#cause how many teenagers just know exactly who they are after repressing themselves for so long??

[self-indulgentfan]

I lowkey wish huntlow wasn’t canon

Like, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s cute, but with the cancellation in mind it just… consumed Willow’s character

Cause she already had reduced screen time after season 1, and now whatever screen time she does get is focused on her romantic dynamic with Hunter and I’m just

frustrated, disappointed, wistful

at the lost potential of the character. I know her whole arc was about her coming out of her shell but I wanted more time to find out who she was afterwards ya know?

[linkspooky]

The Dragon - Megumi and Geto

Geto and Megumi are both the black wolves, the yang in their relationship with Gojo and Yuji respectively. However they are also parallels to one another. Both of them represent the black yang, both are deeply emotional people, and both are also partners and secondary to the strongest sorcerer of their generation. Geto who was the part of the strongest duo along with Gojo, and also Megumi who was the one who saved, and continues to protect Itadori even after he swallowed Sukuna’s finger. They also tend to be associated with serpents (Megumi - Oboro the snake, Geto summons a dragon). More under the cut. 

1. It’s Always the Quiet Ones

Gojo and Yuji are introduced as a teacher and student duo from the start of the manga so their connection between each other is already apparent. Geto and Megumi have never met each other, however, there are already several parallels between them. 

Megumi and Geto are characters who are more concerned with “the right thing to do” rather than saving everyone in front of them. Yuji and Geto are very self involved individuals. They’re more focused on themselves. Yuji and Gojo both have this central goal of becoming the strongest, and for different reasons. Gojo because he’s such a staunch individualist whose goal is to be the best version of himself he can be, and Yuji because he needs that strength in order to save people. 

Gojo and Yuji are people who think about themselves first and foremost. Megumi and Geto are people very concerned with everyone around them. It’s Megumi and Geto who consider the consequences of their actions and how it will affect others. (Teenage Gojo) and Yuji tend to be quite irresponsible with their power. They want to be strong, but they don’t really think about how they want to use that power to impact the world around them. Because they as people are not overly concerned with the world. Yuji only thinks about saving people immediately in front of him, and Gojo mostly thniks about himself. 

It’s that old adage about power and repsonsibility. With great power comes great responsibility. However, the duos Megumi / Yuji and Geto / Gojo are both two halves of the same person. Gojo and Yuji are both the powerhouses of that duo, however it’s Geto and Megumi who are concerned with how to use that power responsibility for others. 

There are several parallels betwen Megumi and Geto. Starting with their Curse Techniques. Megumi and Geto both use summoned entities in order to fight for them while Gojo and Yuji are powerhouses who fight their enemies head on. Megumi and Geto summon powerful creatures to do most of the fighting for them. 

They both seem to be second strongest after their respective partners. Geto is second strongest after Gojo, and Megumi is second strongest after Yuji. However, at the same time it’s implied that both of them intentionally hold themselves back. That their cursed techniques could be used for much more than they are currently capable of. 

A ten shadows loser is capable of overpowering the limitless user with a six eyes. However, it’s implied by Gojo constantly that Megumi is someone who constantly holds himself back, because unlike Gojo his number one priority is not being the strongest. 

Geto at the same time is someone who is made out to be not as strong as Satoru Gojo, but at the same time, it seems someone like Getwo is way better at using his body to his full potential than he is. At the same time Getwo also comments that Geto would have won, if he had not ordered his forces to pull back. Geto lost because he’s more concerned with other people, Geto and Megumi are both people who hold themselves back because they prioritize people over themselves. 

As awful as Geto is. As wrongheaded. As much of a murderer he is. He’s not a selfish person who can sacrifice his family for the sake of his goal. If only he were a little more selfish, if only he loved people a little less, he probably would not have been broken by the world in the same way he did. One more important parallel between the two of them is unlike Gojo and Yuji, Megumi and Geto seem to be really aware of the harshness and unfairness of the world around them and really affected by it. 

Of course, Gojo is aware the Jujutsu world is corrupt too, and he’s affected by it in his own way, but he’s never pushed to a breaking point like Geto was. Gojo simply isn’t as invested in other people as Geto is, it doesn’t make Geto or Gojo better as a person it just makes them different and their priorities different. 

Geto and Megumi’s reflections of the world mirror one another. Their reflections of the world always revolve around the sentiment that the world is fundamentally unfair, no matter how just the two of them try to be. Remember, the key word for both of them is righteousness. They are responsible people who try and obsess over doing the right thing. 

Megumi refers to Jujutsu sorcerers as merely a cog in the system getting grinded down. Which is exactly what we witness happens to Geto. It’s because the fact that Jujutsu Sorcerers are treated as nothing more than disposable cogs in this great wide system, and they’re treated this way even as children that causes Geto to break to the extent that he does, becoming a broken cog. 

Merely doing their duty as a Jujutsu Sorcerer isn’t enough for either of them. Geto begins with believing that what he’s doing he’s doing out of a sense of duty. He begins believing that he’s doing the right thing. They both come to a question of who they are supposed to save as Jujutsu Sorcerers. However, Megumi and Geto both witness a complete innocent suffering. A person that they describe as a good person, a person that they tried to protect, only to fail to protect them and watch that person. For Geto it was Riko, for Megumi it was Tsumiki.

Geto witnessed Rika die just after he promised to protect her as the strongest. Megumi only accepted Gojo’s offer to become a Jujutsu Sorcerer in the future because he thought it would help give him money to take care of Tsumiki. They both try to protect someone, and fail, and it makes their efforts seem pointless. After that point they question what their role in things even is. It left them questioning everything. 

The final parallel between Geto and Megumi is that they’re both reasonable and rational on the surface. They’re both people always seeking a reason in things. It’s Geto of all people who is the person to tell Gojo that they can’t just do whatever they want because they’re powerful, they need responsibility, reason to chain their actions to. Geto becomes Gojo’s tether. Megumi is Yuji’s tether. In a way, both Gojo and Yuji were saved by their respective partners. Geto stopped Gojo from killing so many people, and Megumi saved Yuji at the beginning of the manga allowing him to become a cursed sorcerer rather than being executed right away at the start of the manga. However, at the same time both Megumi and Yuji have these deep and dark emotions unaddresssed that they can’t hold back with reasons. 

Geto and Megumi carry lots of dark emotions and hurt feelings inside of them, and rather than trying to deal with them they tend to repress them in order to keep appearing as the rational and responsible for one. However, on the flip side of things, it means that they both have a tendency to flip. The thing about repressing these very angry, and hurt emotions is that repressing them does not make them go away. It merely causes them to pile up until the weight becomes unbearable and they break. 

Geto and Megumi handle their emotions in the same way, and all of their hurt feelings tend to come from the same place. It’s not that Megumi and Geto hate people. In fact they love people. Megumi and Geto expect people to be much better than theyare. They expect the world to be a good place. ANd, when the world turns out to be not what they expected to be they’re not just disappointed they’re mad. 

Megumi believes in good, compassionate people. He feels the world should be kinder to good people, he believes those people should be allowed a little happiness. He wants to protect people like Yuji and his sister because he sees a goodness in them he can’t see in himself. Megumi, always sees the best in the people he meets, that’s why he’s disappointed when he’s faced with the worst of them. 

The same way that Megumi belives in good people, Geto believes in his connections to his comrades and to other people. Geto goes about it the wrong way entirely, but what he wants from the bottom of his heart is just a world where jujutsu sorcerers don’t have to be killed as teenagers. He, just like Yuji, wants the world to be a better place then it is currently. It’s just Geto has taken radical action to make that chane, whereas Megumi is fighting small battles one fight at a time. 

They’re both characters whose hearts are in the right places. They both have good intentions. However, the unchecked emotions of both characters makes Geto a bomb, and Megumi a land mine waiting to explode. As good as they are, they’re full of dangerous bad feelings. They’re both living embodiments of the phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” 

Geto represents the dangerous person that Megumi could become, while at the same time his partnership with Gojo shows what Megumi can make of himself if he opens himself to others. Geto decided to leave and try to fix the world on his own. Geto decided to try to hold all that weight on his shoulders until he broke, and then he broke away from Gojo. Geto and Gojo were clearly set up as a duo. They were meant to find balance with one another. However, they just couldn’t be together. They were both too busy trying to save the world alone, they didn’t know how to be together, and didn’t know how to be kids. 

Megumi and Yuji are another strongest duo. Another second to chance to find the balance between each other that Gojo and Geto couldn’t find. Megumi is seriously off balance, and doesn’t know how to balance saving people with his sense of righteousness but that’s what Yuji is for. The two of them have the potential to break part like Gojo and Geto did, but they also have the potential to find true balance in one another. 

[dirtydancingdean]

something about how dean so completely parallels buffy summers from btvs like they are two iterations of the same character. i mean, buffy the vampire slayer is an undeniably a big influence on supernatural, even if the show itself wouldn’t exactly advertise that fact. you have sam’s sacrifice in swan song paralleling buffy’s sacrifice in the gift, the borrowing of a lot of demons and (god help me) lore, the weird amount of buffy actors in the show (sometimes playing vampires, which is hysterical), the campiness and horror. hell, even cas’s moment of pure happiness seems like a nod to angel’s moment of pure happiness. (dean and cas did it better though). but the biggest similarity is the way dean parallels buffy. he’s obviously not meant to. he’s supposed to be a gun-slinging, wise-cracking ladies man, but that’s not what he becomes. honestly that’s not even what he comes across as in the beginning. buffy and dean are both meant to be heroes, but buffy is the main character of her show, while that’s supposed to be sam in dean’s. and buffy and sam do share their similarities, particularly in their desire for normality which backfires on them because of their equally weighed desire to help people. but dean is so much more like buffy in so many ways?? like buffy, dean always feels everything is his responsibility (like he says in 7.05, “There’s always something eating at me. That’s who I am. something happens, I feel responsible, all right?”). this is largely in part thanks to j*hn winchester, while buffy’s sense of responsibility comes from the fact that a whole group of old white men have told her she’s the one girl in all the world who can fight evil. both of them kind of know on some level that this is kind of fucked up and even try attempting to fight back against their imposed duties occasionally. dean says it in 2.20: “Your happiness for all those people's lives, no contest. Right? But why? Why is it my job to save these people? Why do I have to be some kind of hero?” which is buffy to a t! that's what buffy is all about! the loneliness and unfairness of having this burden on your shoulders! buffy says this in prophecy girl: “I don't care! I don't care. Giles, I'm sixteen years old. I don't wanna die.” but they both always, always go back to do their job. they both always sacrifice their own happiness for others. none of the writers would have intended to have dean make a speech that is entirely parallel to buffy summers’s prophecy girl speech, right down to both sarah michelle gellar and jackles’s tears. because ha ha, buffy is a girl hero, while dean is the embodiment of every male fantasy about what an action hero is.

the thing is, though, when you make dean every male fantasy in the world - attractive, good with women, tough, strong, likes rock music, hates chick flick moments, knows how to shoot a gun, looks good doing it, etc - you make him every male fantasy about women too. which is how we get those slow, full-body shots of dean that you normally only get with women, how we get dean being a caretaker, dean being a pacifier between sam and john, dean watching dirty dancing and liking taylor swift, dean always being the bait, dean’s interactions with villains being framed sexually, dean getting called pretty twice a season. we joke about dean being a hot action girl but he is often objectified in the particular way only women in media are. the way buffy is - in the show i think they actually did a pretty good job of not objectifying buffy. but there are times where they do, and it’s uncomfortable, and it’s subtle, the way it is on spn. and buffy and dean are both used to this kind of treatment; they often weaponize their sexuality, using it when they feel threatened. in the first episode of s2, buffy’s just suffered the enormous trauma of being resurrected after having been bitten by a vampire whose violence has sexual undertones. when she comes back to her friends, they talk about how closed off and mean she’s being, culminating in the scene where she goes to the bronze. if you haven't seen that scene then i dont know how to explain the way she absolutely uses her sexuality against xander and angel, just like dean uses his as a front to protect himself against everyone. when buffy’s traumatized she pushes herself away from those closest to her, represses her emotions, and uses fighting demons as a distraction. sound familiar? buffy and dean both make witty pop culture references that monsters don’t understand and self-deprecating jokes about themselves to deal with when they feel threatened and their low opinions of themselves. buffy has a lot of lines that sound just like dean’s! @lazarusr1sing mentioned buffy saying, “I may be dead, but I’m still pretty, which is more than I can say for you,” as a line that dean literally could have said and it’s true! they’re both a fan of quirky banter during fights but they’re both so messed up when it comes to their opinions of themselves. buffy in 7x07: “I have all this power. I didn't ask for it. I don't deserve it. It's like... I wanted to be punished. I wanted to hurt like I thought I deserved. [...] I feel like I'm worse than anyone. Honestly, I'm beneath them. My friends, my boyfriends. I feel like I'm not worthy of their love. 'Cause even though they love me, it doesn't mean anything cause their opinions don't matter. They don't know. They haven't been through what I've been through. [...] Sometimes I feel...this is awful. I feel like I'm better than them. Superior.” yeah, that’s...dean.

and they absolutely dive into self guilt and hatred if something goes wrong, even if it’s not necessarily their fault. faith in 3x15 says to buffy, “In the balance, nobody's gonna cry over some random bystander who got caught in the crossfire,” and buffy says, “I am.” the amount of trauma buffy and dean both go through kind of desensitizes them to this idea - dean especially, i think, though that’s mainly the fault of the sheer amount of writers and episodes supernatural has - but if they get someone killed, they will do absolutely anything to make up for it.

the idea of sympathetic monsters in buffy and supernatural is met with scorn a lot of the time by buffy and dean. for buffy this is a matter of mental self-preservation. her job is to kill demons, and if she lets herself think all demons can be good, then that means she might have been killing sentient beings that could have done good or weren’t doing harm, since she was a teenager. she can’t let herself think that way so she closes herself off to the possibility of demons being good a lot of the time. we talk about how supernatural majorly drops the ball when it comes to empathizing with the monsters (where’s that post, you know, the, “saving people, hunting things, white men with guns decide which is which,” post), but when it comes to dean, part of that is because, like buffy, he doesn’t want to face the idea that he’s been killing things that aren’t evil since he was a child. he’ll make exceptions (cas, crowley, benny, rowena), like buffy makes exceptions (angel, spike, clem, oz, anya), but it’s easier if it’s all black and white. they’re both strangely attracted to monsters too, though, because part of them feels like they are monsters themselves. like @s4castiel said they have romantic or romantically implied relationships with things they’re meant to fight - dean with benny, cas, and crowley + buffy with angel, spike, and faith. and monsters change themselves for buffy and dean’s sakes – cas, benny, crowley, angel, spike, all become better for the sake of buffy and dean! like that leviathan in 7.06 who says dean doesn’t have relationships he has applications for sainthood!

they hate the idea of being seen as just a killer (dean in 3.10, “Daddy knew what you were. Good soldier and nothing else,” and buffy in 5.22, “Guess that means a Slayer really is just a killer after all.”) dean says, “[A killer] is not who I am,” to chuck in 15.19, just like buffy says, “A slayer is not a killer,” through the later seasons. spike’s speech in 5.07 i think, really says it: “Death is on your heels, baby, and sooner or later, it's gonna catch you. And part of you wants it, not only to stop the fear and uncertainty, but because you're just a little bit in love with it. Death is your art. You make it with your hands day after day, that final gasp, that look of peace.” their worst fear is that all they can do is hurt other people. they’ve been brought up to think violence is all they can do. but they both are first and foremost protectors, especially when it comes to sam and dawn, whose roles in both shows respectively is to be a reminder of dean and buffy’s humanity.

dawn, who first shows up in season 5 as buffy’s younger sister, is, represents buffy’s most beloved parts of herself, buffy’s humanity. sam is a lot like her in the respect that their destiny was to end the world; they’re both book-smart too, while buffy and dean act a lot like dumb blondes despite being incredibly intelligent in ways that aren’t clear to everyone. (not to go on a tangent but they’re both really good battle tacticians who make a lot of references to literature and tv shows and can perceive people and monsters’ weaknesses, etc.) dawn is dangerous to the world like sam is dangerous to the world in s2-s5, but buffy will not kill her like dean will not kill sam. you know how in the end 2009 dean realizes just how much 2014 dean has changed when he talks about killing sam as lucifer? sam is dean’s humanity like dawn is buffy’s humanity. they both put their siblings over everything else in the world. they sacrifice things that sam and dawn can’t begin to understand because dean and buffy shield them from it - dean in 2.22: “I had to take care of you. It’s my job,” and buffy in 6.14: “Dawn, the most important job that I have is looking out for you.” in s5 of buffy, if dawn lives, the world ends, and buffy doesn’t care because she can’t kill dawn. in 5.22 she says, “I don't understand. I don't know how to live in this world if these are the choices. If everything just gets stripped away. I don't see the point. I just wish that...I just wish my mom was here. [..] If Dawn dies, I’m done with it. I’m quitting,” paralleling dean quitting hunting after sam dies. they’re both insanely protective over dawn and sam - dean in 2.09: “You make a move on [Sam], you'll be dead before you hit the ground,” and buffy in 5.22: “I’ll kill anyone who comes near Dawn.” when sam dies in 2.22, dean doesn’t hesitate to offer up his soul in exchange for sam’s life; when dawn is about to die to save the world in 5.22, buffy doesn’t hesitate to die to save the world in dawn’s place. this all on top of the fact that sam and dawn are the babies, the ones dean and buffy have to take care of, which means that...no one is taking care of dean and buffy. like, dean in 3.10: “Sam, [John] doted on. Sam he loved,” and buffy’s mom in 5.05 hugging dawn and calling her “little punkin belly” and in response to buffy’s question of, “Did you ever have any names for me?” says, “No, I think you were always just Buffy.” when buffy’s mom gets sick in s5, buffy has to shoulder an incredible amount of responsibility - giving her mom her medicine, taking care of her, taking care of dawn, fighting a hellgod - and can’t break down in front of anyone because she has to be strong for dawn and her mom, the way dean has to be strong for sam and john (john in 2.01: “You took care of Sammy, you took care of me. You did that, and you didn't complain, not once.) they’re both so scared of opening up and being a burden - buffy’s nightmare hallucination of her deadbeat dad in 1.10 says the same kind of stuff about her being a burden and unwanted that zachariah’s projection of mary says in 5.16. it really is about the eldest sister complex in the end!!!

but they didn’t ever really mean to have dean be like buffy! buffy was literally meant to subvert traditional male action heroes. buffy summers is the male action hero, but she gets to have feelings and traditionally feminine traits too. she likes cheese and wearing pink and dressing up and having pretty hair, but she thinks about battle tactics and kills a vampire like every episode. dean? dean is meant to be the male action hero without the part about having feelings and traditionally feminine traits...except that backfires spectacularly. i mean, they give dean traits such as liking nightgowns to be like haha, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, isn’t that HILARIOUS. except it doesn’t come off that way, we know it doesn’t come off that way. so dean’s watched dead poets society and rent and he sings along to air supply and is good with kids and nerds out over cowboys, but he drives a classic muscle car and kills death and carries a gun with him everywhere he goes. dean and buffy both become multifaceted, complicated, human heroes – but it was intentional for buffy. it was unintentional for dean, so the narrative actively punishes him for it. i mean ymmv on how you feel about the ending of buffy, but she does get a satisfying happy ending. dean, on the other hand, is silenced and killed off and gets the worst possible ending for his character, all because they couldn’t control him.

[undyingsunshine]

YESSSSS YOU’RE BACK AND TAKING ASKS

14 and 15 for the most recent post, and I’m gonna come back with more too

Here we go!!!!

14. At what point in writing do you come up with a title?

Honestly, it usually differs from piece to piece! Usually, though, the title comes last! (Though I do have a short list of potential titles for Li Cu fics stored away, most of which are just lyrics from songs xD Whether I end up using them or not, only time will tell!)

15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

All of these tend to give me a bit of trouble xD if I was to rank from hardest to easiest however, I think I'd say titles are the hardest and tags tend to be the easiest. For summaries I usually just slap a portion of the fic in and then add a small almost-summary below it, mostly because I feel like giving a sample of the fic will be more effective than trying to give a succinct description? Kind of shows you what you're getting into before you've even clicked xD

Titles, I use a lot of lyrics from songs, especially ones that I think fit with the character. Though, this does sometimes mean my titles are... long and it can make it a little awkward when trying to talk about the fics themselves. xD

Examples include;

"Come with me, I promise the water is fine..." Which is a lyric from God Bless Eric Taylor by Marietta, a song that I relate to Li Cu somewhat.

This next one is the title of a chapter instead of a whole fic, but I'll count it anyway xD Chapter 2 of I'm Here is titled: "I have this dream that I'm hitting my dad with a baseball bat and he is screaming and crying for help..." which is from the song Father by The Front Bottoms.

I ideally try to make it so that the lyrics also match up with the contents of the chapter/fic. I'm Here's second chapter is all about Li Cu's nightmares, so I thought the title would be pretty fitting xD Honestly, thinking back maybe I could've added more types of dreams.... Ones that fit that title even more.... Small rewrite of that Chapter perhaps? I don't think it would be that different, but still... Would add more angst onto everything xD

The title for "Come with me..." Also sort of relates to the contents of the fic, but moreso in the following line that appears in the summary: "I need something else to comvince me I won't die."

Honestly these lines could have me ranting a whole lot, especially in relation to Li Cu. Just makes me think of all his conflicted feelings, and how he must feel when he drags his friends into the mess he didn't even make. (And these feeling really would increase after Su Wan blames him for the snake bite and getting Shen Qiong inveolved, and during just... the entirety of the time he, Yang Hao, Su Wan and Liang Wan are in the desert together. (ESPECIALLY when Yang Hao is being absolutely mistreated by the 9 families, like sheesh.)

It's just a whole lot of guilt, but also maybe some stubborn determination? Li Cu is very adamant on living just to spit in the face of everyone around him. Existing out of pure spite, but with friends involved, it's more like he's existing to fulfil a purpose? One that he feels like he's bestowed upon himself. Not Wu Xie, or Rishan, or anyone. Just him. He stays alive so he can protect his friends. He'll keep them safe, he'll get them home alive. He has to. And he knows that he will. Or else, what is he even persevering for? "I need something to convince me I won't die." In the fic, this could also be referring to Wu Xie, as he kind of marks safety by the end of the drama. Wu Xie being there means it's okay. It means he doesn't have to fight anymore. And in the fic, it also means that Li Cu can let go. Of Everything. Permanently. (I have so many branching ideas based on that 300 word demon of a fic, you wouldn't even believe)

ANYWAY I'LL STOP RANTING ABT THAT FIC MAYBE I'LL TALK ABOUT THAT FIC MORE IN DEPTH SOME OTHER TIME IF PPL WANT IT.

As for tags, I struggle mostly because I never know what's okay to tag? I'm afraid of tagging a fic with something if the content of that particular tag doesn't show up all that much in the fic? Unless it's something that's a potnential trigger, and then I'll tag it, even if it's small. Just ot be safe. But like. Characters, I don't tag unless they're actually there and present and doing something. If they're mentioned, I tend to not tag them since it's not all that crucial? For people to know they show up for a second? Idk, I like to be as succinct and precise as possible with my tags, because I know how annoying it is for tags to be clogged or for fics to have too many tags xD

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

I have a few, surprisingly! I'll choose two, both from the second chapter of I'm Here!

"Each one makes him wake up, terrified and shaky and wanting to hide or just outright stop existing; to become intangible, untouchable, safe. Of course, he can't actually do that, so instead he pushes the fear down and suffocates it before burying it in the backyard of his mind in the hopes it'll never be dug up again."

Something I try and do while writing is find ways to explain how I. Just. Experience life? (This is also present in Chapter 1 with the line "Further frustration gathered in his chest, making it tighten with stress before it shot up into his throat". Just little things that I've never really seen in words before? That I feel but never know how to accurately describe.) There's always the whole "let the void swallow me/him/her/them whole" thing in media that I love because, honestly, mood. But I guess for this I just wanted to word it differently? In the way I felt was most accurate to myself. Just to be in a state of which nothing can get you, be it life or that one imaginary demon that you sometimes think is lurking around the house at the convenient time of 3 AM, Y'know? When real life becomes TOO real and you just want to blip out for a second, just pause everything and have a moment to be free of everything xD

I also just kind of like the metaphor(?) with his fear. Trust Li Cu to not only associate feelings with violence, but also treat his feelings violently xD I feel like I'm not the best when it comes to imagery and creative expression, especially through words. I point out the obvious, the facts, a lot, both when speaking normally and in writing, and it takes a bit of time for me to remember that I'm writing a story and not jotting a list of events xD So anytime I actually come up with something more kind of creatively written, I feel particularly happy with myself.

"He can't even fully comprehend what's been going on - everything feels bizarre and just out of reach, moreso than usual - but what he does know is that Wu Xie is here and he's angry. The man stands above Li Cu, his cold calculating eyes burning him with wordless accusations that, despite their ambiguity, feel justified. There's guilt, desperation and denial crashing inside him like waves assaulting a rickety raft on a stormy sea. What these feelings are for, he doesn't know. It makes him want to plead for forgiveness all the same."

Let's be honest, Li Cu probably has way too many mixed feelings on Wu Xie. The man who simultaneously built him up and destroyed him. The man who caused him agony, but is also probably one of the best things to come into Li Cu's life??? Like damn, I think I'd be pretty conflicted if I was Li Cu. And things only get worse when, in this fic's timeline, Wu Xie essentially ghosts Li Cu out of guilt for what he did to the kid. This is taken wrong by Li Cu, and he ends up feeling abandoned. By his own kidnapper. I just feel like this snippet is pretty okay at capturing all the blame he puts onto himself, and captures some of the trauma that comes with the events of Sha Hai as well. I just kind of like how this paragraph turned out in the end. xD

6. What character do you have the most fun writing

LI CU!!! Absolutely Li Cu. I don't know exactly what it is but it just. Clicks with me? Or at least the version I write of himd does, it's probably not even close to Li Cu's canon portrayal xD Maybe it's because of the fact that I'm also an angsty, angry 19 year old that I feel as such? It's much easier to put myself in the mind of a teenage boy rather than a 40 year old man xD In terms of non DMBJ writings, I have OCs that I love writing for! Funnily enough, one is an angsty 19 year old boy with a lot of self-worth issues (ringing any bells?) and the other is an angry, confused and conflicted character that was modified to be a kind of living weapon, but had since escaped and repressed all their memories of what happened. Though, the memories eventually start to resurface and they begin to question themself a whole lot, with flashbacks haunting the corners of their mind and driving them deeper and deeper into guilt-filled despair.

In general, angsty characters with a lot of conflicted emotions are super fun to write for! To flicker around from thought to thought and dive into all the hidden feelings that a character can have. It's just super enjoyable for me xD

[takakuyaku-archive]

PART 2 of the previous  memory prompts ask. 

[ purple ] for a melancholy memory.

            THE WIND seemed to caress both of them as Takumi flew through the sky. A familiar figure tucked away in their arms as they soared through the clouds, keeping them safe until they landed on a familiar tower. Tall enough to provide a gorgeous view of the city beneath. At a glimpse this view made everyone look like ants, minuscule as the city lights were their only providers of light.

Takumi holds their partner gently in their arms. Fingers interlocking with the other’s as they were able to press their chin gently on her head. Shutting their eyes quietly they remained in mutual silence. Enjoying the view, the wind, and each other’s company. Not many words were needed between them all the time, but it was strange when they felt her turn and grabbed their shirt. Their attention suddenly on Tomie who holds up a small ring in her hands, words stumble, but not too many. She’s always been so simple, never one to say many things at once or many things at all. Shy, reserved, it’s shocking that she’s doing this, such a bold and loud move.

                                                       Will you marry me? 

             WORDS THAT Takami to this day still remembers, the same quiet whisper, the same look in her large wide eyes and the set that floats above her always. They, for once, were speechless, never having imagined in a million years to settle, but they truly couldn’t see themselves dedicating themselves to anyone else. Perhaps they can have their own happily ever after after all.

                                                               Yes. 

[ obsidian ] for a traumatic memory.

            THE DRIZZLE of rain can be heard trickling down from the sky, brushing against bruised and scratched up skin as the boy ran and ran and ran— They moved as though something were in hot pursuit of them. Fear pumping through their veins as they round a corner, talons scratching brick as they lose their grip from trying to propel themselves further. Breath heavy they scatter and flap their wings, but the pain that surged through their spin when they did is what detours them from trying again. Everything is blurry, everything is so hazy, they shouldn’t have tried what they did, but their mentor would never let them move forward. 

They would call them a failure. 

As they try to get over the wall of rubbish that blocks their path within the alleyway they can hear yelling distantly from behind. Their eyes widen and then go neutral quickly as they climb and just as they almost get over the wall something grabs their ankle and YANKS them back down. A loud CRASH echoes as they hit the concrete, head bouncing as they let out a cry of pain. They didn’t register the voices, they felt like swirling, ringing, they see eyes and men looming over them with weapons. 

             ALL THEY knew to do is react, fight for their right to survive in this dark underground they’ve placed themselves in. Feathers shootout, cutting one of their faces as they stumble forward to get away from them. More feathers are thrown, the young person throwing themselves to the side when a gun is heard. Just nicking them against their shoulder as they move out of the way. When they look back they glare and lock onto the feathers they sent out before. 

“Return” 

A hoarse whisper, but as soon as they release this word into the frigid air feathers return back to them and stab straight through their pursuer’s bodies. Causing two to collapse onto the ground suddenly. Takami wastes no time and runs again, this time dragging out their endurance, forcing their wings to move. They take off, leaving them behind and seeking sanctuary. 

A mission that could have gone sour, but at least they still have the trinket their mentor assigned to them.

[ umber ] for a repressed memory.

            THEY CAN still hear the soft snores from him. How small and delicate he was at this time, a time and memory that had simply been kept locked away. Never to resurface and stir whatever it was in their chest that ached each time they saw their child. It was a long time ago, Tomie rests comfortably in the hospital bed she was provided while Takumi held their son carefully in their arms. Looking over him carefully as they squirm slightly in their little cloth prison. They didn’t know exactly what to do with him, if too much movement were okay, if they were holding him correctly. If anything all Takumi really did was stare back at Keigo as they yawn and blink at them. 

So out of curiosity, head tilting to the side, they bring Keigo forward slightly and press their forehead to his. Eyes softening as the small child tries to grab their nose and feel for their parent’s face. Takumi doesn’t really say anything, simply shutting their eyes and allowing the newborn to quietly explore, familiarize themselves with them. . .

             THEY STILL remember, that ache in their chest that added so much pressure when this happened. A desire they didn’t understand, but knew it meant protecting this small wiggly bundle in their arms. 

                                           What an unfortunate turn of events.

[ ginger ] for a nostalgic memory.

            LOUD YELLING from a familiar fiery individual could be heard behind while the teenager present is cackling wildly. Of course they’re being chased, it wasn’t the first nor the last time Todoroki would be on hot pursuit of them for something they’ve done. But this time it may have been validated some, especially when they held his wallet in their hands, flying as fast as their wings could carry them. Quick turns are made as they try to maneuver around a crowd and buildings to get away from him, but they don’t want to quit.

They never were the type to give up so easily. Which Takumi could respect and honestly they found extremely amusing. They kick up against a wall and make a quick turn to dive back around and fly TOWARDS the boy. Grinning wildly as they brought their hand out ready to shove them back. But as flames grew closer it doesn’t seem the other was keen on stopping the sprint he was on for them. It’s when Takumi allows their bit of clumsiness to show unintentionally that they miss their mark and end up smashing foreheads with Todoroki. 

             THE TWO of them falling backwards onto the ground. Takami dropping the other’s wallet and hearing it skid. They quickly shake their head to try and scramble to get it, but Todoroki always seemed to be faster, grabbing what is theirs quickly and putting it away, only to shoot a glare and lunge at them still. Of course they’re going to get their ass kicked, but Takumi wouldn’t let them so simply. 

It doesn’t take long for the two to leave with black eyes and bruises, but even so Takumi doesn’t seem too bothered. If their panting and large grin were an indication of anything else but manic joy. 

“You’re such a fuckin’ short fuse, Jiji.  Can’t you have a little fun for once?” 

[mysticalmusicwhispers]

HELLO I'M BACK!! GUESS WHO HAS A TERM BREAK COMING IN A FEW DAYS I'M VERY HAPPY :D this ask is Very Long so i'm going to split it up into a few parts

part 1/2

But honestly, it would probably be something like “I’m going to bring a (dead) chicken to class for show and tell and you two need to act horrified and cause a ruckus because it would be fun and it would scare the other kids :)”. (this is probably bullying, so in an effort to make them slightly better kids, an alternative plot is that a stray cat has been coming to their school and in order to make friends with it, they feed it a whole-ass dead chicken Nyo China got from the butchers and was planning to cook for dinner. The teachers are horrified and confiscate Yao’s backpack for fear of germs and salmonella.)

hhhhhh the first idea is SO FUN my gremlin repressed anger eight year old self would've loved it. the idea of bringing a stinking plastic bag to school, opening it, revealing a dead, fly-infested chicken and then maybe playing a small game of lobbing the chicken around for funsies is both simultaneously horrifying and amazing. however the second idea is also amazing, one of my previous schools had stray cats and staff and students would feed and pet them (and i miss it :( ) and it was the Best feeling... or maybe they could do BOTH? but this time they're planning to bring a dead chicken to feed the cat (aw, even if yao probably gets detention. also a lecture from nyo china on what exactly you should feed a cat, including why you shouldn't steal the chicken she bought to feed it.) and the next time they can bring like. a bunch of dead flies to show their classmates but in a not bully way. i went once to this family friend's house in a part of the countryside that had an abundance of flies. (i literally haven't thought of this in years i'm remembering so many childhood things because of this omg) they had this paper covered with glue that the flies would land on and then be stuck on the paper. it was both disgusting and amazing to watch a black mass of bulbous bodies straining with their legs (which were probably thinner than my hair) to escape the paper. i also think that indchuran, being both little sadists in the making and having an abudnace of fascination like many children, would take great delight in watching an unsuspecting fly landing on the glue, watch it still, glancing around eerily similarly to when humans realise they have gotten themselves in a bad situation, and then start struggling with all their might to get out. but fuck the flies tho they landed on our food all the time there and it sucked. they can die :)

THE PROBELM is... how will they get that many flies in what i assume would be a gentrified ass area with frequent fumigation efforts given that nyo china would not accept anything than the best elementary education for her ward?? (i have a solution) maybe indus has friends in the countryside and she goes with aditya to visit them. and while they are talking aditya wanders about and discovers a few pieces of paper filled with flies. because he is a gremlin, he is Fascinated with these pieces of paper, and he takes one out to Further Examine. all the adults yell at him, but he is Fascinated and will not be stopped. and then a Thought occurs to him: who would probably enjoy this as much as he would? duh, his friends of course! good things must be Shared even if they're kind of disgusting! so what he does is he gets a disposable plastic tupperware like container, very gently places the fly paper into it, pokes a few holes for air, sprinkles some sugar because he thinks that'll keep them alive, and wraps most of it up in duct tape he found so indus can't see it. unfortunately most of the flies died on the way home because the container was stuffed into aditya's bag and the paper slid to the side + there wasn't enough air, BUT the dead flies are still a Sight to behold when he visits iran's house (which yao is /coincidentally/ visiting) to show them. then he brings it to school after the weekend, and everyone is Fascinated and thinks it is Very Cool, at least until the teachers see it and start screaming. they throw it away but indchuran get an Idea to put dead flies into the bags of people they hate (this is now just bullying) so that opens up a very few interesting weeks of attempts to collect flies in a fumigated city and Horror for the school. fun times for all!

😔 finding and reading that encyclopedia is probably one of my formative memories now and i wish it wasn't 😔 i bet yao during his teenage years would look back on it and be like "... oh my GOD." but i think he would appreciate her directness even if he didn't absorb all the information correctly or remember most of it lmao because it seems like only a very small percentage of the world has actually good sex ed and i don't think indchuran's school would be an exception. at least nyo china like you said instilled a good sense of consent with them 😔 also the idea of saying fuck in mandarin makes me break out in hives the AUDACITY of saying fuck in your first language but of course he would. he WOULD. nyo china probably wouldn't even have purposely taught him that which is why he doesn't know what it means, just that it's an insult, but once they come up to her to complain all she does is give them a Terrifying Contemptuous Glare and steer yao away from them. yao is her kid and therefore entitled to say fuck whenever he wants.

Prev

First things first I hope you had a good term break! this is... very overdue sorry about that :(

Second, ALSK:FJ:SLFDKSFDLKJSLDF the fly infested chicken is disgusting and I want so badly to intervene,,, they need hELP. Please learn about proper sanitation, children, I’m begging you T-T. Also, headcanon accepted: they’re ostensibly bringing it to feed the cats (which is hopefully allowed) but also they want to terrorize (or awe) their fellow classmates with this discovery. Watch the school call up nyo china about this, but she gets annoyed only because yao wasted human food in order to feed cats, not because he brought an inappropriately dead chicken to school that scared the younger kids and fellow classmates lol; what a great value system. Also this scenario def happened:  School: your child got in a fight. Nyo China: Oh no! Did he win?

I am both fully revolted and half fascinated by the flypaper thing because on one hand I CANNOT stand flies, and killing them is 178% gross. But also the way you described it is... very compelling and I would like to experience that, gross as it is lol. So yea I can definitely see those three nastily observing the flies getting stuck to the flypaper one by one... they all intently watch the flypaper with round and curious eyes and it really looks very cute from far away, three heads of fluffy hair close together and bent over something, carrying on an animated whispered discussion, until you get closer and see that they’re watching flies on flypaper •—•;; An even more gross scenario would be if one of them accidentally squashes one and they crowd around to see what fly guts look like 😭 bonus points if it happens during school. Also YES to Indus’s countryside friend; I feel like India would have a lot of fun exploring over there and would be able to bring back v cool stories for city slicker Yao, and also Iran (although I don’t know where they’d live precisely. I feel like they’d probably have a medium sized house with very nice art and Classy furniture (they got good taste from somewhere), but they’d also knows a lot about how rural areas work and stuff, so uh.. suburbs? Or something like that?)

“then he brings it to school after the weekend, and everyone is Fascinated and thinks it is Very Cool. . .” O—O sigh... three balls of absolute chaos. At least the other kids are fascinated this time instead of apprehensive ^-^ but the dead flies in lockers AL:KDSLFDSJF PLEASE NO me as an elementary student would have been absolutely horrified and I. really hope they get detention for that lol; Please Tone Down kids 😔 (also do y’all get flies in the lights at school? Because every single classroom I’ve been in has either had flies, wasps, moths, or some other black spots in the lights and they’d multiply as the year went on 😭 I never thought about it too much but... what if they linger around to watch the lights get cleaned? o-o)

“i bet yao during his teenage years would look back on it and be like "... oh my GOD."” YEAH there’s always a select few memories that make you realize “what even WAS that” and I think this is one lol. Yao just buries it in the back of his spacious mental closet and makes India and Iran swear not to bring it up again but inevitably they do :))))) they find it rather hilarious, actually. Also yes at least Nyo China did a good job in that department!

“also the idea of saying fuck in mandarin makes me break out in hives the AUDACITY of saying fuck in your first language but of course he would” lol I wrote that thinking he'd call someone a 王八* (because it could technically pass as a regular noun o-o. Who knows, maybe he was insulting someone for being slow like a turtle but it got out of hand due to word choice lol) but... the second scenario is quite something... I don't know whether I should laugh or cry. RIP the other parents who just have to fervently hope that disgraceful kid from next door grows out of his foul mouth soon (he never does, just gets better at pretending his language is elegant and not at all dirty XD)

*for non mandarin speakers 王八 is literally a soft shelled turtle, but is actually a pretty big insult in mandarin :)

[stillness-in-green]

Shigaraki, the League and “Redemption”

(In this post: 1700 words about how much I feel like stories/meta in which Shigaraki is rescued or redeemed miss the entire point of Shigaraki.)

It's a big open question how much of Shigaraki's backstory was engineered by All For One.  We're not even sure if AFO is the villain who killed Nana's husband, the event that kicked off the entire downward spiral of the Shimura family, much less what degree of involvement he had in Tenko's manifestation of Decay.  There's a tremendous amount of well-thought-out, interesting meta and fic about what will happen when Shigaraki finds out the truth, whether he can or should still be redeemed as he currently stands, or how Tenko might have been saved from ever becoming Shigaraki to begin with.  While I have read and enjoyed quite a lot of those theories and stories, I still find myself bothered by the prevalence of that line of thought because it ignores the fact that hero society stands condemned regardless.  

Whether or not AFO gave Tenko the Decay quirk knowing what would happen, whether he found out about Tenko the night of the accident or never lost track of Kotaro from the very beginning, in truth, none of that matters to the narrative of the League on the whole.  Nothing about Shigaraki's past has any bearing on the pasts of the other members. Trying to decide how to "save" Shigaraki avoids the fact that he is the leader of the League of Villains and their pain still stands regardless of their leader's history. 

You cannot act as though saving Shigaraki--with All Might, Inko, Izuku, Eraserhead, anyone--would redeem hero society, because Shigaraki is not hero society's only victim. He's not even its most straightforward one!  The condemnation he articulates of the world he lives in can't be addressed by him realizing he was manipulated by AFO all along or getting a good therapist in prison, because the world he lives in has failed a good many more people than just him. 

Let's break it down.  

The League Members

Twice fell through the cracks because of a lack of social support after his parents were killed in a villain attack.  He was just a teenager back then--what arrangements were made about where he was going to live?  If he was old enough that foster care/being placed in a group home wasn't a good option, did he instead have a stipend from the government?  Where was the social worker who should have been overseeing his case?  Where was his homeroom teacher when he dropped out of school?  What support should have been available when he wound up homeless on the streets?  Heroes stop villains and are rewarded both socially and monetarily for doing so, but the much more difficult and involved work of dealing with the fallout from those battles is clearly undervalued, badly so, in comparison.  Hero society, which prioritizes glamorized reaction over everyday prevention, failed Bubaigawara Jin.

Spinner had the wrong kind of face.  X-Men-style mutant discrimination left him isolated and alienated, shunned by the inhabitants of his backwater hometown because of his animal-type quirk.  To say nothing about the threat of violent hate crimes implied by the existence of a KKK analogue!  But it goes further than just the bigotry of his neighbors--Spinner's quirk was also unremarkable, meaning that, in a society that prizes flashy and offense-based quirks in its heroes, Spinner would have had few if any role models.  Given how many heroes there are, it seems strange to consider that there isn't a single straightforward heteromorph for Spinner to idolize, but given how strongly he latches onto first Stain's warped ideals and later Shigaraki's nihilistic grandeur, Spinner is clearly a young man desperate for a role model--if a hero that fit the bill existed, he wouldn't be a villain today.  So he's failed directly by his community for their bigotry and indirectly by society for the way it told him, in a thousand ways big and small, that Iguchi Shuuichi was not a person worth valuing.

Toga had the wrong kind of quirk.  It's true that, more than anyone else in the League, she feels like a character who would always have struggled with mental stability, even with the best help imaginable--but she didn't get the best help imaginable, did she?  She got parents who called her a freak, who berated a child barely into grade school about how unnatural and awful the desires she was born with were.  She was put into a quirk counselling program that apparently only caused her to feel more detached from society.  If Curious' characterization of quirk counselling is at all accurate, it seems to focus not on how to manage one's unusual or difficult quirk in healthy or productive ways, but rather on stressing what society considers "normal," on teaching its participants how to force themselves into that mold.  Hero society wants people with different needs to learn how to function like "normal" people; it is unwilling to look for ways to accommodate such people on a societal level.  Toga Himiko was failed by a society that demonized and othered her for a trait that she did not choose and innate desires that she never asked to experience.

And then, most prominently of all*, there's Dabi.  We all know where the big Dabi backstory mystery is going, and his is the most open condemnation of hero society of them all.  Dabi was raised on a heady cocktail, parental abuse mixed liberally with unquestioned acceptance of the fundamental importance of having a powerful quirk.  Whatever else can be said of Endeavor's path to redemption, the old Enji is emblematic of everything wrong with hero society: the fundamental devaluing of those without power, the fervent strain to push oneself past one's limits over and over and over again, regardless of the consequences to your health or your relationships, the practice of raising children to glorify a dangerous profession that fights the symptoms of societal ills rather than the root causes.  The ugly secrets hidden in the Todoroki house are the ugly secrets hidden within hero society's ideals, and because he embodies those ideals so thoroughly, of course Endeavor is lionized and well-paid by a society that never had to see Todoroki Touya's scars.

Mirror of Reality

All of these issues map to things in real life, and I don't only mean in a vague, universal sense--I mean they reflect on specific and observable Japanese problems. Read up on koseki family registries and consider how the dogged insistence on maintaining them impacted the Shimura family, tracked down by a monster.  Look into societal bias against orphans and imagine how it shaped peoples' reactions to teenaged Jin and his alleged 'scary face.'  Read up on how Japan approaches mental and physical disabilities, on what it regularly does to homeless camps, on what responses get trotted out when someone comes forward with a story about closeted abuse.  The League embodies these issues in indirect, sometimes fantastical ways, but they're not what I would call subtle, either; there's a reason the generally poor, disenfranchised League members are contrasted with powerful, urbane criminals like All for One, callous manipulators like Overhaul, and entrenched pillars of society like Re-Destro.  

Hero AUs are a fun thought exercise and all, but the League exists to call out and typify very real problems in heroic society and, by metaphorical extension, modern day Japanese society as well.  Hero society studiously looks away from its victims.  It doesn't want to see them and it thinks even trying to talk about them is disruptive and distasteful.  There's no indication in-universe that there's even a movement trying to change this state of affairs.  Certainly there are a great many things that could have changed to spare the BNHA world Shigaraki Tomura, but none of those quick, easy solutions would have saved Twice or Toga, Spinner or Dabi.  The League of Villains is the punishment, the overdue reckoning that their country will have to face for its myriad failures--for letting its social safety nets grow ragged, for failing to stamp out quirk-based prejudice, for allowing its heroes to operate with so little oversight.  For growing so complacent that not one person had the moral wherewithal to extend a hand to a bloodied, lost, suffering child.  

Shigaraki, Past and Future

One of the most heartbreaking and yet awe-inspiring aspects of Shigaraki's characterization in his Deika City flashback is that he was thoughtful and compassionate enough to reach out to other kids who were being excluded and teased by the rest of his peer group.  The League is foreshadowed for him even as a child, because even back then, he was a kid suffering repression and repudiation and so had empathy for others in similar straits.  Young Tenko is the person who would have reached out a hand to the scary but obviously needy Tenko wandering the streets; Tomura, despite everything All For One did to him, still retains that core of fellow-feeling that invites other outcasts to play with him.

"Saving" Shigaraki without addressing the societal flaws that created the people gathered under his banner negates the entire point he and the League exist to raise. I think readers will be forced to confront those flaws alongside Midoriya and the rest of his classmates, who the story has made a point to keep mostly isolated and on a steady PLUS ULTRA diet of all the same rhetoric that leads to consequences like the League to begin with.  I only wish more of the fandom--hero and villain fandom alike--was on the same page and writing their fic and meta accordingly.

Footnotes and Etc.

*The only characters in the League whose backstories we don't have much window on are Mr. Compress and Magne, both of whom are framed as seeing society as repressive.  Magne openly says as much to Overhaul; Mr. C intimates it to the 1-A kids during the training camp attack.  I'm inclined to hold off on commenting on them very thoroughly, though, because in neither case do we know exactly what drove them to crime in the first place. That's not a huge problem for Sako--if anyone on that team is into flamboyant villainy for the sheer joy of it, it's him--but I would definitely want to know more specifics about Magne's personal history before I correlate her experience as a trans woman with her portrayal as a violent, even lethal, criminal.  That would get right into the problematic elements of portraying all these societal outcasts as villains, people who undoubtedly have a point, but have taken to terrorism to illustrate it.  It's very possible that, for all that the League maps to real problems in Japan, we're still going to get a very mealy-mouthed, "But it's still wrong to lash out when you could protest nonviolently and work with your oppressors to seek a peaceful solution," moral from all this.

P.S.  None of the above meta even takes into account the multiple non-League characters whose stories illustrate various failings of hero society--Gentle Criminal, Hawks, Shinsou, even Midoriya himself, as those endless reams of Villain!Deku AUs are ever hasty to expound upon.  Vigilantes touches on the idea of "hero" and "villain" categorizations as being almost entirely political in their inception, as is also hinted at with historical characters like Destro.  Seriously, the mountain of problems with hero culture just looms higher with every passing arc!  

P.P.S.  I absolutely do not mean to imply with this meta that Japan suffers uniquely from any of the problems discussed above.  Other countries obviously have their own difficulties with homelessness, accessibility of care, victim blaming, and so forth.  Horikoshi is writing in and about his own culture, though, and stripping Shigaraki of his villainous circumstances in the interest of making him happier and/or more palatable strikes me as being kind of culture-blind in a way that it’s very easy for Western fans to unthinkingly slip into.  Just some food for thought.

[adrenaline-roulette]

Absolute Beginners

Chapter Three: First Positions Everybody! 

Make sure you’ve read Chapters One and Two first!

Sarah shrugged at Jareth’s question, seemingly putting an end to that conversation rather abruptly, not that Jareth minded terribly, he had other things to occupy his mind with currently, and he was sure learning any more pop culture references would distract him from the task at hand.  “That will be all Higgle, you know your place for the runner.” He commanded, and the dwarf bowed, before turning to Sarah, who had to bite her tongue from correcting the name.

“I’ll be seein’ ya ‘round. Gots-ta go ‘an distract this runna better than I did with ya.” He chuckled, causing Sarah to grin down at her stout friend. In the moments she had spent thinking back to her time in the Labyrinth, she had always felt Hoggle had done an excellent job in distracting her from her task at hand, though on the other hand, she had also been the first and only champion on the Labyrinth, so perhaps he hadn’t done as well as she once thought.  

“Good luck Hoggle! I hope this runner doesn’t get you in as much trouble either!” Sarah called after him, laughing quietly. Jareth smirked beside her, watching the dwarf toddle off and out of the throne room. “Does Hoggle always stand guard at the gate that leads to the Labyrinth?”

“Yes, that is his duty in the Labyrinth when there is a runner, however he is not supposed to help the runner as he did with you. You were, special.” Jareth offered in answer, before twisting his wrist in an elegant manner, a crystal appearing on his fingertips. “Come, take a look.” He whispered, as Sarah stepped closer, peering into the endless depths of the small crystal. A cloud of navy-blue fog swirled inside before a scene appeared. A young woman, no more that fourteen was stood in the middle of a child’s playroom, scowling at a screaming baby. The poor child looked tired, its face red and puffy from nonstop wailing. The young woman looked frustrated and at her wits end, the scene was all too familiar to Sarah, no matter how many years had passed, she would never forget that night, or her wish.

The girl tugged her fingers through her blonde curls, trying to prevent herself from screaming. “No, don’t say it…” Sarah whispered, despite knowing the girl was unable to hear her. She felt a sense of duty almost, to protect this girl from the dangers of the Labyrinth. However, something deep within her prevented her from doing so. Perhaps it was the newfound trust she had in the King? A sense of faith that truly, despite all he would throw at her, things would turn out for the best? Or perhaps, it was her bratty teenage self coming out, reminding her that if nothing else, running the Labyrinth had allowed her to become the woman she was today? Or stranger still, perhaps it was that she wanted to see this girl run the Labyrinth….

Jareth quietly chuckled beside her, shaking his head softly. It was as if he could sense the thoughts whirling through her mind…

“I will be back in a moment, take this.” He breathed, as he placed the crystal atop her palm, before disappearing from her side. The throne room became quiet, as Jareth along with his goblins made their way to the summons. Taking one final look around the throne room, Sarah made her way to the large stone steps which lead up to the throne itself. Settling down on the second step, she rested her forearm over her knee, holding the crystal within a loose grip as she stared into the scene unfolding within.

***

The blonde teen left the toy room leaving her baby sister behind, as she hoped she would cry herself to sleep. The door closed with a gentle click, and just as she turned her back to it, thunder boomed seemingly from nowhere, shaking the windows and entire house. Creaking the door open carefully, Lightning lit up the entire room, rain pelting again the window, as huge gusts of wind nearly lifted the house from its foundations.

***

Sarah was fascinated at how the goblins handled the baby, something she hadn’t witnessed when she wished away Toby. Two of the taller goblins scurried towards the crib, one leaning over and scooping up the crying babe, as the other rested three fingers against its forehead, causing the baby to instantly stop crying. The child’s eyes falling closed, as a gentle sleep washed over them, and their face fell peaceful. Sarah had always assumed the goblins possessed some amount of magic, but she had never guessed what it could be used for. It made sense that at least one goblin could soothe fussy children, otherwise she was sure it would be far more difficult to extract the child from their house unheard. The two goblins linked arms, as the one not holding the child snapped its fingers, with a pop of magic,  they vanished from the crystal, only to appear seconds later back in the throne room.

Sarah turned away from the crystal, blinking emerald eyes up at the goblins and sleeping baby. “Lady! Kingy asked if you could ‘old her.” The goblin holding the baby screeched in a nasal, high pitched voice. He looked terrified, his entire body shaking in fear of holding the small child, a feeling Sarah could relate well too, sure she had looked much the same when she had first been introduced to Toby. She thought back the Jareth’s words, these poor goblins had no idea what they were doing, Jareth had likely had little to no time to explain the game plan to them, before they had to spring into action.

“Um yeah. Of course, what’s her name?” Sarah asked quietly, as she made her way closer to the goblins. Without a thought, she twisted her wrist in the same way she had watched Jareth do on so many occasions, the crystal vanishing into thin air, leaving behind the tingle of magic on her palm. If she had been thinking, she would have realised how odd it was that the crystal had done exactly what she had wanted, but for now, was rather preoccupied, especially now that she had  a small child being thrust into her empty arms.

“The girl was calling ‘er Lillian.” The goblin shrugged, squinting his beady eyes at the spot where the crystal had been moments ago. He made a mental note to mention this to his King, though from the corner of his eye he spotted the tankard of goblin ale, and all thoughts of reporting magical doings to the king were gone the moment they appeared.

Sarah smiled down at Lillian, she couldn’t be much older than a year, maybe one and a half at most. Lillian continued to sleep, as Sarah rocked gently from side to side, holding the blonde child carefully. It had been years since she had last held such a young child, Toby was too old and big to be picked up like this anymore, and she didn’t know anyone with children either; most of her friends having opted for studies over families in their young age. Sarah walked around the throne room, cradling Lillian carefully, as she looked around the circular room, occasionally peering out one of the arched windows, looking down to the city bellow. She watched as the goblins prepared themselves for battle, just in case this new runner would make it as far as Sarah once had.  Though from the half hearted attempts the goblins were making at putting up barricades, it seemed unlikely that this runner would be as fortunate as Sarah had been.

“Snicker, please take the baby from Sarah.” Jareth’s voice suddenly sounded from behind her, causing Sarah to pivot on the spot, as a goblin wearing a bonnet appeared at her side.

“Gimme the baby.” The goblin grinned, while making ‘grabby’ hands at Lillian. Sarah eyed the goblin sceptically, lifting one brow at the crusted yellow nails which reached for her.

Jareth reached out slowly, cusping a gloved hand over her shoulder in a feather light touch. He turned his back to the goblin now known as Snicker, his mismatched eyes meeting hers. “Snicker is the Goblin City’s nanny. The baby will be safe with her, just as Toby once was.”

Sarah’s eyes opened wide, darting between Jareth and Snicker for a few seconds. “I thought you said there weren’t any of the Goblins from my run who still did this?”

“They are few and far between these days, however Snicker has been in her role for decades now. I would hate to take the position away from her, not when she is so wonderful at it.”

With a sigh of relief, Sarah carefully handed Lillian to Snicker. “Oooh, you make a good goblin soon.” Snicker cooed, before walking out of the throne room, Sarah watching the two leave in utter shock.

“I’m not sure if I forgot or repressed the memory of what could happen to the children who were wished away, if the wisher doesn’t make it to the Castle in time.” Sarah whispered; her mouth having grown dry at the thought.

Jareth shook his head softly, feathery blonde hair swaying in its own breeze. “It is simply a scare tactic.” He offered, waving his hand, and producing yet another crystal.

“A scare tactic?”

“I do not curse wished away children to live their lives goblins. It would be unfair to the child to do so. Afterall, the child didn’t wish themselves away now did they?” He smirks across at Sarah, mismatched eyes sparkling with mirth.

“Well, what do you do with them then?”

Jareth shakes his head no, “Another time precious. I will answer all your questions in due time.” He almost whispers, causing Sarah to step ever closer towards him. “If you are ready, would you like to see the beginning of the Labyrinth from a different perspective?”

Sarah nods eagerly, eyes falling once more to the displayed crystal. “Actually, I have a better idea.” He declares suddenly, vanishing the crystal, and turning on his heel to face her. “Why watch, when you can participate?”

“Oh no!” Sarah cried, taking three large steps backwards. Sirens were blaring in her head, as red flags waved frantically in her imagination. “No, no no! I refuse to run again! I didn’t wish anyone away; you have no grounds to force me to run!”

“Sarah my love, that is not at all what I meant.” Jareth purred, his velvety voice sending a wave of calm over her instantly. “I apologise if that is how my words came across, it is not what I intended.”

Watching his movements carefully, and keeping an eye out for any sudden changes, Sarah crept forwards. “What do you have in mind then?”

With a flourish of his hand, a new crystal appeared, this one with clouds of rose and peach coloured smoke within. Without so much as a word, he gently tossed the crystal at her feet. The sphere shattering into nothingness, the colourful smoke escaping and enveloping her entire body in a thick fog. As the smoke whirled around her, the scent of peaches and fresh berries engulfed her senses. She could almost taste them, they were so real! In what felt like both only seconds yet hours too, the smoke cleared, and Sarah watched as a smile spread across Jareth’s face. “You look stunning.” He breathed out, eyes flowing over her body, not in lust, but something close to it…

Eyebrows raised in surprise, Sarah gazed down at herself, instantly noticing her lack of jeans, and overall entirely new outfit. A deep forest green coat fell down to the floor around her, ending in long sleeves and a slight train; the cropped top laced in dark brown leather over her bust, meeting with a deep collar made of the same leather. Over her shoulders, in what felt like the shoulder pads Karen had worn in the 80’s, were even darker green spikes, resembling the armour she had seen Jareth wear on numerous occasions. Beneath the coat she wore a comfortable peasants shirt, cream coloured just as Jareth often wore, and just like his, the neckline was severely plunging. A pair of buttery soft leather pants in the same colour as the accents on her coat, clung to her legs like a second skin. No wrinkles could be seen, no matter which way she twisted and turned. They had practically melted against her! Black leather boots completed the outfit, resting just below the knee, with corset style laces all up the back, and a thick yet comfortable heel. Finally, to complete the look, though for now she remained unaware; her long dark hair had been tousled into that of messily imperfect perfection, giving her an air of ferocity and power. “Are jean jackets not socially acceptable in the Underground?” She sighed, running her hands down the soft fabrics she now wore.

“In any other situation, I would say what you were wearing was perfect attire. However, if you would like to come meet the runner, it would be best if you looked the part.”

“Looked the part of what?”

“Part of the Labyrinth and her occupants of course. You are the champion after all.” Jareth smirked at her, before offering her his gloved hand. “Join me champion.”

There are no second thoughts as Sarah rests her hand within his. His champion. The Goblin Kings champion! With a cloud of glitter, the two vanish from the throne room leaving nothing but a smattering of glitter particles and something new in their place. Tiny vine leaves weave and mingle with Jareth’s magic, the stunning forest green mixing with that of sparkling glitter.

***

Just as suddenly as the two had left, they re-appear on the outskirts of the Labyrinth. Orange dust mixing with that of the orange skies, blending together almost seamlessly. Sarah found, that if she stared too long into the distance, she was unable to tell the sky from the land apart. “You’re her aren’t you?” A new voice asks, timid and afraid.

It takes Sarah a moment to realise she is being spoken to. She had assumed the runner would be addressing Jareth, and Jareth alone. He was the King after all…

Turning her attention away from the stunning landscape, her eyes fell on the teenager stood before her. She was acutely aware of Jareth who was stood directly behind her, his arm brushing against hers ever so gently. “And who might that be?” Her voice sounded foreign even to her ears. She sounds regal almost, and not at all like herself. Yet, the words and voice had come so naturally to her.

“You’re the Goblin Queen.” The teen gulped, fear and awe lacing her features.

This caused Sarah to pause, her back going rigid in surprise. Had Jareth known what the girl was going to say, was that why he had suggested she come? “Ahhhh, yes?”

Taglist (If you would to be added just let me know) @fabinapercabeth4179​

Masterlist for all my other writings!

[austennerdita2533]

Slide on back, into this hometown photograph

Summary: Rory and Jess are just two old friends who find themselves perched, shoulder-to-shoe, on the gazebo steps with autumn dusk at their backs and a bottle of Miss Patty’s wedding whiskey between them, plus one glass each.

The night may be young but the sparks between them are not. After all, there's nothing like a celebration of love to stir old feelings...

(Canon divergent + Wedding Reception Fix-It) (Best Man Jess + Maid of Honor Rory)

(AO3) (FF.net)

It starts off innocent enough, he thinks.

There’s a short ceremony, frilly anecdotes, laughter. No bad moods or empty chairs. Fresh, crisp weather and cinnamon sticks. An exuberant motormouth bride who’s escorted by her beaming grump of a groom. Quirky table settings. Leafy napkins. Champagne. Live music once the band finishes tuning, the set list comprised of a multitude of Lane-approved songs from which the guests can choose and then be entertained for hours upon hours. Plus so much engorging food it’d make Willy Wonka himself bust twenty belt loops.

There’s no shortage of eccentricity whirling about at all times either. It’s more like a clownless circus than a wedding soiree what with a pig ring bearer and an accessorize-your-own snow cone booth that’s parked near the diner, not to mention the roster TJ’s circulating through the crowd so he can captain a new flag frisbee league on a vacant Doose-owned lot that was, supposedly, the site of a lettuce stampede a few months ago, but none of that’s surprising at an event like this one. Not here. Not for a town like Stars Hollow, no way.

Somehow that’s fine. Preferable to him, incredibly enough. Whatever.

It seems Jess has grown more tolerant of this place over time, who knows when exactly, but the blaring lack of Elvis Costello lyrics in his brain these days makes it true. A begrudging fact to be more accurate. And although confessing such an abhorrent thought would’ve scandalized his teenage punk of a self into incredulity once, now, despite the close-knit insanity that abounds everywhere he looks or moves, and with the sum of it being nothing short of entertaining and refreshingly jarring to behold, he finds he doesn’t hate it here any longer.

Nope. Consider his attitude changed. His resentment markedly dissipated. Hell, one could almost accuse him of looking forward to his visits back every now and again.

Isn’t that wild? Princess Bride inconceivable at best. The thought is so downright riotous he wonders if perhaps one of Babette’s lawn gnomes may’ve hypnotized him back in 2002.

(If pressed on the veracity of that pleased-to-visit accusation, though, he swears he’ll deny it. One hundred percent. Scoffing through his teeth for extra measure like the smart-assed delinquent Taylor probably still assumes he is at his core.)

It probably helps that no pesky or unfortunate stirrings from the past have dragged him asunder in Stars Hollow for a while, either. And for that, he’s grateful. It allows him to breathe easier at present. Relax. Relieved, frankly, that he and Rory can be at this reception together without awkwardness, without misgivings of any sort. Both of them enjoying the tulle-tied pomp and swirl of festivity around them instead.

It’s nice, isn’t it, Jess admits to himself as he peers at her sideways. Whatever this is. Her mouth’s poised around a pumpkin-headed utensil with her nose scrunched ironically at the moment, blue eyes shining, all while another five references rest on the tip of her tongue that are bound to amuse him once they fly out, and fly out they will. Shortly.

Yeah, he decides with a crack of his knuckles and a lazy smile. The comfort and familiarity they’ve always shared is still there, stirring subtly. It buzzes around them like a cozy undercurrent with no off switch.

Despite the many years he and Rory have spent apart, and no matter the surplus of sparse emails, text messages, or outdated addresses they have or have not exchanged in all that time, they always seem to fall back into it as soon as they reunite, don’t they? Ease. Amity. That ability to simply be who they are.

Like a worn yet jostled feather drifting on air, or an inked over whisper emboldening in the back of his mind, Jess feels the inevitability of that settle between them again.

Their gazes connect, spark, but there’s no pressure. There’s nothing to crinkle meaning into what they are or are not this evening. No expectations whatsoever. Just two old friends who find themselves perched, shoulder-to-shoe, on the gazebo steps with autumn dusk at their backs and a bottle of Miss Patty’s wedding whiskey between them, plus one glass each.

The alcohol is a tasty addition to the cake they’re sampling.

As it turns out, there are twelve different kinds thanks to the chef and best friend of the bride who seems to have arbitrarily decided that sugary gluttony doesn’t apply to those with the last name Gilmore. Or to anyone else who dares to try and eat alongside them tonight in button-popping solidarity. Not that Jess is complaining or anything, because he isn’t. And that’s shocking on its own given his disgruntled history with town events.

With ice cream by the dessert wayside or not, though, he’s satisfied. Stuffed full but content. Each slice of cake he’s tasted - number seven and counting - has been delicious. Just delicious.

Still, with no iron stomach of his own, and a frosting limit they’ve long since surpassed, he finds he appreciates the boozy reprieve more than she knows.

Liquid celebration, Rory calls it as she pours. And he agrees. It’s the perfect phrase, smiling broader then because he knows the warmth in his chest has nothing at all to do with a stupid drink or a home-brewed fifth of whiskey, though he can’t deny the heavenly sting a perfectly aged malt elicits as it slicks down his throat in one smooth swallow. Nor does it come from the next generous swig or two he takes after they toast beneath the twinkle lights Kirk has accidentally ripped loose because he caught the bridal bouquet with his teeth earlier - yes, his teeth - thankfully landing in decorative hay instead of atop Sookie’s elaborative dinner buffet, but it has everything to do with those canoodling newlyweds in the center of the town square over there and the emotion that had shone from his uncle’s face during his Best Man’s speech. A moment that had Lorelai blotting at her mascara in touched surprise herself. No matter how much she’d love to deny it.

He knows that whatever’s sloshing through his insides may have something to do with her, too. Rory. She’s propped against him, barefoot, her toes pinched and sore after too many hours in uncomfortable shoes, babbling and laughing like old times. Like there’s nowhere else she wants to be.

Though Jess is by no means a sentimental man himself, not in an overt way in any case, it’s safe to say a few more kernels of feeling have popped out of him today given the occasion and - yeah, okay - maybe because of the surrounding company as well.

Bizarrely, with her one arm looped around his bicep, and pop culture references rolling off her tongue like a dictionary game, he feels as if he’s come home in a way. Not to a place per se, but to a select few who’ve scooted aside and made room for him in their lives. Including him as if his presence matters. Treating him as though he belongs unconditionally; no matter what, no matter when he may or may not pop around in the future.

It’s an oddly pleasant feeling, to be regarded. Disarming for a man who’s spent most of his life feeling abandoned, on his own much of the time.

So the warmth gushing through him at present is not only foreign, unsettled in potency, but also painstaking and persistent. At least in the sense that it continues to vibrate gently inside him as he and Rory sip their drinks in companionable babble and quiet.

He feels the buttery splash: an amber liquid molting against his ribcage that requires no draining or denying the more the wedding revelry sinks into the background and it’s just them. Just this. Just reminiscence and emotion regarded like a snapshot photograph. It’s something which continues to evade conscious defining as the minutes continue to tick away faster and faster because it turns out the woman next to him is a not-so-innocuous additive that somehow manages to sharpen then inebriate his senses without trying. She simply talks, talks some more, and all feels right with the world.

Huh. Isn’t that something?

Odd, probably, that Jess is not at all freaked out by it when he knows he should be. He faults the booze for that, definitely the booze. It muddles everything.

“So how many broads have you wowed with your dance moves so far, Gene Kelly?” Rory asks as she refills his glass and hands it over.

“None.”

“You’re kidding.” Incredulous, “You haven’t danced with anyone?”

“Nope.”

“Come on!”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” he shrugs.

“How? I mean…you must’ve been forced to endure the Macarena or the Cuban Shuffle or something! Or, I don’t know, maybe Miss Patty and Babette roped you into a three-to-tango situation so they could fight over who got to dip you before one of them accidentally grabbed your butt? Those two tend to become rather handsy after they’ve hit the hooch. Always going after some young stud and mistaking him for Miss Patty’s Prospective Husband Number Thirteen, so it’s okay. I’ll listen.”

“It’s just us,” she elbows him, grins playfully, “you can tell me. You can own up to your bad luck. It happens to the most unassuming of former hoodlums in the Hollow. I promise I won’t make fun of you for it…” She slides her tongue across her teeth to repress a laugh, “Much.”

When Jess waves this off as inaccurate, too, Rory looks all the more aghast while a tinge of scrutiny causes her forehead to scrunch. Intent to assess whether or not he’s telling the truth.

“Fine,” she rests her chin on his shoulder and sighs. Takes a sip of her drink. It appears something in his smirk has convinced her to change tactics. “But I still don’t believe you.”

“Ouch. I feel like I should be offended by that,” he laughs.

“Wait, crap. Crap. That’s so not what I meant! Let me—” A pause. “It’s only that Grandma’s been pouncing on people since the music started,” she says, “shoving any poor sucker she could find under the twinkle lights so the photographer she hired - against Mom’s encyclopedia-length DON’T YOU DARE pre-wedding conditions, might I add - can snap a plethora of suitable candid photos for her expensive Lorelai Gets Married album. I, myself, was paired with Michel no less than four times! Four!”

“So the point I’m trying to make is this: nobody is exempt from at least a twirl or two before the night ends.” Poking him, “Not even you.”

“Funny how that falls somewhere between an offer and a threat, Gilmore,” he says with an unexpected twinge once he realizes what she’s suggesting.

“Oooh. Finally caught on, did you?”

Amused, he leans forward on his elbows. Cocks his head, “I suppose this means you’re asking if I’ll pencil you in, miss?”

“Indubitably, sir. Well—both you and your two left feet that is,” Rory amends with a wink.

“Lame. What a poor choice of cliché. “I mean, listen, I lived in New York City and could prove to be Fred Astaire swingin’ good for all you know.”

“Are you?”

“Hell no.”

Laughing, “Good. You nearly had me worried there. I’m no Ginger Rogers either so we’ll be well-matched. Now up, up, up!” she says with a finger snap. “Time to show me how well you dip, mister.” A hand curled around his tie, which she’s flapping against his shirt, Rory stands and yanks it over her shoulder with a conspiratorial smile.

Without warning, she tugs Jess behind her into a swell of bodies and music before enough sense returns for him to concoct an excuse and wriggle out of it; which, were he to attempt it, would classify as a Luke-like default in every way.

Seemingly determined to claim at least one dance, though, Rory brokers no room for argument. She wastes no time in wrapping his arms around her waist. Next she moves her feet, her knees, her hips to the acoustic beat of the song in the hopes he’ll mimic the movement.

It doesn’t take long to match her rhythm, with him transitioning them smoothly from a sway into a rock.

They teeter closer and chatter to fill the empty space. To curb the tension. Her head brushes against his cheek a little too intimately during the chorus, her touch tantalizing on his nape, but neither one of them draw back. Neither one of them pull away.

Numerous sets lapse before they retreat back to the gazebo perch, their cake and whiskey stash replenished, the hour growing late.

The guests have largely cleared out by now. Only a few stragglers remain who are too drunk, too comfortable, or too tired to care about two old friends who have slipped off together again. Alone.

Apparently all it takes is a wedding party to nip Stars Hollow’s “nosy neighbor” defect in the bud temporarily. Amazing, isn’t it?

Content to watch Rory slide her arms through the sleeves of his jacket, which he’s just draped over her shoulders before the November chill can make her shiver, Jess allows himself to rake over her features for a second, unhurried. To catch a whiff of her floral perfume. Bottling up another memory. Then he becomes much braver than he usually dares by reaching forward to thumb off a fleck of leftover icing on her cheek, chuckling because she flushes, because she pats around for a napkin in vain, holding her eyes longer than he knows he should afterward because her pout is adorable and cuter than he remembered and - oh, screw it - he might be slightly tipsy. He might be drunk off the curves of her face.

Shit. What if things between them aren’t as simple and benign as he wants them to be?

She looks pretty, man. Too damn pretty.

Jess realizes he may be lost for good now, dazed by sweet proximity. He’s a satellite slipping back into the gravity of the once-upon-a-them he thought had broken off long ago, gone astray, combusted so as to no longer be a part of this reality. So what is happening?  

Soon Rory’s blinking back at him.

Embarrassment fading, a small smile forms at the corner of her mouth, the moonlight a trickle of pearls on her skin. One, two, three seconds more and everything else recedes further when she catches him lightly by the wrist before he can think to pull away.

The move surprises him. That ABORT, ABORT frequency in his mind has dulled down to a slow hush, a simple nothing.

They’re alone here, cocooned in a little niche they’ve procured with happy understanding of the other’s needs. This shared solitude is an alcove. Their temporary respite from the remaining crowd and today’s craze.

Swallowing, his throat suddenly dry, Jess stills. Rory idles, her face paned in gentle curiosity. Their gazes tangle with something precarious, a question, something long since buried.

Can this be happening again? Really? Can an ember this old, this burnt up, return to the wick and still catch flame?

Once she shifts closer on the gazebo steps, however, tilting into his touch, her skirt spilt across his legs, he doesn’t bother trying to retie the knots around his heart. What’s the use? There’s a stupid sonnet of nothing and everything building inside of him that he hopes to find the strength to voice before it dissolves in his mind and it’s too late. But he can’t find a pen. He can’t write it down. There’s no room left in his head for words at this point, anyway.

Helpless, he’s stuck on the other end of her spaghetti string like that stupid Disney mutt, the Tramp, and he hates himself for it. Hates it. Yet still owns it all the same.

It’s too exhausting trying to figure out what the hell it all means, so he doesn’t try. Doesn’t analyze.

He’s so sick of rebuffing those edge of seventeen flutters that lurk in his recesses like a hot spot. A reservoir of feeling. He’s so done with all these highlighted passages in his periphery that refuse to fade with time.

He can barely breathe let alone think about the erratic drumbeat spiking in his ears after her palm glides over his pulse point, down the cuff, up his sleeve…

He can hardly refuse when she’s crumbling his self-control, towing him in like he’s already caught…

So he lets go.

Surrenders.

Giving into the ache before it swallows him up whole.

The air charged, unable to glance away, Jess lets his hand fall. Rory takes it into her possession immediately. His other one hovers in the air a moment, tentative, then comes to rest on her shoulder.

It seems the lapels of his tux jacket have flattened a few tendrils of her glossy hair beneath the collar, so he slips a hand underneath it to free them with a deft brush of fingertips against her neck without a word. Afraid to break the spell. Afraid to move even as they both lean in and bump a whiskey glass with a little plink from a clumsy ankle, and smash it to pieces.

Distracted, neither one of them flinch. They disregard the shattered glass entirely.

Eyes locked, resistance faltering, Rory tugs him once, gentle and prodding. Though encouragement is plain in her face, it’s courage he lacks. It’s courage he needs most.

With only a breath left to cross, to finish it off, and with their foreheads already touching, Jess knows one inch more will doom him for certain. He knows one inch less will kill him right where he sits, no joke. And jeez, how big of a chump he feels to admit it without blaming something else first.

Does she notice, he wonders? Does she perceive an iota of this conflict? Can she sense the war he’s losing or has he gotten too fucking good at inscrutable emotion?

“Jess?” she asks softly, the sound more like a pant than a whisper.

“Yeah?”

“Should…are we about to do something smart or stupid?”

“I…” reeling, “I don’t know. Could go either way.”

“If you had to pick?”

“Do you, uh,” he pushes bangs from her face, “do you really need an answer?”

“Only for clarity’s sake,” she says, “but yeah.” Biting her lip, “If you can.”

“Right.”

“So?”

“Both then,” he says with a protracted sigh. He won’t lie to her; he never could. “Definitely both.”

“Right. Okay.” She mulls it over. Her eyelashes flit against the bridge of his nose. “Both.” Tenderly, Rory cups his jaw, runs her fingers through stubble that never used to grow there until he’d reached his late twenties. “I think,” her mouth ghosts against his cheek, beckoning, “I think I can live with a little contradiction in my life,” she smiles. “Can’t you?”

There’s no turning back after that.

His lips throb, they’re already bruised with want. Burning. They’re already smarting from a mark of affection Jess remembers too well from his past dreams but knows hasn’t been anything concrete in years, not given, not taken, not tasted since they were a couple of kids and bad timing was the ultimate champion reigning between them.

But there’s not a single obstacle in their way now, is there? No problems. No boyfriends or girlfriends lurking. No friends, no family members, no town folk who are raining down judgment or wondering if they’ll regret this in the morning.

So where Rory leads next he’s bound to follow. He feels it in the bending, in the liquid pooling of his bones. Who is he to resist? Who is he to try and temper the fire spreading through him like a nuclear bomb as she wraps her arms around his neck? Pulling him in, holding him against her like she never plans to let go again.

Jess shuts his eyes. Decides to close the remaining distance. He’ll take this chance, damn those consequences, worry about cauterizing the hurt he’ll more than suffer from later.

Yeah, later…

After all, how can he pretend any of this is innocent? What could be less indifferent than making out with his ex-girlfriend behind a gazebo at his uncle’s wedding reception?

Reckless or not, he’ll live with it.

[flightfoot]

Memories of Godly Selfishness Ch. 6 - END

I tried not to think about where we were going or what we were going to do.

Two days ago, I’d received a prophecy indicating what I needed to do in order to defeat Python. I still wasn’t sure about what all of it meant - prophecies are almost NEVER that straightforward, something I’d grown quite annoyed about during my time as a mortal - but one part of it was clear: we needed Python’s skin.

I’d vaguely remembered the skin being left as a trophy last time I defeated Python. I hadn’t wanted anything to do with it. I didn’t wish for any reminders of that fight. I couldn’t just leave it there, though. One of my Oracles would reside there, and I didn’t want her to have to put up with a dead snake in the same room.

So I’d taken it back to Olympus and stuffed it... somewhere. I didn’t remember where, and I didn’t WANT to remember. Python haunted my thoughts enough without having his skin in my face. 

I’d avoided my palace on Olympus for months after that. I just - I couldn’t sleep, knowing it was still around up there, knowing exactly where it was. I hung around Artemis a lot, wanting to do SOMETHING to keep my mind off of it.

Of course she figured out what I was doing. She’s my twin. As much as we drive each other crazy, we UNDERSTAND each other.

After another day of spending just a little too long hanging around her camp, she confronted me.

“Why are you avoiding Olympus?”

“Avoiding? I’m not avoiding anywhere. I just wanted to spend more time with these lovely ladies.”

Artemis turned her piercing eyes on me, her face set in her patented I-don’t-have-time-for-screwing-around expression.

Well, so much for that denial.

I sighed. “Look, I- I just don’t want to think about some stuff, okay? It’s easier when I’m down here, to just - forget for awhile.”

Her face softened. “It’s Python, isn’t it?”

“...No.”

She stared at me some more.

“Okay, fine, it is! I keep on thinking about the fight. I mean, I won super easily and quickly, there were no problems, it was easy. But I can’t stop thinking about it. No idea why.”

I could tell she didn’t believe me for a second, but she didn’t push. Well, not on how ‘easy’ it was, at least.There was no way she’d just leave it at that, though.

“Is there anything I can do to help? You should feel comfortable in your own palace.”

I bit my lip. On the one hand, I really didn’t want her to know that I was THIS affected just by having Python’s skin around. On the other hand, she was right, and I did want to be able to enjoy Olympus again. And as much as we teased each other, as much as we could argue, she wouldn’t make fun of me for this.

“...Python’s skin. Could you take it somewhere else? Somewhere safe, but where I won’t run across it?”

It was basically an admission of how much Python had affected me, something I didn’t even want to admit to myself. But if that knowledge was safe with anyone, it was with Artemis (and Leto of course. She would understand, but I didn’t want to bring back her own memories of Python.)

“Ok. Just tell me where it is. It’ll be gone and safely hidden by the end of the day.”

So I told her the location. Sure enough, by the end of the day, the snakeskin was gone.

I’d collapsed right then and there. It was GONE. I didn’t need to think about it anymore. Artemis had taken care of it. It wasn’t here.

So when the prophecy had called for Python’s skin, I’d immediately sought out my sister’s Hunters. I couldn’t see my sister, but it was entirely possible that they would know where it was. 

Then I remembered who her current lieutenant was.

Thalia Grace.

My blood turned to ice.

I’d talked to her a few months ago, at Camp Jupiter. I’d needed to tell her that her brother was dead.

She already knew, of course. My sister may not be able to visit in person right now, but she could get away with visiting her lieutenant in a dream.

It was worth the risk anyway. Thalia needed to know.

So by the time I’d told her, she already knew. 

She hadn’t wanted to believe it. She’d tried to tell herself it was just a dream, but she knew better. And one look at my face had confirmed it.

Telling her what happened... that Jason KNEW he was going to die, that he TOLD me it would happen, and I STILL let him come... I hadn’t thought I could feel any worse about Jason’s death than I already did. I should’ve known better.

She only punched me once, surprisingly enough. 

We’d avoided each other after that. I needed to give her space to process, and she REALLY didn’t want to see me. When we had interacted, she’d been coolly stand-offish, saying the bare minimum necessary, and then leaving the area.

So when I’d told her that we needed to retrieve Python’s skin, neither of us were too happy about it. Still, the way her eyes had hardened when I’d mentioned it, and the way her snippiness had increased... there was something more going on. 

Something I should know.

I groaned. Curse my faulty mortal memory! Or at least, I’d LIKE to curse it. But a nagging sensation in the back of my head whispered Don’t think about it. Don’t remember.

Last time I’d felt anything like this, I’d been repressing my memory of Agametheus’s death, of refusing to listen to my son’s pleas. Whatever memory I’d repressed this time was much, MUCH worse.

We needed to retrieve the skin as soon as possible, and with the way travel had become difficult (which I was pretty worried about. Is something wrong with Hermes?)  we needed to use a more unconventional mode of transport. 

Unfortunately, Leo and Festus weren’t at Camp Half-Blood when we received the prophecy.

Fortunately, Nico Di Angelo was.

It seemed that Nico’s range and stamina had increased quite a bit from the last time I’d seen him. He’d volunteered to take Meg, Thalia, and I to our destination, some kind of ruins in Virginia. 

At that point Will had cut in, “Not without me.”

Nico had opened his mouth, looking like he might try to protest, but Will just said, “Nope. Nico, I love you, but you have NO self-preservation instincts, and the last time you transported people across the country, you nearly faded into shadow. Coach Hedge helped keep you alive last time. This time, I’M going to be your healer.”

And with that Nico’s jaw clicked shut and he nodded.

I should have felt elated. I was getting to spend more time with one of my children and my future son-in-law! And I WAS happy about that. 

Yet a dark coil of dread filled my stomach. Whatever was waiting for us at the ruins, I didn’t want Will to see it. Will was right though, Nico needed him, and we needed Nico. I couldn’t protest. Whatever was causing this guilt and dread, Will would find out about it too. 

Three shadow-jumps and two days later, we arrived at our destination. Will had insisted on taking a little more time than was strictly necessary to rest, so that Nico would still have some energy left over in case we needed to leave in a hurry. 

We manifested in the middle of a traffic circle. Of course, no mortals noticed us. The Mist was able to hide a gigantic metal dragon, hiding five teenagers emerging from shadows was a cakewalk by comparison.

Thalia looked over at a nearby statue of Robert E. Lee. I heard her mutter, “We’re close.” I didn’t know whether she was talking to herself or us.

She strode forwards, very purposely not looking at me, nor anyone else for that matter. I looked closely at her face as we walked. She’d been stony-faced through the whole journey here, which I’d assumed was her way of keeping her composure after finding out about Jason’s death. After finding out that she’d be traveling with me. With the person responsible for sending Jason on the quest he’d died trying to complete.

But now. Now her expression had cracked. Her eyes screwed up slightly, and her eyes appeared wetter than normal. She had a personal history with wherever we were about to go - wherever Python’s skin was. Judging by her expression, it wasn’t a happy one.

The dread and guilt doubled, pressing down on me. I stumbled.

“Apollo!” Meg cried.

“I’m- I’m okay,” I choked out.

That was a lie. But what could she do? I didn’t know what was wrong, and whatever it was, I doubted she could help me. My sins were my own. I’d faced myself, faced my ignorance, my apathy, my casual cruelty on many past occasions.

I’d seen the way I’d threatened to murder innocent demigods and satyrs, just because I was panicking. Heck, I’d threatened to murder Grover just because he scratched my lyre on a quest I FORCED on him and Percy!

That fear in Leo’s eyes as he frantically tried to redirect my panic away from murder-mode... the stammer in Grover’s voice as he wilted under my gaze... I never wanted to see or hear them again. I wanted to be loved, not feared. At least I’d made some progress towards that, at the satyr school.

I smiled briefly. Those three young satyrs, Fern, Aster, and Wren, had started off being terrified of me. Yet I’d gotten them to open up, to see that I wouldn’t hurt them. I’d changed their perception of me, even now, as a mortal. I’d made a change. I hadn’t needed to regain my throne first to make a difference. 

For some changes, I WOULD need to regain my throne first. The other gods weren’t allowed to talk to me currently, and I NEEDED to talk to them. We needed to change our attitudes towards mortals - towards demigods - towards our FAMILY. There was only so much I could do on my own.

The flashback of Otis and Ephialtes had shown me how uncaring the other gods could be towards the demigods’ plight, even when we needed their help and their survival. Bacchus had refused to help the demigods until they’d ‘proven’ themselves. Percy had even given him a MASSIVE tribute, and yet he STILL only deigned to help after Percy and Jason had nearly died ‘entertaining’ him. And he had the nerve to claim credit for the defeat of the Giant twins afterwards! Bile rose in my throat as I remembered Bacchus’s words, “Being a god has its privileges.” Yes, and those privileges apparently included being a terrible person who’d just WATCH while two brave young teenagers desperately fought against enemies they couldn’t possibly defeat without help. Their lives didn’t matter. They were disposable.

Meg shot a concerned look at me. Abruptly, I noticed that I was shaking, my fist clenched so hard my knuckles had turned white. 

I shot her a small smile and tried to relax. I didn’t want to have to explain my thoughts.

I turned my thoughts back towards my previous flashbacks, this time being more careful not to betray my feelings in my body language.

Things had to change. I couldn’t, I WOULDN’T let my godly brethren continue as they had. If I had to argue with them every day, I would. If I had to intervene myself to keep the demigods, OUR CHILDREN, safe, I would. Maybe I couldn’t fix everything, but I’d damn well TRY.

I didn’t really think I’d have to do it all alone, though. During the flashback I’d experienced with Percy, Annabeth, and Meg of Kronos’s defeat, I’d seen Percy’s conversation with Hermes.

Hermes had understood the worth of mortals. He’d cared about Luke SO MUCH, even knowing his future. But fate couldn’t be denied...

I gasped. Thankfully, my friends’ attention were on our surroundings, not on myself. 

Fate couldn’t be denied. Terrible things happened to those who tried. When I’d thought about that during the conversation with Percy and Hermes, a mental block had slammed down. That same mental block reappeared this time, but something told me it had something to do with our destination, with the ruins and the snakeskin that were waiting for us there.

I couldn’t do anything about that now. The mental block wasn’t budging. I’d just have to wait until we got to the ruins to see why it had triggered.

I cast my mind back to Hermes. He’d looked at Percy with something akin to wonder when Percy had stated that the gods could change. He’d WANTED to change, he just hadn’t truly believed he could. We’d all fooled ourselves for so long, thinking we were unchanging, unable to grow. Yet he had. I had. Heck, even a Titan and a Giant had! Being immortal didn’t stop us from changing for the better. I would make sure we continued to change for the better, to make things better for those we always should have protected.

Those flashbacks had been painful, but they’d shown me things I needed to know. However painful the reason for this block, I needed to know.

I snuck a look at my companions. I wasn’t alone. I knew that now. I had friends. I could do this.

I steeled myself as we walked forwards.

We arrived at the ruins a few minutes later.

Well, ‘ruins’ was being a bit generous. There wasn’t a wall still standing. I knelt down and felt the ash at my feet.

“Greek Fire,” I murmured. 

Thalia nodded, her face tight. “Luke and I helped burn this place to the ground.”

I looked up at her, startled. I’d figured that she’d been here before, but with Luke? “What happened?”

She looked over at me with wide eyes. “Wait, you don’t know?”

I shook my head. “My mortal memory is highly flawed. I can’t access most of my godly memories. Plus...” I swallowed hard. “I- I feel like I should know what happened here. Like I DO know, but I’ve blocked it out. Something so terrible that even as a god, I just wanted to forget about it.”

Thalia stared at me with an unreadable expression on her face. Before she could decide what to do with that information, I heard Meg cry out.

I rushed over to her. Thankfully, she appeared unhurt. “What’s wrong?” I asked, gripping my combat ukulele tightly. 

She knelt down and brushed away some ashes to reveal two human skulls. 

My breath caught. I wasn’t freaked out by human remains. I’d seen many, MANY dead humans over my four thousand years of existence. But I could still be freaked out by what they meant.

Gently I knelt down and picked up one of the skulls. Judging by its size and shape, it had belonged to a child no older than eight. The other skull was even smaller. The child it belonged to had still had all their baby teeth. They were probably barely out of toddlerhood.

I stumbled around the area - the impromptu graveyard. I kicked up skull after skull, almost all of them children. They stared up at me accusingly, yet I couldn’t remember what they were accusing me of. I’d had no parts in the deaths of these children - right?

Part of me knew I had. I had something to do with their deaths. I just didn’t remember how.

I breathed harder and harder, choking on the newly disturbed ash.

“Dad!”

Will  rushed over, Nico by his side. He led me away from the ruins, towards the woods. 

Normally woods filled me with shame and guilt with how they reminded me of Daphne. Right now, they were a relief. There weren’t any child skulls staring back at me here, and no ash to choke on.

I collected myself as best I could. “I’m- I’m okay. I’ll be fine. We need to find Python’s skin.”

Will nodded, but looked worried. “Do you know what happened here? You freaked out more than I thought you would when you found those skulls.”

“I- no. No, I don’t. But- I think I’m responsible for it. And that I’ll have to face my memories of it.”

Will frowned, but nodded. “Just remember that we’re here. We’re not gonna leave you.”

Tears filled my eyes and my throat tightened. What had I ever done to deserve such a wonderful son? “I know.”

We walked back to the ruins, being careful not to kick up too much ash. I steadfastly tried to ignore the occasional human bone I kicked up. I could do nothing for them now and could learn no lessons from their deaths until I knew what had happened. For now, I needed to concentrate on finding Python’s skin.

We split up and searched the ruins for nearly an hour. I uncovered bone after bone, skull after skull. With each discovery my conscience weighed on me more and more, until I felt like I was going to break. Your fault, your fault I heard from the other side of the mental block. They’re dead because of you. I couldn’t remember why, but I knew it was true.

Near the end of that hour, Thalia yelled “FOUND IT!”

Will, Meg, and I rushed over. Belatedly I realized that Nico wasn’t there. Looking around, I saw him deep in conversation with some spirit. He didn’t appear to have heard Thalia.

 At Thalia’s feet, newly unearthed from under the ash, was a massive length of snake skin. And on top of that snake skin was a human skeleton.

Unlock most of the other skeletons we’d found, this one appeared to belong to an adult - an elderly one, at that. Thalia stared at the skeleton, a hard look in her eyes.

“Hal...” she murmured.

My mind exploded.

The world came into being around us. I groaned. The mental block I’d built up was crumbling. 

Hal.

I knew him.

He was one of my sons.

And something terrible had happened to him.

I’d happened to him.

I didn’t know how or why yet, but I was certain I was responsible.

I pushed that thought away. Find out what was going on first, wallow in guilt later, once I knew for sure what I was guilty OF.

I rubbed my eyes and looked around. 

Will and Thalia had tensed up, weapons drawn, waiting for an attack.

Meg just peered around, vaguely interested, but not alarmed.

Ah. Of course.

“Don’t worry,” I told Will and Thalia. “This is a flashback. They happen around me sometimes. Not sure why. None of this is really happening, we’re just revisiting someone’s memories of the past. Once it’s done, we’ll be back where we were. Meg and I have been through many if these, along with Percy and Annabeth.”

The three of them relaxed slightly, though they still seemed on-guard.

I looked around at our surroundings. We seemed to be in some kind of ballroom, that weirdly enough seemed to also be the entranceway to outside. Weird design, but okay. I’d seen weirder.

I heard a quiet click. The deadbolt turned. The door swung over, revealing two young demigods.

Two familiar young demigods.

“Thalia and Luke?” I asked. 

They were way younger than I was used to. Thalia looked about twelve. Since she was normally (biologically) fifteen, that wasn’t a HUGE difference though.

Luke, on the other hand, looked to be about 14, which was a LOT younger than he was last time I saw him, in the flashback where he’d died. He’d been 23 at that point, a man. Seeing him and Thalia now... they were so young. So, so young.

My heart clenched. This wasn’t right. They should both be at camp, not wandering around, not knowing where their next meals would come from, constantly needing to watch for monsters.

How could we gods have EVER thought this was okay, letting CHILDREN fend for themselves? Even if they weren’t my own children, I couldn’t imagine leaving them like that. Not now. Not when I knew what it was like to be afraid of a monster killing you anytime you rested.

I was fortunate compared to those homeless demigods. I had never been alone. I always had allies, and ways of acquiring food. They had no such guarantee.

“That is so cool,” past!Thalia murmured.

The two young demigods marched in, Thalia taking the lead.

I looked over at the present Thalia. She stood stock-still, staring at Luke.

Ah, of course. I’d known they used to be close, and seeing him again now, before he died, before he started helping Kronos... I could only imagine how she was feeling. Perhaps I’d talk to her about it later, if we were on speaking terms at that point. 

I turned my attention back to the past. Luke and Thalia seemed to be inspecting the room, though Luke moreso than Thalia. I frowned, taking a closer look myself.

The room looked pretty disheveled, the floor streaked with mud and some dried red-brown stuff - 

Oh. That was blood. Well that’s not good.

I looked over at the furniture. In one corner stood a destroyed sofa, looking like something had torn it apart. Something strong with sharp teeth. Elsewhere in the room lay several smashed chairs. 

The stairs were the worst. Trash was strewn at the base - along with human bones.

“Thalia,” I asked, my voice even. “please tell me you two turned around and left, and this was just a weird, but ultimately uneventful footnote on your travels together.”

Thalia shot me a glare. I wasn’t sure why. “Well, we TRIED to leave...”

*sshnk*

Past Thalia now held a spear. Seems she had noticed the bones too. Good. 

Luke on the other hand...

“Thalia, why is Luke wielding a normal golf club, and not an ACTUAL WEAPON?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. I didn’t think I succeeded. 

“Oh, he had a Celestial Bronze sword. It got melted into acid awhile before this. That golf club was all Luke had for a while,” she said off-handedly.

Great. Maybe the monster was some sort of a dog, and he could hit a ball really, REALLY far away while he and Thalia GOT OUT OF THERE.

Breathe, Apollo. Breathe. They survived this. You know they did. If they survived this, then you can survive WATCHING them go through this.

Luke spoke. “Maybe this isn’t such a good-”

The door slammed shut behind them.

Well that wasn’t good.

Luke tugged at the handle, but it wouldn’t open. He put his hand on the lock, trying to will it open, I imagined. Hermes’s kids could do that sometimes. Came with being children of the God of Thieves. It still didn’t budge.

“Some kind of magic,” Luke said. “We’re trapped.”

Past Thalia ran to a window, tugging at the drape. I supposed she was thinking of smashing a window to get out. Good thought, but I doubted that whoever came up with this trap would have left so obvious an escape method.

The fabric wrapped around Thalia’s hands. 

“Luke!” she screamed.

I hated being right.

The curtains transformed, changing from fabric into a thick black ooze. It enveloped Thalia’s arms and crept down her spear.

Luke charged, whacking at them with his golf club. To my surprise that actually worked. The curtains temporarily changed back to fabric, and Luke was able to pull Thalia out of its grip.

The curtains quickly recovered, turning back to ooze and trying to reach out to Thalia. Luckily the ooze didn’t seem to be able to leave the curtain rods, and it soon quieted down, giving up on reach its prey.

Thalia shivered in Luke’s arms. Her arms and hands steamed and blistered.

I wanted to rush over and help her. Sing healing incantations, give her ambrosia, SOMETHING. 

But I couldn’t. This had already happened. I could do nothing for her now.

Luke, however, COULD. “Hold on!” he shouted, laying her on the ground. “Hold on, Thalia. I got it.”

He fumbled through his backpack, finally pulling out a bottle of nectar. He poured it over Thalia’s hands. The blisters faded.

I breathed a sigh of relief. At least Thalia was okay now.

“You’re going to be fine,” Luke said gently. “Just rest.”

“We- we can’t,” Thalia said shakily as she stood. “If all the windows are like that, and the door is locked-”

“We’ll find another way out,” Luke said.

Luke looked around, trying to find an exit that WOULDN’T try to dissolve them, I assumed.

His eyes locked on some small red lights. Which were paired together. And moving closer. A growl emanated from them.

Thalia made a strangled sound. “Um, Luke...”

She pointed down the second hallway. A second pair of eyes looked back at them. 

From both hallways came a strange sound, *clack-clack-clack*.

“The stairs are looking pretty good,” Luke said.

From somewhere above them, up the stairs, a man’s voice called, ”Yes, this way.”

A sharp pain tore through my head. “Nngh,” I groaned.

“Apollo!” Meg and Will cried out.

“I’m okay,” I tried to assure them. “Just a headache.”

Meg nodded, but looked troubled. Will didn’t seem to buy it either, but neither of them said anything. I noticed that they both stayed close to me, though.

“Who are you?” Luke called up.

“Hurry,” the man called again. I felt like I should recognize the voice.

“Hurry,” echoed from the right hallway, from the creature with the red eyes. It was the same voice.

A creature with a human voice... The same voice coming from two different directions... 

I moaned as my headache pulsed again. 

“Hurry,” the creature on the left called.

Luke grabbed Thalia’s hand, bolting up the stairs with her.

“Luke-”

“Come on!”

“If it’s another trap-”

“No choice!”

They ran like Tartarus himself was after them. They plunged down the hallway, nearly tripping over piles of human bones.

“This way!” the man’s voice called. “Last door on the left. Hurry!”

The creatures echoed the man’s words. “Left! Hurry!”

“We have to help him,” Thalia said determinedly.

“Yeah,” Luke agreed.

They ran down the corridor, towards the last door on the left. Light spilled out from the crack under the closed door.

The door opened as they reached it. The two frantic demigods tripped through the doorway, the door slamming shut behind them.

“Hello,” said the man’s voice, much closer now. “I’m very sorry.”

In front of them stood an old man with gray, spiky hair. He looked resigned and very, very tired.  But his clothes were what really caught my attention.

Snakeskin boots. A mottled green-and-brown snakeskin suit.

He was wearing Python’s skin. Where had he gotten Python’s skin?

Because I forced it on him.

The answer came back naturally, as I’d known it all along. I suppose I had, and had simply forgotten it.

But why would I force the snakeskin on him? And why did it feel like a hole had opened up in my stomach?                                                                                 

Breathing hard, I forced myself to concentrate. I was SO close to remembering. I could feel it.

But do I want to?

I clenched my teeth. Whether I WANTED to didn’t matter. I NEEDED to. 

 Past Thalia spoke. “Um, Luke...”

She pointed to her left.

The left portion of the room was closed off with iron bars, like a prison cell. Inside stood one of the monsters that had just chased Thalia and Luke. It looked like a weird mixture of creatures, with a lion’s body, horses’ hooves (I suppose that explains the clacking sound, I thought distantly) and a head that looked like some amalgam of a horse and a wolf head.

It opened its mouth, revealing two horseshoe-shaped plates of bones instead of teeth. When it snapped its mouth shut, it produced the *clack-clack-clack* sound.

Of course the sound was produced by the more horrifying option. Naturally.

Thalia and Luke stood up, facing the old man.

“Who are you?” Luke demanded. “What’s that thing in the cage?”

The old man grimaced, his expression miserable. He looked like he was about to cry. He opened his mouth, but when he spoke, the voice didn’t come from him, but from the monster in the cage. 

“I am Halcyon Green. I’m terribly sorry, but you are in the cage. You’ve been lured here to die.”

The block in my mind dissipated.

My legs buckled, long-repressed memories whirling through my mind. Meg and Will caught me, having made sure to stay close after the last time I nearly fell.

Halcyon Green.

My son.

I’d done something awful to my son.

I hadn’t wanted to, but I had.

I still couldn’t quite sort out what had happened, why I’d repressed my memories of Hal. The block may have dissolved, but I still needed to sort through the memories it was hiding.

Meg and Will gently lowered me to the ground, sitting me down. 

“Apollo. Breathe. We’re here. We’re not leaving. Everything’s okay,” Will said soothingly.

I appreciated his reassurance, even though he had no idea what was actually wrong. 

The flashback didn’t pause just because I was struggling to remain upright, unfortunately. How inconsiderate!

“Y-you’d better explain,” Luke stammered. “Why - how - what...?”

“I understand your confusion,” said the monster sympathetically, speaking for Hal. “The creature you see her is a leucrota. It has a talent for imitating human voices. That is how it lures its prey.”

Luke looked from Hal to the leucrota and back again. “But the voice is yours? I mean, the dude in the snakeskin suit? I’m hearing what he wants to say?”

“That is correct,” the leucrota sighed. “I am, as you say, the dude in the snakeskin suit. Such is my curse. My name is Halcyon Green, son of Apollo.”

“WHAT?!”

I winced from Meg’s and Will’s yells. Thalia just silently glared at me.

They quieted down in time to hear past Thalia’s own exclamation of surprise, “You’re a demigod? But you’re so - “

“Old?” the leucrota asked. Hal looked over his hands, seemingly contemplating how old and weathered they were. “Yes, I am.”

I understood Thalia’s confusion. It was very, very rare for Greek demigods to achieve senior status. Something else that I hoped to change.

“How long have you been here?” Luke asked.

A long, long time, my memory whispered. Decades.

Hal shrugged listlessly, his face conveying his misery and despair. The utter hopelessness... he’d given up on his situation improving a long, long time ago. The leucrota supplied Hal’s voice. “I have lost count. Decades? Because my father is the god of oracles, I was born with the curse of seeing the future. Apollo warned me to keep quiet. He told me I should never share what I saw because it would anger the gods. But many years go... I simply had to speak. I met a young girl who was destined to die in an accident. I saved her life by telling her the future.”

My blood ran cold. Distantly I heard voices calling me, but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. 

Precognition. The ability to see the future. An extremely valuable and important ability. We were currently on a quest to try and restore the Oracles, after all. But it was the ability I most hated to pass on to my offspring. Seers could easily run afoul of the Fates - and run afoul of Zeus by consequence.

I remembered the horror I felt when I first visited Hal when he was a child. I’d desperately warned him to keep silent, whatever happened. Whatever the contest. That he would be punished severely if he dared to utter a word. He’d agreed. He hadn’t said a word. When he managed to reach adulthood (a rare feat for a Greek demigod) without triggering Zeus’s wrath, I had let myself be deluded into thinking that things would be fine. 

It had only been a delusion. Before Hal was even born, I’d seen that the Aegis would need to be sealed in a trapped safe and left in his family’s house. I hadn’t seen why, simply that it was necessary. I’d convinced myself not to worry about WHY it was like that. After Hal had spoken - after he’d saved that little girl - it became abundantly, horribly clear.

I forced myself to concentrate on the rest of the exchange. I could fall to pieces afterwards.

“I don’t get it...” Luke looked Hal in the eyes, very pointedly NOT looking at the leucrota. “You did something good. Why would that anger the gods?”

I almost laughed. Good intentions only mattered for so much when one stepped on a god’s domain. 

“They don’t like mortals meddling with fate,” the leucrota replied. “My father cursed me. He forced me to wear these clothes, the skin of Python, who once guarded the Oracle of Delphi, as a reminder that I was not an oracle. He took away my voice and locked me in this mansion, my boyhood home. Then the gods set the leucrotae to guard me. Normally, leucrotae only mimic human speech, but these are linked to my thoughts. They speak for me. They keep me alive as bait, to lure other demigods. It was Apollo’s way of reminding me, forever, that my voice would only lead others to their doom.”

I looked around dazedly. Meg and Will had stopped calling my name, instead staring at me in horror. Thalia determinedly did NOT look at me, fixing her gaze on Hal and Luke instead. I was fine with her ignoring my existence. Right now I wanted to ignore my existence. 

I would have to explain later, tell my side of the story, and hope that they could forgive me for what I did. For what I had to do.

But for now, this was Hal’s show. He’d been silenced enough. My son would get to say his piece.

Luke looked furious at Hal’s words. “You should fight back. You didn’t deserve this. Break out. Kill the monsters. We’ll help you.”

I gave a bitter smile. Not deserving something didn’t matter much. Otherwise Jason would still be alive.

“He’s right,” past Thalia cut in. “That’s Luke, by the way. I’m Thalia. We’ve fought plenty of monsters. There has to be something we can do, Halcyon.”

Normally I’d say it was hopeless. This was meant to be a trap for demigods, there were measures in place to prevent them from simply being able to fight their way out, otherwise the trap would have been destroyed years ago. Yet Thalia and Luke had survived this. I was not about to underestimate them.

“Call me Hal.” He shook his head, “But you don’t understand. You’re not the first to come here. I’m afraid all the demigods feel there’s hope when they arrive. Sometimes I try to help them. It never works. The windows are guarded by deadly drapes-”

“I noticed,” past Thalia muttered.

“-and the door is heavily enchanted. It will let you in, but not out.”

“We’ll see about that,” Luke muttered determinedly. He pressed his hand against the door behind him, willing it to open, like he did with the front door downstairs. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.

“I told you,” the leucrota speaking for Hal said bitterly, “None of us can leave. Fighting the monsters is hopeless. They can’t be hurt by any metal known to man or god.”

Hal opened his jacket, revealing a dagger on his belt.

A very familiar dagger.

I’d seen it not too long ago, in a different flashback, that one also involving Luke.

“Is- is that...?” I asked hesitantly.

“Yep,” the present Thalia replied.

Oh, the strange and twisted path the Fates had taken.

Will and Meg looked at Thalia and I curiously, but we didn’t elaborate. I had a feeling that the flashback would explain anyway. They usually did.

Hal stabbed the knife at the leucrota. It bounced off the monster’s snout.

“You see?” the monster said as Hal backed away from it.

“So you just give up?” Thalia demanded. “You help the monsters lure us in and wait for them to kill us?”

Hal sheathed the dagger, gently placing it back in its holster. “I’m so sorry, my dear, but I have little choice. I’m trapped here, too. If I don’t cooperate, the monsters let me starve. The monsters could have killed you the moment you entered the house, but they use me to lure you upstairs. They allow me your company for a while. It eases my loneliness. And then... well, the monsters like to eat at sundown. Today, that will be at 7:03.”

I glanced at the nearby clock. It read 10:34 am. A little over eight hours before Luke and Thalia were dinner.

Hal continued. “After you are gone, I- I subsist on whatever rations you carried.”

He looked hungrily at Luke’s backpack. I felt sick.

“You’re as bad as the monsters,” Luke said.

I flinched. Hal might be as bad as the monsters, but what did that make us gods, who had made this happen? 

“You’re right to hate me,” the leucrota spoke, self-loathing and resignation coating its words. “But I can’t save you. At sunset, those bars will rise. The monsters will drag you away and kill you. There is no escape.”

Two more leucrotae entered the caged off room, as if underscoring Hal’s words. One of them chomped on some long-dead demigod’s Celestial Bronze breastplate, which seemed like an entirely unnecessary illustration of how screwed Thalia and Luke were.

“As you see,” one of the new leucrotae said, “the monsters are remarkably strong.”

“Send them away,” Thalia asked pleadingly. She was trying to put on a brave face, but I could see how scared she was. I didn’t blame her. If I’d been in her situation, my knees would have been quaking so hard I’d have had trouble remaining upright. “Hal, can you make them leave?”

Hal frowned. One of the leucrotae spoke, “If I do that, we won’t be able to talk.”

The second leucrotae continued his statement, “Besides, any escape strategy you can think of, someone else has already tried.”

The third monster ended the statement, “There is no point in private talks.”

Okay, the leucrotae HAD to be doing this on purpose, trying to reinforce how outmatched the demigods were.

Thalia paced, thinking. I admired her ability to concentrate on anything besides ‘Oh my god, we’re gonna die.’

She turned to Hal, “Do they know what we’re saying? I mean, do they just speak, or do they understand the words?”

The first leucrotae whined, then mimicked Thalia’s voice, “Do they understand the words?”

The second one supplied Hal’s voice, “The creatures are intelligent, the way dogs are intelligent. They comprehend emotions and a few simple phrases. They can lure their prey by crying things like ‘Help!’. But I’m not sure how much human speech they really understand. It doesn’t matter. You can’t fool them.”

“Send them away,” Luke said. “You have a computer. Type what you want to say. If we’re going to die at sunset, I don’t want those things staring at me all day.

Hal turned at the creatures and stared at them silently. They snarled and stalked out of the room.

“Luke,” past Thalia asked anxiously, “do you have a plan?”

“Not yet. But we’d better come up with one by sunset,” he replied grimly.

Luke and Thalia paced, trying to come up with some solution. After a couple minutes of waiting, the present Thalia sighed. “Nothing’s going to happen for at least an hour. Maybe more. It certainly FELT like an eternity,” she grumbled. 

This was the perfect opportunity for me to come clean and explain what I’d remembered about Hal.

I half-wished a leucrota would burst in.

Sadly, no such distraction was forthcoming. 

I shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably, not meeting Will’s or Meg’s eyes as they burned holes in me.

“Why?” Will asked softly. I flinched. “Why did you punish Hal so severely just for saving a girl? A-and why...” he struggled to find the words, his face screwing up as he attempted to keep his composure. His voice came out hoarse and rough, “Why did you give him a punishment that would kill HUNDREDS of innocent people. Kill hundreds of KIDS. I- I-” Will’s voice cracked as tears streamed down his face. “I looked around the ruins for an HOUR, Apollo! Do you know how many children’s skulls I found?! How many never got a CHANCE, because they were caught in this messed-up trap?! Just- just- WHY?!”

Looking at the anger and betrayal in my son’s face, at his clenched fists, I almost lost my voice. Nothing I could say could fix this. 

But I could explain it. I owed that much.

“Because Zeus threatened to do something worse. ”

An audible silence fell.

Thalia, Meg, and Will stared at me.

I fought the urge to stare at my shoes and shrink into a tiny ball. I needed to keep myself together. To give them answers.

I took a deep, shuddering breath, collecting myself. “As soon as Hal was born, I knew he was a seer. I also knew that something terrible would happen to him if he ever tried to use his powers. Zeus told me to kill him. That he couldn’t be allowed to live, to interfere with the Fates. I begged for his life. I assured him that Hal would never tell anyone the things he saw. It worked. And as soon as Hal was old enough to understand what I was telling him, I visited and warned him to never reveal his visions.”

“But he DID tell someone. He had to save that girl,” Thalia cut in, an unreadable expression on her face.

“Yeah. And honestly? I can’t blame him. If I’d been in his circumstances, I would’ve done the same thing.”

“But you didn’t have a choice. You HAD to punish him,” Will said.

As I opened my mouth to explain farther, the world blurred.

A new memory?

The scene resolved. We were on Mount Olympus, in the throne room. Only one throne was occupied; my father’s.

But that didn’t mean he was the only one in the room.

My godly self stood, looking up at my father, fear and worry painted on my face.

Zeus glared at him- at me- stonily.

At last he spoke.

“Hal has meddled with the Fates’ design, as I knew he would. He broke his promise.”

“Father, please-”

Zeus steam-rollered on, disinterested in what I had to say. “He must be punished.”

He leaned forwards slightly. I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my neck. I knew what was coming next. 

Zeus rumbled, “YOU must punish him.”

A beat passed. Then another.

“Wha-?” my godly self asked, looking confused and frightened. 

I remembered this now. Zeus had known that I didn’t want to hurt Hal - to hurt my son - so the fact that he was putting me in charge of Hal’s punishment, when he KNEW I’d try to lighten his load as much as possible... well, I knew as soon as he said it that it couldn’t be that simple.

I’d been right.

Zeus leaned slightly forwards, hand teasingly close to his Master Bolt. “Punish him fittingly... or I’ll intervene.”

The world blurred again. This time when it stopped, we were in a forest. My godly self, stood, talking to a preteen girl with long auburn hair and cold silver eyes.

Sister.

My eyes prickled.

I’d seen her in two flashbacks so far, one less than a month ago, but it still felt like a punch in the gut every time she appeared. I desperately hoped I’d get to see her in person soon. To Hades with appearances, I wanted to collapse in her arms and cry and just... BE with her. I hadn’t gone this long without seeing her in millennia. 

“I need Python’s skin.”

Artemis looked back at my godly self, frowning. “Apollo, what’s wrong?”

I smiled slightly. Artemis could read me like a book.

“One of my children broke a promise, told the future when he wasn-’t supposed. Zeus’s on the warpath. He... he said that I had to decide a fitting punishment for him, or he’d intervene. I’m hoping that dressing him in Python’s skin, reminding him that he’s NOT an Oracle, taking away his voice, and confining him to his home will be enough. I... I don’t want to hurt him anymore than I have to. Anymore than I need to.”

Quietly, I told my present companions, “It wasn’t enough for Zeus.”

Artemis looked at me for a long moment. Finally she spoke. “I’ll retrieve it. It’ll only take a few hours. Come back later tonight.”

My godly self nodded and turned to walk away. Before he could leave, Artemis called out, “Oh, and brother? COME FIND ME after this is over, or I WILL track you down and drag you over myself.”

A small smile tugged at my divine self’s lips. “How could I refuse the opportunity to flirt with so many of your lovely Hunters.”

Sis rolled her eyes, “Just come over, you goof. I’m NOT letting you brood by yourself.”

Artemis... sister... she meant so much more to me than I’d ever been able to tell her. Sometimes I couldn’t stand her, but she was always there for me when I needed her.

The world blurred again. At this rate, I might get motion sickness from all the scene changes.

When it cleared, we were back in Hal’s house, in his room.

Bars covered the walls, leucrotae behind them, just like in Thalia’s time. Hal stood facing my past self, garbed in snakeskin. But this Hal was younger. He wasn’t worn down. He hadn’t given up.

My godly self spoke in a monotone, as if reading from a script: “You told that girl her future. You meddled with fate, with the domain of the gods. You shall be punished accordingly. You will wear the skin of Python, to remind you that you are NOT an Oracle. Your voice has been stolen, so that you may never again tell others of what you see. You will never leave this house again. And... a-and...”

Here my past self’s composure cracked. “Y-your voice will be repeated by the leucrotae. It will be used as bait to lure demigods’ to their deaths. To re-remind you that your voice will only ever lead others to destruction. You will be forced to watch them die, knowing it’s your fault. Your curse.. your curse will only be ended when the owner of the treasure in this safe,” here I gestured to a huge locked safe, “successfully claims it.”

Hal looked stunned. He moved his mouth, but no words came out. My godly self turned around, whispering hoarsely, “I’m sorry,” before disappearing.

Thalia broke the silence. “Zeus. HE was the reason for all those deaths. He was the one who set up the death trap,” she spat.

She let out a breath. “I’m not surprised. It explains some things I’d been wondering about.”

I looked at her interestedly. “Like what?”

She looked me in the eyes. For the first time in several days, I saw no anger directed at me. “Hal never seemed angry or upset with you, just resigned. Zeus’s goat led me to the mansion, so he knew about it... and knew that the Aegis was here for me to claim. Plus the fact that the Aegis was here in the first place.”

She gave me a small smile. “Also, after getting to know you... this just REALLY didn’t seem like the kind of punishment you’d come up with.”

I teared up slightly. Thalia Grace, thinking well of me? Believing me to be a good enough person to NOT willingly consign hundreds of innocent demigods to a horrible death? (Okay, that was an admittedly low bar, but I’d take it.)

Still...

“I could’ve done more,” I admitted. Abort, mouth, abort! I screamed to myself. She only just now started to stand you again, what are you doing? My mouth didn’t comply.

“I could’ve tried to guide more demigods away from the area. I could’ve appealed to Artemis and Athena for help in persuading Zeus to change his mind. Maybe I wouldn’t have succeeded. Maybe he would’ve even gotten angry with me. But I could’ve TRIED. Instead I buried my head in the sand. I blocked my memories of this as best I could, ignoring the demigods’ screams for help. I did what I’d been doing for millennia; ignoring those I should have helped to protect. Because it was EASIER. Because it was SAFER.”

I looked Meg, Will, and Thalia each in the eyes in turn, and reiterated a promise I’d already made, but needed to be repeated. “I will fight to ensure that this kind of thing NEVER happens again. That my divine family finally starts to protect demigods. ALL demigods, not just our own children. Even if it means protecting them from other gods. This was WRONG. This... this was EVIL. I can’t go back in time to stop it from happening. But I can try to prevent a repeat.”

Light shone in Thalia’s eyes as she studied me. At last, she gave me a small smile. “Luke would have agreed. The Luke I knew, at least. Before... before everything happened.”

I smiled back at her. 

The world blurred and melted again (seriously, how many times was this going to happen? This had to be a record!)

When it cleared, we were still in Hal’s room, but back with Thalia and Luke. I checked the time. It was 7:01 pm.

Almost time for the leucrotae to eat.

“You haven’t escaped?!” I hissed to Thalia. She looked at me sadly.

“We escaped after this. We had to wait until...”

ZZZAAP-POP

Everyone except Thalia jumped. Past Thalia sat up grinning, holding a glowing jar of Greek fire.

“Somebody order a magic bomb?” she asked cheekily.

“..until that,” the present Thalia finished.

The clock turned over to 7:03 pm.

It was sunset.

Time for the leucrotae to feed.

Hal held out his hand to Thalia, silently asking for the jar. 

“Thalia,” Luke said. “Give Hal the Greek Fire.”

Past Thalia looked back and forth between Hal and Luke, indecision warring on her face. “But-”

“He has to,” Luke ground out, his voice laced with sorrow. “He’s going to help us escape.”

Oh. So this is how Hal died.

Past Thalia realized Hal’s and Luke’s plan at the same time I did. She blanched. “Luke, no.”

The bars continued to slowly rise, the leucrotae clacking their bone plates impatiently. 

“There’s no time!” Luke shouted. “Come one!”

Hal took the jar from Thalia, setting his face in a brave smile.

I knew that smile. That need to put on a brave face for the sake of others. I’d needed to use it several times in the past few months.

He nodded at Luke. I didn’t know why, but Luke seemed to get his meaning. Luke slipped a book and Hal’s dagger into his pack. Then Luke pulled Thalia into the closet with him.

“In here!” One of the leucrotae shouted, speaking for Hal. “I’ve got them trapped in the bathroom. Come on, you ugly mutts!”

The leucrotae ran to the bathroom.

Thalia and Luke burst out of the closet, sprinting for the open enclosure. They barely made it before the panel closed, Luke wedging it open with his golf club.

“Go, go, go!” he yelled. 

Thalia wriggled through as the golf club began to bend. 

Hal’s voice shouted from the bathroom, “You know what this is, you Tartarus scum dogs? This is your last meal!”

On of the leucrota tore away after Luke and Thalia. Luke punched it in the snout, distracting it long enough for the club to snap, closing the panel. 

As the two young demigods started crawling through a metal duct, I heard a battle cry from Hal.

His last words.

“For Apollo!”

The mansion exploded into a fireball.

The world blurred forwards. I felt like my mind was blurring too.

For Apollo? Why would he shout that? Why, when my existence had caused him nothing but misery?

And... he’d sacrificed himself to save Thalia and Luke. He could’ve let them die, like so many demigods before them. But he chose to die in their place.

“He was like you.”

I looked up, startle, and found myself looking at Meg.

“Huh?” I asked, not sure whether I had heard right.

“He was like you,” she repeated. “Like with you and the arrow. With Jason. He killed himself to give the others a chance to escape.”

I almost laughed. “Yeah, but he KNEW he was going to die. I don’t think I would’ve had the courage to go through with stabbing myself if I’d REALLY believed I’d die.”

“You would have,” she said with certainty. “I know you.”

I didn’t know MYSELF well enough to say that; yet, I couldn’t bring myself to disbelieve her. 

Will cut in. “Hal believed in you. That’s why he shouted that, at the end. He wanted you to see. He wanted you to be proud of him.”

“I am. I am so, so proud of him.” I said hoarsely. 

CLANG

I looked around. The world had cleared while we’d been talking. We appeared to be in some sort of warehouse.

Thalia and Luke crept towards the clanging noise. Ahead of them, a piece of metal quivered.

Something was there.

They inched their way over. Luke lifted the sheet of metal. Thalia readied her spear.

A hammer flew out, narrowly missing taking Luke’s head off.

“Woah!” Luke yelped, and grabbed the little girl who had just tried to give him a concussion. 

I took a look at her. She looked about seven years old, with blonde hair and intelligent grey eyes.

 Annabeth Chase.

She struggled and screamed in Luke’s grip. “No more monsters! Go away!”

“It’s okay!” Luke tried to hold her, attempting to calm her down, but to no avail.

“Thalia!” he shouted. “put your shield away! You're scaring her!”

She collapsed her shield and dropped her spear.

“Hey, little girl,” she said soothingly. “It’s all right. We’re not going to hurt you. I’m Thalia. This is Luke.”

“Monsters!” Annabeth yelled.

“No,” Luke said, still holding onto Annabeth. She wasn’t fighting quite as hard now. “But we know about monsters. We fight them too.”

He continued to hold her until she settled down and accepted the hug.

“You’re like me?” she asked suspiciously. 

“Yeah,” Luke confirmed. “We’re... well, it’s hard to explain, but we’re monster fighters. Where’s your family?”

Annabeth’s face screwed up in anger. Her chin quivered. “My family hates me. They don’t want me. I ran away.”

She was so, so young. To be on her own...

My blood froze.  If she’d been in the wrong place... if she’d run across the mansion instead of Luke and Thalia...

I shook those thoughts away. I could beat myself up about that more later. I already knew that scenario would be visiting my nightmares.

Thalia knelt in front of Annabeth, putting her eyes level with Annabeth’s. “What’s your name, kiddo?”

“Annabeth.”

“Nice name,” Luke told her, smiling. “I tell you what, Annabeth. You’re pretty fierce. We could use a fighter like you.”

Her eyes widened. “You could?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said earnestly. I smiled at him. If not for everything that happened, Luke would have made a good dad. I could see why he was made Counselor for the Hermes cabin. 

“How’d you like a real monster-slaying weapon?” he asked, pulling out the dagger Hal had given him. “This is Celestial Bronze. Works a lot better than a hammer.”

Annabeth took the dagger and studied it, looking at it in awe.

Luke continued. “Knives are only for the bravest and quickest fighters. They don’t have the reach or power of a sword, but they’re easy to conceal and they can find weak spots in your enemy’s armor. It takes a clever warrior to use a knife. I have a feeling you’re pretty clever.”

“I am clever!” she cried, beaming.

Thalia laughed and ruffled Annabeth’s hair. “We’d better get going, Annabeth. We have a safe house on the James River. We’ll get you some clothes and food.”

Annabeth’s smile wavered for a moment, doubt creeping across her face. “You’re... you’re not going to take me back to my family? Promise?”

My heart broke a little. No child should be this adamant about not returning to the people who are supposed to protect them.

Luke reached out, placing a hand on Annabeth’s shoulder. “You’re part of our family now. And I promise I’m not going to fail you like our families did us. Deal?”

“Deal!”

Past Thalia smiled at Luke approvingly. “Now, come on. We can’t stay put for long!”

“He broke his promise.”

I startled, looking up at the present Thalia. She stared at the three of them, a far away look in her eyes.

I knew. Annabeth had told me, after we’d flashbacked to the final battle with Kronos. That broken promise had cursed the dagger, making it the weapon from the Great Prophecy.

Seeing Luke make that promise, seeing the sincerity on his face... It made me doubt my own capacity to keep the promises I’d made. If even Luke could fall, what chance did I have? With my record of promise-breaking?

Yet I had to try. I HAD to.

I didn’t want to fail my family anymore.

I didn’t want anymore children’s deaths on my conscience.

I had to do better.

Maybe I’d fail.

But that was better than not trying in the first place.

The world blurred together for the final time. The four of us blinked awake. We were still standing in the burnt out husk of the mansion.

I looked down at my feet. There lay Hal’s skeleton, surrounded by snakeskin.

I smiled bitterly. He hadn’t deserved his fate. I hoped that he’d made it to Elysium. He deserved it.

“What HAPPENED?” 

I heard a shout. I looked to the side.

There stood a frantic-looking Nico Di Angelo.

Oh. Yeah. We WERE in that flashback for a while.

“It’s... kinda a long story.”

Will started explaining what had transpired to the son of Hades.

Carefully, gently, I removed Python’s skin from my dead son.

We’d give Hal the proper rights soon, once Nico was up to speed. 

For now, I had a promise to make.

 “Never again,” I told Hal. “Never again.”

[hollowgroverp]

     EMMA SAWYER

(age.) twenty six (species.) werewolf (occupation.) paramedic at hgfd (residency.) arrived june 2008 (mirror.) nina dobrev

❝  a pavement of the past

TW; Fire, death, bombing

Her birth was the result of a love story that romance novels were written about, the result of a marriage that was doomed from the beginning. Sofia Stefanov was a sweet natured, brilliant witch, a prodigy in the world of magic. She had the world at her feet, a doting father and a future brighter than her most vivid imagination could handle. Aleksander Stoykovska came from a broken home, a human unaware that he carried a gene that could change his life, the son of a painter and a lone wolf who split from the family the moment it became clear that it would not be easy to get the mother of his son to allow Aleks to trigger the werewolf curse that lay dormant in his nature. He was hot headed, bad tempered, always in trouble yet when he met Sofia it was clear that the two were immediately in love.

Yet, Sofia’s father disapproved and tried to intervene, and so Sofia and Aleksander fled Bulgaria for the united states where Aleksander dreamed of making a home for the love of his life, and a success of himself. To prove Konstantin wrong, to prove that he was worthy of someone like Sofia. Upon their arrival, they realised that Sofia was pregnant, and six months later they welcomed their own miracle: Milena Viktoria Stoykovska, born in the March of 1993. It was the first time he felt complete in his life, and the three of them settled into a small townhouse just outside of Seattle, Washington. But, it was too good to be true. Christmas 1995 saw the family celebrating with friends, Milena fast asleep and blissfully unaware upstairs. After everyone had gone, Sofia and Aleksander fell asleep, only to be awoken to the smell of smoke. Unwittingly to all three of them, Milena had manifested the first of her powers, pyrokinesis, and had set her room ablaze in her sleep.

The parents rushed to her room, Aleksander managing to lower their toddler to the ground where frantic neighbours had gathered in a panic to help. However, when it came time to escape themselves they were unable, instead trying to flee down the stairs. But, they were blocked. Sofia succumbed to the smoke, and out of mercy, Aleksander smothered her so that she wouldn’t have to suffer. Her death was his beginning, as he triggered his werewolf curse and fled the house unharmed. He was presumed killed in the fire, despite no body being recovered, and Milena was declared an orphan. Sent to the nearest emergency room with burns on her little legs, she was seen to by a young attending resident. David Sawyer was the attending ER Resident that night, and despite the fact he had two young children at home, he and his wife decided to foster young Milena, now named Emma by the social worker.

And so, she became Emma Sawyer. The middle child of three, her adoption was finalised when she turned five and something that was openly spoken about growing up. It wasn’t a secret, and the Sawyers were sure to tell her everything they knew of her parents. How much they clearly loved her, sacrificed their lives for her to live. As Emma grew up though, she began to display concerning signs of being, as the psychologists they saw put it, ‘disturbed’, a word that would stay with her for years to come. The Sawyers were unaware that the supernaturals had survived the third world war, and that their own daughter was a witch herself. The trauma of her early years had caused her to repress her magic, yet now she was flourishing they were manifesting once more. Fires with no cause were put down to pyromaniac tendencies, an awful temper blamed on mere childhood issues, but that wasn’t was truly bothered them about their middle child. What disturbed everyone about Emma the most, was the way she’d flinch from touch, claim she could see a persons death, claim to see something before it happened.

From predicting the abrupt death of a beloved teacher, to guessing correctly the nature of a neighbours illness, Emma’s parents took her to every professional they could think of. Whilst they tried to maintain her privacy, word got around to her peers and Emma was dubbed the crazy girl, the weird one. It put a strain on her relationship with her sister, the two girls being in the same year at school, Zoe suffered for having a ‘freak’ sister, and took this out on Emma. She felt isolated, lost, wondering what was so wrong with her that she saw these things, soon learning to keep them to herself, to hide her feelings when someone accidentally brushed up against her. It wasn’t until just after her fifteenth birthday that the answers she sought came in the form of her maternal grandfather. Having felt a great deal of remorse since his daughter had fled Bulgaria because of him, he had been searching for them, hearing about Sofia’s death and spending almost a decade tracing Emma. Explaining that she was a witch, she realised her visions were premonitions, glimpses of the future, that she was pyrokinetic to add to it. After months of communication between her parents and Konstantin, it was agreed that Emma could move to a safe haven for people like her. Where Konstantin had called home for ten years, and where he could offer the training and education she needed.

Emma moved to Hollow Grove in 2008, where she felt truly at home for the first time in her entire life. It was like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, and she was free. She was no longer the weird freak that saw things, her visions and her magic made her just like everyone else. She began to train intensively, attending the local high school and trying to adjust to being a normal teenage witch. As graduation approached, she began to think on classes for college, when she began to broach the idea of medicine, like her father and brother before her. Emma graduated from Hollow Grove University in 2015 and began to work as an ER nurse just a couple of months later. Yet, even her work there wasn’t enough, she was still painfully aware of the fact that there were people who didn’t always present to the ER when injured. Whilst supernatural healing was a miracle, she knew there had to be some care given – but what to do with these people who wouldn’t go to hospital? Setting a makeshift first aid area in her basement had merely started when she dragged a long werewolf off the street in her first year out of college, but word spread and quickly she became the go to for those who didn’t want to go to the ER. Forceful in her own quiet way, Emma kept the basement hospital a secret, knowing that the hospital would frown on it.

Emma as an adult began to thrive , revelling in the powers of being a witch. She still was erratic in her behaviour, reclusive and unwilling to engage in physical contact unless she had to, but slowly she began to open up. Become more confident in herself and her abilities. She grew close to her grandfather, unaware of how much like her birth mother she’d become, she had a close bond with the man who had so much regret about how things went with his daughter. How he wanted to make up for it by ensuring that her own daughter thrived and prospered. During the Spring Fling of 2018, Emma was doing exactly what he planned. She was popular at work and out of it, she was happy, content. Konstantin was about to embark on a book tour, promoting the latest in a series he’d been writing since Emma was a girl. The spring fling being one of their favourite events, he delayed the tour to attend.

The bombings that occurred on the second day, an attack from the Clave, left Emma unconscious and fighting for life in hospital. The moment he’d heard about the first round, Konstantin had forgone his own safety, heading into the carnage to find Emma, unaware that she had beed pulled out to safety. The second round of bombs went off, and Konstantin was killed on impact. His death sent Emma into a tailspin, resulting in her work in her basement being discovered and the resulting confrontation with her supervisor had Emma angrily lashing out and quitting her job. With Konstantin dead, she saw no reason to stay in Hollow Grove, forgetting everyone she had come to care about in her decade there, she upped and fled. Instead of fleeing to Seattle like everyone had expected, she flew to Bulgaria, where she found her aunt waiting for her. Viktoria was a bitter woman, having been jealous of Sofia and the attention that she monopolised from her father even after death, the witch sought out to destroy her niece, to ruin Sofia’s legacy.

Researching Aleksander, she found out about the man’s wolf heritage and realised that this same curse lay dormant in Emma. Under the pretence of teaching Emma to harness her powers more, she tricked an innocent bystander and placed him in Emma’s way whilst she was training with her pyrokinesis. Emma lost control, panicking she accidentally killed the man, triggering her werewolf curse.  Emma’s first full moon was painful, and all she remembers of the aftermath was remaining hidden away in her room after, a sobbing and confused mess. When Viktoria ‘discovered’ what happened, she told Emma to leave, and not return. She fled to a safe haven further away from Bulgaria, seeing refuge in a haven so similar to the one she called home once, but too scared to return to Hollow Grove. Finally, word got back to Hollow Grove and help was sent in the form of Lucy Danvers and William Collins, the two recovery agents bringing her back to where she is meant to be, where she belongs. Home. Now, Emma must learn to recover parts of herself and come to terms with the loss of her magic, but also the fact that she’s not the same person she was a few months ago.

Emma couldn’t settle back into town as well as she thought she could though, and a few weeks into her return she was already desperate to leave, too many questions in her mind about her family. About the side of her family that she hadn’t been aware of and the most important of all, did this mean her birth parents were alive? Until she found out they were potentially alive, she hadn’t thought about meeting them, the Sawyers were her parents. But to find that they could be had her questioning why they didn’t want to meet her. So, she began to track them down and eventually got word of her father in rural Montana, and without a thought she set off. But, Emma again was only faced with disappointment and an empty feeling as she came up with nothing. Aleksander was nowhere to be found. Realising he wanted nothing to do with her, she placed him far from her mind , at least as much as she could, whilst she worked on rebuilding her life in Hollow Grove.

During the 2019 Blood Moon, any semblance of peace she’d found was shattered in the attack, her beloved town broken once more — she began to question moving the Sawyers there. It wasn’t safe. A chance to visit other safe havens arose, helping out with training new EMTs and assisting where she could has found her perhaps thinking Hollow Grove isn’t the place for her family anymore.

❝  the nature of the beast

Emma just wants to do good for the world, and for her friends. She is inherently a good person, and she wants to try and be a person that her parents, the Sawyers and her birth parents, can be proud of. But, there’s always that fragile element to the brunette, as if at any moment she would break down and in a way to think that you would be right. Emma is very easy going, and looking for every piece of enjoyment to to live life to the fullest. Now that she is a werewolf, she is a little more reckless then she was before and she’s seeking to test out her new powers and for ways that she can be hurt to find out some way to feel human again. She’s struggling to comprehend the loss of her magic, to her she is finding it strange with no premonitions hanging over her head anymore but she also misses the feel of the fire running beneath her skin, and the connection with nature that she always had. Finding out who Emma is without her magic has left the girl lost and completely unsure of what her place is now, and her world has been shattered, leaving her to try and piece her life together as much as she can.

[commander-yinello]

I've been following your blog for a while now and I wanted to say that I literally fall in love with all your writing, you're so talented! May I request some Juzen? One during Zen's route where Zen is kind of into Mc but after the mountains talk Jumin realises he's in love with Zen and plans to confess to him at the party. I'll leave the rest to you, sorry it's not really detailed. If your not doing requests thank you for taking your time to read this anyway and I hope you are doing well! 😊🌸

Waaaaaah *becomes a puddle of goo* I’m so happy you like my writing, your lovely comment makes me go all skldjdsldjssdlj~ And I am always up for amazing requests like these. I’ve tried something a little different than what I usually do, I hope you enjoy

His father told him everything had to beweighed up in life, measure the net losses and gains for maximum profit. Thatwas the foundation of strong and clever business ethics. Jumin saw a lot ofgain in helping Zen, despite the fallen actor’s claims on the mountainside. TheRFA was stronger with Zen in it, and the RFA was important. It was a logicalchoice.

Then the sun slowly began to set, and Juminsaw Zen laugh, and sass him back, and smile – a smile of relief, a hope thatwas there thanks to him. And as his heartrate sped up, and his mind went slightlyblank from happiness, Jumin wondered if this time he had made a decision basedon unprofitable reasons.

***

The party started off with Zen’s flawlessspeech. No one believed Echo Girl anymore. And as the reporters ran after thelying actress for a statement, Zen let out a relieved sigh before lettingeveryone know he needed a quick break. He winked at MC before leaving the stage,and something clawed at Jumin’s heart.

There was only so much a man could keepinside before he would burst. Jumin knew what he felt was foolish. He repressedevery tiny fantasy he could to stop it from growing, to give him illusions ofthings that could never be. The pain in his chest was something he was used to.

Still, against every better judgement, Juminapproached MC. She was stunning in her black dress with an open back. No wonderZen was so enamored with her.

“I would like to speak with Zen first,” heasked.

MC tilted her head, rightly confused. Herephrased the question. “I need to speak with Zen as soon as he comes back. Itis very important. He’ll most likely head to you once he sees you.”

He hadto speak with Zen before he spoke with MC. Because he knew what Zen wasplanning to do. Because once they did, it was over. Jumin knew it and stilltried to delay the inevitable. A foolish endeavor of a foolish man who couldnot contain his emotions.

But if he didn’t take this chance, this highrisk, low profit chance, he would regret it.

Perhaps she saw his desperation. Perhapsshe could guess the motive behind it. “Sure, I’ll send him to you at once,” shereplied with a big smile. Or perhaps, she thought it was RFA business.

Jumin started to wish it truly was thelatter.

***

“What is so important that you needed tosee me right away?” Zen announced his arrival on the balcony by being direct,as always. His white jacket stood out well in the dark night.

Jumin had trouble turning towards him. JuminHan never had trouble looking at anyone. Fear and anticipation made him numb,made him finally face the now blossoming actor.

Zen was truly handsome. No, he was so muchmore than that. He was honest, outspoken, true to his own values. He cared, andin that one moment on the mountainside, he had accepted Jumin. Jumin had alwaysadmired him, and now he wanted more than admiration. That sliver of thought wasenough for Jumin to spill what was on his mind, even as he had spent the lastagonizingly long minutes trying to talk himself out of it.

He couldn’t hear himself talk. Not when hewas so focused on Zen’s expressions. Seemed there were a lot of ways to showsurprise, shock and confusion, all at once.

“I… just- whoa dude. I didn’t expect this.From you. Not from you,” Zen said, holding on the balcony. His stance wasexactly as when Jumin expressed his commercial plans at Zen’s secret place,except now there was no sunlight, there were no jokes and the void inside hisheart must have swallowed the beating organ whole.

In movies, the one confessing would notwait for a reply. Instead, they’d make another romantic move, sweeping theother off their feet, kissing them passionately so that they’d have no choicebut to see how much in love they were.

“I should go. I need to go,” Zen muttered.

Jumin was painfully reminded how his lifewas not a movie, as the balcony door slammed shut and left him alone.

If rejection was inevitable, why did itstill sting?

***

Sad teenagers in romance movies comfortedthemselves with ice-cream and drama series. Jumin comforted himself with morework. It was his own fault for letting himself get carried away. He held on tothat numb feeling on the balcony and did not allow any room for stray thought. Toavoid the RFA needlessly fussing over him, he left a message congratulating MCand Zen the morning after the party, and then put his phone on silence. He evenmuted Assistant Kang, knowing how close she was to the two. He feared byreading any follow-up messages, he would waver and drown in his own mind.

The first few nights he had passed out inbed, with documents littering his face and pillow.

After the fourth day at night, he finally daredto check his phone again. That’s when he discovered Zen had tried to call him. Atleast ten times a day. There were many other calls from the other RFA memberstoo, and pleading messages from Assistant Kang to finally answer his phone. Lastly,there was an angry message from the actor, stating he was going to C&Rfirst thing in the morning.

Jumin wondered if it was possible for aheartrate to go so fast it stood still. What did Zen want to say to him? DidZen seek revenge for his confession? Did someone overhear him, and use it tohurt the actor’s reputation? Did MC break up with Zen because of it? Too manyterrifying questions with no answer.

That night, he couldn’t sleep.

***

He didn’t need coffee. He was wide awake inhis office, staring at documents he couldn’t read. Zen would be here anytimesoon.

His phone rang and he picked up withoutthinking.

“Jumin, finally!” MC’s voice rang through, “We’vebeen trying to reach you for ages!”

“MC. I apologize for causing you so muchgrief. I assure you, it won’t happen again.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me. Have youspoken to Zen?”

He stared at his closed office door. “No, hehas yet to arrive. I’ll make sure to apologize to him as well, so you both can enjoyyour well-deserved time together.”

“Togeth- Jumin, what exactly do you thinkhappened at the party?”

Jumin leaned back on his chair, rubbing hisforehead. He didn’t want a step by step play of their romantic moment. “Iassume Zen gave you a beautiful bouquet of flowers and professed his love asplanned.”

Was that a giggle? “Oh, he gave me flowersalright. But he was so lost in thought, I had to ask him what was wrong. That’swhen he told me what had happened between you two.”

“I-“

“I don’t think he meant to tell me, it justleft him and he felt guilty for that. When I asked him how he responded, hesaid that he didn’t know what to say so he left. I told him that he’s an idiot,and he had to call you right away.”

He ran his free hand through his hair. “Youdid not have to say that. He was supposed to be with you.” That was, after all,the logical order of things.

“Pfft. I don’t know you guys for very long,but it’s obvious Zen always talks about you. He gave me flowers and you werethe first thing on his mind. What do you think that means?”

Jumin wasn’t sure what to say.

“Talk to him, please? You’ve made him siton it for four days.”

“I will.” A little chime on his companyphone told him he had a visitor. “He’s here.”

“Good luck!” MC last said before the callended.

The door opened to reveal Zen, who lookedlike he had ran from his house to the company, skin flushed and hair wild. Hismouth was slightly open, panting, ready to say a million thing, but upon seeingJumin he went silent, eyes wide but unable to utter a word, as if overwhelmed.

White brows furrowed, indiscernible thoughtsrunning across his face. Jumin noted how his expression was filled withanxiety, but not dread. “I need to tell you something,” Zen finally said, smoothingout his jacket and hair in a clear attempt to gather courage, and straighteninghis back to properly stare at the CEO-in-line. An attempt to stay calm, but clearlyZen was about to explode.

And Jumin wondered if that was how Zen hadfound him on the balcony, unsettled, out of place, taking the risk that every fiberof his being told him he shouldn’t. Zen wasn’t like him, he didn’t weigh potential,he followed his passion without hesitation.

Interestinghow it both led to the same thing in the end.

Jumin got up from his chair, not breakingthe connection of their gaze. There was that feeling again, the anticipationthat weighed on him on the mountainside and on the balcony. But this time, he alsofelt hope. The same hope he saw in red eyes that very carefully tracked hisevery move.

“I’m listening.”

[arcticdementor]

The past few years have witnessed the inception of a new genre of affluent lament — a kind of marriage of our disparate cultural obsessions with the misery memoir and the university. The progeny of this union is the memoir of the elite university education that confers status but destroys souls. The plot of such memoirs almost always begins with a young scholar thirsting for wisdom who encounters our meritocratic educational apparatus, excels by its standards but is morally disfigured by them, wins admission to an Ivy League school, discovers that the place overlooks his secret cravenness and grants him success with professors and attractive women anyway, and is driven to the extremes of existential angst for a brief period by this discovery. When our wiser and more cynical scholar finally recovers, he concludes that elite education is rotten, graduates from the school, and proceeds to a brilliantly successful career as a writer, abetted by the publication of his memoir decrying the rottenness of his elite education. If these books don’t make obvious the devastating costs of an Ivy League education, what could?

The genre seems to have taken off after the publication in 2005 of Ross Douthat’s Privilege, a memoir of his undergraduate years at Harvard. It was followed by David Samuels’s memoir-disguised-as-reportage, The Runner, in 2008; the most recent contributor to the cause is Walter Kirn, whose Lost in the Meritocracy indicts Princeton. If one were inclined to include former Yale professor William Deresiewicz’s partially autobiographical 2008 essay, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” among these laments, then all three bulwarks of American status-lust — Harvard, Yale, and Princeton — will have come in for a beating. It may be a partially or, if you’re really cynical, wholly deserved beating, and our clever meritocracy lamenters unfurl their verbal whips in so many directions that they do hit some of the truly rotten parts of our elaborate educational mechanism, but the requirements of memoir always direct their thoughts back to crafting narratives of their innocence and corruption.

…

All remark on the class disparities and the snobbery among the student bodies. Douthat and Kirn register the now-ubiquitous complaint against radicalism and obscurantism in the humanities, Kirn and Samuels home in on the arbitrariness of the system of standardized tests and melodramatic personal essays that selects Ivy League admits and condemns the rejects to a life of dullness and obscurity with state-school diplomas, and so on. But there remains something implausible in these authors’ combination of purported naïveté about the meritocratic game and their canny manipulation of it. They manage the impressive feat of becoming unwitting victims of the same system they so cynically and effectively exploited, and then they ask us to sympathize with the raw deal they’ve gotten.

…

This precocious knowingness is essential to the genre. Unless one has been cursed with the kind of crippling cultural deprivation associated with backwoods religious homeschooling and a name like Jedediah Purdy, it’s nearly impossible to make an unironic claim to childhood innocence. So these writers admit to knowing all along that meritocracy is an elaborate status game, that college admissions is about faking the appearance of achievement and intellectual seriousness. But even as they concede that their outsized lust for admission to elite schools deformed their character, these writers insist that they seriously believed that attending these schools would make them whole again. As Douthat puts it, after the trials of being unpopular and overlooked in high school, Harvard “became a beacon of hope to my semi-alienated teenage mind.... At Harvard, athleticism and good looks and popularity would count far less than the things that really mattered: native brilliance, and intellectual curiosity, and academic achievement.” College would transport them away from the craven striving of their high schools to a world of integrity, refinement, truth, and beauty. How such an idyll would be created out of a class of craven strivers exactly like themselves seems not to have come under their consideration.

…

Unsurprisingly, once they arrive on campus and confront a place full of perfect reflections of themselves, all their pleasant illusions are shattered, and they indict their classmates as phonies. The rich — targets we love to hate because all Americans, and particularly the readers of such Ivy League laments, are supposedly part of the long-suffering middle class — come in for the harshest attacks. Douthat’s formative Harvard experience consists in being rejected from a club so exclusive that no nonmember has glimpsed its interior for two centuries. Samuels is tyrannized at Harvard by his roommate’s vast collection of neckties. But it is Kirn’s account of the cruelty of the wealthy that most absurdly plays to popular resentments — he alleges that during his junior year, he was led into a car by “a handsome blond campus prince — the descendant of a legendary industrialist,” blindfolded, and driven for hours out into the country. When he removed the blindfold, he found himself in front of “an actual castle, with countless tall windows, pediments, and columns.” In the middle of New Jersey. “My family’s estate. Behold, poor serf! Behold a power you will never know!” the scion told him, and drove off leaving him stranded.

…

Here again, the conventions of memoir undermine the meritocracy lament’s broader argument against elite education. All these writers want to drive home the quite valid criticism of the hypocritical “diversity policy” at these schools, which Deresiewicz describes as “the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.” The superficial diversity of race and ethnicity masks the underlying social homogeneity that arises from selecting a student body almost exclusively from America’s wealthy suburbs, its elite urban enclaves, and its top hundred high schools. The dominance of affluent culture at elite schools may be a real problem, but not for these authors, who are themselves the children of white businesspeople and professionals. But how else to demonstrate the problem in a memoir except to inflict it on your subject, who happens to be you? The results are barely believable claims of victimization of the rich at the hands of the really rich that do little more than provoke a pointless game of poorer-than-thou, in which the authors’ own claims to victimhood can be easily contested on the grounds that other students have it even worse.

The rich are just as corrupt as we’d like them to be in these stories, but, as blogger and English professor Margaret Soltan has pointed out, these caricatures can backfire: “One reasonable conclusion to draw from Lost in the Meritocracy is that only extremely rich people should go to schools like Princeton. Kirn describes a college culture in which the vast majority of the students — rolling-in-dough Percodan-snorters — are happy and well-adjusted, and the tiny minority of middle-class students like Kirn are miserable and alienated.” Indeed, Kirn himself points out that this is a problem inherent in the idea of meritocracy: “A pure meritocracy, we’d discovered, can only promote; it can’t legitimize. It can confer success but can’t grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow.” Possibly to ward against such a reactionary conclusion, Kirn and his fellow Ivy League-lamenters take aim at every other student type as well — the radical activists and the establishment politicos, the ethnic priders and the anglophiles, the prude and the prurient, the women and the men, the studious and the lazy — all phonies.

…

This contradictory hatred forms the crux of the problem with the meritocracy lament — the authors urge us to save the elite university but describe no one in it as worth saving. The misery memoir makes a terrible platform for serious social commentary — it is too bound up with the author’s own ego and his effort to distinguish himself from the mass of his very similar peers to be able to offer much insight. What they seem to be aiming at is the authority and historical vision of Allan Bloom, but the result is something that rarely gets beyond the pint-sized resentment of Holden Caulfield. In reality, as their own logic inexorably leads us to conclude, the authors are really no better than their classmates, and if they want to expose the rottenness of elite education, they must either excuse themselves from the story and shine a light on these schools objectively, or they should do us the service of finding the kind of students who are what they wish they had been — sincere, honest, diligent, and intellectually independent — and figuring out how they got to be that way.

…

Part of their difficulty lies in the fact that sincere, serious, and intellectually honest students persist beside them — a handful among their own classmates, but more often, at other schools — and their character proves difficult to fit into the meritocracy lament paradigm. Theoretically, no one should be able to pass through the system and remain whole, so how did these students manage to do so? One answer is that they sought after some purpose besides head-patting from adults and distinctions for their résumés.

For some, that purpose is salvation. Religious students are anathema to Samuels and Kirn, who share in common early repudiations of their own faiths. For Samuels, admission to Harvard was his ticket out of the repressive Orthodox Jewish world of his childhood, and Kirn claims to have discovered early on that the Mormon Church was just another branch of the meritocratic system, rewarding shallow displays of oratory with hot chicks to make out with in the parking lot after services.

But religious colleges in America have been sources of explicit opposition to the decadent, established elite ever since Yale was founded in 1701 to preserve Puritan orthodoxy against what some viewed as the increasing laxity of Harvard’s faculty. The social status of these schools seems to vary indirectly with their denominational orthodoxy — the Newman Guide to Catholic colleges, for example, heaps its praises on such schools as Christendom College and Franciscan University of Steubenville for their “vibrant and pervasive spiritual life,” but that’s not enough to sneak these schools into even those backhanded “best colleges you’ve never heard of” guides, not to mention the canonical U.S. News rankings. At the same time, the Newman Guide laments the decline of Notre Dame into degenerate secularism, and Georgetown University, perhaps the highest-status Catholic school in America, doesn’t even merit a mention on the Newman list.

…

Where the meritocracy lamenters come closest to getting at the source of the moral distortions perpetuated by meritocracy is where they put their personal grudges and ambitions aside to report on what is actually happening at these universities. From these accounts emerges a common thread of abdicated adult responsibility. In part, the theme arises out of the conventions of memoir as well — these are all coming-of-age stories, and coming of age is always to some degree a process undertaken alone. However, it is no coincidence that some of the most memorable absurdities described by Kirn and Douthat are moments in which adult authority is notably wanting.

…

Who would leave this kind of money to the sole discretion of a bunch of nineteen-year-olds? It might be said that such responsibility is good practice for a future in which graduates of these clubs will go on to manage even larger sums in investment banking portfolios and national budgets, and perhaps that’s true, at least for those who aren’t caught pocketing the loose change first. But at bottom, the Suzanne Pomey incident illustrates the refusal of adults at Harvard — and, indeed, outside of it — to exercise not just punitive but moral authority over what Douthat calls “the high-IQ club.” Douthat describes the glee with which the campus derided her after the embezzlement was made public, and suggests that justice was served when she was sentenced to probation (the judge argued that “no purpose would be served by a sentence of incarceration”) and denied her Harvard diploma, a punishment that amounts to, as Douthat puts it, being “expelled from the paradise of the American overclass.”

Only that’s not quite how it worked out, or how it ever works out with the children of the meritocracy. Once one attains the requisite credentials — the GPA, SAT, and hours of tutoring underprivileged children — then it becomes increasingly difficult to justify exclusion from elite circles on the basis of mere character flaws. Pomey, like the more recent Harvard disgrace Kaavya Viswanathan, who was found to have plagiarized portions of her much-touted first novel in 2006, fled to the shelter of an elite law school to rebuild her respectability after the Harvard embezzlement flap. Gina Grant, whose admission to Harvard was famously rescinded in 1995 after it became known that she had murdered her mother (a fact she omitted from her application), graduated instead from Tufts. Moral considerations should not stand in the way of a person’s clearly demonstrated “potential,” which may be the only thing the adults in these books value in education and the only realm in which they are willing to exercise authority.

…

In her essay “The Crisis in Education,” Arendt described education as the situation in which “authority in the widest sense has always been accepted as a natural necessity, obviously required as much by natural needs, the helplessness of the child, as by political necessity, the continuity of an established civilization which can be assured only if those who are newcomers by birth are guided through a pre-established world into which they are born as strangers.” And Kirn himself corroborates the value of such authority after he suffers a karmic bout of muteness caused by his lifetime of abusing language to get ahead: “What I learned from [Uncle Admiral], his master lesson — the one that would help me reconstitute my mind after it dissolved at Princeton, worn down by loneliness, drugs, and French philosophy — was that the world could indeed be grasped and navigated if one met it with a steady gaze. Matter wasn’t truly solid, no, but it was packed tightly enough to set our feet upon.”

This is essentially what the adults in these books have removed from the curriculum and from education more broadly. No longer certain of anything about the world, the adults of the last two generations have given up trying to pass it on — the culture, politics, and institutions that have constituted American civilization as a species of the West — but they have found nothing with which to fill the holes left behind. They have lost credibility, and, regrettably or happily depending on whom you ask, ceded authority so that succeeding generations can start from scratch and figure out how to fix things. One of the notable products of this abdication of responsibility has been the rise of the educational meritocracy that continually rewards “aptitude,” which seems like something everyone can still agree is good to have and adults are willing to reward, even when they cannot agree on the essential question of what is worth directing one’s aptitude towards. The result is a system that produces an elite that has no clear idea of its own purpose: “I’d been amassing momentum my whole life,” Kirn explains, “and I knew only one direction: forward.... No one ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient.”

[cooperjones2020]

To breathe the fire we was born in

Summary: Filling the prompt “Smut or rather smut with feelings where Jughead wants to have sex with Betty while they look at themselves in the mirror, but she's feeling insecure about watching herself. He persuades her to do it, because watching her come is the hottest thing he has ever seen and he wants her to see that too.” Also turned into fluff and domestic/vacation/future!bughead. Also Dom!Jug cause that’s just how I roll.

A/N: Soundtrack to this fic is (obviously, as you will see) Springsteen’s “Born to Run” album, specifically the A side, but really you should just listen to all of it.Title’s from “Backstreets” off that same album.

Word Count: 3,026

Rating: E (aka smutty smut smut below the jump)

ao3—>http://archiveofourown.org/works/11791893

It’s their last night in the little log cabin in the mountains. From her seat on the porch step, Betty watches as the watercolour sunset melts away, only to be replaced by a circus troupe of lightning bugs.  She stretches out and crosses her legs, brown and bare under a loose dress, and leans back on her hands. Dried dirt falls off her toes in clouds of dust from where she’d tiptoed through the mud in search of cattail stalks and garlic mustard for their salad earlier.

The screen door behind her bangs shut and she tilts her head back to watch, upside down, as her boyfriend hands her a glass of wine and comes to sit beside her.

She shuffles closer to rest her head on his shoulder and slips her arm through his. The night air is still muggy, so the skin of his shoulder is damp where it comes out of the strap of his white tank top.

“I’m not ready to go home.”

“Me either.”

“Are you sure we have to go back?”

“I got no less than five texts from Archie yesterday about what a little monster Scout is being. I normally don’t get that many texts from him in a week.”

Betty laughs. “I got some from Veronica too. In retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have left a fifty pound sheepdog puppy with a guy who forgets to feed himself sometimes and a girl who thinks dogs should fit in purses so you can carry them on the subway.”

“Yeah well, you live and you learn. But that’s tomorrow’s problem.” Jughead turns and kisses Betty’s hair before resting his cheek on her head. “Tonight, the real world doesn’t exist. I have twelve more hours of having you all to myself.”

“Plus the two and half hours back to Riverdale and then three more home.”

“You’re sure we have to have lunch with your mother?”

“Stop it,” Betty nudges him with the elbow looped through his. “Mom’s really excited. And we haven’t been home since Polly’s wedding.”

“I know.” Jughead releases a long-suffering sigh. “I’m just not looking forward to more pointed comments about you busting your ass and your earning potential and the ‘instability of artistic careers.’ I know you’re basically supporting me and this relationship isn’t fifty fifty right now, but—”

“The book will sell, Jug.”

“Yeah. And maybe I’ll get lucky and there’ll be an email from my agent waiting for me.”

“Hey, we said no email-checking on this trip.”

“I’ll wait till we’re within the town limits. Then if there’s nothing, I’ll have at most five minutes to be disappointed before Alice Cooper commandeers all my brain cells.”

Betty smiles up at him, the corner of her lips curving down. “C’mere.”

Jughead tilts his head down toward her and she captures his lips in a kiss. Neither makes a move to deepen it, so it’s sweet, smouldering with the promise of things both past and to come. She sighs when she lets go and when she opens her eyes, Jughead’s are still closed, a dreamy smile on his face. More than ten years and, still, she feels that sweet ache in her chest whenever she looks at him. She lifts her glass and it catches the light, reflecting the facets of the new weight on her left hand.

“Now then, if this is to be our last night in Eden, I want you to dance with me.” Their cabin had come with a turntable and a collection of classic rock vinyls that had caused JB to text her a disturbingly long string of emojis when Betty sent her a photo a couple of days ago. When Jughead refilled their wine just now, he put on Springsteen’s “Born to Run” album, and so the music floats out the window on the evening breeze.

He opens his eyes and squints at her. “Only because it’s our last night.” Then he kisses her on the tip of the nose and pulls her to her feet.

After a minute or two of awkward shuffling, they find a rhythm, barefoot on the bare dirt. Her nails scratch at the nape of his neck and his thumb sweeps across the back of her hand where he holds it.

By the third track, Jughead gets into it, twirling her and dipping her with a skill that she knows he has, but that always surprises her when it emerges. He swallows her laugh in a kiss while she’s bent back, then he launches her forward, catching her against his chest and hugging her tight. Eventually, they settle into a gentle sway, her face in his neck and his arm wrapped around the small of her back, fingers brushing the space between her hip bone and her ribs.

Their mellow rocking lulls her into a trance so that she doesn’t even notice when the music stops. But Jughead breaks it with a husky whisper in her ear: “Have you thought any more about my idea?”

She rubs her cheek on his shoulder before looking up at him. “Yeah, but I’m just not sure about…um, about it.”

“Well, not to put any pressure on you, but we are running out of time.”

She murmurs, “Mhm.”

“And, you know, we’ve done much kinkier shit than this. I seem to recall a certain favourite Hitchcock blonde of mine in a leather get up in a hotel in San Francisco”

“I know, but it’s not that.”

“What is it then, baby?”

“It’s just…Mom’s not wrong when she says I’m working all the time. I can’t remember the last time I went to the gym and we’ve been eating so much take out lately. Some of my shorts are feeling a little snug.”

He pulls back and raises his eyebrows at her. “Really? That’s what you’re worried about, that your ass will look fat? I’ll have you know I stare at that ass every day and every day it just looks better and better.”

She sighs. That’s not what she means. “You may have a slightly biased opinion.”

“So? Plus,” he pauses to drop a kiss on her shoulder. “You don’t even have to see it. I want you to watch yourself, that means face front.”

It’s not exactly about her ass, but the morning after they’d arrived she had caught him looking back and forth between it, where she stood in her panties and one of his t shirts in the bathroom brushing her teeth, and the antique standing mirror in the corner of the bedroom. It’s an ostentatious thing. Ornate and clunky with carved supports and lions’ paws for feet.

She spit and came to stand in the doorway. “What are you looking at, Jug?”

He smiled at her sleepily from the bed. “You, beautiful.”

Betty rolled her eyes and jumped on the bed so she landed beside him on her stomach. “And?”

“I was just thinking of how handy this mirror here is going to be.”

“Yeah, what for?”

He turned dark eyes on her and his voice dropped an octave. “Fucking you while you watch.”

Betty felt all the blood rush to her face. “Jughead!”

“What? Doesn’t that sound hot? I can’t think of anything better. We can put on a show for all the ghosts that must haunt this place.”

“What kind of ghosts haunt vacation cabins in the Adirondacks?”

“The kind of repressed nineteenth century ones that lived here before it was a vacation cabin.”

“So you want to spook the spooks with our crazy sex life?”

“Exactly.”

She kissed him before bouncing back out of the bed. “I’ll think about it if you get up and brush your teeth. I want to go on that hike.”

He caught her around the waist and pulled her back. “But I want to stay in bed and ravish you until it’s dark again.”

“There’s one flaw in your plan. There’s no food up here.”

While he contemplated solutions to that problem, she escaped his grasp and thundered down the stairs, mind whirring with the visual he’d planted there.

He’s still slowly spinning them to the sonata of the bullfrogs and the crickets. She knows he can tell her resolve is wavering. Because she does want to. Anything he suggests in that tone and she’s a goner, molten heat lapping at her stomach.

“Come on, Betts”

“I don’t know, Juggie”

“I’ll do five things on your list.”

“You really want it?”

And she does trust him completely, trusts him to love her and to not see the extra ten pounds where they’ve settled on her hips. It’s her own gaze she’s afraid of.

Somehow, in the course of their dancing, he’s snuck a thigh between hers and he pulls her against him in just the right way. His voice is rough, scratchy.

“Think about it, Betty. You, naked in my lap riding me. Your tits bouncing—”

“My thighs jiggling.”

He pinches her hip before continuing. “The contrast of your skin again mine. Watching yourself fall apart. I love you. You coming is the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. I want you to know how glorious you are.”

With her back to the house, his eyes are lambent in the porch light. They hold the answers to all of her questions. And they hold the promise that’s sustained her since she was a teenager, frightened and angry but never again alone.

So, she nods against his neck and presses a kisses to his jawline. She feels the muscles move as he smiles and the burst of joy in her chest is like unlocking a door and stepping through to the sunlight. She breathes deeply, thankful in the knowledge that he’ll once again help her to conquer her fears.

Inside, Jughead breaks away from her to flip the record so “Born to Run” can chase them up the stairs. Betty extinguishes all the lights and they meet at the landing.

The stairs creak as they climb them, the old house protesting at the friskiness of its young, lovestruck inhabitants. Yellowed lace curtains flutter like handkerchiefs lifted in horror.

Jughead pauses to take her mouth in a kiss, his hands hurriedly unbuttoning her dress and sliding inside to brush against her breasts until her nipples pucker. Then he tugs her hand and her dress flows behind them in his haste.

The old lamps in the bedroom still have incandescent lightbulbs which—between that and the scarves arranged artfully over the top of them—will at least be more flattering than their more environmentally-friendly alternatives. Betty’s thankful for small mercies, and for the warm, yellow glow glancing off the pine walls and bathing the room in soft light and shadowed corners.

Jughead grabs the chair from its place beside the table and slides it over the uneven wooden floor boards until it’s a few feet in front of the mirror. Then he frowns at it and slides it back a little further. Betty stands in the doorway, bunching the material of her dress in her hands.

“Come here.” He pulls her to him so they’re standing in front of the chair, and hugs her back to his chest. His arms form a stripe of brown where they hug her pale stomach.

“Look at me, Betty.” Her eyes find his in the mirror. “I want you to let go and let me take care of you, okay?” She nods. “Good.” Then he slides one of her arms up so it’s behind his head and he kisses her so thoroughly the air whooshes all the way down her body and back up and she’s lightheaded.

He’s playing with her breasts, pinching and pulling and stroking, and she’s getting antsy, rubbing her ass against him. He releases her mouth with a scrape of his teeth against her bottom lip.

“Now look at yourself again. Look how pink and swollen your lips are. And look at your chest heaving and that pretty blush that spreads down. I wonder what I’d have to do to get it to reach your belly button.” He brushes her hair so it rests over her far shoulder and nips at her ear before kissing her neck. Betty has always hated her pale skin, how anyone can tell what she’s feeling by how she flushes so easily. Once, she’s pretty sure she blushed just cause someone looked at her funny. But when Jughead describes it, when she sees through his eyes, she feels beautiful.

Then his hands reach up and push her dress to the floor, his foot kicking it away so she’s standing in front of him, in front of the mirror, in only her days of the week underwear—it’s the wrong day too. She’s wearing her Thursday panties on a Sunday.

But his hand skims down the plane of her stomach and brushes against her and she loses her train of thought. He sucks a hickey onto the back of her neck as he touches her over the damp cotton.

“Are you wet for me?” He hits a spot that sends an electric current through her body and she gasps. “Yes.”

“Are you ready to take these off then?”

“Please.”

“Go on then.” And she does, bending over and then kicking them away while he slides off his own jeans and tank top. Then he pulls her back against him, all warm flesh and goosebumps. His cock nestles in the cleft of her ass and she fights the urge to roll her hips.

He uses one of his feet to slide hers farther apart, then reaches a hand back down. He dips a finger inside her then spreads the moisture around and strums her clit, before repeating the circuit.

“Do you need a warm-up?”

“N-no,” she manages to stutter out.

“Okay.” He lets go of her to sit on the chair, then pulls her back and guides her onto his lap.

“Jug?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Fuck me now.”

“You got it.” Then he spreads his knees so hers are hooked over his and she can see herself, so wet she glistens in the mirror.

“Lean up for a second.” She complies and feels him lining himself up.

When she sinks down, her eyes roll back in her head, this position stretching the muscles in a new way.

She makes a tentative circle with her hips.

“There you go, honey.” Jughead peppers kisses across her shoulder blades as she experiments with direction and pace until she finds a rhythm that hits her clit on every pass. He intertwines one hand with hers and hugs it against her, while the other continues to caress her breasts.

Her gaze flits around, from their hands to objects in the room. Whenever it lands on the mirror, he’s staring at her, his gaze focused on where their bodies join, on where he slips in and out of her. She knows it should be lewd, obscene. But god if it isn’t the hottest thing she’s ever seen.

After a few minutes of letting her be in charge, she can feel him tensing beneath her, can feel him itching to push them harder. So she leans back and lets her head fall onto his shoulder. She lets him take control of her and lets him free her from herself.

He scoots forward on the seat of the chair so he can brace his legs on the floor for better leverage. His hands move to her hips as he thrusts upward and pulls her down in time. She knows when he starts to lose control because his hips begin to stutter and he pulls back, slowing them down and wrapping one arm back around her stomach while the other moves to rub gentle circles on her clit.

She clenches her hands on the ropey muscles of his arm and squeezes her eyes shut as she feels her own orgasm rushing towards her.

“Are you close?” She nods with her head still on his shoulder. Then she feels him skim a hand up her back and cord his fingers through her hair. He tilts her head forward. “Open your eyes, Betty.” It takes a tremendous amount of effort, but she does and she meets his in the mirror. Her mouth falls open and she knows she’s panting, a high-pitched yelping noise that she can’t control.

His whisper in her ear sends shivers down her spine. “Look at yourself. This is what I see when I close my eyes at night. When I rub one out in the shower thinking of you. When I look at you, I remember this gorgeous, glazed look on your face and I know I put it there. Because you’re mine. You’re mine, Betty Cooper, forever and always.”

Then he sucks a kiss below her ear and she’s gone.

In the years they’ve been together, Jughead’s given her more orgasms than Rain Man could count. He’s given her fireworks and starbursts and glass shattering and earthquakes. Her favourite, though, is the wave the starts in the soles of her feet and rolls through her, curling everything from her toes up to hair, a slow contraction and release that leaves her breathless.

When she gets her breath back, Jughead’s forehead is pressed into her shoulder blade and she can feel his heavy breathing. She can also feel their hot come, where it’s begun to seep out and roll down her thigh.

He lifts her off and holds her steady while he stands, a move for which she feels an appreciation she can’t put into words at the moment. When she can stand on her own, she sneaks into the bathroom to pee and clean herself up.

When she comes back out, Jughead has collapsed onto the bed. She crawls toward him and snuggles up by his side. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and plays with a strand of her hair as she strokes a foot up and down his calf.

“Maybe we should look into getting a cheval mirror.”

She feels more than hears his answering chuckle as it reverberates in his chest beneath her ear.

[fiction-queen-blog]

The Uchihas

Pairing: NaruSasuNaru Genre: Superheroes, Power ranger wannabes, Comedy, Supernatural and modern. highschool

Chapter 1 

My gaze was fixated on the ground when I walked through the gates of hell. The tiles were dirty. Every  few  meters there was another piece of gum I already felt sick just looking at it.

It appeared to me that these bastards of a teenagers couldn’t even throw a piece of gum away without fucking up.

I looked up, my sixth sense was tingling and I was right when I saw the dumbasses of the school stand by their locker and look at me like I was an alien, speaking of getting alienated.

I smiled by my own joke, but it freaked more people out. Perfect.

“Nightsky, no hoodies inside the sch-” I glared up at whoever the fuck was talking to me. The teacher shut up right away, and I continued my way to my locker. I have been in this hellish High School for three years now, and I still didn’t know my way around. I wasn’t much of a school person. I barely showed up, and when I did I was either high or drunk. But hey, I was never both.

You would think I have build a reputation of a badass here, but I haven’t.

Simply because when somebody imagines a badass they don’t see a slim, short, pale guy with one arm. Yes, one fucking arm.

I looked at my empty left sleeve. I’m missing my lower arm, and I always hear people talk about it. They wonder if I was born this way or if something had happened.

I don’t like nosy people, so I make up stories.Ýes, every time somebody asked me, I made up a new story about how I lost my arm. It varies between born this way to losing it in the war of Vietnam. Believe it or not, these Konoha idiots believe every juicy story they manage to get their nasty claws on. However, one story actually remained and I don’t even remember  it myself, but I knew it had to do with me cutting my own arm off because “The voices told me to”. These dumbasses.

I stared at my locker, trying to remember the combination. It has been 6 months since I started going to school on a regular basis because my fucking new  super family forced me to. I will come back to that “super”.  

I looked around me, placing my only hand on the lock, a soft purple glow appeared around my palm and I broke the lock. I opened my locker seen the one thing I was looking for, my pencil case. Now I had some pens to doodle with during these damn lectures. I grabbed it and didn’t even bother to close the damn locker. If anybody tried stealing my books, they would do me a favor.

You are probably wondering what the fuck I did to the lock and no I am not a witch. Actually it depends on what you mean with ‘witch’. It is a long story, but my story ..It will be a confusing if I don’t explain.

I sat down next to window and threw my bag on the seat next to me. The teacher was writing something on the blackboard and I put my earbuds in so I won’t have to hear his fucking voice interrupting my thoughts.

I should probably start by introducing myself. I am Sasuke Nightsky, and I was born in the land of Sound, a third world country where there are always conflicts. No, I don’t remember anything from my days in that country. What I do know is that I was a month old and my parents died in a bomb explosion, together with hundreds of others. My annoying crying ass was taken by the Konoha government. Me, together with thousands of others kids.

Kind, right?

Well no, these political fuckers  used these kids in a  project to create human war weapons. They mutated all these kids. Many died on the spots and since the results weren’t significantly big. The funds were pulled and as small consolation, these hopeless kids were released in Konoha’s foster care system. At least it wasn’t a third word country, right?  I can’t judge. I never got adopted. I can’t blame them either. People who adopts kids take the pretty ones, leaving the ugly, weird ones  to fend for themselves.

I was never the type of person to obey the rules. The nun who took care of me  beat me up on a regular bases. It would vary from a slap on the wrist with a ruler, to getting caned to being hit with a belt.

It was abuse, I know that and II am not gonna justify their actions. I have scars on my back proving how wrong they were. However, I wasn’t an innocent angel myself. Now I think about it, even I would have smack the shit out of myself.  I could be sat down in an empty room and still cause trouble. That is why they were sure I was the child of the devil. I think the priest came about once a week to push my head in holy water. They weren’t entirely wrong, but I am not the child of the devil. I am the devil.

I chuckled at my own joke, I saw the teacher look at me from the corner of his eyes. I glared back, causing him to immediately look away.

I am not really the devil. To understand we go back to the human war weapon project that had failed. Many of the kids had died in the first five years after the project crashed. Cancer, heart failure, liver failures. You get the general idea. I have been told only 5 survived, and those who survived were the ones that had awakened their chakra.  

When I heard about this I thought the same thing: What Marvel comic have they tried to copy?

A man named Madara Uchiha was also one of five. He got adopted by the head scientist of the project who died a few years back.  Madara and his little brother Izuna both awakened their chakra around the age of 13. They have tried mastering it ever since. Along their journey they have met Shisui. He was a cop and awakened his chakra during a shoot off. He was adopted right after the project failed by a cop named Kagami. Then Itachi joined in. He had lightly awakened his chakra by the age of seven, but repressed it till the age of twenty. He had been adopted by a lesbian couple. One was a banker and the other worked in a law firm. During that time Itachi was a second year law student. It speaks for itself that he dropped out after knowing the truth and joined Madara’s wannabe avengers team.

They had a couple of good years, they have achieved things no army in the world could dream off. Madara had decided to separate themselves from the government. So, it is really his own organisation that keeps the world peace.

The first time I had heard of ‘The Uchihas’, I laughed. They took over the T.V. At some point there was even a cartoon of them. I was a  fifteen years old runaway teenager and I knew the powers they had, I had. But I was no hero, in fact..I used my chakra only for selfish reasons. I manipulated people, stole stuff, killed people.

Don’t get me wrong,they were bad people, but I killed them for my own selfish reasons. I think one time one of the reasons were that they had bad breath. Them being a mafia organisation was just something on side. I was more of a villain that was under their radar. I planned on keeping it that way.

Until one day, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was an attack down town. Bomb explosion, smoke everywhere. It was thick and almost impossible to look through with the normal eye. The Uchihas arrived shortly after, doing whatever they were doing. I hid in an alley. I didn’t only look out for the manics trying to kill every civilian on the street. I was also looking out for The Uchihas. I put my scarf over my mouth and nose and tried to sneak away from the scene. That is when I heard some kids screaming. I turned my head to the left, seeing through the fog a few kids holding each others while crying loudly. Another explosion was heard and the building where they were standing in front collapsed. I guess someway being raised Christian had done those kids some right. It almost felt if I didn’t do anything I would have gotten caned. So I went against my own morals and ran towards them. Purple chakra surrounded my fist and I hit the collapsing building before it could hit those damn kids. It shattered in pieces and the kids looked in awe. I had never seen anyone look at me like that. I wasn’t going to get used to it either.

“Get the fuck away” I told them and they ran for their lives. That is when I turned around and saw one of The Uchiha look right at me. I knew he saw what I did. I knew he knew. He knew I knew.

I ran that day, and I heard him shout after me, following me. But I was fast and even with one hand I was quite the free runner.  That Uchiha had to stop because, unlike me,he had some morals and couldn’t leave the scene to chase me. I remember exactly what he said,

“You are one of us! You can’t walk away when the world needs you!”

I laughed and I told him, “I ain’t no hero” before I disappeared. Tch...He was such wannabe captain America.

I knew The Uchihas were skilled, I only didn’t expect them to get to me that very next day. I was at my apartment. The one I had manipulated the landlord into given to me. I had ordered pizza, and don’t judge me for waking up at noon and eating pizza as brunch. I get reminded of that daily by the other Uchihas.

The doorbell rung and I got up from the couch, seeing a very cute delivery guy. He smiled kindly towards me and handed me the pizza.

“That is then 7 bucks” He had said.

“Thanks, I appreciate it” I looked at the man and I saw his smile disappear.

“Sharingan won’t work on me” I was surprised for like a tenth for a second. I didn’t need to go to school to know this guy was one of The Uchihas. The fact he named my manipulation technique, yup. I took a step back and  turned my head around the room. The other three were standing in blocking every escape route.

“You got me” I  opened the pizza box and I was shocked seeing no pizza in it. I had gasped. I was shocked.

“You guys are just as big of villains as I am”  I said.

“Sasuke Nightsky”  The man I knew to be the Blue Uchiha stepped up. It wasn’t hard to recognise him without their usual clothes. “ You might want to sit down for this”

“I need some pizza for this” I had yawned, but sat down anyway. That is when I heard everything for the first time and I was ready to ignore it  and just live my carefree life, if it wasn’t for one small detail. Turns out...I had a brother, and my brother is the Red Uchiha. It sound cliché, but for somebody who grew up with nobody...Getting to hear I had a brother was...Much like discovering I had powers I could use for my own selfish reasons. It came as a shock and I wasn’t ready to accept I had family. It took me months to finally see Itachi as a brother, and it still feels weird. It was the only thing that made me join the Uchihas, becoming Purple.

Here I am, six months later. My  muscles hurts from trainings, my cheek was bruised from getting hit on a railing and I was forced to finish high school.

I am 17 now and I came to the conclusion..Being a villain is easier than being a hero. I am remembered of that every day. However, I have a family now. Something that I couldn’t even dream of, and it felt good, knowing I wasn’t alone in the word anymore.

read chapter 2

[hellshearthrob]

JOHNNY’S RP PLOTTING CHEAT-SHEET

Want new-and-exciting plots for your character? Long to reach out to more of your followers, but don’t know where to start? Fear not! Fill out this form and give your RP partners both present and future all the of juicy jumping off points they need to help you get your characters acquainted.

Be sure to tag the players whose characters YOU want more cues to interact with, andrepost, don’t reblog! Feel free to add or remove sections as you see fit. Templatehere.

Mun name: Rex!!!!! My pronouns have been they/them for a long while but name just recently got flopped around because I’m in the middle of a midlife crisis and I know most people still call me by my dead female pronoun name but I’m definitely more responsive to literally anything else. OOC Contact: IM is open to mutuals for forever and you can always ask me for skype. 

Who the heck is my muse anyway:

JOHNNY BLAZE was a young man facing tragedy in his personal life: his mother had left him from a young age, his father was dead, his foster mother had died in an auto accident he caused, and his foster father Crash Simpson was dying of cancer. He did what any young man would do in the situation. He summoned the devil and made a deal to save Crash’s life. The deal was seamless for a few days and Crash was miraculously cured only to die during a motorcycle stunt jump days later.

ENTER GHOST RIDER.

Mephisto had done just what he promised, which meant despite the death Johnny was in debut to the devil himself. He bound Johnny’s soul to The Rider’s making them as one though for a long time Zarathos, the demon that lives inside him, was very over powering with the help of Roxanne Simpson, the love of Johnny’s life and the daughter of the family he’d caused the downfall of, he managed to conquer the beast and resume his life for a while. They bought the circus they had both grown up in and had two children as he clung on to normalcy. But the demon has been with him on and off for years and eventually it would be the downfall of Roxanne. She traded their kids away for an empty promise that Johnny would not become the rider again and then was killed by Mephisto’s son Blackheart. 

Everything since the death of the only woman he’s ever loved and their two children has simply been Johnny Blaze trying to pick up the pieces of his life and find meaning when he’s already had the best Heaven can offer and the worst Hell can dish out.

Points of interest:

LIGHTS, CAMERA, FAILED HOLLYWOOD CAREER: Johnny is a C-list celebrity. He started out as a stunt double after leaving the circus for bigger and better things (or rather bigger and worse cities where Zarathos could have his fill of feeding off sin) and slowly worked his way up the hollywood food chain as producers and casting directors realized he was too pretty to get paid to slam his face into the pavement. While he’s done everything from cheesy action movies to reality tv he’s not much more then a wash out in the world of stars and fame. Occasionally a tabloid magazine will announce that he’s on his death bed which is why you haven’t seen him in the background of your favorite flicks but otherwise he’s infamous actor with a very strange and very small cult following. 

WITTY DESPITE ETERNAL DAMNATION: Johnny is not moody and unable to quip with the best of the super gang. He’s moody and capable of hashing out zingers. Not all plots with him have to be heavy handed and hell-centered. Johnny is a man trying to make the best of his life after a series of tragedies only Lemony Snicket would dream up. He has learned after years of repressed emotion and general mangst that poking fun at yourself is one of the only ways to get by. However, sometimes the prods he makes at himself are more along the lines of jabs which is to say he is very capable of making the atmosphere heavy by taking a joke at his expense too far. 

ANTI-HERO SMOLDER: Very often because of the gnarly appearance of The Rider and his history, Johnny is regarded as a villain by his fellow superheroes. But as advertised he is the most supernatural hero there is in the fact he is a hero. In his early years, when he had less control of The Rider, he was more of a catch twenty-two as he punished evil but left destruction in his wake. Now a days a penance stare, a.k.a. instant death for one’s sins, is more of a specialty menu item then a guarantee when encountering him. More often then not the people he’s meant to work along side can only remember him for the boy who could not control his demons and treat him as such but now a days The Rider has been tamed realizing he needs Johnny just as much as Johnny needs him.

THE DUALITY OF HELL’S HEARTTHROB: On the subject, Johnny and Zarathos are two separate entities both living in Johnny’s body. Zarathos can jump from host to host but has made himself at home cozied up to Johnny’s soul. Johnny, after decades of having the worst roommate imaginable, has learned to control Zaratho’s power as his own so when he lights up and turns into the Rider it’s not by any means Zarathos assuming control of Johnny’s physical form. Although, he can take control it takes extreme circumstances where Johnny finds himself completely and totally weakened which can mean either emotionally or physically. Johnny is constantly at all times putting steely determination towards beating back the demon that lives inside him from assuming control. Even more so when he’s in his rider form as the power is borrowed. 

What they’ve been up to recently:

ALL NEW, ALL SUPERSEDED: Johnny is no longer the only or even main Ghost Rider in town. There has always been more then one rider but Robbie has more or less taken the job he has barred on his shoulders for decades. The transition is not seamless and he’s always on the back burners, ready to step in and tutor the new rider but he’s found that no matter how much he’d like the teenagers who keep getting the inescapable powers of hell to like him and accept his help it’s usually not the case. Perhaps letting a teen boy run free range with the power they both know he has is not wise but Johnny is letting him make his own mistakes as he travels down country back roads and alley ways looking for messes to clean in the mean time. Got a ghost? A demon? A vampire? Consider giving Johnny a call. He’s taken to functioning as doctor on house call for dispelling evil and whatever other odd jobs he can get his hands on (still paying that mortgage on the circus he bought in the 90′s).

Where to find them:

The abandoned fairgrounds of  Crash Simpson's Daredevil Cycle Show in Illinois

Up and down the southern highways of America

Los Angles, California finishing up that soap opera he accidentally signed up for

Hell

Current plans:

FINDING PEACE: Johnny has spent years attempting unsuccessfully to move past the death of his wife and children. He has been searching for a trail to follow for years in the wake of an emptiness he can not fill no matter how many times he saves the world from hell trying to creep it’s way out from the bowels of the earth and has been always unsuccessful. Both heaven and hell have teased him with ways to get his family back more then once: beat down the forces of evil and we’ll let you see your family for one shining moment behind the golden gates or maybe make another contract with another demon and we’ll bring their bodies back to life with no regards for their soul. He’s trying to move on but it’s hard when everyone knows exactly what you want and needs something from you. It would help if he attempted to make friends with anyone but his head is stuck in the past and his body is listlessly going through the loop of failing to find himself some peace.

BEATING BACK HELL: Although there isn’t a large scale apocalypse every day Johnny finds it therapeutic to seek out the little pieces of hell and sin that have scattered themselves across his world and stomp them out one by one. Got a cult budding in your small town? Call Johnny. Need a ghost busted? Call Johnny. Need a demon exorcised? Call Johnny and he’ll call Daimon and bring him along for the ride. He’s busied himself with getting rid of the tiny bits of evil that crop up, hoping that if he gets rid of enough of it one day he can get rid of all of it. At the end of the day his goal is to destroy the power structure of hell, but as brash as the stunt rider is he’s learning to take baby steps.

Desired interactions:

FRIENDSHIPS: Johnny is a sad, sad little man. Due to his grizzly appearance while gallivanting around as a hero it’s easy to say he has trouble making friends. But Johnny is a proud man despite how mopey he is and he’s not one to admit to his own loneliness. Should you ever ask he’s tell you that the ghost rider doesn’t need friends whether he’s powered up or not. While he’s more then willing to use the powers as hell as an excuse for his own isolation it still takes it’s toll on him. I’m not adding romance to this because I’m not actively looking for it but I’m also not closed off to it. 

ENEMIES: He’s a man of hell, reformed or not. He has was more or less own by the devil himself for years and forced o do his bidding. You wanna do a plot where Johnny did your character way back in the day? Let’s go for it! You want your character to hate Johnny exclusively on the premise of him being a servant of hell? Go for it! Don’t be afraid of your character hating the monster that the ghost rider is and always will be no matter how in control Johnny is. (P.S. I’m always down for well plotted out fight threads)

Offered interactions:

NO MORE PICTURES TMZ: Does your character love soap operas? Telenovelas? Reality TV? Johnny has had a supporting role AT LEAST in everything under the sun. There’s nothing this boy wouldn’t do for an extra dollar to pay rent. Feel free to approach him on the basis of having seen him somewhere once. Was it that infomercial you were too tired to turn off but too awake to fall asleep during at 3am? Probably! Snap a selfie with him!

LOCAL GHOSTBUSTER: Hire him to take care of your supernatural problems. Johnny Blaze is an on call supernatural hunter that charges probably too low for his services when called because of that pesky bleeding heart of his. Even if you didn’t call him in his Rider form he can sniff out evil and chase it for miles down an empty country road and he’ll probably show up to the scene of the crime with some salt and very old book he can’t read the latin in to save the day. 

COTTON CANDY DREAMS: After the closing of the circus he grew up in many of the mutants he grew up with and considered neighbors and family moved to District X and after the destruction of District X they were left with no where to turn. It was long after Roxanne’s death and Johnny wasn’t doing much more with the circus they’d promised to raise their children in then sitting in the bleachers and getting self pity drunk in it. He invited them back, they reopened it without his help, and while he’s more down trotten than the boy they remember they appreciate the free reign they have over the running of the circus. He hasn’t done a real show in years but that doesn’t mean the now re-pen circus run by mutants to display their powers isn’t his home and base of operations. If you’re lucky you could always catch him practicing on your trip to Crash’s Circus. 

Current open post/s:

I post starter calls like weekly. You can keep an eye out or just directly contact me for plotting. 

Anything else?

I love my dead gay son

Tagged by: @incartoonhell

Tagging: whoever wants to!!!!