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padme-parker · 3 years ago

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Mizpah // the darkling x reader // ch 5

summary: You tumble a Grisha in more ways than one ;)

warnings: violence, fighting, cursing, SMUT, fingering, masturbation??, praise kink, not proofread.

A/N: this is all over the place, forgive me y'all </3

WHEN you awoke the next morning, you found a single glass of water placed on your night stand. Your head pounded as you tried to recall the blurred events from the previous night. All you remembered was catching up with Alina and then finally leaving her room. From there it was as if everything had muddled together to form a single incoherent memory. The sun had just begun to peak through your window.

While you were away last night, a servant must have stocked up your closet with clean clothes. They had mainly been a few soldiers' uniforms and some new nightgowns. Along with a few robes, each one as soft as a rabbit's fur. The gold kefta still remained in the dresser, collecting dust.

You changed out of your dirty clothes that you had slept in, and placed them in a neatly folded pile on the corner of your bed. After throwing on a clean uniform and putting your hair into a low bun, you rang for a servant. You asked her to bring breakfast to you. It seemed like there was no use in eating with the other Grisha. Where would you have sat? You weren’t a Corporalki, Etherealki, nor a Materialki. You certainly weren’t the Darkling either. There would be no place for you if you’d chosen to eat there with Alina.

Soon enough, a light knock echoed on the wooden door. “Come in!” You said, and the servant strolled in with a cart. She placed down a golden tray in front of you. You were served sweet pea porridge and fresh figs with a tall glass of water. You thanked the servant before she dismissed herself, leaving you to your food. There was another covering that laid on the tray, no plate under it. As you shoveled another spoonful of the porridge into your mouth, you took off the covering. Under the dome laid your weapons, cleaned of the dirt and blood that caked them. You placed your weapons back onto their respective places: a pistol and dagger at your hips, a knife securely tucked into your boot, and the last knife hidden away in your sleeve.

Just as you finished your food, another knock resonated in your uncomfortably quiet room. You beckoned them to come in. A Grisha with a red kefta came in, the black stitching signifying that he was a heartrender. You gave him a polite smile as he stepped in.

“Hello. I am Fedyor. I am to escort you to the training grounds today.” He explained.

“Oh no, it’s alright. I don’t need an escort. I know my way around the palace, thank you though.” You assured him. Sitting on the corner of your bed, you put on your boots. You were surprised to find them in the normal place you had put them, at the foot of your bed, near the very corner. It was a habit you had since you were a child. Every other orphan at Keramzin always placed their boots either to the left or right of their beds. It was understandably easier than leaving your boots where you normally had, yet you couldn’t shake the habit.

“The General himself required me to accompany you. As you must know, I cannot obey the General’s orders.” He stated. After lacing up your boots, you made your way to the tray your breakfast was on. You put the small plate that once housed the figs into the empty bowl of the porridge you were served. Picking up the tray, you began to walk towards the circular table near the door and left the tray there so it’d be easier for the servant to clean.

You turned to him, arms crossed on your chest as you sighed, “Fine.” You examined the new jacket you were issued, it wasn’t the same as the frayed one you were used to. The hem of your sleeves were intact, unlike your old one when you had picked apart the stitching when you were nervous. The only thing that you were particularly happy about was the fur lining. Yours had matted from being used so much and slept on.

“You know, it’s quite odd that you’re staying in the General's hall.” You let out a hm, questioning what he meant by that. “Usually guests stay in the guest hall. The General never permits for anyone to stay in his. He’s the only person allowed to sleep in this specific hall.” He whispered as we walked past a group of Materialki. They were huddled amongst themselves, whispering and giggling as they made their way to their training rooms.

“Maybe it’s because I’m Alina’s friend? Perhaps he feels like he needs to watch over me himself since he has also taken her under his watch.” You said. You took a deep breath of the crisp winter air as the two of you stepped outside.

“Perhaps. But why is Alina staying in the vezda suite? Wouldn’t it make sense for her to be staying in the General’s hall as well?” Fedyor did make a good point, if Alina was the most important Grisha of all, why wasn’t she across the hallway from the Darkling?

“It truly is a mystery I suppose. But if I were you, I wouldn’t question his choices.” You teased. You thought you might’ve offended him until he lets out a short laugh.

“Saints know what he would do if I had.” He replied, making you giggle. Your laughter died as you arrived at Botkin’s training area. Grisha alike had already been paired up and were sparring. Alina had been paired up with a girl she had mentioned last night, you couldn’t remember her name. Madia? No that wasn’t it. Narie? It wasn’t that one either. Noticing a late arrival, Botkin walked up to you.

“Botkin has never seen little girl before.” You tried to suppress the surprise you felt when you heard him refer to himself in third person. “Who is she?” He asked Fedyor. By now some people had stopped training to hear the conversation. You noticed Alina was still sparring with her friend, unaware of your arrival.

“She’s here as Alina’s guest.” At the mention of her name, the girl stopped fighting. Finally taking notice of your figure, she let out a surprised gasp.

“What are you doing here?” She asked as she came closer.

“Training. If I’m going to stay at the palace I don’t want to rot away and do nothing.” You said, rolling your shoulders to loosen up your muscles.

“First Army girl wants to train with Botkin.” His voice, although baritone and guttural, brought a strange comfort to you. “Choose your opponent.” You surveyed the crowd, looking for someone who could pose a possible challenge. Your eyes landed on a tan skinned girl with raven black hair, bangs framing her face perfectly. Her black eyes stared into yours, challenging you.

“Her.” You stated while nodding your head towards her. Botkin weaved his head in the direction you had nodded off to.

“Ah, star pupil, Zoya!” So this was Zoya, the girl who told Alina that she reeked of Keramzin. “I have trained her since she was ten.” The raven haired girl offered you a way out, which you immediately declined.

“Fighters ready?” You put your fist up, getting into stance. “And..Fight!” You waited for Zoya to come to you first. She walked up to you, her fists hung up. You circled each other, playing the waiting game. You were about to make a move when you saw Zoya moving her right fist towards your face. You ducked left, managing to move in time to avoid the punch. With her back still to you, you jammed your elbow into her side making her hunch over.

She came at you again, this time with more veracity and anger behind each swing. Except she didn’t land a single blow. You were able to avoid each one as you let out a giggle, staggering a few steps back.

“Is that all you’ve got, star pupil?” Your comment only seemed to spur her on more. She ran at you in full force, this time you let her land a hit on you for the fun of it. What you didn’t expect was for her to punch you so hard that she drew blood. You sniffled feeling a drop of blood come from your nose. You began your attack with a right hook followed by a left one. In return she used her arms to block each time, leaving her abdomen vulnerable.

You were able to land a hard blow or two before you found yourself briefly soaring through the air, your back meeting the hard wall that was originally ten paces behind you. You let out a wheeze as you feel one of your ribs break.

Botkin had begun to reprimand Zoya, looking at her you could feel her shame as she upset her mentor. You couldn’t help but smirk as she looked at you, at least now she knows how someone from Keramzin fights. Her gaze hardened, about to walk up to you once more before she was taken away by some guards.

“Oh my Saints, now the General is really going to have my head.” Fedyor said in a panic. He helped you stand as he called for a healer.

“I’m quite alright.” You ensured, but the wince in your face gave you away. Alina came running up to you, giving you a once over before taking you from Fedyor and into her embrace.

“You know you shouldn’t be doing that.” She whispered into your ear. “It’s too dangerous for you.” She made a movement to grab one of your cold hands, giving it a squeeze.

“Everything’s a risk for me, Alina. The Doctor made that clear.” When you were younger, you were diagnosed with a heart condition. It was nothing serious really, and only acted up once in a blue moon. The tugging and squeezing feeling only lasted for seconds, but the pain left you feeling unstable for hours after. “The risk is always worth it.”

“But what if one day its not?” She pulled away from you, resting her hands on your shoulders. “The Doctor himself said there was no cure for this, no remedy that could help.”

“It’s worth it if it means protecting our honor.” You replied honestly.

“I don’t need you to protect our honor.” She protested. “I need you to protect yourself. Even if that means backing down from a fight.” You remained silent as a healer began to work on you. Starting first with your broken ribs then moving onto your bloody nose. After a few minutes of sitting still, the healer finally told you that you could leave.

Alina and Fedyor accompanied you back to your room. “What do you think will happen to her?” You asked. Alina shrugged her shoulders as the heartrender went to respond.

“She will probably get reprimanded by the General too. Zoya knows not to use her powers while training. Respectfully, especially not against someone who isn’t Grisha.” He commented.

You must’ve really gotten under her skin then if she went against all those years of training and discipline. “Good. She needs to know her place.” You snarked. “Now I’d like to get some rest.” You glanced at Alina, her gaze unwavering. “Alone, please.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I promise I’ll be fine. If I need help I can always call for the General.” You replied, placing your cold hand on top of hers and gave it a squeeze. With great reluctance, she nodded her head. Fedyor and her leaving to return to combat training.

As you close the door, you feel your resolve break. Wincing as the pain and exhaustion came back. As you grew up, your condition continued to tire you. You couldn’t fight nor run the same way you could two years ago. At this rate, you’d probably be dead in the next two years because of your heart condition. That was if the war didn’t kill you first.

The sun was nowhere near close to setting. You still had most of the day to kill yet you didn’t know what to do. You thought back to one of the places the Darkling had shown you, perhaps you could go to the library. Gathering whatever strength you had left, you returned to the calm and composed front you had always put on.

The walk there had been time consuming, nauseating even. But you were determined to snatch a book or two to read while you were cooped up in your room. The library of the Little Palace was grand, filled from floor to ceiling with various books. If you ever had the chance to visit the Grand Palace, their library would definitely be on a list of places of visit.

You ran your finger along the spines of the books as you walked through the shelves. There were two things that you loved most in your life: the feeling of the sun on your skin and the smell of books. Strangely enough, the smell of the books had reminded you of Keramzin in a way. Probably because you spent most of your childhood with your nose shoved into a book. Collecting two books, you were adamant on getting to your room in time to be able to sit in the sun and read a couple of chapters. All of a sudden the smell of incense and mildew had taken over your sense of smell.

“My Saints, where is that smell coming from..” You whispered to yourself. Unexpectedly you heard a shuffle behind you. Turning around you saw a greasy man in a robe.

“Hello, y/n.” Said the man.

“Do I know you?” You replied cautiously, reaching for the knife you had hidden in your sleeve.

“I am the Apparat, a priest. Advisor to the King.” He stated. Knowing who he was didn’t make you any less tentative, your fingers still gripped the handle of your knife.

“Okay...right. Nice meeting you. I’ll be on my way now.” You said, trying your best to move around him but he stopped you. He latched onto your arm that had been reaching for your knife, effectively rendering your weapons useless.

“Do you remember?” He acquired his answer from the confused look on your face, “Oh, soon you will remember. Everything will face into place.” You ripped your arm out of his rough hands and ran out of the library, never looking back.

When you were finally in your room, you threw the books onto the floor as you rushed to the tub. There hadn’t been any warm water around but you didn’t care. You filled the tub with lukewarm water as you began to strip yourself of your clothes. Skewing them across the floor as you picked up a velvet robe and tossed it on a nearby chair. Stepping in, you grabbed a loofah. Scrubbing yourself clean of the Apparat’s lingering touch. You scrubbed and scrubbed until your skin was raw. After dunking your head underwater to wet your hair, you picked up a soap. It smelt of lavender and honey. In the First Army, they had always given you a singular bar of soap to last you a week. Showers came scarce due to the fact that the soap practically diminished once it touched water. Gently lathering the soap in your hands, you cleaned your hair first. The repetitive circular motions of your hands had started to calm you down, almost lulling you to sleep. Quickly finishing off your hair and the rest of your body, you found yourself smelling good for the first time in a while.

Feeling satisfied enough, you let out a sigh, letting yourself relax as you rest your arms on the edge of the tub. It wouldn’t hurt to take a nap. You thought. After all, you fought a Grisha without the use of your weapons and came out somewhat victorious. You let your hair dangle outside of the tub to dry as you close your eyes, sleep taking over you.

“Stop it!” You screamed, you could feel someone splashing cold water at you. Wetting your hair and dress. “Aleksander, stop!” You said while laughing. You could hear him let out a laugh before coming up behind you and taking you into his embrace. He wrapped his arms around your belly as he rested his chin on your shoulder. The stubble from his face tickling you.

“How are you today, my darling?” He whispered into your ear, making you shiver. He began to pepper kisses up and down your neck, making your legs feel like jelly. Your hands flew to his in order to stabilize yourself.

“Good. But it could be better.” You teased, egging him on. One of his hands travels your hips, bunching up the fabric of your skirt to give himself better access. The other hand made its way to your core, ghosting past your eager bundle of nerves.

“Look at you, already so wet for me.” He shoved aside your underwear, plunging two of his fingers into your heat. He paused at the sound of your moan, “Taking my fingers so well.” He set an agonizingly slow pace, let out a few groans himself as he rubbed himself against you. His long fingers search for the spot he knew so well, the one that would make you mewl and fall apart in his embrace. He hits it once, twice, before extracting his fingers from you. He placed his slick covered fingers atop of your dry ones before guiding them back to your wet entrance. You were able to slide in with ease as he guided your movements.

“I can’t..” You breathed out, the feeling of his fingers and yours combined had been too much for you.

“Yes you can.” He purred, tilting your head with his own to get better access to your neck. “You’re almost there, I can feel it.” Just as he said that, he felt you briefly clamp down, signaling you were close. He guides your fingers deeper, nearing your g spot as his other hand lets go of your dress and goes to your clit.

The action makes you come undone as you moan his name repeatedly, your juices coating both his and your fingers. You let out a whine as he removes his fingers from you, only to place his hand into his mouth, sucking your cum off of him.

“Sweet, as always.” He gently grabs your chin and turns you to face him, his dilated pupils meeting yours. “Here, have a taste of yourself.” His words alone made another wave of heat pool at your core. He grabs your hand before inserting into your mouth. You wrap your lips around your fingers, staring into his slate gray eyes all the while. After lapping up your juices, you release your fingers with a pop!

Even in your dream state you could tell this man looked suspiciously like General Kirigan. They shared the same face structure, their cheekbones rested at the same angle. His eyebrows were as perfectly sculpted as the General’s. Lashes equally as dark and long. The only difference was that the man-- Aleksander, had a near clean shaven face and his hair was grown out to reach his shoulders. The General had a beard and sported a slicked back look. Yet the two looked identical.

Your eyes searched his face, his body, for anything that could tell you anything. You spotted a mole near his right collarbone. Nearly hidden by the collar of his shirt, small but it would have to do. Without thinking, you reach up to grab his face to pull him in for a kiss.

“My Aleksander.”

YOUR doors opened with a bang, startling you from your sleep. The person entered without even knocking, alerting you to three possibilities: someone had broken in and now was here to kill you, you were being kidnapped, or the Darkling was here to brutally murder you. You let the first two options leave your mind, knowing how well guarded the Little Palace was. So there was no possibility for an intruder to get so far into the grounds. Yet the third option did little to ease your mind.

Realizing you were still in the tub, you got out. Not wanting anyone to see you naked. Not like it hasn’t happened before. You thought, thinking back to your time at Caryeva. You quickly threw on your robe, haphazardly tying it while you grabbed one of your knives and unsheathed it. You threw the knife just in time, the person emerging from the curtains being nicked by your blade before it landed on the trimming of the bathroom entrance.

“Oh my Saints, I’m so sorry…” The Darkling stared at you, surprise flicking on his features. “I didn’t hear you come in. I was asleep.”

You walked to the side, picking up a towel to clean up his wound. You dipped it into a bucket of clean water, wringing it out afterwards.

“In the bathtub?” You gave him a nod, a blush forming on your cheeks. “Well you certainly sleep wherever you can.” He joked. As you shifted closer to him, you felt that familiar wetness in your thighs. Fuck. You thought, your blush becoming deeper. You’d been so caught up with the idea of someone coming to kill you that you had forgotten about your dream.

“Are you alright?” It should’ve been you who was asking the question since you nicked him after all. He awaited your reply as you gently pressed the towel against the cut.

“I am. Nothing serious happened to me.” You replied, assuming he had heard of the events that had taken place earlier that day. “Are you?” You asked, “I mean, you seemed very alarmed when you barged in.”

“My apologies for that. You just...you weren’t responding to my knocks or my questions. I’d assumed the worst.” He said, struggling to find the words. You didn’t know how to feel, in a way you were glad that he cared for your well being, yet it slightly made your gut lurch. You’d been here for less than a week and he seemingly cared more for you than Alina. Then again, you didn’t know what the two did behind closed doors. You stopped cleaning his wound, the bleeding had stopped. The two of you remained close, only an arms distance away from each other.

“Why do you care so much? After all, I’m only a guest here at the palace. I’m not a Grisha like you or everyone else here.”

“You're my guest. It’s normal for me to worry about my guests.” He explained. You crossed your arms over your chest, eyebrows furrowing as you listened to him.

“Yes, but..” You paused, “Yesterday I was Alina’s guest. Now today, I am yours. So which is it?”

“Whatever you’d like.” He whispered, taking a step closer to you. His gaze flickering to your lips then back to your eyes.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“You just did.” He replied, giving you a smirk that made you roll your eyes.

“Have we met before?” You asked, making the General freeze in his place. His posture goes rigid, you struggle to read the emotion on his face. “.. I could’ve sworn that we…” You doubled over, your left hand clutching your chest as your right hand flew to his shoulder. The pain had never hit you twice in a day. Not even twice in a month.

“Alina..g-get her.” The General called for a servant to fetch her along with a healer. In his panic, he swept you off your feet and carried you to the bed. He laid you upon it as he took your left hand into his. In a haze, your right hand began to wander, weakly pulling at the collar of his shirt. The pain went away as a moment of clarity came over you, General Kirigan had bared the same mole that Aleksander had. As you placed your hand on his face, the pain came rushing back.

Before you allowed yourself to give into the darkness that called you, a tentative whisper left your lips, your eyes searching his.

“A-aleksander?”

Mizpah tag: @all-art-is-quite-useless @devilxangel @musicconversedance @parabatai-winchester @runawayolives @tartiflvtte @rbg1933 @thatguppienamedbae @batgal96 @thebarisinhell99 @5hundreddaysofsummer @kaqua @queenseneschal @benbarnes-supremacy @princessofpersia96 @takethee @dontjinx-it @freakytillthemoon @amortentiaaaa @marvel-ousnesss @coolninjavoid @areomalfoy @pansysgirlfriend @universalirwin @leavejuliaalone @xx-winwin-wednesday-xx @honeyofthegods @lunamyangel @d-list-goddess @comphersjost@telepathdestiel @the-celestial-kitsune @thestoryofmylife9 @s-corpionem @pancakeisreading @sanna2020 @secretsandtinyshadows @savannah-elliott @maliasblue @tea-effect @disneyandharrypotter @futuristicpinklemur @tanyaherondale @the-puff-is-strong-with-this-one @hxgreeves @yourboiialucard @thereeallink @ladyblablabla @wolfieellsworld @p3nny4urth0ught5 @louweasleymalfoy @the-natureofme @itsloveroflife @oddlittleminx @within-thehollowcrown @itsfangirlmendes @heyyimlaynna @jgtfvhsg @gloriousmoneyrascalbiscuit @auggie2000 @itsnotquimey @jtownraindancer @sonnensplitter @sarcastic-and-cool @poulterfilms @spookybooisa @stickyknightflowerbailiff @hollandsweetie @yungkvte @evyiione @2023-padfoot @kawaiimarshmallow @nikki-sixx-is-daddy @sanktawylan @blackbirddaredevil23

mizpah taglist closed </3

S.a.B. forever tag: @deceivedeer

#shadow and bone #the darkling #the darkling x reader #aleksander morozova #aleksander morozova x reader #general kirigan #the darkling smut #ben barnes #mizpah

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k7l4d4 · 3 years ago

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Midnight Striga: Fairy Tail/Owl House Cross Fic Episode 5 Part 10

Hello, and once again, I welcome you to Midnight Striga. Please, enjoy.

Perry Porter strode into the Covention Center, eyes easily panning across and compartmentalizing the tragic sights around him, a skill he picked up by virtue of sheer experience. Clinically, he noted the amount of bodies present, living and dead, as well as the brow-raising sight of what could only be human corpses, if the ears were any indicator. He felt a sinking sensation within his stomach; whatever had occurred today would rock the Isles to its core, of that he had no doubt.

Shaking his head, Perry scanned the crowd again, eyes widening at the sight of a hand waving him over. Rushing over, he slid to a stop in front of his son, Augustus; his silly, energetic, passionate, brilliant son, Augustus, alive and well. “This is Perry Porter, on the scene saying,” He started, before pulling Gus into a hug. “I am so happy you’re alright.” He sighed, relieved, feeling Gus relax into his grip.

“I-I am really glad you got here so quickly dad.” Gus choked out, a light sprinkling of tears in his eyes. “A lot’s happened, and I really, really want to talk with you about it, but something more important came up, and I think you can help out, you know?” He put on his bravest smile, trying to hold in the scream that was building ever since he had managed to process that yes, everything that had happened to today was all but over.

“I really think it would be best that I try and talk with you about what happened here,” Perry began, before noticing the stubborn expression on his son’s face, “But I can see that you won’t budge on this. So, shall we?” He calmly asked, gesturing for his son to lead the way, which he did with a beaming smile.

As they walked through the clinic, Perry idly noted the general behaviors of the people around him; there was his son’s friend, Willow Park, tearfully talking with her parents, a relieved smile on her face. There were the Blight Children, the two eldest tightly squeezing themselves around their younger sister, a baffled look on her face. He saw the crowds of crying, pleading, nervous faces all around. As his son led him into a backroom of the small clinic that had been established, Perry came face to face with three figures; the Emperor’s Coven Head Lilith Clawthorne, Eda the Owl Lady, and a human girl, all seated around a central table, gesturing for him to sit. As his son quickly saw himself out of the room, Perry had the sinking suspicion he was in a bit over his head.

After they explained the situation, as much as they could at least, Perry took a deep breath, holding in a sigh. They wanted his help to spread this information, which he could see the basis behind it- a group that invested this much effort into an attack wasn’t going to just stop and people needed to know about them- but the sheer depth of this reveal would completely change the social landscape of Bonesburough. “Very well, I agree to help with this. Do you have a plan for how we go about this?” He asked Lilith, who seemed to be trying a bit too hard to hold authority over this meeting, despite the lack of resistance from the other two.

Lilith nodded. “We have two real options at this point.” She said, holding up two fingers for emphasis. “We can either do multiple takes and present them later, or we can have this meeting broadcast live as breaking news.” She ticked off the options on her fingers, a grave look of contemplation upon her face. Lilith pursed her lips. “Personally, I favor the second option.”

That caught the group by surprise. “Huh, I honestly thought you’d prefer to get this all perfect and have it presented later.” Eda commented, arching a brow.

Lilith snorted. “Please, sister, give me some credit. The longer we go without addressing this, the more severe public unrest and hysteria will become. While the release of this information will certainly have its own consequences, those are still preferable to the people being left in the dark, and drawing more unsavory conclusions.” Lilith calmly stated, gaining impressed looks from the others.

Perry calmly assembled the equipment he would need, adding in his own take on the situation. “While an official report would normally be prepared by the Emperor’s Coven,” He carefully ignored Eda’s derisive snort, “that would be contingent on them possessing factual information to present. Without it, anything they provided would be woefully inadequate for informing the people. While a Live Report of this interview will most certainly cause a stir, it will ultimately be a mere fraction of what would result if the Emperor’s Coven issued a report that ultimately proved to be false in some capacity.” The group blinked, but, after mulling it over, agreed with what he said; it made sense, if people placed trust in an organization and it failed them, whether as a result of malice or otherwise, there would be backlash.

Perry clapped his hands. “So! Let’s begin, shall we?” They all shared a look, and nodded.

As they gathered around the table, Lilith leaned forward. “Now then, human, it’s time for you to answer my questions. The People of the Isles are dying to hear what you have to say.”

Luz gave a challenging grin. “Ask away. I’m all ears.”

Taking that as his cue, Perry started up the broadcast. Turning the camera to himself, he began, voice grave. “To all the citizens of the Boiling Isles, this is Breaking News, Live from the Covention. I am Perry Porter, reporting on behalf of Emperor’s Coven Head Lilith Clawthorne.” He paused, allowing the prepared footage to play across the crystal balls of all watching; the broken walls and shattered stands, the caged prisoners held under guard, and the bodies of all those who’d died, some gathered together for examination, others… not so much. He continued. “Today, tragedy has struck. For the first time since Emperor Belos’ ascendancy, an organized attack on our people has been committed. Of the over 2000 attendees, approximately half have been slain, and a third of the remainder have sustained moderate to severe injuries. Many of them were children. Of the 300 Coven Guards assigned to the Covention, over half of them have died, with all but a quarter sporting severe injuries.”

“What is most shocking, however, is that those claiming responsibility, a group known as the Black Dog Squadron, working on behalf of a group or individual known as Oroboros, are humans. That’s right, humans!!” Perry exclaimed, milking the drama a bit more than he liked, but needing to keep the audience invested; tragedy could only captivate for so long. “During the attack, all displayed some form of magic, but none, bar a handful who commanded Plant Magic, utilized any of the Nine Magics. How is this possible? Why did this happen? What will we, as a society, do next? To help answer these questions, Lilith Clawthorne has initiated an interview with a human who fought on behalf of our people, one Luz Noceda.” He knew that the girl’s image was now emblazoned across every crystal ball on the Isles at this very moment, leading further weight to his broadcast, in theory at least. “I am here with Coven Head Lilith herself,” He indicated the prominent Witch, who raised her hand to the audience. “To broadcast the interview to you all. Please be advised, some of what may be discussed may be shocking to some viewers.” With his part finished for the moment, Perry fell silent, allowing the broadcast to focus on the interview, more of an interrogation really, going on in the room.

“To ensure that what you say is true,” Lilith began, cutting right to the chase. “I must insist that you swear an Unbreakable Vow to that effect. This way, none can claim you are attempting to deceive us. Is that acceptable?” She asked, holding her hand out to begin forming the spell.

Luz raised an eyebrow, but saw no problem with the spell. She shrugged. “Sounds fine to me.” She said bluntly, prompting a nod from Lilith as she formed the spell. When the circle was completed, the two shook hands through it, sealing the oath. Luz was blissfully unaware of the shock rippling through the Isles, as now none would be able to refute or deny her words without looking insane or foolish. She had effectively solidified her legitimacy irrefutably in a single instant.

“Excellent.” Lilith replied, a grim smile playing across her face. She began. “First of all, I must ask, for how long have humans been capable of magic?”

Luz gave a shrug. “I can’t give you an exact figure, but at least 700 years, most likely more.” She said, unaware and uncaring of the shock that erupted at her statement. Even Lilith wasn’t totally immune, managing to school her features, expertly concealing the bewildered shock at the girl’s reply.

Lilith cleared her throat, forcing her instinctive urge to dive into the historical implications of that statement. As calmly as she could, she continued. “I see. How is magic utilized in Human Society?”

Luz tilted her head a bit. “You’re gonna have to be a bit more specific than that. There are a lot of Human Societies, all of whom have magic capable individuals, and all have their own ways of doing things. A benefit of being the dominant species in our world, is that we can afford to divide ourselves into a LOT of individual cultures and communities.”

Lilith paled at that, unable to stop the question that bubbled up in response. “Just… how many humans are in existence, exactly?”

Luz pondered that for a moment before replying. “I can’t give you an exact number, but I’d say there’s about several hundred million of us. Our world is big, and there are very few places we can’t survive on it.”

Internally shaking her head, and forcing herself not to focus on all the implications that came to mind, Lilith continued with her questions. “What is this Oroboros that the attackers claimed to be working for?”

Luz’s eyes sharpened, a burning hate filling her eyes, enough that even those watching at home suddenly felt very unsafe at the moment. “Oroboros is a criminal organization; specifically, they are the single largest Dark Guild active in the world right now. Oroboros prides itself on its ability to seize control and orchestrate things to its own benefit, without any regard for the harm and chaos that erupts in their wake. Cruelty and brutality are prized and cultivated among their members, almost as much as magical power is. No crime is too heinous, no line too sacred for them to cross.” She hissed out, the pure malicious hate coloring her tone forcing Lilith to gulp in nervousness.

“I see.” And Lilith did see. She had personally borne witness to the aftermath of that cruelty and indifference; however, Luz’s response brought another question to mind, one she felt she needed an answer to. She narrowed her eyes. “Edalyn told me you would be an excellent source of information for this. So far, you have proven to be so, even if my questions have not been exacting enough to gain satisfactory answers as of yet. But that response of yours has me thinking. How do you know about Oroboros, Miss Noceda?” Lilith inquired, eyes focused.

Luz raised an eyebrow, stood up, and turned around. After ensuring her back was presented to the broadcast, she reached back, and pulled down at the back of her outfit. Seared into her flesh lay a symbol, a serpent arranged into a Sideways eight, biting its own tail. “I used to be a member.” Luz said, voice dead and hollow. She turned a heartbreakingly sad smile towards Lilith. “Specifically, I was a member under protest.”

“Elaborate.” Lilith ordered, voice hard and unrelenting. She could feel the urge to bring out her staff and blast this child into oblivion, but tamped it down. She didn’t have all the information yet.

Luz gave a chuckle, bitter and full of the kind of spite that made people glad for what they had. “Oroboros has no limits to what they are willing to do, and that extends to what lengths they are willing to go to for recruits. Whenever someone with a useful skill or magic appears in their information network, they send out recruiters. For those with a few too many morals, such as myself, they like to employ a more… decisive argument.” She turned an empty smile upwards, oblivious to the daggers Lilith was glaring her way. “Oroboros kidnapped my sister, and used her as a hostage to keep me in line.” Lilith froze, unblinking.

Luz continued, oblivious. “Whenever I talked back, Vee was beaten. Whenever I failed an assignment, she had a bone broken. Whenever I completed a job, she got a good meal, after having been starved and deprived of water to just short of death that is.” She smirked, an angry, tired thing. “I hated myself. I wanted to die. I only kept living for her. And then she died; one of her guards decided they wanted to have a little fun with her, and the next anyone knew, the guard was dead, and my sister had a knife in her liver. I was free in the worst way possible.”

Stunned silence rang throughout the Isles, such that even Lilith herself was rendered speechless. Forcing herself to speak, Lilith asked the next question on her mind, one she felt the Isles would wish to know. “Should we consider this an act of War from the Human Realm?”

Luz blinked. Then, she laughed; a deep, cackling laugh filled with so much loathing and misery it was genuinely astonishing a living being could make such a sound. “No. Or at least, not the way you’re thinking. Oroboros is in no way affiliated with any form of Government or Ruling power. It’s a criminal organization that supports itself alone.” She gave a poisonous smile. “While I have no way of knowing if any Human Governments know about the Isles, I can assure you that none of them were involved in this.”

“Well, that’s something good at least.” Lilith said dryly. “What can you tell us about Oroboros in regards to how it is structured?”

Luz leaned back, gathering her memories on the subject. “Oroboros originally began as a Dark Guild that took jobs that other Dark Guilds shied away from, stuff that was extremely messed up and depraved in what was involved to go about them. When the big three Dark Guilds were dismantled, Oroboros clawed its way to the top of the heap after all the infighting died down. After that, they started breaking down and assimilating other Dark Guilds that they thought might be useful. You actually met one of them out there.” Luz offhandedly mentioned.

“Truly?” Lilith broached.

“Yup.” Luz nodded. “Before they became the Black Dog Squadron, the Squad was originally a guild in its own right, Barghast. Barghast was a mercenary guild at first, selling the services of its members as soldiers and fighters to the highest bidder, with an emphasis on fighting in wars. But when the local groups started fighting less, Barghast decided it would be better to start the wars they fought, and sell their services to both sides to keep the conflict going longer.” Luz smiled at that. It was not a nice smile. “When their little scheme came to light, they were branded a Dark Guild and went on the run, before being absorbed into Oroboros.”

Luz leaned forward. “Oroboros likes to present itself as one big unit, and while it can act like one in the field, Oroboros is full of splintered factions and units. The Black Dog Squadron is one of the neutral factions, actually; they don’t care which faction is using them, just as long as they can cause as much suffering and bloodshed as possible. I was an unaligned member, mostly because none of the Squadrons trusted a conscript like me not to stab them in the back, so I didn’t really work with any of the Factions or Squads outside of being paired with them for missions. My jobs were assassinations, thefts, and… less savory things.” Luz admitted, eyes downcast. Tears pooled in her eyes, dripping onto the table.

Lilith pursed her lips, feeling unwilling to judge the girl for compromising herself in the name of her loved ones; if anything, she was impressed the girl had the sense of self not to justify the atrocities she had done as anything other than what they were, a means of sparing the life of her loved one at the expense of others, and felt remorse over having done so. Still, she had two pressing questions to ask. “I must ask, you keep referencing Oroboros as a Dark Guild. Just what is a Guild?”

Luz slumped, feeling spent from the roller-coaster of loathing that always came when she thought about… all she had done. “Guilds are the Human Version of your Coven System, if far less restrictive. I won’t go too far into it, that would take way too much time, but Dark Guilds are essentially guilds that flout the laws that govern what Guilds can and cannot do, and actively have their members engage in crimes. If I had to give a close equivalent, Dark Guilds are basically for us what an Assassin Coven or Thief Coven would be for you. An organized effort to commit crime with little to no regard for who would be hurt as a result.”

Lilith felt a chill run up her spine at the thought. The idea of the Coven System being twisted like that, perverted into a warped, criminal mirror of itself, made her shudder; the implications of what such a thing could do, producing criminals whose magic was specialized to enabling criminal acts… it was a horrifying thought. Lilith swallowed, before jumping into her last question. “I thank you for agreeing to this; some of what you’ve revealed could not have been easy for you. But… I must ask you this; can we count on you to aid us against Oroboros?” She peered forth, unknowingly mimicking the apprehension of many of the citizens watching.

Luz gave her a smoldering glare. “You don’t have anything to worry about. I’ve already seen enough misery because of Oroboros. I won’t let them do as they please anymore, not while I can do something about it.” Luz paused, a thought coming to mind. “Huh, this reminds me of something my teacher said while I was training.”

Lilith raised any eyebrow. “Oh?”

Luz gave Lilith a soft, tired smile. “Yeah.” She reached up, rolling back her sleeve; Lilith recoiled at the sight. From her elbow to her shoulder, Luz’s arm was a maze of scar tissue, deep gouges and rents woven through the veil of poorly healed flesh; the fact she could use her arm without issue was awe-inspiring, when one considered the pain she must feel every day from such an injury. “I got this when I first tried using my Magic in a combat situation. I was fighting a monster that was bothering some of the fields near the village I was staying at during my training. I had barely been training for a week, having only just barely made a proper spell for the first time less than a day ago. The monster dashed me against a cliff, driving my arm so deep against the stone that it started scraping bone. If my teacher hadn’t intervened, it would’ve eaten me.” She turned to Lilith, sober eyes burning with shame. “I was an idiot. My teacher made sure I remembered that. What they said to me that day, I’ll never forget.” Luz leaned back, before reciting something with the air of quotation. “‘Magic is an unreasonable force. It is wondrous and horrific. It cares nothing for good or evil, or the intentions of those who use it. If you wish to put your skills to such a task as fighting for truth and justice, grow strong. Otherwise, you’ll never be anything more than prey for those with less moral compunctions than you.’” Luz gazed fondly at the ceiling, tears pooling at the memory. “Ever since that day, I swore I would never let myself be too weak to stand up for myself, or what I believe in. I would be strong enough that I could protect others, but also to protect myself.” She gave a chuckle. “Things didn’t work out too well for that promise.”

Lilith just looked on with pity, before turning to Perry. “I think that would be a good point to end the interview. At least for today.”

“Indeed.” Perry nodded. “Well then, you heard it here first, Citizens.-”

“What are you doing?” Lilith queried.

Perry blinked. “I’m… ending the broadcast.”

Lilith shook her head. “Not yet. I still have one thing left to do.” She beckoned her sister forth, who had been silently looking on as the interview went on. Eda’s mind was brimming with questions for Luz, but she was willing to put it aside for when they got back home. For now, she had her sister to deal with. Lilith gazed upon her sister, an unreadable look in her eye. “Earlier, when you defeated me in a Witch’s Duel, your request for your win was that I would tell the truth about your curse to the public, dispelling the official story. We even swore an unbreakable vow over it.” She held up her arm for emphasis, her arm flashing with a white ring. An ominous smile graced her features. “Well, I do believe a live broadcast all across the Isles is certainly public, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yeah, it is. And I’m glad you’re not putting it off, I am! But… are you feeling okay sis? You seem a little out of it.” Eda asked, genuine concern coloring her voice. The hysterical laugh Lilith gave just added to that concern.

“Oh Edalyn, if you only knew.” She said, wiping away a tear from her outburst, before sobering. “But then, I suppose you will in a moment.” Turning to the broadcast, Lilith braced herself, fully willing to bear the backlash her actions would cause against herself and the Coven from this. “Citizens of the Isles, I, Coven Head Lilith Clawthorne, stand before you to reveal a bitter truth. For years, the story of the Owl Lady has been told, how her defiance and dismissal of the Coven System was punished by the Titan. That story… it is a lie.” She bluntly stated, almost feeling the gasps rippling through the Isles. “The Emperor’s Coven itself has no knowledge of how Edalyn was cursed, but it was most certainly no work of the Titan, or its will.” A mysterious smile, almost beatific were it not so filled with pain, crossed her features. “The one responsible for Eda Clawthorne’s curse was a witch. Specifically… the one responsible was myself.” Lilith felt more than saw Eda freeze up beside her. She could see it now on Perry’s own face, the look of horror, accusation, dumbfounded shock.

Lilith turned to Eda, feeling an almost spiteful glee at the look of horror, denial, and hurt that crossed her features. “Y-your lying, Lily. You-” Eda stuttered (Edalyn stuttered!), denial and shock filling her voice. Lilith slowly stroked Eda’s cheek, an almost tender gesture.

“Edalyn, we both know that, for all your hatred of the rules and authority, you are far smarter than this. You know I can’t be lying.” Lilith said, just barely loud enough for the broadcast to pick up. “Think about it, you’ve surely pieced it together after all this time. Who else could’ve gotten into your room to curse you? Who else would’ve had reason to curse you?” Eda shook her head, denial still burned across her features, backing away from Lilith.

“Why?” Eda hissed out, forcing it through the denial. “Why would you do this!? To me!? TO YOUR FAMILY!?!?” She screamed, hurt and rage finally making themselves known in full.

Lilith chuckled, the same bitter, empty laugh Luz herself had used previously when discussing her failings. “Because you were going to win, dear sister!” Lilith cried, almost relishing the horror on Eda’s face, were it not for how sick she felt at it all. “We were set to fight for a place in the Emperor’s Coven, and you would win!! I knew you would!! You were the prodigy, the gifted genius that everything came so easily to when you bothered to try, the powerhouse who could already level buildings at the age of TWELVE!!!” Lilith felt the tears coming, the bitter, hot tears of her own weakness surging forth. “I was the one who wanted to serve the Isles, I was the one who wanted to help people!!!! You only cared about joining the Coven so you wouldn’t have to give up any magic! So why should I have given up my dream, my future, for you!?”

“I ONLY WANTED TO BE PART OF THE COVEN TO SUPPORT YOU!!!” Eda cried, her own angry, hurt-filled tears flowing. “All I wanted was to support you, to give you the future you deserved!!” She shook her head, anger and shame filling her heart.

“I KNOW!!” Lilith shrieked. “I Knew it then, and I know it now!!” The tears were like waterfalls now, bitter pain coating her every word. “But I couldn’t accept it, the idea that you, someone who so effortlessly and deliberately flouted the rules, would have what I wanted, what I dreamed of! How could I have known that you would forfeit, how could anyone!? A position in the most prestigious and influential of covens, and you throwing it away for me!?” She shook her head. “No. I didn’t believe you could be that selfless.”

Eda gave a bitter snort. “And I didn’t believe you could be that selfish. I guess we were both surprised.” Not staying to hear another word, Eda grabbed Luz, who wordlessly followed her, and stormed off. Luz shot Lilith a look of empty disappointment. It was exactly what Lilith deserved.

Lilith turned to the still running broadcast, a blank smile on her face. “And you’ve heard it here first, folks.” Lilith mockingly imitated the standard reporter line. “The Enforcer of the Emperor’s Will is a cheat, scum who would betray her own family, and a fraud. What a shocking revelation, is it not?” She wandered off, tears still streaming. Perry wordlessly cut the broadcast. He suddenly felt the need to give his son the biggest hug of all time.

All across the Isles, people were reacting to the horrifying news. Some focusing on some parts over others, of course, but none could deny that the Special Report was on everyone’s minds.

“This is unacceptable!!” Kikimora cried, frantically pacing in front of the Emperor’s Throne, heedless of her standard deference. “How could Coven Head Clawthorne reveal such sensitive information through a broadcast of all things!? Your Highness, this mutiny cannot stand!!” Normally, Kikimora would never be so blatant and emotional in front of her lord, but she felt now, of all times, was the best moment to voice her worries.

“Hmm… it seems I must adjust some of my plans.” Belos murmured. While Lilith publicly revealing the secret she so fervently guarded was certainly a surprise, if anything the revelation of her obsession should make her even more fervent in her future attempts to apprehend her sister. The revelations of Human Realm Magic now infesting his realm… oh he would definitely need to broach this carefully, but his ultimate goal remained unchanged. Wild Magic would be PURGED from the Titan, that was non-negotiable. But the revelation of Human Magic would certainly prove a useful tool for later…

“My lord!?” Kikimora frantically pleaded.

Hunter contemplated the revelations he had just witnessed. Humans were capable of magic, something deemed impossible. If it was possible for them… could it prove possible for himself? Something to think about for later. Right now, he had to attend to his Emperor. He owed the man everything, and this did not change that fact. He would probably have to keep a closer eye on Lilith though,

Alador calmly adjusted the latest adaptation to the Abomiton project, carefully tuning out his wife’s frantic screams and rage. She would burn herself down, if not out, in a little while, and then he would intercede. For the moment, he needed to properly calibrate the Coiled Composition System, truly a marvel really; if it worked properly, even the lowest quality of Abomitons would be a force to be reckoned with.

Odalia slammed herself down across from Alador with a huff, blistering rage burning in her eyes. “Well, at least now we know who our mysterious clients are.” She bit out, forcing herself to calm down with a cup of tea. Alador merely raised an eyebrow. He would see what she said in full, before replying. Odalia chuckled, a nasty, angry sounding thing. “It truly makes sense, you know. Such mysterious customers, wanting such a variety of goods and supplies! And they turned out to be murderous criminals. Fitting.”

“Will we stop supplying them, then?” Alador faux-absentmindedly asked. He had a feeling as to what she would say, but it was still imperative he hear it in truth first.

Odalia snorted. “No. We’ll keep selling to them. We’ll just covertly sabotage the goods we grant them, and use our dealings to pump them for information. Once we’ve gained everything we can, we use the resources we’ve acquired in our dealings to crush them.” Her eyes sharpened. “They endangered our children. Our FAMILY. They will not be allowed to survive for this offense.” Alador gravely nodded. Oroboros had made a crucial mistake already. They’d tried to challenge the Blight family, and harm their children. There would be a reckoning for this sin, of that neither Blight had any doubts.

Raine Whispers was conflicted. On the one hand, they now knew who had cursed Eda, and their heart went out to their old flame about what she must be going through. On the other, more clinically minded hand, the revelation that Humans could wield magic was in itself a massive blow to Belos’ authority, particularly in regards to his edicts on magic and the Titan. It was certainly something to explore for the future. For the moment, they had to get to their meeting. If all went well, they would finally, finally have prospective members willing to step out of the shadows with them. To be honest, that Katya girl had seemed almost too eager to join up, but they would at least give her a chance to step back and explain before making… hasty judgments.

Eda slammed the bottle of Appleblood back, her tears pouring down as fast as the heavy beverage went down her throat. It still hurt. Luz cuddled up to her, lending a comforting presence, King sitting on her lap. Words could wait. The three of them had enough pain to work through. Eda allowed a small smile to cross her features. At least they had each other to share the burden.

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blxwjobsforclones · 4 years ago

Text

Betting - Din Djarin x reader

Warnings: Smut, and Mando being a cute boy

Words: 4201

Tags: @littlevodika @hxldmxdxwn @maulieber

REQUESTS ARE OPEN

We were in the middle of space, three hours away from the nearest planet. We had been traveling together for about eight months and if someone had ever told me that they would end up in a Razor Crest, with a Mandalorian and a baby of an unknown species who had clear Jedi skills, I would not have believed him. I would have asked him how much alcohol he had drunk and would have dispensed it quickly. Yet here he was, deep in that strange situation, from which he had no intention of leaving soon.

A situation that knew how it would end.

I accepted, or rather, I offered to help Mando, who lately insisted that he call him by his real name, Din Djarin, in his "adventure" of taking the adorable baby with his family. First because it was obvious that she did not know much about children and second and more importantly, he had taken an unconditional love for the little boy and was more than willing to risk my life for his safety.

My relationship with Din Djarin had become somewhat ... complex. We had become a kind of parent for the baby, each in her role and that had united us deeply. Not to mention the countless occasions when we had fought together and saved each other's lives. We definitely had a pretty strong bond. Thanks to that, he had managed to get his to open up with me, enough to tell me about his culture and his past. Mandalorian customs were very interesting, like the topic of the helmet, we ate separately so that he could have a quiet lunch and take it off without worries. I was completely unaware of his face, but I had gotten so used to his deep voice, to the point where I had come across as sexy at times. I sighed, complicated fell short.

I finished putting the blaster in the armory after I had cleaned it and went up the stairs to the ship's cabin. The little boy was asleep in his capsule, which we had repaired between the two a few days ago to make it more comfortable and he was snoring softly, completely oblivious to our world.

I leaned back into Din Djarin's seat slowly.

“Has the child been asleep for a long time?”

He touched a few buttons on the control table and then turned the seat to turn, did not give me time to move, so I was a second away from stumbling. His hand suddenly appeared to grab me, circling my waist and pressing against him, causing me to end up sitting on his lap. Instinctively I leaned against his chest and we stood there paralyzed for a few seconds. I looked directly at him or I think, it was difficult to know with his helmet, from the way he tilted his head I think he was looking back at me.

"Sorry." I cleared my throat loudly.

“You're good?”

I nodded, perhaps with too much energy. I had never been so close to anyone, much less sitting on top ... He removed his hand from the small of my back very slowly, automatically I felt a kind of emptiness. I got up, putting some distance between us, taking a quick look at the little one. He was still snoring peacefully.

"Just ten minutes ago." I looked at Mando again, frowning. "The boy has just fallen asleep. From your breathing I'd say you don't plan to wake up anytime soon. Maybe we can sleep for a few hours straight.

“That would be a novelty”

“And you say so. I think he'll be more comfortable downstairs and so will we. I need to get up from this seat for a while”

I smiled at him sincerely and took the little boy very careful not to wake him, he fit me perfectly in one arm. I placed it on the cushion of the ship's single bed, a place designed only for sleeping. Din Djarin had accommodated him for the baby before we met and had placed a rather large training mat on the floor in front of the door. A mat on which we took turns sleeping and watching. We had been wandering through enemy territory for the past few months, this was the first time we had not been in danger, so perhaps we could relax a bit. I closed the security hatch so that the child did not wake up with the least noise we could make and I turned.

Mando was already there, occupying one of the brass boxes that we used as seats and I think he was waiting for me. I sat across from him and unthinkingly planted my elbow on top of the other box we used as a table. He bowed his head, I would like to know if he ever smiled, I hoped yes, he was the most mysterious guy I had ever met in my life. I did, provocatively. He mimicked my movement by bringing his arm closer.

“Are you sure?”

“Are you afraid of losing, Mando?”

We put our hands together.

“I already told you that you don't have to call me that”

We close our fingers tight

"Does anyone else know your real name besides me?" He shook his head, surprising me a little.

“Not only you. I had never told anyone. Last chance”

I widened the smile, trying not to be distracted by his answer.

“I do not think to retire. Do you want to bet something?”

He shrugged slightly as I held on to my seat so as not to lose my balance when we started.

“There is nothing I want to bet against you, (Y/N). Maybe the cleaning of the ship ...” Was he kidding? It was the first time he had joked with me.

"Done, because I do want to bet something." He cocked his head to one side in a curious gesture. "A question." There is something I want to ask you for a long time, it is not personal, just curiosity, but I do not know if you will answer it, for the whole subject of the Creed of the Mandalorians.

“Cleaning against a response. Done. Ready?”

“Prepared”

And then we both press and push to the opposite side, our hands barely moving. I had been educated in combat since I was a child, my training was hard and yours was. We were practically on boards. And there we stay for the next few minutes. We had resistance capacity and we shared the stubbornness. I clenched my teeth.

“You are mine, Din Djarin.”

“Do you want to double the bet?" His voice sounded harsh, as if he was also clenching his teeth.

“I have enough with what I have.”

And then it happened, after a little bit of pressure, my hand twisted to the opposite side, I put up as much resistance as possible, but my arm ended up hitting the table. I released the air he had been holding and raised both hands in front of him in surrender, looking at him.

“I bow to the winner, but I warn you that there will be a rematch.”

“Anytime.”

I really hoped he was smiling under that pretty helmet. I leaned back a little.

"Well, what part do I have to clean?"

"Actually the dirtiest thing is the landing ramp and the drive wheels, that they run out of oil can be a problem"

"It seems fair to me."

I got up to fulfill the bet, but his hand on my wrist stopped me.

"I didn't say it has to be now, (Y/N). I am more curious"

I frowned, returning to my seat, really intrigued.

"Your question."

I raised an eyebrow, smiling slightly.

"But I lost the bet."

He reached up a gloved hand and brushed a lock of hair from my eyes, leaving me a little surprised. That ... it had been an extremely tender gesture, which he had not done until now and had just carried out as if nothing had happened.

"I would have answered your question anyway. With or without a bet, go ahead."

"Agree. You have told me a lot about Mandalorian culture and I find it fascinating, but there have been certain topics that you have never commented on ..."

He nodded, leaning a little closer to me.

"What do you want to know?"

"The Mandalorians not only care for orphans, but also for their own children, as you once said."

"So is."

"That means that the Mandalorians get married or ... at least they have relationships ..." I cleared my throat. "... intimate with other Mandalorians. Which logically implies that you remove your helmet in front of another person, is that the only case where that is allowed to happen?"

He tensed a little. I couldn't know him from his facial expressions, obviously, but from his physical postures. I don't know what he was expected to ask her but that probably won't. It took him a few long seconds to respond and when he did, his tone of voice had decreased, it was softer and more serious at the same time, my only clue to know his mood and that was unknown to me.

"Yes. It is the only case. Creed Mandalorians are paired for life, believe it or not, so only that other person can see their faces and perhaps their own children when they are very young, but it is not usual."

"How do they know?"

My curiosity about his culture was beginning to worry me, but I had told him practically everything about mine. She was in favor of reciprocal relationships.

"The what?"

"Well ... whether or not they can remove the helmet with that other person. Let's see, I am not saying that they are all like this, since you are the only Mandalorian I have ever met, but you do not seem a very open people with the subject of emotions. No offense. And also, it gives me that there has to be some ritual or special tradition to communicate to the other person that you are in love."

The breastplate of his chest rose as he took a deep breath.

"Yes, there is a ... traditional way." I didn't know if he was going to leave it there or if he would tell me everything, but the intrigue of his prolonged silence suddenly made me nervous. He was not at all prepared for her next words, even though his voice was firm and there was no doubt in it. "The way to tell that person that you are hopelessly in love with her, is to tell her your real name, the one you were born with."

The air stayed in my lungs. But ... that meant that ... He ... he was ...? I knew his real name, I was the only one who knew ...

"Din Djarin ..." I muttered more to myself than anything else, but of course he had listened to me

"Yes." My mind was a bustle of thoughts from here to there and everyone ended up in Command.

"When you told me the first time you seemed to be nervous and I didn't understand why ..." I wasn't able to take my eyes off the crack of his helmet.

"Never, in all my life, had this happened to me with anyone, (Y/N). In reality it is something unusual for Mandalorians, establishing this type of relationship is not common. That does not mean that my feelings are not clear."

I didn't know what the hell to say to that. I stood there, processing his words. He waited with infinite patience for me to react, what he felt was confusing and profound and he did not fully understand it. What he was clear about was that he doubted that he could maintain the connection that he had with him with any other person. So I got up, moved the armchair away from the middle with a movement of the foot and stood in front of him, raised his head to look at me from his height. I took a breath.

"My name is (Y/N) (S/N)." He nodded softly and I raised my hands to hold his helmet on both sides. Beskar was the coldest metal I had ever touched. I swallowed hard, tremendously nervous.

He nodded again. He knew this was a gigantic step, no one, no one else had seen his face since she was twelve years old. He had not revealed his face to a single living being, as his Creed dictated. And there I was, holding up that representative helmet so that I could look him in the eye. Retaining the air in my lungs, I removed it entirely and set it gently aside before looking at him. When I did, I bumped into an attractive dark-haired, brown-eyed man with a small goatee-shaped beard around his mouth. He was ... exotic, I couldn't think of another word to describe him, I hadn't met anyone with those traits

For the first time, as far as I knew, we looked each other directly in the eye. And something I had never felt in my whole life exploded in my chest. The connection that I had created in my mind was real, very real. Without being very aware of it, I stroked his cheek, feeling his skin against mine. He sighed against my palm, still watching me

"You have beautiful eyes, Din Djarin."

"Nothing comparable to your beauty."

Hearing him speak without the echo of the helmet was tremendously pleasant. Her voice was so much softer without him. His words were loaded with sincerity and affection. I leaned down, not sure how to do that, but decidedly I framed his face with both hands and slowly approached, closing the space that separated us. I had to get down on my knees to be able to keep up with him, our noses brushed, suddenly we shared the same air. His intense brown eyes looked decisively at my mouth, once again he brushed a few strands of hair and held them at the nape of my neck with his hand. And then he leaned in. Our mouths were just a few millimeters apart, the anticipation of that act was killing me ... We moved at once.

Our lips barely touched at first, I couldn't even remember the last time I had kissed a man, but that minimal contact was unmatched. His mouth moved against mine, intensifying the sensations a little, I had no idea if this was the first time he had kissed a woman, but if it was, he was not bad at all.

How could something so delicate be so fucking intense?

I kissed him back, our lips moving curiously, feeling and exploring. We ran out of air, but it didn't matter. I tangled my fingers in his hair, it was really straight and soft, he did the same on the nape of my neck, caressing my cheek with the other gloved hand. In the end we parted in a gasp, trying to breathe, face to face. We looked at each other and the intensity of those pretty brown eyes managed to melt me inside. Without stopping to think about it, I approached him again, he replied passionately. This second kiss became a little more expert, more demanding, we let ourselves be carried away by it. I parted my lips, brushing hers with my tongue, getting an immediate response when our tongues met midway. At the time that happened I felt as if a lot of bombs had exploded in my stomach, pressing on my belly.

I clung to him, who, taking me by surprise, grabbed me by the hips making me straddle his legs. Still kissing me, he pulled his hands away from me for a second so he could remove his gloves, then brought them back to my back, hitting me. I bit his lower lip, tugging on it and in response he took control of my mouth, sighing in it with desire. I got as close as I could, realizing that our numerous layers of clothing were beginning to be a nuisance. So with some awkwardness, I reached for the clasps on his breastplate and playing along, Din Djarin began to untie the laces that held my corset.

We took off our superficial clothes while still kissing each other, both sides fell to the ground loudly since they were reinforced with metal plates. I ran my hands over his chest covered only by a shirt, realizing that that breastplate concealed a strong and worked body, Mandalorian training was effective for it I guess. I think everything we had been holding back for the last eight months exploded at once, especially when his fingers slipped under the fabric of my shirt, caressing my sides, slowly lifting the garment. My hands became fists on his shoulders. He cut our stifling kiss delicately, giving me a little respite. His thumbs brushed the sensitive skin on the bottom of my breasts ...

"may l?"

His voice was deep and tremendously sensual. I was wondering if I could get naked and I didn't want anything else at the moment. I nodded, biting the inside of my cheek and raising my arms to let him do it. He gently took it from me, throwing it into a minor place. He watched me, releasing the air I was holding. His eyes slowly rose to meet mine.

"You are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen, (Y/N)."

He leaned forward and placed a sweet kiss on my collarbone, just above my breasts. His hands returned to my skin, down my hips, caressing me. I shuddered in his arms. He had assumed it was his first time doing this, but now he was no longer so sure.

I sighed loudly when his lips found my left nipple and kissed it provocatively. It was an incredible feeling that made me shiver, the pressure in my lower abdomen increased and I wriggled on her legs. It was my turn, his shirt was a nuisance at the time. I yanked her up onto his back, Din Djarin did the work for me, pulling apart for a second to take it off, letting me see her fibrous body. I automatically ran my hands over his torso. He had some scars here and there, obtained in some combat without a doubt. But it was ... sexy. I think I had never thought that a man was sexy, at least not the ones I had known in my life until now. His hand reappeared on my cheek, pulling me toward him. We kissed and this time I leaned in close, sticking my half-naked body to his, sitting on top of his hips. I immediately felt what our closeness had awakened in him and I liked it, I liked it very much. His open palm wandered down my back, down to my ass. I groaned into his mouth as he squeezed gently.

Then Mando wrapped an arm around my waist and lifted us both effortlessly, taking us somewhere I couldn't see, I was too busy with the dance that kept our tongues. He knelt with me tangled in him, the soft blanket we put on the training mat contacted my back. He lay on top of me holding onto his hands so that I didn't have to support his weight. A primitive sound escaped from his throat when I made him descend a little more, with my legs on his hips, hitting our most sensitive areas. That sound sent a direct shock to my lower abdomen, drawing a deep sigh in response. Suddenly our hands were everywhere on each other's body, caressing and provoking in their wake. I left his lips, bringing my mouth to his neck, bit him carefully, Din Djarin groaned against my ear and was not far behind in our erotic game.

He moved forward, creating a delicious friction between our most intimate parts. Despite his pants and mine I felt like he had given me a real shock. It seems that we decided at the same time that they were hindering, since I brought my fingers to the closure of his just as he unbuttoned mine. He gave me a deep kiss before sitting up to take them off, getting rid of mine on the way. Now yes, we were completely naked facing each other. We stood there, looking deeply into each other's eyes, with a primitive desire written in them. He leaned towards me but I didn't allow him to descend again, I sat up, holding onto his shoulders and wrapping my legs around his hips, sitting on top of him. His right arm covered part of my back, holding me against him, his other hand caressed my cheek with infinite delicacy, while I put my arms around his neck.

"Are you sure?"

"More than anything else"

He nodded and kissed me as intimately as possible. I got down and he pushed. We whimpered in each other's mouths, Maker, it was too incredible a feeling to not carry it out more often. When Mando was inside me we remained immobile for a few seconds, just kissing each other, getting used to that deep union. So I wrapped my fingers around the nape of his neck and he squeezed my hips and we started to move.

At first the rhythm we set was slow, smooth and provocative, when the sensations began to take their toll on both of us, our calm dance turned into an almost wild dance. I put a hand on the mat to keep my balance and he ended up on his knees, holding us both. Our grunts and groans bounced off the walls of the ship, nothing else existed in the world, just us. I descended faster, meeting him halfway, desperately craving that deep friction. His mouth was everywhere, my jaw, my neck, my breasts ... I didn't know where he got the concentration to kiss me like that, when I was so lost in it, that I was hardly aware of anything else but us. I couldn't tell how long it had been, when a nice whirlpool began to form in my lower belly and I let him know by pressing closer against his hips. Apparently he was not far behind me.

He possessed my mouth as we both came amid a scream of pleasure. After that I dropped completely backwards, completely ecstatic. Din Djarin descended with me, holding himself on his elbows above me, I could feel his breathing as fast as mine. He bit down on my chin sweetly, demanding my attention. I kissed him and that kiss was an unwritten declaration of everything I felt for him, even of which I had not been aware until now. When he finished he hugged me, burying his face in my neck, his naked body on top of mine, completely relaxed, like I'd never seen him before. I ran my fingers through his hair in slow, loving circles.

When he raised his head to look at me, a pretty, wide smile framed his lips. I returned it without hesitation.

(masterlist)

#din djarin #the mandalorian #tha mandoliar smut #the mandalorian fluff #baby yoda #the kid #din djarin x reader #star wars #star wars smut

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randomnumbers751650 · 4 years ago

Text

Long, unedited text in which I rant about comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell and his monomyth,

Back in 2012 I wanted to improve my fiction writing (and writing in general, because in spite of nuances, themes and audience, writing a fiction and a nonfiction piece shouldn’t be that different) and thus I picked a few writing manuals. Many of them cited the Hero’s Journey, and how important it became for writers – after all Star Wars used and it worked. I believe most of the people reading this like Star Wars, or at least has neutral feelings about it, but one thing that cannot be denied is that became a juggernaut of popular culture.

So I bought a copy of the Portuguese translation of The Hero of a Thousand Faces and I fell in love with the style. Campbell had a great way with words and the translation was top notch. For those unaware, The Hero of a Thousand Faces proposes that there is a universal pattern in humanity’s mythologies that involves a person (usually a man) that went out into a journey far away from his home, faced many obstacles, both external and internal, and returned triumphant with a prize, the Grail or the Elixir of Life, back to his home. Campbell’s strength is that he managed to systematize so many different sources into a single cohesive narrative.

At the time I was impressed and decided to study more and write in an interdisciplinary research with economics – by writing an article on how the entrepreneur replaces the mythical hero in today’s capitalism. I had to stop the project in order to focus on more urgent matters (my thesis), but now that I finished I can finally return to this pet project of mine.

If you might have seen previous posts, I ended up having a dismal view of economics. It’s a morally and spiritually failed “science” (I have in my drafts a post on arts and I’m going to rant another day about it). Reading all these books on comparative mythology is so fun because it allows me for a moment to forget I have a degree in economics.

Until I started to realize there was something wrong.

My research had indicated that Campbell and others (such as Mircea Eliade and Carl Gust Jung, who had been on of Campbell’s main influences) weren’t very well respected in academia. At first I thought “fine”, because I’m used to interact with economists who can be considered “heterodox” and I have academic literature that I could use to make my point, besides the fact my colleagues were interested in what I was doing.

The problem is that this massive narrative of the Hero’s Journey/monomyth is an attempt to generalize pretty wide categories, like mythology, into one single model of explanation, it worked because it became a prescription, giving the writer a tool to create a story in a factory-like pace. It has checkboxes that can be filled, professional writers have made it widely available.

But I started to realize his entire understanding of mythology is problematic. First the basics: Campbell ignores when myths don’t fit his scheme. This is fruit of his Jungian influences, who claim that humanity has a collective unconsciousness, that manifest through masks and archetypes. This is the essence of the Persona games (and to a smaller extent of the Fate games) – “I am the Shadow the true self”. So any deviation from the monomyth can be justified by being a faulty translation of the collective unconsciousness.

This is the kind of thing that Karl Popper warned about, when he proposed the “falseability” hypothesis, to demarcate scientific knowledge. The collective unconsciousness isn’t a scientific proposition because it can be falsified. It cannot be observed and it cannot be refuted, because someone who subscribe to this doctrine will always have an explanation to explain why it wasn’t observed. In spite of falseability isn’t favored by philosophers of science anymore, it remains an important piece of the history of philosophy and he aimed his attack on psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung – and, while they helped psychology in the beginning, they’re like what Pythagoras is to math. They were both surpassed by modern science and they are studied more as pieces of history than serious theorists.

But this isn’t the worst. All the three main authors on myths were quite conservatives in the sense of almost being fascists – sometimes dropping the ‘almost’. Some members of the alt-right even look up to them as some sort of “academic’ justification. Not to mention anti-Semitic. Jung had disagreement with Freud and Freud noticed his anti-Semitism. Eliade was a proud supporter of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist organization that organized pogroms and wanted to topple the Romanian government. Later Eliade became an ambassador at Salazar’s Fascist Portugal, writing it was a government guided by the love of God. Campbell, with his hero worship, was dangerously close to the ur-fascism described by Umberto Eco (please read here, you won’t regret https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf).

“If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge – that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.”

Campbell did that a lot. He considered the Bible gospels and Gnostic gospels to be on the same level. Any serious student, that is not operating under New Age beliefs and other frivolous theories like the one that says Jesus went to India, will know there’s a difference between them (even Eliade was sure to stress the difference).

But Campbell cared nothing for it. He disliked the “semitic” religions for corrupting the mythic imagination (which is the source of his anti-Semitism), especially Judaism. When I showed him describing the Japanese tea ceremony to a friend who’s minoring in Japanese studies, she wrote “I’m impressed, he’s somehow managed to out-purple prose the original Japanese”. So, it’s also full of orientalism, treating the East as the mystical Other, something for “daring” Westerners to discover and distillate.

What disturbed…no, “disturbed” isn’t the word that I need in the moment, but what made me feel uncomfortable is that, in spite of all his talk of spirituality, the impression I had of Power of Myth is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more materialist than him. Not even Karl Marx, founder of the Historical Materialism, was as materialist as Campbell.

At one point in the book, he was asked if he believed in anything and he gave a dismissive reply and said “I want to get experiences.” A man who studied all the myths of the world available, apparently didn’t believe in anything. Is that what spiritual maturity is? A continuous flux of experiences? Being taken by some sort of shamanistic wind like a floating plastic bag?

In nowhere in the interview he talked about virtues. In rebellion with his Catholic childhood, he said that we should go to the confessionary and say “God, I’ve been such a good boy”. Any cursory reading of the Gospel would say otherwise. Wasn’t this exactly Pharisee’s prayer in Luke 18:9-14? While the wasn’t the publican, who went with humility and asked for forgiveness, the one who walked out with an experience? And not only in Christianity, since in Tibetan Buddhism, a tulpa is something you have to kill, not foster like an imaginary friend like in some internet circles, contamined with this obsession with experiences.

The way I came to see Joseph Campbell as a man who was so stuck in his own world that nothing could move him out of it. All he wanted to do was this big experience, but in the end it’s as wide as the ocean, but shallow as a puddle. Even when Campbell speaks about having a “cosmic consciousness”, all that New Age jargon, claiming it’s about people discovering they’re not the center of the universe, it’s still so…self-servicing. It addresses a crowd so obsessed with experiences, but wants nothing to do with anything that requires compromise. He quotes the Hindu concept of maya, that life is an illusion, but I wonder how right he is about it.

I want to share this critique, by a researcher in comic studies: “We do not remember The Night Gwen Stacy Died because Gwen’s death reminds us of our own mortality, ‘the destiny of Everyman’, but because the story exposes the fragility of Spider-Man reader’s fantasies. Even icons can die.”

The exposition of the fragility of myths, especially the Hero’s Journey, never happens in Campbell’s work. It never talks about the potential of myths hindering entire societies, causing strife and causing people who can’t fit to become outcasts. Not even the cruel ones, like the Aztec death cult is treated as sublime, ignoring the fact that the Aztec neighbors helped to Spanish because they had enough of the Aztec myth.

I have changed my article. While I will still write on the hero entrepreneur, I’ll take a more critical view. The focus of the entrepreneur as an individual has many issues, because it ignores the role of public investment (necessary for high risk enterprises, like going to the moon or creating touch screens) and it treats with contempt the worked wage. Cambpell also treated with contempt the “masses”, who cannot be “heroes”. The theory on the entrepreneur is the same, treating the entrepreneur as a hero and the waged workers as lowlifes who have nothing to do, but to work, obey and be paid – to the point it feels like some economists treat strikes as crimes worse than murder. Not only that, but they can exploit the worker (see a book named “Do what you love and other lies about success and happiness”, it could be replaced with “Follow your bliss…”).

Campbell wrote in a time that there was no Wikipedia. So his book was the introduction of myths to a lot of people. It helped it was well-written. He considering his approach apolitical, but it’s clear that’s it’s not exactly like that (though this is a reason why Jordan Peterson failed to become the next Campbell, since he’s also a Jungian scholar, but he tried to become a conservative guru and this was his downfall). And, nowadays, Campbell is still inevitable in the circles that his themes matter, unlike Freud and Jung. Read it, but be aware of its problems, because it has already influenced what you consume.

#my rants #this is just a rant #so don't take it as a final word #sources can be provided on request

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capricornus-rex · 5 years ago

Note

Ooo what about Cal and reader going undercover and having to wear inquisitor or trooper uniforms 👀

I am so stupid to even forget to post the very first chapter using this reply aaahhh ;;A;; I am so sorry! good thing I’ve tagged you in the chapters though haha hope you can forgive me on this 😭😅 [also I’ve ran out of ideas on what image i’m gonna use for a header lol rip]

“The Flicker of Rebellion” (5)

Cal Kestis x Reader

1 | 2 | 3 | Previous: Part 4 | Masterlist

5 of 5

When the base seemed to have quieted down and still completely unaware of your infiltration scheme, the group manages to break out of the base using the long way around.

The scene at the surface was far more graphic than what you have left at your wake back inside the base. Green and red blaster projectiles were in a ceaseless volley, AT-ST walkers have gone against the rebels’ ground assault tanks and speeder bikes, and some of the fighters on your side came charging through in droves thus overwhelming the opposition.

Finally, everyone gets to remove their masks and breathe a tad bit better now.

Cal tossed away his cap, the Stormtrooper decoys have taken off their helmets, and you pulled down your cowl and shed off your mask.

Of course, this was a confusing and alarming sight to the Imps, but they never had the luxury of processing it in their minds as your companion fights have gunned them down.

“We have to regroup with the shuttle!” Cal cried.

You switched on your comm, “Captain Pardell? Fane? Do either of you copy!?”

Riva was the one to heed to your call, “I hear you, [y/n]!”

“We got the plans. Where are you?”

“We’re still here!”

“Don’t worry, we’re coming!”

You took advantage of your position in the enemy lines—your group flanked the enemy, completely taking them by surprise. Lightsabers purred and hissed as you cut down Stormtroopers one after the other, felling them with swift strikes, deflecting and resending their blasts back at them.

“Come on, we can beat the Jedi! C-Can… we?”

“They’re onto me!”

The Stormtroopers’ voices warbled in fear whenever you come closer to them so you could deliver your blows. This flank assault continued, subsequently thinning the herd to help the rebels’ vanguard, until you’ve rejoined your comrades. From a certain point of view, the rebels have the upper hand and they are evidently winning—all thanks to the couple of Jedi.

“Are they… Are they gonna win!?”

“Aw this can never be good!”

Most of the fighters have retreated to the jungle—the vegetation was sparse but the leaved plants were sizable to serve as covers—you and Cal led the enemies into the woods while everyone else crouched low against shrubs, dropped to the tall grass, and leaned against boulders.

The ambush was effective, further overwhelming the opposition; however, there was another problem—AT-ST walkers. Eventually, you’ve regrouped with Captain Pardell and Fane.

“How long until the transports arrive?” Cal maintained a calmness despite the chaos in this crossfire.

“We lost contact with them!” Captain Pardell replied.

“We have to get this plan to the base!”

A static crackled and popped through your and Cal’s commlink.

“And that’s where we come in, kid!”

A familiar, confident, and jolly voice laughed through the comm.

Before Cal could even afford the split second to say who it was, the Mantis’s engine vigorously roared in the sky, all of you had to shade your eyes with your hands as the ship zoomed past above your heads.

“GREEZ, YOU SON OF A BANTHA YOU!!!!” you screamed at the height of your lungs with a rush of ecstasy coursing through you.

Shortly after, two more transports followed the Mantis by the tail, and then X-Wing fighter ships arrived in droves, scattered and dotted all over the horizon as they came to the rebels’ aid.

A burst of cheers and whistled roared amongst the trees and shrubs in the jungle, even the Stormtroopers were taken aback by the grand entrance of the Mantis and the reinforcements. Not only did they bring reinforcements, but they have brought an astounding amount of boost to the ground force’s morale.

“We can take it from here!” Fane beamed at you and Cal.

“You sure?” you confirmed.

“Don’t worry, making toys isn’t just what I’m good at,” she winked. “Now go!”

You and Cal hurried towards the Mantis—which was only hovering just a few feet above ground—the both of you sprang as high as your heels can hoist you. Each taking hold of the hydraulic bars of the entry ramp, you watch the scene from a bird’s eye view as the Mantis flies away. Red and green rods of light shooting at either end of the landscape, both in the ground and in the sky; the AT-ATs were wading through the waters as the X-Wings take on one AT-AT by threes—perhaps even five!

“Get in, we’re regrouping with the command ship back to base.” Cere beckoned.

You and Cal stormed into the cockpit, tussling Greez’s bald head, shaking him by the shoulders altogether, and bursting in laughter—celebrating his grand entrance.

“Greez, you’re amazing!”

“You just HAD to make a show of it, huh?! You cheeky son of a Bantha!”

“Alright, alright, alright! You kids are gonna make me crash before we could even get out of the planet!” he laughed. “Now you two better find some seats or you’re wiping the floor with your outfits!”

You and Cal braced yourselves in your personal seats in the cockpit. The Lateron cranked the steering wheel and the ship tore through the planet’s atmosphere; the turbulence lasted a little over ten minutes, and directly after that, you were in the calm, hollow vacuum of space.

Upon the Mantis’s exit, more and more ships were coming out of hyperspace—it was the last wave of reinforcements consisting of a single transport and a fleet of at least ten more X-Wings fighters.

“Now don’t you worry about them, they’ll have the situation back there under control.” Cere confidently reassured you.

The trip back to the base was a short and easy one, you made use of the travel time in redirecting the metadata of the plans back to the base when the ship arrived into the system. Some of the transports that came with the Mantis had already caught up and entered the atmosphere together.

When the ships were finally within range of the base, one could almost hear the collective sound of the rebels’ cheers and applause. Before the ships’ landing gears could even touch the soil, everyone at the base approached the landing area and directed their applause and praise to their homebound heroes.

The cheers got louder when the ships’ entry ramps opened up. Fighters from various transports spilled out in numbers. Each one ran up to their friends’ arms, locking themselves in a triumphant embrace, comrades—and probably even lovers—hugged and cupped one another’s faces, as if still grasping the reality of the moment whilst celebrating this one of many more victories.

“Cal Kestis, [y/n]!” a voice called out, once faceless and revealed to be Senator Bail Organa.

Out of impulse, you take out the data card from your pocket, “Senator, I think you’re going to have to keep this.”

You beamed as you handed over the data card to the senator, he looked at the card embedded with a golden circle in the center and then to the both of you.

“This would never be in my hands… if it weren’t for your courage and bravery. I can never thank you enough.”

“I think the only appropriate thanks for this, Senator, is defeating the Empire. This is the first step, out of many.” Cal smiled.

He pursed a lipless smile and when he couldn’t seem to control it anymore, he burst in a victorious laughter. Each hand clapped both you and Cal on the shoulders, giving a slight shake, and he pulled the two of you to him in an embrace of gratitude.

Cere then hung her each of her arms over you and Cal’s shoulders.

“I’m so proud of the two of you.” She chuckled, then her hands ruffled your hair.

“Thanks, Cere. You were great back there too.” Cal added.

“You guys better be at the party! I’m cookin’!” Greez cuts in.

“Oh don’t worry, we’re not gonna miss it for the world!” you beamed delightfully.

When Cere and Greez entered the scene of celebrating rebels, you and Cal watched it from a distance. Cal slipped his arms around you, reeled you in close to him and trapped you in his arms. You close your eyes and savor the warmth of his hug. A relief washed over the two of you. This may have been a small victory, but it was a vital one in fighting the menace of the Empire.

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nekoabiwrites · 5 years ago

Text

Ultraviolet

I unironically love Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging and its soundtrack. Ultraviolet has been a song I’ve always loved and I had a cool idea for it. This was supposed to be a short fic... but as usual, I managed to get it to a fairly substantial length...

Here’s the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmqi21YMJP4

AU: School/Teacher AU Parings: Past Prinxiety, Logince Words: 2564 Warnings: Alcohol mention, mention of FWB relationship, kissing, swearing. Anything else, please let me know!

Summary: Roman is crushing hard on his fellow teacher, Logan. When an old friend appears and sets off Roman’s inner performer, well... things start progressing.

---

Roman sat at one of the round tables, a tall glass swirling beneath his hand. It was full of a sparkling drink that was supposed to mimic something akin to champagne. The school couldn’t possibly provide or condone any of their students being given such drinks, though Roman was 99% sure he’d seen some of the kids around him passing some form of alcohol around. It didn’t matter, these kids were leaving anyway, and this was the last night he’d be in charge of any of them. Plus, it was prom. They deserved to have fun, or whatever.

The music was currently pounding, some new dance song that he’d never heard just blasting through the speakers and most of the kids were out on the dance floor. Roman watched them for a moment, but then his attention was stolen by someone sitting at a table almost directly opposite him and the drama teacher couldn’t help the soft sigh that fell from his mouth.

Even this evening, at a relaxed event, where all the teachers were really expected to do was make sure none of the kids got hurt, the object of his affection was dressed so… seriously. The physics teacher was standing up as straight as ever, his shirt and tie just so perfectly fitted and crisp. Yet, his expression was far softer compared to his usual one when he was in the school building as he chatted with some of the other teachers. He just looked so good, Roman wanted to walk up and kiss the soft smile off of those lips.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Ro.”

Roman jumped and turned in his seat to see the person who’d interrupted his thoughts. A soft blush coated his cheeks as he realised who it was, “I didn’t think I said that out loud…”

The giggle from beside him had the drama teacher throwing a playful glare towards the man who’d joined him, “I thought so! But you should probably just tell him how you feel rather than just walking up and kissing him.”

“Patton. Please. You know I can’t tell him that! It would ruin the perfect working relationship we already have!” Roman threw his hands in the air, huffing dramatically.

Patton took a short sip from his own glass before placing it down on the table, “You mean the working relationship that has you both ending up in an argument at least once a day?”

Roman wanted to reply with something snippy but thought better of it. He, instead, looked back over to Logan, watching once more as the teacher conversed. Patton was right; the two of them got on like a dragon and a knight – meaning they fought often and with all the ferocity of such a dynamic. At first, Roman had despised the physics teacher for his high and mighty attitude and the fact that he had an uncanny ability to just appear whenever Roman was about to get something wrong. Logan also seemed to just enjoy correcting the drama teacher, his expression turning smug as Roman was often left getting frustrated at his words.

As time passed though, their arguments turned from something Roman loathed to something he looked forward to. The usual fire behind their words fizzled out over time, replacing their harsh tones with something akin to fondness. They snarked at each other, gave each other withering looks as they passed in the halls, but it was all from a place of friendship or affection, at least in Roman’s case. With each day that slipped by, Roman felt himself falling more and more for Logan and it had gotten pretty bad.

Suddenly, Roman was pulled from his thoughts by a very familiar and specific opening to a song. It was one not many people knew of, at least not anymore. No one else seemed to be paying it much attention, but the drama teacher’s gaze flew around the room for something specific. Then his eyes landed on the DJ, who was staring right at him.

Roman snorted and stood, “I’ll be right back, Pat.”

“Uh, okay?” Patton seemed confused, but Roman didn’t have time to explain, especially as the DJ was tossing around a microphone in his hands.

The drama teacher quickly hopped up onto the short stage to stand beside the DJ, but before he could even get a word in, the man held the mic up and began to sing.

“She's a wave and she is breaking She's a problem to solve.”

During this, the other man held out a second microphone towards Roman. He snatched it out of his hand as quickly as possible, the two of them sharing a look that to outsiders may have seemed a little too flirty between what should have probably been strangers.

Roman, ever the performer however, completely forgot that no one in the room was aware of his past with the DJ and instead joined in the song.

“And in that circle she's making I will always revolve”

A victorious smirk crossed the DJ’s face before both of them sang together.

“And on her sight These eyes depend Invisible and Indivisible”

As they jumped right into the chorus, the two of them continued to flirt. Roman seemed to be following the DJ’s lead, reacting to his advances more than adding his own. Yet, he was clearly enjoying it and was more than used to what was happening as everything seemed almost rehearsed.

“That fire you ignited Good, bad and undecided Burns when I stand beside it Your light is ultraviolet.”

“Visions so insane Travel unravelling through my brain Cold when I am denied it Your light is ultraviolet Ultraviolet.”

A short musical break started and Roman leaned in close to the DJ in order to be heard over the music, “Why didn’t you tell me, Virgil!?”

“Like I knew it was your school.”

Roman pulled back and pouted, only getting yet another smug look thrown back at him. “Oh, you asked for it.” Before Virgil could think of a response, the handheld mic was back up to the teacher’s mouth.

“Now is a phase and it's changing It's rotating us all”

The drama teacher took a few steps away from the DJ’s stand, his back to his friend. He threw a look back over his shoulder at the next couple of lines though.

“Thought we're safe but we're dangling And it's too far to survive the fall”

Something seemed to take Roman over. This was a song he’d performed multiple times in the past and he still knew the routine he came up with for it. That unconscious part of his performer side must have had something to do with the fact that Roman, without considering where he was or what he was actually about to do, performed a slut drop with a rather slow recovery back up to his standing position. He was filled with a sense of pride as Virgil’s eyes widened significantly and his smirk fell away at the move. Roman then sharply turned back to the DJ, staring directly into the other man’s eyes.

“And this I know It will not bend Invisible and indivisible”

Roman, as the chorus kicked in once more, turned his attention fully to the crowd of students and colleagues before him. He was utterly in his element, loving the feeling of performing solo before them all, and the fact that many of the students seemed to be enjoying themselves alongside him on boosted his confidence.

“That fire you ignited Good, Bad and undecided Burns when I stand beside it Your light is ultraviolet”

The drama teacher’s eyes were roaming the crowd as he sang, and he managed to accidentally lock eyes with Logan, who’d crossed the room to stand by Patton at some point. Roman held the man’s gaze as though it were a lifeline, as though he was trying to shove the words he was singing into the other’s head, to get him to realise that every single one was being directed at him and was about him. Well, at least now that Roman realised it fit him so well.

“Visions so insane Travel unravelling through my brain Cold when I am denied it Your light is ultraviolet, Ultraviolet”

There was no moment that Roman’s eyes left the other’s. The instrumental played on and Roman managed to coax the other teacher closer to the stage, Logan almost moving in a trance like state. When the instrumental died out, all that could be heard was Roman’s voice, powerful and strong as he sang to the object of his affection. Roman reached out towards Logan and he continued the chorus. He pulled the man up beside him as soon as he had a good grip on his hand, which caused Logan to stumble a little and practically fall into his chest.

“That fire you ignited Good, Bad and undecided”

The physics teacher sharply pulled away, almost ripping his hand from Roman as if he’d been burned, yet both were still to break their eye contact.

“Burns when I stand beside it Your light is ultraviolet”

Logan was already a step away from Roman, his face visibly red even under the multi-coloured flashing lights that were the only thing illuminating the room. Roman continued to perform, literally acting some of the words out.

“Visions so insane Travel unravelling through my brain Cold when I am denied it Your light is ultraviolet, Ultraviolet”

Once again, Roman’s free hand had a hold of Logan’s, which allowed the drama teacher to get the other to follow him around a little in his performance. It was awkward and uncoordinated as Logan was completely unaware of what was even going to come next, but he ended up laughing his way through it, especially when Roman attempted to spin him into and away from his body during the last, short guitar solo.

“Your light is ultraviolet

Visions so insane Travel unravelling through my brain Cold when I am denied it Your light is ultraviolet, Ultraviolet.”

The song faded into another and the two teachers were left staring at each other once more, this time both of them silent. Virgil, after a moment, reached over Roman’s shoulder to pluck the microphone from his hand.

“You gonna introduce me or what, Princey?”

Roman snapped himself back to reality, “Oh, uh… Virgil, this is Logan Croft, one of the physics teachers. Logan, this is Virgil Crow, an-” The drama teacher practically swallowed the words that were about to leave his mouth. It only took a mere few seconds for him to recover however, “-o-old friend.”

Logan looked Roman up and down suspiciously before reaching out a hand towards Virgil, “Pleasure to meet you.”

Virgil grasped a hold after a moment of consideration, “Same here, I guess.”

There was an air of tension between the two, which had Roman sweating in such a way that would have stage lights jealous. “Well, uh, I suppose we should get back, need to watch over these kids of course!” Roman rambled awkwardly, just wanting to split the two men up as fast as he could. He let out a tense laugh before going to grab Logan’s arm and drag him back down to the table that Patton was still sat at.

The physics teacher was having none of it, however. He easily slipped his arm from Roman’s grasp and stayed put, “So, I assume there is somewhat of a past between you two?” He addressed Virgil, voice perfectly calm.

Virgil let out a short snort, “You could say that.” The DJ gave Roman a once over before smirking as he returned to looking at Logan, “I’m his ‘It’s Complicated’.”

Logan’s head snapped to Roman, who was just a little behind him now, a questioning look on his face. He clearly didn’t quite understand, which had Virgil almost doubling over in laughter. Roman simply sighed and blushed.

He approached the pair and explained, “Virgil and I were in… somewhat of a relationship, a while ago, and it just… sort of stopped one day, though Virgil insists on flirting with me still.”

“That’s a funny way of saying we fucked, Princey.” Virgil’s laughter had stopped so suddenly, allowing him to snarkily respond to Roman’s admission. As Roman spluttered and both of the other men before him blushed darker, Virgil turned and wandered back over to the DJ table, just in time to check in on the next song.

Roman’s head flicked quickly between his old fuckbuddy and his current crush, trying to decide whether to storm up to Virgil and give him a piece of his mind or stay next to Logan and explain things better. During his dilemma, Roman felt a hand gently rest on his arm and he watched as Logan passed him and approached Virgil.

“May I ask you a question?”

The DJ glanced up at him before letting a fond smile cross his lips for the first time, “If you wanted to know if me and Roman are still hooking up, I can tell you that stopped a couple years back. Nothing for you to worry about there, Specs.”

Logan instinctively reached up to adjust his glasses at the nickname. He nodded slowly, “Ah, yes, that was… what I wished to find out. Thank you for your honesty.”

“No problem, lover boy. Just go get him already, the two of you keep staring at each other and it’s painfully obvious.” Virgil turned back to the laptop in front of him, speaking plainly as if he were chatting about something that didn’t concern Logan and Roman’s private life.

Logan opened and closed his mouth a few times before nodding once more. He turned back around and headed over to Roman. The drama teacher went to speak, likely to apologise or to explain himself but Logan simply grabbed a hold of his arm and dragged him to a space away from the curious students.

Once they’d stepped into the dark space beside the stage, Roman continued to babble away about something or other. Logan was still not listening. Instead, he quickly leaned in and pressed a harsh but short kiss to the other’s lips.

Roman fell silent, even as Logan pulled back. He simply stared and blinked.

“I apologise if that was something… unexpected. I was not sure how else to convey the affection I hold for you while you were speaking so rapidly.” Logan flushed and went to take a step away, his gaze falling to the side in embarrassment.

A hand reached out and tilted his head back so Logan was staring at Roman again. The science teacher’s breath caught as he saw the extremely loving look in the other’s eyes. Roman spoke quiet and low, yet it was still loud enough to be heard over the pounding music that was playing behind them, “I’ll admit, it was definitely unexpected. But it certainly wasn’t unwelcome. ...How about you convey it again, but this time I’ll be prepared?”

It was Logan’s turn to be silent and stare. While he’d considered the idea of Roman returning his affections, Logan had not once truly thought it to be possible. But now, here he was, hearing the man before him essentially confess. Logan almost shot forward and recaptured Roman’s lips once more, melting into the contact and letting the negative thoughts float away.

---

My other stuff: http://nekoabi.tumblr.com/myworks Mobile Accessible Masterlist: http://nekoabi.tumblr.com/post/181954641376/fic-masterlist

General Tag List: @not-so-innocent-bi-sander @didsomeonesayprince @llamaly@justanotherpurplebutterfly @iaminmultiplefandoms @ultimate-queen-of-fandoms2@lowkeyvirgilobsessed @louisthewarlock @fangsandrainbows @xxladystarlightxx@sleepyssnail @ao-koshka @notalwaysthevillian @pumpkinminette @doces-e--tuga @coloursintheblur @safesandersides

#Sanders Sides #Fanfiction #Logince #Roman Sanders #Logan Sanders #Patton Sanders #Virgil Sanders #Creativity Sanders #Logic Sanders #Morality Sanders #Anxiety Sanders #Thomas Sanders #School AU #Teacher AU #Song Fic #Ultraviolet

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nellie-elizabeth · 5 years ago

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Suits: One Last Con (9x10)

Okay, so then what happens next is that Harvey and Donna move to Seattle, and they become closer than ever to Rachel and Mike. At least once a week, Harvey and Mike have a "guy's night" while Donna and Rachel have a "girl's night." And then, gradually, they realize they've ended up with the wrong people. So they all get divorced and then Donna and Rachel become a couple, and Mike and Harvey become a couple. Someone please tell me they're writing that fic.

Oh, sorry. Was I supposed to talk about the episode? Let's get to it.

Cons:

I predicted last week that this episode would be overcrowded, and I wasn't wrong, exactly. I'm grateful that the conflict with Faye was over before the midpoint, so we could have a nice long goodbye with all of the characters. But while I do enjoy that, I also must admit it doesn't make a lot of sense. Faye was a season-long threat, and she's dispatched a third of the way through the finale. It just goes to show that as interesting of a villain as she might have been in the beginning, she didn't really matter. She was a figurehead. She didn't really change anything about these people and their perspectives on their lives. It all felt pretty pointless in the end.

No matter how much fan service a finale has, there are always going to be things that get missed. For example, it seems strange to me that Jessica couldn't have made a cameo at Louis' wedding. She's working on another show for the same creators; how hard would it have been to get her in for a few minutes? And I hate that Alex was the one to go to Katrina. On the one hand, I get it. They needed to find something for Alex to do in this episode, because he's been a pointless character for several weeks. But Harvey and Katrina never get a moment of apology, and that really sucks.

I've talked a lot in these reviews about my issues with Donna and Harvey. It's not that they're painful to watch, or actively unpleasant. The actors do a good job. It's perfectly serviceable. But I think I've finally figured out one of the reasons why they never quite clicked for me as a couple. Harvey is always talking about how Donna knows him better than anyone. But this is what editors mean when they say "show, don't tell." Donna knows Harvey. We've seen it throughout the years. But how does she show that she knows him? Well, she has the supernatural ability to read his mind and predict his requirements whenever the plot requires it. And she acts like is mommy just as often as she acts like his girlfriend, guiding him through his emotions like an enabler.

But Harvey can say again and again that Donna is the one for him, and how well she gets him... and then we can see Mike in the same episode, showing that same thing, instead of telling it. I'm not even pushing for a romantic interpretation, necessarily. It's just that Mike comes in, and they have their quippy banter. They work together to take down Faye. They re-enact Mike's interview with Harvey but in reverse. They find excuses to touch each other. And in an episode that involved two weddings and a health scare, the single most emotional moment in the episode is when Harvey tries to leave Mike's apartment dramatically after telling Mike he's never stopped trusting him, and Mike says "no," like the very idea of Harvey losing his license is torture to him. They have the chemistry. They have the beating heart of this show, and that's been true from day one. It makes the romance between Harvey and Donna pale in comparison.

Also, in an episode that had to accomplish so many things, so quickly, it was odd to add in that little health scare for Sheila. Why did her pregnancy have to have complications? It felt like something to add just to make for some more drama, but we really didn't need that. I'm glad that mother and daughter were both okay.

Pros:

I was always going to rant and ramble a lot in this review, since it's the last one for the show. But just because I had a lot to say in the "cons" section doesn't mean there was nothing to enjoy here. Let's start with my girl Katrina.

As I said, I was irritated that she and Harvey didn't have an on-screen reconciliation. But I am so, so happy for her that she gets to be name partner! It's so refreshing to have a character arc on this show be about a woman choosing her career over her love life, and having that be an empowering and rewarding choice to make. I'm all about it. She gets to come back to the firm, newly powerful, and stand with Alex, Samantha, and Louis.

Samantha and Alex were both underutilized in this finale, but I get it. I'd rather focus on the longer-standing characters, too. And the show did a good job of making this episode the end of an era for Harvey and Donna, and yet also a new beginning for the others. The image of the new firm name on the wall was really lovely. I especially liked that Samantha acknowledged how crazy it was that they'd kept changing the name, and decided that they can't change it anymore for at least five years. But Litt Wheeler Williams Bennett will be stronger for Katrina's presence among them.

Louis has one of the best glow-ups in TV history. There were times over the years where I didn't think I'd be able to forgive him. I still selfishly hold a grudge for that time when he physically attacked Mike. But at the end of the day, he has actually grown as a person. This is a great example of show vs. tell, actually. We've seen it all season - Louis has been calmer. He gets angry or worked up about something, but he doesn't fly off the handle. When he tells his therapist that he's ready to have him as a friend and have him officiate the wedding, it doesn't feel like empty words. Louis might still need therapy in his life, but he has the tools now to know how to get himself the help he needs. It was so fun to see his "final form" as it were. And then we see it put to the test, as Sheila goes into labor during their wedding ceremony. You might expect him to freak out, but he's calm. He's planned for this, and he's there to be supportive for Sheila during this difficult time. Even while he's frantic for her and the baby in the hospital, he keeps a cool head and doesn't do anything he would later regret. Yay Louis! (ps - Louis learning that Donna and Harvey were leaving was more emotional for me than Harvey and Donna's wedding). (pps - that scene of Donna and Louis holding hands in the elevator gave me LIFE).

It was predictable that Harvey and Donna would step up and take advantage of the pre-arranged wedding - a lot of fans predicted this exact outcome. And while I've spoken extensively on my mixed feelings about their relationship, I can't deny the cuteness of the scene. We get that lovely proposal, with Harvey's mother's ring. We get Mike putting his arms around both of them, with his little quip about being unlicensed to officiate. We get Harvey and Mike gripping hands as Harvey leads Donna out for their first dance. It's all very cute, and I feel happy for the big Darvey fans out there. They totally deserve to see all of that happiness, even if I don't agree with the couple at its core. This is the inevitable conclusion, and it was done quite beautifully.

Will I ever be over how much Harvey and Mike love each other? I really don't think so. Let's talk about the best parts of the episode.

First of all, I already mentioned it above, but that scene at Mike's place was just golden. Mike walking in to find Harvey already there was great - they have always just barged in to each other's personal spaces and that's such a testament to the trust between them. And then you have Harvey telling Mike the truth, and telling him that he's going to have to go on the stand and risk getting disbarred. Mike's reaction is genuine panic, and then the two of them concoct a plan that will save the day. I just love the idea of Harvey going over there not to ask for Mike's help, but because he couldn't stand the thought of Mike thinking he didn't trust him. That's love, baby.

Then you've got the interview-in-reverse thing at the end. I could spend hours just squealing about the fact that Donna and Harvey are leaving the firm and moving to Seattle (my home town! woo!) to be with Mike and Rachel. Hey, maybe the four of them could all be in a poly relationship... but that's for fanfic to decide, I guess. Good finales need to come full circle, and also need to set the characters up for changing futures. This idea of Harvey moving to Seattle, of Mike being Harvey's boss, manages to do both. They are quippy and cute with each other, but also genuine. Harvey decides to leave the firm in order to take out Faye, but he also genuinely wants a fresh start. His life changed forever when Mike walked into his life, and I really do feel like that was the final message the show left me with, when the dust had settled.

So... yeah. I can't find it in myself to be a hardcore Darvey shipper. This finale was never going to cater to all of my needs. But at the end of the day, I was mighty pleased with several of the scenes, and I love where it left all of the characters, in terms of their careers and happiness. For this finale, I'll give a rating of...

7.5/10

For the show as a whole? Well, I hate to break it to anyone who's unaware of this, but Suits isn't that great of a show. It has a couple of really strong elements, but over the years its stories became repetitive, and there's quite a lot that doesn't actually make sense about these characters and their motivations. But I don't grade these shows based on objective quality. I grade them based on the elements that I enjoy most in a show. For years, whenever Suits came back on the air, it was one of the things I looked forward to most each week. I longed for every scrap of content between Harvey and Mike that I could possibly get. There are moments over the years that I have gone back and watched in a loop because of those two. I also liked the way the show deconstructed toxic masculinity, and had a feminist message that didn't feel like something out of an after school special. I had fun watching this show, and I will think of it fondly for years to come. The show over-all gets:

8/10

#review #suits #suits review #suits usa

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darkdevasofdestruction · 6 years ago

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Kankuro

"Honestly, what a drag...I'm stuck around in an endless circle of boring missions...What is the Hokage even thinking? I'm an ANBU not some Genin who has to rescue cats and take out weeds. I mean, I have my own self-missions! ...And that other stupid cat hasn't replied in a week...Don't tell me Gaara gave him a mission? Come on, Neko-chan, don't scare me for no reason...Ah! Nevermind, I'm close to the Country of Wind anyways, better pay my friends a little visit~!" The red-head smirk widely under her fox mask, changing the direction of her running completely, now super excited to surprise her dear friends she hasn't seen in a long time. Much to her shock, however, she wasn't welcomed by either of the Sand Siblings at all, but in fact, one of the officials told her that Temari was on ambassador-business in Konohagakure, while the Kazekage got kidnapped, and Kankuro got injured trying to rescue him, and is in grave danger. Having already taken off her mask, her jaw hung open as she didn't let him finish his sentence, already being on her way to the Hospital. There, in one of the beds, was a single patient, writhing in pain, eyes closed, groaning in agony as if he was having a nightmare.

It was Kankuro.

But not Neko-chan, the Puppet Master that she used to tease endlessly and play around with.

This wasn't him.

This was Kankuro, a normal person with an injury that could end his life in the blink of an eye.

A person who was struggling to keep on going, to save his little brother from an inevitable demise.

The sight in front of her made her realise that, despite being in the ANBU, the Konoha teaching and the Will of Fire stuck to her tighter than she'd have ever wanted to admit.

For the first time in ages, she could feel something.

A sharp pain in her chest, as if her heart was being stomped on and crushed in front of her very eyes

A shinobi shouldn't have emotions, or it would destroy the completion rate of the mission.

"Guess I should just quit, then?"

those thoughts rung in her head.

Trying to calm down, she softly made her way towards him and sit on his bed, pushing away the hair from his face and wiping the thin layer of sweat forming, as she held his hand gingerly, kissing it.

"Damn it, Neko-chan...If only I knew this happened...I should have realised much sooner...I'm...I'm sorry...Please don't die...Gaara needs you...And Temari too...And all Suna, of course...And well...I guess I need you too...Tsk, who was the imbecile who dared mess with you?! Once I find out, I'm going to...Goodness, what am I not going to do to him! I will avenge you, that's certain...But...Is there anything I can do to help, I wonder..?"

Kitsune mumbled aimlessly under her breath, the words addressed more towards her than anything else, as she could barely look at the brown haired boy in front of her, instead settling for searching for a medical nin so she could understand the situation better and see if she could possibly give any help.

Kankuro knew that it was a bad idea. He knew that he shouldn't go after Gaara because the individuals who had abducted him were dangerous and if Gaara couldn't defeat his abductor, then he knew that he had no chance going up against the guy, let alone two of them. And yet he'd still gone because Gaara was his brother and he loved him. Kankuro had become extremely protective of his younger brother after that, so to see Gaara be taken away and not do anything about it was out of the question even if he knew that it was a lost cause and that he was probably going to end up dead. Maybe he didn't end up dead but his current condition really wasn't all that better. He hadn't thought that being poisoned could hurt quite so much. But that was probably the point; to leave the inflicted victim in as much pain as possible before they eventually died. What had he been told? Four days? Two? Kankuro was having a really hard time remembering how much longer he had to live when he couldn't even figure out how to breathe properly. Each breath felt painful and his entire body was searing with pain. All he'd been able to understand was that the doctor's had no idea how to help him. But he wasn't afraid because the only worry that he had was focused on Gaara. He wanted to know that his brother was alright and that he was going to come back home. If he was told news like that, then he could die happy. He would fall asleep from time to time. Restless sleep that was plagued by nightmares. And when he'd open his eyes, his vision would be so blurry that he'd just close them all over again and try to make sense of the voices around him. One voice surprised him because he hadn't heard it in awhile. He couldn't understand most of the words but Kankuro was interested enough in the voice that he had to force his eyes open to see who it was. He was in too much pain to get his brain to connect the voice to a person unless he actually looked. "Oh. It's you...you've picked a bad time to be a tourist.." Just getting those words out caused the pain in his chest to increase and so Kankuro stopped talking after that and squeezed his eyes shut against the pain. But he didn't have to talk anymore because a frantic doctor stepped up to Kitsune to explain the situation. "Kankuro-san has been poisoned and we aren't able to do anything for him. We can't even give him something to numb the pain because it might react badly with the poison and cause it to spread faster. We had Lady Chiyo, our best healer, look him over but she wasn't able to do anything either. Hopefully someone from Konoha will be here to help but it's up to a three day walk...more if there are sand storms."

"Poisoned...You said? There's someone who could go against even Kankuro, at poison? Poison...Don't tell me you somehow managed to run into Akasuna no Sasori?! Gods...If not even Lady Chiyo managed to cure him, then there's no other. Hang in there, Kankuro, if Sasori did this to you, I have a shot at keeping you stable until Sakura comes. If Konoha sent help, I'm sure the Hokage sent her. Sakura's the best, okay? She can save you, no doubt. Do you hear me, Neko-chan?! Hang in there, fight, and show Sasori that you're the best!" Kitsune said, fired up by the information given to her by the doctor, which made her nod and ask the medical nin for the medical report and for the laboratory, so she could create a temporary relief for the boy. She wasn't a proper medical nin, not like Sakura, but she knew a bit more than average. Most shinobi are unaware of the dangers that lurk every second while on missions, dangers that can cause wounds. Wounds can be treated, but most teams don't have a medical nin, which is why the death rate is pretty high. Although she started learning medical jutsu for noble causes, she felt like a traitor. A traitor who betrayed not only herself, but Konoha, Suna, Kankuro and her old friend...Sasori. As much as she admired the puppeteer, and thanked him for teaching her the basics of chakra strings, he also taught her about poisons and antidotes of every type. She's been using weapons bathed in lethal poisons for years, but now, the poisons she prided herself with, were threatening her Kitten's life, which meant she had to destroy every principle she had, to save him. But it was worth it. She only had to wait a day before Sakura arrived, and once she did, she knew the information she had would help the pinkette work fast and efficient. Until then, she knew she had to work tirelessly to create the antidote. That day passed as slowly as a year, it seemed to the girl, as she could barely think of anything else but the state Kankuro was in when she arrived. She was determined to ease away the pain in any way possible, by any means necessary. Wiping her brow, she smiled softly at the jade-green antidote in the small vial, and getting up shakily, she made her way to the patient and sat down besides him, gazing at him as she caressed his face, before looking at the doctor and telling him about the antidote, a formality needed in order to be allowed to get the patient to drink it. She only hoped the antidote would work fast enough for him to feel less pain, and that Sakura would come faster so she could take away the poison from his system, before it was too late. "Hang in there, Neko-chan. I'm here. Kitsune is here, okay? I won't let you leave me before you can finally beat me at sparring. I'm like a parasite, y'know that. You can't get rid of me, even if you wanted." The fox-like girl chuckled weakly, trying to ease her own mind before kissing him hand once again before administering the liquid.

"Urgh...Couldn't you make it taste better...?" he uttered, choking on the serum, still not able to properly open his eyes, and so, not being able to see her face. In truth, he has never seen her face.

They first met when the Hokage assigned her, an ANBU, to show him around the village, in a way to make her take a break from all the difficult missions, and despite being rather socially awkward, they got along really well. Her fox mask was hiding all her fox-like features, the sly smirk, the mischievous glint in her emerald eyes, the beautiful, flawless porcelain skin... Or at least, that's how he imagined her.

The first day they met, they agreed to take each other's mask/hood off, but she tricked him, so she got to see him without his hood, but he couldn't reciprocate and from then on, he's been trying endlessly, but to no avail, to see her face. It was maddening for him, and it got to the point where he'd just randomly get caught daydreaming at how she'd look like. Maybe once he gets better, she will allow him to see her face, as a reward for not dying... If he indeed doesn't die, that is.

"Goodness, Sakura, honestly, I've never been happier to see you! Please save him, I've done all I could! I need your help to extract the poison from his system! I've seen it done at the hospital before, but it's incredibly difficult and I wouldn't trust anyone else to do it. The antidote...I did it already. If there's something I'm a Goddess at, it's poisons. I-I'll fill you in on the details as we go, but let's hurry and prepare! I know, and I'm sorry...I know you've been running for 3 days straight, but if we stay much longer, who knows what might happen!" the fox-girl yapped frantically, hugging her pink-haired best friend, green eyes staring into green eyes.

Sakura realised the gravity of the situation in a second, as she knew Kitsune never took off her mask, and now that she saw the obvious signs of sleep deprivation and general self-neglect and overwork, she realised that she was incredibly worried for the boy. She realised the signs of desperate emotions better than anyone else, for she would have been the same, were it Sasuke in Kankuro's place. The pinkette nodded firmly and rushed to the bed, reading briefly the status report, as well as hearing what Kitsune had to say and then started ordering the other doctors around, since she needed all the equipment ready.

As she instructed the fire-kissed girl on the procedure, and they began to take out the lethal poison from his system and although the method was incredibly advanced and difficult, there was nothing those two couldn't do together.

Kitsune ignored everything around her, including Temari, her dear friend, Naruto, Kakashi, even Lady Chiyo and the others who had to restraint Kankuro from thrashing around too much, as the girls used water to take away the poison from his system, and after hours, as soon as Sakura declared that there was no more poison left, she fell to her knees, holding the boy's hand tightly in both of hers, praying to whatever deity existed out there for the first time in her life.

Soon, she found herself alone - she had no idea how much time passed since it was night outside, until she heard a grunt which made her shot up to her feet and look him him.

"Kankuro, how are you feeling? Are you in pain? Do you need anything? Water, food, some fresh air uh...Your puppets? Just tell me and-" she asked faster than the brown-haired boy could even process, which made him roll his eyes and facepalm annoyed at her antics, until he realised that the one in front of him had nothing to conceal her face, and he could only stare at her with wide eyes, trying to usher any sound, but not being able too.

"Kankuro? Kankuro, answer me! Can you hear me? Is there something wrong? Oh my god, what if the poison got to his brain and fucked up his synapses...Or or maybe it damaged the temporal lobe? Or-...Oh my God, I must go get Sakura -" much like a meerkat she rambled and rambled, until she heard a quiet "Shut up", which had her stop in her tracks, slowly looking at him, concern still obvious in her eyes.

"Gosh...You're just as annoying as usual...Do you ever shut up?" he tried to joke, but his voice was still hoarse. "Oh uh...Sorry I...I was just worried and uhm...I...I'll just go get Sakura and leave you alone. You need peace and quiet to recover and she's better suited for that. I'll...Uhm...See you." biting her lip, she tried to turn away to leave, but was stopped by Kankuro who grabbed her wrist. "Don't be stupid, I never told you to leave. Not now, when I finally get to see your face. And it only took...What? 3 years? Gosh, you're hard to get. And it only took almost dying for you to forget to put your mask on when around me. Haha..." he smiled softly, motioning for her to sit on the bed next to him. "You almost died, Kankuro. I don't think this is the right time to joke or point out the fact that I let you see my face. It's no big deal, after all. It's just a face, nothing extraordinary, everyone has one." she shrugged, not understanding why he'd talk about that and not of other things more important. "Do you remember how we met?" he asked with a soft smirk, analysing her mimic very carefully. "How could I forget something like that...?" she muttered, slightly offended that he thought she would forget the day she met him.

The day when Kitsune went back from her highly important mission, she went straight to the Hokage's office to get another one, but was surprised to see a person she's never seen before, and even worse, Tsunade's smirk. Apparently, the blonde wanted to give her a break and had her mission be just showing the Sunagakure ninja around, only knowing that his name is Kankuro and he's the old Kazekage's son. The red-head cursed herself mentally since she was a terrible conversation-maker, but the time spent with him proved to be incredibly fun and soothing, since he was a sociable and friendly person.

"So, haven't seen ya around. Are you one of Naruto's many friends too?" he asked barely stealing a glance in her direction. "I used to help him cheat in the Academy. Then, we got separated, him with his team, myself with the ANBU and we didn't get to speak much. Then again, we meet once a month to eat ramen from Ichiraku." she said as a tint of nostalgia hit her. "Heh. That sounds like a lot of fun. Wish I had as many friends as him, sometimes. He's so obnoxious, though, I'd rather leave that one out." he chuckled, shaking his head. "Why do you think we only meet once a month? There's only so much hyperactivity one can take before it gets exhausting." the fox girl smirked behind the mask. "How come you don't take your mask off? What, scared to charm me to death~?" he smirked at her, stopping abruptly. "Supposedly, I'm on a mission. By ANBU rules, I have to keep it on. And not kill the one I'm supposed to protect, if it matters." the smugness in her voice was evident, as she too stopped, getting closer to his face. "Besides, it's not like I see you taking off your hood, kitty-cat." "Kitty-cat?! Wh-What the hell?!" he stuttered, looking at her wide-eyed in shock. "Well, clearly, this hood and the paint make you look like an innocent, harmless kitten. Can you prove me otherwise~?" she tried to provoke him. "I don't look harmle-...Wait a second...You're trying to provoke me! Oh, no no no, missy, it's not gonna work with me! I'm a calm, collected person-" he tried to say, but was cut off by Kitsune pinching his cheeks and saying 'hey, kitty, kitty, kitty~!" "I'M NOT A CAT! STOP THAT!" but the second he grasped her wrists, trying to make her stop, he halted and smirked. "How about a truce? If I take my hood off, I get to see your face. Deal?" he tried to reason. "Okay, fine. That sounds like a fair deal." she stated calmly, slowly taking his hood off, then ruffled his messy hair. "That was uncalled for. I said I was going to take my hood off." he pouted, trying to arrange his hair back. "Ah...You're right, I'm sorry. I was going to tell you that you might be the one charming me to death, after all, but...The deal was broke. Sorry, my fault~! Won't happen again~!" she said, giggling at his betrayed face. "Y-You...! You tricked me! You evil vixen!" he said desperately, trying to reach for her mask, but she quickly leaned back, inches away from his fingers. "Sorry, love. I guess I won't be able to kill you with my charm, just yet. After all, my mission is to protect you~." she was biting her lip, trying to stop herself from laughing. "You're going to be the death of me..." he sulked, hanging his head and crossing his arms. "Keep waiting and I might just be~." Kitsune said, pinching his cheek and walking in the direction of Ichiraku's, willing to treat her new kitty friend to the best ramen in town.

Remembering their first encounter, she smiled softly, closing her eyes and shaking her head, grasping Kankuro's hand again with both her hands.

"How could I ever forget that day..." she muttered, nostalgic. "Help me stand a bit, will you? I uh...Need some water." he tried to find an excuse to get closer to the girl, who was already there with a cool glass of water for him, helping him in a standing position slowly. She was completely unaware of how close they are, her mind only focused on making sure he's comfortable and not in pain, but him, on the other hand...His face flushed a bit, and he could already feel his heart beating faster and faster, as she kept his hand on his lower back to support him as he drank the water. "You're a bit flushed, Kankuro, are you sure you're feeling okay? Your face got really hot and rosey all of a sudden...Do you have a fever? Gods, that'd be horrible-" she started, putting her her hands on his cheeks and her lips on his forehead to feel if the warmth was unusual, but seeing that it was normal, she slowly backed away, her hands still on his face, looking down. "Do you...Do you like me, Kankuro?" she asked lowly, unsure of herself. "What gave it away?" he asked awkwardly, chuckling as her scratched the back of his head. "You don't have a fever, so if you didn't blush because of that...Well...I could only think of one other reason." she bit her lip, looking away, putting her hands on her lap, grasping them together shyly. "Well, there goes my confession. Never try to be romantic with a girl who knows medical stuff, she'll sniff you right from the start." he chuckled, shaking his head and ruffling his hair a bit. "I-I...Haha, Kankuro, I wasn't expecting that, to be fair. I'm...A bit shocked." she chuckled awkwardly, not knowing what to do. "Just when did you start calling me by my name, anyways? What happened to Neko-chan? It's not like you to be so serious for so long." he gave her a mock-smirk. "Honestly...CAN YOU BLAME ME?! You almost died! I was so worried and you expect me to care about what I call you or if I wear the mask or whatever?! Since I came here I could only think that I'd have to live without you and like?! I couldn't stop worrying and crying and all you can say is WHY DON'T I CALL YOU NEKO-CHAN?!" she yelled at him, barely stopping herself from beating him up. "Well...Yeah, I guess that's what I'm saying. I may not like it all that much, but if it's you...Let's just say I wouldn't let anyone call me that, okay? Look, I'm not good with words, okay? Yes, Kitsune, I like you, what else do you want me to say to make it more obvious? And you not calling me that stupid nickname, it's like, you're trying to distance yourself from me. Is that what you want?" he asked, slightly pissed off at her lack of reaction. "Do you think a nickname is going to show you that I love you? If that will make you feel better, then fine, I'll call you that. But I still love you, with or without that nickname. I love you, Neko-chan. Just...You have so many things on your head that I couldn't dare to say anything...But I had to make sure you were alive and healthy. People need you, but I'm the last person you should think about." she sighed, looking away. "It's because there are so many things on my head that I'd want you to be mine. So many bad things...Gaara getting kidnapped, the village getting attacked...But I have you. If I have you, then I think I can brave it all. You've always been with me, so don't leave me now. Kitsune...Will you be my girlfriend?" he asked, putting his hand on the back of her head, getting closer to her face. She looked into his eyes with her jade-green doe eyes looking wide in shock, searching deep into his soul, and seeing with how much love he's hazing at her, the soft smile on his face, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him softly, keeping him close to her.

"Guess that was easier than expected. I should get into life-threatening situations more often, if it means you get to kiss me." he chuckled, smiling shyly at her. "Next time you say that, I promise you I'm gonna beat the hell out of you next time you say, got it, Neko-chan? If you want a kiss, go ahead and steal it. Ain't gonna make it easy for you, hope y'know that, right~?" she slowly managed to get her infamous smirk back on her face, looking at him with her usual mischievous glint in her eye. "Better not complain when that happens then, Foxface." he teased, kissing her again as he caressed her face, feeling the soft skin.

"Hey, Kankuro, how are you feeli-...Ohh, nevermind, I'll just come back later. Lucky you~!" Temari's voice snapped the two lovers from their kiss and blushing, looked in her direction with a shocked expression, making her grin at them, leaving with a wink, putting her hand on Sakura's back to guide her out of the room. Pinkette who only gave two thumbs up and held a cheshire smile on her face, proud of her best friend. "Well...Guess there's no way to hide it now. It's official, and there's no way to shock anyone. Ah, what a pity." Kitsune shrugged, the corners of her lips tugged upwards in an feign-innocent smile. "I wouldn't even think of hiding it. I can't wait to tell Gaara when we save him." he chuckled mirthfully, hugging the girl close to him, laying back down on the bed, her head resting on his shoulder, closing her eyes and letting the peaceful atmosphere take over them.

They've been in love with each other for ages, but now that they confessed, their hearts are at peace. The only thing left to do was save Gaara and enjoy life as much as possible. After all...What's life without a little risk and love, right~?

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everlarkficexchange · 6 years ago

Text

Unmasked ~ Three

Written by: M

Prompt #88

Rating: E (Explicit) This fic will contain consensual sexual content; mild language; discussions of injuries, illness, and amputations in a historical setting; references to non consensual sexual situations.

My thanks to the moderators of @everlarkficexchange for always running an entertaining event, and for playing along with a little fun and mystery. Please enjoy the third chapter of this adventure. Previous installments can be found here. Regards,

~ M ~

~~ Chapter 3 ~~

As a child, my father used to set me in front of him on his horse. Astride with my skirts flapping in the breeze like a bird’s wings as we rode across the farm. When my mother complained of his habit of treating me like a son, Papa found a pair of breeches that would fit me to wear when we rode or moved about the farm, seeing to the needs of the land and our people. One day when he felt I was old enough, he took me into the woods, teaching me to hunt. It wasn’t a skill that I necessarily needed. We were wealthy enough to hire someone else to hunt meat for us, but my father insisted that I learn where everything we relied on to survive originated. He wanted me to have an understanding and a respect for all living beings, a humility found in the knowledge that in taking a life to sustain our bodies, we owed the earth a debt to care for her soil as she has cared for us.

Perhaps he intended it, perhaps not, but the lesson he taught me that now burns in my mind is that nothing comes from nowhere. I cannot sit in my damask chair and expect the world to care for me or to see to my needs, nor to those of the people depending on me. I must take care of that myself. Food does not appear on the table simply because I feel hunger.

“Are we going to stare at it or dare we go in?” Madge asks with a soft teasing lilt and I thrust myself from the carriage and towards the gaudy city dwelling I am now faced with, ignoring the outstretched gloved hand offering assistance. I am used to hunting in the quiet of the woods, in isolation surrounded by nature. Not in this stone and smoke urban jungle. I march boldly up the stairs and prepare to knock. Uncle Haymitch reaches my side then and pulls my lifted fist away from the door.

“This is not the country, and Effie would never forgive me if you knocked on the door for your first dinner party.” I glance over my shoulder at Effie as she fusses over Madge.

“Do I stand here and sing for entrance then?”

“No,” Haymitch says with a deep chuckle. “I do the knocking. You do the hunting.”

The first step of hunting is to stalk your prey, which requires silence and observation. We are welcomed and ushered into a parlor where we are handed a small glass of something that fizzes and makes my head spin a little. We already know the hostess, having spent at least a week squandering our time in teas and salons and parlors meeting every woman of Aunt Effie’s acquaintance and many who were not until recently.

“Darlings!” Effia had greeted us when arrived at her and Haymitch’s town home, before I could even knock on the door. Clearly I was unaware of this societal rule forbidding me to knock. At the time, Effie’s embrace had been welcome if a touch effusive. After several days of travel, all Madge and I wanted was a nice bath and a good nap. It wasn’t to be. “You came to your uncle and I for assistance in finding a husband and that is precisely what we shall be doing. He can provide introductions to gentleman, I can provide a thousand other things. A foot in the door through the ladies, a fabulous wardrobe. Alicia! Send word to Cinna that we shall need an appointment post haste! And Margaret, my dear… We’ll have Cinna whip up a few dresses for you as well. I won’t hear any arguments! Mourning is no excuse for a countess to dress…” Her eyes dragged over Madge’s plain grey woolen travel habit and she shuddered. “So…so…”

“Drab?” Uncle Haymitch had suggested and then protested as Madge and I both imposed upon him for embraces. He pretended to be annoyed, but I know him better. He was happy to see us both.

That began our week of parlor visits and stiff high collared tea dresses while I waited to be unleashed on the real marriage market. A steady stream of women with their daughters or nieces and even a handful of ladies came to call, drawn by the rumors of a heretofore unheard of eligible young woman and her widowed friend. I’ve learned all about the eligible sons of these women and have yet to see a single one of them.

Father always did say that before laying a snare, one needed to know what sort of beast you planned to trap. A snare meant for a rabbit would never hold a wild boar. This is what I tell myself every time I balk at the guidance or instructions Aunt Effie doles out to me. While I attempted to follow Effie’s example and instructions that first week, I did not care for how much time I spent seated in her parlor, sipping tea and hearing the same gossip on endless loop, answering the same questions about who my parents are and how long I plan to stay in town. I have a husband to shop for and do not appreciate being restricted to the parlor. Everyone knows that one cannot hunt from inside the parlor. You might spill blood on the carpets and then Aunt Effie would die of apoplexy.

I also do not appreciate meeting the mothers, and sisters, and widowed aunts, and fourth cousins twice removed of every potential suitor on Haymitch’s list in addition to a few who are not on his list, but not the suitors themselves.

“How can I select a husband if I never meet any men?” I had asked an exasperated Aunt Effie as I stood still for her dressmaker, a lovely woman named Cinna who worked quietly and seemed to see things in my face that I didn’t know existed.

“Good bone structure. Lovely eyes and hair…you carry yourself with regal bearing and strength. If I didn’t know better, I might have mistaken you for a duchess. My dear we shall be showcasing your spirit,” she murmured as she circled me and examined my body and face.

I still have no idea what she meant by that. While Effie’s wardrobe with it’s excess of ruffles and shimmering fabrics leaves me in physical pain sometimes, the day dresses and dinner dresses Cinna has already managed to finish for me are quite lovely. Still, I see no real show of spirit in their delicate folds. I haven’t worn breeches in years – at my mother’s insistence after the vicar’s son wrote a rather explicit poem for me shortly after I turned fifteen – and dresses like these do not make me miss it, yet I still worry about the ball gowns that will expose my shoulders and back to the world. Perhaps a shawl would work to cover my scars and it might become my signature accessory. I don’t have much time to devote to such thoughts, however. There are still a few days before we have a fitting in our ball gowns. I also have a farm to protect and a husband to ensnare.

“We are spreading the word, darling,” Effie insisted about all our parlor visits and teas. “You cannot meet a suitable husband without a proper introduction.”

Unlike the woods, I cannot simply saunter into a ballroom, select a groom, and drag him to the altar. This type of hunt requires more finesse, I am told several times a day. Which is where Madge enters the picture apparently, because I lack finesse on my own, although I would argue that stalking prey in the woods requires a certain level of finesse. What good is hunting if you announce to your prey that they are your target? None.

“Euphegenia, so glad you could join us tonight. And I see you’ve brought your lovely niece and her friend. I don’t believe you’ve met my nephew. Mr. Cato Baxter. Cato, darling, this is Miss Katniss Everdeen of Southeast Panem and her dear friend, recently widowed the Countess Hargrove, Lady Margaret Charmaigne.”

The introductions and small talk continue as guests arrive and while Effie insists there will be several eligible bachelors in attendance tonight, I find myself restless and disappointed with the offerings. Mr. Baxter seems arrogant, although he supposedly fits the requirements on my list. Mr. Marvel annoys me within seconds of conversation.

“Green does not fare well with your complexion. Perhaps you should wear more of a rosy shade, Miss Everdeen,” he says with what I imagine he thinks is a helpful smile.

“How unfortunate that my favorite color does not fare well with my complexion,” I say with a tight smile in return. “At least in your esteemed opinion. I however find men wearing burgundy to be quite ostentatious.” Madge coughs quietly at that and Effie hisses to me to watch my tone. Altogether, the dinner party turns out unremarkable.

It’s the same all week. The guests vary little and I start to wonder if perhaps this task of mine will not be so simple. Everyone who seemed so kind over tea in Effie’s parlors now seems amused by the comments their relations – all supposed gentlemen. Comments on my dress, my lack of style, my brash tones, my outspoken demeanor, or even my age.

I begin to miss my home. I miss my father even more, although Prim reports no change in his health.

“A walk in the gardens,” Madge insists one day after another string of fruitless parlor visits. Mr. Thresh Jermaine appears interested in courting me, and he seems pleasant enough if a little quiet. He radiates force and intimidation, the sort of person whose will becomes law, and yet there is a gentleness about him whenever his young cousin, Miss Rue Beauchamp is about. And yet, something about him keeps me from pursuing more than a cursory acquaintance. I feel as though we might be good friends and not work as a couple.

Madge leads me outside to the gardens as I smile gratefully at her.

“I shall need to marry a prince simply to pay for the dresses.” Several more arrived earlier today and tomorrow we have an appointment for a first fitting with our ball gowns, for an upcoming masquerade party.

“They didn’t cost as much as all that,” Madge says softly. “Besides, the surest way to scare off prospective grooms is with the rumor that you’re seeking a fortune. And the best way to allay that rumor is with dresses that shout to your financial well being.”

“But I am seeking a fortune,” I remind her.

“Better he not know that.”

“Is that not dishonest?”

“Perhaps a little,” Madge concedes. “But what recourse do we have?”

I suppose in a way, she is right. We talk of Maysilee for nearly the entire time we walk. I can see the struggle in my friend’s eyes, the battle waging in her heart. She wishes more than anything to be at home with her child. While I have no claim of motherhood over my sister, I understand the fear I sometimes see in her eyes, at least a little. The fear of responsibility and the effects of absence. I worry about Prim at home with our absent minded and preoccupied mother. At least Prim has Maysilee and Sae to keep her company. I fear I am little comfort to Madge. It does her good to speak of her daughter, though, I think. Even more good when a letter arrives from Prim, detailing their adventures.

We are going to be the best of friends, Maysilee and I, when you return. Take care of Katniss for me and be sure she does not land herself into too much trouble.

Prim wrote in her last letter, making Madge smile and relax at least for half a day.

My letters from home come from Prim but mostly from our steward, Thom. He can manage most issues, but I still cautioned Prim to write me of any emergencies that might require me to return early. I did not need to say it, but she understood that I spoke of Father.

“We shall be fine,” Prim assured me with a smile as we left. “We shall see you when you succeed. You are the best huntress in Southeast Panem. Who would think that one day you would use that skill to catch a husband?”

I laughed at the time, but the hunt grows long and I grow impatient.

“You are hoping to find him, are you not?”

“Who?” I ask and Madge shakes her head.

“Your Peeta Mellark. He has piqued your interest.”

“I just wonder why Haymitch did not include him on the list of potential suitors. He was dressed in wealth, which is my top requirement. Mother indicated that his father is a marquis so his bloodline is respectable. He claimed to have been in the military which means he’s likely a second or later son, not in line for the title.”

Madge hums and bends over to sniff a sprouting bloom. “Perhaps another reason then. His father may not be generous enough to settle money on him. He was in the military after all, and you did say you would not consider gamblers, womanizers, rakes, invalids, or reprobates. Perhaps he has a reputation.”

I did say that, and I did call him a brute. The gift of the shoes confused me after his abrupt treatment of me in the mud, however, tardy or not, it was appreciated. He remembered the destruction caused in his haste and thought to correct a slight. Kindness such as that has always intrigued me. And I suppose in a way, I am hoping for a friendly familiar face at some of these social functions, even if it is a face I cannot stand to see again since it is linked to my humiliation. How can I face him in a drawing room let alone a crowded ballroom when he has seen me at my worst and his hands have ventured up my skirts before we knew one another’s full names? I am certain to blush horribly and give away my thoughts. That won’t do.

“Nor anyone who wishes to add to his land holdings through matrimony. Or perhaps Haymitch determined that I am not even suitable for a second son of a Marquis,” I add. I come with little to no dowry and none of the holdings variety. I am…disfigured in a way that would likely offend a high born gentleman, although I say that makes him a prat. Before Madge can refute me, I take a deep breath and straighten my shoulders. “It is best then that I not find him again. ‘Twould be embarrassing to relive the circumstances of our first meeting.”

************************

A month and still no luck in the husband hunt. I’ve opened my mouth one too many times and the number of potential suitors has dwindled drastically. Mr. Cato Baxter in all his glorious arrogance is the only one still visiting or bringing flowers. Awful roses grown in a hot house and stinking of an overpowering perfume. They are lovely to look at, and yet as soon as I get close to touching them, their scent makes me wish to claw out my nostrils.

Effie insists that my luck will turn with our first ball next week, but I am not so sure.

“I’ve never been away from her overnight, let alone for this long,” Madge says as we sit at the table for dinner. We are rarely placed next to one another, a tactic meant to encourage socializing with new acquaintances. However a few of the guests tonight appear to have not shown and the hostess shuffled the seating arrangement to avoid large empty spaces at her table.

“Prim and Sae are taking good care of her,” I assure my friend.

“I know,” she whispers and then faces me with sadness in her eyes. “Would you think me insane if I told you it is myself that I fear for more during this separation?”

I shake my head in confusion and Madge wrings a napkin in her hands.

“It is a fear that…she will be just fine without me. What then do I mean to her life if she barely misses me? It is selfish, I know, but for the past five years no one has loved me or needed me save for Maysilee. From the moment she opened her eyes, I knew that she loved me as I love her.”

“But that’s just it, isn’t it?” I ask. “You love her and she returns that love naturally. You’ve already taught her to love. She misses you, Madge. Perhaps it will not cripple her, but I think you don’t want that either.”

“Of course not! I suppose in a way, I am also afraid that I don’t know who I am without her anymore. Ever since she was born, every choice that I made was for Maysilee.”

“Well,” I suggest with a cheeky smile. “Now you can mother me. You are one of my chaperones, after all, Countess.” And tonight, she is acting without Haymitch and Effie. My aunt and uncle had a prior engagement and were unable to join us this evening.

Madge groans at her title but a rosy blush stains her cheeks as she smiles. We both know that her title demands a certain level of respect and affords us a kind of protection during this venture. We’ve already seen it’s effects. Doors opened and invitations issued that might not ever be extended to simply Miss Katniss Everdeen.

Not to mention several gentlemen have noticed Madge’s sunny charms over my surly demeanor. It may only be a matter of time before she is wed again, this time perhaps happily so. Once her time of mourning has passed, of course.

The dinner is more enjoyable with Madge at my side, although the seat to my left remains empty. It is the first evening in a long time that I have not had to smile for a man and feign interest in his prattle while already marking him off the list of potential suitors.

“Apologies! Lady Roth, please, accept my apologies for my tardiness,” a male voice proclaims as a man hurries into the dining room, interrupting all conversation.

“Of course! Robert, my dear I am simply glad that you could make it after all. We were a few short on gentlemen this evening.” Lady Roth stands to greet the new arrival.

“You are too kind, cousin. I heard that quail was on the menu and cancelled all other engagements! Your cook’s quail demands my attention,” he declares as he enters my field of view and I nearly choke. Madge elbows me and I turn my head to whisper to her.

“He looks just like him!”

“Who?”

“I don’t believe you know all of our guests, Robert. Please. These charming ladies here.” Lady Roth rattles off Madge’s name and mine as he smiles down at me and I’m a little stunned at how handsome he is when he’s not soaking wet or showing the fatigue of travel. I have to remind myself that this is not the same man who plucked me from the mud. The word brother rings in my head for surely there’s no other explanation and I am certain it is confirmed when Lady Roth finally reaches the point of giving us his name. “My dears this is Sir Robert Mellark. Third son of the Marquis de Vale.”

Madge now coughs at the name, although we both manage to nod at him in greeting. Sir Robert snatches my hand off the table and bows low over it with a charming smile.

“Enchanted. Miss Everdeen.”

“Robert we’ve already rearranged the seats but there is a vacancy next to Miss Everdeen if that is agreeable.”

“More than agreeable,” he says, eyes never leaving mine as my cheeks heat and my heart seems to have grown wings in my chest, beating wildly against its flesh and bone cage.

Warnings ring in my head at his smooth flattery, but I silence them within seconds of him sweeping his chair back and sitting next to me.

Sir Robert speeds through the necessary pleasantries with breathtaking speed, which I appreciate as I am tired of repeating them on end, and he soon has both Madge and I laughing at his tales of searching for the perfect plums at market that morning. It seems so strange. The son of a Marquis searching for his own plums, but the way he speaks to everyone at the table, I form the impression that he wears his nobility carelessly, as though it were merely a speck of dust and not something that defines him.

“They were an excellent fruit and I wish I had some to share with the party,” he says and Madge smiles before turning to speak to someone across the table from her. My attention, however is drawn to Sir Robert, leaning in close to me and speaking softly, so that only I can hear. “Have you had the joy of sinking your teeth into an especially tart plum recently, Miss Everdeen?”

I am not sure what sort of innuendo the man intends, but his voice caresses and teases. And then I’m not thinking of Sir Robert’s plums but of Peeta’s hands on my ankles. A thrill slithers up my thigh and I draw my ankles close together, as though someone might see beneath the table and my skirts and somehow guess at my thoughts. A sinner’s touch, a sinner’s voice. Yes I am almost certain they must be brothers.

“Not lately, although you shall be the first to learn if I do,” I say and am rewarded with a dazzling smile. I wonder if my mother felt so bewitched by my father and turn to focus on my soup after that.

After dinner, the ladies gather in the drawing room while the gentlemen abscond to the study with Lord Roth.

“That isn’t him, is it?” Madge hisses as we sit down to play cards.

“No,” I whisper back. “Brothers perhaps. Though the features are almost identical.”

“Then your Peeta is quite handsome.”

“He is not my Peeta,” I hiss. Madge nods and we continue on, although I notice a gleam in her eyes. It’s not until the men rejoin us and Sir Robert occupies a vacant seat at the card table that I discover what mischief she has planned.

“Sir Robert, I believe my dear friend has already had the pleasure of meeting your brother,” Madge says with a bright smile. I for one, do not appreciate the direction of the conversation. I told her I did not wish to relive my humiliation in the mud. I only wound up there through a series of unwise decisions, after all. And I cannot seem to stop thinking about it while I would rather forget the entire thing.

“Oh? Which brother? There are several of us, I am afraid.” He says with a slight laugh that draws attention to our conversation.

“He gave his name as Peeta,” I explain since I’ve little choice. Madge has dragged me into this fiasco and I cannot be rude. Effie reminds me almost daily that my lack of polished manners drove away Mr. Marvel and Mr. Thresh Jermaine as suitors for my hand. I argue that they were not truly interested.

“Ah so you met my twin.”

“Twin?” Madge asks with real curiosity in her voice. Our fourth at the table, a Miss Davenport, snorts indelicately at this.

“Can you really call him that, Sir Robert?”

“We share a father, were born on the same day, any number of people confuse us for one another–”

“Yes but I don’t believe this is a proper conversation for polite company.”

“Miss Davenport is scandalized. I apologize Countess. Miss Everdeen.”

I am about to ask him why his speaking of his brother would be considered improper when something in what he said seems to click into place, like a tumbler in a lock. I share a look with Madge, her eyes wide as she purses her lips and shakes her head slightly. Before I can confirm, Sir Robert deftly moves the conversation to the masquerade ball the Duchess of Cashmere will be throwing in a little over a week. It is all that anyone can speak of these days.

“Will you be in attendance, Miss Everdeen?” Sir Robert asks quietly. “At the masquerade?”

“I believe we planned on it,” I tell him and he smiles.

“I am glad to hear it.”

He moves on from the card games after that, leaving me with a hundred questions and a fluttering pulse. The fluttering thankfully only lasts a moment or two and I am able to enjoy the fresh night air on the drive home. A rain cleared the sky this afternoon and now the scents of early summer abound. I miss my home. The thought causes me to withdraw further into my own musings.

“So then. Sir Robert is a cheeky flirt and the mysterious Peeta is an illegitimate son,” Madge says as we prepare for bed that night. They share a birth date and a father, Sir Robert had said, implying that they do not share a mother. “Perhaps that is why Haymitch kept him off the list?”

I say nothing, still too lost in the quagmire of my thoughts to formulate an intelligent response.

************************

Sir Robert visits for tea. He sends flowers and asks for a dance at my first ball of the season. The Duchess of Cashmere’s masquerade. Aunt Effie is thrilled.

“I told Haymitch he should expand the list a little higher. After all, a third son–”

“Does not usually stand to inherit a thing,” Haymitch reminds her.

“Yes except everyone knows the Marquis has settled a healthy income on all his sons and lands of some sort on most of them. And why shouldn’t he? The man can afford it.” Haymitch opens his mouth to argue and Effie snaps open a fan, fluttering it madly in front of her face. Madge speaks up to avoid the fight brewing.

“What of a fourth son?” I glare at her.

“There is no fourth son,” Effie says with a click of her tongue that closes the conversation and answers the question of why Peeta was left off the list. Or perhaps I am wrong. Haymitch’s mood takes a turn for the worse and I wonder at it. He is my mother’s half brother after all. He must know of her history with the Marquis. Perhaps there are more sinister secrets lurking in that family beyond a slightly ruthless nature and a bastard son.

I avoid the parlor that afternoon in favor of walking in the garden behind the house. What I truly wish to do is ride Sagittaria, but Haymitch insists riding in the park is not something unmarried ladies do alone and he no longer rides. That is surely why I accept Mr. Baxter’s invitation to ride in the park, despite how much his pompous demeanor annoys me.

#Springtime Edition 2019 #submission #prompt 88 #M

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dxrksong · 7 years ago

Text

A strange crossover chapter 2

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!!!

also happy new years!!!

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After talking with each other the other, ‘Henry’ INSISTED on Henry staying at his house. He couldn’t fathom why, the only thing they shared as far as he could tell was the oddly coincidental name. It was odd though, if Henry didn’t know any better he’d say that the bad feeling was coming from the other Henry. That thought alone made him weary of the strangely kind man? Kid? Who exactly was he? He sounded young, but at the same time knowledgeable. Like he’s lived longer than most humans. He shivered, unknowing of what next, but he did know one thing: he needed to get back to the toons as soon as possible.

Henry had invited the ‘other’ Henry to stay at his house for a while. Annette was there too, but just to check up on ‘her’ Henry. She brought over a box of cupcakes, since the Henry she knew was obsessed with anything sweet.

“So.. This is kind of awkward right? I mean there's two of you! I mean you don't look alike but it's still weird, I mean what are the chances?!”

Annette realized she was rambling so she just stopped talking entirely, feeling embarrassed.

“Nah it's fine, I mean I agree with you; but it's fine! I just hope the other Henry likes cupcakes! If he doesn't, just give them to me.” He whispered the last part, sending them both into a fit of laughter.

“Where is the other guy anyway?” Annette looked around, the house looked as normal as ever. Not a single sign of another presence.

“Oh the other Henry is in one of the guest rooms, or at least I think he is.. I haven't heard a single sound from upstairs. Maybe he’s sleeping. Heh, more cupcakes for me!” Annette laughed again.

“Henry I seriously think you need help for your sugar addiction!” They both laughed again sharing the cupcakes. Annette couldn't let him have all of them! After all she didn't want him to get sick from all that sugar.

Meanwhile on the roof --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Henry stood at the edge of the roof, feeling the cool breeze on his skin while it whisked past him. He wasn’t entirely sure how or why he was up there but he was concentrating on something nonetheless.

What was it? Ah yes, his location! Of course! But how was he going to do that? A tug in his mind told him to climb higher. But he was sure he was on the tallest building nearby. But it was still there, tugging at something behind him. He turned and soon found a ladder. ‘Huh, convenient’ he thought as he started to climb.

At the top he found out that his hearing had increased by a lot. He listened intently like the tug in his mind told him to. Personal stuff, angry customer, a woman asking for directions, an angry driver- wait! A women asking for directions? He tried to zone in on the conversation.

“Excuse me, but can you help me get to (insert important city nearby the studio’s neighboring one)?” the women she was talking to let out a small gasp. “Oh my dear! That’s on the other side of the state! How did you get this far off track?!”

Henry stop listening entirely after that. “Halfway across the state…” he mumbled to himself. He suddenly felt light headed and started to waver “I’m halfway across the state.” but that was IMPOSSIBLE unless….he had definitely been gone from the studio longer than a day. OH GOD HOW LONG HAD IT BEEN?! Henry started to panic and put his hands on his head, before he suddenly lost consciousness and fell backwards, unaware that people were shouting at him and that ‘Henry’ and Annette were right below him, trying to talk him down.

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Henry woke up with a start, sweat practically flowing off his head as he shot up in a storm of panic and sorrow. Where was he? It looks like a bedroom of sorts but- wait...LOOKS?!

He looked down at his hands before a wave of pain washed over his eyes and spreaded throughout his face and he let out a howl of agony as he quickly closed his eyes and put his face in his hands and continued to whimper as the waves started to hurt less when he heard footsteps rush up the stairs.

He could already tell who it was before ‘Henry’ practically broke the door down and rushed to his side.

“Hey I heard screaming are you alright?” ‘Henry’ saw that the other Henry looked to be in an enormous amount of pain.

“Oh yeah, just great- DO YOU THINK THIS IS A GAME?!” Henry said lifting his face and ripping off his bandages revealing the black veins covering the top of his face and the inky substance coming out of his eyes.

“Hey there's no need to yell! I’m only trying to help you-” ‘Henry’ paused, when he noticed the ink leaking from the man’s eyes. It was absolutely disturbing, making him want to scream.

“Oh my god! What the heck happened to your eyes?! I mean the doctor said it was bad, but I wasn't expecting this!”

“Heh, well it helps when ink is practically infused into your bloodstream. I still don’t know when but I think it was removable until I collapsed the first time- IN A FUCKING SUMMONING CIRCLE DRAWN BY SOMEONE WHO WILL NOT BE NAMED!!!”

“Okay first of all! There’s no swearing in this house! Secondly, I literally gave you a place to stay for a bit. The least you can do is thank me.”

“Your right, I’m sorry. And thank you. I’m just a little on edge since one, I can't remember how i managed to get half-way across the ENTIRE state from where I was! And two I’M HALF-WAY ACROSS THE STATE!!!!!!” This was totally a good time to freak out right now.

“Um… I hate to break it to you.. but you’re not half-way across the state. This is the province of British Columbia. You’re in Canada..”

“.........SO I’M EVEN FURTHER THAN I THOUGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!” He leaned on his side and is now crying, completely freaking out.

“How am I supposed to get to the toons now?” he whispered to himself.

“Okay.. I don't mean to be making assumptions, but if you have the same name as me. First and last! You have ink coming from your eyes and you spoke about toons.. does this mean, that you’re not from this dimension..? Because I can't see any other reason for this, it's the only thing that would make sense..”

Henry pondered this for a minute. This was true but if he was here and the other one was too does that would mean.. he slowly got up,hope blooming in his chest. He suddenly grabbed the other Henry’s shoulders.

“Hey! If that’s true then there’s a Silly Vision studio near here right?”

“Uh.. yeah, it's pretty close actually.. why are you asking?”

“Let’s just say. I made a promise to someone.”

“So PLEASE! Tell me where it is! I need to get there as soon as possible! It would be a bloodbath and a mess I don’t want to deal with if bendy lets those searchers loose after me.”

“Well.. Annette and I were planning on going, so I guess you could come too.. but is Bendy really real in your world? I didn't get very far the first time I re-visited. I left after I activated the ink machine, the door was oddly unlocked.”

“...Of course Bendy’s real! What do you take me for? A blind idiot?” Henry jokingly said, smiling and letting go of his doppleganger’s (in terms of names) shoulders.

“No, I don't think you’re an idiot! I did see that corpse of Boris.. but that's all I really saw, besides the creepy moving cutouts and some ink splattered here and there.”

“Just be glad the place didn’t start flooding as soon as the machine was turned on, I almost drowned in that stuff, it went up to my freakin neck!”

“Oh yeah! Well once I got this weird letter at my door, and I opened it; and ink exploded everywhere! There was this monster it nearly mauled me to death!”

“Sounds like a searcher, and you wouldn’t believe how MANY there were in the lower levels!”

“A S-Searcher? Hmm.. so that's what that thing was.. it actually gave me ink poisoning when it cut me. The doctors couldn't remove it for some reason, but I've been feeling pretty okay so.. I think I'll be alright.”

“The weird thing though.. is that I can't remember what happened too well.. It's like one minute it's trying to tear me to shreds, then the next I'm lying on a hospital bed. Annette was there with me..”

“.. i’ll probably ask her ‘bout that later, but for now.. Who’s that kid that’s been staring something fierce into my back for the past few minutes through the window now?” Henry pointed behind him where the bad feeling was kicking up something fierce.

‘Henry’ rushed to the window to see a little boy looking up at them. He waved to him. “Oh hey Vinny, I think you probably shouldn't be here Annette’s just going to get mad at you!”

“I don’t think he cares” he whispered.

‘Henry’ turned to look at the other Henry, giving him a silly smile. Before turning back towards the window, gasping in surprise. “H-Hey! He’s gone?!”

“Hullo..” Said a tiny British voice, coming from behind them. Both men screamed and jumped.

Out of reflex he turned the door and wished he had his axe so he didn’t look so silly. Henry was in a startled position, holding an invisible/imaginary weapon.

Vincent stood in the doorway, watching them with a satisfied expression.

“So.. Let me guess.. his name is exactly the same as yours. Oh and sir, you should keep those bandages on. You might frighten someone..”

Henry internally pouted. ‘But i dun like them TwT’ he visibly cringed at that.

“Okay! Vincent you have got to stop doing that, it's creepy! Wait.. how did you do that in the first place..?” The child gave him a sweet smile, ignoring the question on purpose. Much to ‘Henry’s’ annoyance.

“Seeing about your aging problem, I assumed magic was normal in this place” Henry mumbled, mostly to himself.

“Pffft! Magic isn’t real! Oh.. actually maybe I should take that back.. It makes sense when we're talking about the studio..”

Henry gave him a cheesy grin, this was actually hilarious to him. “Joey once again proves something non-directly in a conversation.” he let out a small fit of laughter, failing miserably to keep it back.

“Well anyway, we shouldn't go yet. You still need to heal, and you! Vincent you need to get to school, before Annette notices you’re here.”

Henry let out a small gasp “NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! I’M LEAVING NOW!!” he marched to the door.

Vincent watched in amusement. Thinking: ‘Hmm, and people call me a child. Well then again I am only eight..”

(Hen-hen needs a chill pill XD)

He only made it out the door when a pair of arms wrapped around his chest. He could tell by the breathing that it was ‘Henry’ but that didn’t stop him from trying!

Vincent giggled at bit, slamming the door. Freaking both of them out, ‘Henry’ let go and wondered if that kid had some kind of telekinesis. However now wasn't the time to question it.

“I swear if that kid is giggling about what I think he is, I’m going to sic Joey on him”

“Nah man, let him have his fun. The kid doesn't have any parents or friends.. so just be nice to him okay?”

“.. Alright” he sighed, the kid reminded him of Bendy. Popping out of nowhere, random powers off the who how, just flat out being a devil…he shook his head, as far as he could tell the kid wasn’t THAT bad. He calmed down at the thought of his toons and friends. Crips was he worried about them.

“Can I come to the studio too Mr Williams? I'm curious to see what's inside..” The small boy asked.

Both Henry’s looked at each other. Henry personally how much BS is gonna go down and with someone else to protect- his mind immediately went to those in the studio.”yeeeeaaaaahhh NO!!”

Vincent just shrugged.

“I am NOT letting another one to go through Sammy’s BS and the ritual crap Joey's been doing! And you don’t wanna KNOW what Susie’s been up to!!!”

The child’s eyes practically lit up. The word ‘ritual’ definitely peaked his interest. This is something he knew he had to see.

The ink from Henry’s eyes somehow made its way to his shoulders because after he shouted and noticed the kids heart beat went up, the ink started to rise like a feral cat’s back as he shouted: “Don’t you DARE young man! I know EXACTLY what your gonna do!”

“Can you really though..? If I ask you to guess what I'm thinking, I highly doubt that you’ll get it right.”

“Your thinking of getting inside the studio anyway” Henry said, crossing his arms. “But fine! Go ahead! But I’m telling you if I go in there and you have a projector for a head, been fused into someone or SOMETHING else, OR HAVE GONE COMPLETELY INSANE. I’m not gonna feel a lick of remorse.” Henry said flatly.

“Ah.. you got part of it right, although you'll never know the reason.. also that was an oddly specific warning.. I don't suppose any of this really happened to you did it?”

Henry froze on the spot, frowning. He paused, then he sighed and said “no….but it did happen to some really close friends of mine.” his eyes started to water again, he looked awfully pale.

The boy softened his expression, with a sudden feeling of empathy. “I understand.. if you don't want to speak of them then don't. I've lost people too..”

“Just.. if you go in there, be ready for some hardcore gore kiddo.” he said sitting on his bed. “Those creatures- those THINGS in there. Were human- and STILL are. Every last one of them…”

“Are you suggesting that.. They’ve been corrupted into monsters?” His eyes narrowed. Making the small, weak-looking boy seem almost predatory.

“Heh…” he wiped a tear away before it became a fruitless attempt of ink. “A-almost. They’re mostly human but made out of ink. Some lost their minds, others their memories. And some are just…..shards of previous co-workers…corpses...t-then there’s those who’ve kept most of their sanity, helpful and loving even!” he said, remembering Bendy and Boris. “But the ink itself…..” he stopped talking and started shivering uncontrollably.

‘Henry’ suddenly joins back into the conversation. “W-Wait.. are you saying that there are people trapped down there..? M-My friends?!”

Henry sniffed, more ink running down his face. “T-the ink. It rips you apart till your in pieces, floating there LIKE FISH IN A BOWL!” He mimicked “alice” in a way. “But th-that’s not it. It doesn’t stop there. The voices of the fallen are shouting- SCREAMING even! It swallows you whole, with no escape. But I’ve luckily...never actually had a real encounter with it. ‘She’ told me about it and I’ve actually seen it suck up random monstrosities in the halls. It still isn’t very safe to be near but you can’t exactly avoid it…”

“I.. I'm all alone then.. Everyone is trapped and I.. got freedom? T-This isn't fair..!” ‘Henry’ took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, which began to tear up as well.

Henry frowned. The other was supposed to be a goof like him. But maybe it was because HE knew what happened to them. Or he was just losing his mind, but he didn’t feel as much pain as he could hear his double was in. he unsteadily got up and wrapped ‘Henry’ into a bear hug, staying silent and keeping an ear out in-case the kid wanted to join in too.

The boy stayed silent. He knew that this was a very emotional moment for the two Henry's and didn't want to be rude.

As his double buried himself in his hug he slowly opened his eyes as much as he could for the burn to be durable enough and he looked at the kid. His right iris was paper white with black seemingly taking over on the edge of the eye itself and seemed to be glowing slightly. while his left eye looked to be a green color but it was darkened and seemed lifeless or fake.

‘Hmm.. interesting, I wonder what kind of dark magic it is that we’re going to be dealing with..’ The boy thought.

He pulled his double away. “Come on, you gotta man up.” he looked at him in his still watery eyes. “They’re still alive! We can still come back to the studio and fix (most of) this mess!”

“Uh.. are your eyes okay?”

“What? Do they spook you?”

“Nah not really I mean well Vincent has violet eyes so I'm a bit used to odd colours but this is just different..”

“Mmmm?” “BOO!” out of nowhere Henry suddenly opened his eyes fully and his left eye seemed to respond as both eyes looked ‘Henry’ directly in his eyes as Henry shouted and almost immediately recoiled in pain and collapsed on the bed. “WorTh iiiiiiiiiiittttttttt”

so yeah! that’s the second chapter! basically Hen-hen almost accidentally commits suicide and then needs some chill pills, ‘Henry’ has a sugar problem, and Vincent trolls the both of them.

#colab #A Strange Crossover #Chapter 2 #Blind!Henry #saudade/pyro!Henry #happy birthday #happy new year

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beelieveinfandom · 7 years ago

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Haunted and Hunted Chapter Four

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 AO3 Link

AO3 is highly advised due to Tumblr having formatting issues.

“And you’re sure this won't kill me somehow?” Charlie asked.

“Yes. Absolutely. If anything goes wrong we’ll stop at once, and even if we don’t, anything going unusually will activate this spell, instantly ending the ritual.” Renee was pointing at a ring of runes inside the arcane circle.

The circle was, outside of the killswitch addition, a very simple one. A pentacle drawn in chalk on the hard cement floor with the five symbols of banishment at each of the star’s corners. It was the simplest reliable banishment spell possible, pretty much only able to work on consenting entities or those who lacked any sort of intent of their own.

I worked pretty hard on that cancel button and I’m like, 80% sure it’ll be fine.

You’re telling me this has a 20% chance of killing me‽

I mean, maybe?

I’m pretty much pulling numbers out of my ass here, to be quite honest.

everything you say is so reassuring.

Hey, I’m the one that advocated against this from the start.

You wanted us to do nothing!

I wanted us to wait for more data. My friend will get us the original summoning circle, and reverse engineering it will be way easier and safer than just guessing at what might work.

But how long will that take? And how will your ‘friend’ even contact us, assuming they get the plans? We’re gonna be in the middle of the woods away from all electronics for a while.

That’s hardly a concern. He’ll find a way; he’s quite crafty.

Anyway.

You’re the one at risk so it’s your decision. You don’t trust my friend? Fine. Try banishing me. Just know that there is danger involved.

“Charlie?” Renee said, “are you ready for us to begin?”

“Um,” Charlie said. “Sure. Let’s… Let’s get this over with.”

“Make sure to let us know if anything feels off.”

“How am I supposed to know if something feels of if I don’t know what getting exorcised is suppose to feel like?”

“Um…” Renee said, “we’ll go slowly. Try and imagine what a normal exorcism might feel like and let us know if this feels different.”

“I’m having second thoughts. Actually, I think I’m probably on fifth or sixth thoughts by now.”

“It’s okay to back out. We don’t have to do this.”

“I’ll be the first to admit I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Vin said. “On the other hand, how much worse can shit actually get?”

“That’s actually a good point,” Charlie said. “I already could easily die via possession, or get captured by creepy scientists, or like, trip on a rock and die. Why not add ‘death from good intentions’ to the list? Yeah, let’s do this!”

Charlie walked into the center of the circle and sat down. Renee started chanting a simple chant in modern English. Older dialects and languages tended to be more powerful, but they were easier to fuck up and there was little need for making the ritual as powerful as possible.

“Um,” Charlie said after a minute, “is it supposed to hurt? Like a lot? Like my skin’s on fire?”

Renee stopped chanting at once. “No, it’s not supposed to hurt at all! Are you okay?”

“Define ‘okay’,” Charlie said. “If your definition includes ‘feels like I just got a really bad sunburn but it’s kinda fading’ then yeah, I’m okay. Or at least as okay as I was before, which was already pushing the definition of ‘okay’.”

“I’m sorry. It would seem that they did tie your skin into the ritual they used.” Renee sighed. “I have no idea where to go from here.”

“Well, maybe mysterious computer friend will come through,” Charlie said. “If not, well, guess I’ll die.”

“Charlie.” Renee met Charlie’s gaze. “You’re not going to die. There are still other things we can try.”

“Really?” Charlie broke away from Renee’s eye contact, shifting zir gaze to the floor. “Like what?”

“Ah...” Renee’s face passed through several expressions before settling on ‘student woken up when called upon to demonstrate a problem for the class’. “Well, we still have time to think of things we can try.”

“Or maybe the situation is just boned and there is nothing we can do,” Vin said. “Like I hate to be that guy but sometimes shit’s just irrevocably fucked.”

“Vin!”

“What? We were all thinkin’ it. Someone had to unpack that shit from the back of their mind and put it on the table to be beheld in all its awful smelly glory.” Vin shrugged. “I still got a bad feeling; I don’t think we’re going to find something that will work.”

“You still have a bad feeling even after we stopped the ritual?” Renee asked. “Are you sure it’s about Charlie at all?”

He shrugged. “What part of ‘I don’t know a thing, my guy’ do you have trouble understanding?”

“That’s not good.” Renee slithered around the chalk circle on the ground. “Maybe we should start moving.”

“Yeah,” Vin said. “Maybe.”

Cleaning the circle off the rough cement floor was easy, which was good because they were in a hurry and it was generally considered rude to leave ritual materials strewn about someone else’s place.

Getting their things together was also pretty quick as they hadn’t had any reason to unpack much the night before. It took only a few minutes to add the few items that Marcus had given them to their things.

Their footsteps echoed faintly through the otherwise silent early morning hallways as they went back through the same path that Marcus had led them through the day before. Walking through the dim corridors they saw no sign of their host, but they figured that she wouldn’t mind them disappearing without saying goodbye.

The crisp outdoor air chilled their lungs as they left the building. They headed East - Marcus had said that it was the shortest way out of the forest and Renee wanted to scout out the area outside. She wasn’t sure she wanted to leave the woods yet - they didn’t have anywhere to go and the woods were large and secluded enough to be a decent place to hide - but she at least wanted a solid idea of what was beyond.

Cliffs rose to either side of them as they walked. It made Renee nervous, but suggesting alternate paths didn’t alleviate the dark feeling that hung over Vin like a bad toupée, and this path seemed to be the easiest way East. The relative flatness and rocky nature of the ground suggested that they were in a dried out riverbed, and none of them were going to complain about having slightly less underbrush to navigate through.

Renee was being careful. Vin’s intuition was telling them something was wrong and she was not going to let whatever fate had in store catch them unawares. She was almost entirely focused on her farsight, trusting in her companions to keep an eye on the immediate surroundings.

Her first thought had been that something was happening at the facility, but when she checked she found the place utterly immersed in chaos. People were rushing out of the place, alarm lights were flashing, a small fire (normal and red/orange in appearance for once) was raging in one of the computer rooms. It seemed unlikely that they were going to be able try anything. She supposed it could be an elaborate ruse but it seemed unlikely that they would actually set their building on fire just in case she happened to check on them.

So whatever was going to happen was already in the works. And was quite possibly unavoidable, judging from Vin’s current state.

She supposed it was possible that whatever was going to happen had nothing to do with the facility at all, and that they were about to die to a supervolcano explosion or a meteor strike or something. There wasn’t really anything that they would be able to do about a natural disaster, and it would explain why no suggestions altered Vin’s intuition.

She decided to stop thinking about that. There was no point wasting her time worrying about things she couldn’t do anything about.

It was possible the small fire at the facility could rage out of control and burn the whole forest down. It was kinda dry. How dry did it even need to be to burn green wood anyway? She really should have studied more wilderness survival. Now they were all going to burn to death and she wouldn’t even know how impressed to be that the fire managed to spread.

She decided to Stop Thinking About That. She wasn’t wasting her time worrying about things she couldn’t do anything about.

She managed to go about a minute before checking back on the fire at the facility. It seemed to be smaller than it had been when she first noticed it. There were sprinklers on. They were probably going to wreck all the computer hardware in that room.

She took a few breaths and shifted her focus away from the facility. The fire wasn’t going be a problem. There was no point watching the facility anymore. Whatever threat menaced them now was already on its way.

The other day the doctor - Dana, their name had been Dana - had been adamant on getting someone involved who was qualified to deal with Tyrone. That was probably what was happening. Not a massive fire, not a supervolcano, just someone who had some way of tracking them and good enough mobility that they couldn’t be evaded with good intuition alone. Someone who would have a computer on them and wouldn’t be fooled by simple illusions.

Renee still had no idea how, exactly, she was supposed to deal with this, but combed through the woods with her farsight anyway, figuring that if she could at least see the threat she might be able to better assess the situation.

The group continued in silence for a ways. No one really felt like talking.

The silence that hung over them wasn’t a comfortable one. The sense of dread that weighed down Vin had spread to everyone, and they were all just waiting to hear the grenade’s pin drop.

And drop it most certainly did.

There was nothing unusual about the patch of thin forest they were traversing through until the trees wavered and disappeared, revealing a clearing with a single short person grinning ahead of them.

The group stopped suddenly, with Renee putting herself in front of the other two.

Looking around, she noticed people with guns pointed towards them on the cliffs to either side.

“You didn’t think you were the only one that could make illusions, did you?” the person said. Their skin was dark and their white hair reached just past the small of their back. They were dressed very formally, in well-fitting clothing that was far too clean for someone trekking through the forest to be wearing.

“Oh, you really shouldn’t look so shocked, dear.” Their voice was high pitched and sounded sort of like someone attempting to talk with a German accent after having one described secondhand to them, which happened to be exactly what a modern Australian accent sounded like.

“You didn’t actually think that a few simple illusions and a bit of luck could keep you from me, did you? Now, that’s just darling? ” they said, clapping their hands together. “Anyways, let’s get on with things, shall we?”

A magicore floated to their hands from behind them. It was a smooth orb, covered with yellow lines of light that danced around at the magi’s touch. The magi made a few sweeping gestures, strumming the magicore as their hands moved around it, and then flicked both their wrists, causing a bright yellow light to shoot away from them at Charlie.

Charlie barely had time to register the light before it hit zir, lifting zir off the ground and illuminating zir body in a blinding flash. This only lasted a moment before ze fell out of the air and consciousness.

Alcor managed to land in a manner that didn’t even vaguely resemble elegant, but at least didn’t hurt the body at all.

“So you cannot be sedated, such a shame,” they said. “I take it that now I’m dealing you and not some little child?”

“I’m amazed you still have the resources left to bother with us.”

“Oh, they paid me in advance darling; I couldn’t care less about what happens to them.”

“You might want to double check that that transfer actually went through.”

“Who cares . What matters is that this is you! Oh, how exciting this all is. I’ve been waiting for years for this moment, you know. Admittedly, this is not quite how I saw this encounter going, but you can’t let a few details get you down, am I right?”

Alcor stared at the magi.

“Let’s do introductions, shall we? Not that you need any introductions, your reputation precedes you, but I’m afraid mine does not. At least, not in your current state. Normally I imagine you have no need for introductions at all. Must make social encounters very convenient. Anyway, I’m Magi Briana Hurtzog, she/her, at your service. Well, not at your service per say, but you know what I mean.”

“Am I supposed to be pleased to meet you or something?” Alcor all but snarled. “Because I really cannot fully encapsulate how much that is not the case.”

“How could you say such a thing? This scar goes deep into my heart.” She dramatically covered her heart with a hand. “Anyways you should come with me and we can go get you out of that ridiculous body.”

“And then what?” Alcor crossed Charlie’s arms.

“I’m not going to lie,” she said. “What happens next is not exactly in your favor. But it will be a great learning opportunity for everybody involved and I think we can all agree that that is what really matters.”

“And what about the kids?” Alcor asked. “What happens to them?”

“What? Them? I don’t care about them . They can go back to prancing through the woods or whatever it is that they were doing. I’m not their babysitter.” She waved her hand absently. “That said, if you don’t come along nicely, well, I don’t care about them. Or specifically what will happen to them. What all of these armed guards will do to them. I’m going to have them killed is what I’m saying here.”

“No, I got that.”

“Oh good. One can never be sure.”

“I’m many things, but a moron isn’t one of them,” he said dryly.

“Some people have trouble with the subtext, darling.” She spread her fingers wide. “There is no shame in that.”

“Do you people have any tricks up your sleeve besides threatening children?”

“Oh!” Her face lit up. “I could also threaten you directly if you’d prefer.”

Briana’s hands spun around her magicore, tiny bolts of electricity reaching between it and her fingers.

She snapped, pointing at Alcor.

It was like being slammed into a wall. Pain - and not the interesting kind - blossomed through his very being. The world spun. He stumbled backwards, or maybe just thought he did because the body didn’t seem to actually change position.

“Not very pleasant, I hope? Just a little something I’ve been working on in my spare time. That was roughly one percent of what it’s capable of. If my calculations are correct I imagine that at full power it would be capable of rendering you incapacitated for a number of hours.”

“Why the hell didn’t you start with that?” he growled.

“Language, darling. There are children about. As for your question, I was hoping we could keep this civil and not have to resort to threats of torture.”

“So instead you open with threats of child murder.”

“Exactly, darling. Now I think we’ve wasted enough time with all of this chitter chatter. Shall we be going, or are you going to make things unnecessarily difficult?”

Renee looked around. She was not going to panic this time. There was a way out, she knew that. She just had to find it. She was smart. Clever. She could do this. Would do this.

Breathe in

Breathe out

Alcor was still talking, having taken a few steps towards the magi. It was hard to say if he had a plan or was just testing the waters. She had to assume that he didn’t have a plan. Worst case scenario, there would be redundancy. Who was she kidding, worst case scenario they were all going to BE FINE. This was Fine. She just needed a plan.

Breathe in

She was fine.

Vin was casually looking at the gunpeople periodically spaced around the cliff’s edge.

Breathe out.

Good. Now go talk to Vin.

“How are you so calm about all this?” Renee whispered, more harshly than she intended. It wasn’t what she intended to say, but upon reflection she couldn’t figure out what she meant to say outside of ‘something else’.

“What?” he replied. “It’s not like we were going to remain valuable assets forever. This was pretty inevitable.”

“Not it isn’t! We’ve gotten so far. Their building is on fire, for Pete’s sake. We just need to find a way out, it’s going to be okay. We are going to be okay.”

Breathe.

“Hey Renee?” Vin said.

“What?”

“I just wanted to say, thanks for everything. These last few days,” he laughed, “okay, these last few days have been a fucking shitshow, but it’s a shitshow that I’m really glad I got the opportunity to experience. I never would have gotten out of there on my own. If it wasn’t for you... I didn’t really have any memories from before, you know, so just having this time out here, having gotten to see and do all this shit before I die… It means a lot to me.”

“Vin, stop talking like that, we’re going to be fine -”

“This is fine,” he shrugged. “Well, it’s kinda bullshit that they are going to kill you too. I’m sorry I can’t help you there; someone as great as you really does deserve better.”

“Vin please, no one is going to die. We just need a plan.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be the realistic one? We’ve seen way too much. The only reason we aren’t dead yet is they want to make sure that Tyrone’s pacified first so he doesn’t get mad enough to explode Charlie and burninate everyone.”

“But hey!” He beamed. “Look on the bright side. This is by far the coolest thing to ever happen to us, and I don’t know about you but I’ve been dying to participate in something this dramatic.”

“How can you -” She shook her head. “No. We are going to get out of this alive. We just… can’t you feel anything about the future? There has to be something.”

“Nah. I ain’t got shit right now.”

“Please! You have to have something. Anything! It just... even some little random impulse.”

“Hey, you know that I can’t control this shit.” He laughed completely mirthlessly. “And I really don’t think you want me to follow my impulses right now. Not really any need to rush it at this point, anyway.”

“Vin come on, there’s something. There has to be something. What about what they were having you do back at the lab? You had some amount of control over that, didn’t you?”

“Renee! I can’t just…”

“You haven’t even tried! You’ve said yourself that you don’t know how this works, the extents of your capabilities!”

“Fine.” He rolled his eyes and then closed them. “Look, I’m making my best constipated face while wishing really hard on -”

His eyes went wide, pupils constricted to nothing.

“Oh fuck.”

The scar along his forehead shot open, his third eye dilated to blackness.

Vin crumpled.

Collapsed.

Renee froze. Balled her hands, nails drawing blood. Reached out, grabbing, pulling him to her chest.

“I’m so sorry. Fuck I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you. I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry. Please say something. Please be okay. You have to be okay.”

She was shaking. Holding him. Tighter, probably, than was wise. Lower torso curling in on itself, pushing and flipping. Slamming against the ground. Her eyes raced around, looking for answers, a way out, something, anything . For.

The gunpeople were alarmed by something, shuffling around, taking aim. Had she made too large of a scene? She wrapped herself around Vin as much as she could. She had a lot of body mass; she could probably take a shot or two, right?

She again looked for any sort of out. For a sign. For a plan.

She could… she could probably project pain with her illusions. Pain was a sensory thing.

That would have to make aiming harder, right?

The gunpeople weren’t aiming at her and Vin. They were focused farther away.

At Charlie.

No.

At Tyrone.

He was next to the magi.

When did that happen?

He didn’t seem to notice the guns. He didn’t seem to notice the danger he was in.

That he was putting Charlie in.

The magi was weaving her arm through the air, casting some spell.

Tyrone was so close. He took the arm.

The gun people were going to-

Renee closed her eyes, keeping the location of the gunpeople in her mind.

She thought about needles. Of scalpels. Of being huddled on a bed too small for her as something ripped through her brain, through her insides.

Screams broke her concentration. The people with guns were screaming.

She was doing that. Oh god that was her she -

No.

She was doing this. This was the plan now. They were screaming and she had to do this.

The magi pulled her arm back.

“Really?” she said. “I think I can manage to handle all the might and physical prowess of an overweight child, darling.”

He was smiling. Baring teeth. Lips stretched farther than they should.

He pushed his claws into her arm. Through the thick fingers and useless nails of the body that contained him. He pushed , sinking into her arm, sinking past her skin, past her flesh, past her bones, into Her.

She realized what he was doing. All her cockiness evaporated in an instant, confidence replaced by desperate anger.

She yanked her arm back, shouting with no words but purely emotion.

Her skin, her flesh, her bones: they easily pulled out of the weak and bloody grip of the child.

His claws were still gripping her Arm, though.

And without her Arm, her skin, flesh, and bones fell limp at her shoulder.

Alcor.

Pulled.

She was screaming. She was panic. She was terror. The emotions filled Alcor, rushing through him like fire. It had been far too long since he had done anything like this. It had been far too long since he let himself do anything fun .

She was writhing in agony, her scream becoming the air he breathed. She genuinely seemed to think that somehow, with the right combination of movements and actions, she could possibly get out of this.

Watching her final sliver of hope die was hilarious.

Her soul was everything. Even the small amount he consumed through his grip was freedom from the tight compressed confinement that he hadn’t realized he’d been feeling. Energy rushed through him as a wave, giddy lightning that tingled and vibrated and pushed out all the stress and frustration and utter bullshit of the past. It was taking a beautiful, intricate mechanism and slamming it on the ground, watching it shatter into something new and even more beautiful. It was jumping on a table in a crowd and screaming . It was overturning a picnic table into a river. It was standing up and decking someone after years of silent discomfort. It was freedom, true freedom. It was the promise that this moment could be truly wonderful if you would just let it.

Who cared what these stupid mortals had been trying to do? He was Alcor! He was the single strongest entity in the whole dimension! They only existed because he permitted it, because they were entertaining. Why should he give a fuck about what ridiculous things they did to each other? About what they did on their comically absurd destiny to ensure their own destruction. Why the fuck had he let any of their petty bullshit tie him down?

He was laughing. He was hysterical. Why wouldn’t he be? What did he care if his body ran out of air? It wasn’t like he needed it.

WRONG.

He stopped, smile fading from his face. The magi reduced to a twitching pile of limbs, her soul frozen in his firm grasp.

Oh. that was right. He cared. Him with his stupid boring killjoy self.

He was Alcor. He was the twin star, the brother, the gruncle, and he was strong enough to ignore the temptation of one measly soul.

One really, really tasty soul. That was right there. Bright. Beautiful. Perfect in every way, really. Tingly and light and -

There would be other souls. Better ones.

But there was also this soul right here, and really the future wasn’t real anyway, so…

That would hurt Charlie. The body was absolutely not going to survive having that much energy going through it.

Ze was already dying, though. Would it really be worth it to waste such a wonderful opportunity if ze was just going to die anyway ? Really, who cared about this one person?

Him. He cared. He absolutely cared. He pushed the soul away from his - from Charlie’s body, a tiny spark flickering from where he rejected the energy he already absorbed from it.

He stared at the cyan flame.

Well now.

It wasn’t much of a consolation prize, but if it worked it would be absolutely hilarious.

Charlie’s face resumed its unnatural grin.

He pushed, ever so gently, on the soul. Its energy was already connected to him so it really should take no effort at all to…

The soul exploded in brilliant fire, racing through the valley with the slightest command. Up the cliffs it raced, searing through the rocks, silicon rich sediments melting into hard and rough glass. It was at the top in an instant. At the gunpeople, who were for some reason a disorganized mess, in an instant. It burned -

That would be crossing a line, wouldn’t it.

It melted their guns. And burned their clothes off. People didn’t need clothes to survive. Or hair.

The remaining energy of the soul roared around him like a maelstorm. It was screaming. The tiny bond that connected it to him was a dagger lancing through him - the real him - not the body he wore. It was wonderfully satisfying and delightfully real in a way most magic just wasn’t and -

TYRONE!

Alcor froze, confused, at the sound that echoed around his mind. Tyrone. That meant something to him, right? He looked away from the beautiful storm of fire that danced around him for a source of the interruption.

There was a person close by. The cloud of fear around them was so thick it was almost impossible to see them through it.

“That’s enough,” they (Renee Iris Etheridge, ~16.853 years old, dead in - ) said.

This mortal was trying to tell him what to do.

Something was wrong. Obviously. He was going to have to teach her a lesson.

No.

Something else was wrong.

He knew the exact time and place of Renee’s death.

His omniscience was trickling in.

His omniscience was trickling through.

Charlie's dreamscape wasn’t strong enough anymore.

He had forgotten about Charlie.

A quick internal check revealed that Charlie was still around, but ze felt faint. Which was entirely his fault. He had forgotten about Charlie. He -

“That’s enough, ” Renee said, surprisingly firmly for how much fear swirled around her. “They aren’t a threat anymore. You can let that go.”

For a moment Alcor had no idea what she was talking about. Then he followed her gaze upward, at the soul that he had entrapped.

He stared at the spinning vortex of soul above him. It was screaming just like Henry had screamed. He couldn’t - wouldn’t - do that. Even if the person did deserve it. Wasn’t going to make it beg for the mercy of centuries of digestion.

He.

He let go of the soul. Watched it practically explode in order to dissipate away. Felt its screams fade.

He was going to fucking slaughter some cults when this was all over.

He let Charlie’s body relax.

Renee was curled up around Vin staring wide eyed at Alcor. She was trembling slightly, clutching Vin like a lifesaver.

Vin didn’t look well.

“What was that?” Renee asked, leaning away from Alcor, putting the bulk of herself between them. “I could feel that with senses I can’t even… What was that?”

He paused. There was definitely a wrong answer here.

“As you know, living organisms, especially those with higher levels of cognizance, produce significant amounts of magical energy from their emotions and intent. I just realized that this was an external source of power I could use without channeling it through Charlie’s body.”

“Was that her soul ?” Renee pushed herself a titch farther away from the demon.

“Yes.”

“What’s going to happen to it now?”

“It’s going to need a little time to regenerate the energy I burned,” Alcor said. “But it should reincarnate just like any other soul removed from its body.”

“You’re not a ghost, are you,” she said quietly.

“I never claimed to be one.”

“What are you?

He smiled. “I think that you are a very smart girl with a lot of evidence at her disposal and probably shouldn’t ask questions when you don’t want to know the answer.”

She kept looking at him.

“Now, do you have the first aid kit that Marcus gave us? I fucked up Charlie’s hand pretty bad back there.” Which was really putting it mildly. Charlie's right palm, where Alcor had pushed through, resembled a failed attempt to cook hamburger more than it did a hand. The skin was badly and unevenly torn, there was uneven charring all over, and it was so bloody that assessing the extent of the damage was impossible.

“Right,” she said, uncurling to get access to her bag. “Right.”

Renee shifted through the contents of her pack. She had thought that she had put things away neatly, but the inside was a mess.

“Why are you helping us?” she asked, looking up.

“Because I want to. Which is pretty much the reason I do anything, really.”

She pulled the first aid pack out of the mess. “That is not... reassuring.”

Alcor sat down and put the first aid kit in Charlie’s lap, picking though it. “It isn’t exactly new information. I’ve been pretty open about the fact that I could leave at any time so long as I didn’t mind killing Charlie.”

“I know that, but I guess I hadn’t really internalized it.” She watched as Alcor cleaned the wound. “Despite what you said, it has felt like you were stuck in the same boat as the rest of us. But you’re only here as long as you want to be. I’ll admit, it makes me nervous. That you might stop wanting to help us. That you could just get tired of all this and leave, taking Charlie’s life with you.”

“I’m not willing to kill Charlie. That isn’t likely to change.” He covered Charlie’s hand with a skin growth spray. “And I’m confident that the friend I contacted will be able to help. Not just with Charlie and my thing, but with getting all of us past this. I may not be stuck here, but I am still in the same boat as you - and we’re going to hit shore soon. Speaking of which -”

Alcor walked over to Magi Briana’s body. Body being the key word - it was not a corpse. One might assume that a body, upon having its soul violently ripped out, might die. One would be wrong. A body doesn’t need a soul to survive. A body needs a soul to be a person. From the body formerly belonging to Magi Briana’s perspective, all that had happened over the past few minutes was that a child gripped its arm with all the strength that a child doesn’t have and it suddenly found itself in the market for a new a tenant. The biohazardous blood from Charlie’s wound was closer to being a threat to the body than anything Alcor had intentionally done.

The body didn’t react to Alcor’s approach. Giving a shit about a literal demon coming towards you while looking like it wants something was the business of a person, which was no longer the body’s problem as of a minute ago.

Alcor took the headset from the body. It, unsurprisingly, did not resist. It didn’t do anything. Soulless bodies were boring .

“Are you seriously leaving Charlie’s hand like that?” Renee asked before Alcor could say anything into the microphone. “You can’t just spray skin growth formula on tissue that’s that badly damaged. You need to treat the injury first.”

“Do you know how to treat something this bad?” Alcor asked.

“When it’s this bad is when you seek medical attention.” She shook her head. “Actually, you should go to a doctor even if it’s a lot better than this. But I can at least make a dressing for it, make sure it stays moist. Let me see it.”

She carefully set Vin down next to her.

Alcor offered her the hand, which she took and started cleaning more thoroughly.

“Hey kid,” Alcor said into the microphone.

The headset was an old fashioned two way radio. It was specifically designed to only use one frequency. The computer on it was so simple that calling it a computer was like calling chihuahua an apex predator. From a logical standpoint, there should be no way it could be infected by a computer virus, as there was really nothing to infect. The Alcor Virus realized this, decided that he didn’t much care for that line of logic, and infected it anyway.

“Hey Dad,” the virus said. “Guess who has no thumbs and fucked up?”

“What happened?”

“They figured out it was me almost as soon as I started doing anything,” the virus said. “Which isn’t surprising; I think they were expecting me. Anyway the long and short of it is they destroyed the servers that had the information you need before I could get it.”

Alcor pinched the bridge of Charlie's nose with zir good hand. “I’m starting to think that they want me to kill them in the most gruesome way possible.”

“It’s not entirely lost, though: I have located a backup. Unfortunately, my ability to access it depends on the cooperation of a human person. I think I should be able to make it work, though.”

“We should plan for what happens if you can’t.”

“For sure. What chance of success do you think you’d have of fixing this on your own?”

“Fairly low.” Alcor sighed. “We’ve determined they’ve incorporated zir skin into the binding ritual but we don't know any details about what they did besides that. If we actually had the skin things might be easier, but we don’t.”

“Why don’t you go get it?”

Alcor raised Charlie’s eyebrows. “You’re suggesting we go back?”

“Why not? Thanks to me and the literal fire the place is pretty well cleared out.”

“Right. Renee mentioned that earlier. Why exactly was the place on fire?”

“They started it,” the Alcor Virus said. “Some moron wanted to be very sure I couldn’t get at those files, I guess. And they weren’t very careful about the surroundings. It’s died down by now, but the combination of that and what I was doing mean that the place is pretty empty now.”

“And you can make sure it stays that way?”

“I pretty much tripped every alarm they had. And since they have no way of knowing if I just tripped an alarm or actually broke something, releasing dangerous quantities of ionizing radiation or carbon monoxide or one of the other half dozen things they were monitoring, it’s going to take more than a day or two for them to determine if it’s safe to actually enter the place. Assuming that they can even get there, which I plan on making hard for them. Did you know that it takes about forty miles for the single road leading to the facility to connect with anything?”

Alcor smiled. “What are you planning on doing with it?”

“I’m not sure yet. I was thinking of taking control of a forklift and stacking some cars on top of each other to make a pileup. There’s also a logging company nearby so it might be easier to just pile some trees on the road, but that’s less fun.”

“Those both sound like they’d work just fine.”

“There’s also a satellite launch happening two states over in a few hours. I’m pretty sure I could hijack the rocket and crash it into the street. They specifically design them to not turn around mid air and crash into the ground, so getting it to do that with any precision would be a challenge, but where’s the fun in life without a little challenge?”

Alcor shook Charlie’s head slightly. “That sounds like it would likely generate more attention then we would want.”

“You’re probably right - but consider - I would get to hack and crash a rocket for the greater good.”

“Do whatever you think is best, and have your fun, just make sure it works. I don’t want another molasses incident here.”

“In my defense,” the Alcor Virus said, “the molasses incident was hilarious.”

“No one is questioning the hilarity of the incident,” Alcor clarified. “I’m just pointing out that it didn’t accomplish what we wanted in the slightest.”

“Which did sort of make the whole thing even more funny.”

“That may be true,” Alcor said with a smile. “But we really can’t afford that sort of mishap right now. Charlie’s life is very much on the line, and if people get through on that road, Vin and Renee are in danger as well.”

“I suppose I could find a different reason to crash a rocket…”

“Do you really need a reason?”

“It’s more funny that way.”

“Well let me know when you’ve blocked that road off, alright?” Alcor said. “I should bring Renee back into the loop.”

“Will do,” the virus said. “It will probably be a little, there’s nothing very close that I can infect.”

“I take it your friend didn’t get the ritual diagram,” Renee said, gently wrapping a bandage around Charlie’s hand.

“No,” Alcor sighed. “They destroyed the digital data before he could. He’s located a backup but will need to get someone to cooperate with him in order to get it.”

“And I’m sure he’s just great at getting people to cooperate with him.”

“It really will depend on what sort of person has backup. If it’s the same person that decided that the correct solution for a data breach was to set a server on fire, he’s going to have to be careful. If it’s a more reasonable person… well, he has a lot he can offer a reasonable person.”

“And in the meantime you’re suggesting we go back,” Renee stated.

“We need Charlie’s skin,” Alcor said. “The facility is going to be a better place to do a ritual than anywhere else in this woods. There also might be physical documentation on the ritual they used that my friend couldn’t access. The place is empty right now, and my friend is going to block the road ensuring it stays that way, so it should be safe.”

“I’m not going to say you’re wrong, but I don’t like it.” Renee hugged her arms tightly to her chest. “I never want to go back to that awful place.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Alcor pointed out. “I can probably manage on my own at this point.”

“I don’t want to abandon Charlie,” Renee said resolutely. “And if there are people still there, you’ll need my illusions.”

“I still have my fire.”

“How much more fire can you produce without further aggravating Charlie's condition?” Renee asked. “Especially after that stunt you just pulled?”

Alcor didn’t respond, thinking about how loose the bond between him and Charlie felt. Any fire at all was probably a bad idea.

“If there is anyone left, you’ll need my illusions,” she said firmly.

“I’m certainly not going to argue against help,” Alcor said. “I just don’t want you to feel pressured into doing something you don’t want to do.”

She picked up Vin again. “My anxiety will eat me alive if I stay back while you two go ahead. I’ll feel better doing something, even if it’s largely unnecessary, than I will if I do nothing. Even if that means going back.”

“Alright then,” Alcor said. “Let’s get on with it. We should see if there’s a way up the cliffs. They probably have some kind of vehicle that we could use, or at least tracks we could follow.”

They walked along the cliff face, looking for a path.

“In case I missed saying it before, thank you for earlier,” Alcor said.

“For what?”

“For stopping me.” Alcor paused before continuing. “If I had been left to my own devices… I’m not sure Charlie would have survived.”

“It was nothing,” Renee said, avoiding Alcor’s gaze.

“It was extraordinary. You were terrified, I was putting on what was likely the single greatest demonstration of destructive power you had ever seen, you had no idea how I would react, and you drew attention to yourself to call me out anyway.”

“Someone had to do something, and I didn’t think the either the dead woman or the two unconscious people were like going to seize the initiative.”

“Speaking of which, what happened to Vin anyway?”

Renee’s gaze dropped. “He’ll be fine in an hour or two. He tried to find a way out and ended up looking too far forward. It’s my fault; I shouldn’t have pushed him after he said that he didn’t have any intuition on what to do next. I knew that this is what happens when he tries to control his abilities and I told him to do it anyway. I guess I thought that if the situation was dire enough adrenaline might get him through it? Or more likely I wasn’t thinking about what the consequences would be for him at all, only about what I wanted.”

“What you wanted was for all of us to get out alive,” Alcor said gently. “You didn’t know I was capable of doing what I did. There was a chance that Vin could have been the straw to tip the scales in our favor, and you acted on that chance. If the only options you know about are to risk putting Vin through this or to die, risking this is the right choice.”

“But was it really my choice to make?” Renee asked. “I’m not the one who got hurt.”

“He was presumably also aware of what happens when he pushes himself and tried it anyway. He made just as much of a choice as you did.”

“I don’t think he was actually trying to look into the future, though.” Renee was slithering slowly. “He was being really flippant about it, and he seemed genuinely surprised when his third eye opened.”

“It is possible that he only did it because of you. That doesn’t mean you made a bad choice.”

“He seemed so content,” Renee said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so relaxed and peaceful as he was when he was sure that he was going to die.”

“Renee,” Alcor said. “Vin’s severely depressed. His relationship with death is badly skewed.”

“Is it really our place to say that it’s a bad end for him, though?” Renee said quietly. “It’s what he wants. It feel selfish to say that he has to live because I want him to.”

Alcor took a deep breath before speaking. “Look, I know you feel like a shitty person who selfishly hurt her friend, but a) you’re not and b) even if you were that doesn’t mean that you’re wrong about everything. Yes, Vin wants to die. Vin also wants to be eating chocolate at all times. If you feel comfortable denying his desire to constantly consume confectionaries you should feel fine denying his desire to die. He’s sick, and unless things worked very differently at the facility than I’m assuming they did, he’s completely untreated and spent most of his life in a triggering situation. I’m not going to say that death is never a solution - there is a reason assisted suicide is a thing - but death is a very final solution. It’s what you do when nothing else works, when you’ve expended all your options, the pain is unbearable and can’t be stopped. It’s not what you do when you haven’t even tried a single method of treatment.”

“But he’s not going to be able to get treated!” Renee cried. “We can’t even go to a farm in the middle of the night without disguising our faces; we’re not going to be able to walk into a psychiatrist’s office, assuming we could even find someone who does in-person visitations.”

“Sure you will. Remember we aren’t alone anymore; I brought someone else into it. This could go very public if we want it to. Or we could shut it down quietly and blackmail them into leaving you alone. Either way, you’re not going to spend the rest of your life hiding in the woods. Unless you want to, of course, in which case I’m not going to stop you. Live the dream.”

“You’re saying we can put this whole ordeal behind us, just like that?” Renee said.

“You don’t sound especially excited about the prospect.”

She shifted her grip on Vin. “On top of the fact that I don’t think I can say with any degree of sincerity that I believe you, it feels wrong. It’s too easy; there’s too many places for it to go astray.”

“There are probably considerably fewer moving parts than you’re assuming.” He smiled. “I can pretty much guarantee that if we get through this alive I’ll be able to clean your records.”

“At what cost?” Renee asked. “What organization would be pulling these strings and what guarantee do we have that they aren’t going to want to hold this favor over us?”

Alcor laughed. “There isn’t a nefarious organization. There’s really just the two of us, and you’re already up to your ears in my crap already.”

Renee cocked an eyebrow. “There’s just two of you and you’re confident that you can both make this go public and give us our lives back?”

“Well,” Alcor said, “it’s mostly just him, if I’m being entirely honest. But he’s pulled much bigger stunts than this before.”

Renee frowned. “Unless your friend is like the Alcor Virus or -”

“Wow,” Alcor interrupted. “That was a really good guess.”

“What?”

Alcor was grinning widely. “I didn’t think you’d figure that out until you two were talking.”

“What‽” Renee was looking around, as if she could find a more sensical universe hiding behind a tree.

“But you got it nigh instantaneously.”

She focused on him with a disbelieving stare. “Are you trying to tell me you are friends with the Alcor Virus?”

“You were the one who suggested it in the first place.”

“I was being facetious!” she cried. “Wait a minute, yesterday you said - did you program the Alcor Virus ???”

Alcor just grinned.

“Just to be clear,” she said, “we are referring to the program that took over the entire world's nuclear arsenal and threatened to use them if a series of increasingly asinine demands weren’t met?”

“Yeah,” Alcor said dreamily. “That was a good time. We managed to get global nuclear disarmament in under a day.”

“You’re telling me the goal of the Tretalelin Incident was disarmament?”

Alcor waggled Charlie’s good hand. “About eighty percent of it was about disarmament, twenty percent was just about fucking with the global powers.”

“Well, that worked out great in the long run.”

“We had a good two centuries of zero active nuclear arsenals. I would say that’s pretty decent for a day’s work.”

Renee shook her head. “So our lives are now in the metaphorical hands of one of the most infamously unpredictable and trollish entities ever. How far we’ve come.”

“Oh he won’t do anything to seriously fuck with you if I ask him not to.”

She glared. “Are you actually planning on asking him not to, though?”

Alcor put up a finger. “That’s a very good question.”

“That is not an answer.”

Alcor put Charlie’s palms up. “Where’s the fun in life if you don’t have a surprise every once in awhile?”

“I’m starting to get the feeling that we have very different ideas about what fun is.”

“I bet Vin would agree with me,” Alcor said. “He has a sense of humor.”

“Vin doesn’t take the future seriously because he doesn’t believe he’ll live to see it. Having him on your side here isn’t doing you any favors.”

“You’re just jealous that it’s two to one.”

She rolled her eyes. “I bet Charlie would be on my side.”

“Well, that’s just because Charlie’s a square.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“That’s because you’re also a square.” Alcor stopped and pointed at a bit of the cliff. “Oh, hey, this looks pretty trampled. Wanna try ascending here?”

The trampled path was at a gentler incline than the cliff around it. It was still pretty steep, certainly steeper than Renee would like to scale while carrying Vin, but it looked manageable enough.

Renee nodded.

As they climbed Renee turned to Alcor. “I can’t think of anything that can rip out the soul of a living, non-consenting person.”

“I normally wouldn’t be able to. But I’ve done practically nothing these past few days but gather my energy up. I could do a lot right now, or at least I could before I went and did the thing.”

“Just how much energy are you absorbing?” Renee asked, looking at Alcor like he was some kind of large wild carnivore. “The amount of energy it would take to do that is absurd.”

“Do you know how much energy it takes to burn through the dreamscape of something with the cognitive strength of a selkie? It’s not a small number.”

“I suppose not.”

“It’s actually sort of lucky that I ended up wrecking zir hand,” Alcor said. “It takes a lot more energy to achieve a physical effect than it does to do things in the mindscape. If I hadn’t had so much of the energy I was channeling through zir push through zir physical body... Things could have been very bad.”

“Well, that sure is something.”

They picked their way up the cliff side.

“So,” Renee said. “If I’m to believe the words of our former captors, you’ve killed enough to gain a reputation for it.”

“I’m not sure why you would trust anything those people have said, but yes, I have,” Alcor said. “What about it?”

“Do you,” she paused. “Do you feel guilty about that?”

“Sometimes.”

Alcor reached the cliff’s top and extended Charlie’s uninjured hand down to Renee.

“Sometimes?” she said, taking it.

“Sometimes,” he repeated, helping her up. “Sometimes I’m not really in a place where I can feel guilt. Sometimes I feel fully justified in my actions. Sometimes the weight of everything I’ve done is completely immobilizing.”

“Do you feel guilty about it currently?”

“Some of it,” he said. “Most of it. Some of it feels pretty justified, though.”

“Like the magi just now?”

“Yes. That was definitely an unusual occurrence, but I’m not going to lose any metaphorical sleep over killing someone who was prepared to murder kids to use me as a science project,” Alcor said. “And although the circumstance surrounding the encounter was obviously unique, and the ending was rather extraordinary, there wasn’t anything too special about her, really.

“The way my existence works…” Alcor continued. “I see the worst side of people. I see a lot of the worst side of people. And even though I also deal with perfectly decent people, when you constantly see the extent of what horrors people are capable of… It’s a fight to keep believing that people are worth grieving over. That I should feel guilty at all. And sometimes, it’s a losing battle. And sometimes, it’s too hard and I just isolate myself.”

“So why do you care, then? Why bother fighting just so you can feel bad about what you’ve done?”

“Because,” Alcor said slowly, “I like people. Admittedly, not always in a healthy way, or a way that’s good for the people involved, but I pretty much always like people. The world would be awfully boring without them. And I want to be liked back, to deserve to be liked.”

“At least, sometimes you do?”

“Yeah. Sometimes I really don’t care what anyone else thinks of me. But I kind of hate that part of me.” He laughed without any humor whatsoever. “Of course, I also hate that I hate that, hate that I feel the need to get validation from others, hate how weak and pathetic that is. And then I hate that I feel that way and... I’m a bit of a mess, honestly.”

“Have you ever considered therapy?” Renee asked. “You sound like you could really use it.”

“Hah! Yeah that would go great. ‘Yes, hello, you can call me Tyrone, I’m a hundred times your age, good with kids, and I’ve almost certainly killed more people than you’ve ever met’.” He sighed. “Actually I have tried therapy before. It didn’t go great. There’s too much that I just can’t tell someone I don’t know that well, and at the end of the day, therapy is about changing what you can and accepting what’s left and I can’t do that. I can’t change what I am. I want to - god do I want to - but it’s too much a part of me. And I don’t want to accept it - I don’t want to be okay with doing terrible things because that’s when I do even worse things.”

“Just how many people have you killed here?”

“I haven’t exactly been running a tally. It’s not a small number though, I can tell you that much.” He paused. “Most of it was an accident though, for what little that’s worth.”

“How do you accidentally kill more people than you can count? Are you secretly a politician or something?”

“No, I didn’t poison a water supply or whatever. I was a dumb angry kid and I threw a hissy fit with more collateral damage than I realized was possible. I didn’t know my own strength at that point, and a whole lot of innocent people paid the price.”

“That sounds terrible. I’m sorry,” she said, unsure how else to respond.

“It was,” Alcor said, pointedly ignoring the part of him that found it hilarious.

The silence that settled over the two was like an especially itchy blanket on a hot summer night.

Renee focused on picking her way through the underbrush. The path was well trampled, making it much easier to traverse than the path leading to the encounter had been. She kind of wished it was harder, that it would demand more of her attention. As it was, it left her with little to do mentally other than contemplate everything she just learned, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to do that just yet. She just wished she had some sort of distraction.

As if on a cue, Alcor stopped in front of her.

“Well, this isn’t what I had in mind, but it will probably do,” he said.

Renee lifted herself up a little to see over Charlie’s frame. Ahead of them, scattered around the area’s sparse trees, was a pack of parked motorcycles. They looked relatively new, despite the layer of dirt that coated them. That was about all Renee could assess from them, as she knew about as much about motorcycles as she did how to feel about Tyrone, which was an almost impressive amount of ignorance to have about a relatively common object.

Renee slithered about the area, getting a more solid idea about what was there. The motorcycles were the only things she could see that were left behind. There was nothing she could see that could practically transport something her size.

“They really weren’t planning on taking Vin and me back, were they?” she asked.

“Doesn’t look like it, no.”

“He was right,” she said. “They were planning on killing us.”

“Probably. I could have told you some very dangerous things by now.”

Alcor walked up to one of the motorcycles. It was still on: apparently they didn’t expect the encounter to last very long. Which, Alcor supposed, wasn’t technically an inaccurate assumption.

Experimentally, he got on one. It was a little large for Charlie’s body, but not unworkably so.

"Think you can get on one of these?"

"You want me to ride a motorcycle," Renee said. "What with my zero legs and four meters of torso."

"I was more wondering if you would be physically capable of mounting one. I might be able to tow you," Alcor said. "I want to get back to the facility quickly; getting me out of Charlie as soon as possible is more important than ever."

"Can you even tow a motorcycle with another motorcycle?"

"I don't see why not," Alcor said.

"You can, so long as you have a towline," the Alcor Virus said in Alcor’s ear. "There should be one in the repair kit in the storage area under the seat."

Alcor shuffled through the storage area’s contents. It seemed to be mostly standardized stuff, but there was a small jar that contained a dead dragonfly and a centipede. The repair kit was easy to find; it was a neatly labeled box that took up a majority of the space.

"Is this it?" Alcor asked, pulling a strap out of the kit.

"You realize that you left the only camera for miles with the Magi, right? You could have just pulled out an irate alpaca and I wouldn't know so long as it was very quiet."

"Right. It's a thick strap with a Y shaped fork at about one third of its length, around 5 meters long."

"That's it. You're going to want to tie each end of the Y to your footpegs, and lead it around the handlebars and have Renee hold it with her left hand. She's going to be your breaks, which is fun because she’s only going to be able to use the handbrake."

"I think I understand how this works." Alcor started to tie the towline to the footpegs."You willing to try getting on one?"

"Sure. Why not. Have the naga ride a motorcycle," Renee said. "It’s hardly the most absurd thing to happen today."

She slithered up to the nearest bike, pushed her upper torso over the seat, and wrapped her lower torso around it. Her torso drooped along the sides of the bike, with her weight resting on the fenders, pushing them close to the tires. Vin rested somewhat awkwardly between her and the handlebar. She had never been more grateful her friend was so small.

“So how are we going to take this out of park without instantly tipping over?”

“There are stabilizers for low speed maneuvering,” the Alcor Virus said. “I can easily activate them.”

Alcor relayed the virus’ message as he hooked the strap around the front of the bike and looped it around the left handlebar a couple times.

“The handle on the right is your brake,” Alcor said, handing her a helmet. “If we’re going faster than you would like, feel free to use it. You want to keep the towline taunt if possible.”

“Shouldn’t there be two breaks?”

“The other one’s a foot brake.” Alcor mounted his bike. “We’ll go slowly, though; I’m sure we’ll only need the one.”

“This is absolutely going to end with us crashing into a tree, isn’t it?”

“Eh, there’s like, ten bikes here.” Alcor put a helmet on Charlie’s head and prepared to go. “We’ll get it eventually.”

Happy TAUniversery everyone!

The next (and final!) chapter only has ~3000 words written so far, and I’m thinking it’s going to be a longer chapter, so it’ll be awhile. Hopefully not too long though.

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#Transcendence AU #Haunted Fic #My shit #My Fic #Guys I really love Magi Briana.#Like #everytime I read her section I have to stop and take a moment to just appreciate her #Also I cried twice while writing this.

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