#and i think certain relatives of hers got their noses out of joint when they felt 'ignored' by her or she wasn't granting their every favor

[fideidefenswhore]

Do you think AB alienated her allies, sometimes?

I mean, for sure... I think the extent of that has been exaggerated by Alison W/eir, but you can definitely find examples of that. Like, Thomas Cheney, one of her relatives that she interceded for above Wolsey's protests, seemed pretty firmly in her camp. Then, by 1536 he's part of the faction that's supporting her stepdaughter.

Generally, though, imo, it's underestimated how difficult it is to maintain allies when one has power/influence, and how it's basically impossible to keep everyone happy all the time.

[nightshade-minho]

-Embers- (1)

warnings: suggestive, future smut, themes of death

wc: 5.3k

teaser 

White specks of paint, scattered across an inky sky - they truly were beautiful. You adjusted yourself on the grassy hill, eyes closing as you tried to calm your nerves. Sighing, you ran your hand over crimson scales, trying to ignore the blinding lights of your village in the distance.

“The stars are beautiful tonight.”

You wished you could stay here forever. Where the only sounds that grace your ears are the deep rumbling snores of the enormous draconian creature you're curled up against. It's a comforting sound, and yet you knew you were going to have to leave soon. Your father would be absolutely enraged if you were late to such an important event- in fact, you were sure he’d have absolutely no qualms killing you in front of the entire village and crowning a broomstick as his heir instead.

Perhaps that's why you delayed the inevitable for a little longer, nuzzling your head against the dragon's hide. Your heart was pounding in your chest as you observed your bustling village from above, frantically getting ready for the festival and the welcoming. People were decorating their houses, painting murals onto their walls and making sure everything was perfect for the guests that would arrive tonight.

The streets were lit up with lanterns, and the people milling about outside their houses were dressed up in their best. The excitement in the atmosphere was palpable, and you could almost feel it from atop the hill.

Sighing, you looked to the side, your eyes meeting enormous yellow ones.

“Aeracus...I know what you’re thinking.” You sighed and curled up your knees to your chest. “And you’re right. I’m nervous, but also excited. I can’t believe we’re going to be seeing him again after all these years. Can you?”

The dragon slowly shook his head from side to side, and you chuckled. “Do you think he’s changed? Or do you think he’s still a feline-obsessed asshole?” You smiled, his laughter ringing in your ears as you reminisced.

Slowly though, the good memories bled into terrible ones. Loss and pain, mingling in your heart and taking over your emotions. The smile disappeared from your face as you remembered what had happened. The reason he left. The reason you weren’t allowed to participate in the championships that were to be a part of the festival’s celebrations...the reason the whole village considered you an outcast, despite being the chief’s daughter.

You swallowed the lump in your throat, pushing your hair back as you slowly stood up, dusting off your tunic. You pressed a kiss to the dragon’s neck, sighing.

“I’m going to go, Aeracus. Honestly, you should be grateful you don’t have to partake in these events.”

The dragon let out a disapproving rumble at that, and your face softened. That was a low blow. After all, it wasn’t his fault that he was forced to to refrain from joining his fellow dragons in the games. No, the blame was to be shared between you and Minho.

The felicity in your heart was intertwined with a faint sense of lingering sorrow. It happened so many years ago, and yet the echoes were still fresh in your mind...

You couldn’t deny that you were desperate to see him again. In fact, saying you were desperate would probably be an understatement. You were thrilled, electrified- and yet, oh so anxious.

You clenched your fists, taking in a deep breath and starting to descend the hill. You’d put it off for long enough.

***

“Children, listen carefully, now.”

The boy next to you didn’t heed the elder’s warning, continuing to draw on the back of his hand.

“Minho! Pay attention, or I will have to call your father.”

Minho looked up, scowling. He placed the chalk down and pursed his lips, directing his attention towards the clay figurines that were laid out in front of the elderly woman. You, as well as the 10 other kids in the cottage, were fascinated by the story being told. The woman was teaching you about your culture, the information you needed to know regarding the upcoming ceremony. It was important, and yet Minho couldn’t bring himself to care. He liked cats more than dragons anyway.

“As I was saying.” She cleared her throat, resuming her lesson.

“Now that you children are 13, you are no longer babies. Certain things are expected of you. You have embarked on your journey to adulthood...and thus, there are certain things you must know. The elements of our village, for one.”

She gestured to the figurines on the dirt floor in front of her. “As you all already know, there are four elements.” She pointed to a spiky pyramid, and then to a smooth sphere. “Ember, Aqua...” Her fingers moved to the next pair- a rough cube and a glassy cone. “...Terra and Aer. These are the symbols of the elements. Of course, you all have already seen the life-sized versions of these in our square.”

Eager nods, making her continue with a pleased smile.

“Every dragon on this planet has a corresponding element that they have control over. They possess immense power, and the ability to command these elements.”

Minho raised an eyebrow, intrigued. Hm, maybe this wasn’t as lame as he’d thought it would be..

“I’m sure you children have seen your parents, older friends and relatives with their dragons.” There was a chorus of agreement, and the woman nodded.

“Well, from next week onwards, you will each have your own dragons. Through the ceremony, you will all be assigned a hatchling, with which you will spend the rest of your life.”

Minho hummed in curiosity as the woman dismissed the class. “Good luck, loves. Remember, there will be a few more classes to brief you further.”

The others started filing out slowly as you turned to Minho. “Isn’t this exciting?” You tilted your head, running your eyes over the figurines. “Since my family are all fire elementals, do you think I’ll get an ember dragon?”

“I don’t think it works that way. My father said it doesn’t matter what family you come from, the dragon you get matched with can be of any element, apparently. Though it hasn’t ever happened yet.” He shrugged.

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He yawned. “I already knew everything she said. I could have used this valuable time for something else.” He was lying, to be honest. The only thing he knew about dragons was what he’d just told you.  

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Do you wanna go to the lake?”

You grinned. “Sure, let’s!” You nodded in agreement as Minho stood up eagerly, grabbing your hand and pulling you out of the cottage. You giggled as he dragged you. “Hey, slow down! Also, we can’t be there for long. We’ve got to be home for that joint dinner, or our fathers will be very mad.”

“Eh, they’d barely notice if we’re gone. When discussing village matters, they don’t give a fuck about their own children, even.” He muttered bitterly.

“Well...that is true.” You sighed as Minho pulled you all the way to the lake, weaving past the villagers, even bumping into some of them. A few of them frowned and made shouts of displeasure, while others didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe they did, and was just too afraid to voice their anger towards the chiefs’ children.

The cottages start becoming more sparse, the trees more tightly clustered. Minho held your hand tightly as you made your way through the woods. Finally, the two of you reached the clearing.

Letting go of your hand gently, Minho sat at the edge of the lake, beckoning you over to sit next to him.

“I wish this place wasn’t so far away from the village.” You sighed, legs aching as you flopped down onto the grass.

Minho shook his head slowly, his fingers fiddling with a tiny dandelion he’d pulled out. “The further away, the better.” He grumbled, blowing on it and watching as the seeds floated in the breeze.

You sighed. There it was, again. You knew better than to oppose him, so you hummed, scooting a little closer and placing your hand on top of his. “I know you want to leave this place. I know you want to...to explore the world. I just want you to know that whatever you decide to do, I’ll be by your side.” You said honestly.

Minho looked up at you. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

He felt like there was a lump in his throat. Minho knew how much this village and its culture meant to you. You were really willing to do that for him? Leave, and never come back?

“Listen here, Miss L/n.” He turned to you, inhaling as he pressed a kiss to your forehead, his lips soft as they brushed against your skin. You blushed, staring at him with wide eyes as he spoke.

“I’m the one who’s going to be making the sacrifices here, alright? I’m older than you, remember? I call the shots.” He chuckled, booping your nose. 

“I love you so much, star.”

You cringed at the nickname, shoving him away. “Stop calling me that, you sound like a character in one of Mr Yang’s cheesy novels.”

He smirked at that. “I’ll never stop calling you that. You’re my star, cause you light up my world and guide me when everything’s dark.” He reasoned, laughing and throwing his head back as he watched you wrinkle your nose in disgust, looking a little like a bunny.

Humming, Minho lay back on the grass, and you followed suit after a minute of hesitation.

“I don’t mind you calling me that. Just don’t do it in front of people.”

“Okay, I won’t. It’s just us all the time, anyway...”

The two of you stared up at the sky, listening to the calm sounds of frogs ribbiting, birds chirping, and the splashing sounds of the fish in the lake. Above it all though, was the sound of your heart, beating persistently as Minho’s fingers creeped closer to yours, intertwining your hands.

“It’s always us...”

***

Your father had explained to you that since your family consisted entirely of ember elementals, your dragon would be of the same kind as well. This went against what Minho had told you before, and your mind was swimming with all the different information you were receiving.

“But...Minho said it doesn’t work that way.”

He sat on his armchair, chewing on  a chicken leg as he raised an eyebrow. “Really? Well, he’s wrong.” He sighed, shaking his head. “It’s never happened in centuries, and it’s not gonna happen now. You’re an Ember, through and through.”

You purse your lips. “Well, you’re always right, Father.”

He nodded, not picking up on the snark your sentence was dripping with. "The bond you share with your dragon is one that can never be replicated. You choose it, and it chooses you. It is truly a beautiful process, a spectacle to behold. Every single villager will be watching, so you better hold your head high. Make me proud."

You were about to reply when you heard a knock on your door. Glancing at your father for permission, you stood up. heading through the long hallway to open the front door.

“Minho?”

You looked at him, tilting your head at his troubled expression. “What’s up?

“I came to give you these.” He said softly, looking around before showing you the fiery petals in his palms. “I borrowed a herbology book from the library a few months ago, and learnt how to grow these. Ignis flowers. They’re symbols of good luck, apparently.”

He took your hand, placing the petals on your palm. “They reminded me of you.”

Your eyes widened slowly. “Wow...Minho, I didn’t get you anything...” You said guiltily, humming when Minho gently pulled you into a hug.

“You don’t have to. I’ve got to go home, now. See you tomorrow!”

You nodded, the petals safe in your hands as he left hurriedly. You watched him head to his house, opposite to yours.

After he left, you were about to head to bed when your father asked you to stay back. Confused, you went over to sit in front of him, tilting your head in confusion.

“Who was at the door?”

“It was just Minho.” You shrugged, eyeing your father as he groaned, massaging his forehead. He looked like he was contemplating something, his wrinkles seeming especially prominent.

"Child, be wary of your...friend."

"Friend...?" You knew he meant Minho. You'd never heard him address him in that manner though - void of affection.

Minho's father and yours were co-chiefs of the village, best friends since birth. He’d always treated Minho like his own son. What had brought on this sudden hostility?

He noticed the expression on your face, sighing and patting your shoulder. "I'm just asking you to be careful, dear. There is talk of the Aer elementals gaining power at an accelerated rate these days. Aer dragons are growing up to be stronger, even more so than our Ember ones. It's truly a strange phenomenon. I do not want to be one of these people who is suspicious of everything and everyone...but both the kid and his father have changed. Even I can't deny that."

You swallowed at his words, watching as his face drifted off, deep in thought. You'd heard of it too- hushed whispers claiming that a single chief would be preferable for the village. And if your father's hunch was right...no, you didn't want to think about it.

Minho wouldn't ever betray you. You'd known him since before you could talk. you’d build up a lot of trust in each other over the years. There was no one else you knew as well. If you couldn’t trust him, who could?

No. He would never hurt you. You were sure of it.

***

The whole village was buzzing for weeks after the ceremony took place. They simply couldn't understand what had happened. It was unprecedented- and the news spread like wildfire.

You were matched with a majestic Aer creature, and Minho a beautiful crimson beast of Ember. Mistakes weren't possible- the process was never questioned- but that didn't mean people weren't bewildered.

For centuries, no one had managed to match with a dragon that controlled an element that differed from theirs.

Neither of you could understand why your fathers and the villagers were so perplexed, though. Was it really as big of a deal as they made it seem?

"I don't get it. Why is it such a humongous problem? They’re just dragons. What’s the need for all this drama?" Minho rolled his eyes as he spoke.

You stroked your dragon's neck slowly as you watched him, huffing and ranting away. ‘Just dragons.’ There was a part of you that understood all the hubbub. The people loved gossip- especially if it involved the chiefs.

"It really isn't. They're both so beautiful, I don't really care what element they control."

You looked at your dragon, curled next to you. You wouldn't admit it, but she looked a little too beautiful- almost to the point where it intimidated you.

Translucent, white scales that reflected rainbows of light...long, beautiful almond shaped eyes that were the color of the ocean. She was larger and brighter than Minho's dragon as well. Your father had been right...the Aer dragons were evolving quicker, somehow.

She was quiet and regal, her sleek body elegant and her demeanor refined. You didn’t really have much in common, to be honest. You’d named her Caeli- a name that wasn’t really all that creative, but it would do. Besides, it seemed to fit.

Minho looked at you, sighing slowly. "Aeracus seems hungry. Father will be expecting me soon anyway, I think I'll go home now, Y/n."

"Bye, Min."

He shot you a dashing grin before standing up, climbing his dragon.

As they left, a great whoosh of wind rustling your hair, you looked up at your dragon. She was staring at the water, her eyes narrowed.

You were starting to feel a little worried. You couldn’t exactly...hear her thoughts. She seemed too closed off, barely even looking at you as she blankly watched the frogs jump from one lilypad to the other. You didn’t feel that special bond everyone had been talking about for years, insisting to you that it would be a connection so profound you wouldn’t be able to live without it.

Did she not like you? You looked so average next to her ethereality, drab and plain as opposed to her stunning beauty.

You couldn’t blame her, really.

***

When Minho stood next to your dragon, the sight somehow made more sense. He was  beautiful, and so was the creature next to him. They fit together perfectly.

Aeracus on the other hand, was slightly more average. He was majestic as well, but not on the same level as Caeli. You felt more at home riding him, somehow. Like...he was the one that was meant to be yours.

Of course, you wouldn’t ever tell anyone about this. It could be considered infidelity, even. Your father was disappointed enough in you as it was. Four years of training with Caeli, and you still weren’t able to channel her power into...anything. She just wouldn’t co-operate.

"There you go..." He finished slipping the harness onto Caeli, dusting off his hands as he came back over to you, giggling as Aeracus rubbed his big head against your side.

Minho raised his eyebrows at the display of affection. Aeracus was never that amicable to him. Yes, he listened to him...but that was about it. And yet, to you...he always noticed how the two of you seemed to have some sort of connection. He’d mentioned this to his father once, only to be called ridiculous.

Then again, he couldn’t blame the dragon for having a soft spot for you. Who wouldn’t?

“Hey...” He looked down at you as the dragon pulled away, ambling off to Caeli’s side. You glanced up slowly when Minho cleared his throat, leaning in a little as his fingers ran through your tresses. Your cheeks flushed, eyes widening slightly at his touch.

"A leaf. In your hair." He mumbled, throwing said leaf onto the ground as he stared into your eyes.

Your heart was thudding loudly in your chest as your gaze ran over his features, so close to your face. Fuck, he was so deathly handsome, even more so now that you were both almost adults. Puberty had treated him well.

A little too well.

The girls in the square swooning over Minho became a regular occurrence now. You couldn't even seem to go anywhere with your best friend, without having a mob of fangirls following closely.

When he was this close to you, it became overwhelmingly evident why his fans were so enamored by him. Lee Minho really was beautiful.

"Careful, a fly might make its nest in your mouth." He chuckled. "What's up, kitten? You look on edge."

That was the other thing. His latest habit of calling you pet names- the likes of which included princess and kitten- had come out of nowhere. He really seemed to enjoy making you blush. At times like this, you wished he would have just stuck with ‘star’.

“Nothing.” You stuttered, avoiding his eyes and choosing to focus your stare on the ground. Minho wasn’t in the mood for your shyness, though. He placed his finger under your chin, tilting your face up to look at him.

“You sure about that? Is there a reason you look so flustered right now?” He breathed, leaning in closer until your noses were brushing.

Oh, fuck you, Lee.

You'd always thought Minho was attractive. Of course. You'd be blind not to notice. And yet, at this proximity, you felt like you haven’t ever truly appreciated just how fucking hot the man in front of you was.

And so you did something you never thought you’d have the courage to do.

Leaning in, you closed the distance between the two of you, lips crashing against his. To Minho’s credit, he wasn’t all that shocked. Smirking against you, his arms wrapped around your waist as he pulled you closer, gluing your body to his.

Backing you up against a tree, Minho was quick to lift your thigh, slotting your hips together as he ran his tongue over your bottom lip.

A groan left you as he slid his hand under your shirt, pulling away to stare at you, the sight of your swollen lips affecting him in ways he couldn’t quite describe.

“What...what did we just-”

He shut you up with another kiss, rougher than the last one. Breathless pecks, desperately claiming you with his lips as he pressed himself against you.

“Just go with the flow, baby.”

And so you did.

***

As you carefully made your way down, your mind was racing with a million thoughts. The thought of seeing your boyfriend again after so many years scared you as much as it excited you. After all...it wasn’t like you parted on good terms.

You still remembered the heartbroken look on his face, the last time you saw him. You couldn’t tell him that you’d tried everything, tried your best to reason with your father who simply refused to budge. He’d expected you to do something more...but what?

It wasn’t his fault. It was a fucking accident, and yet he’d had to take the blame.

Deep down, though, you knew what your father’s real intentions had been when he banished Minho and his father from the village. Of course, Caeli’s death had shaken him- the entire village had been in a state of shock. The death of a dragon was the most tragic event that could possibly befall a village. And when said dragon happened to belong to the chief’s daughter? Shattering.

At the end of the day though, it was a convenient incident...one that happened to take place just as your father’s status was being questioned. A blessing in disguise, for him.

“It’s okay, my child. Yes, you suffered a great loss, but I know you weren’t that close to it. We must move on. On the bright side, you can focus on your studies now! Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted to do?”

You scoffed, his words repeating themselves in your brain. Bullshit. There was no bright side, nor would there ever be one without Minho in your life.

***

“There you are. Where were you?"

"I...was with Aeracus." You didn't see the point in lying. Your brain was too tired to come up with a believable fabrication anyway.

As expected, his face screwed up in anger as he glared, standing up.

"Why?" He hissed. "Let me remind you he is not your dragon. How many times have I told you not to get too close to it?"

"Aeracus and I have a bond." You mumbled.

"No. You don't. A bond is forged between a dragon and its owner by forces beyond our control. This measly 'friendship', if you can even call it that, is trivial. At the end of the day, it doesn't really belong to you. It belongs to the boy who betrayed you."

You couldn't bring yourself to react any more. Your father was old-fashioned, his opinions set in stone. ‘Betrayed’. You wanted to scoff.

You turned around without a word, heading for your room. There was no energy left in your body, yet the exhaustion was overpowered by your emotions.

"Y/n, wait."

You stopped, turning and looking at him. "What?"

"Your maids are waiting to dress you. Don't argue with them. You are to wear the outfit I picked out for you. Today's dinner is extremely important." He paused. "And...what I said before still stands. The dragon won't hesitate to betray you, especially now that his true owner is coming back. Be...be careful." Your father said quietly, his face softening.

You sighed. "I will be."

"Good."

He dismissed you. You heaved a sigh of relief under your breath and headed out, opening the door to your own room.

You would never admit this to your father, but as nervous as you were, you were secretly looking forward to the dinner. To see him again.

If you closed your eyes and immersed yourself deep enough into your imagination, you could still feel his touch ghosting along your thighs. His soft lips, pressing against yours.

You missed his voice, his tight hugs...you missed everything about him. You'd only ever felt safe in his arms.

The loneliness and pain had consumed you when he left. Maybe that's why you latched on to Aeracus, the last remnant of Minho in this village that seemed so much more dreary without his presence.

"Miss Y/n! We have no time to lose." Your head maid scurried about your room with two others, spreading out your dress on your bed. One of the maids- Sylvia, you think her name was- snuck up behind you and began undressing you. Yes, you were used to this, but the layer of urgency in the atmosphere was a lot more profound tonight.

The entire village was on edge, and you couldn’t really blame them. The first Elemental Championships, and they were being hosted at your village. The exhilaration was understandable...you couldn't bring yourself to feel the same way, though. Maybe if you were actually participating, you’d feel different.

You looked at the dress the maid was holding onto, initially without much interest...but your eyes widened when it came into view.

It was beautiful, yet simple...the color of spun gold, with tiny rubies clustered at the bodice. The sleeves fell of the shoulders delicately, and the material was diaphanous, the texture rich.

“Wow....Sylvia, you made this?”

“I did. It took me a year.” She smiled widely, your grin satisfying her. “Do you really like it, Miss Y/n?” There was a hopeful lilt to her voice, and your grin grew wider as they started helping you into it.

“Like it? I love it! You’ve really outdone yourself this time.”

She nodded in content, lacing up the back as the other maids began on your makeup. Usually, you didn’t like being treated as a doll, your servants fussing over you and your appearance. Today, though...

You could barely believe the reflection you were seeing in the mirror belonged to you. You'd never felt so glamorous before. 

“You look beautiful, Miss.” Sylvia said softly, adjusting your sleeves.

You couldn’t wait for Minho to see you in this dress.

“Ann?” Another servant’s head appeared around the corner. “It’s time. They will arrive any moment now.”

A flurry of anxious noises and exclamations filled the room as they worked on you faster. You took a deep breath in, your mind blank and full of thoughts at the same time.

***

You stood next to your father, hands clasped in front of you. Surreptitiously, you raised your hand to your forehead, wiping away a few drops of perspiration. It was happening, you were finally going to see Minho again. And if your father successfully manages to make amends with his- fuck, you were grinning just thinking about it. 

The villagers standing behind you were all dressed in their best as well, and the lanterns shone brightly, washing over everything. The air was sparkling, the atmosphere charged with electricity. Everyone had their eyes trained on the sky, waiting for Minho’s people. The two other villages were to come tomorrow, according to the letters.

Four villages. All competing in the championship yours was hosting. It was nerve-wracking, the amount of people who would be crammed into your village, which was big enough, really- possibly the largest in the country- it still stressed you out, though. Since there weren’t enough guest houses to fit everyone, a lot of the visitors would be staying with your villagers, the chiefs and their families staying at your house. You were keenly aware of the fact that this meant Minho would be in the same living quarters as you. Your heart pounded at the prospect.

Later in the night, you were planning to sneak into his room, since you obviously wouldn’t be allowed to talk to him during the dinner. At least, you wouldn’t be able to communicate the things you so desperately wanted to say to him. Every part of you tingled as you thought about what you’d say to him. 

You felt light as a feather as you stared at the starry sky, eyes widening slightly as you spotted the thousands of dots in the distance, flying closer. Anticipation and exhilaration mingled in you as you waited for them to arrive. Just the thought of feeling Minho pressed up against you again, whispering in your ear how much he loved you...it made you want to cry, almost. You’d waited for this moment for too long.

The conch shell was blown as they reached the edge of the forest. More than a thousand dragons, covered in finery, just like their riders.

Hmm. There were a lot more than you expected. You’d only been anticipating about a hundred, since it was only Minho’s village that was coming tonight. Or so you’d thought...

You turned your head to look at your father, letting the confusion show on your face. Noticing your expression, he shrugged. “It looks like all three decided to come tonight.”

You frowned, looking back at the dragons that were at the border now, preparing for landing. That was weird.

You observed the dragons that had landed, your eyebrows furrowing. Huh.

The three dragons at the front were a lot bulkier than the ones in the back. Darker colors, almost hulking muscles and narrow eyes. They looked like no dragon you’d ever seen before. The sight was almost unsettling. You felt a faint sense of dread spreading over you, a feeling you tried to push away as your eyes searched each dragon’s back for Minho.

You recognized Minho’s father right away. He was at the very front, along with two other old men on a green and blue dragon respectively, that you realized were the chiefs of the other two villages. Surprisingly though, Minho wasn’t sat behind him. You’d assumed it to be that way...after all, Minho’s dragon was still here. So where was he? Your eyebrows furrowed, not wanting to assume the worst right away. You wildly looked over them all, craning your neck slightly. You didn’t want to seem too eager, but it’s not like you could help yourself. Could anyone blame you? Here you were, about to meet the first and only person you’d ever fallen in love with, after years of yearning and loneliness.

As your father stepped forward, a smile on his face to greet the chiefs, you finally saw him.

For a minute, it was like you couldn’t breathe. He looked as beautiful as ever, his feline eyes twinkling, his dark hair exposing part of his smooth forehead. His hands gripped the reins so tightly his knuckles were white, and the way he sat on his dragon was regal, his expression confident and filled with determination. He was older, and somehow even more handsome than the last time you saw him. You didn’t even think that was possible.

You swallowed, your breath catching in your throat as his eyes finally met yours.

It was like time had ceased for a minute. You smiled slowly, happy tears pricking at your eyes as you took in his face.

He didn’t smile back.

And that’s when you noticed the pale arms wrapped around his waist. Confused, you watched as the chiefs dismounted the dragons, along with their heirs. Minho alighted from the dragon, helping down the woman who had been holding onto him. He held her hands gently, leaning in to press a kiss to her forehead.

You felt like your whole world had collapsed, bile rising in your throat as you watched her giggle. You noticed she was dressed in blue, her clothing that of a heiress. As they approached, your eyes fell on the sparkling ring on her finger...one that matched Minho’s.

When his eyes looked into yours again, they were cold, just like your heart.

[scullydubois]

Only the Light Ch. 20

20/? | AU where Melissa moves in with Scully after Scully’s abduction | angst, msr slow-burn, occasional fluff | currently: mid-s3 (canon-divergent) | T | 4.7k | previous chapters | read on ao3 | tagging: @today-in-fic <3

I now present to you a chapter that is filled with more angst than Chris Carter could ever dream of, and for that, I am truly sorry. 

Scully and Mulder's foray into domesticity with Emily is interrupted by the past catching up to them. Faced with despair, they cling even tighter to each other.

--------------------------------

Scully is granted maternity leave, though it’s only for two weeks, which Missy let her know is “a piss-poor bargain.” And she knows this is true, but she also has more incentive to stay at her job than ever, so she’d like not to lose it. The fact that advocating for herself and her child would mean risking her job is a mess in itself, but one lone woman can’t be expected to take down the patriarchy, and besides, she’s already tried and failed. 

As for she and Mulder, they hide their flirtation in plain sight. Mulder’s perpetually present in body or spirit, but his behavior never reveals anything more than it did before. Every morning he swings by to say hi, brings Scully coffee and a bagel with full-fat cream cheese, and checks if Emily’s picked up any new words. Personally, he’s working on “alien” and if you ask him, she’ll get it soon. She knows that it refers to her UFO stuffie, so sounding out the letters can’t be far behind, much to her mother’s dismay.

On Wednesday of the first week, he shows up at 6pm with takeout carbonara from a local Italian joint. His presence makes every Scully girl happy, but it makes one in particular the happiest, and Melissa realizes that there are definitely things her sister has failed to mention. She doesn’t question it, but watches with glee as the situation unfolds. 

After that first night, Mulder keeps coming back with dinner and refuses to let either sister shoulder the cost. On Friday, he stays for a movie too and gets to participate in Emily’s nightly tucking-in ritual (a tickle on the left foot, a tickle on the right foot, and a big smooch on the forehead). 

Saturday afternoon, he joins them for a stroller push through the park, earning some serious side-eye from Scully when he suggests that they stop at the playground because, according to the mama bear, “Em can only take six steps at a time, Mulder.” So instead they buy hotdogs from a vendor and eat them on a bench, Emily sandwiched between her mother, her aunt, and her...Mulder. They couldn’t ask for more.

That night, Mulder hangs around after dinner because what else is he gonna do? Go home and watch old baseball games until he falls asleep? A new leaf has been offered to him, and he’s gotta turn it. 

He’s baffled when, upon announcing that it’s Emily’s bathtime, Scully goes to the kitchen and switches on the sink. 

Scully raises an eyebrow at him. “What, your mother never washed you in the sink when you were a baby?” 

“Not that I know of...I have a hard time envisioning myself ever fitting in a sink.”

Scully scoffs. “I forget. You were a Vineyard boy.” 

Before he can come up with a smart response to that (as if there actually is one), Missy pipes up. “Oh, I bet you were the kid that took baths with your mother,” she teases. “Care to confirm or deny?”

“If I did I blocked it out of memory, thank god,” he testifies. 

Having spread a towel on the counter, Scully strips Emily down and perches the girl on her hip. She sticks her hand under the faucet. 

“That’s not too hot, do you think?” she asks Missy, who tests it as well.

“That should be fine.”

Mulder joins in too, and immediately regrets it. He shrinks away from the water, shaking droplets all over the room. “Jesus, Scully! Are you trying to boil her?”

“Babies lose heat quickly because of their body surface to weight ratio,” she says matter-of-factly. “They’re more susceptible to the cold.”

“I think the cold will be the least of her worries,” Mulder quips.

“If you really think it’s too hot, I’ll turn it down…” There’s a concerned crease beneath her eyes, and it makes Mulder feel bad about his joking.

“No, no, you know what you’re doing,” he assures her. “You’re her mother.”

As she lowers Em into the sink, Scully’s heart twinges. Her. A mother. How many times will she have to hear this before it stops feeling like news to her? 

One week and bathtime has already become routine. Missy fills a plastic cup and pours it gently over her niece, the water cascading down Em like she is nature’s own. Scully soaps her palms, then glides over her daughter’s skin with such care that its memory may blight any future affection Em is graced with. And then another waterfall, and the gentle brush of a wash cloth against eyes and nose. 

Scully squeezes a penny’s worth of baby shampoo into her hand, looks to Mulder. “Come on, get in here. You’re not afraid to get your hands dirty, are you?” she says with a smirk.

He smirks back and shakes his head as she lifts his open palm and shrinks her accumulation to a dime. “Although, technically I am getting my hands cleaner…”

She boops him right on the nose with a shampooed finger. He laughs.

Missy smiles. Oh, to see destiny play out right in front of you. “Someone’s cracking dad jokes,” she points out, unable to resist. This observation is much too on-the-nose for the pair (quite literally for Mulder), who simultaneously blush but say nothing.

Mulder wipes the shampoo from his nose and plants it on Emily’s head, joining his partner in making soapy circles over the girl’s tuft of strawberry hair. Scully’s full attention is directed toward her daughter. As soon as the lather is sufficient, she dons the lifted lilt of motherhood. “Okay, time to rinse! Missy, will you do the honors?”

Missy turns the faucet, fills the cup, and lets it flow over Emily. Mulder and Scully wash their hands off in the stream. 

And as Scully leans for the towel, a splash of red dirties its fresh white surface. Mulder notices it first. He points at his partner’s porcelain face. “Scully, you’re bleeding.”

Her hand shoots to her nose. Sure enough, it stains her fingers. “Shit.” She turns away, goes for a tissue. “I haven’t had nosebleeds since I was fourteen,” she tells them, as if that invalidates this one. She wipes away a glob of blood, her stomach turning. “Missy--” her voice shakes involuntarily, “--will you dry Em off?”

“Uh-huh.” She nudges Mulder. “Will you grab a new towel from the linen closet?” she whispers, not wanting to further upset her sister.

Mulder goes off without a word, and Missy squeezes out Em’s hair as best she can. “What a pretty girl!” she gushes. “All clean!”

“Yee!” Emily throws her little fists in the air, injecting joy back into the room. 

“Time to put your PJs on, and get a tickle, tickle, smooch.”

Mulder scrambles back in with a new towel, skirting around Scully, who remains occupied with her own situation. He slides the soiled towel away and helps Missy swaddle Em. Mulder ruffles the little girl’s hair, and she laughs like a music box. 

“Mol-dy.” She spits it out in halves, as if she’s been rehearsing. 

Mulder’s eyes water with recognition. “Mulder? Mul-der? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Moldy,” the girl declares again, certain of herself.

Missy adjusts Em on her hip, smiles at Mulder. “Looks like you’re Moldy now.”

Mulder bites his lip to hide his overwhelming delight. “Yeah, I...I never thought I'd be so happy to be called moldy.”

Next thing he knows, Scully is at his shoulder with a tissue stuffed up her nostrils. “Wait, what’s going on?”

“Em called me Moldy,” he tells her, full of satisfaction.

“Oh.” It comes out relatively unimpressed, but really, she’s just distracted. “Missy, will you get a diaper on her before there’s an accident? I would but I’m still--” She gestures to her nose. 

“Yeah, yeah.” Missy smiles at the baby in her arms. “PJ time, Em!” They go off toward the bedroom, a happy pair.

As soon as Em is out of sight, Mulder spirals toward his partner, panic-stricken. The glee of moments ago has evaporated. 

“Are you okay?” He touches her hair, shoulders, and the familiar small of her back, unsure of where he should land. 

“I’m fine, it’s fine.” Her grip on his elbows--keeping his hands firmly placed on her waistline--suggests otherwise. 

“You’ve got to see a doctor,” he pleads. “This could be...”

“This could be what, Mulder?” The steel in her blue eyes is a death grip. She’s never liked being told the obvious. 

“Scully…” He sighs, rubs his neck, wills her to say what they both know. When she doesn’t, he takes his hands off her and wrings them together. “The Mufon women...they said it would happen to all of them eventually.” He’s careful not to lump Scully in with their group. 

“And what do they know?” she retorts. “One of them was sick. One.”

“Okay, well, don’t you think it’s better to be safe than sorry?” he reasons. “You have Emily to look out for now.”

Scully rolls her eyes. “Don’t guilt trip me. It’s a nosebleed. Those happen all the time for completely benign reasons.”

“Yeah, but they don’t happen to you. You just said--you haven’t had one since you were fourteen.”

She clenches her jaw. He’s right, and she’s playing the fool. His position is the one she would take if this were anyone other than herself. She’s gonna have to lose this fight with as much grace as possible.

“Fine. I’ll get it checked out, but they’re gonna think I’m insane for coming in because of one nosebleed.”

“That’s a nice change of pace--you being the insane one for once.”

“Well, you’re the one who wants me to go, so you’re not out of the woods.”

“Good, I’ve finally got some company!”

Scully smiles in spite of herself. “Yes, yes you do.”

--------------------------------------

It happens very quickly, as most calamities of life can be said to. This gives it the unreal quality of a nightmare that might soon be woken up from, if there is any justice in the world.

Scully snags a doctor’s appointment for three days after the initial nosebleed. By the time she walks into the waiting room, one nosebleed has quadrupled into four, and her minor concern has snowballed into abject terror. 

Margaret Scully drove into the city to watch Emily so Missy could join her sister. Scully insisted that she would go alone, but Missy wouldn’t accept this. She threatened to tell Mulder the details of the appointment if Dana didn’t let her go, and that was enough to earn her a spot in the passenger seat. Scully can’t take the thought of Mulder witnessing the worst--let alone her reaction to the worst. 

And so it goes something like this: they are taken to an exam room, at which point Scully explains her situation to a nurse, including that she has recently learned she is at high risk for cancer. The nurse assures her that such a diagnosis is highly unlikely, but makes a note for the doctor. The doctor comes in with knitted eyebrows and listens to Scully describe the aftermath of her abduction experience with a heavy emphasis on the convoluted but substantial claims of the Mufon women. She asks if Scully has had any other symptoms, to which Scully replies that it’s hard to tell because she has an infant in the house and thus, a marked lack of sleep. 

The doctor laughs, but it’s not a haha laugh, more of an I feel your pain. She agrees that the women’s claims are concerning, but tells her patient not to fret. They’ll take all the precautions, run any test that might assuage her worries. There’s a quip about how it’ll be on the government’s dime since it covers Scully’s insurance, and then the doctor leaves to order an MRI. 

A full body MRI, which Scully has never had, and which she hoped she would never require. There’s no deeper sickness than one that cannot be pinpointed, and no greater fear than of the unknown turning into the worst case scenario. 

The MRI is completed that same day. As she slides into the machine, Scully thinks of Betsy Hagopian and wonders how she’s doing. It has been many months since she stood outside an exam room and watched Betsy enter one of these. Has fate been kind to her?

For a few minutes, her world is limited to the mere inches between her face and this life-saving yet life-ruining contraption. It is noisy and sometimes bright and altogether disorientating. She is glad when it’s over. 

The images return almost immediately, and maybe it would all have been okay if Scully weren’t trained in radiology herself, if she wasn’t able to recognize the glaring speck of light in her nasal cavity for what it is. But that one glance is all she needs to know that waiting by the phone isn’t an option. 

“It’s a tumor, isn’t it?” she blurts as the radiologist tries to escort her and Melissa from the room. “In the nasal cavity. I have a M.D. I saw.”

“Your doctor will call with the results,” the radiologist insists, standing by the open doorway.

“No, no, you can’t do this to me,” Scully sputters. “I know what I saw, and I don’t have any time to waste.” Her eye twitches in a combination of stress and anger. “I have an infant daughter.”

The radiologist sighs, pity on top of pity. “Perhaps your doctor will talk it through with you now.”

“Yes. Please.”

And it is talked through, though there’s no need to make it complicated: nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Inoperable, and just barely in the realm of treatable. That’s the kicker, the coyote in the pasture, the cloud covering the sun. In the words of Scully’s doctor, it is auspiciously rare. And in Scully’s brain, it is the bottom she’s been expecting to drop out from under since she held her daughter in her arms.

Melissa drives home. The sisters cannot fathom how they will tell their mother. Cannot fathom ruining her blissful time with the granddaughter she’s just met. When they turn onto their street, Scully swallows hard and coughs on her own spit. “Will you do something for me?” 

Missy looks over, eager to do anything she can, yet terrified by the possibility of the request.

“Will you take me to Mulder’s?” Scully mumbles. “I would just take the car but...I can’t face mom right now. I don’t want to risk it.”

Missy bites her lip. “And what am I supposed to tell mom when she asks where you are?”

“The truth,” Scully says curtly. “She doesn’t need the backstory.”

Missy drives past their building, though she’s not completely sold on her sister’s reasoning. “Don’t you think she might wonder why you aren’t coming home to your daughter?”

“I know she’ll wonder, Melissa, I know all of this,” Scully snaps because she needs to. “I don’t care.”

“Okay.” Missy’s voice is barely perceptible. I don’t care; she knows how low her sister has to be to say those words. 

They complete the drive in silence, Scully biting her nails--a habit which she has never possessed, and perhaps just acquired. The car idles as Missy pulls up to the curb of Mulder’s building. 

“I can pick you up when you need it,” she tells her sister as she pulls herself out of the car. “I’ll bring Em.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Scully says, closing the passenger door and edging toward the building. Missy hears a thanks float toward the car, then her sister is gone like a teenage girl embarrassed by her mother.

-------------------------------------

They sit on Mulder’s couch, muted. Words cannot fathom the injustice of this situation, nor can they suffice as empathy. Their hands are clasped together, a throughline of strength between them. This is what they need now; the most primitive language of all.

Scully’s watery eyes brush Mulder’s face. His own eyes, more pained than usual, look into hers. Without a word, she drapes an arm around her partner’s shoulders and scoots into his lap. He is surprised but not distressed. What else is left for them, now?

She is tiny, so tiny. And she is his. 

Their eyes meet once again, speaking in tongues. Scully nods, and then Mulder does too. This is it. This is it.

Permission granted at last, Scully’s lips travel to her partner’s jawline. The first time her lips have touched his body, and this is where they go. She is a constant box of wonders, a fortune he can never predict. Her lips are much like he has fantasized they would be: wondrously soft and silky, stroking him like they have always meant to be there. Yet he couldn’t have imagined the urgency with which they burrow into his skin. As if she’s making a mental map of his bone structure. He never expected that she would want him this much. 

His hands find her hips and grip the cotton of her shirt between his fingers. It is enough to tear her away from his flesh. Mission accomplished. His breath travels past her ear, hitting her neck. It is shallow and warm as he breathes her name. Her real name, the one her family calls her. She breathes his own back to him, like a bird responding to a mating call.

She feels his lips on her neck, wet and aching. It feels like God. This is the most blasphemous thought she has ever had. She throws her head back, exposing the whole of her skin to him. What is holiness, if not this moment?

He showers her in tattoo kisses, and she lets him, she lets him, she lets him. This is not just what she wants, but what she needs. No one will save her now, she knows this. So she has decided not to be saved. 

Her shirt ripples as he clutches it. “May I?” He is breathy, awe-struck. 

“Only if I can do the same.” Always about equality, his Scully is. He lifts his arms, lets her strip him first. He is fraught with the temptation to feel insecure, inadequate, but this is not about him--this is all for her. There is no time to dwell on this anyway. Scully takes in the sight, then puts her own arms up with a hint of impatience. He pulls her shirt over her head, and goosebumps adorn her as the air hits her bare stomach. 

It is unimaginable, the significance of this moment. All Mulder can do is keep going, lest the emotion hit him and he find himself blubbering all over her. His hands travel her body...it is slender and white, but so solid, so strong. Cartilage forming ligaments forming joints connecting bones. And her skin, stretching over her hips and framing it all. The masterpiece that is Dana Katherine Scully. 

He fears for the day she will cave in on herself. Already, one of his hands covers her whole rib cage. Right now he can cradle her body comfortably against his own, but the day will come when a single cautious touch will crush her, and his heart along with it. He wants her as she is now forever.

Seeing that he wants to pamper her, Scully lets herself be pampered. He showers the taut length of her collar bone in kisses. The vibration resonates throughout her bone structure, and already she can feel him in places she’s only fantasized about having him. He is going to heal me, she thinks. If anyone could heal her in any way, it would be him doing this. 

She shows her gratitude by kneading circles into his soft tissues, so tense from all their days chasing ghosts. The sinew relaxes beneath the pads of her fingers, and she feels like she has solved the most important X-File of all. 

Mulder traces his way along her spine. He has never touched her here, nor ever even fantasized about it, and there is an erotic tension--like a needle about to drop on a record--that neither one of them could have seen coming. Inevitably, his hands converge at the hooks of her bra. She arches her back in approval. He slides the hooks away from each other, and both of them feel the release. She shimmies off the garment before he can pull it out of the way. No secrets, not anymore.

Mulder didn’t expect to cry and is aware that most women wouldn’t take that as a positive sign, but seeing her, like this, knowing what they both know, tears feel like the least he could offer up. She is...beautiful is too weak a word to describe it. He needs to invent a new word to capture the essence of his emotions, the reverence with which he views her. He is not a religious man, but he will worship her until the end of time. 

He has known this, intuitively, for a while, and now he’s putting it into practice. He wants to do everything he can for her, give her everything she wants. Yet he doesn’t know how to, and this scares him. She has always slipped through his fingers, always turned on a dime just when he thought he figured her out. Tonight is no exception. How was he to know that he’d be on his couch with a half-naked Scully in his lap?

He fears the tears will offend her, so he nuzzles into her heartspace, his nose pressed against the heart that is--by the grace of that God she worships--still beating. His lips meet the plush of her left breast. 

Where does he go from here? The dusty routine he’s used with other women--the few who have given themselves to him or let him hand himself over--is not worthy enough for Scully. He could never touch Scully in the ways he’s touched the women before because she is not like the women before. There is no mere giving or taking here, no detached exchange of commodities or pleasure for the sake of pleasure. This is survival. They are symbiotically keeping each other alive.

A drop of water hits Scully’s skin, slides down the curvature of her breast. She shudders. A tear. That’s what it is, she realizes. Mulder is crying. It’s a baptism of unfortunate proportions. 

She cups her hand against his chin, tilts it up so his bleary eyes meet hers. She rests her forehead against his. “Shh, shh, it’s okay.” She kisses each eye closed, his lids fluttering beneath her lips. “It’s okay.” 

His breathing steadies. He is quite certain that it is not okay, that it never will be, but he listens to her, lets himself pretend. 

Hands still on his chin, she careens their lips together. His mouth on hers; a godsend. They caress each other for a moment, then Scully opens wide, and Mulder does too. They are reflecting. 

If Scully could compress herself, pushing every particle of air out of her lungs and into his, she would. As a sort of thank you, for everything. For what he has done, what is doing, what he will do...She will never have to live without him. She knows this now, and it makes this easier. But he will have to live without her, and so she must make sure he gets the memories he needs to carry on. This is how grief works, she’s acquainted with it. These moments, these feelings, these bated breaths and tender touches, will be his survival mechanism for awhile. Until the day when he can throw them off and go on without her ghost. It will happen one day, and she will be glad that he made it. 

She feels him pressing against her stomach, which is certainly not where she wants him. “Fox…” Her hands hover above his belt. She unzips his fly first, her hand warm against him. He is dizzy with want as her fingers curl against his belt buckle, loosening it with confidence. In a sweeping gesture,  she pushes his jeans off his hips, exposing him. The thrill she feels, seeing him big and bare in front of her, is a new kind of livelihood. She’s overcome with the desire to take him in her mouth--and that has never, never been her first instinct. She ducks down, but he stops her.

“Dana, no. You.”

She doesn’t need to hear it twice. She sucks in a breath, arches her back, and slides onto him. Slowly, gasping as they go. 

“Am I hurting you?”

Scully shakes her head, lips parted. It has been nothing like this before...nothing so fulfilling. She crosses her ankles, binding them completely together at last. 

Unity triumphs against the self, their union abolishing the world’s insistence on the solitude of the individual. This is what it’s about, isn’t it? Being joined, not only in spirit, but in body? Knowing that whatever horrors are to come, he will feel them as she does. Her dwindling will be his too, her losses an equally empty space within him. 

She is teetering on the edge of something she can never come back from. She is not afraid. 

She careens her fingernails into his back as the pressure builds. If it doesn’t come to a head, she’ll die right here, she thinks. 

She barely registers the cathartic noises coming out of her, though they give Mulder great delight. He thought she would be quiet, and the fact that she’s not trying to hold anything in--after holding everything in for so goddamn long--is the most moving part of the experience. 

And they want this to go on forever, but they want the release. Mulder swivels his hips into her, bringing them both closer to climax. Scully curls against him. 

“I’m sorry,” she cries into his ear.

“What?” He nearly pulls out of her, fearing that she’s hurt. 

“No, no--” She scrambles to stay with him. “This--” she pants “--is so good.” She lowers her lips onto his as confirmation, then speaks into his open mouth. “I’m just sorry to be the one to go.”

He frames her ribcage, thumbs arching toward her belly button. “Fuck, honey...don’t say that, don’t even think that…”

They won’t linger on the choice of pet name, the tenderness with which it settles over her, nor the absolute devastation of her words. There is simply no time. 

Scully hides her face in his neck as the wave breaks over both of them. There is no world anymore, only the two of them on this couch. They have forsaken the physical realm, ascending to heaven in time with their heartbeats. 

Mulder understands then what his reciprocal means when she says she needs proof to believe. Now that he’s been there and felt it, he knows that heaven exists, and holy shit, what does that mean for the life he has lived and the time he has left? What did it mean for Samantha?...What will it mean for Scully?

They collapse into each other, a melted mass of skin and bone. Two becoming one, becoming two again. Mulder strokes the back of his partner’s head, presses his lips to her temple. Her chest rises against him in jagged breaths.

“You are the only proof I’ll ever need that this life is worth it,” he murmurs. “Just you.”

Scully looks up at him, tears running down her cheeks. He kisses them away and wraps his arms around her. “I don’t know if you got the memo, but I love you, Dana Scully.”

She rests her cheek against his. “I love you too, F--Mulder.”

Mulder chuckles, his amusement shaking both of them. Scully closes her eyes and snuggles into him. He puts his hand over her heart, feels it beating steadily into his palm, and longs for it to stay like that forever.

[hypnoticwinter]

Down the Rabbit Hole part 14

As the loud, clanging gunshot rings out again, Elena gives me a sympathetic look and leans in a little closer to me. I gingerly take my hands away from my ears, but when she speaks I still can’t hear her through the earplugs. I reach up and start to take them out but she gives me a look and smacks my hand back down, and then she is tucking my hair back behind my ear and fiddling with the plugs. She presses down gently and the earplugs slip in a tiny bit further and then I truly can’t hear; I guess I just hadn’t inserted them all the way. I flash her a grin and a thumbs-up and she smiles at me a little indulgently. My eyes linger on her a little longer while she crosses her arms again, leans up against the painted brick wall of the firing range.

Ahead of us in the central stall, the robot and the tall, slim man with the joysticked control box are looking for more targets. The robot is holding the biggest rifle I’ve ever seen, one-handed no less, and though the shells it spits out with each trigger-pull have got to be the size of Coke cans – okay, maybe not that big, maybe about the size of a mediumish pill-bottle – it handles the recoil without any strain at all.

Down further the overhead rack whines and sends a dinner-plate sized target whizzing across the line again. The robot’s head tracks it for a moment before with a single swift and precise motion it flicks the barrel of the gun to the left and pulls the trigger. I wince again, less from the sound of it now, thanks to Elena’s help, and more due to the resonating shockwave of it throbbing in my chest.

The man with the joystick toggles something on it and the robot racks the bolt of the rifle, tilts it skyward to check the chamber, and then ejects the massive magazine and puts it on the table before it.

“As you can see,” the man says, looking around at us, “this new model of armature skeleton is the most advanced yet. We’ve put absolutely everything into this bad boy,” he grins, slapping the chest plate of the robot; it doesn’t react. “Gyroscopic stabilizers, redundant systems in practically every area, newest cyborgnetic processors, the works.”

“You said you were from Europe, right?” Ellis asks, and the man nods.

“That’s correct. This is going to be a bit of a joint venture. As I mentioned before, I’m Max Euler, one of the scientists from Anodyne Berlin’s robotics department. We reached out to the administration here,” he says, nodding to Makado, “when we felt that the skeleton was in the final phases of testing and could really do with an…extremely adverse environment to put it through its paces. Then, when we discovered that you were facing a certain…difficulty retrieving an artifact, well, everything seemed serendipitous.”

“You don’t sound very German,” I observe. A few heads twist around to look at me and I can see Makado hide a smile. Euler doesn’t miss a beat, though.

“I actually learned English in America,” he tells me. “That’s why I don’t have an accent when I speak it. Deep-immersion in a culture is the best way to learn, I believe. Now, do we have any other questions about myself or the armature or has its performance spoken for itself?”

To be fair, the thing’s performance was very impressive. Over the past couple of hours we watched him demonstrate its speed, its agility, its coordination…everything that would interest the men and women on the team with ex-military backgrounds, which, from what I gathered from the past couple of days, was the majority. I think only Crookshank and another man I had met only briefly before he’d disappeared again, a short, sinewy, compact individual who introduced himself with a wide, flashing grin as Klaus, just Klaus, weren’t. Well, possibly Elena, actually. Is the Coast Guard part of the military? I don’t know. I think so but I’m not certain. I should ask her if I ever manage to get her alone again.

Alone. That’s a laugh. These past couple of days in the barracks have been a decidedly different experience than what I’m used to. I’m not a particularly shy person and I’m confident enough that I’ve never had any real reservations about my body, but the absolute lack of privacy is something I’ve never really experienced before. I got used to it quickly enough, changing in front of everybody. The first time I was motivated mainly because I knew for certain that if I made a big deal of it I’d be taken even less seriously. Aww, look at the little baby, wants us to turn around while she puts a new shirt on? How cute! She thinks we’ve never seen a pair of tits before!

I guess if I want to psychoanalyze myself I could ask why I want to fit in so badly with these people, but it’s obvious, isn’t it? Being the outsider aches, and even if you can fox-and-grapes yourself into believing that it’s okay because you’re “better” than them, you’re always going to know how much bull that is, somewhere deep down.

As far as becoming part of a team goes, you can either have it built in or have it be something you build up. If I came here and I was a male ex-Marine or even something like a paramedic, or perhaps even a lineman (power line lineman, not football lineman), I’d be much more easily accepted. Not that I think the fact that I’m a woman really has much to do with it; it’s about experiences. What the hell does a reporter know about Real World Things, like how to build a fire or pitch a tent or hide food where a bear can’t get it? Or how to fire a gun, splint an injured leg?

I know how to do some of those things, to be fair. But I don’t have the credentials. Instead I have to build it up, I have to be willing to learn, I have to put in work without complaining, I have to play ball no matter what. Challenging an institution, even a little one like a team like this, is impossible until you get inside of it. You say something like, ‘uh, I think I’d prefer to have all of you not stare at my tits while I change my shirt’ and boom, all the goodwill you’ve built up is gone. You have to play ball, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

“Roan?” Makado asks again, sidling up to me while Euler prattles on about something else up in front. I take another look at him and the robot and flick my eyes over to Makado.

“Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. What’s up?”

“I want to show you the recording equipment we’ve got for you.”

We slip out of the firing range and head down the hallway, Makado’s heeled footsteps echoing off the tight corridor ceiling. She’s wearing her hair down today, with a broad headband resting high up on her forehead to keep those unruly curls in line. “Makado,” I say after a moment, “can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“How dangerous is this going to be?”

She stops, turns and looks at me. Her lopsided gaze is calculating. “Very, I’d imagine,” she says eventually.

“Mm.”

“Why, are you having second thoughts?”

“No,” I tell her, “not particularly. I just wanted to – mentally prepare myself.”

“You know,” she says after a moment, “I was pretty certain you were going to chicken out.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I assumed, you know, throw you to the wolves for a day or two in the barracks with the team, you’d get scared enough to realize this is a bad idea.”

“They’ve been decent to me, actually.”

“As they would have been to anybody,” she smiles, guiding us around a corner. “But I think you might find that my, and apparently your, definition of ‘decent’ might not match with that of a lot of other twenty-something female reporters.”

“If I quit, who’d work the camera?”

“It’s a camera,” Makado laughs. “How hard can it be?”

“Show me the camera and I’ll tell you.”

She shows me the camera and then blushes after a moment. “Christ,” she says. “Stop laughing, it’s a camera.”

“This is what you’re going to use? Where’d you get this, Walmart?”

“Look, our budget isn’t –“

“How much did this cost? A hundred bucks?”

Makado looks at me for a moment. “Eighty,” she says finally. I knead the bridge of my nose.

“I literally have a four hundred dollar camera in my bag back in the barracks that could take better video than this,” I say, “and that’s my backup SLR.”

“SLR?” Makado frowns. I wave it away.

“It’s a kind of camera. Mine’s digital, it can take stills or video. I have…I think three or four memory cards left? So probably about 60 hours of video, I’d guess. More if you’re okay with thirty frames per second instead of sixty. What’s the video going to be used for?”

“It’s classified,” Makado says. “I can’t –“

“Do you want good video or not?”

She rolls her eyes at me. “Look, I really can’t tell you. We just want you to record the operation, that’s all. You don’t need to give it an edge or a slant or an angle or anything, just record it.”

“Mm,” I grunt. “Alright, that’s fair. What’s the deal with the crystal? Why is it so important?”

“Don’t press your luck. This camera you have, how fragile is it?”

I laugh. “About as fragile as this one, relatively,” I point. “Maybe a little more. If it breaks down there I’ll want an assurance that you’ll replace it.”

“If it’s in the budget.”

“A personal assurance, for my personal camera,” I elaborate. She looks at me dubiously.

“You want me to buy you a new camera with my own money?”

“If it breaks.”

“When did this turn into a negotiation?” she asks. Her voice is exasperated but I can tell that she wants to smile. “Fine. How about this? If you break your camera but the footage is usable, I’ll get you a new one. No footage, no camera.”

“Alright.”

“And you’re taking this one as well, as a backup.”

“Fine. I’ll need to get my charger, though.”

“For the batteries? You don’t have it with you?”

“If you recall, I thought I was just going to be coming in and then leaving the same night. I didn’t plan on getting caught up in this adventure of yours. My charger’s back at my motel room in town.”

“Guess we’d better go get it, then.”

And then Makado is putting her arm around my shoulder and ushering me out of the dingy storage closet, and then out of the building entirely.

 * * *

 “You know,” I say as the little Volkswagen powers down the main road and out the gate, Makado giving a cheery wave to the guard in the gatehouse as she passes, “this really isn’t the sort of car I was expecting you’d drive.”

She laughs. “You and everybody else. See, this actually used to be my aunt’s car. She won the lottery, bought herself a new car, gave me this one, and I was like, ‘hey, what the hell, free car, might as well use it’ and from there it grew on me.”

“It’s so tiny.”

“If you turn that into a crack about my height, you’re walking back to the Flesh Pit.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I laugh. “Although you are kind of fulfilling the stereotype by being so touchy about it.”

“That’s it –“

“I’m joking.”

“I know,” she says, flashing me a quick grin.

The world outside is like a bright warm hug. I realized as soon as Makado lead me out of the squat, evil-looking concrete Security building that for the last three days in the barracks I had been suffering from a myopia of purpose; I’d done little more than work out in the gym, hang out with Elena, and play wallflower, listening to the team laugh and joke and riff off each other. If I were to close my eyes, here in the car, with the top down, trailing my hand in the breeze, I’d be asleep in five minutes.

“You look peaceful,” Makado observes, and I crack an eye open, fix her with what I hope is a sardonic gaze.

“Do I not normally look peaceful?”

“Well, considering I’ve known you for about four days now, and about half of those we were both wondering if I was going to have to send you to federal prison, I’d say that generally you haven’t looked very peaceful.”

“Fair point.”

We drive on in silence for a little longer. “You know,” she says, “there’s no shame in backing out.”

“If you didn’t want me to go you shouldn’t have offered,” I tell her. “It’s too late now.”

“If you want the truth, I did it more for Peter than for you.”

“That’s bullshit,” I tell her. She looks at me a little uncertainly.

“He likes you, you know,” she tells me.

I look over at Makado, really look at her. I look at the lines of the tendons in her neck, loose and ropy but ready to spring into life and brace at a moment’s notice. I look at her cheeks and her eye and her lips, at the way she grips the wheel loosely in one hand, the other hand draped over the edge of the rolled-down window. She glances over, catches me staring. “Have you told him yet?”

I let out a little burst of mirthless laughter. “I haven’t even been able to tell my dad yet.”

“Why not?”

“Why haven’t I told my dad or why haven’t I told Pete?”

“I meant Pete.”

I roll the words around on my tongue for a long, long time before I finally say them. “Because Pete might like me, but he still loves you.”

Makado lets out a breath like I’d punched her, and I look over at her incredulously. “Oh, come on,” I say. “You couldn’t tell? Have you seen the way he looks at you?”

“I don’t –“

“I don’t know what happened between the two of you, not exactly, but I know for a fact that he still has feelings for you.”

“I thought you and him…”

“Let’s just say I’m probably not going to be interested in men for a while,” I say. “Maybe for the rest of my life,” I add with a hollow laugh.

“That isn’t funny,” Makado says quickly. “And what do you – oh.”

“Yeah.”

She doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. Hell, if I were in her position I wouldn’t know what to say about it.

It feels good to tell someone.

“Are you scared?” she asks, glancing over again.

“It doesn’t feel real yet,” I tell her. “I got the letter with the results about a week ago. They wanted me to come back in and ‘discuss my options’ but there aren’t any. Once I get sick I’ll be scared, I imagine.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You probably don’t want sympathy, but…”

“The only thing I don’t want is someone treating me differently, that’s all. Maybe I’m dying but this is going to be a long slow goodbye. And right now I still feel fine,” I say, wondering if I really believe it.

“I was meaning to tell you,” Makado says after a moment. “I think I can get you some ballast.”

I look at her sharply; she keeps her head still, eye on the road. “You’re serious?” I ask after a moment.

“Dead serious.”

“How?”

“The suits the team wears, the locator is in the helmet. At the end of the first day, you guys will make camp right near a ballast bulb. You do the math.”

I think about that for a moment, then shrug.

“Seems easy enough. Would it even help me?”

“It might. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. Isn’t it worth a shot?”

“Sure. But what if…I don’t know, what are the side effects?”

Makado laughs. “Well, undiluted ballast…you’ll get really fucking horny. You’ll probably want to drink it right there so you don’t have to worry about hiding a fucking bottle of it from everyone. And it’s going to taste really, really gross.”

“I meant more like physiological stuff.”

“As far as I know it’s mildly addictive but nobody ever figured out if it was actually chemically addictive or if it was a mental thing. Like, the difference between coffee and cigarettes being addictive.”

“Speaking of,” I say. “You smoke?”

“I don’t.”

“Good,” I tell her. “Nasty habit.”

“Okay, miss two-packs-a-day.”

“Ouch. Low blow.”

“Did you always smoke that much?”

She pulls back onto the main road and then turns onto the side street that leads down to the motel. By daylight Gumption looks even sadder than at night. Fewer shadows to hide the cracks.

“No,” I tell her. “I used to smoke about a pack a week or so.”

“Let me guess,” she says. “When you found out you said ‘fuck it’ and started going all in?”

“Seemed like the thing to do,” I say. “I like nicotine, just not a fan of smoking, necessarily. Too concerned about my lungs’ wellbeing.”

“Right,” she agrees. “Alright, we’re here.”

The warm, dry air has sucked all the life out of me. “Alright,” I say, not opening my eyes. “The charger is on the nightstand, you can just run up and get it…”

“Go and get your damn charger.”

I groan, pop the door, stagger out of the low-slung Beetle. “Question for you,” I say, leaning back in.

“Yeah?”

“Why are you personally taking the time to drive me around?”

Makado laughs. “Do you know how busy I am as the Head of Security?”

“Very, I’d imagine.”

“I’m not busy at all. Place runs itself unless there’s an emergency. I do about two hours of phone calls and emails per night sitting in my quarters in my pajamas, rest of the time I just hang around and pretend to do something, anything, that justifies my salary.”

I can’t help but smile at her. “Glad I could give you something to do, then.”

“Go get your charger,” she repeats, reclining the seat backwards. She unclips her seat belt and shuts her eyes. “I’ll be right here.”

 * * *

 I can tell someone’s been in the room the minute I walk in. I’d left the do not disturb sign on the handle, they’ve taken it off, left it on the floor right in front of the door. I stare; then there is a soft, subtle sound from inside the room and I take a step back, reach behind me for the door handle.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Erica Walken tells me, stepping out from the bathroom. She has in her hand a small revolver, held about waist-high, barrel pointed unwaveringly at me.

It isn’t much to look at, that little gun, the barrel glinting in the low, warm light cast by the lamp over on the bedside table. The inside of the barrel seems like it must be the blackest, darkest, heaviest thing I’ve ever seen, and it draws my eyes to it like it were a singularity. Forget movies, forget books, if you have a gun pointed at you there’s no way to be cool, no way to just quip out a one-liner like in a movie. I an feel my hands shaking at my sides and if I don’t get a grip on myself my legs are going to follow suit. But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to at least try a one-liner. When’s the next time I’ll get the chance?

“Put the gun down,” I tell her. My voice almost trembles but I lock it down.

“No,” she says. “Did you come alone?”

“Y-yes. What the hell do you want?”

“You’ve been a hard woman to track down for the last couple of days. Sit down.”

She jerks the gun at the armchair in the corner and I move slowly to it, my back prickling with the knowledge that she’s still holding the gun on me, and sit.

She stares at me for a moment longer. “Are you working for the Company?” she asks me, and something in the way she says it, in the way she’s looking at me, makes me think that this is a capital-letter Very Important Question.

“The Containment Corporation?” I ask, trying hard to keep my voice innocent. She waves an irritated hand.

“The Containment Corp, Anodyne, whoever. You know what I mean.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then why the hell are you back?” she growls. “I know you went with Peter, even though I told you not to, and when you and he disappeared I knew they must have caught you. What the hell are you doing back here?”

“What the hell are you doing in my room?” I snarl back at her. She tosses her head, looks down her nose at me.

“Looking for answers,” she says. “I have a right to know –“

“Lady, I don’t know who you think you are but if you think I’m going to overlook the fact that you broke into my motel room –“

“Answer the question,” she tells me. She moves her thumb and draws the hammer on the revolver back and it locks into place with an ominous click.

“No,” I tell her. “I’m not working for them.”

She stares at me for a long while and I stare back at her, keep my face carefully blasé. “Alright,” she says quietly. “What happened? Why haven’t I been able to get in touch with Peter? When my boy heard the alarms he tried to get out of the Pit. He told me that the ditch had been filled in with concrete, he was trapped in there.”

“Your boy?”

She waves her hand impatiently. “The young man who went in there with you. Marcus.”

“Oh. I didn’t know they’d filled in the ditch,” I say softly.

“Well, they did. He can’t get out.”

“Where is he now?”

“Back in the Pit, of course. He wouldn’t have lasted a day out there on the surface, he’d have been caught in an instant. What happened to Peter? Why can’t I get him on the phone?”

I must be very deliberate now, and choose my words carefully.

“They caught Peter,” I tell her. “I don’t know what happened to him. I only just managed to get away.”

Her eyes narrow. “Bullshit,” she says, the word sounding out of place in her small, elegant mouth. “You’re working for them.”

I can see her knuckles whiten on the grip of the pistol. I feel like I’m going to throw up.

“I can get him out,” I say quickly. “Marcus, I mean.”

“How?” she asks.

Yes, Roan, how? the little voice asks somewhere from the back of my head, and I close my eyes. “They made me a deal,” I say slowly. Maybe it’s pathetic but I feel a little better not being able to see the gun. “I’m going into the Pit. Tomorrow or the next day. I can find him, get him out of there.”

“And turn him right in to the Company?” she snorts. “Fat chance.”

“If you shoot me,” I say with sudden confidence, “you’re never going to see him again. He’s going to die down there and you won’t be able to get him back.”

Erica’s mouth is a tight line. Her eyes are like chips of obsidian. “He’s down there for a reason,” she tells me. “Tell me about this operation they’re pulling. Have they found one of the crystals?” she asks.

My mouth drops open. “You know about those?”

“So that’s a yes?”

I snap my mouth shut. She leans forward, and the muzzle of the revolver snuffles forward. I have to stop myself from cringing back into the chair. If she were to pull the trigger, at this range the bullet would -

“I’m going to blow your fucking brains out,” she says, “if you don’t tell me what you know.”

“Okay,” I say, frantic now, “okay, Jesus Christ, fine, they found a crystal! Is that what you want to know so bad? Yes, they found one. They’re going down to get it and I’m going with. Fuck!”

“Do you know the route?”

“No! Look, I don’t know what the hell you want or what you’re planning, but -”

“Focus,” she says. “They have a crystal. You’re certain? You saw footage of it?”

“Yes,” I say.

Erica blows a breath out. She looks very tired suddenly; she leans back against the counter and the gun finally wavers away from me. “Alright,” she says softly. “It looks like I –“

“Roan? You okay in there?” someone calls from outside the hotel room, and Erica and I both jump. She hurls to her feet, giving me a murderous glare.

“You bitch,” she says. “You brought her with you? I should -“

“Roan, who are you talking to?”

Erica looks as though she doesn’t know what to do. She glances back at the door and then down at me. I can see her start to say something, but before she can get the words out, there is the soft snap of a card fitting into the lock and then the handle turns. My panicked eyes turn to Erica and I can see her raising the gun, mid-snarl. “Hide the gun!” I hiss urgently, and she stares at me for a frozen moment before the door opens all the way and Makado, holding a pistol of her own, a slim black automatic, peeks around the corner. Our eyes meet but she can’t see Erica, the woman is around the corner from her.

Erica is staring at me and I flick my eyes back to her; she hasn’t put the gun away and I try to implore her to with a look, but she’s having none of it. She moves to the wall and the floor creaks. Makado’s aim shifts up and over to the corner as Erica flattens herself against the wall, revolver extended ahead of her, head-height.

I feel as though I’m going to pass out but I know I have to do something, and finally after my anguished nerves have been screaming at me to move, to flex my muscles and move, goddam it, I rise lurchingly, a sudden motion that seems in immediate retrospect to have been a very bad idea. Makado’s gun wavers for a moment but Erica swings around almost immediately and starts to get a bead on me. Makado rushes forward and bursts around the corner, knocking me to the floor in the process. I land hard and lay there for a moment, then I roll over. I see Makado on the ground, Erica on her knees, the two of them struggling over the revolver, Erica trying desperately to stuff her finger back into the trigger guard. I snap out a kick and catch her in the side and she whoops out a breath and lets the gun go for a moment. Makado jerks it away from Erica and I finally, finally see the outline of Makado’s pistol, discarded on the floor right in front of me, blending in with the dark carpet.

Before I can snatch it up Erica bolts to her feet, stepping on Makado’s forearm in the process, a yelp boiling out of Mak’s mouth as she wrenches her arm out from beneath Erica’s shoe, but Erica is already sprinting out the door, slamming it behind her. “Mak,” I say urgently, trying to hand her the gun, but Mak sees it and freezes, and then her eye flicks up to mine, wide and scared, and then I realize I’m pointing it right at her. “Shit,” I say, jerking the barrel away from her. “I didn’t mean to – I’m sorry –“

She reaches out, grabs it and takes it from my nerveless hands. “Grip first,” she says, and then clambers to her feet and rushes out the door after Erica.

By the time I manage to get to my feet and stagger out of the room after her, Roan is there leaning up against the balcony, revolver and pistol both slung away into one pocket or holster or other, watching the big black car roar out of the parking lot fast enough to leave twin streaks of black rubber in its wake.

“You okay?” I ask, breathless still, and Makado glances over, eye wide and limpid.

“Yeah. You?”

“I think so.”

She blows a breath out, inclines her head forward until her forehead rests on the cool metal bar of the balcony. I think about it for a moment before I do it, but then I reach over and gently lay my hand on her back, and I feel her stiffen and then relax. She has a terrible knot of muscle just above her shoulderblade and I work at it with my fingers, run my thumb over it in slow, firm strokes. “That’s nice,” she murmurs after a moment.

“You’re pretty tense,” I observe.

“Well, we both almost died, so…”

“How did you get in?”

“Oh, I made a copy of your keycard when we took your stuff the other night,” she says. “Might have come in handy later.”

“Good thing you did.”

“Never know when you’ll need something like that. We got lucky.”

“Peter told me that Erica’s with the cult,” I say, and Makado nods.

“Yeah,” she says. “What the hell was eating her, did she tell you? She can be a bit of a loose cannon but I’ve never seen her pull a fucking gun on anyone.”

“I don’t know,” I frown. “She - she knew about the crystal somehow, she was asking me if I’d seen it, if we were going down to get it.”

“Ah,” Makado says lightly, “that would do it.”

She does smell like peaches, I realize suddenly, standing this close to her. Her back feels very warm beneath her thin shirt, and her skin has a muscley firmness to it that my fingertips find appealing.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I ask her. Her eye flickers open; I can see her glowering at me from beneath the crook of her arm.

“Mind your own business,” she says.

“This is all about the crystal, isn’t it,” I say thoughtfully. “It was just bad timing, our coming in when we did. You thought we were after it.”

She looks at me bleakly. “Yeah, I did. I didn’t know what to think so I made the call. Beginning to think it was a bad one.”

“Why can’t you tell –“

“Because you don’t need to know!” she snaps. “Because some things are supposed to stay secret.”

I take my hand off of her back. She shuts her eye. “I suppose now you’re going to be mad at me,” she offers, and I blow out a sigh, look out across the parking lot. I can see heat distortion off in the distance, out across the plains beyond the town limits, and in the distance I can see the electric fence.

“I’m not mad at you,” I say so softly that she has to ask me to repeat myself. I look down at her and give her a faint smile. “I’m not mad at you. I’m not – I’m not mad at anything, I guess, not the Pit, not the Corporation, not anything. I wish Rey didn’t have to die but if this crystal is so damn important then what else could you have done? He’d have thrown himself down that elevator shaft if you’d let him. Probably wouldn’t have done any damage, but -”

“A couple of years ago,” Makado says, straightening up, hands on her hips, twisting her back left and right, coaxing a deep crack from her spine like something heavy slotting into place, “we had someone get in with a bomb. He was schizophrenic. Convinced that the Pit was going to swallow the world whole. He sprinted for the orifice and if we didn’t put him down he would have dropped that bomb down there and it would have wrecked the gantry, would have hurt the Pit like fuck, maybe even gotten another choke response out of it. As it was it cracked the fuck out of the concrete exclusion plate, we had to put in a new one.”

I can see ghosts swimming in her eye when she looks at me. “I can’t let that happen again. Even if it’s, fuck, ten times less severe than 2007, there’s eight guys down there in that control room in the monitoring station at all times who are counting on me not to let something like that happen.”

“You did the right thing, then,” I tell her, wondering if I’m lying.

“I – what?”

“You did the right thing,” I repeat. “I don’t know if I would have done anything different if I was in the same position, because you’re right, you can’t risk it. You don’t know what Rey wanted to do, you don’t know who he was or whatever he was carrying. You made the call. As long as you make a decision you’re doing something right, even if it turns out to be the wrong decision. The wrong decision is better than no decision.”

Makado nods after a moment. “Yeah,” she says. She’s looking out in the same direction I am but I can tell from the way she’s staring off across the dusty plains that whatever she sees out there lives mostly inside her head.

“Now, to be fair, I don’t know how I’d live with myself afterwards, but in the moment I’d still make the same call.”

Her eye flicks over to me and then her lips split in a slow lazy smile. “Well aren’t you just a ray of fucking sunshine.”

I grin back, nod to the car. “You’re really not going to call the cops on her?”

“What’s the damn point? She’ll be out of the county by now. Tell you what, do you know her phone number?”

I start to say I don’t, but then I think about it and lead Makado back into the motel room, fiddle with the room phone until I can find a call history. “There,” I say, pointing to one entry. “That’s her. She called me about three days ago, before I came to the Pit. Told me not to go.”

Makado nods, takes her phone out, punches the number in. It rings and rings and then goes to voicemail. “Erica,” she says, once the tinny beep sounds, “this is Makado Veret. Look, I’m not calling the cops on you. I know you probably don’t believe me but as far as I’m concerned this is no harm no foul, alright?”

Her eyes meet mine. “We know about your guy in the Pit. Roan told me you were asking questions about the crystal. I’m only going to warn you once. Whatever you’re planning, call it off.”

Makado’s eye flickers over to me, then away again. I can see her throat bob as she swallows, then she continues. “You probably can’t reach him by phone but if you do get ahold of him, tell him to head to the main gullet and up to the monitoring station. I can’t promise immunity but I’d rather get him out of there alive than dead, and I swear to you I will try to get him off property without any federal charges. Call it good faith. But if you pull the shit you just pulled again,” she says, her voice cooling so quickly I can practically hear the snap, “or if you try to interfere with my operation, you’re going to be coming back out in a bodybag. Oh, and I have your gun. Call me back.” She rattles off her number and then hangs up, blows a breath out.

“Think she’ll call you?”

“Maybe,” Makado shrugs. She reaches into her pocket, pulls the revolver out, examines it. “Free gun, though, if she doesn’t.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works.”

“That was a joke,” she explains, and when I start giggling I can’t suppress it even though as far as jokes go that was fairly lame, but I realize that it’s just all the adrenaline from the fight flooding out of me belatedly in one long relieved flow and even as Makado cuffs me playfully behind the ears and tells me it wasn’t that funny, I manage to make her smile, and I suppose that ought to be enough.

When we get back, charger and a couple of extra half-full SD cards tucked carefully into my pocket, Elena is the only one who noticed that I’d been gone for long, but when she asks where I’ve been, rolling over on her stomach to peer at me from her messy cot, I just shrug. “Out,” I tell her, and content myself with a mysterious smile while she shakes her head and returns to her magazine, muttering something about fucking admin under her breath, but it’s with a crooked smile that I know is meant for me, and when I flop onto the cot next to her nobody gives me a second glance and I feel, for just a moment, like I am starting to belong.

Continue with Part 15

Back to Table of Contents

[purplesurveys]

1080

Do you like to write with sharpies? Sure. I don’t often get the chance to, but if I find a stray Sharpie lying around I will most likely grab it and find a piece of scratch paper to write on.

What are your top five favorite colors? Pastel/baby pink, black, white, maroon, mustard yellow.

Do you wear pajamas at night? Nope. I find them too warm.

What is your favorite type of cereal? Also not a fan of cereal; I never got the hang of its texture once mixed with milk. For my breakfasts, I’d rather already have a full ass meal consisting of fried rice with eggs, hotdogs, dried fish, tapa, tocino, etc. so that I can feel recharged enough to start with my day.

Do you want a Sony Xperia? No.

Do you own an iPhone? Yesss.

Do you like cake or cupcakes better? Cupcakes for sure; they’re one of my favorite desserts. There’s bigger space to be creative and quirky with cupcakes, so I enjoy them more. I’ve stopped seeking out cakes as often as I used to because I keep on seeing the same flavors and the same ingredients used in them.

What is your doctor's name? We don’t have a main one that we go to since no one in my family ever gets seriously sick.

Have you planned out your future? I have grand life events I want to be able to tick off, like getting my own place, traveling to certain countries, getting promoted. etc; but I don’t limit myself to a timeline. If or when those things happen, then they’ll happen.

Do you iron your clothes? I sometimes will, especially if I had planned to wear clothes that tend to get all wrinkly if they haven’t been used for a long time.

If you could own one wild animal, which one would you want? No thanks.

Have you ever been to Universal Studio? Yeah, the one in Singapore. It was a lot of fun, but I think my family and I are forever scarred by the couple who was queueing in front of us for the roller coaster...they passionately made out the entire time we were in line. Ugh.

What is your favorite holiday tradition? I like visiting one particular relative’s place for Christmas - one of my mom’s cousins and her family. It’s always lively there, and my aunts and uncles on that side of the family are the ones I find easiest to talk to. We didn’t go there for years, and we only started to again starting in I think 2017 or 2018.

Do you have curly hair? Nope. Sometimes it’s straight and sometimes it’s wavy.

Do you like the color orange or pink better? Pink.

Do you have long eyelashes? Yes.

How do you keep warm in the winter? I don’t need to worry about this because we don’t get winter.

Have you seen the movie Transformers? No, never looked interesting to me.

Have you ever killed ants with a magnifying glass? I have not. If they are being annoying on me, I just squish them; but I don’t kill them just because I’m bored.

What kind of shampoo do you use? I’ve been using Dove shampoo for a while.

Do you own any pairs of scarves? I own a few shawls that I will sometimes use as scarves, if they count.

Do you follow fashion? I mean, sometimes. I’ve generally followed what’s trending in my age group; but now that one of our clients at work is in the fashion/sportswear industry, I get even more leads on what is currently trending in terms of style even though I don’t always voluntarily choose to follow fahshion.

Are you excited for the 6th Harry Potter movie to come out? Didn’t the last movie come out a decade ago? So the 6th one is even older than that.

What color is your favorite coat? I don’t own a coat. The thicket clothes I have are probably hoodies.

Do you like Minnie Mouse? She’s okay; I don’t really have a strong opinion, I guess? My favorite character was always either Goofy or Donald Duck though.

Moccasins or Loafers? Moccasins.

Do you wear dogtags? Nope.

What is your favorite brand of clothing? I don’t really have one...if I like something, I’ll try to buy it.

Where do you shop for food? My parents always buy from groceries but they make the chain different every time. They will also sometimes buy from our neighbors who have their own vegetable store at home.

What is your favorite font? I’m partial to Proxima Nova because I used it a lotttttt throughout college that I’ve been using it by default for any document I have to make.

Do your hands and feet tend to get cold in the winter? I’ve never experienced winter but whenever I get cold, the joints in my legs and feet tend to feel the most sore and uncomfortable.

Do you know how to play any instruments? If so what? Nah. I got skipped out on when musical talents were being given out, lmao.

Do you recycle plastic bags? Yes. Idk about other cultures but Asian homes definitely have a spare cabinet somewhere in their homes that is just filled with plastic bags to be used over and over in the future if they’re needed lol.

Do you like to drink energy drinks? No. I smelled one before and the scent was too sweet it almost made me sick. I can’t imagine how much sweeter they taste.

What was the last TV show that you watched? I went back to my comfort zone last night, Friends :)

What is the biggest number that you have ever counted to? Not so sure, maybe around 100 more or less.

Are you currently wearing anything with patterns on them? I am not.

Do you like pistachios? OMG yes, but pistachios and pistachio-flavored anything are always on the pricier side so I don’t really feel like buying them most of the time.

Have you ever picked your nose? Sure.

Do you pee in public bathrooms? Only if I can no longer hold it. I prefer to wait until I get home.

[dragimalsdaydreams]

WHEW BOY, I’ve been itchin’ to draw these designs up for quite a while now and finally got around to it, haha. I’ve struggled a lot with my personal style for MLP ponies, trying to make something nice out of “realism with MLP proportions” with.... mixed results, lmao. but I was inspired by @jayrockin‘s tiny sapient ungulate au to draw up my own more specevo designs, and I think I finally got something here I rly like

while I took heavy inspiration from Jay’s au (esp for the pegasus wings, which I will discuss in further detail in that section), I genuinely want to make something of my own here, and hope that comes through. if I’ve failed to do so, I apologize Jay, and I’ll be happy to delete or shift designs as needed-- I don’t want to infringe on ur designs or anything,,

anyways, I have a lot to say abt these designs, so I’ll throw it under the cut

BASE

while this is basically the starting point for my ponies-- the “unaligned” base-- it got me thinking about how it could possibly appear in-canon. magic is such a critical element of pony life, it would have to be something pretty drastic to strip a pony of all unique, class-defining features. which leads me to believe that if it would ever occur in the show, it would have happened in Starlight’s equality town. I imagine this wouldn’t necessarily be on purpose, but perhaps an unintended consequence removing a pony’s cutie mark? or maybe just a consequence of the particular spell Starlight used? either way, she prolly wouldn’t complain about “equalizing” her townsfolk on yet another level (tho she might have to explain why she gets to keep her horn for the removal spell). either way, it’s fun to imagine a uniform, blank set of unaligned ponies..

I had a hell of a time trying to figure out the relationship b/t magic and evolution, and how that translated to hexapods vs. tetrapods and the presence of a magic horn. my tentative lore is that alicorns are the basal ancestors of ponies (briefly: vertebrate hexapod clade >> ungulate-analogue clade >> magic-horn clade >> alicorns >> ponies). the eventual division of labor in early pony society redirected magical energy towards the most essential morphology for the three classes of labor, resulting in earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasi. though the genetic structures for horns, hoof-nails, and wings (+ secondary traits) are still present in any given pony’s genetic code-- it’s simply a matter of whether the switch for a particular set of traits is activated or not

physical remnants of horns and wings are still subtly present in ponies who don’t have those structures, in the form of a small bump on the skull and reduced wing-nubs just behind the front legs. often, the bump or nubs will have some identifying pelt pattern, though this isn’t always the case

now since my take on ponies is that they’re ~technically~ all genetically alicorns, this has the potential for more of a gradient b/t classes. in rare cases, an individual may be born with two different classes of magic+traits activated at once, dubbed a “bicorn”. however, without the regulation of a powerful alicorn to consciously divvy out the traits/magic in an individual’s body (as was the case for Twilight’s ascension), these traits/magic don’t express to the full extent that they could have if they’d been activated individually. as an example, I think Fluttershy would absolutely be a “bicorn”-- a pony who has the innate earth-bound magic of an earth pony, but the physique and wings of a pegasus (and I would hc her with small, underdeveloped hoof-nails as well, in this case). without the full extent of air magic to keep her aloft, Fluttershy can barely keep up with her swift pegasi cousins, and she doesn’t have the brawn typically associated with earth ponies. she’s still a very successful pony in her own right, but she had to find unique ways to fill in the gaps between earth and pegasi life that weren’t necessarily inherent to either lifestyle. due to their perceived ‘lack’ in cohesion and magic, some ponies call bicorns “the beggar’s alicorn” (or if I wanna be rly mean and up the age rating on this au, “the bastard alicorn”)

now past all that nonsense abt the classes, I want to detail some universal traits among pony anatomy.

for one, ponies have dexterous lips that they use to hold and handle delicate objects, much like manatees. this is basically reused from my past suggestion for Jayrockin’s own pony designs, but retrofit for my take on pony faces. since my faces have more pointed, upturned noses, I figure that the lips could hold an object in place, while rabbit-like nose-twitching could direct the angle of the object (like for writing). the bottom lip may still be able to help in angling, but the nose is the more directive force, in this design. this also makes it so the tip of a pencil is up in a pony’s direct line of sight, even if the pencil is a simple straight-line stick rather than more ergonomically-designed. this is important to me b/c I don’t know if more complex writing structures would necessarily be available in early pony society, so if ponies only have simple sticks to write with, I still want them to see what they’re writing lmao

this also directly influences ponies’ long, flexible necks. since pony heads are treated as an extra limb for dexterity (especially in those ponies without horns), the head needs to comfortably reach different parts of the body

pony “hooves” are essentially meaty mitts covering three inner toes. the thick padding and leathery skin usually obscures the internal anatomy, though sometimes indentations are visible (especially in earth ponies). the middle toe is the main anchor of support, with the side toes providing extra support. they also allow for some dexterity, as the side toes can pinch together well enough to even hold thin objects like pencils. while the overall construction of the legs makes dexterous use of the "hooves” a bit difficult, it’s not uncommon to see certain professions gravitate towards hoof use over lip use. many earth pony artists, for example, tend to use their hooves so they can keep their faces an appropriate distance away from their pieces to view the “big picture”, and painters in particular prefer the wide strokes they can get with their hooves

UNICORN

unicorn horns have a keratin shell with an inner base of bone. the center of the bone houses a thick bundle of neurons which extends back into the base of the brain. the keratin covering is composed of overlapping layers that grow into place as the unicorn ages (the tip is the oldest, while the base is the youngest). most newborn unicorns are born without a horn, but the first layer of the horn quickly breaks skin and grows into place within a few weeks of birth. a groove runs up the dorsal side of the horn, acting as a funnel for magic, which then spills into and out of the lips between keratin layers

unicorn spines tend to be rather long, consequently leading to long necks, torsos, and tails. their skulls are also usually a bit long compared to others. this overall length usually isn’t obvious when looking at a unicorn on their own, but next to any other class, they look a bit stretched

additionally, unicorns tend to style their hair long as well, coveting flowing tresses. hair appears in several different places on the body besides the head/neck and tail, such as the chin/jaw, throat, ear tips, and fetlocks. while individuals from other classes can sometimes grow hair in these extra places, it’s a rather rare trait, and seems to be associated more with bicorns than full-blood pegasi or earth ponies. interestingly, hair only seems to sprout from the end-half of unicorn tails rather than the full length as seen in other classes-- some ponies joke that unicorns’ first ancestors stole hair from their tails to fill out the rest of their bodies

PEGASUS

so this is where I more heavily reference Jayrockin’s designs, and where I apologize if I didn’t make my wing designs unique enough from Jay’s... I just LOVE the look of cartilage-lobe wings, and it makes so much more sense than *suddenly feathers* in pony anatomy, imo (unless I were to just make all ponies’ fur/hair highly-specialized feathers, which is.... I mean it’s not a bad idea, but I’m not super into it)

anyways, pegasus wings vary across individuals, with different shapes and sizes leading to different flight styles. all wings are too small to support a pony without magic, but there is still a sense of relative loading and wingspan that leads different modes of movement. all wings have four fingers, with the first digit usually serving as a kind of alula. the cartilage of the lobes can reach as far as halfway up the length of the fingers, though they can be smaller. due to the lobes, the fingers only have one joint about halfway down the finger, near the start of the cartilage. the cartilage spines near the elbow also have one joint, and can range from 2-4 on a wing. pegasus tails are much stiffer and straighter than those of other classes in order to support tail spines and webbing for flight. 2-4 pairs of spines sprout from the base of the tail and are constructed similarly to the spines on the wings. sometimes the webbing of the back edge of the wings and the front edge of the tail connect, but this is uncommon

pegasi are generally the tallest of the classes, with long, thin legs and necks providing ample height. to handle the forces of powered flight, pegasi torsos are much stiffer than those of other classes. while pegasus wings aren’t especially muscular due to the reliance on wind magic, they still bulk up the torso with thick pectorals (still on the fence over whether they need a shallow keel tho..)

pegasi usually don’t have upturned snouts, but rather a straight slope with a small snout tip, giving the overall skull an aerodynamic wedge shape. their ears are also smaller to cut back on wind disturbance

pegasi hair tends to grow rather short, and even then individuals will usually keep it cropped short so it’s less of a hassle while flying. tail hair generally only sprouts from the very tip of the tail, sometimes extending down some of the underside of the tail. unlike the mysterious short range of tail hair in unicorns, this growth pattern is a direct result of the tail spines/webbing. while pegasus hair is sparse, pegasus fur tends to be thick and fluffy, especially around the torso and neck. this helps insulate pegasi when flying high in the chilly skies

EARTH

since earth pony magic seems to be driven by tactile connection to the earth via their hooves, I gave them hoof-nails as a more distinct conduit for their magic. they’re designed after elephant toenails, so they’re thick and blunt

besides that, earth ponies have bulky, thick physiques to match their typically labor-heavy lifestyles. not much more to say since that’s a p universal hc for earth ponies so ¯|_(ツ)_/¯

[coeurdastronaute]

Either/Or: Partners

Supercorp AU Lena as a DEO agent before Kara comes out as Supergirl & they meet via working cases together for the DEO.

Like the rest of the world before dawn, the laboratory on the fifth basement level of the DEO headquarters was still relatively asleep and peaceful. Deep in the sterile tomb, everything was steel and glass, clean corners and not an ounce of trash or anything out of place. It was orderly and pristine and smelling of antiseptic and bleach.

“Morning, Tom,” Jess greeted the guard that kept the top secret lab, top secret.

She juggled the  two coffee cups and dug in her pocket for her badge before letting him scan and moving her eye for the retina scan.

“Good morning, lovely Jess,” the old, cheerful guard greeted her.

While to some he was nothing more than a grumpy, trigger happy, protocol-loving, veteran with a strict adherence to the rules of the base, to the handful of scientists inside the deepest parts of the secret agency, he was sweet as could be.

Hair leaning a bit more toward grey than black, eyes gleaming and just slits where blue peaked out, the guard had a crooked nose and high cheeks, and he kept his cheeks freshly shaven and his uniform pressed nice and stiff, despite already having over a decade logged behind the desk and never letting that make his work suffer.

He was a staple to them.

“How late was she here until?” she asked, turning around and pushing through the newly buzzed door.

“I don’t think she left.”

“What are we going to do with her?”

“I just watch the door,” he smiled. “You and Dr. Luthor figure out the hard stuff.”

“Have a good one, Tom,” Jess chuckled and tossed over her shoulder as she disappeared down the hall toward the bulk of the labs and her and her boss’ office.

It wasn’t often that Jess wasn’t one of the first people in the lab. She had the most demanding boss, the actual Director of Research and Scientific Discovery, and thus that meant she had a more rigorous set of guiding principles and assessments. It also meant that much of her job was spent managing said Director, which in turn meant being ahead of her moods and whims and brain. A feat not easily conquered by the faint of heart.

While the lab was scoured and awfully clean and drab, their office was somewhat more inhabited by humans. The walls had bookshelves with journals and artifacts and degrees and plants, while the large desk now had a sleeping woman folded over it.

Even as she walked through the lab filled with microscopes and large monitors, Jess scoped out a sleeping Lena Luthor and shook her head, disappointed that the promise to make her way home for the night had been ignored.

She debated waking her boss at all. Odds were, she only fell asleep about an hour ago after pouring over some numbers that could have waited until the morning. Odds were, she should have gone home and grabbed some actual sleep. Odds were, she’d be cranky.

So, unabashedly, the assistant allowed herself a little time to get the morning started without the interruption of a certain genius. Sometimes, life was just easier that way.

For another hour, Jess sipped her coffee and responded to emails, downloaded the newest articles to her boss’ tablet, and went about sorting the tasks of the day. Her list of tasks would never get done, and that was on a good, stress-free week. But Lena had her teeth in something, and that meant nothing else mattered.

Recruited while still getting her doctorate, or rather, her third, Lena took right to her job at the DEO, snagging the director’s position at a young age, and despite her assistant’s best attempts, she grew very old, very quickly. Not so much in body and mind, but rather habits. She’d never find anyone if she never left the DEO basement. Jess said those words so much, she was thinking of just having a recording made that she could play whenever she--

BEEP BEEP BEEP.

The alarm echoed throughout the building, blaring and echoing its deafening assault to warn of something.

“Jess!” Lena jolted awake, looking around very confused and alarmed.

Yanked from sleep so suddenly, Lena looked around for something, her heart beating wildly in her chest, her brain catching up as quickly as it could despite the cold start, and still, the warning alarms and strobe lights methodically screamed and blared.

“What time is… When did… What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure,” Jess shook her head, clasping her hands over her ears as she shouted across the room toward her boss. “What does your tablet say?”

Before Jess finished, Lena was already picking up the device and scrolling and opening. But before the assistant could follow up, she dropped the tablet and quickly moved from around the desk.

“Prep the trauma room and tell Ramirez and Patel to go to receiving and collect whatever artifact did all of this. They’re bringing it in now. I want it in my lab immediately.”

Lena tied up her hair and hurried toward the elevator.

“Lena, what’s going on?” Jess asked as she followed and jotted notes despite the noise.

“It’s Supergirl.”

With a grave look, Lena set her jaw and hit the button, the elevator door closing immediately, leaving Jess stuck, standing amidst the chaos only to realize that there was more chaos about to arrive.

Each floor that the elevator passed dinged in a steady rhythm as it approached the top floor of the headquarters. Lena finished pulling up her hair and rolled her head around, stretching the sore, stiff muscles of her neck and shoulders. She grunted slightly as she rubbed a joint that certainly hadn’t enjoyed her impromptu desk nap.

“Just keep cool,” she muttered to herself, steadying her mind for what was to come. “It’s only one of Earth’s greatest heroes. And it could be nothing. Could be a test.”

That helped, a little. But the elevator kept climbing, and Lena let the nerves back in.

It was difficult not to. Fresh from Metropolis, Lena hadn’t fully unpacked her apartment, let alone figured out everything she’d be doing as Director. She hadn’t even met Supergirl, or really anyone other than her department in her first few months of work. She just dove right in, eager to help, and excited to learn.

And now alarms were singing and she still wasn’t quite sure what time or day it was, and she was almost certain the alarm meant that Supergirl was hurt.

“Or you’re about to let a hero die,” she remembered as soon as the lift came to a stop and the doors opened, once again bringing up her nerves in full force.

That was her peptalk as she thrust herself into the forray. Everyone was running around, orders were being barked out, and it was still before dawn, Lena realized, finally finding her way to a window.

“Thank you for getting here so quickly, Dr. Luthor,” the director of the entire agency greeted her, his face long and solemn as he walked past her statuesque figure.

Quickly, Lena skipped to behind him.

“Is it really Supergirl?”

“I don’t know much, except someone has come in contact with a new substance that seems to coincide with an alien we’ve been after.”

In the flurry of activity, Lena stood her ground and waited for everything to start, but once it did she lost her anxiety an let her brain take over.

Lifeless and limp, Supergirl’s body was brought to the prepared gurney while a hundred different voices began to explain things. Lena ignored them, lifting the hero’s eyelids and tracking movement with her flashlight.

She had a doctorate in biology, astrophysics, and chemistry, and never did she expect she’d be working on Supergirl. But she did. She quieted the crowd in a forceful way and took Supergirl to her lab, eager to isolate whatever drug or chemical was doing this to her.

Behind her, she listened to the director telling the other agents that it was under control, and to begin the real work of figuring out what was going on, that the world still continued and their job existed before Supergirl.

As the doors closed, Lena looked down at the helpless person on the bed and gulped, wondering how true it was.

“If you could not die before I figure this out, I’d appreciate it,” she mumbled.

The people came and went, never lingering for as long as they wanted, and instead forcing themselves to carry on with their work. Lena checked vitals and waited for the sunlamp to do its thing as she ran tests on the chemical and weapon brought back to her lab.

Slow, tedious work was her favorite kind. It kept her hands and mind busy, and the quiet was a welcome distraction from the pressure of saving Supergirl.

So involved with her work did Lena find herself, that she didn’t notice, at first, the waking of the hero. She sat right beside the bed and jotted notes down as results came back from her tests, but she didn’t notice movement until Supergirl coughed and grunted against the pain.

“I don’t have my powers,” she whispered, looking around the room as she got Lena’s attention.

“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked, quickly putting her things down and once again shining a light in the hero’s eyes. “You took quite a beating, but the sun lamps are helping with the healing.”

“I don’t have my powers.”

“They will be back within the next day or two. I’m running tests on the chemical you were attacked with, but without knowing the proper dosage, I’m not sure…”

Lena trailed off as she stopped fidgeting with the patient and met Supergirl’s curious glance. Furrowed brow and proud chin, the hero stared back at Lena as if she were the alien. The doctor felt her cheeks heat up under the intense scrutiny.

“I don’t know you.”

“Right, sorry,” Lena gulped and looked away. “Not much of a reason for you to come down to the lab, I guess.”

“Usually I’m out there.”

“I know,” she smiled before taking a big breath. “I’m Lena Luthor. Dr. Lena Luthor. I just transferred over to run the research and development division.”

“Transferred?”

“From Metropolis. I did my first few years working with--”

“My cousin,” Supergirl nodded and tried to sit up, though her body had other things to say about that.

Lena helped adjust the bed and the lamps as she continued.

“The new stealth capabilities and early detection systems were some of my projects. Got me shortlisted for this position, and then it opened--”

“You’re young. The last guy was like… old.”

“Probably why he retired.”

Supergirl snorted to herself as she smiled and nodded. They sat in a comfortable silence for a few moments, both as Lena did some diagnostic work with the machines and as Supergirl flexed and tried to feel any of her power. When she failed again, she sighed and tried to sit up again, this time with a little more success. She watched the doctor move around the room, entering things into her tablet and looking altogether too studious.

Lena felt the eyes on her, and she felt oddly exposed because of it. But she couldn’t say anything to Supergirl, and she certain couldn’t look at her.

“I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself sooner,” Supergirl finally spoke up. “I should get better at knowing who I’m working with.”

“You’re a busy woman. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“Sit back and stop fidgeting with the wires,” Lena shook her head as she earned a dopey smile from the patient. She found herself gently pushing very strong shoulders for someone who was no longer immortal.

“Let me start over,” Supergirl tried, sticking out her hand. “I’m Supergirl, and it is a pleasure to meet you.”

“Lena,” she slowly took the hand that was offered to her, grateful to no longer be touching a supersuit and the muscles beneath it.

“I’m glad you joined our team.”

“Wait until you see the portal replicator I’ve been working on.”

Before she could say anything else, a handful of grateful agents joined the pair in the medical bay, and Lena shrunk slightly to the side. She only caught Supergirl’s eyes one more time before she was suddenly back to work, only then realizing that her facade had slipped into something akin to human.

In under two days it was all done. Powers returned, as promised, and thanks to Lena’s ingenius reworking of the alien tech, the culprits were apprehended, and all future endeavors into alienating Earth’s favorite alien were halted.

From her perch atop the old City Hall, Supergirl ate her take out and surveyed the city as the sun set and another day ended. With everything wrapping up, she let her mind wonder back to the girl she saw when she woke up without powers, and how she didn’t mind working with Dr. Luthor.

When she asked around about her, she only heard good things. People were amazed by how her mind worked and the things she did, and the diligence to which she put into her job. She took on responsibility and she worked to do her part in keeping the world safe. It was all exceptionally admirable.

And there was also the problem of her smile.

Kara shook her head and ate another egg roll before leaning back and scanning the city to keep her mind distracted.

“Hey, Supergirl, we have some more of that alien technology that has been cropping up on the black markets,” Alex came in over the comms.

“Yeah?”

“Seems like something our Research team should investigate.”

Her ears perked up slightly.

“I’ll be right there. I should work this case. This is dangerous stuff,” Supergirl decided, shoving food into her mouth and dusting her hands off on her pants as she quickly stood, preparing to push off as she fumbled to gather her trash.

“I’m sure they can handle it, I just wanted to give you a hea--”

“No, no, I’ll help. All quiet here,” she insisted.

“Quite an interest you’ve taken in research,” her sister teased.

“It’s dangerous technology that I’ve never seen before. I need to be prepared for--”

“Yawn,” Alex feigned. “I’m going to head over to the labs and just drop this stuff off.”

“No! I’ll do it!” Supergirl insisted rushing off as quickly as she could.

“You’re a mess.”

“Shut up.”

Tired and a little sore, Lena stretched her neck and let out a tiny, unsatisfied groan at the resulting creaks and groans her bones made. With a sigh, she leaned forward on her desk and rubbed some of the tension with her fingers, digging into her neck in hopes of relaxing.

Long since gone, Jess left dinner sitting on her bosses desk, which mean it was half-eaten and pushed to the side in favor of more reports. They weren’t even fun ones. If anyone had told Lena that as Director of a department her job would entail lots of budgets, she would have declined swiftly.

That was almost true, she smiled to herself as she sat back in her chair. She was a fan of challenges.

Before she could jump back in to more proposals, Lena caught a movement out in the lab. She shifted as a familiar stock of blonde hair peaked around, weaving through the lab and looking into offices.

“Hello?”

The person who turned around wasn’t Supergirl though. She had the same color hair, and the same kind of face and jaw and when their eyes locked, there was the same blue--

“Sorry to barge in,” the agent managed, adjusting her glasses, pushing them up over the familiar blue that made Lena cock her head and stare. “I just… I didn’t expect anyone.” She cleared her throat. “I’m here to check on the results from the black market technology.”

“I didn’t expect anyone to be on this until the morning, Agent…”

“Danvers,” she offered quickly. “Kara Danvers.”

“Have we met before?” Lena asked, staring at the new agent, the staunch, button up wearing agent who reminded her so much--

“No, no, I don’t-- I just. You’re new, right?”

“You really remind me of someone.”

“Just one of those faces, I think,” Kara nodded, adjusting her glasses once again. “You might see more of me though. I’m assigned to the black market case.”

Lena just cocked her head and stared at the person standing in her office, not wanting to allow herself to believe the idea she just had.

“Shall we begin then, agent Danvers?”

An absolutely magnetic smile flashed across the relieved DEO agent’s face as she sat in the chair across from the Director of Research. Lena felt herself smile because that was all she could do with a smile like that.

[youareiron-andyouarestrong]

the princess rebel, pt. 9

@skitzofreak, thank @crazy-fruit for providing me the much needed kick in the pants to keep going! warnings here for implied torture, though nothing graphic or detailed. 

now, where we were? …oh yes, 

The Pit of Despair 

When Cassian opened his eyes, a few things became apparent: one, he was lying on a table. Two, he was strapped to said table. Three, he was definitely in some kind of cell, with tall walls and a high ceiling and a not particularly promising smell clinging to the air, metal and leather and caustic cleaning solutions, but something…unpleasantly organic underneath.

And four, there was someone to the side of him, tending to the wound in his shoulder.

His neck was free enough so he could turn to look, though his arms and legs were strapped down securely.  A man, with broad stooped shoulders leaned down to the side of him, seemingly paying no attention to Cassian’s now wakeful state. His dark hair was streaked with gray, and his uniform was definitely some kind of Imperial, but…someone low-ranking in the science division, judging by the dull gray bands over the chest.

Cassian took stock. Physically, other than his shoulder, he wasn’t in much pain. His mouth tasted spectacularly bad, but he’d been through that before.

Still, the being strapped to the table gave him pause before he got too optimistic.

“Where am I?” he asked, his voice hoarse, but clear enough.

“The Pit of Despair,” the man at his side rasped, almost croaking. “Don’t even think of—” he coughed, choked, cleared his throat before continuing in an much more normal sounding voice, “Don’t think of trying to escape. Forgive me. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to converse with another organic being.”

Strangely, the man didn’t sound smug or gloating. His voice was almost…kind, grinded down to nothing but sad and knowing resignation.  There was compassion there, strangely enough.

“Am I to be here long, then?” Cassian asked, figuring that since the man was talking, he might as well gather some information.

The man shrugged. “Until you are killed here, yes.”

Cassian fought down the automatic impulse to struggle, or lash out. It would only be a waste of energy. “Then why bother healing me?”

“The Director likes his subjects to be in good health,” said the man, a certain rhythm to his words betraying he had heard them said many times. “Before the…experiments begin.”

“So it’s to be torture then,” Cassian said flatly. The man looked up through the overlong gray bangs of his hair and shrugged, a tiny motion that confirmed it. “I’ve been through torture,” said Cassian and now the man looked Cassian in the face, eyes sad. He had…seen those eyes before, but the ones he knew were bright and full of fire, ferocity, light. The man before Cassian now looked as if someone had been carving pieces away of him, one bit at a time.

“You survived the Fire Swamp,” the man said as if making a great concession, “You must be very brave. But I’ve seen no one withstand the machines here.”

Cassian kept his mouth shut, his teeth clenching together almost audibly. The man smiled, a twisted, rueful thing. “You seem to seem to have more spirit than most who come in. So who knows. You might survive yet.”

There was a whirring, clanking noise from the other side of the table, which made Cassian turn his head. And despite being strapped to a table, almost certainly due for Imperial torture, his blood still ran cold.

An eight-foot tall Imperial droid enforcer, a KX unit, loomed up to the side of him, it’s long arms almost touching it’s knee joints. It’s blank, featureless face with enormous glowing optics peered down at the two men, somehow managing to convey it was deeply unimpressed and uninterested in the proceedings.

“Galen,” it said, mechanical voice crackling, “You should not be conversing with the prisoners.”

Cassian tensed under the restraints, the name going off in his head like a blaster shot. The man besides him—Galen—sighed deeply. “This is K2S-O, my…companion.”

“I am your guard and your caretaker,” the droid corrected flatly. “Not your companion.”

“For lack of anything better,” said Galen, a hint of bitter humor in his voice. “Forgive me, Kay-Too.”

The droid whirred, somehow conveying long-held disapproval. “The apologizing to me is ineffective and inefficient.” Then it stomped off, disappearing from Cassian’s vision.

“He’s not so bad,” Galen murmured, returning to Cassian’s shoulders. “Believe it or not, he used to be worse.”

Cassian kept silent. Galen peered into his face, face creased. “May I give you some advice, young man?”

“I don’t suppose I can stop you,” Cassian retorted. At best, the man was an Imperial torturer. At worst, he was a collaborator.

“Die fast and quiet when they interrogate you,” Galen told him gently, no louder than breath. “Or live so long they are ashamed to hurt you anymore.”

*

Time blurred. Cassian…not slept, but dozed, in fragmentary snatches as the stooped form of Galen moved around him, tending to his shoulder wound, moving around the cell, seemingly doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. The droid seemed to mostly lurk in a corner, never taking it’s optics off of Galen, or Cassian for that matter.

Cassian stared at the ceiling and ran code in his head. Code, ship schematics, names of beings he knew, the first ship he’d ever piloted, the first time he’d taken on the name of Fulcrum, no, wait, thoughts of Fulcrum led to Jyn.

Well…there were worse things to think about.

Jyn. Had she mentioned her father’s name? Had Bodhi? Had he misheard, or been mistaken?

No, no, he hadn’t been. Galen Erso. How many Galens could there be in the galaxy?

A maker of weapons, a scientist, an Imperial pawn, a collaborator—

Jyn’s father. The one she mourned as much as Saw.

Jyn. Now she was in the forefront of his mind, as clear and as complex as code.

He ran through the physical details in his mind—below average height for the typical human female, most of her weight was compromised of muscle, nerve and daring, she had the faintest trace of freckles across her nose, if you looked hard enough. If you were close enough. A blade she used like an extension of her own body.

It was a terribly inconvenient time to remember what it had been like, that strong, tightly muscled body pressed up against his, a blade sharp enough to cut shadows at his throat. And the memory of her eyes, clear and bright and blazing with the energy of the fight, looking into his. Her mouth had been an unexpected source of softness in that fierce face, the lower lip full than the upper, and her tongue had flicked out to moisten it—

From somewhere, a wall hissed and Cassian thought he heard a panel slide open. His thoughts were confirmed when the sharp, crisp bootfalls of an Imperial officer came close to him, only they walked like the rest of the world was in the way.

Cassian waited until the footsteps stopped besides his table before he opened his eyes.

Orsen Krennic’s smug face peered back at him, haughty and satisfied. He couldn’t quite maintain the air of cultured menace that Lord Tarkin did, or the sheer overwhelming terror that was a figure like Darth Vader. He was a man, Cassian thought, who was far too aware of his own shortcomings, and in his furious efforts to conceal them, only made them more obvious to the onlooker.

He could do something with that, if provided with the opportunity.      

“So,” Krennic began, no doubt about to being the “how worthless my opponent is” spiel Cassian had definitely heard too many times before, “Princess Leia insists you are nothing but a royal retainer, devoted and loyal, who brought her back from among the savage Partisans.” It took a lot more than that to make Cassian twitch, so Krennic persisted in this vein. “She says your name is José Ceniza, that you have been in her household your whole life, and she insists that you be returned there immediately.” Krennic gazed down at Cassian, with the smile of a man who knows he has a good hand of cards. “Of course, we looked you up in the records. Perfect background, immaculate. One would think you were made up, so exemplary is your record.”

Cassian still didn’t react. Mainly because he’d been trained for this, and mostly because he wanted to see what kind of reaction Krennic would have to his non-response, if he would continue to sneer and gloat, or become angry and begin the hurt. He seemed like the kind of man who would want a victim to show some visible response to torment.

Cassian kept his eyes in the direction of Krennic’s right ear, a little above it, to give the illusion that he was looking him in the face. He wanted to see if Krennic would notice this subtle little defiance and what he would do about it.

“We continued to search for the Partisans, of course,” Krennic continued. He had a tic, Cassian took the time to note, scratching his nails very lightly over the surface of the table, the subtle little motion betraying some inner thought. “Unfortunate, but they managed to elude us this time. Well, not for long, I should think. They are like vermin, easily exterminated.”

You are terrible at this, Cassian thought, inexplicably fed up with this posturing, this sneering. No better than a back-alley thug, only you wear better clothes.

“Well, no matter,” Krennic concluded, evidently ready to move on to more interesting venues of conversation, like Cassian’s torture. “Let’s begin.”

*

In the after, Galen tended to Cassian. He hadn’t even been hurt yet, Cassian thought, staring up at the ceiling. Only had a truth drug shoved down his throat and started to spout the most ridiculous, farcical things, about cooking and code and droids and math, because he wasn’t a goddamn amateur and knew how to divert things like truth serums into relative uselessness. Granted, his audience was now infinitely more informed about the proper method of cooking gherkins, and Cassian hoped they would be better for it. Once it had worn off and he could reel himself back in, Krennic had left, not irritated or annoyed yet, only contemplative. Cassian wasn’t sure which was worse. 

“Well done,” said the droid flatly, once Krennic was gone. “I found it most informative. Especially the section about all the differences in droid mechanisms and parts, according to make and model, and year of production.” “Did you really?” Cassian said, still not entirely down from the effects of the drug.

“No,” said the droid, still flat. “You made forty-five mistakes and sixty-three different miscalculations. I will inform you of them later.” 

“So that’s to be my torture then,” Cassian retorted, and bit the inside of his cheek, hard, to shut himself up already.

“It will be the truth serums, first,” Galen said softly, carefully cleaning the bandage on his shoulder. “Then he will list the names of all the Alliance spies ever caught and how they died. After, if you do not break by then, it might be the machines, the instruments.”

“Does he do it himself?” Cassian asked, deciding to forgo addressing the prospect of being faced with the names and deaths of his (alleged) fellow agents.

“Sometimes,” Galen said, his eyes somewhere else. He had that trick that Bodhi had, of sending himself somewhere else inside his head, of disassociating when life became too loud or harsh. “Or he will make me do it, or Kay-too.”

At the sound of its name, the droid raised its head. “It is a waste of my intended purpose to regulate me to a torture droid.” Unless it was Cassian’s imagination, it sounded distinctly resentful. 

“That’s his real crime,” Cassian agreed. “Improper distribution of resources.”

Galen stopped, peered into Cassian’s face. “Are you taking your situation seriously?”

“Yes,” Cassian said and shut his eyes, trying to sink back into that place where he knew himself, where he could control what he would or wouldn’t say. “I can’t not, can I? I’m strapped to a table, and some two-bit, jumped up, would be Imperial pendejo leers at me, awaiting my torture. I’m damned well taking it seriously.”

“This room is bugged,” announced the droid. “I would recommend against insulting Director Krennic too much, or he will almost certainly hear of it and exact some form of petty, ultimately meaningless recompense from you.”

“Kay doesn’t like the Director,” Galen informed Cassian solemnly, something almost like humor flashing across his face. “Then, one can’t blame him.”

“Why?” Cassian asked.

The humor faded as quickly as it had appeared. Nothing but bone stark weariness remained. “Krennic’s idea of a joke, I’m afraid. I am down here with nothing organic for company, and apparently, Kay-too’s model of droid was starting to get phased out of the production lines. The broken down, decrepit man with an outdated droid. No offense, Kay.”

“If someone only bothered to update me regularly,” said Kay-too pointedly, “I would not be considered to become obsolete.”

For one insane moment, Cassian almost offered to do some work on the droid’s code, maybe give him a few minor upgrades to his processer, maybe update his system—He killed the thought before it could grow.

*

Krennic came back the next day. Or so Cassian assumed. It wasn’t like there were only chronos or windows.“Where were we the last time we met?” asked Krennic mock consideringly. “Ah yes, you were giving us a fascinating dissertation on gherkins. Truly, an inspiration.”

Cassian did not deign to respond.

“Now,” Krennic went on, moving out of Cassian’s eye line, “let’s start with what we have.”

Cassian stared at the ceiling as Kay clumped around the chamber and Galen shuffled.There were ominous mechanical clanking, grinding sounds in the background. Cassian wondered what was worse, thinking about it or not thinking about it.

“You see,” Krennic continued, slowly pacing about as Cassian looked at the ceiling, “I’m well aware our mutual friends here might have told you what to expect from the next few days. Galen is kind-hearted like that. But for you…well, Mister Ceniza, I find myself feeling inspired.”

Cassian felt the table jerk and move under him. Kay was pushing it. Pushing it…where?

“You may know I’m rather interested in the nature of pain,” Krennic said, as a monstrous, hulking nightmare of a machine loomed up before Cassian.  Do not react, do not react, do not fucking flinch—

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Krennic said almost fondly, like another man might look at a sunset or a beloved’s face. Beloved, beloved, beloved, Galen, father of Jyn, Jyn, Jyn, Jyn—

“The work of a lifetime,” he went on, gazing at the machine. “Most torture machines are much more precise than this of course, but this…” he turned to smile down at Cassian. “I have it on good authority, the best authority, that this machine sucks away life force. Isn’t that so, Galen?”

Cassian went rigid, staring at the ceiling as Galen’s low rasp of a voice reached him. “It was only a theory.”

Krennic made a movement that might’ve been a shrug. “Well, this is for posterity, remember,” he said casually to Cassian. “So after, try to be honest about what you feel.”

Cassian closed his eyes. It was a useless, futile gesture, but he did it anyways. When his eyes were closed, he could think of the stars, the black, of Jyn, lighting up dark places. 

*

“Are you well?” Galen asked softly, after. Cassian still had his eyes closed. If he opened them and looked at Galen, he might do something supremely stupid, like chew off his restrains and gut him with his bare hands.

“No,” Galen murmured, “I didn’t suppose you would be.”The whirring, clanking approach of Kay-too made Cassian flinch in spite of himself. “Vital signs low,” the droid intoned flatly. “No other symptoms.” His voice sounded distinctly displeased.

“The work was not mine,” Galen said quietly, easing off wires and tape. Cassian felt his skin ripple and shudder under his touch, like the skin of a beast that was trying to cower away. “It was another’s theory,” Galen went on, “that…devising a device that could drain the life force out of a living being was possible. I only…I only tried to slow it down, the building of the device, but—”

“Do not justify yourself to me,” Cassian grated out. Galen went silent. “Do not stand there,” Cassian hissed, “And tell me another would’ve done this work instead of you. You built this machine. Do not fucking apologize to me for monsters of your own making.”

He had to stop then, and gasp for air, because even spitting that out at him took too much of whatever remained of his energy. He heard movement, shuffling.“Open your eyes,” Galen said softly, and there was some inherent rhythm to it, a father talking to his stubborn, angry child.

Cassian did it. He didn’t know why. Galen stood over him, a canteen in his hands.

“Kay,” he said softly, “tell him what’s in it.”

A brief whirring and Kay’s intoned, “Water.”

“Drink,” Galen told Cassian quietly, raising it to Cassian’s lips. “I need to support your head.”

Cassian let him do it. Cassian let cool, life-giving water slide down his throat, wet the insides of his cheeks, his tongue. Then, it was over, he eyed Galen, contemplating, just for a moment, spitting it back in his face.“I wouldn’t,” Galen said, still measured and quiet. “You need your reserves.”

Cassian swallowed the water. Then he did it anyways, a sharp, direct hit. Galen didn’t flinch.  “There was an eighty-seven percent chance of him doing that,” Kay informed Galen, barely helpful.  Galen reached up, wiped away the spit. Cassian braced himself for the near inevitable retaliation.

Instead, Galen bent his head still lower to Cassian, practically within biting range, if necessary. “The machine does nothing,” he breathed into Cassian’s ear, so low as to be missed by any hearing devices. “It inflicts pain, yes—it could not do otherwise. It could easily kill you. But it does not take away life force. Nothing can do that but your own soul. Krennic is too obsessed with power and inflicting pain to realize otherwise.”

*

After about what seemed to be third time Krennic came down to inspect the ongoing work, Cassian had had enough.

He’d been mocked, patronized, tortured. He had watched a man with no subtlety and no finesse hamfist his way into attempting to get the truth out of him.  And he could feel time continuing outside of this chamber, this pit, time that was going faster and faster away from him.

The whole time, Cassian had remained silent. Or as silent as he could. Not that it had helped, Krennic had pushed harder and harder, slowly and then more quickly becoming dissatisfied and impatient with his lack of visible response.

Upon seeing Krennic’s impeccably white clad form loom over him again, as he was about to undergo the machine again, Cassian allowed himself to cut a glance at him. “I’m ready to talk now.”

“Ah!” Krennic leaned over, eyebrows raised mock inquisitively. “Well, I must say you lasted longer than most—certainly it had been a challenge breaking you. But come, I am fascinated—what should we discuss first?”

Cassian rolled his shoulders, as best he could. “Well, for one—you are terrible at this.”

Krennic’s eyebrow twitched. “No, truly,” Cassian said, feeling almost cheerful. One way or another—it would be over soon. “Who taught you how to interrogate people? The sneering and gloating and looming. Because this is amateur hour. I know gangsters on the furthest Outer Rim planets who are better at this than you.”

Krennic stared down at him incredulously. From wherever he was, Galen was silent. “It appears,” said the voice of Kay-too from somewhere, almost thoughtful, “he is attempting to provoke you into ending his torture short by killing him.”

“And another thing!” Cassian practically shouted, morbidly gleeful. “You are wasting a perfectly good KX unit by leaving him down here. You could easily update his code and restore him to usefulness but you won’t because you’re lazy.”

“He’s right,” announced Kay, now sounding the most approving he had the entire time. Now Krennic was starting to look distinctly purple around the edges. “You’re lazy and hamfisted and unimaginative, and what’s worse, you’re so fucking blind and stupid that you don’t know your end when it stares you in the face.” Cassian felt his chest start to heave from exertion, from adrenaline. “The Partisan? With the stars on her blade?” He would not say her name, even now, in this pit, he would keep her free. “She is coming for you. And you will know your end.”

“Stardust,” whispered Galen from somewhere behind them and Krennic whirled, teeth bared.

“I should’ve let you rot,” he seethed.

A dry, rasping choke of a laugh came from Galen. “You already did.”

Krennic snarled and started towards the machine.“Start it,” he spat over Cassian’s head and there was no movement from either corner of the room. “I said start it!”

“No,” said Kay and Galen in one voice, and a huge, massive, dark form loomed up in front of them. “You are a waste of resources,” said Kay very decisively. “For the sake of effiency, you must be removed.”

“Useless—” Krennic yanked out a blaster and fired. The bolt went through Kay’s shoulder joint, and the droid staggered.

“No!” Galen lunged, the two men fumbling for the blaster as Cassian watched helplessly. There was furious struggle and then, the sharp report of a blaster going off. Galen staggered, hand pressed to his chest, face gone gray.“Now then,” Krennic got out, panting hard, “look what you’ve made me do.”  He moved towards the machine and slammed his hand down on a panel.

Pain shot through Cassian, furious and brilliant. He screamed then as he had never screamed before, the sound torn out of him by the roots. He was going to die, the world was ending around him, and for once, just once, he was not going to go quietly. He would rage and howl and scream until the stars shook from the force of it.

The machine howled as if in response to his own noise, and something shuddered and pounded, as if a huge fist was beating on the walls of the world. The sound grew so loud and terrible Cassian wondered if this was death already, come for him. Something huge and dark loomed up and smashed an iron fist into the machine.

The world went abruptly dark and silent, and then, so did Cassian.

[incognitowetrust]

Just some thoughts... lol it’s so late at night for me to be typing this dribble.

I find Murdoc Niccal’s a rather interesting character. He’s undeniably done a lotta awful shit... namely to 2D, but at the same time Gorillaz fans far and wide find him still very likable. 

By the way, I was watchin’ me some internets and I found dis. 

Something I’ve kinda thought about and come to realize, is I’d say that much of Murdoc’s success is from the fact that he’s flawed. Often as a society we have a tendency to look at characters and stars and idolize them, and I’ll admit it’s fun to worship a favorite character from a game or cartoon or whatever here or there, but it’s problematic when you look at famous people in ways where you don’t see them as human. We tend to see famous people as very distant from us, often either seeing them as near perfect or perfect, or the flip side of seeing pure negativity. 

I recall that something that Gorillaz has liked to do is defy genre, blur reality, and also, relating to this subject, “reject false icons”. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was intentional in the creation of Murdoc’s character, personally I find when I create characters I often do things by accident as I’m going along that makes the character grow even better, but Murdoc is a bit of a lesson and reminder to Gorillaz fans and other people in general that you kinda gotta take on every person as they are, and not get carried away, it’s good to keep yourself planted in the reality of acknowledging the complexities of humans. 

Something I also kinda wanna mention, is I’m reminded of like... people and their relatives. I’m lucky to have had a close family, or at least those who I consider my family. My dad’s dad wasn’t so lucky, his father was a shit parent, he drank and smoked a ton. My dad wasn’t physically abused or anything, but he didn’t live in a household where he could really show emotions or vulnerability. My sister and I didn’t have a relationship with dad’s father, I’ve met him, I’ve been around him a few times, but I don’t KNOW him because my parents just didn’t really want to be all cozy with him. I guess in adulthood my dad’s relationship with his father was better somewhat, it helps when you don’t have to live in a toxic environment and have options, but dad’s father drank and smoke almost his whole life, he finally quit, though not before a triple bypass surgery somewhere in there. Last year, he passed away. He got cancer, which spread. My dad had one last visit with him, and from what I was told, it was a good visit, the passing was easy, which for my dad’s sake I am relieved because I’m aware that it’s really the complex relationships that hurt the most when someone dies, because people are often left without a sense of closure. My dad took things well, and I am glad. 

Sometimes I almost wish I knew more about my dad’s father. One time he visited, and we were in a store together my dad would frequent often, it was a Hastings that has long since closed down. There was a figure that I really wanted (It wasn’t a figma, but a jointed figurine of an anime gal. Wasn’t familiar with the character, but I always had a fondness for the anime style, and figures and dolls). Dad in the past often would by my sis and I each a toy when we’d go out places, given it was in a certain price range. The figure was a bit too high for my dad, so his father chimed in, saying with a smile “If you want it, I’ll buy it for ya”, and he did. Not directly after the visit, but sometime when I was around my dad I remember he mentioned that his father may not have been the best guy, but one thing about him, he was always generous. Another time, I can’t remember what caused my dad to tell the story... I always get little stories here and there, and I treasure all these little tidbits because my dad isn’t always the easiest for me to read and I’m so much closer with my mom’s side of the family... Once my dad when he was a kid became upset when a fish that was intended to be cooked and whatever was dead (I can’t remember all the context, but it was like a fished fish and had been put in a cooler, and eventually died). My dad, being young and I guess always having been an animal lover and probably having been confused, his father sorta broke his common character, and they held a little funeral, they buried the fish, and his dad gave some words like “He was a good fish” and that little event of sympathy is something my dad has always remembered. 

When it comes to people I am more familiar with, I love my gramma and grampa (my mom’s side of the family grandparents), but I’ll admit that gramma can be pretty fussy, and grampa is often too laid back for his own good. Good thing they have each other, they kinda balance each other out. At least no one in my family now is like my gramma’s mother, over time I learned just how nasty and ill and nuts that lady was. However, one of my earliest memories has to be seeing my great grandmother before she died, I hardly knew anything about her, and I was so young at the time that when years later mom learned I remembered visiting her she was like “YES, I REMEMBER, BECAUSE I WAS HOLDING YOU”... memory like iron... er, anyway, I didn’t have the same grasp on life and death as I do now, so I wasn’t super sad, but I must have been shook to remember so much of it while being so young. I remember thinking I had never seen anyone so frail looking, and I really hadn’t at that age, thin arms, breathing thing in her nose, and she was so weak she couldn’t get out of that bed. Even if I was told all the stories about her I’d hear later in life, I don’t think I could feel hate in that moment. And still, while she was an INCREDIBLY difficult person in her time, one can’t call her 100% bad. I mean... apparently she made good doilies. 

Anyway, uh... yeah... Murdoc Niccals. 

I’m not gonna list off all the “good” and “bad” about him, a lot of y’all out there are already pretty aware of Gorillaz trivia I’m guessing.  

Eh, not the worst stuff for me to blab about before bed. 

Cheers. 

[sunderlorn]

Got tagged in this big long Describe Yr OC Meme by @chameleonspell because they love to make me suffer as they have suffered, toil as they have toiled. I am more merciful, which is why I am tagging no-one. (Also cos chameleonspell tagged most of everyone I’d’ve tagged anyway.)

GENERAL

Name: Simra Hishkari. Alias(es): Sim. Harmless. Flintfingers. “Hey, greyling…” Lonya, to his mum, but not for a while thank fuck. Gender: Cis male. Age: That depends where you’re reading, doesn’t it? Uhhh. He’s 11 in chapter one of part one, poking his nose around Senvalis’ shop and bothering the poor mer for paper. And now in part three, he’s recently endured his twenty-fourth birthday. Place of birth: Chiming Row, The Rigs, The Grey Quarter of Windhelm, Eastmarch, Skyrim. Spoken languages: Native Level Grey Quarter Dunmeri Patois. Fluent Marchspeak. A flexible range of Tamrielics, from the sort of versatile trade-tonguey Imperial Tamrielic you’ll hear at the docks of any major city, to something like the closest thing Skyrim has to a unifying language: an archaic version of Tamrielic with enough in common with all Skyrim’s dialects that it’s at least mutually intelligible for most people. Fluent House Dunmeris, with a few dialectic oddities picked up and understood. Relatively fluent Velothis. Some Riftspeak. Can curse a bit in Jel. Sexual orientation: Insert a withering stare and a question as to why it’s your fucking business. Practically speaking, bisexual. As in, he’s been attracted to men, women, and in the words of the warrior-poet Fred Durst, people who just don’t give a fuck. He doesn’t really have the terminology to parse that out in his own words though. Probably thinks of sexuality more in terms of activity than identity. Occupation: Murderhobo. Uhhh. I mean…freelancer. Currently, anyway. That is to say, sellsword, bounty-hunter, scavenger. Formerly? Semi-pro urchin. Carrier of heavy things on the Windhelm docks. Soldier-of-fortune. Prayer-scriv. Storyteller and sort-of-kind-of-sheriff at one point. Basically like a literal  accountant at another point too. Moral support to more qualified goatherds. Fireman — like, literally, a man who makes fires happen. Quartermaster’s assistant. Caravan guard. Itinerant herder and spokesperson of certain itinerant wisewomen. Bootleg performer of certain Temple rites and duties.

(This is long, so more under the cut.)

APPEARANCE

Eye colour: A reddish shade of amber or an ambery shade of red. Hair colour: Cinder-white. Height: About 5’10” (178 cm or s0). Scars: Oh god I literally have a fucking like reference sheet to keep track of all these. His Velothi harrowmarks: a hornlike curl out from the corner of his left eye, and a tapering line underscored for half its length with a series of dots, curving from the right edge of his mouth up towards his ear. A deep stiff scar through the left side of his lips, diagonal, from near his nostril to the beginning of his chin. A shallow horizontal scar across the side of his throat. A ragged starburst of scar tissue, in the muscle between neck and shoulder, just above his right collarbone and again at the back of his neck, from taking an arrow and having it pushed out. A flat diagonal stab-wound, on the left side of his ribs. A torn right earlobe. A straight raised scar up the back of his ribcage, on the left. A series of silver lines on the outermost three fingers of his right hand, where the joints meet the knuckles, and lightning-scar-looking traces following from those fingers over the front and back of his hand. And a plethora of tiny nicks and burns, mostly concentrated on his forearms and hands. Does a twice-broken nose count? Overweight: Nope. Underweight: At several points in his life, yeah.

FAVOURITE

Colour: Sea colours and shades of bronze. In clothes? Leather tones, slate greys, off-whites, neutral gloomy blues, details and decals in reds, silvers, copper, brass. Doesn’t tend to wear pure blacks or whites, or any particularly saturated colour — they spoil too easy. Hair colour: Statistics suggest red, though he’d be quick to insist it’s just coincidence, not, like, a fucking Thing or anything. Eye colour: Not red. Light-coloured eyes are weird and novel. Music genre: Weirdly he doesn’t enjoy music with lyrics all that much. (In canon, anyway — he’d feel differently in a modern AU or whatever.) Finds it distracting. They can be interesting, of course, but it’s not something that makes him happy hearing it. He likes stringed instruments with an emphasis on drones or echoes and silence. Things like the Tamrielic equivalent of qanun, koto, morin khuur, etc. Side note, but in modern AUs he’s definitely the sort of person who’s physically incapable of doing anything as mundane as laundry or tidying without putting a podcast on first. Movie genre: This is AU stuff, but yeah, he might talk a big game about being into Deep Penetrating Drama and so on, but he’d most often find himself watching the feature length equivalent of all you can eat hi-octane junk food buffets. Fighty action movies, particularly with an emphasis on melee combat. Finds revenge narratives particularly rewarding. Only genres he really considers himself a buff on though are samurai cinema and westerns. He’ll yammer at length about Anti-Westerns too if you get him started. (Don’t.) TV show: Hates the idea of having to watch anything live at a particular time. Fuck letting something as petty as TV schedule and section his life. Will gladly on-demand binge on historical drama, gritty travel documentaries, and twisty-turny political and intriguey thrillers. Doesn’t like cooking shows. Doesn’t want personality with his foodporn. He’d rather wait for the book to come out. Food: The Platonic ideal of Simra food is basically like soft starchy silky carbs with something sharp and heavily spiced on top. Rice porridge and preshta-jan, maybe with a raw egg stirred in while it’s hot. Fresh soft panbreads used to mop up redspiced mutton. Meat still feels like too much of a luxury to have often though, and he has a lot of feelings about vegetables. Pickled carrots, cucumbers, turnips, greens, green tomatoes, soft or crisp, spiced or just salty. Yams roasted in embers, smashed open, drizzled with spiced honey. Dried fruit is a particular pleasure as well, with a special place in his heart for persimmons and figs. Drink: Black tea of any sort – Nordic pine-smoked, Dunmeri fermented, light or dark, toasted or not – taken with sugar or honey. Alcohol of any sort felt like a luxury to be taken whenever luck offers it, back when he was a little younger. He’s got preferences these days, though whether he sticks to them is debatable and down to circumstance. He likes red and dark beers, biscuity flavours in the former, bittersweet in the latter. Hasn’t had either in a good few years though, and mazte compares oddly, to him — too starchy and sour. He once drank some Colovian grape brandy before he realised it was expensive enough that he really should have just sold it, and liked that well enough. He’s had actual grape wine once or twice and liked the idea of being the sort of person who liked it. He doesn’t especially like sujamma except in some freak cases – almondy and subtle vanilla-y wood flavours in that one bottle that one time – but he’ll drink it anyway because at least of all the quietly awful things Morrowind might offer you to drink, you have to drink less of it to know you’ve drunk it. He can’t remember if he liked mezga better or whether he was just less fussy back then. Book: Ideally he would have a larger foundation for reference than he does, but he doesn’t. Still, his basis for comparison has grown a little since he first learnt to read and first got covetous of books, so he does at least have some preferences. He’ll still hoard up and devour literally any book he can, good or bad, because books are expensive and serious business – even the cheap ones – but there are some where he’ll fall into impressed absorbed silence and others where he’ll complain the entire time. He has a thing for treatises on use of one sort of blade or another, not because he really enjoys reading them, or really because they’re very useful. Mostly they’re awfully written and opaque to the point of being very unhelpful. But that puts a sense of the arcane around them, doesn’t it? If something’s hard to read, it must be hiding something worth knowing. Simra reads, trawls, lives in hope that one day that assumption will prove right, but really the issue is that if you never check you’ll never know. Back in Suran he read a lot of pre-Red Year devotional poetry from back during the time of the Tribunal. That and poetry the old Temple couldn’t or didn’t censor and so decided was devotional even if it wasn’t. A lot of that was just wankery – tongue twisters for the brain, either thematically or in terms of its showy prosody – but you’d occasionally get the odd scrap of lyric that was just effortlessly well-turned. There was a third era Dunmeri poetess called Anthiss for instance, the printing of whose work the Temple officially banned which only stoked its popularity. It was only after she died – mysteriously, it’s worth noting – that the Temple lifted the ban and claimed all her work had been religious allegory all along, revealing a conflicted but truly faithful sole. Simra’s pretty sure that, no, she was just writing about her girlfriend the entire god damn time. Between that and tracts on philosophy, interpretation of scripture, hagiography…he enjoyed reading it all but in retrospect couldn’t say he liked all of it. At the heart of what he really enjoys unreservedly in books is escapism. Travel narratives – little holidays for the brain – they’re what put a glint in his eyes and a lightness in his heart without really having to try much.

HAVE THEY

Passed university: Nope, nor has he had any formal education of any kind, yet. Given my headcanons about the state of the Mage’s Guild, for instance, in the 4th Era, and other Imperial institutes of higher learning there aren’t quite as many opportunities for that sort of thing as there used to be. Not in the parts of the world Simra’s kept to so far, anyway. Had sex: Currently, not in a while.   Had sex in public: Define public… The tonghouse of the Dyer’s End Few wasn’t a premises as rich in privacy as it could’ve been, but I’m inclined to say no. Gotten pregnant: Please no. Kissed a boy: Yes. Kissed a girl: Yes. Gotten tattoos: Do scarifications count? If so, yes, facial ones. Gotten piercings: Six in his left ear. Mer have more cartilage than humans. One through the lobe of his right ear too, but that doesn’t really count as a piercing anymore — just a tear. Had a broken heart: Don’t ask. Been in love: Something like that. Stayed up for more than 24 hours: Here’s where he laughs in your face and says “twenty-four?” and kisses his teeth for two minutes.

ARE THEY

A virgin: Covered this. A cuddler: There’ve been times. Sometimes being close to someone’s all you want to fill your head with, your time with, your world with, and all you can do is do that. Not many times though. They’re more anomalies than anything else. Prolonged touching, or lengthy physical intimacy — he’s pretty averse. A kisser: Mouth-on-mouthy kissing makes him nervous. Half his lips don’t really work right and he gets very conscious of it. Makes him feel ugly, clumsy, exposed. Scared easily: Terrified, yes. He doesn’t exactly keep a level head on him all that easily. Jealous easily: Statistics would suggest yes. Worth noting thought that this is less in terms of seeing everyone as someone his lover might leave him for and so being possessive and shitty and more like he feels left out easily, left behind easily, and if he sees someone he cares about sharing some sort of positive experience with someone else, he’ll feel a sense of abandonment and sadness about it. It’s not an angry or suspicious feeling so much as a melancholy self-effacing one. Trustworthy: In what sense, exactly? Depends who you are, what you’ve done to deserve Simra’s trust or respect, what the circumstances in both your lives and their mutual conjunctions are, what there is to be gained from breaking your trust, or what there is to be lost by keeping it or sticking with you. Depends how strong Simra is at this point in his life. Uhhhh…this number of variables probably suggest that, Simra is not inherently a trustworthy person by nature. But that doesn’t mean he’s never loyal, or faithful, or worth putting your trust in. Dominant: Uhhhhh. Submissive: Fuckin uhhhhhh. In love: Right now? Fuck off. Single: And ready to mingle. (God can you even imagine.)

RANDOM QUESTIONS

Have they harmed themselves: Not with anything sharp. Thought of suicide: Yes. Attempted suicide: Comments on my fic suggest that a lot of what he does, accidentally or by choose, basically constitute attempts to die. Thing is though, Simra’s pretty much more terrified of dying than of anything else. Any attempts at straightforward suicide would be impulsive cries for help or lashings-out against feeling particularly helpless. The goal wouldn’t be dying. Wanted to kill someone: Wanting to sounds way more personal than he really wants to have to deal with. Appreciating the reasons for having had to do so? Fine. (Yes, yes, yes, but funny how the people he’s really wanted to kill are for the most part still alive.) Ride a horse: He regrets to inform you that, yes, he has ride a horse. Have/had a job: We’ve covered this. Have any fears: Ghosts and bones, yes. Death, or more accurately, ceasing to be alive and existent. Being maimed; no longer being whole. Blindness, deafness, muteness. He has a pretty primal flight-or-fight response to the idea of being caught out in any sort of lie. Oh, and he’s not fond of dogs.

FAMILY

Sibling(s): Yes, Soraya. Does she still count? Parents: Sambidal Dunsamsi Hishkari nas Mabudani nas Zainab, his babu, Windhelm dockworker and former adventurer. Ishar Dunsamsi Hishkari nas Nem nas Zainab, his ammu, Grey Quarter spellwright, seller of medicines, and former adventurer. Children: No. Pets: No. A cat might be good, but he’d get terrified of it deciding to abandon him, and would take it very personally if it was ever gone for very long.

[radvee92]

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