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ckneal · 3 years ago

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So, up until the last year, I was not actively involved in fandom on tumblr. All of my fan theories and fic ideas were created for the sole purpose of entertaining me and me alone. And as such, when I happened upon the midam and angel communities, I did experience a certain amount of culture shock when I found that some of the things that I had just taken for granted from the very first viewing of the show—didn’t even need to think about it, it just seemed to be right there—were contrary to the beliefs of the overall fandom. And today, I feel like airing out one of these for fun of it.

(And warning, this might be an unpopular take.)

Before discovering the midam community, I believed that Kate Milligan was aware of the existence of the supernatural and complicit in keeping Adam in the dark.

To be clear right off the bat, I am not purposing a Mary Winchester situation. I do not think that Kate was a hunter. But I do think that the chain of events that led to Adam’s conception may have had more in common with what Sam laid out at the beginning of Jump the Shark. I have two main reasons in thinking this.

The first reason, is simply this: John gave Kate his cellphone number. She just had it on hand when Adam decided he wanted to meet his dad twelve years down the line. That just seemed really weird. John Winchester is not exactly the stay-for-breakfast type, let alone the type to stay in contact with a one night stand in a backwater town. But you know who he DOES give his phone number out to? People who know that he’s a hunter, and who might recognize the signs of the paranormal and give him a call in the future. People he expects might lead to further cases.

The second reason is pertaining to the ghoul children. How did they know about Kate and Adam? John had not been to see Adam in a couple of years by the time of Adam’s death, and is implied to have been an infrequent visitor before that. Would the ghoul children have really been staking out the town for over two years before making their move? That seemed so implausible to me, personally, upon the first viewing of the show that I dismissed it outright, and with subsequent rewatches it seems more clear—from the way that the ghoul seems to blink and search for the answers every time Sam and Dean ask about Adam’s history, and with Denise when she asks if “Adam” would like his usual order—that, no, the ghouls had not been watching Adam and Kate at length because clearly the ghoul’s impersonation of Adam was not polished. Kate and Adam were killed by amateurs.

And, to me, the fact that they knew to go after Kate only made sense because, somehow, she was part of the hunt. Not as some nurse who stitched John back together after he hauled himself away from the scene of the crime either.

What I think happened, was this. The ghoul children said that their father was not a monster, and they were telling the truth. A monster named John Winchester came to town with all the motivation of an exterminator coming to take care of a cockroach infestation. He heard about a creepy crawly feeding on the dead, and harmless though the creature was, he was there to kill it. But remember the ghoul we later met in season 13. Ghouls aren’t always just weirdos hiding in the shadows with gore crusted onto their faces. They are perfectly logical beings, capable of being functional members of society, and I think that when John showed up, the ghouls’ father was able to get by in society, maybe changing faces every now and then, but definitely capable of going undetected. I think the reason the ghoul attracted attention at all was because he had two (or three—I still like to think there might have been three) children to support. The father himself might have been able to get by sparingly by munching on the same bit of corpse for months to keep his appearance consistent, but you can’t expect that kind of restraint from children. And maybe, building off that, the ghoul kept his children hidden, because who knows how their shapeshifting abilities translate when they’re young?

But I digress. I think the ghoul found out that John was there—perhaps even met John Winchester and just barely managed to keep his cool—and decided to switch tactics, and switch faces. I think the ghoul moved from feeding out of a cemetery to a hospital morgue. The morgue, of course, is more dangerous. There are a lot more people milling around all day and night, not to mention the security cameras, but the ghoul gets a job as a janitor, using their new face and name, and reasons to himself that it was just temporary until John Winchester left.

However, things became complicated. The ghoul had planned to pull this off by switching back and forth between two different faces, by eating from two different corpses, but at some point John connected the ghoul’s older persona to the case, went to the house, and found the stash. The ghoul’s children had only just managed to escape, and the ghoul was put on edge. He started to get sloppy in his panic. With few options, he makes the decision that he and his children will have to flee—but the fact still remains that there are four of them, and this hunter is stubborn. The further they can go before stopping to feed, the better their chances of getting away unfollowed. So, the ghoul, in his hospital persona, goes back to the hospital for one last food run. He tells his kids to stay put in the car, and stay below the windows. They may look like any ordinary kids, but he doesn’t want to take any chances.

When he goes inside though, the ghoul is finally caught in the act, stuffing body parts into a black trash bag—no one would have thought twice about him hauling things off to the dumpsters. He would have been homefree, if Kate hadn’t walked in.

Meanwhile in the parking garage, the worst happens: John Winchester arrives in the impala. The ghoul children see him in the rearview mirror, and they recognize the man who had broken into their home, and crouch down deeper into the backseat of their own car, even as they start frantically whispering. Their dad told them to stay put, but he was in danger and they needed to warn him!

Inside the hospital, the ghoul had Kate tied to a chair, and he’s stuck holding a scalpel in hand, fighting a battle on the inside, because he is not a violent man. He’s just a single dad trying to take care his kids, and he’s always been so, so careful, but now he’s been caught. Instinct says to kill Kate. If she’s dead, she wont be able to give out any details that might somehow help the hunter find him. But on the other hand, he had been working at the hospital for weeks now, and he liked Kate. She was friendly, nice. They talked a lot—but that’s why she might know something that could help John find him, some detail the ghoul wouldn’t even remember sharing, but that a lunatic like John Winchester could hyper fixate on. You never knew what might give you away with hunters. . .

John barges in and finds them while the ghoul’s still agonizing over the decision—Kate seemingly roughed up with the ghoul standing there, poised to cut her throat, and it’s all over for the ghoul. He fights John as best as he can, slashing with the scalpel and biting with a savagery that he had always thought himself above in the past, but his kids were waiting for him. . .

And unbeknownst to John Winchester and the ghoul, there his kids were, watching from the air vent overhead, out of sight, the way their dad had always urged them to move when they were in danger. They saw the murder, they saw Kate, and they saw the officer, Joe Barton, show up to sweep the whole mess under the rug, never knowing that two (or three) witnesses were huddled there, waiting for everyone to leave so they could crawl away, because if they moved any sooner they would have likely given themselves away, the way that they were shaking.

And that’s why I think Kate knew. I think that Kate was there at the final showdown, or at least present enough during the case that the ghoul children would have seen her, and would have known to look for her as well as Joe Barton when they decided to take revenge. I think that they saw Adam, and the pictures of John their house, and they did the math.

I think that Kate made a mistake in keeping Adam ignorant--regardless of whether it was her idea or John’s (though I’m gonna be real with you guys, I always thought it was Kate’s; I think John would have thrown Adam in the back of the impala and driven him off in to a life and guns, alcoholism, and bloodshed in a heartbeat if it weren’t for Kate)--because she made the same mistake that Mary would have with her children, in thinking that if you aren’t part of this life, it can’t hurt you. She was wrong.

#my thoughts #adam milligan #john winchester #kate milligan #ghoul adam

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misterghostfrog · 4 years ago

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So I was reading someones post about what if Jon went back in time to save everyone, and he managed it. He kept Martin away from Prentiss, he Kept Sasha alive, Tim never even know the unknowing existed and he never had Jons paranioa to ruin him. But They never knew, there was never those moments of bonding between the terror. Martin never had that moment when he realized Jon wasn’t just his shitty boss. And sure the assistants were close, but there was no room for Jon. And it gave me thoughts.

Under the cut bc I started to Ramble and it got Long, warning; its Big Sad Hours down there. No happy endings here.

Jon solves all these problems before they start, he fixes it without anyone ever knowing. The assistants are blissfully unaware, maybe he stops sending them on ‘real’ statement followup. The archives are a normal, safe job for all of them. Sometimes it gets too much, pretending he doesn’t know them. So he’ll record, mostly for himself. Sometimes for them, though he’ll never share. He sticks them all in Gertrude's old storage locker, where he knows they’ll never be found.

And then something goes wrong. He knows the unknowing can’t work, of course it can’t. But Nikola doesn’t, none of the avatars know. And Nikola still wants her skin. She still wants his skin, actually. And she’s not afraid to play dirty to get it, she’s hands-on like that. Because why stop at the archivist when he’s got so many lovely ignorant assistants?

So he fixes the problem before she can make good on her threats, she can’t be killed that easily. He knows. But she died during the unknowing, and there are some pretty simple steps to follow to replicate that result. He knows the easiest way to make sure it works is also a death sentence for him. But that’s a simple choice to make. Alright no, it’s not. He’s terrified of death, of dying. He doesn’t want to die, but he can lie to himself. He can delude and say maybe he’ll get another chance. And just in case, he makes sure the assistants know they can quit now.

Tim, Sasha, and Martin don’t know what to make of the news that their boss died mysteriously in an explosion. They know even less what to make of the notes he left them.

Clearly the ramblings of a very unstable man. They all knew Jon was a bit off but this... Well, they all know there’s something weird about the job. But the apocalypse? Really?

Sasha believes some of it, she’s worked in artifact storage. She’s seen what this stuff can do. But, well. Jon’s never come off as the most stable person, and with no proper proof to back up any of this there’s no reason for them to follow suit. After all she’s known lots of people to quit the institute, she even knows for a fact that Eric Delano did it when she was rooting through employee records for perfectly rational legal reasons.

Then Martin gets called up to Elias’s office, and gets the news he’s the new head archivist.

He tries to turn it down, but he’s offered a pay-raise and a promise that he can step down anytime if he doesn’t feel suited to the position. Elias just sees so much potential in him.

Martin tries to feel flattered and not thoroughly terrified by the way Elias says potential. He takes the promotion, after all, he can always step down if it’s too much.

He offers as much when he finds out Sasha probably should have been given the position, but she turns him down. It’s not his fault their boss is a sexist old bastard, and at this rate he’d probably just turn around and give it to Tim.

Things are normal for a few months. Until slowly a strange noise starts to be heard around the archives, a weird sort-of squishing sound with no source. Along with a metallic scent of meat.

An infestation, of course. They’re getting the problem worked on, or so Elias says. But aside from the occasional exterminator coming in to ‘take a look’ nothing ever seems to change. Weird statements start showing up on Martins desk, surrounding meat and twisted up things, eaten alive and wrong. Suddenly he understands how Jon went off his rocker so easily.

It’s hard to believe all this supernatural stuff as it’s suddenly getting crammed down his throat, after so long of the archives being normal in almost every sense of the word it’s like missing a step on the staircase. The more awful statements he finds- that Tim and Sasha confirm -the more he realizes how much his boss was hiding from them.

He wants to quit, he thinks about it, he tries to think about it. But he just, can’t.

It’s another or two month before it happens. Meat and bone and gristle erupt from the floor, taking on horrible mangled shapes of almost-humans reaching out with hands full of teeth and hungry.

They all survive, though Tim gets eaten up a bit more than the rest of them. And they’ll all have nightmares for the rest of their lives. They’re alive.

And they find Gertrude’s body, though none of them know how to feel about it. They’ve realized by now there’s something to Jon’s nonsensical ramblings. And they’re long past regretting not quitting before this all happened.

There’s a section of document storage that got uncovered during the cleaning,an old cot that was shoved behind some of the shelves, and a box that had a few sets of clothes, an old teacup, and a key. The cleaners say they burned the clothes, but the cup and the Key are given to Martin for him to keep to return to whoever left their things in the archive.

Neither of those items belong to Tim or Sasha, so they all assume they belonged to Jon.

They start following Jons footsteps, they find out he was a suspect in an arson case surrounding Carlos Vittery’s old apartment. Nobody was there except one unidentified body. He was arrested for trespassing on a dock, though no charges were filed. There was an incident that ended in the near arrest of one Jude Perry, though no charges were filed and she soon fell off the grid. And then he exploded using C4 he had no way of getting, Nothing concrete, no proper genuine evidence except a series of weird encounters their dead boss had.

Martin Decides to try and hunt down Jude Perry, it takes some time. He has a very nice cup of tea with one Micheal Crew. Who points him in a general direction and is just a bit weird about tall buildings.

Martin finds Jude, and asks her about Jon. She laughs at him, of course. But she tells him anyway. Jon was trying to have her arrested- no, not arrested. Killed. Officer Tonner would have seen to that, he knew one of the Hunt could do her in, well. At least of Officer Tonner’s sort anyway. Jude resisted, naturally. He escaped her clutches only barely, by running. Like a coward. And she escaped the policewoman by playing innocent. She’s still on her tail though, damn dog. It’ll be a long time before she’d rid of her, but she knows better than to run. Oh, he doesn’t know what any of that means, does he? Oh he really doesn’t, how sweet. Just a little baby archivist- she was going to kill him after this. But watching him stumble into his own ruin will be so much more fun.

She sends him on his way with a burn.

Martin is terrified, he genuinely tries to quit. Almost manages it before his computer shuts off. The others try too, and then they all have a lovely freak-out together.

They decide to try and talk to Detective Tonner, which proves easy. She’s the partner of the one who’s been interviewing them. She comes to the institute, and they ask her about Jon. She tells them they believed he was responsible for killing Gertrude, seeing as he was next in line. Martin accidentally Compels her into a statement, and then into admitting she's mostly just saying he killed her because dead men don’t put up fights.

She threatens him right then and there, though Basira comes in and intervenes before anything happens. He files a dispute with the station, and avoids the police after that.

Basira brings him some of the tapes, she says it’s an apology. He’s pretty sure she’s just trying to get him to drop the dispute in the weirdest way possible. He does learn some about Gertrude though, and through her what he’s dealing with. And something about an ‘unknowing’

A man named peter Lukas visits the institute, one of the doners. Elias says he wants to see how the archive runs, Lukas says a few choice words about it. And Martin tells him in the most polite of terms to shove off. Lukas threatens him, and very briefly makes him forget everyone he’s ever loved. And then tells him he got off lucky, and that Elias should have picked a better archivist. You can hardly trust someone so childish to run something as important as this now can you.

Daisy visits him in his home, and threatens him in much more physical terms now. She tells him if he tries to do what he did to her again he’ll get more than a scar.

After that it’s a bit unclear how he gets marked by the next two (Curruption, Stranger.) but he does.

There’s a delivery, a few weeks after the stranger mark. It’s not supernatural in any sense, just a young woman dropping off a small box in the archivists office. She says her name is Georgie, and no, she doesn’t know what’s in the box. She just had an old friend tell her to deliver it if he didn’t check in after a bit. Then she found out he died on the news, and then she hadn’t wanted to deliver them- clearly whatever was in the box was going to get someone killed. And she wasn’t scared of it, she wasn’t one for fear, but the thought of putting anyone in danger made her skin crawl. But she didn’t want it in her house, and she refused to be haunted be this box forever. And there was no reason to defy the poor guys apparent final wishes- wait, why was she saying all this again?

In the box was tapes, a dozen or so of them. All addressed to ‘the next head archivist’

It’s Jon’s voice, on the tapes. Talking to who he apparently assumes to be an entire stranger, explaining the fears. And how Smirkes 14 wasn’t wrong, but wasn’t right either. It tells the next archivist to avoid eyes, paintings, doodles, abstract representations, and to keep playing dumb. There’s a lot out there, and the more you know the worse it gets. There’s no fighting, don’t struggle the nets already around you. There’s a way out, but you’re not going to like it.

It gives an odd image of Jon, the man who awkwardly tried to make small-talk int he break room, only to shuffle away after it fell flat. Carrying this world-ending secret on his shoulders. Stiff, awkward Jon. Grim, sad Jon. not so far apart but still so far outside of what Martin had known about him.

What had Martin known about him?

Tim decides to quit, Sasha stays. Elias hires Melanie. Who turns out to be another connection to Jon.

Melanie says he was kind of a prick, he belived her about her Sarah incident, but refused to give her library access. Probably because he was sexist, or maybe just a dickhead. She’d been trying to learn more about her encounter for ages. And this was finally her chance. They try to explain the way out but she won’t listen.

Martin starts following Gertrudes tapes, things about the unknowing have been popping up on his desk lately, and it sounds like Jon was right about an apocalypse. He goes to america, gets a bit kidnapped, and meets Gerry. He offers to help, and then asks about the unknowing. Gerry points him towards the storage locker. And when he gets back He and Sasha and Melanie check it out.

It’s mostly empty, apparently somewhat recently cleared out. Though in the corner there’s a large box of Tapes. There has to be dozens of them, and when they pres play it’s Jon. Talking to them. Except it’s not them, it’s another version of them, and something this version.

And there’s another Jon to add to the mystery of a man he was. The jon on these tapes isn’t stiffly awkward or forcedly professional. He’s open, sad. He cries, he laughs at memories they don’t have. He apologizes, a lot. Too much really. He talks about time travel, about forgetting faces and losing friends.

“Sometimes I-I think- I can’t help but be a bit... upset. At how unfair it all is. You’re all happy and laughing and together and i’m-

i’m alone.

I suppose it must be some sort of- cosmic Karma, I doomed the world so in this new one bright an new I pay my penance in isolation.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. I doom the world- suffer its horrors, and get a little bit of time to taste what humanity would be like.

Or maybe i’m just not that likable without an apocalypse.

Probably says a lot about me either way.

Is it bad that I- I sometimes consider letting things play their course? W-without any of you dying of course I just... I suppose it is bad, to want to end the world because you’re lonely. Just because i’m a bit sad doesn’t mean the planet should suffer, no... maybe i’ll try and reconnect with Georgie, it’s been... well. No. Perhaps best not.”

Sasha says that if she knew she would have at least brought him out for drinks or something.

But they did sort-of know didn’t they? Not about the apocalypse, but about the loneliness. After all, nobody chats so awkwardly in the break room because they have a thriving social life.

“I’m going to kill Nikola tonight- i’m not going to die. I’m not. I didn’t die last time, a-and there’s no reason for that to change. T-there isn’t. I’m going to try and be a safe distance from the blast this time, too. But... Well, it’s not like I have anyone to miss me if I do go.

I suppose... Martin, if you’re listening to this- I... I miss you. You always did say I should be more open with my feelings, and it’s weird. To miss someone who’s right there. T-to look at a face and see a friend and a stranger. To love someone you’ve known for years who doesn’t even really know who you are.

It’s all very stranger, ironic really. Considering what i’m about to do.

I love you, and I miss you. I know you’re not listening, even if I did die you’ve probably long since quit. I hope you’re happy, whatever you’re doing. Happy and safe. All of you.

And maybe you are listening, maybe... maybe we do become friends, maybe you actually choose to talk to me someday. Maybe I tell you about all of this and... And you don’t think i’m mad. Maybe you let me take you out to dinner and we’d be together again. We’d never be like before- not that that’s a bad thing what with the eldritch horrors. There’d be bits missing, memories we don’t share- but, it would still be you... It’s always been you, I think. And maybe I've decided to give this to you as some sort of silly romantic gesture.

A-and in that case. I love you, Martin Blackwood. More than you’ll ever know.

[HE SIGHS]

When I come back, i’m recording over this.”

[CLICK]

But he didn’t come back. He died that night. He died loving Martin, who never even really knew him beyond passing awkward conversation. Martin doesn’t know how to feel about it, besides guilty that is.

The tapes point them towards Georgie Barker, the woman who delivered the other set to the archives.

Georgie doesn’t really want anything to do with them, she knows whatever they’re stewing in got Jon killed. But she tells them about her encounter with The End, though she’s tetchy afterwards. Martins finally starting to understand this whole compelling business and is feeling pretty sorry about it. He redirects, he starts to ask about Jon. Who he was, really. What she knew he was like.

They talk, Martins curiosity is part Eye and part knowing that someone loved him, really, really loved him. And feeling like he missed out, like he skipped a train he hadn’t known was there. And wanting to know what kind of person would- could love him the way Jon did. And why that kind of person could end the world.

They talk, Georgie explains why they broke up (clashing ideals, he didn’t believe in the supernatural and her trauma was so inherently tied to it. He was a sleep-clinger and she kicked when she dreamed) And why it took so long for them to break up (Jon was funny once you learned to get his jokes, the Admiral loved him, he had a weird way of caring that was really sweet) they talk about things, Georgie lets him hang out with her as long as he promises to keep the supernatural out of their conversations. And how is Melanie doing by the way?

Sasha has a hard time splitting her time in the archive and helping Tim. He can manage himself of course but it’s hard knowing he’s sitting in her flat alone, he’s getting back into publishing though. Sleeping easier now he knows that not only is he free of the eye, but Jon very much killed the thing that killed Danny. He only wishes he could have been the one to pull the trigger. Sasha is getting more involved though, the eye has it’s own grip on her.

They finally confront Elias. They know it won’t do any good, Jons tapes explained what he was, who he was. But they’re frustrated. Low on options. Jon never really explained what the apocalypse was- if Martins learned anything from the other tapes it’s probably because he forgot, thought he did somewhere and didn’t.

Elias isn’t entirely surprised that they’ve figured it out, he knew something was going on. Though he wasn’t quite sure what. He claims he knows what oncoming apocalypse Jon was talking about, and that he was likely underestimating the amount.

He sends them to Ny-Ålesund. And Martin views the black sun. Gets briefly taken hostage by Manuela. And gets “saved” by a man who pops out of a door to stab her.

He says his name is Micheal, and he’s not there to help. He does his whole distortion bit, confuses them. Stabs Martin when he tries to take his statement. Says he was going to kill him, but what happens next might be much better than death. And leaves after stating that he’s very excited to watch how the rest of this plays out.

They go back to the institute, and Elias says he must have been wrong. Oopsie. Anyway the web is planning a ritual you should go check out the spooky house from all these statements.

They meet Annabelle in person, Martin gets marked by the web.

This continues on for the end the slaughter and the buried. They finally confront Elias again about these wild goose chases, he claims innocence but he’s done it enough times they don’t believe him. They stop trusting Elias. Not that they ever really did, but they stop listening to him.

Melanie isn’t as angry as she was. Though she is still angry. She didn’t go to india so no ghost bullet, but she’s still trapped. Though she knows how to quit, it’s been a scary idea. But the longer she stays the more she realizes how low she is on options. So she quits.

Martin is angry, he’s exhausted, he’s confused. Nothing makes sense. And another one of Elias’s goddamn doners is visiting. A weird old man who, when he shakes his hand, makes him feel like he just dropped off a rollercoaster at a million miles into empty nothingness. He laughs when Martins regained himself, and says that that tricks better than a buzzer every time.

He visits Georgie again, he’s thinking about quitting. But he can’t figure out what the apocalypse he’s supposed to stop is, because according to Jon it’s pretty bad. And he’s the one who can stop, or maybe start, it. But he doesn’t know what it is.

He talks to Georgie about Jon some more, it’s funny, to grieve a man you already knew. Except four years too late. There’s a sort-of helpless frustration to it, every time he talks about Jon he wishes he could be learning this first-hand. Not from someone who hadn’t spoken to him in years before this.

He also finds himself glued to the tapes, he can relate, in a way. To Jons loneliness. To have a person so, so close but so far away. He wishes he could meet the Jon on the tapes now. Then neither of them would have to be lonely. But Jon is dead. And Martin... Martin might love Jon. Jon, who died years ago. A dead man who apparently loved him enough to consider ending the world for the chance to have a real conversation with him.

He goes back to work, frustrated and so, so lost. A million questions that genuinely can’t be answered. There’s a fresh statement on his desk. It’s a statement of Jonah Magnus, regarding stopping the apocalypse.

Certainly a goddamn roundabout way of giving Martin information, but he’ll take it.

He reads the statement.

The world ends.

Sasha, Tim, Melanie, and Georgie all get their own domains. And wander free in the hills of suffering. Martin is alone, well and truly alone. He ended the world, because he was too stupid and sad to read a few extra paragraphs before starting the tape.

But Jon went back, didn’t he? He went back in time and stopped this once. Maybe Martin can too. Maybe he can stop the flesh from attacking, maybe he can stop Melanie from joining the institute. Maybe he can meet the real Jon.

He goes back, he does it. Nobody remembers but him.

Nobody remembers but him.

And things keep happening he can’t have predicted.

Worms, Sasha is gone, Gertrude. It’s all wrong. And Jon isn’t the Jon he knew, he doesn’t know Martin, he doesn’t even like Martin. Nobody is the person he knew before.

He is alone. And things keep happening he can’t have predicted, worms tables and paranoia. He starts recording. Trying to follow in Jon’s footsteps and leave information behind, easier to access this time of course. In his flat, and he’ll have the key sent to the archives if something goes wrong. He’ll record until Jon trusts him enough to believe him, Maybe he’ll even stop him before it’s too late and he’ll never need to find out what happened at all. Maybe he can't get close as he was to everyone, but he can keep them safe.

He doesn’t get to finish his recordings, he wasn’t careful enough. Jonah catches wind and half the tapes are destroyed when he dies in a mysterious housefire. But what’s left does get delivered to the archives.

And the cycle continues.

#jonmartin #the magnus archives #tma #angst #writing #ghostly scribbles #Tma is a tragedy and so is this #not a proper fic more like a really weird outline

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bookandcranny · 4 years ago

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SAUSAGE SIMULATOR 2000

A single short burst of light, sound, movement. A rhythmic throbbing of the arteries. A dry edible seed, rich in protein, belonging to the legume family. A palpitation of the neck or wrist. A common feature on a blender.

If one day you happen to find someone lying prone and unconscious, the first thing you’ll do is check for a pulse. But even when that signal, that faint tickle of motion is gone, the brain may yet live on for minutes. It may live on even longer.

summary: A surreal scifi horror set In Another Time, Another Place, in which the narrator reminisces on some events, real and dreamed, whole and fragmented, that occurred during their time attending high school alongside their best friend.

word count: 4.3k

content warnings: Insects, parental abandonment, descriptions of gore and body horror

🦗🦗🦗

We give thanks for the grain, for without it we would have no bread. We give thanks for the vermin, for without them we would have no meat. We give thanks for the machine, for without it we would have no work.

The work is to preserve the law. Without the law, the vermin would devour the grain. Without the law, the machine would devour the vermin. Without the law, man would devour the machine.

-----

Sive dissects his sandwiches layer by layer. He’s probably my best friend, but the guy is so weird sometimes. Regardless, these are the moments I remember the most.

We’re on a field trip, our entire grade; it’s one of the few times we get to hang out during school hours, since Sive is in Class C this year and I’m in A. When we break for lunch, he comes over to sit with me on the crumbling stone wall without either of us asking. I take two sandwiches out of my bag and hand him one. He peels it apart and starts licking mustard off a pallet of pink Bugmeat©️.

Maybe it’s now, maybe it’s later. The moments blend together in my recollection, blurred by the years and the medication. I seem to recall a couple of other friends from my class sitting with us, talking and laughing, but whenever Sive is around the world seems to narrow to a single point of focus. He has a way of commanding the room’s attention, with the oscillating pitch and volume of his voice and his swinging hands, illustrating the latest gossip with all the fervor of a street preacher.

In theory, I understand why some of the other kids are afraid of him. He’s taller than maybe anyone I’ve met and the way he hunches his shoulders makes him look sort of looming. The way he talks and the way he smiles, lip curling back into something more like a sneer, doesn’t help. But he’s my friend, has been since we were small, and I know he’s no more frightening than a field mouse. Besides, while he may be tall he’s also rail thin, skin sucking on his joints when he moves, now more than ever. He inhales his sandwich in seconds, even with the picking and fussing that proceeds it, so I give him half of mine too.

I kick my legs over the side of the wall, looking down at the sloping gray-green mountainside. There are a few masses of rock hovering alone, pushed and pulled by rich natural deposits of magnetic ore. I know this place, the sight of it if not the significance. My dad must have brought me once when I was little. He likes these old ruins, but I never got the appeal and can’t really be bothered to listen as the chaperoning teachers drone on and on about its history. I’ll just take some scans and make a recording to study for the test that’s sure to ensue and call it a day. Better yet, glom some notes off of Elege-- she’s got the good pods, and I know she likes me. Then Sive will glom it off of me. Circle of life.

A boy to my left, Tez Walker, unthinkingly wipes his sticky hands off on his uniform shirt. I watch him with a sort of morbid fascination and when I turn back around Sive’s looking at me like he’s waiting for my input on something.

“Sorry, what’d you say?”

He rolls his eyes, big gray eyes. “My mom wired me some more money so we can go to the video park after school. You in?”

“If you’ve got money to see shows, how come I’m buying your lunch?”

“Come on, I don’t have enough for food and streams and rent.”

I hum a non-answer. “When’s your mom gonna come back anyway? Did she say anything this time?”

He shrugs. “Don’t know. I like living on my own anyway.” So long as nobody knows. It’s not technically legal, even though we’re both almost of age. I’m not even sure how he’s managed to keep it a secret thus far, big-mouth that he is. I might tease but I really don’t want to see him relocated to another district. It feels somewhat inevitable, with this being our last year and all, but I’m not ready to let go just yet.

“I’ll pay for the park if you use some of that money to get an exterminator,” I say, pointing at the reddened welt peaking out above his hip.

He pulls down his shirt with an almost guilty expression and laughs through his teeth. “Stop overreacting, it’s probably just acne.”

I give him a dubious look, and he meets it with another shrug.

“We eat bugs, bugs eat us. It’s only fair.” He flaps around the limp half-sandwich for emphasis.

I growl around a mouthful of my own. “Bugmeat©️ isn’t made of bugs. That’s crazy.”

“Uh huh, I think I see a leg in your teeth.”

I swing around and kick his ankle. “I’ll put a leg in your teeth.”

He laughs. He’s laughing. There’s mustard on the corner of his mouth. Yeah, these are the things I remember.

-----

I’m in study hall going over vocab with Elege when I hear the news. One of the first to know and the last to believe it, and even then I don’t trust the way the others tell it. Sive has been in fights before, I know, but only because some kids go out of their way to pick on him. They see his face and his towering stature and it makes them think there’s something to prove there. But while you wouldn’t know it to look at the two of us, I’ve always been the one to squash ticks and spiders for him while he squirms. I can’t imagine him breaking anyone’s nose, especially not without a good reason.

I want to talk to him, to get the truth, but he’s sent home on the spot and when I try to call him after class all he gives me are these curt half-answers and a warning.

“Don’t come over,” he says. He tells me I was right. There’s something in his apartment, roaches or rats or maybe some crossbred mutation of the two. Whatever they are, they're big and they’re bloodthirsty and he doesn’t want me to risk getting bit.

“If your apartment is infested you need to tell someone,” I urge him.

“If I do that, they’ll realize I’ve been living alone and try to move me. This place might be a shithole, but it’s my home.”

“What are you gonna do then?”

There’s a sound in the background of the call, like something heavy being dragged across the floor.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll take care of it.”

Over the days that follow I keep trying to reach Sive and eventually he agrees to meet me somewhere, just not the apartment. He hasn’t finished taking care of it, I guess.

We’ve been scoping out some of the abandoned buildings in the area for a while now, looking for a suitable lair. I first had the idea after we saw this show about urban explorers and modern treasure hunters scouring the skeletons of infested districts in their glimmering kevlar. One night at the park I even manage to glom a few episodes when no one’s looking and save them to my pod.

There’s this one part: One of the crew is walking in a precarious spot when the plates shift suddenly and clamp down around his ankle, crushing it until it more resembles sausage wrung out of its casing than anything human. The man screams and one of his teammates quickly cauterizes the flowering stump with a hot blade. He cleans and binds it and they keep moving, because staying put is more dangerous than pushing on with a missing limb. Sometimes when I’m restless at night, I mute that episode and play it on loop until I fall asleep.

All this to say, it’s not such a surprise when Sive tells me to meet him at the old annex attached to the east wing of the school. Supposedly they used to hold art classes and things like that over there before it got too expensive for them to keep it up. The few remaining cameras are in poor repair and the back entrance is mangled and rusty, making for easy entry. Sometimes the local pests will try to bite you there, but things will try to bite you everywhere and a thick pair of socks resolves the issue well enough. That’s the place where we’ll meet.

But that’s not how it happens. I push past the broken lock with ease and call his name, to no answer. There’s a pink twilight settling over the campus, refracting through tall tinted panes of stained glass. I walk from one end of the building to the other until I come upon the old music room, nothing left inside it but a dusty grand piano and shards of crystalline debris that crunch under my feet. The classroom is/was built like a fishbowl, windows all along the hallway so visitors could look in on the students without letting out the music.

I pick up one big piece of glass and hold it up to the light, but when I turn it around I only see myself, staring darkly. I wait and I wander, but it’s always just me. I leave when it begins to grow dark and I hear something moving in the empty halls.

-----

That’s one thing I remember. Here’s another:

I’m walking from the bus stop with Sive, just Sive. Just us. His eyes are bright and bruised with red. There’s a new cluster of those little bumps crawling up the far side of his neck, but he keeps that side of himself turned away from me. My parents aren’t home yet and I don’t have any plans so I walk with him all the way to his building.

It’s a squat concrete cube with littler cubes inside it, just like any of them. There’s some moss or lichen or something growing in the cracks, and at this time of night it looks almost like mold.

“Do you want to go inside?” I ask, when he lingers on the steps.

He shakes his head, silent in the way he never is. Something's clearly weighing on him. We go around the back to the parking garage and climb up onto the overhang. Sitting here, on a clear night like tonight, you can see everything from the Bug Burger to the distant radio tower. The moon sits bloated and bulging against the city skyline, an egg sac fit for bursting. Sive scratches the back of his knee. Our twin breaths turn to ghosts in the February air.

Sive turns and asks me, “Do you know what you’re going to do after graduation?”

“I guess.” My parents both went to the same college when they were my age, so I’ll be going there too. No reason not to turn down any advantage I can get. My grades aren’t bad, but they aren’t great either, and neither is our area code. “Did you pick a school?”

He doesn’t answer, which is an answer in and of itself. I try to change the subject and wind up spitting out the first thing I can think of.

“Have you heard from your mom?”

“No.” He won’t elaborate.

“When are you coming back to school?”

“Soon.”

“Did you really fight those guys?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Sive looks at me annoyed and instead of answering he says, “A counselor talked to me the day I got suspended. Did you know that?”

I don't. I didn’t.

“I was leaving the principal’s office and she took me aside and told me that with my record I might want to consider a future in security.”

My breath seizes in my chest. Suddenly I feel like I’m the one who was punched. “But you’re not gonna do it, right?”

The pause that follows feels like an eternity. “Nah, of course not,” he lies.

This isn’t actually the first time we’ve spoken about this, I recall. One night, after a particularly rough exam, he says something like, “At this rate I should just volunteer for security.” It’s a careless sentence, a tactless joke, but I laugh or pretend to laugh, assured he means nothing by it.

“It’ll turn around,” I tell him, and in the moment, I mean it with all my heart.

-----

On the day Sive returns to school, he gets written up for a uniform violation. I never know for sure why. Could be anything, an untucked shirt or an ink stain seeping through his pocket. Laundry and mending costs money, money that I know he doesn’t have since he stopped letting me buy him lunch. I try, but when I bring it up he says he hasn’t been hungry, and as improbable as it sounds I don’t think it’s a lie, at least not entirely. He must have found something else to eat.

We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about it at all.

-----

“I don’t love you, not like a partner, maybe like a brother. I’ve never had a brother, or any siblings for that matter. It’s always been just me. Except not really. No one is ever really alone. All you have to do is look around, look inside. Inside, there’s all this movement, all this warmth. And you see? That’s the cause of it all. It was in us from the start. It’s not even just the food we eat or the shows we watch, it has always been there.

“Did you know? I returned to our meeting place, that great vestigial organ, but I don’t think you could see me. You only saw your own reflection. It almost made me doubt that you were ever there at all. I don’t love you, but if you asked, I’d do just about anything for you. We didn’t used to need to ask, but right now, I really wish you would.”

-----

I don’t see my friend much these days. Weeks pass, then months. Sometimes he comes to school, enough to keep the threat of investigation at bay, but-- and I don’t know how to explain this, but even when he’s here he’s also not. Or maybe he is, and he’s just hiding from me.

I keep looking for him right up until the final day, but even then we’re divided by class and I can’t pick out his face in the crowd of all our classmates. We file into the gymnasium where someone’s set up a little wooden stage with a scuffed red carpet draped over the frame and opened all the doors, filtering out some of the stifling, sweaty air and letting in the summer scents of hot asphalt mingling with freshly laid turf.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit I don’t remember much of my highschool graduation. It seems like one of those things you’re supposed to remember, to hold and cherish years down the line, but in the moment all I know is it’s hot and crowded and I am painfully bored. The principal and vice principal stand up and give some speech while the students fiddle impatiently with their heavy, itchy robes. A girl standing in front of me quickly applies another layer of makeup to a bubbling red patch of acne on her chin. I watch her for longer than I like to admit before tearing my eyes away to search for Sive again.

He’s nowhere to be seen, but he has to be here. No one misses graduation because no one doesn’t graduate, no matter what other infractions they may have committed. My name is called, I receive my diploma, and that’s all. I return to my place and wait. I wait for one thing even as I tumble blindly towards another.

As the ceremony crawls to a close, the principal returns to the lectern at the center stage. He says,

“Before we wrap things up, I have one final announcement. This year a number of our graduates will honor their community by volunteering for the city security tract. Will the following students please come to the stage.”

My heart pounds. I know before I know, still I don’t start screaming until I hear his name get called. The animal grief punctures my lungs and bleeds out my throat in a rushing torrent, clawing and scraping. My classmates and their families all around me barely seem to react. At most they exchange some fleeting glances of pity and annoyance as I fall to my knees.

Someone touches my shoulders, to comfort or to quiet, then I’m being dragged away. Someone or many someones; I don’t know but I like to think I put up a fight. If I try hard enough, it might turn out different this time.

-----

I have this recurring nightmare sometimes. In it, I see myself, or the figment of myself projected into my own mind by an outside eye. Through that narrow watery lens, I see it/me standing in a beam of light. I’m hosting one of those nighttime shows where they used to read the lotto numbers. There’s a big lottery spinner made up of opaque, milky polygons and it tumbles with a sound like chattering teeth.

I turn the crank around and around and when the device finally spins to a stop it flails in my direction a sort of wet nozzle appendage whose shape reminds me of a shower head. I wrap my hands around its vermiform neck and wring a number from the puckered opening, but when I hold up the little white ball to call the winner, the number begins to morph and multiply into a string of numbers, and letters, and symbols I don’t recognize. I can’t divine the meaning and so I start to cry.

The ball splits open.

-----

NO NO NO NO STOP STOP IT NO NO NO STOP NO

-----

Ears ringing, vision swimming, I can barely make out my friend’s face as he steps out onto the stage. I writhe, I howl. I try to make him change his mind. Surely it’s not too late, I think. And I’m sure he hears me. He turns toward the crowd and as I’m pulled through the double doors I desperately will him to see me. He never meets my gaze.

Anyway, that’s all I remember. That, and one other thing but I promise, it will not bring you satisfaction.

-----

After I complete my first semester, I catch a train and vow to spend at least a few days pretending to enjoy my winter break back home before I ultimately retreat into the cradle of my studies. It’s strangely nostalgic to be here, even though chronologically speaking I haven’t actually been gone for very long. Time holds no dominion over feeling, however, no matter what people might tell you.

I am changed. I know that, I think I do. It’s all subjective I guess but the way I speak, the way I carry myself, even the way I dress has changed-- more pale patterned shirts, less muddy sneakers. My mom says I’m just in the process of acclimating myself to college life, that she went through the same thing when she was my age, and I don’t really have much choice but to believe her. Call it growing pains, I guess. Call it a new chapter, a fresh start. Call it anything that keeps you comfortable while you roll around in bed at night.

As I walk around the place I’ve known all my life, I find myself mesmerized by the sight of my white breath dissolving against the cornflower blue sky. I can’t remember the last time I saw a sky so clear. Maybe it’s that succoring sense of reminiscence that draws me back to the grounds of my old highschool. More realistically, it’s probably something to do with my recent change in medication. I’m technically not supposed to be walking alone like this yet; my head gets all fuzzy and I’m liable to get confused. The past bleeds into the present and back and forth and back again like a swinging pendulum, although that analogy, I realize, attaches an impression of consistency to the idea that the reality rarely lives up to.

It’s not all bad though. My focus has improved, and I’m sleeping less but I don’t feel as tired. My math scores have gone up by an average of seven points.

The path is still so familiar to me I could walk it blind, and I don’t realize just where I’ve come until I’m standing outside the front gate. It’s locked, for obvious reasons. Upon a second glance I notice that the school buildings themselves look quite different than I remember them. The dilapidated annex has finally been torn down for one thing. Disappointing. I linger regardless, tracing the perimeter, trying to put a name to this distant feeling of unease.

A shadow passes over my eyes and I smell rot. Rounding a corner I see a cluster of massive, chittering vermin gnawing on the fence where it’s gone red from oxidation. From a distance, from the right angle, their undulating black backs make it look as though the pavement is breathing.

Distantly, I know I should be afraid, but the fear doesn’t quite make it through the veil. One insectoid catches sight of me and rears back, flaring its rear wings and giving me a gurgling hiss of warning.

Before I can react, a security drone-- one of the Angel series, if I’m not mistaken-- descends upon the vermin and carves through them a gory swath of bright pink gristle. Their scattered serrated bits stay twitching where they lay. Some other dispatch from city security will be by in time to clean up the remains.

The bugs are getting so much bigger than they used to be. I have a theory about that actually, but there’s no one I feel like telling it to. It’s sad. This used to be a nice neighborhood.

The Angel series are still a pretty new breed, a hot commodity, recently introduced to the district in the wake of some new hives popping up. It’s honestly fascinating to see one up close like this, and more than a little frightening. At least eight feet of perfect patented genes, of muscle and metal, circuits like the most delicate seams running up the length of its thick fibrous limbs.

It starts to walk away, its work complete, and suddenly I feel this pressing need to stop it. It’s indescribable, the need, an emotion so strong after blank, dreamlike months that it's like a physical probing in my lower stomach. I stagger and trip in my haste, scraping the palm of my hand where I catch myself. The scent of blood emboldens some more common pests, tiny slug-like masses that poke up their pulsing head through the cracks and wriggle from the ground to get a taste. The drone exterminates them with ease as well. All the while I am searching the impassive Angel’s face for some sign of emotion, of recognition.

Bioengineering isn't exactly my field, but I’m not stupid. No, stupid's not the word-- naive. I know it may likely be only a small part of him in there, if anything at all, split into individual strands and laced throughout the makeup of a dozen distinct living machines. Security is very efficient, threshing away the superfluous husk of personality and, like a pot of simmering fat, rendering their creations down to the most basic, most useful parts. Only then are the fresh-cooked soldiers that come out the other side of this procedure truly ready to protect us.

There’s no reason to believe whatever shred of him that remains should know me. Still, selfish creature that I am, I stare into his/its featureless not-face and I search for my friend one more time. I search for big lip-curling smiles, patchy teenage stubble, gray eyes bright with laughter or tears. I would have him any way. I would have him on the worst days: dirty and hungry, bruised and bloodied and bug-bitten. I could even love him, I think. I could love him.

“Sive?” I ask. There’s a quiet rasp to my voice, a wavering uncertainty that shames me even now.

The Angel does not respond, but neither does it turn away.

“Look at me,” I beg, staring into my own reflection in the darkened visor. “Look at me.”

Another few drones drop down across the green, summoned by a signal from their kin. There’s a distressed civilian in need of escort. Of course, of course. These chimerical android creatures are almost completely identical, masses of matching sinew growing like vines around the mass-produced metal hulls, and nothing throbbing inside them but a singular purpose. I realize, abruptly, my foolishness and allow myself to be herded off the premises.

I’d like to say I looked back. Someone like me, forever sick with sentiment? Of course I would look back. That’s not what this is though. This is not closure. This is not an ending, not an exit or an epilogue. The food chain we worshiped back then was as immutable as it was self-serving, a rare form of autocannibalism that feeds everyone and nourishes no one. These still-twitching remains are, as I well know, just a memory.

#writeblr #short fiction #horror #surreal #scifi #original fiction #my writing #dystopia

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goalieprotectionsquad · 4 years ago

Text

so i’ve watched like three straight days of maine cabin masters and my idiot ass is thinking of the harringtons having a cute little cabin on a lake in maine where they went every summer as a family before his dad started making bank and didn’t have the time anymore.

it’s been seventeen years since steve’s been up there. he doesn’t live at home anymore. he has a job that doesn’t really make him happy, but doesn’t really make him miserable, either. he has plenty of savings from the government coverup but doesn’t have anywhere to go with it. nothing to spend it on. the kids get older. they leave for college. he’s in his mid-twenties and complacent and isn’t all that motivated to change anything.

he gets dinner with his parents when they’re in town in the spring. his mom is talking about a lodge they stayed in when they visited basque country over christmas and he suddenly remembers the cabin. he waits until his mom is done relaying unimportant details like the color of the drape tassels to ask his dad if they still have the cabin in maine, and it’s evident on his face that he’d forgotten about it, too. he looks sort of wistful for a moment but it passes quickly. yeah, they still own it. no, nobody’s been up there in a while. steve doesn’t really think before he’s saying, “can I take a trip up there?”

his parents stare at him for a second like they’re surprised he’s actually interested in doing something, which. not unfair. his dad can’t remember where he put the keys but gives steve the address and tells him to find a locksmith who can get him inside. (steve plans on elbowing through a window or something to save on time and the hassle).

he subleases his apartment and leaves. everyone he likes is either away at school or just. away. moving on with their lives. he doesn’t have anyone to say goodbye to beyond telling his boss he’s quitting.

it takes a while to get up there, but he does, eventually. the cabin is hard to find and it looks so bad on the outside that steve has to triple check the address on the adjacent cabins to make sure it’s the right place. he thinks it’s maybe not just him who hasn’t been here in almost twenty years.

he stays in a hotel and gets up early to meet the contractor. she looks like she’s holding in a laugh when she introduces herself as kali. “look,” she says. “I’m going to be straight with you. this place is literally falling apart.”

steve doesn’t know what to say so he says, “yeah.”

“we can do a walkthrough,” she continues, “but I guarantee that this is going to make your budget look like pocket change.”

steve doesn’t really want to say it’s his dad’s money, so he shrugs and says, “let’s do it,” and watches her pick the lock.

the foundation is rotted out. the floor is rotted out. the porch is rotted out. she points at things and says any variety of that has to go or we’d start by taking that out or when was the last time you were up here again? they need to hire a plumber and a landscaper and an electrician and probably an exterminator, too, and kali doesn’t say anything when she watches him write a check for half the amount she quotes. she gives him a calculating look with kohl-rimmed eyes and says, “all right. we’ll be here tomorrow morning.”

steve shows up at seven because he doesn’t have anything better to do and there’s already a truck parked outside. a tall guy with a beanie shoved low over his forehead is tearing the porch off the front of the house and steve goes over to him and tries not to get hit with any falling debris.

“hi,” he says and has to stand there a minute before the guy looks at him. “I’m steve. is kali around?”

she’s inside the cabin and is leaning over the sink when steve walks in. she yells no. no. no. out the open window to her right as the water continues to run and then yes that’s it we got it as it cuts off abruptly. she looks unsurprised when she turns around and sees him standing in the doorway.

“hi,” he says again. “I’m here to help.”

“you’re paying us to do this for you, you know,” she says, but something in her face makes steve feel like she gets it.

a guy with his hair pulled into a tight bun at the nape of his neck hoists himself through the front door from where the porch used to be. “hey,” he says, all silk, when he sees steve.

“billy, this is steve harrington. the homeowner.” she stresses the word enough that steve literally cannot not notice the emphasis. billy rolls his eyes and shakes steve’s hand. it’s rough with calluses and steve would be stupid not to think about what that would feel like on his skin.

“billy hargrove,” he says. “head carpenter.”

“steve’s here to help with demo,” kali says.

“well,” billy says. he gives steve one of the most obvious once-overs he’s ever seen. “welcome aboard. you’re gonna help me knock down these interior walls, pretty boy. heads up, though. you might break a nail.”

billy shows him how to use a stud finder and how to cut into the walls to make sure there aren’t any loose wires running through it and then he fucking kicks the wall in and gives steve a wild grin as the drywall dust settles into his blond hair.

steve comes back every day to see billy. he doesn’t even bother lying to himself. billy is funny and sharp and always seems to have a comeback for anything anyone ever says. he shows steve how to build things. stands at his shoulder and watches him use the staple gun on the trim. brings him lunch when he goes out to get food for the rest of the crew.

he tells steve that his mom sent him to live with a friend who had moved from san diego to bangor a few years before. his parents split and she didn’t want him living with his dad. he says susan is a little ditzy but she means well, and she didn’t give up on him during his rougher years in high school even though he isn’t even her kid. he calls her daughter my sister and gets a pinched expression on his face when he talks about how she’s been going through her teenage angst since she was eight and how they’re still figuring out how to not always be at each other’s throats.

it takes a month for them to take out the rotted lumber and to fix the foundation and floor and porch and roof. billy shows steve the crumbly mess in the insulation that means he has an ant infestation. steve helps make the framing for the bathroom and bedroom walls and helps lay the stones for the walkway down to the lake. he spends all day at the work site, then he goes back to the hotel, has dinner, crashes. rinse and repeat. he spends the days the crew isn’t working exploring sort of idly and missing the smell of sawdust.

when kali declares the place habitable, he buys a mattress and drops it onto the floor of the master bedroom, which is still missing its walls. he checks out of the hotel and buys some groceries and spends his evenings down at the lake, his own private little waterfront. he tries reading but the only salvageable book in the cabin is walden and he can’t make it past the first page.

he hears axel and mick talking about a meteor shower one night. once the crew is gone and the sky is turning purple-navy, he goes down to the lake and lays back to look at the stars. they’re brighter out here, brighter than hawkins, somehow, and the sky feels endless.

he turns to look over his shoulder when he hears footsteps crunching through the undergrowth in his direction. “just me,” billy calls through the dark. he drops down heavily next to steve and passes over a beer and a hamburger wrapped in greasy foil. casual, like they do this all the time. his hair is down and curly and he’s wearing a red shirt unbuttoned to his navel, where it’s tucked into his jeans. he’s wearing cologne, too, and billy smiles when he sees it get steve’s attention.

they talk and they sit in comfortable silence and then they talk again. billy seems to be getting closer and closer until their shoulders and thighs are pressed together and their elbows are knocking. when billy turns to look at him, their noses almost brush, and steve knows billy doesn’t miss the way his eyes drop to his mouth.

“have you swam in the lake yet?” he asks instead and gives steve a wicked smile when he shakes his head, and then he’s up and stripping down and is in the water, wet hair slicked back over his head, before steve’s brain has even puttered beyond looking at billy’s mouth. “come on it, pretty boy! water’s fine.”

he unabashedly watches steve undress and reaches for him immediately once he’s in the water. no preamble. just. puts a hand on his hip. when steve doesn’t move back, he slips an arm around steve’s waist, and then the other. their knees bump under the water and billy noses at steve’s cheek. kisses him on the chin and the corner of his mouth before he kisses his bottom lip. they kiss and kiss, the water not even up to their collarbones, and steve has never been so aware of the night noises around them. cicadas in the trees. a loon some ways away. something shrieks in the distance and it startles steve enough that he stumbles in billy’s grip, and billy tightens his hold and tilts his chin closer again and whispers, “it’s just a fisher cat,” into the crease of his lips.

they start heading back to the cabin before billy makes them double back for the food wrappers and beer bottles and steve grabs their clothes so he has something to do with his hands. he’s never run naked through the trees before but there’s something freeing about it. for some reason, the trees out here don’t look as threatening as the ones in hawkins. maybe they’re older, wiser. maybe they’ve seen more and know how to protect him and billy from whatever else is out there.

steve clears away the painting tarp over the bed and barely has it on the ground before billy is crowding against him, skin dry but hair dripping at the ends over his freckled shoulders. they lose track of time in a cabin they rebuilt together.

billy’s hand on his chest is what wakes him up. the sun is filtering in through the windows and billy is trying to press a mug of coffee into his hands. steve doesn’t own mugs or coffee or a coffee maker out here. steve sits up and leans against the wall, right where they’ve sketched out the custom headboard billy’s going to help him carve, and lets the blanket pool around him in a way that has billy’s gaze dropping, the apples of his cheeks going a little pink. he looks good in the morning sun, in the little bits of dust floating through the air.

“where’d you find the coffee maker?” steve asks. “and the change of clothes?”

billy gives him a big shark smile but sounds a little sheepish when he says, “I was hedging my bets on needing morning provisions.”

steve makes them eggs and bacon and toast and they sit out on the new front porch to eat and wait for the rest of the team to show up. billy keeps leaning in to kiss his ear, the hinge of his jaw, the side of his neck. just pecks. they still set steve on fire.

billy stays that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. they go swimming for real, eventually, and play cards, and fall asleep outside in the grass with their fingers twisted together. out in the open as much as in their own little world.

kali knows something is going on between them, even if steve doesn’t know if billy told her or she figured it out herself. when it’s just the three of them in a room, billy likes to pitch his voice down, low enough to be husky, but loud enough to be overheard, and gives steve directions more gutturally than usual. pull out a little, he’ll say, all breathless, when they’re fitting the doorframes. now push it back in. harder. mm, yeah, steve. right there. steve doesn’t know if it’s meant to be embarrassing or not but he laughs himself red in the face anyway.

they finish the cabin over the next six weeks. if steve hadn’t been there every day for almost three months, he might have thought he’d gotten the address wrong. it looks like a house, first of all. the outside is a soft brown to blend into the trees. there’s a little living room with a couch and a little table with two artfully mismatched chairs in the kitchen. there’s a huge window in the master bedroom overlooking the lake. steve has never really felt drawn to the water as a non-great-lakes-midwestern kid, but every time he looks out over the lake, he wonders if he even wants to go back to hawkins.

it feels weird giving kali the second half of the payment, knowing he won’t see her again. he hugs her and she pats him awkwardly on the elbows until he lets go. one by one, the rest of the team leaves, and it’s not until steve’s standing alone in the fading sunlight that he realizes that billy’s gone, too.

it’s the first time billy’s just left without saying anything about where he was going and when he was coming back. that deep, dark part of steve says they were just fooling around during the job, but he drinks a beer and talks himself out of panicking. he makes himself a sandwich. lays in the bed. showers. doesn’t really know what to do with himself now that the job is done and billy is gone.

he’s laying on the couch and staring up at the ceiling when the sound of a key scraping in the lock has him on his feet on instinct to do -- something, he didn’t really think that far ahead -- but then the door wedges open and billy’s head appears around it.

“sorry,” he says when he sees steve still gaping. “didn’t mean to scare you. we just -- kali forgot to give you back your spare.”

steve watches him reach out and hang the key ring around the hook next to the door. it overlaps steve’s set.

“oh,” steve says. “thanks.”

billy gives him a little smile and looks like he’s going to leave, but then they’re both saying wait in the same moment and billy’s smile reappears around the door, wide but shy.

“stay,” steve says.

billy slides the rest of the way past the door. he has a small duffle thrown over the shoulder steve couldn’t see behind the door and he’s holding a bottle of cheap grocery store champagne.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” billy says. now that steve’s shown his hand, it’s like billy’s found his footing again. he drops his bag and goes over to the cabinet to pull out two mugs, sets them on the counter. he wraps an arm around steve where’s he’s drifted over without really meaning to. billy kisses the corner of his mouth and presses the bottle into his hands. the foil is already peeled off the cork. “I heard you’re celebrating a housewarming. you wanna do the honors?”

#harringrove #i'm so mad this was supposed to be short but then it was 2700 words #i like. cannot stop watching this show #ryan reminds me so much of james harkin lol #i've only been to maine once and only to portland but i have had friends from maine #and my college best friend went there every summer and always showed me pics of how beautiful the sky is there at night #also sorry if my rehab timeline is off LMAO #sorry but also not sorry #also billy has toooootally developed a little bit of mainer accent lol

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trans-estinien · 4 years ago

Note

🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊 TELL ABOUT OC FREN

OK BUCKLE UP IT'S INCOHERENT RAMBLING TIME (WARNING THIS GOT LONG WHOOPS)

MMM I think it will be about how Lokris (My Titan) met The Young Wolf, and joined the Iron Wolves! (Their Fireteam)

So! A little backstory first: Lokris (Also known as Loki) was, in his previous life, one of the awoken loyal to Uldren Sov after Mara's 'death.' Which... If you didn't know, Uldren basically slaughtered all of them. So anyways, Loki ended up dying (By screebs, this isn't relevant but it's funny) and being revived as a lightbearer, by Helix!

Helix is a little ray of sunshine and thinks everyone deserves the best... Often to his own detriment. Poor lil' guy almost got snatched up by Spider a few times while searching for his guardian out on the Reef.

Helix was warned time and time again by other ghosts that going to the Reef was basically a death sentence, but Helix was so sure his guardian was out there, he went anyways.

And he was right! His guardian was there!

Loki may have been a mangled corpse corrupted by dark ether at the time, but he was there!

Loki still has a ether burn scar on his chest that, no matter how many times he's brought back, never goes away.

He was raised about a year and a half before Season of the Hunt, and was basically left stranded in the middle of the Reef, not even knowing his own name. Helix tried to explain everything the best he could... But he's not very good at explaining stuff.

They hid out in what was, unknown to either of them, Loki's old home, since most of his family's possessions were either destroyed or stolen. It was also infested with Scorn, so they didn't hide there for long.

After a few days, he was found by a lone Eliksni maurader by the name Kolkyris.

At first she was afraid of him, since he was a lightbearer and all, but once she noticed he had no clue what he was doing as a lightbearer, she decided to basically adopt him. She also gave him his name, since she felt he deserved one.

(If you guys want I can make more posts about my ocs I LOVE talking about them and I have tons of lore for Kolkyris and her gang)

After a bit of convincing, Kyreks, the captain of the gang, said they could keep Loki around, and he became fast friends with all the gang members, growing close to them and going on plenty of adventures. They were family.

Cut to Season of the Hunt.

Loki was out with his gang one day, just sorta, existing on the Tangled Shore, when one of their members, Ravyks, who had always had an interest in hive magic, came across a cryptolyth. Yes, one of those cryptolyths. For days they tried what they could to see what the cryptolyth did... And it worked. They managed to summon a Wrathborn. The Wrathborn quickly tore through the gang of only 8 members. Killing all of them but Ravyks and Kolkyris. Ravyks took for the hills the second people started dying, while Kolkyris managed to escape through sheer luck.

The rest of the gang wasn't so lucky. (Don't worry tho!! I have plans for them.)

Loki watched as they all died one by one, and no matter how many times Helix brought him back, he couldn't save them.

And boy was he mad about it.

He managed to take down the Wrathborn that murdered his friends, but only after they were gone and he was the last one standing.

He was so lost without them, so confused, that the only place he could think of going now was to the one place he probably shouldn't go.

He went to The Spider.

Loki had heard of the lightbearer that Spider had taken under his wing, and he thought just maybe they could help.

With what exactly? Revenge. Burning down every cryptolyth until there were none left. Exterminating the Wrathborn.

There, he met The Young Wolf, and The Crow.

After a few success Wrathborn Hunts, The Young Wolf realized: 'hey, I can bring this new light I just met to the tower, since he's not, y'know.... Since he's not Uldren'

So he did, and there Loki met Kai, and boy did they hit it off immediately! (Quite litterally BC I ship them :3)

Later on, during Season of the Chosen, Loki met Lord Saladin, and Saladin taught him how to properly use the arc subclass and solar subclass. His favorite is the giant flaming Battle Axe of doom.

Saladin saw how he got along with The Young Wolf and Kai, plus how he fought, and came to him one day, offering to let him train to join the Iron Lords. He may not know much about them, but he knows that they're super awesome since two of his new besties are Iron Lords themselves.

So yeah! That's all I got for Loki without going into spoiler territory because I may or may not attempt to write something abt my YW and Crow, which features him.

#i apologise for the read more not working I'm on mobile while writing this #ill fix it tomorrow #destiny #destiny 2 #destiny oc #long post #lokris #answer

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ryqoshay · 3 years ago

Text

Putting on Hairs: Audition Day

Primary Pairing? Trio?: YuuAyu... Setsu? Words: ~4.2k Rating: G, maybe light T for some implications? AU: Theater, Werewolf, Werebeast, Monster, Cryptid, Angel, Demon, Eldrich Horror

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Author’s Note: I’ve no idea how real theaters work, so anything that may be off with the timeline or proper procedure or whatever, I’ll just have to excuse as author ignorance, or handwave away by this theater being different, in many ways. That said, thank you lonelypond for fielding the questions I’ve sent thus far.

----------

“Ayumu!” A voice called from a few rows up. “Up here! Up here!”

“Yuu-chan?” Ayumu had to consciously keep her own volume down due to her surprise on seeing her girlfriend. “Shhh!” She added, holding a finger to her lips.

Yuu simply chuckled in response as Ayumu moved up the aisle. Well, it wasn’t like the twin-tailed girl was being any louder than the blonde sitting nearby. Ohara, was it? The theater’s patron, or one of them at least.

“I saved you a seat.” Yuu said with a grin as Ayumu reached her.

“Thank you.” Ayumu replied as she sat.

She was pretty sure they both knew the gesture was unnecessary as there were literally hundreds of empty seats, but it was the thought that counted. Ayumu loved that part of Yuu, always seeking little ways to make her feel special, even simple and unnecessary ones.

As for why the seats were empty, it was because this was merely an audition session. The only people in the theater today were cast and crew. And the cast were all up on stage, ready to make their bids for their potential roles. Well, all but the two leads, Yazawa and Nishikino, as they had been brought in specifically for their star power and were also sitting in the house with most of the crew.

Also, not everyone present was theater staff. There was of course, Ohara, the patron, and her driver, Matsuura. And there were the two from the catering company that had brought lunch earlier, Honoka and Rin, who insisted Ayumu refer to them by their given names when she spoke with them during the meal. She wasn’t quite sure why they were still around as they had finished cleaned up a little while back.

“I didn’t expect to see you here, Yuu-chan.” Ayumu whispered as Dia and Umi prepped the future cast for their auditions. “How did you even get in?”

“I told ‘em I was Ayumu’s girlfriend.” Yuu shrugged. “And they obviously figured out what I am, which probably helped. Although speaking of that…” She glanced around quickly, sticking out her tongue a couple times. “I’m pretty sure everyone here is like us. I don’t remember them advertising that they were only hiring monsters, but… oh sorry, supernatural beings.” She corrected.

Ayumu let her grimace relax. She had never liked the term monster as seemed to carry more negative connotations than other similar terms. And while Yuu was usually careful to avoid using the word, so many of their fellow cryptids used it that Ayumu couldn’t really fault her girlfriend for accidentally using it as well from time to time. Of course, that still didn’t mean she had to like it.

“But I don’t think there’s a single full blood human here.” Yuu continued. “And man, what a mix.” She flicked out her tongue again. “I’m getting a bit of everything. There’s gotta be a werewolf among them. And someone with feathers. At least one undead. I’m getting a bit of sea salt, so there’s probably a mermaid or the like. Sulfur, brimstone, so maybe a demon, or other fire creature I suppose, maybe both. And…” her brow furrowed, and she held her tongue out for longer than usual “that’s odd…”

“What’s odd?” Ayumu pressed.

“I don’t know. There’s something… else… here.” She shook her head. “I’ve never smelled anything like it. Heat. Flame. But not like any I’ve ever known… It’s otherworldly, and yet, not unpleasantly so. Huh…”

“Oh, I think they’re starting.”

“Right.” Yuu turned her attention to the stage where a young woman with long brown hair with some tied in a bright red ribbon was about to begin.

If Ayumu remembered right, the young woman’s name was Osaka Shizuku and had graduated alongside Nishikino Maki from Waseda, a prestigious school known for its arts degrees. For her audition, she had chosen to recite and act out a dramatic monologue in English. Ayumu felt like she had heard the lines before, though not on stage. Perhaps a movie? In any case, Shizuku left little doubt as to her skill and training, leaving Ayumu rightfully impressed.

Next up was… Nakasu Kasumi? Ayumu knew she had seen that face before. The young woman had appeared in a handful of television commercials, usually cute things aimed at a certain female demographic. Ayumu had actually purchased a few items promoted by Kasumi. As such, it came as little surprise that Kasumi’s audition resembled one of those cute commercials.

The next few auditions were a bit of a blur for Ayumu. It didn’t help that she was far less familiar with their names and faces.

But then, she stepped onto the stage. A short, raven haired young woman with an aura Ayumu could only describe as passionate. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Yuu sit up straighter as she seemed to sense something about this girl. Like the previous several others, Ayumu wasn’t familiar with this one, but something about her held her attention.

“Yuki Setsuna, was it?” Umi read from her list.

“Yes.” Setsuna confirmed.

“And what do you have for us today?”

“Well, I read the script and really enjoyed one character, so I would like to recite a few of her lines.”

“You’ve already memorized lines from the script?”

“Yes.”

“The script you were just given earlier today?”

“Yes. It was just so~ good. I couldn’t put it down.” Setsuna seemed to be actively holding back her excitement.

“Impressive.”

In a nearby seat, an orange-haired girl bounced a little, seemingly excited by the admission. Perhaps she was the one who had written the script?

“Oh, I may have also added a few lines.” Setsuna admitted. “I believe they fit the character.”

Umi gave a glance toward the orange-haired girl behind her who nodded enthusiastically.

“Very well.” Umi turned back toward the stage. “Carry on.”

Setsuna closed her eyes and took a deep breath before releasing it slowly. When she opened her eyes again, her entire demeanor had changed from restrained excitement to a fiery passion. Even from several rows up, Ayumu felt she could see flames in the young woman’s eyes.

Suddenly, Setsuna struck a dramatic pose. “At last, I have found you, foul beasts!” She practically shouted, pointing to somewhere else on stage.

Ayumu jumped a little in her seat, having not expected the outburst. She heard Yuu giggle quietly beside her.

“It is I, Artemisia Ullrin! Hunter of Horrors by trade and Collector of Cryptids by hobby.” She held her hand to her chest as the belted the lines proudly. “By order of Lady Lycaonian, I am to exterminate the infestation of werebeats suffered by her lands. You are welcome to resist, though I assure you that you shall lose. However!” Setsuna emphasized her lines with exaggerated gestures. “I offer an alternative! Surrender and be added to my collection.”

As melodramatic as the performance was, Ayumu couldn’t deny that it was quite entertaining. She watched in amusement as Setsuna skipped ahead to what she assumed to be a battle scene where she called out attacks like a cheesy hero show for kids. She knew the production was intended to be a little tongue in cheek, but Setsuna seemed intent on not just chewing, but flat out consuming the scenery, happily.

And then, seemingly all too soon, it was over.

“Bravi! Bravi!” Mari cheered, loudly, as she stood up from her seat. “Bravissimi!”

The orange-haired girl joined in standing as well, clapping and laughing. Then Yuu stood, as well several others.

“Thank you, everyone.” Setsuna bowed before standing back up with a beaming smile.

“<Where in the world have you been hiding,> Secchan?” Mari exclaimed in English

“Se-Secchan?” Setsuna blinked.

“Really, you were perfect!” The script writer added. “I love the new lines! I’ll be sure to add them!”

“It would appear you’ve earned a few fans.” Dia spoke next, fairly coolly and calmly, though Ayumu was certain she detected a touch of amusement in her tone. “That will undoubtedly play in your favor when we make our final casting decisions.”

“Thank you.” Setsuna bowed again before moving off stage to allow the next audition to proceed.

“Alright, next we have…”

Whatever else Umi was saying was lost to Ayumu as hands grabbed her shoulders.

“That was amazing!” Yuu did he best to keep her volume down. “That really got my heart racing! Actors are amazing! Theater is amazing! Ooo… I want to meet Setsuna-chan in person now!”

“-chan?!” Ayumu balked.

“I can’t wait to see the production!” Yuu continued as though she hadn’t heard Ayumu. “How long did you say it would take?”

“Well, it’s a musical, so that apparently adds more time.” Ayumu recalled. “I think I remember either Umi or Dia saying they were slotting for twelve weeks before opening night.”

“Twelve weeks?” Yuu visibly deflated a bit. “That’s like three whole months! I don’t think I can wait that long…”

Ayumu chuckled at her girlfriend’s newfound obsession. She’d seen this dozens of times before as Yuu would latch onto and hyper-focus on some new hobby or interest. “Maybe we can find some old clips of plays performed by the other Sonoda or Kurosawa theaters?”

“That’s a great idea, Ayumu!” Yuu’s eyes sparkled like emeralds. “Let’s do that tonight.”

“Alright.” Ayumu nodded in agreement.

Satisfied, Yuu settled back into her seat to watch the ongoing audition.

For her own part, Ayumu found her thoughts drifting. Artemisia? Ullrin? Lady Lycaonian? Mythology was not her strong suit, but it sounded like that wasn’t the case with the script writer either. It was almost as if she had simply Googled something about werewolves and just went with the first result that came up. Also, wasn’t Artemis already a woman? Did her name really need an -ia at the end to make the character female?

Well, the showrunners seemed fine with the ideas and the script writer and at least one of the actors were excited about them. So, who was Ayumu to judge? It wasn’t as if she herself hadn’t been entertained by Setsuna’s performance.

Setsuna… -chan… Ayumu glanced at her girlfriend. She had seen Yuu fawn over fictional woman before, but this was a first time she remembered her doing so over a living, breathing woman. And for some reason, that bothered her. Was she jealous? Ayumu shook her head to clear it of such thoughts. She was probably overthinking things and being insecure. She and Yuu had been happily dating for several years now. She shouldn’t be worrying about losing her at this point… right?

----------

“Yuu-chan, wait!” Ayumu protested as her girlfriend pulled her through a door clearly marked Employees Only. “We… I mean, you shouldn’t…”

“I just want to meet Setsuna-chan and thank her for the wonderful performance.” Yuu responded, not letting up her pace.

They rounded a corner and…

“Takasaki Yuu-san.” Dia stated solemnly as she stood in the center of the hallway.

“Oh, hi!” Yuu responded cheerfully. “You’re one of the women I met at the front door and decided to let me in. Dia-san, right?”

Dia blinked, obviously not expecting Yuu to skip a level of formality. But Yuu had been like that for the entire time Ayumu had known her. Still, Ayumu winced as she wondered how much trouble they were now in.

“Yes…” Dia confirmed.

“Right. Thank you again for letting me watch the auditions today.” Yuu continued. “They were amazing! My heart was racing pretty much the entire time. Especially with Setsuna-chan’s.”

There she goes again with -chan…

“Yuki-san did indeed give us quite the performance.” Dia agreed. “Anyway, as I was about to say, Takasaki-san, you are not employed here.”

“Nope. Not yet.” Yuu grinned.

“Not yet?” Dia raised an eyebrow.

“This whole experience has been so inspiring that I want to apply to work here.”

Ayumu also raised an eyebrow. That was news to her.

“You wish to become an actor?” Dia inquired.

Yuu shook her head. “No, I don’t really want to be on stage; I’d rather watch from the audience. But I can’t help wanting to support the amazing members of your cast in whatever way I can.”

“I see.”

“I could haul supplies around.” Yuu suggested. “Oh, I’m pretty good with my hands.” She held them out for emphasis. “So maybe I could help assemble sets or props? Ayumu has taught me a thing or two about hair and makeup, so I could definitely help her. Oh, and I worked a while as an editor for my college newspaper, so maybe I could go over the script and help there? And I did some composing for the band and orchestras, and even learned to play a couple instruments, like the piano, so I could help in the pit as well.”

Dia nodded. “I think I am starting to understand. You are essentially a jack of all trades.”

“Master of none.” Yuu confirmed.

“But better than a master of one.” Dia completed.

“Right. I’m no specialist, but I’m pretty good at picking up the basics.”

“Yuu-chan is a fast learner.” Ayumu added.

“I see.” Dia nodded. “Then I would suggest you get a resume in order and send it our way. Uehara-san should have the contact information.”

“Oh, I have that already. I was actually the one who found this place and recommended that Ayumu apply. I probably would have applied as well at that time, but I had a job then.” Yuu shrugged. “But they decided they needed to cut costs, and as I was the most recently hired, I ended up being part of that cost.”

“Well, I admire your enthusiasm and desire to help my cast and crew.” Dia smiled. “I shall look forward to working with you soon. Now, if you will excuse me, there are matters to which I must attend elsewhere.” That said, she stepped past the couple and moved down the hall.

Ayumu released a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding. So… Dia wasn’t kicking them out after all? She wasn’t in trouble for letting a non-employee into this area?

“C’mon!” Yuu said, grabbing her hand again and shattering her thoughts. “We still gotta find Setsuna-chan. Say, do you know where her dressing room is?”

“I, uhm… know some of the rooms are off to the right.” Ayumu motioned in that direction. “Though I’m not sure if she has one assigned to her yet.”

“Well, let’s go see.”

“Uhm… alright…” Again, Ayumu was pulled down the hall.

The couple turned another corner, moved past the rooms for Yazawa and Nishikino, another without a name plate and… huh…

“She has one.” Yuu said, stopping in front of a room. “They must have just given it to her.” She indicated the paper sign taped over where the a more permanent placard would be placed. “Maybe she already got the part she wanted?”

Ayumu shrugged. She didn’t know enough about the overall process to comment.

“Setsuna-chan!” Yuu called as she knocked. “Are you in there?”

“Yes,” the young actress replied from within “you can come in.”

Yuu opened the door and stepped in.

“Uehara-san?” Setsuna turned away from whatever she was setting up on the vanity. “And… uhm…?”

“Yuu.” The twintailed girl responded. “Takasaki Yuu. I’m Ayumu’s girlfriend and they let me watch the auditions with her.”

“Ah…”

“So, you’re the source.”

“Eh?”

Yuu flicked her tongue. “Of the scent I smelled earlier.”

“Sc-scent?” Pink dusted Setsuna’s cheeks.

“Flame. Fire.” Yuu stepped closer and leaned in toward the young actress. “But not the kind I am used to… Just what are you, Setsuna-chan?”

“Yuu-chan!” Ayumu scolded, moving forward to pull her girlfriend away from Setsuna who was starting to display some defensive body language. “You shouldn’t just ask such things so bluntly.”

“Mm? Why not?” Yuu seemed confused. “I think it’s pretty obvious now that Dia-san and Umi-san intended to create a sort of haven for us here. And if we’re all going to work together, it makes sense to know what we all are.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Anyway, I’m a lamia.” Yuu indicated herself. “I’d show you, but I wore pants today.”

Well, at least she has the decency to not unceremoniously drop trou in front of someone she just met. Ayumu thought to herself. Like she so often does at home…

“But I can do this.”

Eh? Ayumu felt her cheek being pinched.

“There. As you can see, Ayumu is a moon rabbit.”

Eh? Eh?! Ayumu caught her reflection in the mirror near Setsuna. Sure enough, white, fluffy rabbit ears had sprouted on her head.

“Mohhh… Yuu-chan!” Ayumu punched her girlfriend lightly in the arm.

“What?” Yuu giggled at the playful jab. “Ayumu always looks so cute like that. I can’t help wanting to see you like that more.”

“Mmph…” Ayumu puffed her cheeks out to pout, though she couldn’t deny liking the compliment.

“They are indeed quite cute, Uehara-san.” Setsuna agreed with an amused smile.

“Oh, uhm… thank you.” Ayumu replied. “And, Ayumu is fine. Like Yuu-chan said, we’ll be working together a lot, so I don’t mind being a bit less formal.”

Setsuna’s smile grew. “I’d like that. Please feel free to call me Setsuna in return. Oh, and if you don’t mind my asking, by moon rabbit, do you mean…?”

“Well, I wasn’t actually born on the moon, if that’s what you mean.” Ayumu explained. “My ancestors were though.”

Setsuna nodded in understanding.

“But you should try her mochi, though.” Yuu spoke up. “It’s the best. Same with her rice cakes.”

Setsuna seemed to recall something. “I think you’ll find a good friend in Koizumi-san.”

“Oh yeah,” Yuu thought out loud “Ayumu, wasn’t she the one you said they brought a huge container of rice for?”

Ayumu nodded in confirmation. “I was honesty surprised how much she was able to eat, though she wasn’t the only one.”

“I suppose some of us have larger forms to feed.” Yuu shrugged. “Anyway, I gotta know the source of that fiery smell.” She turned her attention back to Setsuna. “You know what we are now, so what kind are you? Why is your fire so different than that of an ifrit, salamander, phoenix, dragon or whatever?”

“Oh, uhm…” Setsuna fidgeted a bit. “I’m a Cthughan.”

Yuu furrowed her brow in thought for a moment before something came to her and she looked up excitedly. “You mean you’re the Elder God, Cthugha?”

Setsuna shook her head. “Great Old One, actually. And I’m only a descendant of him. Cthugha is my great great great… I actually don’t know how many greats, grandfather.”

Oh, kind of like me being a descendant of rabbits who actually lived on the moon way back when. Ayumu thought.

“That’s. So. Cool!” Yuu practically squealed. “No wonder I couldn’t identify it, I’ve never met an Elder God before.”

“Great Old One.” Setsuna corrected again.

“Right, sorry. Anyway, that wasn’t actually the reason I wanted to meet you today.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I actually wanted to tell you how amazing you were in your audition and that I really hope you get the part.”

“Thank you. And they did actually already give me the role.” Setsuna said. “That’s why I’ve been setting up my stuff here.”

“I was right.” Yuu tossed over to Ayumu. “Congratulations, Setsuna-chan!” She offered the actress.

“Thank you again.” Setsuna smiled. “I really like the part.”

“It looked like it was a lot of fun to play.”

“I know right?” Ayumu detected some of the excitement Setsuna displayed before her audition.

“I haven’t read the script yet, but…

“It’s so~ good!” Setsuna seemed less able, or perhaps less willing to suppress her excitement. “I was able to talk with Chika-san, who wrote the script, and she was able to tell me a ton of things about what she had planned for possible modifications, depending on who got what parts and, oh my gosh, it all sounds amazing, and I think they already know who to cast for the main villain and while I didn’t expect that choice, Chika-san’s explanation was awesome as she revealed her plans to me and what she has planned for Yazawa-san and Nishikino-san’s characters, oh it sounds like so much fun and…” Setsuna suddenly recoiled and stepped back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go off like that…”

Yuu laughed. “It’s fine, it’s fine.” She dismissed. “Your excitement makes me want to see if I can track down this Chika-san and get a copy for myself.”

“You can have one of mine!” Setsuna pounced at offering.

“One of…?” Yuu asked, picking up on the word choice.

“Oh, uhm… I may have made a couple copies for myself to write ideas on after Chika-san said she would like to see what I think.” Setsuna admitted as she shuffled through a stack of papers. She started to hold out a set before pulling them back. “Wait, you don’t work here though.”

“Not yet.” Yuu admitted. “But your audition, and many of the others, inspired me to apply here so I could support the amazing actors here however I could.”

“Ah.” Setsuna nodded, holding out the papers, only to pull them back yet again. “You’re not a spy from that other theater down the street, are you?”

Yuu chuckled. “If that was the case, I’d just get my info from Ayumu.”

“Right, that makes sense.” Finally the actress gave the script to Yuu.

“I already offered to Dia-san that I could help with editing.” Yuu skimmed it excitedly. “I wonder if Chika-san would mind if I slipped in a few ideas of my own.”

“She seems pretty willing to accept ideas from others around the theater.” Setsuna said. “Both Osaka-san and Nakasu-san have offered some of their thoughts already.”

Yuu opened her mouth, but whatever she was about to say next was interrupted by her stomach growling. She giggled. “I guess it is getting a little late.”

“Let’s head home then.” Ayumu spoke up. “I’ll make dinner for us. It was nice meeting you, Setsuna-san.”

“I don’t think I can make it all the way home.” Yuu said. “Why don’t we stop at that sandwich shop along the way.”

“Alright.” Ayumu agreed.

“Wanna come with us, Setsuna-chan?”

“Eh? Me?” Setsuna seemed caught off guard by the invite.

“Yeah, that way we can talk about the script and stuff.”

“Oh, uhm, thank you, but I wouldn’t want to impose. Besides there’s still a couple things I want to do here before I head out.”

“Alright. Maybe some other time then.” With that, Yuu took Ayumu’s hand and headed for the door. “See you later, Setsuna-chan!” She called as she exited.

At first Ayumu felt relief that Setsuna had declined, but as she and Yuu walked down the hall, a sense of disappointment set it. She actually did want to talk about the upcoming play. Perhaps next time…

----------

“Ne, Yuu-chan.” Ayumu said as the couple walked home.

“Mm?”

“Would you… uhm… Would you support me if I decided to become an actress?” The way you say you want to support Setsuna-san and the others?

“Of course!” Yuu gave her a toothy grin. “I think Ayumu would be an amazing actor.”

“Really?”

Yuu chuckled. “Well yeah, the Ayumu I know and love may be shy sometimes and hesitant to try new things. But when she decides to do something, she’s the hardest worker I know. She always gives it her best. That’s one of my favorite aspects of Ayumu.”

Ayumu blushed at Yuu’s affirmations.

“So, what prompted this all of a sudden?” Yuu looked at Ayumu with sudden curiosity. “Did the auditions inspire you as well?”

“A little…” Ayumu admitted. Did she need to include her desire for Yuu to look at her the way she looked at Setsuna?

Yuu smiled. “Well, maybe tonight we should look into finding some acting classes for you to take.”

“Classes?”

“Well, I don’t know anything about acting, so I’d be no help to you there.” Yuu explained. “Though I’d be happy to help you rehearse lines or whatever. And you’ll want some knowledge before you start auditioning for roles, right? Surely there has to be some evening or night course you can take somewhere.”

“Alright.”

Yuu’s expression became whimsical. “Mm… I can imagine it now. Uehara Ayumu stars in… something something big show, the marquee proudly proclaims with flashing lights. Ayumu on stage bowing before a standing ovation. Flowers are tossed on stage by devoted fans.”

“Y-Yuu-chan…” Ayumu murmured a quiet protest.

“What? I can’t imagine my amazing girlfriend being adored by all?”

“Well… I don’t really need to be the star, do I?”

Yuu shrugged. “Even if you only want supporting roles, I’ll still happily come watch your performances.”

Ayumu smiled. She loved this side of Yuu, her unwavering and unconditional support, always willing to adapt to anything Ayumu wanted to do. It was a constant source of confidence from which she drew to take on those new things, when she did.

Maybe she was overthinking the thing with Setsuna. Yuu was just being Yuu, getting excited over a new obsession, and Setsuna’s performance just happened to be the gateway into that obsession. As for Setsuna herself, she seemed equally excited about acting as Yuu, if not more so. And as her audition proved, she had talent. Perhaps Ayumu could learn a thing or two from her through observation, or just talking with her.

“Alright.” She set her mind on her decision. “Let’s look into classes when we get home.”

----------

Author’s Note Continued in Followup Post

#YuuAyuSetsu #Takasaki Yuu #Yuki Setsuna #Uehara Ayumu #Putting on Hairs #fanfic #Love Live Nijigasaki #AU August

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malandi · 4 years ago

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my essay on caa for philosophy class :)

there is a lot of exposition because i have to assume my reader has no background knowledge

The story begins with the infestation of a species called Chimera Ants. The Ant Queen, pregnant with the next Ant King, desires to eat nutritious food to make him as strong as possible. She gives birth to soldiers who bring her food of different species. The species she consumes are present in the DNA of the next generation of soldiers, so on and so forth. Therefore, some ant soldiers have the qualities of lions, some have those of cheetahs, of owls, and these characteristics increase their ability to hunt and fight.

The conflict begins when humans are taken and consumed by the Ant Queen. Thus, the next generation of soldiers are sentient, and their loyalty to the horde is contradicted by human's innate ambition and selfishness. Most of them wish to hunt and kill humans for leisure instead of viewing them as food for their queen. But some ant soldiers also start to remember their past lives, and they unlock the other innate qualities of humans such as compassion, mercy and selflessness.

One of the Chimera Ant soldiers, Colt, who is more human than the others, observed that their human side provides a great advantage in combat and survival, but was a great disadvantage when it came to unity. Since each of them had their own beliefs, they were unable to operate as a hivemind. And this rings true in our society. Humans thrive on division. It is in opposition that we grow, it is in challenging each other that we evolve. Like how philosophers debated each other, how scientists questioned each other, how fighters battled with each other, humans are at odds because of the differences that make us special.

But that doesn't mean humans are incapable of unity. During times of strife, when outside forces come to attack such as nature or merciless authorities, humans as a community band together to protect their own. Even the Chimera Ant soldiers, who were constantly at odds which other, banded together when their Queen was in mortal peril. Therefore, these supposed monsters are closer to the protagonists than the audience was first led to think.

The human protagonists seek to exterminate them as a species, and in the beginning of the arc, the audience is inclined to agree that their total extermination is a priority. But as the story progresses, the Chimera Ants are faltering between monster and human, and some of the human leaders believe these two contrasting natures will be unable to reach a compromise. Therefore they must still be exterminated despite what humanity they have.

The Ant King was eventually born, and his power far surpassed any of the superpowered individuals that the humans had to offer. At first he was also a callous monster, but upon befriending a young girl, his human nature was awakened.

And what really struck a chord with me was when the most powerful and wisest human, Netero, confronted the Ant King, it was the Ant King who didn't want to fight. Instead, he wanted to have a civil discussion, and wished to reach a compromise. Total control over the world wasn't his desire, but he aimed for it because he saw the incompetence and malice of the human government leaders in charge. It was unacceptable for him that millions of people starved while the rich lived leisurely in their mansions.

And he was right. His concerns were not unfounded. But Netero didn't want to listen. Netero even stated that he couldn't allow the Ant King to talk any more lest he be swayed into giving up the fight. He only had one goal: to cut off the head of the Chimera Ants so as to ensure their extinction.

By this point, the audience is left wondering, which side is more human, and which side is more monstrous? Because it wasn't our side who tried for peace and it wasn't their side who aimed for genocide. According to Netero, the Ant King's two natures were still battling for dominance, and it was too much of a risk for the human race to wait for him to decide whether he was more human or more monster.

In this situation, the humans were controlled by their practicality while the Chimera Ant King was controlled by his optimism. Both traits were found in humanity, but the humans were an older species than the Chimera Ants, therefore more capable of making hard decisions and more realistic. By thinking of it this way, it would almost seem like the monsters are naive while the humans are cruel. So which one really is the monster?

In the end, this wasn't a battle of good versus evil. It was a battle of two species competing for survival. Neither one was more deserving than the other. Because the audience is human, we automatically believed that we were the good side in this war. But the narrative forced us to reconsider. And now, I'm questioning, what exactly makes a human?

Is it rationality? Theoretically, a vicious being without rationality is a wild animal, while a vicious being with rationality is a monster. Before the human nature of the Chimera Ants awakened, they were rational while being monstrous killers. They could communicate and strategize among each other.

Is it a conscience? When the Chimera Ants began to sympathise with the plight of their human victims and with each other, for they too were once human, that was when the narrative began to make us question if they deserve extinction. However, the true humans in the story, the protagonists, showed no remorse when they were planning to kill off these sentient beings. Does that mean the humans aren't human anymore? But their goal was to protect their own.

The shared goal of protecting their respective species also couldn't be the essence of humanity, because this trait could be seen quite often in nature.

Could it be ambition? The humans planning to kill a powerful species utilized their ambition to achieve the seemingly impossible goal. The Chimera Ants whose desires began to deviate from that of the horde was driven by their ambition. However, not all of them displayed this trait. For instance, a Chimera Ant who remembered his past cried when he thought he was about to die again and said he didn't want ultimate power or his old life back. He just wanted to see his old friend again. A human, who was supposed to lead, gave up his role out of fear when he witnessed a Chimera Ant's power.

Not all humans are driven by ambition. There are many of us who are happy and content with simple lives. They are essential to society for they are willing to take up and enjoy humble but necessary jobs that some ambitious people think are beneath them. Their existence and importance disproves that ambition is central to human nature.

The nature of humanity is too varied, too contrasting to be pinned down to one essence. And it's ironic because a major conflict in the story is human nature versus monster nature, but we're not quite sure what the human nature is.

For me, it is impossible to pin down the complexity of human nature to one defining trait and call it our essence. It is everything—compassion and cruelty, rationality and emotionality, sympathy and selfishness, all the traits that comprise us are equally as important in our identity as humans. Monsters are the simplified version, say, rationality and cruelty, or selfishness and emotionality, but never reaching the range of humans. It is why the two species are at odds; they don't understand each other and why they operate the way they do. And the more the Chimera Ants grew to understand humans, the less they sought to fight.

I'll conclude this with a reminder that the next time you see a conflict between humans and another species, especially in glorified media, don't take the side of the humans so easily. We're not innately the good guys. Being the hero isn't encoded in our genes. Humans are heroes only when we choose to, not because we're human.

#hxh #ᜇᜎ᜔ᜇᜎ᜔#hxh meta

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i-can-do-tricks · 5 years ago

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archivist sasha tma au living in my head rent free is just the truth babe!!!!

wrote a little something because while not!jon is fucking great i had to put my own spin on it for a minute. this is all well and good and definitely not awful

now on [ao3]

During the Prentiss attack Jon gets separated from Tim in the tunnels after they both lose Martin, and he finds himself back in the Institute. In artifact storage.

He’s not alone.

After he meets back up with everyone, he’s……not acting quite right. Martin can’t put a finger on HOW, but he concludes WHY is because of this Very stressful encounter with the alleged supernatural firsthand. He doesn’t think about it again for a long time.

Everything’s back to normal, or at least as “normal” as working in the Magnus Institute really can be, but Jon is… different? But not in ways immediately obvious. More…mellow. More keen on making conversation than refusing to shut up about the Leitners. Doesn’t fidget with the stapler anymore. Much more easily pressured to clock out on time instead of staying late.

Every time Sasha’s mind wanders over to one of these thoughts, she can’t help but dismiss it without a second thought. She’s glad that Jon’s making healthier decisions since the attack, it had really taken a toll on his physical and mental health more than the others. She’s glad that she doesn’t have to worry about him, she tells herself, though there’s something lingering behind that sentence she can’t quite parse.

A woman had arrived in the Archives, though to provide support for her friend making a statement rather than herself. She had a statement of her own inside her, Sasha had been growing strong enough to… know that, but the woman just didn’t want to give it, was all. Georgie Barker, she said her name was when Sasha asked.

They got to talking, and both Georgie and her friend Melanie had stayed in touch, being intrigued by the supernatural themselves and apparently what Sasha had to say about it. Georgie had been visiting one time when Sasha noticed she had been looking strangely at someone at the other side of the room. Sasha knew that Georgie and Jon had been together at one point, and now they weren’t, so she didn’t really pay attention to the weird glance Georgie was giving him until she spoke up.

Why was Jon drinking coffee?

At Sasha’s confusion, Georgie started listing things that as they were pointed out suddenly became clear they didn’t make sense. Jon hated that sweater vest, he’d always said it was so scratchy he could feel it under his shirt. Jon claimed to like being tidy, but he could never get papers in just the way they were neatly piled on his desk now. Jon wouldn’t be caught DEAD listening to his old Mechanisms songs for fear that someone would see and find out about the band he was part of in college. Georgie knew Jon, why was he acting so differently? Somewhere behind Sasha’s eyes begin to hurt.

Sasha’s clever. Of course she’d realize something had been shifting her attention away from the couple of statements she’d dropped three times now, one of them even in the trash. It had taken an ungodly amount of excruciating focus to listen and read through each one of them, one after the other. The house on Hilltop Road. A psychology experiment gone wrong. A student choked by a thick cloud of strings that had pulled them along through living for weeks, unnoticed. A tape that had turned on back when Sasha had rushed out of the room to warn Tim of the woman behind him, of Jon confiding in Martin about his encounter with a Leitner when he was a child.

Sasha listened to this one for as long as she could, somehow knowing it to be the last record of Jon she had before… it was the last time she had heard Jon being scared, she realized. The next day, when Sasha looked closely, she could see the faintest of oily threads glinting in the air above Jon’s hands.

Jon was being punished for pulling back the curtain, for showing a thread pertaining to him thought to be invisible, even to just one person that he loved.

And she hated it.

When she’s ready, she sends the rest of the staff home early, and thinks she has Jon cornered. He’s lying still in the cot in one of the back rooms of the Archives, the one he hadn’t used in so long ever since he had been…”convinced” not to overwork himself, with the lights off. When Sasha calls out to who might be the puppeteer, he freezes, curled up so tightly that he felt more like a crumpled sack of….. than a person. When Sasha calls out to Jon, though, he risks a glance over his shoulder toward the door of the room and, seeing a figure there, quickly turns back to the wall, muttering to himself near inaudibly; if he doesn’t move at all, doesn’t struggle, then maybe the Spider watching at the edge of the web he was trapped in wouldn’t notice, and more importantly, he’d know that his inaction was his own–

Sasha hears rope of all kinds of thickness stretching and tightening from down the hallway. She snaps into focus and hefts up Jon in her arms, much to his (though not disgruntled) bewilderment, and carries him out of the institute as fast as she can, wiping cobwebs stuck in Jon’s hair and clothes away, and pulling apart the now oh-so delicate spiderweb threads attached to his hands, his legs, his tongue….

The floor is sticky beneath her feet.

A few days later, when Sasha was still letting Jon stay at her flat and giving everyone paid leave while the…exterminators? got rid of the spiderwebs and the rest of the unexplained infestation, she invited Tim and Martin to get lunch with them.

Jon told the three of them how at first, it really didn’t feel like he was being controlled or compelled. When he did something just a touch too out of character, even for him, he felt surprised, but he guessed the attack had changed him a lot more than he thought.

That is, until he noticed the strings.

Before he could properly realize what they even were the strings tightened, thousands of impossibly strong threads constricting around him so tightly he couldn’t move.

Until he did.

It hadn’t hurt, no, but it felt wrong, walking too slowly and standing too straight, words coming out of his mouth so alien it felt like someone else’s, with the bitter taste of bad coffee lingering on his tongue. The strings hid any sign of loosening its suffocating hold, so he became numb, slowly turning complacent that he would never be able to act of his own accord again at the same time as being utterly terrified out of his mind by that very same thought.

As the months went on he felt something else rise up, however. Jon had lost his tongue to a string ages ago, and when whatever was speaking did talk… they were polite. More considerate to Martin when he slipped up. Friendlier with Tim and easier to laugh with. Jon became all too aware that whatever- whoever he was was taking greater care of himself than he had ever thought to. Maybe- if he ever DID come back- it would just be better to give himself up again, if he did anything himself he’d just ruin everything, he should just not-

At that point Jon had full collapsed with his head on the table, shaking and sobbing in front of the three of them. Martin had been crying as Jon spoke, and now reached out tentatively to comfort him. Tim was certainly no worse for wear, tears in his own eyes and looking completely distraught as he thought about the talks he’d had in the past seven months when someone who was Jon, but somehow so very not Jon had been working with them, and they had just….never noticed.

With Jon’s permission, Sasha placed the tape recorder on the table in front of them and pressed play. They wordlessly listened to Jon and Martin panicking and hunkering down in the Archives, hiding from the worms, when Jon had told Martin about Mr. Spider; the last time in seven months any of the four of them had heard Jon speaking.

#tma #archivist sasha #not!jon #except not quite #i love this au w my whole heart and while not-jon would be rad as hell i keeping thinking of his ties back to the web and how... convenient #my writing #tma au #on spiderman?#@yall out here making archivist sasha content: thank you for your service #archivist!sasha #jonathan sims #sasha james #the web

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sally-mun · 5 years ago

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Y’ALL, I JUST GAVE MYSELF THE BIGGEST SCARE AND IT’S HILARIOUS.

Okay so like 10-ish years ago, I had gotten bedbugs, and it SUUUUCKED. We think that I got them from the student lounge at school, since at the same time I realized I had them the couches in the lounge were replaced with something non-fabric. Anyway, as some of you probably already know, it’s a whooooole ordeal when you get bedbugs. You don’t just have to strip your bed and clear out everything around the bed itself and possibly get a new mattress, which is hard enough; you also have to clear everything out from against the walls, too. The way exterminators treat bedbugs is they have to spray EXTREMELY toxic chemicals in the bed, around the bed, and along all the corners where the floor meets the wall, because bedbugs nest and reproduce in crevices.

Most of you guys have seen pictures of my room, SO YOU CAN IMAGINE how difficult it was to clear out space along my walls. I have ENORMOUS shelves that are FULL of books and collectibles, and we ended up having to get a storage unit for a short while because I basically had to pack up my entire room and move it temporarily. This process even damaged a very rare and expensive Sonic statue I have, which makes me weep to this day. After the extermination was done, and after it was deemed safe to go in my room again (because like I said, SUPER TOXIC), I then completely covered my mattress and baseboard with trash bags that I sealed with duct tape, and then put a special bedbug cover over the mattress as well. The reason for this is that I wasn’t able to get a new mattress at the time, which would’ve been the first recommendation, so instead I had to seal off the current one as much as possible. Even as toxic as the sprays are, bedbugs are OUTRAGEOUSLY hard to kill and sometimes still live through it, and they can survive without food and water for like a year, so if any of them survived the process they needed to essentially be entombed.

Anyway, that’s like a decade ago. If any of them made it past the process they should’ve been long dead by now, right? WEEEELL here’s the thing: When you get bedbugs once, you kind of never stop worrying that you’ll get them again. I can confirm this. I don’t think about it often, but it is something that periodically crosses my mind even to this day. The bug bites themselves aren’t honestly that bad (they’re about as annoying as mosquito bites), but the process I had to go through to get them taken care of?? THAT’S where the anxiety comes from. I’m paranoid of ever having to go through that again.

SO IMAGINE MY REACTION when, last night, I notice a few tiny red dots on the toes of my left foot. At first I wasn’t sure what exactly I was looking at. Are these teeth marks from Selina? She has an odd fixation on my bare feet and tries to bite my toes a lot, but I don’t remember her getting me anytime recently. Is it maybe petechial hemorrhaging from sitting on my foot for too long? I almost always sit on my left foot, and my computer chair is SO old and worn down at this point that there’s literally no cushioning left in the seat, it’s super flat and honestly is kind of painful to sit on for more than like 10 minutes. But I’m also quietly thinking, could these be early bedbug bites?? They don’t have the characteristics of bug bites; they’re not raised and irritated and they’re not the size I remember, but like I said, I’m quietly paranoid of bedbugs ever coming back.

I noticed this just before bed last night, so I told myself, let’s see if my toes are any better tomorrow. If the marks have gone away, it was probably just something mild like sitting on my foot or Selina nicking me, right? So today I get up and see that the ones from last night are still there -- but I also notice MORE red spots on the toes of my RIGHT foot now. This seriously cranks my fears into high gear, because now it looks like I went to bed and things got worse. I’m already trying not to let myself fall into a panic over maybe having to go through the whole ordeal again, and I tell myself to keep it cool and I instead turn to research. As I said, the marks don’t look or feel like normal bug bites. They have no associated symptoms, they’re just tiny red dots, as though someone had put them there with a red pen. I start searching online for bedbug information that I might’ve missed the first time around, like if there are any early signs that this could be pointing toward. I come up with nothing but I don’t feel any better.

At this point I’m thinking, I can’t just sit around being anxious all day, especially during quarantine when I have nothing else to do but obsess about my worries! I start thinking, should I try inspecting my mattress? I figure I probably should, but I’m also hesitant because I just plain am worried about what I’ll find. I remember we have a bottle of over-the-counter bedbug spray somewhere in our cleaning supplies; no idea if that works or if it’s just toxins in a bottle that was sold for profit, but I think, should I start spraying that as a precaution?? Our two current cats really don’t crawl around my bed the way my gen 1 cats did, so if I shut them out for few days they probably won’t notice, and I can sleep on the couch, right?? WHAT SHOULD I DO??

I’m again on the verge of panic, so I grab my feet and a flashlight and I inspect them again, trying to hope for ANY extra clues that might help me. I inspect the dots VERY closely, and now that I’m using a flashlight this time, I realize that they do look different. I realize that, in a way, the redness appears to be a lot weaker than I thought; when I shine the light directly over it, it almost disappears and I feel like I can see some of my regular skin just sitting underneath. I scratch one spot, and it just comes off, just like that. I’m thinking, what the hell?? Was this just some weird skin thing?? My brother and I both inherited psoriasis, is this related to that?? Is it something else I don’t even know about?!

And then it finally hits me: IT’S FUCKING TOMATO SOUP!!

You see, yesterday afternoon I was in the mood for a grilled cheese sandwich (been having them a lot lately), and my mom commented that she wanted one too. Since it was more than just me, I decided to throw on some tomato soup to go with it -- but when I opened the can, I tilted it too far and spilled some on the floor, which splattered out quite a bit. I grabbed a paper towel and wiped up the floor, and I wiped the big splats off the tops of my feet and ankles, but that was it. I didn’t wipe my toes because I didn’t feel anything there, but apparently I got some micro-drops on them.

SO YEAH. I FREAKED MYSELF OUT FOR LIKE 12 HOURS THINKING I WAS RE-INFESTED WITH BEDBUGS OVER TOMATO SOUP. I mean all things considered this is the IDEAL outcome, but holy shit I couldn’t stop laughing at myself when I realized what was actually going on. AND NOW YOU CAN ALL LAUGH AT ME TOO~

#SORRY IT'S A LONG STORY #the backstory is really important

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7team7 · 5 years ago

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I'm twenty when I'm with you: chapter three

Chapter title: Floor mates

Summary: Soulmate AU: Sasuke and Sakura go to the same college, where they end up being floor mates in the dorms.

Rating: T

chapter one / two / four / five / six

Sakura had just moved into her new college dorm and everything was looking good so far. Scented candles that were technically against the rules to light? Check. Too many pillows on the bed for her to use at once? Check. Cute pictures of her and Ino all over the wall? Check. She left her door propped open in hopes of someone stopping by to say hello while she continued to unpack and tidy up her space.

So when the biggest spider she’d ever seen decided to drop down to her floor from the middle of the ceiling, the entire floor must have heard her piercing scream.

She was frozen. Of all things to greet her on the first day, a big ugly spider had to be it?

Someone—her savior—knocked on her door frame,“everything okay?” (The deep voice sounded slightly out of breath, as if they heard her scream and came running.)

“Can you please come kill this spider—oh! It’s you!”

Sakura had her fair share of embarrassing moments in life, but this one was looking like it would take the cake for “most mortification felt at one time.”

Sasuke Uchiha, her secret crush since the day she saw him one year ago, and who she hadn’t really seen much of since he delivered her food, was leaned against the doorway looking an illegal level of handsome. All while Sakura thought she was going to die because of this very unwelcome spider.

He nodded once to acknowledge her, like yes, it’s me. Of course. Who else would the universe bring to you?

Then he took a look down at the floor and Sakura felt marginally better when his eyes widened at the size of the spider. But then she realized he has to be kind of insane because he marched into her room with his bare palm open, as if he was going to slap the spider out of existence and into the next dimension.

“Ah, ah, wait! I’ll grab you a tissue,” she said as she gingerly stepped around him to avoid walking directly over the spider. But he was standing right in front of the shelf with the tissues, and if he moved any further into her room, he would be the one standing over the spider, and that just wasn’t okay either. So Sakura had to slide against him to pluck a tissue from the shelf as Sasuke stood rigidly in front of her, keeping watch of the spider. She was still standing awkwardly behind him, not wanting to step any closer to the unwanted guest, so she reached around his very broad back to hand him the tissue.

Sasuke moved too quickly for her to notice the faint redness dusted across his cheeks, but after he crushed the spider with far more force than needed, he muttered, “let me know if more show up.” It simply wouldn’t do to have the floor infested with easily exterminated spiders, especially if they insisted on bothering his pink haired floor mate.

It turned out Sasuke and Sakura’s schedules aligned just as well as they did in high school. They took many of the same entry level courses and therefore left the dorm at the same time each day. Sakura’s chattering helped him wake up and prepare for morning lecture. Even during their downtime, the two seemed to drift together naturally. It mostly started when Sasuke stuck around the library at night until Sakura was ready to pack up so he could walk her home. It unsettled him to think of someone so small, so easily startled by a spider, to walk in the dark by herself.

She had yawned and closed her laptop, signaling that she was calling it a night. Without a word, Sasuke finished up what he was working on and started putting his things away as well. They got up from their chairs at the same time, and Sakura’s brain was so fried from studying, she simply thought it was a coincidence. He was glad she wasn’t too tired to smile at him.

“You’re leaving too? Perfect, we can walk together,” Sakura said as they made their way to the library’s exit.

Yeah, together, perfect. All that.

It turned into Sasuke often knocking on Sakura’s door with a simple, “study room’s open, saved you a spot.” Sakura made sure to bring Sasuke a bit of food from the dining hall on weekends since Sasuke tended to sleep in past the breakfast hours. He always picked up a copy of the school paper and handed it to her with the pages turned to the crossword puzzle.

Even when she convinced him to take kickboxing classes with her at the gym and he learned of her terrifying strength, he still insisted on walking her home at night. Although she clearly didn’t need his protection, he enjoyed her company. With fewer students out and about, the cool night air and twinkling stars were a comfortable and intimate setting. Did the moon notice the way they looked at each other?

Sakura had spent many nights wondering why Sasuke occupied her thoughts so often when he hardly interacted with her during high school. Why did he fit into her life schedule so easily these days? Why was it so easy to be around someone who had a tendency to freeze people out? She didn’t want to get a big head, but it felt like he paid particular attention to her.

The worst part of living on the same floor as Sasuke, though, had to be the way he came in and out of the shower with only a towel wrapped around his waist. Once, when she was trying to apply a face mask by the sink, she asked him why he didn’t put on a robe and wasn’t he cold? He scooted past her by placing a hand on her lower back, “Hn. A bit. Lend me yours?” Sasuke stepped into the shower and shut the door before Sakura could respond.

Sakura, clad in a fluffy red robe, had to bite her arm to keep from screaming. Didn’t he know it was a safety hazard to look like... that ? Truly a distraction. She should be able to put on a mud mask in peace.

A/N: yes I lived on a co-ed floor my freshman year and yes we shared bathrooms, it was actually a fun gathering space but also gross because ew teenage boys

If anyone needs a layout of the spaces I can try to show you on twitter lol

#sasusaku #my writing #soulmate au #fan fic

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aaymeirah-writes · 5 years ago

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Angels & Demons & Slugs

(Written as a gift fic on ao3 for thehedonistspurge as part of the good omens summer gift exchange)

Summary: A fun little fic told from Warlock Dowling’s POV as he tries to understand the peculiar relationship between Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis. Ft. a slug infestation.

Sometimes, it was like living with an angel and a demon on his shoulder. Warlock knew about this concept because Brother Francis made him read a book that had old illustrations of very unrealistic angels and demons whispering into people’s ears. Not that he really knew what angels and demons looked like, but what use are wings if they aren't even attached to your body? Stupid adults.

The book talked about the angel counseling good, and the demon counseling bad, always fighting for dominance. This was exactly like Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis. Case in point; yesterday Brother Francis told him he should ignore those stupid kids mom made him visit who taunted him for still having a Nanny at nine years old while Nanny Ashtoreth grew angry and helped him devise a plan of revenge involving silly string, a few paperclips, and a leaf-blower.

There was a problem with this theory of his though. The angel and the demon were supposed to hate each other. And while Nanny and Brother Francis sniped at each other, they never actually acted like they hated each other. Warlock knew this because he hated schoolwork, and he did anything to avoid it. On the other hand, Nanny and Brother Francis,were always glancing at each other and whispering when they thought he couldn’t see. C’mon, he was nine, not stupid!

However, the strangest proof to his theory was that Brother Francis always seemed to say the exact opposite of what Nanny Ashtoreth told him and Nanny Ashtoreth did the same. They never even had a real chance to talk to each other, because they were both busy during the day and Warlock knew that everybody went to bed at 9 pm. He did. It was only fair.

Maybe all gardeners and Nannies were like this.

“Watch out for that slug my boy,” Brother Francis put a hand on his shoulder, which caused him to pull up short, break out of his musings and look with disgust at the slimy creature that was just about to be crushed under his boot.

“Ew.”

“We must love all God’s creatures. Yes, even the ones whose outward appearance is off-putting.”

“But slugs are pests!”

“That doesn’t mean we have to kill them. Besides, you’ll get your boot all covered in guts.”

“Whatever,” Warlock muttered, continuing to walk beside Brother Francis as they toured the gardens he knew so well.

“Here is another slug. See? It’s only eating the leaf, not harming you at all,” Brother Francis smiled toothily at Warlock. Warlock decided to give him his best sullen glare. For all that Brother Francis seemed to fulfill the angelic role, he didn’t seem to trust that Warlock wouldn’t just ignore the gross and slimy thing like an angel who was supposed to see the best in people should.

“School is canceled for the day,” said Nanny Ashtoreth as she swept into the room in a swirl of black skirts. Warlock looked up from the paper he was happily drawing army tanks on, the kind he imagined his Dad used when he went into the dangerous territory of something called troubled political waters. Warlock didn’t exactly know what that meant, but he did know that it sounded really cool.

“Why?” Warlock asked.

“We are going on a slug extermination mission. Time to get rid of those blighters,” Nanny said.

“But Brother Francis said to leave them alone, they aren’t hurting anybody,”

“Anybody being the keyword. The slugs are hurting the plants,” Nanny scowled, “Brother Francis is sometimes too nice for his own good. I’m tired of seeing that slug infestation destroy the perfectly lovely gardens out there. So come on, put on your jacket.” When Warlock continued to sit there staring at her, she sighed.

“Or would you rather stay inside and do schoolwork?” Nanny had Warlock there.

“So, how do we kill them?” Warlock asked Nanny with interest as she led the way to the big kitchen.

“We’re going to create and set out slug removal traps, and if you see any slugs, you’ll spray them with a special slug killing solution,” Nanny replied, smiling at Warlock from behind her glasses.

“Awesome.”

As Warlock watched Nanny commandeer the kitchen to put together saucers and containers of cornmeal or milk or beer, he decided that she looked to be filled with demonic glee. This was another example of suspiciously going directly against Brother Francis’s counsels. Maybe this was their version of fighting- through battling over slugs.

“Warlock, get me the mister bottles,” Nanny said as she took a generous swig from the beer bottle before grimacing and glaring at it. He got up and found two nice blue-green ones.

“Will these ones work?” he asked. Nanny Ashtoreth glared at him.

“Warlock, you’re the Antichrist. Believe they will work and they will.” Warlock looked at the bottles in his hands.

“They do work?” To demonstrate he sprayed the one that had a small amount of tepid water in it.

“Just give me them little-demon child,” Nanny said with exasperation, somewhat ruining the effect by ruffling his hair at the same time.

“Hey! Not the hair,” Warlock groaned.

“15 slugs for me!” Warlock crowed, holding up a dead one just sprayed with the ammonia mixture from his gloved hands. This was so much more fun than school!

“I’m taking the long way around by planting these traps,” Nany said as a pitiful excuse for only having killed one.

“Hey! Another one.” Warlock tossed the dead slug into the bucket and lunged to spray it. He missed and fell face-first into the dirt. Ow. This was gross. He raised his head to see a pair of muddy boots belonging to Brother Francis. Now it was embarrassing as well.

“Are you alright my boy?” he asked kindly, offering a hand to pull him up. Warlock scowled, he didn’t need any help!

“Yes. I’m fine,” brushing himself off, Warlock turned to see Nanny Ashtoreth watching him, holding a cup of beer and a shovel in the other hand, genuine smile on her face. For him or for Brother Francis? He turned quickly to see Brother Francis looking at Nanny Ashtoreth, not at him in sympathy as he should be.

“What are you two doing in my garden?” Brother Francis asked curiously. Nanny drew herself up to address the hunched over gardener.

“Saving your garden from destruction by slug.”

“You’re killing them?” yelped Brother Francis.

“Gotta make sure the pests don’t come back. It’s for the good of the plants.”

“So to save one thing, you’re killing another?” Brother Francis demanded. Not with anger as Warlock thought he would have, it was his garden after all, but with interest in Nanny Ashtoreth’s motivations.

“You were the one who let the situation develop enough that hard choices had to be made.”

“So it’s my fault?”

“It’s nobody's really, but the slug infestation is a problem that needs to be dealt with.” Nanny lifted an eyebrow as she continued to stare at Brother Francis, ignoring Warlock and the new slug he had just severed with the metal head of the garden shovel.

“I suppose I can see that.”

“You suppose! Angel I don’t-”

“Can we go inside now Nanny? My feet are all slimey,” Warlock whined. These two were spending entirely too much time in some weird unspoken conversation. Time they should be spending paying attention to him and all the slugs he had killed!

“Of course dear,” Nanny sighed. “Brother Francis, I’ll leave the supplies here. Of course you must deal with things as you see fit, since you are the gardener”

“That sounds.. good,” Brother Francis looked disappointed for a moment before he smiled at Warlock.

“Have fun, my boy.” Warlock snorted. He was dirty and cold, killing slugs had lost its’ appeal and now he was even more confused about Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis.

“With what?”

“Life. The world. It won’t be around forever you know,” Brother Francis replied as he picked up the basket full of slug traps, “unless you do something about it.”

“Okay,” shrugged Warlock “have fun with the slugs I guess.”

“I- will.” Brother Francis said, managing to look only mildly disgusted with the brown creatures that had already congregated at a milk saucer by his feet.

His train-themed alarm clock said 11 pm when Warlock woke up from a deep sleep because of a sudden draft of cold air. Blearily looking around him, he saw that the window had blown open. Darn. Getting out of bed, Warlock decided to try to close it himself. After all, he was nine. He didn’t need his Nanny for every little thing. He took a moment to look out the window, then took another when he saw two familiar figures standing just beneath it talking quietly. A secret meeting, awesome! The thought that maybe Nanny had lied to him about everyone going to sleep at the same time came to him suddenly. But then again...this was the perfect time to practice his cool eavesdropping skills.

“Angel...I’ll just....oh thank you, my dear boy...miracle...slugs are little blighters...not my favorite of Her creations...actually, I think...Gabriel, really?” Disjointed words from Brother Francis and Nanny Ashtoreth reached his ears then fell away as the two moved away from under the window and onto the path to Brother Francis’s cottage. Warlock yawned as he strained his ears to catch more. Nothing. There was really no point in listening further. He carefully closed the window and got back into bed.

As he drifted off to sleep, Warlock decided that even if Nanny called Brother Francis angel, even if they wanted him to do opposite things, even if they didn’t really seem to hate each other and quite rudely communicated silently over his head, he still liked them both. After all, the few other kids he’d played with didn’t have someone cool enough to help plan awesome revenge or someone nice enough to listen to him and never intentionally make him feel stupid. Maybe his theory was right after all.

Sleep claimed Warlock and he smiled as the musings were cast aside in favor of a dream of silly stringed revenge, crushed slugs and the comforting presence of an angel and a demon on his shoulders.

#good omens #crowley #aziraphale #warlock dowling #nanny ashtoreth #brother francis #angels #demons #fanfic #warlock is a little shit #but a smol #perceptive little shit #writers on tumblr #my writing #aaymeirah-writes

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the-magnus-archives-archiver · 5 years ago

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Anatomy Class

Case: 0161207

Name: Lionel Elliott Subject: A series of events that took place during his class, Introduction to Human Anatomy and Physiology, at King’s College, London, in early 2016. Date: July 12th, 2016 Recorded by: direct from Dr. Lionel Elliott, under the supervision of Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London

[Archivist (John): Apologies for the somewhat archaic—

Dr. Elliott: No need to worry, I understand. Some things you just can’t trust to computers. It’s like I always say about those robotic surgery machines. It’s just not the same. If I’m going to be operating on a man’s pancreas, I want to feel that pancreas. Fiddling with a joystick just won’t cut it. As it were.

Archivist: I didn’t think you still performed surgery?

Dr. Elliott: I keep up with the developments. And I remember the feel of a pancreas.

Archivist: Well... quite. Now, if you’d be so good as to—

Dr. Elliott: You know you have an infestation, don’t you?

Archivist: Excuse me? I’m not sure—

Dr. Elliott: Yes, little, grey, maggot things. I saw a few on the way in. Don’t recognise the species, but I’d say you need to get the exterminators in here. Gas the little blighters.

Archivist: You saw them? You weren’t bitten were you?

Dr. Elliott: Bitten? They’re worms. Still, I’ll admit I didn’t like the look of them. I reckon the sooner you get someone in to kill them dead, the better.

Archivist: We’ve tried, believe me. Now, shall we?

Dr. Elliott: Oh, certainly. Where do want me to start? The bones? The blood? The... uh... the fruit?

Archivist: Right from the beginning. One second. Statement of Dr. Lionel Elliott, regarding a series of events that took place during his class...

Dr. Elliott: Introduction to Human Anatomy and Physiology

Archivist: At King’s College, London, in early 2016. Statement recorded direct from subject 12th July 2016.

Statement begins.

Dr. Elliott: Now?

Archivist: Yes, just start from the beginning.]

Right. Well, I shouldn’t even have been teaching the class, really. As far as I knew, I wasn’t going to be needed for any teaching on the Biomedical Engineering course this year. I can’t say I was particularly upset. The Human Anatomy module is where a lot of the engineers discover just how messy the human body is, and while the human heart is a phenomenal piece of machinery in terms of design and function, most of the students would be more comfortable holding a transistor. Not to put too fine a point on it, I get tired of... squeamish students, and was glad that I could avoid it this year.

You can perhaps imagine, then, that I was not best pleased when Elena Bower, the admissions officer, emailed me last November to say that there had been a mistake, and I was needed to take a ‘spillover class’. Apparently the system had accepted more students for the course than there were places, and they were trying to organise an additional class for the seven who were unassigned. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, Anatomy class wasn’t until the second term, so surely this mistake should have emerged earlier, but Elena just kept saying she didn’t know, she just had seven students who needed tutorials. I won’t pretend I took the news gracefully. I have a lot of research due shortly and, well, you know academia – never enough hours in the day. Still, I was the only staff member both qualified to teach the class and technically free when it had to be scheduled. So I agreed, although that really makes it sound like I had more of a choice than I actually did.

I didn’t meet the students until the module started this January. I wasn’t responsible for any of the lectures, so the first time I saw them was in our initial class tutorial. They all sat there, all seven, staring at me, and I felt... oddly uncomfortable. There, there was nothing wrong with them, of course, nothing strange to see or to look at, just... well, this is going to sound stupid to say out loud, but I don’t remember what they look like. Any of them. I remember that each wore blue jeans and a white shirt, though they were all different makes and styles; I think one of the girls had a skirt, instead. I must have noticed that they were wearing the same outfits, but it didn’t strike me as odd. They all just looked so... normal. Unremarkable. I remember their names, though, from the register. They stuck with me – maybe because they were such an international group. There was Erika Mustermann, Jan Novak, Piotr and Pavel Petrov, who I think were brothers, maybe twins, John Doe, Fulan al-Fulani and Juan Pérez.

I greeted them when I entered the room, and was met with silence. Not a malicious or angry silence, just silence. I’ve never been self-conscious when teaching, but walking to my seat with those fourteen eyes just... watching me... it made ever so slightly uncomfortable. I got the oddest feeling they were judging my walk.

[NERVOUS LAUGH]

The class began, and we started going over some of the basics of anatomy and how the body works. They started to talk then, and some of my unease left me. I don’t remember exactly what was said, after doing it long enough most tutorials just kind of blur together a bit, but I recall being struck by just how basic some of their questions were. The composition of blood, where in the body the various organs sat, the sort of thing that anyone who’s done a science GCSE should know. I was almost tempted to ask where they went to school. At the time, I didn’t question the fact that they must have all gone to the same school.

Aside from that it was mostly normal, except... about halfway through the tutorial, we discussed the lungs and respiration. Inhalation, alveoli, et cetera. As I said, basic stuff, but I paused afterwards, just to have a think about where to go next, and I heard the sound of them breathing. That’s not abnormal, I know, but it seemed to fill the silence so suddenly, and all at once. I could... I could have sworn that I didn’t actually hear it before that moment. Like they’d only just then started breathing. [Nervous laugh] Which is, which is absurd, obviously. I was probably just listening out for it because we’d been discussing the lungs. Even so, it was disconcerting, and I don’t mind telling you that I breathed quite a sigh of relief myself when the tutorial was over and I could get out of there.

Now, I consider myself a conscientious worker, and in all my years at King’s I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve called in sick, but when the time came for the next tutorial with this class, I had to stay home with a migraine. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, the thought of sitting there for another two hours with those staring, placid eyes gave me such a spell of anxiety that my brain felt like it was being stabbed with a shard of ice. I did have to teach them eventually, of course. I couldn’t avoid it forever. Re-entering that room, though... All of them were sat in the exact same positions, in the exact same clothes, their breathing deliberate and almost pointed. When Erika Mustermann – or was it Jan Novak? – said ‘Good morning’, the others followed suit, one by one, and I had to fight the urge to run. It struck me then that, despite how diverse their names were, none of them seemed to have any noticeable accent. Not that it did anything to reassure me.

There was no-one else who could take the tutorials. Believe me, I did everything I could to try and find a replacement. Still, once I got used to their stares, their silence, and the fact that their questions were both specific and oddly basic – one of the Petrovs once asked me “How sharp are the knees meant to be” – I swear, it was just about tolerable. I’m a bit ashamed to admit it, but I came to terms with the fact that I didn’t care if they passed any exams, and that actually made the whole affair more manageable. I just did my best to stop caring.

And then came our first of two sessions in the dissection room. We were looking at the skeleton. I had been dreading this. Given exactly how creepy and unsettling the students were just sat in a classroom, the idea of what they could do when given access to human remains made me feel quite nauseous. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave them there alone, so I went.

It was even worse than I’d feared, seeing them stood there over the bits of cadaver. Their faces, normally so neutral, were alive with... what was it I saw? Excitement? Curiosity? Hunger? Whatever it was, it didn’t reach their eyes, still staring and blank. I went through the procedures with them and tried my best to keep the trembling out of my voice. When Fulan reached for a scalpel and started cutting into our samples, I felt faint.

I was trying to keep an eye on everyone, but the dissection tables were arranged in a semi-circle around the lab, and each time I turned to face one of the students, I began to hear this cracking sound from whichever tables I wasn’t looking at. Like a snapping bone, or a ribcage being forced open. I’d turn back and see nothing untoward, just John or Erika or Juan or whoever it was, looking at me quizzically over distinctly unbroken bones. But it kept happening. Whenever I wasn’t looking, I heard the crunch and the crack of bone. I couldn’t ask about it. I knew the dead-eyed, mute stare they’d give me if I did, and I just couldn’t face that.

Finally, I managed to position myself so that I could see what was happening behind me in the reflective edge of the metal table. It wasn’t much, but I could see a slightly warped image. It was Pavel, in this case. I saw him pick up a bone – a radius I believe, from the forearm. He held it up next to his own arm, and then there came that snapping, crunching noise. I swear I saw his arm distend itself, the skin shifting as something inside changed and rearranged, until it matched the length of bone he was holding up to it.

I tried not to react, not to make a noise at this mad impossibility that I saw. I couldn’t help it, though, and my legs gave out. I collapsed on the floor with a whimpering cry. None of them looked at me, none of them offered to help me up, none of them gave any reaction at all. I shut my eyes tight as that cracking sound began to come from every direction, as all seven of them began to change themselves. It went on for almost half an hour, until our allotted time in the lab ended. And then they left, walking past me, still sat helpless on the floor. As they did, each of them thanked me for the lesson as though nothing had happened. And I swear that every single one of them was taller than when they started.

I started taking more sick leave after that. I avoided their tutorials as often as possible, and when I did go we largely just sat there in silence until one of them asked a question about human anatomy, which I would reluctantly answer. I know I should have just abandoned them entirely. If they were going to complain to anyone they would have done it already. But even then I was worried my colleagues might notice, and I really didn’t want to get a reputation as some absentee tutor. It didn’t help that a colleague of mine, Dr Laura Gill, once expressed surprise on learning I’d been absent the day before, as apparently she’d passed by my teaching room and my anatomy class had just been sat there, waiting quietly. The thought of them politely filing into every tutorial, just sat there, blank and staring, whether I was there or not, just waiting... To be quite frank I think that bothered me almost more than being sat there with them.

Still, I managed to largely avoid them until the 21st of March, when they had their second lab dissection. Hearts. I’m not an idiot. I was well aware of the sort of sinister nonsense that was likely to happen if I went, but I also knew by now that they would attend whether or not I was there. And to leave them in the lab unsupervised would be the sort of thing that would get me actually fired from my position.

It was a rainy morning. I remember that, because I deliberately didn’t put up an umbrella. Something inside me was so dreading what was going to happen that the very act of opening umbrellas seemed pointless, as though my being dry couldn’t stop what was coming, then there was no reason not to get soaked. So I was dripping wet when I entered the lab, and my glasses had steamed up to the point where I could no longer see through them. When I wiped them clean, they revealed those seven blank faces, utterly unconcerned with my sodden state. Each had somehow got the heart laid out in from them on the dissection tray. I decided not to prolong it, and waved them to start.

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I thought they’d descend into some sort of feeding frenzy, but they didn’t. They just began to dissect the hearts, as any other class would, occasionally asking me polite questions. I was so taken aback at how normal the whole situation seemed to be that it took me some time to actually answer them. I did, though, and the first hour of the class almost put me at least a little bit at ease. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Maybe they were doing weird things to their insides, but if it was the heart, then I couldn’t see it and I couldn’t hear it. And I’d long since decided with this class, that if I couldn’t see or hear it, I didn’t care.

Then Erika Mustermann held up her heart and looked at me. I began to get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as she asked me “How does the heart pump blood?” I started to explain the biological mechanisms of the heart pumping, when she shook her head slowly and said, “What does it look like?” And then, when I didn’t answer, “Is it like this?”

The heart in her hand began to spasm. Not like the regular, rhythmic pulse of a heartbeat, but like a balloon being rapidly squeezed at one end. Bits of it swelled and stretched and distorted seemingly at random, and blood began to flow haphazardly from the ventricles, dripping down Erika’s forearm and dribbling onto the floor.

I stood there speechless, staring at this horrible miracle, from when behind her I see Fulan raise his heart, saying, “That’s not what it’s like.” And blood starts to gush from all over his heart in tiny geysers, shooting in every direction. Soon each of them is holding a heart up, each pumping and throbbing differently, blood leaking, spurting out of them in a different way, a different nightmare. They wanted me to tell them which was right.

[NERVOUS LAUGH]

I don’t know how long I stared before I finally raised my hand to point at Jan Novak, who seemed to have the closest to an accurate impression of a regular human heartbeat. Then I turned and walked out of the lab.

I spent the rest of the day sat in the staffroom, waiting for someone to come running in, screaming about the lab being full of blood. I expected questions I couldn’t answer and immediate termination. But nothing happened. No-one came. When I returned to the lab several hours later, there was no sign of any blood, except for the tiniest speck, dried into a tile crack in the corner. Unless that, that had been there before? I don’t know. My shoes were still speckled with blood, though, so I know I wasn’t hallucinating it. I checked with Dr. Gill, who confirmed that she could see the spots, though I neglected to tell her it was blood. I had no intention of inviting further questions.

I missed the next three tutorials. I just stayed at home. But something wouldn’t let me just simply let it go. Finally, I made a decision. I wanted to see where they lived. I felt like I needed to, for some reason. Needed to see if they existed outside of my class, outside of my mind. I asked Elena and, irregular as it was, she gave me the address. It didn’t surprise me to find out they all lived in the same place. A semi-detached house on Kingsland Road in Newham. I’m afraid I don’t remember the number, and the details have disappeared from the college systems.

The house itself was run down, as might have been expected, and I must have spent a good fifteen minutes just stood in front of it, waiting for the courage to approach. Finally, I knocked on the door. The wood was old and dry, and some flaked off under my knuckles. It opened immediately, and there stood Jan Novak. When she saw me, her mouth twisted into something I think was meant to be a smile.

“Hello,” she said, “have you come to give us more lessons? We would like to learn about the liver.” Her eyes locked onto my abdomen.

I was about to reply when a muffled scream of pain came from somewhere deep inside the house. It sounded ragged, like whoever was crying out had been gagged. I looked to Jan Novak, who showed no indication she had heard it, still staring at where I had taught her my liver would be. I ran, and she watched me go without moving.

I did call the police, but they just told me that the house was currently unoccupied, and they’d found no evidence that there had been anyone present. I took great pains never to see the class again. I avoided all tutorials, and simply waited until the end of term. I haven’t seen them since.

[Archivist: That’s it?

Dr. Elliott: Not quite. There was one other thing. When I went to the classroom shortly after what should have been their final tutorial, I found something on the desk. It was an apple. Next to it was a handwritten note that said “Thank you for teaching us the insides”. I burned the note, just in case.

Archivist: And the apple, did you... eat it?

Dr. Elliott: Do I look like an idiot? Of course not! I cut it in half, first, to check if it was... off.

Archivist: And?

Dr. Elliott: Human teeth. Inside were human teeth arranged in a smile. Here, I brought you the two halvesto see for yourselves.

Archivist: Oh good lord! That’s...

Dr. Elliott: Deeply unpleasant, yes. You can keep it, if you want. As proof.

Archivist: We do not want it. I’m afraid it isn’t really proof. Someone could have stuck those teeth in after the apple had been cut.

Dr. Elliott: [Somewhat distressed] You think I would do that?!

Archivist: I didn’t say you would, I just said it was enough of a possibility that I don’t think your... tooth apple has a place in our artefact storage. Also, it is technically medical waste.

Dr. Elliott: Fine. I’ll dispose of it myself. Now, is there anything else you want me?

Archivist: No, this should do. We’ll investigate and get back to you if we find anything.

Statement ends.]

Archivist Notes:

The first thing about this statement that makes me dubious is that it comes from a fellow academic. Historic and prestigious as the Magnus Institute is, there are still many within the sphere of higher education that do not grant it the respect it deserves, and some have been known to make false statements as ill-conceived jokes.

Another mark against the veracity of the statement is the names of the students. A quick Internet search reveals ‘Erika Mustermann’ as the official German placeholder name, similar to the English, well, the English name ‘John Doe’. The same is true the other names, ‘Juan Pérez’ is the generic name of choice in most Spanish speaking countries, ‘Fulan al-Fulani’ in the Middle East, et cetera. It seems strange to me that Dr. Elliott would fail to take note of this.

Still, Tim made contact with Elena Bower in the King’s administration office, and while she couldn’t find any actual records of them in the system, she does remember them being there, and confirms that she assigned them to Dr. Elliott last year. She could be in on it, of course, but Tim seems to believe her.

There’s also the matter of the teeth. I stand by my assessment that there is no evidence they were placed there by supernatural means, but it does seem an awfully long way to go for a bad joke. In the end we did send them off to a dental specialist, but they weren’t able to tell us much beyond the fact that they all seemed like healthy adult teeth, and most of them appeared to come from different people.

There’s not much more we can do to follow this up, without dedicating additional time we can’t afford. The only other lead was Sasha’s discovery that, early last year, Dr. Rashid Sadana took his own life. There’s no direct connection, except that he taught the Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology for Complementary Therapies course at St Mary’s University, and the only note found near the body simply read “NOT TO BE USED FOR TEACHING”.

#the magnus archives #magnus archives #MAG #MAG34 #MAG 34 #AnatomyClass #Anatomy Class #Statement #The Stranger

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jamesbucksiclebarnes · 5 years ago

Photo

Rating: Mature - Heavy Violence, Language.

Chapter List: [1] | [2] | [3] | [4] | [5] | [6]

[AO3 Link] | [Fic Page]

SERIES SUMMARY:

"Not human. She was not human. They all knew it. Could almost feel it, but couldn't make sense of it. That was why they were afraid. Not because of what she used to be Before. But because of what she was now."

Having found herself serving as the right-hand to the Governor for too long, Synnove le Jacques does her best to make things right with the people of the Prison. Stuck beside her partner in crime, her irritatingly obnoxious and hideously problematic best friend, Merle, she does her best to fight back against the monster she has let the Governor become.

CHAPTER TITLE: The Hand That Fed and Fed

We had been walking in absolute silence for almost an hour before I heard the unmistakable crack echo from somewhere in the distance.

I could tell by the way Daryl suddenly stopped in front of me that he’d heard it, too. He turned his head to look at Merle and I over his shoulder, brows furrowed beneath the strands of hair hanging over his face.

“Was that –“

His question was cut off by the sudden, rapid sound of gunfire in the distance. We all spat out a curse before taking off in the direction of the sound, the same direction I imagined the prison was in. With my hands still bound, I had to pay close attention to where I stepped, which hindered my speed enough that I was only able to barely overtake Daryl. Usually, I was faster than any and all humans in the vicinity by quite a decent margin, but I’d almost made a habit of purposefully slowing myself down to not appear weirder than they all already thought I was. Now, however, I’d thrown caution to the wind.

Merle knew I was fast. He knew I could see and hear things almost five times better than he could. And he knew I was strong – stronger than my leanly muscled body should have allowed me to be. At this point, I think he’d just accepted it. After all, it had been the reason I’d saved his ass so many times.

Daryl, though. I didn’t know how he’d handle it, but I also knew it would crush him if anything happened to his friends at the prison. So, I didn’t hold myself back. Not on purpose. Not this time.

I broke through the tree line almost a full thirty seconds before they did. The sight that awaited me brought me to a slow halt. Biters had infested the grounds inside the fence, having wondered in through the broken gate. A familiar truck sat upon the grassy hill inside the fence, one I recognised from the Governor’s stash of vehicles. It was one of the biter trucks.

I surveyed the situation as quickly as I could, my gaze catching the movement by the side of the prison fence, where the outline of a familiar figure caught my eye. Rick was pushed up against the wire, struggling against the group of biters currently making a move to surround him. He didn’t have a weapon.

Daryl broke free of the forest and stuttered to a shocked halt beside me.

I reached down without looking and pulled the bowie knife from his belt, ignoring his yelp of protest as I kicked off once again, sprinting across the grassy plane towards Rick. Mere moments before I reached him, I felt an arrow blaze past me. It buried itself in the forehead of one of the biters surrounding the sheriff.

I got the one standing next to it, leaping up and burying Daryl’s bowie knife into the top of its skull. Even with my bound hands, I made short work of the next three before Daryl and Merle both arrived to help take out the other five or so.

Rick looked between the three of us, nodding at each in turn before reaching out and grabbing Daryl’s shoulder in relief.

It was a touching moment, brief though it was.

Rick looked at each of us, his face drenched with sweat and his eyes holding an intense, near crazed look as he turned to peer through the fence.

The field beyond was lost, taken now by the dead as they mindlessly shuffled through the untrimmed grass, the sounds of their moans drawing more of their kind in through the ruined gate. Both Daryl and Rick remained standing before the fence, gripping onto the wire, glaring hatefully at the creatures that now walked on their land.

I took a step back, looking at Merle with a tight frown. This had been something I had suggested to Philip, once, long ago. It had been intended to be a scare tactic more than a means for extermination. However, that had been back near the beginning. When we had all been concerned about the possibility of another community rising up nearby and wanting what we had.

Rick barely looked in our direction as he began walking, along the fence line and toward the side of the prison. Apparently, there was an alternative entrance. Daryl followed along behind him dutifully. Merle and I exchanged one more look before silently deciding to do the same.

When we arrived by the door, a rusted metal thing that looked as if it would be more at home on Alcatraz than in the midst of Georgia, Rick turned so fast on his heel, his boot literally kicked up a cloud of dust.

Instantly, I lifted my hands. Both were coated in biter blood and I still had Daryl’s bowie knife gripped loosely in my left hand. “Hey, I know you don’t want us here,” I quickly said, hoping to get a word in before Merle opened his big, stupid mouth to say something aggressively unhelpful. “And I understand why – I do. But neither of us has anywhere else to go.”

Rick cocked his head slightly to the side and surveyed me from head to toe, eyes narrowed in thought. His dark hair stuck to the skin of his creased forehead, beads of sweat sting clinging to the strands.

I sensed Merle taking a step forwards and quickly side stepped in front of him, effectively placing myself between he and Rick. “This is your place,” I continued quickly, keeping my tone perfectly polite. “We understand that. We respect it. It’s your call to do with us what you will. Want us to leave? We’ll go. Want us to stay and pull our weight? We’ll clear that field single-handedly.” I paused, considering my words and, before I could think better of it, opened my mouth once again. “Well, I mean. He’ll do it single-handedly. I have two.”

Merle grumbled something particularly unfriendly under his breath.

Rick’s demeanour seemed to shift slightly. He straightened, pulling his shoulders back as if he’d been slouching this entire time, and took a deep breath. The edges of those bright, crystalline blue eyes of his seem to loosen, no longer narrowed in my direction with unveiled suspicion. One side of his mouth turned down at the corners in a lopsided frown as he weighed his decision.

From beside him, Daryl took a shuffling step forwards, looking at his friend with a troubled expression. “Come on, man. They said they’d help.”

Rick barely even acknowledged him, too caught up in his own thoughts.

“I know it isn’t ideal,” I tried, giving the sheriff a slight smile. “Having both Merle and I here might make things… uncomfortable for a little while. But, I can assure you we will both –” I glanced over my shoulder pointedly at Merle before looking back to Rick “– make an effort to keep the peace.”

His gaze never once strayed from either Merle or I, his body almost rigid as he took in a long, steadying breath and pursed his lips in thought. A few tense moments of silence passed before, finally, he nodded.

It was slight and barely discernible, and he definitely didn’t stick around to further clarify, turning immediately to open the door and storm inside. I took it.

With an arrogant grin flashed in Merle’s direction, I began to follow the tense sheriff inside the prison walls. Merle himself was thankfully too relieved to even make a smartass remark – a miracle in and of itself.

We could stay. We weren’t exactly welcomed, but we could stay. And that was good enough for me.

#####

I should have known there’d be a downside.

A cage. Why I hadn’t seen Rick throwing Merle and I into a cell whilst he deliberated amongst his people was beyond me. I mean, it was prison. It was literally built for people like Merle and I. We’d slept the night on an uncomfortable concrete bench and neither of our moods were particularly better for it, but at least we’d had a roof over our heads.

The main room of the cellblock itself was made up of a series of circular tables and benches. A grated mezzanine ran along the side and back walls, ending with a pair of metal stairs on either end, and overlooking the cell built into the corner of the room beside the concrete stairs that lead up to the entryway.

It was from that cell tucked into the corner that Merle and I watched the remaining members of Rick’s group, where they were gathered a few feet away in the block’s main hall of cells. They were gearing up – as best they could with their limited resources.

Merle and I spoke in soft voices between ourselves, debating the numerous means the Governor would likely use to attack the prison next. He, of course, believed the Governor would come crashing through their one remaining gate and light up the place with all the firepower we had oh-so-generously gifted him with, killing everyone caught in the crossfire. I disagreed. He was a rash fool at times, that was true, and my grasp on the reality of his mindset was not what it had once been, but I had taught him a lot during our time together. The capacity to think like a sly, cunning assassin was buried barely an inch deep in that rotting mind of his.

He wouldn’t come crashing through their doors. Not yet, anyway. He still had an opportunity to manipulate this situation in his favour. Either to fix it and become the diplomatic hero, or to provoke it until he truly made villains of these people, enabling him to become the warrior hero.

It was difficult to discuss in depth, though, considering half my attention was divided between Merle and the conversation going on between Rick and the others. Their raised voices had effectively shut both Merle and I up, our nosey asses almost instantly tuning in to the unfolding argument.

No one particularly wanted either Merle or I there, which was understandable, but their main source of tension came from the undecided notion of what to do next. Leave or stay? Their group was split between the two.

They argued for a few more minutes before Merle felt the need to make an input. Because, really, whenever didn’t he?

“Better to live like rats,” he remarked, from behind his cell wall. Unironically.

“You got a better idea?” Rick asked, cocking a dark brow.

“Yeah,” Merle responded. “We should have slid out of here last night and lived to fight another day.”

I slowly rose from my sitting position, coming to stand beside him to look out through the wire wall before me at the group of people down the hall.

“But we lost that window, didn’t we?” Merle continued. “What do you think, Jacques? Reckon he got scouts on every road out of this place by now?”

“Likely,” I answered with a curt nod.

“We ain’t scared of that prick,” came Daryl’s voice from the second story row of cells. He was bending over the railing to look at us.

“Ya’ll should be,” Merle snorted, wrapping his fingers through holes in the mesh wire door of our cage. “That truck through the fence thing? That’s just him ringing the doorbell.”

I cringed slightly, knowing my part in that making the shadow of guilt begin to crawl up my throat.

“We might have some thick walls to hide behind, but he’s got the guns and he’s got the numbers,” Merle continued.

It was true and I nodded my agreement, mind racing with theories. “If he was smart,” I chimed in, leaning against the wire wall beside Merle. “All he’d have to do was take the high ground. Starve us out.”

The likelihood he’d think to wait us out was low to say the least, but it was worth saying. He’d never had much patience but guns and would-be soldiers? He certainly had those aplenty.

And we’d been the ones to give them to him.

“Hell,” Merle snorted after a moment of tense silence had settled. “Ya’ll should just be glad she’s here with me.” He jerked his head at me. “If he’d had her too, you’d all already be dead.”

I elbowed him in the ribs. Had he really needed to say that? Now everyone was looking at me.

“Can we put him in the other cellblock?” Maggie asked tautly.

“No,” Daryl answered. “He’s got a point.”

Maggie didn’t like that response – not that I really blamed her. She whirled around to face us, pointing a finger in our direction with a fierce scowl. “This is all you! You started this!”

From above her, at the beginning of the stairs, a thin blonde girl shouted, “What difference does it make whose fault it is?”

I concurred. We were all stuck in the same prison now, both literally and figuratively.

“What should we do?” asked the dainty woman with short, silver hair. Her voice was at odds with her appearance, stronger and clearer than her timid appearance claimed she was.

“I said we should leave,” the one-legged man sitting on the bottom of the staircase said harshly. “Now Axel’s dead. We can’t just sit here.”

Rick lifted a hand to rub his jaw before turning, pulling open the gate separating the hall and the main room and striding out toward the exit. The old man, clambering up onto his one good foot, a pair of old metal crutches tucked beneath his arms, began to follow him.

“Get back here!” he yelled, making half of us jump in surprise at the harshness of his voice.

After a brief moment of stunned silence, the young, dark-haired boy trailed after them, leaving six-and-a-half of the group behind.

I say six-and-a-half, you see, because, a little box by the edge of the staircase, I had learnt barely a few moments ago, contained a baby. An actual, tiny, newborn baby. It had given me such a shock when I’d heard the little one cooing in the middle of the night that I’d literally been unable to fall asleep. The young blonde girl, whose name I was pretty sure started with a “B”, had carried her down from the second story, bouncing her along in an attempt to calm her back down into a soft sleep. I’d been able to see her little face poking out from the edge of her pale pink blanket in the dim moonlight. She was a cute thing, content and pink-cheeked. I can’t believe Daryl hadn’t mentioned her. Had I known, I might have fought harder to go back with them when they had all been arguing by the roadside. We had children in Woodbury, that was true, and the idea that they could potentially get caught in the crossfire between Rick and the Governor made my heart ache. The youngest was four, a tiny little thing named Gretta. Gretta could run. A newborn baby could not.

Everyone seemed confused as to what to do next. Their aimless shuffling about reminded me of the biters.

I could hear the distant sound of Rick’s voice filtering in through the upper windows and spent a few moments attempting to tune into it, but it was just out of my range. The warmth of the mid-day sun upon the brick walls began to filter into the small, enclosed room. I loved the heat, thrived in it. But something about being stuck inside a cage, watching the heat waves distorting the concrete by feet made me begin to feel uncomfortable. I wasn’t claustrophobic in the least, but I wasn’t exactly made for captivity, either.

My leather jacket was beginning to choke me.

I lifted up my hands to undo the zip, pulling the sleeves free from my heavily tattooed arms and tossing it against the wall. It struck the concrete with a somewhat amusing sound before falling atop the bench that ran along the wall and flopping over it, onto the floor. The air caressed the bare skin left exposed by my black tank. I rolled my shoulder, my neck, and lifted my arms up to stretch.

God, I needed to get out of this cage.

As I lowered my arms, twisting back around to find Merle sneering at me, I felt the sensation of prying eyes off to my right. Before I could strike Merle across the back of the head, my attention was turned, and I caught Daryl’s eye mere seconds before he had a chance to jerkily avert his gaze. The red tint to his cheeks and the way he shuffled uncomfortably in his place, sitting upon one of the steps in the centre of the hall of cells, made me chuckle slightly under my breath.

Until I caught a second eye.

The timid-looking woman with grey hair had been partway through a hushed conversation with the younger Dixon, only to pause mid-word when she caught his gaze slipping elsewhere. She had followed his line of sight and was now surveying me from top to bottom with her eyes narrowed, more in thought than in suspicion. In fact, it was almost calculating.

I turned away.

#####

We were freed a short time later by the old man.

He didn’t speak to us, merely pulled a set of keys from his belt loop once he’d returned and unlocked the door before turning and hobbling back over to the row of cells, lowering himself down on one of the steps once again. The door between the main room and the cells was pushed closed behind him by Maggie.

So, we were free of one cage, only to be locked into another.

Whatever. It was their place and I had said I’d respect whatever means they felt they needed to take to be safe.

Unfortunately, this had given Merle quite a lot of room to make a nuisance of himself. He’d begun rummaging through their belongings almost immediately. I followed along behind him, more-so to keep him from doing anything too out of order, but also out of my own sense of curiosity.

They didn’t have much. Some old cans, a pot or two, and a handful of old milk cartons for water. A small collection of baby formula was tucked away inside one of the cupboards beneath the metallic shelving unit. My heart constricted at the sight of it. How long would that last them? Would they be able to prepare it on the road if they were forced to leave?

I shook my head to knock that train of thought off its tracks.

“You think they’ll make it?” Merle asked after a long stretch of silence. He was partway through trying to bend a piece of broken metal from the side of the staircase at the back of the room.

“Don’t know,” I answered honestly. “But I think they’ve gotten this far for a reason.”

Merle’s snort morphed into a grunt as he tried to pull at the sharp rod of metal to no avail. It was still partially welded onto the side of the step. With a sigh, I stepped forward and shooed him away. He gave me an agitated look before shuffling dejectedly to the side and allowing me to take his place.

“How do you know it ain’t just luck?” Merle responded, watching with his arms crossed over his chest as I reached out to grab the shard of metal.

“Because,” I began, turning to look at him as I pulled the rod downwards, snapping it from its welding with a satisfying sound. “I saw this prison before they got here. It was overrun. They cleared it out.”

Merle’s face was a mixture of frustration and exasperation as I handed him the snapped piece of metal, but he took it with a shake of his head. I knew it irritated him that my strength surpassed his. It played on his male ego so much that he constantly tried to outdo me whenever he was given the opportunity. One time, he’d even challenged me to an arm wrestle.

I’d almost broken his arm.

“Then why’re they shittin’ their pants about that damn field?” Merle asked, grabbing the roll of duct-tape from the top of the shelving unit beside us and making his way back toward the cell we’d been freed from. “You and I would have a damn party out there.”

“You might, maybe,” I responded, following behind him with a grin. “I’d be too busy constantly saving your ass while you frolicked around, wondering why it was so damn easy.”

Merle paused mid-step to turn and look at me, brows furrowed. “Frolicked? Do I look like a damn fairy-boy to you?”

I blinked once at his choice of words, trying to hide my ironic grin before shaking my head once and stepping past him. Now that the cage door was open, the claustrophobic feeling I’d had was gone as I sat atop the concrete bench, pushing myself up into the corner where the wire wall met brick.

Merle took a seat next to me, putting his leg up and resting the metallic contraption on his forearm against his thigh. He put the piece of metal in his mouth – gross – as he began to line the metal in duct-tape, preparing to secure the sharp point where his hand used to be.

I was about to open my mouth to make a smartass comment when the door to the cellblock slammed open. Rick came waltzing back in, barely giving us a side-ways glance as he made his way back to the hall of cells where his people were still milling about.

He reached into the cell closest to the opened gate and pulled out a hunting rifle, handing it to Maggie. “Take watch,” he ordered. “Eyes open. Head down.”

She gave him a nod and left the building without question.

Rick continued toward the others, a hand on his hip as he announced, “Fields filled with walkers. I didn’t see any snipers out there, but we’ll keep Maggie on watch.”

Daryl made his way down from the second story mezzanine. “I’ll get up in the guard tower. Take out half these walkers, give these guys a chance to fix the fence.”

Michonne, who had been given much more leeway than either Merle or I, stood by the stair railing with her hands in the pockets of her tight jeans. “We could use some of the cars to put the bus in place.”

The old man, whose name I’d learnt from listening in was Hershel, stepped up beside Rick. “We can’t access the field without burning through our bullets.”

“So, we’re trapped here?” Glenn asked angrily.

I glanced sideways at Merle, wondering if their hushed voices were reaching his plainly human ears, but he was too invested in building his new toy to give me the slightest of hints one way or the other. Part of me was tempted to tell them to just let Merle and I out there. After all, the only one of them that actually seemed to care about our wellbeing was Daryl – and I say “our” loosely, considering the younger Dixon hadn’t exactly made his opinion of me quite clear. It made sense for them to send us, the disposable ones, out into that field to clear as many biters as we could before getting devoured. Not that we would, but from their point of view, it was a logical conclusion to draw.

I turned my head slightly to the side, tuning back into the conversation whilst also keeping half an eye on Merle and the pointy thing in his hand.

“There’s barely any food or ammo,” Glenn continued, growing more and more agitated as his words went on.

Daryl shrugged. “Been here before. We’ll be alright.”

“That was when it was just us!” Glenn’s voice was rising in volume. “Before there were snakes in the nest!”

Daryl’s head twisted to look at him, eyes narrowed in a near feral glare. “Man, we gotta go through this again?” he asked with a growl. “Merle and Jacques are stayin’. They’re with us now.” With a curled lip snarl, he turned away from Glenn and began to climb the staircase two steps at a time. “Get used to it. All ya’ll.”

Glenn watched him go for a moment before stepping up closer to Rick, voice low, no more than a hiss. “Seriously, Rick. I don’t think Merle living here is really gonna fly.”

“I can’t kick him out,” Rick responded, just as aggressively.

“I wouldn’t ask you to live with Shane after he tried to kill you,” Glenn spat.

That seemed to make Rick instantly uncomfortable. I watched him shuffle from foot to foot as he tried to process the best way to respond, though the old man, who had stepped up beside Glenn, beat him to it.

“Merle has military experience,” Hershel said softly. “And the girl’s proven herself to be capable.”

Glenn turned to look at him with a scowl.

“He may be erratic, and she may be unpredictable, but I wouldn’t underestimate their sense of loyalty. Merle, to his brother, and hers, to him.”

Seemingly ignoring Hershel’s wise words, Glenn turned back to look at Rick, his body language making it look as if he were about ready to enter into a fever. “What if we solve both problems at once?” he asked intensely. “Deliver Merle to the Governor. Bargaining chip. Give him his traitor, maybe declare a truce.”

I had to hold back a snort. If, after everything he’d witnessed the other night, he truly believed the Governor would honour any sort of agreement made between the Prison and Woodbury, he was a fool. This was more than just a territory dispute now. It was personal to him. He wouldn’t accept any half measures.

“You think the girl would just accept that?” Rick was asking, though his voice was low enough that I could only barely hear it over the sounds of Hershel’s crutches against the floor.

The old man was making his way over to us.

“We’d have to take her, too,” Rick hissed. “You think she deserves that?”

Glenn didn’t respond right away, giving Rick enough time to press it further, though whatever he said was lost as Hershel’s form took up the doorway to our cell.

My body tensed slightly without my provocation.

Merle glanced up, the old man’s proximity breaking through his focus. He’d made pretty good progress on the arm, having almost solidified the sharp metal at the tip of his stub with duct-tape.

“You’re the farmer,” Merle said in way of greeting, looking the old man up and down. “Hershel.”

Hershel smiled slightly and stepped further into the cell, lowering himself down onto the concrete bench to my left with a grunt. “And you’re the black sheep,” he responded without judgement. “Merle.”

He turned his attention to me, the kind eyes and soft smile he gave enabling my tensed muscles to relax and loosen. It had been a long time since I’d been treated with unmotivated kindness. I knew that was partially my own fault, due to my somewhat aggressive personality, but it was still nice to see a pure, good natured kindness in a stranger’s eyes when he looked upon me, instead of the judgemental, perverted, or scornful looks I often received.

“You’re… Jack, was it?” the old man asked politely.

“Jacques,” I answered, inflecting the French pronunciation with a grin. “Synnove le Jacques.”

Hershel’s smile widened beneath his unruly white beard. “That’s a pretty name. Interesting.”

I breathed out a small chuckle. “My, uh, Mother. She had a pretty strong ancestry back to the Vikings – hence the Synnove. And my… Her husband, he was from a French family. So… le Jacques.”

Speaking of my adoptive parents had always been a sensitive subject for me. It made me uncomfortable at the best of times and miserable at the worst.

Hershel nodded along. If he noticed the way I somewhat stumbled over the mention of my adoptive father, he didn’t let on. “And where are you from?” he asked, though it sounded as if he already knew the answer.

It wasn’t hard to guess, after all. My accent was still quite strong, even after I’d spent the last few years surrounded by Americans. “Australia,” I answered, anyway, with a small, sad smile.

“Your parents, too?”

“Yeah. They were.”

Hershel’s smile dropped slightly. “I take it they are no longer with us?”

“Haven’t been for more than a decade,” I answered simply.

He gave me that soft, apologetic look most folks gave when you informed them that your parents had died when you were young. “I’m sorry to hear.”

My shoulders rose in a half-hearted shrug and I averted my gaze. Even after all these years, it was still difficult for me to talk about my adoptive parents. Speaking about my biological ones wasn’t much better, either. The subject was a sore spot and Merle knew me well enough to push the old man into a different conversation.

“How’d you lose it?” he asked, jerking his head toward Hershel’s missing leg.

The old man’s smile returned slightly, though it was somewhat sad as he looked down at the stub below his knee. “I was bit.”

“Bit?” Merle echoed, blinking once in surprise. “Hack it off yourself?”

I felt myself cringing at the thought.

“No,” Hershel answered, leaning back against the metal wall behind him. “Rick did.”

“Awfully kind of him,” Merle said with a condescending snort.

I gave him a side-eye that he promptly ignored.

Hershel didn’t seem bothered by it, though. “He saved my life,” he said with a soft, patient tone.

My respect for him grew. Being patient whilst holding a conversation with Merle was akin to walking on water in my book.

Merle snorted at Hershel’s response, but the old man merely leant forward and looked at him.

“He gave me more time with my girls,” he stated simply. “Gave the both of you more time with each other, and you with your brother.” He leant back again. “Can’t put a price on that.”

“Can’t put a price on anything, anymore,” Merle muttered to himself as he averted his gaze from the old man and stared down at the haphazardly designed metal on his forearm.

I watched him silently for a moment with a frown whilst Hershel reached into the inner pocket of his jacket. The sounds of fabric against skin was oddly stark in the settling silence. Glancing back toward the old man, I watched him pull a small, pocket-sized black book from the inside of his jacket lining and bring it to rest upon in his lap.

I’d never been a religious person – how could I and still do what I do? – but I knew a bible when I saw one.

“I found this in one of the cells,” Hershel said softly to neither of us in particular. “Lost more than the Good Book there for a while. Lost my way.” He took a long, steadying breath before using his forefinger to pull the book open, looking down at the small text with a small, content smile on his lips. “And if your right hand offends you, cut it off, cast it from you, for it is profitable that one of your members should perish –“

“– And not that thy whole body should be cast into hell,” Merle finished for the man, looking up at him with a smug smirk. “Matthew 5:29 and 30.”

Hershel looked a little taken aback by Merle’s reciting and I found myself chuckling under my breath.

That man was, indeed, full of surprises.

“Woodbury had a damn fine library,” he explained, his tone much lighter than it had been before. “One of the only things I miss about it.”

“Hot showers,” I remarked, looking to the ceiling with a dreamy look on my face.

Merle clicked his tongue. “Oh, hell yeah.”

“Fresh apples. Oh, and how could we forget, Roger’s moonshine?”

Merle let out a chuckle at that. “That was some damn fine mix.”

We grinned at one another silently for a moment before I looked up at Hershel and saw the slight frown pulling down his bushy white brows. The disapproval in his eyes almost made me feel guilty. I understood, of course. Reminiscing about a life we’d lost wouldn’t serve anyone.

“Too bad about that megalomaniac, though, huh?” I added with a light-hearted shrug. “Those bastards ruin everything.”

The wide grin on Merle’s face faded much quicker than I would have liked as he turned and gave me a perplexed look of contemplation. Hershel and I both waited silently, watching the wheels in his head turn as his frown deepened.

“He’ll be gunning for you,” Merle said to me after a moment. “You know that, don’t you? He’s gotta take out the biggest threat first.”

I met his gaze evenly. “I’d say he’d know better than to try, but these days he has more ego than sense.”

It was a possibility I’d known to expect. The Governor knew too much about me. He knew of my previous profession; knew of the things I was capable of. He’d witnessed it himself, both outside the gates and within, during Game Night. Since we had begun the admittedly somewhat twisted weekly tradition, I’d remained undefeated. I was quick, strong, and trained to kill. At the beginning, my lethality had unnerved Philip, but the Governor had seen the advantages of having someone like me by his side. Saw it as his greatest weapon.

Now, I was his greatest concern.

He knew, if I were so inclined, I could get into Woodbury undetected and move through the town like a ghost in the shadows. He knew I could easily scale the side of the town hall and reach his window. And he knew, better than almost anyone, that I could certainly find a new home for a knife in the base of his throat.

It stood to reason that he would plan to eliminate me from the board as soon as possible. After all, I’d been the one that taught him to always target the biggest threat first.

“I’ll deal with what comes,” I stated lightly, giving Merle what I hoped was a confident smile. “Always do.”

Merle nodded, giving me a lingering look that almost seemed like concern before turning back to Hershel. “I’ll be next,” he guessed. “Michonne, my brother. Then your girls. Glenn, Carl, the baby, whoever the hell else is left. He’ll save Rick for last, so he can watch his family and friends die ugly. That’s the kind of man you’re dealing with.”

I nodded along with a deep sigh, feeling the warmth of shame begin to build in the pit of my stomach. It disturbed me more than words could express that I had served under the Governor’s rule for as long as I had, as if I’d been too comfortable in my little slice of his world to wake up and see what he had really become. As if, suddenly, I’d blinked and the man standing before me was no longer the soft-hearted Phil I’d known since the beginning.

When had he become “the Governor” to me? At what point had I even stopped calling him by his name? I should have stopped myself then. I should have known better. I’d been trained to know better. When had I lost my damn sight?

It was the not knowing that irritated me the most. There was a moment, somewhere in time, that I had actively chosen to ignore the red flags in favour of my own safety and comfort.

The army men by the roadside should have been the moment I left. When he ordered us to gun them down, and we’d obeyed with little thought. Sure, when I’d noticed one of them had survived, partially hidden behind their truck, I’d done my best to save him – told him to run and tried to distract the Governor so he wouldn’t notice. But he had. And the moment he spotted him, he turned and lifted his hand, shooting the boy in the back. There had been no emotion on his face, no hesitation. A simple and smooth execution.

I’d seen it, then. As if waking from a trance. Seen that something about this man before me was… corrupted.

I remembered feeling a dull sense of regret. Guilt for being the one that had taught him to shoot, that had enabled his violent streak purely for my own benefit. That was when I should have left. But I’d somehow convinced myself that it was a one-off happenstance, that no one else other than Martinez even remotely took my concerns seriously, so surely it was all in my head, right?

But since that day, I had been unable to look at him the same. Every move he made, every word he spoke, I began to analyse. And then, that night with Glenn and Maggie…

If I had left that day by the roadside, Maggie never would have had to live through that. And I hated myself for it.

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