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gingersnaaps · 3 years

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red light, green light

If there’s one thing that being with Aran Ojiro has taught you, it’s the importance of trust.

wc: 2.2k

tags/tw's(PLEASE READ): explicit n*fw, noncon, very unhealthy portrayal of bdsm dynamics, bondage, breathplay bc deepthroat, bratty/switchy!reader at the start turns into sub!reader, blowjob, penetration, fem!reader with inner genitals

a/n: written for @fallensvint's collab!! not proofread,, ill get to it later

i don’t want minors interacting with my content

The first time he’d wrapped those ties around your wrist, smooth and silky and surprisingly secure, you’d stared at him with confusion.

“Aran,” you mumbled. “What’s our safeword?”

He smiled, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. “Don’t you trust me?”

You’d been a bit apprehensive in the beginning, but as it turned out, he was right.

Every time he fucked you after that, every time he bound your wrists and spanked you until your ass glowed red - he always knew when to stop. It was as if he had some kind of sixth sense, a magic ability to read every twitch of your hips and crease of your brows, all the subtle signs that laid bare your inner thoughts and feelings. He knew when to give you more, when to slow down, when to stop entirely.

All you had to do was to close your eyes and let him take over. It felt easy. It felt right.

You suppose it made sense, too. He was a little older, a little wiser, and much more experienced. He knew what he was doing, and he was the one who showed you the ropes - quite literally. Aran knew how to tie all sorts of different knots, square knots and half-hitches and lark’s heads, letting you watch with your eyes blown wide as he threaded the rope into intricate patterns.

Still, at the end of the day, your favorite toy would always be the silk ties he’d first used. They had this allure to them, this magnetic pull that radiated out from the box in which he kept them. And when he used them to bind your wrists nice and tight, deft hands working quickly as the silk slid across your skin, your mind would always blur into a thick haze of arousal and want that left your cunt dripping with heat.

Sex was always better when he tied you up.

He didn’t have to hold you down, because the ties did the work for him, the restraints leaving your mind fogged up with submission, every thought wiped clean except the urge to be a good girl for him. It made him lose his fucking mind to see your doe eyes peering up through the lashes, begging oh-so-sweetly for him to fuck you. And since you always asked so nicely, he’s more than happy to oblige you.

He pounds his cock into your tight, quivering little hole, hips snapping relentlessly, each drag of this dick against your slick, sensitive walls coaxing a squeal from your lips, your cunt fluttering pathetically as pleasure starts to twist in your gut. You’d never deny how good it felt to be fucked stupid while tied up.

But there was more to your little obsession with his silk ties than just that.

There was some small part of you, some unexplainable compulsion, hidden beneath your sweet cries and high-pitched whimpers, that wanted to find out what Aran would look like if he was on the receiving end of things.

You wanted to see what he’d do.

It happens on a Saturday morning.

He’s exhausted from a full week of work - the volleyball season is in full swing again, and it always takes him some time to readjust, even if he doesn’t normally sleep in. It’s rare that you wake up earlier than him.

And maybe the alcohol you’d been drinking last night hadn’t worn off entirely, or maybe you were just feeling a little bold that day, a little impulsive, because you take one look at his sleeping form before you reach under the bed for his little box of toys. Sure, you hadn’t exactly discussed this with him beforehand - but he’d done similar things to you before: tied you up without warning, tried different positions in the middle of sex, little things here and there that were never really expected. The surprise was just supposed to be part of the fun, right?

The soft light of early morning filters in through the windows and sets his skin aglow. He looks so at peace when he’s asleep, so calm, the lines in his forehead and the bags under his eyes melting as he dozes away.

There’s not so much as a twitch from him as you tie his wrists together.

You pull aside the comforter, crawling on top of him until your face is inches away from his clothed cock. He looks so good like this - so handsome - the outline of his dick pressing up near his thigh, his toned legs exposed to the cold morning air. You press soft kisses along his inner thigh, trailing your lips up and down the shaft of his cock, dragging the tip of your tongue against the fabric.

There’s a soft rustling noise, and you feel him shift beneath you. “Babe?” he mumbles, voice thick with sleep.

You giggle nervously. “Good morning, Aran.”

“What are you doing?”

You blink up at him through your lashes and pull down his boxers. His cock springs out - it’s half-hard already, the tip slightly swollen, and you trail a finger over the leaking slit.

“Nice way to wake up, I won’t lie,” he says, sighing happily. He shifts slightly, as if trying to get up - and freezes.

You feel his body tense up, thighs flexing as you flick your tongue along his length.

“What happened to my hands?”

Your heart rate spikes. His voice is a bit more measured now, a bit more controlled, an underlying warning threaded through every word.

“Did you tie me up?” he asks, soft and dangerous.

You’re too flustered to make eye contact with him any longer, ducking away under his gaze. You nod hesitantly. His cock strains, twitching slightly, and you wrap your velvet lips around the head, taking him into your warm, wet, mouth with a pop.

“You better get these restraints off right fucking now.”

His outburst startles you. You weren’t expecting such a strong reaction, but the anger that undercuts his words is clear as day. If you untie him now, you know you’ll be in for a hell of an extremely unpleasant ride, one that might end with your ass blooming with bruises and face stained with tears.

For the first time since you’d gotten with Aran, the emotion that seeps into your veins isn’t excitement.

It’s fear.

You stay mute, bringing your hands up to scratch lightly across his thigh, drawing a groan from his chest. Your cunt pulses involuntarily at the noise he makes.

Maybe if you make him cum hard enough, he’ll forgive you.

It’s this faint, stupid, hope that makes you stretch your throat around his cock, trying to fit as much of him in as possible, lips bulging as you drool and slobber around him. It’s messy, pathetic - but your goal isn’t to preserve your dignity. It’s to make him feel good enough to let this slide.

“Feels so fuckin’ good, sweetheart,” he breathes, hips bucking upwards, cock sliding in further past your swollen, shiny, lips.

Maybe your strategy would even work.

You bob up and down, working his cock until it grows rock-hard against your tongue, the head pulsing and throbbing in your mouth, your tongue tracing along the underside of each vein. Precum dribbles down your throat, salty and slick, and you swallow eagerly. Your mind grows hazy as you slide yourself further down onto his dick, the up-and-down, back-and-forth motion intoxicating as he fills up every sense you have with his taste, his scent, the sight of his abs flexing as he strains against your mouth. You feel a hand slide to rest on top of your head, and you melt.

The expression on your face when the realization finally hits is too fucking precious.

You pull off of his cock, a string of drool still hanging from the corner of your lips, eyes darting around frantically. The silk bindings that you’d wrapped around his wrists lie in tatters on the bed, all torn and ripped, and Aran stretches leisurely.

“Why’d you stop?” he asks, the barest hint of a grin in his voice. “I didn’t say that you could stop.”

He leans forward, grabbing onto the top of your head, and drags you back to him until your lips are grazing the tip of his cock again. Disappointment is etched onto his features, but it’s a strange, twisted sort of disappointment - his eyes glitter, his pupils dilating - almost as if he’s giddy that you’d messed up and made a fool of yourself.

“Please,” you whimper. “D-don’t-”

“You know what happens to bad girls, don’t you?” he asks gravely, shaking his head. “Bad girls get punished. Don’t complain if you get what you deserve.”

With that, he forces your mouth back onto his dick, but with the help of his insistent hands, you’re able to take him even deeper than you were before. Your throat burns red and raw as he shoves your little mouth as deep as possible on his cock, gorging you on his thick, swollen length, impaling you on his dick until your eyes begin to tear up.

“Need to breathe,” you mumble, but your words are barely coherent with your mouth stuffed so full. The only noise that comes through are your small, desperate moans, and the little gagging noises from the back of your throat.

“What’s that?” he asks, nonchalant. “Didn’t hear you properly, baby. Speak up.”

It’s at this point that panic begins to flood your veins. Your head hurts from how hard he’s gripping it, a dull, throbbing ache that leaves tears trickling down your face. You’re not sure he’s going to relent any time soon, either, because Aran seems dead set on making sure he sees your punishment through, even if it means leaving your jaw sore and tender for days. A haze begins to settle over your brain from the lack of oxygen, black spots creeping into the edges of your vision -

You lose it.

"Red," you scream against his cock. "Red." You faintly remember reading somewhere that this was the word that meant stop, the one that was used when things went to far.

"I'm not sure what that means, baby."

“Please, Aran,” you cry. “I’m serious. Stop. Stop. I’m not kidding.”

Your chest heaves uncontrollably with your sobs, tears and drool mixing as slick drips down his shaft and onto his fat balls. The words you want to get out aren’t really coming through, but you keep trying, slobbering all around his dick as your muffled moans vibrate against his crotch.

He sighs. “Alright, alright. You’re a bit softer than I thought.”

His words send a pang of hurt through your chest - you’d tried your hardest, and wasn’t that enough? - but it’s pure relief that floods into your veins when he finally drags you off of his cock. You gasp for air, wheezing and coughing as oxygen finally floods into your lungs.

You look pretty, he thinks. A bit like a drowned kitten, with your lashes wet, your hair messed up, and lips all bitten and swollen and leaking with drool.

It makes his cock twitch against his stomach.

He flips you over onto the bed, pinning your wrists down, and lines the tip of his cock up so it prods at your entrance. “Ready?” he asks.

And to be honest, you’re not, but at least he’s stopped choking you with his cock. Maybe you should be grateful for that.

When he pushes his cockhead past your tight, clenched pussy lips, it’s unbearably slow. It leaves your insides aching, raw and needy, even when the drag of his dick against your slick, ribbed, walls stops, even when he’s bottomed out and his balls are tapping gently against your cunt. He fucks you slow and deep, pushing up against your g-spot, breaking you apart on his cock until you’re sobbing again for an entirely different reason.

This is punishment, remember?

It feels like hours have gone by before that familiar wave of pleasure begins to build steadily in your core. Every thrust of his hips leaves you reeling, eyes rolling back into your head, fingers fisting at the bedsheets - but he’s still fucking you so slowly it hurts. Your cunt clenches uselessly, greedy and desperate, as if it’s trying to keep him buried inside you, and it draws a breathy chuckle from his lips.

“Close?” he asks, pulling his cock out almost all the way.

You nod eagerly and buck your hips up. You don’t really care if you look stupid or pathetic, because all you want right now is for him to speed up his maddeningly slow pace, to fuck you until you’re drooling into the mattress.

He pushes back in, snapping his hips harshly, and you squeal - you’re right on the precipice, your orgasm building and coiling tight in your gut, the walls of your cunt cinching around his cock like a vice -

He pulls out.

You’re silent for a few seconds, brain still too hazy to comprehend what he’s doing, but then you hear him speak, voice low and rough, and you shiver.

“Bad girls don’t get to cum.”

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willowcrowned · 4 years

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Grey Apprentice AU (Installment #4)

aka Sith!Obi-Wan AU Flavor II

(Previous parts: x x x)

Qui-Gon paces the length of his and Obi-Wan's small sitting room, first once, then twice, then a third time. He looks up, expecting the usual dry comment from Obi-Wan on jedi masters’ peaceful bodies and minds, but he’s not there. Of course, that’s the problem in the first place: Obi-Wan is gone, off on a ship with a figure that felt like a maelstrom of darkness in the Force, and he’d left with a wink. The man must know something Qui-Gon doesn’t, but what it is, he can’t guess.

He turns, pausing at the entrance to Obi-Wan's room. He normally doesn’t enter without permission; it’s an invasion of Obi-Wan's privacy— privacy to which he is well entitled— but in this case...

Qui-Gon grimaces, opening the door. He won’t snoop, won’t do anything other than have a superficial look. At the very least it might calm him down to have tangible evidence of Obi-Wan's intention to return. When they’d left, he hadn’t taken the black bag he usually keeps with him, a velvet thing smaller than Qui-Gon's palm. Obi-Wan wouldn’t have left it if he thought he’d be gone for more than a week.

The room is just as Obi-Wan had left it, tidy and empty, with a plant on the desk next to a picture of his friends, a spare cloak hung up on the peg next to the door, and a blanket folded perfectly at the foot of his bed. It’s the room of a knight, not of a padawan, Qui-Gon realizes, and he has to push down the surge of pride and guilt that seems to swell up in his chest more and more often these days.

He frowns, for the first time noticing the odd pressure building in his brain. It’s a strange, blunt, thing— the marked absence of something, rather than its presence. He scans the room once more for the offending object, for the first time noticing an odd red glow from the closet. Qui-Gon pauses. He’d said he wouldn’t touch anything, but— The glow grows brighter, and he can hear the Force calling to him from it, not light, not peaceful, but not unkind. Qui-Gon sighs, and opens the closet door.

The glow is coming from the floor, within the black bag Obi-Wan had left behind. Qui-Gon looks at it, a furrow forming in his brows. It’s not Obi-Wan's habit to leave things on the floor, and the cleaning crews haven’t been in their apartments since they left. When he picks up the bag, intending to return it to its place on the shelf, a white-hot pain sears through his hand, and he drops it. The bag tumbles to the floor, and out of it falls a holocron.

It’s the last thing Qui-Gon notices before the onslaught of darkness hits him, pressing him beneath a tsunami of emotion. The fury slams into him first, not so hot as the zabrak’s had been but far, far, deeper. Qui-Gon falls to his knees without noticing, forced to sustain the mental battering of his shields. He can feel them weakening even as he clutches them tighter, being torn away bit by bit like an old house in a storm.

How is no one noticing this, Qui-Gon wonders. How come no one has come in to see what this endless wave of darkness is— this storm with no light.

The first tear in his shields happens, and he works it shore it up, plugging it with whatever he can think of: random bits of trivia, a poem, a meal he shared with Obi-Wan. Stay, he tells them, give me time. The pieces do not stay, each layer being ripped away until all that’s left was the look on Obi-Wan's face as he realized the sandwich he’d bitten into was filled with candied ants. Then, abruptly, the maelstrom stops, and Qui-Gon is left grasping for the pieces of his shields, the void around them quiet once more.

“Do forgive my intrusion,” a female voice says, dry and unapologetic as Qui-Gon struggles to get control of his breathing on the floor. “You know how it is: better safe than sorry.”

Qui-Gon falls back, resting against the wall as he tries to catch his breath. “What are you?” He says, injecting his tone with as little worry as he can manage. “What are you doing here?” What are you doing in Obi-Wan's room, he wants to add. What have you done to my padawan?

Zannah’s nose scrunches slightly, halfway between amused and disgusted. “Your shields are down, Jedi.”

“I wonder why that is,” he manages.

She shrugs. “I’m not going to apologize.”

Qui-Gon patches up his shields, weaving the skeleton of the old threads of memory into a new place, beside several strong pockets of compulsion. It won’t be enough to stop the woman if she attacks him again, but it might gain him a few seconds of reprieve. It will have to be enough.

“As for your questions,” the woman says once he’s finished, “A Sith, sleeping, Obi-Wan brought me here, and I’ve done nothing to him.”

“Nothing,” Qui-Gon repeats, disbelieving, the aftershocks of her attack still filtering through his mind.

“Yes,” the woman says. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Darth Zannah. I’d tell you to sit down, but, well...” She gestures to him collapsed on the floor.

Qui-Gon shakes his head, trying to disseminate the information. “Does he know you’re here? Does he know what he brought back?” Surely not, he thinks. Surely Obi-Wan wouldn’t have knowingly brought a Sith into the heart of the Jedi temple.

“I should hope so,” Zannah says, “given that I’ve been training him for twelve years.”

“Twelve—” Qui-Gon freezes.

“Yes,” Zannah agrees, “since Bandomeer.”

“Impossible,” Qui-Gon breathes.

“Is it?” Zannah raises an eyebrow in a perfect imitation of Obi-Wan— or, no, all this time Obi-Wan must have been imitating her. Qui-Gon remembers when he picked that little habit up; it had been the months after he’d turned seventeen, just beginning to grow into his too-long limbs, still gawkish and almost awkward. Then, over the course of their mission, his gait had grown smoother, countenance more graceful, and his awkward smiles at Qui-Gon's jokes had turned into an amused raised eyebrow and half-smirk.

It had felt odd at the time, watching the maladroit child he knew turn into a clever, subtle, adult, but he knows it now as the sign of Obi-Wan growing up, leaving Qui-Gon as a student and returning to him as a friend. He remembers the white stone of the city, remembers the late spring blossoms of the sea-roses, remembers the first time Obi-Wan had turned that quizzical look on him— and feels the taste of the memory, sweet with the blossoms, turn to ash in his mouth.

“How—” Qui-Gon starts, mouth dry. “Why—”

“I offered him knowledge,” Zannah says, not unkindly, “and companionship not to be found in the constraints of Jedi.”

“Why train him?” Qui-Gon asks, clutching at proof that she has not— could not— have trained Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan is kind, and clever, and selfless, and none of the things a Sith should be. He cannot have lied so fully for so many years. He cannot. “Why not train someone else? Someone you wouldn’t have to corrupt first?”

Zannah gives him an incredulous look. “You think I’ve corrupted him? Have you forgotten Ghé’aiit so easily? That was not the behavior of one corrupted.”

Qui-Gon feels ire stir deep in his chest, at her prodding, guiding rhetoric, but the memory springs to him unbidden.

It had begun as a trade dispute. Three families, each the head of a government and of a trade sector. The Jedi had initially been brought in to facilitate negotiations; those had lasted all of two nights, ending with Obi-Wan kidnapped and in chains— a hostage for the third family. Qui-Gon hadn’t known that at the time, of course. He’d only known that Obi-Wan was gone and the place where their bond was had turned to a jagged mess of edges before it disappeared into nothingness.

He’d found Obi-Wan again, oblivious to Qui-Gon's presence, escaped and facing the Third Peer, who was holding a blaster to his sister’s head. It would have been easy, laughably easy, for Obi-Wan to let him shoot her, claim he had gotten there too late to save her, and arrested the Third Peer with little risk to himself. Instead, Obi-Wan had lain down his blaster, and braced himself for the shot.

(Later, when their bond was back and whole, Qui-Gon had blocked it off again, too overwhelmed by fear and relief not to yell at Obi-Wan. How could he yell at Obi-Wan, when he’d done exactly as a Jedi should do? But how could he not be angry, not be furious, that he had lain down his blaster and braced himself for death as if it were second nature? How can I forgive you, Qui-Gon had thought then, for almost leaving me? How will I be able to let you go when it’s time?)

“He scared me too,” Zannah says softly. “When I heard what he had done, I could barely restrain myself. Foolish, loving, Jedi, and their need to do the right thing.”

“I hope you don’t think,” Qui-Gon says, tired, “that I trust you.”

“No,” Zannah says. “You’re not a stupid man, on the whole. I hope you will trust Obi-Wan, though.”

Qui-Gon sits straight up, reminded of what had caused his agitation in the first place. “Obi-Wan. You sent him after that darksider?”

“Darth Maul,” Zannah agrees. “I wouldn’t fear, he’s not a match for Obi-Wan— merely the servant of the Sith Master.”

“You would send Obi-Wan to do another Sith’s dirty work?” Qui-Gon doesn’t hide the curl of his lip from her, meeting her gaze head-on. “I thought the masters were supposed to discard their apprentices themselves.”

“I do not,” she hisses, eyes flashing, “do that creature’s dirty work.”

“Lady Zannah—” Qui-Gon replies coldly.

“Lord, actually,” Zannah corrects, and all of a sudden the fire has left her eyes. “The title is ‘lord’ regardless of gender. A Sith Lady is a different job entirely.”

“Lord Zannah,” Qui-Gon corrects, making sure she can hear the eye-roll inherent in his tone, “Are you implying that not only are you embroiled in a rivalry with another Sith clan, but that you have, in fact, created your own?”

“We call them houses,” Zannah replies. “Mine is that of Athén. And you are correct, Obi-Wan is a part of it. We are a House of two.”

Fantastic, Qui-Gon thinks bitterly, and his patch-job must not be as good as he thinks it is because he swears he hears Zannah chuckle. He sighs. “Out of curiosity, what is the job of a Sith Lady?”

“A combination of cultural advisor, archivist, and magic user. And occasionally a consort.” Zannah smiles a wickedly sharp smile. “I much prefer being a Lord.”

Yes, Qui-Gon thinks, not caring that she can hear it. You would.

Some notes:

-Yes Zannah did name her house after her dead wife, who is in turn named after Athena, because I am a basic, basic, bitch

-Yes, I did borrow the line about Sith jobs from the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Patricia C. Wrede I’m so sorry I’m using your work for my nonsense AUs but also those books shaped me as a human, so. Too Bad. They’re a part of my writing now.

- I included a bug-eating joke because apparently I am constantly under the compulsion to talk about people in sw eating bugs. I have no excuses

#I still need a name for this AU so if you've got suggestions hand 'em over #this is long enough to be an actual fic chapter #but it is also woefully underedited and I dislike posting unfinished things on AO3 in any case #on the offchance I do ever finish this story I may edit and post it on AO3 #star wars #star wars au #sith au #sith!obi wan #darth zannah #qui gon jinn #grey apprentice AU

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badassindistress · 3 years

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The Thylead (Session 23)

We, in the temple built for unknown Gods,

Beat those who by their words would not be bound

Thalestris, home again against all odds

As High Priestess witnessed the new Queen crowned.

Thalestris shouts to Daran that the false Queen is there and she should do as she judges best. Everyone gets the chance to look away from the Medusa Queen, except Iliana, to whom bad things happen.

Phryné trances and foretells two good events. Faux Makhaila goes into some sort of a rage. She tries to hurt Cleophe but Cleophe strugs everything off, including the Medusa’s glare. {verse 54} The Medusa attacks her with her hairsnakes. Iliana shrugs off the petrification, just like Phryné foretold, and burning hands the imposters. Mania tries to hit the fake Queen with her staff with her eyes closed and fails. The snakehair poisons her.

Cleophe’s spirit guardians hit Fake Makaila so hard she explodes. Nobody knows why. Sadly she takes Basil with her in the flying shrapnel. She seems to have been made of metal. Azelma holds up a handmirror in front of her face to try and reflect the Queen’s gaze.

Azelma hits the wall with her eyes closed. The Medusa slashes her claws at Mania, grapples her and tries to use her snake eyes to make Mania look at her. She uses all her power to make Mania look at her, but as Phryné foretold, Mania withstands her gaze. Mania tells her she has no right to this throne or this island and tries to curse her, but the medusa laughs it off, intimately familiar with curses.

Daran leaps forward with a war cry and slashes at the medusa. She looks her straight in the eye and doesn’t flinch. It makes the medusa let go of Mania. {Verse 55} She gets attacked for it, gets slashed at and poisoned and passes out in the fake Queen’s eyes. The medusa stabs her again. Phryné foretells her own success as she runs to Daran with wide open eyes to cure her.

Iliana burning hands the Queen again, who still has a hold of Daran. The medusa tries to shove her way out. Thalestris runs after her. Thalestris nearly kills her. Phryné runs up close and knocks her out with the hilt of her dagger. Thalestris and Azelma immediately tie her up, Thalestris heals Daran. Thalestris picks up the fake Queen’s silver helmet it disintegrates in her hands. Thalestris remembers the room as the inner altar of the temple. There’s a statue of Lutheria that Thalestris feels a strange urge to touch (not a compulsion).

Iliana takes the makaila-bot’s faceplate and sees that this is very good magical craftsmanship, a robot body with illusion magic bolstering it. It’s probably tied to the Fake Queen’s illusion magic. Phryné gives the medusa a sedative to keep her down. They clean up the room, stashing the other bodies in the bedroom.

Thalestris does not want them to mess around with the altar room. She asks Daran if she feels anything when she looks at the statue. Daran says it’s unsettling. Mania didn’t feel the need to touch it either. It’s a white marble statue of Lutheria with her scythe and onyx eyes. Phryné throws her bones to ask if Daran should say her secret royal words in the room. The bones say it would be good.

Daran thanks Phryné for rescuing her and asks her and Thalestris to come witness with her. Mania helps Daran clean up and they go upwards to find the guard amazons. The guards immediately salute the princess. Thalestris tells them they’re required downstairs In the temple. Mania tells them they’ve uncovered a traitor.

Daran kneels in front of the altar and starts chanting. Power builds up in the room and the statue begins to shake and cracks appear in it. It turns to dust. Thalestris passes out. She has a vision of a glowing golden sphere. As she looks at it, she begins to see holes on it, places that look corrupted and dark and strange on the surface. Her vision zooms out and she seems strange eldritch creatures poking and prodding at the sphere. She sees Thylea inside the sphere, suddenly she sees Lutheria, a glowing golden light from her fingertips, hands up, with a madness of staring too long into the void in her eyes. Thalestris wakes up and continues kneeling. Daran stands up and says “the Gods have recognised me as Queen of Themis. Do you witness?” The two amazons witness and acknowledge her as their Queen. IN the statue rubble is a leather choker with three rings hanging from it. She hands it to Thalestris, it was the old priestess’. Daran explains the evil Queen plot to the amazons, how her Queen-mother made the traitors swear an oath to keep her alive.

(Everyone gets 1 point of honour! Phryné and Thalestris 2 as the witnesses) Daran and her new Amazon bodyguards go and free Astarte and Osima. Cleophe gives them her sword back. They go to put the Medusa in the prison cell. The lizard folk ask if this is a good time to get freed. Mania tells them they should tell their Queen that the Chosen Ones are going to save Thylea and that she’d do well to join their cause. They want to save their smith and they ask them

Thalestris tells Daran about her vision. Daran tells her that there hasn’t been a priestess that had been able to have true vision in such a long time. Thalestris is getting quite flustered. They bond about having to train in solitude and not talking to people. Thalestris tries to give the necklace back to Daran because she won’t be able to go back to the island. Daran says that’s all the more reason to be protected, to win, to be strong. Thalestris says she’ll be strong for her, the island. Thalestris says she has to go again, because the others don’t know much about the things outside this world. Daran agrees those things are not spoken of in the outside world. Lutheria is a guardian of sorts, according to the stories Daran’s mother told her. Daran doesn’t know what would happen if things changed. Thalestris says there must have been a reason Lutheria sent her followers to take over the islands. One of the first things she did was force her followers to feed Titan’s Bane to the Hydra, she didn’t want anyone to use it. Daran promises Thalestris that when she comes back she’ll be stronger, she’ll be a worthy Queen. Thalestris promises to be a stronger priestess. As an afterthought Thalestris asks what Makaila’s symbols on her armour mean. She’s the first one who doesn’t snicker. She says it’s probably a prank and nobody was allowed to prank her. She doesn’t know what it means.

It’s a necklace for druids with spaces for three animal parts. It gives her an extra cool wildshape. She tries to get one of the other amazons to explain makaila’s symbol means. They laugh a little bit, but don’t explain. Iliana dutifully does her homework and takes notes on the medusa. She takes out the little robot, which is beeping and still trying to march. Thalestris spots it and asks what it is.

Thalestris says they should throw it in the ocean. Mania asks why. Thalestris explains her vision, that she thinks that Lutheria is messing around with extra-planar beings. Mania says that can’t be, because Kentimane protects the entirety of Thylea from the outside world. Thalestris thinks the robot is connected to Lutheria. Cleophe says the same effect happened with her family. Thalestris explains that like the underworld is part of our world, but also not. There’s lots of other worlds. Azelma asks about a kind of plane with horrible shadow creatures. Thalestris says there is, Azelma says she saw that as a kid once.

Thalestris asks if they want her to travel with them again, they all say of course, don’t you want to travel with us. Iliana wants to see what makes the robot tick. Thalestris explains they sacrifice to all the gods of all the planes to keep them happy. They don’t actually know the specific gods, it’s just that they’re there so to be safe they sacrifice.

Iliana sees the robot is a construct, infinitely self-powering with some kind of mechanism to change its shape. Thalestris shares that the titan’s blade is inside the hydra. The hydra’s intestinal fluids would damage a person.

(Having the Titan’s Blade might help Daran convince people, it’s the Queen’s weapon. The lizardfolk say Fire Island is under the constellation of the prisoner.)

Mania kneels down with the staff to get a feeling from Kentimane, to see if he’s alright. She gets a feeling of overwhelming tiredness. Then she gets a vision. She sees herself on the lip of a caldera of a volcano and sees herself falling in and massive hands forming from down below and grabbing at her. Mania comes out of her trance weeping. Phryne comes over to hug her and wipe her tears with her veil.

Thalestris says that she couldn’t tell if Lutheria was helping or harming. Mania agrees the prophecy doesn’t say that the twin titans need to be killed.

Cleophe, feeling lost, checks on her egg. She hears a little tapping side, coming from inside. After a minute, there’s a little crack and a tiny dragon crawls out. She recognises Cleophe and nuzzles into her. “There you are again” Cleophe says, as the catsized dragon shakes out her wings. Cleophe Bonds with her and both start to glow as she recites her Oath. Iris is a little silver dragon now. Mania gives Cleophe the bracelet she got her and spends a long time babytalking at Iris and scratching her little chin.

And that’s the end of this session of the Thylead…

@aporeticelenchus @leomundstinyblog @m-siecle @pioup-pioup @somuchbetterthanthat @abubblingcandle

#baby dragon!!!!!!#dnd #session recap #odyssey of the dragonlords #a talia original #thylead #mania's fun and flirty adventure #robots!#time to go fight a hydra gang!

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thedreadvampy · 4 years

Text

so I understand you like Historical Mechs Fandom stuff

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your ship?” Nastya raises an eyebrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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the-magnus-archives-wiki · 5 years

Text

Red string & Spiders

The Web is obviously gonna be important in season 5 and ive been meaning to dig into some of it’s threads (hah) for a while. Now, I know about Web!Martin and I admit that it’s a possibility, but i dont personally see the narrative taking that route.

I don’t know that all these connections are intentional manipulations either, but I’m just gonna work under the assumption that they are and see where it gets me. Somewhere behind the scenes, Annabelle and the Mother are playing five dimensional chess and laughing at all of us.

This ended up being a bit long (1.5k words, whoops!) so it’s going under a cut.

123: Web Development.

“You would have to write out, and post, in full, a horrible event that had happened to you, or someone that you loved.“ This sounds an awful lot like Annabelle is collecting statements, possibly scouting victims and potential vectors through which she can influence the Institute? She starts doing this in early 2015 and that brings me to

16: Arachnophobia & 39: Infestation

Carlos Vittery's name is found in the Chelicerae website. His experience happened in early 2015 and he made his statement in April. Investigating his statement is what brings Martin into contact with Jane Prentiss and sets into motion a chain of events that saves everyone during the Infestation. ie, he ends up living at the archives and stashes the extra fire extinguishers and the corkscrew.

Of course, Prentiss is also forced to start the wormpocalypse early after Jon accidentally discovers it when killing a spider.

147: Weaver & 80: The Librarian

It’s that damn lighter. From 147: “I realise that addiction is one of the strongest vectors of control there is.“ Leitner wouldn’t have been left alone if Jon hadn’t gone for a smoke, or just vaped instead. (Daisy helpfully mentions that he smokes Silk cut brand at one point -.-)

Of course, the lighter was delivered alongside the web table and destroying it is also what directly lead Jon to meeting Leitner in the first place. idk if the goal here would’ve been to actually get Leitner killed or if that was just a side-effect of pushing Jon further along his journey?¨

121: Far Away

The Web sends Oliver Banks to feed Jon a statement and encourage him to go full avatar. It’s just very kind and helpful, huh?

130: Meat

It helpfully points toward using a body part as an anchor when entering the coffin. This whole mess gets Jon marked by both the Flesh and the Buried.

Hill Top Road, pt 1

There’s A Lot Too Unpack Here

So they’re originally using this place to ensnare fresh adults and filling them with spiders. I think it is a place of power and essentially a production facility for the hollow type of spider person that Trevor encounters in 56. These might very well be the “spider husks” that got Daisy sectioned in the first place.

Then there’s the whole mess with Agnes. I still don’t feel like I fully understand what went down there. Let’s look at these two quotes:

“she had destroyed the place utterly. And yet she remained bound to it, tied to it in some vital way.” (Eugene Vanderstock, 139)

“It let the Mother of Puppets bind me to Agnes, interweave our existences at some… metaphysical level, as it had with Fielding and the house.” (Gertrude, 145)

So we have ties that bind between Fielding/Hill Top, Agnes and Gertrude. The way Eugene talks about it, seems that being bound to Hill Top wouldn’t prevent her from realising her destiny, but being bound to Gertrude did. And while waiting for Gertrude to die, doubt crept into her and made her unfit for their grand ritual.

I still don’t understand why the uprooting of the tree at Hill Top is what spurred Agnes to finally end it though. It seems like that might’ve broken the bond between her and that place, which you’d think is a good thing? idk, maybe we’re not done with Agnes yet, or I’m just overthinking it.

Hill Top Road, pt 2

Season 5 babey!

“I can’t say much about exactly what happened within the walls of that house, but it seems the fight scarred the place in a way far deeper than simple fire. A scar in reality, that I believe has since been compounded by the interferences of other powers.” (Eugene, 139)

“There is something wrong with Hill Top Road. You know it as well as I do. Some strange scar on reality at the center of - whatever it is that the Spider is spinning.” (Helen, 146)

First, idk if it’s anything but this kinda reminds me of how Jon is marked by every fear.

Second, episode 114. This is the episode I keep coming back to when thinking about Hill Top Road cause what the heck is up with this:

“I went to clean that house on April the 23rd 2009 which, according to all of you, is tomorrow. But it can’t be. That was two weeks ago. I’ve tried to talk to my friends about it. Those of my friends I can find, but they seem distant, like they don’t really know me. Everything is just... wrong. I can’t find my favourite coffee shop. And I don’t know who you people are.“

This whole episode reeks of alternate universe and I’m just ??? Additionally, the lady talks about the tree in the backyard, but it was uprooted in 2006, so even more AU vibes. Of course, it could be mental manipulation, someone altering her memories, but that seems like a weird red herring that Jon doesn’t even pursue.

Alternatively, we’ve seen NotThem rewrite reality around a person and at this time the NotThem was bound to the Web table. I don’t think that’s anything, particularly given that the table was destroyed, but it’s a thought. (And NotSasha was very recently released back into the world so, hmm)

Ultimately I feel like the lady in 114 may have been a kind of experiment? A trial run to see exactly how they could harness this scar in reality, or to see if they needed to exacerbate it further? Whatever it is, I’m certain it’s gonna be Important™ in season 5.

81: A Guest for Mr. Spider

I don’t think baby-Jon was necessarily targeted beyond being a convenient victim. Him walking away from Mr Spider alive though, that may have made him interesting. I wonder if the Web being the first to mark him carries special significance and that’s maybe why it’s been assisting him? Its highly speculative but the Web did also mark Gertrude and it sounds like it may have been her first mark too. (Assuming the cat thing to be a joke)

Maybe it’s trying to use this to hijack Elias’ ritual somehow? Or to do a second ritual? Or the order of the marks has no significance and all it wanted Jon for was the Mass Ritual?

110: Creature Feature & 136: The Puppeteer

I feel like I know the least about these two. I don’t know to what extent they’re really connected but Neil Lagorio and the film angle seems like a big thing, and Annabelle’s presence makes me think it’s part of something bigger.

So Lagorio is supposed to be creating a spider animatronic but is actually housebound (you could even say homestuck). Annabelle shows up at his place and spends 5 months doing something before he dies. As news of his death break, a big spider monster kidnaps ~100 actors. It doesn’t feel like a big leap to say that he probably created (or was used to create) some sort of spider in the end.

idk what the end goal here is though, why did Annabelle send Lagorio’s original cuts to the Institute? Why is one body a year washing up on a beach? Are they just using them to lay eggs in, or as food? Just killing people isn’t very spider-y but I guess everyone needs to eat?

This whole thing is giving me ritual vibes but I don’t think that’s it? At least not your standard ritual.

Elias & 160

I feel like the Web has definitely helped us get to 160 but I don’t think Elias is directly working with it. They just seem to share the completion of the Mass Ritual as a goal. (Or maybe they are working together and Elias is getting played somehow, that’d be nice.)

Annabelle straight up says “Maybe I’ve occasionally been nudging something here and there to keep you safe, to keep everything on track” and she directly calls out his compulsion to read statements, which Elias’ ultimately uses to set it off. I feel like, if she wanted to stop it, she would’ve just found some way to kill Jon.

I don’t know if the final goal was just to piggyback on Elias’ ritual though, that feels a bit too simple, especially since Hill Top Road hasn’t been resolved. There’s probably some further, sinister plot at play that just needed the fearpocalpyse to be a thing. I don’t know what it is, but it’s gonna involve a big spider and Hill Top Road.

#the magnus archives #magnuspod #tma spoilers #tma meta #oof that got a bit rambly huh #i dont think ive missed anything big ??#although #I didn't even bring up Dekker #i dont really have anything solid on him #im just not convinced he's dead #and he was able to use the web table #of course you dont need to be aligned to an entity to use their artifacts but hmmmmm #and he was helping the previous archivist much like annabelle has sneakily helped jon at times #but idk #its not exactly solid #.txt

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ask-crimson-weaver · 4 years

Text

A Dream of the Deep

Melly knew something was wrong as soon as the dream began.

She had grown familiar with the usual sets of nightmares that would come about from time to time as she slept. Old wounds reopened, moments of the past replaying and mixing into one another. Likewise, she knew what dreams were supposed to feel like. This wasn’t it.

The room she was in was ornate, but also largely empty. The browns, yellows, and oranges of the walls and molding gave most of the room a warm feeling, glowing in the light of a large fireplace in the center of one wall. However, the wall opposite of the hearth was dominated by a sheet of glass, beyond which the cool blue tones of water filled with schools of sea life could be seen. From Melly’s best guess, it was an aquarium of some sort, though aside from some beams of light shining down from an unseen surface, she couldn’t discern any sense of depth or volume from the space beyond.

Melly felt her attention be pulled back towards the center of the room. She spotted two plush lounge chairs, set several feet apart and facing one another. The seat closest to Melly, lined with crimson fabric, was vacant, but the green chair that sat across from it was occupied by a messy-haired woman in a lab coat. A silver tea cup and saucer rested in her hand, and as she raised it to take a sip, her gaze shifter to Melly, giving her an expectant look.

“So... Crimson Weaver,” she said with a smile. “Have a seat. You’ll be better off that way, just letting you know.”

Melly felt a compulsion to go sit down, and though she let it direct her over towards the chair, she could feel her skin crawl with every step. Looking at the woman… there was something about her that Melly recognized, but she was unable to put a conclusive finger on why that was. The chair had some give as she sat down in it, and she found herself sinking down slightly into the soft fabric.

“Perfect!” the woman said, clapping her hands together-- wait, where was the tea cup she had just been holding? “Now, this shouldn’t take too long, so please bear with me for a sec.”

“What shouldn’t take so long?” Melly asked. The coziness of the chair beckoned her to lean back and relax, to not worry, but she resisted the urge, keeping herself upright and alert as she stayed at the edge of the seat. “Where is this supposed to be?”

“Don’t worry about the ‘where’ part, Weaver,” the woman said. “I’m here to ask you some questions-- there are answers that I need, and I’m looking forward to getting them straight from you!”

In the space of a blink, the woman was suddenly holding a pen and pad of paper. There was a sharp click as she pressed the end of the pen, bringing it down to rest against the page in front of her.

“Right…” the woman said, “So what can you tell me about the Shards?”

As the woman asked her first question, Melly felt a sharp jab in her head, causing her to let out a gasp. Her mind was suddenly filled with her memories, playing in fast-forward as snippets of past moments were called forward. Her talks with Strange and Energy Weaver, with Hannah, even with Hobbs were pulled up, and though the feeling only remained for a split-second, she could feel her heart pounding in her chest.

“What was--” Melly began to say breathlessly, though her words were cut off as the woman spoke over her.

“Good!” the woman exclaimed, scribbling down notes on her pad while keeping her eyes locked on Melly. “See? This is way easier for the both of us if you just go with it. Hmmm, what next…” she paused for a moment in thought. “Oh! Your Shard-- the Red Shard-- what is that little thing capable of, exactly?”

The jabbing feeling came again, followed by a wriggling and grasping as more memories were pulled forward. She saw herself use her powers over and over again, saw herself combining the Shard’s warring themes-- ‘spider’ and ‘control’-- to stop her glitching, and watched once more as reality refracted around her as she claimed the Red Shard, using it to seal the rift in the world behind her.

Melly was shaking a bit now, gasping a bit as she scrambled to put her thoughts together so she could figure out what was going on. This place… not, the place wasn’t important. Who was this woman? What was she trying to do?

“Fascinating…,” the woman said, a green glow fading from her eyes as they narrowed in thought. “There’s some gaps in what you know, but I know that my illustrious Patron and I will still be able to use what you have. Well, what we have now, I guess.”

“You…” Melly said, still recoiling from the previous jabs she had felt. “You shouldn’t be here. Who are you? What are you doing to me?”

The woman frowned at Melly’s line of questioning.

“Weird,” the woman said. “You sure are a lot more… aware than most people who go through this. But hey, we can still make this work-- just let this happen and it’ll be over before you know it. Trust me.”

The woman grabbed the edge of the page she had been writing on, flipping it over to a clean sheet. Melly caught a split-second glimpse of the original page, but she saw no words that were legible to her, and a wave of nausea washed over her just from looking at them. What words she had meant to send the woman’s way were lost in the dizziness.

“Moving on,” the woman said with a sigh. “Let’s see… I’ve heard things about the Red Shard being bound to your soul. What do you know about the nature of that connection?”

The jab to her mind came again, but this time the memories were not as benign. She could feel the wrenching sensation in her chest as she watched Redline tear both Shard and soul from her body, felt herself fall and shatter in the dreamscape only for her Shard to pull her soul back together, and felt her self scatter again as the poison from the amber blade sapped away the very energy that had been holding her together. And all of it being shoved through her mind again in a matter of moments… it was too much.

Melly sprung to her feet, hands clutching her head as she fought back against the barrage of memories. This woman… was she trying to change her memories? Turn and twist them like her mom had done? Just thinking about it sent another jab through her head, and the memories of what her mom had done flickered by. She squeezed her eyes shut as she let out a resounding scream:

“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!”

Melly’s spider-arms snapped out behind her, and the warm-colored fireplace suddenly shifted to a radiant Shard-red. There was a rumbling from above, and arcs of red energy sprung into existence, shooting down like lightning and colliding with the floor. After each strike, the light faded, leaving scarlet webs that began to cover the walls of the room around them.

The woman looked almost nonplussed as she looked up towards the webbing that crackled downwards. She let out a sigh, flipping the pad of paper closed before both it and the pen blinked out of existence.

“Well, I was kinda hoping to keep things cool around here,” the woman said, standing up from her seat, “but I am not leaving here until I get what I’m after. The more you work with me, the less this will have to hurt.”

“You’re messing with my head,” Melly hissed at the woman. “I’m sick of people like her-- like you-- coming in and doing whatever you want. So I won’t say it again. Get. Out.”

“... Looks like we’re doing this the hard way. Your choice,” the woman said

The temperature in the room began to drop, and the cool blue light seeping in from the water-filled window began to seep inwards, overtaking the red light of both fire and webbing. With it, a wrenching sense of wrongness came with it, and Melly turned towards the glass wall as she tried to find its source. After a moment of looking, however, she noticed something entirely different. In the waters beyond, the fish and other creatures that had been swimming around had completely vanished, and a creeping darkness seemed to be crawling its way through the space. As it grew closer, Melly could start making out its form-- if you could even call it a form. She could make out hundreds, perhaps thousands of tendrils curling off of it, a writhing mass that emanated with a feeling of dread.

“What is that?” Melly said, finding herself taking a step away from the glass unconsciously.

“That,” the woman said, “is the Writhing One.”

A dozen tentacles surged forwards, crashing through the glass and severing both wood and web as they dug into the sides of the room. With them, a surge of water crashed in, slamming into Melly and spinning her around. She lost sight of the room, the chairs… even the woman had vanished into the churning darkness of the sea. Something latched onto her, pulling her down and keeping her in the darkness. She pulled and kicked to try and find a hold on anything, maybe even find a surface, but she could see nothing

“Now let’s try this again,” the woman said.

Melly struggled to hold her breath as a renewed jab spiked into her head, pulling her memories out into her consciousness-- in front of her own eyes. The barrage had hardly finished before the next jab came, and then the next, each pushing deeper and deeper to find what it needed from her mind. A stronger jab came down, and Melly reflexively gasped, and in an instant the sting of saltwater filled her throat. She started to panic, flailing around blindly as the images of her own mind flickered by.

Eventually, another jab failed to come, and Melly’s eyes managed to slide open, though her vision was still blurry from the salt water that surrounded them. The woman was in front of her again, floating in the water, and though Melly couldn’t quite make it out, something about her felt different, like she was radiating the same sinister vibe that the unfathomable creature had brought forward.

“I think that should be it,” the woman said, her smile returning. “Thank you for sharing your knowledge.”

A ripple emanated through the water from above, and the woman turned her gaze upwards to find its source. Several bands of golden light appeared a moment later, weaving their way downwards and pushing back against the all-encompassing eldritch energy that filled the space.

“Damnit, a Sorcerer Supreme?” the woman muttered to herself, sounding rather annoyed. “Took him long enough to get here.”

The strands continued downwards, and though many seemed to curve down towards Melly, several others darted around and made a beeline for the woman.

The woman’s eyes began to glow that sickly green once again, the many tendrils of the Writhing One creating a path for her to traverse for her escape. While there were close calls as the light strands chased her down, the Patron’s tendrils seemed to fight back viciously, slowing the lights’ path down. The tendrils make a path to the abyss, giving her a chance to dive into its depths. Just before the void swallows her whole, she smirks at the light’s attempts to catch her.

“Better luck next time, Steve,” she quips, her presence vanishing completely.

As the woman disappeared, the grip that held Melly in place began to slacken, letting the golden strands of magic finally reach her. They began to pull her upwards, and the sunken space began to grow brighter and brighter, until…

Melly awoke with a gasp, jolting upright right before she tilted over again, coughing and struggling to steady her breath. There was someone next to her that caught her-- no, not just anyone. Hannah. One of her arms was curved in front of Melly to help support her, while the other rested supportively on her back.

“Hey-- you’re alright, you’re awake,” Hannah said reassuringly, though her expression was still one of worry. “You’re safe.”

Melly leaned into Hannah’s arms, letting herself breathe for a moment. However, her spider-sense wouldn’t let her ignore the other, considerably more powerful presence in the room. Glancing up, Melly’s eyes met those of the annoyed-looking Sorcerer Supreme of her dimension: Doctor Strange.

It took another moment for her to speak up-- she swore that she could still feel the sting of salt in the back of her throat.

“Strange,” she said shakily, “what the hell just happened to me?”

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geraskierficrecs · 5 years

Note

okay but aside from the witcher soldier gimme some of the witcher trapped in a curse forcing him to push jaskier away (thats what forced him to say the thing on the mountain maybe?) and he breaks the curse somehow and just pulled jaskier close for a kiss and everything is better okay byw

Okay, so I thought about this prompt and it got really dark. Hope it hits your angsty heart right.

______________________________

Geralt walks out of the inn with a smile twitching at his lips.

The smile is only the latest of a seemingly endless list of of strange things that have occurred since he first met Jaskier. He had been so convinced that loneliness was just another part of the Path, as inevitable as the monsters he was called upon to hunt. It had been obvious, aching, and constant, but he told himself that he would accept it.

And then, Jaskier.

Jaskier with his quick smiles and fumbling affections. Jaskier who never shied away from the blood and death that clung to him like shadows. A man that had seen the worst of Geralt’s sins only to choose to remain at his side.

Falling for the bard had been slow and steady--the final slide towards something close to happiness. As implacable as gravity.

Geralt wasn’t proud of how long it had taken him to see it, but now...

Now he knew the taste of Jaskier’s love on his tongue, the way his eyes flared dark with lust and bone deep happiness, and how perfect the bard felt against him. It was, all of it, perfect.

The kiss had been unexpected--as most things regarding Jaskier seemed to be. He’d been careful around the bard since all the venom he’d spat at him on the mountain. Too damn grateful and terrified of what could happen if Jaskier realized that Geralt was only capable of bringing pain to risk upsetting the human again.

But then he’d woken to find Jaskier curled along his side like he belonged there and the scratchy sheets and sounds of other humans in the tavern below them became meaningless.

Geralt let himself fall.

Now he walks away from the tavern with happiness thrumming in his chest like the wings of some songbird trapped within his ribcage. Jaskier had been sleepy and warm when he’d left, smiling softly at Geralt’s explanation that he intended to finish off the drowners nearby and use the money to get them another night here and some food.

“Hurry back,” the bard murmured and settled languidly on sheets that smelled like the two of them.

Geralt’s feet move faster at the reminder, his mind torn between the hunt and the man waiting for him back at the end. For the first time, Yennefer’s rejection feels meaningless. He’ll be tied to her forever, but not the way he is tied to Jaskier. Loving Jaskier will be a choice he never regrets.

He’s almost out of sight of the village when a voice calls out from behind him, “Witcher! Geralt of Rivia!”

He turns and feels the dull crackle of magic sink deep into his chest and freeze him in place.

Yellow eyes go wide with surprise and fury, but he can do nothing as a woman dressed in plain black robes closes the distance between them. She appears unfazed by the raging Witcher caught in her spell and steps closer to examine him more closely. Whether she was truly looking at him was hard to determine as a gauzy scarf was tied around her eyes, blocking them completely from sight.

Geralt glares at her, still trying to fight the compulsion to stay still. She smiles, “I’ve been looking for you for some time, Witcher.”

A growl rips itself free from his chest.

“Yes, you are a vicious thing, aren’t you? But can you also speak?”

Abruptly the vise around him is loosen enough that he can move his jaw. He licks his lips--torn between getting answers and not wanting to give her the pleasure of doing as she asked.

“What the fuck do you want, witch?”

She sighs, moving close enough to run her fingers over the front of his armor. He grits his teeth when he catches the scent of her--rot and blood. Her fingers are stained at the tips as though she never manages to clean away the remains of her victims.

“It’s unfortunate, Witcher, that we must meet this way,” she says with a fake pout, “I feel like we could be great friends-” The way she says friends makes him want to vomit. “-but I’m afraid I need your services now.”

“I already have a job--go find another Witcher.”

“Ah, but you’re the only Witcher--or man, for that matter--who has managed to ensnare the lovely Yennefer of Vengerberg’s heart.”

Geralt stares, a cold knot twisting in his stomach. “What do you want with Yenn?”

Somehow he feels the moment the eyes beneath the scarf turn to him. They drift over his face, trailing slime and filth in their wake. He shudders and she smiles again.

“I want to make her pay.”

____________________________________

His feet move with the inevitability of the damned. Past the venomous laughter of the mage. Back towards the tavern with a sick sense of dread.

He fights each flex and pull of his muscles to no avail. Just as he tries to fight the words that echo in his mind with every beat of his heart.

Find the one your heart aches for and make them suffer.

Bile pools in his throat as each step takes him closer and closer to the person he has already hurt too many times. Only it isn’t Yennefer’s proud, broken expression that fuels his cursed focus--it’s Jaskier.

He walks through the streets with the ghost of the happiness he’d felt this morning nipping at his heals. He can feel the way his fingers are aching for soft skin and flesh that will bloom dark purples and blues when he wraps them around Jaskier’s fragile ne--

Geralt gives a full bodied shudder and vomits bile and the last of his supper into the street. Someone shouts angrily at the mess, but Geralt can’t even stop long enough to snarl back. His feet are already pulling him back to the path that will lead him to Jaskier.

In desperation, Geralt yanks weakly at the straps of his weapons until they fall with dull clanks to the ground. His mind whirls, searching for loopholes in the command like an animal caught in a trap. Suffering can mean so many things, after all. Without his weapons, he can at least ensure that the bard isn’t permanently harmed. All he needs is time. Time enough for his Witcher abilities to eat through the power fueling the compulsion and spell that keeps him moving forward.

Beneath his feet, the floorboards of the old tavern creak irritably at his weight. His mind whirls. Perhaps he’ll be lucky and Jaskier has disappeared into the town to spend the day among the market stalls. It’s only been an hour or so since Geralt left him in their room. He shouldn’t be expecting the Witcher to return for at least a few hours and--

“Geralt?”

Jaskier’s voice feels like a death knell instead of the salvation it usually brings.

Geralt bites his tongue bloody when the bard opens the door to their room wider and smiles, bright and beautiful and so damn trusting. He looks delighted at the thought that the Witcher has returned so quickly to him.

“Well, my dear Witcher,” he says as Geralt steps forward on numb feet, “this is an unexpected pleasure. I thought you were going to be hunting for the rest of the day? Or did you just miss me?” Jaskier’s eyes are dancing with laughter and love and--

“Now why would I do that?”

Jaskier stops, surprised and looks back at Geralt. “What--what do you mean?”

The words drip like poison from Geralt’s lips even as his horrified mind tries to order them away, tries to clench his jaw--anything to keep this from happening. He can feel the spell settling into his skin and bones like a disease, eager to fulfill the compulsion of the blind witch.

Make them suffer.

“Did you think last night meant something to me, little bard?” he asks, despite the screaming in Geralt’s head, “That I actually wanted more from you.”

The bard is still now, only a slight tremble in his hands.

“Why would I ever want anything from you?” he continues, speaking slowly like Jaskier is too stupid to understand the lies spilling from his mouth, “You. An insignificant bard whose only claim to fame is the fact that you follow after me like a lost puppy and pick up every scrap of affection I throw your way.”

Geralt wants to scream.

He wants to grab Jaskier close and whisper that he loves him over and over again until it’s all he can remember.

He wants to find the witch and find some way to make her suffer before he rips her shriveled heart out of her chest.

But all he can do is watch every bit of eager happiness leach away from Jaskier’s body like sun behind a cloud.

“But,” Jaskier’s voice is rough and Geralt thrashes within his mind against the compulsion with the need to cradle him close, “...what about last night?”

Geralt feels his fingers twitch and he’s so elated by the realization that the spell is weakening, that he doesn’t notice his lips forming the words that destroy every bit of the happiness he’d found at his bard’s side.

“I was bored and you were always so willing to spread your legs for anyone--I figured I could finally see what all the fuss was about.”

And here, here is the worst of it all.

Because Jaskier doesn’t turn on him. Doesn’t snap or snarl at the hateful words Geralt says. Doesn’t slap the Witcher across the face like he deserves.

No, he goes still and quiet. There is no surprise in his features, nor any of the usual good humor and quick wit. He straightens as best he can and nods to himself.

“I see,” he says in a brittle voice, “well, I think I understand now.”

He reaches for the pack beside the bed and stuffs his clothes in roughly while Geralt watches helplessly. The Witcher’s fingers twitch again at his side, but it does nothing to stop Jaskier’s jerking movements as he pulls on his boots and walks past him to the door.

There he stops and tilts his head so that Geralt can’t see the tears dampening the collar of his shirt.

“Goodbye, Geralt.”

The door closes behind him with a soft click and Geralt is left staring at the wooden lute left quiet and alone on the bed still tousled from the night they’d spent together.

Jaskier doesn’t come back.

_______________________________

I know I usually promise a happy ending, but the angst really got me here. I may come back and write another chapter if y’all want more. Until then, I’ll just be over here crying.

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haberdashing · 4 years

Text

Martin K. Blackwood

Martin tells Jon what his middle initial stands for while they’re in the safehouse together.

on AO3

Martin and Jon were curled up on the safehouse’s lone couch, Jon’s head pressed against Martin’s shoulders, their hands intermingled. The tea that Martin had brought out for the both of them some time ago had doubtlessly gone cold by now, but that didn’t matter much; Jon was warm enough that his sheer proximity was more than enough to make up for the absence of hot tea.

Jon turned his gaze upwards towards Martin, and Martin could feel the weight of that gaze upon him. It wasn’t a Beholding thing, he didn’t think--there was none of that strange gleam in Jon’s eyes, none of that hunger hiding behind them--just Jon, looking up at him, eyes wide and curious.

“I’d like to ask you something.” Jon’s voice was as soft and sweet as the afternoon sunlight streaming in from the window behind them.

“Ask-ask, or...?”

Jon shook his head slightly, a gesture that Martin felt against his shoulder more than actually saw. “Just ask. Lowercase ask.”

Martin let out a soft, shaky laugh. “Go right ahead then.”

“W-” Jon stopped himself, took a deep breath and let it out; his breath was as warm as his body, hot air pressing against Martin’s cheek as Jon exhaled. “I’d like to know your middle name.”

Martin hadn’t been moving much to begin with, too concerned with being a steady headrest for Jon, but when he heard those words he froze entirely, a half-taken breath sitting uncomfortably in his lungs as he considered his options.

Because the truth was this: Martin K. Blackwood didn’t actually have a middle name, middle initial notwithstanding.

He’d had one, once, but that had been a long time ago, before the Institute and the Archives, before he’d even been Martin. He’d been given his grandmother’s name as a middle name at birth, and it started with a K and was horribly feminine, so once Martin knew that that didn’t fit him, and knew why that didn’t fit him, he’d given it up immediately.

Settling on Martin instead of his birth name hadn’t been terribly difficult for him, but he’d agonized over the middle name for months, wanting to keep that middle initial but having it stand for something more masculine. He’d torn through baby name books looking at every K name anyone had ever considered giving to a baby boy, and when that failed him Martin had briefly considered having his middle name just be the letter K, but no, that was awkward and would lead to the sort of questions he’d much rather avoid, thanks.

So when the time had come, he’d made his full name be Martin Blackwood, no middle name; he figured he could still add in the middle initial K for things like poetry, because he liked the sound of it, and his poetry probably wasn’t going to see the light of day anyway so nobody’d ask pesky questions about his middle name because of it anyhow.

Which had been a brilliant solution up until Jon went and asked the very question he’d been hoping to avoid all these years. (Well, not asked, exactly, and certainly not Asked, but made his curiosity clear in such a way that avoiding the not-quite-question would be more suspicious than just answering it.)

Apparently Martin’s uncertainty and hesitation had been made obvious to more than just him, because Jon continued. “You know I won’t judge, whatever it is. Even if it’s just the letter K, like Harry S Truman, or, or K-A-Y--that’d explain some things, actually...”

“No.” Martin said, and then paused, because he hadn’t actually figured out what he was going to say beyond that. The logical thing to do would probably be telling the truth, but... but Martin knew it was a silly thing to do, to just take on a middle initial that stood for nothing (and emphatically didn’t stand for one thing in particular) solely because you liked the sound of it, and much as Jon said he wouldn’t judge, and much as Martin wanted to believe him, that didn’t stop his anxiety or untangle the mess of knots in his stomach...

So Martin took a deep breath and did what, perhaps, he did best: he lied his ass off.

“It’s actually spelled K-H-A-Y-E.”

Martin kicked himself as soon as he said it, because adding just the H or just the E might be plausible, but Khaye, now, that didn’t even seem like a name... but he couldn’t take it back now, couldn’t very well claim he’d misspelled his own middle name, not without the whole charade falling apart, so he pressed on. Besides, Jon didn’t look at all suspicious--surprised, maybe, and eager to hear more, but not suspicious in the slightest.

“Still sounds just like K, though, so you got that bit right, anyway. It- it was my grandmother’s name.” Martin knew well enough by now that sometimes, the best way to lie was to tell a bit of the truth along the way.

“Does, uh, it...” Jon pressed the hand that wasn’t intertwined with Martin’s against his face for a moment, closing his eyes as he considered his words. “The meaning. I assume the name Khaye has some meaning.”

“Honestly? If it does, I have no idea. My grandmother passed away before I was born-” That bit was true; the middle name had been given to honor her, which might have been one reason that Martin had fought to find a way to keep that middle initial even after he’d figured out that the name behind it didn’t suit him. “-so it’s not like I could, you know, pop over and ask her about it. And I’ve never seen it in any baby name books, either.” That bit was technically true, too, because the name didn’t exist, at least as far as Martin knew...

Jon smiled slightly. “Fair enough. I don’t even know why I got named Jonathan, so...”

“I did, uh, think about changing it when, when I changed my name to Martin, but I figured a name that obscure, who’s to say what gender it is, right? And I liked the sound of the K, and I couldn’t find any good male K names to replace it with.”

“What about Kevin?” There was no compulsion to the question, just a gentle curiosity, and Martin half-suspected that Jon didn’t even realize he’d asked a question outright.

“I considered that, actually, but Martin Kevin Blackwood sounds atrocious.”

Jon snorted with amusement. “You’re right, I didn’t think that one through, that does sound pretty bad. Martin Khaye Blackwood, on the other hand-” Martin could swear he heard Jon sounding the name out, saying it as a name rather than a mere initial, even though the whole point was that the two sounded identical. “That sounds lovely.”

Martin could feel his face turning hot and pink, and he wasn’t sure whether it was doing so more out of love or embarrassment. “Well, I’m glad you approve.”

“Of course I do. You decided on it, after all.”

Jon stretched upwards and planted a kiss on Martin’s cheek, and it was warm and sweet and soft and gentle, and in that moment any thoughts Martin had about coming clean to Jon evaporated, because this moment was too precious to ruin that easily.

It was just a little white lie, after all. He’d told bigger lies plenty of times before (though rarely to Jon, and never in the safehouse). And maybe if it came up again, he could confess, tell the truth about it all...

But middle names were such an inconsequential thing to begin with; it probably wouldn’t come up again anyway. And that was fine too.

Martin would tell a thousand white lies if they all led to kisses like that, after all.

#tma #the magnus archives #tma fic #tma fanfic #the magnus archives fic #the magnus archives fanfic #tma spoilers #tma 164 #mag 164 #martin blackwood #martin k. blackwood #martin k blackwood #personal #my writing

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rimmers-swimming-certificate · 4 years

Text

Red Dwarf fanfic - Comatose (6/?)

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5

Lister was halfway through a movie when Kryten entered his quarters with an empty laundry basket tucked under one arm. His other hand clutched a full-looking teapot with steam rising slowly fro the spout. The mechanoid stopped completely still in the doorway and stared at Lister.

Lister, laying in his bunk, head propped up on one hand, smiled at him. “Alright, Kryten?”

Kryten didn’t reply. He remained where he was, staring at Lister as though transfixed.

Lister’s smile turned into a confused frown. He glanced behind him, checking there was nothing there that might have captured the mechanoid’s interest. Finding just the usual wall, he turned back. “Uh, Kryten?”

His hand moved self consciously to the large letter ‘H’ on his forehead. It was the only thing in the whole situation that was different, and it had taken him a while to get used to seeing it on Rimmer, so it stood to reason that the others would find it strange on him.

“Kryten, what’s going on? Is something wrong?”

Finally, Kryten blinked. “No sir. Stare mode cancel. I’m sorry, it’s just so good to have you back, Mr Lister. For the past six months, I’ve been trapped on the ship alone, with only Mr Rimmer and Mr Cat for company.”

Lister shrugged unsympathetically. “Yeah, been there,” he said.

Kryten walked busily across the room, placed the teapot on the table and the laundry basket on the floor next to it. “So, sir, I trust you’re well? How are you adjusting to your hologramatic status?

Lister gave the question serious consideration as he took a swig of his hologramatic lager. The drink was nothing like lager, not really. It wasn’t even like having a drink. There was no feeling of quenching his thirst, because he had no thirst to quench. The drink didn’t feel cold, but it didn’t feel warm either. It was somehow completely without temperature. There was no fizz either, and he was reasonably certain that the taste he was detecting was constructed entirely from his own memory and expectation of the flavour, rather than from the drink itself.

“Sir?” Kryten asked

Lister shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it’s…” he shrugged again, struggling to put it into words. “It’s not been very long,” he said. I’ve done nearly this long before, when me and Rimmer swapped bodies.”

Of course that had been different. There had been a time limit on that arrangement. They had agreed to swap for two weeks, although in fact it had lasted much less time. This was completely open ended; he had no idea how long it might last, or when it might be over.

Kryten nodded. “I imagine this is a little different to that, sir.”

“Well, yeah. For a start I’ve got you looking after my body instead of Rimmer, so that’s definitely better.”

“But sir, you’re in a coma.”

Lister nodded. “Even so. The whole thing’s not great though. I think it’d be easier to put up with if I knew how long it was going to be for.”

“Of course.” Kryten opened one of Lister’s clothes drawers as he spoke. “And I wish I could give you that information sir. I really do.”

He knew Kryten didn’t know. He took another sip of pointless lager, just for something to occupy his hands. Vaguely, he wondered whether Holly would be capable of simulating a pack of cigarettes for him.

“I’d forgotten what a pain in the arse it is to not be able to do anything for yourself. You want to pick something up? Nope, gotta ask the skutters to do it for you. Want to push that button? Too bad, ask the Cat. And this stuff?” He raised the can of holographic lager in the air. “It’s like vaguely beer flavoured nothingness. I don’t even know why I keep drinking it.”

He took one final swig, then tossed the half-empty can across the room in the direction of the bin. It spun through the air for a second, then disappeared just before it hit its target.

“I see,” said Kryten. “Sir, I don’t know whether you’re aware of this, but historically, new holograms were given a minimum six weeks of weekly therapy sessions by the Space Corps, as well as company mandated rehabilitation.”

Lister frowned. “Why?”

“Well, sir, it was found that holograms were prone to depression and bouts of existential crisis. Of course, much of that was linked to the knowledge that they -- the person that they were -- was dead. That is not the case for you, of course. Still, I would expect there to be a certain adjustment period. A significant portion of the rehabilitation involved learning ways of doing things without the ability to touch, as well as coping with the emotional impact of that.”

Now that Lister thought about it, that all made perfect sense. “I don’t suppose you have any of those therapy sessions built into your programming, do you?” he asked.

Kryten shook his head. “Me, sir? No, I’m afraid not. You might find some relevant literature in the ship’s databanks, but, as loathe as I am to say it, most likely the best person for you to speak to would be Mr. Rimmer.”

“I don’t think so,” Lister said, immediately.

“No. Honestly, even thinking that suggestion felt ridiculous,” Kryten admitted. “But unfortunately, he is the closest thing we have to an expert on the subject.”

“He’s also a complete smeg head,” Lister countered. Rimmer would probably love it if he went to him for help. After all, Lister hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to make things easy for Rimmer when he had first been switched on.

“Granted, sir,” Kryten agreed. “He did, however, visit you almost every day when you were in the medi-bay. He does appear to care. Although honestly I doubt he would make an effective therapist.”

No kidding. Literally anybody that had ever been born would make a better therapist. With the possible exception of Cat.

“Although, frankly, given the circumstances, it’s a miracle that Mr. Rimmer is still sane.”

Lister scoffed. “Kryten, Rimmer was never sane to begin with.” He had been teetering on the edge long before he had even died. Although, maybe that only proved Kryten’s point. “So how’d he do it then? How’d he manage to not go any crazier?”

Kryten appeared to think about the question as he reached into Lister’s drawer, pulled out a handful of neatly folded t-shirts, screwed them up, and dumped them in the laundry basket.

“I suppose the only way to be certain would be to ask him. I do have my own theories though. Perhaps Mr Rimmer’s personality, deficient though it is, is actually suited to being a hologram. I mean, he is stand-offish to the extreme and cowardly to the point where not being able to be touched, and therefore not be hurt, may actually be considered beneficial. Also, while admittedly I didn’t know him in life, I don’t imagine him to be the kind to be touchy-feely with his friends.”

“What friends?” Lister asked, then sighed. “I didn’t know any of this stuff.”

“No reason you should, sir.”

But there was. He had been bunking with a hologram for five years, and what had he done? Nothing useful, that was for sure. He had repeatedly told Rimmer to stop whinging about being dead; actually point blank told him that he wouldn’t touch things for him, because he’d seen what Rimmer liked to touch; and occasionally threatened to switch him off in favour of someone better.

Honestly, if Rimmer did want to gloat about Lister’s current situation, he would probably be justified.

From another cupboard, Kryten removed a packet of biscuits, took one out, crushed it between his hands and dropped the pile of crumbs into the laundry basket with the clothes.

Lister watched him, bemused. The mechanoid picked up the teapot he had brought into the room and tilted it, ready to pour the contents into the basket. “Kryten,” Lister asked. “What the smeg are you doing?”

Kryten looked from the basket of screwed up, crumb-covered clothes, to the teapot in his hand, and finally back to Lister. He appeared to consider the question carefully. “Laundry,” he said.

Lister frowned. “I’m no expert or anything, but even I know that’s not how you do laundry. Not unless we’ve landed in the backwards world again.”

“I...I...I…” Kryten opened and closed his mouth in a compulsive way that made Lister think he was about to have a serious malfunction.

“Kryten…”

“You just don’t understand what it’s been like, sir. You were unconscious, you didn’t need me to do your washing because you simply weren’t generating the same amount of mess that you usually did. Add to that, I only had half the number of dishes to wash, and absolutely no detritus to pick up after you, and I was quite literally going out of my head with boredom!”

Lister frowned. “So why didn’t you just find something else to do?”

“I didn’t want to do anything else! It was laundry day and I had nothing to launder, so I went into your quarters one day, emptied out your drawer and… well, it was such a relief to get back a bit of normality. Since then, I’ve been doing two loads a week.”

“Right,” Lister shook his head in bafflement. “But couldn’t you just do the Cat’s laundry instead?”

“He wouldn’t let me. He said he didn’t trust me with his suits.”

“Look, why don’t you just put those back, and watch the end of the film with me?” Lister suggested. “Or I can get Holly to rewind it to the start, I don’t mind watching it again.”

Kryten shook his head, still brandishing the teapot above the basket. “I can’t, sir. I need to get these clothes dirty so that I can get them nice and clean for you.”

Lister sighed. “Whatever makes you happy, I guess,” he said, but as he spoke he noticed a yellow t-shirt among the biscuit crumb-covered pile. His eyes widened in panic and he leapt down from the bunk to grab the basket out of Kryten’s hands.

He remembered at the last moment that he couldn’t. Instead, he waved a hand at the yellow t-shirt in the middle of the pile. “Hang on a minute, what’s that?”

“A pile of laundry, sir. We just discussed it, remember? Perhaps I need to do some additional tests to ensure you didn’t sustain brain damage in the accident.”

“No, what’s that,” Lister tried to clarify. He pointed at the yellow t-shirt again, knowing that he only owned two t-shirts of that particular colour and hoping that this one wasn’t the one he thought it was.

Kryten put down the teapot to free up his hand, then pulled the shirt out from the centre of the pile and held it up for Lister to see. “A t-shirt, sir.”

Lister looked at it, and his heart sank. “Smeg,” he said.

You could barely see the stain anymore. He moved his head a little closer and squinted. He could just about make out the mark where the blob of vindaloo had dripped from an overloaded piece of naan three million years ago, but it had faded almost to the point of disappearing.

“Kryten, how many times have you washed this t-shirt?” he asked.

The mechanoid looked at it, doing a quick calculation. “Between the beginning of your coma and now? Approximately twenty times.”

“You’ve nearly got the stain out,” Lister told him.

Kryten looked at it. “Which one, sir?”

“That one,” Lister pointed at a barely-there stain on the left side of the t-shirt. “There was a stain there from where I dropped curry on it. It was the first time Kochanski spoke to me, and I was so surprised I dropped curry and it made a stain in the shape of a heart. That was the first time I knew that we were meant to be together.” And now it was gone.

Kryten looked at the t-shirt again, a guilty look appearing on his face. “Oh sir, I’m sorry! I had no idea that stain had sentimental value. I didn’t rotate the wash, I just kept taking the clothing from the top of your drawer. If I’d dug down a little deeper, maybe this wouldn’t have happened! Although, frankly, I was a little afraid of what I might find in there.”

Lister sighed. “Forget it. Just, don’t wash that one anymore, okay? Leave it alone, it’s clean enough.”

The mechanoid put down the basket of ‘dirty’ washing, shook off the crumbs and carefully folded the yellow t-shirt and put it back in the drawer where he had found it, then picked up the remaining t-shirts and left quietly.

Lister watched him go, and sighed to himself, then turned to address the middle of the room. “Holly, give me another beer, will you?”

(next)

#red dwarf #red dwarf fanfic #dave lister #david lister #kryten #lister's getting a bit down #poor guy #my fic

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ginnranger · 4 years

Text

A Strange New Student

Summary:

Ginn is a new student in a prestigious London private school. It’s pretty obvious she is not the type to be in private school, but is that going to stop her? Honestly, she doesn’t even know the answer to that one.

But she does have a pretty good guess, when she meets Alex, Martin, George, Louise, and Elsie. They are pretty different from her. They seem nice enough, but will her past lessons allow her let them in? Another good question.

Word count: 6542

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The large, stone hallways of Churchill high school were a lot less busy than Ginn’s old public school back in Liverpool. She guessed that was because barely anyone was able to afford the tuition to actually attend this school. How she got in was a complete miracle, sparked by some pretty unfortunate events.

The biggest understatement of her life.

Ginn was not used to anything that she had already faced in this new school at all, and she had only been in the building ten minutes. The students hanging around in the hallway before class were well behaved, milling around and chatting instead of running and fighting. The floors and lockers were clean, free of graffiti and chewing gum. The uniforms were the weirdest part; everyone wore it neat and proper, the boys’ ties being evenly tied, their shirts neatly tucked into their trousers, which were not sagging halfway down their butts, and their blazers free of burn holes and glue stains. The girls’ skirts were closer to the knee than the butt, their blouses also neatly tucked, and their cardigans neatly buttoned. Everyone’s shoes were perfectly shined, not a scuff in sight.

Every student had neatly styled hair, not a strand out of place. They all had perfect posture, shoulders squared and backs straight, the girls tending to keep their feet touching each other. Their faces shone with happy, satisfied smiles. There was no anger, hunger, or sadness in these people’s lives. Very different to what Ginn saw back in Liverpool. It was obvious these teenagers knew their place in the world. So did Ginn, and it was not surrounded by these people. They made that clear with their odd looks.

She stood out for many reasons around these people. For one, she was the only girl wearing trousers and a tie. Ginn flat out refused to wear a skirt, and the rules said trousers could not be worn without a tie, so she was stuck in the unflattering, unfitted, too big boy’s uniform. Her tie was relatively neat, but she had not buttoned the top of her shirt, and pulled the tie down slightly to accommodate the room the lack of a top button provided. her blazer sleeves had been rolled up slightly to accommodate her shorter arms. Her shirt was tucked in, but it was not neat. the sides of the shirt were bunched up, as she had tried to angle it in a way it was more fitted to her feminine frame. It was not working, but she felt comfortable. When Ginn stood, she leant on one leg, arms crossed, and her feet obviously not touching. Her shoulders slumped, and her hands folded into fists, no matter whether she was walking or standing. When she walked, her back curved forwards slightly, and her eyes shifted between everything that moved, glaring into every pair of eyes she met. Ginn had to be aware of everything that was happening around her. Just a little compulsion of hers. Her hair was cut short, mostly jar length, with layers getting shorter as they went up, and a fringe cut in line with her eyes, parted favouring the left side, and whilst that was not abnormal for girl, it was expected that she would make an attempt to calm and style her messy mop of ginger hair. But she didn’t. She liked it messy. It gave her an excuse to have her fringe covering her left eye. You see, Ginn had heterochromia. Her right eye was a bright, electric blue, whilst her left eye was a shining light brown, almost orange when the light hit it just right. Ginn preferred to cover her left eye with her hair, as it blended in with the orange strands better than the blue did. That, and the brown colour was not the genetic colour. Her mother had blue eyes, and her father had green eyes, so brown was definitely not a family eye colour.

Ginn could tell people were looking at her as she wondered the fancy hallways towards the administration office, though she couldn’t tell if this was because of her rough, stand-offish appearance, or the fact that it was early November, and she was a new student entering year 10. Honestly, Ginn didn’t care which one it was. She didn’t expect to form relationships with these people.

She managed to reach the administration office, where she was expected to pick up her time table and ID card, after a few minutes of cluelessly wondering around, following strange signs written in the worst font for someone like her; cursive. How is that acceptable, you may ask? It honestly isn’t, but this school had an aesthetic to stick to. Ginn was dyslexic, so anything that wasn’t block letters or her own handwriting was torture to read. As she reached the old looking, oak wood door, she straightened her back and readjusted her backpack, forcing her face to change from confrontational to neutral. This was the face she preferred to show in front of adults, as they could never figure out what emotion she was feeling so they struggled to ask her questions. She opened the door and walked up to the desk, waiting for the old woman sitting, typing on her computer, to look up at her. She did quickly, luckily.

“Hello there! What can I do for you today?” Her voice was far too perky and high pitched. It irritated Ginn’s ears. Ginn forced her face to remain neutral, pushing down her natural, uncomfortable reaction, so she could respond as quick as possible.

“I’m the new student. I was told to pick up my stuff here.”

“Ahh, yes! Ginn Ranger, am I correct?” The woman squeaked, smile never faltering.

“Yeah, that’s me.” Ginn avoided eye contact, uncomfortable with her full name being announced.

The woman rooted around the organised mess that sat on her desk, until she found the right envelope that held Ginn’s ID card and timetable. She handed it to Ginn and asked her to sit down for a moment, as the headmaster wished to speak to her before classes started. Ginn forced herself to swallow a groan as she nodded and took a seat next to the desk, facing the door to the headmaster’s office. Her leg bounced quickly as she stared into space, trying to concentrate on her thoughts rather than the loud world she lived in. She slouched in her seat after finding a comfortable place in her imagination to rest. Sadly, it only took two minutes for her to be called into Headmaster Windsor’s office.

“Hello, Miss Ranger.” Mr Windsor was far more serious. much more pleasant to Ginn’s ears. “It is a pleasure to finally have you here.”

Ginn only forced a smile as she sat awkwardly in the chair. Her eyes quickly scanned the room, taking in every detail she could. the shelves behind Mr Windsor mostly held the textbooks this school studied. Two of the four shelves held the textbooks. one held a collection of frames, some holding pictures of what Ginn assumed to be Windsor’s family, other holding certificates. One was a certification of first aid, one an inclusivity certificate, another being Windsor’s degree in teaching. The inclusivity certificate intrigued Ginn, as she knew for a fact that this school was pretty exclusive.

‘Guess it’s for everything except class.’ She thought to herself.

The final shelf held folders, ordered by category. The first was labelled ‘Enrolment’. The second was labelled ‘Disciplinary Reports’. The third was ‘Human Resources’. The fourth one was what Mr Windsor pulled off the shelf and flicked through. It was labelled ‘Inclusive Support’. Yay.

“So, Miss Ranger-” Ginn interrupted Windsor.

“Call me Ginn.” She said quickly and sheepishly, shoving her hands under her legs to avoid her usually gesturing that annoyed so many adults. “I prefer just Ginn.”

“Ok then.” Mr Windsor peered over the top on his reading glasses, unhappy with the interruption. “Ginn. Your old school transferred us your files and records last week, and I feel we must discuss some things before you head to classes.”

Ginn bit her lip and nodded. She had always gotten pretty good scores in lessons, but she was by far the favourite student to any teacher she ever had. She had a tendency to speak her mind, even when out of terms. Especially then, actually. She also did not have the best track record when it came to peer relations. Most of her past incidents were not her fault, but she had to claim some as her own doing. What could she say? She knows how to stick up for herself.

“These records say you are a very smart young girl, you could thrive in an academic environment, if provided with the right resources. This is why our scholarship program chose you to be our first representative of the… less fortunate.” Windsor hesitated with that last part. He really needed to brush up on his appropriate language book.

‘Just say I’m poor and move on.’ Ginn thought to herself.

“However,” the dreaded sentence conjunctive. “You do have a worrying amount of negative peer relations reports. I must tell you, Ginn. Fighting is strictly prohibited on the campus of this school.”

Ginn let her voice take the lead. “What’s your stance on fighting in self-defence? Mine is that is fine to fight, as long as you don’t start it. Pretty sure those records say that’s what I did.”

Oh dear. She really should have thought before speaking.

Windsor looked exasperated. Ginn was clearly not the first wise crack he had dealt with. “I believe anything can be sorted with the right words. As long as it is reported, it will be dealt with.”

“What about the times it can’t be reported?” Ginn’s voice deepened as she became serious. “That’s what happened in my experience. I couldn’t report it, and if I could, nothing happened, so I sorted it myself. Sure you wont have to worry though. This doesn’t exactly seem like the place where fights happen.”

Windsor chuckled and nodded. “You are an interesting young lady, miss- Ginn. I’m sure you will fit in with the class I have placed you in. All of your teachers have been informed of your mental heath and learning difficulties, as per your request.”

Ginn hated how that was phrased, but she thanked him anyway. ‘Gotta try and be polite’, after all.

“I have assigned a young man to help guide you around school as you settle in.” Oh no. forced interaction. “He should be outside now.”

as Windsor finished his sentence, the phone device on his desk beeped, and the voice of the receptionist through the door sounded out, saying ‘a Mr Peterson was here to see Headmaster Windsor.’ Windsor told the receptionist to send him in, and the device buzzed, causing Ginn to cringe. That sound was horrible!

Before she could fully recover, the door opened behind her and a boy around her age walked in. He had pale white skin, with bright blond hair, shaved at the sides and combed over, the parting favouring the right side of his head. His eyes were cornflower blue, shining and bright. He had a small, wonky smile on his face as he greeted the headmaster and took a seat on Ginn’s right side.

“This is Alex Peterson. He will be, what we call, your class escort.” Windsor introduced the boy to Ginn, and the boy turned to Ginn and smiled, offering his hand to shake, which she just looked at nodded to him. Windsor broke the awkward tension between the two and continued. “He will show you around until you are comfortable with your surroundings.”

Ginn hated this idea. She could see why they implemented it, many people would want it, but she was not one of those people. She would much rather just figure it out on her own, even if it meant being late to all her classes.

“The bell is about to ring. You two should head off now.” Windsor gestured to the door, and the two teens picked up their bags and walked out.

“So…” The boy, Alex, said, drawing out the ‘O’ sound. “Can I see your schedule? Just so I know for sure where you are?”

Ginn wordlessly shoved the piece of paper into Alex’s hand, still avoiding eye contact with him. Alex shot her a strange look, realising this was going to be so much harder than he originally thought. He did think she would be quiet, being new and all, but dang.

“Cool, you’re in mine and my friend’s form.” he handed back the paper to the new girl and started walking, being closely followed by her. “You’ll like Mr Caxton, he’s fun.”

Ginn hummed in response. God, she was not making it easy for Alex.

The bell rang and Ginn tensed, her shoulders squaring, and her fists clenching. Another loud, irritating noise. This school was just made to make her uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, Alex had noticed her reaction to the sound. “You ok? It’s just the bell, no need to worry.” he chuckled.

“Fine.” Ginn grumbled through gritted teeth. She started storming off down the corridor without a plan, and luckily Alex jogged to catch up to her before she reached the turning point.

Alex desperately wanted to break the awkward air between them, but did not know how. This girl seemed tense, understandably, as she seemed quite strange to the standards of this school, so he did not know how to approach anything with her.

“So… where you from?” Alex asked, trying to study her body language. She walked like she was trying to look tough, as well as be silent in her steps. She succeeded on both aspects as she definitely looked intimidating, and her steps barely echoed around the halls.

Ginn subtly looked Alex up and down, figuring out his motive, in both the question and with helping her. He stood straight and proud, taller than her by a good few inches. Although, that wasn’t hard, as Ginn was only 5”3’. She estimated him to be about 5”9’, and she guessed he still had room to grow. He was looking at her expectantly with a small smile, his blue eyes shining in curiosity. She could see no malice in his wonderment, so she answered.

“Liverpool.” She said, bluntly. To be exact, she lived in a small terrace house, in Roscoe Street, very close to her primary school, Pleasant Street Primary. Ginn had hopped around several high schools in the past four years, so she couldn’t say how far she lived from them. She did not live in a great area, but it was close to the city centre, and she always felt safe there with her parents. She missed Liverpool.

Alex nodded, biting the inside of his mouth in mild frustration at Ginn’s refusal so converse. “Cool. Good city. What brought you to London then?”

“Family stuff.”

The two sighed, knowing that conversation was not going to happen right now.

The two arrived at the classroom after everyone else had arrived and sat down. Alex greeted the teacher with a cheerful ‘good morning’ and he sat down on a table for four, with two other boys, whom he greeted and immediately started chatting and laughing with. The boy sitting next to him had slightly more tanned skin than Alex, but he was still quite pale. He had neat, honey brown hair, with a full fringe that was cut just under his eyebrows, the top of head was thick with hair facing forwards, and what Ginn estimated as one inch clipped shaving around the rest of his head. His eyes were forest green, thoughtfully staring at Alex as he spoke, but also at someone on the other side of the room Ginn couldn’t locate. The other boy had his back to Ginn, but from what she could see, he had dark, sun kissed skin, and the only messy head of mahogany brown hair she had seen in this school. Well, there was an order to this mess, unlike the mess that sat on her own head. His hair was methodically spiked up, then brushed forward. He appeared to have every portion of his hair cut to a similar length, apart from the front.

Ginn heard her name and she turned, seeing the teacher beckoning her towards his desk. she walked over, head down.

“You must be Miss Ranger!” Oh god, he was perky. “Now, I like to ask before I start teaching new students, if you don’t mind, what would you like me to call you, and what pronouns shall I use for you? And are they the same in class, privately, and in front of other adults?”

Ginn blinked at the sudden questions as she let her mind catch up with her ears. “Just Ginn, thanks. Female pronouns, all the time.” She said quietly.

“Perfect.” Mr Caxton smiled softly at Ginn, then continued. “I have been told of the support you require, so don’t be afraid to approach me any time!”

Ginn felt extremely awkward, biting her lower lip, and nodding, avoiding eye contact. She always hated it when her personal stuff was brought up by other people. She knew they were only trying to help, but it never helped Ginn. all she did was nod.

“Ok, so everyone in this class has their seat. I had everyone choose to sit somewhere at the beginning of the year and that is where they sit for the rest of the year. The only available seat is across from your guide, Alex. Go sit down, and we’ll start up, ok?”

Ginn glanced over at the table of three boys. She would be sitting next to the dark-skinned boy. He looked like the more energetic person in the trio. Freaking fabulous. At least the seat was on the left side, so she wouldn’t be bumping elbows with the seemingly right-handed boy.

Ginn had nothing against boys. Truly, she didn’t. She was just very insular, and teenage boys tended to be pretty rambunctious. She also didn’t exactly have a perfect track record with relations. Not just with boys, girls too. But, well, Ginn’s short, slim stature was not a good match up when she fought with boys. Luckily, she is quick, so at least she has that going for her.

She sighed and walked over to the table, unslinging her bag off her shoulder and sat down, immediately leaning on her hand and staring at the floor. She dazed, and started thinking about what she could draw. She thought of characters from tales she enjoyed, and she started moving her finger on one spot of the table, mimicking drawing. This was something she did when uncomfortable. Actually drawing is much better, but she hated showing others her stuff, so rarely drew when sitting at a table with strangers. Or classmates, as she should call them.

the three boys had noticed Ginn sitting down, and turned to her to smile and greet her, but she was avoiding all eye contact. Alex shrugged, realising this was going to be his week. Boy to Ginn’s right decided to break the awkward silence by introducing himself.

He went to speak, nudging her first to get he attention, but before he could speak, she jumped at the sudden touch, tensing her shoulders and clenched her fists, straightening her back and gasping lightly. Her duel coloured eyes stayed locked staring forwards, and she took a few breaths before she snapped her head to look at the boy and growl, “What?”

Now she could see his face, she took in his features. He looked nervous, likely due to Ginn’s aggressive nature. He had warm, russet brown eyes that where currently wide in shock. He was handsome, with a square jaw, and strong cheekbones. His mouth was tight in shock at her reaction. Luckily for him, he recovered quickly. His eyes softened into a more relaxed form, and his tight mouth morphed into a cool side smile.

“Hey,” his voice was smooth and joyous. Enjoyable to Ginn’s ears. Wait what? “I’m Martin Williams. This is George Groden, and you’ve met Alex. It seems like we’re desk mates!”

Ginn struggled to relax her muscles from the sudden touch. She swallowed and forced her hands to open as she shoved them under her thighs. Her voice was failing her, so she just looked back at the table and nodded, humming ‘mm hmm’.

The boy, Martin, made eye contact with the other two, concerned by the reaction. He decided to pry a little, tying to get Ginn out of her shell. “Ginn, right? Interesting name, never heard it before. Where’s it come from?”

Ginn was shocked by the question. Usually when people found out about her name, they made a joke about alcoholic parents, or threw out guesses as to what it was short for. Her name was Ginn. Not Ginera, or Ginevra, or even Geneva, shockingly. This question made Ginn happy, and her vocal cords decided to work.

“It’s a combination of Gill and Finn.” Ginn kept her head down but was smiling lightly for the first time in a while. “Gill was my mum’s mum, and Finn was dad’s dad. They wanted to honour both of them, so it was either Ginn or Fill, and Ginn was pretty gender neutral.”

She huffed in amusement at that last bit. the story of her naming was always interesting to her, especially when you think of the whole story of a young pregnant woman and her husband staring at each other, trying to make the other back down, until they came to the compromise of combining the names.

“That’s cool!” Martin said, enthusiastically. “You have such an interesting story! I’m just names after my grandad!”

Ginn smiled, amused by the boy’s excitement.

Before they could continue, the teacher cleared his throat and started the lesson. It was English. This was not the best subject for Ginn due to her dyslexia, but she had a creative mind, and enjoyed story telling, so it wasn’t so bad. Well, unless they were reading old stuff, like Shakespeare or Jane Austen, they were utter torture for Ginn’s brain. Sadly, that is exactly what they were doing. Romeo and Juliet, to be exact. They started the lesson reading the play, the characters being assigned to a random assortment of students. Ginn struggled to follow along as they worked, not understanding anything they were saying. The words were floating around the page, lines and letters flipping and swapping place, it was giving her a headache. It didn’t help that the most dramatic character in the play, Mercutio, was being voiced by Martin, who was slowly becoming more and more dramatic in his reading, his movements rocking the table, making reading even harder for her.

After they had finished the first four scenes, Mr Caxton instructed the class to discuss them as a table. Ginn was thankful for this as she could finally rest her eyes for a minute. She rubbed her eyes and led her hands up to brush her hair up out of her face, letting it fall how it wanted, which was apparently not in front of her eyes. She looked at the trio of boys expectantly, waiting for a conversation to start, when she noticed they were all staring at her. Alex looked shocked, staring curiously, eyes switching between each of her eyes. George seemed curious, one eyebrow raised, and a small smile spread on his lips. Martin was far too excited for Ginn’s taste.

“Woah!! You have heterochromia?!” He said far too loud. “That’s so cool!”

Ginn quickly dipped her head and brushed her fringe over her brown eye, feeling her face flush red.

“If you say so...” She muttered under her breath.

This conversation was clearly going nowhere, much to the dismay of the three boys. Ginn was obviously not a conversation person, and the boys were not interested in discussing Shakespeare, so decided to further press.

“You don’t think so?” George questioned.

“Let’s just say it’s not my favourite thing about myself.” Ginn grumbled, shooting them a sarcastic and awkward smile. The boys shared a look, all expressing different thoughts and emotions. Martin locked eyes with his friends, then looked at Ginn quickly, and back at them, wiggling his eyebrows and smirking. The boys shot him warning looks, but he ignored it, turning around to look at Ginn, leaning his elbow on the table and putting his head on his hand, wearing his flirtatious, lopsided smirk.

“Well,” He said, making Ginn look us at him. Once she saw his face, she huffed, rolling her eyes, and looked back down at her work. “I think they are beautiful, completing the gorgeous image you hold all over.”

Ginn felt panic rise in her chest. She had never been complimented like that before from the mouth of someone who... had little to no obvious ill intentions. This boy did not seem to be particularly threatening, but still, Ginn could not be help but be wary. She clenched her fist around her pen in panic, as her defence mechanisms snapped into position.

“Say anything like that again,” She turned and glared at Martin through her hair. “And I break your hand.”

Martin tensed up, squeaking in fear as his arm slipped off the table in surprise. Ginn did not break eye contact, however, needing to maintain her tough exterior.

“Well ok then.” He squeaked. Pleased with herself, Ginn looked back down at her work, deciding to do the work herself. The boys fell silent and just did the work, quietly discussing Shakespeare out of fear for their hands.

At the end of the class, after a long lesson of awkward silence between the four tablemates, the boys packed up and met with Elsie and Louise. Ginn had rushed out of the classroom a lot quicker that the others, so Alex had already failed at his job of making sure she was ok. This was going to be a rough day.

The final class of the day was P.E. Luckily for Ginn, sport was something she excelled in. Unluckily for Ginn, she had to get changed in front of other people, which was less than ideal.

Alex instructed her to follow Louise and Elsie to the girls’ changing rooms. Ginn kept her head down and shuffled along with the other girls as they chatted, complaining about the lesson they were going into.

“P.E. sucks, I hate it so much!” Louise groaned, dramatically. “I mean, I like exercise, but the structure of P.E. is so messy, and its so boring!”

“I know!” Agreed Elsie. “It’s even worse right now, doing those weird drill things.”

Ginn perked up at that comment. If they were anything like the ones she used to do in Cadets, she was golden! She didn’t look at the other girls, but she did smile and huff in satisfaction.

“You like P.E., Ginn?” Said Louise, sounding surprised. The girl looked Ginn up and down quizzically. She did not exactly fit the typical description of a fit girl. She looked very skinny, but Louise guessed that was mainly due to her oversized uniform.

Ginn hesitated with her answer, wondering how to answer without sounding weird. “Yeah, kind of. I like exercise, and I’m used to pretty strict sessions, so nothing really bothers me much anymore.”

The other girls seemed satisfied with her answer luckily.

After only moments, the three girls had reached the girls’ changing room. As the tried to find a free section of bench to place their bags and clothes, Ginn was silently praying that no one would pay attention to her so she could change and slip out unnoticed. She utterly hated changing in public. Sadly, her prayers were not answered, as the only available space was on a bench in the middle of the room, with a group of chatty girls surrounding it. Perfect. The three set down their bags and started undressing, quickly swapping from blouse to P.E. polo shirt. Ginn was particularly mad about their easy method of swapping from skirt to shorts without presenting their underwear; slipping the shorts on under their skirts, then taking off the skirt from above. Ginn, wearing trousers, had no such luxury, so had to take advantage of her too big shirt and take off her trousers, hoping they would cover her behind as she slipped the shorts on. Now for the bit she dreaded: changing from shirt to polo. She wanted to do this as quickly as possible, but struggled due to her ever growing anxiety. She slipped off her tie and unbuttoned her shirt, then readied her polo shirt to be the correct way to slip on as soon as she rid her back of it’s professional cotton attire. Quickly, she took off the shirt, and immediately heard what she feared.

Louise and Elsie had gasped, quietly. They had finished changing and lacing up their trainers, and were waiting for Ginn to finish changing so they could walk out together, and happened to glance up when they saw her take off her shirt. The two girls were sitting on Ginn’s right, so they could see what Ginn was worried about clear as day. Right across her back, from the bottom of her shoulder blade, creeping up to the top curve of her right shoulder, were two long, pale, jagged, and bumpy scars. They looked awful, and the two girls were certain that they were from a horrible incident from a long time ago. This scared them, as they worried about Ginn’s safety and current situation.

Before they could say anything, Ginn tugged her polo shirt over her head, hiding the scars before anyone could ask questions, or, god forbid, anyone else saw them. Louise opened her mouth to speak. She was not sure what she would say, but it was instinct. Before she could make a sound, however, Ginn shot her a warning glare, her blue eye shining like a lightning storm, her amber eye shimmering like a raging fire. Her lips were tight and eyebrows knitted in a tight V-shape. Her ginger hair had fallen before her face, blocking the light from reaching her face, only making the looming pit of aggression in Ginn’s aura stronger. Her fists were tight. Louise only just realised the new girl’s flat and scarred knuckles. Louise immediately shut her mouth. She offered an awkward, slightly scared smile, but Ginn just straightened her back, slipped on her battered old trainers, and started towards the door. Louise and Elsie shared a concerned look, then darted up and dashed to keep up with Ginn, who had suddenly developed a quick, strong stride.

Once all of the students had gathered in the sports hall, the P.E. teacher, Mr Dullan, called registration and introduced the aim of today’s class. The class knew they would not like this lesson. Mr Dullen was clearly in a bad mood, he was completely stiff and glaring at everyone who made eye contact with him. Ginn was not happy when he grabbed her shoulder and pulled her to face him when she marched into the hall, so he could interrogate her about who she was. He seemed satisfied after a full 30 seconds of comparing her to the ID picture that was on his register. But, this was a respectable school that definitely would not accept her doing what she wanted to do at that moment, and tuition was far too expensive for her to be kicked out on her first day, so she let it go.

“Ok, everyone!” Mr Dullen shouted, making a huge, distracting echo ring around the room. Ginn knew she would barely be able to understand him immediately. “I don’t want to deal with teaching you all today, so you’re just going to do run laps around the school grounds all lesson.”

The entire class groaned and started quietly complaining to themselves and their friends. Well, all except Ginn, who enjoyed running. Also, the echo in this room was getting to her, and she was finding it hard to concentrate. She silently thanked every deity she knew of that the run was outside.

“Alright, alright, quit the complaining!” Mr Dullen yelled, making Ginn bunch up the hem of her polo shirt in her hand to squeeze. She found early on that this was a better coping mechanism than her automatic reaction, which was covering her ears and gripping locks of hair and pulling. Distractions from bad noises are always oh so fun. Mr Dullen carried on, interrupting Ginn’s thoughts, “Everyone get your butts outside!”

The crowd of grumbling students headed towards the doors leading to the yard so they could start the run. Before Ginn could disappear into the crowd and go off to enjoy her run, Louise had grabbed her wrist and started to speak.

“Hey, are you ok? We should talk abo—”

“Do not touch me!” Ginn growled, ripping her hand away from Louise, immediately marching off in a strong, quick pace.

As soon as she set foot on the outside area of the school grounds and witnessed part of the crowd all heading in the same direction, she started her rounds of the school with a light jog, preparing her body and lungs for a long, pleasant run. She really needed to calm her mind, after everything that had happened today, especially in the last few minutes.

Louise was incredibly confused by that reaction. She had noticed Ginn tense up and ball her shirt in her fist, and she knew Ginn had not calmed down from whatever emotion she was feeling after presenting those scars in the changing rooms.

“What was that about?” George said, the four friends walking up to Louise so they could walk the laps of the grounds together.

“She’s seemed pretty tense all day.” Alex offered. “Maybe you just scared her and she reacted.”

She definitely has something she’s hiding.” Elsie said, as the group wondered outside and started walking. “She had two huge scars on her back. She got real tense, more than usual, when we saw them.”

“Let’s go find out what’s up with her.” Louise said, determination in her voice. Then, she sounded unsure. “If we can catch up to her...”

Ginn was no where to be seen as they walked their round. They knew this because Ginn was extremely noticeable in the crowd of students, being one of the only people in the school with ginger hair. She was even more noticeable because her hair was messy and choppily cut short, and her P.E. kit, like her uniform, was too big and looked it. They walked quickly around the grounds, talking and looking around. Ginn was nowhere to be seen.

“She must actually be running.” Martin shrugged. “That girl is an enigma.”

“An enigma you’re crushing on!” Alex said teasingly, elbowing his friend in the side and laughing.

“Shut up!” Martin pushed Alex to the side, a crimson blush rising in his cheeks. “I am not!”

“Then what was that comment in the changing room about?” George smirked and raised and eyebrow.

“Ok!” Martin’s dramatic flare revealed itself as dramatically waved his hand in the air and pointing at nothing in particular. “You have to admit, she is quite pretty!”

Martin stared a the group, waiting expectantly for their response, to which he got a couple nods, but mostly just looks of ‘my dear boy, calm yourself’.

The group continued to walk around the school grounds, giving up on searching for the strange new girl, she was far gone and they could not see her at all. The lesson went by relatively quickly, the group only lapping the school once and only going another 20 yards before Mr Dullen blew his whistle and called everyone into the changing rooms five minutes before the final bell rang. The five friends wondered back into the school, avoiding the stares of disapproval from Mr Dullen.

Louise and Elsie were slowly changing out of their kits when Ginn finally appeared by their side. She was sweating slightly, despite the November chill outside, and her breaths were long, quick, and laboured. As expected, she did not greet the girls, she just started changing, first preparing her shirt to be quickly thrown on after she removed her polo. Louise and Elsie tried not to look at her, feeling her haste and discomfort with being around people after what happened earlier. However, Louise is a pretty stubborn girl, so waited for Ginn to finish changing before she confronted her.

“Hey, where were you all class?” Louise tried to keep her voice perky and welcoming, rather than the interrogating tone she almost used. “we were looking for you when you ran off.”

Ginn let out a small growl of annoyance. “Ahead of everyone. Just needed to run.”

She removed her shorts, her shirt covering her underwear, and slipped on her trousers, then sat down to put on her school shoes. She never looked at Louise. Not that that was expected. This girl is so strange.

“You must be quick then!” Louise laughed lightly. Ginn just hummed. “It’s pretty impressive, running is pretty hard.”

This made Ginn’s head snap up, shooting Louise a confused look. “How is it hard?”

Louise and Elsie shared an amused look. Elsie laughed lightly and said, “You know, keeping pace without losing your breath, stuff like that.”

Ginn hummed thoughtfully whilst finishing up lacing her shoes. Once she was done, she stood and picked up her bag, just in time for the final bell to ring. Ginn attempted to supress her cringe at the sound, but her efforts were in vane, as the other two girls noticed. Luckily for Ginn, all they did was share a look and stand with their bags.

“Not sure I follow, but ok.” Ginn broke the silence, starting to walk out alone. However, Louise and Elise had other plans, both speeding to catch up to her and standing on either side.

“You’re a real enigma, you know?” Louise chuckled. That was apparently the wrong thing to say, as Ginn glared at her, a quiet and low growl echoing from the bottom of her throat. Her eyes raged, like a fearsome lightning storm and a blazing fire. Even though she is a very small person, Ginn knew how to make herself look large and terrifying.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Erm... well, I... I just meant that you, well,” Louise stuttered and squeaked, as if she were learning how to speak again. “I just mean that you’re, you know, pretty mysterious...”

Ginn grunted and said something like ‘that’s the point’ as she stormed off, out of the building and around the corner towards the front gates, not to be seen again that day.

“Well, you kinda fucked that one up, huh?” Elsie chortled anxiously.

“Thanks for helping there Els. Come on, let’s just go find the boys.”

Alex, George, and Martin exited the boys changing room a few minutes later. The girls explained what happened as they walked out of the school and back home. The only thing they could all agree on when it came to Ginn: She would be very difficult to befriend.

#no war au #rangers alive au #ginn ranger #Alex Peterson #george groden #martin williams #louise mitchel #elsie brown

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ultravioletproxy · 5 years

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[Sona] Hine Cross (Proxy OC)

I've finally done it. I finally finished an actual sona reference up as well as finally completing a updated digital reference of HINE! I'm so very pleased with this and how my art has progress since his original reference, all those years ago... I actually was able to get up the energy to go fully in depth with his information and soon I'll get to his backstory comic going.

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Personality/ Mental State:

Basic summary; Hine is a VERY complex character. He has many layers to his personality which I'll try my best to explain. He is a quiet person with a lot on his mind, constantly bombarded with various thoughts which makes it hard for him to keep track of all that's going on around him. Hine "Zones/ Spaces Out" occasionally and does not realize that you're talking to him, he might even not respond to you in the middle of a conversation. All of these things may come off as rude; but he really doesn't mean to be. Later on in his timeline/ as he grows up, Hine becomes much more of an unstable person, laughing a little too loudly at things (and volume control in general), walking off in the middle of conversations, and tends to get a bit unhinged...

Hine has several mental disorders that can effect his personality:

⊗-Autism: Doesn't pick up on social cues, and it takes him a while to think of a response when in a conversion, in turn he pauses and stutters. With autism comes anxiety, if in a high strung social environment or decision, Hine may have a break down (Sitting down and grabbing his shoulders tightly), He does not let people see him break down, he will go to a private area to try and cool down before coming out into view and acting perfectly fine. This luckily, doesn't happen often as he's trying to cope with his social anxiety. During a conversation Hine may accidentally say something that he doesn't mean, like a mess up of words(Saying something unintentionally mean as he just didn't think how it would sound when spoken or combining two words together.)

⊗-Compulsive liar: He doesn't ever mean to lie, a lot of the times he feels as though a lie is safer than telling the truth and before he even knows what he's done, the person has accepted the lie as truth and he's too afraid to tell them that his response was false. This stemmed from abuse during his life at the orphanage. He currently is trying hard to pull away from this.

⊗-Minorly a Paranoid Schizophrenic: Sometime this disorder makes him feels like everything and everyone has an ulterior motive, even though the thought is completely irrational. Hine mentally beats himself up for having these kinds of thoughts as he feels like he's betraying his loved ones/ friends. The thoughts themselves tend to be of a violently disgusting nature as they try to convince him that everyone is lying. He rarely witnesses hallucinations, mostly just little shadowy things in his peripheral vision.

⊗-Hypochondriac: Do to being mixed with a Slender, and his fear of dying, he constantly feels like his body will just give out on him, or that any sickness no matter how minor will end up killing him in one way or another, he's very paranoid of random aches and pain, irrationally telling himself to accept the fact that he's just going to die.

⊗-Sociopathic Tendencies: Hine has a hard time grasping that other people are just like him and have emotions, thoughts, and a consciousness. He tries quite hard to convince himself that other people are essentially sentient like him.

⊗-Unintentionally Manipulative: When living in the orphanage Hine was treated poorly due to his lack of social abilities and therefore was mostly ignored by the caretakers and fellow children. He desperately tried to figure out ways in order to be able to get a break from the constant chores and duties that he was given since he would not participate in being social with the others. He(not exactly intentionally) developed ways to read people in order to get what he wanted, again, not in a particularly malicious manner. More of just a way of survival.

Habits/ Quirks, Likes, and Dislikes:

⊗-Quirks/ Habits: Hine has quite a few funny little habits. One being collecting, he just adores collecting various things from silverware, to plushies, to seashells, really anything he finds the least bit intriguing and holding sentimental value. He is a little bit of a pack-rat you could say. He also has a bit of a compulsion to essentially "preen" or "groom" himself. For instance; cleaning under his nails, picking fuzz off a shirt, or even idly pulling hairs. He also has a lot of trouble finishing hot drinks, particularly coffee as he tends to forget about them, they get cold, and then he's too lazy to heat them up. Hine is mostly nocturnal as bright lights make him disorientated. Another not so good habit include Stress Smoking developed from watching a certain Slender and a friend smoke and seeing how it relaxed them. He occasionally delves into cannabis (Once Mr.KittyKitty comes around) due to the many medical benefits it has, such as anxiety relief, being more talkative, painkillers, motivation, or to calm him down.

⊗-Likes: He loves long walks alone in nature, particularly next to streams/ rivers either in silence or with music. He loves listening to the wind through the pines, the birds chirping, the sound of rain hitting the underbrush, and classical music. He loves pickled foods/ the taste of vinegar, as well as eating, and cooking in general. He tends to be rather indecisive about his favorite foods as he likes way too many, although salt and vinegar chips, popcorn, pomegranates, and cherries are a few of his favorites. His favorite drinks are Earl Grey Tea and Shirley Temples. Animals he adores are Bears, Raccoons, Ferrets, Ravens, Barn Owls, Coral Snakes, and Cats. He absolutely loves to draw, he makes his own characters and story lines, he also delves into other artistic feats such as crafting, painting with water colors, and sewing. A good book/ movie in the supernatural or horror genre will keep him content for hours. He loves dark humor, and coming up with ridiculous jokes(Blaming that on L.J.), and has a penchant for spouting the most random of facts. He really loves to talk to others and tries his best to keep up with them even though he has a hard time figuring out a response a lot of the time. Lastly, he has a weird enjoyment for the smell of disinfectant chemicals and has a particularly strange fixation on tornadoes...

⊗-Dislikes: He very much dislikes crowded areas, physical interactions, cities, thunder/ loud noises. He's not too fond of overly cutsie things. He can't stand highly sweetened foods or drinks (Candy, Cakes, Chocolate); once in a while/ a craving is fine, but he'd much rather take a bite of fruit. He doesn't care for baking all that much except for making breads at which he's none too shabby at. He doesn't care for bright colors unless they're mixed with dark ones.

Relationships:

⊗-Significant Other: Is in a delightfully happy relationship with flannelRaptors's Character, Johnny.

⊗-Slenders: When he was young, Hine ran away from the orphanage, he found his way into the forest where lovely Splendorman welcomed him with open arms and tendrils. Soon after, Slenderman himself took interest in Hine and became some sort of a strange father figure to him. The other Slenders joined in with helping take care of Hine. Trender helped his practical artistic side, while Splendor helped him understand his emotions, social cues, and tame his wild mental health state, Slender was his stable rock, and Offender schooled him in street smarts and how to deal with the "real" world.

⊗-Other Creepies: As a quiet person, Hine mostly sticks to himself, however if the opportunity presents itself, he absolutely loves talking to and learning about other people's pasts, Likes, etc.

Basic Background Summary:

⊗-Past: When Hine was young his parents were murdered by a trusted family friend they’d met from the church they attended. This person in turn, kidnapped and tortured Hine for quite some time, until Hine was eventually freed. However, as a mentally scarred young boy, shipping him off to an orphanage didn't really bode too well and he eventually ran away to join the Slenders' care and eventually became a "Proxy" to Slenderman.

Basic Background Summary:

⊗-Appearance: Hine has many abilities as shown above, however there are a lot more details and catches than what's written on the reference sheet. As the acronym may explain, Hine does not have any eyes. In an accident in which Hine almost died, Slenderman gave Hine an essential blood transfusion. The Slender blood, being incredibly aggressive, took over a good chunk of Hine's DNA giving him not only Eyeless vision, but also tendrils, an extra set of blood vessels, and a whole new horrible form.

Slender Affected Abilities:

-Hine can still see, but he now has what is called "Slender Vision" which is a 360-degree sight range, meaning he can see in all directions at once, ultimately maddening when first getting used to it. This is one of the reasons why Hine is constantly distracted. The range of sight and focus can be altered however it is rather difficult to do so as he was not born with the ability. Most of the Slenders can see a good mile or so around them while Hine has a shorter, about 50 ft range. Hine, not used to his new vision, rarely turns his head to look at objects that he is focusing on, due to there not being a focal point of eyes, therefore he tends to come off even more blank and emotionless than he really is.

-Hine's tendrils are hidden beneath his skin in what are called "Ports". Hine has a total of eight "ports", 4 on each side of his back. The tendrils can painfully be pushed through his skin at will, ultimately piercing through his back. He's supposed to constantly leave them out so the holes can seal up around them (much like a piercing would), but to do that he would have to keep out of sight from all other non-slender beings, as him being half slender is a well-guarded secret. The tendrils can lengthen and split apart to form thinner smaller pieces due to their "braided nature". However, in the early stages all of Hine's slenderification, his abilities are all INCREDIBLY clumsy.

-Other attributes Hine’s gained include, but are not limited to: heightened versions of all the senses, Moderately increased strength and speed. A bit of an iron stomach (ex: can eat raw meat), and more advanced healing rates (the less severe the slower it heals).

-With all these benefits came quite a few negatives. For instance, until he gets used to it, Hine's depth perception and hand eye coordination is completely off. His two blood types sometimes mix and therefore cause him to become incredibly ill for short periods of times, his varying blood colors also result in a pale yellowish grey complexion. Hine’s body has an unnatural slimness to it; he experiences continuous, nonstop increase in height in addition to having disproportionately long and lengthened arms and legs.(He has to make his own custom clothing.) Due to these things Hine suffers from minor growing pains as well as occasional cravings for human meat/ flesh. (Inherited from the dietary nature of the Slenders)

I applaud you if you read this all! Here's a TLDR version of this massive piece:

Hine is a mentally and physically scarred orphan who grew up with all the Slenders as his family. He came close to death at some point, but Slenderman saved him by transfusing his own blood into Hine, resulting in a well-hidden secret. Hine got really cool abilities with a few pretty bad side effects and is now an official Slenderman Proxy.

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⊗-Terms of Service-⊗

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fateaccompli · 4 years

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title: the mornings after notes: I’ve been reading the Modern Love book anthology, which reminded me of this story I wrote in high school. A girl slept with her boyfriend’s brother and there is a fallout. I don’t remember most of it, so I’ve decided to re-explore the premise as practice because I'm trying to get back into writing. Why did she do it? Why did he go along with it? How to write it honestly and respectfully for all parties while admitting their faults? I dunno. We'll see.

…

Willa woke up in a strange hotel room, chilly.

Willa wanted to blame it on the alcohol, especially when she sat up straight. She hadn’t had enough to drink to account for the hangover. Something hadn’t gotten the memo.

Her gaze dropped back down to the impressive amount of cleavage created by hugging the hotel bedsheet to her. She could blame it all on the alcohol – every person in her spot had done it or, like her, had been tempted to at least.

The hotel door lock scrambled to unlatch in a mess of mechanisms. She could’ve looked up then to watch him stride in.

“Nice view,” the man said. She imagined he did his usual shrug with his lower lip before swapping it for a rogue gallery grin. Willa’d watched him learn to turn leers into allure during her friendship with Tan. She wondered what he saw now - a young woman with thick brown hair and green eyes or something of the girl she had been. Did he feel guiltier than she did?

“Could be better," he concluded.

Apparently not.

She kept her face carefully blank when their gazes met. He seemed delighted by what censure he saw in her eyes, but she thought she found something else was there, too, if she peered a bit closer.

She didn’t have that kind of bravery on hand, so she held onto irritation instead.

Li looked good, though – last night's suit somehow neat, clean-cut, just shy of devastating. A girl could cut herself on that charm. As if on cue, the sharp edge of his grin challenged her like it had when she and Tan were thirteen and he was seventeen, before she knew what his look meant. He had been further from devastating then, but he’d known where he was going.

Now she knew, remembering last night (and this morning) and her even-keeled expression wavered. Her cheeks heated up like she was a teenager again and she was meeting her best friend’s brother for the first time.

Except Li was now her boyfriend’s brother.

No, this was what happened when a thirteen-year compulsion take the wheel. Thirteen-year-old girls want love stories. Twenty-six-year-young women want the whole package, but love stories make for the best ghosts and poltergeists. She and Tan had a good relationship and there was no reason for her to muck it up with Li, of all people.

So she couldn’t put it all on the alcohol; she just had to pursue her rabbit hole. Now that she had, what else could she do but grit her teeth and bear it, whatever that meant?

Although getting out of bed and out the door would be a good start. If only she’d left before he got back with coffee, but seeing as the easy shot got her on her back in the first place...

Well. The easy shot and lust. She was old enough to own up to it. She bought the proverbial shovel with her own money and started digging all on her own.

“Better than you’d ever expected you could get,” she muttered. Pushing away from the headboard with her shoulders, she tucked the end of the bedsheet between her breasts and made her way off the bed.

He chuckled and Willa’s stomach flipped. She focused on the plush rug underfoot instead. It was a nice hotel room. Most of her memories were blurry and Li - well, let it suffice to say he had a starring role, not the multi-hundred-thousand piece of impressionisms hanging on every other wall. She can almost still feel his arm around her waist, his hand reaching down to -

Willa shut down the thought and got busy before her face grew any warmer. She first made for her panties hanging on the back of the chaise lounge, then the strapless bra dangling from the lamp. Li said nothing, but she could feel his attention on her. She could imagine herself slipping on the tail end of the bedsheet while putting one leg through her underwear, banging her head on the coffee table on the way down...

Grabbing her shiny red dress off the ground, she made her way to the bathroom.

Which brought her right across his path - or, more accurately, where he was standing and watching her.

She held her breath as she passed, like he may forget this whole thing if only she abandoned all signs of life and dignity, and he seemed entirely willing until she was a step away.

And then his hand found a hot perch on her shoulder.

“We need to talk,” he said.

Biting her lower lip, she turned to him, arms crossed . His voice was softer and deeper than she was comfortable with, in context, and his dark brown eyes were definitely looking lower than they should be in a way that had nothing to do with the fact he had a head on her. But his face was still. He pressed his lips firmly together and there was an earnestness that rang a city-wide fire alarm in the back of her mind.

“When we’re both wearing clothes.”

The earnestness took a backseat as he cocked a single eyebrow. She always wished she could pull off that level of sauciness.

Li casually pulled down the knot of his tie. “We could do it the other way, too.”

Willa refused to blush. Instead, she sighed. She could hardly escape the consequences. She shouldn't. “Wait here.”

As she walked away with all the dignity she could muster, she couldn’t help but compare him to Tan. And that was when she knew she was sunk.

TBC

#writing #MC writes #fiction #original

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calucadu · 5 years

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Ochako’s discovery

This is the piece I made for the @kindergarden-zine, a multifandom kindergarten themed zine!

The zine is super cute! Everyone worked super hard to make their lovely pieces 💜

I’m extremely happy with how my piece turned out! I’m very proud of it and I loved working on it! 😊

Ochako’s discovery, a Boku no Hero Academia/My Hero Academia One Shot.

Summary: Ochako is a four-year-old girl in kindergarten that hasn’t developed a quirk yet. She’s been explained what they are, and lives with two parents who have special abilities of their own, but she hasn’t found hers yet.

Characters: Uraraka Ochako, Uraraka Ochako’s Mother, Uraraka Ochako’s Father, Original Characters.

Rating: General

Read on AO3

Or read below the cut

Ochako is a four-year-old girl in kindergarten that hasn’t developed a quirk yet. She’s been explained what they are, and lives with two parents who have special abilities of their own, but she hasn’t found hers yet.

One Monday afternoon, when she’s in the living room playing with her blocks, she feels a strange tingling sensation running through her fingers. Instinctively, she lets the power flow from within her, and her eyes grow wide in amazement as she sees a green block slowly rising towards her.

Screaming, she runs towards the kitchen, without noticing that the toy is following her. When she reaches her mum and dad and asks for help, she’s surprised to find that they aren’t scared like she is. In fact, quite the opposite: they seem delighted with whatever is happening to their daughter.

Ochako is about to scream louder when tears come rushing down her cheeks and her mother picks her up.

“It’s your quirk, sweetie!” She tells her, overjoyed. “It’s finally manifested!”

The block comes cluttering to the floor loudly as the child lets out a shaky breath of relief.

Her parents explain what it means to have a power and they even tell her she’s lucky because hers is fantastic. Ochako feels pleased with herself for discovering something so cool!

As she tries to understand her new power, she suddenly remembers some of her friends have also developed their quirks. She can’t wait to show them hers!

She’s giddy the next morning, nearly bouncing up and down with excitement as her mother dresses her in the cute little uniform she has to wear for kindergarten.

Her mum giggles as she watches her, scolding her lightly when she wriggles too much and doesn’t put her arm through the sleeve of her blue shirt.

“Ochako, sweetie,” she says lightly, trying to get her daughter’s attention, “we need to get you dressed.”

Breakfast goes by more or less the same way, with her father struggling to get her to finish her milk. Ochako keeps floating her Sippy cup away from her mouth and giggling while her dad tries to persuade her that the faster she finishes, the earlier she’ll be to kindergarten, but her daughter just doesn’t want to listen.

She stops abruptly when a pang of pain hits her and she clutches her stomach, forgetting about her Sippy cup, which comes rushing to the floor, spilling milk everywhere.

Her father is about to scold her when he notices something’s wrong and immediately goes to her side, picking her up and asking her to tell him what is happening to her.

“My tummy!” She wails, sobbing loudly. “It hurts!”

Worried, they decide to take her to the doctor, who immediately pins the pain to overuse of her quirk, and her parents have to instruct her to be careful when she makes things float. Ochako doesn’t quite understand it, but with watery eyes she agrees to listen to their warnings.

Her tummy stops hurting by the time they get her to class, but she’s not as happy as she was that morning.

She’s scared to use her quirk again because she doesn’t want the pain to return so she just spends the entire day moping in a corner as she doodles.

Back at home, when her parents see she’s visibly upset, they tell her that the doctor’s warnings didn’t mean she can never use her power again, only that she needs to be careful.

Because that doesn’t seem to make it much better, her mum comes up with a way to get her to use it again. “Honey, you’ve got to practice your power, little by little if that’s what you need, to make the pain go away.” She’s smiling as she says it, crouched down so she’s levelled with her daughter. “Like how you learnt to tie your shoes. At first you couldn’t but after you practised and practiced you could do it perfectly!”

“Yeah, now you’re so good at it!” Her father chimes in when he sees their daughter perked up noticeably.

“Pwactice.” Ochako says, her eyes shining once more. “Okay!”

At home she starts to experiment with her newfound ability. She lifts her crayons up when she gets bored of drawing, and she watches intently as they slowly crash into one another in the air.

This causes her to get tummy aches often, though, forcing her to stop abruptly. The crayons all end up scattered on the floor as she clutches her stomach and wails.

She tries not to do it too often, even though something inside of her nags at her to work compulsively on her ability. She repeats to herself what her mother told her: if she practises, the pain will go away.

Bored of her toys, she decides to try her quirk on something bigger. With a little bit of difficulty, she clambers up the small table where her mum’s favourite vase is, and places her small hands on it, releasing her quirk. The object shakily goes up. It’s heavy since it’s full of water and flowers, and it takes a lot of concentration from her to keep it in the air.

She wants to get down from the table, so she sort of throws herself off. Tumbling down makes her forget about the vase, which also falls to the ground, smashing completely when it hits the floor.

In pain – from both her usual tummy aches and her knees, from falling – and in shock because she’s realised she’s broken her mummy’s special object she got as a gift, Ochako starts wailing uncontrollably, terrified of her mum’s reprimand.

Her mother is alerted by both the crying and the crashing, and runs into the hall, where she finds the tell-tale signs of her daughter’s crime.

“Are you hurt?” Her mum asks her, and her child slowly nods her head, tears running down her cheeks. Sighing, she instructs her not to move so she can clean the mess and tend to her.

Ochako nods again, trying to stop the sobs she can’t help but emit. Her mum tut-tuts gently and walks over the broken porcelain carefully to pick up her child.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she shushes her as she calms her down, rocking her against her chest and stroking her hair lovingly with her free hand. “I know it was an accident and that you didn’t mean to break it.”

“I’m sowwy mummy.” Ochako hiccups against her mother’s shoulder, grabbing her shirt tightly.

“It’s okay, sweetie.” Her mum whispers as she cradles her, trying to soothe her with her soft voice. “I forgive you.”

When she manages to get her child to stop crying, she looks into her eyes sternly and tries to tell her off. “That doesn’t mean I’m not angry though.”

Her mother can’t exactly forbid her from using her quirk at home, but she does limit how she must use it. Ochako has to practice her little gift, or she will never learn how to master it, and doing so at a young age is the key to success. “From now on you’ll only be allowed to use your quirk when your father or I are in the room, do I make myself clear?”

While Ochako doesn’t understand all of the words her mother said, she does get the overall idea, so she nods her head hesitantly.

Her mummy hasn’t said anything about using her quirk in class though, so Ochako’s happy to practice there. She plays with her pencils all day long, giggling inanely.

When she gets bored of making her own things float, she decides to play with something else. She finds the closest thing that’s not hers to be her classmate’s bright yellow hat, so she grabs it from his head and lets it slowly raise up, watching in amazement as it floats away. The boy starts crying immediately, demanding her to give it back while screaming that his mummy will punish him if he loses another one of his things.

Panicking, she looks at the boy but tries to tell him she doesn’t know how to get things down. Normally they fall to the ground when the pain gets too much to bear.

Alarmed by the child’s wailing, the teacher approaches the pair and quickly notices what’s wrong. She grabs the floating hat and crouches next to the children as she fights the headgear from trying to fly away.

“You’re not supposed to do that with your quirk.” She scolds her softly, smiling lovingly at the still weeping child next to her. “Please give him back his hat and apologise.”

Ochako doesn’t know what she did wrong – after all, she’s just practising her ability – but does as she is told. Releasing the power inside of her mind makes it stop floating and the hat immediately stops struggling in the teacher’s hands, who gives it to her.

Hesitantly, the girl thrusts it against the boy’s chest, flushing in embarrassment as she forces out a low “I’m sowwy.”

It’s not only the humiliation and shame she’s just felt, it’s also the weird sensation of not knowing what she’s doing wrong. What is she supposed to do with her power then? On top of that, her mum had already told her off. Ochako isn’t as happy with it as she was at first.

She thinks it’s a useless quirk, and all it does is give her tummy aches and make her believe she’s misbehaving.

As a result, she decides to stop using her quirk.

“What’s wrong, Ochako?” Her father asks as he picks her up from class that day.

The little girl just pouts, unwilling to unfold her crossed arms or stop staring at the ground.

“Nothing.” She mutters back.

Her dad chuckles warmly as he picks her up and scoops her into a big hug. “Did you miss me?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that why you’ve got such a long face?”

Ochako doesn’t answer. She does lift her head up slightly, and her big, round eyes lock with her father’s for a few seconds before she turns her gaze back to the floor again. She shakes her head and remains silent.

“Will a hug make it better?” He asks good-humouredly and she quickly smiles, spreading her arms widely to tell her dad that she’s ready for him to accept her invitation. He cuddles her to his chest and rocks her against it, shushing her gently.

Ochako is playing in the living room with some toy cars while her parents watch her. Her dad sometimes joins in, going ‘vroom, vroom’ and making her giggle as he trails the plastic vehicle over her body, up and down her arms and shoulders. He tangles it in her hair and she shakes her head to try to get him to remove it from there.

After playing for a while, her mother frowns, looking at her daughter with concern when she finally notices something is off. “What’s wrong, honey?” She asks, kneeling down in front of her daughter. “You haven’t been using your quirk for a few days. Is your tummy feeling alright?”

“No.” Ochako takes a while to answer her, unable to look at her mother as she lies to her.

“Oh, baby, come here.” Her mum coos, picking her up and putting her on her lap. “Have you been using it too much in class?”

Her child doesn’t answer. She just averts her eyes and continues to play with the red car in her hand, hoping it will make her mum stop asking questions.

“Ochako, you can always tell mummy if something is wrong.”

“My power is bad.”

“Why do you say that?” Her father asks her, and she looks away, unwilling to answer. She shrugs her shoulders and her mother lifts her chin up with her fingers.

“Did anything happen?”

“Your power isn’t bad.” Her dad sighs, closing his eyes before scooting closer to them. “Show me what you can do, I bet it’s amazing.”

And just like that, Ochako feels a little bit better. She hops off her mother’s lap and touches the toy car, making it float.

“Bring it over to me.” Her father instructs. When she gets up and is about to reach for it, he tells her to stop. “No. With your quirk. Make it come to me.”

The girl frowns. She’s never done that before, she’s not sure she can. But she tries to, anyway, because she loves her father and because both her parents are looking at her expectantly.

She concentrates on trying to get it to move in the direction she wants it to. It’s wobbly, but the car slowly heads towards her father, who catches it in his open hands.

“See? You’re going to be a star.” He smiles at her.

Ochako feels her heart swell inside her chest.

Finding out she can make things go from one place to another changes everything! The girl feels like she’s discovered a new power altogether. It’s not just making things float – it’s making them move. With an intention, a purpose.

Ochako’s invented a new game. She likes touching other people’s objects and making them fly from one part of the classroom to another.

Smiling, she lifts her tiny hands up and carefully traces the teacher’s red pen with her fingers. She lets go of the object and watches with wonder in her eyes as it slowly drifts away from her. With a faint giggle, she follows the movements until she starts feeling queasy and lets the pen drop onto the floor. It rolls on the ground and ends up behind a cushion. The little girl tilts her head in bewilderment, but quickly forgets about it when she finds a new object to play with. This time it’s a pink and yellow ball just slightly bigger than her hands.

“What are you doing?” Someone suddenly asks her.

Startled, Ochako turns around and sees Naoko, a dark-haired girl in her class she’s not overly acquainted with. Her head’s tilted to the side and there’s a quizzical look on her face.

Relieved that she hasn’t been caught, she goes back to making things float.

“Pwactising!” Ochako replies happily, showing her how she makes the ball fly only by touching it.

“Will you get in trouble?”

Ochako decides not to answer that one, hoping the girl will leave her alone.

“Your power is so cool.” Naoko whispers, a soft smile on her face. “I don’t have mine yet.”

Because she doesn’t answer, the girl comes closer and sits down next to her. “What else can you do?” She finally asks.

“Just this.” Ochako replies as she makes the ball drop onto the floor.

“You can make it fly!”

Ochako nods her head and goes to pick up the object. She feels energy tingle through her fingers and she giggles. “It tickles.”

She doesn’t let it go until a few seconds later, and then she watches with a giant smile on her face as it rises through the air. Naoko claps in excitement as she whispers: “You’re so cool!”

Ochako has always wanted to fly. When she was smaller, she used to run around the park flapping her arms as if they were wings and pretending she was soaring the sky.

“I want to fly.” She states, staring up at the sky with an unreadable look on her face. “But I don’t have wings. I’m not a bird.”

She wishes she were because when she makes things float around, she herself wants to fly.

Granted, she’s never tried to make herself fly, so she doesn’t even know if it’s possible, but she sure wishes she could.

One day it occurs to her that she could try it out on the playhouse they have in the kindergarten’s playground.

It’s big and colourful and made for the children to clamber over and play. It has three slides and various ladders, as well as two tunnels. Normally they use it by pretending it’s a castle, but this time Ochako has a different idea in mind.

Going up the small steps she finds herself overlooking the whole playground. She can see the recent drawings they did that are up on the windows, decorating their classroom.

She smiles, sort of confident, but mostly excited.

Placing both her hands on her cheeks, she slowly lets her quirk flow from her fingers. Feeling a warm tickle being emitted from them she lets her power emanate and slowly her body starts floating upwards.

At first she feels elated – she can fly! But then, as she sees her feet getting further away from the ground and she feels the familiar nauseating sensation in her tummy, she starts to scream, terrified.

She doesn’t know how to get down, and even if she did, she could fall and hurt herself.

Ochako is too busy screaming and kicking her legs to notice the teacher is running towards her to aid her, but when she feels a tight grip on her ankle, she immediately stops wailing.

“Ochako-chan!” the teacher calls out to her. “Let go of your quirk!”

For a moment the young child is petrified. How can she do that? Her eyes go back down and she panics when she sees that not only her feet but now the woman’s as well are far from the ground.

“It’ll hurt!” she screams, closing her eyes.

“I’ve got you!” the woman urges her “Do it now!”

The hint of urgency in her tone of voice forces Ochako to follow her instructions, and she lets go of her quirk. Her tummy does a leap as she notices the new feeling of falling from a distance and she screams, trying to brace herself before they hit the ground.

She lands on a cushiony substance, and when she opens her eyes again, she realises a bubble has wrapped around her.

“I’ve got you.” The teacher smiles at her, relief clear on her face as she says it.

Ochako pants as she’s lifted by the woman, who gives her a once-over before putting her back down onto the floor.

“You must never, ever do that again. Do you understand?” The teacher reprimands her, forcing tears to well up in the little girl’s eyes. “It’s dangerous.”

“Okay.” She whispers reluctantly and slightly dejected, her lower lip wobbling.

“I’m just glad you’re okay.”

When the teacher leaves, Ochako feels tears roll down her cheeks and she starts sobbing uncontrollably.

“Why are you crying?” A soft but slightly squeaky voice makes her turn her head. Through blurred vision she sees Naoko staring at her with a worried look on her face.

“I got told off for making myself fly.”

“But that shouldn’t make you cry. Flying is so cool!”

Unfortunately, those words don’t make Ochako feel better.

It only gets worse when her parents come to pick her up. They explain to her that the teacher phoned because she wanted to speak to them about her recent behaviour.

While the adults talk Ochako doesn’t listen, but feels shame heat her cheeks. Her teacher is telling them about how she’s been misbehaving, taking other children’s stuff and hiding it, and then trying to fly, putting herself in danger.

She hears her mother gasp, horrified, and the child looks away, her lip wobbling yet again.

“Ochako…” She utters, shocked and clearly disappointment. She’s about to scold her when Naoko comes running, her own parents calling for her.

“It’s not bad!” The child screams.

“Naoko!” Her mother says, grabbing her daughter’s wrist and pulling her away. “Don’t interrupt! It’s rude.”

“Ochako isn’t a bad person! Her power isn’t evil.”

The teacher sighs but gives her a wide smile. “It’s not evil, Naoko. It’s dangerous. She could’ve hurt herself.”

“But she’s good!” The girl tries to say again, tears welling up in her eyes.

“Naoko! Let’s go!” Her mother insists, not pleased with her own child’s behaviour.

“She could use her power to do good!”

Ochako’s father clears his throat. “Yeah, you’re right. She could and she should. It’s how you use your quirk that matters.”

Naoko immediately smiles, finally feeling relief that someone listened to her.

“And I want my daughter to understand that. It’s true that I want her to be safe. Her safety is what’s most important to me, but I don’t want her to be discouraged. I want her to learn how to use it and to experiment. I want her quirk to grow with her.”

He sighs before kneeling down, and he picks his daughter up.

“I believe in you, Ochako. I believe in your abilities and I know you’ll one day figure them out. Don’t rush it, enjoy learning how to use it.”

The small child just looks at him with wide eyes, curiously waiting for what else he has to say.

“That doesn’t mean you should be stealing people’s stuff or throwing yourself from the swings. You need to use your quirk responsibly. And use it to do good.”

“What does ‘use it to do good’ mean?” Ochako asks, her voice soft.

“It means doing what you think is right in order to make the world a better place.” Her mother says as she strokes her child’s head. “And your father is right. We shouldn’t limit you or your power, we should help you make it grow.”

The teacher stares at them with surprise in her eyes. “That’s not…” is what she tries to say before she’s interrupted by Ochako’s father.

“It’s okay, I think we’ve finished here for today. Thank you for your hard work.”

He places his daughter on the floor and crouches next to Naoko.

“What’s your name?”

“Naoko.” The girl quickly answers.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He replies, getting up and offering his hands to both small girls, who take them without hesitation.

“We’d love to have you around some day.” Ochako’s mother smiles warmly at the child before introducing herself to her parents.

“We’d also like that.” Naoko’s mum replies, surprise clear on her features as she returns the grin.

“Shall we go, then?” Ochako’s father asks, but before he can start walking, the two girls share a look and they quickly start running. He just follows them, laughing as he lets them lead them out of the kindergarten.

#ochako #ochakos discovery #kindergarten #zine #kindergarten zine #bnha #multifandom #bnha zine #multifandom zine

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