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bangtan-madi · 5 years ago

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All Of Our Lifetimes — Five: Requiem

Pairing — Taehyung x Reader

Tags — boyfriend!Taehyung, husband!Taehyung reincarnation au, lovers to strangers and to lovers again, established relationship, implied soulmate au

Genre — fluff, angst, crime (ish)

Word Count — 2.5k

Summary — Does love ever truly end, or does it simply take another form in a new life? The cycle is like clockwork: your lives end and you’re reborn again. You’ve lived it over and over. Each cycle, one of you loses your memories and is tragically unaware until the other finds and awakens their lover. After all these eons, all these lifetimes, is it possible to find each other again—even when neither of you awakens with your memories?

Part — 5 / 15

Warnings — language

A/N — Taglist is open! Comment, message, or ask and I’ll add you to the roster :) (Also I’m a freakin’ moron and forgot to post on Wednesday night like usual, which was yesterday. So enjoy this late chapter lol!)

Previous — Next

The first person you text is Namjoon. To you, he was the obvious choice. Friendly, open, and the first of the members to accept you into their enclave. It wasn't anything in particular, just saying hi and reminding him of who you are and that you were looking forward to tomorrow.

Not two minutes later, he replies and invites you to join a group chat he'd just created for you and all seven members.

"This way, we can all keep in touch!" he says. "DMs are fine, of course, but if we all wanna get to know each other, group chats can be a lot of fun."

He wasn't wrong. The remainder of Sunday evening is spent texting the members. On the way home, while you cook a quick dinner, and when you're relaxing before bed. They're flooding your messages with all kinds of hilarity. Jungkook and Hoseok are a fan of memes, while Yoongi seems to prefer the straightforward communication that gifs provide. Jimin and Namjoon adore emojis, and Jin sticks to his usual bad dad jokes. Taehyung replies to a question every now and then, but for the most part, he's absent from the conversation.

"You're awfully quiet, Taehyung-ssi," Jimin teases half-way through a conversation on whether or not mint ice cream is edible.

"I'm working, but you guys are blowing up my phone so it's hard to concentrate."

A sigh slips out as you reply, "You can put your phone on vibrate, Taehyung. Really, we won't mind. Or at least I certainly won't."

His response is speedy. "Okay. I'll talk to you all tomorrow."

Namjoon sends you a private message. "Don't let him bother you. He can get like this when he's focused. He doesn't do well with things distracting him."

"Yeah...you're probably right."

"Oh, I definitely am!"

"Hey, thank you again for everything. Except for Kim Taehyung, I really feel at ease with everyone. I feel like we're going to get along great at the set tomorrow."

"My pleasure, [Y/n]. I really wanted to avoid you feeling like more of an outsider than you probably already do. Being in a new country, even if you speak the language, can be scary. I've been to enough of them to know that there's no place like home...but maybe we can make it a bit easier."

A smile spreads across your face at his genuine spirit and pure kindness. "You have, big time! Each of you is really fun to be around. Honestly? I can't wait for 'Run' tomorrow! Can I ask where we're going? I didn't see a production report yet, and Director Hyeon hasn't responded to my email."

"We'll probably knock out a few episodes in one night, and I think we're closing down the Seoul Museum of Art. They're going to close a bit early so we can have it to ourselves. The games we have planned will happen there!"

You turn your eyes away from your cell phone at the mention of the museum. Recalling what happened over the weekend, returning to that place doesn't seem like a terrific idea. But then again, if you are there with Taehyung, maybe the two of you can finally talk about what you see in your dreams.

Maybe, just maybe, you can get those answers.

Your resolve strengthens a little bit, and a new message comes through, one not from the group chat or Namjoon. You click out of your conversation with the leader and check the notification.

"Who are you?"

The question is blunt and straightforward, coming from the second-youngest member via a private chat. You open the message, and your fingers hover above the keyboard for a few moments.

"Hi Taehyung. What do you mean?"

"I know we've met before. I can't remember where."

You bite your lip at his statement. So you were right; he does have some sort of familiarity with you, too. Now, to figure out just how much.

"Have you been to a concert before? Or a fan-sign? Maybe you worked on the set of Hwarang?"

"None of those. I actually didn't listen to much of your music before recently, and I've never been to a concert or fan-sign. And I've never worked on any set before."

"You weren't a fan of BTS? Even though you applied to Big Hit?"

"Nope. Actually, my roommate Milo was the Bangtan superfan. I heard of you guys through her, and then of Big Hit. I applied because I wanted to live in Seoul. It's been my dream all my life. Big Hit just happened to have the job I wanted in the ideal location. Call it fate, I guess."

A half-truth, but it will have to do for now.

"I know. I remember. Your gut feeling."

You pause, your fingers halting mid-type. How did he already know about that? You hadn't mentioned it in either the group chat or in the earlier conversation. In fact, the only person you'd mentioned the gut feeling about Seoul to was—

"I have to go, sorry. I'll see you at the museum tomorrow. I think you know the way."

The museum looks almost spooky after the sun begins to set over the buildings that touch the sky. Downtown Seoul is as beautiful as ever as the bright oranges and pastel pinks bathe the exteriors of each in brilliant colors. If it weren't for the thirty or so Big Hit employees rushing about, you might've stood at the entrance for much longer than thirty seconds.

But the moment you're on-scene, you go to work. One of the producers flags you down, offers a brief introduction, and tells you where to hide the English words.

"Have you seen what we did a few episodes back, eighty-seven and eighty-eight?" he asks, shoving a stack of stickers into your hands. "When we put Hangul all over the Oil Tank Culture Park?"

You shake your head, offering a sheepish smile. "I haven't...exactly watched too much 'Run.'"

The producer waves it off. "Just run around the building and stick these wherever you think seven boys may or may not find them. Feel free to go crazy. We have fifteen minutes to get everything set before filming starts. The boys should be here soon. So, go! Once you're done, come back here. While they're running around, you can help me with the grading system."

"Grading system?"

"They're going to make sentences with the words they find. Since you know English the best, you can award points to each word based on difficulty in using."

A smile spreads across your face. "Got it! Sounds fun."

You speed off into the museum, weaving past the sound and lighting crew that are attempting to set up. Several of the museum staff have also stayed behind to give guidance, and you're relieved that the boys and company have the entire building to themselves. This wouldn't be possible during daytime hours when the public is here.

You begin sticking several dozen stickers along the walls, on the frames of pieces of art, on the marble floor. Basically, anywhere you can reach. You cover the Van Gogh exhibit with difficult words like "effervescence" and "halcyon," along with colorful words like "lilac" and "vermilion."

The further into the building you move, the fewer and fewer people you see. Once you've passed the room of modern art and approach the Winged Victory of Samothrace, there's no one in sight. Down to your last few words, you slip into the dimmed hallway and turn the corner.

Winged Victory is just as you remember. Tall and beautiful and haunting. The statue is still so familiar to you. Looking at the base, you can almost see the body of the woman from your dream. Right before you and Taehyung started running for your lives, this was where a murder occurred.

You flinch at the memory of the blood, but something else inside you is pulling you out of the room and towards the fountain. Last time you saw it, you ran from the room and left the friendly acquaintance behind. Part of you wonders what he must've thought. Surely, you looked like you'd seen a ghost.

But you might as well have.

Your feet tip-toe on the marble. The boys have most certainly arrived, and the filming has started from the sound of it. Their crazed and excited laughter fills the echo-y halls. Seeing as there aren't any stickers this far into the museum, you take your chances and continue moving deeper in. The producer could wait just a few more minutes, couldn't he?

The last of the sunlight ricochets across each panel of glass in the dome ceiling, greeting you with shards of light skewed in every direction. Like fireflies dancing together, they bring an almost magical aura to the open space, one very different from the horrors of your nightmares. The columns are made of ever-moving fire, and the fountain is made of glittery stars.

As you stand in the doorway, your throat drys and tightens. Seeing this place again, no matter how different, brings back the memories you can't explain. Are they even memories? Surely, that has to be what they are. But from when or from whom, you can't explain. They're a requiem for someone you hardly know.

Does Taehyung know the answers? Does he know more than you about this event you keep playing over and over in your mind? He's been in your dreams ever since you were a child, as a version much older than you were then and even older than you are now. Who has just one dream their whole lives, unless the explanation is that he has that dream, too?

You shake your head at the absurdity of it all. "What am I doing here?" you murmur, running your hand through your hair.

"Are you okay?"

The deep voice behind you causes you to jump and spin, eyes wide as you spot a familiar face at the entrance to the fountain. Taehyung stands with his hands in the pockets of his pants, his head tilted as he observes you.

"Holy shit, don't sneak up on people!"

The brunet smirks a little and shrugs. "Didn't mean to, sorry. You were staring off into space and didn't even hear me walk down the hallway. And it's hard to be quiet on marble floors."

"God, sorry, I didn't mean to snap." You run your hands over your face. "This museum has...some strange memories for me. I thought coming back here would help, but I think I've made it worse."

"How do you mean? I thought you hadn't been to Seoul before?"

"I haven't. It's complicated." Your eyes flicker to the corridor behind him. "Where's your cameraman?"

"I ditched him, told him I was running off to the restroom. But I didn't see you anywhere, so I figured you'd be back here."

Eyebrows pulling together, you reply, "How'd you figure that?"

"Well, you seemed really freaked out last weekend. You ran out of here like a ghost was chasing you. I was honestly worried until I saw you at Big Hit the next day, and you seemed fine, so..."

He trails off, and the realization of his words hits you. "Wait...shit, were you the one I was talking to both times I visited here this week? The one in the hoodie and mask?"

Taehyung nods, though there's a tiny line between his brows that shows he's as confused as you are. "Yes? I thought you knew that from day one, when you spoke to me at the Van Gogh exhibit."

Shaking your head fervently, you spout, "No! Not at all. I had no idea, honest to god. I just thought you were shy or introverted or maybe had a tough time talking to girls. I never, ever thought you were..." You gesture to all of him.

His brown eyes widen as he steps closer and out of the doorway. "Wait, really? You had no idea."

"None!"

He chuckles softly, turning to gaze at the fountain as the sunlight fades to soft blues of night. "I'd assumed you knew who I was. You were so open and friendly to a perfect stranger. I thought you'd recognized me."

"Not at all," you retort. "I was being nice and friendly because there was something about you that was so damn familiar. Kind of like this whole place, actually. I don't know. I can't explain it."

Taehyung nods and runs a hand through his curly locks. "I won't lie, there's something off about this place for me, too." He shifts his attention from the fountain to you. "You weren't lying about anything you said before, were you? About you being called to Seoul and not knowing why?"

You lock eyes with him as you reply, "I promise, everything I said was true."

"Then why did you run away?"

A heavy sigh slips out, and you sit down on the water fountain's edge. Looking into the water to your side, you run various ways to go about this disclosure. Blunt truth? A comforting lie? A bit of both?

"[Y/n]?"

"I've had this...nightmare, ever since I was a little girl. Ever since I could remember. It's always the same. I'm running for my life with someone I know that I care deeply about. We're trying to escape a murderer who's closing in behind us. He's just slaughtered one of our friends and he's coming for us."

You pause to take a breath, and Taehyung takes that pause to sit beside you. He doesn't say a word, only waist patiently for you to continue.

"We're eventually trapped. The man with me tells me to run while he distracts the murderer. Of course, I don't listen. There's a fight. We're both injured. And we both die."

There's a pregnant pause in the air before Taehyung hangs his head and murmurs, "That sounds horrible."

"I haven't told you everything," you reply. "I'm afraid I shouldn't...but what the hell." You gesture to the space around you. "In my dream, the entire thing is set here, in the Seoul Museum of Art. Our friend was killed at the base of Winged Victory. The fight happens among these columns. And the man and I, we die in this very fountain, bleeding out from gunshot wounds."

You turn to face the man beside you, seeing his eyes shift from his feet to yours as his head tilts slightly. "And every time, it's the same three people besides me. The same woman at the base of Winged Victory, the same murderer with a gun, the same man that this nightmare-version of me loves. I have no idea who the first two are..."

In your hesitation, Taehyung says, "But you know the last one."

Nodding, your knuckles turn white as you drip your knees. Here it goes. All or nothing. No turning back now.

"I do. He's—"

"—Me."

Taglist — @just-call-me-trash-can, @jaienn

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sebthesnipe · 5 years ago

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The Wounded Jellyfish

February Prompts 2/24

Prompt List

First // Previous February Prompt // Previous MDP Chapter // Next

The February Collection on AO3

My Dearest Procyon

Other works by me

Prompt: Umbrella / Unhappy

Ship: Prinxiety and Logicality

Original story based on this wonderful post by @underdog-arts

TW: Blood, violence, Jellyfish

“A half-dragon-half-witch that is also a queen?!” Roman asked excitedly as he walked beside the smaller man, his arms filled with the supplies they had purchased throughout the day.

“I guess so,” Virgil chuckled. “I don’t know why I would though.”

“Well, why wouldn’t you?” Roman scoffed.

“Fair,” the witch shrugged. Roman had been shooting Virgil suggestions of things he could possibly pull from dreams since he discovered the darker man’s ability. It seemed as if Roman was testing him, as if he didn’t truly believe in the man’s power. It was cute.

“Oh! One of those creepy, pink things that have all those tentacles and float around in the ocean?” the prince pressed, earning another laugh from Virgil.

“You mean a jellyfish?” the dark eyed individual clarified with a grin. He wasn’t sure if it was Roman himself that lightened his mood or the fact that he had come clean about his past. Either way, he felt lighter than he had in a long while. In fact, he was having such a good time with the prince that all thoughts of Logan’s deception had escaped him.

“Yeah! That!” Roman grinned in return, “A jellyfish!”

“I told you, I can make any-'' Virgil's words were cut short as a thin oily man bumped into Roman, causing their supplies to scatter at their feet. “Hey!” the witch snapped as the weaselly man raised his hands in surrender. “Watch where you’re going!”

“Sorry, sorry. My sincerest apologies, sir,” the man rushed, his voice nasally and shrill. “Allow me to assist.” He bent to scoop up the books Virgil had purchased along with a few of the jars of preserves, shoving them into Roman’s hands as the prince knelt to do the same.

“It’s alright, accidents happen,” Roman offered politely, accepting the items as he offered an uneasy smile.

“No, no. I must make amends,” the man continued earning a suspicious glare from the witch.

Virgil took a step back, not bothering to help the two pick up the mess they had made. No, something wasn’t right here. The space he set allowed him to keep a better eye on the slimy individual as he continued shoving items into Roman’s grasp.

The witch’s gaze caught the slight movement of the man’s hand brushing against Roman’s pockets, no doubt checking them for valuables. Virgil frowned. Roman was completely unaware of what was happening to him even as the man found his coin purse and managed to get it loose as Roman fumbled about. The poor sod was so dense it was almost adorable.

The oneiromancer didn’t hesitate to take a step forward, taking hold of the man’s wrist as the creep tried to stand.

“I don’t think so,” Virgil hissed, his hackles raised in his annoyance. “I’ll have that back, thanks,” he added, holding out his free hand for the purse.

The man’s gaze went wide with surprise as he eyed the witch, obviously trying to determine whether he would be able to take him. Roman was far too busy trying to balance all of the haphazardly placed supplies in his arms to be much of a threat. The man tugged at his arm, trying to get away, but Virgil’s hold remained firm.

“Virgil, what-” Roman interrupted, confused by his companion’s actions and earning a quick glance from the man.

The distraction was the perfect opportunity for the man to produce the small blade at his waist and lash out. Pain bloomed across Virgil’s chest, skin heating as it was split open. Somehow, the witch kept hold of the thief’s wrist even as he pulled back, dragging the man with him. The man used the newfound momentum to now thrust the sharp metal into Virgil’s side, finally winning his freedom as Virgil’s breath hitched in shock.

For an instant, everything seemed to freeze. The cold iron intruding into his muscles sent a chill through his body. His knees threatened to give way, about to deposit him onto the muddy ground. He glanced at the prince, whose horror was obvious on his features as he allowed the items in his hands to drop to the ground once more.

“Virgil!” Roman cried out, sounding as if he were far away despite the way the world seemed to stand still as Virgil began to fall.

……………………….

The cat sat in Patton’s lap, looking extremely unhappy under his crown of flowers. It was a very fitting look, considering how Logan currently was feeling. It was getting well into the late afternoon, and Virgil and Roman still weren’t back yet. Supply runs should not take this long.

Patton on the other hand seemed completely content as he worked the two needles against each other, knitting something that looked far too small to be anything but a rag. They had been like this for hours, Logan just lounging in the dragon’s lap as he worked, Patton still sneezing occasionally. He had even managed to catch one of his rags on fire by accident, giving a small cry as he desperately tried to put it out.

Logan wasn’t sure how much more of this he could ta-

He tensed as he felt the mana flow within him drain substantially. Something was wrong. Virgil wouldn’t use that much power unless there was an emergency, and he certainly wouldn’t use it in a populated area.

The clicking of the needles fell away as Patton froze in response as well, glancing in the direction of the surge of magical energy he suddenly felt. He wasn’t familiar with Logan or Virgil enough to recognize the feel of their magic, but as far as he knew, there were no other users in the area.

Logan jumped down from his perch immediately, bounding for the exit. Patton wasn’t too far behind him, scooping up his pack as he yanked open the door. The two rushed down the stairs and out the front of the inn without so much as a glance backwards.

……………………………

Roman’s hands pressed against the soft fabric of cloak Patton had given him. The bright red now mixed with the darker tint of Virgil’s blood as he applied pressure to his wound. Panic welled in his throat as he struggled to keep it together. Flashes of his kingdom burning and his loved ones dying in his arms threatened to break to the forefront of his mind.

“You’ll be fine, Virgil,” he whispered brokenly. He glanced about the street once more, desperately searching for help. The people that surrounded them simply stared, no one willing to help. “Someone get me a doctor, damnit!” he cried again, yelling at the onlookers who just whispered amongst themselves.

A young boy suddenly rushed forward, bending low to snactch Roman’s satchel before bounding back into the crowd. The realization that the small thief had just robbed him took a moment for the prince to process before he began to cry, holding Virgil even closer to him. How could the world really be this horrible?!

“Hey,” the witch’s weak voice came, “it’s okay.” Roman shook his head desperately, only pausing when he felt Virgil’s red stained hand against his cheek. “It’s all good, ah!” his breath hitched in pain, grimacing before continuing, “Princey. Gonna take more… more than this-”

Another set of footsteps could be heard, and when Roman glanced up, another portion of their supplies was gone.

“What are you doing?!” The tears doubling as they poured down Roman’s cheeks, dripping from his chin as he yelled at the crowd, “Can’t you see he’s in pain! He’s dying! Somebody do something!”

Virgil’s soft smile faded as he lifted his other hand, pulling Roman’s attention once more.

“S-stop moving…” the prince whispered, his voice cracking, “You’ll make it worse.”

Virgil, as usual, ignored the man, and twisted his hand this way and that, drawing an image in the air. The atmosphere around them began to grow heavy with something electric, sparks flying from the witch’s fingertips and showering down on them both. He brought the motions to a halt, leaning to press two fingers against Roman’s forehead and pulled back. A single glowing pink thread appeared from the spot between Roman’s eyes.

The string pulsed brightly once… twice… it jerked slightly, doubling in width before it jerked again… and again. Suddenly it split, far too many tendrils to count appearing from its middle.

The crowd gasped in horror, murmurs of ‘witchcraft’ washing through them as they backed away.

Swirling through the air, the original light engulfed the tendrils into a ring, popping up to make a dome, creating what appeared to be a floating jellyfish bobbing above them .

Roman stared up at the creature in awe, taking in the sight with a small shaky gasp.

“Virgil… it’s beautiful,” he whispered, smiling down at the quickly paling man.

“Only because it came from you,” the injured witch returned with his own weak smile, hissing as he shifted in Roman’s arms.

“WITCH!” Someone cried, tossing a stone. Roman cried out as it struck him in his shoulder and he bent low to try and protect Virgil with his larger body.

As if in retaliation, the glow of the jellyfish pulsed, the creature expanding to a massive size. The crowd was forced to stumble back as the umbrella spread across the ground, tendrils whipping out to shock anyone who drew near. Roman glanced up at the glowing pink shield that now completely enveloped them, but he made no move to stop shielding the smaller man himself.

“Ro.. Roman…” Virgil breathed, words catching in his throat as he began to choke. “You need… need to go. They’ll be after you now. They… They think you’re... you’re like me.”

“If I were half the man you are, I would be grateful,” the prince buried his face in the man’s chest, dampening his cloak further with tears. “I’m not leaving.”

Virgil gave a huff, the act forcing another wave of pain to shoot through him as he coughed.

“Logan… Logan will need you. H-He’ll die without me. You have to save him… Please…” the words slowly trailed off as Virgil’s voice grew weaker and weaker, uttering his last plea in a soft whisper.

Then his eyes fell shut.

“...I can’t… I can’t…” Roman cried, “I’m useless… I can’t save anyone!”, his sobs doubling as he clung to Virgil’s now limp body. He hadn’t been able to save his family or his home and he wasn’t able to save Virgil! How could he be expected to save Logan? He was a nobody that could do nothing. Perhaps it was better if he let the monsters around him think he was a witch,. Let them kill him for it. Maybe then at least he wouldn’t be in so much pain….

To be continued….

Taglist:

@hiddendreamer67 @nightashes @aequinoctiale @sumersnowlilly

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yellowmagicalgirl · 5 years ago

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Juliet Dies in This Chapter Six: Life

Claire is alive. She is not well.

Welcome to the final chapter, sorry for the late update! In exchange, have some art of Jim and Claire.

If anyone thought this was going to be a happy chapter, though... well, trigger/spoiler warning for offscreen torture and death, mentions of malnutrition, PTSD, and some internalized ableism.

Also, huge thanks to everyone who has reblogged the previous chapters of this fic.

AO3

FFN

The walk to the hospital felt so very long.

The walk to the hospital was two agonizing blocks and one alley they had taken because Claire had taken one look at the mass of people and –

She didn’t remember what she did, but she remembered Jim and Toby trying to calm her down, telling her that she didn’t have to interact with a lot of people yet, that they knew a shortcut.

What had she been thinking? That once she got out of the Shadow Realm, her anxiety would suddenly go down to zero?

The entire way to the hospital, Claire had been on the edge of a panic attack and she didn’t know why. She was safe now. She had saved Enrique. Her friends were still alive. Jim was alive. She had escaped. A mob of people doing last-minute Christmas shopping – because she had been there for six months – wouldn’t be able to hurt her in a meaningful way, so why was she so scared?

Was it because everything was so loud? She was used to sounds only happening because she made them happen, but she had been always listening to make sure Morgana wasn’t coming back to torture her.

Claire was thankful for the diversion from the crowd. Her knees, ankles, and hips were not thankful for the supposed “shortcut.” She had tried to keep up an exercise regimen, but it was hard to keep to a schedule when the passage of time was a nebulous concept. The amount of weight she had lost didn’t help, either.

Jim didn’t let go of her hand. Toby only let go of Claire’s hand when he needed to readjust Enrique. It was better for him to hold her brother; there were sharp edges on his armor. He was less of a hazard.

The waiting room for the clinic was empty. There was a clock reading 3:46, and it ticked, because time was meaningful on Earth. The receptionist looked up and immediately reached for their pager. “Doctor Lake? Your son and his friends are here.”

Barbara must have been close, because not a minute later – Claire kept the clock in her vision – she came barreling down the corridor.

First Barbara’s eyes landed on Toby, and she looked relieved to see Enrique, alive and mostly well, aside from the cut on his hand. Then her eyes passed over Claire in favor of Jim; Barbara had a look of frustrated concern upon seeing Jim’s burns. It was as if burns from the sunlight was a too-common occurrence. Then, finally, Barbara noticed the figure standing between the two boys.

She looked like she had seen a ghost. Claire didn’t fault her for that; just because she was opaque didn’t mean the girl who had jumped through the portal hadn’t died six months ago.

Barbara recovered quickly. “Toby, take Enrique to the pediatric ward. Jim, I’m sure you know where the burn treatment center is.”

Toby ripped his hand from Claire’s with an apologetic look. “I’ll call your parents, tell them that you and Enrique are here,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away.

Jim began to move away from her, too, and in panic – chains, Blinky, torn, snapped – Claire used her other hand to hold onto his. Immediately she felt guilty, but she did not let go.

“Hey, Mom? Is it okay if I stay with Claire for a bit?” he asked, giving her a comforting smile. Or at least, it was supposed to be one. Claire took no comfort in the situation, no matter what changed.

“Five minutes, maximum, and then you’re getting those burns looked at.”

They walked to an empty patient examination room. Claire couldn’t remember if this was the same one where Barbara had proclaimed that Claire’s illness from the portal was due to stress. She hoped that Barbara had gotten better with identifying the symptoms of dark magic.

There was a scale and a blood pressure cuff in the room. Claire felt her eyes widen; she didn’t want anyone to see her. She didn’t want anyone to see how much she had been warped.

“Can you take off your armor?” Barbara asked. Claire’s joints ached even when her armor braced them; if she wanted them to heal, she would have to let a doctor see them. Barbara had accepted when her son had become a troll, so she was the best bet for not casting Claire away in horror.

Claire braced herself against the wall with one hand. With the other, she closed her fingers around the crystal in the center of her breastplate and pulled it out. Her armor glowed and was pulled in like a star into a glowing black hole. Her porcelain-white hair floated around her head for the briefest of moments as she placed the crystal in her pocket, carefully wedged so that she could don her armor again in a half-moment’s notice.

Someone inhaled sharply. Shock, probably, from seeing the way cracks crawled their way up and down her arms, with a concentrated group around her wrists and elbows. From seeing the irregular choker of cracks around her neck, a scar from when her neck had snapped when she had first become trapped; a brand that said no matter how many times Claire died, Morgana would resurrect her again just to make sure the agony never ended.

She was thankful that she woke up cold, and wore sweats, socks, and a t-shirt instead of the tank top and shorts she had gone to bed in. She wished she could be wearing a long-sleeved turtleneck, and a hood, and gloves, and maybe a glamour mask while she was at it.

Taking off her armor was a mistake. Not only was she shaking, but they knew, now. They knew that she was not the Claire they knew anymore; she was broken, and her body was just a bunch of brutally glued together pieces. She was very tempted to take out her hairclips and hide behind her hair like she did as a child.

“Hey, Claire?” Jim asked. “Why are you wearing my clothes?”

“What?”

“I mean, you wore your Papa Skull shirt when… on that day, when you and Toby were putting on your armor.” His face fell, but then he grinned. “Why are you now wearing gym clothes?”

She couldn’t help the laughter that caused her to nearly double over. “You, you aren’t even funny,” she said when she was able to catch her breath. How long had it been since she had laughed like that? How long had it been since she had last smiled?

Barbara pushed her glasses up slightly to pinch her brow, despite her shoulders shaking slightly from laughter. She and Jim then helped Claire to the scale.

Concern flashed across Jim and Barbara’s faces as they saw just how little Claire weighed. Claire didn’t think her weight was that bad; it was harder to see her ribs than when she had first escaped Morgana.

She had to be helped to the bed, too, because her arms and legs ached, and she didn’t want to risk triggering a panic attack by levitating herself. Claire pressed her lips together and tried not to think about the way the blood pressure cuff squeezed her arm.

“Hey, I don’t know if I told you this, but that was pretty cool, what you did with the chains,” Jim said. He was trying to distract her. She appreciated it, because logically she suspected that no one wanted to attack her in this hospital despite her anxiety telling her to be vigilant.

“Thanks,” she said, the energy from her laughter gone. She glanced at the blood pressure monitor and realized that she had no idea what 130/78 meant, though she was pretty sure usually the top number was lower.

“Claire, I’m going to ask you some questions. Jim, go get your burns treated,” Barbara said as she removed the blood pressure cuff.

“Yes, Mom,” he said, reluctantly. “See you in, like, twenty minutes, Claire.”

Claire waved and winced at the strain.

“The places where the cracks are,” Barbara said. “Do they hurt?”

“Sometimes,” Claire said. Her eyes darted about, looking for a clock. Twenty minutes. One thousand, two hundred seconds. Without a clock, it meant nothing to her. She didn’t hear a ticking noise.

“Have you… were any of your bones broken?” Barbara asked, and her voice was awkwardly stiff, like she was trying to stick to a procedure. A list of questions to ask a former POW, or something.

Claire nodded. “They… they got healed, though.”

“Okay,” Barbara said, writing it down. “Can you say how long ago that was?”

“No.” Claire found the clock. It read 2:10. A large post-it note was on top of it, and it read “REMINDER: FIX!”

“Do you think they’re the reason why you have difficulty walking?”

“Uh… no, it was… it was… I’m sorry.” Chained, pulled, snapped, slammed –

Claire gnawed at her lip. She was supposed to be okay here. “I can’t remember which, which method of torture made my joints bad.”

“It’s okay, it shouldn’t affect the treatment,” Barbara soothed; she pulled her stethoscope from where it hung around her neck. “I’m going to check your heartbeat and breathing.” She pulled Claire’s shirt up from her back. Barbara’s gasp would be inaudible for anyone who wasn’t hypersensitive to every sound.

The feeling of the cool metal circle against the crisscrossed scars and cracks was an odd one, but Claire tried to keep her breathing steady.

“Well, the good news is that your heartbeat and breathing are normal,” Barbara said. She smiled, and Claire tried to mirror it. Her own felt like an ugly, broken mess.

“When was the last time you ate?” Barbara asked.

Claire shrugged. “I… I don’t know, I guess in the last day?” As if on cue, her stomach growled. “Yeah, last day, since my body is still acting human.” She had come to notice that if she didn’t eat for a long enough period of time, her magic would switch on to keep her alive. She always felt more tired than usual when that happened, though. Maybe more depressed and anxious, too.

“When was your last period?” Barbara asked.

“Um, like, a week or two before the Eternal Night?” Claire said. “I… I think between the, the torture and the forgetting to eat it just… stopped.”

Barbara pulled out a small flashlight, and then put it back into her lab coat. Since she then began to gently feel around Claire’s head, Barbara must have realized that Claire didn’t have pupils anymore.

“I’m going to start an IV,” Barbara said. “Will you be okay for that?”

Piercing, claws, heart, ripped –

“I should be,” Claire said, blinking away the flashes of memory. “Will you be able to find a vein?”

“Your veins shouldn’t be harder to find than Jim’s,” Barbara said, feeling around Claire’s elbow. “Make a fist?”

Claire looked away but complied.

“Your parents are going to be so happy to see that you’re alive.”

Would they be, when they saw?

Pain, piercing, claws, gold –

“Are you cold? I can go get a blanket,” Barbara said. Claire realized she was trembling, and that there was an IV drip connected to her arm.

“I, I’ll be fine.”

“Do you have a lot of flashbacks from what happened to you, in the Shadow Realm?”

“Y-yeah.”

“You’re safe here,” Barbara said, looking Claire in the eyes. “And even if anyone were to come after you, I keep an enchanted knife on me these days.”

And Claire had her armor, and her magic, and maybe she could fight well enough. She was exhausted, though.

“I’m going to get you something to eat,” Barbara said. Claire realized she must have frowned or did something wrong because Barbara rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, it’s hospital food, not my cooking. The bread shouldn’t upset your stomach.”

Claire was pretty sure she had eaten a jalapeño or two while in the Shadow Realm, but bread was fine. Barbara left the room. Claire was alone, again.

There was noise, though. A lot of noise. Had Earth always been so loud?

Enough time passed for Claire to count forty of the white parts of the triangles in the ground, with the couple times she had restarted twice because she had lost focus because a noise outside had startled her.

Claire heard three sets of footsteps as well as Barbara’s voice.

“She shows some signs of malnourishment, and I’m going to want to run x-rays on her later, to see how well her broken bones healed, and also maybe find a cause to her bad joints,” Barbara said in a hushed tone. The footsteps stopped outside the door. “And, please don’t take this as a formal diagnosis because I’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but I think she might have PTSD. She’s really spooked, and she says she often has flashbacks to her trauma.”

The door opened.

Barbara held a small tray of food, but despite her hunger she wasn’t the person Claire focused on.

Claire’s parents looked ecstatic, and then bewildered. And why wouldn’t they be? They were expecting their daughter, not a girl covered in black cracks with white hair and black-and-purple eyes.

Claire couldn’t bring herself to put on her armor, even though surely that would make her parents realize who she was.

“Claire?” her mom asked in a shaking voice. Her mom’s voice never shook. Her dad looked like he was about to cry but was holding himself together for the sake of her mom and Enrique. Enrique, whose hand had been bandaged from where the sorcerer had cut him.

Claire couldn’t bring herself to speak. Couldn’t speak, not really, not with the panic settling in. The muscles in her jaw and neck kept twitching as the left side of her mouth kept trying to move downwards. It wasn’t a frown her face was trying to form, it was a raw expression of pain she knew too well.

She missed them so much, but surely they would leave, now that they knew the truth about her.

Claire gave a slow nod, and that was enough permission for her family to suddenly be close and hugging her.

Suffocated, restrained – no. Claire forced herself to breathe deeply.

She had survived the Shadow Realm.

She was safe. She was home.

She hugged her parents back and began to weep.

She might even get to live.

#claire nuñez #jim lake jr #toby domzalski #trollhunters #tales of arcadia #3below #toa wizards #barbara lake #ophelia nuñez #javier nuñez #enrique nuñez #jlaire #juliet dies in this #juliet dies; life continues #death tw #torture tw #my writing

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whumppile · 7 years ago

Note

First of all, I love your writing very, very much! And was wondering, if you could write a fic where Tony accidentally hurts Peter. Having hallucinations or mind control or something (maybe even a rage attack and Peter gets in the way trying to stop him for doing something, I don't know). And with some angst guilty after :)

Aw thank you that’s so sweet! I’m so glad you like my writing that means a lot to me!! Oooh yes I can! This is such a great fic, I actually had someone else request something just like this so, @shoyzz-art this one is for you too.

I hope you like it and as usual I’m sorry it took so long to do. It’s called “Control” And I’ll post it on my other fanfic accounts. PLease tell me what you think of it?

Peter nudged his elbow against Tony’s armour, as the twowalked away from the mess of their last battle. “That was a pretty stickysituation, wouldn’t you say?”

Tony’s groan ended in a laugh. “Oh, god.”

Peter bounced a little on his feet, high on the adrenalinefrom the fight. “My spider senses tell me you aren’t a fan of puns.”

Tony continued to laugh, as Peter walked beside him. It hadbeen a good mission, and Peter had even gotten to use a web grenade or two.He’d probably say the best part had been when Cap literally threw him at atarget, that was awesome, but his thoughts were interrupted when his visionexploded into white.

Stars flew across Peter’s vision, and the teenager blinked,suddenly finding himself on the ground. He hadn’t known what happened until helooked to see Tony’s arm sticking out towards him, and he paled as he realized.

Tony had hit him. It had been so unexpected that Peterhad no chance to block it.

His face throbbed painfully, and his ears rang, as Karenspoke. “You have sustained a mild concussion.”

The teenager got shakily to his feet, words unsure.“Woah, okay, I didn’t think you’d be that annoyed.”

Tony took a halting step forwards, and Peter held up hishands cautiously, not knowing what might happen next. Tony grunted, and hisarms came up to reach for Peter, fingers curled as if he were trying to chokehim.

Peters blood ran cold, as he looked for any recognitionin those cold eyes on the Iron-Man mask

“Is this some sort of weird training thing? Because we just finished a battle,I think we should take a minute.”

Tony let out a growl, before his fist swung towardsPeter’s face again, but he was prepared this time, and he caught it in onehand.

“Hey! What’s going on? Seriously, Tony you’re scaringme.”

Tony kept fighting his grip, pulling at his arm beforeslamming his free fist into Peter’s chest, sending the youngest Avenger soaringacross the street. He skidded across the concrete, before flipping himself overand landing on his feet, in a crouch.

“Tony, what is happening?!”

But the suited man in front of him said nothing, justmarched over towards him, his heavy metal boots clanking threateningly on theground. Peter had never been scared of Tony before; he’d been intimidated, ofcourse, but he’d never been afraid for his life.

Tony marched towards him, as Peter got to his feet,blinking away his blurred vision. He held his hands out in front of him, insurrender, and backed away as Tony came closer.

“Karen, what’s going on? Is that really Tony in there?”

The Iron-Man helmet opened, before the AI could answer,revealing Tony’s cold, indifferent, face. He looked so little like himself,eyes empty and uncaring, that a shiver ran up Peter’s spine.

“I do not know what is causing this behavior, but itdoesn’t seem as though he is going to stop.” Karen sounded a tad worried, andPeter knew that she had reason to be, because although Peter was strong enoughto take on Iron Man, he couldn’t bring himself to do anything to hurt Tony. Andhe knew, if it came down to him or Tony, he would choose Tony.

The other man came closer, and Peter took a deep breath.“Karen, call for help. Tell Cap we have a situation.”

The AI obliged, sending out a distress signal, as Tonymarched over to Peter. The teenager fired a web, swinging up onto a buildingacross the deserted street; ever thankful that civilians had been evacuated forthe previous fight. If he could just distract Tony, and keep him occupied tillhelp came, it might all turn out okay.

Tony’s expression twisted a little, as Peter continued toswing out of reach, leading him slowly down the street; he looked angrier, andhis movements became more purposeful. He no longer looked like a stiffmarionette, more like his old self, just really, really, mad.

His arm shot out and fired a beam at Peter, just as hewas swinging to another lamp post, and the blast of heat and light struck himin the chest, sending him crashing to the ground.

His suit protected his skin, but the blast burned, andhit him solidly, like a bat. Karen’s voice was worried. “I have detected acrack in one of your ribs.”

Peter grunted and wrapped an arm around his chest. “Yep,felt that one.”

Her voice came again, as Peter watched Tony come at him.“Help will be here soon.”

Peter threw a web at Tony, sticking his feet to theground, and tying his arms to his sides, watching warily as the man struggledin the bonds.

“Sorry Tony, I don’t know what’s happening, but whateverit is, we’ll fix it. I promise.”

Tony grunted, and groaned, sounding more like an animalthan himself, and Peter flinched back as he jerked particularly hard in hisrestraints.

“Tony? Can you even hear me?”

The other man’s eyes were so empty. He looked mad, buthad no recognition in his glare, and Peter quickly looked around for anycivilians, before pulling his mask off.

“It’s me, it’s Peter. Do you know who I am?”

Something flickered in Tony’s eyes, like something in himwas wavering, but it lasted only a second before he screamed in rage and shookhis head roughly and pulled at the webs tying him down.

Peter was scared, he’d never seen anything like thishappen, and he didn’t know what else to do but keep Tony tied up until helpcame. His webs were usually very good at holding people, but Tony always hadhis suit geared up for anything, and he watched in horror as the suits surfaceheated enough to melt the webs, Tony pulling at it like gum.

Peter cursed as his mentor surged towards him, and triedto dodge the oncoming punches before they hit him. He had trained with Tony before,and knew a lot of his moves, but he wasn’t usually this fast. Tony alwayspulled his punches, but this time, he was using every ounce of strength he had,and with a suit of metal, it was a lot.

Peter was struck in the face again, stumbling back,before receiving a blow to the side of his head, and another to his chest. Painflared through him, knocking the air from his lungs as he slid across theconcrete once more.

He hadn’t even had enough time to get up, before Tony wasstanding over him, gripping the collar of his suit and hauling him up, holdinghim while he drew his fist down, over, and over, into Peter’s face.

Spider-Man could take some hits, but Tony’s fists wereencased in metal, and even Peter’s abilities couldn’t protect him from the harmthat it brought. He cried out in pain, as he was struck, his head snapping tothe side with each punch.

He couldn’t hear Karen with his mask off, but he didn’teven need her to tell him his concussion was worse, and that something in hisface was broken. He felt blood running down his forehead and cheek, and saw itsmeared on Tony’s fist as he tried to push it away.

He felt awful, his eyes barely able to open, and breathscoming as wet, pants, from between his aching teeth. And while he didn’t wantto hurt Tony, he couldn’t stand the pain anymore.

He shoved his hand against the metal chest plate of Tony’ssuit, pushing him back a good few meters, so that he could attempt to stand onhis shaky legs. Everything was spinning, and it was hard to see through theblood pouring over his eye, but he held up a trembling hand as Tony watchedhim, furiously.

“P-please. Stop.”

But those eyes, that were so familiar, and usually sokind, were full of an empty sort of hate. It was as if Tony was nothing but ashell, with endless rage and anger, but no reason or direction for it.

He came forwards again, and Peter let out a sob. He wasscared.

“Please, I don’t want to hurt you. This isn’t you, thisisn’t right. Please, Tony, stop.”

He jumped out of the way as the mechanic ran forward tograb him, only to be yanked down to the ground by his ankle. He slammed againstthe pavement, groaning in pain as his injuries were jostled, before screamingin agony as Tony’s metal fingers squeezed his ankle, crushing it until it brokein his hold. Peter felt the bone snap, his vision going white as he tried tosuck in a breath.

Tony rolled him onto his back, and lent over him asPeter sucked in a breath and sobbed once more, trying to shove the man awayfrom him.

“Please! Tony, stop hurting me, please. You don’t want todo this.”

Tony scowled above him and brushed Peters hands away fromhis chest. Usually, Peter was stronger, but Tony wasn’t holding back, and hisown injuries were making him weak, and he no longer knew if he could keep Tonyfrom killing him.

Tony had always said he’d protect him, but now he was theone hurting Peter, and Peter didn’t know what to do.

“Tony!”

He looked in those eyes as he cried, and he knew then,that if he didn’t stop him, Tony would kill him.

He needed to fight back. At least until help came.

Peter threw a punch, landing on Tony’s cheek and leavingan angry red mark, though he hadn’t hit nearly as hard as he could have. Tonybarely reacted, grunting with the impact before turning back to the kid andcatching the next punch. His metal hand caught Peters fist, and squeezed, justas he had on Peter’s ankle, snapping his fingers beneath his grip.

Peter screamed and writhed beneath him, pain blurring hismind and turning it to panic. He used his uncrushed hand to fire a web to tieTony’s arm to a nearby lamp post, but it didn’t last more than a second, beforeTony pulled it free with a scream of rage, and twisted the webs ends in hisgrip.

He smiled horribly down at Peter as he brought the web toPeters throat, and used it to strangle him.

Peter had never been more scared in all his life. Hepushed his good hand against Tony’s chest, desperate enough to leave dents inthe metal, as Tony pulled the ends of the web and squeezed Peters throattighter, making him choke.

The teenager’s vision was going white, he couldn’t getany air in, and he knew that he would black out soon.

But, he couldn’t get free without hurting Tony. If heused his full strength on him, he could end up crushing his skull with onepunch, or hit his chest so hard he had a heart attack. And he couldn’t do it.So, he struggled, and tried to push Tony off him, as his lungs screamed fortheir need for air.

His limbs grew weaker, the longer he went without oxygen,and soon his hand slipped from Tony, to smack against the ground, as his braintried to conserve oxygen by taking it away from his muscles. He could no longermove, just blink hazily up at the man killing him.

Peter had heard about people’s lives flashing beforetheir eyes as they died, but all he saw was the rage on Tony’s face, before itwas replaced by the familiar, and concerned face, of Captain America.

………..

Steve had received the distress signal just as he was finishingwith some civilians. A van had been flipped during the fight, trapping multipleinnocent people; so, when Karen informed him through his coms, that Peter andTony needed help, he didn’t answer right away. The civilians needed help too,because while he could lift the van easily on his own, one of them was pinnedand moving it would cause more harm.

He stayed to help, as did the rest of the team, becausethere was just too much to do and they didn’t have all the Avengers present. Heand Tony had gotten the call to action, and Tony had taken Peter along, whileCap took Wanda and Vision. They didn’t have as much back up as they usuallydid.

He was sure they’dbe okay on their own, but hurried as much as he could.

It took too long to help those in need, in fact, he hadwanted to leave earlier, but the people that had been trapped were onlyteenagers, and they had begged him to stay with them till the ambulance came.And he couldn’t say no.

He stayed until the civilians were okay, and then tappedat his coms, asking Karen for an update on the others.

“How are Tony and Spider-Man? Still need assistance?”

The AI’s usually happy voice was tinged with worry, andher words quickly made Steve’s chest fill with the same heavy weight.

“Tony has been compromised, and is currently attackingPeter. Peter doesn’t appear to be breathing.”

Steve’s heart thumped hard against his rib-cage, and hisblood ran cold. He stood, grabbing Wanda’s arm, and tugged her to where Tonyand Peter were located, as he yelled at the AI.

“Why would Tony be hurting Peter!?”

Wanda’s eyes grew large and scared, as Vision followedbehind them.

“I do not know. Please, hurry; Peter’s vitals aredangerously unstable.”

Steve began sprinting, feeling the burn of his muscles ashe used every ounce of strength and power, to get to his team mates as quicklyas possible.

They were about to turn the corner, onto the street wherethe trackers lead them, when Wanda stumbled back, hands coming up to hertemples.

“Woah, Steve wait.”

The super soldier skidded to a stop, impatiently turningback. “What?”

The young girl’s eyebrows furrowed as she lifted herhands and began curling her fingers, red streams of light seeping through theair around her.

“There’s someone here, I don’t know who but I can feelthem. They’re trying to invade my mind, yours too.”

Steve was desperate to get to Tony and Peter, he didn’tcare who tried to stop him, he would not leave them.

“Is that what’s happening to Tony? Is he beingcontrolled?”

Wanda nodded, frowning in concentration as she curled herfingers tighter, as if pulling on an invisible string to someone’s mind.

Steve inched towards the next street, needing to find theothers. He could already hear the faint sounds of someone choking, someoneyoung; and he felt sick with worry about what he might find, or be too late tostop.

“If I go there, am I going to get controlled too?”

The girl shook her head, gasping at the strength neededto hold back the attacker. “I’ve got them distracted, I know where they are.I’ll block out their influence, and Vis can help me stop them. You go help Tonyand Peter.”

Steve didn’t wait a second, sprinting to where the soundsof gagging were getting quieter.

He had a million things going through his mind, and athousand bad images for what he might be met with when he found him; but whathe saw, made his heart skip a beat.

Tony was crouched over Peter, with webbing twisted in hisgrip, wrapped around the teenager’s throat. He was squeezing so hard Peter’sface was turning purple, and his hands were weakly pawing at the metal armorover Tony’s chest, before falling limp.

Steve surged forward, just as Tony began to shake,twitching and groaning as he seemed to come back to himself. Cap pushed themechanic off the teenager, just in time to see Peter’s eyes roll back into hishead.

He could barely breathe as he unwrapped the web fromaround Peter’s throat, placing a hand on the kid’s chest.

Tony groaned behind him, metal scraping against concreteas he stumbled, confused. “Peter? What happened?” Steve didn’t even look behindhim, but he knew Tony was no longer being controlled. That was one problemsolved, for now, but the other one…

He placed two fingers at Peters neck as he used his otherhand to tap his coms.

“I need a medevac now! Get Bruce on the line!”

Peter didn’t respond to his gentle ministrations, andblood dripped from the cut over his eye, as well as the one on his cheek, andhis nose. God, the kid was a mess.

Bruce’s voice came through the coms, hurried, andconcerned

“What happened?”

Cap’s words were breathless, and he almost forgot Tonywas behind him, as he spoke.

“Peter was strangled, he’s not breathing and his pulse isweak and rapid.”

Tony sucked in a greedy breath behind Steve, and metalclanked again as he tried to come closer. “God, did I-?”

Steve didn’t have time to be gentle with him; he flungout a hand and an apologetic frown to his team mate, before turning back to thedying teenager beneath him.

“Tony, stay back!”

Bruce’s words were quick and focused, and Steve was gladsomeone knew what to do. “Start rescue breaths, it’s just like CPR but withoutcompressions. Try not to move his neck or head too much, he could havesustained some damage, I’ll put him in a collar as soon as I get there.”

Steve did his best to be gentle, as he opened the kidsmouth and tilted his head back. He could hear Tony crying softly behind him, ashe breathed into Peter’s mouth, pausing to allow him a chance to breathe on hisown, before trying again. But nothing was happening.

“It’s not working! He isn’t breathing and his pulse isgetting weaker. Bruce, what do I do?!”

The answer came quick, as Tony’s breathing got harsher.“I’ll be there in three minutes, keep breathing for him, he can’t go withoutoxygen for much longer!”

Steve had done a lot of horrible things in his life, morethan most, but he’d never been more afraid than when his shaking hands held ateenager’s mouth open, so that he could breathe for him. Peter was innocent, hewas bright, and kind, and so, so young. But he was about to die at the hands ofhis mentor, and Steve didn’t know if he could save him.

Tony’s mind was fuzzy, and slow, but when he saw Peterlaying there, unmoving and bleeding, he felt as though his whole world hadstopped.

Bruce came, and Tony couldn’t bring himself to move as helent over the youngest member of their team. He wasn’t as calm as he usuallywas, cursing and grabbing at equipment.

“His throat is too swollen, I’m going to have tointubate. Dammit, get that line in.”

His chest felt as if it were caving in, as he watchedmedics swarm over that vulnerable form, placing IV’s, wrapping a collar aroundthe kid’s neck, and shoving things in his throat. And it was his fault. He hadtried to kill his kid.

The mechanic choked on a sob, as he saw Peter’s brokenfingers, lay still on the concrete, limb stretched towards him, as if reachingfor him, for help. But he could give none.

“God, Peter, I’m so sorry.”

Hands took his trembling shoulders, as Peter was liftedcarefully onto a backboard and strapped to a stretcher, Bruce hoveringdiligently over him. Tony didn’t have to look up to know that the firm butgentle hands belonged to Steve. His voice was sad.

“Let’s go home. Bruce has got him.” He offered noreassurance that Peter would be fine. Because he didn’t know. The kid was sobattered, that he didn’t look like himself at all; and he didn’t know whatwould happen.

Tony went with him, and wished he was the one hanging onby a thread.

………………

The list of injuries was long, and each addition madeTony want to throw up even more.

“He’s healing fast, as usual, but it will take a littlewhile for everything to go back to normal. The cuts over his cheek andforehead, took a few stitches each, to close, but they’ll be fine. His ankleand hand are in casts, and should come off in a week or so; his rib will healon its own. His cheek was broken, which caused a lot of swelling, and it’lltake a little longer than the others to heal, but it didn’t need surgery.”

Tony winced and looked away from the x-rays on screen. Heremembered the feeling of Peter’s bones snapping beneath his grip, the way theteenager had screamed and begged him to stop. An ankle, four fingers, and threeknuckles. He swallowed his nausea.

“What about his… when I…” He couldn’t say it, butgestured to his neck. He couldn’t say the words, couldn’t say the wordstrangled, or choked, or attempted murder. Bruce nodded, and swiped at hisscreen, pulling up images of more scans and x-rays.

“The swelling went down, he’s breathing on his own now,but it’s still very painful for him so he shouldn’t talk just yet. Luckilythere was no damage to his neck or spinal cord, and his CT and MRI showed nolasting damage to the brain.”

Tony sighed, because he could tell that wasn’t it.

“But-?”

Bruce pressed his lips together. He didn’t want to sayit, but Tony’s expression was hard, and he knew he would just look through hisfiles if he didn’t tell him.

“He’s showing signs of confusion and short-term memoryloss.”

Tony ducked his head, rubbing a hand over his face.“Jesus.”

Bruce tried quickly to amend as Steve placed a comfortinghand on his team mates shoulder. “It should pass soon, and it’s most likelyjust because of the concussion. But…because of how long he went without oxygen,I have to keep an eye on it. Just to be safe.”

Tony stood, and began pacing as Steve’s hand fell fromhis shoulder. Tension and anxiety was evident in his rigid stance, and everfidgeting hands.

“You should have me locked up.”

Steve started forward, interrupted as Tony spun to facehim. “Tony- “

“I almost killed him! I broke his bones Steve, Istrangled- “

He choked on the words, and closed his eyes as he triedto keep from hyperventilating. His voice was quieter as he tried again.

“Tell him that I’m sorry, and that he’ll never have tosee me again.”

Steven tried to grab his arm, but sighed as he wasdodged, and watched Tony leave. There wasn’t anything he could do for him, heknew, but it wouldn’t stop him trying to dig Tony out of the grave of guilt heburied himself in.

……………………

Peter was laying in his bed, drugged enough to keep thepain at bay, and watching the clouds pass outside his window, when Steve walkedin.

The teenager turned to him as he entered, and Steve had ahard time not walking right back out again. It had been a day sincethe…incident, and he wasn’t looking much better than when he’d found him lyingin the street. Heavy bruises covered his face, and ringed his neck, with stripsof bandages taped over his skin to cover the rows of stitches.

His casted ankle and hand were propped up with pillows,and the whole room was kept dim and quiet so as not to aggravate hisconcussion.

But he smiled as much as he could, because that wasPeter; and Steve smiled back, sitting on the edge of the kid’s bed.

“Hey, bud. Are you feeling any better?”

Peter shrugged a little, eyes blinking slowly, as hisglassy gaze slid over the super soldier’s face.

“Where’s Tony?”

Steve swallowed, unwilling to give the message themechanic had wanted him to. “He’s giving you a little space, till you feelbetter. It’s hard for him to see you like this, after what happened.”

The teenager looked disappointed, good hand fiddling withthe wires stuck to his chest, till Steve gently tugged them away. His voice wassmall, and weak, throat still recovering, and his words came as hoarse whispers.

“Is he mad? I hit him, to try and get him off me, but I didn’twant to do it. I didn’t hurt him, did I?”

Steve’s heart broke at the worried look in Peters eyes.He’d been almost killed by his mentor, and here he was, worrying about onepunch.

“He’s okay, buddy. You did a good job controlling your strength.He’s not mad at you, he just can’t…see what he did to you, without it hurting.”

Peter nodded a little, looking tired. “It was scary, butit wasn’t him, right?”

Steve nodded, and stood, tucking Peter’s blankets overhis chest. “No, he would never do that to you, if he could help it. It was amind manipulator, he decided to have a little fun, but Wanda and Vision tookcare of him. He won’t be hurting anyone ever again. And Peter you have to know,if anything like that happens, you’re allowed to protect yourself; you canfight back, even if it might hurt us.”

Peter frowned. “No, I couldn’t do that. Hey, Steve?”

Cap adjusted the kids pillows as he nodded, gesturing himto continue.

“Where’s Tony?”

The soldier sighed and looked down at Peter, brushing hishair back over his forehead. “You already asked that, Pete. He’s okay, he’ll beback soon. You just get some sleep now, you’ve done enough talking.”

The youngest Avenger did as he was told, sinking backinto his pillows, and quickly falling asleep, as Steve rubbed a hand over hisface and tried not to cry. What was he going to do?

……………………..

It took only a few days for Peter to heal enough to getout of bed. Tony stayed away from him, but kept an eye on his kid through camerasthroughout the compound, and updates from the rest of the team. He didn’t wantPeter to see him, but that didn’t mean he would leave him completely. He stayedlocked in his lab, and refused to come out.

Steve also thought it might have been a way of punishinghimself too, that Tony thought he had to look at the injuries he caused, thathe deserved to feel that sick guilt eating away at him every time he saw Peterthrough the camera’s footage.

So, for four days, Tony kept an eye on him. He watched asPeter got stronger, the way he smiled when the other Avengers signed his casts,and how he went back to his normal talkative self as soon as his throat wasbetter.

Cap watched movies with him, and Bruce patiently answeredthe same questions over and over when Peter forgot the answer.

But that got better too, Peter’s memory improved, and hisattention span was less like a bird, flicking from one point to another withoutlanding for long.

Peter was getting better, and the bruises were fading,but Tony’s memories about what happened were not. He could still see everythingso clearly, and feel the way it had all felt.

He knew that Peter had been having nightmares, too. Hebarely slept himself, so when Peter screamed in the night, Tony could hear it,he could hear the names Peter called out, and the pleas for help.

“Tony! Please, don’t! Stop, hurting me, this isn’t you!Steve, help me!”

No, he couldn’t see him. There was no telling what mighthappen when Peter saw him again, he could have panic attacks or PTSD, and Tony wouldn’tbe responsible for any more of that kid’s pain.

But Bruce and Steve were insistent; they came to hisroom, and spoke to him each day with updates, and meals that they forced him toeat.

“He asked about you again today. Remembered the answer too,so he’s improving. He misses you.”

Tony didn’t look at the doctor, just took the offered plateand set it down on his desk before turning back to a project he’d been workingon instead of sleeping.

“He had another nightmare about me, too. What, you thinkI couldn’t hear him screaming at two AM this morning?”

Bruce slammed his hand down on the desk, making tools andmetal rattle. “You know what he was dreaming about? He wasn’t scared of youTony, he was scared for you! He hasn’t seen you in days, he thinks you hatehim! His nightmare was about you being hurt, about him being unable to controlhis own strength when fighting you off!”

Tony’s breathing was speeding up, and he ignored the wayhis hands shook as he tightened a bolt on his project.

“He shouldn’t ever have had to fight me off. That’s thepoint.”

“He knows it wasn’t your fault, you would never hurt him.He needs you.”

Tony pressed his fingers to his eyes till bright spotsdanced across his mind. “I can’t.”

Bruce’s voice was softer, and Tony sighed as he felt hishand drop on his shoulder, gently squeezing.

“Yes, you can. Because you promised you’d always be therefor him, and I won’t let you break that promise.”

His hand left Tony’s shoulder, and he thought that wasthen end of it, until Bruce spoke again, quiet, and sad.

“He got this for you, by the way. Said it was his apologyfor punching you.” His footsteps faded away, and Tony took a breath beforeturning around to see what Bruce had left on his work bench. It was a mug, andTony’s chest squeezed as he read the words printed over it.

‘World’s best Dad Tony.’ The ‘dad’ had beencrossed out, and ‘Tony’ written in Peter’s neat handwriting, with permanentmarker. Tony covered his mouth with one hand as he picked the mug up, knowinghe was going to cry. Because, he was well aware that Peter was smart enough to knowhow to order a personalised mug, he didn’t have to get this one and scribble itout, but he did, which meant it was intentional.

Tony held the mug and cried.

………………..

Peter grunted in annoyance, as he tried to spread peanutbutter over his toast, with his casted hand. It would be coming off soon, butit was just so annoying.

Steve let out a small laugh and came over to help, gentlytaking the knife from his grip and doing it for him, as Peter gave him agrateful smile.

“Thanks, Captain America. You save people and you maketoast, what can’t you do?”

The older man laughed and nudged the kid with his elbow. “Hey,don’t get smart or you can keep trying to do this yourself.”

“Local hero bullies injured child, that’ll look good inthe papers.” Peter and Steve both turned at the voice, shocked to see Tonyleaning on the doorway of the kitchen, casually sipping coffee from his newmug.

Peter hobbled over to the man, the moon boot on his foot makingit difficult to walk without looking stupid, but he smiled all the same andwrapped his arms around Tony’s chest.

“Tony! You’re back!”

Steve pulled the mug from Tony’s hand so that he couldhug him back, and he gave the soldier a nod before looking down to the teenagerattached to his chest.

“Yeah, I’m sorry I left. I won’t do it again.”

Peter pulled back, frowning sadly. It was still hard forTony to look at him, but it wasn’t about how he felt, it was about Peter.

“Why did you leave? Were you hurt too? I tried to becareful but I just didn’t- “

Tony quickly shook his head and took hold of Petersshoulders. “No, no you didn’t hurt me at all. You should have, but you didn’t.I just didn’t want you to have to see me again. I didn’t want you to be scaredof me. Peter…I am so, so sorry for what I did.”

Peter relaxed, sighing at the knowledge that Tony wasokay. Jesus, what did he do to deserve this kid?

“I know it wasn’t your fault, I forgive you.” The wordswere so simple, and Peter’s eyes had been honest and bright as always, as he’dsaid them, yet they hit Tony like bricks, slamming into his chest and takingevery gasp of air with them.

He sniffed, vision blurring with tears once more, as hepulled Peter back to his chest for a hug. He felt as if he could finallybreathe.

“Thanks, kid. I missed you.”

Peter hugged him back tight, smiling. “I missed you too.”

#whump #fanfic #Spider-Man #peter Parker #tony stark #steve rogers #Bruce banner #mine #fanfic prompt #blood #violence

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marypsue · 7 years ago

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@blogg-saron Just remember: you asked for it.

Reincarnation Blues (95,096 words, published April 2, 2015, completed September 26, 2015)

This fic was the product of an idea that absolutely would not leave me alone. I’ve mentioned before that originally Rosa was the centre of the piece, with Ian as a supporting player and partner in crime in her bid to take over the world by being adorable and popular. Rosa Darling, Taylor Swift’s Evil Twin, crawled fully-formed out of the first time I heard Delta Rae’s ‘I Will Never Die’, at least two months before I ever wrote a word of Reincarnation Blues.

Ian didn’t actually have a name until I decided to write a short fic based on these characters who just wouldn’t get out of my head; he was a generic, grinning-evil Devil Went Down To Georgia reference with a fiddle but no name playing backup in Rosa’s band and lending her supernatural firepower when necessary. As originally conceived, he knew exactly who he’d been and used it to his full advantage. I decided on 'Ian’ after considering ‘Liam’ as a name that referenced ‘William’, but not as obviously as a ‘Bill’ or ‘Will’, and then deciding that would give the game away too soon. I also just plain didn’t like the name ‘Liam’ as much. It was only later that I found out that the man responsible for the absolutely stunning art direction on Gravity Falls is named Ian. And I just found out now, looking up Delta Rae to see when ‘I Will Never Die’ was released, that one of the band members is named Ian. This is...typical of the experience of writing this fic.

Mira came into the picture after I gave up on finishing the fic I was working on at the time before giving the RB characters free rein on my imagination, and decided to write just a short one-shot, just to introduce them. (Hah.) I’m not sure, exactly, when or why I ended up deciding that Ian shouldn’t have any knowledge of his previous incarnation (I think it was somewhere between Brown Bird’s ‘Blood of Angels’ and the short burst of Alex!Bill popularity), but it ended up being a good decision. It would’ve been around that time that I decided I needed to put him into Alcor’s path in order for his previous incarnation to come out, and that the best way to do that was to put him into the orbit of a Mizar. Deciding to have them date was purely a ‘hey, wouldn’t it be funny if...’, with an added touch of ‘oh man, Dipper would hate that’. Mira basically started out as an amalgamation of Mabel traits and fashion that I like, and a lot of her arguments with Dipper came out of my trying to figure out just what the heck was going on in her head. (Also, her social media presence is a little bit based on Manzi, who Alex was dating at the time, because I followed her on here for a short while before realising we had practically no interests in common and she posted a LOT of stuff that wasn’t cosplay. )

And now that the stage is set:

Chapter One

This began life as a one-shot that was meant to exorcise these characters from my head. Ninety-six thousand words later, we can all see how that turned out.

I wrote a good chunk of this chapter from Mira’s perspective, but it just wasn’t working, and I realised around the point where Dipper flips out that if I wanted to keep it as a short, I needed the readers to know whether Ian was really evil and scheming like Dipper suspected, or if he was just as clueless as Mira was. Now, I think I might have stuck with my original plan and left that ambiguous, because that would be a nice, tight little horror story. On the other hand, ninety-six thousand words later...

Given the opportunity to do a complete rewrite, though, I would adjust Mira and Ian’s introduction as a couple. Their first interactions seem really, really stilted and forced to me now.

Chapter Two

I actually wrote a short fic for the TAU blog based on a prompt about Ian and Dipper learning to tolerate each other and Ian pitching a show based on Dipper and Mabel’s experiences in Gravity Falls before I decided I was going to expand the, at the time, one-shot into a full multichapter fanfiction novel. It actually was part of what convinced me that I still had a lot of stories to tell about these characters, and that it should be expanded. That short fic also introduced Ian’s prosthetic eye, which he didn’t, at that point in Reincarnation Blues, have. I got to answer a couple of asks with axolotl gifs and feel like a real creative mastermind.

There were a couple times while I was writing the climax that I actually considered killing Ian off, because it seemed more likely with the state of each of the characters and also just so that the Toby plot could still work, but because I had made this short fic of events taking place after the events of RB and Ian was still alive in it, I decided that meant I’d made a tacit promise that he’d survive. I didn’t really want to kill him off anyway, so it made a good excuse when I was weighing my narrative options and they all seemed to be sliding towards Death.

A lot of this chapter was influenced by the surge of human!Bills in the fandom at the time, and especially of human!Bills (and human-shaped!Bills) who had flashy, obvious, fire-based powersets. I felt like Bill Cipher’s real power lay in misdirection - the flash and the fire, in canon, always only distracted the main characters from Bill’s real objectives, and, arguably, what he was really getting out of their interactions. To my way of thinking, it was far more likely that a human Bill Cipher would have some kind of mentally-based powerset, if they had a ‘powerset’ at all, and weren’t merely very quick cogitators who could think big and put themselves one step ahead of everyone around them. At the time, there were precious few authors and illustrators who seemed to have come to the same conclusion - none that I ran across, anyway. (There still aren’t, but the flood of billdip-based Cool Human Bills With Fire Powers seems to have slowed to a trickle.)

It also came in response to Toby, who was invented by the Transcendence AU’s very own Mod Z and exploded in popularity almost instantly. He was a sweetheart, a genuinely good, kind, little kid, who was facing enormous cosmic retribution for a millennia-long previous lifetime as a liar, monster, and snappy dresser. Toby is great, his creator manages to milk all the hilarious irony out of the situation, and there are some authors who’ve done really good and clever things with him. I’ve just never been all that interested in purely Good characters who just keep getting kicked in the teeth by a cruel world, and it struck me that Toby was the perfect setup for Bill to sneak in close to Dipper and do...something vicious. (I don’t think, at this point, that I knew exactly what Bill was planning to use Ian for, but I definitely knew that Bill was planning something, and it was going to blow up spectacularly in everyone’s faces.)

With those things in mind, I tried to imagine some realistic flaws or weaknesses that a near-omniscient, immortal demon forcibly bound to a decaying, imperceptive meatsack might potentially develop. Ian’s anxiety and nihilism(-lite?) and self-destructive tendencies all come from there. I settled on the feelings of insignificance and impermanence as the two major issues Ian had to face mostly because those were two things that Bill had never had to consider, would never have had to consider if he hadn’t ended up human himself, and would never have been able to satisfactorily reconcile with his own omniscience and indelible influence on human history/trail of destruction across several dimensions. It was not long after I settled on this and really committed to it (I believe it was a few chapters later than this, though) that Alex did a twitter Q&A where he talked to a fan with anxiety and...basically laid out that he suffered from very similar fears, and had developed very similar coping mechanisms to the ones I’d decided to give Ian. I initially only made Ian look like Alex for the sake of the joke, but as the fic progressed it became more and more clear to me that, by writing a version of a character who Alex Hirsch had once gotten in a ‘which character are you’ online personality quiz, I had inadvertently tapped a vein of similarity that was only gonna get wider.

If you’re reading this, Mr. Hirsch: I am so sorry, and I swear that I did not and do not stalk you. I know my icon of cartoon Dana Terrace kinda makes this harder to believe, but still.

Chapter Three

The first Mira-POV scene! Also the first appearance of Rosa!

I think this was the chapter that really cemented for me that I was doing this, that this 'short one-shot' was now a fully-fledged multichaptered fic and I was in it for the long haul. This is the first chapter that starts to set the plot in motion, and the first chapter where I really knew that there WAS an overarching plot thread and where, in a more specific sense, it was going. I believe this is also the chapter where the fic got its title (the previous two oneshots had been posted without titles).

...her punk-bluegrass act, the Savage Peace...

Oh yeah! I never mentioned these guys again. This was the duo that Ian and Rosa played together in, before Ian left to go into animation and Rosa went solo. The name is a riff on the Civil Wars, another excellent bluegrass duo who split up due to differences of opinion on their future direction. I love the Civil Wars.

I searched last.fm for 'punk bluegrass' after this chapter, because I had a very specific idea about what Rosa's music sounded like (like Delta Rae but with more electric guitar and bass, pretty much) and I wanted to see if anyone else had made it a reality. I did not find what I was looking for, but I did find Wood Spider, a band that plays bluegrass music with screamo vocals. I recommend 'Is It Strange?' because it is a very, very Ian song.

In case you hadn't noticed yet, a lot of the making of this fic was heavily influenced by music. I really need to make another playlist for it at some point.

Also, there's been some confusion amongst TAU peeps regarding Rosa's hair. I intended it to look like P!nk's blonde fauxhawk. Word Of God has spoken.

"He knows what I like and don't like, what matters to me, even things I don't tell him. He pays attention to what I say and do, and he remembers. He just does nice things for me sometimes when I'm least expecting it, and it's always exactly what I didn't even know I wanted."

This line was meant to show how Bill's 'ALWAYS WATCHING!' shtick might, under a very different set of circumstances and put to a different use, actually be a good thing. Post-Escape From Reality and Mabeland, it also takes on a vicious irony which I really appreciate. Successfully predicting what'll be ironic in the most painfully angsty way before canon even gets there: The Mary P. Sue Advantage!

I think this scene is where Mira actually coalesces into her own character for me, rather than 'a Mizar who is dating an r!Bill'. This is where she gets to show some of her own strengths and values, and to oppose and conflict with Dipper on her own terms, rather than because of Ian. I made a conscious effort to make sure this fic passed the Bechdel test, but I feel like even though this was a conversation with a dude, it was equally important in giving Mira a voice and an interior life separate from the men (well, okay, man and demon) in it. It also shows off the two sides of her - she's picked up a lot from Dipper, as evidenced by her nonchalance about cult-busting, but she's also still empathetic and compassionate, as shown by how she handles the kids. She's stuck between Dipper and humanity, and this is the first place where that's really shown, rather than talked about. It's one of my favourite scenes in the fic for exactly those reasons.

The last scene in this chapter is also where Mira and Ian start really feeling real to me as a couple, too. I really think this is just the chapter where I found my stride and all the pieces started to come together.

Chapter Four

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this chapter. It mostly exists to set the scene for what comes later, to get the reader more familiar with the characters, to set the cogs in motion. I am very pleased with Ian and Rosa’s friendship in the first couple scenes, though - I think it’s pretty natural.

Rosa looked up at him, her expression completely neutral. “Beale, I am goin’ to steal your girl.”

At the time I was writing this, there had been - I remember it as several, but it really must’ve been like, three - Gideon reincarnations (and preincarnations) in TAU who had gotten weirdly possessive about Mizars and had caused All Of The Plot in their respective fics by trying to make her their own. We’d also - if I recall correctly - received an ask basically proposing that Gideon’s soul would always do that, any time it came into contact with a Mizar’s, no matter what else might be going on. I...wasn’t a fan of that idea. I believe I’ve mentioned in a previous thing-where-I-talked-too-much-about-RB that Reincarnation Blues’ major theme is determinism versus individual identity. That was why I felt like this was the perfect place to kind of deconstruct that idea that there could be no r!Gideon who wasn’t an epic jerk. Right from the beginning, I intended for Rosa to get fixated on Mira, to set events in motion by doing a bunch of stuff that was beyond the pale to try to ‘steal’ her from Ian, and then to have to face the consequences of her actions. The goal was to see if she could grab a clue, if knowing what was going on and what she had done would give her a chance to look at her life, look at her choices, and make better ones the next time.

That’s right. I was redeeming Gideon before it was canon cool.

(There’s a whole lot I could get into about what I’m meaning when I say ‘redemption’ versus ‘apologism’, but...I won’t, here. Suffice it to say that I wouldn’t have wanted any kind of redemption plot for Gideon - or, indeed, any character, anywhere - that didn’t acknowledge that they started out in the wrong, and, though I usually disagree, I completely understand people not wanting to see certain villainous characters get a second chance.)

“... So - noose joke. Think that can ride, or are the censors gonna flip?"

I made a Mistake here. I was referencing the cut storyboards from Scary-oke where Dipper finds Ford’s ‘Zombie Survival Kit’ and all that’s in it is a noose. It was a suicide joke. (Well, I mean, suicide wasn’t the joke, but - well, whatever.) I should have referred to it as a suicide joke, or chosen a different deadly weapon. Instead, I referred to it as a ‘noose joke’ and it became a meme on the TAU blog, that Ian would be hiding nooses in the backgrounds of scenes all the time.

It was only, like, a month into this that I realised what the noose has historically, in the States, been a symbol for, and that without the context of a cut storyboard presented at a con (which might not necessarily be widely known) and then taken out of the context of a scene where the character is making storyboards (thereby removing the storyboard reference link)...yeah. I have to apologise for this one. Nobody has said anything to me about it, but in hindsight and with some consideration, I would word this differently if I were to rewrite the fic today.

I had a loooot of fun writing sleep-deprived Bill-like Ian here, and I hope to do more of it at some point.

Chapter Five

The introduction of Sun-mi! Sun-mi was a last-minute addition because I realised Mira had no female friends and panicked, and also because NWHS came out and I fell even harder in love with the character of the Author, and figured that tossing an r!Author (we didn’t at the time know that he was named Ford) into the mix with an r!Bill would be fun. This...is why Sun-mi’s role is small (though, I think, still important enough to justify her inclusion) - it was added to the plot post-outlining.

While I was writing Sun-mi, I was thinking of her with a voice much like April on Parks & Rec. This is not particularly relevant information to anything, I just see her as being very deadpan in that same way.

“So, not that one. How about Tam Lin?”

The mention of Tam Lin - one of the Child Ballads, in which a girl rescues her fairy lover on the night his soul is to be sent to hell as a tithe, and restores him to humanity, by holding him fast, and fearing him not - was a blatant nod to how the fic was going to end, and nobody picked up on it. It is also just a great, classic fiddle tune, though, and apparently it's not widely known that it's in the same time and key as St. Anne's Reel and so the two can be played together?

(I also answered a question about what each of the characters would have on their iPods, and said that Mira would have the Kerli song ‘Chemical’ on hers. If anyone had looked it up, they would have found out that it’s got a refrain that goes ‘This love is more than chemical’, which also directly references how the fic ends. I took every opportunity to hide spoilers for this fic in plain sight. It was so much fun.)

Stamped into the starry void around them like an artificial horizon was a massive ring, parallel lines glowing red like gashes cut into the dream to reveal an inferno on the other side. And between those lines, all around the horizon, burned familiar symbols.

Most of Ian’s nightmare is based on what I thought Bill’s experience of the Mystery Shack, from the mindscape, must have been like. This bit, though, is based entirely on a nightmare I had which involved Bill Cipher. I was practically contractually obligated to include it here.

Chapter Six

I have to preface any comments I make about this chapter with a disclaimer. Normally, I loathe miscommunication plots, especially ones where characters who ostensibly love and trust each other just flat-out refuse to listen to the other's explanation of a situation that looks bad. However, that's...exactly what I've written here.

I feel like the saving grace of this first scene is that, one, it doesn't constitute the entire plot, and two, it's more of a symptom of larger, deeper problems that they're having, rather than manufactured drama so that there can be some conflict and a tearful reunion in the third act. Sure, things end up hinging on Mira and Dipper trusting one another, but things are already strained between them, and this one miscommunication isn't the only problem they face, it's just the straw that broke the camel's back. Clearing up this one particular misunderstanding also doesn't magically solve all of their problems. I could, of course, be totally wrong and this miscommunication plot could be exactly as painful as every one I've ever seen on a made-for-TV romcom.

Had this whole thing been a colossal waste of time?

And here we see the product of Rosa's machinations! My thinking behind her slightly-absurd recruiting of Sun-mi to investigate Ian's past lives in an earlier chapter was that she thought that, any negative information Sun-mi turned up, she would share with Mira, and it wouldn't look like Rosa herself had deliberately sabotaged Ian and Mira's relationship, so she'd still have a shot with Mira. Devious.

(It occurs to me that both of the two characters who were the initial inspiration for RB started out as evil masterminds in concept, but ended up being sympathetic characters who got redemption arcs in the actual fic. There's some kind of irony about this.)

Trying to work out how the historical record might represent the Shack so far in the future was also a lot of fun. I know that the worldbuilding on this fic isn't sufficient for something that's meant to take place a full thousand years in the future, that the rate of change is so rapid that the society - and even the landscape - of the world Ian and Mira live in ought to be near-completely unrecognisable. On the other hand, I just wanted to write a fun story about character interactions, and I couldn't really set it any earlier or I'd risk 1) Dipper still having a clear thread of niblings around to anchor him, 2) things not having progressed far enough to actually have something like preincarnation testing, and 3) it being too early for Bill to have recovered from his 'defeat'.

(Also, I'm pretty sure that this, here, is the first use of the word 'preincarnation' in the TAU.)

He was still himself, more or less, he wasn't like Bill - !

Dipper is a little (or a lot) less human in this fic than in some of my others, but the thing is, he isn't really aware of that. This is the scene where it gets hammered home. It was a lot of fun constructing the scene where he eats Ian's nightmare so that it could be deconstructed here, to put all of the pieces of his real motivation and plans on display and show just how much like Bill's his modus operandi has become. (It also explains how he's able to get into Ian's head to offer the deal he does right at the end of the fic.)

Chapter Seven

aka "Shit, Meet Fan".

If you asked Dipper what seeing the future was like, he'd probably say it was like a beach.

I lifted this metaphor from Terry Pratchett's The Carpet People, a book which I strongly suggest for anyone who is interested in high fantasy, slightly deconstructed, and set among a race of teeny-tiny people living in the hairs of a carpet. He wrote it at seventeen and then came back and edited it as an adult. The result is...not quite A Terry Pratchett Book, but also not your average Extruded Fantasy Product Tolkien knockoff. He deploys the metaphor a little differently, and I can't remember how exactly he phrased things, but the concept of seeing possible futures as grains of sand on a beach came from him initially.

"I'm Alcor and I was wrong

I'm singing the Alcor Wrong Song..."

Dipper's apology is, of course, based on the Stan Wrong Song, which I thought was a nice touch to show that he was still thinking of Mira in terms of his life with Mabel in Gravity Falls. You gotta give the boy credit, though, he's trying.

I also think that Dipper will never be over his fear of puppets, partly because of Sock Opera, but also partly because we never got the Labyrinth episode. Until Dipper and Mabel have a siblinghood-affirming adventure in a giant, glittery maze with a mess of Muppets and a David Bowie guy, Dipper Pines will forever fear all puppetry.

"Well, we're all going to die."

Ian is really, really, profoundly bad at being comforting. (Unless you're worried about having embarrassed yourself or messed up your future, in which case, your ultimate insignificance in an eternal and uncaring universe and the inevitable certainty of your eventual complete eradication can sometimes be comforting.)

Ian hummed along as he turned on the faucet. "Dream a little dream of me..."

Annnnd here we go.

I decided that Ian would like folk and bluegrass music, partly because of the initial character concept and the Rosa connection, partly because I thought it was a genre that would remain resistant to introducing synthesised music even in the hypothetical future, partly because then I could make 'The Devil Went Down To Georgia' jokes. I decided he should also be into jazz music mostly because of the incredible His Name Was Billy Mischief, which is probably one of my favourite GF fics of all time and also highly recommended for anybody who liked RB. The author's inclusion of 'Someone To Watch Over Me' was both inspired and led to me looking up more jazz music, which led to finding a surprising number of songs that could be easily read as referring to Bill. It's not jazz, but Alex's inclusion of 'We'll Meet Again' in the finale still made me kick my feet in vindicated glee.

This scene was in the works from chapter 2 onwards, and it's another of my favourites - I think with good reason. I've had a lot of feedback from people that this was the most viscerally effective scene in the whole fic, and somebody drew me fanart for it! It was a little challenging to get into initially, because I was so excited to write it and I had to restrain myself somewhat to keep it taut and tense and simmering, instead of just explosive from word one. I think - I hope - that it succeeded.

Chapter Eight

“I’ll be looking at the moon,

but I’ll be seeing...you!”

I found Billie Holiday's version of 'I'll Be Seeing You' somewhere around chapter three or four and I instantly knew I had to write this scene and use it as a backdrop. I'd love to see this on film; Mira looking through the empty apartment, the slight and subtle wrongnesses adding up as a sinister bass note slowly builds from under the song to nearly drown it out, only to vanish on the final line as the camera overlooks the sink abandoned in the middle of a task and the phone left docked on the wall, letting Billie's voice echo, alone, over the unnatural stillness, before the song ends and all is left in perfect, fragile, ominous silence -

Anyway. Sometimes my mind is unnecessarily cinematic, and sometimes I profoundly regret not being able to score and soundtrack my fics.

“Do y’all mind?” Rosa asked, holding her phone away from her head. “Can’t hear a word my friend’s sayin’.”

This scene was originally even longer and more obnoxious. I really wanted to give people a reason to like and root for Rosa. Okay, so I also thought it would be badass. Thankfully, I have long trained myself to sacrifice cool awesome character stuff when it needs to be sacrificed for the sake of the story.

Are you done laughing yet? No? Okay, I’ll give you a couple more minutes.

Please ignore literally everything I had to say about the wards, because it is all bullshit. I think I said that anything less than an SS-class demon would be bounced back from Mira's wards, and that Ian, once 'active', shattered one of them completely on his way out, but that Dipper could go past them without having any effect on them at all? Which would require him to, like, probably use his powers to recreate them after he passed through...? I don't know how any of that was supposed to work.

I am, however, very, very pleased about opening a scene with Dipper missing Mabel's absolute faith in him, and immediately taking it into Mira accusing Dipper of murdering her boyfriend because Dipper's just such a demon. Juxtaposition!

The 'highlight reel' is equally if not more bullshit than the wards. I think this chapter is where I just gave up on trying to give Dipper a balanced powerset and decided to just go with whatever best served the emotional, character-arc thread. Sometimes you just have to play to your strengths.

Dipper didn't like other people knowing things he didn't. ... If he wasn't that guy, then - well, what was he?

A good brother! A real scrapper with a heart of gold and a will of adamantium! A sarcastic little shit! Dipper's focus on being The Smart Guy getting deconstructed and his realising that that isn't the be-all end-all of who he is was a wonderful good awesome character arc, even if it ended up being kind of understated in comparison with some of the more in-your-face character development that, say, the Stans got. TAU kind of does a similar thing with Dipper's arc, giving him All The Knowledge but making it come at the price of his family, which makes him reconsider its value...but it doesn't address that particular thing in the same way as canon, so I can see Dipper still getting hung up on this even thousands of years later. (Also, there are a lot of interpretations that indicate he may be kind of mentally frozen at the age he 'died', which I kind of love and subscribe to.) Hence, this line!

(I bet Dipper haaaaaaates when, like, The Slang and memes change. He has all kinds of arcane knowledge, but just what exactly the kids are talking about when they say something that looks like a random combination of syllables is beyond even his eldritch comprehension, and he can't figure out the nuances of how the new words are used, and - argh.)

"I tried to set things up so you'd find out something awful about Ian and break up with him so I could date you instead!"

There was a beat.

"That's it?" Mira asked, carefully.

One, I personally still think this is hilarious.

Two, this is the thing about Gideon - in a world of supernatural, outsized threats, he's really quite mundane! His whole shtick is something that can and does happen in real life! And he's the second-worst antagonist in the whole show! I front-loaded the redemption arc in this fic and gave Rosa a little more self-awareness and a quicker leap to recognising that what she was doing was shitty, so how funny the mundanity of 'I want you to be my girlfriend and I don't care what you think' as compared to 'a literal demon is going to try to blow up the whole of reality' is can really shine, but, like...it's still terrible, and giving it outsized supernatural consequences doesn't make it worse or better than it is when it happens in reality. Do any of these words make sense? Who knows.

My one explicitly lesbian character in this fic being manipulative and predatory in her affections? Mmmmmmaybe not a choice I'd make again. But I do like how this storyline played out.

Chapter Nine

I'm still not entirely sure who knows what about Bill and why. That was another thing that I'd change, given a chance to do a rewrite - I'd solidly establish Bill's position in history, myth, and public consciousness in this particular future right up front. That way, it might actually make a lick of sense when the characters react to hearing his name when there's not...like...any evidence that they have any idea who the fuck he even is.

Don't set your stories in a future where magic has been real for a thousand years if you don't have a lot of experience or interest in worldbuilding, guys.

This is the chapter where Mira is just completely fucking done with absolutely everyone's shit, and I love it.

"...They used to have to take my pulse manually every time. ..."

I decided that Ian wreaks havoc with medical technology because his Ooo Weird Demon Soul Energy is, like, an actual electromagnetic weirdness that hangs around him. This is also why the viewscreen for the peephole goes all fuzzy on him in chapter seven and why, in some extracanonical material, he can't get his storyboard files from his tablet to talk to literally any other piece of technology. It's also why Rosa can tell his energy's 'weird' and why Mira's mom thinks his aura's like a hole.

"... Remember Paloma Heart?"

... "I don't."

I should have mentioned Paloma earlier. That's all.

Brown really did think that he had Ian figured out, that he knew Ian back to front, just because he knew Bill Cipher. ... He wasn't expecting Ian Thomas Beale.

Ian, here, is thinking he's making Brown nervous, making Brown think that he's up against some semi-omniscient, potentially-omnipotent extradimensional being who knows more than he does and can do more than he can, in hopes that Brown will get scared and angry and slip up, give away information that Ian doesn't actually have yet (like how Bill sent Ford that nightmare in the beginning of TLM that really had no purpose except to send Ford running scared for his defenses against Bill, and which also led to the brainwave-encryption machine being destroyed and Ford taking Dipper into his confidences and growing closer to him and ultimately seeding the rift between Dipper and Mabel that ends with Bill getting the rift...). Just how in control is Ian of his own actions here? Debatable, since what he ends up actually doing is getting Brown scared and angry enough and believing enough in Ian's 'powers' to, eventually, let Bill out. Oh, the irony.

Area 51! For someone who's never been big into aliens, I sure have put this dang place into a lot of fics.

(I also wanted to give Mira a chance to one-up Dipper in the Smart Guy department. And do something nice for Dipper. He deserves a bone thrown his way.)

Chapter Ten

Mira is one of the only people - if not THE only person - in this entire fic who has exactly zero ulterior motives. She does exactly what she means to, goes for exactly what she wants to, directly and without hesitation. I kind of love that about her, it's a breath of fresh air.

Here, however, it does probably make her immediate job a little harder.

"It just kills you, doesn't it?" he said ... "Not knowing?"

#getrektIan

I am unreasonably proud of the jet-skate Ladies of English Lit roller derby team as a method of mass destruction.

This scene originally had Dipper taunting Mira about killing mooks lead into the 'mooks' turning out to be magically mind-controlled people, which Mira found out very graphically and horribly when she wrenched the helmet off the guy who tried to choke her out to jam her fingers in his eyes and saw the sigil on his forehead - but that dragged me down a rabbit hole of Is Mira Actually A Good Person etc, and it was both too late to introduce this thread and would have muddled the plot. I might revisit the idea sometime, but then again, I might not.

Chapter Eleven

Janice!!! Janice is one of my favourite backgrounders and I almost wish I hadn't killed her off so quickly. Almost.

I have a boatload of headcanons about how the Society of the Blind Eye worked, how it was originally a secret society designed to stop Bill but Bill used Fiddleford to co-opt and disable it and then used Dipper to destroy it, most of which ended up finding a home in Raising Stakes. This is one of them. There's just no way, in-universe, that the Blind Eye is so deliberately similar to Bill's in design just by chance. (Out of universe, of course, it makes perfect sense for the gravi-team to maintain a consistent aesthetic, but still. My convoluted headcanons can still be supported by textual evidence!)

There was a circle in the middle of the room.

Goodbye, Ian. It was nice knowing you.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and his outstretched wings flickered with stars, surveillance footage, images of the fight that had just happened, an apple tree in a forest of pines, a blueprint, a wide-eyed alien-looking creature...

Dipper's wings flickering is meant to parallel Bill's face flickering in Dreamscaperers, and, like Bill's face flickering in Dreamscaperers, it contains spoilers! The surveillance footage refers to how he and Mira eventually find Ian (through the central control room, on a security tape), the apple tree in a forest of pines is a reference to Henry's antlers and his tree over his grave in Gravity Falls and also a metaphor for him being part of the Pines family, the blueprints refer to the wards on the structural components of the facility, and the alien's just a reference to the fact that it's Area Fifty-freakin'-one.

"For the love of - are you actually twelve?"

Nyahahaha.

I love the bounce castle. I love Mira and Dipper's dialogue immediately post-bounce-castle. I think I have Dipper rip the doors to the soul tree room off their hinges and then later have Mira say she should've closed them, whoops.

I have nothing particular to say about the last scene except that I'm very proud of how it turned out.

Chapter Twelve

The summer Ian had turned fourteen, one of the artists his mother represented had gone triple platinum, a record-breaking heatwave had hit the West Coast, and Ian had tried to kill himself.

I like this scene too. I like montages, bullshit experimental purpley prose, and expressing emotion through place. I also like that this nods to what they're trying to do to Ian - they can't bring Bill back proper, but they can dredge up all his memories, theoretically creating a powerless, more controllable human with all of Bill's borderline-infinite knowledge and no requirement of making a deal or dealing with demonic senses of humour to get at it. All of Ian's own memories bubbling to the surface is part flashback, part the spell dragging up something old and dead and long-buried and dislodging Ian's memories as it rises.

I also should've established Ian's father's death earlier, I think, though now that I'm staring it in the face again I don't dislike it as much as I did just considering it as a concept. I could've mentioned it more concretely earlier on, but bringing its full impact on Ian out here, where everything he's tried to forget is being dragged out of him and everything he is is being stripped bare, is not the worst narrative decision I've ever made.

The soul tree (or ‘tree of knowledge’, as Janice calls it, because haha, it bears apples and it’s a research project) is a product of me looking at what they’re doing to Ian and trying to work backwards, to see what kind of other things they might be doing to research souls, if this is how they decide to deal with Ian. It was also a nice opportunity for a great big hunk of angst, and a good excuse to give Dipper the powerup necessary for all the heavy magical lifting he’s going to have to do. Three for the price of one cool-looking plot device!

“We’re not going anywhere,” Brown said, taking his hand away from his earpiece. “We’ve still got -”

Janice gave him a pitying look. “It’s Alcor,” she said.

Janice is...probably a little bit of an Alcor fangirl. (Not the Twin Souls kind. The watches-doumentaries-about-serial-killers-on-her-days-off kind.) She is perfectly aware of, and starstruck by, the fact that he can kill her with barely a thought. She would just love to get him under a scalpel or energy blade of some description, but she’s also not a complete idiot. No one who’s ever tried to summon Alcor for anything like the kind of research she does has ever lived to tell the tale. She probably just has a wall of newspaper clippings all about Cool Shit Alcor Has Done.

“Wanna know what your future has in it?” ... He blinked, once, slowly, deliberately, and said, “Exactly three minutes!”

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It also probably wouldn’t have worked if Ian hadn’t already played at being Bill for Brown earlier. BAM. PLOT.

Ian glanced over at the timer as Brown brandished the tablet. The last few seconds drained away just as Brown pressed a finger down on the screen.

The house from Ian’s nightmares crashed down around him.

This is another one that I can see as a scene, animated or filmed; the room beyond, the ‘real world’ with the circle and the magitech and the terrified people suddenly vanishing from Ian’s viewpoint when a wall drops in front of it, no, slams down in front of it, shaking snowglobes and pine-tree trucker hats off the shelves and putting huge cracks between the boards, settling slowly into place like it was just dropped by a tornado even as blue light starts to spill up through the floorboards and the cracks start to widen as gravity fights for every board and nail...

Man, I wish I could make the moving pictures. (Though I guess if I’d put my time and energy into learning to make the moving pictures, maybe I would know less about making the words go. And, like, I’ve managed to just blither some seven thousand words about Making The Words Go. So I might actually have some modicum of skill at that by now.)

Chapter Thirteen

Mira hadn’t said anything since they’d left the room where Henry’s soul had been imprisoned, and Dipper was starting to worry.

TAU’s creator and Mod Z mentioned to me after this chapter was posted that I could’ve held off naming Henry as the owner of the soul until Dipper is forced to admit it, out loud, to Mira, and I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t think of that before posting the chapter because it’s a great suggestion and would have been very effective.

“See, at least we just kill people.”

Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t get into the ‘moral dilemma of Mizar’ aspect in this one any more than I did.

“You’re my best friend, you know? And I don’t want to lose that.” She glanced down the hall, back the way they’d come. “But if this is going to work, then sooner or later, you’re going to have to trust me.”

WHOOOOA THESIS STATEMENT

Everything from Mira and Dipper breaking into the control room straight through to Mira landing in the hospital was pretty much written in one straight shot, without stopping. This was the part I'd been itching to write since, like, chapter two, and it was GREAT to finally have it all fall together. The reactions I got to Bill's appearance - even though I think everybody was kind of expecting it by the time we got to this part - were all awesome and priceless.

I do want to make sure it's clear - the whole Bit in Area 51 was set up to approximate the circumstances under which Dipper became demonized. We had 1) an enormous, elaborate spell being worked, 2) ancient spells in the foundation of the building which had been in place for more than a thousand years, 3) all of which were destroyed, releasing all that pent-up power while 4) demonic energy and knowledge was being forced through and into a fragile puny human with an intrinsic tie to the physical plane.

It seemed like it made sense at the time, okay.

"AND PUBERTY! REMIND ME TO GIVE THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS THAT DREAMED THAT ONE UP A SWIFT KICK IN THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST!"

I love writing dialogue for Bill. That is all. Most of my favourite lines did actually make their way into the fic, but I still ended up having to scrap some that I really liked, just because I couldn't make the dialogue work with the plot and the other characters. A shame.

I honestly don't think I could be happier with how the scene with Bill in the centre of the circles with Mira turned out. Choreographing it was a bitch, though.

"Give Ian back, you son of a -"

"AH AH AH, LANGUAGE!" Bill interrupted, with a wink. "TRYING TO PRESERVE THAT Y-7 RATING HERE!"

this is my favourite fucking joke in the entire fic

can you imagine how much funnier it would've been if I actually had kept the entire fic Y-7 rated

"Why does everyone keep forgetting I'm Mizar?"

#getrektbill

Chapter Fourteen

I really don't have anything more to say about the rest of the scene in Area 51. I think the writing actually says exactly what I want it to say, how I want to say it. It all flowed easily and beautifully, and I barely had to edit it at all. I was and still am pleased as punch about how it came out.

Everything was floating.

This fucking scene, on the other hand.

I rewrote this entire scene from scratch no less than three times (and it was probably actually four). This scene was a righteous pain in my ass. I had one goal with it - I had to get Dipper to offer Ian the deal that would remove all outsiders' memories of Ian being an r!Bill, in exchange for eating all of the Bill-memories left in Ian's head. Usually, that's a good thing. Usually, knowing the purpose of a scene makes it pretty easy and straightforward to write.

This motherfucker, though. This scene was like pulling teeth. I'd get about halfway through Dipper explaining the deal to Ian and why it was important, and then I would just stop. I couldn't go any farther. It was like I was on the end of an imaginary rubber band of Actual Ability To Make The Words Go that I could stretch only so far, but no farther, and only with a great amount of struggle, before I'd be snapped back to the beginning and have to try to start again from there in a direction where maybe I could make it to the next scene before I ran to the end of my rubber band again. I tried over and over and over with no luck, no success, and no small amount of frustration.

I don't know what tipped me off to the fact that, one, I had to actually deal with the demons I'd pulled out of Ian's head, and two, there was so much more I could do with the mindscape than the literary equivalent of talking head panels, but once it clicked into place, it was like that imaginary rubber band just vanished and I wrote the whole thing all the way through in forty-five minutes without stopping. It also required minimal editing, and it is now one of my favourite scenes in the entire fic.

A little while after I finished this chapter, I saw a quote (from Clickhole, so obviously fake, but) attributed to Haruki Murakami, which basically said, "If you can set a scene in the basket of a hot-air balloon, do." It was a joke, of course, but I also, since writing this, think it's genuinely excellent advice.

Also, I managed to sneak in references to used-car-salesman!human!Bill, stylised-skinny-smirky-pretty-boy!human!Bill and how I felt he was kind of a caricature and a lot of versions of him that looked like that also flattened out the depth of the character, and to the apocalypse tapestry, which I actually don't think I've seen mentioned anywhere in the fandom since Escape From Reality aired! Huh. Too bad, it was cool.

Chapter Fifteen

...and the forest outside with all of its eyes is burning, burning -

I just really like this line, I don't know.

The news story about the Nordwext group that's playing when Ian wakes up for the first time is, one, yes, a reference to the Northwest family, and two, a callback to the girls in the factory who Dipper hadn't been able to help back in chapter five. This is him trying to do something that will actually help them and make a difference in their lives, instead of just lighting people on fire from inside out and getting them in trouble for summoning demons.

"... another such facility located under the former Ellens Air Force Base in Idaho."

Ellens Air Force Base is entirely fictional. It was invented for an episode of the X-Files, Deep Throat, where Mulder actually sees a UFO up close and personal (before having it wiped from his mind by the government). I couldn't resist.

I actually researched eye removal for this chapter. It took a lot of psyching up and then realising I could probably start with Wikipedia and click though to their sources without ever having to brave the minefield of Google Suggested Images.

He'd never seen this ring of trees (aspen? Birch?) in his life...

When I wrote this, I had the clearing where Gideon first summons Bill in mind. I also deliberately used descriptors, when Ian looks over and sees he's holding hands with himself, that could apply to either Ian or Bill.

"Oh, demons ... We can deal with demons."

I love Mira's parents.

Guess whooo put in a Twin Peaks reference without knowing basically anything about Twin Peaks!...okay, I could not pass up the opportunity. Besides, you know Ian watched Twin Pines at a formative age, and nearly flipped when he found out they were resurrecting it as Twin Pines: The Returnening.

He’s also a big fan (and friend) of Lauren Mephistopheles, but there is absolutely nothing that will make him actually watch more than ten minutes of Friendship is Prestidigitation. Sorry, Lauren. Some things are too terrifying even for an ex-demon in human skin.

And here we have the culmination of the Rosa Darling Redemption Arc! Ian telling her that Bill played all of them is, as she correctly deduces, a test - if she took the out as offered, played off her own responsibility, he’d know that he really couldn’t trust her to recognise what she’d done wrong and try to fix it. At that point, he probably would’ve had to ask Dipper to remove her memories, too. It’s a lucky thing for both of them that she got a clue!

“State-of-the-art prosthetic.” Rosa clasped her hands behind her back. “This model’s so new it’s not even on the market yet. Which, uh, would mean that technically you’d be part of a clinical trial -”

“A guinea pig,” Ian said, softly.

Just like Bill made Dipper into! I’m a genius.

“You’re not my father,” Ian says at last.

Ian’s father shrugs. “Does it matter, if I’m right?” He puts his glasses back on, light hitting the lenses just so that Ian can’t see his eyes. “Does any of this matter?”

Ian thinks.

“Yes,” he says.

Hi, my name is Mary, and I love Terry Pratchett’s writing.

“You know what,” Ian said, still looking up at the ceiling, at the hoist that dangled over the bed and the dark bulb in the reading lamp, “it’s been - three days? Four days? A couple days since we narrowly escaped death and you haven’t kissed me even once.”

“You haven’t kissed me either,” Mira said, with an affronted look, but there was a hint of laughter in her voice.

Remember how I said they started out forced and stilted? Yeah. I think that was just inexperience and a lack of familiarity with the characters. Let this be a lesson unto me: write the whole damn thing, then go back and rewrite the first, like, until it starts sounding natural again.

“Mira, don’t call me nerdface,” Alcor grumbled, coalescing out of the dark and fussing with his cufflinks.

“Okay, dorkbreath,” Mira agreed, just to hear Alcor’s long-suffering sigh.

Case in point.

Epilogue

Toby!

Everybody loves Toby. I guess I’m no exception. I am a sucker. Also I really wanted to show how the whole Ian thing affected Dipper’s relationship with Toby, while not actually causing it to deviate at all from what had already been established as TAU canon.

“Fragile neurological attachment, huh?” Dipper said, under his breath, and then, loud enough to hear, “Well, now you’ve got me.”

That’s all, folks!

Some more RB-related song recs, before I go:

- The Garden, by July Talk (This ain’t Johnny Carson/I got thoughts that ain’t my own/I’m talkin’ black souls dressed in red and things that I shoulda never known)

- I Run Roulette, by Boots (I’ve been tricked into a thousand different ways/to slide myself away right down the drain)

- Better Not Wake The Baby, by the Decemberists (make your moan of your lot in life, split your mind half-crazy/gouge your eyes with a butter knife)

- Tic Toc, by Mother Mother (the Sandman told me, there’s no use in listening)

and because shush, it’s a great song and I had it on repeat for writing a decent chunk of the middle bits

- Out Of The Woods, by Taylor Swift (but the monsters turned out to be just trees/when the sun came up you were lookin’ at me)

#chatter #reincarnation blues #holy hell why am I so long-winded and opinionated #blogg-saron

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