#if thomas' drivers had any will of their own none of this would have happened

[skarloeyspa]

WHOS READY FOR SOME CENTENNIALS!!!!!! unasked for explanations below once again

This set of designs is different from Ryan's because i basically just traced my old sketches and redid them digitally to give them colour so there are less design details (sorry lmao)

ANYWAY continuing with the "time-accurate" clothing choices, I'm hoping it's more obvious with loey and neas this time. You have no idea how RELIEVED i felt when i saw neas' third overhaul was in the 2000s. I love details but I have been working with suits for like 30 designs by now.

Because I did these back in october I don't really have proper ref images but if you googled men's fashion for each of their respective eras you should get pretty good results and if you don't im sorry💀

Not sure if it's obvious but they're supposed to "age" with every overhaul, yea im aware my ability to draw people older than 40 is nonexistent-

On that note, I have a more in-depth hc for how the "human" of an engine appears which would explain how loey and neas can "age" but the short version is the "human" is a combination of the maturity of an engine's mentality and the engine's actual age

I do not know enough of the Skarloey Railway lore to back my headcanons but I hc that during their early days, the SR was more strict with appearances, hence the suit jackets and whatnot (kinda like how RWS SR engines all have the same livery)

Towards the SR's later days, the change of directorship and the increasing diversity of their rolling stock led to much more relaxed regulations on appearances. The jackets that the overhaul 2 designs are holding would look similar to the jacket that overhaul 1 loey is wearing, which would bear the engine's nametag and the signature red shoulder pad designating an engine's gauge

Also the nametag and specifically the number badge were details added later when I finished my handel and petah designs, yes I love it a lot that's why i mentioend it.

Overhaul 1 neas is particularly different from overhaul 1 loey because for one they're two different decades, but also the time between his first and second overhaul was when neas had to run the line on his own (not to mention the world war woah...)

I haven't really figured out specific height hcs yet but neas and loey are around the same height as each other but grow a tad with each overhaul

ok das it for this one i think, thank yall for the wonderful reception of ryan im so happy yall loved him😭🥹also thanks for making it to the end next time it's probably gonna be handel and petah<3

[1016anon]

Title: Four Tulips Author: 1016anon Fandom: Bridgerton Pairings: Anthony Bridgerton/Kate Sharma, Thomas Dorset/Kate Sharma Summary: Anthony is a strategic mastermind.

A/N - Not proofread. Yes, this will have a Home Evacuation Alert, don't worry. It's fluffy. Anthony's just being an idiot, as usual.

-2-

It was the plan to end all plans.

Anthony congratulated himself on his tactical genius. He even devised a clever name: Operation Doorstop.

Let the record show that Anthony had, over the years, made a sincere effort to befriend Kate. It was not his fault that she had rejected each and every olive branch.

He had realized sophomore year of high school that it was juvenile for him and Kate to be sworn rivals. They were no longer freshmen, wide-eyed and innocent of the ways of the larger world. They were sophisticated, jaded citizens in possession of driver's permits which allowed them to operate two ton machinery capable of going 120 miles per hour carrying four to seven life forms. Surely they were mature enough to let bygones be bygones and agree that Anthony was the better debater.

Alas, it was not to be. For whatever reason, Kate took exception to this and a rivalry which had been confined to debate team (and any class they shared where debate was possible) soon spread like mushroom spores to every part of their lives. And unlike a ring of toadstools, it was not a magical experience.

Now nearing the end of his junior year, it was imperative (for reasons of university applications, but mostly pride) that he become captain of the debate team. Why they could not be co-captains was obvious: in any contest between Kate and Anthony, there had to be a winner. There was none of the wishy-washy "everyone is a winner" bullshit. Besides, high school was preparing them to be Adults In The Real World, where one did not become co-president, or share gold medals at the podium.

Someone always had to be at the top.

In other words, Anthony had to beat Kate.  But they were deadlocked in an arms race, too evenly matched.  Anthony somehow had to gain an edge; and what better way to gain such an edge by using psychological warfare and spy games to divert Kate's attention?

This was the lesson Anthony took away from the Cold War. (Proving he had missed the entire point of that particular history lesson, but moving on.)

Anthony had no choice. He had to use the nuclear option. The circumstances were dire enough to justify the decision.

Adults knew that teenagers were soggy croutons in the French onion soup of gonads and prefrontal cortex development.

But teenagers--

Teenagers thought they were noodles in the broth of love.

Anthony, as a wise, worldly junior in high school who used aftershave and owned more than two suits, understood the finer points of teenage psychology.  The best distraction-- the way to victory and becoming captain of the debate team and putting it officially on his college applications-- was to get Kate a boyfriend.

She wasn't going to suddenly change extracurricular activities.  They had practically all the same classes; she wouldn't have a sudden influx of homework.  No-- the way to reduce the amount of time Kate had to prepare for the debate which would determine the course of Anthony's future by demonstrating to college admissions officers that he was a well rounded student with proven leadership skills (and hopefully led their team to victory next year) was to distract her with a boyfriend.

And as it happened, Anthony had, over the profound eternity of five teenage years, gathered all kinds of useless trivia about Kate that could only be gotten between sworn rivals.

Did anyone else care about which three questions Kate got wrong on the biology final their freshman year? No. But Anthony cared knew and remembered.

Did anyone else know by how many seconds Kate beat the school record at 100 meter hurdles? Yes, and his name was Simon, but he didn't count.

Did anyone else understand why Kate had a My Little Pony keychain? Fine, a few people, but did they know why it was Fluttershy? (It was an inside joke with her stepmom, Mary.)

All of this useless trivia, however, turned out to have a very good use. It was all valuable intelligence; these key details allowed Anthony to create an astoundingly good profile of the unsub named Kate Sharma. (No, he did not consider himself to be Hotch-- just because they had dark hair and Anthony had delusions of being in charge of everything didn't mean they were similar, Ben. Anthony fancied himself more of a Reid, i.e. a genius.)

Over the years, the unsub had demonstrated a preference for dark haired individuals-- male, female, trans, and non-binary-- who had a "sense of humor." (Anthony scoffed; everyone thought they had a "sense of humor," and everyone thought they wanted to date a person with a "sense of humor." Colin had an excellent sense of humor. Colin also had less sense than natural selection gave to a guppy.)

Back to the matter at hand, the unsub Kate Sharma's relationships did not last for more than a month, fizzling out for reasons unknown. (Siena refrained from pointing out to Kate that it was because she spent every single day after school with Anthony. At debate club.) She remained on friendly terms with all her exes and did not like getting coffee for a first date.

How did Anthony know this? Because they'd been working late and needed coffee. They went to the local coffee shop full of chintzy fat sofas and plaid wingback chairs (what garage sale from hell they came from, Anthony did not want to know); Kate complained that her dates always brought her here. She grumbled that the shop served mediocre masala chai and was covered in grad school students wearing noise cancelling headphones working studiously on their laptops watching Maru stuffing his adorable head into yet another box.

Anthony took exception to this. There was nothing wrong with watching Maru stuff his head into yet another box. Kate conceded that cats in boxes were cute, but there was nothing better than watching a row of guinea pigs waiting patiently in line for dinner and bouncing off with a carrot three times the size of their body.

The unsub Kate did not like to watch videos of corgis, despite having a corgi named Newton at home. So named because an apple had fallen on his head as a puppy; that day, Newton took a solemn vow to destroy all apples and its derivatives. He'd gone crazy when Edwina brought home apple blossom lotion, barking at Edwina with a look of determination on his face, as though was going to rescue her from the body-snatching apples.

Consequently, the unsub Kate loved apple pie a la mode simply because she could not have it at home. She admitted that she probably wouldn't care much for it otherwise, but if she ordered apple pie for dessert, Appa had to also let her drink a whole cup of coffee to cover the smell. Given that the first time she had apple pie was when she was eight, Anthony felt this explained a lot about her.

No, she did not drink coffee at eight years of age. At eight years of age, she got a second dessert if she ordered apple pie.

"So what you're saying is that you don't actually like apple pie, you like all the benefits that come with it."

"Mm hmm," she agreed, crumbs of pie crust on her lips. "So, what are you going to buy me?"

"What? Nothing! Get something for yourself!"

"You were the one who offered by buy dessert. Now you have to face the consequences."

"Newton can herd sheep for all I care, I'm not getting you anything else."

"Worth a try," she shrugged. "Are you going to have the rest of that?"

"Stay away from my cheesecake, Sharma. I'm warning you."

Right, so the point was that Anthony weaponized all this knowledge for Operation Doorstop.

First, he chose a suitable target.

Siena: "You want me to date my best friend. So that you can be captain of the debate team."

"No," (yes), "I just think you'd be good together."

Anthony made the mistake of opening his spiral bound three-subject notebook.

"Let me see that--"

"Wait, Siena, don't--"

"Oh my god-- is this a list?"

"It's not what it looks like--"

"Candidates must be: tolerable, dutiful, suitable enough lips for French kissing, and at least half a brain, preferably with a sense of humor. You have a suggested list of first dates?!"

"Give that back to me," he snatched it out of her hands.

"Ant, what the hell?"

"She has a type," he grumbled.

"You are insane. Why can't you be co-captains?"

"Because!"

"Oh my god, that's exactly what Kate said too."

"Wait, you've talked about debate team with Kate?"

"Nope, no, I'm not getting in the middle of this. This is between the two of you."

"So... is that a no?"

Siena just stared at him like he was an imbecile and walked away.

"Right," Anthony crossed her name off the list.

--

Operation Doorstop had come to something of a standstill.

He arranged interview with all the potential candidates and they fell short.

One didn't know about the Peloponnesian War; another didn't understand the sociological and economic importance of shifting fiscal responsibility of the household to women. Another couldn't name the composer of a classical harp piece; still another didn't know that the Rite of Spring was a dance, not the soundtrack to the animated dinosaur battle in Disney's Fantasia.

Anthony almost considered giving up on Operation Doorstop-- he was devoting too much time and energy to it and not enough time to arguing with Kate.

Then: a miracle.

Thomas Dorset.

Dorset was the answer to all of Anthony's problems. Once Kate and Dorset started dating, she wouldn't have time to prepare for the all important debate which would determine who became team captain. Anthony's plan wasn't malicious-- she would have a consolation prize, after all. Dorset was a good guy. He checked all the boxes. Anthony wondered why he hadn't thought of Dorset in the first place.

Now all he had to do was set them up on a date and he'd be captain of the debate team.

Win, win, win, for all parties involved.

--

"What do you think of Tom?"

"Tom?" she frowned. "Tom who?"

"Dorset."

"We're friends. I had world history with him last year, why?"

"Nothing, no reason."

Kate narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing him.

"Did he say something?"

"Who?" Anthony asked.

"Tom."

"No. I just wondered if you knew him."

"You asked me what I think of him, not whether I knew him," she replied. "I don't think he'll do well on the debate team."

"Why do you say that?"

"I mean, he's smart and knows what he's talking about, but he doesn't really enjoy confrontation. He rarely participated in debates last year in history."

"But you think he's smart."

"Yes? What is this really about, Anthony."

"Nothing. I just wondered," he paused. "Would you date him?"

Kate looked like she had no idea how to answer that question.

Anthony shrugged.

"You think he's smart, I mean. He sounds like your type."

"Why are we talking about my dating life? Wait-- do you keep track of my dating life?"

"Of course I don't. It's just been a while since you told me about one of your conquests--"

"They're not conquests, I've told you a million times--"

"And the dance is coming up--"

"That's in two months."

"Hazards of growing up with Daph."

"Oh, I meant to ask," Kate grinned sweetly, never a good sign. "Has Simon asked her out yet?"

"WHAT?!"

"Daphne and Simon. It's obvious to everyone they like each other."

"She's a freshman! He's a junior!"

"He's a good guy."

"She's my little sister!"

"So? He's your best friend."

"Exactly!"

"I can't believe you," Kate rolled her eyes. "You'd better not warn him off her."

"He's known her since she was nine!"

"They're sweet. Anthony, there's no harm in it--"

"Oh, and I suppose you'd be fine with Eddie dating me."

Kate made a face.

"That's different-- you and I aren't friends."

Something in Anthony's heart fell when she said that. It must have shown on his face because she hurriedly said,

"I meant-- we're rivals. Frenemies."

Anthony smiled wryly.

"And frenemies don't let younger siblings date frenemies."

"Yes," she nodded emphatically. "See? You get me."

"I don't think I do."

Then, Anthony had a brilliant idea.

"I won't say a word about Simon and Daph--"

"Good"

"If you go on a date with Tom."

"What? Why would I-- I don't even like him like that!"

"You're asking me to do something uncomfortable, I only think it's fair I ask the same."

"Did he put you up to this?"

"No."

"Are you and Ben betting on me again?"

"I have never bet on you in anything. It's your friends-- Siena, Gen, and Marina."

"As though George and Desmond aren't the same. And your brothers."

"This is not a bet. I promise you."

"Then what is, Anthony?"

"I don't know," he shrugged. "He's looks at you sometimes."

"You look at me. You stare at me."

"Frenemies," he smiled.

"Ugh. So if I say yes, you promise you won't make a big deal about Simon and Daph."

"I give you my word."

"Ugh."

"And you won't have to listen to Eddie complain about Daph interrupting her time with El."

"Don't remind me," Kate shuddered. "I'm scarred for life."

"You're scarred? How do you think I feel?"

"I'm fairly certain El didn't subject you to a play by play description of--"

"I can't hear you," Anthony said, covering his ears.

She flipped him off.

"So?" he asked.

"So what?"

"You know."

"Fine. One date. But he's never going to ask me."

--

"Whatever you do, don't take her to the corner coffee shop, she hates it there."

"Okay," Dorset looked at him, amused.

"And if she asks for a second dessert after apple pie, always get it for her. And she will order apple pie, I guarantee you."

"Ant, are you sure you don't want to date her?"

"What? Me? Of course not," Anthony said, as though the very notion was ridiculous. "She hates me. We're rivals. Frenemies."

"I don't think spending every afternoon in each other's company is considered hatred."

"It's because we're arguing," he said, dismissive. "She like tulips, but I guess they're out of season."

"Look, Ant, Kate and I are good friends and I like her, but I don't think she returns the feeling."

"She hasn't had a chance to get to you know you."

"Because... she spends all her time with you."

"Look, just ask her. She might say yes."

"I'd rather not have my ego crushed."

"Jack was stupid. And he's not her type."

Dorset's eyebrows, which were already quite high, seemed to be making a bid for an Olympic record.

"You and Kate have a lot in common, I promise you. She goes to India very other summer to visit her family."

"What do you get out of all this?"

"Pardon?"

"You're trying to set me up with your frenemy, Ant, so I wondered what you get out of all this."

"Oh. Well, I can't be nice once in a while?"

Tom laughed.

"Does it matter what I get out of it? You'll be happy, she'll be happy, I'll be happy. We'll all be happy, the reason doesn't really matter."

"I think the reason you'll be happy will matter a lot," Tom shook his head, smiling. "But this is clearly about Kate and she's more than capable of handling you."

"Your vote of confidence is much appreciated."

"If things go wrong, I'm placing the blame firmly on you."

"Absolutely."

"And you're certain you don't want to date her?"

"One hundred percent."

"All right. What have I got to lose?"

"See? You get me."

--

"So."

"So what?"

"You're smiling. I see my plan is working."

"He told me you coached him on everything."

"I wanted to give him a fighting chance. So? It went well?"

Kate blushed.

"He's very sweet."

"I don't want to know details."

"I was going to give you any," she rolled her eyes. "We're going on a second date next weekend."

"I told you, he's your type."

"You're going to hold this over my head for the rest of time, aren't you."

"When I'm right, I'm right."

"Yes, and when you're wrong, you're so terribly wrong."

"See, Kate, I know you."

She looked at him a little strangely.

"I suppose you do."

"And, I know I'm going to crush your arguments at practice tomorrow."

"You wish."

"Then what're waiting for? Give me your best shot."

--

"Hey, Kate."

"Oh--" Kate turned to see Anthony leaning against the locker. "Hi, Anthony."

"You're the only person who says my full name."

"Am I?"

"You've never called me Ant."

"I never noticed," she shrugged, putting her books in her bag.

"Practice?"

"Not today. Tom and I are, um, going to see a movie."

Anthony didn't understand why his heart felt like it was slowly, slowly rolling down a hill.

"Told you I was right."

Kate made a face.

"You were, so go away and bug someone else."

"Kate," Tom came up to them. "Ready to go?"

"Yeah. I was just telling this one to stop being so smug."

Tom laughed.

"I don't think that's possible. It's part of his charm."

"I'm standing right here, thanks."

"Oh, is that you, Ant? Didn't see you there," Tom joked.

"Ant!" Simon called.

"Looks like I've gotta run. Have fun on your date!"

Tom opted for the genial, "Thanks, we will," while Kate just told him, "Have fun at practice."

Anthony saluted and walked to Simon.

"They look surprisingly good together," Simon remarked.

Kate chose that moment to give Tom a peck on the cheek, which made the other boy turn red. Anthony watched her tease him, her smile wide and clear.

"Yeah," Anthony replied. "Yeah they do."

--

Operation Doorstop: Successful.

Anthony: Strategic Mastermind.

Onward to victory.

[joezworld]

📁

Specifically, any headcanons of the Sodor Engines interacting with the internet, or the internet in general?

For some reason, I’d imagine that podcasts and the like are popular among vehicles in general.

That is a question that I've been working on for some time - because I'm workshopping my own Tornado headcanon (and boy oh boy does she use the internet a lot) - but I have some ideas for the Sodor engines as well: 

Henry is probably the most "plugged in" engine on the island, weirdly enough. One of his drivers gave him an iPod back in the early 2000s, and kindly preloaded it with a bunch of torrented music.

 BTW, that works because all the engines are now equipped with automatic train warning systems, and the little on-board computer has a USB port - as a nice side effect it allows music players to work with the engines in the same way as bone-conducting headphones do. The computer also acts as some kind of computer interface, which I am not going to explain how that works because Jesus Christ I don’t know how it does either.  

 Henry has managed to upgrade his iPod a few times since thanks to hand-me-down units from NWR staff, so he eventually got his buffers on a wifi-enabled iPod Touch and now downloads new music from the station wifi. He does listen to podcasts, but as every other engine will tell you, you could show Henry ten thousand new and exciting songs from the best artists in the world, and his top ten played songs are still going to be Genesis, Phil Collins, and Yes. Bear considers it a win that he managed to convince Henry to regularly listen to Rush after a mere twenty years of convincing. 

 Mavis and Daisy listen to a very interesting program called The News, because as stated elsewhere, they invest a shitload of money and need to be on top of things. Thomas and Percy wish that Daisy would use headphones or something similar to that, instead of listening to Bloomberg TV at loud volumes in the middle of the night. Toby frankly doesn’t mind, as it’s very nice to be kept up-to-date on the outside world.  

In a move that surprises no-one, Bill and Ben have a podcast where they talk about whatever they think about at that moment - usually horse-racing, investing, and clay mining. As such, they have a wide audience, almost none of whom know that they’re that Bill and Ben, as their podcast is audio-only.  

 In an also unsurprising move, Edward and BoCo have been made very much aware that Bill and Ben have a podcast, but are still unsure as to what the hell a podcast is, despite being frequent guests on it.  

Of the main line diesels, only Bear has shown any real interest in the internet, and was immediately put in charge of the Amazon Alexa when a unit was installed in the diesel shed. He also has an iPod that he got for Christmas a few years back. (The NWR has a very good personal  electronics recycling program called give it to Henry, he’ll make use it.)  

Bear does listen to podcasts as well as music, but his choices are so insufferably boring that even Henry refuses to listen to them. (I don’t really listen to podcasts - despite making one - so insert the most boring podcast you can think of here.) 

 As for other internet uses... 

Gordon is very up-to-date on the newest social media trends - somehow - but only really cares when he is involved. He won’t admit it, but he’s been trying to figure out how to work a camera/selfie stick for some time so he can start up his own Instagram account. So far he has been unsuccessful, but one day he will manage it. 

 James has had an ongoing feud with his own Wikipedia page for about a decade now. The article sourced most of its information about his construction off of some out-of-print book about the L&Y. The book in question is accurate about James’ class, but not James himself - as he was a prototype engine. There’s no other primary sources available, so the very dedicated Wikipedia mod who created the page won’t change it - no matter how much James complains that he was there! He knows what happened! 

Every now and again a TTTE fan blog/tumblr will make a post about hypothetical “ships” of the Sodor engines. Most of the time it’s shipping the core characters like Gordon and Henry, much to Gordon’s bafflement and Henry’s amusement! 

Only one blog (a ttte fan tumblr by the curious name of @mean-scarlet-deceiver  ) has gotten it right. Henry actually reached out to congratulate this blogger, but was unfortunately mistaken for a very dedicated roleplay account.  

James is very annoyed by these blogs, as they have never once correctly guessed who he is “shipped” with! He has tried several times to be seen in public with Delta, but these events have never gone as planned - the “best” instance is when Edward rolled by at exactly the wrong moment, leading to months of speculation that JamesxEdward was the ship to look out for! 

Thomas, being a generally oblivious sort of engine, was totally unaware of the online fan community around the TV show until he started getting actively harassed by vloggers and Instagrammers in the early 2010s. He’s fine with it now, but it was a deeply unusual experience for most of 2012.  

Toby has developed an unexpectedly popular following on social media following his collab with Stormzy. His official twitter is huge now, with over a million followers, even if he has no idea what to do with it. He posts rarely, but usually manages to make an incredible post when he does.

No-one is sure who told Oliver what a “fan-production” is, but if you manage to get ahold of him for any period of time and ask him nicely, he will lend his voice to your TTTE fan-project, so long as it isn’t about [INSERT TERRIBLE SOCIAL/POLITICAL VIEW(S) HERE]. This means that he has 100% voiced dramatic readings of NSFW Fanfics before, which is always an absolute riot to spring on people unannounced.

There is a series of slice-of-life TTTE fanfics on Ao3 that have been written with such accuracy and innate railway knowledge that people are sure it was written by a Sodor engine, but nobody knows which one.

The Culdee Fell Railway has very active Instagram, Twitter and YouTube accounts, with all of the engines and coaches showing up regularly. It’s about the closest any of the railways on Sodor have come to what those outside the UK would call “normal locomotive social media”.

The Skarloey Railway has social media accounts too, but they don’t really feature the engines in any meaningful way, instead being used as a normal service announcements page.  

 The SR is a real working railway that doesn’t rely on tourism money as much as the others do, so they get a bit of a pass here.  

 The Arlesdale Railway has Twitter and YouTube, which didn’t usually get a lot of hits until 2020, when Ivan and Amanda Farrier started badgering the staff to make some videos just to alleviate some boredom. So far the most popular videos on the channel are a front-mounted camera video of the entire line slow-tv style, Bert explaining how steam engines work, and a video of Mike complaining about Justin Bieber for a solid half-hour.  

 That’s about it as far as Sodor goes, but before we’re done, I want to take a moment to talk about Tornado, because I have some fun ideas for her... 

First of all, we need to establish that Tornado is very young. Her construction only started in late 90′s, and she was steamed to life in 2000, putting her firmly into the “Zoomer” category. Add in the fact that she was built by a bunch of old men who didn’t really know how to treat a new engine, and she was raised much more like a human than a locomotive - I’ll get to this much more in the proper Tornado Headcanon post, but what this means here is that when social media started being a thing in the mid-to-late 2000′s, the people at the A1 Trust decided that they needed a young person to run things like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace... and, well, Tornado was the youngest person in the trust by a large margin.

I should state here that in the rest of the world, locomotives are on the internet at roughly the same level as humans are, so there’s plenty of equipment to connect a phone/computer/camera to an engine - being English, the A1 Trust didn’t know how common it was, but they managed to get it up and running just the same.

 So Tornado has very quickly become attuned to the internet, just like any other teenager would. (yes, let’s let that settle into our minds for a moment - Tornado is barely old enough to drink in the US!) Quite naturally that means that she knows social media inside and out, and is actually quite a proficient social media manager for the trust, managing all of their social pages. More than one person who has complained about the trust on twitter has unknowingly been complaining to Tornado herself! 

 “On the internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog Engine”. 

 Tornado has her own personal social media accounts too, but most/all of the time she gets mistaken for a very dedicated role-player, as the general perception of British Locomotives is that they don’t tweet. This has resulted in some amazing reactions from podcast hosts (because, as you might expect, Tornado is very knowledgeable about steam traction in the 21st century, and tweets about it often, so train podcasts want to talk to her) when she gets invited onto video calls, turns on her webcam, and is met with screams from people who suddenly realize that her profile picture is accurate.  

 By far the best instance of this is when she was invited onto a video call with a railfan podcast. She was at the NRM at the time and managed to convince them to let her use their Skype setup. A wide-angle lens was needed because she was on the turntable in the Great Hall, so that podcast quickly got sidetracked when her webcam was turned on and revealed Tornado, with Mallard, Evening Star, City of Truro, and Green Arrow visible behind her. Whatever the original topic was quickly got thrown out in favor of a 2-hour Q&A with some of the most famous engines in the UK. 

[smallheathgangsters]

Guardian Angel | G!S

A/N: Sorry if this is bad, I’m only just getting back into writing lol. This one is for @maggiescarborough. 💛

Requested: by @maggiescarborough

Gold!Sister Reader

Word Count: 1333

Type: some fluff, violence, description of murder

Summary: Bonnie’s older sister is known for helping with the dirty work. Lucky for her, she always has her brother by her side.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The ambush was perfectly planned. Your father had mapped out every move, every single step. There was no chance Changretta would get out of this alive. At least you hoped it would be that way.

It had been a challenge convincing your father to let you be part of it. Even though, in the end, you would always join and help the men do the dirty work, your father tried explaining to you, that this specific one – compared to all the other jobs – was too dangerous for a woman.

Luckily, you could rely on your younger brother Bonnie. Chuckling and shaking his head at his father’s desperate tries to make you stay at home. “Dad, you know she’ll be joining us, no matter what you say. And that she’ll be more than useful.”

A deep sigh.

An eyeroll.

But he gave in. As usual. And you knew it wouldn’t be the last discussion you would have regarding the job. Only half an hour later, you were staring at your father tauntingly, an eyebrow raised.

He shook his head violently. “Absolutely not.”

“Stop resisting, you’ll only make the bad decision of sending one of the men up on the bridge.”

“You’re going to get hurt, Y/N,” he tried to explain, clearly unhappy with your stubborn behavior.  

You huffed. “If someone would get hurt, you wouldn’t be executing it this way. Or is your plan not as good as it seems?”

“No!” your father exclaimed, a little too loud.

“No,” he repeated with a lower voice, running his hand over his face, sighing for what seemed like the millionth time. “No, the plan is good.”

“So, what’s the problem? I’ll clearly be quicker and quieter. They won’t notice me, I promise,” you told him, sending him a kind smile.

His weak spot.

The gorgeous smile of his second-oldest daughter. The tough one. The one he would never, could never tame. A wild, but lovely soul. And if Aberama were truly honest with himself, the daughter he was most proud of. She was fearless, courageous and completely independent. She didn’t need a man to rely on. The only person she had to rely on was herself. And he knew, she’d be safest on her own.

“Fine.”

As a result, you were now crouched behind a large bush, as close to the bridge as possible, watching Changretta’s vehicle roll past you, directly towards the wagon you and Bonnie had tipped to the side only five minutes earlier. A police car was positioned on the other side, waiting for our carriage to be cleared out of the way. The automobile abruptly came to a halt and you heard mumbling in a language you did not understand. A police officer went over to the Italians and spoke to them through the window.

“What’s that accent?” you heard the officer ask.

An incomprehensive answer.

“Well, you gonna have to wait – we waited for you fucking yanks until 1918. It’ll be clear in twenty minutes.”

With that, the officer turned around and went back to his vehicle.

Your father knew he would get out of his car. He knew Changretta would not be patient enough to wait twenty minutes for the path to be cleared.

It took thirty seconds. You almost chuckled to yourself. Thirty seconds. What a child.

The slamming-shut of the doors was your sign. You straightened yourself up and stepped out from behind the bush. You had to be fast, probably only had a few seconds to complete your task.

Your feet silently carried you over the road, the coolness of the knife against the palm of your right hand. Your grip on the weapon was tight, but not in a nervous way. You weren’t nervous, you were cautious. Your father, your brother depended on you. And as much as you hated to think about it – Thomas fucking Shelby depended on you.

A few steps later, you were stood next to the driver’s side. A man in a black coat and a black hat was sat behind the steering wheel, watching the men in the middle of the bridge. He was so focused, that he didn’t notice you appearing beside him and lifting the knife. You also raised your left arm.

Just to be sure, you thought to yourself, before covering the driver’s mouth with your glove-covered hand, startling him and most likely scaring him to death.

Almost literally.

With a swift and precise movement, the silver blade ran over the poor man’s throat. Blood spilled out of him. He started chocking and coughing, but you kept your hand over his mouth, keeping him from making any noise at all.

When he eventually stopped splattering blood all over himself, you let go of him and began taking careful steps back to your hiding spot, constantly watching the Italians’ movements. You knew you would succeed. You knew your father would have nothing to worry about. And you knew the plan would work. It always did.

Positioned back behind the large plant, you suddenly heard a whisper.

“Y/N!”

You whipped your head around, spotting your brother a little further down between the trees. He nodded his head, gesturing you to join him and abandon your hideout. You shook your head, grinning and mouthing no.

But Bonnie wasn’t satisfied with your response. He began waving his arm, signaling for you to move down. Please, he mouthed back, sending you a smirk.

Eventually, you sighed and looked back to the happenings on the bridge. Maybe it really was best for you to get away from Changretta’s car. You were still super close.

You noticed the Italians getting fed up with the officer and returning to their vehicle. If you wanted to move, it had to be now. They would notice their dead friend at any point now. So, you sent a last glance to the enemies before hurrying down to Bonnie, ducking the entire way, so nobody would spot you.

“That was smooth!” Bonnie complimented. “Let’s make sure the next few minutes work out just as amazing.”

You gave him a wink and crouched down beside him. “I told dad there would be nothing to worry about.”

Instead of replying to you, your brother nudged you with his elbow. “They noticed.”

A blink of an eye later, you heard a shot. Your father and one of your men had started shooting, hitting one of Changretta’s guys. Bonnie quickly loaded his gun in response and started shooting as well. Unfortunately, none of his shots hit a target. Instead, Changretta and his fellow grabbed their own guns, firing back at us. Since they did not know where the shots came from, they pointed their weapons aimlessly into the woods.

Though, as it turned out, you were not paying enough attention, because you did not realise that Changretta eventually spotted you and Bonnie. For some silly reason, you were so inattentive, that you did not notice the gun barrel pointed towards the two of you.

Suddenly, you heard a gunshot. Simultaneously, you were pushed out of the way by your brother.

It only took you a splint of a second to comprehend what had happened.

“Fuck, I’m so sorry Bon!”

He was bleeding. A lot.

“Fuck, I should’ve seen that coming,” you exclaimed, pressing your hand against his wound. Luckily, the bullet had only hit his arm.

“It’s okay,” he groaned, trying to smile at you.

You frowned. “Stop smiling, why would you do that?”

“Smiling or saving your life?”

He chuckled lightly.

“Both. But mostly, why would you take my bullet? I could’ve handled a shot wound, trust me. It would not have been the first time.”

“I would die for you, sis,” he said, the widest grin on his face. “I’m your personal guardian angel.”

You snorted at his ironic comments. “You’re a fool, Bonnie Gold. Thank you, though.”

And without feeling even a tiny bit bad, you pressed a little harder on his wound, making your sweet brother scream out in pain.

++++++++++++++++++++

tag list: @livingforbarnes  @shelbyreilly @multi-fandom-iimagines @lovemissyhoneybee @peakyblindersengland @lucillethings  @callmesunshinexx @simonsbluee @anyasthoughts @sophieshelby

[electronicgrowth]

Can’t Get Enough Part 3

I can’t get enough of posting this (ahahaha get it?). There’s a little violence in this chapter and a lot of time period standard sexism. Sorry, but it’s the 60′s my friend. 

I was planning on posting this at a later date, but I had an absolute TERRIBLE day yesterday and in the midst of it I was able to smile because of all the love this series is getting. It’s not much but every single like means the world to me. So, without further ado, here’s the next chapter a little early as a thank you for making me smile on a horrible day.

Summary: The two most stubborn people in Knockemstiff, Ohio have eyes for only each other. Lee Bodecker is determined to become the town’s next sheriff. He knows that image is everything. Billie Dechswaan doesn’t care about her image at all. All she wants is to leave Knockemstiff and never come back. But Lee has other plans for her. Both are far too stubborn to give up their own plans. What happens when they can’t get enough of each other?

Word Count: 3.2k

Billie drifted through the rest of the day in a distracted fashion. She helped her mom in the kitchen for a bit, then she was allowed to read her book. Before dinner she decided to go clean up. She fixed her hair nice. She wouldn’t admit it, but she wanted to impress Lee. She fought with herself. She saw her whole future laid out before her. If she stayed in Knockemstiff and married Lee, she knew her life would be good. She knew that deputies made good money, and sheriffs made even better money. They could have a nice house. And all the babies she wanted. The other part of her still wanted adventure. Maybe Lee could be her adventure. She didn’t know anymore. 

Billie’s parents always went to sleep at nine. Billie went up around the same time each night. Unfortunately, she shared a room with Sylvia and Clara. Sylvia was sixteen. So, both her and Billie covered for the other. And Clara stuttered so bad, she couldn’t tell her parents even if she had caught her older sister. Billie told Sylvia she was going out that night, Sylvia smiled. The worst thing about the farm house was that all the children’s bedrooms were upstairs and each floorboard creaked underfoot. Billie carefully avoided the loudest steps as she snuck out of the house at 9:45. Joseph and Thomas were still in the living room, luckily the living room was just outside her parents room. The boys were watching some program on the tv while playing cards. Not paying attention at all. Billie managed to slip out of the back door totally unseen. She ran across the yard and into the woods. Once she was into the woods, she slowed to a quick walk. She felt safe with the trees wrapped around her, hiding her from prying eyes.

She walked until she got to the road where Lee said he’d meet her. He was already there. He was leaned up against the cruiser, smoking a cigarette. She emerged and smiled at him. He was quick to put out the cigarette and open the driver’s side door for her. She slid in, but only just so he could get in. She was pressed up against him. The car roared to life, Lee drove just ten minutes. They drove away from town, he slowed when they drove just barely off the road, down a dirt path. He cut the engine and turned to Billie. 

She pounced on him. Kissing him aggressively as she climbed into his lap, straddling him. The skirt of her dress rucked up in the process. She couldn’t find it in herself to care. Her tongue skated across the roof of Lee’s mouth. His hands were everywhere, her thighs, her breasts, her ass. He couldn’t touch enough of her. She ground down on Lee’s lap, he was hardening under her. She moaned into his mouth. He pulled away, panting against Billie’s lips. 

“Lay back, baby,” Lee grunts. She followed his directions, laying herself across the front seat of his cruiser. He pushed her dress up and pulled her underwear down her legs. She’s exposed to him. He rubs his fingers up and down her slit, wetness leaking out of her. He sinks two fingers into her, pumping in and out of her vigorously. He curls his fingers inside of her. She can barely contain her cries. Her eyes are squeezed shut in ecstasy. 

Lee decided that he wanted to try something new. He kneels on the floor of the car, continuing to fuck her with his fingers. She doesn’t even notice that he’s changed his position. He leans forward and removes his fingers from her. She whines at the loss. But Lee quickly laps at her folds. Billie’s eyes fly open and she sits up in shock. 

“Just relax, baby. Let me make you feel good,” he groans. She lays back down, sounding breathless. Lee continues to lap at her, soon he pushes further in. He sucks her essence from the source like a man dying of thirst. 

“Lee,” she whimpers breathlessly. He grabs her thighs, pulling her closer, humming against her. The vibrations making her even wetter. Lee separates himself from her folds, and licks up to her clit. He spells the alphabet with his tongue and places his fingers back inside her. He moves his fingers almost violently. Billie can’t contain herself much longer, her thighs begin to shake uncontrollably and she gasps for breath. She cums with a strangled cry. Lee lets her ride out the orgasm before removing his fingers from her. She’s panting as she watches him suck her juices from his fingers. 

“You taste so good, baby,” he groans. Billie sits up and kisses Lee. She can taste herself on his tongue and she’s desperate for more. Billie undoes Lee’s belt as they kiss. His cock emerges hard as a rock. She delicately wraps her hand around it, and jerks him back and forth. She’s going slow, painfully slow. 

“Your mouth,” he says. Billie nods and gets down on her knees. She licks up his length multiple times before taking him in her mouth. She bobs her head slowly, Lee looks down and makes eye contact with her. Lee has a unique taste. Despite the fact that she just came, she clenches her thighs as she tastes him. He thinks about fucking her face, but she’s so pretty like this, mouth stuffed with his cock.

“Faster,” he grunts. Billie obliges quickly. Her hands aid her mouth. One hand wraps around his cock, it closely follows her lips, gently twisting. Her other hand fondles his balls. 

“Good girl,” he groans, head leaning back as he closes his eyes. One of his hands rests in her hair. She seems spurred on by his encouragement and she speeds up. 

“That’s it baby. You’re doing such a good job,” he praises. He opens his eyes and looks down at her, “You gonna be this good when you take my cock in your little pussy?” Billie moans around him, a desperate look in her eye. 

“Oh, I bet you are. Gonna let me fuck ya, nice and deep. I’ll ruin you. You’ll never want another man after me,” he snarls, his other hand goes to her hair to hold her in place. He thrusts his hips up and she gags around him. He fucks her mouth as if it were her pussy and cums with a roar. She swallows all of it down, not wasting a drop. Lee pulls out of her mouth and reaches for a handkerchief in his gloves box, he wipes the excess salvia off her chin and neck. 

Billie rejoins him on seat. They both fix their clothes. Lee looks at his watch, it’s only 10:30, they have some time yet. So, he holds her, rubbing a hand up and down her back. Lee would give anything to hold her like this each night. He can tell that Billie is starting to drift and he drives her back to the wooded area near the farmhouse. He kisses her goodnight and sends her on her way. 

Billie sneaks back into the farmhouse with no issue. She sneaks upstairs and changes into a night dress, before crawling into bed. Her parents none the wiser to what she’s been doing. 

Billie and Lee continue on, meeting at least three nights a week. Sometimes they just kiss endlessly. Sometimes they really fool around. Other times they talk. One night Lee brings a blanket and they stargaze for hours. They learn all about each other. But Billie never lets Lee forget that their time together has an expiration date. She reminds him that she’s going to school and nothing can stop her. Lee visits her at the diner at least five days a week. He can chat with other locals when she has to take care of other tables. Billie is thankful for anytime that Lee eats at the diner. The boys her own age leave her alone when he’s there. 

Unfortunately, tonight was not one of those nights. Billie was working the late shift. Some of the boys from her graduating class were hanging around. They were making sexual comments at her and staring. When they finally cleared out she was grateful. Patty told her to hit the road. She promised that she and Peter could lock up. Billie was glad to get off early, she could crawl into bed early that way. She walked out the back door like she did after every shift. 

She doesn’t notice a car full of boys following her. She’s one block away from the diner when the boys park and gather around her. Billie panics. Among them is Ralph. 

“Can I help you boys with something?” She spat. 

“Heard you wouldn’t give it up for poor Ralph here. So, we figured we would help him out,” said one boy, Jay. 

“I don’t give it up for anyone,” Billie said with a roll of her eyes. Just a moment later she was slapped across the face. She’s shocked and that gives the boys a chance to pounce on her. She’s fighting with all she can, but she’s no match for five boys. She kicks anything she can, claws the face in front of her. She doesn’t care. She’s not going down without a fight. She’s screaming as loud as she can. Another boy closes his fist and hits her hard in the stomach. It incapacitates her enough that they slam her on the hood of the car they were in. Each boy holding down an arm or a leg. She’s overwhelmed by the smell of moonshine on them. She doesn’t know how any of them are standing. Ralph smirks down at her, about to get what he always wanted. He tries to kiss her but she bites his tongue. 

“You fucking bitch!” He shouts. He lifts her head and slams it back on the hood several times. Unwillingly, tears stream down her face. She’s sure this is it. She wishes she would have told Lee how much she cared for him. She really wished she would have called Thomas to pick her up. Then, just as she is giving up hope, she sees a flash of blue and red lights. 

“What the hell is going on?” Shouts a familiar voice, Lee. Thank god. He and several other deputies rush to see what’s going on. The boys try and keep calm, they release their grips on her and she slides from the hood of the car to the road. Gravel digs into her exposed thigh but she can’t find the will to move. 

“We’re just joking around,” one claimed. 

“Billie,” Lee said, “What’s going on?” Billie can’t answer, she just sobs. 

“Billie, you have to tell me,” Lee coaxes gently, crouching next to her. 

“They—they grabbed me and they were— they were gonna—“ Billie can’t finish her sentence, she starts to sob even harder. Lee pulls her head to his chest. 

“Arrest them,” he says to the other deputies. Another couple of police cruisers pull up. One by one the boys are cuffed and put into cruisers. They each are trying to talk their way out of it. But the deputies don’t listen. 

“Billie, honey. You need to get up off the road. Can you do that for me?” Lee asked, reaching out a hand for her to grasp. She slowly comes to her feet and Lee really examines her. She’s covered in bruises. Her nose is bleeding, her lip is split. She has cuts all over her hands, suggesting she maybe landed a few punches. 

“Did they— did they touch you— down there?” Lee asked gently. Billie shakes her head. 

“Good, good,” Lee hums, he leans down and picks Billie up, and carries her to her car. 

“I wanna go home,” she begged, between gasps for air. It broke Lee’s heart, but he couldn’t take her home. 

“We have to get your statement at the station,” he said, quietly. Billie silently cried the entire way to the station. She had pressed herself up against the passenger side door, as far away from him as possible. Lee had no idea what to say. When they arrived at the station, he led her inside to his desk. Only then did Billie realize that her work uniform was completely torn. An inappropriate amount of leg was showing and the front of the uniform was torn so much that her bra was peaking out. She felt horribly exposed. Lee made her sit down gently, before turning away. And grabbing his jacket off the back of his desk chair. He helped Billie slide into it. At least that helped her cover a bit. 

“Edna is calling your mama,” he told her, gesturing to the secretary, “But in the meantime, you have to walk me through what happened. We need it for the police report.”

Billie began gasping for air. 

“Shhh, shh. It’s okay, just take a deep breath, hold it for two seconds and slowly blow it out.” Billie did as he said five times. 

“Good,” he murmured, “Now just walk me through it and take as many breaks as you need.” 

“I was walking home from the diner,” her voice was terribly hoarse, “Patty had let me go early because we weren’t busy. I didn’t even see them until it was too late. One of them said something about me giving it up for Ralph. And then they were on me. I—I tried to fight them off, I really did. But there were five of them and I’m just me. They hit me and slammed my head on the car. I-I-I really thought Ralph was going to rape me. They had me pinned to the hood of the car. I didn’t know what to do.” She was sobbing, fighting against her cries to speak. 

Lee nodded as she finished. She didn’t even notice that he’d been quickly writing down all that she said. 

“I’m going to get you some water and a damp cloth for your face,” Lee said before standing up and strutting away from the desk. Billie took her self in. Her knees were bloody and scrapped, gravel stuck into the injuries. She peaked inside the jacket and saw that at least one elbow was in a similar condition. The exposed parts of her chest were bruised. And she didn’t even want the opportunity to look at her face, because if it looked as bad as it felt it was pretty horrible. Lee came back damp cloth in hand. Glass of water in the other. He gently rubbed under her nose, cleaning the blood that had started to dry. She winced as he rubbed the cloth against the cut in her lip. 

He leaned back, once he got her face cleaned up. “Gibson, get me the first aid kit, will ya!” He shouted at a younger deputy. Gibson scurried away in search of the first aid kit. Lee gently brushed the gravel from her knees and elbow when Gibson returned with the kit. Lee rubbed the antibiotic cream over her injuries before finding the largest bandages to cover the abrasions. 

“Thank you,” Billie whispered. 

“How are you feeling?” He asked, studying her face. 

“I want to go to bed,” she responded. 

“Don’t worry your mama will be here soon,” he placated. 

“Are they even going to get in any trouble?” 

“I don’t know,” he admitted, “They got you pretty good. But they’re all from good families.”

“You mean rich families. And my family is just a bunch of poor farmers,” she spat. 

“If it were up to me, they would get thrown in jail,” Lee growled. 

“But it’s not up to you,” Billie nodded. 

“I’m so sorry, sugar,” he murmured. 

“I know.” 

“Billie!” Joy ran into the building in a desperate search for her daughter. Closely following Joy was John. 

“Oh my baby!” Joy gasped. 

“What happened?” John asked gruffly. 

“It seems Billie got attacked by five of the local boys. Ralph Johnson, Jay Smith, Grant Parker, Gideon Cousins, and Jimmy Barrow were the boys we found with her when we pulled up. Four of them were holding her down. It sounds like they were planning on holding her down so Ralph could violate her,” Lee explained. 

“Were you leading that Ralph boy on?” John questioned. 

“No, I went on a date with him back right after graduation. But that’s it,” she answered. 

“Well, you know how boys are honey,” Joy attempted to soothe. 

“Even if I slept with Ralph a month ago, which I didn’t, it still wouldn’t be an excuse for this. All we did was kiss!” Billie yelled. 

“Calm down,” John commanded. 

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” She maintained. Lee decided to step in to de-escalate the situation. 

“I’m inclined to agree with Billie. It probably has very little to do with her and more to do with the fact that those boys were drinking and she was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Lee conceded, “I’ve already taken Billie’s statement and I think you should get her home. I’ll check in tomorrow.” 

“Thank you Deputy Bodecker,” Joy beams. 

“Just want to make sure that our Billie here is safe,” Lee answered. Billie slips out of Lee’s jacket. 

“Thank you for letting me borrow that. I hope I didn’t bleed on it,” she said quietly. 

“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. John and Joy lead Billie out of the station and to their own car. When they’re out of sight Lee marches to the sheriff’s office. 

“You gonna charge those boys?” He asked the sheriff as soon as he entered the office. 

Sheriff Collins sighed. 

“I can charge them with possession of moonshine and third degree assault,” he grunts. 

“Third degree? They weren’t just recklessly messing with her and she got hurt in the process, I would say there is considerable evidence for first degree aggravated here. They may have drunk, but they knew what they were doing,” Lee said in disbelief. 

“Look Bodecker, those boys come from good families. The Dechswaan family is nice. But they’re trash. No money. No real standing,” Collins responded. Lee walked out of the office in disbelief and disgust, slamming the door on his way. He wanted to really go after those boys. He’d seen it before with men like his father, nothing was going to stop them from hurting another girl. But he was at the mercy of the sheriff, and if the sheriff wouldn’t press the appropriate charges there was nothing he could do. 

Joy helped Billie from the car and to the bathtub. She took Billie’s ruined uniform away. 

“I know Lee patched you up at the station, but I want you to really clean the wounds and I’ll get you some fresh bandages. Holler if you need anything,” Joy said from the door. Billie did as her mother said. She cleaned the abrasions. She scrubbed the dirt from her body until her skin was raw. She even washed her hair, it’d gotten dirty in the scuffle. Billie re-bandaged herself and dressed in the clean nightdress her mama had left her. After that Billie crawled into bed and passed out. But even her exhaustion couldn’t keep the nightmares away. 

@greeneyedblondie44 @bxnnywriting

[i-am-bitterly-jittery]

Five times Virgil sat on a surface not meant for sitting (and one time he didn’t) pt 6/6

Rating: Teen to be safe

Word count: 829

Pairings: none

Warnings: non-graphic, non-sexual nudity (it’s Remus)

+1. Thomas

That’s the last time I eat tacos before bed, Thomas thinks to himself as he descends the stairs to get to the kitchen. He had trouble getting to sleep earlier, and then once he’d finally fallen asleep, he’d had the weirdest dream, which resulted in him startling awake again. He’s not sure what time it is, he hadn’t checked, but he decided to take Patton’s suggestion of a warm glass of milk.

Thus why he’s going to the kitchen at dark o’clock in the morning.

Normally, if he’d been going for a glass of water, Thomas would have left the light off, trusting himself to find a glass and the sink in the dark. But since he’s after warm milk, he decides that it’s best to turn a light on. He doesn’t want to burn himself, after all.

So Thomas switches on the living room lamp.

And promptly screams.

“What in the name of Adam Driver are you screaming about?” Roman’s voice demands from his right, causing Thomas to scream again.

After he’s calmed down from his second scream, Thomas realizes that he must have summoned the Sides with his first scream, seeing as how his living room was now full of… well himself, really.

“Thomas,” Logan reprimands from his place next to the stairs, looking barely awake, dressed in only his unicorn onesie and no glasses. “It is incredibly early in the morning, you should not be awake yourself, let alone waking the neighbors with your unnecessary screaming. I thought you were getting a glass of milk and then heading back to bed.”

“Yeah, Thomas,” Virgil drawls from the couch, as if his unexpected presence wasn’t what made Thomas scream in the first place. “People might think you’re being murdered and then they’ll call the police and then you’ll have to talk to the police to tell them that there’s no murder going on.”

“Wouldn’t that be fun though?” Remus asks enthusiastically. Other than Virgil, he seems the most awake, standing naked and proud in the middle of the living room.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas apologizes, looking between his Sides that he had accidentally woken up. Logan seems to be fully utilizing the banister to keep himself upright. Roman‘s face is covered in stark white moisturizer, and he’s wearing those fancy silk pajamas like Thomas had always imagined rich people to sleep in. Patton is sitting by the window in his car onesie with the hood pulled up, obscuring his face. Actually, he might just be sleeping. Janus is definitely sleeping, having taken Virgil’s usual spot since Virgil isn’t currently using it, curled up on the stairs in a nightgown like Ebenezer Scrooge. Remus, as previously stated, is standing, wide-awake, in the middle of the living room, wearing only a nightcap that looks like it goes with Janus’ gown.

And Virgil is on the couch, fully dressed, because he’d been sitting there in the dark when Thomas came downstairs.

“I didn’t mean to summon you guys, I just wasn’t expecting to find Virgil on my couch in the middle of the night.”

“Apology accepted,” Logan says before sinking out, too tired for anything more.

“Yes, if no one needs me then I’m going to go finish my beauty sleep,” Roman declares with an overly exaggerated yawn.

“You could sleep for a hundred years and you’d still be the ugly twin!” Remus yells after him. “Well this was disappointing,” he informs Thomas. “Call me if something juicy happens.”

And then he’s sinking out, too. Leaving Thomas with just Virgil and two sleeping Sides.

“Um, should we wake them?” Thomas asks, gesturing to Patton and Janus.

“Nah,” Virgil waves him off. “They’ll sink out on their own soon enough, it’s hard to stay in the real world when you’re unconscious.”

“Oh, okay.”

Thomas stands around awkwardly for a minute before deciding to continue the conversation.

“Why were you sitting on my couch in the middle of the night? Don’t you have a couch in the Mindpalace?”

“Yeah,” Virgil shrugs. “But I think more clearly when I’m on your couch. The Mindpalace has a way of… twisting things, I guess. It’s less distorted out here.”

“Oh, I guess that makes sense,” Thomas bobs his head. “But why in the dark?”

“I’m a figment of your imagination, Thomas, I can’t turn your lights on.”

“Oh, yeah, that makes sense,” Thomas says again, rubbing the back of his head. “Hey, do you want warm milk?”

“Yeah,” Virgil nods, standing to follow Thomas into the kitchen?”

“Wiff cookies?” The slurred question comes from behind them, and Thomas turns to find Patton blinking blearily at them from the floor.

“Sure, Pat,” Thomas smiles at the Moral Side. “Just don’t tell Logan.”

“Promise,” Patton swears seriously, as he stands and shuffles forward, stopping only once he’s walking right into Virgil.

Thomas turns to the stairs to offer Janus milk and cookies, but finds that he’s already sunk back out.

Oh well, he thinks. More cookies for us.

~~~END~~~

[Janus], [Logan], [Roman], [Remus], [Patton]

Taglist:

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AN: that’s the end of the series (which would have been more accurate to call “Eight times Virgil sat on a surface not meant for sitting (and one time he didn’t)” or “Five times the Sides found Virgil sitting on a surface not meant for sitting (and one time Thomas found him on the couch)” but whatever). Sorry it took so long for this part to be up, but I had to move out of my apartment.

I hope you enjoyed it and definitely let me know if you want to be tagged in any other Sanders Sides fics I write in the future. 💜💜💜

[valiantarcher]

This is rather delayed, but I’ve got some thoughts on Waking Rose after my last reread. Below the cut for spoilers and extreme length.

Timeline/Continuity:

Rose says it’s been almost three years since she met Fish - but if she’s 19 now, it should only be two years (it also makes more sense for Blanche and Bear to get married a year after Black as Night rather than two years after).

Back to Steve/Steven Foster (instead of Stephen).

Per Rose, Fish and Bear slept on the Fosters' couch.

Ben was 13 when his mom died, 16 when Father Raymond died.

Little Things Short Comments (mostly):

I love Bear inviting Rose to dance with him and Blanche on the last song - remembering that it started with the three of them.

Kateri is an observant and good friend - I too would probably tell Rose Fish wasn't worth it under the circumstances.

"Your particular brand of exuberance"

Ach, but Rose wants Fish to be happy and he tells her he's "happy enough" (...true for very low values of "happiness") but follows it up with "God's going to take care of me," which IS true.

Rose’s dramatic “I shall have twenty cats...” poetry.

Fish trying to make himself look like someone who doesn't folk dance. 

"What you see in front of you is fighting."

Rose thinking Fish's vocation is to be at the right place at the right time; Ben would probably argue that, but there is an extent it’s true.

We get the charges against Edward (I think this is the first time we learn his first name) Freet: (2) Attempted murder - Rose and Bear, (2) Assault - Rose and Fish (or Bear - it’s unclear), (3) Kidnapping - Fish, Rose, and I’m not sure if the third charge is for his involvement in Blanche’s kidnapping?

“Not that it was going to make much of a difference in the world, but it was good to attempt to bring some justice to this literary question.”

Fish dealing with the nuns is...I’m not sure humourous is the right word for it, but I appreciate his internal “they’re crazy, Father Raymond warned me about Catholics like them” dialogue.

“He had known too many manipulative women to be convinced by tears.” Well, Elaine is the first one to come to mind - no idea who the others are.

I know we get the hints towards the Rumpelstiltskin retelling with Fish (I think his role is the servant?), but I’m torn between going a) YES, GIVE ME MORE and b) no way I want to see Fish suffer even more, as I know he will in that story.

Alex assigning everyone who gets in trouble to read Thomas Aquinas outside.

I love that Kateri and Ben become really good friends - she asks after his health and knows when he’s cooking a Scheme and he keeps an eye out for her and worries after her and bails her out of jail.

“You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t want to be explaining to some bereaved parent or college official why their charge is dead, maimed, or serving a prison sentence because of something I set up.” “Since when were you expendable? Says the older brother who nearly went out of his mind scouring the streets of New York for you when you were kidnapped for three days.”

The idea of a fatal/fundamental doubt is echoed when Ben doubts that Dr. Murray is guilty for just a second.

Ben warning Alex that he’s now an arrested suspect and that by driving off with him in the car, he could be liable for part of his crime, and Alex just being like, “Well, I guessed that much - where do you want to go?”

Ben telling Alex about the assault and looking him in the face to do it - something he has struggled with so much - and Alex just taking it calmly and with sorrow.

Ben being like, “You don’t understand how bad this is,” and Alex being like, “Maybe not, but I understand enough, and it doesn’t change anything.”

Also, Alex basically blessing Ben as he goes off to the barn? Ach.

Ben’s birthday is in April, and so is little Ben’s!

Longer Comments (In no particular order or level of clarity - apologies):

Fish shows his propensity for law and justice while questioning Donna (even though or maybe especially because he’s angry and loses his temper). And then Kateri shows her heart by her interactions with Donna. I really like the conversation she and Ben have after they leave and when they clear the air, including the fact Kateri has had a grudge against Fish for ages.

I appreciate Alex more and more this reread. In addition to the above comments, he’s the one who suggest and inducts Rose and Nanette into being Ladies of Sacra Cor (and basically tells them it means they’ll start training too), he’s the one who remembers to call Ben Ben, and he’s the one who’s training the other guys and deciding when they’re ready to be knighted.  ALSO, he and Ben challenge each other - he tells Ben that the world doesn’t stop being evil just because you stop fighting, and Ben is the one who tells Alex to put his beliefs into action and back Kateri up.

The whole scene where Alex, Kateri, and Ben are wandering around Graceton looking for Paul and how Ben says that for being so tall, Paul sure got himself pretty lost, and they all nod BECAUSE THEY’RE ALL AVERAGE TO SHORT HEIGHT. And then how mad Alex is at Paul for going off on an interesting diversion and making him late for the proctor meeting and assigns him Thomas Aquinas to read.

“Blanche, you are a lifesaver,” Ben says when she tells him about Nurse Johnson. And, though he doesn’t know it, it ends up being quite literal as that starts the chain of believing Dr. Prosser is behind everything, leading to Ben doing his sting operation, and ultimately leading towards him realising Rose isn’t actually comatose and thus her being woken and saved.

Okay, so in the car going to see Rose, and they’re talking about Christmas plans and Fish says he’s staying there, so James asks where Fish’s parents are from. Fish says New York, but they’re both dead. James says, “Oh, sorry,” AS YOU DO and Fish replies back, “That’s okay. I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.” AND YOU KNOW THAT BOTH YOUR PARENTS DIED FROM MEDICAL ISSUES, BEN - IT’S VERY MUCH NOT JAMES’ FAULT.

Also, when Donna does go and tell Fish about following Rose to the barn - Fish very much doesn’t trust her, but he does thank her and even goes with her to talk to the police (again, legal/experiential side coming through). (Also, “Fish, being Fish, didn’t want to answer the question directly.” But he then gives her an answer by reasoning out that she has nothing to gain from telling him.)

On a tangent, the entire idea of Fish being the protector and having never wanted the Briers (or any other bystanders) involved in his and Bear’s work is why it’s so important that Rose gets into trouble all on her own: it means that Fish doesn’t feel guilty (...well, besides his stray thoughts which he thankfully gets under control pretty quickly) about causing Rose’s coma or obligated to look into what she was investigating for any reason beyond his own desire and sense of justice. And it takes a while, but that’s why it’s so important he does decide to do the undercover sting and try to bring justice to this - not as an obligation but as an active choice to try to fight the evil in the world.

Dinner at Fish’s apartment after the sit-in is great. Paul is not at all chill about being a hero in Kateri’s story and then there’s the stare-down between Alex and Kateri with loaded subcontext (how awkward might that have been for Donna, Paul, and Ben?).

Fish tells Donna that he’s convinced by actions, not words. Which makes sense, but it’s also interesting to see how that works out - because when she comes clean and tells him she lied, he believes her but he doesn’t trust her. And he accepts her into the group because Kateri trusts her and he trusts Kateri, but then he decides to trust her with the makeover for the sting operation. And, after that, he trusts her to take him to the barn and then - most of all - to get the antidote back to Rose in time.

Fish tries to claim he’s expendable and Bear is having none of that. Also, Bear puts his foot down about Fish working solo - either he has backup, or he doesn’t do this. And so Fish asks Alex to be his getaway driver.

And then Kateri and Paul and James and Leroy and DONNA! They all came even though Alex explained the situation and told them not to, and Ben is mad and explains how much legal trouble they’ll be in, but they don’t care. As Kateri says, “We’re not letting you do this alone.”

Alex organising the troops and planning it all out so that there’s the best chance for Rose to survive and for Ben to make it through. And Kateri being indignant about being left out of the lineup until Alex tells her her job is to sacrifice herself to save Paul and Rose, if the staff get through him and Leroy and James. Even if Paul won’t let that actually happen.

DONNA. I had forgotten that Donna not only played a crucial part in saving Rose’s life by getting through the staff/police barricade but also in saving Ben’s by sending Bear to the barn to help him. And I’m just so happy that she was redeemed and healed and she fully joined in - she could have easily said no or just done the bare minimum, but she waded in just the same as the rest of the group. Although it’s not explicitly stated, I fully expect her and Kateri to have been full-fledged ladies of Sacra Cor by their last appearance if they weren’t already. And she tells Ben she’s praying for him and gives him a kiss on the cheek, and he tells her thank you, truly and sincerely, and there’s peace!!

And Kateri also!! She and Ben have become full friends now, and he gets a kiss on the cheek from her and there’s half an idea that he’s kind of smug and pleased about her and Alex.

I wonder if Blanche had a premonition about Ben at all? Since she has them (or references them) multiple times in the previous books, it would make sense (and also help explain why she sent Bear off after him so soon after baby Ben’s birth - granted, she probably knew there was a sting operation, if not details), but there’s no comment about it at all.

I still would have liked a reunion between Rose and her family (beyond just a scene with her and Jean - though, I guess we got to see her and Bear’s meeting again, but it was pretty distracted, of course), even if it wasn’t strictly necessary for the story.

[taxicabinmemphis]

“I’m exhausted” Logan and whatever side you want (can be platonic or romantic), Logan's experiencing emotions he's not used to and it's draining

so i’m a sucker for analogical and this got long. tho honestly this is me we’re talking about so what did you expect?

“Logan!” Virgil exclaimed, slamming the logical side’s door open. “What in the name of Ray Toro are we going to do about Thomas driving near a club at night on Wednesday? That’s the route you suggested he take! But Thomas is going to get killed by a drunk driver if that happens! So, what do we do?!”

Logan sighed, picking his head up from the table on which it was resting. He put his glasses on, facing the anxious side. “We’ll be fine, Virgil. However, if it bothers you so much we can go on another street. Also, will you please knock next time?”

Virgil’s exclamations and anxiety-fueled antics stopped, and he finally got a good look at the logical side. He looked terrible.

“You good, L?”

Logan rolled his eyes, turning his head away from Virgil so the side couldn’t take notice of his messy state. “I’m fine. I have given you what you required, so unless you have any other qualms you wish me to take care of, please leave.”

“Yeah, I have one more ‘qualm’ or whatever you called it,” Virgil said, approaching Logan. “You.”

Logan exhaled, giving Virgil an irritated look. “Yes, of course. What did I do this time?”

Virgil sat on Logan’s table, on his left, and gave him a scrutinizing look. “You’ve done nothing wrong, as per usual, but you’re a mess.”

“Thank you,” Logan said sarcastically, though Virgil’s ‘as per usual’ did lighten his mood by the tiniest fraction.

“I don’t mean it as a thing you’ve done wrong, but...” Virgil gave him a once-over. “Your hair is a mess, your glasses are crooked and weren’t even on when I came in, your tie is incredibly loose, your top button is undone, and your shoes are untied. If I wore your clothing, that would be expected of me and might even be considered nice, but this is you we’re talking about.” He paused, looking into Logan’s eyes. “What’s going on with you, buddy?”

Logan tried to fix his hair, adjusted his glasses, and tied his shoes. He left his shirt and tie the way they were as fixing them would feel restricting. He had loosened his tie and unbutton the top button of his shirt a few hours before because he felt like they were hindering his breathing.

“This is a worry I will not be calming for you. I’d greatly appreciate it if you would leave and not tell anyone about what you saw here.”

“No.”

“Look, I’m not in a compromising situation. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”

“You just told me,” Virgil said slowly, “me, not to worry.”

Logan sighed, putting a hand to his forehead. “Yes, I realize my mistake. Of course you’re worried. Fine. Worry somewhere that isn’t my room, please.”

Virgil crossed his arms. “Rude.”

“Exactly. No one wants to be around rude people. Leave me alone.”

Virgil shook his head, putting a hand on Logan’s shoulder, the logical side immediately shrugging it off. “I’m worried about you, dude. I can’t help it, you’re the voice of reason. If you’re not doing okay, Thomas will suffer. And I don’t mean this as criticism or pressure for you to be okay, just...it’s really important to make sure you’re alright. It can’t just be dismissed as one of my normal, unimportant worries. It wouldn’t be...logical to leave you like this.”

“I’m not fond of the fact that you are likely correct,” Logan grumbled.

“Great; we’ve established that I have to stay,” Virgil stated. “So, what’s up?”

“I...” Logan trailed off, thinking about how to voice his emotions. “I’m exhausted.”

“Hmm?”

“Every day I work tirelessly to provide you all with what you need. Schedules, explanations, assistance in educational activities. I join you all in most of your discussions, offering the logical explanation or solution for the current dilemma almost immediately, and yet no one listens. No one will heed my advice, or listen to my suggestions. I would gladly do what I do with no problem if it wasn’t like talking to a wall and telling it how to deal with its issues.”

“Logan...”

“I’m just...I don’t know...” He put his head back down on the desk.

“No one means to hurt your feelings.”

“It’s not that. I’m over being hurt, or offended...”

“Then?”

“I’m just so tired, V.”

Virgil didn’t have a response to that. Logan lifted his head to look at Virgil.

“There’s nothing else to it.” Logan rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “I’m tired. Exhausted. And I don’t know how to deal with it.”

“Get some sleep?” Virgil suggested. “I can talk with the others, fix our rude behavior. And I’m sorry, I know I can be rude to you-”

Logan thought back to Dealing With Intrusive Thoughts. Virgil had been particularly disrespectful that episode, but it was only because he thought that further conversation on the topic would only make Thomas’ situation worse and his likelihood of becoming a bad person all the more likely.

“You’ve only been rude to me recently when your anxiety was telling you that what I was doing would make things worse. Your actions were out of fear and were understandable and while I was annoyed, I am over it and require no apology.”

“Oh...okay,” Virgil replied quietly. “Thank you for understanding.”

“And talking with the others may help, if you’re up for it.”

Virgil nodded. “Maybe we could do it together? I don’t know exactly how you’re feeling, so having you there would help.”

“Of course.”

“...Would sleep help?” Virgil asked. “I know you work a lot so it could help with the fatigue. You don’t always listen to your own advice, so-”

“Not with this problem, I’m afraid,” Logan said with a grimace. “Sleep doesn’t take me away from dealing with everyone and my emotions permanently.”

Virgil raised an eyebrow. “Emotions, huh?”

Logan sighed. “Yes. It has come to my attention that I do indeed...feel things, despite it not being logical.”

“It may not be logical, but it’s normal.” Virgil furrowed his eyebrows. “What emotions are troubling you?”

“I’m not sure I would like to talk with you about it,” Logan said bluntly. “There’s more than I know what to do with.”

“Oh. Should I get Patton?”

“No!” Logan exclaimed, eyes widening at his own volume. “Apologies. No, that would not be appreciated.”

“Is it, like, anger over not being listened to? Irritation? Insecurity?”

Logan stared at him for a moment, before answering. “Yes. Those are some of the troubling emotions.”

“Among others?”

“Among others.”

“And you don’t want to talk with me about it because...”

Logan didn’t want to answer this. He knew he’d been feeling something for the anxious side lately, and it was before he walked in the Logan decided it was likely something akin to romantic love.

Virgil was just so wonderful. He was smart, thoughtful, protective, funny (at times), beautiful, and they got along very well.

Having those types of feelings for someone, especially Virgil, scared him. He also didn’t want Virgil to know, in case it hurt their friendship or heightened his anxiety.

So, he figured it would be best not to mention it.

“I would rather not talk about it at all.”

Virgil frowned. “But you singled me out. Why?”

“Because we are currently talking.”

Virgil gave him an unimpressed look—he clearly didn’t buy it.

“I don’t want you to know.”

Virgil nodded, looking away from Logan and to his lap. “You hate me, don’t you?”

“Wha- no!” Logan objected incredulously.

“It’s okay, I get it, no need to sugarcoat it,” Virgil said pitifully. “I undermine what you do, I annoy you with my worries, I-”

“Stop,” Logan commanded firmly. “None of those things are true. I’m not having trouble with hateful emotions...I’m having trouble with their opposites. Please don’t talk to me about them.”

“You’re having trouble with...love?”

“Can’t we just leave it?”

Virgil grinned. “No. I will get to the bottom of this.”

Logan groaned, throwing his head back against the chair he was in.

“Is it Patton?” Virgil asked. “I bet it’s Patton. That’s why you’re so hurt when people don’t listen. You want him to think you’re smart and cool and you want him to notice and like you.”

“It’s not Patton.”

“No?” Virgil asked, surprised. However, he was secretly very happy. “I bet you’re lying.”

Logan didn’t understand how Virgil hadn’t caught on. “Just leave me alone, please.”

“No, we went over this,” Virgil said, exasperated. “I will now help you find love.”

“No, you won’t,” Logan disagreed. If Virgil was willing to help him with this, he obviously didn’t feel the same.

“Yes, I will,” Virgil replied. “I care about you. I won’t let you suffer through this unfamiliarity alone.”

In truth, Virgil knew because he suffered through it with his feelings for Logan. He still was suffering through it.

“The gesture is touching, but I will have to decline.”

Virgil gasped. “Is it Janus? You two are both incredibly intelligent.”

Virgil really didn’t know?

“No, it isn’t.”

Virgil put a hand to his chin in thought. “What’s he like?”

“He’s an idiot, that’s what he is,” Logan said in exasperation.

“Oh, so it’s Roman.”

Though, considering he didn’t want Virgil to know, this may have been good.

“All of you are idiots; I wasn’t specifying anything.” He pulled out a schedule for a future day and started to work on it.

“So it’s Roman.”

Logan shook his head. “No.”

Virgil paused. “It’s Remus?!”

Logan put his pen down, absolutely done. “Yes. Yes, it’s Remus. Me, the embodiment of logic, fell in love with a chaotic and crazy side who took out my teeth and hit me with a throwing star that, if I were human, would have killed me.” He gave Virgil a look.

There was a moment of silence.

“...Thomas?”

Logan threw his pen at Virgil’s head. “Get out. Leave. Leave my room, you utter and complete moron. I will not tolerate such idiocy in my sacred space of intelligence and higher thinking.”

Virgil put his hands up, jumping off the table and walking towards the door. He reached for the handle, but stopped.

He thought back to their conversation, who he’d eliminated, who he’d hadn’t, and Logan’s reactions. He remembered that time when he and Patton were in Logan’s room a week before, and Logan yelled at Patton for so much as leaning on his table. Logan just let him sit on the table for an extended period of time. Logan didn’t force him out of his room or sink out, he just told Virgil to leave multiple times. He did try to ward him off with rudeness once, but never tried again. He also defended Virgil’s actions that hurt his feelings...to Virgil. Not to mention, he described his crush as an idiot before going on to call Virgil out on his idiocy and use that to send him out of his room.

“...Oh.”

Logan knew this meant Virgil had figured it out, so he took another pen and started to write furiously.

Virgil swiveled on his heels to face Logan, a look of realization on his face. He suppressed a laugh when he saw the side turned away from him and to his work, writing quickly and fully ignoring him. He found it absolutely adorable.

He walked over to Logan slowly, hands stuffed in his hoodie pockets. He stood beside Logan’s chair, placing a hand on the top left of it. He saw Logan’s movements stiffen a bit, but otherwise stay the same.

He turned the chair so Logan was facing him. Logan’s eyes widened, his pen dropped from his hands, and he stopped moving.

Virgil tilted the chair back, and he leaned over Logan.

“You love me, don’t you?”

“It appears so.”

Virgil chuckled, getting closer to Logan.

“You’re adorable, you know that?” Virgil teased.

Logan shook his head no in protest.

Virgil laughed. “If you say so. You’re already hot so I guess it’s unfair for you to be both.”

Logan’s cheeks flushed. There was a silence as the two just stared at each other for a moment.

Virgil’s eyes flickered to Logan’s lips.

“Would you mind if I kissed you?” Virgil murmured quietly.

“No,” Logan replied.

Virgil smiled, and—still tilting Logan’s chair back—kissed him like he was the most important thing in the world.

And to each other, that was exactly what they were.

~

Sorry this got long! I am such an a sucker for analogical I’m sorry. Hope you liked it! If you would like a redo, please shoot me as ask. Thanks!

[nothingbutfangirlsmut]

Roles Reversed

Pairing: Gally x Reader

Requested by: @youtemptressyousunshine

“hii! could you please do a piece where the reader was in gally’s place in the first movie, and they were the one who was stung + killed chuck + speared by minho, and gally’s on Thomas’ side like in tst and tdc. so like in tdc reader see’s Gally and everyone else outside the wall in the crowd, while reader is geared up and takes them back to Lawrence, and they have the whole reunion thing? thank youuu, you’re an amazing writer and i love your stuff”

Thank you for the wonderful request! I hope it’s what you were looking for! I did really enjoy writing it either way! (I couldn’t think of a better title for it lol)

Female Reader takes the place of Gally in the series while Gally sides with Thomas. Just a one shot! Enjoy!

Outside the city walls was just as chaotic as usual. The massive crowd of WCKD's forgotten filled the streets. Jasper started shouting his new speech through the megaphone as the van we were all on slowly drove towards the blockade. Andy sat next to me on top the roof of the van. Both of us in our full riot gear. At this point in my stay here I'd gotten use to this attire and the usual speeches Jasper liked to give to hype up the inhabitants of this massive hovel. As we drove slowly down the sand covered road I spotted a familiar face in the crowd. My heart sped up as I looked straight at Thomas. The greenie from WCKD's maze. He was unknowingly staring right back at me. My full face mask kept my face hidden. As we drove past I saw Newt, Fry, and.. Gally.

"Holy shit" I whispered.

My heart thumped in my chest as my brain and thoughts were propelled back to the last time I had seen them. The last time I had seen Gally.

—

My heart shattered into a million pieces as I watched Gally turn his back on me. He followed Thomas and the others into the maze. Everything we had been. Everything we had told and promised each other was gone. It was like none of it meant a damn thing. Len patted my shoulder softly then started walking back to the homestead with the handful of boys that decided to stay. I continued to stand there staring into the maze. The group could no longer be seen. They turned the corner out of sight. Part of me hoped this was a bad dream or some horrid prank. Any second Gally would pop back around the corner looking at me with his big puppy dog eyes and his ridiculous eyebrows and say it was all just a bad joke. He'd say he loved me and he could never truly leave me.

As the minutes ticked by I knew I was kidding myself. He was gone and he wasn't coming back. He'd chosen his side. He'd chosen that idiot greenie over me. Over the person he'd spent the entire past three years with. A shudder ran down my spine as a griever shrieked from somewhere behind me.

"Shit" I gasped.

I turned back towards the homestead to see the boys looking around frantically.

"Get inside! Get in the homestead!" I shouted as I started to run towards them.

Each of the boys made it inside but as soon as I reached the door a pain like no other took over my body. I fell to the ground as my body convulsed. Every limb and nerve was set ablaze. Images flashed through my mind at lightening speed.

WCKD. Thomas. Teresa. Water. A test.

I screamed as I rolled onto my stomach. All the memories flooding my brain had me clawing at the grass to get back to my feet. I had to stop them. They'll never survive. I clenched my teeth together as I used all my might to stand.

"(Y/N)?" One of the boys questioned from behind me.

"She's been stung." Another boy said.

I growled from somewhere low in my throat as I took off running towards the maze. I have to stop them. I can't let them leave. They can't leave. He can't leave. I ran faster than I ever had before as the burning under my skin continued. I can't stop. I gotta keep going. Keep running. I don't know how I knew where to go but I made every turn without a second thought. I came to an area that seemed to be where the others had been. A single spear laid on the ground covered in blood. I stepped up to the concrete wall in front of me. There was no surprise in me when the wall lifted opening up a path. Two dead and squished grievers laid before me. I stepped over them without a thought. I could see the light of my exit. I knew I had to be close to them. I pushed open the door into a brightly lit hallway. I immediately turned to the right then started jogging.

I stopped in front of a door for only a moment. I knew this was it. I pushed it open. Only a few steps inside I found a few dead bodies. One of the ones closest to me had a small pistol in their hand. I picked it up then held it tightly in my hand at my side as my body started to shake. I slowly walked around the corner.

"Over here!" I heard Chuck's voice before I saw them.

A searing pain went up my neck. Stop them. I have to stop them.

"No!" I shouted as I stepped into view of them.

The whole group turned to face me. I kept my eyes trained on Thomas. This was his fault. All of this is his fault. He helped them put us here. He didn't deserve to be alive. He doesn't deserve to get out of here. I won't let him. Kill him. Kill Thomas. I shook my head trying to clear it. I can't kill him. I'm not a murderer. Kill him!

"We can't leave."  I choked out as I fought my own thoughts.

"We did, (Y/N), we're out. We're free." Thomas said as he raised his hands slowly.

I faintly heard Gally's voice say my name. I twitched as another burning sensation took over my chest.

"Free?" I choked out as I tried to stretch my neck.

The burning was increasing as it moved slowly up my neck. Kill him.

"You think we're free out there? No. No, there's no escape from this place." I told him as hot tears stung my eyes.

Kill him. I shook my head again. No! I won't! Shoot him! Shoot him!

"(Y/N), listen to me, you're not thinking straight. You're not. Now, we can help you." Thomas spoke as he kept his arms raised.

Kill him. I shook my head.

"Just put down the gun." Thomas begged.

Kill him.

"I belong to the maze." I cried as I raised the gun pointing it straight at Thomas.

Kill him.

"Put down the gun." Thomas repeated.

Kill him now!

"We all do." I pulled the trigger.

Only a second later I was suddenly gasping for breath. What happened? I stumbled backwards as I looked down. A spear. There's a-

I dropped to my knees as I tried again to get air into my lungs. It didn't hurt. Not like it should have. The burning took over my entire body as I fell limply to the floor. My vision started to blur but I could make out the outline of someone running towards me. They dropped to their knees in front of me. They seemed to get close to my face. I couldn't tell if they were speaking to me or not. Everything had went quiet. All I could hear was my heart struggling to beat but it was still beating. Large rough hands grabbed each side of my face slightly lifting my head off the ground. The next second I felt soft, wet, and warm lips pressing against mine.

Gally.

I tried to will myself to speak. To kiss him back but I knew my body was no longer under my control. I was nothing but a disembarking passenger just waiting for the train to finally stop. I felt the hands leave my face in a quick jerk. The outline through my blurring vision looked like he was being dragged.

"Gal-" then everything went black.

—

I leaned over so I could whisper to Andy. He immediately leaned closer to me.

"New comers in town. They're immunes. I know them." I told him.

He pulled back most likely to look down at me through his mask. He nodded then hit his fist against the roof of the van. The vehicle stopped immediately. The both of us climbed down. Andy went to the driver to tell them what I had just said. When he came back to me he had two other men with him.

"Let's find them. Henry and the others will wait to grab them." Andy told me.

I nodded then started to walk with the slightly older man to find my old friends. It took a few minutes but I finally spotted Newt and Fry quickly followed by Gally. Jasper and Rick went around the mob of people to follow them. Andy and I kept our distance behind them the best we could. We had to keep shoving people out of our way which seemed to attract Newt's attention. I saw him nudge the others. Fry and Gally turned around. My heart skipped a beat when Gally looked right at me. He hasn't changed a bit.

We were only a few feet from them when they got to Thomas. The alarm sounded as warning for the guns. Andy and I stopped in our tracks.

"They're not seriously about to open fire." I said in disbelief.

A second later all hell broke loose. Bullets and explosives rained down as people ran in every direction. There was nothing we could do. Andy grabbed my shirt dragging me behind him. We ran as fast as we could back to the meeting spot for the vans. When we got there both vans were parked and waiting. To my surprise Thomas and the others ran straight into the small square. We didn't hesitate to start grabbing them. Andy grabbed Thomas throwing him into the van. I grabbed the back of Gally's shirt to guide him into the same van. Jasper tossed some girl in then all three of us climbed inside closing the door behind us.

The drive was quicker than usual back to base. It was unusual for us to pick people up like this but the others knew if they were inmunes we needed to save them. When we pulled into the run down building I jumped out first as Andy and Jasper ordered our three captives out of the van. I moved to stand a few feet away as I watched them find their feet. The other van pulled in then Alex was thrown from the back only to have some man jump on top of him. He punched Alex as he screamed for some girl. The girl we had taken ran over to him with her arms raised. The man was fine the next second.

"Everybody relax! We’re on the same side here!” I shouted.

The whole group turned to look at me. The look on Thomas’ face as he pulled himself from Andy’s grasp could only be described as completely annoyed and pissed off.

“What do you mean the same side? Who the hell are you?” He asked me harshly.

I sighed as I let my gun fall to my side. I took in a deep breath then pulled off my mask. I turned to look straight at Thomas.

“Hey greenie” I said softly.

All the boys looked completely shocked and even a little terrified. My eyes moved to Gally who was looking at me like I was a real ghost. In his eyes I might have been. To me all I saw was my happiness in a person. I had never been the same since he left me in the maze but now I understand why he chose to leave. I couldn’t blame him. I couldn’t resent him. I still loved him. I always had. It’s always been Gally or no one.

“(Y/N)?” Thomas questioned in disbelief.

My eyes stayed on Gally like there was no one else in the world. I wanted to run to him. Tell him how much I missed him. Tell him that I love him. Tell him how stupid and sorry I am. Instead of a loving moment with Gally I was suddenly being lifted by the front of my shirt. Thomas held me tight as he held one fist back ready to strike. The fire in his eyes was being held back. I could see the hesitation. He wanted to hit me.

“Stop! Stop!” Newt yelled coming to stand next to Thomas.

Thomas panted as he glared at me.

“She killed Chuck.” He said through clenched teeth.

“I know. I remember. I was there too. I also remember she was stung and half out of her mind.” Newt told him.

Thomas glared at me even harder as a tick started in his jaw.

“Just calm down.” Newt said softly.

Thomas huffed but let me go. He stepped back running his hands through his hair. I took a moment to take in each of their faces. Fry and Newt looked stunned. Thomas looked pissed. Gally mostly confused but also stunned.

“How? How is this possible? We watched you die.” Newt said in bewilderment.

A sudden rage washed over me at his words.

“No, you left me to die.” I corrected harshly.

Gally softly said my name sucking all the anger right out of me. I turned to face him again. He visibly gulped then took a step towards me. That was all I needed. I ran straight to him as the overwhelming need to feel his arms around me consumed me. My body hit his with a thud. I wrapped my arms tightly around his neck as his arms wrapped around my waist.

“Gally” I whispered into his neck.

“Holy shit (Y/N). I never thought I’d see you again.” He said softly as his arms tightened around me.

I pulled back so I could look him in the eyes. I grabbed his face with both my hands.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have went with you. I was so stupid.” I cried.

He smiled softly down at me. My heart lifted at the sight.

“It’s okay (Y/N). None of that matters now. We have a second chance. I mean if you want it.” He said hesitantly.

My mind, body, and soul soared higher than ever before. I crashed my lips into his making him chuckle. He kissed me back with the same force. His soft warm lips felt like a dream. A dream I’d had so many times but never thought would come true. Yet here we are.

“Of course I want that. I’ve never stopped loving you.” I told him as I pressed my forehead against his.

“I never stopped loving you (Y/N).” He whispered.

—

Requests are open!

—

[theheartsmistakes]

The Last Night Part X

(Author’s Notes at the End)

But if you’re just joining us, here are the other parts:

Here is Part I

Here is Part II

Here is Part III

Here is Part IV

Here is Part V

Here is Part VI

Here is Part VII

Here is Part VIII

Here is Part IX

PART X

The iron gates to the Institute rumbled open as James took the corner off the street nearly destroying the trumpet on one of the angel statues that had already been replaced several times in the seventeen years that James has lived there. Xanthos dripped sweat as he came to an abrupt stop outside the front steps to the institute door, just behind Matthew’s automobile that still had all of the doors left wide open.

James jumped down from the driver’s seat and skid on the loose gravel as he grabbed the coach door and yanked it open.

Lucie grimaced when the sun illuminated the inside of the dark cab. Her eyes were red and swollen, her hands covered in something too dark to be blood. His stele gripped in her hand as James grabbed Cordelia underneath the arms and positioned her in a way that he could easily lift her off of the cab seat.

With her head tucked beneath his chin, he could faintly feel her breath against his throat. He tightened his grip on her, offering her some of his own strength, or at least the comfort of knowing that she was safe now and help was coming.

The doors to the Institute opened as he climbed the marble steps. He was met with the worried expressions of both of his parents.

“James.” Will whispered as he reached out towards Cordelia. “What happened?”

“Where is Lucie?” Tessa asked, her eyes drifting over his shoulder.

“She’s in the carriage,” said James, as he adjusted Cordelia in his arms. “Are the Silent Brothers still here? She needs to see them urgently. There is no time.”

“Up the stairs,” said Will, leading James towards the curved staircase that led to the second level. “They arrived sometime this morning, but no one knows who summoned them. Jem said that a message arrived for them to come to the London Institute urgently and that there had been an attack. About half an hour after they arrived Alastair was brought in and they warned us that Lucie and Cordelia were still missing and that Belial might have something to do with it. James, please tell me that you can explain some of this?”

Will quickly followed after James up the staircase while while Tessa ran to assist Lucie behind them. Will barked orders at the house servants to tend to the horse outside while James took the stairs two at a time careful not to jostle Cordelia, but by the small whimpers she made he knew that it was inevitable.

They took a corner and climbed another small flight of stairs that deposited them into a hallway that was crowded with people. The closest to them was Christopher, standing with his back to James and in front of a crumpled Thomas on the floor. Anna sat on the floor beside him with an arm around his shoulder. Matthew, who has been leaning beside the Infirmary door, pushed off from the wall and ran to meet James. He cursed at the sight of Cordelia and quickly moved out of the way while Christopher ran forward to open the infirmary door for James to rush through.

Three silent brothers were gathered around Alastair’s head. James could hear their whispering in his mind, but couldn’t make out the words they were speaking, when a familiar voice cut away from them.

“James.”

“Uncle Jem,” said James as he came to stop in the center of the room. “Please, you have to do something quickly. I don’t think she’s breathing.”

“Lay her down here,” said Jem as he motioned for a bed opposite Alastair’s. Three more Silent Brother’s emerged and began to swarm around Cordelia as James carefully placed her on top of the white sheets. Her skin had become impossibly ashen; her lips tinted blue; she looked like the shell of the person that he used to know.

James kneeled on the bed beside her. His hand gripped hers and squeezed, but her own remained limp inside of his own. Not even a flex from one of her perfect fingers.

Inside of his head he resumed his quiet pleas for her to live. To breathe. To fight.

Beside him, Will put a hand on James’ shoulder. “Follow me. We should let the Silent Brothers do their work.”

“I want to stay with her,” said James. “Please, someone should be with her.”

“I will not leave her,” said Jem, inside James’ mind. “You should listen to your father. It is best if we can perform our work without interruption. If anything is to happen, I will let you know first.”

If anything is to happen.

If she were to die, he means. If she doesn’t respond to their treatments. If James was once again too late. He hesitated to release Cordelia as tears trickled down his cheeks. He leaned forward and pressed a quick kiss to her temple. She smelt of ashes and dust with only a hint of the warm floral scent that used to come from her.

Behind his closed eyes he could see Cordelia inside the Hell Ruelle, dancing under the red tinted lights, flecks of gold glistened on her skin and in her hair, and her cheeks fluffed with excitement and life. He could see her walking with Lucie in the park, her hair falling out of the tortoise shell clip that attempted to secure her delicate curls. He could see her eyes dancing when she called him the leader of the Merry Thieves. He didn’t notice it then, because of his own blindness or because of the bracelet, but her belief in him burned like a witchlight in perfect darkness.

The thought of never seeing her like that again made it difficult for him to breathe.

Will led him out of the infirmary and back into the hallway where the rest of his friends were waiting. But once out in the hallway, James broke away from them without a word, his eyes on the dried blood that covered his hands, when he nearly collided with Grace Blackthorn. The usual surge of emotion that once blinded him to everything else except her was non-existent and replaced by a bitter rage that had him tightening his hands into fists at his sides at the mere sight of her. When she stepped into his path, he paused for only a moment, before he skirted around her and continued stalking towards the stairs.

Grace’s voice followed him. “James, please, I need to speak with you.”

“Not now, Grace.” James threw the words over his shoulder.

Grace moved quickly so she fell into step beside him. “Please, I don’t blame you for not wishing to speak with me and I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t of the utmost importance.”

James’ steps did not falter.

Grace grabbed him by the arm before he could descend the stairs and turned him towards her on the peak of the top step. Her eyes widened with realization. “You removed the bracelet.”

James kept his eyes on the floor. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her out of shame, humiliation, betrayal. He wasn’t sure.

Grace lifted his sleeve exposing his naked wrist.

“I supposed you’ll be wanting it back.”  James reached into his pocket and pressed it into her hand.

Grace looked down at it. Her already ghostly complexion had somehow become even more pale. “But—How? That’s not possible.”

James swallowed heavily. Every muscle in his body urged him to turn around and keep walking, but the words formed on his tongue before he could stop them. “I had something real.” The words spit from his mouth like venom. “Someone real. And because of you, and whatever you’d done to that bracelet, I was too blind to see it.”

Grace caught him by the shoulder. “Will you allow me to— James!”

But James broke out from underneath her grip and ran down the stairs with no sense of hope or direction in his mind.

* * *

Lucie’s hands shook with Cordelia’s blood still covering them; caked underneath each of her nails and buried in each cuticle bed and shallow line of her palm. Every rune she drew into Cordelia’s skin glowed for a moment and disappeared no matter how much Lucie willed it to do its work and heal Cordelia just enough that they could make it back to the institute. She couldn’t help but wonder if they had become parabatai sooner if any of this would have happened.

An even sicker thought entered her brain. If Cordelia had never become their friend, the friend of the grandchildren of a prince of hell, then none of this would have happened to her.

Lucie knew she should get out of the carriage and follow after James and Cordelia, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. A sob ripped from her throat and she couldn’t even bury it in her hands. It just filled the empty space around her as James’ stele clattered down from her lap onto the floor of the carriage.

“Lucie!” Tessa stood in the doorway of the carriage. “Darling, are you all right?”

Lucie swallowed another sob that threatened to emerge from her throat and clenched her jaw until she shook. “Yes,” she answered. “I’m not hurt.”

Tessa nodded and extended her hand for Lucie to take. Lucie tightened her grip on the fabric of her gear though, afraid to put one of her hands into her mother’s. She knew her mother had seen her fair share of blood before, but Lucie didn’t want to share the responsibility of Cordelia’s blood with anyone else.

When she emerged from the carriage, Tessa quickly tucked her into her side and hurried towards the institute door while several servants emerged to tend to Xanthos who’d dragged the carriage home with one damaged tire and looked positively tired and exasperated from his travels.

Lucie let Tessa lead her up the stairs, asking a maidservant to warm some water for a bath for Lucie. The maidservant hurried ahead of them to start preparing. Lucie allowed her mother to carry most of her weight as her legs felt like they’d been filled with sand. Her skin itched and crawled. Her chest ached and her throat felt like someone was squeezing it with an iron fist. All of her thoughts raced like a thousand thoroughbred horses sprinting around a track.

When they arrived in Lucie’s bedroom, Tessa helped Lucie out of her gear and carefully unpinned her hair and down came handfuls of orange sand sprinkled across the floor.

Tessa quickly brushed the material off of Lucie’s shoulders. Lucie could see the questions spilling through Tessa’s mind, but Tessa only offered her daughter a small smile and led her towards the bathroom.

Once inside the tub, Tessa busied herself with soap and calming incense while Lucie drew her knees up to her chest and allowed her mother to wash the sand from her hair and the blood from her skin, paying particular attention to her hands and arms. The water turned a startling shade of pink by the time Tessa helped Lucie from the bath. It was a strange thing, but Lucie wanted to stay in the water a bit longer, as if somehow Cordelia remained with her that way.

What a terribly grim thought, but Lucie thought it nonetheless.

Once in a fresh cotton frock and nestled under the heavy quilted comforter of her four poster bed with her wet hair pleated by her mother’s gentle fingers, Tessa sat on the bed beside Lucie with her arm over Lucie’s legs.

“Would you like for me to stay with you awhile?” Tessa asked as she brushed a finger down the curve of Lucie’s face. “I don’t mind.”

Lucie turned her water rimmed eyes away from Tessa and looked towards the window where the heavy curtains were drawn.

“It’s all right, darling.” Tessa cupped Lucie’s face in her hand. “It’s all right. You’re safe now. Cordelia is getting help. You did so well, my darling, you did so well.”

“I couldn’t—“ Lucie took a deep breath as the tears flowed from her eyes to be caught by her mother’s gentle fingers. “I couldn’t save her.”

“But you did what you could do,” said Tessa. “And you brought her to the help she needs.”

Lucie grimaced. “Oh mother, don’t you see? It’s our fault.” Lucie brought her arm over her eyes. “It’s all our fault. If she dies it will be because of me.”

Tessa straightened the covers over Lucie, a habit she adopted Lucie realized when her mother felt that there was little else she felt she could do. When she spoke again, Lucie could hear the pain in her voice. “No,” said Tessa. “No, this is not your fault. This is not your doing.”

“He took her because of me,” Lucie cried.

Tessa pulled on Lucie’s arm. “You? What did he want with you? I thought it was James he was after.”

Lucie sucked in a breath. She wanted to tell her mother everything. The words were practically sitting on her tongue, the anvil weighing on her chest lifted just a bit. But the thoughts drifted back in: what would they think of her? Their  daughter who could raise and command the dead. What would they say? They’d protect her, she was sure of it, but at what cost? If they knew Belial was after her they’d die trying to protect her from him. They’d lock her into an even smaller cage then they condemned James too, because she was a girl, and couldn’t possibly defend herself against a prince of hell.

No, no she could not tell anyone.

The anvil slammed back down.

Lucie let her arm fall back down to her side. “He wanted to get to James through Cordelia and I. It was a dramatic miscalculation on his part, honestly. I’m not sure where he is getting his information from but his sources are sorely lacking in accurate information.”

Tessa’s eyes narrowed just slightly causing Lucie to hold her breath, but her expression relaxed. “What did he say to you? What is it that he wants?”

“World domination,” Lucie shrugged.

Tessa made a small noise. “It seems a strange thing to want, doesn’t it? Complete control over an entire world. I have enough difficulty being responsible for three people’s lives, I cannot imagine being responsible for an entire civilization.”

“I don’t think it's the responsibility he wants,” said Lucie. “It’s about possession. It’s control. He’s powerful, but he has limitations. He’s not human and what did Lucifer envy most of all?”

“Humans.” Tessa nodded. “God’s most perfect creation.”

Lucie reached out and took her mother’s hand. “We’ll not let him. I think he’s trapped wherever he is. He can’t reach us on his own and that buys us some time. We can come up with a way to kill him—“

“No.” Tessa’s voice grew stern. “No, I do not want you involved in this any longer. None of you. You’ll let your father and I worry about this. This is our fight, not your own.”

“Mum,” Lucie attempted to argue, but before she could Tessa released her hand and stood up. “You’re to keep yourself away from this, do you understand? I’ll spend no more time on this. Get some rest and come downstairs when you’re feeling up to it.”

Lucie nodded and watched her mother turn to leave. “You’ll come and get me with any word on Cordelia?”

Tessa nodded and urgently left the room.

Sleep and all manor of rest alluded Lucie. She laid in bed staring at the crown molding around the perimeter of her room. Herons were carved into the wood with long vines hanging from their mouths. When decorating her room, her mother and aunt Cecily tried to convince her that the dark wine burgundy wallpaper she had chosen was an awful dark color for such a large space, but it made Lucie feel like Mary Shelley writing in a dungeon about many impossible creatures. She kept her space simple. Hand painted pictures that Cordelia brought her from a trip to India hung on either side of the bed. When she looked at them, she felt like a world traveler, having seen these places herself. Her bed linens were an off-white with golden stitching with no bed ruffle because she liked the dark distressed wood, and it was easier to slide a copy of her manuscript under when one of her parents came into the room to tell her to go to sleep.

She found solace in her room the way James found it in the library, but tonight it brought her no such relief.

Her thoughts raced with images of Cordelia and Belial. His long fingers stretching out towards her flashed whenever she’d close her eyes. She wished she’d figured out a way to kill him when she had the chance. When he was standing right in front of her. Now, she’d have to wait.

“Why didn’t you tell her?”

Lucie sat up in bed to find Jesse standing at the end of it, a translucent shadow with the glow of the fireplace glowing through him and behind him.

Lucie exhaled heavily and clutched her chest. “You must stop doing that.”

“My apologies,” said Jesse, a smirk lifting at the corner of his mouth. “I thought you could feel my presence.”

Lucie adjusted herself with her back against the headboard. “No, it’s me who should be apologizing, my mind is preoccupied at the moment. I’m afraid I’m not myself. Jesse, I cannot properly thank you for helping me last night. I wasn’t entirely convinced it would work, but it seemed worth a shot. You saved me yet again and at a large expense to yourself.”

Jesse shook his head, but Lucie went on. “You could have been lost in there, in the shadow world. Your soul could have been trapped there forever. And still you did it anyway. I’m afraid that I owe you for a lot more than just my own life.”

“Lucie, you owe me nothing.”

“I do,” insisted Lucie. “I am going to find a way to bring you back.”

“Necromancy is a dark magic,” said Jesse. “One that is not easily forgiven by the Clave. It’s too dangerous. I came here to tell you to stop.”

“To stop—“

“Yes,” Jesse said firmly. “I blame myself for all of this. I let you entertain the idea of bringing me back, because I liked the idea myself, and I like you. But I realize now that I’m only a danger to you the closer we become and I cannot allow something to happen to you.”

“Jesse—“

Jesse took a step backwards. “Your attention should be on stopping Belial, on being a Shadowhunter, and a writer, not on something that has proved to be impossible. Please, Lucie, I need for you to understand.”

“Well, I don’t,” said Lucie. “I don’t understand at all. I won’t stop trying, and frankly, I think you’re being incredibly indecent at the moment. I may have lost my friend tonight, I will not lose you too!”

“Cordelia's life is flickering,” said Jesse. “It’s weak, but it’s still there. She’ll need your attention when she wakes up. Please know how sorry I am, but this is absolutely for the best.”

“Is this because I used you to escape Belial?” Lucie couldn’t stop the tears from spilling from her eyes. “I won’t do it again. I promise. I’ll command some other ghost next time. I’ll be more sensitive, I--.”

“This is why.” Jesse walked around her bed and grabbed her arm, but his hand went right through her like vapor. “I am dead, Lucie. My sister has ruined her life because of me. My mother is on her way to prison. You will not be the next tragedy that befalls because of an attempt to save me when it may well be futile. And while I couldn’t stop them, I can stop you.”

She tried to reach for his hand again, but her fingers went straight through his.

“I am sorry,” said Jesse slowly, she thought she felt the cool wisp of his breath on her cheek. “Life is for living, Lucie, not for the dead. It’s time I find my peace with it.”

“No.” Lucie swung her legs over the side of the bed, but when she stood up, he was already gone.  

(If you want some more feels added to the sadness that is this chapter give Light of Love by Florence + The Machine a listen. It inspired most of the conversations in this chapter. It really helped me get into the Herondale mindset. I hope you enjoy this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it. Don’t hesitate to leave it some love! Next update is coming Sunday 6/14.)

[rai-wick]

Gally x Reader Chapter 28: Wrong carriage

Y/N'S POV

-THE GANG HAVE BEEN TAKING OVER TRAINS WHICH HAVE BEEN TRANSPORTING IMMUNES, HOPING TO RESCUE MINHO-

"Newt!"We looked to see Vince waving at us from where we were hiding behind the rocks.

"All right, come on. Let's go!"I gestured for the others to follow Newt and I. As we approached the carriages, Thomas pointed at one he thought held the Immunes.

"This one!"Newt took off his backpack and began craving the carriage open, with his welder. We watched as a WICKD helicopter landed in front of Brenda and Jorge, attempting to take them prisoner before being overpowered by Frypan's squad.

"Newt, how're you doing?"I yelled down to him as Thomas and I prepped to take the carraiges away.

"Don't rush me"His response was muffled through his mask just as bullets starting flying.

"Shit!"We ducked down"Keep going, I'll cover you"I told Thomas before jumping down and firing back.

"Newt, get up here"Thomas shouted at him.

"Almost there"He shouted back as he finally broke the seal. Vince jumped down and gestured for Newt and I to get up to roof. We nodded, climbing the ladder before firing shots at the WICKD swat team.

"Where the hell are they?"Newt looked around for our chopper just as Jorge flew in, cutting it close as usual.

"We're here boys!"

"There's too many of them!"I yelled at the others to get up to the roof of the carriage as Thomas and Newt attached the carriage to chopper. Once it was attached, we yelled at them to go while we kept the soldiers at bay.

"Vince get up here!"Newt yelled down. Vince ran, quickly leaping onto the ladder and crawling just as we drove away, cheering at our victory. Once we landed, we smashed the door open and checked the carriage, our hope falling as we scanned the terrified faces. Thomas turned back to us, his face hard.

"He's not here"

~SOME TIME LATER~

"Took you guys long enough to rescue us"Aris chuckled as I walked in and sat down next to Newt who looked me over with a quick nod.

"It's good to see you too, bud"Thomas replied"So what happened?"

"Fought back or well tried to"

"You're lucky you found us at all"Sonya added"They had us on the move a lot. It felt like something big was happening"

"Do you have any idea where they were heading?"Newt questioned.

"All I know is, they kept talking about a city"Aris scrunched his face, trying to remember. We all looked at each other with concern.

"I didn't think there were any cities left"Harriet wondered.

"That's because there aren't"Brenda crossed her arms"Not still standing anyway"

"Okay, wait. What about Minho?"I turned back to Sonya and Aris"Why wasn't he on the train?"

"I'm sorry _______"Sonya and Aris looked at each other"He was. There was a second carriage" We thanked Aris and Sonya and headed back to our conference room. I made some coffee, handing it out as Thomas slammed a map onto the table.

"There, that's it"He pointed to circular dome on the map"It's a few hundred miles. Based on the railways, everything that Aris told us, that's gotta be where they're headed. That's where they're taking Minho"

"We should take everyone who can fight"I continued"Follow the roads where we can. We can make it back within a week"

"A week?"Vince raised his eyebrows"It took us six months to get here. We got over a hundred kids here now. We can't just hang out here forever after what we just pulled. You wanna wander off to some random point on the map?"He gestured to it"You don't even know what's there"

"I do"Jorge interuppted"It's been a few years but I've been there. The last City"He strolled up to the table"That's what WICKD called it. It was their whole base of operations"He looked around at us"If that city is still standing, that's the last place you wanna go, hermana"He told me"That's the lion's den"

"It's nothing we haven't done before"I rejected.

"Yeah, with months of planning"Vince pointed out"Reliable information, the element of surprise, none of which we have now"

"Vince we've thought this through"Thomas argued"Would you just hear us out?"

"The last time we went off half-cocked"Vince said over him"I lost everything. You remember that?"He paused, rubbing his hand off his face"Look, I know it's Minho, All right? But you can't ask me to put those kids on the line for one man. I won't do it"We were silenced by static on a radio we had picked up from WICKD.

"Searching the grid now"A guard's voice said before some warbled voices were muttered"A is completed. Scanning B-sector now" Instantly, we ran to cut our power, going outside to see the Bergs flying in the distance.

~LATER THAT NIGHT~

"There he goes"I pointed out Thomas' figure as we saw him going into the kitchen"Why does he insist on carrying burdens alone?"I muttered to Newt next me while we watched Thomas pack his bag.

"I wonder where he gets it from"Newt glanced at me sideways with a smile making me scowl. Thomas climbed the stairs, closing his bag just as Newt turned on the lamp next to him.

"Where do you think you're going then?"Newt crossed his arms making Thomas look up.

"_______, Newt..."Thomas sighed.

"Don't be a twat about it"Newt approached him"We're already in"He threw Thomas's bag to me and I threw it into the back of the jeep"Come on"

"No. No, not this time"Thomas shook his head"Look, even if we find Minho, there's no guarantee we make it back from this"

"Well, you'll need all the help you can get then, won't you?"I said as Newt opened the driver's door where Frypan was sitting. Frypan leaned forward with a grin as we all looked at Thomas expectantly.

"Well, we started this together"Newt pointed out"May as well end it that way too"

"Okay"Thomas finally nodded"Let's go get him back"Thomas got in next to Frypan while Newt and I clambered in back. We drove most of the way in silence, each of us in our own thoughts.

"That looks fun"I pointed out the overhead sign as we approached, which read MANDATORY INFECTION CHECK: 2 miles ahead, making Frypan shake his head with a grin. We drove in past all the abandoned cards and trailers, stopping the jeep to get out and look into the dark and long tunnel which lay ahead.

"You want us to go in there?"Newt asked Thomas who consulted the map"I don't want to come off as too negative but if I was a Crank, that's exactly where I would be"

"Yeah, looks real cozy"I mumured, looking in on the map"But I don't think we have much of a choice. There isn't any other way in"

"All right but I get shotgun"Newt muttered as we climbed back in. We drove quietly and cautiously, using our flashlights to scan for any signs of movement. The tunnel was a maze of junk and rusting cars.

"Whoa! Whoa"Frypan stopped as we saw a lone figure standing a few feet in front of us, gagging and twitching.

"It's okay, it's just one"Thomas urged"So take it slow, go around him. We'll be fine"

"Take it slow"Frypan said to himself. Newt rolled up his window while Thomas and I leaned back in our seats. He looked out of his window and we jumped as we saw a woman standing there.

"Please"She was breathing heavily, looking at the figure ahead of us"Help me. Please"I jumped as my window thudded and I saw a bloodied man scratching at the glass.

"Please! Let me in"Suddenly we were surrounded on all sides by Cranks.

"Fry we gotta go!"I shook his shoulder to shake him. Frypan floored it, pushing most of them away but one was stuck to the window. He twisted the jeep around, trying to throw the Crank off, finally managing it by crashing into a ladder. We sped away, relief filling our veins. I turned back to the front and let out a yelp.

"Frypan watch out!"The jeep ran over a car and flipped throwing us all into each other. I quickly unbuckled myself and slid out through my window.

"Newt? Are you okay?"I pulled at his door but it wouldn't budge"Thomas help Fry!"I shouted as I lifted a crowbar to wrench the door open which finally worked.

"Thanks _______"He patted my shoulder as we grabbed our things. Thomas helped Frypan up but just then we heard the horrifying screech of the Cranks. Looking behind us, we saw a distant mass grow larger.

"Oh shit"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[phantomofthepairofdice]

The Rosscars 2020

Wow. It’s that time of year again, only this time it’s different because it’s on a blog that no one will read! (hold for applause) Welcome to the first annual online publication for the Rosscars (hold for applause while the reader acknowledges how positively droll it is that I combined my name with “Oscars”). Who can forget such indelible Rosscar memories like when Steven Soderbergh surprised us all and won Best Director for Out of Sight or Bill Irwin’s beautiful speech upon winning Best Supporting Actor for Rachel Getting Married?! The Rosscars mean something different to everyone, but we all know that they mean quality choices made by a committee of one schmuck. This year’s Rosscars are bizarre because in an effort to be more like the Academy guidelines, film’s nominated have been released between January 1, 2020 and February 28, 2021. As usual, theatrical windows be damned, streamers are welcome. Of course, I have my gripes. I like categorizing movies by release year – specifically, when they become available to the plain old public like yours truly – not at festivals, limited runs in NYC and LA. Well, the Oscars are still weeks away and I feel like everybody wants to forget about last year and move onto this one that we’re already three months into - So here are my awards for the films, performers, and craftspeople that stood out in a pretty exceptional year for movies even though distribution was stranger than ever. 

**A few caveats and guidelines to Rosscar newcomers (which I imagine is just a formality since we all know the Rosscars so well)**

The rules and categories are a little different around here. First, not every category is honored directly. That’s for a few reasons, chiefly that I don’t feel qualified to reward the technical categories properly – I suppose I should say that I feel less qualified to do so than the “above the line” categories. In keeping with the Academy standard, there are five nominees in each category, except for Best Picture, Best Non-Fiction/Documentary Feature, and Best Ensemble Cast which allow up to ten. Every category, save those three, will have the possibility of honorable mentions, because I want to highlight some things that just barely missed the cut. The narrowing down of a lot of these categories was awfully tough.

Nominees are listed alphabetically, and the winners are in bold and italics.

Also, it’s important to keep in mind that I couldn’t see everything (this isn’t a job and it’s still $20 to rent The Father, y’all) and that these are just the opinions of one (self-described) “bozo on the internet.” If you’re a reader and have different picks, feel free to share!

Special Commendations for some things that I want to recognize: • Ludwig Goransson for his Tenet score which is an absolute banger • The costumes of Emma. (Alexandra Byrne), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Ann Roth), and Small Axe (Jaqueline Durran, Sinéad Kidao, and Lisa Duncan) all struck me as exceptional • Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross with their scores for both Soul and Mank. Crazy that Pixar is working with the guy who made “Closer” • The cinematography of Da 5 Bloods (Newton Thomas Sigel), First Cow (Christopher Blauvelt), Beanpole (Kseniya Sereda), and A White, White Day (Maria von Hausswolff)

The Rosscars red carpet was, as usual, a bizarre affair. People filed into the theater and it seemed like the only encounters were awkward ones. Vin Diesel showed up in character as Bloodshot, Aaron Sorkin started getting really verbose about what a lovely night it was, and it became clear that most of the celebrities in attendance didn’t read their invitations closely enough to realize that this was not, in fact, the Academy Awards.

Everyone’s seated, and the show is under way. After a medley about the nominees this year by Common and Seth McFarlane that was more corny but clever than it was funny, the first official category is here, and the presenter is none other than... Ross!

Best Supporting Actor:

1. Chadwick Boseman for Da 5 Bloods

2. Matthew Macfadyen for The Assistant

3. Jesse Plemmons for Judas and the Black Messiah

4. Paul Raci for Sound of Metal

5. Glynn Turman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Honorable Mentions:

• Lucas Hedges for Let Them All Talk

• Orion Lee for First Cow

• Bill Murray for On the Rocks

Best Supporting Actress:

1. Vanessa Bayer for Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar

2. Candice Bergen for Let Them All Talk

3. Gina Rodriguez for Kajillionaire

4. Amanda Seyfried for Mank

5. Yuon Yuh-jung for Minari

Honorable Mentions:

• Jane Adams for She Dies Tomorrow

• Charin Alvarez for Saint Frances

• Talia Ryder for Never Rarely Sometimes Always

• Debra Winger for Kajillionaire

Everyone loves a montage. The audience gets comfortable in their seats as the video screens start to show a montage of some of the most famous moments from Hollywood’s most magical movies. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers waltz, gliding across a dance floor like two hovering angels. There’s a clip of Leo declaring himself king of the world in Titanic, the flying bicycles in ET, Bogart stares longingly into Bacall’s eyes, and then there’s some scene where Tom Cruise rides a motorcycle from 2010′s Knight and Day. The audience all seems confused how that last one got in there. The John Williams music swells as little Kevin McAllister screams when puts on aftershave. We see clips of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia embrace Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, Bruce Lee smoothly declares that boards don’t hit back and... wait... was that a clip from Michel Gondry’s Green Hornet with Seth Rogen? And that’s a clip from What Happens in Vegas... Bad Teacher... Vanilla Sky... Shrek 2... Any Given Sunday... Everyone is flummoxed. The last clip fades out and a sole editing credit appears: Cameron Diaz. The lights come up and there’s some applause, but mostly confused murmurs. 

The ceremony has had a bit of a misstep, but nothing it can’t recover from, especially as the next category is announced over the PA, and it looks like the presenter is... Ross!

Best Ensemble Cast:

1. Bacurau

2. Da 5 Bloods 

3. Kajillionaire

4. Let Them All Talk

5. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

6. Minari

7. Nomadland

8. Pieces of a Woman

9. Small Axe

Best Original Screenplay:

1. Danny Bilson and Paul Dameo & Spike Lee and Kevin Wilmott for Da 5 Bloods

2. Lee Isaac Chung for Minari

3. Brandon Cronenberg for Possessor

4. Sean Durkin for The Nest

5. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles for Bacurau

Honorable Mentions – a very difficult task to weed this down to five.

• Shaka King and Will Berson for Judas and the Black Messiah, from a story by Kenny and Keith Lucas

• Steve McQueen, Alastair Siddons, and Courttia Newland for Small Axe

• Kelly O'Sullivan for Saint Frances

• Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm for Another Round

Best Actor:

1. Ben Affleck for The Way Back

2. Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

3. Delroy Lindo for Da 5 Bloods

4. John Magaro for First Cow

5. Mads Mikkelsen for Another Round

Honorable Mentions:

• Riz Ahmed for Sound of Metal

• John Boyega for Small Axe

• Daniel Kaluuya for Judas and the Black Messiah

• Hugh Jackman for Bad Education

• Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson for A White, White Day

We have a break in the action and it looks like Darius Rucker has showed up to perform what he would have nominated for Best Original Song. The crowd is absolutely furious as he starts playing a song that apparently was in Trial of the Chicago Seven. An ocean of sonorous boos and curses overtakes the the once docile crowd. The Rock just ripped his chair from out of the ground. Jane Lynch somehow smuggled in a civil war era flintlock pistol that she’s now pointing at the stage! Suddenly, the crowd unifies around what started as a confident chant of one lone audience member - John C Reilly. It’s growing... Ja Ja Ding Dong, Ja Ja Ding Dong, Ja Ja Ding Dong - it’s like the macabre circus performers from Tod Browning’s Freaks, but instead of chanting “Gooble Gobble” they’re clearly pining for Darius to change his tune to the silly and delightful jam from Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. Darius, scared for his life, leaves the stage, but here come Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams to deliver the goods. Busy Philips and Michelle Williams burst into tears. Tom Hanks nods in approval. A segment saved by brave artists placating a toxic group of fans... we’ve just witnessed a live version of the Snyder Cut, folks.

Jack Nicholson seems completely unfazed, giving a thumbs up to the camera and blowing a kiss to the next presenter. Coming to the stage is... Ross... again...

Best Actress:

1. Jessie Buckley for i’m thinking of ending things

2. Carrie Coon for The Nest

3. Han Ye-ri for Minari

4. Sidney Flanagan for Never Rarely Sometimes Always

5. Vasilisa Perelygina for Beanpole

Honorable Mentions – these cuts were especially painful

• Haley Bennet for Swallow

• Morfydd Clark for Saint Maud

• Frances McDormand for Nomadland

• Christin Milioti for Palm Springs

• Geraldine Viswanathan for Bad Education

Best Adapted Screenplay:

1. Charlie Kaufman for i'm thinking of ending things from Iain Reed's novel

2. Sarah Gubbins for Shirley from Susan Scarf Merrell's novel

3. Kelly Reichardt and John Raymond for First Cow

4. Simon Rich for American Pickle from his short story "Sell Out"

5. Mike Makowsky for Bad Education from Robert Kolker's "The Bad Superintendent"

Best Non-Fiction/Documentary Feature:

1. Boys State

2. Collective

3. David Byrne’s American Utopia

4. Dick Johnson is Dead

5. Feels Good Man

6. In & Of Itself

7. The Painter and the Thief

8. Time

Jimmy Fallon has come out on stage to do a bit about the pandemic and watching movies at home. People are just absolutely not having it. He tries not to laugh at his own jokes while doing what I guess is technically a pretty good impression of Dr. Fauci interviewing James Corden as Martin Scorsese (the less said of this impression, the better) on what is or isn’t cinema. The bit doesn’t track and Fallon is absolutely tanking. The producers cut away from the stage to spare the viewers at home from this monstrosity. We see crowd shots of Millie Bobby Brown shaking her head in dismay, Colin Firth is simultaneously grimacing and trying to stave off laughter, Cynthia Erivo is texting, and director Tom Hooper is taking notes for his next film. Corden yells, “Carpool Karaoke! Remember?!” Ron Howard has fainted. This thing is almost completely off the rails.

Coming back to the stage is the next presenter, a clearly embarrassed... Ross! He’s in a total flop sweat, but stumbles his way through a joke about how Fallon should try co-hosting the Oscars with James Franco sometime. There are scant chuckles throughout a crowd that mostly just wants to see who won and go home.

Best Director:

1. Christopher Nolan for Tenet

2. Spike Lee for Da 5 Bloods

3. Steve McQueen for Small Axe

4. Kelly Reichardt for First Cow

5. Chloé Zhao for Nomadland

Honorable Mentions:

• Kitty Green for The Assistant

• Eliza Hittman for Never Rarely Sometimes Always

• Charlie Kaufman for i'm thinking of ending things

• Thomas Vinterberg for Another Round

Best Picture

1. Bacurau

2. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar

3. Da 5 Bloods

4. First Cow

5. i'm thinking of ending things

6. Judas and the Black Messiah

7. Never Rarely Sometimes Always

8. Nomadland

9. Small Axe

10. Tenet

Accepting the award for best picture is none other than Eve, the cow actor who played the titular First Cow! The audience is enamored with how graceful she looks in her cow gown, and her speech, though indecipherable, is likely simple, observational, and deeply profound for those who speak cow.

Wow, what a ceremony! Hearts were broken, property was damaged, dreams were fulfilled... blood was shed? Damn it, Meryl Streep came in and mugged Charlie Kaufman before absconding with the trophy. Oddly, she’s a previous winner, so the attack isn’t out of need for hardware. People are reading through articles about production on Adaptation for potential motives. Streep made time for a photo opportunity, but remains at large.

I could go on ad infinitum about all of these nominees and winners themselves and why they did or didn’t make the cut, but that’d be better served in a different piece. For now, my thoughts on most of these can be found on the Best of 2020 write-up and over on my Letterboxd. And, as always, these awards can be revoked and redistributed at will, so don’t get too cozy with that statue, Danny Bilson!

On behalf of the RAOGL (Rosscars Association of One Guy at a Laptop), thanks for reading, and stay tuned as we’re establishing a tip line for anyone has seen Ms. Streep or her stolen valor Rosscar. We’ll see you next year. Keep watching movies, and keep arbitrarily quantifying them in terms of subjective quality!

[arabrot]

Who Do You Love by John Doran

Who Do You Love?

We drove 5,000 miles of barbed wire.

You’d think that by travelling that distance around a country you could get the measure of it. Especially if the country was only 361 miles from top to bottom and even less from East to West. You’d be thinking reasonably but not accurately.

Despite journeying the equivalent of one fifth of the circumference of the entire Earth in 31 days, all we got to see was the road itself. England endless. What we experienced was just a percentage of a splodge, a smidge of a blotch on the coastal fringe of Europe that deserved neither the sobriquet Great, nor the title United. How did such a small area of land contain such extravagant lengths of major road? In the same way that a human body could house a tapeworm 33 metres long. Probably not comfortably but hopefully not fatally either. Undoubtedly, in May 2015 - general election month - England had beauty to spare: it’s just that none of it was visible from the motorway.

We met on the forecourt of a petrol station near an airport. Heat haze was already starting to rise from the tarmac. The Driver was dressed immaculately in a tight-fitting black suit, shades and wide-brimmed black hat. His concession to non-monochromatic decoration was silver chains carrying cocks and crosses. He looked like Asa Hawkes, the “blind” preacher from Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood - but much thinner. He tipped the brim of his hat hello. This was not his stage hat but his everyday hat. His stage hat, the kind of prairie Stetson featured in the opening scene of Holy Mountain was massive and kept in the kind of box that suggested it was an essential part of a drum kit. It had its own carefully allotted slot in the back of the van with the tons of amplifiers, speaker cabinets, guitars, synthesizers, boxes of books, suitcases full of clothes and bags and bags of oranges we were taking with us. There was only one way to fit all of this stuff into the vehicle, and packing it correctly was like 3-D Tetris. All it took was one giant, impractical hat in the wrong place and then everything had to be taken out again and reloaded in the correct position.

He was the colour of milk, which made the angry red scars up either side of his neck all the more vivid. He looked like the missing link between human being and some future race of Lovecraftian eel-men who would be able to breathe via gills under water.

As well as me and the Driver, there was the Passenger. She looked more like she had stepped straight from the set of Bladerunner than a Jodorowsky or John Huston movie. This was to be their last tour as boyfriend and girlfriend as they were headed straight to a deconsecrated church in rural Sweden to get married as soon as the trip ended. I was merely a temporary guest in their world. A road voyeur with a month long pass.

Within minutes of setting off we hit the M25 we became enmeshed in May Day traffic. I realised that most of the month was going to be spent looking at slow moving traffic on motorways.

But just as driving to Brighton was slow and painful, leaving it the next day was a dream. On the motorway, time stretched and contracted simultaneously in temporal doppler effect. The days seemed longer but time blistered, popped and broke apart pleasantly as the brain switched down a few gears into a near pure experiential mode. There was little to worry about. All I could do was count the pylons and pretend I had a flamethrower to aim at UKIP billboards and hoardings; to luxuriate in motorway sign typography and listen to Maggot Brain as loud as it would go. Miles Davis’ Agharta was the soundtrack to us speeding out of the south up the M1 towards the Rainy City. Al Foster’s ringing, open hi-hat was our fuel. And then it was nothing but John Coltrane, Electric Wizard and NOMEANSNO until we reached our destination. It started raining the second we hit Stoke. And then before long we were on the Mancunian Way heading for Piccadilly in torrential rain, parking the van under a tangle of flyovers. When I planned this jaunt it was a thing of beauty. I took an AA road map and unfolded it until it covered half the floor space in my tiny living room. I took a sheet of stickers from my son’s Thomas The Tank Engine magazine and created a spiral of towns and cities, first round the edges near the coast and then spiraling in toward the centre. Our proposed journey looked like an occult temporal and spatial message only discernable from the god perspective. What I planned was a perfect thing. But after you plan your perfect thing what happens is this: promoters start phoning you up or emailing you. ‘We’ve double booked you with a Stereophonics tribute act’; ‘There’s actually a bar mitzvah on that day’; ‘It’s Record Store Day.’ And then the perfect thing falls to pieces. By the time we hit the road the perfect thing looked like that terrifying film of a spider on LSD trying to spin a web. And there was only one thing worse than a spider on LSD trying to spin a web and that was a spider on caffeine trying to spin a web.

We stopped for several coffees en route to Sunderland the next day. The weather was beautiful. Fields of golden rape seed glowed under a blue sky. But I gave up counting the UKIP billboards. There were just too many. The purple pound signs zipped past in a blur. We’d been on the road for five days and I hadn’t seen a single sign for Labour. It was almost a relief when we passed a huge hoarding in an arable field next to a broken tractor which proclaimed: “Prepare to meet your Lord!” We pulled in soon after to stretch our legs in front of a petrol station that shared a forecourt with a sex shop wrapped in a large tarpaulin hoarding, proclaiming: “Under new management!” Next door was a garden centre flying a row of ten confederate flags and two Union Jacks. There was a knackered and rusty jet stream caravan serving up plastic cups of filter coffee.

It became clear early on that the Travelodge was our friend. Every Travelodge the Driver, the Passenger and I shared was identical. A family room. One double bed, one fold out couch bed, minimal decoration, very interesting mass produced art, scant furniture, tea making facilities and a portable telly, often chained to the wall. The Travelodge may have had less furniture in it than the average bail hostel and may sometimes have smelled like a suburban pet shop from 1984 but it was totally fine as we were low ranking touring musicians and writers, not visiting dignitaries from Saudi Arabia.

After Leeds, our Travelodge was situated in a motorway retail park so the following morning we walked just a few hundred yards to the Toby Carvery for breakfast. Pushing open the double swing doors we were confronted by a man in stained chef’s whites, with hair pushed under a light blue plastic turban crowning a jowly and crimson face. He was methodically and noisily applying a large cleaver to a foot long cylindrical sharpening steel with a schnick-schnick sound.

“Hello!” said the Driver cheerfully. “Are you Toby?”

The chef looked up slowly and a pendulous and translucent bead of sweat swayed under his nose. His eyes were like drill holes in gammon. Bruised udders of flesh were hanging below each of his nicotine-stained ocular orbs. He was possibly the most hungover man I had ever seen. He jawed away silently, his eyes flickering dully with rage as he started straightening up. The BPM of metal on metal increased. The three of us circled round him gingerly and headed rapidly for the breakfast counter past tables rammed full of people who looked like they were about to die. I had never seen so many morbidly obese people in one place at one time. It was like God’s waiting room with unlimited fried egg.

Oh England, you are sick.

It was only £5 per head and you could eat as much as you wanted but the choice was only bacon, sausages, roast potatoes, black pudding, fried egg, fried bread, beans and mushrooms. The thrill of the open road. Unlimited roast potatoes and bacon for breakfast.

(We spent just one night at the supposedly more upmarket Premier Inn, and it was relatively more luxurious but due to its incomprehensible automated reception machine, it took us an hour and a long conversation with two angry Premier Inn employees to gain access to our room. “Getting into this hotel was like the opening scene from a new episode of Black Mirror”, said the Driver, a recent convert to the show. “There’s nothing like waking up in some shitty English town, before eating some shitty English breakfast before driving slowly down some shitty English motorway for 12 hours before loading into some shitty English venue and playing a shitty gig to ten people before going to some shitty Travelodge just to watch a really well made English TV series which explains to you exactly why everything is so fucked”, he told me gleefully.)

Any hotel room was actually very much like home as long as you had a laptop, a handful of Nick Cave CDs, some Right Guard and a copy of Threads on DVD, which happened to be the exact contents of my overnight hotel bag.

Waking up in another identical Travelodge on another identical Motorway retail park the next day I realised finally that this was literally the worst place for a writer to be during general election month. Nowhere had wifi that worked. It was like being in a bubble of ignorance for 31 days. We had to choose these parks to minimise the chances of the splitter van getting stolen with all of our gear inside it. Every Travelodge we stayed in was essentially the same, surrounded by a handful of other outlets - a Toby Carvery or a Harvester or, if you were really unlucky, both of them. Then maybe also a Costa, a Boots and an Esso petrol station as well. They were all accessible from a motorway roundabout that wasn’t really near anything other than either an airport, a prison or an industrial estate. A vague hangover from reading JG Ballard as a schoolboy led me to believe that there would be some kind of mind-expanding nourishment to be had from this aspect of the venture but these motorway retail parks were all identical. They were the most co-opted and least free spaces of all.

After breakfast, outside, sitting on a wall drinking a cup of tea in the sunshine, I looked intently at a semicircle of rooks surrounding a single bird of their own kind. They were slowly advancing in toward it. The bird in the middle was stock still and not moving. It didn’t look like a friendly encounter. The Driver and the Passenger came out and joined me. The parliament were just about to attack the accused in order to peck it to death but just as the corvine jury bore down, they were disturbed by a loud noise from above. The Red Arrows flew over the Travelodge in formation causing them to scatter  It felt almost as if the Driver existed in a bubble of weird, uncanny, apocalyptic and esoteric events that moved with him wherever he roved. But it was also as if he barely noticed any of them. I stood pointing at the sky.

“Yes, yes” he snapped irritably as if he was sick of seeing this kind of thing. “Let’s get in the van and get off otherwise we won’t get to Digbeth in time.”

That night I dreamt that the solid iron core of the Earth was about to slough us all off until the planet stood raw and bleeding in space, just roiling magma with no skin to contain it. The utter indignity of being born between waves, the scions of a pusillanimous age we were all about to be cast into the void with the filthy scab of a country we called England. A flat and unmagical land. A depressing and tawdry place. When I opened my eyes Toby was stood in the corner of the room, sharpening his cleaver, schnick, schnick, schnick, schnick. Empty eye sockets carved out of rancid, fly-blown gammon.  

“We have to stop eating lunch at the Harvester!” I sprang out of my fold out bed and shouted at the Driver and the Passenger, waking them from their sleep. “The full rack of ribs is fucking killing me!”

Fuck the Harvester. Fuck Toby Carvery. All of the clothes that were hanging off me on May 1 were now snug and it was only May 12. My ears were ringing with the premonition of some future blue cheese dressing related pulmonary event.

It was easy to see how ruinous life on the road could be, even when you didn’t drink or do drugs. I felt sorry for younger bands who felt they had to go out partying every night after shows. After a couple of weeks it must end up hellish.

The road to Hull was paved with UKIP signs. Only Necrosis by Cadaver played at ear disrespecting volumes kept us sane. It was dark as we drove into town and ghosts lined Ferensway waiting to greet me. The cinema where I’d had my first date in town, the pair of us just turned 18 - watching Shirley Valentine no less, saying, “Imagine being that old” about Pauline Collins and Bernard Hill - was now a bingo hall. The war memorial that I regularly drank sherry in front of on a bench. The Welly nightclub where I saw a punter swan dive off a balcony and go headfirst through the corner of a formica table. When they took him out on a stretcher there was a blanket pulled up over his face. And then down past my old house on De Grey Street and into the car park of the Adelphi. And then the ghosts waved us back out of town.

The drive to Great Yarmouth was gruelling and 13-hours long because of traffic - we got stuck behind no less than three serious road accidents. Bodies strewn across baking tarmac. Bloodied travellers weeping in incomprehension at the hard shoulder. Slow moving the traffic might have been but at least we had plenty of long albums to listen to. Just like a mattress in a shared student house or the narrative flow of the Bayeux Tapestry - Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly sagged in the middle but it was very, very long, making it ideal for the van.

Eight hours later, after the show, we flew down the A47 unimpeded like we were clinging to a rocket, listening to Slayer albums sequentially at full volume, gabbling like a bunch of four-year-olds as we went. By the last day, I felt like I was about to die and constantly on the verge of tears. I didn’t want it to end. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times. It was genuinely the worst of all times. And yet I’d crawl over broken glass to be able to do it all again right now.

You know, if you really want to get the measure of a country don’t drive round it. Take a train or walk. Maybe buy a bicycle or a skateboard or something.

We drove 5,000 miles of barbed wire and parked the splitter van by the roadside.

John Doran, Bangkok, Thailand, December 2017

[kieraswriting]

Easily Broken Chapter Two

Masterpost

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Virgil woke sluggishly, too tired to move, despite the pain in his head. He managed to push himself to his hands and knees, confused at why he was laying on hard plastic. And why the plastic was shaking. He then registered the sound of an engine, and enough adrenaline flooded his body for him to wake up. He was in a cage, in a car. Logan was in a cage next to him, asleep, or… please let him just be asleep. 

Virgil looked around the car. They were in the backseat, and the cages were seatbelted in so that they wouldn’t slide around. There was a human in the front seat, driving. 

Virgil tried to remember why he was there. But he couldn’t remember anything. After Thomas and Patton had left, Remy left next, and then Logan had used Thomas’s laptop to start a movie for the two of them. And then he woke up. 

They had been kidnapped. 

A soft groan drew his attention to Logan, who was starting to wake up. Virgil pressed his hands against the side of the cage and pushed all his body weight into it. He hadn’t expected it to move, but he was still disappointed when it didn’t. 

“Logan!” He whispered. 

Logan shook his head slightly, and then sat up, looking around disorientedly before he saw Virgil. 

“Virgil. What—where are we?” Logan’s voice wasn’t as quiet, and Virgil caught the glance the human gave them in the rear view mirror. 

“I don’t know.”

Suddenly Logan started banging on the cage. “Let us out! There are laws against kidnapping hybrids!”

“No, Logan! Stop!” Virgil hissed. 

Logan kept banging and yelling at the human, but the human just ignored them. 

It was several minutes later when the human yelled back. “Listen, I’m patient, but I’m getting tired of this. Shut up.”

“You think I’ll obey a human that kidnapped me?!” Logan yelled back. 

Virgil shrank back. They didn’t know this human. Anything could happen. 

Suddenly there was music. Loud music. 

Virgil clamped his hands over his ears, but the music was loud enough to rumble through his chest, and even past his hands it hurt his ears. He looked at Logan, who was having similar problems. 

The music didn’t turn off until the car stopped. 

The human woman unbuckled the cages and lifted them by the handles at the top, completely ignoring the hybrids inside. 

The cages were set up on a long table, which already had many other cages, also with hybrids inside. From the minute they entered the room they could hear soft crying. Virgil froze. This was bad. This was so much worse than the pet shop. What was going on? Why wasn’t— he wanted Patton. 

The human left them to talk with several other humans. 

Virgil set a hand on the wall of his cage, and Logan put a hand on his cage, in a similar place. It was the closest they could get, but it felt so far. 

Humans were milling around the room, observing the hybrids. A large man came to stand in front of Logan’s cage. 

“A big one, aren’t you?”

Logan stayed silent. Virgil was glad. If Logan got angry and yelled again… well, Virgil’s brain could think of many, many ways that this could go even more wrong. 

“How old are you?” The man asked. 

Logan glowered at him, but didn’t answer. 

The man reached out and picked up Logan’s cage. 

Virgil instinctively flung himself against the front of his cage. “Logan!” His voice being the loudest thing in the whole room at that moment. 

Logan jerked around, and his eyes were as wide and scared as Virgil guessed his own were. 

The man smiled, and it shook Virgil to his core. “So the little one has some spine to him after all. You know each other?”

Without waiting for an answer, the man grabbed Virgil’s cage with his other hand. He went to the woman who had brought them, and paid her for them. 

They’d been sold. 

••^*^••

“Where are they?! I knew we shouldn’t have left them alone!” Patton said. 

“It’ll be ok,” Thomas said. “They might have just gone with Remy.”

“But we don’t know where Remy goes!”

“He said something about a concert, I’m sure if we check for concerts that are in town, and then check the ones that allow hybrids, we’ll get a clue at least.”

••^*^••

They were in a small room. The man set down Logan’s cage on the floor. Then he set down Virgil’s box and opened the door. 

“Don’t touch him,” Logan said, half warning and half pleading. 

The man ignored him, reaching into the cage. Virgil huddled in the farthest corner and hissed at him. 

“If you corner him like that he may get violent.” Logan tried, well aware that it probably wouldn’t work. 

But he never expected what the man said next. “Oh? Lucky me.” The man retracted his hand slightly. “Listen up, kitten. You’re mine now, and I can pick you up whenever I want to.”

Virgil hissed. 

“I’m going to pick you up now, and every time those teeth or claws come out, I’m going to hold onto you for another hour.”

The man grabbed Virgil by the front of his shirt, and Virgil predictably sank his teeth into the man’s hand. But the man didn’t even flinch, just pulled Virgil out of the cage and held him tightly in his lap. Virgil scratched and bit furiously, but the man’s grip was unyielding. 

Nothing Logan said to him made any difference either, whether he threatened or begged. 

Finally the man must have gotten tired of Virgil attacking him, and he pressed him into the floor, hands splayed over his chest and holding his arms to his sides. Virgil squirmed and screamed angrily. 

Logan couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t do anything. 

The man was entirely unmoved, even as his hands were bleeding, and Virgil’s cries echoed through the small room. 

“Virgil.”

Still struggling, Virgil turned to look at Logan. 

“Just… just be still.” It hurt Logan to admit defeat, and hurt him more to tell Virgil to do it. But he couldn’t see Virgil get hurt if there was anything he could do to stop it. 

Virgil kicked a few more times, but then went limp, still shaking. His eyes were wide, clearly terrified, and his whole body twitched every few seconds. 

“There you go,” the man said. “Just lay calm a while. We’ll be in here quite a while.” 

It was at least an hour later when the man let Virgil off of the floor, setting him in his lap. Virgil’s shaking started up all over again, but he didn’t try to bite again. 

Several hours passed before the door opened, and a young girl passed in a plate with several sandwiches on it. The man ate two of them, and there were two left on the plate. 

Logan’s eyes narrowed as he realized. This man was going to force them into being as dependent on him as he could. He was going to show them his hand, with all of the cards in it, and make them realize that they had none. Well, Logan wasn’t going to go along with it. He was not going to beg for the sandwich.

More time passed. The tension rose and fell whenever any of them moved, but gradually, as the hours passed, it grew calmer. The girl came back, bringing several paper bags with fast food. She took the sandwiches out with her. 

The whole time, barely a word had been spoken. The man seemed very comfortable in the silence, and Logan was scared of what he might do to Virgil if he became annoyed, so Logan didn’t dare speak. 

The smell of the food filled the room, and Logan’s stomach growled. 

The man opened the bag one handed, his other hand still wrapped around Virgil. He held a fry out in front of Virgil’s face. 

“Want one?”

Virgil hissed. 

The man shrugged, and ate the fry himself. He ate, occasionally offering something to Virgil, only to be hissed at. 

Once the man was done eating, he pulled out his phone and sat doing something on it, just as silent and seemingly content as before. 

It was several more hours before the man set his phone aside. He yawned and scratched his head. 

“Well, I think we’ve got about thirty left. I’m going to sleep.”

He stood up, still keeping a grip of Virgil, who thrashed and hissed, but didn’t try to bite him again. 

“No…. don’t take him!” Logan found himself saying before he could think about whether or not he ought to. 

But he was ignored. The man left the room with Virgil, who was getting more and more vocal in his protests. The light turned off, and Logan was left in silent darkness. 

••^*^••

“That car is gone…” Remy noted. It had been in the same place every other time he had come, and he’d had to avoid being seen by the driver, but this time it was gone. 

The instant he knocked on the door it was opened, and Patton was practically screaming at him. 

“Where’ve you been!?! Where’s… where’s… Remy, Where are they?”

Remy frowned. “Jeez, Pattycake, what’s going on?”

Patton grabbed him and shook him. “Where are Logan and Virgil?!”

“Let me go! I haven’t seen them!” 

Patton dropped him and burst into tears. 

••^*^••

Virgil felt like crying with relief when he was taken back into the room with Logan. Logan looked like he hadn’t slept any more than Virgil had, but he didn’t look hurt. 

The man just sat down again. How he managed to do it Virgil had no idea. He’d never met a human capable of just sitting for this long. 

Time passed slowly. 

Then Logan looked up, determination on his face. Oh, please don’t let him do anything stupid. 

“May I come out?” Logan asked, his voice carefully level and even. 

Virgil’s gaze snapped up to the man. He looked as surprised as Virgil felt that Logan would ask. He shrugged. “As long as you remember the rules.”

Logan looked down, barely disguising the disgust on his face. “I’m yours and you can pick me up when you want to. If I use my teeth or claws against you you’ll hold onto me for an hour each time.” His voice, though clearly through gritted teeth, was still even. 

The man looked pleasantly surprised. He shrugged. “Then sure.” He leaned forward and opened the cage. 

Logan came out immediately, looking like he wasn’t worried at all, especially with how he stepped into the man’s lap to get to Virgil. He ran his hands over Virgil’s head, and the parts of his arms and sides he could reach. 

“I’m fine,” Virgil whispered, his own voice quavering and hoarse. 

Logan pulled Virgil into a hug. Virgil relaxed slightly, and gripped Logan’s shirt. A large part of him wanted to ask Logan to get him out, but he knew that Logan had no more control of the situation than he did. 

Virgil didn’t look up. He didn’t want to see the man watching them. 

“I knew you looked smart,” the man said triumphantly. “But I didn’t realize you were one of the failures.”

Logan flinched slightly, and Virgil held on tighter. 

“I’m willing to bet you both are. Both got chucked into the trash bin and that’s where the girl found you, huh?” The man chuckled and then continued. “You’re awfully lucky then, not many trainers would keep you if they knew you were failures. But I’m not like that, and you’re smart. You’ll figure it out.”

Logan stiffened, but didn’t acknowledge the man. 

A few seconds later Virgil felt Logan stiffen even more, and looked up to see him gritting his teeth. The man was petting his head. 

Virgil didn’t expect Logan to say anything, but he did. “Surely with as much as you think you know about me, you could infer that I do not find this pleasant.”

The man hummed, but didn’t change what he was doing. 

Virgil had an idea. It was not a particularly pleasing idea, but if he was right, they could survive. It seemed that this man was familiar with hybrids already. He hadn’t pulled at their ears or tails, hadn’t really hurt them, hadn’t yelled. Virgil had directly bitten him, several times, and he hadn’t exploded or gotten angry. But he did seem to demand obedience, and a degree of submission. Which meant that… well, they’d certainly be treated demeaningly, but, they might be able to survive here. 

It was… odd. Virgil liked Patton and Thomas far more than he would ever like this man, but he felt like he understood this man a bit better. He made rules, and followed through with them. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, but it was predictable. And Virgil could work within a predictable situation. 

“Please, don’t pet Logan.” Virgil said, and despite his relative confidence that he was right, his voice still quavered with uncertainty. 

Logan pulled back, staring at Virgil in shock. 

But the man smiled triumphantly, taking his hand away from Logan. “It seems you’re both smart. I’ve certainly made a good investment this time.”

Soon after the man turned Virgil around, facing him outward from his lap, mostly so that Logan would move and he could get back to doing whatever he was doing on his phone. 

It was a while later when lunch came in. Again, it was four servings, of which the man ate two. Virgil was ready to test his idea again. 

“Can we eat too?”

The man smiled, clearly pleased with himself. “You may.” He puffed himself up as if he imagined himself a benevolent king. “You, Logan, I think he said, bring the food over here and you two may eat.”

Logan’s teeth had been gritted almost all morning, but he did as the man said. They were both starving, and the food was good. 

More hours passed. Virgil was very nearly used to the feeling of a massive hand wrapped around his side. It still made him jump if the man shifted his grip, but on the whole, if Virgil didn’t move, the man didn’t either. 

Dinner came, and Virgil asked for it again. The man let them eat, and Virgil wondered if his idea was proven. 

It was late, late at night when the man stood up. Virgil was lifted into the air, and grabbed onto the man’s arm so he wouldn’t fall. 

“The time is up.” The man said, his face stern. “What have you learned?”

“I should let you pick me up, and not bite or scratch. And…” this was the final test of Virgil’s idea. “And to ask for things.”

The man beamed. “Excellent! You’ve learned well. By far one of the quickest learners of all my hybrids, even though the start was a bit rocky.” 

He set Virgil down on the floor. 

Then the man left. 

[ziracona]

I think you've said the your first plan for Frank's fate was a lot different than what happened in fic? Do you mind sharing what your original idea was?

Sure!

So, originally, when I added Legion to In Living Memory--which was by far the biggest rewrite I did to my outline--I planned out Susie’s arc and Joey’s more or less as they appear in-fic. However, almost none of what happened with Frank was planned. So, when I write, characters often do stuff I don’t understand at the time or only partially understand, or figure out the reasons behind later, which can be a little bit of a hassle but isn’t too bad. Unfortunately, they also not just incredibly infrequently will decide to do shit I had no idea they would do ahead of time, and like, I can’t stop them, because like it or not, if I did, I’d be writing them OOC, so I just kind of have to go with it. When I got to The Lost, the section with Frank was supposed to be very different. He was supposed to show up, and Jeff was going to be low-key nice to him. I think in the original outline draft, he was a little more fucked up still than he is in-fic, so in the outline, Jeff bumps into him upstairs while looking for the tape, easily incapacitates him when Frank attacks him, and is super surprised by winning the fight in like 0.8 seconds, and realizes how fucked up he is. Frank is kind of freaked out, because he’s super weak and at someone who he would expect hates him’s mercy, but Jeff just is kind of silently like “it’s okay--don’t worry” and doesn’t tell anyone else he’s there so that he won’t be in trouble, and they leave with the tape. When I actually wrote the chapter, that changed to Frank being more healed at this point, and them actually fighting him, and some of what ended up in chapter, but Jeff was mostly just expected to be like “Okay, but we’re not going to kill him. We’re going to show mercy even if he wouldn’t, and let him go.” because Jeff is, well, Jeff. And instead he was like “Hey uh can I do a thing?” and I was like “Uh yeah I guess” and he just went off and was unreasonably nice and compassionate to Frank Morrison for like 40 pages and I was like...This is going to butterfly effect update everything. Shit.

And it did. Thanks Jeff. (Sincerely though, it’s much better the way the cards fell and the way I ended up writing/developing Frank and Julie and also Jeff and Joey and Susie too).  Originally, Frank was going to be slightly conflicted (as Jeff would still have been unexpectedly merciful to him), but to a much, much lesser extent. He was never a monster--he’s kind of a shitty person, but not without redeeming qualities, and he’s still in his early 20s. [To be fair, though, in ILM, Frank gets away with a lot. Like, going back and reading Tenacity, Adrenaline, and Grit alone, he does some sincerely fucked up stuff to Meg that he is allowed by the compassion of the rest of the cast to come back from. Meg doesn’t get enough credit for how nice she is to Frank by the end of the fic. Which I mean, everyone nice to the Legion is going to be automatically juxtaposed with Jeff, who is the most compassionate and selfless man ever, but credit where it’s due, Meg is a super, super kind person. Lets Frank go in Vs. because he helped Susie and because it would make Susie sad, doesn’t try to get revenge on him even though he’s caused her lasting PTSD and some pretty big trauma for petty reasons, is willing to believe he and Julie could/have actually changed, and while at fic-end she’s still kind of at “I am sincerely glad for you that you’re not who you used to be, but also, being close to you is traumatic for me because of what you did to me in the past, so I do not want to be around you,” (which is already a both valid and incredibly generous place to be at towards him), she feels further compassion for him because at this point he really does sincerely regret and feel guilt and shame for the things he’s done and wish he could change them, and extends the possibility that maybe in the future she will heal enough that that’s not the case anymore and there might be a future where they could be okay with each other, or oven become friends. And I know that next to Jeff people don’t all be looking as amazing as they would otherwise haha, but that’s like, that’s such a kind and strong and compassionate choice to make towards someone who has hurt you. Forgiveness is such, such a valuable thing, because it just is never merited, it’s always an act of compassion, and I really love her for that. I know I’m totally derailing the actual question so I’ll get back to it now though--sorry--I just have a lot of love for Meg Thomas.]

But uh yes, back on topic. Frank was never a monster. Legion is super interesting and I love them because they’re in a class all their own, which I know I’ve said before. But like, “teens who murdered one guy once spur of the moment because one of the group was in trouble” is such a different mental/psychological/ethical/emotional place to be coming from than any of the other killers. Frank is kind of a shithead, but he does genuinely love and care for his friends, and would be willing to suffer for them. He’s definitely got Reactive Attachment Disorder too, which is part of why he has such a hard time getting to trust Jeff eventually. 

So, as aggressive and kind of shitty but not wholly without redeeming qualities, his original story would have seen him usually an aggressor (tries hard to stop Susie, hurts Meg, gets on Joey’s case for anything kind he does, kills survivors pretty brutally & threatens people to try and keep them in line, etc), but also having moments of sympathy and humanity (letting Quentin go in Distortion/Iron Maiden, conflicted about Jeff helping him, being willing to get incredibly hurt by the Entity to protect Joey, fighting Ghostface to save Susie even though their relationship is not good right now, etc), and getting kind of mixed results in his ending. He would still have saved Susie in Vs. and been helped by Meg, who would still have offered him temporary Clemency because he saved her girlfriend and she’s got some honor, and would have escaped with Julie and the rest of the survivors and allies and made it back to the world. However, instead of sticking around to help patch up Jeff etc, Frank and Julie would have booked almost immediately in 600 Seconds (I doubt he would have stopped to help the truck driver either), and ended up with an uncertain fate. In the original outline, they kind of go off Bonnie & Clyde style and live together on the run. They send Susie and Joey postcards and such sometimes, but are kind of just MIA at the end, and it is unclear/up in the air if they will escalate into violence again, or be convinced by their old friends to come meet up and maybe try living a different life. I am not sure of details beyond that, because that outline kind of burned to death with the first actual paper draft of The Lost, as at that point I was pretty sure what Jeff was choosing to do would drastically change Frank’s future and decisions. I was kind of unsure how to feel about that at first. 

I’ve never like, hated Frank, but when Darkness Among Us released, I did not like him. Didn’t hate, but like, he was kind of vaguely portrayed as an angry, violent white boy who thinks his sad backstory gives him the right to commit murder, and despite that was wildly not just like, liked, but like, stan-style liked and pretty frequently really woobified too in big chunks of the fandom right after release, while the much more canonically sympathetic Joey got super sidelined (probably for race reasons) and so did Julie. So, I certainly didn’t like, plan to give him as big even a role as he had? I wanted him to be complex because he just was, but uh, it was surreal for me that I ended up having a deep emotional attachment to Frank hecking Morrison, but like, I guess here we are lol. And I’m not sorry. It was a good way for the story to go, and improved the plot. My frustration with the initial portrayals I saw were p valid, but I just didn’t end up writing Frank that way, or seeing him that way when I got to know him, and the person he was in ILM is someone who I am happy got and chose to take a shot at redemption and a good life with people who loved him. I care about him a lot. I think after The Lost, and certainly by the first draft of The Cat I was fully on board with how I knew then that Frank’s story was going to go, and it’s a kinder, softer story than I had planned, but I’m glad it was. I’m glad the stupid rat boy got a redemption arc. It’s so fkn hard to actually choose to change if you do bad stuff in real life, and it’s pretty damn valuable if someone can face the guilt and responsibility of what they did, accept it, and try to find some way to make right. He had a stacked deck in life, and got pretty lost out there for a while, but he beat the world, in the end. Frank let himself get pretty hardened and chose to throw out a lot of humanity before he decided to stop, but he did, and he earned a little bit of hope in the end. I don’t know if his ending is fair or not, considering all the bad shit he did, but I also don’t think it has to be. I don’t remember the exact line, but Jeff’s right when he says that life has always been unfair to them, but never in ways that were good, and that unfair can be a good thing too. Life is so rarely unfair to human beings in a way that is merciful or kind, and it’s really kind of amazing the rare times it is. I’m happy things ended up how they did. : )

[Also: fun stupid fact as a last note here. When I decided to expand Frank’s role, I was like “Okay, I can definitely see the value of this character arc and story change, and I like it and am on board, but you absolutely cannot sideline Joey to give Frank room,” like--I was not going to end up like

nuh-uh, so I literally invented a rule for myself that any time Frank got new content that wasn’t in the outline, I had to give Joey new content too so he wouldn’t get bypassed/sidelined and his arc and narrative would get the value and consideration and time it deserved alongside Frank’s and not accidentally, good intentions or not, end up getting overshadowed, and I really did stick to that. Like it got kind of funny to me. But I’m also glad I did because now Frank has a cool and well developed, hard-earned redemption arc, Julie gets one too, and I get *EveN MOooREe* Joey being a wonderful character screen time. Just good for everything all around. <3 ]

[aniray]

Where You Least Expect It... Part 4

Part 4 of 5

@maryams-things

~*~

Day 217

Tommy leaned against the side of his car. Lizzie was doing a final walk-through of the guest house. He’d drive her to her apartment- the truck too high for her to get into. The last box was put into the back and Tommy watched as one of the men pulled down the door. A flare of anger rushed through him- dark and violent. His fist clenched at his side as the men got into the truck and drove off.

The anger only grew when Lizzie stepped out of the house. She eased down the front steps as Tommy watched. It was small, but he still saw the hesitation when she reached the last step. Like she didn’t want to leave. Like she had no fucking choice. He forced himself to relax, to keep his face blank. But the closer she got, the angrier he became.

“Ready?”

Her voice was quiet- hesitant. Like it had been at the beginning, before the dinners and the fucking talks and the laughs. Back when she was just the surrogate and not Lizzie. The anger burned deeper in his veins. He didn’t respond- just opened her door and helped her in. He forced himself to take a deep breath while he walked to the driver’s side. He’d known this was coming. He’d known the day would come when things had to end.

He started the car and pulled away from the house. He’d done it dozens of times- after visiting with Lizzie, taking her for a drive. He’d come and gone from this house more times in the past six and a half months than any time before. But this time his hands gripped the wheel too tight and the idea of driving away made him want to fucking hit something.

“Tom?” He cut his eyes towards the woman beside him. She bit her lip the way she did when she wanted to say something he didn’t want to hear. And he knew what it was. “I think- Maybe when I get back-” She let out a sigh and from the corner of his eye he saw her blink back tears. “Think it’d be best if we all kept our distance from here on out. Don’t want to get attached, yeah?”

Fucking late for that. “Still got doctor’s appointments.” She nodded. “Grace’ll want to visit- check up on things.” Things like the baby. Things like whether Lizzie was being reckless. She nodded again. His grip tightened on the wheel again. “Alright. Yeah, alright, Lizzie. Grace can do all that, then.” The words tasted like dirt in his mouth. Made him want to smoke. Made him wish he had a fucking whiskey.

She turned her face to the window. Her fingers bunched the bottom of her shirt. The anger flared again. “That sounds good,” she whispered. “Thanks, Tommy.” He didn’t look at her. He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to fucking say. Just kept his eyes on the road as they sped towards Lizzie’s shitty fucking apartment. There was a new landlord, though. Like she’d heard his thoughts, Lizzie said, “At least I don’t have to worry about Joe.” Her fingers smoothed out her shirt- bunched it again.  “Heard the new guy’s okay. Doesn’t try anything with the girls.”

Again, he kept quiet. The rest of the drive was silent.  By the time he pulled into the parking lot of Lizzie’s apartment the anger was gone. In its place was a restlessness he refused to name. The movers were already unloading the truck. Tommy watched people peek out their windows to see what was happening. He’d have a man keep an eye on her- make sure nothing happened. “I’ll walk you up.” She turned and looked at him for a long moment, her gaze weighty in a way he didn’t want to think about.

“Goodbye, Tommy.”

She went up alone.

~*~

She’d been gone a week. One fucking week. And he kept seeing her. Every time he closed his fucking eyes, she was there, mucking about in his head. She’d show up in his damn dreams- laughing and smiling that Lizzie smile. It was worse than his nightmares. Worse than the memories of his mother’s broken bones or the burn of his father’s cigarettes. Because she didn’t belong. Not in his head like this. Not in his fucking bed. He couldn’t do that to Grace.

But Grace barely looked at him anymore. She didn’t sleep beside him at night. She pretended to, she’d wait until she thought he was sleeping before she snuck out. But he didn’t sleep much- never had. And so he’d lay in their fucking bed trying to understand what the hell had happened to his wife. Only to wake up with Lizzie’s face clear as day in his mind- following him out of his dreams.

He’d fallen into work- pushed his people hard, pushed himself harder. He’d started taken the horses out, running them until man and beast were both tired and shaking. And he’d drink. He’d drink until everything was so fucking hazy- a pleasant lack of clarity to keep her from finding him. But it didn’t work. None of it worked. Because she’d still be there, under his skin and in his head.

He paced the floor of his study. Grace had come and gone again. He’d tried, he’d fucking tried, but she was locked away farther than he could reach. And he was tired of dealing with the woman wearing his wife’s face. He turned at the end of his desk and his eyes went to the guest house. It sat dark and empty.

It was strange. That house had sat empty for almost four years. He’d never seen it lit up at night before Lizzie. She’d been in it for little more than half a year. But it felt like she’d been there forever- like there’d always been a light on, a beacon for him during his long nights. Made no sense. Sounded like something Ada would toss out from one of those books she liked so much.

But he didn’t look away. The feeling didn’t go away. Instead another crept up on him- slipped into his blood where he couldn’t get it out. This pull- this need to see her. A noise from upstairs made him think of Grace. He thought about the way she’d looked the day he married her- beautiful and light and his. He thought of how she’d been lately- aloof and lost in shadows. But then his eyes were back on the guest house and that pull was even sharper. Fucking desperate.

He grabbed his keys and left.

He had her pressed against the wall as soon as she opened the door.  “Get out of my fucking head.” He was breathing hard. From the stairs, from the drive, from her- he didn’t even know. His forehead as pressed to hers. Her wrists were caught in his hands. He could feel the firm swell of her belly- the baby kicked. “Damn you, Lizzie Stark. I can’t do this. I can’t do this to Grace. I won’t. You’ve got to get out of my head.”

She tugged one hand- he let go. Then her palm was pressed to his cheek. This was the closest they’d ever been. It scared him. How right it felt. How much he wanted to be closer. But he pushed the thought away- focused on the warmth of her palm and the stutter of her breath. “Go home, Tommy.” Her voice was hoarse and shaky, but it stopped the noise in his head. Her other hand twisted free, fingers twined with his. “Tommy, please. Please, Tom. Go home.”

His head dropped to her shoulder, his face pressed into the curve of her neck. “No use. You’re haunting me.” The hand that had been on his cheek found its way to the back of his head, fingers curling in his hair. His hands found her waist- held her still, kept her close. His mind slowed, sank into a comfort that was purely Lizzie. And maybe she felt it, too, because her breathing evened out and her pulse slowed.

“I’ll stop. I’ll stop haunting you, alright? I’ll stop.”

He cursed himself even as he held her tighter.

“Don’t.”

~*~

Day 241

It should have been better.

Lizzie was gone. There were no more dinners at the guest house. Thomas didn’t see her. He even stayed in the car during the doctor’s appointments. He only asked about the baby, never Lizzie. And it made Grace’s heart feel lighter. She had even slept in their room the other night. She hadn’t been able to do that for…too long. And it should have felt like an accomplishment. It should have felt wonderful.

But it hadn’t. Nothing felt wonderful. Nothing felt like it should. Because as much as he tried to hide it, Thomas had slipped away. She’d pushed him away. And now they were so far apart Grace couldn’t see how to get them back to where they had been. He didn’t sleep anymore. He only ate if she made him. And he was always, always, working. It was his way of hiding from things- it always had been.

The only thing he truly cared about, the only thing that could pull him out of his work-induced haze, was the baby. Grace had always known that Thomas would be an amazing father. She’d known he’d be strict, but fair. She knew he’d be playful and kind and everything his own father hadn’t been. So when he stopped working or drinking or pacing simply because she mentioned the baby… Grace wanted to believe it was a good thing- pure paternal love. She’d never been good at lying to herself, though.

Staring at the plate in front of her, Grace tried to think of something to say. It had been two days since she’d exchanged more than banal pleasantries with her husband. And for all the thoughts constantly swirling in her mind, she couldn’t find a single thing to say to the man across the table from her. Her eyes lifted briefly, immediately going to Thomas. But outwardly he was the same as he had always been. His plate was empty, a glass of whiskey on his right-hand side. His body both relaxed and tense in a way she’d only seen in Thomas.

He looked at her. She forced herself not to look away. She could see him planning is words. He’d always done that, just never with her. She dropped her gaze. “When are you going to stop hiding? Running away?” Her hands slid from the table, fingers gripping tightly in her lap. “I’ve tried, Grace- to be patient, to understand. I’m still trying.” Her nails bit into her skin. She should look at him. She should tell him what she was feeling. This was her chance to bridge the chasm between them.

“I don’t know what you mean, Thomas.”

She met his eyes once more. But there was nothing. She was staring at a stranger where only moments ago her husband had been. She felt cold. She felt lost and afraid. She didn’t know why she’d said it. She didn’t know why she couldn’t just be honest with him. She forced her hands apart. Some instinct demanded that she not show how broken she was. It demanded that she lift her fork and eat. It forced her to sip her wine, slowly, as if her world wasn’t imploding under the weight of her silence.

 Another minute ticked by. Then Thomas rose from his seat. Palms pressed to the table, he leaned in close. “In a month there will be a baby in this house. In a month we won’t have the luxury of ignoring whatever the fuck this is.” He stood straight, but his eyes grew colder, his voice sharper, with his next words. “I won’t raise my child with a stranger, Grace.” Then he was gone. She looked back to her plate. She picked up her fork and took a bite. Lifted her glass and sipped her wine.

She stopped.

The glass flew across the room.

She finished eating while wine dripped down the wall.

~*~

She threw herself into decorating. Her hair was tucked into a messy bun. A pair of old jeans had paint spots on them and her t-shirt sported more than one hole in it. The room was chaotic, but it was purposeful chaos. There was an unboxed crib that had yet to be assembled. The changing table was finished, but she still needed to stain it. There was a large tarp taped to the floor to catch spills, and there were quite a few. But the rug she was going to put down was tucked into the closet waiting to be used.

She needed this. She needed to do this. There wasn’t time or energy for anything else. No Thomas, no silence, no walls. There was just this room and making sure it was perfect. Each stenciled animal had to be perfect. Each little leaf and flower had to be precise. The right colors and shapes and textures. Each detail down to the smallest thing. That was the only thing that Grace could allow herself to care about- to spend her time on.

Footsteps stopped outside of the nursery. She knew it was Thomas. The staff had stopped coming to check on her hours ago. She’d noticed, but hadn’t really noticed. It was irrelevant, anyway. But Thomas- she knew he wouldn’t leave. Or maybe he would. Maybe they would live in this huge house and never speak outside of necessities. Maybe they would raise this baby together without ever truly being together the way they should be. She didn’t know. She couldn’t think about it.

Dipping a small brush into the forest green paint, Grace began filling in the leaves on the weeping willow mural painted over where the crib would go. She and Thomas had talked about this long before she realized she couldn’t have children. Mostly it had been her describing to Thomas what she thought would be soothing and what she hoped would make the room special. Thomas had listened, an indulgent smile on his face the entire time. As she painted the small leaves, it felt as if a lifetime had passed between those happy moments and the present.

It’ll be worth it once she’s born. Everything will fit again once the baby gets here.

A part of her said that a marriage was a lot to put on a baby. Some rational place inside her told Grace that babies rarely ease tensions. But like with everything else, she pushed such thoughts away and focused on creating the perfect haven for her little girl. The painters had done such a lovely job. The furniture would be beautiful when it was finished and in place. She could picture herself here, rocking her baby to sleep. She just had to hold on until then.

“Going to the office. Should be back in a few hours.”

She didn’t even turn to acknowledge that he’d spoken. When had ignoring Thomas become natural to her? A strange tightness pressed against her ribs. It made her breaths come less easily. And suddenly her mind was full of words she wanted to say. Dozens of apologies and explanations, every insecurity and hope and fear. She wanted to pour it all out at Thomas’s feet, let him wrap her up in his arms until she felt whole again. She heard the shuffle of his footsteps moving away and a sharp panic set in.

“Thomas?” she rushed to the nursery door. There he was, almost to the stairs. But he’d stopped. He’d waited. Even after all this, even when she didn’t know how to bridge the distance or what words to say. He was still there- waiting for her like always. He turned around to face her and she saw just how much she’d lost. She’d known, of course. She’d seen it in other moments and felt the pain. But now, outside of the room that their child would sleep, it seemed so much more real than those other times. “Do you still love me, Thomas?”

A stillness came over him that she’d never seen before. It was more than hesitation- it was… She didn’t know what it was. But it left her hollow. It left her frozen in ice, sharp pricks of pain radiating from every part of her. His hand dragged over his face. His fingers dug into his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. Then his hand dropped back to his side and a heavy sigh escaped him- like all the weight of the world had settled on his shoulders and it was too much for him to bear. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Okay.”

He didn’t come back until morning.

~*~

Day 272

Lizzie sat, eyes closed. Trying not to think about him. She’d tried to pretend. She’d tried to convince herself that nothing was changing- that nothing had changed. But it was hard to hold onto the lie. Things were different. She’d made a mistake. She’d gotten attached. Not just to the baby, though she couldn’t imagine walking away from her at the end of this. No, she’d gotten attached to Tommy. She’d gotten attached to his dry, almost morbid, humor and his rare smiles and the rough sound of his Brummie accent- an accent she hadn’t ever thought she’d miss.

And maybe, just maybe, he’d gotten a bit attached to her. Maybe he’d missed Small Heath in the same impossible way she did. Maybe he missed the boy he’d been when he saw glimpses of the girl she’d been. Maybe the bit of home she reminded him of had formed a bond between them. A bond that never should have been. A bond that she should have fought harder to ignore. But she hadn’t.

‘You’re haunting me.’

He was haunting her, too.

Almost two months had passed since that night- the night he’d shown up at her door and shattered the illusion she’d built around herself. She could still feel his breath on her neck and the softness of his hair. She could still feel the pounding of her heart from being so close to him. That night- everything it’d made her feel- that had been the reason she’d wanted him to stay away. Because she knew how it ended. ‘I can’t do that to Grace. I won’t.’ she’d never thought he would- never thought they’d be anything more than two people brought together by strange circumstances.

“Come on, Lizzie. Stop that.” It was something she found herself saying more and more as time went by. Standing up, with more than a bit of difficulty, she waddled to the kitchen. “Never thought I’d see the day. Lizzie Stark, big as a fucking cow.” Her hand dropped to her belly as the baby moved a bit. “Yeah, don’t worry about it. I don’t mind since it’s for you.” There wasn’t much room for her to move in there, but the baby kicked- almost like she approved of what Lizzie had said.

‘Grace’ll never go for it, but…I want to call her Ruby. Ruby Shelby sounds nice, right Liz?’

She paused at the sink to catch her breath. I’ll call you Ruby. When I think about you after. I won’t forget you.  Tears pricked at the back of her eyes, but she blinked hard to clear them away. God, it seemed like she was always ready to cry nowadays. It wasn’t hormones- most things were, but not this. No, this was just Lizzie missing a baby she still had inside of her. This was her missing a man she could never have. She shouldn’t have let herself get attached to either of them. Just her fucking luck, though.  

Turning on the faucet she reached into the cabinet and pulled down a glass. A sharp pain cut through her as she filled the glass. But she ignored it- had been ignoring it for a few hours now. She knew what it was. Hadn’t even tried to convince herself it was Braxton-Hicks first. She’d read too much to not know the difference by now. Figures her body would skip the pre-contractions and go straight for the real thing.

She leaned over the sink and took deep breaths until the pain eased, hand rubbing her belly all the while. “I know, Baby Girl. You’re ready to come out. But we’re gonna wait a little longer, alright? Just need a bit more time.” She couldn’t say it out loud- was scared to even think it. But it was truth all the same. She wasn’t ready to hand this baby over to Grace. She wasn’t ready to walk away.

The pain stopped and Lizzie took a sip of her water. It felt good going down. The coolness helping to fight the heat that seemed to be wrapping itself around her middle. Deep breaths, Lizzie. Just take deep breaths. Slowly she pushed herself up from where she’d been leaning. Keeping her hand on the wall, Lizzie slowly made her way to her bedroom. Her hospital bag was packed. There was nothing to do- nothing to prepare. One call and that would be it. But she didn’t call. “Just us, Baby girl. For a little bit longer.” She sat on the edge of her bed, grabbed her phone from the nightstand to sit beside her. Then she waited.

Another contraction came, closer.

She waited.

Then another, closer still.

She waited.

Another, three minutes from the last.

She called Tommy.

~*~

She hadn’t gotten to hold her.

It was for the best. Probably. It meant she couldn’t get any more attached. Couldn’t fall even more in love with a little girl she’d never see again. Grace had taken the baby straight from the doctor’s hands. Lizzie had caught a glimpse of dark hair, and a red face- mouth wide, voice loud and angry. Then the baby was out of sight, tucked in the corner with Grace. Lizzie had watched her smile and coo over the newest Shelby. She had only let go for the nurse to check her over and clean her up. Then it was right back to Grace. Until, with one absentminded nod, Grace had walked out the door, baby wrapped tight and pressed close to her chest.

She hadn’t gotten to hold her. But an hour later Tommy’s lawyer had stepped into the room. He’d brought a nurse and a social worker. He’d gone over papers relinquishing Lizzie’s parental rights. He’d had her sign a paper saying she understood what everything meant. Then the nurse signed as a witness. And it should have been simple. It should have been the easiest part of her day. All she had to do was sign a piece of paper, initial a few spots. Then it would all be done. But it wasn’t simple.

It was impossible.

So the lawyer had tucked the papers back into his briefcase. He’d told her that when she got out of the hospital to come to his office. He’d explained that Grace couldn’t start the adoption process for ‘the child’ until Lizzie signed the papers. So it was ‘in everyone’s best interest to get this matter resolved as quickly as possible’. The matter being the baby Lizzie had carried for thirty-nine weeks. The matter being this little person that was half Lizzie. The matter being her baby. The baby she wasn’t supposed to want- the baby she was never supposed to have.

Then the room was empty. The nurse had asked if she wanted visitors. She’d hinted that Tommy was wanting to see her. But Lizzie had said no. As much as she wanted him with her, she couldn’t. Fuck, it was almost laughable. She couldn’t have what she wanted because she wanted it. Because the wanting was too much and wrong and would never be more than that. So she sat in the hospital bed and stared at the blank TV. She listened to the sound of babies crying. She wondered if her baby- Grace’s baby- was crying. She wondered if she was hungry. She wondered if she missed her. She sat and she cried and she wondered.

Suddenly the door opened. Without bothering to hide her tears Lizzie turned towards whoever it was. Her breath caught in her throat. Her heart started pounding in her chest. Because there he was, a little bundle held close in his arms. If Tommy saw her tears, he didn’t let it show. If he had guessed how not okay she was he didn’t let on. Just stepped in, the door closing behind him.

Lizzie watched with almost hungry eyes as he got closer. She was nearly vibrating from forcing herself to keep still- to not reach for the little girl kicking in his arms. He sat on the edge on the bed and she nearly screamed at him to just let her fucking see her kid. But she bit it back, kept as calm as she could. It wasn’t her kid- papers or not. He was being nice, doing her a kindness. The thought didn’t keep her hands from shaking when he held the baby out for her to take.

“Thought I’d introduce you.” Lizzie tucked the baby close to her heart. She made sure that the blanket covered her feet. She straightened the little cap on her head. A smile lifted the corners of her lips at the peek of dark curls she’d seen. “Her name’s Ruby. Ruby Evelyn Shelby” Lizzie’s eyes shot to Tommy’s. He was wearing a slight smirk on his face. “I know. Didn’t think she’d go for it either.” Shaking her head in wonder, Lizzie turned back to little Ruby.

Her throat went tight. Her eyes watered a bit. “It’s a good name, Tom,” she whispered with a shaky smile. “Ruby Shelby. She’ll be somebody. She’ll have a good life and she’ll have so much love.” Her eyes found Tommy’s again. The blue in them was so clear. But there was a hint of something- something she was terrified to give a name to- in them. “Promise me that? That she’ll be loved and happy and safe?”

He didn’t say anything. Not with words, at any rate. But she felt it- his promise. She felt it deep in her soul. And it was almost enough. If she never saw this little angel girl again, that promise was just almost enough. So she stopped worrying. She let herself have this time. She sank into the easy weight of little Ruby. She breathed in the fresh baby scent of her. She basked in the warmth of Tommy’s hand on her arm, thumb brushing back and forth while she held his little girl.

I love you, Ruby Shelby. I love you.