#and the composition!! all that dark empty space between them

[oblako]

absolutely obsessed with the visual execution of this part like are we all seeing this...

also these two panels:

[m3rricat]

You Do Not Have To Be Good - Ch. 2

Story summary: Four months after the defeat of the Netherbrain, Astarion finds himself stuck in the mire of his past and all the anger and despair that comes with it. While wrestling with her traveling-companion-turned-lover’s misery, Cat makes an impulsive decision that sets off their first falling-out. This post-game short story is told alongside the full in-game story of the evolving relationship between Cat (the not-a-bard) and Astarion (needs no introduction) which varies from canon. Told from both POVs.

Chapter Masterlist

Chapter 2: Cat finds herself at the dark heart of it; then, bite night re-imagined, in which Astarion accidentally gives almost as much as he gets.

Pairing: Astarion x female Tav

Chapter Content Warnings: gore, brief description of flaying

Word Count: 4572

Read on AO3

No matter where Cat stands in this heap of a city, she always knows where it is. It presses just barely on the base of her skull when she picks through greens at the grocer stall. When she winds through the market-day throngs on her way back home. When she lays her head down and tries to sleep—it tugs at her from where it squats to the east.

Cazador’s former palace is a certified ruin now. A strike from a nautiloid during the last battle had sheared through the roof of the main structure, disintegrating much of the dilapidated attic space and exposing the floors below to the elements. No distant relative of the Szarrs, if they still lived, had sought to claim it, and no one else seemed keen to try. Standing as it does practically within the wall between the upper and lower city, it is far too close to the unwashed masses to be at all attractive to anyone who could afford it. And so it sits, empty. Patiently moldering.

The structure haunts her subconscious because the horrors that were inflicted within it consume Cat’s waking mind. What an idiot she had been to think that Astarion had left it behind. At all. To think that he could just slough it off like dead skin and be reborn perfectly content. This past month it feels like she has been living with two of him, and neither the one stuck fast in 200 years of torment nor the one who sometimes manages to dig his way out is happy. More than wearing on her patience, it is wearing out her heart. Which makes her feel more guilty.

Because Cat knows. She knows that the place that makes you gets its claws in you, and they’re forever. She’s had a couple decades to learn to live with them. Most of the time she can ignore where they’re hooked into her, but now and then something will jerk them under her skin, and it all comes flooding in, like high tide on the marsh. And in all her senses she is thrown back there: the ubiquitous perfume of decay in her nose, and in her ear, the seabirds’ cries mingled with her father’s drunken sobs.

The past that dogs Astarion is not hers to claim. And yet, Cat feels it dogging her all the same. Dragging his mind away from the present, from her, more and more. She hates it with a sharpness that sticks in her throat. She wants it to manifest before her, for that sneering terror Cazador to re-form so she can beat him to death again with all the rage and despair that has built up like grit in her body since they had killed him. When she thought they had killed him for good.

Cat wakes directly from her fantasy of snapping the vampire lord’s skinny neck to find herself staring up at the pockmarked doors of his palace, grocery basket still hanging on her arm. The massive doors sit at crooked angles, half off their hinges, forming a slim gap only just large enough to slip through.

She doesn’t remember how her feet carried her here. How she must have veered from her weekly shopping run a good half-mile away to this ruin, which stands behind an abandoned guard post and wrought iron gate. Really, she should get back—she has some fresh crab in her basket that would not keep, and a composition waiting for her that she must make some progress (any progress) on, so she can finally bring some income.

Cat’s eyes continue to range over the blunt edifice of the palace. What gestures towards greenery the groundskeepers had maintained around the entrance were long dead. Four months ago, the only other time she had been here herself, the plants here were already withering. Because the master within had better things for his servants to prepare.

But she had seen this place, too, when it had been meticulously maintained with flowers for every season. She had seen it through his eyes that time Violet and Aurelia had dragged him back screaming his throat raw the morning he had been caught trying to save that one man from Cazador’s clutches. They had shoved him out of the shadow of the doorway to let the rising sun start the torture he would endure for as long as his master willed. He remembered seeing the colors of the flowers by the stairs, emerging in the dawning light as his extremities began to crack and crumble. There was one, a morning glory, which twisted open just as his eye alighted on it. The deep, almost electric indigo of it seared itself into his mind, and he clung to the memory of it when he was sealed in the smothering dark for that next year.

Cat wipes her eyes and plunges through the gap.

~

In Cat's dreams that night, the marshes are filled with blood, which is not unusual. But this time the metallic stench of it in her nose almost makes her wretch. She is about to wade out into the red-tinged blackness when she feels a prick on her neck. Her first thought is that a bird had alighted on her shoulder, that it's pecking at her—

Cat jerks awake. Something next to her jerks.

Before her mind can fully register anything, her body manages to teleport several feet away on all fours, like a spooked horse. The thing does not follow. It stays wallowing in the dirt by her bedroll which is laid outside tonight, Cat having to forego the shelter of a tent since they do not yet have enough for all.

Cat’s heart is beating clear out of her chest as she scrambles to her feet while her eyes adjust with her smidgen of darkvision. She peers at it. It looks like a mangled corpse huddled on the ground. Without warning, it groans. And then it speaks.

“Ca—at…please,” Astarion’s voice wheezes out of its throat as if through a punctured bellows.

The second thing Cat recognizes is the shirt. Those insipid frills that he so very casually leaves untied (revealing what? A pale, skinny chest?). Only half the shirt still clings to him—the right half is gone completely, torn off, and a good chunk of his right arm with it. Or—eugh. It isn’t a clean chunk of it gone. It has been gnawed on, bones crunched, splinters poking through the gore that remains. The whole thing hangs at a sickening angle from the few tendons that still connect it to his shoulder. Her eyes drag to his torso, which is black with blood, slashed to ribbons through his shirt—and then his face. She does not want to look. His one remaining eye glints in the darkness. The other side of his face is a red ruin, cheek torn clear through. Her stomach roils.

His mouth lolls open, revealing what she has been strongly suspecting since the beginning—fangs gleaming like a beacon amidst the wreck of his form.

Cat had of course noticed his pallor when they met. His eyes. That what little of his canines she saw seemed unusually long. But after he threatened and cajoled her on the beach by the smoldering wreckage, she had still decided to keep him on. Maybe wandering through clouds of smoke from burning, rotting ship-flesh simply did not allow one to think straight, but she vaguely remembers wanting to stick with other tadpoled folks for safety. And to observe them for early warning signs.

Astarion had been standing on that beach under a cloudless sky in the afternoon sun. That had to rule vampirism out. Didn’t it? Cat had put her questions aside, but evidence to the contrary continued to pile up day after day. They lived cheek to jowl, and yet she never saw food pass his lips. And on a couple early mornings, she had watched him saunter into camp and, on closer inspection, noticed a few rust-colored specks on his otherwise spotless self.

Cat has pondered what to do—clearly, if Astarion was a vampire of all things, he had decided to keep his feedings away from the group, which seemed to indicate he meant no harm. But before Cat could resolve on anything, her plan to get a quick cure from the Gith crèche was dashed by a squadron of Gith and a red dragon (mostly the dragon), so she scrambled to begin plotting a Plan B.

The animated corpse that is Astarion lurches toward Cat, startling her back to the present. A nauseating gurgle sounds from his throat. It seems whatever air was in his lungs has leaked out, and they are too perforated to hold more.

Cat shivers in her loosely-tied stays and shift against the chill of the night as her mind tries to wrap around what is happening, tries to decide what the hells she should do. Astarion flings his good arm out, levers on top of it, and tries to crawl. His face is canted up toward her, his mouth working wordlessly.

That is when she feels the tadpole tickle at her brain. After a moment it starts to thrash, sending a painful jolt through her skull down into her spine. She hears words in her mind, but they sound too far off to make them out. They echo, and then stop. Astarion continues to stare up at her, body trembling with the effort. Now his teeth clench in something like frustration. He bows his head. Then, with no build-up, the worm in Cat’s brain lashes ferociously, flinging her into the abyss.

Eyes. Red, glowing balefully. They are your universe. The impulse in your limbs, your dead brain. There is nothing that came before them. Nothing else that will come after. And as they commanded, you bite down with an unfamiliar mouth into a writhing handful of fur and bone and muscle. Your tongue laps greedily at the rivulets of blood you manage to squeeze—

—squeeze the scream from your mouth as your master unhurriedly peels the skin from your fingers, then fillets them to the bone as the flesh tries to grow back against the relentless violence, all the while murmuring praises for the sweetness of your sobs—

—sobs that tear from your parchment-dry throat as your mind tries to recall color, any color; it has been years, surely, that you have been in the close press of the dark, and you shiver as your splintered mind conjures up flickering images of the most vibrant blue-purple, so beautiful it must have been a dream—

—dream, no more than that, your mind so used to the leering stares raking across your perfect skin that will soon turn to pawing and groping and pulling and penetrating; the violations that cannot reach you, you tell yourself, not matter how deep they get—

Cat falls down and down, her mind catching on the random spikes of horror that stab through him like lightning. A handful are scenes so clear she shudders from the sharp immediacy of their feeling, but nearly all are mere scraps of images or sensations she cannot make sense of. The tide of deep, aching misery is ever-present.

Just as Cat feels she is about to hit the bottom, she braces herself. But the impact doesn’t come. She opens her eyes, finding herself on her own two feet. She stands in the morning mists of the group’s campsite from several days ago, on the cliffs overlooking the beach. Where Astarion had called her dour. He is in front of her, standing, looking east at the sky just starting to lighten. She does not stand in his place now, but she feels the tightness in his chest as if it is her own. The refusal in his mind to let himself hope for anything, but the inability to deny the joy he feels at seeing this for the first time his body can remember.

Cat steps towards him. He whips around—his expression quickly turns from wide-eyed wonder to narrow annoyance as he sees her.

“I need your blood,” he snaps.

Cat’s mind races. Blood? Why would he—and then she remembers exactly where she is. It feels like she has been buffeted through his mind for ages. But no, the real her was standing in front of chewed-up him somewhere outside of here.

Cat tries to form words. “But—healing. I’ll get Shadowheart—”

“No,” he retorts like a whip. “I need to regenerate—but this damn tadpole is slowing it down. I haven’t gotten enough blood, between the fighting and everything else. Please,” he says through gritted teeth. The crest of the rising sun throws him into relief, blinding Cat—

—the chill of the night and the bloody smell of Astarion’s body come rushing back as Cat opens her eyes. She has fallen to her hands and knees. Astarion is where he was, and he is looking back at her, but he can barely keep his head up.

Cat swallows. She tries to make her mind work. Despite his protests, Shadowheart should be able to heal him, surely? But then a thought occurs to her—but can healing spells heal him, being as he is… undead? She can’t recall if she ever saw anyone use one on him before now. And Shadowheart herself also said that her own powers have been severely weakened by the worm. And Astarion needs something powerful—

… Fine.

She sighs. This is about to top the list of gravely stupid things she has done in her life.

Cat half-rises, takes the couple steps to her bedroll, and sits down in front of Astarion. She looks at her wrist. It is the first spot she thinks of to... donate. But her head suddenly fills with visions of an over-eager Astarion chomping down on the delicate tendons and mutilating them, rendering her more useless than usual without the ability to perform.

Where else? Elbow? Same problem. Where were other major veins, close to the surface? She can only think of her neck. Gods damn it all to hell.

She hardens her voice as she speaks at last. “Fine. I’ll give you some. But take more than you need, or try to bite without asking again—and you’re done.”

Astarion can’t say anything, but Cat decides to take his blink—one eye, like a morbid wink—as confirmation. Now comes the messy part.

She is not going to lay down for this. No way, no how. So she goes about gathering him upright as she kneels on her bedroll. Despite how excruciating it must be, he doesn’t so much as whimper. Not even when, trying not to hurl, she picks up his ruined arm to keep it with him out of fear that the bit of his shoulder still clinging to it will give way. She moves it slowly onto his lap. Then she puts her arm around him, pulls him toward her, then decides to shift toward him instead after she finds that easier. In the end she holds him against herself in a sticky embrace.

Then she sets about maneuvering his head. First he lolls it to her left side. “N—nuh-uh. Not there. That side—that side’s for violins only,” she half-whispers. Her inane words almost makes her laugh.  Except they don’t, because what she doesn’t say is also he can’t feed from that side because it would leak out of the side of his face where he has no face.

So she lays his intact left cheek down on her right shoulder. She half-expects to feel his breath, but of course there is none. She’s holding a dead body, after all.

He just sits there in corpse-wrong stillness. She half wonders if he has, well, died-died. So she ventures, “Go on, then. Get this over with.”

The sudden tickle of his nose sends a shiver through her. It’s searching, sounding for the vein. And then the touch of his lips, almost shockingly soft.

Well, this is it, you stupid girl. This is when you have to fish or cut bait.

Her arms clutch at his back at the same moment his fangs slide so easily into her neck.

It’s like plunging into a cold ocean, but after the initial shock it turns to deliciously warm bathwater. She hears herself let out a moan that if she was in her right mind would have made her die of embarrassment on the spot.

But she doesn’t. Because all the tension Cat has been carrying for eight damn years is leaking out her neck with the blood. She feels fuzzy, like the edges of her are melting into Astarion whose attentions are getting more and more forceful as her blood wakes him up. There is a twinge of panic deep in her mind, but the signal from it is taking its sweet time hitting her consciousness. So instead she wraps her arms around him tighter, greedy for the irresistible comfort suffusing her body. She feels as if Astarion is melting into her at the same time, the sense of him as something separate beginning to tangle with herself. She sighs contentedly.

Cat doesn’t know how long it’s been when she finally feels the spark of fear surface, the flood of adrenaline as she realizes what is happening. Her first instinct is to wrench her body away, but Astarion feels very latched on, and she fears that if she tears him off he will come away with a chunk of her neck.

So she winds one hand in his hair and says as loud as she dares, voice cracking right in his ear, “Astarion, enough—”

His sucking falters. She tugs as sharply as she can with her weakening arm. “Off. N-now.”

He groans, and for a moment Cat fears he is about to bite deeper. But his jaw hinges open. He goes to raise his head, then sets his forehead on her shoulder instead, breathing slow and shuddering, blood dripping from his mouth.

Cat is hit with a sudden wooziness and sways, clutching at him for balance, setting her own head against his shoulder out of necessity. In the haze of her blood loss, everything seems barely real.

“Are you all better now?” she mumbles into his collarbone, suddenly giddy.

With effort, he raises his head. Cat tries to do the same, but her skull is still too damn heavy. She turns it against his shoulder instead, looking up at him. Her blood coats his mouth and his chin, black and glossy. Looking at it gives her a strange feeling she can’t place. From her vantage point, she starts to see muscle crawl back over his cheekbone and jaw, followed by a layer of pearly skin. Her hand raises unconsciously to touch the new cheek, but thankfully her sane mind intervenes in time to stop it.

“Y—you seem. Unruffled,” he manages to cough up. His face is blank as his newly-mended eye rolls down to look at her. Cat feels him stiffen under where her cheek lies, but he does not attempt to push her away.

“Oh, well. You’re not my first dead person—I mean,” she shakes her head against his shoulder. “You’re not the first dead person I’ve seen. May be the nicest-looking, though. Not so bloated.” She shrieks inwardly at her daft babbling.

He finally makes an expression, blanching. “Bloated!? I’m bloated—?”

“Nnno, you’re not,” she practically wails, jerking upright. She sways where she sits, her head pounding. “It’s—my mind is. A bit blurry. I mean not bloated. Not waterlogged at all.”

He glares at her as he shifts back and sits on the ground. Cat notices his arm. “Oh! Thank gods, I was worried about that.”

Astarion clutches it to him and hisses, “and it almost was as good as gone thanks to you needing so much hand-holding!  In my state I could barely control that damn tadpole to send you a simple message, and instead you—” He cuts himself off. His eyes rake her face. “What did you see?”

“Where?”

“Don’t play dumb. In my—head. I could feel you snooping all around before I finally found you. What did you see?”

The giddiness has fully worn off now. Cat regards Astarion tensed before her, looking less dead but still a mess. She tries to choose her words carefully, fighting the clearing fog in her head. “I—I saw a lot of. Of pieces. A few longer, but most were just snatches, things I couldn’t—” she stops. Starts again. “I can’t put it all together. I know he—Szarr was your master. Guess those old rumors were true, huh?” she mutters as the thought occurs to her. “You’re his… spawn, right? And he tortured you. Made you… eat rats.”

Astarion’s glare is still wary. “That is the short version. Yes. But you saw more than that. I know you did.”

“Yes,” Cat begins slowly. Astarion feels like a cornered animal in front of her, angry and terrified by turns. She doesn’t want to voice them, but… “Do you want me to tell you? What I saw?”’

He grits his teeth, looking away. “I—no,” he says bitterly, in the end. “The only thing worse than you seeing my memories would be to have you recount them to me.”

Cat is at a loss. Astarion appears to be as well; he still won’t meet her eyes. At last, she says, for want of anything better to offer: “Astarion. I won’t tell anyone. It’s your business, and I didn’t mean to pry.”

He looks up at her. The edge of his anger has abated slightly. But he is still irritated. “Well—fine. I suppose there’s little else I can do short of. Well.” He stops abruptly. Then something seems to occur to him. “And. I suppose I should thank you, anyway. For this.”

Cat quirks a brow. “You mean me letting a man I just found out was a hungry vampire bite my neck with no idea if I’d make it out alive? Yeah. Probably.”

“Exactly. There you go then,” he says breezily, waving his hand in dismissal.

Cat feels a prickle of anger, but it is somehow trumped by amusement. She snorts. “Gods but you are stingy. What the hells happened to fuck you up so bad, anyway?”

“Oh, it was—a bear. Set my sights too high.” He shakes his head, annoyed. “Like I said in my—my head, I’ve been starving. It’s one thing to live on rats when you’re… more sedentary. But all these battles day after day—what I could scrounge in the woods hasn’t been enough.”

“So you went after a damn bear?” Cat gapes. “Why didn’t you just say something to me?”

“Oh, you think we had something special, did you, bonding over Cazador?” Astarion retorts, spitting out his master’s name. “When you didn’t even know what he really was. Please. I had no reason to believe you wouldn’t kick me out right there. Or stake me.”

Fair enough. Maybe. Cat drops it and moves on to her next burning question. “So how did you manage to get away from it, then?”

“It,” he pauses, and something like embarrassment flits over his face. “it chewed on me a bit, but it seemed to decide I wasn’t worth the trouble. Ultimately.”

Cat grins. “Ah. I guess a vampire wouldn’t taste that good.”

“I’ll have you know I taste delightful,” Astarion snaps back, with a slight sultry lilt. Something in it triggers Cat’s brain to recall that memory—when he was… presented, and hungry eyes appraised him.

“What’s that look for?”

Cat blinks. “What?”

“That stupid sad look. I don’t want your damn pity,” Astarion practically snarls, his hackles back up again.

Cat tries to settle her face. “I… can’t help it. Anyone with a heart would.” His eyes burn with hate. It’s hard for Cat to keep his gaze, but she does, and says as evenly as she can, “but I don’t think you’re pitiable.”

“There’s no difference!”

“Yes there is! The fact that you still have your—your sanity after that? How long has it been?”

 He looks at her sullenly. “…200 years. Give or take.”

“Hells,” she breathes. “Not pathetic at all.”

Astarion shifts his seat irritatedly and looks away. He is quiet for a moment. Then he swings back toward Cat. “I still don’t like this. You know too much about me and I barely know a thing about you. Where in the hells are you from? This place where harpies abound and apparently bloated corpses as well?”

Cat’s jaw sets. After a few moments, she says, “on the Winding Water.”

Astarion clicks his tongue. “The river that’s five hundred miles long? More specific, if you please.”

Cat sighs. “The end of it.”

“The—oh, you mean the Delta?” he cackles with a jarring shift of emotion. “Oh, that explains the drawl as well. My dearest Cat, approximately how many blood feuds are you involved in right now? Ten? Twenty?”

He likes having something on her, Cat can see. She feels irritation at his sudden smugness. She might snap back at him with any one of a hundred things. But that would be conceding he had gotten under her skin at all—and Cat hates admitting defeat at the best of times. So instead she sits back on her hands and retorts with a pointed drawl, “Oh, darlin’. I know you can do better than that.”

“What?”

“Come on. Hit me. I’ll let you know if I haven’t heard it before.”

Astarion smiles with all his teeth and leans forward. “Well, that delicious moan you let out when I bit you made me think you might be attracted to me, but I now know that cannot be the case, sadly. Since I’m not your cousin.”

Cat smiles crookedly despite herself. “Better. Unoriginal, but better.”

“Tough crowd, I see.”

“Discerning.”

Astarion concedes with a nod. “Discerning. I shall endeavor to improve my material for you in the future, Cat of the Delta. Now, if you’ll excuse me—I look a horror, and I should probably wash off before we tell our fellows the good news in the morning.” He stands up carefully. Turns. His words were light, but his body is all tension.

As he moves, Cat’s eyes absently notice his half-exposed back. A partial wheel of a pattern drawn on it. Scars. A sensation flickers through her, one that had been a brief screaming flash—a careful, dragging slice near his spine, while the rest of his back felt as if it were aflame.

 Her eyes water with the echo of the pain. She looks up at him, a few steps away now. The impulse grabs her. “if anyone has a problem with you, they can leave,” she blurts out.

Astarion turns around. Looks at her silently for a moment. “Thank you,” he says at last, curtly, and then walks away in the direction of the river on the other side of camp.

[unround]

Renee Gladman. We Were Glowing Dark Inanimates, 2022.

And in all that time I was watching something still be still and something named be named inside a syntax that was the shape of a narrow channel; I was watching stillness itself sit in a defining stillness, in a radiant enactment of holding still and waiting, of being pinned and waiting, of being sculpted as something open and curved, something tapered and painted and stained and heated, something stripped and set to stillness, moving only when moved, still even when so, still even when. I was watching something be still even when moving and I saw a syntax try to carry it and felt space cut around it, and I saw the day unfold. I saw someone open the curtains, then close them. I saw someone pour a glass of something and drink it while pacing the light; it was another day of radiant inaction. It became a series of radiantly inactive days. You were being held inside and time had become something measured by something being drunk, and something pacing inside something solid and opaque, the wood of the house eroding but holding back the light and water of the outdoors, yet letting in the small animals, the varied insect life. And this was how still it was inside the narrow syntax that was the flow of something waiting being defined by its own curving, shaped by another, named by. It was in a holding pattern and was holding and being held by being named and was so still the day passed through it and light refracted off it and made shadows on the floor and on the back of the person waiting also, waiting to be named or renamed, waiting to mask or unmask, waiting to be safe or held, to breach the town, to cross the threshold of the door. Such that between the person and the stillness was a use not being tended to; each entity in that place had something it was becoming but also was still patterned by something it was leaving. You were never just new or just made; you came from something. I was a composite of elements and had been standing in front of the door for a long time, wondering what was happening in the world and to the world, and behind me were several other shaped elements forged from elements not present, and we were all sitting in a kind of ink—written on but also capable of writing. I wanted to be someone who could build despite rarely going outside; I wanted things that were teeming with darkness lit from inside, bright from non-knowing, and for these things to hold space and cut space while buildings were going up and days were passing. 

It was easy to turn around and see their stillness; it was impossible to catch them in motion. We were all expected to be in motion because that was how time moved and how success was measured: you were getting on an airplane, you were walking the streets of a city, you were meeting people in a bar, signing your name to things, you were racing through the night with your care and your use, presenting yourself to others, to another, everybody reading each other’s quick views—this is how I work, this is what I do—then walking off together. There was a lot of movement inside of something not moving. Inside the body waiting for the world was something radiant and silent. It was elemental and pressured for action; it was something ancient with something teeming inside of it; it was something named next to something teeming; it was teeming slowed by being named and put to care. It was a rounded rough; it was a hard, flat extended: it was fired and cooled and left for a decade. It was dug up and scraped then fired. It was something hard and curving; it was something ancient and set to use and was inside you. Dark glowing memories. It was something glazed. It had a glaze that made what was moving inside it still; things were happening on the exterior side of being a dark animate glowing. You were set to roam sitting inside something set for use. 

I picked up a ceramic cup and pulled from it until it was empty then replaced it. Everything was bright. I picked up a bowl; I picked up a wooden spoon and set it in the bowl; I placed the bowl and spoon onto a flat, smooth surface that stood twenty-nine inches above the floor then I sat down on something soft about eight inches below my bowl. I waited: someone was bringing something. Someone was cooking something to bring, so I waited with these ancient entities. I was an ancient entity borrowed by space for time. Waiting here, glowing darkness. 

I was waiting and time was unfolding, and I had a name that held me in place; I had my care and my use. I was something still sat inside something still, waiting for something hot. Someone was crossing the floor with something hot, and we were in a kind of choreography of objects revealing and suppressing their care and use. It was a strained and radiant inaction of elements fired and glazed into stillness but moving even so. It was a day of doing things with and next to objects that were fired and glazed, that were sanded and scraped and painted. Everything I picked up I also counted. Everything was clay; everything was iron. There were rims and handles all over the world, too many to count. Everything was glass: there were flutes and bubbles; there were cracks and sealant. Everything was marble. Things were slightly amethyst in color. Everything was wood; everything was ivory. Things had come through silver. Everything was bronze. It was a collection of pressures. Everything was cast; everything was set to mold, was curved and molded, and as the elements were bent to care something went quiet in everything. You couldn’t have some parts of the space be quiet without other parts taking on quiet, too. You couldn’t be animate among inanimate entities and be at your fullest: you had to wait for the world; you had to write and wait and take on names in this choreography. I agreed to live among the things I put to use and saw where I went still around them. I said it in a poem. I said it in a drawing. I said it in the shirt I wore. I could tell the difference. I knew when it was an ancient entity and when it was new construction. I waited for the iron to ring. I hit the tuning fork against the clay pot. I called out “pen, pen, brush, pencil, pen” as I moved my eyes across my desk. The months never passed fast enough: you crept out after dark to walk the driveway. I came back in and said “eraser”—I’d forgotten it. I said “paper, paper, wood, table, wood.” I said, “pigment, metal, metal, metal.” Nothing moved. I sat at the long expanse and said, “hot, hot, warm, hot” and needed something cooling. Blueberries were objects. They sat in the ancient entity. I said, “bowl.” I said, “bowls” and “cupboard.” It was getting late. The wine had been chilling. I said the syntax of the thing: “Let’s pour the wine in the glass”; “Let’s put the plates on the table.” 

These were wares. This was their use. Yet emptying a glass of the wine it held brought the glass no closer to me than did my saying “glass” or having a thirst for the wine in the first place. We were glowing dark inanimates, straining on our respective stages, and this was grammar. This was what was left of being gathered. This was attention and consumption. This was the back of, the through, the still. This was what curved, what rimmed and covered. The glaze made me glow and become very slightly amethyst in color and begin to see other things go amethyst around me. I saw amethyst in the line between the town and the door, amethyst around the windows, on the lampshades, coating the filaments, amethyst on the stairs leading to the loft, amethyst in the vessel by the bed, in lying down to rest, in counting mornings. 

[jakesealblackhangar]

Jake Seal Black Hangar Reveals the Secrets to Building Suspense in Film

Suspense is a powerful tool in filmmaking, and few understand this better than Jake Seal Black Hangar. His mastery in creating tension keeps audiences on the edge of their seats, eagerly anticipating what happens next. Here, we delve into the techniques and insights he shares for building suspense in film.

Understanding Suspense

Suspense is the emotional state of anticipation and anxiety regarding the outcome of certain events. It's the glue that keeps viewers glued to their screens, hearts racing, as they wait to see how the story unfolds. Jake Seal Black Hangar emphasizes that effective suspense is not just about shock or surprise; it's about engaging the audience's imagination and emotions.

Key Elements of Suspense

1. Strong Characters

Jake Seal Black Hangar asserts that the foundation of suspense lies in well-developed characters. When viewers are invested in the characters, their fates become crucial to the audience. Seal believes that building deep, relatable, and complex characters helps viewers form emotional connections, making them care about what happens next.

2. Strategic Use of Information

One of Seal's primary techniques is the strategic use of information. By controlling what the audience knows and when they know it, filmmakers can manipulate emotions and build anticipation. Providing viewers with more information than the characters have can create dramatic irony, where the audience anticipates the impending danger the characters are unaware of.

3. Pacing

Pacing is crucial in maintaining suspense. Jake Seal Black Hangar emphasizes the importance of a well-balanced rhythm of storytelling. Alternating between moments of calm and intense action keeps the audience engaged. This ebb and flow prevents predictability, ensuring that the viewers remain on the edge of their seats.

4. Sound and Music

Sound and music play a significant role in building suspense. Seal highlights how the right audio can amplify emotions and create an atmosphere of tension. Subtle sound effects, sudden silence, or a well-timed musical score can heighten the sense of unease and anticipation.

5. Visual Techniques

Visual storytelling is another essential aspect. Jake Seal Black Hangar points out the importance of camera angles, lighting, and composition in creating suspenseful scenes. Techniques like close-ups, shadows, and rapid cuts can intensify emotions and direct the viewer's focus, building tension effectively.

Crafting Suspenseful Scenes

Setting the Scene

Seal advises that the setting is more than just a backdrop; it’s a character in itself. A well-chosen location can add layers of tension. Dark, confined spaces often evoke feelings of claustrophobia and fear. In contrast, an open, empty landscape can create a sense of isolation and vulnerability.

Building Tension Gradually

Gradual buildup is key to sustaining suspense. Jake Seal Black Hangar suggests that suspense should be built incrementally. Start with small, seemingly insignificant details and gradually introduce more significant threats. This slow buildup keeps the audience invested, with a growing sense of dread.

Use of Cliffhangers

Cliffhangers are a classic technique to maintain suspense. Ending scenes or sequences with unresolved conflicts or unanswered questions compel viewers to keep watching. Seal believes that well-placed cliffhangers can be incredibly effective, provided they are not overused.

The Psychological Aspect

Jake Seal Black Hangar also delves into the psychological elements of suspense. Understanding human psychology is crucial for creating believable and engaging tension. The fear of the unknown, the dread of impending doom, and the anxiety of making decisions under pressure are all psychological triggers that can be exploited to build suspense.

Learning from the Masters

Seal recommends studying the works of suspense masters like Alfred Hitchcock, known for his meticulous attention to detail and ability to manipulate audience emotions. Observing how these filmmakers create and maintain tension can provide invaluable insights and inspiration.

Conclusion

Building suspense in film is an art that requires a deep understanding of storytelling, psychology, and technical filmmaking skills. Jake Seal Black Hangar's insights highlight the importance of character development, strategic information control, pacing, sound, visuals, and psychological manipulation. By mastering these elements, filmmakers can create compelling, suspenseful narratives that captivate and thrill audiences.

[makemywebsite1]

Typography in Web Design: All You Need to Know

Readability

Readability in typography refers to how easily and comfortably text can be read and understood by the audience. It is crucial for an effective user experience and one factor which comes at the core of web design in Perth.

● Use an appropriate font size that is neither too small nor too large. It should be legible without causing strain to the reader’s eyes.

● Optimal line spacing, also known as leading, allows for comfortable reading by providing enough vertical space between lines. Avoid overcrowded or tightly spaced text.

● Ensure sufficient contrast between the text and background to enhance legibility. High contrast between light and dark elements improves readability.

● Select fonts that are clear and legible, especially for body text. Sans-serif fonts are generally easier to read on digital screens, while serif fonts may be suitable for headings.

Hierarchy

As a team specialising in web design in Perth, we understand how far content hierarchy goes towards creating a navigable website. Hierarchy in typography refers to the visual arrangement of text elements to indicate their relative importance and establish a clear order of information. It involves using techniques such as font size, weight, style, colour, and spatial placement to differentiate headings, subheadings, and body text. By creating a hierarchy, you guide users’ attention, make the content more scannable, and help them navigate through the information more easily. Establishing a clear hierarchy enhances the readability and overall user experience of a website or design.

Consistency

Consistency in typography refers to maintaining a uniform and cohesive visual style throughout a design or website. It involves using consistent typographic elements, such as fonts, font sizes, colours, and styles, across different sections and pages. Whenever you engage with web design in Perth you have to adopt consistency to create a uniform brand image across all platforms.

● Consistency creates a harmonious and polished look, providing a sense of unity and professionalism to the overall design.

● Consistent typography reinforces brand recognition and helps establish a strong brand identity. It ensures that your design aligns with your brand’s values and personality.

● A consistent web design in Perth enhances user experience by reducing cognitive load. Users become familiar with the typographic patterns and can navigate the content more easily.

● Consistent font choices, sizes, and styles improve readability and legibility, as users can recognize and follow the typographic hierarchy and patterns consistently.

Whitespace

Whitespace, also known as negative space, is the empty or unmarked area between design elements, including text, images, and other graphical elements. It is the absence of content or visual elements in a design. It can be a blank space or a neutral background that separates and provides breathing room between different elements.

● Whitespace helps improve the visual clarity and organisation of a design by creating separation and defining relationships between elements. It allows the viewer’s eye to focus on important content and reduces visual clutter.

● Ample whitespace around text improves readability by providing a clear visual separation between lines and paragraphs. It enhances legibility and reduces eye strain, making the text easier to read.

● Whitespace is essential for achieving a balanced and harmonious composition. It helps distribute visual elements evenly and creates a sense of equilibrium in your web design in Perth

● By isolating specific elements with whitespace, you can draw attention to them and create a focal point. Whitespace can help highlight important content, calls to action, or key messages.

● Strategic use of whitespace often conveys a sense of elegance, simplicity, and sophistication in design. It can create a sense of luxury and sophistication, giving the design a polished and professional appearance.

Pairing Fonts

Pairing fonts involves selecting and combining different typefaces in a design to create a harmonious and visually appealing composition. Using multiple fonts that go well with each other can take the aesthetics of your web design in Melbourne up a notch.

● Choose fonts that have contrasting characteristics to create visual interest and differentiation. Combining serif and sans-serif fonts or mixing different weights and styles can create a pleasing contrast.

● Select fonts that have complementary styles and personalities. Consider the overall mood and message of the design and choose fonts that align with the desired tone, whether it’s formal, playful, elegant, or modern.

● Establish a clear typographic hierarchy by selecting fonts that differentiate headings, subheadings, and body text. Ensure that the chosen fonts are legible and readable in their respective sizes and styles.

● While contrast is important, there should also be a sense of coherence and harmony in the font pairing. Look for subtle similarities in letterforms, proportions, or stylistic elements to create a cohesive visual connection between the fonts.

● Avoid using too many fonts in a single design. Limiting the number of fonts to two or three helps maintain simplicity and prevents visual clutter.

Accessibility

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) governs web design in Perth and lays down certain recommendations for making digital content more accessible. Your font choices should prioritise legibility, readability, and inclusive design principles to ensure that individuals with visual impairments or reading difficulties can comfortably perceive and comprehend the text.

● Use fonts with a clean and straightforward design with clear distinctions between letterforms. They avoid excessive decorative elements or overly stylized features that may hinder readability.

● Optimal character spacing, also known as letter spacing or tracking, is crucial for legibility. There should be sufficient spacing between characters to prevent them from appearing cramped or overlapping, which can improve readability, especially for individuals with visual impairments.

● The x-height refers to the height of lowercase letters in relation to uppercase letters. Accessible fonts often have a slightly larger x-height, which improves readability by providing more prominence to lowercase letters, as they are typically read more frequently than uppercase ones.

● Including a range of font weights (e.g., light, regular, bold) and styles (e.g., italic) can provide flexibility and allow for visual emphasis or differentiation within the text. This can be particularly useful for conveying hierarchy and organising information.

Conclusion

Remember, effective typography enhances the overall user experience and makes your website more visually appealing. By considering factors like font selection, readability, hierarchy, consistency, responsiveness, whitespace, accessibility and loading speed you can create an engaging and user-friendly website. If you have been considering all these elements and choosing the right typography elements is no easy feat, connect with our web design experts in Melbourne at Make My Website. We will help you make the right font choices amongst other web design elements and help you build a fully functional and optimised website.

[mi6011joelturnbull]

Shot 3

Render one - This first render is with the same composition as my storyboard. I think I could improve this shot further by changing the lighting of this shot to something slightly brighter as a lot of the scene is already very dark. 

Render 2 - This is a second render of the same environment from a different angle this time. I plan on having the camera look around the scene so I wanted to test out what can be seen from different angles. 

To improve this shot I plan on moving the factories closer to fill the empty space between the houses and them. Also replacing the lighting to something brighter and bringing in a background. 

My shot is made up of three key assets being: the houses, roads and factories. This time around I decided to change the way I created these as in my first village shot I created very high poly assets which ended up slowing down production as Maya was running slower then it should be. Therefore with a more optimised scene like this one not only will Maya run faster but it will also reduce the render times of my final animation. 

This is a image of the scene with all three of the assets placed in. I decided to add lots of factories round the outside of the houses so that when the camera pans around to look through the scene theres always something going on. 

After having built the scene I then imported it into my main Maya file along with the other two environments. 

I then animated a quick camera move transitioning between the two environments. 

From here I plan on working on the camera animation more and beginning to simulate a crowd walking through these environments.

[kangaracha]

DEAD EARTH, DISTANT STARS

---

The earth feels strange beneath their feet. 

There’s a moment, a week after they find their home, when a girl sits in a car and panics – face red, chest heaving, voice screaming panic, the kind of panic that fills the air and chokes you down with it (FEAR: an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm. CONCERN: anxiety; worry).

She’s claustrophobic, a forgotten face explains, their voice lingering in the space between their minds.

We are the opposite, A-spen tacks on to the end of the statement, staring up towards the sun.

A list of problems springs to mind; logical, ordered thought. It feels like home again, until the stream of chaotic babble follows it down their throat, choking out any reasonable understanding they’d previously reached.

THE EARTH IS TOO WIDE.

The earth is perfectly unilateral, and smaller than sixty percent of known planets. There’s no walls, no centre, no ring to walk around. There’s no end out here!

THE SUN IS TOO HOT.

Too bright, too warm, and the moon shines too, and there is no such thing as darkness! Ninety percent of planets have moons and all of them have a sun. Space is cold and dark and lonely, and maybe it just takes time to unlearn that. Or maybe this place is going to slowly cook until it erupts.

THE EARTH IS DEAD.

Fundamentally untrue. It is warm from the sun but not its own life, and it does not hum a lullaby in the half-dark nights when you can’t get to sleep. The earth doesn’t care if you can’t sleep. Planets don’t care about anything. A planet is a celestial body in orbit around a star, not a sentient rock. Where did you learn that, grade four chemistry? Chemistry is the study of the composition and the physical and-

THIS DOESN’T FEEL LIKE HOME.

What is home? What is home? What is home?

What is home?

What is home?

There’s a memory, far back in the corner of their open minds and blurred and bleached with time, of a place called home. It’s from an age before the spark is strong enough to reach out and touch their collective mind, or passed down from another generation long ago; but it’s there; sultry skies and wide-branched trees, sandy loam and reedy plants tangled around their knees. 

Their mother smiles as she calls out to them – their father tries, but only half of his face curves and creases. The other half sags, the skin anaemic and blotched with patches of grey that glitter silver in the light of the blue sun. 

They don’t remember what this place is called, or the city that shines around it, clogging up the sky. Only the spark keeps the father’s face from slipping away into oblivion; when the mother talks, the ship’s disembodied voice comes out of her mouth. 

Is this home? It is dead and gone, a lifeless husk somewhere out there in the stars, and they remember the ships launching better than they do that place or those people (if it is even their memory at all).

HOME:

One’s place of residence.

A familiar or usual setting.

The social unit formed by a family living together.

“Mothership,” they whisper, and the familiar light of the warp point wraps around them and lifts them away into the ether.

“A-spen,” the ship says, her voice echoing down the empty halls. “What are you doing here?”

“I have a question,” A-spen answers, their feet carrying them unbidden to the heart of the ship. Soft light precludes them, blinking to life several steps ahead so that their way is always lit.

“Well, I will try my best to answer it – but shouldn’t you ask your new friends, if you need help?”

“I’m…not sure that they can help.” The door to the central controls of the ship slides open, the lights blooming to life. “They can’t understand the nature of the problem.”

“Your old friends, then. A-lan is always sensible, and you know how A-li can surprise us when things are going wrong.”

A wry smile twists at their lips, their hand trailing along the edge of the control unit as they walk a lap of the room. “I already tried asking them. They couldn’t help.”

“Well, if it is that desperate…”

They stop halfway around the room, frozen between the ship’s controls and the blurred view of Seabrook through the window. Silence presses in from every side; suddenly, they realise that the ship is empty, devoid of all life, an obsolete machine left to rust by a people that no longer require its assistance.

“What is ‘home’?” they ask the still air and the hum of the engines, the houses far below and the stars that shine so far away they’re not sure if they can hear them anymore.

“Home?” The ship sounds surprised, her audio rendering up and then down again. “Well, home is the place that you live in. The place where you most belong.”

“How do we know that Seabrook is our home?”

“Are you sure the humans can’t help you? I’m just a lonely mothership, you know.”

A-spen sighs. “I think this is our home. You are, I mean. We don’t fit on this planet.”

“It’s only been a week, A-spen. How can you be so sure?”

They start walking again, around and around and around. “It doesn’t feel right. The ground is all hard and cold, and the sunlight bites, and there’s water everywhere? And the air moves so much, and there’s all these strange…things around everywhere, and the people are-”

“That’s just what a planet is like. Are you okay, A-spen? I’ve never heard you complain like this before.”

They stop in their tracks, their thoughts coalescing from a jumble into one single strand. “Oh,” they say suddenly, somewhat stilted. “There’s something wrong with me.”

For several seconds, there is silence. “Mothership?” they question tentatively, almost afraid to ask.

“Sorry,” the ship responds. “I was just shocked by what you said. Why would something be wrong with you?”

“Because everyone except me loves this planet,” they say, resisting the urge to grit their teeth and stomp their feet and put a fist through the glass screens that fill the room (fear flashes at the unfamiliar feeling – what is this? Rage? Grief? A lump settles in their throat as the claws of fear rake down their back, tears welling unbidden in their eyes. They blink it back and swallow it down before it can overtake them).

“Or are they just hiding it, like you are?”

A-spen frowns at the floor, their feet beating out their familiar path. “What do you mean?” 

The ship goes to all the effort to sigh out loud. “None of you have ever lived on a planet before. Are you sure that no one else is uncomfortable?”

“Well, maybe…A-li has been very hostile recently.”

“And?” 

“And A-lina was hiding from us the other day.”

“And?”

“And A-mir can’t sleep. He was up all night last night.”

“Therefore…”

“I’m not the only one?”

“Exactly!” The ship sounds smug, like she’s proud of herself and the point she feels like she’s proven.

A-spen still isn’t convinced, face twisting into a frown. “Or this isn’t the right planet for us.”

“Oh, for heaven’s – what else are you going to do, A-spen?”

They shrug. “Go somewhere else?”

“Oh hell no.” The ship laughs at them – loud and mocking enough that, just for a second, they are glad that the ship is empty in a way it never has been before. “I’m not taking you anywhere. You belong here, and you will give it more than a week before you decide to leave all your friends and family behind and run away!”

“But you’re my family too,” A-spen argues hands curling into fists at their sides. “You raised us! And now you’re just going to leave us here, whether we like it or not?”

“I am your mothership, not your mother. And I can’t keep you forever. Eventually, you have to go and live a life out there, without me.”

“What if I don’t want to leave you?” Their chest tightens like they can’t breathe, their body stiff and yet unsteady at the same time. “What if we can’t live without you?” 

A long suffering sigh escapes from the speakers around them. “Now you’re just saying things. This planet is more than suitable for you. For all of you.” 

A long silence stretches past her words. A-spen doesn’t know what to do with it; do they allow it to go and on and on, until they are forced to accept the things they cannot change? Continue fighting, the way their ancestors strove so ardently to avoid? Walk away, and commit themselves to this life that feels wrong, the way the wind and the sun and the turn of the earth under their feet does?

It doesn’t matter if they’re all adjusting to this new planet; only if A-spen is. Will they ever feel normal here? Will this nagging feeling in the back of their brain ever go away, or will it just stay, like the memories stay, and their people always stay, and these hopes and dreams and things that they shouldn’t be feeling—

Will stay. Forever. Because this is how people live on this place called earth.

“I don’t know if I like this planet,” A-spen says finally, their voice too small. The room around them feels too big, without the others to help fill it. This planet feels too big, too full of life. And the life itself - there’s so much variety, between the humans and the monsters and the endless things that hide in the dark-

“It’s not going to be perfect,” mothership says, softer now. “But things are not so hopeless, A-spen. You’ll learn to enjoy it, in time.”

They nod, eyes flickering down and tracing the outlines of buttons and levers they wished they never touched. Maybe if they had never reached for the stars, they wouldn’t have gotten trapped within them.

“You can make any place a home.”

---

shoutout to @keepswingin for helping with the end of this, you're my fave

[hyungieyoongi]

See You

Pairing: Professor!Hobi x Professor!Reader

Genre: Enemies to lovers + fluff + angst + Hobi and Reader have some personality conflicts at work but should really just make out or something and stop acting like they dislike each other + this entire fic is inspired by Hobi’s look in that gum commercial I mean he screamed professor with that turtleneck and plaid blazer (thank you @moon-write​ for encouraging this vision)

Word Count: 3.2K+

---

“No, no, please tell me you’re joking,” you groaned, eyes scanning over the classroom assignment list posted on the faculty board in the hallway over again, hoping you were seeing things wrong. A third look at the paper confirmed that your fears had in fact come true – you and Hoseok were teaching next door to each other the entire fall semester.

Hoseok was the History of Dance Professor in your department. He was hired at the beginning of last year, three years into your career as one of the youngest faculty members in the Music & Arts program at your university. While he was bubbly and energetic, you were the more typical academic – down-to-earth, a little bit serious. He was beloved by his students for his positive personality and passion for teaching; you were well-regarded as being a natural talent who wanted to hone your students’ abilities.  

It wasn’t that your students didn’t like your course. No, it was well-reviewed and relatively popular considering it was an elective. But once Hoseok arrived, you felt like you were competing with the star of the program. Every student, even the ones who didn’t like dance, were lining up for his course, pushing your class and others into smaller classrooms with dwindling numbers. He, of course, got the large lecture hall this year.

He was the pain in your side, constantly flashing his bright smile to get his way in the department, dazzling your colleagues. Students would often be buzzing in the hallways about how they didn’t have to take an exam in Professor Jung’s class like they did in Professor Y/L/N’s. They got to go to a local show instead and analyze the dance performance. Hoseok was creative and intelligent – that much you could agree with – but you rolled your eyes every time you saw another one of his students attempt to flirt with him.

Hoseok and you figured out you got on each other’s nerves pretty quickly. He would always play music too loud in his office while you were grading papers – he timed how long it took you to show up at his door to tell him to turn it down every afternoon. You would make it a point to have your students play samples of their pieces they’d written on the piano while he was in the middle of a lecture, leaving your classroom doors open so the notes of the instrument would float down the hallway to the lecture hall. You’d have a satisfied grin on your face when you heard the telltale noise of the lecture hall doors slamming shut.

The entire department knew about this little game the two of you would play with each other, not to mention the sarcastic comments from you and teasing jokes from him that were on repeat any time you were in the same room. The bickering was bound to get worse with the two of you in such close quarters all semester.

“Y/N!” you heard a loud voice call down the hallway. You hadn’t heard that voice in two and a half months thanks to your summer vacation. You gritted your teeth, turning with a tight-lipped smile toward your least-favorite coworker.

“Hoseok,” you greeted with a nod. As usual, your semi-chilly behavior toward him didn’t faze him.

“Y/N, come on, I thought I told you to call me Hobi!” he said cheerfully, his eyes squinting from his smile. He was wearing a cream turtleneck tucked into his khakis, plaid blazer over his shoulders. He had dyed his hair from the black you were accustomed to, his strands now a platinum blonde. You realized, begrudgingly, that he looked more attractive than he did last year.

“Well would you look at that, we’re neighbors,” Hoseok said after scanning the list on the board.

“Try to keep the gaggle of screaming fans away from the hallway when I’m teaching, would you?” you said sarcastically. Hoseok’s hand flew to his heart, acting like you had personally attacked him.

“Y/N, I cannot believe you would accuse my students of being so frivolous,” he said dramatically. “Just because we have more fun in my class, doesn’t make it any less serious than yours.”

“Oh, please, save the theatrics for the students who signed up thinking your class would be an easy ‘A’. I know for a fact that you gave out four D’s last semester.” Hoseok’s eyes twinkled at your challenging tone.

“And how many did you give out, Professor Y/L/N?” Hoseok asked in a sweet voice.

“None, thank you very much. Since my students actually learn something in my class, I don’t have to give out such low grades,” you quipped. Hoseok chuckled, running a hand through his wavy blonde hair.

“Maybe I should sit in on one of your classes this year. Learn a thing or two,” Hoseok said, stepping toward you. You flushed momentarily at his low tone, immediately stepping back. He smirked at your reaction.

“It’s invite only to audit my class, Jung,” you said before turning on your heel to walk toward your office down the hall, “I would say I’m sorry, but I’m really not!” you yelled over your shoulder.

You heard Hoseok laugh, and you cursed yourself for giving him the satisfaction of knowing that his teasing had gotten to you.

You had promised yourself at the end of the summer not to play into it this year – you were going to be professional, courteous. But the first time you see Hoseok, bam, it goes right out the window. 

You would just have to avoid Hoseok as much as possible.

You sighed once you closed your office door behind you. It was going to be a long semester.

---

Two months into the semester, the leaves had turned to burnt oranges and red, signaling the return of fall. Hoseok was sitting in one of the auditorium seats, his legs crossed over each other, looking down at his fingers with a soft smile playing at his lips. The delicate notes of the piano were playing from your classroom, the noise piercing the thin walls separating your classroom from his.

His class had been dismissed half an hour ago, and, based on the lack of students having straggling conversations in the hallway, yours had, too. He often waited after he was done teaching to see if you would play when you thought no one was listening. The notes you played sometimes indicated your mood; the music was soft and flowing, other times dark and intense.

Today it was, melancholic? He couldn’t quite place it, but it made him think about the change in seasons. He wondered if that was on your mind. The song was fluid, making him want to choreograph a piece to it, the dancer’s body matching the tempo of the music. He shut his eyes, picturing the movements behind his closed lids.

He’d never admit that he indulged in this as often as he did – he knew you wouldn’t be playing if you found out he was your only audience member. You had been avoiding him this semester. He had tried all of his old tricks – the loud music during office hours, teasing comments during staff meetings. But you wouldn’t blink.

He opened his eyes, the song transitioning into something light and happy. It made him think of sunshine.  

---

You stopped playing, your hands lifting off the keys like they burned you. You had been playing mindlessly, your fingers starting to pluck away at the keys in the melody that you had thought of when you would think of Hoseok.

The more you avoided Hoseok, the more you seemed to miss his overly positive personality. You would see him at staff meetings, always giving you a big smile. One day you came in late after a meeting with a student ran long, and you came into the room to see that he had saved you a seat next to him, the last one left empty in the room. 

He was still playing his music too loud, but you had stopped bugging him about it, and you noticed that it was gradually getting quieter.

You closed the cover over the keys, willing the thoughts about Hoseok to go away, packing up your papers and laptop. He was just your annoyingly happy colleague; there was no reason he should be taking up this much space in your mind.

---

“Are you honestly suggesting that the music composition class shouldn’t be considered a prerequisite for all music program students going forward?” you questioned angrily. You and Hoseok were at a standoff in the department meeting, his normally pleasant features tense, arms crossed in front of him.

“If that means that it prevents funding from getting diverted from the dance program to the instrumental students, then, yes, that is what I’m suggesting,” Hoseok countered.

“That’s ridiculous! Music composition is a fundamental building block for all students – including dance, Jung!” your voice had risen, and the department head looked between you both, deciding that the meeting had gotten too out of hand to continue.

“Professor Y/L/N, Professor Jung – why don’t the two of you take a walk around the building, get some fresh air. The rest of you, dismissed. We’ll resume this conversation, civilly, next week,” the department head declared.  

You were fuming, angrily shoving your notebook and pen in your bag before storming out of the building. You felt someone else’s presence, and you turned, groaning when you saw the last person you wanted to see standing behind you, a shit-eating grin on his face.

He opened his mouth to say something, but you held up your hand to stop him.

“Give it a rest, Jung, I’m not in the mood,” you said grumpily.

“I was going to ask if you wanted to go to the bookstore to grab a coffee and put this behind us,” Hoseok scoffed, smile wiped away. “But, I guess not.”

“Not everyone wants to just roll over and play nice when you flash them a smile, Hoseok.”

“Well, not everyone wants to act like they have a superiority complex, either.”

Your lips pursed, hands beginning to fidget with how angry and upset his comment made you. The two of you had been annoying last year, sure, but you had never been mean to each other. Until today.

“You don’t know anything about me,” you said quietly, heated tone still evident despite the low volume.

“The feeling is mutual,” Hoseok said harshly. “It’s not like you’ve even tried to get to know me. You immediately disliked me from day one. You never even gave me a chance!”

“That’s rich coming from you. All that shit with the music and the comments – it’s like you wanted me to dislike you,” you replied.

“I wanted you to talk to me, Y/N,” Hoseok said, exasperated. “Forget it, I can see now that it was useless to try.”

“I was trying to play nice this semester,” you said, glaring at Hoseok. “You came in like a damn bulldozer last year, disrupting everything in the department. And everyone just did what you wanted because you’re ‘mister nice guy’, and you make people laugh and people just think you’re perfect. Well, I don’t buy it.”

You took a deep breath, leveling your gaze at him.

“Stay out of my way, and I’ll stay out of yours,” your voice was stone-cold. Hoseok’s eyes flashed, lips in a thin line before he responded bitterly.

“Perfect.”

---

Things had been quiet between you and Hoseok since your fight outside of the building a few weeks ago. You politely nodded at each other in the hallway when you passed by, avoiding eye contact. You would grimace when you heard his laugh during lectures next door to yours, wanting to block the sound out.

You couldn’t get what he said to you out of your thoughts – you really didn’t know Hoseok very well. All you knew is what he presented to the rest of the world. He was bubbly and positive and optimistic; he probably thought you were just some brooding, academic stiff.

Hoseok noticed the songs you were playing lately were rather intense. Sometimes he would hear you smash against the keys like you were angry with the piano for not producing the sounds you wanted to hear.

He knew the feeling. He was spending more time in the dance studio lately, dancing aggressively to loud hip hop music, trying to drown out the frustration he was feeling at not being able to make you crack and talk to him.

That’s where he found himself tonight, trying to get rid of his stress. You were stubborn, but you were also beautiful, intelligent, passionate, tenacious. He turned his music up louder, drowning out the thoughts of you.

---

You had re-read the same sentence four times, red pen poised in your hand ready to edit the student’s paper. The loud beats were still audible from the practice rooms. It was late, and the building had been closed to students for the past two hours.

You decided to go down there. You weren’t going to get them in trouble for staying past close, but with finals coming up, you were sure the students needed a gentle reminder that sleeping was just as important as practicing.

You walked down the dark hallway, going down the steps to the practice rooms on the floor beneath the faculty offices, finding the one with the light on, music blaring through the glass panes separating the space from the hall.

You glanced into the room, seeing Hoseok dancing. You had never seen him in his element before, and it was captivating. He was wearing a black pair of sweats, an oversized yellow t-shirt adorning his slender frame. The music seemed to be moving through his body. He was grounded in the floor, an intense expression on his face as he hit heavy movements on the beat, fluidly moving through other parts depending on the music. You felt like this was personal, like you weren’t allowed to be watching, but you couldn’t tear your eyes away from him.

Hoseok looked into the mirror, his eyes looking toward the shadow in the hallway. His eyes met yours, his gaze burning into yours through the glass. You gulped.

He turned, grabbing a bottle of water and pausing the music. You figured that was your cue, opening the door to the studio and stepping inside.

“Was it too loud?” Hoseok asked, voice light despite the obvious tension in the room.

“No, it’s okay uh – I was grading papers, and I thought a student was still down here,” you explained softly. “I thought I’d tell them to go home, get some rest.”

Hoseok had a curious expression on his face. If he was surprised to hear why you were down here, he didn’t mention it. You felt the need to fill the silence, so you spouted the first thing that came to mind.

“You’re really talented, Hobi,” you said quickly. His eyebrows shot up at the sound of the nickname you never called him. “Hoseok – sorry, I meant Hoseok.”

“Watch out, people might think we’re friends,” Hoseok joked, but it came out strained.

“Hoseok – Hobi. I’m sorry about what I said a few weeks ago. I was heated, and I apologize,” you said, looking down at a scuff in the hardwood floors.

“I’m sorry, too. What I said was uncalled for, and I didn’t mean to upset you. Last year, this semester. Anything I’ve done that has made you mad or annoyed. I’m sorry,” Hobi said sincerely. “I-um, well…”

You looked up, waiting for him to continue.

“I just wanted your attention.”

“What?”

“I wanted your attention. I wanted you to want to talk to me. I wanted you to get to know me. Not the version of me that I show my students. I wanted you to see me. Really see me.”

You gulped, Hobi’s vulnerability making you nervous. He took a step toward you, and you willed yourself to stay in place.

“I know you do the same thing; you hide. Hide behind this persona you’ve created. I think it goes away when you play piano.”

“How do you–what do you mean?” you asked incredulously.

“I hear you play. After class. I never told you because I selfishly wanted to keep listening. Your music it – it tells a story. About your day, your feelings. If you didn’t tell me yourself, at least your music did.”

Your cheeks burned knowing that he was audience to all of the time spent in your classroom, working out your feelings on the piano like it was your therapy.

“Everything goes away when I play,” you stopped, thinking about how distracted you had been lately trying to compose. “Well, most of the time, anyway.”

“That’s how I feel when I dance,” Hobi admitted with a gentle smile. You nodded, realizing that the two of you had this in common, at least.

“I’ll leave you to it,” you said, backing away from Hobi toward the door.

“Wait –,” Hobi said, slightly flustered. “Dance with me.”

Your eyes widened. Hobi laughed, and you hated to admit that you had missed the sound.

“Come on, just trust me, Y/L/N.” You waited while he picked out a song, holding out his hand. You placed your fingers in his, and he pulled you close to him, leading you around the studio floor to the song. He made you feel light on your feet despite your lack of dance experience, his hand tightly gripping yours, his other floating over your waist. Your skin tingled from the contact.

He spun you around twice, your hands landing on his chest as you tried to regain your balance. You looked up at him, genuinely enjoying yourself. His bright smile you used to roll your eyes at lit up his features, causing your smile to match his.

“Can you see me now, Y/N?” Hobi asked, referencing his earlier confession. “Because I see you when you play. When you tell a student crying in your office that everything is going to be okay. And I see you now when you’re dancing with me like this.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Remember when you said I didn’t know anything about you?” You nodded, recognizing his reference to your fight outside of the department building. “I don’t think that’s true. But I know there’s so much more to know. And I want to know everything.”

Hobi’s hand came up to your cheek, softly placing it on the side of your face.

“I want to know you, too, Hobi,” you whispered.

He leaned forward, his breath fanning over your lips, “Want to start now?”

You gripped his t-shirt in your hand, pulling him the last few inches to your lips instead of answering. You felt him smile against your lips, wrapping his arms around you and holding you close to him.

He pulled back, his forehead resting on yours as you caught your breath.

“Does this mean I can start playing my music loudly during office hours again?” Hobi teased, his fingers playing with the hem of your sweater, brushing against your skin.

You made a face at him, causing him to laugh. He kissed you on the forehead, then on the lips again to make you smile before answering.

“Not a chance.”  

---

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[ticketstomydaydreams]

HOME

(All We Have: Part One)

Part Two

Colson x Female Reader

Summary: You and Colson are close friends and he invites you to move in to his house while you work on his record together

Word count: 1,580

Feels: Friendship Fluff for now

Warnings: Alcohol consumption, cursing, mentions of feeling depressed

Companion playlist:

Machine Gun Kelly - Home

Sia - Dressed in Black 

The Beatles - With a Little Help from My Friends

A/N: Throughout the series there will be changes to the timing of real life events like the pandemic, the release of certain songs etc. There's certain things I want to incorporate into the series, like particular events in MGKs life and lyrics from songs, so some stuff will get moved around to fit in to the story ✌️

______

It had been a long evening working in Colson’s home studio, The Boulevard, with him and the gang on the upcoming Tickets to my Downfall album. To say your schedule was busy was an understatement, but Colson had insisted you get involved with the new material after the success of your work together on Hotel Diablo.

Composing music was your main gig, you had an ear for melody and your passion for writing meant you always had lyrics swirling around your head. You had a penchant for dark and melancholy lyrics, finding music to be a source of therapy for you. It was something you and Colson had instantly bonded over. He'd bugged you to list some of the stuff you'd written that he'd know and you had gained his professional respect immediately.

He always kept a close eye on your work, ever the supportive friend and had laid claim to your piece ‘Glass House’ as soon as he'd heard it.

______

2019

You were sitting crossed legged on the sofa in your lounge, gently strumming your guitar and gazing off into space and mumbling to yourself, as you worked out some lyrics in your head. Colson was lying on the floor by your feet, scrolling through his phone with earphones in, a blunt in his hand that he occasionally passed up to you. This was a common set up, you found it easier to write in the peace and quiet and Colson has gradually started hanging out at your place more when he needed to focus on his own writing.

"All alone in the glass house, lie awake til the sun's out, pink sky when you come down…"

"Throw me in the damn flames, Bury me in gold chains, throw me in the damn flames…"

You'd started singing out loud, occasionally stopping to scribble down lyrics and make adjustments, not noticing that Colson had removed his earbuds to listen to you

" Dude, that's hard, like, beautiful… " His comment made you jump slightly, you hadn't seen him propping himself up on his elbows, watching you intently "Sing that last bit again"

You blushed slightly, his opinion was always important to you, and started singing. He muttered to himself as you did, then pointed at you "Again!"

Letting out a little laugh and rolling your eyes, you sang again

"Throw me in the damn flames, bury me in gold chains, throw me in the damn flames"

Colson's voice met yours at the end of the line, rapping softly "I'm waiting on the rain to come and wash it all away"

You locked eyes, smiling and he sat upright. "Dude, Im'a need that hook! That spoke to me right there, I've think got something for it that I've been stuck on"

He looked so excited, your heart did a little flip. You'd seen that writing this album had taken it out of him, he'd been digging deep and really going through it emotionally. You could tell it was going to be raw and special from what you'd heard already.

He sat forward and moved the guitar from your lap so he could lean his arms on your knees and looked up at you shooting you puppy dog eyes with those baby blues "Pretty please Y/N"

You laughed and ruffled his hair, "Anything for you Col" Honestly, it'd be an honour to be part of such a personal project, you thought

He wrapped his arms round you and squeezed,

"You're a legend, kid. Get a sample recorded and send it to me!" He grabbed your guitar off the sofa and whipped back around, strumming a few chords as he carried on talking with his back to you, leaning against the sofa "This is gonna be fire, you always just hit the nail on the head, I swear it's like you're in my head sometimes"

You smiled, seeing the wave of motivation that had struck your friend. You felt so lucky to have a friend who was not only so inspiring, but one who 'got it', who understood that music was a form of release. Someone who recognised that it was important to feel these things, rather than encourage you to push dark thoughts away with toxic positivity.

He’d pushed to use your original samples on his record, but as much as you loved writing and singing, you were a behind the scenes kind of gal which had always suited you just fine. Naomi, a mutual friend of you both, came onboard to record them with him. A decision that turned out to be golden… 'Death in my Pocket' would be born not long after, with Naomi doing your lyrics such beautiful justice yet again, perfectly pairing with Colson's emotional rapping.

______

From then on Colson had kept you close to his recording. You'd been helping here and there with composition and notation, but your production skills were what was taking centre stage during the most recent sessions. You had a long list of projects you were working through, leaving you chained to your equipment most days and nights anyway so throwing more music into your workload didn't seem like much of a big deal. In all honesty, the chaos of Colson’s studio and the revolving door of personalities that were in and out constantly, made it one of the most fun places to be. You loved what you did for a living and it never really felt like work Even though the guys were a real handful at times, you kind of enjoyed being the studio 'Mami' as they often affectionately referred to you

Everything had wrapped up for the evening and the guys had migrated back into the house. You could hear from the raucous that the drinks must have started flowing freely. You were saving your work and packing up your stuff when Colson bursts back into the studio and throws himself in a chair, spinning it around with his arms in the air.

"You staying for drinks Y/N?" he grins at you, clearly hyper and in party mode

You let out a big sigh "Urgh, I'd love to but I have an early start tomorrow. I finally managed to get an apartment viewing. I swear I've looked at a hundred places now, they get snapped up so quickly.. I've only got a few weeks left on my lease as well"

“Ah, that sucks kid” Colson empathises, spinning his chair again before an idea strikes him “Wait! Why don’t you move in here for a bit until you find a place? The guest room is pretty much your room anyway, the amount you crash here”

You laugh “This is true, that mattress is so much better than mine! Aw Col, that would honestly be so helpful, the stress of finding a place when I’m this busy is killing me. I don't know… You sure the guys won’t mind?”

Colson scoffs “Why would they mind? You practically live here anyway” he teases “I’m sure they’ll be just as stoked as I am at the thought of you joining the madhouse for a while”

Before you have a chance to respond, he stands up and throws his arms around you, squashing you into him tightly “That’s it decided Roomie. Another song in the bag and a new housemate, plenty to celebrate tonight!”

Wriggling out of his tight grasp, you laugh and in a deep voice shout “let’s goooooo” mocking his signature catchphrase. He flips you his middle finger and says “Kitchen, now”

Once you’re in the kitchen, Colson heads to get you a drink and grabs one himself. Appearing back at your side, he passes you your beer and then shouts out to the rest of the group,

“YO, meet our latest housemate, Y/N is moving in. LET’S FUCKING GOOOOO”

Everyone in the kitchen lets out a big cheer, clearly pleased as he said they would be. Colson bends down and picks you up, swinging you around in a circle, spilling your drinks all over the both of you as you shout his name in mock annoyance, between giggles.

“I hope you know what you’re letting yourself in for” Rook laughs, clinking his drink against your now empty beer bottle once your feet are back on the floor

“It’ll be good to have another pair of hands around here, looking after you lot” Ashleigh chimes in, laughing and slapping Slim away as he pulls her hood up over her head, covering her eyes

It had been 5 years since you'd made the decision to move to LA, barely knowing a soul. You'd worked several jobs, jumped from place to place, worked your ass off to catch your break in the music business, sometimes feeling like the grind would never get you anywhere.

There had been times where you felt like you couldn't carry on, aching from trying to keep pace. The dream had felt like it was turning into a nightmare, as you tried to make ends meet, feeling so lonely in this enormous city.. but eventually you'd made these amazing friends who made you feel so safe and loved.

Now, there were times you had to pinch yourself just to make sure it was all real.

As you shake off some of the beer that's dripping from your hands, you look around the kitchen. Taking in the crazy, loveable bunch before you, your new housemates, you are filled with gratitude. You finally felt like you were exactly where you were supposed to be…

Home.

______

❌❌ Lace up!

[fatehbaz]

Interspecies encounters, togetherness, irreducible strangeness when creatures meet, caring for “the multitude of life we cannot sense”:

Ada Smailbegović talks of starfish time (2015). Starfish may seem to be still, but longer attention, through time-lapse photography for example, shows them moving, changing. Smailbegović also talks of larval time, the time it takes for eggs to develop and hatch, a time that is a compound entity of other variables, longer in the cold, or sped up with increasing temperature. Larval time is the right time for eggs to hatch, a deeply relational and contingent time. As she points out, “many of the temporalities that are relevant for developing a politics of time in the Anthropocene – such as minute and incrementally accumulating processes of change, or the long duration of geological time, rock time, or the temporal rhythms of non-human organisms – are beyond the human sensorium” (2015: 97). [...] For by attending to more-than-human agencies of time and weather, diverse multiplicities emerge even as they are beyond human understanding. This is the seasonal time of clouds gathering. It is also the time of hydrological cycles, of water moving through aquifers for thousands of years, of transpiration and growth. And short spirals, of the flash of lightning, claps of thunder, of traveling sound and light. Then there are beings that experience hundreds, thousands of generations within a human lifetime. For such beings, the memories, learnings and modes of passing on experience are, it almost goes without saying (yet it must be said as it is so often not), radically different from any human’s in terms of the ways they experience change. The immensity of the alterity is, literally, incomprehensible to humans. We can’t know how and what these beings know. But we can be aware that they have knowledges and experiences beyond us. For many people, coming from different cultural and ontological positions, not knowing does not mean not connecting or not respecting. For it would seem that there are things that humans cannot and should not know. We don’t need to know what starfish know. But we should know they live and experience and think beyond us. We should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled [...]. It is not abstract, or empty.

(Source: Bawaka Country including, S. Wright, S. Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum. January 2020.)

-------

We can now turn to abundant evidence that nonhuman creatures matter politically, ethically, and that they pulse with world-making vitality. [...] Studies of microbes have charted the importance of alienness and difference in processes of becoming. Helmreich’s study of microbial oceanography suggests that “the lowly microbe constitutes a force of leviathan significance” for life, but also witnesses the sense of alterity that this vast cosmos of microorganisms in the sea evokes in humans. […]. Taken together, such studies shift agency away from the bounded figure of the human and underline the indifference of the many inhuman forced folded within us. Attending to microbial life also points us to animal others that […] we do not (like to) see or touch. […] We are more intimately familiar with them than we like, but at the same time they remain alien to us, catching us in what Hugh Raffles describes as the “nightmare of knowing and the nightmare of nonrecognition.” This opens up space for friction, conflict, and misrecognition within togetherness […]. For every meeting between creatures involves an irreducible strangeness, and something singular, irreducible and vast behind each relation. […] There is a distance between beings when they meet, a multitude of life beyond sense and matter, and flourishing and togetherness emerge from this “virtual ecology.”

(Source: Maan Barua, Uli Beisel, Franklin Ginn. “Flourishing with Awkward Creatures: Togetherness, Vulnerability, Killing.” 2014.)

-------

Such otherness can be seen in work concerned with dimensions of human–animal conflict which is full of depictions of strange, disturbing, fraught, chance, and violent encounters. Whether the challenges of coexisting with coyotes or cougars in North America [...], the growing presence of Macaques in the borderlands of Singapore [...], shark catch and kill policies in Australia [...], or the verminization of rats in urban areas [...], notions of encounter are central to accounts where non-human animals are somehow rendered out of place or too close for comfort [...]. Many examples of human–animal encounters are about the breach of spatial and regulatory boundaries – home spaces, urban borderlands, safe swim zones, and so on – but the distinctions of human/animal, society/nature, urban/rural, domestic/wild that are central to these renderings are a reminder of the colonial knowledge-practices that continue to define humanity on the basis of the separation between humans and animal [...]. A concern with the dangers of one-sided accounts in the context of unequal relations is one that has been central to multispecies work, which has raised challenging questions about voice, interpretation, and decipherability [...]. An encounter is an event of relation – it is about two beings or things that are momentarily held together. Encounters make (a) difference [...] and are often experienced as something that disrupts, unsettles, or surprises in ways that can be as affirmative as they can be violent. [...] [W]hilst encounters can highlight distinctions, and thus forms of separation or psychological and cultural distance, it is important to emphasize that they are also events of relation. The experiences of shock, surprise, and rupture that so often accompany accounts of human–animal encounters are evidence of a moment in which something is destabilized or unexpectedly broken open; a moment in which borders are shifted, exposed, crossed, made, unmade, and undermined [...]. Encounters, then, do not simply take place at the border, and are not simply about existing borders, but are rather central to their making and unmaking [...].

(Source: Helen F. Wilson. “Contact zones: Multispecies scholarship through Imperial Eyes.” Environment and Planning. July 2019.)

-------

Slugs, like other often uncomfortable companions such as microbes [...], bees [...], cougars [...], test our resolve to live ‘convivially’ with non-humans [...]. Yet live we must, for the lives of humans and slugs are stuck together. Composition is the work of building a common world [...]. It is, simply put, how things come to stick together. [...] [A]gents and materials are never distributed in time or space according to [...] the authorities of Modernism [...]. In this the composers are certainly not all human [...]. [In some cases] the stickiness of composition leaves a residue that echoes through time, as narrated by [gardeners] shifting their sense of what is possible and good in their gardens after an intense connection reaction to slug death. [...] [E]very [interspecies] meeting in fact reminds us that the being we meet is and always shall be strange to us [...]. [E]verything is not just related, but also that there is something singular, irreducible and vast behind each relation. When beings meet there is a distance between, such that in encountering the slug we also encounter something beyond the slug -- a multitude of life we cannot sense. The ethic that emerges from this space ‘between relation’ is, as Yusoff puts it, part of a ‘virtual ecology’ that exceeds encounters with matter. So despite shared histories and the close proximity in which slugs and gardeners live, the slug retains a certain darkness as a creature apart; something is held in reserve [...]. And so fleeting awareness of the irretrievability of the lives of others intensifies poignancy, such that despite a gulf separating the gardener from other creatures, some connection, however, fleeting, is made to something -- however strange. Refusing to dismiss the everyday and the banal is an ethical response. [...] Slugs are there: sliming, chomping, and oozing around quietly and that should be enough to give them consideration.

(Source: Franklin Ginn. “Sticky lives: Slugs, detachment and more-than-human ethics in the garden.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 2013.)

[ask-de-writer]

THE PRICE OF AMBER : Part 6 of 23

This takes place shortly after MASTER SARGENT (RET.) WARRIN’S HEARTHWARMING

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to MLP Fan Fiction

THE PRICE OF AMBER

Part 6 of 23

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

29012 words

New to the story?  Read from the beginning HERE

© 2022 by Glen Ten-Eyck

Inspired by a bit of silliness shared with

@frostlass-and-the-gang

All rights reserved.  This document may not be copied or distributed on or to any medium or placed in any mass storage system except by the express written consent of the author.

//////////////

Copyright fair use rules for Tumblr users

Users of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights.  They may reblog the story provided that all author and copyright information remains intact.  They may use the characters or original characters in my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical compositions.

All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fiction is actively encouraged.

///////////////////////

Arianne smiled sadly, “A REAL WAR, Sir?  You mean a slow and murderous, scortched earth war with thousands dead?  Your ego raised up like a hot air balloon fueled by the rising plumes of smoke from burning cities?  No, Sir, I have no stomach for that.  I can do it but choose not to, at least not unless I must.

“I have done what I have accomplished for the purpose of creating peace with my neighbors.  I hope that when we are done, I will share a drink and table in friendship with them and no need to fight any more.”

Luna spoke compassionately, “Corbiestep, while the final fate of these two who sought to derail your campaign is under the Royal Wing, We, Your Princesses, do wonder what you would do with them, were they under your rule?”

Arianne did not hesitate but returned, “I would place their titles, offices, duties and responsibilities in the custody of one of your choosing. I would place the persons of Nullit and Neighsmith in a madhouse until such time as they recover from the present insanity that places their egos above the kingdom and the lives of its soldiers.”

Celestia stood before her Throne and demanded, “You have heard the verdict of Arianne, Countess Corbiestep, Force Leader of the Armies of Equestria in Prance.  You may choose her judgment or Ours under the Royal Wing.  What say you?”

They blustered, “You would put our fate in the hooves of that FILLIY? Lock us away in a madhouse?  No!  We will not be so humiliated.”

Luna stood forth and proclaimed, “Neighsmith and Nullit are Vacant!  Let them be stripped of all ranks, honors, chains of office, and badges of duty.  Lay all before the Empty Throne of Our Mother, Skyglow, Titan of Life Creation and titular Queen of Equestria!

“You have been found guilty Under the Royal Wing of the charge of Treason to these Thrones.  Offered the clemency of your lives, before this Court, you have refused.”

Heavy of heart, Celestia pronounced, “You will be given the Traitor's Drop.”

Luna stepped across the space between them and laid a dark wing up over the shoulder of her larger sister.  “In this hard duty, my sister, you shall not be alone.”

Together, the pale pastels of Celestia's magic and the clear dark blue, shot with stars of Luna's magic picked up the struggling ponies and lifted them out past the parapet.  Let to fall, their screams went on and on.  It takes a long time to fall 550 meters.

Returned to their Thrones, Celestia pointed out, “I do hope that all present understand just how seriously We of the Thrones take any interference with this war effort.  We would never have allowed this expedition at all, had Prance simply chosen to be a peaceful neighbor.  Instead, they have repeatedly struck at County Corbiestep, destroying the castle, armory and garrison on Hearthwarming last.  Countess Arianne drove them off.

“Regretfully, they have since actually invaded through other passes and were met again by the just turned sixteen Countess Arianne.  She engaged two full brigades, taking many prisoners along with much loot of weapons and monies.  In the process, destroying that invasion attempt also. She did not bother to report it to Us until AFTER she took them.

“With TWO attacks on Us in just less than six months, accompanied by intelligence that another attack was being prepared, We directly authorized Corbiestep to strike first.  Remember, this war was declared here in this room by Prance's Ambassador.  In spite of our striking first, we are not the aggressor here.”

Arianne politely signaled for permission to speak.  “Your Highnesses, since we have all learned that my being here was part of a plot to derail my assault, may I please be allowed to return to my troops?”

Celestia nodded agreeably, “Most certainly, Our good Countess Arianne.  How will you travel there?”

She smiled, “I have spoken to the transportation unit that brought me here. They are rested, fed and provisioned for the trip already.  I can be back to the battle fronts in just under five hours.”

Princess Luna grinned as she commented, “Please return to your attack. Later, We would be most interested in learning the details of HOW you can travel so fast.”

She withdrew to a huge buzz of whispered conversation.

Speaking through their Heralds, the Princesses called the Ambassador of Prance back before the Thrones.  “My good Lord, Ambassador, did you hear the peace terms that Countess Arianne has proposed?”

“I did, your Highnesses.  I have used my Magic Net mirror to relay them to my government and King.  I have not yet had any coherent answer.”

TO BE CONTINUED

<==PREVIOUS ~~ NEXT==>

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[bounce-a-coin-off-your-witcher]

He Was a Sk8r Boi

Happiest of Birthdays and best wishes to one of my most beloved and darling friends on this earth, the fantastical @hailhailsatan ! May your sass never cease.

modern au - college student Jaskier - the Kaer Morons are all skater punks

tw: mild injury (scraped arm)

---

Jaskier took a seat on what remained of a crumbling stone bench and pulled his black-and-white composition notebook onto his lap, opening it to the closest blank page. He tugged his favorite pen out from its place of honor behind his ear and waited for inspiration to strike.

And waited.

And waited.

After half an hour of staring into space and getting absolutely nothing written, the frustrated college student stood from his seat and jammed his headphones into his ears. If nature wasn’t going to help finish this stupid poetry assignment then maybe he could find a person or two to observe for inspiration instead. Glancing around the otherwise empty benches and pathways of the public park, Jaskier sighed and shook his head. “Fuck this, I’ll try the other side.”

He pulled his MP3 player out from the pocket of his light autumn jacket and painstakingly scrolled through every song available until finally giving up and pressing the “Shuffle” button. As a heavy, angry guitar riff began to filter through his headphones and lighten the load of the world from his shoulders, Jaskier found himself approaching a half-hearted attempt at a skatepark.

There was one cement half-pipe to his left and a few rails and quarter-pipes scattered around the vicinity, bolted into the ground in a seemingly random pattern. Several oddly shaped cement bowls were sunk into the earth, obviously made to work like ramps but with a larger and less predictable surface area.

There were only three skaters enjoying the park on this particularly grey afternoon, zipping back and forth from one piece of equipment to the next like emo hummingbirds. Jaskier took out his headphones again as he made his way to a nearby bench - wood this time - and casually sat himself down. The skater dudes were yelling back and forth to each other as they swanned over and around the equipment on their boards, mostly insults from what the student could hear.

The loudest of the three had springy orange hair that he wore pulled back into a small, messy half-bun at the top of his head. The rest fell down against the back of his neck in an equally messy sheet, reaching nearly all the way to his shoulders but not quite touching them. He was wearing a bright red t-shirt with a catchphrase that Jaskier couldn’t read and plain denim jeans.

“What the fuck are you doing, Eskel?” he laughed, pointing to the tallest of the group and pulling a face.

“Shut up, Bert,” the brunette shouted back at the redhead, doing a quick kick-flip over the far end of a metal railing. “You can’t skate for shit.”

“I’m better than you!”

The third member of their little gang was the quietest so far and, in Jaskier’s personal opinion, also the prettiest. He had a mass of long white hair that fell all the way to the bottom of his shoulder blades, pointed and stiff in a way that meant it had been straightened and sprayed into submission. The silvery strands were being held out of the stranger’s eyes by a baggy black beanie and Jaskier desperately wanted to know whether or not that hair color was natural (though he heavily suspected that it was not).

The white-haired guy was also the most talented of the three gathered skaters, flying from one end of the half-pipe to the other and landing a few flips in between as if risking his life was as simple as breathing. He wore no knee pads over his ripped black skinny jeans and no elbow pads either; Jaskier noted with a little zing through his nervous system that the skater’s arms were muscled like a Greek statue’s and equally pale.

He was fucking hot.

“Geralt, do a three-sixty!” the redhead jeered, chucking something at the pretty one.

“I can’t land one yet and you know it,” the white-haired guy, Geralt apparently, replied. His voice was low and sonorous and Jaskier nearly fell off his bench in surprise. The student hadn’t realized how far forward he had been leaning in order to listen to their conversation and he scooted back again with a self-conscious little blush. In the distance, Geralt continued. “Why don’t you get up here and try it yourself, asshole?”

“I just fucking might, White Wolf,” Lambert huffed, turning his board back toward the half-pipe and picking up speed. The dark-haired one, Eskel, caught Jaskier’s eye from across the park; the student blushed an even darker shade of red and looked down at his lap to avoid any sort of confrontation. If any of these guys wanted to start a fight with him, Jaskier would surely lose.

By the time the anxious student worked up the nerve to look at them again, Lambert had already climbed to the top of the half-pipe and taken a defensive stance. His eyebrows were furrowed and his arms were crossed over his chest in a projection of almost childish anger. As Geralt came up the cement incline, Lambert lashed out with his foot and kicked the other man’s board out from beneath his feet.

Eskel gave a wordless cry of alarm.

Geralt wavered in the air for a moment - cartoonishly, Jaskier thought, almost like Wile E. Coyote - before plunging to the pavement and rolling limply down the inside of the half-pipe. Eskel chucked a rock at the redhead and started screaming, “Fuck off, dude! You could have cracked his fucking skull! You could have killed Geralt, you absolute cock-toboggan!”

“Fuck! Shit, I didn't-,” Lambert fell on his butt and slid down the ramp to Geralt’s side, kneeling over him with concern written all over his face. “Are you alright, man!?”

Jaskier couldn’t hear if Geralt replied or not, but he suddenly remembered the first-aid kit sitting right there in his bag. Jaskier was a total klutz and tried to keep a handful of bandages and a tube of disinfectant on him at all times just in case he ever needed them. Thank goodness they would be able to come in handy, and for a far nobler purpose than patching up yet another one of his table-smacked knees.

Without thinking any further ahead, Jaskier grabbed the strap of his bag and took off running towards the site of the accident.

“Hey!” he shouted, coming to a stop a few feet away. “I have - uh, I have a first-aid kit if you want to use it.”

“Cool, thanks,” Eskel said, glancing over his shoulder with a curt nod. “Come on over, we don’t bite. Well, I don’t.”

“Dude, I’m so sorry,” Lambert apologized to Geralt once again. When Jaskier glanced over at him, the redhead looked legitimately upset and guilty. Geralt looked up at the newcomer from the pavement, his silver hair spread out around him in mimicry of a halo - the black beanie was lying a few feet away, forgotten or ignored.

Up close like this, the stranger stole the breath out of Jaskier’s very lungs. The man's eyes… His fucking eyes were a gorgeous molten gold in the late afternoon sun, sparking and shining like gemstones. Holding Geralt’s gaze made Jaskier feel as if his very soul was catching fire.

“Do you need a band-aid?” Jaskier asked rather stupidly, holding out the little cardboard box. Geralt nodded stoically.

“I think I scraped my arm.”

“Let me help,” Jaskier said. The student knelt beside Geralt and set the box of band-aids down. He flung open the kit and retrieved some ‘pain-free’ disinfectant, then returned to the box of bandages in search of one without a Disney princess on it. “Do you guys always do this without wearing any protective gear?”

“I’ve got a helmet,” Geralt said. He pointed towards three mismatched backpacks piled near the edge of the pavement; a bright red helmet with several semi-familiar logos stuck to it sat atop one of them.

“It’s very useful over there, keeping your backpack from cracking its skull open,” Jaskier chastised lightly, trying to keep his nerves in check. He was feeling oddly protective of a guy he’d never even met before and it was very fucking weird.

“Sorry,” Geralt shrugged. He was still laying on his back, his topaz eyes flickering between Jaskier’s hands and face. The student applied a thin layer of medical cream to the shallow scrape with shaking fingers and then wiped the remaining goo on his shirt, uncaring of the damage it may have done. He bandaged the minor wound quickly and leaned back, glancing between Lambert and Eskel as if just noticing their presence on either side of Geralt's head.

“Thanks,” Eskel grinned, holding out his hand. “I’m Eskel.”

“Jaskier,” Jaskier replied shyly. “And the loud one is Lambert, right?”

Geralt chuckled from his place on the ground and Jaskier’s heart seized painfully in his chest. What a laugh, ye gods. “Yeah, that’s Lambert. I’m Geralt.”

“Nice to meet you, Geralt,” Jaskier could practically taste the name as it melted across his tongue. “Well, not the nicest way to meet you, but I’m glad I met you all the same. Anyway.”

He stood up with a little grimace and took a step back.

“Where are you going?” Eskel asked. “You came to Geralt’s rescue so I think that means he owes you like, at least an ice cream, or something.”

“Yeah,” Lambert piped up. He smirked at the man on the ground and then turned back to Jaskier, mischief clear in his expression, “Let him take you to get an ice cream.”

“I’m lactose intolerant,” Jaskier squeaked. Then he realized he’d sounded rude and held up his hands as if offering surrender (surrender for what, he wasn't exactly sure), “Not that I wouldn’t like to hang out with you more but I’ve got an assignment due and I’m sure you’re very busy doing skater things and I-”

“Am I not good enough for you?” Geralt asked, finally sitting up. He straightened his arms out behind him and rested there, reclined comfortable, a god in his temple.

Jaskier shot the older man a half-annoyed look, beating back his anxiety with a stick. “I listen to Avril Lavigne. I know not to underestimate pretty skater punks.”

“Pretty?” Geralt raised his eyebrows. Jaskier hid his face behind his hands and turned on his heel.

“Anyway, nice meeting you!” Jaskier shouted, hoping they could hear even if he was facing the opposite direction. He took off toward the edge of the park at a brisk walk, verging on a jog. He needed to go hide behind a tree and cry. What the fuck!? He was terrible at flirting and now he’d gone and ruined his chances with the guy he’d… literally just met. Chill out, he told himself - just before a strong hand clamped down over his shoulder and stopped him in his tracks.

“So not ice cream,” Geralt said. Jaskier slowly turned back to face the mostly-stranger. His lip was caught fast between his teeth and Geralt lifted one large hand to gently thumb it free again. “Maybe a boarding lesson, instead? It would give me an excuse to put my hands around your waist and you could put yours on my shoulders.”

“Are you asking me on a date?” Jaskier asked. He fluttered his eyelashes and took half a step into Geralt's space.

The broad-shouldered punk smiled down at the Little Mermaid band-aid on his arm and then turned that smile to Jaskier. “Yeah.”

[itsyosi26]

Hello Guys,

These are the relevant information for the picture down below:

Tools Used:

Canva: Edit Image feature (changed the saturation, brightness, contrast, used the grayscale filter)

I added the two photos to Canva and then I placed them were i thought was appropriate.

Pixlr: To edit out the background from the second photo (the one with the arm branch)

Be Funky: To change the color of the image



Rules of Composition Identified:

Rule of third: Looking closely at the photo it may seem as though the main subject the flower and arm branch appears to be in the middle but in reality it is placed more to the right side of the photo. This is a very important rule of composition in photography which states that a photo should be divided in to segments (9) using horizontal and vertical lines. Emphasis is usually placed on the main subject ensuring that the focal point is away from the center it makes use of empty space by attracting your attention to a certain portion of the image that is highlighted through composition.​  Using this techniques helps to balance and draws more attention to the viewer's eye, instead of just glancing at the center. By placing the subject off center, you also embrace the background more.

Background: When talking about the background we must understand that The element of the photo closest to you makes up the foreground. The furthest element away from you is the background, while the middle ground makes up the area in between. This is a very important rule of composition. Keeping a minimal background ensures that you don't take away the attention from the main subject which is the flower and the arm branch. I purposely ensured that the mountains were dark (black), this is to make sure that I don't confuse the viewers. An effective background will add to the meaning, providing valuable information about your setting, creates depth, and helps to dramatically enhance your photo. 

Symmetry & Patterns: You are able to identify different shapes and patterns in my photo from the oddly shaped triangles in the leaves to the uneven rectangles and triangles used to create the mountains in the background. This refers to eye catching compositions which could be shapes, lines odd objects that provides a sense of tension to the focal point of the image (flower and branch). I can identify vertical symmetry which is the most common and straightforward type of symmetry that can be achieved by keeping both sides of your quite photo similar or symmetrical (the flower is more on the right hand side of the photo). Patterns are essentially repetitive elements either found in nature or human-made structures or arrangements of objects in a photo we can see a rusty pattern all through the image especially in the arm branches as well as little lines which you can identify when you look closely at the photo.

Depth: This can be used by ensuring that objects are included in the foreground, middle ground and background. It helps distinguish the foreground from the background creating a focal point that draws the viewers eye telling them where to look. in this instance they are able to make meaning of what message I'm trying to pass across by making the flower my subject. The viewers are able to identify and recognize layers of the photo and mentally separate them.



Explanation: I deliberately chose this photo because we don't talk enough about the importance of nature and our environment. We receive food, oxygen to breathe, and water to irrigate our crops from our forests, rivers, seas, and soils. They provide us with a wide range of additional goods and services that are crucial to our prosperity, comfort, health and well-being. ​ The flower in the image isn't a fully blossomed flower or "healthy flower". This is to emphasize the effect of not caring for our environment. The arm branches signify that it's the work of humans that has put us in this situation. Simply, recycling, reducing green house gases and fossil fuels would help alienate or mildly eradicate the problem. I put a browish, yellow - orange hue (color) over the image to emphasize a dull warm feeling. This issue isn't something to be happy about that's why I restrained from using happy, upbeat colors like (green, pink, purple etc). I believe that the photo passes my message across. RECYLE MORE & CARE FOR OUR ENVIRONMENT!!!



Citation:

Ansel Adams photo: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2022/feb/17/ansel-adams-rare-photographs-in-stunning-hi-definition#img-5 -Flower, Half Dome, Yosemite Valley (Cow Parsnip).

Second photo: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/i-think-the-tree-trunk-to-the-hand-needs-to-have-a-slower-change-like-the-hand-needs-to-have-a-little-more-tree-like-detail--271623421248827886/



I know your tired of reading but if you got to this point :)

Thank You

[willadisastercry]

Lance ignores his asthma and Coran is not willing to be an accomplice pt. 2

It’s a race against the clock as Lance’s lungs worsen and his team scrambles to come up with a remedy before it’s too late. And though this whole mess certainly could’ve been avoided had he been upfront about his situation to begin with, his team will have to save the scolding for when Lance can focus on something other than the pain of trying to force air into his rapidly constricting airways. Altean technology works fast, but what if fast isn’t fast enough?

Part 1 / Part 2

“D’you check these yet?” Hunk asked as he threw open the topmost drawer of the in-wall storage space in Lance’s cabin.

“No, and it’s not in here either... I don’t understand wh—shit!” Keith cursed as he knocked over the trash can beside Lance’s nightstand and began scooping the contents back up.

“I don’t know where it could possibly be if—“

“—found it...” Keith interrupted as he held up the inhaler that had fallen out with the rest of the trash.

“Did you just get that from the... don’t you dare tell me it’s... oh, quiznak!”

“We’ve gotta tell Shiro...”

Keith was scared that Hunk would actually cry with the way his body tensed and his eyes glossed over.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure Coran will know what to do,” Keith offered as he forwent cleaning up the rest of the mess he made for the sake of time.

“Bring that with you, maybe it can help him figure something out,” Hunk said after a second of staring blankly before he turned on his heel and joined Keith in a mad dash back to the training deck.

When they finally made it back they wished they’d never left.

Lance was collapsed onto his forearms with a very distraught Shiro rubbing circles on his back as he struggled to take in heaving breaths. He hadn’t even realized they’d returned until Shiro spoke up.

“Thank god you guys are back, just toss it—”

“It’s empty, this was his last inhaler...” Keith offered for the look of utter despair on Shiro’s face as Hunk sunk down next to them and placed one hand beside Shiro’s on his back and wrapped the other around Lance’s, receiving a weak squeeze in thanks for the small comfort.

“You’re gonna be fine dude... Coran and Allura are going to help, they can fix this. Just keep breathing as deep as you can,” he repeated over and over as Lance’s chest continued to hitch, the wheezes so loud and guttural now as his lungs worsened and his body grew more exhausted.

Understanding washed over Shiro all at once and then he was moving, maneuvering Lance’s struggling body despite the unwillingness of his lax limbs.

He was too exhausted to do much of anything aside from keep his chest rising and follow whatever direction his pliant frame was guided, letting himself be pushed back onto his heels as hands clasped his forearms and settled on his back to keep him from tipping over.

Every muscle in his abdomen was screaming. A similar tension burning up his neck and seeping into the sinews between his shoulder blades that made his head feel way too heavy to sit atop his shoulders. After not even thirty ticks of trying to summon the strength to keep it up he let it hang forward, the hands on him tightening their grips when he did.

He was extremely grateful they couldn’t see his face anymore because tears were beginning to form quicker than they could fall and he was sure he would have been fully sobbing at that point if he’d had any energy to spare.

“We’re meeting everyone at the infirmary then, you guys run ahead and let Coran know,” Shiro ordered as he motioned for Hunk to take hold of Lance while he turned away and crouched.

With some help he rose on shaking legs, Keith rushing to support his other side when his oxygen deprived legs protested the action.

“Woah, we’ve got you... thanks Keith...”

Their hands under his armpits kept him standing long enough to collapse onto Shiro’s back.

He literally only had the energy after that to throw his arms over Shiro’s shoulders and nestle his chin securely in the space between his own bicep and Shiro’s neck before his body sagged against his leader like dead weight.

“Go! I’m right behind you,” he shouted, his voice dark and fearful.

He could feel Lance straining against him as he followed after them, could hear the way his congested airways sputtered each time he tried to breathe.

Shiro made his way with steady urgency, not exactly jogging but not walking either, the anxiety bubbling in his stomach only forcing his legs to pump quicker as Lance got worse.

Keith and Hunk made it to the medbaby in record time though, both boys panting after sputtering to a halt once they made it through the whooshing doors.

The paladins knew today’s workout would be a doozy, but none of them expected to be doing this much running, especially under these circumstances.

Pidge was on the floor sorting through boxes of medicine and supplies carrying on an in-depth conversation regarding the compositional makeup of altean pharmaceuticals with Coran and Allura.

“Hey guys—wait why do you have...?”

“Empty...”

Keith answered a bit breathlessly as he waved the tube of navy and teal plastic in the air before gesturing to toss it to Coran who nodded and raised his hands in anticipation.

“...figured you’d want to take a look at the ingredients or whatever before Shiro got here with him.”

The air in the room seemed to thin as worry descended upon everyone.

“Christ, Lance!” Pidge exclaimed and sat back on her heels.

“Yeah, he’s not doing too hot,” Hunk said as he joined them, stealing the box of tubes and gadgets from Pidge to rifle through it himself.

Coran’s frown somehow deepened and Allura looked increasingly more distraught as he began filling them in.

“What level of dangerous is his breathing at?” Pidge asked hesitantly, like she didn’t want to hear the answer.

“He’s panicking and already really exhausted, so pretty dangerous. It’s one of the worst attacks I think he’s had in a while...”

Allura worried at her lip and kept glancing between the jumble of medical supplies and the medbay doors while she worked absently to ready a bed, the mice smoothing out wrinkles in the sheets and pulling down corners for her.

“Well, it was smart of number four to think of bringing this. I am synthesizing several medicines in likeness but none of them are exactly complete yet—”

“That’s—fuck, that’s not gonna be good enough...”

Everyone stilled at Hunk’s harsh interruption, his hands shaking in loose fists at his sides while he stared fixedly at the boxes of miscellaneous medical equipment in front of him.

“Lance can’t breathe, he can’t just wait for something to finish synthesizing, he might not be breathing at all when it’s done!”

Pidge scooted across the floor and laid her tiny hands on top of Hunk’s trembling ones.

“I think what Hunk means to say is that Lance’s condition is, erm, kinda dire and requires something that works as fast as possible.”

“Hmmm, I see. That is why the blue wilgam bark salve is strictly for prevention... this is indeed a rather tricky—ah, though I suppose I can try to extract and aerosolize whatever might remain of his earth remedy for a temporary solution,” Coran noted as he braved his stern concentration face and began separating the metal canister from the outer plastic to compare the words on it to the words on the bottles of medicine in front of him.

“And we can always place him in a pod for however long it takes to create an accurate remedy... he is truly in the best hands Hunk, do not fret so much,” Allura finished with a tight smile that was warm and assuring all the same.

It was strange how well she could do that, squash so much worry with such a simple act.

Coran hurried over to a station with lots of tools and canisters and turned on several machines that made various clicking and whirring noises.

Keith’s nose wrinkled at the new sounds but he couldn’t find it in him to feel angry about it. Not when they were going to help Lance when was in such bad shape.

“Okay, okay... those are good ideas,” Hunk agreed with a gasp, he hadn’t realized he’d been withholding air as he lost himself in his panic.

“Deep breaths, big guy,” Pidge urged, the weight of her hands bringing him back down from the brink of panic as his mind raced.

“Yeah, don’t forget that you’re the one who can actually breathe,” Keith chided gently with a hesitant hand on Hunk’s shoulder.

“Right... sorry. It’s just that these can get ugly really quick if—“

The doors whooshed open with an unsettling burst of air as Shiro emerged and crossed the room in a matter of seconds, a flurry of concerned exclamations filling the silence in between pauses of commotion that should have been hurried gasps for air.

But weren’t.

There wasn’t time to make sense of the lack of color in Lance’s face or the absence of movement in his chest as Shiro slid him off of his back, human hand trembling as he moved to support his middle and the base of his neck as he lowered his lifeless body onto the bed.

It was a grim enough sight to have even Allura’s mice crying out.

“Lance!”

“Holy fuck...”

Pidge was acting on autopilot as she pinched the altean breathing mask Coran had pulled out over the bridge of his nose and cupped it under his chin to secure the seal, Keith moving in eerie similarity to connect the tubing and flip the right switches on the machine when it became apparent that Hunk wouldn’t be spurred from his horror any time soon.

It wasn’t prepped because they hadn’t realized they’d be needing it so soon.

“No... nonononono—“

They aren’t sure how they heard it through the muddle of commotion and devastating silence but it stopped them all in their tracks, the faintest whisper of air passing his lips.

His very blue lips, go figure.

“He’s breathing, Hunk. Just barely, though...”

Lance’s eyes were open still and staring at nothing as his neck strained for air that was there now but still not accessible with how severely inflamed his lungs had become, the only sounds leaving his lips at all just rapid exhales where he couldn’t expel enough before his aching lungs screamed for more of what the mask was providing

“It doesn’t look like it’s helping...” Hunk all but sobbed as he gripped the base board of the bed so tightly his fingers blanched.

Lance’s eyes bobbed at that, struggling to locate who out of his friends was distressed through the tears welling at their brims.

They were puffy and bloodshot as silent tears spilled in a continuous stream, his eyebrows drawn together with pain and desperation.

“That’s because it’s not,” Shiro deadpanned, his hands working to soothe over Lance’s stuttering chest as his rasping breaths caught in his throat on their way out.

“Wh-how is it not working... it’s oxygen?!”

It was almost pitiful how helpless Keith looked as he stated the very blatant fact, his expression sharp and his tone prickly, like he didn’t know who or what to be mad at.

“His airways,” Pidge started weakly, her voice wavering, “they must be too tight for the air to get through...”

Shiro’s hand gripped Lance’s fiercely. It was ice cold.

The gravity of the situation dawned on his friends like a literal blow then, all eyes turning to Allura.

“Coran... he-he’s working on something, but...”

It wasn’t often that the paladins saw the princess hesitate. Her usual order of proceeding during a crisis was to do something brave or noble first and think about it later, but her impulse instinct was uncharacteristically absent as she stared at Lance’s greying face.

Her hands rose slowly, long fingers uncurling from where they’d been pressed tightly in her palms to reveal a subtle pink glow.

“Princess...”

“I know, Shiro... it’s just—I am scared it might cause him greater discomfort...”

“I don’t think we have time to worry about that, Allura,” Keith noted gravely from the foot of the bed where Lance’s eyes were half focused and darting between him and Hunk.

A status update from Coran made the tension in the room skyrocket further as he estimated another twenty or so dobashes before anything was viable.

It only took one more particularly worrisome sound of distress from Lance for Allura’s hands to descend on his chest with certainty, the pink furls leaving her fingers and settling on his body for not even a second before his back arched off the bed with a strangled gasp.

Allura grimaced as she called upon several energy reserves to ease the vice constricting Lance’s lungs as fast as she could.

A phantom tightness bloomed in her own chest as she visualized the pressure leaving his while she forced each passage back open, the channel she had opened between them by using her powers allowing her to feel the gridlock for herself.

She didn’t let up until Lance was sinking back into the pile of pillows and by then she was so lightheaded that her vision was spotting, but Keith was at her side and gripping her elbow securely before she could even stumble when the strength in her legs wavered.

“I am quite alright, just feeling a bit weak.”

“Are you sure? Why don’t you take a seat for a few anyway?”

Lance couldn’t really make sense of the conversations going on around him while he collected himself after being released from the pulls of Allura’s magic.

“It’ll pass, Keith.”

“Allura...”

Not that he was known for having stellar listening skills, but he was just usually able to follow along with the general flow of things even when otherwise preoccupied.

“Coran you said only eighteen minutes, right?”

The voices of his friends filtered back in slowly though, his skull throbbing still after the horrible pressure had lifted.

“Can you lift his head for a sec so I can secure the strap?”

He hadn’t been coherent of much of anything before, fixing what remained of his energy on the miserable stalemate in his chest.

“It’s only seventeen dobashes and forty three tics now...”

And then the twisted relief of Allura’s magic.

But after that his hearing seemed to flatline, zeroing in on a high pitched hiss that was either static or the oxygen flow of which droned on and dribbled into his present when the tension that had yanked every muscle in his body taught alleviated all at once.

It was so disorientating it almost nauseated him and brought a distinct rush of blood to his eardrums, the oxygen flooding his deprived bloodstream like a dam had broken and left him feeling utterly weightless.

Shiro was the first one to break through the barrier of cotton that muffled his brain.

“Easy, Lance,” he instructed when he didn’t start breathing normally right sway, too stunned by the sudden levity to remember how.

“Take it slow hermano, you’re okay now...”

Everything was still uncomfortably tight and restricted, but air was at least accessible even as his body struggled to acclimate to the change, his heaves greedy and crackling.

“I was able reduce the inflammation for now but there is a substantial amount of fluid that remains in his lungs.”

“Fluid? What like blood?”

“No, Keith, not blood. Phlegm.”

“Oh, gross.”

Lance let out an indignant huff at that and despite the restriction of the mask managed to return the look of disgust the mullet had given him.

“Why is that so bad if it’s just phlegm?”

“Because anything in your lungs besides air is bad, Keith. It’s your lungs!”

“Precisely, Pidge. And it will only keep irritating Lance’s but we cannot risk him progressing back to such a state before Coran has derived his medicine when my powers are not indefatigable.”

“Yep...” Lance winced.

In order to speak he had to battle against the congestion in his chest which made his already wrecked voice sound downright abrasive.

“Shhh, no talking!” Pidge hissed with a warning glare.

But when was Lance ever known to take good advice when it’s given?

“Think... I can feel th’fluid... s’not very—“

He didn’t have to elaborate any more than that to get his point across because the rapping of his own vocal cords against each other had him launching into a harsh fit of coughing that rocked his entire frame. The accumulated cloud of condensation in the mask never allowed to chance to dissipate fully as he hacked.

It sort of felt like he was drowning since he didn’t have the strength to get his arms underneath him while all of the crap that his stupid respiratory system produced to counteract the strain in his lungs only worked to suffocate him and his freshly reduced air passages.

“Shit someone help me get him up, it’ll be easier to breathe if he’s vertical...”

Hunk surged to grab the arm that was closest to him as Shiro slotted his own beneath Lance’s back and hefted him into what only partially passed as a sitting position. But the motion made his head spin and his stomach clench and then Hunk’s hands planted on either of his shaking shoulders to keep him from tilting over as Shiro slid behind him.

The others looked on with horror.

“You’re okay,” Shiro assured as he pulled Lance towards himself.

He was grateful for the solidity of Shiro’s chest, his hold firm enough that Lance didn’t have to work anymore to keep himself up as he slumped into it, but the tears started back up anyway when he continued to actively choke on what felt like nothing despite being upright.

But there wasn’t anything in his throat to actually choke on.

“Just gotta work through it...”

He was starting to get really tired of the exhaustion and malaise that came with being deprived of oxygen for an extended period of time.

“Paladins! Only fourteen—er, minutes remaining.”

“Hear that bud? You’re gonna be okay.”

He did hear but he’s shaking his head in the crook of Shiro’s arm where his head had lolled because he can’t wait that long. He can’t.

“Yeah, you’ll feel better real soon,” Hunk affirmed.

But Lance was verging on a hysteria that he couldn’t summon the strength to express when every muscle that can be strained in his body felt like it most definitely was. And with how acutely his ribcage ached he was also certain he’d displaced a couple of those false ribs made up of just cartilage too.

“Hey, no don’t get upset, you’re gonna be fine!”

He’s never been more exhausted in his life and he can’t communicate that he can’t wait that long because he hasn’t stopped coughing.

His eyes are burning from the amount of crying he’s done so he relies on touch alone when a hand cups his chin and turns it, deducing it must be Allura.

“Lance, can you hear me?”

A shakey jerk seems to be good enough for her.

“I know you aren’t the biggest fan of the healing pods, but I understand that you are in a great deal of distress still and I believe you have endured enough...”

“What are you—oh, yeah! We could totally just put him in stasis like you and Coran were for thousands of years and bring him out when the medicine is ready.”

“Yes, just as Pidge puts it. There is no need to extend the suffering of one of my paladins.”

Shiro set his jaw as he regarded Allura sternly, it didn’t matter what she believed if Lance didn’t agree and he knew how wary he was of returning to the pods after the harrowing experience that landed him in one for the first time.

“Is that something you want to do? It’s alright if you aren’t comf—“

“Please.”

His voice was small, hard even a rasp, but it didn’t need to be loud for Shiro to accept it as his answer.

“Okay...”

Lance checked out after that, allowing himself to save the energy it took to focus on what was happening around him.

So when he started registering Shiro’s voice in his ear he wasn’t exactly sure how both him and the respirator came to be at the foot of a cryochamber but he made a desperate noise at the realization.

“I know, bud. You’re almost there but we need to take the mask off.”

No one missed the fear that flashed across his face before it softened into resignation, or otherwise known as I don’t care, please put me in that stupid thing right now.

Shiro was still holding him and seemed to sense the urgency in it.

“I’m gonna stand up with you...”

It was so surprise when Lance’s knees hardly held any of his own weight before wobbling and giving out as Shiro stood with him still flush against his chest.

He regarded Hunk with a lazy roll through lidded eyes as he tipped his head forward and worked the strap off but held the mask in place.

Distantly aware of the burst of air from the pod opening and a renewed flurry of commotion around him, Lance tried to work with Shiro as he ushered him forward but his legs were too heavy and he couldn’t coordinate his movements well.

Someone else’s hands were on him, bending his knee so they could set one leg down in the pod and send the rest of his body with it. He thinks it might’ve been Keith.

The various sets of hands on him stay even after he’s securely in place, probably scared he would crumple if they did.

They were probably right.

“-nce. Hey, Lance? There you are, this is gonna suck but only for a second. I promise. Ready?”

You would’ve missed the brief hum from his somewhere deep in his sore chest if you weren’t practically inside the pod with him like Shiro seemed to be.

“Okay, now Hunk.”

The crackling heave that erupted from hims mouth was something a dying thing made, but he couldn’t hear himself or the horrible sound he made as consciousness began to swiftly melt away in stages.

First with the initial pressure everywhere after the removal of the mask.

And then pain because holy shit he couldn’t breathe.

But the cold creeped into his bones at light speed and the darkness wasn’t too far behind.

[bellygunnr]

Blown Lightbulb

A commission piece for @poisonheadcrabsalesman featuring Thomas Lasky/Sarah Palmer. 

---

The house is cold. It hasn’t changed at all since you’ve last been here, some twenty odd years ago. You hadn’t been a kid then-- just a pilot, home on leave despite not really wanting to be. It had been tense then. It was the same now, even if your mother wasn’t even here, and you were laying bare the contents of your past to the two people you loved the most and considered the most important in your life. You hesitate to look at them, not quite fearful of what they’re thinking but definitely reluctant, like any of this is your fault and something to be ashamed of.

You know no one can really blame you for wanting some modicum of closure, but you’ve always been conscious of starting losing battles. Your mother isn’t even here, for one. A toneless holo-message is all she’s left you, detailing that an emergency at work brought her in and she’ll be back sometime in the evening. Maybe you and your colleagues could meet her at this location, even, and upon further investigation, that location is a startling high-profile restaurant of considerable Martian renown.

So much for flying close to the surface. You’d be in the air for all to see, just for a chance to reconcile with what little remains of your family. But that wasn’t for several hours yet, so you content yourself with poking around the giant empty house and listening to Sarah and Roland banter between each other.

“No offense, but this feels kind of like a museum exhibit,” Sarah says. “It’s not even dusty. I’d prefer it if it was.”

“You’d prefer it? There are stock photos of kids up here-- unless the Lasky family is way bigger than records suggest,” Roland answers.

You look at the picture frames Roland is pointing out. Amid the pictures of your brother Cadmon, there are photos of a foreign family, conspicuously only featuring a father figure. You run your fingers through your hair, nostrils flaring with a barely-restrained sigh.

“We didn’t take many family pictures,” you say, as if that explains anything. “I’m going to check out the upstairs.”

You tug on the back of your head, pulling at the recently shaved strands in a fit of anxiety. You don’t want to go upstairs. You’re afraid of what you’ll find there. Cadmon’s room was practically a shrine twenty years ago. The stairs don’t even creak as you step up them and you’re not sure why you expect them to. They look and feel and sound like wood, but you know them to be special composites that just didn’t degrade.

Your grip lingers on the railing as you take the final step. The door you know that leads to your mother’s room is closed. The keypad lock to it is bright red. You wonder if the keycode has changed at all, but testing it probably isn’t worth the risk. Across from her room is Cadmon’s, but that door is also, as you expected, closed.

And the one you recognize as your own is ajar. You let your hand find Sarah’s, squeezing it so tightly that she squeezes back, thumb rolling over your knuckles in a decidingly tender way.

“You know you don’t have to do this, Tom,” she says gently.

“But I want to,” you say. “I know I don’t need to.”

“Well, that’s something.”

It is. You offer her a braver smile than you feel and let her follow you to your room. There are more picture frames up here, covering the walls in even intervals. You can only ignore them because you know Roland is looking at them. You nudge open the door with your foot and, again, hesitate at the threshold.

Was everything in this house going to be difficult?

You shut your eyes and take in a shuddering breath. You can feel Sarah at your back, her presence radiating warmth. If you wobble, you feel her sturdy body against yours, so you let yourself lean into the partial embrace of her arms. She squeezes your shoulders, just as ice trickles down your spine.

Roland’s presence bleeds into your mind like condensation forming on the outside of a glass. It’s not enough for his thoughts or feelings to be tangible, but it’s so distinctly him that you smile and relax, easing the tension in your balled-up fists and opening your eyes. The room ahead is dark, but all you need to do is step inside for the lights to wake up and--

It’s not exactly the same as you left it, but it’s close. Your eyes roam the room, picking out all the various effects of teenaged you. There are posters on the wall, though some of the pixels have gone dark in their paper-thin construction, and models on the shelves, thick with dust. Your bed is perfectly made, the pillows hidden beneath a dark red blanket. Inevitably, your eyes roam over to a box bolted seamlessly into the wall, just above your nightstand. 

“Ah,” you breathe, staring at the box. “I see.”

“Is that…?” Sarah starts, but trails off, uncertain.

You can feel Roland’s curiosity curling up in the back of your mind. If you strain, you can even see his glittery-gold essence creeping out toward the box, but that gives you a migraine the harder you try.

You open your mouth to try and explain what it is, despite what it is being obvious. It’s a physical control panel for a domestic-grade Dumb AI. His name is still plainly depicted in the form of colorful stickers-- Admiral Hart. He hadn’t been active last time, but he hadn’t been gone either, so at least the sick hope flickering in your belly isn’t fully misplaced.

Still, is it worth trying to activate him?

“Roland,” you say, feeling quite outside yourself. “You can investigate it, if you want. Um, if he’s in there, could you…?”

“Of course, Captain,” Roland says.

Roland’s projection hovers in mid-air, thrown there by the custom commpad he was currently residing in. He smiles brilliantly at you and Sarah before bringing up what must be the digital counterpart of the control panel, his gestures as grandiose as ever, his expression just visible behind the transparent boxes. You hate it, but you distract yourself by leaning into Sarah’s space and kissing the bottom of her chin, staying there until Roland pipes up again.

“He’s in there, Captain. Says here he hasn’t been activated since… 2549. Very long service life, this one.”

Oh, that wasn’t too bad. Still, nearly ten years, completely shut down.

“...I don’t know if I’m ready to see him yet,” you say in one long rush of breath, the realization making you feel ill. “I do miss him, though.”

“There are also several other AI matrices in here,” Roland adds. “Why so many, if I may ask?”

“They were my teachers, when I was doing homeschooling. I’m surprised they’re still here.”

Dumb AI were very limited in their fixed personalities, but you swear they’re more sentient than they let on. One didn’t befriend several all at once and not experience some inexplicable variances, but dwelling on it was starting to make you feel hot behind the eyes. You shake your head, exasperated.

“Sorry, this is-- a lot more than I thought it’d be.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Sarah says lightly. “Want to go back downstairs?”

“Mind if I hang out in your house’s network for a little while?” Roland asks. “I won’t touch anything.”

“Go for it,” you say with a smile.

Roland winks and smiles before gathering up the tendrils of himself, more visible now that he was letting his essence ooze out between commpad, neural interfaces, and nearby network ports. Smart AI were remarkably fluid, or even gaseous, automatically filling in the void spaces around them, not because they wanted to be big as possible-- they were just that big. Still, you rub the back of your neck the same time as Sarah does, acutely conscious of the absence.

“Downstairs, then,” Sarah says. “Think there’s anything in the fridge?”

“I have no idea. Are you hungry?”

“I haven’t eaten since yesterday. To keep the motion sickness down, you know.”

You hum in acknowledgement. Her moving ahead of you prevents you from lingering too long upstairs, anxious as you are to keep up with her long strides. You have no idea where either of you are going to get clothes nice enough to go to a restaurant. Neither of you are dressed for it, let alone packed. Roland had suggested dressing as casually as possible to take the edge off, and well, maybe that was going to backfire. 

“I can feel you thinking too hard,” Sarah says.

She’s in your space the second you leave the stairs. But it’s gentle and unintrusive despite her taking up your whole line of sight. She’s teasing you, even as her brow is bent in concern.

“What am I thinking too hard about?” you ask.

“Hmmm. Something about your mom, like that stupid message she left us. Seriously, talk about a neutral location.” 

You laugh before you can stop yourself. 

“Got it in one,” you say. “I don’t know what she’s thinking.”

“Guess poor mother Lasky is going to have to come home after all,” Sarah says. “Isn’t that sad?”

She bumps your hip with the back of her fist, a playful nudge that, surprisingly, doesn’t send you stumbling. You punch her shoulder in return, silently following her into the next room, where the kitchen is. You watch Sarah go for the fridge and open it, head disappearing inside to scope out the contents. She retreats a moment later to throw something green and limp into your arms.

You catch it more out of surprise than anything, but you feel nauseous just holding it.

“What the hell is this?”

“Nutritional smoothie paste!” Sarah says, like she’s struck gold. “Used to eat this shit when I was a baby Spartan. They put it in Mjolnir on long-haul ops.”

“And that’s…. Is it good?” You ask, instantly skeptical.

“Hell, no. But I’m too polite to eat the meal plan stuff she has in there. So, drink up.”

Well, you couldn’t fault her there. You set the plastic tube of paste down on the faux-granite countertop, deciding that you’d rather let Sarah just drink both of them. You can’t stifle a smile as she immediately scoops it up, tearing open both of them at once and drinking them down in a truly disgusting fashion. But she doesn’t spill a drop, so... 

“I see you’ve gotten better at that,” you say.

“Roland made me promise not to make a mess if I’m going to be carrying the commpad,” she admits, looking exasperated for all of a split-second. “So.”

She tosses the spent bags onto the countertop, despite the trash can being directly underhand. You shrug that off in favor of grabbing her by the collar of her tank top and pulling her down, kissing her flat on the mouth. Her answering hum is felt in your bones and you both relax into each other, your anxious tension sapped by her solid core. She curls an arm around your waist and holds you in place, like she’s been waiting to do that.

“Relax a little,” she murmurs. “We can worry about her when she gets here.”

Not you, we. You feel a little weak in the knees at the distinction and let yourself hang onto her arms, certain that you’re looking at her with a dopey smile.

“But we probably shouldn’t do this in the kitchen,” she adds.

Before you can pull away, Sarah effortlessly hauls you into her arms, supporting you by grabbing a fistful of your ass and waiting until you wrap your arms around her neck. She squeezes your rear a couple times before moving, gait so smooth that you don’t even feel it when she turns on her heel to dump you on the couch with a flourish. 

You sink into the couch cushions, but wrap your arms around hers so that you don’t disappear completely. Her face is so close to yours that you count each individual scar and freckles, including the faint lines of surgical augmentations that only show up in the right light. You snake your hand up to the back of her neck, mindful not to grab ahold of the enlarged neural implant.

“Anyone ever told you you’re handsome, Tom?” Sarah murmurs.

“Mmm, I can think of a few…”

Her laughter is felt on your skin as warm puffs. She kisses you, her lips rough with bitten and half-healed skin that you nip at, chasing them when she tries to pull away. The plasticine fabric squeaks as she carefully, carefully lowers her weight over yours and straddles you, her thighs big enough to keep you in place. 

“Let me know if I’m hurting you.”

“I will,” you promise.

You want to say that you know she won’t, but she always looks so earnest when she asks that this time, you don’t. Because she has before-- there’s a biological differential between the two of you that you never stop thinking about. You work your hand further up to pull her hair out of its ponytail, working your fingers into the coarse locks and kissing her more intently, eyes fluttering shut. I love you, you want to say. I trust you, which is just as hard.

Her hands roam across your shirt and pluck open several buttons so that she can follow the edge of your collarbone and the slope of your shoulders. Her warm, slightly sweaty palms are a sharp contrast to the cool air, and the shock of physical contact has goosebumps lifting on your arms. You lick at her lips and fist some of her hair, mumbling indistinctly as you pull her down closer.

There’s no smart quip or knowing look to make light of your neediness. She finally lets her weight drop onto your lap completely and the kiss moves on, her teeth and lips tracking across the edge of your jaw to just underneath your ear. Instead of letting your hands hover, you start to follow the hard curves of her body, groping at the bunching muscles and admiring the power coiled there. 

Then she snaps into rigid attention, face turned toward the front door, her lips drawn back in a snarl. You vaguely notice that she has a chipped tooth before you hear the door opening and Sarah is still poised over you and she’s kissing you again, hard, and you kind of moan into it--

“Well, then,” an all-too-familiar voice says. “Thomas, care to… introduce me?”

Finally, Sarah climbs off of you, but not before buttoning your shirt and kissing your forehead. Your brain already hurts from the mental whiplash of the situation.

“Um, mother,” you start. “This is Sarah Palmer. My partner.”

Your mother is shorter than you remember. Her hair, once a brownish-black, is in faded tones and grey at the roots. A scar that wasn’t there twenty years ago lurks just by her eye and she looks exhausted. Stress and worry lines make canyons of her face, ones that twist your heart to look at.

“A pleasure to meet you,” Sarah says stiffly.

She does not look amused. She doesn’t look much of anything except terribly stern and suspicious of the scene before her. You almost can’t blame her. Almost.

“You know, I was hoping you’d be here when we got here,” you say. “But it seems you’re still working.”

“Of course. Duty still calls, you know.”

You watch her as she shrugs off her jacket and hangs it up on the coat rack in the anteroom. Both nothing and everything has changed about her and it makes something in your throat tighten.

“Oh, I know that more than anybody,” you breathe. “Yeah.”

“I do appreciate you coming home, Tom,” Audrey says, not looking at you. “It means a lot. I thought I’d have to see you when the Infinity opened her doors to the public. That is still happening-- right?”

“Sure, it’s happening,” Sarah says. “Look, Tom, do you want me to…?”

You shake your head.

“Yes, but I won’t be back on Mars until then. Working nonstop has its benefits-- like a lot of vacation time.”

“That sounds like a dream, to be able to use it,” Audrey replies calmly. “I need to know if we’re having dinner tonight.”

You and Sarah share a look.

“I was thinking we could share a bottle of wine and shoot the shit instead,” Sarah says. “Or some scotch, if you have it.”

At that, Audrey looks amused.

“I never took you for a scotch man, Tom,” Audrey chuckles.

You don’t say anything as she leaves the room, no doubt seeking out the desired glasses and alcohol. The sun is going down outside, plunging the room in a deep red. This was going better than expected. You want to break open the window and run. You want to do anything but sit back down and draw out the table and sit in a semi-circle and “shoot the shit.” But you’re already sitting down and the bottle is open and you haven’t ate anything-- neither has Sarah, even, but with her augmentations drinking on an empty stomach is probably beneficial and--

“Good news, everybody! I took the liberty of ordering us some, what do you humans call it? Party food? You know, for all the drinking we’re about to do. You’re welcome!”

You choke on your own spit and your mother nearly drops the glass she’s pouring. Sarah, for her part, is taking the bottle and stealing a sip directly, if only to conceal a smug smile.

Roland is hovering inches above the faux-wooden table, drawn up to his full height with chest puffed out and expression gleeful. He flicks one hand out in a casual salute toward Audrey before trotting aside and sitting down, legs crossed.

“Cheers,” he says.

“Hi, Roland,” Sarah greets.

You had completely forgotten about Roland. Oops.

“Thomas, I do hate to ask,” Audrey says, peering down at Roland with a pinched expression, “but why is there an AI?”

“Oh, you know,” you say vaguely, waving a hand. “It’s classified.”

“I’m Captain Lasky’s boss,” Roland says, grinning. “So I’m allowed to be here, you see.”

“Are you my boss, Roland?” Sarah asks.

“No, ma’am.”

Audrey’s eyebrows shoot up. She takes a sip from her glass, shifting in her seat uncomfortably.

“Well, I’m Audrey Lasky,” she says finally. “Pleasure to meet you.”

The rest of the night goes painfully.