#also I’m five foot eight stop acting like I’m in danger of getting carried away by a hawk

[heavencasteel420]

Steve in the no-UD IU Stonathan AU is metaphorically googling “tiny boyfriend go in mosh pit worried???”

[coconutknightshade]

A Very Tony Stark Move

A Very Tony Stark Move

By @coconutknightshade​ for the wonderful and excitable exciting @seek-rest​​!!

Rating: Gen Relationships: Peter Parker & Ben Parker ; Peter Parker/Michelle Jones ; Peter Parker & Tony Stark Characters: Peter Parker, Ben Parker, Michelle Jones, Tony Stark, Morgan Stark Word Count: 3,300

Summary: 

Peter's sixteen when Tony Stark busts into his room on a Saturday morning and convinces him he's going to be late for school. Now that Peter Parker is a grown-ass adult with a son of his own, he thinks it's time to start a family tradition.

A/N: Because we don’t have enough Dad!Peter and Seek-Rest’s influence reaches far and wide, ahaha! Also, shout out to @blondsak​​ for helping me hella fine tune it!! 

Read On AO3

"Why does your face look like that?"

Michelle's sitting at the kitchen table, books scattered everywhere as she works on her Ph.D. thesis - which very quickly became her second baby - when Peter strolls in and drops into the seat across from her. He's wearing slacks and his favorite blazer, but most importantly, he's wearing a grin lifted directly from the Cheshire cat. It doesn't take over a decade of having been together to recognize that her husband is very much up to something. The fact that he's dressed up as such on a Saturday night with nowhere to go is a dead giveaway.

"Because it's my face?" Peter doesn't even attempt to look offended, too distracted by whatever's bouncing around his head.

"Try again."

"I can't gaze upon my glorious wife without it being suspicious?" He's pulled one of her books closer to him and casually flips through the pages. The innocent act isn't fooling her.

"Not like that, you can't. And not when you're using phrases like gaze upon and glorious wife. What gives, Parker?"

Peter doesn't even bother with a parry; instead, his grin only widens as he looks up from the page he definitely is not reading. "I was just thinking-"

"Dangerous for everyone involved."

"- about something Tony pulled on me once," he continues, raising his voice an octave to speak over Michelle's drag. Peter pulls himself to his feet and crosses the kitchen to put on a cup of coffee that he definitely does not need at this time of night.

"In retrospect, it was brilliant. Damn, if I wasn't mad for days, though."

He grins again, staring at the clock like it's in on some little secret. Apparently, that's precisely the case, made evident in the way Peter bounces between the clock on the wall and that on the stove, messing with them both until they read roughly 6:30. Michelle leans back in her seat, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes at Peter.

"What are you going to do to my baby?"

Peter's expression darkens mischievously as he turns towards his wife. For a moment, he doesn't answer, turning instead to pull their son's favorite Iron Man mug from the cabinet and pour himself a cup of coffee. The pregnant pause that hangs between them is dramatic, and Michelle rolls her eyes. It's a very Tony Stark move.

"I'm going to wake him up for school." He doesn't elaborate, but his eyes flick back over to the clock on the wall that now reads 6:30. "And would you look at that- We're running late."

Michelle bursts out in surprised laughter. "You're going to what?"

Peter, vibrating with childlike excitement, nearly dances back over to the table before dropping into the chair and leaning forward like he's about to share a secret that he really shouldn't. "I'm going to wake Ben and tell him he's going to be late for school. Tony did it to me at sixteen-"

"You should be embarrassed that he succeeded."

"- now I'm going to pay it forward." He leans back, crossing his arms and failing to pull off a smug expression. He still looks like a child at Christmas.

"Except Ben is eight, not sixteen."

"Yeah, but with your genes, I give it another year before he sees through all my bullshit." Michelle shoots him a - successful - smug grin. Ben really does take after her, something Peter loves to feign offense over, but Michelle knows better.

She can see it in his eyes. Especially when Ben twists Tony's words against him to get what he wants. It's not so funny, however, when he tries to pull the same on Peter. Then it quickly becomes, "Michelle, come get your child before I give in to his demands!" To which the little shit always smirks - thanks Tony, for that lesson - with a triumphant, "I love to win."  

Michelle loves her boys.

"If you follow through with this, you're going to regret it. He's going to get you back somehow. And probably with Tony's help."

"Oh, I'm sure of it," Peter laughs. "But it will be endlessly worth it in the moment."

"Don't you think Ben will notice when you load him up into the car, and the clock doesn't match what you're telling him?" Their kid is eight, but he's wicked bright.

Peter smirks, taps his index finger to his temple, and says, "Your husband isn't as dumb as you think. I've already gone out and taken care of it."

"So," Michelle drags out. "That wasn't you carrying the trash out?"

"I think we both know the answer to that."

Michelle can only shake her head and smile openly at the chaos that is about to unfold. Peter pulls himself to his feet, buttons his blazer, and runs a hand down it to smooth out the non-existent wrinkles.

"Now, M'lady, I must bid you adieu. I have a son that's going to be late for school." He bows dramatically and takes off down the hall towards Ben's room. Michelle laughs, opening another book and dropping it over the already open one in front of her, when she hears Peter's mock-hurried, "Ben, get up! I overslept, and we're both going to suffer for it!"

---

Peter bursts into his eight-year-old son's room in a flurry, hurriedly crossing over to the chest of drawers and pulling out clothes left and right at random.

"Dad, what?" comes a sleepy voice from beneath the covers.

"Ben seriously, if you don't want to be late for school, you need to be up like five minutes ago." That seems to do the trick because Ben Parker, bless him, is an absolute nerd - "Stop calling him a nerd, Morgan"  - who loves school.

The kid trips over his own feet - because yeah, he's definitely got Peter's genes in him somewhere - and lands on the floor with a soft groan as he scrambles out of bed. Peter snorts in amusement, still needlessly pulling clothes from the drawer knowing full well picking them up and refolding them later will be worth it.

"Shit," Ben says, snatching off a shirt that's landed on his face before tearing out of his pajamas and hopping around on one foot as he tries to get his leg through a pair of jeans. The word has Peter's brows furrow in surprise as he whirls around, eyes narrowed at his oblivious son who is now fighting to get his shirt on.

"Benjamin Parker... Seriously?" When he's finally got his shirt all the way on - backward - he looks up at his father with wide eyes. The look on Peter's face makes him wince.

"Uncle Happy says it whenever he's annoyed!" It's a weak defense.

"So basically all the time," he mutters, now digging through the closet and tossing over a pair of sneakers.

Ben, catching with ease, slips them on and doesn't even bother checking if the laces are tight enough. He grins up at his Dad when he says, "Pretty much."

Peter fights not to match Ben's infectious smile and pushes him towards the door.

"Alright, monster, go brush your teeth and think about what you've done!" His voice is stern, but the fondness in his gaze gives him away. "It's almost seven, and if Daddy's late, he's going to be fired."

"What?" Ben's confusion is evident on his face, and Peter rolls his eyes, flicking his hands at the kid in a clear, shoo-ing motion.

"Just hurry!"

A clear example of Ben's lack of forethought has him spinning around and tripping over his shoelaces, flailing before hitting the ground. Before Peter can rush over to him, he's back on his feet with a hurried, "I'm okay!" thrown over his shoulder.

Okay, maybe Ben has more of Peter in him than he thought.

--

Ben comes racing into the kitchen like he's on fire, and Michelle looks up once more from her chaos on the kitchen table. He's not even bothered to take a brush to his thick curls and whew does it show. That on top of a backward shirt and pockets pulled out has her baby boy looking like a hot mess. She cuts her eyes over to Peter, who is sipping his coffee with a glint of deviousness in his eyes as he watches Ben scramble around, climbing up onto the counter so he can dig into one of the cabinets for a package of pop-tarts for the road.

Michelle clears her throat, and Peter pulls his eyes away from Ben as he now pulls whatever he can grab fastest out of the fridge and throws it in his lunchbox. When their eyes meet, Michelle raises her brows expectantly. Peter chuckles and defends with, "It's not like I'm actually letting him walk into school looking like that."

She opens her mouth for what will absolutely be a snarky retort but stops short when 50 pounds of hurried, flailing arms slams into her side with enough force that she has to grab the edge of the table to steady herself. Small arms wrap around her neck, and she's assaulted with minty fresh breath, and a whined, "Why didn't you wake me? I'm going to be late now!"

Peter, damn him, laughs as Ben manages to spin this whole debacle into somehow being her fault. He squeals when Michelle wraps one arm tight around his midsection, pulling him in for a hug, and not letting go as she digs her fingers into Ben's side - his Achilles heel, if you will.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Her voice exudes innocence as she relentlessly tickles her son. "Is this my fault?"

"No!" Ben gasps for breath, immediately taking back his slight against her as he scrambles to escape her clutches.

Now satisfied, she lets him go with a grin as devious as her now laughing husband. When Ben tries to back away, she grabs his wrist and pulls him in once more to press a loud kiss on his cheek, which he equally tries to escape. He is, as of late, too cool for that. Free once again, Ben scurries around the table before she can snatch him back up and grabs his backpack that's been haphazardly abandoned on one of the counters.

When he throws it over his shoulder, he turns to Peter with a huffed, "Let's go, Dad. Waiting on you. Like always."

Michelle nearly chokes at both his words and the offended expression Peter's now shooting his way. He turns towards Michelle with a look that very clearly says, can you believe this kid?  

"Rude," he mutters under his breath, dumping his coffee into the sink and dragging his messenger bag off the counter where it had also been haphazardly abandoned. Michelle picks up a book to hide her laughter as she watches two of the three most chaotic individuals she's ever met head for the door.

----

"The sun's not even up!" Ben says as they pull out of the parking garage. He's practically bouncing in his seat, borderline anxious at the prospect of being late for school, as they're already twenty minutes "behind schedule". Dad, he'd whined, racing off towards the car ahead of Peter when it was apparent the man wasn't going to literally run towards the vehicle. I haven't been tardy all year, and if I'm tardy today, I won't be eligible for the perfect attendance award!

Absently Peter wonders if he had been just as freaked out nearly a decade ago when Tony had rushed him out of bed with the same excuse.

He remembers being half-dazed as he skid into the kitchen in his socks, catching himself on the counter as his feet nearly slid out from under him. Pepper had been in pajamas which really should have been the one damning piece of evidence that Tony Stark was full of shit, but the two of them had been up until after midnight the night before - what should have been Exhibit B, your honor, of why Tony Stark was full of shit. The difference then being Tony had actually chosen to wake him at ass o'clock on a Saturday morning rather than after sunset like Peter was currently doing to Ben.

"Wow, good observation, Ben. I can really see how you're top of the class. I know they taught you the sun comes up later during winter." Peter laughs when his son pushes at his arm. Before the eight-year-old can shoot off a retort that in all likelihood would have made his mother proud, The Imperial March plays through the vehicle speakers. Peter grins when he hits the button on the dash.

"Hey, Mr. Stark!" There's a tired sigh on the other end of the line as Peter defaults back to an old habit that took several years to break. "I've got Ben here with me."

Which is effectively code for watch the language.

"Hey, Benny!" Peter grins at the way his son scowls at the nickname Tony definitely calls him just to rile him up. "I feel it's my not-parental parental duty to ask what you're both doing out at-"

"Tell Dad he needs to pull it together and drive faster!" Ben flat out cuts Tony off, and Peter can't help the brief snort of amusement before processing his kid's words. A phrase he no doubts picked up from the terrifying blend that is both Tony and Pepper wrapped up nice and neat in the form of one snarky sixteen-year-old package.

"Tony, tell Ben the adults are talking and-"

"You're both children, and it shows." Peter huffs, mock offended. Before he can respond, he hears a muffled, "Pull it together, Peter!"  over the speakers, which absolutely confirms his suspicions that Ben is picking up habits from Morgan. He smirks childishly when Tony sighs dramatically and says, "Children. All of you. I'm surrounded by children."

"I guess now you know how Rhodey felt whenever he was stuck with the both of us."

Tony laughs, starts to speak again but is cut off once more when Ben groans loudly, sounding very much annoyed.

"Can we stop with the hah-hahs? If I'm late for school, I'm not talking to either one of you for a week!"

"Promise?" both Tony and Peter respond at the same time. There's a brief beat of silence before Tony follows it up with a confused, "Wait, what?"

Peter can practically feel his son rolling his eyes.

"Do you know what time it is, Tony? It's Ben's Gonna be Late for School o'clock." Peter swears up and down his son picked this flair for theatrics up from Tony, but Michelle always shoots him a knowing look that has Peter crossing his arms petulantly over his chest with a pre-emptively muttered, "I am not that dramatic." 

Another beat of silence that has Peter holding his breath, and he can almost hear the light bulb click for Tony before he howls with laughter and his face flickers to life on the dash-screen in front of Ben.

"Peter," he says, trying to hold back his laughter. "You didn't! Without letting me partake? Rude!"

Suddenly Morgan is there, pushing her Dad aside so she can see the two of them. When she spots Ben, her expression softens in the way it always does when she's around him.

"Ben, are they being mean to you?"

Tony hides his laughter, all too knowing, behind a hand, but the way his shoulders shake is a dead giveaway.

"Morgan," Ben whines. "Nobody cares that I'm going to be late for school." He's sunk down in his seat, arms crossed over his chest. There's another moment of silence and Peter resolutely keeps his eyes on the road.

"Oh, you two are just terrible!" Morgan shoves her Dad, pushing him nearly off the screen. "Ben, it's Saturday. And it's just after 7. At night. You aren't going to school."

Peter's already got his right shoulder lifted to his ear to brace for a blow that never comes. When he chances a quick glance over to his son, he can see the clear confusion on his face mere seconds before it softens into something more relaxed.

"My end of the year award for perfect attendance is safe," he says, placing a hand over his chest in relief and letting his eyes fall shut. At his words, Peter frowns.

"God, I love this kid," Tony laughs openly, bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose as his grin widens.

"You're not mad?" Peter asks in confusion. How anticlimactic.  

"Oh no," Ben reassures. "I'm mad, but my teacher says patience comes to those who wait."

"I don't think-" Peter begins before his brain reroutes. "Wait, what does that mean?"

Morgan snorts. "You're all the height of lame. Except you, Ben." She winks before wandering off camera.

"I heard Mom tell her friend that you're a genius, but now I feel like she was lying." It's the only response he offers up, and now that they aren't in a "hurry", Peter presses a button on the dash. Once he feels the slight shift in the vehicle that indicates it has switched into self-drive mode, he takes his hands off the wheel. Peter leans over to flick the image on Ben's dash upwards so that Tony's holographic image broadcasts on the center of the windshield.

"Mom tells her friends that I'm a genius?" he preens, heart warming still all these years later under Michelle's praise.

"Yeah," Ben says, distracted. "She usually follows it up with, but he's still a dumbass."

Where Tony snorts in amusement, Peter's face falls. But honestly, she's not wrong. He turns towards his son and lightly flicks him on the side of the head.

"Stop swearing. What is wrong with you, Kid?"

Ben frowns as he rubs the side of his head like it hurts. Peter rolls his eyes because, once again- dramatic .

"I'm not a kid. I'm almost done with third grade."

Peter's eyes cut over to Tony, who looks equally amused.

"Hmm," Peter begins innocently. "Most not-kids I know don't trip over their shoelaces."

Ben turns towards him with a face of pure betrayal. "Dad, that was embarrassing!"

"Don't let him fool you, Ben. Your Dad is the CEO of embarrassing himself." Tony doesn't look away from Peter as he smirks.

Ben glances between the two, face screwed up in confusion when he says, "CE what?"

"Not important. What is important is that one time, when your Dad was about Morgan's age, he thought it would be a good idea to-"

"Anyways!" Peter cuts him off. "Look at the time! It's time for Ben to be asleep. He's got school in the morning."

"No, I don't!" Ben says, indignant. "I'm not falling for that again." He crosses his arms once more and refuses to look at his Dad.

"Don't worry, Ben. Morgan and I will help you get revenge." Tony's grinning deviously, and suddenly Peter knows how Michelle felt earlier when he'd walked in wearing that same expression. Except for this time, he knows he'll be the victim.

"I don't like this game," Peter scowls.

"Tough shit, Kid." He winces and looks over to Ben. "Don't tell your mom I said that."

Ben only grins, and Peter rolls his eyes.

"Anyways, as I was saying earlier- your Dad thought it would be a good idea to-"

"Okay! Thanks, love you, bye!" Peter interrupts, speaking so quickly it sounds like one long, single word before he cuts the feed.

"That was rude." Ben sounds too much like his mother for comfort.

"That was rude," Peter echoes back in a mocking voice, only cracking when Ben laughs. He leans over to reroute them back to their apartment but frowns when, in doing so, "Override Failed"  flashes onto the screen, followed immediately by FRIDAY's voice ringing through the vehicle.

"Initiating the Time Out Protocol."

The new route lights up on the dash, and where Peter groans half-heartedly, Ben gasps in excitement.

"Sleepover at Tony's!"

And honestly, how can he be the least bit put out when Ben is vibrating with such pure unadulterated delight? The kid has the whole family wrapped around his finger.

~fin~

[coloursflyaway]

Dirk+Todd: 57+24 - Thor+Loki: 100+4 - Harry + Eggsy: 60+70 (You don't have to do all of them, but I'd be so happy :D)

Dirk/ Todd, 57: Forgotten First Meeting and 24: Soulmate AU

Oh Jesus, I actually kind of started to write a fanfic about that and never finished it!But anyway. This is like, almost but not quite what you asked, but I hope good enough after all (: (Meine Deutschlehrerin hätte es wohl trotzdem eine Themenverfehlung genannt)

They’re younger still, Dirk has just come to America, and everything is new and bright and loud and beautiful and he loves every second. He’s scared, too, also every second of it, but that doesn’t matter quite as much, not when everything is so exciting. He buys new clothes, and incredible amounts of pizza, and life is good, at least for now. Sometimes there are cases,  sometimes he even solves them, and it should be enough, but after a while, it isn’t anymore. There’s has always been this itch inside of him (if Dirk had ever known a home before, he’d call it homesickness), and back in England he had learnt to live with it, but now, in this new, strange land, he finds that it gets worse with every beat of his heart, every breath he takes. He doesn’t know why, or what causes it, but one night he wakes up, choking on it, and there is just one thought left in his mind; he needs to walk. And walk he does, without knowing where to, only that with every step he takes, it gets a bit easier to breathe. The city around him turns dirty, run-down, but he keeps walking, until he’s standing underneath a window that’s brightly lit, open although Dirk is fairly certain that it’s dangerous to keep it that way in the night.A moment passes in which he doesn’t know why he has stopped, then a guitar starts to play, and a voice belts out two, three, four words, and Dirk is home. He knows that voice although he never heard it before, he knows the person behind it, although they never met. And he knows they’ll meet, someday, somewhere, and that he’ll look at them and never leave again. It takes another five years, seven months, two weeks and twenty-eight days until he finds out that the band he listened to under that window was called Mexican Funeral, and seven days less than that to find his soulmate. 

Thor/Loki, 4: Coffee Shop AU and 100: Accidentally Savingthe Day

(I’m really bad at getting these topics right 100%)

It’s not that Thor wanted to start working in the shop, it just happened. The world is quiet after all, now after Thanos has only left half of them alive, too many empty spaces to be filled. Thor tries not to think of what is left of him, or his heart, or what used to fill it, so he spends as much time as possible outside, sometimes just walking, sometimes helping, sometimes finding a spot in this empty city that’s loud enough to make it impossible to think. One of those is a small café, which used to be run by a couple, now only one woman who looks twenty years older than her age, and cries in the kitchen when she thinks no one notices, clutching a tattered photo to her chest. At first, it’s only supposed to be a small act of kindness, because Thor knows she needs the money, and there is a man, who has been waiting to be served for ten minutes at least without her reappearing, swollen eyes or not. So he gets up from his seat, walks behind the counter and makes the best cup of coffee he possibly can. It must still taste bitter, but the man just thanks him, hands him a bill and leaves. Thor doesn’t need his dead brother’s magic to know that the man he just served is as broken, as splintered inside as he is, as the woman running this café is. And it doesn’t help to help him, not really, but it is something to do and something to forget yourself in, and Thor figures that, if any of the Avengers needed him, they’d find him eventually. So he stays.

He doesn’t come to work every day, and if, he doesn’t always help, but the owner, Ingrid, he learns, and he find an understanding without ever talking about it. Sometimes, she leaves for hours on end, comes back drunk, or crying, or not at all; sometimes he flinches when someone with green eyes comes inside, or cannot speak when a young man smiles with just enough mischief in his eyes. Once, he punches a hole into the wall when a young woman asks him how he is holding up. Ingrid just puts a poster up over it.

Then, one day, there’s an attack. Nothing special, at least not by his standards, some other race, come to enslave humanity once more, and Thor could fight them, should fight them, but he’s tired. He has lived millennia and suddenly he feels each year weighing him down, and he knows Ingrid feels almost the same, so while he could try, he doesn’t. Instead, he takes a punch, takes a second, finds that the pain gets easier to bear with every drop of blood they beat out of him.

His nose splinters under a fist, his lip splits open, and suddenly the air next to him moves, swirls, tastes tart and familiar on his tongue. Thor opens his eyes, although the blood makes them sting, watches the air turn golden and green and black in front of him. It shouldn’t be possible, not until he’s stepped foot in Valhalla, and yet Loki is there, his armor glistening in the sunlight and his expression screaming murder. Slender fingers thread themselves into his hair, pull his head back until Loki can look at him properly. There is something like pity in his eyes, or maybe it’s just pain; Thor only has a moment to recognise it. Maybe it’s love. “Stand down”, Loki hisses, and although his words are hardly loud enough to stir the air, no one dares to move. “He’ll be mine to kill once Ragnarök comes.”

Harry/Eggsy, 60: Poorly TimedConfession and 70: Locked in a Room

“Oh, you have got to be kiddin’ me.” Eggsy tries the doorknob again, pushes his shoulder into the door, but it won’t budge, just like the last time he tried this. Or the one before. Or the one before. It’s not his fault, though, not really, because the Statesman HQ is huge, and he has gotten lost more often than not, and there are four different doors to choose from in the kitchen. Usually, he chooses the right ones, too, but apparently not in a panic. 

“Eggsy?”, comes a voice from the other side, Harry, who sounds genuinely concerned. “Are you alright?”It’s a difficult question to answer; physically, yes, psychologically? Not quite. Not after he unthinkingly told Harry, “G’night for now, love you”, before realising what he had said, tried to run out of the room, but instead got himself locked up in the supply closet. “Yes?”, he tries anyway, finds that he sounds as unconvincing as he feels. “Mostly.”

There is a pause, loaded, it feels at least to Eggsy, who stops jingling the doorknob and instead just sinks down onto the floor to wallow in misery there. He doesn’t think Harry is going to hate him for this - he can’t call it crush, not when it’s so much more - this thing, but he will try to talk to Eggsy about it, and everything between them will be incredibly uncomfortable from now, and at the moment, that sounds almost as bad. 

“Is there something you would like to tell me?”, Harry finally says, every word pronounced carefully, slowly, like Eggsy is a small animal he is trying not to frighten. “I really think saying it once is bad enough”, Eggsy responds, and there is half a chuckle in his voice, born of desperation, not mirth. “It hasn’t changed much in the two minutes you haven’t seen me, bruv.”Again, a pause, the shuffle of shoes and a mumbling that sounds like Harry is talking to himself, then, “So you did mean it.”

Harry says it with wonder in his voice, something almost sounding like amazement, and Eggsy won’t hope, he won’t, he - “You know, dear boy”, Harry says, and his voice still sounds the same, just warmer, softer. “I quite return the sentiment.”

It doesn’t take a moment for Eggsy to understand the words Harry is saying, it doesn’t even take a minute, or two, it takes a year at least, a century at most.“You what?”, he asks back, halfway through it, and Harry, still hidden behind that blasted door, laughs. “Love you too”, he replies, and Eggsy’s brain short-circuits, has him on his feet, pressed against the wood within a second. “What?”, he asks again, like it‘s the only word he’s still able to form. “Do I really have to repeat myself?”, Harry asks instead of answering, “The answer hasn’t changed much in the few seconds you haven’t asked.”“Kinda. Yeah”, Eggsy mutters, rests his head against the door; if he has wished this door to hell before, now he’s ready to carry it there himself. There’s a tentative happiness starting to blossom in the back of his mind, lighter than anything else he has ever felt, and so overwhelming Eggsy isn’t sure he’ll be able to take in all of it at once.

“I love you, then”, Harry says again, softly now, as if he was pressed against the door too. Eggsy really hopes he is. This time, the happiness almost washes him away, makes him dizzy. It still hasn’t quite sunken in that he could really, truly have this, Harry by his side, holding his hand, kissing him, but it will with time. As soon as he can get past this door, and look at Harry while he says those words again.

“Get me the fuck out of here, Harry”, he says, no, demands, closes his eyes and tries to imagine how it’ll be to be with the only person he never thought he could have a chance with. “And I swear, if you don’t kiss me so hard I’ll see stars once I am, you’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight.”“I think I can do both.”

Send me two tropes, a ship and I’ll write you a far too long ficlet about it

[beans-shadow]

looking for the truth (pt 3)

Fandom: Naruto

Relationship: Kakasaku

Characters: Hatake Kakashi, Haruno Sakura

read on ao3: here

part one / two / three / four / five / six / seven / eight / nine / ten / eleven / twelve / thirteen

Upon arrival at the village, the pair halted just before the gates, suspending themselves in the trees. Summoning his ninken, Kakashi sent off Pakkun to snatch some clothes better suited for a semi-affluent couple on a romantic retreat. A bit insulted at the trivial task, Pakkun only agreed when Sakura begged and scratched him on his head.

“Well, how could I refuse now?” The dog had said. “I always liked this one,” he shot at Kakashi.

He set off on his little shopping spree, money tucked into his jaw.

Due to his small stature, Pakkun had to make a few trips. First, he brought back a nice summer dress for Sakura: white with cherry blossom petals blowing in the wind.

“How fitting,” Kakashi said as Sakura once again rolled her eyes.

For Kakashi, Pakkun purchased (or rather, left coins near the stalls he had taken the clothes from) a smart button down and well-fitting jeans.

Holding up the light blue pants to the sky, Kakashi scrunched up his face. He wasn’t too excited to wear something so constricting. He much preferred the loose ninja outfit that made him feel free and safe. Protected.

“Oh, lighten up,” Sakura told him as she changed on a branch a few levels above him. “At least you’ll have pockets.”

Kakashi had to admit that was nice. Sakura was stuck with strapping weapons and scrolls on her upper legs, or stuffing them down her bra. Not very comfortable.

Regardless, he still grumbled as he stripped off his ninja clothes. Pakkun was shaking with laughter as Kakashi fumbled with the buttons of the shirt.

“Haven’t gotten out much lately, have you?” The dog commented.

With a glare, Kakashi finished the last button. “Why are you still here?”

The dog shrugged. “This is incredibly amusing. And I thought you might want some tips for this mission.”

“Tips? Why would I need advice?”

The dog gave him a knowing look. “Even though you avoided the question, I know you haven’t been out much, much less gone on a date recently. Do you know how to act around a girlfriend? A fiancé?”

Straightening out his collar, Kakashi avoided eye contact. “I think I’ll manage.”

“Maybe with anyone else, but this is Sakura we’re talking about.” Pakkun circled in place three times, then settled down with his paws crossed.

Kakashi paused in his fidgeting. “And what does that mean?”

He could see the dog sigh. “Well, I guess if you have to ask that, the point is moot.” He scratched his ear with a rear foot. “Any other things you need me or the crew to take care of? A perimeter check? A sniff-out?”

Although still wondering what Pakkun meant by his last comment, Kakashi let it slide. “I think we’re good for now, but I’ll definitely need the pack later on. Don’t stray too far.”

“We never do,” the dog replied. With a nod, he disappeared in a puff of smoke.

“Oh no, did I miss saying goodbye?”

“Yes, but he’ll be back, don’t wor—” his mind went blank when he saw Sakura. Her headband was stored in her pack, leaving her short hair to flow unrestrained around her face. Her grace in the wind perfectly mimicked the dress as it bellowed in the soft breeze both in the physical world and the illustration on the material. She looked so small in the dress, so different from the powerful Sakura he had constructed in his mind.

She cocked her head to the side. “Are you alright?”

Kakashi pinched himself. “I’m perfectly fine. Are you ready?”

Shouldering her backpack, Sakura nodded. “But what about?...” she shyly pointed at Kakashi’s face.

He patted himself down. “What? Is there something on my face?”

Somehow Sakura made herself even smaller by crossing one arm around her body to clutch at her opposite limb. “Shouldn’t you take off your mask? I’m not sure if that’s really a common thing around here.”

“Oh.” Kakashi brushed his mask with fingertips. She was probably correct, but he wasn’t ready to strip himself that much in front of the kunoichi. “I think it’ll be fine. Lots of people have loads of odd customs.”

“Okay,” Sakura said. And without further argument, she leapt down. Kakashi followed, meeting her at the base of the tree. She waited patiently, scanning the area around them and contemplating the entrance gate to the village.

“Here, let me take that,” Kakashi extended a hand for Sakura’s backpack.

She’d never looked more offended. Taking a step back, she said, “I’m perfectly capable of carrying it myself. I think I might even be stronger than you!”

“I don’t doubt that,” Kakashi admitted, “but people might think it odd if such a dutiful fiancé wasn’t carrying his partner’s luggage for her.”

Reluctantly, Sakura handed over her backpack. And with that joyous note, they left the solitude of the foliage to approach the main gateway.

Two hired guard stopped them. “Halt! What brings you two here?”

Before Kakashi could answer, Sakura draped herself over him, placing one hand over her chest and lifting one leg in the air. “Why do you think?” She batted her eyes at the guards.

Immediately the guards softened. “Of course, my apologies for my comrade’s rudeness,” the other said, slapping his fellow guard in the chest. “You two must be here for the festival. Welcome, welcome.” The two stepped aside and gestured into the main road of the village.

“Much gratitude,” Sakura said sweetly. Linking arms with Kakashi, she led him past the men and into the town.

“Impressive,” Kakashi mumbled down to her.

“I’m a kunoichi,” Sakura stated. “Charming is in the job description.”

Of course. Kakashi felt chills at the implications in her statement. Ninjas were expected to be used for seduction purposes, female ninjas more than men. Kakashi had had his fair share of such assignments, but thinking Sakura had been through such demeaning and self-deprecating situations made his lip curl in distaste. Kakashi had no worth. But Sakura shouldn’t have had to go through that. Not that any kunoichi should—but something about Sakura made him feel more protective. Maybe he was already taking his role as fiancé too seriously. He needed to take a step back and act more professional.

Kakashi left that dangerous train of thought to take in his surroundings. He was astounded at the scene in front of him: the main street was similar to Konoha’s, with lines of street vendors and different shops. But for the event the people had clearly gone crazy. Drapes of pink and white lights arched through the sky above, crossing over from one street lamp to the next, flashing their colors. Banners hung from every building, proclaiming the event in huge letterings and large hearts. The street itself was lined with flowers of many kinds, including roses petals, daisies, and even peach blossoms.

Solicitors roamed around, selling flowers and chocolates to anyone that would listen. Vendors overflowed with bouquets, trinkets, and food for loved ones. Dozens and dozens of couples swooned over the attention from shopkeepers, dragging significant others from stall to stall. From all the rustle and bustle Kakashi wondered how they would get the information they needed for Tsunade.

Sakura tugged on his arm. “Come on, we should find a place to set up camp.” Once again, Kakashi followed, after slyly removing his arm from Sakura’s. The lack of warmth left him empty, and the space between them was cold. Sakura shot him a surprised look, which turned to of sadness and slight rejection. But she covered it up quickly and took the lead down the path.

“Ahh, what a lovely lady! Would you like a necklace? Lovely necklace for a lovely lady!”

“It’s such a hot day, how about a nice refreshing smoothie! Peach and cherry to match that beautiful hair of yours!”

“Take a break and sit down, Madam! Let me sketch you and your lover!”

Sakura was the target of nonstop street car peddlers. They zoomed in on her summer dress and immediately recognized her as a tourist. Every time she indulged them, but after a moment she would always turn them down.

Hands raised in a small surrender, she apologized. “Sorry, but we’re not interested right now!” And Kakashi would follow her once more as she continued down the road.  

After the eleventh shopkeeper took interest in her, Kakashi stepped forward. “Please leave my fiancé alone, we’ve had a long journey and really must find a place to rest. Have a good day.” He placed a hand on the small of Sakura’s back, leading her away from the leering stare of the salesman.

“There’s no reason to be rude,” Sakura muttered under her breath.

Exacerbated, he shot back, “There’s also no reason to stop at literally every little shop.”

She tugged herself away from his body. “We just arrived, we need to get a feel for who is here and what’s going on! Ever heard of reconnaissance?” Shamefully Kakashi looked away, knowing she was right. It was just not the way he would have gone about it. “Besides, we also need to keep up appearances. No one will guess if we’re snooping if that’s just what we’re like.”

Sakura said that as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, but Kakashi hadn’t even begun to think of that. He was just planning on settling down in a hotel room and sending out his dogs at night, and then following up on any suspicious activity. Spying in broad daylight was a tactic, just one he barely employed. He was still thinking as if he were alone on this mission.

Crossing his arms, Kakashi tapped his chin. “You’re quite right. I’m sorry.” He placed his hands in his hips. “Good thing my fiancé is so smart!” He said loudly.

“Sens—Kakashi,” Sakura corrected himself, looking away with a blush. “You don’t to be so obvious.”

“Gotta keep up appearances,” Kakashi referenced Sakura’s line with a shrug, walking away to explore the other shops, pretending to be interested.

Before he reached the cart lined with books, a hand cut of his line of vision. Following the limb upwards, Kakashi saw a young man with a bright smile attached. He was dressed quite smartly in a dark blue suit, and a nice brown bow tie.

“Good evening, sir! Pardon my eavesdropping, but am I right in overhearing that you and your fiancé have only just arrived at our wonderful town?”

In a split second, Kakashi memorized the man’s sharp chin, wide nose, and big ears. Height: 5’11. Hair: dark brown. Skin: brown. Eyes: green. He was overconfident, rich, and eager.

“Yes,” Kakashi answered, looking to Sakura as she joined his side. Taking her cue, he slid his arm around her waist, careful not to put a lot of weight on her. “We are so excited to share this wonderful adventure together. And you are?” He still didn’t take the man’s hand.

The man paused, taken aback by Kakashi’s slightly cold demeanor. “Oh, of course! I am the Lord of this village’s son, Futoshi Sato.”

With a nudge from Sakura, Kakashi finally took the man’s hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Sato.”

Sakura extended her hand out as well. “I’m Sakura Haru, and this is Kakashi Hata. Soon to be Mr. and Mrs. Hata, obviously,” she giggled.

Futoshi shook Sakura’s hand as well. “Wonderful, truly wonderful! Our entire village is blessed that you both chose to spend the next few days here. Have you decided on a place to stay?”

The pair shook their heads.

Futoshi beamed. “Then I must insist that I offer you the finest of accommodations our Village has to offer. Right next to the residency our Lord, by the palace, are our best houses. Please allow me to give escort you there.”

Spinning on his heel, Futoshi led them through the tight streets of the village. Sakura and Kakashi let go of each other and stood a respectful distance apart to follow.

“The Lord of this village is also the daimyo, since this land is so small,” Kakashi noted.

“I know,” Sakura whispered back. “This is a good opportunity to get close to the royal family, without being too obvious.”

Before Kakashi could ask her to divulge how she meant to so that, Sakura excitedly pointed to a ramen stand within their eyesight.

“I’m famished!” She announced. “Would you mind pausing a moment so we can eat a bit? We haven’t had a bite to eat in ages.”

After one look at the little run-down ramen stand, Futoshi had a look of utmost horror on his face. “Of course, but here? In this place? For ramen? Do you not want me to take you to some of our five-star restaurants?”

“I love ramen,” Sakura insisted. “Please, I would love it if you joined us.”

Kakashi had to hand it to the girl. Futoshi had no way to refuse without insulting his guest now. How Sakura managed to be such a bad shogi player and yet be a master at mind games was impressive.

“Alright,” Futoshi relented, joining Sakura who had already sat down at the stall.

“One tonkatsu ramen and one miso ramen,” Sakura ordered as Kakashi sat down on her other side. Kakashi shot her a surprised look, and she smiled. “What type of fiancé would I be if I didn’t know my partner’s ramen order?”

“Quite right,” Futoshi admired the two of them. Sakura was correct, that was Kakashi’s preferred ramen order: good old miso style. And goodness knows they’d had ramen countless times with Naruto. Kakashi was just surprised Sakura took the time to notice that he never strayed off from his one selection at Ichiraku.

Futoshi flagged down the waiter. “One more tonkatsu, please.” He turned to the ninja. “So are you two excited for all the festivities planned?” Futoshi asked, resting his elbow on the counter.

Sakura rested her head on a fist. “We don’t actually know much about what’s been scheduled.”

Futoshi’s eyes lit up. “There’s so much that we have prepared! Tonight, there’s a dance set to music that has been choreographed by yours truly,” he gestured to himself. “Tomorrow is the celebration of the first meeting: partners plan on gathering at a designated location by themselves, to mimic bumping into each other for the first time. Later that night we have a firework show. Then we have a day just full of activities, ranging from pottery, flower gathering, picnicking, petting zoo, boat rides, and more! The next day we rejoice in the inner beauty; participants are expected to wear masks so everyone can focus on the personality quirks that make us love one another. I see you’re already prepared for that one,” Futoshi joked.

“Indeed,” Kakashi squinted his eyes in a smile.

“Wow,” Sakura tapped on the counter. “That’s a lot. How much is this costing the village?”

With a wave in the air, Futoshi did not look concerned. “Oh, this whole shebang won’t even cause a dent into our village’s funds. We have so much nowadays!”

Right then, three heaping bowls of ramen slid in front of them. “Dig in!” The chef told them with a bright smile.

The conversation ended, so Kakashi filed the information for a later discussion. For now, he would enjoy his favorite type of ramen.

***

Any feedback is very welcome!

[crystallinecrimsonmoth]

Future Serial Killer [ongoing]

Chapter 21

‘Darling…’

‘No.’

‘He won’t leave until you talk to him, you know that.’

‘Then shoot him until he goes away.’ Carl grumbled into the crook of Negan’s neck, still lying comfortably on his chest.

It was the morning after Rick had shown up at the door and shot at the older man, ending up with a bullet in his own arm and a broken nose for his troubles, and Carl had been dragging his feet on seeing him all night and through the morning, reaching ten o’clock without leaving the bedroom.

Negan had woken early at eight to find hands wrapped around his throat and the angry little shit riding him like his life depended on it, taking out his frustration with sex once again. He wasn’t complaining per se, because the kid did have a nice little ass that fit his dick perfectly, but regardless of how much stamina he had, Carl would be lucky to get three erections out of his man on an average day.

This fact didn’t seem to have much impact on Carl’s desperation though, as he still used Negan as a method of letting out his anger whenever he was pissed off, erection or not. It would be flattering if it weren’t also scary, the dark look in his young lover’s eyes giving him a new kind of fear that he hadn’t experienced before.

Carl was dangerous, likely more dangerous than himself, and that made Negan both terrified and so fucking in love all at once.

He ran a hand through the kid’s hair, tugging out the knots gently as the teen’s nose pressed up against the pulse point of his neck, letting out deep breaths of warm air onto his skin.

He knew Rick was a danger to the Sanctuary, always had been, and that he’d killed more than sixty of his people – but he was still Carl’s dad, and he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of letting the kid kill his own father, no matter how bad he was.

‘We’re not shooting anybody, Carl. You have to talk to him, it’s the only way the alliance will work.’ He insisted, petting his cheek to keep the boy calm, but

Carl slapped him away, sitting up and getting off the bed so he couldn’t pull him back into his arms.

‘I don’t want an alliance, I don’t want a treaty, I don’t want him fucking here!’ The teen snapped as he pulled on the denim shorts he’d picked out from the new clothing haul, tugging Negan’s old green hoodie over his head viciously.

‘Carl, calm down-’

‘-no! He’ll ruin it, Negan! I have peace here, I don’t have to sleep half-awake because the security’s shit or it’s an open camp, I’m not in danger five floors above ground in a warm bed! But I will be if you let him in-’

‘-Killer, he isn’t going to ruin that. I won’t let him.’ Negan reassured but it did nothing to quell the tears starting to well in the teen’s eye.

‘He won’t let me stay with you.’ Was all Carl said, his usually grumpy exterior breaking down at the thought of losing his life with the man.

Negan watched him lose his cool with a heavy heart, sitting up and going over to the boy. He lifted him up into his arms, legs around his waist, and stroked his beloved’s cheek as he stared back at him with his one watery blue eye.

‘I wouldn’t let anyone, no matter who the fuck they think they are, take you away from me. You’re mine, and you belong here. You are old enough to make your own decisions.’

That made Carl go quiet for a moment. Negan watched him think about his words before his soft fingers were rubbing on his beard, running through the fine grey and black hairs. The teen looked so focused on stroking his face and beard that it made him chuckle, and he moved his arm further up on Carl’s back to keep him steady.

‘I appreciate the beard massage, little lamb. Are you okay now?’ He purred, running his hand across one of the smooth thighs wrapped around him.

The young man’s face flushed red when he touched his thigh, and he nodded barely, the movement imperceptible to anyone further away than a foot. Negan kept stroking back and forth on his thigh as he replied.

‘I’m okay. I’ll talk to him, but you can’t come because I want to know what he really thinks without being threatened. Then I’ll know whether I can trust him.’

Negan nodded with a sigh.

‘Okay, darling. But you’ll take Lucille to keep you safe.’ He told him in a firm tone of voice, narrowing his eyes at the teen until he pressed a kiss to his cheek, dainty hands cupping his jaw.

‘Okay, daddy.’ He murmured, licking Negan’s upper lip to elicit a groan from him.

‘You know just how to tease me, don’t you, little lamb?’

Carl nodded, his cheeks blotched with the red blush because of his damaged skin, and he kissed Negan again, this time on the lips.

‘I know. Can I wear your jacket? To show my allegiance to your cause…’ The teen replied in a breathy whisper, lulling the older man into a sense of security while he nodded, entranced by his gaze until he was being kissed rough and needy, his lamb’s thighs clenching tighter around his hips.

They kissed like that for at least thirty seconds before the younger pulled away, pecking his cheek.

‘I’m going to see my dad now.’

‘No, just kiss me again, leave him down there to rot. Don’t ever stop kissing me…’ Negan held him tighter, leaning forward to kiss him again and groaning when his lips moved further away.

Carl just grinned at him, jumping down from his waist, and changing into a shirt and the jacket. Then he tossed a sultry glare over his shoulder, eyeing Negan up.

‘I think you should give me another bruise, Neeg, the one on my throat is fading.’ He murmured, letting out a giggle when the man moved faster than the speed of sound to attach his lips to his neck.

His already marked thighs shook at the sound of his slurping wet tongue on his skin, the scratch of his beard making Carl weak at the knees. Once the hickey was dark enough, Negan let him go, kissing his forehead.

‘Your dad’s in the prison, I had him moved before he woke up.’

‘Okay…’ Carl purred softly, pecking his cheek once more before picking up Lucille.

‘Bye, daddy!’

Carl wandered down the basement hallway with light footsteps, walking made easier and more comfortable with the lighter shoes Negan had gotten him. He kept Lucille on his shoulder, glad she was with him in case his dad did something psychotic and tried to hurt him, and kept a firm grip on her handle.

‘You’re not supposed to be down here, princess.’

He glared at the man leaning against the wall to his right, observing him standing there with a glower on his disgusting face. The teen still hated all of his boyfriend’s men. All of them were rough and greasy, with no manners and a tendency to sneer at him whenever he passed by. Now one of them had the bravery to use one of Negan’s personal nicknames for him. He didn’t fucking like that.

‘Excuse me? Call me that again and I’ll cut your nut-sack off.’ Carl snarled at him, baring his teeth and tucking his hair back away from his socket to look more threatening.

The guy just smirked at him, leaning forward off the wall and approaching him.

‘Yeah? You’re a feisty little thing. I’ve heard you’re a real whore for the boss’s cock. Maybe you’re desperate enough to take mine too.’ The teen gulped as he was pinned up against the edge of the nearest cell, blinking at the man and trying to figure out where he could cut him deep enough to kill him.

He tilted his head before giving the fucker a little smirk, running his finger down his cheek, and grimacing at the way he didn’t have facial hair like Negan’s to scrape through.

‘I don’t think you could handle me, sir.’ He murmured, slipping the knife in his belt into his stomach and slicing across his torso as Negan had once done to Spencer, spitting onto his face.

‘I fucking despise people like you.’ Carl hissed, dropping his body to the ground, and letting him bleed out as he wandered up the hallway to find his dad’s cell, smirking at the sound of wolf whistles from the other prisoners.

It took him a few minutes, lost in the number of cells there were in the basement, until he finally found Rick’s cell, seeing the man sitting up and awake, staring at the wall across from his cell.

‘Hey, dad.’

‘Carl… oh hell no.’ Rick shook his head, looking away from him when he saw what he was wearing.

Carl frowned.

‘What?’

Rick let out a laugh that made Carl’s shoulders sag.

‘You look like Negan’s little bitch. It’s disgusting. After what he did to Glenn and Abraham? And you carry around the bat he used to do it?’

Carl’s heart hurt from that comment, but he disregarded it in favour of fighting about the insult. He didn’t see the point in dwelling on past mistakes.

‘I’m not his fucking bitch. He loves me, he protects me, I’m safe here.’

‘You were safe with me!’

‘You were going to let him kill me! He told you he was going to kill me, and you didn’t do anything, you didn’t even acknowledge it-’

‘-I was trying to act like a leader!’

‘While failing as a fucking father!’ Carl snapped back, his fist shaking by his side as he gripped Lucille tighter in his other hand.

Crystal tears were dripping from his lashes, staining the concrete floor under his feet as he tried to hold back his upset. He listened to his father’s breath stutter and stepped back when he heard footsteps approach him.

‘Carl.’

‘No. He protects me, he cares about me, I don’t feel unsafe around him. I feel good for the first time in my life and I’m happy.’ The teen insisted, still shaking and gripping Lucille tighter for some support.

‘So, you’re a whore for a paedophile?’

Carl saw red when those words left Rick’s lips and used the prison keys at the guard desk to open the cell, hitting him square in the face.

‘He’s not a paedophile!’ He hissed, wrestling his dad to the ground, and hitting him harder with every punch.

‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’ He cried as he just kept hitting him, tears streaming down his face.

He beat his face until he couldn’t breathe anymore, his vision so blurred from tears that he couldn’t tell if the man was still alive. He just had to get out of there, to get away from his dad’s bleeding face, and he stumbled as he stood, escaping the cell.

Carl ran in what he thought was the direction of his bedroom until he found himself back at the door, his heart racing. He walked into the room, covered in blood from punching Rick and heard a faint version of Negan’s voice speaking to him.

‘What have you done, little lamb?’

The teen hesitated, his grazed hands twitching before he replied in a quiet voice.

‘I think I killed him.’

[peterjonesparker]

the saga of is it a fic or are they headcanons continues.

one | two (THIS ONE!) | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | nine

so michelle starts to get buddy buddy with ned and peter, ish.

she starts to actually kind of like ned, even if he sometimes puts his foot in his mouth sometimes. but they argue about the merits of comic books as a form of literature and he teaches her some words in tagalog and she learns how to call peter a son of a bitch so she’s pretty entertained.

but the weird things just keep piling up with peter.

he rushes off at random times, freezes whenever she asks him where he’s going, shows up to school with cuts and bruises looking like he’s been fighting in an underground boxing ring. she even saw him go into the chemistry lab the other day at lunch time even though they both took chemistry last year and he’s taking biology now.

he just does really weird things sometimes and michelle can’t help but notice.

michelle also can’t help but notice that spiderman is becoming more and more popular. people sell t-shrits, masks, shot glasses, tote bags. everything, basically. and maybe one day michelle might spend a little too much time looking at a t-shirt with a picture of spiderman in all his toned, muscly glory. but she just shakes her head and keeps moving.

she gets curious about him, though. where did he come from? who is he? why is he doing this? why did he sound oddly familiar in DC when he saved her friends?

and then one day she’s walking home from school after academic decathlon and she missed the bus which is totally her fault for staying later after practice to chat with peter and ned about the upcoming weekend and how their plans to construct a lego version of the starship enterprise were so utterly boring she could barely stand to listen to them. (and weren’t people supposed to choose star wars or star trek? was that not a thing? not that she cares about things peter likes. well, peter AND ned. anyway.)

she’s turning a corner when she sees someone out of the corner of her eyes. there is a man on the opposite side of the street walking several yards back from here. it could be nothing. but she’s also been taught to always be on high alert. so she grips her backpack to her body a bit tighter and walks a little faster down the street, cursing herself for not taking the more populated albeit slightly longer route home.

she continues down the street when she notices the man cross the street so that he’s on the same side of the road as she and at that point she just starts running. better that he thinks she’s odd if he isn’t following her than be caught if he is trying to catch her. she sprints down the street and turns another corner as she looks back to check if the man is following her and then bam. she’s on the ground, gripping the shoulder that practically crashed into a brick wall.

“oh my goodness, are you okay?” she sighs and looks at the owner of the panicked voice and she is left speechless. it’s…well, it’s spiderman.

“what the hell are you doing here?” she notices that in her panic she turned into an alleyway instead of the main street she has intended to run onto. at least she ran into a superhero.

“well, I just, I, uh…” he fumbles over his words and looks around them. “I was just in the neighborhood and thought I had seen something so I came down here.”

she lets him help her to her feet and looks at him blankly. “and you always carry a backpack with you?” she motions toward the one strapped on his back and tries to get a better look, but he shifts away so she doesn’t see. she raises a skeptical eyebrow at him, crossing her arms and smiling slightly. “what you got in there?”

“oh, nothing special.” he coughs and his voice gets deeper. “nothing you need concern yourself with, citizen.”

“drop the act, man.” she laughs, but his breath hitches. she scrunches her eyes together. “dude, you’ve got to be in high school if you’re carrying that around. don’t pretend that you’re a thirty five year old man when you’re probably no older than eighteen.”

“i’m sixteen, actually.” he says as a throwaway and she can see him hesitate immediately after the words leave his mouth.

“i’m not trying to expose you or anything.” she sighs. “look, sorry I ran into you. I thought some guy had been following me so I was trying to get away as quickly as possible.”

“i’m not sure running into an alleyway is the right solution for that.” he chuckles and she rolls her eyes. She does not need this from a dude in red and blue tights with a spider on his chest. he stops chuckling suddenly and gets solemn. “wait, why are you walking alone this late at night?”

“just trying to get home like the rest of us. accidentally stayed later at school than I had intended.” she crosses her arms, trying to keep her cool. she doesn’t think of herself as someone who buys into the hype of things, but, well, this guy has a really nice butt. and he saved her friends. and he’s saved a lot of people. and okay, maybe, just maybe, she might have a thing for hero types but that’s a more basal part of her and she doesn’t let it control her actions. but, well. “I never thanked you for saving my friends.” when his head tilts, she clarifies. “in DC. my friends were the people stuck in the washington monument.”

“oh, uh, no problem at all. just doing my job.” he says, saluting at the very end and oh my goodness who is this person and why is he so dorky. “sorry, I don’t know why I did that.”

“me neither, man. it was dorky.” she laughs, and he does too. “well, I should really be getting home now. my parents will be worried.”

he nods his head and she turns around to leave. just before she leaves the alley, he clears his throat and speaks up. “do you, uh,” he pauses briefly and coughs. “could I accompany you home? it’s still pretty late and anyone walking home alone is a little dangerous at this hour. especially here where they aren’t many people around.”

she doesn’t know what to say. part of her wants to refuse. she can handle herself. she took self-defense lessons for three years and she knows how to fight if she needs to thanks to the kickboxing classes as a kid. but. another part of her is still a little shaken up from the man following closely behind. and that part of her knows that, even though it sucks, walking home with a man gives her added safety because people don’t fuck with men. especially not when the man is spiderman. she thinks of her parents at home and them worrying and allows herself to say yes.

he falls into step next to her and she laughs. “are you really just going to walk next to me? aren’t people going to see you and get curious?”

he scratches the back of his neck. “I…I don’t have a response to that.” he chuckles nervously, “I don’t suppose you want to travel by web slinging, do you?”

“eh, it could be fun.” she says before she even thinks about the words. they both stop walking suddenly and look at each other.

“are you serious?” he asks, incredulous and she feels a little defiant because of it. she might be very slightly scared of heights. no, she isn’t scared of heights. she’s scared of possibly falling from said high heights. but she takes his incredulous question as a challenge and she’s never been that great at backing away from a challenge.

“yeah, why not.” she says, gripping the straps of her backpack tightly. “but if you drop me, i’ll kill you.”

“uh, okay.” he says, slowly stepping toward her. she doesn’t know what to do because she’s never exactly been in a situation quite like this and oh my is her journal going to freak out when she writes about this. so she just wraps one arm around his back and the other over his shoulder, making sure to avoid the backpack he has on. and maybe in hindsight this isn’t the best idea, but it’s a little late now. at least it is in her mind. he wraps a firm arm around her back and pulls her tight against his body and she nearly gasps but she doesn’t want him thinking he has that large of an effect on her. because he doesn’t. her body just happens to be very attracted to his and reacts accordingly when there is close proximity between the two.

*sexual frustration intensifies*

“if at any point you want me to take you down, just say so, okay?” he says, looking at her with those white beady eye holes on his mask and she wishes she could see his face. she wishes she could know who this person is. though she knows she’s heard his voice before. that’s the one thing that always stays with her. she knows she’s heard it and she can’t place it, which infuriates her. but then they’re shooting up into the air and travelling building to building and she grips her arms more tightly around his body and closes her eyes so that she can pretend they’re not at lots-of-pain-upon-impact falling distances.

she nestles her head into his shoulder a bit and then she smells it. once in her life has she ever hugged peter parker. that day in the hallway when he found her crying. she smelled him and took in his scent and for reasons she isn’t willing to admit she has remembered his smell and thought about it and him more than she’d care to say. and she smells it again. and suddenly, everything clicks. she can’t believe she could have been so stupid as to not have put any of this together before. he’s always rushing out, the sticky goop she saw him trying to sneak out of the chemistry lab, how anxious he gets every time she accuses him of hiding something, why he’s so busy, why he fucking knows tony stark. oh my goodness, is this the stark internship? she is going to kill peter.

but then she thinks about it.

he never told her. he didn’t want her to know. doesn’t want her to know. and she can’t blame him. this is a huge secret and he can’t just go around telling everyone, no matter if they are kind of friends or not. but, still, a small irrational part of her is slightly hurt he never shared this with her. didn’t think she would keep his secret. she wonders if ned knows. she wonders if his aunt may knows.

then he’s stopping onto a roof directly adjacent to her apartment building. snd she realizes she never told spiderman where she lived but that peter parker has been to her house exactly twice in their entire friendship. but she doesn’t bring it up. because she still can’t get over the fact that she didn’t figure this out sooner. and she doesn’t want to spook him and drive him away. should she tell him that she knows? he clearly didn’t want her to know. but he spent so much time chatting with her as spiderman, he must have known the risks.

“thank you.” she says, as she slowly extricates herself from him. and there’s still a small part of her that aches at the loss, but a much larger part of her is reeling from the fact that peter parker, dork galore and friend, is spiderman.

“uh, no worries.” he hesitates. she still needs him to get her down onto the street from this roof, but other than that they don’t have anything else to say. “try to avoid taking the shady routes home. it’s just common sense.”

and of course he would have the audacity to insult her at a time like this. “oh, that’s rich coming from the guy who will walk into the middle of a bank robbery.”

“fair enough.” he laughs, shaking his head. “guess we’re both looking for some thrills in life.” he looks at her. she can tell he is looking directly into her eyes. and she knows it’s peter under that mask and she wants to tell him, to say she will keep his secret safe, that she won’t do anything to knowingly hurt him. but they aren’t friends like that. yet. snd she doesn’t want to ruin any friendship they might have at this point. so she just smiles.

“I guess.” she smirks and feels so uncharacteristically protective of this boy in this moment. impulsively, and she will bang her head against the wall for this when she walks into her room, she steps toward him and plants a light kiss on his cheek. “thanks again for saving my friends. and other people too, I guess.”

he doesn’t say anything for a bit, but then he coughs and giggles a bit and oh my goodness how could she not know this was peter immediately? “of course. anything to help. we all have our battles to fight.”

“so, uh, can you help a girl get down to the street?” she points toward her apartment complex and he seems to shake into duty. he uses his web to slowly drop her down. she pushes against the wall a bit and it feels like repelling down a rock climbing wall. but much less controlled and she definitely doesn’t feel all that secure. but then her feet touch the ground and she looks up. he salutes and then takes off and she smiles against her better judgement. she walks into the house and her father lectures her about calling if she is going to be late and how it’s dangerous late at night.

she just nods her head, thinking back on how peter parker walked her home and how peter parker is fucking spiderman.

[runningonnothing-blog1]

What’s In Store?

<> Slight authors notes here: This is a story format I’m not used to but I’m willing to push the boundaries. This was super fun to write and it was a beauty to come up with a storyline. ENJOY!

<> Prompt: The world goes through 2000 year natural cycles of magic and non-magic. The non-magical cycle is about to end any day now. (from @writing-prompt-s)

<> Word count: 1932

17 year old Alexis sat in the corner of the business room, watching as the officials scrambled around like chickens. They were trying to figure out the plan for trying to live through what they call ‘The Turning’. Every two thousand ears, a terrible fate would be lowered on the humans of the earth. The globe would be washed somehow of every mortal, and replaced by another. Every Turning it was different. They say the last one consisted of everyone having the urge to do an insane thing. Over half the population was killed by cliff diving, and the other half all died in strange ways to add. Now the two thousand years of normal humans was about to end, and was going to be replaced by the ‘Magics’. It’s something they focus a lot on in school, and more recently than ever.

Alexis’ dad was one of the head officials of the department that deals with huge crises. Mr. Boe was his name, and he was well known throughout the country. He was always calm, cool, and collected. Everyone looked up to him, but unfortunately he took that to his advantage. Now, Mr. Boe looks like a fool yelling at everyone to calm down, yet he looked like his own eyes were popping out of their sockets. Alexis was dragged around to each of his stupid little meetings, and happens to now be the calm one out of the twenty five men in the room.

While lounging in the corner, she’s adjusted her position many times in the past hour. Alexis has learned to not care about what others thought of her clothing here, everyone knew her as ‘Mr. Boes daughter’, she never heard ‘Alexis’. Any other person in her position would have been in the sea of confused, panicking men… But she has internally accepted her fate as a whole. Humans of the past have never been able to survive this epidemic, and no one knows how we even have knowledge of this being true.

Standing, Alexis sauntered tiredly over to the large pane of glass, only to see the streets filled with people below her. She sighed, almost frustrated with their stupidity. Parents carried their children across the street, people paid hundreds more for groceries, and everyone was on edge constantly.

“ALEXIS! Get away from the glass!” Mr. Boe screamed, and the whole room came to a stop. The silence caused an icy tension to fill the room, everyone's heads slowly turned and their eyes burned into Alexis’ back. After rolling her eyes, she turned on her heels in annoyance. Each of the officials, held the most bewildered look on their faces.

“What? Is it going to break?” As if almost on cue, the glass did break. Out of surprise Alexis dove forward onto the brown leather sofa, backing away from the many dangerous shards. The ear shattering sound continued… and continued… and continued. Alexis sat upward, propping her one elbow to hold her back up, and used her other hand to check her plain blue tee for shards. Her blonde hair was pulled up in a loose bun so she didn’t need to worry about that. Once Alexis clicked back into reality, she looked around to see everyone still staring at the window, she joined them out of curiosity. It’s not like a large, bulletproof piece of glass would just… shatter? Right?

What they all thought wasn’t possible, happened. Once her eyes caught the other buildings, she noticed a somewhat repeating pattern. Every window that was designed to be bulletproof has shattered. Screams and crying sounded from below, police sirens rang. All twenty six people in the room stood in utter disbelief, the silence now filled with heavy thoughts.

“It’s begun.” Alexis breathed.

After only being a day since the first ‘wave’ hit, Alexis was extremely done with how everyone was acting. Her dad insisted to have her go back to work with him today, but she denied and promised to go get the groceries, and be back home… and stay home. Alexis new that wasn't going to happen, because even she was tired of being cooped up, even if it was for only twenty eight hours. She didn’t bother with the list, because her dad went totally crazy with items… They didn’t need 8 large flats of water bottles.

Pulling herself out of bed, Alexis pulled her long blonde hair out of her loose messy bun and threw it over her shoulders. After putting on black leggings and her favourite coral pink long sleeve shirt on, she looked closely at her face in her bathroom mirror. No need for makeup today… She thought to herself. Afterall, I might die today. Grabbing her purse, she slipped on her white converse shoes. Alexis gripped the golden door handle, as a small thought in the back bothered her in the back of her head. She ignored it, dismissed it along with all her worries. She had read somewhere that death comes easier if you aren’t afraid, hopefully it’s true, as she didn’t seem to care one bit. Alexis traveled down the busy Washington streets, not wanting to bother with her car, people would have yelled at her that it was too dangerous anyways.

Once she entered the supermarket, filled with people filling their carts to the brim, she sighed. All she needed was a jug of milk, eggs and maybe her favourite chocolate bar. Making her way to the isle that held eggs, she grabbed her needed item. Alexis noticed a single jar of pickles that was left, and as she reached for the jar, another pair of hands met her own.

An older woman with two young children who clung to her legs stared at her with pleading eyes, “please, my dear, let us have this jar.”

Alexis looked at this little woman in confusion, her eyes narrowed, “but I want this for my snack later.”

“So you don’t know that pickles are supposed to last the longest? How dare you waste something like this! Give it to me!” The mother yelled, tightening her grasp.

“Hmm, not like I wanted cheese and crackers anyways.” Alexis let go of the glass jar, and the mother clung it to her chest.

“Good choice.” she snarled, running off with her cart filled with other various items.

Alexis shrugs this behavior off and wanders to the baking isle. Maybe she could bake cookies instead, or some sort of bread. She’s noticed how desperate people of come, though the first wave just hit twenty eight hours ago. Once her eyes meet the sugar, next to it was the flour. Which was where a bunch of boys were tearing them open. There were about five or six of them, one of which was peering interestingly at the vanilla on the shelf next to him.

“Come on guys, you might get us arrested, get your heads straight.” He said, putting down his hood. It revealed messy long brown hair, and a fairly sharp jawline. When he turned to face Alexis, she noticed how he seemed to have a constant smirk. She went to reach for the last bag of flour, but one of the goofs on the floor grabbed it before her hands were even in a foots radius. He tore it open, and added to the growing pile on the floor.

“What’s next? The eggs?” Alexis scoffed, holding her own close to her. Maybe instead a tasty omelette will help satisfy her hunger.

“Maybe, if you’d hand them over.” A muscular one growled.

“What’s the point of fighting me? It’s not like we are actually going to live. Can’t I just have an omelette, since I can’t have cookies…  Or crackers with pickles and cheese?” At this point, Alexis was just hungry and wanted something to eat. She knew this trip was going to be relatively long, but she also didn’t think it would be this long.

“Oh, so you’re not crazy like the rest of these freaks?” The one was no longer interested in the vanilla ingredients, as he has turned to face Alexis.

“Uh- no. My father is trying to convince me that it’s bigger than we think, but it’s not going to help the fact we all are going to die anyways.” Alexis said, reaching up to grab the baking soda.

“I like your views… What’s your name?” The guy continued, but Alexis just shoved the baking soda in between her elbow and her side.

“Trying to get a girl for less than who knows how long? Not gonna happen, buddy.” She started towards the front, she heard a pair of footsteps follow her. Ignoring them, she waited at the back of the insane line, her hunger slowly increasing by the second.

“Seriously? Did daddy raise a good girl?” The same voice snickered behind her, “Just cut the line, they are too busy to notice anyways. Come on.” The boy grabbed her free elbow and pulled her away before someone gathered behind her. Once they reached the fresh sunlight, Alexis couldn’t help but feel off. Like something was about to happen, but she pushed it to the back of her head.This man was following her, or- with her.

“If you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.” She stated, striking the deal.

“What? My name? Oh its Sean. Now it’s time to fill your end.” His face still held that annoying smirk.

“Alexis, now would you leave me be?” Just as she started to walk, she turned on her toes. Screams and cries took control of her mind, ears, and that’s all she heard.

Rows of people one by one fell to the floor, twisting and contorting their bodies Alexis didn’t know were possible. They reached for sky with angry twitching fingers, as if something was choking them. Each scream seemed to leave her head ringing with confusion. She couldn’t move, nor could her new found friend.

“Alexis. Run.” She found herself stuck to the cement, her knees shaking.

This was the second wave. It was here, the end… the end is here. Sean grabbed her elbows, and she dropped all her items in the process. He dragged her for a few feet before Alexis gained her own balance. She followed the taller man in now desperation. The realization hit.

Death was inevitable. It was going to come either way. Every thought of ‘run’ or ‘I must live’ has left her mind. The Turning was destined to happen every two thousand years, it’s not like it was just going to stop now. She stopped dead in her tracks, spun around, and stared at the bodies dropping in front of her. Alexis wasn’t sure how to feel as the rows dropped closer and closer to her.

“Alexis are you insane?” Sean’s voice was heard from behind her, just as the bodies were a few feet in front of her, she turned to face him. Alexis didn’t want to fight the fate she was given, it would be harder to live.

“I heard death is easier if you aren’t scared. Bye Sean, now it’s your turn to run.” She raised her arm to wave at the boy, now pale. He looked dead himself, but he nodded.

“See you soon, Alex.”

Alexis heard a scream as if it was right in her ear. She let herself be taken under the invisible pressure, the loneliest colour took over her vision. Her mind was silent, but for one thought. The thought she pushed to the back of her head that morning.

I never said ‘I love you’ to dad.

[megsblackfirewrites]

The Beginning of a Legacy: Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Miyu checked her sword one more time before she swung it across her back. Domino was coiling miserably in her chest, the closeness of her sister making her distress even more palpable to the dragon. She rested a hand on the dragon head tattooed on her chest, trying to calm her guardian. They’d be in Hanamura soon and they would defend their loved ones together.

The rest of the passengers on the shuttle were getting ready to land. There was a spot in Tokyo that they had been cleared to land at, but they would have to find a different way to get to Hanamura. She knew a few rental companies in Tokyo that they could get some cars from, but she was almost tempted to just walk there. There was no way the other soldiers could keep up though.

“Landing in five minutes,” John shouted. “Strap in. Miyu, that includes you.”

Miyu sat down beside Joel and strapped herself in. Normally, she would tease John about the amount of worry he had for their well-being, but she was too wound up. She could barely think straight and it was nice to have someone like John to take control of the situation. Joel held her hand through the descent, squeezing whenever her breathing grew harsh. She hated this part; it was never a smooth landing no matter how hard the pilots tried. They touched down with only a small bump, but Domino was snarling in her chest.

“Be ready,” she said as she stood up. “Something isn’t right.”

“How do you know that?” John asked as he picked up his rifle.

“Call it a hunch,” she smiled slightly at him.

John lifted an eyebrow before he ordered everyone off of the ship. He knew her intuition wasn’t all her own and that the dragon tattooed on her body was more than just ink. He also knew not to mention it in front of the others. There was a group of men waiting for them as they descended and Domino snarled with fury. Well, that explains the unease. The welcoming committee had arrived in full force.

“Friends-a yers?” Joel asked as he tapped a finger on his rifle.

“No,” Miyu said as she pulled her sword free. “Captain, I suggest we deal with them quickly.”

John glared at the men before he set his rifle against his shoulder and started forward. Joel followed, his rifle held parallel to his shoulder, and the others fell into step behind them. The men with the car stepped forward, pulling weapons out. None of them had any sort of identifying symbol on their clothing and she couldn’t see their tattoos. There was no way to tell what clan they were from.

“Identify yourself,” John ordered as he advanced. “This is a restricted area and I am ready to use….”

“Watch!” Joel shouted.

He fired before Miyu had a chance to realize that one of the goons had taken aim at John’s head. The goon dropped dead and John ordered everyone to spread out. Miyu followed John to the closest cover, ducking down to watch the goons fire furiously on her comrades.

Domino snarled to be released, eager to tear these men apart. She ran a hand slowly over her chest before she changed the grip on her sword. She glanced at John and nodded her head; time to move. John rose over the crates they were hiding behind and started firing, letting her rush the attackers.

“Dragon, guide my blade!” she roared.

Domino rolled down the length of her sword and set it ablaze. The goons stared in horror as she advanced on them, her blade held parallel to the ground and Domino blazing down its length. They scrambled to get away, but she leapt into their midst without thinking twice; there was no time to think and plan, she could only act. Her blade cut through meat and bone, Domino roaring her fury in Miyu’s ears. In less than five minutes, the goons were dead and her blade was dripping blood onto the ground.

She flipped the blade around and cleaned it quickly before it could rust the steel. When she was satisfied that the blade was clean, she sheathed it. While the others were slowly approaching, she searched the goons’ pockets for the car keys.

“Three cars,” she said as she tossed the keys to the soldiers. “Saddle up.”

John led the convoy out of Tokyo and towards Hanamura. It was the first time he had ever seen the Dragonblade used against another human being and he was more than a little unsettled. Miyu had reduced the men to bloody piles of gore in a matter of minutes. What could the rest of the Shimadas do with their impossibly powerful guardians?

“Front gates,” Miyu said and pointed through the windshield. “Almost home.”

“Lot of people standing guard,” he noted as he watched the men on the walls glare down at them.

“Part of the rival gang,” she shook her head. “We’re driving their cars though. We should be alright for now. They have no reason to suspect anything.”

John nodded his head as he drove into the village. Joel and Laura followed in the cars behind him, each one stuffed with soldiers. It wasn’t the safest mode of transportation, but it was the only way to get everyone there. A small sacrifice to get his team where they needed to be.

They parked the cars in an underground garage and started the trek to Shimada Castle. Miyu scouted ahead, doubling back to let them know if they needed to take an alternative path. She returned at one point with two men in tow, introducing them as members of her household’s guard. John wasn’t sure what to think of them, but anything was better than the people they were fighting.

He heard the shouts before they reached the main gates. Without stopping, he sprinted forward and pressed his gun against his shoulder, firing into the crowd of men trying to get at the gate with the swirling dragons. They scattered with shouts and the rest of his soldiers charged forward, driving the yakuza goons back.

Miyu shouted something at the gates and one of the doors cracked open. A young man appeared between the doors and motioned frantically for them to approach. John whistled and they hurried forward, slipping through the crack before the enemy could regroup. John counted his soldiers before he looked pointedly at Miyu.

She spoke quickly with the guard and he immediately spun to start bowing repeatedly to John. He spoke rapidly in Japanese before switching to English to thank him. His accent was thick; he clearly wasn’t used to speaking the language even though he knew enough words to communicate. John nodded his head before Miyu gestured for John and Joel to follow her.

They strode away from the gate towards the castle looming behind them. Joel whistled loudly at the sight, grinning as he tipped his hat back.

“Now that’s a sight I never thought I’d see again,” he sighed happily. “Haven’t been here since I was young. Lots changed.”

“As things always do,” Miyu chuckled. “Please show your respect, Joel. This is my cousin’s home and he will not take kindly to insults however good natured they are.”

“I’ll be on my best behaviour,” Joel promised.

They walked up into the shrine and Miyu immediately knelt down to scoop an excited child into her arms. The child squealed and thrashed in her arms, grinning widely as they babbled away in Japanese. Miyu covered the child’s cheeks in kisses before she set them on her hip.

“Hello, cousin,” she greeted with a small bow of her head. “I brought help.”

“Miyu,” a regal man in his late twenties rose to his feet and rested the infant he was carrying against his shoulder.

John swallowed slowly as he gazed at the man. Daiki Shimada was about five foot eight inches with black hair that reached past his shoulders and was tied back with a golden ribbon. His cheekbones were sharp and set high on his face, giving him a slightly feminine appearance to balance out the strong jaw. He had a modest goatee growing on his chin, but he kept the rest immaculately shaved. His eyes were a dark, dark brown, the kind that John used to love getting lost in, but he was too old for that now.

“Shimada Daiki,” John bowed his head politely. “I hope you do not find our assistance as an insult to your ability to protect your family and your town.”

“I am aware of why you are here, Captain,” Daiki returned the bow. “I appreciate it greatly.”

Daiki called for someone to come collect the children and waited for them to be carried away before he let his calm expression drop. John wanted to reach out and pull the man into a hug; he looked so miserable and exhausted. Daiki shook his head and turned to face them.

“You came at a dire time, my friends,” he said softly. “It is not just one rival clan that plagues us, but two. They will stop at nothing to eradicate my people and my hands are tied. If I lash out, I could put the city in jeopardy. If I allow them to advance, my family is in danger. There is no safe course of action available to me and time is running out.”

John frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ll need schematics and roadmaps of the entire village,” he said. “As well as an idea of the force we’re dealing with and how many men you have at your disposal.”

Daiki narrowed his eyes. “You are quick to take command,” he said.

“That is what I do,” John shrugged a shoulder. “I’m here to help, Shimada-san.”

Daiki looked at him closely before he smiled. “Please, just call me Daiki,” he said. “Forgive me my hostility, Captain. I am simply…on edge.”

“No offence taken, Daiki,” John returned the smile. “Your boys are cute.”

“Hanzo and Genji are growing like weeds,” Daiki laughed. “They’ll be climbing over the walls before I know it and sneaking off to explore their domain. I…hope to live to see that day.”

“You will,” John promised. “Trust me.”

Daiki gave him a sweet smile and John’s insides melted. “I do, Captain. Thank you.”

MZ did his best not to react as Reyes let out a long sigh of frustration. His fingers moved methodically over the exposed flesh of his patient’s arm, sealing it up while spraying antibiotics over the wound. His patient’s face was pale from bloodloss, but they were watching him work with a fascinated expression.

“There,” MZ nodded his head as he knotted the end of the string and cut it. “It will take some time to heal properly, but the thread will dissolve while that happens. Try not to pick at it.”

“Can I have a lollipop?” the patient joked.

“Of course, one moment,” MZ chuckled. He walked over to his medical supply station and pulled a cherry lollipop out of the container. “Here you are.”

“Ooh, cherry; awesome!” the scout grinned. “You’re the best, M.”

“It’s only in his programming,” Reyes snapped. “Any surgeon could have done that.”

“Not on their own,” the scout glared at him and stuck the lollipop in their mouth. “And not without lots of sweating. Thanks again, M.”

“Take care of yourself, my friend,” MZ inclined his head. “As much as I enjoy the work, I do not like to see my comrades harmed.”

“Will do, boss,” the scout laughed as they hopped off of the medical table and strode out of the room.

MZ shook his head before he walked over to his sink and started sanitizing his hands. Reyes was growling behind him, not at all happy that he was under the command of an omnic. MZ was starting to think that he was never happy unless he was in charge of the situation. What a sad way to live ones life.

“Could you get started on cleaning the medical equipment?” MZ asked as he scrubbed his hands clean of blood.

“I’m not your bitch,” Reyes snapped.

MZ wished he had eyes like a human so that he could roll them. That was not at all what he was implying, Reyes. Why must you be so touchy?

“I was not implying that you were,” MZ said. “I merely asked you to help me clean my equipment as it will save me time for when the next patient comes in.”

“I know what you meant, omnic,” Reyes said. “I don’t appreciate you thinking that you can lord over me just because Golden Boy told you to.”

“Golden…? Oh, Captain Morrison,” MZ shook his head. “On the contrary; he did not give me permission to lord over you. Merely to keep you occupied while he is away.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Reyes snarled and took a step forward.

“Is that what I was implying, Reyes?” MZ asked as he straightened his back. He was not going to be intimidated by a man like Reyes. He’d spent too long cowering under their boots in Cairo. He would not do so again with his new freedom so fresh before him. “You are looking for an excuse to be angry. It is not healthy.”

“What the fuck does an omnic know about being healthy?” Reyes sneered. “You’re just a bucket of bolts.”

“And you are a mass of cells that somehow gained sentience,” MZ replied. “Very comparable. If you do not wish to help me, go speak with Dr. Lindholm. I’m sure he’ll have something much more fitting to your tastes.”

He knew he shouldn’t have turned around and exposed his back, but he wanted to make it clear that the conversation was over. He grunted as he was grabbed and slammed against the wall. The muzzle of a gun was shoved under his jaw and his head was wrenched backwards.

“You think you’re so tough because you have Morrison in your back pocket,” Reyes snarled.

“You are misreading the situation, Reyes,” MZ said calmly. “Please, this is unnecessary.”

“Omnics can’t be trusted,” Reyes growled as he twisted the muzzle of the gun. “Who’s to say you aren’t….?”

“Why are you man-handling our medic?” Reinhardt’s voice boomed across the medical bay. “That is highly inappropriate!”

“Back off, kid,” Reyes snarled. “I’m putting this omnic in its place.”

“He is already in his place,” Reinhardt said as he walked over. He grinned widely and gestured around them. “After all, this is his medical bay! Now, you’re going to let him go, right?”

MZ felt Reyes growl and slowly started to twist. If he could just grab the man’s arm, he could render him incapacitated with the right amount of pressure to his nerves. Reinhardt, however, was much faster than he was.

He grabbed Reyes by the scruff of his neck and hauled him off of MZ as if he weighed nothing. He shoved him away, growling as he stood in front of MZ and brought himself up to his full height.

“Maybe I should use an order, ja?” he growled. “You will leave MZ alone.”

“You’re hardly more than a cadet; you can’t order me around,” Reyes snarled.

Reinhardt leaned forward and grinned. “What good are your words, Reyes, when I could snap your neck with one hand?” he asked. “You only go after MZ because you think he is weaker than you. I know your type. I will not allow an innocent life to be threatened like that, human or omnic.”

“Even after what the omnics did to your home?” Reyes sneered.

“MZ was not responsible for the destruction of my home,” Reinhardt snarled. “Nor were any of the innocent omnics. I will not fall into the same trap so many of my ancestors did of blaming those that did not harm me. Maybe you should do the same.”

MZ rested a hand on Reinhardt’s forearm and the young soldier turned to smile at him. Reyes turned without a word and stormed off. MZ didn’t care where he went so long as he stayed out of his medical bay.

“Thank you, Reinhardt,” MZ sighed. “I am grateful for your interference. I do not think I could have chased him off on my own. I am sorry that he tried to….”

“You do not have to apologize on his behalf, my friend,” Reinhardt chuckled. “I know that Reyes is a nasty piece of work. It doesn’t bother me.”

MZ inclined his head and sighed again. “Well, do you mind lending a hand? My equipment needs a great deal of cleaning.”

“Of course,” Reinhardt grinned widely.

“Thank you,” MZ bounced on his toes. “I appreciate it.”

He led the way over to the sink so that they could start cleaning all of his equipment.

[lodelss]

Davide Enia | translated by Antony Shuggar | an excerpt adapted from Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope | Other Press | February 2019 | 16 minutes (4,334 words)

On Lampedusa, a fisherman once asked me: “You know what fish has come back? Sea bass.”

Then he’d lit a cigarette and smoked the whole thing down to the butt in silence.

“And you know why sea bass have come back to this stretch of sea? You know what they eat? That’s right.”

And he’d stubbed out his cigarette and turned to go.

There was nothing more, truly, to be said.

What had stuck with me about Lampedusa were the calluses on the hands of the fishermen; the stories they told of constantly finding dead bodies when they hauled in their nets (“What do you mean, ‘constantly’?” and they’d say, “Do you know what ‘constantly’ means? Constantly”); scattered refugee boats rusting in the sunlight, perhaps nowadays the only honest form of testimony left to us — corrosion, grime, rust — of what’s happening in this period of history; the islanders’ doubts about the meaning of it all; the word “landing,” misused for years, because by now these were all genuine rescues, with the refugee boats escorted into port and the poor devils led off to the Temporary Settlement Center; and the Lampedusans who dressed them with their own clothing in a merciful response that sought neither spotlights nor publicity, but just because it was cold out and those were bodies in need of warmth.

*

Haze blurred our line of sight.

The horizon shimmered.

I noticed for what must have been the thousandth time how astonished I was to see how Lampedusa could unsettle its guests, creating in them an overwhelming sense of estrangement. The sky so close that it almost seemed about to collapse on top of us. The ever-present voice of the wind. The light that hits you from all directions. And before your eyes, always, the sea, the eternal crown of joy and thorns that surrounds everything. It’s an island on which the elements hammer at you with nothing able to stop them. There are no shelters. You’re pierced by the environment, riven by the light and the wind. No defense is possible.

It had been a long, long day.

I heard my father’s voice calling my name, while the sirocco tossed and tangled my thoughts.

*

I happened to meet the scuba diver at a friend’s house.

It was just the two of us.

The first, persistent sensation was this: He was huge.

His first words were these: “No tape recorders.”

He went over and sat down on the other side of the table from me and crossed his arms.

He kept them folded across his chest the whole time.

“I’m not talking about October third,” he added, his mouth snapping shut after these words in a way that defied argument.

His tone of voice was consistently low and measured, in sharp contrast with that imposing bulk. Sometimes, in his phrases, uttered with the sounds of his homeland — he was born in the mountains of the deepest north of Italy, where the sea is, more than anything else, an abstraction — there also surfaced words from my dialect, Sicilian. The ten years he’d spent in Sicily for work had left traces upon him. For an instant, the sounds of the south took possession of that gigantic body, dominating him. Then the moment would come to an end and he’d run out of things to say and just stare at me, in all his majesty, like a mountain of the north.

Before your eyes, always, the sea, the eternal crown of joy and thorns that surrounds everything.

He’d become a diver practically by sheer chance, a shot at a job that he’d jumped at immediately after completing his military service.

“We divers are used to dealing with death, from day one they told us it would be something we’d encounter. They tell us over and over, starting on the first day of training: People die at sea. And it’s true. All it takes is a single mistake during a dive and you die. Miscalculate and you die. Just expect too much of yourself and you die. Underwater, death is your constant companion, always.”

He’d been called to Lampedusa as a rescue swimmer, one of those men on the patrol boats who wear bright orange wetsuits and dive in during rescue operations.

He told me just how tough the scuba diving course had been, lingering on the mysterious beauty of being underwater, when the sea is so deep that sunlight can’t filter down that far and everything is dark and silent. The whole time he’d been on the island, he’d been doing special training to make sure he could perform his new job at an outstanding level.

He said: “I’m not a leftist. If anything, the complete opposite.”

His family, originally monarchists, had become Fascists. He, too, was in tune with those political ideas.

He added: “What we’re doing here is saving lives. At sea, every life is sacred. If someone needs help, we rescue them. There are no colors, no ethnic groups, no religions. That’s the law of the sea.”

Then, suddenly, he stared at me.

He was enormous even when he was sitting down. “When you rescue a child in the open sea and you hold him in your arms . . .”

And he started to cry, silently.

His arms were still folded across his chest.

I wondered what he could have seen, what he’d lived through, just how much death this giant across the table had faced off with.

After more than a minute of silence, words resurfaced in the room. He said that these people should never have set out for Italy in the first place, and that in Italy the government was doing a bad job of taking them in, wastefully and with a demented approach to issues of management. Then he reiterated the concept one more time: “At sea, you can’t even think about an alternative, every life is sacred, and you have to help anyone who is in need, period.” That phrase was more than a mantra. It was a full-fledged act of devotion.

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He unfolded his words slowly, as if they were careful steps down the steep side of a mountain.

“The most dangerous situation is when there are many vessels close together. You have to take care not to get caught between them because, if the seas are rough, you could easily be crushed if there’s a collision. I was really in danger only once: There was a force-eight gale, I was in the water with my back to a refugee boat loaded down with people, and I saw the hull of our vessel coming straight at me, shoved along by a twenty-five-foot wave. I moved sideways with a furious lunge that I never would have believed I could pull off. The two hulls crashed together. People fell into the water. I started swimming to pick them up. When I returned from that mission, I still had the picture of that hull coming to crush me before my eyes. I sat there on the edge of the dock, alone, for several minutes, until I could get that sensation of narrowly averted death out of my mind.”

He explained that when you’re out on the open water, the minute you reach the point from where the call for help was launched, you invariably find some new and unfamiliar situation.

“Sometimes, everything purrs along smoothly, they’re calm and quiet, the sea isn’t choppy, it doesn’t take us long to get them all aboard our vessels. Sometimes, they get so worked up that there’s a good chance of the refugee boat overturning during the rescue operations. You always need to manage to calm them down. Always. That’s a top priority. Sometimes, when we show up on the scene, the refugee boat has just overturned, and there are bodies scattered everywhere. So, you have to work as quickly as you can. There is no standard protocol. You just decide what to do there and then. You can swim in a circle around groups of people, pulling a line to tie them together and reel them in, all at once. Sometimes, the sea is choppy and they’ll all sink beneath the waves right before your eyes. In those cases, all you can do is try to rescue as many as you can.”

I have the distinct sensation that I’m face-to-face with human beings who carry an entire graveyard inside them.

There followed a long pause, a pause that went on and on. His gaze no longer came to rest on the wall behind me. It went on, out to some spot on the Mediterranean Sea that he would never forget.

“If you’re face-to-face with three people going under and twenty-five feet farther on a mother is drowning with her child, what do you do? Where do you head? Who do you save first? The three guys who are closer to you, or the mother and her newborn who are farther away?”

It was a vast, boundless question.

It was as if time and space had curved back upon themselves, bringing him face-to-face with that cruel scene all over again.

The screams of the past still resonated.

He was enormous, that diver.

He looked invulnerable.

And yet, inside, he had to have been a latter-day Saint Sebastian, riddled with a quiverful of agonizing choices.

“The little boy is tiny, the mother extremely young. There they are, twenty-five feet away from me. And then, right here, in front of me, three other people are drowning. So, who should I save, then, if they’re all going under at the same instant? Who should I strike out for? What should I do? Calculate. It’s all you can do in certain situations. Mathematics. Three is bigger than two. Three lives are one more life than two lives.”

And he stopped talking.

Outside the sky was cloudy, there was a wind blowing out of the southwest, the sea was choppy. I thought to myself: Every time, every single time, I have the distinct sensation that I’m face-to-face with human beings who carry an entire graveyard inside them.

*

I tried calling my uncle Beppe, my father’s brother. We called each other pretty frequently. Often my uncle would ask me: “But why doesn’t my brother ever call me?” I’d answer: “He doesn’t even call me, and I’m his first-born son, Beppuzzo, it’s just the way he is.”

The phone rang and rang for more than a minute, with no answer.

I hung up and went back inside.

We ate dinner, tuna cooked in sweet-and-sour onions and a salad of fennel, orange slices, and smoked herring.

There were four of us sitting around the table: Paola, Melo, my father, and me.

We were at Cala Pisana, at Paola’s house. Paola is a friend of mine. She’s a lawyer who’s given up her practice and has lived on Lampedusa for years now. There, with her boyfriend Melo, she runs the bed and breakfast where I usually stay as my base of operations whenever I’m doing research on the island.

I was setting forth my considerations on that exceedingly long day, in a conversation with Paola. From time to time, Melo would nod, producing small sounds, monosyllabic at the very most. My father, on the other hand, made no sounds whatsoever. He was the silent guest. Patiently, with his gaze turned directly to the eyes of whoever was speaking, he displayed a considerable ability to listen that he’d developed in the forty-plus years he’d practiced his profession, cardiology. He invited people to tell him things just by the way he held his body.

I was considering out loud that everything happening on Lampedusa went well beyond shipwrecks, beyond a simple count of the survivors, beyond the list of the drowned.

“It’s something bigger than crossing the desert and even bigger than crossing the Mediterranean itself, to such a degree that this rocky island in the middle of the sea has become a symbol, powerful and yet at the same time elusive, a symbol that is studied and narrated in a vast array of languages: reporting, documentaries, short stories, films, biographies, postcolonial studies, and ethnographic research. Lampedusa itself is now a container-word: migration, borders, shipwrecks, human solidarity, tourism, summer season, marginal lives, miracles, heroism, desperation, heartbreak, death, rebirth, redemption, all of it there in a single name, in an impasto that still seems to defy a clear interpretation or a recognizable form.”

Lampedusa itself is now a container-word: migration, borders, shipwrecks, human solidarity, tourism, summer season, marginal lives, miracles, heroism, desperation, heartbreak, death, rebirth, redemption, all of it there in a single name.

Papà had remained silent the whole time. His blue eyes were a well of still water in whose depths you could read no judgment whatsoever.

Paola had just poured herself an espresso.

“Lampedusa is a container-word,” she repeated under her breath, nodding to herself more than to me.

She sugared her coffee and went on with her thoughts. “And in a container, sure enough, you can put anything you like.”

Little by little, with a gradual rising tone, her voice grew louder, and the pace of her words became increasingly relentless.

“In the container called Lampedusa, you really can fit everything and the opposite of everything. Take the Center where the young people are brought after they land. Do you remember? You saw it when you came back here the year after the Arab Spring.”

It was the summer of 2012 and I’d asked a few Lampedusan piccirìddi — kids — who I’d met on the beach: “Do you all ever go to the Center?” I was fantasizing about the idea that the structure where anyone who landed on Lampedusa was taken must somehow constitute a focus of enormous fascination for them. “E che ci ham’a iri a fare?” those children had replied in dialect. I was stunned to hear their answer: “Why on earth would we bother with that place?” I had been convinced, until that moment, that the presence of new arrivals must have generated a monstrous well of curiosity, becoming the sole topic of conversation, of play, of adventure. Something rooted in the epic dimension.

“Would you take me there?” I’d asked them, hesitantly, already anticipating my defeat.

“We’d rather die.”

There was nothing about the Center that appealed to them, it had never interested them. Only after I finally saw it did I understand that I had committed an enormous mistake: I’d interacted with the children but used the parameters of an adult. Along the road that leads to the Center, there was nothing but rocks, brushwood, and dry-laid stone walls upon which signs appeared here and there, reading for sale. The only form of life was a thunderous bedlam of crickets. It was an arid place. Of course the piccirìddi never went there, there was nothing fun to do, nowhere to play. Myths aren’t built out of nothing.

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The Center had been built from the ground up on the site of an old army barracks. A number of dormitory structures, an open plaza, an enclosure fence. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a prison.

“Has anything changed about the Center in the last few years?” I asked Paola.

“The name. At first it was called the Temporary Settlement Center, then the Center for Identification and Expulsion, and now it’s a Hot Spot Center, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The governments change, the names rotate, but the structure is always the same: Under normal conditions it can hold 250 people, in an emergency situation it could take in at the very most 381 full-time residents. Those are the numbers, you can’t increase the number of bathrooms, or, for that matter, the number of beds. And in 2011 more than two thousand people were packed in there, for days and days, without being told at all what was to become of them. The world applauded the Arab Spring, and then imprisoned its protagonists. Was this the best response we could provide to their demands? And do you know what you create by keeping too many people shut up in such a small space? Rage. That’s how you create wild animals. And, in fact, a revolt broke out; they burned their mattresses and set fire to one wing of the structure.”

My father listened impassively, even though — clearly listening, but remaining opaque, inscrutable — he had to be squirreling away all that information. Melo was chewing on his lower lip, Paola continued to talk without taking her eyes off the demitasse of espresso.

“The Center, at least on paper, is supposed to be a containment facility if nothing else, right? And in fact, there’s a hole in the fence around the Center. I think it dates back to that period in 2011, but I couldn’t rule out by any means that the hole was there even earlier. It’s a great big hole and it works as a pressure valve, in fact, allowing the young men to get out, take a walk, come into town to try to get in touch with their families by using the Internet through the generosity of a number of residents. And what are you going to do, if a little kid asks you to let him talk to his mother to let her know that he’s still alive? Tell him he can’t use your computer?”

She’d continued to stir her espresso, tiny spoon in little demitasse. The sound of steel rattling against porcelain had punctuated the cadence of her words, like a rhythmic counterpoint, necessary to keep from losing the thread, to keep from plummeting body and soul into an abyss of screaming.

“Believe me, Davidù, it’s a good thing that hole is there. It’s a door, a way of keeping them from feeling like caged animals. So, you see what the point is? The Center is a structure garrisoned by the police force, inside which no one can go without special authorization. Not even a priest can go in. The facade remains intact. But in the fence, there’s always been a hole. It’s a well-known fact and no one does anything about it. And it’s a good thing that no one does anything about it, let me say that for the thousandth time. Here is a concrete example of how closely emergency and hypocrisy have to coexist, bureaucracy and solidarity, common sense and cult of appearances. Lampedusa is a container of opposites, for real.”

History is sending people ahead, in flesh and blood, people of every age.

Through the open window came the roar of waves, water rising, tumbling, crashing down onto the sand, pouring back out, and starting over again, in an endless relaunching. Melo, seated at the head of the table, had consigned himself to silence, just like my father. Melo, too, spoke little if at all, the whole day through, at most a bare handful of words, often drawled out, because speaking costs effort and effort is a burden.

Paola sipped her coffee slowly, and it wasn’t until she’d finished it that she started talking again.

“It is History that’s taking place, Davidù. And History is complicated, a mosaic full of tiles of different shapes and sizes, sometimes similar, other times diametrically opposed, yet all of them necessary in order for the final picture to emerge. No, wait, let me correct myself: It’s not that History’s taking place now. It’s been taking place for twenty years.”

She started taking long drags on a cigarette, her third in half an hour.

“As you had an opportunity to understand yourself this morning, the scale of this event can be perceived immediately when you witness a landing. But even if someone never had a chance to witness one, what can you expect them to care about the history of your, my, our perceptions? History is already determining the course of the world, tracing out the future, structurally modifying the present. It’s an unstoppable movement. And this time, History is sending people ahead, in flesh and blood, people of every age. They set sail across the water, they land here. Lampedusa isn’t an exit, it’s a leg in a longer journey.”

She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray while Melo poured himself what beer remained in the bottle. Through the open window, warm fall air pushed into the room, scented with hot sand and salt-sea brine.

*

In the days following the Arab Spring, mass arrivals had begun on the shores of Lampedusa. An island resident named Piera had happened to be down at Porto Nuovo, or New Port, to supervise the efforts of the town constables.

“I’ve still got the scene before my eyes, it was completely insane! So many people had landed that you couldn’t make your way through the port. They were everywhere, the wharf was packed and the vessels were coming in and landing, more people one right after the other. A procession of refugee boats! And they were coming ashore by the thousands! We were there to give them a hand, but we were hardly prepared for anything like those numbers. A carabiniere was telling all the new arrivals in French to move over to the hill to make room for the others, and in the meantime new boats were coming in from the sea, all of them packed to the gunwales, and there was just no time to move people aside before the new refugee boats had already landed more young people. I really couldn’t begin to guess how many thousands came in that afternoon, it was impossible to count them, seven thousand, eight thousand, nine thousand, there was no settled number. And how could we ever reckon that number? There were more of them than there were islanders on Lampedusa, that much is certain. The ones who were standing on the hill, as soon as the boats came in carrying their families — wives, husbands, children — would rush down to rejoin their loved ones. An incredibly crazy scene: The police would try to separate them and we were caught in the middle, knocked back and forth. You couldn’t figure out what was going on. And from the sea, boat after boat kept arriving, so many of them, in quick succession. A flotilla! No one had ever seen such a thing. There was a gentleman who arrived with a falcon on his arm. On another refugee boat, one young Tunisian had brought his own sheep. A lovely sheep! A breed of sheep I’d never seen in my life, spectacular. A thick coat of wool, very curly! Stupendous. But in the end, we had to put the animal down. There was no alternative.”

There were more foreigners than residents on Lampedusa, more than ten thousand refugees as compared to five thousand islanders. Fear and curiosity coexisted with mistrust and pity. The shutters remained fastened tight, or else they’d open to hand out sweaters and shoes, electric adapters to charge cell phones, glasses of water, a chair to sit on, and a seat at the table to break bread together. These were flesh-and-blood people, right there before our eyes, not statistics you read about in the newspapers or numbers shouted out over the television. And so, in a sort of overtime of aid and assistance, people found and distributed ponchos because it was raining out, or they cooked five pounds of pasta because those young people were hungry and hadn’t eaten in days.

Everyone had been abandoned to their own devices.

The following year, the Italian government proudly proclaimed the figure of “zero landings on Lampedusa” as if it were a medal of honor to be pinned to its chest.

“And it’s true,” Paola had assured me that summer in 2012. “No boats are landing here anymore. We didn’t even see any in the spring. And do you know why? When the refugee boats are intercepted they’re escorted all the way to Sicily, and that’s where the landings take place, far out of the spotlight. Which means: zero landings on Lampedusa. From a purely statistical point of view, the logic is impeccable. And yet, you see? The island is fragmented, in the throes of anxiety, tumbled and tossed in this media maelstrom, a hail of contradictions. People talk less and less and, when they do, it’s only to complain about concrete problems, such as the lack of a hospital, for instance, or the cost of gasoline, which here is the highest in all of Italy. And they point out, with a touch of bitterness, that all the attention is always focused on those who arrived over the water, while the everyday challenges that we residents face don’t really seem to matter to anyone, except to us.”

There was the vacation season, the real engine of the island’s economy, to get up and running.

From time to time, someone would shoot a furtive glance toward the horizon.

“Sooner or later, something will come back to these beaches,” a fisherman had told me. That prediction, shared by all the residents, came true the following year, on October 3, 2013. It was an event that outpaced even our wildest nightmares. A refugee boat overturned just a few hundred yards off the coast of the island, the waters filled up with corpses, and Lampedusa was overrun by coffins and television news crews. What had actually changed in the recent years, after all, were just the minor details. The corpses found in the fishing nets, for example, were simply tossed back into the sea in order to prevent the fishing boats from being confiscated and held in a subsequent investigation. The reports of alleged sinkings — alleged because the only sources were the words of those who had traveled on sister refugee boats — were only mentioned at the tail end of the newscasts. In the absence of a corpse, it’s always better to leave death confined to territories that everyone prefers not to explore. And yet, in the months that preceded the October tragedy, the everyday rescue work carried out by the Italian Coast Guard continued as always, people continued to trek across the Sahara, women continued to be raped in Libyan prisons, the refugee boats and the rubber dinghies set sail and were intercepted, or else they sank.

History certainly hadn’t stopped.

* * *

Davide Enia was born in 1974 in Palermo, Italy. He has written, directed, and performed in plays for the stage and for radio. Enia has been honored with the Ubu Prize, the Tondelli Award, and the ETI Award, Italy’s three most prestigious theater prizes. He lives and cooks in Rome.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

[lodelss]

Notes on a Shipwreck

Davide Enia | translated by Antony Shuggar | an excerpt adapted from Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope | Other Press | February 2019 | 16 minutes (4,334 words)

On Lampedusa, a fisherman once asked me: “You know what fish has come back? Sea bass.”

Then he’d lit a cigarette and smoked the whole thing down to the butt in silence.

“And you know why sea bass have come back to this stretch of sea? You know what they eat? That’s right.”

And he’d stubbed out his cigarette and turned to go.

There was nothing more, truly, to be said.

What had stuck with me about Lampedusa were the calluses on the hands of the fishermen; the stories they told of constantly finding dead bodies when they hauled in their nets (“What do you mean, ‘constantly’?” and they’d say, “Do you know what ‘constantly’ means? Constantly”); scattered refugee boats rusting in the sunlight, perhaps nowadays the only honest form of testimony left to us — corrosion, grime, rust — of what’s happening in this period of history; the islanders’ doubts about the meaning of it all; the word “landing,” misused for years, because by now these were all genuine rescues, with the refugee boats escorted into port and the poor devils led off to the Temporary Settlement Center; and the Lampedusans who dressed them with their own clothing in a merciful response that sought neither spotlights nor publicity, but just because it was cold out and those were bodies in need of warmth.

*

Haze blurred our line of sight.

The horizon shimmered.

I noticed for what must have been the thousandth time how astonished I was to see how Lampedusa could unsettle its guests, creating in them an overwhelming sense of estrangement. The sky so close that it almost seemed about to collapse on top of us. The ever-present voice of the wind. The light that hits you from all directions. And before your eyes, always, the sea, the eternal crown of joy and thorns that surrounds everything. It’s an island on which the elements hammer at you with nothing able to stop them. There are no shelters. You’re pierced by the environment, riven by the light and the wind. No defense is possible.

It had been a long, long day.

I heard my father’s voice calling my name, while the sirocco tossed and tangled my thoughts.

*

I happened to meet the scuba diver at a friend’s house.

It was just the two of us.

The first, persistent sensation was this: He was huge.

His first words were these: “No tape recorders.”

He went over and sat down on the other side of the table from me and crossed his arms.

He kept them folded across his chest the whole time.

“I’m not talking about October third,” he added, his mouth snapping shut after these words in a way that defied argument.

His tone of voice was consistently low and measured, in sharp contrast with that imposing bulk. Sometimes, in his phrases, uttered with the sounds of his homeland — he was born in the mountains of the deepest north of Italy, where the sea is, more than anything else, an abstraction — there also surfaced words from my dialect, Sicilian. The ten years he’d spent in Sicily for work had left traces upon him. For an instant, the sounds of the south took possession of that gigantic body, dominating him. Then the moment would come to an end and he’d run out of things to say and just stare at me, in all his majesty, like a mountain of the north.

Before your eyes, always, the sea, the eternal crown of joy and thorns that surrounds everything.

He’d become a diver practically by sheer chance, a shot at a job that he’d jumped at immediately after completing his military service.

“We divers are used to dealing with death, from day one they told us it would be something we’d encounter. They tell us over and over, starting on the first day of training: People die at sea. And it’s true. All it takes is a single mistake during a dive and you die. Miscalculate and you die. Just expect too much of yourself and you die. Underwater, death is your constant companion, always.”

He’d been called to Lampedusa as a rescue swimmer, one of those men on the patrol boats who wear bright orange wetsuits and dive in during rescue operations.

He told me just how tough the scuba diving course had been, lingering on the mysterious beauty of being underwater, when the sea is so deep that sunlight can’t filter down that far and everything is dark and silent. The whole time he’d been on the island, he’d been doing special training to make sure he could perform his new job at an outstanding level.

He said: “I’m not a leftist. If anything, the complete opposite.”

His family, originally monarchists, had become Fascists. He, too, was in tune with those political ideas.

He added: “What we’re doing here is saving lives. At sea, every life is sacred. If someone needs help, we rescue them. There are no colors, no ethnic groups, no religions. That’s the law of the sea.”

Then, suddenly, he stared at me.

He was enormous even when he was sitting down. “When you rescue a child in the open sea and you hold him in your arms . . .”

And he started to cry, silently.

His arms were still folded across his chest.

I wondered what he could have seen, what he’d lived through, just how much death this giant across the table had faced off with.

After more than a minute of silence, words resurfaced in the room. He said that these people should never have set out for Italy in the first place, and that in Italy the government was doing a bad job of taking them in, wastefully and with a demented approach to issues of management. Then he reiterated the concept one more time: “At sea, you can’t even think about an alternative, every life is sacred, and you have to help anyone who is in need, period.” That phrase was more than a mantra. It was a full-fledged act of devotion.

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He unfolded his words slowly, as if they were careful steps down the steep side of a mountain.

“The most dangerous situation is when there are many vessels close together. You have to take care not to get caught between them because, if the seas are rough, you could easily be crushed if there’s a collision. I was really in danger only once: There was a force-eight gale, I was in the water with my back to a refugee boat loaded down with people, and I saw the hull of our vessel coming straight at me, shoved along by a twenty-five-foot wave. I moved sideways with a furious lunge that I never would have believed I could pull off. The two hulls crashed together. People fell into the water. I started swimming to pick them up. When I returned from that mission, I still had the picture of that hull coming to crush me before my eyes. I sat there on the edge of the dock, alone, for several minutes, until I could get that sensation of narrowly averted death out of my mind.”

He explained that when you’re out on the open water, the minute you reach the point from where the call for help was launched, you invariably find some new and unfamiliar situation.

“Sometimes, everything purrs along smoothly, they’re calm and quiet, the sea isn’t choppy, it doesn’t take us long to get them all aboard our vessels. Sometimes, they get so worked up that there’s a good chance of the refugee boat overturning during the rescue operations. You always need to manage to calm them down. Always. That’s a top priority. Sometimes, when we show up on the scene, the refugee boat has just overturned, and there are bodies scattered everywhere. So, you have to work as quickly as you can. There is no standard protocol. You just decide what to do there and then. You can swim in a circle around groups of people, pulling a line to tie them together and reel them in, all at once. Sometimes, the sea is choppy and they’ll all sink beneath the waves right before your eyes. In those cases, all you can do is try to rescue as many as you can.”

I have the distinct sensation that I’m face-to-face with human beings who carry an entire graveyard inside them.

There followed a long pause, a pause that went on and on. His gaze no longer came to rest on the wall behind me. It went on, out to some spot on the Mediterranean Sea that he would never forget.

“If you’re face-to-face with three people going under and twenty-five feet farther on a mother is drowning with her child, what do you do? Where do you head? Who do you save first? The three guys who are closer to you, or the mother and her newborn who are farther away?”

It was a vast, boundless question.

It was as if time and space had curved back upon themselves, bringing him face-to-face with that cruel scene all over again.

The screams of the past still resonated.

He was enormous, that diver.

He looked invulnerable.

And yet, inside, he had to have been a latter-day Saint Sebastian, riddled with a quiverful of agonizing choices.

“The little boy is tiny, the mother extremely young. There they are, twenty-five feet away from me. And then, right here, in front of me, three other people are drowning. So, who should I save, then, if they’re all going under at the same instant? Who should I strike out for? What should I do? Calculate. It’s all you can do in certain situations. Mathematics. Three is bigger than two. Three lives are one more life than two lives.”

And he stopped talking.

Outside the sky was cloudy, there was a wind blowing out of the southwest, the sea was choppy. I thought to myself: Every time, every single time, I have the distinct sensation that I’m face-to-face with human beings who carry an entire graveyard inside them.

*

I tried calling my uncle Beppe, my father’s brother. We called each other pretty frequently. Often my uncle would ask me: “But why doesn’t my brother ever call me?” I’d answer: “He doesn’t even call me, and I’m his first-born son, Beppuzzo, it’s just the way he is.”

The phone rang and rang for more than a minute, with no answer.

I hung up and went back inside.

We ate dinner, tuna cooked in sweet-and-sour onions and a salad of fennel, orange slices, and smoked herring.

There were four of us sitting around the table: Paola, Melo, my father, and me.

We were at Cala Pisana, at Paola’s house. Paola is a friend of mine. She’s a lawyer who’s given up her practice and has lived on Lampedusa for years now. There, with her boyfriend Melo, she runs the bed and breakfast where I usually stay as my base of operations whenever I’m doing research on the island.

I was setting forth my considerations on that exceedingly long day, in a conversation with Paola. From time to time, Melo would nod, producing small sounds, monosyllabic at the very most. My father, on the other hand, made no sounds whatsoever. He was the silent guest. Patiently, with his gaze turned directly to the eyes of whoever was speaking, he displayed a considerable ability to listen that he’d developed in the forty-plus years he’d practiced his profession, cardiology. He invited people to tell him things just by the way he held his body.

I was considering out loud that everything happening on Lampedusa went well beyond shipwrecks, beyond a simple count of the survivors, beyond the list of the drowned.

“It’s something bigger than crossing the desert and even bigger than crossing the Mediterranean itself, to such a degree that this rocky island in the middle of the sea has become a symbol, powerful and yet at the same time elusive, a symbol that is studied and narrated in a vast array of languages: reporting, documentaries, short stories, films, biographies, postcolonial studies, and ethnographic research. Lampedusa itself is now a container-word: migration, borders, shipwrecks, human solidarity, tourism, summer season, marginal lives, miracles, heroism, desperation, heartbreak, death, rebirth, redemption, all of it there in a single name, in an impasto that still seems to defy a clear interpretation or a recognizable form.”

Lampedusa itself is now a container-word: migration, borders, shipwrecks, human solidarity, tourism, summer season, marginal lives, miracles, heroism, desperation, heartbreak, death, rebirth, redemption, all of it there in a single name.

Papà had remained silent the whole time. His blue eyes were a well of still water in whose depths you could read no judgment whatsoever.

Paola had just poured herself an espresso.

“Lampedusa is a container-word,” she repeated under her breath, nodding to herself more than to me.

She sugared her coffee and went on with her thoughts. “And in a container, sure enough, you can put anything you like.”

Little by little, with a gradual rising tone, her voice grew louder, and the pace of her words became increasingly relentless.

“In the container called Lampedusa, you really can fit everything and the opposite of everything. Take the Center where the young people are brought after they land. Do you remember? You saw it when you came back here the year after the Arab Spring.”

It was the summer of 2012 and I’d asked a few Lampedusan piccirìddi — kids — who I’d met on the beach: “Do you all ever go to the Center?” I was fantasizing about the idea that the structure where anyone who landed on Lampedusa was taken must somehow constitute a focus of enormous fascination for them. “E che ci ham’a iri a fare?” those children had replied in dialect. I was stunned to hear their answer: “Why on earth would we bother with that place?” I had been convinced, until that moment, that the presence of new arrivals must have generated a monstrous well of curiosity, becoming the sole topic of conversation, of play, of adventure. Something rooted in the epic dimension.

“Would you take me there?” I’d asked them, hesitantly, already anticipating my defeat.

“We’d rather die.”

There was nothing about the Center that appealed to them, it had never interested them. Only after I finally saw it did I understand that I had committed an enormous mistake: I’d interacted with the children but used the parameters of an adult. Along the road that leads to the Center, there was nothing but rocks, brushwood, and dry-laid stone walls upon which signs appeared here and there, reading for sale. The only form of life was a thunderous bedlam of crickets. It was an arid place. Of course the piccirìddi never went there, there was nothing fun to do, nowhere to play. Myths aren’t built out of nothing.

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The Center had been built from the ground up on the site of an old army barracks. A number of dormitory structures, an open plaza, an enclosure fence. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a prison.

“Has anything changed about the Center in the last few years?” I asked Paola.

“The name. At first it was called the Temporary Settlement Center, then the Center for Identification and Expulsion, and now it’s a Hot Spot Center, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The governments change, the names rotate, but the structure is always the same: Under normal conditions it can hold 250 people, in an emergency situation it could take in at the very most 381 full-time residents. Those are the numbers, you can’t increase the number of bathrooms, or, for that matter, the number of beds. And in 2011 more than two thousand people were packed in there, for days and days, without being told at all what was to become of them. The world applauded the Arab Spring, and then imprisoned its protagonists. Was this the best response we could provide to their demands? And do you know what you create by keeping too many people shut up in such a small space? Rage. That’s how you create wild animals. And, in fact, a revolt broke out; they burned their mattresses and set fire to one wing of the structure.”

My father listened impassively, even though — clearly listening, but remaining opaque, inscrutable — he had to be squirreling away all that information. Melo was chewing on his lower lip, Paola continued to talk without taking her eyes off the demitasse of espresso.

“The Center, at least on paper, is supposed to be a containment facility if nothing else, right? And in fact, there’s a hole in the fence around the Center. I think it dates back to that period in 2011, but I couldn’t rule out by any means that the hole was there even earlier. It’s a great big hole and it works as a pressure valve, in fact, allowing the young men to get out, take a walk, come into town to try to get in touch with their families by using the Internet through the generosity of a number of residents. And what are you going to do, if a little kid asks you to let him talk to his mother to let her know that he’s still alive? Tell him he can’t use your computer?”

She’d continued to stir her espresso, tiny spoon in little demitasse. The sound of steel rattling against porcelain had punctuated the cadence of her words, like a rhythmic counterpoint, necessary to keep from losing the thread, to keep from plummeting body and soul into an abyss of screaming.

“Believe me, Davidù, it’s a good thing that hole is there. It’s a door, a way of keeping them from feeling like caged animals. So, you see what the point is? The Center is a structure garrisoned by the police force, inside which no one can go without special authorization. Not even a priest can go in. The facade remains intact. But in the fence, there’s always been a hole. It’s a well-known fact and no one does anything about it. And it’s a good thing that no one does anything about it, let me say that for the thousandth time. Here is a concrete example of how closely emergency and hypocrisy have to coexist, bureaucracy and solidarity, common sense and cult of appearances. Lampedusa is a container of opposites, for real.”

History is sending people ahead, in flesh and blood, people of every age.

Through the open window came the roar of waves, water rising, tumbling, crashing down onto the sand, pouring back out, and starting over again, in an endless relaunching. Melo, seated at the head of the table, had consigned himself to silence, just like my father. Melo, too, spoke little if at all, the whole day through, at most a bare handful of words, often drawled out, because speaking costs effort and effort is a burden.

Paola sipped her coffee slowly, and it wasn’t until she’d finished it that she started talking again.

“It is History that’s taking place, Davidù. And History is complicated, a mosaic full of tiles of different shapes and sizes, sometimes similar, other times diametrically opposed, yet all of them necessary in order for the final picture to emerge. No, wait, let me correct myself: It’s not that History’s taking place now. It’s been taking place for twenty years.”

She started taking long drags on a cigarette, her third in half an hour.

“As you had an opportunity to understand yourself this morning, the scale of this event can be perceived immediately when you witness a landing. But even if someone never had a chance to witness one, what can you expect them to care about the history of your, my, our perceptions? History is already determining the course of the world, tracing out the future, structurally modifying the present. It’s an unstoppable movement. And this time, History is sending people ahead, in flesh and blood, people of every age. They set sail across the water, they land here. Lampedusa isn’t an exit, it’s a leg in a longer journey.”

She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray while Melo poured himself what beer remained in the bottle. Through the open window, warm fall air pushed into the room, scented with hot sand and salt-sea brine.

*

In the days following the Arab Spring, mass arrivals had begun on the shores of Lampedusa. An island resident named Piera had happened to be down at Porto Nuovo, or New Port, to supervise the efforts of the town constables.

“I’ve still got the scene before my eyes, it was completely insane! So many people had landed that you couldn’t make your way through the port. They were everywhere, the wharf was packed and the vessels were coming in and landing, more people one right after the other. A procession of refugee boats! And they were coming ashore by the thousands! We were there to give them a hand, but we were hardly prepared for anything like those numbers. A carabiniere was telling all the new arrivals in French to move over to the hill to make room for the others, and in the meantime new boats were coming in from the sea, all of them packed to the gunwales, and there was just no time to move people aside before the new refugee boats had already landed more young people. I really couldn’t begin to guess how many thousands came in that afternoon, it was impossible to count them, seven thousand, eight thousand, nine thousand, there was no settled number. And how could we ever reckon that number? There were more of them than there were islanders on Lampedusa, that much is certain. The ones who were standing on the hill, as soon as the boats came in carrying their families — wives, husbands, children — would rush down to rejoin their loved ones. An incredibly crazy scene: The police would try to separate them and we were caught in the middle, knocked back and forth. You couldn’t figure out what was going on. And from the sea, boat after boat kept arriving, so many of them, in quick succession. A flotilla! No one had ever seen such a thing. There was a gentleman who arrived with a falcon on his arm. On another refugee boat, one young Tunisian had brought his own sheep. A lovely sheep! A breed of sheep I’d never seen in my life, spectacular. A thick coat of wool, very curly! Stupendous. But in the end, we had to put the animal down. There was no alternative.”

There were more foreigners than residents on Lampedusa, more than ten thousand refugees as compared to five thousand islanders. Fear and curiosity coexisted with mistrust and pity. The shutters remained fastened tight, or else they’d open to hand out sweaters and shoes, electric adapters to charge cell phones, glasses of water, a chair to sit on, and a seat at the table to break bread together. These were flesh-and-blood people, right there before our eyes, not statistics you read about in the newspapers or numbers shouted out over the television. And so, in a sort of overtime of aid and assistance, people found and distributed ponchos because it was raining out, or they cooked five pounds of pasta because those young people were hungry and hadn’t eaten in days.

Everyone had been abandoned to their own devices.

The following year, the Italian government proudly proclaimed the figure of “zero landings on Lampedusa” as if it were a medal of honor to be pinned to its chest.

“And it’s true,” Paola had assured me that summer in 2012. “No boats are landing here anymore. We didn’t even see any in the spring. And do you know why? When the refugee boats are intercepted they’re escorted all the way to Sicily, and that’s where the landings take place, far out of the spotlight. Which means: zero landings on Lampedusa. From a purely statistical point of view, the logic is impeccable. And yet, you see? The island is fragmented, in the throes of anxiety, tumbled and tossed in this media maelstrom, a hail of contradictions. People talk less and less and, when they do, it’s only to complain about concrete problems, such as the lack of a hospital, for instance, or the cost of gasoline, which here is the highest in all of Italy. And they point out, with a touch of bitterness, that all the attention is always focused on those who arrived over the water, while the everyday challenges that we residents face don’t really seem to matter to anyone, except to us.”

There was the vacation season, the real engine of the island’s economy, to get up and running.

From time to time, someone would shoot a furtive glance toward the horizon.

“Sooner or later, something will come back to these beaches,” a fisherman had told me. That prediction, shared by all the residents, came true the following year, on October 3, 2013. It was an event that outpaced even our wildest nightmares. A refugee boat overturned just a few hundred yards off the coast of the island, the waters filled up with corpses, and Lampedusa was overrun by coffins and television news crews. What had actually changed in the recent years, after all, were just the minor details. The corpses found in the fishing nets, for example, were simply tossed back into the sea in order to prevent the fishing boats from being confiscated and held in a subsequent investigation. The reports of alleged sinkings — alleged because the only sources were the words of those who had traveled on sister refugee boats — were only mentioned at the tail end of the newscasts. In the absence of a corpse, it’s always better to leave death confined to territories that everyone prefers not to explore. And yet, in the months that preceded the October tragedy, the everyday rescue work carried out by the Italian Coast Guard continued as always, people continued to trek across the Sahara, women continued to be raped in Libyan prisons, the refugee boats and the rubber dinghies set sail and were intercepted, or else they sank.

History certainly hadn’t stopped.

* * *

Davide Enia was born in 1974 in Palermo, Italy. He has written, directed, and performed in plays for the stage and for radio. Enia has been honored with the Ubu Prize, the Tondelli Award, and the ETI Award, Italy’s three most prestigious theater prizes. He lives and cooks in Rome.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

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