#and how every time ive admitted ive been at a higher weight than this

[whsprings]

.

[badwolf-winchester]

Ancient Bloodlines

Pairing: Loki x Emy Nightstar (OC)

OC Summary: Emy is the newest Avenger. She specializes in Magic and close range attacks/ weapons. Her heritage is unknown to her as she was left at an orphanage door step when she was a young girl with only the memory of her name. She goes by her nickname Emy but has never told anyone her full name as its a reminder of her being abandoned. Emy can see through any illusion and Magic no matter how powerful they are or how strong the magic is and is unaware of this. Her powers include Telekinesis, Elemental Control, True Sight (as stated above) Enhanced healing and Shifting (she wont discover this till much later in the story). She loves to read, listen to music, play violin, sing, and draw.

Story Info: Takes place after infinity wars. Tony and Natasha are alive Steven comes back from the future after giving back the infinity stones. Vision is alive and living with Wanda in the tower. Thor and Loki live in the tower with the rest of the Avengers and for the sake of the story Himedall is alive and living with the rest of the Asgardians on earth in New Asgard (you will find out why later)

One last thing: Please do not repost my work on any other site or social media, however reblogging on here is fine. I work hard on all of my fanfics and it’s disappointing when people take my work as their own. I am the creater of all my OCs such as Sora Nightstar, Emy Nightstar, and Lithium Nightstar. My inbox is open for any and all requests as i am a multi fandom writer. Let me know how you like the story and i will do my best to answer any and all questions. As always i encourage any and all feedback as it helps with my writing. I hope you all like it!

The Beginning

They say that your parents are there to teach you the rules of the world, but what happens when you have no parents? Who will teach you then? The world is cruel but people are crueler. Ive learned this first hand when the person i trusted most in this world left me on the door step of the St. Trinity’s Orphanage. I was 9 when my mother told me she didn’t want me anymore and i guess I couldn’t really blame her. I mean who could love someone who couldn’t control the powers that grew with each passing year. Someone who started fires out of thin air when they had nightmares, conjured whirlwinds when startled, unfurled earthquakes when angered, spring forth rain showers when sad, and levitate objects when riddled with anxiety. I will never forget that day for its seared into my mind like its own person brand echoing with every beat of my heart. A monster thats what she called me, her own flesh and blood was a monster in her eyes, and i could see the relief when she ran from the solid oak door finally rid of the burden she had to put up with throughout the years. An abomination she cried as she reached the cobblestone sidewalk eager to be rid of me and by the pace she was going at i could tell she had more spring in her step than on the walk over from the bus we exited from. Unnatural she bellowed as she disappeared around the corner a ghost of a smile springing from her lips as she disappeared. These where the last words i would ever hear from my mother, if thats what you would call her.

Emy’s POV

Tonight was just like any other. Crisp cold air submerged the city in a blanket of dark and silence while it settled into your bones. I never minded the cold in fact I welcomed it, it reminded me of the cabin i found one year after running away from one of the many abusive foster homes i was forced to stay with. I’ll admit it was one of the times I was able to avoid the social workers for longer than a week and the happiest I had ever been in my life up until i was captured by Hydra. When I had a flair up with my powers, which usually ended up being fire, i would immediately get sent back to St. Trinity’s but this time i ran before they had the chance to toss me aside. The staff there used to place bets on how long i would stay with a family, they would joke saying i was cursed or jinxed but i knew the truth, no one wanted me. Once the parents found out about my abilities I was sent packing. I was labeled as a flight risk and a danger to others which only deepened my anti socialism.

Walking through the streets of New York i pull my dark purple jacket on and my dark brown hair in a pony tail as I get closer to my destination. Because i don’t feel the effects of the cold weather Tony, being such the dad figure he is, has made it his priority to make sure i still wear one just incase so here i was walking home in black ripped up jeans, a black v neck T-shirt, black and purple checkered vans and a light weight dark purple jacket. With my headphones in my ears and “I like it heavy” by Halestorm blasting I make my way to the place i call home, Stark Tower. Walking through the front doors i make my way past the receptionist who always greets me with a bright smile. As I walk towards the elevator I give her a small smile back and a head nod. After entering the elevator and pressing the button for the penthouse I start to reflect on how i got here.

By the time i was 15 Hydra found me in that cabin and took me away. I went from hopping from family to family to being used as a science experiment, constantly being poked and prodded just so they could get a reaction out of me. As a child my powers where very unstable mostly flaring up with my emotions, its no wonder that Hydra caught wind of me its not like i was hiding it very well or more so that i couldn’t hide it. They tried to wipe my memory to gain control of me “a blank slate” is what they wanted, but for some reason, they failed as I wasn’t susceptible to their conditioning methods no matter how much time i spent in the chair. However, I could tell they were scared of me I could see it in their eyes. This didn’t last long though as they used what they called their perfect weapon code name Winter Soldier to beat me into submission. After that first meeting that left me with a broken arm and a fractured ankle i started to obey, since then Ive met the Soldier a couple of times but if he remembers me he dosent let on and I dont blame him, he has been in that chair so many times Im genuinely surprised he can even remember how to walk. He is stronger than the others as most of the other test subjects had turned to vegetables after the 4th mind wipe, he was on his 10th the last time i saw him with Hydra.

Another test was done on me and this one was different. They used a teseract? If thats what they called it I can’t be sure nor did I care all I could feel was pain like as if someone injected lava in my veins. After they injected me I started screaming after a while I couldn’t even hear myself anymore, my throat was so sore and horse from the constant roar of my agony I just wanted it to end. How long was I out for? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days? Years? They didn’t keep clocks there or at least not in the dungeon like cell they had me in. When the fire faded i was left with this numbness and after further tests I realized that I was immune to fire. I can literally stick my hand in fire and i will be left untouched and unscorched. They did the same test with freezing temperatures to see if they could subdue me at least in some way. I must have been out longer than just a couple of days as during the tests i didn’t recognize any of the Doctors. In that moment I realized something, if they were trying to contain me then something must have happened to the soldier. It was time to plan my escape.

Back in my cell i could hear footsteps approaching me and then stop short. One of the scientists frantically trying to talk some sense into someone just out of my line of sight. “She is immune to anything we throw at her sir. We have done every test we could there is nothing left for us to do.” One of the goons in a lab coat stated to what i assumed is a higher up. “Bolden If her powers keep growing at the rate they are it could be days in which she will be unstoppable and with the soldier gone we dont have anything that can keep her in line. She broke Mandy and Rays arms the last time we tested her. She is getting too strong.” Brining a hand up to his chin the higher up Bolden stepped out of the shadows and looked at me with deep interest before he turned to looked at the man and scoffed. As he walked away i felt a cold chill ran down my back as I anticipated what was to become of me; I knew it was nothing good i had already broken their rules. His next words only confirmed what I feared. “ Its simple. Break her spirit or kill her Doctor. And when i say break her i mean in anyway means necessary.” His sadistic laugh is the last thing i remember before everything went black.

Its been 2 years since i have escaped and now I’m living in the avengers tower. I don’t remember what happened after that night in my cell its all a blur of red, screams, and gunshots. When i woke up next i was in a 6ft crater where I was being held captive without a scratch on me. Trees were uprooted and fallen over as if a bomb went off. Luckily the Avengers showed up not long after me waking up and took me to their base where i met Directer Fury. With his permission and 24/7 surveillance provided by Tony Stark via FRIDAY and training sessions to get my powers under control i was allowed to join the Avengers and fight for good. Little did i know that by agreeing to this I would end up in the path of a certain God or Gods who were also taking residence at the tower.

With the sound of a *ding* the elevator shook me out of my mind and back to the present. As i exited the elevator I pulled my head phones out of my ears and was instantly met with the sound of Tony losing his mind. “Where did she go? She knows she can’t be out this late. She could be taken again! Its 5 minutes past her curfew!” Rolling my eyes I roll my headphones up and shove them in my pocket and round the corner. “Tony it takes 5 minutes to get from the lobby to the penthouse calm down. I bet she will walk through that door anytime now.” Came the sweet voice of reason of none other than Pepper Potts. “I’m Home.” I said in a deadpan voice as i walked by the couple only for Tony to stand up and intercept me by placing a hand on my upper arm. “Where did you go and why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” I looked at him and raised an eyebrow pushing his hand off me. “Tony its Wednesday. I have training with Strange on Wednesdays and I had Friday alert you as I was leaving but you were in the lab with Bruce.” Not sure what to say next Tony mumbled a small apology. “Sorry I was just worried about you. I know you are grown enough to make your own choices as you are 25 but I just want to make sure you are safe. How was the training with The Wizard?” Sighing and shaking my head just wanting to go the library and read I decided to just let it go. “Strange is a hard ass that much you already know. It wasnt bad actually I think I’m warming up to him. I didn’t spontaneously throw him to the wall when he snuck up behind me as i was going over the ancient texts so i call that improvement.” I said sheepishly while side stepping around him. “I’m gonna go to the library now and grab some light reading before bed you guys have a good night.” With out waiting for a response I quickly made my way towards my new destination only to have Tony saying something about guests in the house but I ignored him.

Pushing open the library door I make my way to the poetry section to grab my usual copy of Edgar Allen Poe that I read before bed. As my had reached for the spot i knew i put the book in i find that its not there. “Wait what? Where is my book? I know I put it back here before I left for training so where did it go?” Frustrated I stomp back over to the entrance and rip open the door ready to go on a murder spree while shouting down the hallway. “CLINT! You better give me back my night time book or I’m breaking all your arrows again! No one reads in this tower but me! How stupid do you think I am!?” Straining my ears I listen for any type of movement but was met with dead silence. After a minute I finally hear movement through the vents coming from the west part of the tower and I take off sprinting. Sliding around a corner I barely miss colliding with Steve and Bucky who look like they were on their way back from a mission. Offering a quick apology before I continue my pursuit I hear Steve yell “Hey! No running in the tower!” Not faltering in my hot pursuit of the Hawk thief I continue to zip through the tower ignoring the Captains words until i was almost to the vent that lead to the 2 level family room. Using the railing for the steps leading down to the family area to give me more height i jumped as close to the vent as possible and conjured my signature Scythe to slice through it while twisting in the air kicking the vent free and off its track. A shocked and terrified scream resonates from the vent as the culprit falls to the ground with a thud and a grunt. I landed in a crouched position and slowly straightened to my full hight. “What the hell Emy?! When did you learn to do that?!” Clint yells as he sits up rubbing his left shoulder that he landed on. I started stalking towards him with the blade of my scythe scrapping across the ground as i went while giving him a death glare. “Give me back my book Barton.” At the mention of his last name his head snapped up to me fear replacing the pain from his fall. “Oh shit last name not good.” Scrambling up on his feet he turns and runs towards the common room that connects to the elevator with me hot on his tail and my scythe trailing behind me in my right hand.

“Shit shit shit shit shit shit SHIT!!” He yells as he makes it fully to the room only to fling forward as i jump and kick his back tired of all the running. Twirling my weapon around I place it at his neck sneering at him. “I will not ask you again.” I said placing pressure on his neck with my blade. Sensing a fast moving object coming from my left from the kitchen I move my head back 3 inches as what looked like a hammer flew by me embedding itself in the wall. Turning my head slowly in the direction of the flying object, I confirmed it was indeed a hammer that was thrown at me. Irritation flared through me as i released Clint from the end of my scythe and turned fully to the kitchen to face my attacker. There stood 2 men that i did not recognize, one tall oak of a man with blond short hair, blue eyes and tan skin in blue jeans, a red T-shirt ,and grey jacket. the other shorter man made me stare at him and faultier for a second as he was so different from anyone i have ever seen, dark blue skin covered his entire body with darker almost black symbols and piercing red eyes, long black hair with black jeans, a green dress shirt and black jacket. Tearing my gaze away from his own curious one i looked between both men before i clenched my jaw letting my irritation settle back in. “Which one of you threw that hammer.” I said venom dripping with every word. “Whoa its ok Emy thats just Thor and Loki they are the asgardian Gods that live here in the tower part time when they are not in Norway.” Clint said standing up quickly. Not moving from my position i narrowed my eyes and flicked them over in Clint’s direction. The ground started to shake as my irritation and annoyance grew to anger remembering what i was doing before being interrupted by the Gods. Throwing his hands up in surrender he then quickly reached into his back pocket and retrieved my book. “Ok ok dont blow a fuse Em.” He said while tossing me my possession stopping me from causing an earthquake. Catching it in the air with my left had I inspected the book to make sure it wasn’t damaged before I let go of my scythe, with a wave of my hand it disappeared back to the pocket dimension I keep it in then looked back at Clint as the tremors stopped. “Touch my things again and i will be wearing your guts like my mom’s pashmina.” I said to the thief before walking out of the room and disappeared down the hallway not giving the Gods a second glance. As I entered my room i could hear a silky voice ring out from the kitchen. “Well isnt she interesting.”

Part 2 coming soon

@nickkie1129

[we-are-only-halfway-home93]

Come and Lay the Roses 21- Sweet Lips On My Lips- [Ivar x OC]

Summary: Aaline and Ivar attend their second social function as a couple. Aaline stakes her claim.

Characters: Ivar x OC, Bjorn x Torvi, Ubbe x Margrethe, Hvitserk x Thora, Sigurd x OC, Ragnar, Lagertha

Warnings: arranged marriage, violence, sex, torture, language, mentions of rape/sexual assualt

Ch. 20

Word Count: 3761

AN: First, I want to apologize for taking so long to update. This quarantine has done a number on my mental health and I've been trying to teach 120+ high school kids from home for the last two months. I also really struggled with the beginning of this chapter. I've had the Freydis scene written pretty much since I started this story but I was having trouble with everything leading up to it. I hope you like it. Thanks for sticking with me.

“The higher you build walls around your heart, the harder you fall when someone tears them down.” ~Unknown 

Ivar adjusted his cuff links, snapping the smooth metal together satisfied when they clicked into place. 

He was dressed in a black ensemble from his bow tie to his shoes. His dark hair was slicked back against his skull, shining under the light. He smoothed his hand over his jaw, nerves making his hands shake.

Ragnar was putting on a charity event tonight. Every year, since the death of Aslaug, Ragnar held an event to raise money combating gun violence. It was ironic considering Ragnar ran a business that thrived on violence perpetrated through the use of guns but it all boiled down to the fact that he was a businessman and he needed to maintain a certain image. Running a charity against gun violence maintained his respectable persona to the public and provided him with a certain level of protection from the police. 

The charity events, because they held multiple every year, served as a cover of sorts. It allowed Ragnar to operate his illegal dealings through his charity holdings. They still had to keep up appearances however and hosted several charity galas, auctions, balls, what have you, throughout the year. The Aslaug Lothbrok Foundation Against Gun Violence event took place every April around her birthday.

For the last seven years, Ivar hated this event. For him, it only served as a reminder of her absence. Today was different.

Today he was attending with his wife. 

He and Aaline had only made one social appearance since their wedding and it didn’t end how Ivar had hoped. Today would be different, however. He and Aaline had made significant progress in their marriage. Ivar had admitted, only to himself and to his brothers, that he was starting to fall in love with her. He was not going to tell her. Not anytime soon at least. He needed some assurances before he did. Maybe her declaration of love first. He was prepared to wait. He’d been showing her how much he cared recently so hopefully, that would work in his favor, make her admit her love sooner.

Today Ivar was looking forward to showing off his breathtaking wife to everyone around. 

Ragnar had invited all the Earl’s of the Northmen as well as the King’s of the Saxons. Journalists were there from at least five magazines and newspapers and every family of high society was represented by at least one family member.

Ragnar’s events were widely publicized and heavily attended. Anybody who was anybody showed up and you weren’t an A-lister if you didn’t. 

He glanced down when his phone buzzed. It was Björn. It was time to go.

The women were riding separate from the men and Björn was waiting at the top of the stairs. Ivar adjusted his sleeves again and headed out.

He nodded at his brother when they met at the top of the stairs. Ivar could tell that something was on Björn’s mind. He was fidgeting and he wouldn’t look at Ivar. 

“Is there something on your mind brother?” Ivar asked. They pushed through the heavy front doors and moved towards the limousine. Björn sighed and gestured for Ivar to enter first. He slid across the leather seats and eyed his oldest brother. Hvitserk, Ubbe, and Sigurd were already seated in the limo, talking quietly amongst themselves. Björn slid in beside Ivar and eyed him with unease. 

Ivar stared right back until he saw his brother break. 

Björn grunted and pinched the bridge of his nose. He could feel a headache coming on. “Ivar, I’ve only just found out and there’s nothing I can do to change it, unfortunately. If I could, I would but it’s inevitable at this point.”

“Björn, just spit it out.” Ubbe snapped. Ivar glanced at his brothers, the tension in his frame increasing ten-fold. This was supposed to be a good night and he had a feeling that it was about to be ruined. 

“Freydis is coming.” 

.

Aaline stood at a tall round table in the corner of the room, a rapidly warming flute of champagne clasped loosely between her hands. 

She felt a little out of place. The other women had long since found friends and acquaintances to talk to, leaving Aaline alone to wait for Ivar to arrive. She didn’t know anyone there besides the brothers and their wives and the brothers weren’t even there yet. 

She watched as people mingled throughout the large ballroom, talking quietly and helping themselves to the open bar. Ragnar had arrived before his children but was waiting to speak until they appeared. There were trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres being passed around by waiters. Two open bars were available for anyone who didn’t care for champagne. 

There were several familiar faces in the crowd. People who had attended Aaline’s wedding. She didn’t know they’re names or who they were associated with so she just kept to herself. She startled when someone came up beside her and gave Sibylle a small smile. Sibylle smiled back and took a long pull from her own champagne. 

“The boys should be here soon. I just got a text from Sigurd. They’re stuck in traffic but they’re only a couple of blocks away from the hotel.” Aaline nodded her thanks and went back to examining the room. 

“It doesn’t matter how many of these I go to, I’ll never get used to them,” Sibylle said. She shared a look with Aaline and both women giggled.

“Ragnar is very good at throwing parties. It doesn’t matter what the reason is, he loves entertaining. It gives him a good excuse to show off.” Aaline chuckled and watched as Ragnar walked around the room, chatting with everyone he came across and gesticulating wildly at every story. 

“Uh-oh,” Sibylle whispered. Aaline jerked around and followed her gaze. She tensed at the sight of her father slowly making his way towards them.

“Do you want me to stay?” Sibylle asked. Aaline hesitated before shaking her head. She could handle her father. 

Sibylle nodded once and left her alone to deal with her father. Ives Jensen stopped at the table and cleared his throat, staring at his hands. 

“Is there something that you wanted?” She asked. There was a hard edge to her voice. She was only open to his presence for a short period of time. She was not willing to deal with his hesitancy. She took a drink from her champagne. 

Ives swallowed audibly and finally looked up at her. He did not look well. There were dark bags under his eyes and the wrinkles around his face had deepened considerably since she’d last seen him. His clothes were baggy like he’d lost weight and he reeked of cheap vodka. Aaline held her breath and scrunched up her nose. 

“I don’t have time to stand around and wait for you to grow a spine. What do you want?” She hissed. Ives flinched and looked down again. 

“I didn’t get a chance to talk with you at the wedding. You were very busy and I didn’t want to bother you.” He said. His voice was soft and could barely be heard between the two of them. She sighed and rubbed at her forehead, feeling a headache coming on. 

“Yes, the wedding that you arranged without my consent. I remember.” He flinched back and she thought she saw tears in his eyes. She tried to sum up some swell of sympathy for him but she just couldn’t.

The man before her was so alien that she couldn’t even see her father anymore. He no longer resembled even the distant man who would visit her boarding schools. He was a shell of who he used to be and she was surprised he was even still alive. 

“I have people I need to talk to. If you have something to say I need you to say it. Otherwise, move on.” She said. Sibylle nodded once towards security but Aaline shook her head. 

“Would you dance with me?” Ives asked. 

Aaline rounded on her father, surprise coloring her features. That was what he came over to ask? She almost snorted but held it back at the last minute. 

“That’s what you came over to ask me? To dance?”

“Well, you didn’t do me the honor at your wedding. I thought I’d get the chance then but it seemed you had someone else in mind.” She had no idea where his sudden courage came from but she was not about to let him make her feel guilty.

“You lost that honor the second you arranged this marriage. Don’t you dare stand there and act like I should be grateful.” She seethed. She glanced around, hoping that Ivar had arrived but there was still no sign of her husband.

“Aaline, I never wanted this for you.” He began to plead. She rolled her eyes and turned away from him. He followed her though. 

“Please, I only ever wanted you to be happy.” She glared at him.

“Happy? You only ever wanted me to be happy? Did it ever occur to you that maybe I would’ve been happy at home? With you? You were all I had after mom died but instead of caring for me, loving me, you shipped me off to another country instead of having to deal with me. 

“Did you even notice when I got in trouble? Did you even care? Or were you just concerned with keeping your good name unblemished? You’d rather sign a check and transfer me than bother to ask me what was wrong. And you claim you wanted to make me happy?” She shook her head, refusing to let her tears fall.

She had promised herself that she would stop being angry with her father. It took too much energy and she had more important things to focus on. Like getting to know her husband and taking over her father’s company. She didn’t need to worry about her father anymore. In all honesty, he hadn’t even been a blip on her radar since the wedding. The fact that he was bringing forth all these emotions now only made her angry.

“I think you should leave.” She said. She locked eyes with Sibylle who raised her eyebrows in a silent question and Aaline nodded. Sibylle moved to get security when Ives grabbed Aaline’s arm above the elbow. 

She sucked in a sharp breath and glared at him. “Get your hands off of me.” She hissed.

“Aaline, please, I’ve been speaking to some people and I’ve been trying to think of a way to get you out of this.” 

She arched an eyebrow, stunned. “Do you mean a way that won’t get you killed?” She asked. Ives clenched his jaw and tugged her towards him. He had no intention of hurting her but the act itself was still threatening. 

“I’m trying to fix this.” He whispered. 

Aaline could see security coming towards them followed closely by Ivar. She hadn’t seen him arrive. 

She looked back at Ives and jerked away from him, breaking his loose hold and twisting his arm around behind him. He yelped and arched away from her. She could feel several pairs of eyes on them but she didn’t care. 

“I don’t want to fix it.” She snarled. She pushed him away from her and towards the two security guards a few feet away. They each took an arm and began escorting Ives out of the ballroom. 

Ivar watched them pass and spoke softly to the guard at the door, requesting that Ives be escorted home and not allowed to return. The man nodded and followed after the group of three.

He turned to his wife and had to steady himself.

She looked like a goddess. Her floor-length black dress had a thigh-high slit up the right side that showed him an intoxicating view of her creamy skin. The neckline plunged nearly to her navel and the lights gleamed off her simple gold chain. The sleeves were long but sheer, accentuated by the gold beads that covered her wrists and shoulders. The beading collected around her waist as well, showing off her figure. Gold stilettos finished the look and made her look regal.

The fire in her eyes made him hard and he had to take several deep breaths before approaching her. He did so with delight and swept an arm around her waist, bringing her easily towards the dance floor.

“You look stunning, my dear. I hope he didn’t ruin your night.” His lips brushed softly against her ear and he felt her shudder.

She settled her arms around his shoulders and rested her cheek against his. “It’s better now that you’re here.” She could feel his grin against her neck and he pulled back.

“I’d say the same about you, elskede.” She smiled up at him and let him twirl her around the dance floor. He smelled absolutely divine and she closed her eyes, letting him consume her. 

“What did your father want?” She opened her eyes and pulled back to look at him. His eyes were earnest. She sighed and settled back against his neck. 

“Nothing important. He wanted to dance with me.” She said, her voice dripped with contempt. Ivar pulled back, his face contorted in confusion and scorn. 

“Why?” He asked. She shook her head. “He said something about not having the honor at my wedding. I told him he lost that honor as soon as he arranged our marriage without my consent.”

Ivar turned her around the dance floor, sweeping her in wide circles, making her dizzy. “And how did he feel about that?” He asked. She chuckled darkly.

“He told me that he only ever wanted me to be happy?” Ivar arched an eyebrow and hummed.

“And he thinks he accomplished that?” He scoffed and shook his head. She smiled and looked at him, his eyes sparkling with joy. She didn’t think she’d ever seen joy in his eyes before. 

“Well, it’s not all bad. I did get you.” She said. Ivar’s smirk was wicked. His eyes dropped down to her lips and she closed her eyes just before he kissed her. 

His lips were warm pressed to hers. He didn’t do more than press his lips firmly to hers but it sent shivers down her spine nonetheless. She moaned against his lips, the sound lost in the music. Ivar pulled her closer and dragged his hands down her back, settling them low. She pulled back and blinked up at him. He smiled down at her and nudged her slightly away.

“Go, Sibylle looks ready to burst with questions.” Aaline turned around and smiled at Sibylle. She looked like she was bouncing on her toes, her fingers tapping against the champagne flute in her hands. She eyed the two of them with an eager gaze. 

Aaline laughed and looked up at him. “I better go ease her mind then shouldn’t I.” Ivar nodded once and let her go, releasing her hand only when she was too far away. He watched her approach Sibylle and the two began whispering.

He felt someone come up behind him and he turned his head. Björn settled his hands on his shoulders. “Come, Ivar, the snake approaches.” Ivar tensed and grunted allowing Björn to lead him away.

Aaline watched as Björn and Ivar walked away, tension in their steps. She watched as they found Ubbe and Hvitserk and the four of them started whispering. Their gestures to each other were harsh and she could see the anger in Ivar’s face. She turned her head when Ubbe gestured across the room.  

She narrowed her eyes as she caught where Ubbe was gesturing. There was a blonde woman across the way making eyes at her husband. Her eyes were intense and she looked like she was close to salivating.

She turned her head to face Sibylle and lifted a brow in question. Sibylle followed her gaze and hummed. Aaline tensed. “What?” She hadn’t meant to snap but her sister-in-law clearly knew something she didn’t. 

She glanced at her and Sibylle’s face looked like she just sucked on something sour. “What’s that face for?” Sibylle looked at Aaline and sighed. “I can’t believe she still has the audacity to show up at these events after what she did.” Aaline’s mouth nearly dropped open at the venom that followed those words. She turned fully to face her friend. “Who is she?”

Sibylle sighed and took a long drink of her champagne. “Her name is Freydis Eiriksdottir and she’s Ivar’s ex-girlfriend.” Aaline sucked in a sharp breath and turned back to look at the other woman. She was watching Ivar with a gleam in her eye that set Aaline’s teeth on edge. It was a possessive look that screamed ownership and Aaline did not like that it was directed at her husband. 

“What did she do?” She said, taking a deep gulp of her champagne.

Sibylle waved over a passing waiter and took two more flutes of champagne, handing one to Aaline. Aaline pushed her half-empty flute aside and clasped the new one with shaking fingers. 

“First off, the only reason she comes to these events is that she works for one of Ragnar’s firms.” Aaline shot Sibylle a look and the other woman rolled her eyes. “Don’t give me that look. She was working here before she started sleeping with Ivar and it would look bad if she was fired after they broke up. She was transferred as far away from Ivar as Ragnar could put her but there are the occasional events where they’ll both be in attendance.

“Her presence had lessened somewhat but I think your recent nuptials got her interested again and now she’s back in full force.” Sibylle slammed her champagne down in one swig before she pushed the empty flute aside. Aaline’s head was spinning with this new information.

In some part of her mind, she knew that Ivar had dated other women before he married her. They just never talked about those women just as they never talked about her previous men. It went unsaid that they had been with other people but now they were really growing as a couple and Aaline didn’t want anything to ruin that. Especially clingy little blonde girls who didn’t know how to take a hint. 

“You still haven’t told me what she did,” Aaline asked. Her voice was soft. Sibylle shook her head and glanced over to where Ivar was still talking to his brother’s.

“They were pretty hot and heavy for a while. Almost a year when Ivar found out she was cheating on him.” Sibylle snipped. Aaline sucked in a sharp breath and whipped her head around to look at Freydis. She was still watching Ivar like a hawk but hadn’t moved from her position across the room. 

“Ivar was pissed.” Sibylle continued. “He threw all her stuff out of his room, changed the locks to his office. Literally, anything you can think of to give someone he gave her and then took it back. To make matters worse, she came back a few months later and told him she was pregnant.” Sibylle shook her head at Aaline’s horrified expression. 

“Ivar didn’t believe her so he made her get a DNA test before the baby was born. He was right. It wasn’t his. I think she ended up giving the baby up for adoption but…” Sibylle pulled Aaline’s unfinished champagne towards her and downed it.

“Anytime there’s an event where they’ll both be there, Ragnar sets up special security to keep Freydis away from Ivar. She can’t get within five feet of him before someone whisks her away.” Aaline snorted and watched as the woman in question began to move across the room but was quickly cut off by a hulking security guard. 

Aaline grabbed a champagne glass from a passing tray and downed it quickly, her eyes watering at the bubbles that stung the back of her throat. She cleared her throat and nodded once at Sibylle before making her way to Ivar. 

She kept Freydis in her line of sight the entire time. She wanted to make sure that the woman saw her with Ivar. She wanted Freydis to know that Ivar was her’s now and there was nothing she could do about it. 

Ivar smiled when he saw her approach. Ubbe and Hvitserk stepped back to let her through and she draped her arms over Ivar’s shoulders. Ivar’s eyebrows rose in surprise but he wrapped his arms tight around her waist. “Hello, wife. How was your conversation with Sibylle?”

Aaline smiled and pressed her cheek against his, nuzzling against him. Ivar grinned at his brothers and their faces shared his amusement. “Better now that I’m with you, husband.” She whispered. Her breath sent shivers down his spine and he tightened his hold on her. He hummed and started to sway with her, his hands stroking up and down her back.

“Not that I don’t enjoy your affections but this wouldn’t have anything to do with a particular blonde, now, would it?” Aaline tensed against him but held her composure. She stroked her fingers through his hair and across the nape of his neck. She pressed her lips to his ear. 

“Now why would you think that?” Her voice held a husky tone that had Ivar grinding his back teeth and clenching his fingers in the fabric of her dress.

He cleared his throat and pressed a gentle kiss to the hinge of her jaw, his tongue poking out to taste her flesh. Aaline shivered and a soft whimper escaped against Ivar’s ear. 

“Well, she’s been staring at me all night and I was just about to have her escorted out when you suddenly appear in my arms.” He pulled back slightly and gazed into her eyes. She kept her face blank but Ivar could see it in her eyes. He clicked his tongue and stroked her hair back away from her face.

“You do not need to worry about her, elskling. She means nothing to me.” Aaline could feel the contentment rising up in her chest and a blush painting her cheeks red. Ivar chuckled and pressed his lips to her forehead. He brushed the backs of his fingers down her cheek and nudged her back to Sibylle. 

“Go, mingle. I’ll find you later.” She nodded once and turned, smiling at Hvitserk and Ubbe.

Tags: @dreamlesswonder @youbloodymadgenius @inforapound @bcarolinablr @funmadnessandbadassvikings @jay-bel @feyrearcheron44 @londongal12810 @khiraeth @didiintheblog @jeremyrennerfanxxxx123 

[mandadoration]

hound - viii.

summary: Mando forces you to talk to him about the past few days, and as a result, your souls are laid bare for a moment. 

word count: 1, 114

pairing: mandalorian x mandalorian!reader

Warnings: emotion turmoil?? idk, fluff (if that even is a warning…)

a/n: I feel like you guys are owed some fluff so… here it is!

chapters: i | ii | iii | iv | v | vi | vii | viii

Read this on AO3

You’re distracted. More so than usual. 

Mando has gotten annoyed at having to call you moniker several times before you snap out of your daze. While he can’t see your face, he knows you probably have a glazed look in your eyes, unseeing as you stare off into space. 

Literally. 

He starts to think that you’re dead when he calls you a record five times before you jerk awake with a shout, your head bobbing down and back up. Just sleeping, then. 

“What?” you breath. He sighs. 

“I asked if you wanted to refuel and eat before we head to Atris,” he repeats bluntly. “It’s not where the bounty we’re looking for is, but it’s on the way.” You stare at him blankly before you remember you’re supposed to respond. You nod your head. 

“Sure,” you say. Your breaths are shaky. Mando looks at you pointedly. “What?”

“When’s the last time you’ve slept?” he asks. You rack your brain, then open your mouth to answer. “Canto Bight doesn’t count.” You snap your mouth shut. You think harder, but you’re not sure you want to answer his question anymore. “Dog,” he says with a warning voice. 

“The night before we picked up our bounties,” you admit. 

“That was four days ago,” he cries out. You purse your lips. “Why don’t you sleep?” he asks. Mando swivels his chair to face you. “Don’t think about lying to me. You owe me that much.” Although his words alone sound condescending, his voice is soft, akin to when he had called your name on the streets of Canto Bight before you had gone into delirium. You break. 

“I’m scared.” You hope to whatever higher power was out there that he didn’t think you were a coward, but it was true. Every time you had closed your eyes, there were visions of death and dogs. The blaster fire and plasma strong in your nose, the heavy weight of Mando’s head in your hands, and the snarling strills nipping at your heels. You wonder if it was possible to be traumatized from nighttime terrors. You would’ve happy to leave it at that, keep your vices and fears close to your heart where you’ll never let them see the light of day, but Mando pries with gentle hands.  

“Of what?” he asks gently. 

“Of sleep.” 

“Bad dreams?” he guesses. You nod. 

“Want to talk about it?”

“No,” you say quickly. “But they’ve been… unsettling,” you add on. “Visions of death, mostly. Memories that are warped. And with the things I saw when I was drugged…” you trail off, a cold shudder working its way up your spine as you think about claws and teeth. “They’re bad. Worse now.” You clench your fist. “I know they’re not real, don’t get me wrong. But they feel real, like it could happen at any time, and- and I--” You stop talking, huffing as a lump forms in your throat. Talking was so hard. You’re frustrated at yourself. “I just, ugh- I’m trying to- I’m scared of--” A sob escapes you and you clench your teeth together to stop any more sounds from coming out. You angrily hit your leg with your fist and hot tears form in your eyes. “This is so stupid,” you mutter. You get up to leave. “Forget I said anything.” As you turn to go, Mando’s gloved hand reaches and grabs your wrist.

“No,” he says. “I--” He clears his throat and pulls you back down to your seat. As he does, he trails his hand down to hold yours. It’s awkward; he has to figure how to lace his hands against yours, but it’s nice. You can feel the warmth of his skin through his glove, even more so when he brings his other hand to join. “I get it,” he says after a tender moment. “This line of work, it’s hard. Dangerous. Something could always happen.” He quirks his head. “Something always happens to you, it seems like.” You huff out a laugh and turn your head away. It’s true. It seems like since you’ve started working together, you’ve been in harm’s way more than him. “But, I will admit,” he says slowly, “you scared me. Back on Canto Bight.” His grip tightens. “I know we haven’t known each other long, but--” His voice catches, and you find yourself inexplicably wishing you could see his face. “-- but it was… difficult for me. To watch you tearing yourself apart. I couldn’t- I didn’t know what was happening. I was just so focused on getting us out of there. When you collapsed, calling for me, my heart,” he continues, “just stopped.” He shakes his head as if to clear some horrible thought.

“Careful, Mando,” you choke out, voice thick with some emotion you can’t quite put a name to. “People might start to think you care about me.” He laughs. It’s rich and deep and from his chest as he gently runs a thumb over the top of your hand. 

“Yeah?” he says, almost to himself as his voice is so soft that you strain to listen. His gaze drifts down to watch where your fingers are entangled with his, wrapped so tightly it’s hard to tell your glove from his. “Let them think what they will.” Your heart stutters at how determined he sounds. This is nice, you think, how the starlight trickles in and the lights and buttons reflect off of both of your armor. You don’t know how long you and Mando have been staring at where your hands are holding before he pipes up. 

“You should rest. I’ll find another place to refuel so you have time to sleep,” he says. He pulls his hands away, and a panic starts in you at the thought of sleeping again. “I’ll be here when you wake up, and I’ll be here if you have nightmares again.” You want to believe him, you do. That he will chase away those bad dreams as if you were some child, that he’ll make sure you’re safe and cared for that you don’t have to dream of snarling dogs and rolling heads. 

So you do. You chose to believe him as you descend the ladder and settle into your cramped cot, sleep pulling at your eyelids with the hum of the engines. Your stomach is doing flips, like when you were free-falling through the air on that rocky moon.

A sudden thought goes through you as you stare up at the ceiling of the Razor Crest. You haven’t seen the riduurok amulet since you’ve thrown it on the ground. But exhaustion washes over you, and you fall asleep and forget about it.

--

Hound Tag List: @knockbeforeyouspeak​​ @gothtechie​ @killtherandomness​  @cyraris​

[mercifuldeaths]

The Heat that Drives the Light

Michael Langdon x Reader

Summary: Michael hasn’t been himself having to literally carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Because Michael hasn’t been okay, you haven’t been either. 

Notes: Just a blurb that got out of hand. Was originally supposed to be really smutty and about distracting Michael while he worked...but this came out of that. I think it’s a little more interesting to take down the walls that Outpost!Michael puts up and get a little more into his psyche. Sorry it’s a bit sad and not smutty at all, but I hope you enjoy, nonetheless. 

Warnings: Sad cockwarming. Because apparently I’ve made that a thing. 

Word Count: 3K

Credit to @yourkingcodyfern​ for the beautiful gif.

Being underground was suffocating. The walls closing in, high ceilings not doing enough to clear the air and you felt the dust settling in your lungs. Outpost Three had become something strange to you. Having spent happier times there with Michael when things were simpler placed fond memories in certain corners where he had hiked up your skirt or placed little nips on your neck. But now, it reeked of desolation.

Sure, there were the Sanctuary candidates, but did they really matter? Gone were the warlocks that Michael had called his friends, his teachers, your mentors. All that remained were the near-empty hallways. Modified victorian dress rather than the Hawthorne uniform you liked to remember Michael wearing, his hair still short, and eyes still bright.

He had hit something of a wall. After traveling to all the outposts, each of them overrun, each failing his father a little more, Michael started to turn inwards-even to you. You knew it wasn’t you nor him. It was the stress, because that’s all he could be described as of late. He hid it well, you admitted. Perfectly coiffed hair, tailored suits, and a cocky grin on his lips all made up for the man you knew was crumbling under the facade. The crushing guilt he felt for not carrying out his father’s plan to perfection.

It really wasn’t that bad...it was just one of those nights. A night where Michael was overwhelmed and working himself into the ground. He had been sat at the desk in what was his former dormitory when he was a student. He opted to take that one, refusing another Outpost guest to take ownership over it. Sentiment, you supposed.

Regardless, he sat there since dawn, or what you imagined was dawn as it was impossible to tell in the claustrophobic bunker. He had refused meals, even offering something from the stash you both had packed from the Sanctuary, and only accepted coffee. Just something to keep him going. You knew this wasn’t how he had intended to spend the day. He was dressed in his usual tailored shirts and jacket, ready to face the guests. But he hadn’t stepped outside the bedroom. And on days like that, he usually would stay in his sweatpants, hair tied in a bun, and shun the world from seeing him like that. Vulnerable. Out of his armor.

He was growing distant. Again, not at his fault and probably rooted in your natural insecurity of the relationship. It wasn’t easy being the partner of the Antichrist.

You continued to roam the halls, anything to do at this point ,having read all the interesting books in the Hawthorne library ages ago. The other guests of the Outpost were asleep, mandated by Venable’s strict schedule. She knew better than to say anything to you.

Your shoes clicked on the polished marble of the floor, almost comforting you. You felt less alone, in a sense. The sealed corridor that lead to the room Michael performed his rituals in was slightly pushed in, reminding you that maybe he had started one. That’s really all he did. Work from his computer, work with the other Cooperative higher-ups, and work for his father under the guise of asking for help. You knew better than that.

It was maybe the third time you had to pick Michael up off the floor, blood still painting his skin and the floor around him, you asked him to stop. He had passed out. Weak from blood loss, dehydration, probably malnutrition. You begged him to slow down, to take a break. He couldn’t. He literally had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

You could tell it was getting to that point again, because it did ebb and flow depending on the state of the world, the outposts, the competency of the Cooperative that week. It was understandable. Outpost Three was a success in some ways. But others, a massive failure. Nobody was making it to the Sanctuary. He had closed the book on every person left in the world. Made his final cuts, and was now weighing the decisions heavily in his mind. It was extremely successful because it was still standing, almost everyone alive. And then there was that Mallory he was trying to figure out-sitting on his knees, blood pooling as he screamed for help, screamed for answers. You weren’t sure if he was actually asking his father for help or just needed to scream his frustrations. There was a feeling sometimes that Satan had given up on him, left him here to flounder until everyone on the earth, including Michael, was gone-given into the fire and disease around them.

With really nothing else to do, and nobody to talk to, you meandered back to Michael’s room. Even if you shared it during your stay at the Outpost, it would always stay as Michael’s dormitory in the back of your mind.

You took the long way. Passing by your secret corners, the library shelves you’d hide behind, the kitchens where midnight snacks were shared...anything to remind you of the Michael that stole your heart and soul.

You sighed before opening the door, not bothering to knock as he had probably already heard you. Preparing yourself for the image of your overworked Michael, a sight that saddened you just a little, you opened the heavy door.

As you expected, he was sat there, typing away on his laptop. The blue light of the screen cast ghoul like shadows on his features, reminding you of the demon’s face you had only borne witness to once. That with the warm light coming from the candles and fireplace set Michael in a strange light. Regardless, it accentuated the stress hiding in his shoulders, between his brows, his tightened lips.

He didn’t look up, but did spare a, “Hi, my dove,” as you headed over to the bed. Changing course, you decided to walk over to him, your Antichrist who seemed so small lately. Feeling a little selfish, you ran your fingers through his hair, something you knew would distract him but also something you needed.

It had taken a toll on you, the only person you really trusted, to abandon you, in a sense. You just wanted to feel him. Touch him. And judging by the way his typing slowed and he leaned into it, you suspected he needed the same. His eyes closed lazily, sleepily, as he rested his cheek against your palm. You rubbed soothing circles into his cheekbone, admiring the beautiful face that was hidden under the layers of stress, under the pressure put on him. When he was himself, his face was soft-no tension, pure radiance. Eyes not shooting daggers, no snarling lip, venom in his voice. Just a man who was forced to grow up too fast, thrown the world to carry, and nobody to help him hold it.

You’d said it a million times to him, but it didn’t stop you from muttering a small, “You work too hard, Michael,” while still stroking his soft hair.

“I know,” came the familiar reply, voice hoarse from lack of use.

“But you have to,” you said before he could. You knew the script by then.

“...But I have to,” he echoed, typing stopped for a moment, his hand coming to meet yours that had somehow settled over his chest. “I know I’ve been….absent lately. You know I don’t want to be doing this, right? I didn’t know it would be like this.” He looked to you, bloodshot eyes starting to tear. Before any could fall, she shook his head to refocus and let his eyes look over to the small collection of empty mugs that covered the desk, so very unlike Michael’s usually neat freakish tendencies. He picked one up, dark, cold coffee sat at the bottom, obviously abandoned quite a while ago. He knocked it back, grimacing at the too strong, bitter grinds that had made it into the cup. You saw his hand shake, just the slightest amount.

“Maybe no more of that.” You took the mug from him and replaced it on the desk, further from the others and his collection of files. “Come to bed, it’s late.”

He hesitated and you already knew the answer. “I just need to finish this. Then I can sleep.” He nodded, almost trying to convince himself that he’d be sleeping next to you soon enough. “In a few minutes… get in bed and I’ll meet you.”

He tried to smile. It wasn’t like he was unaware of what he was doing to you. He saw the way your heart seemed to break a little more each time he had to choose work over you. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You weren’t in his plan. His nor Satan’s. Michael knew deep down that he was never supposed to fall for anyone-he hadn’t the time.

But had happened. And you were his.

He wouldn’t change it for anything.

“I’m not sleeping without you tonight,” you mumbled, leaning over him from behind and gently kissing his neck. Just a small motivation to get him to relax, just a little. You untied the messy bun his hair had been pulled into, loving the way it fell to his shoulders and framed his face against the contrasting lights.

His eyes remained unfocused, looking away in guilt. He wanted you. It wasn’t that he didn’t want you. It was that there wasn’t enough time and for all his planning everything remained a failure. He supposed that maybe he deserved this as punishment. Working every day, nonstop, while his love was there and waiting for him. A sick mockery of Hell itself. Michael suspected that it was his father’s doing. Allowed to remain living as a reward for bringing the end times but punishment for not doing it well enough.

“I’m so-sorry,” he choked out, voice still rough and cracking.

Coming around to stand in front of him, you tilted his head up to look at you. No more words were needed as you leaned down to place a gentle kiss to his full lips. You felt a sigh come from him, a small amount of tension leaving. He couldn’t help but move against you, hands reaching to your waist, your cheek, anywhere. He needed to feel you. Feel how you moved, breathed, radiated energy. Just to feel something living and breathing in this cold, dead world he had created.

Before even thinking, processing that he was still busy, you slipped off the dressing gown you had on as coverage as you meandered Hawthorne earlier. Michael settled his hands on your hips, thumbs tracing small circles as you stood before him, in between his spread legs and his desk. He leaned in, lips and tongue tracing your stomach and sides. Unable to stop himself, he pulled you in, arms wrapping around tight, until you were settled straddling his lap.

You continued the open but small kisses to his neck. Unbuttoning his shirt, you slid it down his shoulders, knowing full well that he wouldn’t fully undress but needing to feel his warmth against your cheek as you rested on his shoulder. He was hardening under your ministrations but that really wasn’t your intention as you just needed to feel him. Not even sexually. Just as another person. His warmth. The rise and fall of his chest, his breath.

Knowing you were causing just another distraction in his already busy life, you stopped your small movements but couldn’t find it in you to climb off, reveling in the sensation of him against you. He felt the same. Your weight on him a reassuring presence that maybe he wasn’t as alone as the thought.

Taking a moment from the small bites he was leaving on your shoulder, he looked past you, eyes settling on the open laptop. You felt him sign under you, already defeated. His hands hesitated over your hips, refraining from grabbing you like he wanted to.

“Michael. Look at me,” you whispered, the room only full of the sounds from the crackling fire. Your thumb traced over his cheekbone, eyes pleading for him to just relax for even a moment. “Please…”

He couldn’t, ashamed that he’s let it get this far. Let himself get so caught up in work that you were neglected...that he, himself, was feeling neglected. He sighed, eyes still downcast. “I have to. I know we’re both feeli-”

“You can keep working. I know how important this is. I just wish you would let me help you relax a little.”

“I miss you.” The confession dropped from his lips. Despite spending every day, almost all day, at his side you missed him, too. Even when you were sitting beside one another, laying in bed, even occasionally while intimate...he felt miles away.

“You don’t have to miss me anymore. I’m right here.” You resumed placing small kisses onto his temple, jawline, all the places that made his eyes flutter shut and heart full. His hardness still pressed into you and you reached to cup him through his tailored trousers.

“Y/N….not tonight,” he choked out, looking broken.

“No. I don’t want you to fuck me, I just need to be close to you. I need you.”

Michael nodded slowly, recognition setting in. He allowed you to remove him from his confines, breath already coming faster now that your hand was gripped around his length.

“I need you, too. Please. I need to be in you,” he murmured against your lips, sounding more desperate than he cared to admit. You nodded in response, noses brushing innocently, and placed another kiss behind his ear, over the mark of the Beast. The very thing that defined him, made him what he was, who he was. The reason he was this overworked shell of himself. You couldn't help but still love every part of him.

Not completely free of bad intentions, you pressed yourself against him so he could feel the slick heat of your core against himself. Michael let out a soft moan, his mouth occupied toying with your nipple. You felt him shiver under you and tingles resonate up your spine. As much as you wanted to, it wasn’t the time to play cruel to your Antichrist.

It didn’t take long for you to line yourself up to him and before you could do anything, Michael’s steady hands gripping your waist forced you slowly downward onto him. Once fully seated on him, the two of you let out contented sighs. His head rolled back and your hand instinctively went to catch it, supporting his neck. You took the opportunity to nip on his full bottom lip, but smiles bloomed over both of your faces. Finally home.

“You...still need to work.” The spell remained unbroken, however. He nodded reluctantly, head now resting on your front.

“I know,” he resigned and you felt his hands leave your body, cold rushing in where his touch left. It was mere seconds later you heard the quick taps of his nimble fingers over the keyboard, the shuffle of paper.

It was irrelevant. Everything was except the warmth you felt radiating from him, the stretch of your cunt around him, his body inside yours. Physically as close as two people can be. Emotionally...you were getting back there, you could feel it.

He showed it in small ways. A small kiss to your palm when you’d graze a hand over the velvet of his jacket, the softening of his eyes from across the room when dealing with Cooperative business or reprimanding Outpost inhabitants. It was there and always would be. You knew the shroud was lifting and it would be back to hiding in the corridors of Hawthorne, his laugh radiating and a perfect match for his boyish grin.

One of his hands removed itself from the keyboard to caress down your spine and settled at the base, warm and firm. You breaths matched, each sigh shifting him inside you, hitting a new angle, making you feel even closer than before.

The keyboard clicks continued, slower due to the fact the one of his hands was stroking the soft skin at your hip. Michael’s shoulders dropped a fraction when you placed your head on his shoulder, nose brushing the sensitive spot under his jaw. His eyes lowered, breath softened.

Over the course of the minutes, he would occasionally drop a kiss onto your shoulder, soft and awfully chaste considering the fact that he was buried in you. But it wasn’t about that, that evening. It was about Michael and who he was and his breath and movement and reminding him that maybe things weren’t so bad in the godforsaken hellscape he was responsible for. That there was still some good left, despite the original goal to strip humanity of that.

And he knew it. He felt it from you. The undying love that you held for him and he could only be reminded that there was good left. And that he loved you, the same.

The typing continued even after Michael dropped a cheek to your shoulder, head tilted, as he somehow continued working through his drooping eyelids.

“Mmmmmm,” he mumbled into your skin, exhausted.

“I know.” He didn’t need to speak, you already knew what he was trying to say.

His other hand settled on the back of your neck, the only sound being the crackling fire and candles. You shivered and he pulled you in, bodies still connected.

“Michael,” you whispered, going to suggest that maybe you two go to bed, but the small shake of his head told you that he’d rather stay put.

His breathing evened out, face still resting on your shoulder. All his muscles relaxed into your touch. Finally at ease.

Your fingers threaded through his hair and you considered waking him to move to bed...but you were comfortable too. Warm and finally feeling a little more complete with him inside you. Perhaps closing your eyes for just a few minutes couldn’t hurt.

Tags: @ccodyfern @langdonsinferno @langdonsrapture​ @starwlkers​ @michael-langdon-appreciation​ @babypinkstyles94​ @i-will-die-for-jim-mason​ @langdonalien​ @katiekitty261​ @duncvn​ @wroteclassicaly​ @lvngdvns​ @aveiangdon​ @americanhorrorstudies​ @sojournmichael​ @1-800-bitchcraft​ @nana15774​ @langdonsdemon​ @michael-langdon-owns-my-soul​

[duhragonball]

[FIC] Luffa: The Legendary Super Saiyan (116/?)

Disclaimer: This story features characters and concepts based on Dragon Ball, which is a trademark of Bird Studio/Shueisha and Toei Animation.   This is an unauthorized work, and no profit is being made on this work by me. This story is copyright of me. Download if you like, but please don’t archive it without my permission. Don’t be shy.

Continuity Note: About 1000 years before the events of Dragon Ball Z.

Previous chapters conveniently available here.

[12 March, 233 Before Age.  Ristet IV.]

Yesterday, Zatte had killed an alien invader, single-handedly liberating the  Ristet IV.     Unfortunately, her swift assassination left no clues about the invader's origins or intentions.     Her best guess was that he was simply an opportunist seeking to exploit the chaos of the Federation-Jindan War for the sake of looting.  His spaceship contained no useful data that would confirm or refute this theory.  

Nor did the jamming device he had set up in orbit around the planet.    With the invader dead, there was no one to stop Zatte from taking his own ship into orbit and using it to find the jammer.     Once this was done, she quickly radioed the Federation starfleet nearby and inform them that the situation was under control.

With that matter resolved, Zatte finally returned to her own vessel, the star-yacht Emerald Eye, to take care of one last responsibility.    She docked the invader's one-seat pod in the cargo bay, and met Dotz in her usual haunt, the observation deck.    Night had fallen at the spaceport where the Eye was undergoing repairs, and Dotz had shut off the interior lighting of the deck, leaving herself illuminated only by her collection of candles, and the starlight that shone through the transparent dome covering the deck.  Zatte entered, and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of Dotz.   She saw no point in any greeting or preamble, and simply started talking.

"So yeah, I had a vision once," she began.   "An epiphany.  It showed me that Luffa is destined to be an important part of the divine plan."

The fortune-teller nodded pleasantly and seemed to consider these words for longer than Zatte would have liked.    She was uncomfortable enough discussing such a personal experience out loud, and she doubted that any reaction from Dotz would put her at ease.    Even so, she felt Dotz had earned her respect, and she was determined to share this.

"One god, or many?" Dotz finally asked.  

"Huh?"

"Well, uh, I get a lot of clients who have religious experiences," she said.  "I find it helpful to know if we're talking about monotheism or polytheism before we discuss it."  She paused before adding:  "I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to make it sound like your experience was commonplace.  Um, it does happen to a lot of people, but that doesn't make your experience any less special."

"No, it's okay," Zatte said.  "I just never considered that before.  I'm so used to being on my own with this, that I never thought of comparing notes with anyone.  We... we call it Providence, and consider it uncountable."

"I see," Dotz said.  

"Luffa hates it when aliens compare her to supernatural figures, like angels or goddesses.  She feels like it dismisses her  accomplishments as a mortal warrior."

"I see that a lot too," Dotz said.  "A lot of powerful people struggle with the idea of fate, or a higher authority."

"I don't think of her like that.  I mean, she's sacred, but not divine," Zatte said.  

"What did you see?" Dotz asked.  "In your vision, I mean?    Did Providence speak to you?"

Zatte didn't answer right away.  Something about the way the older woman said "Providence" without really knowing what it meant.    It was respectful enough, but it still bothered her somehow.   "Maybe this is a bad idea.  I... I don't know if I should be talking about it."

"Oh.   You didn't hear a voice," Dotz said.  "It was more of a feeling, one that you recognized immediately."

Zatte was beginning to stand up when Dotz said this.    She knew Dotz had clairvoyant abilities, but somehow those abilities still had a way of catching her by surprise.  

"We don't have to talk about this if you don't want to," Dotz said.  "But I don't want to make you think that your experience doesn't count.  There's no rule that says you have to hear a voice, or see a certain thing."

Zatte sat back down and gathered the will to continue.  "Luffa saved me," she said.  Not in the vision, I mean.    She was saving me in real life when I had the vision.  I was... well it's a long story, but I was sick.  She purged that sickness from me with her powers.    And while she did, she managed to do the same for a lot of other people at the same time."

"From what I've seen, that sounds like a typical day for her," Dotz said.  "Not to diminish what she does, but..."

"This was different," Zatte said.  "At least, different for me.  As I recovered, I could feel her mind touching my own.  I understood what it was like for her.  Just... just this constant drive to fight and prove herself.  Like a surf pounding at the shore."

"Go on."

"Well, I just remember feeling so... restored.  I was finally myself again.  And she was doing something so good for the universe.  She was purging a great evil, and I don't think she even really knew how important that was.  It just pissed her off, so she struck back.  And something told me.  Not with words, really.  I just remembered thinking that this was the sort of thing she was meant to do.  And it felt so right to think of that that, like it was the truest thing I've ever known."

"And you still feel that way," Dotz surmised.    Zatte was nodding in agreement before she could even finish saying it.

"This war... well, I think it's the start of something big, like everything is coming to a head," Zatte said.   "I don't have any way to be sure, but she's beaten just about everyone else in the galaxy.    If she defeats Trismegistus and the Saiyans working for him, then there's no one left to oppose her.   I don't know what'll happen, but there's all these signs.   Her son, the Saiyan Free Company, they're all showing up to help her save their people.   And... well, you being here can't be a coincidence, right?"  

"Me?" Dotz asked.  

"Well, sure," Zatte said.   "You're like a prophet, bearing witness to whatever comes next.   It's got to mean something.   I'm sure of it."    

"I... I don't see how," Dotz said.   "My abilities changed after Luffa helped me out of that coma, but I still have a blind spot where her own future is concerned.    I still can't tell how her battle in the Fedender system is going."

"It'll work out," Zatte said.   "Somehow.   Why don't you try again?   We can't radio Fedender while their communications are being jammed, so for the time being, you're all we've got."

Zatte didn't like asking this of her.   It made it sound like she was admitting that she didn't trust Luffa to take care of herself.    And Dotz seemed to be frustrated with the "blind spot" in her abilities.    But they didn't have much else to do, and Dr. Topsas was away, and she still worried about Luffa, even if there was no need.  

With a heavy sigh, Dotz nodded, and began reshuffling her cards.  

*******

[12 March, 233 Before Age.  Nagaoka.]

It was something of a relief for Trismegistus to disrobe.  The heavy garment had its uses, but one of them was the dramatic impact it had when he took it off.    So many of his followers rarely got to see his face, and so it became something of an honor when he revealed it to them.    It was important to make even simple gestures like these take on a greater significance.   The cloak landed at his feet with a thud, thanks to the iridium weights sewn into the lining.   A minor touch, but one he enjoyed.

Behind him, Treekul stood at ease, awaiting his next command.    He felt a twinge of shame at the high priestess "costume" he had arranged for her.  Was it really necessary to objectify her in such a revealing outfit?  Probably not, though it kept her off-balance, and he did enjoy her figure, even if he found her lavender skin off-putting.    He often thought that she would look so much lovelier with a Saiyan complexion.   Perhaps he would alter her pigmentation someday, to suit his own aesthetic.  That thought also embarrassed him a little, but he didn't allow it to bother him.   Treekul belonged to him now.  She wasn't indoctrinated like the cultists, but that made no difference, since she was trapped on the planet with no way to survive except by his favor.    He would do with her as he saw fit, and for now, she served him best as a symbol of power to display before the others.

Before him, one of his newest followers, Lesseri, knelt before him in supplication.  She was like most Saiyans-- proud, stubborn, ambitious-- but those qualities made Saiyans very easy to control.  He had promised her great power, and in return, he had asked for her complete devotion.  It was an easy bargain for Saiyans like Lesseri.  They all craved more power, and they cared little for how they got it, or who they had to thank.  But once they got the power they craved, they always craved a little more, and that was when they would finally begin to have second thoughts about their choices.

"Rise, Faithful Lesseri," he finally said.  

"Thank you, my lord," she replied as she stood.  He hadn't given her permission to speak yet, but she was still new to the cult, and that lesson could wait for another time.  For now, it was best to teach her about matters that already held her attention.

"What troubles you, child?" he asked.  He addressed them all this way, even the ones who were older than himself.    It was important to condition them to think of him as their superior in every sense.

"I... well, I think there was something wrong with my initiation rites, sir."

The reluctance in her voice was music to his ears.  She had only just joined his flock, and she was already unsure about defying him.  Oh, she had been very vocal about her complaints in private, or rather, what she assumed was privacy.  But now that she stood face to face with him, she was much more careful with her words.  She would make a fine servant.

"Something wrong with the initiation rites?" he asked.  "Why do you say that, child?  You fasted for three days, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"You drank the elixir, I prepared for you, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir."

"You observed all of the other sacred rites.  The garland, the linen belt, the oath of the yoke."

"Yes, sir."

"And you have become stronger than you were before you came to me.   You feel it, don't you?"  Trismegistus asked.

"Very much, my lord," Lesseri said.  "But..."

"But it's not enough," he said, anticipating her next words.  "Is it?"  

"I, er, don't mean to seem ungrateful, sir..."

"Why do you feel cheated, Lesseri?" he asked.   There was no anger or hurt in his voice.    He spoke kindly and patiently, as if the implied accusation in her words did not exist.  "You may speak freely.  In fact, I command it."

She hesitated, then said: "Guwar, sir.  He was weaker than me before we joined you.  Now he and I both have the Jindan power, and he's stronger than I am."

"Oh?" he said.  "And what of it?"

"You gave him more power than you gave me!" Lesseri said.  "It isn't fair!"  She had tried to be obeisant and respectful, but now her frustration and outrage began to well up inside her.   She believed he was playing dumb with her, and she was right.   It wasn't fair.   The lesson she needed to learn had nothing to do with fairness.    

"Let's say you're right," Trismegistus said.   "What do you plan to do about it?"

Her building defiance suddenly melted away.   Lesseri took a step back from him, as though the question itself had physically shoved her.    

"Well?" he asked.   "I did order you to speak your mind, Lesseri.   Speak."

He enjoyed making them squirm like this.   Saiyans like Lesseri thought they would do anything for greater strength, but 'anything' included far, far more than they ever bothered to consider.  

"I... I only want what you promised me--" Lesseri said slowly.

"No," Trismegistus said.   "You gave yourself to me, Lesseri, and I gave you Jindan in return.  As far as I'm concerned, our transaction is concluded.   What you're asking for now is to be stronger than Guwar.   And I could make you stronger, but you have nothing else to bargain with.   Everything you have, everything you are, is mine.   Guwar is mine.    I owe you nothing.   So I'll ask again: what are you going to do about it?"

He looked at Treekul while he waited for Lesseri to come up with an answer.     "What do you think, Treekul?" he asked idly.  

The alien woman rubbed the back of her buzzcut and smiled uneasily.    "Well, she could always quit the cult, right?" Treekul said.    

"Yes, she could.   You both saw what happened to Salziff when he left my flock," Trismegistus said.    "Jindan exacts a tremendous price.   Allow me to demonstrate."

Lesseri suddenly collapsed, and a red aura glowed faintly around her body.    

"No!" she moaned.    "I didn't mean--!   I never wanted--!"

"Unlike you, dear Treekul," he said, "Lesseri is free to leave us at any time.   However, if she goes, she won't get to take the Jindan power with her."

"You can remove it at will?" Treekul asked.   She stepped forward to help Lesseri, then thought better of it.    The two women had been allies for a time, and it pleased Trismegistus to separate them this way.  Treekul's best chance to survive was to at play along with the role he had laid out for her.    She would eventually seek an opportunity to escape, but first she had to earn his trust, which meant that she couldn't squander it by defying him openly.    That was the alien's hope, but it was hollow.   The fact was that Trismegistus would never trust her, no matter what she did or didn't do.    But he would string her along, and make her think her plan was working, and she would continue to obey him, waiting for a chance that would never come.  As for Lesseri...

"The Jindan elixir binds the user's ki with my own," he explained.    "Increasing their power is a somewhat complicated operation, but taking it away?   For me, it is as simple as contracting a muscle.   But it's not as simple as filling a cup with fresh wine.    A little of the user's ki is mingled in the process, and so when I rescind my gift, the subject always ends up weaker than when she began."

As he said this, the red aura vanished from Lesseri's body, and she looked at her open palms in abject horror.   "No!" she gasped.  

"Take heart, Lesseri," Trismegistus said.   "You're still stronger than Guwar was before he accepted the Jindan power.   That must be of some consolation to you."

"Please!" she begged.   "I never said I wanted to leave you!    I only wanted to be stronger!"

Trismegistus made a cruel smile.    "I have no intention of driving you out," he said.    "I will return what I have taken from you, Lesseri... tomorrow, I think.   That will give you time to reconsider things.    And you'll have to prepare for the initiation rites again."

Lesseri made an audible gulp.   "Again?" she asked in a small voice.

"I'm afraid restoring Jindan to you isn't as easy as taking it away," Trismegistus said.   "At least you won't have to repeat the Crucible.   Others have not been so fortunate."

Lesseri began to weep softly.    As she did, he turned to Treekul and addressed her.

"Tell me, Treekul.   What question should Lesseri have asked me?"

Treekul considered this for a moment, and then shrugged her shoulders.  "I'm not sure," she admitted, "but I'm curious about why Guwar got more from the same dose of Jindan elixir.  Does it depend on the person, or is that something you can control?"

"Very good, my priestess," he said.  "Lesseri can learn a great deal from you already.  The problem is that she has a lot to unlearn as well."

"So this is some kind of ideological thing," Treekul guessed.  "Guwar was favored because he had greater faith, or because he was worthier in some way."

"It's more complicated than that," Trismegistus said.  He looked down at Lesseri, who was still cowering at his feet.  "Up on your feet, my child.  You're weakened, but you have enough strength to stand, don't you?"  He waited for her to rise before he continued.  "I need the Saiyans, Treekul.  I need them as much as they need me.  With each one who joins my fold and receives my sacrament, I grow stronger.  In return, I give them strength, purpose, and order."

He walked around the spot where Lesseri stood, and when he was close enough, he reached out and seized her tail in his hand.  Lesseri winced with pain, but didn't move.

"You know that a Saiyan's tail is their weak point," he said.

"I've heard," Treekul said.  "But I've also heard most Saiyans train their tails to overcome that problem."

"That's right," he said.  "Lesseri is a fine example.  If she hadn't rigorously trained herself, she would be overcome with agony right now.  Left untrained, simple squeeze of my hand would make her helpless, but instead I can only make her uncomfortable.  But why should she have a tail at all?"

"The great ape transformation," Treekul said.  "I've never seen it, but I hear Saiyans can increase their power dramatically that way."

"That only works under the light of the full moon,"  he said, "and even then, it's a liability.  Most Saiyans lose all control of themselves in the Oozaru form.  Even the ones who don't must still be careful, because if an enemy attacks their tail, it could undo the transformation."

"I know some Saiyans cut their tails off," Treekul said.  "Including a lot of the ones here."

"Yes, and they are the ones who demonstrate true wisdom," Trismegistus said.  "So many Saiyans revere their tails, foolishly attempting to justify a vestigial organ.  They let a quirk of biology decide their strengths and weaknesses, rather than taking control of their own destinies.  Lesseri has accepted the path of wisdom already.  By accepting Jindan, she has rejected the limitations of her own body.  One day, we shall hold a ceremony, and she will cut off her own tail, proving once and for all her willingness to cast off her bodily weaknesses."

"Okay," Treekul said, "But Guwar still has his tail, at least for now.  What puts him ahead of Lesseri?"

"Guwar has kept his tail out of ignorance and complacency," Trismegistus explained.  "Other Saiyans choose to keep them, out of a misplaced sense of pride.  They have been taught by false teachers, who fill their heads with heretical nonsense.  That is what sets Lesseri apart.  That is the true weakness she must cast off.  There are many Saiyans afflicted by this corruption, but Lesseri more than most."

"I... I don't know what you're talking about!" Lesseri finally exclaimed.    He smiled at the desperation in her voice.    "My mother abandoned me to a gestation facility before I was born!  I grew up alone!  What false teacher--?"

Trismegistus grabbed her by the face, silencing her as harshly as possible.  "I speak of the antiprophet herself!" he shouted.  "The un-Saiyan, the Queen of Lies!  Or do you deny training with Luffa herself?"

The look in her terrified eyes was priceless.  Trismegistus lacked the power to read minds, but he knew enough to be assured that Lesseri would now be his forever.   She had been "hiding" this secret from him the whole time, worried that if the truth were revealed, that it would ruin her standing here.   But he had known all along.   He would never tell her how he knew.   Best to let her imagination fill in the blank for him.    She would assume he could see her thoughts, or that Treekul had betrayed her, or that she had given herself away somehow.

"Hold on," Treekul said.  "Lesseri hates Luffa.  I mean, sure, she told me once about how she trained with her, but she found the whole thing to be a waste of time, so she quit."

"Of course she did," Trismegistus said.  "Even the lost can recognize true evil when they encounter it.  Lesseri forsook the wicked, and with your guidance, Treekul, she found the divine.  That is to her credit, but her debt must still be paid.  The stain of Luffa must still be cleansed."

"Then... then it's not too late for me?"  Lesseri asked when he released her.  He could practically smell the fear coming from her.  She could not leave the cult, and so her only way forward was to embrace it as completely as she could, in the hopes of being deemed 'worthy'.  As with Treekul, Lesseri's goal was unreachable.  He would lead her towards it, offering her chances to redeem herself, but she could she ever truly be rid of the "sin" of her past association with Luffa.

"It's never too late for anyone, Lesseri," he assured her.   "But your path will be very different from Guwar's.    Much will be asked of you, and-- for a time-- you will receive little in return.   One day, you will be rewarded in full, but first we must purge you of Luffa's corruption, this sense of entitlement you have.   Luffa would have us all believe that power is a Saiyan's birthright, to be claimed through perseverance.   You cannot win supreme power by your own merit, Lesseri.   Compassion, collateral, shrewd negotiation, none of it matters.   It can only be received from higher power.   My power.    You intuited this when you first decided to seek me out.    Now, we must teach your conscious mind to understand the great truth you have discovered."

"H-how do I start?" Lesseri asked.    

Trismegistus stroked his chin for a moment as he pretended to consider the matter.   Then he gave Treekul an expectant look.  

"Um... well, if you're asking me," Treekul said with a start, "I'm new to this, but maybe some manual labor?   Yeah, nothing like some mindlessly repetitive tasks to, uh, cleanse the spirit."

"Very good," Trismegistus said.    "The breeding pits are always in need of cleaning."    He patted Lesseri on the shoulder and smiled warmly at her.     "One of the deacons will help you get started."

There was something in Lesseri's eyes that betrayed a hint of resentment, but her grateful smile marked the progress he had made.   It would take time to break Lesseri to his will, but the important thing was that he had set the terms.    She now understood that she had to mold herself to his expectations, instead of the reverse.   "Thank you, my lord," she said.    "I won't disappoint you."

"Of course not," he said.  "Now go, and let my triple-blessing fall upon your task."

Lesseri lowered her head respectfully, and after she had withdrawn from the chamber, Trismegistus turned to Treekul and chuckled.    

"Breeding pits?" Treekul asked.    "Is that what I think it is?"

"As I told you," he said.    "I need the ��Saiyans as much as they need me.   Not only this generation, but the next, and the one after that.    I have facilities here on Nagaoka for incubating their progeny, and breeding partners are selected through genetic screening, but when it comes to the copulation, well--" he stepped toward her and put his arm around her waist to pull her closer.  "--sometimes the old-fashioned ways are the best."

"Yeah... but Saiyans are really uptight about that stuff," Treekul observed.  "You mean you just order them to pair off and cuddle up in some public space?"

She kept glancing down at his arm, which amused him.   She didn't like when he touched her, but she knew better than to object.   After all, the little fool needed to gain his confidence, didn't she?  

"The Saiyans have always been a prudish race," he explained.  "The breeding pits serve as a way to de-stigmatize their mating habits, and to ensure that no one shirks their duties."

"Just another way to keep them in line, isn't it?   The ones who object get singled out and punished just like Lesseri, don't they?" she asked.  

"Absolutely," he said.   "You learn quickly, my dear.   But enough of this.   I have several more alchemical lessons for you today.   Lesseri and her kind can wait for another day."  

He loosened his grip on her, only to take her by the arm instead.   As he led her to his apparatus, she resisted him with a tug.    

"Hold on," she said.   "What about Guwar?   You kept saying how exceptional he's been, but I haven't seen him since I got here."

He looked back at her with a smirk.   "I'm sure you'll see him in time, Treekul," he replied.  "Though I would remind you that the breeding pits are off-limits to non-Saiyans."

He turned and led her onward, unconcerned with how she reacted to this statement.   He suspected that she had feelings towards the Guwar, or perhaps the reverse, or perhaps neither.    The point was not to correctly guess what she was thinking, but to make her question her own thoughts, and to cloak himself with an fog of inscrutability, so that no one could be sure what he could do or not do.  

That was the key to true power, and why he so enjoyed the chance to disrobe.   He left his cloak where it lay.   Someone would fetch it for him, and consider the chore to be a tremendous honor.  

*******

[12 March, 233 Before Age.  Ristet IV.]

"The seven of knives, twelve of horses.  The black hole.  The bishop.  The nine of lances."

"What does all that mean?" Zatte asked as she looked at the cards Dotz had drawn.  

"Absolutely nothing," Dotz said.  "Well not nothing, but it's all jumbled.  Contradictory."

"I don't understand," Zatte said.

Dotz placed her fingertip on one of the cards lying face up on the table.  "This one tells me she's going on a journey very soon.  But the others indicate that she won't.  This one says she's going to die.  And this one means that she'll live a very long life."

"I would have thought that there was a consistent prediction for every possible combination of cards," Zatte said.    "Otherwise, what's the point?"

"There should be, but... well, I apply my own sensibilities when I do a reading," Dotz explained.  

Zatte noticed her tone was even more apologetic than usual.     She found it ironic that Luffa, the mightiest Saiyan of her age, had developed such a fast respect for this meek and unassuming middle-aged woman.    "The strictest interpretation of this hand is that Luffa is a very passionate person who will be experiencing a great challenge soon.  Well, pardon my saying so, but that just doesn't tell us very much at all."

"No, I suppose it doesn't tell us a whole lot," Zatte said, "but your own interpretation doesn't make sense."

"It's worse than that," Dotz continued.    She looked down at the cards scattered on the table.  "I've done a dozen readings for her, and they all end up like this.  Sometimes she meets an important man, either a stranger, or a close relative.    Sometimes she fights him.    Sometimes she receives instructions from heaven.  Other times it's like she ceases to exist.   I hoped that the cards would give me better insight, but I'm no better off than before."

"I'm sorry," Zatte said. "I wish I could help."

"It's not all bad,  I suppose.  Working on her fortune has forced me to improve my technique.  I'm no closer to reading Luffa's future, but I'm a lot more confident in predicting others."

"If that's an offer, the answer is still no," Zatte said.  "My place is beside her.  If her path is unknown, then mine should be the same."

"Of course," Dotz said. "I only meant that I could get a better reading on the next attack."

"What about the enemy's base of operations?" Zatte asked.  "These cultists keep popping up from out of nowhere.   From what I hear, Federation intelligence can only suggest that they're using cloaked ships or low-power runnings to approach undetected.    Every time we beat a few, there's always more to replace them.   If we don't find out where they're coming from, we may never stop them."

"The answer will come to us," Dotz said.  "The path of the traitor will show the way."

"A traitor?" Zatte asked.  "From our side or theirs?"

"I can't tell," Dotz said.  "I-I'm sorry.  I know there's a lot at stake, but some events are to fluid to predict."

"Don't apologize," Zatte said.  "If this is how your ability works, I'll just have to get used to it."

"I'll try again," Dotz assured her.     "Sometimes, things improve after a few hours, as we get closer to the answer.     I'll do whatever I can to get some more solid information for you."

"What about Xibuyas' fortune?" Zatte asked.  "Can you read anything about him?"

Dotz leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.  "His is a difficult path," she began.  "He will hold many levers of power, but the ones he'll actually turn will be very few."

Zatte shrugged.  "I don't know what to make of that," she said.    "Are you saying he won't prosper?"

"Not long enough to truly enjoy the rewards of his work," Dotz said.  "He sows the seeds and he tills the field, but others will eat the crop."

Zatte couldn't help but smile.   Her stepson despised Luffa, and he seemed to hate Zatte almost as much, so he probably wouldn't have appreciated the sentiment of it.    Among her own people, the Dorluns, a fate like the one Dotz just described would be very satisfying indeed.   She made a mental note to say a prayer for the boy.

"What about Fedender itself?" she suggested.    "If you can't see how Luffa's doing, maybe the planet's status is easier to read."

"Oh, that's a good idea," Dotz said.    She concentrated for several minutes, or at least Zatte assumed it was concentration, since she had no idea how Dotz did what she did.    Eventually she dealt another hand from her deck of cards, and then--

"The battle is over," Dotz said.  

"Over?" Zatte asked.   "Then why hasn't there been any word?"

Dotz grimaced as though asking the same question to whatever unseen force gave her those kinds of answers.   "I'm not sure.   The damage was extensive.    Maybe they can't restore communications, even with the enemy gone."

"Then we won?" Zatte asked.   "Are the cultists definitely off the planet?"

Dotz hesitated before replying.   "Yes," she said.    "Yes, I'm sure of it now.    They're gone, but... but they'll be coming back.   Which means Luffa will have to return there as well."  

"I don't get it," Zatte said.   "How can she return to Fedender if she hasn't even left yet?"

"She's not there anymore," Dotz said.   "I can see a woman.   One of Fedender's leaders, I imagine.    An authority figure, that much is certain.    She's watching a ship take off, and she's begging Luffa to stay."

"That doesn't make any sense," Zatte said.    "If she were headed back here, I'd have already picked her up on the long-range sensors.    And if she's not staying put on Fedender, we should have heard from some other Federation planet by now, one that's under attack and needs her help.    Where could she be going?"

"And what will happen to Fedender," Dotz asked as she slowly opened her eyes, "if Luffa doesn't return in time to help them?"

NEXT: Luffa vs. Trismegistus.

[havanarr]

Plenty of Time (After The Fall Pt 2)

Part One > Plenty of Time Ao3 > Part Three Sheith background Krolia & Keith

Keith's recovery is slow, and hospital beds are uncomfortable.

Keith lies in the hospital bed, dark hair making a stark contrast against the white sheets, as Shiro sends Iverson a message to say he won’t be able to do his duties for the next week. Keith hadn’t been able to stay conscious for long after he had accepted Shiro’s proposal. Shiro’s not even sure he’ll remember it the next time he wakes. The doctor had said it was normal with head injuries. She’d also said they should expect him to be confused. Forgetful. Shiro had pulled himself from Keith’s side to page the doctor, and now he sits at Keith’s bedside instead, fingers interlaced with Keith’s.

Keith wakes up again a little while after a nurse dims the ward’s lights. He’s eyes are still decorated with dark purple bags, but they look a little brighter than they had earlier. He tugs, lightly on Shiro’s hand, causing him to jump.

“Keith!” He says, he doesn’t think he said it too loudly but Keith still winces at the noise. “Sorry.” He whispers back. “How are you feeling?” He asks as his free hand traces the edges on the bandage around Keith’s head.

Keith doesn’t answer, just tugs on his hand again. Shiro gets the idea pretty quickly, standing up and perching on the edge of Keith’s bed. It’s not very comfortable, and it’s clearly not what Keith wants because he tugs again, except this time it’s accompanied by shuffling. He watches cautiously as Keith shuffles his broken leg over so that Shiro can inhabit more of the bed. The slight wince of his forehead isn’t lost on Shiro. “You don’t have to hurt yourself baby.” He mummers, but Keith tugs him again, this time into the empty space.

Shiro’s can’t help but comply. After all, he’s never been able to resist Keith. He positions his arm, the human one, into a pillow for Keith, which Keith takes eagerly. He uses the opportunity to card fingers through his hair, which Keith melts into. “Better?” He asks. One of his legs is hanging over the edge of the bed, but he ignores it. Keith needs the space more. Keith nods.

“Is pulling me into your bed going to become a habit?” He asks, grinning down at Keith’s closed eyes. “Yeah.” He responds, without opening his eyes. His voice is hoarse, but it's still Keith's. “Def wanna marry you.” He mumbles more than says as he turns into Shiro’s shoulder his breathing evening out.

______________________________________________

Keith is still curled into the ghost of Shiro the next morning. Shiro can’t help but grin, neck twinging from the lack of support the hospital chair offers. He’d moved from the bed a while after Keith fell asleep, mostly he’d been worried about turning over and hurting him, he’d also been a little worried about falling off the bed but, he wasn’t going to tell anyone else that.

They haven’t slept together before. Not in the soft way that lovers do, not with Keith’s head in his neck, where it seems to fit so perfectly. Not with hands reaching for each other, legs mingling. He’s never felt the heat of Keith next to him under the covers. He’s slept next to Keith a couple of times. Once on the castle. Everyone had fallen asleep in the lounge, Keith included. Shiro remembers thinking that he looked lonely. Lance and Hunk were leaning on each other, mouths slightly open, a blue blanket thrown over the both of them. Allura, Pidge and Coran were all on the other sofa, Pidge’s feet resting in Coran’s lap. Allura’s head on his shoulder. And Keith had been an island. Alone in the water. Until Shiro had woken up from his own spot on the floor and spotted Keith. Spotted home, or what was left of home so many miles from Earth. He’d moved onto the sofa, sharing the space, and his blanket, with Keith. Even without touching him once, Shiro had felt a little less alone.

A message pings through on his tablet and Shiro pulls his gaze away from Keith to rummage for it in his bag. When he pulls it out there’s a message from Iverson, the Galaxy Garrison leave request form attached. Family Emergency. He puts on the form before sending it back to Iverson. Sent. Appears on the screen as the door to Keith’s room opens slowly, revealing Krolia, Kolivan in tow.

“Good morning Shiro.” She says, he watches her eyes flit between Keith and himself. Feels the heat rise on his cheeks.

“Did Keith wake up again?” She asks.

“Not for long.” Shiro pushes out, trying to keep his composure.

He leans back in his chair again as Krolia and Kolivan settle in for the day. Closing his eyes as she adjusts Keith’s pillows. Pulls his blanket around him a little tighter.

Keith wakes up again a few hours later. Then again a few hours after that. He stays awake longer each time, talks a little more each time. Moves a little more each time.

After a couple of days he starts sitting up in bed. The nurses are letting him drink his own water, still no solids. He starts complaining too, when Krolia tries to rearrange his bed for him, when she starts to fuss.

“Mom.” He mummers, stretching out the vowel. “I’m fine, you don’t need to hover over me.” He says as she pulls the blanket a little higher.

“Someone needs to make sure you do as you’re told.” She responds quickly, Shiro has to hold back a laugh. She might have only known him for a year, but Krolia already has dealing with Keith down to a fine art.

“But Shiro’s here.” Keith shoots back. “He’s got the whole week off, The Blades need you and Kolivan.”

Krolia shoots Shiro a look over her shoulder. He tries to wipe what must be a sheepish grin off his face, tries to look respectable, but he’s not sure he manages it in time. Krolia’s eyes narrow at him instead, and he feels like he’s just been read for filth. Galra moms are clearly harder to impress than Earth moms.

It’s not like they’re keeping it a secret from Krolia, or from the team.

But they’re keeping it a secret.

After the fight on the Satellite, after a version of himself had torn a mark in Keith’s face. After he’d thrown words as sharp as daggers, designed to hurt Keith into their friendship, everything had been so different. Keith… you saved me. Was the first thing he’d said when he’d woken up in the heart of the Black Lion, with white hair and only one arm. But the first thing he’d thought had been, Keith… you love me.

__________________________________________

It takes a couple of days, but eventually Krolia and Kolivan leave them alone for more than two hours at a time.

Keith is a lot better. He’s able to hold a full, real, conversation for more than 2 minutes. He’s able to keep his eyes open for hours at a time. He’s able to look at the Garrison correspondence on Shiro’s data pad.

He’s also able to kiss Shiro into a whimpering mess.

Shiro hadn’t expected Keith to pull him in by his collar, hadn’t expected him to kiss so passionately. It had been messy at first. Keith had revealed later that it had been his first kiss. After that it got better, with some practice. Now they were sneaking kisses at every chance they got. He could tell Keith was getting restless, restless being stuck in bed, restless being unable to fly, restless being stuck in bed and not able to do anything other than sleep.

Keith has his hands down Shiro’s pants when the beeping starts. It shocks both of them into action, Keith withdrawing his hands like he’d been electrocuted. Shiro sinks further into Keith’s collarbone, where he’d been laying a trail of kisses just a moment before. He’s embarrassed to admit how close he’d been, even to himself. He feels like the sun’s just been snatched away from him. “What is it?” He mumbles into Keith’s neck. At this point he’s not sure he cares if the nurses catch them. Maybe the mutual embarrassment will convince them to discharge Keith so that they can both get out of here. Back to a real bed, in the privacy of the Atlas. Where no one can bother them. “Fuckin’ IV came loose.” Keith replies, untangling the wires connecting him to the drips next to the bed.

Shiro can’t help but snort.

“Is the hospital cockblocking us?”

Keith laughs just as the beeping stops, his hands coming to rest on the small of Shiro’s back.

“Maybe we should take it as a sign.” He says. “I mean, we’ll have plenty of time later, right?”

“Yeah,” Shiro replies, shifting his weight so that he’s not resting on top of Keith, careful of his remaining injuries. “We have plenty of time.”

[shittyfandomimagines]

Appendicitis

Word count: 2,109

Angstsy with a little fluff.

(GIF creds to owner)

“You denied my FaceTime call.” I could basically hear the pout in Luke’s voice. “Yeah, I just don’t look good right now.” Well, it wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth. “Pft, you can look amazing in a trash bag for all I care.” Luke sounded slightly annoyed but mostly joking.

I didn’t want him to see what room I was in because it definitely wasn’t our house, the last thing I need is for Luke to ask a thousand different questions.

Two days ago, I had a huge ass pain in my side. Turns out I have a chronic appendix that I never knew was chronic, so the pain hit me like a 2-ton truck and basically, I passed out. Then, I got a concussion from passing out and now I’m waiting for my head to get better before they can do the surgery. I have bruises all over my face and arms from hitting the floor and the last thing Luke needs to see before a show is his girlfriend filled with bruises and in a hospital bed.

“You’ve been acting weird for the past 2 days, is there something I should be worried about?” He asks and I could tell he was overly worried. “Nope, just been getting shit-faced drunk every night and out partying.” I joke and I hear him scoff. “Yeah, really funny.” He says and I scrunch up my face a little. “It was a joke, it’s not like that’s not what you guys do every night after a show. What would be any different if I was doing it?” I ask and I really didn’t mean for a joke to go this far.

“Well, you hardly drink and I can imagine that getting drunk would elude that something is wrong. Are you mad at something or someone?” He asks like he’s searching for an answer. “Luke, I said that I’m not even getting drunk. I literally don’t understand how you can’t take a joke.” I sigh and brush my fingers through my hair.

“Y/n, I can take a joke and on most days I know that you’re joking. You’re just acting really fucking weird. Is it okay for me to be concerned for you? Or is that asking for too much?” He snaps and I roll my eyes. “Yeah, it’s a lot to ask for since you never cared beforehand. You hardly call me Luke, so it’s not that big of a deal now that you’re actually on the phone.” I fumed and I heard him sigh on the other side.

“Are you sure that you’re okay?” He asks and I groan. “Yes Luke, I’m fine,” I say and he starts moving around on the other end of the line. “We play Atlanta in an hour and then we have a few days break before Nashville, so I’ll probably not come home.” He says, I finally realized that was what he wanted to avoid and tried to make a scene over it. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to let him know I was in a hospital.

“Goodbye, Luke,” I mumble after a short and quiet period. “Bye, I love you.” He says and I tried to smile. “I love you too.” I end the call and put my phone down beside me on the bed.

“Miss Y/L/N, it’s time for your pain medicine.” The nurse that I actually like says as she knocks quietly. “Thank god, my head is pounding,” I admit and her face contorted, she looked worried now. “Not from my concussion but from a personal life thing, I’m not gonna die. Promise.” I add and I see relief flood her.

“You seem lonely in here.” She says cautiously, putting something on my IV hook. “Yeah, but I’m used to being alone at home so this is no different,“ I mumble as I twirl the engagement ring on my finger. I loved the ring, but sometimes I felt like it took up too much space on my finger.

“No family around?” She asks and I nod. “My parents live very far away and my fiancé travels a lot, it’s usually just me and Petunia, our dog,” I explain and she gives me a sympathetic smile. “But there is one girl who visits every day at the same time, isn’t there?” She asks and I nod.

“That’s Louisa, she is my friend who took me to the hospital, she gets off work and comes to see me. I was lucky enough that I woke up and called her, if not I’d probably be dead on my floor.” I admit and she just nods. I honestly had to beg Louisa not to call Luke, I didn’t want him to drop tour and fly to be with me. I couldn’t do that to the fans.

“Well, on a higher note; the doctor reviewed your case this afternoon and thinks it’s time for your appendix to come out. It’s only going to get worse and since your head is getting better, we need to get the appendix out.” She says and I nod. “So, when do I have to stop eating?” I ask and she looks at her watch.

“It’s 6:30, so you have till 12. Do you want me to get you any snacks from the nurses' station?” She asks and I shake my head. “I’ll text my friend and ask her to pick me up some food,” I say and she nods. “Okay, I’ll leave you alone now. Bye girl.” She says and closes the door on the way out.

I quickly text my friend and then situate myself on the uncomfortable bed. I watch some reruns of I Love Lucy and eat some of the ice chips they put in my cup. “Knock knock.” Louisa’s voice catches my attention and I wave her in.

“It looked pretty lonely in here, I brought some balloons to cheer it up.” She said and put the balloons on the bedside table by the phone.

“Thanks, I’m sorry you had to stop and get some food. They say I’m having my appendix out tomorrow and I won’t be able to eat past midnight.” I explain and she nods, sitting beside me. “Well, it’s no problem. You’re in a hospital bed with a concussion and a fucked up appendix, the least I could do is stop by Subway.” She jokes and puts the sandwich in front of me.

“Well, I appreciate it,” I mumble and she tilts her head slightly. “You seem upset, I mean you have all the reasons to be, but you seem really down.” She voices and I nod my head. “Luke and we’re bickering, they have a couple days off after the show tonight and said he wouldn’t be coming home. I know I’ve asked you not to tell and I haven’t said anything, but it hurts to know he isn’t coming home regardless if I was sick. I know it’ll be a waste of a trip and it’ll make him unbelievably anxious over it, but I guess I still feel upset.” I twirl the ring so more and then I take it off.

“Woah, put the ring that costs more than my entire life back on your finger.” She warns and I laugh a little. “I’m not going to break up with Luke, I just want you to take it so they won’t lose it tomorrow during surgery.” I chuckle and she takes it like a child afraid of being scolded.

“Put it on your finger or something, I’ll get it back from you tomorrow night,” I say as she continued to be really cautious. “Holy fuck, this weights like thirty pounds.” She examines her finger and I was almost empty without it on me.

“It doesn’t weigh 30 pounds.” I laugh and she pulls her phone out of her pocket. “Oh god, the babysitter is calling. I’ve most likely got to be at home, so I love you so much. I’ll see you tomorrow night and if you need me to call off work, I’m here. I will not lose this gorgeous ring.” She kisses my cheek softly and sprints out the door, phone clutched by her ear.

I eat the rest of my sandwich and push the table away from me, I turn off the light above me and turn on my side. I started to look at my empty finger and my heart hurt (worse than my appendix), I really miss Luke and I wished that we never got into an argument about us so I could ask him to be here with me.

—

I hear sniffles and it wakes me up, well that and the pain in my stomach. I look down to see Luke’s curls sprawled across my arms, he was literally grasping my hand so tight.

“Luke?” I shove him a little and his head shoots up, his eyes were bloodshot. “You’re awake, I’m sorry. I know you need your sleep.” He wipes his eyes harshly and I just reach out for his hand.

“What are you doing here?” I ask and he gives me a look. “Well, let's start with the obvious fact that you’re laid across a hospital bed.” He sasses and I roll my eyes. “Let’s try this again, how did you find out?” I ask and honestly, I expected like a fan to have seen me come in and they posted it all over Instagram. “Louisa called me around 7:30 but it went to voicemail and then I got her text that said I needed to listen to the voicemail.” He explains with some more sniffles and I nod slowly. I knew she would pull this.

“What did her voicemail say?” I ask and he sighs deeply. “Y/n is in the hospital and has been for days, she has a bad concussion and will be going into surgery tomorrow to get her appendix out. Sorry, we both lied to you, thanks bye.” He repeats it and my eyes widen.

“I listened to it the whole plane ride here and it’s burned in my mind. I honestly thought you were like unresponsive- type of bad concussion. I was so fucking worried and then I thought of our small fight this afternoon and I felt worse because you were fighting to get better and I was literally making it worse. I’m such an asshole.” He groans and turns his head so I can’t see him cry. Even though he was profusely crying, I was happy to see him in person.

“Look at all of these bruises on you, maybe if I would have called you more often then you could’ve told me how your stomach had been feeling. Or that you decided to stop wearing the ring and that you probably hate the fact that I’m here right now.” He continues on and I didn’t even have the chance to reply by the time more words flowed out of his mouth.

“I honestly haven’t been a good fiancé and I’m so sorry.” He was sobbing by this point and wasn’t making any eye contact. “Luke.” I tug his arm and he keeps his head low. “Please, if you want me to go, I will.” He sniffles and I tug his arm again.

“C’mon, get up here you big dork. I want you to hold me.” I demand and he looks up quickly. “Really?” He sounded so hopeful and I nod, scooting over to make enough room for the giant. “Luke, the last thing I thought about when I fell asleep was that I wish you here and that we never argued. I’m sorry that I left you in the dust, but I knew you’d give up a lot of tour dates to be here. I didn’t want you to let the fans down.” I admit and he starts to make himself comfortable, he pushed a few hairs out of my eyes.

He was running his calloused thumb across my hand. “I gave my ring to Louisa because I didn’t want a nurse to lose it when I was in surgery. I promise that I still love you and I will put it back on the minute I’m out of surgery.” I tell him and he grins. “I’m sorry.” He says again and I shake my head.

“Hey, we’re both done with apologies now. Let’s just sleep because I need it and so do you.” I wrap my fingers around the ringlet curls in front of his eyes.

“I love you so much,” I whisper and kiss his cheek. “I love you more.”

[boy-porridge-vent]

Day 1

***Trigger Warning for most of this post!*** :(

 New vent account, I just have a lot to get off my chest, not right now per-say but in general, a lot has happened and I’m not coping well.

To start off, I’ve relapsed into self harm again

Not only cutting, but nearly everything I was able to get myself to stop doing.

 * I’ve begun to cut again, it’s now to the point where it gets deeper & messier each time I have a panic attack/breakdown (whatever the difference is).

* Im scratching & biting a lot more

* Punching myself until I bruise

* Weighing myself constantly, about 3-10 times a day, it’s in secret though since the scale is kinda hidden in my basement ever since my parents took it away

* Ive begun to check calories & count them. Before this past month, Ive never done this before & now it’s almost like a nervous habit! :(

* I’ve relasped into my an*rexia urges again. I’ve been having trouble with my body image & eating since about 5th grade; not to get too personal, but my mom was & still is hard on me, always called me ugly or fat because of an early puberty that made my body change quickly in a pretty gross way. Had a lot of acne since 4th grade;;; anyways, because of all that, and finding Onision, I was obsessed with his UhOhBro channel around 5th grade & took some of his more serious videos related to starvation & self harm to mind and tried it on myself because, despite him having a stone-cold hatred for it, I was a dumb kid and didn’t listen. So yeah, 5th grade I would starve myself or eat very little; 6th grade I kinda stopped but struggled with my clothing choice/identity more; 7th grade I struggled with gender; 8th grade was when an*rexia came back, more severely than ever, but it happened in short bursts over a few months, I also started cutting but very rarely; 9th I was much more happy & settled down just a bit, really figured out who I was; 10th things weren’t exactly the best, cutting came back & began to be more frquent but not deep; 11th was the worst, I’ve now been eating very little ever since school started, first day back wasnt exactly the best & I ended up cutting again for the first time in months moments after I got home.

 A lot more has happened since then and it’s only gotten worse. I don’t know what to do anymore

I don’t mean for any of this to make anybody upset or possibly relapse/get urges themselves when reading all this, I get so sad when I see others struggling too, I always try to help any of my friends or even random people online if they post a vent. I love bein there to support & help, even help get people to come out of serious relapses! But when it comes to myself, I tend to feel no pity, like I deserve this. There’s something wrong with me in my head, this has been gong on for years, every year feels worse than before, and yet everytime Ive gone to my dad, principles, teachers, or school counselors, they never help! They tell me off, saying Im fine, I dont need a therapist because therapists are scammers, or that I just need to be more positive & get over it.

Ive been told this for years, so maybe… it’s just me who’s to blame. Im the only one who sees what’s happening because it’s not really a big deal. I just make it seem wore than it is in my head. I have friends who care & ask if Im okay, ask if they can help, but honestly they cant help. They can support & I’ll vent to them but it doesn’t fix anything, I vent but it doesn’t fix my mind or my empty stomach or my hand reaching for my same used razor. Nothing has helped and I’m worried that after a while Im going to end up killing myself, whether it’s on purpose or it happens on accident when I go too deep. I have a lot I wish to do in my life, but at the same time, with all this shit that’s happened and how my life feels as if it keeps getting worse everyday, I will admit that at this point if I DID die, I guess I wouldn’t be too upset. I am scared of what will happen after death, nobody knows what happens, but I know that I am legally an organ donor, and I do have part of my will typed up in the case that I do die suddenly one day, so I guess it isn’t too bad.

I will be honest, Ive never been exactly suicidal before, but these past 4 months I think I’ve been legitamately suicidal and ready to go whenever I have a breakdown. Everytime I relapse I think of just ending it all right then and there, but then pussy out because I think about my few friends, my followers on other social media, my pets, my plants, and other people I wish to change the lives of in the future. I want to adopt a kid someday and give them what I didn’t get, treat them as I wished to be treated, help them grow up into the person I wish I had by my side growing up. They’d be my child, I’d be their parent, but we’d also be best friends. I wanted to start my own show, my own comic, my own booth at cons, meet so many people, get married, do music, so many things

but honestly, I don’t think I’ll live much longer after my senior year of highschool. I’m planning on finishing this year out, trying to finish my senior year, graduate, then I’ll leave this Earth with a bang. Maybe literally, or maybe through some other way of suicide, I don’t know. I might even do it sometime before I graduate. Not to make people sad, not for attention and pity, but because I can’t continue on like this, and I want the people who’ve wronged me to see what they did. I want those who refused to help, even when I was in front of them screaming & begging them to get me some kind of therapy or help, to see what they caused. I want them to see that I wasn’t just some sensitive crybaby that needed to get over himself, I want them to see that mental illness can run rampant in anybody & they need to be open to helping those who really need it.

 Ive been through so much. Ive been bullied, made fun of by my own mother, neglected by her, pysically/emotionally/mentally/VERBALLY/and even sexually abused by an ex partner of mine, Ive been literally harrassed, Ive been used solely for sex by nearly every single ex of mine, Ive been manipulated/guilt tripped/gas-lighted/made to feel as if my abuse was my fault, Ive been punished by my school for being abused by my ex! Yet everyone who has ever hurt me in these ways always got away with it scott-free. Why? I have no idea. I like to say that they’re let off the hook because I don’t come to school with black eyes, broken bones, bruises, and mascara running down my face. Abuse is abuse, it doesn’t have to have visible signs. Yet, mine does. I have self harm wounds, not because I blame them for making me self harm (as one of my exes once did), but because of trauma I still deal with that stemmed from their treatment of me. I have nightmares about my ex and her treatment toward me. I get SCARED when my mom comes home. I get nervous walking into school. I hate being touhed physically because it reminds me of so many people from the past getting physical and leaving me in the dirt afterward, even when I trusted them with everything. I hate saying I love you to anybody because of how little it means when others say it to me. Many partners would send hearts & “I love you"s, then throw me out like I was garbage.

I’m so tired of it all.

But maybe it’s all my fault. Maybe Im the problem. Im too quiet. Im too much of a pacifist. I hate confrontation. I hate violence. I hate hating people. If Im hurt by someone, even being abused, I always forgive and let them back in, and I get hurt again over and over. But on the rare chance that I dont forgive, when I do hate them with every cell in me, then for some reason, I can’t get them away, I can’t get them out of my life. They’re always around as a constantly reminder of what happened and how I was used and how I will never change, I’ll never be able to stick up for myself.

 if all that is going to happen in my life involves me being used for sex, money, or compliments to make others feel higher about themselves, then I don’t want to be around anymore. But I can’t just kill myself on a whim and call it a day.

I wouldn’t exactly say this is why I self harm, my self harm isn’t a choice, it just… kind of happens. It’s an addiction; scientifically, it has been proven to have addictive tendencies, which is why it’s so hard to stop once you’ve started/relapsed. I self harm because it’s an addiction that I can’t help, and becaue of bottled up, unresolved trauma that gets worse with every new day that I keep it bottled up for.

 This isn’t going to get better. Sorry for typing out so much too. I have an issue with piling all my thoughts and how I feel into multiple huge paragraphs, so there’s much more of that to come.

Also to come, weight updates & keeping track of what I eat/how long I can go with no food whatsoever. So far I’ve gone about 1/ maybe 2??? days straight, though I stayed home today so I did have to eat dinner, which caused me to gain 1 pound. But I lost 4.5 pounds in that day of not eating, so I can lose that 1 pound pretty quickly. Plus my metabolism is very very fast, so even if I did eat a lot I’d lose all that weight in a few hours/a day or two, depending on how much I ate.

This is day 1 of my further decline.

September 01, 2019

[healthandroutine1]

Monoclonal Antibody Infusion Therapy – A Solution to COVID-19

As it may seem to many of us, COVID-19 is around forever. After all this time, you might wonder if there is any legitimate way to treat the patients.

The virus and its variants are still relatively new and emerging, so it is obvious to think this way. Wuhan, China, was the first city to identify it in December of 2019. March of 2020 was the month that it was declared a global pandemic. Scientists developed and are still finding treatments for the disease.

People who get sick from the virus have some hope for recovery, thanks to promising treatments. Monoclonal antibody infusion therapy is one of them. As an intravenous infusion therapy, monoclonal antibodies are administered before patients are admitted to the hospital. In hospitalized patients with COVID-19, treatments are also available. Those undergoing chemotherapy or organ transplants may also use the therapy as protection against COVID-19.

Can people outside the hospital get treatment for COVID-19?

If you are diagnosed with COVID-19 but not sick enough to require hospitalization, you may be hesitant to take any action. Still, it is crucial to steps like:

Self-isolation

Make sure you get enough sleep

Hydrate yourself

Take medications to reduce the fever can be taken if necessary

If you are thinking of getting an infusion of monoclonal antibodies, talk to your doctor. The prevention of severe illness appears to be effective.

Monoclonal antibodies: What are they?

Our bodies produce antibodies as a way of fighting infections. The body cannot fight off a new infection, such as COVID-19, when exposed to it for the first time. Monoclonal antibodies fill this gap. Monoclonal antibodies are created in laboratories. Unlike traditional antibiotics, these medications target a specific type of virus or infection, like COVID-19.

Infusion therapy using monoclonal antibodies: how does it work?

Monoclonal antibodies are administered intravenously to patients with COVID-19. This therapy helps a person's body fight infections by using antibodies against COVID-19. Studies have shown that these antibodies shrink the number of viruses in our bodies. Less virulent individuals have milder symptoms. Hospitalization and death can be prevented by reducing the viral load.

Which patients should receive antibody infusion therapy?

Individuals at risk of severe illness who have symptoms for less than 10 days and COVID-19

Patients with positive COVID-19 symptoms for 10 days or less are treated with monoclonal antibodies. It is best to give the therapy early in the course of the COVID-19 illness. A high-risk patient should only receive this treatment.

A severe illness can result from exposure to COVID-19.

Patients exposed to COVID-19 may also be eligible for monoclonal antibody treatment. To prevent COVID-19, antibody therapy is administered as a shot or IV. COVID-19 can be controlled with antibody therapy if the patient meets the following criteria:

They have not been fully vaccinated;

Nursing home residents or prisons are at high risk of contracting an infection from an infected person;

The COVID-19 vaccine may not provide them with complete protection due to their medical conditions.

Individuals who fall into this category include:

Dialysis or chemotherapy

Transplanting organs

When taking certain medications.

The treatment can be repeated every four weeks in patients whose immune systems do not respond to the vaccine.

Ask your doctor if the treatment would be appropriate for you or if you qualify for any of these criteria.

COVID-19 poses a high risk of severe illness for whom?

COVID-19 can be deadly for anyone, but those at most significant risks are:

Over 65-year-olds

The following conditions affect people 55 years and older:

Twelve-year-old and older with 1 or more of the following conditions:

Weight over 88 pounds and 12-17 years old with 1 or more of the following:

Cardiovascular disease

Hypertension

Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease.

Insufficiency of the immune system

You can weaken your immunity by taking medicines that weaken it.

Overweight and obesity

Having a diabetic condition (type 1 or type 2)

Kidney disease is chronic.

Weight gain

The use of daily medications because of asthma or chronic respiratory conditions

Medics often use monitors, feeding tubes, and ventilators

Experiencing a disability such as cerebral palsy

Illness associated with sickle cells

Inherited or congenital heart disease.

What monoclonal antibody infusion therapies are available for COVID-19?

Four antibody infusion therapies have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use:

Combining casirivimab and imdevimab

Etesevimab combined with bamlanivimab (paused by FDA from distribution in June 2021)

Sotrovimab

Tocilizumab

If I have COVID-19, where can I get monoclonal antibody infusion therapy?

Monoclonal antibodies are prescribed by healthcare professionals. Contact your physician if you have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or are at high risk of contracting it.

Infusion of monoclonal antibodies is done in what way?

At an infusion center, monoclonal antibodies are administered intravenously. An IV will be started as soon as you arrive. A little over an hour later, you will receive your antibody infusion.

Infusions are followed up by an hour of monitoring after completion. To detect allergies, this should be done. Approximately 2-3 hours are required for the entire process.

Infusing monoclonal antibodies still, makes people contagious?

COVID-19 cannot be cured with antibody infusion therapy. An individual's contagiousness persists even after they have received treatment. You must continue to isolate yourself until:

The symptoms of COVID-19 have been present for at least ten days.

A fever-reducing medicine such as ibuprofen is not taken for 24 hours.

There has been an improvement in your COVID-19 symptoms.

Infusion of monoclonal antibodies causes what side effects?

Among the side effects of monoclonal antibody treatment are:

Bruises on the skin

Inflammation

Increasing swelling

Infection possible

The following side effects are more severe:

COVID-19 will be harder to fight in the future.

Reduction of the immune system's response to the COVID-19 vaccine

A COVID-19 vaccine must be given 90 days after the infusion therapy.

A monoclonal antibody infusion therapy allergy reaction is characterized by the following signs?

Monoclonal antibody infusion therapy can cause an allergic reaction in some people. The infusion clinic must monitor you for one hour after the infusion.

Medical professionals should be notified of the following signs of an allergic reaction:

The flu

Feels cold

Feeling nauseated or vomiting.

Symptoms of headache

Breathing problems

Blood pressure that is too low

The wheeze

Lips, throat, or face swelling

Hives, as well as rashes.

Irritation

Aches in the muscles

Feeling dizzy

How is COVID-19 treated in hospitalized patients?

Hospitalized patients are treated with effective treatments by doctors.

Decadron (Dexamethasone) is a corticosteroid (like prednisone). Patients on a ventilator or who need extra oxygen can benefit from dexamethasone.

Antiviral drug called Remdesivir. Patients who weigh 88 pounds or more and are over the age of 12 can use it. Patients with COVID-19 can benefit from it in terms of speeding up the recovery process.

When taken with remdesivir, baricitinib can provide respiratory support to patients older than 2 years.

The prevention of blood clots is frequently accomplished with blood thinners in low doses. There are several people with COVID-19 who develop them. Patients at increased risk for blood clots may be prescribed higher doses of blood thinners.

COVID-19 is still being studied by scientists. New research evidence is used to update guidance on treatments.

View original Source-https://bit.ly/3yIeIjm

[eve-the-egg-lover]

Sith, Spies, and a Whole lot of Lies

Chapter 2

*Yay, chapter 2!! It’s shorter than the first, though I don’t know if this will be it’s normal length. Anyways, enjoy :) 

For the first few moments after their eyes met, neither Rya, nor Theron moved a muscle. They just stared, eyes locked, mouths open, frozen in time. That was until the Director reminded Theron of his still open comm channel.

“Theron Shan, what the hell was that!? I swear, if you just started a gang war I’ll…”

“Call you back.” Theron spoke, adding in a whisper, “Disconnect.”

With the director’s interruption, time seemed to flow once more, along with all the dangers that came along with it. Rya sprung to her feet, igniting her blood red lightsaber, and Theron whipped his blaster from its holster.

She looked the same as she had on Rishi. Long, golden blonde hair tied in a bun, pale skin flushed with just a bit of pink, ice blue eyes piercing as she refused to even blink. Stars, she was beautiful.

Sometimes, Theron had imagined them meeting again. Sure, lots of them involved a lightsaber at his throat, but the sudden heat from the blade made him realize how easily she could end his life right then and there. The question was, would she?

              Pulling her lightsaber had been purely instinctual. A foolish instinct here, but standing face to face with Theron made her do and say a lot of foolish things.

              “Theron.” She put sternly. “Put the blaster down.”

              “Not until you deactivate your fancy glow stick.” Theron responded, not wavering from his stance.

              Gritting her teeth, Rya let her grip relax, the blade deactivating with a hiss. Theron lowered his blaster, leaving them suddenly very alone. The air was still thick with tension and from her current position, Rya could escape through the alleyways… but Theron would most certainly give chase.

              “Rya…” Theron broke the awkward silence. “What in the nine Corellian hells are you doing here?!” His voice rose with every syllable until he was practically shouting.

              It was understandable. If she were to ever stumble upon Theron on Dromund Kaas… actually, she had no idea what she’d do. She at first suspect he was doing work for the SIS, just as he was probably suspecting she was doing work for the Empire. Which she was (not that telling him would help her case). Telling him “I can’t tell you” would pretty much tell him I’m doing work for the Empire, and lying she wanted to see him would… well, that was all she had. Unfortunately for her, there was no way she could make it convincing.

              “I…. uhhhh…. I was just site seeing.” She spluttered. Stupid.

              “Wow. For a crafty Sith Lord, you sure have a way with words.” Theron narrowed his gaze, shaking his head from side to side.

              Rya swallowed, racking her brain for something else she could say. Her previous elatedness at seeing Theron had all but disappeared, the understanding of how complicated she’d suddenly made the situation dawning on her.

              “You shouldn’t have followed me. I could have killed you.” Rya said suddenly.

              Theron’s caution turned to outright anger. “Following you? I was trying to help you! I’m assuming that weird man has something to do with why you’re here!”

              Rya sighed. So it had been just another bar patron. Gritting her teeth, she ran her fingers through her hair, the loose wisps that had escaped her bun ghosting over her hands. She’d just exposed herself to the last person she’d wanted to see on Coruscant, all because she’d been overly paranoid. “Great.”

              “What did you say?” Theron returned, his hand moving back towards his blaster’s holster.

              “You weren’t supposed to know I was here.” Rya answered. Not the best choice of words.

              “That doesn’t help your situation.” Theron grumbled, crossing his arms and glaring. Sighing, he put a gloved hand up to his forehead. “You know I’m going to have to turn you in right?”

              Rya paused. And he caught it. Just a flash in her eyes for the briefest instant.

              Fear.

              Theron had always found it strange. Rya, she’d never been like the other Sith. Even Lana, as strange as she was, had never been quick to admit when she was afraid, or when she was uncertain. Nor was she ever willing to show gentleness or kindness. A weakness for Sith he supposed. Rya on the other hand… well, maybe she didn’t walk into fights with her heart on her sleeve, but she most certainly was not afraid to show such “soft” emotion. There was a tenderness to her that whatever training Sith went through hadn’t seemed to have been able to beat out of her.

              Her voice was barely above a whisper when she spoke. “You must know what would happen to me should you do that.” She chuckled, her throat clenching a bit.  

              Theron swallowed. Unfortunately, he did know what they would do. Some flashy war trial where she’d be paraded around by the Senate, blamed for everything  she may or may not have had a hand in doing, before being executed. Malcom would probably have a hand in it, she was a war criminal after all. And then when that was all said and done, she’d either be locked in the deepest depths of Belsavis to rot or be executed.

              He could not deny what she had done. She’d killed so many from the Republic. She’d destroyed the War Trust, intentionally broken the Treaty of Coruscant, and reignited the war. Hundreds of thousands were dying because of her actions. Why was he even contemplating this?

              His mind wandered to Jyvora. He could still hardly believe the Jedi Code spouting girl was a former Sith Lord. Not to mention Rya’s sister. She’d committed atrocities in the name of the Sith and the Empire as well. The difference was, she defected. She gave secrets in exchange for a chance to start over as a Jedi in the Republic. Something told Theron Rya wouldn’t agree.  

              “You’re right. I do know what they’d do to you.” Theron admitted, shifting his weight to his left leg. “And you know why.”

              Rya looked to the ground this time. All early traces of her anger dissipated. “I know.” She laughed. “Guess the Coalition on Yavin IV or taking down Revan wouldn’t help my case.”

              Theron chuckled in response, but quickly stopped himself. Sighing, he ran a finger through his hair.

              “I can’t let you do that Theron.” Rya finally spoke, crossing her arms. The more they talked, the higher the chances she’d let her emotions win. She needed to leave now.  

              “And I can’t let you harm the Republic.” He responded, his eyes closed.

              “I’m not here to do that.” Rya attempted to assure in vain. She knew she could not hurt Theron to escape, yet her feet were glued to the floor.

              Theron chuckled. “Sure. Because you think I’m stupid enough to trust a Sith.”

              Rya furrowed her eyebrows. “You trusted Lana.”

              “Yeah, and look where that got me.” Theron grumbled.

              “You trusted me.” Rya pointed out. “You said on Rishi you knew I’d come and get you.”

              Theron grumbled something, placing his hands on his hips, his eyes seeming to take an awful lot of interest in a soaked flimsi on the ground.

The silence that passed between them gave Rya a chance to think. The logical, ultra-heightened part of her mind battled against the emotional torrent flooding her system. She hated the profound impact simply speaking to Theron was having on her. She was a kriffing Sith Lord, not some giggly actress from Vette’s holo-vids. Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. She clenched her fists at her sides. Passion only worked if it was short lived. What she felt for Theron on Rishi when he’d been captured had driven her to wipe the Revanites guarding the compound from the galaxy. Had given her an incentive to defeat Revan at all costs. That passion had fueled her, delivered her to victories doorstep. But passion fades with distance. So why did she still feel this way? It was taking all her self-restraint to deny she felt anything for Theron. Kriff, if he had been an Imperial it would have made everything so much simpler.    

“I’m not asking you to trust me Theron, I don’t expect you to. Just know, if you try and stop me the whole galaxy will suffer.” It was all she could do to keep her raging emotions in check. Playing at Theron’s feelings was manipulation, plain and simple, but it was all she had. Going any further, using what had happened between them was her last resort.

              Theron laughed. “You know, lying to me only makes this worse.”

              “I’m not lying Theron.”

              “Of course not, because Sith always tell the truth.” Theron had begun moving towards her, but she refused to back down.

              “Not every Sith is evil, Theron. Look at my sister. You trust Jyvora, she was Sith.” She pointed out as Theron glared.

              “Jyvora left the Sith because of their twisted ideals you still serve.”

              “How do you know I still serve the Empire?” she spat, suddenly realizing how close Theron had come.

              “Isn’t it obvious? Why else would you be here?”

              Even in the dark, Rya could feel the emotions rushing over Theron like a tidal wave. The one, dim light in the alleyway cast shadows over Theron’s face. Rya could see the hazel of Theron’s eyes, the outline of his broad shoulders, his soft brown hair, the feint shimmer of his implants. The only other time she’d seem him this clearly was on Rishi. Then he had been bruised and bloodied, vulnerable. He’d winced a little every time he moved, his pride and confidence damaged. But here… now… towering over her, there was no inkling of that man. The anger from their argument made his eyebrows furrow, his nose scrunch just a little at the top, his lips downturned into a grimace. Lips that hadn’t wanted to leave her own when she gave him what he’d never realized he’d wanted. They had been soft and gentle, even in their hasty eagerness. Lana and Jakkaro’s long prep time had given them a lengthy opportunity to  “get to know one another.” The memory of what Theron and she had done on Rishi caused her face to flush considerably, and she was suddenly grateful for the darkness of the alley.

              Theron hadn’t even realized he’d been walking towards Rya until he had to look down to meet her eyes. The dark hid her features, but Theron knew she still looked the same. Sharp cheekbones, an upturned nose, clear skin, and ice blue eyes, her features unchanged from any kind of dark side corruption. He’d learned of Sith who used Sith alchemy to keep their features eternally youthful, but he simply could not fathom Rya taking such drastic measures. And yet, he knew the skin beneath her clothing was scarred from years of combat. On Rishi, he hadn’t taken the time to study them all, but he remembered a few. The slashes on her arms and the bite marks on her back from a Nexu. The raised skin on the side of her abdomen from being impaled by a collapsing pipe when her former master tried to kill her. The four gashes on her back from a Teratanek she had fought on Korriban.

              He felt the blood pounding in his ears as he took his time studying what features his eyes could make out in the dark. The softness in her eyes and the slight flushing of her cheeks told Theron Rya was doing the same. It amused him he was not the only one so distracted.

              He hardly remembered Rya reaching up to press her lips softly against his. Or when he’d wrapped his arms around her waist, lifting her a little so she didn’t have to stand on her tiptoes. He could feel her thin fingers running through his hair, her warm breath on his face when they momentarily broke apart to breathe. She tasted of alcohol, a burning, bitter taste of something so strong and intoxicating with just a hint of sweetness, so like her. Oh kriff, Theron what are you doing? He thought to himself as his lips left hers and began a trail down her jaw to her neck.                  

              “Theron…” Rya let out a breathy moan as Theron nipped at her neck, his arms pressing her to him. Her mind was racing, heat building in her core. Stars, she wanted him. But she also didn’t want to catch whatever strange disease was lurking in the stagnant pools of water. “Theron,” she said again, trying to get his attention. He pulled away, breathing heavily. She could feel his need pressed so close to him. “Theron, not here.”

              “My place.” Theron whispered huskily, leaning down to kiss her neck again, but letting his grip on her loosen.

              Rya couldn’t stop herself from thinking what a terrible, terrible idea this was. But the warmth of Theron’s hand when he took hers in his own quieted her mind. Right now, there was no Empire, no Sith, no spies, no war. It was just them.

[sleepyfan-blog]

Two-part Drabble Game: 10 - After a near-death experience & 16 - “There’s nothing to be scared of, okay? I’m right here.” for Connor/ConHayth uwu

@balsaminaceae​

Fandom: Assassin’s Creed

Characters: Connor and Haytham Kenway

warnings: incest tw, modern au, stabbing tw

pairing: ConHayth

word count:1,930

summary: A normal work day for Connor ends terribly.

Connor was in the break room, eating lunch with his fellow coworkers and watching the tv. His father was at a press conference and they’d decided to tune in to see what he was talking about. Most of his coworkers seemed to be only half listening, but Connor, as ever, was completely focused on Haytham… Although the young man could readily admit that he was enjoying listening to the sound of his father’s voice, though the fact that Abstergo was expanding their veterinary clinic program from the initial three clinics that they’d opened last year to another eight - three outside of the US, in other countries that Abstergo had offices and other work buildings in - was rather exciting.

The young man had been tempted to apply for one of the veterinarian positions at the first three clinics… But they were a bit far from where he and his father lived - and with a closer Abstergo Employee housing… It was possible that he might have been tempted to move… At least while his father was jet-setting around the world for work purposes, although it would be very strange to be living in two apartments, and not something that Connor was very interested in… Besides while Connor had loved working as a vet in the small village that he had settled into while he had been there…

The setting of being back in a veterinary clinic might remind him of the small village, and while he knew that the anarchists were working against his father and would very clearly do anything in order to achieve their goals… Including and especially if they had the chance to kill his father, the young man still occasionally felt guilty for just up and leaving them as he had done … In order to protect himself from kidnapping… But still. Occasionally the feelings of guilt would remain, despite the fact that Connor was very much aware that he had left in order to protect himself… The young vet worried that he might feel guilty working in such a place - or it would remind him of where he’d worked previously…

Besides, he really enjoyed working in the research department with the raptors. Connor made sure to focus more on Haytham again as the other continued to talk, doing his best to not get distracted by the small smile on his father’s face - or the way the other’s tie brought out the blue in his father’s eyes. Haytham concluded the speech and was met with dozens of questions - each of which his father expertly answered. Once the press release was over, Corbin - one of his coworkers - switched the channel to a music channel while everyone finished the last of their lunches.

~

The young man was headed home from work - it was about a mile walk, but Connor enjoyed it, and it allowed him to exercise his legs a little before and after work every day. He stopped for a moment, frowning a little as he thought the saw someone familiar, sitting at a nearby café table. Was… Was that Myriam? He blinked in surprised and frowned a little, glad that he was on the other side of the street - even if she wasn’t Myriam, the resemblance was uncanny - and given the fact that she’d been directly involved in stealing the… Piece of Eden? That’s what the bitter old man who’d tried to take it from him had called it. Not that Connor had let him do such a thing.

He cautiously made his way down the sidewalk, hoping that if Myriam was, for some reason, at that café, that she wouldn’t notice him among the dozens and dozens of people walking on both sides of the streets - or through the cars that honked and slowly rumbled their way down the road. Not that he glanced at her more than one or two more times, as he didn’t want her to potentially see him looking at her, having recognized her if the person he was trying to get past really was Myriam.

A lightly accented voice sounded in his ears, right behind him, causing the young man to startle and try to get out of the way, but for several moments, whoever it was managed to hold him completely still which was a rather terrifying feat in and of itself “It’s a pity that he’s got you so deeply under the spell of the Piece of Eden. Hopefully this will wake you from it and you will realize the truth.”

“Let me g-mmph!” Connor tried to yell as loud as he could, but the person muffled him with one of their hands, as he felt something cold and sharp stab into his back. There was a cloth in the other’s hands and he tried not to inhale, but as he struggled, he found that he desperately needed to breathe and something that was quite possibly chloroform caused a deep darkness to overtake him. He heard shouting and felt the person let him go - and the sound of running as he passed out.

~

Connor woke up with a pounding headache, in a room with too much white and too much light. He covered his face with one of his hands as he groaned and tried to sit up, hissing in pain as his lower back ached. Memories of what had happened last filled him and the young man sat bolt up right, eyes switching to his second sight, despite the pain and the dizziness that was coursing through his body. He didn’t see anyone who was an enemy nearby… But he also didn’t see anyone who was a definite friend, either, which made the young vet rather nervous.

He switched his sight back to normal, and it was clear that he was in a hospital of some kind. There was a saline drip attached to his arm, but it had a rolling base to it, which was why Connor started to get out of bed. Someone had taken his clothes and everything else that he had on him and placed it in an open-faced cubby on the far side of the room, and he was going to get to it. He didn’t know if his father had been contacted - if the hospital he’d been taken to even knew that was necessary or not..

Had he been stabbed and kidnapped by the anarchists, so that he wouldn’t be able to escape as he had the last time they’d tried kidnapping him? If so -why was he in a hospital? Unless he was in an Assassin-controlled hospital? Connor had no idea how long he’d been out for, which was why he was very carefully swinging his legs over one side of the hospital bed and very carefully shifting so that bit by bit, he was starting to put his weight on his feet, one hand on the metal post that his IV bag was attached to, the other hand firmly gripping onto the hospital bed.

Haytham burst into the room, arguing quietly with someone in scrubs - either a doctor or a nurse, Connor couldn’t entirely tell “- and I’m telling you, I am very certain that my son is in this room and I will be seeing… Connor get back into bed. Now. You were just stabbed in one of your kidneys.”

“I… Rake:ni! I… I wasn’t sure if I’d gotten kidnapped again and was hoping to get to my phone to call you.” Connor murmured gratefully, leaning back against the bed, pulling his feet up carefully. 

Haytham moved further into the room, and the young man gratefully held tightly to his father’s hands when his beloved drew closer to be touched. He hadn’t realized that he’d been trembling until his father murmured gently “There’s nothing to be scared of, okay? I’m right here. I won’t let anyone try to cause you any harm.”

The younger man nodded a little, feeling himself relax a little, as he tugged the blankets up higher. He felt really cold. He blinked a little, feeling tired. “Okay. I’m glad that you’re here.” He wasn’t sure how long it would take for him to heal, but the young man was well aware that he healed a lot faster than most people. He wondered if they were in a normal hospital, or in the place where his father had been taken to, when the other had been dying. “Where are we? I mean… I know that we’re in a hospital but… Which one?”

“Meridian Park Hospital. A dozen people witnessed you suddenly collapse and start bleeding out - one of them thought to call for help - but not before someone stole your wallet - which is why no one here knew who you were, as none of them thought to go through your phone. I tracked your location through the phone and came as soon as I could. I knew that something was wrong when you weren’thome and was an hour and a half later than when I usually get home, and you hadn’t texted me about working late, orstaying out with coworkers or friends. So  I’ve already dealt with the potential identity theft issues on the drive over here, so you need not worry about that… And I informed your place of work that your work-badge had been stolen when you were injured, so you need not worry about that either.” Haytham explained, and the medical staff member frowned a little at that, although Connor couldn’t imagine why - perhaps that someone would steal his wallet and ID badge, but not his (very expensive) phone?

He nodded, still feeling dizzy. “Okay… Thank… Thank you for taking care of everything and coming to find me. I… I’m tired…” Connor yawned softly, though he hid it as best as he could, not wanting to be rude.

“Then rest. I will be here when you wake, I promise.” His father murmured, voice warm and gentle as the other lightly brushed a stray lock of hair that had come undone from his braid, tucking it behind one of his ears.

Connor nodded sleepily, sending the other a small smile as he settled into bed, grumbling a little “Wish I could sleep on my stomach… Stupid cord won’t let me.” His father chuckled softly at that, a wonderful sound that helped the young man fall asleep within moments.

[nebris]

The first global city

High in the Andes, Potosí supplied the world with silver, and in return reaped goods and peoples from Burma to Baghdad

In 1678, a Chaldean priest from Baghdad reached the Imperial Villa of Potosí, the world’s richest silver-mining camp and at the time the world’s highest city at more than 4,000 metres (13,100 feet) above sea level. A regional capital in the heart of the Bolivian Andes, Potosí remains – more than three and a half centuries later – a mining city today. Its baroque church towers stand watch as ore trucks rumble into town, hauling zinc and lead ores for export to Asia.

Elias al-Mûsili – or Don Elias of Mosul, as he was known – arrived in 17th-century Potosí with permission from Spain’s Queen Regent, Mariana of Austria, to collect alms for his embattled church. Potosí silver, Don Elias believed, would stave off the Sunni Ottomans and Shiite Safavids who battled for control of Iraq, periodically blasting Baghdad to smithereens with newly scaled-up gunpowder weapons. Just as worrisome to Don Elias were fellow Christians, schismatics with no ties to Rome.

The great red Cerro Rico or ‘Rich Hill’ towered over the city of Potosí. It had been mined since 1545 by drafted armies of native Andean men fuelled by coca leaves, maize beer and freeze-dried potatoes. When Don Elias arrived a century and a quarter later, the great boom of c1575-1635 – when Potosí alone produced nearly half the world’s silver – was over, but the mines were still yielding the precious metal.

By 1678, native workers were scarce and the output of the mines dwindling. Yet in the city’s royal mint, Don Elias marvelled at piles of ‘pieces of eight’, rough-hewn precursors of the American dollar, fashioned by enslaved African men. He saw them ‘heaped on the floor and being trampled underfoot like dirt that has no value’. For a long time, Potosí’s medieval technologies kept producing fortunes, if on a smaller scale.

On Potosí’s main market plaza, indigenous and African women served up maize beer, hot soup and yerba mate. Shops displayed the world’s finest silk and linen fabrics, Chinese porcelain, Venetian glassware, Russian leather goods, Japanese lacquerware, Flemish paintings and bestselling books in a dozen languages. Votive African ivories carved by Chinese artisans in Manila were especially coveted by the city’s most pious and wealthy women.

Pious or otherwise, wealthy women clicked Potosí’s cobbled streets in silver-heeled platform shoes, their gold earrings, chokers and bracelets studded with Indian diamonds and Burmese rubies. Colombian emeralds and Caribbean pearls were almost too common. Peninsular Spanish ‘foodies’ could savour imported almonds, capers, olives, arborio rice, saffron, and sweet and dry Castilian wines. Black pepper arrived from Sumatra and southwest India, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, cloves from Maluku and nutmeg from the Banda Islands. Jamaica provided allspice. Overloaded galleons spent months transporting these luxuries across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. Plodding mule and llama trains carried them up to the lofty Imperial Villa.

Potosí supplied the world with silver, the lifeblood of trade and sinews of war – and as Don Elias knew, the surest means to propagate the Roman Catholic faith. In turn, the city consumed the world’s top commodities and manufactures. Merchants savoured the chance to trade their wares for hard, shimmering cash. The city’s dozen-plus notaries worked non-stop inventorying silver bars and sacks of pesos, loaded onto grumbling mules for the trans-Andean trek to the Pacific port of Arica or for the much longer four- to six-month haul south to Buenos Aires. In the rainy season rivers swelled, and in the dry season livestock died of thirst between scant watering holes.

Mule trains returning from the Pacific brought merchandise and mercury, the essential ingredient for silver refining. Most mercury came from Huancavelica in Peru, but the Spanish Habsburgs also tapped mines in Almadén (La Mancha) and Idrija (Slovenia). From Buenos Aires came slavers with captive Africans from Congo and Angola, transshipped via Rio de Janeiro. Many of the enslaved were children branded with marks mirroring those, including the royal crown, inscribed on silver bars.

Soon after its 1545 discovery, Potosí gained world renown, but central European mines also flourished after 1450, faltering only before Potosí hit its stride in the 1570s. Silver was discovered in Norway in the 1620s, but not enough for export. The Iwami silver mines of southwest Japan, developed in the 1520s, exported substantial silver via the port of Nagasaki after 1570, first by the Portuguese and then, between 1641 and 1668, by the Dutch. The main exporters of Japanese silver however were the Chinese. Scholars dispute the numbers, but Iwami was not quite another Potosí.

As early as the 1530s, Mexico exported silver too, and considerable amounts of it. Yet Mexico’s many mining camps – Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Taxco, Pachuca, Real del Monte and the namesake San Luis Potosí – peaked only after 1690. In the 18th century, the Mexican peso or ‘pillar dollar’ took the world by storm. Even in the Andes of South America there were other silver cities (or towns) besides Potosí, including Oruro and Castrovirreyna in Peru. But no silver deposit in the world matched the Cerro Rico, and no other mining-refining conglomeration grew so large. Potosí was unique: a mining metropolis.

Thus Don Elias, like others, made the pilgrimage to the silver mountain. It was a divine prodigy, a hierophany. In 1580, Ottoman artists depicted Potosí as a slice of earthly paradise, the Cerro Rico lush and green, the city surrounded by crenellated walls. Potosí, as Don Quixote proclaimed, was the stuff of dreams. Another alms seeker, in 1600, declared the Cerro Rico the Eighth Wonder of the World. An indigenous visitor in 1615 gushed: ‘Thanks to its mines, Castile is Castile, Rome is Rome, the pope is the pope, and the king is monarch of the world.’ A 1602 Chinese world map identified the Cerro Rico as Bei Du Xi Shan, or ‘Pei-tu-hsi mountain’.

For all its glory, Potosí was also the stuff of nightmares, a diorama of brutality, pollution and crime. What Don Elias might not have known in 1678 was that Potosí’s reputation – and with it the Spanish Empire’s – had a generation earlier suffered mightily. In 1647, amid royal bankruptcy, King Philip IV dispatched a former inquisitor to unravel a massive debasement scheme that had metastasised inside Potosí’s royal mint. The plot corrupted nearly every official within 1,000 miles. Even Peru’s viceroy was suspected of complicity. Potosí’s debased coins, mostly pieces of eight, hit world markets after 1638, and before long merchants from Boston to Beijing were rejecting Potosí coins. The fountain of fortune had become a poisoned well.

It took more than a decade to hunt down and punish the great Potosí mint fraud’s culprits and to restore the coinage to proper weight and purity. A new design debuted to signal the new coins, but winning back global trust in Potosí silver took decades. Into the 1670s, even as Don Elias took donations in exchange for sermons in Syriac, Sumatran pepper-growers balked at coins stamped with a ‘P’.

Like the Bernard Madoff scandal of the 2000s, the Potosí mint fraud of the 1640s tells an interesting if not universal story. Nobody wanted to admit that they had been deceived. For Spain’s King Philip IV, the mint fraud – an inside job – was a world-class embarrassment and a sign of the decline of his empire’s fortunes. The global flood of bad coins hurt everyone, rich and poor. Genoese, Gujarati and Chinese bankers suffered ‘haircuts’, merchants worldwide forfeited precious ties of crosscultural trust, and soldiers throughout Eurasia saw their pay halved or worse.

Almost a century before Don Elias visited Potosí, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo revolutionised world silver production. Toledo was a hard-driving bureaucrat of the Spanish empire – and he more than any single man transformed Potosí from a hardscrabble mining camp into a bona fide city. It was a colossal undertaking, but one suited to the ambitions of King Philip II, the first European monarch to rule an empire upon which the sun never set. Toledo reached Potosí in 1572, anxious to flip it into the empire’s motor of commerce and war.

By 1575, the viceroy had organised a sweeping labour draft, launched a ‘high-tech’ mill-building campaign, and overseen construction of a web of dams and canals to supply the Imperial Villa with year-round hydraulic power, all in the high Andes at the nadir of the Little Ice Age. Toledo also oversaw construction of the Potosí mint, staffed full-time with enslaved Africans. Its first coins were hoarded, higher in silver content than they were supposed to be, and overweight.

Toledo’s successes came with a steep price. Thanks to the viceroy’s ‘reforms’, hundreds of thousands of Andeans became virtual refugees (those who survived) and, in the search for timber and fuel, colonists denuded hundreds of miles of fragile, high-altitude land. Implementation of a new technology, mercury amalgamation, introduced from Mexico on the viceroy’s orders, fouled the region’s air and streams. The city’s smelteries belched lead and zinc-rich smoke, guarantees that its children would suffer lifelong stupefaction.

Environmental hazards multiplied as the city boomed, and with these ills came murderous social conflicts, vagabondage, sex-trafficking, gambling, political corruption and general criminality. Epidemics swept the city every few decades, culling the most vulnerable. How did people respond to this lawlessness and chaos? How could they live in such an iniquitous and foul place? In what might be termed the ‘Deadwood paradox’, bonanza brought out the worst in people even as it also provoked startling acts of liberality. It was, after all, the city’s generosity, its profligate piety, that brought Don Elias to Potosí, all the way from Baghdad.

The Habsburg kings of Spain cared little about Potosí’s social and environmental horrors. Potosí silver, for them, was an addiction: deadly and inescapable. For more than a century, the Cerro Rico fuelled the world’s first global military-industrial complex, granting Spain the means to prosecute decades-long wars on a dozen fronts – on land and at sea. No one else could do all this and still afford to lose.

A steady flow of Potosí silver – or, rather, the promise of silver futures – rendered the Spanish Habsburgs’ otherwise absurd dreams possible. Then, all of a sudden, it didn’t. Even before the mint fraud of the 1640s, which helped bankrupt the crown, large quantities of Potosí silver slipped away, siphoned off by the empire’s friends and enemies alike: foreign bankers, contraband traders, pirates. At the same time, silver’s abundance stunted other parts of Castile’s internal economy. Some joked that the Habsburgs had discovered the magic formula for turning silver into stone.

The great Potosí bonanza, source of price disruptions, fiscal crises and costly building projects all over Europe, mostly fuelled commercial and imperial expansion in Asia. Throughout the 17th century, Dutch, English and French merchant-colonists, followed by a few intrepid Italians and Scandinavians, jockeyed with each other and with the embattled Spanish and Portuguese for a space at the great Asian table. All that Asia wanted, beyond tips on gun design, was silver. Europeans steered or inflected some of this pan-Asian trade and empire-building, but not most of it.

Often forgotten were the many thousands of Asian and African merchants and bankers based in Mombasa, Mocha, Mosul, Gujarat, Aceh, Makassar, Canton and many other port cities, including European-controlled Goa, Batavia, Madras, Macau and Manila. In the 17th century, these ‘country traders’, as Europeans called them, moved and lent more Potosí silver than all Europeans combined. Chinese diasporic trading communities in Southeast Asia alone controlled a large share of this global business.

Asian emperors were another matter. Mughals such as Akbar and Shah Jahān, or the Safavid Shahs Abbās I and II, or the Ottoman Sultans Murad III and IV, ruled tributary states whose size and diversity more than matched the empires of the Iberians. Northern Europeans, Dutch ambitions notwithstanding, were far behind. Just as the Spanish Habsburgs began squaring off against the French and English, the ‘gunpowder’ monarchs of the Middle East and South Asia scooped up satellite kingdoms and principalities, propelled to a degree by Potosí silver.

And what about China? As the Potosí mint fraud reverberated, the Ming Dynasty collapsed. The tipping point came in 1644, but the historic Qing takeover was hardly instantaneous. Both Qinqs and Mings spent massively as China’s economy shuddered from war and famine. Ming subjects scrambled for slivers of silver to ward off invading soldiers or to buy passage to freedom. Even a debased peso was a gift of heaven.

When Don Elias visited in the 1670s, Potosí had seen better days. But it was without qualification a global city, a site of suffering but also of wonder, a showcase of technological innovation and cultural sophistication. In the 1970s, proponents of dependency theory, most famously Eduardo Galeano in Open Veins of Latin America (1971), held up Potosi as the tragic exemplum of third-world underdevelopment, a hollowed-out periphery. Yet in its own day, Potosí was a recognised centre. A 1640 manual by Alvaro Alonso Barba, its great metallurgist, was translated and republished for centuries. Numerous painters, poets and playwrights made the city home. In the decades before the great mint fraud, potosinos challenged the king, proclaiming that he (and the world at large) needed them more than vice versa.

The end came not as spectacular implosion but as irreversible decline. Lower taxes and the imposition of a harsher labour regimen lifted silver production in the later 18th century, but the mines were deep and mercury expensive. Technological fixes failed. Simón Bolívar reached a beaten-down but jubilant Potosí in 1825, but British capitalists – close on the Liberator’s heels – could not revive the mines. It was local entrepreneurs and smallscale miners and refiners, many of them indigenous, who kept Potosí alive to the end of the 19th century using archaic but trusted technologies, including the methods of Barba.

By the time that the American historian Hiram Bingham visited the former Imperial Villa in 1909, Potosí had less than a 10th of the population it had boasted three centuries before. A colonial precursor to Bingham’s 1911 ‘discovery’ of Machu Picchu, the old Imperial Villa struck the professor as a silent spectre, not a typical US ghost town but rather a ‘super-sized’ object lesson in the vanity of Catholic Spain’s global ambitions. By this time, mineral rushes had helped to produce cities such as San Francisco and Johannesburg, but nothing quite compared for sheer audacity with the Imperial Villa of Potosí, a neo-medieval mining metropolis perched in the Andes of South America.

Today, almost 500 years after its discovery, Potosí’s Cerro Rico continues to supply the world with raw metals, a bit of silver and tin, but mostly lead and zinc. Half-processed ores wend their way through town and across the mountains and the Altiplano, to refineries in China, India, South Korea and Japan. The city has grown considerably in recent decades, now surpassing its colonial population (and severely straining its water supply). Has Potosí come full circle or is it stuck in the same rut? Will the sale of metallic mud to Asian manufacturers do more for ordinary folks than what was done by the silver-hungry Spanish, British or Yankees?

Potosí remains a globally connected city, a cog in the world economy, a regional magnet for migrants, a space for self-reinvention. Yet recalling its Habsburg heyday, the Imperial Villa of Potosí was famous not only for its mineral bounty but also for its artistic production, its political heft, its piety. Despite their own troubles, the city’s inhabitants gave Don Elias a small fortune in silver to fund his quixotic project in ‘Babylon’. Potosí also remained infamous for its pollution, its round-the-clock workingman’s horrors, its perennial violence, its corruption. Potosí was a mountain of silver that changed the world even as the world changed it. After five centuries of globalisation and exploitation, we can look back on this unique city’s history and ask what, in truth, it means to be ‘worth a Potosí’.

https://aeon.co/essays/potosi-the-mountain-of-silver-that-was-the-first-global-city

[teentitaans]

bbrae week: day iv: lips/kiss - i usually post to my main blog but since it’s not teen-titans-centric anymore, i hope you guys won’t mind! light nsfw (below the cut) -   - (i know i’m a day late….. sorry @ bbrae week mods & thank you for hosting!)

preview: 

“I’m fine.”

“You’re stubborn,” he corrected, peeking an eye open. “What’s up with you anyway? Y’seem a little antsy tonight.”

“Maybe because you won’t kiss me.”

It had never really dawned on her that she was in love with him. Not until this particular moment, of course.

It was around eleven at night when they’d gotten back to the tower, bruised and bloodied after a tousle with Cinderblock that had taken far too long… Or wait, maybe it had been Plasmus. The point was that it was too late and her mind was too foggy to remember which hulking creature she’d had the pleasure of spending her Thursday evening ripping to pieces. Raven rolled her eyes. Sending her soul self was always such a feat, leaving her mind as worn as her body. When she’d finally dragged herself to her room, there were only two thoughts occupying her weary mind, and one of them had been getting that foul purple goop out of her hair. 

Oh right…. They had definitely fought Plasmus. Disgusting. 

If she had to guess, Raven would say it was midnight now. After tending to the wounds Robin had begrudgingly allowed her to heal, she’d been wandering aimlessly around the boys’ corridor, silently hoping to run into a certain teammate. Of course, he didn’t disappoint, (he never disappointed her), which lead to their current situation.

“How’re ya holding up?”

His playfully hushed tone crossed the bridge of her nose, and her arms tightened around her chest. “M’fine,” her gaze faltered, “Robin’s wounds were minor, so I figured while I was over here, I’d-”

“Thanks for worrying,” he pressed a kiss to her temple, “but you should get some rest.”

She really should. Pure exhaustion had a way of tearing down the strict structure she filed her emotions into so neatly. It would be wrong to abandon her structure for a single, foolish urge. Then again, his hands were so warm around her waist… No, no, no. No. Anything she thought she wanted tonight were trifles at best, poorly filtered thoughts that would fade with the morning light. Swallowing her desires, Raven peered into those gorgeous emerald eyes, glinting ever so kindly against the dim hallway lights. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

Beast Boy nodded, leaning forward one more time. The kiss was simple, meant to be a parting gesture, but it knocked her mental resolve over like a clean row of dominoes. Raven couldn’t help it. Rising to her toes, she pressed back, a firm message delivered directly against his lower lip. The boy froze, shocked as he caught her earnest gaze. Shifting his grip on her waist, Beast Boy offered a goofy grin before slamming her back against the carpeted wall.

“Umph!” 

The strangled sound left her lips before she could choke it back, her hands flying over his one, which now had a slightly looser grip on her thigh. 

“R-Raven?!” Beast Boy gasped, muscles tensing. The girl shot him a guilty glare, withdrawing her hands just as quickly. “What the hell?” His tone lowered to nothing more than a grumble grazing her earlobe. “You said you were fine!” 

“I am.”

“Shut up,” he sighed, resting his forehead against hers, “you’re totally not fine, Rae.” His eyelids fell closed and his guilt overwhelmed her senses, sending an undeniable message blaring in her mind: I don’t want to hurt you.

Raven scrunched her nose, staring up at him with the slightest of pouts. It wasn’t fair how gentle he was with her. Since they’d started this whole… whatever it was, he’d been nothing but nice. Unbelievably polite, with the exception of taunting remarks laced with affection. To the untrained eye, it was cute to see Beast Boy act like such a gentleman, but Raven knew better. They’d been teammates for years, after all. She’d seen him fight, she’d seen him protect, she’d seem him possess; he had passion. And she only wanted a little taste. But instead, he coddled her with butterfly kisses that were so gentle they felt like a tease. Of course, that hadn’t quite been his intention… And yet, she’d fallen for the bait. 

It wasn’t like she didn’t like how he kissed her. When he tilted her jaw, just so, his lips fit perfect against hers and it made her head so light she could float. It was flattering how much respect he’d put into their relationship. But this… The way he’d resorted to treating her like a fragile little bird was infuriating. Like a bruised hip could stand in the way of throwing her up against the wall and kissing her senseless. Hell, she was still Raven. She was still the daughter of an intergalactic demon, and still a member of the most esteemed team of heroes in Jump City. She wasn’t fragile… Not in the slightest. 

“So that’s….” Raven finally spoke, eyes trailing lazily up and down his torso. “That’s all I get?” 

“You’ve at least got a bruised hip and knowing you, it’s probably actually broken. Someone’s gotta look out for you, Rae, if you’re not gonna look out for yourself.” 

“I told you I was fine, Garfield.” She retorted, running her fingertip along a tear in the fabric of his uniform. Slender fingers stroked the fresh scratch stretched over his ribs with an aqua glow, and Raven sighed, “I’m fine.”

“You’re stubborn,” he corrected, peeking an eye open. “What’s up with you anyway? Y’seem a little antsy tonight.”

“Maybe because you won’t kiss me.”

“…”

“Wha-what?!” Pressing a palm to her forehead, the changeling offered a nervous chuckle. “You’re definitely worse off than I thought, Rae. We literally just-”

“No… I… Not like that, idiot.” 

“I don’t really get-”

“I want you to kiss me like you mean it, Gar.” 

“But you’re hu-”

“I know, I know,” Raven swallowed back another irritated sigh, waving his protests from the air like a obnoxious smell. “But….” Trembling fingertips traced his frame, higher and faster until they laced around his neck, fidgeting with the damp forest hairs at the base. “But if you’re the one to hurt me… I don’t think it would be so bad.”

Emerald eyes flashed.

“You… You don’t know what you’re talking about,” his voice went serious, “once I start, it’s not so easy to quit,” hands curled around her waist, “so if you want me to stop… Tell me now.” 

Amethyst hues met his, answering his warning with all the disregard in the world.

His knee shoved between her legs, pressing her up and back against the wall. Raven swallowed. “Or now.” His movements were fluid, one hand gripping firm around her waist, the other snaking up through the swell and dip of her curves until his grip had locked firm against her neck. “Or now.” His lips were against her cheek, caressing carelessly down her jaw. The pressure of his knee against the thin sliver of uniform was agonizing against her core, his fingertips forming new bruises along her jawline. She felt his canines, ghosting dangerously over her veins, followed by the sweltering slick of his tongue at the base of her neck. “Or,” he paused, his greedy stare striking hers with enough fervor to drop her jaw, pretty lips parting just for him, “now.”

And then, he pressed his lips against hers. 

It was rough and unrestrained, and in that moment, Raven decided she was in love. And being in love felt like Garfield’s calloused hands rushing beneath the tears in her uniform, it tasted like the tip of his tongue, it sounded like desperate gasps and quiet hums beneath a familiar cloak of darkness. A slight gasp escaped her throat as his tongue slipped across her lower lip, twisting her own into knots as tight as cherry stems. It was an experience more intoxicating that a case of the finest wine; Raven could drink in the experience forever.

He was breathless, lost in her flavor, moans so guttural she could feel the vibrations between her thighs. Raven shuddered, eyes slamming shut as he yanked her up against his mouth. “Sorry…” he murmured, brows threaded in concentration as he blindly tucked a lavender strand behind her ear, “your, ah, bruises…”

What bruises? She could only feel him. His touch was territorial, hands claiming every curve and swell of her body as his mouth lurched further against hers. His abdomen, clenched as she ran the naughty trail between his hips, the his slight weight against her thigh. Ragged breaths pushed against her chest, the rise and fall forcing her heartbeat into the same rhythm as his own. 

Garfield… He had much more power over her than she’d care to admit. Just his lips, supple and gentle as they pulled against hers with insatiable hunger before curving blissfully against hers, made her weak in the knees. The hungry metallic taste to his breath, needle-like trace of his canines against her tongue sent her heart fluttering. He was a wonderful kisser in every sense of the way.

She could kiss him every second of every day until the end of time, and even that infinity wouldn’t be enough.

When he pulled away, he cupped her face like his masterpiece, admiring the way he’d nipped and tugged her lips into a wonderfully supple swell, the way he’d planted burning red roses along her neck that would surely bloom into a gorgeous violet garden atop her silvery skin. 

Beast Boy stared down at the breathless sorceress, wiping the corner of his slightly puffy lips with the edge of his wrist. God, why was that so hot? Raven bit the inside of her cheek. 

“Are you…” he touched the tip of his nose to hers, a nervous smile playing his lips, and not a bit of remorse in his gleaming green eyes, “did I hurt you? How, uh.. How was it?”

Raven smiled, “let’s just say we’re going to need to replace some light bulbs in the kitchen.”

“How many?”

“….All of them?”

“Oh, shut up.” 

a/n:  Beast Boy didn’t stop smirking for a week.

[perspectives-otherwise]

A Skeptic’s Certainty: How is He Certain of His Beliefs?

The first time I witnessed my father cry, he was standing at death’s door.

I have been raised on the bread and butter of a political household. For the many years that I sat in front of the television, forced to flip to the news channel, dear, my father has appeared behind the tempered glass screen more times than I could count as my age today. Not once did he ever waver in his conviction, nor his voice. His chocolate brown eyes held a steadfast – our family would call it hard – look that could shoot an eagle dead; once his eyes became glazed over in that way, all of us knew there could be no persuasion and negotiation entertained.

I inherited this very look from my father. Eyes that, at first glance, are colored a boring dark chocolate brown, but then one notices them to be a clear, soft almond as the light hits my face at the right angle. When defiant, I could bore holes into another’s pair of eyes. Most of the time, my parents were on the receiving end of it. Though I had never actually went out of my way to stand in theirs.

Everyone at school knew me as ‘the kid with a scary but famous dad’. This was, admittedly, an extremely helpful deterrent for those who loved picking on the timid, puny ones along the corridor – not that I was a shrimp, but small nonetheless. Acquaintances greeted me by my family name, but close friends call me Jo. My real name is Jean, but who likes to be named after an item of clothing?

The memory of books crowds my mind whenever I reminisced about childhood. The four walls of my father’s study room were lined with heavy bookshelves made of oak: each lacquered slab of wood that groaned under the weight of hardbound, leather-bound books had handwritten labels stuck on carefully with tape. Most of the spaces on the shelves had been filled even before I was born, but when I turned 7 and read as much as I breathed, my father called me into his room one day and faced me to the shelf closest to the French windows. He looked at me and said:

“This belongs to you now. Fill it with the knowledge you truly wish to have.”

Together, we began removing the books long untouched by human hands, and the air soon became choked with dust.

As a child, I devoured fairy tales and fictional stories. As a middle and high school student, my teachers unearthed and enthusiastically cultivated in me the love of nature and science. This naturally led me on to pursue environmental studies later in university, which also spelt disaster for the relationship between my father and me. In the years leading up to the falling out, however, I relished the joy in collecting books on geography and philosophy, amongst various classic literature novels that only encouraged my idealism and naivety.

~

“Excuse me, Ms. Brooks, I think the textbook is wrong…and I don’t understand this paragraph.”

It was in the middle of my favorite 6th grade lesson when I pointed out an error in our still crisp, plastic-wrapped textbooks.[i] At home, I had read a little about climate change – something about rising sea levels and melting glaciers – that these were the effects of human activities, such as industrialization and carbon emissions. However, the school textbook printed vague, ambiguous statements that eventually led to the conclusion that climate change is natural, and not at all caused by mankind.

Being the nitpicky student that I am, my hand shot up in the air during quiet reading time.

“Nonsense, Jean, the textbook is never wrong! Just follow the arguments and you’ll understand.”

Being the determined individual that I am, I went home and consulted my father on the matter.

“Jean…your teacher is right. Do as she says and you’ll do well in school. Anyway, you should stop reading whatever it is that is getting you all confused. Trust me, it will bring you no good – because they are WRONG. For every day that I am at the office and campaigns, all I hear about is the same damn thing: that climate change is truly happening and that we are the cause of it, blah blah blah. My colleagues and I are up to our eyeballs in work trying to rebuke these claims and keep the higher-ups happy, so the money continues rolling in for us. Please don’t be an additional worry on my mind, girl!”

I left the room in much greater confusion.

~

Politics never used to interest me at all. Since the textbook incident, however, I began paying more attention to environmental campaigns broadcasted on the news and searched the web for old speeches by my father. Amidst the name-calling and dramatic pauses, I realized the shocking mindsets many politicians had towards climate change, and how deeply rooted their beliefs are.

To them, climate change is a lie.

Besides accusing the activists of hurting the economy in their efforts to reduce carbon emissions, the ‘conservative’ politicians refused to make any further comment or argument by concluding that “I’m not a scientist”, and this statement effectively renders them immune to any scientific discussion or opinion requested.[ii] On the surface level, they claim to have no scientific and thus, expert knowledge on the issue of climate change, but in reality, they simply wish to avoid getting their hands dirty and putting America’s economy on hold. Evidently, they are much more concerned with earning profit than saving the Earth, though they would rather die than admit so.

As an amateur holding a Bachelor’s degree in environmental studies, I could still understand and empathize with some of the senior politicians and the general public; the phenomenon of climate change can be bizarre and its technicalities difficult to grasp, such that even the world’s leading experts are still racking their brains over finding a solution.[iii] If even the scientists are uncertain about the whole issue, then perhaps the average individual should be allowed to entertain a little skepticism!

Total skepticism is pushing it a little too far, however. The research I did online was baffling: one in four Americans were completely skeptical of climate change, and they believed that it is a natural process that humans had nothing to do with.[iv] Most of the time, the skeptical politicians had monetary backing from corporations vested in economic interest, such as the fossil fuel and oil industries. With a cap on carbon emissions, these corporations would face much loss in business and thus, revenue; with profit as the ultimate goal, these companies were little inclined to agree to such restrictions.[v]

Following the campaigns sickened me to the stomach, but I continued to do so in order to be updated on the progress of climate change mitigation. Little was achieved.

~

“You have no right as a daughter to lecture me!”

2009. That year, my father and I contested against each other at the 15th Conference of the Parties. At that point in time, I was considered one of the most established experts on the field of environmental science, global warming in particular. To everyone, I was greeted as Dr. Ernie, and my name was well-respected worldwide, but spat on by climate change skeptics.

My father was one of them.

Our relationship had steadily soured ever since I decided to throw his advice out the window and follow my instincts. Rationality kicked in as I dug deeper into the underworld of politics and environmental science, and I forced myself to stay level-headed whenever my father’s face drifted to mind, his threatening voice commanding me to leave the entire matter alone. Counter-intuitively, as I grew knowledgeable of the subject, his inability to understand my most beloved passion only encouraged my inability to understand the inner workings of his mind.

I worked through years with a single motivation: to persuade my father that climate change is, and has been ongoing for decades. Personal scientific reports were painstakingly simplified and rewritten countless times, complicated models reduced to layman diagrams drawn by hand in order to illustrate the very reality of it all.[vi] Every single time I handed him the papers, he tore them up into shreds before chucking them at my feet.

We had just returned home from the conference before I walked out of his house for the last time. He had ripped every single beloved book of mine from the shelves and set them on fire in the backyard.

~

2015.

I was about to leave my home for a jog when the telephone shrilled through my briefcase. A frantic female voice asked for my name, and I answered yes, speaking. It turned out to be my mother.

She told me that my father was dying.

~

“Hi, Dad.”

The house had remained its exact, spotless appearance. The midday sun illuminated his bedroom, washing it down with clean and golden-yellow warmth.

Blanketed and cushioned by stark white, sterile cotton sheets and pillows on his bed, he wheezed heavily and paused often to catch big gulps of air. My father beckoned me feebly nearer to his side.

Some formal exchanges on how are you, what have you been doing, before we lapsed into an awkward contest of staring each other down. Then he spoke.

My father lamented on the years wasted on preserving his own pride and self-image, instead of embracing new knowledge and making up for his lack of education. Something about cognitive dissonance theory, he waved his hand impatiently. To put it simply, denying climate change completely was the easier choice compared to conceding that his commitment in opinion is flawed; with scientific authorities directly challenging his belief system, the unconscious psychological inclination was to react negatively towards the rejected option, or reduce its initial appeal. In this case, my father was faced with the dilemma between altering his entire belief system on climate change to allow the appropriate decisions in mitigation, or to condemn the scientific consensus as a pack of lies and continue his anti-campaigns.[vii] Also, there was growing economic pressure from the corporations to deliver results and ensure that carbon emissions levels are not restricted.

As an uneducated and conservative man, he could only invest faith in human innovation and technological advancements to reduce the effects of climate change, rather than swallow the overwhelming scientific evidence that condemned everything he supported. Naturally, he sought discord with the latter and picked at any uncertainty that the scientists reluctantly revealed; this he did so especially with climate modeling, which are far from accurate and complete in their analysis and prediction of our climate.[viii]

“I’ve watched the world gradually progress into the technological age, a complete makeover that occurred over a few mere decades. There is so much more potential for the future, and I so believed in humans to conquer anything that stood in our way.[ix] Climate change, to many of us, was just another trivial matter that the government and certain goody-two shoes fussed over in order to gain more funding and support from policy makers. We didn’t want to relinquish any monetary control to them…[x]

Your growing passion in environmental science did nothing to persuade me in changing my mind. I had secretly admired your fierce determination in not letting the matter rest, but this old man of yours was never going to admit to his daughter that he is wrong about something he had devoted his life to fighting against. And I wish to apologize for that now.”

Never once did he let go of my right hand – clasped tightly in his icy cold own, I could only interpret this long abandoned gesture as his final way of expressing affection and regret, perhaps mingled with a little pride. There was no hardness this time, only a single tear clinging on desperately to the corner of his right eye.

 Endnotes

[i] See Singer, Merrill. "Anthropology and Climate Change." AnthropologyNews.

[ii] Atkin, Emily. "‘I’m Not A Scientist': A Complete Guide To Politicians Who Plead Ignorance On Climate Change." ThinkProgress RSS. October 3, 2014. Accessed March 8, 2015.

[iii] Dunlap, R. E. "Climate Change Skepticism and Denial: An Introduction." American Behavioral Scientist 56, no. 6 (2013): 691-98. 691.

[iv] Saad, Lydia. "One in Four in U.S. Are Solidly Skeptical of Global Warming." One in Four in U.S. Are Solidly Skeptical of Global Warming. April 22, 2014. Accessed March 8, 2015.

[v] Dunlap. “Climate Change Skepticism and Denial: An Introduction”, 692-694.

[vi] Dunlap. “Climate Change Skepticism and Denial: An Introduction”, 691. Refer also to Atkin, Paragraph 3.

[vii] Gelfert, Axel, “Climate Scepticism, Epistemic Dissonance, and the Ethics of Uncertainty,” Philosophy and Public Issues (New Series), Vol. 3, No. 1 (2013), 167-208, edited by S. Maffettone, G. Pellegrino and M. Bocchiola. 189-194.

[viii] Gelfert. “Climate Scepticism, Epistemic Dissonance, and the Ethics of Uncertainty,” 179-181.

[ix] Gelfert. “Climate Scepticism, Epistemic Dissonance, and the Ethics of Uncertainty,” 183-184.

[x] Dunlap. “Climate Change Skepticism and Denial: An Introduction”, 694.

[taifan92]

100 Topic Challenge- Introduction

A/n: So, I took longer to get this done than I’d have liked, but here is topic one! The introduction! I kinda used it to at least somewhat introduce my BNHA OC that I will probably be using for a lot of these. Will they all be in the same story? Be interconnected? I have no idea. I may also stray from using her at all in some of them as well. But this kind of gives you some idea of her background, though not nearly all of it, and what she does for a living(though I didn’t go into excruciating detail and focused on one part). As I said, it’s just an introduction, which is a fairly difficult topic for me to sort out exactly how to do. Last time I did something like this, I really did much better.

Topic # 1 - Introduction

“Hello, welcome to the Esuha Pet Medical Center,” the receptionist said as someone walked into the clinic.

The person walked up to the counter and began talking with them. Through listening in, I learned that they had just been at a scene of a villain attack and had found the dog they carried in their arms nearby injured. As they described the dog’s injuries, I listened as well as inspected the dog from a distance. The poor pup did have a long gash that led from its shoulder to about mid-back. It’s ears were also damaged and the man reported that its hind leg seemed to be messed up as well.

When I got the signal from the vet, who was also listening in—it was an abnormally slow day today so the two of us weren’t really busy at the moment besides checking stock and keeping track of how everything is going—I approached the man with the puppy.

“Hello,” I said in greeting. “I’m Icilius, Kesshou, I’ll be your assistant today. If you come right this way, we’ll get your pup seen to.”

“Icilius?” The man looked suspicious.

“Don’t let the name fool you, sir,” the receptionist spoke up. “She’s good at her job and trustworthy. Otherwise she wouldn’t be here.”

“I’ll come, but if anything happens to this pup, I’m coming after you,” the man warned.

My ears twitched. “I understand, sir,” I said, my smile becoming more forced now. I was no stranger to people hearing my family name and immediately distrusting me. My family was practically the mafia of Esuha and always seemed to get away with their crap. It was something I hoped changed some day.

I lead the man to an open treatment room, where the vet had already sent a tech to get things prepared. We had the man lay the pup on a table and as the tech began asking the owner questions to fill in as much of the gaps as possible, I began doing the TPR. I frowned at the results as I got them, not liking how low the heart rate was, nor how still the pup was being as I did it. When the vet came in, he directed us to suture the wounds and get an IVC in her since the vet’s exam revealed she was really dehydrated. The tech worked on suturing while I got the IVC in her.

“I’m really concerned about the fact I can do this without someone restraining her for me,” I muttered where only the vet and tech could hear. “Her heart rate is also really low. I’m willing to bet blood work will show anemia.”

The vet nodded. “Don’t take a lot,” he said. “It’s clear she’s lost blood. We should prepare an infusion. Her leg is messed up, so we’ll need x-rays as well. We’ll get a couple angles on that.”

The tech and I nodded. We continued working silently, getting the pup set up for what was likely going to be a long stay in the clinic. We got blood—a minimal amount needed just to check levels for now. We discovered that she was indeed anemic, as well as low on platelets and white blood cells. This meant that if her leg required surgery that it couldn’t be done immediately. The vet prescribed a few different meds, as well as a blood transfusion and IV fluids. After getting x-rays, the tech and I got her set up in a kennel with both those things set up and directions on her treatment plan written clear on the sheet while the vet spoke with the man.

We got the go-ahead from the man, who promised to pay the bills it created, to move forward with the overall treatment plan. Over the next few weeks, this puppy would receive enough blood transfusions to get her count back to normal, some antibiotics for infections, the wounds healed and, once her anemia was rectified she had surgery to fix her broken leg properly. She spent another several weeks recovering from that at the man’s home with check-ins every week, as the man had decided to adopt her.

On her final check-up, he brought her in while I was busy with a client with bunny that was being seen for an abscess on its cheek. The vet with him poked in to let me know as I was helping the vet I was currently helping take the bunny off anesthesia. I finished up with the bunny, giving it a couple more pets before leaving the vet to take the bunny back to the owner and explain the game plan for treatment.

Upon entering the room, I was greeted by a cheerful puppy with tons of energy and mobility.

“Oh my goodness, you’re so happy today!” I smiled widely as Snow, what the man had decided to name her, greeted me with happy wiggles and a play bow, tail going a million miles per hour.

I gave her lots of pets and a couple treats, telling her how good she’s been and how great her new daddy has been for her.

“Alright, Kessh,” the vet chuckled. “We do still need to take her TPR and stuff. We waited for you, since you’ve been my assistant for her this whole time.” He had a grin on his face.

I felt my cheeks warm. “Right, yes, sorry,” I said. “Seeing them at the end of their recovery just always makes me so happy.”

The man who had brought her initially and adopted her smiled. “You are passionate about this,” he said. “I admit, I misjudged you at first. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I assured the man as I walked Snow to the scale. “I’m used to it. Besides, what matters is that Snow here got all taken care of.” I gave her some ear scratches before writing down her weight.

After taking the TPR and asking the needed questions as the vet did the rest of the exam, we were finally able to give Snow a clean bill of health.’

“You handled that guy a lot better than the last one,” the vet told me after we saw them off.

“He wasn’t as bad as the last guy,” I pointed out. “There was no yelling involved this time. Or accusations. Just distrust, which changed in time. Actually this experience gave me a bit of my hope back I lost from the last guy.”

“Good,” the vet said. “In time people will all see you differently from your family, you’ll see. Then you’ll accept that promotion, right?”

“We’ll see,” I rolled my eyes, giving him a crooked grin.

I was happy where I was. I didn’t require having a higher position, though being a tech would be nice. I just wasn’t ready for the tech position, not when I couldn’t handle the naysayers as well as I’d like. My goal wasn’t to be a vet, though it wasn’t entirely off the table to reach that point someday.