#but internally my first instinct is to just dramatically get to the ground and sob

[delightfullygiddy]

I feel like i gain an intangible golden sticker with "pleasure to have in class" applied to me every time someone in public says nice things back to me.

[coraxaviary]

Never Done

EUGENE SLEDGE  X   READER

Preface: My first Pacific thing! More notes at the end.

Summary: There is a bomb and then they say there is peace. You do not feel it. 

Word Count: 3.4K

Warnings: Canon-typical profanity. Depictions of major character death (kinda).

Taglist: @keoghans​​ @papercinders​​ @junojelli​​ @notmykirk (ask to be added; please notify me if you prefer to be taken off the x reader taglist)

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He repeats it, but you don’t react as he expects you to. All the other men positively erupt, but you can’t do anything except clench your teeth, rock back and forth, and try to quell the stinging of the tears that are springing up unbidden in your eyes.

You feel a tear slide down your cheek, and you swipe it away roughly. They are tears of shock – the type that spring forth when artillery is so bright the night flashes a phosphorus white and your retinas feel positively sandblasted.

It can’t be done. It can’t be over. Of course it isn’t over – these Japanese are gonna fight until the very last man. The very last woman. The last child, in the street, you suppose, if it comes down to it. Victory means the eradication of every single one of those goddamn Orientals, and you intend to finish the job.

Instead of dropping your rifle, your grip tightens around the barrel, and you are momentarily steadied by the solid metal and wood of the thing – this weapon, this machine, that has followed you throughout your entire godforsaken three-year stint in the mud and mosquitoes. Wading through the corpses and the bloody waters – thickened with suffocating rot and guts spilling out and shells scattering deadly and bright overhead with a noise that could deafen.

It’s not over; of course it’s not. As long as there are still people on that island, the war is not over.

You grip the rifle tight, and you can’t say anything, except you absently hear this kind of keening animal-ish noise, until there’s a hand on your back and a voice telling you to calm down. The hand moves in slow circle and the unpleasant sound stops, and you close your own mouth, and there are sobs ripping from your chest and you are shaking your head no in disbelief.

You are shaking so badly that you can see the tremors in your own hands even though they’re tight around the gun.

“Easy,” says a gentle voice.

You do not give in to whatever is easy, but you do recognize that someone is trying to calm you down. It’s a bit like stroking a dog, whenever someone from the company tried it before, and then after Peleliu it eventually evolved into a “shut up” and ultimately hands closing around your throat if a dream turns out too loud.

This one is not a stranglehold. It comes to rest very lightly on your shoulder. You are crying in earnest now, and the surrounding universe fades away until all you can feel is the disbelief. And then the injustice. The countless bodies littering the shore after every beachhead invasion; the bodies forgotten facedown in the endless jungles; the mutilated, tortured corpses left behind by the Japanese; the ones who are missing a leg or an arm or a couple of fingers; the ones with no more sanity left to spend in the civilian world. The ones with soul torn out of their bodies too soon, bullets puncturing flesh and releasing sprays of lifeblood. And just like that, they bleed out and pile on top of the others, dying in dust.

Returning to the earth, just as Adam was raised from it.

You wish you could dig all of them up with your hands, grasp their souls and drag them back to solid ground with sheer willpower, clutch their faces between your palms and tell them it’s over, and it almost occurs to you to crouch down and start scratching at the ground before you are yanked back to reality.

Were they all for naught? For the Japanese to just surrender? It was that easy. Just issue an announcement.

Too soon and too rough.

“What’s after this, huh?”

You don’t answer. Burgie won’t mind. His boots – all you can see of him – retreat a few moments later when your mouth opens in a silent, agonized scream and another sob rips forth. You fold yourself over your rifle where you are sitting on the ground, and you crumple inwards, holding your head between your hands.

Sledge keeps rubbing you on the back until you relax halfway. And then he sits back, languidly packs the pipe with that routine normalcy, and smokes it. You appreciate the presence. It’s comforting. And he doesn’t ask anything or say anything – he just sits.

Maybe, you think, as you regard him secretly when he’s looking out over the water, he is considering what he’s going to do when he gets home.

Maybe, like you, he just doesn’t want to face it. You have no idea. He’s different like everyone else, including you. Two years ago, you might’ve been overcome with joy.

Now, sudden changes make you grim. No matter if it’s moving out to retake an airfield or a declaration of the surrender of the Empire of Japan.

–

You are correct. It is not over. In fact, it’s far from over, you realize, standing an entire year later in the back of a transport vehicle as it roars and revs through the Chinese country. You sit back down, jam the rifle between your legs, and try to get some sleep. It doesn’t come, though, no matter how hard you try.

It’s the trouble with sleep. It doesn’t come when called. Instead, it becomes increasingly evasive.

Sleep becomes an elusive figure in the night, and a spectre burning off with the morning overcast in the day. You can only get some if your body has to beg for it, and so you work yourself to the bone with pointless tasks while all the other Marines kick back and mess around in the city.

Sledge looks at you from his seat beside you, and his elbow brushes against your arm every time the truck hits a rut. It’s almost like looking at an entirely different person from the one you met at the beginning of the war. He doesn’t smile now. When he laughs, it’s harsh and sardonic. It’s a little like you, but it was just more dramatic seeing him change. He’d been an optimistic one once. But like everyone else, he’d gotten his insides chewed up and spat out. He was absent at times.

He is absent now, and it’s not a bad thing, necessarily, to be absent in the peace of Chinese occupation. His eyes are closed and his shirt is flapping in the breeze – instead of being soaked through with sweat and jungle moisture, clinging to his frame. He needs a haircut, you think, as his strands flutter almost delicately off his forehead.

Absence is comforting. You can feel the world gearing back up again – the world-ending possibility of bombs, the liquidity of the international borders, the cold reaching hands of the hard vengeful nation up north. It’s nice to retreat inwards. Forget your duty as a part of the war machine. You signed up for it, after all. Detachment permits you to momentarily separate from the accumulated, crushing thing that is much more than guilt.

Sledge cracks an eye open, squinting into the bright sun, which is a white-hot disk behind heavy fog. He catches you staring, and raises an eyebrow. You’re comfortable enough with him to just shrug and say nothing more, and he leans back against the bar. His head is bouncing slightly off the metal, and it looks far from comfortable, but at least it’s almost like peace.

–

You’ve cleaned your rifle already that day, but your fingers are itching to be occupied again, and you bring out the cleaning supplies and the rifle, nudging snaps apart and prying locks apart. There are worn calluses on the sides of your fingers that have grown there over time. You distantly remember basic training, when you were told your rifle was your life. It ain’t a gun. It’s a rifle, the sergeant had said. You sleep with it, train with it, fight with it.

It has done you well over the three years. You had clutched it to your chest under your soaked poncho, vainly trying to keep it dry as artillery exploded around you in miserable, mud-filled foxholes. You had run with it, crawled through the gritty sand with it under tank fire, scooping dust into the air and down your shirt, leaving a trail of blood that had spattered onto you from someone close by under threat from Japanese bunkers waiting up the hill. It had come with you all the way from the motherland and it was with you on the ships, in the waters, on the islands, in the jungles, and now in the east Asian lands.

China’s foreign, to say the least. Everyone looks different. You are suddenly the foreigner, barraged with foreign sights and sounds and smells whenever you go off-base. You tire of it, eventually, but some of the other men go after the opium, girls, and questionable food. You stay inside, and sometimes – too often – there are empty moments alone in the barracks when you stare out the window, wondering when the pain will bleed away.

In the battlefield, it’s unsafe to have loud and boisterous nightmares. So no one had them. They were suppressed by pure instinct or something deeper. Ingrained fear, you would like to say, but it’s not like the fear ebbs away when the sound of gunshots recedes. You are still fearful. It’s a different kind of fear. A strange one. It smells of the open air and the crashing sea – the sickening, swelling, desert of a sea – and of the infinite blue sky vaulting into the beyond. Cloudless and suffocating in its volume, grandiose and terrifying in its broad might.

But the loud nightmares commence, because the vice-grip of fiery fear has faded away. Arguably, this new void-mouth of time’s progression and the future of the unknown is even worse.

You are back again, standing on the precipice of one of those coral cliffs in Okinawa. The black ones, rough and abrupt; there is nothing and then everything all at once – the shells and the rifle fire and suddenly there are intermittent flashes of light every time they send up another illumination flare, the shadows spreading and turning with each spark of a sensory flood.

There’s a growing presence in the swimming, churning mixture of hypnotic black and white as darkness folds and bright light ignites and dies in the lifespan of a second or three. Time stutters and flies and then turns around on itself. You are back again.

You are back again in the fields of heat and rapturous metal and death. And you are crumpled into a ball behind a jut of coral.

The firefight is deafening, you realize, as you become rooted in the memory. A man from your platoon beside you catches a bullet straight in the helmet, and with a dull metallic ping, he jerks back violently by the neck and then his entire body falls back heavily into the deep, sucking mud with a tremendous splash, without a word or a groan. The only reason you’re sure he’s dead is because of the red spray that almost aerosolizes from the hole in his head as he is hit – a little like a perfume spray, you observe, as you watch him die silently and quickly in the mixture of rainy black silt in a scene that is a dime-a dozen. A few bubbles come up from where his head is submerged, and then nothing. You have more pressing things to be concerned with.

It’s not really clear who the man was, but the replacements cycle so frequently and men are replaced so often that it’s not really a priority to know, and you crunch into a smaller ball around the cold firmness of your rifle – your friend, your wife, your salvation.

When it’s all over, you have a strange urgency grow in the back of your mind. There are still ricocheting bullets in the distance in another part of the battlefield – there is artillery booming and the sound of rocks hitting the ground, and machine-gun fire. But this small section of the area is clear for at least one or two breaths of air, and the luxury of thought and emotion slams back into your body from where it had dissociated during battle, hovering somewhere out of reach in the sky. It’s a soldier’s best friend and their worst enemy. You become suddenly conscious of the body lying in the caking muck.

Their head is buried deep in the brackish soup. It feels almost like confirming reality to check the tags, like somehow knowing the identity of whoever used to reside in this body would make their death official. It’s acknowledgement from the living, you think, as you bend down, reaching under the sodden folds of dungarees to fish around for the tags against the body’s cold, foul chest. If acknowledgement of the living is required to release a soul, you think, maybe there is some reason to slink off and die alone like a wolf.

You catch them between your shaking fingers, and you manage to grip them in your palms, yanking the tags and their chain out from below the dungarees. You blink, trying to force your eyes to readjust to reading the minutiae of the engravings instead of taking in bare images for the purpose of reaction.

You grip the tags in your hand, pulling harder to bring them into the watery marine-fogged light of dawn, the chain probably cutting into the neck of whoever it was hard enough to cause discomfort if they were still alive.

You blink several more times. The tag reads Eugene B. Sledge.

You yank harder on the chain, squinting at the tags in irritation. Of course it wasn’t Sledge. He was one of the eternal living who never seemed liable to death. He wasn’t here at the start of the battle, was he? You didn’t remember him moving to get next to you.

“You’re gonna cut ‘is neck off,” mutters the guy next to you irritatedly, and he smacks your hand to make you let go of the tags. They fall with a jangle, and somehow the light metal tinkle spirals deep into your mind like a key in a lock, and the last dregs of your own self trickle back into place.

“Sledge?” you whisper, staring at the body. Its face is under the mud, so you fall to your knees and plunge your hands in to the wrists, taking hold of the body’s head and wrenching it out of the heaviness of the mire.

“Sledge?” you repeat, not comprehending. You forcefully swipe the grime away, like clearing dirt from a watch or blood from your eyes so you can see.

It’s him, alright, or what used to be him. By now he will be long gone, sailing off to the halls of Valhalla or the gates of hell – wherever they put soldiers, you guess. Wherever they get stored.

Sometimes you wonder if even God knows what to do with soldiers. You are all walking, talking, battered, miserable, and sinful contradictions.

If you were God, you’d give Sledge a place within the golden streets, or the pearly gates or whatever he believed in.

But you are not God, and all you can do is keep wiping water from his face and trembling and staring emptily at his open eyes, where there are bits of soil resting wrongly in them – and why isn’t he clearing them out? Why won’t he blink?

You are not God as sure as the Japanese ain’t human and as sure as Okinawa ain’t home. You’re just a soldier. And you have no control of the fate of the universe, even something so small as one tortured soul and one bullet lodged in a certain, singular brain. It is out of your hands, because you’re a soldier.

–

There is shaking and turmoil, and someone is trying to tear you away from behind.

No, you scream at no one in particular. There are other incoherent sounds coming from your throat, maybe they are words and you don’t really pay attention to that – but you do claw and scratch and fight your way back to the empty vessel wearing Sledge’s tags.

“No, no, no!” you shriek. “Come back!”

The body lies motionless, the sky is gray, and the rain starts up again. The hands around your waist get stronger, and you are being born away – the coral falls away and you are still clawing for the body because it’s him.

You awake fully in a sweating, writhing mess, and the body is there. You scream wildly, pushing him away and kicking at the sheets, and he looks at you with a look that somehow mixes the most extreme inexplicable extent of empathy and helplessness. His eyes are bright and open and very, very blue.

You are panting and shaking violently and you dart nervous eyes to check your surroundings, making sure you didn’t wake anyone. You are not sleeping below an open sky, and there are actual army cots in the room, and they are all empty. The ceiling is wildly and strangely foreign, even if you’ve been in China for a while now.

And he is there, very much alive.

“Sorry,” you choke out uncomprehendingly, wiping an exhausted arm over your damp face. Tears or sweat, you don’t know – maybe a mix. Probably a mix. Sudden shame comes over you as you look at him and realize you probably were bothering whatever attempt he had made at catching some sleep in this typically empty afternoon.

He shakes his head a few times.

“Ain’t got nothing to be sorry for,” he says quietly.

You are still trying to take in the vitality in his face because a moment before you had come to the conclusion that he was dead.

“I get ‘em too,” he says.

“I know,” you get out, and then swallow in reflexive regret. “I- I didn’t mean that you bother–”

“It’s okay,” he whispers. “Best of us, you know.”

All you can do is nod a few times. He’s leaning over the sheets, you realize, in a position he hasn’t changed since you awoke and jerked away, and your eyes trace his arms until you see the deep scratches in his forearms. There is a small amount of blood beading up in some of the streaks.

You look down at your own hands. There is a hint of fresh red staining your nails, and your mouth opens in shock and more shame and regret.

He was trying to wake you up and you had hurt him. You feel his eyes tracing your own hands as he sees you realize what you’ve done.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Don’t hurt none.”

“I’m sorry,” you say again, because there’s nothing more you can think to say. The shame is beginning to get suffocating, and you can’t look him in the eyes, and you stare at the scratches on his arms, looking like they were put there by an animal instead of a human. You’ve never clawed someone before. You’d always had your M-1 to do the hurting for you.

“I’ve felt worse.”

Something about that statement makes you feel suddenly like crying. Because it’s true. Both of you have weathered the worst of humankind. Whoever had coined the term battle angels didn’t know what they were talking about. You both were floating in a purgatory between learned savagery and a desperate impulse to try and shed the violence.

You haven’t shed it yet. You probably would never.

You heave with sobs. He moves his arms around you, and you lose sight of the scratches and are pulled close.

He is alive, and you are, too. It’s over, you realize, with a heavy weight of realization and grief and a guilty gush of relief.

It’s over and you and Gene are alive.

It may never be exactly done for you or for him. But in this moment, you can pretend that someday this hell will fade to a version where you have time occasionally to breathe.

Moments like this, where the only thing in the world is warmth and proximity.

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This work previously contained a shortened form of "Japanese" which was intended to communicate cultural (and era) immersion, but my views have now changed and I don't believe hateful speech or slurs has any place in my fics, especially when I never felt right writing them in the first place. As always, I am open to conversation on the subject :)

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[letgraysonsheart]

The Cats Cradle

Selina just wanted to steal a pretty diamond, instead she finds a dying bird.

A/N: This fic has an alternate ending posted separately (spoiler alert! it’s the more happy one),you can read it on tumblr hereI also have to say a massive thank you to @liathgray who listened to all my rambling about the fic and helped me with editing, grammar and the title! also thanks to @schweeeppess for advice on how to post this mess.  

She is careful as she makes her way through the empty street. There has been yet another Arkham Breakout. Most people have already vacated the grim and dirty main road of Gotham. Smart people. Selina didn’t catch all about what had happened. The blonde news-lady with the pretty lipstick had said something about the Riddler with a dash of Scarecrow. Fun.

For her, it had been the perfect timing.

The Gotham Historical Museum had managed to get their hands on a very special, and very big, diamond. She has had her eyes on it since they first announced on TV that they would be showcasing it in the main hall. The owner had been bragging about it on Gotham Today of all things. How someone had willingly loaned it to a museum in Gotham, she could not comprehend. Rich people and their carelessness, she could only shake her head over it. Then use it for her own gain, of course.

The guards of the museum might be on high alert because of the breakout, but she isn’t worried about them. Their training is.. not that great. They’re only middle-class men only trying to make a living, and she is a master of her craft. It seems the museum never learns to hire better guards even after all the break-ins. Maybe that is the very reason they can’t afford too.

It’s an especially gloomy night in Gotham. The fog laid over the city is like a thick blanket, and there’s no clear sky in sight.

It is almost a dream come true, a perfect heist. Her only worry is Batman, who has a knack of turning up out of nowhere when she least wants him too. The fog is a favorite weather of his to practice his over-dramatic entrances. She has put all her trust in the breakout to slow him down enough so that he will arrive only for her to have already snagged her prize.

Through the fog, she can just barely see the majestic wooden doors of the museum. It is quite a wonder that the museum keeps rebuilding. Especially in that same expensive and historical style. She has lost count of every time it has gotten ruined in some attack or intrusion. There’s been quite a few. Another reason they can not afford better guards, even after gracious donations from Wayne Enterprises.

It seems like the battle has already been in this particular street. There is a crashed and abandoned car, and parts of the pavement are broken or missing. There is, thankfully, no pools of blood, it would be a shame for her boots to get dirty. She isn’t wearing those that work well with anything wet, like water, or blood.

There is nothing to be heard either, besides distant rumbling. It is in no doubt some rogue ruining some building, and Batman trying to stop them, which means she is alone for now.

She wonders what Bruce will say once he sees the news of the stolen diamond. Hopefully, it will be after he has put the escaped villain back into their cell. When everything has quieted down. Her little jewel theft will not be covered in the news as much as the Arkham Breakout, yet she has no doubt the bat will get ahold of it anyway. He has a way of knowing about all crime that happens in Gotham. She is still trying to figure out exactly how he does it.

Bruce will know it was her, but he won’t come after her. They have an understanding of some sort. She has, after all, been in his kitchen sipping tea with Alfred Pennyworth. Whatever it is they have, must have been going on for years by now. Since Batman had his first Robin, running around in small green shorts and pixie boots. He would not break their weird relationship now unless she did something unforgivable. Something which she is not planning to do, she would rather avoid the wrath of the bat.

There is not a person in sight, but Gotham is covered in fog tonight, so that doesn’t mean there isn’t anyone hiding somewhere. Her goggles do help a little though as she slips them on and secures the strap. The tech in them makes things a tiny bit clearer.

She goes to cross the street and head towards the back of the museum. It is so pathetic-level guarded that she’s considered sending the poor museum some notes for consideration on how easy it is to break into.

A horrible sound interrupted her trek, freezing her in place. A pained gasp, a sound she wishes she didn’t recognize. A sound she wishes she hadn’t heard so many times before, enough times to know what it is. It sounds like a dying animal. It’s a dying human.

Her eyes linger on the vent she was planning to use as an entrance into the museum. She thinks about all the money the diamond will give her. Funds that will go to help that family she has hoped to help out for a while now.

Another pained sound, more like a sob, comes from the alleyway on her right. She walks up to it and tries to peer in, but she can’t see anything through the dark and the fog. Even if she squints, the only thing she can make out is some lumpy form on the ground a couple of meters away. It might be a body, but she isn’t sure.

She sighs and gives the museum one last longing look as she starts walking into the alleyway. Maybe it will be some criminal that she can make a fast process with. Perhaps a civilian she can call an ambulance for and then disappear again. That is if the hospital even has any ambulances that aren’t already in use considering there is a breakout.

After all her time on the street, she’s sure to have her back against the stonewall of the apartment building at all times. She doesn’t feel like being bothered by some low-life ambushing her from behind right now.

Her foot hits something, and she steps over a bag of trash. The lump she had seen before. It’s rather concerning that her mind had initially jumped to the conclusion of it being a body instead of abandoned garbage.

Whatever had made the sound is further into the alleyway. She knows because the person is obviously trying to be quiet, and failing. They must have heard or seen her coming, could have been when she had rustled the trash by accident. Their breathing has picked up and they’re shuffling around.

What first falls upon her eyes as she walks into the dead-end of the alley is the unconscious body of some goon. The man is still breathing, but bleeding from a head wound and not giving any sign of waking up any time soon. It looks like the wound is superficial, so whoever hurt him had no intent to kill. They had only wanted to incapacitate him. Yet she does not envy the killer headache he in no doubt will be sporting once he wakes up. For good measure, she slips out a pair of spare handcuffs from her bag and secures them on him.

She lets her eyes travel to the corner, where the apartment-building meets the brick wall ending the alley. There is someone there, sitting, no, leaning, against the wall. A black arm with blue finger-stripes laid protective over their stomach.

It’s one of the bat-brats. None other than Nightwing, the first one of Batman’s proteges.

He is making some awful gurgling sound. When she moves closer she can see that there is blood dripping from his mouth and chin down onto his chest. It’s slicked onto the arm he is holding over his abdomen too. He’s practically sitting in a puddle of it.

She could leave him, considers it for a second - he isn’t her responsibility. The bat himself, or any of his annoying sidekicks, are most likely already on their way. She could leave, and finish her job in time to pop by some fast food shack for a late dinner.

As she steps closer, just to look, she tells herself, she steps on something. It crunches under her foot. She curses herself and her own lack of awareness. She is supposed to know better. The sight of the usually smiling Nightwing so beaten and broken has rattled her more than it should.

When she crouches down, she sees that what she’s stepped on is some kind of electronic device. With closer inspection, she can see it’s a com-unit. She has seen Bruce use it to call off his kids often enough, those times when they have met on rooftops without really planning too. She has even seen him throw his own off in a haste the few times they have made it to his bed. This one, in contrast to Batman’s black one, carries a blue earpiece. It was probably already broken before she stepped on it. There is certainly no saving it now.

Crap. There goes her diamond heist. She can’t leave the kid here not knowing if he has called for back-up or not. If there is one thing she can not be responsible for, it’s Nightwing dying. That is one of those things the bat would never forgive.

A painful sounding cough brings her attention from the com-unit back to the former Boy Wonder. He is trying to cover his mouth with the hand not cradled over his stomach, but blood is still bubbling through his fingers. Internal bleeding. He’s in the eleventh hour. She has no idea how long he’s been there, judging by the amount of blood he’s lost - too long.

He is slumping over, about to fall down onto the unforgiving ground. Without thinking, acting on instinct, she is moving, running. She catches his shoulder before it hits the pavement, and lowers him down.

At first, he’s resisting, he may be fearing that she is someone who’s come to hurt him. A bat in peril, no matter which one, is something many criminals dreams of stumbling upon. His attempts to escape from her grip is shaky and feeble. He wouldn’t have stood a chance against the weakest of low-life criminals.

“It’s just me,” she hears herself saying as she pushes her goggles off to rest on the top of her head. She hopes the younger man will calm down once he can see her face.

Half of Nightwings domino mask is missing, and a blue eye blinks open to look at her. He furrows his brows in confusion.

“Selina?” he stutters, and she uses her sleeve to dry some blood off of his chin. Her boots are already a lost cause. They got seeped with blood the moment she stepped in to save the boy - which he still is, just a boy - from crumpling to the ground.

“D-did Bruce-” his words are interrupted by yet another harsh cough. He spits more blood, it lands both on himself and the pavement.

“Did Bruce send you?” he asks again, once his breath has calmed down enough from the coughing fit. There’s a glimmer of hope in his eyes. She knows it is a hope that Batman knows what has happened. A hope that his dad is coming. Perhaps a newfound hope that he will survive this.

She smiles sadly at him and shakes her head. If Dick is as bad off as he looks, the skin not covered by blood stark white, and Bruce knew, he would have already been there.

“I was in the neighborhood, tending to other business,” she settles on replying. If the situation was any different, if Richard wasn’t half-conscious and bleeding out, he would be prodding her about said “business.” The boy has always been too curious for his own good.

When he was younger and still Robin, he had been a teen filled with crude remarks. He would always question her. She had thought his look on the criminal world naïve, he saw it like everything was black and white. Why the bat never had corrected it, she hadn’t understood.

Back then, Dick had not understood the relationship between his mentor and herself. Most likely because she was a known criminal. It could be he still didn’t understand now, but how he looked at her had still changed. There was no venom in his eyes anymore whenever they would stumble upon each other. That’s including that time they’ve never spoken about when Selina had come stumbling out of Bruce’s room at around 4 am. At the same time, a drunk and underage Dick had stumbled up the stairs to his room. They had looked at each other, nodded, and then gone their separate ways.

Besides, that was before the Bat had all the other little bratlings. Before Dick had stepped up as his own hero and as a big brother to the newer bats. It was before a lot of pain had come to the bats’ makeshift family. Before Richard’s eyes had been forced open to reality despite Bruce’s attempts to shield him from it.

Now, Dick’s eyes are slipping shut. His blinking is slowing as if it takes too much energy to keep his eyes open.

“No falling asleep,” she says as she shakes him by the shoulder. She feels bad when he winces, but his one visible eye opens once again, looking a bit clearer than before. She knows she needs to keep him talking, at least until the bat shows up. If he does.

She doesn’t wanna think about what will happen if Batman shows up too late and finds her leaning over his dead son. She can’t think about him not showing up at all. She doesn’t want to live in a world where Nightwing is dead, again, either. Both for the world’s sake and for Bruce’s.

“Can you list your injuries?” she asks instead of voicing her fears and to grab Dick’s attention again.

“Hmmm..” Dick starts, and it looks like he is struggling to find words.

“Concussion,” he says, after half a minute, and Selina can’t help but snort. It earns her a small bloody grin from the teen, and she counts it as a win.

“I messed up my leg, it hurt like a bitch at first, the pain has dulled now though,” he continues. It’s the longest sentence he has said since she found him. She looks at his legs and oh - yeah. She had missed it in the worry of oh god he is coughing up blood but his right leg does not look good at all. It’s wrangled in a way she didn’t think a foot could ever be. It will be a long time before Nightwing is up and walking again, if ever. She doesn’t tell him that.

“Anything more?” she asks switching topic, knowing he has missed something quite vital.

“There is also a bit of a stab-wound in my abdomen. Maybe some internal bleeding,” he says, pretending it’s no biggie. The waver in his voice tells Selina otherwise. The boy is worried too. “That doesn’t hurt too much either anymore” he continues. Now he doesn’t even bother to hide the shakiness in his words.

“I guess that’s not a good thing,” he looks up at her as he says it and she is surprised by how coherent he looks. Their eyes meet. God, there are visible tears in the eye not covered by the domino. Selina is not prepared to deal with that.

She opts not to say anything, again, she doesn’t know which words to use. So instead she tries to pry his arm away from the stab-wound. She needs to take a look at it, and then apply more pressure. Dick’s arm is weak, and there is barely any resistance as she lifts it up off the wound.

It ‘s.. not pretty. Far from. It looks deep, no surprise considering how the kid has been coughing up blood. Luckily there doesn’t seem to be anything left of whatever inflicted the wounds still in there. It hasn’t stopped bleeding, though it’s not going as heavy as it looks to have been earlier. She has no idea if that is good or bad. Good right? The blood is staying inside? Or does it mean there is too little blood left? The uniform around the wound is torn. Unnatural pale skin is shining up at her from where the blood has yet to get to. Usually, Dick is one of the tannest in his family with his darker skin and all.

She drags her leather jacket off her shoulder and puts it over the stab-wound. She’s going to miss it, it was a personal favorite. She’ll make the boy wonder buy her a new one if he survives this. When. When he survives this. Dick gasps at the sudden pressure, both arms clawing at her to stop her, but they are still too weak. Selina thinks to herself that it’s good the boy still feels the pain because then there is still hope.

“Can you manage to hold it there, while I take a look at your leg?” she asks and doesn’t wait for an answer before putting both of Richard’s hands over the jacket again.

“Apply pressure,” she commands when his hands just fall limp over it. She sees the muscle tighten in Dick’s arms, and she figures that is as good as she is going to get.

She takes one look at the leg and knows she can’t do anything with it. It’s twisted in an off-putting way. If she were to rip off the tight costume covering Dick’s leg, which by some miracle is still intact, she knows she would be looking at bone. The suit is probably the only thing keeping the bleeding in. It should be set straight and held secure, but she can’t do any of that here. Not alone. Especially not when Dick is barely awake and coherent as it is. The risk of sending him into shock, or him bleeding out even faster, is too big.

The risk of Dick getting any lasting nerve damage is one she is willing to take, as long as he survives. She hopes the boy will agree, as daring flips off of rooftops and acrobatic moves fills her thoughts, and moves away from the leg.

“It is bad, isn’t it?” Dick asks when she settles beside his upper-body again. She puts her hand back on the jacket covering the wound and leans over to apply more pressure. He grits his teeth when she puts her weight on it. She only nods, not one for sugar-coating anything.

Silence, or as much silence as Dick is capable of with his rattling breath and badly concealed whines, falls over them. She is thinking of something to say, to keep Dick’s attention on her. Dick is shaking. The temperature has been falling steadily for the whole night, and it doesn’t seem to be stopping. Even her, with her suit fully intact, is starting to feel the chill. Could it be that some ice villain had broken out of Arkham too? It wouldn’t surprise her.

“Do you have a way to contact Batman? Or anyone else?” she asks. She refuses to believe that the com is the only way of contact Bruce has given his little sidekicks. Maybe she should have asked about it when she first arrived at the scene, maybe Bruce would already be here then. It is too late to think about that now.

“Emergency beacon,” Dick rasps. “In my belt, it should have gone off automatically when my vitals dropped. My hands..” he once again has to stop to cough and his concentration is slipping. “My hands… too much blood, too slippery,” his sentences aren’t really sentences anymore. They are more like mumbled words, each one sounding more painful to say then the next. It’s so wrong. Dick is usually always talking, he’s known as the chatty one of his family. He always seems to be teasing his siblings or taunting whichever villain he is facing. Dick is one of the few people she has ever seen without a glimmer of fear tease Batman.

She looks at his utility belt, there is blood where Dick most likely had tried to find the emergency button. If it had gone off or he managed to push it, someone must be on their way. Then there’s someone who knows that Dick needs medical attention, stat. Someone who will relieve her of this awful duty she has stumbled upon.

There is a faint blue light coming from under a shield in the belt. She sees it when she tips her head slightly sideways, parallel to Dick’s upper body. The light is only visible when looking downwards towards the feet of the wearer.

“Is it the one glowing? A blue color?” she asks. Dick says something, she can’t decipher it.

“If it’s..” he starts, “it’s blue?” he asks instead. His brows are once again furrowed.

She nods, “yes.”

“Shit,” he whispers. He leans his head back, and he looks up at the sky which still is nothing but fog.

“It’s.. not..,” he mumbles, his eye is closed and the single lens of his domino that’s left has become a thin slit.

She taps his face, rather hard. His eye blinks open again, although they look too hazy.

“Huh?” he asks.

“The emergency beacon, it’s blue. Does that mean it hasn’t gone off?” she asks, dread filling her stomach. Dick doesn’t have much time.

“Emergency?” is Dick’s answer, he looks confused, resembling more the young boy she once knew and not the man he has become.

“Blue means safe,” he then says, confusion still evident on his face. He looks like he is barely awake, his skin is cool to the touch when she taps his face again when he looks to be drifting off.

“Your emergency beacon, we need to turn it on, now,” she tells him when he looks up at her. She gives him as much of a stern look that she can muster. He needs to hold on long enough to tell her how to activate it. Then she has at least done everything she can to save the boy.

“Dad will be here,” Dick says, his one visible eye half open. He doesn’t seem to completely be with her anymore, and she doesn’t know what to answer his little statement with.

She regrets not taking Bruce up on that emergency com-unit he had offered her a few months back. She had been too afraid to say yes, even after all these years. Coms are too easy to trace. Too big of a commitment.

“Dick, your emergency beacon, how do I activate it?” she tries to keep her words clear, hoping they are filtering through Nightwings ears. One thing at a time, she tells herself.

“‘’s jus’ a button,” Dick mumbles, head lolling a little to the side. She grabs both sides of his face and forces him to look up at her.

“Which button?” she asks, but there is no response. Dick blinks up at her, but it looks like he isn’t actually seeing her.

“NIGHTWING!” she yells and shakes him a little, not even sorry for jostling him and the pain it causes. His eye focuses on her again, he blinks.

“Where is the emergency button?” she asks, not losing eye contact.

“Beside the l’ght, just - small,” he whispers, a drop of blood escapes the corner of his mouth and makes its way down his chin. She regrets it, but she has to let go of Dick’s face. Has to let their eye-contact go.

She looks at the utility belt. With the help of the claws on her gloves, she manages to pry the protective shield covering the blue light off. She pushes her goggles down again, and they help her get a closer look. There is, in fact, a small button placed half a centimeter from the little light. She pushes it in, hard.

For one too long second, her heart is in her throat.

The light switches to a glowing red.

“Hey, it’s red now, that means it’s activated, right?” she asks, still examining the little beacon. It’s a steady red, not blinking, just like the blue light had been earlier. There is no sound emitting from it. Then again, on the battlefield, anything playing sound might attract unwanted attention.

She looks up at Dick’s face again when there is no response. His head is to the side, mouth slightly open, and his eye is closed. His arm is completely limp now, laid over the leather jackets weak attempt to stop the bleeding from his gut.

Dread is filling her stomach. It starts at the bottom of it and fills up her lungs and throat and makes it hard to breathe. For a few seconds, it feels like too long, she is frozen. She wishes she had turned earlier, gone the other way, followed her original plan. Then she wouldn’t be sitting here. There wouldn’t be a bleeding and limp Nightwing by her side. Her maybe boyfriend’s oldest son would not be dying in front of her.

She puts two fingers on his neck, between the gap of the high-necked Nightwing suit and his chin. There is a pulse, but even her whose only medical knowledge comes from the street can feel that it is too damn slow. When she stares at his chest she can see that he is still breathing. His chest is still moving up and down, if only ever so slowly. It is too shallow, the movement too small.

She doesn’t know what to do now. This isn’t the first scene like this she has seen. People have died in front of her before. She has seen people laid dead and forgotten on an unforgiving ground too many times before.

But this is a kid she watched grow up. A once ten-year-old who she teased for his choice of uniform. A twelve-year-old she ate ice cream with, while they waited for Batman to show up. A teenager barely turned sixteen who she taught about sexual harassment when Bruce was lacking the emotional understanding to do it himself.

She knows she shouldn’t move him, considering his injuries, his bad leg, but she can’t let him lay there either with his head resting on a pillow made of dirt and asphalt. Medical reasons be damned, he is not going to die thinking he is alone.

A whine escapes his lips, even if he doesn’t wake up when she grabs his shoulders and drags him onto her lap. Both of them are damp, from both the moistness of the fog and all the blood which should’ve been inside Dick’s body. The inside of her jacket, still laid over Dick’s wound, is dark, filled with blood, and doing little purpose now. The wound itself is barely bleeding anymore. She does not want to think about what that means.

She softly hushes him when another whine escapes his lips. She uses her teeth to drag one of her black gloves off, and combs her now naked fingers through his hair, away from his face. The hair has grown stiff and matted because of all the blood and grime.

He is still breathing. His poor heart is still beating, desperately trying to pump blood through his system. The skin of his hand feels too cold when she touches it.

His breath hitches. His face falls. It goes slack. The furrowed brows ease.

Her heart feels like it is going to burst out of her chest. She holds her breath.

He takes a shuddering breath, and so does Selina.

Now he is completely limp in her arms, more so than before. He isn’t tightening his muscles in pain. His body feels more like jello than muscle and bone. When she looks at his face, the pained grimace is gone.

He is slipping.

She looks at the red light on his belt, which is still attached around his body. She wants to take it off, it’s digging into her hip. It can’t be comfortable for Nightwing either to be laying on it. But she knows the bats. They have their traps, especially on their weapons. She is not up for an electric shock, even if she could probably manage to dismantle it if she had the time. She has seen Bruce do it often enough.

She wonders why the damn emergency beacon hadn’t gone off in the first place. Nightwing’s vitals must have been far from good before she even arrived. They have only deteriorated since. She cradles him a little closer as a gust of wind follows the alleyway and sends chills down her spine.

When she lets her head dip back, and stares up at the sky, she can see that the fog is finally lifting. The night sky is almost peeking through.

She hopes she will see the blur of a cape up on the rooftop.

There is nothing of the sort.

She uses the glove she took off to wipe the blood off of Dick’s face. Half of the domino mask is still on. With gentle movements, she manages to peel it off. There’s no point in him wearing half a mask anyway, anyone who knew Dick would recognize him with only one eye covered. The area where the mask once sat is red and irritated. Some blood has seeped in under it while it was on, and now it’s dry and crusted. She wipes that away too.

She looks down at the young man’s face. He is still handsome, even when pale and supporting a busted lip and a darkening bruise on his left chin. He would have made a great cat if he wasn’t already a bat and Selina liked to have sidekicks. His jaw is sharp, and his body lithe and smooth while still muscular and strong. She thinks his Nightwing uniform resembles Catwoman’s more than Batman’s. The play on his body he uses is much like her own, she has thought about it many times before. It had been one of the reasons she had agreed to sit down and have that talk with him, all those years ago. Plus, watching Bruce squirm had just been too amusing

She and Richard could have been a good team if faith was different. She could have molded him quite nicely.

He is so young. She wonders how Bruce, who she knows sees all the little bats as his children, can let them do this. How can he let them run around, risk their own life, on a daily basis? How many will have to die before he puts an end to it?

Then again, none of the bats ever seems to stay dead.

If she is too loose Nightwing tonight, she hopes he isn’t the exception to the rule. Or do they all only get one resurrection? She doesn’t know the laws of death, who works in more mysterious ways than Batman himself.

Dick is deathly still in her arms. She would be sure he was dead if she didn’t have two fingers on his pulse. It is a miracle that he is even alive, considering the blood-loss he has suffered. But then again, Bruce has always complained about how stubborn his eldest is.

She hopes he gets the chance to complain about it again.

The roar of a powerful motor a couple of blocks away makes Selina tighten her grip on Dick. She tries to scoot them both backward further into the shadows, to safety. The man from before is thankfully still unconscious on the floor. She does not want to deal with some enraged criminal while Nightwing is still dying on the ground.

Dick was lucky before, when the only one all his not so subtle noise attracted was her. They might not be so lucky if someone else were to stumble upon them now.

A heavyset of boots falls from, seemingly, the sky. When she looks up from the alleyway floor, it’s into the glass visors of the Red Hood. Before saying anything to her, he is turning the man she found in her entrance to the alleyway over. He kicks him slightly as if to make sure he is out.

“Better to be on the safe side, right?” the Red Hood’s metallic voice says while turning to look at her again.

She knows that the Red Hood is supposed to be on the good side now and that it’s Jason Todd under there. She knew him, at least kind of, back when he was Robin. It was before he died and became.. whatever this in front of her is. Still, she is unsure. She has never been one to throw trust around. He must sense her hesitation because the next thing he does is reach back, behind his head, and with a swift click take off his helmet.

“I got the emergency alert,” he says when she makes no move to speak first. He isn’t looking at her face anymore though, or at her at all, but at the man still lying limp in her lap. His brother.

He steps forward and crouches down in front of them.

She lets her grip slacken a little, to let Jason get a good look off his dying brother.

“They got him good, huh?” he whispers.

“He’s lost blood, a lot of it, and his leg-” Selina says. Jason’s eyes move from the drenched leather jacket to Dick’s broken foot. “- his leg’s ruined, plus he’s got a concussion,” she continues.

“His breathing hasn’t been right since I got here. Jason,-” The Red Hood flinches when she uses his real name, and she files it away for a later time.

“He’s going to die,” she says.

Jason shakes his head, “Bruce is on the way, he won’t let him die,” he argues. Funny, because she is pretty sure Bruce was too late to save Jason. Then again, Dick had only a few minutes ago said something along those lines himself. He must have known he was on his deathbed as he proclaimed his belief in the bat.

Yet a glimmer of hope fills Selina, even if she doesn’t want it too. Bruce, Batman, is on his way. He is going to save Nightwing, do what Selina couldn’t. She won’t have to bear this much longer.

With help from Jason, they lay Dick down between them. Some irrational part of her wants to keep on holding him, just in case Dick slips away. But Jason wants to look over Dick himself, wants to be sure of what he’s dealing with, and Selina cannot deny him that. Instead, she settles on holding one of Dick’s white, almost blueish, hands tight in her own.

-

Dick’s heart stops beating one minute and thirty seconds before Bruce arrives.

When Batman runs into the dirty alley, the sky is clear above him and the moon is providing him with a pale shimmery light. The first thing he sees is Jason. And then - Jason, desperately trying to revive his older brother. Dick.

There is no sight of Selina, who had left the moment Richard’s heart stopped. Bruce didn’t even know she was there until Jason told him later.

-

Four weeks later, and Selina has heard nothing. She’s unsure if that’s good or bad. There hasn’t been anything in the underworlds rumor mill either. No one has seen or heard from Nightwing. She can’t say she’s surprised. There have only been wild guesses about the vigilante’s sudden disappearance. Nothing real or from a believable source.

The bat-sightings have been scarcer than normal too. She knows they’ve been doing their usual patrols though, minus Nightwing. She’s seen them. Every time she’s spotted them, she hasn’t been able to muster up the courage to confront them.

There hasn’t been anything on Dick Grayson either, besides a small notice of him traveling abroad. She hasn’t seen anything on the rest of the family either, besides the usual gossip tales of romance and heartbreak. If only real life was that easy.

Now she’s standing up on a rooftop, their rooftop. It is still a couple of hours until the sun will start to make its way up.

It is an olive branch if there ever was one. She is in his territory.

She hears Bruce before she sees him, the ruffle of his cape, the sound of his boots as he walks over the rooftop. He isn’t trying to hide, he wants her to know he’s there. She wonders if he’s trying not to spook her? It’s funny, as she is the one who initiated contact.

Selina doesn’t turn to look at him as he walks towards her. He comes up and stands by her side without a word.

They stay like that, looking over Gotham, for a couple of minutes. The moon is shining just like how it did when the fog lifted that night.

“You left,” Bruce says, finally breaking the silence.

Selina finds the power to look up at him. He has the cowl on, but even with his face half hidden, she can see that he looks tired. His uniform looks a little worse for wear like it hasn’t been on his mind, or anyone else’s, to patch up the small rifts in it.

“There was nothing more for me to do,” she answers because it is the truth. She could not bear to sit there and do nothing, and only look on as Jason Todd tried to revive his only older brother.

Her stomach hurts with a pain that doesn’t come from anything she’s eaten. It fills all of her. She wants to ask, to know. The teen has been on her mind too much the last few weeks. She has to ask now, or she will never have the courage again.

“The boy?” she is suddenly all too aware of how quiet it is. How it is as if even Gotham is holding her breath, waiting for Batman to reply.

Bruce shakes his head.

Selina feels sick as she tries to force the tears away from her eyes. Some part inside of her knew that it must have gone like this. Still, she had held onto a sliver of hope. The hope Jason Todd had given her, hope in the caped crusader, in that he would arrive on time. She grips the railing off the roof, her hands hidden under her new pair of gloves. Her last ones had been drenched by blood beyond saving. Just like Richard.

She almost wishes she hadn’t ever asked. It would be better living in uncertainty until the news broke for the rest of the world, rather than being told by Bruce himself like this. By Bruce, and his broken voice.

“Only the family knows,” Bruce says. It is obvious he is working very hard to keep his voice unemotional and detached.

“Did he say any-, what was, I -,” it’s painful to hear Batman stumble over his words.

Selina wishes she had something meaningful to say to him. That Dick had proclaimed his love for his family or found the words to make his death easier on everyone - but he hadn’t. His death, like most deaths in their line of work, was filled with pain. His last moments awake had only been filled with desperation to survive.

“I.., he just.. said where the button for the emergency beacon was,” she says. She’s surprised when she manages to keep her voice steady.

Even if she knew Dick when he was Robin in his childhood and early teen years, she had little to do with him once he grew up into a man. Still here she is, crying over his death.

“He.. he did ask if you sent me, to get him, when I arrived,” she adds as an afterthought, unsure if she should say it or not. She doesn’t know if it will do more bad than good.

“The vital-reader, in his suit, it malfunctioned. It.. broke, while he was fighting, judging by the timestamp it stopped transmitting,” Bruce’s voice is filled with bitterness. “I didn’t even know how bad it was before I got there, and all that time he just… laid there,” his voice comes close to cracking. It hurts to hear this. It hurts to hear Batman unravel.

She thinks about telling Bruce that his son wasn’t alone. She wonders if she should tell him that she held his son in his last moments. That even if his family wasn’t there he at least must have known that someone was there. Someone held his hand as his heart stopped.

Maybe she should tell Batman that his son had faith that he would arrive on time. That he held on to the belief, even as his life was slowly ebbing out in time with the blood pouring out of his gut. That Dick had still, at a point where he must have known he was going to die, believed his dad would come for him.

She can’t bring herself to get the words out. It hurts too much, and she doesn’t know if it will help Bruce anyway. Bruce has a way of turning everything that happens into something that was his fault, his mistake. It would be too easy for him if Selina were to tell him some of Dick’s last words now. She doesn’t know how to say it in a way he will understand.

It seems to be a theme with the two of them, never finding the right words.

When it becomes clear to Bruce she has nothing more to say, that she has no more comments on how much Dick suffered in his final moments, the man leaves. He jumps over the ledge, grapnel gun in hand, and once again disappears into the night.

A dark cloud covers the moon as Selina makes her way down from the rooftop. Her new boots make almost no sound as she moves down the stairs. As she slips into the shadows again, it feels like Gotham is suffocating from holding her breath waiting for the first Robin to come back.

-

ALso@liathgray explained the title like this; “cats cradle has been associated with innocence vs corruption and situations that become increasingly complicated” and i just found that very very perfect and fitting

again, theres an alternate ending available on tumblr here 

[writingbyella-portfolio]

Human

The last two people in the world weren’t me and you. Our love didn’t make us unstoppable or immortal. We didn’t transcend time because we fell in love. No, we withered, died, died again and were buried apart. Mum and dad weren’t the last two people in the world either. They withered and died just like we did, just like the children we did not get to have would have withered and died, also.

The last two people in the world were named Sarah and Oscar. They weren’t, technically speaking, people any more. Clones. Two scientists, grown in a tube and cloned, over and over again. Outliving the masses, with one surviving purpose: solve the population crisis. And now, as they stood together, they suddenly realised they were the last two humans ‘alive’.

Sarah and Oscar were about to press a big green button. Many years ago, back when iPhones still existed, they’d decided against the colour red. Too cliche. Too dramatic. Green was a better fit. Sarah had pitched it to marketing as the ‘Go Green’ button. They liked it, so it stuck, and project Go Green was born.

In the early days people were reluctant, particularly the elderly. The generation of ‘baby boomers’, they were called. The last surviving generation that could remember a time before the age of technology. They were bitter; project Go Green represented everything their childhoods escaped. They were the first to be given the option to upgrade, too; they were the eldest, so they needed to be preserved before they withered. Though they were reluctant, when they realised there was no other option, they agreed. And the few that didn’t chose to die in old fashioned ways: old age, cancer, suicide.

It had taken nearly 400 years to collect all the data - it was delayed more by the feral humans that kept reproducing, despite of the ban. More babies mean’t more conversions and more memory needed. But now, 400 years later, the last two people in the world stood in front of this big green button, ready to change what it meant to be human.

“Are you almost ready?” Oscar said.

“Yes.” Sarah replied, stepping forward, closer to the button.

Oscar began flicking switches on the other consoles. He thought about Sarah, and what they were about to do. She was a strong woman, unemotional - though so was he. They’d been assigned emotional inhibitors; some of the first humans to have them - the bosses didn’t want emotions to affect their work. And after Alice Smith published a book on the hindrance of emotions, the rest of the world followed suit.

Yet now, in the summit of their project, Oscar thinks he’d have admired Sarah, in another world. One not ran by technology. Subconsciously, he touches the inhibitor hanging around his neck. A golden chain, with a small piece of technology running through it, pulsing out some kind of ‘anti-pheramone’, counteracting heightened states of human emotion. That’s what it said on the packaging and adverts, anyway.

Oscar finished switching on the computers and double checking the internal battery loops for each. Once satisfied, he returned to Sarah’s side.

Ready to press the big green button, and upload all humans to the internet. Forever.

He’s about to begin the countdown, but Sarah speaks.

“You know, our inhibitors don’t actually work. They never have. I did some research a few generations back, all this ‘anti-pheramone’ stuff sounded like bullshit. I was right, they don’t do anything. It’s just a chain, anchored with a successful psycho-manipulative marketing campaign. The ultimate placebo.”

She tugged at her chain and it snapped and fell to the ground. “Funny thing is, even then, when it snapped, I still felt like something was releasing me - like I was allowed to feel emotions again. Their psycho bullshit works even when I know it’s bullshit. And now we’re about to upload every human that converted their soul to technology, onto the internet. Humanity stops existing after us. This is the last conversation of humanity,” she scoffed, “got anything wise to say?”

He smiled at her, for the first time fully appreciating the sea of green in her eyes.

“Wow, that’s a lot of pressure.” He laughed, but it didn’t sound mechanic, like usual. It was tinged with something alien, until Oscar realised it wasn’t alien, it was human. Raw human emotion.

He began to cry.

Big fat droplets crashed onto his cheeks. His whole body shook, overcome with all the feelings he’d bottled up for far too many years.

Sarah instinctively reached out to touch him, placing her hand on his back.

This was the first time two humans had made physical contact in 70 years. It felt - well - everything. Oscar had this warmth on his back, a small warm hand. It made him feel safe and comforted, and that made him want to cry even more. But a different kind of crying, like all bubbly and laughing crying.

Sarah felt the bumps of Oscar’s spine and shoulder blades as she comforted him. She could feel the warmth of his breath; less so each time the sobs subdued a little more. She moved closer, this time enveloping him in an old fashioned human tradition: a hug. He instinctively copied, though nobody had hugged for hundreds of years, their bodies remembered the long forgotten reflex.

They stayed like this for quite some time. Enmeshed together, in the silver forest of technology. They just stood, holding each other, feeling everything; wondering how they ever lived without feeling anything at all.

And then something happened, like in the old films from Netflix. They both looked up at each other, their faces in such close proximity that their lips brushed each other. Then, suddenly, they were kissing. Wildly.

Oscar was on fire all over his body. His brain felt like the beginning of a supernova. All these things were exploding inside of him that he didn’t even know existed.

Sarah was shaking like a leaf. She had known for a while now, she’d known since she figured out the inhibitors were bullshit. Oscar had always been here. It was always going to be him.

They stopped as suddenly as they’d started, breathless and glittering.

“Is this what it used to be like, in the old days?” Oscar asked, wide-eyed.

“I guess so.” Sarah murmured back.

“It’s.. It’s wonderful. Why did they want to give this up?”

“I.. don’t know… I don’t know.”

They both turned to look in the direction of big green button. Only this time they weren’t looking at the big green button. They were looking at the small red button, next to it. The button engraved with “ESC”. The abort button.

They looked at each other. They looked back at the button.

“It’s our job.” Sarah said, “We were given life to do this.”

“But we were given life by people who didn’t want it themselves. They wanted us to make them into technology, so they could live forever. But they never even let themselves live in the first place.” Oscar felt a sudden wave anger.

They’d taken away 400 years of his existence and emotions, so that humanity could become one giant hard drive.

“I don’t think we should do this.” He tried not to shout.

Sarah hesitated. On one hand, she had lived with knowledge of her emotions through every life, and she could see why they didn’t want them. She could see why they wanted humanity to become 100% technology functioning. But then, she had never felt anything like this. The strange, gorgeous starlight that filled her veins. This was something worth being human for.

“If we do this,” Oscar continued, “humanity becomes nothing but binary code. Humans become numbers without feelings. They become the internet, and nothing more.” His face dropped, “It’s so hollow. I wouldn’t want that for anyone.”

Sarah pulled away from Oscar, started towards the Go Green button, hand outstretched.

“We have to.”

“Sarah! No, please! This isn’t right, this isn’t human, this is numbness and nothingness.”

She turned towards him, with an unreadable look on her face.

“This is our job.” A single lonely tear, drenched with emotion, ran down her face.

“No. This isn’t my job anymore. I don’t want this!”

“Then what do you want? There’s nothing left for us here, Oscar. That’s the point! We have to die here, tonight, after we’ve uploaded humanity. This has always been what must happen, we signed contracts. There are no humans, there’s nothing. We spent 400 years uploading everyone to this database. There’s no life left.”

“There’s you.” The words flew out of his mouth like friendly bullets. “You. That’s enough. That’s all I need.”

She tried to glare at him but failed. He stepped towards her, pulling her into his chest and holding her like she had just for him.

“We can live out a life together, you and me. Live for all the people who didn’t get to. Live like people once did. Humans aren’t machines,” he whispered, “we’re too full of love for that.”

He took one of her hands, and stretched it out towards the little red button. He put her hand on it, then placed his own hand on top of hers.

They stared at each other. The future in the palm of their hands. And then they pressed down, hard.

The deafening sound of alarms flooded the room. The nuclear factory reset.

“No!” Oscar screamed.

A countdown began. 3. Before they had time 2. react, it was 1.

The room exploded with light.

And then there was nothing but darkness.

The last two people in the world were named Sarah and Oscar. They weren’t, technically speaking, people. They were human. Raw, alive, bursting with emotions, human.

Sarah and Oscar saved the world with love. The last two humans in the world, who saved humanity from itself.

[mirajens]

Lauren

rating: t characters: jellal, seigrain, mystogan, anna, acnologia, erza genre: family, humor accompaniment to Seigrain in Lutalica

“Lauren is not a thing, mom, she’s an alligator snapping turtle and she has feelings.”

“Hey, Jellal.”

Jellal turned his head from the selection of pastries in the refrigerator and came face to face with two boys who looked just like him, sounded just like him. Everything was odd, or maybe just because they looked alike, from the devious smiles on Mystogan and Seigrain’s lips, the excited gleam in their eyes, the manic energy eking from their flesh. Jellal’s face took on a cautious, almost scared look. His brothers liked to drag him into the trouble they find; Mystogan unconsciously and Seigrain aggressively consciously.

“What? You’re not gonna make me eat all the Gummyvits again, are you?” Jellal asked. He remembered how mad mom had been, and didn’t want a repeat.

Seigrain rolled his eyes. “No. And shut up, you didn’t even get to eat five because you were too slow!”

Mystogan shook his head. “We have something to show you but you can’t tell mom.”

“Why not?”

“No, you have to promise first or we won’t show you and it’s awesome.” Seigrain insisted.

“Okay, fine. What is it?”

Mystogan lead the way up to the third floor bathroom the three of them shared. Seigrain entered first, his grin wide and scary. He stood by the bath tub and gestured grandly. Jellal was almost afraid to look. It might be a dead body like in that gore flick they watched in secret.

He was right to be afraid. Jellal didn’t know what he was looking at. The water in their tub was murky and it held an ugly creature that looked like Freddy Kreuger. Jellal shivered. Mystogan came to stand beside him and smiled upon the thing.

“What is that?” Jellal asked.

“This is Lauren.” Seigrain replied. No one offered any more information, as if that was sufficient enough. Jellal looked to Mystogan questioningly.

“Lauren is an alligator snapping turtle. I found her in the back yard near the tomatoes.”

“Alligator?” Jellal squeaked. It kind of looked like an alligator, just in the sense that it looked mean. It didn’t look like a turtle at all.

“Mmhmm. So be careful with your fingers. Lauren bites. She bit me here so I learned my lesson.” Seigrain said, brandishing his bandaged palm.

Jellal gasped. “Evil!”

“Nuh-uh!” Seigrain scowled. “Lauren is not bad, that’s just the way she was made. Animal In-sinks.”

“Instincts.” Mystogan corrected.

“Right.” Seigrain nodded. “Lauren didn’t mean to hurt me. She loves me. She doesn’t know any better and we have to love her for who she is.”

Easily convinced, Jellal nodded, mirroring his brother. He was always quick to placate. “I get it. I’m sorry, Lauren.” Jellal crouched beside the bathtub and watched Lauren swim and felt himself get enamored faster than a crash. “What do we feed her?”

“I read that we can feed her worms and bugs when she’s still this small. But she has to keep a balanced diet so I’ll have to procure more sustenance for her.” Mystogan pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. Same as the other two boys, his eyes followed Lauren swim across the bathtub as if they were hypnotized by a pendant. “Lauren is probably about seven years old, judging from her size. I’ll have to measure her more accurately and read up on it some more.”

“When do you think her birthday is?” Jellal asked.

Mystogan shrugged. “We should just make it today. Lauren deserves a birthday.”

Seigrain’s mouth fell into an awed o and his eyes shone. “Happy birthday, Lauren.”

“I’ll get her a cake!!!” Jellal shrieked as he ran downstairs, back to the refrigerator.

In the end, Jellal chose a large square of chocolate chunk brownie and Seigrain found an old birthday candle in his cabinets. They watched Mystogan demonstrate the proper way to handle Lauren as he took her out of the bathtub and set her on the floor in front of the birthday brownie. Seated around their beloved with their legs in pretzels, they sang Lauren a hushed birthday song, lest mom hear and get too curious.

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The peace did not last long in the Fernandes home. It only took Anna 4 days after Lauren’s birthday celebration to find the boys’ dirty (really dirty) little secret and call her husband in hysterics.

“There is a- a thing in the boys’ bathtub!” Anna cried into the phone.

“Lauren is not a thing, mom, she’s an alligator snapping turtle and she has feelings.” Seigrain said with his arms crossed, having missed the memo that when mom was upset, the children hung their heads and did not talk back. All the fight died in him when Anna aimed a sharp look at him.

“An alligator snapping turtle, apparently.” Anna corrected. She could hear Acnologia sigh over the line. “Are those legal here?”

“Call pest control, amor. I’ll be home in an hour and then I’ll deal with the boys.”

Anna hung up, then turned to her sons. “Dad says get rid of it. I’ll be calling animal control.”

On cue, the boys unleashed their meltdowns. Anna heard a lot of shrill NO or PLEASE and sobbing that she could tell was fake. Three pairs of arms grabbed at her, one encircled around her waist, one around her ribs from behind, one around her legs. A contingency attack of cute against the parents, tried and tested for the best results.

“PUH-LEASE, MOM,” cried Jellal on the fakest sniveling ever recorded in the history of snivels. “WE’LL TAKE CARE OF LAUREN.”

“Ohana means family!” Mystogan said, his thin arms doing a good job constricting around her ribs. “Nani didn’t take Stitch away even though Stitch was worse than Lauren.”

“Mom, PLEASE DON’T LET THE ANIMAL GUYS KILL LAUREN.”

Jellal’s head snapped back from where it was burrowed into her belly. “YOU’RE GONNA LET THEM KILL LAUREN, MOM?”

For nine year old boys, their shrieking was still considerably high pitched. Anna sighed when their panic rose, and wondered why her children were so dramatic. Acnologia said it was because they were half Latin.

“No one’s killing Lauren!” she said in an exasperated tone. “But we can’t keep her, boys. This can’t be legal. You can’t keep animals in bath tubs.” Another thought occurred to her. “Where have you been showering?” The boys’ bathroom didn’t have a shower separated from the tub and all the other bathrooms in the house were unlocked just for guests.

“Seigrain still has dry shampoo left from summer camp, and we asked Jamima for baby wipes.” Mystogan gestured to the can of powdered shampoo and large pack aloe vera wipes on their counter.

Anna felt herself die a little inside. “So you’ve been housing a snapping turtle and not showering?”

Jellal knew his mother’s angry tone when he heard it, and he almost wept for real for it. “We’re sorry, mommy! It’s not Lauren’s fault! She’s not bad, she was just made that way! She’s a good girl!”

“The best girl.” Seigrain said. “We’re sorry, mom. Mystogan has been reading up on houses for Lauren so we can shower again.”

“It’s called an outdoor habitat.” He uncoiled his limbs around his mother and stepped back. “We can save our lunch money and make it ourselves. I’m talking to someone on this forums and he’s telling me how I can make an adequate pond habitat with just a kiddie pool or a large basin.”

“We’ll be responsible!” Jellal translated.

Anna would not be swayed. “We can’t keep Lauren. She’s dangerous. I’ll wait for your father to get home so he can call animal control. No more playing with Lauren, especially touching her. If someone loses a finger, you’re all grounded.”

She wriggled out of their constraints and told them to drain the tub before she left.

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Acnologia found them just before dinner time. The bath tub was clean and Lauren was in the sink. Seigrain and Jellal flanked Mystogan as he fed Lauren worms they’d dug up from the compost. Acnologia’s heart jumped when he heard the snap of its beak and prayed fervently that all of his sons’ fingers were still intact or else all his hard work on his wife would be out the window.

“Is this Lauren?” Acnologia asked when he finally stood near enough to watch the feeding process. His pulse raced yet again when Lauren’s head moved slow in the way predators did, just before clamping down on the stick of zucchini Mystogan offered.

“We’re trying to spend all the time we have left with her.” Jellal told him. “Before you take her away and we live a life of loneliness.”

Acnologia barely resisted rolling his eyes. He placed a hand on the crown of Jellal’s head. “Ay, hijo, you are too young to be talking so morose.”

“Jellal isn’t talking morse, dad, you need a walkie talkie to do that.” Seigrain said.

Mystogan scoffed. “Morose means sad, Seig.”

“Smarty-pants.”

“How do you know Lauren is a girl?” Acnologia interrupted before the back and forth could escalate.

“What do turtle dongs look like?”

“Jellal, don’t say dong.”

“Sorry, dad, I meant penis.”

“I checked the underside of her shell. You can tell the difference by the shape of it.” Mystogan explained. He reached for another wiggling worm and dangled it in front of Lauren. Acnologia tried not to grimace.

“We’re you boys honest with your mother when you said you would be responsible?”

Seigrain, always quick to see the hard resolve of his parents crack, turned to face his father so fast he felt dizzy. “We can keep Lauren?”

Acnologia held a hand up. “We can talk over dinner about the extent your duties to Lauren. She will be your pet, not your mother’s, not the maids’, not anyone else’s. Pets are not something you acquire when you’re bored and cast away when you decide is it too much responsibility for you to handle.”

Mystogan gasped. “We would never cast Lauren away! We love her!”

Acnologia managed to keep his groan internal. “I want you to commit to taking care of Lauren. We will help you, but only when we see you taking initiative. When you stop being responsible, we will cease to help you and you’re on your own. The animal police will come for you, you know?”

Seigrain puffed out his cheeks. “Why’re you only looking at me, dad!”

Acnologia blinked. “No, I wasn’t. I was talking to all of you.”

Jellal cut in, “WE GET TO KEEP LAUREN!” His brothers’ excited yelling rebounded in the tiled room. Then, three small bodies were jumping and running around before Jellal put the tub’s drain plug back and opened the tap and Mystogan grabbed the sides of Lauren’s shell and lifted her Lion King style.

Acnologia hoped he wouldn’t regret it, but he was pretty sure he would someday. Maybe when he was in the ER with at least one child for a snapping turtle bite.

He told the boys to calm down and come to dinner, but he was ignored. Bemused, he left to join Anna downstairs, thinking that his sons were way too young to be ignoring their father in favor of a girl.

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Bliss persisted even a couple of years after Lauren’s acceptance into the Fernandes household. The habitat the boys made for her was not too shabby even though they did take a lot of the plants and rocks from the front lawn’s landscaping and dug a shallow pit for the thick basin right in the middle of the back yard. Anna helped them make an animal proof fence from chicken wire and wood and Acnologia bought them minnows to keep in an aquarium to feed her.

Anna disliked Lauren. It brought her just a bit of shame to admit it because her sons clearly loved the ugly creature, but there was just something menacing about Lauren’s face. She could tell Lauren knew she didn’t like her, too. Lauren wore a smug look on her beak when the boys flocked around her and ignored Anna.

One night, when the boys were asleep, Anna padded down to the kitchen for the moist chocolate cake she’d been saving since lunch. All three kids and her husband at some point have asked her for it but she’d been firm that it was hers and that her wrath would be uncontested if she found even a bite out of it. The cake was reserved for her downtime when everyone was in bed and she could look at her empty house and imagine that aliens had taken her family and she could eat in peace, preferably with three glasses of wine.

Anna selected Chianti from the wine fridge and made her way to the cake. Movement by the corner of the island counter made her stop in her tracks and a scream bubble up at her throat. Lauren stood just by the doors of the refrigerator, her mouth open wide to show a fleshy mouth ready for devouring whatever appendages it would get to bite off Anna.

They stood there in a bad imitation of a Mexican Standoff, Anna radiating disdain and fear while Lauren basked in her smugness like the evil demon that she was.

“Hey mom, did you seeꟷ There you are, Lauren.” Mystogan came into the kitchen and picked Lauren up by the shell. Lauren closed her beak and retracted her extended neck in a less threatening demeanor. “Sorry, we were watching Harry Potter in the library and I must’ve fallen asleep. I’m gonna put her out now, but you should be careful in the night, mom. You might step on Lauren or something. Good night!”

Anna couldn’t quite reply as she watched her eldest go out through the back door and sweet talk his pet as he set her down in the turtle pen. She wondered if it was too dramatic to say that Lauren was tearing her family apart.

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The time came for Lauren to be liberated when the boys were fourteen and Lauren had clearly outgrown her tight habitat. Anna was adamant that they could do no expansions in the back yard and Acnologia agreed.

“We can donate her to the butterfly farm but that’s 20 minutes from here. Or we can set her free by the creek. At least she will be nearby.” Were the options given to the boys who were devastated. Lauren walked by Mystogan’s legs.

“I’m sorry, boys, but we can’t keep her and stunt her growth. It would be cruel.” Acnologia said. “When you care for someone, you have to do what’s best for them, even if it’s not what you want.”

Mystogan blinked burning eyes. “You’re right, dad.” He turned to his brothers. “The creek? At least we’ll be able to see her from time to time.”

So they released her to the creek. None of the three identical pairs of eyes were dry as they watched Lauren make the slow trek into the rocks, then settle into soft mud. Soon, the sun went down and they could see her no more. Seigrain sniffled one last time and clapped a hand on each brother’s back. “It’s for the best.”

Jellal asked, “Do you think we’ll see her again?”

“Hopefully. But if not, we can be secure in the knowledge that Lauren is in a safe place nearby.”

They went back to the main house, not excited for the prospect of cleaning up Lauren’s old home and face old memories.

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Seigrain stewed over his dinner as he watched Jellal lean close to Erza and whisper something that made her laugh. He’s had such a bad day with his car breaking down and having to walk back home and then getting a ride back to the car to tow it to the garage. He didn’t need to see this.

He was just about to snap the classic “get a room,” when the back door burst open and Mystogan came in, panting, glasses askew, color high on his cheeks.

“Come outside. Lauren’s back.”

“Back?” Jellal echoed?

“Who is Lauren?” Erza asked, but no one answered; Seigrain and Jellal bolted for the back entrance.

She got up and followed them outside and found three heads of blue hunched over a mound of… something. Erza approached and tried to figure out what she was looking at.

“Uh…” Was all she could say.

“Holy fuck,” Seigrain whispered in awe, his voice watery.. Was he crying? Erza squinted to check.

“Oh my God, Lauren.” Jellal said in an equally choked voice. “How have you been, sweet girl? How long has it been?”

“It’s been almost two years.” Mystogan, too, sounded touched. It was probably the first time Erza has heard him speak with feeling. “Look how big you are.” He tried to lift her by the shell and grunted. “Heavy, too. Pretty girl. Look at you.”

Erza felt it was time to speak. “What is Lauren?” A mistake, probably. She looked like a turtle but… wrong.

“Lauren is the best girl ever. She was our pet but we had to set her free because she was getting big.” Love shone in Jellal’s eyes and Erza could say she’s never been the recipient of such a look.

“She’s Jellal’s first love.” Seigrain teased with a grin.

“All of ours, probably.” Mystogan said with his own smile.

“Lauren is an alligator snapping turtle.”  Jellal finally said.

“Oh, okay. I’ve never seen one before. Does she have a different diet than a normal snapping turtle?” As in, was Lauren a carnivore?

Erza was ignored. The boys had their phones out, taking all kinds of commemorative proof of Lauren, who was clearly satisfied with all the affection. At some point, Mystogan made another run inside the house and came back out with some vegetables and a long metal kebab. He put a bunch of grapes on one end and waited. The boys cheered when she snapped her beak shut and crushed the grapes.

Jellal stood up. “I’ll go find some lizards inside.”

“Wh- Lizards?” Erza squawked, still ignored as Jellal was already sprinting halfway to the house.

“It’s okay to feel the way you feel, Erza.” Seigrain said, finally putting his phone back in his pocket after sending his parents a picture of the prodigal pet and slung an arm around Erza. “It’s normal that you’ll feel inferior to the first love. If I were you, I’d preserve my dignity and break up with Jellal first before he can.”

“You’re nuts, Seigrain.” Erza huffed, shaking his hand off her shoulder.

“Nuts, sure. I can classify as ‘rebound’, too, if you like. It’s okay to find comfort in someone else in trying times like this.”

“Hilarious.” Jellal said, finally back with a can. Erza hoped there wasn’t actually a lizard in there. “You classify as ‘barking up the wrong tree’, too. I couldn’t find a lizard but I took dad’s worms.” The superworms Acnologia kept for his prized arowana.

“That’s fine. I can buy some fish tomorrow before school.” Mystogan said.

Lauren was gone come morning, but no one was too sad with the promise of another opportunity. If Lauren came home once, she’d do it again.

Lauren visited every few months, more commonly during the rainy season, much to the ecstasy of her fans. They kept earthworms nearby, just in case.

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“Mom, over here!” Seigrain called from the creek on the edge of their property near the crops Anna kept. “I’ve been here forever. Can you take a picture of me and Lauren?”

Seigrain jutted his chin towards his phone on the rocky ground, his hands full holding both ends of Lauren’s shell.

“Why aren’t you wearing a shirt?” Anna asked as she picked up the phone and took a picture, close enough that she was distracted from her son’s beautiful smile by Lauren’s beastly face.

“Girls like it. And when they see me holding Lauren, too, it looks super badass.” Seigrain answered. “Lauren gets me a lot of numbers. She’s a great wingwoman. Totally ride of die.”

Anna didn’t even pretend to understand what the modern slang meant. “Good for you. Put your shirt back on and help me with the vegetables. Lauren and I are too old to be impressed by shirtless men.”

He set Lauren down near the shallow water but not before dropping a kiss on her shell.

“Gross, Seigrain. Don’t do that.” Anna groaned.

“Lauren is always impressed by me, mom.” Seigrain watched her waddle into the muddy water before turning to his mother.

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“Are we going far, daddy?” Sofia asked. Her hand was in Seigrain’s as he led her to the creek marking the end of his parents’ land.

“No, we’re close. It’s gonna be worth it, I promise.”

During lunch, the gardener told Seigrain that he spotted a familiar visitor by the vegetable garden. Seigrain had asked Sofia if she wanted to meet an old friend of his and the little girl agreed. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face as he imagined how she would react to Lauren.

He could hear her before he saw her. The crunch of leaves by the tomatoes was reminiscent of her shell dragging over the surface. Seigrain saw her spiny back and nudged Sofia, directing her attention towards the turtle.

“Don’t come too close because she bites sometimes, okay?” Seigrain cleared his throat for show. “May I introduce Lauren?”

Sofia’s jaw dropped. “Hello, Lauren.” She couched low to be eye level. “She’s so big, daddy. The biggest turtle I’ve ever seen!”

“Did you know Lauren was my best friend? She was your uncles’ best friend, too.”

Sofia beamed. “Can I have a snappy turtle, too, daddy?”

Seigrain wilted. “Ah, not like Lauren, baby. Why don’t you just come over and visit her?” He couldn’t imagine keeping a snapping turtle in his two thousand dollar tub in his modern apartment.

Thankfully, Sofia nodded, smitten just as quickly as Seigrain had been back then.

note: @erzadragonborn and I talked about how the triplets keep a lot of weird/ugly pets and give them the most vanilla human names. Lauren was my favorite among them because my sister had a snapping turtle named Ne-yo that we released into the creek by our farm and he visits us once every few months and then goes back to the creek.