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personinthepalace · 4 years ago

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MBS Trailer Analysis

Hey guys, as you probably could tell, I am SUPER excited about the MBS tv series! The lovely anon who pointed me in the direction of the trailer asked me to give my thoughts on it and well...I decided to do a shot by shot analysis of the trailer! (even though I definitely have other things I need to do haha). This is most likely going to be less of an analysis and more of me rambling and pointing out stuff haha. Apologies in advance for any grammatical errors. Also I’m sorry if I get any book facts wrong! (my memory isn’t what it used to be) Without further ado, here is my analysis! (below the cut because boy is this going to be long haha)

Ok before we begin, here’s the trailer in case you haven’t seen it/ want a refresher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atFYUbwMYo4

Ready? Let’s begin

Nomansan Island!! I wonder if this is the view from Nomansan or if that’s Nomansan in the distance. Either way looks like there’s a lot of trees

Mr. Benedict’s house!! Definitely not how I imagined it. I thought it would be taller

You can see a manhole(?) near the bottom of this image. Later in the trailer we see Milligan come out of it. So I’m guessing this is the show’s verison of “the cellar across the street”

A secret room behind a bookcase! I’m guessing this is in Mr. Benedict’s house? It’s hard to see who’s pushing the door though- I wonder who it is

A Stonetown bus! I remember reading somewhere that the show has a 50s/60s vibe, and I definitely see/feel it

Reynie!! Of course the first person we actually get to see in the trailer is Reynie :) It looks like he’s in a restaurant? At night?? By himself??? Reynie what are you doing all alone?!?

Ah yes The Emergency. It’s scary how it feels revelant today...It’s kind hard to see but below “The Emergency” it says “Anxiety Index At Yearly High”. Yikes Mr. Curtain really knows how to create fear doesn’t he?

YES the BEST best-selling book series ever!! Also loving that pattern in the background

Another shot of Reynie! That sign says that that’s Bishop Building. I’m guessing Reynie is going to take one of the tests. Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure that it’s the Monk Building in the book

Look they’re social distancing! The test takers! Can you spot Reynie? (He’s in the second column from the left, four desks back). I wonder if that’s Rhonda sitting in front of him? She has a white dress. Hard to tell if she has green hair

Number Two! And it looks like she’s wearing boots!! I love it!

Let’s have a close up on Reynie :) Ahh he look so precious! And he has the outfit!!

A close up on Number Two! I’m loving her outfit. And look there’s a matching yellow pencil sharpner on the desk! There’s the “no talking” sign. And are those rocks behind the glass??

These kids are dressed up all fancy. It looks like they’re going to a formal party or piano recital. Not about to take a test

And here’s Reynie not all dressed up. Also is that a watch on his left wrist??

“Will be excused.” That’s a change from the book. In the book she said “escorted”. “I’m sorry, did I say executed? I meant to say escorted.”

I realize it’s a good thing that the show is going to be on Disney+ (more exposure and all that). But at the same said I’m kinda sad that MBS is a Disney property now

Now this is interesting. These kids are playing tetherball. I’m guessing that this is at the Institute. Except I thought the kids there spend most of their time watching TV? I wouldn’t expect them to be exercising. Is PE part of the curriculum?

A morse code telegraph machine! Very cool especially since in the book, they learned Morse code using a flashlight

And it’s Sticky and Kate!! It looks like Sticky still has some hair, so he’s not completely bald. I’m mourning the loss of Kate’s long blonde hair, but the short brown hair looks good! Loving Kate’s beanie. And look she’s still wearing her red striped shirt! (underneath the yellow jacket) Ahh they both look great

Constance!!! I’m loving her pigtails. I wonder what’s she doing though. It looks like she’s on a platform? I thought that wasn’t introduced until the later books

Kate walking on her rope during the floor test! And look you can see her bucket!! Okay I’m kinda disappointed with this scene because in the book the floor is suppose to have blue, black, and yellow rectangles. But here it looks like they are all squares (and instead of blue, it’s white). And Reynie is suppose to realize that the floor has rectangles so he can simply walk across. How is he going to walk across the floor if it’s full of squares??

Another shot of Reynie! I think he’s at the Institute, but I have no idea what that thing is. Anybody have any ideas?

Also Mr. Benedict has been narrating this whole time, and at this point he says “And our criteria for approval may be considered...mysterious.” Cue title credits!

Hmm okay Reynie got a stamp of approval- most likely from one of the Ten Men when they arrive at the Institute? Wonder who Pierce and Veronica are. Will they be important to the story? Also it looks like Veronica is crossed out?

Number Two is taking them to see Mr. Benedict! Huh so it looks like the three older kids are about the same height. I wonder if Kate is still a year older than Sticky and Reynie

Mr. Benedict’s study!! Look at all of those books!!! And a yellow couch- it matches Number Two’s outfit :)

So many books!!!

Ahh look at them!!! I love their outfits! They’re accurate to the books! Also loving those green lights in the background

How are all of these books not falling hahaha

Another shot of them. Is that Kate’s rope? Or the handle for her bucket? Also I would like to take the time to say that I love the music (the violin!)- it really fits the vibe

“I’m the aforementioned Mr. Benedict.” And here’s Mr. Benedict!!! He really loves dramatics doesn’t he. He’s definitely younger than I thought he would be. Also he’s not wearing green plaid. That makes me sad :( Wait does Mr. Benedict still have narcolepsy on the show?

We have an Emmy Award Winner on this show!

And we have our first look at Rhonda!!! She’s taller than I expected haha. But I love her outfit!! And look Number Two has a stopwatch hanging from her dress, most likely from timing the kids during the maze test

IT’S THEM!! IT’S THEM!!! Breaking the fourth wall and looking very confused (or angry in Constance’s case haha)

“You all possess a quality that is lacking in our society” - ok it is time to meet the members of The Mysterious Benedict Society!

“Reynie, your intuitive understanding of human nature” -omigod Reynie comforting Sticky!!! Ahhh my heart! I can’t wait to see this scene in the show. I have a feeling that they expanded on Sticky’s indecision about joining the mission, and this scene here is part of it. Ah I can’t wait to see more of their friendship! (Also it seems like the show is pronouncing Reynie’s name like “Rainy”. I personally had been pronouncing it like “Winnie”. TLS pronounced his name as “Winnie” as well)

“Sticky, your reservoir of knowledge” - Sticky at a competition! It looks like he has the same amount of hair as he does when he meets the mbs, so I think it’s safe to say that Sticky did not shave his head when he ran away

Sticky won $10,000 on a game called Buck Buck Goose -wow! Also we see Constance watching Sticky on TV. The room is all yellow, so maybe it’s Number Two’s room? But why is Constance watching a video of Sticky?

“Constance, your defiance of conventional thought patterns” -Constance ripping up that piece of paper, tossing it, and walking away- omigod I love it hahaha. Ahh Constance is a drama queen and I love it! Also I think this is her red raincoat- it’s very cute

“Kate, your uncanny feel of how things go together” - Kate!! It looks like Kate is removing a vent? So I’m guessing this is during the maze test. And it looks like she has her Swiss army knife!

“What is it that you all have in common?” -I just noticed that Mr. Benedict’s beard seems to be neatly trimmed. So I guess he doesn’t have shaving problems? And I’m still mourning the loss of the green plaid haha

And we have our first look at Milligan!! I personally never imagined him with a beard or long hair. But ahhh I can’t wait to see his reunion with Kate on the show!! (I will definitely be sobbing when that happens)

“I see fear. And bad fashion” “You’re very unpleasant” - I can tell I’m going to love Kate’s and Constance’s relationship on the show already hahaha. It’s hard to see in this screenshot, but Reynie’s nodding in agreement with Kate’s statement haha. Also Constance’s facial expressions are perfect!

A full view of Kate and her bucket! I am so happy that Kate has her bucket!! It looks like Sticky is in the back. Maybe this is a scene from them taking the tests? I wonder if those two other kids are important to the story

I have many questions about this shot. Where are they walking to? Is that the Institute? Is Reynie looking back to the mainland where Mr. Benedict and everyone else are?

Okay so the sign originally says “Room(?) At The Wheel” (I can’t make out the first word). Who is painting that anyway? An ordinary brainwashed citizen? A Helper?

They’re leaving for the Institute! Number Two with all those yellow suitcases haha. And is that Milligan standing on the side of the car? So one car takes the kids to the Institute. The other one (the one that Milligan seems to be standing on) is the car the rest of the adults will take so that they can camp out in the woods to keep an eye on the Institute

It looks like there are Helpers in the background!

Constance walking behind Reynie with her umbrella is adorable

Kate, Reynie, and Sticky pulling the bell rope! I don’t think they ever rang the bell together in the book, so I’m curious to see the context of this shot

Is this the boat in which they escape the Institute?

Sad Mr. Benedict :( I’m guessing he’s berating himself for putting the kids in danger

Rhonda and her fun driving! Btw the sign says “Who’s watching out for you?” I love that the presence of the Emergency seem to be everywhere in the show

Kate changed to a blue striped shirt, while Sticky changed to an orange shirt. Constance and Reynie seem to be wearing the same outfits

Crossing the bridge! Ten Men (sorry the Recruiters) are supposed to be stationed at the bridge entrance, right? Those people don’t look like they’re wearing expensive suits...

What are they watching?

And here is our first look at Mr. Curtain! Like with Mr. Benedict, this is definitely not how I pictured Mr. Curtain haha. He doesn’t have his sunglasses. I hope he has his wheelchair in the show

What room is this? Is that the Receiver behind Mr. Benedict?

I’m guessing this is the scene where they meet Mr. Curtain for the first time

What is happening with this split screen? Are Mr. Benedict and Mr. Curtain talking to each other? Also Mr. Benedict reveals in the narration that Mr. Curtain is his twin brother (I wonder why they decided to reveal such a big twist in this trailer). So do the kids know beforehand that Mr. Curtain is Mr. Benedict’s twin? Or will they all be shocked like in the book? Though I don’t think Reynie can make that comment that Mr. Curtain’s nose looks like a cucumber haha. Also I take back what I said about mourning the loss of Mr. Benedict’s green plaid- you can see it in this screenshot!

My facial expression right now is exactly like Kate’s in this shot. What the heck is that?

Okay this just might be my favorite scene from the trailer- Reynie hugging Miss Perumal!! Ahh my heart!!! I love this so so much!!!

Number Two with a stick! She is ready to attack! I think this is from the part when the Recruiters break into Mr. Benedict’s house

What machine is this? Is this from the final battle against the Whisperer??

Ooh no poor Sticky is scared!!

Again I want to say that I am disappointed with how they interpreted this part of the book. Reynie is suppose to be able to casually walk aross the floor but instead he’s leaping???

Milligan!!! Even though the beard is unexpected, it looks like they got his outfit right! Seems like this is Milligan leading the kids out of the underground passage

The main four! Looks like they’re sending out a Morse code signal to Mr. Benedict and the others. Though where are they standing?

This looks like the official title card! I love that the font looks similar to the one used on the cover of the books. Again this not how I pictured Mr. Benedict’s house haha

“So you need a bunch of smart orphans to do a deadly mission. I get it.” - have I mentioned that I love Constance and her facial expressions??? Also her sass!! I wonder if Constance is still two in this? She is at least a lot younger than the rest of kids. Will the other kids be surprised with her age reveal (if there’s an age reveal at the end). Wait will Kate give Constance piggyback rides in the show?? I would love to see that

The kids are like deadly???

“Ideally not deadly”- he is so done haha

Phew and that’s the whole trailer! I would like to note that the only people we hear speak in this trailer are Mr. Benedict, Number two, Constance, and Kate. Also S.Q., Martina, Jackson, and Jillson did not appear in the trailer. I hope that they will be in the show though (I think Martina for sure will be in it).

Anyway, if you read this far- thanks for reading my ramblings! I would love to hear your thoughts about this trailer as well :)

#I did a trailer analysis #this is how obsessed I am with this show already haha #ahhh I am so excited!!!#mbs disney #mbs tv series #mbs trailer #mbs video #mbs trailer analysis #mbs #the mysterious benedict society #mysterious benedict society #long post #rambles in the palace #posting in the palace

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tagsecretsanta · 4 years ago

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From @hodgehegposts

to @eirabach

Secret Santa does not own this work, full credit to the author above!

It had all started one, late, night, when Alan was back on duty on the Island and Brandon was busy halfway around the world trying to piece together enough footage to keep his vlog going over the next few weeks so that he could visit Alan without having to worry about not producing content. Their relationship seemed to be walking the tightrope that their two competing schedules spun, relying on snatched moments of contact over vid-calls and flying visits, but for the moment it was working for them. Brandon knew, deep in his heart, that the moment that it seemed to be getting too much, that it wasn’t enough any more to sustain themselves with these brief glimpses, that he would leave to go to the Island and be with Alan full time, if Alan would let him, knowing that Alan could never give up International Rescue even if he tried, but they hadn’t reached that stage yet. For now, they were coping, for now it was okay, even if it was at times tiring.

“Do you ever think,” Alan had said that one late night, huddled up in bed and cradling his comms device close to him. “Do you ever think that like, this isn’t the only universe?”

“What do you mean?” Brandon had asked, hair tousled from sleep, a mug of coffee on his bedside table growing cold.

“Like, do you think that maybe somewhere else, there’s an Alan and a Brandon who are able to spend all their time together? Like, an Alan and a Brandon where there isn’t an International Rescue, or whatever?”

“Maybe, I don’t know.”

“I think there is. I think there are infinite universes, each with something different in them, with infinite Alans and Brandons, all with their different lives.”

Brandon had just smiled, because only Alan would ever think to say something like that.

Meanwhile, in another universe...

It was cold, snow piled high along the edges of the sidewalk and the sky had been heavy with the threat of more for the past week. It was one of those long, dark winters that made people want to hibernate, to stay inside with blankets and hot chocolate and fluffy socks. People didn’t, of course, because life didn’t stop just because it was a harsh winter, but that didn’t meant that there weren’t appreciative smiles when people stepped inside and into warmth, shedding coats, hats, scarves and gloves like they were a second skin, stamping on the doormat to shake off the snow from boots and blowing on frozen fingertips.

That hustle and bustle wasn’t present this morning, though. The city was sleepy and still, the late rising sun staining the sky with a fiery orange, a spot of bright vibrancy in the otherwise stark weather. It didn’t matter, though, how beautiful the orange was, because those who were up to see it were already focused on other things, on family and sugar and laughter. In a tiny, cramped apartment with dodgy radiators and plants spilling across the countertops, buttery yellow curtains at the window and a blue sofa that seemed too big for the space it had been squeezed into, a young couple were smiling, the radio playing softly in the background whilst one of them tried to cook and the other instructed from the kitchen table, a plaster clad leg propped up on a stool and pile of cushions.

“Are you sure that’s right? It looks like a mess,” Alan said, frowning at the bowl in front of him. Brandon rolled his eyes, shifting a little in his seat.

“Yes.”

“But it doesn’t look like cookie dough.”

“That’s because you haven’t added the flour yet.”

“It looks like shit.”

“Alan,” said Brandon, aiming for stern but missing when he wasn’t able to completely hide his grin. “It’s supposed to look like that. That’s what happens when you add the wet ingredients and dry ingredients together separately.”

“Are you sure though? You’ve seen my grandma’s cooking, the stories of food poisoning were not exaggerated, and I really really don’t want to find out that I managed to inherit those genes on Christmas Day. We’ve spent enough time in the emergency room for this month.”

The tone was light and teasing, but Brandon could see the worry that still flashed through Alan’s eyes at the memory of the snowboarding accident, the way his hand tightened ever so slightly around the mixing spoon, and Brnadon wished he could stand and cross the small kitchen, wished he could kiss away all of his eyes boyfriend’s stress and bad memories. Instead, he went for a wry half smile, flicking a stray chocolate chip from the small pile given to him by Alan when he had pouted over not being able to steal any.

“Hey,” Brandon said, trying to lift the atmosphere that was starting to settle. “I’m okay. And I know how to make cookies, and I trust you. Don’t stress, okay?”

“...Okay,” Alan agreed, giving Brandon a small, tentative smile. Brandon huffed.

“Alan, it’s fine.” He reached across the table, only just managing to brush the very end of his fingertips across Alan’s soft hoodie, but Alan got the message, moving around the table and bending down so Brandon could give him a small, reassuring kiss. “Just chill, yeah? It’s Christmas. And you promised me cookies for breakfast and I plan on holding you to that, so better get baking.”

“So demanding,” Alan teased, still leaning over Brandon.

“You love it.”

“I do.” He gave Brandon one last, sweet, kiss before straightening back up and returning to the kitchen counter. “Right then. Flour.”

“Yep. All purpose, one cup.” Brandon sat back, crunching on another chocolate chip and trying (and failing) not to laugh when Alan dumped a cup of flour into the mixture with a heavy hand and caused a white cloud to puff up into his face.

***

Later, when the sun had finally risen properly and the air outside was light, bright and clear, despite the freezing temperatures such weather brought with it, Alan and Brandon were tucked side by side on the blue sofa, sharing one of the many blankets Gordon had gifted Alan with when Alan had first moved to Colorado. Alan had protested at the time, but Gordon had pointed out that LA was different to Denver, and Alan would thank him later. Alan had rolled his eyes petulantly and hadn’t, in fact, thanked him, but he could at least appreciate the usefulness of them, even if they were a particularly ugly shade of yellow that didn’t match their curtains and only Gordon and Brandon seemed to like.

It may be ugly (in Alan’s opinion, not that he was famed for his interior design skills), but it’s soft and warm and, most importantly, big enough to cover the two of them, Alan tucked into Brandon’s side whilst Brandon sat diagonally in the corner seat, broken leg stretched out and propped up on a stack of Alan’s old textbooks, softened by one of the cushions taken from the sofa. There was an untouched plate of cookies on Brandon’s lap and a cheesy Christmas film that was playing on the television in the background, going mostly ignored. It was soft and sweet and domestic in the living room that was barely bigger than the kitchen, if two separate rooms could even be made distinct given that it was a large bookshelf that marked a divide, full of books, trinkets and photographs, rather than an actual wall.

“...are you going to try one?” Alan asked eventually, breaking the comfortable quiet. Brandon’s eyebrow raised, but he lifted a cookie to his mouth, taking a large bite and not breaking his gaze on Alan. Alan could feel himself blush, waiting with baited breath as Brandon chewed swallowed, eventually ducking his head into Brandon’s shoulder. Alan could still feel his eyes burning into him as the silence stretched. “Well? And stop looking at me like that, you’re making me nervous.”

“Well…”

“Oh God. I've poisoned you, haven't I? They’re awful. We should’ve just stuck to cereal, and now I’ll have to write your eulogy where I explain to everyone that it was my lack of baking skills that killed you-”

“Alan. Shut up. They’re good.”

“...what?”

“They’re good.” He shifted, dislodging Alan enough so that he could kiss him softly, the taste of chocolate chips and sugar on his lips. “Thank you, baby.”

“Merry Christmas, Brandon,” Alan mumbled into the kiss, not willing to pull away. He could feel Brandon’s lips pull up into a smile against his own.

“Merry Christmas. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Meanwhile, in another universe…

Brandon had always, always, associated Christmas with snow. As a child, his family had always jetted off to spend Christmas abroad in some picturesque, aesthetically pleasing place with the backdrop of snow and pine needles, choosing to spend the Christmas holiday in a bed not their own and paint the picture of a happy, perfect family that had made Brandon want to scream when he was old enough to understand the hypocrisy of it all. It hadn't been any better as Brandon got older and he was shipped off to work for his godfather in a bid to curb some of his wild tendencies. It hadn’t really worked, of course, because Lemaire was just as wild as Brandon in his projects, albeit with the benefit of dressing it up as a need to explore, rather than to satisfy his own endless curiosity and need for adrenaline, but at least now Brandon had a better understanding of the importance of a carefully curated public persona, why aesthetic shots of dreamy wooden chalets to paint a false image was important.

Still. Just because he could now appreciate his family’s motivations, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to jump at the chance to spend Christmas with Alan, when the idea was first proposed, complete with shy blushes and a hopeful, tentative smile. Brandon had simply kissed Alan, hard, and given his now breathless boyfriend the biggest smile possible that told him just how excellent an idea that was.

Brandon was supposed to have arrived on the twenty-second of December, enough time to acclimatise to the Island and meet everyone before the main festivities began, but this got pushed back to the twenty-third and then again to the twenty-fourth, when a bright pink car pulled up outside his apartment and a person who was decidedly not Alan stepped out, a small pug in a seasonal red jumper held securely under one arm whilst the other was outstretched for Brandon to shake the perfectly manicured hand.

“Brandon? Alan is terribly sorry, he was desperately keen to come and get you himself but unfortunately rescues have held all of them up and you’ve just been stuck with me. I do hope you don’t mind. I’m Penelope Creighton-Ward.”

“It’s fine,” Brandon assured, finally able to place a face to Gordon’s girlfriend that Alan had mentioned once or twice before. He ducked quickly into his hallway to pick up his bags and followed Penelope to the car.

The flight to the Island was pleasant enough, Penelope making polite conversation as they crossed the ocean, but Brandon was feeling increasingly impatient, a feeling that didn’t dissipate until they had landed and he was finally, finally, back in Alan’s arms. Luckily, only Gordon and Alan were around and it was easy to sneak back to Alan’s bedroom to exchange kisses and private smiles, drinking in each other’s presence now that they were together again.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come and get you,” Alan said eventually, cuddled up into Brandon’s side and struggling to keep his eyes open. “Stupid space pirate ghosts.”

The hand that Brandon was using to card through Alan’s hair stilled, and he looked down at him in confusion, Alan’s soft hair tickling his nose. “The… what?”

“Space pirate ghosts,” Alan repeated, mumbling through a yawn. “Met them before but they’re so annoying.”

“If you say so.”

“They are, you’re lucky you haven’t met them. They just cause so many problems and steal my astro-boards all the time. So annoying.”

“Space pirate ghosts?”

“Yes. Or space ghost pirates if you prefer.”

“I think you need to sleep, baby.”

“Mmm,” Alan agreed. It wasn’t a tacit agreement, but Alan’s breaths started to even out and Brandon had resumed the gentle strokes through his hair. It wasn’t long before the two of them were sound asleep, tangled and pressed close together as the sun began to rise on Christmas Day.

Meanwhile, in another universe…

Everything was beautiful. It was beautiful and perfect and tasteful, from the canapés and trays of drinks being carried unobtrusively around the edges of the room to the elegant decoration of holly and pine, a great Christmas tree standing at the opposite end to the hall where the band was playing, soft white lights twinkling from where they had been wrapped around the branches and catching on the red and gold glass baubles and causing them to shine in bright spots of colour that culminated in a great, golden sunburst of a star at the top of the tree. The music was loud enough to cover people’s conversations and provide a semblance of privacy, but not too loud that the guests had to shout at each other, playing a wide range of popular carols and songs that had prompted enough people to take to the dance floor that it was now quite full.

None of that mattered to Brandon, however. Nothing mattered at all, hadn’t mattered the moment the Tracy family had stepped through the great doors in full force, all decked out in their smart suits and commanding attention without even trying. Lady Penelope had glided forward in full hostess mood, greeting Jeff Tracy first with a kiss to each cheek and a musical laugh to whatever comment he made to her, before turning to each of the brothers and welcoming them each with a kiss of their own, leaving Gordon until last and breaking the pattern with a swift kiss to the lips. Brandon watched as Gordon had beamed, his entire person brightening up even more, brighter than the sun, and Brandon had to squash the pang of longing and jealousy forcefully. It wasn’t fair to indulge in those feelings. He and Alan had talked about it, had agreed to keep things just between them for now whilst things were so new and Alan still hadn’t, actually, come out to his family, and it was fine. Brandon loved Alan more than anything and wouldn’t ask anything from Alan that would make him uncomfortable, wouldn’t even think to ask.

Still, watching as Gordon pressed a kiss to Penelope’s hand and guided her onto the dance floor to spin her around in time to the music, Brandon couldn’t help the small part of him that wished that one day, he’d be able to scoop Alan up and sway with him on the dance floor as well.

***

It didn’t take long for Alan to find him, or for him to find Alan, or for the two of them to gravitate together because really, they were like magnets in the way they managed to always seek each other out at gatherings like these. One of the advantages of being related to rich, powerful families was that they were often at gatherings for rich, powerful people and it was perfectly natural that a friendship would have sprung up between the two of them, providing a perfect cover story for their meet-ups. Even still, when they did inevitably find each other that evening, it was in a secluded doorway that seemed to be mostly hidden from the rest of the room, a door almost hidden by a heavy velvet curtain that Brandon was currently standing behind as he pressed Alan into the door frame, their lips sliding urgently over each other as hands gripped at suit jackets.

“Wait,” Alan gasped breathlessly, pulling back to gaze heavy lidded at Brandon. His lips were pink and puffy, and Brandon couldn’t help but lean forward to kiss them once, twice, three times more. Alan’s hands moved from where he was pulling Brandon’s hips closer to cup his cheeks instead, stopping Brandon from being able to distract him further. “I have something to tell you.”

“Can it wait?” asked Brandon, his question more of a plea.

“It’s important.”

“Alan…”

“I came out to my dad.”

That pulled Brandon up short, stopped him from trying to drop kisses down Alan’s neck, choosing to look Alan in the eye instead as he tried to gauge Alan’s feelings towards coming out to his dad.

“You did?”

“Yeah. I um… I told him that I had a boyfriend. I didn’t say it was you, because I know we agreed to go slow for now and not tell a whole bunch of people and I wanted to talk to you first before Dad knows, but yeah. He was okay about it and now he knows. He knows I like guys. Or I guess a guy. A specific guy. You-“

Brandon cut Alan’s nervous rambling off with a searing kiss, trying to pour as much love and support as possible into it until his brain managed to come up with adequate words to say. The moan Alan rewarded him with indicated Brandon’s success.

“I love you, so much. I’m so proud of you,” Brandon said when they finally pulled apart, thumb brushing the nape of Alan’s neck and arms resting on his shoulders. Alan’s face split into the widest grin.

“I love you too.”

“Are you staying the night?” Brandon asked, already tipping forward for another kiss, pushing Alan further back into the wall.

“Yes, why?”

“Because you’re amazing, hot as hell and we’ve been kissing for a while now and I don’t think it’d be a good idea to go back out with all those fancy people including our families.”

“...fuck.”

“My point exactly.”

“Follow me, I know a shortcut.”

Alan took one of Brandon’s hands, lacing their fingers together, and fumbled for the door behind them. Just as he was tugging Brandon through it, Brandon reached up and snagged the branch of mistletoe that was hanging unobtrusively above it, winking at Alan’s questioning look.

“For later,” he promised, and tried not to laugh as Alan started pulling him through the manor at a quicker pace.

Meanwhile, in this universe…

Brandon stifled a smile when he saw Alan yawn for the fifth time, easily making the calculations that were by now second nature when trying to determine the time zones and working out that it had now gone midnight for Alan and that Alan really needed to sleep. The conversation had drifted and meandered along, as it was prone to do when the two of them were talking, but Brandon couldn’t stop thinking about what Alan had said earlier, about the different universes with the different Alans and Brandons.

“Hey, Alan,” he said, and Alan blinked at him sleepily, already curled on his side with one arm tucked under his pillow.

“Hmm?”

“I think you’re right. About the different universes.”

“Of course. I’m super smart,” he bragged, and Brandon rolled his eyes, the move tempered by his huffed laugh.

“I know baby. But I think, even with all those different universes, there isn’t a single one where we don’t find each other.”

“No?”

“No. I think in every one we’re together, and that we’re happy.”

“I’m happy in this one. With you.”

“I know. And I’ll be with you tomorrow. Well. My tomorrow.”

“I know. I love you, Brandon.

“I love you too. I’ll see you at Christmas.”

“See you at Christmas.”

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds 2015 #tag team secret santa #secret santa 2020 #Brandon Berringer #alan tracy #hodgehegposts

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thedreadvampy · 4 years ago

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so I understand you like Historical Mechs Fandom stuff

anyone wanna read this unfinished fanfic I wrote in 2013 about Bertie from the Gunpowder Tim backstory???? it is my Bertie Lives AU that was my baby for like six months and then I gave up because once I tried to write non-joky Mechanisms dialogue I was Incapable.

it’s pretty much just 10 pages of Bertie bumbling around having PTSD and then 5 pages of Bertie having a FULL ON NIGHTMARE BAD TRIP ON THE AURORA

[oops I put this up during my lunch break and I forgot to put content warnings - cw for alcohol abuse, suicidal thoughts and self-harm (plus all the usual Mechanisms stuff)]

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The night before the battle, Tim had a strange dream. At least, he decided on reflection, it must have been a dream, because it was far too odd to have actually happened, and the alternative was that he was going mad.

In the dream, he opened his eyes in darkness, and it took him a moment to work out why. Outside, someone was whistling a jaunty tune. It drifted down from above into his consciousness, and it occurred to him that he half-knew it. Humming along under his breath, almost inaudible, glory glory hallelujah, Tim crept out of his bunk and picked his way surefooted to the ladder out of the dugout, pausing only to pick up a shuttered lantern.

Up above, the dim light picked out the vague silhouette of the whistler. His back was to Tim; the young soldier could just about make out that the stranger was wearing neither Lunar or British uniform, but a long non-military trenchcoat. His long dark hair billowed in the stale cycling of the tunnel air, but he was otherwise motionless, whistling his tune repetitively out to the darkness.

Dragged by the strange compulsion of mystery, Tim drew closer, holding his breath. He was mere feet away from the stranger now, and the other man showed no sign of recognising his existence, just stared ahead and whistled. His soul goes marching on...

Caution gave him pause for a moment, the nightmare fear of the unknown, but the tension of the moment pulled Tim forward. Slowly, with eyes wide, Tim raised a hand to touch the long-haired man on the shoulder, but a fragment of a second before he could touch him, the whistling abruptly stopped. In that awful frozen moment, Tim's heart stopped in terror, and the other man turned, looked him in the eye.

With a strangled noise, Tim dropped his lantern in the mud. It flared as it fell, flashing reflections off metal and strange, unknowable materials embedded in the other man's skin.

He had such eyes, and that wasn't the worst of it. Paralysed with horror, Tim gaped, and his own ruined face stared unblinking back at him, pale and marred by those inhuman, mechanical eyes.

And in the darkness, the Other-Tim whispered to him, told him his future. Told him what he had to do.

-------

They land in the north of Scotland a few hours before dawn, a ragged, wounded band of half-men more pain than thought, and sunrise finds Bertie on the train south, a weary soldier on his way home at last. He clutches Tim’s dogtags like a rosary and rocks freely with the motion of the train. Not for the likes of them the heady luxury of the airships, nor even the smooth skytrain built not so long before the war that stretches around the coast. The common soldiery are crammed unceremoniously into commandeered civilian trains, and there’s little complaint because while it may be slow and loud and shaky and cramped, while they may be granted little more thought than freight, the trains are taking them home. The war is over, the years of hell behind them, and they are going home.

Still, tight-packed, the carriage is airless and steaming, and encrustations of dirt and blood and worse on the demobbed soldiers’ uniforms fill the train with the stench of war. Sitting next to Bertie is a boy who looks half his age, and the war so fills Bertie’s past that he wonders that it’s possible for someone so young to even have been alive when he and Tim enlisted lifetimes ago. He’s missing an arm, and the half of his face on Bertie’s side is a shattered, bandaged mess, collapsed jaw, empty eyesocket visible through the dressings. Bertie feels sick, miserable, and the pitching of the train does nothing to ease his nausea. The claustrophobic airless heat, the smell of men and misery, all of it’s too close to the tunnels for him to bear. Tim’s tags bite into his palm. He’ll have to tell Tim’s parents about what happened, when he finally makes it back. He wonders if they’ll be surprised. He wonders if they’ll remember him.

He presses his face to the mud-speckled glass and feels the vibrations running through his skull, tries to ward off the panicking part of his mind that tells him that what he’s feeling is the rumble of approaching Lunar vehicles. He shuts out the train, the sweaty warmth, the shattered bodies, and watches the familiar half-forgotten landscapes rush past. He longs to be out of here, out there. He wants to just fall down in the gorse and the heather below the enormous openness of the dawn sky, he almost convinces himself that he can smell the fresh sweetness of bruised leaves and rain-moistened earth, feel the rain on his face. Rain! It’s been so long he reels from the strangeness of it all, from the heaviness of normal g that sets his weakened body to buckling, from the greens and yellows and blues after the colourless landscape of the moon, from the improbable lack of echoing and the solid ground beneath his feet after years of tunnels and sinkholes and muck.

When he gets off the train, though, holding himself steady on his crutches in the crush of men, once the paperwork’s done and the stamps stamped and he leaves the station, his kitbag on his back, his legs wobbly and weak, once he’s off the train and out in the open, it’s all too much. The sky is too wide, a great, sucking emptiness above him, the air fills his lungs in strange ways, there’s nobody to tell him what to do or where to go, and he gropes for Tim’s hand but of course Tim isn’t there, won’t be there, and he finds himself losing the fight to stay standing. There’s too much air, he gasps it in and out and it can’t get through, and he’s crying in a shower of spit and tears as he drops his kitbag and crutches, curled on all fours, grabbing and gasping for breath that won’t come and he can’t do it, he’s left the tunnels but he’s still stuck there in his mind, and the more he tries to calm himself the worse it gets, until gentle hands lead him back into the station and push a tumbler of brandy into his hands and make soothing noises, and over the roaring of blood in his ears he can hear ‘poor old bastard’ and ‘shellshock’ and he thinks bugger that, it’s not the shells that shocked me, it’s getting away from them that did the damage. The brandy burns, makes him cough, but the effort of drinking it slows him, calms him, and the world comes back into focus.

He has to admit to himself he can’t get back to Roseburn Street by himself. He calls home from the station. His mother’s in hospital (he didn’t know, nobody told him), so his sister Sophie comes to pick him up, and he almost doesn’t recognise her. She’s grown, become a sensible, careworn woman since he left, though she’s barely twenty, and he almost comments on how much she’s changed from the laughing child he left behind until he catches sight of himself in a darkened window and sees himself through her eyes, his cavernous scars, his weakened frame, his aged face, his haunted eyes, his awkwardly dragging leg, his round cheeks turned hollow. There are lines gouged in his brow and around his mouth, lines of pain and misery and anger, and he struggles to align that Bertie with the person he knows he is. That Bertie looks middle-aged, looks worn, a veteran of a nightmare war, but he doesn’t understand because he knows he’s not yet twenty-five and the man in the window looks more like fifty.

He holds Sophie’s hand like a child on the tram back to the flat. He doesn’t speak. Neither does she. They are worlds apart. She isn’t fourteen any more and he doesn’t know who she is. One hand is in his pocket, turning over Tim’s tags, twining the chain endlessly around his fingers as if it could bring him closer. Outside the window, the city’s shifted to alien strangeness. Rails and tracks have been ripped up in the name of the war effort. New buildings have sprung up, old familiar facades fallen into disrepair. He doesn’t belong here. He is conscious that the other passengers are staring before he becomes aware that he’s weeping openly. Sophie’s hand tightens around his. He can feel blood oozing from his cracked palm, running over the warm metal dogtags in his pockets. He wants to disappear.

The tenement building of his childhood is at once too big and too small. The stairs take him an age to navigate, pausing at each landing to catch his breath, Sophie hovering concerned at his elbow. His shoulders scream with the effort, his lungs burn. The flat is on the fourth floor. Every pitted step of the stairwell is an aching return to childhood that his ruined leg drags over and scuffs to nothingness.

The flat seems to have shrunk since he left for Oxford an eternity ago. The walls close in around him. Exhausted by the journey, he fights to smile as his siblings and old family friends welcome him home with fanfare and homemade cake and childishly painted banners and balloons, but there are tears streaming unstemmed down his face. A balloon pops like a grenade and he finds himself crumpled on the floor. Someone screamed deafeningly in his ear; he decides it was probably him. He feels weak and selfish and fragile. His body weighs several tonnes. His aunt and his sister carry him to his room. He can’t stop apologising and he’s still apologising when they leave, Sophie’s mouth twisting as she holds back tears.

His room is starched and washed and cosily clean, little changed in all these years. He struggles into the pyjamas laid out on the bed, crisp and smelling of laundry, and hurls his hateful uniform across the room with what little strength is left in him. It lies there, watching him balefully. He throws a crutch at it. The little heap is miserable, muddy, alien in the childish comfort of his room. The wet fabric leaves a little puddle where it lies. He is seized with a sudden urge to be rid of it all, and despite his exhaustion, he struggles up on one crutch and hauls the filthy bundle to the bathroom across the hall, to shove it wilfully to the bottom of the laundry basket. Sudden realisation strikes him, and he digs back down to rescue Tim’s tags. Now his beautiful clean pyjama sleeve is wet and muddy, and there’s a brownish grey patch damp down his white-and-blue-striped side where he held the uniform to him. Angry and hurt and shaking with exertion, he tears that off as well, and shoves it too into the laundry. Then he sits on the toilet lid until the shaking subsides.

He doesn’t get up, because he can’t, but he reaches over to the cracked sink and drops the dogtags next to the tap. Then he scrubs his hands under the hot tap until they start to bleed again, until the water runs clear past his hands, trickling and dripping down his bare arms onto his chest. If there’s pain, it doesn’t reach him, but his hands are lobster-red when they emerge. He still doesn’t feel clean, but the room is spinning and the walls are closing in and he needs to sleep before he passes out. He brushes his teeth slowly and haltingly with a new toothbrush left by the sink, and realises he’s not been clean in years.

Before he goes to bed, he puts Tim’s stained and bloody tags around his neck, to hang there with his own. He wraps himself, like a small scared child, around a threadbare teddy bear his mother gave him when he was young. He has a vague feeling it ought to smell like childhood, but it doesn’t, it smells of age and dust and cleaning products.

He blacks out almost immediately, curled on top of the neatly made up, crisp sheets. He does not dream, and he awakes confused and lost, crying out and reaching for Tim in soft tangled strangeness that takes minutes to make sense to him.

It ought to be better, being out of the tunnels, being home. It is better, he tells himself, but he’s not convinced. At least on the front, he knew he had a use, he had orders, friends, Tim. Now he lies here, a pallid, broken thing, watched by faces pale and concerned, afraid of his own shadow. Bertie never learnt how to do nothing; for as long as he can remember he has been a comforter, a worker, a student, a soldier, a protector. Now the days stretch endless before him and crush him with their weight, closing in like tunnel walls.

For weeks, he barely leaves his room. His siblings bring him food and clothes and sit with him, try to talk across a gap of half a decade to the stranger wearing their brother’s name and an old man’s face. He lies in bed and reads and fingers Tim’s battered tags and tries not to think. Slamming doors and backfiring cars make him jump out of his skin. He cries without knowing why. There is a dent in the wall where he punches it in his sleep. He feels useless, empty. He’s forgotten how to be normal, and the world’s moved on without him.

He tries to take his kitbag and his uniform down to the yard to burn them, but Sophie stops him with a desperate hug and a comforting hand to guide him upstairs. The uniform is taken out of his unresisting hands and he is glad, but like a bad dream it returns in the end, freshly cleaned and folded, lurking like a predator in his wardrobe. He doesn’t complain, but he feels its baleful presence. There are stains in the fabric that will never come out, even if the uniform is washed to bleach-paleness. He hates it with a fervent passion.

A fortnight after he gets back, Bertie summons up all his courage and peels himself out of the comforting shell of the flat, struggles down the stairs to see Tim’s parents. They sit, awkward, three people all broken in their own ways by his death, and Bertie sips tea, unsteady hands slopping it into the saucer, as they stoically don’t talk about what hurts. In their conversation, Tim is still a brilliant child, and he and Bertie play in the sunshine, and nothing bad can ever happen, and though Bertie remembers that there were bullies and beatings and the sunshine was never as bright as it seemed, he imagines himself into that world. He doesn’t have anything to say that won’t hurt. He just wants to keep his mouth shut and lose himself in the rosy past they paint, but they ask about the war and though his teacup clatters in his hands and he can feel himself twitching, he calms himself as best he can. He tells them that Tim fought very bravely. He tells them how Tim’s experiments helped win the war, he talks about nights spent in camaraderie around their meagre heatstrip in the dugout, how Tim’s battered guitar had kept their spirits up night after night. He tries to gloss over the worst of it, but watching their faces he realises how far the boundaries of normal moved for him in the last few years, how the smallest things that had been everyday life in the tunnels were unthinkable to civilians.

He tells them that Tim died saving him. His face stays unmoving. He tells it as a stranger’s story, detaches himself. He wonders absently, as he tells them how Tim’s death allowed him to escape what should have been his death and crawl to safety, whether they hate him as much as he hates himself for stealing their son’s life for his own. He tells them the way Tim had lied to him to save his life, the way he’d forced him to leave him behind, the way he’d understood the situation better than any of them, willingly and actively given his life for Bertie. He wonders if they believe him. It’s too hard to explain. Even he doesn’t believe it, and he knows it’s true.

When he goes, he leaves the little bundle of Tim’s personal effects with them. His regimental mug, his notebooks, his favourite fountain pen, the two books he read and reread during the years in the tunnels. He doesn’t give them the dogtags, or the creased and bloodstained picture of himself and Tim that he recovered from the body. They are his and they are all he has.

Time eddies around him and he stands outside it, or so it feels. But he is healing. It’s slow and it’s painful and it’s almost unnoticeable but now he walks without cringing, he cries less often (though always at night, and the nightmares haven’t stopped). And now, after four months, August is shading into September and he remembers that he had a life once. He remembers why he enlisted. He tells his mother he ought to go back to Oxford and finish his degree, because he is sick of shadowing around the house like a ghost, because the hole Tim left in his life is more sucking than ever when he’s a cripple stranded with nothing to do.

The train takes him south-east, moorlands and industry fading into flat green farmland under the golden sunlight and the still-strange wide blue sky. He is almost enjoying the journey, until they begin to pass through tunnels and the hot darkness envelops him, panics him. He closes his eyes, tries to pretend that the darkness is an illusion, but the change in the air defies him; once again it is tight, sweaty, closed. His breath comes harsh and fast. By the time the train explodes back out into bright sunlight, Bertie is huddled against the seat, barely holding back the urge to scream and cry.

The journey is soured. Children complain about the intermittent darkness. Bitterly, Bertie wishes they understood just how bad it can be to be truly afraid of the dark. At the same time, he is glad they don’t. By the time the train pulls into London for his connection, he’s a nervous wreck. The way to Oxford is spent gnawing his nails to the bone, and he worries. It’s so unpredictable, what can set him off, and Oxford is full of memories and ghosts.

Unlike home, Oxford hasn’t changed a bit. It never does. Hell, there are buildings here going on for four thousand years old and still standing (heavily scaffolded and supported, naturally, but still). The streets are still strangely tranquil yet swarming; buses and airrails rattle past as he walks the old familiar ways back to Wadham, after half a decade away. Even after all this time away from the blasted Moon, the normality of it all still strikes him as disingenuous.

But things are wrong. Subtly, slightly wrong. There’s a strange feeling in the air. The students who pass him all seem ridiculously young. A memorial to Wadham students lost to the tunnels has risen up inside the quad, and once again Bertie sees Tim’s name and smells cordite and death and chokes back nausea. He sits outside his tutor’s office, resting on his crutches with his useless leg stretched across the corridor, and looks over at the girl next to him who has to be at least six years younger than him, and he feels old and weary and lost on familiar ground.

Of course, there is little to no trouble with him coming back to university. After all, he’s far from alone; all across the country since the end of the war, people pulled away by the draft have been coming back to pick up the pieces of their old lives. And now, with his savings and his soldier’s pension and his disability allowance, he can afford his tuition, and a small ground-floor flat not too far away to boot. All according to plan. Except that his flat is so empty after a lifetime of sharing rooms and housing, and at least at first he’s disorientated by not living in the place he and Tim had been occupying in their first year.

It all falls together. Which isn’t to say, of course, that it’s easy. He finds that distances he used to run in minutes exhaust him, and so to start with he turns up late to lectures almost every day. His fellow students are younger, fresher than him. They understand what he, scientific mind atrophied by years away from the concepts, struggle to grasp. He has few friends, and his frequent panic attacks alienate him more; the others view him with mingled admiration and pity, always from afar. He cannot go out on nights out with them; crowded pubs make him panic, long nights wear him out. Worst of all, in his absence the field has changed almost unrecognisably; the war forced such advances on technology and engineering understanding that suddenly, unexpectedly, he finds himself left years behind, a relic of a bygone age. He cannot work hard enough to regain his place at the head of his class, nor is he sure whether he has grown stupider or this new generation of engineers are unreasonably intelligent. It isn’t fair, he curses again and again, to be obsolete and old at the age of twenty-four. He can feel his chance of earning a scholarship once more slipping between his fingers.

But worst is the loneliness. Though slowly he gets better and better, begins to gain once more a handle on this new and alien form of engineering, walks with more strength, answers with more conviction, still he wakes screaming to an echoingly empty flat and Tim’s photograph eyes laughing behind the glass, trapped in time. He had hoped that regaining his university life might help him recover, but he has fallen far enough behind to never pick himself all the way up again, and lost friends’ names watch him whenever he walks around college, and the ghost of Tim haunts their favourite spots. And he is still so lost. His savings trickle away on cheap food and cheap rent and enough whisky to knock out an elephant, and sometimes he goes through hours of work without noticing that he’s crying into his glass. He barely sleeps, because his sleep is haunted. He awakes in the night and sees phantom soldiers in the shadows of the empty rooms and shivers under the covers, he hears noises in the hallway and drowning in paranoia, lies awake contemplating going outside to reassure himself that there’s nothing there, unable to build up the nerve to reach for his crutches in case there is.

He stays in the library until the morning, works late in the lab, does everything he can to avoid going home to the flat and his nightmares. He develops a habit of sleeping flopped on desks or leaning on walls in cafes, trains himself to operate on half-hour snatches of naps for weeks on end and to sleep during the day and work at night, forestalling the moment he has to lie in the darkness which makes every shadow and every creak into a horror story. He finds himself in this strange life where he needs people around him, their presence comforts him, but his eccentricities and his nervousness, not to mention the antisocial hours he keeps, leave him practically friendless. It’s strange to him. His whole life, he was always the one who everyone liked, who was easy to get along with and easy to spend time with. Now he finds himself taking a new role on the outside of everything, and it’s strange and uncomfortable.

But then, sleepless and uncomfortable, though he is learning to cope with work and to manage cramped places, the madness begins to leak into daylight. He wakes from naps in coffee shops with an uneasy feeling of being watched. He sees shadows following him for streets on end as he walks the city in the evening, but turns to see nothing. People pass him in the streets, people who he glimpses with a strange sense of familiarity but whose faces are never in view, people he knows he knows but can’t place. One day he gets home to find things in his room have been ever so slightly moved. Logically he knows it’s ridiculous, paranoid, that he’s misremembering, but he can’t shake the feeling that someone’s been in his home. People give him strange looks in the street. He is, he realises, definitely going mad. Not a-bit-of-shell-shock mad, gibbering in the corner, paranoid delusions mad.

He thinks about seeing someone about it, but what if they take him off the course again? What if they lock him up? He can cope. He grits his teeth and tries to ignore the feeling of being followed.

Exams come and go, not as good as he hoped or as bad as he feared. He goes home for a couple of weeks, and while he’s in his family’s flat he feels less watched, although there are still moments when he ventures off Roseburn Street where he hears someone walking behind him for turn after turn, always gone when he looks around. When he gets back to Oxford, he advertises for a flatmate. He doesn’t know if it’s a good idea, with his night terrors and the odd hours he keeps, with his nervousness around people, but he hopes that it might make the nights less terrifying and the flat feel more secure. Still, he’s oddly relieved when he gets no responses; the life he’s living might be tense and operating on the slow and steady road to total insanity, but it’s become familiar and the idea of a change to his hard-won routine, even a positive one, is terrifying. Around the start of Trinity, the visitations abruptly stop. He can walk the streets without feeling followed, the feeling of being watched gives way to the usual loneliness. Life goes on.

He’s surviving. That’s the best he can say. Struggling day by day to keep his head above water, focusing on lasting the day. He isn’t doing badly. If you watched him, you’d barely know how hard it is. He does his work competently if not with his former brilliance, he responds with ghostly smiles when people speak to him, he has friends, both on his course and in the society he found by accident, the little drinking community of Lunar vets. But his colleagues don’t see the exhaustion in his eyes or the drag in his step; when he takes days in a row off sick they just take it as a given. And perhaps the other veterans can see it, but they’re all fighting the same war in their heads. Like in the tunnels, this is just what normality is for them all now.

He wonders what he’s living for. Under his clothes, where nobody can see, his upper arm bears a bloody tally of the times he’s come close to wasting Tim’s gift. The skin is rough and livid with criss-crossing scars.

He wants to die. He can’t die. Around the city, bridges and trains, high windows and passing cars, remind him how easy it would be to stop fighting. But then who would remember Tim? Then, what would Tim have died for? It’s useless. Ridiculous. If he’d been shot, if he’d been killed in the war, all would have been well, it would have been nobody’s fault. All these years he’d thought that the war was hell, but at least he’d known what he was doing. Now he drifts through a grey haze of lonely days, and it is with a palpable shock that he realises it’s a matter of days until the anniversary of Tim’s death.

Accordingly, when the day rolls around (April 3rd, ten days before his birthday), Bertie skips class, skips his usual library session, and devotes the day to getting as utterly and completely hammered as humanly possible. He attempts to drink until he’s incapable of feeling feelings any more; it doesn’t entirely work out as planned. He does, however, drink until he’s incapable of feeling his fingers, and then very nearly breaks his fist trying to get in a fight that nobody else wants to have. Ultimately, he wakes up with a splitting headache, missing a crutch, on a park bench halfway across the city.

He lies very still, trying not to vomit, and then it occurs to him that the paranoia must have come back, because he feels eyes on him despite the fact the sun’s barely risen and the park is empty. A few more brain cells juggle into place and he realises he isn’t making it up. There’s a shadow falling across him. Someone is standing behind the bench, watching him.

With a shout, he erupts upwards, trying to catch the watcher off-guard. The figure is gone, but looking around frantically, he sees the tail of a long coat disappearing around the gate. His nausea and headache pushed aside for the moment, Bertie gives chase as best he can on one crutch, desperation lending him a surprising turn of speed. He runs lopsidedly through familiar streets and alleyways, always just close enough behind to catch a glimpse of his quarry, never fast enough to catch up, breath tearing raggedly, lungs and limbs burning.

Chasing the glimpses of flapping brown coat over Magdalen Bridge, eyes fixed on his quarry, Bertie doesn’t see the man stepping out in front of him until it’s too late. Knocked off balance, his head hits the paving stones hard enough to start stars dancing dizzily in front of his eyes. His crutch skitters noisily into the road. He chokes back vomit, shaking with exertion and rage, and hauls himself halfway up to give a piece of his mind to whoever ruined his chase, but the words dry in his throat when he sees who he ran into.

He gasps, shudders, stifles a scream as he tries to crawl away and encounters the solid parapet, because he’s definitely snapped. Impossible ghosts have come back to haunt him.

“Bertie!” A grin grows across the other man’s face, making the rivers of ink on his face shift and bend. At least, it’s probably a grin, although the number of teeth exposed make Bertie feel rather like a small animal trapped in the gaze of some vast predator. “Bertie, Bertie, Bertie. This is a fucking treat. Haven’t seen you since, hell, when was it?”

Bertie, gaping, chokes out, “Sea of Tranquillity. A year and a half ago. You died, D’Ville.”

“Did I?” Jonny D’Ville sticks a cigarette between his teeth and lights up, looking singularly unconcerned by that information. “Huh. Learn something new every day. Oh well, these things happen, huh? That’s life. Or not, as the case may be.”

“How are you here?” Bertie manages, struggling to his feet (well, foot) with the aid of the parapet. A thought strikes him. “Oh God, am I dead too? Is this what it’s like?”

Jonny snorts. “Dead? Fuck no, you’re just hungover. Trust me, there’s a difference. Hungover is a lot less fun.”

Bertie has had more than enough of this cryptic shit. Just about managing to keep himself supported on the parapet, he lunges forward to grab Jonny by the collar, and is almost taken aback when his hand doesn’t go straight through. Oh hell, what must this look like to people passing them by? Is Jonny really there, or has it finally happened, has he joined the ranks of the crazies who stand in the street shouting at nothingness? “Would you just tell me what the FUCK is going on?!”

Unconcerned, Jonny steps back a few steps, dragging Bertie away from his support so he loses his balance again and falls at his feet. “Where’s the fun in that? I dunno, some people just want to take all the mystery out of life. You’re alive and mostly unmaimed, isn’t that good enough for you?”

“No, it’s fucking not!” Scrabbling around for a moment, Bertie manages to reach his crutch and starts the painful process of getting back up. His face is burning with humiliation and rage, he wants to break everything, beat Jonny’s smirking face into a bloody pulp.

“Well, that’s fucking gratitude for you, isn’t it? After all the trouble Tim went to to get you out of there in one piece. How’d that work out, anyway?”

The red mist descends. Bertie lashes out upwards with the metal bar of his crutch, catching Jonny under the jaw with a satisfying crunch, and then they’re both rolling on the pavement among horrified passersby, and Bertie is straddling Jonny’s chest and punching him repeatedly in the face, and he’s not so much lashing out at Jonny’s smug comments as he is at his own insanity, at the feeling of being watched, at the country that let him down and at Tim’s ghost for being cruel enough to die for him. Jonny laughs through broken teeth, a bloodstreaked devil’s smile, and it fuels Bertie’s rage more, until his fists are bruised and torn from punching.

Something cracks Bertie in the back of the head for the third time this morning. Jonny’s laughing, ruined face swirls and swims before his eyes, and then nothingness embraces him.

-----

Blinking awake, eyes gummy, head killing him, it takes Bertie a moment to realise what’s wrong, but when he does he swings into full consciousness in an airless rush of panic. He’s lying on something hard and uncushioned, and the gravity’s all out of whack, he feels strangely weightless and buoyant, his fearful breathing echoes off tight metal walls. For a moment of impossible certainty, he’s sure he’s somehow back on the Moon, trapped again in the tunnels, but no, that can’t be, since the end of the war there have been blockades around the lunar remains, nobody gets in or out. But that doesn’t stop the bile rising in his throat, claustrophobic panic seizing him. His mind knows that this isn’t the Moon, but his hindbrain disagrees with absolute surety, and rises in revolt, and if this isn’t the Moon then where the hell is he?

He tries to sit up, and sets the room spinning as white-hot pain lances through the base of his skull. Nausea sweeps through him again, and he retches, but some time must have passed because his stomach is empty and he only succeeds in dribbling stomach acid onto the floor. His head is excruciating, and it takes him several minutes to remember why. Gingerly, he touches the sore part, trying not to move his head, and hisses between his teeth as his fingers brush scabbed swelling and bruises under curls matted with clotted blood. It isn’t too badly cut up, he decides once he can think again over the pain. There’s a lot of blood, yes, but you get that with head wounds, and the wound isn’t deep, really just a scratch. The pain and the nausea comes from the fact that someone hit him hard enough to lay him out with one blow, and bugger everything if this isn’t just about the worst day for headaches he’s ever had. Assuming it is the same day, of which there is precisely no guarantee.

Exploring his pockets, he finds with some relief that whatever else might’ve happened, he hasn’t been robbed. Among small change and keys, he finds his pillbox in his jacket; his hipflask is a comforting weight in his trouser pocket, half-empty but still full enough. With trembling hands, he tips out a couple of heavy-duty painkillers , washes them down with a big enough gulp of whisky to be a really bad idea, and then sits very, very still, his head in his hands, waiting for one or both of them to kick in enough for him to move, and trying to process what possible madness could have befallen him.

Literally none of it makes any sense. The dead walking around being very not-dead, the stranger watching him constantly who turns out not to have been a figment of his imagination…who was it that hit him, back on Magdalen Bridge? Why bring him here, and where is here? And who is the man in the brown coat who seems so familiar and so alien? Why him? He hasn’t done anything interesting, never got mixed up in anything political, never did anything huge, has no power, no heft; he’s just a messed-up veteran living in a crappy student flat with the ghost of his dead lover, like half the rest of the bloody country. He isn’t special.

He makes an abortive effort to get up, some combination of booze and drugs calming slightly the pain fogging his mind, then realises that his crutches are nowhere to be seen. Slowly, dizzily, he crawls three-limbed to the nearest decent-sized object…a cannon, it looks like, but in a design he’s never seen before, and something about it is trying to stir something up in his mind, but he’s in no fit state to make links and the thought slips away before he can get a grip on it…and hauls himself upright with a grunt of effort, hop-shuffles towards the door, aided by the low gravity and his hand on the wall.

He makes his way out of what seems to be some sort of arsenal, down long, doorless corridors, slightly curving floors, rounded metal walls, festooned with exposed pipes and wiring. Memories of more makeshift corridors well up inside him; he drowns them with the remainder of his whisky and struggles on. There are voices up ahead. He recognises Jonny’s mocking laughter, and, burning with rage, follows the echoing sound.

“You knocked him out.” He hears Jonny’s voice clearly now. “With his own fucking crutch. That’s fucking cold, Nastya.”

“Yes. And?” The other voice is female, tinged with something like and yet unlike a Russian accent, and wholly uninterested. Bertie creeps closer. He can see the change in light coming from a half-open doorway up ahead; he slows his step, wincing at the echoing drag of his bad leg on the steel floor.

“And nothing.” Now, creeping to the doorframe, Bertie can catch a fractured glimpse of the inside of the room. Jonny is sitting in a raised chair, his booted feet up on the console in front of him, his back to the door. The young woman he’s talking to, Nastya, can’t be more than twenty, if that, and Bertie can’t decide if the strange silver sheen to her skin is a trick of the light, or yet another mystery. Jonny swigs a glass of whisky dramatically. “Could’ve done it five minutes earlier, is all. He smashed in my whole face, which is a, a massive pain in the arse, and b, extremely unoriginal.”

The young woman shrugs, but smiles slightly, unpleasantly. Bertie can’t quite express why her amusement is unnerving, but it is.

Jonny ignores her. “Plus, it’s set you-know-who off again. You know it’s only a matter of fucking time before he starts talking at us, and last time it took ten years in a fucking dwarf star to shut him up.”

“He didn’t shut up,” replies another voice. Whose, Bertie can’t see from his vantage point. “But he’s whining to Ivy now, so who gives a fuck?”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Jonny drains his glass and thumps it down on top of the console. “Point is, we’ve got this fucker on board my ship now, so-“

“Your ship?” Nastya raises an eyebrow.

“Your creepy robo-fuckbuddy, whatever. The ship of which I am captain, how about that?”

“First mate,” says the disembodied voice, accompanied by a drifting cloud of smoke.

“Yeah, can we not fucking start this again? It gets really fucking old after a few millennia. Let’s not dwell on who’s right and who’s wrong, and who’s captain and who isn’t, especially because you all know in your heart of hearts that it’s me on both counts. Point is, we have a very mortal annoyance getting blood all over the place. Personally, I vote for seeing how long he can hold his breath in space.”

“189.3 seconds on average, not taking into account pressure differentials.” A new voice, female, with a clipped public school accent.

“But the pressure’s what makes it funny. Fuck’s sake, Ivy, learn to have a bit of fun.” He picks up his empty glass and looks at it askance. “I’m gonna get another drink before somebody, naming no beardy and annoying names, decides to stop moping and start flavouring perfectly good whiskey with nitroglycerin again.” Jonny takes his feet off the control panel and swivels in his chair. Bertie tries to peer closer, but Jonny’s face is still turned away; he can’t make out how much damage he managed to do. Standing up, he disappears out of Bertie’s blinkered line of sight, but now, Bertie can hear his footsteps coming towards the door. He freezes, paralysed like a mouse before a snake. He can’t run away quietly, not on this leg, nor is there anywhere to hide. Blood pounds in his ears, and he‘s looking around desperately for somewhere to hide, and somebody up there likes him, because there! A service hatch, big enough to crawl into fairly swiftly, and he manages it just in time, pulling the hatch closed and sealing himself into the crushing darkness a split second before he hears the door swing open and slam shut.

The space is small, the ceiling low enough that he has to sit with his head tucked onto his bent-up knee, his bad leg twisted uncomfortably under him. His hip is screaming already. He feels around in the darkness, trying to find out how deep the space is, hoping that it might be a service shaft to take him to somewhere slightly less immediately awful, and encounters something he thinks for a horrible moment is a leg or an arm, dressed in wool fabric. But it’s got no warmth, and it’s hard to the touch, and, heart in mouth, he pushes up the cuff of the fabric sleeve and feels smooth, polished wood under his fingertips.

He breathes a sigh of relief. Must be a broom closet or something. Weird, but what isn’t today?

There’s a clink in the darkness, like glass or china, the sound incongruous.

“I say, old bean!” remarks a cheerful voice, sounding incredibly loud in the small space. “What a spiffing idea! A secret tea party! What larks! Biscuit?”

Bertie jumps out of his skin, fumbling for a match. The light flares for a moment, illuminating a familiar and incredibly unwelcome inhuman face, painted moustache and all.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” He scrabbles backwards, collapses out of the hatch in a clattering racket, and stumble-runs off down the corridor as fast as he can manage.

Behind him, a chirpy voice echoes from the vent. “Are you sure? They’re jolly nice. They’re the sort with little silver balls on top.” Bertie, however, is long gone.

He’s staggering down the corridor in an increasingly hellish state of stomach-churning terror, concussion, pain and overheating when he reaches a fork in the corridor. Pausing in an agony of indecision, he hears Jonny’s voice up ahead on the left. “No. Fuck right off. He’s your fucking problem, let me know if and or when he cracks up and blows his own brains out.”

There’s an echoing clang, rather like somebody’s head being smashed at breaking-speed into a metal wall, and then Jonny starts laughing in a damp, gurgly sort of way. Bertie heads down the right-hand corridor, holding himself up on the wall, until his lungs give out and, muscles screaming, blood pumping fire through his veins, he can run no more, and collapses gasping against the wall, slides down with an audible squeal of sweat on metal to sit panting on the floor, doubled over and staving off a total meltdown with difficulty. His hipflask is devastatingly empty, his body a mass of pain, his head spinning.

A noise echoes down the corridor up ahead. Whatever it was to start with, it is magnified and replicated beyond recognition, but it’s enough to push Bertie back up into all-senses-tingling fight-or-flight mode, and he scrabbles like a mouse from a cat away from the noise. Around the curve of the corridor, a few metres away, there’s a door set into the wall, and he falls through it with relief, hoping against hope that he gets lucky this time, that there’s no bloody dead thing living in here too.

It’s very dark, and very quiet, and he crawls forwards into the blackness until he bumps into what feels like a low desk, or possibly a lab bench, the sort with three solid sides reaching down to the floor. The ground underneath is cluttered; with what, he can’t decide by touch, but metal and plastic and glass shift as he inches under the table as quietly as he can. His hand goes down on glass shards; he ignores the pain, adds it to his long list of miseries, and pulls himself into the corner, huddled in the dark with only his own shaky breathing for company.

At some point, he falls asleep, and is aware of it only when he wakes in a panic, hearing footsteps somewhere nearby. He gropes for a weapon, something to defend himself with; his scabbed and stiff hands find what feels like a length of pipe. If he can’t hit with it, it might be long enough at least to help him stand. Hand resting on its comforting coolness, he keeps feeling around, but the footsteps grow closer and then Bertie freezes as a door opens on the other side of the room, and antiseptic white light flares into being, making his eyes water and his head squeeze vice-tight. He grips the pipe as tight as he can and waits in breathless tension, offering up a silent prayer to anyone who might be listening that whoever it is will just go, go now and let him be, but the footsteps keep coming.

Over the pounding drum of his heartbeat, Bertie can hear the heavy swish of a long coat now, a subtler accompaniment to the harsh leather-on-metal thuds of footsteps. A shadow falls past the side of the desk. Bertie does his level best to shrink further into the corner whilst remaining simultaneously absolutely still, which isn’t exactly easy.

Then, a glimpse of a swinging brown canvas coat hem and battered brown leather shoes, and Bertie knows he’s discovered, because the man in the brown coat has never failed to track him down and haunt his days, is hardly likely to start now. His only chance is to take him by surprise and make a break for it.

Pulling the pipe under his weight as he rises, Bertie surges upwards, a broken flask in hand, one arc of motion sending the sharp glass slashing towards the stranger’s throat, but before it can so much as graze the skin, the man in the brown coat grabs Bertie’s wrist and twists it away, turning as he does so, eyes catching Bertie’s.

The beaker falls unheeded to the ground and explodes in a shower of shards. Bertie doesn’t even notice. All his breath is gone from him as surely as if he’d been punched in the gut. His voice is thin and reedy and disbelieving. “No.”

Gripping his wrist still, not ungently, Tim’s expression is unreadable. There’s no flicker of emotion in the ruinous eyes. Bertie gapes. Slowly, Tim releases his hand, and Bertie falls back against the unyielding support of the desk, limp and unblinking as he stares at the impossible figure before him, all he’d hoped and not dared to hope, all he’d feared from the moment he saw D’Ville on the bridge.

“No,” Bertie repeats, hysteria bubbling up in his voice. “No! Fuck you! You can’t…you fucking…you bastard! You fucking bastard! Do you know what you fucking did? Do you know what you put me through? You total fucking shit!”

He glares up at the once-dead man’s unreacting face (saw his eyes dim once, saw him crumple, saw him breathe his last) and he can’t take it any more. With a frustrated yell, he flings himself into Tim, pummelling his fists into chest and face and arms, shouting unspeakable emotions as tears sting his eyes and fall hot down his face.

Tim just stands there, unflinching, and takes every blow without a flicker of his unnatural eyes.

#the Mechanisms #gunpowder tim #tim x bertie #back in the day we made our own ships out of grit and gumption and not wanting to ship our friends' characters together #mechs fic

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bainhardt · 4 years ago

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#RibbonQuest2.0 - Part 3: Master Ball Rank or Bust

It’s kind of poetic, in a way. My very first meeting with Jin, and the beginning of our travels together, was commemorated with the chucking of a Master Ball - a guaranteed capture. It’s a one-of-a-kind ball typically reserved only for one-of-a-kind Pokemon (like Jin). When it comes to capturing Pokemon, the Master Ball stands above the rest as the symbol of infallibility, the promise of success overcoming any and all odds.

Well, we’re gonna need to channel that spirit in our latest challenge, because our success is anything but guaranteed: we have to take on the Master Ball rank in online rated battles for Pokemon Sword and Shield! Among our countless trials and triumphs spanning generations, Jin and I have never actually battled online against other real players. The World Ability Ribbon back in Platinum would’ve been our first foray, but the DS Wi-Fi connection had long been shut down in the time before our quest began.

Keeping with the theme of RibbonQuest2.0, this comes as an unexpected surprise. Jin, like all transfer Pokemon, is ineligible for rated battles; the standardized rules only permit Pokemon born and raised in the gen 8 games. Back when our time in Galar first started, I had never even planned on mentioning the Master Rank Ribbon, simply because we weren’t allowed to try and earn it!

But all of that changed with the release of the Isle of Armor DLC and patch version 1.2. By accepting the reset of your Pokemon’s move pool to only moves compliant with its gen 8 iteration, you’re allowed to mark your transfer Pokemon eligible for rated battles online! The icing on the cake is that Jin’s XD-exclusive purification move, Baton Pass (which I bent over backwards to keep even through all the Pokemon Contests), is now a TR which Farfetch’d can learn anytime. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

It’s like getting your hand stamped at a concert, but with a side of forced amnesia.

With that, preparations were complete. There was nothing left to do but hop to it and get battling! The Master Ball Rank doesn’t earn itself, and if I’ve learned anything from our past, I think that means we’re going to need some help...

However, in the interest of cutting down on superfluous Ribbon Gang members like (sorry to single you out) Speedrun the Talonflame, I’ll only be honoring the final 5 actual contenders accompanying Jin when the ribbon is earned. Numerous grueling battles will be fought on the path to Master Ball tier and those stories will be lost to time, for only the best of the best deserve to call themselves part of Ribbon Gang 2.0.

I got boxfuls of second-stringers here, for real.

When first beginning in earnest with the July season, I mainly played Double battles, my preferred format for fun. I had a couple different teams, but never climbed any higher than Great Ball. Some teams of note included:

self-proc Weakness Policy Stamina Mudsdale with Skill Link support and Psych Up Stored Power follow up

Entrainment Plus Dedenne alongside special attackers with spread moves (coined the “fuck redirects” team)

a strange combo Sandstorm and Round team that was kind of an excuse to see if Refrigerate Aurorus could amount to anything

I was too committed to gimmicks, and at this time still hoped to reach the necessary heights using something built for fun at its core. I convinced myself that whenever I got around to really trying, it’d come together easily enough. In the past I’d do anything and everything to increase my chances of success, and I needed to return to this mentality moving forward.

After burn out from facing VGC competitive teams, several months of distraction with other games, and the arrival of 2021, I changed gears to test out Singles beginning in March. Despite having essentially zero experience with the format, I drafted two main teams during my Singles stint:

a Focus Energy Baton Pass team designed so every other Pokemon is then guaranteed crits with every attack

a Shedinja team with Pokemon like Ditto and Zoroark designed to help determine whether Shedinja can survive the opponents

Still sounds gimmicky, I know. I can’t help it. But a funny thing happened as I continued to chip away at this challenge: the Focus Pass crit team actually kind of... worked. Once you’re critting every attack, you start to notice just how many game mechanics critical hits outright invalidate. Intimidate? Your negative offensive stages are ignored. Bulk stacking opponents? Their positive defensive stages are ignored. Grimmsnarl and Lapras walling you out? Screens don’t apply against crits (although a Shell Armor Lapras did shut me down quite handily once). Honestly, the boosted damage almost feels like an afterthought.

Every team I played required considerable reworking as I’d progress, honing in on specific threats often encountered and dropping low-participation Pokemon who weren’t pulling their weight. There was even a rule set which allowed the use of extremely powerful Legendary Pokemon for a time (a very bad time). But all digression aside, allow me to introduce the team that would eventually carry me higher than ever, swiftly through Ultra Ball tier and directly into Master Ball. They are the new and final members of Ribbon Gang 2.0.

The ones on the left, I mean. This box is just more second-stringers.

First is Gepigop the Togekiss, sporting Super Luck as a core member of the original crit team. Spamming STAB Life Orb boosted Max Airstream is the Singles meta, after all. And he’s from my Y version, same as Speedrun!

Second is PkmnConquest the Kartana, probably the most consistent and useful member I picked up along the way. Give it a Scope Lens and it’ll BEAST BOOST its way to easy sweeps - just pray your opponent isn’t hiding any Fire types in the back...

It goes it goes it goes it goes it goes it goes it goes it goes Guillotine... the Weavile at number three. YUH. She was included as a direct response to the unending hordes of Cinderace and Zapdos I faced. Focus Sash and Counter helped her turn around so many unfavorable matchups, I can’t recommend it enough!

Bringing up fourth is 8008 8008 the Rhyperior. Need an idea of how broken Dynamax Zapdos’ bulk is? Rhyperior is the only Pokemon I found who can one shot it from full HP without needing to Dynamax in return... and even then, only using Rock Wrecker. Seriously.

In our final slot is AZKi the Espeon, because Hololive kept me company through many of my battle sessions, lol. After one too many Focus Passes were blocked by Taunt, I put an end to it with Magic Bounce. You remember that scene in The Incredibles where Syndrome’s robots were revised as they faced off against more and more heroes? She’s basically that.

By the time I was barely breaking into Ultra Ball tier, I found much greater success if I didn’t try to force the crit gimmick every time, but still had it if I wanted it on AZKi, the fourth in the succession of Focus Passers. Yes, after months spent honing my skills in battle, I finally learned that just bringing three Pokemon that can beat your opponent’s is the simplest way to a win. Incredible, I know. And win we did!

The final needed victory in Master Ball tier was secured by PkmnConquest, Guillotine, and 8008 8008, a trio I found myself locking in very frequently.

It’s... it’s beautiful.

With this Master Ball ribbon attached to my Master Ball Farfetch’d, we’ve finally brought our lengthy Galarian story to its conclusion. Having managed to snag this online-exclusive ribbon before these games lost popularity or network support, Jin is once again a tried and true Ribbon Master, and I’ve no unfinished business to worry about any longer.

Until it is time to take up your sword once more,

Rest easy, Jin.

POKEMON SWSH: COMPLETE!

#Jeffu plays Pokemon #RibbonQuest2019

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starkerism · 5 years ago

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Title: Kiss Me

Summary: Five times Peter and Tony almost kiss and one time they did.

The next few weeks around the compound leaves Peter feeling strung out and exhausted.

It felt like every time Tony enters the room, every molecule in Peter’s body bursts into flames. He’s hyper-focused on everything; Tony’s breathing, his movements, his voice. Each sound sends a new wave of fire coursing through his body and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t tear his eyes away from his mentor.

In a room full of superheroes with the ability to catch onto microexpressions, Peter could’ve stood on the nearest table and screamed about the situation and it’d be less obvious.

But if anyone notices, they say nothing. Mr Stark says nothing – in fact, not only does he say nothing, he refuses to acknowledge Peter’s presence all together. No greeting, no friendly pat on the back, no smiles. Just glances that seem to stick just a little too long. And the really, really sick thing is that it just makes Peter want more.

They’re all spread across the lounge, drinks in their hands, a gentle hum of music playing in the background. It’s a rare day where no one was on any life-threatening missions, no one was brooding. Despite Peter’s awareness of Tony throughout the whole night, he felt comfortable. At home. With family.

Peter watches as Tony spreads an arm across the back of the sofa, his forearm brushing against Steve’s shoulders as he lets out a laugh. His legs stretch out in front of him, jeans pulling tight across his thighs. Peter’s mouth goes dry and he chugs back the rest of his beer, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth to catch the rogue drops. This action brings Tony’s attention to him and even though he’s nodding in agreement to something Steve says, his eyes are trailing across Peter’s body.

God, Peter curses inwardly and his body moves on its own accord, legs spreading, head tilting back, mouth parting. Mr Stark’s eyes darken and whatever Steve’s saying is forgotten. The sounds in the room around them fade out, replaced with a buzzing in Peter’s head, the room blurring around everything but Tony.

A hand on his shoulder jerks him out of his stupor and he immediately straightens up, splashing a small drop of beer onto his leg in the process. He looks up at Nat, who’s watching him carefully, head tilted to the side. Instead of acknowledging her, he glances back over to Mr Stark, who’s gone back to talking to Steve like nothing had happened.

“He’s twice your age, you know,” Nat says quietly, propping herself onto the arm of Peter’s chair. Panic shoots through Peter, straight down his spine and then back up again, right into his chest.

“I-I don’t know what you mean,” Peter stammers and even he doesn’t believe his own voice. Nat snorts softly, sipping the martini in her hand.

“Remind me to sign you up for lessons in lying, Parker. Pretty sure it’s superhero 101.”

Peter swallows, a hard lump appearing in his throat. His eyes flicker around the room, making sure everyone is occupied enough to not pay attention to their conversation. He leans closer to her and drops his voice to a whisper.

“Is it that obvious?”

Nat smiles gently at him, taking a sip of her drink to delay the time before she answers, pondering how to reply.

“I want to say no, just to save you the crushing embarrassment, but that would be cruel,” She smirks at the look of horror on Peter’s face. She smacks his chest with the back of his hand. “Hey, if it’s any consolation, Tony’s not being as discreet as he thinks he is either.”

Peter’s gaze snaps straight to her, mouth falling open slightly, eyes wide. “What do you mean?”

“Jesus, Parker, you’re supposed to have super-spidey senses. You telling me don’t know bedroom eyes when you see them? I’m perfectly human but even I can pick up on that.” Nat tips back the rest of the martini into her mouth and taps her nails against the empty glass. She’s watching Tony carefully and Peter follows her gaze. He’s still talking to Steve, but sends the occasional suspicious glance their way. “Listen,” Nat says, standing up, “He’s a piece of work. Pepper got out of there before he dragged her under. But this – whatever this is – that you two have going on, you better be sure you know what it is you want, because I’m pretty sure Tony won’t be able to handle having his heart ripped out again.”

And then she leaves, and Peter’s left wondering whether she’d just told him to stay away for his own good, or whether she’d just given her stamp of approval wrapped up in a ‘hurt him and I’ll hurt you’ warning.

Peter has to get out of there. As the evening goes on, Mr Stark strips one layer off and leaves himself in just a tank and baggy sweatpants that keep sliding down, and Peter can’t take it. He ducks into a nearby storage room, a single dim light sending an orange glow across the wooden shelves stocked with wine, bottles of beer and spirits. He rips off his jumper, leaving him in a too-baggy t-shirt that slips off of his shoulder when he grinds his palms into his eyes.

He can’t take it. He doesn’t know if it’s because he’s never really had strong feelings towards someone, or because of how everything in his body had been amplified after the spider bite, but every little action Tony takes is driving him crazy.

A finger across his lips, a brush of his hand against his own thigh, a flash of a smile, a look through half-lidded eyes, arms stretching above his head and showing a patch of skin just above the waistband of his sweatpants.

It’s too much and Peter’s groin aches. His chest hurts, his lips are dry and twitching, waiting.

He’s trying to cool himself, his head pounding and throat scratchy and dry. The alcohol hasn’t helped – it’s sent his body into a hot overdrive, limp and pliant. The cold of his palms against his eyes is soothing and he keeps them there, head tipped back against the wall and chest heaving. He doesn’t even hear the door open over the sounds of his distress.

“Pete?”

His breath catches in his throat and his hands snap back to his side, attempting to right himself. He can’t though; Tony’s here, he’s at the door, in the dark, and Peter breathes in, takes in the lingering smell of alcohol and aftershave coating the air between them. His breathing comes out heavier, his skin prickles down his back, and then Tony’s in front of him, hands grasping his shoulders.

“Snap out of it, hey, Pete, come on.” Tony shakes him gently and it knocks Peter out of his trance just enough. Peter grabs Tony by the arms and flips them round quickly, a small grunt forced out of Tony’s mouth when his back collides with the wall.

Peter dives forwards, pressing his forehead into the side of Tony’s neck. It’s warm, soft, smells delicious.

“What—” Mr Stark starts, words trapped in his throat when Peter’s lips press hard against his pulse. Peter can feel the shiver that runs through him. “Pete—”

“Please,” Peter croaks against the skin underneath Mr Stark’s ear. “I—I messed up, I know, back in the lab,” Peter rolls his head onto Tony’s shoulder and brings his hands down from Tony’s shoulders to grasp at his hands. He presses them gently against the wall and feels Tony’s breath hitch. “But I can’t—I want—” Peter moves his head from Mr Stark’s shoulders, cheek brushing against stubble, until their mouths are so close Peter can feel when Tony stops breathing. He brushes their lips together, fingers tightening in their place around Tony’s wrists, still pressing them firmly against the wall.

“Fuck, kid, you—” Tony tilts his head back against the wall, breaking their not-kiss, to let out a breath. “You’re really putting me through hell. I’m not really one for self-control, but god—“ He cuts himself off with a groan when Peter leans forwards to bite at his earlobe. There’s a few beats of silence, their heavy breaths creating a muted bubble around them.

“My skin feels like it’s gonna burst whenever you’re in the room,” Peter admits, whispering brokenly into Tony’s neck. “I can’t stop thinking about kissing you, doing… things to you. I don’t know if it’s the spider bite but everything is so intense and it almost hurts, Mr Stark, I just need to…” He trails off to press their foreheads together and neither of them are looking anywhere but each others mouths. It goes quiet and Peter’s scared, he’s absolutely fucking petrified, because he’s going to take the kiss even if Tony doesn’t want it—

But Tony stretches his head forwards and closes the gap between them. He presses his lips hard into Peter’s, forehead creasing, and Peter’s soaring.

The fire flares up, and everything in Peter’s mind focuses on that one point of contact. They’re still, just their lips pushed together, but then Tony tilts his head to the side, nose nudging across Peter’s, and opens his mouth and Peter loses it.

His hands leave Tony’s wrists to snap to his head, fingers burying themselves into Tony’s hair to deepen the kiss, prising Tony’s lips open with his own and slipping his tongue inside. Tony’s moan reverberates through Peter’s mouth, down to his chest, then to his toes, and then Peter’s being flipped over himself. Tony crowds in closer, pushing him tightly against the wall, hands finding the base of Peter’s neck and the back of his head. Tony’s taking it now, mouth sliding easily across Peter’s, and Peter whimpers, legs going weak.

They part to take a breath, Tony’s tongue leaving a trail of glistening saliva across Peter’s bottom lip, and they stand in the dim light, panting into each others mouths, hands gripping different parts of their bodies.

“This is a real bad idea,” Mr Stark whispers and the feel of his breath across Peter’s sensitive mouth sends a shiver down his spine. The burning need in Peter has sizzled into a simmer now that he’d felt it, tasted Tony’s lips on his. He brought his hand round from the back of Tony’s head to his cheek, eyes flitting between both of Tony’s. He’d felt it, and he was never going to let it go now.

“Didn’t feel like it,” Peter replies and he grins when Mr Stark lets out a huff of laughter in response. “Besides, I’m pretty sure Miss Romanoff gave us her blessing.”

Mr Stark looks less shocked then he should. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised, subtlety isn’t my strongest suit.” His fingers find the back of Peter’s hair and he tugs a little, eyes darkening when Peter lets out a tiny gasp.

“Or self-restraint, apparently.”

Tony’s eyes dart back down to Peter’s mouth and he leans forwards, closing the distance to press a surprisingly tender kiss to Peter’s mouth. When he pulls away, he’s taking in Peter’s face like it’s the last time he’ll see it.

“If we do this, it’s for the long haul,” Tony whispers, voice trembling slightly. Peter’s heart thuds, hard, at the confession. Peter thinks maybe he should take a second, to think it through, wonder about the future. But he doesn’t. He leans forwards, the space between them shrinking until their lips are pressed together again. One, two, three kisses.

It’s a promise.

A knock at the door makes them jump apart, Peter’s heart beating a million miles a second.

“If you guys don’t mind, I’d rather you took it somewhere away from the beers,” Sam’s voice calls out from the other side of the wood. Heat rushes to Peter’s face and he shares an uneasy smile with Tony, who doesn’t even look embarrassed, more surprised.

“Guess even the dumbasses could see what was going on,” Tony says into the silence, and Peter snorts. Tony reaches down between them and grabs Peter’s hand, firm and warm. Grounding. He reaches across to the shelf and takes down an extra pack of beers. “Definitely leaving here with a lot more than I thought I would.”

Peter surprises himself – and Tony – when he surges forwards and takes Tony’s lips again, the bottles on the shelf rattling when Tony’s back pushes against it. He takes, and takes, and takes, mouth pulling back and diving back in against Tony’s, hands brushing down Tony’s chest, his arms, his waist, his ass—

Peter pulls back, breathing heavily, and Tony’s staring at him with that same look; the one that makes Peter feel like he’s alight.

“Sorry, couldn’t help it,” Peter says through panted breaths. Tony laughs and pushes himself up off of the shelf.

“Yeah, we’re gonna need to keep you doing that to a minimum or I’m pretty sure we’ll christen every surface of this tower within a week.”

The implications of that sentence makes Peter flush, but he nods in agreement and takes Tony’s hand, surprised at his own boldness. Tony entwines their fingers together and nods towards the door.

“Best go face the music,” He says, heading towards the door. Peter doesn’t hear it. He’s looking down at their hands, small slender fingers against rough, thick ones, and he feels good. It feels good.

Five kisses, Peter thinks, staring at Tony’s face as he pulls open the door to the storage room. He trails his eyes down his face, past his stubble, down his neck, his chest, back to their hands. A small smile twitches around his lips. And more.

#starker #tony x peter #mine: fics #i can't remember who i had to tag for this #and it's like 4 months late lmao #and im seriously out of practice writing fics #but here ya go!!!#pls tell me if there's any errors

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blu-joons · 5 years ago

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You Walk Out On Him ~ Min Yoongi

Prompt: 5

After working your fourth night shift in a row you couldn’t wait to get home, your bed sounded like a dream as you unlocked the door, walking in to see Yoongi sat on the sofa, staring directly at the blank television screen. You looked at him in confusion, sitting down beside him.

“I’m home,” you smiled but he didn’t give you a reaction. “Yoongi? Hello?”

His eyes diverted to the coffee table, you followed it, spotting a newspaper. You picked it up taking a look at the front cover, spotting an image and you of your colleague out yesterday during your coffee break.

“Care to explain?” He snapped, refusing to even look at you. “Do you know how badly this reflects on me?”

“Are you going to give me a chance to explain or just accuse me of being unfaithful?” The last thing you needed after ten hours at work was an argument, but with the nasty mood Yoongi was in, you weren’t going to let this one lie.

He snatched the paper out of your hand, tearing it in half. “The picture speaks for itself, surely.” It didn’t look completely innocent, but they’d bought you a coffee, so innocently you hugged them as a thank you.

“It was a hug to say thank you for a coffee, where’s the harm in that? Yoongi I’m tired, I shouldn’t need to explain this, you should trust me, just like I trust you when you’ve got thousands of fangirls screaming all around you.”

“That’s different,” he smugly replied.

“No it isn’t. If you can’t trust me enough to know that from time to time I hug my friends, then what is the point. Clearly you’re just jealous if you can’t see that they’ve set this up just to try and break us.”

He shook his head, stressfully running his hands through his hair. You sighed, leaning back on the sofa, struggling to fight the sleep that was quickly overcoming you.

“I don’t even have words for you right now, how can I be jealous? This guy isn’t even good looking, yet there is plenty of pretty fans I could get pictures like this with.”

Your eyes went wide, had he just implied what you thought he had? Was he comparing an innocent interaction between two work colleagues to potentially setting himself up with one of his fans?

“Are you serious!” You snapped, standing up from the sofa.

“Of course. I should have listened to the fans to begin with, they never liked you, telling me that you’d end up doing something like this to me.”

“Like this? Yoongi I don’t know whether you’re tired, stressed, or just utterly delusional, but you’re making such a big deal out of this. I’ve explained this to you, and yet you go and say things like that. If you want to go off and hook up with some fans, do it, I’m fed up of this anyway.”

“If you’re fed up, you know where the door is.”

“It’s like you don’t even care, it’s like you’re willing me to go like, you want me to walk out of that door and never return.”

“Do what you want,” he sighed, “I don’t own you.”

Your eyes went wide once more, biting your bottom lip, carefully thinking about what you said. “You’re right, I can do what I want, like go for coffee with friends.”

He stayed silent for a few moments, only reacting when he saw that you started to walk off. He followed you up the stairs into your bedroom, slamming the door behind himself making sure that you knew he was there.

Both of you had adrenaline pumping through you, you’d never experienced an argument like this. Usually you were quick to talk things through together, arguing was a nightmare for you both, it was horrible for you both.

“It’s funny, because so many of the fans are way more gorgeous than you are, you can run to that ugly guy, you’d be a perfect fit.”

It was the last straw, without another word you grabbed a suitcase, chucking in any item that was available to you quickly. It took Yoongi a moment to register what you were doing, or how serious you were.

“What are you doing?” He asked, lowering the tone of his voice, perching on the end of the bed. “You can’t just ignore something like this.”

“I can,” you snapped, turning to face him. “If you think I’m ugly, fine, let me make this easy for you. You can go and find all the gorgeous fans in the world, I’m out of here.”

He stood up, grabbing your bag trying to stop you, but you moved it out of the way. “Don’t do that. Honestly, I was just jealous, I was just scared what people might think.”

“Your jealousy doesn’t justify what you said. I won’t stick around to be treated like that. I won’t have the fans speak about me like that. Just remember Yoongi, all of this, is your fault. Sure we say hurtful things in arguments, but that was over the line, because deep down, I know you meant it.”

“No, I didn’t!”

“You did!” You quickly shouted back. “Just move out of my way, I don’t want to be here anymore.”

He had no fight left in him, stepping aside to let you finish packing your bag, making your way downstairs. Yet again he followed you, struggling to vision you actually walking out of the front door.

“I’ll be back at some point in the week to get the rest of my stuff, delete my number, and maybe think the next time you get a girlfriend about the things you say.”

“Y/N, come on,” he sighed, placing his hand on the door, “I know you’ll come back to me, you need me.”

Your eyes rolled, staring at him in disbelief. “There you go again Yoongi, I don’t need you at all, I’m my own independent woman. If my mind wasn’t made up before, it certainly is now. I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

Within the blink of an eye you were out of the door, the sound of it slamming making him jump. He froze, staring at his reflection in the mirror of the hallway, letting out a frustrated scream. He’d always got jealous, it was one of the things he hated about himself, he was terrified leaving you when he went off on tour, because he didn’t trust those around you.

It was all harmless, until it hit him, you were gone. He slid down the wall, burying his head in his hands, tucking his chin as he brought his knees under him. Tears were quick to fall down his face, stamping his feet hard.

He thought you’d come back, but now you weren’t. He’d realised how serious you were, instantly regretting the things he’d said. You weren’t ugly, you were beautiful, and he needed you way more than you needed him.

Now he had nothing, he wasn’t independent like you, he was dependent on your love and support throughout it all.

His jealousy and his mouth ran away from him, and now, so had you.

---

Masterlist

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manotelier · 4 years ago

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Hi there! Catching up with tags, and I saw the one about posting snippets from WIPs. Long story short, I'd love to see something from HALQA2: the stolen faces, hey!me and my cat are bakers!, and The Mess In His Life. :O

hello!! thank you for asking and bear with me, this going to be a little long!

I will start with hey!me and my cat are bakers! This a new project so I haven’t written anything yet. I also wanted to write a simple story, slice of life style and everything and I got inspired by amazing friend who’s a baker. So basically the story follows a baker who freshly opened her bakery, she’s really young and have competition. You know that bakers have to go through three years (in France) so they could be bakers but you can also do just one year (my cousin only studied for one year) but the baker of story didn’t study at all. She’s self-taught and went to exam without even knowing the names of techniques or how to use a certain type of oven. So the story follows the adventure of the baker and the baker has a cat. A gangster looking cat that everyone is afraid of. He has the grumpy look, a scar on the eye and he’s terrifying the clientele. The baker loves her cat a lot so she doesn’t care at all. When she goes home which is located just upstairs of the bakery, it’s time for the cat to shine and I absolutely love put a little bit of fantasy in my story...

He’s a baker! In the world of cats, the bakery is also a bakery for cats so he bakes for cats like real cakes and everything. He’s a ganster, he fought every cats in the streets and now they are his subordinates that he uses to deliver cakes. He’s well-known for his cakes but even here, cats are scared of his scary look.

HALQA2: the stolen faces is explained here so I will share an extract!!

"Hind."

The young woman stood staring at the horrible scene before her eyes. With trembling hands, she approached despite her father's cries for her to return to him. But she couldn't. Not when a little boy was screaming in sadness next to the lifeless body of his mother, the little boy holding in his hands the still warm hand of the one who had brought him life. She looked like nothing, her face was cut in two and her body was mutilated all over. She wore only a simple beige dress, torn and very dirty on the sleeves, her blonde hair bathed in her own blood and her eyes looked at the sky. The young mother looked peaceful as if she had prepared herself for that dreadful end where she would end up abandoning her son, where he would have to survive on his own or unfortunately be reduced to a slave as the Elektoan policy wanted. A policy that Hind hated from the bottom of her soul. A barbaric policy without any trace of humanity that was killing thousands of people across Ellekt.

"Hind benti, we must leave." Urged her father, a tall man with a jewel-braided white beard. He stood further away with his hand against his mouth, horrified by the smell of the corpse decaying in the street. He knew that if he came any closer, he would faint. Hind didn't care, her orange silk caftan was against the wet ground of the capital. Mud and blood had settled on the beautiful kasmaeon silk that cost more than any shop on the street. The young woman grabbed the hands of the little boy who screamed louder when he saw Hind, it was normal for him to be scared after the carnage his mother had just been subjected to.

"Don't worry... I'm not going to do anything... I just want to know something." She gently stroked the little boy's hand, her heart pounding. "Who did this to you?" "The royal seal milady."

and the Mess In His Life is a fan fiction based on a character from an anime. I wanted to try to write in the second person because I have never did it and it was like a challenge.. It’s really hard and I don’t specially like it so I am thinking about editing it after finishing the story. The story is about a married couple that is the total opposite. Husband is neat, serious, always on time and Wife is not serious at all, a complete clown, messy and always late. It’s a really funny story where I love to break the fourth-wall and make funny jokes heheh. I’ll share an unedited extract that is for the next chapter!!

"What if.." you close Momoko’s laptop before coming next to her. "If your life was a fan fiction."

"Then the author is a fucking bitch." She took a sip of her beer before trying to burp. "Uh... not enough BEER! Bring me more beer."

"Stop drinking, I’ll kill you!" You groaned before stamping softly on her leg before getting up to go take some beers for her.

"Perhaps our lives are really fan fiction." She finally said, grabbing the beer your were giving her. "Like I am the main character of my life and you’re the support... WAIT! Does that mean I’m the support character of your life?!" She pointed her finger at you, suddenly getting up and screaming.

"I am too pretty to be a support character!"

"Okay, okay." You rolled your eyes as you finished your noodles.

"But it would make sense for you." She put her hands on her hips. "Look at you. Fake wedding with who? Your beautiful and hot neighbor! That’s a freaking fan fiction."

"Eh..."

"Don’t eh me! And what happened in the last chapter?! A sudden woman came to your door, saying she’s your husband’s spouse! That a level of Korean drama we have here!"

And voilà!!! Sorry for the late answer, I was looking for extracts for HALQ2 as I haven’t work on it for months!!!

#halqa2 #the mess in his life #hey!me and my cat are bakers #mano answers

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calamitousrpgarchive · 4 years ago

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Take your seats folks for the S H O W is about to begin, let the Circus E N T E R T A I N you one and all...

The lanterns suddenly dim, the inside of the Big Top darkens, the only visible light streams in from the centre and barely allows sight of the person either side of the next; even those with enhanced vision struggle to determine what’s in the D A R K N E S S around them. Only driven to attention by the beams that swarm the middle; music roars to life, a mechanical twist of cogs that scratch together like an out of time clock...

It begins. Comes in gentle flushes as magnificent silks erupt from the back entrance, manipulates the shape of a D R A G O N with such magical realism it could be mistaken for R E A L and it moves with such grace, obscured figures beneath the covers of the excessive false manifestation, travels the length of the small arena, breaks the fourth walls to flurry along the pathway between ringside and the first row grandstands.

A B A N G erupts, a single figure appears, a striped cane between clasped hands as the man stands in dead silence. Almost statue-like to the audience who watch with curious eyes to what is to come. A top hat, tipped downwards, head bowed under it; face hidden by clothing; a ringmaster that commands the room - despite the way he stands dead still. There’s a hum of voices whispering; wondering aloud if this is the man responsible for it all; Khaos in the F L E S H, but it’s quiet, bar the movements of the silk dancers that distract watchful eyes; strange shocks to peripheries.

And the figure doesn’t move.

From the rear of the ringmaster, a stream of bodies emerge, extravagant feathered tails; peacocks waving ribbons; they dance - match the calm pace of the dragon that amounts a growing number of hungry eyes. High above, a clatter of metal snaps every head upwards, trapeze artists thrown from bars as the business of the room intensifies.

Though nothing B E Y O N D what hasn’t been done before, no?

The show remains like that, hold for a few more beats - present, a lion; a typical act that puts its handler close to headless; it’s truly just that; a C I R C U S.

And the audience begin to grow restless - the immortals hungry for blood; for the promised performances that dragged them there; it becomes obvious in the room too...

The first person stands to leave - and like a trigger, the voice snaps to attention; comes from the centre of the ring:

K H A O S

Am I not E N T E R T A I N I N G you? Is my Circus not to your liking; too M U N D A N E for you to E N J O Y? Pity.

You can’t say I really didn’t T R Y to be a good host to you all; that I wasn’t K I N D to provide my services. Let me introduce the T R U E awaited K H A O S shall I?

Thank me later,

If you’re still alive, of course...

It’s instant. The snap of broken chains; the S C R E A M that tears through the Big Top like a banshee freshly released from a cage; though this is pained; A G O N I S E D in its manner. Something heavy drops from the roof of the Big Top; a body H A N G S almost still. An unrecognisable face is choking on their own blood, iron clasped around their throat, a wish wash of rusted chains tight on the individual; unbreakable. The sight is ghastly, the body mauled by harsh claws, the only indication that under the mass of dried crimson is something alive is the way the spasms of muscle fight to breathe beneath the weight of chains that bind them there.

And for those with impeccable vision and know their ranks; the vampires K N O W that there hangs their O V E R L O R D; strung up for all to see by the circus as thought that is an event. it’s delayed, the hiss of questioning; the way the body writhes to escape the clutches of metal. Khaos isn’t done:

Still here? Why, thank you - have I finally gained your undivided attention? Does the OVERLORD have such an affect on you; don’t they look pretty now?

The panic is late, the dragon that’s been dancing circles around the ringside ignites; a demon’s fire sparking it to life, catches those in the first row of Grandstand Two and the Ringside - now it truly looks alive; an impossible beast marked to carry death. There’s more screaming. Where Demon Fire lights up the wooden slats of the seating, the ones scorched by flames shriek and howl; cave under burnt wood.

There’s a S I C K E N I N G sound of bones crunching from above, the trapeze artists suddenly replaced by grotesque creatures; demons in their true forms and human bound skin sheds and drops down below; heavy thumps of guts splattering to the ground to leave mutilated piles; a stench that’s foul comes with it.

The head of the ringmaster jerks upwards, a mask where features should be; pale like a ghost, holeless and with the impression that KHAOS cannot see; that beneath the darkness of the metal cast face there is no potential to witness his own oncoming K A R N A G E.

Because that comes in the form of something resembling G U N F I R E, certainly sounds similar, the peacock dancers throwing spherical cannisters into the audience; paired with E X P LO S I O N S that shake the room; small metal shards pepper unsuspecting guests and that panic that’s been withheld..

Kicks in...

Everyone grapples to their feet; a free for all of sirvivors that haven’t been singed, bulleted or reduced to ash... some in pieces; limbless and crawling along grasslands... stepped on by careless immortals; stamped on by even less sympathetic monsters...

F I N A L L Y, Khaos adds, The S H O W has begun; I promised you K H A O S...

HERE IT IS.

The dragon; now fully resembling a magical entity sits below the strung Overlord, coaxes a real awful scream for their voicebox as flames engulf the body, reduce the choking to a gargle untill nothing but a blackened and withered form remains; a S A C R I F I C E to the Circus...

And everyone in the Ringside seating can’t escape it fast enough; a wave of heat expels from the form with enough force to send all off their feet and stumbling to recompose their senses; those still alive; unharmed fighting to get to the exit.

But it’s gone; the walls of the tent proven impossible to break - knives, guns evaporating on its touch and where the magic binding everyone in the room distracts them, still dodging Khaos’ showman who have intent to make them the G R A N D D I S P L A Y, begin to crowd and just as a few guests direct their attention to the ringmaster himself.

He vanishes in smoke; that darkness sweeping the room in a flash and suddenly; the harshness of rough wild magic scratches claws at the skin of all within; and when lights return to the chaotic mass of moving bodies... they are no longer in a recognisable big top...

It’s a M A Z E; tracks underneath them, steel and stone walls haphazard and staggering the mass into smaller, unplanned groups that must dare to E S C A P E the new route they’ve been contained in; or at least, T R A P P E D and forced to navigate a dark pit. Khaos’ voice thrums one final twisted introduction:

Welcome to the G H O S T M A Z E, last one to the exit is M I N E.

Run quickly sweet creatures, for I like to keep my promises and I want you to see all the R E A L things within these walls that you’ll never have seen before...

Try not to die now will you...

Easier said than done...

Because I want to look you in the eyes first...

Within the M A Z E

it is built from nightmares; pulled from vivid thoughts of those confined within its walls and made R E A L by imagination. The deepest, darkest monstrosities that creature fear lives inside as G H O S T S of the maze, haunting the thick stone and striking pain into those who manifested them. Accompanied by T R A P S that are designed for the strongest of immortals, there’s a sudden need to work as a team; as a unit with the ones who would deem to be unlikely allies

For if you’re left alone with your fears... driven to insanity by them and S T U C K in a loop that your mind can’t free itself from.. well then you better hope you die before Khaos catches you...

NOTE: This is the main conclusion of the Circus De La Khaos event, the final part of 3.5 comes to close the event done, but until then, your characters must survive their darkest of nightmare; face their demons and stare them in the eye whilst they attempt to navigate through a concrete maze with both allies and foe...

Are you going to try risk it alone, leave old enemies behind? Find an unlikely companion? You choose. This part of the event will conclude Monday 3rd August, Midnight.

Keep in mind, if your character was seated in a detrimental hit zone; they might be nursing some serious injuries too... that’s without ordinary enemies playing fatal parts...

Good luck Crooked Souls...

�� Dare I say...

You might need it...

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buckysbest · 5 years ago

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CHAPTER THREE: I DON’T WANT TO PAIRING: best friend!peter parker x reader WARNINGS: swearing, heartbreak, slow burn, emotional turmoil?, mental breakdown level sadness, Aunt May being a bean too good for this world SERIES SUMMARY: peter parker is about to embark in the next chapter in his life with his best friends by his side. a secret relationship, a heartbroken girl, and the pains of growing might be strong enough to pry these friends apart. WORD COUNT: 1.3k Tags: @eridanuswave @whatareyouhidingpeter A/N: this series is based off the album “the pains of growing” by alessia cara! if you want to follow along, you can listen to I don’t want to (track 3 on the album)! i hope you are enjoying the story!

series masterlist // masterlist

You and Peter both had the same shock in your voice as you simultaneously gasped, “Liz?”

“Uhm, Hi.. Michelles here too” MJ waved, rolling her eyes and setting down the plant she held on the tile beneath her. You quickly got up and embraced the two of them.

“Man, I really missed you guys!” you smiled, dropping your arms from around them and grabbing the items that burdened their arms.

Liz chuckled, “Y/N… We’ve only been gone for like 2 weeks!”

“It felt like an eternity without my girls!” you laughed back, setting down your new plant and coffee pot on the kitchen before grabbing more plates and silverware. “Come, sit! They're totally enough for everyone!”

You let out a giggle before continuing “ These boys wouldn't know portion control if it hit them in the face, plus it's Friday… Pasta night!” you giggled, setting places at the table for two new additions.

The noodles flowed freely between your friends as you sunk toward the back of the conversation, eventually finding yourself just listening to the four. The girls spoke about their roommates and syllabus week, Liz commenting on the party scene and MJ commenting on the ignorance of Frat boys in her robotics class. Once again, day disappeared into night as your friends surrounded you and the dread of deja vu collapsed on your shoulders.

The group migrated to the living room next. Ned insisted on finishing the show you had started at the beginning of the summer but almost everybody fell asleep by the time the first episode of the night ended. Peter left his seat and found his way up to his room as you followed his example, now finding yourself in the center of your bed, staring up at your ceiling and preparing for another endless night. A third set of footsteps soon creaked through the hall causing confusion to form on your face. As the door opened and closed in the room beside you, Liz’s voice soon filtered through your walls.

A soft giggle sang through the barrier before a quiet, “Hey” followed.

Your eyes widened as you cursed the thin walls that made up your apartment. For the next hour, you found yourself what must be your version of hell.The nauseatingly cute sentiments that left their mouths only dulled when the sound of lips connecting covered them. Each sound wave that invaded your room washed over you like a tidal wave, eventually drowning you in your own sorrow. Desperate for an escape, you quietly snuck out of your room and to the front of your new apartment building, placing you on the front porch of the brick building with your phone in hand.

Despite the late time that stamped the upper right corner of your screen, you texted the only person you could think of. Within seconds, your phone illuminated with the face of Aunt May.

“Y/N? Are you ok?” her tinny voice rang through the small rectangle now glued to the side of your ear. The tears you had held in for the past month instantly began to fall.

“N-no” you sniffled, trying to find your breath again and regain composure.

“Whats wrong my love?” she soothed, prompting you to divulge the events of the past month in excruciating detail, beginning at the pool party, the not-so-secret phone calls over the summer, and ending at the events that took place just minutes earlier. Tears streamed down your face at an alarming rate as you struggled to form coherent sentences.

“I’m so sorry Y/N” she offered before urging you to continue.

“I-I just can't do it anymore Aunt May. The minute my heart heals one wound, three more appear and it's so exhausting,” you paused, as your body rattled with exhaustion. “And you know what, it's the little things I can't shake. Like how he grabs her hand when he thinks nobody is looking, or how he knows her coffee order, or how his eyes light up at the sight of her,” you sobbed before pausing again in an attempt to gain some control over yourself. “and it hurts to know that there is no happy ending here for me. I tried to be mad at her… I really d-did but she's Liz. She’s perfect, kind, beautiful Liz who would break up with him if I even hinted at my feelings and I can’t hate her even if I tried. I keep trying to find a best case scenario here but it doesn't exist!” you sniffled, tilting the phone away from your face and wipe the tears from your eyes. Your body shook as you exhaled a sigh, “I am just so tired of it Aunt May. I-I can't physically keep this up.”

Your words hung in the air for a moment before Aunt May tried to comfort you. You sat on the phone for hours as she reassured you with her loving words but as the sun began to rise over the horizon, you bid your goodbyes and you snuck back into your room. Quietly shutting your door, you flipped the lock and shut the blinds curling into your bed and allowing your eyes to finally rest. Your body melted into the mattress as each weary limb collapsed beneath you and you fell into a deep sleep.

•••

A sharp knock at your door startled your eyes open and your body awake as adrenaline pumped through your body. Grounding yourself into your surroundings, you relaxed and wrapped your blankets around your body before slowly unlocking the door and opening it.

“Hey Y/N we were all going to- woah… are you ok? Have you been crying?” Concern instantly wrapped Peter's face as his warm, kind eyes met your red, puffy ones.

Your fatigued body mustered up the best smile it could as you reassured him, “No, I’m ok, I’m just really tired Peter so I’m just gonna go back to sleep.”

You closed the door and locked it again before he could respond before sinking to the ground. You thanked your body for relinquishing the little bit of strength you had left to put on a brave face in front of Peter and you tried to calm yourself by finding some comfort in your room. As your eyes scanned the space, the dread that bubbled in your stomach grew. Every picture and memento seemed to mock your broken state as they replayed memories of happier times. Beginning at the photos that lined your dresser, you slowly gathered every individual trinket that decorated your room and placed them in your closet, closing it and collapsing on your bed once more. Your phone buzzed relentlessly throughout the day as concerned texts and calls from your friends flooded your lock screen. It wasn't until 2 that your phone died, leaving you in the quiet you so desperately craved.

Your radio silence continued through the week, well after MJ and Liz returned to NYU. With your new sleep schedule adjusted to contrast your roommates, you occasionally slipped out of your room at odd hours of the night to gather enough food to sustain yourself.

This system had been working so you grew more comfortable as you snuck into the kitchen for a fourth night in a row, grabbing some fruit from the bottom drawer of your fridge and returning back to your room. You closed the door, locking it behind you and crawled into your bed, wrapping yourself the blankets before you began to snack on the apple in hand.

A small shriek left your mouth as the light flipped on, revealing Peter with arms crossed and a scowl painted on his face. He plopped down on the floor in front of the door effectively blocking your only exit from the dreadful situation you now faced.

“We need to talk.”

#peter parker x reader #peter parker fanfiction #peter parker #peter parker imagine #marvel x reader #marvel #marvel fanfiction #marvel series #peter parker series #buckysbest the pains fo growing

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mrs-berry · 5 years ago

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20 Things I Noticed When Rewatching ML Origins Part 1 & 2

Marinette recognizes Ivan's voice when he is Stoneheart. He sounds far more different than Marinette compared to Ladybug or Adrien compared to Chat Noir. I don't know if it's been confirmed, but their transformations must disguise their voices otherwise this makes no sense to me.

Ladybug yells, "Alya! The tap!" when she needs Alya to help out in this episode. There is no way for Ladybug to know her name, unless they had already met (which they had, but Alya doesn't know that). Why isn't this a major clue that Alya has pounced on? I guess it could be the adrenaline and everything going fast that makes her miss it. But I know I would have been confused by some stranger calling me by my name (like Ivan is, later on in the episode).

Chat Noir calls Ladybug "Wonderbug" and "Bug Lady" before she decides on her superhero name. Alya calls her "Super Bug."

"There's no shame in telling someone you love them," says Ladybug to Ivan. Says the girl who still hasn't told Adrien she loves him. This girl needs to take her own advice. 😂

Ladybug calls Ivan by his name. Naturally, he asks how Ladybug knows his name, but Alya interrupts their conversation. Ivan never brings it up again, of course.

When Marinette takes off the earrings, Tikki immediately disappears. In other episodes, like Kwamibuster, taking off the jewellery doesn't make the kwamis disappear, so why did it happen in this episode? Was it because she essentially forfeited her power? It wasn't overly official (like, "Tikki, I renounce my powers" or something), so Tikki disappearing seems weird to me.

"Everyone will be powerless against me! I will have absolute power! Muhahahaha!" says Hawk Moth, who supposedly wants the Miraculous just to save his wife. Not for power, like he claims here. My assumption is that at this point, the writer's hadn't decided his motive. Otherwise, it's kind of weird he is so interested in being powerful and everyone else being powerless, considering we know that's not his goal.

Marinette touches Ivan's arm in an almost identical way to how Ladybug did and tells him to tell Mylene how he feels. How does Marinette know about his feelings? Does he really believe she could tell by the way he looks at Mylene? Does Ivan not feel like this is uncannily similar to his interaction with Ladybug the day before? Does he just not make the connection? Or maybe... is it possible Ivan knows Marinette is Ladybug but is a shy and good guy who keeps her secret?!?! (That would be cool.)

Ivan stamped on his phone (or mp3 player?) and broke it! That shit's expensive, there's no way a kid would do that. Fake.

Adrien has a rollerblade in the top of his locker. One rollerblade. First of all, when does he ever rollerblade? Secondly, where's the other rollerblade? This show needs to answer the real questions.

Marinette's in the middle of a street when she puts her earrings back in and transforms. Yet no one notices, of course.

When she confronts Hawk Moth, Ladybug suddenly begins speaking into an invisible microphone of some sort as her voice echoes and is heard all around the area, despite her talking in a normal volume. Trés realistic.

How come Stoneheart had thousands of Akuma butterflies in him? Did Hawk Moth specially plant them there so he could make his announcement to Paris?

Chat Noir breaking the fourth wall to talk to the viewers is cute.

Stoneheart's yell blew away the helicopters. That's one mighty yell.

Chat cataclysms a piece of the Eiffel Tower which somehow makes a long metal rod come out of it? Riiiight. Makes total sense...

"I'm sorry, I'll be gentle," Ivan says to Mylene. 😏😏😏

Alya and Marinette pound fists after sitting in the seats Chloé had taken from them. How cute!

The umbrella scene is still amazing, no matter how many times I rewatch it. The music, the atmosphere, the words, the little umbrella mishap, Adrien's laughter and Marinette's giggle... it's all perfection. ❤

There is a lot of Master Fu salt in this fandom and I understand why. But one thing that we should all be grateful for is that he chose Marinette and Adrien to be Ladybug and Chat Noir. He made a damn good decision. Good job, Fu.

#miraculous ladybug #ml origins #ml analysis #(sort of)#ladybug #chat noir #marinette dupain cheng #adrien agreste #ml spoilers #this isnt really salt #just some observations and comments about the episodes

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jcolosblog · 4 years ago

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Lecture series: Oscar Tuazon

Public Art Fund Talks at The New School: Oscar Tuazon

“An artwork doesn’t need a space. It needs to make a space for itself. It needs to be alone. It is a space.” 8:22 time stamp

Oscar Tuazon talks about the differences of sculptural work made outside as opposed to inside. How working inside ‘frames’ and adds certain limits or constraints to the work. He suggests that the work isn’t equal to the space nor need be subservient to it. He utilizes colorful language to describe breaking the fourth wall of sculptural constraints within a space. When he started working inside as opposed to the freedom of outside, his sculptural practice required change to counteract the limiting aspect of a room. Like a poet, through the use of words, cuts through the air to pierce our ears or mouth in a performance of penetration. Similar to that metaphor, his works pierces the space it occupies. It forces the space and object to become one and more. It forces one to question where does the art begin and the space end or vis a versa. The artist seeks for the work to become invisible through its use of banality.

How does one use the architectural constraints of a given space, to force the artist and the object, to assert itself; and still remain “invisible”? Does his work accomplish the idea of invisibility? I would argue both yes and no. Due to the aggressive masculine nature of his work (penetration, scale, phallic,etc.) I would argue that his work is highly visible, much like a male peacock strutting its wings to attract the attention of its possible mate (“fucking the space” quote). While transforming the banal into a grandiose gesture of originality, his work forces us to see it, to participate in its presence as it seeks to hide (or blend) into an otherwise bland background of space. It imposes its own architecture into a seemingly passive space.

#spacial practices

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watchmegetobsessed · 6 years ago

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Best friends - Shawn Mendes

i know yall are waiting for boundaries, butttt until i manage to put the next part together here is a cute fluff

You eye yourself in the mirror that takes up an entire wall in the elevator, and you notice how worried you look. Once you relax your forehead those small wrinkles soon make their way back to your face no matter how hard you focus to look calm. You hold the grocery bag to your chest tight as the elevator dings every time it passes a floor. Your teeth sink into your bottom lip, but when you realize you are doing it you quickly straighten your features. You don’t want to show up with a bleeding mouth to your best friend’s house for the first time after an entire year.

Shawn has been on tour in the past seven month, he had a lot of other gigs before that and you were also busy with school, then work, and a few months ago you were still dating a guy from literature class making him your priority which now seems like bullshit. The guy was a loser and you can’t believe you wasted so much time. Shawn wanted to fly you out once to one of his US concerts but you canceled on it for the guy. How ridiculous.

You’re not sure about the sudden nervousness. He is still the guy you were best friends with ten years ago, he is just taller, more handsome and oh, also a huge popstar now. But still the nicest guy you’ve ever known and despite the lack of contact between the two of you lately you are sure everything will be just like in the good old days. Except that you are hiding a huge secret from him now. The big fat crush you realized you have on him.

Your breakup urged you to realize why all your past relationships ended up dead if you don’t count your poor choice of men into it. You had some pretty promising sparks through the years, but somehow nothing seemed to be good enough for you, and the realization hit you harder than you were expecting. No one was good enough because no one was Shawn. Neither of those men were the guy you grew up with and relied on every time you needed a shoulder to cry on. Neither of them were your best friend you call immediately when something amazing or horrible happens, you didn’t stay up all night FaceTiming each other just because he watched a horror movie and it upset him so much he needed you to talk him into sleep. The history you shared with Shawn beats every other attempt any men have ever taken and there is nothing you can do about it.

The elevator doors slide open pulling you out of your nostalgia about what it was like when you were younger and Shawn was just an ordinary guy, when there weren’t screaming girls in his life, following him everywhere he went.

You pace down the hallway to his front door and push the doorbell with your nose having both your hands occupied with the bag. You sigh looking around in the hallway as you wait for him to open the door. The next door is pretty far from here, so the apartments must be big around here, your place is probably like Harry Potters room under the stairs compared to these homes here. Seven years ago you would have never thought this is where you’d be meeting Shawn.

The door flings open and a tall figure appears in front of you, a more mature and even more handsome version of the Shawn you last seen a year ago on the porch of your parent’s house when he came to have dinner with you and your family before flying to New York the next day. Back then you both though you’d see each other in only a couple of weeks, but the weeks turned into months and then a year.

His look dark in the lighting, a warm chocolate tone, and the shine in them breaks you into a smile, just as he grins at you happily as well.

“Y/N! Hey! Let me help you with that.” His hands reach for the bag and you hand it to him mumbling a silent thank you. The bag is filled with all the ingredients you need to make tiramisu, some snacks and a few beers you knew he would very much appreciate. Cooking together has always been your thing, Shawn has always been in charge of the actual food while the dessert was your field and you knew he is dying for your tiramisu so there was no doubt what you’d be making when the two of you made the plan to finally meet a few weeks ago.

You follow him in, eyeing around curiously as this is your first time in his new place. He bought it months ago, but you never had the chance to see it in real life, only on photos.

“Do you want a tour?” he asks glancing back at you as he sets the bag down on the kitchen island.

“Would love that,” you nod your head grinning.

You follow him around as he is talking about his home in a very MTV Cribs way, but you’re enjoying it a lot, mostly because it shows that one year didn’t change a thing on his amazing personality.

“Pretty nice view,” you compliment standing in front of the window from where you can see the CN Tower in its tall glory.

“That’s one of the reasons I bought the place. I love just… sitting here in the evening, play the guitar and watch the lights.”

You can see his reflection in the glass of the window and his dreamy look over the city makes your stomach flip. Then he looks at you and the dreaminess is replaced with a boyish smile.

“So, how about we start cooking? I’m actually very hungry.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

While both of you work on your own part of the dinner he keeps asking you questions about everything, he is hungry to know all the things you didn’t have the chance to tell him over the phone. So you talk about school, about the classes you had, and then your new job comes up. He seems genuinely happy listening to you talk about your very normal, uneventful life while you know he has way more interesting stories up in his sleeves, but still, he just wants to listen to you.

Then you take the questioning in your hands, he tells stories about tour, about his friends and colleagues, about the wild and unbelievable life he has been living, and you can’t help but wonder how you are still in his life. Your way of living is nothing like his and it makes you feel insecure for a moment, but then a question of his diverts your attention.

“And how is the guy from literature? I’m sorry, I forgot his name,” he lets out an awkward chuckle and only then do you realize you never told him about the breakup.

“Cody and I broke up around September,” you state matter-of-factly causing him to put the knife down from his hand and turn to you.

“Really? You never told me. What happened?”

You shrug your shoulders. It was never a big deal, Cody was only interesting until the two of you had common things to talk about, but that was only literature. After two months, you quickly realized you are just too different and ended it in the fourth month already feeling like you gave too much of your time for him.

“It didn’t work out. Don’t worry, it was peaceful.” You give him a reassuring smile so he knows it wasn’t a trauma you went through alone. He nods his head taking in all the new information before turning back to the food.

He doesn’t bring Cody up again and you’re happy it’s kind of out of the way. You soon start talking about old things, stories that happened in high school when he was still a full-time student. His phone chimes into the conversation at one point, he washes his hand and grabs it from the counter. You look at him just in time to see him roll his eyes at the screen.

“What is it?” you ask as you finish up the last layer of the tiramisu.

“It’s just Andrew, he wants me to post a story, because I’ve been too inactive lately,” he explains as his fingers are tapping rapidly on the screen.

“What should you post?” you ask putting the box into the fridge so it can chill until the end of dinner.

His mouth opens, but then he stops and his eyes flicker up on you. You don’t understand what this means, but the sinister grin on his face already tells you it’s going to be wild.

“Do you remember the lift we used to do all the time in your backyard?”

“Oh my God, Shawn, no! We are not doing that again and definitely won’t record it.” You protest immediately. He steps closer putting his hands together as if he is praying to you and he is even pouting his lips at you.

“Please, let’s just do a try, it’d be funny. If we succeed, it will look cool and if not, people will laugh at least.”

“No! We haven’t done that in years and I know you are muscly, but I’m not sure you can lift me up,” you say avoiding his eyes, but then suddenly he pick you up and spins you around to show you, he is very much capable of lifting you up.

“See? I’m good. Come on, just give it a try.”

As much as you want to say no to him, you just can’t. So soon you two are in his living room with the furniture pushed out of the way and his phone set up, ready to record. You’re shivering nervously as you watch him press record and then he takes his place.

“Okay, Just trust me, I’ll catch you, promise,” he encourages you holding his hands out, ready for the jump.

The move was just a silly something you two came up with one summer. You have to run towards him, then stamp right before him, he catches you mid-jump with his arms wrapped around your thighs, and then you bend over his shoulder, he squats down and you basically swing over, your hands on the floor at first, then come up to standing at the end. Facing him you are not even sure you are able to swing over like that, you haven’t tried it in a long time.

“Y/N, come on! Trust me, it’ll be good,” he nags you clapping his hands together. You take a deep breath and start running.

It all goes smooth until you jump and he catches. None of you could keep balance suddenly, a high-pitched shriek escapes your throat as you start falling forward and Shawn’s feet slide on the hardwood floor. You both end up on the floor, you almost smash your face to the ground, but catch yourself just in time.

You both lie on the floor laughing uncontrollably as you try to untangle from each other.

“See, I told you!” You scold him laughing, wiping some tears away from your eyes.

“I’m sorry! Are you okay though?” he asks checking out if you have broken anything, but you are fine.

He ends the video and you watch it back. It’s even funnier on tape and you end up allowing him to post the part where you jump and then collapse to the floor. He doesn’t tag you in the video though, this is something you’ve agreed on before. You definitely don’t want all his fans to stalk your profile, even though they still can find you if they want.

In half an hour food is ready, Shawn made roasted chicken with grilled veggies and some fries. You set the table nice and just keep on talking while eating. You don’t seem to run out of things to say, something always comes up and it’s relaxing to know nothing has changed.

You eat the dessert sitting on the kitchen floor, another thing you two used to do a lot. Karen was very strict about sweets so whenever you were over at their place you’d sneak into the kitchen and sit on the floor, so Karen wouldn’t see you in there eating cake.

“Oh my God, this is so good,” he growls in satisfaction, his mouth full of tiramisu, you giggle to yourself.

“I’m the master of tiramisu,” you proudly say scooping some into your mouth and tasting the sweet cream.

“You definitely are, you could enslave me with this.”

You start laughing at the depth he just went into to compliment your work, and before you could think about it, something just slips your mouth.

“Yeah, I’m that good. I don’t even understand why you’re not dating me.”

You scoff lightly, but then you freeze mid movement, just like him, as you realize what you just said. The mood immediately changes and panic is creeping up on your neck, making your whole head feel numb.

You quickly think of something to say that can save the situation, and you end up just changing the subject.

“So, when are you leaving next time?” you ask the only thing you know will distract him from your previous comment. His leaving is a touchy subject, he has told you how guilty he feels for the one year hiatus, because after all, he was the one who left for months, and though you tried to convince him it’s totally alright, you understand it and that’s his job, he is just too stubborn to believe you.

“Um, I have to go to LA in a week, but I’m coming back at the end of the month.”

That means he will spend two weeks away from Toronto, away from you. That’s bearable.

You feel like he forgot about what you said earlier, so you also stop thinking about it. It was just a stupid slip of your mouth and you’re sure he didn’t really think it over.

You help him clean up in the kitchen and by the time you are done it’s almost midnight. You have to drive home, so you think it’s better to leave.

“I’m so happy we got to do this, just like we used to,” he smiles at you as he is walking you out. “We should do something next week before I fly out.

“Sure, I don’t really have plans, so… just hit me up,” you chuckle as you step out into the hallway.

“Will do. Take care and text me when you got home, okay?”

“Okay.”

You hug him shortly before heading to the elevator. It feels like everything weights on you at once when you think you are alone. You feel happy and loved for the way you two could be around each other just like in the old times, but then you think about that stupid you made on him dating you and you are positive you are a real idiot. You are very much lost in your own thoughts when you hear him call out for you.

Turning around you see him barefoot out in the hallway and you give him a puzzled look.

“Shawn, what are you-“

“I was thinking about what you said all night,” he says licking his lips and you hold your breath for a while as you stare at him and wait for him to continue. “I really don’t know why I haven’t dated you yet.”

Your eyes widen as you try to process what he is saying. He scratches the back of his neck as he is trying to find the words.

“Look, tell me if this is not a good time, or if you don’t feel the same way, but… this one year I’ve been missing you like crazy and I realized I want more than just be best friends with you. If you are in, I thought maybe… maybe we could like, go on a date or something.”

He is nervously fumbling with the hem of his shirt and staring at you he is waiting for your answer. You struggle to find your voice, but then you finally build up the courage to answer him.

“I-I would l-love that,” you mumble still unsure if this is really happening or not. His eyes light up hearing your words.

“Great! Good, um… how about, going out tomorrow? I can pick you up at seven.”

“Sure, it’s… it’s fine for me,” you say nervously tugging your hair behind your ears.

“Then… see you tomorrow,” he smiles at you and leaning down he presses a soft, tender kiss on your kiss.

You say goodbye, he disappears in his place and you take the elevator down. Turning to the mirror what you see is so much more different from what you saw when you were arriving. The beaming grin on your face is just endless, your heart is beating fast and your palms are sweaty and you are sure you’ve never been happier in your entire life.

#shawn #mendes #shawn mendes #shawn mendes imagines #Shawn Mendes Imagine #shawn mendes fanfic #shawn mendes fanfiction #shawn mendes x reader #mendes army

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carryonsimoncarryonbaz · 6 years ago

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Happy Birthday to @vkelleyart ! This is a gift fic for you based on the prompt for a character who is “unable to open their eyes for a few moments after a kiss” (I didn’t forget you liked that one!)

So here is a day in the life with SImon and Baz. Hope you enjoy it and enjoy your day!

Read at Ao3

In Between Days

Baz

It’s the fourth week in a row I’ve invited myself to the Bunces’ home. I can’t spend my weekends alone at Watford when I know Simon is just a few hours’ drive away.

It’s not like we don’t talk on mobile. Well, I talk. Simon mostly gives me monosyllabic answers and drawn out silences. But I get to hear the sound of his breathing and that calms me. I know it calms him too. I talk to him until he falls asleep most nights, until I can hear his breath puff in and out through the speaker (mouth breather).

Bunce usually takes his mobile from him once he’s asleep and then she tells me what Simon doesn’t: how he’s sleeping, if he’s eating enough. What goes on during his days with her, when I’m sitting in class—desperate to reach out to him—but forcing myself to translate interminably long passages of Greek for the Minotaur instead.

Father has let me have the Jag at Watford this term. I asked him for it near the end of the holiday break. He heard me out, when I made my request for it, his forehead creasing in concentration. “He’ll be alright with Martin and Penelope, Basilton. I’ve no doubt about that. And Wellby will make sure to check in on him as well. He’s awfully fond of the boy.”

“So am I.” My words came out as a whisper. It was the first time I’d been so open to Father about my feelings for Simon. I don’t regret saying it, no matter what his response.

It’s true and I’m done hiding.

Father’s hand gripped my shoulder briefly. “I know.”

My eyes darted to his. His expression eased and a hint of a smile quirked his lips. “I may be old but I’m not blind. It wasn’t hard to puzzle it out at Christmas.”

I could feel my ears go warm as what little blood I have rushed into them. I opened my mouth to make some retort but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t deny it.

And he didn’t seem perturbed by it.

“And if I had been too thick to notice then, it certainly wouldn’t have escaped my attention now. You’ve spent practically every moment driving down there to see him.” Father waved a hand at me, as if to forestall any comment on my part. “It’s understandable. The boy has been through the unthinkable.” He shook his head and his hand made an involuntary movement towards the inside pocket of his suit jacket, where he keeps his wand. “Simon needs the companionship of those who care for him.”

My mouth went dry. This was not the direction I expected this conversation to go. I should have known better than to underestimate Father’s powers of perception. He’s sharp and Daphne’s a natural empath, so I suppose it was inevitable that they would figure it out. I swallowed in an attempt to force some moisture to my mouth. “So, you’ll let me have the car?” I needed to get back to the point at hand. I wasn’t sure I could handle the intensity of a heart to heart at that moment.

Father nodded. “Yes, yes. You’ll try to figure out some other way to get to him if I say no.” There was an unexpected glint in his eye as he spoke. He must have appreciated my perplexed expression because he raised his eyebrows, shoved his hands in his pockets, and huffed an unanticipated laugh. “You know your mother and I started dating at Watford.” This was a startling topic. I’ve rarely heard him speak of those times. Most of my information has come from Fiona.

He kept speaking, eyes gazing off in the distance somewhere over my left shoulder. “Your mother would always come here for the summer and I would be in Suffolk.” His eyes darted to me again. “I know every possible route from the estate there to our door here.” He huffed again. “I can’t tell you how many times I asked my father to borrow the car so I could save time on travel and have more time to spend with Natasha.” He pulled a key fob out of his pocket and dangled it in the air between us. “I’ll not make you endure the vagaries of the British rail system the way he made me.”

I took the keys from his hand. “Thank you.” I meant it. I was in a state of shock, honestly. He’d been utterly nonchalant about my feelings for Simon, uncharacteristically forthcoming about his past with my mother, and so unexpectedly kind about it all. I put out my hand to shake his and he gripped it with both of his, for longer than usual.

“Don’t park it at the lot near the Wood. The snow devils are hell this time of year. The last thing you need is them messing about with the motor or pelting the car with chestnuts. If the Mage’s Men could park off the Courtyard so can you. Mitali should have no problem with it.”

Headmistress Bunce has had no problem with my car or my mobile. She reversed the technology ban as soon as she set foot on the grounds. Considering she had provided Bunce with a contraband mobile during eighth year, this did not come as much of a surprise to me.

I grab the key fob from my desk and make my way down the steps of Mummers. The snow is swirling with the wind but there’s not much to speak of on the car yet. It’s early still. It might be thick by the time I get back tonight.

I’ll have to come back tonight. The Bunces’ home is bursting at the seams with people. There’s no place for me to stay when I go. Simon theoretically sleeps on a cot in Bunce’s room though I think she lets him crash on her bed more often than not. She complains about his wings enough.

I’m envious.

I know Bunce and Simon are just friends. I’m not bothered about that. I just miss his presence in our room so much that it hurts. There’s an ache in my chest when I look at his empty bed.

I’ve left it all just as it was the day he bolted to come find me. Dirty trackies in the corner, an untidy pile of books on his desk, his wand on the table, his bed a rumpled mess.

Slightly more rumpled now because I’ve been curling up on it, inhaling the faint smoky scent of him it still holds.

The motorway is fairly empty this time of day. I’m not a morning person by nature but the earlier I get on the road the longer I can spend with Simon. I’ll forego a few hours’ sleep if I can spend those hours with him instead.

I texted Bunce before I left, so she’ll know to expect me. She’ll make sure Simon’s up and about. He used to always be up with the sun, the bloody git, blundering around the room. I’d wake up to the sound of him only to huff and groan in mock annoyance. I’d watch him from under my half-closed eyelids as he riffled through his papers, hunted under the bed for his shoes, shrugged on his uniform jacket.

Simon’s not such an early riser anymore. Bunce says he still wakes with the sun, on the nights he gets any sleep, but he’s not up and about. Not until she harangues him for a bit. Or more than a bit. She usually manages to chivvy him to the kitchen for breakfast but then he’s a lump on the sofa for hours after.

Thousand-yard stares. Long stretches of immobility on the Bunces lumpy sofa. Silent walks with me.

He was never one for many words, but in the time since the Mage’s death he’s been painfully laconic in his speech.

I know he’s still in shock. It’s so much to take in. Simon had so little to begin with and now he’s lost that. The Mage. Ebb. Wellbelove. His magic. Watford.

He’s still got Bunce.

And now he has me, for whatever that’s worth.

It breaks my heart that his world shattered, just as my fondest dream finally came true. I’m not sure I’m a worthy trade.

I rap on the Bunces’ front door when I arrive. The snow is thicker here, flakes swirling around my head as I stamp my feet to stay warm. The door flies open and Priya rolls her eyes at the sight of me. “Oh, it’s you.”

I follow her in, relishing the warmth that washes over me. Headmistress Bunce is seated at the kitchen table, tapping away at her laptop. “Basilton.”

“Headmistress.” She usually makes the trip home early Friday afternoon and heads back to Watford at first light on Mondays.

“They’re in Penny’s room. You know the way.”

I give a warning knock on the door before I lean in to take a look. Bunce is seated at her desk but her chair is spun around to face Simon. He’s sprawled out on his stomach, wings nestled against his back, shirtless as usual.

“Baz.” Bunce greets me first, but Simon is already sitting up as she speaks.

I drop down on the bed next to him and press a gentle kiss to his temple. “Good morning, love.”

Bunce, as expected, snorts. “I’ll leave you two for a bit, shall I?” She ruffles Simon’s hair as she walks past us and then give me quick squeeze on the shoulder. Our eyes meet and she shrugs.

Not much has changed then.

Simon ends up on his side, head in my lap, as I lean against the wall by Bunce’s bed, my fingers sliding through his curls. I tell him about my week, all the stupid, useless, trivial things that happened at Watford since I’ve seen him last. Anything to distract him.

“Dev’s been sick this week so Niall tried to use “snug as a bug in a rug” to tuck the blankets around him when he was shivering and damn near strangled him instead. They got so damn tight around him it took both of us to get him unraveled.”

Simon tilts his head back to look at me. “You didn’t come up with a spell?”

There’s a glint in his eye, one I haven’t seen in far too long. I’m so desperate for it, I must be imagining it’s there.“I wasn’t there when he cast it. Niall tried something else but that just unwound the weave of the blanket and he couldn’t spell that away. Left Dev wrapped up like Frodo after the spider got to him. That’s when he shouted for me.”

Simon blinks up at me. “You didn’t use an “as you were”?

I’m not imagining it. Even his tone of voice is sharper.

I shake my head, focused on keeping my own voice calm and steady. “No, that would have just taken him back to the too-tight blankets. You know you can’t keep doing “as you were” over and over, once you’ve done another spell. It would just go back and forth between the two most recent ones.”

“How’d you get him free?” This is perhaps the most interest he’s shown in happenings at Watford since I returned to school. I can’t help the sharp flare of hope that shoots through me.

I keep my voice light. “I used scissors.”

“You did not!”

“I had to. I couldn’t think of a spell to put the blanket back together and every time I pulled on a strand it just got tighter.”

“I’ve never known you to be at a loss for a spell.” Simon narrows his eyes at me. I know this look. It usually presages him jutting his chin out in that delectable way of his. “Why didn’t you use “into thin air”?

Why the bollocks hadn’t I used that? Hadn’t even thought of it. I had just snatched the scissors from Dev’s desk and proceeded to decimate the shreds of the blanket. Perhaps the darkening shade of Dev’s face had alarmed me too much.

I feel quite mortified about it now. Blast Niall. He didn’t think of it either.

I still can’t tamp down the rush of warmth that comes over me from Simon’s words though. Not only for his faith in me, or for his immediate ability to think of an appropriate spell for the situation, but also for that brief spark of the old Simon. That’s progress, isn’t it?

It’s more than I’ve seen so far.

I shrug. It’s a terrible habit I’ve undoubtedly picked up from him. “I’m not infallible. Dev took Niall’s blanket in recompense and made him deal with the mess we left behind. Now they’ve been fighting over how warm to keep the room since Dev’s got the only blanket.”

A flicker of a smile crosses Simon’s face. “If it was you, I’d have just made you share.”

My heart beats faster. I think I might swoon at his words, it’s not beneath me.

I don’t want to disrupt the moment though, so all I do is run my fingertip along his jawline. “You’re warm enough I wouldn’t have to share it.”

“Prick.”

“Mouth breather.”

I force myself to keep my breaths even. I can’t recall the last time he insulted me like this.

I’ve missed it.

Simon stares up at me silently and I trace the freckles along his cheek until I reach the one I’ve loved for years. I press my finger to it, keeping my tone casual as I speak. “Are you going to be a lazy bones and stay in bed all day, Snow? I thought we had plans to take you shopping today.”

I attempt to devise some reason to get him out of the house each time I come. Food, shopping, a film. I’ve not been too successful so far but I think at this point even he’s sick of wearing Premal’s old clothes.

I get him up and rummage around the untidy pile of clothing at the foot of the bed until I find a shirt. I spell it on then spell his wings and tail invisible. I can’t do much about the awful track bottoms. Does no one in this family wear jeans?

We’re definitely going to do something about the lack of them in Simon’s wardrobe today.

We wander around the city center, drifting into shops, getting coffee and scones (of course we get scones).

I eventually find an upscale men’s clothing store and drag Simon in.

“This is too posh for me, Baz,” Simon hisses in my ear as I make my way to the shelves of jeans near the back.

“Nonsense. It’s about time you dressed in something other than chavvy track bottoms and Premal’s lurid tshirts.” I flick through the jeans, eyeing Simon as I do. He’s shorter than me but with a more solid build.

At least he used to be. I’m not sure of his size anymore. He’s lost weight since the end of last term.

I won’t think about that right now.

I find a few pairs that appear to be the right size. They may be a bit long but he can just cuff them. I toss the jeans at him and move on to the shirts. He trails behind me like a forlorn puppy.

“Baz.”

“Hmm?” I’m riffling through some fitted crew neck shirts that are velvety to the touch. These will do nicely.

Simon tugs at my sleeve. “Baz. I can’t afford any of this.”

“You can actually, with your leprechaun gold, but that’s not relevant at the moment. I’ve got this. I promised to take you shopping and this is going on my account.”

He looks as horror stricken as if I’d announced a nation-wide shortage of butter. “I can’t let you do that!”

“Why the hell not?”

“It’s too much money. I can’t have you buying me clothes.”

I put the shirts down and reach for his free hand. “Simon. I want to. I’m your boyfriend and I want to do this.” I step closer to him. “Let me do this for you, please?”

He frowns at me, eyebrows drawn to the middle of his forehead. I squeeze his hand. “What’s this really about?”

Simon’s eyes dart away and then return to me, the expression on his face harder to puzzle out now. “I just … I just don’t need all this.” He gestures with the arm holding the jeans and then rapidly clutches at them before they slide out of his grip. “I’m fine with what I’ve got. I can go to a thrift shop, find something in my size. You don’t have to do this.”

It dawns on me then that he’s never done this. Simon’s never gone into a real shop, to buy new clothes. Not even an H&M or a Uniqlo.

It’s all been hand-me-downs at the care homes or cheap thrift shop finds. Or the occasional Christmas gift from the Wellbeloves.

The only full set of new clothes he ever had were the uniforms at Watford. The ones he wore all the time.

The ones I gave him interminable amounts of grief over, back when I was just his prick of a roommate and insufferable nemesis.

It makes me furious at the Mage all over again. Couldn’t he have taken Simon to a real store, to buy some nice clothes? Just once?

I realize I’m standing here, staring at Simon, clutching his hand far too tightly. “I’m not doing it because I have to, Simon. I told you. I’m doing it because I want to. Because you deserve to have anything you need or want. New clothes. New shoes. A proper jacket. Whatever the fuck strikes your fancy, because by Crowley, why shouldn’t you?”

He blinks at me. I step closer. “Come on now. I need to see how my terrible boyfriend’s arse looks in these jeans.”

Simon flushes instantly, his expression rapidly shifting from serious to flustered. It’s adorable. “You can’t be serious, Baz.”

“I’m deadly serious about clothing, Simon. I’d think you’d know that by now.” I can’t help but smile down at him.

He huffs a laugh and I relax a little. “You’re fucking ridiculous about it, you wanker.”

“Trust my judgement then, you fashion disaster. You’re a prime candidate for a complete Queer Eye makeover.”

He actually grins at me. “Well, you’re queer enough to manage all that for me, yeah?”

I am. Challenge accepted.

We exit the shop an hour later, laden with bags. I’ve managed to find two pairs of jeans that are sinfully fitted to Simon’s form, an assortment of soft shirts that hug his muscled torso, one slim cashmere jumper that clings to his shoulders, and a brown leather jacket that nearly caused me to spontaneously combust in the shop. I’m delighted with the entire lot.

A judicious use of “clothes make the man” in the dressing room allowed the clothing to appropriately accommodate his wings and tail. I’ll have to mention that spell to Bunce.

I load our purchases into the car and find a curry shop for Simon. I linger over my kebabs, just drinking in the sight of him. The color has come back to his face, cheeks reddened by the brisk winter wind. He’s digging into his chicken tikka with a gusto that’s been sorely lacking the last few weeks.

I feel a surge of satisfaction when he eyes the lonely kebab on my plate. “You going to eat that, Baz?”

“I had considered it.” I don’t mean it. I ate more than enough samosas. I’ll put some of the Watford rats out of their misery later tonight. “Oh.” He shrugs and I can’t keep up the charade.

“Of course, you can have it, you nightmare. I saved it for you.”

Simon’s face lights up as he reaches for it. It’s the little things that give me hope that he’s making some progress. I know I can’t count on it every time. I know he’ll likely regress next week. But every little bit of improvement is a step in the right direction.

We head back to Bunce’s place in the late afternoon. The days pass far too slowly at Watford and far too swiftly when I’m with Simon. I’ll need to leave soon, to make it back before the drawbridge goes up for the night.

I make some perfunctory conversation with the Professors, indulge in a whispered exchange with Bunce while Simon hangs his new clothes in her closet, and then let Simon walk me to my car. I try to drag it out as long as I can, but the sun is sinking and I’ve got no choice but to leave now.

The chill is more pronounced as the shadows lengthen. I can’t help the shiver that runs through me. Simon wraps his arms around my waist and I revel in his heat. Even now, with his magic extinguished, he still radiates warmth. It’s comforting, though I should be the one giving comfort rather than him.

Simon rests his head on my shoulder and I bury my face in his hair, inhaling the scent of him. It’s not the smoky aroma that haunts my dreams. It’s fresh and green and holds the barest hint of that familiar fragrance.

I lightly brush my lips to his temple and he turns his face up to me, lifting his head from its resting place on my shoulder and touching his lips to mine. I hold my breath. I’ve not ventured to do more than lightly kiss his cheek or forehead, not wanting to push him, not now, not after everything.

Simon presses closer, his lips firm and warm. And just like the first time we kissed, he takes the lead and moves his mouth, doing that thing with his jaw that leaves me breathless.

My lips part and he deepens the kiss, his tongue sliding against my own.

My heart is hammering in my chest, my pulse pounding in my ears. I’ve yearned for this, hungered for his touch, not daring to seek it for myself. I’ve been content with holding his hand, letting him rest his head in my lap, feeling the press of his shoulder against my own.

I’m grateful for anything he’s willing to give me.

My eyes have drifted closed as his touch heats my skin and his mouth moves against my own. I’ve missed this so very much. We may have only had two days’ worth of spectacular snogging, but Simon’s kisses have become more than just a craving to me. I need them. Like air or water. I don’t know how I’ve survived without them.

I’d dreamed of this often enough through the years, fantasized about his lips on mine, his hand sliding up my back like it is now, his shoulders underneath my grip.

The reality is far better than I’d ever hoped.

Simon pulls back and rests his forehead against mine. Our breaths mingle, arms wrapped tightly around each other. I can’t seem to open my eyes. I know it’s not a dream, but part of me still expects it all to vanish if I do open them.

It’s only when Simon’s hand slides up to tangle in my hair that I force myself to bring my gaze to his. The blue of his eyes is so close I can see the variegated shades that make the color so unique. There’s nothing ordinary about this boy in my arms. Not now. Not ever.

“I’ll miss you.” His words are just a whisper but I can hear them clearly.

“I’ll miss you too. I’ll call, every night.” My grip on him tightens. “I’ll be back next week.”

“I want you to, but you don’t have to. I know you’ve got schoolwork to do.”

I can’t help the laugh that escapes me. “I’ve no one to distract me during the week anymore. I’m so far ahead that I could take a week off and still not fall behind. It’s not as challenging, without Bunce there to goad me on.” I press a kiss to his forehead. “I’d rather be here with you, you know that.”

Simon’s lips brush mine once more. “I’d rather have you here too.”

I make it back to Watford just in time. The drawbridge goes up just as I reach Mummers. I take a shower, sort through my papers, read next week’s Political Science assignment. I wait until ten and then I dial Simon’s number. He answers on the second ring.

“Hey.”

“I miss you already.”

“I miss you too.”

I listen to him breathe. Words aren’t necessary. It’s enough to know he’s there.

My thanks to @basic-banshee @penpanoply and @fight-surrender for the encouragement, feedback and support for this fic during the crazy real life events going on as I was writing this.

#carry on #simon snow #baz pitch #birthday gift fic #my writing #my fic #shopping #a day in the life

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salmonruntips · 6 years ago

Photo

Here’s our piece for the @salmonrunzine! We were one of the few duos, and we’re very excited to share our pieces! Special thanks to the zine mods for all their hard work and congratulations to the other contributors! We were really excited when we saw that this zine offered the ability to work in pairs, so we’re very grateful for the opportunity!

Art by Katie (@katiemonz) Written by Ashe (@theashemarie)

A Lesson in Grilling

Here’s the facts: Grillers on Ruins of Ark Polaris on the third wave and everything is green; you and Katie are backed up against the basket with red lasers trained on your chests, while Kiera is having trouble climbing a wall and holding her Squiffer’s charge. The Grillers are nowhere to be seen, which is what’s so horrifying, because they’re quiet and fast and they swerve around corners like drag racers, hellbent on destroying your small squad. Dan, your fourth teammate, is a bit of a newb, but he’s trying his best, and that’s all you can ask of him really. Smallfry are his number one enemy, and there’s a running bet amongst your squad about how many times he can manage to be bludgeoned into a splat by their tiny spoons. His knees are probably bruised yellow-purple under the Grizzco uniform. It’d be sad, really, if it wasn’t so funny to hear him constantly sputtering and panicking as the tiny Salmonids serpentine toward him.

Dan is near the water, trying to outrun a swarm of said Smallfry, with only a Sploosh-O-Matic between himself and their deadly spoons. He’s on Smallfry murdering duty, a role that he’d accepted with a grim face. “Sometimes,” you’d assured him, as the sky darkened and Mr. Grizz grumbled that Grillers were on their way, “the only way to defeat your fear is to face it head on.”

You’re very much regretting that now, as a Griller swerves up a ramp and onto the top floor. Ruins of Ark Polaris is the newest in a string of places where Salmonid runs are common, and you’re not that familiar with the geography yet—it’s all vertical, with grind rails and stomach-churning drops to the water, but the Ark is a beautiful site. You and Katie liked to lean against the stern of the boat and stare back at it as you were towed away after a shift, imagining how it got that way. “The humans were in a panic,” you said once, as Katie leaned her hip against yours, spit-balling, storytelling, trying to figure it all out. “Sea level rising, nowhere to go, no time.”

“I know the feeling,” Katie said, miming a shooting action. It was graceful, fluid, because she was so seasoned with so many dualies. “Sea level rises like crazy here. I’m surprised the ship is still around.”

You looked back at the giant boosters. “Humans built things to last.”

She slung an arm around your shoulders. “Ashe, you need to stop thinking about the humans. Let’s regroup with Kiera and Dan.”

Now though, you can’t spare a glance at the ruins. The Griller is barreling toward you, not unlike an out of control Ultra Stamp, and Katie barely dodge rolls out of the way. You can hear her grunt as she lands in a splotch of green ink and tries to unstick her feet. You’re equipped with an Octobrush, which enables you to slide away from the Griller, but doesn’t really help dispatch it easily. You run away, because you’re a girl who knows when it’s best to retreat and hope to at least lead the Griller away from your teammates. Just there, you see Katie jump on a rail to lead the other Griller away. Hopefully, Kiera and Dan can help slow them down.

Things had been going well. You, Katie, and Kiera were a tri-squad for a while, picking up random freelancers when you needed them, but you wanted a fourth to round out the team. Dan was barely fresh enough to buy clothes in the square, but he was Katie’s longtime friend who desperately needed money, so you decided to take him onboard. He was a quick learner—though he got tripped up by the small things (Smallfry) and had a tendency to babble incoherently when panicked. Still, he fit the team well. Kiera preferred long-range weapons like chargers and splatlings while Katie was a dualies fiend. You were a jack-of-all trades but preferred brushes and rollers, so you needed someone who liked short-range shooters who could paint well, and Dan fit that role.

If only he didn’t get tripped up by ankle-biting Smallfry.

“Ashe, behind!” Kiera cries, and you whip around to finally see her slam an egg in the basket and train her Squiffer’s sight toward the Griller’s tail. The laser isn’t nearly long enough to hit it, so you swerve a little, crushing a few Smallfry under your brush, and lead the Griller back toward the basket. Kiera lets off her shot and it lands true; it’s just enough to finally stall the Griller out and you hear Katie give a whoop from where she’s still sailing around the basket on the rail, Dualie Squelchers aimed at the newly frozen boss.

Quickly, the three of you dispatch the Griller and pop its five eggs into the basket, easily getting over quota.

“Where’s the other one?” you ask as Katie paints around the basket and Kiera dunks down to refill her tank.

“Switched to Dan,” Katie answers. “How many specials you got?”

You reach up to feel your hat, where both special packets are still securely tied in place. “Two Splashdowns.”

“I got one Bomb Rush left,” Kiera says.

“And I’m out of Inkjet. That means Dan has Stingray.”

“He’s doomed,” you and Kiera chorus together.

Then, on cue, a very loud, very sad yell comes from down below. It’s followed shortly by a weak “Help!”

“Called it,” Katie sighs.

“I’ll get him,” you volunteer.

“Be careful,” Katie advises, and points at her chest, where a red laser has appeared, a reminder that the Grillers switch targets quickly. There’s an identical one on Kiera’s chest. “I’m gonna keep the ground painted. Kiera, get on a rail when it gets close.”

“Got it.”

The group breaks and you jump off the edge, falling as fast as you can so you can bring Dan back into the fight.

You remember, vibrantly, time before, back when Turf War was localized in the Plaza instead of the Square, when the Squid Sisters were the keepers of the news, when Strength Up was still allowed on the battlefield. Things were simpler then, and you didn’t want to let it go. Grizzco is what brought you to the Square. Grizzco with its promise of riches and teamwork, of challenge, and, most of all, of a change of pace. Turf War was fun, but there was something about getting on the boat, riding out to the abandoned places where the Salmonids spawned, something about those golden eggs, so shiny, so luminous, with their tiny sparks of life in them. You tried not to think about the little embryos that stared out at you as you dunked them into the basket.

“They have to respawn like we do,” Katie said once, as you were sailing out to Marooner’s Bay. The human’s giant abandoned ship made your Grizzco-owned vessel look tiny. “There are so many of them.”

“I hear they trade with Octarians,” you said, casting a quick glance in Kiera’s direction. Kiera, with her backwards tentacles and high-pitched voice, Octoling from head-to-toe.

“They do,” Kiera muttered back from where she was sitting with her back against the stern, checking over her Squiffer for damage. “Grillers are just really fast Flooders.”

Something about that, about her lightly accented words, said with such confidence, made you shiver. “That doesn’t bother you?” you asked her.

She shrugged and lined up her Squiffer’s sight. “I live in Inkopolis now.”

She does, along with hundreds of other Octolings—Octolings who flocked to Grizzco’s welcoming arms as quickly as they could because they needed money. You and Katie picked her up early, and you’ve been friends ever since. Lucky too—she’s a crack shot with all the weapons you’re not confident with.

You and Katie, however, are close, very close, “as close as Pearl and Marina,” your friends like to joke. Friends for a long time, growing ever closer, Grizzco is your primary source of income. Without it, both of you would be seriously hurting for cash. Plus, there’s something super appealing about trying to figure it out, the Salmonid patterns, the weapons and their roles, the dangerous waves that happen after dark. And together, with Katie, you feel invincible.

But, back to the present. You reach Dan quickly, save him from certain doom, and lead him back up to the basket with your brush. He breathes a breathless thanks in your direction, and you merely push his Sploosh-O-Matic toward the ground, muzzle aimed for the Smallfry. “Shoot them,” you say. “Just keep your feet painted and they’ll die.”

“Got it!” Dan nods once, forcefully, and follows your directions. He’s a fast learner.

Around the basket, there’s pandemonium. The Grillers targeting both Kiera and Katie have arrived and they’ve already taken a chunk out of Kiera. She’s respawning slowly, crying for help at steady intervals, while Katie is dodge rolling away, aiming for a rail again. She’s almost out of ink though.

You point Dan toward Kiera and he nods again. Given direction, he tears across the map, easily dodging a Griller and only getting caught up on Smallfry for a few seconds. You hear him save Kiera when she lets out a loud booyah and you focus on clearing the ground of any green ink.

There isn’t much you can do with two Grillers running around. Your Octobrush hits hard, but the Grillers move in fast, unpredictable patterns, so instead you rush for a rail. You have to get on top of the Griller if you have any hope of doing any good, safe damage.

The rails have always been your favorite thing about the Ruins. A Grizzco addition, they circle the basket like sharks, and you love jumping on and seeing everything from a different angle. Plans form, bosses scatter, Smallfry swing their spoons, and your team regroups. Kiera backs into the basket, using it for cover, Dan takes to attacking Smallfry, lip caught between his teeth in concentration, Katie sails by on the other side, still on her rail, trying to fill her ink tank.

You’re close to the end of the rail now. Kiera dispatches a Griller with a well-aimed shot, and it explodes with a burst of machinery and purple ink. The other Griller switches targets, its laser moving from Katie to Dan. Dan, now a closer target, panics and tries to get out of the way as the boss changes direction.

You leap, Octobrush primed. It feels familiar in your hands, and your fingers and palm are well-calloused from holding it, from swinging it; your arms know its rhythm, and you instinctively know its range. The Griller doesn’t stand a chance.

You land on top of the Griller and bring your Octobrush down with a loud whap! It twangs off the top of the boss and you slide backward. All according to plan. It switches targets, to the most dangerous attacker, and the laser appears on your chest. As you go down, you swipe, hitting true to the tail and stalling it out. The Griller freezes, panicked, and your frantic teammates shoot at it as its tails twirl about its UFO-shaped body.

It goes down. All four of you grab an egg and deliver them. You let Dan grab the fifth.

Then, two more lasers appear (Dan and Kiera) and you share only a moment of peace, a single breath where you look at each other and smile.

Dan yelps, because a Smallfry has managed to escape his Sploosh-O-Matic’s wrath, and he grabs at his leg. “My knees will never be the same!” he cries.

Everyone laughs, but then the Grillers appear, careening up the ramps.

Back to work.

#splatoon #splatoon 2 #salmon run #salmon run zine #mod art #not a tip #chatter

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