#cw crushing

[paintingpuff]

When there's not enough official Outer Wilds merch so you make your own poster

[rainbowchewynuggets]

TMA Encore #13c

Freezing.

~

Sasha is slipping. She digs her fingers into the jagged broken stone that rises from the whirlpool of red. Her muscles strain to pull her upward under the weight of her soaked clothes and hair. She reaches higher, stretching her arm to find purchase on drier rock. She falls. The rushing fluid pulls hard at her legs toward certain death. She’s so tired. It would be so easy to just slip away. The roaring behind her, eagerly awaiting her exhaustion, draws what little she has left to the surface. The pool howls with laughter. Laughing at her for wanting to live as so many others are sucked down. For being stuck where she didn’t choose to be. Her throbbing hands grasp at the roughest parts of the wall she can reach, and she begins to climb again.

~

The sea is vast. Its waves are strong, as if the island itself were driving the current to keep the occupants of the Lonely shore away. Martin’s limbs are frozen, barely operational in their sockets. Fighting through the waves and riding the smooth water afterward feels like a net neutral action. His only measurement of progress is the size of the island itself. Its menacing presence only grows larger, regardless of what Martin does. The cold keeps Martin centered on finding shore, rather than what could be waiting on the island or beneath the waves. Implausibly, his limbs keep moving even after he thinks he’s drowned.

~

Tim cuts at his strings with a sharp piece of glass. Elbows, knees, neck, waist, shoulders, ankles, head, hands. Whenever he thinks he’s got them all, something jerks at him and his feet slide closer to the cliff. His brittle skin peels away like paint. His joints creak and bleed as the tethers inside are pulled apart. Blurs of his own reflection pass at the edges of his vision in the slivers of shattered mirror all around him. He catches flashes of others. The clown Joseph Grimaldi who killed his brother. Robert Smirke whose face is etched in Tim’s mind from researching the theater where Danny was killed. The thing that Tim had seen on the theater’s stage that hadn’t quite been his brother. The thing that pretended to be Sasha, though he’s never seen its face. Their smiles are painful to look at. The strings continue to pull. His heel slides over the lip of the cliff. He can’t pull it back. He’s losing. Cutting a string at the right of his collar gives one at his left full tilt. He turns over to face the cliff and is met with the broken plastic countenance of Nikola Orsinov–a stranger to him. He instinctively knows what she is and uses the force that would carry him to his death to drive the piece of glass through the center of the mannequin.

~

Martin pulls himself out of the water and approaches the outer crust of the island. He discovers an opening by pushing aside a loose pile of rubble and squeezes inside.

It’s so red. The corridor he finds himself in is a narrow gap between floor-to-ceiling clusters of mulched brick, cement, and plumbing. It looks loose and wet, but it’s sharp when Martin brushes past some of it. The passage morphs as he navigates. Its mass bulges outward into the negative space, either growing itself or being moved out of the way from the other side. It makes him nervous. Trying to avoid dead ends slows him down, and the room is closing up behind him. As he sidles sideways through a narrow pass, the undulating red mouth bites down on the arm that drags behind him. He gasps. Wriggling only makes it worse. The mouth bites harder, pressing on his chest. Terror wrests control away from him, wasting the time he has left to act. Martin shuts his eyes and focuses on the lingering numbness from the icy water. It doesn’t dull the pain or the pressure, but it feels further away. Separate from himself. What his nerves are telling him isn’t important.

He pulls steadily and hard, and he slowly, grindingly comes free. Martin darts forward the instant he has mobility back. The sound of rushing water guides him along as the mass juts outward around him. He uses his peripheral vision to keep an eye on it and holds his smarting arm behind him so he can’t see it. He fixes on a closing sliver of dark red at the end of the winding crevice and makes it with plenty of time.

The interior of the island is dim and loud. An overpowering smell of iron and sediment knocks him back as he breathes it. But he can breathe. Martin takes a few deep breaths to try to get used to it. He looks around at the surviving pieces of the prison that loom like great mangled bathers in what he hopes isn’t a frothing pool of blood. Rust, clay, and hard water, maybe. He ducks into a slick stone walkway that winds among the stone giants and eventually comes to a set of stairs with some railing left. He automatically reaches for it with his bad arm.  It looks just fine. Doesn’t hurt.

As he climbs the stairs and explores the top area, he feels a cool stillness wash over him. He’s protected, he tells himself. Whatever could be hiding in the crevices of the stone can’t reach him. He’ll see it first. He can deal with it. Then, a flush of heat pushes the cold back down as the outlines of Tim and Sasha on the ground at the edge of a platform come into view. He calls out to them, but they don’t respond. He comes closer. His steps slow to a crawl when he sees Sasha’s neck. She’s limp in Tim’s lap. Tim is bent over her in despair. Martin’s heart hammers in his aching chest.

Martin: What happened?

He can barely get the words out. When Tim doesn’t answer, Martin gently puts a hand on his shoulder. The second he does, Tim’s head tips out of the socket in his neck, falling next to Sasha with a hollow “clunk”. Martin crouches down. He sees the exposed wood fiber in Tim’s arms. Sasha’s features are mottled and rubbery like acrylic paint. There’s a shadow behind the hole in her neck.

Martin gets up and keeps moving, spurning his concern and the heat that lingers on his skin.

Ahead, Martin hears Tim’s voice calling to him. He spots him trapped in a cell on a piece of support architecture that sits independently over the water. Martin hesitates. The support crumbles, and Tim and the cell are engulfed in the water. Martin steps toward the edge to see if either comes up again. They don’t. Before he can process, he hears both Tim and Sasha somewhere high behind him. He turns. They’re cradled in a fold in the mulch debris walls. The fold overlaps as the section presses down, and they’re gone. Martin moves on, starting to feel like he’s being made fun of.

He keeps his eyes forward. The thicket of concrete begins to thin out. He can see layers of shadowed forms that reach far into the distance. However large it seemed on the outside, the island is several times more on the inside. This is just another tactic to keep him out. He’d like to find out what’s so important to keep away from him.

His friends continue to die around him. Calling for help. Asking why he’s ignoring them. He moves on. Their voices overlap into unintelligible noise that drifts away into the distance. He comes to a gate. Pushing it open takes a while.

Sasha: Martin.

Martin turns. Sasha and Tim are standing on a side passage, just a few feet away from him. So close, he could touch them. Tim is staring at Martin’s fingers. They’re cut, he sees.

Without a word, Martin turns and pulls the gate shut behind him with a horrible noise. He walks down the cracked stone passage to what lies beyond with shaking hands held at his sides. Tim and Sasha call after him. He doesn’t hear.

————

I have an important message

Next

Prev

First

Index

[the-sun-and-the-craftsman]

The Sun and the Craftsman - Chapter 2

Content warnings for this chapter are at the bottom and tagged!

For more info, read the pinned post here.

It’s too much for Darius to ignore. The sight of Ashur brings a natural sort of panic to him, and seeing him grasp at Lafayette like that—it brings him back to that night. 

Darius had been living on the Isle of Ascent for a few months by then, having grown accustomed to his simple life there. One moment, he’d been on Earth, working in his smithy as usual, and there had been a mild altercation that had sent him running—and the next moment, he was transported to the Isle. Ashur’s magic didn’t interest him; it had merely gotten him out of his old life, and there had been nothing for him in his old life anymore. But that’s beside the point. 

This world—Ana, as Ashur called it—had been teeming with life and opportunity. Darius watched the way that life sprang back after it was cut down, chilled, burned, whatever. Ashur had helped him cut down some trees and split some logs to make his house, and upon learning that Darius had been a blacksmith, Ashur eagerly set up a rudimentary smithy for him, coaxing the plants to split the ground open under his feet, tearing up some ore, and letting Darius pound out nails to his heart’s content. Ashur had been kind; so childlike in appearance, but with such knowledge behind his too-bright eyes. 

He looks the same now—albeit, a bit reserved. He’s pretty short, not even coming up to Darius’ chest—maybe about the size of a child just entering his teenage years. His skin is tanned heavily, rich and saturated in color, but his eyes are pale and bright, almost white. He wears elaborate clothes, almost toga-ish, wrapped around himself and decorated with gold-embroidered thread and shining stones, pinned in place by gleaming brooches. But he wears no shoes—and Darius has never seen him wear shoes. He claims they’re uncomfortable, though Darius would argue that it’s more uncomfortable to step on one of the thousands of thorned plants littered around the forest outside. 

But Ashur can heal himself. 

Darius hadn’t really paid attention to it until he had shot him that night. 

Lafayette—grinning like an idiot, squeezing Ashur’s lithe hands in her own worn ones—looks vastly different. That night, her already-pale skin had been drained of all color, all that color spilling out as a dark pool on the wooden floor. Her hair had been wet and matted, much in the same way that Ashur’s is now, albeit with a much darker hue. And her eyes were lifeless. 

But Ashur had brought her back to life after cannibalizing her. After Darius had whipped out his colt navy and shot him—after Ashur’s neck had exploded in a spray of unnatural gold—after Ashur had chased Darius down, canines bared like a dog, his flesh growing both as he healed himself and as he lengthened his arms and fingers to reach for Darius, a sickening, tumorous display of flesh growing over flesh growing over flesh, he had healed Lafayette. And nothing had been the same since. 

The flash of a fanged grin as Darius’ body crumpled in on itself, every muscle forced to flex in a way it shouldn’t, crushing any hollow space within himself. The realization that the meat that Ashur had provided Darius had been sliced from one of his friends, and the soul somehow kept inside to feel the pain of each severed nerve. The sweeping thunderclouds that would blot out the sky in seconds and throw down sharp, piercing, ice-cold raindrops that killed every living thing below it and washed away everything else—just for Ashur to pin down any soul he wanted to keep and hastily reconstruct their bodies once more. 

Watching the way that Ashur and Lafayette interact makes Darius’ stomach turn. He lets out a shaky sigh as Marco steps past him, wanting nothing but to turn around and go straight back to his house, his chair, and his box—the box that keeps his mind and body away from any feeling at all. 

Lafayette nods, and Ashur grins, and Lafayette lets go of Ashur’s hands to step inside the magic circle. Ashur picks up a jar, fingers fishing inside of it, then works like an artist around her, each swift motion sweeping his loose clothes as he spreads down a course, gray, metallic powder from that jar. He first outlines the magic circle around her, then fills it in with all sorts of arcane symbols. Despite the glaring injury on his head—which, Darius can now see, takes the form of a deep gash, crusted around the edges by his golden blood—he moves with the grace of a dancer. 

But he pauses, glancing at Darius, falling still. “Oh,” he says, his voice light. “Darius.” He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Right? Oh, there’s so many people here to remember...” 

“Yes, this is Darius,” Marco says to Ashur, just a trace of nerves left over in his voice. He turns to Darius, pointing at Ashur. “He really did lose his memory, huh?” 

Ashur’s cheeks darken, uncannily yellowish. Darius glances past Ashur, toward where Lafayette stands in the circle. 

“And how do you remember your magic, but not us?” he asks, glancing down at Ashur. 

Ashur’s eyes widen. “Well—it’s—I didn’t lose everything,” he says. “My magic is ancient—I'd know how to do these spells in my sleep!” 

He looks back at Lafayette. 

“She wanted to go home, too,” he says. “Did you want to say anything to her before she left? I was told that you two had a special bond...” 

Darius wouldn’t put it like that—she just happened to be from a marginally similar world. But he’ll be damned if he doesn’t get a say in any of this. He pushes past Ashur and carefully steps over the powdery lines to get to her. 

Lafayette looks at Darius, a certain optimism in her eyes. 

“I didn’t think you’d actually come,” she says. 

“I wanted to see if it was really true,” Darius responds. “You should’ve been the one to come get me. I would’ve believed you over Marco.” 

“Well, you’re here now, aren’t you?” she says. “And you wanted to ask something. You wouldn’t have talked to me, otherwise.” 

Darius nods. 

“Do you really think he’s sending you back home?” 

Lafayette smiles. 

“I do,” she says. “Sara volunteered to try, and after Ashur sent her away, he brought her back to tell us what she saw. She said she’d been sent back home—to the very place and time she vanished from. She felt the air change, she saw the house she used to live in down the road, she heard people’s voices...” 

“How did Ashur know where to send her?” Darius asks. “With his memory gone to the point where he doesn’t remember us?” 

“He just needs something from your own world to do the spell,” Lafayette says. She gestures behind Darius, toward a section of the magic circle, where a single silver button from her shirt sits nestled in a small pile of powder. “Apparently, something about it is linked to the exact place and time where you left. Glad we fought so hard to keep some of our belongings, huh?” 

Something from his own world—Darius looks down at himself. There are a few loose threads on the coat he’s been wearing since he was brought here... 

“Alright,” he says. “You’ll be safe in your own world, then?” 

Lafayette nods. 

“Then I’ll leave you to it.” 

Darius turns and steps out from the circle, glancing around the room to find Ashur, who had moved away to make the final preparations. Heading back to Marco’s side, Darius watches as Ashur snaps his fingers, producing a flame on the tip of his thumb. 

Ashur stoops down. He touches the edge of the circle and flame rushes around the whole thing, surging forward, flaring up, and vanishing as quickly as it came, leaving only the scent of smoke and a few dark stains on the floor. 

Ashur sighs. “Getting hard to do so many of these,” he says. “But only two left. Who’s up next?” 

As Marco steps forward, Darius folds his arms and thinks. He had seen how easily Ashur had healed from a wound that would be fatal to anybody else. There was barely even any time to bleed after the bullet had pierced through him. Now, looking at the wound on Ashur’s head, Darius struggles to reconcile the two sights. 

Ashur has every reason to trick everyone. He’s a cruel being. He had been nice in the beginning, sure, but he had flipped to cruelty in the span of that one day. The day before Ashur had eaten Lafayette, Darius had heard that he had been helping Ofor with making repairs to his house. And the day after, Ashur had stormed into Darius’ house, called Darius a few names, and put a hand on his chest, forcing Darius’ muscles to painfully squeeze and force the air out of him. He had played with Darius’ body like a doll—no, with more mastery than that, considering Ashur’s control over every biological process within the people around him. With a twist of his hands, Ashur could mangle organs with absolutely no outside indication. 

Once he feels himself receding back into his box, Darius shakes his head and forces himself to stop thinking about that. He has to think about something else—so for a moment, he assumes that Ashur’s being completely genuine with this. Even if Darius could go back home, he isn’t sure if he would want to. 

It’s nice that everyone else can go back with no qualms. But when Darius had first been pulled to Ana, it had come with relief. As a wanted man on the verge of getting caught, it had been a literal lifesaver. 

And if he’s heading back to the exact same place and time...he has to have a plan.

CW: mentions of crushing, asphyxiation, severe storms, flooding, dissociation, torture, loss of autonomy, and encounters with police descriptions of blood, gun violence, head injury, cannibalism, body horror, amnesia, and fire. 

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[captain-krow-drozdov]

Danny Is An Alternate Version Of Ra's Al Ghul And Flash Already Called Dibs On Adopting Him

Danny In All His Sleep Deprived Slightly Scuffed Up From A Fight Glory Is On His Way To Clockworks Tower To Hopefully Get A Nap And Maybe Some Homework Done When A Natural Portal Opens Up In Front Of Him And Proceeds To Unceremoniously Drop Him In The DC Verse Just Outside Of Central City Before Promptly Closing Leaving A Tired Danny Behind In A Run Down Abandoned Parking Lot.

It's Times Like This When Danny Regrets Putting Off Learning How To Make His Own Portals, Cause Now He Is Very Much Stuck For The Foreseeable Future And He Has No Idea Where Or When He Is. Luckily For Him However Central City Isn't Too Far Away, Unlucky For Him However Is That Once In The City He Realizes This Isn't His Dimension. He's Pretty Sure He'd Remember Something Called The Justice League.

So What Do You Do When Supernatural Bullshit Fails You? You Fall Back On Your Mad Scientist Roots And You Make A Portal Gun. So That's Exactly What Danny Plans To Do.

Unfortunately Staying Alive And Building Questionably Safe Portal Technology Requires Money And Supplies, So He Ends Up Wandering From City To City Doing Odd Jobs/Fixing Up Busted Tech For Cash Or Unwanted Electronics For His "Operation: Get Home" Needs. This Obviously Ends In A Few Superhero Encounter Shenanigans.

Though He Always Ends Up Back Near Central City, Both On The Off Chance The Natural Portal Will Open Up Again And Because Out Of All The Superheroes That Apparently Exist In This Universe The Speedsters Are His Favorite (Red Robin Is Solidly His Second Favorite Ever Since The Gotham Vigilante Gave Him A Large Coffee Filled With Enough Caffeine To Kill A Man).

Unbeknownst To Danny However Is That Every Hero/Vigilante He Has Encountered Has Come To At Least One Of The Following Conclusions; 1. Run Away Meta Who Is In Desperate Need Of A Good Meal/Adoption Bait. 2. Possibly Red Robin/Tim Drake Clone 3. A Good Kid But Could Possibly Be A Future Rouge If Left Unsupervised. 4. Did Bats Get A New Kid And Why Is He Here?

All Flash Knows Is That He Saw The Kid First And Therefore Has Dibs. Suck It Bruce.

Fast-forward A Few Months And Danny Gets Hurt During A Rogue Attack While Trying To Help Some Civilians Get To Safety (Old Hero Habits Die Hard (Ha Die Hard) And All That Jazz) And He Nopes Out Once Everyone Is Safe And When The Paramedics Are Busy With Other People Unaware He Left A Blood Sample Behind.

One DNA Test Brought To You By Paranoid Bat Concerns Of A Possible Red Robin Clone Later And They Find Out That Dannys DNA Matches One Ra's Al Ghul.

They Now Think Danny Is An Escaped Ra's Al Ghul Clone.

Memes For The Vibes:

[lynxgriffin]

Eldritchrune - Knock You Down!!

1 | 2

Story Setup Eldritchrune Masterpost

Queen tries to get to Kris with some psychological torment, but Kris pushes through, and the Fun Gang wins! Berdly is also recruited to the team...for better or for worse!

Aaaand yay, this part's all done! Definitely one of the most complex so far, but also satisfying to do a real boss battle!

[the-haunted-office]

This is a companion piece to the writing bit I reblogged the other day. Yep, there was a time when Sept was angry at Thursday and she murdered her. They are girlfriends now and all is well, though. x)

Some muses named here belong to people I used to roleplay with, just an fyi!

Tell Thursday I said hi, and that she’s doing great, and to never give up, and that I love her. 

Those had been some of Stanley’s last words to Cyrus before the seance Ander had initiated for them ended and he once again faded away into his incorporeal existence.

Thursday hadn’t gotten to say anything to him then, despite how much she’d wanted to. There were always so many things she wanted to say to him that she thought she probably would never get to, even with his ghostly presence still within their midst. He was here and not here at the same time. So close, yet so far. She could feel him, but couldn’t touch him.

(Cut here due to length!)

Keep reading

[bluerosefox]

In Luminous Green Glow.

Another TaliaxDanny idea

So we knows those AU where Danny pops out the Lazarus Pits and meets like Damian or Jason.

What if, due to time travel shenanigans or even dimensional reasons Danny pops out of the Lazarus Pits when he was investigating it (maybe he's CW apprentice and helping keeping the Zone in check) and while looking he suddenly gets a sword put to his neck and a voice, a very very spine tingling smooth voice, saying

"Who are you. And how did you find this place."

Out the corner of his eye Danny could see a woman (or if time travel, teen! Talia) around his age and ooooh boy the Fenton 'I love a woman that just might kill me' genes are totally kicking into high gear.

[maddilynmuse]

Memory Of Helplessness

CW: Gore, Crushing, Temporary Character Death, Guilt, Vomit.

Hurt, no comfort. Isabeau POV. Technically everyone is there but only Isabeau and Siffrin are mentioned in much depth.

I saw this post for @mari-lair ‘s “Siffrin, more like Sif’s Out” AU and immediately got possessed by angst demons. Please note this post might have spoilers for upcoming comics in that AU, though also, this story isn’t going to make much sense without it.

Also, spoilers for the base game of In Stars and Time too. You’ve been warned!

The King’s Speech washed over Isabeau for the whatever-eth time only to be cut off by Mirabelle for the whatever-eth time. As much as Isa was actually good with numbers, he’d long ago given up on counting these loops, all of them had. It’d just make you go insane. There were enough things driving them insane, including the pit in their guts—snack time had stopped filling it a long time ago, this loop they didn’t even bother.

“Flower for you,” Siffrin said, giving it to their greatest enemy like it was nothing.

It meant nothing. It was just random (at least so Isa liked to tell himself).

Mirabelle put up their Adorable Moving Shield as the King charged his attack. However many loops ago, Isabeau would’ve started buffing defenses, but they were well past the need for that… mostly. Siffrin hadn’t even gotten to level 47 this loop, and maybe they could’ve done a better job of letting him feel useful, but that was fine. It’d reset and he wouldn’t remember a thing. As much as it’d hurt the first few times they did this, it was easier on everyone just to let Siffrin stay down.

Anyways, Isabeau punched at the king with his Paper Mache gloves. There was no triumph to it anymore even as hit points got shaved off like they were fighting a Tristess. Odile followed up with Paper Alpha V. Already down a third. It wasn’t always so easy to beat him. The King’s attack washed over all of them, the majority of it bouncing harmlessly off the shield. Siffrin was almost down. It stung Isabeau’s heart to see the way Sif’s one eye looked to Bonnie, to Mirabelle, then to the rest of them, just like it had the last few times they came here, so he didn’t look. He didn’t look their way at all. No one did.

Maybe they could’ve stopped him if they had.

Isabeau instead braced himself for a blow from the King, eyes screwing shut by instinct….

“I CAN HELP!”

c r A C K

The smell of copper. A horrible drip of blood on stone as the King raised an oversized fist. The feeling of something warm and sticky sprayed on Isabeau’s legs, his torso, maybe just a bit on his face. His eyes opened before his mind could tell them it was a bad idea.

“… Sif?”

Was that Sif? It was hard to tell. There was almost no darkless left. Or any face. Or distinctly human features at all. Mostly just fabric and pulp. The hat, also no longer darkless, floated down from the King’s fist, landing in the puddle of blood and bone dust.

This…

Hah. This was probably what he looked like under the rock. The King is a rock type, after all.

A hysteric laugh at the not-funny not-a-joke escaped Isabeau’s laugh as he tried to take in what he was seeing. His hand went down to tug at the suddenly-stained fabric as though he could still pick them up. “Siffrin?”

How? How did this happen? This wasn’t supposed to happen! It never happened before! Siffrin was supposed to be knocked out! To end up hitting the floor, maybe busted up, maybe bleeding a little, but only normal battle wounds! The King couldn’t kill them until the end, right?

Right?

And, well, sure! Siffrin got the Memory of Useless Idiot. It lowered their stats, but that was fine! With Mirabelle’s Memory of Sadness, they barely needed to fight. And, yeah, they’d been trying to read those Headache Books any time the rest of them looked away for even a second, but it’d come back at snack time, right? Which they… skipped…

“ooooooh….. you must’ve known this would happen. though that look on your face…… perhaps I was mistaken…… either way, Vaugaurde will be preserved.”

They drove him to this. They all drove him to his death. They were supposed to protect him, supposed to make sure he at least lived, and now he was a splatter on the floor again-

“Siffarooni?”

Isabeau reached out once more to the pile of meat and cloth and-

START AGAIN START AGAIN PLEASE START AGAIN-

He awoke to see his hands, free of blood, hovering above grass.

[Isabeau got Memory of Helplessness! When equipped, it makes Siffrin more likely to take damage for him in battle!]

Isabeau threw up.

[bananafire11]

Hi tumblr have more of the clown

[ping-ski]

id literally let him FLING ME ACROSS THE RINK until i crash into a wall just to hold hands and skate together <3

(lil' extra based on this!)

[izzystizzys]

“ - but have you ever considered, I don’t know, not sucking all the time? Just a thought.”

It takes the combined grips of Nuisance and Hound to keep the wriggling, snarling body beneath Fox from throwing him off its back. With three years’ practice of having to fix his own rickety desk chair over and over again, the movement merely ruffles the proverbial fringe on his helmet.

“And I don’t mean that as an insult, necessarily. Well, I do a little bit. But also I have some amount of empathy for the no doubt immense amounts of trauma that had to go into the creation of something so dysfunctional as you, on a very personal level, so have you considered going to the root of that in a way that’s like… useful? Instead of wasting it all on kriffing Kenobi, I mean. Look at the guy. All he does all day is drink tea and commit warcrimes. I bet he knits for fun. Bit of an embarrassing nemesis, don’t you think?”

“I”, says Kenobi, then pauses. The space between his eyebrows is creased with uncertainty, and he looks deeply torn between continuing rocking the shaking Duchess of Mandalore against his chest from his corner of the throne room and re-activating his lightsaber to continue losing his fight against the Darksider Fox is currently sitting on. “I feel like I should object to some part of that, but I’m not entirely clear on what. Or how this happened, again. Isn’t Mandalore a few star systems from your purview, Commander?”

“Probably the warcrimes”, mutters Nuisance underneath his strained breath.

“About as far from my supposed assignment as yours, General”, says Fox a little louder.

Kenobi twitches. Fox cannot claim to know which of them does it. Both, maybe. Probably.

“I will - taste - your - flesh!”, heaves out Darth Maul, snarling and hissing.

“Oooh, kinky!”, calls Grids, from the corner where she’s got her stun-setting aimed at the other Zabrak, currently passed out cold. Fox sighs deeply. He knew he shouldn’t have taken those three - any combination of Grids, Hound and Nuisance in a room together usually spelled chaos.

Unfortunately, it also spelled competence. The Basic alphabet can be funny that way.

The point being: as of some months into the war, one of Fox’s assigned tasks is the surveillance of all GAR-wide communication. All command-class staff theoretically got that memo, but no one seems to have read the fine print where that includes both professional and personal communication, as well as any and all comm devices registered or suspected to be registered to that person. Especially not one Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala.

The point further being, if that sounds both immensely impractical and sort of terrifying in a democratic supposedly non-surveillance state, you’d be bang on the credits, and to Fox’ eternal chagrin the singular person in this whole useless army who’s spent the second of thinking necessary for that conclusion.

The final point being, when one frantic General’s mad dash across the Galaxy to rescue his teenage sweetheart from the spectre of his supposedly dead nemesis crosses his desk on its way to the Chancellor’s inbox, it doesn’t take much time for him to block any and all trace of it across the digital space of the GAR commboard and take matters into his own hands.

“ - which is why I told Thorn to suck it up and be in charge for a few days, and also why you’re still alive, your Highness, very welcome, was no trouble at all”, he concludes, drily. The Duchess stares the wide-eyed look of someone attempting to reconcile clones with ‘sentience’ or perhaps ‘personality’ in her head, but won’t say it outright.

Or the look of someone who’s just been violently overthrown and nearly murdered, perhaps, Fox allows.

“Um -“, Kenobi hedges, blinking rapidly.

“And the reason you’re still alive, probably. You’re welcome for that too, by the way”, Grids calls from the back of the throne room, cheekily.

“Alright”, says Kenobi, loudly. There’s color back in his deathly-pale cheeks, Fox notes, even if that color is a lot of red. It doesn’t fade very gracefully into his beard. “Opinions on whether or not I had everything under control notwithstanding -“

“You really didn’t”, Hound supplies helpfully.

“ - opinions notwithstanding, I am admittedly still lost on why you’re now sitting on Darth Maul and attempting to, to - jeer at him, Marshall Commander!”

“We’re not jeering, we’re trying to create a safe space and lay the groundwork for more open communication”, Fox says, primly.

Maul screams into the ground, attempting for the umpteenth time to rear up and visit great violence upon Fox, which admittedly has him rattling in his crosslegged seat atop his back.

Kenobi raises a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Safe space?”

“He’s restrained and not stabbing anyone, I personally feel much safer than before”, Grids muses. “Watch the teeth though, Hound. Little biter.”

Indeed. Fox’s right greave will have to be replaced posthaste.

“And anyways, the point isn’t to jeer at him, it’s to make clear that he’s focusing his energy in the wrong places and could be doing much better things with his admittedly not-great life”, Fox adds, shifting to cast a pointed look down at Maul. The Sith is panting open-mouthed into the durasteel floor, sharp teeth gnashing wildly as his piercing yellow eyes shine with barely restrained rage. “I’m just saying - aim higher. You aren’t seeing the forest for the Kenobis, Maul. Can I call you Maul?”

“I will feed you your own entrails”, yowls Maul.

“See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Right now, I’m an easy target to focus all that built-up rage on, but is killing me really going to help you achieve any of your goals? No! Think about it - when it all comes down to it, who sent you on that mission to Naboo in the first place? Who made sure the Jedi and, by extension, Kenobi would be there to kill you? Who used you as a dejarik piece and then cast you aside the second you outlived your usefulness?”

Beneath him, Maul slowly stills in his struggle, still panting heavily. Hound and Nuisance don’t let it deter them in their vigilance, because they’re damn good vod’e and possess an ounce of common sense.

“And, look, I get it. I could spend the rest of my life punching every civilian who spits on me in the streets and it would even be satisfying. I could hit back the Senators who think of clones as easy targets. Or - I can aim my sights at who’s on top. And I think you know who I mean, because you know as well as I do the same damn man has ruined both our lives.”

Kenobi makes an alarmed noise, and Maul an interested one - not that Fox is going to let him walk out of this place awake. Still, he tilts his head in a way he hopes conveys his helmeted grin successfully to non-vod, as well as the bloodlust behind it. “You’re also welcome for the fact that the Chancellor won’t have heard of your spontaneous resurrection yet, by the way. You’ll retain your element of surprise instead of gambling it away on petty revenge on Kenobi.”

“He cut me in half!”

“He killed my master!”

Fox waves their protests away.

“Also, that’s treason!”, Kenobi adds, sputtering. Fox grins. Kenobi purses his lips, and continues. petulantly, “…do you have any proof?”

“So. Much. Proof”, says Nuisance, dreamily. “Like, do you want it alphabetically or by date?”

Which is when the Duchess, of all people, bursts out into barking, crazed laughter.

“You - you’ve certainly given yourself an edge in that fight, Marshall Commander”, she wheezes, brushing tears from her eyes. Fox raises his eyebrows at her, which she somehow seems to be able to tell, because she gestures at the clunky handle dangling from his belt.

“What, this old thing?” He unclasps the black rectangle from its hook, holding it up in the air. Maul stills strangely beneath him, and Kenobi goes ghostly pale again. Fox is starting to get a bad feeling.

“I took it off Viszla and beat him over the head with it. I figured he’d taken it off a Jedi cadet or something. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

[artchixs]

girl loser arc continues <3

[wild0moon]

the lucky one

[solargeist]

I saw this post on twt and screamed

[pineappical]

smoke break

[g1ngerbeer]

he glows like a glowstick btw