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felassan · 4 years ago

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Jon Renish (Foundation Technical Director @ BioWare, working on DA4) recently did a Twitch stream where he played through some DAO. Although he works on DA, this is his first time playing through DAO. He’s playing through it looking at random details from a dev perspective as he’s currently working on DA4 and therefore wants to know more about the previous games.

On the stream he mentioned some tidbits on the development of DA4. There were also some insights and anecdotes about the development of DAO and similar. It’s a 3 hour stream so I collected them here in case that’s of use to anyone (for example not everyone can watch streams which don’t have subtitles/captions). The stream is a fun/interesting watch though, so if you’re curious or able to watch I recc doing so. 😊 The rest of this post is under a cut for length.

Please note that there’s some paraphrasing on my part, this is not a transcript. There are also some additions from another dev who featured on the stream to give some commentary. The stream also contains more snippets that at times I couldn’t make out (I tried my best!).

(There is a mention of Cullen’s VA in the text below.)

DA4

Jon said he can talk about things about DA4 that aren’t “consumer-facing”, but he can’t say anything about the game that would be consumer-facing but which isn’t already publicly available. There are several reasons for this. One, that’s not his job, there are people whose job this is and they let each other do their respective roles. Two, BW are a publicly-traded company, so if he said something that could affect that that would be insider trading. Three, they’re not done making DA4 yet, so if he said that they have added [x] to the game and people got all excited about that or pre-ordered on that basis, but [x] ended up being cut, people would be like ‘BioWare lied to us’, when it’s just that things changed during the course of development, as is often the case

He’s glad that fans are excited for the game but notes that fan expectations are always double-edged. It can be really tough as some people started ‘playing’ the game in their heads as soon as they heard of it. That’s fine, he loves that, but he hopes that peoples’ expectations don’t turn into requirements. Clearly BW have alluded to certain characters, like Solas, being in the game, but some fans say things like “If [say] Morrigan isn’t in the game, then, rahhh!” Y’know, there’s a lot of talk about how certain characters have to be in the game, and yeah.

On characters which are quantum (i.e. characters which can die or which can have similar end-states as death in previous games): their being quantum makes it really hard for the devs to work with those characters in subsequent games. The devs naturally aren’t going to put as much effort into characters which could have died previously. A character can have had an amazing appearance throughout/role in a previous game, but if there is a risk of something happening to them and of them being removed [effectively] from the plot, it just doesn’t make sense to have them as a major character in a subsequent game. If a character can, say, sacrifice themselves in some glorious ending, the devs have to make sure that if they use them again, in worldstates where the character didn’t do that, the character is kind of ‘muted’, as the devs don’t want to disrespect the players who made a different choice

A comment in chat expressed a wish for Shale in DA4. Jon’s response is that he has no idea on that front

Bugs don’t come out of crunch, they come out of development in general. Crunch does impact on the quality of a game though. In recent years BW are always really trying to reduce crunch, they’re currently working really hard to bring it down. The best way of doing that is by controlling scope. As creatives it’s tough to balance wanting to make great stuff and be industry-leading with the desire to constantly do extra passes over things they’ve created like the audio, art etc. Their biggest enemy is time, other ways of reducing crunch or time spent in general include iterating tools to make often-repeated processes as time-efficient as possible

I think the following was an observation on the industry in general as opposed to a BW-specific/-exclusive comment: he thinks that as a result of this sort of thing [working to reduce crunch], a lot of games are going to have to be smaller and a lot more focused in scope i.e. the devs will have to focus on hitting the key selling points of that particular game/series as hard as they can, and cut down on branching out sideways/wide on a bunch of random other stuff

Jon doesn’t personally engage in character creators in games, but he knows that for some players that expression is worth a lot of time and focus. BW want to be industry-leading in this kind of stuff as it’s something which is interesting/key/integral to their games

In a way BW have made their own nest of problems what with every DA game being so different to the previous one. Still, he notes that each game has a staunch fanbase that says that their particular favorite game is the best one in the series

He doesn’t want people who think that DA4 isn’t what they want to buy it and be upset - there are so many other great games out there! BW are going to make the game they’re going to make - if some people like it, that’s great, and if some people don’t, that’s cool. Sometimes waiting until reviews are out and/or really seeing beforehand if a game is something that you want [has things/features in it that you want] prior to getting it - as opposed to jumping right in or pre-ordering - is a good idea. Fans don’t always know what they want, but they do know what they like - these are 2 different things

He hopes that whatever they ship for DA4, people go “I enjoyed this experience”, and that then, if there’s additional content for it down the road, people can decide, “do I want this further content?”

On hair: BW are using the new hair technology in the latest version of the Frostbite engine, so they’ll see what they can do! This was said in response to a comment about the hair in the latest FIFA games (as EA make FIFA)

A comment in chat asked about a flying mechanic (griffons). Jon’s response is that flying is such a heavy gameplay mechanic that you can’t put it in a game without everything in the game being built about it (see Anthem)

Relating to the above comment, in DA4 mounted combat would be cool but then they’d have to make the game ‘around’ mounted combat and make the mounted combat feature meaningful

On the underwater concept art: it should not be interpreted as a promise of gameplay. BW have amazing artists who sit down for a couple weeks while they’re in early production and just draw loads and loads of all kinds of stuff. Concept art is like a moodboard or Pinterest board. Elsewhere in the stream he advised, take all the concept art together like a mosaic and ask, ‘what is the overall theme[s] here?’, and to zoom out from individual details. [This stuff echoes PW’s word on concept art]

BW don’t generally write things or the choices as bleak as the choices in DAO were anymore. This is a conscious choice on their part, they want their game to be fun [note: this was said when the side quest in Orzammar where the Warden has the option of convincing a dwarven mother to abandon her young baby to die was being played through. It seems to refer to intensively grimdark choices/beats of this kind]

I think this was more of a general comment on games: SSDs (solid state drives) mean that players will see shorter elevator rides (Mass Effect - was this a reference to the remaster?) and fewer switchback corridors (those are actually loading zones). Generally, these are going to change mechanically the time it takes to do stuff in games

The devs have lots of features on their backlog that they’d like to offer players but each will ofc involve implementation and subsequent maintenance, and each one that is chosen to add is being chosen over something else. And sometimes, it’s hard for them to tell if [x] feature or [y] feature would be better to add to the game

They’re about to work on a giant feature (a pure tooling feature, something that isn’t consumer-facing) that is probably going to take ~2 staff years of effort [I think “staff effort” includes multiple staff working concurrently, so 2 years of staff effort doesn’t = 2 years of time chronologically] to get done in the next few months. They’re investing all this effort across the people working on it because they don’t want their artists and designers etc to have to deal with the problem that it’s going to solve anymore. I’m not sure what this feature is but elsewhere in the stream they referred to tooling and automation and gave the example of, the better your tooling is, the fewer times you have to manually set the camera for a human vs elf vs dwarf position, for dynamically-generated [cinematic?] content and for the first pass to be automated (if this is the case, less time is spent/wasted on redoing it and manually touching it up) [see last bullet point in this section]

He doesn’t know how big DA4 is going to be but said “let’s ballpark and say like most games it’ll be somewhere between 70 and 100 GB”

If we kept our Wardens as the PC throughout all 3 games, at the end they would be so powerful that it’d be a bit like “Let’s just do [thing], I’ve killed gods before, whatever”. He thinks it’s good that they have fresh characters each time in DA in order to reset that power level. Some people want more Commander Shepard in the next Mass Effect and he feels like, ‘what else could you possibly want / what else could that character possibly do after 3 games?’

When asked how much freedom he/they have now to focus on next gen, he said that there’s actually almost no difference on that front. The problems never change. They now have better renderers, better ray-tracing, better graphics cards etc, but they have always made DA games for high- and low-spec PCs, so it’s actually about gameplay systems. The freedom isn’t power-based and them getting access to more cores and more RAM generally isn’t going to change how the games are played. The games still have to be made for hard drives on PC. Dev creativity matters more than power here. The challenge of building a BW game is more about/from managing loads of different plotstates, loads of different art pieces, etc

On the title situation (two): names are the last thing they worry about because names have to go through legal before being approved. Every name, including character names, has to be checked in case it’s a famous person, or associated with something bad, or offensive in a different language due to localization etc

They don’t do face scans of people with big beards

There was also a bit about changes/developments to/in the cinematic design process and associated tooling [?] but I found it too hard to follow sorry >< This bit of commentary begins at timestamp ~ 1:52:45 and continues til ~ 2:00:05 [keep listening through the bit where they pause for a cutscene]

General BW

There’s currently ~350 staff in Edmonton, ~200 in Austin and more elsewhere

He notes that DA games sell pretty well, but relative to EA games in general, they’re a drop in the bucket compared to FIFA

DAI

5% of players of DAI never created a character [Q: does this refer to people who just used the default appearances/presets with no editing, or people who only played multiplayer?]

The mounts don’t actually go faster than running, this is an illusion

I think they said it has 55,000 lines of dialogue. [I’m pretty sure I remember devs elsewhere saying it has 80,000 lines of dialogue]

One of the companions had to have their name changed during development because of legal/translation reasons. It sounds like the original name sounded too close to something offensive

DA2

Back when DA2 was internally code-named “Nug Storm”: this was at the beginning when it was pitched to the team on a set of slides. The image on the slide for that pitch had devil horns, a metal hand and no flesh, it was just made out of fire and flames

DAO

The engine DAO is made on is the third engine that they tried for it during development. [David Gaider has gone into the DAO engine stuff some on Summerfall’s series of DAO playthrough streams]

The cracks on the cracked eluvian asset are modelled after the crack on the Tardis in Doctor Who from around that time, as at the time some devs had been talking about Doctor Who a lot. A dev actually added this factoid to DAO’s entry on TV Tropes but someone else (evidently not a DA dev) came by and deleted it saying that it was too much of a stretch x)

Before the game had its name there was an HTML script that randomly generated possible titles for consideration, it adds verbs and nouns together e.g. “Grim Dark”. One of the craziest possibilities that it once generated that the devs always remember is "Bone Wind”

One of the portraits that’s used for decoration around the world in-game (it’s of a bearded human man) is actually of a specific BW staff member

He played through Stone Prisoner, where Wilhelm’s son Matthias gives exposition in the cellar. Matthias is voiced by GE and this had been pointed out to Jon earlier on. Jon: “I don’t think that character’s voice acting was super strong there”

On the in-game area towards the end of Stone Prisoner: Outdoor areas in games are large and one of the things needed for them is streaming, so different chunks can be ‘streamed in’. There’s a tower [?], and technically the top of the tower was made an outdoor level so that sky stuff could be there, though it didn’t really need to be. The person that made it an outdoor level chose the very smallest chunk size for the terrain mesh, which determines how fine of a streaming they do. So when playing, every time you moved like 4 meters, the game would stream out 50-100 chunks behind you and the same in front of you (this is the bubble around the player of what actually exists). Because it was so small, it was constantly thrashing the CPU and disc to do all the loading. The devs were like “this isn’t going to work”, but they barely had any time. The solution: they made a new level that was outdoor and copied all the sunlight and other settings, but with the largest chunk size. They copy-pasted the entire level from one to the other. The problem with that many chunks then is that there was a giant expanse of flat terrain sticking out of the middle of the tower. They didn’t know if the story was going to involve shots of the outside of the tower for this sequence or not, so they took the terrain deformation tool and bundled all the terrain vertices at the bottom of the tower in a giant clump. So to this day there’s a mess of vertices and twisted terrain at the bottom of the final level that probably no-one has ever seen [not sure though if this anecdote is in reference to a place in that DLC or somewhere elsewhere in the game?]

There were also some tidbits on Anthem, however I didn’t note them down (sorry).

If you think I misheard or misunderstood anything from this stream please let me know and I will edit/fix it. :)

(Thankyou to some of my friends who explained a tech detail from this to me.)

[source] <-- current rewatch link

#dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #dragon age #bioware #video games #greg ellis mention #morrigan #queen of my heart #solas #mass effect #anthem #next mass effect #i love these factoids and insights into game dev it's so interesting and fun #i actually started this post yesterday but 2 hours in I was so sleepy (it was mad late) so I called it a night

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littlemisspascal · 4 years ago

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Death and an Angel part 13

Death!Din x Cupid F!Reader

Summary: Ahsoka takes Din on a journey through the past.

“You should know though, you might not like what you see.”

Din shakes his head, dismissing the warning. “What’s one more nightmare?”

Rating: T

Word Count: 5,958

Warnings: angst, swearing, character death (canonical, but with my own twist), made up planet name that is ridiculous, dialogue heavy, plot plot plot, backstory

Author Note: Good lord this is soooo late coming out. To anyone who sent me an encouraging message I am beyond grateful because I really needed the encouragement to finish this segment. I hope more than anything this segment gives more answers than it raises questions (although reading your theories is both awesome and entertaining so keep them coming too!)

Links to Part 1 and Part 12 and Part 14

Cross-posted on AO3.

Photo Inspiration:

“Who the fuck is Moff Gideon?”

Ahsoka looks at Din, her brow furrowed deeply. He’s seen the expression on her face enough times to recognize its meaning: this is the face she makes when she is about to reveal a message directly from the universe itself. As an Oracle, she is the only immortal who can glimpse details of the past, present, and future. She has a soft spot for mortals, sharing the few precious snippets the universe allows her to with them in the forms of riddles and vague prophecies that never fail to give Din a migraine with their crypticness when he hears them.

“Moff Gideon is a Seraph who grew discontent with his position amongst immortals,” she says at last.

“Is he the one responsible for keeping my soulmate from me?” he asks, voice as harsh and unforgiving as the environment surrounding them.

“He is responsible for many sins.”

“I don’t have time for your vague answers,” he growls, hands twisting into fists. “You tell me not to kill this Seraph, then in the next breath claim he’s a threat. I am not a mortal who will be entertained by riddles, Ahsoka. You summoned me here to talk, so start talking. Tell me what you know.”

The Oracle’s mouth purses into a thin line. Nearly a full minute passes before she speaks again. When she does, the calmness is no longer natural, but forced. “Telling you what I know would be impossible.”

“Ahsoka—”

“But,” she pitches her voice higher than his protest while narrowing her eyes disapprovingly, “I am capable of showing you. You should know though, you might not like what you see.”

Din shakes his head, dismissing the warning. “What’s one more nightmare?”

She reaches forward, pressing her index and middle fingers to the center of his visor. If not for his helmet, she’d be touching the space directly between his eyes and instinct tells him the positioning isn’t random.

“We’ll start at the beginning,” she says, but her voice has changed from its usual cadence. It is ancient and youthful, a harsh scream and a hushed whisper all at once.

Din has only the slightest of seconds to process this in addition to the way her facial markings start to glow and her eyes flash white before he finds himself standing in the midst of a crisis.

There is mass hysteria every direction he turns. People screaming in terror, pushing each other and tripping over those who have fallen in their haste to flee an unseen threat; whole buildings are crumbling, sending flaming debris and shards of glass raining down upon the streets as smoke billows into the sky. The edges of his field of view are blurred, like he’s looking at everything through someone’s glasses, and it creates an ache behind his eyeballs. Fuck, is this what it’s like for Ahsoka when she experiences visions?

‘You remember the Fall of Mandalore, don’t you, Death?’ Ahsoka’s voice resonates from deep inside his brain, as if she’s fused her consciousness with his.

His jaw tightens when he says, “Of course.”

‘Oh, look. There you are.’

Sure enough, when Din looks forward he sees himself moving swiftly through the crowd, unaffected by the chaos as he stoops to reap the soul of a woman who’s had her skull caved in by the stampede of frantic civilians. He wonders how many others can say they’ve had an out-of-body-experience such as what he’s dealing with right now: reliving a traumatic event all over again while observing himself the same way a stranger would from a distance.

“Why are you showing me this?”

‘Because it’s important,’ Ahsoka answers, and the image of her frowning face enters his mind unbiddenly. ‘The universe has a plethora of endings imagined for every civilization, but it is the individual choices of the community that act as stepping stones bringing them closer to a specific fate.’

“Mandalore was always meant to fall apart. It was just a matter of how, not when,” he surmises, voice devoid of emotion. His words are punctuated by another fiery blast from a nearby complex, followed by an ear-piercing wall of a terrified child.

‘Precisely. But the same cannot be said for an individual’s lifespan. There are consequences if someone perishes before their time has come. You should know that better than anyone.’ There is a hint of accusation thinly veiled in her tone that has his body tensing reflexively.

His location shifts, shapes and colors mixing together without warning before another scene gradually comes into focus. It’s a large chamber with sparse furnishings, but its beauty is tarnished by the copious amounts of glass littering the room as every single one of the ornately designed windows have been shattered from the force of the explosions outside. Din knows before he even lays eyes on the throne he’s inside the royal palace because he first sees the familiar face of his most trusted reaper standing next to a blond-haired woman. Both women have such strikingly similar facial features nobody who sees them side by side can have any doubt they are related.

Whereas Bo-Katan dons gray-and-blue armor with a jetpack strapped to her back and two blaster pistols holstered at her sides, her sister, Satine, wears a garnet colored dress with a gold belt wrapped around her slender waist. In this moment, the sisters differ from each other as much as night and day; one a military leader, the other a pacifistic duchess.

“You need someone here to protect you. We don’t know who or what we’re dealing with and it isn’t safe for you to be alone,” Bo-Katan argues, crossing her arms over her chest as if to intimidate her sister into submitting.

“Our people are scared and defenseless, Bo. They need your protection during this crisis more than I currently do,” Satine says, voice soft but firm in a way only those deeply involved in politics can master.

Bo-Katan glances out the broken windows at the burning city, stubborn loyalty to protect her sister warring with her duty to protect her people. “Then at least send a message to Obi-Wan to come here.”

Satine shakes her head. “Bo—”

“I know things are strained between you two right now—”

“That’s a glaring understatement.”

“—but he’s one of our best and most loyal guards. He’s proven more than a dozen times he’ll fight anyone who’s a threat to you.”

“I don’t need the reminder of what he’s done for me.”

Bo-Katan places a hand on the blonde’s shoulder and squeezes it when she says, “He’s the only one other than myself I trust to protect you if you were to encounter danger.”

“Just because I’m committed to peace does not mean I am incapable of looking after myself.” Satine reaches behind herself to detach a weapon that had been clipped to the back of her belt. She clicks a button on its hilt, emitting a white blade shining brightly like a beacon amongst the dark clouds of smoke tainting the air.

Din’s breath catches in his throat. “Is that…?”

‘The Lightsaber of Mandalore,’ Ahsoka confirms. ‘Made by the Armorer herself.’

The Armorer is deeply respected by both mortals and immortals alike. As the goddess of metalworking and blacksmiths, there is nothing she cannot forge and infuse with grand powers. However, she is exceedingly cautious about choosing who is a recipient of her creations.

Din is one such recipient, having been given his armor of pure beskar when the Armorer realized how dangerous his touch was to mortals. He remains eternally grateful for the gift not only because it prohibits unwanted physical contact, but also because it is invulnerable to damage or rust like other types of armor. Ahsoka’s dual sabers were also made in the Armorer’s forge, specifically designed for the Oracle’s grip alone and meant to protect her during her journeys throughout the galaxy, but in contrast to the white blade of the Lightsaber, the blades of Ahsoka’s weapons matched the same blue coloring as the stripes on her lekku and montrals.

According to the legends Din’s heard, the Armorer created the Lightsaber for the first ruler of Mandalore because she was impressed with their culture and strong military, and it was passed on to each new heir to the throne over the centuries. When wielded in battle, the Lightsaber made the user invincible against enemy attacks as it siphoned off energy from the souls of those it sliced through.

Throughout the long history of Mandalore, Satine was distinguished as the only ruler to avoid warfare as she sincerely believed negotiations and treaties could solve any problem quicker than bloodshed.

As such, Din isn’t surprised when Bo-Katan raises a judgmental eyebrow. “Did you forget who you’re talking to? I know you wouldn’t use the Lightsaber even to cut a piece of fruit.”

Satine sighs through her nose, sheathing the weapon once more. “Fine. I’ll contact Obi the second you’re gone.”

“You better.” Bo-Katan leans forward, pressing her forehead against her sister’s. A gesture of affection within their culture. “I’ll see you soon.”

And then she’s gone, flying out the nearby window and diving straight into the fray. As a mortal and as a reaper, the redhead is fearless in the face of danger. Some might consider the behavior reckless, but Din’s always been impressed by her dogged tenacity to achieve victory no matter the difficulty of her mission.

Din looks back at Satine. Now that she is alone in the room, she is able to freely express her distress at the unfolding situation, looking as if she’s aged ten years within the blink of an eye. She fiddles with the comlink around her wrist, seeming hesitant to call this Obi-Wan fellow like she agreed to.

‘They haven’t realized it, but they’re soulmates, ’ Ahsoka murmurs, low and melancholic. Hearing it makes Din’s chest constrict with unease. ‘They fought recently and parted ways upset with each other. Unfortunately, she dies before they can resolve their miscommunication.’

The next sequence of events play out startlingly quick, as if Ahsoka has chosen to suddenly jump forward in time. His eyes struggle to absorb the fleeting details—the doors to the throne room being blown open; a Seraph in black armor emerging from the smoke; his voice is unique, velvety and thorny at the same time, as he addresses the duchess by her full name Satine Kryze; Satine attempting to stall as she subtly taps at her comlink, only for the tactic to fail as the foe teleports closer, eliminating the space between them.

“You have something I want,” he tells her, seizing hold of her throat. “You may think you have some idea of what you have in your possession, but you do not.”

One of Satine’s hands claws at his face, attempting to gouge out his eyeballs with her nails, while the other reaches for the Lightsaber. Her fingertips brush against its metal hilt just as he throws her to the floor. The impact knocks the breath out of her lungs, eliciting a strangled gasp, and shards of glass dig into her exposed skin, dotting the pale flesh with beads of blood.

Gideon—Din doesn’t need Ahsoka’s input to know this, for who else could the Seraph be but him?—places the heel of his boot over Satine’s neck. He doesn’t apply pressure yet, but the action in itself has the duchess squirming with panic, hitting at his leg futilely. There is a red light on the comlink flashing insistently, indicating someone on the other end is speaking but they’ve been muted.

“Give me the asset I seek.”

Through clenched teeth, Satine wheezes, “It belongs to Mandalore.”

“I thought you might say that,” Gideon replies, feigning disappointment. “However, in case you haven’t noticed Duchess,” he gestures towards the windows, “Mandalore is dead. My accomplices have made sure of that.”

“You’re a coward for hiding behind others. You don’t deserve the Lightsaber.”

There is a sudden change in the atmosphere, air turning impossibly frigid and crisp.

“I deserve it more than anyone,” Gideon says, angry enough he is trembling. The Seraph’s stance shifts, and although Din has witnessed every type of brutal death imaginable, he flinches at the sound of Satine’s neck snapping beneath his heel.

Gideon rolls her lifeless body over and rips the Lightsaber off her belt, a satisfied smirk on his face. He disappears as quickly as he arrived, reward in hand, and an eerie silence envelops the room. It’s almost as if the palace itself is stunned by the loss of its ruler, struggling to make sense of the merciless act of violence.

Time skips forward again, showing a young bearded-man dressed in military armor clutching at Satine’s body, pressing his forehead against hers as he weeps. Over and over he keeps murmuring apologies for not being quicker, for failing to be there when she needed him, for never saying he loved her.

“How do you know Satine and Obi-Wan are soulmates if they never matched?” Din asks, feeling like he’s intruding on a private moment despite not actually being there.

He thinks of a similarly phrased question he’d asked his angel on their way to Sorgan what feels like entire lifetimes ago: how will I know it’s my soulmate? Her eloquent response remains embedded deep in his memory, safely stored away along with every other moment they’ve spent together. Longing twists like a knife in his side as he allows himself a second of weakness to look at the soulmate marking on his palm.

‘I saw the life they were going to share,’ Ahsoka tells him. ‘Satine Kryze was not meant to die here. She and Obi-Wan should have both survived the Fall of Mandalore, settling down happily with each other elsewhere in the galaxy. Gideon’s greed altered their destinies.’

The palace fades away to reveal a much older Obi-Wan, gray-haired and wrinkled. He’s in Mos Eisley; Din recognizes the crowded spaceport instantly having taken his ship there for repairs numerous times over the years.

‘The universe puts a lot of effort into making sure soulmates match with each other at a very precise moment. Even if the match is rejected, the individuals still had an important impact on each other’s lives. Timing is the most important factor for a soulmate pairing, and if it’s off then the universe will attempt to fix it.’

Obi-Wan stops to help a woman who’s accidentally dropped her shopping bag, contents spilling out onto the sandy ground. She thanks him as he offers her a polite smile, both of their attentions on each other’s faces and not their hands. More specifically: their marked hands. There is the barest brush of their fingertips as they reach for the same item before an invisible blast of energy erupts from their touch, splitting them apart and sending every person and thing surrounding them flying in all directions.

The shock on Obi-Wan’s face matches Din’s own beneath his helmet. He remembers his angel telling him after the failed match with Omera what happened on Sorgan wasn’t the first time an event like that occurred, but she hadn’t been privy to the details. Her superior had told her she wasn’t high enough ranking which Din had thought sounded like a load of bantha shit at the time.

“Ahsoka, what is the meaning of this?” Din asks the questions quietly, but there’s an audible coating of frustration that he knows she won’t miss. “Satine’s dead.”

‘You didn’t reap her soul,’ Ahsoka says. It’s said as a gentle reminder, but it nevertheless has Din feeling like the ground has disappeared beneath his feet as realization dawns.

“I...didn’t.”

A quiet sigh echoes through his head. ‘I forgot how ignorant you can be. You can’t reap a mortal soul that transforms into a new entity.’

“She’s a Cupid,” Din murmurs. Either that or a reaper, but he knows each of his reapers like the back of his hand and Satine isn’t nor has she ever been one. He shakes his head, thinking of Obi-Wan finding Satine’s body in the throne room. “That doesn’t make any sense. Obi-Wan clearly loved her.”

‘Rejection can sometimes stem from a misunderstanding. Satine’s last living encounter with Obi-Wan was him saying so long as he was part of the royal guard they had no future together. She perceived this as him denying he cared about her, not knowing he had made plans to retire in order to ask for her hand.’

In front of Din, Obi-Wan rubs at his soulmate marking while staring at the mess around him, lines of unease and confusion creasing his forehead.

‘You asked, what is the meaning of this moment?’ Ahsoka continues. ‘It’s one of the universe’s attempts to reconnect Obi-Wan and Satine so they experience their matching as they were intended to.’

“But they’re of different statuses,” he points out needlessly. “She’ll outlive him.”

‘Yes, but the matching of soulmates not only influences the lives of the pair, but the lives of other people as well in ways both obvious and invisible. Think of it as a ripple effect.’

“Did the universe’s attempt work?” Din wonders. “Were they ever reunited?”

‘When Satine awoke as a Cupid, it was a surprise to both her and Gideon. Rather than kill her a second time, the Seraph chose to inflict a worse fate. She became the first of her kind to have her memories erased. However, he’d never previously used his ability on another immortal before, resulting in him nearly wiping her entire mind clean. The universe is capable of many miracles, big and small, but every attempt of reuniting the pair failed. It remains the universe’s most profound regret which is ultimately the reason why the universe brought you to Trinomliaxeros without your armor so that history wouldn’t repeat itself.’

There is a strange, heavy feeling that suddenly inflates within the confines of Din’s chest like a balloon. It’s different from the rampant anger he can still detect simmering beneath the skin of his human façade. He tries to shake it off, focusing on his breathing and the desert heat emanating from the twin suns overhead, only to slowly realize that what he’s feeling is fear.

Within his memory he can recall just one other distinct moment in his existence where he felt this spine-chilling emotion, and that moment was experienced on Trinomliaxeros.

“What did you just say?” His voice sounds shaky even to his own ears, but he can’t find any energy within himself to care.

A long stretch of silence fills his head; it’s the fragile kind, too, preventing him from snapping at Ahsoka to answer lest she become angry at him and yank him out the vision entirely.

‘Twice the timing of a soulmate match has been disturbed. The first pair affected was Obi-Wan and Satine. And the second pair was...’

“Ahsoka,” he says when she hesitates to continue, but any additional words he can think of saying catch in the back of his throat.

‘The second pair was you and your angel.’ Another pause of silence, shorter but no less meaningful. ‘Only fifty years ago, she wasn’t an angel.’

This is what Din remembers from Trinomliaxeros: feeling a pull so forceful, impatient and unanticipated it drags him across the galaxy in his civilian clothes, arriving to find the planet engulfed in smoke, unable to see his hand in front of his face, even without his gloves on. Finding skeletal remains burnt to blackened crisps with the souls inside shaking and traumatized, practically leaping into his outstretched hand, knowing either the afterlife or damnation would be better destinations than lingering there even a second longer. Explosions in the distance, bursts of flames as intense and hot as the sun, greedily consuming everything in their radius.

Out of the smoke and darkness, a survivor. A girl, covered in soot and sweat, colliding with his chest. The dead are calling out to him, pleading for him to reap them, to save them. Their voices swirl around his head, clawing at his brain and pounding against his skull. Shoving the girl aside, one foot in front of the other, letting his powers guide him to the next soul. Her voice cuts across the distance, a plasma bolt striking him in the back. We’re soulmates, she says.

His breath stills in his lungs. Fear spreads like a virus through his bloodstream, slipping beneath his defenses, turning him into a stranger within his own body. The declaration is a lie, an impossibility, a delusion. He has no match, hands unmarked, flesh poisonous and lethal. His words, too, are weapons themselves. Sharp, ruthless, desiring to wound her as she’s wounded him. You could never be my soulmate.

And then he’d left her.

This is what Din remembers. But, he thinks, squeezing his eyes shut so tightly it hurts, I’ve remembered everything all wrong.

Phantom hands gently press against the sides of his helmet, offering comfort without caring about the dried blood. He keeps his eyes shut, knowing it’s just a manifestation crafted by Ahsoka in his head. ‘Don’t blame yourself. This was the only viable outcome the universe could produce to ensure the bad timing would be remedied in the future,’ she says, but it does little to lessen the weight on his chest. ‘Your rejection saved her life. It granted you both a second chance of a first meeting.’

“How did—” Din struggles to string words together, to fucking breathe. “She—She knew. What we were. How…?”

The Oracle puts him out of his misery. ‘She found out the way all soulmates do: through touch.’

Din’s eyes fly open at that, and he has to blink a few times to bring everything into focus because there’s him and his angel right in front of him, frozen mid-collision. She’s grasping the sleeves of his coat to keep her balance, the palm of her marked hand touching his wrist. He stares at the point of contact for a moment, then barks out a laugh, hysterical and strangled sounding.

“That’s not possible.”

‘Soulmates can’t kill each other. She’s always been meant to withstand your touch.’

Din swallows thickly, staring at his angel’s face. He hates the question forming on his tongue, but it will haunt him the rest of his life if he doesn’t ask it. “In your visions, when I meet her at the right time, what happens?”

'You’re different by then, less broody and more accepting of the notion you could be loved. You have a soulmate marking,’ Ahsoka tells him. ‘You fall for her hard, even before your hands brush. You love her throughout the entirety of her lifetime.’

“And...when she dies?” The words taste like blood in his mouth.

‘Don’t torture yourself, Death. That timeline doesn’t exist anymore.’

For one brief, fleeting second Din is actually grateful Gideon altered their destinies. However, in the next, he’s trying not to let the fear gnawing at the back of his mind increase as it belatedly occurs to him that the universe is not as infallible as he’s always believed it was.

He wishes he could see Ahsoka, if only so he could glare at her directly. “Everything you’ve shown me has only further convinced me Gideon deserves death. Why have you asked me to promise not to kill him?”

'Do you remember what happens after this moment on Trinomliaxeros?’

Din frowns at the change of subject. “I continued to reap souls.”

'Yes. And then?’

He huffs a frustrated breath through his nose. This is Ahsoka, he thinks, at her most annoying. But, as much he loathes admitting it, this is also the most helpfully transparent she’s ever been. Today may be the only time she trusts him enough to share her visions. He owes it to her to be as open as she’s being with him.

That being said, he’s still wary of the memories he’s kept in the distant, shadowy corners of his mind being pulled into the spotlight. “Tell me we’re not gonna talk about the kid.”

‘We talked about the universe’s biggest regret. It’s only fair we talk about yours too.’ Ahsoka has found the crack in his armor he’s tried so long to conceal, peeling it open without remorse.

She doesn’t spare him time to argue. All he does is blink and he’s looking at his past self locked in a staring contest with a little green-skinned child who is propped up inside a floating, orb-shaped pram.

Of all the buildings and homes on the planet, only its temple had remained untouched by the destruction. Din didn’t know if it had been the structure’s own holy foundation keeping it standing or if it was the personal choice of the mastermind behind the attack, but he’d been drawn to it regardless, finding souls there to reap whose hosts had differed from other victims in that their throats had been slit. The walls of the temple were adorned with intricate murals depicting immortal figures and religious events of ancient history, but before he could observe the artwork closer, a quiet coo had stopped him in his tracks.

When he opened the pram, he hadn’t anticipated finding a baby of all creatures. When their eyes connected, every background noise abruptly ceased. Even the voices of the dead fell silent. Rather than rouse his suspicions, Din had felt only a sense of peace he usually only experienced in the midst of hyperspace travel where the stars were his voiceless companions.

An unspoken conversation transpired between the two of them, one Din still can’t translate into words all these years later, but it concluded with him knowing he would take the child with him.

Din had reached for him unthinkingly, the child lifting his arms up in eagerness to be held, but self-awareness kicked in right before contact and Din retracted his hands away so fast it startled the child into crying, brown eyes filling with tears. Panicked, he surveyed the room, looking for something to put an end to the wailing, before looking down at his own coat, experiencing a lightbulb moment.

“Alright, kid, it’s okay. You’re okay.” Watching his past self shrug off the coat, Din remembers it had been his favorite of his civilian clothes, well worth the cost for its soft fabric and length. He managed to successfully swaddle the child, ensuring his arms were safely tucked away to prevent him endangering his life, and Din exhaled a quiet breath of relief when the tears dried up almost immediately.

However, the ensuing silence wasn’t as peaceful as the previous one. Both past and present Din turn at the sound of distant shuffling echoing off the temple walls from another room.

“Ignore it,” Din tells his past self. “Just take the kid and leave.”

But his plea goes unheard and the past remains unchanged. Ahsoka is silent inside his head, either because she knows he won’t accept any more comforting words or because she thinks he’s undeserving of them for choosing to leave the child behind in his pram, closing it when he starts to whine again, so Din can go investigate the noise.

Din exhales a quiet breath, fingers twitching restlessly at his sides as he watches himself stalk through the temple halls, checking each room he comes across. It’s strange, seeing himself from this perspective. The distanced viewpoint allows Din to glimpse new details he hadn’t been capable of noticing back then.

Such as the reappearance of a familiar Seraph emerging from the shadows to stab him in the back.

Here’s one of the perks about being Death: he can’t be killed. That fact doesn’t mean there haven’t been attempts though. As Death, people sometimes look at his armor as a challenge. Like if they can fire a shot or throw a knife at just the right angle, it’ll wound him and allow them to live longer. Simply put, all those people are idiots.

When he looks like a regular, unintimidating civilian, he’s also been involved in violent predicaments where someone’s attempted to mug him or where he’s tried to save someone else from a similarly sticky situation.

Armor or no armor though, he’s always walked away from these encounters completely unscathed.

Well. With the sole exception of Trinomliaxeros where he was mostly unscathed.

It wasn’t the first time Din had been stabbed before. Usually knife wounds felt like a mild pinch. More irritating than painful, similar to a splinter stuck in one’s thumb. Once the weapon was removed, the damage healed within seconds, leaving behind no scar or proof he was ever attacked.

Usually, is the keyword to note here.

Ahsoka freezes time right when the blade of the Lightsaber is driven straight through the center of Din’s body, bone and flesh as easy to slice through as melted butter. His agonized expression—eyes screwed shut and lips open in a silent scream—would be comical if Din didn’t remember the exact emotions he was feeling in that moment.

Instead of a pinch, it’d felt as if thousands of invisible hands were pulling and scratching at him, attempting to strip apart his human exterior layer by layer—peeling off skin, scraping away muscle and bone marrow, seeking to reach the core of himself where his powers resided.

‘Looks like it hurts,’ Ahsoka says. The return of her naturally calm and neutral tone of voice seems almost cruel given the frozen, graphic display.

Din again wishes he could glare at her. “Is this funny to you?”

‘The transformation of the Lightsaber into the Darksaber is anything but funny.’

Lost in recollection, he failed to notice until now how the blade of the Lightsaber has changed in color from white to black. It’s the same inky hue that absorbs the brown in his eyes, that had dyed his veins during the execution of Hess.

‘The Armorer specifically instructed the Lightsaber only be used against enemies. As a neutral entity, you are, by definition, no one’s ally or adversary. By stabbing you, the saber became corrupted. It is a consequence Gideon still has yet to fully realize the monumental repercussions of.’

Time resumes, Din’s past self collapsing onto the floor, pressing a hand to the throbbing hole in his chest, attention too consumed by the franticness of his powers struggling to repair the trauma to notice Gideon lingering behind him. The Seraph’s stunned look of shock lasts barely ten seconds, morphing into one of deep contemplation as his gaze flicked between the weapon and Din, before he vanished.

When Din recovered enough to stand, he teleported back to the child’s location at once. He needs to get the little guy as far away from here as possible, somewhere peaceful and safe. His planning came to an abrupt halt upon finding the pram open and empty, his coat shredded and scattered about the floor in pieces.

“Gideon took him.” It isn’t a question.

‘Yes,’ she confirms. ‘The child was the intended target of this siege.’

“Why?”

‘He’s...very special.’ There is something about how her voice hitches when she says ‘special’ that has Din’s instincts prickling with alertness, but he holds his tongue. ‘Gideon considers him a tool he can take advantage of.’

The ugly, tight mass of anger swells inside of him and presses against his lungs, resulting in a low growl slipping out of his mouth. He curses his own ineptitude. If he’d paid more attention, hadn’t allowed himself to be wounded, he could have subdued Gideon and spared both his angel and the child from being captured.

“I warned you once upon a time, there would be consequences if you released your darkness,” Ahsoka says, her voice no longer emitting from inside his head. The vision fades back into reality the same sudden, jarring way one wakes up from dreaming. It takes all of Din’s self-restraint not to perform a full-body shake. “Your control is slipping as your rage increases. It’s making you not think clearly which is exactly what Gideon wants. That is the reason I am asking you to promise you will not kill him.”

Put like that, Din no longer thinks her request sounds quite so outlandish, even though he does still remain in the dark as to what consequences exactly will unfold. Ahsoka has remained stubbornly tight-lipped about the topic from their very first encounter, claiming the universe is adamant she can only share the details with one other person and it isn’t him.

“He deserves to die for all he’s done,” Din says quietly, but he’s self-aware to know his resistance is beginning to crumble.

“Between you and me, I think so, too,” she admits in the same low tone. Her ocean eyes are dark and stormy, reflecting her internal turmoil. “But rules are made for a reason and we would be fools to carelessly overlook the consequences of breaking them.”

The accusatory note from earlier has returned with a vengeance. He’s not surprised—of course the universe would utilize the Oracle to express its disapproval—but aggravation still thrums through his veins.

“Hess played a hand in my soulmate’s fate. He called her a whore.” Din’s upper lip twitches with the urge to snarl. “I don’t regret what I did to him.”

Ahsoka sighs. “I was afraid you’d say that. When you swore your creed, you promised the universe you’d only reap a soul when their host’s time has reached its destined end. By killing Hess, you not only broke a sacred rule, you also broke your creed.”

Din recoils, feeling like he’s been stabbed with the Lightsaber all over again.

“...What?” The anger is gone, extinguished by the weight of the revelation. Confusion and wariness are quick to fill the void. “What does that mean?”

She looks away then, but not quick enough to hide her troubled expression. “I...don’t know.”

He blinks, mind scrambling to understand the implications. “Isn’t that your purpose? To know everything?”

“For the very first time, the future’s unclear to me,” she murmurs, eyes briefly turning cloudy as if she’s trying to take a peek at the potential timelines right then and there. She shakes her head a beat later, frowning. “There are many choices left to be made, each one capable of influencing the fate of the galaxy. It is not possible at this time for me to predict our upcoming reality, let alone your consequences. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Din says, because it’s the truth and he doesn’t like seeing her crestfallen expression. Fuck, he might actually consider her a friend after all.

Whatever happens, he thinks to himself, it can’t be any worse to deal with than being separated from his soulmate. If he can survive this, he can survive anything.

“The last promise I made was broken.” He bites back a wince at the memory of his angel’s pinky promise. “But if making another one is the only way you’ll take me to my soulmate, then you have my word. I won’t kill him.”

A ghost of a smile pulls at her lips before she grabs hold of one of his vambraces. “Take me to your ship. I will guide you to her location.”

“You don’t trust me to go alone?” he asks, unsure whether to be amused or indignant.

“No,” Ahsoka replies bluntly.

Din huffs. “Fine.”

“I may not be able to see much at the moment, but I know it’s never wise to turn down support. You’re going to need us.”

“Us?”

“It’s Bo-Katan’s choice to make, but you and I both know she’s never been one to back down from a fight. Especially once she learns Gideon is her sister’s murderer.”

Series Tag List: @stardust-and-starlight, @adrieunor, @remmyswritings, @rhiannon-russo, @maytheglitter, @eleinemk, @becauseican2, @kay2304, @odelia-d32, @nicotinebirds, @computeringturtle, @absurdthirst, @linkpk88, @bethany2002, @spideysimpossiblegirl, @imthedoctorlove, @fishsficrecs

Permanent Tag List: @promiscuoussatan, @vintagesaph, @sylphene, @over300books, @aerynwrites, @softly-sad, @chibi-yuki, @theocatkov, @oh-no-a-whovian, @freeshavocadoooo, @you-and-i-deserve-the-world, @lin-djarin, @happiestsparkleofall, @randomness501, @gallowsjoker, @rogertaylorsfalsettogivesmehives, @captain-jebi, @leilei-draws, @coaaster, @stilllivindue2spite, @pointy-sharp, @melobee, @artsymaddie

#din djarin x you #din x you #my fic #death and an angel #mandalorian x reader #Din Djarin #Pedro Pascal #pedro pascal character fanfiction #din djarin x reader #din x reader

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puppy-phum · 2 years ago

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Rules: Posting a list of current writing works in progress. Feel free to ask me for info on any of them, whether snippets of writing, plot details, main characters, etc. Send me a title listed below and I’ll share something related to it. ;)

tagged by my beloved brigid @s1utspeare ♥ thank you so much! i haven’t talked about my wips in ages tbh bc i haven’t been writing that much ever since my heihua saw the light of day?? i guess am focusing more on images currently. my brain just cannot do words between uni and work sigh

but here’s a list of the things i’ve been kind of working on (or hope to get back into and finish at some point when the stars align just right) so feel free to ask about anything if it interests you:

I. bad buddy drabbles. currently working on a snippet that focuses on wai and pran finding each other in high school after pran’s transfer. am not sure how long it will become or where exactly it’s going but i have a lot of thoughts about them and how they fit between all the things they don’t talk about. also wai is kind of amusing to write? i can go a bit bonkers with him

II. set on the same file is my random snippet about the bad buddy x the gifted au (a mutant au?) i have stuck in my brain. this, too, is about wai in some ways. more so about pat and wai and what their conflict could be in this universe. am not sure if i will ever write more for this au or share any parts of it really but i wanted some thoughts out of my brain so here we are (also thank you a lot to mimi @dimpledpran for allowing me to share all these plot bunnies in our dms ♥)

III. zhou youdu returns. i still wish to finish this one day. novoland remains a fond memory in my brain and i just loved zhou youdu So Much ;; he deserved better than just having to retreat into some cold winter city alone to lick his wounds smh especially when william’s character in this drama was Like That

IV. li qian falls in love. my take on what rebirth for you could’ve been if they weren’t cowards and gave us the ot3 relationship we and them deserve. they could’ve been so good and Yet (am still pissed about the ending of this drama, it was just So Bad. glad zsx soon returns to me in heroes, am so excited ;;)

V. bloodplay. my feral xiaoge au, happening during the events of the ending of tlt2 (kind of forces me to rewrite the ending and the whole bronze door situation? rip). i’ve talked about this a lot so ppl probably already know what this is about. i still try to find the courage to write anything sexy for this hhhh

VI. dreamwalker au. exploring the universe i used in In Orbit with li cu and xiaoge, this time with liu sang as i originally planned. i have so many ideas for this but this feels like a huge monster am too scared to touch. also gosh liu sang remains a character i just Cannot Write in a way that would satisfy me

and that’s basically it. i don’t currently have any insistent drive for anything i have lying around or could be starting but am casually working on something all the time. i hope i can get at least these bad buddy thoughts into something sometime soon. then maybe later this year something else will consume me and force me to write again.

(i would love it tho if anyone liked to discuss any writing or plots with me ♥ it’s been a while since i’ve been involved in any of that. i miss it, horribly.)

tagging: @humanlighthouse @jockvillagersonly @rose-of-tori @gusu-emilu @i-am-just-a-kiddo (and i realize i cannot remember many of the amazing writers i must know here? i am so sorry)

#tag game #my fic #i love you brigid ♥#watch me sob about my own inability to write again #also realized i already shared stuff about all of these #quite a lot in here but well #i doubt anyone asks anyway haha #dmbj #bad buddy #maybe??? idk

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wackybuddiemewbs · 3 years ago

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Random Buddie Fic Snippets - no title, just (bad) vibes

Here’s to another snippet of things that ghost through my Word files. This one’s particularly headache-inducing for me personally. For one, trigger warnings galore. And then I have *checks file* 41k (!!!) words worth of non-fic noted down, but it’s really just unassembled bits and pieces of mostly dialog. Grrrrrrr. 😖

Since such a fic would take a lot more planning... which is basically the antithesis of me for all intents and purposes... I pester you with snippets like they are pestering me. Said it before and can only reiterate: I make you suffer with me. *cackles*

Basically, the story plays on the idea that Eddie and Buck grew up together due to plot convenient purposes and meet again at the fire station after years apart. Anyway, here’s to more madness mingled with angst! Cheers!

Buck slings his duffel bag over his shoulder when his phone vibrates. Sighing, he shifts his weight to take it out of his pocket and take the call. A smile creeps up his lips when he sees the picture flare up on his screen.

“Hey, what’s up, Mads?”

“Hey, I just wanted to let you know that you were right about that little bakery downtown. It’s so worth the twenty minute trip,” she nearly groans. And Buck can relate. When he found that authentic Mexican bakery on a long run through the city, he may or may not have shed a few tears of happiness. And he may or may not have bought pastry worth a hundred bucks.

Totally worth it to run all those extra miles for the carbs, though.

“How many conchas did you have?” Buck asks, chuckling softly.

“I’m pleading the fifth.”

“Did you drive back to get more?” he questions, though Buck is fairly sure what the answer is already, which comes promptly, “Which is why I might be late for work.”

Buck laughs, leaning back against his car. “They are in the top 5 of conchas I ever had, which is saying something. So yeah, I get the feeling.”

And he should really know, he’s had the best in the world and no. 2 and 3 also. Though those are not up for sale.

“So, I need a bit of distraction to keep myself from digging through the remains of the bag before I make it to the car,” she tells him.

“Sure, what do you want to hear?”

“Howie told me that you’re getting someone new on the team today. Are you excited?”

“… Oh, ugh, sure.” Buck can feel his jaw cramping at that.

“You know you just sounded more excited about me being on a sugar high thanks to Mexican pastry than you are about your new teammate arriving.”

He’d hoped to avoid that conversation before he got over with it. Because that’s how he normally rolls with it. He gets over with it.

Works with band-aids and most situations that give you discomfort.

But Maddie has maybe not the sixth but seventh sense apparently big sisters seem to inherit by birth, so it appears that not even the most amazing conchas up for sale in all of Los Angeles will spare him having that conversation now. Which is the equivalent of tearing duct tape off, but slowly.

“I’m a huge concha fan, what can I say? And sure, it’s cool. It’d be nice to have a partner on the team, like, permanently, like Chim and Hen, more like.”

Buck rolls his eyes back as far as they will into his skull. It’s a small wonder that Maddie doesn’t buy his bullshit. He was fine just dodging the topic until now, it’s what normally works best for him. But yeah, Maddie just knows how to coax it out of him, and he loves and hates her for it.

“Talk to me, Buck.”

Buck looks up to the sky. “… I guess I’m just a bit nervous.”

“You are nervous? Don’t you think it’s up to the new teammate to be a bundle of nerves?”

“That’s kind of my thing, though,” Buck argues.

He has been ever since Bobby announced that they’d get a newbie, not a probie, but someone to be on the team with them. Dutifully, Buck laughed at the comments about how Bobby seemingly hired him a babysitter to make sure he doesn’t do reckless stuff all the time.

The nervous energy settled in when he got home that day and his leg wouldn’t stop bobbing well into lying in bed, trying to sleep. He only fell asleep halfway through reading the Wikipedia list of minor planets named after people.

“Then why do you feel nervous?”

“It’s nothing.”

“You know you can tell me,” she says softly.

Buck closes his eyes. He understood by now that yes, he can. But that doesn’t mean he wants to. Most of the time, Buck wished he didn’t have to tell anyone anything ever again and simply exist in the here and now. Because the here and now is sunny and tastes of pretty damn awesome conchas.

“I know it’s stupid, but…” His voice trails off.

And maybe she can read his mind, Buck wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be the case, because Maddie goes on to say, “You know he’s not taking your place, right?”

“What? Yeah, I mean…” Buck chews on his bottom lip. Whenever Maddie starts to talk like that, he feels like he’s sitting with a therapist. And suddenly, what he wants to believe are just his antics sounds like food for the shrinks.

“This is supposed to be your partner. Someone to have your back, not stab you in the back,” Maddie points out.

“Rationally, I know all that. It’s just…” He stretches out his legs.

“It’s just what?” she asks in a gentle tone of voice.

“What if he’s better than me?”

What if they realize that he’s expendable after all? What if someone comes along who can do things better than Buck without the attitude? What if he can’t prove his worth anymore because that guy can do it just as well, maybe even better?

“Then I will be glad because that means someone capable is watching out for my baby brother,” Maddie answers, pulling Buck back to the current conversation, not the fictional ones inside his head.

“What if we end up hating each other’s guts?” Buck continues. He had to restrain himself from actually typing a list of all those questions on his phone when his mind went spiraling upon receiving the news. Because that’s what’s been going on ever since Bobby announced. And Buck knows how stupid it is, but his brain didn’t get the memo. There are so many what ifs that it’s making him dizzy thinking about them.

“Then you talk about it like actual adults. And anyway, no one can hate you to your guts. You’re amazing.”

Buck has to fight hard not to blush. “Thanks, but you’re biased because you’re my sister.”

His heart still beats a little faster every time he says those words out loud. Something that comes so light and casual these days, though it isn’t. It is closer to what it should be. Because it should be casual, natural, given.

But apparently, the world didn’t get that memo yet. Seemingly a pattern.

“And as your sister, I’m also always right.”

“Are not.”

“Are too.”

He laughs. She chuckles back.

“Listen,” Maddie continues. “Just be yourself. You’re going to figure it out. This is exciting, Buck. More people to add to your family, okay?”

“Yeah, okay. Thanks,” he croaks.

“I’ll call you during lunch time, unless you’re out on a call. And then I want all the details on the newbie.”

“Alright. Pro tip: Put the bag of pastries in the trunk of your car. Only way to keep your paws off of them while driving.”

“I may actually crawl back, but yeah, it’d require a lot more effort.”

He smiles. “Drive save.”

“Will do.”

“Alright, I’m heading in,” Buck says, pushing away from his car. “Or else I will be running late, too.”

“Love you, little brother.”

“Love you, too. Talk to you later.”

“Bye.”

Buck hangs up and stuffs his phone back into his pocket.

Maddie is right. There is nothing to be nervous about. He has a team now. No one is leaving. New people are arriving. That’s how it works. That’s normal. And he gets to pester the newbie. So he should really be excited, as Maddie said. Buck knows he should focus on that. On how great this could turn out to be. On having a partner. Someone to have his back. All the time.

He sucks in a deep breath as he comes to stand in front of the door leading inside the fire station.

“The door is not closed,” he mutters with closed eyes, grabbing the handle. Buck pushes inside. He is greeted by the familiar hum of the fire station coming to life. People are talking over coffee, some are still fastening the buttons on their shirts as they make up the stairs.

And there’s no place he’d rather be. Buck knew that the moment he first walked into the station for the first time, and that assessment hasn’t changed since.

Buck makes for the locker rooms to change, not wanting to run late like Maddie. Once changed into his uniform, Buck finds himself a little more at ease. Athena once pointed out that they wear those uniforms as a way of protecting themselves. You take them off after work and leave all the bad behind that you’ve witnessed on a call. For Buck, the other way is just as true, though.

When he puts on that uniform on, he can leave his anxious, knee-bobbing self behind and do something meaningful. Because that’s what he found here, beside the team that means so much to him. He found a purpose. A way of answering a calling that lies far back in a past he can’t and won’t remember. To save lives.

Buck looks at his reflection in the mirror, straightens out the collar, makes sure his hair sits perfectly. His glance lingers on the name tag a moment longer, brushes his fingers over the metal plate, the one thing he can’t fix or straighten out.

But that won’t make me flinch. Ever.

“Buckaroo! Time for coffee and talk! I need new material on that show Denny and you are watching and that you need to update me on, so I don’t have to watch it!”

Buck smiles as he closes the locker to see Hen standing there with two cups of coffee.

“Coming.”

But that fixes a whole lot already.

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

Hen sips her coffee in silence as Bobby goes on about who is doing what for the day. She is glad that she isn’t assigned truck cleaning duty. That’s one of the best things about newbies and probies coming in. They get to do the dirty work for a bit. She had to jump those hoops, too, like everyone did, so it only seems fair.

Chim nudges her in the side, pulling her out of her musings. “Have you seen the newbie yet?”

She nudges him back a bit harder to tell him wordlessly that he is supposed to stop doing that. “If I had, don’t you think I would’ve told you by now?”

“Just saying, being late on the first day is not a good sign.”

“Can I help you with something, Han, Wilson?” Bobby calls out. “Care to share with the rest of the team?”

Buck laughs beside them, earning himself a nudge from Hen. That kid is going places sometimes, but Hen learned to love him fiercely after he stopped being a punk.

Fine, he’s still a punk sometimes, but we got to see there’s a heart of gold underneath all the punk and muscle and hair gel.

He grew on her the way he managed to grow on anyone, even the Captain who doesn’t like to admit that more than anyone around the station. He fired the boy first week in, and it was well-deserved, but he proved capable and kind.

Hen knew she was done for this humanoid golden retriever when she fussed over not having a babysitter for Denny and Buck jumped in after he’d just done a double-shift. She and Karen were still working things out and he just made the room, even though the boy deserved bed more than anyone else. Still, he took Denny to the park, finished homework with him, and got him to go to bed even though the kid is not so much a negotiator as he is a small dictator when it comes to bedtime. Karen and she found Buck passed out, snoring like a lawnmower, a book still in his lap while sitting next to Denny’s bed.

“Nothing, Cap,” Chimney answers. “Just sharing excitement about the newbie.”

“You’ll meet him shortly. He had to pick up his gear first and talk to the higher-ups another time. Once he arrives, you can pester him with questions as I know you will.”

“On it, Cap.”

Bobby rolls his eyes, but then his mind goes back to the clipboard and the rest of the chores yet to be divided among the firefighters on shift. The rest of the morning routine goes without further incident, so the three are soon walking down the stairs to their designated task of checking their stocks on medical equipment.

“Okay. That is a beautiful man,” Chimney says, suddenly stopping in his tracks.

Hen trains her eyes on the dark-haired Latino, putting on a shirt. That should be the newbie, then.

“Where’s the lie? And I like girls.”

“Eddie…,” Buck breathes beside her.

Hen whips her head around at the sound.

“Wait, you know this guy?” Chim asks, but Buck doesn’t say anything. Instead, he starts to walk towards the new guy, or almost staggers, she should rather say. The newbie only takes notice of him when his head pops out from the shirt.

“Buck?”

To Hen, it feels like the two just go in slow motion while the rest of the fire station is crazy and busy as always. As though the whole world disappeared around them.

She can’t make out whatever words may be exchanged between them before the new guy covers the last few steps between them and pulls Buck against him in a tight hug. Shock is written all over his face, but also huge relief. Though Hen honestly wished they stood the other way around, because she would like to know just what expression is flitting across her little golden retriever’s face.

“What on earth is going on here?” Chimney mutters.

“I ain’t got no clue.”

The newbie pulls away, smiling over both ears, both hands deftly resting on Buck’s arms. Even though Hen still can’t see Buck’s face, it seems that the guy is doing all the talking for a change. Then he is hugging him all over again.

“I repeat, what on earth is going on here?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Before they can overcome their paralysis, Buck starts to move, gesturing behind himself. The new guy nods with the brightest of smiles, not once letting go of Buck’s arm as they start to walk towards them.

Her confusion is multiplied by the way Buck carries himself, eyes downcast, looking nothing but nervous.

Did someone exchange the 118’s golden retriever this morning, or what’s going on here?

“... can’t believe we meet again in this place of all places,” she can hear the new guy say as they approach.

“S, same.”

Buck is stuttering. To repeat the repeat: What on earth is going on here?

“We have so much catching up to do.”

“Yeah.”

“Buckaroo?” Hen calls out, or maybe demands. She no longer cares for the details here. She needs to get down to the bottom of this. Fast.

“Oh, sorry, I just… this is Eddie.”

“Hi.”

“Hi Eddie, it is a pleasure meeting you. We will greet you good and proper in only just a moment. Hold the line,” Hen says, before turning her attention back to Buck. “Now to you, Buckaroo. Spill the beans.”

“Yeah,” Chim agrees.

But Buck is not forthcoming. Boy looks like a fish out of the water, his mouth opening and closing without any sounds coming out. This makes the sirens ring inside Hen’s head, not the ones at the station. Because their Buckaroo never stops talking, even when he should sometimes, and even when he wants to stop talking, he will keep talking. So him not finding anything to say may or may not force Mother Hen to have to look after her punk chick here.

“We grew up together,” Eddie says after a pause, still all soft smiles and maybe even softer curls, by the looks of it. Hen will worry about that later, too. “I honestly had no clue he was working at this station, let alone that he was in L.A. Color me surprised. Abuela will not believe this.”

“Abuela?”

“My grandmother. She’s the one who fostered him before…,” Eddie continues, but then stops himself when he notices the look of sheer panic on Buck’s face. “They do not know this.”

Buck shakes his head.

“Dios.”

“Wait, you were in foster care?” Chimney almost cries out.

“In Texas?” Hen adds, her mind still short-circuiting thanks to that input.

“Yeah. I was adopted by the Moores after that.”

Chimney gapes at him. “You were adopted?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, they don’t know about that either?” Eddie asks, now almost as frantic as they are.

Welcome to the club, hon.

“Now they do,” Buck mutters.

“But Maddie isn’t adopted. I should know.” Chimney lifts his index finger.

“Right,” Hen agrees.

Eddie makes a face. “Who’s Maddie?”

“My girlfriend, Buck’s sister.”

“You have a sister?” Eddie slaps his hand against Buck’s arm, shock taking the place of confusion.

“Wait, you grew up with him and don’t know his sister?”

“It’s a long story,” Buck sighs.

“Like how you’re Texan?” Hen scoffs.

Buck holds up his hands. “Okay, guys, can we stop spiraling for a second?”

Hen opens her mouth to give him a piece of mind, but she’s abruptly cut off by their captain standing at the top of the stairs. “Buck! I could use a hand up here!”

“On my way, Cap!” Buck yells back, the amount of relief to opt out of the conversation more than imminent. “Sorry, duty calls!”

“Hey no,” Chim hisses, but Buck isn’t having it. He pats Eddie on the shoulder. “We’ll talk later, okay?”

“Okay.”

With that, he starts to jog, or rather run, up the stairs. All watch him go, before their eyes fall back on the people standing right in front of them.

Well, if that’s not awkward.

“So, ugh. Hi again,” the new guy says, smiling sheepishly. “Eddie Diaz, your newbie.”

“Hi. Hen Wilson.”

“Howard Han, but you can call me Chimney or Chim. And why I’m called that is between me and God.”

“Okay. That may be only the second most confusing thing to happen on my first day.”

“We don’t normally act like this,” Hen tries to reassure him.

Chim makes a face. “We don’t?”

Hen nudges him in the side hard enough to make Chim gasp.

“Wilson, Han, you’re supposed to get on with the stocks!” someone calls out.

“You’re not our boss!” Chim shouts back at what turns out to be that jackass Lambert from B-roll no one likes because his attitude stinks about as much as his aftershave.

“But Cap is and he told me to tell you to move it!”

“I hate that guy,” Chim grumbles.

“I think I’ll like it here,” Eddie chuckles.

“They are so young and innocent when they join,” Chim snorts.

“Welcome to the 118,” Hen says, giving the younger man’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I suppose you should go up there as well and talk to the captain.”

“Alright, I’ll see you around.”

“Most certainly.”

“That was only mildly threatening,” Chim laughs, rolling his eyes well before Hen jabs him another time.

“Good to have you here,” he adds.

“Indeed.”

“Good to be here. See you later.”

“Later,” both say in unison.

Eddie smiles at them before climbing up the stairs.

“You try to get a hold of your boo, I’ll see what info I can squeeze out of Cap or Buck, whoever I get my hands on first.”

“Aren’t we supposed to get on with…”

Hen glowers at him.

“I said nothing.”

“Less talking to me, more talking to your girlfriend.”

Chimney makes a mock salute, before walking away while fiddling with his phone. Hen let’s her gaze wander up to the gallery with a grimace. Something is not right, but she is going to figure it out. Because Hen Wilson keeps all her little chicks on track, even more so now that they got a new one to take care of.

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

Eddie tosses the sponge into the water bucket. Getting some of the crappier chores for the day is something he fully expected to happen. What he didn't expect, not in a million years, was running into Buck. Eddie’s head is still reeling because of it. And for what it seems, the same is true for Buck.

Buck.

To say that he seemed shocked is an understatement. Eddie knows the way Buck expresses panic. He’s grown up making sure the kid breathed instead of keeling over when it hit him, so Eddie knows that this was not just surprise, this was fight-or-flight level panic. Eddie knows by now he was so panicked because his colleagues didn’t know about the fostering or adoption – and he could still kick himself for bringing it up unawares.

He jumped to the conclusion because Buck used to talk about it freely to anyone who asked, especially after he was adopted by the Moores. Because it was his way of signifying to the rest of the world that he’d made it from being abandoned to finding friends and family. So Eddie assumed that Buck wouldn’t act any different around his colleagues.

Far from it!

“Eddie, my friend.”

Eddie nearly jumps when Hen and Chimney materialize next to him.

Speaking of…

“Hi,” he greets them.

“How’re you liking it thus far?”

“The detergents smell not as bad as some others do,” Eddie snorts. “But I’m pretty sure that’s not what you came here to ask me about.”

“Just so that you know, you can tell us anything,” Hen says in that mild tone of voice, though Eddie is pretty sure she only says it this way not to scare him away.

“You are looking for bribing material on Buck, I take?”

“We always appreciate it, but we are more like… trying to get up to speed. Until you came to the station, we didn’t even know he’d been fostered,” Hen answers.

“Or adopted,” Chimney adds.

“In Texas.”

Eddie chews on the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, about that. So he actually found his sister?”

If seeing Buck nearly floored him, hearing about his sister was definitely not adding to Eddie’s calm.

“Yes, she’s my girlfriend. You’ll get to know her soon enough.”

There is a part in Eddie that’s very much relieved to hear that Buck found at least part of his family, but another part of him hurts at the news just as much. Because that means Buck likely learned some very uncomfortable truths about his past that won’t have added to the man’s confidence.

“Back in Texas, we knew nothing about where he came from, including whether he had siblings or not. There was an assumption, but no one could be sure.”

“How old were you by the time your grandmother fostered him?”

“I was eight years old.”

“Eight years old… Buck made it sound like he and Maddie were out of touch like, only by the time she got to know Doug.”

Eddie frowns. “Who’s Doug?”

“No one you want to know.” Chimney shakes his head.

Eddie shakes his head. All of this starts to make less and less sense. Why didn’t Buck tell them about any of this? Why didn’t he when he apparently found his sister? Why are they about as clueless as he is, even though they’ve been working side-by-side with him for how long now?

“We lost sight of each other when the Moores moved away from Texas. So they aren’t around anymore?”

Hen shrugs at that. “Let’s say we’ve never met them, never talked about them, or seen any pictures.”

“Kid arrived here with a travel bag and the will to become a firefighter,” Chimney adds.

Eddie can’t help but smile at that. “That sounds like him.”

“You sound pretty clueless actually, and not gonna lie, that is strangely reassuring,” Chimney snorts.

“I prepared for meeting many new people today. Not my best friend back from childhood.”

“Aw.” Hen clutches her hands in front of her chest.

“I just hope he’s not mad at me.” Eddie grimaces. There is something tugging at his heart, just thinking about it. A memory that goes way back in time. When he thought he’d messed it up with Buck forever and always, but he forgave quicker than Eddie could forgive himself.

“I don’t remember our Buckaroo being capable of keeping grudges for long.”

“Then that hasn’t changed at least,” Eddie sighs.

“I think you two should definitely get something to drink after work, reminiscence about the good old times. Catch up. Report back to us in the morning,” she says, her voice trailing off.

“You are aware that they are childhood friends.”

“But I can be far more intimidating.”

“I think getting something to drink and catch up is actually a good idea,” Eddie ponders. “So thanks.”

“You, I like.”

Eddie grins.

“You still missed a spot, though.”

Eddie chuckles, shaking his head. Buck made some good friends here, for what it seems. And he is more than glad for it. They can surely figure this all out.

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

Waking up this morning, Buck thought his biggest worry would be to sort himself out with regards to the newbie and his standing on the team as a result. While that remains true, he just didn't imagine for one hot second it may be Eddie of all people in the entire universe.

Eddie.

When Buck saw him at the station, he didn’t know how to breathe. Even though he hadn’t seen him in years, he knew instantly, only to know that he suddenly knew nothing anymore. Buck used to think he made his peace never seeing Eddie again after they moved away, but then Eddie was hugging him and all those things Buck made sure to bury deep in the ground started to crawl up through the dirt, scratching at a way too thin surface.

And now he is sitting at a bar, nursing his alcohol free beer – because he doesn’t drink when driving, he has to get people out of cars thanks to that behavior way too often, thank you very much. He is at a bar. With Eddie. His Eddie. Because Eddie invited him to get a beer after the shift, and Buck didn’t know how to say no.

Story of my life, isn’t it?

“… I don’t even know where to begin,” Buck admits after a while of awkward silence spreading between them, wherein both men just started peeling the label off of their bottles of beer.

“Same. I mean, you got a sister.”

“Yeah, ugh, I would have told you that, but Chim is still over the moon with her, so of course he mentioned her before I could. They are cute together, but at the disgusting kind of stage,” Buck ponders.

“I’m just so happy for you that you found your family, Buck.”

He manages a feeble smile. Because Buck knows that Eddie means it, understands it perhaps better than most. Because he had to deal with it growing up, had to deal with Buck dealing it growing up.

“I didn’t really find Maddie. We just… happened to meet again. Like us two did today.”

Eddie blinks at him. “Really?”

Buck nods his head. The universe always had the strangest kind of humor when it came to him.

“She’s a dispatcher now. We talked over dispatch for a while, not knowing who we are to each other. We decided to hang out. As friends. She didn’t know people in the city after she moved there only recently, so we also went to a pub and… we started to talk.”

Déjà-vu much, huh?

“Over time, I told her some stuff about my past and, well, Maddie realized that the timing seemed oddly familiar to the brother she thought had died,” Buck continues. “DNA test confirmed it.”

“I was wondering about that,” Eddie sighs, still trying to process that input for what it seems. “I mean, I really put my foot in it, just blurting out with this.”

Buck holds up his hands. “Eddie, no. You had any reason to believe I had told them. I suppose I’ve been blowing this up out of proportions anyway, so this is really just on me.”

“It’s your choice what you want to share with people about yourself, Buck.”

Buck blinks. Sometimes, he forgets how wise Eddie used to be already at a young age. He was also a dumbass a lot of times, but when it came to talking about Buck’s feelings instead of his own, the guy always knew how to make sense of the chaos and make Buck feel like his feelings weren’t just a tedious affair best ripped off like band-aids.

Eddie always understood Buck, even when he couldn’t understand himself. And Buck wants to think that the same was true the other way around, for as long as it lasted.

“Thanks.”

Eddie smiles at him, sipping from his beer.

“Speaking of, thanks to Maddie I now know my official name,” Buck continues, doing his best to sound jovial. “Evan Buckley.”

“Buck-ley. Well, that explains how you got the name,” Eddie ponders, before tilting his head to the side with a cocked eyebrow. “So do I call you Evan from now on?”

“If you want me to call you Edmundo?”

Eddie narrows his eyes at him. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Buck sniggers. “You should know better than to tempt me.”

“Evan.”

“Edmundo.”

“This sounds all kinds of wrong,” Eddie laughs, shaking his head. “For me, you can only ever be Buck.”

“Which is convenient, because I can only be Buck.”

There was a brief moment in time when Buck considered changing his name, taking on that identity, the one intended. In the end, he dropped the idea for what he hopes to be for good. He doesn’t know who this Evan Buckley was or what he’d be now. He knows what Buck was like growing up. He knows what the guy is up to these days. And while they have their qualms, he’s mostly at peace with Buck.

Even a name tag doesn't change a thing about it.

Because he’s Buck. And thankfully, Eddie sees it the same way. So maybe he’s not entirely crazy for holding on to that, however schizophrenic it may be in the end.

“Anyway, part of the reason why I managed not to let anyone in on this is that Maddie agreed to run with not mentioning it. We just stuck to the part where we lost sight of each other and found one another again when anyone asked. And until now, no one really questioned the timeline.”

“And no one ever made the connection between Buckley and Buck?” Eddie asks.

Buck shakes his head. “Maddie’s married name is Kendall. She considered changing it back to Buckley after she broke up with her scumbag husband. But when she found out what kind of scumbags our parents are, it was out the window. So no one had reason to question the difference in names and just assumed that Maddie’s birth name was Moore, too.”

“I take that there is no good explanation as to how you ended up in Texas, then,” Eddie sighs. Buck can tell that he’s trying to sound casual, soft, but the white-knuckled grip on the beer bottle is an entirely different story.

“No, not really. As far as we understand it, our parents moved across state borders under the pretense to get treatment for me. Then they just dropped me at a fire station and drove back. They told Maddie I died.”

“Why would they do that? Why would anyone’s parents…?” Eddie shakes his head, disbelief settling in. Buck knows the feeling oh too well. When he found out, it didn’t make sense to him at all. But as more details were added, the clearer the bigger picture became, though it turned none the brighter.

Buck looks around, just to be sure none of the 118 was sent here to spy on them. Once he is sure there is really just them, Buck hunches forward in his seat.

“Well, I was a big, fat disappointment, I guess. They had me to save their oldest son, Daniel. He had juvenile leukemia. I was… I was a savior baby. Just that… ugh, I didn’t save him. My guessing is that they never wanted me, so they gave me away after Daniel died. I was just there for spare parts anyway.”

Buck suddenly feels something cold in his neck, only to realize it’s Eddie’s hand gently squeezing it. Buck tenses for a moment, then eases to the familiarity of the touch, suppressing the urge to lean into it like he used to.

“I’m so sorry. I would’ve hoped for something else to come out of this.”

Buck manages a feeble smile. “It’s fine. I got a sister now I never expected to find. That’s great. Over the moon kinda great. And now I also ran back into you, too. So I’m one lucky bastard after all.”

Eddie’s hand lingers for a while, no words spoken and yet all is said between them. And how much Buck missed that. Not having to say things for them to be understood.

Eventually, Eddie’s hand falls on his shoulder, giving it a light pat before returning to his beer. “So we’re still friends after I spilled to your colleagues?”

“I didn’t stop being your friend after you got so mad for me saying that you couldn’t bake for shit, so you covered a balloon stuck to a cardboard box in frosting and told me you’d baked a cake and I cut the thing only for it to explode in my face.”

“To this day one of my proudest achievements when it comes to pranks,” Eddie snorts, breaking out laughing at the memory.

Buck can’t help but laugh along. Many of those memories got stuffed away alongside the ones he’d buried in the ground. He had no reason to unearth them because he chose not to tell anyone. But with Eddie, those things come back to light and they shimmer like gold, even after all those years of packing on dust.

“Laugh it up all you want, I got back at you eventually.”

“Don’t remind me,” Eddie groans. “I got grounded for a month because you led my parents to believe I’d be stupid enough to have a folder for porn on the family’s computer and made a message pop up every time that the folder was overloaded and created a system error.”

“Yeah. That was a masterpiece,” Buck sniggers. “But anyway. If that didn’t cancel our friendship, I think we’re fairly good with all this here.”

“Then I’m glad. When you fled the scene, I got kind of worried.”

Buck shrugs. “You know me. I’m a whirlwind of emotions, so I thought it’d be best if I took the time to cool down.”

“That was definitely not how you went about it before,” Eddie argues.

And Buck can’t argue with that. Back in the day, Buck just let the storms rage, never minding the consequences. On the job, that’s still how he rolls, but it was also how he talked, how he presented himself. After he got to meet the Diaz family, he stopped hiding a lot of things. He screamed when he felt like screaming and he cried when he was sad. He laughed when he was happy. And sometimes he even cried because he was that happy, but he learned that this was okay. Abuela always told him this and he took it to heart.

At least for as long as I could.

“Which is why I’m working on it. But anyway! Enough of me. Tell me about you. How long have you been in L.A.? What got you here?” Buck asks. Judging by the look on Eddie’s face, his transition of topics is not nearly as smooth as he’d want it to be, but Eddie rolls with it anyway.

“I moved here only shortly, for the job,” he says. “Before that, I was working some odd jobs. Before that, Afghanistan.”

Buck winces. “Shit.”

“Yeah, that’s one way of describing it. After I came back home injured, I couldn’t do this anymore. I had to set priorities differently, and somehow… I ended up in L.A.”

“Fresh start.” Buck nods his head. There is still so much to unravel in just those few sentences. Afghanistan. Injury. Priorities. Eddie tends to hide a lot more in his words, even more so when they are scarce. But for what it seems, he will now get the time to dig deeper. Because that is what Buck knows someone has to do in order to understand someone like Eddie Diaz.

“Yeah, exactly.”

“I get that feeling,” Buck says. “Los Angeles is great for that, worked out for Maddie and me, too.”

“We’ll have to drink a lot of beers to catch up on all those years we didn’t hear from each other to wind up having a fresh start in the same city.”

“Then it’s a date.”

Eddie wants to say something, but then his phone vibrates. “Sorry about that.”

Buck holds up his hands. “It’s fine.”

Eddie takes out his phone and checks his messages. Buck can see the instant shift in the other man’s demeanor. He knows that change like the back of his hand, even with years between where they parted ways and now crossed them again. Eddie’s shutting down.

“Hey, uhm, sorry, I gotta head out. It’s urgent,” he says, grabbing his wallet, clearly embarrassed and beat-up for having to leave so suddenly.

Some things don’t change, do they?

“Hey, it’s fine, man. We, ugh, we are stuck together now anyway, right? We’ll find enough time to catch up. It’s a date, after all,” Buck assures him. “Also, you’re not paying for the beer, unless you wanna pick a fight with me. Just go.”

Eddie smiles at him wryly. “Thanks. I’ll pay next round?”

“Sounds like a plan to me. Now off you go.”

“Sorry another time. I really gotta…”

“See you at work!”

“See ya!”

Buck manages to keep up the smile until the door shuts behind Eddie. His shoulders drop and he sucks in a deep breath. He pays for the beers and nearly flies out the door.

He makes for his car and climbs in. Buck realizes only now how badly his hands are shaking. Struggling for breath, he takes out his wallet again and fishes out that one crumpled piece of the past he carries with him whenever he’s not on the job, so to be sure it doesn’t get further damage.

Buck unfolds the faded photograph with shaky hands and presses it against his mouth, breathing hard against it. The tears keep coming, no matter how hard he tries to stop them. They are happy and sad. Desperate and relieved. Everything and nothing. And all that at the same time.

Eddie is back.

Eddie is back in his life, just like that, after the years it took him to accept he’d never see him again. That he’d moved on as he should have.

How do you rip off the band-aid or duct tape for that?

Or maybe that’s just the universe telling him that some things really can’t be fixed.

Because apparently, the universe is still mocking him.

#buddie #buck x eddie #eddie x buck #buddie fanfic #fanfic #snippet #y'all let me in and now I'm making y'all miserable #:)#long ass snippets that pester me and now you too #by a non-native no less #bon appétit

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valaks · 4 years ago

Note

Hey Valaks! I love your blog and your writing!

Please could you do 1, 10 and 18 for the writing asks?? 🌺

Thank you for the ask! I have added a cut to hopefully not be that person clogging up the feed XD

1. Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

I have a few collabs outstanding like Gemini and a Kabir/Alex sequel to Reunion (It’s rated T at the most so still kid friendly) with Lupin and Devil Went Down to Georgia with Galimau. My utter love for both of my collab partners for pulling me through at a time when I’ve been really struggling. I have a WIPs List but I’ll confess to not having touched most of them in quite sometime (partly from life, partly because I’m not sure how interesting they’d be to anyone else other than me which influences my writing more than I would like to admit):

Good Intentions: Smithers never thought he’d be anyone’s moral compass, he was no angel to sit in anyone’s shoulder but trying to keep Alex Rider from following in the ruthless footsteps of his father or worse his former handler, Alan Blunt is as close to hell as he can imagine. (Wherein Alex becomes head of MI6 we watch his morality slip away form the eyes of an increasingly frustrated and heartbroken Smithers - it all culminates when Alex uses a child “just as an informant, simple information gathering” but hidden behind the charming smile of John Rider and the brutal coldness of Alan Blunt’s words is Alex Rider dying as he says them (Smithers just hopes there’s still a part of the boy he once knew in there to mourn)

Walk the Line: Alex thought he was done with SCORPIA. But they kept creeping back into his life in the most unexpected of ways. He thought he could at least count on it being on the other side until he gets teamed up with Walker, his former classmate and current CIA spy. Unfortunately he still hasn’t been able to figure out whose side Walker is really on - attempted deep cover op like his dad, repatriated rogue spy back on the “good” side, or SCORPIA double agent? He doesn’t know but at least he’s nice....in that obnoxious American way.

Temperamental: (Sequel to Sentimental which isn’t all that popular and you would need to read it for the sequel but basically amnesiac Yassen whose memories stop pre John’s betrayal set during the Stormbreaker mission and features him trying to come to grips with the use of chemical weapons against children and how to handle Alex once he snaps back to reality which is where this starts) Yassen had promised Alex Rider that he would be safe from the world of spying but fate had other ideas. In the days after Sarov’s failed plan, Yassen scrambles to find where MI6 have hidden his wayward charge without drawing Rothman’s attention. A request from one of their existing clients to look into suspicious activity at his son’s former school prompts Yassen to investigate under the guise of offering security. He should have known where there was trouble there would be Alex.

10. How would you describe your writing process?

Lordy do I ever not have a good answer for this. Typically it involves an idea hitting me and then the determination: would this idea work better as a short to post on tumblr (because the set up would take away the tension or would require a multi chapter which is not really my strength), as a prompt to lob out into the ether for someone better and brighter to touch on, or a fic. Once fic is decided I determine whose perspective the fic would be the most interesting from either because it would create the most tension or their internal monologue/background knowledge would add the most to it. Then the summary is written and a title is chosen. If it’s something I’m really passionate about and I already have it in my head I tend to write it all in one go, if there’s more I need to chew on then it’s a series of dates with the Evil Writing App. The final determination is whether it’s good enough for Valaks or if it gets sent to an alt account.

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

Allegedly. I’ll try to go in order of posting -

Ruthless has a sequel where Alex just goes *quiet* once the initial dust as settled it’s unnerving to everyone because they’re not used to having to wonder just what Alex is thinking, at least not behind closed doors but what happened isn’t exactly something that can be recovered from easily, not when Alex isn’t sure who all’s in on it no matter what they’ve told him. Failure is the AU where I considered what would happen to Alex to make him want to torture.

Alibi was originally going to have Yassen show up in the end but I found it far more fascinating if MI6 was just testing Alex so out went Yassen and in went Ben. The sequel to it was torn apart and turned into Warm Reception because I wanted to trope flip SCORPIA comes to Brooklands and decided that it was more logical to have a small fight in Mrs. Bedfordshire’s lobby than anywhere else and I wanted to explore some side characters instead of Ben.

Providence’s sequel thoughts ended up inspiring Gentleman’s Agreement but I did write a small short for it “Yassen and Alex encounter each other on mission. Surprisingly they are working to mostly the same goal - Yassen needs to kill the millionaire who Alex needs to get information from. “I suppose I could answer some questions for you, Sasha. /In Russian/“ “Is now really the time for a language lesson?” he ground out in frustration but the man pointedly ignored him “/Fine but I don’t know some of the words/“ “/Then there is no better way to learn/“

I mentioned the Sentimental sequel but changing Sarov to come first and probable for almost a month before Yassen figures out he’s missing made the most sense. It was also a bit of fun at the Yassen would absolutely take Alex away from MI6....just to throw him in a school and throw away the key. Almost had him send him to Point Blanc but decided that wouldn’t quite fit all that well and wouldn’t be as interesting as if Alex had already gotten his feet back under him with MI6 and now sees that Yassen was right that MI6 would just use him until he’s dead but that doesn’t mean Alex wants to be anywhere near Yassen. Julia Rothman might have other ideas when she finds out what her newest second in command is hiding.

Gentleman’s Agreement.....there’s a lot of thoughts on Sequels and AUs, a lot of them have been written by better people, but that fic was written in 45 minutes so there wasn’t much time to recharacterize or change scenes. It did get Turncoat aka the Alex saves Yassen fic I wanted so badly.

Blood Brothers is a fic I really worked hard on considering how John would feel about his son being thrown into SCORPIA assuming Alex was of age. A rocky marriage was characterization that didn’t quite fit what I imagined would have happened but did fit the story so it stayed in. It was a fic that was supposed to get expanded on - the competition between Hunter and Yassen and Nile and Alex who is desperate to beat his Dad and his “apprentice”. I think two teenagers thrown against each other with a bit of a bone to pick, especially Yassen and Alex who can both hold a grudge even if one runs hot and the other runs cold, would have been compelling and a little fun but the premise and specifically John’s characterization doesn’t quite work out to me.

Found and Legends both have their plotting done but it’ll never see the light of day

Little Moments and Sweetest Thing were my guilty pleasure writing pieces for a while and I have about 1000 DMs of scenes for both of them that are lost to the sands of time and an embarrassing amount of self indulgence

Mates has a follow up ending for those who needed resolution in the comments of it. I’m not sure I did a good job of showing that Tom was in a semi abusive relationship since a lot of people seemed to blame him for him and Alex’s breakup. Most of my headcanons for how their relationship goes have them splitting much sooner just because of Tom’s own home life and either being unable to relate/talk to Alex and drifting away because his Mom throwing a plate at his head isn’t being hung over crocodiles but that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt or because Alex is just too dangerous/jumpy to be thrown back into a school environment and lashes out even unintentionally especially not under the pressure of being seen as a failure. School is also a barometer of just how much he’s lost of himself and his childhood, bonus points for Alex being completely upfront with Tom about everything he’s done

In My Sights has an AU where this is all post Christmas at Gunpoint and Yassen is there because he knows Ian is already at Sayle’s factory and will have to be...handled. So two weeks of just getting Alex trained for the protection he might need, connecting him to resources, etc. Ian finding out that Yassen had been there was part of a draft at one point which was included Alex wondering about an all too sincere goodbye from Ian “who never hugged him” but I can’t find the snippet anymore ;__;

A Warm Reception was an alternate version. Originally I wanted it to be Alex watching his last chance at normality slip from his fingers and then the crushing realization that it was something that was his own doing, not even MI6 but Skoda who he had picked a fight with and the accompanying breakdown but then decided that Mrs. Bedfordshire was the right way to go upon writing the summary. Because everyone loves some Outsider POV

Adopted was supposed to be a one chapter throw away trope flip of K Unit adopts Alex. I kept it pretty consistent with Amitai and Lil Lupin’s K Units, tried to add in some more characterization just in how they treated some of the details. It has an alt ending/chapter where they find out Alex is Cub when they pull him from Three’s tender mercies almost by accident. I was persuaded into light humored fluff via guilt trip.

The Truth and Other Deadly Weapons has Ben acting exactly like he think he would in front of everyone but my AU was that this interaction happened in the field and absolutely shattered Ben’s trust in him partly because he had worked for the other side and partly because even if it ‘wasn’t as bad as it looks’ it showed a severe lack of judgment. It also featured several chapters of Alex running into the glass ceiling that is having “Member Malogosto Class of 2004” on your resume. Was going to feature Alex running into Walker as well and into problems within MI6 and the CIA but that was eventually cut and it was kept to one chapter.

Guardian....Guardian holds a very special place in my heart. I was given the prompt of a Monster Fic and I wrote what I knew but the interesting parts were all the ones that come after the story but might come across to a general audience as Hogwarts School of Prayers and Miracles. The plotting done post this was going to feature baby Angel Alex reuniting with his parents but...they were strangers to him and so he stayed with Yassen more and more, followed him, learned from him....it encompassed everything from the dynamics of broken families to reflections on theology and references from the Good Book....which is why it’ll never see the fandom but has a very special place in my heart.

In another, more perfect world Glocking Around the Christmas Tree is the Die hard fic this fandom deserves but as Lupin and I untangled the plot of the movie more and more we just couldn’t make it into anything that would be coherent on paper so it was changed and changed and is now a half finished sad abomination that sits on my works list only because Lupin would kill me if I took it down.

Hot Shot was supposed to feature my current favorite character that is not Nile Abara, John Crawley but I wimped out and changed it at the end because I swore I would write the Crawley fic that we all need. Hear me out: John Crawley knew and worked with John and Ian Rider, was respected by both of them, was recruited by SCORPIA within one year in the field, is the Chief of Staff of MI6, the man who “no one gets a knife in the back without him signing off” and is also the man who walks his dog to check on Alex. There’s a mentorship waiting to happen there, preferably in a nice work study program during college where Alex finally gets to see the repercussions of his missions and Crawley helps try and pull him back from the black mark that SCORPIA would have put on him.

My personal fluffy favorite is the spinoff of Devil Went Down to Georgia where Joe Byrne did pull Alex out post Skeleton Key and brought him home. There’s a pretty extended one about where Tom ends up after Mates. There’s also an actual sequel but ask me no questions and all.

Skipping a few collabs and Febuwhump fics but Burning Questions was just supposed to be Branded - a fic where upon being captured by Razim he is brought in and forcibly branded to differentiate the appearances of Alex and Julius (since Razim has decided to have him killed after shooting the Secretary of State). As a result of the pain levels spiking when Alex actually sees that the SCORPIA logo is branded onto his cheek Razim considers that emotional pain might be something to investigate. There’s a couple thousand words on it, one day I might polish it up.

First Impressions is supposed to be a mirror verse of Alex working for MI6 which includes Three as Blunt, Rothman as Jones and of course Sagitta as K Unit while he’s up against his father as Yassen and Yassen as Crawley. But it was cut down significantly even if the ideas are pretty fun to consider.

Sorry this was probably more than you bargained for but it was fun to get everything out there so thank you for asking

#alex rider #alex rider fanfiction #Im so sorry #I just have a lot

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sirsparklepants · 4 years ago

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I've been staring at my WIPs a lot recently, as you do, and I think it's time to release everything I've got of my favorite story I will never write. I kind of fell out of Overwatch before I had the spoons for longfic, and now there's so much lore to catch up on (this dates from before Doomfist was released) that I'm just not going to be able to incorporate, but it's still a really great idea that I really love, so I'm going to put my story notes and snippets out into the wild.

The Darkness In Our Hands

Jesse McCree wasn't expecting to get a message when the Recall went out. He'd been Blackwatch, after all - he'd written half their playbook. But he'd lived five years with the death and slander of Gabriel Reyes burning in his chest, not knowing who to blame, and this new Overwatch was the best way to find out who had killed him so he could kill them right back. But the deeper he looks, the more mysteries he finds - and he'll need some help if he's ever going to get his justice.

[[MORE]]

Crime and conspiracy fic

Opening: McCree, in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico - give insight into the state of the world and how territorial governments are, him thinking on Reyes and what he owes to him, the recall message, decides to respond but have his own agenda.

He travels thinking about how different from the rest of Overwatch Blackwatch was, and how he hopes at least one Blackwatch agent has made it back, thinking about past with Genji - flashbacks to unsavory missions maybe? Arrival - he sees new faces and is not particularly prepared because he didn't feel it was secure enough to ask on a comm line who was there. Not as familiar with this base, paranoia rising, but then a familiar face! Sort of. (when he arrives Reinhardt and Brigitte are fighting about Brigitte calling Torb on him, Reinhardt doesn't want to pull Torb away from his wife) ← might combine these two into one chapter?

Genji puts him off when he initially tries to talk though, and when McCree pulls him aside to speak about his own personal mission Genji talks first about Hanzo and Genji's changes, and McCree realizes that Genji is so utterly different as to be unrelatable, so he never does tell Genji the whole story of why he's there. Genji asks him to give Hanzo a chance instead of acting on his loyalties to Genji and providing retribution. End of section, Hanzo arrives

McCree and Hanzo spend some time scoping each other out but they can both tell they're very different from the people around them. A particular do-gooder incident happens and they bond over looking at each other like “r u srs rn”. Meanwhile, Winston is creating profiles for everyone and trying to find a fit for like… intelligence gathering, brute force, explosives, etc - team roles I guess? In the interests of that are exhaustive interviews and training. First kinky sex somewhere in here

McCree is getting antsy at this point and I need to move along from character development to actual plot, so time to send out trial field intel squad for a rootin tootin hopefully not shootin time! They go - somewhere with a large Asian population where someone McCree’s size won't stand out. Uh. This is a note to do more research into where Omniums are. Hong Kong maybe? Hong Kong is a good city for crime. Maybe Singapore if I want to make things difficult for them what with all the weapons laws. Anyway. Somewhere with an omnic population that's not great with outsiders but Genji knows enough about their culture to be respectful and he's metal enough he won't stand out. They're not actually researching Talon but McCree is! Hanzo catches him and then they're wary partners. The omnic culture thing is a breadcrumb, be sure to emphasize it.

They leave and Genji finds out Jesse and Hanzo are screwing and starts laughing and taunting them both and being a fucker, he gets slightly let in on the Reyes plot, Intel Squad tentatively a success, they've all bonded and everyone is confused about it

Meanwhile while they were gone a stomach bug swept the base and Mercy throws a fit about not being a GP. McCree shares a cigar with her to calm her down and starts making a plan to try and get information sneakily out of everyone by reminiscing - I think??? No one knows who Reaper actually is at this point??? Anyway everyone talks shit about the UN and there's more worldbuilding dumps because this feels like the right place to put it. McCree and Hanzo and Genji are kept basically quarantined until the base isn't contagious and in that time they devise A Plan. Also enter Zenyatta because Mercy really needs a backup doctor

Lúcio isn't vetted yet so McCree gets sent out alone to send him an offer, there's a Talon base in Brazil he investigates on the way maybe? I feel like this is enough outline to be getting on with atm tho. Yeah, talon base in Brazil where there's a mention of Talon trying to infiltrate Vishkar

Meanwhile, Ana and 76 have shown up at Gibraltar because they figured out someone was tracking their movements and wanted to go to ground in the general area but spotted the activity there and they're both not best pleased that Overwatch has started back up. When McCree comes back with Lúcio there's another fight he walks into - a running joke? Every time he returns to base there's someone yelling. Second kinky sex, very dominance and pain flavored because McCree needs to shut his brain up. Or maybe not, that’s a long time to go without porn??? Maybe they have coitus interruptus with Genji and that’s how he finds out

Ana and 76 hang around for a while but can't stomach the idea of being there too long because they have their own mission but they drop the bomb that Reaper is Reyes and he's Teh Evulz now because they know too much and i need to get rid of them so we don’t have experienced field operatives for mccree to work around. Also some Widowmaker info dump here. McCree pretends to be shocked but he has a different definition of evil than most people so he doubles down on his investigation and wants Hanzo to give up some contacts. Metal arm fisting here maybe???

what. the fuck. has reaper been doing all this time. has he just been swanning around in the background ruining investigations? maybe he’s laying low because the winston raid thing made him so visible? talon needs to work underground so yeah this sounds right. in the meantime VISKHAR because lucio is here now so we can talk more about the evils of corporations and have corporate espionage going on. Lucio says they should look more into vishkar and they make contact with symmetra who is a whistleblower, ideological clash because that’s what i’m about. lucio and symmetra are both trans with prosthetics btw, that’s happening now because i said so and because hormones are a horrible way to control someone and so it makes sense that vishkar controls sym’s access to them along with her arm. because they’re fuckers. A N Y W A Y vishkar knows things about the old omnica corporation.

sombra makes contact with them here because she’s been keeping an eye on the new overwatch and talon thinks that maybe mccree could be an ally, not that he knows that at the time but they test him out with a dead drop with omnic-related code shit on a TEAM MISSION which happens to, idk, build goodwill or something. winston got info from someone for something and i have to have at least one team mission happen in the foreground, it can’t be all background shit and Intel Group. the mission goes. okay-ish. someone gets fairly seriously injured? tracer, maybe, or reinhardt, either way i can write their significant others fussing over them. it’s a member of old overwatch so winston can be conflicted and take people off field missions for a bit so mccree can tinker around and end up having to ask zenyatta for help. a much longer sex scene than normal here somewhere? OHYES this is where i’m gonna stick the scene where Hanzo makes McCree take off his prosthetic legs and makes McCree leave on his prosthetic arm (because pain kink and metal arm kink and he has to have both arms to handle him) and basically makes McCree fuck him in exactly the way he likes, up to and including making McCree bounce him up and down on his lap. AND THEN ACTUAL AFTERCARE HAPPENS FOR ONCE, A TURNING POINT. perhaps there’s a scene where one of them lays their head on the other’s sweaty heaving chest and doesn’t even mind the sweat in fine romance novel tradition

something has to happen here for pacing reasons but i’m fucked if i know exactly what. uhhhh for Reasons they have to go to an omnic city? more omnic culture and worldbuilding dump here.

aaaaand then the Reveal Chapter: reyes knows something about this mystery mccree stumbled into when he was investigating the death, and he’s willing to talk. hanzo and mccree make plans to meet with him. and then we find out that the reason reyes blew switzerland was because he was working for talon ALL ALONG. the chapter ends with a ridiculous dramatic sequence where mccree puts together all the evidence and goes “so talon was created to fight the god programs”

okay this is the chapter when i get down to the nitty-gritty and break down the structure of talon and have like. a nice artsy chapter explaining how the omnics came to be and how the government created wars to be fucks and all that. i will get to the details of this LATER but the important part is that at the end of it hanzo and mccree are secret talon moles and they have actually pretty kink-free sex while staring into each other’s eyes and kind of freak each other out with how they like and trust each other and that doesn’t happen in their world but it’s overshadowed by the freakout of them agreeing to work for a shadow organization that wants to destabilize all the world’s governments, the fuck were we thinking??? the fuck was i thinking this isn’t even the proper climax, i die

okay for pacing reasons i have to have at least two chapters of them doing double agent things and getting more deeply involved in overwatch, fuck. some public missions should be mentioned where they like. intervene in humanitarian crisises and shit. crises. whatever. maybe hanzo and mccree have to split up and feel sad that they miss each other? one chapter for hanzo to make contact with his shady criminal underworld people to get verifiable info - maybe like. idk. plastic surgery clinic records - and mccree to re-emerge and rehabilitate his image?

and after that one chapter where like. winston gets suspicious about shit. and maybe??? they have to bring EVERYONE in on this huge conspiracy? they have enough evidence to convince other people? yeah i like this, i want to emphasize how ragtag and vigilante-like and underground the new overwatch is. probably an actual defining the relationship talk and possessive sex here.

story ends with like. a giant news story break i think. as i get closer to the end i’ll know more about what threads need resolving. BUT that is the end of my outline. I DID IT HOORAY

Notes

So McCree responds to the recall not because he believes in the cause like Winston does - he probably still sees most of Overwatch as outsiders, although he's at least surface friendly with most of them by the time he leaves based on in-game interactions - but because something in Overwatch killed Reyes, who he doesn't yet know is Reaper, and joining back up with Overwatch is his best chance to find out what it was and hit them back for killing someone who had his loyalty. He's friendly still because that's the best way to get what he wants, i.e. information and access to records, but this isn't like Blackwatch. He's not surrounded by people who came from the same type of lawless loyalty structure he did, who think the way he thinks - they all believe in restorative justice, and his whole life, justice has been nothing but punitive. The only person he was counting on to understand him, Genji, has changed, and it's probably better for him, but he's become different. He doesn't lash out the way he used to. He believes in second chances, where in the places they both came from, you paid for a second chance in blood. He's done with revenge. He's well and truly gotten out of the life, and McCree has never changed his mindset and never will, because it's kept him alive this long. But Genji has brought along someone he does understand - his brother. McCree gets Hanzo, he gets why he did what he did, even though he regrets it. McCree isn't happy about it, but when he was fifteen he came along to meet the cartels with Deadlock, and when he was sixteen he saw what they did to turncoats. You pay for treachery with blood in their world, and Genji betrayed the Shimadas by passing along information. Hanzo paid when he lost his place, and he made his clan pay for what they made him do. Him, McCree understands, and McCree starts testing him out, because he could use an ally in finding out what was under the surface of squeaky clean Overwatch.

And Hanzo understands him. Hanzo is here because he owes a debt to his brother, still, and because he wants to understand Genji. But everyone in Overwatch is alien to him. They take him working for them as a given, as if of course he would want to make up for what he's done. But there's a difference between owing a debt and regretting his whole life. Hanzo was an assassin after he left the Shimadas, and he feels no need to atone for that. It was what he was skilled in, and he also became skilled in finding things out his clients did not wish him to, because being manipulated by his clan taught him to be canny, to find out people's real motivations. So he knows McCree wants his skills for something, but he's willing to make an alliance for the sake of mutual understanding.

So they ally together, with the understanding that any betrayal will be paid in blood, that they both know different tricks of the trade. McCree wants information on Overwatch, and Hanzo wants protection and information on Genji. McCree works on the old guard to find things out, and Hanzo gets in touch with his criminal contacts in every place he's deployed on a mission. And they start to find things out about Talon...

I don't actually know what the resolution to that story would be. The talon-is-hydra-overwatch-is-shield thing has been done. Maybe I'd go a route of "talon was actually founded by Reaper to fight corruption in the UN and that's how he has all those Blackwatch members" and there would be a worldwide conspiracy where the God programs and therefore the omnic crisis were created by top tiers of government and weapons corporations to create a threat that would keep governments separate, give them more power, and give the companies more profit.

...y'know what I actually really like that idea. The world was getting closer and closer to more human rights and one large global government, and corporations and world powers really didn't like that. So what's the best way for humans to give power to government? When they want to be protected from a threat, of course. And they won't be thinking rationally. They'll want to stay apart, because of course the whole thing is *insert other country*'s fault. So Hanzo and McCree run into Reaper and discover this conspiracy and are from then on Reaper's agents inside Overwatch, both to get information and to get enough media exposure they're familiar faces and trusted by the public. So when they blow this thing wide open, it can't be swept under the rug.

Bonus things in this story:

-they have to bring Genji in because he has the most connections to the omnic community through Zenyatta and Omnics have some key evidence to the conspiracy

-bastion provides an essential clue.

-omnic culture and worldbuilding

-underground cities

-Sombra is key, both as a contact that knows what's going on in Mexico (where Important Things should happen just because I mentioned the cartels so they should play at leat a minor part) and in helping them to get into Blackwatch data undetected

-symmetra helps them spy on Vishkar, which was one of the corporations to profit the most from the crisis because they got the most contracts for rebuilding

-Hanzo, McCree, and Genji sit around and exchange stories about things they had to do for deadlock/the Shimadas; it's all horrifically violent and gory but they all three get drunk and laugh about it because it's their life and they won't let it break them and it kept them alive

-it ends with Genji being happy that he's not forced to do lots of violence any more and McCree and Hanzo being perfectly happy with their very violent lives

So Talon has a ruling council which both Reaper and Doomfist are a part of and factions are #confirmed (ty for info people who are up on overwatch lore I Cannot watch a video rn), and Talon is all involved in a global conspiracy. That's canon. So what if Talon is several disparate movements that allied themselves? They need to fight this war on all the fronts they can, given the potential power of their opponents.

Irl, the UN is not a super powerful body - people put much more faith in individual governments of countries. So what makes the UN able to create a peacekeeping force? Well, what if before the crisis, some large thing happened that made the world move towards one earth government and the UN being powerful is remnants of that?

Kind of tempted to channel my frustration with the world falling apart and all the political conflicts into saying that in like... 2022 or sth, something bad enough happened that humanity decided that the only solution was to come together - perhaps we came close to nuclear annihilation? Just writing about it as a small bit of backstory and making the Scary Potential a side note in history seems like it could be really reassuring. Thoughts? (2020 note: I wrote this in 2017 and all I have to say today is OOF)

With this cooperation between nations, corporations couldn't take advantage of cheap labor in developing countries any more, and there was more of a focus on education. That could account for the leaps and bounds in science in sixty years. But that lack of cheap labor meant that robotics was developed more and more, until automation became artificial intelligences. Omnics.

The game takes place in 2076 and the Crisis took place anywhere from 20 to 30 years before that. I'll say it didn't officially start until 2050, but for several years there were developing tensions and small-scale attacks. Historians disagree about the exact cause of the crisis.

It was in the best interest of the Omnica Corporation to not let on how intelligent and sentient Omnics were - with the new focus on human rights, it was only a matter of time before an omnic rights movement erupted.

But the information started to leak. Sometime in the late 2040s, people who worked closely with Omnics started to talk to other people, tell them about how they really were intelligent and person like. And if it came out that the corporation had been deliberately hiding that, things would be bad.

So they had to do damage control.

Meanwhile, the governments of nations that used to be world powers, that used to do as they pleased, aren't that pleased with the fact that they have a lot of eyes on them and they can't meddle the way they used to in the world.

So they get together, and they throw money at the problem, and they come up the the God Programs.

Scientists worked in cells, and when they were done, they often disappeared. There could be no evidence.

And then it didn't matter how intelligent Omnics were. They were the enemy, and everyone hated them. The top executives of the Omnica corporation knew they would be hated, so they had a backup plan. They disappeared. They had surgeries. Their money went somewhere else under a different name. And they resurfaced in areas very far from any of the fighting.

Here is the secret that the Omnics and Sombra help uncover: Omnics were not meant to evolve, to change, beyond basic learning. Originally, they couldn't modify themselves. They had to come to a licensed technician, who was human. Quality control. Planned obsolescence. What the God programs did was take that cap off, distribute a patch that meant that Omnics could fix themselves - but there was a worm in the code that allowed them to be taken over. And the information that would allow that to happen? Before the crisis, it was proprietary corporate information. That shit had the highest security levels in the modern world. Corporations are very protective of their secrets. So either they were infiltrated or the crisis was an inside job. Either way, it was orchestrated by humans.

There's an implication that no humans worked in the Omniums at all, that they were completely automated, and I'm just... Gonna ignore that because it boggles the mind. The people who worked there did have to wear constant radiation shielding because apparently if Omniums are destroyed they leak radiation (or is it that the Australian one was destroyed with a nuclear device? Can anyone help me find a straight answer on this because it makes no sense) but they did work there because automation and seeing things indirectly through cameras and things means the Omniums were networked, and if they were networked they were less secure. So people worked there.

The plan to make the god programs was started off by the fraud accusations and was what caused the executives to bail the fuck out. Several plastic surgery clinics got entirely new wings just before the omnic crisis and I think this should be a weird clue that someone - probably Sombra through her hacking or Symmetra through her knowledge of corporate ins and outs - digs up.

The God programs and the militarized omnics that were pumped out allowed omnics to modify themselves and to develop things like their own independent communication methods and languages. Omnic language is a combination of binary and different computer code languages. There are different regional "dialects" depending what code language was easiest for the omnics in the area to learn and adapt to when modifying their own programming. It's also most often encrypted with... Probably some method I'll have to do research on.

Oops well I think I just ran myself into a big fuckin' wall here, and that wall is Widowmaker. She is canonically brainwashed by Talon into an assassin, and I don't want to make her husband Awful Abusive Forever and erase what was done to her.

Maybe Widowmaker is the face of Talon's moral ambiguity - she was created by a now-defunct Mad Science branch because while her husband wasn't awful for her, he was in a key position, and killing him would destabilize the power structure, and because Talon as a group's motto is probably "the end justifies the means", they still use her. This is probably a major sticking point for any omnics that want to join Talon's cause, and I could use that to highlight how desperate people can get when they're facing someone who has massive power over them.

Actually, have a couple of crime and conspiracy fic tidbits related to that: when he first went on the run, Hanzo got a nasty infection because he was so used to biotics that he didn't glove up or properly sterilize his tools before treating his own wounds. After a ten day course of penicillin derivative and a bad stomach reaction to them, he learned. Conversely, Deadlock probably had one or two fairly low-power biotic emitters, probably military surplus, and use of them was a privilege if you were high-ranking or a reward if you'd done particularly well but got kind of fucked up in the meantime. McCree has one or two big scars on his torso, and they're pretty visible because he got them young, but they don't inhibit his movements because he got treatment for them during his Blackwatch days. Hanzo, on the other hand, has a nasty hypertrophic scar on his upper thigh from the infection he got, and it occasionally restricts his movements.

Snippets

The stomach virus one

They hadn't been directed to medbay after the debriefing. This new Overwatch hadn't exactly established much standard operating procedure - hard to when you were a bunch of vigilantes and more or less all wanted under international law - but it still struck Jesse wrong, whatever Winston said. He'd known Angela longer than he'd known anyone here but Genji. They didn't run in the same circles, but they'd both been recruited before they were really supposed to be, and that gave them a bit of camaraderie Jesse wasn't afraid to lean on. He left the Shimadas to their not quite good-natured bickering and headed for the office just off the infirmary.

Angela's face, when he opened the door, made him glad he'd stopped by. Even her legendary (and probably nanite-enhanced, given the direction of her research) youthful looks were flagging under some kind of strain. Her undereyes were dark and her mouth was drawn, which in a trauma surgeon used to work in the field meant she'd been working for days on four hours or less. Jesse didn't have to do much beyond waving the nice cigars he'd picked up in (location) at her before she was out of her chair and headed towards the nearest balcony with him, monitor clipped to the lapel of her white coat. They hadn't smoked together since the recall, but the old tradition they shared seemed to be as clear in her mind as it was in his.

He was quiet for a few moments, just passing her the lighter, until they'd both blown out slow mouthfuls of fragrant smoke. Then Angela sighed, and some of the tension slipped away from her shoulders as she stared off at the waves. "You probably shouldn't be even this close to me, Jesse."

Jesse laughed at her, a low quiet chuckle. Anything truly serious and Athena wouldn't have let him anywhere near medical. "And why's that?" he asked her, slowly pulling in the rich smoke and rolling it around his mouth.

"The whole base has come down with a nasty stomach virus," she told him. "I have most of them in cots, hooked up to IVs. It's horrible! A certain amount of bodily fluids is to be expected in this job, of course, but the cleaning drones simply can't keep up. It's as much as I can do to keep everyone hydrated and mostly clean. Comfortable is out of the question. It's very contagious, and I haven't done work like this since my residency! I'm not a generalist. I don't prescribe birth control or deal with routine ailments!" Her accent grew sharper as she spoke, and when she'd finished, she took a deep breath before taking her own smooth pull of cigar smoke.

Jesse winced. He was glad any lingering sour smell was covered up by their cigars. He'd take blood and guts over vomit any day. "The whole base?" he asked. No wonder the corridors had been so quiet.

Angela nodded emphatically. "Everyone present, except for Winston, of course. I'm simply thankful it isn't zoonotic."

Jesse whistled. The infirmary had to be filled to capacity. "And nothing you've given 'em makes the nausea any better? That does sound nasty."

Angela froze with her cigar halfway to her mouth, and then began to curse emphatically. (German curses here.) She pulled her bangs with her free hand. "I can't believe I've been so stupid! I never give patients an antiemetic, it's dangerous when they could have been drinking poisoned water, but that doesn't apply here! (More German curses.)" Eventually, she subsided and took a particularly vicious pull off of her cigar.

"Easy with that," Jesse told her. "That's the good stuff - don't waste it."

"Oh, I'm not wasting it, believe me," she told him. "It's keeping me from storming Winston's office and demanding he add a generalist to the staff. Doctors have specializations, and this one isn't mine!"

"I could talk to him, if you like," Jesse told her. His voice was even, though inside he was triumphant. He'd wanted a reason to bring Zenyatta on, and the universe had just dumped it in his lap. "Might even have someone in mind."

"Would you?" Angela asked him, staring wistfully at the half a cigar she had left. "It's only - I have to dose everyone now, and wait half an hour to see how they respond, and I haven't slept since - too long."

"Wouldn't mind a bit," Jesse told her. "You worry about clearing out the infirmary. I'll work on our fearless leader."

Angela looked, briefly, as if she was about to cry. Instead, she breathed in deeply and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, her expression had settled. "Thank you, Jesse," she told him, and smiled. The expression was no less lovely for being surrounded by signs of her exhaustion. "These really are quite nice," she added, puffing again on her cigar.

Jesse laughed. "You come find me whenever you need another one," he told her. They smoked the rest of their cigars in silence.

The twelve o'clock high one

76 - Morrison - sighed. There came the sounds of him pacing around the room, his ridiculous boots heavy against the grating. "Winston," he said finally, "you like movies. You ever watch any old war movies - from the 20th century, I mean?"

"Well, no," Winston said, sounding honestly puzzled. "Most of them are well over a century old. I didn't think they'd have much cultural relevance."

Morrison snorted. "Not much cultural relevance," he repeated. "Maybe not out in the world, but here in Overwatch - in any place you've got to take command and order people into the line of fire - they still matter. Put one on your list. Twelve O'Clock High. The original, from 1949, not the remake they made right after the crisis." His gruff voice didn't make it a suggestion. Still used to ordering people around, McCree guessed.

"I will, but why would you pull me aside just to say that?" Winston sounded baffled and slightly irritated.

Morrison sighed again, a heavy put-upon sound. "This would be easier if you'd seen the damn thing. Used to have all the command track recruits watch it." The pacing sounds started up again for several moments.

"It's a movie about leadership," Morrison said finally. "And about what happens when you get too close to the people under your command. It's bad for you and it's bad for the mission, and it gets people killed. You can't be their commander and their friend at the same time."

"I fail to see how any of this is your business," Winston said, voice firm and starting to get frosty. You tell 'em, bud, McCree thought.

"I watched this organization fall once because of its commanders," Morrison said. "I can't watch you make the same mistakes. I bowed too far to the UN, but Reyes was too close to his men. Some of them came in young, but they'd done things that made sure they would never be kids again. Reyes couldn't see that. They were all loyal to him in their own way, as much as they could be, but he thought it meant he owed them some loyalty too, and he couldn't do that and send them into danger like we had back then for special ops. They got into his head, made him too much like them, and he snapped."

Winston was saying something else, and McCree forced himself to pay attention to that instead of the rush of blood in his ears, his clenched hands, his pounding heart.

"I believe that will be all, 76," Winston said. The frost in his tone had thickened up into a full ice sheet. McCree took that as his cue to slink out before the super soldier sniffed out his hiding spot - literally, maybe.

Morrison thought his loyalty put Reyes in a bad spot? It sure had - but it was his lingering loyalty to Jack Morrison that had gotten him killed, McCree was sure. Morrison really was blind if he thought Reyes had been doing anything in Zurich besides trying to pull Morrison's blond ass out of there before it blew.

what I have of chapter one

Jesse McCree had disappeared. Oh, he surfaced every now and then in some attention-grabbing way, but it wasn't healthy for a man with a bounty as high as his to go around under his own name. He'd taken a handful of false identities with him when he'd left Blackwatch, and he did enough flashy stunts with his familiar getup from the bounty posters to keep anyone from digging deeper and finding them. Most people figured he spent the rest of his time lurking around all the lonely, uncivilized places of the Southwest, like he had before he joined up - it was closer to the twenty-second century than the twenty-first, but urban sprawl hadn't conquered all the emptiness of his home state yet. So he was very surprised to receive any communication addressed to Jesse McCree at all, much less on the secure comm he carried more for sentiment than practicalities these days. And yet there was still a quiet, persistent chirp indicating a message for him.

Jesse wasn't stupid, of course. He didn't open the message that day. He'd spent too much time in a covert ops unit to trust anything that could send an active signal. He let it stay in the hard-sided guitar case that held his weapons and anything else he didn't want connected to the soft-spoken insurance adjuster who rented his Albuquerque apartment. Instead, he used his legitimate phone to reserve Chris Stevenson a campsite at a national park and rent a car for the weekend. No one had yet managed to bring enough signal towers out there that phones worked, and the campers liked it that way. Chris liked it too - it gave him a good excuse for not being available if his boss called with a last minute assignment, he told the park ranger.

Jesse, on the other hand, wasn't much for camping - he'd spent more than enough time out under the stars, first in Deadlock and then in Blackwatch, and his back wasn't as young as it used to be. But needs must - the signal could be a trap, or it could be someone from the old days needing his help. You could say a lot of bad things about Jesse McCree - most did, these days. But he knew what he owed Reyes and Blackwatch both, and he paid back his debts.

The canyon he'd chosen had several isolated hiking trails, and he set off for one just after dawn the day after he'd arrived. The other tents, few as they were, were quiet. He still waited until he'd reached the peak of his chosen trail, where he could see anyone coming, before he played the message.

Of all the faces he'd expected to project in front of him, Winston's wasn't among them. He was too recognizable, and Jesse stifled the urge to curse. The audio was routed through the wireless headset he'd brought, of course, but five years on, Winston's face still screamed Overwatch to anyone who cared to see. A talking gorilla was hard to forget. Still, Jesse let the message finish - it was very early - and dropped the comm into a pocket of the backpack he'd brought with him. Then he sat down right where he was.

Anyone passing by might have thought he'd be watching the sunrise, but he'd seen too many from the wrong end when he was with Deadlock to be stunned by nature's beauty any more. Chris was watching the sunrise, of course - a natural early riser, he saw sunrises from as many places as he could get away with. But Jesse McCree just happened to be staring at the horizon while he contemplated his options.

He didn't doubt the comm had sent some sort of locational ping out, so he'd need to burn Chris no matter what he decided. A pity - he'd liked being somewhere familiar, a place where he knew the lay of the land, how to find the best restaurant in a little highway town, which outcroppings kept you out of view of the satellites passing by, which streets nice people avoided at night. Couldn't be helped, though. Most of the Southwest was dangerous for him now. He couldn’t be sure someone hadn’t piggybacked whatever ping Winston’s call had sent out. He was inclined to curse his luck, hop a train, and move out - somewhere east, maybe - except. There was something he owed, and a debt to a ghost didn't make it any less real. He didn't have anything in common with the old Overwatch staff he guessed that idealistic message had been aimed at, but they had resources and records. Maybe he could use them to track down what really happened to Reyes.

Jesse’d been halfway to disappearing on a deep-cover mission - all they did in Blackwatch those days - when the news about Zurich broke. He could smell bullshit on a cover story from a mile away, and this one reeked. Reyes wasn’t jealous of Morrison - that asshole had to deal with the paperwork and politics while Reyes got to intervene in the real hot spots. If he’d been in Zurich, it was out of a sense of loyalty to his old army buddy. That loyalty had gotten him killed, and no one in Overwatch seemed interested in doing anything but slandering him after the fact.

Just because they didn't do much of an investigation didn't mean that they didn't still have records up in Gibraltar, though. The Watchpoints had all been networked at one point. Athena had had limits put on her when the Petras Act passed, but Winston had made her devious, under all the fussing. She had to be if she was going to fight Overwatch’s enemies. McCree's access had been stripped when the UN had recalled Blackwatch’s authorization, but that meant jack shit if Athena decided he needed to know something. And he knew how to ingratiate himself with her.

It’d mean the end of his relatively peaceful existence, but hell, he'd already known he'd have to get rid of Chris and go on the run. Might as well run a little farther than usual. He could check out the lay of the land, see who all was there and what they were up to. It wouldn't be fun - he was Reyes’ man to the bone, still, and none of the proper Overwatch agents would understand that - but this was the closest he'd come to being able to pay back the man who'd changed his life in years. He couldn't let it slip through his fingertips.

International travel was, according to those who could remember, a bit more difficult to manage now than it was before the Crisis. The United States especially had buckled down on the jingoism, blaming most of Europe for letting the Omnica Corporation run wild. It wasn't as bad as it has been in the 20s, of course, but if Overwatch hadn't provided the encryption on his passport themselves, McCree would have found himself paying a pretty penny for a good fake. As it was, he wasn't exactly flush with cash right now, so he was glad Chris’s papers were still good.

Chris Stevenson, despite his whitebread name, had family in Spain: a sister who'd recently taken ill. So he - and Jesse McCree, under his skin - was flying to Madrid. Teleporters were still new and expensive, and Chris couldn't afford one. The days of the ancient, cramped airliners were long over, though. Chris had a ticket on an overnight flight, with his own little cot and plastic privacy wall and two credits to use in the onboard cafeteria.

The flight attendant directed them all through the ship’s amenities, pointing out the cafeteria and the bathrooms as well as the small rec area, on the way to direct them all to their berths. They had to go through the first class lounge first thing, of course - probably to make them all regret they hadn’t coughed up enough to spend half the trip on leather furniture drinking premium cocktails. Jesse couldn’t care less about it. He planned to eat, sleep, and then eat on this trip; airline food wasn’t that great, but he’d eaten plenty of bad shit in his life, and he’d need the rest and the calories to find the best ways to ditch Chris’s identity and make his way across the border into Gibraltar.

The berths were more private than the ones on most of the Overwatch transports he’d been on in his time, but that wasn’t saying much; military didn’t think anything of communal bunkrooms for everyone but officers, and Overwatch had always been true to its military roots. The ship wasn’t ritzy enough to have sound cancelling tech in any cabin but first class, so he could hear the contained but emphatic ruckus happening two berths over. Politeness would have dictated Chris did his best to ignore it, but Jesse had always been an incurable snoop, and years of covert ops hadn’t exactly curbed that. He tucked his bags under the plastic frame of his ship’s cot and leaned against the thin barrier under the guise of working his boots off.

“I don’t see why we’re kept out of the lounge,” a voice Jesse pegged as belonging to someone around Reinhardt’s age said crossly. “We paid our fare just like everyone else!”

“I’m afraid the lounge is for first class passengers only,” said their flight attendant, in the calming tones universal to customer service employees who weren’t allowed to tell customers to fuck off but who really wished they could. “However, if you would like to upgrade -”

“Don’t you upgrade me!” the older voice said again. “I went on these transports when they were first made, twenty years ago, and they didn’t have any sort of restrictions! This is just - it’s a cash grab, is what it is, by unscrupulous -”

“Pop! He can’t do anything about that. I’m sure it’s corporate policy,” interrupted a younger voice, audibly embarrassed. “I’m so sorry about this.”

“It’s quite all right - I understand change is difficult. Can I offer you -”

“We’re not interested in little placating gifts, like drink tickets, you corporate shill!” the older voice yelled again.

Jesse felt a twinge of sympathy for the flight attendant having to deal with all that, but he felt it was safe to tune out at that point. His boots - sturdy hiking boots, not the attention-getting cowboy boots of his wanted poster getup, good for grip on all sorts of surfaces - were unlaced and under the bunk and they weren’t quite underway, so he decided he’d be hitting the cafeteria early. And maybe he’d shell out for a drink for the old man’s traveling companion, he thought, shuffling quietly past the squabble. He was sure the flight attendant couldn’t drink on duty, or else he’d send him one first.

It was a ten-hour flight, and mission discipline should have sent him right to sleep for seven of them after his mediocre cafeteria meal. But he hadn’t had anyone hanging over his shoulder to enforce that discipline in five years, and sleep didn’t come easy. After an hour of trying to force himself into something deeper than a doze, he gave up and summoned the flight attendant for a drink. Jesse would have preferred to work out his troubles in a gym or at the range, but the transport had neither, and this was a good enough substitute to quiet the buzzing of his brain enough for a few hours’ rest.

He just couldn’t work it out, was the thing. Why had Winston called him, of all people, back? It didn’t fit with the do-gooder message he’d sent out. Jesse didn’t recall running with him much on the very few occasions he’d been sent to liaise with the main Overwatch forces, so it wasn’t out of some misplaced nostalgia. Winston’d been close with Tracer, though, and she’d seen him in action enough to know that he didn’t hold with tugging on heartstrings as a way to run things. None of Blackwatch had. Why did Winston bother sending the message out to them at all?

Jesse doubted many of the Blackwatch members - those still out of jail after the Petras Act stripped them of their pardons, anyway - would be at Gibraltar when he showed, with a message like that. Maybe Genji would. He’d been pretty tight with Reyes. Not as tight as Jesse, but the man needed some guidance on letting anger fuel you instead of rule you when he first joined up, and Reyes had that in spades. Jesse hoped he’d be there, or else he’d be running a covert mission in enemy territory solo, with no extraction plan and no end point. He could do it, but it’d be tricky. He hadn’t used anything more than basic infiltration skills in years, since his neighbors rarely required the effort. Overwatch was all trained operatives, though, and he’d be kept on his toes even with reliable backup.

Wasn’t worth borrowing trouble about, though. Jesse had more immediate concerns, like the best way to ditch Chris without raising too many suspicions, and how long he’d have to wait in Madrid before Peacekeeper made her own way across the Atlantic. And before all that, he needed to sleep. He knocked back the last swallow of his liquor and laid down, determined to get a little rest while he was secure.

It turned out that Peacekeeper wouldn’t be in Madrid after all. His smuggler contact had left him a coded message that told him to meet her for dinner in Malaga. Jesse’d had to hustle to get to the train, but he’d made it - and he was riding on the inside this time. Europe had more satellite cameras fixed on it than the deserts of the US did, and there was no reason to draw the attention of their flagging algorithms. Besides, the wireless connection inside the train was better.

One of Overwatch’s support staff had cooked up a program that disengaged an identity from public records gradually, in case anyone needed to use them again or the activity was being monitored. Jesse wasn’t supposed to have it still, but it’d been useful enough he transferred it from phone to phone. Over the next couple of weeks, Chris’s landlord and acquaintances would receive messages that his sister was sicker than he thought and he’d need to stay in Spain to manage her affairs. His bank account would make purchases to back that up. And with no close friends in the area, he’d quietly disappear unless Jesse needed him again. The program needed a stable connection to work, though, so it could learn from the communications he’d sent as Chris. The connection on the train was nicely anonymous, so it couldn’t be traced back to him.

Twenty minutes out from Malaga, Jesse took his bag into the bathroom. Instead of Chris’s baggy sweatshirt and wind pants, he put on tight jeans and a flannel button-up and pulled out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. When he came out, he begged a hair tie off of a woman on the train, waggling his prosthetic fingers in explanation (they did get tangled in his hair if he wasn’t careful). When he was done, he looked like a tourist of a different type - a hipster American with a backpack and a guitar. The two days of stubble on his face made most natives peg him for an aging graduate student and give him a wide berth.

Carla, his contact, had left him a note at the Malaga information desk, and he followed her instructions to a worn-down bar that had probably been popular before the Crisis. It was looking a little worse for wear, though, and even before sundown had plenty of quiet, dark corners. Jesse spotted her iron-gray braid at a corner table and sat down, though not before getting a glass of wine at the bar.

“Auntie,” he said in Spanish as he settled in. He was sure Carla had heard his boots and spotted him well before he’d reached her table, but no use not being polite to someone who had your prize possession. “I hope you’ve been taking good care of my girl.”

Carla looked up at him and rolled her eyes. “Don’t I always?” she said in her crisp Iberian accent.

“You do, but the way you left Madrid, I’d almost think you wanted to keep her,” Jesse said, smiling in a way that didn’t hide the watchful glint in his eye.

Carla shook her head, but Jesse noticed she didn’t outright deny it. “Madrid gets so crowded this time of year,” she said. “It’s a little quieter here.”

“La Linea is even more peaceful, I hear,” Jesse said, leaning back as he sipped his wine. “That’s where I want to take her next.”

“Ah, going to take her to see the Rock?” Carla asked. “It’s quite the sight.”

“I am,” Jesse told her. “In fact, you could call it the reason we even came to Spain. There’s a little problem, though.”

“Oh?” Carla asked. “Nothing to spoil your holiday, I hope.”

Jesse put the fingers of his flesh hand to his mouth and then put it back on the table, like a man fighting the urge to bite his nails. “I hope not either. See, I want to cross the border, but I don’t have all her papers - her mother, you know how she is. But I really want her to be able to see the sights. Are the guards there understanding?” Meaning, of course, could they be bribed.

Carla shifted in her chair and leaned in on one elbow. “Most of them are family men and women, not career military the way it was a few years ago,” she said, meaning mob. “They should be able to work something out with you - they understand how it is for men in your position. After all, it’s not like there’s anything really dangerous she could get into these days.”

“That’s true,” Jesse agreed. “And I’ll keep a close eye on her, of course.” Meaning that he’d make sure Peacekeeper didn’t cause any trouble that brought too much attention to their operations.

Carla nodded. “I might just know a young man down there who could help you,” she said. “I’ll send him a message once I see you both get on the bus, and he’ll look out for you both.”

“I appreciate it,” Jesse told her, with an expression of relief. Carla’s reputation would make it a lot easier to get past the border guards while he was carrying. “How much did she cost you? I know how my girl can eat.”

“No, no,” Carla said, waving her hands in a way that was all show. “She was a pleasure. It wasn’t any trouble.”

“I insist,” Jesse said firmly. “Let me pay for the train tickets, at least. You couldn’t have been expecting Madrid to be so busy.”

“Well, that’s true,” Carla said. “But I’d watch your girl for you any time, you know that.”

“I do,” Jesse agreed. “Now, c’mon, tell me how much the tickets were, and I’ll pay you back.”

Carla named a sum with a show of reluctance, and Jesse added it to the already agreed-upon price before transferring it to her account. If she’d had to leave Madrid in such a hurry, it was probably because the law was getting too close for comfort, and Jesse was sure she’d had to bribe her way out. It was just good business to pay her back for that, and he’d been trusting Carla with Peacekeeper for a long time. His burner phone beeped, and after a moment, so did hers. She nodded, satisfied, and pushed away from the table.

“Come, let’s go get your girl,” she said. “I’m sure you missed her. She’s waiting at the bus station.”

Carla had been as good as her word. Even with Peacekeeper sewn into the lining of a laptop bag, Jesse hadn’t had any trouble getting past the border into Gibraltar, and even if she wasn’t at his hip, he felt better holding her steadying weight. He’d transferred all his belongings into a hiking backpack when he’d gotten there, and only as he started up the Rock did he send the signal from the communicator that would tell Athena and Winston he was on his way - and exactly how close he was. There were plenty of hidden protections that he was sure were still active on the base, and he’d need the signal to get in.

It only took a few moments to connect, and Winston’s voice was cautious as he answered. “McCree?”

“In the flesh,” Jesse answered. “Know I didn’t call ahead, but I was hopin’ my invitation still stood.”

#overwatch #mchanzo

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chillyravenart · 5 years ago

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Hi, I'm curious about your opinion on a seldom discussed asoiaf matter: Rhaegar Targaryen's relationship with his mother, Rhaella. It's bugging me since there's little to no mention of it in any of the books. Safe to assume that Viserys was close to her, her crown was his last joy according to Dany. Dany herself sadly doesn't count, she only has stories about their mom. But Rhaegar has plenty of years. He must have seen her misery as well. Surely he didn't just stand aside and did nothing right?

It's a seldom discussed matter for a reason, we simply don't have enough material on their relationship and only mere snippets on them entirely. I have opinions and views of my own, but none of them are fully backed up by canon- because the info just doesn’t exist :(

Rhaegar was born to thirteen-year old Rhaella during the Tragedy at Summerhall- an event that was said to overshadow him throughout his life. As per royal etiquette, I can only assume that baby Rhaegar was brought up by wetnurses and tutored by maesters as a child, with limited access to his mother. This would have been exacerbated by the fact that within the first eleven years of Rhaegar’s life, Rhaella lost FIVE babies. Her role was to provide Aerys with heirs and spares, and for a very long time, it ended in grief. I’m sure Rhaegar would have known of his mother’s misery, but there’s literally nothing to illustrate that point. Royal children did not share the same maternal relationship as children today, and whilst I’m certain Rhaella loved her firstborn, I just don’t know if they were super close on account of her losses, as well as Aerys’ increasing madness.

I’ve done some rambling below the cut just to try and explore this further. Hope it makes sense lol!

To start off with, Rhaella and Aerys’ marriage was never a happy one. Aerys was unfaithful, and Rhaella clearly disapproved.

Sadly, the marriage between Aerys II Targaryen and his sister, Rhaella, was not as happy; though she turned a blind eye to most of the king’s infidelities, the queen did not approve of his “turning my ladies into his whores.”

This led Rhaella to eventually dismiss her friend and lady-in-waiting Joanna Lannister, who as everyone knows, married Aerys’ Hand, Tywin Lannister. Her marriage suffered as did her health when she lost 5 babies in a ten year period.

Relations between the king and queen grew even more strained when Rhaella proved unable to give Aerys any further children. Miscarriages in 263 and 264 were followed by a stillborn daughter born in 267. Prince Daeron, born in 269, survived for only half a year. Then came another stillbirth in 270, another miscarriage in 271, and Prince Aegon, born two turns premature in 272, dead in 273.

This tidbit had escaped me entirely but when Tytos Lannister died in 267AC, Tywin returned west and Aerys accompanied him with Rhaegar.

Though His Grace left the queen behind in King’s Landing (Her Grace was pregnant with the child who proved to be the stillborn Princess Shaena), he took their eight-year-old son Rhaegar, Prince of Dragonstone, and more than half the court. For the better part of the next year, the Seven Kingdoms were ruled from Lannisport and Casterly Rock, where both the king and his Hand were in residence…

This highlights a period of almost a year where Rhaella and Rhaegar were separated. Again, I can only assume they missed each other- as any mother and child would- but nothing is written of it. It was also during this time that Aerys’ relationship with Rhaella began to show cracks.

At first His Grace comforted Rhaella in her grief, but over time his compassion turned to suspicion. By 270 AC, he had decided that the queen was being unfaithful to him…

Aerys began imposing restrictions on Rhaella at this stage, forbidding her to leave Maegor’s Holdfast and having two septas share her bed. This probably extended to her relationship with Rhaegar too, sadly.

The march of the king’s madness seemed to abate for a time in 274 AC, when Queen Rhaella gave birth to a son. So profound was His Grace’s joy that it seemed to restore him to his old self once again … but Prince Jaehaerys died later that same year, plunging Aerys into despair….

Nothing is mentioned of Rhaegar during these troubling times, but again, I can only assume he was kept separate from the inner workings of the queen’s court and wasn’t fully exposed to his mother’s troubles. We also know he was a solitary child during his early years and preferred books until the age of ten when he decided to take up arms too. He was seventeen when Viserys was born, and was “everything that could be wanted in an heir apparent” and yet it was still overcast by Aerys’ deteriorating mental health. It’s also worthy of note that once Rhaegar came of age, his role in the workings of the court would have increased; he may have sat at council meetings and been prepared for the role of heir. This paired with the fact that he continued to read, train vigorously, and travel to Summerhall on his own indicates that he didn’t really have much of a “family environment” to speak of. I always wonder where he got his love of music from, and I’d like to think Rhaella enjoyed his sad songs and harp skills- but again, WE DON’T KNOW :’(

The birth of Prince Viserys only seemed to make Aerys II more fearful and obsessive, however. Though the new young princeling seemed healthy enough, the king was terrified lest he suffer the same fate as his brothers… Even the queen herself was forbidden to be alone with the infant…

I don’t think Rhaella and Viserys were as close as could be hoped during Viserys’ early childhood. Aerys was extremely paranoid, particularly after the defiance of Duskendale which broke him irrevocably and turned him against his wife and heir.

Convinced that the smallfolk and lords were plotting against his life and fearing that even Queen Rhaella and Prince Rhaegar might be part of these plots, he reached across the narrow sea to Pentos and imported a eunuch named Varys to serve as his spymaster…

Similarly, when Rhaegar wed Elia in 280AC, Aerys did not attend, nor did he allow Viserys to attend. Since there’s no mention of Rhaella being prohibited, we can safely assume that she was in attendance.

They were wed the following year, in a lavish ceremony at the Great Sept of Baelor in King’s Landing, but Aerys II did not attend. He told the small council that he feared an attempt upon his life if he left the confines of the Red Keep, even with his Kingsguard to protect him. Nor would he allow his younger son, Viserys, to attend his brother’s wedding…

Rhaegar and Elia took up residence on Dragonstone after the wedding, presumably because Rhaegar and Aerys were definitely at odds at this stage and rumours and paranoia were rampant. There were talks of Aerys possibly disinheriting Rhaegar, Rhaegar deposing Aerys etc. Again, no clue on how Rhaella would have felt about this- but you can probably guess! The only slight snippet we have is when Rhaegar presented Rhaenys in court.

When Prince Rhaegar returned to the Red Keep to present his daughter to his own mother and father, Queen Rhaella embraced the babe warmly…

This certainly gives us an insight to how pleased Rhaella would have been to be a grandma, so I can imagine this reunion would have been very dear to her too. Fast forward to the Tourney at Harrenhal, neither Rhaella or Viserys were present, and had been left behind at the Red Keep. During the Rebellion, we know Rhaegar meant to win the war and bring about change- for his own family too, “... changes will be made. I meant to do it long ago, but... well, it does no good to speak of roads not taken…”

But when Rhaegar was slain at the Trident,

When the word reached court, Aerys packed the queen off to Dragonstone with Prince Viserys…

Nothing is mentioned of her reaction to her firstborn’s death (but we can imagine) nor the nine months Rhaella and Viserys spent together, but it must have been a time fraught with worry and fear as King’s Landing fell and House Targaryen was unmade. I feel most deeply for Rhaella’s life, and I wish we had more detail on her direct relationship with her children- particularly Rhaegar- but alas, there is not much to work with. All I can say is, despite her woes and losses and the abuse she suffered, Rhaella was a strong woman, she held her own and was dignified until the end. I’m certain she adored all her children, and the pain she suffered throughout her life affected her acutely, but she remained with her faculties intact and was able to possess the fortitude to carry Daenerys to full-term and deliver her safely, before sadly perishing herself.

RIP Rhaella, your daughter is amazing and you would be so proud of her, and Rhaegar’s legacy also lives on. VIVA LA HOUSE TARGARYEN!!!! I really hope this answered your question, if not, it certainly made me sad AF to research all this.

#anon asks #chillyravenart answers #rhaella targaryen #rhaegar targaryen #its depression hour #gosh this breaks my heart man

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astrarche-x · 4 years ago

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I read “Fangirl” by Rainbow Rowell after I finished 2 books I got for Christmas. It was staring at me from my sister’s shelf and I’ve heard something good about this book, Rowell is also quite famous YA author, so I decided to give it a try.

It certainly didn’t match my expectations; in fact, my disappointment grew with every page and I grew tired of the heroine, Cath - an introverted first year college student and fanfic writer- and other characters.

Why so?

- At first, I thought that snippets of Cath’s fanfics are a cool addition to the book, because it’s such a crucial part of this character, and I also thought that they will be somehow related to the events happening in-universe. But they weren’t! They didn’t help me as a reader to understand Cath, didn’t expand my understanding of the events of the plot, didn’t really give me any “story within a story” because they were so fragmented (I know there is a whole book about Simon Snow, but that’s not relevant now, is it?) and I already felt like I knew Cath’s writing style after like 3 examples, so idk why there were so many.

- I felt like the characters don’t develop at all. And what’s the point of the story if it’s not character development? In the end of the book, the only thing different from the starting point is the fact that the heroine has a boyfriend. She isn’t more open, she’s still talking to like 2-3 people (and writing is not like a movie, adding a character doesn’t cost you money, right?) and it’s not like those relationships change a lot. Cath and her roommate Reagan? They form a bond in the middle part of the book and it stays the same. Wren, Cath’s twin sister? They lose contact during the plot and Wren has a new friend to prove she’s a separate person, but eventually they make amends and sisters are together again. The other friend disappears. No big talk about being separate people but still needing each other, no reflecting on that in any way; they make amends and then Wren is just there, spending a lot of time with Cath like her own life never happened. Relationship with dad and mum? Stays the same, even though they were written in a way that suggests big plot points.

- Levi, Cath’s boyfriend. He doesn’t have an inner life. He’s just a smiling, nice guy with learning difficulties. But Cath can always feel safe with him and count on him; honestly, how is he different from her ex? Also some can say that Cath and Levi were cute tohether and they kind of were, but for me it was too much sugar and when their relationship became the focal point of the plot I couldn’t take it anymore. How many times a writer can describe the same physical features with exactly the same words? Like yeah, we get it, the character is in love, change the subject.

(Also his attempts at unneccessary chivalry... ugh. Not cute).

- Nick from the library. He was actually the guy I was shipping Cath with (and myself as well, if I had the chance). They had so much chemistry! But it was also strongly hinted at that he won’t be the endgame; in fact, I don’t really see the point of his existence as a character. He’s Cath’s crush, but after he stops playing this role, he’s mentioned only twice and then dropped completely. But the point of him being the crush and the writing buddy/rival is not even relevant! It’s not reflected in Cath in any way except that she’s a bit sad.

- Cath doesn’t develop as a writer. Actually, after reading a few sentences about how writing is so important for Cath etc, I thought that I would see more of her as a writer, but mostly it looks like “...and she wrote 5000 words that night”. No description of creative process. Talk about how her life influences her writing: 2 times (at the end of the book). Pressure from readers who? I don’t know her. Also I was really surprised that she said “I only ever want to write fanfiction, I want nothing of my own!” - like... who would say that? Sure, they are people who just write fanfiction as a hobby, but there are others who start with fanfic and then create their own stories, so if Cath is an established fanfic writer and went on to study English lit and take creative writing class, then having her say something like this sounds super fake.

- Cath herself was a boring protagonist. And I’m not saying this because she was an introvert. Lots of introverts make interesting protagonists; take, for example, Offred from The Handmaid’s tale. Cath is boring not only because she literally sits in her room and cries for like half of the book (giving me Rodion Raskolnikov vibes and he annoyed me like hell), but also because so little of her inner life is described in detail. Like, c’mon, I’ve opened this book, I want to know what’s going on in her head. But instead of paragraphs of her thoughts, we are only given a sentence, maybe two or three. And one of them sounds often like “she thought about all the reasons she had to dislike their mother” but then none of said reasons is listed, making this sentence effectively worthless. Very often Cath’s remarks about other people are repeated; I don’t even want to count how many times she noticed that Levi smiled a lot. And then she noticed noticing it; and then she noticed him smiling even more times. Seriously that’s his only feature? (That and his hair). Because this makes the heroine very unobservant; I don’t want to look at the world through her eyes, because it’s nothing there to see.

- Cath as a (titular) fangirl: she doesn’t really interact with the fandom during the course of the actions in other way than writing and that’s... unusual? Who limits themselves to only one form of fan content? I know she had merch and fanart, but she doesn’t interact with other fans (except for her sister and a random stranger). She also mentions having internet friends at the very beginning, which I assume would be very likely for a fanfic author of her status. Then her roommate says “internet friends are not real” (yes. literally.) and Cath’s internet friends are not mentioned again, because, you know, internet friends are irrelevant to your real life. Generally this book makes it look like belonging to a fandom was about the merch you own and maybe writing your fanfic, if that’s what you use as a coping mechanism for real life. No talk of reading other fanfics, visiting sites like Tumblr or other blogs, no interaction with other fans, no conventions, stuff like this. It made fandom look like something for sad and lonely people, and while it kind of is, it’s also a source of joy and satisfacton for many; in Cath’s case, I only saw it as a straw to which a drowning man clutches.

(Also I found it kinda weird that sex in this book is like Schrodinger’s cat: existent and nonexistent at the same time. Does Cath write erotic scenes? I guess. Is it adressed? Yes. And then immediately dismissed in order not to talk about it. She also wants it and doesn’t want it at the same time, which is fine irl, but confusing in a book, especially when she doesn’t reflect at that confusion much).

I thought I will see in Cath a glimpse of myself - first year of uni was also stressful for me (even though I’m certainly not an internet-famous writer). But she was almost extremely unrelatable. And then I started comparing “Fangirl” with “Loveless” by Alice Oseman, which has very similar setting - first year, loneliness, outgoing roommate, introverted protagonist having trouble opening up, breaking of a sisterly bond, fanfiction (even though Georgia, the protagonist, only reads it). I’d recommend “Loveless” a lot more. You won’t get much talk of the writing process, but hey, you weren’t getting it anyway. You will be given queer characters instead.

My final thought was that I’m probably just too old for “Fangirl”. That it was written for 17-year-olds who are anxious about going to college. But my sister is 17-year-old who is anxious about going to university and she didn’t like this book either (this post is brought to you by our displeased brainstorming last night), so it’s probably just bad, shallow writing.

#fangirl rainbow rowell #rainbow rowell #fangirl book review #well... sort of #loveless #book ramblings #follow up to that angry post from earlier

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infinites-chaser · 4 years ago

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Oooh for that fanfic ask, what about 2, 6, 9, and 12??

Ps I love you

💌 BRYN PS I LOVE YOU TOO! 💌

2. What is your favorite snippet of dialogue?

asklfjdsgs tbh this is related to 12 (What's the hardest thing to write for you?) bc DIALOGUE is actually what i find hardest to write,,,,, so um.... i don't write very much dialogue? but if i had to choose jUST based on how much they currently appeal to me probably this lucien/mc exchange

“Where are the stars?”

“Shall I go and fetch them for you?”

also i love writing thoughtful MC so this too :>

"You know, sometimes I think the stars must be lonely. They're thousands of light years away from each other. Maybe they wonder if they're all alone, sometimes, if they're the only light for miles in an empty, endless dark sea. It makes me sad, to think about it. We spend our lives looking up at the stars and casting lines, drawing constellations between them, but in reality, they're just as lonely as we are. Maybe even more."

6. What’s the detail you wait on bated breath for readers to notice?

I LOVE SNEAKING IN SNIPPETS OF CANON DETAILS or just trying to interweave them with the story's plot (or lack thereof) my goal is to one day be confused with canon aksljgsd

9. What’s the fic you like the least?

ksdlgjd this sounds t e r r i b l e but as someone who is very used to writing for myself and myself alone i find myself not as proud of either of my secret santa fics and the writing i used there makes me feel like i should've put more effort in even though it was a thing meant to be fun and low-stakes T-T it might just be also because my more bittersweet writing turns out more ~~poetic~~

12. What’s the hardest thing to write for you?

i said it aLready but. dialogue for SURE aklsjgds i don't talk that much irl or i tend to veer into the philosophical and then my writing ends up doing that too,,,, most times my writing starts with a vibe? an aesthetic or a feeling? and then grows from there, with dialogue being more of an afterthought or not put in unless it can't be hinted at in the descriptive words themselves so. yeah. something i'm always hyperconscious of while writing dialogue is also how natural it sounds? idk if it makes any sense, but since my descriptions and my prose itself always ends up getting very poetic and abstract, dialogue is where i try to let characters breathe without dragging things out :> and for the most part it sounds realistic to me, even the philosophical stuff since i talk like that LOL but i often worry about how human and relatable it is to other readers while still wanting it to be memorable y'know?

thank you so much for the ask Brynnnn i love you lots and lots this was super fun to think about!! 💌💌 sending some love back your way !!

#val rambles

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salty-dracon · 5 years ago

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More YTTD Theories Because I Forgot A Bunch

A continuation of this from a couple of days ago.

More theories, spoilers go up to 3-1A, and also include YTTS spoilers. Also I appreciate all of your thoughts on the matter.

In the previous post I said there were a few reasons to be suspicious of Gin. I forgot to mention one important point:

Remember the locker room and the Discussion there, where Hayasaka and Gin got magnetized to the ceiling and almost hung? According to vgperson, you can win the discussion by letting time pass three times after Hayasaka is magnetized. But after the second turn, Gin gets magnetized as well. And one turn after that, the mechanism is shut down by Midori. He makes sure “those two” are still alive via the intercom, and once confirming that they are, says “oh goodie, we can still play some more!“ and fucks off. Basically, you’ll win no matter what, because Midori doesn’t want them to die.

Midori says he observes all of the floors in the painting room, but he doesn’t really give “instructions” once they arrive or anything similar. Depending on what he’s using to monitor the room, he more or less uses his abilities to mess with the participants and the dolls. Think about how he spooks Sara and crew by saying “I’m not a painting!” if you look at the painting of him, or how he lets the crew get their hopes up about the transceiver until he speaks through it. However, he says he observes all of the floors, meaning he knows what goes on in each one. And though he’s not about losing well (he wants to kill people with the gun if he’s in a bad position, after all), he seemed to be concerned enough about Hayasaka and Gin to try and save them.

Considering he didn’t try to save Hayasaka the moment he could, and seems to have some form of disdain for the dolls, I wonder if it’s Gin he was trying to save. That brings up the question of why someone like him would want to save Gin in the first place. Maybe he’s allied with Gin somehow, whether Gin knows it or not.

-------

(Danganronpa 1 and AI: The Somnium Files spoilers in the next paragraph)

One interesting prediction rule when it comes to murder mystery games is that the culprit is “someone who’s been mentioned several times, but who we’ve never actually met”. They almost pulled that twist in Danganronpa 1 with a certain missing student. They mentioned her by name, making us think she was the mastermind for a while, before revealing the truth. The other big example I can think of is AI: The Somnium Files, wherein the serial killer in question is mentioned by name more than once, but we don’t actually meet him, knowing it’s him, until near the end of the game and after we’ve unlocked most of the other routes.

Extrapolating this to Your Turn to Die, there is one character we haven’t met yet who’s been mentioned more than once- that being Sara’s mother. We see her at the beginning of the game, passed out presumably due to an attack by Sara’s kidnappers. She’s brought up again by Sara’s dad in a flashback before Chapter 2, and then again when Kai leaves a message for Sara on the laptop. The password to that file is her mother’s name. Furthermore, we know her rough appearance, as based on seeing her passed out in Chapter 1. And taking the events of YTTS as canon, we know that Sara, or someone that looks exactly like Sara, is somehow involved in Asunaro’s AI experiments. There’s also one interesting oddity about her. As far as I remember, she’s one of two characters to get a background sprite, but not a foreground sprite. Here I’m referring to “background sprites” as the sprites that appear inside environments without black outlines, and foreground sprites as the sprites with different expressions that usually appear when you talk to a character. Every other character, notably all of the Death Game participants, the Floor Masters, and now the Dummies thanks to Chapter 3, have both foreground sprites and background sprites. Some characters, like Sara’s father and the man that Keiji killed, have only foreground sprites. The only two exceptions, that is, the only two characters whose faces we haven’t seen in perfect detail, are Meister and Sara’s mother.

Furthermore, we don’t know what Sara’s mother’s name is. Granted, we don’t know what her father’s name is either, but her name is apparently important. What if her name was also Sara Chidouin? What if she was somehow also Sara- as in, the Sara we know is a clone of her created using a doll? It’s a mystery why she’d be raising a clone of herself, but people are weird like that, sometimes.

Another related theory people have had is that Sara’s mother is in fact a part of the game- she’s just disguised as someone else. That someone else could be Miley. Though in my opinion Miley looks nothing like the background sprite I’m using for reference, a good wig can change everything. This theory might have become even stronger with the release of Chapter 3. There are a couple of situations in which Midori can say something along the lines of “Miley said you were cute when you got angry” to Sara. Though we could just take it as Miley being an asshole (she’s totally an asshole), I think there’s only one situation in which Sara got mad in front of Miley, that being when Mishima was killed. Maybe this was lost in translation, but it’s a rather sweeping generalization and a somewhat weird thing to say about someone if you aren’t familiar with them. Meaning Miley’s really familiar with Sara. Or Miley was just being an asshole.

After looking up Sara’s mother on the wiki the manga only has a picture of her wearing a mask over her mouth. The plot thickens.

Regarding the other character, Meister... people have made a couple of interesting observations about him. First, he shows up in collaboration artwork. Second, there is a person who looks very similar (albeit with grey hair) in the room above where the monitors were in Chapter 2. His clothing color scheme is exactly the same. Also it’s a big ass painting. Third, with the release of Chapter 3, there’s the entertaining feature of naming Midori whatever you damn well please, unless he makes some joke about it and tells you to pick another name. Most of his responses to you picking something like “Alice Yabusame” and “Tia Safalin” are either “here’s a fun anecdote about that character and/or what I think of them, but I don’t want that name“ and “that’s mean :( pick another name please“. Elect to name him Meister, and he only says “... Pick another name, please”. Considering his personality can be accurately described as “Kokichi if he were Monokuma”, it’s out of character. He fears Meister, or doesn’t want to be associated with him. So yeah, Meister’s probably important. Maybe he’s even the Meister-mind. (Feel free to boo me for that bad pun.)

-------

Regarding the game’s endings, most people seem to believe there’s two- a logic ending an an emotion ending. I agree with this viewpoint, as “choosing logic“ has been explored a few times throughout the game. With the release of Part 3, the choice of which ending’s which has become a little more clear.

If Alice lives and Reko dies, Q-taro says something along the lines of “The Dummies may be dolls, but they’re human just like us”. Implying that we, the humans, are also supposed to think of dolls as human as there’s no difference appearance or personality wise. Q-taro talks about Doll Reko being almost perfectly human, as a supporting argument, in reference to Alice who was unable to tell the difference between the Doll Reko and the real Reko. Remember also that the only reason we pushed Reko down the Impression Room was our logical conclusion that she was a fake. On the other hand, if we choose not to, Sara comments that despite the logic, she can’t see the Reko standing before her as anything other than real, even though there’s lots of evidence to the contrary. In that ending, the real Reko dies. Furthermore, there’s a little bonus snippet in the “afterlife” scene after Nao’s death, where Reko shows up, but Alice doesn’t appear if she lives.

For this reason I strongly believe that the emotion ending is Alice/Kanna living. Therefore the logic ending is Reko/Sou living. I have yet to test out to see if there’s any changes in dialogue with those two combinations specifically, as most people online seem to be playing Alice/Sou and Reko/Kanna. I’m streaming this game for a couple of friends on Discord, and also all my midterms are over the next couple of weeks, so it’s hard to find the time to play this right now.

I also believe that we’ll soon be facing another path split- maybe at the very beginning of 3-1B- that has to do with logic and emotion. Whatever that consent form is, it scared the other participants- it’s definitely a bad thing. However, Sara now faces the choice between saving Keiji and consenting to Whatever Evil Thing’s Going On, and sacrificing Keiji to avoid it. Logic would be sacrificing Keiji, while emotion would be saving him, in this case. Perhaps that’s not true, as Midori is the kind of person who can and would pull a fast one on Sara for funsies. Perhaps there’s something in his language implying that Keiji’s going to end up dead no matter what. He does seem to want to antagonize Keiji, after all. That, or someone else is going to die instead- probably Q-taro, having just been stabbed by Mai and being in bad shape. Even so, I wonder which will be which- whose death would be considered “logical” and whose is based on “emotion”.

TL:DR So many mysteries with so many possible answers. I just want to see someone vibe check Midori like he vibe checked us already.

#your turn to die #kimi ga shine

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memaha19 · 5 years ago

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Things I Want(ed) From KH3 That Re:Mind is Probably Not Going to Fix

AKA, a brief interlude from Frozen 2 posting because Kingdom Hearts was on my mind this morning.

AKA, I’m excited for Re:Mind but still...

AKA, KH3 disappointed me and I’m still salty about it almost a year later.

AKA, there are many “my problems with KH3″ posts/discussions floating out there on the internet and many are probably worded better than mine but, as I said, the game was on my mind this morning.

Just...the worlds. The Disney worlds in KH3 bothered me. There were so few of them but they were so so LONG. Some of them were painfully long. Toy Box felt like the longest experience of my life. Every time I thought that level was coming to an end, BAM, another trek to another area. And Arendelle...though I love Frozen, there’s only so many times I can trek up the mountain only to get thrown off and have to climb back up again. There were so few worlds, only seven, I believe, (because we’re not counting Twilight Town or the 100 Acre Woods, more on those later), that I think they could’ve given us a few more worlds and made the levels a little...shorter? A little more detailed and charming? The levels were huge but empty and devoid of the character that previous Disney worlds had in other games. The previous main games had about 10 or 11 worlds, not including the throwaways (like Atlantica in KH2) or the final worlds (TWTNW and End of the World), so there could’ve been some more! Birth By Sleep had numerous shorter worlds and I vastly prefer that to slogging through the same world for hours. Even the way that KH2 had us revisit each world would’ve been nice. What’s more, they could’ve taken some of the massive time and space devoted to the empty, excruciatingly long Disney worlds and given us more time in Twilight Town or the Keyblade Graveyard, or put a playable Radiant Garden in the game. Those non-Disney worlds always served as nice interludes in the other games and it’s sorely lacking in this one. (And yes, I have heard that Re:Mind is going to let Scala be a playable world, so I’m excited for that!)

Related, I also wanted some worlds from older Disney films. I know the other games have had worlds from older films, but almost all of KH3′s worlds were so jarringly...current. I would’ve liked to see some of the older Disney film worlds rendered in the beautiful graphics of KH3, but, instead, the oldest film represented was Hercules (1997). Three of the worlds (maybe four, actually, with the Pirates world) were from movies from this decade (Corona, Arendelle, and San Fransokyo).

Related, they did the 100 Acre Woods so dirty. It was disappointing and short. It used to be a fun little interlude between the big worlds in previous games, a time to chill and play a mini-game and not have to fight a big boss fight. This was like “hello, here’s one mini game, goodbye.”

Related: all that Twilight Town exploration we got in the other games and this one gives us the forest and the town square area and that’s it?! We can’t even go to the clock tower or inside the mansion? When we first got to Twilight Town I was like “wow this is gorgeous!” and then quickly disappointed when I realized we couldn’t go anywhere.

Related, I’ve seen others say this and I agree: the Disney worlds seem like they’re just there, oftentimes, to get in your way. They feel like obstacles to the actual plot because they didn’t bother to place much/any relevance to the plot into any of the Disney worlds. Sometimes we get little snippets of the big story, like Marluxia and Larxene hanging around in Corona and Arendelle just to say cryptic things without ever being a real threat (that in itself is weird too, I spent ALL of the Corona level bracing myself for a fight with Marluxia only to fight...Mother Gothel’s heartless?) but it feels like two different games: The KH that wants to still be about Disney worlds and the KH that has gotten so deep in its own world building that it doesn’t have time for anything else.

Related, again: KH3 has an abundance of Disney worlds where Sora being there doesn’t make any difference to the plot. The most fun Disney worlds have always been the ones that have an original story that we’re actually involved in. Corona is just the plot of Tangled with Sora and co. tagging along. Their presence or lack thereof make no difference to the story. Arendelle is the same way.

The boss battles in the worlds were...lame. I understand that it maybe doesn’t make sense to fight someone like Mother Gothel, who never shows any physical fighting power in Tangled, but we can’t fight Zurg? We’re in a literal toy store and we can’t fight Zurg as the boss? We have to fight a weird doll and 800 robots? We have to fight Hans’ heartless? Not Hans? We fight Mother Gothel’s heartless? Not Marluxia, who’s been harassing us all level long? I understand that they held the KH characters back because of the whole “assembling 13 pieces of darkness for a big final battle” thing, but we had to fight Xemnas like ten times in previous games, they could let us fight Marluxia twice. I feel like the other games were a lot better at having us face a combo of heartless/nobodies/unversed AND Disney bosses. But, as the game has really zero interest in making the Disney worlds a part of the plot, they throw these cheap (and endless) unversed/heartless bosses at us and they’re all so EASY. They could have, and probably should have, let us fight the Organization at the end of each world and then let us fight them again in the Keyblade Graveyard, similar to the way Chain of Memories had us fight each Organization member a couple times.

When you finally do get through the Disney worlds, the ending is like “here’s all these characters that have been missing from the rest of the game” and the Keyblade Graveyard flings boss battle after boss battle at your face without much rhyme or reason. And while some of them are fun, some of them feel like “let’s just pair these characters together and make you fight them at the same time so we can save some time because we didn’t bother to put any of these fights into an earlier part of the game”. I’m looking at the Luxord/Marluxia/Larxene fight in particular. I would’ve understood pairing the last two together, but then Luxord is also there like they didn’t have any other place to put him.

This game is too easy. I’m not great at video games. I’m good-ish. I’m into stories more than anything so I hate when a game’s difficulty keeps me from completing it and keeps me from seeing more of the story. But I still like a little challenge. I have not-so-fond memories of yelling at the TV as I died time and time again fighting Ansem/Riku at Hollow Bastion in KH1, but I also have fond memories of finally beating him and what a rush it was! I didn’t get any of that in KH3. I’m not sure I died more than once or twice, if that.

The way they just let the Organization members hang out in the worlds and do nothing has always seemed weird to me. They’re big parts of the overall plot but now they just stand around and verbally harass Sora? As I said above, I spent all of Corona thinking I was going to have to face Marluxia at the end. Instead, they stand around in the worlds and then they stand around in the Keyblade Graveyard in the cutscenes and just talk. Also, okay, maybe I get the reasoning behind why Luxord was in the pirates world and why Vanitas was in Monstropolis, but Marluxia seemed like he was shoehorned into Corona solely because of the connection between the magic flower and his powers, which was stupid. And Larxene had zero connection to anything going on in Arendelle.

All the characters we’ve been waiting for (Ventus, Aqua, etc.) don’t appear until the very very end, which is a problem with the story pacing. They tease us, very early, with Riku and Mickey trying to find Aqua and then immediately drop that plot point to give us some empty Disney worlds. (Side note: this 100% tricked me into thinking we’d be switching back and forth between what Sora was up to and what Riku was up to and I was sorely disappointed as I played and realized it wasn’t true.) They dither in this “Sora needs the power of waking” to avoid giving us Ventus until the very end.

Just...the story pacing in general, which kind of ties into everything else. This game has a beginning, because it had to, and something they wanted to end with but they weren’t really sure how to fill the space in the middle. You spend most of the game just chilling in the Disney worlds with very low stakes. This big battle waiting at the end is always there in the background but, partially because the Disney worlds feel like distractions that don’t add to the story, the middle of the game never really feels like it’s building toward the ending, or anything. And then, when you do get through the Disney worlds, about 75% of the plot is thrown at you in the last hour or two of the game. It reminds me (a lot of this game reminds me, actually) of FFXV. I love FFXV dearly, I’ve poured A TON of hours into gathering ingredients and taking photos and doing side quests, but it has the same plot issue. The majority of FFXV is a light-hearted journey about four bros on a roadtrip, only for everything to take a VERY dramatic tonal shift about 3/4 of the way through the game and then stay very very SAD for the rest of the game. KH3 does something similar, with the way we spend most of the game traveling through Disney worlds and cooking food with Remy, only for the game to suddenly remember at the 11th hour that it’s supposed to be wrapping up this big 10+ year long story and thrust you into battle after battle and plot-heavy cutscene after plot-heavy cutscene.

To the pacing point: yes, I’m aware these games have always had slightly funny/back-loaded pacing. However, a main thing the other games had that KH3 lacks is that Radiant Garden/Twilight Town/Traverse Town interlude world that helps push the plot along. Without that in KH3, we get a ton of long Disney worlds where we’re like “when is the story going to happen?” and then the Keyblade Graveyard where suddenly ALL of the story is happening. Previous games have let us experience the Disney worlds for awhile before bringing us to an interlude world which furthers the plot, a la the big Radiant Garden section in KH2 that happens midway through the game.

Anyway, I think Kingdom Hearts 3 was a gorgeous game, graphics-wise, and I’ll still be shelling out money for Re:Mind come January, but after waiting for 14 years for a continuation of the main story line, this game just feels like, after everything, Nomura still wasn’t sure how to end it? It feels rushed and underwhelming and incomplete as hell.

TL;DR: I have all these thoughts about KH3 that I’ve waited 11 months to express.

#kingdom hearts #kingdom hearts 3 #kh3 #kh3 remind #sora #riku #bad plot pacing galore #rant #review #tldr #kh #kingdom hearts 2 #this is like almost a year late #i've had a lot of time to think about how underwhelmed i was

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