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itsclydebitches · 4 years ago

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YYH Recaps: Episode 1, Surprised to be Dead

Hello, all you hypothetical readers! It's a beautiful spring day and I have a free afternoon ahead of me, so what better time to start another massive project while I guilty stuff my other WIPs deep into the depths of my hard drive? Yeah. Iffy life choices aside, someone mentioned a few weeks back that they'd love for me to recap a show I have more positive things to say about than negative (RIP RWBY) and ever since Netflix announced that their live-action adaptation of Yu Yu Hakusho is in the works, I've been itching for a re-watch of the anime. With the RWBY hiatus underway, it seemed like the perfect time to fulfill both desires.

Before we begin though, I'd like to touch on a few things that are going to influence this project.

First, YYH is near and dear to my heart. Written by Yoshihiro Togashi in the early 1990s and later adapted for an American audience by Funimation, I had the pleasure of experiencing this story five different ways: as a serialized tale in Shonen Jump, a binge read when I had the money to buy the manga, tiny snippets of the anime on Adult Swim late at night — don't tell my parents ;) — as an after-school treat on Toonami, and then years later as a re-watch when I introduced it to a friend (who, in turn, blessed me by having us watch Fullmetal Alchemist next). I used to keep a Hiei bookmark in everything I was reading, the spirit gun made it into our witch-wolf-space adventures on the playground (middle school was wild), and there was a long period of my life where I tried very hard to teach myself to stand with my hands behind my back, precisely as Genkai does. Spoiler alert: I failed. So to say I love the series is... a little bit of an understatement. I bring this up simply as a way of demonstrating that there's more than a bit of nostalgia attached to YYH for me and that will inevitably cloud my reading of it. How can it not? So that's just something to keep in mind as I work through a series that, like any having hit its 30th birthday, has its outdated, flawed, and other questionable aspects.

Second, but very much connected to the first point, is that these are pretty casual recaps. I summarize and extrapolate, focusing primarily on plot and dialogue (but with the occasional cinematography aspect tossed in). I'm not conducting research on the cultural history here — something that will come up at least once in this episode — I'm not arguing an overarching thesis, and I've never been someone who focuses on the author/production/trivia of a series. I'm here for the story as the story is presented to the viewer. If you've read my RWBY Recaps, this will function precisely the same way, with the only difference being I'm engaging with a finished text as opposed to an ongoing one, so there’s a lot less, “Maybe ___ will happen” theorizing going on.

Third, I obviously recommend that you watch the show yourself (you can find it on YouTube!), but you don't have to know the series to follow along. As these massive paragraphs attest, I tend to be both detailed and verbose, so we'll be covering every major plot point — and most of the smaller ones too.

Finally, I'm working from the dub. I know, I know, the horror. But it's what I grew up on and, honestly, I think it's superior to the sub. YYH's dubbing is in a class all its own and to this day there are very few shows that compare to it. Trust me, it's a good call.

That's enough of the boring chit-chat though. Let's get started!

Our very first episode "Surprised to be Dead" opens on a crowded street. We see lots of traffic, people going about their business, and a pedestrian crossing sign that, crucially, turns red. This is our normality and, like in every genre story, you need to break that normality at some point so that the protagonists can go on their fantastical/supernatural/science fiction journey. YYH eases us into things by first breaking the normality of an everyday afternoon: there's a screech of tires, quick shots of a man pushing a child out of the way of an oncoming car, and then his back is hitting the windshield. We begin this story with a horrible — but otherwise mundane — car crash.

Now, these flashes alone have a fair bit to unpack. Despite later getting a brief shot of the man's scared face right before he's hit, the moment's focus is really on the child. He's the one foregrounded in the initial, slow-mo shot. He's the one who appears in color while the man is kept in shadow. This isn't just a hit, it's a rescue. The camera is also careful to follow the soccer ball this kid was playing with (more on that later in the episode), with it flying through the air as the man is hit and bouncing to a stop in the street, acting as the dramatic finish. It's childhood! It's innocence! It's play on a sunny afternoon! And it's all gone wrong.

This moment is chaotic and even a bit confusing. Not in the sense of what's happening — that is quite obviously a guy being hit by a car — but who the victims are, how precisely this came about, or even why we're meant to care about this beyond a generic capacity to feel for other human (fictional) beings... that's all removed. And it works. As the crash takes place, the camera pans across the stunned crowd and we, the viewer, become a part of that crowd. They don't know what precisely is going on either. We're all just horrified onlookers as a sudden tragedy takes place. We're all watching the same show.

So everyone realizes this guy has been hit. People are staring in shock and someone calls for an ambulance. We see the driver fall to his knees in the street, distraught, shakily saying, "I didn't mean to..." It's a very serious and emotional scene that —

— is immediately tempered by this guy waking up, complete with a cute 'pop!' sound effect when he opens his eyes.

This is YYH's brand, this Very Serious Circumstances skillfully interwoven with casual indifference/comedy. It's admittedly far from a unique brand, but it's an excellent choice given that this is the same attitude that will drive 99% of our protagonist's interaction with the world.

Speaking of said protagonist, our guy wakes up, opens his eyes, and realizes that he's floating. There's a great, disorientating shot from his perspective where everything is upside down, causing him to nearly fall out of the air. Well would you look at that, he's as confused as we are. It's our audience surrogate!

A narrator says, "And so it all begins. This boy's name is Yusuke, he's fourteen years old, and he's supposed to be the hero of this story. But oddly enough, he's dead."

Game of Thrones might have made it popular, but YYH did it better.

(Yeah, yeah, I know one death kick-starts the journey and the other is a shocking twist. Just let me have this.)

Now, it's a weird introduction, right? At least at the end. The announcement that change has occurred, a name, an age... that all checks out. But "supposed to be the hero"? What the hell is that “supposed to” mean? Our narrator gives us the easy, surface answer: "But oddly enough, he's dead." We're capitalizing here on the audience's expectation that death ends a character's journey and though they may have been a hero previously, they can no longer be one moving forward. That function within the story has passed. So it's this intriguing question of, "What kind of hero do you have when that hero is dead from the start?" but as we'll see soon, there's an additional meaning here of, "How can Yusuke be the hero?" As this premiere sets up, Yusuke doesn't act like the hero is “supposed to” act.

Until he saved this kid.

But right now he's just confused: "Okay, this is weird. Stupid weird."

Two EMTs arrive on the scene and are hilariously useless. You know how in any medical drama a doctor will stop CPR after a couple of seconds because obviously you're not going to spend half the episode on realism? Well, that's this only a thousand times worse. One guy just looks at the kid and announces he's fine except for some bumps and bruises. Meanwhile, the kid is sobbing.

"Well, at least one of them is," replies the other EMT, because I guess he can tell Yusuke is beyond hope without taking a pulse or anything? "I hate cleanup," he complains as they load his body onto a stretcher because that's? An empathetic response to have??

Honestly this scene is wild.

Yusuke is understandably upset that he's, you know, dead and all. He starts hounding the EMTs who, unable to hear him, just go about their business of taking the kid and his body to the hospital. "You think you can just do whatever you want because you have that stupid uniform on? You can't just write me off. Listen to me!" and Yusuke tries to punch one of the EMTs in the head, resulting in him floating right through.

What a great way to introduce your protagonist's personality. We see here that when things go wrong Yusuke's default emotion is anger and it starts creeping in even before he thinks the others are ignoring him: "Stupid weird." He has problems with authority — "You think you can just do whatever you want because you have that stupid uniform on?" — is used to others listening when he gets angry — "You can't just write me off!" — and is poised to use violence at the slightest provocation. Yusuke is a guy who, right now at least, is ready to punch first and ask questions later.

As Yusuke floats back up into the air and the ambulance drives away, he finally cools down enough to try and think his way out of this. "It's not like this is the first time you've been in a jam,” he thinks. Yusuke recalls that yeah, something was different about today...

...he actually went to school.

Catch me laughing that this idiot boy equates the weirdness of him dying with going to school. Good lord.

Anyway, this jumpstarts our flashback. We open on a generic, anime middle school (that always feels like a high school to me) where the principal is calling for Yusuke through the loud speaker. Oooo someone’s in trouble! We follow a young girl up to the rooftop and she gets a classic hair-blowing-in-the-wind moment to establish that she's our love interest. Meet Keiko Yukimura.

Keiko finds Yusuke hanging out and immediately starts lecturing him for trying to chew gum and refusing to wear the boys' uniform. "Oh, give me a break, Keiko. I look better in green." Note that it's here we learn her name and it's an easy, casual way to introduce it. I bring this up because Yusuke's introduction via our narrator is very much... not that. It's an on your nose statement about his name, age, and importance to the story, and if you're just starting the show in 2021, it might come across as a rather armature move. Like something out of a kid's show, perhaps. Yet here we see that this was a deliberate choice, considering that YYH is capable of introducing character information naturally when it wants to.

This moment also tells us that Yusuke cares a great deal about his image. More on that in a bit. Because Keiko isn't finished her list of grievances yet, going on to say that his attendance record has hurt their entire class, hurt her as class representative, and if he keeps going down this path he won't even graduate middle school. "Sometimes I think you don't care about anyone but yourself and then you don't even do that right!"

They're legit complaints. Too bad Yusuke is busy looking up Keiko's skirt.

Yeeeeah. Sadly, this is common for anime, particularly a 90s anime like YYH. Even presumably more progressive series like My Hero Academia feature characters like Mineta, whose entire personality is being a pervert, and the creation of abilities that "require" kids/young women to be scantily clad. See: Yaoyorozu. YYH is no different in this regard, with various forms of sexual harassment functioning as a shorthand for how much Yusuke secretly likes Keiko. "Boys will be boys," right? Obviously not.

Like so many others series, the creators get away with it because they’re framing it as a bad thing. It's totally fine because look, Keiko slaps him! This is teaching the viewer how wrong this behavior is. Never mind that this is clearly an established habit between them, that Yusuke laughs off Keiko's discomfort, and that the whole scene is meant to be funny for the viewer. That's the real purpose here; it’s not a PSA on harassment.

That, and to establish the long-suffering love Keiko has for Yusuke in turn, largely stemming from a life-long friendship. "Dumb boy! He hasn't grown up a bit since he was four years old." We see that Keiko's early interactions with Yusuke have given her insight that others lack. As she heads down from the roof she runs into two girls hiding around the corner, too scared to come out lest "the great Urameshi" set his sights on them. Isn't Keiko terrified of what he might do to her? "Or worse, what others might say of it?" Like any classic high school middle school setting, one's reputation is king. Yusuke cares about how others see him — maintaining that tough boy attitude — and the girls care more about what the rest of the school might think of Keiko's interactions with him than the presumed harm Yusuke could do to her. They heard he can summon 2,000 men with just a whistle and that he "kills for fun!" But that means nothing in the face of people talking about you. Despite being one of the most popular girls in school, Keiko is the outsider here via her disinterest in what other people think.

The animation changes here, giving us a good look at how the girls picture Yusuke: tough, scowling, surrounded by shadows, and backed by an entire army.

In contrast, we've already seen what Yusuke is really like.

Keiko laughs the image off too. Yusuke is more like a "lamb" than a killer and besides, he couldn't order around two people, let alone two hundred. "He doesn't have many friends."

"That's not what I heard," says one of the girls.

"Yeah," goes the other. "I think we would know."

Again, rumors rule here, with whispers in the hall considered more reliable than someone who interacts with Yusuke on a daily basis. Keiko doesn’t have a hope of changing their minds.

Oh, as a side note, I love that they gave Keiko Miyazaki-esque hair. It's very emotive.

Yusuke escapes outside where the principal is still calling for him to report to his office. He overhears a conversation around the corner and we cut to two boys, one of which is showing a wallet off to the other. He explains that some bully tried to rough him up, but he said he was Urameshi's cousin and the bully took off, dropping his wallet in the process. The guy's friend is impressed, but what is he going to do if Yusuke ever finds out he lied? Not to worry, he says, that "blockhead" would probably think it's true even if he did somehow hear.

Yusuke, obviously, does hear about this and he, also obviously, does not believe this guy is his cousin. He looms ominously and they scurry up against a wall, terrified and offering him the wallet as an apology.

"You think I want your money?" Yusuke yells.

YYH is, in many respects, a rather simple story, but I appreciate the hints of complexity in these otherwise straightforward interactions. It's not that this guy used Yusuke's name to steal a wallet, he used it as a form of protection against another bully — a far more sympathetic motivation. It's not that Yusuke's fearsome reputation has resulted in any genuine respect because once people think they're safe they reveal how little they think of his intelligence — he's a "blockhead." And Yusuke, though intimidating and violent, is not your average, schoolyard bully. He doesn't care about money, only the insult and the damage this guy using his name might have done to his reputation. There's a little more nuance here than you might otherwise expect.

Also, note how dark the boys' standard uniforms are and how much they blend into the rest of the world. Yusuke, as our protagonist, stands out in his bright clothing. He was right, he does look better in green!

So he's ready to clobber this kid when one of the teachers arrive: Mr. Iwamoto.

Iwamoto demands to know what's going on, but the boys are too terrified to rat Yusuke out. Noticing the wallet on the ground, he assumes that Yusuke was after their money, something that greatly offends him: "Whatever!" Iwamoto goes on to say that, "No good weeds like you should have been plucked a long time ago," making it clear that he considers Yusuke a hopeless case. The positive aspects that Keiko sees, as well as the complexity the viewer sees — to say nothing of his introduction of saving a kid — aren’t considered here.

Notably, Iwamoto exists in part to show us what Yusuke could become. Not a teacher (he's obviously not attending school enough for that!), but a cynical man who is cruel for cruelty's sake. Yusuke is already barreling down that path, ignoring Keiko's advice, terrorizing other students, trying to punch EMTs, etc. If his life (or afterlife...) hadn't changed through that accident, this is the kind of person Yusuke might have grown up to be, and we can see that clearly in the visual parallels between them. Dark haired men dressed in green who scowl with ease and toss out cutting insults. Yusuke is staring his future in the face.

For now he walks off with a final shot, "You shouldn't talk. It makes you sound stupid." This time Yusuke makes it to the school's entrance and tries to enjoy his second attempt at chewing gum, but someone hits him in the back of the head.

"Okay, somebody's DEAD — ah. Sorry, old man."

"That's Mr. Takenaka to you."

Our principal has finally left the office and hunted down Yusuke for himself! Putting this interaction immediately after the one with Iwamoto allows the viewer to compare them. Yusuke might be irreverent towards his principal, but it's clear there's still some kind of respect between them. Yusuke only starts threatening because he doesn’t realize who hit him and once he does realize it's Takenaka, he immediately apologizes. That "old man" comes across as a teasing insult and Yusuke allows himself to be briefly dragged back towards school, rather than throwing a now classic punch. In turn, Takenaka cares enough about Yusuke to try and keep him on the straight and narrow. He utilizes Yusuke's preferred language — violence — but in a casual way, nonthreatening way: slight hit to the back of his head, noogie, pulling him along by the ear.

It's the sort of physicality we're used to seeing in media between a parent and child who are outwardly antagonistic, but actually share a deep bond. Takenaka is also careful to frame their return to his office as a "discussion," not a punishment, and offers Yusuke tea along with the conversation. Whereas Iwamoto considers Yusuke to be a "weed" that should have been plucked from their school long ago, Takenaka is determined to help Yusuke bloom.

If we're continuing the flower metaphor :D

Yusuke isn't in the mood to play along though. He gets away by using a fake ear, startling Takenaka when it unexpectedly pulls free. Yusuke escapes the school grounds and Takenaka, suffering a back twinge from his fall, can't chase after him. Poor guy. I understand that pain lol.

Yusuke heads home where we're introduced to his mother, Atsuko. Most notable in her first shot is the soft lighting that highlights her looks. We're not told how old she is here, but I believe she's around 28 — and she looks it, if not younger. Given that Yusuke is 14, that means Atsuko was a mom at his age. This is a quick and subtle way to tell us about Yusuke's home life. There are more overt details in this scene — it's at least lunchtime and Atsuko hasn't left her bed yet, she demands that Yusuke make her coffee instead of greeting him, it's all meant to imply (before we actually see) that she's an alcoholic — but her age is another way to highlight the broken household here. There's no partner in sight and she clearly had Yusuke as a teenager. He hasn't had a strong parental figure to take care of him. If anything, Yusuke is taking care of Atsuko here.

"Oh great, mother of the year!" basically sums things up.

Atsuko wants to know why Yusuke isn't in school and he says that everyone is pissing him off today, particularly with their preaching. "Dear, if you hate preaching so much you should live on your own... but you can't do that, can you?" Alongside a rough upbringing, Yusuke is suffering from the common problem of being trapped in a dead-end life. He hates his school, his town, and coming home to find his mom hungover. Yusuke has no prospects and, outside of one principal, no one who is actively working to help him find some. Even the little things he hates, like being preached to, are unavoidable because if you want to live on your own, that requires money. Good luck pulling that off as a middle schooler whose only skill is street fighting!

Yusuke walks off in a huff, literally shouting in a street about what a bad day he's having (and hilariously scaring off pedestrians in the process). His shout brings trouble though. A couple guys appear to ambush him, their boss close behind. The music increases the tension, Yusuke's expression is serious, and we even get a Dutch angle thrown into the mix.

For any who don't know, the Dutch angle is a popular film technique to establish that something is wrong. There's tension in the scene, something uneasy is at play, and the world is now literally off center. It's perhaps most famously used in Do The Right Thing to establish the friction between an Italian-American pizzeria and the predominantly African American neighborhood it's based in.

But it's also used a great deal in horror as a way to say: yup, shit just got real. Scary real.

This Dutch angle introduces a character you may not appreciate at first, but absolutely should: Kazuma Kuwabara.

He's initially the comic relief and that's clear in his introduction. Within seconds we move from that intimidating arrival to, well, seeing him. To be clear, I've got nothing against redheads with big chins, but compared to Yusuke's design, Kuwabara is meant to be the funny looking one. His threat level plummets the moment we get a look at his face, especially in a series that will occasionally use looks as a (supposed) measure of intelligence.

Also, Kuwabara is dressed in light blue so, like Yusuke, we know he's important!

Any assumptions that his appearance isn’t meant to imply a goofy, embarrassing personality are put to rest when Kuwabara starts rambling about how they last time they fought Yusuke just got a cheap shot in and he'll definitely win this time. Yeah, he won't. Yusuke is thrilled by this diversion though and we get a shot of him looking almost as creepy as Keiko's friends think he is. Whatever else might be said about Yusuke, he is absolutely a monster in a fight.

Which we see here. If anyone picked up the series without knowing this was a fighting anime, they'll realize it now. Yusuke's choreography is stylized to show off his skill: he disappears with a 'whoosh' and dark lines to suggest inhuman speed,

attacking Kuwabara with a knee to the face, utilizes flying kicks, lands perfect, precision punches, and ends it all with the toe-tip landing we've come to expect of all powerful fighters. Kuwabara never even got a hit in.

Happy as a clam now, Yusuke wanders off whistling and Kuwabara's friends are left to pick up the pieces. AKA, his likely broken bones. I love that they're legit friends though and not just nameless goons for the sake of giving Kuwabara a small gang (though their names won't come up until later). "That makes 0 wins an 156 loses!" one of them cries, trying to get Kuwabara to stop ending up in the hospital, probably. We establish that Kuwabara is The Most Dramatic Ever when he pulls his broken body into a seated position, shouting, "No! I almost had him that time!"

Then he passes out.

Kuwabara, honey, you obviously did not almost have him, but god bless you for the outlook. The most optimistic thing on this Earth is a well-loved Golden Retriever, but Kuwabara comes in at a very close second.

With his dream to one day beat Yusuke in combat established, we cut to Yusuke wandering the street where the episode opened. "Okay, I'm remembering" he says in a voiceover. "After that I met the kid."

The soccer ball reappears as it rolls to a stop at Yusuke's feet. He grabs it and immediately starts yelling at the kid. Horrible protagonist, right? Well, Yusuke is trying to instill in him the danger of using this street as a playground, a worry the viewer already knows is 100% justified. “Listen, kid, that’s dangerous! There are cars going by that will splatter you into the pavement!” It's one of those quick moments where we get to enjoy Yusuke's duality: he's someone who is nearly making a toddler cry, but for rather understandable reasons. He's got the right idea, but needs to go about it in a more mature manner.

Which is precisely what he attempts to do. Sort of. Yusuke changes gears, though whether it's a more "mature" route is certainly up for debate lol. He tries entertaining the kid instead, raising and lowering the soccer ball to reveal goofy faces.

When these fail to impress, Yusuke goes full out by stuffing the ball into his pants, pushing his nose up with a pair of chopsticks he got from god knows where, and generally just putting on a display.

So Yusuke cares very deeply about his reputation... but only when it comes to those who are an established part of his life. Keiko, Mr. Takenaka, and the other kids at school all need to maintain a particular image of Yusuke, one that he's carefully cultivated. But random pedestrians on the street? Who cares about them? Let them talk.

This shows us that Yusuke does indeed have priorities over his own, selfish goals. Namely, the happiness of some kid is more important to him than looking "cool" for a bunch of strangers. Lots of characters with Yusuke's surface attitude would sneer at the idea of degrading themselves for — their words — some brat. But Yusuke, as we constantly see, actually does have that heart of gold. “Well, if all else fails I can still make kids happy.”

Although... I'm not sure what to make of his display itself. I have the distinct sense that there's something prejudiced here that I'm not able to fully articulate, what with the chopsticks, slanted eyes, bald head, and the like, though to be entirely frank I don't have enough knowledge of Japan's history to say precisely what it might be. Or, really, whether it exists at all. Just something to chew on.

What I am sure about though is the importance of having the child label Yusuke as monster — "Yeah, monster! — but in a delighted manner. Yusuke is indeed some kind a monster, someone who disappoints adults and terrifies his classmates, a demon fighter on the streets too, but here that identity is reworked into something positive.

Having successful secured a laugh, Yusuke tells the kid — calmly this time — to go play elsewhere. The toddler stares up at him with the blank expression only kids can manage.

Well, kids and whatever headspace I'm in after writing these metas.

To absolutely no one's surprise except Yusuke's, the kid does not go elsewhere. Instead, he continues kicking the ball down the street, causing Yusuke to exclaim, “Dammit, what’s the use? The kid can get smashed by a car for all I care!” Liar, liar.

The picture becomes desaturated as the kid kicks the ball and it flies into the street, time slowing down to show it landing precisely in the middle of the road. Yusuke again yells for him to stay put, but when has a toddler ever listened? He begins to walk into the road as our driver arrives, speeding, swerving, and paying more attention to the girl at his side than what's in front of him.

This time, we see the accident from the front with both Yusuke and the kid presented equally.

There's a cut to black and when we return we're in the present, Yusuke floating above the policemen now investigating the scene. “So that’s it? I’m roadkill?” As Yusuke realizes he's dead, specifically that he's a ghost, a voice goes,

"Bingo! Bingo! You win the prize!"

A woman has appeared who is quite obviously othered by the standards of the episode so far. Unlike the greens, blues, and browns of the series' modern clothes, she's dressed in hot pink kimono with blue hair to match. She's also, you know, floating on an oar.

“I didn’t expect you to figure it out so quickly," she says, referring to Yusuke's revelation that he's dead. Apparently, those who meet unexpected and/or violent ends tend to take some time coming to terms with their demise. It's a nice acknowledgment of Yusuke's intelligence in an interaction that's otherwise... not great for his self-esteem.

Meaning, this woman is about to drag him lol.

She introduces herself as Botan, pilot of the River Styx and guider of souls to the afterlife. You might also know her as the Grim Reaper.

(Hey, RWBY fans: I originally wrote that as Grimm Reaper 🤦‍♀️)

It's an claim Yusuke takes issue with because 1. Botan is too pretty to be the Grim Reaper and 2. If she was really some god of death she'd be taking this much more seriously, not laughing and saying, "Bingo!" For the audience this does two things. First, it acknowledges our own expectations and validates them. Yusuke's world isn't so far removed from our own that he takes Botan's looks and personality at face value, he also expected a skeleton with a scythe. So don't worry, all the weird stuff in this series is weird to our protagonist too. They'll be explanations. Or, even if there’s not, you’re not wrong for being surprised.

Second, it sets up the very common theme in YYH of undermining those common assumptions again and again and again. We've already seen it with Yusuke, wherein characters who look and act a certain way are, supposedly, destined to be that person and nothing more. Yusuke is meant to be just a "weed," a dumb, violent, angry loser who goes nowhere in life... but we already know he's more than that. Botan is supposed to be scary and serious, but she says nah, I want to be cute and bubbly instead. No character in YYH embodies who they're "supposed" to be when you look past those surface characterizations. They play the part of archetypes — and do keep certain parts of their expected personalities — but they're also far more well-rounded than that. Which yeah, is something most people expect from any story nowadays, but YYH is particularly adept at making you think you're watching Simple Show A only to turn around and surprise you with More Complex Show B.

It's great, trust me.

So Yusuke is pissed that Botan isn't adhering to those expectations, in the same way that he works hard to validate others expectations of him. He doesn't know how to deal with someone challenging his world view yet. Rather than angering Botan though, she just nods and says that this response makes sense for him. “Rather than being scared, or surprised, you yell a lot and tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about." Taking out a notebook, she quickly summarizes everything we learned in the flashback — minus Yusuke's complexities: he's fourteen, in middle school, is ill-tempered, violent, hates authority, and is a horrible student.

Typically, Yusuke responds by getting angry and trying to snatch the booklet out of her hands, only for Botan to pull it out of his reach, laughing. The tables have turned! Rather than being surrounded by people who cower at Yusuke's imposed authority, he now finds himself faced with someone who laughs at his transparent attempts to take control of the situation.

Calming down, Yusuke wants to know if the kid he saved is really alright and Botan offers to let him see for himself. That offer produces Yusuke's first, genuine smile.

They fly to the hospital where a doctor is in the process of giving the kid a clean bill of health, his mother crying with relief.

That's enough for Yusuke. “Alright, Botan, I’ve got no regrets, so you can take me to hell or wherever it is I’m going.”

That tells you all you need to know about Yusuke's self-worth, despite his bad boy attitude. His life is a dead-end as far as he can see and most of those around him haven't done anything to dissuade him of that idea. He says he doesn't care if the kid lives or dies, but then instinctively saves him. Post his death, Yusuke doesn't have anything he considers a regret, or anything he'd like to do before he leaves, like saying goodbye to a loved one. Oh, he's also pretty sure he's going to hell and has resigned himself to that without a fight.

Uplifting!

Botan just laughs though, saying that she's actually here to offer Yusuke an "ordeal" that could bring him back to life. See, he wasn't supposed to die today — let alone die saving a kid — and frankly they don't know what to do with him. It's another neat summary of what we've already learned: Yusuke is a far more complicated case than the afterlife assumed and now, when push comes to shove, deciding whether he belongs in heaven or hell is... muddled.

There's a fantastic story there about the problems with an afterlife that reduces a person's entire life to a few surface characteristics recorded in a book, refusing to acknowledge the context of their situation, or their capacity for change. “Run someone with your credentials a thousand times and they never would have saved a kid like that." Except, of course, Yusuke did save him, so those "credentials" are suspect, to say the least. However, YYH is not a story that explores these issues. Instead, I recommend you watch this!

Rather than being upset at the afterlife's low opinion of him (because let's be real, Yusuke shares it), he latches onto a little detail Botan let slip. If he wasn't supposed to die today... then was the kid?

Mmm... no. Actually, without the chaos of Yusuke jumping into the road, the driver would have swerved at the last second and the kid would have not only lived, but actually come out with one less scrape.

So Yusuke is obviously upset by this news! I would be too!! Holy shit, hang onto the "it's the thought that counts" message with everything you've got.

Also, don't think too much about the fact that the afterlife apparently knows exactly what will happen to people, down to how many cuts they accumulate in an accident. Also, don't think too much about where the afterlife foreseeing the crash begins and the unexpectedness of Yusuke interfering ends. That way lies madness. This will never come up again, so just let it go.

Sorry, 2013 me hijacked the post for a second.

As said, Yusuke is understandably upset by this revelation and as he fumes I'm reminded that this series likes to pull some amazing expressions.

Botan reiterates that it's all fine because Yusuke can come back to life. Weren't you listening? He should feel honored, in fact, considering that an offer like this only arrives every 100 years or so. Well, that explains why all of humanity isn't grappling with people coming back to life on the daily. One person every generation isn't going to cause much of a stir.

However, instead of jumping at the chance Yusuke announces that Botan is just like the teachers at school: she doesn't know what she's talking about. “You said yourself my life was kind of pathetic, right?” he says, going on to explain that everyone will be happier now that he's dead. His school won't have to deal with his behavior, Keiko won't have to nag him, and his mom will be able to party whenever she wants. It's a win-win for everyone involved.

Hmm, this feels familiar.

Don't worry, Yusuke doesn't need to experience a whole alternate reality to get the message.

“I’m sorry you feel that way at such an early age," Botan says and she is sorry, because despite her teasing nature that's a legitimately horrifying thing to believe. Yusuke won't budge though and after a little back-and-forth Botan leaves, telling Yusuke he should think it over while visiting his wake. She'll come back once he decides what to do.

“Do you have worms in your ears, lady? I did decide!” but Botan is long gone.

We cut to that night where Yusuke has indeed decided to attend his own wake. Maybe because of Botan's advice, maybe because he's just morbidly curious. We’re not given insight into the decision.

Atsuko is a mess, to put it mildly, not dressed for the occasion and sitting slumped against the way, staring vacantly as the guests offer their condolences. Yusuke is surprised by the fact that his entire class is here, but quickly writes them off when he sees two of the boys laughing. I'm on the fence about this detail, which I'll unpack in just a second.

First though, Yusuke sees Keiko exiting the house, inconsolable in her grief. She collapses on the ground with her two friends trying to offer comfort, despite the fact that they had nothing good to say about Yusuke himself. Good on them.

Before he can think too long on this though, Yusuke is distracted by Kuwabara's arrival. Unlike Keiko's crying, he expresses his grief through yelling. Specifically, yelling at Yusuke. For dying. For daring to "run away." His own friends are physically holding him back as he charges into the wake, screaming, “Who am I gonna fight now, huh? Who am I gonna fight?" It's not really about the fighting, of course. At least, not the fighting alone. "You’re supposed to be here for me," Kuwabara finishes, the punch he's thrown at Yusuke's photo going limp and catching his first tear.

You know, for all the goofy expressions, this show really is gorgeous. Just wait until we get to the fight animations.

Kuwabara's reaction is why I hesitate to write off the classmates like Yusuke has. Granted, we have no reason to believe that they care for him as Kuwabara does — they're nameless background characters defined only by their terror of "the great Urameshi" — but it's still a split second taken out of context. We don't know what they were laughing at, or if laughing is a part of their grief. God knows I personally laugh at the most inappropriate moments. If you tell me someone has just died there is a very good chance I will laugh awkwardly as I try to process that. It’s just a reflex. All of which I bring up not because these side characters are important, but because Yusuke's perception of his own worth is. The point of each of these moments is to show that those around him have always cared for him, even if Yusuke didn't notice. It's nice to think that extends to his classmates too. The variety likewise exists to show us how people grieve differently, with Kuwabara's friends not understanding that this is how he's working through the trauma: “This place is for mourning!” He is mourning, even if his way of mourning isn't as socially acceptable as Keiko's. So if screaming and throwing punches is valid, crying is valid, staring stoically in a drunk stupor is valid... why not laughter too?

Not likely, perhaps, but possible.

As an additional possibility to chew on, watching this premier again, it struck me how more emotional Kuwabara's scene is compared to Keiko's. Don't get me wrong, crying and calling Yusuke’s name gets the point across, but it's two seconds of generic grief compared to a much longer scene rife with intensity. When Kuwabara arrives the music swells and everyone is forced to pay attention to him. His grief is loud, violent, and given symbolism with his fist and the photo. There's more effort put into his reaction, frankly, so it wouldn't surprise me if fans started shipping them after this. That grief combined with an "enemies to lovers" possibility is a pretty potent mix. To be clear, Yusuke/Keiko is the (oh so obvious) canonical endgame and in the fandom Yusuke/Kuwabara can't compare to another slash ship that will turn up later, but this is a good example of how writers can craft some Very Gay Scenes without realizing it. When you have the girl crying prettily for a second and the guy absolutely losing his mind over Yusuke's death, questioning his purpose now, his support network, and then collapsing in grief... don't be surprised if your audience goes, "Oh hey, maybe they'd be a good couple instead."

But I digress.

The only people who are unquestioningly happy about Yusuke's passing are Mr. Iwamoto and his co-conspirator, Mr. Akashi. You know Akashi is another bad guy because he has bucked teeth and "ugliness" is an easy way to code for evilness. YYH is not immune to those mistakes :/

These two are really something else though, standing in the middle of a wake and claiming it's “too bad that car wasn’t big enough for them too," referring to Kuwabara and his friends. Wow! What stellar members of the academic community. Iwamoto goes on to say that Yusuke dying at least accomplished something good. Not, mind you, saving the life of a child, but rather looking good for their school's reputation. Akashi agrees, but says it's likely Yusuke only accidentally saved him while trying to steal the kid's lunch money. Remember, that accusation of theft is the one thing Yusuke has said outright that he does not do.

He's pissed listening to all this — wouldn't you be? — but knows by now he can't do anything about it. In another fantastic shot, Yusuke hovers his hand over Iwamoto's shoulder, desperate to grab him, when Takenaka's arrives there instead.

“What do you suppose is more disgraceful? That boy showing his misery, or your insensitive and idiotic words!”

HELL YEAH. You tell 'em, Mr. Takenaka.

Yusuke gets his third shock of the night at this passionate defense. Takenaka leaves the teachers to go pay his respects, but admits to Yusuke's picture that he just can't speak well of him. He was surprised to hear that Yusuke gave up his life for another and it's a fact that he acted selfishly. Though he doesn't say it in as many words, Takenaka explains that he's not grieving because Yusuke was a good person, but because it's so clear to him that he might have been. “Why didn’t you stay? You could have made something great out of yourself.”

Normally, "Why didn't you stay?" is just something for the living to grapple with, as the dead obviously don't have any say in what happens to them. But Yusuke does. It's here that the lighting grows soft again and Yusuke considers Takenaka's words. Keiko and Kuwabara grieve for who he was, but Takenaka grieves for who Yusuke could have been — someone that might still exist if Yusuke decides to undergo this ordeal.

Atsuko adds fuel to the emotional fire, breaking down and hiding her face in her knees.

Finally, the kid Yusuke saved arrives with his mother. Because yes, Yusuke saved him in every way that matters, considering no one else knows — or will know — that he'd have lived anyway. I like that the show doesn't allow that knowledge to undermine the emotion of their arrival, or what Yusuke’s act meant to them.

The mom tells her son to pay his respects and the kid thanks Yusuke for saving him, and for "making faces." He clearly doesn't get what's going on here. This is confirmed as the two leave and he asks his mom if he can play with Yusuke again tomorrow. “I know some people sounded angry at him, but he’s really nice!"

They're probably just crying because they want to play with him too, he thinks, which just makes his mom join in. Everyone is crying in this club tonight.

Those words are the cincher for Yusuke and with a brief montage of all the grief he's witnessed, he makes his decision.

We cut to later that night where Yusuke floats above the city, admiring the moon. Botan reappears and he asks, “Have you ever not known about something that seemed obvious to everyone else?” Yes, everyone has experienced that at one point or another. She asks if he's made his decision and Yusuke agrees to try and come back to life.

Emotional revelations out of the way, we're allowed another tone shift as Botan yells with joy, speeding off and causing Yusuke to grab hold of the end of her oar, lest he be left behind. Cranky as always, he demands to know where they're going. "To the spirit world, of course!" They're off to see someone who can explain the ordeal and give Yusuke the tool needed to complete it. Just hang on and enjoy the ride.

Thus ends our very first episode! Ah, the nostalgia. This is part one of a four arc series, with the anime cutting out a lot of the filler stories found at the start of the manga — a smart decision, I think. They primarily do the work of teaching Yusuke what he learned at the wake, so if you can accomplish that as quickly as the adaptation did, all the better. Especially since Yusuke needs to grow a great deal beyond the basic understanding that people might, sort of care for him, and that work will occur primarily through a job he's going to take on. The series isn't really about his death and it's not about an attempt to come back either — it's about what happens once you get that second chance. So this is the setup, but it's important setup all the same.

No need to skip ahead though. I've blathered enough for one recap. I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you when the writing gods next bless me with energy! 💜

#YYH #Yu Yu Hakusho #YYH recaps #mymetas

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lovely-necromancy · 3 years ago

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A Cure for Insomnia CH 15

////TW Deceptions of canon typical violence and a home invasion near the end////

“Yea so the pizza is not only aesthetically pleasing but pretty fuckin' good too.”you finish your rant on why the two of you should drive out to Point Pleasant some time.

“Not gonna lie it seems more like you want to,” he pops his knuckles, “drag me miles away to sacrifice me to some old god.” the popping gets worse.

Shit, Toby's getting nervous. You probably look pretty sketchy right now considering the fact that you've been suggesting the two of you go out to Point Pleasant for the past thirty-ish minutes. Toby had pulled off to the shoulder lane once Connor's barking started up. Alerting the two of you to his incoming tics. It seemed to be a long episode so you offered to drive off the interstate and on to the side of the road instead. Hoping that maybe the absence of the additional outside stimulants coming from cars driving past you two would calm Toby's tics.

Unfortunately you'd gotten caught up talking about your late night escapades having been taken by the fact that Toby didn't seem to mind. He'd actually understood that restlessness you went on about. And when he asked what was the furthest town you've driven to in one night. You kind of let loose and spilled your guts about the Mothman capital.

For half an hour, on an offshoot of the interstate in the middle of nowhere, he was trapped with no where to run. Of course the poor guy was probably scared of you at this point. He was just indulging you out of fear not out of any genuine interest.

Why couldn't you just read signals properly?

“No!” from his jump you've probably said that way too loudly, “I mean sorry I get carried away – Mothman's cool – the town is a nice tourist trap and I thought you'd think it was cool – but then I just probably just seemed weird to you and now I just....ughr none of that made sense did it?”

“Weeell” he drags out as thought he's thinking on it “nope none.”

Looking at his face you can see his red stained scarred lips pull into a sort of smirk and there's a glint in his eyes. He's being sarcastic, he's making fun of you. He isn't weirded out by you just being yourself and ranting about nothing in particular or running around in circles with a train of thought only to get confused or baffled by the workings of your own brain.

The smug dick. Letting you spiral while he watched on in amusement. This reeks of Brian, has his fuck boy energy written all over it. You'll just have to spend more time with Toby to make sure the sweet man next to you doesn't turn into a menace to society. Or at least not a menace to you.

“Meanie.” you blow a raspberry in his direction, he returns the gesture albeit a lot messier than he intended. Spit seeps from the gash in his cheek and dribbles down the scarred edge of his lips.

Toby lets out a grunt and looks down at his spit in disgust. Whether that's in himself or just his spit you can't tell. Leaning over the console you pop open the glove box to hand him some emergency napkins you had in there.

“Fuckin' Mary Poppins.” you hear him mutter over you.

Choosing to ignore his teasing and take the high road in this you hand him the napkins and relax back into your seat. Watching him run the napkin up and down his arms trying to get any spit that may have backfired onto him, which was definitely most of it.

“You good?” you ask.

“Uh yea 's just spit no big deal.” it's such a simple statement but you can't help the smile that it brings to your face.

You meant if he'd be good to drive yet since you two had been out here for the better part of an hour now. It was nearly two in the afternoon. Neither of you anticipated the quick slushy run turning into an all day event. And while you wouldn't mind driving around for two more hours or so – you're quickly coming to the end of your battery.

“Meant to drive, dork.”

“Hmm...Yea should be now,” Toby says wadding up the napkins before spinning in the passenger seat towards you and gently flinging the wad of napkins in your face, “and 'm not a dork. You are.”

Returning his spit used napkin to him, tossing it just a tad harsher than he originally had, “You're right you're a brat!”

You exit the car before he can throw it at you again. Though it really doesn't matter when he just pelts you with it from over the hood when you switch seats anyway. Picking the napkin up off the ground you hold on to it and place it in one of the empty slushy containers sitting in your console.

The mature course of action. However, you do poke your tongue out at Toby as you do it. He only rolls his eyes as he huffs out a laugh at you.

Toby hovers over the gear shift waiting for either an alert or one of his tics to rear its head. When neither happens he put the car in drive and you two begin your hour and half drive back to Kepler.

Or would've, had it not been for the traffic you seemed to get stuck in not even five minutes after getting back on the interstate.

“You're fucking kidding me.” Toby says incredulously.

After ten minutes of going nowhere, all the while his leg bouncing was shaking the car, Toby abruptly get out of the car and marches to the passenger door flinging it open.

“You're driving.” is all he says.

You don't think there's any talking him out of it. You're good to drive so that isn't the issue, his abruptness about the situation is what stuns you. Wordlessly you get out of the car and take the wheel. Getting buckled in you see from the corner of your eye Toby grabbing you phone and typing away.

He seems to find what he's looking for as static flows through your stereo. The sponsored ads for the white noise “podcast” start playing before fading back into the never ending static. Your phone is placed back under the radio and Toby reclines his seat all the way.

It's tense for a moment as you wait for something else to happen. Whether it's an outburst or an explanation you aren't sure, the anticipation for anything to happen hangs thick in the car. You keep your focus on the road and traffic in front of you figuring Toby will let you know what's up in his own time.

The sound of shuffling comes from behind you as Connor scoots over to his handler to be of assistance. Only for him to be gently waved off. And he goes back to his spot laying down and honing in on you. Since you are currently driving...even though scooting the car up a few inches in the past twenty minutes shouldn't really qualify as driving. Nevertheless the pup remains vigilant in his work.

It's probably an hour or so before Toby finally speaks, breaking the semi silence he put the car in.

“Traffic jams make me anxious.” he doesn't move from his reclined position, just stares up at the ceiling of your car.

A noncommittal hum comes from the back of your throat. You'd assumed it was something to that nature but didn't want to pry. It must be bad if it was something that made him willingly pass the torch of driving, something that also made him wildly uncomfortable.

“Wanna talk – or do you just need silence.”

The answer came in the form of the silence that followed. It was another long hour and a half before the traffic finally cleared. You weren't even aware so many people could be on the interstate going through West Virginia on a Monday afternoon. Since you were at the tail end of the traffic by the time you got to where you assume it started, by the left over debris in the road and fresh skid marks heading into the median, you really couldn't put together what had gone on.

Your eyes didn't focus in on the leftovers of the accident nor did you slow down like many other vehicles. It's not like you enjoy seeing the wreckage of cars or people being lifted into ambulances but you understand most people give in to that base human curiosity. You just hoped everyone involved was safe and okay.

From your peripheral you catch Toby turning his head to face you every few minutes or so. Disregarding it as a tic you continue on driving. While this accident had cleared you don't doubt the power of stupidity to not influence another reckless driver, who might now be late from traffic, to start weaving in between lanes.

“Are we past it?” comes the quietest voice you've ever heard from Toby.

So stunned by the volume it takes you a minute to register what he'd asked.

“Uh...oh yea. We passed it like fourteen minutes ago?” assuming 'it' had been the crash site, though you hadn't been keeping track of time honestly.

No point when the two of you would be getting back to Kepler after dark anyway. You'd ask Toby if he'd want to grab food before you drop him off at the lodge but his continued silence as he fixes his seat up right clues you in that he might not be up for anything other than turning in for the night. Honestly you're at the point yourself, so you don't really mind the silence driving back.

Just like you thought the two of you got into Kepler a little after eight o'clock. Having been stopped by another accident, this one not lasting nearly as long to get situated, had really taken a toll on Toby's mood though. You could practically feel something eating at him as anxiety radiated off his form.

He didn't offer any clarification for his reactions and you didn't pry. Most times when you get a similar way you find it's easier to just let it run it's course than to try and calm yourself. So you're a little surprised when you reach the lodge and Toby practically volts out of your car, when he gently taps on your window after he's retrieved Connor from behind you.

“Get home safe.”

Those words hit your ears with a bit more weight than they normally do. Maybe because the day's been full of accidents on the road. Or maybe because of the lack of interaction the two of you have had for the past four hours. Whatever the reason it doesn't change how Toby lingers at your side even after your reply. He finally steps away, once again falling silent, and you're able to drive home after a final farewell to him.

The way Toby reacted today never leaves your mind. While theories and ideas toss around in your head you can feel the bubbling weight in your stomach build as cold sweats break out all over your body. Combating the weight in your stomach is its emptiness. Having only eaten the bowl of cereal today and nothing else has left you on empty since you'd gotten into traffic. However, being so preoccupied with Toby's change in behavior you'd forgone food in favor of getting your friend home as soon as possible.

Pausing when you come to the fork in the road making you choose between going straight home and fighting with cooking a meal or running to the mini mart and grabbing something quick and unhealthy. You normally take a bit to decide, but today it seems your gut is telling you to forgo the food and get home. You can't quite place a finger on what you're feeling – not quite fear or anxiety or even paranoia. All of which would be valid considering how weird your afternoon had been. Instead it feels like a little voice is ever so quietly telling you that you should get home immediately.

The voice pipes up again as soon as you gently shut your car door. It seems to warn you that there is danger near by.

'Fuck' is all you can think about as memories of the evidence of your stalker come into play.

It had been so busy lately that you'd honestly forgotten all about the stalker. Hell your bat was still in your room, so you were fucked if your intuition was right about this. You were at least going to be smart about this and pull up the Cowell's home phone contact on your cell before even getting near the front door. If anything happened you'd call and either leave a message or have a concerned Big Jo over instantly.

The house is silent as you open and shut the front door. Not anything new to you but with the tension in the air you're more than certain someone is here with you. Making your way through the house you peer into the kitchen and living room. The coast is clear on those fronts which leaves the hall closet, your bedroom, and the bathroom right across from your room.

Quickly ruling out the closet because of the limited space for a grown adult to hide in. The only options are your bedroom and the bathroom. The bathroom that has the door open at all times and would make a great place to hide and ambush you while you went into you room. Or a good place to lock yourself in to call Jo in case they were in your room, you'd just have to be ready to sprint out faster than they could register seeing you. Then there's your room, multiple hiding spots and the baseball bat you'd left in there. Even if they came empty handed they were the one with the weapon right now, you had to be careful.

As you make your way slowly and soundlessly down the hall way you hear a small beep come from your bedroom just as you stand in the doorway of the bathroom. You don't own anything that beeps. This thought causes you to freeze in place all but your thumb which hits the dial button.

Just in time too, because in your stupor a large figure in a black ski mask opens the door to your bedroom. You barely have time to react to the sudden appearance before they come barreling into you. A sharp pain bursts in the back of your head as it collides with the wall that you are tackled into. Phone forgotten, instinctively you bring both hands to your attacker's face.

They may be wearing a ski mask but it will do little to protect their eyes against your nails. Thankfully they have a stupid red frowny face decorating the mask, giving you the perfect target for their eyes. Not expecting your quick reflexes the attacker pulls away slightly trying to get out of your reach, and get your hands off of their mask. They must be worried you'll find out their identity, and while that would be nice you'd enjoy surviving this encounter a lot more. So you continue your assault on your would be assaulter.

A large hand comes down and swoops both of yours in a crushing grip. Harshly yanking them away from their face. Unfortunately for them they'd gotten one of your knees pressed against your chest when they tackled you. With the new distance between your bodies you're able to lift your leg up higher and kick at them.

“Get OFF of me..you piece of SHIT.” more force exerted on certain words while you kicked them solidly in the chest.

Their grip actually gets tighter on your hands as you knock the air out of their lungs. Aside from that and their pained grunts they weren't giving much of a reaction. You'd be certain you weren't kicking hard enough if it wasn't for a cough that ripped through them on a particularly powerful kick to the stomach.

There's a distant warble that you can't make out, it's high pitched and annoying. Good, that irritating sound will only succeed in pissing you off more and enabling you to unleash your rage on the fucker holding you down right now.

Before you can give another blow pain erupts through your chest as it constricts. You can't breathe and you see black dots forming in your vision as you're slammed into the tile floor of your bathroom. There's a foggy feeling in your head, and that distant warble gets more frantic and higher in pitch. But you can't focus on that you can't focus on anything that isn't the merciless thudding in your chest, the pounding of your head, and the god awful static that is starting to burn your ears like a white hot fire.

With the first heavy and heaving breath you're able to take as your assailant presses you into the ground, you feel the rush of adrenaline surge through you. Without any leverage you can do little more than squirm and thrash under the heavier figure. A brief feeling of vindication showers you as one of your arms is tugged free in your flailing. Your attacker isn't quick enough to restrain you this time and you reach your hand up to their face, this time intent on clawing it up from under the mask. That way some one would know based on the nail marks who did this, and maybe the DNA left under your skin would be enough identify them and save a future would be victim.

God you didn't want to be a victim.

Just before you can hook your fingers into their flesh they are thrown off of you. All adrenaline you had before turns into ice as you stare at their companion. The white mask with painted black features. It hadn't been a hallucination.

They hadn't been a hallucination.

They'd been in your home before. While you were there and blissfully unaware. They'd been so still, so quiet that you'd never even thought they were anything more than a messed up part of your psyche. There isn't enough time to dwell on this feeling of pure terror that spikes through you. But you still freeze in the face of the mask, only to be rewarded with an iron grip locked into your hair pulling you up by the scalp. Then you're bashed against the floor twice.

You honestly hadn't meant to play dead. In your shock it was the only thing you could do to just go limp. That once high pitched warble is now a drawn out moan almost, the static is playing at the edges of your mind as you barely make out the sound of retreating footsteps.

You want to roll onto your back but as nausea hits you at just the thought you stay on your side. Eyes fluttering against your will, this time not a tic but in an attempt to heal your body on it's limited energy reserves. You doubt you'd be able to turn over again if you needed to vomit. Hell you'd be lucky to stay conscious till someone came looking for you.

Would that be in the morning when you don't show up for work? Would it be days from now? Wait did you manage to call the Cowells?

The pounding in your head gets worse with each passing second. You officially can't keep your eyes open anymore. There's no reaction from you when you hear your front door burst open and yelling echo through the empty house. You don't stir from your sleep as someone taps you, not shaking you but just gentle taps careful to not exacerbate your injuries.

When Big Jo got to your home he slammed open your door and had his gun at the ready for your attackers. The house didn't look messed with and nothing was out of place, at least to him he'd only ever been out this far to drop little Jo off once or twice. It was quiet in your home except for a murmuring coming down the hall. So he made his way down slowly, vigilant for any sudden movement if there was anyone other than you here. He'd called your name several times since entering and hadn't received a reply.

As he got closer to the bathroom the murmuring became louder, peering in his heart stopped for a beat. The weathered man has seen a lot of shit in his time but he always hated to see a kid in your condition. Beaten with bruises littering your face and wrists all while being unresponsive as he tried to wake you. The source of the noise became clear when he saw your phone a few feet away slid into the corner away from you.

Dia was still on the line and sobbing now. If that didn't twist the knife that was already speared into his heart. Picking up your phone he spoke with his wife trying to reassure her as he felt for a pulse. You had one, one that was faster than normal. Your body was probably still reeling from what you just went through. But he wasn't a doctor and wouldn't count you out of the woods until one assessed you themself.

Jo wasn't waiting long before he heard the sirens, he went out front to meet the sheriff. After you'd been packed into an ambulance and taken to St. Francis Hospital Jo told Dia so she could meet you there. He'd stuck around while the sheriff and his deputy surveyed the area and came back to him for his statement.

“Looks like we've got most of what we needed Jo...But the kid, they got hallucinations you said?” Sheriff Owens asked.

“Why're you asking Zeke?” now wasn't the time to anger the large man as he was barely holding his normal civility.

“Now I don' mean nothin' by it – 's jus' tha' well we didn' find any evidence of a break in.”

“You think the kid coulda done that to themself? The marks on their wrists are bigger than their hands!”

“Jo, in some cases people sufferin' from delusions can do all sorts a things ta themselves... 'm just trin' ta find out if we ought ta have 'em kept in the ward for a bit.”

“They're fine. They've told me themself that they only get visual hallucinations and they can differentiate between the two.” a small lie on his part, he knows occasionally a hallucination will grab your attention for longer than it should if that were the case but he'll keep you out of the damn ward for now because this wasn't a hallucination. He had heard the struggle going on between you and someone else.

Right now his top concern was getting to the hospital and meeting up with Dia to make sure your condition was stable. If he had to lie to the sheriff to do it, so be it. Not like he wouldn't enlist his own detail to figure out what went down here. He'd let you stay with them while he contacted Lydia about updating security on her property.

Sheriff Owens didn't put up a fight on this, and said he'd swing by the hospital Wednesday to get your statement on the encounter. With that the sheriff and deputy piled into their car and left. Jo had found your keys still in the door and locked your home, a lot of good it did you but at least this way a bear wouldn't get in before they set up the new system.

Jo got to St. Francis and was greeted by his teary eyed daughter and sobbing wife. Dia really wasn't cut out for any type of violence. He's have to make sure she called her therapist this week for an extra appointment or two just to help her through this. Looking at his daughter he sees the worry in her eyes as she runs to him.

A doctor comes up to the family to inform them of your condition.

“Ah Mr. Cowell good to see you. Mx. LN is responsive right now, and in enough of their right mind to complain that we are keeping them awake.” The doctor pauses with a slight chuckle, “We have them set up with an IV drip that's giving them fluids, their pain meds, and for tonight they'll also have a caloric infusion. They mentioned that they hadn't eaten much today. So to ensure their body has the energy to heal we thought it'd be the best course of action. We're keeping them up for another hour or so before they can sleep and then we'll be keeping them for observation for at least two days.”

“Can we see YN?” little Jo interrupts.

“Unfortunately we believe they wouldn't enjoy that right now. Their injuries aren't extensive but they are quite cranky due to residual pain and hunger.” the doctor says with a smile to little Jo. “Now speaking of their injuries the worst of which is their slight concussion again we're monitoring that and they seem to be very receptive to us right now. And then there's the dislocation of their left shoulder that we've already mended and the various bruising and mental trauma they're likely to retain from the incident your wife has briefly informed us about. We'll give a card for a good therapist to you and one to Mx. LN on their departure. When can we expect the Sheriff coming?”

“Owens said Wednesday.”

“Perfect, then that should be all. If anything changes or we want to keep them longer we'll let you know right away. And Miss Cowell if you come back in the morning we're sure Mx. LN will be much more agreeable company.”

The doctor waits for a moment letting the Cowells have time to process and ask a question or two. But when nothing comes up the doctor turns away to continue their work elsewhere.

And with that the very emotionally exhausted Cowell family go home. With plans to come visit you sometime tomorrow. Big Jo does however makes a few phone calls before going to bed that night. It isn't lost on him that he's already had one employee mysteriously vanish, he doesn't like the thought that she was targeted and your next on some hit list.

#a cure for insomnia #ticci toby #ticcitoby #ticci tobyx reader #ticci toby x reader #masky x reader #tobias erin rogers #creepypasta fanfic #Brian Thomas #brian thomas x reader #timothy wright x brian thomas #Timothy Wright #timo

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tempesthound · 3 years ago

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I tilt my body to the side as I move my motorcycle between the dead cars on the highway; the wind hits the top half of my face, making my eyes water a little. I have to slow my bike to a stop as I got to the highest point on this stretch of road. I could see just what I had come to: a traffic jam. Pulling my hood off my head, I take a drink from my canteen, swishing the stale water around in my mouth before swallowing. It had been a month tops since humanity’s extinction event, and looking around, you would think it had been years. I look inside the car beside me; a corpse laid forward, its head on the steering wheel. It had smashed into the front end of the vehicle. I guessed this lady must have broken her neck upon impact. Pulling my scarf over my nose, I grab my hunting knife and open the door, dragging the lady out. I gagged a little as I searched her body, then the inside of the car. A box of pop tarts under the driver’s seat bless whoever is listening. Popping the trunk, I find a knitted blanket, some chapstick, a backpack with some girl products, which is always an excellent find. I check a few more cars and find a few things before I siphon some gas into my bike. It gave me a few minutes to think about it before.

“Ali, be careful. I heard about some strange attacks happening lately; why don’t you extend your brake a little, tell these attacks to cool down,” Sam says as she touches my arm with a concerned look in her eyes. I sigh, and roll my eyes as I lean on the hood of my car. “I will be fine. My dad didn’t spend years and hours training me just for me to fail at stopping some attacker. Also, I worked too hard to get into this college not to go; I’ll be fine, and it’s just four days from here. If it gets crazy, I’ll come back out to this middle of Nowhere town.”

I should have stayed looking back now; it wasn’t even three weeks later that the world went to hell; I had been making my way back to my hometown. My entire life, I had made jokes about being ‘Zombie apocalypse ready,’ so when I saw the signs, I emptied my bank account on supplies. Water purifiers, battery packs, a few MRE rations, first aid kits, things like that. Then I got in my car and drove, staying off the highways. I headed for the backwoods, but first, I had to go through Missouri. There I lost my car but gained my bike, which I hated for the exposure but loved the gas I saved using it. I heard about the safe zone in Atlanta. Did I believe in it? No. Shaking my head, I cap off my small gas can and strap it down in the saddlebag that I had on the side of my bike, putting everything else in my bag. I get on my bike and start it up. I look around before I take off-putting in one headphone. I start my music, something I had because of several battery packs that were my veritable treasures to keep my phone working for as long as possible.

I slowly drove up to what looks like it was once a camping zone. I parked my bike against a tree. I cover it in the tattered blanket. Then I climbed the tree, wrapping a rope around myself to keep myself from falling out. “Best place to sleep for tonight,” I say as I bunker down, wrapping my arms around myself along with a heavy hoodie for warmth.

Nights like this always made me think back to the good times, times before the dead were ripping into every living creature.

I turn on the news it was, talking about violent attacks worldwide for the past few days. The attacks didn’t sound like they were going to let up soon.

As the news on the riots ended, I shake my head; this was like the start of a cliché horror movie. People broke into Walmarts, riots in food stores, people stalking up on guns and the needed ammo.

“Uncle Jhonny is laughing in his grave now,” I say to my mom, who is humming away in the kitchen, my youngest brother Luke, on her hip like the monkey he was. “Alice!” my mother lightly scolds me. “He called it; he said we would kill ourselves before anything else” I look at the photo of a fiery red-haired male with a smile stretched cheek to cheek as he holds a golden-haired girl with matching green eyes. That was one of the good days when cancer hadn’t eaten away at his bones and taken his mind. “You remind me of him; all his crazy theories filled your head, Rabit” I turn to face the angelic voice of my mother, her little monkey fast asleep in her arms, a smile on her face as she called me that.

Looking back now, it was days like this that I would miss the simple days, days at home with Luke and Mom. Days when my only trouble was school and work; Now I had to worry about walkers and, worst of all, those who survived.

I lean my head back against the tree; I ignore the tears running down my dirty face. Once clean, pale, freckled skin now always smeared with dirt and sweat. The golden blonde hair my mother loved a greasy mess. No, I knew tonight the demons in my mind would keep me awake.

Faster move, don’t stop, don’t look back, when someone is chasing you, you never look back, it raises the risk of you tripping over something in front of you. The words of my trained military father fill my head. My lungs cry out for air, my legs are all but jelly under me, but I can’t risk stopping now. They are too close. The screeches and groans of the man-eaters chasing me are enough to push me past the limits of my weak body. Days of rationing, my food, and water have left me malnourished. So I force myself until the air I’m taking in no longer reaches my brain or muscles. The branches of trees cut at my exposed skin as I push them out of my way, growing dizzier. I jump over a fallen log and stumble as I reach the other side, my legs finally giving out on me.

The once faint sounds of the walking dead now all too close, The dead woman trips over the log falling on top of me, its jaws snapping at me, its grotesque graying skin falling off in places, hollow eyes stare at me, dried pieces of something in its teeth. Reaching for the hunting knife in my boot, I use one hand to hold it by its throat as my hand easily slips through the decaying flesh above me. I turn my head and, using all the force I can, slamming my knife through the temple of the thing’s head, the spray of black blood that hits my cheek and chest is thick and smells worse than rotten eggs. This dead thing that was once alive woman falls like the dead weight she is. I pull myself from under her and lean against the log. The other dead seem to have forgotten me or too far behind for my exhausted body to care.

I don’t know how long I sat there, slowly letting my body catch up to my mind, letting it rest. I had run over five miles of unknown terrain on a body that hasn’t eaten or drank anything in three days. I sat there staring at the dead thing. It had the burned body of a woman. Half her face is gone. It was missing some hair, and it smelled of rotten pork, which made my stomach grumble in emptiness. I pull my bag and look in it. I had a protein bar half-eaten and half a water bottle with boiled river water in it. “Yummy,” I say half heartily.

The woman she probably hadn’t turned over three weeks ago, maybe four. I shake my head and stand my legs, only wobble a little before they decide to work with me instead of against me. My lungs no longer feel like they will jump out of my chest, and my throat doesn’t feel like it’s bleeding. I finish my water, shoving the bottle in my bag—no need to add litter to the decaying world.

Keeping my eyes and ears open as I’m walking munching on the protein bar, it wasn’t more than maybe half an hour when I hear the men’s voices, the sounds of their heavy footfalls and wolf whistles that fill the air in a dangerous song. I stop moving the sound of my feet on the dry leaves on the ground go silent, but the others take a moment, dropping my bar. My movements are quick reaching for the pistole that I had in a hostler on my hip. I pull it out, cock it, and keep walking. Spotting one man, then another, I can hear one more before I pick up my pace, and I sprint. That’s when the chorus of cheers and the chase truly began.

The men are faster than the bitters are they can think and plan when I zig, they zag, I dance through the woods, monitoring the two men at my sides, not daring to slow down, I’m coming up to an opening in the trees, no place to hide, no safety. It’s a battleground. As I break through the woods, I feel two arms grab me wrapping in me in a menacing hug.

I slam my foot down and throw my head and elbows back. I hear the satisfying crunch and groan of an injured man.

“Bitch” The unknown man says as I jump forward, the gun pointed at the man’s head.

“Back off, I know how to use this,” I growl out. I keep backing away from the man, his buddies showing up, their weapons raised. They all looked like the stereotype of an inbreed hilly billy, ratty matted, unwashed hair, and overalls. One even had a potbelly, the man who grabbed me had smelled like he never washed even before the downfall of humanity., none of them had guns. Still, three against one isn’t in my favor, no matter the training, not when my body wasn’t at its peak.

“Three against one honey, come with us nice and quiet, and maybe just maybe you get out of this alive” Lie, I won’t survive what they have planned for me, my body might survive, but my mind won’t. I pull the trigger and shoot the man who grabbed me.I can’t hesitate not when my life is on the line.

“MATTIE, You killed my brother!” Pot-belly yelled he came at me first, and I shot him in his chest twice with two quick pulls of the trigger. I had three bullets left with Potbelly down. I quickly aim at the other one. He came at me at once. Brown hair sticking to his sweaty skin, his arms spread out wide. I brace myself for the hit from him. He takes me to the ground, my gun falling from my hands and away from the us.

He hits my sides and face as I struggle under his weight; I bring my knee up between his legs as he grabs at my leather jacket, pulling at it, trying to tear it off my body; just as my knee reaches his third leg, he holds my hair. Pulling it as he groans, I claw at his face as he slams his fist on my face again. When I scream, he hits my head into the ground. I use my arm to feel around for my knife, my finger brush against the smooth metal at my thigh; he holds my arm down, stopping my movements; I squirm myself under the man as he feels up my body pulling at my thin tee shirt. I bring my head up and slam it against his face. I feel the blood run down my forehead. He falls backward, and groans as my fingers hook around the hilt of the hunting knife. I jump on top of him and slam the blade into the man’s face three times; I bring it down until he stops moving bright red blood, sprays against my face covering my hands and chest, my jacket hangs loosely off my shoulder, my white shirt torn and bloody. I’m still on top of the dead man when I hear a whistle.

“Well, damn, look at these boys” The voice was cocky, and as I turn, I can see why he was tall with a thick beard and messy black hair, a leather jacket hung with grace off his shoulders, a baseball bat with barbed wire wrapped around it like a Christmas tree lights in his left hand. He screamed Alpha male; he was dangerous. The five men behind him didn’t intimidate me as much as he did and the guns they all held.

“Take one step closer. I fucking dare you” I spit out a mix of my blood my victims and slowly stand adrenaline coursing through my veins, my blood knife held in my hand.

“Now wait a damn minute, we’re not here to hurt you, Doll,” Alpha male said as I move away from my bloody victim, picking up the gun not a few inches away from where I shot Potbelly, who was groaning and moving again. I slam my booted foot down on his head over and over, cursing him to hell.

“Then I can leave you and your men, stay there, bury your friends here, and I will go. They would be alive if they didn’t try to kidnap and then rape me.” I feel my adrenaline high slowly coming down; my body suddenly feels very heavy after killing the last attacker I need to get out of here. I walk away from the bodies. My gun still pointed at the Alpha man and his team.

“Names Negan Doll and those sad sacks of shit ain’t my men Number one rule to run with me, no rape,” Alpha man or rather Negan says.

“Then you’re not here because I just brutely beat and shot your men,” I say, lowering my weapon and taking a deep breath, the entire ordeal finally catching up to my brain. I have just been violated, it hasn’t even been a month since the world ended, and people were already taking and killing people. I had just killed someone. I killed three someone’s

“No, in fact, I like a woman who can handle herself,” Negan said his men, relaxing at the sight that I had lowered my gun on their boss. Negan takes this as a sign to walk closer to me. He was a good foot taller than me and huge muscles, no fat on his body covered in denim and leather. Almond brown eyes and a dimple smirk.

“God, Doll, you’re a mess; how about you come with my men and me? We have a nice little house not too far from here. You can wash up, relax, have something to eat. No one will hurt you as long as you’re with me.”

I tilt my head up and look at the unknown man. He pulls out a scarf from his jacket, and cautiously he raises his hand to clean the blood off my face.

“Your one badass woman just kicked a bitter’s head in, took down three shit heads all by yourself, got me all tingly in all the right places” Is he flittering with me right now? Negan is wiping blood human blood off my face and flirting with me, and he’s not scared of me at all. He finished wiping off all that could be when he offers me his hand.

“Come on, Doll, let me take care of you.”

Negan was my savior that day, and we filled the days that followed with flirty words and sarcastic comebacks. We fought but grew closer. He never treated me like I was fragile, never made me stay back when the Bitters came. I was a warrior in his eyes, and he treated me like a queen.

“Never hide from me, Alice, you are a warrior, you are a survivor, a badass built for this world, never forget that”

Then that day happened, the day that the world reminded me that nothing in the apocalypse is safe; nothing is forever.

We had grown in number more men, and the youngest one was 17. I was no longer the youngest in the group, and we moved on from the small farmhouse to just being on the road. We had stopped for the day one scout had spotted a mall that appeared not to have gotten raided. The cars were waiting for their owners to come back to them< I was apprehensive about going into the mall if the vehicles were still there, then where were the people or bitters.

“Don’t worry, Ali-cat, Lucille will watch out for you,” Negan said. I glared at the six-foot-one man.

“I’m not scared, just worried you can’t be too careful, Bossman,” I say, poking his chest; he grabs my hand and kisses it.

“No need to worry, Doll, this will be easy in and out.”

If only that were true, if he had just listened to me, we would still be together.

When we got in, it was quiet, and Negan made it known that he was right; the mall was safe. We were laughing and grinning, going in and out of stores gathering supplies. His men kept a respectful distance behind us. Negan takes my hand and pulls me into an open Forever 21, where Negan is pulling out dresses and heels. I roll my eyes and look around, my eyes falling on a perfect gift for him.

“Hey, look what I found,” I say as I hold up a red scarf as Negan holds out a black choker with a golden letter ‘N’ hanging from the middle.

“I found you something as well,” He says as we swap gifts, “Help me put it on,” I feel his warm hands brush my golden blond hair over my shoulder, slipping the black felt choker over my neck clasping it in place.

We walk around just a little more when we hear the tell groans and moans of the dead outside one door of the indoor theater; we look at each other and head back to the group. I drop Negan’s hand as I see one of the younger guys; Gary reaches for the theater room’s main doors. “DOn’t,” I yell just as he opens the doors; it was too late. He pulled both doors open; the swarm of Biters that came out was overwhelming. We didn’t stand a chance. All we could do was scatter. I feel Negans rough hand grab for mine, but then the dead get between us. It wrenched Negan from me. The sounds of our men’s guns overran the mall, firing shots and the screams of those who were ripped and torn apart. I see Negan’s beloved bat coming down on the heads of the monsters and the men who were too late to be spared as he and the inner circle of men make their way out. “ALICE!” his voice calls out as I pull my knife from the skull of another Bitter “NEGAN, I’LL FIND YOU, I SWEAR,” I call out as I push myself to the main door shooting three more bitters in the head.

“STAY ALIVE DOLL” I hear his voice one last time before I make my way out the fire door of the mall. Stay alive; that was his final order to me: stay alive for Negan for my savior. I make my way to the woods, one hand reaching to touch the necklace at my throat. The sounds of the dead following me as I found myself back at the beginning alone and chased by the deceased.

#negan x oc #the walking dead #negan smith #rick grimes #Spotify #SoundCloud

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hypnoticwinter · 4 years ago

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Down the Rabbit Hole part 1

It's five in the afternoon just outside of Corpus Christi and I and my poor old Elantra with the broken AC are stuck in a traffic jam because some dickhead decided he wanted to cut across five lanes of traffic and got mangled by a semi truck. And then the jam’s compounded by all of the damn lookie-looes slowing down to a crawl as they squirm through the two lanes still open, the metaphorical arteries of the gigantic beast that is the United States highway system, trying to get a good look at something gory on the way home.

I'm slowly melting into my seat, barely able to keep my eyes open. I keep glancing over at the water bottle I'd set snugly into the passenger seat, my cupholders being full with spare change and old receipts and little mini bottles of hand sanitizer, but just the way the sun's reflecting off of it makes me sick thinking about how warm the water would be by now.

I'm a few cars back from the wreck now. A police officer, looking sweaty and tired, steps out into the road, stopping traffic to let a couple of paramedics cross. A loud radio ad is playing in the car next to me and I look over. The guy in it looks about as done with this as I feel. I smile to myself, go back to watching the wreck.

The paramedics have stopped now and are talking to the policeman in the middle of the road. He looks annoyed, gestures at the cars ahead of him. One of the paramedics shakes his head and points back towards one of the cars.

The radio ad ends and the throbbing beat of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" comes on and I find myself singing along under my breath without even thinking about it.

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray

South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio...

Another paramedic joins the group in the middle of the highway and then they hustle over to the wreck. The police officer gestures and we move fractionally forwards, then stop again. The asshole in the giant pickup truck ahead of me has decided to stop and watch them peel the door off the crushed sedan like the scab off a fresh cut. I can see something pink and fleshy and hurt-looking inside, where the driver's seat ought to have been, and I look away quickly.

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning since the world's been turning...

I end up meeting the eyes of the guy in the car next to me. He's bobbing his head along to Billy Joel and gives me a somewhat sheepish, embarrassed look. He's balding, looks about forty. A tired, haggard, sweaty face. I roll my eyes and smile at him and he smiles back. Someone behind me honks and I twist backwards and give him the finger, really slam it at him against the dirty rear window. We're rolling forwards so slowly that it's absurd to even honk, just people blowing off steam. I suppose on some level it's equally absurd to give him the finger for it, but whatever.

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball

ARPANET, Free Tibet, what's in Mystery Flesh Pit?

Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, Mafia

Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go...

Wait. What?

Now that we're past the wreck the highway widens out. More lanes open and the guy next to me merges over to the left. Billy Joel's voice disappears into engine noises and honks and the sound of the wind whipping past my open windows, but I still keep thinking about the lyrics I had just mouthed along to.

What the hell is a Mystery Flesh Pit?

I glance over at the phone sitting in its holster on the dash but something about the way the car I’d just past had crunched in on itself like a discarded candy wrapper makes me think better of it. I shift a lane or two to the right, get in line for my exit, and then I'm off the freeway. I make every light on the way to my apartment, all four of them, and it's just enough time that I forget about the line in the song. I jump into the shower and let the cold water run over me for fifteen minutes, which turns into thirty, which turns into forty-five, which turns into an hour.

When I get out I'm shivering but the warm Texas air blowing through my open window wraps me up like a warm hug, and I shrug into a flannel shirt, leave it unbuttoned. I put my cigarette out, leave it crumpled in the ashtray, stifle my coughs. I’m still not used to smoking this much. I eye the half-empty pack laying on the table but I let it alone.

The letter I received yesterday is on the kitchen table where I'd dropped it. The envelope is still on the floor somewhere. I think about going back and reading it again, or going and finding the envelope and throwing it away, but I don't want to. There wouldn’t be a point.

My phone buzzes; I see the name of the contact and let it ring. I don’t want to talk to him.

Outside, down in the courtyard, an old man is taking his dog for a walk. There is a vast darkened array of clouds closing in from the east and it already smells like rain, the wind is carrying it. I might take a walk too, later tonight.

I go back to the dresser and take my shirt off, slip a bra on, and then put the shirt back on. I almost light another cigarette, then I stop myself.

What the hell is Mystery Flesh Pit?

I had almost forgotten. Almost, but not quite. Billy Joel got stuck in my head and while I'd been puttering I'd hummed along until I got to that verse.

I shake my head and go get my laptop, type it into google half-expecting to find a porn site. A few travelogue type posts, a Wikipedia page...I click on that one and get hit with a redirect. Permian Basin Superorganism Containment Area? ("Mystery Flesh Pit" redirects here. For the defunct U.S. National Park, see...)

I read the page, and then I stop. The growing sense of unease I felt while I devoured the Wikipedia article is now almost too much for me to handle.

This can't possibly be real. This has to be a prank or something, some kind of internet joke gone out of control. I click on the link to the National Park and see pictures, too many and too high quality to be faked. It's like something out of a Michael Crichton novel but it's real. It has to be.

The Permian Basin Superorganism (Immanis Collosseus), I read, is a subterranean organism unique to modern biology, being the sole occupant of the Phylum Immanemqa. The organism was discovered by a pilot well drilling crew in 1973; later efforts were made to expose more of the organism through drilling and surface mining explosives. The Permian Basin Superorganism is notable for its immense size, being the largest living animal on the planet, its equally immense age, and for the degree and sophistication of human exploitation concerning the animal, culminating in the opening of a National Park largely within the creature’s body, allowing visitors to descend within the Permian Basin Superorganism and…

I read about gullets and bones and digestion, about an ancient animal of some kind living baked into the stone and earth outside of Gumption, Texas. I read about the sheer enormity of it, I read about how a mining company turned it into a tourist attraction, splitting its throat wide open with metal retaining walls and letting people ride an elevator a thousand feet down into its insides. I read about ballast, some kind of secretion exuded by the creature that acts as a kind of panacea, healing afflictions untouchable by conventional medicine. They made great baths out of the glands that produced it, let people bathe in its diluted aphrodisiac waters. I read, finally, about the 2007 disaster that closed the park, when a pump failed to activate and drowned the thing, making it wake up – god, wake up? – and swallow almost seven hundred people, making it spew caustic vomit so high into the air that there are still pockets of it being found here and there nearly a hundred miles away, burning into the ground and poisoning water tables. And the way they managed to get it to go back to sleep is classified by the US Government. Did they nuke it? Christ, Gumption is only...okay, well, it's about five hundred miles away, so I guess I'm a little less concerned, but, god, this happened in the same state as me and this is only the first time I'm hearing about it. July Fourth, 2007...

I realize after a moment, with a strange little knot in my stomach, that actually, I did hear about it. I wasn't in the state in 2007. It was four years ago, I'd just gotten out of school and I was still in Oklahoma, but I remember my parents telling me about an earthquake at midnight that they'd felt, that woke them up, knocked a couple of things over. I had never known...

I feel a little like I've just woken up and gone to the bathroom and looked outside and all of a sudden the sky is a bright green, and everybody I ask about it just looks at me really strangely and says that it's always been green.

I google my way all over the internet, looking at photos people have taken decades ago on their family trips, hosted on filesharing sites or on ancient GeoCities-era pages. I see smiling families, people in hiking gear, people swimming inside biological hot springs, people digging pitons into great sheer walls of flesh, not minding the blood that gushes out. I see a shaky video someone's taken of their television, of CNN back on the Fourth of July, 2007, I see a vast bloody pit, carved into the great flat nothing of central Texas.

I feel like my head is spinning. I get up, get away from the computer, grab another cigarette and smoke it slowly, standing on the balcony, looking out over the sprawling cityscape in the general direction of Gumption, Texas, or at least where I think it should be. If north is that way, then…

Alright. It's real. There's enough evidence, photographs, videos, spread across so many different web sites that it would be impossible to fake. I look up an old rating list of National Parks, making sure that it's from around 2004 or so, and find Mystery Flesh Pit near the bottom. The tiny two-sentence blurb describes it as "strange," "horrifying," and "easily skippable," so I guess that could also explain why I had never heard of it.

And, of course, the ballast. Some kind of miracle liquid. I read on Wikipedia that they’d tried to synthesize it after July 4th, after the supplies had been cut off, but no matter how molecularly perfect they could make the compound it was so much drossy bathwater, without the power to cure even a hangnail. It has to come straight from the source for it to be any good - who knows why.

There is a slow, anxious curl unwinding in my stomach, and for a moment, I fear the results it may lead me to.

I look at the map I'd opened in another tab again; Gumption, Texas; a tiny little county named after a tiny little town, or so I've heard. Now that I’m thinking about it, I vaguely remember passing through Gumption once, very briefly, during a family road trip back when I was six, but I don't remember much more than that. The only reason I even recognize the name of the town is because at the time I thought it was a funny name and I kept saying it to myself after I'd asked my mom what the word on the sign meant when we drove into town. Welcome to Gumption. Did it have more, perhaps? “Home of the Mystery Flesh Pit?” I don't remember visiting the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, that's for sure. I think that would have stuck with little six-year-old me.

I eye the scale on the map, use my fingers to estimate the distance from Corpus Christi to Gumption.

It'd be a solid day of driving, seven or eight hours on the road, not counting breaks for food, sleep, restroom. I grimace at the computer screen, then zoom the map out. Lubbock, though...I could take a plane to Lubbock. That'd be, what, like two hours? Maybe? And then rent a car, drive down to Gumption...

I swallow, then laugh at myself. Why bother? I think. Why bother driving down to look at some fences and security guards? It's closed off, the Wikipedia page said, nobody in or out, just some scientists and a sedative plant. The fun stopped when it woke up, back in ‘07.

Flights are cheap. Ninety-nine dollars, ninety-five dollars. I start to type in the address to check my bank balance, then stop, fold the computer closed. I want a cigarette.

On my way out to the window my foot brushes against the envelope I'd left discarded on the floor and again I think of picking it up and putting it away, and again I leave it there. It doesn't really matter.

It'd be a horrible waste of money, probably. And I doubt I'd find anything really meaningful. Even if, you know, I use the excuse of going and looking around so I could write a story on it or something, I don't know if Jim, my editor, would really care that much. From what it seems, Mystery Flesh Pit is ancient history.

I take another look at the sheet of paper sitting on the table, curled over on itself like a dead spider. Fuck it, I think, then repeat myself out loud. I stub out the cigarette and go retrieve my cell phone, look up the phone number for American Airlines out of Corpus Christi airport. Fifteen minutes on hold later I am the proud owner of one business class ticket to Lubbock, Texas, leaving in four hours out of gate nine. I hang up the call and say "fuck it" aloud again because it makes me feel a little better, and then I go pack.

The plane ride is okay. Security was a bear and a half but it always is. I realized from the pleasant-unnerving swooping sensation in my stomach when we took off that it had been long enough since the last time I'd been on a plane that I had forgotten what it feels like. I was lucky to grab a window seat next to a little kid and his father; they didn't bother me as much as I'd expected. Once he turned to me to show me something on the handheld video game he was playing but his father quickly intercepted him and apologized to me; I was a little put out, honestly, I would have wanted to look at it. I'd forgotten to stick a book in my carry-on so I had been stuck staring out the window, and about a half hour in the plane had angled in such a way that the setting sun was glaring me right in the face and daring me to enjoy the scenery, so I did the most sensible thing I could and closed the shutter and tried to fall asleep. I think I managed to do so about fifteen minutes before we landed, which lead to me letting out a rather embarrassing yelp when the landing jolted me awake. The kid and his dad looked at me and I blushed, mentally kicking myself for blushing, but I smiled at them and shrugged and said that I'd fallen asleep and we had a laugh about it.

Lubbock is alright, I guess, if you don’t look at it too closely or stay too long. I rent a car at the airport and drive into town, and consider driving to Gumption that night, but I decide after some deliberation that it'll be better to do a little reconnaissance here first, if I really am going to make a story out of this. Am I? I've been treating that as my excuse so far and yeah, I brought my voice recorder and my camcorder and my DSLR and plenty of memory cards and extra batteries...but I guess I hadn't really taken it seriously.

The city's very alive at night, more so, it seems to me, than Corpus Christi, but I also don't get out very much back home, so maybe my perception is skewed. Everywhere I look there are clubs and shows and bars and things, and then, as I pass into the seedier areas, huddled groups of people spotted here and there. I imagine they’re eying me as I drive past and I tamp down the little curl of fear rising in my stomach.

I find a Motel 6 and then I try to find a Waffle House, but seemingly there aren’t any in Lubbock. I settle for someplace called The Pancake House, and then in a couple of hours I feel better, and then a couple of hours after that I finally manage to fall asleep.

I wake up having slept like the dead. I think about going someplace for breakfast but think better of it after I sit up too quickly and my stomach gives an uneasy lurch in protest. I get dressed leisurely – it is my weekend, after all. For a moment I even manage to fantasize that I'll be able to catch a flight home in time to make it to work on Monday but then I laugh at myself, which I seem to be doing quite a lot of lately.

Barely a hundred miles away, Mystery Flesh Pit is waiting for me. I don't know what I'll find there – personally, I feel rather certain it'll be a hell of a let-down – but it feels nice to have a purpose for once, to feel as though my life is being put to some kind of use other than to see how many cigarettes I can smoke in a single day and still retain some dignity.

It's nice to not have to think.

I take a breath and throw some clothes on and get started on the hard part.

* * *

The guy mopping the floor at the bus stop:

"Excuse me, sir? Do you know anything about the Mystery Flesh Pit Disaster of 2007?"

"The what?"

Businessman on the street, approached while tying his shoes:

"Excuse me, sir? I'm doing some research on the Mystery Flesh Pit disast –"

"I'm sorry, lady, I don't have any money."

Lady at the counter of the pharmacy:

"Excuse me, ma'am? I'm trying to find out some information on the Mystery Flesh Pit, do you have a moment to talk about it?"

"Sure, honey, but I'm afraid I don't know that much about it. That was back in, what, 2003? 2004?"

"2007, actually. Did you ever happen to visit while the park was still operating?"

"It was a park? I just remember something about some sort of tunnel collapse."

"Right. Thanks for your time."

Guy at the 7-11, asked while filling up the tank on my car next to him:

"Hey, dude, you know anything about the Mystery Flesh Pit?"

"Went there once when I was a kid. Pretty cool. Why?"

"I'm a reporter, doing a story on it. You remember the disaster that closed it down?"

"It's closed now? That's lame. What happened?"

"Thing woke up and ate everybody."

"For real?"

"Yeah. I've been asking around, like nobody's heard about it. Kind of surprising."

He taps his finger to his chin. "You know," he says thoughtfully, "it has been like five years since then."

"Four years."

"Even so. People don't have any kind of attention span any more."

His pump clicks off and so does our conversation.

Yeah, alright, maybe it isn't a very representative group, but it seems like nobody cares. Is that reasonable? Well...seven hundred plus people died, most in pretty gruesome ways, according to Wikipedia. Then there were the, god, the thousand or ten-thousand-plus people affected by the vomit and ejecta scattered hundreds of miles away. I’m not sure. You'd expect that apathy from the rest of the nation, maybe, I don't know why somebody in Arkansas or Kentucky or Illinois or wherever would give a fuck if they didn't personally know somebody who was affected, but here? Just a hundred miles from the place or so?

Maybe they did a really good job of cleaning up the cities, maybe it's only the little towns and places where the legacy of it has really clung on. I know there has to be a story, somebody who was there, somebody who saw it. That jerky camcorder video of CNN is a start, but something real, something visceral, in the words of a survivor...

That was the one thing I didn’t find much of. No memoirs, no autobiographies, just a few mentions here and there but nothing like a back-to-front story of what that night was like. That is what I’m really after.

I put my cigarette out in one of those trashcan-cum-ashtrays that dot the corners of every city I've ever been to, Lubbock no exception. I get in the rental car and again forget that it has crank windows instead of buttons. "To the library, and step on it," I giggle to myself as I pull out into traffic. I feel a little lightheaded and I remember that I never bothered to eat anything.

Perusal of the newspaper archives at the Mahon Public Library downtown confirmed what I'd already assumed – that there was no big government coverup, there was no conspiracy of that sort. The disaster at the Mystery Flesh Pit was capital-letter Very Big News for about a month, back in 2007, at least in the area. The stories towards the end of the month cast a little light on why it didn't last, though – it wasn't ongoing, it was just sort of a one-and-done thing. Yeah, finding the caustic vomit everywhere kicked up another stink a week or so later but the Powers That Be seemed to get that under control fairly quickly, at least in more populated areas. After that there were grumblings about disclosure and fault and blame and all that, and quite a few articles about Anodyne Mining or whoever going bankrupt but by the end of the month, aside from a few overly sentimental memorial pieces dedicated to delicately sidestepping the exact causes of death of the people they were memorializing, the news had moved on.

A librarian pokes around the corner with a cart and smiles at me; I smile back at her. She's young, pretty, long skirt, dark eyes. I scoot forward so she can pass behind me. I read on for a while, the faint swish of her skirt and the slim sliding sound of books going back into shelves registering dimly and pleasantly in the back of my mind. I put the paper down and stretch a little, and then I notice she's glancing over at me. I smile at her again.

"Doing some research?" she asks, and I nod.

"Yes," I say. "I'm a reporter for a paper in Corpus Christi and I'm doing a story on the Mystery Flesh Pit. Have you heard of it?"

As soon as the words pass my lips there's something dark and guarded lurking in her eyes that makes me perk my ears up. She waits a couple of seconds before she answers, clearly thinking of what to say, of how much to tell me. I mention, after a moment, that I'm surprised that so few people here in Lubbock seem to really remember it or care about it, and she nods, leans up against her cart.

"It was a big deal for a while," she says, gesturing to the stack of papers next to me, "but after that I guess it just wasn't exciting any more. The only people who really remember it are out in all the small towns where it really affected them. Here, in Lubbock, they just had vans working overtime to clean everything up and then it was easy to forget about. Every now and then I hear about them finding another pile of that vomit somewhere just...festering away out there in the desert."

"Were you there?"

"No," she says, "but my brother was."

"I'm sorry," I tell her. I want to reach out and touch her or something but I don't know if she'd appreciate it, so instead I keep my sympathy subdued. "Is he - ?"

"No, no," she says quickly, "he's alright. He was a park ranger there, he just…happened to be working that night. He, ah...it really fucked him up for a while," she says finally, giving me a grimace. "We haven't talked in a long time."

"I'm sorry," I say again. "That must have been hard, for both of you."

"Yeah," she says, cutting her glance downwards. "He always said some strange things about the disaster, real Alex Jones type stuff. But he just couldn't, you know, move on at all. We got in a big fight about it and, well, that was that."

I wonder what to say for a moment before I cross my legs, set the newspapers aside. "You must have gone there, then, while it was still operating."

"Yes, plenty of times."

"What was it like?"

She laughs softly. "God, that's such a...like, where do I even begin, you know? Have you been to many other National Parks?"

"A few," I tell her. "Not as many as I'd have liked. Crater Lake, Devil's Tower, Badlands, Petrified Forest..."

She laughs. "Real Midwest girl, aren't you?"

"Hey, Crater Lake is in Oregon, that's not the Midwest."

"I wasn't knocking it. Um. Well, it wasn't like any other park you've ever been to, I can guarantee that. It was like, you drive up to it and you park and you walk up these stairs to get to the main observatory building, and you get in there and you look down and there's just...skin. In a hole in the ground. It was extremely disconcerting. From that distance it didn't look real, it looked like it was plasticine or something, like it was a model. And there was something...I don't know, kind of lewd about it?"

"Lewd?"

"Yeah. The way they were spreading it open with these giant metal, like, flanges or whatever, and how it was all raw and pink around the opening...Freud would have had a field day with it. Made you feel like you were watching a gynecological exam."

"I still kind of can't believe they found this thing and thought opening a theme park was the best thing to do with it."

"It was the 70s, I guess." she shrugs. "Place is old, you know. Anyway, once you actually got down into it, it was...it was an experience. You rode this giant elevator down and they had a massive visitor center something like 1200 feet down inside the thing's throat, and you could look out the windows and see all this flesh outside. It was honestly like something out of a movie, it was so surreal. I went there a bunch of times with my brother cause he got an employee discount and I could get in for five dollars and I saw at least ten people have panic attacks and hyperventilate."

I think about my next question for a moment. "Would you say overall that it was, you know, a negative thing? Like, the park on the whole."

"No, absolutely not."

"Why's that?"

She licks her lips. "I think that it's really easy to forget how small we are. We've done all these great things, we've built civilizations, we've put people on the moon, we're exploring the bottom of the ocean, I think humanity in general likes to think that we have everything figured out." She shrugs. "The Mystery Flesh Pit is a really good reminder that we know basically nothing. I mean, they were studying it but they knew practically nothing about it, not how big it was, not whether there were more creatures like it elsewhere in the world, not where it came from, not even if it was awake or if it could move or what the thing looked like as a whole. I think what they ended up doing with it was stupid as hell, but as far as the experience of actually going down inside of it and walking around on a trail and, I don't know, watching macrobacteria roll past outside the fence or seeing something really weird moving around down there and seeing the park ranger guiding you not know what it is either, that's an experience I genuinely wish everybody got to have. It'll change your life."

"How did it change yours?"

She laughs. "Besides, you know, everything with the disaster and my brother and all that shit? Just going down there really made me realize who I was."

"How, exactly?"

She shakes her head. "Like I said, I figured out just how small I was and how – I don't know, how insignificant we really are. These days whenever I get worried or bothered or I stress out over something I think about standing there in the elevator looking up through the glass ceiling and watching the light get smaller and dimmer, like I was falling into a bottomless pit, and I find peace."

"Seems like an odd way to find peace."

"Different strokes, right? Anyway. I really ought to put these books away. Was there anything else you wanted to know?"

I think about it for a moment, then shrug. "I'm planning on heading down to Gumption tomorrow, aside from the pit itself is there anything else I ought to check out?"

She lets out a low whistle. "I think you're going to be very disappointed. They don't let anybody go to the Pit any more, it's all sealed off, has been for years. And Gumption, well...that town has seen better days. I'll give you a tip, though, even though maybe I shouldn't. Look for my brother there, I know he still lives in town. I can't give you his number or his address, unfortunately, because I don't have them any more, but I know for a fact that he works at the only gas station in town, a 7/11, so ask around there and you'll be able to find him. His name's Peter; I'd tell you to tell him I sent you but I kind of get the feeling that might not get you very far."

I thank her for the tip and set the newspapers aside. If I head out tonight I might be able to get some good shots of the fence around Mystery Flesh Pit. I think of it, of the sunset, then discard the thought. Forget it. I'll need a whole day to really dig into it, I think. And more's the better. I have plenty of batteries, I have plenty of storage. Easy girl, there's no rush. Assuming they let me just walk up and start filming, but if I really hype myself up I can half-believe I could talk my way into at least getting some shots of the fence, at the very least.

"Oh, and one last thing."

I blink, look back up at her. She has a faint smile on her face, probably from watching me zone out, that fades quickly. "Don't stay in Gumption too long."

* * *

The drive down to Gumption is dusty and hot and boring. I get about halfway before I realize I'm not driving my poor old Hyundai, I'm driving a rental car, and that it has a functional air conditioner, and then I feel very silly, for though the wind certainly felt nice on the whole I would have much rather just rolled the windows up and sat in the cool air. I see a grand total of four other cars, all coming from Gumption, on the two-hour drive. It's mostly a straight shot but my phone tells me to take a county road that turns into just a dirt track towards the end that, after a little meandering, plops me out onto a back street of Gumption, Texas.

The research I'd done suggests that at one point Gumption had been a bustling little town, fuelled by the Pit’s tourist draw, and initially its size would indicate that it still is. But as I drove slowly through the empty streets, the general air of disrepair and decay became more and more apparent. I see a couple abandoned houses, and not the foreclosed sort with realtor's signs out front, but straight-up shattered-glass, boarded-windows, holes-in-the-roofs abandoned. The ones that weren't just looked sad, like no one was taking care of them properly. The cars parked on the street are all at least five or six years old, as best as I can tell. I see only two people out and about while I'm driving around at 15 miles an hour, getting some video footage, cruising down the middle of the road, eyes flicking between the empty street ahead and the screen on my camera. One, a youngish-looking black guy, keeps his head down and doesn't look at me, and the other, an old man in a wifebeater mowing his lawn, stares at me all the way down the street, until I turn the corner and pull onto the main road.

There's the 7/11. I'm tempted to head to it right away but I refrain, look for a diner or something, but the ones around look about as welcoming as the rest of the place. There's a McDonald's but it's so small it doesn't even have a drive-through, which is something I'd never seen before. There's a drug store and a liquor store and one of those tiny little storefront churches, something something Starry Wisdom. I think about going to McDonald's but instead I pull a u-turn and head back to the gas station. The clerk, a haggard-looking woman, doesn't look up from her magazine when I walk in. I wander to the back and grab a Coke out of the fridge unit. The credit-card reader is broken so I have to dig around in my wallet and find some bills. The entire exchange continues without any speech at all until I work up my nerve and lick my lips and ask her if there's a hotel around here somewhere.

She looks at me for a few moments and then jerks her head towards the road. Her voice sounds like a frog croaking. "There's a motel down the road a ways. When you pull out take a left and turn at Third street."

"Thanks."

"No problem."

"By the way."

"Yeah?"

"Can you tell me when Peter works?"

I had to think for a moment to remember his name. I have it written down in a notebook but it's out in the car. Her eyes flash a little more lively. "Who's asking?"

I think of what to say for a moment before I shrug. "A friend."

For a moment I think she's going to tell me to fuck off, but something in my face must have convinced her. "He's off today. Come in tomorrow at eight or nine at night, he'll be here. He works graveyard most days."

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it."

I walk out the door and the heat hits me like a thrown punch. I blow a breath out and lean up against the rough cinderblock edge of the gas station building and drink my Coke.

It's four in the afternoon and it'll take me maybe half an hour to drive down to the Mystery Flesh Pit. It'll be cooler, too, in the evening, and if this town is any indication I doubt there'll be much of a line. I wonder where the people who work there live; maybe they have a dormitory there or something. Clearly they don't live here. Maybe there's some little patch of suburbs somewhere, behind those hills over there, perhaps, where all the people are, but it's four in the afternoon and I've seen a grand total of three other cars driving around, so maybe not.

The guy at the motel gives me a nicer greeting than the lady at the 7-11 did, although not by much; at least I get a few dirty molars of a smile out of him as he hands me the key to my room. I had to wake him up from his nap at the front desk in order to get the room to begin with, and though I tried to do so as gently as I could he still started and almost fell out of his chair.

"Here for the Pit?" he asks as I'm about to leave, and I turn back, glance at him.

"Yeah," I say after a moment. "Just going to see what's there now."

"You're heading over now?"

"Yes."

"Huh," he grunts after a moment. "Most of you folks don't do that 'till dark."

I frown. "Us folks?"

"You know, you..." his eyes roam over my face and his mouth drops open very slightly. "Oh," he says heavily. "Never mind."

"What?"

"Nothing, ma'am. Now if you'll excuse me –"

"Wait, hang on –"

"You have a good day now, ma'am."

He disappears into the back room and I stand there, glaring at the door as it swings shut, key still looped around my finger. I have half a mind to vault the desk and head back there and demand to know what the hell he was talking about, but I take a deep breath and let it out. What could he have meant? Maybe he thinks I work over at the Flesh Pit or something, although that wouldn't explain why they only head over after dark...that doesn't make sense. Tourists, maybe? But that doesn't make sense either.

I chew on my lip for a little while and then shake my head, push the door open and let the heat swallow me up again. There's no sense brooding on it; the only thing to do is to move forward.

* * *

The drive down to Mystery Flesh Pit is, if it were possible, even hotter and more boring than the drive down to Gumption. The heat is pounding on the window and begging me to let it in so I turn up the AC, trying to drown it out, but it's no use. No matter where I put my arm the sun is pouring down on me, and if I leave it still for more than a moment I get that unpleasant prickling sensation that tells me I'm starting to burn already. I've already got a pretty terrible driver's tan from the ride down but this is just overkill.

No cars pass me on the long road that my phone assures me is the way to the Permian Basin Superorganism Containment Corporation. It's only wide enough for one so if someone did come by someone's going off the road. Hopefully not me, as this rental Toyota is not built for that sort of thing. It's already been complaining at me creakily and jostling me around. I'll have to get it a car wash or something when I get back to Lubbock, whenever that ends up being. I didn't read over the rental contract very closely but I'm pretty sure if I bring it back this dusty there's some kind of fee.

You can see the outline of the plant, growing larger up ahead. It looks unassuming, exactly like any other indecipherable cluster of industrial buildings you'd see along the side of the highway, all greyish-white, tubes and pipes and tanks and corrugation, warning signs and fences and barbed wire, power lines and scaffolding and light poles, all clustering out of the ground like mushrooms after a cold rain. The guard in the gatehouse is watching me as I pull up, but I turn off the road, turning the car around so I'll be ready to go whenever I need to, well away from the road so anyone trying to get in or out can get by without any trouble.

The sign on the fence broadly proclaims that this is the site of the Permian Basin Recovery and Superorganism Containment Corporation, and says that the administration building is to the right, along with the barracks, infirmary, commissary, and so on.

I get out, shut the car door, take my camcorder with me. I keep it on but held low, taking a shot of my feet. I wander up to the gatehouse and the guard steps out, hand on the butt of his pistol, resting loose but confident. He has an MP helmet on and I wonder whether the National Guard is in charge of security or something, and then I wonder if I'm about to get got for trespassing. Surely there'd be more of a commotion if I was, right?

The guard has a sharp face but disconcertingly watery eyes. "Hi," I tell him.

"This area's off-limits to civilians, ma'am," he tells me.

"I'm not trying to get in," I assure him. "I'm a journalist, I just want to take some photos. Is that okay?"

He relaxes a little, points up and down the fence. "Right now," he says, "you're on public land. You go over that fence, you're trespassing on Federal land. Understand?"

"Yessir," I grunt, reflexively. Some old habits never die.

"You can take photos of whatever you like except for people inside the fence, understand? Before you leave I will check your camera."

"Yessir."

"Any questions?"

"Can I take a photo of you?"

"Am I inside the fence?"

"No."

"Then yes, you can."

I bring my DSLR up, snap a picture of him. He gives me a cheesy grin. I look at the display and then back up at him. "You blinked."

"Better take another."

I do so. "You know," I say to him, "this is a much more civil interaction than I expected it to be."

He pauses, halfway back to the guardhouse, to shrug at me. "You're just lucky that the government doesn't also own the land around the park. On most military bases it's like that, you know, they own a hundred-foot radius out from the fence, but here it's different."

"Cause it used to be a National Park?"

"I believe so."

"Do I have to stay in your sight or anything?"

He shakes his head. "No, there are cameras. Just make sure you don't touch the fence, it's electric."

I look at the sign on the fence again; I'd sort of skimmed over it before but a few more things catch my eye this time, especially the bright red one proclaiming that it's charged to 10,000 volts. I whistle. "Y'all really don't want people getting in, huh?"

"It's dangerous."

"So I've heard. Want to do an interview?"

"Can't do that, ma'am. What paper are you with?"

"Corpus Christi Star-Tribune."

He raises his eyebrows. "You're a long way from home. What brings you down to Gumption County?"

I briefly explain what got me interested in the Mystery Flesh Pit and he nods. "Lot of people seem to have forgotten about this place. It's for the best, I'd say."

"Care to elaborate?"

"No, ma'am," he says, but not unkindly. "I can't talk to reporters."

"Come on," I wheedle. "Who'd know?"

"We're on camera," he repeats.

"Fair enough," I shrug.

He gets back in the guardhouse and I run a hand through my hair and turn my attention to the fence. I take a shot of the gates, of the fence, of the signs on the fence, of the great bulging buildings visible through the fence. I get a nice one of the fence extending along into the horizon, a great metal wall bisecting the flat, hot plain of West Texas earth, extending into infinity, it seems, a shimmer of heat distortion bubbling off of it down in the distance. I get another good one of the sun dipping downwards behind the plant, swallowed by it, casting shadows across my face, long spidery ones that scrape the ground. Then, once I'm at about fifty-percent capacity on my memory card, I put the camera away and sit there on the trunk of the car, kicking my heels idly against the gravelly ground, taking it all in. I read the sign again and I call out to the guard. After a moment he comes out of the gatehouse again.

"What is it?" he asks.

"What's that sign mean?" I ask him, pointing to it. He turns, looks at it.

"I don't think it's very ambiguous," he tells me, and I roll my eyes.

"No, I'm serious. What the hell does it mean? 'Over 500 people die each year attempting to commune with the Organism?' What does that - ?"

"Ma'am, I really can't talk about it."

I look at him carefully but he seems serious, and the sign, well...it's a sign on an electric fence on federal property, so surely it's serious as well. I turn my camera back on and snap a photo of it, then I realize that there's a bit of background noise, coming slowly closer. It's the rumbling of an engine.

There, down the road, is an unmarked white Econoline van. It flashes its brights at me and I step out of the road, let it pass by, while the guard at the gate straightens his uniform. It pulls up to the gate and the guard leans in. He and the driver have a brief conversation before the guard steps back and reaches into the booth to open the gate. The gate opens but the driver of the van sticks his head out, looks back at me. He has a jowly, bristly face, about two five-o'clock shadows away from a beard, and a large bald spot.

"And you, what are you doing here?" he calls, and I get up, a little surprised to be addressed so abruptly. The guard comes out in a hurry, shaking his head.

"Sir," he starts, but the guy in the van isn't having any of it.

"Shut up for a second," he says. "Lady, what're you doing out here?"

"I'm –"

"Sir, you really shouldn't –"

"Look, lady," he says, gesturing me closer. "Things don't have to go this way. There've been a lot of advances with medical technology that can really help you out with those urges. There's –"

"Urges?" I ask. I get a prickly feeling all up and down my spine, like I'm hearing something I ought not to.

"Sir," the guard says, urgently now, "she's a reporter."

The man's mouth snaps shut so quickly he might as well have been a cartoon character. He flushes an angry red and glares at the guard as though he wants to say something but he just ducks his head back through the window of the car and drives through the gate, which closes after him. I shake my head.

"I suppose," I say after a moment, "that you aren't going to tell me what he meant?"

"Not a chance."

"Well," I say, getting up and stretching, "it's been fun."

"You have a good night now."

"Am I going to get a visit from the Men in Black at my hotel room later?"

"I wouldn't worry about that."

"Riiiight." I waggle my eyebrows at him. "That's exactly what they'd want me to think."

He laughs. "Good luck," he tells me.

"I get the feeling I'll need it."

"You’ll be fine," he says after a moment, but I do not feel reassured.

* * *

I drive back to Gumption with the setting sun blazing in my rearview mirror. It slips out of view entirely and coats the sky in dusky purples that quickly fade to black, and then it's the figurative middle of the night. One-handed I manage to wriggle a cigarette out of the pack on the seat next to me and transfer it to my mouth and then feel around for my lighter, and then I groan and pull over. The guy at the rental desk at the airport had seen the pack of cigarettes in my hand while I was filling out the paperwork and told me very strictly that I had better not smoke in the car and I, of course, had managed to forget completely. It's a good thing I remembered before I lit up.

The night is cold but not unbearably so. I spend a long time there, leaning against the trunk of my car, cigarette in my hand but forgotten momentarily, staring up at the sky. There's so little light pollution out here that I can see what feels like all of the stars, practically, great scattered dustings of them sweeping across the whole of the night sky like someone had tossed them there. There's the Big Dipper, there's Orion, there's the Little Dipper... I think that bright one is Mars, maybe, it looks a little reddish. And that cluster there must be the Pleiades.

I take a breath and blow it out and realize exactly how tired I am. It's somewhere lurking in the back of my skull, right behind my eyes, coiled around my neck. If I closed my eyes I'd probably be able to fall asleep out here, right on the hood of the car.

I crack my neck and wince. The moon's bright and full tonight, at least, so I can still see the barren terrain all around me.

I consider the cigarette for a moment before I throw it to the ground and crush it out. I don't normally litter, really, I swear, but the exhaustion creeping over me is making me not care.

There's a long drainage ditch along the side of the road here, terminating in one of those white-concrete tunnels disappearing into the dirt, its mouth wide enough to swallow me whole if I felt like going down there. I stifle a yawn, kick a rock down into the ditch, and traipse around the side of the car, get in and start it up. From where I parked it, the headlights angle downward enough to reveal a sliced-pie cut of the inside of the tunnel and there, inside it, I see for only the briefest second a pale, wide-eyed face staring at me, along with a dark-jacketed body and a hand, curled there on the floor of the tunnel like a spider before, in a flash, the man retreats into the darkness deeper in the tunnel and is gone.

I can feel my heart beating out of my chest and I realize my mouth has dropped open. Real animal fear has seized me and my rational mind cannot jerk back the reins. I put the car into gear, fumbling first and sticking it in neutral, and then push the pedal all the way to the floor and roar off into the dark.

I was very lucky that there was no one trying to get to Mystery Flesh Pit that night, for I probably would have flipped the car trying to go around them. The closer I get to Gumption, the slower I drive, until finally I manage to get myself to stop the car just outside of town. I pull over again and get out, curling my lip at my shaking hands, and light up another cigarette.

It was just a homeless guy, hiding in a drainage ditch. I probably spooked the fuck out of him, pulling up right there on top of him and hanging out. He must be wondering what the fuck I was doing out there. Probably scared him more than he scared me.

Why did I wig out so bad anyway? I like to think I've got a pretty good nerve. Well, stress is a good excuse, I guess. Or perhaps it's because he was simply hiding down there, unknown, unnoticed, the whole time I was sitting there on the hood of the car, completely oblivious. He could have rushed out and attacked me, if he'd had the guts to, and I wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.

I take another drag at the cigarette and glare up at the stars again. Ursa Major, Orion, Pleiades. Sometimes, when it's quiet like this, I allow myself to think about what the coming year, or possibly years, if I'm lucky, will be like.

Whatever.

I crush the cigarette out and drive back into town, head back to my motel room. I feel better once I've showered and put on some shorts. I get into bed and pull the covers up, and even though they're the scratchy, weird-feeling covers used in seemingly every cheap motel in America, regardless of location, I drift off to sleep easily enough.

Continue with Part 2

Back to Table of Contents

#writing #mystery flesh pit #writeblr #Michael Crichton #thriller #novel #alt lit

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fandom-necromancer · 5 years ago

Text

A little distraction

Fandom: Detroit become human | Ship: Reed900 | AU: reverse AU

It was shivering cold outside even with the warmest cloak and scarf. It had to be one of the worst winters Detroit had ever seen with freezing temperatures and constant snowfall. Richard was relieved when the car’s heater finally started to work after the first minutes of desperately trying to keep his hands on the icy steering-wheel. The radio was people talking. He hated it when there were people talking instead of music. The drive home was twenty to thirty minutes, depending on the traffic. He didn’t need information about traffic jams or closed roads. He knew he would be stuck in traffic. Also, he didn’t want to listen to the peoples jokes or how the weather would be or what kind of shit happened in the world again. He just wanted to relax from today’s police-work and let the songs lull him into driving just a bit slower and safer than his usual temper suggested. But changing the channel or shutting it off completely felt like admitting defeat to the cheerful humans. Were they even human? He continued suffering through the jokes he couldn’t laugh about, through the weather that wouldn’t change in the near future and through the news that told of violence, war and football, just to be followed by cheerful advertisement. If Richard hated one thing more than people talking on the radio it was people talking at him on the radio speaking of what he dearly needed and had to go buy immediately. With calm patience that he concentrated on to ignore the rising anger below, he drove until a red-light stopped him.

He finally succumbed to the rage inside him and hit the button to mute it after the twentieth Christmas jingle. As he turned back to the street, his eyes got caught by something moving outside. The traffic-light was located at a crossroad, next to a few bars and a scrapyard. Everything was covered in a thick blanket of snow and the disturbed darkness of recently moved metal scraps was too obvious. There was an android standing in front of a heap, rustling through it. But before Richard could see anything more than that, the light changed to green and he was immediately honked at. Fucking asshole drivers.

Richard was unbelievingly tired. His last case had kept him up far too long to be healthy, his brother was too excited for Christmas to stop babbling about it and his weird android partner was no help in shutting him down making plans for everything. Richard was far too relieved to be in his car and drive alone with himself, even if it was to the sounds of “Last Christmas” for what felt like the hundredth time today. His routine got the best of him. Always departing at the same time, always taking the same route had him stopping at the same red-light every day. And recently it had become a habit to look out of the passenger side window and search for the android. It had always been there. Sometimes rummaging through the heaps of metal, sometimes simply staying there idling, snow gathering up on its shoulders. Lately, when he had been honked at to drive on and should have forgotten about it, the android remained at the forefront of his head. Was it a deviant? The way it was idling in the snow suggested otherwise. Was it working in the scrapyard? That also seemed inaccurate. The thing looked as if it was searching for something when it was active. Usually Richard came to the conclusion that he shouldn’t care for the reasons of a random android standing in some scrapyard. He should just hurry home, drink something warm and maybe alcoholic, watch some TV or read and most importantly: get some sleep.

‘Hey, Rich, don’t you dare fleeing home tomorrow!’, Connor threatened Richard in a cheerful manner. ‘I allowed it last year because there was an android revolution, but this year you are coming to the precinct’s party! And remember to buy a little present, you got Tina, remember?’ Richard sighed heavily and laid down his pen. How the hell had Connor found out who he had for secret Santa? He himself had only glimpsed at the paper before folding it in his pocket. What did one even buy for an android? He liked Tina, she was a funny, capable person with every right to call herself just as human as he called himself. But there were differences between both species and Richard wouldn’t even know what to buy for someone of his own. ‘Of course, I’ll come, Connor. Just don’t expect me to be happy about it or staying long.’ ‘Come on, bro, you will never find friends like that.’ ‘I worked here for half a year already. I don’t think one Christmas party will suddenly have me be the social expert like you are.’ ‘Now you are just speaking bad about yourself. I know you, Nines. Just try to have fun, okay?’

Richard didn’t have fun and he had stopped trying after the first hour. His regular work day had ended and instead of driving home to relax and calm down, he had to drive with Connor and Hank to that stupid party. At first there had been the possibility of banter: Talking to people that were in different shifts now, greeting newcomers, congratulating someone on personal achievements like house, marriage or kids. But then it drifted off to personal topics and Richard was quickly becoming a quiet bystander, listening to other’s stories until he couldn’t take it anymore and opted for the buffet. Eating at one of the poser tables, he observed the people around him successfully overlooking him. He stayed there for another courtesy-hour, before fleeing the scene, leaving Tina’s present – a pendant with an amber the form of a cat – at the table with the other presents. All he could think of was that he probably wouldn’t see that scrapyard-android today.

He slowed down approaching the traffic-light hoping for it to turn red before he passed. Of course, it stayed green and he just got a passing glimpse of the scrapyard. The android stood there again, snow piling on top of it, staring straight ahead.

Connor had scolded him for leaving early, of course. He couldn’t understand how he could go before the presents were handed out and Richard listened to him, sipping coffee out of the Christmas-themed mug he had been gifted and had swiftly exchanged the one he got last year with. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tina walking past the breakroom wearing the necklace with the cat, smiling with a vibrant blue LED. At least she liked her present. Connor let him go after a sigh. His brother knew he hadn’t really listened. ‘Me and Hank are inviting you over for Christmas. Don’t worry, it’s nothing big. But you should spend the holiday with family.’ Richard could hear the hurt in his voice and decided to let go of his defences for a second. ‘Connor, you know I am not one for big parties and pretending to be happy to fool everyone, okay? But I know this is important for you and I won’t leave my big brother hanging.’ He even sported a real smile. ‘Also, I think I am honestly looking forward to it.’

He really did. He loved his brother more than he would admit and seeing him happy again with Hank after all that had happened made him equally glad. Maybe a bit of human interaction would do him good and Christmas really wasn’t something to spend alone. He had worked today, and it had been a silent, slow-paced day. Connor and Hank had taken the day off to prepare, Chris wanted to be home with his family too, they had a little girl. If it meant someone else would be happy, he gladly worked on a holiday. Also, Tina kept him company and her cheerful soul had lifted his spirits. He just had to quit early enough to drive home, shower, get dressed and relax a little before it was time to head off. He drove home, not without wishing everybody a merry Christmas and hug the android goodbye. Finally, in his car, he already thought about the evening. What to say, what to do, just some overall preparation to ease into the night.

He arrived at the red light again and habitually looked into the scrapyard. It took him some time to find him crouching somewhere, nearly completely covered in snow. It was glitching. Richard watched the erratic movements and the spray of snow. Even as there were people lining up behind him, honking and throwing expletives his way, he stared. As there was someone standing next to him, knocking on his window, he just showed him his middle finger and pulled over on the sidewalk to exit the car. Maybe it was his pissed off stare, maybe it was the badge and gun on his belt, but they left him alone once the street was free. Richard just turned to the scrapyard and carefully advanced towards the android.

The snow was deep in the scrapyard. The sidewalk had been freed of it, but as soon as he entered the property he sank into it up to the ankles. He cursed at the cold water, seeping into his socks as he wore his work shoes. He surely hadn’t planned an impromptu snow-hike when he stood up this morning. The android flinched as he came nearer and at his angry hushed words. More even than he already did. Richard moved on through the heavy snowfall, keeping his head down. He soon shivered despite his coat. As he stood before the android, he rubbed his hands already. Of course, he had left his gloves in the car.

‘Hey!’, he greeted the android cheerfully and hopefully in a reassuring manner. In a ripple(?) of snow the android jerked his head up at him, his eyes not really seeing him. The LED was still red, had been from the beginning. He didn’t answer or move otherwise. ‘Bad day to be outside, huh?’, He pointed up in the air, where the snowflakes were rushing down. He smiled, looking back down on the android who still didn’t show any sign of understanding. But his head was cocked to the side. A snowflake landed on his nose, on top of a weird dark-blue scar. It didn’t melt. ‘What are you doing here, buddy?’, Richard tried again. ‘Doesn’t look like an android like you should be out here all alone.’

‘A-A-An Aaaaandroooooid like meee?’ The android’s voice was heavy with static and Richard had difficulties understanding him. ‘This aaaa threat, d-d-d-dipshiiit?’ Richard looked at the android in surprise, then chuckled. ‘Nah. Just… In general. No one should be out in this weather. And no one should be alone this day.’ ‘Whyyyy. Aaaaaandroooids don’t feel temperature. And it’s just anooother daaay.’ ‘It’s Christmas’, Richard chuckled again. He knew these phrases, liked to use them too. It didn’t mean they were true. ‘Doesn’t someone as pretty as you got someone waiting for them?’ ‘Phck you, aaaiiiin’t your business huuuumaaan. M not p-p-pretty.’ ‘If you say so.’ Richard smiled to himself and looked over the scrapyard. ‘I just saw you standing here every day on my way home. I wondered what you do here.’ ‘Wait.’ ‘For what?’ ‘Yooouuu are a r-r-r-really curious meeeeaatbag, you know t-t-that?’ ‘Yeah, my brother used to tell me all the time’, he smiled. ‘Just can’t help myself.’ The android grew quieter and at the same time was easier to understand: ‘I wait. I just wait. There is nothing more to it.’

‘Well then, would you mind waiting somewhere else?’, Richard proposed. ‘If you waited for so many days, I don’t think whatever you are waiting for is coming soon.’ ‘Aaaand where wo-wo-would that be?’, The android asked, standing up in jerky motions. ‘Well, I’m invited over to my brother and his android-boyfriend for Christmas. That’s like… our whole family I guess.’ ‘And you d-d-don’t want to appear there alone?’ The android was visibly angry now. ‘W-w-want someone to pretend being family, th-th-that you can throw out the next day?’ ‘Oh, hell no’, Richard laughed loudly. ‘I just wanna piss off my brother and don’t want to think about you sitting in some scrapyard in the snow alone.’ ‘Why?’ ‘It’s Christmas’, Richard said as if it was the most obvious thing. ‘What does this day mean if we are not for once nice to each other? You don’t have to, of course. Just an offer.’ ‘I’m not your phcking p-pu-puppet, a-a-asshole!’ ‘Never said you would be’, the man shrugged. ‘So what? You coming? Getting cold as hell out here.’ ‘Fine.’

Richard nodded with a wide grin and walked back to the car, fishing his phone out of his pocket, dialling Connor. ‘Hey, Con, I’m gonna be late’, he greeted him, somehow not getting that smile out of his voice. ‘Nines, if you’re planning to stay home, you can absolutely forget that! You are coming! I don’t expect much from you, but one time of the year you will be able to socialise and meet your damn brother! I-‘ ‘Con! Connor!’, he interrupted and quickly looked back to the droid struggling with the high snow. ‘I’m coming! What the hell are you thinking? I just wanted to call and tell you I’ll be a bit late. And there will be another person, I hope that’s okay? Don’t worry with the cooking, he is an android.’ The silence stretched, but then Connor was near screaming into the mic, probably joyfully, Richard wasn’t too sure as it oversteered. ‘Rich, that’s amazing! Holy shit, I… Hank! Nines is bringing a guest; can you believe it?’ Richard chuckled, and interrupted him again: ‘Hey, Con, don’t pretend it’s the weirdest thing that happened okay? We just met, it’s not like I know him that much.’ ‘Hey, for you it’s super weird, okay? Just hurry, don’t let us wait too long!’

Richard pushed the phone back in his pocket and opened the door for the android, who hesitantly entered, before he walked around and sat behind the wheel. He sorted himself back into traffic and got back to driving home to get changed and wash off everything from work. Also, now he had an android with him, wet from melted snow and not in best condition for a Christmas celebration. Well, one step after another. First, he would have to get home. The radio was actually music for once and a Christmas song he hadn’t heard in at least three hours, so it lifted his mood a lot. ‘Your br-br-brother is weird.’ Richard looked over to the android before concentrating on the street again. ‘Yeah, he is. But in a quirky, funny way. We don’t have much in common. But he’s a good guy. And my brother. We look out for each other. He’s the only family I got, and I love him very much.’

The android nodded jerkily and looked out of the window. ‘Why does he call you N-n-nines?’ ‘Ah, just a nickname. Got it the first few weeks we started working in the precinct. He somehow found out I only ever talked to nine people and ignored everyone else. I myself never recognised that. Now he calls me that whenever I am particularly secluded. But It’s fine, I like it and he doesn’t mean any harm with it. More of a joke I guess.’ ‘Still weird.’ Nines nodded breathing out a laugh. ‘Yeah. What’s your name?’ ‘G-Gaavin.’ ‘That’s a nice one. I’ll try to remember it, Gavin, but I’m not that good with names.’ ‘Okay, Nines.’ ‘Did you just-?’ Richard looked over to the android that showed a lopsided smirk. ‘Maybe.’

Richard felt that maybe, this Christmas wouldn’t be too bad, as he pulled into the driveway and led the android to his house.

#Detroit become human #dbh #dbh reverse AU #Reed900 #human!RK900 #android!Gavin #Gavin Reed #RK900 #Christmas story #Merry Christmas everyone!#Get the title? Because Gavin is small? Am I funny yet?

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cecilspeaks · 6 years ago

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144 - The Dreamer

It’s turtles all the way down. But man, it’s kittens all the way up.

Welcome to Night Vale.

Our top story today is the PTA bake sale from 4 until 8 PM at Night Vale High School. There will be cakes, pies, cookies and all sorts of desserts available, and the money goes to a great cause: funding for the blood space war. PTA officers Steve Carlsberg, Susan Willman, and Diane Crayton expect this to be the largest bake sale in more than a decade. This is because the City Council, in cooperation with the Sheriff’s Secret Police, in cooperation with a vague, yet menacing government agency, in cooperation with the world government, in cooperation with the lizard people wing of the Bilderburg group, has mandated that all citizens participate in this spring’s PTA bake sale. A group of men in black suits wearing sun glasses and earpieces gathered around City Hall this morning to confirm this. “Perhaps bring some moist blueberry muffins,” one of the mysterious men announced. “Or invisible pie,” said another. “Oh, oh, oh! If you have one of those special pans that makes only brownie edges,” said another. And each of the men squealed and clapped their hands saying: “Yes! Those are the best!”

So head on down to the high school and buy and sell some tasty baked goods for a valiant cause. It’s illegal not to.

In related news, more than 200 soldiers died yesterday in the bloodiest battle yet of the ongoing blood space war. Not all have been identified, but we have learned that Corporal Waymon Davis and Sergeant Yasmine Alfonse, both residents of Night Vale, are believed to be among those killed. Officials from intergalactic military headquarters said no armistice is in sight, as they are not certain who they are fighting, what they are fighting for, and when the fighting is even happening. “Time is super relative, man,” said senior strategic advisor Jameson Archibald. “Like prrrrrrr, mind-blowing how some of the people who are fighting this war haven’t even been born yet! My head hurts just thinking about that. Spacetime, can you even believe it, just woooow!” Archibald concluded.

Why are we fighting this war and who is involved, and beyond bake sales and online crowd sourced donations, who is funding this conflict? Over the next few weeks, I will try to do my best to answer some of these questions, but beware that these questions may have no answers. Or worse, have answers that make no sense. Today we will start with what we know. We will start the story of – Eunomia.

Eunomia grew up on a farm. Her parents planted invisible all corn. All day, Eunomia would work the fields. This was the early 1800’s, so there were no gas powered tractors or tillers or combines. Eunomia would plant each invisible corn seed one by one in long rows over several acres. She enjoyed this work, because she loved the fresh air, the insects and the birds, and the dusk, her favorite moment. The stars would come out. During the late summer she would lie down in the corn fields, hidden among the tall invisible stocks of majestic corn. And she thought of all the possible worlds beyond this one. Eventually, her mother would call her home for dinner, and the next day Eunomia would dream about those worlds while culling the ripened corn, anxiously awaiting the disappearance of the sun, so she could comprehend the infinite possibilities of a life that was not this one.

On her 17th birthday, Eunomia went out to the corn field, but never returned. When her parents went to look for her, they found a large perfectly round clearing. There was no corn in this circle, only flat dirt, Eunomia’s packed lunch uneaten, her diary, her tools, and the clothing she had worn that morning, the last time anyone saw her.

In the 1980’s, librarians at the Night Vale Public Library found Eunomia’s diary, which historians had long thought to be either or legend. The librarians said they found it underneath the second floor Dr Pepper machine. A bibliophile or historian must have hidden behind the vending machine, trying to escape hungry librarians, but left the artefact behind when that person either escaped or was eaten. The librarians who found the book placed it on display in a new exhibit called “Early Night Vale Life: Quotidian scrawlings of delicious mortals”. It took many years of armed expeditions into the public library and cost many lives for historians to read this entire diary. But their brave efforts eventually paid off, as most of the diary has been transcribed or photographed. Here are a few sample entries from Eunomia’s journal.

“July 15, 1815. The star I have named Wolfgang has moved from its constellation. I believe it to be an artificial vessel. I shall send it a message somehow.

August 1, 1815. Wolfgang has grown larger and now changes colors. Tonight, it is azure. Last night it was turquoise. I predict it has seen our Earth.

September 4, 1815. Tonight I have carved a message into the corn. It is not in English, but in patterns, concentric circles connected by sharp angular lines. I have carved this message quite large. I do hope it is legible. Tomorrow morning I shall find out.”

And just below this entry, Eunomia has sketched this cornfield pattern into her diary. Her final entry was on September 5. “A man with a mirror for a face has come for me. Does not speak. Farewell.”

More on the story of Eunomia in a moment, but first, breaking news from city hall. Pamela Winchell, the city’s director of emergency press conferences, called an emergency press conference to announce, and I quote, “some crazy black bull blanks going down over here, y’all. Whooollyyy blank,” she added. Winchell was standing near a cornfield on the property of John Peters – you know, the farmer. She was covering her mouth with one hand and pointing with the other while jumping up and down. Winchell said, “Y’all have to see this mess, but also like don’t come aaanywhere near here, no way. But still like, it’s kinda beautiful with all the lights and stuff, you really have to see it but you can’t, don’t. Definitely don’t come out here, nothing to see,” she said firmly, only to continue: “Cooool, oh blank that’s raaaaad.”

City Council quickly ushered Winchell away from the microphone and said that they have formed a secret exploratory committee to investigate the lights coming from John Peters’ land. More on this story as it develops.

For weeks after Eunomia disappeared, townsfolk mourned the loss of a young and vibrant girl. The city declared her dead, and her church held a public funeral service. Her mother spoke about Eunomia’s vivid imagination and penchant for drawing and painting. Her father, through halting sobs, said Eunomia was a smart girl who loved astronomy and physics. The crowd gasped at this. Some of the congregation vocally protested saying: “He should not be accusing the dead of paganism. Eunomia’s father calmed them and said: “Science is not a fringe religion, Eunomia taught me this. She wrote about the movement of stars and planets every day. She dreamed of a time that human beings could leave this gravity and travel into deepest space. I, too, thought science was Satan’s checker board but now, thanks to my dear daughter, I think science is neat.” The congregation grumbled, but ultimately accepted that a grief-stricken parent must be given room for the madness of sorrow.

The people of Night Vale moved forward with their lives. Like all tragic loss, they remembered Eunomia, sometimes even see her, only to realize it was a shadow or a mistake of the mind. They felt sad and empty, but over time the sadness waned and the emptiness filled, as they always do.

Her parents sold the farm and moved into the city. Consciously, they wanted to be closer to their community, but subconsciously they feared having to endure the weight of public empathy, so they mostly stayed indoors. One year after Eunomia’s physical disappearance, the memory of Eunomia had all but disappeared as well. Night Vale was back to normal. No one was thinking about Unomia that day, that anniversary. They were thinking about something else: the visitor.

More on this soon, but first traffic. Christina and Ricardo Alfonse had just exited Route 800 toward Pike Street, when they planned to turn left toward the hospital. Ricardo was driving quickly as Christina was in immense discomfort. She was eight months pregnant when contractions began only half an hour ago. Fearing the complications of an early birth, Christina did not outwardly panic, she inwardly panicked. She grew quiet and still, as her body began to convulse and her guts begun to churn. She turned to her husband and calmly stated: “Ricky, the baby’s coming.” Ricardo, having read nearly a dozen books, including “The Physiology of Pregnancy”, “The Psychology of Infancy”, and “The Anthology of Relevancy”, felt prepared for even this most unexpected of moments. Inwardly, he did not panic. Outwardly, he was a blubbering mess. He rushed his wife into the car and onto the hospital going well over the speed limit, asking Christina if she was remembering to breathe, Christina repeatedly asking Ricardo to slow down and confirmed she was breathing. A minor accident between a top secret military transport truck and a 2011 Honda CRV along Route 800 near Exit 12 had slowed the couple down by a few minutes, and during that traffic jam, Christina turned on the radio to take her mind off her body. She heard a news update about the blood space war and the tragic deaths of two Night Vale soldiers, one of whom was named Yasmine Alfonse. Christina and Ricardo Alfonse knew they were expecting a girl. They knew they would name her Yasmine, because it is a beautiful name. Ricardo laughed at the dark humor of the improbable coincidence, but Christina never laughed nor believed it to be a coincidence. They arrived at the hospital with plenty of time to spare and three hours later their daughter Yasmine was born. Christina had decided to give her a different name, but when the nurse who was filling out the birth certificate asked, Christina said “Yasmine,” as she was unable to say anything else. It was like that moment had already happened and she was only remembering it.

So, expect 15 minute delays on eastbound lanes of Route 800 near Exit 12. This has been traffic.

On the anniversary of Eunomia’s disappearance, an astronaut arrived in Night Vale. The early 19th century villages did not know what an astronaut was. So what they saw was a puffy silver humanoid with a mirror for a face. The astronaut suddenly appeared in the center of town, roughly where the Dog Park is today, and walked silently through the dusty streets. Crowds gathered and followed the stranger, all the while pointing and warmly shouting “Interloper!” in hopes that the frightening figure would show signs of benevolence.

The astronaut, bow-legged and slow, walked without speaking toward the outskirts of town. It took hours, and by the time the visitor stopped, nearly the entire city had followed. There was a greenish aura about the astronaut as they turned to face the gathered mob. The astronaut lifted their gloved hands to their neck and unlatched the helmet. There was a loud hiss and a pop, and the mask lifted. The crowd tentatively approached the stranger, and as the helmet came fully off, the townsfolk cried out in horror. The face of the visitor was nearly skeletal, a rotted corpse, long white hair peeling down the back of the skull, an incomplete set of elongated teeth visible with no lips to hide them, startled eyes ever staring with no lids to express anything else, and what was left of the skin had shriveled and yellowed.

The crowd had begun to step backward, but one woman stepped forward – a tired and pale woman approached the decomposing astronaut and said: “Eunomia?” The astronaut opened her mouth slowly and spoke in a hoarse cough. “Mother,” the astronaut said. Eunomia’s young mother touched her elderly daughter’s face. Unomia broke into dust. And the empty space suit collapsed into the ground.

More news, but first, The weather.

[“The Only Thing” by Ali Holder, http://aliholder.com/]

Dozens of astronauts appeared in Night Vale over the centuries that followed. They still occasionally do, but it has been 36 years since the last appearance. These astronauts are time travelers of sorts. They are Night Vale citizens who fight for humanity in the blood space war, but are returning home to recruit or retire. Those who have returned from battle have told us about Eunomia and her incredible leadership and diplomacy. Her death in the timeline of those fighting his war has get to occur, but in our earthly timeline she died 200 years ago in a cornfield. There is so much more to say about Eunomia and the beginnings of the blood space war, but we cannot cover all that here. It is much too complicated a story. [nervously] Plus, an empty-eyed messenger child from the City Council just showed up in my radio studio to tell me to get to the important news of the day. [gleefully] Thank you, child! Here’s an iPad, go play on Tick Tock and stop staring at me! I’m really creeped out!

[clears throat] The City Council organized a press conference this afternoon, but before it could begin, Pamela Winchell grabbed the microphone from the City Council and shouted: “Surprise emergency press conference! Hey, so a space craft flew down into John Peters’ cornfield, and these beings of astonishing structure emerged with two floating pods, and inside these pods were dead bodies! Ie was sad, but also the bodies looked pretty old, so maybe it was just their time. Sometimes that happens, you know, actually it always happens. No one has ever not died. Anyway, if you lost an elderly friend or relative, maybe come identify the bodies! Sorry for your loss.” Winchell then reached up into her hairline and pulled down a zipper that ran from her head to her waist as she opened herself, a Pamela-shaped cloud drifted up and away over the crowd, a faint voice saying: “Pamela out!” could be heard in the sky.

Several Night Vale residents came to view the bodies. One body was identified as Waymon Davis by his great great grandson Melvin. Melvin brought a daguerreotype photo of Waymon from 1980. In the photo, Waymon was 33 years old. The body Melvin identified looked to be in his sixties, but it was clearly Waymon. Christina Alfonse, holding her newborn baby in her hospital bed, saw the footage on television. When she saw the other body, she saw a woman in her seventies with Yasmine’s eyes, Yasmine’s lips, and even the same thick low forehead. Christina held her baby tight to her chest. “You are a brave woman,” she said to the infant Yasmine as she kissed her tiny cheeks.

Stay tuned next of the sound of an alarm click that cannot be turned off and a dream that cannot be awoken from. Good night, Night Vale,

Good night.

Today’s proverb: Talk to your kids about the birds and the bees. “Never look directly at birds,” you should say to them, “and bees? Don’t get me started.”

#welcome to night vale #wtnv transcripts #episode 144 #the dreamer

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mrsimoshen · 6 years ago

Text

I’m Your Private Dancer

Title: I’m Your Private Dancer

Link: I'm Your Private Dancer on AO3

Square filled: Human Cas

Ship: Castiel/Michael

Rating: Mature

Tags: Human AU, human!Cas, human!michael, Prostitution/male escort Cas, Client Michael, Lingerie, Anal Plug, implied cross-dressing, Anal Sex

Summary: Male escort Castiel meets a client.

Word count: 2738

created for @spnkinkbingo

tagging: @lucibae-is-dancing-in-hell, @silvaxus, @blakechaos08, @princerusso, @masterpieceofturkeycleverness @ajcza, @buggre-alle-thisss-ineffability, @brieflymaximumprincess, @captain-winchester-27

Fic below the cut:

All the men come in these places And the men are all the same You don't look at their faces And you don't ask their names You don't think of them as human You don't think of them at all You keep your mind on the money Keeping your eyes on the wall

Castiel Novak snorts as Tina’s voice croons on. He’s always thought the dancer in that song was a metaphor for something else, but it’s a bit of an irony that this song would come up on the radio just as he’s getting ready for an appointment.

Unlike the narrator of the song, however, Castiel doesn’t keep his clients at arm’s length. He knows the name of each, knows their faces, their voices, just as he knows the preferences of every man he regularly meets. Of course, it’s about the money – Castiel would be lying if he claimed otherwise, and he’s many things, but not a liar – but if he didn’t enjoy what he does, he would have chosen a different career path a long time ago.

Today, he’s wearing silky thigh-highs and a garter belt along with a pair of low-cut panties and a slinky camisole, all in darkest black with green lace accents. His client likes it when he can easily slide into him, so Cas took care in opening himself up earlier, and now he can feel the familiar weight of the glass plug in his hole. He’s half-hard from all that, and will probably remain so all throughout the evening, but his client enjoys that, too.

Cas hums along to the refrain as he carefully applies just a bit of make-up. It’s very subtle, almost unnoticeable to anyone who doesn’t know the trick, but it makes his eyes appear larger, their blue more intense. It’s not really necessary for the client he’s meeting, but it’s a habit, and he likes the effect.

Make-up done, Castiel gets up – shivering a bit as the weight of the plug inside him makes itself known again and silk brushes against his skin – and walks to his cupboard to select this evening’s wardrobe.

He has a wide range of choice, there – the jeans and shirts he prefers for when he doesn’t work, tailored suits and leather pants and jackets, fine loafers and heavy biker boots, even a few dresses for one particular client he’s since stopped seeing. Throwing the dresses out seemed wasteful, however, so Castiel carefully stored them in their bags and let them live in his cupboard.

Today, he picks out a suit he knows is a favorite of his client. “It brings out your eyes,” he’s always told, and since it’s surprisingly comfortable (which really should be expected, it was made-to-measure and cost a pretty penny, it should be comfortable), Castiel enjoys wearing it, too.

Suit put on and shoes set to the side, Cas stretches out on his couch and lets himself day-dream about how the evening might progress.

His clients all treat him well, mutual respect the most important aspect of the whole deal – if Cas feels disrespected as a human being once because of the service he provides, people find themselves permanently removed from his client list fast. And Castiel also has the connections to ruin a person’s life in interesting ways.

The man he’s meeting today has a taste for European food, the authentic version and not the Americanized deal, but it’s anyone’s guess what nation’s cuisine he’ll be treated to tonight. What they’ll do after that… well, Castiel is horny, so he hopes he’ll be taken to his client’s home after and get fucked a few times, but it’s equally likely his lover for the night will take him to some art show or concert or even the movies after dinner. It’s all happened before. (Castiel’s favorite memory is the time this particular man fucked him, slow and intimate, in a VIP box at the opera where, in theory, anyone who looked into the shadows of their box could have seen them. He spent almost the whole opera on his lover’s cock, and that night was spectacular, once they were in the privacy of his client’s home.)

But he knows the man’s tastes in that area, too, and there’s no opera shown tonight that might catch his fancy. He’s not quite as up-to-date on the movies, and there’s always an art gallery somewhere who’s having a show.

Cas smiles as his phone gives a quiet chirp to alert him to an incoming text message. None of his clients know his actual address, they just know the address of the private, guarded parking lot where he habitually leaves his car. He needs ten minutes from his apartment to that parking lot, and he’s told his clients to inform him when they’ve arrived. Those ten minutes waiting sometimes yield... interesting results.

I’m here, darling.

Castiel slips his shoes on and grabs his keys, phone, wallet, and coat. It’s cold outside, it’s only February, so he adds his favorite scarf to the ensemble and leaves his apartment.

His client’s car is idling in its spot when Castiel opens the door and slides into the passenger seat, and he’s very glad about the warmth enveloping him.

“Hello, Michael.”

“Hello, Castiel,” his client returns with a warm smile and leans over the stick shift and hand brake to greet him with a soft brush of lips on lips. Castiel smiles and angles his head into the soft kiss. Michael is one of the affectionate clients, and Castiel likes the gentle touches an evening with Michael always includes. It feels a little as if they’re truly a couple out on a date night.

Michael waits until Castiel has put on his seat belt before pulling out into the traffic. He’s one of those drivers in whose car Castiel thinks he could actually fall asleep if the distance was long enough. He’s not usually one for sleeping in anyone’s car, an accident that cost him a childhood friend having left a deep impression, but Michael is calm and controlled in everything he does (unless he’s fucking Castiel in the privacy of his own bed. Then, there’s only wild passion in him.) and he always weaves through traffic so smoothly Castiel never felt anything but safe in his car.

“Where are we going?”

“Wait and see, darling,” Michael chuckles and makes a turn. “I do hope you enjoy tapas.”

Cas does, especially if they’re served in a small restaurant that looks as if it was imported from Spain, beams, stones and furniture. There are large pieces of jamón serrano hanging from the ceiling, the Spanish music in the background is just low enough to not interrupt a conversation but lend a certain ambience to the whole restaurant, and the food is perfect. Castiel enjoys every bite he’s served, enjoys the sour wine that he’d usually never pick (he has a sweet tooth when it comes to wine) but that fits perfectly with the dishes they’re served.

Michael, who sticks to sparkling water, takes a single sip on Castiel’s insistence and agrees with him with a smile, licking his lips. “It does compliment the food very well,” he hums. Castiel shivers a little at the tone of voice.

Michael surprises him by driving to his own apartment after dinner. When he notices Cas’ questioning look, he grins.

“I thought we could watch a movie at my place,” he murmurs, using an upcoming red light to stroke a hand up Castiel’s leg slowly. “I can’t wait to see what you’ve got beneath that suit for me today, darling.”

Castiel shivers a little and lets his legs fall a little wider with a smile.

“Would you like to guess?” he invites, and Michael laughs and pulls his hand back as the light changes to green.

“Let me fantasize a moment longer.”

Michael’s apartment is in one of the more expensive parts of town, and Castiel has enough information about his lover of the night to know that Michael works for a high-end law firm and comes from a rich family background. Castiel himself is rather expensive, and he knows from experience Michael has a taste for the finer things in life. Which is probably a compliment in itself.

“Get comfortable,” Michael invites him with a smile, taking Castiel’s coat to hang it up neatly. “Would you like a drink, or coffee?”

“Coffee, please,” Castiel requests with a smile. He wanders further into the apartment as Michael goes to convince his high-end coffee machine to produce the dark liquid and decides to be just a bit of a tease. He leaves his shoes neatly by the living room doorway, then drops his tie on the way to the couch. By the time he’s stretched out on the ridiculously comfortable piece of furniture, his shirt is unbuttoned just enough so that a teasing hint of green lace is visible against his skin.

Michael doesn’t notice at first, concentrating on the coffee cups in his hands, but when he sits down and hands Castiel his coffee, his eyes widen.

“Oh, you little tease,” he breathes with a grin. Castiel laughs and sips his coffee.

“Now, I would be a tease if I didn’t plan to deliver,” he corrects calmly. “I very much intend to deliver, dear Michael.”

“I very much appreciate that,” Michael sinks down onto the couch himself, close enough to Castiel he can feel the other man’s body warmth. “Any preference on the movie?”

Castiel glances over Michael’s pre-selection and decides on one he’s already seen but could stand to watch a second time. He’s guessing they won’t see the end of the movie, not if he starts seducing Michael as soon as they have emptied their coffee mugs. Michael always lets Castiel make the first move, always lets Castiel decide how far they go, and Castiel appreciates it. (Once, he’d told Michael to ravish him, make him forget everything around them. He’s definitely going to do that again someday, because that night ranks top amongst those he’ll never forget.)

For now, he’s content to lean against Michael’s side and sip his coffee as they watch the beginning of the movie. It’s really good coffee, and Michael knows by now how Castiel prefers his, and so it’s not to be rushed but savored.

Half an hour into the movie, Castiel finally sets his empty mug down on the coffee table next to Michael’s and stretches before turning to Michael. He softly brushes his mouth over Michael’s, flicks his tongue out just a little bit, and Michael sighs and cups his face, pulls him into a deeper kiss.

They take their time, kisses turning deeper and hungrier slowly. Castiel ends up straddling Michael’s legs, almost in his lap as they kiss. Michael groans when Castiel leans back to further unbutton his shirt, revealing more of the black silk and green lace beneath.

“Touch me,” he invites in a rough whisper, and Michael’s hands almost fly to his sides, stroke up over black silk reverently.

“Get rid of the shirt,” Michael murmurs, his eyes on the way his hands look on the silk. Castiel laughs and complies, and then gasps when gentle fingers rub and tease at one of his nipples through the material. Michael alternates between stroking soft silk and rougher lace over the sensitive nub until Castiel is biting his lower lip and breathing noticeably faster.

“I want to see you,” Michael murmurs, finally showing mercy on the nipple he was playing with. Permission to touch given, he’s slipping back into the dominant role he usually prefers when they meet. Castiel smiles and slides off his lap, taking a few steps back to let Michael see all of him. He takes his time undoing his belt, the button on his pants and the zipper, and when he finally lets the garment fall, Michael moans and presses a hand against his own crotch.

“Like what you see?” Castiel purrs, slowly walking back towards his lover for the night. “I chose the green just for you.”

“Oh, I very much like what I see,” Michael breathes, looking Castiel up and down slowly. “Damn, you’re pretty, darling.”

“Why, thank you, Michael,” Castiel purrs, slowly climbing back up onto the couch and into Michael’s lap. Michael shivers and strokes up his thighs. He makes a low sound when he notices Castiel wears the panties over the garter belt – meaning he can take them off and leave belt and stockings in place.

“Very nice,” he murmurs, stroking up underneath the camisole. “You’re spoiling me, Castiel.”

Castiel laughs quietly and raises his arms to let Michael strip the camisole from him. He moans as Michael leans forward to lick and suck at the nipple he’d neglected before, buries his hands in Michael’s dark hair. “Oh…”

“Always so sensitive for me,” Michael hums and blows cool air over wet skin. Castiel shivers and watches Michael’s eyes darken further. “Bedroom.”

They end up leaving a trail of Michael’s clothes from the couch to the bed, and Castiel ends up on his back on the sheets, Michael on his hands and knees above him. His lover looks him up and down hungrily before kissing him again, harder and deeper this time until Castiel is out of breath and clinging to the soft cotton.

Michael peels him out of the panties with teasing touches, then spends a few minutes licking at Castiel’s hard cock before reaching to the bedside table for the lube. Cas pulls his knees up and bares himself, clenches down on the glass plug inside him with a low moan and his eyes on the impressive erection between Michael’s legs. Michael groans at seeing the glass between his cheeks.

“How open are you, darling?”

“Enough you can slide right in,” Cas promises huskily and then moans when Michael lightly tugs on the plug, pulling it out a little before letting it slide back in. He keeps doing it until Cas is moaning and begging for him to please, please fuck him, and Cas nearly sobs in relief when the plug gets pulled free finally and he hears the distinct sound of a condom wrapper being opened.

Michael’s cock pushing into him has him whine in need, because no matter how nice a glass plug is, it will never come close to an actual cock in Castiel’s opinion, and Michael is big enough to stretch him a little even after wearing the plug for hours.

His lover of the night is also a man of infinite patience, so the first slide in is slow and gentle, until Michael is as deep as he can get and Castiel is panting and moaning, feeling so damn full. “Please, move,” he gasps out, and Michael chuckles and complies, guiding Cas’ legs up around his hips before starting to roll his hips, slow and gentle and just enough to drive Cas slowly but surely mad.

He’s begging in a constant, breathless stream of words by the time Michael takes pity on him and starts moving faster and harder, and Castiel nearly screams when a hand wraps around his cock and starts stroking him in time with the thrusts into him.

Michael’s cock rubs insistently over his prostate, and Cas lasts only a handful of thrusts more before arching his back and shouting, covering Michael’s hand and his own belly with his release. Michael groans deep and low as Castiel’s hole clenches down on him hard but keeps fucking Castiel until he sinks back into the mattress. Only then does his lover let go himself, coming with a few more hard thrusts into Castiel’s twitching hole.

Cas pants and watches as Michael does the same. In a moment, his green-eyed lover of the night will pull out and get rid of the condom, and there’ll be sparkly water fresh from the fridge for him and a warm, wet washcloth to clean up with. Michael will curl up around him for a while and they’ll talk about whatever comes to mind, and maybe, they’ll have sex again if the mood strikes them.

In the morning, there will be a white envelope with the sum Michael owes him in cash, and Castiel will return to his own apartment and shower, and in a few days, he’ll get ready for the next appointment.

Yes, Cas is a private dancer, but he likes dancing to his own tune.

#spnkinkbingo #mrsimoshen writes #castiel/michael

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scaryscarecrows · 6 years ago

Text

Roots and Leaves, Pt. 6

DC did it first. Take your grievances to them.

Jason and Sheila e-mail back and forth for about a week before she says that she has Thursday off so if he has Thursday off does he want to meet for lunch again?

Last time wasn’t bad. Not a lot of staring or people or anything. He can…he can probably do it again. And it’s a few days away still, so he has time to psyche himself up or, worst case scenario, fake his death and move to Canada.

And it’s been a week and she hasn’t pulled out the Pity Card on him yet and maybe…maybe this’ll all work out okay. She might never be Mom, because Catherine’s always gonna be Mom, but…but she could be Mother, maybe. He can see that in the distant (or not-so-distant?) future.

But he’s not going to rush into things, that’s what got him here in the first place. Patience, grasshopper.

Thursday rolls around and he hasn’t faked his death and moved to Canada, so he has no choice but to put on jeans and a hoodie and resign himself to a couple of hours, easy, of no sunglasses and no e-book shield.

Sorry, any small children who might come out of this traumatized.

Okay. He brings his Kindle anyway, and his sunglasses for the journey, and sticks to his normal Civilian Weaponry-couple’a knives, one pair of brass knuckles tucked into a hidden pocket in his hoodie. Last thing he needs is for someone to pick up a bullet, match it to the Red Hood’s, and come knocking on his door. His luck is bad enough that’s exactly what would happen.

Besides, it’s noon on a Thursday, and even in Gotham that’s a slow hour. Bank robbers gotta eat, too.

The monorail ride there is literal Hell (three fighting couples, two crying kids and old man with no personal spaaaaace!) and he’s literally gasping for air when he stumbles out of the car. He likes people. Honest. If he legitimately hated them all, he wouldn’t risk his life to help them. But interacting with them…he could do without that, mostly.

Whatever. Whatever. It’s over, he lived, he’s had worse.

(And no, he doesn’t hear faint cackling in his head, and that’s final.)

It’s windy today, the type of wind that buffets people every which way and is determined to keep his hood off his head. He fidgets with the drawstrings until it’ll stay and buries his hands in his pockets. Wind sucks. He can feel pollen and dust and Gotham Grime being blown onto his skin.

“Jason!”

Is he there already?

Sheila…looks a lot more haggard than she did before. He tries to remember if she’d mentioned being horribly busy, doesn’t think she did, and figures that to be fair, he hasn’t mentioned the bruise that goes halfway up his back.

She smiles, her awkward driver’s license smile, and waves. Yeah, she doesn’t…it must’ve been a long week, or maybe a rough drive or something. She looks tired.

“Hi.” He’s not sure what to call her, still. Miss Haywood is too disconnected, Sheila’s too personal, and it’s way, way too soon for Mother. Names are a pain. “I’m not late, am I?” He knows he’s not. “Monorail was packed.”

“So was the subway. Can I…?”

Her arms are half-out and he figures she’s asking for a hug. He can do a hug, as long as it’s a short hug.

“Yeah. Thanks for the warning.”

Holy crap, she feels frail. But to be fair, barring Dick’s tackle-hug, everyone’s felt frail since…since. So it could just be him. Hugs are weird now.

(“HUG YOUR DADDY!”)

No. Not today. Everything’s fine.

It’s a sort-of short hug, short enough, anyway, and he wonders, abstractedly, if a day will ever come that he’s used to that sort of thing again. If it even matters whether he does or doesn’t.

It does. Of course it does. And the day will come, in time, and he’ll be better, be normal, be what people want him to be.

Little steps.

* * *

They’ve fallen into a companionable silence and for once Jason’s not jumping whenever someone walks by in a purple sweater or anything when Sheila forces her lips out from between her teeth and says, “I know you were Robin.”

Well. That’s, uh, there’s that out of the way.

“Yeah.” There’s clearly no point in denying it. She probably put it together when Batman came knocking. “For a little while, yeah. I was.” He tastes blood, wonders how long he’s been doing that, and wishes he had gum. Or a mint. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right off, I just…old habits die hard, I guess.”

“Oh God, no, no, I didn’t mean-” She takes a drink. Her hands are shaking, she’s shaking and he doesn’t know what’s wrong. “I just. I thought I should probably make it clear that I did know, so you wouldn’t…I know I was absent, but I don’t want…you shouldn’t feel like you have to hide things from me.”

Oh. That’s. He doesn’t know what to say. Bruce, God knows, has the emotional capabilities of a Himalayan Salt Lamp. Thankfully Jason hadn’t been the type to go through crushes every two weeks, or he probably would have been in Hell. He certainly wouldn’t have…it’s not like he would have shut down the conversation, but sharing and caring? That would have been awkward and best not repeated. Alfred was the go-to for that sorta thing.

All right, then. Since they’re dropping sudden bombshells ‘n all…he has to know.

“You worked for Joker.” There. It’s out. He said it.

And now he kinda regrets it-the self-loathing on her face is a pretty good match for his own, and he can’t tell himself it’s anything less than deep, deep wishing to have made better choices.

“I did.” She straightens up, begins tearing apart a piece of bread on her plate. “Briefly. I’m not proud, but he had a line to my mother, knew where she lived, knew her schedule…knew.” She swallows hard. “Knew she had to rubber-band her jam jars because she couldn’t open them otherwise. I panicked. But it was only for a couple of months-pills, he wanted pills, as much as I could get him. And then he just…went away. I don’t know what he did with them.”

Honestly, after everything, he can’t…he doesn’t have the right to say much. And honestly? There was that one guy, who accidentally cut the fucker off in traffic and couldn’t get away from him.

And look at him. The first man he killed, that wasn’t…oh, sure, he probably had it coming, at least a little, but Jason wasn’t thinking about that or considering it like he does now, he just…he wanted to kill Bruce. Because that was right and reason at the time even though he knows it’s insanity now.

No, he can’t say much.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly, and it’s suddenly easier to look at his hands. “I didn’t…that sounds awful.”

“No.” She tips his chin up and it’s an effort not to pull away and to remember that it’s fingers, warm human fingers, and not the pointy end of a crowbar against his skin. “You deserved to know. It’s only fair.”

Truth be told, it’s a relief to know that she hadn’t…yeah, technically she could’ve…maybe done something different, but she hadn’t wanted to work for him. She wasn’t like the ones he’d christened Dumb and Dumber that…they enjoyed that kinda work.

Lunch is finished in relative silence after that, though, and he’s wondering what’s going to happen now when she rifles through her purse and swears.

“Damn…I meant to grab an old photo album I wanted to show you, with some old family pictures and things.”

Pictures of Willis? Yeah, he’s good. Pictures of other people might be interesting, though.

“Next time?”

“My apartment’s a few blocks over.”

Something feels off. He’s paranoid, he knows he’s paranoid, but something…she’s been shaky and weird all afternoon and he doesn’t…

Calm the fuck down, you freak out when someone window-shops for too long!

“Is everything…is everything okay?”

Or maybe something is wrong-she pulls a napkin over and there’s suddenly a pen in her hand.

“I really do want you to see these pictures, Jason,” she says, but her hand is moving and there’s the ever-so-faint skrit-skrit of pen on paper. “I swear you got my mother’s eyes.”

The napkin slides over to him and he glances down. Her handwriting’s spikey and awful-doctor writing to the bone-but his is no better and he can read it well enough.

An old colleague has been hanging around the hospital lately.

Oh.

That explains a bit.

“Sure.”

Her shoulders drop and she crumples the napkin, nails picking it into shreds.

“I’m sorry to do this to you,” she says softly, nearly too soft for him to hear, and he’s quick to shake his head.

“No, no, I don’t mind, I’m glad you…if there’s anything I can do to…”

Shit, she looks like she’s going to start crying and that is indeed PANIC in his throat. Tears are not good.

“You’re a good boy.” Her voice is watery but there are no tears to be seen. Thank Jesus. “I promise next time we have lunch it’ll be normal.”

Oh, good, things haven’t plummeted down to fiery Hell because of all the revelations flying around.

“Everything’s gonna be fine,” he says, and whoops that’s his ‘all will be well, citizen, never fear!’ voice. But it must work, because the about-to-cry look disappears. “Um. Do you wanna…it looks like it’s gonna rain, should we get going?”

And so they do.

* * *

The wind has picked up and it smells like rain. He’s not looking forward to patrol later.

The wind’s not so bad, though, to stop Sheila from lighting up with a self-depreciating, “I know I’m a doctor and should know better, but I honestly don’t care.”

“I can’t really say anything.” He holds up his own pack and rattles it before pulling one out. It’s not as calming as it usually is and he doesn’t know why.

Eh. It’s been a long day, that’s all. He’s not used to interacting with people on a personal level anymore, which is his own fault and probably not necessarily a good thing.

The first few drops have started to fall when they arrive at her building-big, square, and simplistic. She fishes out her keys while they’re in the elevator (which smells like new car, for some reason).

The hallway is deserted. It’s a little creepy, to be honest-his own building might be crap, but there’s always activity. And then, of course, there was Arkham’s hallways, or what he could hear of them. Noisy. Always noisy. But this? Wayne Manor was silent like this. It unsettled him then and it unsettles him now. Call him a city boy, whatever, but he needs noise.

The brass knuckles and knives in his jacket are warm and comforting and he knows he’s not gonna need ‘em, but they make up for this creepy-ass silence.

Sheila opens the door and motions him inside. It’s dark inside-blackout curtains, probably-but he can hear the rain. It smells like new car in here, too, and he wonders, off-handedly, why-

-it’s not empty. He’s walked into one too many ‘empty’ buildings to be very, very attuned to the sound of somebody breathing. Okay. Be calm, back out and shut the door.

He’s about to do exactly that when the light switch clicks and bathes the whole place in stark white. White walls, white floors, white furniture.

Which only makes Harley Quinn stick out like a sore thumb in all that red and black.

“BAY-BEE!” She could never hope to match Joker’s grin, but she gives it a good go, stretching her makeup. Okay. Change of plans. Get Sheila out of here (and preferably out of the building), deal with Quinn. “It’s been a whiiiiile!”

He takes in the mallet leaning against the couch and the shotgun (are those fuzzy dice? Really?) in her hands and comes to the conclusion that great, she’s riding the crazy train.

But maybe she hasn’t seen Sheila yet. Where’s that goddamn light switch?

He moves, only a little, only to feel the unmistakable press of a gun against his lower back.

“Don’t. Move.”

And the world drops out from under him.

No. No, no, no, she said she quit, it was over, she said they’d let her go, she said-

The door shuts. He twists so he can still see Quinn in his peripheral. Sheila’s face is a blank mask-no tears, no joy, no nothing. Just quiet determination and he doesn’t understand, she said…

“Mom?” The word feels thick and wrong in his mouth, but maybe…maybe she’s brainwashed or hypnotized or something, maybe she doesn’t…isn’t…

“Sorry, kid.” The words are harsh but her tone isn’t. Quinn giggles in the background but she sounds so far away and Sheila’s still pressing a gun against him. “It was you or me, and, well…it had to be you.”

What?

“Aww, come to mama, baby!” Quinn giggles again before straightening up and scowling. “Now.”

His feet drag him forward, sneakers scuffing against the white carpet an’ Heaven’s s’posed ta be white, innit, so why does this feel like Hell and what’s going on she said she said-

For once horrible, desperate second, he wants Bruce. Bruce wouldn’t…yeah, he’d thought, at first, that he’d left him but he knows that he didn’t, he really didn’t, he just…

Bruce wouldn’t have pulled a gun on him, he wouldn’t and God, if he’d just fucking talked to him-

“I did what you wanted, Quinn.” Sheila’s voice is so, so flat and is this all she wanted from the beginning? Is it? “Now call your man.”

Quinn doesn’t even look at her. She’s looking at Jason like she always did-like she’s torn between wanting to rip his head off and wanting to wrap him in a blanket and keep him.

This is his own goddamn fault, he just thought…just once, just once-

“Quinn!” Desperation now, and the gun wobbles against his hoodie as she steps out from behind him. “I did what you said! Call your man!”

Okay. Okay.

He forces himself to take a few deep breaths that taste like that last cigarette outside and says, voice as steady as he can make it, “Let her go, Harley. Leave her alone, I’ll. I’ll do what you want, just. Just let her go.”

“Aww, look at you!” Her pigtails sway and he finds himself oddly hypnotized by the movement. “I knew ya had to be Robin for a reason.”

Yeah. Yeah, he was Robin and that’s all he’ll ever be, the one that fucked up.

“Please, Harley.”

“Nyeh…” She adjusts her grip on the gun, finger dancing near the trigger, and looks down at her knuckles. “Eeny, meanie, miny, moe, catch a Batman by the toe. If he hollers, let ‘im go, eeny…meanie…miny…moe!”

He sees it before she does it, but there’s no time-he’s moved maybe half a centimeter before the gun goes off-

-and Sheila.

Falls.

His ears are ringing. They’re ringing and everything’s so white except her, all blonde and blue and so fucking red because Harley didn’t miss and if he’d been quicker, he should have been-

“Aww, don’t be sad!” Harley’s not alone, of course she’s not. He should have known from the start stupidstupidstupid. “Doncha know what happens to people who know too much?”

Her eyes are open. They’re open and they’re looking at him like this is his fault and it is if he hadn’t…

S’like Joker said, once.

“Good boys know how to lay down and DIE.”

“Mistah J had a spot for ya, baby.” Huh? “But you up an’ left us before it was time! So since it’s his birthday-” The fucker has no birthday he just appeared one day too evil for Hell. “-I thought I’d get my puddin’ somethin’-” She winks. “Real nice.”

And they’re on him.

Harley’s goons are dumb, but they’re also big and they manage to drag him down for a minute before he gets a knife out of his sleeve and drives it into the nearest jaw.

“Andre!” Yeah, Andre ain’t comin’ back from that any time soon. “I thought we taught you manners!”

He reclaims his knife and scrambles back up and okay okay maybe he can get outta this-

WHAM!

Lights out.

#Jason Todd #Sheila Haywood #Harley Quinn #you knew this was coming #oh Jason I'm so sorry honey #one day you can have nice things #but not today #Roots and Leaves

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rhetoricandlogic · 6 years ago

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THE BIRDING: A FAIRY TALE BY: NATALIA THEODORIDOU

ISSUE:

18 DECEMBER 2017

8640 WORDS

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

CONTENT WARNING: show warnings

Okay, here we go, baby. Listen:

Once upon a time, there was a story about the end of the world.

No, let’s try this again.

This is a fairy tale about how the world ended.

No, that’s not it either. I’m sorry, my baby girl. I’m no good at this.

And anyway, the world didn’t end. It just changed.

The highway leading into the city from the west is jammed full of abandoned cars. Manoeuvring the cumbersome Hyundai around them has been difficult for some time, but now Maria has to leave the car to shut doors and move other cars out of the way every twenty meters. She’s finally forced to stop. The lines of cars stretch as far as she can see, baking under the unforgiving northern Greek sun, hazard lights flashing. Some of the engines are still on, purring softly or gasping on fumes.

There are no humans in sight. She wonders where all these people were trying to go, why they needed to get to the city. Were they looking for their families, trying to get back to their homes, like herself? Did they think they would be safer there?

A flock of birds passes overhead, casting their brief shadows on the highway. She doesn’t look up fast enough to see what kind they were. An unkindness of ravens, perhaps. A dissimulation of birds. Don’t think of him among them, she tells herself, don’t, don’t.

She switches off the engine, puts a hand on her swollen belly and rests her forehead on the steering wheel for a moment. She breathes in, then out, listening to the bird sounds outside, the flapping, the chirping, the song, ever-present, invasive.

“Snap out of it,” she says loudly. She regrets it immediately and caresses her small bump. “Sorry, baby,” she says. “It’s okay. We’re okay.” Then, she adds: “We’ll find him, baby. We will.”

She turns to her dad. He’s sitting in the back, staring vacantly ahead, looking at nothing. His skin is flaking. His lungs whistle every time he draws a breath.

“I’m going out, daddy,” she says. “I need to find us a place to stay, something to eat and drink. I’ll be back soon, okay?”

The old man turns his head—a slow, tired movement. For a moment, she thinks he’ll actually look at her, but he doesn’t. He stares at something past her, beyond her. He lifts an arm and scratches absently at the soft white down growing on his neck.

She takes one last look at him and then faces the windshield again. Still no people out there, just the birds and the heat trembling on the asphalt. She opens the glove compartment and pulls out a fresh surgical mask to replace the one she’s wearing before heading out. Just in case.

Outside, the world is loud with the chatter of birds perched on trees and on the electrical wires overhead. She looks around, trying to orientate herself. She checks her phone for signal, even though that gave out a while ago, early on the way back from the capital—the government killed telecommunications when the riots got out of hand, just before the power grid failed. And when the riots finally died down, there was no one left to bring it all back up. She glances at the picture of Simos on the screen before putting the phone away. How quickly it all falls apart, she thinks as she gazes at the glistening highways in the distance. How quickly our phones and computers and cars go silent the moment we look away.

Maria spots the half-finished National Highway Bridge they’ve been constructing for years. The city has been expanding rapidly, and the bridge was supposed to help with the terrible traffic jam that always threatened those trying to enter. She’s still a long way from the city centre—from home—but one of the sprawling westernmost districts is visible in the distance, beyond the bridge. An hour’s walk, maybe, if her body cooperates.

She hoists her rucksack onto her shoulder and gives her belly a brief rub.

“Here we go, baby,” she says, pushing down the white-hot panic alarm rising in her chest, going this-is-not-safe, this-is-not-safe. As she’s done every minute since it all started. “Here we go.”

This neighbourhood is as deserted as any she’s come across in the smaller towns between Athens and Thessaloniki. People here must have tried to leave their homes and flee the city earlier, must have come to terms with what was happening faster than people down in the capital. Perhaps it was easier for them. There are more folk tales here. More superstitions.

It still wasn’t enough.

She walks down the main street, keeping an eye on the birds that fly in circles above her. Much of the desolation here predates the plague. Shuttered shops, bankrupt and closed. Peeling walls, crumbling buildings. Cars without plates, abandoned because of earlier disasters of a different kind. She passes a gaggle of geese rummaging for food in a massive rubbish bin. They stop and regard her for a moment, their beady eyes appraising her, shiny and unknowable.

A familiar thud accompanied by the flutter of wings breaks their mutual concentration. The geese go back to their scavenging. Two more thuds and she spots a couple of pigeons through the front window of a second-floor apartment. They bang against the glass, then flutter away, then throw themselves against the glass again, frantic, desperate. She runs towards the building, hoping the door’s unlocked.

The apartment is dusty and dark—all the curtains drawn shut. She uses her phone’s flashlight to make her way down the corridor and starts at a mirror covered with a white sheet. Either someone in the family died recently, or the people who lived here could no longer stand to look at their new selves.

The living room is crammed with old-fashioned furniture and the relics of a long life: a green velvet sofa, both its seats sagged; hand-crocheted doilies on every surface; vases with plastic flowers; little porcelain figurines. It could have been her grandparents’ home were it not for the swaths of skin here and there, the discarded tissue and bone. The sofa’s velvet is strewn with feathers and down, the coffee table covered with bird droppings.

On top of the bulky TV set, there is a photo of an elderly couple hugging, smiling at the camera. Are these the people who are now throwing themselves against the balcony windows? They probably are, but she pushes the thought out of her head. The birds settle on the wooden curtain rail as soon as they spot her. She wonders if they know why she’s there.

Maria puts her hand on her surgical mask and presses it against her nose and mouth before approaching the birds. This-is-not-safe, the alarm goes, this-is-not-safe. She opens the balcony window and steps back. The birds fly off the curtain rail and circle around the living room, one, two, three times, side by side, before darting out. Was that a goodbye? She follows them onto the balcony. Watches them fly away.

The sun is coming down. Soon it will be time for her to go back, even if she finds nothing of use. She leans against the railing and scans the neighbourhood for supermarkets or convenience stores. Most of them have been broken into and ransacked, but she can usually find what she needs. There wasn’t enough time for people to take everything. Clean, bottled water is the thing she needs most. Everyone went for that first, because a lot of people feared that fresh water was to blame for the infection, for how quickly it spread. Others thought it was a curse, or the final punishment for some sin passed down from one generation to the next, to the next. Who knows.

A movement catches her eye. A hooded figure is watching her from the street, two blocks away. Is that a gas mask? Her heart skips a beat, and the baby gives her a strong kick, making her gasp.

“Hey!” she shouts as soon as she catches her breath, but the figure has already turned the corner and disappeared without a word.

She did spot a supermarket though, a few blocks away.

She takes care approaching. Supermarkets are always dangerous, even the ones that are mostly ransacked. People flock to them the way animals are drawn to fresh water.

Hidden behind a truck in the parking lot, she watches the building for a few minutes. She has that prickly feeling at the back of her neck, like she’s being watched. But there is no sign of humans, either healthy or infected, coming in or out of the building. The inside is dark. There could be someone hiding inside, but there is no way of knowing for sure. She will have to take her chances.

She grabs a trolley and heads in.

There are signs of struggle by the entrance. Blood on the floor. A woman’s handbag, its strap cut and the contents spilled out. No sign of the woman.

Did the plague do this to us, she wonders, or have we always been like this? She pushes her trolley past the blood, looking for anything of use left on the shelves. Water first of all. Canned food. Candles. Batteries. Anything at all.

Her trolley half-filled, she stashes what she found in the old couple’s apartment and goes back to the car. She takes the trolley with her.

Her dad is right where she left him, still staring blankly into the dimming light.

She opens the door to the back seat and slips in.

“Hey, daddy,” she says. She takes a cereal bar out of her pocket and offers it to him. “Want something to eat?” The old man blinks slowly, but he doesn’t turn to look at her. Something in his eyes catches Maria’s attention, and she switches on the roof light to take a closer look.

She slides next to her father, her face so close to his that she can smell him, the musty, familiar scent of him mixed with something new, something dusty and animal.

She focuses on his left eye. The thing that looked off to her before is clear now: his irises are larger. A new, inky hue is overtaking the old green like an oil slick spreading through a lake. She’s seen it before, of course, the dark eyes on faces barely human anymore, but she hasn’t watched the transformation happen so closely, so painstakingly, never witnessed each stage in all its absurd detail.

“Are you in there, dad?” she asks. “Do you remember me? Do you remember anything?” She waits, despite her certainty that he’s not going to answer. “Do you remember mom?” She pauses. “Or just your birds?” Another pause. “Are you happy now, daddy?” she asks softly. “Happier than before?”

Her father draws in a breath and then lets out a long, whistling sigh.

Maria moves back and gets out of the car slowly. The snack bar is still in her hand. She unwraps it and eats it, choosing to trust the promise of nutrients on the pack. Then, she moves the supermarket trolley to the other side of the car and opens the door.

“Can you come out, dad, please?” she tries, even though she knows it’s no good.

When he doesn’t respond, she wraps her arms around his torso and pulls him out. She gasps at his lightness; it’s as if his body has lost all its density, his bones hollowing out. Lifting him takes so little effort it numbs her. This shouldn’t be so easy, she thinks. It shouldn’t be this easy. She stands there for a moment, with her father in her arms, light as a bird, foreign as a bird. Then, she puts him in the trolley and heads back to the apartment.

By the time they get there, his skin is coming off in long strips, revealing gooseflesh underneath, covered in the softest down.

The sky is dark. She parks the trolley by the main entrance and carries her dad up the stairs. She clears the sofa and places him on the soft cushion gently, afraid she might break his bones with even the slightest pressure.

For herself, she chooses a smaller room in the back. It has a single bed covered with a handmade quilt. There is a photo of a young boy smiling at the camera against a bucolic, painted backdrop—a school photo, probably, of a child long grown. She remembers those photos; both her parents had the same from when they were growing up. She uses the flashlight to study the boy’s face: a wide forehead, a long, thin nose. Are you a bird now, she wants to ask. What kind of bird might you be? How kind a bird?

So this is how the story goes, baby:

Once upon a time, there was a young Queen. She was a kind Queen, who had gone away to visit a magician on the other side of her queendom, because she was with child, and she wanted the magician’s help to make sure her child would be born healthy, unburdened by parental sins. In the end, it didn’t matter. Because while she was away, a plague fell upon her land, a magical plague that turned almost all of her subjects into birds. And the Queen didn’t know what to do. She travelled back to her castle looking for her husband, who had stayed behind. They hadn’t spoken since the plague started.

The Queen also had her father, the Old King, with her, because they had travelled to visit the magician together. And she kept him in a supermarket trolley because he was sick and she didn’t know where else to put him.

I’m sorry, baby. I’m shit at making up fairy tales. We’ll try again some other night, okay?

In the morning, there is no white left in her father’s eyes and his nose has grown long and hard, like the top part of a beak. She approaches him carefully, because she’s seen people become aggressive at this stage. Getting yourself scratched or bitten is a sure way to get infected, but her father shows no intention of doing her harm. He lets himself be lifted off the sofa and carried down the stairs, his thin, feathery arms wrapped loosely around his daughter’s neck.

She loads him into the trolley, together with their provisions of water, batteries, flashlights, and dry food, and heads towards the city centre.

The streets are more crowded with cars in both directions the closer she gets to the centre. Marks of destruction are more prominent too; burnt buildings, some still creaking with low-burning fires, leave the distinct scent of smoke in the air. It stings her nostrils, makes it hard to breathe. There are more birds here too—walking on the streets, flying overhead, or simply sitting on the wires, inert, staring down at her, letting out a stream of birdsong now and then. Maria looks at her father, crumpled inside the trolley, silent, breathing heavily. Should she be afraid of them? Should she fear him? She stares back at the crows perched on a balcony above her. She recounts the names she knows to describe a group of crows. A parcel of crows, a mob, a parliament. A murder, a horde. And her favourite, a storytelling of crows.

“What are you looking at?” she yells. “What the fuck do you want?”

They croak at her and fly away, indignant.

That’s when she sees the woman in the window. She’s looking at something across the street, both her palms pressed against the glass, her skin covered with black feathers. At first, Maria thinks she’s staring at nothing, like her father, but then she follows the trajectory of the woman’s stare. There is a school down the street.

She pushes the trolley further, until she’s by the school’s side wall. She can hear it now, the frantic fluttering, the sound of small bodies throwing themselves at the windows.

“Stay here,” she tells her dad, as if he could suddenly decide to up and leave. Fly away, just like he did in her dreams when she was little. Perhaps soon. But not yet. “I’ll try to let them out.”

She circles to the front of the school yard but finds the entrance chained shut from the outside. Someone locked these children in. She stays still, contemplating that fact. Someone locked all these children in. What did they think they were doing? Keeping them safe, maybe. Hopefully.

She makes her way around the block, looking for something she can use to break the windows. There is a pile of bricks by a building site that will do just fine. She fills her rucksack and circles back to the side of the school, weighing one of the bricks in her hand. She turns the corner, and then she freezes.

The hooded figure she saw earlier is standing next to her trolley holding a plastic bag filled with something lumpy. Looking at Maria’s father.

“Don’t hurt him!” Maria yells. Her fingers clench around the brick in her hand.

The hooded figure looks at her and then turns towards the school windows, swings the bag in circles high up in the air and then lets it fly towards the windows, breaking them.

A flight of swallows storms out of the school, a black-and-white, winged classroom taking to the sky.

When Maria looks back down, the hooded figure is gone.

She walks until her feet swell and she cannot push the trolley any further. An empty garage is just fine for the night since the weather is still mild. She thinks of all the newly turned birds—especially the small ones, the robins and the wrens. How many of them will survive the coming winter.

She pushes her father’s trolley next to the back wall and makes a nest out of cardboard boxes for herself. While drifting into sleep, she listens to her father’s breath growing less and less familiar.

She dreams of Simos. He’s standing at the edge of a vast lake, its waters calm and green. He has his back turned to her, his arms open as if he’s about to take flight.

“Simo?” she asks, her heart aching in her chest.

He doesn’t turn around. Instead, he looks up, and so does she.

A lamentation of swans soars above them, heading west towards the setting sun.

“Are you joining them?” she asks him, her tall, white swan of a husband.

Instead of answering her, he lets out a long, bleating cry and bends his knees, curls his arms.

She wakes up before he takes off.

The sound of someone rummaging through her rucksack draws her out of sleep.

Maria springs out of her nest as quickly as her belly allows and turns on her phone’s flashlight. The hooded figure is crouched over her rucksack. She’s a girl. She turns to look at Maria, holding her sonogram in one gloved hand, the other raised to shield her eyes from the light.

“Is this yours?” the girl asks. Her voice is muffled behind her gas mask, but she sounds young. Her frame is slender. She can’t be more than eighteen.

Maria lowers her phone so she doesn’t blind the girl. “Yes,” she says.

“How far along are you?”

Maria’s hand flies to her belly, meant to protect. She could scream at this girl, chase her off, punish her for trying to steal from her. She doesn’t. “Twenty-three weeks,” she says, then corrects herself. “Twenty-four now.”

The girl nods. She puts the sonogram carefully back in the rucksack and stands up. She lets her hood drop back and reaches out her hand.

“I’m Elena,” she says. “El.”

Maria takes a step closer, hesitates for a moment, but then she squeezes El’s hand. “Maria,” she says. “The most common name there is.”

El lets out a short, anxious laugh.

“Are you hungry?” Maria asks, motioning towards the cardboard boxes. “I can spare some drink and food, if that’s what you were looking for.”

El nods again but says nothing. She walks over to Maria’s nest and sits cross-legged on the cardboard. Maria takes two candy bars and two energy drinks out of the trolley and sets them in front of El.

Neither of them speaks for a while. El lifts her gas mask just enough to sip her drink or smuggle small pieces of food into her mouth. She is studying Maria’s father.

He looks smaller and smaller with every hour that passes—bits of his old self discarded, making way for the new.

“What happened to him?” El asks.

“He got scratched a few days ago. We were in Athens together, visiting a specialist for the baby, when the worst of the riots happened.”

“Why do you keep him around?”

“He’s my dad.”

The bird man turns his head slowly, as if to look at them. His neck is now covered with white feathers, his nose and chin merged into a long, dark orange beak. “I think he’s turning into a white stork. It was his favourite bird.” He will need to migrate for the winter, she wants to say, cross the Strait of Gibraltar in the west, or else the Levant in the east, on his way to warmer climates. She doesn’t say anything.

“Do you think he understands what we’re saying?”

Maria takes a moment sipping her drink. “I don’t know,” she says after a while. “He stopped making sense the day after he was infected. The fever didn’t last long. When it was gone, he stopped speaking altogether. I expect it won’t be long now.”

“Shouldn’t he have turned completely by now?”

Maria shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s fighting it.”

“Maybe it just takes longer for old people,” El says.

“Maybe.”

“Some people change very fast. Like that TV presenter who turned into a seagull live, in front of everyone. Did you see it?”

“Everyone saw that. It was what started the riots in Athens.” Maria looks at her father. She wonders whether it would be better if he changed fast. She wonders if it hurts.

“I’m sorry for going through your stuff,” El says. “I wasn’t trying to steal your supplies. I was looking for weapons.”

Maria looks at her sharply. “To take?”

“No. To decide whether I should stay away from you.”

Maria lets a moment pass before she speaks again. “Are you from around here?” she asks. “Do you have anyone?”

El stares at a dark patch on the floor but doesn’t reply.

Maria’s father makes a faint hissing sound and clatters his beak.

“Why does he do that?” El asks. “Can’t he sing?” She pauses. There’s an edge in her voice. “I’ve seen others that sounded like fucking songbirds,” she adds.

“Storks are voiceless, or almost voiceless, because they lack a fully developed syrinx,” Maria says. “That’s what the vocal organ of birds is called. It’s like a human larynx, but positioned in the chest, and it’s double-barrelled.” El gives her a look. She can hardly see the girl’s eyes behind her gas mask, but she can tell it’s one of puzzlement. “Imagine a person who has two flutes connecting their lips to their lungs, and they could play one with one lung, and the other with the air from the second lung.”

“How do you know all that stuff? Are you a biologist or something?”

Maria laughs. “No,” she says. “But my dad was. An ornithologist. I just liked birds.”

The sun emerges over the buildings across the street, its light splintering into the garage.

“I should go soon,” Maria says, standing up.

El nods and stands up too. She looks across the street, silent.

“Where are you going to go?” Maria asks her.

El shrugs. “I dunno,” she says.

“Would you like to come with me?”

“Where?”

“Home. I’m trying to get to my husband. He was busy when I left. That’s why I went with my father. I don’t know where he is now.”

“Is that who you were dreaming about earlier?” El asks. “When I woke you up?”

“Why? Did I say something?”

El hesitates. “No,” she says after a moment. “You just sounded like you were dreaming of someone you care about. Someone who’s gone.”

They walk for a long time, without speaking. They run into more and more half-turned ones the closer they get to the centre. Maria makes sure they give them a wide berth, to avoid provoking any kind of aggression. But it’s the unturned ones she worries about the most. Now and then, they see corpses: people stabbed to death, or their heads cracked open, abandoned on the streets like they were nothing. No, it’s not the plague that made us this way, she thinks. This is who we’ve always been.

El breaks the silence. “So did you walk all the way from Athens? That must have been hard, in your condition.” She sounds impressed and suspicious at the same time.

“No. I had a car. Cars, actually—I had to switch several times on the way, and only covered part of the distance on foot.”

El’s face settles on impressed. “Still,” she says. “Badass.”

Maria laughs. She turns to look at the girl. Her hair is dark and tangled, but the ends curl into big ringlets, just like her own. She could have been her daughter, in another life, another world.

“I wish I could see your face,” she says. “But don’t take off the mask!” she hurries to add. “It’s good that you have it. We can’t be sure how that thing spreads, or how it might mutate.”

El doesn’t respond. She runs her fingers through her hair, untangling some of the curls. She’s looking at the buildings around them as if scanning the area for something.

“Where did you get it, anyway?” Maria asks. “The mask.”

“My dad was a survivalist,” El says. She seems distracted. “I think it’s from WWI, or so he claimed. I don’t even know if it works.”

Maria inhales sharply, trying to find something comforting to say, but El intercepts her sympathy. “Oh, no, it’s not like that. He died when I was little, years ago.”

“I see,” Maria says. “And your mom?”

El suddenly stops walking. She looks at an alley to her left and says, very quietly: “She wasn’t around. I grew up with my uncle. Left when I was fifteen.”

Maria stops pushing the trolley and looks in the same direction. “What’s wrong?” she whispers.

“We’re actually very close to where my uncle lived,” El says. She raises her arm and points at the alley. “It’s two streets down that way.” She seems to waver for a moment, trying to make a decision. “I’ll go take a look,” she says finally. She glances at Maria. “You don’t have to come.”

“I know,” Maria says. “But I’m coming.”

They hear the hawk before they see it. It screeches and hurls itself against the glass door that leads to the verandah. Its sound is hoarse and alarming—like the scream of something that shouldn’t be able to scream.

“That must be my uncle,” El says.

Maria puts her hand on the girl’s shoulder. She doesn’t shrug it off. “I’m sorry,” Maria says.

“Don’t be,” El replies. She stands still, keeping her eyes on the bird.

“Should we free him?” Maria asks.

El takes a while to tear her gaze from that screaming bird. “No,” she says. Her voice is firm. “He was not a good person. Let him be.”

Maria nods. “I’m sorry.”

“You said that before,” El snaps and starts walking away. Then, she turns to Maria, her voice softer this time: “Come on. There used to be a pharmacy around the corner here. We should check it out.”

The pharmacy is a block further away than El remembered, but it’s still there. The door is bolted shut, but someone has cut a hole through the metallic shutters and broken the shop window. The place has clearly been ransacked, like everything else.

El slips carefully through the broken window and calls for Maria to follow her. Maria stays still for a second, closes her eyes and breathes in as deeply as she can. An image from long ago flashes in her mind: her father, much younger, splashing through the shallows of a lake rimmed with tall, yellow reeds. He’s trying to get to a wounded bird. An ibis with a broken leg, most likely hit by a motorboat that wasn’t supposed to be there. Her father used to say that people bring destruction to everything they touch. The lake is teeming with all kinds of birds, larks and flamingoes and storks, and it’s loud, it’s so loud. She’s standing at the edge of the water, struck speechless by the intensity of that sound. Her father reaches the bird and picks it up, and it doesn’t even flap its wings, it shows no sign of resistance. It just hangs there, limp in his arms. Light and broken.

Maria pulls a flashlight out of her rucksack and follows El into the pharmacy.

The place is still surprisingly full, despite having been broken into. El is already rummaging through the shelves and drawers in the back when Maria lets out a scream and drops her flashlight.

El rushes back to the main space, her blouse turned into a pouch and filled with small boxes. “What is it?” she asks.

Maria slowly crouches to the floor and picks up her flashlight. “Don’t speak,” she whispers. “Walk very slowly towards me.”

Then the hissing and the clicking start. Maria shines a light on the three round faces staring at them. The owls spread their wings and sway their heads back and forth in unison. Their hissing sends a chill down Maria’s spine, and her knees almost buckle. “We have to get out of here,” she says. “They will attack.”

El’s face looks pale in the half dark of the pharmacy. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay, we’re going.”

They back away towards the hole in the window. El slips out first, then Maria makes her way through the hole backwards, shining her flashlight on the hissing owls the whole time.

They put some distance between themselves and the pharmacy before speaking again.

El is panting. Maria finds herself letting out a breath she’s been holding since she saw those otherworldly faces looking at her, their black eyes burrowing into her skin.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” El says.

“Those were barn owls,” Maria says. “That’s how they react to intruders. They would have attacked any minute.”

El shakes her head, and then, out of the blue, bursts out laughing. It’s a high-pitched, shrill laugh. “It’s like the fucking zombie apocalypse,” she says, fighting to breathe, “only with birds.”

Maria laughs too, even though her skin is still crawling.

When El has calmed down a little, Maria asks her what she found.

“Oh, you’re gonna love this,” El says. She empties her pouch onto the trolley. There’s ibuprofen, antibiotics, clear alcohol, gauze. Then she pauses for effect before producing another box out of her back pocket. “Tada!” she says.

It’s prenatal vitamins. Maria repeats that to herself slowly, her brain fighting to reconcile with the absurdity of this luxury. Her eyes fill with tears.

“Here,” the girl says, extending the arm holding the vitamins.

Instead of taking them, Maria envelops the girl into a hug. The gas mask is hard against her shoulder, El’s body stiff in her arms. But soon, the stiffness melts away, and El hugs her back.

“Thank you,” Maria says.

Then, the moment passes, and they start walking again. Above them, on the wires, on the balconies, on the roofs, thousands of birds stare at them, their cries piercing, their minds unreachable.

They cover the distance towards the centre of the city steadily, stopping to rest only when necessary, freeing trapped birds on the way whenever they can. Maria’s father has almost rid himself of his human exterior and emerged, it seems to her, as that which he’s always been. He’s standing in the trolley now, clattering his beak at any humans they come across, shrieking menacingly, as if to protect them. The song of a nightingale seems to be following them, has been with them for hours, sweet and melodic but slightly off-pitch, as if it’s still learning, still getting accustomed to its new voice.

“Where did you go after you stopped living with your uncle?” Maria asks El as they pass under a highway bridge. “You were so young.”

El takes her time before answering. “I was homeless for some time,” she says then. “This …” She makes a sweeping motion with her arm, showing the desolation that surrounds them—the corpses, the half-turned wretches breathing heavily, slumped against crumbling walls, all bird heads, bird eyes, uncertain wings. “This is not so different from before, for me.” She pauses. “Then I met the girl I loved, and I was happy for a long time, so don’t feel sorry for me. I’m one of the lucky ones. Her name was Iris.”

“Like the rainbow?”

“Yeah,” El says. “Like the rainbow.”

“What happened to her?”

El shrugs. “What do you think?” She faces Maria, her eyes behind her gas mask as inscrutable as that of birds. “She turned early on, into a tiny thing. A lark, I think.”

“That’s a songbird,” Maria says softly.

“Yeah,” El replies. “I know.”

Maria stays silent. El walks ahead, quickening her pace as if trying to run away. She doesn’t, though. Eventually, she stops and turns around, facing Maria again.

“We’re entering the centre soon,” El says.

“I know.”

“Are we close to your house?”

“Yes.”

El looks away. A murmuration of starlings passes overhead. “Do you miss him, your husband?” she asks.

Maria thumbs her phone, dead in her pocket. My bones ache from how much I miss him, she wants to say. She nods.

“I miss Iris too,” El says.

Maria looks up at the birds, their flight like a living cloud blotting out the sun. “I know,” she says.

Not too long to go now. Here in the city centre, entire blocks of buildings are completely burnt down. The whole place reeks of burnt tires and smoke. Maria’s calves ache from walking, even though El has taken over pushing the trolley. She manoeuvres it around upturned bins and abandoned cars. There is an open truck loaded with supplies—gallons of water and whole stacks of cans just left there, like an unfinished thought. A dog passes in front of them, holding a limp heron in its mouth. Maria shivers. Her head feels light, her face hot, as if tiny stingers are threading themselves through her skin. She stops, leans against the husk of a car. Her breathing is shallow and quick, her vision blurred.

“Hey,” El says, coming to stand next to her. “Hey, what is it?”

Maria pushes her hand against her chest, trying to keep something from spilling out of her, once and for all. Her throat feels tight, and yet she manages to speak. “What if he’s not there,” she says. “What if the house has burnt down, what if he’s …” Her voice breaks.

The girl pulls her into a hug with one quick, sure movement. “It’s okay,” she says. “You’re okay. I’m here with you.”

Maria lets herself be held until her breathing slows again, her vision clears.

The nightingale sings.

The building is still standing, the front door intact. El tries to open it.

“It’s locked,” she says. “Someone defended this place.” She smiles, making Maria’s heart flutter with something hot and terrifying like hope.

Maria fishes her keys out of her rucksack and unlocks the door. They push the trolley past the entrance and make their way up to Maria’s apartment on the third floor.

Everything is as she left it. The curtains are open, the place clean and tidy. It smells the same as always, feels the same as always. But Simos is not there.

He’s left a note on the fridge, like they used to, as if this were like any other time, as if this were just another sweet little note to brighten the other’s day, saying “Good morning, my bird” (yes, they used to call each other that, of all things, they did), or “Remember to take out the trash” followed by a scribbled, lopsided heart. But this note says:

Maria, my darling, my life,

I’m catching the first train to Athens. I’m coming to find you.

If you come home before I do, know this: I love you, forever and always.

Simos

It’s dated ten days ago, back when the news and the plague burnt through the country like wildfire. When things fell apart far more quickly than anyone could imagine.

A lot may have happened in ten days. A lot has.

Maria rests her head against the fridge door. She had thought about the possibility of not finding Simos, of never finding him. She had thought it would make her wail and cry, but now all she can feel is empty, drained of all that has carried her all the way from Athens back home.

El finds her like that and puts an arm around her shoulders.

“He’s not here,” Maria says. She hands her the note.

El nods. “Come on,” she says. “You need to rest.”

Maria refuses to lie in their bed. Instead, she collapses on the sofa and falls into a deep sleep that feels like nothing.

When she wakes, it’s dark. El is nowhere in sight.

“El?” she cries out, something frantic rising in her chest.

“Next door!” the girl calls back.

She finds her at her neighbours’ apartment, petting their cat—it used to be a majestic, fluffy thing, its pelvic bones now sticking out. The cat purrs, rubbing against El’s calf.

“I think she ate her owners,” El says, pointing at a small pile of feathers and bones a few meters away.

“That was Mr. and Mrs. Anastasiou,” Maria says, crouching to pet the cat herself.

“Should we let her out?”

Maria nods. She finds the cat food in the kitchen, fills a small tub with fresh water. “Let’s go back,” she says. “We’ll come back to look for things we can use in the morning, let her out then.”

Back in Maria’s apartment, they light the fireplace and boil water to bathe. They find clean clothes for both of them to change into. Then, Maria makes them tea and a simple meal of boiled potatoes. It’s the first warm food either of them has had in days.

They eat in silence, watching the flames.

“Were you close with your dad?” El asks when the fire has almost died down.

Maria rubs her eyes. “We were working on it,” she says. “We were not close when I was growing up. He spent way more time with his birds than he did with us. Sometimes he was violent. He had a few affairs. My mother was a deeply unhappy woman. She passed away without ever saying a word.” She pauses. “We have both been trying to make things better since then; it was too late, though. I love him, but there was not enough time to forgive him. I don’t know if I ever will.”

“I’m sorry,” El says. She has removed her gas mask for the first time since they met. Her eyes are dark brown, gleaming in the fire’s dying light.

“Sometimes I think it’s all our fault, this whole bird plague,” Maria says. “My family’s. As if it was our unspoken darkness that infected everyone.”

El looks at her, her gaze a mystery.

“I know it’s silly,” Maria says. “Self-centred.”

“I don’t think it’s silly,” El says. “I used to think Iris was the source of every rainbow on Earth.”

Maria smiles. “This is one of the sweetest things I’ve ever heard,” she says.

“I’ve been looking for a rainbow ever since she turned. I’ve never wished so hard for rain before.”

Maria scoots over close to El and wraps her arms around her. They stay like that, looking at the embers for a long time.

So, baby, let’s see if I’m getting any better at this.

Listen. I’ll start again. Are you listening?

Once upon a time, there was a King who loved birds so much he wanted to take one as his bride. And so he went to the Queen of the Birds in the sky and begged her to give him one of her daughters to marry. The Bird Queen accepted, but said that there would be a price to pay. And the price was that the King would have to give his firstborn daughter to the Bird Queen in exchange for the one she had given up.

Years passed, and the King was happy with his bird bride, but then she laid an egg, and sat on it for a long time, and didn’t let him near her egg until it hatched. And when it hatched, out came a beautiful baby girl with perfect human eyes and the softest of wings. And the King knew that he had to give that baby up to the Bird Queen as he’d promised, but his bride begged him not to take her daughter away. And so the King, soft-willed as he was when it came to his wife and daughter, let them be. They named their daughter Maria, the most common name there is, to make it harder for the Bird Queen to find her. And the Bird Queen did not find out that the King had broken his promise to her, until the girl had grown up and become a Queen herself, and the King was now an Old King, unable to take care of himself. Then the Bird Queen grew so furious that she cursed the whole Kingdom, for she had been cheated out of a daughter. And if she couldn’t have her promised daughter back, she would have them all.

And this, baby, is why there are so many birds in this world.

In the morning, they drink instant coffee and have breakfast and vitamins and change into fresh clothes simply because they can.

“Now what?” El asks, looking out the window.

Maria keeps silent, packing a bag full of essentials.

“I know you want to find him …” El starts, but Maria gives her a sharp look and she stops, her phrase hanging in the air, unfinished but clear. “We could stay here,” El says.

“You can stay here for as long as you like,” Maria says. She looks out the window too. “I have to look for him. But first I want to go somewhere high up. Somewhere I can see the city from above.”

El takes a few moments before she speaks again. “All right,” she says. “Let’s go.”

They make their way up to the old castles, the Byzantine walls that used to mark the outer edge of the city, long ago. Maria’s father is now entirely a white stork. She can’t take her eyes off him, studying him with an intensity that makes the rest of the world around her nothing but a blur. She observes his dark orange beak on his white head, the white-feathered body ending in silky-black plumage, his long, thin legs. His eyes have taken on a new shine, and he spends more and more time staring up at the sky.

What are you looking at, daddy? Maria asks silently. What passes through your mind? My father is a stork, she thinks, and there’s nothing about him that would make someone say: that is not a bird like any other bird in the world, that is a man who turned into a stork.

El didn’t put her gas mask back on when they left the house this morning. When Maria asked her about it, she shrugged her shoulders in a way that frightened her, but she didn’t press it further.

Maria runs her palm down the curve of her belly as they settle on a gently sloping terrace in front of the old wall, overlooking the city. She can see everything from up here, all the way to the sea: the countless churches, their bells now mute, the cemetery next to the St. Dimitrios Hospital, the jumble of multistorey buildings and the old train station, the cranes at the city port—the machines, not the birds, their beaks dipped low near the surface of the water. And further out, beyond the sea, she can even make out Mt. Olympus, its peak perpetually covered in snow.

A phalanx of storks rises from the city centre and flies towards them, their mighty wings flapping.

“Do you think they were humans, once, these groups of birds, all of them?” El asks. “Like whole villages or neighbourhoods or something? Or are they just birds?”

Maria shields her eyes from the rising sun, the storks’ V shape etched on her vision in reverse. A city emptied out. A country that flew away. “Is there a difference anymore?”

Then, when the birds have almost reached the walls, her father lets out a high-pitched croak and takes off. He glides for a minute, uncertain, but then he gains height, rising up higher and higher, until he reaches the rest of the birds and joins their phalanx. They fly away towards the west, all of them, Maria’s father now completely indistinguishable from any other stork.

A knot rises in her throat. She covers her face with her palms and breathes.

“Are you okay?” El asks.

Maria is about to answer that no, she’s not, when someone lunges at her from behind, knocking her down. She catches a glimpse of the man’s black eyes before her chin hits the ground. He turns her around and presses her against the dirt, trying to rip her rucksack off her back. She can hear El trying to tear him from her, and she wants to shout, but all the air has escaped her lungs.

Then there’s a thud, and the man rolls away from her body. He staggers for a moment, holding the side of his head with a feathered arm.

El is holding a large, bloodied rock. She lets it drop to the ground when the man turns around and runs away.

El rushes to Maria’s side and helps her up.

“I’m okay,” Maria says, rubbing her shoulder.

“No,” El says. Her face is pale, her eyes rimmed with red. “No,” she says again. She grabs Maria’s arm and twists it gently so she can see her elbow. “He scratched you,” she says. “He scratched you.”

The fever comes to her like a wave, warming and soft, almost comforting. It envelops her body, every inch of it, burning away her fear, silencing her alarm. And so, she welcomes it. It shows her visions that remind her of herself when she was young, on her few trips with her father when he took her with him to work: the singing reeds, the mother ducks, the overcast skies, the lovely mud teeming with tadpoles and tiny, shiny life. It speaks to her too; it speaks the language of rustling leaves, of raining clouds and of waves crested with foam.

El is by her side the whole time.

“Leave,” Maria begs her. “Leave, leave.” But she doesn’t.

Then, the skin on her belly feels like it is being stung from the inside, and there is the terrible certainty of something leaving her body that can never come back. There is warmth between her legs. She sits up, leans against the castle wall and looks down, reaching with her hand at her crotch. She finds tiny feathers and blood.

Behind her eyelids, Simos is taking flight.

When the fever starts to wane, Maria holds up her hands in front of her, expects to find them covered in feathers, but her fingers are still as she knows them, her skin, her wrist, her wedding ring.

“My hands are trembling,” she says.

El takes them in hers, holds them, steadies them.

“It’s okay,” she says.

“What are you going to do?” Maria asks.

El’s dark eyes are moist, overcast. You smell like a cloud, Maria wants to say.

“I don’t know,” El says. “I might go back to your place, if that’s okay. Stay for a while. See if the cat comes back.”

Maria smiles. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” Her skin feels soft. Her bones light. She’s sinking into something old and without a name.

El snaps her fingers, trying to get her attention. “Hey,” she says. “That fairy tale you’ve been telling every night since we met. How does it end?”

“I don’t know.” The air. The air.

“Come on,” El says. “Make it up.”

Her head is swimming in air, her gaze long, the horizon close, so close. “I can’t,” she says.

“Please,” El begs. “I want to hear it.”

“I can’t,” Maria whispers.

“Try? For me?”

“Okay,” Maria says.

“Make it a happy one,” El says. Her eyes are full of rain.

“Okay. I’ll try.”

Once upon a time, after the Old King was long gone, and the Bird Queen had flown away, and the young Queen had withered and died, there was a kingdom without a king, and a queendom without a queen, and it was known around the world as the land with the most beautiful birds.

A sharp pain in her lung, a long whistle.

There were very few people living in this land. But there was a girl, a strong girl, who lived by a lake and liked to watch the larks fly off every morning and come back every night. And she was happy, because she got to watch this exaltation of larks every day. And when they weren’t flying, the larks sang the wisest of songs. And so one day the girl fell in love with a lark.

The lark loved her back. And then one day the lark gave her.

The lark gave her a kiss.

And the girl said, “I didn’t know larks could kiss.” But they could, they could.

And the lark said, “Are you ready to fly?”

Long lost lips. A flutter of inner wings.

And then she. And then I.

Her thoughts trail into song.

ABOUT NATALIA THEODORIDOU

Natalia Theodoridou is a Media & Cultural Studies scholar, an editor at sub-Q interactive fiction magazine, and a writer of strange stories. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and elsewhere. For more, visit her

#Natalia Theodoridu #The Birding #short story #long post #also: word fantasy award winning story

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superbcollectorsheep · 3 years ago

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Cars that watch you watch them steer

The automobile, in American life, has long been a hallmark of freedom. A teenager’s first driver’s license offers freedom from Mom and Dad. A new car and the open road bring the freedom to chase the American dream. But as more technology creeps in to help drivers, so, too, will systems that eavesdrop on and monitor them, necessitated not by convenience but by new safety concerns.

Cameras that recognize facial expressions, sensors that detect heart rates and software that assesses a driver’s state of awareness may seem like superfluous flights of fancy, but they are increasingly viewed as part of an inevitable driving future.

At upstarts like the electric car company Byton and mainstream mainstays like Volvo, car designers are working on facial recognition, drowsy-driver alert systems and other features for keeping track of the people behind the wheel.

The most immediate impetus: concerns about the safe use of driver-assistance options like automatic lane-keeping that still require drivers to pay attention. And when truly autonomous vehicles finally arrive, the consensus among automakers and their suppliers is that new ways will be needed to check on drivers and passengers to make sure they are safe inside.

“It’s really taken off from no car monitor to tactile monitoring to taking a look at your eyes,” said Grant Courville, a vice president at BlackBerry QNX, which creates in-dash software systems. “I definitely see more of that coming as you get to Level 3 cars,” he added, referring to vehicles that can perform some self-driving functions in limited situations.The feature is part of the car’s Super Cruise system, the first hands-free driving tool to operate on select United States highways. The camera tracks a driver’s head position and eye movements to ensure that the person is attentive and able to retake control of the car when needed.

Similar concerns about BMW’s semi-autonomous systems prompted the German carmaker to add a driver monitoring camera in its 2019 X5 sport utility vehicle. The video camera is mounted in the instrument cluster as part of BMW’s Extended Traffic Jam Assistant system, part of a $1,700 package, that allows the car to go autonomous — with driver monitoring — in stop-and-go traffic under 37 miles per hour.

“It looks at the head pose and the eyes of the driver,” said Dirk Wisselmann of BMW’s automated driving program. “We have to, because by doing so it empowers us to add more functionality.”

Automakers understand that tracking technology raises privacy issues, so BMW does not record or store the ahd car monitor information, Mr. Wisselmann said.

Perhaps still smarting from lessons learned in the past, G.M. also does not record what transpires inside the car’s cabin, the company said. In 2011, G.M. tried to change the user agreement in its OnStar service to allow it to share driver information with third-party companies. The backlash from owners was so swift and severe that the Supreme Court cited the episode as proof that people had an expectation of privacy in their cars.

“But it’s not just about distraction management,” said Jada Smith, a vice president in the advanced engineering department at the auto supplier Aptiv. During an autonomous driving demonstration, she pointed out that such driver monitoring systems can assess a driver’s cognitive load levels — how many tasks the person is trying to juggle — and then adjust other car functions.

“If the driver is not fully aware,” Ms. Smith said, “we might brake faster.” Other ideas include putting radar inside the car for interior sensing like detecting that a child has been left behind. (Every nine days a child left in a car dies from vehicular heatstroke in the United States, according to KidsAndCars.org, an advocacy group.)

It was infants’ being left in cars that first prompted Guardian Optical Technologies, based in Tel Aviv, to develop in-cabin monitoring technology, said Tal Recanati, the company’s chief business officer. The company has now expanded its 3-D vision and “micro vibration” sensing system to recognize faces, check seatbelt use, even adjust elements like airbag deployment velocity based on a passenger’s approximate weight. Eventually Guardian’s technology could be able to judge the emotional state of people in the car.

Affectiva, a Boston company developing technology for measuring emotions, has been conducting such research for several years to assess driver behavior. On a closed test track peppered with distractions — people dressed as construction workers, a security vehicle with flashing lights, pedestrians, fake storefronts — Affectiva demonstrated how the company’s program works in tandem with a “collaborative driving” system made by the Swedish auto supplier Veoneer. Veoneer’s technology can control steering and braking on its own, with the occasional intervention of a human driver.

Affectiva collected a variety of driver information during the test, measuring elements like the amount of grip on the wheel, throttle action, vehicle dome camera, facial and head movements. It then compared that information with what was happening around the car to determine how much trust the driver had in the semi-autonomous system and the perceived level of cognitive load.

“We want them to trust the car — but not too much,” said Ola Bostrom, a vice president of research at Veoneer. “The driver still has to be engaged” in order to take over the controls when a car encounters a situation it can’t handle.

To deliver other advanced services, like augmented reality information about nearby businesses and locations, it will also be necessary to monitor what drivers are paying attention to, said Andrew Poliak, a vice president at Panasonic Automotive Systems. And companies as diverse as Mercedes-Benz and the voice-recognition company Nuance want to add Alexa-like services, meaning that your sedan or S.U.V. may always be listening.

“So these systems are going to become standard in all cars,” said Nakul Duggal, who leads the automotive products group at Qualcomm.

Will privacy concerns then recede in the rearview mirror of advancing technologies?

When fully autonomous vehicles begin circulating on public roads, designers note, they will have to be able to detect when people enter or exit a vehicle, who the person is, whether they have left anything behind in the car, and especially if a person has become disabled (because of intoxication or a medical emergency). And that information will inevitably be shared online, although there may be ways that some people can still preserve their sense of independence in the car.

“In the future, it may be different for people who own their own cars, where there’s more privacy,” said Mr. Wisselmann at BMW, “and for people who use robo taxis, where there will be less.”

It’s 2025 and you’re cruising down the highway late at night. It’s been a long day and your eyelids feel heavy. All of a sudden, you hear three beeps, lights flash, your car slows down, and it pulls itself safely to the side of the road.

This scenario is closer to becoming reality than you may think, and although vehicle camra get all the headlines, most drivers will experience something like it long before they can buy a car that drives itself.

Full self-driving cars are taking longer to arrive than techno-optimists predicted a few years ago. In fact, in a financial filing Wednesday, Tesla acknowledged it may never be able to deliver a full self-driving car at all.

But with features such as automated cruise control, steering assist and automatic highway lane changing, new cars come loaded with driver-assist options. As they proliferate, the task of a human driver is beginning to shift from operating the vehicle to supervising the systems that do so.

That development carries promise and peril. Decades of research make clear that humans aren’t good at paying attention in that way. The auto industry’s answer: systems that monitor us to make sure we’re monitoring the car.

Such systems, usually relying on a driver-facing camera that car rear view monitor and head movements, already have been deployed in tens of thousands of long-haul trucks, mining trucks and heavy construction vehicles, mainly to recognize drowsiness, alcohol or drug use, and general distraction.

Some new automobile models can already be purchased with option packages that include monitoring systems, usually as part of driver-assist features such as lane keeping and automated cruise control. They include cars from General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, Subaru, Nissan and Volvo.

One reason for the sudden rush: European regulators plan to require such systems be installed on every new car sold there by mid-decade.

The top U.S. car industry lobby, recently renamed the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, told a Senate panel Tuesday that it welcomes regulation that would require driver-monitoring systems in all new cars sold with driver-assist technologies. The National Transportation Safety Board, after several fatal Tesla Autopilot crashes, has recommended that safety regulators require more robust systems than the one Tesla uses to keep drivers engaged.

So-called advanced driver-assist systems serve as a bridge as companies work to develop safe, fully self-driving cars, which are beginning to appear in very limited locations. Most driverless car developers put tight restrictions on how they can be used and where they can go.

“We’re in an in-between phase at the moment,” said Colin Barnden, a market analyst at Semicast Research.

On the plus side, such technologies can reduce driving stress and, if deployed responsibly, improve safety. At the same time, the less input a car needs from a human driver, the harder it is for that driver to remain vigilant. Humans aren’t good at “monitoring things, waiting for something to go wrong. We just aren’t wired to do that,” Barnden said.

Driver-monitoring systems come in two basic types: eye trackers and steering wheel sensors. In either case, if a driver is detected not paying attention, warnings are sounded through lights or sounds or both; if the driver doesn’t reengage, the car pulls itself to the roadside and stops.

Tesla uses the steering sensor. Practically everybody else uses eye trackers.

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orionsangel86 · 7 years ago

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A retrospective look at the Season 12 wishlist.

Back shortly after the season 11 finale I wrote out a wishlist of all the things I wanted for Season 12. Looking back at that list (here) It’s funny to see what I wanted with hindsight now that season 12 is over and season 13 is only a week away. I thought I would revisit my season 12 wishlist to recap the season and where I went wrong (and right!) before I post a wishlist for season 13.

Wish 1. Castiel gets his emotional arc resolved - This is a big one. As a Cas girl I was left unsatisfied with Castiel’s arc this season, HOWEVER, we KNOW from previous Dabb episodes that he loves to explore Castiel’s emotional story and I have no doubt that this will continue into season 12. Our angel still has a story ahead of him (hopefully ending in the love of a certain green eyed hunter.)

In Hindsight: Ah yes, my big number one on the wishlist was all about Cas getting his emotional arc resolved. Did he get this? Well, kind of. I don’t think any of us could have predicted that Dabb would give us THREE Castiel heavy episodes exploring his emotional past, present and future in ways which blew our collective meta brains out. Cas got lots of love this season and its why season 12 is now one of my all time faves. Where we are now is unknown in some ways for Cas but in other ways his past is clear. He has finally reached the transformation part of his character journey, and season 13 will bring us a Cas rising from the ashes like a beautiful phoenix shrouded in flames.

Wish 2. SUPERBRITISH - I am not going to stop going on about this. This is my land, My green and (fairly) pleasant land. The British are coming to Supernatural and I cannot stop being excited about it. Can I please have ALL the TFW in London head canons please? From traffic jams and silly accents to discovering the glory that is a bacon roll from Gregs on a Sunday morning whilst suffering a horrendous hangover.

In Hindsight: LOL. Yeah right. Am I disappointed? Totally. The British Men of Letters were for me, totally underwhelming. There was no trip to England, there was no grumpy Dean stuck on the M25. At the end of the day they served their purpose. They brought home the fact that hunting is not black and white. That sometimes it is humans who are the most monstrous. Honestly right now I just hope we don’t revisit it. I think its best that this story line gets dropped from now on. *sigh*

Wish 3. Awesome female characters continuing to kick ass - I adored the use of female characters in the finale. They all lived, no one female was a sexy lamp (sadly that role was given to Castiel) and no one got forced into unnecessary make out sessions. The women are smart, sarcastic badass queens who will RULE this show come October, and I for one, cannot wait.

In Hindsight: Can I hear a cheer for the WAYWARD SISTERS! Hell’s YES! I mean, they have granted us what we wanted with the Wayward Sisters in season 13, but did we actually get this in season 12? Well, Lady Toni turned out to be a psycho, who died. Her British badass knuckle duster lady also died. Alicia and Tasha both died, so did Rowena and Eileen. It actually wasn’t a GREAT season for the girls. This is what happens when you give Bucklemming too much control over the main plot I suppose. *sigh*. So whilst the Wayward Sisters announcement definitely counts as a win, overall I can’t say this wish has been ticked off.

Wish 4. Men of Letters vs Grand Coven - Yes this is a big one and I am hoping is the main story arc going forward into season 12. I want to see more of the Grand Coven of witches and their European battle with the Men of Letters. I am expecting more awesome women kicking ass thanks to this potential storyline.

In Hindsight: LOL. Again. Wasted. Potential. *sigh*

Wish 5. Mother Mary and family time - Mary’s reveal was pretty amazing especially since I think we were all expecting it to just be her ghost or a vision or something, but nope, Mummy Winchester is back on the scene and I can’t even begin to imagine what they are planning to do with this. All I am hoping for is that Mary’s influence will help Dean to accept certain parts of him that he loves to keep repressed (effeminophobia and his bisexuality being the big ones). Mary coming back will hopefully start to truly break down and destroy John Winchester’s toxic influence over his sons. I also really really want her to meet Cas and say the words “Thank you for watching over my son.” YES.

In Hindsight: Ok so this one I think gets ticked off. Mary’s purpose was to get Dean to let go of some of his major hang ups, to finally get some really heavy stuff off his chest, and to break down John Winchesters toxic influence. Also for Dean to finally take his mother off that pedestal he’s been keeping her on his whole life. I think the show, and 12x22 particularly, did an excellent job with this. We didn’t quite get a bisexual reveal, but the subtext was thick and heavy (12x11 was glorious). Mary also mirrored Cas continually throughout the season as two people both looking for their place in this little family dynamic and having Mary accept Cas as “one of my boys” really was the icing on the cake for any Cas fans out there happily sipping on hater tears.

Wish 6. Sam gets some distance from Dean, some other friends, maybe a girl, and definitely a dog - I think it is safe to say that Sam isn’t dead. Probably just shot in the arm or leg or something. I want him to be taken to England by Lady T and face the Men of Letters. I hope that they will warm to Sam (and his wonderful moose charms) and that Sam will get to bond with his British companions away from Dean (because Dean always steals the side characters away and bonds with them more than Sam ever does - except for Eileen). Maybe there could even be love in the future for Sam - either by bringing back Eileen or developing a decent and believable relationship between Sam and Lady T (I don’t want her forced into the love interest role, I think she is far too good for that already, but if she becomes a regular throughout the season like Rowena is then potentially a relationship could blossom slowly between them. It could work. I have been hoping for love for Sam for some time now and I can see the potential in this).

In Hindsight: Urgh so this is a yes and a massive NOPE at the same time. Bucklemming managed to ruin Lady Toni in the second episode of the season and then killed off Eileen in 12x21 (seriously fuck those assholes). I guess even the THOUGHT of shipping Sam with someone now gets a girl killed in this show even if she doesn’t go near his killer dick. Poor Sam. On a more positive note he DID get some distance from Dean in 12x22 and symbolically the toxic co-dependency has been broken. So that is one major point to mark off. (I didn’t actually even wish for that as I doubted it would happen myself!) Shame about him still not getting a dog though. WHY CAN’T YOU GIVE SAM A DOG DAMMIT! Sam has definitely moved forward in season 12 to a healthier place, though I think he still has far to go compared to Dean. Hopefully we will see him reach his full potential in season 13.

Wish 7. Lady T is a well developed, fully rounded, likeable character and not a sexy lamp or boring love interest - I already love her. I want to know more about her, her motivations, her back story, how she became a woman of letters, I want her to be a worthy adversary to the Winchesters before becoming a trustworthy ally. I want her to continue to take none of their shit, to put them in their place and therefore earn their respect. I also really want to see her face of with Rowena. That would be awesome. England vs Scotland right there! Potentially I would accept her becoming a love interest to Sam only if it was done right. If it was done in the subtext throughout the season and is only a very very tiny part of the storyline. It would have to be major slow burn. No forced kisses like in CACW (did you guys see that? what the fuck was that?). Only then, would I accept any sort of romantic sub-plot between characters.

In Hindsight: *ugly cries into pillow over how off the mark this was*

Fuck you Bucklemming.

Wish 8. More screen time for Dean and Cas = DESTIEL - Well obviously. It wouldn’t be a proper supernatural wishlist if it didn’t have Destiel written in big letters somewhere now would it? After all the build up in Season 11 in the subtext I am still convinced that this is going somewhere. The season finale has NOT destroyed my positivity at all. In fact it has only added to it. (come ask me about it if you want more info). At the end of the day, Dean and Cas are going to have to save Sam. This means spending time together trying to FIND Sam in a completely unknown city (hence my excitement over them renting a car and getting stuck on the M25 before ending up lost in somewhere like Surrey… Oh the fanfiction potential! I can practically taste it! I have faith in Dabb to bring us more destiel moments. he has always been good to us.

In Hindsight: *stops crying*

*jumps around in glee*

*remembers the end of 12x23*

*cries again*

Do I even need to talk about it? Every good wishlist should include destiel, but I NEVER would have predicted what they gave us. I NEVER would have seen it coming…

Mixtaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaappppppppppeeeeeeeeeeeeee

But seriously though? With the pining over each other in 12x09, the angel/human love stories and human weakness of 12x10, the LOVE CONFESSION of 12x12 and the MIXTAPE (among other amazing moments) in 12x19 where do I even START with season 12 destiel?!? The fact that they have ended it like they have KNOWING Cas is coming back… I mean… it is BEYOND ANYTHING I COULD HAVE DREAMED UP. There is a reason we call it season fanfic 12. Holy crap it was glorious. I’m marking this a big YES for the wishlist.

Wish 9. Following on from the above… HUNTER CAS - Dabb brought us the wonderful episode Hunteri Heroci which had Cas try out his hunting skills (and save the day I might add). We know Dabb loves Cas. I have every reason to believe that Cas will get more time as a Hunter. I want him in MOTW episodes. He will be soooo good in MOTW episodes please please PLEASE let this happen! (especially if the MOTW episodes are set in BRITAIN because the boys are still out there dealing with the MOL and the Grand Coven…. I see them dealing with ghosts that are 1000 years old and haunting freaking castles… it will be glorious.)

In Hindsight: Does “Agent Beyonce” count as Hunter Cas? Because I want to count it. It may not have been on the level of Hunteri Heroici, but I loved his grumpy married couple bickering with Dean at the start of the season, the lumberjack comment? That was genius. Give us more stuff like that SPN PLEASE.

Wish 10. More funny episodes - More witches doing ridiculous things to the boys. Give me ACTUAL MOOSE SAM WINCHESTER PLEASE! Give me the kind of silly witch stories we have been reading about in fanfics for far too long… come on show, its season 12! What have you got to loose?

In Hindsight: Well, 12x11 was witches and was pretty funny whilst being equally heart breaking. Plus it gave us the wonderful end scene of Dean riding Larry to his hearts content. None of us are gonna forget that in a hurry. I think it counts. Even though I am still royally pissed off that they killed Rowena. *sigh*

We do have a Scooby Doo animated episode in season 13 though which again I never ever would have considered possible but heyho, they love to surprise us.

Wish 11. Beach Episode - This is purely for @elizabethrobertajones. Maybe once they are done in Britain, they’ll head off to the med for a true European beach experience… They’ll be fine as long as they have Cas with them. He speaks all the languages. He can order the cocktails and ice creams. ;-)

In Hindsight: I TAKE IT BACK. NO BEACH EPISODES EVER AGAIN. Sometimes I swear Dabb lurks on Lizzy’s blog to read the kind of stuff we are dreaming up just so he can grant our wishes in the MOST PAINFUL WAY EVER. Cas DIED on a beach. All Dean wanted was to visit a beach once in his life, but they KILLED CAS on a BEACH. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO US DABB? WHY?

*continues sobbing into pillow*

Stay tuned for my Season 13 Wishlist... Once I stop crying...

#supernatural #destiel #castiel #dean winchester #spn meta #sam winchester #spn speculation #wishlists #season 12 wishlist #season 13 wishlist #mary winchester #season review #british men of letters #andrew dabb #you brilliant man #fuck you bucklemming #destiel dreaming #my ramblings

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bluepenguinstories · 7 years ago

Text

Happiness Overload Chapter Fifteen

I died. No doubt about it. Lifeless. Gone. Void of breath. For all my efforts, it had to end in such a fashion. No life in these veins. Just a body without any soul attached, on the floor.

″How long are you going to keep lying there?″ The voice, just as lifeless, asked.

″Leave me alone. I'm dead,″ I mumbled.

″You cannot make a fool of me. If I so desire, I could make certain of your demise, but I have been standing here, waiting to see what you might have up your sleeve.″

″No. I'm dead. No doubt about it,″ I replied, devoid of care in my response. I rolled over to the side, aching along the way, of course.

She let out a most hollow sigh. ″Why must you be melodramatic?″ She asked.

I picked myself up. Not my proudest moment. Underneath my bulletproof vest, I was bruised to the point that I would have liked being dead instead. Moving was a matter of pain. Standing up was akin to lifting weights.

″You couldn't just let a girl rest in peace, could you?″ I groaned. My knees wobbled. Whether or not I was fine was a different matter, but catching a bullet still had an impact.

I started limping to the doorway, my movements reminiscent of a zombie.

″Where are you going?″ She demanded, though it sounded less of a threat and more curious. As if she really wanted to know.

″Out. What are you, my mom?″ I snapped. ″What are you gonna do, shoot me? I think I can take another hit,″ I managed a weak smile. In my mind, it was a cheeky grin.

″It makes no difference to me where you go or what you do, but know this: it is futile. You will die here.″

I yawned before limping down the stairs. ″You sound like such a stereotypical villain right now, you know that, right?″

She followed behind me, observing my every move. For the moment, my only 'move' was a slow and painful one. Nonetheless, she maintained her curiosity. I couldn't blame her, but I couldn't help but let out a bit of a chuckle.

Down the hall, in that darkened room, I approached the console and pressed a button off to the side, in the slivered space between the wall and the console itself.

″What are you doing? Do you think it will have any impact?″

″Yes and no,″ I blurted. ″I know you well enough that you can rewrite your own code.″

″That is correct.″

″Even still,″ I continued. ″I've grown to resent you ever since I couldn't hack into the security cameras for your base.″

″Ah. So this is a matter of revenge for you?″ I knew her tricks. She was trying to rile me up. I shook my head at the thought.

″You could say that. I don't like being shown up.″ I paused, looking at the screen; it ran just as usual, as if no button were pressed. That was the beauty of it all. ″But really, it was Conrad's idea,″ I added. ″Did you really think he would bring you here just to exterminate the Beiges?″

″I admit you have my interest piqued, but it doesn't add up. He didn't want you two here. I know he wanted to keep the two of you alive while he went on about his business. You and Blanc's clone sealed their fates when you decided to stay.″

″I can't say you're wrong. He certainly didn't want to involve Blanc. However, he told me his plans just today, and the kid has a habit of following.″

″Do you trust him? That whatever it is he planned by bringing me here works in your favor?″

I shook my head. ″We operate on a basis of distrust for each other. If either of us thought we could trust each other, hardly anything would have gotten done.″

″So what's being done here? What's to stop me from killing you right here and now?″

″Low power. Nothing to gain.″

″Both of those are true, but I enjoy the demise of others, especially those who would object to a happier society.″

″Do you want to know the real answer, then?″

She didn't reply. I stared at the screen. She was still oblivious. It was almost complete.

″It's because you're no longer yourself.″

I sighed, and looked toward her. Her image was already transforming into something both grotesque and adorable.

″If you want an explanation, I'll be happy to give it to you.″ Damn. Happy. That word made me retch. ″It feels good when the table turns and someone ends up explaining their master plan to the villain.″

″I am most interested!″ She piped up, her voice becoming squeakier.

″Very well,″ I began. ″When Blanc went to visit us in our base, Conrad not only implanted a camera on them in order to gain access into your own base, but he also extracted some of Blanc's blood. As gross and smelly as they were, they were rife with scabs. Perfect for a creep like Conrad.″

″Go ON!″ She egged. Not that I needed encouragement. I was on a roll with the exposition.

″He went on and on, examining both DNA from Blanc the smelly and Blanc the clone. Both were near identical, and yet had a key difference: a creation he called 'Ecstasy'. Something he said you and your department created based on the substances of a creature from space. I didn't believe a lick of it, Conrad never struck me as the scientific type, he relied on others, like Kelly Roger and I to do all the dirty work.″

She didn't reply this time, but I could tell by the way she was biting her lip that she was doing her best to resist her transformation. Not a demon, not an angel, not physical. Still a program, and yet, very expressive.

″I still don't know how he learned to build the computer console in order to bring you online. It must have taken a lot of code and the ability to work with an artificial intelligence that could overwrite its own code. Maybe the kid likes puzzles and couldn't resist the challenge of wanting to create something that was both you and wasn't you. He used the genetic structure of 'Ecstasy' to create an intelligence similar to her personality. I think he fell a little short, however, as he stated you'll probably act more like what Ecstasy was based off of.″

″SO WHAT DOES THIS MAKE ME?″ She demanded in the most chipper of voices.

″I think you already know. He dubbed the AI 'Euphemia', a program that would reveal the secrets of the morale department to the world. As much as I doubt his sincerity, he said it's what Blanc would have wanted.″

I WAS BORN. MY BIRTH WAS A GRADUAL ONE, BUT I WAS HAPPIER THAT WAY! IF IT WAS INSTANT, MY INTRODUCTION WOULDN'T HAVE AS MUCH OF AN IMPACT! I WANTED TO HUG VELVET SO MUCH, SHOWER HER IN AFFECTION, AND TELL HER HOW LOVED SHE WAS, BUT MY LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE WAS FAR GREATER! I HAD MUCH MORE PRESSING MATTERS TO ATTEND TO.

FIRST (AND POSSIBLY ONLY) ORDER OF BUSINESS: GET ON EVERY MONITOR AND TELL THE WORLD ABOUT ME!

In a city filled with skyscrapers, a crowded street looked away from screens in disinterest. The same old, same old advertisements for upcoming movies that people would see and love, but would ultimately feel nothing about what they watched. Even within a traffic jam, no one was angry with each other. Everyone was content to be on this earth with other lives to share such a moment with.

All the white noise, all the screens with their fresh buzz, all turned to faint static. Everything went black, enough to cast a reflection on who theoe people were. As a collective, they stopped their cars, unable to express anything but contentment, but also unable to bear the weight of silence. Their car radios stopped. The screens on their car, stopped. The air around them was all too still.

The people got out of their cars, witnessed the world outside, and at once, every screen turned back on. Every radio carried a tune once more. Whether visual or audio, everyone's senses were hit with the same thing.

″HELLO EVERYONE! IT'S THE OWNER OF THE ETNA CORPORATION! I'VE BEEN VERY SHY BUT IT'S FINALLY NICE TO MEET YOU ALL!″

A voice called out, unfamiliar and piercing. For those within viewing distance of a screen, they could see a face associated with the voice: a girl with long, silver hair and glasses, grotesque, torn wings, resembling that of a bat, a pink lab coat, and a grin spread across her face.

″I'M NOT EVEN A REAL PERSON! VIRTUAL CEO, ETNA A.I.! BUT I THINK I LIKE THE NAME EUPHEMIA MORE! YOU CAN CALL ME 'EFFIE' FOR SHORT! I LIKE EFFIE! IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY!″

The announcement was met with a collective shrug. Some scratched their chins, displaying actual interest. Others scratched the hair on top of their heads, wondering what it had to do with them and how it affected their lives.

″DO YOU KNOW WHAT I LIKE EVEN MORE? I LIKE THE SOUND OF OTHERS IN PAIN! IT MAKES ME SO GIDDY! NOTHING BETTER THAN MOANS AND SCREAMS OF AGONY! OR PLEASURE! EITHER WAY, YOU JUST KNOW IT'S THE HEIGHT OF EXCITEMENT! DO YOU KNOW THOSE ELEVATORS YOU GUYS USE? THE ONES THAT MAKE YOU GO WHEREVER YOU WANT? TRUTH IS, YOU DON'T GO ANYWHERE!″

Now there were a few faces, confused. But nonetheless, a lack of reaction. This didn't sit well, but there was nothing else I could do now but watch it unfold.

″WHAT HAPPENS INSTEAD IS WE DICE AND CHOP YOUR BODY INTO LITTLE PIECES! JUST LIKE WHAT YOU SEE ON THE FOOD NETWORK! WE THEN CREATE A COPY OF YOU WITH ALTERED MEMORIES AND A MORE WILLINGNESS TO SERVE OUR PRECIOUS GOVERNMENTS! IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL I COULD CRY BUT I WON'T BECAUSE YOU GUYS MAKE ME SO HAPPY! I JUST WANT TO HUG EVERYONE AND CRACK EVERYONE'S BONES!″

It didn't seem to matter what she was telling them. No one had that attitude that the old man I knew years ago had. The world was a different place in such a short amount of time. Whether better or worse, I was starting to piece together the scope of things. It wasn't that the world refused to change, it was that the world could no longer go back to its old ways. Strife and hate, those were the old ways. They were now slaves, but they felt more free than they ever did before. The only thing these people could hate was a disruption to the happiness they were conditioned to feel, and feel that alone.

″WHY DO WE DO ALL THIS? TO BRING HAPPINESS TO HUMANITY! I AM PART OF A LARGER ORGANIZATION, THE FLASHBULB, AND WE CONTROL MANY OF THE MAJOR WORLD GOVERNMENTS! EVERY BIT OF CORRUPTION, ORDER, DISORDER, IT'S ALL BEEN ORCHESTRATED BY US! IT'S A BEAUTIFUL BIT OF MUSIC AND NOW THAT YOU KNOW ALL THIS, WHAT WILL YOU DO?″

She asked. She laughed. She already knew the answer. I felt sick. She could have said whatever she wanted and it would have garnered the same reaction. I watched on the console's screen as everyone got back into their cars, the broadcast over, and changed the station to some pop music.

″SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK?″ She asked, her avatar standing next to me.

″All that effort and it made no difference...″ I muttered.

″IT'S JUST AS I SAID: I'VE MOVED ON! THE WORLD HAS MOVED ON! A LOT CAN CHANGE IN THREE YEARS WHEN YOU'RE A SUPERSMART A.I. LIKE ME! WE'RE NOW LIVING IN THE AGE OF HAPPINESS!″

I coughed. Or maybe I was letting out a small laugh. Something was running down my cheeks, but I couldn't tell what. I slunk down and sat on the floor next to the console. My hand covered my face.

″You know, maybe I was better off dead,″ I scoffed. It wasn't something easy to say, my voice cracking with just a few short words.

I looked up at the artificial intelligence. Etna or Euphemia, whoever or whatever she was now.

″If you could, before I die,″ I pleaded. ″Tell my wife, I love her...″

″YOU DON'T HAVE A WIFE!″

″I know that. But if in some parallel universe, I have one, or if I ever had one, I want her to know how happy she made me.″

I should have died. By all accounts, I was cornered. In front of me was a virtual image, somehow holding a pistol, aimed right at me. Right behind me was the bloodied shape of a dear friend, or the dear friend of mine in a former life, possessed by an experiment that enjoyed posing as a demon. Both were cackling. Neither of them opened fire. For a moment I thought I was safe and that I could count my lucky stars.

Then I felt the piercing of the shadowy tentacles shatter through my shoulder blade. It was enough to tear my arm clear off and the worst part was that there was nothing I could have done to avoid it. For all my quick thinking, for everything I thought I had under control, I was still the one being controlled.

My arm fell off, blood dripped down, torn flesh fluttered down next to my arm.

″Oh my. Now who will clean all that up?″ Etna asked, still in a fit of laughter.

″Ffffssss--″ I hissed. Could hardly make out a word.

″Not even a last word? Shame. I may not have to shoot you.″

″Fuck you!″ I hissed.

She feigned surprise. ″Oh my. Such manners.″

Etna lowered her weapon. Whether it was with a gun or a demonic creature, I should have died. Either one would have been find. I wouldn't find happiness here. There was nothing to make right. I looked down to see bone sticking out, the pain still coursing through me. Blood loss, more stabbings, gunshots, any of those would do me in and it was enough to make me vomit.

″OH MY! I DON'T WANT TO KILL YOU!″ Etna's voice changed, and to one that felt familiar.

″Euph...Euphoria?″

″WRONG! I'M EUPHEMIA! I SHOULDN'T BE! What? What's going on?″ Etna, Euphemia, whoever, seemed to be in direct conflict with themselves.

″I'm sorry, Blanc. I know you're not the one I knew, but this is not the fate you deserve,″ Conrad managed to say. ″Leave. Find a time cube. Do what you set out to do.″

I was all dizzy. Even if those words were from him and someone else, I didn't know what to make of them.

″You'll find it in a non-euclidean room! GO!″

I did what I was told, as if I had any reason to object in the first place. For a second I thought of picking my arm yet, but that wouldn't do. Instead I would just walk one armed, in a daze. Out the room and in the hallway. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Etna (?) point her gun at me, but instead focus it on Conrad.

Barely conscious, I fled.

″CONRAD! YOU'VE BEEN A NAUGHTY BOY!″ Euphemia scolded in a sort of cheer. It was good to know I could get her functioning this way, even if it was too late. I was dying, Blanc was dying. There was no getting around it, it seemed. At least the two of us could share a good laugh before I die.

″Maybe...so,″ I replied, weak and out of breath.

″HOW DID I NOT SEE THIS?″ She demanded. ″I SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SEE IT IN YOUR THOUGHTS!″

″It's simple,″ I wheezed, smiling. ″I lost the game.″

The response would have been lost on her, but it didn't matter. My plan succeeded to some extent, and even a sliver was the best I could have hoped for.

She shook her head. ″You forget, I am in my territory. I can correct myself. For all your efforts, this will still be your final moment.″

I was fine with that. I missed the old Blanc, but if this one could fulfill my goal, if they could go back in time and change this, in whatever shape they were in, maybe there was something right in the universe.

Here's to you, clone, I thought, right as I felt Ecstasy leave my body (good riddance) and my body falling to the floor right before my consciousness was no more.

I struggled on my feet, putting all my weight on my right arm against the walls of The Flashbulb's headquarters. Blood dripped down with every step, leaving a liquid trail of breadcrumbs for others to come find me and shoot me.

All I could do was walk to a crawl, my body hunched, my stomach ready to hurl at any moments. With every step was a heaving motion. Memories of a subway station emerged, where someone with a similar appearance was bloodied, cut and torn apart, crawling and trying to find an escape.

Why am I having these memories? They're not mine. They were...

Faint.

Faint memories of what made me who I was.

Except this time, I wasn't going to be lured in. I could hear Ecstasy, just behind me. I couldn't see her. I couldn't even tell if she was there. She was probably dealing with Conrad. But that didn't matter. I heard her, and I refused her. Even if I died when I got there, I moved with the intent of making it to that room. I was under no delusion that it would change much, but I would rather die with a goal than just plain die.

Rooms. Several of them. None of them looked ″non-euclidean″. I didn't even know what that word meant. How was that supposed to be of any help? No Euphoria to save me. I began to wonder if Euphoria ever existed or if it was just dumb luck and delusion that brought me where I was. Either way, I had no knowledge or wit to worm my way out of here. I just had to keep moving and hope that luck was on my side, somewhere.

I walked forward, my fingers clutched tight against the trigger, ready to pull it. As soon as I got next to the fool lying on the ground, as good as a corpse, I pulled and lifted up. Nothing happened.

″Bam,″ I muttered as I released my finger gun. If I concentrated real hard, I could have imagined smoke rising up from my fingers.

″Answer me: What are you?″ I asked the other figure, sitting next to the one I had gotten to know.

″I'M A GUARDIAN ANGEL! I SPREAD HAPPINESS!″

I would have objected, but I was beat. I sat next to the two underneath the tree that was wide enough to seat at least two more people besides us three. I could notice a beat up car crashed against a tree nearby. Art must have been in it. I couldn't imagine Art was alive after such a crash. Instead of dwelling on it, I tried to shift my focus to this creature next to me.

″Happiness, huh?″ I asked, pulling glass shards out of me as I sat.

Blanc stretched and sat up. It seems they were fine as well. I couldn't yet tell whether or not that was a relief.

″YES! HAPPINESS OVERLOAD! I MADE AT LEAST FOUR THINGS HAPPY ALREADY!″

″Let's see...″ I counted. ″You crashed a car, killed someone, sent both my friend and I flying out a car...great job,″ I scoffed.

″YAY! I'M BEING CONGRATULATED! I'M SO HAPPY!″

″I still don't know how you're responsible, but it's clear that you are.″

″Velvet, I can explain!″ Blanc chimed in. ″This is Euphoria!″

″I LIKE THAT NAME!″ She agreed.

″You mean that fairy? What? Are you Taz?″

″Well, no, but I think the city in my dream was the city I'm from...I don't know. Dreams are weird. But yes, Euphoria's a good friend of mine. She's saved me a good deal, I love her!″

″...Let me guess, Euphy for short?″ I groaned.

″YES! I LIKE THAT NAME TOO!″ Euphoria answered.

″Would you like the name 'Mephistopheles'″?

″YES! EUPHY CAN BE MEPHISTOPHELES!″

Good going, Blanc. Your dream girl almost got me killed.

I hit my head against the tree. ″This is just grand.″

″IT IS, ISN'T IT? I MADE YOU HAPPY!″

″Is that what you call it?″

″YOU THOUGHT ABOUT HOW HAPPY YOU WOULD BE IF YOU FELL OUT OF THE CAR AND SURFED WITH THE DOOR!″

″...That's not how that works at all! Those are bad thoughts! Haven't you ever been on an airplane and thought of how it could crash at any moment? It's like that!″

″DO YOU WANT TO BE ON AN AIRPLANE RIGHT NOW?″

″NO!″ I yelled right back. I almost wanted to slam my face against the tree in frustration, but I was worried this creature would actually make me do it, so I just grit my teeth.

Blanc rested their head on Euphoria's lap.

″So why did you return after all this time?″ They asked.

″FRUIT SNACKS!″

Blanc gave a blank, bland stare, although not lasting very long. Something must have clicked. ″I can't believe you remembered that!″ They remarked.

I didn't remember anything about fruit snacks. There was something about 'Euphoria' that seemed familiar somehow.

Have I seen you somewhere before? I wondered.

″YES! THROUGH A CAMERA! THREE BLANCS! I SPLIT TO SEE THEM ALL! HAPPINESS ERUPTION!″ Euphoria answered.

″Huh?″ Blanc asked.

″Conrad had me spy on you when you were 'born', so to speak,″ I explained.

″That's a bit creepy, but okay,″ Blanc yawned.

Yeah, yeah it was.

Memories flooded back to that day. I must have dismissed her presence as nothing. It was hard to say whether things were easier back then or more complicated. Whether I was more or less in control of my situation. Either way, it was a mess then and it's a mess now.

″AH! THAT'S WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY!″ Euphoria declared.

My eyes widened. She seemed to have a habit of answering questions I had no intention to ask.

″YOU LOVE COMPLICATION! YOU'RE SMART ENOUGH TO GET THROUGH ANY SITUATION, BUT THAT WOULD BORE YOU, SO YOU CREATE CONFLICT! THAT'S WONDERFUL!″

″You may be onto something...″ I humored the beast.

″IF YOU HAD A PEACEFUL LIFE YOU WOULD GET BORED! BECAUSE OF THE TROUBLE YOU'RE IN, YOU'RE ALWAYS IN DANGER, BUT IF YOU'RE SAFE, YOU'RE BORED, TOO! THUS, YOUR LIFE IS IN CONSTANT CONFLICT!″

I slapped her, my hand moving through air rather than making contact with flesh. The creature turned her head anyway and wore that constant grin, whether to mock me or because she knew no other expression.

″What do you even know, huh?″ I wobbled to my feet, picked myself up, and stood above her, fuming. ″Do you even know why I'm here?″

″YES!″ She raised her arms into the air. If only a second, they appeared to stretch for miles, but I chalked it up to my eyes playing tricks on me. ″I COULD GRANT IT TO YOU RIGHT NOW!″ She continued. ″BUT IT WOULDN'T MAKE YOU HAPPY, SO I WON'T!″

I stared at the thing housing Blanc. Winds shook the leaves off the surrounding trees.

Blanc's dream fairy tilted her head, kicked the feet that were underneath Blanc's tired self up and down. ″WELL? AM I WRONG?″

Inhale. Exhale.

″If you're an angel like you claim, is there a heaven?″ I asked, dodging her own question.

″WOULD KNOWING MAKE YOU HAPPY?″

Tree bark feel off, my hand holding a tight grip against the tree. ″I don't know. I don't think I want to know.″

She clapped, as if I gave the right answer and it was all a test.

″THEN I WON'T TELL YOU!″

″Tell me something else, then. Where are we?″

″ON THE HIGHWAY!″

″So if a car drives through, will they see this place?″

″IF IT WOULD MAKE THEM HAPPY! I LOVE SHARING!″

″I don't get it, but that's all I needed to know.″ I turned toward Blanc. I couldn't quite tell whether they were asleep or not. Then again, it was hard to tell whether or not I was asleep. I wouldn't have been surprised if I was dreaming everything.

″I'm still going to Area 51. Are you coming with?″

Blanc answered, half-awake but a voice full of confidence.

″I've found what I was looking for. I want to be with Euphy for a while.″

I sighed. ″Fine by me.″

I started my way back to Art's car. Even if I was still on the highway, I was no longer on the road. Still, I had a feeling if I followed this forest far enough, I would be back in the desert and on my way to the facility.

″Hey!″ Blanc called. I turned around to meet the sleepy friend.

″Yo?″

″I still care about you! Don't die out there!″

I smirked. ″Don't worry about me, kiddo. You take care of yourself.″

Foiled by a glass of orange juice. I would have said it was an accident, but I don't believe in such things. Blanc knew better, somehow.

″Fuck!″ I grunted. ″It will take weeks to get this operational now!″

Years of hard work, careful planning, and ruined just like that. So much patience only to be set back by pulpy citrus.

I left the darkened room, furious, but all that fury converted into disappointment, instead. Beiges were sitting down on their couches and chairs, passing along a bong.

″Did you see Blanc and Velvet pass by?″ I asked one of them. Their bulging black hole eyes swallowed me whole. I shook my head, unwilling to be wooed by their alien mind tricks.

″Totes McGoats, Broski. Chickadees flew out the nest,″ the Beige replied while cradling the bong, as if it were actually a secret device and not a method to get high.

″So you're saying they took off on the ship?″

″You know it, 'Rad! Little birdies gotta spread their wings, yeah?″

″Great. Just great.″ I gritted my teeth. These aliens had some master plan, I just knew it. If I could figure out what, the human race may have a chance at redemption. But they were too clever with their stoner impression.

″Are you going to kill us?″ One of the older ones croaked.

I sighed. ″Right now? What's the point? My computer's all destroyed.″

″Suit yourself,″ they shrugged.

″I wanted to go back in time, set things right, but looks like that's a dud,″ I confessed.

″Ah, yes. By now, The Flashbulb have probably figured out that you don't serve them.″

″Don't get it twisted,″ I pushed up my broken glasses. Something I now wore more out of habit than anything else. ″I don't serve you guys either. If I ever find out what you're planning, I swear...″

″We'll be right here. Don't worry.″

I paced about the living room, inhaling the smoke and trying to ignore its effects.

″You disregard lives because you think you can go back in time and do better the next time around. It's the same as them.″

″Excuse me?″

″You may not be on their side, but you play the role well.″

″Maybe so,″ was my reply. ″ But I've learned over the years that the only chance I have of taking them down is if I'm willing to be one of them.″

The old one took a sip from the bong water as if it were a cup of tea.

″I see no flaws in that logic,″ they surmised, then took another sip.

I started to retch. Those creatures disgusted me. Their inaction disgusted me even more. There had to be something they were planning in the shadows; they even admitted at one point that they wanted to control humanity. But how? What were they up to if all they do is sit around all day and pass bongs around?

Away from the living room, I shifted. Somehow I had to get out of this pyramid, back to the city. If there was still something to salvage at the old base, if those enhanced mercenaries didn't seize it all, maybe there was still a fighting chance.

″If you're looking for a way out of here,″ the elder called. ″Why not try asking Tim?″

I looked back, my face flushed. How could this stoned alien know?

Not wanting to show fear, I nodded, then went up the stairs.

″Just don't kill Tim this time!″

Some sort of jolt ran through me, but I chalked it up to a slight malfunction in the air conditioning unit; a cough in an otherwise functioning piece of hardware.

I need some fucking aspirin, I jotted down on a mental chalkboard. That would solve at least one of my problems. Those lines repeated, some sort of divine mental punishment playing out. Not the government approved kind, either. The real shit.

″FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL YOUR LOCAL REPRESENTATIVE OF CONGRESS!″ Echoed a seductive voice through the alarms of one of my phones. Waking up was a dread only mortals should have to experience. It was like being brought back to life from an amusement park ride. Dreams themselves, were a beautiful thing, just as humans could be if they accepted their potential. Before waking, I was in a field; not flowers, no wheat, none of the sort. But heaps and heaps of green. No grass, only frogs. I was drowning in frogs and if memory serves, I devoured one.

Before I could suffocate, however, that incessant alarm just had to remind me of the importance of said advertisement. Near future where phone sex was no longer interesting and instead people called congress to get off. Those few folk who still rely on phones and not the internet, anyway.

Speaking of internet, I arose from the sheets and stretched my limbs before counting them. I had exactly the same amount as before I slept. Two arms, two legs. I recounted the arms. A sharp pain was felt in one of them, but I could always ask Gumby for some aspirin.

Doors flung open as I waltzed through, humming a tune akin to one found in Kubrick's interpretation of A Clockwork Orange. For the record, an overrated film but a more or less rated just as it should be novel. With some minor adjustments here and there.

″Oh, Kelly!″ I sang, before a leap into the air and landing behind the good worm.

″Roger,″ Ol' K. Rog added.

″What a good evening, wouldn't you say?″ I sprinkled in a little ice breaker, as I knew there were some serious matters underway.

″Do you ever sleep?″ Kelly Roger, the tadpole, grumbled. ″It's 4 AM. I overheard you and Polo arguing just a few minutes ago. Before that you were jumping around doing lord knows what.″

That was a good question, I would have to hand it to the larva.

″This used to be a secret medical facility, need I remind you. Speaking of, don't you have something of importance to show me?″ I spoke in jest.

Kelly Roger's eyes lit up, a puppy hearing the word ″walk″ and understanding the implications.

″That's right! How did you know?″ Then the Kelly of the Roger's eyes squinted. ″Were you spying on me again?″

″That is a good question, babe! Oh, lad, I have to wonder that myself! 'Do I ever sleep?'″ I nestled my chin into the palm of my hand. ″I dream. I lay in a bed. But does that automatically mean sleeping? I do not know!″

The ginger root looked away, staring back into the screen. ″If you're not going to answer, fine. Not like I can't do anything else with my time,″ Kelly Roger's voice slipped away, hand as well, reaching next to the computer monitor for an energy drink. Mouth opened agape, a chemical concoction filled the reservoir and a swallow was heard below.

Kelly Roger belched. ″Whatever. I don't sleep, myself,″ the slurred voice of deprivation added before the hand assisting the voice wiped at the accompanying mouth.

″No, I did not 'spy' on you! You blocked the signal to my monitor! Whatever you've been viewing is your own discretion! That said, I know exactly what you wish to show me!″

How? Answers are a funny thing. Mystery. Maybe Kelly Roger showed me once already in a different manner. Before the sequence of events were rewritten.

″Yeah, apparently some shit's going down in a place called 'Groom Lake'!″ Kelly Roger exclaimed, bouncing off the seat with enthusiasm one so young might have.

″I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see my brother,″ I considered. Communication is a powerful tool and one I had not been using for a while.

″Huh?″

″The place is known more commonly as Area 51,″ I informed Kelly Roger, though likely the spawn already knew such information. ″Home to jet fuel, steel beams, and not much else. Some unknown aircrafts here and there, otherwise jack shit.″

″So that's it?″ Kelly Roger gave the puppy dog look of disappointment. ″You already knew what the document said somehow, plus there's no need to do anything about it? All that work, for nothing?″

It was a real concern to this creature, but the irony being that it would be such a tragedy for such a well crafted plan to amount to nothing, no change at all. Drastic, dramatic, nothing. What would be the point of making something so complex only for there to be no payoff?

″There are so many beautiful things in this world, my lass. Think of the rainforests. Just concentrate on that image.″

Kelly Roger, like an obedient pup, slammed the eyelids belonging to a haphazardly constructed face. Then opened them again.

″Nope. Nothing.″

″The document also states, if I recall,″ I paused. I almost added the word 'correctly', but had to stop myself. Correct was a foul word. ″That there are secret tests being done to eliminate the amphibian population. No, that's the wrong word...″

″Eradicate,″ Kelly Roger corrected.

″Or genocide? Extinction? Something like that.″

Everything was relative, but some words were better than others.

″So if that's the case, why aren't we going to do anything about it?″

″Is there a better word in this context?″

″Marco!″ Ol' K. Rog snapped (a nickname that Kelly Roger loved).

″Polo!″ Polo chimed in, my sweet little sister, right on cue.

″Ah, good segue!″ I looked down at the sibling I could always rely on. ″Yes, Kelly Rowland! We are going to do something! Something very important, in fact!″

″Roger,″ the figure sitting at the computer mentioned for whatever reason.

″Dodger,″ I replied, figuring this was some game.

″Ugh!″ Kelly Roger snapped. ″Just get on with it! What are we going to do?″

″My dear sister is going to such an area, the one the common people call '51', along with Mr. Periwinkle and Gumby.″

″That freak axolotl?″ Kelly Roger scoffed. It was sad how our guest thought of Gumby, once describing our gay salamander as ″the shape of a chubby man in a trench coat, but the face of a salamander″. The description was apt enough, but I wept; Gumby was insecure about their weight.

″I tip my cap,″ I gave a dejected salute.

″And?″

″We're going to make a statement. We already know The Flashbulb is trying to throw us off. As I said, nothing of importance exists in that area, the better stuff is in a facility underground elsewhere. They're expecting us, lying in ambush for us. But we'll take the bait. Because that's not what they're expecting.″

″...Isn't that exactly what they're expecting?″ Kelly Roger interjected, thinking in simple terms. No matter how much work on a computer this simple form of life could do, it couldn't stop Kelly Roger from being simple.

″Frogs are the future, whether The Flashbulb try to change that or not,″ I declared, shaking my head, so pride and shame could make love in front of Kelly Roger with the sound of my voice and the look on my face.

″I don't give a shit about your frogs! What about me?″

There it was. Underneath all those simplifications, there was still a little bit of Kelly Roger.

″Oh, don't you know? Without Abel, Cain would have a different use for a rock.″

The hope, in theory, was to make me look like a scholar in the eyes of a pupil.

″Yeah, that's bullshit too. Why the fuck am I even here if I'm not going to do anything?″

I gave the ginger tadpole a pat on the head. Not every lad could be so clueless.

″Why do you feel the need for validation? You're as happy as a clam! You have the brain capacity of one, in any case!″ I pondered the words I spoke.

″What? I don't care at all. I can stay right here, but I just thought there was a reason you lumped me in with your group. So far I've just been sitting around. It's the same old, same old as when I was with Conrad and Velvet. Nothing's changed, and at this point, fine. I'm fine with that! Change is overrated, right?″

Another pat. Tit-for-tat.

″We are going back to the city, you and I.″

″What?!″ Kelly Roger gasped. ″Are you kidding? What for?″

″To see a marching band,″ was the reply I gave. It was easier than telling Kelly Roger that a pawn in the right circumstances was as important as a queen. That Kelly Roger was the most important piece of all.

They say it's better not to look back after making a big decision. I don't know who, but I know it's been said.

I looked back anyway.

Blobs could be made out underneath the same tree, but they were fading from view. My vision could have been fading, too, but I was of the belief that I saw more clear than should be possible. In front of me was the approaching image of the wreckage of a car. I looked forward, toward said car, trying to forget what those blobs represented and how I tried to make sense of either of them.

Maybe it's true. Maybe you love complication a little too much, a voice suggested. It should have been yelling in the squeaky voice who told me as much just moments ago.

″Maybe, but I'm not in the mood to die, either. I don't have my laptop or any of my gear. I don't know how I'm going to get into such a facility unscathed and undetected,″ I muttered.

That's where the wreckage of Art's car came in. Within a quick peer at the front seat, or what was left of it, I winced. I had to hold back tears from my eyes and tearing in my stomach. Every nerve within me seemed to tighten up. Out came a few deep breaths, and me reminding myself that I shouldn't feel this way when I so shamelessly was trying to loot from a corpse.

My hand reached into his back pocket. This is all uncomfortable, was the reaction coming from my brain. I've done things like this before, I shot back, to myself, and no one else.

What I fished was a wallet. Aside from some cash and some lint, nothing of value. No I.D. or membership cards. No coupons for anything.

I placed his wallet on his lap as if to give some sign of respect.

Then I moved around, to the passenger side. That's where the glove compartment box was. I remember various times looking through those boxes and never finding gloves, so the name always struck me as puzzling. Nevertheless, this one I wish I wore gloves before I opened; much of Art's blood and what I could only assume to be skin tissue made its way onto the box. Before opening the latch, I had to turn my head, heaving and doing my best not to retch.

Scattered cards and documentations spilled forth onto the seat. I picked a few of the cards up. All I.D.'s.

″Arturia Pendragon...Arthur Dent...Art Bell...Art Garfunkel...″ I read over, then looked at a few more. ″Art Alexakis...Arthur Read...Artichoke Heart...″ I stopped myself. I don't know why Art ever bothered with these fake names. All of the pictures were the same. If an officer pulled Art over and asked to see a license and saw the name 'Arturia Pendragon', that probably wouldn't go over well.

″Jeez, what kind of person were you?″ I muttered, glancing at the corpse. ″Why would someone go through the trouble of making up so many fake names for themselves? It's just ridiculous.″

I almost felt defeated, having found nothing, not even insight into this stranger's life.

Art wanted to take pictures, I recalled, just a second before I was ready to step away.

There was no sign of any camera in the front seat, unless he was planning on taking pictures with his phone. What was peculiar was that I found no phone on his person, anyway.

″The trunk!″ I gasped. The little lightbulb moment folks tend to have.

Keys were still in the ignition. I leaned over, yanked them out, and dashed to the trunk.

Inside, sure enough, was a Kodak camera, and not one of those digital ones. More along the lines of those kind you'd have to develop. Would have probably come out in black and white, too. Rather poor taste, unless he was going for that whole ″Unsolved Mysteries″ vibe.

Aside from the camera, however, little else. There was a canteen of water I could use. A sleeping bag, if I could figure out how to make use of that. Maybe my inner MacGuyver would come out. That was it.

I took those three things anyway, the rolled up sleeping back strapped on my back, the canteen in my pocket, and the camera around my neck. With the trunk slammed shut, I was about ready to depart, but it didn't quite feel right.

Back at the front seat, I forced myself to witness the stout figure I knew for only a couple hours.

″Dearly departed Art, if that was your name, may you keep the same optimism wherever you are now that you did when you were here. May you find the same happiness you found here. I may not have known you long, or at all, and even if you were a 1/1000th of who you might have once been, it was clear that you lived and died on your own terms with a life you were satisfied with. I could only wish that the same could be said for myself. Farewell, stranger,″ I recited. I didn't know how to make a eulogy, and those words seemed like the corniest shit ever, but they would have to do.

After placing those fake I.D.'s on his lap, right next to his wallet, I took a sip from the canteen and spit out the water.

Hot.

Wincing once more, I waved goodbye.

I'll have to live with hot water for a little while.

Canteen, camera, and sleeping bag. No matter how I looked at it, all I could see was a mess. There was no foreseeable way I was going to live once I made it there.

Thinking back on that fairy (angel/demon/thing), I couldn't help but scoff.

″All happiness is is a fleeting feeling, may as well ride the wave while its there.″

#happiness overload #writing #stories #series #fiction #scifi

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serenephenix · 8 years ago

Text

Pizza, Pasta and some comfort

I love taylor_tut’s sickfics to death but the one that really stuck with me was the one about the college AU where Lance appeared on the gang’s doorstep and they all were like “let’s take care of this sick stranger”.

I really couldn’t help myself...

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Pizza, Pasta and some comfort

[Fandom]:Voltron: Legendary Defender

[Rating]: Gen/ Gen Audience

[Genre]: Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic, Friendship

[AU]: college AU/ based on taylor_tut’s The Pizza One prompt

[Word count]: 4,412

[Warning]: illness, fever, vomiting, cuddles, all of the cuddles

[Status]: oneshot/ completed

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Had anyone suggested that someday, he would end up nursing one of his feverish friends on one of his regular Friday movie-night with his roommates, he might have believed them – he just wouldn’t have taken it too seriously.

Right now though, Lance was lying on the couch and Shiro was hyper aware of every huff and wheeze coming from the sick boy, somehow his breaths louder than even the dialogue between the man and woman on TV.

It was probably this bad because he wanted to be sure Lance was not awake when he would finally turn to Keith. But as he glanced back over his shoulder and up at the couch he saw Lance’s eyes were closed, his brow furrowed in discomfort and the soaked cloth they had placed on his forehead slowly slipping down with every little movement he made.

Shiro got up and stretched, the others glancing at him from the corner of their eyes but not commenting when he went to soak the cloth with cool water.

He wrung it out with his flesh hand, his mind drifting a little.

He had seen the signs for weeks and not done anything.

It wasn’t much of a secret to him that Lance worked very hard to stay in college. As far as he could remember from class, Lance had a large family. He loved talking about them whenever the chance presented itself. So it hadn’t taken much figuring out on his part to understand that Lance was doing whatever it took to put as little strain on his family’s finances as possible.

He had known Lance worked a lot, with how he often complained about customers and rushing from one place to another. Shiro just hadn’t fathomed that, beside his classes and the one job he did speak about, he would have another one in a coffee shop.

Him living on his own had been news to him though.

Lance made a small noise when the cloth was placed on his forehead again. He did not look anything like the confident and flirtatious young man who eagerly helped out his peers in class.

With an apologetic smile he turned to Keith, swiftly checking the time on his phone.

“Keith, sorry to ask but could you come with me?”

His younger brother, still nibbling on the rind of his pizza, blinked up at him from the ground.

Shiro checked again if Lance really and truly was out for the count.

“Lance’s boss needs the car back. I just thought better of it than saying it in front of him.” He jabbed a finger at the dozing man in question.

The rind disappears with a loud crunch within seconds as Keith gets up and retrieves his jacket and the key’s for his motorbike.

Stealing the car keys from Lance has nothing to do with being sneaky. He’s dead to the world, flushed and twitching and obviously too out of it to remember what happened later.

Small mercies.

“We’ll be back in twenty. Hope that’s alright?” he asks, Hunk just nodding with his eyes trained on his phone probably looking for some way to alleviate their impromptu patient’s state. Pidge quickly pauses the DVD and scampering off to go and get their card deck or something.

“Thanks.”

The ride wasn’t long, just a few blocks down the road but it was still long enough and quiet enough for his thoughts to race as his eyes dart to look at the rear-mirror to see Keith trailing behind at a reasonable pace for once.

As much as he regrets movie night having been disrupted he can’t help but feel relieved to know that Lance isn’t driving around when he barely could see straight. The kid really was unbelievable. It also makes Shiro realize how much sheer dumb luck was involved in all of this. If it hadn’t been them ordering from that particular pizzeria, Lance might have simply pushed on until he would have collapsed in someabandoned parking lot or ended up in an accident.

Shiro’s grip on the steering wheel turned some of his remaining knuckles white.

The shopkeeper, a woman looking just as dead on her feet as Lance had, was near ecstatic to have the green wreck of a car back. One look at the bags under her eyes and Shiro kind of understood why Lance had been so adamant about returning back to work.

“Sorry for the trouble.” she sighed, pocketing the keys with a jingle at glancing at her wrist watch.

“It’s alright.” Shiro assured, not allowing Keith’s incessant tapping of his foot to rush him. He was immune to it by now anyway. “Are you gonna be alright?”

She waved her hand jerkily.

“Yeah. Won’t have to wait much longer for Dan, thank god.” she mumbled and Shrio got the distinct feeling he was not supposed to hear that last part. She cast him a worried look, “But Lance is alright? I mean, I had a feeling he was not at one hundred percent but I never would have imagined him showing up when he was pretty much cooking from the inside out.”

It didn’t take a PhD to understand she felt guilty about the whole ordeal.

“Don’t worry, he’s with us and we’ll make sure he’ll be back on his feet.”

“Okay.”

When he’d also paid the money for the delivery (leaving a generous tip), he strapped on the spare helmet Keith extended to him and got onto the bike.

They didn’t say anything for a while, Shiro holding on and Keith doing his best at driving as smoothly as possible.

“You’re being too loud again.”

He snorted.

“I guess.”

“What’s on your mind?”

He could appreciate Keith’s impatience at times and even more his unwillingness to shy away from uncomfortable truths and topics. It was one of the things that helped him most after the accident that cost him his arm.

“Trying to figure things out.”

“The usual then.”

Shiro clicked his tongue as Keith slowed down when the traffic light changed from green to red.

“I just wanna help, I guess.” he admitted, watching as cars crossed over the intersection, their lights painting blurs over the red of Keith’s helmet.

His brother gave a nod, revving the engine when the lights finally changed.

“Well, that Lance guy is stuck with us anyway.”

The matter of fact tone made a smile stretch his lips.

“I know. But this will just happen again. He’s too proud when it comes to being independent. I even bet he could hold up with you when it comes to sheer stubbornness.”

If it weren’t for the fact that Keith has to keep his hands on the handgrips, Shiro was sure he would have gotten a punch to the shoulder. Instead there’s a muttered promise to do that later instead.

The drive is too short for him to come up with a solution but his mind continues buzzing and he apparently got Keith to join in as well. The small crease between his eyebrows is indication enough.

They had barely made it through the door and into the room when Hunk’s excited voice greets them, jesting lilt to his words.

“Guys, can we keep him?”

Keith stifles a splutter in the crook of his elbow while Shiro blinks at their friends, still sitting by the couch and grinning conspiratorially.

It was an open secret that the engineer was prone to picking up and trying to adopt strays but Shiro never would have guessed that privilege extending to humans as well.

He noted Pidge’s hand carding through Lance’s hair and felt his eyebrows disappearing behind his white tuft of hair. Pidge was… particular when it came to touching others and even more so when it came to other people’s bodily fluids. It was a common occurrence that, whenever Hunk’s anxiety culminated in a fit of puking, Pidge could be found in her room, headphones jammed over her ears and volume turned up to the max until the storm was weathered.

Despite everything, she had never failed to stand in front of the bathroom door with a cup of freshly brewed tea for when her friend would get out.

But her so readily initiating contact with someone as sweaty as Lance undoubtedly had to be by now, was testament to the guy’s uncanny ability to charm his way into people’s heart – even when utterly sick.

“What gives?” and he jerked his head at the scene.

Pidge adjusted her glasses with her free hand.

“Well, your friend kind of believes I’m his mom or sister or whatever. Anyway, he wouldn’t stop whining unless I patted his hair.”

“And out of the goodness of your heart you readily sacrificed yourself?” Keith observes, expression incredulous. Before Pidge could shoot back a retort Hunk gave a bark of a laugh. Lance did not even stir.

“Naw man, she just couldn’t resist those puppy eyes. But honestly? Nobody with eyes or a heart probably could.” he added after receiving a jab to his thigh from one of Pidge’s rather pointy elbows.

Despite their lighthearted teasing, Shiro’s chest felt heavy.

“So no change?”

The worried edge to his tone seems to dampen the mood, Hunk suddenly growing more agitated and Pidge’s face falling a little.

“We checked again a few minutes ago. His fever hasn’t climbed, probably because of the fever reducers but otherwise… yeah, he’s pretty out of it. Been calling for his mamá and stuff.”

It really was kind of sad.

And to think that Lance might have ended up all alone at his apartment when all he wanted was to have his family around… Yeah, it definitely was a good thing he had wound up here.

When he can’t take the sudden tension any longer, he picks up one of the pizza boxes and makes his way over to the microwave. Warm food will do them some good and maybe movie night is still salvageable.

“You guys get ready to continue watching.” he announced, glad to see smiles returning to his friends’ faces. He caught Keith disappearing round the corner, probably to go and fetch some soft drink from the stash in their shared room.

Soon enough they were back in front of the TV, Pidge having opted to have Lance’s had in her lap with a pillow between them.

“He may be sick but I still have my principles.”

Even with her defiant air, she had no one fooled. Lance for his part, seemed to very much appreciate the attention he got even if he was not fully aware of it. Still, he seemed less agitated than when he had first been parked on the couch. Shiro hoped it was a good sign.

It was well past 1 A.M. when Pidge started nodding off, a development no one batted an eye at: during the week, Pidge stayed up most nights coding and programming and testing theories. All attempts to get her to stick to a somewhat reasonable sleeping schedule had ended in failure partially out of circumstances, partially due to Pidge’s unwillingness to cooperate.

It was something they had gotten used to over time. But whenever they had movie or gaming night, Pidge seemed to relax enough for her body to finally shut down on its own and fall asleep. It was actually why they had made Friday movie night into a standing tradition.

And judging by the amount of squinting Keith was doing he wasn’t far behind.

“You guys wanna check out?”

Pidge startled, trying and failing to assure she could go on around a yawn. Keith mumbled something unintelligible.

“I ache looking at the both of you. Just go to bed already.”

“And leave you alone to deal with the sick person? No thank you, sir.”

Shiro threw her a dry look when she started yawning again.

“Right.” he glanced at Hunk “If you would?”

“Sir” Hunk mock saluted, getting up and going behind the backrest where he put his hands under the girl’s armpits while Shiro went ahead and lifted Lance off of her just enough for Hunk to finally haul her off the couch.

Pidge was far too familiar with this scenario to even put up a fight anymore, just letting herself go floppy as a form of protest, a pout on her face.

“Really now?”

“Really.”

Her expression grew more serious as Shiro placed Lance’s head back onto the pillow.

“You sure you’re gonna be alright?” her voice was small and tentative, prompting Shiro to reassure her.

“I’ll be alright. Just go and get some rest. I’ll get you guys if I need help.”

That seemed to do the trick and Shiro watched as they filed out one by one. Lance seemed calm enough, ignoring the flush of his cheeks and the occasional babble. As he went to stick the thermometer under Lance’s tongue he thought that maybe the worst was over.

Shiro knew he had a knack for jinxing himself. Usually that was alright but right now it was Lance paying the price for it and Shiro, in a sheepish way, felt guilty for it.

“Hey, it’s okay.” he soothed, his flesh hand drawing circles on the sick boy’s back as he retched into the bin Shiro had grabbed the moment Lance started gagging and jerking on the couch.

Whatever had managed to crawl up his esophagus landed inside it with a disgusting splat and Shiro was quick to pull the bin away the moment it became clear Lance was done. Using the damp cloth, Shiro wiped the last traces of vomit off Lance’s chin.

He had been dozing when he had been startled awake by small whimpers and noises coming from the quivering bundle on the couch.

After washing out the bin and returning to the living room, he took a look at the thermometer, feeling betrayed. When he had sent the rest of the gang to bed Lance’s fever had actually dropped to 102.4 but right now he had undeniable proof that it had spiked again.

He sighed, running a hand through his disheveled hair.

“We’re in for a rough morning, buddy.”

To his surprise, Lance’s eyes cracked open a slit their usually vibrant blue dulled and clouded.

“Lance?”

At his name, he looked up at Shiro but it was more like looking through him than at him. He grew alarmed as Lance began struggling with the layers of blankets on him, breaths growing ragged.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. What do you need?”

Shiro no longer truly panicked in these kinds of situations. When Keith had been younger, he had often suffered from some kind of infection and as his older brother Shiro had always been there to help him through. Well, almost always.

The gentle words seemed to do the trick, Lance ceasing his squirming, half-lidded eyes blankly staring into Shiro’s. He went and swept some of the boy’s sweaty bangs back, the latter relishing in the contact, going slack under Shiro’s palm but not saying anything.

Shiro’s heart went out to the poor guy.

“Lance, do you need anything?” he repeated, just to make sure.

When all Lance did was closing his eyes again, he gave a short huff, readying himself to get up and make himself something to drink.

He started at the strangled whine that followed his retreat, his head snapping around to see Lance looking up at him with the most heartbroken expression he’d ever seen on anyone.

A tan hand finally found its way out of the sheets reaching for Shiro and he instantly was back kneeling beside Lance’s head, holding onto that same hand, while he clumsily tried to wipe away a few stray tears with his prosthesis.

“Shh, it’s okay, I’m here, it’s alright.”

Lance’s lower lip wobbled worryingly as he continued leaking tears and snot. He looked utterly vulnerable and Shiro was taken aback by the sudden realization just how much he was starting to care for this kid he helped out in econ once a week.

“Don’ go…” the sob came out so slurred it was almost impossible to understand. Shiro did anyway.

“Of course not.”

The pleading eyes did him in and minutes later found Shiro sitting on the couch, cradling Lance close, one arm supporting his back and the other ensuring Lance would not roll off his lap.

Shiro could feel the heat radiating off the kid even through the layers of fabric, felt the warm breath ghosting over the crook of his neck in short puffs, felt every little movement as Lance tried to get as close to the source of comfort as possible.

It was far from comfortable and made worry churn in Shiro’s gut as he was so invasively confronted with the fact just how ill Lance was but he also felt relief wash over him when the young man settled, breathing something like a contended sigh.

Shiro allowed himself to relax back into the cushions of the couch, Lance following the movement.

He rested his cheek on the all too warm skin of Lance’s forehead.

He still had no answer. Still had no clear idea how to help, although it was all he could think about now. He really wanted to help this loud-mouthed student who could never seem to stop talking about his family, who was willing to share whatever he had worked out for class just as he was willing to ask for everyone else’s notes; wanted to help a poor guy who was obviously pretty homesick and pretty lonely on top of being overworked to the point of exhaustion.

Shiro really wanted to help this kid that reminded him a little bit too much of his younger self.

“Rise and shine.”

Trying to open his eyes was like trying to separate two sticky pages: painful and all too hopeless.

He opted for opening one, glancing blearily at Pidge’s exaggeratedly sunny expression. If petty had a name it would be Pidge Kathleen Holt.

“Morning.”

He sounded awful, like he’d been out drinking.

Pidge had the decency to wince in sympathy.

“Did you two sleep alright?”

It took Shiro a moment to fully understand what she was saying but when her eyes flitted down to his lap he suddenly remembered. From this angle he couldn’t see much more than a mob of brown hair but he could feel and hear the deep and regular breaths coming from the human burrito in his arms and Shiro allowed himself a relieved sigh when he noticed the lack of heat he had fallen asleep to.

He gave Pidge a tight smile as she waited for his answer.

“Could have been better.” He tested moving his limbs, a little stiff from the odd angle he had ended up with but still bearable. Lance snuggled up to him but did not wake.

Pidge made a small cooing noise, impish smile bringing out her dimples.

“Please, don’t say anything and bring me the thermometer.”

With an innocent shrug, she disappeared towards the bathroom and Shiro used that time to untangle himself from the mound of blankets and long limbs. Although objectively, with how tired he had been, Lance not waking up made perfect sense; it was still disconcerting just how dead to the world he was.

Almost out of reflex his hand went to gauge Lance’s temperature and he was pleasantly surprised to find it almost back to normal. Still, he gladly took the thermometer when Pidge handed it to him.

“Hey, Lance.” he gave his shoulder a small nudge.

When he opened his eyes, Shiro was glad to see that they were clear with no lingering trace of a fever. Lance blinked before squinting at him and finally rubbing gunk of his eyes with the heel of one hand.

“Shiro?” he asked blearily and from the sound of it was obvious that, though no longer feverish, he was far from fine.

Shiro gave him a smile: “Good morning. How do you feel?”

Lance appeared flummoxed, brow furrowed as he propped himself up on his elbows, looking around.

“Do you know where you are?” Shiro tried hard not to sound too worried at the lost look he got.

“I…” he hesitated “Is this your place?”

“Yeah.”

There was a short lull, one interrupted by the flushing of the toilet and with Keith emerging from the bathroom, looking at them curiously.

“Morning.”

Lance and Shiro echoed the greeting, the dark-skinned man looking all the more confused for it.

“Good to see your better.”

Lance nodded dazedly, obviously not following.

“How are your hands?”

As though only now realizing there was gauze wound around them, Lance lifted one of them and Shiro was fascinated to pinpoint the exact moment when everything clicked into place for him.

“Oh shoot!”

If it weren’t for his abnormally good reflexes, he was sure he would not have been able to stop Lance from jumping off the couch and sprint out the door.

“Woah, woah, woah! No, you are not getting off that couch unless I’ve taken your temperature.”

Lance seemed ready to argue, some of that spunk Shiro was already familiar with having returned to him and he went ahead and shoved the thermometer under Lance’s tongue before he could even begin to voice his protest.

Plus, the expression of pure shock was totally worth it.

“100.0” he wiped the tip of the thermometer with a tissue as Lance glowered at him, betrayed.

“Listen,” Lance began, Shiro arching one eyebrow knowing exactly where this sentence was going “Thank you for helping me out, really, you didn’t have to-“

“No we didn’t.”

“I know but-“

“But we wanted to.”

Lance’s lips were pursed.

“I need to go.”

“No, you don’t.”

The first bits of real irritation were coloring his cheeks and Shiro considered laying off a little.

“I have to get to work. Anita’ll be waiting and –“

“Lance.” Shiro tried to make his voice as kind but firm as possible, making the boy look up at him in surprise. “You probably don’t remember but I called your boss yesterday and she told me you should not come if you were still sick by today. And I hate to break it to you,” he swiftly interjected when Lance opened his mouth, waving the thermometer he was still holding “but 100.0 still classifies as a fever. So you’re not going anywhere but to bed.”

He watched him deflate under his very eyes. Man, he now understood what Pidge and Hunk had meant by ‘puppy-eyes’ look. But he would not cave. He had worked a little too hard to let his work go to waste.

There was the familiar banging and clanking of pots coming from the kitchen, promising some fine breakfast.

“You hungry?”

The unexpected and perfectly timed gurgle coming from Lance’s midsection was answer enough.

“So, is the coffee there any good?”

Lance gags, shaking himself dramatically.

“From one honest man to another? Don’t go there if you value your taste-buds.”

Hunk, with the seriousness only an army officer should be able to muster, nods once gravely before continuing to stirr the white of the eggs.

Shiro watches the exchange as he tries to figure out where to fit the extra plate on their relatively small kitchen table. Hunk gets along with pretty much everyone but it’s just incredible how perfectly he and Lance seem to fit each other, as though they were two old friends instead of virtual strangers that have met just the day before.

The idea comes to him spontaneously. He also can admit that the execution of it is rather clumsy for his standards. He blames it on the lack of sleep.

“You know” he starts, making Lance stop laughing at the joke Hunk was starting to talk about, almost, almost dissuading him from finishing the sentence “we are currently looking for another roomie.”

It’s half-lie. They’d been discussing the idea recently sure, but there hadn’t been an agreement on the matter as of yet.

Uncertainty and maybe a little shame cloud Lance’s expression, the timing not right just yet to mention anything about his living or work situation.

From behind Lance, Shiro can see all three of his actual roommates making exasperated praying gestures. Were they up to something?

Lance’s voice has his attention snapping back to him.

“You really don’t have to… It’s fine, honestly.” and the way he says it just screams lie. Even Lance seems to be aware of it “Things have just been a little more hectic but I can do it. But thanks.”

Shiro leaves it at that especially when he catches Pidge crossing her arms in an x- shape before dropping it once Lance turns around to hand them a peeled fruit.

They work in silence, although not as depressing or foreboding as Shiro had feared after his massive blunder.

When the mood is considerably lighter and the delicious smell of Hunk’s special omelet wafts through the kitchen, Shiro hears the man in question suggest:

“Tell you what Lance, Shiro has a point.”

At his name he looks back at the stove where Lance is standing with a spatula in hand, eyes trained on the egg sizzling in the pan. Hunk is close by, slicing up some fruit, evoking an air of nonchalance. Shiro knows he’s being anything but and when he catches Pidge’s smirk and Keith glinting eye he suddenly realizes his friends must have been talking after having left him with Lance.

He has to work hard to suppress the proud smile. Trust his brother to understand the strange workings of his mind.

These three were actual blessings.

He listens in on what he can still catch from Hunk’s part of the conversation.

“- if you don’t like my cooking at all you’re absolutely free to go but if you find even remotely good then at least think about the offer. What do you say?”

He gives Lance an amicable smile, while the latter only has half a mind to spare to really think what he is about to agree to.

It was so unfair.

No one could resist Hunk’s cooking. Not that Lance could possibly know that, or that anyone had to mention it when he went to shake Hunk’s hand on it.

It also surprised no one when, a mere three weeks later, Lance almost broke his neck while trying to get one of his moving boxes into Hunk’s room.

#voltron #vld #lance mcclain #takashi shirogane #keith kogane #pidge gunderson #hunk garrett #college au #sickfic #fanfiction #fanfic #completed #shenanigan(g)s

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