him noticing. Graduation creeping closer, schedules getting too busy, interest changing, and an encounter that confirmed to him that everything he touched ended up broken. So, he simply left and gave up. Continuing the same routine every single day: sleep, eat, work, and fall deeper and deeper into insanity. Until he snapped. The day had started out like all the rest, gloomy and plain, he had been coming back from meeting with another company and selling another demo. Music used to be his passion, it was something his friends had encouraged him to pursue years ago and he had because it was the only thing that caused him to feel something. Now it was just another part of his routine. All his music was deemed beautiful, poetic, and always charted. People always spoke about how it made them experience the beauty of life – it was a cruel irony.

The meeting had taken all day and he wanted to do nothing more than crawl into bed and ignore the pain in his head and the throbbing pain coming from lack of food for several hours. His apartment was a forty-minute walk from where he currently was, but he opted to walk. The city’s busy streets and the far too rowdy population was the only thing loud enough to block out the nagging voice in his head and he desperately desired a break. It wasn’t long until he began to recognize his neighborhood: the abstract skyscrapers and shopping malls transitioning slowly into more conventional apartments and privately-owned businesses. It happened in a matter of seconds, a feeling grew in his gut. It was dark and terrifying, an uncomfortable one which caused goosebumps to fill his skin. Then he heard it, the screeching of car tires and several screams. Morbid curiosity caused him to run towards the scene of panicked individuals desperately screaming at each other and with cell phones in the ears. He had to push past several people to reach the front and he regretted it immediately, he wanted to be wrong and he kept blankly staring at the body hoping he was wrong.

It had been years, but there was no way he could not recognize the messy dark hair. The eyes that always shone a little too brightly and lightened up the world. The boy who had followed him like a lost chick who imprinted on as if he were his mother. The youngest of the group – had grown up. The last Yoongi had seen of him was behind a locked door and through a small hole where the other boy had been banging pleading to see him and be let inside – apologizing for everything. He couldn’t under why when nothing had been his fault, and everything had been his. Now Yoongi stared at his distorted body twisted on the gravel floor, blood tainting all his clothes though he couldn’t see exactly where he was bleeding from. Jeon Jungkook stared up at the night sky with empty eyes and Yoongi hoped he was in a better place, no matter how much he desperately wanted the boy to simply jump up right and be okay. That it was merely a scratch and act stronger than he was – the way he had always done. The younger boy had always been much stronger and mature than Yoongi, despite the glaring age difference.

He wanted to scream, to cry, to laugh, to die. He wanted to die. So, before he could even comprehend what he was doing his feet were moving. Leaving behind the little hope he had left, moving robotically to what would be his final destination. The surroundings became quieter and the streets less crowded, until it was only him and a handful of people – some drunks, some criminals, some just lonely – all walking in the dead of night with little care for their life. Simply existing. Yoongi saw his apartment building, its grey faded paint and old rusty metal fence befitting the atmosphere of the people who lived in it. He was about to input the code to get the fence to open when he realized there was someone next to him and speaking to him.

“…fortune.”

“What?” He muttered, annoyance in his voice as he turned to see the person speaking to him. It was an elderly lady, most likely in the twilight of her life, and much shorter than he was. Her clothes were brightly colored and mismatched; she wore colorful makeup he deemed not age appropriate. Had the voice not been so raspy and clearly withered she might have resembled a child playing dress up. The woman cleared her voice and repeated what she had said, “It seems you’re in a need of a good fortune.” This angered him, and he was actually pleased with the emotion filling him up, it reminded him that he was human and not simply an android. “Fuck off lady.” He turned to input the code and the machine beeped informing him, he had put in the wrong code. Fuck.

“I can help you, people like you are simply a victim of fate. But I can change yours for a price, of course.” He rolled his eyes at her and pressed the number pad again, another beep echoed louder than the last. He only had one last chance before the machine called the police and they assumed he was an intruder – he was not in the mood for that. “What do you say, son? Are you interested?” She was now standing far too close for his personal taste, he needed her gone so that he could get a move on with his plan. He would have likely pushed her or told her off, but a culturally engraved sentiment to respect those a lot older than him prevented him from doing so. “Listen, lady, I’m not interested in whatever you’re selling. It’s late you should go home.” Let’s try this again. Before he could press his index finger for the last time against the pad, the older woman gripped his wrist strongly. He turned to face her with a bewildered look, now she had crossed the line. Chivalry be damned. It was the look she had on her face that made the words tangle in his mouth and be unable to come out: it was dark and serious. Almost as if the words she was about to say where the most important she had said in all her life.

“Fate is not predetermined, it can be altered and manipulated to fit our wants and needs. You have been mistreated far too long and too cruelly by this world, my boy. But fear not if it is a soul you lack that is what you shall receive: love, happiness, joy, all the beautiful things in this world can be yours. All you have to do is be selfish, you have been the opposite for far too long. If you want it, take it and never let it go – no matter what.” Her voice was no longer frail and had Yoongi not been far past anger and annoyance at his point, he most likely would have shit his pants at the woman who now resembled something demonic. She let go of his wrist and merely walked away, leaving him to stare at the ground where she had been standing. A couple of minutes passed and every emotion he was feeling faded, returning to the numbness that threatened to consume him. He remembered his plan.

After inputting the code, the third time and final time, the gate finally opened and let him in. The walk to his apartment door was a short one and his steps felt a lot lighter than they did before. He had no desire to take in his surroundings one last time, there would be no point, there would be nothing left after he was done.

Yoongi walked through his barren apartment and sat on his bed contemplating what to do next. What was the best course of action? As his eyes scanned across the room, they landed on an unopened vodka bottle lying on the floor with a thin layer of dust laying on it. He had bought it when his last song charted, and he had been invited to a congratulatory party, he went for a bit merely hoping that it was loud in enough to get some much needed quiet in his head – it wasn’t. After maybe an hour, he left but not before stealing an expensive looking bottle from the bar hoping to feel even a tiny bit of an adrenaline rush pass through him – he didn’t. As he stared at it, a thought popped into his head. It was simple enough. Easy. Painful. Even in his last moments, he hoped to feel something, anything to remind him that he was, in fact, alive before he died.

He stood up and grabbed the vodka bottle, twisting it open and haphazardly draining its contents onto the floor, the bed, the curtains, and finally him. Then he reached into his pockets and pulled out the cheap white lighter he always kept on him; he had stopped smoking long ago, he simply kept it for sake of remembering. The last thing he hoped to see was the lighter, instead of the face of the dead boy that popped into his head. “Goodbye.” It was a soft whisper that left his lips which had formed into a smirk as he let the lighter fall slowly to the ground – it instantly combusting to flames. Yoongi leaned back onto the bed and closed his eyes hoping to sleep for one last time and as the flames crawled closer to him, so did sleep. Until they almost consumed him. He was too far gone to hear the pounding, too far gone to hear the door breaking, and too far gone to feel himself being dragged out of his last chance for escape.

 The old lady stood outside the apartment complex that was now consumed in flames, watching as the young men she had met on the street was lifted into an ambulance by the paramedics – not missing the girl that climbed inside after him. A sinister smirk played on her lips, “Be cautious, boy. The price has been paid and this is your last chance. Don’t waste it.” Then she simply disappeared into the night interested in the events about to play out.

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S3 Ep 1: Can We Just...Ignore the Apocalypse? Let’s Just Ignore the Apocalypse.

Ah guys, we’re back, it’s a new season! Sort of! It’s a filler arc that probably won’t make a huge difference on anything in the plot but bro has promised is hella weird so lets dive into it.

Remember all the stuff we were talking about last season, and how I had to like basically carry around a notebook and take character notes like for the first time since my High School English class when we read Shakespeare? Remember how freakin complicated everything got?

Well the writers for this season decided to do a soft reset on all of that mess. Apparently they’ll get back to that crazy stuff we spent a whole season building up but with a new season they’d get a new audience of viewers, and maybe they didn’t want them to be confused. Because, lets be honest, nearly all of the latter half of S2 would be unwatchable if you did not know what was happening.

They also knew they had a problem, especially since they were waiting for the manga to catch up to the show at this point so they couldn’t accidentally step on the manga’s shoes and invent things that later negated the manga entirely. They had to edit. They had to stay as far away from the manga points as they could. And they did it in the most ridiculous way.

Y’all don’t even know this blog was *almost* a SeaQuest DSV blog. But it was pulled. So then it was almost a Kolchack the Nightstalker blog. But that got pulled. Yugioh was my third choice. Much like my dating life.

That’s right, we’re going to do a soft reset by adding a whole new set of characters! A whole new plotline to keep track of! To show us this tantalizing view of Kaiba island and then just.......detour.

It’s honestly, a welcoming thing for me, a reviewer, because I was getting hella lost and now it’s back to basics. Although, there are certain things they just...didn’t even address.

Cold as ice, Yugi. Cold as freakin ice, like way to appreciate your most interesting friend. Like maybe put that house fern where Bakura died or something. Anything.

What teenager finds out their other teenage friend freakin died last night and is like “well...that happens” and of all teenagers--especially Yugi Muto. Yugi is usually so freakin extra but he doesn’t really...seem to be freaking out. I’m so used to this kid having a melt down so often, that when he’s not having a melt down, I assume there’s something absolutely wrong with him.

Yugi kind of glazes over the more complicated parts of Season 2 in some flashbacks, and then the blimp starts shaking violently to get us right off course in both location and plot.

(read more under the cut)

We did not get a peek at anyone’s mirrors to see if the giant mystery purple bottles are still around. A shame.

Also, guess what time it is, just by looking at this image. Just guess in your head, knowing that all these people went to bed at like 3AM last night.

Yeah it’s canonically 5 AM. In grand Yugioh tradition, all these kids, mostly a bunch of really gross boys, who are still in clothes from the day before, who miiiight not have showered, are now going to continue their adventure, just piling on the gross as much as possible until this season ends. It’s like every little kid’s dream honestly.

Anyways, we’re gonna fly right into a plot dump that is maybe one of the most insane dumps this show has ever dumped--and y’all we’ve had some nuts dumps--but this one is especially weird because it actually makes sense within the continuity.

Just remember when you hear this that we are in Season 3. It is Season 3 and this has never once come up, not even once before. That one guy on the writing staff who really, really, REALLY stans Seto Kaiba apparently walked into work the day when they were making this episode and was he like “wow, everyone called in sick to work today and no one’s here but me and I can go home or I can finally just go NUTS.”

So this entire time, the Kaiba’s were basically the Patriots. OK.

I mean, it actually makes so much more sense as to why these children know how to ride a helicopter and why Seto randomly knows CQC. I never thought I would ever get a proper explanation for this but here it is. Kaiba was being honed to devote himself to the...war economy...but then he said “actually nah, because that’s too effed up even for Yugioh” and then to spite his father replaced every weapon with trading cards.

And then...accidentally weaponized trading cards in the process thus turning into his own Father. 

I guess that’s why people are legit dying in this tournament and Seto and Mokuba are like “Yeah? This is what happens?” since they were literally raised by some Hideo Kajima mini-boss. They probably have no idea what children’s games are supposed to be like, so when Yugi loses his nut and starts Shadow Realming they’re like “hm. Is this what kids are into? I’ll go along with it. See Dad? I am blending into kid culture real well. Really good at kid stuff.”

Like, it’s a good layer of irony that these two decided to bring peace and harmony to the whole earth by replacing weapons with games you’d play with children--but then they chose the one game that will absolutely end the Earth quicker than a weapon of mass destruction. Congrats. You did it.

This show, man, sometimes I’m not sure what it wants Seto Kaiba to be. Because, yeah, Seto just showed us a very nice thing he did as he randomly does--he’s basically won a Nobel Peace Prize by default--but he’s still a complete asshole. Like did he just feel like he has to show up Yugi again for saving the Earth last season by reminding us that Seto has already done that before this show ever started? That he dissolved the freakin Patriots before this show ever began?

Like Seto single-handedly fixed the entire plot of Metal Gear. Like this is the child that ended how many wars with getting rid of the ammunition? This is the child the writers chose? Seto freakin Kaiba?

And then he turned around and essentially put cards into a bunch of guns and you wear them on your wrist what the hell is even going on with this kid?

But don’t worry we won’t get even five seconds to register this plot dump, much like that time they told me that Seto freakin Kaiba has a dead soulmate from 5000 years ago who is now four separate playing cards and also probably his Great^nth Grandmother.

The Seto lore is rapidly getting more complicated than the Yugi lore and Yugi Muto is two people. Just saying.

Anyway, lets meet our new villain.

So the theme of this arc seems to also be a theme that the writers are currently wrestling with. You got Yugioh which has a very--INTERESTING background, it’s this horror manga turned effed up anime turned much more tame child’s anime and it’s like, that’s a lot of pressure for this team. Kinda feels like every time they try to do Yugioh there’s going to be people that are pissed off because it wasn’t like what came before it. And so this whole story of Kaiba trying to get out of his problematic Father’s shadow is almost like the entire writing team at this point just begging us to please let them do a thing without having to do 158 on-screen murders.

(JK, they’ll murder off more people in this very episode.)

And so this arc they decide to make this character who, as bro mentioned, is a throwback to Season Zero Kaiba, but with better hair. Sort of. Honestly, I mostly only see the white shirt as a reference but I can see what bro is getting at, especially since their hair shape and eyes are like...VERY Kaiba-ey. Anyway, I called it right away before we saw this kid that he’d be a distant relative here to claim his cut of the Kaiba inheritance pie so, because his hair is Mokuba blue-green, we’ll just make him a Season Zero green. Because it looks like no one else’s font color.

Honestly, hopefully that won’t get too confusing if he and Mokuba are speaking at the same time but I have changed Mokuba’s font color once already and now I might have to change it again...

They’re already kidnapped, right? Like all of these people on this blimp have absolutely been kidnapped by Marik and are at this moment at his mercy? (mercy meaning “he just doesn’t feel like it right now”)

So yes, Noah kidnapped them, but at the same time he’s just borrowing hostages from Marik for a little while. He’s just babysitting some other person’s kidnapees from how I see it.

Also, his name is Noah and he lives on a very big ship. That’s uh...a little on the nose there with the naming conventions, Yugioh. As far as villains go, at least this kid doesn’t live underground and get tortured with back tatts. But, with the way this show is going, I would not be surprised if all the Kaibas got Agent 47 serial codes on the back of their heads.

*I love a good Star Trek tractor beam, don’t get me wrong, but never in my life did I think I’d see a sci fi tractor beam being used on a freakin party blimp*

Marik, PS, is still standing here on top of this blimp saying “this will be very interesting to just let another villain waltz in here on my territory while I just chill on the couch for a little while. I am tired.” which was...actually pretty true to Marik. This kid will let anyone else do his job for him if given the opportunity. Such a lazy villain. In a show where all the villains have been pretty lazy.

Now, Noah insists that everyone get the hell off this blimp, but Seto was like “Really, honestly, I just want to keep one secret today. Just any secret. Lets just have this conversation in private and everyone else, please don’t mind my family issues. No need to call the cops, it’s just a light kidnapping, no big deal. Family, amiright?”

So because they’re getting shot at, they stubbornly get off the blimp.

And then Marik wrote himself right out of this arc. At least according to my bro.

So, in honor of blimp, lets give that blimp a good send off. One last time, for blimp

I will miss you, blimp.

So, down a hallway and in a room of so much bloom they run into...these guys?

I had to like really think for a while to remember who the hell these guys were, it feels like 10 years ago since that one-off MMO arc that I figured would never come back.

Apparently time doesn’t work the same, much like in Narnia, so the Big 5 are just straight up insane now. Got it. Really glad I get to try and keep track of the names of 5 new people, don’t hold me to it, I’ll absolutely forget the name of every one of these mini-bosses. Anyways, while they were strapped to Kaiba’s game for 2 months, they freakin died.

Yeah, what?

Wow Yugi killed 5 people and it’s not even Season Zero! Like this is a Yugi kill, right? Like Yugi did this entirely? Like that whole game would’ve been a lose if Kaiba wasn’t told exactly what to do by Yugi and Pharaoh? Nice.

And then they got...the digital version of Shadow Realmed.

Ah the digital space. We can go anywhere here. Any environment. Anywhere. lets see where they go.

Man this show and it’s obsession with island climates.

I say that, forgetting they’re all from Japan.

Apparently every season of Yugioh contractually has to have at least one reference to Tristan’s enigmatic ass. Thing is--assuming they’re all hooked up to sensors or whatever---is there just one that covers...farts? Like there’d have to be, right? Google, stop whatever weird self driving car glasses you’re making and get on that.

After Kaiba proves that you can’t actually touch anything in this universe, Tea immediately sees a great opportunity and just starts touching all the stuff that she can’t touch, too. So she goes over to the bushes and sees this looking back at her. From a bush.

This still doesn’t answer the question of why the hell there was a clone in the bush!

Anyway, apparently Kaiba has made hundreds of clones of himself so he could play cards since he had no friends growing up and that wasn’t even the weirdest Kaiba plot dump this episode. Kaiba and his Clone Wars just feels so tame now.

So they go over rules--it’s a lot of words all right. Whatever, we don’t go into duels here, but overall they have to choose a mascot whenever they play to act a King in chessboard. So if their mascot card dies, then they lose.

Honestly they could just kill everyone straight up but youknow, it’s Yugioh so we’re gonna throw some honor into this murder by making it card murder. It’s fine. Don’t think about it.

Ishizu just slept through everything, right? Like she looked outside, saw all this go down and was like “NOPE” and then went right back to bed? I mean...that is also sort of what she did for half of last season.

And no, Yugi never ever once mentioned that Bakura freakin died last night. Amazing.

[pass-the-bechdel]

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

No.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Six (31.57% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Entertaining, but overrated.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Though Nebula and Gamora trade a couple of lines on a few occasions, they invariably speak about either Thanos, or Ronan. 

Female characters:

Meredith Quill.

Bereet.

Nebula.

Gamora.

Carina.

Nova Prime.

Male characters:

Mr Quill.

Peter Quill.

Yondu Udonta.

Ronan.

Korath.

Rocket.

Groot.

The Broker.

Drax.

Thanos.

The Collector.

Denarian Saal.

Denarian Dey.

OTHER NOTES:

Seatbelts on spaceships should really be mandatory.

Aahahahaha Peter has a woman on his ship whose name he can’t remember and whom he forgot was even there! Oh, it’s so funny and charming! What a classic misogynistic cliche intro! Garbage.

Rocket chastises Groot to ‘learn genders’, and I don’t think the irony of a raccoon (a species with almost no visually-evident sexual dimorphism) saying that to a tree-person (whose species - if sexually dimorphic at all - certainly has no reason to adhere to the humanoid/mammalian model) is deliberate. The other alien higher-life-forms they encounter in the film are pretty uniformly human in appearance (not much effort going on in the ‘alien’ department besides just painting people in bright colours), but lack of imagination from the creative team doesn’t mean that the binary gender system we’re accustomed to on Earth has any broad bearing on the galaxy at large. 

Aaahh, and now Peter is explaining his scars to Drax, with lovely stories of women he cheated on in the past because he’s ~such a stud~.

Thanos tells Ronan off for his dull political raging and whiny behaviour, but he’s sitting on a shiny floating throne himself, so I’m not sure he’s earned the right to criticise what other people have got going on.

Rocket suggests that Gamora trade sexual favours to get things from other prisoners, because we’re being Like That with this movie.

The Collector keeps female slave ‘assistants’, whom he evidently treats so nicely that Carina commits suicide by infinity stone at the first opportunity in order to escape him. We’re just doing so well for the ladies in this film.

As a great comedic beat, Drax calls Gamora a “green whore”. It’s both a shitty line, and nonsensical, since Drax isn’t supposed to comprehend metaphors and he has no reason to believe Gamora is a literal ‘whore’ (nor is he likely to use such a colloquial term, considering the calibre of his standard vocabulary). Basically, it’s a rubbish line from every angle, and all in service of a misogynistic joke. 

This film is a terrible waste of Djimon Hounsou.

Ronan is very theatrically over-the-top in his pronouncements, but Lee Pace does his damnedest to make it work on delivery.

Why does Ronan’s flashy purple infinity stone weapon not kill people when he shoots them with its energy blast? Obviously it would be terribly inconvenient to the story if he just casually killed all the good guys, but honestly. It doesn’t make much sense. They coulda at least pretended there was a reason.

The part of me that is susceptible to acts of heroism is affected by the guardians all joining hands to share the stone’s power. Not enough to feel that the film or the character relationships actually connected on an emotional level, but enough that this ending doesn’t feel totally unearned.

Drax patting Rocket’s head while he’s crying over Groot is a lovely touch. THAT is the strongest character interaction of the film.

So. I’ll be honest: I don’t like this movie. I don’t think it works. I think it’s essentially just a string of gimmicks, loosely attached, entertaining enough on the surface but with no meaningful depth to hold in the mind or keep the audience engaged once the credits kick in (it’s also much heavier on the sexist tropes than any other MCU film previous). I don’t hate it, but it doesn’t give me anything that I value in a viewing experience, it just happens and then ends and that’s it. And the reason it doesn’t work is, frankly, the writing is lazy as shit. It makes a sub-par effort at establishing character and thus relies heavily on cliches, it rarely bothers to incorporate relevant plot and motivations and such into the story at early points in order to generate narrative pay-off, and the world-building is hazy at best and, like the characterisation, trades predominantly on expectation of stereotypes rather than actually creating anything original.

Let’s start in the obvious place: with our lead character. I’m tempted to just say ‘Peter Quill is garbage’ and then move on, because it’s true and also, he’s just not complex or interesting at all, which is ridiculous because he’s got that whole ‘alien abduction’ origin story and there should be like, literally any layers at all to his story instead of him just being an obnoxious Lothario who makes pop culture references like that counts as having a personality. But, here we are. I’m not familiar with the comics so I don’t know if this is a common complaint from fans who can’t believe their boy got all his nuances deleted in favour of such an inane cliche, but if this is exactly what Quill is like in the comics too? That’s no excuse. Part of the magic of adaptation is the opportunity to improve upon things the source material did wrongly or badly. The Quill we’ve got here in this movie is such a bland template he’s almost functionally useless; he barely impacts the story at all, especially in any way that is relevant to his personality or skills and necessitates his presence (the dance-off distraction is the only good Quill moment, and it’s also one of the few inspired choices in the whole film). At the end of the day, Quill exists so that the story has a Main Guy, being a straight white American male (and making sure we all, excessively, know about it), because God forbid we be expected to identify with anyone else. I have heard people sing the praises of the film for ‘subverting cliche’ by not having Quill and Gamora actively hook up by the end, as if that somehow makes it better that every single other aspect of that tedious forced romance plot is still squarely in place and set to play out in future films (pro tip: if the main guy still ‘gets the girl’, only it doesn’t happen in the first film, that’s not subversive. That’s still playing the trope dead-straight). Quill not immediately being shown to be rewarded with sex is not some incredible feat of original storytelling, and it certainly doesn’t absolve him of being a dime-a-dozen pig of a character. If that’s the most ‘unexpected’ character element you can cite, you’re in dire straits. 

Now, I’m not gonna talk about every character individually, because in most cases there’s not much to talk about; Drax is the big warrior guy with the Fridged Family backstory we’ve seen so many times before it elicits zero (0) emotions now; Groot - though an interesting idea on paper - is basically just a Deus Ex Machina of whatever ability is most useful at any given moment, too ill-defined to have boundaries to his powers and conveniently not using his full potential whenever it would allow the characters to win too easily; and Rocket, well, Rocket is actually the only one of the leads who manages any meaningful nuance, which is unfortunate because most of the time he’s just used for sarcastic comic relief. The other character I am going to talk about is Gamora, and it’s because she’s a prime example of how this movie fails to establish things so that they feel like they actually matter or the character’s motivations are understandable, etc. We are introduced to Gamora when she overrides Ronan’s order for Nebula to retrieve the orb from Xandar; as it turns out, Gamora’s introductory moment (literally the first time we see her or hear her speak) is also her act of rebellion when she puts into action her plan to escape Thanos’ clutches and go her own way. The problem, obviously, is this is her introduction. We’ve never seen this character before, we’ve only just met Ronan and Nebula as well, Thanos is barely more than a concept, as is the planet Xandar and the politics around it. Nothing has been established yet about the life that Gamora occupies, so her ploy to escape it? Meaningless. We don’t even find out that Gamora was not planning to retrieve the orb for Ronan until she tells us so after she’s been arrested, and we have literally no reason to believe her because we don’t know her yet because her character has not been established at all. The traditional way to do this would be to show her in her old life, doing as she’s told and/or witnessing terrible things being done by her compatriots, and showing the audience that she has clear misgivings so that when she turns, we understand the context and can believe that’s a logical character decision based on established personality and morals (think of Finn’s introduction in The Force Awakens for a textbook example). Because no time or effort is ever invested in establishing who or how Gamora is, everything we know is delivered to us directly in dialogue, all tell, no show, and what could easily have been the film’s most dynamic character is instead hampered by having her development choked off to avoid spending time on letting her origins matter (despite the fact that those origins are essential to the plot).

On which note, lets talk bad guys. Thanos first, because there’s not much to say, and that’s not a good thing: Thanos is actually pointless to this film, the only reason he’s there is so that the MCU can use him to actual purpose in later films and his relation to Gamora and Nebula and the hunt for the Infinity Stones needs to be established first, but as with everything else this movie is terrible at establishing things effectively. Consequently, Thanos...just floats around on a chair, and then Ronan tells him to piss off and we don’t see or hear from him again in the rest of the film, and there’s no real effort made to integrate Thanos into the story so that he seems like anything other than a dead-end subplot cluttering up the movie for no reason. The closest Thanos gets to anything notable is when he chides Ronan for his boring politics, but even that is symptomatic of the wider problem with this movie’s lazy writing: Ronan’s whole character is essentially just another dull archetype - in this case, the extremist villain - and a solid nothing at all is done to establish his politics or what they mean, other than death for the people we’re told are the innocents. This is a problem with the world-building of the film as a whole, because none of the galaxy’s politics is fleshed out, there’s no context to why the Kree have a problem with Xandar or why we should care, and Xandar kinda gets treated like the centre of the universe but it also seems that’s just for convenience sake so that the plot can return to a previous location for the final act. Hell, I haven’t the faintest fucking idea where Earth is supposed to fit in to all of this, other characters talk about it so it’s clearly a known quantity to the rest of the galaxy, and yet no one knows any details about it and Quill never bothered to go back there for reasons which really SHOULD be explored and yet are not even mentioned (that would seem like some of that characterisation he doesn’t have), so I don’t know what we’re supposed to interpret from that. I’m not confident that the creative powers bothered to think about it, considering how much they didn’t think about anything else. This is a movie where ‘human, but painted’ passes for ‘alien’ and society apparently functions exactly like Earth, tedious misogyny and all, despite the absence of cultural sharing to explain the Earthlike similarities (and boy oh boy do I HATE the laziness of science fiction where everything being identical to Western culture on Earth is treated like it’s ‘just the natural order’ that should be expected to develop in any sentient species, instead of a complex system shaped by unique and varied influences over thousands of years and dependent upon environment, religion, philosophy, and a myriad of other factors not replicated in these poorly-drawn ‘alien’ cultures. I get that you’ve gotta employ at least some shorthand in order to get on and tell your story within time constraints, but come on. If you’re not gonna think about world-building at all, don’t set the story on an alien planet). Above all else, we know that Ronan is the villain because he’s painted (literally) as one; he’s the bad guy through visually-indicated othering, because we all know good guys don’t look like that (whereas most of Ronan’s enemies on Xandar are just regular-looking white folks. Curious...). Sure, Ronan is also introduced spouting rhetoric and then smashing a dude with a hammer, and that seems like villain behaviour, but that only reinforces the point: Ronan’s role is made unmistakable through age-old tropes, and it’s never explored or subverted or made dynamic from there. Like Quill as the ‘hero’, Ronan is a dime-a-dozen cliche.

So anyway. Lets talk plot. This one goes like so: Quill collects the orb from Morag, where he coincidentally runs into Korath and company who just-so-happen to be after the orb at the same time (how it is that multiple interested parties only just found out that one of the most powerful destructive forces in the universe is just chillin’ on this abandoned planet, they don’t bother to explain). Quill runs into both Gamora, and Rocket and Groot, the other parties happening to be after him for different reasons and coincidentally converging on Xandar at the same point. Everyone gets arrested and sent to prison, where they meet Drax and promptly escape and fly to Knowhere so that The Collector can exposition-dump about Infinity Stones. Drax calls Ronan up, just literally straight-up calls the bad guy to come and find them because I guess figuring out a normal plot reason for the villain to catch up with the good guys was too hard, so we had to go for extreme stupidity instead. Ronan gets the orb and goes back to Xandar to destroy it, and our main characters figure they should stop that, so they do. Roll credits. Now, you can make pretty much any story sound basic and stupid by breaking it down into its component pieces, but the important thing to note about this layout is how many convenient or just plain stupid aspects there are. There are almost no character meetings or story developments that come about logically through the sensible development of plot driven by character’s motivations springing from established narrative, etc, and part of that problem is absolutely because there’s so little established character/world-building to begin with, but it’s also because whatever there is tends to apparate when it is needed without any sign of existing beforehand; that is, very little of the story is seeded early on so that it can come to fruition later in a narratively satisfying fashion. The Nova Corps sentence the characters to the Kyln prison as if it’s a big scary concept, but we’ve never heard of it before so we have no reason to consider it trouble. Drax appears and other characters literally tell us why we should pay attention to him, instead of him being, say, pre-established (SUCH AS by having his family tragedy shown on screen as a dual-establishing event for him and Ronan, or something to which Gamora was privy in some way in order to intro her misgivings as discussed above, or even just having someone reference the legend of Drax the Destroyer BEFORE getting to the Kyln (you could also, y’know, establish the Kyln itself in talking about how Drax was sent there. Just saying)). Intro the idea of Knowhere and/or The Collector BEFORE heading there so that it’s less convenient for Gamora to just-happen to have a buyer already set up for the item we didn’t even know she had planned to steal as part of the escape plot we didn’t know she was hatching. For the love of everything, establish some actual REASON for Ronan to follow our characters to Knowhere, instead of just ‘Drax got drunk and called him’. Link the pieces of your story together with concepts and developments that build upon each other in a narrative progression. That’s the difference between having a plot, and having a string of chronological set pieces (some of which - like Morag and the Kyln - don’t even have a purpose anyway beyond providing some action-scene opportunities). 

Before I close this out, I just want to run through a little exercise to demonstrate something that you never, ever want to happen in a story. You never want to have a lead character who can be deleted from the plot without leaving a hole too big to be easily filled by the rest of the cast. But what happens if Peter Quill is removed from this story? Well, pretty much all of the misogyny disappears, so that’s a plus. Someone else is gonna have to retrieve the orb from Morag, but we could easily send Rocket and Groot to do that. Gamora can still fight with them on Xandar exactly as it happens in the actual movie, only this time it’s not just pure coincidence that they conflict. We saved vital time that the film spent on Quill’s inconsequential childhood abduction (and we could save more on trimming the pointless action on Morag), which is time that could be better spent on all that other establishing crap I was talking about earlier, tightening up the narrative. Quill doesn’t serve any important purpose in the Kyln, so we can remove him from that no problem, nor does he matter on Knowhere other than a frankly stupid and ultimately pointless moment when he saves Gamora (definitely unnecessary when we’re removing the romantic subplot bullshit along with Quill). And then what? The characters agree that not letting Ronan destroy the galaxy is probably a good call (not Quill-relevant), they head back to Xandar, fight some bad guys, hold hands, win the day. We lose Quill’s only good moment in the form of the dance-off, but it’s an acceptable loss in order to strengthen the entire rest of the film by deleting the most meaningless character: the lead. We also arguably lose the Ravagers in the process, but as much fun as Yondu is, the plot can also survive completely intact without him (the only time the Ravagers matter is for the previously-identified useless damsel contrivance with Quill saving Gamora, and then they do help out on Xandar in the end, but they aren’t necessary for that - the Nova Corps could have been expanded just a smidge and taken care of everything). On the other hand, if you remove Gamora, you lose the connection to Ronan/Thanos as well as the moral compass of the Guardians; some other character would have to be significantly altered to fill the gap. You lose major Deus Ex Machina skills without Groot, and without Rocket someone else’s narrative has to change in order for Groot to have a buddy (plus you need a new mastermind for various plans, though that’s an easier hole to fill). You skip Drax and you do lose a major plot development in the form of him drunk-dialling Ronan, but admittedly that’s one of the worst things in this whole dumb waste of a movie, so maybe it’s not such a loss. You could ditch Drax. But, that’s not important, because Drax isn’t packaged as the leading man: Quill is. If you delete Drax, you don’t really streamline or improve the story (you could fix the one big flaw in his character very easily, he doesn’t have to disappear for that). You delete Quill...I know, comic book adaptation, dropping the main character is not considered an acceptable alteration when you’re improving the story for the screen. But come on. The least they could do is make him actually matter, not just be a perfunctory inclusion for the sake of sticking this ‘weird sci-fi’ as firmly in the centre of over-done cliche as a lazy gimmick story ever could be. There are a few chuckles to be had with this film, and it’s not entirely boring, but it’s not half as endearing nor even an eighth as inspired as it thinks it is. I’m not impressed by any of it.

[exalok]

Prince!Daud AU, part 24 (repost)

“Emily is in the palace,” Corvo said, having sat down heavily in the chair. He was looking right at the girl's face but could hardly see it through remembering how Thomas and Kay had been left behind, back in Karnaca, back in the palace's long halls. I needed people there that I could trust, the Prince had said. His eyes had fled direct contact. Maybe Corvo's mistake had been in thinking he could trust any of them at all.

“I brought her there,” the girl said, “the day before the ship weighed anchor.”

Yes, the day she'd arrived – the Prince had gone to meet someone, come back gray in the face, he'd said– he'd said they would leave tomorrow, that he had one last thing to do – had to find... had to find a nursemaid. Corvo'd forgotten. He hadn't cared. It had seemed so unimportant, compared to...

He stood abruptly and hesitated. He felt the brutal need to move like a trembling all the way down his legs, but as much as he wanted to pace the length of the cabin his joints felt weak enough to give at the first step. Emily was supposed to be in Dunwall. She was half of the reason he was moving at all.

“Why – Why take her?” he asked, and the clench of his ribs to control the quaking of his lungs made the words a feeble, shallow sound. “Was Dunwall Tower not safe?”

“The Spymaster was behind the coup, Lord Attano,” the girl said, frowning, and her voice was calm but all-over tight, and in her dark eyes there was an echo of what she'd said outside the door: I suppose he didn't tell you. No one had told him anything. The Prince must have known. This girl must have told him. And he hadn't said –

“Burrows? But he's – Lord Regent –” he said, head dropping into his hands not to see the words well of course written across the girl's face. He hated politics. Everything was twisted. Burrows should have protected her and he'd –? And Parliament had... And Corvo had looked that narrow rat-faced expression of his in the eyes and nodded in response to his farewell and taken it for grudging acknowledgement of the years he had fulfilled his role –

He turned back to her and the girl flinched, then drew herself up, refusing to look afraid.

“Was she well?” he asked, voice rasping but steady. “Emily, when you left her.”

A child. An infant. Hardly more than a month old.

“As well as she could be,” she said. The inside of his chest spasmed. He was days from Dunwall – he'd been so close –

But no, he'd never been close. With every day he spent hiding in this cabin he had gotten further and further away, while on that island he had been bare meters from the only person left that mattered. He gritted his teeth, hands clenching, and didn't break the chair into its component parts.

Uninformed. Misinformed. Lied to.

“Who are you?” he asked, distress like a stone on his diaphragm. “How do you know any of this?”

“My name is Callista Curnow,” said the girl, for all the world like she was presenting herself at an interview. “Empress Jessamine Kaldwin hired me as nursemaid and future governess to her daughter. I was there, in Emily's chambers, when the Tower Watchmen took down the Imperial Guard and attacked the Empress.”

Corvo took a moment to gather his thoughts. The Imperial Guard had protected her – at least the conspiracy hadn't reached that far – but for Burrows to have mobilized enough men from the Watch spoke of deeper corruption than what he imagined could be worked in the month he'd been gone. How many? Five? Ten? A year? How long had the Spymaster planned for this? And Corvo had been blind. He had seen no further than Burrows' tight-lipped mask. He had –

(and that voice again saying, hissing soft and slicing, he had– he had–

he had failed –)

Though his body did not move, he felt himself take a step back. The air buzzed silver and sharp. The girl's face was terribly clear, and entirely unmemorable.

He had worked under layers of lies. They seemed as a screen between him and the world now, transparent, a tangible distance. He needed to stay calm. He needed to– And what if she was lying, then? His lungs were compressed, like a second heart, mid-beat and struggling. (Let her be lying.) Words ran through his head and out of his mouth like a faucet cracked open.

“You're responsible for her. Why didn't you stay in the palace?”

“I'm going back to warn my uncle,” she said, and the fire he had failed to see in her plain brown eyes flared enough to burn that hopeful doubt like so much scrap paper. Not suspicious, no – only a girl with a fight within reach of her fists. He had known enough of them to recognize it. But that meant – “He's a Captain of the Watch, a good man, he wasn't involved in the coup – he can help take back the throne –” She paused, and for the first time she looked uncertain, rubbing her folded hands together. “That was why I came to Karnaca, with Emily – because you were there. I thought you of all people could save Empress Jessamine.”

The air pushed at his ribs from the inside, burning like winter's dry and smoking maw; the sounds of someone's ragged breathing were almost enough to distract him.

Then what Callista had said cut through.

“Save her.” He stood very straight. Outside, the wind carried them onward to their destination. Afternoon sunlight had started to stream through the window. “What do you mean, save her?”

“The Spymaster lied,” said Callista.

There was a wave waiting to break over him. His ears rang – a clear musical tone, like the highest-pitched string on a harp. He thought, as long as I hear it the wave will not crash.

“Empress Jessamine is alive. He's holding her somewhere, hidden. I don't know where, or why – but she was gravely injured. The Royal Physician may have been appointed to heal her. If so, he should know.”

Corvo sat down.

“You saw her?”

“No,” she said, her voice just slightly softer. Or unsure, maybe. Something in her face had closed back up. He looked at her, his eyes unveiled; her shoulders squared. “I overheard guards talking about it while hiding in the Tower.”

He put his hands on his knees and tuned out their uncontrollable shaking. Burrows behind the– the coup, not an assassination – Emily, behind him, far behind, in the palace instead of in his arms – Dunwall ahead. What waited for him there? The Prince had left him in the dark. Had lied. Emily, kept from him. What else? Why hide that, if the Prince wasn't in on it?

It was too much to be a coincidence. The marriage, a month before Burrows made his move – a hundred moments of hesitation before the Prince adjusted his speech, a hundred more where he visibly redirected conversations – too much, too clear in retrospect. What had he been looking at that all of it passed him by, unease notwithstanding?

Would Corvo be walking into a trap by returning to Dunwall?

(He thought of the Prince's attempt at honesty the past few days. Expressions that hadn't reached him. Looks in those eyes he hadn't understood.

No – he had been lied to. For over a month, every part of it, a lie. Not just the marriage. Even the mission the Prince had given him, he imagined with a bilious clenching of teeth – everything, a fabrication. Six weeks of being led by the nose, fed untruths in bitter spoonfuls. What irony, that Corvo had been protecting him against a false threat, while a predator closed in on his Empress.

And she was alive.

Outsider's eyes, she was alive.)

The door swung open, smooth and quiet, the sounds of the ocean and wind bursting in like a thunderclap, and shut silently again.

“I suppose she told you almost all of it,” Daud said, impassive. Behind his shoulder, Lee and Dodge stood statue-still, Dodge's eyes flickering nervously from Corvo to Callista to Daud, Lee glaring and tense. Corvo drank in the ache of his own muscles as he breathed, sinew stretched tight as garotte wire, his hands clenching reflexively in his lap.

“How much more is there?” he asked. His eyes felt so dry – how long since he'd blinked? If he looked away, the Prince might strike, like a snake in the grass. “Emily in Karnaca, Jess attacked by her own watchmen, Burrows behind it all – what else do you know? What else do you know?” he snarled, and by the end he was standing, his whole body coiled like an arm pulled back. He was suddenly, viscerally aware of the weight of his sword on his belt.

Lee stepped forward, teeth bared. “Back off, Attano, you don't talk to him like that –”

“I'm married to him,” Corvo spat, rounding on him like an agitated bloodox. “I'll speak however I like and you will shut your Void-damned mouth.”

“They're not involved in this,” Daud cut in, sweeping an arm aside to push Lee back.

“Then they should leave,” Corvo said, blunt and curling-lipped, and the sibilant hiss of that last consonant was just as much a threat as the tension twisting his mouth.

Daud exchanged a glance with his bodyguards; Lee started forward again, but Dodge caught him by the vest and pulled him back out the door, out of sight. Daud's gaze crossed Corvo's again.

“Burrows asked me to demand your hand in exchange for helping Dunwall,” Daud said in answer to the question, his voice still entirely lacking in emotion. Corvo fixed him, wild-eyed and panting for breath around the knot of furious loathing he refused to swallow.

“So all along, the threat was a lie too.”

Daud muttered, “In a sense,” but the words were drowned out by Callista's shocked gasp as Corvo took the chair and heaved it across the cabin, the crack of it terribly loud in the enclosed space.

“You bastard!” Corvo howled, his voice broken in two, and Daud paled and seemed to almost take a step forward before stopping himself. “You let me grieve for her!”

Callista moved for the door; Corvo whipped around, eyes zeroing in on her, and she froze on the spot. Daud smoothly stepped between them, arms held a hand's breadth out from his body.

“What else should I have done?” he asked, and as Corvo looked back at him the door opened and closed. Callista was gone.

“Anything,” Corvo snarled, “but let me think she was dead.”

Daud's jaw clicked shut, the blankness of his face no longer controlled.

“Two weeks,” Corvo said, cracked and grating, “of you watching me break. Was it another game?”

“She –”

“What else did you hide from me? How else did you betray your Empress, you traitorous dog?”

His arms hung limp. “She– She's alive?”

In three strides Corvo had stepped right up to him, his sword unsheathed in his hand and outswung like a promise.

“Lie again,” he hissed, “and I will cut you down where you stand, prince or not.”

“Corvo,” and Corvo's sword hand twitched to hear his name in that lying mouth, that slack and disbelieving mouth, and only minutes ago he'd wanted to– “The Empress is alive?”

“Don't tell me you didn't know–”

“She didn't tell me.” Daud stood stockstill, a sickly kind of gray.

“Who?” Corvo demanded.

“The Curnow girl. She didn't tell me.” His voice was quiet, not quite wheezing. The sword's edge was digging into his flank. Corvo took a short step back.

“And Burrows? Your partner?” Corvo laughed, a hard exhale, like a gunshot. “Has the liar been lied to?”

“I wouldn't work with that ambitious slug if he kissed my feet and paid me,” Daud snapped. Corvo bristled, immediately closing in, but just as quick Daud gave way, his head dipping and eyes dropping to the floor, disturbingly submissive. He didn't even look afraid – just... patient, almost demure. Dark-eyed and bitter and accepting. Unless he was so good an actor, his control so complete, the image he projected was always exactly what he wanted it to be. Exactly what he needed. Had the things Corvo had learned to see beneath the mask been yet another layer to carve through?

The part of him still raw with a loss he should have never had to suffer wanted to bite the Prince's face back open, exactly like the feral dog he'd spoken of, dig in teeth and tear down to slick white bone.

(His heart stuttered, angry and grieving-quick, for an entirely different kind of loss. He could feel the muscles of his arm wanting to shake. He didn't want to believe he had been misled so completely.)

Corvo's grip on the sword loosened.

“You didn't know.”

“I didn't know,” Daud confirmed, though half of him still seemed to be processing it.

Corvo stared him in the face with all the force of the fury burning him from the inside out; the Prince met him, eye to gray, terribly open eye. The sword hung between them, steel and shining as a guillotine's blade.

Corvo stormed to the chair, dragged it back and slammed it down, and dropped into it.

“Sit,” he ordered. “I want explanations. Now.”

Daud glanced around the cabin – the cot, level with the chair, behind Corvo; the desk, much higher, to his side – and, fixing him with a considering look, sat cross-legged on the bare floorboards.

“Last year, during the Fugue, some of my people disappeared while they were keeping an eye on the festivities in Karnaca.”

“Your people?”

“Agents,” Daud clarified. “People I recruited from the streets. Some of them work as guards around the palace, or servants. Most aren't so visible.”

“Leonid?” Corvo asked. “Jordan? Sean?”

Daud's mouth twisted, a flash of something distraught, then smoothed, pond-flat.

“They didn't disappear, but yes,” he said. “We didn't find those we lost in the Fugue, nor where they'd gone. We assumed it was bad luck. It happens, some years. But then it kept on through the month of Earth – ten over two weeks. The servants were in a panic.”

“Get to the point,” Corvo snapped. Daud's jaw ticked, and his shoulder twitched, but he restrained whatever he'd been about to say.

“I received Burrows' message on the seventeenth of Earth. He was holding those vanished hostage. In return for their lives he wanted any information my men in Dunwall had sent me on the plague, and my silence on what I'd learned.”

Corvo frowned, momentarily distracted. What was so important about the plague? All of the isles had known of it by middle of last year, and as far as Corvo knew Dunwall was no further ahead on how it worked or where it had come from than anyone else.

He shook off the thought and focused back in.

“They got caught. Why not leave them?” Corvo had already seen more mercenary behavior than that among the nobility. They didn't often care for captured pawns. Though there was – “Because he had your friend? Rulfio?”

“None of them are expendable.” Daud was doing his best to keep his voice level, but Corvo still heard the low tremble in its foundation and felt a vicious stab of satisfaction.

“So you rolled over? Played along?” he asked, acerbic.

“No,” Daud returned, a flash of his usual verve. “I sent three loyal men after him. They moved on the Tower the ninth of Harvest.”

“The attempt on Jessamine,” Corvo blurted, suddenly remembering. Of course – that was why the assassins had been found in Burrows' office instead of near the royal quarters. They hadn't been after the Empress in the first place. Corvo bit the inside of his cheek, his insides wound up like a mass of eels – and to think Burrows had him fooled, spinning some bullshit story about his own competence, stopping the strike before it could get near her –

Daud glared up at him, exasperated by the constant interruptions. “What?”

Corvo ignored the question. His teeth unclenched; his mouth tasted sharp, like iron. “They disappeared too?”

“No.” This time the word was grim, Daud's mouth a long thin line, sick with remembering. “He sent me back their heads, and I buried them. That was when I gave in.”

The graves.

He leaned forward to spit something sardonic – I weep for your loss – and his tongue tied itself into a knot before he could get the words out. His anger was faltering. He wanted to hold on to it – take hold with both hands, keep it close, remind himself of the time he had spent wading through the fug of his own hateful helplessness – but just as much he wanted to keep those days at arm's length, the exhaustion and turmoil too much to bear thinking about.

The back of his throat was still bitter with acid, but –

but Daud was on the ground before him, a prince reduced to little more than the bent curve of his back. Unprotesting. Unresisting. He hadn't yet tried to defend himself.

Corvo wished Daud would, a sudden and fiercely furious thought, if only so he could have something to fight against.

Daud glanced up at him, questioning, but when Corvo kept still and quiet he continued.

“He sent me instructions. Offer aid, marry you, take you away from Dunwall. It was obvious he was planning something, but –” He hesitated. Corvo's eyes narrowed. “I thought he was after the Empress's hand. Getting rid of a rival. Why marriage, otherwise?”

“How naive of you,” Corvo muttered, that unpleasant taste spilling up over his tongue. Daud's eyes were dark when they flicked up, but not with resentment – needles and thorns, directed inwards. He knew. He'd known his error ever since his spy's letter had ended up in his hands. Unforgivable, for someone in his position – wilful ignorance.

“I made a mistake. I –”

“If you tell me you miscalculated, I'll break your nose again.”

Daud bowed his head, the back of his neck exposed like that of a man waiting for the executioner's axe. Corvo, eyes riveted on the hair that curled there at his nape, considered whether it would feel satisfying to bring the blade down himself.

“Why didn't you leave me with Emily?” he asked.

“You wanted to go to Dunwall,” Daud answered simply, still looking down.

Corvo leaned forward, elbows on his knees and hands clasped, his sword balanced across his legs. He imagined his gaze like a weight on the Prince's back; an albatross, dead and hung around his neck.

“I would have stayed, for her.”

“You would've had questions.”

“That you could have refused to answer.” Like all his other questions, before – left hanging, or answered vaguely, Daud's reasons for anything cryptic and opaque.

Daud glanced up again, a strange look on his face. “No, I really couldn't have.”

They observed each other across two feet of space that felt simultaneously like miles – the distance between what Corvo had believed he knew and the truth – and like meaningless dust. If he kneeled in front of his chair, he would only have to reach out to brush his thumb over the crooked shape of the Prince's nose. Only reach out to drive his thumb into the Prince's eye.

He curled his hands into fists.

“When we reach Dunwall, I'm going after Jess,” he said. There would be no turning him away from this. It was his purpose, returned to him.

Daud's eyes were clear morning gray. “I know.”

“You're not going to stop me.” It wasn't a question. It was a statement, with the implicit assurance that if you try, I will make you suffer.

Daud didn't waver. “I won't.”

“You'll help me.” Here he was on less solid ground, expending effort not to let his uncertainty show – he had no leverage to make use of, nothing to force a prince to act but what that man might think was owed – but Daud only nodded without breaking eye contact.

“To the best of my ability.”

Corvo looked to one side, thinking, a hand on his mouth and frowning in concentration.

(Exhaustion pressed in the shape of a dull and pulsing pain at the back of his skull – but protection had been his life for eleven years now, and his Empress needed him. He would rest later.

Beneath the oppressive beating of his heart, a still-smouldering ember of rage scorched the inside of his ribs. Daud sat still and patient in his peripherals, watching him or the floor.

The Curnow girl had said Sokolov might know where Jessamine was being kept. If she had been dead –

the thought stung, grief sparking like it had been lying in wait, and he crushed it ruthlessly –

If she had been dead, Burrows might have considered him less of a threat, but now his arrival would certainly be seen as a disaster waiting to strike... and of the people Daud had taken with him, only two were fighters whose skill Corvo might place his trust in. They'd need more, and he could only think of one sure source.)

“Where is Burrows keeping your men?” he asked.

There was a pause, then Daud's answer, hesitant: “... Coldridge prison.”

The spy's message, before the paper dropped from his hands – nothing from CR. The whole thing had been branded into his memory. Those the Prince had scattered across Dunwall could be useful, too.

“First move should be getting them out. I'll need manpower, people I can depend on.” Silence, not even the draw of breath. Corvo frowned deeper, still planning. “Better not to waste their lives. Burrows'll kill them as soon as you make a move, otherwise.”

The brush of a touch on his shin and he jerked back, the move unexpected, but Daud's hand had fisted in the cloth of Corvo's pants and refused to let go. Corvo lashed out, grabbed him by the shoulder of his shirt – teeth bared, mouth snarling –

His eyes met the Prince's and found devastation.

Daud's next inhale was profound, and more than all those before it sounded like his chest was a weight to dislodge with every breath; hitching once, barely heard but still loud as the crack of gunpowder in the quiet. His body was drawn up and caught with tension. Corvo's heart leapt in his throat, irrationally afraid. He'd never seen the Prince show anything like this.

The Prince kneeled now, awkwardly off-kilter with Corvo's grip shoving him out of alignment and entirely uncaring, gaze fixed on Corvo. His knuckles pressed hard against Corvo's shin.

“You want to break them out,” he said, and like this, his fisted hands, his head tilted back to look Corvo in the eye, he was the picture of supplication. Corvo stared down at him, caught between horror and trepidation, and said nothing. Daud swallowed. “Won't it– Your Empress will be at risk.”

“The city thinks she's dead. He's not holding her hostage.” His mouth moved of its own will, sounds falling out from behind his teeth. “He won't kill her for a jailbreak. He'll target you first.”

That thought didn't seem to pierce through the manic veil in Daud's eyes. His hands only tightened, the muscles of his arms trembling with exertion.

Slowly, realization dawned at the front of Corvo's mind.

“You thought I would let them die.”

Corvo heard Daud's throat click like he might have replied, but his shaking exhale was answer enough. It wasn't even relief, what showed through his face – too desperate, too disbelieving by half. The Prince must have had some idea, in the last week or more, of how Corvo would react when he learned the truth – there had been no surprise in him, when he returned to the cabin. Corvo wondered how long he had been carrying the weight of those deaths on his head.

“I would've thought the same of you,” Corvo said, and Daud's eyes finally dropped, his broad shoulders bent. “Guess we're even.”

Slowly, inevitably, Daud's head lowered until it rested on Corvo's knees. He shuddered, a gale going through him; his forehead pressed down harder. Corvo thought of taking him by the hair, forcefully throwing him away.

He allowed it. Gradually, his hand unclenched from Daud's shirt and folded around the solid shape of his shoulder.

Much later, Daud raised his head again, and Corvo's hand slipped out of his hair, where it had migrated without his quite noticing. The Prince's eyes were rimmed in red, but dry.

“We have four days to start planning,” he croaked, and Corvo's gaze followed as he rose to his feet.

[dressed-up-in-blue]

The man of flesh and blood (Drake X MC)

Book: The Royal Romance

Pairing: Drake X MC

Words: 2275

Summary: Sick and tired of preparations for the ball, Coleen takes a stroll in the woods and Drake follows her. 

Note: So it looks like that’s gonna be my first fic! I really hope you will enjoy it.  This scene takes place during the stay in the Alps (Book 1).

The whole day passed off so quickly. The great ball was arranged for today’s evening, so it was obvious that everyone was doing their best to perform well. From the early morning, service was busy with cleaning and arranging the whole Nevrakis residence. Every single speck of dust was wiped off, new decorations were hung all over the palace and even fresh flowers were imported for this occasion. All of the guest seemed to hide somewhere in their rooms, even Maxwell and Hana were gone.

At first Coleen thought it was quite strange, so many preparations just for this one night. She couldn’t understand why it was so important. On the other side, she knew Olivia wouldn’t forgive herself wasting such a great opportunity to show everyone the splendor of her own estate. It was obvious she was doing her best to impress everyone and show the whole world she’s the best in everything. For a moment, Coleen had this impression that this ball wasn’t worth this kind of efforts. But happily it wasn’t her business and she was glad she didn’t have to worry about organizing anything. She was only surprised that no one was trying to give her advices or instructions for such an important event. Maybe it was because of Bertrand’s absence. Usually she would be instructed from the early morning, then it would be the time to choose a fancy, glistering dress and finally all of those “remember”, “don’t forget to” and obligatory small talk about “the Beaumont house” and it’s honor. But honestly? She managed to get used to it. After all of those long weeks she even started to like it and now, when Bertrand wasn’t here in the Alps, she found herself missing his chat.

Finding everyone occupied, Coleen decided to put on her coat and take a stroll in the woods. She wanted to think over all of the recent developments. She changed her clothes and left the house. As she went outside, fresh air hit her with its chill. The weather was just perfect. The sky was covered with all sorts of white, milky clouds, sailing down slowly. The sight of the Alps was just breathtaking, but maybe it was because she’s never seen the real mountains before.

Coleen headed for the woods and after a few minutes she found herself between tall pines, all whitened with the snow. It was so peaceful there, in the forest. She could barely hear a sound. It was only her and the old trees. Such a great opportunity to think about all of that happened last days. Specially yesterday. She knew Olivia’s way of life and her motto was to poison each’s days. She got used to her ratty, rude and insolent remarks, but when she attacked Drake, Coleen felt something strange in her heart. She didn’t exactly know what it was or how to call it, but she definitely hasn’t felt anything like that before. And that was what worried her most. What was it supposed to mean? Was she changing her mind of Drake? At first, when they met, he was so awful. And she even didn’t know why. But there was something in him, she didn’t even know how to call it. But all that she knew, was that she felt different when he was beside her. Of course, she flew to Cordonia because of the prince. It was a crush, at least that’s what Bertrand, Maxwell and even Liam thought. If somebody had just the idea of asking her what  s h e  really felt, it could be quite shocking. At first she also believed she loved Liam. But after some time, or rather moments, spent with the prince, she was slowly becoming sure. She didn’t love him. Of course, he was the future Cordonia king, always so well-behaved, polite and tactful. It was the ideal of perfect man. But not for her. She needed someone real, someone of flesh and blood. A man with harsh, sometimes even tough, sense of humor. Someone who exactly knows what he wants, someone resolute yet so gentle. Someone like Drake. Yesterday, under the stars, she saw his real side. It was him – rough, snarky, always hiding behind irony and his sarcasm. But it was only a mask. Deep inside, he was fragile, insecure, unsure and very harmed. Liam had everything – he was the future king, handsome, eloquent and just the right man in the right place. But Drake always had to live in his shadow. He was his best friend and it was obvious he cared about Liam. And that was the point. The real Drake was a reliable, loyal man, that put Liam’s good above his own. The prince seemed so unreal, maybe even fake. Whereas Drake was someone, she really admired. And the fact that he was hiding all that was good in him under thick layer of irony, only made him more endearing.

Coleen took a few more steps and suddenly stopped in the middle of the forest. It looked like something magical. White and fluffy snow had covered nearly everything. Huge pines, swaying softly on the wind; rays of sunlight running through the trees and quiet melody of singing birds. Even snow, that started right now to fall gently on the ground, seemed to make that sort of the soft sound calming one’s senses. This fine scenery made such a great contrast to what was in her heart. It was almost shouting and craving freedom. Maxwell and Bertrand have put so much effort in her appearance, clothing and the way of speaking. They really seemed to pin their hopes on Coleen. She just wasn’t allowed to let them down. And there was also the other side – all of her enemies waiting for her defeat. And finally there was Liam. How was she supposed to tell him about her feelings? Besides, she really didn’t want to admit it, but it looked like she was the only one caring of him, not his throne. Madeleine, Olivia, Kiara – all of these women wanted his splendor, fame and money. They just wanted to be queen of Cordonia, that was the cruel and stinging truth. But she also knew, she just couldn’t cheat on Liam. And how to name this whole situation with the prince as not a lie?

Struggling with herself, she suddenly heard a strange noise. It was a crack, something like breaking limb. Coleen looked behind but she saw nothing special. When she turned away, there was somebody standing in front of her. It was Drake.

-      Drake! What are you doing here?! You scared the hell outta me!

-      Nice to see you too, Windsor.

-      Nice and cheerful as always – she said as Drake came closer.

-      What are you doing here? Alone in the forest, I could barely call it responsible.

-      Well, I could ask you the same question. Are you following me?

-      You really think I don’t have other occupations?

-      Yes, that’s what I’m thinking – she smiled softly as Drake shook his head.

-      Well, if you must know, I saw you going out and I thought that with your luck I’d better go and see if you’re ok.

-      With my luck?

-      Yes… Let me remind you of all those funny situations you put yourself into through the whole season.

-       You’d better not – she added and after that an awkward silence fell.

Coleen give Drake a sudden look as she caught him observing her. His eyes were lingering on her until he quickly looked away. But before it, she saw something weird in his look. Something, that she’s never seen before. She had no idea, he was struggling with himself. After yesterday’s night he couldn’t stop thinking of her. Before that, he managed to control himself, but something has changed. He was still trying to hide under irony, but it seemed like it wasn’t really working with Coleen.

-      Shouldn’t you be preparing for the ball? – he finally broke the silence.

-      That’s what I was thinking. But it looks like everyone’s occupied with themselves. Honestly, I don’t even know where they are gone – she smiled softly. He always liked that sort of smile, but of course tried to hide it. Quiet sigh was all that he let himself.

-      They say, when the cat's away the mice will play.

-      Very funny. You might be surprised, but Bertrand can be tolerable.

-      Tolerable? It that a new fancy synonym of stiff and grouch? – he asked and both of them burst out laughing.

When silence fell and the only sound was actually the falling snow, Coleen looked at Drake. At first he didn’t want to do the same, like he was avoiding her. But she was relentless and soon he looked in her eyes. There was something rough in his stare, something unreadable. But what was strange, he didn’t look away. They were both staying in front of each other in silence, and snow falling between them.

-      Drake… – she started first. – Don’t you think we should talk?

-      Talk? About what?

-      About yesterday? I might be wrong… but don’t you feel anything? – she hardly managed to say and took a look at Drake. He was silent, but his face expressed the whole palette of feelings she couldn’t guess. The silence was dragging on so she eventually decided to say something. As she opened her mouth, Drake overtook her.

-      Of course I feel! I have so many feelings for you, Windsor. But it doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have even said that. What am I doing? – he added rather to himself.

-      Why are you saying such things? You know you’re wrong.

-      Wrong is what we’re doing now. You see, all of this is because of Liam’s sake. You’re here for him, just like other suitors and the whole court. It doesn’t matter what I feel.

-      Drake, listen. Yes, I admit, I’m here because of Liam. But so many things have changed. That was the reason why I’m here at all, in this place. But the reason I’m  still here… The reason is completely different – she said and looked at him hesitating.

They were now standing so close. It would be enough, if just one of them made one small step and they will find themselves come together. Coleen could even feel his warm breath on her skin, what made her shiver.

-      Drake, I don’t care about all that fancy dresses, knighthoods, flashes and golden stuff. You should see, I seek something real. A real person. Someone like you…

-      Hell, Windsor… You shouldn’t have said that. It was easier that way, when I was avoiding you.

-      You should have noticed hiding behind irony doesn’t work.

-      Well, I guess you’re right – he smiled lightly, looking now even boyish with that glint in his eyes. – But you see, Liam is my best friend, he also had tough moments in his life, even if it’s hard to imagine. I couldn’t betray him.

-      Drake, you must know I care about him. He means a lot to me. But you mean more…

Drake took a deep, ragged breath and she saw him struggling with his thoughts.

-      I didn’t think you would ever say so.

-      It’s truth and you should know it, Drake. It is you that I love…

As Coleen finished, she lowered her head and looked away, clearly embarrassed by what she had said. She never thought she would be able to admit such thing and make such confession. All of a sudden, she felt Drake putting his hand against her chin. She looked up and spotted Drake fixed his eyes on her. He seemed so touched, nearly heaving passion in his sight. Drake looked away, moving from her eyes to her lips. If only she’d known how hard was it for him to stay calm and control himself when he was beside her. Suddenly, not able to linger, he pulled her tight against him and started to kiss her deeply. His lips hungrily finding hers, his hands running up and down her hips and the whole body, ending in her hair. Coleen put her hands on his shoulders, embracing him tightly and returning his kisses. The kiss deepened as she took the joy of being with Drake. She even didn’t notice the freeze and the falling snow. Drake dipped his head to brush his lips against her neck, when he suddenly broke the kiss. But he didn’t move back. He just whispered softly:

-      Even yesterday I wanted you so badly… I never hoped it would be something real.

-      Drake… – she murmured.

He cupped her face in his hand and kissing her tenderly on the lips. He broke the kiss, but didn’t pull away, he stayed there, so close to her, staring into her eyes with such love and devotion. Coleen looked back at him and rested her forehead against his. Drake smiled lightly and he finally pulled away.

-    We should go… It’s getting cold – he said.

-    I know… Drake, do you think, we will find a solution?

-    We will – he answered and nodded. – For I know it’s worth it. Come on, let’s go back to the palace.

She didn’t say anything, she kissed him deeply one more time, putting her hand in his hair. Drake gave her a smile and looked at her with such love. She was happy. And she knew, she was just sure, they would find a solution to that messed up situation. Because she loved him and so did he.  

[jessipalooza]

Hair of a Virgin; Eye of a Whore

It was in the later hour of the day that Karsteth found himself in The Leaning Mast, a shit hole of a tavern in Booty Bay. The floors were sticky with gods only knew what, the chairs and tables were lopsided, the art on the walls were stained and awful knock-offs of paintings...but the drinks were damned good, and if a fight was to turn up, nobody would give a shit. Bouncers and guards were merely a formality, meant to keep ruffians and pirates from stealing from the house. They did not care if the patrons stole from each other. With Booker at his feet, he sat in the corner, masked in shadow and with a mug of whiskey in his hand, the leather wrist cuffs stained with blood. Hanging from the belt around his waist was a small pouch also stained with blood. But nobody gave it question in The Leaning Mast. Just like nobody gave a second thought to the gnarled scar of a hand over his face, poorly hidden by the eyepatch he always wore. It was amidst the loud chatter and chaos from the other patrons that the Captain of the White Widow relaxed with his mutt of a worg. He was thankful that he had informed Vinny that he would return to the ship before midnight. It gave him time to relax without the goblin chirping in his ear about gold. The men had been thriving, but not as much as they had before. He complained that they complained and all Karsteth could do was tell him to be fucking patient. He was almost done, after all.��

Elleynah balked at the door of the tavern, her freckled features drawing into a disgusted frown. She quickly schooled the expression away, patting the layered of her vest and tunic, making sure it was secure-- and the deck of cards beneath were as well. 

It had been a long time-- a year if not longer-- since she'd served in a shithole of a bar in Booty Bay. Since her promotion, Elleynah had forsworn any work that was not going to reflect well on the Guard or herself, as a leader of the menders. Gone were the days of tight blouses and slit skirts, forever. She had hoped never to have to return to a place like this for anything save a war or a rescue... But loyalty was a bladed virtue, and it bit deep and with nothing promised in return. She had been summoned by an old friend to the dank little space. Elleynah remembered at least, how to dress so she wouldn't get many looks; the right level of hand-me-down, fitted fabric that had seen better days, a scarf holding her orange curls tight to her head save in the back where they spilled to the nape of her neck. Her vest and tunic and leggings were all things from the old days, quickly rehemmed and fitted to her new frame, in faded burgundy, amber and sage. Taking a breath of the at least sea-salt cleaned air before entering the murk, the mender attempted to let the years of propriety slide off. She stepped through the doorway, through the dark and grimy hall and into the tavern itself. The Leaning Mast was never a place she worked when she worked here, for its... reputation. Bell had insisted that her sister avoid the place. Perhaps that was why she'd sent notice to Bell that she'd be going there tonight-- just once. Just for a friend.

Her eyes wandered the place very quickly-- not lingering on any male face (that was always a danger, when you weren't on the clock-- no one cared if you got hurt if you were off shift). Instead she looked to the bar and the servers, and found the woman she was looking for. Shariya was tressed in the frothy faded dress of a barmaid, her lank blonde hair pulled away from a face that while normally made up to look flawless, was now smudged. Leaning at the edge of the bar, the woman was all exhaustion and drunkenness, despite being on her shift. Elleynah didn't hesitate-- perhaps another of her faults. She walked to the bar and whispered to the woman as she neared, placing a hand on the stained-lace at Shariya's elbow. "Shar--" The other elf blinked, automatically recoiling at the touch. Her features only unknit when she recognized Elleynah's freckled face. "Oh, Elley." She sighed, eyes closing with the effort it took to focus. "Ohh thank you for coming, I didn't know--" Elleynah let her hand drop, and looked around. "Why are you here and not the The Linewalker's?" That had been their place, it was one of the nicer Inns, and was always bright and clean-- an officer’s pub, where coin was made even if you got your ass grabbed by men who thought they were entitled everything by rank. "I just-- It’s such a long and sad story... little Elley, gods, imagine you going so high." Shariya leaned forward, lifting a hand as though to cup the younger elf's cheek. "Always was better than Bell and me."

The mender leaned away from the hand, lips pursed. "You said you needed a reading, are you off your shift?" Elley's eyes slid around the bar itself, not daring to venture further or invite attentions their way. She did not want to be here longer than needed.

Shariya shook her head, about to speak when the bartender-- a gruff orc-- slammed a pair of tankards down next to her. He rumbled out an order inaudible to Elleynah, but Shariya must have understood. Forcing herself to unsteady feet, the woman took up the drinks. "No, I'm here til dawn, I don't--" She looked at the smoky bar. "If you get a table, I can sit down when my break comes... I need that reading, Elleynah, you're the only one who can tell me true if--" She shook her head, and jolted forward. "I'll be back!" Elleynah felt her gut clench. This was not what she had hoped for at all. Worrying her lip, she selected a table near the bar, under one of the few lights that seemed to be in working order. Working her vest pocket open, she ran her fingers nervously over the deck, pulling it from the silk to smooth between her fingers. It spoke to her discomfort, that she would use the cards to soothe herself.

Chatter. Loud chatter and shouting. Conversations about gold and blood and tits and drinks. It all filtered into the air, making a white noise that cut nearly everything from Karsteth's ears or mind. The perfect way to relax. However, one thing was able to reach him, always able to reach him, above it all: a growl. A low growl scratched its way up from Booker at his feet. Mid-sip of whiskey, Karsteth stopped and glanced downwards. The giant, black mutt was facing towards the door, and so towards the door, the pirate looked. He was about to abandon the task when he saw a flash of bright red. Even with one eye, he could see the light that flickered and how it bounced off of the curls of the Stormsummer girl. A dark look overtook his face, but he paused before it got too far. Raising his free hand to rub at the five'o'clock shadow along his jaw, he spared a glance down towards the bloody sack at his side. The irony did not escape him, and it drew forth a low, harsh breath of a laugh. When he saw the cards, he saw an opening. "Booker," was all he said, his voice a low rasp in his throat. He finished his whiskey in one pull and stood. With little care of the sticky floor, the drunkards around him, he moved forward. Those that were in his path, drunk or not, cautioned away - by either luck or will. Each step was slow and purposeful, silent thanks to the loudness of the rest of the tavern. It gave him the surprise he needed. Ignoring the look on on Shariya's face at having a man with a scarred face abou tot interrupt their reunion, he placed a rough, callused hand on Elleynah's shoulder. It was firm, powerful, and his tone of voice spoke the same intention: Do not move. Do not scream. Do not be stupid. "Are those cards, girl?"

Settled at her table, Elleynah had pressed the deck to her chest a moment; she could feel her heart in her chest beating just a pace fast, as though she was coming down from jogging; she was nervous here, despite all her history with taverns. The pressure of the paper against her sternum was a comfort; she could feel... something. It was the magic of her bloodline, the pump of it through veins and through the filaments that connected her to the cards. With one hand he kept them there while she worried at the silk. Shariya approached, having dropped the drinks down, and Elleynah looked up to meet her eyes, when-- Horror and sudden panic washed through Shariya's face, making her cosmetics stand out harsh against a fear-pale face. A hand fell on Elleynah's shoulder, and it held her in place against her chair. Along her spine, the hairs stood on end up to the nape of her neck, and the magic comfort of the cards became a screamed warning only she could hear. If she had been someone else, outrage might have come before fear, but she had grown up in the apocalypse of a people, in a city overrun by the dead and worse, the living. She was stock still and quiet, the prey-wary sixth sense reminding her that this was a predator. Elleynah cleared her throat of the fear that constricted it. "Y-yes sir." She couldn't help the stammer and hated her voice for it, and the hotness in her cheeks that was all shame, the only thing that was powerful enough to rise against the bloodless fear that had turned her pale. "Fortune cards." She almost emphasized they weren't for gambling, but she did not want to say more than she had to. Say what he wanted to hear, and then run. Always what Bell told her to do.

A glance was spared to Shariya with his one good eye and he nodded once, looking to the side. It was a silent speech, but one a barmaid would know well: Get the fuck out of here. Already, he had started to walk towards the other woman's chair. If she did not move away from fear, she would move away from having no room of her own. Karsteth sat across from Elleynah, the chair creaking under his weight. Booker came to a rest at his feet again, baring her teeth briefly to the Stormsummer girl, but silently so. In reward, a heavy had swung down to ruffle the coarse fur between her ears. But the pirate's attention remained on Elleynah. "Tell fortunes, do ye?"

Loyalty was bladed, given without the promise of any sort of return; Shariya proved this, when with a frightened glance to Elleynah, she dropped her eyes and wandered back into the tavern, heading to the bar where the orc behind the counter slammed a meaty palm down and pushed drinks forward. This left Elleynah with... the man from the tavern. The one who had scared her half to death the last time she'd been down in Booty Bay; the one whom Gabriel had warned her off. "I do." She took the deck away from her vest and fanned the cards expertly; some skills did not diminish in fear, and thankfully this was one. She met his single visible eye without wavering, but she was young enough her own gaze was as legible as a book. He'll kill you as easy as anything. Gabriel's warning was in her ears. Fear lanced her body. "Do you want me to tell your fortune, sir?" She tried a small smile, fake and hollow, to see if it would thaw the panic that made her stiff and still.

He stared Elleynah down with no need to ask if she remembered him or not. The question was a nonissue. He could tell enough by the slight tremor of her voice - so slight, but there nonetheless. He did not bother to look at the cards as she fanned them out. He raised a hand and snapped his fingers, calling over his shoulder in a raspy order: "Whiskey." He waited in silence after that. He did not answer her question, nor did he pose one of his own. He merely stared, and the weight of his one eye was monumental. He allowed her this silence to look over the scar should she so choose. And should there be any unease, he relished it. Only once he received another mug of whiskey did he speak. "Know another bitch that reads cards. D'ya believe in what yers say?"

The silence stretched. She would not look at the scar. Despite the time, the seconds ticking down, the hairs would not settle on the back of her neck. He was familiar, for more than the drink-- for more than the time she spent on his first mate's lap. There was something in that green, tainted gaze that was clawing at memories, something she almost remembered from a dream... or a-- Shariya returned, eyes averted, with a glass of whiskey; the cup was marginally clean, but there were smudges around the rim that caught the light. Elleynah did not regret her choice of seat-- everywhere else was cast in shadows, and here, despite the baldness it showed her the danger, at least she could see it. Clearing her throat, attempting to reign in the panic that threaded her, Elleynah spoke carefully and succinctly. "I do." The next words spilled out. "Do you believe in the cards, Captain?" There was no use pretending she didn't remember his title. She did not know how they had circled back to each other in the scheme of fate, but it was a cruel twist.

His lips pulled into a smirk - small, but there. He took a pull from the mug of whiskey and rather than answer her question, he waved her forward. "Give me a fuckin' reading," he said casually. Beneath him, there was a low growl, barely heard over the chatter of The Leaning Mast's patronage. Another pat of Booker's head was all Karsteth offered before he leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. "Y'need a question, aye?"

If the flat stare had been unsettling, the smirk made something inside her wither. It was threatening in a way the touch had not been, and she fought the urge to bolt. Not that she would get far, the hound;s growl reminding her precisely of how tenuous the situation had become for her. Heart hammering, skin cold and clammy, she nodded assent to his request-- demand-- and started to pull the magics of the cards into her. There was always a moment of hesitation, when she reached into the weave to let the parts of her that were young and unwise fall away. It was frightening, to suspend herself-- the part of her that was Elleynah-- while the magic slid into place like a mask, covering and separating her from the words she spoke, the visions she saw. There was a fear-- what if she never came back? What if she was adrift in that nothing, the threads of fate, for eternity? Now, the hesitation tasted like copper and fear as she forced the mask to come over her features, the magic sliding through veins. Between breaths, it settled on her-- one moment, the girl was stiff with fear, and the next, she was... still. The tension left her frame, leaving her motionless but calm, all trace of emotion fading from freckled features. Her eyes closed, and opened, and within them was... nothing. Empty green eyes met his gaze, vacant and distant. With mechanical precision, she gathered the fanned cards and laid them in a neat-- unnaturally neat-- stack. With a voice as flat as her face, and low enough to nearly be drowned by the clamor of the bar, the Oracle spoke. "What is your question of the cards."

There the two were, surrounded by people. She could turn and tell the person next to her that she was seated with a murderer, a pirate. But she would only be telling yet another murderer, another pirate. She could scream for help, but nobody would listen even if they could hear over their own loud conversations and songs. She could run, but she would need to push through the crowd and she would need to outrun Booker...and Karsteth. He watched her as she changed, his head tilting slightly as her eyes became vacant. Finally, he looked away, towards his mug and then towards the cards. He took a long sip of whiskey and then asked in that low gravelly voice: "Will I get what I want?"

There was no movement in the woman, save for her hands-- it was so very different from the old witch in the forest; where Dasia had simmered, swaying with her power, words dripping with potential, the girl before him was flat and featureless; just like one of her cards. Lifting the deck, she spoke in that same tone. "A worthy question." The petition offered, she now started to weave. Moving with rhythmic precision, the Oracle's hands moved mechanically. The cards flashed quickly through her fingers, almost too fast for the eye to follow. It might have been merely interesting in sunlight, but in the murk of smoke and low light, in the swaying of shadows, it was almost... hypnotic. There was magic threaded between the motions, something barely felt, an old power that was felt, not seen. As the cards twisted, showing myriad colorful faces, the woman seemed to still even further, like the sensation of a held breath. "Tell me... when to stop."

Karsteth watched as Elleynah's hands worked over the cards. His one eye traced over her movements and then studied her face, watching the vacancy in her expression, in her gaze. He took his time, took another pull of his whiskey...and then finally spoke. "Stop."

They were in a tavern, surrounded by the lowest of the low; she was at a table with one of those whose deeds and history might make some here pale, or stand with the worst-- it was all evilness, in the smoke and noise. The Oracle seemed to shift, even as he spoke the word; it was like there was two of her, one overlaying the other-- the mask, all calm perception and flat, and beneath… the girl he had scared, hiding in the shadow of the self that wasn’t. The first card hit the table, and it was like a thunderclap; just between them two. The world around stilled; sound died in a single instant, like a grinding of the gears of the world that missed a cog, and beyond their table was nothing but flatness. Even the dog who had been at his feet was gone; he was alone with the woman, and the cards laid out. Six cards-- one more than the witch of the woods, but then again, this seemed something as far removed from Dasia as Karsteth himself had been from the cowardly, simple Booker. 

Now though, he was without anything. He was simply Karsteth, man without mother, killer of his father, murderer and thief. And in front of him, the woman-within-woman and the cards that seemed to lift, glow of their own power. They rose, and began to spin-- growing faster and faster while he was rooted to his seat, powerless. Erupting with crimson light, they seemed to unmake whatever their light touched. They whirled, the faces-- the figments of the paint and paper revolving around him, caging him. They turned potential into something visible, touchable, real. The first of the cards pulled from the wildly careening halo, and like a bolt of lightning it struck him, right in the chest; one moment he was in his chair in a world of nothing, and then, he was-- Stormy seas, a ship in the distance. He was at the helm of his Widow, but it was not his. Not now. At his side, Booker leaned over the gunwale; he looked young and strong, no grey at his temples yet, a hunger in his eyes.

Yet, when he turned to Karsteth, where his mouth should have been was a maw of shark teeth, cutting up from the soft flesh of his mouth, and blood ran down Booker’s chin and throat to his chest, where a gaping wound cut across. It was not one wound; no, Karsteth had been thorough, and took his ascendancy by force of cruelty. “Always want what is not yours; a creed we shared in seas dark.” Around them, the waves seemed to grow higher and higher, the storm clotting and darkening the sky. Booker stepped forward, his head hung at an unnatural angle. “Always meant for nooses, we, but no-- you would always want for a blade, wouldn’t you?” Booker’s voice is made of the crash of bodies into distant waters, the gurgle of his death rattle. “Can’t keep happy, can’t be satisfied-- that’s what the witch did to you too, made you outside how you is inside.” The frozen vision seemed to warp, and Karsteth could once more move. He lunged forward, bow in hand, and struck down at the human. Just as he had before, his face held shock when he collapsed. “Don’t say… you weren’t warned… bastard.” The glaive of Karsteth’s bow slammed down again, and the man seemed to explode into light; bloody, vermilion light, that lanced through the world, through human and elf and ocean alike until there was nothing but red.

For a moment, it was like he could see them; the threads of magic, the tavern, the girl. Time had stilled; he was still there. But the magic flooded into him red and blinding and the vision of reality broke. The world seemed to right, and he was no longer at sea. Karsteth was in his father’s lighthouse; in the signal room, where the pillar of magical light would shine, but it was dimmed. It was in disrepair; around him, the chairs had moldered down to nothing but debris, windows cracked or shattered, piled of leaves and other trash catching in corners. Outside, the storm from the ship seemed to still rage, casting long shafts of pale light into the room and the rest left in inky dark. From the shadows, three figures rose; as though from the piles of detritus, they walked from the darkness. Two women, and in the center, a man. He recognized them; he had played his part in their ending, and the familiarity of features was evident… even in death. His mother reached for him, jawless and rotten, half bones and rot but overlaying her was the woman as she was, when he ended her short and useless life. Accusation burned in those eyes, her silent judgement unheard. The woman to the other side hummed softly, offkey, a sailor’s shanty but she too spoke no words. It was only the man in the center who spoke, and his voice was soft. “You’re going into a ruin. You’re running and fighting but it’s going to burn for awhile longer.”

As one, the three figured turned their heads; not even a second later, lightning struck the side of the lighthouse with a crack like the end of the world; when the light faded, the three figures were gone… but below, the night turned to orange. The lighthouse was on fire, and the rain and smoke began to fill the tower room. Karsteth would look for escape, but as he neared the broken windows, they seemed to grow whole-- barring his exit. The door vanished entirely, and then the flames began to eat at the floor. They licked at the beacon, and it shuddered to life, filling the room with light-- blinding, crimson light and he could hear the flames and then-- He was in the familiar cursed woods. All was night; the storm rumbled behind him. He was running and the shadows of the trees seemed to shift to follow, grabbing at him with spindly fingers, catching and slowing him. He heard laughter-- hawk cries-- crow caws-- in the air but saw no shadows of wings… instead, saw scales in the dark places between the trees that vanished before he neared. He was running to and from-- he saw what from, but it was not until he saw the scarlet glow of flames that he knew his aim. He fled to the circle of light, where the trees ended abruptly. Across the flames, he could see her-- Dasia, the witch woman. She swayed in an ancient dance, her dusky flesh painted in whorls and symbols alien to him and nothing else. The light caught at her; the long, free hair, the swelling of her belly, the bloody feathers beneath her feet. She sang, soft and barely audible over the crackle of flames, but it was unsettling and eerie.

Where she walked, he could see; the threads of reality seemed to coalesce behind her, and he saw the tavern, the girl, the mug of whiskey. Dasia smiled to herself, as though she could not see him. Instead, he saw, she danced with a bone-- his mother’s jaw. She sang to it, weaving softly through the smoke. As she moved, the feather beneath her feet shifted; he could see the other offerings there too. This was the preparation he was paying for; it waited only for him to return with the last of his deed and spoils. He smiled-- for the first time-- and the woman stopped, confusion and wonderment on her features. “An’na maehik...? Aeyanti--?” She reached through the flames, but she shifted a foot-- feathers fell into the fire-- and it began to roar, growing into a column of flames, all vermillion and searing. Karsteth surged through the flame, trying to grab at the witch to make this stop, but instead, as he emerged from the fire, he was… on a ruined path. Around him the woods of the Ghostlands were overgrown and clawing to reclaim the road, but he was there now and the recoiled. In the distance, he could see the glint of something-- and he moved towards it, walking at first, his boots thudding on the stone, and then he ran, and then he bolted, sprinting as fast as he could. In the woodlands he felt eyes on him-- so many, single eyes just staring, but they dared not stir from their darkness. At his hip, the bag of spoils was full. He had all he needed. Karsteth ran, and as he ran, the bag seemed to empty on its own, and he was leaping, and he was flying and his sight became endless and he was seeing all-- those whose eyes were stolen, those whom he had hunted, those who hunted him, and he felt the malice and fear there.

Forcing himself towards that feeling like a loosed arrow, he spun towards his enemy, through the forest of Eversong, and deeper, and then-- He flew through the red run, and this was becoming familiar, this feeling of being unmade, and-- He was once more on the White Widow, at the helm. He was where he belonged. His eyes-- both-- scanned the horizon. The helm seemed to erupt beneath him, as he took a step back, but he was confident in this. Karsteth smiled to himself as the deck formed beneath him, splinters and bones and gold and steel, a throne. He sank into it-- made from the eyes of whores and holy men, the amber of witches and amethyst. Beneath him, the crew were rendered faceless, obedient and fearful, and he was their god-- unstoppable, with his vision thousandfold, with his witch. In the hole through the ship, he saw all his precious treasures; gold in his quarters piled, crusted over the walls and floor like barnacles, sliding up the swell of thighs and breasts of the women who rested in silks on his berth, their bodies pliant and waiting, chains of that same gold wrapped around their throats. Below them, more gold clotted the veins of his ship, and then, the weapons of his crew glinted with hunger-- he could see the maps of Azeroth, and with a narrowing of his eye he could see the paths of the ships, the wealth they could vomit up at his feet. He was smiling, a satisfaction rising in him, when a familiar and cool voice clipped through the rising smugness of the vision.

“Be wary of anything that offers something, for nothing.” Karsteth looked back to the helm, and at the wheel, was the thin quel’dorei-- Quineven. The man turned, and he stared back with his own replacement eye. It swirled with a cosmos, severe and stark against his pale features. “You’re going to regret the greed. You can have a taste, but the weight of that want is going to bring you… down.” He waved a hand to the deck beneath them, and Karsteth looked at his ship. The hole he had torn in her heart was filling now, crimson waters rising and flooding each level of the ship. The captain of the vessel tried to rise, but the chair had become host to that golden barnacle infection, and it crept over his calves, over his groin and arms. When he opened his mouth to speak, it rushed between his lips, and he tasted the tang of metal before the ship sank beneath the waves, crushed and drowned in vermillion. When he opened his eyes, he was once more in the tavern. He reached for the bitch in front of him, the witch still motionless, ready to throttle the life from her, and his hands passed right through Elleynah, past her chair. The tavern was still frozen, and now too it was dark with the red light.

At his back, he felt a single point of pure, steely cold. It erupted through his chest, and he saw the sword burst through his sternum, and not even his blood could turn it red, it shone clean and sharp, glinting in the light. The thick scent of ichor and copper filled his nose as he gurgled on his last breath. There was a single, quiet whisper in his ear. Fair and forgiving. The world went that red, and it consumed him. It was everywhere, like the pain that enveloped him, and Karsteth was falling, falling… He was in the tavern, and the witch sat before him, her features flat, the shadows in her eyes shifting with the magics. Beneath her fingers, he could see the cards. Knight of Cups, reversed. The Tower. Queen of Pentacles. Six of Wands. The Devil. And then… The Ace of Swords, reversed.

It was unsettling to say the least. One moment he was there, the next he was not. The woman in front of him - the girl was there, then she was not. 

Then she was Sid, his work shown on the former captain. Karsteth looked over the gruesome cut, the way he was split and the unnatural form of his movement. He could still feel the weight of his own bow as he swung it down, the resistance of flesh against blade as he cut through. He could still hear that bitch gasping for breath between pained sobs as she bled out on the floor. But he was a man of reason. This was not real. This was not real. And so, even as he felt a spark of fury ignite in him at the dead man's words, he did not shout back. And then the ship was gone. Sid was not Sid. Sid was his mother, his father--.... Karsteth looked at the three and shook his head as they reached out. 'Ruin' they said. Piss on them. Piss on all of them. They had no idea. They were dead. And then they were gone. He was out of breath from running, panting with sweat dripping down his face. This was not real, but he felt the moisture, tasted the salt, and smelled the smoke from the fire that she danced around. He saw her. Dasia. Not of his own will, he felt his loins tighten and his mind surge with rage. He had no control over this and he did not like a loss of control. Spit on Sid. Spit on his bitch of a mother and his coward of a father. Spit on the witch herself. Spit on the eyes. Spit-- He felt the ship erupt beneath him. The loss of control was gone. He felt completely in control. The ship was steady beneath his feat. The throne of gold was heavy, sturdy, and built for him and him alone. No seat had ever felt as good as that throne did then. He felt the smoothness of gold beneath his hands--

--but then his hands could not move. His feet could not move. His legs, his arms-- he was being swallowed. He was being restrained. He was being-- His eyes opened wide and he looked down at the pristine sword protruding through his chest. He was about to shout, about to curse, and then he heard the voice of a woman. Something familiar. Someone familiar. And then he was in the tavern. No throne. No sword. No ship. No father, no mother. No Dasia. No Sid. Only himself, the bitch at his feet, and the bitch across from him. And the cards laid out before him. He steadied himself from the vision, catching his breath, and trying to do it subtly. His palms were clammy and Booker, sensing something was amiss, growled a bit louder. Beneath the table, she bared her fangs at the witch across from her master. But he gave no sign to attack and so she held. His gaze lingered on the final two cards. The Devil on his throne and the Ace of Swords. Looking to Elleynah, he spat out a low and dangerous question: "What the fuck was that?"

The flatness remained; whatever had taken the space within the girl's skin remained, and with empty gaze, it spoke. "You seek to gain, to ruin others and rise yourself. You have bones and bodies and eyes laid at your feet, and they lift you towards the goals you seek. You were content to feast, but then the hunt came for you. You have run, and clawed, and kept your feet but the tangling roots and the clawing shadows come closer. In seeking salvation from your hunt, in turning the tides against the predators to hunt in return, you have left yourself few doors, few ways safe to walk. Be careful, Karsteth Dusktide of the White Widow, who shows an unberbelly only to strike; you will taste what you want, and in knowing you have won, you will fall. Take warning here-- a victory precedes the end. Be wary." The Oracle remained, because Elleynah was lost-- caught in the vision of her own magics, she was slow returning to her flesh. Fear, thick as the smoke in the bar barred her return. Instead, the featureless facade of the cards blinked once, and a smile turned the lips. "You have been marked by witches, and witches know you. The weaves of fate clash over your name; the mother of your sons awaits your return, and she will give you the answers you need, and offer the final prize for all your efforts..."

He listened to the words that were spoken by the puppet of the cards with a grit of his teeth. The vague nature of them infuriated him, especially after having been jerked around in his own mind, as far as he was concerned. When he heard his full name and his ship, his jaw clenched, his temples pulsed, and he looked like fire ready to burst into something more wild. A victory precedes the end. Be wary. As she smiled, he felt fury rise in his belly. She spoke of witches and fate and Dasia, he knew that well enough. And though she spoke of him getting what he wanted, he felt mocked. He did not like to be mocked. And in order to get what he wanted, he knew what that meant. "You sealed your own fucking fate then," he all but growled. Knocking back the remainder of the whiskey, he slammed the mug down - to not other patron's surprise or care - and stood. In an instant, Booker was on her paws and growling as the captain rounded the table. He harshly grabbed Elleynah's arm and whether she was still in a daze or not, he dragged her as a child would a rag doll. Out of the chair and out of the bar, caring not if the heavy door slammed against her as he pulled her with him.

Before he moved, her hands were gathering the cards. It was fate-- premonition? That they were all gathered and pressed to her chest before the storm broke around them. Even still, pressed to her heart as they were, she was hapless to stop the pirate's moves-- even if she had been herself, he was stronger and faster. Elleynah watched from behind her own eyes, stapped in the space between. It was with horror that the doll that she had become was yanked bodily from the chair; Her feet moved with surety, between the patrons. Though he pulled her callously through the wildness and the riot of the Leaning Mast, whatever magics were in her made the progress oddly... smooth. Where he tugged, she followed, her feet landing precisely where they needed to be so as not to fall-- and with the space of a hair, she managed to slide past the door without it crashing on her frame. It was only when the bracing scent of the sea air hit her that she felt herself slam back into her form; and her knees nearly buckled with the sensations of fear and panic. A scream clawed at her throat. Inside the murky tavern, Shariya watched as the girl was dragged away, guilt and shame clawing her her belly. Reaching for a mug, she turned to deliver it, excuses tumbling around in her mind. A scarred and calloused hand closed around her wrist, with enough force to make her gasp. "Where'd she go." Baelisian's voice was low and dangerous, the sinuous roil of ink on her bared arms leading to a face thick with anger and disgust.

Into the dark, Karsteth dragged Elleynah. If she fell, he jerked her back up without a care. His strength was raw and animalistic, his stride deliberate and primal in its anger. He was so fast that Booker had to trot at his side, her claws clicking against the rickety, wooden dock-like pathways of Booty Bay. They passed the drunkards, laughing or puking over the edge of the docks, half-digested food splashing into the disgusting water below. Nobody paid them mind. Even the 'guards' cast looks briefly, but couldn't be bothered to intervene. A lover's quarrel perhaps. Or a debt owed. Either way, not their business, not their problem. Through the shark's mouth and into the tunnel that lead the way out of the 'city' did he lead, already starting to brandish a knife as he went. Once they were out of Booty Bay and surrounded by the sounds of the jungle, he swung Elleynah around until he back slammed hard against the rough bark of a palm tree. What anger he had at the vision was now beginning to boil over, having something - someone - to point it towards. A hand grabbed her hair roughly, calloused fingers wrapping into copper curls and jerking her to stay in place. "Marked by witches, am I, bitch?"

Now the girl staggered, her voice stolen by fear-- this was when she should fight, should run, but no one around her could help-- it had been so long since she had to think of life and death in so small a way, so personal, and the Spectre would be so disgusted, Bell would be so angry at her for letting this happen-- She tried, just once to yank away, but it was was futile enough he didn't even notice. He just pulled her along, and the sounds that shuddered and fought in her chest were rendered mute. No one could help her; these were pirated just the same as he was, this was not her world any more and she had forgotten the simplest of rules. In the tunnel of the Shark, she tried to look for anything-- any last-minute help, something, but if she lashed out now, she felt he would murder her where she stood. He'll kill you as easy as anything. Gabriel's warning, offered early, forgotten for only one moment and now-- Elleynah's only hope was to send for help. At her side, she concealed reaching for her commstone with a fake-stumble, turning it on. The last person she had messaged was Bell-- maybe the woman would be able to hear the sounds of the city die, the rise of the insects of the jungle. Closing her fingers around the comm, she held it tight-- it was her last, and only hope, as she was too weak and stupid to have prevented this. Her back slammed against the palm and a pained gasp broke from her lips, and with it, the silence was broken from her. "Yes, you've been-- there were deals, and a witch, the cards showed you what you asked for--" A cry broke from her as he yanked hard at the curls, her scarf unraveling at the rough treatment and sliding off her brow to the jungle floor. Meeting his eyes, fear and desperation flooded her freckled features. "I gave you the truth, not what you wanted to hear."

"You didn't give me fuckin' truth, you gave me something fuckin' else," he said, slamming her head back against the tree once more, his grip stern and never-faltering. He could hold the helm through a storm, he could most certainly hold a young girl against her own futile struggling. He had done it before. Many times. "What the fuck did I see? I know you fuckin' know." Again, he slammed her back. "What did you fuckin' make me see, bitch!?"

Elleynah closed her eyes as her skull slammed against the palm bark, stars going off in her vision like fireflies. "Th-that's the magic! That's the cards-- they-- they show the truth, in their own way--" She gripped the commstone, raising her voice as though on the verge of tears. It wasn't an act. "Please, let me go back to the city, I g-gave you the reading you asked for-- you saw what you needed to see, you got your warnings!" Panic was beginning to bubble over inside her, and if he didn't let go of her soon, she was going to make the mistake of trying to escape-- despite knowing his dog was waiting for her with bared teeth, despite knowing there was a blade held close to her throat.

Karsteth's grip tightened and he leaned in. The stench of whiskey was sharp from his breath, permeating the air between them. "That's not what I fuckin' wanted," he said, his voice a low growl - one that matched Booker as her snarling became more prominent. "Yer a fuckin' witch. Can't see that in yer fuckin' cards?" Brandishing his knife, he reached upwards and placed the cool blade against Elleynah's freckled cheek. He pressed hard enough to draw blood if she continued to struggle - and then a harsh jerk of her hair, enough to rip some out of their roots. He tugged downwards and then cut, a clump of bright orange hair left in his hand - and the knife was back at her throat. As he stuffed the hair into his pocket, he tilted his head to the side. "Ye talk about fate and witches and what ye want t'hear, what ye don't want t'hear. If it's really fuckin' fate, then it fuckin' hate you, bitch." Booker growled a bit louder and then barked once, the sound vicious and wet with frothed saliva. But Karsteth paid her no mind, his anger still narrowed at Elleynah. "Hair of a fuckin' virgin. In The Leaning Mast. How fuckin' perfect is that." With a harsh laugh and his hand free, save for a stray curl clinging to a dirty nail, he balled his hand into a fist and swung it into the young woman's gut.

She struggled, until the cold pressure of the knife cut her cheek; it was a small pain, but it shot through her, turning the threat in his voice and the cruelty in his words into something palpable and real. Panic blinded her; Elleynah’s breathing grew shallow as his hand twisted-- sharp pain slicing through her scalp and face, a small cry breaking from her lips-- And the hair came away in his hands, the brightness of it shorn from her, and something inside her quailed. There had been warning-- she knew, not to let this-- he shouldn't be allowed to-- The punch landed hard in her belly and Elleynah doubled over in pain, acid racing up her throat with the strike and she heaved on the emptiness in her stomach. Her limp fingers dropped the commstone to the rotting undergrowth. Tears fell from her tight shut eyes, and she waited, waited for the next blow to land. There was a single moment, in the jungle, where the insects sounds dulled; half a heartbeat of quiet. It was followed by two booms-- two shots from a rifle. The rounds thudded into the hound's flank; one near her throat, the other in the soft part of her belly. They were aimed to take the beast out of combat as quickly as possible. Bell lifted the gun to pepper one in the back of the pirate, but she'd loaded quickly-- the gun jammed, power not igniting. With a curse, Baelisian dropped the rifle in favor of her sword and lunged from the vegetation, straight towards Karsteth's back.

Booker snapped again, lunged, and took the two shots. The power of the rifle was enough to send the mutt back  and tumbling into the dirt with a splatter of blood following her. With a high-pitched yelp, her growling continued, but quieter and slightly strangled. It at least pulled Karsteth's attentions to the side. He almost looked surprised at the familiar sight. He recognized the harsh features, the black hair, the tattooed arms. He smirked and swung his fist against Elleynah's face with a low grumble of, "Fuckin' fate. Your boy ain't here too, is he? Slinkin' around in the shadows like a fuckin' dickless bitch?" In an instant, he threw his knife forward and the blade sung as it whipped through the air towards Baelisian. Quickly thereafter, he swung his bow from his back and held it at the ready. And arrow was notched and in the blink of an eye, it flew after the knife, towards its prey.

Baelisian had sized up the man when she saw him in the tavern; he was lean muscle and hate, stank of his sins, hollow-hearted and mean. With Gabriel, it might have been a fairer fight-- or alone, she might have had the thought and the wherewithal to stay clean, stay concise, fight with her mind and not her rage. But his fist slammed into Elleynah's cheek and she went down, cradling her cheek and eye, and everything in Baelisian vision narrowed to red. The dagger grazed her temple, the sting sending her forward; it informed her enough of his aim that she was nearly vertical in the air when it went flying. Sword held against the length of her arm, she launched herself at him, trying to force him away from the woman and the palm tree by any means necessary, throwing her arm in a slash towards his belly.

The dagger flew by, the arrow followed it, and then in an instant, Baelisian was upon him. He had no idea why she was there, but he did not mind. He could only laugh, low and cruel like the Devil himself. How fortuitous. Why had he even bothered asking the cards? Cruel joke or no, he knew exactly what he was looking for and that he would get it. He would get it this day. With a trained shift and twist, the bow become glaive and he brought it up along his arm to block the sword. She was fighting with rage, something he knew and knew well. And he knew how it could blind. Ah, the irony. Pressing in hard, he his words were a hiss through gritted teeth. "That shit of a boy not enough for ye? Gotchyerself this bitch too? S'that how it is?"

There was nothing that made it through the roar in her ears; it was anger, and it was panic. Everything was going wrong and she was vicious with her rage-- it moved her, but not her sister. It wasn't a thought; her body moved of its own, and she was closing the distance again between her and the mongrel who was the target of that rage. Baell brought the blade up again, attempting a slash at his side; it might hit, but her own defenses were shoddy and half-forgotten in the anger that fuelled her. Behind, at the root of the palm, Elleynah's head swam. After the vision, after everything, she could barely mend the parts of her thoughts that broke along the edges. There was loudness just beyond her, and she scooted away from it lamely, trying to make sense of all that was going on.

With a blade as massive as that of his bow glaive, Karsteth's movements did not have to be precise to crash into Baelisian's, but they were anyway. Where her anger made her vicious but shoddy, his own made him more dangerous, more even. He had learned to harness what drove him. With a shower of sparks as steel met steel, he swung his way down harder and pushed back what ground she had tried to claim for her own. "C'mon, bitch, ye can do better than that," he taunted, emphasizing that last word as he crashed his bow glaive downwards for an opening, drew back the first of his free hand, and let it fly towards her face.

She had been born a fighter, but her years were her enemy here; she had fewer than her own Captain, for all they had been cruel to Baelisian as well, but where others might have honed anger into coldness, hers was still heat-- too much fire in the bloodline, too much animal. Baelisian barely held out against the parry, her foot sliding in the rain-and-rot slick leaflitter, and she caught Karsteth's fist in her temple. It made her fall back a step, but where anger made her decisions poorer, it sped her, and she lifted her blade to block his own incoming attack-- or would try.

Karsteth took the dagger to his arm and it drew blood with a vicious hiss between clenched teeth. He looked down, the flesh between his rolled-up shirt sleeve and leather wrist cuff prickling with red. Behind him, Booker was making her way to her feet and at the smell of her master's blood, she growled obediently. He looked to Baelisian and in an instant, the bow glaive was against the dagger, against her arm, and then he dropped, swinging a powerful leg beneath her to sweep her off of her feet.

Elleynah hobbled away from the combat, her head throbbing, belly churning like she might vomit at any moment. It was-- this was wrong, something felt wrong in the weave. This wasn't supposed to happen; that thought repeated over and over in her mind. This was not the way the threads unraveled, it was-- She shook the useless imaginings away, and with a calming breath, steadied her thoughts. It had not been so long ago she had turned herself to steel under Esme's eyes-- not so long since she fought for her rank. This was not the end of her. Placing hands over her belly, she let the green magics flow from the earth around her, fecund jungle rife with energies just waiting to be used. It rushed into her, stealing the ache from belly and brow, and Elleynah scrambled to her feet. Baelisian, facing against the calmer pirate, fared less well than her sister. She snarled, teeth bared like a hissing cat, and tried to press her advantage-- only to have her momentum play into Karsteth's hands. His calf connected with Bell's knees and she went down. Back hitting the mud with a thud, she grabbed for the leaflitter with her free hand and threw a handful up into Karsteth's one good eyes, pushing backwards to put space between them now that she was prone.

Karsteth turned, but too late. Dirt flew into his vision, causing it to burn and feel sharp. He growled, not unlike the bitch nearby, and then swung his bow glaive down with a vicious attempt at cutting Baelisian's legs - one or both - as she tried to scamper away. Crawling on top of her, using his weight to his advantage, he shoved the bow glaive down against her neck with little care if it cut her or not. Holding it with one hand, he swung down with the other. Over. And over. And over. And over. He was brutal in his assault and kept punching until his knuckles were bloody, blisters in his future. Bone against bone, flesh against flesh, blood against blood. And then, he pressed down. When the cunt finally stopped moving, he leaned down with a whiskey-scented scoff. "Supposed to be a whore. You'll fuckin' do." And then his fingers plunged. They pressed into Baelisian's eye socket, pushing against the lid, surrounding the eye within. If blood spurted, he cared not. Her screams caused him no pause. Booker's growling caused him no pause. He had a task - a bloody one - and he would see it done. He pushed, reached, grabbed, and then yanked. He yanked until the slick and slippery green eye was free and in his blood and dirt-stained grip.

She's been caught up in the attempt to get distance-- she wasn't thinking, she was acting on instinct and it was the undoing of her. The glaive caught at her thighs when he slashed downward, and Bell barked out her pain-- but it wasn't anything compared with what was to come. The attack slowed her enough that he had his moment. The pirate dropped, weight enough to pin her. Baelisian kicked, thrashed-- the glaive cut against her neck, even as his punches rained down. She blindly groped for her blade as his fist smashes against her face, fingers coming away with nothing but leaves. She fought until she saw stars, until blackness swam in her vision, but her head was ringing and she could only focus on breathing through a broken and bloody nose, the whistle of air through it and her swollen, bust lips haggard. It was enough to make her go slack, panting hard, rattled as she tried to find her opening, find her strength to fight him through the aches and pain. She couldn't understand what he said through the ringing, but she knew what was coming when his calloused, dirty hands got near her eye. A feral, angry scream erupted from her and it soon became one of genuine agony. Baelisian thrashed, to the last-- even when the filaments snapped between eye and socket, she was fighting. There was a slick sound of boots sliding on mud and leaves, and despite the prize already taken, Elleynah's frame slammed against the man's side. She was not a fighter by nature, but she was solid with the muscles of years in a military and all of her was flung at the center of Karsteth's mass, anything to get him away from Bell.

It was a slick thing, a fresh eye. As difficult to hold as a small bit of soap. Still gritting against the dirt in his own eye, he felt the hard hit of Elleynah against him. He tumbled to the side, clutched the eye in one hand and kept hold of his bow in the other. He didn't bother with a pouch - there was no time. He stuffed the bloody eye right in his pocket and then rubbed to try and rid his sight of the dust that made such a haze. Viciously and blindly, he swung out with his glaive to keep both of the bitches at bay. But behind them, the third bitch growled. Booker was on all fours once more, though limping on her hind leg. Blood matted the dark, coarse fur, and she looked angry. Slow, but angry - and nonetheless dangerous.

The night was thick with the lengthening shadows, and Elleynah missed the fly of his glaive; she caught the slash in her upper arm, but she wasn't staying to fight. Whatever Bell had done was slowing him enough for her to think, and move, and use the skills she'd won hard at the Spectre's heel. As soon as the man was off of her sister, Elleynah was scrambling back, mimicking (without knowing it) Bell's actions-- another handful of grime and leaf litter was lobbed at his eyes. This time, though, it was filled with magic; her anger threaded the leaves and the dirt, and as soon as it contacted Karsteth's skin the debris would attempt to root itself-- green tendrils pobing at his pores, attempting to slide into his nose, if any reached the eyepatch they squirmed beneath it as well. A growing charm, made into annoyance. She did not look back to see if her dirty trick landed-- instead, she clawed her way towards her sister and tugged up at her arm. "Get up get up for fucks sake get up!" Elleynah's voice was shrill and high, panic leeching into it. Once the dark-haired woman was on her feet, Elleynah pulled her along-- there was no fight, there was only getting away.

With a vicious curse and a scream of, "YOU FUCKIN' BITCH!!", Karsteth wildly wiped at his eye and nose with his free hand. It was a throb of panic in his chest that the tendrils would do as he just did and go for his eye, so he ripped them away from any possible hole they might have made. He scratched, tore, and ripped, neverminding if he clawed at himself and drew blood. He heard both of the bitches start to scamper off, but so did he hear Booker start growling, snapping and snarling. Even wounded, she stood in the way, in the center of the path - though, she would be slow should they dash in their blood-covered retreat. Wildly wiping at his face, he then grabbed for his glaive, grabbed for a bow, and in the general direction of where he heard the two, he let the arrow fly.

Baelisian was panting hard through clenched teeth, brow to neck nothing but tense muscle and grit. Her face was a sore of pain, all of it, from fist and... She couldn't think-- gods, her fucking eye. Anger and senseless hate brimmed in her skin as she tried to imagine the  ways she would kill that man, but all it did was made her feet unsure as she was torn in directions. In a last act of anger, Bell groped at her thigh, reaching for the dagger there-- she held it up to her chest aggressively, ready to fight despite the fact her world was darker by half. Booker’s growls caught her ears, and she bared teeth as they neared. The thing was still alive, for fucks sake. Something had to die tonight. She would have lunged for the dog, but Elleynah tugged her along with strength that belied her cowering earlier, all purpose for now. "No, no come on--" Elleynah summoned more of her panicked magics, knowing it would tax her later but at that moment she wanted to get away. Muttering a spell beneath her breath, she mimicked the other casting she had used against the pirate himself but on a greater scale; it was a druid’s calling, not hers, but she'd learned from them she served with-- more greenery rose to meet her fingers, all vibrant and powerful, almost more than she could grasp. With a hiss, she spun the magics like thread between her fingers, letting it build. Once there was enough of it, she cast it towards the pirate’s bitch, and Elleynah could spare no more time or thought; she had to run.

"Booker!! Go!!" Karsteth shouted, wiping madly at his face, even as the greenery faded and all that was left was dirt and paranoia. He notched another arrow and with a squint against the haze, he shot it towards what he could make out of the two women as they hastened their retreat. Booker yelped and snarled as the greenery wrapped around her, tightening her wounds already made by Baelisian. Though she tried to be loyal and heed her master's command, she kept halting to gnaw at the vines that the younger Stormsummer had summoned to her call.

The first arrow whizzed by as the spell was launched-- it soared past Elleynah's extended hand. She had snatched it back, panic still threading her, but her focus was forward. If fear would slow her, she would have none of it-- she was already laden with a sister who was lurching more than running and her own, other hobbles. It was the ache of the magic use made her steps leaden, not fear-- she was no druid, no Greenseer or Dor'wynn to whom nature bent like bower-leaves; she was just a witch, and the charms of life-giving, the blessings that grew, were taxing still. She could hum healing into tea leaves, but it was an effort of days, of sunlight and rain. Magic as aggression was alien to her. She was nearly to the edge of the palms when Karsteth's next arrow was loosed; The second shot flew truer than the first. It pierced the jungle-moist air and slammed into Elleynah's thigh. A cry erupted from her at the pain that blossomed, and something inside her grated hard against the spell-exhaustion. Something stirred, below the surface of her magics, old and calm. It morphed panic to something harder, more cold-- and she almost hesitated, hand drifting towards the shaft that sprouted from her leg. Baelisian's pained grunt brought her back, and the thing beneath slid once more into the dark of subconscious. Shoving her arm around Bell's shoulders, Elleynah spared no more time-- she ran, leaving blood and green in her wake.

Though Booker tried to follow the two women, she stopped eventually to gnaw at the vines that continued to sprout, until they withered and died from the sheer distance from their maker. She had drawn more blood, matted in her teeth with her own black fur. The bitch limped her way back towards Karsteth, whom drew himself up to his feet, angry and seething. He rubbed the dirt from his eyes and it caked on his skin, moist from sweat and the humidity of Stranglethorn. Blood trailed into the jungle , the dirt was scuffed from their tussle, and he was breathing hard with anger at having prey escape. Taking a deep breath, his low and hoarse voice boomed throughout the area, weaving its dangerous way through the tall trees and thick vines. "RUN AS FAR AS YE FUCKIN' CAN!! RUN AN' DON'T YE DARE FUCKIN' LOOK BACK, 'CAUSE I'LL FUCKIN' BE THERE!!" Would he truly be there? No. More than likely not. But as he heaves a breath, he felt more accomplished. The two would run and run far, and his mark had been put on them. An arrow into one, and the other would not see again out of her own eye. The eye.... He shrugged and swung his bow over his shoulder, into its usual and comfortable place. With a bloody and dirt-covered hand, he reached into his pocket and felt for the slick eyeball, the trail of nerves after it still warm. Plucking it out and giving it a careless toss (to which Booker barked slightly), he then dropped it into the small pouch at his side, where the other eye sat. His other hand made its way to his other pocket and when he felt the curls of copper hair still in place, his anger started to subside. A cruel smirk slid up onto his lips and he looked after where the two women had escaped. "AND THANK YE - VERY FUCKIN' KINDLY!!" he shouted back, for no one's benefit but his own. With a bark of a laugh, he looked down to Booker and tilted his head to the side. "C'mon, y'fuckin' bitch. We got a delivery to make."