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7-wonders · 5 years ago

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As Above, So Below Ch. 22

Summary: Your average, mundane life as a college student is flipped upside down when the man you thought you knew as your next-door neighbor turns out to be the God of the dead. When Michael lures you down to Hell, everything that you thought you knew about the world is proven wrong.

Word Count: 3165

A/N: Thank you all so much for being patient with me. I’ve been working on this chapter for a couple of weeks now, and I really hope it lives up to your expectations (yes, there’s smut). Feedback is always appreciated, and I would love if you liked, commented, and reblogged if you enjoyed this.

Although the news that the golden apple that will grant you immortality is on its way to the Underworld should cause you to hurry back home, you and Michael take your time in gathering your belongings. Cassius had left just as quickly as he arrived, the demon having nothing more to do than to serve his master. After fulfilling his duty of telling Michael the news, he had no reason to remain Above. Michael’s right hand preternatural being had given you both an odd look upon your lack of haste, but wisely chose to remain silent on his opinion of the matter.

“Are you nervous?” Michael asks, watching as you fold the picnic blanket up before deciding that it’s not even and starting again.

“No, not nervous.” You’re certain that you’re not nervous. The ball of nerves that settles in the pit of your stomach and refuses to go away is nowhere to be found.

Michael tilts his head, examining you as you pack away the rest of the supplies and carefully shut the basket. “You’re scared.”

Biting your lip, you turn to look at him. “Please don’t make fun of me.”

“Why would I ever make fun of you?”

“I don’t know, because it’s dumb to be scared in the first place?”

“My love, nothing you could ever say, do, or feel is dumb.”

“Not even when I ran away and nearly got eaten by that monster?”

Michael rolls his eyes at the reference of your first night dining with him. “Okay, I amend my previous statement. Nothing that you could ever say or feel is dumb. Some of the situations you get yourself into, however…”

“Okay, I get it! I do dumb stuff.”

Michael chuckles, gently removing your hands from the basket that you’re about to pick up and wrapping his arms around you. “Why are you scared? You know that there’s nothing to be scared of, right?”

“I worry that I’m going to end up rambling if I start to list the reasons why.”

“Ramble away.”

That’s all the encouragement you need, your fears spilling out of you like your mouth’s a broken dam. “Just...what if it doesn’t work? Or what if I die in the process? What if I eat the apple and you decide that you don’t love me anymore? That I’m not the girl in your prophecy? What if it does work, but immortality makes me a completely different person?”

Michael frowns as you brokenly finish listing your worries, eyes shining with tears when you look up at him. He had known that this was weighing on your mind, but not this heavily. “Hey, please don’t cry. It makes my heart ache to see you cry.”

“I’m sorry--”

“There’s no need to apologize.” Pulling you into his lap, he strokes a hand through your hair as he holds you to him. “I wish that there was some sort of precedence for me to draw on that would help to rid you of your fears. All that I know is that Violet would not have agreed to this unless she was absolutely certain that no harm would come to you. As for your fear of me not loving you anymore, I can assure you that that is impossible.”

He looks at you with a tenderness that would shock anybody who knew Michael as the God of the Dead. All that he wants is to make sure that you’re okay, even if that means shedding his stoic persona in order to reassure you. When you finally nod, wiping the tears from under your eyes, Michael slowly smiles.

“I hope that made you feel at least a little better?” Michael asks.

“It did. I’m still scared, but I’ll be okay as long as you’re next to me.”

He smirks. “I wouldn’t leave your side unless I was forcibly dragged away from you.”

“I love you,” you mutter into his shoulder. Regardless of the barrier, Michael hears your words loud and clear.

“Not as much as I love you.” Pulling you up with him, Michael runs a hand across your cheek and assesses you. “Are you ready?”

“No, but we’re doing this regardless.”

“That’s the spirit.” Before you can protest, Michael throws you a wink and transmutes with you back to the Murder House.

Your jump with Michael into the Hellmouth is much more willing than the last time you made this journey with him, neither of you wasting any time before stepping off the ledge and falling through dimensions. He lands gracefully, although everything that your fiancé (it’s going to take a bit to get used to being engaged to this literal god of a man) does is graceful. You, however, have to grab Michael’s arm to keep from stumbling to your knees upon landing. He bites his lip to keep from laughing, dutifully making sure you don’t fall over.

“I hope clumsiness is something that I lose in immortality,” you mutter as you straighten yourself up again.

“I don’t.” You look at Michael questioningly, and he elaborates. “I love how you trip and stumble. It’s...cute, and very uniquely you.”

You stare at the ground to avoid Michael seeing the bashful expression on your face, waiting for Michael to give the guards the signals to open the doors to the Great Hall. He chuckles beside you, amused at your silence, but nods at his servants and leads you into the room.

The dark shades of red and black that decorate the room makes it difficult to fully light up the room, which is probably why the Inferno that Dante had so famously written about is conveniently located on the other side of the room. The flames provide more light than 30 bright overhead lights, but still cast ghoulish shadows on the walls. Somehow you’ve managed to get used to seeing the entrance to the nine circles of hell whenever you need to visit Michael officially, but you don’t think you’ll get used to the screams the echo from the pit and the ever-present smell of brimstone that permeates the air.

A woman with coiffed blonde hair stands at the foot of Michael’s throne, her pastel Easter dress a stark contrast to the doom-and-gloom of the Underworld. She holds a cigarette in her grip, the paper stained with the pink color that’s painted on her lips. As you and Michael ascend the steps to his throne, she appraises you both with a cool gaze.

“Lord Hades,” she greets, curtseying to the man now sitting on his obsidian throne.

“Hermes.” You’re only mildly surprised to learn that Hermes is not a man, as has been depicted for centuries. If this was the information you were learning prior to meeting Michael, you would be freaking out right now. “As always, you are welcome in my realm.”

She smiles at him, the conventions that the gods and goddesses must engage in upon meeting melting away. “I bring a gift, although I’m sure that you are already aware of that.”

“Thank you for being so prompt with this matter.” Michael looks up at you and takes your hand, meaning for you to step forward. “I don’t believe you’ve had the chance to meet my beloved. (Y/N), this is Billie Dean, god of border crossings and guide to the Underworld, among many other patronages.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” you say softly, shaking her hand.

“The pleasure is all mine. After all,” she casts a wry glance towards Michael, “we’ve only heard stories of what the Fates had told Michael about you for centuries.”

“I hope I live up to those stories, then.”

Billie Dean smiles at you, giving your hand a reassuring squeeze before letting go. “You’ve already surpassed them, my dear.”

Your cheeks heat up as the two mythical beings get back to business, Billie Dean producing a small package from the bag on her hip.

“That’s it, then?” Michael asks, staring at the box.

“Violet requested that I transport the apple as inconspicuous as possible. This was the best I could come up with.”

“You’ve done well.”

“And with that, my work here is done.” Billie Dean nods to both of you, backing away so she can transmute without any collateral damage. “I assume I’ll be seeing a lot more of you, (Y/N). I look forward to it.”

With that, she’s gone, and you look at Michael as you process the whirlwind interaction with a woman who manages to embody the American South. “Wow, she’s…”

“She’s definitely a character,” Michael agrees.

“Why has she always been portrayed as a man?”

Michael gives you a look that says you already know the answer. “Surely a woman would not be able to lead others, even if it’s just to the Underworld.”

The sarcasm is evident, and you roll your eyes. “Thousands of thousands of years of sexism, all wrapped up into one goddess.”

“Discouraging, isn’t it?”

“So she’s the only being who can come and go from the Underworld as she pleases?”

“Besides me, yes. Otherwise, it becomes impossible to find. Many have tried and failed to find a way into the Underworld, but the magic that surrounds this realm means that the mortal plane’s entrance seems to always be moving and changing.”

You nod, already appraising the box with a calculating eye. “Should we...open the package?”

“In my chambers. That will give us more privacy.”

It doesn’t even register that Michael’s standing and leading you to his rooms, your attention so focused on the literal life-changing fruit that’s contained without its small cardboard home. As he closes the bedroom door behind you, you realize that you’re no longer scared. Indeed, you only feel fascination, a determination to get your hands on the legendary apple and see just what’s made so many of Ancient Greece’s heroes lose their lives in the process of earning.

“You know, I’ve never actually seen one before,” Michael says as he sets the package down on the bed.

“Seriously?”

“After what happened with Heracles, she nearly burnt the orchard down. She thought nobody was worthy of earning the gift of immortality.”

“What convinced her not to go through with it?”

“The thought of forsaking such a powerful and rare gift directly contradicts everything she stands for.”

“No offense, but if I were her and my husband, who had cheated on me, told me to grant his son immortality, I’d burn the tree to the ground.”

Michael grins, pulling you onto him as he sits on the bed. “And that’s why you’re my perfect match. I’m not interested in people who would savor the fruit of that tree. I look for people who would cut down the fucking tree and use it for firewood.”

The dark look in his eyes makes arousal pool in the bottom of your stomach, and you hungrily kiss Michael as a result. He’s more than happy to reciprocate, but pulls away far too soon for your liking. You want to complain, but his pointed look reminds you of what needs to be done.

A flick of Michael’s wrist has the sides of the box falling open, revealing the prize hidden inside. For all intents and purposes, the apple looks like a normal apple. Besides, of course, the fact that it appears to be solid gold. The light of the chandelier reflecting off of the surface confirms that it is what Violet described it to be, and you can feel the intoxicating call of immortality wafting off of the fruit. Michael holds the apple up to you, and you take it from him wordlessly. What is there to say when your entire life is about to change with a single bite?

“I’m right here next to you the entire time,” Michael says, grasping your free hand tightly.

Taking a deep breath, you lock eyes with Michael as you bring the fruit up to your mouth and pierce your teeth through the skin. It’s sweeter than any normal apple that you’ve had before, and you savor the taste as you take another cautious bite. Violet didn’t say how much or how little to eat, so you figure that means to just eat until something happens.

You let out a gasp when your heart starts to speed up, body going limp as you fall back against the mattress. Although your eyes are open and appear to be staring at the ceiling, your vision whites out and stars flash in front of your eyes. Liquid gold runs through your veins, the warmth coursing through your body sending you into a euphoric state.

Michael watches you intently, studying you to make sure that nothing bad will happen to you. He doesn’t see any physical changes, which doesn’t surprise him. However, he can feel the changes that are happening. The air seems to spark around you, like you’re a live wire ready to electrocute whoever may touch you. It’s almost like he can see the change occurring inside your very cells, fortifying themselves in the eternal youth that eluded history’s greatest conquerors.

The ecstasy clouding all of your senses reaches a fever pitch, the sensory overload making it difficult for you to even feel Michael’s grip on your hand. Your heart beats at a pace to rival that of a jet engine, chest heaving as you try to remember to breathe. When the fog starts to clear, it happens sense by sense. First your thoughts, followed by your nerves and your hearing.

Michael can tell that you’ve fully completed the transition when the glaze over your eyes disappears. You blink rapidly, pupils dilated as you try to adjust. Everything’s the same, and yet nothing’s the same. Everything seems so much clearer, as if you’ve just had Lasik surgery. You’re marvelling at how the fabric of the bed feels against your skin when Michael’s chiseled face appears in your line of sight. You had been so enthralled with experiencing everything as if for the first time, that you had nearly forgotten who was sitting right next to you the entire time.

“(Y/N),” Michael whispers, and you could nearly cry at how heavenly your name sounds on his lips. “How are you feeling?”

Your lips part as you try to come up with the words to answer Michael’s question. Finally, after a long minute, you manage to breathe out a simple, “radiant.”

Michael smiles at you softly, which proves to be a surprising trigger for you. All of your emotions are running haywire, and each emotion that you feel is experienced on a level that you’ve never felt before. When Michael’s piercing blue eyes deftly analyze your face, an intense feeling of lust overcomes you.

You catch him off guard when you surge up to kiss him, a soft gasp escaping him as your lips meet his. Using the upper hand to your advantage, you hook your legs around Michael’s waist and flip your bodies over so you’re on top of him. He stares up at you, a delightfully bewildered look on his face.

“This is...new,” he comments, threading his hands through your hair.

“Are you complaining?”

“Never.”

Rolling your hips against his, you pull your bottom lip between your teeth upon feeling his bulge against your clothed core. Although you’re both used to Michael being in charge, the new position is a welcome change for Michael as well as you, if the sparks of arousal forming deep in your abdomen are anything to go by.

“You’re a tease,” Michael mutters as you kiss down his neck, sucking purple bruises onto his beautiful porcelain skin.

“Mm, I learned from the best.”

His hands loosen around your hips so that he can remove your shirt before returning to their designated spot, helping to guide your pace. You have no time for the tedious removal of the rest of your clothes, and a wave of your hand leaves you and Michael bare.

“Never the patient one, even in your newfound immortality,” Michael remarks.

You roll your eyes, kissing him harshly to shut him up. Michael lifts your hips, making sure you get the message as he lines himself up with your entrance. You slowly sink down on his cock, both of you groaning as he stretches out your walls. Wriggling your hips to get comfortable, Michael stares up at you with blown-out pupils, biting his lip while he waits for you to start moving.

You begin to slowly ride him, rolling your hips against his and delighting in how wrecked he already looks. Tossing your head back to rid yourself of the hair that’s fallen in your face, you lift yourself up until just the tip of Michael’s cock remains sheathed inside of you before sitting yourself back down. Michael’s hand moves up from your hip to caress your breast, rolling your nipple between his fingers before wrapping his lithe fingers around your throat.

Shuddering in pleasure, you ignore the burn in your thighs as you begin to ride him faster. Michael’s eyes darken even more with lust as your own hands trail up to fondle your breasts, soft gasps escaping you as you tweak your nipples harshly. Beads of sweat begin to pool along your collarbone while you bounce on Michael’s cock, your walls fluttering around him as you begin to lose your rhythm.

“Are you close?” Michael coos, giving your neck a harsh squeeze. “Are you going to cum from riding me, my queen?”

“Yes, my king,” you gasp, grinning when Michael lets out a surprised moan.

“Fuck,” his hands grab your hips tightly again, beginning to harshly thrust up into you. “Say that again.”

“Say what again?” you tease, crying out when he hits your g-spot. “My king?”

Michael’s jaw goes slack, and you lean down to kiss along his jaw. “Yes.”

“You fill me so well, my king, better than anybody ever could.” The praise starts a fire within Michael, and he starts to rub his thumb against your clit as he works to bring you to orgasm. “Fuck, I love you. You’re an amazing king and you’ll be an even better husband, I-oh!”

You cum suddenly, hips stuttering to a stop as the pleasure that had been building in your abdomen explodes throughout your body. Michael’s eyes are alight as he watches you lose yourself to the pleasure that he brings you to. He continues to fuck you through your orgasm until he finally reaches his own, cock pulsing as he releases inside of you.

Michael pulls you to his chest, both of you breathing heavily as you come down from your highs. His bedroom is silent, the sheets a mess around you and the half-eaten apple lying discarded on the floor. You lock eyes with Michael before dissolving into giggles, the sound of your laugh leaving him no choice but to laugh too.

“Welcome to immortality,” Michael says against your bare skin as you nuzzle into his neck, more than satisfied with this welcome party.

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takerfoxx · 5 years ago

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The Rise of Skywalker Review

All right, new year, new decade, and all that jazz. Now, I do have a few things I wanna say about reflecting back on where I was and where I am now, personal growth and all that, but first, I have some major I need to get out of my system, something that’s been eating at my mind all week, something I really need to sit down and dissect to properly suss out my thoughts and feelings.

And that thing is this: what the fuck happened with The Rise of Skywalker?!

Now, just for the record, I’m that lapsed Star Wars fan who grew up with the original trilogy, who had a full shelf of EU novels that I read and reread over and over until their covers fell off, who spent untold hours replaying both of the Knights of the Old Republic games, was majorly let down by the prequels and became disillusioned by the franchise as a result, who reacted to the news of Disney’s acquisition of the franchise with cyncisim, who thought that The Force Awakens was decent but otherwise substance-less knock-off of A New Hope, who was bored to tears by Rogue One, who skipped Solo entirely, but who actually was surprising engaged and receptive to the subversive themes and new places that The Last Jedi took the franchise even if it was very flawed structurally and thought that it was the best Star Wars film since Return of the Jedi.

And hell, let’s just state my reasons right now. The Last Jedi came out at a time when I was just so tired of people trying to recapture lightning in a bottle with once-great franchises that had lived on long past their expiration date with trying to pass off clearly inferior knock-offs to their original installments as sequels. I mean, it can work, sure. Both of the Creed movies followed the Rocky movie formula pretty closely but were still great, and even if it didn’t click with me the way it did with other people, Fury Road was a fantastic film. The thing is though, both of those movies were still being handled by their original creators, specifically Sylvester Stallone and George Miller, while my beloved Star Wars and Jurassic Park had become divorced from their daddies and were now being handled by people who just. Didn’t. Get it.

And then The Last Jedi came along and was all, “Shut up about bloodlines, they don’t matter! Your main character is not the descendant of some already established character, she’s just some rando Force-sensitive that caught up in all this and decided to answer the call, so let her stand on her own! The Jedi were a well-meaning but immensely flawed, so leave them in the annuals of history and stop venerating them! Same with your heroes! Also, your Resistance has its hands dirty too because it’s a fucking war and war makes monsters of everybody while the little people suffer, sometimes you need to listen to the people in charge instead of being a hothead bucking the system, and the intimidating villains in black are in truth a bunch of insecure man-children playing dress-up to make them feel better about themselves and are pretty pathetic until they take that last step and become actual threats because that is how fascism works!”

Do you realize just how refreshing all of that was? Oh my God, is the Star Wars franchise actually…moving forward? Are we getting new stuff that’s not hampered by George Lucas’s unbearably hackneyed writing?

Yes, the whole Finn and Rose sidequest contributed nothing to the plot and ultimately went nowhere. Yes, the whole Poe vs. Admiral Holdo had the looming question of “Why doesn’t she just tell Poe that she’s got a plan instead of doing everything to set the team rebel off?” which undercut its message. These are major problems, I acknowledge that. The thing is, they are easily fixable problems that would have been smoothed out by a few more script treatments. It sucks that they weren’t, but as for me, they were roadbumps, not dealbreakers. I noticed them, I saw that they were major problems, but they didn’t make me angry, and I liked what they were trying to say enough for me to still be with it. And I felt that all the Luke/Rey/Kylo stuff was gangbusters (yes, I loved cranky, disillusioned old Luke. I know Mark Hamill didn’t care for it, but that’s fine, it worked great for me), so I ultimately left feeling pleasantly surprised. As if in, it was a flawed but very refreshing experience, one that said things I had been feeling for a long time and took things to interesting places that I actually wanted to see play out. I even got choked up when Luke let himself fade away when feeling absolutely nothing when Han died the previous film.

Unfortunately, that seemed to be a minority opinion, with many other Star Wars fan outright detesting it, sometimes to a pretty gross level (you know what I’m talking about). So when JJ Abrams was brought back on board to try to salvage things for the final installment, my reaction was, “I’m going to hate it, aren’t I?”

Still, I knew I was going to see it anyway, just to say that I did. And…welp.

…

Dafuq was that?

All right, all right, now before I continue, I need to acknowledge something. First of all, I have nothing against JJ Abrams as a person or even really as an artist. From all accounts he’s a cool guy who’s been taking all the backlash he’s been getting with a commendable amount of maturity, and he was placed in a very unenviable position by taking the reins in the midst of a very volatile situation. Plus, he had set a ton of things up in TFA that TLJ burned to the ground. Granted, it was a bonfire that I thoroughly enjoyed, but as the person watching his ideas just get cut off, that must have been frustrating watch. Like, what was he supposed to work with once he was brought back on after Colin Trevorrow had gotten the boot? And on a side-note, they really need to stop bringing Colin Trevorrow into big blockbuster franchises.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, we had the tragic passing of Carrie Fisher, which, in addition to being a terrible loss in general because she was a wonderful person that we’re all the poorer without, this movie was supposed to in some way revolve thematically around her, much like the TFA did with Han and TLJ did with Luke. But with her gone, they were just left with footage and recorded dialogue from deleted scenes from the first two films, which is next to nothing to go off of. Now there’s a debate to be had about whether or not it would be appropriate to CG her face onto a different actress, and I do get them feeling that doing so would be ghoulish…but they kinda already did that to bring Tarkin back in Rogue One, so…

Even so, that really sucks, and as awkward as the Princess Leia scenes are as a result, it isn’t their fault, so I’ll leave it at that.

And finally, it must also be acknowledged that a lot of the things I’m going to criticize them for were present in the original trilogy, and were just as awkward then. The OG movies weren’t perfect, folks. We’ve come to accept these flaws, but they were just as clumsy asspulls back then as they are now.

All right, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I actually want to start off on a positive note, specifically talking about the stuff I liked.

Let’s begin with the thing that I consider to not only be good, but actually kind of great: the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren. Their weird Force-link in TLJ was one of the few new ideas that everyone seemed to like, especially since neither of them could really control it and were equally befuddled by it. It’s just a cool idea, a new aspect of the Force we haven’t seen before, and it’s slowly built upon, actually affects both the plot and the characters, and leads to some great scenes between the two of them.

And you know what? I was actually surprised by how much I liked these two together. After the wooden pile of bleh that was Anakin and Padme, I was bracing myself for more of the same. But as it turns out, Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver have an incredible amount of chemistry, and Adam especially was able to pull off the whole tortured bad boy who’s trying to be a villain but feels endlessly conflicted in a way that Hayden Christensen never could (though to be fair, Adam had way more to work with). So giving them that weird link where they’re forced to interact at different points despite being galaxies across from one another is a fantastic idea.

And I was happy to see that not only was this idea not walked back on, they actually built on it. Without giving too much away, there’s an amazing scene where they actually have a lightsaber fight despite being in two completely different locations and not really knowing where the other is, with the camera jumping back and forth from each other’s perspective and items from each other’s surroundings keep getting thrown into the other’s area and it’s honestly really great.

There were also a lot of visuals that were pretty great. The whole indoor lightning of the Sith Planet was neat, as was the flying stormtroopers, and that festival was pretty cool, and…

Actually, come to think of it, most of the scenes in this movie are, when viewed in isolation, pretty good, and could have worked if they had been buffeted by, you know, proper buildup, actual pacing, and taking the time to let events have weight.

But that leads us to this movie’s biggest failing, the problem that bring the whole thing crashing down. And that is it will just. Not. Slow. Down!

Seriously, don’t take a bathroom break, because if you do, you’ll come back to find everybody on a totally different planet doing something completely different, and the plot point you left on is completely in the rearview. It’s exhausting how quickly this movie jumps around from place to place, where we get a look at a setting and characters that might have been interesting if we got to spend actual time with them, only to drop it and we’re onto the next part. This isn’t a story, it’s a list of bullet points! It’s a three hour highlight reel of a whole-ass fourth trilogy, one that could have been cool to watch if they had chopped it up into three parts and fleshed them out into three movies. Hell, I’ll tell you where to end each one: Rey vs. Kylo on the Star Destroyer, Rey vs. Kylo on the wreckage of the Death Star, and the actual finale. Expand on the stuff in between, flesh things out with actual, you know, character development and consequences instead of zipping around, trying to come up with as many places as they can to cram into Star Tours’ randomizer.

And that’s what this basically is, an overly long Star Tours ride! Now I like Star Tours just fine, because it visits places that hold actual meaning due to being properly developed in actual movies, but these places just left me feeling hollow. And while we’re on the subject, did we really need another desert planet, ice planet, and forest planet combo? Spice things the fuck up! Say what you want about the prequels, but at least they tried to take us to cool new places.

And you know what? I’m going to say it. This movie is actually worse than the prequels. Not because it’s nearly as clumsily written and woodenly acted, or because it’s dragged down by dumb attempts at comedy; it’s none of those things. But at least the prequels were trying! George Lucas might be totally inept as a writer and should not have been given free reign, but there were attempts at things like proper plot and character development, pacing, plot twists, mystery, building things up and paying them off. Just go read the novelization of Revenge of the Sith. It’s fantastic! Same plot, same events happening, same conversations, but the dialogue is reworked to give the characters actual personality and it’s narratively told in an awesome and creative way and it’s overall just a great book. So George Lucas’s movies had the framework of a good story, he just wasn’t the right person to tell it.

In contrast, this movie has actual good acting, and the dialogue isn’t anywhere nearly as corny, but it’s just so unbelievably basic. It’s surface level writing, with barely a hint of cleverness and very little personality other than what the actors are about to wrangle out through their performances. But structure-wise, other than to expand it into a full trilogy, I don’t see how anyone can turn this mess into an engaging, single-movie narrative. So much happens, and it just feels so empty.

And…okay. Let’s address the Bantha in the room. Let’s talk about Palpatine.

Why is he back? Why? Just…why? He doesn’t need to be back! He doesn’t! It’s stupid, it’s hackneyed, it’s not even explained! I mean, there’s an offhand mention of cloning, so yeah, it’s feasible, it just makes no narrative sense! Hell, the fucking opening title crawl just plain says, “Yeah, he’s back. No reason, he just is” and goes on from that. And apparently he’s been behind everything that’s happened, like Snoke and Vader’s voice in Kylo Ren’s head and stuff, because things just can’t happen without being masterminded by someone I guess.

Really? This is the best they could come up with? I know TLJ cut off a lot of their plot branches, but goddamn it, this is the best you’ve got? Resurrect Palpatine? They do remember that the first two movies from the trilogy barely had the emperor as a presence, right? Vader carried them all just fine! Just run with that! Have Kylo Ren be the main antagonist! Have this be able his ascension to actual mega threat instead of Darth Vader cosplayer. If you want Ian McDiarmid to ham it up in the robes one last time (and hey, who wouldn’t?) just give him a cameo! Like, a holographic message to any potential successors Kylo Ren is looking for. Have him be the devil on Kylo’s shoulder in a is-he-real-is-he-just-a-hallucination sort of way. Make him something tempting Kylo Ren to fully embrace being the new Sith Lord, something Kylo has to overcome if he wants redemption. But don’t bring him fucking back! That’s just so, so stupid.

And Rey being Palpatine’s granddaughter kind of pisses me off. Her being revealed as a nobody from nowhere in the last film was great! I loved that idea! But no, let’s just retcon that whole business because we’re trying to apologize for the only one of these movies that had any balls and everybody has to be the descendant of someone important. Even fucking Lando gets a long-lost daughter in this! No, I’m not joking, he totally does.

Now, could Rey’s Sith heritage have worked? Sure! In of itself, it’s a rad idea, one that could have been used to explore all sorts of awesome themes…if that had been their plan from the beginning instead of a cheap attempt to replicate Empire’s big plot twist. But let’s face it: they threw it in as a desperate attempt to placate the fans. There never was any sort of plan. Abrams made the first movie with the sole intention of trying to recapture that nostalgic feel and fucked off, Rian Johnson took over with no notes and decided to do what he wanted, Trevorrow got fired, and Abrams got brought back for PR reasons because hey, people liked his movie, and he had to scramble to piece something together! Damn it, Disney! You literally have infinite resources! Hire someone with actual creative talent!

Oh wait, you did, and people hated it. Fuck.

So yeah. Rey’s parentage? Total waste, raises more questions than it answers. Chewie’s apparent death? Total waste, because he was actually on another ship! Though you could Force sense these things, Rey! Dark Side Rey in the trailer? Total waste, just a Force vision. That whole bit with C-3PO potentially sacrificing his entire identity? Total waste. No one seems to care, he gets no say, and after his memory gets wiped it’s treated as comic relief. Yeah, one last look at your friends indeed, Threepio. Some friends you have there. Oh, except Artoo’s got your memory backed up, so it doesn’t matter, just like everything else.

Oh yeah, and fuck Chewie’s medal! Who was really asking for that?

What a mess. What a disjointed, soulless, pandering mess. What a waste of potential, squandered on nothing. Bleh.

Oh well, at least we still have the Mandalorian. I’ve started watching that and it’s really cool so far.

#star wars #the rise of skywalker #rey #kylo ren #jj abrams #the last jedi #the force awakens #george lucas #rant

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astrodances · 6 years ago

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Faith Is Found In the Winds

Finished Darkwing Duck for the first time last week, so...consider this a celebration of that fact. And by “celebration,” I mean, I got a sad headcanon for the aftermath of “Darkly Dawns the Duck” and I’m bringing you all down with me.

************************************

Their first official day together as a family had already filled Drake with enough glowing memories to practically heal his injuries, he felt.

After signing the adoption papers, he, Gosalyn, and Launchpad had driven through St. Canard’s suburbs in search of a new house for the three of them, during which Gosalyn and Launchpad learned that they shared a mutual love of crooning to the car radio, much to Drake’s reluctant amusement. Drake, for his part, pointed out the various hideouts of the local crime scene when they passed them, and all three swapped stories about their lives before the Taurus Bulba fiasco. Before finding each other.

It already felt so natural, so right, to be in each other’s lives.

Of course, that didn’t mean that they didn’t still have a lot to learn about each other.

As late afternoon took a hold of the sky and Launchpad started to drive their new station wagon away from Hamburger Hippo, where they’d gotten an early dinner to go, Gosalyn piped up from the backseat. “Can we stop by the cemetery on the way home?”

If her request hadn’t been so disarming, Drake would’ve smiled at her calling Darkwing Tower “home.” Until they could make an offer on a real one, his hideout was all they had. But instead he sputtered around a mouthful of fries, “The cemetery—! Gosalyn, honey, I...why?”

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” she answered.

A shiver ran down his spine. When he called her “spirited” before, he hadn’t expected the term to be so literal. “Well, that’s not ominous in the least...”

“Y-Yeah, couldn’t it wait until tomorrow? Or until Drake can drive again? You know, when I’m not here?” Launchpad cut in. He already looked like he’d seen a ghost by the way he had the steering wheel in a death grip.

Still, she insisted. “Please? It’s important.”

One look over his shoulder was enough to convince Drake. Gosalyn didn’t look like she was trying to trick them. Gone was the boisterous, carefree attitude that had filled the car with squeaky singing earlier; rather, a somber little girl with pleading eyes stared back at him, searching for his trust, and he had the sinking feeling he knew who she wanted him to meet.

“Launchpad...go to the cemetery.”

“Aw, man!”

—————

After a quick stop at a corner flower stand to pick up a bouquet of gladioli, the trio arrived at the cemetery. Launchpad parked on the curb right outside the gate, and after giving Drake a chance to get situated with his crutch, they walked in together.

An orange glow crept over the cemetery as the sun began its descent towards the horizon, giving the rows of graves an otherworldly aura. A slight breeze made Drake wish he was in his Darkwing outfit, not only for the added warmth of the cape and thicker jacket, but to fend off the nagging sense of death lurking behind him.

While Launchpad wasn’t faring much better, Gosalyn took in her surroundings in stride. She kept her chin held high as she marched a step ahead and lead the way down a path of engraved headstones and freshly-cut grass with flowers in hand. The image filled Drake with guilt and a desire for vengeance; his daughter shouldn’t have been this familiar with a graveyard. As grateful as he was to have her in his life now, she was too young to know death this well. Too precious to have that innocence of mortality marred, and if Drake could, he would have gladly fixed things to take that knowledge away from her.

“We’re here,” Gosalyn announced.

“Let’s not stay ‘here’ more than we need to, huh?” Launchpad rambled out as he checked his personal blind spots for any ghoulish threats. “I-I say we leave before it gets dark. Or if anything besides us shows up.”

Drake shushed him with a nudge from his good elbow, then took a half-step closer to read the tombstone before them and confirm what he’d already suspected in the car: this was Professor Waddlemeyer’s grave.

As quiet as ever, Gosalyn crept forward and laid the gladioli at the base of the marker, taking the time to make sure they were adequately arranged and shielded from the wind as much as possible. When she stood back to admire her work, she instinctively reached for Drake’s hand, and he obliged her after handing his crutch off to Launchpad. It was only then that he realized she was trembling.

Before he could do anything about it, Gosalyn gave his hand a gentle tug to have him shuffle forward a few steps with her. “Grandpa, this is Drake,” she presented, her voice surprisingly calm. “He’s gonna be my new dad and take care of me, right?” She looked up at him with green eyes full of hope and want.

Drake choked up as tears pricked the corners of his vision. He hadn’t expected Gosalyn to want to come to the cemetery to do this; at most he thought “meeting someone” would’ve just entailed paying their respects with the flowers.

Despite feeling caught off-guard, he nodded and cleared his throat. “Right. I...” he faltered as a delayed sense of responsibility slid onto his shoulders. “Right. I promise.” He pulled Gosalyn close to his side in a one-armed hug that she returned, which seemed to calm her nerves.

They all stood there for a moment longer as the breeze whistled past them. All the words of comfort that failed Drake’s beak, he squeezed into her shoulders, and that seemed to spur her on.

“Y’know, Grandpa used to tell me that if something ever happened to him, he would send the brightest star in the night sky to watch over me, and a rainbow to reach it so I could talk to him.”

If his heart wasn’t already shattered at his feet before, it sure was now. He needed to say something, lest he start crying. “Gosalyn, sweetie, I don’t think he needs to send you a rainbow so you can talk to him.”

“He doesn’t?”

“Nah. It’s like he sang to you: you’ve got a rainbow right inside of you.” Drake punctuated his point by poking her shoulder with his finger. “You are a rainbow. My little rainbow, now.”

Gosalyn buried her face into his side, and this time, he was positive he heard her sniffling. He soothed a hand down her back and planted a kiss on her forehead, and figured it was best time that they headed home. Only, now that he was here, there was one more thing he wanted to do.

Drake kept an eye on the grave as he leaned back to whisper, “Launchpad, will you take Gos back to the car, please?” When he didn’t get an answer, he turned to find Launchpad downright blubbering over their exchange. “Whoa, you okay, buddy?”

“Just fine, DW.” Launchpad blew into a bandana he must’ve kept in his pocket. “Just some allergies...probably from the grass. Sorry. Yeah, I’ll take her back.”

Drake gave him a sympathetic smile before looking down to answer Gosalyn’s questioning stare. “I’ll just be a second.”

“M’kay.” She gave him one last hug before walking over to place a hand on Waddlemeyer’s tombstone, looking back at Drake as she murmured, “Thanks, Grandpa.”

After giving him back his crutch, Launchpad took Gosalyn by the hand and together they walked back to the gate, leaving Drake with glassy eyes and silence. He thought about what he was going to say as he waited for them to be out of earshot, the sky growing dim above.

“She’s a brave one, that kid...” he began once he was completely alone, his gaze transfixed on the tiny indents he was making in the grass with his crutch. “After everything she’s lost, she still refuses to lose her spirit.” He chuckled softly. If it came down to the end of the world versus Gosalyn’s spunk, he’d put his money on her without a second thought.

The petals of the gladioli rustled in kind, and Drake sighed, growing serious and turning his stare back to the grave.

“Mr. Waddlemeyer...er, sir...I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’ll do everything in my power to watch over Gosalyn, just as I know you are. But...” he swallowed thickly. What he was about to ask was so selfish, he knew, but something in the back of his mind needed to get this off his chest. A sort of hero’s prayer he needed to offer to the heavens. To that star shining down on St. Canard.

“I know I live a dangerous life, so...please, keep me safe, for Gosalyn’s sake. Keep me safe, so I can keep her safe and protect her for you. Please...”

It was all he had to live for now, keeping Gosalyn out of harm’s way so she could light up the world. He didn’t want to fail her, or her grandfather.

The wind picked up once again. Despite the way his daughter had so carefully arranged the bouquet, a petal broke free from the gladioli and flew towards Drake, landing squarely on his chest. He’d never been one to give much thought to them before, but Drake decided to take it as a sign.

“Thank you,” he whispered up to the sky.

The last bit of sunset caught the renewed glint of purpose in Drake’s eye as he made his way back to the car and his new family. Night was ready to dawn, and with it, a new life for them all.

#Darkwing Duck #Drake Mallard #Gosalyn Mallard #Launchpad McQuack #Darkly Dawns the Duck #my fanfics

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iamnathannah · 6 years ago

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So...I got this review on ff-net for "Longing" this morning. Usually I love reviews because they give me encouragement...this ain't one of them, though.

If you don't want to read through it, in summary...

"Great story, but it seems like you hate men and the direction of society. Why isn't Dean just the bland fella presented in the show? Why is he violent and a cheating asshole who's rich; that's Logan y'know? Love the story as I said and Madeline and Louise are great, but I'm done with it."

Yeah, a lot to unpack here if you're not in the GG fandom like I've been since near the beginning, along with the basic concept of fanfiction.

"It's a well-written story with good characterisation of Rory and Paris but...there's a lot of anger in it."

When I started the story in 2003, the sky was the limit, and Paris and Rory were on their way to great lives bereft of any issues with men and so much potential for women in the world. Fast-forward to 2019...where we have a lying cheat of an asshole in the White House, merely disagreeing with a man is enough to bury your Twitter mentions in hate, and LGBTQ+ rights are being attacked at every turn.

Then we have the aftermath of AYITL, which dynamited Rory's future into being completely dependent on men (aka Logan), took away her entire drive and reason for being, and left her as a homewrecker having a kid she probably never wanted. And Paris is in a loveless marriage with a completely underwritten Doyle whose character traits went from 'being a loving and supporting boyfriend to a neurotic Jewish girl with the entire world upon her shoulders' to 'wink-wink Danny Strong writes Empire and Oscar-winners; Doyle can't raise kids let's just write that Doyle's that now since we threw out the Doyle notebook in our post-S6 burning of all our character notes'.

Yeah, over sixteen years, you tend to write for your reality, and the reality right now? Totally sucks.

"Some of it seems to be directed at society, some of it at the show, with a disproportionate amount of it being taken out on mostly male characters who bear only a passing resemblance to their on screen portrayal..."

Once again...AYITL hasn't aged well. Society hates journalists. It hates driven women (see my last post taking down that asshole who hates Brie Larson). Males are pretty damned well responsible for most of it. And I haven't had the best male figures of my life and have been mostly around women. I'm probably not going to write a positive view of some men; it's bias, and I own up to it here.

And yeah, my men don't match up to how they are on screen. Because, fanfiction is...

'Fiction written by a fan of, and featuring characters from, a particular TV series, movie, etc.'

Speaking of which...

"...Which seems to have got worse as I suspect you liked the show less and less."

You're reading my story. A Gilmore Girls fanfiction. My Twitter bio declares that I've loved it a decade and a half before the Gilmore Guys started their podcast. A show where I literally follow nearly main actor on the series into every future project they've had and watched loyally, for the most part. I buy every movie the girls have been in. Fanfiction isn't defined as 'a random person writing hate screeds against a particular TV series, movie, etc.'. You're not going to ever see me write even a drabble about how much Kevin Can Wait should be called Kevin Can Burn In Hell Because He's a Ghoulish Sexist Fuckface Who Celebrated His Wife's Death To Move On With His Former Hot Wife From Another Show.

Still love Gilmore Girls in full. But being a fan doesn't mean I have to like every single decision the writers and ASP ever made.

That is the fun of fanfiction. If I disagree with canon...I can disregard it, in part, or in full. I have never been able to find a fellow fan that agreed with every plot point the show has ever made. I hope I never will, because that's definitely not why anyone should ever be a fan of the show.

And excuse my language here...but I've written over a MILLION WORDS for this story. 27 chapters have been posted. I have an eventual endgame planned for the story that has been in my mind since the day I posted chapter one. Why the fuck would I write a million words about something I hate?!

"Dean has gone from a good first boyfriend who just wasn't right for Rory long-term to a violent thief who cheated on Rory throughout their relationship and never loved her anyway. And now, incredibly, seems to be just another entitled rich kid? It feels like you really want to bash on Logan but can't find a way to have him in the story, so you've turned Dean into him."

Oh reviewer...dear reviewer...oh, you don't know what you've gotten yourself into.

I have ALWAYS hated Dean. Always. Since January 2001 when I caught up on the backlog of episodes I missed because I only started watching during the two back-to-back night Christmas episodes, the only positive thought I've been able to spare for him was that Jared Padalecki (no attacks on him here, just the character) got a good living playing a completely underwritten bore who has nothing redeeming going on and a backstory that I would call 'existent'.

The show claims he's from the south side of Chicago in a neighborhood near the Dan Ryan that has 5% white people going by the zip code of his mail from there (the show's basic research department blew it there). Most white people from Chicago are in the Gold Coast, the northwest suburbs, or the North Shore. I have been adjacent to the Chicago market my whole life. He's from the North Shore, no question, judging from how his parents seem to have good enough wealth and how every white guy Chicago teenager story is drawn from a kid from the North Shore.

He literally punched Jess out three times!

He made Rory fear violence for merely losing a bracelet he gave her and for being near Tristan for a school function (LOL, Dristan...that burn still causes me to laugh at inappropriate times about how dumb it was, and I'm sure Tristan has it as one of his constant bon mots).

He called her home phone nearly a hundred times a day and drove her to the edge of madness with a 'must watch every day' love of Lord of the Rings that compares unfavorably to my four year-old nephew only loving Frozen, PJ Masks and Daniel Tiger. That isn't anyone any person has to tolerate in a relationship.

Dean’s only reaction to Rory trying to prove a point with her Donna Reed night was just she looked hot and he learned nothing about how women hate being confined to being solely homemakers and sexual receptacles.

He dumped her because she didn’t say “I Love You” like it was the goddamned bonus round in Wheel of Fortune and she didn’t get the solution out before the buzzer.

Dean’s shambles of a gift, that piece of shit car? It almost killed Rory and Jess. It looked like it didn’t have seatbelts. I’m surprised we didn’t get an episode where Dean ended up homeless because Richard sued his cheap ass into the fucking ground.

He decided to make her go back to him in front of the entrance of Chilton, where Rory would have looked like the biggest b***h in history if she didn’t return an ‘I love you’, and goddamned well knew it. Any good person would have done this in fucking private, like a considerate person.

He never respected the Chilton side of her life. At all. If it was up to him, he would’ve made up a bomb threat and had his friend imitate Rory’s voice to get her kicked out of the school she spent her young life trying to get into. If it was up to him, Harvard would have never even been a possibility, and if not for Jess coming in, he would have intimidated her into pushing off her dream entirely to stay in the kitchen.

His origin story was never mentioned outside 'he moved from Chicago and had a girlfriend in the past, Beth'. Fanfiction allows you to examine the holes in stories and go from there, and I just worked with them because the thing with moves to new locales? You can have a brand new image with people, and they will never know what you did in your old place. Judging by his violent/stalkerish tendencies, he has a pretty good case for having Imposter Syndrome that eventually reset itself in the Hollow.

Over time he went from a guy who seemed to like good literature to hyperfocusing on the 'it' media property of the time. Likely he started out liking fine literature, but once he fell in with the imbeciles of his friend group in the Hollow, that proved to be a lie.

He had a thing about being close to Lorelai. So much that around that time, there were so many more people shipping Lorelai/Dean than Rory/Dean as a romantic couple. If not for his later flanderization, that fangroup would still be strong.

HE CHEATED ON HIS WIFE!

**HE. CHEATED. ON. HIS. WIFE!

***HE! CHEATED! ON! HIS! WIFE!

****And outside losing his home and some stuff being damaged (rightfully fucking so) by Lindsay, both her and Rory took all the brunt of the damage his wandering dick did between all of them. Lindsay was guilted by her parents for checking out on her marriage and was never heard from again (I assume she's in a convent now because ASP's writing outside of Lorelai and Rory [or Paris, Sookie and Lane on a day she wasn't angry at the world for not pressing her hat right] for women was 'they are the enemy'). Rory had to find her way back to her old self (and she never did going by ending up with Logan). Dean? Welp, good thing "Supernatural" started at that time to save ASP the bother of having to explain what a dumbass Dean was.

*****Justice for Lindsay Lister! I hope she didn't go to a convent, but flipped off her parents, squealed out of town and is killing it in a career where she's respected, with a partner who loves her deeply.

The scene where he cornered Rory into sex in her house and said he didn’t love Lindsay was sexual assault and gaslighting. ASP intended it to be romantic, but instead created a nightmare scene that would be completely passe in a Lifetime movie. Rory’s first time was her being forced to give up her sexual agency for the pleasure of only Dean. And it’s exactly why the Paris/Rory scene I wrote on the yoga mats was intended to be the exact reverse of that trash.

He hoped to get ahead in life on a hockey scholarship. That's...not a life plan. And he paid for it by being stuck doing construction.

He hated Paris. He hated that Rory had her as a friend. He wanted a life with Rory that never involved Paris.

Paris is a strong-ass lady for daring to step to him and lie through her teeth about wanting Jess to stop the Great Stars Hollow Homicide of 2002 By The Coward Dean Forrester from ever being a thing.

LOL Logan is Tristan Lite and always will be.

About ten chapters back I mentioned how the girls consider Logan terrible already from a distance based on the New York media scene. Trust me, he's in this story (he may be a little more in this story later).

"There is a lot to recommend in this, like the slow burn set-up (although you've made up for it since!)..."

#backhandedcompliment (Also, what's to recommend? Love to know what you did like, but you spent all that time saying 'I'm mean to men', so I guess you ran out of time on that)

"...and turning Madeleine and Louise into three-dimensional characters..."

You sent me a flame, but didn't expand on what you loved about this? Thanks for the lack of feedback (and for misspelling Madeline’s name).

"But there are several reasons why it's not been an easy read so I won't be hanging out for an update, I'm afraid."

You basically said that you consider me a man-hater and that because I choose to have the ladies present their views in the story, you don't like that I'm drawing real life into their motives, mores and decisions. And you said I hated the show when most of my friend circle was formed through bonding through it, and we still love it, even if we think Rory needed to do better in life and ASP's writing weakened as each season went on.

I don't need readers like you, seriously. There are many other Rory/Paris stories you can read out there. As I have said in many other flame responses;

I am not the be-all end-all of Paris/Rory fic. PLEASE, read other writers. Enjoy their stuff. But don't whine at me or them because we choose to show that even in fictional worlds, people are against LGBTQ+ issues and people. We're not going to get equality by sugar-coating or whitewashing our way past those issues, and if you can't handle what I consider light attacks against entitled men, you should probably find something else to read.

#longing #paris x rory #review #review rant #fanfiction rant #gilmore girls #longing with a cherry tomato on top

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yasminsqueendom · 5 years ago

Text

Antique the Vamp Geek Pt1 Ep10

CW: Lots of cussing, anxiety, crying, stress

A/N: Like a lot of stress

W/C: 1856

Hey y’all! It’s story time.

Imma get right into it.

My bitch ass, stick up her ass having, roommate found out I’m a vamp…..and the bitch ratted me out to my school.

So, rewinding a little bit, I got an email from the nurse’s office “reminding” me that I had exactly one month to submit my status to the office. I thought it was just a routine reminder that was sent to everyone who hadn’t taken it yet. But, then a follow up email came through setting a specific time for me to come down for testing.

At this point, I’m getting nervous because I know that appointments aren’t required. We all just had a deadline to submit the results. We aren’t even required to get the test done here at the school. So it seems extremely odd to me that they would be harassing me like this. On top of that, I DON’T HAVE TO SUBMIT MY RESULTS SINCE I LIVE OFF CAMPUS. And even if I did, I had until the end of the month to do it.

So, when my afternoon class ends, I go down to the nurse’s office to request a time extension or something. Just anything to buy myself some time. I get down there and there is only one nurse in the office and public safety officer at the door. That set off alarm bells in my mind because there is always a secretary, an assistant, and some student volunteers. It looks way too creepy in here for me.

The lady looks scared for her life, and I'm already convinced they know what I am. My stomach is in knots and everything and I'm stressed tf out. Like what am I going to do? She damn near jumps out of her seat when I say who I am and why I'm there.

She pushes this little kit across the counter and says “Open it and follow the directions inside.” I feel myself starting to get pissed because now I can't go into a room for privacy? I can't get a alcohol swab before I stick this needle in my finger or whatever? What the fuck?

So I gently remind her that it is protocol for me to be called back to one of the rooms for privacy.

THIS BITCH GON SAY IT'S FOR EVERYONE'S SAFETY FOR ME TO DO IT HERE!

I kindly say that I wouldn't be taking any tests until I get my own room for it. If I have something contagious, it would be safer for everyone if I was somewhere private. Internally, I feel completely unsafe and honestly am convinced that if I come to a back room I might not make it back out again. The public safety monkey outside has me feeling like I'm turning myself in for committing the crime of existing. I start to doubt myself, and I feel my resolve weakening.

So, she shakily gets up and points down the hall talking about “You can use the last room on the right.”

Ignoring her rudeness, I go down the hall with the kit. I follow the instructions to remove the cap and press it to my finger. It would put you in the mind of blood sugar monitors for diabetic people. I place it in the little baggie that comes with the shit. I go back out to hand it to the nurse over the desk.

This bitch jumps like I threw a whole grenade at her. I mean all the way, damn near under the desk. Her damn chair hit the file cabinet behind her and everything. It would have been fucking hilarious if it wasn't for my severe terror building up inside me. I was almost numb.

She says I can go so I just turn around and walked out because fuck this place.

I barely remember what I did after that. I send some vague email to the professor of my next class about feeling too sick to come in. And then just go back to my place and curl up in a ball on my bedroom floor and sob like a fucking baby. Like snot and shit everywhere. I'm just beyond consolable.

Eventually, I hear someone moving around out in the main room and I'm immediately paranoid. I crawl over to my bathroom to splash water on my face. I look a hot ass mess in the mirror. I'm frustrated at myself for crying because if I didn't look ghoulish before, I do now.

Anyway, I ease my door open and see it's gotten dark since I came in. And that's strange to me since both my other roommates need light to see at night. So, if one of them is here, it would certainly be much brighter in the apartment.

I see my super religious roommate's door is open. I peak around her doorway and see her in there trying (and failing miserably) to stuff a backpack full of clothes. Some burly dude is in there with her using his cell phone's flashlight.

When I tell you I felt heat in my damn scalp. Like, literally I thought I was gonna set something on fire just by touching it. Because I immediately know that everything I have suffered through that day was because of this ugly, naked mole rat looking, “I only buss it open for Jesus” acting, “my shit smell better than yours” behaving, stick up her ass having ass bitch is trying to run away after she just potentially ended my time as a student. And may have just fucked up my whole world. AND SHE IS TRYING TO RUN??? RUN AWAY FROM THE SITUATION THAT SHE IS CAUSING RIGHT NOW.

I close my eyes for a brief moment, and switch the lights on. I know it will take them longer to adjust than me. She starts screaming and he grunts like the big ass gollum he is. But he recovers quicker. I know already that any physical motion I make will be interpreted as a threat to these assholes. I just slowly open my eyes and just stare at them. My eyes burn, but I am so numb that I can’t even manage a reaction. He is standing there looking like there isn’t much between his ears (as my grandma would say). But she…...oh this bitch right here…..has the audacity to look like I just pulled a gun on her. Like I was gonna shoot her right then. I guess that’s how I looked. I know that’s how I felt. I never wanted to bite someone so bad. As much as I hate the thought of consuming any part of a creature like her, I wanted to attack. I was feeling reckless.

“Just tell me the truth.” I asked her. And she looks like she is about to piss on herself. I’m hoping she does. I want her to feel humiliated. I want her to hurt. She won’t say anything though, so I repeat myself. “Just tell me that you did it. Tell me that you called in and snitched on me.”

She is still standing there looking absolutely foolish. But eventually she squeaks out, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Now, I feel cold. Like ice cold. We already run a little cooler, but now I feel a got damn iceberg. And then I feel nothing.

It is at this precise moment that I hear the key turning in the main room. The Uninfected in front of me can’t hear it. They both clearly want to bolt, but I’m blocking the only safe exit. The fire escape outside of the window is rickety and rusting in places, but they look like they might try it just to get away from the “monster.”

“Home sweet home.” My other roommate says from the hall. She walks up behind me, and freezes. She can only just see over my shoulder, and she is so close behind me I can feel her body heat. “What’s going on?”

It’s weird, but her body heat starts to thaw me out a little. I feel completely drained. I almost slump over, but I’m still angry enough to keep standing. I slowly back into my roommate, I know there are shadows behind me, swallowing me up as I step backwards. She’s complaining about me bumping into her, but she isn’t strong enough to push me forward, and she clearly doesn’t want to get in between me and the others.

I reach up and shut the lights off again, and feel the smallest bit of satisfaction from the look of horror on Gollum and Stiff’s faces as they can’t see me anymore. He’s fumbling for his phone for the flashlight, and she is looking like a lost child. I can’t bring myself to care. They look pathetic.

“Tell me what’s going on right now.” My saint of a roommate whispers in my ear. I pull her back across the hall into my bedroom and close the door loud enough for the others to hear. I leave the lights off since I don’t need them (she’s used to that by now), and I tell her everything that has happened to me. Even things that haven’t happened yet. All my fears, all my pain pours out of me, and I feel incredibly grateful that I have at least one good friend that I can talk to face to face about everything.

It made me think about all of my baby vamp listeners who send me emails about how alone they feel. I know it’s hard, but you aren’t alone. We aren’t alone. You are seen. You are heard. You are loved.

Back to the story, my phone starts buzzing. I look over at it, and hear my roommate gasp. I realize this is the first time that she has seen my face. The light of my phone is illuminating me. Apparently, I was crying while I was talking, so she reaches across and hugs me. Just a sweet, friendly hug of someone being supportive, and kind.

And then she does something I never thought anyone would do for me. She offers to be my source. I mean, wow. My world is fucking ending, and sometimes I don’t pay my portion of rent on time, and she offers to keep me alive. I am stunned. But, I politely refuse. I don’t want her life to be stained by mine any more than it already is by associating with me.

I was so distracted by her kindness that I almost forgot what I had just seen on my phone. My father called me...he never calls me. My panic levels instantly soar over 9,000. My eyes go blurry and I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do. There’s a text message there, too, but I feel too distraught to read it.

I just put that shit down, rolled over and went to sleep.

At some point, I woke up and dealt with that shit later.

Anyway, stay safe y’all. Moisturize and hydrate.

Love Tique.

#black vamps #black women in fiction #black fiction #black fic #black women #vampire #vamps #vampires

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jawsandbones · 6 years ago

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I’ll Go First - Part Five of Ten

Rating: E

Summary: An unexpected leader, unlikely allies. Bound by the Breach, Alexi Trevelyan is trying to hold it all together. Thankfully, he doesn’t stand alone.

Pairing: Cullen x Male Trevelyan

AO3 Link: Click Here

Chapter Five: Feeble Dreams

“So this is the worst. Why do Wardens always build their fortresses out in the middle of nowhere?” Hawke says, a hand over her brow, trying to find some relief from the relentless sun.

“Mystique,” Carver tells her. She instantly snorts amusement.

“Their little mess of secrecy is what got us into this,” Varric says, “shouldn’t everyone know about the Calling?” Carver, with his arms crossed, raises an eyebrow. Shifting slightly to look at him, and he shakes his head.

“We barely get any recruits as it is. How many people do you think would join if they knew there was a time limit to it? You saw Larius. He was steps away from becoming a ghoul. Who would give up a normal life for that?” he says.

“Good point,” Varric says. Hawke is staring at Carver, almost a mirror image. Both of them stand tall with their arms crossed, black hair and bright blue eyes.

“What?” Carver asks.

“I’m trying to imagine you bald,” she says. “Ghoulish.” Carver groans, gives her shoulder a playful shove. She grins as she rights herself, and for a moment, after Carver looks away, some different expression crosses her face. A brief flash of a pained thing, lips turned downward, brows twisted together. Varric sees it. He takes her hand in his, raises it to his lips. She smiles at the kiss, and that strained red eases. Alexi goes to stand beside Carver, at the same surprising height. It had baffled Hawke at first. Two baby giraffes, she said.

A patchwork of tents surround the keep. Dotted dark spots against the sand of the Approach. The sappers are gathered together, and the Inquisition makes ready to march on Adamant. A strange feeling to cast his echo, find a mixture of everything. He knows they wear armor of the Inquisition. Gathered, under his order. “This almost feels – wrong,” Alexi says. “The Wardens are heroes.” Stories were all they had in the Circle. Stories of those travelling across Thedas, trying to save it. The Wardens were always a favorite.

“Heroes who are just people, and people make mistakes,” Carver says.

“And Clarel is making quite the mistake,” Hawke says.

“A distinctly un-hero like mistake,” Varric says, “One the real heroes will fix.” Hawke reaches upwards, chimes one of the bells on Alexi’s staff. Holding one of the crystals in her fist carefully, and Alexi smiles as he feels it suddenly ring with power, a mark that is distinctly Hawke’s own.

“What about after this?” she says, “what’s next for the Inquisitor?”

“Orlais, Josephine tells me. To the Winter Palace, to attend peace talks for the civil war. We think that’s the most likely time for Corypheus to strike against the Empress. After that – I’m not sure. He’s gone after something from ancient elvhen before, so he might try to do that again,” Alexi says.

“Ancient and elven? I think I know something that might fit the bill, and someone who knows a lot more about it than I do. I’ll write a letter, and see if she can chime in with anything helpful,” she says. “Maybe we’ll figure it out before Corypheus can get his hands on anything. Get the jump on him.”

“I’d appreciate any help. Thank you Hawke,” he says. She ruffles his hair fondly, as one might do for a younger sibling.

“Inquisitor. We’ll be ready by nightfall,” Cassandra says as she walks up to the group.

“Is there anything I can do until then?” Alexi asks.

“Don’t run off,” is all she can offer. Hawke laughs, and moves even closer to Cassandra. She’s already shying away, but Hawke slings an arm over her shoulders, and keeps her in her grasp.

“Now that we’ve finally and formally met, Seeker, I’d love to know what Varric told you about me,” she says. Cassandra’s shoulders are hunched together, her grip tight over the hilt of her sword. Somehow, Hawke has managed to shrink her, make the mighty Cassandra small. Her face is flushed red, the shell of her ears a bright scarlet.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she mumbles.

“And then I’ll tell you what Varric told me about you,” she says.

“Either way, I can feel this turning bad for me,” Varric says, “I’m going back to the Keep, and I’m going to enjoy some shade. While I’m still alive.”

“If I don’t get out of this sun, I will die,” Carver says, turning to walk beside Varric. Alexi stands for a moment longer, before heading for the keep as well. His boots sink slightly into the sand, every grain shifting underneath his weight. It’s a feeling he’s gotten used to, after the weeks spent in the Approach with Hawke and the rest. Adamant, and then Skyhold. The idea of it relieves him. He’s come to think of Skyhold as home. He never thought he’d find another, not after the Circle.

Leliana finds him the instant he steps into the Keep. “Josephine is at Skyhold, continuing negotiations with Orlais. We’ve had many offers by nobles who wish to be the one to bring you to the Winter Palace. Josie will ensure we choose the right one,” she says. “Cullen is with Rylen, discussing battle plans. Here for only minutes and already giving Rylen a headache. You should go and say hello.” He doesn’t know the smile that spreads across her face, the sly look she’s giving him, with her hands clasped behind her back.

“Thank you Leliana,” he says. Her purple has been calmer these days, far from the more broiling restlessness it had been when they first met. As he traverses the keep, he keeps an appreciation for the consideration the workers have given him. A path clear of lumber and stone, all the tools they need to repair the crumbling walls. Up the stairs of the keep, and he can hear the banners flying overhead. Sera’s told him that she thinks they’re ugly. Large swathes of cloth – shade so desperately needed. They shift in the slight breeze, just as the sand moves over stone.

Voices, all around him. Some he’s heard before, some strange to his ears. Some far more familiar. “If we can knock down this wall, we can cut off reinforcements from that opening. We could narrow it down to this choke, and limit those trying to get past us.” As Alexi walks forward, Cullen’s voice grows ever louder. “We’d need to direct the sappers here, and then we could send the ladders here.” He’s bent over a small table, pointing at certain places to what Alexi is sure is a map. A breeze, the cloth moving overhead, and the bells on his staff chime. Cullen immediately turns around to see him.

“Inquisitor! It’s – it’s good to see you,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “You’re tan – well, tanner, I – you know what I mean, maker’s breath.” Vivienne’s gaze narrows, shifting between the two of them, before she rolls her eyes. Rylen hides his smile with a well-placed hand, and a low cough.

“Welcome to the Approach, Commander,” Alexi says as he goes to stand between Cullen and Rylen. “Are you going over the plan for tonight? Was Cole’s information helpful?”

“Yes it was. The plans of Adamant that Josephine found were a little outdated,” Cullen says.

“It’s more to the fact that Adamant is already falling to pieces,” Vivienne says. “Surely this siege will be the last thing it needs to finally knock that foul structure into the dirt. It’s been too long since that keep has been used for anything remotely positive.”

“Maybe that’s what we should do after we clear out the Wardens. The Chargers can make sure nothing remains of it,” Bull says.

“Let’s win the battle first. Have you thought on who you’d like to take into Adamant with you?” Cullen asks.

“Hawke, Carver and Varric,” Alexi says, counting them off with his fingers, “I’m hoping that Blackwall being with us will earn us some trust with the Wardens not fully convinced by Clarel. I was thinking Cassandra as well.”

“You could use the support of another, properly trained, mage,” Vivienne tells him. Alexi chuckles under his breath and shakes his head.

“I have Hawke. She’s more than capable.” She gives a displeased huff, making her disagreement in that statement more than obvious. Alexi only smiles even wider. She often reminds him of his friends at the Circle. Protective.

At the mention of Hawke, Cullen looks around, as though he fears she might be right behind him. Unconsciously, he rubs his jaw. “Right, I’ll work with Leliana and place other members of your inner circle with groups of our men,” he says. “If that’s all? Then dismissed.” He sighs as everyone else slowly departs, until it’s only Alexi standing beside him.

“Alexi.” It’s still momentarily strange, to hear his name properly. Trevelyan. Herald. Inquisitor. Alexi now, when they’re alone. “You should try and get some sleep before tonight,” Cullen tells him. “The last thing we need is anyone asleep on their feet during the battle.”

“I’ve never fought in anything like this before. I’ve heard stories but those are just… stories. I don’t know if I can sleep. I don’t know how to do this,” he says.

“It will be loud, chaotic. It will also smell awful, I’m warning you right now. Just – stay with Cassandra and the others, and don’t get separated. You’ll have the whole of the Inquisition with you. It’ll be alright,” he says.

“I’m asking people to march into battle where they – I know it’s foolish to hope that Clarel would listen to us, and stop this before it began,” he says.

“Desperate people resort to desperate things,” Cullen says softly. “She’s scared for herself and for her people, and making foolish decisions based on that fear.”

“You talk as though you speak from experience,” Alexi says.

“Perhaps.” He wants to ask if that’s why Hawke dislikes him. Every attempt at asking Hawke was met with barking laughter, murmuring as she simply walked away. Carver always said he didn’t want to get into it. Varric would only give half answers. She is a mage. He was a Templar. He can hear the reluctance in Cullen’s voice, the hesitation, and so he doesn’t press.

“Will you be part of the battle?” Alexi asks instead.

“Yes, of course. I’ll be directing your troops where needed,” he says.

“Then maybe more than one of us should get some sleep,” he says. Holding his staff loosely, fingers that tap against the gnarled wood. Shifting from arm to arm, bells ringing, crystals and stones knocking against one another. The one that Hawke filled with her mana sounds different now, sparking little bits of static as it rubs against the others.

“You’re probably right,” Cullen chuckles as he rubs the back of his neck absentmindedly. “I’m going to look over the plans with Leliana one last time.” Alexi can hear him gathering books, papers, and a deep sigh as he rolls up the plans of Adamant.

Alexi curls up on one of the cots in the lower levels of the keep. He doesn’t toss, he doesn’t turn, but still sleep doesn’t take him. He sits up when he feels a weight at the bottom of the cot. He needs only the barest breath of his echo to know that it’s Hawke. She burns so brightly, that conflicted red. “I don’t think I’ve told you before how brilliant I think that is. A bit of force magic to find the edges, and the healing to root deep inside. Your magic feels a bit like how Anders’ used to,” she says.

“What was he like?” Alexi asks. The pointed edges of her gauntlets pull at a loose thread of her trousers.

“Everyone’s already made up their minds about him. It doesn’t matter what I say or do, nothing will change their opinion of him, or what he did. I learned that the hard way, in the weeks after.” As she speaks, her red pulses deeper. He wonders what color she used to be, before hiding from the Chantry, before the explosion, before being the Champion of Kirkwall. It’s one of the reasons he’s afraid to look at his own. Will his colors betray his becoming someone he no longer recognizes? “But he was my friend. I should have fought harder for him,” she says.

Alexi move to sit closer to her, shoulder against shoulder, feet planted on the ground. “I wanted to thank you. For believing Carver and I about how serious this is with the Wardens. I think you’re the first person I’ve met who didn’t immediately go to mark their door to ward off evil. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m usually thought of as bad luck,” she says, amusement on the edges of her words.

“I don’t see how us sitting in the middle of a desert about to fight an army of possessed Wardens and demons could be thought of as bad luck,” Alexi says. He’s learned that her sense of humor is fatalistic, grim, but her laughter is the most whole thing he’s ever heard. It encompasses all of her, shakes her shoulders, moves her feet.

“Hey, have you been told to get some sleep? I think five different people have told me that I should sleep before the battle. The only people who can sleep before a battle are psychopaths,” she says as she shakes her head. “Which is why I came to ask you if you wanted to join Varric, Carver and I for a little game of diamondback. Don’t worry, I’ll help you with the cards.”

“Yes, please,” Alexi says, reaching for his staff.

Hawke stands beside him. Her hair whirls in the wind of the trebuchet, a beacon of flame that streaks across the night sky. It finds its target in the west wall. Alexi takes comfort in her ease, her hunger for battle. She is a force that moves ever forward, and he is happy to follow in her wake. They move forward with the troops. Hawke and Alexi find their place on either side of the battering ram. The barrier goes up, surrounds them as they march forward. Lit arrows bounce away from it, rocks slide against it. The Wardens seek to stop their approach, but nothing can stop them now.

An arrow finds purchase in the throat of an Inquisition soldier, and he falls from the ladder that was being raised. Alexi bites his lip, pretends he doesn’t hear the heavy sound of a body breaking against the ground. The screams, the shouting, and his echo finds so many colors fighting against one another. The possessed Wardens are easy to find, that pitch in the heart of them, but the majority are simply fighting because their commander ordered them to. In death, sacrifice.

Wood splinters as the battering ram bursts through. Soldiers flood inside, while the rest march in behind. Cassandra, Carver and Blackwall weave around Hawke and Alexi, join the soldiers in clearing the area. The sound of Bianca is steady, one bolt after the other. Alexi weaves renewed energy into their muscles, protects them with a barrier well placed. Hawke is on display, and with a push of her hand, sends the Wardens in their way flying. She makes them targets for the rest to finish. Her aggression comes easy to her, just as Alexi’s defense is second nature to him.

“Pull!” she calls as she lifts enemies into the air. A well-placed bolt from Bianca finds their mark in each of them. They make a natural team, the two of them, and even when they aren’t touching, their colors still seek each other. Swirling as they talk to each other, as they fight together.

“Another one for me! How many have you got, Birdie?”

“Oh, don’t even try and tell me those don’t count for me too!” Hawke tells him. They’re all breathless as the last demon is felled, as the last Warden standing in their way is cut down. Cullen puts a hand on Alexi’s shoulders.

“All right, Inquisitor. You have your way in. Best make sue of it while it’s still there. We’ll keep the main host of demons occupied for as long as we can,” he says.

“We’ll be fine. Don’t risk the troops for my sake,” Alexi says.

“We’ll do what we have to, Inquisitor.” It’s spoken gruffly, with such determination. “Just – be safe, Alexi,” Cullen says, his voice much softer.

“See you soon,” he says, as he turns, anchors himself to the colors of those closest to him. Cassandra and Carver are a sure green in the chaos, determined and focused. Blackwall is more conflicted, but easily found. He keeps track of the warriors as they stray, clear their path forward. The keep is a mixture of sand dunes and broken stone, with twisting corridors. Walls were falling even before now, held in place by a mixture of mortar and prayer.

“I am a Warden, like you!” Carver barks out at a warrior caught behind his blade. “Clarel is being tricked. You all are! The Inquisition doesn’t want to kill you, they want to help you.” Blackwall is doing the same at every turn as well, and slowly, those they manage to convince crowd around them. It makes their moving through Adamant easier, as the only ones in their way become the demons, and the mage Wardens who are already lost.

“Perhaps Clarel will be able to be reasoned with,” Alexi says hopefully, as they race along the battlements. His arm is shaking. His mark hungers. It senses the Rift being opened nearby. Mages are tearing at the fabric of the veil, bleating at the song, ripping it asunder to pull Maker knows what through. No doubt Erimond is behind that as well. All these things they’re making the Wardens do… It only moves him forward faster.

Cullen beats back the shade with his shield. Cole flits around the edge of his vision, reappearing at the shade’s back, burying his daggers deep. It collapses in shadows, and they move onto the next. Vivienne turns the fire of the rage demon into mist, while Solas raises spikes of ice into it. Dorian and Bull are on the battlements, keeping the way clear for reinforcements. Sera’s laughter can be heard here and there, as she bounces her way around, helping who she needs. Even Leliana stands with them, quiver at her back and bow in her hands.

They’re holding. They will hold. Cullen moves methodically, lost in the fight. Block, parry. Strike forward. Next. Sweat down his temples, his back, and the headache beating at the back of his skull. Not now. He can’t afford this now. Solas whirls his staff, strikes down a possessed mage that screams her way towards them. Cullen silences her with his blade. All of them come to a standstill when they hear it. It breaks over metal, over the cacophony of battle.

The dragon roars, and Adamant is silenced.

Stone crumbles underneath its claws. Spewing hot crystalized fire over the structure, high up in the tower of the keep. Where they assumed Clarel would be. Where Alexi is. Cullen immediately takes off running, keeping the dragon in sight. He’s surprised to find Cole next to him, the others following in tow. They watch as the dragon spreads its wings, towards the others trapped on the decaying bridge. Such small figures, so far away. Adamant was once the fortress which guarded the Abyssal Rift. The deep chasm that run as far down as the Deep Roads.

The dragon roars, the dragon walks, the remaining bridge crumbles. They watch as the Inquisitor, Hawke and all the rest crumble with it. A flash of green, and they are gone. Some strangled noise traps itself in Cullen’s throat. “He opened a Rift with the anchor,” Solas says, sounding somewhat in awe as they all look upwards where only stone falls now. “They’re in the Fade now.”

“There’s nothing,” Alexi says, casting out his echo once again. Only darkness, save for the figures which stand around him. The Rift had been little more than instinct, a desperate plea. His breath had been stolen, his heart dropping, as the ground suddenly gave way beneath them. He’s only grateful he had managed to catch all of them.

“Right,” Hawke says, taking her hand in hers and placing it on her shoulder. “Hold tight then. The Rift we saw in the courtyard should be nearby. We can get out that way.”

“And what about that huge demon we saw on the other side of that Rift? The sight of that thing doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence,” Varric tells her.

“We don’t have a choice,” Carver says.

“Then there is no point debating. We cannot stay here,” Cassandra says. Hawke moves forward slowly, looks back to make sure Alexi is close to her. He keeps his hand tight on her shoulder, and she keeps an easy pace.

“When I dream, the Fade looks much different. It must be because we’re here physically,” she says. “What about you?”

“Well, considering I can actually see things when I dream…” Alexi chuckles.

“Right, right. Well, you’re not missing out on much right now. Everything’s very green. The water’s green, the rocks are green, the sky is green. There are a lot of what looks like old Tevinter statues, and there are some rocks that float. It’s like the Fade has taken all the discarded bits of our world and placed them wherever it felt. Otherwise, it’s very barren,” she says. He appreciates her running commentary, her description.

“It reminds me of the Bone Pit,” Carver murmurs.

“Shit, the Bone Pit is at least a little creepier than this place,” Varric says. Hawke laughs in agreement, wholehearted as always, a hand pressed against her belly as if trying to contain it.

“That’s what we should do when we get back to Kirkwall. The Bone Pit: come experience what it’s like to walk in the physical Fade, on Thedas! We’ll be rolling in gold,” she says.

“There’s something up ahead,” Alexi says suddenly, cutting into the conversation, “I think it’s a spirit.”

“That cannot be.” Cassandra is marching forward, ahead of the rest, “Divine Justinia?”

“Cassandra.” The voice is lilting and light, the accent of Orlais fliting around the edges. All Alexi knows is that this is some shining thing. Far brighter than Cole, who has found himself tied to the dull edges of the waking world. This is a spirit, through and through, taking on the appearance of the Divine. “I greet you Warden, and you Champion. Inquisitor.”

“It is said that the souls of the dead pass through the Fade and sometimes linger, Inquisitor – could it be?” Cassandra sounds so confused and yet so hopeful.

“In truth, this debate will cost us time we do not have,” the Divine says. “You cannot stay in the Fade. I am here to help you. You do not remember what happened at the Temple of Sacred Ashes, Inquisitor. The demon here which serves Corypheus has stolen those memories from you. It is the nightmare you forget upon waking. It feeds off memories of fear and darkness, growing fat upon the terror.”

“Memories make us what we are,” Varric says, “stealing those and eating them? That’s low, even for a demon.”

The Divine draws near to Carver, “the false Calling that terrified the Wardens into making such grave mistakes? Its work.” He has one hand behind him, wrapped around the hilt of his sword. The frown resting on his brows only grows at her words, and he squeezes his sword tighter. It’s as though he’s measuring her, deciding whether or not to cut her down.

“We should let her help us,” is all Alexi can offer to his decision. It’s enough. He slowly lets go of his sword, lets his hand fall back to his side.

“If what it says is true, then we should kill this demon and free the Wardens from the Calling. Might put some sense back into them,” Carver says.

“You will have your chance, brave Warden. This place of darkness is its lair,” she says. “The nightmare serves Corypheus willingly, for Corypheus has brought much terror to this world. And will bring more.”

“Can you help us get out of the Fade?” Alexi asks. He wonders how many had watched them fall. It would take only one to send word through the ranks of the Inquisition. The battle was already a precarious thing. They can’t be gone for much longer.

“That is why I found you. However, you must first take back what the Nightmare has stolen from you,” the Divine says. This formless light gestures forth, and Alexi sees a small flame floating in the dark. He steps forward, and Hawke steps forward with him, helping guide him towards it. He moves his staff from one hand to the other, bells chiming strangely in the empty Fade. With his other hand, he reaches out. It’s the first touch of skin against it which does it. Burning him from the inside out, Alexi whimpers, doubles over, holds it tighter.

An echo, of what once was. A figure, the same shape as the spirit, held in place by dark tendrils of magic. Across from it, a color he cannot forget. That towering inferno of burning red, malicious dark. Corypheus. In his hand, the orb. Surrounding them… shapes and colors he does not know. It’s the Divine who solves this mystery. It’s as though she speaks from far away, a distant past. “Wardens? Why are you doing this? You have all people?” She sounds saddened. Disappointed.

“Keep the sacrifice still.” Corypheus’s voice is twisted, deep, and recognizable. He holds the orb out, this glowing ball of power. Parts of all that the Divine is begin to weep from her, twist knotted strings towards the orb.

“Someone help me!” At her words, the sound of a door opening.

“What’s going on here?” That is a voice he does recognize. Colors. Shapes. All of them, all they are. They had been with him since his first day at the Circle. His friends. Himself, at the center, with them. They were all there. At the sight of the group, the Wardens attack. Alexi watches himself place a barrier, as Adam strikes out with a bolt of lightning. Flames, courtesy of Ben. Zoe is casting bolts from her staff, coated in her magic. His friends. His family. All of them, fighting together. He knows this isn’t what they want.

Adam had always loved animals. Many in Ostwick would call for his services when their herd fell ill. He would come home, excitedly talking about the baby lamb he had helped deliver. The cow, with the wounded foot, now running free in the fields. Ben would mix poultice and potion, a cure for any ailment. His stock was always popular in the shops, for his not just helped, but he would bind them with flowers, a scent that did not smell of death like others. Zoe was never confident in her magic. Instead she took to books, spending hours reading in the library. Often buried in a stack, but whispering secret knowledge so many others had forgotten.

Distracted, Corypheus looks away from the Divine. In that moment, she strikes out, knocks the orb from his hands. “Alexi! Grab it!” Adam’s voice. Alexi watches his own shape, his colors, dive forward. His teal mixes with anxiety. When he picks up the orb, it mixes with something else. A green he knows, the mark of the anchor. Whatever Corypheus had set in motion, it completes here and now, in the palm of Alexi. The orb explodes into a well of light, and burns away everyone who had stood beside him. The vision fades as quickly has it had come, the flame disintegrating into nothing.

Alexi reels backwards, into Blackwall, who steadies him with hands against his arms. “If I hadn’t touched it, if I hadn’t picked it up, my friends might still be alive. It was me – that activated the orb. I –” He’s shaking his head, holding his staff with both hands. Underneath his gloves, his knuckles are white. Breathing coming quicker now, as though he cannot hold air in his lungs, a sharp stab underneath his ribs.

“Alexi.” Hawke takes his face in her hands. “This is not your fault. You are not to blame here. If you hadn’t picked it up, then Corypheus would have. He would have the anchor, and he would be unstoppable. You didn’t know what would happen. Your friends wouldn’t want you blaming yourself for this. You did everything you could,” she says. It’s spoken firmly, with an echo of experience. A lesson she’s hard learned, trying to pass it on to him.

“The Divine knocked it out of Corypheus’s hands, towards you. I agree with Hawke. This is not your fault. You saved us from a far worse fate,” Cassandra says.

“Corypheus intended to rip open the Veil, use the anchor to enter the Fade, and throw open the doors of the Black City. Not for the Old Gods, but for himself. We are lucky that the orb bestowed the anchor upon you instead,” the Divine says.

“This will haunt you,” Blackwall says quietly, meant for Alexi, and Alexi alone. “But you’ll make peace with it. Everyone here knows you. Knows you wouldn’t have hurt your friends. Blame Corypheus, not yourself.”

“There are more memories held ahead,” the Divine says. In an instant, the spirit disappears, meaning to make them follow. Hawke pulls at Alexi’s hand, puts it on her shoulder once again.

“I wonder how long the Wardens were being held under Corypheus. Even before the Conclave – Maker. I’m glad we got you out of there when we did,” Hawke says to Carver as they walk.

“Right. Although I don’t think Aveline’s been too pleased with me taking up her spare bedroom,” he tells her.

“And cleaning out her kitchen,” she says.

“A Warden’s hunger is infamous,” he says, “Besides, I always gave her coin to replace it.”

“Well, let’s kill this Nightmare and then you can go back to eating the Wardens out of house and home,” Hawke says.

“I think we’re still recovering from the last time Carver stayed with us,” Varric says, “some of that stuff was being aged on purpose, you know.”

“And it was delicious,” Carver says.

At his side, Cassandra puts a hand on Alexi’s arm. A small pat, whatever reassurance she can offer. The discussion of the others is being drowned out by the argument in his head. Their colors had burned away. Why him? Why was he left standing when the others died? The crater at the center of the Temple of Sacred Ashes. The valley that had been wiped away. All those people.

“Ah, we have a visitor. Some foolish little boy comes to steal the fear I kindly lifted from his shoulders.” This is so very like Envy. That voice, rattling around in his skull. But Cassandra grabs the hilt of her sword, Blackwall and Carver following suit, and Alexi knows he’s not the only one hearing it. “You should have thanked me and left your fear where it lay, forgotten. You think that pain will make you stronger? What fool filled your mind with such drivel? The only one who grows stronger from your fears is me.” In this moment, he doesn’t feel strong.

“But you are a guest here in my home,” the Nightmare speaks so easily, gracefully, “so by all means, let me return what you have forgotten.” A flickering flame presents itself, shining before them, just like the last. Reluctantly, Alexi reaches out towards it.

A Rift Alexi recognizes floats in this memory, dream-like vision. “This is the Breach back in Haven. That’s how we… how I escaped.” His voice sounds far away, removed from the memory, as he speaks it. The Divine in this memory reaches towards him, takes his hand. Pulling him up and over a cliff, pushing him towards the Breach.

“Go!” She yells as the demons descend upon them. Alexi moves towards her, but she pushes him back… and is gone, same as the vision.

“It was you.” The spirit’s light shines from behind him, and he turns to face it. “You sacrificed yourself, for me. They thought it was Andraste sending me from the Fade, but it was the Divine behind me. And then you… she died.”

“Yes,” the spirit says. Alexi does not see a change, but from Cassandra’s gasp, he can guess that the spirit is burning away its shape. Shedding the guise of the Divine, standing as a spirit for all to see. “Now, come. The Rift is ahead.” This time, the spirit doesn’t disappear, simply guides them forward.

“Perhaps I should be afraid, facing the most powerful members of the Inquisition.” The Nightmare’s laughter trails them as a shadow, a dark presence at their backs. “Like Blackwall. Ah, there’s nothing like a Grey Warden. And you are nothing like a Grey Warden.”

“I’ll show you a Warden’s strength, beast,” Blackwall says, low and angry.

“Your Inquisitor is a fraud, Cassandra. Yet more evidence there is no Maker. That all your ‘faith’ has been for naught.” Yes, a fraud. A thing brought about by chance and circumstance. The anchor feels hot, aflame, from the moment they entered the Fade. An overwhelming sensation, pins and needles in his fingertips. He keeps his hand wrapped around his staff, finds some comfort in the familiar feeling of it.

“Die in the Void, demon,” Cassandra says, unwilling to listen to any of it.

“Once again, Hawke is in danger because of you, Varric. You found the Red Lyrium, you brought Hawke here… you’re going to get her wings clipped.” Hawke’s steps stutter only once, as she looks around to find Varric. He’s holding tightly to Bianca, wearing a furious frown. She puts her hand on his shoulder, and smiles at him.

“Did you think you mattered, Hawke? Did you think anything you ever did mattered? You couldn’t even save your city. How could you expect to strike down a god? Varric and Carver are going to die, just like the rest of your family, and everyone you ever cared about. You’re a failure, and your family died knowing it.”

“I’ve heard worse from Carver,” she says.

“Hawke being chased out of Kirkwall, being wanted and hunted, meant that now you could be the Hawke. Did you cheer when you found out? Finally able to step out of her shadow, and make a name for yourself. Look at what you have done with this opportunity. Nothing. You will always be nothing.”

“Can you imagine if both of us went by Hawke? Imagine the confusion,” Carver says, through a clenched jaw. The Nightmare laughs.

“Alexi, Alexi, Alexi. Did you really think you could lead the Inquisition? A blind man? You’ve already killed your Circle, think now what will happen to those around you. And those who wait for you at Adamant. My demons descend upon them, overwhelm them! All of them are bound through me, every fear come to life!”

“Ah,” the spirit says, “so if we banish you, we banish the demons? Thank you, every fear come to life.” The shadow at their backs grows with displeasure, before seeking refuge elsewhere. “The Rift is ahead. Go through it, Inquisitor, and then slam it closed with all your strength. That will banish the army of demons… and exile this cursed Nightmare to the farthest reaches of the Fade.”

“The Rift! We’re almost there,” Hawke says, hurrying her steps, putting a hand over Alexi’s.

“Great, Hawke,” Varric says. “Why not just dare the Old Gods to try and stop you?”

“Who would we be without something standing in our way every single time?” she says. What stands in their way, this time, is the Nightmare itself. With it, a demon of impossible size and strength. For Alexi, they are swirling smoke in the darkness of his echo.

“What do we do against that?” Carver asks.

“We fight,” Hawke says.

“If you would, please tell Leliana, ‘I am sorry. I failed you, too.’” The Divine whispers it to Alexi, as she gentle pushes him forward, and disappears into nothingness. The Rift stands behind the demons, where they wait to challenge them. Alexi feels it building in Hawke, magic rising to the very surface. She lets it loose with a jagged cry, jagged lightning to match. Cassandra, Blackwall and Carver move to stand before them, by shield and sword, to let the mages and Varric do their work uninterrupted.

Cassandra dives forward, unafraid, as Alexi’s barrier weaves itself around her, an almost impenetrable thing. The Nightmare almost takes it down with one simple swipe of its claws. Alexi is building it up once again, blanketing the rest of them, guarding Carver as he goes to chop at the legs of the larger demon. Varric keeps a rhythm of bolts, aiming for every eye that he can see. It blinks away his assault, moves forward. It clears a path of stone and rubble with one kick, sends Carver flying back.

The Nightmare is stuttering around the edges, flickering in and out of sight, screaming towards Varric. Hawke bites it back with flame, and Blackwall rams into it with his shield. Alexi knows it, same as the rest of them. This isn’t a fight they can win. Here, in the Fade, they are still mortal while the demons are not. “Carver!” Hawke calls it out in a yell, as bolts of lightning draw attention to her. “Grab Varric and Alexi!”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Promise me you’ll get them out of here,” she roars, pushing Alexi forward, sending him crashing towards Carver. His hand is rough around Alexi’s arm.

“Hawke – what are you doing?” Alexi shouts, just as Carver pulls him back, out of the way of another attacking leg.

“Birdie –” Hawke silences Varric with a rough kiss.

“I love you. I’m sorry,” she tells him. Gathering up every ounce of magic left in her, she pulls them all together. Hawke has always loved being a force mage. With a wave of a hand, she sends them all flying past the demons, towards the Rift. With her other hand, she strikes lightning upwards, keeps their attention on her. With his other hand, Carver reaches out and grabs hold of Varric.

“Let go of me Junior, we can’t leave her behind – Carver! Hawke! Marian! Marian, please!” A sob catches in his throat. Carver charges forward, and does not look behind him. His grip rough and bruising, he pulls them into the Rift with him.

Cassandra and Blackwall are gasping on the ground. Alexi turns to face the Rift. “Do it,” Carver says in a low voice. Letting go of both of them, walking off into the crowd. The anchor hungers. It devours the edges of the Rift, eats towards the middle. It gorges, until the Rift is no more. The demons scream, turn to dust in the wind. Varric is sitting on the steps of the courtyard, his face in his hands. Blackwall and Cassandra push themselves up to their feet, as Wardens and Inquisition soldiers alike gather around them.

“Corypheus has lost control of the Wardens and his demon army now,” Blackwall says.

“Inquisitor,” a scout is pushing through the crowd, running towards him, “the Archdemon flew off as soon as you disappeared. The Venatori Magister is unconscious but alive. Cullen thought you might wish to deal with him yourself.” Cullen himself is standing at the entrance to the courtyard, speaking orders to the soldiers around him.

Cole puts a hand on Cullen’s shoulders. “Hurting and wounded, pain where no one can see, placed he can’t heal. He needs you,” he says. Cullen immediately whirls, turns to see Alexi addressing the Wardens.

“We stand ready to help make up for Clarel’s… tragic mistake,” one is saying.

“We have barely any surviving senior Grey Wardens,” another says.

“What do we do now?” The murmur is making its way around, through all gathered.

“I grew up hearing tales of the Grey Wardens. About their bravery, and perseverance even in the face of overwhelming odds. Wardens have always tried to do what’s right, and save the world they live in. Your world is threatened now, by Corypheus. Let the Inquisition help you rebuild, and fight back against Corypheus – the one who would have made you an enemy of Thedas. I believe the Wardens are worth saving, but they can’t be saved unless you believe it to,” Alexi says. His voice is quiet, and small, and yet the whole of the courtyard is silent, listening to him speak.

“We should send a report to Weisshaupt, so that other Wardens won’t be caught off guard by Corypheus,” one says. Alexi nods, and slowly walks down the steps of the Courtyard.

“Thank you.” The Wardens are murmuring as he passes. Thanks, from almost every one of them. “We will not fail you.” Pressing a fist against the sigil that marks their armor. “Maker watch over you.” It’s a relief, to get through them all.

“Cullen,” Alexi says, standing in front of him. Cullen reaches for his hand, pulls him into an abandoned room.

“Alexi,” he says, “are you alright?” Alexi’s hand is trembling, slips from Cullen’s grasp. He folds against Cullen, wrapping his arms around him, burying his face into the fur of his cloak. A fist winds itself into his cloak, and Cullen can feel it shake against his back. He can feel all of him shaking. Cullen holds him tightly in his arms, and allows him to sob out his grief against him.

He sits up in bed, waking from the dream. He knows it’s still late, as he hasn’t been able to sleep through the night in the days returning to Skyhold. The bed feels suddenly too soft, the blankets far too restrictive, the air of his bedroom somehow different. Boots watches him stand up, reach for his staff. Before, he had felt he had never needed it in Skyhold. Now he takes it everywhere with him. Reaching for the robe draped over the end of the bed, slipping on the shoes by the stairs.

Every other place risks running into guards, and he has no interest in seeing anyone else. Instead, Alexi makes his way towards the war room, closes the door behind him. He finds the edge of the table, the wood sanded down smoothly underneath his fingertips. He lets his staff rest over the table, between the marked sections of the map. All these places he is meant to go. Varric is still quiet. Carver made his way back to Skyhold a few days later.

Varric used to be so yellow. Steady and optimistic. Now is orange, still colored from Hawke’s last touch, last kiss, last words. There’s a crystal missing from Alexi’s staff. The one she had filled with her magic he had taken, given to Varric.

Alexi sighs, half sits in the crook of the table, his hands clasped in his lap, and one foot flat against the floor. Head tipped downwards, and at least now his thoughts are quiet. He only looks up when he hears the door open. “Oh! I didn’t expect – I can leave, if you want to be alone.”

“No, please, don’t mind me, I’m probably in your way…” Alexi says, fidgeting with his robe.

“No,” Cullen says, putting down his stack of papers at the end of the table, “you’re not.” He moves closer to him, his hand tracing around the edge of the table. “Still having trouble sleeping?” Alexi nods. Cullen has left behind his cloak, and stands in nothing but simple trousers and a tunic, evidence of his own struggle with sleep.

“What were you planning out this time?” Alexi asks, wanting to change the subject.

“Well, the Duke and the Empresses armies are still fighting on the Exalted Plains. There might be time for some Inquisition forces to intervene and offer aid to the soldiers there, before the Winter Palace. The fighting should be calming down as negotiations grow closer, but we don’t know if they even know negotiations are going to be happening,” Cullen says.

“Are you going to send me away from Skyhold again?” Alexi asks with a smile. Cullen chuckles, rubs the back of his neck.

“Not if I can help it,” he says. He lets the statement stand for only a moment, before he clears his throat. His fingertips tap at the table. “Forgive me if I offend you, but I was curious to know – how do you see?” Alexi gives a casual wave of his hand, brushing away the idea of any offence given.

“I call it an echo. I cast it out like a net, and it blankets things. It’s as though I’m in a dark room, and I can see the outline of things. People, however, appear as color,” he says.

“Color,” he repeats, “how so?” Alexi gives a thoughtful bite of his lip.

“Well, Sera’s all yellows. Vivienne is a very deep, royal shade of purple where Leliana is like lavender. Varric’s more orange now,” he says.

“What color am I?” Cullen asks.

“You… change,” Alexi says.

“I change?”

“Yes, when I do this,” he says as he reaches out slowly, gently resting his hand over Cullen’s. He watches as strained blue shifts, the red cracks at the edges smoothing, becoming some calm lake of deep water. Cullen blushes, Alexi smiles.

“Alexi –” He struggles for a moment to find the words. He finds there are no words to say at all. He hesitates for only a moment. Then, with his other hand he reaches upwards, over his shoulders, settling at the nape of Alexi’s neck. A nervous inhale. Pulling him down gently, eyes closing as lip touches against lip. A soft press, at first. There’s surprise in it, the briefest of seconds, before Alexi leans into it, returns it in full. One hand still over Cullen’s, the other moving to wind in the sleeve of his shirt.

They break, on the exhale. A moment of uncertainty, his eyes opening, looking at the way Alexi’s lips are still parted. “Sorry,” Cullen says, a little hoarsely, “should I not have?” Alexi is still smiling, shakes his head, and pulls Cullen back to him, kisses him once again. This one is more confident than the first, far more eager, delight in every breath.

“I didn’t think to – I mean, I didn’t dare hope… you said before you weren’t interested in men, and I –” Alexi speaks it breathlessly, nervously, his cheeks suddenly flushed. Cullen turns his hand over, and holds Alexi’s hand completely in his, thumbs moving over his knuckles.

“Alexi,” he says, “I’m interested in you.”

#cullen #cullen x inquisitor #cullen x m!inquisitor #cullevelyan #dragon age #cullen x m!trevelyan #inquisitor #m!trevelyan #m!inquisitor #dragon age inquisition #dai #writing #mine #I'll Go First #Cullexi #Alexi Trevelyan

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darkultimatefrisbeecamp · 6 years ago

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Looking For Some Silverlinings: Chapter Two

The following is part of the dark!frisbeecamp au. To learn more, visit @darkultimatefrisbeecamp. There you can find ghoulish headcannons, spooky stories, and more. Feel free to comment or submit content. Enjoy.

Warning: The following story, as well as the rest of the dark!frisbeecamp au content includes graphic content, and viewer discretion is advised.

“Hey, could you pass the blue beads?” Gus asked. Jonah handed him the box, and returned to sitting in utter disbelief from the past 24 hours. Right now he was making a friendship bracelet. Last night he was being told that he was now a part of a cult. At some point a person has to wonder why their life ended up the way it did, and nothing will raise that question more than being forced into a satanic cult where the first thing they have you do is make friendship bracelets. Jonah shook his head, and continued making his bracelet, looking down at the bracelet Andi made him. Though the pain of leaving her seemed trivial now that he was faced with an even greater tragedy: the unknown fate of his parents. Curtis nor any of the other counselors mentioned what exactly happened to them, and every possibility scared Jonah to his very core. They could’ve been tortured or killed, already a frightening possibility, or they could’ve known what they were doing to Jonah. Even then, Jonah couldn’t be concerned about that because he needed to think of a way out. The biggest problem was going strategy, as any one of the campers around him could be working for the cult. The only person he knew for sure wasn’t with the cult was Gus, and this understandably left Jonah feeling a little hopeless.

“Jonah, you ok?” Gus asked as he finished his bracelet.

“Are you freaking kidding me right now Gus? What part of this is ok?” Jonah snapped. Gus looked down at his bracelet, and passed it to Jonah.

“I just wanted to let you know I made you a bracelet.”

Jonah looked down at the bracelet; it had blue and green beads and Jonah’s name in the middle. Jonah sighted. Gus wasn’t the enemy, just a kid in the same horrifying situation as him.

“Thanks Gus. Sorry for snapping at you.”

“It’s fine. You know, you just got to try and stay positive.”

“How are you not freaked out by all of this?”

“Eh, I guess I always figured I’d end up with a cult. I’ve always been more of a follower than a leader if you what I’m saying.”

Jonah just sort of sat there and stared at Gus, and before he could respond, one of the counselors came into the mess hall. Her name was Nancy, a tall blonde who seemed to be one of Curtis’s right-hand men. She had the same dead-eye stare that Dave had, but unlike Dave she didn’t even attempt to smile. She was just stone-faced, and anytime she looked at someone it looked like she was staring into their soul. Hell, Jonah thought, with everything that’s going on she might actually be able to do that. She blew her whistle.

“Alright children that’s enough bracelet making. Clean up your stuff and head to the field. It’s time to start practice.”

Practice. Jonah had been dreading it ever since orientation. Anything could happen. They could be sacrificed, or someone could be revealed to be the Antichrist. It could be anyone, Jonah thought, oh god what if it’s Gus? Jonah looked over at Gus cleaning up the beads, and shook his head. It was definitely not Gus. But Gus might know more than he’s letting on. Jonah couldn’t trust anyone, as at any moment they could be revealed as the Antichrist. Just make it through practice, Jonah thought, just try and survive.

The kids followed Nancy out onto the field, and Jonah frantically gazed around trying to find anything odd. For the most part it looked like an ordinary field; bright, trimmed grass, some benches on the side lines, nothing unusual. Just as Jonah was about to let himself relax, he saw a familiar face walk across the field. Natalie. Carrying a cooler, wearing the camp’s shirt. Her eyes met Jonah’s and she walked over to him.

“Jonah, what a nice surprise!” she said, “I haven’t seen you in a while. How are you?”

“Um, are you serious?” he asked, backing away a little bit.

“Of course I am! Ensuring our campers are having a fun time is almost as important as finding the Antichrist!” she exclaimed, with the same unnerving smile Dave had. Nancy called her over.

“Oh I gotta go. Have fun at practice Jonah, I’m sure you’ll do great!” She ran over to Nancy and Nancy blew her whistle.

“Listen up campers. Today we will be seeing you raw ability in destroying your opponents. Joining me will be our counselor in training, Natalie.” Natalie gave a big smile and waved to the campers. Gus waved back before seeing Jonah’s bewildered look and slowly putting his hand down.

“First, we’ll run some drills, and by the end we’ll divide you up into teams. The rest of the week we’ll be determining which campers are best fit to be the team captains. Any questions?”

Jonah looked around at the mix of horrified looks, and Gus slowly raised his hand.

“Yes?” Nancy said.

“Will snacks be provided?”

“Of course snacks will be provided, what kind of institution do you think we’re running here? That’s enough talk, let’s get started.”

The campers head out to the field when Nancy blew her whistle again.

“Wait, one more thing,” she yelled out, “while only one of you is what we’re looking for, the rest of you still have a purpose to serve. However, any campers that are viewed as weak and therefore of no use to this institution will be disposed of. Permanently. So, I would try my best out there.”

Jonah could sense the panic from the rest of the campers, Gus looking like he was about to cry. It was in that moment that Jonah knew that there was no hope of escape, no way out. He was truly gone. He looked over at Natalie, still smiling. She had been home, she had left this place. But she must have been here before if she was a counselor in training. Jonah had to push it all out of his head because he needed to do his best. He couldn’t screw up like he did last time, cause not playing ultimate was a matter of life and death.

They spent about four hours on drills, taking water breaks intermittently throughout the afternoon. After what seemed like an eternity, Nancy blew her whistle once again and called the group over.

“That will be all for today. Before you head to the showers, we will be giving team assignments. There will be two teams, team A and team B. There are no reassignments, no trades, what is given will be final. Now, will the following campers please step forward.’

Nancy rattled off some names, one of which being Gus, but not Jonah. Gus looked noticeably disappointed but didn’t object, seeming to despite his past shortcomings understand that complaints were a quick way to be disposed of.

“The rest of you will be in team B. That will be all. Head to the showers and meet back in the mess hall for dinner. Curtis will be giving a special presentation,” she said, and for a second it almost seemed that a twinge of a smile appeared on her stone face. Jonah began to head to the showers when Natalie ran up to him.

“Wait, Jonah you left your bracelet.”

“But I have all my - “ he looked down to see a small note tied to the beaded bracelet. He took it and Natalie ran off. He took out the small piece of paper and opened up. Meet me outside cabin 4 at 2:00 am tonight. Come alone. Jonah looked down at the note, unsure as to what to make of it. For all he knew it could be a trap, but right now it could be the chance at escape. He put the note in his pocket, and looked back at the bracelet. It had glossy rose-colored beads with two eye ball beads and the word “Mirror” spelled on it. He put it on and met up with the rest of the campers.

At the mess hall, the campers dined on a rather odd soup. It was a brown broth with what appeared to be vegetables, but when Jonah went to take a bit, he realized that all the vegetables were plastic. Confusion quickly came over the campers, and before anyone could say anything, Curtis walked onto the stage.

“Good evening children. As I’m sure you’ve all realized, the vegetables in your soup are not real. Throughout your time here, we won’t just be searching for the dark lord’s offspring, we’ll be teaching valuable life lessons. The first lesson here tonight will be that of altruism. We don’t want a group of Satan’s minions who consume will little regard for one another. No, what we want is a group of Satan worshippers who are willing to give up everything in service of our dark lord. To learn more, we will be watching the following education video.”

The projector screen lowered and a video in a similar format to that of the orientation video began to play. It was as if someone had taken the script of a low budget after school special, gotten even worse actors, and added occult overtones to it all. Jonah couldn’t entirely concentrate as he was focused on the note, and kept trying to catch a look at Natalie. She was in the front of the mess hall watching the video intently, not seeming to notice his stares. Nancy was next to her, eyes glued to the screen, mouthing along to all the words of the video. The whole thing seemed to drag on forever until the screen finally faded to black, and Curtis walked back on stage.

“Now I hope you kids learned a little something about altruism that can help you in serving the dark lord. Go on and get some sleep, because tomorrow the journey really begins.” He continued to smile as the campers filed out of the mess hall, gazing proudly at the work he had done that night.

In the cabin, Jonah laid restless, looking at the clock on the night stand every few minutes. Around midnight he decided to get dressed and kept pacing around the room, careful not to wake up his bunk mates. Around 1:45, Jonah quietly slipped out of the cabin and walked over to cabin 4. It wasn’t too hard to find with lanterns lighting the path to each cabin. He found Natalie standing behind the cabin, gazing down at her watch. She looked up at him.

“Good you’re early,” she said, “I wasn’t sure you’d come.

“What do you want Natalie?” Jonah asked coldly, trying not to show just how terrified he was.

“Well for one for to calm down cause right now you look like you’re about to shit your pants.”

It seemed Jonah could not hide his horror.

“Well, in all fairness Natalie you asked me to meet you in the middle of the night when we are in the middle of a satanic frisbee camp!” he exclaimed.

“Shh! You wanna get us killed? Listen, I told you to come because we need each other.”

“For what?”

“What else? To get the fuck out of this camp.”

#dark!frisbeecamptheory #looking for some silverlinings

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warrior-thief-and-intelectual · 6 years ago

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Chapter 1

Emily looked up, snapped away from her thoughts by the loud foghorn of the ship coming into the harbor. She had been waiting for a while and slipped into deep thought about her mother’s stories.

“Nervous about leaving for Glorantis?” Sebby asked playfully, trying to lighten the tense vibes he was getting from his friend.

“No, I was just thinking of something. I’m not quite sure what’s awaiting me on the other side of this ocean. What if I find her? What if I don’t? It’s nerve-wracking,” she said.

Sebby sighed. “You need to relax, everything will go just fine.”

Emily kept looking towards the horizon, her long, butterscotch brown hair billowed in the wind. It was pulled from her helmet, more for comfort than aesthetic. Sebby changed his tone, trying a different approach. “Trust me on this, don’t worry! What can possibly go wrong if you just stick to the plan?” he asked.

“But what if it does go wrong, regardless?” she asked as she continued to look forward while the boat started unloading.

“Stop being so dramatic, you’re overthinking this,” Sebby said, she finally looked at him, a glare and a frown drawn on her features.

“This isn’t a joking matter!” she replied.

“Alright! I understand. Maybe you should push all your doubts aside for now at least, and try to focus on the mission at hand?” Sebby proposed while looking Emily straight in her ice blue eyes. Emily’s stern look gradually turned softer as she took a deep breath, “Okay, fine. I know you’re just looking out for me,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll just take your word for it, for the time being, that is,” she concluded. “Great,” Sebby said satisfied, “that will do for now!”

A man suddenly approached the two. “Ready to board the boat ma’am? We’re ready to leave now,” the sailor asked politely.

“Yes, I am,” Emily replied. She started walking alongside the man in the direction of the boat.

“Oh, and Emilie?” Emily paused for a bit. “Promise me you’ll try?” Sebby asked. Turning her head towards him, Emily nodded her head in acceptance, before she continued walking forward.

“Right, I will.”

~*~*~*~

Many hours had passed since they left the harbor, and the sun was on it’s way down. The weather was nice, however, there were hardly any clouds to be seen. Looking outward, Emily was supporting her upper body on the safety banister around the edge of the boat. Even after all this time, she was still thinking. She couldn’t help it, no matter how many times Sebby had asked her not to. She kept questioning things, like what to do when she found her mother. She couldn’t even enjoy the sunset - the ocean was calm, the sun was reflecting off the water, casting an orange glow on the surface.

“Still unable to focus, ma’am?” she heard a familiar voice say. It was the sailor again, approaching her.

“Aren’t you supposed to be steering the ship?” Emily asked him.

“Why? I’m not the only one here on duty,” he answered. “I believe I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Wyatt, by the way. I’ve got some free time at the moment, so I thought I’d look for you.”

“And why me?” Emily asked, followed by a slight sigh.

“Well, the last time I checked, you are the reason we all are here,” he replied, as he, too, leaned against the safety banister. “I’m aware that this entire expedition is regarding your mother,” he then continued. “Didn’t she disappear years ago, if I may ask?”

Emily took a deep breath before answering: “I’m determined to find her, or at least find out what really happened. Honestly, wouldn’t you? You couldn’t possibly be content with just sitting back and forgetting everything if you knew you had the opportunity to find out?”

Wyatt gave what she just said some thought. “You tell me, I’m not actually sure I do know. The way you put it: of course, I would want to find my family. But would I actually do it?” he asked. “You shouldn’t take it for granted, Ms. As far as I’m concerned, I would assume that few people would actually put matters into their own hands in such a situation. It’s a big world. Not everyone would know where, perhaps not even how, to start looking.”

“Well, I know where to start looking. I’m not a hundred percent sure what to expect, but I’m confident it will lead me somewhere,” Emily stated without hesitation, still not budging from her spot.

“Right you do,” Wyatt replied. “Still, you’re asking many questions. Are you sure you’re alright with this?”

“More certain than I can be at this point. There’s no point in waiting any further. It must be done,” Emily said. Her determination and motivation put a smile on Wyatt’s face.

“Then we all certainly are on board with you, ma’am,” he said. The sun was on its way down beyond the horizon. He started walking back in the direction from which he came from.

“I should get back, but I’ll surely see you around. Have a great night, ma’am. And may this journey lead you to what it is you are seeking,”

Even after Wyatt had left, and the night was upon them, Emily stayed. Wyatt’s voice repeated itself in her head. Although quickly returning to the present, she couldn’t free herself of a feeling of uncertainty, a feeling she had been pondering over the entire day. And so, after a moment's contemplation, she went inside and crawled into her bunk, at last. She drifted off into deep sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, exhausted from the day and distress plaguing her mind.

~*~*~*~

She awoke with a start as the boat shook violently and almost threw her straight out of the rough bed she laid upon. As she reoriented herself, she could hear the yelling of the crew tossing orders and information around as the captain desperately tried to hold the boat steady and afloat. The next noise truly woke her from her dazed stupor; a ghoulish, blood-chilling screech that made her skin turn white, and her previously warm body run cold from otherworldly fear. She forced herself to her feet and took a deep breath to calm her nerves.

“I knew there’d be danger when I left, it was naive of me to assume there would be no monsters on the journey-” she mumbled to herself before being interrupted by a flashing pain. “Ow!” she exclaimed loudly, slowly trying to regain her composure.

After the pain had settled a bit, she realized that she was still wearing her armor. She was apparently more exhausted yesterday then she was aware of, and didn’t have the energy to take it off before going to bed. A few hours of uneasy rest in the armor had given her a severely sore back.

However, she had no time to lose. She steeled her nerves, picked up her sword and walked out the door to her room. There was no turning back now.

The second she made it to the stairs leading up to the deck, the door up top swung open violently, releasing a torrent of water downstairs, dousing her in it. If she wasn’t awake before, she most definitely was now. Emily began to run up the dripping steps. The echo of waterdrops and clanking sound of her armor was the only noise she could recall before stepping out on deck. The sky was dark, indicating that is was still in the middle of the night. Before she could think another thought, she was instantly swept off her feet by a powerful wave, and thrown for a loop by all the screaming of the crew trying to hold it together. People were rushing to and from, tying down ropes, pulling the sail, trying to toss out as much water as possible so that the boat didn’t sink, and working with cannons and other weapons at the ready.

“Probably waiting to attack the source of that screech before it sinks us…” she briefly thought as a grimace pulled her features. She moved to stand once again and closed her eyes, trying to drown out the sounds.

Was coming up here a mistake? she wondered.

Emily shook her head, throwing out the negative thoughts. “No, no, I need to help. I want to help.

She opened her eyes again and went towards the captain. Right as she arrived at the wheel to speak to the struggling man did the monster appear, accompanied by a mighty shake of the boat. She stumbled once more at the shake as she looked up at the huge monster. It towered over her, the crew and the boat, or was it the fear coursing through her and the crew exaggerating the proportions? She desperately hoped it was the latter.

And as it raised its dripping, slimy tendril, time almost froze. There were white, hooked claws beneath it that reflected the moonlight and the light of a few torches that still flickered on the boat. If it could smell the fear of the crew, she didn’t know, nor did she want to know. She felt smothered by the permeating stench of dead rotting fish and salty sea water, but it was more preferable than the pulling weight of fear on her back. Some crew members pulled to action and shot at it, the creature letting out a yowl of pain from the heated projectiles that were shot into its gushy, slippery body. More tendrils arose from the depths and slammed down into the boat, Emily narrowly dodging the attack from one of the long appendages. At this proximity, she saw the claws digging into the boat, the wood, keeping the two things attached to one another. And it, unfortunately, confirmed her fears - it was as big as she thought it was.

After another round of bullet fire, she watched as the creature started to tear at the deck of the ship, the hooked tendril pulling at the wood, creating holes. She could only imagine what the other ones were doing to the hull of the ship. She briefly studied the muscles on the long tendril contracting. She stood to her feet and tightened the grip around her sword, a fairly thin and polished silver blade that reflected the present light wonderfully as if it was blessed by the god above. It was lightweight and sharp, and she had practiced enough that the blade was like an extension of her movements, precise and strong.

She moved quickly into action once her plan was formulated, raising her sword above her head and swiftly bringing it down to sever the tentacle from the creature. The unearthly, ear-shattering, ungodly screech that followed shook her to her core. Everyone froze, fearing the attack that followed because chances were it wouldn’t leave till the ship was sunk, and everyone dead.

“Shi-” she was cut off by the need to run away. But there was nowhere to run, she was stuck on a boat, probably in an ocean with tons of other monsters and she didn’t know how far away they were from shore. Desperation hit her faster, and more powerful than a lightning bolt.

The boat shook wildly from the attack, with no intervals. She could feel in her toes, the ground giving in beneath her. They were sinking, the cold, dark depths had to be getting closer. It was not stopping anytime soon, Emily knew.

She frantically looked around, trying to figure out where would put her furthest from the water, and therefore safe from the slashing limbs of the enraged creature, whose screeching and that of the crew’s terrifying yowls would probably cling to the reaches of her mind for the rest of her life. In the chaos surrounding her and clouding her mind, she didn’t notice one of the loose masts swing towards her until the momentum threw her off the boat. The hit made her vision blur as she flew into the water. The creature seemed preoccupied with the float in front of it. She spent the remains of her energy getting and clinging to a large piece of driftwood that crossed her tunnel-vision. All she could see before she fully blacked out, and was met with the cold depths that she was floating in both figuratively and literally, was the monster ripping more holes into the boat as she slowly, but surely, drifted off.

#original story #fantasy #fantasy world #adventure #action #magic #original content #original character #i swear this is good #work in progress #original characters #illustration

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daebakinc · 7 years ago

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We Make the Kingdom - Pt 17

Image by silverdagger865 Pairing: Yongguk x OC Genre: Fantasy, with Angst and Fluff(but not this chapter) Summary: After a vampire attack leaves you almost dead, you are rescued by a group of werelions, powers long thought to be extinct. Upon discovering the same magic flows in your blood, you join their fight against encroaching vampires and another, very human monster, to save the kingdom. A/N & Warning: Mentions of blood, violence, and some gore. Character death. Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 , 8, 9(M), 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16(M), 17, 18 , Final

The winter solstice. A night whose air is suffused with spices and laughter that seep through tightly closed shutters and constantly opening doors to usher in welcome company. Inside, families and friends lounge around roaring fires to tell stories taller than the flames that keep the cold winter night outside at bay. But tonight, there are no songs, no merriment.

Many houses sit empty, their residents evacuated earlier in the day to the nearest port city in a long column, noisy with the cries of children and lowing of animals. Should the Capitol fall, they will board ships to flee the country. But most of the city’s residents remain behind, too poor to leave, condemned by circumstances to witness the city’s fate firsthand.

With windows lashed shut and homes hushed with fear, they tremble. The fires give as much reassurance as a cloud-covered star. The air is thick with the city’s bated breath as it waits on the brink of its doom which only the Goddess knows. And tonight, She is detachedly silent.

The defenders are quiet as well as they stand before and on the city walls, but they are not gods and can fall prey to unease. Some of the soldiers around you tug at their freshly forged iron collars uncomfortably, but they will be grateful for them in the end. Horses and soldiers alike anxiously fret and shuffle their feet in the cold, armor, weapons, and tack clinking. They are made for the action of marching into battle, not standing still in anticipation of one as they have since sunset.

The stallion beneath you whickers in the same impatience you feel. His snorts send streams of white clouds into the air like a smoldering dragon. Trained for battle, he senses its oncoming and wants to charge into it with hooves flying. You pat his neck and whisper in his ear until he settles down to simply chomp on his bit. Readjusting your grip on the reins, you frown as you roll your shoulders. The golden plated armor, despite its bulk, is not inordinately heavy. Yet it still sits uncomfortably on your body, as does the tight helmet with its high cheek-guards that hide most of your face. You wish you could wear the same light armor the other weres received, ideal for flexibility and shifting back and forth, but to do so would defeat your plans.

Stifling your sigh lest the soldiers surrounding you mistake it for doubt, you look out across the small army again. Calvary borders infantry on both sides, waves and waves of men and women stretched in front of the Capitol’s battlements. If you concentrate, you could find the other weres, strategically scattered amongst different regiments. You can feel Yongguk near the princess in the center of the field, his steady heartbeat soothing your own. Only the bears are obviously visible, royal amethyst tunics covering their armor as they stand in close formation around their charges.

Your own guardians, Hyungwon and Kihyun and Seokwon, sit on their own mounts around your horse, stoically staring into the distance towards the mountains. They lie on the far horizon, craggy black shadows scarcely discernable against the lightless sky. As in your dream, clouds suffocate the stars so no light but the Capitol’s shatters the ominous night blackness.

Lamia chose the time of her ultimatum shrewdly, you begrudgingly acknowledge. Selecting the longest night of the year gives her more time to wage war, more confidence with the threat of the scorching sun rising. It also robs your soldiers of their sight, or would have if a clever scholar had not suggested a solution. You glance back at the walls with a small smile. In between the catapults, bright fires in enormous braziers burn all along the battlement beside carefully placed, magically enhanced mirrors that are angled to flood the plain with light. Let Lamia make what she will of that when she comes.

You begin wondering what she is waiting for. Though still hours away, dawn approaches with each minute and with it she loses her advantage. Unless she counts on the clouds to prolong the cover of darkness.

You notice the soldiers growing even more restless. Perhaps, her failure to appear is another cunning tactic. Though the soldiers’ faces do not betray them, they are afraid to face creatures they only yesterday thought were the stuff of children’s stories. Each minute they do not see the enemy for themselves is time for the dread and monstrosity of the vampires to grow in their minds, infect them with potentially deadly fear.

A piercing horn blasts its warning into the night, sending every soldier’s head snapping up. The enemy is coming.

A second blowing directs your gaze to the north. When discussing how Lamia and her army could approach the city, one of the scholars, who possessed earth elemental magic, pointed to the mountains. Deep beneath the earth lie series of soaring caves that extend the length of the mountain chain with various chambers that rise to open to the surface. They would provide perfect passage for vampires to easily come within a few hundred kilometers of the Capitol. Following this logic, Princess Hyosung had set those in the city who could scry to sweeping the mountainsides for signs of the vampires.

It would seem your prediction was well-founded, but time passes, and the landscape remains unchanged.

“Come on,” you mutter under your breath. Your heart pounds in your ears in anticipation while every sense strains for the slightest sign of Lamia.

At last, the wind carries the familiar musty scent of grave dirt and blood, along with the macabre hisses of vampires eager for a feeding. A few horses away from you, Junhong growls deep in his throat. The bears shift in their saddles, looking to you.

“Is that..?” Hyungwon lets his already quiet voice trail off.

Their faces harden at your small nod of confirmation and they turn back towards the mountains.

A black mass quickly materializes from night, roiling and ravenously devouring the distance. Horses whicker and prance at the foreign smell they instantly identify as a predator. As the vampires come within human eyesight, a ripple of shouts and cries arises from the soldiers, but their officers and discipline quickly silence them. You intentionally keep your expression empty except for your iron resolve as you feel many soldiers glancing at you, one of the few they know to have faced vampires before. However, you do not have long to linger on maintaining appearances.

The approaching vampires demand your attention. There is no order in their ranks. Each fights to reach the mass of humans first, rabid dogs shoving and snarling each other. The vampires run on bare or raggedly shoed feet as if the freezing ground is nothing, closer and closer. You can make out vampires with ghoulish, gray faces skeletal with hunger alongside the well-fed, cruelly beautiful whose eyes blaze with the same blood madness. Most clutch ragged-edged swords, but some bear nothing more than their teeth.

A quick sweep sends your heart plunging into your stomach. The vampires number in the hundreds, possibly the thousands. Less than you feared, but still more than you hoped. Your chances of winning are decreasing before your eyes.

You straighten your shoulders and let out a breath. In the hours before assembling with the army, still safe in Yongguk’s arms, you had come to terms with the possibility of your end. You will not be afraid. You are not afraid. Nervous, but not afraid. If it saves your people, you will make your sacrifice alongside your friends and send as many vampires as you can to their second and final graves.

The horde halts on the edge of the sea of light from the mirrors. They grimace and hiss and shriek like the high mountain winds, terrible and inhuman. To your army’s credit, not a man or woman makes a move to abandon their post despite their fear that fills your nose.

As if sliced by an executioner’s sword, all noise stops. In waves, the vampires’ lines slowly part. You smell her before she emerges to the front of the army.

Lamia wears a blood-red lacquered breastplate and armguards over the black dress she wore in your dream along with her crown. A longsword with a ruby-set hilt sits on her hip. Her teeth shine ivory against her blood red lips. Those lips curve in a haughty smile as she surveys the humans in front of her. Before you can exhale, she is in the center of the field, an arrow’s flight away from the kingdom’s snapping standard. Murmurs of awed alarm ripple through the troops at their first glimpse of a vampire.

“Who speaks for this rabble?” Lamia asks, her seductive purr loud as a shout. She shows no sign of the light affecting her.

From within the ranks of the center infantry, wearing the crowned helmet, Hyosung pushes her horse forward. Voice clear and strong, she answers, “I, the princess of this land, do.”

Another rider comes forward from the eastern cavalry, the mirror image of the princess. “I, the princess of this land, do,” she calls in the same voice.

With a deep breath, you knee your stallion past your guard. When your mouth moves, it is not your own voice that comes forth, but Hyosung’s. “I, the princess of this land, do.”

Lamia’s eyes dart between the three of you, her lip lifting infinitesimally in and impulsive reveal of frustration. Her nose wrinkles as she tries to catch a scent, but your borrowed clothes cloak your smell. Your heart beats faster. Using magic to change your voice had been a gamble, but it is working.

The sneer quickly returns to Lamia’s face. “Very clever,” she says with an exaggerated clap. “But it is no matter. The earth will be covered by all of your blood, royal or no. Unless, you choose wisely and surrender now.”

“If we do as you say?” asks the Hyosung opposite you

“First, you will turn the weres over to me as your uncle so promised. Then, you must accept me as your ruler forever more and live out your days under my reign.” Lamia’s voice is cajoling and smooth, full of benevolent promises to move the stone-hearted. “I will not stay in your kingdom long for the whole world awaits my coming. You will live in peace and plenty so long as you provide tribute and loyalty to me.”

An undignified snort escapes your mouth, but you faithfully move your mouth as Hyosung’s instrument. “A tribute in flesh and blood, no doubt. One that will be doubled and tripled to fuel your unending evil.”

Lamia shrugs, not denying Hyosung’s accusation. “What is the price of a few lives for the many? Consider, Princess. Why continue this fool’s errand of attempting to stay the inevitable tide of change? Dynasties rise and fall like the waves, and mine is readying to crash against the shore and turn your land to an ocean of blood and suffering. Do not waste the lives of your brave soldiers. Submit to me and save your people.”

Grim satisfaction tickles your mouth when there’s not a single whisper of uncertainty in the ranks in the face of her offer.

After a few moments of bated silence, the princess in the heart of the army raises her sword. Her voice soars through the cold air, proud and strong as she trots along the length of the center army. “People of our beloved kingdom, hear me! A choice lies before us. It affects not only us, nor our children’s children, but the whole world. Shall we lay down our arms and our liberty to save our lives in exchange for peace and let others, countless future generations, die in our place? Will we let the land we love be conquered and covered in a darkness so complete our loved ones will never see the light of hope?”

You knee your stallion further into the field. As he prances, you become Hyosung’s mouthpiece again. “Or shall we show these vampires the indomitable spirit of humanity, spirit that can never be broken? Shall we ride into certain death to do battle against the odds with such honor and bravery that our glory will be preserved in story unto the dying of the world?”

“I would rather be slain in battle than die safe in my bed before I let my fellow countrymen suffer untold terrors at the hands of the monsters before us,” the third Hyosung calls. “I am your princess, your sister, your servant, but I will not command you to fight, to sacrifice. The decision is yours, brothers and sisters. What say you?”

The troops stare back in reverential silence, Lamia and her kind temporarily forgotten. Your own heart swells with the fiery pride and fervor.

A lone wolf’s howl shatters the tension. It sings of defiance and courage and resolve. Another wolf joins in, then another. Lions’ and bears’ roars thunder across the plain in a wild, fearsome cacophony. Across the army, thousands of voices rise in battle song while swords and lances beat against shields. Restrained to your human body, you add your fierce cry to the clamor as the stallion beneath you rears and screams his own challenge.

The princess turns her horse around and lowers her sword to point it at Lamia. “You have your answer. We fight.”

Lamia does not appear surprised, her sneer only deepening. “You die.”

She vanishes from the field. With that signal, the vampires swarm towards the city.

Distantly, you hear Lady Kim’s firm commands on the ramparts. The creak of wood and metal precede the explosions of fire and iron shrapnel plummeting down on the vampires. Hyosung’s shout sends hails of iron arrows following. Screams and decimation are instant as flames engulf the vampires and iron finds lifeless hearts to turn them to ash.

Still the vampires come thick as locusts, rushing and shrieking.

Across the plain, a trumpet blares. You gather the reins and your courage, shouting, “For light and home!”

Giving your stallion his head, you charge wide of the enemy at the front of the surging cavalry. Vampires split from the main column heading towards the city to sprint towards you. When your armies meet, they meet with a crash that sends shudders through the very earth.

Screams of the dying from both sides and the clanging of swords clashing permeate the air until they become nothing in your ears. Your stallion’s hooves kick out, crushing vampire skulls and limbs as he pushes through the hordes towards your goal, but he cannot keep them all away. Black blood splatters on your hands, your face, as you hack and slash and parry at vampires who try to pull you down.

Stinging streaks up your leg. Furious, you kick away the vampire who bit your leg through a break in your armor. Before you can kill it yourself, Seokwon drives a stake through its chest. All you have time for is a grateful nod before you have to face the next assault.

Wading through the horde, you give yourself over to the movements engrained in your muscles. So lost in your own body, only the flash of black armor stops your sword mid-swing.

“Alive?” Jongup pants, deftly throwing a stake into the chest of an oncoming vampire.

“For now.” You shake the sweat from your eyes. If only you could remove the damned helmet. Another reckless vampire meets its end with a slice of your sword. “Glad to see you are.”

“For now.” He lowers his arm and turns his horse back towards the city walls. “If our lines hold, we’ll be in position.”

Even as you speak, Kyungsoo and Minseok’s howls direct the cavalry to reform and charge again. Outraged shrieks echo as the vampires realize they’ve been outflanked. The two forces collide with more screams and death and blood. But faced with iron pikes and flaming torches, the vampires do not break through.

You turn your gaze to the city as well. With relief, you see the main body of the army’s lines remain unbroken. Thinned, but whole. Its locked shield wall bows shallowly in some places under the volume of attackers, but it stands resilient. As you watch, several vampires vault over the army and run towards the walls and its catapults. Your warning cry turns to a cheer when they make it no further than a few yards, evaporating into ash a few yards away.

Jongup smiles grimly. “Blessing the city worked. Lamia will never touch it.”

“She won’t have a chance to try if the elementals carry out their task.” You change your sword to your other hand and hold out your sword arm. “See you on the other side, be it in this world or the next.”

Jongup clasps your arm firmly. “In this world or the next.”

You release your grip and he’s off his horse, landing as a lion. Facing the Capitol, Jongup roars three times, his call ringing above the chaos.

When nothing immediately happens, you worry the defenders on the walls did not hear him. Then, a bone-rattling boom precedes a blast of heated air that scorches your back through your armor. You can see the massive tower of flame behind you reflected in the black eyes of the vampires around you. Seconds later, three more lines of fire burst from the earth and race towards each other until both armies are entirely encircled by walls of solid fire burning hotter than hellfire and taller than the walls of the Capitol.

Should the last human fall lifeless to the ground, not a vampire will be left in existence either.

Vampiric screeches of rage and fear crowd above the din of battle and thick black smoke. They skitter back in the face of their bane, only to fall on your troops with renewed viciousness. The ground beneath your stallion’s hooves slickens as dirt mixes with human and vampiric blood. Enemy falls beside slain enemy, littering the ground like dead leaves from a forest of ruin even as the fire tightens its circle and pushes combatants closer together.

Muscles aching, you reach deep within yourself for your reserves of strength. A flash of red catches your eye between the fighters. Lamia. Her sword sprays crimson as she cuts into the leg of her opponent. Your heart drops as Lamia hauls up the golden figure by the shoulders. The princess’ sword drops from her hand so it can frantically scramble and scratch at Lamia’s. Her were guards are nowhere in sight.

Heedless of your own escort, you kick your horse to barrel headlong through friend and foe even as Lamia rips the princess’ helmet off and thrusts her fangs into the princess’ throat.

“Be damned, you are not she!” Lamia screeches, tossing the decoy’s lifeless body from her. She spins, eyes searching. Then they meet yours across the field and Lamia’s glower turns into a murderous leer. A bloodstained finger beckons you to where she waits.

You tighten your grip on your sword and tense to jump from your saddle as you ride closer. Something collides with your horse, sending him sprawling with a squeal and you plunging to the ground.

Scrambling for your sword, you find it and your feet in time to watch a bear rushing at Lamia. She easily sidesteps him and his swiping paws when he rounds on her. The bear rears up to lunge, but a vampire springs on his back, biting at his thick neck. Lamia leaps.

“No!” you scream, hand uselessly outstretched.

Her sword sinks into the bear’s chest. Minkyun’s body is human before he hits the ground, his eyes already empty.

Lamia rips her sword free and kneels to shove a hand into his wound. Only to jump back with a cackle from your swinging sword.

“You will not touch him,” you growl. You are careful not to look at the body you stand over lest the tears burning your eyes fall.

“All I wanted was his heart, Princess.” Lamia licks at her bloodied hand and moans in pleasure. “It has been so long since I tasted were blood. And today I have had so much. Such a lovely winter solstice present.”

Fear and grief stab at your heart, but they vanish, overwhelmed with rage. Leveling your sword in challenge, you speak through gritted teeth. “It is the last winter solstice you will ever see.”

You throw yourself at Lamia with all your might. She thrusts upward to block your sword, dirt spraying beneath her feet as you press downward. Lamia slips under your guard to stab at your stomach. You dance away and come at her again, funneling every drop of fury into every strike, every blow. But Lamia is more your match, countering your every move and launching her own assaults with an infuriatingly confident cool.

As your swords lock at the hilt and you come face to face, a scream echoes from the city parapets. The wall of flame closest to the Capitol evaporates as if it never was. Panic sends a chill right to your heart. Officers desperately try to rally their soldiers with desperate cries as the vampires rush their lines towards escape.

Lamia takes advantage of your distraction and savagely clouts your jaw with her fist. Red erupts behind your eyes as you fly backwards. Pain takes your breath and turns it to choking wheezes. You spit out blood and push your hair out of your face, freezing. Your helmet lies beside you.

Lamia hisses as she advances. “You. Where is the real princess?” Suddenly, her head jerks away to the east, face lifted like a hound catching a scent.

As abruptly as it vanished, the missing fire wall explodes back into existence. Frantically, you follow Lamia’s gaze and find what she did. Hyosung, arms outstretched towards the new blaze. Invisible, pungent power streams between her and her creation as she stands undisturbed, surrounded by her embattled bears and Jongup.

Smiling, Lamia bends at the waist in a mocking bow. “I will finish you later, beast-child.” And she is gone.

Hyosung cannot fall. If Hyosung falls, so does the kingdom.

“Weres!” Ripping off your armor as you run, your distraught cry turns to a roar as you shift. To the princess! Lamia!

Having four feet makes dodging clashing vampires and humans and falling fire balls far easier and faster, yet you are still too slow. Lamia is almost on the princess on her small band of defenders, cutting down all in her path.

A bear throws himself in front of Lamia, his purple robes tattered and bloodstained. Seokwon’s sword glows gold with reflected firelight as it arcs downward. Lamia counters, but it throws her off balance, so she cannot do the same for his descending paw. Her head snaps to the side at the impact, blood spraying.

Lamia dances away from Seokwon’s pursuing jaws before swooping back in with a bloodcurdling shriek. She catches him by the throat and flings him away. You cannot see where he lands.

Vengeance fuels your body as you spring. Your claws and teeth sink through armor into cold, vulnerable skin. Screaming, Lamia drops her sword and digs her own claws into your shoulders to throw you off her, but you dig your claws deeper so you both tumble down.

Together you roll and tussle, teeth gnashing and claws lashing out. Her blood drips onto your fur from the gashes Seokwon’s claws scored on her cheek and the dozens of wounds you inflicted yourself.

Lamia’s fangs snap at your chest, only scraping it as you jerk away. “I should’ve killed you when I found you,” she growls. She scuttles away, shedding armor as she goes. Her crown haphazardly clings to her head.

You snarl in reply and hurl yourself at her again. Lamia crouches at the last minute so you fly over her head, standing and twisting to drive a dagger into your side.

The agony is instant and terrible and wrenches a tortured roar from your lungs. You shift back as you land, quivering hands reaching for the blade imbedded below your ribs. Biting back a scream, you yank it out.

Lamia’s shadow falls on you. When you look up, panting, she is standing there smirking at you. She opens her mouth, but another shadow soars over you as Yongguk collides with her. His jaw closes around her shoulder as they collapse.

Howling, Lamia tears away, black blood cascading down her arm. Yongguk lets her go, backing up until he stands above you.

“How quaint,” Lamia jeers. She reaches down to grab up a sword from a fallen soldier’s hand. “The lover comes to die with his beloved.”

Yongguk shifts into a human, but offers no retort. His golden eyes follow the movement of every muscle in Lamia’s body. Without looking away, he anxiously whispers, “Ness?”

Though your body screams and your lungs whistle, you drag yourself to your knees. You place a hand against his back. “Go,” you tell him. “Kill her. End it.”

Yongguk reaches behind to briefly squeeze your hand before stooping for a sword of his own. He braces himself as Lamia strides closer, red eyes reflecting the rising flames.

Lamia strikes, Yongguk easily batting her blade aside. She attacks again, taunting. Once again, he blocks. Lamia grins and falls on him.

Sword rings on sword in a deadly, discordant song. Lamia darts back and forth, harrying and provoking with tiny scratches and cuts, but Yongguk always keeps her in his sight, never reacting recklessly. He never allows her an inch closer to where you lie.

Yongguk is tired. His armor is gone, leaving plainclothes that are torn and shredded. The blood running down his skin is pink from his sweat. But he does not falter, does not let his defense buckle. Yongguk is conserving what is left of his energy for the right moment.

It comes when Lamia thrusts, overextending her reach when Yongguk sways aside at the last second. Yongguk lunges and crushes Lamia against him, pinning her arms to her side. Hissing, she bites down into his exposed shoulder. His breath stutters, but he does not release her and with one hand, Yongguk drives the stake you slipped him through Lamia’s back and into her heart.

Lamia gasps, a horrible croaking sound. Her eyes widen with disbelief. Her shaking fingers weakly scrabble at Yongguk’s shoulders. He digs the stake in harder. Finally, Lamia’s lifeless head falls backward. Her body explodes into ashes and her soiled crown lands upside-down in the bloodied grass with a dull thump.

Lamia, the vampire queen, is dead.

Previous Part

Kingdom Map, Lion’s Keep, Were Scale, Were Guide

#yongguk scenarios #bap scenarios #kpopwritingnet #b.a.p scenarios #kpop scenarios #bang yongguk #kpop au #bap au #b.a.p au

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vmheadquarters · 7 years ago

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What Goes Around... (Part 27b)

This is PART 27b of a story that is being told in segments by twenty-seven different authors, campfire-style. Each author will take over the story with no prior planning and then pass it on after putting their own spin on it! Expect the unexpected! :) You can check our vmhq campfire tale tag for all of the previous installments or read the story as it develops on AO3. — Part 27b is written by @cheshirecatstrut.

[Part 27a]

PART TWO--CONCLUSION

DICK

This new tunnel Rubes found, just to switch things up, is artificially lit, fluorescents attached at intervals along the walls. Plaques at every junction read, “NO FIREARMS, NO SMOKING, NO CELL PHONES, NO LAPTOPS, PLEASE WEAR PROTECTIVE GEAR.”

“Something’s flammable down here.” Ruby pauses to consult the blueprint, points right. “Also secret.”

“Bunch of wine crates were stacked near the spot where you left Sean,” Dick says. “Old ones. I bet these catacombs were used for smuggling once. Toss a match on some two-hundred-years-buried booze, you’d have a big-ass underground bonfire, amirite?”

“Sure, but I don’t think that’s the reason for the signs.” Ruby taps one as they pass. “These mention modern tech, and someone’s keeping every light working.” She glances back at him. “Is it just me, or is your brain reverting to normal?”

“Haven’t smoked up in, like, half an hour,” Dick says. “And I’ve got what you’d call a high tolerance. There’s a roach in my pocket, still, but do you really want me to ignore the warnings?”

“Probably it’s best to hold off.” She stops at a metal door with a plaque that reads PROCESSING ROOM and tests the handle. “We’ll never save America from the Fuchsia Menace if we’re unexpectedly burned alive.”

Removing supplies from her purse, she goes through her straw-air-hammer routine again; the safety door swings open with a clang. Ruby’s eyes widen as she enters. Once Dick sidles through behind her, he totally concurs.

The big round space on the blueprints marks an enormous underground cavern, walled in rock machine-scraped smooth. Higher-tech coffins than the one in the barn fill most of the available floor space—they look like hyper-sleep pods from Alien, windows showing pink soup beneath. Gigantic steel tanks at the cave’s center sprout spiderish sprays of pipes, each attaching to one coffin. Dick wonders how any amount of revenge could be worth lying Matrix-style for DAYS.

“I KNEW IT!” he crows, prompting Ruby to shush him. His voice echoes. “Didn’t I call this scenario, last time we were theorizing? Seriously, I need to patent this weed-- it’s, like, miracle shit, Rub-a-roni.”

“Did you breed and grow the particular strain in your pocket? No? Then you can’t patent it, dummy. Now hush. Something just started beeping over there, and I need to figure out what and why.”

She crosses the room, picking her way carefully between coffins; for lack of anything better to do, Dick follows. When she stops at a screen of scrolling, random-seeming words he looks over her shoulder, shifting his murse back out of the way.

“Is that the names of the pink dudes?” He squints at one line that reads ‘Henson’, and another, “Soloway’. “And if so, what do you think ‘BEGIN DETACHMENT’ means? ‘Cause it seems like some of these coffins are doing it.”

Ruby gasps as, with a loud, clanking hiss, half the tubes uncouple from coffins and begin, slowly, to retract. The list pauses, flashes a ‘DETACHMENT COMPLETE’ message, and begins scrolling again with new names.

“Shit!” she murmurs, and looks up at him with terrified eyes. “Shit, shit, shit, Dick, I think all these zombies are about to wake up! We have to hide; if they find us in here, who KNOWS what they’ll do?”

Dick casts around for a likely nook, but it’s a fucking cave. Notices part of the wall to their left contains an inset desk, and shoves her that direction. “Under there!” he hisses, as several coffin lids creak open. “Quick, we’re out of time!”

“But we’re not hidden!” she whispers back, obliging just the same. He scrambles in after and pulls the rolling chair in front. “They can see us if they look!”

“That Pez guy turned into a moron,” Dick argues, feeling his pocket to make sure the joint’s still there, for after. “Just shut it--I bet you a grand they won’t notice.”

One by one, the coffins’ inhabitants rise, in a flurry of flailing pink limbs and high-pitched shrieks. Hulks of various shapes and sizes, all clad in white t-shirts and briefs, claw and stumble free as if coordination was a casualty of the process. They land on heads and sides, with zero instinct for self-preservation, then bicycle like upended cockroaches until they make it to their feet.

The room fills, rapidly, with milling, squealing pinkness; Ruby clutches Dick in a way that would be gratifying under less gross circumstances. Then, abruptly, a voice booms out across the room. The hulks turn, as one, towards a white movie screen slowly descending from the ceiling.

Sean Friedrich appears in ten-foot Technicolor, wearing a laurel-leaf crown and toga, lit in such a flattering and gilded style Dick’s positive he directed this segment. Raising his arms like that Italian dictator from Call of Duty: World War II, Sean shouts, “Welcome to the Pantheon, demigods!” Then giggles, the way he always does when he’s had a shitload too much coke.

The Hot Pink Funky Bunch cock their heads and screech like a bunch of brain-damaged birds. But at least they quit staggering around, and a few actually try to listen.

“You’ve been selected, after a VERY competitive search, and gifted with powers FAR beyond those of mortal men,” Sean intones, voice getting higher and rapider as if someone’s switched him to fast-forward. “Now it’s time to USE those powers for our common good. And to teach the assholes populating the rest of the world their PLACE!”

Lots of howling punctuates this statement, along with rudimentary words; a few fights break out between Hulks that stumble into each other. “Please form a line,” Sean continues, more prosaically, “and walk through the door beneath the flashing red light to get street clothes. We’ll gather in the auditorium for a speech. Then you’ll be bused to the location specified on your liability waivers, so you can FULFILL YOUR HEROIC DESTINIES!”

More chaos accompanies this statement--the screen retracts into the ceiling as ‘A Film by Sean Friedrich’ flashes across. Then a red safety light, accompanied by a klaxon, begins flashing over a door on the far wall. The Hulks gather to stare, attracted by the noise and color. When the door swings open, they file out, screaming and punching all the way.

In the quiet after the last of them leave, Dick exhales, then checks to make sure he didn’t pee himself again. Ruby peeks out from beneath the desk.

“Come on!” She turns to tug urgently at Dick. “We need to LEAVE, pronto, and call somebody! If those guys are set loose all over the city to wreak havoc, it could become a statewide emergency!”

He shushes her frantically as booted footsteps echo through the room—this guy moves like he’s got a purpose, and more importantly, is wearing shoes. She hears, presses in close, but her silence comes too late. The feet pause, the chair’s jerked aside, and the owner of two denim-clad legs says, “Come out right now, you idiots. Don’t make me shoot.”

Ruby emerges slowly, hands up. Dick follows, wishing for once she’d let him go first. Then sighs with relief when he sees who exactly it IS, holding the gun.

“What the hell?” he demands, shoving their discoverer back a step. “You scared the crap out of me! Don’t you realize this place is dangerous?” Then, as the gun barrel pointed at him doesn’t waver, adds, “Wait, wait, wait…you’re not…IN on the whole zombie thing with these douchebags, are you?”

VERONICA

V pushes aside a branch and peers past it into a clearing; at the center stands a tall, pink individual in rags and Hanes Big Boys, face pressed fervently against a piece of fabric. Birds have fallen silent as the woods reverberate with his moans.

“That’s definitely not Wallace,” Logan observes in her ear, barely a breath of sound. “He’s as tall as me, and his hair is spiky.”

“No,” Veronica muses, “but he seems familiar somehow. Like I met him once but can’t quite remember the name?”

“WHERE YOU GO RONKAAAAA?” the figure wails, turning its face in profile to the sky, and Mac says hesitantly, from behind them, “Listen I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but…isn’t that Piz?”

“Oh shit!” Veronica says, and apparently the Hulk hears THAT. It turns abruptly, face lighting up in a ghoulish-pink too-many-teeth grin.

“RONKAAAAA!” it yells, staggering towards her on twisted, bleeding feet. Extends the piece of fabric and adds, “RONKA YOU MEET MY MOTHERRRRR!”

“Is he holding a woman’s jacket?” Veronica takes an involuntary step back, hand on Logan’s arm. “Why does he have…and what’s the milky smear, that CAN’T be…EW!”

“Maybe he thought it was yours?” Mac suggests, sotto voce, and Veronica shoots her a scandalized look. “So what are our options? We can’t hurt the guy, it’s Stosh Piznarski! You used to do his laundry.”

“As if.” Veronica shifts to evade when Piz lumbers closer. “And he’d better not be hoping I’m willing to wash THAT.”

The creature stops, head cocking, to study Logan, who’s standing very quiet and still, rhythmically flexing his hand. Eyes going wide with belated-recognition rage—confused, possibly, by the donkey shirt—he screams, “LOGAN I KICK ASS YOUUUU!” at the top of his lungs. Then charges.

Pink Piz is fast, far faster than he was as a person; V flinches in reaction, expecting him to take Logan down. But her boyfriend somehow manages a spectacular leap, vaulting over the zombie’s shoulder like an Olympic gold medalist. He lands, crouched and sneering, at the clearing’s center and beckons.

“What was THAT?” Mac demands as Piz shrieks and lowers his head. He does another flailing run, reminding Veronica why she stopped going with him to dance clubs. Logan stands braced until he’s a foot distant—then unexpectedly runs top speed out of the woods. Bellowing, Piz follows.

“Ugh, he’s protecting us by leading that thing away!” Veronica growls, giving chase. Raises her voice to add, “I’m the one with the gun here, dipwad! Will you EVER quit acting suicidally heroic?”

“You can’t shoot, though,” Mac chides, stumbling along behind her. “Because you’d be offing your ex. Remember?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Veronica shoves branches aside, emerging onto the lawn. “But I’m not letting him murder Logan based on an excess of sentiment, either.”

“Clearly,” Mac says, dry. Moves up beside her as Piz chases Logan in circles like a frustrated pink Elmer Fudd. He makes an actually-successful grab, ripping a flap loose from the donkey shirt, and Logan uses the moment of confusion to punch him in the face.

With a roar, Piz lunges and catches him, lifting him high into the air; pink lips peel back from giant pink teeth as excited zombie squeals fill the air. Veronica cocks the golden pistol and aims, falling into a two-handed stance.

Then a cop car barrels up over the hill, emergency lights flashing, horn honking, and makes straight for the unequal combatants.

Piz tosses Logan aside like he used to toss aside used towels, even when the laundry basket was right there. Screams at the approaching vehicle, “LOGAN GO TO JAIL NOT MEEEEE!” then takes off at a shambling run for the woods. He shouts, “I COME BACK RONKAA!” as he goes.

The car skids and squeals to a halt. V rushes across the yard, uncocking the gun as she goes. “Are you okay?” she asks, landing on her knees beside Logan, visually inspecting him for injuries. “Did he hurt you?”

Logan manages to sit up, flushed and sweaty, shakes his head like words are a bridge too far. Grabs the flap that used to be his shirt sleeve, and uses it to wipe his face. “Just chill for a minute,” V says, brushing back his hair. “We should head up to the house and get you some water.”

The cruiser’s driver door opens, and Veronica does a double-take as Weevil climbs out, definitely the worse for wear. “Forget Echolls, he’s just winded,” Weevil calls, voice muted by distance. “Fennel here is in way worse shape. I hope you’ve got the antidote ON you.”

“Oh thank God,” Veronica says, as Logan fumbles in his pocket for the vial of green liquid. “We came back and everyone had disappeared. We thought something terrible happened.”

“Your yuppie ex rampaged all over the house chasing Casablancas in a wig.” Weevil beckons her impatiently closer and opens the rear door. “We escaped through the catacombs, then I TRIED to drive this guy to the CDC.”

“The WHAT-acombs?” Veronica kneels on the floorboard beside Wallace, laying a palm along his forehead. He’s bright pink and thrashing, burning up with fever; a slow dribble of foam leaks from his mouth. Quickly she uncorks the vial. “Jesus, hold that thought. How much of this should I give him?”

Mac moves up behind her, carrying the slip of paper with the formulas. “Whoever wrote this could stand to work on penmanship,” she says. “But it looks to me like the dosage is one drop.”

“Okay, buddy, keep it together just a little bit longer.” Very carefully, Veronica tilts the vial over Wallace’s slack mouth. A single, emerald-green drop slips between his lips, and the effect is immediate. Wallace’s whole body stiffens and jerks, arms thrashing, nearly spilling the antidote before Veronica can re-cork. His jaw opens wide like he’s gasping for air, his lashes snap up, and the pink flush staining his body begins slowly to turn…green?

He stares at Veronica upside down for a moment, face frozen in rictus; then all his muscles relax and he manages a smile. “Just in time,” he says, faintly. “I can always count on you to milk situations for every ounce of drama.”

WEEVIL

Sparing a glance for Echolls, who doesn’t look so hot after fleeing Pinkzilla, Weevil runs his palms over his shaved head, breathing out stress. His hopeful musings about this weird-ass night maybe being over are interrupted by Veronica’s friend Cindy, who sidles up beside him.

“Not to pry,” she says, prying, “but how on Earth did you show up in the nick of time with Wallace, driving a police car?”

Oh right, Weevil thinks. Keith. So much for even half an hour of sleep in his own bed. And he can’t call Hector to open the shop, because there’s no freaking cell service.

As if on cue, his phone rings. Mac lifts a brow as he removes it from his pocket and reads ‘unknown’ on the caller ID. “It’s Clayton’s vehicle,” he tells her, pressing ‘accept’. “I dropped him at the Pro Med on the way through town--I’ll explain in a minute.”

“MAN, the mobile reception here is weird.” Cindy shakes her head, looking as disgusted as Weevil feels. Across the line a male voice calls, “Hello?”

“Navarro,” Weevil says, curt, and the guy says, “Oh, thank God. I was beginning to think I’d never reach anyone but Casablancas. And no offense, but that guy sounded WAY too high to help much.”

“If you think I’ll be offended by someone ragging on Casablancas, you don’t know me very well.” Weevil walks away from the ongoing tearful reunion so he can hear better. “Who is this, and how’d you get my number?”

“It’s Leo D’Amato.” The voice pauses to cough. “I’m looking for Veronica Mars, you seen her?”

“Yeah, she’s here.” Weevil relaxes—he knows this cop’s a friend of V’s. “But now’s not a good time. She just gave the antidote to her pink friend, and it’s having some weird-ass side effects.”

“The ANTIDOTE? She FOUND it? Navarro, that needs to get to the CDC, like yesterday! At last count thirteen pink individuals have been captured all over the city, after wreaking havoc to confuse the news crews. If we don’t provide a remedy soon, those men are going to die.”

“Yeah, that was never gonna happen before Fennel got a dose.” Weevil smirks. “Guy’s eyeballs were pink, and you know V takes care of her people first.”

“Fine, whatever. Just make sure she saves some for testing; the government scientists can reverse-engineer it. Look, here’s the main reason I called—you guys aren’t anywhere near the Van Vliet winery, right?”

“We’re standing in the middle of it,” Weevil says. “Strange shit’s been going down here all day. Piznarski’s running around hot pink in his underwear. And your dirty detective pal has you would not BELIEVE how complicated a plot going with Liam Fitpatrick, this drug dealer I know, and my high school English teacher.”

“Explain all that to me later,” Leo says. “When I’m not hopped up on morphine and can figure out what you mean. Right now I need to warn you--this plot you’re talking about goes way beyond drug dealing with a side of rosacea. Military officers keep turning up to grill me about secret armies and political rebellions, and one of them made a crack about going in hot. Which means someone’s thinking of dropping a bomb. On YOU. SOON.”

“Shit,” Weevil says, takes a step back like that will somehow protect him. Then promptly falls down a hole.

He lands on sand after a ten-foot drop, winded but mostly unhurt, gazing up at the night sky through a small, square opening. His phone, not so lucky, hits a rock, and shatters into a hundred sharp fragments.

“Mackenzie!” Weevil calls--pauses to cough, tries again. Hopes fervently he’s not catching a cold on top of everything else. “Echolls! Get over here, I found something!”

Silence for a minute, while he sits up with a groan. Then Echolls’ smug face appears in the rectangle of sky. “Looks like…you found a hole, man.”

Weevil extends a middle finger, pushing up to standing; Echolls slaps a previously-unnoticed ladder bolted to the rock. “Trap door,” he says, unnecessarily. “Can you climb?”

“Yeah, give me a minute.” Weevil spreads palms on knees and bends over, trying to get air back into his lungs. A stray moonbeam flashes across metal, making it shimmer, and he kneels to pick the shiny object up. It’s a tie clip, shaped like a pair of handcuffs.

“You recognize this?” He passes the clip to Echolls, then slowly, painfully, returns to the yard. “Looks familiar, but I’m not sure from where.”

“Yeah, Keith.” Echolls sits to study the thing, rubbing a thumb along the crease between his eyes. He glances apprehensively at Veronica, still by the car cooing over Fennel. “It’s…Mr. Mars. Was wearing it tonight.” Spreading a palm over his face, he shakes his head, as if trying to clear it.

Mackenzie approaches to touch Echolls’ shoulder. “You OK?” she asks, concerned. “Did Piz clobber you?” She inspects his scalp for lumps, then extends a hand, palm out. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Mac, I’m just tired,” Echolls says. Weevil sighs, because he’s the one who fell down a fucking hole.

But he’s not a whiny two-year-old, so, “Mars!” he calls, instead of complaining. Her head bobs up over the cop car, like a prairie dog on some nature show. “We got a situation!”

Veronica helps Wallace gently out and offers a shoulder. The guy admittedly seems better, coherent and moving on his own, despite rocking the Jolly Green Not-So-Giant look. “What’s wrong?” she asks, with a concerned frown at Logan, when she gets close enough to talk.

In answer, Echolls holds up the tie tack; V sets Fennel on the grass to examine it. “This is Dad’s.” She looks between them for confirmation. “He was wearing it earlier. Where did you find this?”

Weevil points to the hole, and Veronica lies beside it, peering down. “Do you hear CHANTING?” she calls, girly voice audible despite the wind. The rest of them move closer, and yeah.

“So I guess we follow the creepy underground cult sounds?” Weevil asks, resigned. Veronica gives him the you-get-a-gold-star smile he learned to dread in eleventh grade. “Can Fennel even hike?”

“Somebody should take him to a hospital,” Veronica decides. “Mac, you game? You’re most able to explain his symptoms from a scientific perspective, and I’m sure the CDC doctors will have questions.”

“Of course.” Cindy holds out her hand for the car keys, which Weevil slaps into her palm. “You want me to surrender the antidote formula?”

“Yes,” Veronica says. “But first…” she takes the slip back, pulls out her phone, and quickly photographs both sides. “Insurance,” she says with a grin, returning it. “In case they have trouble distributing medicine to anyone in need. Oh, and after Wallace is squared away, call Bob Dillen at the San Diego PD and tell him everything. He’ll make sure nothing important gets swept under the rug.”

Veronica and her friend hug goodbye; Echolls sits on the ground staring at the tie tack while Weevil helps Fennel back to the car. Seems like V’s BFF is fading, exhausted by his ordeal--but he still grabs Weevil’s arm as soon as he’s buckled in.

“Thanks, man,” Fennel says, flashing a tired green smile. “For working so hard to save me, I really owe you one. And thanks for sticking around to look after these characters, too.”

“No problem, man, just get better.” Weevil pats the hood. “And less like a glow-stick at some rich kid’s party, this right here is not a good look for you.”

“Beats being dead,” Wallace says, and Weevil smiles and shuts the door. Veronica waves as Cindy drives away.

They descend into the tunnel, Weevil first (of course), Echolls shambling along ten feet back; Weevil wonders, watching him, if another trip to Pro Med’s in the cards. V has a hard time with the ladder, her hand doesn’t want to grip. She keeps flexing her fingers and frowning as they traverse the sandy dimness.

“You all right?” Weevil asks. V glances up at him with a faint smile.

“I landed weird when I fell this afternoon. My whole arm was numb for a while, then seemed better—maybe adrenaline masked the pain.” She waves off personal injury, activating the flashlight on her phone. “Doesn’t matter. Breitski’s got Dad’s down here somewhere--job one is to find him.”

“Dick’s on the premises, too,” Echolls contributes from behind. “And my stalker, whatshername, Jetson, and…Piz.”

“Oh yeah,” Veronica says, unenthusiastically. “Those guys. Sure, we can save them as well, if the opportunity presents.”

“Whatever we’re planning, we need to do it soon.” Weevil frowns as the chanting grows louder. “D’Amato called right before I smashed my phone, said the military’s gonna drop bombs.”

“Great.” Echolls emits a choked half-laugh. “Shock and awe. My karma.”

“Man, what did Piznarski DO to you?” Weevil demands, turning back to watch the guy stagger. “Usually your conversation’s all five-dollar words, and you won’t ever fucking shut up.”

“I’m fine,” Echolls says, stubbornly, and manages a reassuring smile. “Gotta find Dad, can’t…get lit up. Then X-rays.”

Veronica frowns, laying a palm against his cheek; but takes him at his word, because they’re both drama queens with hard-ons for saving humanity. Weevil shakes his head, checks his watch, and points at the door through which chanting filters.

He tries the handle--it’s unlocked, so he cracks it and peeks through. Echolls and V line up above and below so they can see, and softly, Veronica gasps.

Inside a big-ass cave, done up like a Broadway theater, a hundred pink idiots mill, dressed in street clothes, bumping each other and yelling. A video screen on the wall is playing loops--a pink Nice Guy shoves a leather-clad douche off a pretty girl, who then melts into Pinkie’s arms.

That senator’s son who framed Echolls for murder lounges in a throne center-stage, surrounded on three sides by soldiers-for-hire. He’s desultorily leading the Pinks in a chant of, “What do we want? Revenge! When do we want it? Now!” between sips of Topo Chico.

And handcuffed to a bench, stage left, are Dick, Ruby and a groggy-looking Keith Mars.

DICK

Richard Casablancas, Esquire is way glad, at this point, he’s high as fuck. Because watching LUKE, of all people, turn out to be the brains behind a zombie superhero rebellion is…really pretty hilarious, when he thinks about it.

To Dick’s left, Keith Mars is finally starting to rise and shine. Which takes a load off, because Ron Ron would ruin anyone who let the guy die. “Wha…?” the slightly-less-tiny detective manages, trying to make it upright. “Where?”

“Take it easy, man.” Dick uses his shoulder to lever Daddy Mars upright. “I think Breitski whomped you good. You’ve got a knot on your temple the size of an egg.”

“Where am I?” Keith asks, sinking against the wall for support. “And what on Earth is…all this?”

“You’re in the catacombs,” Ruby buts in, on top of the sitch as usual. “Under the Van Vliet winery. I’m Ruby Jetson, by the way, Mr. Mars. You’ve probably heard of me?”

Keith frowns, clearly at a loss, and Dick explains, “Dude, she’s on our side, no worries. And as for ‘all this’…looks like a motivational meeting to rouse the idiot brigade?”

Luke abandons the chant, because none of the zombies are listening, and beckons one of the mercs. “They’re as riled up as they’re getting,” he says, draining his Topo Chico. Snaps for someone to fetch him another. “Get ‘em on a bus, drop ‘em off all over the city, let them wreck as much infrastructure as possible. And try to monitor their…activities during the trip. Last time we had to hose the seats down.”

The guy salutes, activates another flashing-light-klaxon, and rounds up a couple buddies to herd out the Hulks. The dumbasses moan, punch and protest—one tries to grab and hump the girl in the video—but the soldiers have cattle prods to keep them in line.

“Your evil plan will never work!” Ruby calls out, movie-bravely, and Luke spares her a bored look.

“Are you talking about them?” He accepts a fresh sparkling water and gestures with it at the Pink Horde. “What do you take me for? They couldn’t execute a plan if you drew it out in crayon. They’re just meant to tie up police resources--and confuse the public--while our REAL operation goes down.”

“Which is what?” Keith asks, seemingly calm. But Dick, who’s been interrogated by the guy more than once during Keith’s Sheriff days and Dick’s vandalism ones, recognizes his sneaky cop face. “World domination? Why is it always world domination with you guys?”

“Not the WORLD,” Luke says, impatient. “Just the nice part of California, from Neptune to Malibu. Our non-pink militia is poised to take over, during the chaos caused by those morons.”

“But dude,” Dick protests. “Why work so hard? You’re already rich as fuck, your dad’s a politician—you framed Logan for murder, plus threw Susan off a boat, and all you got was PROBATION.”

“Duh,” Luke says. “Would YOU want to report to some mouth-breather every week for a year? I’m sick of being told what to do! First my dad forbids me to come out, then that douchecanoe Cobb makes me pretend to be his friend, and THEN the cops get all up in my face, sending me to rehab for six MONTHS. All because stupid Carrie Bishop had to sing about my every tiny mistake, for catharsis or whatever.”

“Hey!” Ruby yells, struggling to get loose like she’s overcome with fury. “Carrie was a goddess! You take that back!”

“Whatever, wannabe.” Luke favors her with a dismissive look. “Anyway, a lot of us missed the old days when Van Lowe and the Lambs were Sheriffs, and we did what we wanted, and no one cared. So we figured, the whole country’s expecting Calexit anyway--why not oblige? Create our own little utopian kingdom, where nobody can tell us no. Sean, admittedly, got carried away with his Gods Among Men delusions of grandeur; but you know how cokeheads freak when their artistic travesties fail. Have you seen Sean around this evening, by the way? He’s been missing since last night, and he was supposed to run this meeting so I wouldn’t have to. He lives for the Dr. Wayne Dyer shit.”

“Yeah, he’s at the bottom of your service-road Pungi pit with a broken leg,” Dick says. “And some dead body named Andy to keep him company. Ruby gave him Kleenex, though, to wipe away his tears.”

Ruby snickers beside him; Dick smiles, ‘cause it feels good to make her laugh.

“Damn it!” Luke throws up his hands. “WHY is good help so hard to find?”

A yelling uproar begins as Veronica, Logan and Weevil burst in from the hallway--Dick grins, because about fucking time. “Ronniekins!” he calls, even though he knows she can’t hear. “You came to save me!”

“Veronica Mars,” Luke says with disgust, draining his Topo Chico and tossing it aside. “Always showing up to kill my buzz. Go take care of them for me, will you boys? We’re on a tight schedule of California-conquering, we don’t need Miss Nosy butting in.”

The mercs file down to fight, only Wei remaining behind, presumably as Luke’s bodyguard. Logan and Weevil, neither of whom frankly looks so hot, go back to back and raise fists; Veronica, who seems fine despite that memory-loss business, comes running towards the stage. She’s waving a gun…and granted, Dick’s still kinda high, but they can’t make pistols out of solid gold, can they?

“Get away from my father, Luke!” she yells, aiming; that little Ronnie face Dick privately considers chipmunk-ish is screwed up into a scowl. Wei doesn’t bother to take her weapon—probably he knows as well as everyone Veronica won’t shoot. Luke, safely shielded, stifles a snicker.

“Come on, guys, Star Wars reference!” He points at Veronica, then himself. “God, you’re a bunch of buzzkills. It’s like you’re not even grateful I’m changing the world for your BENEFIT!”

“Maybe Dick would rather live in the REAL world…with people who are actually his friends,” Ruby says defiantly, and laughter distracts Wei and Luke long enough for Veronica to toss Dick a handcuff key. He can’t catch it, because, well, handcuffs; but he puts his foot over it on the floor and winks.

“Friends like you?” Luke asks. “Or Veronica? Whatever, Veronica Mars CONSTANTLY oppresses Dick and me both. And it’s not like she doesn’t want the status that comes with being elite. I mean, she hitched her wagon to Logan fucking Echolls. That guy used to be our KING.”

Everybody turns for a minute to look at Logan, who’s mid-room fighting like a BOSS, throwing super-mercs around as if they’re Cabbage Patch dolls. Ruby fans herself, muttering, “HUBBA, HUBBA!” Veronica gets so distracted LUKE kicks her gun out of her hand.

Keith falls on the floor during the chaos, faking unconsciousness, but secretly whacking Dick in the ankle to attract his attention. Obligingly, Dick moves his foot. Keith grabs the key, and gets to work on his handcuffs.

“If I wasn’t so appalled, I’d be impressed,” Veronica bluffs, glaring at Luke and gauging the distance to the fallen gun. “Who knew you had a scheme like this in you?”

Breitski picks up Keith and sets him back on the bench; studies the fight mid-room, frowning, as he tosses the gun backstage, then reluctantly wades into the fray. Luke says, “Hey, I’m just tired of being kept down by the Man. If people would let me do what I want with no CONSEQUENCES, I would never have had to get nasty.”

Handcuffs undone, Keith covertly passes the key to Ruby, and chimes in to distract their captors’ attention. “I think you might want to brush up on your Bill of Rights, Haldemann,” he says. “You seem to be laboring under some misconceptions.”

“Yeah, well soon I’m not going to be laboring at ALL.” Luke cracks up over his own joke, then dives for the gun a half-second after Veronica does. They begin tussling on the floor for possession; Keith wades in to help, and Ruby gets herself free, then uses the key to unlock Dick.

Dick grabs his sort-of girl, plants one on her, says, “My hero!” while she blushes and shoves him (but not like she means it). Then he yells, “DUDE, I’M COMING!” and takes a running leap, stage-diving into the fray.

The fight’s down to six mercs versus the Three Amigos; Navarro’s getting the shit beat out of him, which Dick finds weird. It’s not like these guys are especially tough. Dick’s grabbing and throwing them like it’s a Matrix video game, and Logan’s a freaking machine. Super-soldier shmuper-soldier, he thinks, kicking one jackoff sideways across the room. They’re no match for the Wonder Pot. Dick just needs to figure out how to grow the stuff from scratch, then he’s gonna make millions.

“Dude, military training is seriously underrated!” he shouts at Logan, who grunts in response. His pal knocks two bad guys together just as Navarro goes flying, landing against the stage with a thud. Dick blocks a hammer punch by stupid Breitski, kicks the douchebag in the nards, and says, “Yeah, that hurts, doesn’t it?” when the guy stays down for a minute, writhing.

He forgets what he’s doing for a second—apparently he IS still baked--then cackles and punches some asshole in the neck. Navarro shakes it off and forges back into the fray. “It’s like this is all going in slow motion!” Dick yells with glee, spinning in a circle and striking a karate pose. “Super Weed is so cool! I know kung fu!”

“Man, how much dope did you SMOKE?” Navarro asks, barely dodging a blow that would have broken his nose for sure. “And why do you smell like piss?”

“Long story.” Dick waves it off. Then gapes as Logan grabs one of the two mercs still standing, swings him around over his head by one arm, and throws him all the way across the fucking room. “Holy shit, dude, someone ate his Wheaties this morning! Did you SEE that, Weevs? Even all sunburned and exhausted and shit, he is kicking ASS!”

“He’s sunburned?” Navarro demands, grabbing up an empty shoe and slamming it into Breitski’s face. “You’re practically scalded, even your eyes are fucking….oh SHIT! Shit, Casablancas, man, did you and Echolls touch the pink goo?”

Dick thinks back as he grabs Breiski and throws him onto the stage, where he slides halfway under the big, red curtain. “Well, Rubster said not to, while they were giving Wallace a bath. And Piz just chased me around and tried to hand me flowers…oh crap! Logan and I carried Wallace inside the house, after I kinda-sorta ran him over, and we didn’t wash off! We’re fucking PINKIFYING!”

Logan lets out a roar, snarling as he waits for the next threat to come at him. Dick glances around, observes that all the nearby mercs look unconscious, and pulls the half-smoked joint out of his pocket. “Don’t worry, dude, I’ve got this. I just need to spark up and blow some in Logan’s face. This pot must work, like, synergistically with the pink to make people extra-smart; because every time I’ve gotten high all afternoon, I turn into, like, this super-efficient genius.”

Weevil manages a skeptical look with his swollen face; but Dick, undeterred, sticks to his plan. Logan tries to attack him when he ventures close—man the guy really does look as grapefruit-colored as Piz—but Dick just says, “No, dude, trust me.” Then grabs his arm, and blows the biggest drag he can right up Logan’s nostrils.

“Help!” Veronica yells from the stage, and Weevil goes sprinting off her direction--but Dick’s got his hands full, so he doesn’t bother to look. He feeds Logan another hit, which brings enough of his friend’s mind back to bat weakly at the smoke and go, “No, Navy….trouble…BREITSKI!”

Then he shoves Dick down and aims a punch over his head, right into that pain-in-the-ass rogue cop’s face.

Rolling his eyes at Wei’s deck shoes with no socks, Dick trips the guy and stands to feed the last hit to his friend, because that’s the kind of sharing bros do. Logan coughs, says, “I can’t believe this is helping,” then kicks Breitski for good measure. “You need to resign yourself…jail,” he adds, wiping sweat from his brow. “It’s two against one, and we’re all on the same drugs.”

“Ah, but I believe in the righteousness of my cause.” Wei grabs Logan’s foot and tries to yank him down—but Logan does some jump-over-the-leg martial-arts thing and plants a foot in the guy’s head because he’s just. that. awesome.

“Impressive,” Breitski admits, shaking off the blow. “I could use fighters like you two. And frankly, I’ve never understood why you’d both thwart us rather than join us. Aren’t you as sick of lawyer fees and taxes as I am? Superior officers threatening to court-martial, parents causing trouble even from jail, and never enough time to REALLY surf?”

He backs off and begins to circle, somehow under the impression they have time to listen to words. “Help us establish our kingdom, and all that’s behind you. The wannabe’s dumb enough to sign up for Pink Formula take the fall. And you know the serving class will fall in line, because things won’t be so different, really, from the way they are now. You could be kings again, just like you were in high school. You’ll never face another murder charge as long as you live.”

“Wow.” Logan tilts his head to loosen his neck, bones cracking. The smirk on his face clues Dick in that whatever comes next will be sweet. “Ten years ago, right after Veronica left, that line might have held faint appeal. But I’ve cleaned up my act, since, and learned something your desperate-to-be-Bodie-Chang ass won’t—rules and social accountability are GOOD.”

“Whoo, political arguments from the Log-meister! The Wonder Pot is wor-KANG!” Dick claps as Logan lays his right hook on Brietski, a really epic one, like a sledgehammer. The guy goes flying backwards and lands on his knees, flush to the edge of the stage. Rushing forwards, grinning (because no matter how spit-shined he gets, Logan’s always gonna love a good fight) he cocks a fist to annihilate. But before he can, Veronica appears from behind the curtain, and administers a whack to the poor bastard’s head with the butt of her golden gun.

Breitski goes down with a smear of gold to his temple, eyes rolling back. “And that,” she tells his unconscious form, with satisfaction, “is what you get when you mess with the bull. Or the bull’s impressively ethical boyfriend, as the case may be.”

“Ronniekins!” Dick crows, as Logan leaps onto the stage to lift and embrace her. “Is that gun, like, made of titanium? Because nobody’s disputing you have balls, babes, but this asshole’s super-soldier strong.”

Veronica holds out a palm, which is bright pink; pushes up her sleeve to reveal creepy-ass pink tendrils stretching up her arm. “I held hands with Logan,” she says, favoring her biggest admirer with a worried glance. “So temporarily, I am, too.”

Dick glances up at the stage, where Haldemann lies hogtied with the curtain rope, under the watch of Keith Mars and his handgun. Navarro slumps, panting, on the bench. Around the room, a sea of out-of-it super mercs lie groaning, but…Dick frowns. “Where’s Rubes?” he asks, patting his pocket and wishing he had just one more joint. “I ran off to help fight, and when I looked up, she was gone.”

Veronica ignores him, naturally, busy administering antidote to Logan and herself. Just as Dick’s about to remind her he could use that shit too, the door at the far end of the room slams open. A Special Forces squad storms in, late as usual because fucking military red tape.

Dick knows the drill so he just lies on his face with his hands behind his head. Wonders if his lawyer’s even awake yet.

A small boot nudges him, after a moment. A voice from above says, “You can get up now. We’re only arresting the actual criminals.”

He rolls over, and there, looming, is Ruby, decked out in a flak vest and helmet over the Lara Croft gear, carrying a freaking automatic. She extends a hand to help; he stands and gestures up and down at her outfit. “What’s this all about? Where did you GO?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” she says, with a faint smirk, and he actually can’t tell if she’s kidding. She pats his chest. “But let me remind you, I DID hint from the start I had a part to play.”

Going up on tiptoe, she kisses Dick’s cheek, then wanders off to confer with what looks like the squad’s leader. She looks scarily at home holding a gun. Dick files the moment away for the spank bank, since it’s clear, now, she’s too badass to date him.

Logan moves up beside him, sweaty and starting to show bruises—though it’s pretty hard to tell how big they are, since the poor bastard’s currently bright green. “Was that Ruby JETSON?” he asks, running a hand through his short Navy hair. “I thought her leg was broken!”

Dick shrugs and mutters, “Women.” He figures that pretty much says it all.

VERONICA

A half hour of general chaos follows, during which super-soldiers are cuffed and hauled to quarantine, and Luke is led away in chains; her friends are herded up to the surface for individual debriefs, while the catacombs are quartered and searched. Veronica answers a tired commando’s questions to the best of her ability. Watches Logan joke, out of the corner of her eye, with a couple of armored guys who seem to know him.

When her story’s told she searches the crowd for Weevil, last spotted in an ambulance receiving first aid; she still has no clue what he was doing here, and curiosity’s her besetting sin. The ambulance hasn’t moved—Sean Friedrich, attached to a stretcher, is being loaded into it--but Weevil’s long gone. Probably he headed back to Neptune, away from all the authority figures with guns. V decides to stop by his shop on Monday. She needs help with a few more cases, and he’ll be easier to grill if she gets him alone.

Veronica DOES find Dick, sprawled morosely on the lawn with his back to a tree, a woman’s purse and grocery bag beside him. He’s still lobster-pink, in startling contrast to his yellow hair. Glancing around covertly to make sure they’re unobserved, she hisses to attract his attention, and administers a drop of antidote.

“Aw, I KNEW you cared.” Dick tilts his head back, letting the violent trembling that seems to be a side effect overtake him. Watches, amused, as she re-pockets the still-half-full vial. “Not planning to give that up to the brass?”

“Do YOU trust our government to use powerful drugs for the good of humanity?” She sits beside him. “I told them we drank it all. Besides, they’ve got the formula, if they really want to save people. If not—if some kind of cover-up takes place—I want as much proof as possible squirreled away, so I can create a counter-narrative.”

“You’ll need this, then.” Dick hands over the woman’s bag; Veronica frowns, because it looks just like hers from college. “It’s Ruby’s,” Dick explains, maybe reading her expression. “She disappeared and left it behind. Her cell’s dead, but there’s a video in ‘photos’ of Lydia, Sean and Jeff confessing to crimes.”

“Nice!” Veronica fishes out the heavily-bedazzled phone and pockets it. “Way to be a player on the noble team for a change.”

The commandos begin loading up their transports; the guy in charge approaches, followed by Logan leading Dad (who’s got a bandage around his head, but looks a lot more chipper). “Ms. Mars, Mr. Casablancas,” the officer greets them, admirably avoiding comment on their general greenness. “Is your vehicle on the lawn over there operational?”

Dick shrugs and looks to Veronica, who nods. Logan says, “I’ve got the keys, I’ll check,” and crosses to the SUV. A moment later, the engine revs, and he returns with a thumbs-up.

“Excellent,” Guy in Charge says. “What we need you to do is remove it from the premises immediately. Unofficially, this place will look like the surface of the moon in about half an hour, and we don’t want any debris found that point to your presence. As for the serum you absorbed through the skin--medic says you all seem healthy. But we’d like you to avoid contact with civilians for the night, just in case. If you report to the base in Coronado you’ll be given temporary rooms, and a full repeat eval in the morning. Maybe the docs can help with the…staining issue.” He glances over at Logan, just barely represses a snicker, and adds, “Good thing Echolls already has a girlfriend.”

Logan offers him a bland, yet still somehow sarcastic, return smile, and the guy grins. Shouts, “Move your asses, we’re Oscar Mike!” and climbs into the nearest vehicle. The military convoy moves slowly down the service road…accompanied, faintly, by the sound of some jackass singing “It Ain’t Easy Being Green.”

“Hoo-kay.” Logan dusts his hands together in a good-riddance gesture. “Anybody want to enjoy a re-enactment of my basic training days, insufficient-sleep version? Sounds like they have some uncomfortable cots and scratchy blankets with our names on them, waiting.”

“I’m doing concussion watch, so I’ll be in the sick bay,” Dad says, with a wry smile. “But I’d love a chance to lie down. It’s not every day an old guy like me helps his daughter wrestle evil masterminds.”

“Need a hand climbing up?” Logan asks. Dad waves him off and gets in alone. Logan takes the opportunity to grab Veronica and kiss her senseless, the sweet-but-promising-scorching variety that always gets her going. She sighs, happily, twining her arms around his neck…surprisingly unfazed that he DOES look vaguely Kermit-y.

Dick snorts disdain. Removes a blonde wig from the bag, which he slaps on his head, muttering, “Oh, Logan, do me, you’re so MANLY!” Reaches back in to locate an old wine bottle, which he uncorks and toasts them with in one economical motion. Lifts it to his mouth, sniffs…then tosses it away, repulsed.

“Pink goo,” he explains, examining his hand to make sure nothing got on him. “Maybe some of that super-old wine zombie-formula-ified when it spoiled? Lydia could have figured out her crackpot idea from there.”

Logan laughs, bends his head for another kiss. Which is when Piz comes rushing out of the woods, screaming, “RONKAAAAAA!” and tackles Dick sideways.

Veronica digs for her taser, before remembering she gave it to Mac; Keith calls, “What’s happening?” from the passenger seat, and attempts to get down. Logan runs straight towards the altercation (of course), but trips on a tree root. Piz begins humping a startled Dick with a fervency that’s truly disturbing.

“Dude, get OFF,” Dick shouts, an unfortunate choice of words, and fumbles for the purse beside him. Manages to remove a can of air before any of the rest of them can find a weapon, and sprays it directly into Piz’s eyes.

Captain Pinkness shrieks and scuttles back, and Dick follows, whacking him with a hammer. “Give it up, man!” he yells, striking Piz’s shoulder with a meaty crunch. “Veronica is NEVER going to date a guy who acts so needy!”

“YOU NOT LOVE LOGAN LIKE YOU LOVE MEEEE!” Piz screeches in response, deterred from romance by the viciously swinging hammer. He stares, panting, for a moment, angry longing of a thousand thwarted Nice Guys in his eyes; then turns and runs, past the barn and off into the distance, almost too fast to track.

He’s just reached the line of foliage near the cell tower when the first bomb hits. Both the fake tree and NPR’s Greatest Millennial Hope are abruptly reduced to a plume of white ash.

Veronica winces. Logan shouts, “We need to MOVE!” grabs her hand, and races for the car, Dick on their heels. They pile in. Executing the kind of tidy three-sixty only a jet pilot could, Logan guns it down the service road at top speed, the approaching apocalypse literally at their heels.

Bombs are going off in the rearview by the time they make it onto the highway--Veronica winces as incandescent flashes and sonic booms wipe the Van Vliet Experiment from existence. Sighs, as they gain distance and the noise fades, slumping back into her seat.

“Hey guys?” she asks, not opening her eyes. “Thanks for riding to the rescue when I didn’t make it home.”

“Protecting Veronica Mars is job one,” Logan says, and she can hear the smile in his voice. “If you went and made it easy on us, life would be no fun.”

“Well in that case…” she says. “I won’t bother fake-promising never to do it again.”

“You gotta be you.” Dick elbows her from his position sprawled against the window. “Come on, let’s get to that base, see what they can do about this whole turning-green problem. Maybe Rubester will show up dressed like a naughty nurse and administer the treatment.”

“Ew,” Veronica says, but not with any heat. She stretches her legs out, crossing them at the ankle. Drifts off as they speed down the road, the receding sound of explosions like a lullaby.

THE END

This concludes our VMHQ Round Robin / Campfire Tale story. We hope you all enjoyed this collaborative fic as much as we did. Many thanks to all the wonderful writers who participated, and all the wonderful readers who commented and reblogged the story posts.

Next up at VMHQ is our Holiday Fic Grab Bag challenge, which will post on Christmas Eve! Submit your prompts to our Ask Box now, and maybe your favorite writer will be inspired!

#vmhq campfire tale #vmhq round robin #vm fanfic #veronica mars #vmhq

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marybeatriceofmodena · 7 years ago

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A very happy birthday to the lovely @the-reylo-void! Here’s a little gift especially for you, with the moodboard made by me and a drabble below by the one and only, @kylorenvevo! We sincerely hope you enjoy it all, and happy birthday!

The Snow Queen: original tale by Hans Christian Andersen

"They say the devil made a mirror," old Maz told Rey one flickering fireplace night when a chill wind blew in from the Kattegat, "a mirror that distorted all reflections and magnified all flaws so that even the most beautiful landscapes and the best of persons were turned horrid and ghoulish and mean. Anyone who looked into the mirror would see not one good thing left about themselves; it was all corrupted by dark arts. The devil tried to carry the mirror up to heaven, wanting to make fools of the angels and of God, but it slipped from his grasp and fell back to earth, shattering into a hundred million tiny pieces, each one no larger than a grain of sand. These pieces flew about in the wide world. They got into people's eyes and made them see only ugly, hateful things, and they splintered into people's chests and turned their hearts into lumps of ice..."

Rey did not forget this story even as she grew up and most other folktales of her childhood were subjected to the wear and tear of eking out a meager existence. Perhaps it was the kindness Maz had shown her that night, letting her sit by the fire of the pub when it was too late and too cold to walk back to the orphanage, that lingered. In any case, the images remained burned into her memory, a mirror falling from the sky as God and the devil and all the angels looked on, the myriad glittering shards scattered about every which way by many winds.

Ben spoke of winds, too. "The Finland woman is clever," he told Rey one afternoon as they sat side by side and shivered and watched the dark canals ripple in the icy breeze. "She can twist all the winds of the world together into a knot. If the sailor loosens one knot, then he has a good wind; if a second, then it blows stiff; if he undoes the third and fourth, then it rages and upturns the forests."

He was something of a scholar, was the object of Rey's misplaced affections, and he specialized in folktales because he was also a dreamer, which was the worst possible combination for the son of a man who believed only in what he earned by sweat and cunning and a woman who bore the weight of leadership on her shoulders.

"So there is the Finland woman," Rey said, attempting to follow along, "and then there is the Lapland woman, who writes messages to her sister on the scales of fish."

"And then there is the Snow Queen," Ben added wistfully. "They say her eyes are like stars and her skin is made of ice, and that she is very beautiful."

Rey scowled. "But cold to the touch, surely?"

Ben stared at her with his warm brown eyes, the corner of his generous mouth loping into a wry half-smile. "And what," he challenged, "would you know of touch?"

Rey lifted her nose in the air, affecting the haughtiness she'd learned to mimic from more well-off girls. "I know enough." She was painfully aware that she had no right to be jealous, but eighteen was a difficult age, especially when one was in love with the mayor's older, more worldly son, who for the most part still treated her as if she were the ragged little urchin he'd caught picking roses from his mother's garden ten years ago.

Ben's gaze darkened with something that Rey couldn't understand but filled her heart with anticipation and nervousness in equal measure. He reached out as if to touch her cheek, but then another gust of wind blew through the town, rattling shutters and spinning weather-vanes wildly on their poles, and he recoiled as if she'd struck him, drawing back his hand to curl it over his heart in a fist.

"What's wrong?" Rey asked.

"My chest hurts." Ben looked down at the water over which their feet were dangling, and he blinked rapidly. "And I think there's something in my eye."

He was cruel to her after that day. He'd never been a particularly kind person, but now it was as if all his bad traits had been amplified. He sneered at her and made her feel ugly and stupid, and his already tense relationship with his parents took a turn for the worse. Elf-touched, the old people soon started whispering, but it wasn't until the town drunk swore up and down and by all the saints that he'd seen Ben Solo whisked away on a white sled in the middle of the night that Rey realized she'd known it all along.

She wanted to start looking for him right away, but the roads were impassable this far along into winter, piled high with snowdrifts. "Wait until spring," Maz advised, and so it was a few months later when Rey set out into the thawing world, afraid that she was already too late.

She followed the river, because the drunk had last seen the sled gliding over its frozen surface. It wasn't frozen now but, rather, was a wild and joyous thing roaring in its banks; it took Rey to strange new lands where the flowers talked and the wolves watched her with human eyes, and along the way she asked every living thing she met if they had seen Ben. But the flowers knew only their own old rhymes and spoke only of what they had dreamed during the long winter beneath the soil.

"The woman in her long robe stands upon the funeral pile as the flames rise around her and her dead husband," boomed the tiger lily, "and thinks on the living one in the surrounding circle, the fire of whose eyes pierces her heart more than the heat which soon will burn her body to ashes."

"Two little girls sit on a swing beneath the trees, rocking themselves backwards and forwards," sighed the snowdrop. "Their older brother holds a little cup in one hand and a clay pipe in the other; he is blowing soap bubbles that float in charming, changing colors. A swing, a bursting bubble, such is my song!"

"Three sisters made of glass," tolled the bells of the hyacinth, "dance beside a calm lake in the clear moonshine. They vanish into the wood and then three coffins glide out of the forest and across the lake, glow-worms flying around like little lights. Do the dancing maidens sleep, or are they dead?"

All this talk about funerals and coffins caused Rey to worry even more. She eventually found a patch of thorny red roses and asked them, "Do you know where Ben is? Do you think he is dead?"

"Dead he most certainly is not," said the roses. "We have been in the earth where all the dead are, and he was not there."

The relief was overwhelming, but the sight of the roses called to Rey's mind the summer day where Ben found her in his mother's garden, so many long years ago. She sat down and screwed her face up so she wouldn't cry, an act that she'd come to view as a weakness over the course of a hard life.

The ever-watchful wolves wandered near, their muzzles stained with the blood of a fresh kill. "Why are you making that face?" one of them asked. "It is an odder expression than when you humans show your teeth to express joy, odder than when water drips from your eyes in your sorrow."

"I'm looking for someone," Rey answered. "The Snow Queen took him away."

The wolves cocked their heads and flicked their furry tails. "There is spring and summer and autumn and winter, an endless, unchanging cycle that drives the wheels of the world," said the wolf who spoke for the pack. "Birds fly south and we ourselves come down from the mountains and the flowers shed their finery. All realms must bow to the Snow Queen."

"I don't care," Rey growled. "I want him back."

Hunger was the most enduring language that wolves could understand in their bones. They helped her, then, cornering a reindeer in the forest and extolling the trembling beast to carry Rey to the Snow Queen's palace. Rey clung to the reindeer's brown coat as it galloped over the wide plains and through shining valleys, to the glaciers and deep coastal fjords where even spring and summer and autumn dared not tread. Blue and green lights pulsed in the black sky and the reindeer snuffled happily, for all northern creatures dearly love the Aurora Borealis, but its hooves clattered to a stop at the edges of the Snow Queen's garden, and it quailed at the thought of going further.

Taking pity on the poor beast, Rey dismounted. She walked on foot through the bitter cold, fat snowflakes burning her eyes and her lips as she stumbled towards a great portal sculpted from knife-sharp ice.

A knight in a suit of white armor was standing guard, but he took pity on Rey when she explained her purpose. "You're in luck," he said, taking off his helmet to reveal the dark and handsome face beneath. "The Snow Queen has gone to have a look down into the black caldrons," by which he meant Vesuvius and Etna, "and to give them a coating of white, for that is as it ought to be. As for myself, I dream of warmer lands and perhaps it is time I go see them."

"There's a reindeer outside the entrance," Rey told him in payment for his kindness. "You may take it and go where you wish."

"What about you?"

"Ben and I will find our own way back."

The knight thanked her profusely and left his post, and she soldiered on. The walls of the palace were made of driving snow, and the windows and the doors of screaming arctic winds. There were more than a hundred hallways there, lit up by the frosty, jeweled colors of the Aurora, and they were all so large and empty and cold.

She found Ben in a long, echoing chamber, the northern lights casting colored veils over his pale face as he sat by the window. He stood up when he saw her, and he was thinner than she remembered, dressed in severe black robes. But it was still him, after all this time, and Rey all but barreled into him, lifting herself up on her toes to throw her arms around his neck. To her own very great surprise and annoyance, she started crying as she buried her face in his chest.

The warmth of Rey's tears melted the lump of ice that was Ben's heart and consumed the splinter of the looking-glass caught within. He wrapped his arms around her, tentatively at first, his gloved fingers running through her hair. Once it registered that this was not a dream, that she was really here, his embrace grew tighter and more fervent, and he bowed his head and wept into her neck. His own tears flushed out the shard of glass in his eye and, when he finally drew back to look upon her face, her cheeks wet with tears and her freckles faded by the winter and her chapped lips nearly blue with cold, she was the most beautiful thing in the world. As she had always been to him, before the devil's mirror, before the Snow Queen.

"I..." Rey hiccuped, kissing the covered palm of his hand as he lovingly cradled her face. "I gave away our ride."

Ben laughed, a sharp and rusty and long-unused sound, and he pressed his lips to her forehead. "I don't mind walking."

"It's a very long walk," Rey said, smiling as her hand found his and their fingers tangled together beneath the northern lights.

He shrugged. "So we'll do some sightseeing along the way. And maybe we can talk a bit, and I'll tell you everything I should have said long ago."

Rey nodded her assent and they left the icy palace hand in hand, warmth unfurling between them every time their eyes met, like a promise of summer.

#star wars #rey #kylo ren #reylo #aesthetic #snow queen au #reylo fanfic #the-reylo-void #HAPPY BIRTHDAY AGAIN #kylorenvevo

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watermelonsugarcubes · 5 years ago

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gotta be you (up all night, track 2)

Summary: reader insert based on One Direction’s song “Gotta Be You”

Request: nope :)

A/N: Ah I’m sorry this took so long!!! It’s certainly not the greatest thing I’ve ever written, but it’s an improvement from WMYB, and I spent a bit more time on it. I’m hoping to see my writing improve more and more over time as I continue with this. Anyway... enjoy!

Warnings: angsty pining

Word Count: 2.5k

It is nearing midnight when I look at the clock for the first time in hours.

It feels like forever ago that I took a seat on the couch and pressed play on the DVD player. I remember considering breaking out the chocolate ice cream I keep in the freezer, but I didn’t want to seem too miserable.

In reality, I absolutely am miserable.

How else is a girl supposed to feel when the love of her life chooses someone else?

It has only been a few hours since I finally admitted my true feelings to Harry, but it already feels like a distant memory. That could just be because I want to block it out of my mind forever.

Honestly, I never planned to tell him. If it had been up to me, I would have gone the rest of my life with him never knowing. But as fate would have it, I confessed, and now here I am, watching my favorite movie alone rather than with my best friend by my side.

. . .

“What has she ever done to you, Y/N? You two barely know each other!” Harry nearly screamed, his hands gesturing wildly in the air. “What is so wrong with me liking her?”

“Nothing,” I squeaked. I felt so small in that moment, so terrified of what I simultaneously knew and was oblivious to. “She hasn’t done anything, Harry. She’s perfect. You know that.”

“Then why do you hate her?” I maintained the gaze I held on my socks as he fumed, but averting my eyes could not prevent the wince that graced my features when he barked, “Why?”

I knew he would not be able to hear me when I whispered my reply, but perhaps I hoped he would just drop the matter. “I don’t hate her...”

“What?” At the top of my vision, I saw him take a step closer. I should have known better. He likes her. I know he likes her, and I know how Harry is when it comes to people he cares about. I also know that even though he is a normally even-tempered person, when he is angry, he will stop at nothing to satiate his annoyance. “What is it, Y/N!”

Make something up, I thought. It’s easy. Tell him she bullied you in middle school.

I swear I was about to tell him that she crashed into my bike as a child when suddenly I felt ready to burst. With frustration, with resentment, with pure, unbridled emotion, I could not say. But I consciously knew that nothing in my power could stop my oncoming words.

“I don’t hate her, Harry!” I ripped my gaze from the floor and shot my eyes straight up to meet his. When he took a step back, I took one forward. “I love you!”

It was silent for a moment, only the sound of our heavy breaths filling the air.

“I’m— What?” he repeated, although much softer than before. He shook his head, in disbelief, most likely, and continued to stutter.“You—” And although I was now squeezing my eyes shut and could not see him, I knew that when he sighed, his left hand was carving a trail through his unruly hair.

I rubbed a hand over my eyes as if to prepare them for what would come next, for when I opened them, a brimming tear immediately escaped. I swiped it away before Harry could see. I would not have him pity me in this moment. I couldn’t.

I guess I didn’t really need to worry about that, though, because before I could even worry about him noticing the onset tears, he was muttering curses under his breath and grabbing his jacket from the back of the couch. And as he rushed out the door and into the night, I crumbled to the floor.

. . .

I wipe the tears of embarrassment that have fallen from my eyes as I sit in complete awe of my own stupidity.

What kind of idiot just says something like that to their best friend?

“I love you.”

What a bullshit thing to say.

But it’s not bullshit.

Maybe it would be if it wasn’t true. But I do love him, and there is a part of me that wishes I had just admitted it long ago. Because who knows? Maybe then, I would be the one Harry is getting drinks with instead of her.

But she is a perfect influencer, and I am sitting on my sofa reading the subtitles of Love Actually because I want to be sure that I’ll hear Harry’s ringtone if it ever happens to play. I hate to admit it, but I know it won’t. Harry knows who he is, and he knows what he wants, and if that was me, he never would have left. Even if he doesn’t want Lover Y/N, I pray that he still wants Best Friend Y/N, because I truly don’t know what I would do if he rejected me forever.

It might be good in the long run, but it would hurt like hell. I have never lived my life without Harry by my side, and I never thought I would have to. But then he went and stirred up feelings inside of me that I had lost hope for. And now I’ve ruined the best thing in my life. All because I fell in love.

I can’t help but keep replaying the moment he gathered his things and bolted. Harry is the one who always stays behind, but in that span of seconds . . . he just walked away.

I recline on the couch and close my eyes to the Prime Minister and Natalie’s deliciously cringe-worthy love story for a moment to bask in my humiliation. For a time, I focus on my own lack of romance and the mumbled sounds of that very thing coming from the television a few feet away.

The only thing that rouses me from my meditative mortification is the sudden series of raps that occurs. Glancing at the clock again, I see that it is now 12:24 AM. Certainly not an appropriate time for a visitor, but perhaps just the right time for a ghoulish one. It’s dark, it’s rainy, and it’s late: ideal conditions for a ghostly visitor. A ghost is the absolute last thing I need tonight. I wrap my blanket a bit tighter around my body and praise my past self for shutting the blinds earlier. Unfortunately, I fear that will do little good, because another three sharp knocks ring through the house.

This time, though, they are accompanied by the familiar voice of my best friend.

“Y/N, it’s me!” I hear Harry shout, his usually clear voice muffled by the thick wood of the front door. “Let me in before I have to ask your neighbor for the spare key!”

Despite my emotional agony regarding the situation with Harry, I actually smile a bit as I unswathe myself from the blanket and the cushions. Wishing I had put socks on again after my tear-filled shower, I patter across the wooden floors and around the counter in the kitchen.

I shouldn’t be surprised to find Harry when I open the front door, and yet the shock shakes me to the core.

Why is he back? He left. He could have stayed gone, and I wouldn’t have blamed him.

His hair is dripping water droplets onto my front porch, and when he lifts his hand to wipe the water from his forehead, a splatter of raindrops shoots onto the interior floor. His face is flushed, and his hair is a mess, and he is wearing just a pair of black skinny jeans and a white shirt, but I cannot remember him ever looking better.

Without making a move to come inside, Harry looks me in the eye. “Y/N,” he sighs.

I scrunch my eyes at him and poke my head outside to look around. Not understanding, I step to the side and gesture for him to enter.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. He takes a breath and swallows. “No, I need you to hear me.”

“Harry, please come inside,” I insist. I may be mad at myself, but I could never be mad at him. Certainly not enough to make him stand outside in the rain.

As if to knock sense into himself or shake around an idea, he gives one flick of his head. “Please just let me say what I came to say.”

I relent and whisper, “Okay.”

Turning my body to regain my position directly in front of him, I listen.

“I need you to know I canceled my date with Sofia.”

When he doesn’t continue, I open my mouth to question him, but he makes the first move.

“That’s not what I meant,” he continues. “I didn’t just cancel it. I mean I’m not seeing her anymore.”

Immediately filled with guilt, I interrupt: “Harry, I didn’t—”

“I’m not seeing her anymore because I realized she’s not the girl I want to pursue.”

If he just came to tell me that there’s another girl also in the mix, I think I might just slap him across the face.

But then he grants me a little smile, and I know I shouldn’t, but I just absolutely melt. He releases a frustrated grunt and smiles to himself now.

“I don’t know why I can’t just get it out,” he admits. For someone so eloquent with his songwriting, Harry has never had a way with words. “What I mean to say is . . . I disappointed you. You’ve trusted me to be honest with you all these years, and I’m just now realizing that I never have been. I could see in your eyes, earlier today and right now, that I broke my promise to keep your heart safe, and I am so incredibly sorry. But I want to make a new promise. If you’ll let me. Because, Y/N, the only thing I’m surer of than how sorry I am, is how much I am in love with you.”

My brain registers nothing but the soft pitter-patter of the raindrops against the roof and the compelling color of Harry’s bright eyes for several moments. A drop of rain forges a path down the slope of Harry’s nose and collects in the crease between his nose and cheek. When he blinks, his long eyelash knocks it from its hiding place, and it travels down the rest of his face, finally ending its journey on the sharp drop of Harry’s jaw.

I blink, long and hard, and although his perception is far from the truth, I suppose Harry takes my dumbfoundedness as his cue to leave.

“That’s it,” he concludes.

I am frozen in the seconds between his words and the rotation of his body, but as soon as I see him take the first step away from me, my muscles activate again.

Completely ignoring the cold and the rain and the dark, I step into the midnight air and grab Harry’s arm. When he turns to me, he is clearly alarmed, but it is replaced with shock when I pull his face to mine and press my lips to his.

We are one and the same, he and I, and his reaction to my kiss is the same as my reaction to his words. He is frozen. But right when I think this is futile, he springs into action. When he pulls away from my lips, I am petrified, chilled by the thought that this is all a ruse, that Sofia is hiding behind the bushes with a camera. That is, until he meets my eyes and whispers my name with parted lips.

And before I know it, Harry is crashing them into mine.

This time is different. This time, Harry is animated, and he grasps my hips to pull my body flush against his own, eliciting a gasp from my own mouth. Once I am sufficiently attached to him and soaked with rainwater, he moves one hand to cup my cheek and tilt my head to further accommodate our needs. The size of his fingers against my face catches me off guard, and I have never before appreciated so much a man’s touch. The way my fingers slip right into his hair despite its boundless curls makes me think we were built for each other.

Hell, a part of me has always know we were built for each other.

The force of Harry’s lips nudges my head back, and I realize that while the rain around us is so wonderfully cliche, it is so perfect, for it accentuates every part of Harry that I love the most. He is tough in stature and soft in nature. His arms curve around my body, and his figure against mine makes me feel safer than ever before. His chest is firm but warm. He stood in the rain to tell me he loved me, just in case I decided to send him home.

I am in love with you, he said.

I gasp suddenly, and Harry pulls away. He searches my eyes for an answer to my action, but of course, does not find one.

“I’m sorry,” he says breathlessly. “I thought—”

I transfer a hand from his hair to his cheek and caress his bottom lip. He sighs and lets his eyelids flutter shut for a heartbeat.

“You’re fine,” I tell him with a smile. “You’re perfect. I just . . . I never thought . . .”

Harry grins and chuckles before resting his forehead against mine. Although the rain is cold, I have never felt as warm as when he touches me.

“You said you love me,” I whisper with closed eyes. And this time, despite the noise around us, he hears my breathy words and confirms them.

“I do, Y/N.” He places another quick, soft kiss against my lips. “There’s no one else for me.”

I open my questioning eyes and look to him for an answer.

“I know why these other relationships haven’t worked out. It’s because they weren’t with you,” he clarifies. “The problem was with me being too blind to see it. But I see it now. It’s gotta be you.”

My eyes fill with tears at Harry’s words for the second time this evening, but now for an entirely different reason. No wonder all these girls—including me—have fallen for him.

“I just need you to give me another chance.” He rears back and dips a finger under my chin to tilt my face up. “I’ll love you right this time. That’s my promise.”

While I would love to scream, “Yes!” and shout from the rooftops, I hold a finger up in hesitation. “On one condition,” I propose.

Harry nods eagerly. “Anything.”

“We get out of this horrid rain.”

A bark of a laugh escapes Harry’s mouth, and I admire his delighted smile. He looks at me with what I can only call adoration and wraps his large hand over my much smaller one. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

And finally, finally, I think, we are on the same page.

. . .

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