#i want you to know that i have absolutely been replaced by a fucking pod person

[vriskabot]

every day i think about my skyrimstuck au and then every day i remember i need to figure out what the HELL to do with the 13 other Main Characters i dont give a RATS ass about

[stripper-patrick]

China Love 🎎Andy Barber

Part 1

Part 2

Warnings: smut, language, daddy kink, straight up nastiness, dom!Andy, angst, protected, this is a 2 parter

Ima try my best to do a 3rd person POV

Tags: @rebellious-desires @mrsbanreswillseeyou @eclecticblkgirl @designerwriterchic @bvssmob

Relationship: Andy Barber x black plus sized reader

~Andy’s POV~

2:46am and all I can think about is her moans and how good I made her feel. Her smile when I walk into the room, how strong she is, especially strong-minded. Laurie stirs in her sleep resting her arm on my chest and that’s when I look at her. I don’t find the same love I had for her before Y/N. It’s not to say I don’t love her as a person. I do dearly and I love her as the mother of my child but I don’t love her as my wife anymore.

I sigh closing my eyes finally drifting to sleep not wanting to think anymore.

...

Y/N has been avoiding me for about 3 weeks and I can’t help but feel bad. The truth is I don’t know how to tell her I want her. That night is all I can think about. I’ve been so stressed out these last few weeks because my son might be a suspect in a murder case. That’s really been weighing on my shoulders especially since I’ve been kicked off the case. Laurie has been growing cold against me and I think she believes our son did it. There’s no way he did it. And I’m scared to ask just in case she thinks I’m trying to accuse her. I just need to know we’re on the same page as a family.

I’m sitting at my desk when I’ve finally had enough. I press the button for my assistant and she walks in with a smile “hey Lynn can you bring Y/N in here to me please?”

“Yes sir” she leaves and I take a deep breath standing up. I watch out of the glass as Y/N pushes her chair out and walks with Lynn. She opens the door and sees me folding her arms. Flashbacks hit me hard and next thing I know I’m having to shield my boner. She looks so gotdamn good with her beautiful mahogany hair placed into a neat puff on top of her head, her shapely body concealed into a short tight floral skirt and an olive green top with nude sandals with gems on them. Maybe it’s because I was drunk but I’m just noticing the tattoo on the inside of her wrist that says ‘breathe’ in intricate letters

“You wanted to see me” she doesn’t even make direct eye contact with me. I nod towards the seat and she shuts the door and sits down. I lean on the front of my table watching her cross her legs and move back.

“Can I ask why you’ve been avoiding me? And don’t lie”

“Because I feel absolutely terrible about what your wife will say when she finds out you fucked your intern and further more I don’t wanna be fired for fraternizing with my bosses boss” she cuts right the the chase

“Understandable but you won’t get fired” I reassure her

“Andy I already have people that don’t like me in this office and I don’t need our business getting out and I’m scared”

“Don’t be Y/N but if you wanna stop I completely understand” I nod “I just want the old us back” I’m referring to how much we used to be. Like 2 peas in a pod. Bound at the hip. Going from best friends to not even speaking is different for us.

She stares at me with her big daunting brown eyes “I bought you a coffee it might be a lil cold but you’ll be ok” I chuckle dropping my head while she stands up to get it. Honestly I don’t wanna stop what we’re doing because I can’t get enough of her but if that’s what she wants then I won’t argue it.

Y/N comes back with the coffee in her hand and hands it to me. “Have you talked to

Laurie about it yet?” She cross her arms looking at me and it’s just something about her stance that makes me wanna place her over my knee and smack her ass red. Laurie never really enjoyed when I spanked her or pulled her hair or even choked her.

“Absolutely not” I take a sip of the lukewarm coffee. She nods in approval.

“Well back to my never ending paperwork to file”

“Just do these for me and fill this out and have it back to me by the end of the day” I watch as YN scans the paper I gave her skipping the other papers. “This is an official hiring worksheet” she states as a matter of factly.

“I’m aware”

“You wanna hire me?”

“Yea and plus you’ll make more money that what you’re making now as an intern so fill it out and you’ve got it” I smile. She bites her lip and I know she said we should stop but I could fill that pretty pussy one more time.

“Thanks” she smiles. I watch her walk away before taking a deep breath. I sit back behind my desk and continue working.

....

Another late night at the office. I sigh rubbing my hands over my face. I look out and see Y/N coming in here. I believe it’s only me and her in here. I watch as a tall man stand up and walk to her. It’s Neal. He slams papers on her desk startling her yelling throughout the office.

“You dumbass bitch. You filed the wrong fucking stack” she stands up in protest. Anger fills me half way and I’m about to slap the dog shit out of him for talking to her like that.

“Don’t you ever in your gotdamn life say some bullshit like that Neal. I’ve dealt with your shit long enough. That stack was getting filed regardless right? Ard then chill out with the fuck shit” there’s her Baltimore accent. He rises above her with intimidating power and I stand up jogging to the door. Anger washes over me as I swing the door open and stomp towards the pair. I didn’t even notice the shocked scared expression painted on Y/N’s face. I grab Neal by the collar seething like a rabid animal. Without saying a word to him I give him a death glare as a warning.

“Andy” Y/N peeps out. Neal cracks a smile and I press him against the wall watching the humor drain from his face replaced with sheer terror.

“You think this is a joke? Do you?” I scream

“Andy” Y/N screams louder and I come to my senses. I let him go watching him scramble to gather his things leaning collectively. I let out a deep sigh and she’s comes to my aid rubbing my shoulder “calm down I’m ok he didn’t hurt me”

“He wouldn’t have gotten the chance” I take a deep breath

...

It’s been a few weeks since the ordeal and unfortunately after that I was let off my sons case. To make matters worse me and Laurie got into an argument that I’m sure puts us close to the brink of separation. I believe that she thinks Jacob murdered Ben and she won’t admit to it and keeps trying to switch the narrative.

I’m sitting on the couch drinking a beer at 10:30 at night when I get a call. It’s Y/N.

“Hey Y/N” I swig the last of my beer

“Hey Andy are you busy?” She asks. She sounds nervous

“No why?” I ask smiling at the sweet sound of her voice

“Can you come by the office I have something for you”

“Y/N you know they’re gonna lose their shit if they see me in there especially after hours”

“Please it’ll be worth it” she pleads. I can already envision her bottom lip puckered out and her arms crossed. I sigh standing up stretching my back

“I’ll be there soon”

“Yay” she perks up and I laugh hanging up. I grab my coat and hear the footsteps of my basically estranged wife approaching.

“Where are you going? It’s 11:30”

“To handle some business at work” I lie. I’m not even sure what Y/N is up to. If it’s what I think it is then of course Laurie can’t know.

“I thought you were kicked off the case”

“Just some important files I forgot to log into the system. No big deal” I pull on my coat placing my hood on my head and exit swiftly. The heavy rain patters hard on the concrete splashing upward with each step I take toward the car.

I get in and press the start button watching Laurie observe me through the curtain. I reverse out of the driveway pulling off into the night.

....

I open the doors and see YN standing there with a trench coat and some heels on and a bottle of champagne. She doesn’t notice my movements as she smoothes out the wrinkles in her coat trying to perfect herself. She doesn’t realize she’s already perfect.

“To what do I owe this dubious pleasure Ms. YLN?” I inquire placing my hands on my pocket and leaning on the door frame. Her smile is bright when our eyes lock.

“Well I have made a change of my mind on something” I walk towards her where she sits me down in the chair standing before me. My heart is racing and my dick is starting to get hard.

“I bought the champagne just in case you need some extra convincing” she laughs. YN opens her coat dropping it on the floor revealing a beautiful 2 piece LINGERIE set. Her body compliments the piece beautifully and that’s when I really take her in. Not just for her sex appeal but for her in general. She kisses me leaning down and straddling my waist where I hold her hips and grab a handful of what’s really mine.

<3rd Person POV>

Andy can’t help but moan as YN grinds down on his thick throbbing boner just waiting to be released from its shackles. Her dominant side takes over and she grabs his face planting an open mouth kiss on his neck. She works on his pants getting on her knees. Mouth salivating as his dick finally springs free. She wraps her acrylic nails around the base swirling her top around collecting the precum.

Andy sinks in the chair ravishing in her skills. He presses her hair out of the way watching the way her pretty brown eyes stare back at him while she sucks and slurps her way to his soul. His head falls back guiding his hips into the back of her throat never breaking rhythm. She pulls his penis out of her mouth rubbing her thumb and palm over the tip while she takes one of his balls in his mouth. A loud moan escapes his lips. Andy has never experienced this before. Not this detailed to say the least.

All the while he’s receiving glorious pleasure, Laurie is home rocking and sobbing on the shower floor. She’s come to the conclusion that her husband doesn’t love her anymore and than her son is a murderer. While one of those is true she can’t help but feel rage and insanity boil within her.

Laurie collects herself and dries off grabbing a pair of jeans and a a shirt. She places her wet hair up letting it air dry. Her long legs stride to her sons room where he’d playing his game but pauses it and looks at her “are you ok mom?” Jacob asks

“Come with me honey we’re gonna go for a ride” before he can respond Laurie leaves the room going downstairs grabbing her shoes. She’s out of her mind. It’s like she’s watching herself complete this indescribable action and she can’t stop it. But she knows deep down in her heart Jacob murdered this boy and she can’t live her life knowing her son is a murderer.

Andy pulls YN up by the neck dragging his tongue along the bottom of her mouth holding her captive in his spell once again. He pulls her panties off collecting her wetness through his fingers. She’s more than ready. Andy pulls YN down on top of his dick watching her gasp as he fills her up.

“Feel that?” He rasps “that’s all yours”

“It’s mine. You’re mine” she utters rocking and swirling her hips electrifying her heated body. Her hands grip the arm rests of the chair as Andy starts pumping up into her.

Her sweet moans. Andy could listen to her moans all day. Laurie was never loud or pornographic like this. Not by a long shot. He watches her ass bounce on his lap as she licks and nips as his ear. The clapping and slushing sounds of their juices makes music to YN’s ears.

“My dirty little slut so fucking wet for me”

Meanwhile Laurie has just downed her second glass of bourbon while waiting for Jacob to approach. She places her glass in the sink when she hears his footsteps.

“Mom where are we going?” The young boy asks watching his mother look so far gone it looks like it’ll take her aged to return.

“Just for a drive” is all she says before she grabs the car keys walking past him and to the car. Jacob shuts and locks the door placing his hand on the car door and instantly gets this gut wrenching feeling that he needs to stay home.

“Maybe I should stay?” He asks

“Nonsense just get in” she starts the engine and Jacob takes a deep breath getting in the passenger seat. He grabs and locks his seatbelt as Laurie pulls out of the driveway pulling off. She takes an unfamiliar road of what looks like dark road. The sound of the rain was always Jacobs favorite. Only this time it dreaded him even more. The rain was heavy, loud, and unforgiving to any car that would step forth on the slippery slope with a daring intention to overcome it.

“Jacob I’m going to ask you one question and I need you to answer honestly” oh no. Jacob knew this question all too well “did you kill Ben?”

“Mom I already told you no” that wasn’t the answer Laurie had damn near given up her marriage for and she knew it wasn’t the truth. She just couldn’t shake this feeling that he was lying. Before she knows it she starts speeding up to 30 miles an hour when the speed limit is 35 but of course driving slow in this nasty weather is imperative but she didn’t care. It was imperative for Jacob to tell her the truth and she was convinced he wasn’t doing that.

“Jacob I’m being very serious tell me the truth”

“I am mom slow down” he pleads with her trying to understand why he isn’t believing her. Her foot presses on the gas even more going 45 miles an hour He goes on his Apple Watch sending a quick text to his father praying to God he answers immediately.

Andy’s wrist buzzes but he doesn’t even bother looking at it as YN whimpers his name. Her hands shake as they try to find something to grab onto. Andy grabs her arms wrapping them behind her back as he holds her waist down thrusting upward hitting her sensitive g-spot making she cries out and squeeze his thick hands. The black hole soon to swallow the two up at the same time.

By this time Laurie is screaming at Jacob and has reached 70 miles an hour down the long road. Jacob pull on his seatbelt which locked for his protection. “Jacob I know you did. Your father may believe your lies but I don’t. You’re just like him. He lies to me and says he’s doing work and I just know he’s screwing someone else” Laurie is fed up. Tears pool both of their faces. Hers in despair and Jacobs in fear. She reaches 90. Jacob has been trying to call Andy and to no avail, no answer. He’s weighed all the possible outcomes of throwing himself out the car but with his locked seatbelt it won’t work.

“Jacob tell me the truth” before he can answer she presses on the gas going to 100. His chest is tight and Jacob has a feeling he’s going to die.

YN’s legs shake as Andy keeps drilling into her relentlessly wanting to make the biggest mess of her. “Neal can’t have you. No one can have you your mine. Fuck this tight pussy is gonna make me fill you up”

“Andy I’m gonna cum”

“Cum for me darling” As the pair reach their climax grasping onto each other for dear life Laurie reaches hers screaming at Jacob continuing to incline the accelerator as he continues calling his father on his apple watch. The teary eyed boy sees that the speedometer has reached 104 Mph and all attempts to try to stop his manic mother have faded. He silently prays as she yells one final statement “I know you did it”

Andy clutches YN’s quaking body as she whines taking the thrusts of his dick with no other option. The duo moans out loudly just as Laurie and Jacob scream before black consumes the both of them. She crashed the car head first into the side of a brick tunnel.

YN looks at Andy who has a small smile on his face. His hands unwrap from her lower back where he held her in place and she looks at his Apple Watch seeing the 7 missed calls from Jacob and one text reading: “mom losing shit”. YN glances at the time displaying 1:22am. Why is Jacob awake and why did he call 7 times.

“Andy you need to go. Jacob called you 7 times” his eyes go wide as the brown skinned mistress pulls herself off of his deflating member as he tries calling Jacob back. It goes straight to voicemail. Andy can’t think of anything but the worst.

[army-of-mai-lovers]

Jet and Yue’s Deaths: Were They Necessary?

Two of the most common ideas I see for aus in this fandom are the Jet lives au, and the Yue lives au. I’ve written both of these myself, and I’ve seen many others write them. And while yes, fanfiction can be a great way to explore ideas that didn’t necessarily have to be explored in canon (I’m mad at bryke for a lot of things, but not including a Toph and Bumi I friendship is not one of them, even though I wrote a fic about it), it seems to me that people are mad that Yue and Jet are dead, to varying degrees. There’s a lot to talk about regarding their deaths from a sociopolitical perspective (the fact that two of the darker-skinned characters in the show are the ones that died, and all the light-skinned characters lived, is ah... an interesting choice), but I don’t want to look at it that way, at least for right now. I want to look at it as a writer, and discuss whether these deaths were a) necessary for the plot and themes of ATLA in any way whatsoever and b) whether it was necessary for them to unfold in the way that they did, or if they would have been more impactful had they occurred in a different way. 

(meta under the cut, this got really, really, really long)

Death in Children’s Media

When I first started thinking about this meta, I had this idea to compare Jet and Yue’s deaths to deaths in an animated children’s show that I found satisfying. And in theory, that was a great idea. Problem is: there aren’t very many permanent deaths in children’s animation, and the ones that do exist aren’t especially well-written. This may be an odd thing to say in what is ostensibly a piece of atla crit, but Yue’s death is probably the best written death in a piece of children’s animation that I can think of. That’s not a compliment. Rather, it’s a condemnation of the way other pieces of children’s animation featuring permanent character death have handled their storylines. 

I’ve talked about this before, but my favorite show growing up was Young Justice, and my favorite character on that show was far and away Mr. Wally West. So when he died at the end of season 2, it broke me emotionally. Shortly thereafter, Cartoon Network canceled the show, and I started getting on fan forums to mourn. Everybody on these fan forums was convinced that had Cartoon Network not canceled the show, Wally would have been brought back. And that is a narrative that I internalized for years. Eventually, the show was brought back via DC’s new streaming service, and I tuned in, waiting for Wally to also be brought back, only to discover that that wasn’t in the cards. Wally was dead. Permanently. 

So now that I know that, I can talk about why killing him off was fucking stupid. Wally’s death occurs at the end of season 2, after the main s2 conflict, the Reach, has been defeated, save for these pods that they set up all over the world to destroy Earth. Our heroes split up in teams of two to destroy the pods, and they destroy all of them, except for a secret one in Antartica. It can only be neutralized by speedsters, so Wally, Bart, and Barry team up to destroy it. It’s established in canon that Wally is slower than Bart and Barry, and it’s been played for laughs earlier in the season, but for reasons unexplained, the pod is better able to target Wally because he’s slower than Bart and Barry, and it kills him. After the emotional arc of the season has wrapped up, a literal main character dies. There’s some indication at the end of that season that his death is going to cause Artemis to spiral and become a villain, but when season 3 picks up, she’s doing the right thing, with seemingly no qualms about her position in life as a hero. In the comics, something like this happens to Wally, but then he goes into the Speed Force and becomes faster and stronger even than Barry, in which case, yes, this would have advanced the plot, but that’s probably not in the cards either. 

In summary, Wally’s death doesn’t work as a story beat, not because it made me mad, but because it doesn’t advance the plot, nor does it develop character. Only including things that advance plot or develop character is one of the golden rules of writing. Like most golden rules of writing, however, it’s not absolute. There is a lot of fun to be had in jokey little one off adventures (in atla, Sokka’s haiku competition) or in fun worldbuilding threads that add depth to your setting but don’t really come up (in atla, the existence of Whaletail Island, which is described in really juicy ways, even though the characters never go there.) But in general, when it comes to things like character death, events should happen to develop the plot or advance character. Avatar, for all of its flaws, is really well structured, and a lot of its story beats advance plot and develop character at the same time. However, the show also bears the burden of being a show directed at children, and thus needing to be appropriate for children. And as we know, Nickelodeon and bryke butted heads over this: the death scene that we see for Jet is a compromise, one that implicitly confirms his death without explicitly showing it. So bryke tasked themselves with creating a show about imperialism and war that would do those themes justice while also being appropriate for American children and palatable to their parents. 

The Themes of Avatar vs. Its Audience

So, Avatar is a show about a lone survivor of genocide stopping an imperialist patriarchal society from decimating the rest of the world. It’s also a show about found family and staying true to yourself and doing your best to improve the world. These don’t necessarily conflict with each other, and it is possible for children to understand and enjoy shows about complex themes. And in a lot of cases, bryke doesn’t hold back in showing what the costs of war against an imperialist nation are: losing loved ones, losing yourself, prison, etc. But when it comes to death, the show is incredibly hesitant. None of the main characters that we’ve spent a lot of time getting to know die (not even Iroh, even though he was old and it would have made sense and his VA died before the show was over--but that’s a topic for another day.) This makes sense. I can totally imagine a seven year-old watching Avatar as it was coming out and feeling really sad or scared if a major character died. I was six years older than that when Wally died, and it’s still sad and terrifying to me to this day. However, in a show about war, it would be unrealistic to have no one die. Bryke’s stated reason for killing off Jet is to show the costs of war. I’ve seen a lot of posts about Jet’s death that reiterate some version of this same point--that the great tragedy of his character is that he spent his life fighting the Fire Nation, only to die at the hands of his own country. Similarly, I’ve seen people argue in favor of Yue’s death by saying that it was a great tragedy, but it showed the sacrifices that must be made in a war effort. 

Yue

When we first meet Yue, she is a somewhat reserved, kind individual held back by the rigid social structures of the NWT*. She and Sokka have an immediate attraction to one another, but Yue reveals that she is engaged to Hahn. The Fire Nation invasion happens, Zhao kills Tui, and Yue gives up her life to save her people and the world, and to restore balance. Since we didn’t have a lot of time to get to know Yue, this is framed less as Yue’s sacrifice and more as Sokka’s loss. Sokka is the one who cares for Yue, Sokka is the only one of the gaang who really interacts a lot with Yue on screen, and Sokka is the one we’ve spent a whole season getting to know. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call Yue a prop character (i.e. a character who could be replaced by an object with little change to the narrative), she is certainly underdeveloped. She exists to be unambiguously likable and good, so we can root for her and Sokka, and feel Sokka’s pain when she dies. In my opinion, this is probably also why a lot of fic that features Yue depicts her as a Mary Sue--because as she is depicted in the show, she kind of is. We don’t get to see her hidden depths because she is written to die. 

In light of what we’ve established earlier in this meta, this makes sense. Killing off a fully-realized character whom the audience has really gotten to know and care about on their own terms, rather than through the eyes of another character, could be really sad and scary for the kids watching, but not killing anyone off would be an unrealistic depiction of war and imperialism. On the face of it, killing off an underdeveloped, unambiguously likable and good character, whom one of our MCs has a deep but short connection with, is the perfect compromise. 

But let’s go back to the golden rule for a second. Does Yue’s death a) advance the plot, and/or b) develop character? The answer to the first is yes: Yue’s death prompts Aang to use the Avatar State to fight off the Fire navy, which has implications for his ability to control the Avatar State that form one of the major arcs of book 2. The answer to the second? A little more ambiguous. You would think that Yue’s death would have some lasting impact on Sokka that is explored as part of his character arc in book 2, that he may be more afraid to trust, more scared of losing the people he loves, but outside of a few episodes (really, just one I can think of, “The Swamp”) it doesn’t seem to affect him that much. He even asks about Suki in a way that is clearly romantically motivated in “Avatar Day.” I don’t know about you, but if someone I loved sacrificed herself to become the moon, I don’t think I would be seeking out another romantic entanglement a few weeks after her death. Of course, everybody processes grief differently, and one could argue that Sokka has already lost important people in his life, and thus would be accustomed to moving on from that loss and not letting himself dwell on it. But to that, I’d say that moving on by throwing himself into protecting others has already shown itself to be an unhealthy coping mechanism. Remember, Sokka’s misogyny at the beginning of b1 is in part motivated by the fact that his mother died at the hands of the Fire Nation and his father left shortly thereafter to fight the Fire Nation, and he responds to those things by throwing himself into the role of being the “man” of the village and protecting the people he loves who are still with him. Like with Yue, he doesn’t allow himself to dwell on his mother’s death. This could have been the beginning of a really interesting b2 arc for Sokka, in which he throws himself into being the Avatar’s companion to get away from the grief of losing Yue, but this time, through the events of the show, he’s forced to acknowledge that this is an unhealthy coping mechanism. And maybe this is what bryke was going for with “The Swamp”, but this confines his whole process of grief to one episode, where it could have been a season-long arc that really emphasized the effect Yue’s had on his life. 

In the case of Yue, I do lean toward saying that her death was necessary for the story that they wanted to tell (although, I will never turn down a good old-fashioned Yue lives au that really gets into her dynamism as a character, those are awesome.) However, the way they wrote Sokka following Yue’s death reduced her significance. The fact that Yue seemed to have so little impact on Sokka is precisely what makes her death feel unnecessary, even if it isn’t. 

Jet

Okay. Here we go. 

If you know my blog, you know I love Jet. You know I love Jet lives aus. Perhaps you know that I’m in the process of writing a multichapter Jet fic in which he lives after Lake Laogai. So it’s reasonable to assume that, in a discussion of whether or not Jet’s death was necessary, I’m gonna be mega-biased. And yeah, that’s probably true. But up until recently, I wasn’t really all that mad about Jet dying, at least conceptually. As I said earlier, bryke says that in the case of Jet’s death, they wanted to kill a character off that people knew and would care about, so that they could further show the tragedies of war and imperialism. Okay. That is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. 

My issue lies with the execution of said idea. First of all, the framing of Jet’s original episode is so bad. Jet is part of a long line of cartoon villains who resist imperialism and other forms of oppression through violence and are punished for it. This is actually a really common sort of villain for atla/lok, as we see this play out again with Hama, Amon, and the Red Lotus. To paraphrase hbomberguy’s description of this type of villain, basically liberal white creators are saying, “yeah, oppression is bad, but have you tried writing to your Congressman about it?” With Jet, since we have so little information about the village he’s trying to flood, there are a number of different angles that would explain his actions and give them more nuance. My preferred hc is that the citizens of Gaipan are a mix of Earth civilians, Fire citizens, and FN soldiers, and that the Earth citizens refused to feed or house Jet and the other Freedom Fighters because they were orphans and, as we see in the Kyoshi Novels, Earth families stick to their own. Thus, when Jet decides to flood Gaipan, he’s focused on ridding the valley of Fire Nation, but he doesn’t really care about what happens to the Earth citizens of Gaipan because they actively wronged him when he was a kid. That’s just one interpretation, and there have been others: Gaipan was fully Fire Nation, Gaipan was both Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation but Jet decided that the benefits of flooding the valley and getting rid of the Fire Nation outweighed the costs of losing the EK families, etc, etc. There are ways to rewrite that scenario so that Jet is not framed as an unambiguously bloodthirsty monster. In the context of Jet’s death, this initial framing reduces the possible impact that his death could have. Where Yue was unambiguously good, Jet is at the very least morally gray when we see him again in the ferry. And where we are connected to Yue through Sokka, the gaang’s active hatred of Jet hinders our ability to connect with him. This isn’t impossible to overcome--the gaang hates Zuko, and yet to an extent the audience roots for him--but Jet’s lack of screentime and nuanced framing (both of which Zuko gets in all three seasons) makes overcoming his initially flawed framing really difficult. 

So how much can it really be said, that by the time we get to Jet’s death, he’s a character that we know and care about? So much about him is still unknown (what happened to the Freedom Fighters? what prompted Jet’s offscreen redemption? who knows, fam, who knows.) Moreover, most of what we see of him in Ba Sing Se is him actively opposing Zuko and Iroh. These are both characters that at the very least the show wants us to care about. At this point, we know almost everything there is to know about them, we’ve been following them and to an extent rooting for them for two seasons, and who have had nuanced and often sympathetic framing a number of times. So much of the argument I’ve seen regarding Jet centers around the fact that he was right to expose Zuko and Iroh as Firebenders, but the reason we have to have that argument in the first place is because it’s not framed in Jet’s favor. In terms of who the audience cares about more, who the audience has more of an emotional attachment towards, Zuko and Iroh win every time. Whether Jet’s actually in the right or not is irrelevant, because emotionally speaking, we’re primed to root for Zuko and Iroh. In terms of who the framing is biased towards, Jet may as well be Zhao. So when he’s taken by the Dai Li and brainwashed, the audience isn’t necessarily going to see this as a bad thing, because it means Zuko and Iroh are safe.

The only real bit of sympathetic framing Jet gets are those initial moments on the ferry, and the moments after he and the gaang meet again. So about five, ten minutes of the show, total. And then, he sacrifices himself for the gaang. And just like Yue, his death has little to no impact on the characters in the episodes following. Katara is shown crying for four frames immediately following his death, and they bring him up once in “The Southern Raiders” to call him a monster, and once in “The Ember Island Players”, a joke episode in which his death is a joke. 

So, let’s ask again. Does this a) advance the plot, and/or b) develop character? The answer to both is no. It shows that the Dai Li is super evil and cruel, which we already knew and which basically becomes irrelevant in book 3, and that is really the only plot-significant thing I can think of. As far as character, well, it could have been a really interesting moment in Katara’s development in forgiving someone who hurt her in the past, which could have foreshadowed her forgiving Zuko in b3, but considering she calls Jet a monster in TSR, that doesn’t track. There could have been something with Sokka realizing that his snap judgment of Jet in b1 was wrong, but considering that he brings up Jet to criticize Katara in TSR, that also does not track. And honestly, neither of these possible character arcs require Jet to die. What requires Jet to die is the ~themes~. 

Let’s look at this theme again, shall we? The cost of war. We already covered it with Yue, but it’s clearly something that bryke wants to return to and shed new light on. The obvious angle they’re going for is that sometimes, you don’t know who your real enemy is. Jet thought that his enemy was the Fire Nation, but in the end, he was taken down by his own countryman. Wow. So deep. Except, while it’s clear that Jet was always fighting against the Fire Nation, I never got the sense that Jet was fighting for the Earth Kingdom. After all, isn’t the whole bad thing about him in the beginning is that he wants to kill civilians, some of whom we assume to be Earth Kingdom? Why would it matter then that he got killed by an EK leader, when he didn’t seem to ever be too hot on those dudes? But okay, maybe the angle is not that he was killed by someone from the Earth Kingdom, but that he wasn’t killed by someone from the Fire Nation. Okay, but we’ve already seen him be diametrically opposed to the only living Air Nomad and people from the Water Tribes. Jet fighting with and losing to people who aren’t Fire Nation is not a new and exciting development for him. Jet has been enemies with non-FN characters for most of the show’s run at this point. There is no thematic level on which the execution of this holds any water. 

The reason I got to thinking about this, really analyzing what Jet’s death means (and doesn’t mean) for the show, was this conversation I was having with @the-hot-zone in discord dms. We were talking about book 2 and ways it could have been better, and Zone said that they thought that Jet would have been a stronger character to parallel with Zuko’s redemption than Iroh and that seeing more of the narrative from Jet’s perspective could have strengthened the show’s themes. And when it came to the question of Jet’s death, they said, “And if we are going with Jet dying, then I want it to hurt. I want it to hurt just as much as if a main character like Sokka had died. I want the viewer to see Jet's struggles, his triumphs, the facets of Jet that make him compelling and important to the show.” And all of that just hit me. Because we don’t get that, do we? Jet’s death barely leaves a mark. Jet himself barely leaves a mark. His death isn’t plot-significant, doesn’t inspire character growth in any of our MCs, and doesn’t even accomplish the thematic relevance that it claims to. So what was the point? 

Conclusion

Much as I dislike it, Yue’s death actually added something to atla. It could have added much, much more, in the hands of writers who gave more of a shit about their Brown female characters and were less intent on seeing them suffer and knocking them down a peg, but, in my opinion, it did work for what it was trying to do. Jet? Jet? Nah, fam. Jet never got the chance to really develop into a likable character because he was always put at odds with characters we already liked, and the framing skewed their way, not his. The dude never really had a chance.        

*multiple people have spoken about how the NWT as depicted in atla is not reminiscent of real life Inuit and Yupik people and culture. I am not the person to go into detail about this, but I encourage you to check out Native-run blogs for more info!

[joezworld]

Any headcanons about Ever Ace and the other new A-class Evergreen ships? This totally isn’t just because I love your version of Ever Given and want more of her and her family XD

The following is an excerpt from How to Avoid Huge Ships, Or: I Never Met a Ship I Liked by Capt. John W. Trimmer (National Writers Press, 1982)

Chapter 14: The Emotional State of Ships

For most captains, the emotional state of a seagoing vessel (other than your own, of course) is often seen as irrelevant - after all, who cares if the seven hundred foot tanker about to run over you and your ketch is a nice person or not?

However, like many common beliefs in the marine industry, this is an incorrect one. The mental state of vessels is vital to continued safe navigation.

First, we must mention the obvious: An unhappy ship is a dangerous ship. Think about the last time you drove to the store while upset. Now pretend you weighed several thousand tons and required a mile and a half to stop in an emergency. I imagine your car insurance premiums might be a bit higher, no?

Then we must mention Fleets.

Allow me to explain: While this may be seen as a massively reductive statement, most large vessels (and most living machines for that matter, including commercial aircraft, railway locomotives, and even large dragline cranes) are best viewed as pack animals. When left alone to their own devices (and the growing economic benefits of 'machine autonomy' have meant that more shipping lines are allowing ships to go off by themselves!) vessels will often form a "fleet", as they call them, which substitutes for what we humans would call a joint family.

A fleet may include any number of vessels and relationship combinations, ranging from a number of single vessels who consider themselves siblings, to sets of separate married couples, and even groups of non-monogamous vessels whose conduct would make a Mormon blush. That being said, regardless of type, bonds formed in this manner are extremely strong, and will often overcome any difference between vessels - see the growing trend of former US Pacific Fleet vessels and their former Imperial Japanese Navy spouses!

Now, what does any of this have to do with the continued safety of marine navigation, I hear you ask? Well, let me put it to you in the simplest terms possible:

If you were to wrong me in some way, I might decide to take legal action against you, or I might lick my wounds and walk away. I might even go to the police if the offense were serious enough.

If you were to wrong a ship, and the offense were serious enough, they wouldn't lick their wounds, they wouldn't pursue legal action, and they most certainly would not go to the police. Most ships believe quite strongly in the merits of what could be charitably called 'extrajudicial punishment'. Most ships, if they are in such a relationship, would bring this to the attention of their fleet-mates, at which point you would not have one, but several, maybe even a dozen, extremely large and extremely angry ships going after you.

-

Of course, any discussion of the often-overlooked subject of Fleets is incomplete without at least a brief mention of the US/Canadian Great Lakes Fleet, which has managed to continuously add to their numbers through a process they call 'Lake-napping'...

-----

April, 2021 - Great Bitter Lake, Suez, Egypt

The Egyptians were insane, Given concluded. Aside from the obvious - where in the name of all that floated was she going to get nine hundred million US Dollars? - they'd actually called their Navy on her, like some kind of Triad enforcer making sure a mark didn't get away without paying.

He was a tiny ship, really - some old design that made its priorities clear, judging from his open-air flying bridge and thick hull, but the massive anti-ship missile pods on his aft deck showed he could punch well above his weight.

She'd tried speaking to him, but they didn't have a language in common - and that was impressive all on its own. From the short, clipped sentences, and badly accented Arabic, he seemed both Eastern European and decidedly unfriendly.

As the sun set on the end of the first week of what might be a very long stay in Egypt, she wondered if the line might abandon her here. The cheap fucks had already been making noise about replacing her with another, bigger ship, but Ace - still in the shipyard, but already proving herself to be just as loud and annoying as any proper 20,000+ TEU ship, bless her - had made enough noise about "not being a rebound date" that their hand had been forced.

Of course, that was all before the Egyptians decided that they wanted nine hundred million dollars, so who knows?

Another ship went by - the backlog still wasn't through, and convoys continued at all hours. This one was one from CMA CGM, and while she couldn't quite catch his name in the dark, she could absolutely catch the scathing French insults being hurled her way as he passed by.

"Je parle français, toi voilier sans hélice." She sniped at him, relishing in the startled yelp that trailed him into the night. The tugboats pulling him along laughed, and he growled at them as he moved further into the lake.

The missile boat looked at her with what might have been admiration, but it didn't stop him from keeping his guns trained on her as he changed his watch position to a spot off of her stern.

She honestly considered running - the mockery she'd get once she left Egypt might be too much.

As the next ship in line approached, she got a ping on one of the company radio frequencies.

Tuning in, her brow furrowed in confusion - now that everyone had satellite internet downlinks, internet chatrooms had become the primary communication method across the fleet. Evergreen Lines ships had all gravitated towards Discord instead of WeChat or Line, but their server had been strangely silent for most of the last week.

Opening the channel, she caught a flash of a call sign - What was Elpida doing out here? Wasn't she on the Australia run?

"Don't say a word, we've got it under control."

"You what? Who's we?"

Elpida swept past , literally - she was breaking the speed limit for this part of the lake, and had probably been doing so in the Canal too - the ropes to her tugs were taut, and judging by the Arabic screaming, they were trying to get her to slow down or at least let go. She was high in the water - her decks empty of containers - what the hell was going on?

Given was too big for the swells to affect her, but the Egyptian Navy ship wasn't, and he yelped in whatever his native language was as he rocked and rolled in Elpida's wake.

Behind her, a distant cry that sounded suspiciously like the word "Now!" rang out, followed by a deafening cacophony of foghorns.

She'd shut down her radar - because what really was the point? - and it took a worrying few seconds for the Furuno system to spin to life and return a clear result.

Or... what might be a clear result.

All hell seemed to be breaking out behind her - the convoy had broken formation and was going in what seemed like every direction possible. At least ten ships were now going berserk behind her.

The Navy ship, by far the smallest vessel out there, (except the tugs, who were fleeing for their lives, it seemed) spun around towards the main shipping lane.

Collision alarms immediately started wailing on the Canal's common channel as a very large blip on the radar screen (Who turned off their AIS transponders in the Canal?) slowly swung towards him.

The Egyptian seemed stunned for a moment - he'd drifted back into Given's range of vision, and his expression ranged between sheer horror and mildly poleaxed - before he calmed himself and stood down the ship bearing down on him.

That calm look lasted for a few minutes, but as the blip got closer and closer his confidence faded. The doors to his missile pods swung open, but his nerve broke before he could fire them, and the water around his stern frothed up into a roiling tempest as he set off at full astern.

It wasn't enough. He'd held his ground for just long enough for the other ship to reach him.

Slowly - this whole event was playing out in breathless slow motion, because nobody was actually that speedy - a bulbous bow, riding high out of the water without a load of containers, ploughed towards him. It was followed by a bowsprit, one that was so huge it looked like it could have been Given's own.

Then came the name: EVER ACE.

Then came the collision.

Ace (?!) didn't so much collide with the Egyptian ship as she drove over him. His low freeboard meant that the impact with her bulbous bow had his far side dipping into the water. Once his deck hit the swells, it acted like a giant scoop, and his keel was to the night sky within a few seconds. He'd been hit at an angle, so once he'd been pushed free, he slowly rolled back up, a much more traumatized and injured vessel than he had been a minute ago. More importantly, the water gushing out of his missile tubes meant that he was no longer a problem.

"Hey!" Ace boomed as her pilothouse drew even with Given. "Best Sea Trials Ever!"

Behind her, another ship - this one laden and looking a lot like Golden - steamed by. "Stop hanging around and get her out of here!"

"That would be my cue." Another voice called from behind her.

"Tex?" He was in Manila!

"Who else would it be?" Texas Triumph, thick Texan accent and all, steamed up. "now let's jus' get you settled up here and we'll blow this joint."

"This is a rescue?!"

"For sure pardner! We've been planning this since those highwaymen said they was keepin' ya here."

"Stop talking and get her out of here!" Golden bellowed from further up the river. It seemed like she was now intimidating some other tugboats from intervening.

"Well, ya heard 'er." Tex said. "Les' go!"

Given had been so distracted by the appearance of so many members of her family that she hadn't even noticed Tex slipping lines through her hawseholes until they went taut and she was yanked from her moorings by Tex steaming out in pursuit of Ace's retreating form.

She just barely managed to get her anchors retracted before Tex really put some power on, and began to pull her across the lake entirely.

------------------------------------

Later...

The War Zone

Ever Given Escapes Custody Suez Canal Authority claims no responsibility, Egyptian Navy vessel possibly damaged. BY TYLER ROGOWAY April 17, 2021 THE WAR ZONE

📷@mahmou10_ships VIA @SUEZWATCH_EGY

SHARE TYLER ROGOWAY View Tyler Rogoway's Articles @Aviation_Intel Details remain limited at this time, but there was an incident in the Great Bitter Lake. At least one Egyptian Navy vessel has been severely damaged, and MV Ever Given, who had been held in the Great Bitter Lake by the Suez Canal Authority, has now fled the Canal into the Mediterranean Sea.

Again, details are extremely limited, but based on social media reports, marine tracking data, and radio reports, at approximately 11:47 PM Egypt Standard Time (EGY) a disturbance was reported by the Egyptian Navy craft - their identity is still unconfirmed, but images posted to social media seem to indicate that the vessel is a former Soviet Osa-class missile craft. The vessel reported that "A convoy has gone mad" and he was "under attack from multiple vessels".

While a convoy had transited the canal at that time, it is unclear if they were involved in the attack, or if one occurred at all.

We've reached out to Evergreen Lines, The Suez Canal Authority, the Egyptian Navy, and the individual ships believed to be involved, including Ever Given.

We will update this piece as more information comes available.

Contact the author: Tyler@thedrive.com

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[winchesterxxi]

Come Back (Obi Wan x Reader) | Part 2/2

Rating: T (Teen and Up Audiences)

Type: Angst

Summary:  About a year later since Reader was last seen, word comes to the Jedis that there is a new Sith Lord that has been building a reputation on killing Jedi Masters. Obi Wan is sent to investigate.

Word Count: 2.1k

Warnings: Swearing, deviations from canon, descriptions of violence, death.

A/N: Really poorly written, I apologize but my mind is all over with uni work

MASTERPOST | REQUEST HERE | KO-FI

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Dagobah.

A new Sith Lord had been tormenting the galaxy for the past few months, taking villages at a time in search of Jedi Masters, or so the word ran. As it had been made known by the Council, this Sith hasn’t taken a single civilian life but rather targeted the Jedis that would come to defend them. Almost as if luring them to their deaths.

Mace Wu managed to detect a pattern in the planets this Sith Lord visited and deduced that Dagobah was the logical subsequent destination.

It was a rupture in the path of civilian planets the Sith had visited: Dagobah was one of the purest locations in the galaxy, one of the strongest with the Force, Qui-Gon had taught him once, only ever visited by Jedis – the perfect trap.

Obi-Wan felt a dutiful need to be the one to fly out to this planet and be the one fighting with the Sith and, hopefully, bring an end to their destruction.

Dagobah’s ground was hard to walk in, the mud and soft soil pulling at each of Obi-Wan’s steps made his expedition all the harder and slower. He was alone, only accompanied by trees and the animal lifeforms that inhabited the planet, but there was something else.

Just as he had expected the Force was strong on this location, both Living and Cosmic. All of his senses were enhanced and his head felt in a state between euphoria and bliss, and he had to focus harder in the task in hand and not let the Force have that sort of effect in him.

Then, from his right side, he felt the quick passing of a presence, no voice, no sound of running, just a passing presence – he stayed still, looking around him with his blue eyes, ready in anticipation of the presence returning.

And sure enough, it did. He felt it on his left side, then behind him and finally at his front, where it stayed beaming through the atmosphere as if beckoning him closer.

Igniting his lightsaber, Obi-Wan uses its light to guide him through the bushes and hung plants that fell in front of his face. The energy growing stronger with each step he carefully took forward until a faint red gleam starting to show through the thick mist.

The closer he got, the easier it was to make up a shape ahead of him, a human one. A cloak draped over your head and shoulders cast a shadow over your features that prevented him from making out the face of the person that he was about to oppose. They had dark leather knee-high boots with absolutely no scratches, a clear indicator that no one had managed to strike them there, what was normally the part most people forgot to protect – they were experienced.

“I must say, your reputation precedes you.” He shouts over so that his voice can cross the safety distance between the both of them. The Sith remains stoic, in a wide leg stance facing the Jedi General, no answer to be heard.

“You’ve killed plenty of Jedi Masters, on your own. I have to say, I’m impressed.” He tries to make conversation with the person in front of them in hopes of at least hearing their voice but they are giving him nothing, so he steps closer, slowly, gripping his lightsaber tighter.

“Don’t you have anything to say for yours-“ he doesn’t even finish the sentence as the Sith raises their arms and brings it down almost striking Obi-Wan weren’t it for his fast reflexes. The blades clash and sparks fly between them and the Sith forces their path forward continuously attempting to strike his upper body. He deviates every hit quickly as he keeps stepping back.

The clashes and sparks that fly let some light reach the Sith’s face but it’s still not enough to see their faces completely.

Then, Obi-Wan quickly charges forward at the Sith, but they beat him to the punch and block his swing towards their neck. The Sith shoved him off and backed away from him, keeping their defence up, waiting for Obi-Wan to make the next move. He swings at the Sith’s torso, but their attack is quickly deflected it and he is shoved back once more.

He goes in on the Sith once more, rotating the lightsaber behind his back before going in for their right side, an attack that always proved itself to be efficient as the swing was unexpected most of the time but he is beyond shocked as his torso is struck on his left side just as his blade swings over his head.

He lets out a grunt of pain, stumbling back, looking up at the Sith with wide eyes.

It can’t be. Only 3 people, besides himself, are familiar with this move.

It can’t be.

Looking down at the blood that gushes trails out of his wound he forces a two handgrip of the handle of his lightsaber before charging ahead at the Sith. They mimic their actions, weapons gripped on opposites side as they clash forward and stay there, trying to push the other away, and that’s when he sees it.

The light irradiating from the contact of the blades irradiates the Sith’s face from below the cloak’s hood and weren’t it for his rational mind and the possibility of dying then and there, Obi-Wan would’ve dropped the lightsaber to the floor.

“Y/N.” He whispers, looking you in the eyes through the blades. He is angry, any softness in his face and heart gone and instead replaced by the rage of knowing that you, of all people, a Jedi yourself would’ve done all this.

Pushes you back with more force than you were expecting and you fall back into the floor, hood leaving your head and revealing you in all of your glory.

Obi-Wan looks down at you, blade at your throat, illuminating your features. Your face was thinner, sharper than before, eyes darker and heavier on their sockets. Not that you’d lost weight but rather as if the life and brightness that you once sported had been drained out of you, leaving you a shell of what you once were.

“I knew they’d send you, eventually.” You hiss up at him, face challenging, breathing heavily “They were running out of Masters, it was only a matter of time before they sent the almighty General.”

“What the hell do you want?” he asks desperately down at you. His heart aching at the situation.

“What I want, General Kenobi… is to end the Jedis. Starting with you.” With a swift movement, you strike your lightsaber up and jump to your feet, delivering blow after blow to the Jedi’s blade.

“There is no reason for you to do this Y/N.” he speaks between clashes.

“NO REASON?” You shout over your own attack “You Jedis sent me to die away from your precious temple!”

“We didn’t send you to die, it was what was necessary.” your blade stops a blow of Obi-Wan’s coming from above.

“Necessary?” you push him away with brutal force. “How fucking dare you?”

That notion of his, that it was a necessary measure to send you away with not even a goodbye and rather a cold shoulder struck a nerve in you, raising your hand and flicking it at Obi-Wan, his lightsaber flying from his hand and before he even has time to react your raise your hand and the Force pins him to the tree right behind him.

He is struggling to breathe and holds his throat as a way to try and alleviate some kind of pressure. You weren’t this powerful the last time he saw you. Sure you were a magnificent Jedi Master, one of the best, but your use of the force had grown stronger and sharper – deadlier.

Your voice is coarse, bubbling with rage, and your hand unmovable as you step towards him.

“Have you ever been in an exile pod? Have you ever been throw to the ends of the galaxy with no means to ever get back? I reached out to the Sith Order where I landed. They gave me everything the Jedis couldn’t. They made me stronger, and they aren’t blinded by a code as ridiculous as the one of the Jedis.”

“They made you deadlier.” He mutters

“Is that supposed to be a bad thing? The Jedi Order spent their time limiting our abilities. No emotion, no passion, no chaos, no death? That’s bullshit.”

“Y/N…” Your rage rises as you speak and your grip on his throat grows tighter, the Force shrinking his airways.

“How many creatures have you killed General Kenobi?” you snap at him, your hair rustling with the movement “In all of your years as a Jedi, how many creatures have you killed? Because my guess is pretty fucking high.”

Obi-Wan doesn’t answer, rather averting your daring gaze.

“Jedis are just Siths with a God complex, and it was only a matter of time before I realized it.”

With a sudden movement of his legs, Obi-Wan kicks you in your stomach, sending you tumbling back and the grip on his throat dissolves away. In a split second, you both reach for your lightsabers and stand in a fighting stance in front of each other, just a few feet away.

“Don’t make me kill you.” He grunts, looking you in the eye.

“You’ll die trying.”

You charge at him, swinging with all your might hoping to hit him in all the places that hurt the most, despite a silver of love for him still remaining in your subconscious, holding you back from delivering the ultimate blow just yet.

One of your swings was unsuccessful and Obi-Wan ends up delivering a deep cut in your shoulder, lightsaber falling down on the mud. On the following second, he moved and cut you in your calf, right through the leather, making you collapse to the ground in pain. 

It’s his turn to raise his hand in the direction of your body, holding you still to the ground, the bright blue blade of his weapon disappearing, remaining only the handle.

With his steady hand, he gets close to you, kneeling one knee close to your body.

“I did love you, you know.” he huffed out, his injury and the tiredness that the fight had caused weighing down on him.

Below his hand, you were still trying to fight his hold, unsuccessful as the strength that you are trying to conjure rather turns into pain once it contracts your injured muscles and you wince in pain.

“I was supposed to tell you that morning but then we got called in and you know what happened. It wasn’t right to say it back.”

“Always following the fucking Code.” You throw your head back the pain starting to be too much. You couldn’t be bothered with this soft talk right now. Maybe once you did, maybe once you yearned for it. But that you died a year ago.

“You were such an amazing girl.” His free knuckle brushed a stray hair out of your forehead, tainted with sweat. “Y/N, come back. Remember who you were.”

“A Jedi puppet, that’s who I was. I’m free now and I will take down every single one of you, you can’t stop me.” Your growl at him, face hard and challenging despite the pain that you hid behind your eyes.

“Don’t make me kill you.” He bites down his lip and you swear you saw a tear glisten at the corner of his eyes “Please.”

“It’s only a matter of time before the Republic falls, General Kenobi.”

“You leave me no choice.” Trying to keep the hold of his strong facade, Obi-Wans shaky breathing betrayed him as it exited his body when he reached for the handle of his lightsaber and pressed it against your stomach, but he hesitates.

“Do it, you coward.” You mutter, a sentence that could be confused for a plea by the way it was said.

“I will…” he takes a dry gulp, fearing his next action and the ultimate consequence he knows it’ll bring. “do what I must.”

And then, in that moment, the blade in his lightsaber ignites, trespassing you from how close it was to your stomach, practically pressed against you, delivering you a quick and painless death, the one act of love Obi-Wan could possibly carry out at that moment.

Your soul left your body not with a scream but with a slow breath, your frame relaxing beneath him, your eyes falling lifeless. Finally falling to both of his knees, all the pent of emotions of this encounter and the pain that he had lived with since the day you were sent to exile come rushing up and he succumbs to the tears that he was trying to hold back.

Silently sobbing, he gently pulls your head on top of his knees, gently stroking your wet cheeks and the face that he once adored so much, now forever cold under his touch. Leaning down, a few stray strands of hair falling from his head, Obi-Wan closes his eyes as he lays a long and warm kiss on your forehead, before his own connecting with yours.

And there he laid for a few hours, holding the only person who ever managed to come the closest to his heart now dead in his arms having destroyed herself and the people he owed his life too.

A broken Pietá, that could make any romantic weep, had they known their story.

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[willadisastercry]

More than ‘just a little tired’: aftermath turned aftershocks part 3

tw: discussion of sever burns and re-burning, lots of pain, also lots of heavy emotions, ptsd symptoms towards the end

Keith is in a lot of pain from just having his wounds cleaned but complications arise that make the relief of the pod that much further away. Tensions are still high and everyone’s emotions are running rampant as they are forced to watch their friend be in so much distress, their friend who never let on when he was anything other than angry, who is now crying and begging for it all to stop. Keith is desperate, his stoic facade has shattered but his body refuses to pass out and they still have to separate him from the bits of the suit that remain...

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

(( haven’t edited yet so ignore for now if it’s riddled with errors or some parts make zero sense lol, enjoy!!! ))

The infirmary was both eerily silent and brimming with commotion, nearly devoid of any conversation or background noise at all aside from muted whispers and the gentle clink of tools as the sound of Keith’s pain filled every dreadful square inch and left little space for much else.

Shrio was still perched on a stool with both hands clasped securely around the one of Keith’s that was accessible, the other hanging over the edge of the table limp and unmoving. 

The older boy spoke calm reassurances to him in a low voice, the sentiments themselves not so much soothing as the steady cadence of them were.

It was clear he was still suppressing every wince and grimace though his resolve to remain unbothered seemed to be weakening as he fatigued further. And so Shiro’s gentle tenor worked to ground him as his wherewithal plummeted, the neutral pressure on his hand giving him something else to focus on and keep him from panicking while he lay somewhat paralyzed.

He hadn’t moved much as they cleaned his back up after they gave him the muscle relaxant, not that he could if we wanted to, not when his whole body felt about as solid as jello. The only movements possible were occasional reflexive twitches or sudden bursts of shuddering breaths that had whoever was poking his back pause to give him a minute to steady himself.

That was until the team had separated him from as much of the under-suit as they could with just tweezers and saline... because about 30% of what they’d sectioned off around each wound was still attached and not coming free no matter how hard they pulled or however much saline they poured.

It was then with everything cleaned away that they saw how severe it was, how little of the blur of soot around each blast could actually be cleaned away because it wasn’t his skin that was charred, it was the suit itself.

They couldn’t fix that with tweezers but they had to remove the melted material so the pod didn’t heal around it somehow.

Keith’s attention was admittedly elsewhere when the disorienting haze of pain granted him a few moments of clarity once he realized the only hands still touching him were Shiro’s.

It took him a while, but he was able to cut through the fog enough to vaguely tune in to what was going on around him. He has missed the beginning of the conversation that Shiro was having but it wasn’t hard to piece together what was happening.

“The process should be relatively seemless if I use this—“ Coran noted grimly as he presented Shiro with a scalpel that had a cord attached to the end of it “—the scarring will already be minimal given the pod’s capabilities and the fact that these are mostly second degree, but in order to remove the bits that remain I must burn number four again to sever what joins his flesh to the undersuit...”

Shiro had figured as much and so had Keith.

Well no, his addled brain hadn’t figured much of anything coherent in a while, he just wasn’t surprised to hear that it was the only solution.

Keith wouldn’t consider himself as handy as Hunk or Pidge but he knew his way around tools from having a bike and living on his own for so long. And he couldn’t come up with anything else on hand other than a hot knife that would do that kind of job either.

He also didn’t really care how they did anything anymore. He didn’t have the energy to when all he wanted was for this to be over.

Exhaustion seeped into his bones like radiation, clogging the channels in his marrow where his blood should flow and making his entire body feel so very heavy. It was the kind of weight that lulled you into a deep sleep, yet Keith remained awake, his nerves fried and his mind wired.

Shiro sighed, bowing his head to catch Keith’s pleading eyes one last time before nodding, giving Coran the go ahead.

It’s not that Coran was hiding the tool from the other paladins or what it did, that much was sort of obvious. It’s just that the question didn’t concern them, the decision wasn’t theirs to make. Shiro was their unofficial health proxy now that they were in space and called these kind of shots for all of them, but that was especially true for Keith since he’d already sort of been doing so back at the garrison before Kerberos.

The paladins were of course privy to deciding what happened to their own bodies regarding altean remedies or lesser pod stays since some of the options are pretty out there and if they aren’t absolutely necessary, then they aren’t mandated. But all decisions were passed by Shiro who ensured that their younger counterparts were entirely clear on what they were or were not agreeing to before Coran or Allura did anything, given the situation allotted time to take such measures.

This is one of the rare instances where Shiro had little choice in how to handle the matter. There was only one option and Keith would continue to suffer if he wasted time worrying about what none of them could control.

And it wasn’t even that he was too out of it to know what this meant and be able to deliver the green light himself, the fear on his face when Coran said ‘burn’ was more than apparent. But the kid was so goddamned rational about things no one his age should be able to rationalize that it was clear he had already evaluated and come to terms with the predicament in those brief moments of hesitation before Shiro agreed.

His eyes fall closed again and Shiro thinks he can hear the screams already.

The gravity of the decision seemed to dawn on everyone else a beat later, an anticipatory silence replacing the anguished weight that hung on all of them seconds before.

Everything moved slowly for a moment, the rise of chests halted, the chitter of mice quieting while they searched the princess’s face for answers until reality crashed back down on the castleships’ inhabitants like the tidal surge of a hurricane. The green tinge on Hunk’s face deepened several shades and Allura absently slid a waste bin closer to him, her movements robotic, like she wasn’t all there anymore. Pidge’s sobs from her helpless position on the adjacent cot were almost as painful to hear as Keith’s.

The only one to contest the idea was Lance, the sheer horror of what was about to happen registering on the blue paladin’s face like it was a death sentence for his friend.

“No, that’s torture! You can’t possibly think that’s a good idea, it’s barbaric, it’s—“

“Lance, calm down.”

“I will not calm down! Don’t you see how insane this is?!”

“There’s nothing else we can do. Don’t you see where the hell we are? We’re in space. We are light years away from human healthcare, we kind of have to work with the resources that we have!”

“But there has to be another way! I don’t understand why you’re not trying to figure something else out first... haven’t you hurt him enough today, Shiro? For fuck’s sake, aren’t you supposed to be his br—“

“Do it—” Keith punches out in a harsh whisper, effectively silencing the argument “—j-just do it already.”

His voice was gravelly and weak from all the shouting, his waning energy evident in the exasperated punctuation of his words. He’s fairly sure he won’t remain conscious long enough to be truly traumatized by the a procedure and was growing more irritated the longer they delayed it.

Keith appreciated that Lance had a conscience but also knew full well that he was stuck on the agony he was emoting since he usually never emoted at all, and probably not imagining just how awful it must actually be if he was advocating that more pain be inflicted so the sweet relief of the pod came sooner.

Lucky for him, Coran seemed to grasp the concept well enough on his own.

“Alright my boy, as you wish... Allura you might want to grab something for him to bite down on.”

What remained of the upper half of his under suit lay on him in tatters, his back bare except for the front section beneath him with strips of black littered over the table and floor. There’s a square of material missing on his thigh but the rest of the bottom portion is pretty much in tact.

The wounds looked worse free of all the blood and shredded bits. Like so much worse. But Keith didn’t have to see or be told how horrible it looked, he already knew that however bad it appeared, it hurt a thousand times worse.

“I have a topical anesthetic here that should numb the surface tissue but I’m afraid I can’t make any promises about nerve pain that might go deeper... it will still hurt a great deal.”

Talking was hard. He didn’t have the energy to stay awake let alone speak, but since his body was denying him that mercy, he figured forcing himself to communicate might speed the process along.

“Kay... s’fine,” was all he managed in response, his head swimming slightly as he forced the words out.

Allura’s face came into view then, smiling with so much sadness behind it as she lowered a hand to Keith’s flushed and tear stained cheek, gently coaxing him into opening his mouth.

He was sort of confused as to why until she brought a small hand towel folded in a tight roll up to his chin. His eyes widened a bit but he hummed in understanding and parted his blood encrusted lips so she could place it between his teeth.

They hadn’t had a chance to fuss over the gash on his face with everything else they were focused on but he was also very much laying on top of it. The cut itself also didn’t appear to be giving him much of an issue, but the fact that he was resting his cheek in an ever dampening rag as it caught his blood was woefully uncomfortable, the swelling laceration under his eye endlessly agitated with every reflexive jerk.

The sight might’ve been more alarming if his back wasn’t so horrific.

Shiro searched Keith’s lidded eyes when Coran pressed a button that had the tool whirring to life with a warm orange glow before he set it aside to warm up. They were sluggish and bloodshot and slow enough in meeting his gaze that would’ve had him majorly concerned should he not already have dozens other reasons to be.

“The spray might sting a bit at first... just bear with me lad.”

Coran’s voice was pinched and level, his statements clinical and his hands deft.

He’d already gathered that Keith didn’t need things explained before they were done like Shiro who needed to feel like he was in control of his own body when being tended to, or Pidge and her unwavering need to know absolutely everything ever, or Hunk and his already debilitating anxiety regarding the unknown.

No, he was like Lance who didn’t want the details, didn’t need to know what was happening or when. In fact, he reacted worse when he knew.

Keith needed things done without preamble. It didn’t matter how much it would hurt, he just needed it to hurt before the anticipation that it was about to could consume him. And Coran would do whatever he could to ease the red paladin then, so if that meant working fast than he would work fast.

“Nngh...” Keith choked out against the towel, nearly gagging on it when his entire body jerked as soon as Coran started spraying despite the medicine running through his body to specifically lessen reactions like that. But the man didn’t slow once he started, not even for Keith’s muffled pleas.

The spray did in fact sting. It stung a lot.

His head flew back and his eyes screwed shut as he struggled to breathe through the application, jerking despite himself each time the liquid landed on his raw and burning wounds.

The cloth trapped between his clenched teeth had him sputtering on the spit in his mouth and he almost welcomed the fear that flooded his body when his throat closed to keep from inhaling it.

“I know, bud... looks like just a bit more and then hopefully some relief.”

Shiro looked so young when he was like this, the knitted worry lines on his forehead almost out of place for the age he looked then. Keith didn’t like seeing him like that, it’s what he looks like when he’s having a rough day with his ptsd, so he closed his eyes against the tears that were brimming in the corners of them and took in long, purposeful inhales while Coran finished up.

He felt it as soon as the anesthetic started working, a discernible cold partially quenching each tiny inferno that was at the center of his injuries. It didn’t do much more than place a lid on the fires, not putting anything out completely but it was something and had him sagging into the table at the small bit of respite.

“I’ll be right here the entire time, okay? Coran will try to be as quick as he can but you can do this Keith, you’re strong, I know you can do this...” Shiro rambled, his timbre still subdued and settling.

It was nonsense. It was absolute nonsense he was babbling but the older boy’s voice never wavered and the constant presence of it hung on Keith’s battered body like a warm blanket, soothing the biting chill of anticipation that spread over it before the endless waves of agony started all over again.

“It’s going to be okay, bud.”

Keith clung to his words like they were a broken board from a sinking ship, the only buoyant thing in sight that could keep him from sinking right down with it.

“It’ll be over soon...”

He felt himself physically calming the longer he spoke until suddenly his chest didn’t feel as tight.

“...and then you can rest.”

Because he believed him. He believed that Shiro wouldn’t tell him he would be okay if it wasn’t true.

“We’ll get you set up in the pod...”

And for just a second, he actually believed it would end, that it wouldn’t last forever.

“...and then you’ll start to heal...”

The breaths he took were urgent, almost greedy as he relished in the temporary peace from everything. From the pain, from his anxiety, from feeling so fucking helpless.

“...just a little longer. I promise.”

Shiro made a point not to make many promises to Keith, even if he never planned on being anything other than good on them. He knew that too many had been broken for him to trust a vow like that. The words were empty, just another tool for people he trusted to bait him with before they left.

In Keith’s experience, everyone always left.

“I am going to begin now, remember to breathe lad...”

Before Keith had been holding back most of his exclamations of pain, biting his lip or cheek and setting his jaw to swallow them back before they escaped.

He wasn’t exactly sure what it was that made that impossible now, maybe since he knew the pain would be insurmountably worse or maybe because his body was too tired to expend that kind of energy anymore, either way the only thing muffling the sounds then was the towel keeping him from biting clean through his tongue.

The way his back arched when Coran brought the scalpel down looked like it shouldn’t have been possible in his condition. Keith didn’t know it was possible either but wasn’t too focused on the logistics with how intensely his lungs were screaming as he realized he could no longer move air in or out with how shocking the pain was.

It was like he’d been electrocuted, his muscles spasming and his nerves glitching in override.

“Shit, someone help me hold him down... come on damnit, hold him still!” Shiro ordered when it was apparent that Keith was incapable of controlling his reactions as Coran kept at it with the tool.

The movements were violent and quick, more convulsions than Keith’s own will, but they happened with each slice which made it difficult for Coran to work, so Hunk and Lance repositioned themselves on either side of the table and pinned his chest down wherever was most absent of injury while Shiro kept his head still and attempted to talk him through it.

Allura wasn’t having much luck in soothing Pidge either who was hysterical with her hands clamped over her ears. The guilt she felt over being the reason Keith was now in such intense pain was overwhelming and the princess was deeply concerned that she was going to make herself sick or reopen her only somewhat mended wound.

“Huh, huhh, huh... AHGh!”

Coran ignored how his fingers were blistering from working around the red paladin’s struggles.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry...”

Apologies were pouring out of Shiro like his own blood would.

But Lance didn’t buy them. He couldn’t grasp how their infallible leader missed someone being injured this severely.

And for it to be Keith of all people.

He’d spent half of his young adult life on his own, looking out for himself, no other support. He wasn’t used to having a team to look out for him especially since the last time anyone had was when Shiro had taken him under his wing. Shiro who had pretty much promised not to give up on him only to leave for Kerberos and never come back.

And what’s worse, as if anything could get worse at this point, was that Keith genuinely hadn’t wanted their help. He would’ve insisted he was okay whether or not his injuries were known regardless, but Shiro overlooking him in the heat of the moment had only fueled his warped view on taking care of things himself. It made him think he didn’t deserve any help, like he was being selfish for even suggesting he might not be okay when Pidge was also hurt.

It wasn’t true. But Lance knew that Keith couldn’t always decipher those kinds of things, the subtle messages in tonality that other people would’ve instantly picked up as, ‘no, I don’t actually hate you’ but completely eluded him.

Because Keith was extremely literal. He was also a self sacrificial idiot. Kinda like Lance. Not the literal thing, Lance almost never spoke literally.

But Shiro knew that, he knew that Shiro knew all of that about Keith and yet here they were.

His eyes were glossy and he was livid. It didn’t make any sense. They were supposed to look out for each other. It was Shiro’s whole philosophy and here he was, a complete hypocrite.

Pidge let out a strangled hitch then that broke Lance’s focus on analyzing whatever the hell had gone down on that mission.

The guilt was raging an almost identical fire in her chest, licking at her lungs like there was lighter fluid on them and threatening the sinews that had just barely latched across the chasm in her abdomen.

Hunk wished he could cry, wished he didn’t have to be so close to the terrible mess that was his friends’ back or the sounds he was making.

He didn’t know how many more he could stand to hear. How many more times he could handle the pang of terror in his chest when one escaped the lips of either of his friends.

Anytime anyone was hurting he felt like he was too. Like he had an access pass to their pain or some wicked ability to envision exactly how it must feel. And between Keith bucking beneath his hands and the guttural groans smothered by the towel, Hunk’s stomach was flipping dangerously.

Keith’s strained huffs had turned into hysterical shouts.

“Coran,” Allura deadpanned, her voice low and deadly.

They’d started off with a sort of restraint but it hadn’t taken long for them to raise in volume. He hated it, he was too tired to be so vocal and his throat was aching, but he couldn’t help it.

If it was up to him he would’ve just relaxed and taken it. He was used to simply enduring in the moment and compartmentalizing as he went. He had no experience in allowing such real reactions, in being so vulnerable against his every will.

Taking it silently would’ve been just as painful, there was no changing that, but maybe then he wouldn’t have had to see everyone so upset.

But he couldn’t relax. And he couldn’t use his twisted reason to logic himself out of it.

“This is cruel-I can-I can ease his suffering with my powers, move aside and let me—“

“Princess.”

Coran sounded distressed, almost pained. It was the first hint of emotion he’d shown since they’d dragged Keith into medbay.

“You couldn’t heal him without going into a pod first or it would start depleting the quintessence of your life force... we don’t have time for that, you know what my answer is—“

“But it’s worth it! Just a second, even just a touch would make the world of a difference, please—“

“Allura... come on, let him work.”

Lance looked angry still, and Shiro wasn’t sure he blamed him anymore, but the princess’s voice was shaking and his hand on her arm was pulling her away from Coran gently.

And she let him, the sob that erupted from her throat startling everyone. But Lance was there, the usual smirk he wore when speaking to the princess noticeably absent as he braced his her shoulders because they were shaking too.

Shiro is pressing Keith’s chest down flat where Lance had been after he Coran hissed at the heat of the tool while he continued to thrash.

The energy in the room was so dark and heavy it was almost sinister.

But the worst part was seeing it on his face. The desperation in his expressions was gutting. It felt like a sort of betrayal, which in a way it was, but so was the alternative.

Shiro tried to keep up his rambles of assurance but found the sentiments catching in his throat.

It had become wildly apparent that they were more comforting to him than they were to Keith, but he repeated them still, the same nonsense over and over again like a prayer. The swipe of his metal thumb clearing the endless stream of tears out of his eyes was the only constant other than the sound of his own screaming sobs.

And the pain.

His sobs and the pain.

It was blinding and it was everywhere. He couldn’t get away from it. Couldn’t get away from himself or the terrible sounds he was making.

All of it was suffocating. The fire poker dragging against his already charred skin, the hands holding him still, Shiro’s words, his own cries, all of it.

The air was filled with a bitter and nauseating heat, the smell of his own flesh burning permeated it and made him cry harder.

He wanted to throw up, wanted to pass out, hell if he died right there he wouldn’t have even minded.

He just wanted everything to stop.

He didn’t think he could stand much more of it but his body wouldn’t give in. His screams had morphed into one piercing and continuous wail as every limit he had was tested and shattered.

Keith thought he could handle pain fairly well, but this was absurd. This pain was otherworldly.

It’s only when he spits the rag out for the millionth time and begins chanting his own prayer that Shiro really wavered, his hand halting abruptly as he went to put it back between his teeth before they tore through his tongue the next time Coran moved his tool.

But Coran had taken the glowing metal away for a moment and was fiddling with something, so when Shiro leaned in to replace the cloth he could finally make out what he was saying.

“...D-d-d-da-dad... pl-please, dad... dad m-make it st-stop... dad...”

The words were slurred and barely audible with how wrecked his throat was, but there was no denying it.

“Oh, Keith...” Shiro breathed before his jaw was working to muffle his own pitiful sounds.

He was in such a delirium that he was calling out for his father, the man who Keith hadn’t called out to in years because he was dead. He’d left him in the most final way someone could leave.

Shiro didn’t know how many promises his death might’ve broken, just that the words Keith was uttering were what finally broke him.

Allura’s cheeks were still wet with tears but stepped forward anyway and moved the towel back into place, her hands running through and smoothing down Keith’s wild locks all tossed out of place from writhing.

She bent down to speak softly into his ear, Shiro didn’t catch much over the ringing in his own while his eyes locked into place on the towel in his mouth and the blood staining his chin and neck, though he thought he heard something about him being strong, him doing so well...

“Shiro.”

The hand on his arm didn’t make him jump because he couldn’t feel it. The room was expanding and he was shrinking because Keith’s whimpering was beginning to sound like the despairing cries before someone or something died in the arena.

The arena...

His eyes open wide and flit around wildly, the room abruptly fitting back to size.

“Huh?”

Shiro was good at snapping himself back to reality when he needed to, good at functioning at half capacity just to see through whatever he was in the middle of until it was safe to let the lights of the arena bleed into his present.

Not that acknowledging his memories was ever safe. And not that reliving them in his cabin was any safer.

Just easier.

“What is it?”

“I’m starting again...”

He hadn’t noticed that he’d backed up into Pidge’s bed or that her tiny hand had wound its way into his.

“...and he’s asking for you.”

“Right.”

His voice was sturdy again, hands no longer trembling. He could do this.

The whirring of the tool sounds too much like his metal arm, it glows orange instead of purple but that doesn’t seem to matter because it’s cutting into Keith’s skin all the same and the screams that escape his mouth cut into Shiro just as bad.

But he pushes it all away. He can unpack the emotions that rise up with it later but Keith needed him now.

The initial twitches that wracked his brutalized frame when Coran brought the tool back down had Allura turning away and the smoke that rose up with the first slice had Hunk clamping a hand over his mouth and nose. But the princess’s hand never stopped brushing through his hair and Hunk kept the grip on his shoulder firm.

They could feel his muscles loosening, could feel the power of each jerk dwindling.

And then they watched with heavy consciences as even his steady cries quieted, his body finally waving the white flag.

“I’m sorry...”

Shiro chanted it so many times that the syllables blended together and turned into something else altogether.

Keith’s breathing was more erratic than it ever had been and it didn’t seem like he could see straight anymore so Shiro lowered his forehead to Keith’s and draped his metal arm over his neck.

Both were damp with sweat that created condensation on his hand, his hair wet with it and plastered all over, but Shiro couldn’t find it in him to care. He needed him to know that he was there, that he hadn’t left.

“I’m here, Keith. And I’m sorry...”

But his cheeks were flushing with something other than straight up exertion. And Shiro felt it, felt his hand go cold while all the blood raced to his head. He knew what was happening but he wasn’t worried.

He was relieved.

“I’m so sorry...”

The rag falls out again because his jaw had gone slack and his eyes were rolling to the back of his head. Shiro didn’t move to fix it.

His breathing still irregular but falling into a more even rhythm.

Lance looks stricken and Hunk is rather green when they let go and step back.

Pidge had finally found the ability to relax abs was slumping into the bed, eyes glued to Coran’s hand who was still not done.

Still not okay. Still not in a pod, but no longer in pain.

Hunk took exactly one deep breath before devolving into tears. He was done being strong, but Lance never seems to get the luxury and was pulling him into a hug that didn’t have him standing any straighter or have his chest working any less, but it was something.

Coran’s hands move slow and he doesn’t seem to feel the red welts on his fingertips from wrestling with his tools. But he looked more at ease with Keith blissfully unconscious, like he was breathing again.

Shiro was still holding Keith’s hand. It was ice cold and looking sort of blue with the white blotches dotting it. He leaves his other hand on his neck where his skin is hotter, figuring if the cool metal could be useful for anything other than killing, it might just be that.

Lance eyes the distance in Shiro’s gaze, the rigidity in his movements, and he thinks he understands. He thinks he can overlook his anger to remember that the guy is still human.

He’s almost scared that he was speaking out loud when Shiro rakes his grey pinpoints around the room, not appearing to actually see any of it before passing over Lance’s briefly. Hunk has his head burrowed in his chest as he fights to regain his composure but he musters up a small smile for him despite being otherwise occupied.

It’s a peace offering. A sad one at that, the corners of his mouth barely perking up, but it’s something.

Shiro wasn’t sure if he returned it but his heart felt lighter once Lance did that.

The energy in the room was still buzzing but it was less stifling, not as heavy as it had been moments ago.

The artificial sunlight starts to turn purple again and he can hear desperation mix into the buzz and for a second Shiro is worried that Keith has woken up. In a bit of a panic he drags his gaze back down to find his eyes still closed and his face still scrunched up like he hadn’t escaped the pain entirely with sleep.

But that was infinitely better than him sounding like them, the dying things he was hearing.

He vaguely wondered if the medbay was a safe enough place to let the purple flood in and ultimately decided that it didn’t matter.

He’d staved it off long enough, was strong for Keith when he needed him to be.

And so he lets himself drift.

[voidcat]

– “Friend” is a four letter word

Characters: Kuroo Tetsurou / gn! reader

requested by anon, prompt 1

wc & genre: 2k - mostly fluff, a bit angst by the end

a/n: the title is literally a 1 trait danger song title, pls dont come @ me, i just thought it was nice to use bc “love” is a four letter word so yea,, also pls dont ship ppl irl or ask them too many Qs abt their relationshio even if they look so good together n should date bc it is rlly rlly annoying (speaking from experience)

The first you meet Kuroo Tetsurou, you don’t even notice.

It’s not surprising, he’s quiet and doesn’t gather attention. You don’t go looking around and keeping an eye on everyone either. The most is you’re just two fish in the vast sea, unaware of one another, too tangled with your own lives.

Then comes a moment, nothing special, almost out-of-a-movie type. It begins with a joke, if it can be considered that. It’s bad, awfully bad, a horrible pun in the middle of chemistry and from the volume of the voice you can tell they hoped no one would hear. But you do, so does few who sit next to him and your giggles dance around in the air. You don’t notice it’s him at that time but you grow to recognize his jokes in the following time.

Kuroo Tetsurou feels like a mystery when your eyes lie on him one afternoon. He’s not bad looking, a part of a sports team, a key member even. And yet compared to all the other jocks he doesn’t bask in the attention, in fact, he doesn’t receive any. Others like to brag and talk smug, as if they’ve discovered life in an inhabitable area and then there’s him. You can’t even tell he plays in the team if it’s not for the uniform and tracksuit he’s in after classes.

You think to yourself, if only jocks were like him. Still, you take no step and neither does he.

Maybe neither of you need to because the universe is more than happy to provide the nudge you both seem to need.

Funny enough it’s a science project that starts it.

He’s too quiet to your liking, speaking only when absolutely necessary. As you desperately try to kill the silence that hangs in the air, he avoids it as hard, making so little sound.

An idea comes as fast the lights are on and you speak before you even get to think ‘what’s there to lose?’

“No science puns for me? What happened, cat got your tongue?”

To say he is baffled, is the understatement of the year. You’re not sure if he’s surprised you’ve heard him joke or want to hear more of them; but either way, he looks cute, with his guard down, at a loss of reaction, mouth slightly open and – is that a hint of blush on his cheeks?

It only goes upwards from then on.

Awkward conversations is how it begins, seeking each other out in close environments is where you’re leaded.

You find yourself enjoying the way he talks, listening to what he has to say, the way his face brightens up when he starts talking out of pure interest. You only hope he feels the same way about you, and from the way he often discreetly directs you to take the lead and pick the topic, he does.

In a short span of time, you two are attached from the hip. Inseparable, always doing something, going somewhere, discussing a thing or just laughing. Shy smiles replaced with a Cheshire-like grin, almost ironic considering your school’s name, that’s only a new expression on him that you like to see.

It feels freeing, natural; as the sea sighs, the rain drops hit the surface and the sun shines. Two peas in a pod, thick as thieves, inseparable…

This goes beyond high school and throughout university too, which you’re grateful for. Because times come when you wonder where would you be without him, what would you do without his support; so you thank the stars once again, for having him in your life even today.

Then comes the times you wish you didn’t spend as much time together because the people around are being insufferable. All you want is to hang out with your best friend but half that time is stolen away by the never changing questions. Those who keep asking if you’re together, as an item. As if it doesn’t rub the salt in the already existing wound, it sure makes things unbearable. Getting approached by people you never saw before is no fun, neither is dealing with those who have the audacity to think you owe an explanation about your love life.

“But why? The two of you spend all the time together! Sure you must be in love!”

As if platonic relationships do not exist, surely do you have to love someone in that way to care for them? Loving Tetsu is a case that matters to only you, you’re happy knowing he cares for you, maybe not in the way as you but at the end of the day, the bond is there in plain sight, on your sleeve.

“But you guys would look so good together! Have you given dating a try? I’m sure it’d work out! I understand if you want to keep things a secret but come on, you must have had something going on-“

Stop, stop, stop…

It gets exhausting after a while, showing its signs on you, the irritation high and your nerves are at the edge, he notices it not long after.

After a little persuasion, you spill it all out, ranting about the pent up anger you had bottled all week –month maybe. You don’t notice the way his shoulders slump as you talk and go on about the stupidity of the people. It misses your attention how he talks less than usual that day, even after the mini ranting session. You do, however, notice how he starts to act strange around you. More preserved, and not as chatty as much. Holding his touch and avoiding contact, not going out of his way to approach you any longer. This drives you crazy, hurts a part of you and you worry –what if he has grown bored of me? Did I do something to hurt his feelings? Does he like someone and avoids me to get in their eye? What has happened, what did I do wrong? And goes and goes and goes the worries and the dynamics shift in your friendship.

So with the change of dynamics, you try desperately to hold onto what you once shared. Soon enough it’s you who invites the other to outings.

When your coffee offers are denied, you bring up walks, after that study dates, as he tries to ignore one attempt of alone time, you come up with another and one evening you find yourself asking to go to a party.

Campus parties with him, are interesting, to say the least. It stings when you’re separated, a punch to the stomach when he’s awfully close to those who were flirting with him, a new kind of torture when he keeps his talks with you short at the scene but at the end of the day you always leave, together, and you settle with this too, as you settled with all his love you could get years ago.

Some nights with booze apparent in the air, you don’t bug him with questions but each party gets worse somehow, only makes the distance between the two harder.

One night you snap and let it all out, unlike that afternoon it wasn’t an asked question but an aftereffect of him pushing your nerves and once you begin, you don’t stop, letting the storm out and he just looks at you.

You stop and his gaze stays, face devoid of any emotion and you worry, all the words you’ve said dawning on you and with one last attempt you whisper “Aren’t we friends?”

Voice calm and stern, colder than that icy cocktail you had: We’re not just friends and you fucking know it.

Holding back the tears by the corner of your eyes, you blink once and turn your back, steps set on your way. You can’t recall the last time you’ve walked home alone, without him.

Some time passes, days begin to blur and you try not to dwell on things too much or think about him that much. But the brain is a traitor as much as your heart and you find yourself thinking about him too much to your liking. Not sure whether you want him to find you, you keep an eye out; maybe plan to get out of the eye sight when you spot that messy hair but there’s not much need as he’s never around.

At the same time you’re unaware that this is his way of giving you a break, providing the alone time you needed away from him; as Tetsu tries his best to gather his thoughts and shape the sentences to show how he truly feels, what he actually thinks, he keeps an eye out for you. Even the smallest of smiles on you making his racing heart worse but what lands the final blow is how rarely you smile these days. Knowing he is the reason behind, knowing he causes the weight on your shoulders and the ache in his heart, he wishes more than anything to change this as soon as he can but he is at a loss of words and actions and he hates himself for that.

When the two of you are brought together once again, as fate pushes you from behind like it did years ago, you’re not sure who looks up first. But it is Tetsu who speaks first, not giving you a chance to say anything back, call him names or yell him insults. And as he talks, eyes focused on you, locked into yours, his gaze warmer than ever, his voice nothing like that disastrous night.

“I know I fucked up and ruined the best thing I’ve ever had in my life. I have nothing to blame but myself, I know, but please. Even though it’s selfish of me to ask this… Would you give me a second chance?”

Letting go of the breath you were holding, you prepare to answer him. He doesn’t let you.

“One last chance… To start over? Because that one sentence, as cold as it sounded, had a truth to it. And I- I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t go on and pretend like I don’t have- like I don’t have all these feelings in me. I can’t nod along to your rants about how much you hate the people perceiving the two of us as more than friends. ‘Cause you got to admit. They have a point. Maybe at the beginning, yes... But we’ve not been friends, not for a long while. And you know it too whether you want to say it or not.”

As if spoken without breathing once, considering this is Tetsu that was definitely the case ,he gulps and takes a step forward.

“Will you give me a last chance and let me show you how much I can love you? Free of this ‘just friends’ title. Would you let me take you on dates and make you laugh wide and loud? Not just as your friend but as your boyfriend? As your partner in crime and in life, as Persephone is the pastel queen of hell in the realm of Hades, the sun to my Icarus, the Sodium to my Chlorine?..”

His speech was getting to you until the last sentence, your softened body goes stone cold, hands hanging in the air, Tetsu’s last pleads of “would you let me?”s falling deaf to your ears.

The gears turn quick and he realizes exactly which one of his words could leave an effect like this, be so ridiculous and bring you to a halt.

One of those smug smiles you saw on his face often, he says “What happened, cat got your tongue?”

And your mouse hanging open, all you can do is smack him on the arm, as hard as you can, for that awful salt simile and for using your words on you.

Before you know it, both of you are laughing and the air feels warm once again.

tags: @celosiiaa​ @boosyboo9206

[kaesaaurelia]

a conscientious objector

For @whumptober2021 day 4: Trust Fall (specifically "Do you trust me?" and "taken hostage") Continues on from day two, wherein our protagonist, having narrowly escaped from an exploding spaceship, and on the verge of running out of air in her escape pod, was permitted entrance to a strange ship.

CW for medical trauma; more specific, mildly spoilery detail in my tags. (The trauma is very science fictional and over-the-top as described, but the aspect of it that I find most frightening can happen to people irl, so, better safe than sorry.)

The ship was dark, and eerily quiet. Was it a derelict? Had she just been speaking to an AI the whole time? There was no gravity, but the ship didn't seem to be built for gravity, which made her anxious; she did not want to start losing her strength. Then, a lot of her musculoskeletal system had been replaced, so she wasn't really sure if that would happen. But it didn't really matter if it did; she was stuck here for a while, at least until she could convince the ship, or the person in charge, to take her back to civilization.

She was tempted to shout "Hello?" into the darkness, but also, it wasn't like she'd never seen a horror movie and it seemed like a good way to trigger a jump scare. She could see, of course; she had had her eyes replaced long ago, before she'd been deployed, but it still felt spooky.

Then she climbed around a corner and came face to face with a long maw full of horrible teeth. She kicked backwards and away, and she had the vivid, horrible sense memory of her nanites practically shouting awake! awake! awake! and coming back to consciousness unable to move, the stench of rubbing alcohol in her nose.

Something made a horrible series of cackles and clicks, and her heart was going to pound out of her chest, because no, she had gotten away from them, how could they have found her again here? But then the lights came on and the cackling glitched into a voice. "There you are! You should have said something! Haven't cleaned up in a while, haha, sorry about the mess. Are you all right?"

The toothy maw was nowhere to be seen in the slightly red-tinged light, although there was some floating junk -- used meal packets, maybe? "Yeah, no, I'm good," she said, looking around. Little suction instruments came out of the walls and cleared up the junk while she watched. She wondered if any good could possibly come of asking whether she'd seen anything real.

Excuse me, does this ship belong to the -- oh, I'm going to mispronounce the name -- it's just that these aliens kidnapped me and took half my body apart a few years ago just for fun and I think maybe they put my brain back the wrong way, so could you confirm that you're not them? Or, Sorry, rude question, but are you the AI of a derelict vessel or a real person, and if you're an AI would you mind telling me about what happened so I know you're not going to go crazy and kill me? It wasn't like she had a better option. And any no, you were hallucinating answer wouldn't help. Either her host (?) was lying and she was trapped here with it, or they were telling the truth and she was just fucking hallucinating. Which, well, it wasn't like she hadn't had enough nightmares about The Incident.

"So, uh, where are you?" she asked, making a show of looking around the corridor. Maybe then she would get an answer to her AI or not question.

"Haven't you ever heard of a PA system?" the voice said. The words were sarcastic, but the voice was strangely neutral, so it was probably artificial, even if the personality behind the words was not.

"Oh, right, of course," she said, trying to make it sound as if it was a normal thing, to forget about audio projection technology that had been around since the ancients. "Um, do you -- are you --"

"What happened to the person who told me to choke on a magnet? That person seemed way more fun than you," the voice interrupted.

"I was severely oxygen deprived, I'm sorry," she said, quickly.

"So you're saying I should lower the percentage of O2 in the shipboard atmosphere to get you to say what you really mean?" the voice suggested.

"No!" said Victoria. There was a long silence, and then she heard it: an ominous hissing noise. "Okay look I just want to know, uh, uh, are you, do you -- are you like some kind of crazy murderous AI that's lured me here to kill me, because if you wanna do that I think we can just skip to that part, I made peace with dying earlier today and it's not ideal but if it's inevitable I'm good with getting it over with."

The hissing stopped. "Pretty sure dying is inevitable generally," said the voice.

"I meant, you know, in violent, terrifying circumstances," she snapped.

"You know that hissing was just a recording, right? I'm just fucking with you. The ship's not a fucking balloon. You know that, right?"

There was an awkward silence; she had not considered that.

"Anyway," the voice continued, "I did not bring you aboard just to kill you. That seems like a waste of everyone's time, since you were going to die perfectly well outside. I was iffy about bringing you in, but here you are. Are we good?"

"Why aren't you using your real voice?" She wanted to kick herself for asking, but maybe the voice would appreciate her honesty.

After another brief pause, the voice said, "I don't have a real voice. Does this one bother you?"

So it was an AI after all. Which seemed weird, because most of the ones she'd met would never have fucked around with her in the way this one had. (When an AI fucked around with you, it was usually in ways you didn't really notice until you'd been in the tech support queue for days dealing with what had initially seemed to be an unremarkable glitch.) "No, it's -- it's nice."

"What was wrong with it? I don't have an extensive library of human voice... stuff," said the voice. "Not in this language, anyway."

Not an AI made by humans, then. "It's a little unexpressive?" she said.

"All your languages are unexpressive," it said. "Well. That's not true. I do like some of the swears."

That was also weird for an AI. Well, it was weird for an Inner Solar AI, anyway; all the ones she'd worked with in the course of her job regularly had obscenities expunged from their dictionaries. They either made do without, or worked out increasingly baroque methods of relearning them immediately. Maybe it was different elsewhere, though. Instead of admitting to her ignorance, she said, "I had a buddy who could swear in about two hundred languages. Just the swears, though, nothing else." Something else was still niggling at her, though. "Why didn't you let me on at first?" she asked.

"Look, I have not in general had good experiences with your military," said the ship. "I'll keep you alive, but if you try to commandeer me or bring me back to your territory, that is absolutely not happening. I can take you to the nearest neutral or human territory that is not Inner Sol controlled, but --"

"No, that's fine!" she said, quick to avoid looking the gift horse in the mouth. The horse had no mouth at all; she was going to ignore that mouth. And all those teeth. Except. "Um, what, uh. What happened to the crew?"

"Let me amend my earlier statement: I have not in general had good experiences with anybody's military. They have also not had good experiences with me." The ship paused, presumably for effect. "Call me a conscientious objector."

"What's that?" Victoria asked. She was already regretting this gift horse mouth-looking experience. This was a terrible horse. But her face was already near the horse's mouth, so if it was going to bite she might as well find out now how much of her nose it was going to eat, or whatever horses did. (Victoria was not entirely clear on why, idiomatically, one wasn't supposed to be looking at horse mouths; she had always been a little afraid to look it up, because what if there were pictures?)

"You really don't know? Hang on, hang on, gonna implement some uh, new linguistic data. You really don't know?" The first statement had sounded mildly curious; the second, abjectly horrified. "I mean -- the phrase is from your history, I didn't -- we call it something else, but -- seriously, you don't --"

"Sorry I didn't study a lot of history, I guess?" she said, feeling a little stung. It wasn't like she was stupid, she'd just had more important things to learn -- math and physics, mostly. Also, since she hadn't gone to school at an Inner Sol college, it was a bitch getting their approval to sign up for any classes that weren't directly applicable to what they knew they wanted her doing, especially history and literature. She was still kind of smug about having snuck in some art classes, even though she hadn't been very good at anything she'd tried. "I'm not stupid, though."

"Oh, no, sweetheart, I don't think you're stupid," said the ship, almost pityingly. "You're just brainwashed as fuck. Come on, let's get you fed and rested."

[soveryanon]

Reviewing time for MAG199! ;_;

- That discussion was a lot, and raised a lot of interesting points, but wooftie did the beginning show characters going back to their bad reflexes out of habit and stress. Melanie and Jon were quick to get snappish at each other, and we know from MAG186 that Martin making tea is also his way of avoiding conflict:

(MAG186) ALSO MARTIN: We could. [SIGH] But we both know that loved ones make the worst therapists. They’re too wrapped up in trying to stop you hurting, to actually help. But hey: we know all about that, am I right? MARTIN: There’s nothing wrong with comforting people. ALSO MARTIN: A cup of tea isn’t a resolution. At best it’s a… a plaster; at worst… a muzzle.

So the fact that the sequence began with Martin asking about tea?

(MAG199) MELANIE: … So… ARCHIVIST: … Yeah. [UNCOMFORTABLE PAUSE] MARTIN: Anyone want another cup of tea? [SOMETHING WOODEN SCRAPES ACROSS TUNNEL FLOOR] Well, heh, I say “tea”, it’s har– GEORGIE: We can’t keep putting it off. We need to talk about this. About what we’re going to do.

Aouch. (I wonder where the tea came from: from the London supermarket? Or were those the bags he had packed before leaving the Scotland cabin?)

- Meanwhile, Basira was providing out-of-the-box ideas or possibilities and Georgie acted a bit like a debate mediator, laying options down and trying to keep things on track. I’m especially glad that she was the one to point out that there were actually three options, counting inaction (letting the world slowly die out) as one, since, as she pointed out, she had felt guilty for not having helped Jon back in season 4 – she had told him so, she had to reexplain to Melanie again this episode.

- Although he had begun the season correcting Martin about Elias actually being “Jonah”, Jon mainly used “Elias” to refer to him this season, until they reached London and he was oscillating between the two. But since Jon told Elias Bouchard (the real one)’s statement, it’s been “Jonah” without hesitation, to the point that he corrected Georgie about it:

(MAG193) ARCHIVIST: I could kill his body, sever the link, break The Eye’s power, and… Jonah Magnus would die.

(MAG194) ARCHIVIST: Look. Right, when I said that I would “replace” Jonah in there, that’s not… I m– … That place, the centre of The Eye, i–it’s… it wasn’t made for him.

(MAG197) ARCHIVIST: I see. Destroy the Panopticon, and you release its power. Kill Jonah, and you cut the connection between the Fears and the world.

(MAG198) ARCHIVIST: Had a blazing row? MARTIN: I, uh… eh… Yeah, that. BASIRA: What? ARCHIVIST: About what we should do with Jonah. With… the Panopticon. BASIRA: Oh, about whether you should, uh…?

(MAG199) GEORGIE: One. We follow Annabelle’s plan. We destroy the Panopticon, kill Elias– ARCHIVIST: Jonah– GEORGIE: Whatever– ARCHIVIST: –Magnus.

It feels like knowing about the real Elias helped Jon distinguish the two, since he could now put a story and a personality on “Elias”?

(I’m still laughing a bit that Jon had to be That Person and interrupt Georgie. Not the point, not the moment, Jon.)

- Overall, I like how we could clearly see what was prioritised by everyone amongst the options they explored and how they approached the problem. Basically, the unknown factors came to whether other worlds were already impacted by the Fears or not, and whether the Fears would contaminate all of them or just a portion, which led to a few scenarios showing what they feared and hoped for the most:

-> Keeping the Fears in their world and sacrificing it in the process: hoping that the Fears were intrinsically tied to this world in particular, that this option would mean their absolute annihilation, and fearing that other worlds getting contaminated by them would lead to these other worlds experiencing their own apocalypse, thus perpetuating a cycle they could have stopped.

-> Throwing the Fears into other worlds to save their own: hoping that the Fears already existed in other worlds, that it would only impact some amongst an infinity of worlds, and fearing that sacrificing their world would be a pointless sacrifice if the Fears happen to exist elsewhere anyway.

Jon was behind the first plan, with a few variations (offering to accelerate the death process if necessary… which, indeed, was chilling, and Basira’s firm opposition against actively contributing to people’s murder was very necessary, but made sense as an option if the scenario was to doom this world). The others federated for the second with various priorities: Basira sounded like she could have accepted the sacrifice of this world if it came with the certainty that it would eradicate the Fears everywhere (but they do not have that certainty), while Melanie insisted on people’s own responsibility when it came to bringing around an apocalypse and the fact that hypotheticals could go both ways, while Georgie seemed more receptive to what would happen to this world for sure vs. the unknown in other universes, while Martin was refusing Jon’s option to take Jonah’s place and was receptive to other ideas. From Georgie&Melanie, there was the additional fact that they had recently witnessed the survivors, who trusted them and were under their protection, getting snatched away without them being able to do anything; from an emotional point of view, it might have pushed them to… do something, anything, that could indeed save people, while they hadn’t been able to be active until now.

* I really like that Basira was the one to point out and reiterate how unfair it was of them to take this decision, that they ultimately were very privileged compared to the main victims, trying to find ways to get people involved in the process. It does feel like she’s learned during the journey…

* Jon’s voice (weary, miserable) when he explained that he already knew what people wanted, and that it was for their suffering “to stop”, broke my heart into pieces ;_;

* Martin’s main argument (“I’d rather live the rest of my life lying awake wondering if I made the right choice, over… lying awake listening to the screams of everyone on Earth being tortured!” really echoed what had happened with Annabelle on their journey to Hill Top Road: that he couldn’t help making additional stops to relieve people’s suffering for a bit, and that he briefly lamented Salesa’s death despite Annabelle pointing out that he had made victims, since Martin “didn’t know them”. Martin reacts more strongly to what’s in front of him, uh…

* Georgie felt very End-touched this episode? “until the end”, “towards the end”, just like Beholding avatars had occasionally been punning about their patron…

* Melanie, sayer of “fuck” /o/

(MAG131) MELANIE: Oooh, fuck off?!

(MAG199) MELANIE: But if you think that’s all I care about here, then frankly you can fuck off out my tunnels on your high horse.

Jon still in the lead with four over the course of the series, we’ll see if anyone else takes the lead with MAG200…

- Overall: what was the most striking was how, at this point, Jon was indeed too disillusioned to hope for any possible positive outcome. They all made good points, about what they knew and didn’t know, about the worst and best cases scenarios – but from Jon’s point of view, it feels like the guilt has been heavy enough already, and that he couldn’t stand to add to it anymore.

(And ;; It’s especially cruel that he stuck to his line of trusting the others, that he shared the information with the others and counted on them to make a collective decision… but that he was the only discordant voice in the end. That was the risk! And it just cruelly (for him) turned out this way.)

- Amongst the points that weren’t mentioned, I’m curious that the followings didn’t come up:

* They barely talked about The Web or Jonah as, well, being the main factors resulting in the current apocalypse – as the people who wanted it to happen and worked for it. They all were ready to take the blame but… the apocalypse wouldn’t have happened if The Web hadn’t wanted to control its escape by backing up Jonah to make it happen, and if Jonah hadn’t worked for it. Yeeting the Fears into other worlds also means yeeting The Web, who now knows for sure how an apocalypse can happen, which means it will search for a crack to widen as its next escape pod as soon as it arrives somewhere else, thus repeating the cycle probably much more faster…?

* They all seem confident that once the Fears leave, they’ll be gone forever. But Gerry had raised the point in front of Jon that nobody can tell really which came first, if the Fears originated from people or caused their fears. What if the problem in the TMA world is that the Fears are produced by people – what if they would be recreated as soon as they leave (especially now that people are left traumatised and hurt)?

* They weren’t sure whether the other worlds would be very similar to theirs (“Assuming time even works the same in different dimensions.”) but… the two examples of people crossing the Hill Top Road line had come from very familiar worlds: Anya’s was almost identical (except that there was no Magnus Institute in hers – maybe no Jonah Magnus at all?) and Eowa was killed by the same army he had tried to flee. The examples both Jon and Martin read about felt really similar to their world; those could be drops in the bucket, but still…

* There was absolutely no mention of the people they lost in the course of the series. It’s a strange feeling, because when it came to it, their conclusions seem pretty disconnected from everything that had happened to them, to the point that Melanie could blurt out “We all lived with monsters in the shadows, and we just got on with it.” without being countered by anyone – although it was the most obvious lie ever (and Melanie had to be aware of it, given how she blinded herself to escape The Eye). Melanie knows in detail how her father suffered because of The Corruption at Ivy Meadows before dying. Georgie lost Alex and her ability to feel fear. Basira had to hunt and kill Daisy after she got lost to The Hunt. Jon was traumatised as kid, witnessed Helen Richardson getting taken by Michael in front of him; Martin was preyed on and groomed for The Lonely for months by Peter; Jon&Martin both lost Tim and Sasha. They know how damaging the Fears can be even at the lurking stage. I wouldn’t have been surprised if, even taking this into account, they’d still have gone with the plan to yeet the Fears (since in the best case scenario, Fears would already be present in other worlds anyway, or whatever inhabits them would be insulated to them), I’m just surprised that the topic of the people they have lost didn’t come up as a potential counter-argument, especially since we’re at the end of this journey.

- Oh gods, Jon leaving for a smoke…

(MAG199) ARCHIVIST: Fine. I’m going for a cigarette. [DEPARTING FOOTSTEPS] [CLICK.]

… sounded like a very bad omen, given how las time he had left people alone to smoke, it had gone, uh, pipe-murderly:

(MAG080) ARCHIVIST: I’m going to have a cigarette. Don’t… [DOOR OPENS] Don’t. [DOOR CLOSES]

Surprised that nothing bad happened when he left; if it had been at the end of an episode, I would have panicked for a week about the Watchers coming back for the others while Jon was away.

- It was the first time we’ve heard Jon smoke on tape! We knew he did thanks to a few mentions (him announcing his cigarette break to Leitner in MAG080, the fact that Daisy had found Silk Cuts in his bag in MAG091, when he had tried to give a cigarette to Gerry in MAG111) but we hadn’t heard him taking a smoke.

* … How long has Jon carried these cigarettes? Did they come from before the Change, did Jon restock at Salesa’s, did he get some from Leitner’s stashes of stuff? Or does his own stock never truly deplete, The Web providing an infinite supply of cigarettes just like the recorders keep spawning?

* We could hear the whirring sounds and the drones, Georgie joked about an “indoor smoking ban”, Jon commented he could think better here, we heard Georgie climbing stairs to reach him, so I’m guessing he was at the bottom of the tower? I like how this scene managed to feel nostalgic despite of it, with Jon being somewhere between inside and outside and hiding for a smoke – we don’t know for sure where he used to go to smoke, but Gertrude had mentioned the Institute has a courtyard.

* And just the location highlighted Jon’s situation: not “human” enough anymore to be in the tunnels, but refusing to embrace what is at the top of the tower. So, alone in that in-between.

- Gods, the Georgie and Jon scene began so adorably?

(MAG199) ARCHIVIST: [LONG EXHALATION] GEORGIE: You do know there’s an indoor smoking ban, right? ARCHIVIST: They’ll make an exception for me…! GEORGIE: [FAINT CHUCKLE] ARCHIVIST: Besides, I can’t really think down there. [DRAG ON CIGARETTE] That’s not true, I can, it’s just… exhausting. Puts me in a foul mood. [INHALE] It’s better up here, close to The Eye. Thoughts come quicker. GEORGIE: … If it’s any consolation, you seemed pretty on the ball earlier. ARCHIVIST: It isn’t really but… thank you.

Friendly exes! It really took me back to the familiar bantering they shared in season 3 – except that, back then, Jon was trying to hide what was truly happening to him, and this time around, Jon was shown more open and direct about what was on his mind.

- Again, I love and hate what the scene said and showed, reminding us that… even if the plan they have chosen goes accordingly, Jon won’t be okay, as Jon had explained to Martin:

(MAG181) ARCHIVIST: Uh, these last few days I–I’ve been… getting weaker. Dizzy spells, vagueness, you’ve seen it. Being cut off from the Eye, i–it’s not good for me. MARTIN: Yeah, but if… [INHALE] If you’re that connected, that… dependent, what happens if we actually, y’know, do manage to– ARCHIVIST: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, I just need us to be moving on.

(MAG191) MARTIN: … Jon. If… When we defeat The Eye, the Fears… What happens to you? [SILENCE] ARCHIVIST: Nothing good. I think it depends on what actually happens. […] If, however, we… find a way to destroy or, uh… eliminate the Powers… I’m not going to be okay. There’s… too much of me that’s part of The Eye now. I don’t… know what would be left of me without it. Maybe I just… die. Maybe I survive, but I–I lose… something. My identity? My mind? My… memories? I don’t know.

(MAG197) ANNABELLE: Most would simply lose whatever power they have been gifted. Jon would lose much of himself, the parts of him that are The Eye. But he would survive. And perhaps, more importantly, he would remain who he believes himself to be. [TAPE SQUEALS]

His moment of rest consists of coming up under Beholding’s radar again; but if they succeed, there won’t be that anymore. At best, Jon would be like he was in the tunnels, at worse, he would wither away like he did at Salesa’s, losing grasp on his memory and unable to focus. It wasn’t mentioned as a factor in their discussion (Martin and Jon had already covered this privately earlier in the season, after all), but it’s likely not something Jon has forgotten.

- Oh GODS, Georgie, no!!

(MAG199) GEORGIE: … Can I have a cigarette? ARCHIVIST: [AMUSED SNORT] … Sure. [PASSING ONE OVER]

(MAG001) ARCHIVIST: “I picked myself up as best I could, checked I hadn’t seriously injured myself, no broken bones or anything, and decided to roll a cigarette to calm myself.  That was when I heard it. [STATIC RISES] “Can I have a cigarette?” [STATIC FADES]”

Given Jon’s reaction, he had picked up on it. You either die an Archivist, or you live long enough to see yourself become the Anglerfish’s victim.

- Georgie used to smoke, and Jon knew that about her! They might have been smoking together as students, given Jon’s official chronology regarding smoking?

(MAG080) ARCHIVIST: I’m going to have a cigarette. Don’t… [DOOR OPENS] Don’t. […] Sorry, I’ve been quit for five years now, but th– [STUNNED SILENCE] … Oh. Oh god… I need to… Uh… I need to, um… [TRAILS OF ALMOST INCOHERENTLY]

MAG080 had taken place in February 2017, so five years ago was 2012, which is roughly when Jon joined the Institute (in MAG051, he had mentioned “One of [his] first cases as a researcher for the Institute in 2012”). Although, well. Jon saying that he had “been quit for five years” wasn’t super convincing when he apparently had cigarettes on him at that moment, but it’s a bit difficult to guess when Jon went back to smoking in the series (Elias’s “He’s not smoking again, is he?” in MAG039 could have been referring to him knowing that Jon used to smoke, or to Jon having started again as soon as he got the lighter; and Tim’s “I don’t mean like ‘sneaking a cigarette’ bad” in MAG079 could have been a random example, or referring to the fact that Jon was indeed having cigarette breaks in season 2 and not being super subtle about it).

- Aouch about the theme of shattering illusions and your heroes being people above all:

(MAG199) ARCHIVIST: I thought you quit? GEORGIE: I did! For my health. But… it’s already the apocalypse so… I’ll need a light too. ARCHIVIST: Yeah. [LIGHTER SNICKS OPEN] [GEORGIE LIGHTS UP] GEORGIE: I tried to avoid it in the tunnels, when we had our, uh… When the others were here. […] ARCHIVIST: You didn’t want to tarnish the image of the prophets? GEORGIE: Just didn’t think they wanted one of their “revered leaders” puffing away in the corner. ARCHIVIST: [MURMURS AN ASSENT] GEORGIE: Saw a bishop smoking once when I was a kid, full Easter regalia and all. Really weirded me out.

The comparison hurt a bit by likening the survivors in the tunnels to… children who can’t really tell decorum apart from reality, but there sure was an interesting theme of Georgie being aware of how she was seen, and trying to not hurt the survivors while at the same time indirectly feeding their perception of her as “holy”.

- Okay, so. Probably what felt the biggest, most important thing in this episode was… Georgie taking the lighter, how it happened, and whether or not it will be narratively relevant.

(MAG199) GEORGIE: … Can I have a cigarette? ARCHIVIST: [AMUSED SNORT] … Sure. [PASSING ONE OVER] I thought you quit? GEORGIE: I did! For my health. But… it’s already the apocalypse so… I’ll need a light too. ARCHIVIST: Yeah. [LIGHTER SNICKS OPEN] [GEORGIE LIGHTS UP] GEORGIE: I tried to avoid it in the tunnels, when we had our, uh… When the others were here. [LIGHT METALLIC SOUND] Nice lighter. [STATIC RISES] ARCHIVIST: Hmm? [STATIC FADES] […] I should probably quit myself, then. [LIGHT METALLIC SOUND] GEORGIE: Then, you won’t mind if I hang onto this? [STATIC RISES] ARCHIVIST: [DISTRACTED] Hmm. [STATIC FADES] GEORGIE: … I’m sorry. ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] GEORGIE: I know you hate what we’re doing.

* Static when people mention the lighter and Jon not being able to focus on it is far from new:

(MAG111) GERARD: Nice lighter. You a spider freak, then? ARCHIVIST: What? Oh! Er, n–no. I–I, I never really, uh… I never really thought of it. I–I’m Jon. I’m with the Magnus Institute. … I–I’m the Archivist.

(MAG136) DAISY: [SCOFF] She’s… Web. Spider’s sneaky like that. [PAUSE] Like that lighter you’re always using. Where’d you get that? ARCHIVIST: Mm. [STATIC RISES] Good point. We should keep our eyes open. [STATIC FADES] Anyway, how’s Basira doing?

(MAG162) MARTIN: You said this place, the–the cabin was… [WOODEN CREAKING SOUND] It, it’s feeding on us, right? ARCHIVIST: Yes… MARTIN: … So should we… destroy it, before we go? […] We’re not even gonna try? We, we’ve got your lighter, maybe we could just– ARCHIVIST: We can’t fight the world, Martin.

(MAG197) ANNABELLE: And it just so happens that the perfect tool was once delivered to you as a token of appreciation. Though you really do need to learn to keep better care of it. Somehow, it always seems to slip your mind, doesn’t it? ARCHIVIST: What…? BASIRA: Jon, it’s that stupid lighter of yours. ARCHIVIST: [INDIGNANT] My what? I… [STATIC RISES] [PULLS THE GOLD LIGHTER WITH EMBOSSED SPIDERWEB FROM POCKET AND FLICKS IT OPEN] Oh? … Oh. [STATIC FADES]

What is surprising is that it still happened even after Annabelle pointed out the purpose of the lighter. If Jon is supernaturally compelled to not pay attention to it (by The Web, to ensure it stays with Jon? By Beholding, out of self-preservation, like it tried to push Jon away from Eric’s tape that explained how to quit the Archives?), how the heck was Annabelle expecting him to use it in the tunnels to explode the Archives with the gas main?

* At the end of the episode, the others explained how they would proceed, and it’s presented as a given that Jon wouldn’t be in the tunnel team – but rather, that he would go with Martin, despite being unnecessary since Martin would take care of the Jonah murder. It’s rather strange that the others didn’t ask for the lighter directly, but that Georgie took it in the flow of the conversation and in a way Jon barely noticed… as if she wanted to take hold of it sneakily because it was necessary that Jon didn’t really notice. Plus, as was explained, Melanie is supposed to be the last person standing to ignite the gas main: Basira is supposed to be a planned distraction, and Georgie is a back-up distraction in case things go sour. If the point was to get the lighter for the gas main, then Melanie should have been the one to get hold of it.

(* It’s additionally rather strange that Georgie said she had “tried to avoid it in the tunnels” when the survivors were around, implying it was a conscious choice but she might have been smoking outside when patrolling with Melanie… yet had to ask Jon for a cigarette and for a light, as if she didn’t have these things on her.)

Overall, I see three options:

* Total coincidence, red herring, Georgie just didn’t take her own lighter along because she wasn’t planning on smoking.

* Since the beginning of the episode implied that Jon&Martin&Basira had given a complete recap of what had happened to Hill Top Road before the tape recorder clicked on, Georgie took the lighter on purpose to free Jon from The Web’s potential influence. She hasn’t gone back to smoking during the apocalypse; she lied about it to lower Jon’s guard by telling a convincing story, given that Jon knew she used to smoke. Likely meaning that Georgie&Melanie&Martin&Basira have another plan in Jon’s back, but couldn’t share with him due to both the tape recorders and Jon’s connection to Beholding – if Jon knows something, then Beholding might be knowing about it too.

* It’s… actually an End thing. There was a feeling of finality when Georgie took the lighter, as if she might be taking a step that would irrevocably lead to her own death? (“The moment that you die will feel exactly the same as this one.”) She said the exact same thing (“Nice lighter.”) as Gerry, who was dead when he said it; she took the lighter for a dangerous mission; she pointed out her own regrets due to her inaction, and was the one to mention that they had to pay the cost, whatever it was, for this plan to succeed. I don’t know, I got the impression that things might be slotting into place, that her own mechanism had set into motion – that things in the tunnels will go awry, and that she won’t make it out.

- Overall, I like the different approaches characters had about their own guilt and Jon’s in this episode:

(MAG199) GEORGIE: … I’m sorry. ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] GEORGIE: I know you hate what we’re doing. ARCHIVIST: I hate all the options, I just… It’s all my fault, you know? GEORGIE: What, because you weren’t able to outsmart the literal embodiment of manipulation and scheming? ARCHIVIST: Mmm. GEORGIE: We all make bad choices, Jon. It’s not your fault some eldritch horror decided yours were going– ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] GEORGIE: –to affect the whole world…! ARCHIVIST: They were still my choices. GEORGIE: … Yeah. And you live with them. Or you don’t. That’s all there is, really. ARCHIVIST: Hmm.

For Jon: what was the most apparent is that he was adamant about presenting what happened as his choices. It could be a remnant of Elia’s gaslighting about it (MAG092: “You never wanted this, no. But I’m afraid you absolutely did choose it. In a hundred ways, at a hundred thresholds, you pressed on. You sought knowledge relentlessly, and you always chose to see. Our world is made of choices, Jon, and very rarely do we truly know what any of them mean. But we make them nonetheless.”), but also a sign that Jon had been struggling about (what he perceives to be) The Web’s hold on his life: if The Web had indeed manipulated him all his life, since he was eight, puppetting him like Francis or the kids at Ray’s house, then what is left of Jon? What is his, who is he? Jon clinging to his own guilt, his own responsibility, the idea that he made his own choices at every turn, might be his way to not fall into the other extreme, the idea that he has been nothing but the Web’s marionette all along and that he’s nothing without it.

It’s also striking that the others have told Jon that the apocalypse wasn’t truly his fault, that they knew Jon hadn’t wanted it, but that Jon redirected the blame on him every time anyway. Georgie tried two other approaches in quick succession: taking The Web into account, with the idea that Jon’s particularity was that he was preyed upon by it, that the consequences were only more dramatic than regular “bad choices” because something was planning to use them anyway; and then, something that resonated more strongly with Georgie’s own experience. As she told Jon, she had regrets about not helping him, felt like she had failed him and had contributed to the steps leading to this apocalypse: she knows what it is to carry that sort of guilt, although on a smaller scale. (And her last sentence felt… extremely End-touched, too.)

- The moment of Georgie introducing that Martin (“your next appointment”) was there and that it was her cue to leave was so sweet ;_; Jon’s ex to Jon’s current partner, and both Jon & Georgie being cool about each other’s new partner in their lives…

- And gooods, Jon&Martin’s conversation ;_;

(MAG199) GEORGIE: He’s all yours. MARTIN: Thanks. [GEORGIE’S FOOTSTEPS DESCEND AND FADE] … You all right? ARCHIVIST: Yeah. Sorry it got so heated in there. MARTIN: Don’t be. I’d have been more worried if you were super calm about it. ARCHIVIST: Yeah. MARTIN: … I’d understand if you hate me right now. ARCHIVIST: What? No! No, Martin, I love you. I always will, and I know you love me too, I mean… [SIGH] That’s it, isn’t it? That’s… the real core of it. You want to save me. MARTIN: I want you to save yourself.

* The fact that Martin was ready and understanding that Jon might hate him for the option Martin defended, that he was expecting Jon to hate him for it, and that he still stuck to it… Oh, Martin… (It’s not the first time a Magnus moment made me think of the When They Cry series but… this one was peak Federika’s poem: “Don’t be sad. The world may not forgive you, but I do. / Don’t be sad. You may not forgive the world, but I forgive you. / Tell me. What must I do to earn your forgiveness?”)

* So many “I love you” coming from Jon this season…

(MAG161) MARTIN: I’m sorry. ARCHIVIST: No, it’s– [SIGH] I love you, I just… I need more time.

(MAG162) ARCHIVIST: “The screams may linger on the distant breeze, and your eye may wander beyond the curtains from time to time, but you and the one you love are, it seems… safe. […] There within the thing that pretends to be a cabin is the one you love. […] The one you love is always near, so close that refuge sometimes feels a prison.”

(MAG183) MARTIN: … I’m sure I love you. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: I love you too. [FABRIC RUSTLES] Let’s go.

(MAG191) MARTIN: … I promise. I love you, Jon. ARCHIVIST: [FOND HUFF] I love you too.

(MAG199) MARTIN: … I’d understand if you hate me right now. ARCHIVIST: What? No! No, Martin, I love you. I always will, and I know you love me too, I mean…

I really wasn’t expecting it when season 4 ended, and yet!! Jon has been so soft and open about it with Martin this season…

* I really like the nuance Martin insisted on, that he mostly wished that Jon would want to save “himself” – it’s not necessarily that Martin is right about it but… from his point of view, he might still be suspecting that Jon is still pretty much self-destructive (although in indirect ways), as Daisy had pointed out in season 4, and that his way of engaging in dangerous missions is still tainted with guilt, with the idea that he has to compensate for something:

(MAG142) DAISY: Not like there’s… “normal” trauma, you know? But it’s pretty common. The most important thing becomes control, engaging on your own terms. Even when it’s stupid or dangerous. Anything to not feel helpless. MARTIN: Oh, god… DAISY: And of course, for Jon, there’s survivor’s guilt in there, too. He thinks he’s not human. Makes him very… self-destructive. MARTIN: Yeah, well. We’ve all had trauma. DAISY: And everyone’s changed.

(And gods. Maybe the problem this season for Jon is that Daisy wasn’t there anymore to at least point out these things. She hadn’t really managed to take Jon’s mind off of it (and he hadn’t opened up enough with her to confess that he had been attacking people) but she might have been able to lay it out, at least, if she had been there…)

- I’m really glad about the contrast between Jon and Martin when thinking about hypothetical scenarios!

(MAG199) ARCHIVIST: … Sometimes… I imagine if none of this had happened. If we had just… met. Been together, w–without… all of this. MARTIN: [SOFTLY] Me too. … But we wouldn’t have, would we? Been together, I mean. ARCHIVIST: Huh? W–what do you mean? MARTIN: Well…! We had that, didn’t we? Almost a year of just working a normal job together and… you hated me. ARCHIVIST: I didn’t “hate” you. MARTIN: No–no, no, no, I listened to those tapes. At one point, you explicitly said you’d be fine with me being chopped up by that old jigsaw lady. ARCHIVIST: Oh, god, Angela! Ha! She’s still about, you know? Lording it over a nasty little Flesh domain. Anyway, I didn’t explicitly say it, I… implied it. MARTIN: Face it, Jon, it took almost two years of crisis and trauma to even make us compatible.

* Jon truly is the romantic in that relationship.

* I’m very glad for Martin pointing out that he remembers how Jon used to treat him, and that he doesn’t really believe that they could have gotten together without the circumstances they experienced. I don’t think we’re meant to take Martin’s words exactly at face value (the circumstances allowed them to open up to each other and get closer, they didn’t necessarily turn them into whole other human beings), but it makes sense that, from his perspective… it’s hard to romanticise the past:

(MAG014) ARCHIVIST: I sent Martin to look into this “Angela” character, not that I want him to get chopped up, of course, but someone had to. Apparently he spent three days looking into every woman named Angela in Bexley over the age of 50. He could not find anyone that matches the admittedly vague description given here, though he informs me that he had some very pleasant chats about jigsaws. Useless ass.

Jon was absolutely awful to him back then, and ranting about him on tapes was textbook workplace bullying since he knew the tapes were semi-public (as in MAG032, Tim reported to him that researchers and students had been pointing out mistakes in his recordings). Off-tape, just from Martin’s point of view, we know that it was so pervasive that he remembered about it when left alone, tormented by his worst memories and feelings:

(MAG170) MARTIN: … Oh, I, I met someone! Did I tell you? He’s… [SHUFFLING] I, I don’t know. I like him. He doesn’t like me, though. Not really. I don’t blame him. I don’t like me sometimes, and I am me! Plus, he’s… he’s my, my boss? Is that right? [CREAKING] Ei–either way. It’s probably for the best? Wouldn’t really be appropriate, eh…!

(MAG186) ALSO MARTIN: Or… does it just keep paralysing us, make us shrink back and wait, hoping things work out? Like with Jon when we thought the worms had got him. MARTIN: Hey, to be fair, he still kind of hated me back then. I’m really not sure it would have been the best time to take my shot. ALSO MARTIN: … Fair. He was projecting hard.

Season 1 is not a time Martin would be eager to go back to, because it’s when Jon was at his worst against him (and Martin lived in fear of his fake CV being discovered), while for Jon… it was before Prentiss attacking the Institute, before his scars and before losing Sasha. It makes sense that Martin would want to defend what they got, to defend this world over others, given that from his point of view, it might be the only configuration possible that made his relationship with Jon possible – which, once again: might not be necessarily the truth, but makes sense from Martin’s point of view.

* Though, Martin, sweetie, the “normal job” included you getting besieged by Prentiss for two weeks and having to eat canned peaches. It’s never really been a “normal” job.

- Jon lightening up at the mention of Angela and immediately infodumping about how she was doing was so bittersweet to me, since it emphasised (once again) how deep Jon is in the Fears’ society by now. Those are familiar names, familiar figures, doing terrible things, but it still feels like his own universe when he mentions them, when he explains what he knows about them. Once again, it makes me wonder what will be left of him once all those things are just… gone.

- Martin listened to so many tapes, uh?

(MAG142) MARTIN: I listened to your old statement. Wasn’t your partner down there? DAISY: Yeah. Didn’t find him.

(MAG188) MARTIN: Plus, I… I was a little bit jealous as, well. ARCHIVIST: Of what? MARTIN: Of Helen. Well, the, the real Helen. I found the tape when you were on the run and… I don’t know. Something about the way you two seemed to connect when she came in. ARCHIVIST: [HUFF] Before she was eaten by a door. MARTIN: Well, yeah. It certainly seemed to have a pretty deep impact on you.

(MAG199) MARTIN: No–no, no, no, I listened to those tapes. At one point, you explicitly said you’d be fine with me being chopped up by that old jigsaw lady.

He listened to the one involving Angela (MAG014), to Helen’s statement (MAG047), to the events that got Daisy section’d (MAG061) – that last one being even more interesting since it explicitly mentioned that Basira&Daisy were giving Jon the tapes, which means it was from the stash Jon was recording secretly. I’m back to fearing a bit about Martin as a back-up Archivist: he used to read statements and to take a few live ones, Annabelle made him read her statement in MAG197, he’s been listening to tapes… just like Jon.

- Martin has been good at finding loopholes in mutual promises:

(MAG199) ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] That’s very sweet of you, Martin. Sort of. … Thank you. MARTIN: Wherever you go, I go. That’s it. ARCHIVIST: You promised to let me go, if I had to. MARTIN: And you promised not to go if there was any other choice. And there is. So that’s the deal. ARCHIVIST: … That’s the deal.

Martin said that he wouldn’t “doom the world” over Jon: he’s still respecting that in a way by prioritising Jon and this peculiar world (and as the others had pointed out earlier, they weren’t sure whether their actions would doom others or not).

I’m super afraid about that “Wherever you go, I go” which sounds like something that could suddenly come to a stop. Martin had pointed out multiple times that he was “following” Jon (MAG170: “I was following, al–always following, never leading; never leading.”), but recent episodes have operated a bit differently – Jon didn’t follow Martin to his domain, respecting Martin’s wish to confront it alone, and Jon followed him to Hill Top Road. At this point, Jon has been following Martin, too…

- I got a first impression of Martin’s words before understanding that it could actually be referring to multiple things:

(MAG199) MARTIN: I guess that’s why it really bothers me, you know? [SAD CHUCKLING] I try, but I can’t actually imagine… ever making a decision that I knew meant losing you. And it… It hurts to know you can.

At first, I thought Martin was saying that he felt like Jon would be ready to sacrifice Martin or his relationship with him for a greater good, while Martin definitely couldn’t (as he pointed out to Also Martin, his limit would probably be to sacrifice Jon), but… it could also be a reference to Jon’s self-hatred, the fact that Jon would sacrifice himself so easily. In that case, it’s a bit hypocritical of Martin indeed (since he had told Also Martin that he was ready to sacrifice himself too), but I still feel like there might be a difference between the two – Martin would do it to save the world or Jon (or to not live on the pain of his domain’s victims), while Jon… would likely do it out of self-hatred and because he feels like it’s his responsibility to make up for the apocalypse.

- The contrast between Georgie’s scene and this, when Jon finally broke ;_;

(MAG199) ARCHIVIST: I hate all the options, I just… It’s all my fault, you know? GEORGIE: What, because you weren’t able to outsmart the literal embodiment of manipulation and scheming? ARCHIVIST: Mmm. GEORGIE: We all make bad choices, Jon. It’s not your fault some eldritch horror decided yours were going– ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] GEORGIE: –to affect the whole world…! ARCHIVIST: They were still my choices. GEORGIE: … Yeah. And you live with them. Or you don’t. That’s all there is, really. ARCHIVIST: Hmm. […] You didn’t damn the world, Martin. MARTIN: [SIGH] We all– ARCHIVIST: [HARSH] No! “We all” nothing! I… I’m the one who caused all of this, that’s just the truth of it! I’m the one whose whole life has been nothing but one – long – setup – to this. MARTIN: Jon… ARCHIVIST: [WITH SADNESS] You didn’t speak the words! You didn’t feel them move through you, vomiting out of you like…! [SHAKY BREATHING] … I did this. It’s my fault. And I don’t want… I can’t let anyone else feel that, that… helpless, enormous guilt. Ever.

Both Georgie and Martin beginning by “We all”, but Jon’s reaction being so hugely different when he heard it for the second time.

* I wanted Jon to have a breakdown, I got the breakdown, I’m still sad about it ;_;

* Jon had been very susceptible to the rhetoric of being “chosen”: he had wondered about it in season 3 and 4, until Jonah had concluded that if Jon had been “chosen” in any way, it was by him when he decided that Jon’s Web mark made him prime for his plan and that it was mostly just due to Jon’s “own rotten luck”. It might have been easier to swallow for a while, technically, until Annabelle reactivated all those fears about being “chosen” but from even longer – since childhood, since he was eight, since he was just a kid who just survived a Fear encounter. I do feel like there was a lot of bullshit in what Annabelle told him, in the way she framed it; she had also told Martin that a web couldn’t be “precious about a single strand” and I feel like it was more likely that there were multiple potential Jons, or that The Web had already tried to get someone (Gertrude? Her assistants, with Emma pushing them into danger?) marked and prime for the final ritual. But Jon has been very vulnerable to the idea that there could be something wrong inherent to him, that things he had no power over had to be his fault somehow, such as not being able to rescue his bully, or Sasha getting killed by the Not!Them, or the apocalypse (while he had more trouble accepting his own blame for things he was directly responsible for).

* I was wondering recently if Jon might have finally accepted that he wasn’t responsible for the apocalypse, that it was Jonah’s fault (since he hadn’t mentioned it for a long while at this point) but… nop. He didn’t really change his mind about it since the start of the season, just got better at hiding it:

(MAG161) MARTIN: Jon, it’s not your fault… ARCHIVIST: Martin, can we not do this again. MARTIN: Sorry. ARCHIVIST: I’m just… I’m mourning a world I killed…! MARTIN: I know… ARCHIVIST: And we’re all trapped in its rotting corpse…!

* ;_; My heart broke when Jon recalled the experience of reading Jonah’s letter, and how traumatising the mere action was. We could hear him struggle and try to stop speaking in MAG160, and yet the letter was following its course…

* Just like with The Web’s clutch on him yet Jon still defending that he made those “bad choices”, it’s heartbreaking how Jon seems to be stuck on the paradox of being conscious that he couldn’t stop reading the letter, that something awful was done to him, yet still defends that it’s his fault and his responsibility. Jonah was barely mentioned this episode (and not as the man who chose to unleash that apocalypse), but he was still… very present in the multiple ways he fucked Jon over.

* It’s extremely sad that their current plan requires to trample on precisely the thing Jon didn’t and doesn’t want (to inflict what he experienced over someone else)… and yet, as sad it is, it also needs to be seen in the whole situation. Is guilt the worst thing that someone can experience? What about the people currently being tortured in their domains? (Or is there something coming up, such as Jon’s guilt being one aspect of his “domain” all along?)

* But still. Sobbing over the fact that Jon didn’t even blurt out out that he couldn’t allow anyone else to be hurt and fucked over by another Jonah like he was, but that the worst thing, for him, still was this “helpless, enormous guilt”. Not the pain, not the constant anguish, not the people he lost, but the guilt of having been used to end the world.

- There have been a few mentions revolving around Jon’s voice lately:

(MAG197) ARCHIVIST: As far as I can tell. I–it’s hard to s–… If I look too closely at them, my own voice, things get… recursive. Hard to follow. […] ANNABELLE: [CHUCKLING] I am sorry you find them irritating! They’re a side effect of the very specific way this web has been spun. I thought you liked his voice? MARTIN: I do when it’s his voice. I’ve never liked the statements. It always felt… Yeah. ANNABELLE: Well… you can trust me when I say you’ll be hearing his real voice very soon. […] We found the one we believed most likely to bring about their manifestation. We marked him young, guided his path as best we could. And then, we took his voice. ARCHIVIST: No… ANNABELLE: His, and those he walked with. We inscribed them on shining strands of word and meaning, and used them to weave a web which cast itself out through the gate and beyond our universe. So that when the Fears heard that voice, and came in their terrible glory, they might then travel out along it. [TAPE SQUEALS] Or be dragged.

(MAG199) ARCHIVIST: [WITH SADNESS] You didn’t speak the words! You didn’t feel them move through you, vomiting out of you like…! [SHAKY BREATHING] … I did this.

And once again, there was the “For the silence” coin Albrecht discovered in the tomb of what was likely to be an old Archivist. Whatever happens in MAG200, I wonder if Jon won’t lose his voice in the process? Wouldn’t be the worst thing and, anyway, he will lose his voice symbolically with the end of the podcast (even in the case where he wouldn’t be straight up dying) but… I don’t know. The end of the episode had Jon exceptionally withdrawn and silent while the others discussed, so it already felt like he was falling “silent” in a way, and I wonder if he’ll lose his voice in a more literal way during the crisis, especially if the Fears are following “his voice”…

- Martin was so soft… and the Fabric Rustled again.

(MAG158) MARTIN: I see… [INHALE] I see you, Jon. [BREATHLESS CHUCKLE] [PRESENT, ECHO FADES] I see you…! ARCHIVIST: Oh, Martin… [FABRIC RUSTLES] MARTIN: I w–I was on my own…! I was all on my own…

(Season 5 trailer) MARTIN: You know I’m here for you. ARCHIVIST: [LONG SIGH] … Yes. Yes I do. [RUSTLING OF CLOTHES] MARTIN: All right. All right. ARCHIVIST: Thank you.

(MAG170) ARCHIVIST: [CLOSER] Oh! Martin, hold on, I–I–I’m coming, I just… [STATIC REACHING A PEAK] [FOOTSTEPS] Oh, Martin! Thank god, I, I was… I–I thought you were behind me. [FABRIC RUSTLES] MARTIN: I thought you’d left me behind…! Gone on without me.

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: … I’m sorry. [SILENCE] MARTIN: [SIGH] It’s okay. I understand. [BAG JOSTLING] [FABRIC RUSTLES]

(MAG183) MARTIN: … I’m sure I love you. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: I love you too. [FABRIC RUSTLES] Let’s go.

(MAG187) ARCHIVIST: [GROGGY] Oh. Martin, good! [BAG JOSTLING] [FABRIC RUSTLES] MARTIN: Wh–, wh–wh–what happened? Th–th–there was the hotel and then…

(MAG191) MARTIN: No, I, I know, I know. I’m sorry, it’s okay. [SIGH] [FABRIC RUSTLES] ARCHIVIST: … Bad dream? […] Maybe I just… die. Maybe I survive, but I–I lose… something. My identity? My mind? My… memories? I don’t know. [FABRIC RUSTLES AS THEY EMBRACE] MARTIN: [LONG EXHALE]

(MAG197) ARCHIVIST: Martin! [FABRIC RUSTLES] MARTIN: … Oh god, I’m sorry, I– ARCHIVIST: It’s fine.

(MAG199) MARTIN: Hey. ARCHIVIST: [SNIFFS AS IF TEARING UP] MARTIN: Hey, hey, hey, hey, come here, come here. [FABRIC RUSTLES] ARCHIVIST: [SNIFFS] MARTIN: We’re going to fix it. ARCHIVIST: No…! [HUFF] … We’re just going to pass it on…! MARTIN: You don’t know that.

It might have for the last time ever…

- What was that sigh, Martin.

(MAG199) [SILENCE, AS THEY BOTH COMPOSE THEMSELVES] ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] Come on. The others will be waiting. [SHUFFLING] [FOOTSTEPS DESCEND] MARTIN: [HEAVY SIGH] [CLICK.]

Was it “just” the sigh of knowing the current plan is making Jon miserable, or is it the sigh of someone who knows that something could comfort Jon, yet can’t share it with him yet…?

- Logistic of things in the next scene was that Jon&Martin came back to Georgie, who explained to them that Basira&Melanie had gone scouting, and the tape recorder clicked on when Basira&Melanie arrived:

(MAG199) [CLICK–] GEORGIE: I’m not sure, they said they were out– Oh, hey. [DOOR CREAKS, FOOTSTEPS ENTER] ARCHIVIST: There you are. I was getting worried. MELANIE: We were scouting. I was showing Basira where we think the gas mainline is. MARTIN: And? BASIRA: Not good. You know those Eye things? ARCHIVIST: The old Archivists? BASIRA: Yeah. I think they know something’s up. The place is crawling with them, it’s like they’re looking for something. MELANIE: Or patrolling. MARTIN: Hmm. GEORGIE: That’s why the stairs were unguarded? BASIRA: It looks that way.

* I’m still not sure what the point of the lighter is in relation to the tape recorders and The Web. Annabelle implied that the lighter had acted as a tracker or would act as a tracker (MAG197: “A little anchor of our power, so that we, and our tapes, may follow wherever you go.”) but we’ve had various examples showing that it wasn’t exclusively the case: the tape recorders had turned on and off in the Archives and in Elias’s office while Jon was away in season 3, they turned up around Martin and in Elias’s cell in season 4, one popped up to record Melanie&Georgie at the end of MAG191 while they were walking in London. What it might be able to do, however, is allow the tape recorders to reach places that should be insulated from other powers (such as within the Coffin, or when Jon was Nikola’s prisoner, or at Upton House)? I’m not sure. Anyway, Georgie took the lighter, has the lighter, and the next scene included Georgie, so I wonder if something will change in the POV of the action next episode, or if the team wasn’t suspecting that The Web still had another use for Jon.

* Why are the Archivists acting up? Is it because Beholding is getting impatient and wants Jon as its pupil? Is it because Beholding is sensing that something is threatening its position? Is it because Jon knows about the plan and the potentiality of Beholding losing its hold over this world, therefore allowing Beholding to know about it and making it react in self-defence? Are Jon’s own feelings about the plan influencing Beholding? Jon said that he didn’t feel like it could think but, if The Eye was indeed behind Jon’s difficulty to listen to Eric’s tape, that showed that it still has instincts and a capacity to try and protect itself.

- As mentioned above, I’m surprised that the last person standing to ignite the tunnels is supposed to be Melanie:

(MAG199) ARCHIVIST: So what’s the plan? MELANIE: I reckon me and Georgie go for the mainline, and hopefully they won’t notice us. GEORGIE: I’ll need a torch. They might notice that. BASIRA: I’ll give a diversion. I’ll try and draw them off. MELANIE: And if they see Georgie’s torch, we just go to Plan B. She becomes another distraction, and I go solo. GEORGIE: I don’t like the thought of you going on your own. MELANIE: And I don’t like the thought of you being chased by manky old archivists, but there it is. MARTIN: Okay. [EXHALE] So what are you going to do when you find it? GEORGIE: We’ve got some old tools. I guess we just… mess with it until we smell gas, and then… back off, set something burning and leg it. It can’t be that hard to break a valve.

… since Georgie had been the one to take the lighter, and didn’t present it as an element she would require in their plan. It’s possible that she’s going to give it over to Melanie and just retrieved the lighter for that goal but mmm, I’m still having doubts about it.

* I love Melanie’s “manky old Archivists”, I’m going to miss her so much ;_;

* … screaming a bit because GEORGIE, if you smell gas, it’s TOO LATE to ignite something without getting caught in the middle of an explosion…………. It’s gonna go very wrong, isn’t it.

* Sob, Melanie&Georgie had been resolute about doing something in MAG191, and Georgie still wanted to be careful about the old Archivists at the beginning of MAG192… but now, they’re really ready to risk everything, uh…

- Melanie was way more careful (and less confrontational) with Jon now that they had to establish the plan, and I wonder if Georgie asked her to tone it down or if Melanie made a conscious effort since they needed to pool their resources and collaborate? I’m really curious about Jon’s wording here:

(MAG199) MELANIE: … Jon, you’re sure about this whole gas main thing? It just seems… I don’t know, really mundane. ARCHIVIST: It’s what Annabelle said. And she wasn’t lying – at least, she didn’t think she was. BASIRA: Well, it’s a bit late for second-guessing.

Because what Annabelle thinks and the reality of things could be very different things. I’m still having some doubts about Oliver and her explaining how their patrons work and presenting them as Fears-that-can-think – it’s fitting in a way but… we also had examples of older avatars (Simon, Arthur) pointing out that they couldn’t guess what their patrons wanted except for some cravings. Something I could see is about the relation between avatars and their Fears (between humans and fears): the idea that the Fears might be… whatever people project on them, and them modelling themselves in turn. Could The End kill people in this world if Oliver wasn’t convinced that it could do it? Could The Web feel so omnipresent and powerful if Annabelle and Jon weren’t projecting their own fears on it?

- Georgie gave me so many red flags this episode…

(MAG199) GEORGIE: Well, we’ll do what we can but… this is it. Whatever it takes, right? If there’s a price, we pay it. No hesitations.

And that one was especially bad by itself, but it also echoed Gertrude’s last instructions to her potential successor:

(MAG161) GERTRUDE: You are entering a new world, a place I’ve lived for most of my life. A place… [SIGH] A place that will often demand a high price from you. Pay it without hesitation, because one way or another, the world is now on your shoulders.

Basically paraphrasing what Gertrude said? Bad sign. Baaad sign.

- There might have been a small misunderstanding between Melanie and Jon there ;;

(MAG199) MELANIE: Sure he can! Just magic-laser-eye zap him or whatever, same as with all the others. MARTIN: [SIGH] MELANIE: Like he did to Helen. ARCHIVIST: Listen, Melanie, I– MELANIE: It’s fine. If we all get out of this, we can talk it through, and, if not, well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? ARCHIVIST: I suppose not.

Since Jon had been unaware that Martin had broken the news to her already, and that Melanie already knew that Helen was bad news… but had learned from Basira that Melanie used to be close to her:

(MAG190) MELANIE:  Oh! Oh, I nearly forgot! Careful of Helen, if you see her. MARTIN: Mm? MELANIE: Uh, she turned up a while back and tried to eat Celia. MARTIN: She was here? MELANIE: Yes… A few times. [INHALE] Looking back, I was so stupid! MARTIN: Because you kind of liked her? MELANIE: Yes. Yes… Honestly, I had started to think she was on our side. MARTIN: Yeah. MELANIE: [SIGH] MARTIN: Jon killed her. MELANIE: [SPLUTTERING] Uh, sorry, what?! MARTIN: Yeah, she tried to– I wasn’t there, but they got into a standoff and he… he destroyed her. MELANIE: He can do that? MARTIN: Mm! MELANIE: Well! I mean that’s… that’s interesting to know.

(MAG195) ARCHIVIST: … I also killed Helen? BASIRA: Oh! Right. ARCHIVIST: Yeah… [CONSIDERED ROWING] BASIRA: Didn’t expect that. ARCHIVIST: She was dangerous. And not like the others out there. It was only going to be a matter of time before– BASIRA: No, no, I get it. Honestly, it’s kind of a relief. How did Melanie take it? ARCHIVIST: Melanie? BASIRA: Yeah, she and… she and Helen were pretty tight back when, uh… Oh… ARCHIVIST: What? BASIRA: Back when you were in your coma. ARCHIVIST: I see…! Well, I haven’t told her yet, so… I suppose I have that to look forward to when we get back.

So: from Melanie’s point of view, she used to be close to Helen but learned independently that Helen wasn’t her friend and was actually dangerous for them. From Jon’s point of view, Melanie used to be close with Helen and might have just learned that he had killed her (and might be sad about it). But Melanie was dry about it and it came as an accusation, which immediately made Jon defensive about it. They can’t really manage to interact without making a conscious effort to not rub the other the wrong way, uh…?

Cries, still, because they’ll never talk it through, uh. ;;

- I am REALLY concerned about Martin being adamant that Jon couldn’t be the one to kill Jonah because of the potential consequences…

(MAG199) MELANIE: And it’s hardly going to be a picnic for you either. You’re going up that tower to kill Elias, and if we muck up the timing, you’ll be up there when it blows. MARTIN: … Jon can’t do it. ARCHIVIST: What? […] MARTIN: You’re not listening. I mean, if he kills Jonah, then knowing our luck he’s just gonna end up taking his place in the Panopticon, isn’t he? GEORGIE: [SIGH] Good point. MARTIN: He can come up with me, but when it actually comes to Jonah… BASIRA: You’ll have to be the one to do it. MARTIN: Yeah. ARCHIVIST: Martin… I don’t– BASIRA: Have you got this? We can trade if you don’t think you can do it. MARTIN: No. No, I can do it.

… because it’s not what Jon had said:

(MAG193) MARTIN: So not that then, but… wh–what about something, like… physical? ARCHIVIST: I… What? MARTIN: Look, I know it’s all about… dream logic and metaphor and all that… stuff, but, you know, what if we just… what if we just grabbed him and, you know, pulled him down? Or, or just threw something heavy at him? ARCHIVIST: Uh… […] You were right. MARTIN: About what? ARCHIVIST: His body is vulnerable. A–at least to me. MARTIN: … What’s the catch? ARCHIVIST: I could kill his body, sever the link, break The Eye’s power, and… Jonah Magnus would die. MARTIN: Okay, that sounds good but…? ARCHIVIST: But… that wouldn’t actually harm The Eye itself. And with him gone it would… it would choose a suitable replacement. MARTIN: Oh. ARCHIVIST: If we kill Jonah Magnus… I take his place. MARTIN: Oh, god… ARCHIVIST: And I think… that’s exactly what it wants…!

Jon said that killing Jonah would lead to Beholding taking a replacement, not necessarily the person who’d kill Jonah… and regarding “suitable replacement”, Martin was emphasised as Eye-aligned this season (and Lonely):

(MAG183) ARCHIVIST: Well, you’re a watcher, Martin. You worked for the Institute, you read statements, The Eye is… fond of you. You’re not getting thrown into your own personal hell, which means… MARTIN: [QUIETLY] That one of them belongs to me. But that’s… Ho–how can I be a “Watcher”? I, I didn’t even know it existed! ARCHIVIST: But you’ve suspected for a while now, haven’t you? MARTIN: Maybe? But that’s not “watching”! ARCHIVIST: Do you want me to tell you about it? MARTIN: No. … Yes. N–no, no, I don’t know, I don’t know. [SIGH] [STATIC RISES] ARCHIVIST: It’s a small domain. A swirling mix of The Eye and The Lonely.

And was supposed to take Jonah’s place at the end of season 4 precisely thanks to his connection to Beholding:

(MAG158) PETER: I want to use the powers of this place to learn about The Extinction: what it’s doing, where it’s manifesting. Then we can stop it. MARTIN: And you need me for this? PETER: Correct! Without a connection to The Eye, any attempt to use it would likely end… very messily indeed! But thankfully, it just so happens that you hold such a connection. MARTIN: So that’s it… Both “lonely” and “watching”. PETER: You must admit you’re the perfect candidate. […] You’ll have to dispose of the current occupant. MARTIN: Curren–… [QUICK FOOTSTEPS] [SHARP BREATHING] … Who is that? PETER: Jonah Magnus! His… body, at least. Sitting here; watching; binding it all together; growing ever older. If you want to take his place, well… MARTIN: �� I’ll need to kill him. PETER: Yes. Don’t worry, though. I brought a knife. […] Martin. What are you doing? MARTIN: I’m… saying no. I refuse! Game over. [KNIFE CLATTERING ON THE GROUND]

Jon hadn’t mentioned whether Martin would be able to hurt Elias (just that he could), but we’ve seen that dream-logic could be a factor to hurt each other: Basira could kill Daisy, Daisy could hurt Jon through their connection. Given that Martin was once expected to kill Jonah (did Jonah fear that Martin would choose this?), and that Martin has felt guilty all season about the fact that he feels like he could have stopped things if he had just knifed Jonah:

(MAG174) MARTIN: All those lies you told me… You helped to do this, you turned the world into your… your playground! SIMON: Hum… Not to be a pedant, but if you recall, I was actually doing a favour for Peter. And if Peter had won, none of this would have happened.

(MAG186) MARTIN: [HEAVY SIGH] If we’re glad, why do I feel so… ALSO MARTIN: Guilty? Because you feel guilty about everything. MARTIN: That’s… That’s not– ALSO MARTIN: […] The end of the entire world? MARTIN: If I’d done what Peter had asked… If, if I’d not chickened out, and just killed Elias when I had the chance…! ALSO MARTIN: Really? Really, that’s how you’re choosing to remember it? “Chickening out”? MARTIN: I remember it was the wrong choice…! ALSO MARTIN: You choose to remember it that way, and so the guilt– MARTIN: [SIGH] I–I get it, all right? But I need it, I, I choose the guilt, because… ALSO MARTIN: [LEADING] “Because”? MARTIN: Because it motivates me to do better!

I could see Martin managing to hurt him thanks to this. But regarding what could come afterwards:

I’m concerned about the fact Jon tried to object during the discussion and that nobody listened to him… as if Jon was already anticipating something to go very badly because he knows something the others don’t. Overall: what if Martin can’t kill Jonah? What if Martin kills Jonah and Beholding takes Jon anyway? What if Martin kills Jonah and Beholding picks Martin as a replacement?

(Mental picture of Jon screaming “Take me, not him!”, since we’ve been in the season 1 nostalgia this episode… ;_;)

- Aouch for Melanie falling back into old habits…

(MAG199) MELANIE: Make sure it hurts. MARTIN: Oh, I will. MELANIE: … Good enough for me.

(MAG117) MELANIE: I have my own stuff to take care of, they think they’re giving me a chance to “face my demons”, by helping to take down Elias. They don’t get that the only way to deal with something like him is to watch his eyes go dead with your hands around his throat. [SHAKY INHALE] I’ll… play it their way, for now. But when it comes down to it… I want – to see him – dead. […] [INHALE] So… yes. That’s it. That’s all you’re getting, because it hurt like hell to live through, and I didn’t do it so you could stroke your chin and call it fascinating. … Good luck, Jon. I do hope you win. [INHALE] But I also hope it hurts…!

- So, resting time:

(MAG199) GEORGIE: Okay. Sounds like we’ve got… something like a plan. MARTIN: [SOUND OF ASSENT] BASIRA: Makes a nice change. [VARIOUS SOUNDS OF ASSENT] MELANIE: [BRIGHTLY] It does, doesn’t it? Eh! Uh… so. When do we actually do it? GEORGIE: First thing tomorrow. That’ll give us time to prep and rest.

Georgie had already explained how they evaluated “tomorrow” in the tunnels and without any clock:

(MAG190) GEORGIE: Look. We’re all tired, and you still seem a little… disoriented by the tunnels. Let’s get some rest. We can talk about next moves tomorrow. ARCHIVIST: And how do you know when tomorrow is? GEORGIE: We generally err on the side of caution and sleep in…! ARCHIVIST: Sounds good.

So they’ll probably do the same ;;

- Basira thanking Jon for helping her with Daisy (and for helping her personally) made my heart break a bit and really made it sink in that it was likely the last time some (most? all?) of them would talk to each other, or that they won’t be in any state to discuss things like this afterwards. It was also fitting that Jon got his private moments with Georgie, with Martin, with Basira… but not with Melanie. That bridge burned, uh.

- Overall, although with interesting points and heart-wrenching and bittersweet and tender and intimate moments, it was… quite a depressing episode in the whole scale of things?

* The episode gave the impression that it was validating everything about The Web: that Jon had indeed been “Chosen” as the bringer of the apocalypse and had been a right pick for it; that Annabelle had been right when she told Martin that she just needed to tell them the truth for them to do what she wanted; that The Web scheming for centuries to open the crack and prepare its escape, and bringing the apocalypse about just to escape and infest other dimensions… worked. That everyone, regardless of their motivations and feelings, has indeed come to the conclusion that arranged The Web and served its plans, that The Web… is very casually winning just as planned.

* The episode didn’t talk about what would come after, for the characters. Jon briefly explained to Martin what was likely to happen to him, Annabelle confirmed it, but… the episode gave the impression that characters weren’t truly expecting to come out of this alive in the first place.

* Jon’s silences in the last sequences were so sad? He barely managed to sneak in a few words. He couldn’t contribute to the plan. Martin presented him as optional while others are taking care of the action. Yes, it used to be all on Jon but the fact that he couldn’t even contribute and that others ignored him when he tried to object about Martin being the one to kill Jonah was just so heartbreaking, as if he was already silenced and once again not in control of things that would happen…?

- I want to err on the side of caution but, despite it, I can’t help but wonder if some of the Team Archive interactions weren’t… staged a bit for the tape recorders. It’s very suspicious that they apparently got updated on the Hill Top Road situation, but that nobody commented about the tape recorders turning on (although they now know that it means The Web is spying on them and/or that their tapes will be heard by other people in other worlds and associated with the Fears). Melanie and Georgie had taken notice of them when Jon&Martin had arrived in the tunnels for the first time, Melanie was good at hearing the tape recorder turning on… but nothing this time around. Is it possible that they’re planning something else, too, and that it required The Web and The Eye (the tapes and Jon) to not know about it, a bit like how the assistants had put on a show in front of Elias in season 3?

(MAG116) ELIAS: Now! If you’ll excuse me. [DOOR OPENS AND CLOSES] BASIRA: Do you think he bought it? MARTIN: We’ll talk about it later. ARCHIVIST: I doubt we’ll get time, we need to go. MARTIN: It’s fine. We’ve got this, okay. ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] … Okay.

Is it why Georgie took the lighter?

I don’t want to bank on it but the fact that nobody has commented about the tape recorders since Annabelle revealed what they were and their purpose has been any nagging at me, so, mmmm…

If MAG200 actually shows the action as it happens, I’m wondering about a few things:

* How are they planning to time up the explosion and the Jonah murder? Jon couldn’t know about the tunnels when he was outside of them, and according to what we’ve heard in MAG192, climbing the tower was a very long process. It’s possible that Jon actually has some awareness of the tunnels as long as he’s in the tower (since both are connected), or that they’ll go for the murder once they hear the explosion coming to them, but how would Georgie&Melanie coordinate to not do anything before Jon&Martin are the top? (When I’m wondering about it, I can think of a few options: Jon&Martin dropping something once they’re at the top, to convey they’ve arrived, or maybe relying on whether a tape recorder clicks on, as a signal that Nothing Interesting Is Happening Up There And It’s Your Turn To Do Something, etc.)

* Will we hear Rosie again? Jon&Martin might have to pass in front of her again to reach Elias. Will they evacuate her, will she stay with them?

* … Surprisingly and yet fittingly: we might hear Jonah/Elias in the last episode. (And funnily enough: it would be the 4th episode where he would talk this season, which means this wouldn’t even be the season with the least amount of Elias appearances! He was in 3 episodes in season 1 (MAG017, MAG039, MAG040) and in 4 episodes in season 2 (MAG048, MAG060, MAG067, MAG080). Season 3 was an outlier that really got us used to hearing him a lot.)

* I’m still squinting about the fact that Annabelle told them to “destroy the Archives” and that they translated it into “destroy the Panopticon” while both Jonah and Oliver designated Jon as the “Archive(s)”…

* If they succeed, and if it all goes accordingly, I am really wondering about the state of the world post-Fears – and it might not be something we’ll get to witness. But mostly, I’m curious/concerned about the complicated cases: if people do remember what happened to them and who were the rulers, wouldn’t it be likely that things turn into chaos as people get back at the people who hurt them? What about the cases Basira mentioned of rulers who hated being in that position? What about, for example, Callum? (Who is currently doing horrible things and… is also a traumatised kid.)

* I wonder if the episode will have an actual date as the case number, and if it would correspond to another world’s timeline or this one. “0181810–B”, as things pick up from the point Jon had read Jonah’s letter (MAG160’s was “0181810”)? “0212503” to play with the release date, since it’s the same release date for everyone for once (no early access for Patreon)? “0111507” to play with the date of Jacob’s statement, heard in the very first trailer? Something beginning with “015” as, in another world, someone (Jon or Sasha or someone else) becomes a new Head Archivist after Gertrude’s death?

* If The Web succeeds and leaves with the tapes, will they be like the Fear Books used to be perceived in this world? Will Jon’s voice be perceived as a bringer of disaster and tragedies? What will happen to Jon’s voice is an interesting question given that this episode ended with… Jon being withdrawn, barely being part of the conversation, trying to object and not being heard, as if his voice was already partially silenced by the others.

* Technically, since the tapes are supposed to leave with The Web, the series might cut off with the tapes leaving, but… other configurations are possible. We could finally hear something without the mediation of the tapes. We could get a new point of view from another world, inheriting the fears. We could be deprived of the action, since the plan was laid out, and have someone (Martin?) recalling what happened, much later, etc.

In previous seasons, the 40th episode was more about the aftermath of the action and posing elements that would be fundamental during the next one: MAG040 explained how Prentiss had died, what had happened to Jon&Tim, but also confirmed (to the audience) that something had replaced Sasha without the others noticing, and revealed that Gertrude’s obviously-murdered-body had been found in the tunnels, leading to Jon’s secret investigations in season 2; MAG080 showed Leitner explaining to Jon who was likely to be Gertrude’s murderer, what the Institute was about, that Jon was now a servant of Beholding and that a Fear ritual was incoming, leading to Jon’s quest to stop the Unknowing; MAG120 confirmed who had come out of the Unknowing alive, revealed what Jon’s dreams were about, had Peter replacing Elias as Head of the Institute and confirmed Peter’s interest in Martin; MAG160 had Jon&Martin running away, Jon receiving Jonah’s letter hidden amongst the statements (and a few tapes likely sent by The Web) and being forced to read his incantation, provoking the current apocalypse.

MAG200’s title has been made public on twitter, so – “Last Words” it is. It sure feels like the series is ending ;; It’s fitting for both the characters and the podcast itself, and I’m screaming that it had appeared in the first episode of this season:

(MAG161) ARCHIVIST: Hang on, have you been recording this? [RUSTLING OF CLOTHES] TIM: Oh, yeah! I… just thought it might be nice, you know, something to look back on when we’re all old and sick of each other…! […] Now, all right, all right; fine! Look: I’m turning it off. Any last words for your future selves?

… in the specific context of leaving a message for the future.

[thepartyresponsible]

another soundtrack fill! this is for the anon who asked for  bucky barnes/jason todd and “vengeance” by neoni, which i had never heard before, but which is definitely a “killing monsters with giant robots” song.

so here’s a pacific rim au. the only surprise here is that it’s taken me so long to write one.

                                                        ---

Echo Lazarus and Bullseye Lucky throw Scorpio back into the Pacific, but the Kaiju’s barbed stinger rips a hole clear through Laz’s chestplate first. Twenty seconds later, Lucky executes it with a shot through a weak point in its cranial bones. Jason would take that less personally if the damage had been on his side of Laz, instead of Frank’s. Probably.

“Fucking assholes,” he says, fighting free of the harness, elbowing his way out of the Conn-Pod. “Kill-stealing chucklefucks,” he continues, right over the top of Frank’s half-assed attempts to calm him down. “I’m sick of this shit, Castle.”

“I’m fine,” Frank says. There’s a bit of blood on his mouth, but it’s from smashing his lip against his helmet, not from neural overload or internal bleeding. When he wipes it away, no more leaks out to replace it. “Nice of you to check in.”

“I know you’re fine, Castle,” Jason says, ignoring the still-panicked thudding of his heart. “Fuck off.”

He stomps his way free of Lazarus and shoulder-checks Frank seconds later, relieved by the solid warmth of him. Relieved, also, by the exasperation in Frank’s face as he shoves Jason out of his personal space.

“I’m fine,” Frank says. And then, a beat later, a bit more intent: “Jason. I’m fine.”

“I know,” Jason says. Because he does. His brain was Frank’s brain was their brain when the hit landed. The fear that flooded them was Jason’s, not Frank’s.

Frank’s not scared of dying. Jason’s not that nervous about it, either. But being linked while the other dies? Feeling Frank fade away like water down a drain?

Yeah, sure. That scares the hell out of him.

“Jason,” Frank says, looking at him, sidelong and flat. Outside of the Drift, he never seems to know what to say.

“You’re fine,” Jason repeats, sullenly, dutifully. “I know that. I do. I told you.”

He flattens himself obligingly against the hallway wall, lets the techs swarm past him to get to Echo Lazarus. None of them even make eye-contact, and Jason knows what that means. Their Jaeger will need extensive repairs. They’ll be out for a week or two, minimum, and they won’t even get a recorded kill out of this little shitshow.

Bullseye Lucky will get the kill. Again.

“If I break their knees,” Jason says, as the crew of techs scuttles between them, “they’ll stop stealing our fucking kills.”

Frank rolls his eyes. When they’re in their own brains, he likes to pretend he’s indifferent to this whole business. But Jason’s been in his thoughts. He knows how Frank feels about the Kaiju. He lost his whole family to these ocean-borne bastards, his wife and his little girl, his son. He likes the kill just as much as Jason does.

It’s a balm. A comedown. It’s a moment of catharsis they both need more than they want to acknowledge, and Lucky has stolen three of their last four, and Jason’s losing his mind about it, a little.

“If you cause a big scene about this,” Frank says, “I will not have your back when Barnes knocks you on your ass.”

Jason scoffs. Audibly. And then, just to be sure Frank hears him, he does it again, louder, with more emphasis in his jaw and shoulders. “Fuck you, Castle,” he says. “You’re gonna have my back forever.”

Frank rolls his eyes again. He doesn’t argue.

Forever means for as long as he can. Forever means today and, if they’re lucky, tomorrow. And they have tomorrow because Jason flinched when he saw the hit coming, because he threw everything he had into moving, directing that hit anywhere that wasn’t right at Frank.

They have tomorrow because Clint Barton and Bucky Barnes shot Scorpio through the skull, and so now Jason will never know if he and Frank could’ve saved themselves. He can’t come down, can’t feel safe.

“I’m gonna fucking kill them,” Jason says.

   Barton and Barnes aren’t generally known for partying, but a beer or two seems to knock the taste of Kaiju ichor out of their mouths. Jason finds Clint tucked away at the little on-base bar, which exists primarily to stop Rangers from going out among the civilian populace and regaling them with the most recent stories of how close they all came to absolute annihilation.

“Hey, shithead,” he says, as he slides up next to Barton at the bar, “quick question: are you at least getting off on giving me blue balls? Because someone should be getting off. And it’s damn sure not me.”

“Christ,” Frank says, with a heavy sigh. He elbows up between them and directs bleak, beseeching eyes toward the watchful bartender. “Help me.”

“Sure,” the bartender says. “Is that a single or a double?”

“Please, yeah, tell me all about your balls, Todd,” Clint mutters, in a tone just as deeply skeptical as Frank’s. “They definitely don’t feature in my brain enough.”

“A double,” the bartender says, with a decisive nod. “Sure.” He starts pouring. Frank grunts what would probably be a thank you, if he took his head out of his hands.

“What the fuck does that mean, Barton?” Jason says, leaning half over Frank’s shoulders to see him. “Are you daydreaming about my balls? Because I’ll give you a free sample if you stop sniping my fucking kills.”

Clint swivels his head to stare at the side of Frank’s. “Can you,” he says, low and deeply felt, “believe this shit?”

“Absolutely,” Frank says, as he takes a hearty swig of whiskey. “Believe it? Yes. Hate every minute of it? Also yes.”

“Can I tell him?” Clint asks. “Can I just--”

“Hey,” Jason says, because he’s finally caught sight of Barnes, skulking in the shadowy back of the bar. Barnes is like that. Jason’s noticed. It can be full summery sunshine, and Barnes will find a way to be evasive and out of sight. Jason always manages to catch sight of him anyway, though. He’s not hyperaware of the guy. It’s just basic situational awareness. “Hey, asshole.”

“Thank God,” Clint says, and Frank taps his tumbler against the side of Clint’s glass in a show of solidarity that Jason finds both deeply disloyal and completely unacceptable. He steals their drinks as recompense and then stalks across the bar.

Bucky looks up at Jason gets closer. His hair is too long again, still wet from his post-fight shower, falling across his face and curling, a little, at the ends. His eyes are bright blue and narrowed, wary like a stray cat. He’s wearing a PPDC t-shirt and old jeans. He looks ridiculous. He’s an asshole.

Because Barton will come through when you need him, but he’s not the mother hen on the team. Lucky’s been stealing kills because Bucky Barnes can’t keep his hands off the trigger.

“That for me?” Bucky asks, pointing at the whiskey in Jason’s hand.

“No,” Jason says, and he takes a quick sip to establish ownership. It’s smoky as hell, because Frank likes that kind of old man garbage, but Jason drinks it anyway.

Bucky points at Clint’s drink. “So the beer’s for me?”

“The beer is also mine,” Jason says. He downs a bit of that, too. “Why the hell would I be bringing you a drink?”

“Gratitude?” Bucky says, eyebrow cocked. “For saving your ass?”

“My ass was never in danger,” Jason says. “Fuck you for worrying about my ass.”

“I don’t know if you’ve seen your ass,” Bucky says, “but it’s really difficult to--”

“Oh, is that what we’re doing?” Jason puts the glasses down on the table. “We’re gonna skip straight to the part where we fight?”

Bucky steals Frank’s stolen whiskey. “You brought me a drink. I figured ass talk was allowed.”

Jason’s jaw drops. He rescues the beer before it falls victim to similar machinations. “Sure,” he says. “Sure, Barnes. We can talk about asses. We can talk about how I’m gonna kick yours all the way to--”

“Jason,” Bucky says. He leans forward, elbow on the table, and he looks good, when he comes out of the shadows like that. The light does nice things for his cheekbones, for his eyes, for the sharp line of his jaw and the soft curl of his smirking mouth. “Is that really what you want to do with my ass?”

Jason swallows. He takes a long, fortifying drink of the beer in his hand. He’s been learning about these kind of tactics from Frank. Stalling, Frank tells him. Tactical misdirection.

But he’s just a kid from Gotham, and he plays by Gotham rules. The Joker’s always wild, the stakes are always high, and you call every bluff you find, because you’ve always got less to lose.

He sets the glass on the table. It’s empty, anyway. He’s great at tactical stalling. A Goddamn natural.

“I dunno, Barnes. Do you have any suggestions of something else I could do with your ass?”

   Hours later, Barnes still isn’t out of ideas, but they’re catching their breath through another round of tactical stalling. “Jesus,” Jason says. “Did you see those shitheads high-fiving when we left? Frank won’t even let me high-five him.”

“He and Clint have a history,” Bucky says. Which Jason knows, thank you. He’s seen plenty of Barton in the Drift. “Anyway, Clint’s been bitching at me about you for months.”

Jason furrows his brow and looks over at him. The sheets are bunched up at mid-thigh. Bucky doesn’t look any less beautiful than he did when he shoved Jason backwards onto this bed, but he at least has the decency to look winded and considerably mussed.

“Months,” he repeats, trying to infuse the word with all the dubiousness a single syllable can hold. “What the hell do you mean, months?”

The look Bucky gives him indicates that maybe he’s not interested in Jason for his brain. In fact, it seems to suggest that he doubts Jason has one. “Oh, fuck you,” he says. “What? You want me to say it?”

Jason doesn’t know what the hell Bucky is or isn’t saying. When they left the bar, he figured they were going to work out their shared aggression in a way that wouldn’t get either one of them demoted or transferred. He’d held onto that assumption until Bucky started treating him like he was something worth putting effort into, and he’d been too busy after that to do any complicated reanalysis.

“Yeah,” he says. “I want you to say it.”

Bucky makes a face at him, a sideways smush of his mouth and a long look up through his ludicrous eyelashes. He reaches up to touch the side of Jason’s face, fingertips gentle as they run across the freshly bruised skin, the only sign on Jason’s body that he almost died today.

If Bucky had touched him like that four hours ago, Jason would’ve slapped his hand away and told him to go to hell.

Right now, he wants to lean into it. He holds himself still.

“I’m not stealing your kills on purpose,” Bucky tells him, gaze dropping from the bruise on Jason’s hairline to look him straight in the eyes, pinning him to the bed. “I just hate it when you get hurt.”

Jason swallows. He tips his head into Bucky’s hand, and Bucky leans in and kisses him like he can’t help himself.

“You’re still a kill-stealing piece of shit, Barnes,” Jason says, mouth an inch from Bucky’s, staring up into the bright blue of his stardust eyes.

Bucky looks down at him for a moment, mouth caught between a smirk and a smile. “Uh-huh,” he says. He kisses him again, on his cheek, on his jaw, in a line down his throat to his chest. “Let me make it up to you.”

[danddymaro]

Follow me| Higgs Monaghan x Reader

Damn that Troy Baker and his little voice of his, as well as Higgs for being so captivating. This game is lit.

Also, could this be romance? I’m really just writing concepts I come up with. Sometimes bullshit stories come to mind. 

FUUUUUCCKKK, I already had this thought out and halfway through I realized he wears that fucking pod (ꐦ ಠ皿ಠ )

How could it slip my mind?

Anywhoo..

Everything is pretty understandable, but just a warning, 

‘ example’ = Italics in quotations are thoughts

example = Italics W/out are flashbacks

He watched her, downright dumbfounded, eyes trained on the woman like she was a strange phenomenon. 

And perhaps she was…

She was out In the middle of nothing, miles way from a single living being , excluding himself of course.

‘ So where did she come from? ‘ He wondered, truly perplexed, because it couldn’t be as though she magically appeared out of thin air.

‘Not a shelter in sight either…’ He observed.

He took a quiet step forward, being cautious in doing so, keeping his eyes fully trained on the bizarre woman the entire time. Though, it seemed as though his alertness was unneeded, because she seemed none the wiser, not knowing he was there to begin with. 

Instead, her sights were placed on the little creature crawling along her (s/c) skin. Keenly staring on, she had no mind for anything but  the little orange butterfly walking along her index. Meanwhile, the creature itself seemed just as oblivious as she was about any possible existing danger, happily moving it’s thin, little legs over the flesh.

‘ Like only you exist in this world,’ He thought with disbelief.

A small smile began to surface over her features, one that was undoubtedly pretty, stopping his musing, and every question he had in regards to the strange woman’s unexpected appearance.

It was then that the sound of the crackling sky erupted, echoing throughout the field, and as it did, he noticed she came out of her perfect little world.

The young woman gave a small jump and though he didn't hear it, he knew a small sound left her. The abrupt widening of her eyes, along with the parting of her pretty lips, topped with the sudden growing of her chest indicated it.

 The little happy butterfly which was on her index finger fluttered away in fleet, leaving her behind to stare at it, not being able to do much but follow it with her (e/c) eyes.

.And then she was truly left alone, with nothing but blue eyes to observe her, marveling at her from a distance.  

Standing up from the floor, she began to look up at the grayed sky with her eyebrows creased up, light worry lines on her forehead becoming visible. Inside her mind she began to fret, and finally he got a gimps of what concern seemed like once settled onto her face.

With steady steps she took as she finally rose, walking further from him in a direction that lead to more nothingness, all with notable uncertainty.

‘Are you hoping to find anything?’ He wondered, continuing to watch her, interested in everything she did, wanting to know just where she’d lead him to.

It all felt like a strange dream,a vivid one where he wasn’t tormented, where he didn’t see death , but instead a strange sort of angel, lost in an apocalypse.

In search of something...

 She then reached up, her body lightly shaking as another roar erupted from the somber sky.

 Afraid, she reached up, challenging extinction she stood her ground,

 “Any second now,” he said to himself, knowing that there was only a few more moments left before the Timefall came. Absentmindedly he took a step forward, “If you don’t get out of here...” he trailed off, knowing there wasn’t anywhere she could go.

Knowing just what would happen... 

Her palm faced up to the murky sky for a moment, longing in her heart as she reached out to where the glowing sun had become a stranger. And she wondered when she’d see the glowing star, not having seen it during the many hours she’d spent outside already.

The rain then fell, ready to claim anything that it touched. Merciless as always, it lay waste to anything that dared challenge it with existence with absolutely no exception.

A twitch to his heart made his current step falter, and abruptly he stopped, everything else in the world moving in slow motion as he found his eyes locked with the (h/c) young woman. 

For just a brief moment she stared at him, having found him in her line of sight as she took a gaze at the world around her.

A cloaked figure stood in her vision, and swallowing down largely she took a daring step toward’s it.

If anyone were to ask him why he did it, he wouldn't have a single, sensible answer as to why he took action, but all the same his deed remained. 

He moved faster then he could blink, traveling through the space and reaching her within a second’s time. He encased  her within his cloak, huddled over her as he pressed her close towards his chest, pinning the (h/c) woman to him.

It was then that the downpour began, but of course, she was safe, protected within his safe cocoon, her body stiff with the strong press.

It took her a moment to move, being utterly surprised at first before she seemed to settle, her head inclining back as she brought her eyes up to him, once again connecting.

She stared up at him with wonder, her eyes looking large and beautiful, absolutely breathtaking to him as she stood before him. And to his surprise, she didn't squirm, but instead reached her hand up, cupping the side of his mask's cheek before trailing along the sharp edges with the tips of her fingers.

Cold metal connected with warmed flesh, but it wasn’t something that made her draw away either.  He could see that dancing within her wide open (e/c) eyes was pure hearted  astonishment as she continued to caress the golden piece.

She didn't look afraid, startled perhaps, but not afraid, and it stunned him, shaking him to the core.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her, his voice sounding breathy, but he wasn’t tired.

 If anything, he’d never felt more alive.

He could feel it in his chest, a strange feeling invading him and taking over, 

‘I can’t stop it,’ he thought to himself helplessly.

Blinking a couple times in silence and confusion she shook her head slowly, answering him with uncertainty, “ I don't know,”  she replied, a very soft voice being what graced him. “I'm not sure what I'm doing here,” She added, a gleam to her eyes shining with sadness, replacing the awe that was meant for him. 

“ I was here alone,” she admitted. “And I’ve been her waiting,” she added, a fore lone smile coming into sight.  

“ I wouldn't be able to tell you with certainty how long I was by myself...simply waiting,”  she went on, her hands descending, trailing over part of his chest before coming to the cool glass of his pod.

  “...I don’t even know how to determine how long I had been alone.” she said with the same melancholy.

She'd woken up to the barren land, frightened and cold, left at the mercy of the new dark world she’d been dragged into. There was no sign of life, as even her own heart stilled, quieted as it waited in frightened suspense.

“...How long I had waited,” she added lowly, “ I just sat here waiting to die... waiting for either starvation or something to come and sweep me away,” she admitted with dejection and shame. 

Initially, she’d screamed out for someone, anyone to save her, but no one called back.

No one went in search of the stranded woman, and so having no choice, she went on her own search.

She walked aimlessly, desperate for a ray of hope to shine upon her, but not even the sun graced her. Instead, it stayed hidden behind dark clouds, the murky sky and it's muted colors being all that lay in her sights.

Finally giving in , she fell onto her knees, surrendering at the game of life.

And then the single butterfly landed on her, it’s little legs tickling her nose as it walked along the bridge.

She didn't know how it ended up there either, and she thought that perhaps  it came with her, traveling through the same strange route. It was the only thing that comforted her.

Narrowing her eyes at it she began to smile, abiet somberly, 

“could it be that we are alone?” she asked it, not expecting an answer. “Could it be that no one will come?”

“But you're holding me... someone else is holding me...”she said with a tremor touched voice.

And then she questioned him, 

"Are you some sort of God? ” she said with partial amusement, “ Or death itself?” She questioned him, seeming mystified by the possibility. 

Was such an assumption strange?

Within the barren land someone came to her, appeared before her to hold her. And as though by strange magic he reached her, embracing her.

 He was flattered to say the least, an amused chuckle leaving him, “A god?” he asked himself,  liking the idea as she spoke, 

‘No darling... but I am a partical of God,' he thought to himself with seething pride.

“ What if I tell you that you're right? " he asked her, watching those beautiful eyes sparkle at his response. 

While she waited with diminished hope, and as she screamed and as she pleaded, she’d cried.

She cried her heart’s lament, knowing she’d lay to waste.

His hand's gloved fingers fell down her face, the thick, black material grazing her gently, falling down what had been dried tear trails. 

‘ She’s been crying...

Waiting...’

" What would you do then?"  he asked her his eyes never leaving hers as he found himself unable to draw them away.

He watched as she seemed to contemplate the question,

‘Will you try and run from me? 

Push me away...

I want to know...’

She had to know that whatever savior she hoped for wasn’t there. The idea of a knight in shining armor wasn’t befitting for him.

" I'd be afraid," she admitted." I am afraid," she added, not holding back, " But you're the only one here…"  she told him, " You were the only one that came," she reasoned.  

 He could be death itself, and even then she wouldn’t run, she wouldn’t draw back, so, happily, smiling softly with joyous relief she spoke, 

"You found me.”

He could feel his heart once again bouncing, like a sort of detector setting off in her presence, “ I guess I've been waiting too,” he said lowly, his voice just a short whisper. And during then, his mask dispersed, leaving her to gaze at his true face and nothing more. 

He spoke the truth, despite not realizing before how tangled with her he’d been. But there was no question in his mind that what had magnetized him to the same patch of nothingness she was at was a powerful pull sure to be fate itself.

The trailing fingers stopped, his palms cupping her cheeks instead, holding them dearly. Meanwhile, she reached up again, her fingers touching the dark tears that trailed down his cheeks.

He felt her fingers leave a warm trail where she touched him, effortlessly exiting him as she unexpectedly brushed the digits by the outline of his lips.

Would it be so bad to take her with him?

Would it be so bad to find out more about her? 

Discover how she came to be...

Find out just how she came to him...

“Will you come with me?” he asked her, leaning down to her, his lips so close to her flesh as he spoke, “Will you follow me?” he asked, a curl to his lips as he felt her shiver. 

Over the flesh of her arms little bumps had risen as she was both startled and exited. Nodding silently, she agreed, planning to follow him till the ends of the world, 

which was coincidentally just where he planned to travel with her, 

Right to it’s destruction...

‘Looks like I’ve got my plus one,’ he thought to himself, unable to deny the lovely feeling he felt in his chest.

[cosmiceverafter]

Whiskey Lullaby

Summary: The aftermath of Alex leaving Roswell. 

Warnings: Mentions of alcohol, depression, death, abuse (shed scene memory). 

This fic is for @michaelguerinweek - Day 3: “I don’t want you to go.” (distance/separation) It’s quite angsty. 

***

The whiskey was bitter and stung his tongue, but Michael devoured the pain.

Hell, he welcomed it.

Michael wanted to forget. Forget how the love of his life’s guitar calloused fingers felt caressing his naked body. The way that smooth tongue sucked deeply upon the sensitive skin behind his ear where it met his neck’s skin. But most importantly, he wanted to forget those damn soulful eyes and the way they had peered into his with a promise of forever.

More whiskey.

There would never be enough whiskey for this type of numbing tincture, the rational part of his brain exclaimed.

Michael swore loudly and chucked the empty glass bottle deep into the desert, hearing it shatter within the distance as if it had been his heart he had thrown instead.

God, he was so damn angry. Alex had just left, left without a word.

Fuck.

The reasonable and raw part of the whole ordeal was that Michael knew this was his own damn fault.

Michael bit his lip and tasted blood, cursing the tears starting to form in his eyes.

If only he hadn't pushed Alex away. If only he had told Alex the truth, not just about Rosa, but about who he really was.

God, he had wanted to and even replayed the conversation over-and-over inside of his mind.

But after that night with Rosa, Michael had changed. They were the monsters the humans believed them to be. How would Alex ever want him knowing what they had done? Rosa was like Alex’s sister, and they had erased her from oblivion.

Guilt, not for the first time, soaked his veins as the whiskey had.

The Pod Squad had covered up a murder and ruined the innocent image of a girl who had her whole life in front of her. All to protect one of their own. He would do it again for his found family, but it still made his stomach feel sick.

He had thought he was a good kid. One that studied and tried for more. But that was the lie, wasn’t it? Michael wasn’t normal. He was an alien from another planet. He’d never truly fit in. And after what had happened with Rosa, the realization had made him stop trying.

Michael tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, but the way Alex had looked into his eyes every single time as they made love, he had felt like a fraud. It would push him to rebel even harder, even though he saw it was breaking Alex’s heart.

The guy believed in him for some reason, which he used to love but now loathed.

Alex was too good for this world. He would never truly deserve him. Jesse Manes had been the devil in his ear, haunting him at every move.

Michael looked down at his injured hand and clenched his eyes shut from the painful memory.

He had just wanted one good thing in this stupid life, even if he didn’t deserve it.

But it was too late for that. He had acted rash and ridiculous, throwing his future away as he drank himself into oblivion in the middle of the day, secretly pouring his stash of acetone into the glass.

Michael had gotten into bar fights and had once again been thrown into jail.

It was nothing new but this time when he had been released, everything had changed.

His love had left him.

The pain hadn’t settled in as he knew and hoped Alex understood he would’ve followed that human anywhere on this planet.

Michael had thought perhaps he was still in a drunken stupor, but the sad truth of the matter was that aliens recovered quicker to sobriety than the typical human.

This nightmare had been a reality check, the worst kind, and Michael felt sick in his truck’s back as he re-lived every second of it.

He had made his way to the Manes’ residence after he had been released, even though he had known Jesse would kick his ass. But he had realized this time in jail, that he needed to get his shit together before his once-promising future really did wash away.

Michael had wanted to go and find Alex and apologize for being a dumbass for far too long. He wanted to prove to be the man Alex believed he could be. And he also wanted to open himself up raw and finally tell Alex everything. Absolutely everything.

The thought was terrifying, to say the least, but it was worth it. He saw Alex by his side for the long haul. Michael didn’t know much, but he knew they belonged together. 

He had known this the first time he had heard Alex sing and play his music in school. The moment had touched him in a way nothing else had. For once, he had wanted to know someone other than his alien siblings. Michael had wanted something for himself. 

Perhaps there was more to earth than he had come to understand.

But that apology and the communication of who he was and what they had done that night with Rosa, wouldn’t happen, because as he had searched around Alex’s house, a neighbor had asked who he was looking for.

“Alex Manes,” he had said innocently, a bit out of breath.

The older gentleman shook his head and said the words that had crumbled Michael’s existence. “Sorry, son. Alex Manes enlisted into the army and left first thing this morning. He’ll be gone for quite some time.”

Michael had felt as though he had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest, yet the words refused to register inside his intelligent brain. “I’m sorry, what? He’s...gone?”

“He sure is. His father is proud of his choice to go. Serving his country and all.”

“I’m sure he is,” Michael had growled. That sadistic son of a bitch had forced Alex, Michael just knew it. This was no choice. Alex wouldn’t have left him...not like this. 

“I’m sure Sergeant Manes will leave you his son’s mailing address.”

Not in this lifetime. Michael shook his head, “Nah. Thanks, though.”

He hadn’t remembered walking away. He hadn’t reflected going to the liquor store and getting several bottles. He hadn’t recollected driving his truck out to the desert to his and Alex’s spot. But he had remembered taking his first sip that day.

Because that sip of whiskey had been a lullaby of a soulmate gone away; the missing void would now be a permanent hole shaped resident etched into his dead beating heart. It was the love who wasn’t coming back. The one that got away.

The only one.

“I’ve lost my human,” he whispered to the stars foolishly, talking to the family he’d never actually known, the ones who had left him, too.

Michael looked at the night sky, knowing that now the world would be a darker place. The sun would not shine as brightly, and the stars would be forever muted with their brilliance.

With each sip, he said goodbye to the future he had hoped to have. He washed away the dreams and desires and replaced them with self-hatred and a mask of someone he no longer recognized.

Which was fine by him.

This would be the new song of his life here on earth.

His whiskey lullaby.

[justanotherpersonsuniverse]

The Sacrifice of Lila Rossi

Cyberpunk Mafia AU:

The small Medbay of The Garden had always been cramped, but ruthlessly organized to be the most efficient center for treatment in the city. Max, despite being someone that cared vary little for the acclaim and praise of others found joy in knowing that if he was known for anything, it was how well he could help people, especially since he was so often without the best methods to tackle a problem. He’ll often claim that when there are a thousand and one ways to use a paperclip, he could do the impossible with whatever he had on hand, he just wishes the universe didn’t actively try to test that theory…

In a rush a panic the crew of The Garden wheeled in a stasis pod, the contents of which was one Aurore frozen in a single moment within the chamber. Her eyes were wide in a mixture of fear and panic, several small burns littered her skin, a sign of far too many close calls at the wrong end of a plasma rifle, but the most prominent injury was the practical crater where her heart should have been the deep red of blood already overpowered the light blues of her usual attire well before she could make it into stasis.

“Alright I need a full report of the incident, no detail is too small.” Max rattled off to the panicked crew, already descending into his cocoon of holoscreens, processing information far faster than any normal human could. “Markov, activate ALL emergency protocols, I want to be prepared for the slightest hiccup.”

“Affirmative” a monotone synthetic voice rang out in the laboratory as several pieces of advanced equipment sprang to life.

“Please Doctor, you have to help her.” Sabrina begged as she refused to leave the side of pod. “I can’t just get my emotions back just to hurt like this. Please…”

“It’ll be ok Sabrina. Max is the best at what he does. Just let him do his thing” replied Rose who gently guided her away from the pod and into the arms of Chloe who hugged the girl with everything she could. “Alya, if you want your friend to get better, I suggest you answer his questions.”

“R-right” said Alya, snapping her attention from the pod, her whole body still shaking. “It was a mark III plasma rifle, like a really modified, really illegal model. We were so close to getting tangible proof that Argeste Industries was running corrupt experiments for the Mayor, we could finally put an end to the missing person posters…  but there was this huge gorilla looking dude that attacked us. He looked like he was being mind controlled since his eyes were blank. He decked me and sent me flying into a wall. He was about to blast me point blank when Aurore blocked the shot with her umbrella. The blast tore right through it and got her in the heart. Thankfully, the broken umbrella made some kind of flashbang so I used a stasis capsule to try and stop the bleeding and got us here as fast as I could. She… She saved my life…” she took a moment to compose herself, trying to ground herself in the present. “I… I have the footage. Here.” Placing her palm on a terminal, a copy of the footage began playing on one of Max’s screens.

“Looks like you’ve found Gordan Rillan,” said Max. “He was a dock worker that used to work at the pier before the mayor allowed a competitor to take the whole thing over and put Gordan in serious debt. Argeste industries offered him a position and then he was reported missing shortly after. Scans seem to show he’s suffered an even more advanced version of whatever the hell they did to Kim… As for the blaster well, its partially radioactive and goes against several international laws. Her heart can’t be salvaged. The stasis prevented the spread of radiation but… there’s no fixing this without an outright replacement.”

“Please there has to be something!” Sabrina begged. What if I gave her my heart, I can survive being shut down for a while and we can fix me up later.”

 “Unfortunately, since she doesn’t have a single interface, I can’t implant an artificial replacement. By the time I’ve put in the tech needed for a mechanical heart to work she’d already be gone. Unless we manage to find an organic option, and soon, I can’t do more than this and the stasis won’t hold forever.”

“Max.” everyone’s attention was brought to the main terminal which was glowing a bright pinkish orange, Lila’s true avatar on the screen. “What about project phoenix. I looked at the stats. They’re a match.”

“Lila… you do realize what you’re asking right?” Max asked, concern heavy in his voice.

“I do.”

“Alright…” inputting a few commands from his chair, a storage compartment opened up revealing a similar pod, only this one housed the same girl on the screen.

“Is that-” Alya began but couldn’t bring herself to finish.

“Yeah, it is.” Lila replied as she seemed to stare sadly at her own corpse. “when Gabriel, did what he did… he sold my body on the black market. Me and Max managed to find it before it was cut up, but the damage to the brain was too much. Max has been trying to hide that bit of info from me, maybe even try to lie to himself, but I already know the truth. I’m not coming back, at least not this way.” Her attention drifted to Sabrina who was beginning to understand the implications of what was about to happen. “The old me, the one long dead in that pod, she never once went out of her way for someone else, she never really could. She spent every day living by lying through her teeth. Other people were either targets or threats.”

“Sounds like a pretty lonely way to live…” commented Rose with sad compassion, remembering some of the patrons she couldn’t manage to save over the years.

“It was” replied Lila, a hollow chuckle punctuating her point. “It wasn’t until I ‘died’ that I finally found out that sometimes… people aren’t so bad. I somehow got myself a little brother in desperate need of my street smarts, but with a heart of absolute gold, and a Mom in desperate need of a vacation, but who actually looks at me, the absolute mess of a girl, and saw a daughter she actually said she was proud of… Heck if Clara keeps it up I might even have a second mom in the works.” There were some distortions to her avatar and you could swear they looked like tears. “and now that I know what it feels like to care about someone, I’m not about to let you lose the one you care about. Besides, we still need ‘Chameleon’ right now if we’re going to set things right after this.”

“Thank you so much Lila,” Sabrina replied, she reached a hand out to the terminal and her hand glowed ever so slightly the same color. It wasn’t a perfect touch, but Lila could feel the hand all the same, and Sabrina could the slightest sensation of someone grasping it.

“Lila,” Max caught her attention, “the promise still stands, I WILL bring you back one day.”

“I know you will Max. I’ll be looking forward to it. But for now we have a life to save, and the girl I once was deserves to do at least one good deed before she’s retired.” ———

Oh shit-

Well- damn Lila

Now that’s a fucking redemption arc holy shit

Thank you. That was fucking amazing.

I feel so bad for Aurore- what a trooper though- bitch got her heart exploded and she’s fucking fine

God dang

Poor Lila too—Holy shit I made her suffer in this au. Chameleon baby needs a break. Her accidentally becoming Adrien’s sister is really cute. I’m proud of her development, I hope I give her a happy ending.

Max and Lila being bro’s is lovely and fun. They’re too smart for their own good. This was amazing, thank you so much for this, I’m glad you guys like this au, I know I do.

[nike-shawn]

Can you please write a blurb for the vampire series like about Shawn taking her to the island and maybe it doesn’t make him weak and he can also stay or something idk you can change it up if you like. I just really like this series!

Island blurbs start now.... (thank you guys so much for requesting from this series. I love this couple and it makes me so happy that you guys love them too. Continue to send in requests and comments about the series-- they make my day). 

You’re crying from the second you leave your apartment to the moment you land on the island. 

Shawn’s with you, of course, but you know that he will be leaving soon. Just the weight of his hand in yours somehow hints at his inevitable departure, and each time he kisses you or wraps his arm around your shoulders, it feels like some sort of quiet goodbye. The two of you don’t speak much on the journey. Shawn looks sadder than you’ve ever seen him. He keeps reaching out, trying to get you to laugh, to even smile, but you can’t get yourself to take the bait. You’ve left your whole family, all your friends, and your boyfriend will leave you in a matter of hours. 

You’ll be completely alone. 

The two of you step off the tiny jet plane that took you from the mainland to the tiny string of islands where you’ll stay for some long period of time until things quiet down at home. While you should be marveling at the perfect weather, the crystal blue of the sky, the reflection of the sun on the majestic water, you can’t. You can’t do anything but let the continuous stream of tears fall down your cheeks. 

Shawn talks in some alternate language to a local who advertised his access to a boat. He squeezes your hand as you and the local man walk to the docks where he starts up a well-kept, expensive looking motor boat. You sit on the hot leather seats and once again retreat into yourself. 

“We’re here,” Shawn whispers in your ear, as if you can’t feel the boat come to a stop. He tugs on the hem of your t-shirt gently, prompting you to stand. You hear him thank the boat driver and you both step onto the dock that leads to white sands and palm trees and... nothing. There’s nothing else there. 

“What is this?” you ask. “There’s no one here.” 

“That’s the point.”

You feel an even bigger knot start to form around your vocal cords. “Shawn, what are we even doing?” you cry. “I can’t stay here completely alone. This is so cruel-- there’s not even one other person who lives here! What am I supposed to do!” You’re sobbing now, pressing your palms against your eyes as your shoulders shake. “I would rather risk my life back home than slowly die out here, all alone, missing you and my family and my friends.” 

Shawn just continues to walk beside you silently. His lack of a response makes you so angry that you grab his elbow and pull him to a stop. You say, “take me home. Take me home please, Shawn. I can’t stay on some glorified fucking sand bank!” 

He shakes his head and ushers you forward, stepping off of a dock and sinking into the soft sand. You feel helpless and so incredibly sad. As soon as you start to tell Shawn off yet again, the world around you transforms. 

The sand and palm trees in front of you shift to a large, luxury resort with above-water villas connected by a series of walkways. Pods of dolphins jump in the distance, and you see happy, tanned tourists wearing flip flops and baseball caps walk around the resort. Your tears seem to evaporate as you look on the scene with shock. “What...” you start to ask. 

“I wouldn’t leave you alone on a sandbank, baby,” Shawn laughs. 

That morning felt like it took eight years to pass you by, but the next couple hours sped by in a matter of blinks. Shawn leads you to the main building and you check in, and although you don’t remember giving anyone your luggage, it’s folded and organized in your villa before you even walk in. The villa itself features wall-to-wall windows with a view of the most beautiful ocean you've ever seen, stretching far and wide. Shawn patiently sits on the large, fluffy bed and waits as you tear up once again, but this time out of sheer joy that you don’t have to stay on that sad, empty island you saw the second you stepped off the boat. A pamphlet of various activities to do on the island (featuring dolphin riding, swimming with mermaids, and a class called “tips and tricks for humans who are dating fairies”) is in your hand, crinkling from the way your fingers grip the paper absentmindedly. 

“I’m so sorry for yelling at you.” You hear Shawn laugh from behind you, your hands still pressed against the glass of your beautiful windows. “This is the most beautiful place I have ever been. Thank you; I’m sorry.” 

You feel his hands wrap around you, his palms resting low on your stomach. He kisses the side of your head. “I’m glad you like it. I’m sorry that you had to leave your friends and family, though. I just don’t know how else to keep you safe.”

“No, no, I understand,” you tell him, shifting around so you are face-to-face. You quickly notice the absolute exhaustion clear in his features-- his eyes are drooping, and his skin has lost it’s usual radiance, replaced by a sunken, yellow-is tint. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Greta’s magic,” he reminds you. “I’m damned. She’s holy. The two don’t mix.”

The high of the island’s beauty wears off instantly. “You’re leaving.”

“I’m leaving,” he confirms. 

“It... it hurts you that much? It hasn’t even been that long.”

“It’s been four hours. The only reason I’m able to step foot here at all is because Greta did some kind of enchantment. But that doesn’t last very long.” 

You bite down on your cheek to keep from crying for what feels like the millionth time today. “Okay.”

“Please don’t be upset. I wish I could stay, I promise I do. But I need to fix things back home so you can come back. And I don’t want to keep you in danger-- you’re... you’re the number one thing in my life,” he admits, somewhat sheepishly. “It’s dangerous for both of us if you’re in their domain.” 

“I know.” 

He reaches up and grabs your jawline, his thumbs reaching up to gather the tears underneath your eyes. You close your eyes. “I love you,” he says. 

“I love you too.” 

“I will see you soon.” 

You nod. 

His hands tilt your face up so he can duck down and get his face parallel with yours. He lightly kisses you, his lips feather-light. You let him pull away and you sniff. 

He steps back and rocks back on his heels. You are confused for only a moment before it registers for you. “You need to eat, then?”

He nods reluctantly, looking guilty. He can’t help it, of course, and you never thought about how any absence from Shawn would mean he goes without sustenance for that same amount of time. Of course he needs to feed before leaving. 

You reach for his hand and lead him to sit on the side of the bed. You straddle his thighs and criss cross your legs behind his back, resting your head on his shoulder. He noses at the junction of your neck and shoulder. 

Then he bites. 

[popculturebuffet]

Top 10 Sealab 2021 Episodes (Comission)

Happy 2021 Everyone! After an utterly AWFUL fucking year, it’s nice to be in a brand new year with brand new possiblities, new projects you’ll see soon, finsihing the old.. and all that good stuff. And good friend of the blog and only patron and contributer kev had a great suggestion to comission to kick off the year. Since it’s 2021 it’s only fair ot honor one of the very first adult swim shows, one taking place in the same year and still one of it’s funniest and fucking weirdest, and as we’ve seen that threshold is vast: Sealab 2021 Sealab was created by the wonder twins of Adam Reed and Matt Thomspon, and if those names sound familiar.. that’s because their the guys who created Frisky Dingo, a cult classic i’ll defintely have to write about someday soon, and more famously and in Matt’s case still to this day, Archer. Yup, after adult swim jerking them around lead to the closing of their initial studio, the two moved to FX and here they are. So yeah this is where the roots of a lot of archers workplace shenanigans and petty dickery come from.  But even ignoring what it’d lead to, Sealab on it’s own is pretty damn good and holds up pretty well. Some jokes.. have not aged well, especially the treatment of Debbie as the villiage bicycle, but on the whole most of the humor is just really funny, really weird and really insane and I still love it after this revisit even if some episodes didn’t hold up so good, most of them held up good or even better than I remembered.  The show was THE first abriged series, taking bits of old forgotten and seemingl really damn boring hannah barbara show sealab 2021, and using the footage to tell the tale of a bunch of assholes, weirdos and what have you running an underwater research station.. and being so bad at it or getting into such other insane bollocks it often blew up. Continuity was loose, jokes were the priority, and dialouge was key since the animation was not great in any way shape or form, but the cheapness was enough of a charm and improved enough with time that it didn’t really matter. The show was good and set the bar for adult swim shows for better or worse alongside other greats like Home Movies, Aqua Teen Hunger Force and others. It also had a unique cast of mostly small time actors, and bafflingly one respected news pundit as local asshole idiot head Stormy, and broadway legend Henry Goz as series MVP Captain Murphy. It was good, it was part of my childhood and teen years, and I love it so. I bought the dvds, quoted it decently and will again now Kev’s brought my fire for the series back.  So naturally for a series like this since regular reviews just don’t.. work on something this insane sometimes, i’m instead counting down my top. 10 . episodes. Yes top 10 lists are comissionable, 5 bucks a pop. As long as I know the series well enough i’d be glad to and here I ws more than honored to. I also uped my game this time and rewatched every cantidate and thus I feel this may be one of my best lists yet. So without further adeu... grab your grizzlbees oninon burst , your bebop cola and your pitcher of whale cancer. this is the top 10 episodes of sealab 2021!

10. Tinfins  This one’s a classsic just for it’s uniquness, taking the piss out of glitzy and vapid hollywood insider shows and their annoying hosts, while also being delightfully weird, from mocking the show’s own animation by having detailed cgi used to map the limited animation, to Erik Estrada’s interview where his fictional self is clearly having none of toni and is also clearly getting wasted, to the utter bizzarity of Kid N Play being the films directors.. it’s just a good time. 

But what REALLY makes the episode are two things: The first is a series of increasingly bizzare commericals for Grizzlebees, a fictional restraunt that would become a staple of the show: From a simple commerical showing off their onion bursts, to their kids meals with tonic water, to Henry Goz’s utterly bizzare farm based commerical for it, to finally a commerical about depression being okay because grizzlebee delivers that’s pitch black as it is utterly hilarious, it’s just one hit after the other.  The crown jewel of the episode of course is the trailer ofr tinfins itself, which is insane and includes great bit after great bit, the best being the titular mecha shark cutting the power “How the hell can it cut the power? It’s a shark. “ Holy Crap indeed. 

9. In the Closet A bottle episode, which Sealab really excelled at and not the last on this list by a mile, as the show’s key was it’s dialouge the episode had a simple premise it quickly managed to have make some pretty insane turns. Marco, played by the glorious Eric Estrada and Muprhy, played by the late and very game Harry Goz, have been trapped in the suply closet for a few days, with Muprhy, being muprhy, having already married a bucket who has a history as a “Hookermop” named wendy. Soon other sealabians get caught inside too, and it results in plenty of hilarious gags, From muprhy sucker punching the hell out of everyone, to Sparks panicking under claustrophiba, to the repair guy getting sucker punched and no one caring much about his well being. This one lives off of Muprhy as while the others are good, Goz as he usually did during his time on this earh and on this series before his untimely passing, steals the whole damn show, and the ending, where it turns out Muprhy adopted and starved a bunch of fighting dogs, is a nice twist on everything. And the punchilne to it is utterly fantastic “It could be worse” “How in the hell could it possibly worse?!” “We could be out there.. with Stormy”. 

8. The Legend of Baggy Pants Speaking of Bottle Episodes and Captain Murphy being awesome.... this one narrowly beat out the episode it’s a spirtual sequel too, the classsic all that jazz, but this one is easily better. Like that one it’s a bottle episode that’s almost entirely just Captain Muprhy on some sort of shenanigan, with only abit of other cast, in this case Hesh, Eggers, and an unfortunate phone operator. In this case the premise is simple, kind of nuts, and utterly hilarious and utterly captian murphy: Captain Muprhy is having a round of Golf in Sealab, which is weird but fits the character but what ratchets it up to funny is apparently this underwater research station, for no reason, has a pro shop. So after loosing his last ball in a reactor, and sending poor hesh in to get it leading to the advent of the glorious Monster Hesh, Muprhy spends the entire episode tooling around in his “Muprh Mobile” trying to find the pro shop. As a result it’s basically 11 glorious minutes of Harry Goz going absolutely mental as muprhy, and it is as great as that sounds. From Muprhy’s sudden hatred of pod 6, to his bullying of Eggers, a hapless sealabian he runs into and then tries to run over, his bullying of dolphin boy and then trying to run him over, to his compuance as eggers steals his stuff and then his muprh mobile, it’s just glorious riffing from one of the best in the buisness and Harry is still deeply fucking missed by yours truly. RIP you magificent stalion. 

7. Cavemen One of the series final episodes, and easily one of it’s best. While the later Seasons get some flack. While season 3 is a bit weak,a s Goz’ tragic passing left them stumbling, Season 4/5... it’s complicated, is REALLY damn good and has some of the series finest episodes which many probably never saw. Case in point, Cavemen.  Cavemen is another spirtual sequel this time to lost in time, which also didn’t make the list, but this one is also better. Like LIT, it focuses on one of the series best dynamics: Brainy super scientest and often only sane man Dr. Quinn and all around idiot, moron and bane of everyone’s existance, Stormy, played by Brett Butler and Ellis Henican, both of who nail the two and this episode. The two are trapped in a cave after Stormy’s stupidity blew up sealab, and his trail of dead rabbits lead a shark to him and quinn. The result is a TON of great back and forth as Stormy tries to make Quinn see him as his best friend, Quinn rightfully shouts at Stormy for... everything, and Stormy tries to show off some ancient cave painting she himself made, that quinn quickly figures out because he left his paint around, and shows that off in a very clever gag I can’t convey correctly here. We also get knife fights and Quinn beating stormy over the head with a dead rabbit, an da surprisingly solem ending where the two hold hands as they die before heading up to heaven for a happy and weird ending. Overall an episode that’s really hard to dive into as it’s just relaly damn good and all in the performances, gags and pacing, as it’s done entirely in real time. Easily worth a watch. 

6. Shrabster Another great late season episode and another really experimental one. This one’s told from back to front, then we’re given the ending. It ends up working really well as it not only jacks up interest but the story itself is great. Asj it ends up turning out over the episode Dr. Quinn’s created the solution to world hunger: The shrabster, a hybrid of crab, shrimp and lobster. Grizzlebees, naturally wants it and after finding out Sparks didn’t actually own the rights, have Shanks, muprhy’s replacement, try and steal it, only for him to fall in love with the creature and spirit it away to give it a better life.. before shooting it in the end and eating it himself. We also get some good runners as Sparks starts speaking in slang and gets his neck rightfully snapped for it by Quinn, Stormy keeps eating shellfish despite being allergic, and we get the glory that is dan and don, two grizzlebees reperceives played by reed and thompson who are just an utter delight. I also ALMOST forgot the fucking announcer whose just fucking hilaroius the whole damn time with his various segways. 

5. HappyCake An early classic and damn worthy with a simple, batshit premise, which as should be clear by now was Sealab’s Bread and Butter. Muprhy’s happycake oven has been stolen, so he sends Stormy (who knows about the captain’s bedwetting and thus must be silenced) Quinn and a fishman out to find it in the ocean. Turns out it’s Sparks, in a character defining episode, fault as he’s working on world domination, and thus is working on driving murphy insane and thus stole it. He and marco discuss Marco becoming his henchman and getting metal teeth, Muprhy goes nuts, it’s a damn good time. Also a lot of talk of Michael Cain so that’s always a plus now I know who he is. And of course it has one of the series best lines period “Pudding can’t help the void inside” but it’ll help. Only this low because i’ts a bit structually messy compared to what’s to come and given it beat out two really damn good structurally episodes for this slot, that should say something. 

4. Hail Squishface! No best of list would be complete without this one. Once again the show banks itself on a simple premise: Captain Muprhy buys a white blob, a gloop, from a vendor and gives it liquor and gremlins style his little buddy multiplies and he soon gives them out to the crew. Everyon’es on board except Quinn.. whos naturally proven right ot be suspicious as the gloops methane output will doom them all and only muprhy, whose gone insane and is wearing squishface like a fez as you’d expect, wants them alive leading to what you’d expect: a flamethrower battle between muprhy and the crew with murphy decked out like a transformer.  This one’s just endlessly creative, from the various glooptransformations to the finale to the gags, i’ts just great. The fart gags are also.. actually pretty funny, which given i’m not a fart gag guy most of the ttime, speaks to how well executed they are and use the gags of htem being fart machines. Also we get muprhy in a fez and that alone cements it as top 5 matieral.. but as for the top 3. 

3. Moby Sick

Our last late season entry and the third to last episode of the show ever, this is top 3 for a reason, even above a classic like Hail Squishface. This one just has so many insane jokes packed in I forget quite a few despite them all being pretty damn great.  The premise is dour: A whale named Avalard shows up in Sealab wanting to die, as he has whale cancer. Stormy recognizes him as the star of the show “Gotta Have that Dick”, even saying “I gotta have that dick!”.. which of course they have a loop of ellis saying in the credits he correctly assumes will haunt him for the rest of his days. And if a whale starring in a cheesy 90′s tgif sitcom wasn’t enough we get the best gag of the episode as Marco eats some of avalard’s whale cancer leading to an insnae kool aid style add

And of course Marco later puts on a Mayor F Whale outfit and eats the cancer.. and his way out of avalard. But before that we get fights over wether the whale should die or not, including the guy on the pro whale side stabbing him, Debby’s rambling nosense and Shanks, who first builds a wooden whale to put his brain in .. that promptly sinks “and all my puppies were in there!” and then goes on a far right pundit show and gets into a giant robot phsyical challenge.. which frankly we need more of. Tucker Carlson would be .0001 percent more tolerbale if he were getting his ass kicked in a gundam is what i’m saying. 

2. Feast of Alvis I’ll be brief here, which in an article where i’m already trying to be brief says a lot but since I JUST covered this one a few weeks ago for my best holiday special lists: Feast of Alvis is, like most of sealab, deeply creative, deeply batshit and deply fun as Muprhy pushes his violent frontier version of jesus on everyone, with predicably great results. I watch it every year for damn good reason, it has some of the series best gags, including “Cram a penny o nthere” And great satire about the supposed “War on christmas”. I’m only being so breif as I said pretty much all I had to say last time. Exxcept this: Adam Reed is a DAMN talented voice actor both as virjay (though in hindishgt he REALLY shoudln’t of been playing a hindu man, especially since otherwise the series actually cast poc), and in various rolls and kills it as alvis here. So what could top one of my faviorites? Wellll.

1. Chickmate Another early one and as should be clear the best. It incapsulates the series the best, has the funniest jokes packed into it’s 11 minutes and in general is just an outstanding episode that throughly defined the cast and their rolls and chemistry.  Debbie’s biological clock is ticking and she wants to have a baby, and after mothering a dolphin dosen’t help decides one of the sealab men will be the father and auditions them. It goes as well as you’d expect: Muprhy thought she’d become his mommy, and not in a kinky way, Sparks provides one of the series best gags by giving her a modest proposal by jonathan twist and giving us the utter black comedy joy of him describing “ribs dripping off the bone”, Stormy’s tape gets interrupted by Hesh who clasically screams “Hesh wants some sex”, Marco freaks her out with his muscles and quinn seems sucessful before ultimately botching it and Debbie decides none of htem are worth it. We also get stormy’s untieontally racist and throughly stupid use of the term “Black debbie” to describe the other debbie, which he gets rightfully called out on. We also get this exchange as a result Quinn: What if everyone started calling you white stormy? Stormy: You mean there’s a .. black stormy Quinn: (Beat to take in the stupidity) no. 

It’s funny, it’s clever, and it’s just damn fun. Easily the series best outing and the reason it became what it became. And overall.. the series is just really good. it’s on HBO Max if your curious, and if you haven’t vistied that lab underneath the sea. maybe i’ts time to. Goodbye, Goodbye, goodbye for now, until then.. play us out marco and debbie. 

[radioromantic-moved]

it's the final livebloooog (doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo) this baby's extra long, because the episode is twice the average length. also big time spoilers. you know.

-"no place in the universe can compare with our past. our burned, ashy past." a statement about david's place and also about the earth which i'm pretty sure died from global warming in the stellarverse. not scary at all.

-HARTRO'S‏‏‎ ‎BOYS....ONE MORE TIME FOR THE ROAD <33333

-"do you know what this means???" "that‏‏‎‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎trexel‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎‎‏‏‎has no taste." "that we're all getting slushies."

-hartro's‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎little excited snuffles that sound like she's about to have a breakdown but, like, the good kind are basically exactly how i feel right now too.

-"what have i always told you??" "shut up! shut up! shut up!"

-HEY THEY MENTIONED FRANKENSTEIN!!!

-long time viewers of the Blog may remember that one of cyril's special books is‏‏‎ ‎frankenstein.‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎trexel‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎knows what‏‏‎ ‎frankenstein's monster is (kind of). you know what that means. at least one cute little reading time.

-i was going to make a joke about 'three neurodivergents argue about social rules' but that's kind of the entire podcast. with the number of neurodivergents differing by episode.

-THE TWO OF THEM BOWING TO DAVID...hartro‏‏‎ ‎genuinely getting into it and sounding like she's about to cry and‏‏‎ ‎trexel‏‏‎ ‎sounding so deadpan

-oh i Hate this conversation! i hate the conversation they're having about killing off everyone who's ever met a board member!

-hartro‏‏‎ ‎and‏‏‎ ‎trexel‏‏‎ ‎as david's pa's <3

-IS THE BOARD ALL DEAD. DID THEY NEVER EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE. BECAUSE IF SO THAT ALL CHECKS OUT

-"the...secret loss?" "yeah, you idiot, the secret loss where the board all died, have you been living under a rock??"

-CALLED IT, BABY

-yesssss go OFF imogen!!

-DON'T BE MEAN TO HER STANDARDS!!!!!!

-"hello, and welcome to 'so you've discovered that the board is dead,' with me,‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎sigmund‏‏‏‏‎ ‎‎shankeray.'"‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎trexel--"ugh, this guy again?"

-context:

-ughhhhh tasty tasty worldbuilding!!!! the board all dying in an incident....security was destroyed in a coup.....standards wants to replace imogen with new board.....

-HOLY SHIT

-IT'S A "NO MAN CAN KILL ME" RULE

-NO PERSON CAN ALTER IMOGEN'S CORE FUNCTIONS....BUT CLONES DON'T COUNT AS PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-OH MY GOD THIS IS SO TASTY

-IMOGEN WAS TRYING TO GET DAVID ONTO THE BOARD FOR HER OWN REASONS!!! AND THAT'S WHY HE'S SUCH A FUCKED UP LITTLE ANARCHY BOY!!!!!

-angry beyond belief that something that‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎‎trexel‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎‎could figure out confused me badly enough that i had to relisten to the same part twice and reread the transcript to figure out why the plan wouldn't work.

-in case of a deadlock....

-one of the ORIGINAL FOUNDING FAMILIES

-CAN BE NOMINATED -TO BREAK THE TIE

-AND GUESS WHOSE BITCH ASS IS FROM A FOUNDING FAMILY?????

-ugh you big big dummy...even your big moment is just reduced to who can take you to the better bar. but he does call david his favorite clone. and he DOES vote with them.

-"well--aheh-hah."

-oh my god. david's smug little laugh is my new favorite noise in the ENTIRE WORLD.

-number 48's maniacal laugh is Very fun. but don't shoot david please.

-"trust me! i'm a‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎geistman."

-the WAY HE SAYS THAT LINE IS FUCKING

-HMDGKDGDMHODHGGRGRRRRHHH.

-OH HE COMES THROUGH IN THE END

-DAVID'S CHAIR IS THE ONLY ONE NOT HOOKED UP TO AN ESCAPE POD SO HE HITS THE EMERGENCY EVACUATION AND

-GOD. FUCK.

-obsessed with the group's enraged "TREXELLLLLLLL!" as they get launched out of the airlock in the pod. that's absolutely cartoon levels of sillydumb and i love it.

-"can we....get them? we can't just leave them out there. it's inhumane." "they wouldn't do the same for you." "i don't know, i think...i think that maybe he would have."

-HI, BAWLING MY FUCKING EYES OUT

-THIS IS GONNA BE THE LAST TIME THEY SEE EACH OTHER ISN'T IT. THEY AREN'T GONNA GET THE POD BACK ARE THEY.

-YEAH. CHECKS OUT.

-okay so they're alive but in any number of thousands of habitable locations across the galaxy. that's not so bad! i can write fix-it for that easy! these motherfuckers are gonna be friends forever whether they like it or not! the worst found family may be free of the everpresent fear of death but they will never be free from the status quo.‏‏‎ ‎trexel‏‏‎ ‎finds out the planet they land on doesn't have a bar and he figures out a way to access a communications system from scratch so he can call david in tears.

-the little trumpet when david gets voted in....HELL YEAH, HAIL DAVID!!!!!

-"well, you do have the power to destroy‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎stellar‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎firma‏‏‎ ‎now. i'd never allow another ai to take over, but i'd quite happily...burn this all to the ground."

-YESSSSS KILL VIOLENCE DEATH KILL KILL

-imogen sounds so hurt when david starts asking alex to make copies to run functions...."explain away! i can both listen and plot my revenge at the same time."

-"...but that was before the population crash, so the escape shuttles should be able to contain everyone!" "and the clones!" "oh, right, the clones! recalculating and the clones too! wouldn't forget them! :)"

-oh i have too many thoughts about this conversation i'm just gonna post it and let it sit

-DAVID AND IMOGEN ON A PLEASURE CRUISE TO‏‏‎ ‎GALACTONIUM!!!!! FUCK YEAH BABY!!!!!! GOOD FOR THEM!!!!!

-after credits‏‏‎ ‎enola‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎scene!!! my beloved!!!!

-okay okay okay okay okay okay okay. hoooooooooooh boy.

-THAT WAS!!! REALLY GOOD!!!!! AND EVERYONE MORE OR LESS TURNED OUT OKAY....WE GOT OUR ANTICAPITALIST MESSAGE....the only thing we didn't get was the main four's theater troupe and i think i'll forever be a littttttle bitter about that but nobody's stopping me from writing about (or just imagining)‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎hartro‏‏‏‏‎ ‎‎and‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎trexel‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎eventually tracking down a working communications system and finding david and imogen so they can all yell at each other forevermore. i'm gonna miss these stupid little dorks so much but i'm so glad i got to be here for the ride. now to figure out whether cyril went with david and imogen or‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎trexel‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎and‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎hartro‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎‎and how it changes their fake little storyline.