#embedded journalists tended to kind of lose their identity as journalists

[spookyteeths]

i’ve been researching military journalists for work and all i can think is man we are not beating the manufactured consent allegations

[subwalls]

WHUMPTOBER 2021 - 2/30

No. 2 - TALKING IS OVERRATED garotte | choking | gagged

Also available on AO3!

It’s not that Ranboo doesn’t want to protect Snowchester. 

He lives here. Of course he wants to keep it safe. And it’s not like he hates his kwami, either! Voyd is a blessing more often than not, a calming voice to keep him steady when the times get rough. 

The other Miraculous users are the same way. They all love their kwami and their power, and it’s unfair to expect everyone to hand them over just because the ex-Guardian said so. Fighting Dreamons is a good thing. Trying to separate Exdee from his wielder is a good thing.

It’s just… 

Ranboo doesn’t like Enderman.

Which is stupid, he knows. Ranboo is Enderman. Kind of.

Part of him is.

“Ranboo,” Voyd says, and Ranboo looks up from the cracked jewel of his cufflink. The kwami floats closer, her chitinous purple shell gleaming in the lamplight. “Honey’s pinging for Enderman. Are we going?”

Ranboo could say no. Voyd would understand—she’s understood in the past, and it’s not like there’s a lack of Miraculous users to pick up the slack—but, contrarily, that just makes Ranboo feel worse about it. She deserves a better wielder. One who doesn’t hesitate out of fear and misplaced sympathy. 

There is no other user she’d choose, though. There’s only Ranboo.

Ranboo, the Guardian without a guide, who can’t even meet the empty eyes of the body his brother used to inhabit. But he’s still here, isn’t he? Dream is still alive, empty or not, which means he has to be doing something right.

He takes a deep breath. Lifts his chin. He’s already in position to transform, anyway; nobody’s around. 

And Honey is asking for his help.

“Voyd,” Ranboo calls, and her body flashes a deep purple, already twisting into liquid light. “Warp in!”

His Miraculous lights up. Sparks erupt from the hairline fracture across the otherwise smooth face of the amethyst jewelry, but the magic runs its course anyway, armoring him in the light fabric of a suit and cloak, Enderman’s classic look settling cool and familiar over his body.

He doesn’t pay it any mind. Instead, he tries to cradle a single thought like trying to protect a candle in a hurricane, repeating it like a mantra: Don’t hurt Nightmare, don’t hurt Nightmare, don’t hurt Nightmare, don’t hurt Nightmare. Every transformation, he tries to remember that Nightmare forgot why he gave up Guardianship, only for Ranboo himself to forget the moment the light settles, but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

Don’t hurt Nightmare, don’t hurt Nightmare, don’t… 

… But why shouldn’t he?

Ranboo frowns to himself as the transformation completes in a rush of sparkling purple energy. He’s certain there’s a reason for that, because there always is, but he can’t remember what it could be.

Eh, it’s probably not important. Besides, Ranboo isn’t the one planning to punch Nightmare six feet into the ground once he’s found; that’s more Honey and Mellohi’s thing.

The guy deserves it, anyway. Unleashing Dreamons into the city is clearly an abuse of power much greater than anything they’ve ever done. So there.

Nodding to himself, Ranboo slips out of his hiding space to climb up the side of a building. With a flick of the wrist, his silken gloves darken and extend into sharp, tough points. The shadowy claws dig into the brickwork easily, letting him clamber all the way up to the roof without leaving a single dent in the wall behind him.

He spots the fight quickly. The Dreamon this time is a massive spider, easily three stories tall with even longer legs that go tap-tapping up the side of a mansion like it’s trying to climb inside. When its mandibles part in a hissing scream into the sky, the rest of its body flashes a violent teal under the sunlight. 

A blur of gold and black movement highlights Honey in the fray. He’s keeping the oversized bug occupied, poking irritably at its eyes with his lance-like weapon. There’s no tell-tale shine of Stinger in action, though, so he must not be having that much trouble.

Ranboo leaps buildings and rooftops—very much enjoying the rush of air and that lightweight feeling of being less affected by gravity than he’d normally be, untransformed—until he lands within shouting distance.

“Hey, Honey!” he calls cheerfully, and Honey turns with a bright whoop and greeting.

“You’re a bit late, Ender,” Honey says, grinning. “We had to get started without you!”

Ranboo snorts, and darts in to rake his claws against the Dreamon’s leg to stop it from advancing on them. “Why don’t you try sprinting halfway across the city in half a minute, and then you can talk?” he asks over the monstrous hiss of the recoiling spider.

“No need,” Honey says cheerfully. He does a little spin, clearly showing off the iridescent bee-like wings humming against his back, before swooping in to stab into the Dreamon’s eyes.

As the spider backs away from them, stumbling, Ranboo takes a moment to look it over properly. “Do you know where its Mask is, Honey?” he calls.

“Oh! Yeah, it’s somewhere under it, I think.” Honey points at his own stomach. “Like here-ish. It won’t let me make a dive for it, so do you think you can handle it, big man?”

“I hope so,” Ranboo says. Getting there the easy part; once Dreamons lose their Mask, they tend to go crazy until they get it back, and they don’t care if who or what stands between them. “Any idea where the victim is?”

“You know that bookstore next to Nihachu’s bakery?”

Oh boy. Non-transformed knowledge. Ranboo flounders for a moment, trying to grasp the fringes of his civilian self’s memory, and manages to pull up a mental map of Snowchester. “Yeah?”

“Think they’re in the back room somewhere.”

“Okay, okay.” Ranboo watches as the spider gets its bearings back, its body flashing teal again as it bellows at them. “So, you distract, I go get it, I Pearl out, and you Sting like my life depends on it because it most definitely does?”

“Read my mind,” Honey says, giving him a thumbs-up. “Make a bee line for that bookstore, and it’ll all work out in the end!”

Ranboo can feel himself withering at the halfhearted puns, which he swears Honey doesn’t even like that much (mostly because he tends to stumble over them a lot), it’s just to bother him with. “No.”

“No?”

“No, please, I can’t stand it.”

Honey laughs, throwing himself into a loop before buzzing up towards the spider’s face again. “You can’t hate puns this much, it’s a requirement to be a Miraculous user!” he shouts, barely audible from the growing distance between them.

“That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about Miraculouses to dispute it!” Ranboo retorts, and promptly dives out of the way as the spider staggers and its leg drives into the ground where he’d been standing a moment before.

They’re too far to communicate further, but Ranboo trusts that Honey’s occupying the Dreamon’s attention as much as possible. As for him, he maneuvers himself under the spider without much effort; the hardest part is getting up to the shiny abdomen.

Maybe the plan should be tweaked just a little. Pearl into it, grab it, drop off, and just make a normal run for the bookstore on foot.

Ranboo waits exactly twelve seconds just in case that idea is, in fact, so awful that they would’ve needed the Journalist to turn back time and stop him. No amnesiacs in eye-searing sweaters show up to stop him, so Ranboo taps his cufflink.

Light flashes across its surface, still catching on that little crack, but eventually the sparks it shoots out coalesces into a green glass orb that fits neatly into the palm of his hand.

Faintly, Ranboo catches a glimpse of an eye within his Miraculous that shuts. He’s on a countdown now; five minutes at best. Unfortunately, with his Miraculous broken the way it is, this is the only warning he’s going to get. 

Five minutes should be plenty of time, though.

Ranboo takes a deep breath, rocking his weight back, carefully positions himself right under the pale glimpse of porcelain embedded in the spider’s abdomen. He heaves once, twice, and throws—

The Pearl shatters on impact, and Ranboo feels the world drop out beneath him. He digs his claws into the tough exoskeleton of the spider (spiders do have exoskeletons, right? He thinks they do, they’re bugs) and yelps, trying to flatten himself to the underside of the Dreamon as much as possible as it sways abruptly to the side.

It probably knows he’s there now, so he has to act quickly. Ranboo carefully extracts one hand and jams the sharp talons of his glove into the edges of the circular mask. It creaks, and then pops free with a quiet snap.

Above him, the Dreamon shudders.

“Alright, time to go,” Ranboo says, mostly to himself. He drops down just as a sickly wave of teal energy emanates from the Dreamon’s body, managing to avoid it by ducking under an overhang. The civilians who hadn’t yet evacuated abruptly keel over, coughing wet and sickly, and boy is Ranboo glad he didn’t get caught in that. Yikes.

The spider throws what can only be called a tantrum, stomping its feet and reeling about with furious screeches. Ranboo’s starting to think he isn’t going to be able to leave the street intact when it suddenly freezes in place, rippling with the honey-warm glow of Stinger. 

Paralyzed, at least for the moment. Thank heavens for Honey. 

Ranboo sprints for the bookstore. 

It’s not too far, thankfully. Dreamons usually try their best to take the victim’s Mask as far from them as possible, which maybe has something to do with the whole ‘distance themselves from their worst emotions’ thing, but it looks like Honey managed to cut it off before it could get too far.

Maybe he’d been on the scene as a civilian? Ranboo makes a mental note of that. They don’t know each other’s identities, and he isn’t trying to know, but it would be useful to have an idea of where to look in case something happens.

Regardless, he’s here now, and he has two or three minutes left before he’ll need to recharge. He can only hope his civilian self brought Voyd those sprinkles she likes. 

Ranboo walks through the door and immediately gets caught on something—a thin line of some kind, pressed up to his throat. 

He coughs, immediately reeling back, but the wire goes with him, refusing to let up from his neck. Ranboo twists to the side, thrashing, and nearly slips out before someone pulls him down from the back and kicks the smiling Mask out of his hands.

The pale porcelain skitters over the floor with a rasp.

Ranboo can’t even reach for it. He paws at the wire, but the shadowy claws of his Miraculous suit can’t cut or damage anything. They can only catch against it.

The line goes tighter, somehow, and Ranboo makes a wheezing noise when he tries to cry out. “Shush,” says an unfamiliar voice, low and grating. “You were going to put that Dreamon back in me, weren’t you?”

Well, not usually phrased like that, Ranboo would say, if he could get the air to. He just coughs, hands at his neck. The line feels thick, but not metallic, like he’d expected. More like… silk. 

Spider silk.

Definitely the Dreamon’s victim, then. They always think they’re better off like this, letting their deepest emotions run amok without them, leaving the original person a seemingly logical shell of themselves with a few extra powers left over from the gaping hole in their heart.

They don’t usually take the initiative when it comes to attacking Miraculous users, though.

“Don’t worry,” the person says, as Ranboo’s vision starts to darken, “I’m not in the business of murdering children. I just want your Miraculous—Nightmare will let me have the Dreamon forever if I bring it to him…” 

Ranboo never sees the smile flash across their face, the unnatural glow of a Miraculous at work, because the next thing he knows, his cufflink is flashing purple and his half-mask is dissolving from his face and the rest of his suit is fading into light and his memories fall back into place and oh, is he going to die, is this where it ends, is he going to be the next failure of a Guardian who can’t even pass on the others properly, he still can’t breathe—

A blur of purple darts across his vision, a smear of color Ranboo blearily identifies as Voyd in squeaking anger, “Stop it, Dream, he’s your brother!”

The line slackens, but Ranboo tumbles into unconsciousness anyway.