#dragged from his stage hospital bed

[invisibleicewands]

[scientia-rex]

One of my patients used to be a Big Deal Specialist in the city and you can just TELL he’s SEETHING that no one out here is even qualified to understand what he did, much less how important he was. He’s also terrified of death. It’s both annoying and really sad. Like, sir, I hate to break it to you, but no amount of knowledge will protect you from the ravages of time. It’s a special kind of hell to know the stages of various fatal diseases intimately. What is it going to feel like when it’s my turn? How do doctors want to die? Suddenly, quietly. Slip away painlessly in my sleep. But how likely is that? Not very. More likely I’ll get cardiovascular disease or cancer, the greatest killers of our time.

He was so afraid of cancer he had an organ that wasn’t cancerous removed just in case. He talks down to me as if I’m his student, and who knows? Maybe I was. He was in the same city as me, and they were forever dragging Big Name Doctors in to teach us things. Maybe I learned how to elicit Achilles tendon reflexes from him.

But mostly I find myself a little scornful. Who lives without the shadow of death? Who doesn’t think about death all the time? When you die, life is a round thing, finished and whole. What will your life look like when God holds it in the palm of his hand?

Also don’t fucking call me by my first name unless I’ve specifically said you can. I don’t GIVE that permission to patients, except for my mentally ill trans and queer patients. If I wanted to be disrespected by an older man I would have married young.

You do not have time. This important doctor who based his whole life around his importance lived as rich and full a life as anyone. And now he’s clinging to it, leaving fingernail marks on the walls on his way out. No one has time. There will be a moment when you’re dying when you think, I would give anything I have to be back in that moment. Any ordinary moment. Taking the dogs out to go potty. Browsing at the grocery store. When you’re being crucified on a hospital bed, dying and aware of it through the morphine, you would give anything you ever possessed to go back and have one more agony-free afternoon. Sit on a curb or a stoop. Walk through a park. Hug your spouse. These tiny fragmentary moments that we are constantly sliding through, tobogganing past at high speeds, these are what will be our life when our life is over.

I am accountable to that self. To the dying me. What did I do with this gift and curse? I don’t believe in God, but I know that I will die, and I have watched enough dying people by now to know the kinds of things I’ll think about. I want to make that me proud of what I’ve done and how I’ve spent my life. She will be a harder judge than God, and I want her to look at this one little life and think, yes. I did what I meant to.

[humanityinahandbag]

Steddie Halloween

Halloween after 'Spring Break' must be such a hard time for Steve. This is the guy that regularly hosted costume parties at his house during his King Steve era. And at some point probably hosted more laid back ones for the kids and Robin.

But since the Russian bunker he just... can't.

He has regular and more frequent night terrors of torture that had him and Robin shivering and holding onto one another like buoys. He's been dragged down into the depths of lakes by unseen monsters that left all kinds of scars. He gets migraines from moving too quickly or seeing strobing lights.

He carried Eddie's body out of the upside down, hands slippery in blood. He did CPR and felt Eddie's ribs crack under his hands. He looked at Eddie handcuffed to a hospital bed while doctors said we just don't know yet. Had to watch his Uncle, his father, sit by Eddie every day, rarely leaving his side, staring at his chest like he was grateful for each breath his boy took.

So. He's not really able to do Halloween anymore. And that's hard for him.

But whatever. He'll survive. He's fine to sit on the sidelines if it means the others will have a good time.

At this point, Steve was already coming to terms with his bisexuality. He'd already done a speed run through the Coming Out stages and walked out the other side with the eerie confidence only Steve Harrington could muster. This is a dude who has decided that he's going to flirt with Eddie until the other realizes and gets with the program. He knows Eddie likes him. He's a pro at dating and relationships and crushes. He just needs Eddie to figure out that the not so subtle hints mean something.

And then came Halloween.

He'd already told Eddie during a movie night about how much he missed the spooky season.

(And yes, he did discuss it while openly combing Eddie's hair back from his face and absolutely relishing in the way the other boy was turning all kinds of pink under the glow of the TV. Yes, Eddie was taking his time to catch up but no one said Steve couldn't have fun while he waited).

"Aw man. That sucks." Eddie barely managed to boot up his brain again to answer.

"It's fine," Steve would say, even though it wasn't.

And then, on October 31st, Steve wakes up to a maze in his backyard.

It's not a very good maze. It's mostly just tipped over pallets taken from behind Melvalds as the walls and tarps as the ceiling to block out some of the light. But it's so clearly meant to be some kind of a haunted hallway.

Steve is in boxers and a ratty Hawkins Swim Team t-shirt. He didn't take time to put on shoes, so he's walking across the cold concrete and the dewy grass in tube socks.

There's a sign posted on a piece of cardboard at the entrance.

ENTER IF YOU DARE

He stands there, shifting from foot to foot in his rapidly dampening socks, not quite sure what to do but intrigued nonetheless.

There's whispering and hushed voices from inside. And then Dustin is stomping out from around one of the pallet corners dressed in a suit that's clearly too small for him.

"Come on, dude. Can't you read? You're supposed to enter."

"It says enter if I dare."

"Yeah. So enter."

"What if I don't dare?"

Dustin rolls his eyes hard enough to make them stick, and honestly this kid and his tone.

"Can you just-" He groans. "Look. Eddie set this thing up and he and Robin dragged us all out of our beds at ass o'clock in the morning to put on these stupid haunted house costumes and wait around for you to wake up. So can you please just dare?"

Steve blinks. He looks at Dustin's suit. The tie is a little crooked and he's wearing bright yellow socks with his dress shoes. "I thought haunted house costumes were supposed to be... yunno... scary?"

"Yeah," said Dustin, gesturing to himself. "I'm the corporate grind."

And Steve can't do anything but laugh.

He goes through the little haunted maze. El was apparently having the time of her life and waves at him from a dead end, decked out a dress she made out of bits of stapled paper. "I am very frightening," she assured Steve. "I am overdue bills."

"That is very frightening," Steve agreed and ruffled her hair before going down another short hallway.

No one jumps out. There are no bright lights. Will had drawn decorations that they'd taped to the inside of the recycled plywood warning him of imposter syndrome and sleeping past your alarm and girls. Lucas at least put in a little more effort as a basketball player, though he had his knee wrapped in a bandage they must have picked up at the pharmacy and explained to Steve that the true horrors were being benched all season.

Max had refused to put on a costume and declared that she was scary all on her own.

Even Robin was there, waving at him. There was a cooler besides her. "This is the checkpoint," she said. "All the best haunted houses have checkpoints."

Apparently, the checkpoint included his migraine medication that he'd coincidentally forgotten to take that morning and a takeaway cup of lukewarm coffee.

"I tried to keep it warm!" She flapped her hands, waving them at the cardboard cup. "I literally held it between my knees and everything. But I had to help Eddie out last night to start building and-" she paused. "Shit. I wasn't supposed to tell you that. Forget I said that! Just- drink your coffee! Or don't! Is it warm enough? It's probably not. Fuck."

Steve is always shocked at how much more he loves Robin every day.

"It's good," Steve assured her, taking a sip. "Much scarier this way. Nothing scarier than a cold cup of coffee."

When he finally does make it to the end of the maze, Eddie is right there waiting. He's dressed as a vampire, with the stupid fake teeth and blood drawn down his chin with lipstick.

"You escaped the haunted maze!" Eddie put on a show of acting shocked, horrified, angry. His speech comes out garbled from behind the plastic teeth so it sounded more like you ethcaped the ha'ted mathe! It was endearing. Charming. Perfect. "My evil plan is foiled!"

Steve smiled. He looked back at the tarp and plywood and cardboard and duct tape. "You put this all together?" He turned back. "You built me a haunted house?"

Eddie's posturing paused. Despite how much he tried, there was little Eddie could do to hide the way he turned almost shy. He took out the teeth. "Uh. Yeah. But it's no big deal."

"It's kind of a big deal."

"It's really not," said Eddie. "Just- yunno. Figured you should be included." He brightened. "And this isn't everything! We've got a party planned at Joyce's tonight. Low music, we'll keep the lights on. Kids even picked out a movie, but I can't attest to the quality."

"You built me a haunted house."

"I... did." Eddie cleared his throat. He shoved the teeth back in. "But just so you know, it was all part of my evil plan. Which you foiled, My Liege!"

Steve stepped forward. "What was it?"

Eddie paused.

"The evil plan. What was it?"

"Oh. Uh." Eddie swallowed. "Keep you in my evil clutches forever?"

Steve beamed.

Robin had to usher a group of jeering kids away from the Harrington house. It was apparently too much for them to see Steve grab Eddie by the edges of his stupid vampire cape and tug him into a kiss.

"Dracula doesn't swoon," Dustin shouted back at them, covering his eyes.

"This one does," said Steve happily, before going back to work on a very shocked Eddie.

In the end, it did take Eddie a minute to catch up. Once his brain rebooted and he was able to comprehend that he was kissing Steve Harrington, the boy he'd loved since long, long ago.

He spends that night at the party sitting on the couch with his face buried against Steve's chest while the movie played. "You'd been flirting with me?"

"Mmmhm," said Steve, popping a candy corn into his mouth.

"This whole time?"

"Yup," said Steve.

"I wasn't imagining it?"

"Nope," said Steve.

"This is real?"

"Yup," said Steve, and dropped a kiss onto the top of Eddie's head.

"Okay," rasped Eddie. "Just checking."

"Learning how dumb you were being was the scariest thing this entire halloween," Dustin mumbled from the floor.

[steddiehyperfixation]

don't you forget about me (part six)

(part one)(part two)(part three)(part four)(part five)

Steve allows himself a brief mental breakdown in the shower when he gets home. He lets the water mix with his tears as he curls his arms around himself and wishes with everything he is that they were Eddie’s. There’s nothing he wouldn’t give right now just to be held by him again, just to feel Eddie’s arms around him one more time. All it took was a tiny kiss on the back of his hand for Steve’s skin to remember just how much it missed that feeling. Now Steve’s entire body craves Eddie’s touch, and he shakes in its absence like an addict in withdrawal. 

Then he puts himself back together, gets dressed and styles his hair and heads off to work. 

They’d defeated Vecna before he could split the world into pieces or whatever his diabolical plan had been. So while Steve’s whole world may have been torn apart, while Steve’s whole world lays bruised and bandaged and amnesic in a hospital bed, the rest of the world carries on none the wiser. The rest of the world still rents VHS tapes and has movie nights and date nights and no fucking clue that they were seconds away from being dragged down into a hell dimension a couple weeks ago, so Family Video is still open for them. Fuck that. 

“You’ve gotta handle the customers today because if someone starts asking me stupid questions I can’t promise I won’t snap at them,” Steve tells Robin as he drives them to their shift. 

“Aw, but it’s so funny when you snap at them,” Robin quips. 

“Robin.” He gives her his best I’m so fucking serious look. 

Her humor dries up immediately and she nods solemnly. “Alright, yeah. I got it.” 

Steve sighs, pulling into the parking lot. “Thank you.” 

He busies himself with cataloging and reshelving and rewinding returns while Robin takes over the customer service part of the job. It’s mindless - mind-numbing - the monotony of the tasks exactly what Steve needs to dull out the thoughts in his brain and distract himself from the way the back of his hand still tingles from Eddie’s kiss. 

When the afternoon rush dies down after a few hours and the store is all but empty, Robin sidles up next to him where he’s putting away a stack of fantasy films. “Hey.” 

Her voice cuts through his focus and nearly startles Steve out of his skin. “Jesus! Don’t sneak up on me like that.” 

“Sorry.” She grabs half the stack of tapes and starts helping him shelve. “Just wanted to check in with you, we haven’t gotten much of a chance to talk today. How are things going with Eddie?” 

“It’s fine. He’s fine,” Steve grumbles, glaring down at the tape in his hands. It’s got a dragon on the cover. He thinks Eddie would probably like it. “He still doesn’t remember me, but he’s starting to see me as a friend now at least, so.” Steve shoves the movie into its spot on the shelf. “That’s something, right?” 

Robin raises her eyebrows at the sharp bitterness in his tone and how forcefully he put the tape away. “Okay. Yeah. So I see we’re in the anger stage of grief now,” she comments. 

Steve scoffs. If this is a stage of grief, he thinks he’s been going through them in the wrong order, or maybe all at once - a neverending ebb and flow of denial and anger and depression all swirled together into one fucked up cocktail of grief. “I’m not angry,” he says, rubbing his hands over his face. “I’m just tired- emotionally burnt out, I don’t know. I just miss him and it’s not fair and I’m so fucking sick of feeling like this.” 

“Yeah, that’s anger, Steve,” Robin says, infuriatingly blunt. She slides the last tape in her stack into its place and then leans against the shelf. “Did something else happen to set this off, or are you just generally overwhelmed?” 

Steve sags against the shelf beside her. “Both. I don’t know. It’s stupid, it’s so fucking stupid. He just- he kissed my hand this morning, that’s it, and it wrecked me.” 

“He what?” Robin questions, curiosity widening her eyes. 

“He kissed my hand,” Steve repeats. He sighs and adds context, gives her a full recount of the events of that morning.

“Oh my god?!” Robin practically squawks as she backhands Steve’s arm, which is definitely not the comforting words or touch he needs from her right now. 

“Ow!” he yelps, rubbing his arm. “What the hell was that for?” 

“Dude. He was flirting with you,” she tells him, eyes even wider now like she’s trying to explain to him something obvious. 

“What? No.” Steve shakes his head, looking at her like she’s crazy. “He definitely wasn’t.” 

“Ughhh,” Robin lets out a long, dramatic groan, dragging her hands down her cheeks and pulling down her eyes. “I cannot do this with you two again. He totally was.” She drops her hands from her face so she can use them to illustrate her point as she starts to lists off, “First of all, he literally called you daddy-” 

“As a joke,” Steve interrupts to protest. 

“Yeah, a flirtatious one,” Robin retorts. She continues, “Then he said you have a magic touch, and then his heart literally started racing for no reason-”

“Because I was stressing him out!” 

“Only after his heart rate went up in the first place, which, as I was saying, was for no reason other than the fact that you were smiling at him and holding his hand-” 

“That literally doesn’t-” 

“And then, he kissed your hand - pressed his lips to your skin - and told you that you were his good luck charm,” Robin finishes, looking smug like she’s said something novel and not just completely reiterated exactly what Steve had just told her only with more emphasis. 

He sighs wearily. “Your point?” 

“He likes you, dingus,” she says, whacking his arm again. “Don’t you get it? His mind may not remember still, but his heart is starting to.”

Steve doesn’t know what to do with that. A lump rises in his throat, a rush of jumbled emotions chafing against his already frayed edges. “Don’t say that. You don’t know that.”

“I think you should tell him what you were to each other,” Robin suggests. 

“Right, yeah, okay, sure,” Steve scoffs, somewhere between sarcastic and hysterical. “And while we’re at it, I think you should tell Vickie that you like her. Because telling people things like that is so easy, isn’t it?” 

Robin gives him a withering stare. “That is not the same thing at all, and you know it.”

“No, yeah, you’re right,” he agrees. “Because I know Eddie, and he would not take that news well. He already gets a little weird whenever I seem to know too much about him - if I tell him I know him biblically too-” 

“Ew, don’t tell him like that!” 

“Doesn’t matter if I tell him like that; I say we’ve been together for 9 months, he’s going to assume we’ve-” 

“God, okay, I get it!”

“See? It would freak him out,” Steve concludes, crossing his arms. “Even if he does…like me again or whatever, he definitely wouldn’t anymore and it would just generally make him uncomfortable. So I can’t tell him. I just have to keep waiting for him to remember on his own, even though it’s fucking killing me,” he says, his voice harsh as he tries to keep it from breaking. “It’s what’s best for Eddie.” 

“Steve-” Robin starts, frowning like she’s only just beginning to realize she may have pushed him too far, but whatever it is she was going to say is cut off by the ringing of the bell that announces the front door being open. 

“Customers.” Steve points his chin towards the couple who just walked in, a bitter jealousy boiling in his stomach as he watches them walk hand in hand towards the romance aisle. It’s not fucking fair. He shoves himself away from the shelves and mutters, “I’m taking my break.”

He stalks to the breakroom, closes the door, and sinks to the floor with his back against it. The tears in his eyes feel like they’re made of acid, like they would carve tracks into his skin if they were to spill down his cheeks. He wraps his arms around himself again. The thoughts in his head are made of acid too, bitter and burning and cursing everyone who gets to enjoy their lover's touch while he suffers without his. 

Steve’s brain feels corroded, corrupted. “He likes you,” Robin’s words echo there too, “his mind may not remember still, but his heart is starting to.” Would Eddie touch him now if he asked? Would he trace his fingers across Steve’s skin, kiss more than just the back of his hand? Steve digs his own fingers into his sides. He feels gross, he feels rotten. It wouldn’t be right to ask that of Eddie without him knowing the truth, to take advantage of him like that. It wouldn’t be the same, anyways. The superficial touch of a boy with the beginnings of a crush is not the tender lover’s caress that Steve craves. 

That is if Robin is even right about Eddie redeveloping feelings. Which she probably isn’t.

Steve’s just being stupid and selfish again. He wants to remove his brain from his skull so he can stop thinking, tear his heart from his chest so he can stop feeling; both so burned and decayed he thinks if he held them in his hands they would dissolve and crumble to dust and ash and sludge between his fingers. 

Fifteen minutes pass, and Steve forces himself to be fine. He peels himself off the breakroom floor and returns to work, continues the tedious tasks that he hopes will numb him out again. 

Robin catches his eye from across the room where she’s sorting a customer’s cash at the register. I’m sorry, her expression says, I didn’t mean to make you upset. 

Steve gives a tiny shake of his head and a small smile. It’s okay. It wasn’t your fault, his own expression reassures her. You meant well. I’m not mad at you. 

They don’t talk about Eddie again that day. The next time there’s a lull in customers and they’re able to chat again, Steve tells Robin he honestly just needs a distraction right now, and he lets her ramble on about Vickie and band and school and her impending graduation and the movie she watched last night and whatever other random thoughts are bouncing around that hyperactive head of hers. Her voice fills in the cracks in Steve’s brain, keeps it from falling apart completely. She’s always been good at that, and he’s grateful for it. 

Then he drops Robin off after work and he drives away alone in silence because all the songs on the radio are love songs, and he drives back to the hospital - back to the source of his grief again and again like some sort of fucking masochist - because Eddie needs him. Because Steve loves him.

~

Eddie cannot help the way his face all but beams the second Steve walks back into his room that evening. “There you are, Stevie! How was work?”

Steve returns the smile, genuine, but there’s a tiredness to it. “It was alright. Bit boring, really, uneventful. How are you doing?” 

“I’m good,” Eddie says, adding with a jaunty grin, “All the better now that you’re back.” 

It comes out a bit more flirtatious than he intended, but thankfully Steve just laughs it off. “Alright, smoothtalker,” he scoffs through a chuckle as he takes his usual seat by the bed. “It’s nice to see you again too.”

“Oh, the actual doctor came in to talk to me today. Good news, don’t worry,” Eddie tells him, the last bit tacked on quickly before that concerned crease can appear between Steve’s brows. “She says I’m healing up nicely, and I might be able to be discharged soon. A few more days’ observation and then they're gonna see how well I can actually move since, you know, the bats chewed through half the muscles in one of my legs. But, yeah, I could be out of here by the end of next week.” 

“That’s great, Eddie!” Steve brightens. 

“Yeah.” Eddie smiles. “I can’t wait to be somewhere familiar, feel normal again. Or, well,” he amends, smile falling a little as he realizes, “as normal as I can feel given that I’ll probably be walking with a limp for the rest of my life and be covered in nasty scars all over.” 

A strange expression crosses Steve’s face then, something happy and sad and sympathetic all at once, and his voice is soft as he says, “We’ll match.” 

Eddie blinks at him. “What?”

“The scars,” Steve clarifies. “The bats got me too, you know. I was lucky, it wasn’t as bad for me as it was for you, but, uh- yeah, we’ll match. See?” He stands and pulls his shirt up a bit. 

Eddie’s heart rate immediately kicks up again, blood growing warm, as his eyes snap to Steve’s stomach, to skin and muscle and body hair and- oh. Two giant, jagged red scabs cover Steve’s sides, the edges fading into skin bumpy and pink and white with the beginnings of scarring. The bite on Eddie’s own side twinges in sympathy. “That’s-” He swallows back the word hot, and breathes out instead, “Holy shit.” Without really thinking, he finds himself reaching out to skim his fingers over the ridges of Steve’s scars. 

Steve gasps - full body shudders - at the touch, and Eddie instantly pulls his hand back, afraid he’s hurt him. “Sorry,” he mutters.

“No, it’s fine,” Steve manages, though it sounds a bit shaky. “You didn’t hurt me, I just- I wasn’t expecting it.” 

Eddie tentatively starts to reach back out; Steve nods. He slowly traces the outline of the wound again, every uneven edge, feeling the evidence of hurt and the evidence of healing and the ripple of each breath Steve takes - breaths that echo in the quiet that falls between them. Eddie doesn’t realize just how intimate this silence has become as he runs his hands across Steve’s skin, until he glances up to find Steve just…watching him. It’s impossible to tell exactly what emotion is behind his eyes, but it’s intense and it’s devastating, and Eddie suddenly feels like he can’t breathe. 

“Uh-” A nervous laugh stutters out of him. He rescinds his touch. “Twin scars, huh?” he remarks, cracking a crooked smile and attempting to change this strange, suffocating energy with a joke. “Hell of a matching tattoo. Next time let’s just exchange friendship bracelets like normal people do, yeah?”

Steve huffs, a short burst of laughter that escapes from his chest like it’s been punched out of him. “Since when have you ever done anything like a normal person?” he teases in return as he pulls his shirt back down.

Just like that, blown away by Steve’s playful smile, the weird tension lifts. Eddie grins back. “Alright, fair point.” He adds, “Those are gonna be some pretty metal scars, Stevie.”

“Not as metal as yours,” Steve says warmly, settling back in his chair and kicking one leg over the other. “You’re the one that literally survived death, Ed. It doesn’t get any more metal than that.” 

“Now who’s the smoothtalker?” Eddie smirks, and he hopes he isn’t blushing. Steve Harrington calling him metal with so much pride and affection in his voice is doing numbers on his heart. Curse this stupid fucking crush.

Steve eyes divert briefly to the heart monitor, which has not once calmed down since the second he’d lifted up his shirt, and Eddie is so sure that he knows then, that he’s finally made the connection between what’s got Eddie’s heart racing, but he doesn’t say anything, just laughs it off again, smiling like everything’s completely normal as he looks back at Eddie and rolls his eyes and mutters in return, “Shut up.” 

“Make me,” Eddie mumbles, not quick enough to bite back the words before they fall from his mouth, only managing to lower his voice enough that maybe Steve didn’t hear him. 

“What?” 

“TV?” Eddie grabs the remote, pretends like that’s what he’d said in the first place. Real smooth. 

“Oh, sure.” Steve shrugs. If he noticed Eddie’s slip, he gives no indication of it. 

Eddie turns on the TV and they spend the next hour or so laughing and making fun of the bad acting on the show that’s playing. Easy, normal, platonic. Eddie’s heart rate stabilizes, remaining even so long as he doesn’t look too long at Steve’s smile. 

When sleep starts lapping at Eddie’s consciousness, he doesn’t fear it anymore. Silently, he holds out his hand, and Steve takes it, wrapping him in the warmth and protection that allows Eddie to let himself drift off undaunted. 

And in his dreams his hands skate across Steve’s skin again.

(part seven)

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[avoxrising]

The Feral One • Chapter 1

Finnick Odair x Y/N

Series Masterlist Link

The first thing you remember after they lifted you from the arena was the hands of Capital doctors grabbing at you. Three weeks in the arena had left you extremely weak and you had a bad cut on your face but none of that mattered. They were touching you and you didn’t like that.

The second thing you remember after they lifted you from the arena was waking up chained to your hospital bed, surrounded by peacekeepers and President Snow.

“Miss Y/L/N,” the old man stated. “I wish you wouldn’t be so difficult with us.”

“Difficult?” you ask with what little voice you have left.

“It seems that you won’t let us treat your wounds, or let anyone get close to you for that matter,” he states. “The poor doctor was just trying to take your temperature when you stabbed him with a scalpel.”

“He was touching me,” you reply.

“Oh my dear we have a long road ahead of us if you are planning on remaining… difficult.”

You hadn’t meant to kill so many people. First it was 6 in the arena, then it was the doctor in the capital, then it was your first client, then it was another capital doctor and a peacekeeper trying to restrain you. By the time you came down from your lapse in sanity, you had been sentenced to house arrest in District 4’s victors village.

“Feral” is what they called you. To everyone outside of your home you were uncontrollable; crazy; even dangerous. To yourself, you were broken; confused; misunderstood. To him, you were everything.

“Y/N Y/L/N!” Linessa, the District 4 escort, calls out as she reaps the tributes for the 75th annual Hunger Games. Mags moves to volunteer but you quickly shoot her a look and she backs down. She knows you won’t hurt her, in fact, she’s one of the few people who genuinely cares for you, but she knows not to interfere when your mind is made up.

Annie shrinks into Mags’ side as you shuffle past her towards the escort. She’s another poor, misunderstood being like you. The two of you have never been friends for the simple reason that she is absolutely terrified of you and sometimes her meltdowns set you off. Maybe in a different reality you two would be friends, but not in this one.

Peacekeepers follow you to the front of the stage as you drag your shackled feet forward. This is the first time anyone besides the victors has seen you in around 5 years, and they’re getting a good look at what “feral” looks like.

The peacekeepers hold a gun to your back as you stand on the stage, head high. It’s so hot out you’re hoping you’ll sweat enough to slip your hands out of your cuffs. The district center looks the same as the last time you saw it all those years ago.

“Finnick Odair,” Linessa reads out and your head immediately snaps towards her. She lets out a small shriek and the peacekeepers tighten their hold on their guns as Finnick makes his way to the front to stand next to you. Of course, they don’t let him get anywhere near you, but you wouldn’t hurt him. You would burn the whole world to the ground if it meant protecting him.

The peacekeepers allow Mags to join you and Finnick on the train but they don’t let her anywhere near you. Finnick tries to tell them that you’re fine and won’t hurt anyone but they won’t listen.

You’re done trying to advocate for yourself. In fact, it’s useless. You haven’t spoken to anyone besides Finnick in five years. Not since your client…

Anyways, peacekeepers escort you to your room and set up guard in the hall. They’re too scared to be in the room with you, and none of the avoxes will go near you.

You wouldn’t have even been fed if it weren’t for Finnick barging into your room (despite the peacekeepers’ protests) with a plate of food. The peacekeepers made him keep the door open so they could monitor the situation but at least you could eat.

“How are you feeling?” Finnick asks as you pick at your food. You shrug your shoulders in response. He goes to lay his hand close to yours in comfort, causing one of the peace keepers to pipe up.

“Hey!” he yells, causing you to jump. “Back up Mr. Odair. We’ve been advised not to let anyone get within five feet of it.”

Finnick stands up and moves himself between you and the peacekeepers.

“First of all,” he states. “She is not an ‘it’. She’s a human being like the rest of us. Secondly, she is not a danger to me. She would never hurt me and even if she tried we both know I would win that fight. Scaring her like that is only going to set her off, and I won’t hold her back if she does. The best thing you can do, for everyone’s safety, is treat her like a human being, absolutely do not touch her, and no yelling. She’s not an animal, she’s traumatized.”

“Sir we’ve been ordered to shoot her at the first sign of agression. The capital doctors have advised us that she’s a danger to those around her,” the peacekeeper states.

“The capital doctors haven’t seen her in over five years!” Finnick exclaims. “They don’t know the first thing about her. Now get out and let us eat in peace. Don’t forget I’ve killed people too.”

The peacekeepers, visibly shaken, leave your room and allow the door to close. Finnick sits back down on your bed with you to resume your meal.

Taglist:

@randomgurl2326 @mystargirl-interlude @uther-pendragon-is-an-ass @yourdailymemedelivery @americanprometheuss @l3xi3luv @noisyalmonddreamer @nordicvxid @teaganthemorningstar @samatokisunfinishedcigarette @justtrying2getby @heytherellala @notplutos

[sweetiesicheng]

seungkwan - injury

word count : 702

-

the door slides open, "y/n!" seungkwan shouts and hurries towards you. "you okay?" he asks.

"huh? why are you here?" you ask him, knowing that his schedule is packed today.

"i'm supposed to be at a recording session, but i left when one of the managers texted the group chat," he explains and sets his bag down on a chair. "what happened?" he asks.

you sigh, "fell off the ladder when i was helping my sister," you shortly explain. "it's not that bad.”

"you're in a cast."

"okay, so it's a little bad."

seungkwan sits on the edge of the bed and holds your hand. he brushed some of your hair out of the way.

"how long are you out for?" he asks.

"long enough to miss rehearsals for the tour," you reply, staring at your injured leg.

seungkwan glances over at the cast and then back at you. he knows you're upset, but you're keeping yourself composed with him there.

"i can tell you're upset you know. you're not good at acting," seungkwan says and reaches over to pat your head.

"cause i can’t dance with you,” you reply, leaning towards him.

“hey, look at me,” he says to you. you look up at him. “even if you can’t dance, we’ll still find a way to make the best memories. besides, i’m dragging you on tour whether you like it or not,” he says and wraps an arm around you to hug you.

—

it's been a few days since you were discharged from the hospital. you have been spending a lot of time at home since you can't do much.

today, you decide to hang out at the company building to watch one of the rehearsals for the tour. you're friends with a lot of people who will be on tour too, so you won't be alone the entire time the guys are rehearsing.

"y/n, you're here?" dino asks as you enter the room with seungkwan.

"hi," you greet everyone present.

"sit over here," one of the dancers says, pushing a bag off of a chair. you go over to the chair and sit down.

"i got these," seungkwan says and takes your crutches. "don't dance," he says to you in almost a strict tones while pointing at you.

you pout but seungkwan kisses your forehead before putting his stuff down and starting to warmup with the others.

"has he been helping you?" one of your friends asks while stretching.

you nod, "yea, he's been helping a lot actually. i feel really bad. everyone is busy, and i probably ruined everything," you say before receiving a whack of the head, "ow!"

"you didn't ruin anything," one of your friends says. "everything will be fixed. maybe we can drag you on stage somehow," he says to you.

—

rehearsal continues going on and everyone runs through one of the bigger stages. all of the dancers are involved, so you sit by yourself.

you do the arm movements as the music plays, trying to keep yourself occupied so you aren't bored the whole time.

you watch everyone dance and start to get a bit sad about how you can't dance with everyone.

"y/n!"

you look around and see one of your friends pushing a chair with wheels on it towards you.

"come on, come on," he quickly speaks and gestures you to sit in the chair.

you get up and sit down on the chair. your friend starts pushing you across the room, and you have to hold onto the arms of the chair to brace yourself.

"too fast! too fast!" you shout as you make it across the room. the chair turns and someone else starts pushing you across the room again.

as the music continues, the dancers go back to dancing while you're in a random spot on the floor.

"y/n, what are you doing?" seungkwan asks, not even dancing to look at you.

"gotta be a part of the show somehow, right?" you reply. seungkwan smiles and laughs.

he leans in to give you a quick kiss before returning to dancing while you continue to be moved around and enjoying rehearsal despite not being able to dance.

[film-in-my-soul]

Sweet Enough to Eat | 3,160 | Fortheloveofexy / @fortheloveofexy

Summary: Neil is cute and Andrew has a crisis. That's it, thats the fic.

A different kind of attack | 3,351 | amidsthechaos

Summary: Neil teaches a secret self-defense class and Andrew shows up one day, never expecting to learn a thing and much less feel a thing.

Falling | 3,517 | Fortheloveofexy / @fortheloveofexy

Summary: He'd known all along that Andrew didn't care about him. It was part of the allure, what made Andrew a safe choice to experiment with. Andrew's apathy would protect him from getting hurt, and Neil's own feelings were little more than an afterthought. He wouldn't have to deal with the consequences of getting attached once he was dead, after all. Except, here he is. Not dead, and thoroughly, undeniably attached. He needs to tell Andrew. 

head case (what to do with you) | 4,007 | Major_816

Summary: It bolsters him now. Because Andrew’s in the hospital and this medical fuck with an incompetency problem won’t let Neil in to see him. Andrew gets hurt and Neil...handles it.

(see more recommendations below!)

One Hundred | 4,553 | TheRainbowElectric / @agreatperhaps12

Summary: The most shocking thing about the sight of Neil is how still he is. Andrew has seen Neil bloodied and bruised before. But even beaten to a pulp and beyond exhausted, Neil talks and twitches and kicks in his sleep, restless fucker. Now, Neil’s only signs of life are the shallow rise and fall of his chest and the steady beep of the heart monitor beside his bed. That’s all Andrew has to hold onto as he drags a chair from beside the window to the gap between Neil’s bed and the door and sits down.

lucid prayers | 4,914 | andreil

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backstage (the world is yours) | 5,011 | Major_816

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Blood Spilled (But None Wasted) | 19,531 | Detective4

Summary: Neil licked his lips and Andrew’s gaze tracked the movement with the efficiency of a predator. Neil glanced at the fangs again, then down to his bare forearm, then to the fuzzy carpet that laid under the coffee table. “Neil,” Andrew’s voice was firm, demanding complete attention. Neil met his eyes once again, encapsulated, “You can say no.” Neil shook his head lightly. Took a deep breath. “I want to,” And he was surprised that he wasn’t lying.

Follow You Through The Dark | 22,461 | sambutwithbooks

Summary: “Don’t say no-” “No.” “Andrew-” Aaron shakes the paper a little in frustration before composing himself. “It’s a quiz bowl. Basic trivia. It runs for five consecutive weekends and there’s a prize at the end. I need you and your sponge brain to help me win.” His brother has asked him for many things since Bee had pulled Andrew aside to tell him he had a doppelganger wandering around San Jose, California causing trouble but this might be the dumbest thing Aaron has ever asked him to do.

that one flower shop au by moody_lesbian

2 Part Series | Rated G | Total Words: 2,794

Part 1 Summary: “I brought you this.” Andrew continued to stare at him for another moment until his eyes slid from Neil’s and to the slightly crushed daisy in Neil’s hand. “What is it?” Nervously, Neil itched to take his hand back. “A promise.”

the foxhole - coffee shop au by jaylocked

2 Part Series | Rated T | Total Words: 7,003

Part 1 Summary: Neil collects the cup a moment later, almost absently, as he thinks back to the nightmare that had started his day. He takes a sip, planning to turn away, and is almost assaulted by the sheer quantity of sugar in his drink. Who knew coffee could taste that sweet? It’s disgusting. Neil looks back to Andrew, who is once more leveling a blank gaze at him, hazel eyes deeply unimpressed. Neil quirks an eyebrow, confused. It’s definitely not worth it to say anything. After all, it’s been engrained in him not to draw attention to himself, to order whatever is blandest and least interesting, to get in and out best he can. He can feel the weight of Andrew’s gaze on his back as he leaves the cafe, but he tries to ignore it.

Excerpts From The Rooftop by loveandwarandmagick

2 Part Series | Unrated + Rated G | Total Words: 9,012

Part 1 Summary: Andrew is an English major coming down from his drugs, spending his nights on the rooftop while everyone's asleep. What he suspected was a hallucination, a side-effect, follows him up there, and doesn't disappear even after he gets sober. This is troubling. It's even more troubling that Neil wants to listen to him. The worst part is probably that Andrew finds himself wanting - the truth, to give his own, to see if Neil wants more than that. Or, the non-mafia au where the only impending doom is the height of the roof, and the fact that talking to Neil makes him feel like he's standing at the edge of the drop.

no love without teeth by moonsock

2 Part Series | Rated M+E | Total Words: 9,508

Part 1 Summary: Neil’s legs kick a little faster. “What better way to avoid being outed as a vampire than to join a vampire slaying agency?” Andrew actually stops chewing at that. “You get stupider every day.”

New Tricks by likearecord

2 Part Series | Rated T & M | Total Words: 27,784

Part 1 Summary: Kevin, Neil, and Allison are grad students, roommates, and obviously best friends. One fortuitous day, Kevin meets a short, knife-wielding blond guy in the library and brings him home to meet the short, knife-wielding redhead he lives with. If only Neil knew what having a crush felt like before this happened.

High School Science by fuzzballsheltiepants / @fuzzballsheltiepants

4 Part Series | Rated T+E | Total Words: 29,926

Part 1 Summary: Andrew's unfairly hot chemistry lab partner needs a date for the prom to appease his uncle. Andrew agrees...for a fee.

Inside Your Mind by moonix / @annawrites

2 Part Series | Rated E | Total Words: 42,414

Part 1 Summary: Andrew and Neil switching phones by accident brings them closer together than either of them anticipated.

TFC High School AU by moonix / @annawrites

4 Part Series | Rated T + M | Total Words: 50,786

Part 1 Summary: After his mother's death Neil Josten just needs to keep his head down until graduation, then he's going to leave this town and identity behind like all the others and start over somewhere new. There's a small hitch in his plans though: his deal to protect Andrew from bullies in exchange for some quiet company.

Tales From Foxhole Aquarium by Fortheloveofexy / @fortheloveofexy

3* Part Series | Rated E | Total Words: 88,897

Part 1 Summary: Neil Josten stares at the large building in front of him, his mouth twisted into a small frown. Yesterday, Browning had handed him a manila folder containing his new name, his new life. Included in that file had been a note, the same slightly crumpled note he’s holding in his hand now, with the name of his new employer. Foxhole Aquarium. Ask for David Wymack.

*Part 3 incomplete

2024 Reclists · INBOX · Blog Updates

[the-dumpster-fire-of-life]

Hey! I really love all of your imagines and I really think your work is immaculate. Especially the Modern!Bill Kaulitz imagine and it made me wonder what it would be like to be Modern!Tom Kaulitz's daughter,if you don't mind could you write an imagine for that? If you do,you don't have to rush, I know you have many other works to publish so take your time! :) ❤️

(Hello! I'm very happy to do so and that you love my writings! This also was the perfect time for daddy issues to pop up in my playlist :')

Being Tom Kaulitz's Daughter

He is the very proud dad all the time

He teaches you electric guitar since before you could even walk

And let me tell you, he did a great fucking job

Doesn't force you though to play instruments and lets you be your own person

Is always happy to talk about his amazing daughter in interviews and videos

You were also taken on stage a lot as a kid

Bill was your best uncle, always had you on his hip and dressing you up and doing your makeup

Gustav is a more careful but caring uncle who let you go ham on drums and steal his shit while also pretending not to see you in hide and seek

Georg was the uncle to let you stay up, eat whatever you want, steal you without anyone knowing and teach you cuss words

You and Tom bickered so much even when you were a kid because you got his attitude

When you were little he always carried you around on his shoulders or was holding you

You're his little girl so much and he doesn't let that go

Doesn't want your career to be based around him if you go into the entertainment business and wants you to be your own person

Not just his kid

He's a supporting dad in whatever job you want to do or whoever you want to date

He's just happy that you're happy

He had almost a full on mental breakdown when you were getting older when you were a baby

He couldn't handle it

Struggled with being a dad to you at first and was nervous but he did an amazing job with you

He lets you dress him up, have tea parties with you, make him wear tutu's makeup and everything

He's sitting in a small ass chair, a tea cup in his hand as you give him a scone, decked in a boa, tiara and tutu at a small table as Bill is teasing his brother so hard

Until you drag Bill and your uncle's into it

He spoke too soon

He's the dad to always be there when you need him or just to be there when you don't want to talk

Is the dad front row when you have a recital, award ceremony, play and everything else

He doesn't want to miss anything going on in your life

The dad to push you higher than any other kid on the swings

Let's you sneak in his bed no matter how old you get or even if you don't live at home anymore

You'll always be the little girl he raised

You and him were partners in crime as you grew up against your mom

He gives you cookies when she said no because it would "spoil your dinner"

He snuck you one and told you not to tell mom

He gets you out of trouble so many times

Picks you up early from school all the time just because he can and wants to take you to a gig or concert they're doing

He'd be proud of you took after him on electric guitar

Is happy if you ever got into a band or music with your friends

You remind him of himself when he was younger sm except for the flirting

He made you swear off dating for so long because he couldn't handle it but actually loved your future partner as long as they treated you right

Whenever you're upset he's still the dad to mess with you, tickle you and make you laugh until you're ready to talk

He is the best dad to ever have

He spoiled you so damn rotten but made sure you appreciated everything

He raises the best kid ever and he didn't even know how he did it

When he first met you in the hospital room and held you he was shaking

He was just in awe that he made this perfect little girl and that he was your dad

Can you tell I'm curing my daddy issues with these requests?

[m00nymonster]

Promise Me

Prompt: anticipation

TRIGGER WARNING: character death, cancer

I paced outside the hallway of Mensah's bedroom, inside of which her children and partners were gathered. I couldn't handle the crowd, even with drones. The few I had brought with me flew around my head in a defensive pattern.

Out of all the ways for Mensah to die, I'd have never anticipated this. I had expected old age to take her. And frankly, I hadn't expected to see her die at all. The chances of me dying before her were statistically higher, with my job. But it would have been old age, for sure. A very long time from now.

No one expected pancreatic cancer.

By the time she'd complained of stomach pain, it was too late. Most cancers could be treated. It wasn't easy, but it was managable. If you caught it before stage four, anyway.

I kept pacing. I couldn't meet anyone's eyes. Ratthi and Gurathin were waiting outside with me, sitting on chairs dragged in from the living room for this purpose. Arada and Overse were murmuring to each other as they gripped hands, and Pin-Lee stared at the floor. I didn't care.

I wanted to fight something. I want to tear something's spine out. But you can't rip out cancer's lungs. You can just wait and watch as your favorite human leaves the hospital because the treatments didn't work, watch as she went home, watch as she climbed into her bed like it was a mountain and lay down to be comfortable. You can't rip cancer limb from limb as you watch your favorite human die by inches.

Farai and the rest slowly filtered out of the room.

"Not long now," she murmured. Ratthi ran a hand over his face. Gurathin stared holes into the carpet. Overse and Arada stopped whispering, and Pin-Lee finally looked up, tears in her eyes. They started to get up. Farai raised a hand.

"She wants SecUnit," she said. "You can go in after."

I stopped pacing. Farai waved at me, but I couldn't move.

"SecUnit? We don't have much time."

I stared at the door. It was rectangular, made of a smooth brown wood with a golden knob. No entryway had scared me more.

"Me?" I whispered. Farai nodded. I took a deep, shuddering breath and forced myself to open the door and step inside. The door shut behind me.

Mensah lay on the bed, surrounded by pillows, propped up to be as comfortable as possible. Her children had left little stuffed animals around her, and the tables were covered with flowers. She was pale, sickly, but her eyes still had the determined sheen I'd seen when she'd killed a SecUnit with a mining drill to protect me.

"SecUnit."

"Murderbot," I corrected. She smiled and nodded weakly.

"Murderbot. Sit down."

I sat in a chair next to her bed.

"Can I....?" She raised her hand. I hesitated, then gripped it tightly. She sighed.

"I remember the last time you held my hand."

I said nothing, just stared. She smiled at me and continued.

"I had no hope when they held me. Then you were there, and--and I knew there was a chance. You fought so hard to save me, and you almost died. Several times. You risked everything to protect me. And when you went on that survey with Amena...you did everything you could for her, too. When I learned about that, you have no idea how...upset I was. That you'd almost died." She coughed. I tightened my grip. "I want you to promise me something," she said.

"Anything."

"Take care of yourself."

I hadn't expected that.

"You throw yourself into danger, all the time. You don't care if you die. I do." She coughed again. "I want you to live a long, happy life. Understand?" She cocked her head, then gently lifted her free hand and brushed it against my face. It was wet.

"That's too hard," I whispered.

She nodded. "You're tough. You'll figure it out."

"I don't want to. I don't want you to die."

"We don't always get what we want, Murderbot." She sighed. "I wanted more time, too." She winced. "Promise me, Murderbot."

I was quiet for a whole four minutes and thirty seven seconds. "Okay," I said finally. "I promise."

She gave a relieved sigh. "Send in the others," she said. She smiled and released my hand. "And don't forget your promise. Live. For me."

I nodded, and quietly slipped away.

"She wants you," I said thickly at my humans outside, jerking my head as I closed the door. Ratthi jumped up. He stared at me, his expression soft.

"SecUnit..."

"I'll be downstairs," I said, and fled.

[babydollmarauders]

SLEEP — LUKE HUGHES

luke hughes x fem!reader

FAITHLYNN’S 500 CELLY!

🌷: “They’re so cute when they’re asleep.” with Luke.

“nap time?” my boyfriend asks as he walks into his room. i was already here, laying in his bed and awaiting his return from morning practice for our daily nap.

the routine had started as an accident, us having fallen asleep one day before his game when we were spending some time together. but now it’s become a good luck tradition; i wait for him in his room during morning practice and then he comes home and we nap together until he has to wake up to get ready and leave for his game, in which case i ride with him to the arena to watch him play.

“finally! i was about to fall asleep without you.” i tell him. Luke just smiles, stripping off his hoodie and throwing it to me, leaving him in a t-shirt and sweatpants. i slip the hoodie over my head, burrowing inside it’s warmth, as he crawls in bed beside me. allowing him to pull my body close to his, i snuggle my face into the crook of his neck and let out a content sigh. i close my eyes, letting myself drift to sleep, happy in his arms.

*

i’m stirred awake by the sound of whispers, the culprits not doing the best job at keeping quiet.

“they’re so cute when they’re asleep.” someone says.

“yeah, cause they’re not telling me ‘Ethan, no!’ and ‘Ethan, get down from there!’ and ‘Ethan, stop doing that. you’re gonna fall and get hurt.’. they’re such buzzkills.” now i know that voice was Ethan Edwards.

“to be fair, they’re usually in the right when they say those things.” another voice pipes up.

“shut up.” i groan, swatting at someone hand that’s currently tickling my nose.

“ow.” Ethan dramatizes and then stage whispers a “bitch.”

“Ethan, if you wanna keep playing hockey, i suggest you take that back.” Luke mumbles, burrowing his face farther into me.

“sorry, mom.” Ethan drags out, and i already know he’s rolling his eyes without even opening my own. i finally crack my eyes open to find Mark, Ethan, Dylan, and Mackie standing in front of the bed.

“what do you guys want?” i whine, scrunching up my nose.

“we have to leave in like 15 minutes.” Mackie says, making Luke pop up.

“what? no, i set my alarm to go off forty-five minutes before we have to leave.” he picks his phone up, checking the time and cursing before sliding out of the bed. i watch my boyfriend run around the room, telling the boys to get out as he gets changed into his arrival outfit.

my own phone buzzes with an incoming text, and i pick up the screen to find a message from Dylan with a picture of Luke and i sleeping.

“aww babe, look at us.” i turn the phone around for him to see but he’s still rushing around the room.

“no time, babe. let’s go.” he tells me. i sigh, rising from the bed to just slip on my shoes and follow him out the door.

i guess it’s time to watch my boyfriend win another game.

**

@y/noninsta just posted

y/noninsta game day naps are my favorite times with you 💙💛

Load more comments

lhughes_06 love you baby

y/noninsta i love you too sweet boy

edwards.73 yeah they’re my fav too cause i don’t have you guys yelling at me

y/noninsta who else is gonna tell you not to try doing a back flip off the kitchen counter right next to the flaming stovetop?

edwards.73 i still think i could’ve landed it

lhughes_06 and i still think y/n and i would’ve been the ones stuck driving you to the hospital with a broken nose and 2nd degree burns but hey what do i know?

edwards.73 you guys have no faith in me

jackhughes gross this is not the content i signed up for

y/noninsta i could block you. would that help? ☺️

elblue6 you guys are too cute!

y/noninsta at least someone appreciates us! thank you mama El!

-

-

[quillsandblades]

🔫 this is a robbery, hand over your post war Levihan headcanons (please 😊)

The world needs to know

Post war levihan gives me life ok, they're both alive and happy and together and no one spoils that for me. It's canon. Isayama who?

Congratulations, the robbery was a success and here's the loot

So after the Rumbling and the Battle of Heaven and the Earth, these two retire. First they recover in the hospital, Hange’s burn injuries and Levi’s leg and they take a break to just breathe and relax. 

Once they’re on their feet (and wheelchair) Hange drags Levi to travel as many places as they can go.

Queen Historia funds their visits (Hange somehow convinced her to allocate a budget for them cuz she wanted to see everything. And as they were heroes of the war and her parents former superiors, she agreed) and they travel a lot.  

But it’s not just going places and having fun, They plan on helping out in the rebuilding of the areas affected by the Rumbling too. They go around aiding in reconstruction and Hange helps the mechanics and engineers and learns things from them too. 

Levi distributes clothes, food, and lollipops to kids who love him. Hange later teases him for looking too long at the lollipop, “You remembered that clown right?”

“No, I was thinking about how you chased after cars in Marley with carrots in your hand.” And she gets all embarrassed, crying out how she was just so excited that she couldn’t stop.  

And he says fondly, “There’s no need to get defensive four-eyes, I was happy to see you so excited after months back then.” And she blushes because wtf?! When was Levi so romantic? But then again, he was. When she was about to sacrifice herself and he’d given her his heart. 

They don’t talk about this, nor her proposal in the forest. They don’t need to, not yet. They’ve both reached a stage of familiarity and comfort with each other throughout the years which doesn’t need any words. They both just know and they’re fine with it (levihan telepathy at its peak) 

They stay with the brats whenever they stop by in Paradis—or at the palace and help out with Historia’s orphanage. Eventually they decide to buy a house since they won’t be traveling forever. It’s a nice little cabin in the woods, just like Hange had dreamt of. 

It turns into a kind of summer house, or a place to stay in whenever they stop at Paradis and rest. They have it renovated, repainted and furnished and it becomes their own cozy little place. 

Levihan eventually settle down in their cabin for good once traveling constantly becomes too hectic. They’re used to sharing a bed by now, they did it all the time in their travels, and it comes with the much needed comfort of having someone familiar close by after waking up from nightmares. 

But that night feels different, they’ve finally settled down and this cabin is no longer a temporary lodging for their stays in Paradis, it’s on its way to become their house, their home. A safe place to relax and live in. Just like what Hange yearned for in the forest when she proposed they live here together

So Levi turns to her and sees her awake as well, staring at him. They both know that now words are needed to solidify this thing between them. But neither of them know how to proceed

Hange goes first, cuz Levi may be the strongest, he’s still not the bravest when it comes to certain things. So Hange talks, shapes out their feelings into words and sentences and each sits warmly upon them both like an extra blanket in the chilly night. And when she’s done, Levi just pulls her close and there’s too many words, feelings stuck in his throat, his mind but all he can say is “Yes. Me too.” And he just kisses her, and they hold each other all through the night. 

They look after each other’s injuries, he takes care of her burns, she helps him with exercises for his leg. Both of them are a bit conscious about their injuries. There are times when Hange looks at her scarred, burnt body and she feels broken, weak and just falls into despair. She asks Levi how he can stand looking at her, how can he put up with her, does he want to? She’s not enough. 

But he takes her face in his hands and tells her she’s more than enough. And he places her hand on his own knee, the injured one and looks into her eye. It’s one of those levihan telepathy moments where he tells her with his eyes we’re both broken, you’re there for me and I’m here for you, so we’re each other’s crutches. 

Once again, they’re like two halves of a whole. Even after the war, with their flawed bodies and capabilities, they fit in together perfectly. She’s there as his support when he needs to walk and he’s there as the soothing balm to her burning scars. They don’t need anyone else. 

Things have changed, and now it’s Hange who helps Levi take a bath. She’s careful with him and Levi would tell her to wash his hair again and again, he likes how her fingers feel in his head. But the roles haven’t completely switched, he’d still drag her for a bath as well since she always neglects it. 

Levi is the cuddler.

While they both naturally wake up at the crack of dawn due to years of army training drilled into them, there are days they hold back and relax. But on those days Hange's usually the one who wants to jump out of bed first, there's just so much to do, how can she waste her day in bed? But it's levi who pulls her back and buries his face in her shoulder and cages her in his warm sleepy embrace and says, "Stay still four-eyes, those seedlings aren't going anywhere." And he just. Cuddles.

Hange goes wild in the garden, she plants all that she can get her hands on and Levi goes around ordering her to arrange it all neatly. And his help is needed, otherwise their garden would’ve been a terrible mess. He makes sure there are neat sectors to all the things, vegetables at one side and fruits at the other. 

“I’m telling you shorty, tomatoes are fruits! We’re not planting them on the veg side.” 

Levi’s got a side of the garden all for himself where he grows tea and he cherishes his little tea garden. Whenever Hange comes across any exotic or new species of tea, she makes sure to get plenty of seeds for Levi to plant. 

She goes about experimenting with plants and seeds, she does grafting and makes hybrid seeds and plants them to observe the results. They have plenty of land around the cabin and she’s got all the time in the world now. She also tries to make hybrid species of flowers. 

She works together with Levi and does the same things with tea. They end up opening a tea shop and Levi tells her it was once his dream as a kid. It gets a lot of customers, and it keeps Levi and Hange busy. Hange continues to experiment with tea and they get the most unique blends that way. Eventually they add a few other things to the menu but their tea remains the most famous one in Paradis.   

The 104th often visit their home or the shop. Armin’s often at their place, asking Hange for commander advice and they talk politics for long hours. 

Mikasa prefers the tea shop more, it’s a cozy, comfortable place, not too quiet, and not too loud. It suits her mood and the aroma of tea calms her down. Levi would often find her asleep in one of the cushy armchairs and just throw a blanket over her if it’s cold. She doesn’t like to go back home since it’s mostly empty and quiet (and she misses Eren, we don’t blame her) so Levihan often invite her over to their place. By now they’ve practically made the second guest room as Mikasa’s bedroom. She often spends the nights there and when she can’t sleep she comes out and sits on the porch. 

Levihan also have sleepless nights, so when their daughter she’s staying over they all gather outside or in the living room and have hot tea and talk to forget their worries. It’s a good way to keep unwanted memories away for all of them. The morning finds them all asleep on the carpet, Levi and Hange leaning into each other, Mikasa with often her head on Hange’s lap. 

Jean and Connie visit a lot as well, and whenever the 104th all come together, Hange makes sure they all stay the night no matter how much Levi grumbles about them being too noisy. She brushes off his complaints, he was always an old man hiding away from fun and excitement. 

They have drinking games on the porch and Hange and Levi get a lot of dares to kiss each other. They kids were always betting on them to get together, and now that they officially are, they wanna see all the proof they can get. Plus it’s good to see their tough captain all red faced and embarrassed. 

Whenever their Marley friends visit, Levi and Hange go meet them. Gabi and Falco get along surprisingly well with Levi, they steal him away from Hange for the day and zoom around the city with his wheelchair. He pretends to complain. Pretends. 

Pieck, Onyankopon and Hange get along the best together. They always fill her in about the situation of the world, the aftermath of the war. It starts out with just people collecting the pieces after the rumbling and focusing on rebuilding everything. But over the years as the states get stronger Hange and Levi get news about more conflicts, more schemes, no war in sight but the usual political disagreements and disunity. It saddens her how quickly humans revert back to their divided state, fighting once more over land or money or people. 

Pieck tells them they don’t have anything to worry about. They’ve retired, all they gotta do is enjoy the rest of their lives.  

Hange wants to write about their dead comrades, document everything about their lives within the walls and outside them, their training and the survey corps. She wants their memories to remain and Levi agrees on that. So they begin, it turns into a book with a few volumes. Hange writes down all she and Levi can remember and fills the pages with their friends’ laughter, tears and blood. The war and Paradis’ side of the story behind the genocide. 

It gets published and it’s a hit. People around the world would eventually read it (but by that time Levi and Hange would probably be dead) and it’s one of the crucial things that changes the views of the masses about the ‘Island Devils”

They talk about having children, Hange asks Levi if he wants any. The idea is nice, having a little brat of their own. But it turns out they’re too tired to manage a baby and the crying and wailing that comes with it and the attention it would demand. Besides they already do have children, the brats from the 104th. 

Perhaps if they were younger and had lived different lives, they would’ve been more serious about it. But not here. Now they’ve survived through hell and want to be selfish with the rest of their lives. And they are. 

💚💜

[theloveoffootball10]

sᴛɪᴄᴋᴡɪᴛᴜ - ᴛ ᴡ ᴇ ɴ ᴛ ʏ ғ ɪ ᴠ ᴇ

s e r i e s m a s t e r l i s t / c o m p l e t e m a s t e r l i s t

ᴛ ᴡ ᴇ ɴ ᴛ ʏ ғ ɪ ᴠ ᴇ

"So how hungover are you?" Lando asks as I stir in bed.

"Very. I don't remember getting back last night" the whole night after a certain point is a blank. All I want to do is sleep the day away and feel sorry for myself.

"I'm not surprised. When you got me to pick you up, you were just sat on the kerb talking shit to be honest"

"You know it's serious when the thinking kerb happens" I say with a laugh seeing Lando's confused look "it started when we were teenagers. It happens when you're so drunk you think you're having the deepest conversation with anyone who will listen and they usually happen in the most random of places, for me and my friends it always ended ip being a kerb outside of a club or wherever we were"

"So when you start having conversations with me like that I need to remember to be serious?"

"Pretty much" I say snuggling myself under Lando's arm resting my head on his chest "I didn't make an idiot of myself with your parents did I?"

"Not at all. You, Flo and Sav were hilarious when we got back here my mum and dad were thoroughly entertained. Thank you for making an effort with my family, it means a lot"

"Lando I'm always going to make an effort with your family. You've given my friends and family a chance, I'm not going to write off your family. They've all been amazing with me from the moment I met your parents at the race" I genuinely like Lando's family. They've all taken me in as one of their own and it's nice to be treated like one of the family. I've never felt as comfortable with a boyfriends family as I do with Lando's. I've never got on with a ex's siblings the way I do with Lando's either, I can see myself becoming really good friends with the girls.

I fall back to sleep in Lando's arms needing to sleep off this hangover, we have a three hour drive back to my house at some point today the last thing I want is to still feel like a corpse when I'm stuck in a car. Eventually waking up I notice Lando is no longer in bed with me, I don't blame him. I drag myself to his bathroom to make myself more presentable. When I say presentable I mean having a shower, brushing my teeth and pulling one of Lando's hoodies on with a pair of leggings. My hair is scraped up into a birds nest on the top of my head, it can't even be considered a messy bun the sheer state of it.

"I'm pleased you two look as hungover as I feel" I say walking into the living room where Flo and Savannah are both lying on either side of the sofa with a blanket and a can of full fat coke in front of them.

"it's hell Lucía. Being this hungover with two kids is not for the weak. I've had to get Oliver to take the girls to a park so I can recover" I had noticed the house is quiet, I'm assuming Lando has also gone with his brother.

"Morning Lucía, I'm making a roast beef dinner if you'd like some" Cisca tells me as she joins us in the living room "you all look like you need it"

"That would be amazing if you don't mind" the thought of a Sunday roast makes my stomach growl, I'm at the hungover stage where all I want is to eat "do you want some help?" I ask not wanting to take advantage of the hospitality I've been shown.

"Don't be silly. Lando should be back from the gym soon" Cisca tells me as she walks back into the kitchen answering my unspoken question as to where my boyfriend is. Laying on the other sofa I decide to follow Flo and Savannah's lead and will this hangover away.

"Hi baby" I feel Lando lifting my legs so he can sit next to me, he's freshly showered and I'm the human version of the heart eyes emoji looking at him "you look better than you did the morning"

"I don't think I feel it. I'll miss you when you go to Baku" I say quiet enough so only Lando can hear me. I know once Lando leaves on Wednesday it's going to be near enough two weeks until I see him again as he's leaving Baku and going straight to Singapore for media work in the run up to the race.

"I'm going to miss you as well baby. I would love for you to come to every race with me. I know we've had this conversation and I understand you have work but if it was up to me I wouldn't leave you" one of the things I really like about Lando is that he doesn't try to get me to give up working, he understands I have my own career and respects that I won't just drop it for him.

"I hate that that we have to leave each other as well but we can make this work Lando" reaching out I take Lando's hand in mine playing with his fingers "I'm going to watch every second of both races. I'm watching the Baku race with Liv, I haven't seen her for ages and I need to know how her and Max are doing" I've been a terrible friend lately, all of my time has been dedicated to Lando and I've barely seen my friends.

"He's completely smitten with her. He talks about her a lot and I know she's spent a lot of time in London with him and he's going back to Manchester with her when she goes" I know Max and Lando talk all of the time but it's always amusing for me when I hear men gossiping the way women do.

"That sounds like someone else we know" Flo joins in obviously listening to what we're saying about Max and Liv "in fact you're not even just smitten, you're completely in love"

"No one asked you, brat" Lando says throwing a cushion at Flo and I can't help but think he's embarrassed his younger sister is calling him out.

A few hours later we're back in my car on our way back to Cheshire. We had the most beautiful roast off Cisca followed by a nap before we decided it was time to leave. We've probably been in the car around an hour or so but I can't take my eyes off Lando. The way he's holding the steering wheel, his muscles flexing and the veins in his arms popping. I've tried crossing my legs and holding back but I can't.

"Lando?"

"Yeah baby?" He has no idea what's about to come out of my mouth especially when he's driving.

"I need you to finger me" the look on Lando’s face is priceless. The car practically comes to a stop in the middle of the motorway, he did not expect this.

“What the fuck you can’t just come out with that when I’m driving” I can tell Lando is trying to concentrate on the road but I’d happily pull over onto the hard shoulder to get what I want.

“I’m not just saying it for the sake of it. I need your fingers in me Lando. I thought I could wait until we got back but I can’t”

“Are you actually serious?”

“As serious as a heart attack” taking Lando’s left hand I bring it to the waistband of my leggings “don’t make me do it myself”

“Fuck you’re well and truly hungover and horny” feeling Lando’s fingers push their way into my waistband I gasp feeling his fingers on my clit “fucking hell you’re soaking!”

“All for you Lando” Lando runs his fingers up and down my soaked slit pushing two fingers in. I don’t even need him to get me ready, I feel like I could orgasm just looking at him today. Spreading my legs as far as I can I give Lando as much space as my car allows.

“Is this what you wanted? My fingers curling inside of you. My thumb on your clit?” Lando’s words only spur me on, throwing my head back in my seat I let out a guttural moan. This feeling is exactly what I wanted.

“Keep going…right there” as Lando’s thumb gives my clit more attention I feel myself getting close “fuck…feels so good”

“Come on baby, cum for me. Let me taste you” I have no idea how Lando is concentrating on driving right now. I couldn’t even tell you if the car is still moving I’m so overcome with pleasure.

I feel the all too familiar feeling building up in my lower body. Pushing my head back into the headrest I let out a loud moan and I dig my fingers into Lando’s arm needing something to hold on to. As I come down from my high I look over at Lando watching him suck my juices from his fingers. It’s probably one of the most attractive things I’ve seen him do.

“That was fucking incredible. I can’t wait until we’re home so you can fuck me properly” I can’t help but notice the bulge in Lando’s joggers, it’s a dead giveaway that he enjoyed this just as much as I did. I can only pray the rest of this journey is over soon.

emselucia

Liked by landonorris, daniellemitch and 19576 others

esmelucia swipe to see the after effects of a bottomless brunch with flonorris1 and savnorris 😅

View all comments

flonorris1 we had the best day with you!

↪️ esmelucia miss you already 🩷

savnorris Mila has not stopped asking for her auntie Lulu since you left!

↪️ esmelucia I'll FaceTime soon 🩷

↪️ landonorris not only did you steal my girlfriend I've also been replaced as Mila's favourite person 😭

↪️ esmelucia cry me a river Norris 🤷🏼‍♀️

user478 it must be serious when she's meeting the family! So cute!

↪️ user954 she's still a desperate whore Lando deserves better

↪️ esmelucia I might be a desperate whore but he's sticking his dick in me not u so who's the real winner here 🤷🏼‍♀️

The next few days I spend every breathing second with Lando. It’s been so nice to have him with me all of them time and wake up to him on a morning. It was painful to say goodbye to him knowing I won’t see him until after the race in Singapore. Granted after that we have around a month together but 2 weeks is going to drag. I’m like an obsessive girlfriend who wants to be with him 24/7.

It’s been two days now since he left and Liv has came over so we can spend some time together. I’m like a love sick puppy and nothing other than Lando is putting a smile on my face lately. I really think I love that man.

"Max is going to Singapore next week, he's got stuff to do with Quadrant but he's mainly going for the race"

"Are you not going?" I ask thinking Liv would be going with Max not wanting to be apart from him, I know I’d be with Lando if I could be.

"No I have work but I also think Max and Lando need to spend some time together. They've both been so busy lately I'm sick of Max telling me he misses Lando"

"They're like a married couple. I find it highly entertaining when they're on a stream together" the times when I hear Lando on a stream with Max, I leave him to it however I do always find myself sitting in another room laughing at them bickering "I think I might go to Monaco when Lando comes back from Singapore. I haven't told him yet but I'm going to see if work will be okay with me not going into the office but essentially working from home even if it's from a different country"

"Do you think they'll agree to it?"

"I have no idea. I guess it's a case of me logging on from Monaco or potentially taking leave and not working at all" I say with a shrug. I don't see why work would have an issue especially if I'm still working.

"There's no harm asking I suppose" Liv says with a shrug "do you think you'd move to Monaco for Lando?"

"I wouldn't write the idea off as a point blank no and I do think if that's what it came to I would consider it I just don’t think it’s an option yet" I think it's a long way off but if I had to move to Monaco with Lando to make our relationship work I'd take it into consideration. This man makes me want to fight for every fibre of him. The more I think about him the more I really do think I love that man.

[sanest-bsd-delegate]

Concert tickets

Headcanon: Where its you, them and the music taste. Ft Dazai, Chuuya, Tachihara and Lucy Masterlist Please look at the request rules in masterlist before requesting. Here is a lil headcanon for you (exams are shit, they decrease the writing creative power) bear with it AND THE GIF AM SORRY I CANT LMAO 😭

Dazai:

This man is 10/10 screaming the lyrics in the office.

Now he is a fan of Mitsiki too, but 'I wanna be yours' hits different.

Assuming your favorite band, he makes sure you least have a vintage case tape thingy even if it means Kunikida's bank account goes dead.

You both are broke babes,😭 cant even go to the concert.

But if you get to go into a concert, *cough* Kunikida's card *cough*, he makes sure you stay close to him

He 1000/10 gets lost in the concert, so pretty much you have to make sure his body aren't damaged. Twig like mf fr

WHY DO I IMAGINE HE MIGHT AS WELL AS CLIMB THE STAGE AND SING OUT-😭

If there are any fan meets, he makes sure you are with him cause there was this one time you beat him up just cause he didn't take you to a meetup. 💪💀 #saddazaicauseheisbroken

Dazai slays in the artist's t-shirts.

He secretly writes those artist x reader fanfiction on tumblr or smthg idk

I think he had a arctic monkey obsession phase.

It was a traumatic phase

I can feel like once you both only talked in I wanna be your lyrics, and oh boy the ADA was traumatized.

Once you refused to give him cuddles and bro really screams 505 lyrics.

He got a restraining order from the band when he sung at their concert.😭

The whole neighborhood got deaf by his singing.🤡

IMAGINE FIGHTING WITH PM AND THEN MF GOES LIKE "I go crazy 'cause here isn't where I wanna be" AND THE PM GOES WHO POSSESSED THIS MF NOW. (I need sleep)

Aww you love your boyfriend even when he is having broken bones and currently in hospital bed for going to a concert alone and getting crushed by sweaty people😭 <333

Chuuya:

"MILLANIUM KIDS THAT WANNA DIE" Bro might as well be a Dazai kinnie in music taste.

He had a Conan gray phase and still isn't over it.

Its a good thing you are his S/O.....YOU GET A FREE TICKET TO CONCERT WITH HIM.💪💀

can we appreciate this man? HE BUYS MERCHS FOR YOU <3333 WITHOUT STEALING OTHER'S MONEY UNLIKE SOME. 🤡

(well technically he steals their life so naturally the pay is for the life so he steals soul and money but he is a babygirl...he is forgiven.)

He has to use his gravity powers thingy. YOU BOTH ARE TO MUCH DEPRESSED IN THE CROWD.

"Woah, this place is just like my mind, messed up" "STFU Y/N 😭I AM TRYING TO BUY SOME MF TICKETS"

Awww he probably have you sit over his shoulder so that he can lowkey fly and you both can see the concert.

He cries if the song describes his life.🤠

Cause like one time you caught him listening to Mitski and he was crying. YKW YOU HUGGED HIM AND KISSED HIM CAUSE NO ONE LIKES A CRYING CHUUYA (maybe in bed thats different)

PLEASE I CAN IMAGINE THAT WE FORCE THIS MF

INTO

SINGING

LEVITATING

WHILE FLYING 😭

"I wish he levitates away forever, his singing makes my ear bleed" *Dazai proceeds to levitate to ADA hospital bed*

Chuuya supremacy

Tachihara:

Who knew this man got a music taste?

The same music taste as yours.

213420/10 the best music taste duo.

YOU CAUGHT THIS MAN RED HANDED LISTENING TO CPR. 🤡

His personality will be screaming Daddy Issues 😭

You still are suspicious how he got the concert tickets that too for TWO PEOPLE 💀

He will be those people who either will scream lyrics in someone's phone while they are recording or will those privileged people who get recognized by the band.

Why can I imagine him saying that the concert sucks?

YADADA YOU STILL DRAG HIM ANYWAYS.😭

*insert him doing funky dance on new rules by Dua Lipa*

Lowkey feels he listens to Spanish songs.

Imagine being along in room with this mf and he starts to sings Die for you??? While he spins you around dancing and laughing????

#blessed.

STFU. He had a Alan walker phase. No ifs and buts.🤡

Awww he brought your favorite artist's merch......WHERE IS THE HIDDEN MONEY BOY.

(Ill vibe with him on song 'this december')

EXTRA BUT HIM SINGING TELEPATH?? MY HEART CANT-😭

He brought a spotify premium for both of you <33 TAKE THAT ADS. 😭

Lucy:

She gives me girl in red vibes.

Pretty sure she is embarrassed to admit her music taste.

SHE IS THE REASON YOU LISTEN TO AMERICAN MUSIC ATM IDC.

You both will be sneaking in the concert using her ability.

LIKE FOR FREE??🎉🤠

You suggested that you should just have the door half ass open cause the crowd is just to much crowdy.🤡

She dragged you to follow her.

HELP SHE GOT CALLED ON THE STAGE TO SING WITH THE ARTIST. 10/10 she sings well.

Her music taste really is various but we love it.

She lowkey thinks you don't know she had a Justin Bieber phase, but you aren't confessing, it will hurt her ego.😭

You both watch those 2 hr concert video uploaded on Youtube (bless those uploaders)

"Y/N we can very well visit the concert venue you know?"

WAIT TILL THE COPS REALISE THAT💪💀

Awww look at you, just you both making Spotify playlist for each other.

"F-R-I-E-N-D-S" "Y/N please, you are acting worse then when you are drunk😭" "🤡 Haven't I made it obvious"

You brought her a little marshmallow keychain.

So like Atsushi accidently entered you both jamming to your favorites of all time and ummmm it left a traumatic picture in his mind that day. (Dw its just both of you jamming to much hard and the room is trashed out <3🤠

Fun fact: I was really confused on who to pick and wrote Tachihara thinking the poll cant change in 30 mins. (P.s it did and Lucy won)🤠 Fun Fact pt 2 : Requests are getting proceeded, stop spamming asking when they are finished 🤠 dw, am up for y'all love and appreciations and Ideas

[delta-lethonomia]

man, revisiting silent hill 2 as an adult with life experience is a completely different ballgame.

Spoilers below if you haven't played Silent Hill 2, discussions about grief

I mostly remembered lots of analysis about James Sunderland's sexual fixations: the leggy nurses, ✨Maria✨, the vagina monsters everywhere... culminating in analyses about how he's an intrinsically terrible person who killed his wife because yada yada Madonna/Whore complex & she was too sick to have sex with. It's all repression, all the way down, and James is terrible because men, ugh. (Maybe that's not an accurate representation of late 2000's SH2 takes, but I was a teen with hangups lol, and that's how I remember it.)

Now? Talking about the remake specifically, but James Sunderland, I completely understand you. Honestly, it hits too hard. I will eat my shoe if someone on the OG writing team didn't have close and intimate experience with dealing with terminal illness with a close close loved one, because it's all there. If everything in Silent Hill is a reflection of his relationship with Mary/her illness, if all the disgusting shit everywhere is part of that - I understand his disgust, his resentment of her, and I think this is a part that people don't necessarily get if they haven't been through the same thing. Because long-term terminal illness, the type that leaves you bed-bound like Mary's, it's dehumanizing. It's disgusting. You'll see things done to a person that you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy, and it's all in the name of healing.

It's not that James had some other life to return to, that he was just itching to get out and find a new hot wife or anything - he clearly loves Mary deeply, and certainly has nothing else going on in his life. Not wanting to bang your dying wife who's oscillating between acceptance and agonizing fear is 100% normal, as is fantasizing about every hot pair of legs that walks past. And I could feel his resentment, his hatred of her, this awful blending of emotions where you can't stand to see them in such pain that it hurts you, horribly, so much so that you start to associate that pain with them. It's simple association: you think you can stand by their side, but every moment is agony, and like an animal with it's leg caught in a trap, you'll gnaw your own limb off to survive.

I completely get why he smothered her to death. I think it was an impulse decision - one made out of mercy and hatred and love all the same - because Mary's pleading, to kill her, and then the backtracking, to save her? Go away, but stay, please, don't leave me? But leave - I'm disgusting - don't remember me like this, remember me how I was - it's all so painfully, horribly real. It plays out on every hospital bed with a long, dragged out death. And three years of that, however much she spent in the last stages - it can't be explained. It's not something you recover from. You're different, afterwards, and legal euthanasia starts to sound like the sweetest gift.

Anyway I thought it was funny how people online say that it looks like she had a skin disease when I thought it looked like shingles. lol (seriously, shingles can be so much worse than you've ever imagined. It's not something to be taken lightly. Pray you never get it, and get that vaccine the second you're eligible.)

It's just funny in hindsight how I focused so hard on all the ~repressed sexuality~ as a teen, but now? Mary, man. Wild. The leggy monsters and screaming vaginas are just set dressing. Anyway the new acting and VA's are excellent and the remake is absolutely worth checking out if only for the chance to revisit the story.

(Pyramid head definitely is less hot though. Can't explain it.)

[zak-sn33-bagels-ii]

More Powered Spirit loree,,, deaths and stuffss (Phrozyr/Neo, Three/Douglas, Romeo/Theo, Jackie, Zero, Boss demon mentioned and the Inventor implied)

The exact means of creation for the powered spirits has been something I've gone back and forth on,, but i think i have something pretty solid now,,,

I'm thinking each of the powered spirits were created by extremely violent and/or sudden deaths and then existed independently as cryptid-like creatures before being discovered and taken in by Boss demon.

Phrozyr (Neo) fell off an icy mountain. In life, she was a hiking guide for groups of people on the same mountain. As Phrozyr, she served the same function she did in life, keeping people on the right path and away from danger by scaring them away from the wrong path. Occasionally, she would make examples of brash hikers who broke the rules and went off-path (killing them), something she saw as necessary to protect others (as the deaths of these rule-breaking hikers would spread as cautionary tales that deterred people from hiking into dangerous terrain).

Three (Douglas) was a school janitor that either slipped and fell or got pushed down a flight of stairs. As a spirit, they mostly stayed undetectable and could only be seen wandering the halls after hours. Because of their fluid nature, i can imagine them slinking through pipes, faucets, and drains, possibly startling the people who caught a glimpse of them.

Romeo (Theo) died of heart failure in a hospital after an incident on stage put him in stress-induced cardiac arrest ((subject to change)). Romeo, using his reality-bending powers, entertained sick patients with performances as they approached death to give them a gentle ease into the afterlife (but because of the gentle and fun aspect of his shows, many of the patients' egos didn't actually persist into the spirit veil, as a spirit is only created in sudden or high-stress deaths).

I can imagine him being a good bed-side companion to patients that had otherwise been given up on by everyone else, like the very elderly or comatose.

Like,, imagine all the stories of dementia patients seeing monsters at the end of their hospital bed except this time its a funny little robot that does a dance.

And Jackie, of course, became "The Siren of the Bluff" after drowning in a lake. She was the most active and vengeful of the four, dragging victims into the depths of the water, and was responsible for many disappearances when she was most active. As is typical of sirens, she would lure men out into the lake with her song.

Also also, each of the powered spirits were lured away from their individual locations by the cabin (controlled by the crown and utilized by Boss demon). Jackie was the first one to reach the cabin, therefore the first one to reach the crown and become Zero.

[solivar]

Annual Repost: I Heard the Bells

It's Christmas Eve and the former members of Overwatch celebrate as only they can: with unexpected gifts from lonely exiles, assassination attempts, and world-hopping heroics.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their old familiar carols play And mild and sweet their songs repeat Of peace on Earth, good will to men

The packages arrived within hours of each other, in cascading order, earliest time zones first, on Christmas Eve. And, for a miraculous change, nothing -- no deficiencies of local air or ground mail delivery, no perfidious intent-thwarting issues of back-ordering or selling out, nobody failing to be where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there -- managed to screw a single solitary bit of it up. He watched it all come together as the delivery notifications popped up on his tablet, from the vantage of a cheapass hotel room in Fredericksburg while he waited for it to get dark enough and late enough to complete the last stage of his self-chosen mission.

Within sixteen minutes of the first delivery, his phone chimed with the tone he’d assigned to Genji the very instant he’d found out his former partner in twentysomething angst had shacked up in a Nepalese monastery with an omnic spiritual adviser. It was a gong. The most obnoxious gong available in open source sound files. Hearing it now brought an extremely satisfied little grin to his face, a grin that stretched a fraction wider with each new, unique text notification tone.

Really. It was almost as good as being there.

***

Dr. Angela Ziegler desired nothing more than sleep. She longed for the soft, cool embrace of her pillow as she desired absolutely nothing and no one else for years. The terrible, heavily bleached hospital sheets she and everyone else slept on called to her with the sweetest of siren voices. The door to the suite she shared with the two other doctors -- an infectious disease treatment specialist and an epidemic disease control specialist -- with whom she was coordinating the establishment of the world’s first teaching hospital interfacing all of their disciplines lay but a few feet away and she had, at that very moment, been awake so many hours in a row that she was perfectly willing to abandon a lifetime of heartfelt pacifism if someone would try to prevent her from reaching it. So close.

“Angela!”

And yet so far.

“Yes, Kate?” Katherine Solaja was an amazingly gifted young woman, afire with the desire to help others, a quick study and a steady head under pressure, and generally Angela was grateful to have such a talented young physician working with her. At the moment, however, she was firmly resisting the urge to introduce her resident to the truest meaning of the term ‘defenestration’ and then offer the last fifty-two sleepless hours as her defense when someone came to arrest her. Perhaps they would be kind enough to handcuff her to her bed and wheel her out that way.

“You have got to come down to the office. Something just arrived for you with the late mail drop-off.” Angela found her hand in Kate’s uncompromisingly energetic grip and, before her weary brain could formulate a coherent objection, she was being pulled down the hall and into the elevator.

“Kate,” Angela began.

“I know you’re tired, Angela. But I’m serious. You need to see this.” Kate was grinning, dark eyes shining with glee.

“What could possibly be so -- “

“Trust me. You’re going to want to see this.”

The elevator doors hissed open and Angela again allowed herself to be dragged along, into the labyrinth of offices that occupied the hospital’s lowest floors, her own inclusive, which seemed to contain entirely too many people for that time of day. Entirely too many, and most of them loitering in the vicinity of her own neatly arranged workspace, which at the moment contained a desk, three floor to ceiling bookshelves, a potted ficus, a tiny holotank in one corner, approximately the entire senior medical advisory staff, and a cylindrical object approximately three feet around and four feet tall, wrapped in silver paper neatly stamped down its side with air mail shipment codes.

“What in the name of God is that?” Angela asked, completely flummoxed.

“That’s what we’d all like to know.” Kate nudged her gently forward. “Like I said, it came in with the late mail. Go on, Angela, open it open it open it.”

“It’s -- “ Slowly, Angela’s weary mind put the pieces together -- the lateness of the day, the lateness of the year, the unexpected late delivery. “Oh, dear. It’s Christmas Eve, isn’t it?”

She found herself collecting a series of pitying looks and, gathering the remains of her dignity about her, she stepped forward to examine the object. Not just silver paper, clearly -- it was a far heavier gauge than simple paper, wrapped in an overlapping scallop design that came together at the top beneath a medallion of what was probably not sealing wax but which artfully resembled it nonetheless. Fortunately, she had absentmindedly stuck a clean scalpel into her pen case earlier that day; it slid beneath the edge of the seal and disengaged it without damaging the seal itself. She palmed it into the pocket of her lab coat as the wrapping unfolded itself, expelling a burst of intensely cold air and releasing a genuine flurry of impossibly tiny snowflakes as it did so, glittering briefly in the artificially dry air of the hospital complex’ air conditioning. The entire assembly took a sudden breath, some ooohed, others ahhhed, there was at least one squeal that Angela suspected came from Kate.

The little Christmas tree contained inside the package was utterly perfect in every way, its blue fir branches glittering with a hint of frost, strung with beaded golden and crimson garland, hung with impossibly tiny and perfect blown glass ornaments, the angel atop it bearing a rather suggestive resemblance to her Valkyrie suit as occupied by she herself. Piled at its base were a selection of equally tiny and perfect individually wrapped presents, all of them tagged with her name in a hand she knew well.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” Kate murmured as Angela bent down and retrieved one, opening it to reveal an orb of dark chocolate molded in the shape of a Christmas ornament. “You do have a secret admirer.”

Angela handed her the tiny gift box. “No...not an admirer. A brother.”

At that moment, her phone buzzed for the first time, and continued to do so steadily for the next three hours.

***

WickedCuteButDeadly: Oh my God. OH MY GOD.

DeathFromAbove: Are you kidding me? You too? Is is a tree? He sent you a tree, didn’t he.

WickedCuteButDeadly: HE DID. IT’S SO CUTE I WANT TO DIE. AND -- look, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t have a good number for him, the last time he called me was, oh, maybe three months ago wanted to be sure he had a good snail mail addie for me, and I spent two hours chewing his ear about Em and how we met and how wonderful she was and how happy we were AND HE SENT US A PREPAID RESERVATION CARD FOR A COUPLES WEEKEND AT THIS SWANK SPA HOTEL IN PARIS AND THE NUMBER I HAVE FOR HIM IS NO GOOD ANYMORE AND I KNOW AT LEAST ONE OF YOU HAS TO KNOW HOW TO GET IN TOUCH WITH HIM. Ange, it’s you, isn’t it? It has to be you, you’re his DOCTOR.

DeathFromAbove: My tree is covered in miniature planes from the dawn of aviation to the present. I’m afraid to open any of the boxes. My heart can only take so much.

WickedCuteButDeadly: Do it. You know you want to, Fareeha.

DeathFromAbove: … DeathFromAbove: … DeathFromAbove: …

DeathFromAbove: This is not okay. I can’t stop crying.

WickedCuteButDeadly: ????!!!!!!

DeathFromAbove: You remember that huge old erector set I had as a kid? The one my father got me for...I want to say my tenth birthday? I lost it in one of the moves sometime before I went away to college and I swear I only told him about it once and he found it HE FOUND IT. I’VE GOT IT SITTING IN MY LAP RIGHT NOW. I don’t even know how he knew I was going to be in Vancouver for Christmas this year, I only finalized my plans two weeks ago!

WickedCuteButDeadly: Angie, please.

DeathFromAbove: Angela, you have GOT to tell us.

SantasLittlestHelper: I don’t know how he remembers ALL THEIR NAMES and all their favorite candies. I’m their FATHER and I don’t remember all that at the same time.

***

Angela fell asleep with her phone still vibrating next to her on the bed, having given away far more of Teuscher’s wonderful champagne truffles than she actually ate herself and without receiving a reply to the text she sent to the one contact number she had.

***

The inner rooms of the monastery were, it was generally agreed by all residents and visitors, far warmer than the outer chambers -- the milled stone walls were paneled in ancient, fragrant wood, hung with the heavy woolen draperies woven in the radiant iris pattern of the Shambali order dyed in brilliant hues of saffron and emerald. They captured the warmth of strategically placed high efficiency solar powered ceramic heaters and the more traditional charcoal braziers and the banks of votary candles in the memorial shrine dedicated to Tekhartha Mondatta, kept it close for the succour of the monastery’s handful of entirely human residents. Most were postulants to the order, men and women who had come from all corners of the Earth, drawn by the offer of all-encompassing inclusion and acceptance that lay at the core of the Shambali philosophy. Some were tourists -- the monastery opened its doors to the curious as well as the dedicated, provided they were willing to respect the customs of the order during the course of their stay. Only one was a professional assassin.

The assassin occupied one of the outermost of the inner chambers -- it was cooler, markedly so, but also significantly less likely to result in being forced to interact involuntarily with another human being, particularly the sort of human being likely to seriously strain his minimal tolerance for idiocy. (There were a number of wealthy tourists on hand at the moment, forced by the weather to wait for the next stage of their pre-packaged Journey Of Enlightenment, and they were growing gradually less enamored with the pursuit of spiritual evolution and union in the soul of the world with every passing day, most of which were exceedingly cold. The monks tolerated them because the tour companies always donated generously on top of the standard fees, the novices tolerated them because they could always claim to be functioning under vows of silence in order to escape unsatisfactory conversations, and the assassin tolerated them, barely, because there were simply not enough places to hide all the bodies -- the snow piled at the bottom of the cliff would, after all, melt eventually.) He had arrived at the end of autumn, just ahead of the first snows, greeted with an excess of enthusiasm by his brother -- a student of Tekhartha Zenyatta -- that many considered equal parts ill-advised and adorable, and, after a lengthy private interview with the elder sibling serving as abbot that season, was permitted to stay. He selected a room on the same corridor as the chambers his brother and the mendicant Zenyatta occupied when they were in residence, and thereafter he was an enticing mystery to the rest of the monastery’s inhabitants, a phantom within its walls, nearly invisible unless he chose to be seen and he almost never allowed it. The cooks saw more of him than the monks, for he would occasionally take his meals in their company, and the security team that patrolled the plateau on which the monastery sat, who occasionally witnessed the feats of physical prowess he indulged in during his personal exercise regime. The best chance anyone else had of seeing him was on one of those rare days when he made use of one of the public chapels or meditation rooms, rather than retiring to the privacy of his own chamber.

It was therefore a matter of some note when, one morning just at the edge of dawn, when no one but the earliest-rising novices would be stirring, he emerged from his quarters dressed in a manner that would not have looked out of place in a painting of the Heian imperial court, carrying a small rolled silk case in the crook of one arm. Word of this astonishing sight -- rendered even more astonishing by the sharp contrast with his decidedly untraditional hair and even less traditional piercings -- made the rounds from novice to support staff back to novice and from there to more than a few monks while he was still crossing the courtyard to the dokhang. By the time he set foot on the first of the five staircases he would thereafter climb, the prayer hall was at least half-full of novices, monks, and three sleep-groggy tourists, most of whom shamelessly watched him in his progress, for reasons ranging from wildly irrepressible curiosity to absolute prurience, for no one could deny the sight of him at that moment was one of the most glorious to be found on the mountain. At the top of the fifth and final staircase, he retired to one of the uppermost meditation chambers, politely declined the offer of a senior monk to bring him anything that he might require to effectuate his devotions, and slid the door shut.

***

It took twenty minutes to grind the ink to his satisfaction and another twenty to make certain that it was warm enough in the vicinity of the plate for his chosen medium to remain in its liquid state. The upper meditation rooms were, in general, fiercely cold at the best of times and today the cold was particularly penetrating -- the wind was light but constant, dry enough to suck the last lingering traces of moisture out of any exposed skin, and with a certain cutting edge to it that suggested the weather might be about to make one of its unpredictable high altitude changes. The pass leading up from the next nearest village had only just been cleared enough to allow passage the evening prior; below in the courtyard, the tourists were making good their chance at escape. At the moment, the sky was a pure and perfect shade of blue that reminded him of his dragons’ scales, the snow-capped Himalayan peaks that ringed the monastery’s high plateau shone savagely in the thin winter sunlight and undulated away in a manner that reminded him of their coils as they flew, and he wanted nothing more than to capture the image in silk and ink. The exceedingly traditional multiple layers of heavy winter clothing simply meant he could do so without freezing to death while in the best painter’s vantage point in all of Shambali.

He rendered the faint, nearly invisible filaments of windbourne snow curling away from the saw-backed ridge of the mountains in the palest, pearlescent shades of gray, the bones of the mountains themselves in a darker wash, a wider stroke. The snow itself was nothing more than the pure white of the silk on which he painted, it existence delineated in washes of ink that established the shape of the snow line, the jut of stone and ice in slightly darker shades. It was soothing, to create so, allowing the brush to dance and the ink to sing in a way that he had not for years, having neither the leisure nor, if he were being honest with himself, the desire. Painting had given him great peace and joy as a child, and even as a young adult; as an adult, with violence and death as his closest companions, it seemed nearly obscene to engage in such pleasures, the perversion of an art of which his hands were no longer worthy. He still did not feel worthy, precisely, but now his own absence of virtue seemed to matter somehow less, enough that he could lose himself in the serenity of drawing his brush across an unblemished length of silken canvas, allow his thoughts to vanish into the concentration needed to compose each stroke, to contemplate nothing but the image taking shape before him. His spirit was as still as the surface of a lake on a windless day, tranquil enough that, when the dragons stirred within him to watch what he was doing, it disturbed him not at all and, for the briefest of instants, his awareness became theirs and theirs became his --

Something sent a ripple of dissonance through them -- through them and into him, jarring his concentration and, very nearly, his arm, and it was only intensely disciplined reflexes that saved the stroke from complete ruination. For an instant, the insides of his skull were a jumble of perception and emotion not his own -- a flash of something silver, a flash of something green-gold-crimson, a breath of cold, surprise childlike delight a sudden stab of sorrow so intense it brought involuntary tears to his eyes and made Tombo keen softly --

Hanzo blinked the tears -- not his own -- out of his eyes, set his brush carefully aside, and briefly considered the stairs before deciding that swinging over the window ledge, sliding down the secondary roof, and climbing down the side of the dokhang was altogether more efficient, particularly once he shed a few layers of clothing. Fortunately, most of the tourists had already departed the courtyard; also fortunately, those that were left contented themselves with gawking and did nothing to impede him as he crossed the distance between the prayer hall and the monastery’s living quarters at a dead sprint. The cluster of human and omnic novices gathered in the dormitory’s central common hall was too small to be called a crowd, no more than a handful really, but they effectively screened the source of the distress that had cried out to him. Fortunately, they also knew, to a being, that it was generally best to get out of his way.

“Genji?”

His brother sat cross-legged in the middle of the common room floor in front of what looked, to his eye at least, like a fully decorated albeit miniature Christmas tree -- branches somehow frost-coated despite the relative warmth of the room, tiny ornaments glittering and, unless he was seriously mistaken, that was a Pachimaru sitting on the top, where an angel or a star ought to be. It was. A Pachimaru. Genji’s head was in his hands and his shoulders were quivering silently and there was a box sitting open on his lap. And not a single one of any of those things made the slightest trace of sense, taken individually or together, and so he knelt, and carefully placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder, firmly resisting the urge to shake something resembling an answer out of him before he was ready to provide it on his own.

It took some moments before Genji was ready to speak and, when he did, his voice was not steady, synthesized or not. “I -- My apologies, aniki. I did not mean to disturb you. But I...was not expecting this, in any way.”

“You did not disturb me.” Softly. “What has happened? Why -- “

Silently, Genji showed him the package. Inside, nestled carefully in a mass of impact-resistant wrap and neon green tissue paper, were a pair of hand-held game machines, one black with green fittings, the other black and red. Perplexed, Hanzo looked up and found his brother’s eyes swimming again with unshed tears and, before he had even the slightest chance to construct a reasonable interrogative about either, Genji’s head was resting in the crook of his neck and his shoulder. He did, at least, know what to do about that, and wrapped his brother close. It seemed to be the correct choice, for shortly thereafter Genji began to speak again, softly. “When I was...first recovering...the initial neuromechanical attunement was...complex. I could not walk reliably for weeks. I was confined to the medical research complex at Watchpoint Geneva for much of it. I was losing my mind from the boredom -- I was not yet allowed access to anything and then...one day...someone found out about it and decided enough was enough. And brought me these.” A pause. “Well, probably not these particularly since these are much newer but...the same thing. Something to distract me. To help with something that...simply made me feel better.” He could hear the smile, tremulous though it might be, in his brother’s voice. “I can imagine that Cole would think a monastery on the top of a mountain in the middle of the winter would be the very definition of madness-inducing boredom.”

“Cole?” The word itched at the back of Hanzo’s mind, familiar for no good reason that he could name.

“Cole Cassidy.” Genji pronounced that ridiculous surname with the ease of long familiarity. “A comrade in arms and a very dear friend.” A flicker of expression crossed his face, a welter of emotions mostly visible in his expressive eyes. “I have often wished -- “

“Cassidy.” Hanzo knew he was mangling it, and the uncontrollable twitch at the corner of Genji’s mouth confirmed it. “Are you certain this came from him?”

“It is extremely likely. He knew that Zenyatta and I would be here through the winter and his Christmas gifts in the past have been…” Genji gestured eloquently. “Not quite as elaborate as this, but always well-meant and heartfelt. He cannot be with us, and so instead sends the best that he can give.”

“Why?” Hanzo caught the tiny package Genji tossed at him and opened it to find it contained higashi, carefully shaped in the form of snowflakes, tinted blue and silver, and he decided in that instant whatever faults the absent friend might possess, bad taste was not among them.

“Not all of us joined, or left, with a clean slate.” Unspoken: Overwatch. “Cole attempted to wipe his clean but circumstances conspired against him, then and now. He -- “

It clicked into place then -- suddenly and all at once, he knew where he had heard that name before, and in what context, and he forced his face empty of expression. “Genji.” He reached into the innermost pocket of his clothing and drew out his tablet, thumbed open the lock, scrolled through the most recent half-dozen of his contracts, made his selection, and handed it to his brother. “Is this your friend?”

Genji’s brows knit momentarily. “How -- ?” He looked, and read, and the last of the color fled the scarred skin of his face.

“Someone attempted to hire me to kill him before I came here.” Hanzo replied.

***

GreenCyborgNinjaDude has joined the conversation.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Does anyone know how to contact Cole?

DeathFromAbove: LET ME GUESS. He sent you a TREE and EVERYTHING UNDER IT made you cry like a two year old?

WickedCuteButDeadly: I DID NOT CRY. We both cried, it’s not the same thing if everyone’s crying all at once.

DoNotHassleTheHoff: A case of the finest Schwarzbier, a currywurst sampler, and two tickets to the Hasselfest tribute concert next year. Tears were shed. MANLY TEARS.

SantasLittlestHelper: He remembered the names of all my children AND my wife AND somehow knew that I needed a new portable thermal anvil. I suspect a conspiracy.

DeathFromAbove: And Angela isn’t answering her phone --

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: My friends, please. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. Do ANY OF YOU have good contact information for him? The number I had now belongs to a very pleasant young woman who did not appear to speak any of the languages I know.

DeathFromAbove: Not I.

SantasLittlestHelper: Alas, no, or I’d have used it.

DoNotHassleTheHoff: Nein.

WickedCuteButDeadly: I was trying to get someone to cough it up earlier. Still think Angie’s our best bet but she’s not picking up or answering texts.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: This is bad.

WickedCuteButDeadly: What’s the ish, Genji?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: I have unfortunately excellent reason to believe that he is in danger. MORTAL danger.

DeathFromAbove: … WickedCuteButDeadly: … DoNotHassleTheHoff: … SantasLittlestHelper: …

WickedCuteButDeadly: SPILL IT.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: An...acquaintance...here in the monastery witnessed the arrival of my present and recognized Cole’s name when I spoke of him, and indicated to me that he was offered a contract on Cole’s life before he came to Nepal, but ultimately declined.

DeathFromAbove: An ACQUAINTANCE? At the MONASTERY?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: It is a very long story. But I have no reason to doubt him or consider his information in any way not credible. The request came through a contract broker my acquaintance has worked with more than once in the past -- I have seen enough of the negotiation to know that, whoever made the request, they knew enough of Cole’s service with Blackwatch to extend specific warning of his abilities. And they seem to know where he is going to be tonight.

WickedCuteButDeadly: TONIGHT?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Yes. The contractor seems to believe he will be at Arlington National Cemetery tonight.

WickedCuteButDeadly: IT’S CHRISTMAS!

DeathFromAbove: I’m pretty sure anybody willing to put out a hit on someone isn’t really going to care about that, Lena.

WickedCuteButDeadly: I KNOW that but -- it’s the PRINCIPLE of the thing! And at

DoNotHassleTheHoff: Gabriel’s grave. He is going to visit Gabriel’s grave.

DeathFromAbove: I’m trying Angela again. Is there anybody in the eastern United States right now? ANYBODY?

WickedCuteButDeadly: If we took off from Gibraltar RIGHT NOW it would take us at least eleven hours to get there -- we couldn’t cruise at commercial air altitude -- and we can’t take off right now, I’d have to fuel up for a long-haul flight and run preflight checks and

DeathFromAbove: I’m closer and I’m still not close enough, Lena. It’s not your fault. Angela, please, please pick up.

***

Genji was distraught. That, alone, was astonishing -- Genji, as a young adult, had been charismatic, effortlessly charming to all except the eldest and most hidebound members of the clan, almost casually lethal with everything from blades to the edge of his tongue, and as utterly self-absorbed as it was possible to be. Hanzo, then, had thought he could count the number of people his brother actually cared about on the fingers of one hand, if that, and rarely considered himself among the number.

Hanzo, now, had more than one reason to reevaluate his judgment. He had not anticipated, when he made his decision to follow Genji to Nepal and make the attempt to reconcile all that had passed between them, that he would witness his brother in fear for the life of another. It occupied the precise space between bewildering and heart wrenching and Hanzo, for the first time in a long time, had no idea how to react.

“There must be something that can be done,” Genji muttered, on his sixth pass around the perimeter of the dormitory common room, now cleared of random bystanders by the order of the abbot, who had sent senior monks to shoo them back to their own neglected tasks. He was dialing another number that could, in theory, be used to contact Dr. Angela Ziegler who, it seemed, could be anywhere from Zurich to some godforsaken war zone without even the most basic communication service; the woman did not, apparently, even take holidays off and she was, in the estimation of all, the most likely to know how to reach Cole Cassidy. Thus far, no one had managed to raise her.

His brother was, at most, sixteen seconds away from literally climbing the walls in his anxiety, for which Hanzo could not at all blame him. A discreet nibble around the edges to his intermediary had yielded the information that the contract was no longer available -- not cancelled but accepted and closed to further interested parties. That was, in his estimation, no good news whatsoever, given that he had been directly and personally approached for the matter. His particular skills, areas of expertise, and reputation placed him among fairly rarified company in the loose and not especially friendly society of freelance killers-for-hire; he could think of three who could reasonably be considered his equals and only one his superior and none whom he would wish to bet against in matters of life or death.

Genji uttered a number of uncomplimentary things under his breath in Japanese and came to a halt, folding into a place at his side, deliberately and carefully setting down his phone between them. Hanzo rather thought he wanted to throw it, either against the nearest wall or off the side of the mountain, and that impression was confirmed an instant later as Genji flexed his hands, his wrists, flicked weapons from beneath the armor his forearms, between his fingers, and then back into their housing, nothing about the gesture bleeding any tension from the set of his shoulders, the length of his body. “Hanzo.”

“Suzume.” He rested his hand on Genji’s shoulder and could not miss the shudder that passed through him.

“Please tell me that he will survive this.” It emerged as a whisper, barely given voice at all.

It was on the tip of his tongue to utter a comforting lie. He was spared the necessity of making it sound convincing by a soft chiming, almost as of bells, and an equally quiet voice. “My apologies, Shimada-san. It was not my intention to interrupt.”

Genji took a ragged breath. “Master.”

“Tekhartha.” Hanzo inclined his head slightly in greeting. “No apology is necessary, and your company is welcome.”

It was only a slight overstatement; Genji found his deepest comfort in the companionship of his mentor, and comfort was what his brother needed more than anything but a solution right now. Tekhartha Zenyatta, hovering in the doorway yet, bowed from the neck and floated to Genji’s side. In his wake, the senior Shambali monk acting as the monastery’s abbot also entered the hall and, if it were possible for machines to look thoroughly and utterly uncomfortable, Hanzo would have used those words to describe his posture, the set of his spine.

“It was not my intention to interrupt,” Zenyatta continued in that same perfectly modulated voice, the one that he adopted when he was strenuously controlling the urge to allow the direction of his thoughts to show in his tone, “but I feel that I must do so. It has been brought to my attention,” out of the corner of his eye, Hanzo swore he saw the omnic abbot actually flinch slightly, “that we have at our disposal a means of reaching your friend more swiftly than we thought.”

Tekhartha Zenyatta turned what had to be the most heavily weighted look Hanzo had ever witnessed between two omnics on his brother, the abbot, who responded with a low, deep bow -- to Zenyatta, to Genji, and, peripherally, to himself. When he spoke, his voice was also a carefully expressionless tone. “Some months ago, after much discussion among the elder siblings in residence here in Shambali,” the faintest hint of reproach colored residence, Hanzo thought, “it was decided that we required a more reliable method of transport into and out of the monastery in the event of an emergency -- physical danger to the community in the form of attack, or an inability to resupply by our ordinary methods due to weather. We therefore entered into a contract with the Vishkar Corporation to meet our needs in this regard.”

“What Brother Dzasatta is trying to say,” Zenyatta cut in, coolly, “is that the monastery is now equipped with an active short range telestation.”

“What.” It was not actually a question and Genji surged to his feet in a sinuous motion that, only barely, remembered to turn into a bow. “Brother Dzasatta, may we -- “

“Yes. Yes, you may.” The poor abbott sounded as though it gave him enormous pain just to say it and Hanzo could not help but wonder how many arms Zenyatta had to twist, and with how much enthusiasm, to achieve that permission. “We have already calculated your route. Our telestation is not powerful enough to reach the United States directly -- you will have to transit in stages, from here to Tehran, Tehran to Istanbul, Istanbul to Madrid, and Madrid to Washington, DC. The arrangements have already been made but you must depart soon.”

“Thank you, elder brother.” Genji bowed again, lower this time, and then turned to him. “Aniki, I must -- “

“I know.” Hanzo rose. “Give me a moment to change and retrieve my case and I will -- “

The force of his brother’s embrace lifted him entirely off the floor.

***

Columbarium Court Nine would, in any other place, have been a cemetery all by itself, a long fully walled quadruple rectangle of elegantly designed and expertly tended landscaping, the perfectly flat-cobbled lanes between the niche walls kept clear of snow in the winter and leaves in the autumn and blowing blossoms from the flowering trees in the spring, the marble benches discreetly placed just so in the central memorial garden, around the fountain, for mourners to sit and collect themselves, before or after or both. Since it was sitting in Arlington National Cemetery, it just happened to have the distinction of being the largest of several of its kind, originally part of an expansion intended to extend the useful life of the cemetery, and then expanded twice more in the years since its construction, home to sixty thousand inurnment niches, about half of which were in use. By day it was the very image of martial, commemoratory solemnity, row upon row of variegated gray stone walls faced in gleaming white memorial plaques, surrounded outside in row upon row of headstones and monuments and, in at least a few places, something vaguely resembling a serious attempt at security fencing, mostly around the places where, paradoxically, people were supposed to enter the grounds.

Cole Cassidy had been to Arlington National Cemetery exactly once by daylight and the occasion still resided under the heading of the Worst Day of My Life in his memory, only dragged out and examined under duress or too much terrible whiskey in the middle of the night or some combination of the two. Subsequently, he kept his visits confined to those hours when he was distinctly unlikely to encounter another living being -- well after official closing time, far after dark, and he never bothered hopping one of the more properly fency fences while it was possible to jump off the top of the last metro train of the evening, over the significantly lower backend fence along the tracks, and walk the rest of the way under the cover of night and the thin copses of trees still left standing along the perimeter. It was particularly possible that night: bitter cold and dark, the moon a brushstroke crescent hanging low in the west, the rest of the sky an empty arch of light pollution that offered no help to unenhanced eyes. He had a flashlight clipped to his belt for the parts of the walk that lay outside the nimbus of the security lamps scattered along the main thoroughfares, routes he generally avoided, in any case -- the grounds weren’t patrolled, but there was always a full guard complement on station, rotating on and off watch at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier through the night. And, once he was inside the outer wall of the Columbarium, through the arch of the ungated gate, he had no need, could find his way to where he was going without eyes if necessary.

Overwatch had its own monument, plunked down on one of the plots set aside for the memorialization of future disasters, immediately next to the significantly larger one dedicated to all the victims of the Omnic Crisis, civilian, military, and otherwise. One of them was, in fact, a columbarium in its own right, laid out in the form of the organization’s insignia, Morrison’s nonstandard gravestone beneath which his ashes were interred dead center, and every former member of Overwatch who had also first been a member of the American armed forces had the at least theoretical right to be buried there. In practice, “anyone” included a specific exclusion, for the obvious reasons, particularly when the six layers of international and domestic bureaucratic fuckery involved in the decisions related to who got to rest where could veto each other and reject requests for reconsideration until Hell froze over solidly. The Marine Corps, by way of contrast, had authorized Silvia Reyes’ request on behalf of her late brother without hesitation -- Major Gabriel Reyes had, after all, saved the entire goddamned world while still technically under their colors and, even if the rest of his service record was so classified God himself wasn’t rated high enough to access it, that was something they never forgot for one minute.

Gabe’s niche was in the newer segment of Court Nine, in one of the alcoves at the far end of the whole structure, a quiet and secluded little spot equipped with its own sculpted marble bench and a little patch of garden around the base of a wide-spreading sakura, currently winter bare, a bit of ice clinging to its corners. The plaque wasn’t quite centered in the back wall but it was at least still mostly aligned with the bench, more or less at eye level, polished white marble incised with his name and final rank, Omnic Crisis, two dates nowhere near far enough apart, You Are Not Forgotten. Silvia and Lorena always came in the summer, on his birthday, to make sure the plaque was tended and to lay flowers; he always came at Christmas, by mutual agreement, to lay the wreath.

The wreath, this year, was tiny, a braided confection of evergreen and holly made by the same former client who’d constructed the trees, strung through with strands of beaded garland in black, white, red, and came with a hook small enough to hang on the lip of the plaque. He fussed with it a bit until it looked just right. “Been awhile, shizhé’é’. Got quite a bit to catch you up on.”

The glass and the bottle wrapped up in his pockets had come through the jump-off-the-train-and-roll routine without a scratch, fortunately, though both were warmer than they’d been when he set out. He cracked the seal and a scent more in common with summer filled the cold air, cherries and almonds, the liquor clear as it poured, the kirschwasser he’d developed a taste for while living in Switzerland. It wasn’t sweet, which Cole had always thought completely defeated the point of drinking something that tasted like cherries, and he had never gotten even slightest buzz from it, because there wasn’t a booze on Earth strong enough to overcome his super-science-enhance metabolism, but he’d loved the flavor and thus the cemetery caretakers had acquired an encyclopedic collection of fine European lifewaters over the years. He left both the glass and the bottle sitting on the bench next to him.

“You remember how I told you last year that Ylva was pregnant out to here and we were all making bets on when she’d pop? Well, she didn’t make it two weeks past New Year and guess what? They finally did it. Gabriel Matthias Lindholm.” A smile curled one corner of his mouth. “I understand he’s already a precocious little troublemaker who escaped his bassinet Mission Impossible style before he was eight months old so your legacy is in good hands.”

Somebody wasn’t moving as quietly as they could have -- that was an unmistakably distinct scrape of boots on stone. Cole reached down and unclipped his spurs, tucking them into a pocket.

“Lena finally stopped dodging long enough to actually get asked on a date -- they moved in together last month. And, yeah, it was the one Angie spent two years trying to set her up with. Two years. You’d think she’d have eventually given up but noooo.”

He unclipped a stun grenade from his belt, thumbed it over to maximum yield on the flash, minimum on the bang, and deactivated the micro electromagnetic pulse generator entirely, because he didn’t need even minor twitch issues with his arm right now. The yahoo -- or, more likely, yahoos -- dithering on just the other side of the alcove wall weren’t likely to dither for much longer and so he set the timer for fifteen seconds, boosted himself up the outside wall with just a slight gravity anchor assist, waited for them to round the corner, dropped into the alcove they had just vacated, and shielded his eyes. The detonation wasn’t quite as impressive as it would have been if he’d left everything cranked as high as it could go and, even so, it was more than sufficient for the purpose to which he’d put it -- the pair of would-be assailants, one big, the other bigger, staggering around the alcove in visibly disoriented anguish were wearing night vision gear. Cole indulged in an infinitesimally tiny amount of pity for perhaps a tenth of a second before he introduced Big’s head to the edge of the alcove partition wall with force sufficient to break a few of the more delicate bones in his face and robbed Bigger of the remains of his senses and the free use of his jaw with a firmly to-the-point left. The echoes of the grenade’s sonic component were still propagating across the rolling fields of the cemetery as they hit the ground and if that didn’t poke a stick into the honor guard relief quarters and swish it around a few times, nothing would, and that gave him little time to work.

Big was carrying a heavy shock baton, one of the new school tasers hung heavy enough to work on an omnic or a cybernetically enhanced human, and a pepper-box muzzled sidearm whose ammo looked more like a reinforced hypodermic needle than a standard flechette. Bigger had one of those, too, and another baton, and a couple cylinders he knew for a fact were area-of-effect neurodisruption ordnance. “This is a goddamned cemetery. And it’s Christmas. You couldn’t wait for me to walk out?”

He tossed both the flechette guns and their extra ammo over the far wall, with the hope that they would meet their end under the wheels of a passing truck or at the very least not end up pointed at him. He slid both shock batons through his belt, the taser in the pocket not containing his spurs, and briefly considered the neurodisruptor grenades before the quiet hiss of static caught his attention. Bigger had a still-active comm in his ear and a bit of attention lent to it gave him the knowledge that his present companions were not alone (too much to ask for), there were at least six other teams of two positioned at strategic points (the entrances/exits, the major cross lanes), and two of them were being sent to investigate What the Hell That Was. Cole cheerfully decided he knew what he was going to do with the neuro grenades.

The best and worst aspects of the Columbarium were one and the same. The pathways were wide and open, particularly the main thoroughfares running through the midline and up both sides, easily traversed when searching for a grave, obstruction-free fields of fire in the admittedly not planned for instance of the place turning into a combat zone. The niche walls themselves varied in altitude, from little more than waist high (good enough for cover in a pinch) to the overhead gate caps at least ten feet off the ground (perfect platforms for enfilading fire). Staying low yielded some advantages, but not enough. Cole detached the night vision goggles from Bigger’s face and used the last of the charge in his gravity anchor to retake the high ground, hugging close to the outside wall as he put healthy distance between himself and the initial point of contact, scanning across the visible territory through the night vision goggles, careful not to look directly at any of the security lights.

There was the team he arbitrarily chose to call Dumbass One and Dumbass Two, approaching from the central memorial garden in staggered order. From what he could see, hunkered down in the shadow of one of the enormous memorial trees growing along the Columbarium perimeter, Dumbass One was carrying a flechette gun at the ready and Dumbass Two had a taser in hand, both had a baton, arguing for organization and standardized equipage, and yet no recognizable insignia. He swept the upper levels, found no one hanging out up top with him, or at the very least no one visible. He moved, quickly, because D1 and D2 were about to discover the present he’d left sitting on the trussed-with-their-own-MOLLE-webbing colleagues in Gabe’s alcove. The subsequent involuntary screaming was, indeed, music to his ears and also helped cover the largely unintentional noises he made jumping between outer wall and niche wall and then scrambling up to the top of the gate.

Something was going down at the far edge of the enclosure beyond the central garden -- he caught a flicker of movement between the walls, there and gone again before he could properly focus on it, a strangled, choked-off cry in the distance. Beyond that: headlights coming down one of the internal access roads, a hoverjeep no doubt carrying a team of honor guards off rotation coming to investigate the brouhaha, which officially made cutting and running the least morally defensible of his options -- if he hadn’t been there, neither would Dumbasses One through Twelve, and whoever was in that vehicle would be spending a long, boring winter’s night freezing their asses off or recovering from the same, not in danger of strolling into the middle of a fight with opponents armed to, at the very least, mess their central nervous systems up good and proper.

Fortunately, it looked like D1 and D2 had been the team assigned to cover the central garden, with its low enclosing wall and an exit into the rest of the cemetery on each side, and no one else had moved in yet to replace them. Or, if they had, that team hadn’t made it yet; he waited, tensely, feeling acutely exposed in his present perch while he watched for his most recent victims’ backup to arrive and received nothing for the effort. Whatever was going on at the far side had migrated to the east, close to the furthest gate; he could hear, just at the edge of range aided by the Columbarium’s acoustics, the faint thwipthwipthwipthwip of semiautomatic flechette fire. Running footsteps, approaching quickly, and he dropped flat against the top of the gate, watched arbitrarily assigned Dumbass Three and Four running down the narrow corridor between the outer wall of the Columbarium and the inner wall of the garden, foregoing the exit and sprinting almost directly towards him. He unclipped a second stun grenade and lobbed it as they came in range, flash and sonics both fully engaged, pulled off the goggles and covered up.

Dumbass Three was having trouble keeping on their feet, blind and deaf and off-balance after catching a face full of less-lethal ordnance. Dumbass Four was clinging helplessly to the edge of the garden wall. Cole dropped off the side of the gate, landed in a roll, came up swinging with one of the shock batons, and caught D3 under the chin; the impact was almost disconcertingly satisfying as was the solid thud as they landed in a senseless heap. “Seriously. Christmas. In a cemetery. What is wrong with you people?”

D4 collected a sharp blow to the gut and folded, which he found somewhat surprising, before he realized they were already wounded, ballistic armor smeared with tacky blood and something long and thin jutting out of the shoulder joint. An arrow. An arrow that had cleanly pierced armor specifically designed to prevent just that eventuality. Of all the evening’s surprises that was, he decided, probably the most surprising thus far.

The distinctive pop of military standard-issue small arms fire joined the second round of echoes and the ongoing flechette thwipping and he filed armor-piercing arrows, provenance unknown under things to investigate once he was closer to the action. He took a moment to make certain D3 and D4 wouldn’t get back up without assistance and ducked into the garden corridor, keeping low and moving quickly. Up ahead, the sound of caps popping grew more frequent and more widely spread. On the far side of the cemetery, the Old Post Chapel’s belltower began sounding the hour in low pealing tolls and, beneath it, he heard the sharply echoing bark of a rifle firing, from above and behind.

***

“That may have been one of Cole’s stun grenades,” Genji remarked in an undertone, as they crouched together in the deepest available pool of shadow, watching as armed and armored individuals took up station at strategic points throughout the cemetery.

A moment before, an intensely brilliant flash lit the far southern end of the Columbarium and a not insignificant portion of the sky above it; even as far away as they were, Hanzo was still blinking after-images out of his eyes after a single unwary glance. More worrisome were the echoes of the detonation, which would no doubt be audible for some distance. “I suspect, then, that he has made contact.”

“No doubt.” Once again, he could hear the smile in his brother’s voice and it was not a kindly one. “Shall we make the odds somewhat more even?”

“A moment.” Hanzo closed his eyes, pressed the tips of two fingers to his brow, and silently bespoke Zentatsu and Mizuchi, where they coiled within his flesh and soul, begging the aid of their clarity of vision. When he opened them again, it was as though the night had fled, replaced by a flat and shadowless stormlight that dispelled the advantage of darkness. He murmured his thanks and turned an unkind smile of his own in Genji’s direction. “Right or left?”

“Left.” Genji was up and over their concealing wall with a speed that exceeded even his own dragon-enhanced vision, little more than a flicker of motion briefly silhouetted against the sky.

He waited for the soft but unmistakable sounds of Genji introducing himself to the pair guarding the southern entrance before leaving the alcove himself, clinging close to the outer wall until he drew even with the next team, one to a side along the midline thoroughfare, crouched and waiting for something to come in their direction. Neither saw him, dressed to blend into the darkness and indistinct in a way that deceived the eye, even one equipped with night vision enhancements; he climbed the wall and slid forward on his belly to observe them at closer range. Ballistic armor, including what looked to be a military-grade helmet, night vision gear, communication equipment. Their sidearms looked too boxy for a silencer or flash suppression, and they were both carrying a baton of some kind. His curiosity itched, and he scratched it by firing a scatter arrow directly between them, flechettes radiating out from the point of impact in multiplying waves. The one closest to him fell with a howl of anguish, pinned to the ground; the further fell silently, with at least two slender shafts jutting from their throat. Hanzo dropped behind the howler and gave him peace and the world silence. He gathered up the gun and the baton and made good his escape before the running footsteps he heard approaching could reach his position, retreating to a spot atop the outside wall where he could both watch the pathways and examine his acquisitions.

The gun was a flechette pistol, which explained the boxy design, but the entire thing felt heavier than the weapons of that type with whom he was acquainted. He ejected the magazine and then a clip of the darts, found them to be substantially beyond standard, a projectile hypodermic flechette, reservoir filled with a clear liquid. He snapped a picture with his phone, making certain to catch the serial number engraved on the side of the dart, and sent it to Tekhartha Zenyatta, on station with their getaway vehicle. Tekhartha, please identify if possible.

The baton was also modified -- weighted normally enough, sufficient to break unenhanced bone and pulverize unenhanced flesh, but also equipped with a shock generator heavy enough to overcome omnic, or cybernetically enhanced human, neuromechanical surge protection. He reached up and keyed the comm. “Genji, be careful. At least some of these creatures are armed with weapons that can harm you despite your armor.”

“Thank you, aniki.” Genji sounded slightly breathless and Hanzo glanced back in the direction he had come, concerned. “Be aware that our friends have brought more reinforcements than we originally suspected and also a team from Fort Myer has arrived to investigate.”

“Do you require my assistance?” Hanzo tucked the pistol into a jacket pocket and slid the baton into his belt, half-turning as he did so.

“No.” And now it sounded as though he were breathless with laughter. “I have the situation under control. Find Cole -- if any proper soldiers reach him first, we may have to do something...regrettable.”

“As you wish.” He slipped his bow off his shoulder and nocked an arrow, arming the scattershot as he did so, and sped along the top of the outside wall as quickly as he could without compromising his balance. To his right, the midlane remained clear as he passed a second set of internal gates, to his left, something flickered in the corner of his eye, movement.

Hanzo stopped, spun, and snap-fired -- connecting, to his annoyance, with nothing. The arrow passed cleanly through empty air and came to rest somewhere amid the field of gravestones opposite the Columbarium and the access road running between. He remained in place for a moment, intensely still and watchful, waiting for whatever he had glimpsed to show itself.

Behind him, someone screamed. It was a brief, abortive, choked off thing followed shortly thereafter by a storm of semiautomatic flechette fire -- it sounded like more than one gun -- and running footsteps rapidly approaching his position. He nocked another arrow and waited, drawn to the ear, and loosed the instant the first target crossed into view. The arrow punched cleanly through the shoulder joint of their armor and they stumbled, half-falling and half-dragged by their partner as they both fled. A gust of something, a dark mist moving against the faint breeze, flowed down the midlane in pursuit and Hanzo followed as swiftly as he dared.

Ahead, the night dissolved into another intense burst of light, one he was spared by the grace of the dragons, and far more intense burst of sound -- loud enough to make his ears ring, even at a distance, not enough to affect his sense of balance. He leapt across the outside lane to the top of a niche wall, ran its length, and dropped into the midline, attempting to get a better look at what was going on up ahead. The garden wall was low enough to see over, barely, as he ran in that direction and he caught intermittent glimpses of a scuffle taking place before the gate that opened into the southern end of the Columbarium, someone ducking into the corridor passing the front wall of the garden, the muzzle-flash from atop the gate and the report of a single high-caliber gunshot.

Hanzo went over the garden wall even as the shooter dropped from the gate, its form slim and sleek and dark in a manner that suggested engineering rather than armor. He crossed the garden at a dead sprint, arrow already on the bowstring, and as he came through the gate, he fired point-blank at the shooter’s center of mass, once, twice, before he rolled out of the immediate line of fire, explosive heads that knocked it back and forced it to give up the shot it was about to take. Its target lay in the garden corridor, a pool of blood spreading across the paving stones, shuddering helplessly in a way that suggested a seizure in progress. He came back up over the wall, the last of his explosive arrows nocked, just in time to find the shooter regaining its feet -- an omnic most definitely, nothing purely human, even an armored human, would have shrugged off those hits that quickly -- reaching for a cylinder at its hip, hurling it at him. Hanzo fired to intercept it at the peak of its arc and dove flat; the neurodisruptor pulse spent itself on nothing as it triggered in midair and he rolled to his feet, reaching for a scatter arrow.

The shooter fled across the narrow court separating the garden wall from the gate, and regained its previous perch in a single prodigious leap. To his surprise, it did not turn back -- did not even attempt to do so, leaping to the top of the next niche wall and sprinting across the rows in long, loping strides. He watched until it vanished out of immediate view, dropping below the level of the walls, and then turned his attention to its target.

He was scruffier than the pictures in the file sent along with the contract information, his beard and hair longer and less tamed, but still recognizable as the man he had nearly been hired to kill. His upper left chest was a mass of blood-soaked cloak and shredded outer jacket, the wound itself concealed in layers of clothing, but the shooter had clearly not missed. And he was seizing, his muscles spasming convulsively, the tension half-lifting his back off the ground, face contorted with pain, desperate sounds that were almost words coming out of his mouth. Hanzo knelt at his side, caught his face between his hands, and, with an effort that he felt in his own flesh, Cole Cassidy forced himself to meet his gaze and rasped out, “Arm.”

Cassidy’s left arm was a known cybernetic enhancement and at that moment it lay at his side, unmoving, fingers locked in an involuntarily contorted claw. He felt along the edge of the skull plate and found the switch concealed there, popped open the diagnostic panel, reading red across the board with multiple neuromechanical system failures, and pressed the emergency disengage switches in sequence. The joint sealed and locked, the arm itself disengaged with a series of audible metallic clicks, and the muscular convulsions slowed almost immediately, finally stopped entirely as Hanzo lifted him, gathered him around the chest, and bodily pulled him into the garden, behind the fountain basin. It wasn’t the best possible cover but it was still better than none and it allowed him to prop Cassidy up as he sliced away the blood-soaked over-cape and the heavy suede-and-fleece jacket beneath. With both gone, the blood flowed freely across the ballistic armor he wore under them, armor that had been broken from beneath by a high caliber, high velocity armor-piercing round that punched through it completely, taking a divot of flesh and bone and muscle the size of a large man’s fist with it. Hanzo saw, amid the mass of pulped flesh and shattered bone, strands of broken neuromechanical control wire, the feedback from which must have caused the seizure. Cassidy coughed, and wheezed, trying to draw enough breath to speak and another pulse of blood flowed out of the wound, frothed with air bubbles. Hanzo hit the disengage switches on the remaining shoulder joint and both side panels, lifted the armor away as gently as he could; the sounds that escaped his patient were completely involuntary.

Hanzo reached up and activated his comm. “Genji, I have him but he is badly injured. We are in the central garden.”

Cassidy’s throat worked silently for a moment as Hanzo opened the pouch in which he carried his own medical supplies, inadequate though they might be to this task, and began searching for something large enough to serve as a proper compression dressing. A little sound escaped him as Hanzo pressed one of the sleeves of his own jacket over the site and bound it as best he could with knots and a length of sterile bandage wrapped around to keep it in place.

“Genji?” He croaked.

“Yes.” Hanzo slipped out of his own coat and wrapped it around Cassidy as best he could -- the man was broader across both chest and shoulders than he, but he had no other means of warming him, and silently cursed the lack of an emergency blanket among his gear.

“Shimada.” It took all of his breath to properly aspirate the syllables and Hanzo pressed a hand to his chest.

“Yes.” Gently. “Be still. Save your strength and your breath. He will be here soon and we will...make certain you are properly cared for.”

He was in no way certain that was true. He knew, from many years of long experience, what a sucking chest wound looked like, suspected mordantly that the heavens would not favor making this one clean or uncomplicated, knew that the longer it took to bring him comprehensive medical attention the greater the chance of his death from shock or cardiorespiratory collapse. Knew also that saving this man’s life greatly exceeded his skills. He pressed close to his unwounded side, the best to share body heat, resting one hand against the curve of his throat to monitor his heart-rate (high, fast, with pain and adrenaline), watched the shape of his chest for signs of a collapsing lung.

Cassidy took three ragged breaths, in and out, and rasped, “Who?”

Hanzo glanced up, found dark eyes hugely dilated with pain fixed on his face. “Hanzo. At your service. Please, do not speak.”

He looked, for an instant, like he might try to argue that point -- and then his gaze shifted upwards, and his lips parted in a pained, more than slightly bloodstained smile. Genji landed almost precisely at his side, soundless and apparently none the worse for the evening’s exertions. “Cole.” “I just told him to save his breath,” Hanzo remarked, with some asperity.

“Heya...li’l brother,” Cassidy wheezed. “Long time...no see.”

“Perhaps I should save mine.” Hanzo flicked a glance over his shoulder. “Pursuit?”

“Napping.” Genji held up one of the flechette pistols with the tip of one finger, the gesture a thing of ineffable disdain. “Experimental sedation rounds -- the serial number you sent my master matches a lot stolen from a cargo hypertrain last month. I summoned assistance for the soldiers, at least, and my master should be here -- “

A sleek, nondescript sedan pulled up immediately opposite the garden entrance, the rear door cycled open, and the driver’s side window came down, Tekhartha Zenyatta peering owlishly out at them. “Please hurry. Another group of soldiers has been deployed and I suspect we should make good our departure before they arrive.”

Together they lifted and together they carried, Cassidy biting down on his gloved right hand to hold in any sounds of pain, and in such a way did Hanzo find himself sitting in the car they had stolen upon their arrival at Vishkar’s Washington DC telestation with a bloody cowboy propped against his chest. Fortunately, there was an emergency blanket in the vehicle’s First Aid case and, perhaps even more fortunately, the wrapper was large enough to lay over the worst part of the wound with enough whole flesh around it to tape it in place. One of Zenyatta’s spheres joined them in the back and hovered over Cassidy’s chest, shedding warm and soothing golden radiance as it did so. The desperate edge to Cassidy’s breathing eased somewhat, his head fell back against Hanzo’s shoulder, and his eyes flickered shut as exhaustion claimed his senses. Hanzo kept a hand wrapped around his wrist, fingers on the pulse-point. “Where can we take him?”

He could feel the helplessness in Genji’s gaze as he looked back at them. “I...do not know. If we take him to the hospital…” The thought trailed away into things that they both knew would happen. “I am going to message Lena for their ETA and then we can -- “ “My student,” Zenyatta was behind the wheel of the vehicle, carefully navigating them through Christmas Eve traffic. “Something is...happening.”

“Master?” Genji looked up from his phone, perplexity clear in his tone.

“Something is attempting -- “ A pause, a brief burst of sound that Hanzo was tempted to call a gasp. “Something has ejected me from the vehicle’s control systems.”

Hanzo’s hand flew to the manual door latch, only to find it locked. Genji swore, short and explosive, as he made a similar discovery, and all of Zenyatta’s spheres chimed a single high-pitched tone of alarm. Then, the vehicle’s onboard sound system activated itself, and the console navigation panel flickered, flashing a lurid electric purple overlaid with a stylized white skull icon, its nose an inverted heart; the voice that came over the speakers belonged to the vehicle’s GPS navigation system. “Whatever you do right now, do this one thing: do not panic.”

“Who are you?” Hanzo demanded, reaching up to steady Cassidy’s head where it rested, as the vehicle maneuvered through traffic at a rather higher rate of speed; a sign for hyperlane access sped past on the right.

“Consider me a contractor.” A warm little chuckle in the navigation system’s sexless contralto. “I’ve been hired by a not exactly neutral third party to make sure you and your cargo make a clean getaway and reach a place where you can hunker down in reasonable safety. So, if you want my advice -- and, I assure you, you want my advice -- don’t entertain any heroic foolishness for the next couple hours, sit back, and enjoy the ride. So long you make sure the dumbass vaquero doesn’t bleed to death or hack out a lung, we’ll be golden, and the rest will be up to you once you get where you’re going. Agreeable?”

“If it were not agreeable?” Genji growled.

“Oh, well, in that case,” The navigation system replied cheerfully, “I’d pulse some sonics through the vehicle’s entertainment system that would render you all unpleasantly senseless and you’d still go where I’m taking you, only you’d get there with a skullfucking headache and maybe a dead cowboy. Seriously, the speakers in this thing are incredible.” Hanzo felt one, just behind his back, vibrating at a decidedly threatening pitch. “Your pick.”

“Agreed,” Hanzo snapped, before Genji could intervene. “Where are you taking us?”

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. Seriously...just relax, and make sure he doesn’t die. All I ask.”

The vehicle peeled off onto the hyperlane, headed west.

*** GreenCyborgNinjaDude: We have him but he is severely injured.

DeathFromAbove: HOW severely? We’ll be leaving for the airport in a minute, btw, might be without good service for a bit while Dad and I are on the road.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: It would be best if my master describes it, he is monitoring Cole’s condition.

PeaceLoveAndBalance has joined the conversation.

PeaceLoveAndBalance: Greetings and thank you for permitting me access.

ATHENA: You are entirely welcome, Tekhartha.

WickedCuteButDeadly: What’s the word? Winston, Em, and I are inbound and we’ve got one of those mobile life support pods loaded in the passenger compartment. Incidentally, I hope nobody’s carrying too much gear.

DeathFromAbove:...Weren’t those experimental?

PeanutButterIsLife: They’re significantly less experimental than they were. Tekhartha?

PeaceLoveAndBalance: Briefly, he was shot from behind by an individual using a sniper rifle, firing high caliber, high velocity ammunition. He was hit between and to the left of the first through third thoracic vertebrae, just above the upper edge of his ballistic armor. He has suffered significant injury to both the trapezius and pectoralis major muscle groups, the brachial nerve plexus including the neuromechanical attachments to his left arm, the left scapula, the left clavicle, the left acromioclavicular joint and ligament, the glenohumeral ligament, the second rib and costal cartilage, and the upper left lobe of his lung. He was respiring abnormally when we found him but has responded well to our efforts to treat that particular injury and his lung is not in danger of collapsing at this time. He has, however, lost a great deal of blood, which we have no means of replenishing, and he is still bleeding internally -- slowly, I can personally assure that much. But we are maintaining him in a state of shock, at best, and he requires more care than we can provide in our current circumstances.

WickedCuteButDeadly: I hear you. What’s your present position?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: That...is an excellent question. We are not entirely certain ourselves.

WickedCuteButDeadly: What.

DeathFromAbove: I’m with Lena. What?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Our vehicle has sort of been hijacked.

WickedCuteButDeadly:... DeathFromAbove:... PeanutButterIsLife:... ATHENA:..

DeathFromAbove: Explain this to me using small words and diagrams.

PeaceLoveAndBalance: As we were departing the Washington DC metropolitan area, an external force ejected me from our vehicle’s navigational systems and seized control. It was not...violent, per se, but it was extremely swift and thorough and brooked no resistance on my part. We have been proceeding under its control since.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: We’re travelling through the mountains west of the city, heading south.

WickedCuteButDeadly:... DeathFromAbove:... PeanutButterIsLife:... ATHENA:...

PeanutButterIsLife:...Are you saying that, in addition to everything else, you three have been KIDNAPPED? By parties unknown? Is that what you’re telling us?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Sort of? Whoever they are, they helped us get away -- in fact, they told us they were hired by an interested third party to make sure we got away and would reach a safe place for your arrival. Admittedly, we do not know where that is yet.

WickedCuteButDeadly: OKAY, THEN.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: I am so sorry, Lena.

WickedCuteButDeadly: No no no, don’t be sorry. I made certain all the fuel tanks were loaded to capacity before we left and the backup solar cells are fully charged. Just...lemme know your final coordinates as soon as you’ve got them out and we’ll...figure things out from there!

DeathFromAbove: You are going to owe her all the booze, Genji. The GOOD stuff. And me. All of it.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: I am poignantly aware of that, yes.

MercyMercyMe has joined the conversation.

MercyMercyMe: I’m sorry, everyone, I just woke up -- it has been a terribly busy last few days. What is going on?

***

In the front seat of the car, Genji uttered a sound that, even synthesized, could not be mistaken for anything but a moan of absolute despair. Zenyatta reached over and laid a comforting hand on his student’s shoulder; he leaned into the touch in a manner that suggested he had forgotten, for at least a moment, that they were not alone in the vehicle.

Hanzo declined to remind them, partly watching the scenery as it passed, mostly attending to his charge, who was drifting in and out of consciousness and occasionally making sounds that were almost words. Cassidy was, at the moment, still and silent and the view outside the window consisted entirely of dark, dense forest with occasional glimpses of overcast sky, the leading edge of a storm according to his phone’s weather app. Even more occasionally he caught a glimpse of ruddy light pollution staining the bottom of those clouds, though at present is was oppressively dark, the road lined in stands of enormous evergreens that screened the view as effectively as a wall. A glance at his phone showed him they were still heading generally southward, now tending somewhat more west; the road wended along the side of a heavily forested mountain, one of a dozen twisty lanes they had followed since leaving the hyperlane an hour before. They had, in fact, only remained on the high-speed, fully-automated-vehicles-only interstate long enough to put a hard burst of distance between themselves and the city and turned off as soon as pragmatically possible -- not the least, he suspected, because the hyperlanes were heavily monitored by law enforcement.

Their navigator had, in general, declined to explain their thinking, ignoring questions in general in favor of switching through a series of radio stations exclusively playing Christmas music and actively refusing them access to a newsfeed. Hanzo managed to find one on his phone, displaying luridly melodramatic streaming text suggesting that a left-wing domestic terrorist cell was clearly responsible for desecrating America’s most hallowed cemetery on the very eve of Christianity’s most important holiday, and he clicked it off, satisfied by the lack of immediate association with Cole Cassidy’s rather too notable name.

Cassidy chuckled softly, the sound more cough than laughter.

“You should be resting,” Hanzo murmured against his ear, and slid the phone back into his jacket pocket.

“Ears...popped.” Several slow, shallow breaths. “Woke me up.”

They were, Hanzo had to admit, changing altitude, climbing higher into the mountains and, it seemed, slowing as they went, as though their unseen navigator were searching for something. They found it quarter of an hour later, the vehicle slowing almost to a stop, then turning off onto an unmarked side road that went deeper into the forest and higher onto the hill. The antigrav generators whined in protest, the entire frame shuddered the incline steepened and in the headlights Hanzo could see that the road itself was entirely unpaved. Cassidy’s body tensed with every jolt, and Hanzo held his arm and head as steady as he could; even so, by the time they reached their destination, he was soaked with pain-sweat and shivering uncontrollably, tiny, choked off sounds clawing their way up his throat.

“And we are here.” The navigation system informed them. “Wait just a moment annnd…”

In the forest ahead, lights appeared -- low-power security lamps, lining a path through the woods.

“Follow the path. Your destination is at the top. I’ve unlocked the doors and turned on the power. Once you’re inside, I’ll activate the security perimeter.” The door locks disengaged. “Rápidamente.”

It took some time and quite a bit of careful maneuvering to get Cassidy out of Hanzo’s lap and into Zenyatta’s, the monk more than capable of holding him and floating at a decent clip despite their differences in size. Hanzo took the lead, bow in hand and at the ready, and Genji took rearguard, covering their tracks as snowflakes began drifting through the winter-bare canopy. It was, fortunately, not a far or strenuous climb, the path opening into a small clearing, the bulk of which was taken up by a compact two-story cabin. A light burned on the porch next to the door, and in the window athwart it; as promised, Hanzo found the door unlocked and a puff of air warmer than that outside greeted them as he opened it.

Hanzo resisted the impulse to ask his companions to wait outside while he scouted, choosing to err on the side of bringing Cassidy into the relative warmth before he lapsed even more deeply into shock. There was not, in fact, much to scout: immediately inside the door, to the right, a kitchenette and dining nook, a security panel gleaming luridly purple against the far wall; to the left, a sitting room separated from the rest by a low counter, equipped with heavy wood-frame furniture, a flat-panel holotank mounted in the wall. Down a short hallway: a bedroom, equipped with two sets of bunk beds and a single cot; a bathroom, sink, toilet, shower; linen closet full of pillows and blankets sealed in plastic. A steep, narrow set of steps having more in common with a ladder than a staircase led upwards to the second floor, which was more of a storage space, stacked front to back with storage bins, their contents neatly stamped on the the visible end: provisions, cold weather gear, warm weather gear, small arms, ammunition, medical supplies…

Hanzo seized that one and dragged it to the top of the steps. “Genji, please assist me with this.”

His brother appeared and took one end of the case as Hanzo eased it down, then carried it into the bedroom, where he and Zenyatta had already transferred Cassidy to the cot, propping him up against the rear wall with a half-dozen pillows behind him and at least two blankets thicker than reflective foil spread over his legs and chest. The lights were pale and mounted in the walls and showed all too clearly how terrible his color was under the dried streaks of blood, eyes closed and sunken into nearly bruised hollows of flesh, his chest heaving with the effort it took to breathe and fresh blood welling beneath the bandages. Zenyatta cracked open the medical supply case and began extracting useful items; Hanzo left him, and his able assistant, to the task of tending Cassidy and prowled back into the kitchen, to the security monitor.

“The perimeter is armed and active.” The security system’s voice was close kin to the navigation system, though slightly deeper. “Write this code down.” He fetched a yellow legal pad and a miraculously functional pen from one of the kitchen drawers and scribbled down the alphanumeric sequence that crawled across the screen. “That’s the deactivation code, one-time use. Punch it in when your rescue crew arrives. Otherwise, don’t touch this panel unless I tell you to do so. And, just so you know, I drove the car off the side of the scenic overlook just up the way. You’re welcome. Thermostat controls are in the hallway but I suggest you let the heater work on its own curve, it’s running off the solar batteries in the attic. So are the lights. For the time being, you should make yourselves comfortable, let me keep an eye out for any pursuit, and get in touch with the rest of your friends. Not necessarily in that order.”

Hanzo, shivering slightly from the chill in the air and covered from neck to knees in the dried blood of a man he hadn’t actually tried to kill, could find very little to argue with in that.

***

A search of the kitchen cabinets yielded both a six-cup coffee maker and a teakettle, stirring within him the hope that, somewhere, there was tea to be had. It also yielded cups and bowls and plates, the sturdy microwavable ceramic sort, wrapped in plastic to keep away dust and mice -- not that there was much evidence of either, leading him to suspect that their unseen rescuer/captor/host made some effort to maintain the place on a regular basis. A trash receptacle and cleaning supplies hid in the cabinet beneath the sink; he opened the tap and was rewarded with water that ran clean almost immediately, which he used to fill the kettle. There was no proper oven, but the microwave mounted above the four-burner stovetop, and the stovetop itself, were high efficiency models clearly designed to play nicely with a house mostly powered by solar cells.

The provisions cases were stacked four deep and contained blocks of freeze-dried coffee, vacuum sealed packages of tea bags, assorted flavors of electrolyte-replenishing drink mix, and two dozen boxes of calorie-and-nutrient dense military surplus food sachets. A canvas sack hung on a hook at the top of the stairs and to it he added a package of tea and a box of snack sachets. The cold weather gear boxes contained an astonishing quantity of clothing vacuum sealed in plastic in a variety of sizes, each individual package containing, per its label, thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, fleece lined trousers, and a hooded sweatshirt. He selected one such package in a size that seemed a reasonable fit for himself and a second, two sizes larger, in the name of hope. Further to the back were the cases he hadn’t bothered with once he located the emergency medical supplies, and those consisted of more household goods. The cases labeled bathroom contained vacuum-wrapped towels and washcloths and hospital-grade toiletries, the sort one could use with or without water, and he added some of each to his bag.

He supplied the bathroom and paused outside the closed door of the bedroom, hesitant to interrupt. The worst of the muffled sounds of pain, of Tekhartha Zenyatta’s voice modulated to a low, soothing pitch, had faded away a quarter hour before but he did not wish to distract either the monk or his brother if they were in the midst of something dangerous, or delicate.

“Damn you.” Genji’s voice, even muted through the door, was fierce, taut with emotion. “Why did you not contact me? I would have come for you, I would have -- “

“I...know.” Softly, gently, and it silenced his brother more effectively than a shout. “I...know...you would’a. You’d hide me...in the middle of a place...full of unarmed pacifist monks.” Cassidy made a sound somewhere between a cough and laugh; it was, he thought, one of the most terrible things he’d ever heard. “That’s not...taking cover, li’l brother. That’s...taking hostages.”

Hanzo made his way back to the kitchen, and turned on the heat beneath the kettle. The tea package, once unsealed, released a tolerable aroma; he placed a bag in two mugs, opened a vacuum-sealed washcloth, and ran water that began tepid and finally turned genuinely hot into the sink basin just as the kettle sang and his brother emerged into the sitting room. He applied the boiling water to the mugs and watched as Genji paced the close confines of the room, every inch of his body tightly drawn, gloved to the elbows in the drying blood of a man who called him little brother.

“Genji,” He put perhaps a bit more command in his voice than was, strictly speaking, necessary but it achieved the desired result -- his brother stopped and looked at him. “Come here.”

Genji hesitated, fractionally, then did as he was asked; Hanzo pulled out a chair for him, and went to work with the fresh cloth and the hot water and a bit of soap, scrubbing the blood from the joints of his hands and the surfaces of his armor.

“You do not have to do that,” Genji protested softly, but did not pull away, the tension in his shoulders and arms and wrists slowly loosening.

“Quiet.” Hanzo replied, also soft. “You must contact your friends. I retrieved our coordinates from my phone’s GPS system.” He dried his hands and handed the towel to Genji, slid the legal pad across the kitchen table. “Drink this.”

He set the steaming mug down at his brother’s elbow and Genji reached up, detached his faceplate for the first time since they left Nepal, and looked up at him with reddened eyes. “Is it any good?”

“It is completely awful.” Hanzo admitted, having taken a sip himself. “But it is warm.” He slid a thumb across his brother’s scarred cheek, wiping away the remnants of moisture. “Contact them. That will also help.”

And, so saying, he gathered his own vacuum sealed package of clothing and retreated to the bathroom, his eyes burning for no good reason he could name.

***

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: I have the coordinates, Lena.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude sent WickedCuteButDeadly a Private Message.

WickedCuteButDeadly: Okay, you’re...on the top of a mountain on the edge of Shenandoah National Park. Lemme see if I can get a good satellite overview…It’s a cabin? A little cabin? And there’s a clearing a bit over, just big enough to manage a VTOL landing and departure, I think.

DeathFromAbove: THINK or KNOW?

WickedCuteButDeadly: Know, know, it’s definitely know, trust me I’m a trained professional.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Message me when you begin your approach. There is an active security perimeter of some sort -- I do not know precisely what defenses might exist and I would prefer not to find out the hard way.

WickedCuteButDeadly: Jeez, what is it, a survivalist bunker? We’re about five hours out, should be getting there sixish local time. Also, since it’s past midnight there, official merry Christmas, Genji.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: And to you, Lena. To all of you. And to answer your question...I am not sure? Our navigator brought us here, permitted us entry, and activated the perimeter. The storage space is full of military surplus supplies -- including medical supplies. My master managed to stabilize Cole somewhat more completely but

MercyMercyMe: Tekhartha, are you monitoring and can you give me a more complete report?

PeaceLoveAndBalance: He is resting at the moment. When he is awake, he is still mentally alert and aware of his surroundings, but he is growing more frequently drowsy. Fortunately, there were large injury biotic-impregnated bandages, air-seal drape, and a decompression catheter in the emergency medical supplies, which has helped a great deal. I think he is in significantly less danger of developing tension pneumothorax.

MercyMercyMe: Sehr gut.

PeaceLoveAndBalance: ...Unfortunately, I suspect that he may have sustained internal injuries that are beyond my ability to detect or treat. We did not retrieve the bullet that struck him, because it overpenetrated significantly, but the force of the impact shattered the left clavicle and the second rib, and I fear that their fragments may have behaved in a manner similar to a fragmentation bullet. I suspect he is accumulating blood in the pleural cavity.

MercyMercyMe: Lena, if you can fly faster, you will wish to do so.

WickedCuteButDeadly: Headwind’s working against me right now, Angie, but I’ll punch it as hard as I can. We might be coasting into Gibraltar on the fumes.

MercyMercyMe: I will be leaving the Oasis within the hour, flying directly into Gibraltar International Airport.

ATHENA: I have activated your medbay access credentials and a vehicle will be awaiting you at the terminal, Dr. Ziegler.

MercyMercyMe: Danke schoen, Athena.

DeathFromAbove: Still getting my arrangements in order, but at least I’m in the airport. And, uh, not to distract us all from horrible things we can’t do anything about but...have any of you taken a look at the news? What did you lot DO?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude:...I feel as though I should defend my honor. What is the news saying?

DeathFromAbove has posted a link.

PeanutButterIsLife:.... MercyMercyMe:.... PeaceLoveAndBalance:.... WickedCuteButDeadly:.... ATHENA:...

GreenCyborgNinjaDude:...I assure you, I did not kill eighteen people on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, and I am fairly certain that neither did Cole.

PeanutButterIsLife: What...happened to them? They look

MercyMercyMe: Withered. I have seen reports on this before.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: The ones in black were with the shooter. Guarding the entrances and exits, patrolling the paths. They were carrying flechette pistols loaded with sedative needles and shock batons -- a few had neurodisruptor grenades. Less-lethal armaments that would allow them to slow or disable him. Hanzo engaged the actual assassin at relatively close range, an omnic sniper of a design he did not recognize, nor does he know personally of any omnic

DeathFromAbove: WAIT. WAIT ONE MINUTE.

WickedCuteButDeadly: Did you just say

MercyMercyMe: Hanzo. Your BROTHER. THAT Hanzo.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude:...This is a very long story.

***

Peeling off his bloodstained clothing had the immediate effect of making Hanzo feel more human. The shower, kept warm rather than hot, helped even more and had the additional salubrious effect of waking him up. His body very much wished to believe it was still in another time zone, likely on the opposite side of at least a few hours sleep, a weakness that his mind could not afford to indulge under the circumstances. The fresh clothing completed the process of renewal and he was privately astonished at how comfortable the underclothing was, sleek and close-fitting and soft against the skin, the charcoal gray pants and dark green sweatshirt a bit loose on his frame but warm nonetheless. He tied his still-damp hair back in a loose queue, hung the towels to dry, gathered up a few items he thought might be helpful, and stepped across the hall to the bedroom, knocking quietly and opening the door at Tekhartha Zenyatta’s quiet, “Come in.”

The monk hung in midair beside the cot, long-fingered hands laced together in his lap, spheres rotating slowly around his shoulders and chiming gently as they did so. In the bed, Cole slept at what seemed to be peace, chest and shoulder swathed in bandages, each breath accompanied by a soft, high-pitched note from the decompression catheter. He was still a bit bloodier than Hanzo could imagine being comfortable.

“I have water and cloths,” He murmured. “If you think it would do no harm.”

“I think it would be a relief, when he next wakes.” Zenyatta bowed over his hands. “If you would be so kind.”

Hanzo fetched a basin of warm water, a dry towel, and a handful of fresh washcloths and set to work slowly and with care. It took a bit of scrubbing to get the worst of it out of his beard and hair and what was left of his chest hair -- they had sheared most of it away around the site of the wound to help the air-tight drape adhere more securely. The skin beneath was unhealthily sallow rather than the warm golden-brown of his files, for which he chose to blame the extremity of the blood loss, but at least his lips had backed away from the edge of cyanosis.

“Do you think he will…?” Hanzo asked, not quite sure how to phrase precisely what he wanted to know.

“Survive? It is...not impossible. Our friends are still some hours away and his wounds are grave -- but his will to live is also enormously strong.” Zenyatta replied quietly. “He has promised Genji that he will try.”

And this man would not break his word to a brother. Hanzo bowed himself out, taking the bath things with him, depositing the lot in the shower next to his bloody clothing.

Genji was still sitting at the kitchen table when Hanzo returned, this time with his head pillowed in his arms in a manner that suggested he had, recently, been banging it against a solid object. Possibly the table, in fact. He rested a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Genji? Is everything -- “

Genji wordlessly held up his phone; Hanzo accepted it and scanned the conversation still displayed. “Ah. Well. It was only a matter of time. In fact, it was only a matter of a few hours -- better they know before they arrive than have it be an unpleasant surprise once they are here.”

Genji lifted his head. “Who are you and what have you done with…” His voice trailed off and his eyes widened. “Hanzo. Where did you find that?”

He handed the phone back and glanced down the length of his own body. “One of the cases upstairs is full of vacuum-sealed bags of clothing -- I assumed it was military surplus, like the food. Why?”

His brother reached out and caught hold of his shirtsleeve, drawing his attention to the patch sewn to the shoulder. “Because that,” He replied, “is the organizational insignia of Blackwatch.” A complicated expression crossed the visible elements of his face. “This is...this must be...a Blackwatch safehouse.”

“How can you be -- “ Hanzo cut that question off before he could finish it; it was foolish, and fatuous, to question his brother’s experience in that regard. “Who could have known of this place’s existence? It has been maintained, possibly regularly resupplied.”

“I do not know -- Blackwatch functioned under...numerous layers of operational security. Its agents likewise.” Genji scrubbed a hand down his face, thoughts visibly racing. “When Overwatch disbanded, more than a few were arrested and prosecuted, even more turned to the mercenary trades -- I cannot think of anyone who would -- “ He trailed off again. “I do not know.”

“I am not certain that I -- “

The security panel sounded a rising-falling trill, and the visual display flashed luridly purple. When it spoke, it sounded remarkably human, and almost surprised. “Movement on the outer perimeter.”

They crossed to the display together, jostling one another’s shoulders as they crowded close. The inset screen flashed once more, then cleared, showing the layers of the perimeter monitoring, which fully encompassed the entire crown of the mountain: contact at the outermost edge, in the middle of the forest rather than closer to the road, and the security system voice made a sound that was almost a snort of annoyance. “Probably a deer. Or a bear. There are bears around here, right? I bet it’s -- “

The motion-activated optical scan cameras came online. The thing that crouched low in the leaf-mould was neither a deer nor a bear. Its shoulders and hips were canted at unnatural angles, its limbs abnormally thin and tipped in long fingers for tearing, long toes for gripping, its head a sleekly predatory mass of sensor modules mounted above a mandible that had more in common with an insect than a human attempt at a mouth. Its gun was not, as Hanzo had originally thought in the heat of the moment some hours before, a separate weapon, but mounted to its shoulder assembly. As they watched, it skittered past the camera into the snowy dark.

“Well.” The security system remarked. “Not a bear.”

***

It took ten minutes to screw together eight more arrow shafts from the supplies he carried with him at all times. He fitted them with his remaining four explosive heads, since the assassin had not enjoyed receiving them on their last meeting, and the rest with bodkin-point armor-piercers. He still had three scatter arrows remaining from his original preparations for the mission, and two sonics, and he debated with himself and Genji the merits of swapping them out for something more immediately lethal.

“Leave them.” The security system suggested, and in it he heard the synthesized sound of distinct irritation. “Even the motion detectors are having trouble locking on this thing and the infrared isn’t picking up a heat signature at all. Any ninja tricks you can bring to the table to help us see it are all to the good.” A mutter. “The inboard stealth rig on that thing must be insane, I just upgraded the perimeter monitor equipment up here six months ago.”

“Can you tell which direction it is moving?” Genji asked, flicking his wrists, rolling blades through his knuckles and back into their housings.

“Barely. Plotting the actual motion detector hits and the presumed hits, it looks like it’s trying to circle around from behind.” The security panel display flashed up a topographic map of the area with the assassin’s projected path marked in red, the confirmed perimeter detection hits marked with little skull icons. “Ground’s slightly higher, woods a little denser. It could squat there and just wait for you to come out.”

“Or we could, in theory, position ourselves to intercept it.” Hanzo observed, sliding the last of the replenished ammunition into the quiver.

“If you circle around the other way and haul ass, yes.” A second path sketched itself into place, this one in electric purple. “Keeps the bulk of the hill between you and easy line of sight, trees as a screen, and it’ll bring you out slightly above and behind -- unless it brings you out in exactly the same spot which, admittedly, it might.”

“Then we should make haste.” Hanzo slung the quiver across his back and tested the tension of the bowstring.

“Agreed.” Genji snapped his blades back into place and went for the door.

“Wait just one second.” The security system said.

“Were you not the one just telling us to hurry?” Hanzo asked, with some asperity.

“Yeah, yeah, I just didn’t think you’d hurry that fast. Men of action, I approve in general, but let’s think this through, okay?” The security panel flashed again and pulled up a captured image of the assassin. “This thing...doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before, which means it’s either really old and been on mothballs long enough that any extant references to it have been expunged from the entire record of human events -- not particularly likely -- or it’s so new that even my many, many sets of eyes and ears haven’t caught wind of it yet which is -- and I hate to admit it -- somewhat more likely. What do we know thus far?”

“It is not infallible.” Hanzo replied. “It missed a clean killing shot on a target whose back was turned to it. It is also willing, clearly, to disengage if it perceives the present tactical situation does not favor its success. Heavily armored and armed, but that does not appear to impede its physical speed or maneuverability and its reflexes are inhumanly swift.”

“And I can think of one person here right now that can counter all of its advantages, and you’re not him.” The security system responded flatly.

“I will not permit my brother to face this thing alone.” Hanzo snapped.

“I don’t think he should.” The security panel literally flashed in irritation. “Do you think leaving the one least capable of putting up a fight in case something goes catastrophically wrong with this plan here alone here is the best idea? With, I might add, the target who is incapable of defending himself?”

“...You have a point,” Hanzo admitted, after a long moment of silently wrestling with himself and a number of unworthy impulses, most of which involved doing violence to the security system’s display.

“Thank you.” He rather suspected that the security system was withholding the sort of commentary that would lead it to collecting rapidly propelled ballistic weapons in its display. “Do you concur?”

“My master and I have reached the point where we function well together as a unit.” Genji admitted, his tone carefully even. “And he possesses skills capable of leveling otherwise uneven fields. I shall ask him.”

His brother slipped soundlessly down the hallway, returning a short time later with Zenyatta floating in his wake. The monk examined the plotted route laid out on the screen, conferred quietly with the security system, and rejoined them where they waited in a tense and awkward silence in the sitting room. “I will join you, my student. It seems prudent to stack as many odds as possible in our favor in this situation.” Hanzo received the impression that, were the monk’s faceplate more mobile, he would be smiling a rather dry smile. “I shall leave an orb here -- it can function outside my immediate presence for some time and Cole will likely require it far more than we.”

They stepped out onto the porch together, the boards dusted with a half-inch of snow, far more piled on the steps and in the clearing and the air still full of gently drifting curtains of white. Before he could step away, Hanzo caught Genji by the crook of the elbow and pulled him closer. “There are not enough hours left in this day for me to describe all the ways in which I loathe this plan.”

“I am not surprised.” He could hear the wry smile in his brother’s voice and only barely resisted the urge to shake him. “For what it is worth, were Cole capable of objecting he would no doubt be doing so loudly and with great enthusiasm.” Genji leaned forward, pressed their foreheads together gently. “Protect him.”

“I will permit no harm to come to him.” Hanzo, with enormous reluctance, released his hold.

“I know.” Genji collected his teacher with a glance and together they vanished into the snowfall.

Hanzo watched until he could see not even a last lingering spark of his brother’s lights. Only then did he step back inside, lock the door at his back, and turn his attention to the security system. “What can be done to make this place more secure?”

“The door and the windows are fitted with blast proof shutters that deploy in approximately six seconds once panic mode is activated. The walls and roof and foundation are reinforced against impact and bulletproof within reason but I’ve got no idea how they’d stand up against whatever ammunition that thing is firing.” A pause. “There are antipersonnel weapons mounted at strategic points around the outside of the cabin -- solid light turrets. They run on their own independent power system but they have a relatively short operational life and I’m not sure how well they’d work against an omnic.”

“I...see.” There was enough warm water left in the teakettle to make one cup of weak terrible tea and so he did, in order to give his hands something to accomplish while he thought. “Is there some means that I could use to monitor the perimeter cameras from the bedroom? I do not think he should be alone and I do not wish to be blind.”

“Check your phone.”

He thumbed the screen open and found a new icon on the homescreen, a little purple skull that winked at him as he touched it. A screen opened, split, and split again, showing him six views of snowy forest, darkness, undisturbed ground cover. “...Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I didn’t even poke around. You’re welcome for that, too.”

Hanzo sighed, supposed he deserved that for even asking, gathered up his tea and gear and carried them all to the back of the cabin. It was perceptibly warmer in the bedroom than elsewhere in the building, a fact he attributed to the absence of windows and possibly to the presence of Zenyatta’s sphere, which hovered over the cot in which his charge slept, shedding pale golden light and chiming gently to itself. At some point, either Zenyatta or Genji had made both of the lower bunk beds; he chose the one next to the door, placed one of the pillows between his back and the wall, set his bow and quiver in easy reach, and turned his attention to his phone. A bit of fiddling showed him more than the camera feeds alone, returning information about the location of his brother and the monk as they swiftly made their way through the forest. The tea, as it turned out, was terrible enough to lack anything resembling soothing qualities and Hanzo found himself hunched over the phone in his lap, only barely resisting the urge to pace as the point of convergence with the assassin’s presumed route grew ever closer.

“What’s...wrong?” The sound of another’s voice, even soft and breathy as it was, startled him so badly he jerked upright hard enough to slam the top of his head into the bottom of the upper bunk. “Heh. Sorry…’bout that.”

“I did not realize you were awake.” Hanzo slid off the bunk and went to his side. “Are you well? Do you require anything?”

“Well...as I’d expect.” The corner of his mouth twitched slightly, not really a smile or anything close to it. “Mighty thirsty. Something to...drink’d be nice.”

“Of course.” It took only a moment to retrieve one of the canisters of electrolyte drink from the storage room. He found a handful of squeezable sports bottles hiding in the back of the cabinet holding the coffee cups and returned with one, juice freshly mixed, to find Cole still awake and eying his phone where it lay on the bed with obvious interest. “Here. Let me help you.”

“Much...obliged.” Hanzo, in truth, did most of the work of holding the bottle steady while he swallowed; the mere act of moving, even a little, seemed to extract a high price in pain from him and a thin sheen of sweat broke out on his brow. “Ambrosia. Thank you...kindly.”

He set the bottle aside and settled on the edge of the cot. “Are you warm enough? There are more blankets.” He paused, considered the closed box of medical supplies sitting on the upper bunk. “There may be painkillers but -- “

“Nah. Talked with...Zen.” That there and gone again not-smile. “Can’t risk...blood thinners...right now.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “What’s...wrong?”

“Nothing with which you should concern yourself.” Hanzo offered the bottle again and Cole obediently drank down a few more sips.

“Liar.” His head fell back in the pillows.

Hanzo considered, sighed and retrieved his phone. The man had the right to know. “The assassin that shot you has somehow managed to follow us, if not locate this place exactly. Genji and Zenyatta have gone to intercept it.”

Cole blinked up at him. “It?”

“An omnic, of a kind none of us have encountered before.” He opened the screen and pulled up the security display.

Genji and Zenyatta’s icons were stationary, having reached the optimal point of potential contact. Hanzo opened the camera feeds and scrolled through them until he found one that offered at least a partial glimpse of them, lying in wait, snow falling steadily around them, and showed it to Cole. “The perimeter has visual and motion detection monitors for several miles surrounding this place. If it makes it past them, I will still see it coming in time to take action.”

It was, he thought, only a small lie and hopefully a comforting one. Cole stared up at him, expression still and dark eyes unreadable, and then nodded slightly. “...Thanks.”

“You are welcome.” Hanzo stood and pulled the blankets a bit higher over him as he shivered. “Rest. If anything happens I will wake you.”

He did, eventually, rest; Hanzo took up station on the floor next to the cot, listened to the slow, labored rhythm of his breath and the small, pained sounds that escaped him when he was too unaware to stop them, cycled through the camera feeds in sequence. Occasionally he caught glimpses of foliage still in motion, masses of snow falling from branches overhead, even hints of animal life, but no sign of the omnic. Genji was circling slowly outward from the stationary interception point, while Zenyatta kept watch from there, and Hanzo activated his own comm to listen in on their quiet, to-the-point conversation, his nerves slowly winding tighter as no contact was made.

When the perimeter contact trill sounded again, it was nearly a relief. All the other open panes on his phone closed and the registering point of contact opened, along with its coordinates on the perimeter itself. It was with a jolt that Hanzo realized the contact was deep inside the perimeter, less than a quarter mile from the cabin itself, and a second, stronger jolt as he beheld what caused it: enormous, bulkier around the upper body and the thighs, with a muzzle more lupine than insectile, hands more claw than finger and feet more in common with paws than human extremities.

“Oh, damn.” The security system realized what they were looking at more or less simultaneously.

Hanzo reached up and triggered his comm. “Genji. There is more than one.”

On the screen, the omnic beast leapt away, bounding through the forest in ground-eating strides. Hanzo made certain the laces of his boots were secure, pulled on his gloves, slipped quiver and bow over his shoulder and sprinted for the door. “Lock the cabin down behind me!”

It was snowing more steadily now, the wind from the west rising along with it. At his back, the blast shutters slid shut over the door and the windows and as he swung up onto the porch roof, the comm unit in his ear crackled with the security system’s voice. “Lockdown complete. Unlock code is quarry down.”

“Understood.” The snow was eight inches deep on the flattest parts of the roof and the footing was treacherous at best but the false chimney at least provided a windbreak and a place to wait unseen for his target to break cover.

Beneath his skin he felt the dragons shiver, coils winding tight, aroused by his tension and their awareness of the storm, creatures of the tempest that they were. They gifted him with that awareness without even a plea and, for a moment, he was one with the wind as it sloughed through the pines frosting the rise, sent curtains of snow falling in waves across the clearing, dusting the metal flesh of the creature waiting in the deep shadow of the woods, falling on his own back and shoulders as he drew an arrow and set it to the string. Now that he knew where to look, he could see its contours, a mountainous shadow beneath the pines, the sensor arrays that made up its eyes gleaming redly in the dark. It was on those pinpricks of red that he fixed his focus, adjusted the arc of his fire to account for the wind, and, drawing to the ear, released an armor-piercing arrow at its head.

It sat, immobile, until the instant before contact -- and then it moved, the shot passing through empty air and embedding itself in the tree beneath which it had sheltered, breaking cover and crossing the ground between itself and the cabin with horrifyingly explosive speed. Hanzo fired again, a scatter arrow a handful of feet in its lead and was rewarded with an inhuman howl as a spray of flechettes peppered its face and chest. Significantly less rewarding was the reaction: a leap that carried it a dozen feet above the peak of the roof and sent him scrambling to avoid being beneath it as it came back down, its claws raking inches deep into the false chimney’s stonework and the solar panelling that made up the roof cover under the force of its fall and weight and strength. Hanzo skidded backwards down the steeply angled upper side of the roof, the beast in pursuit, reaching for him with taloned hands, jaws lined in metallic fangs the length of his fingers agape.

He fired directly into that yawning maw at point-blank range and barely half-draw, the armor-piercing point punched cleanly through the back of its skull even as it slammed into him, talons raking down his right side ribs to thigh, momentum bouncing them off the porch roof and over the side. The landing was not a graceful one for either of them, the beast clawing at the back of its head, clearly wounded but not mortally so, Hanzo barely managing to turn it into an impact-mitigating roll, ribs and hip and leg howling protest as he did so. Even so, the distance he gained was not enough and when the creature lashed out, backhand, it caught him in the chest with force sufficient to drive every pascal of air from his lungs and send him flying, skidding to a halt a dozen feet away, bow skidding across the snow, skull ringing from its impact with the ground. For a moment he could do nothing but lay there, chest heaving as he struggled to breathe, black explosions of pain and oxygen deprivation going off behind his eyes as broken bones ground together in his chest, his own blood reddening the snow. He heard, at a vast distance, the sound of the antipersonnel turrets firing their hard-light beams, the screech of tearing metal as its talons disposed of them, the resonant impact as it rammed its weight into the blast-shielded door. Heard the blast shield begin to bend, to fail.

It took almost all of his remaining strength to make it to his knees, to limp-crawl across the length of snowy clearing separating him from his bow, to extract an arrow from the quiver. The omnic creature had the top of the blast door bent outwards and was in the process of tearing it out of its recessed housing as he pushed himself to his feet, spat blood and dragged in a searing breath, took aim in the loosest sense of the term with shaking arms.

The shot he fired lit the sky for miles in a flare of lightning-stroke white and stormcloud blue, left partially molten and barely-identifiable bits of omnic monstrosity scattered for a quarter-mile in all directions, and swallowed down the last of his strength in mind and body, the price that neither he nor his guardians could avoid paying. In his mind, he heard them keening distress even as they killed for him, even as his knees folded beneath him and the snow-covered earth embraced him in its soothing cold. He could feel them writhing beneath his skin, trying to force his battered flesh to move, to get to his feet, to his knees, anything that would allow him to save himself. Felt their efforts fail as his battered body refused to respond; he was losing blood, too much and too rapidly, his aching bones broken in too many places to hold him up.

Felt, instead, something else moving him: strong hands rolling him over and catching him beneath the armpits, dragging him across the snow and up the porch steps, propping him against the outside wall beneath that relative cover as it completed the demolition of the blast door. He could not lift his head, or offer any meaningful resistance -- could only barely open his eyes enough to perceive, through a haze of pain and blood-loss and exhaustion, a blur of misty and indistinct darkness, coils of shadow and a smudge of bone white where a face should be, as claw-tipped hands reached for him again.

***

“Genji. There is more than one.”

His brother’s voice, in his ear, had been calm, even, not even remotely surprised and had planted a seed of fear in him -- fear that sped his heart and tightened his insides and he had been the one stalking an unseen omnic assassin through a darkened forest in the middle of a snow storm. That fear had blossomed into outright terror was Zentatsu and Mizuchi lit the heavens in a soundless burst of unleashed power that dissolved the storm above them and sent a keening wail of distress echoing through the bond they shared with their sister into the depths of his own being. The omnic assassin taking up station a half-mile away, attempting to lock onto Cole’s heat signature through the walls of the cabin, had shortly thereafter met him at something other than his most serene and merciful.

“Go,” Zenyatta told him, gently. “I will bring what is left back with me. Hurry.”

Hurrying was not the term he would use to describe the speed he made down the side of the mountain, straining his cybernetically enhanced reflexes to their utmost, barely touching the ground until he reached the edge of the clearing itself. Where there had clearly, obviously been a fight. Pieces of...something...lay scattered across a wide area, the snow around them melted from the heat that had attended their dismemberment. The front wall of the cabin looked as though it had been mauled by an angry bear with claws capable of cleaving solid stone; the door frame was twisted out of true, and the door itself damaged. The steps and the boards were smeared with blood.

His heart skipped a beat and his internal autonomic control systems activated, attempting to adjust his rate of heart and breath, even as he wanted to begin screaming and not stop. The blood trail continued inside and down the hall, already tacky and drying, into the bedroom. He followed it, fighting down the fear threatening to engulf him entirely, and opened the door, bracing himself -- for the sight of his brother’s bloody corpse, for both his brothers’ bloody corpses -- and stopped on the threshold.

Hanzo lay unconscious on one of the bunk mattresses, laid out on the floor next to Cole’s cot, wrapped in biotic-impregnated bandages from mid-chest to nearly his right knee, covered in an impressive and spectacular array of cuts, contusions, and bruises. Situated at strategic points to maximize their efficiency and power, four high capacity biotic emitters covered them both in overlapping spheres of reparative energy. Even as he stood, stunned, Cole opened one dark eye and whispered, “Don’t...know when...he got here...but I think...he won.”

Genji nodded and whispered back, “I think you are correct. Rest. The others will be here soon.” And, so saying, he closed the door.

Zenyatta was brushing the snow off his shoulders as he entered the sitting area, still feeling slightly too overwhelmed to express the storm of emotions swirling within him in words. His master, of course, understood, rested comforting hands on his shoulders and held him silently as he shook under the force of it.

“Sparrow,” His master murmured, once the worst had passed, “What is that?”

Genji lifted his head and followed the direction of Zenyatta’s gaze. Sitting on the kitchen table, next to his phone, were a number of curious objects. A potted plant, its foliage such a deep red as to be nearly burgundy and the pot itself wrapped in metallic golden paper, sat in the middle of the table. Next to it, on the right: Cole’s hat which, Genji realized with an inward pang, had not been with them earlier -- he could not remember picking it up, or even seeing it during those few chaotic moments before their escape in Washington. Next to it, on the left: a package wrapped in plain, satiny red paper and tied with a golden bow and ribbon.

“I do not know,” He confessed and, at that instant, his phone chimed.

***

WickedCuteButDeadly: You there, Genji? We’re on our inbound leg, less than an hour out. What’s the situation?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: I will deactivate the perimeter momentarily. We have had, I confess, some excitement.

DeathFromAbove: Define ‘excitement.’

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: The assassins found us.

WickedCuteButDeadly:... DeathFromAbove:... MercyMercyMe:...

PeanutButterIsLife: There was more than one?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Yes. We were...not aware of that ourselves until only recently. I can, however, say with some confidence that the threat has been emphatically neutralized.

DeathFromAbove:...In a lot of tiny pieces?

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Yes. But Hanzo is injured -- I do not know how severely. Someone attended him before I could arrive and...this is the strangest thing…

WickedCuteButDeadly: Come on, don’t leave us hanging here!

GreenCyborgNinjaDude:...Whoever it was left a present.

DeathFromAbove: A present.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Yes. And Cole’s hat which, frankly, I believe we accidentally left behind in Arlington.

DeathFromAbove: So, the lot of you were, as of this reporting, possibly rescued from horrible death and/or maiming by Santa Claus. This is officially the strangest Christmas ever and I remember that one time someone accidentally dropped an experimental hallucinogenic crowd-control weapon at the base Christmas party in Geneva.

PeanutButterIsLife: And I’m still sure that wasn’t any kind of an accident.

MercyMercyMe: In any case, I will automate another medical bay here at Gibraltar to receive your brother when you arrive.

GreenCyborgNinjaDude: Thank you, Angela.

WickedCuteButDeadly: All right, you lot, touching down in fifteen. See you soon, Genji.

***

The team completed its landing, loading, and dust off in reasonably good order -- not as good as if they’d spent a couple months running behind-lines extraction drills but faster than his most pessimistic estimation when it came to their potential level of rust. He watched from a reasonably safe distance as the VTOL fans lifted the vehicle above the treeline and then high enough that, when Oxton stood that fat-assed ungainly thing on its tail and punched the afterburners the exhaust didn’t actually light anything on fire. It arched across the sky more gracefully than it had any right to, for a plane shaped like that, and vanished into the high, thin overcast, only just beginning to turn crimson with the oncoming dawn.

Red skies on Christmas morning. It seemed, at that moment, rather fitting considering the storm that was about to break on a number of people who should have known far, far better than this.

“You are such a sap when it comes to him, old man.” A voice that belonged to neither a navigation nor a security system informed him through the inboard comm built into his mask. “Someone’s going to figure that out and use it against you one day.”

“Possibly.” Probably you, the voice of brutal honesty replied in the back of his mind. “But not today.”

Notes:

Special thanks: to JoAsakura for graciously permitting me the use of Tombo, Zentatsu, and Mizuchi; to p1ratew3nch, Katschy, JoAsakura, and smol-sarcastic-snek for cheering me on. Maps of Arlington National Cemetery can be found here: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/ I strove to accurately depict the layout of Columbarium Court Nine while simultaneously playing fast and loose with its future size. The playlist I listened to while writing it can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/user/1248796996/playlist/4V2iZNGpYfGjniPw7szR0i Reinhardt Wilhelm owns a vintage collection of David Hasselhoff albums on vinyl. Search your feelings, you know this is true. More of my fannish ramblings can be found here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/solivar and here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/companerosdearmas