#my writing: Obscure

[whump-me]

Obscure: Chapter 11

Chapter 11 of Obscure, novel-length interrogation whump about a rebel leader who can erase memories with a thought, an interrogator who can see inside his subjects’ minds… and the connection they share that neither of them suspects.

Masterpost | the Mind Games universe | Read the completed novel on Patreon

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Elias

The interrogation rooms must not have been cleaned on a daily schedule, because the next morning, Elias smelled his own sweat hanging in the air. The table was smudged with the nervous grease from his own hands. It cut the reflection a little, made it more bearable. He could have done without the sweat, though.

But if he was going to make wishes, he might as well wish himself back home.

Kirill sat across from him. He had dark circles under his eyes, and the lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth were more pronounced. But those pale eyes themselves were daggers newly sharpened to a fresh point.

Kirill sat up straighter, inhumanly straight, like he was trying to blend in with the furniture with all its cold right angles. His breath came in a steady rhythm, like there was a machine in his chest breathing for him. The sound was hypnotic.

“What’s the mask this time?” Elias asked. “What game are we playing today?”

“No games,” said Kirill. “Not anymore.”

“You keep saying that. But we keep circling around to the same thing.”

As always when Kirill was in the room, a slow but steady trickle of fear-memories leaked out of him. A constant small betrayal on the part of his mammalian brain. Kirill might have been able to turn himself into a machine at will, but Elias didn’t have that ability. No matter what he had thought at first, in his hubris, with his hours of practice at desensitizing himself to his own grief.

“We were done with games days ago,” said Kirill. “If you think we’ve been playing, you haven’t taken my threat seriously enough. Should I show you a picture of your son, here in headquarters, to prove I mean what I say?”

The thought stopped Elias’s breath. But no emotion rushed out of him. A second later, when his chest filled with an inner warmth, he understood why. Negative emotion brought out the memories, Kirill had said. The thought of seeing a picture of Sammy, alive and grown up… that was the fulfillment of fifteen years of hope. Kirill could get nothing from that warmth.

The fear hit a second later. Because his dream had been to see his son happy and healthy, and if he was either of those things now, it was only because he was ignorant of the threat hanging over his head. Elias wanted to see him, but not like this. Not as a hostage.

Not as a PERI resource.

“Would you like that picture?” Kirill asked. His voice was strangely empty, even for him. Like someone had scooped out every ounce of humanity in him, and the thing in front of Elias now was what was left.

Elias shook his head.

“Do you still think we’re playing games?”

Elias shook his head again.

“Then let’s get started,” said Kirill. “You asked what part I was playing today. I’m not. I have a better way of getting emotion from you now. All I need to do is mention your son and what will happen to him if you stop giving me what I need, either through your memories or through what you tell me aloud.”

One more time, Elias shook his head. “Of course you’re playing a part. This isn’t who you are.”

“This?” Kirill looked down at himself, like he was trying to see what Elias saw. “There is no this. I’m not being anything.”

“Exactly. You’re nothing right now. No one is nothing inside.”

“Still looking for the answer to your question? You’re going to be disappointed. Anyway, we’re not here to talk about me. And we’re not here to play. I’m going to talk to you about your son, and you’re going to give me the information I want. If you’d like things to move faster, you can speak aloud, and spare yourself the grief and fear I’ll have to evoke otherwise. If I stop getting anything from you, I’ll take you to your son, and I’ll hurt him.”

The fear-wound tore a little wider, bled a little more. Nothing Kirill could use—Elias was certain of that. A face from a horror movie poster when he was a child, on one of the family’s big trips into town. They had always drawn looks—a dozen adults and twice as many children, clustered together in one big herd. Half of them small-mouthed and wide-eyed like a gaggle of country mice. The other half behaving like wild things, like the trip out was an excuse to let out the sides of themselves they had to keep buttoned up at home.

Their parents had let them, so long as they didn’t let their powers show—that was the only unbendable rule. The children had run around like rabid animals, grabbing all the unfamiliar brightly-colored things with their grubby hands, smearing fingerprints all over the ticket counter and the movie posters. The adults—eager for a chance to let loose themselves—had laughed too loudly and worn impractical clothes they never wore at home, and poured liquid from small metal flasks into their extra-large sodas.

Max had been one of the country mice. Elias had watched the wild things longingly, but had stayed with Max, letting him clutch his hand and hold him in place.

“We’re not here to talk about your ghost boy,” Kirill said, his voice sharp.

Elias blinked away the past. “We’re not here to talk about Sammy, either. Not really.”

“Your son is a means to an end. Focus on him. Think about the hands of the child you remember. How will it sound when those small fingers snap?”

Was Kirill’s cruelty another mask he could put on and take off at will, or was it part of who the man was underneath? There was no point in asking—no point in wondering, even, when he would never get an answer. Elias clung to the thought anyway, because any distraction would do.

But no distraction could hold up to the image Kirill’s words evoked, or the sound in his imagination of a tiny, delicate finger bone snapping. Sammy’s hands weren’t that small anymore, of course. They had to be the size of his own by now. Elias knew that intellectually. But when he thought about Sammy’s hand, he pictured the hands of an infant, of a toddler, of an eight-year-old. When he imagined them broken, those were the hands he saw.

Sick fear. Helpless rage. A river of memory overflowed its banks. A gushing wound, memory-blood pooling around him, bleeding out the entirety of his son’s history. In front of Elias, Kirill rocked back slightly as eight years of memory flooded him at once.

“The branches of your network,” Kirill said, his voice tight, his unfocused eyes darting back and forth like he was in the grip of a nightmare. “The command structure. Names and faces.”

Elias couldn’t control the flow. It carved a new path in his mind, veering away from Sammy’s childhood, passing through the details of the network he had painstakingly built over the past fifteen years. He tried to steer it back, but the memories were a river, and they flowed through his grasping fingers like water.

The names and faces Kirill had demanded poured from him and straight into Kirill’s brain. A rush of guilt followed. He was giving Kirill everything. And his people would suffer for it, the people had trusted, who had agreed to work for him despite the danger. The future children they could have rescued, the future Sammys, they would also suffer.

The river grew faster, stronger, drawing a soft noise of protest from Kirill. But Kirill’s mouth, curled in a hard smile, was satisfied, his hunger slaked.

Guilt was an emotion. Emotion made the memories come faster.

He breathed in. Breathe out. He stared his grief straight in its wide and helpless and relentlessly hungry eyes, and resisted the urge to reach out and throttle the creature. That wouldn’t help.

Fighting grief never killed grief.

Fighting fear never killed fear.

Fighting pain never stopped the pain from coming. It only multiplied it —the pain that couldn’t be stopped, times the pain of failing to stop it.

His son was in danger. But he had faced that before. He had stared that monster down, and it had blinked first.

His people would suffer and die because of his unwitting betrayal. But he had lost people before. He could still remember the feeling of hot blood on his hands, the thick and earthy tang of it in his nose, pleading eyes going soft and glassy. He could still remember the heat of the flames, and the dying screams of everyone he had almost loved.

Almost everyone. That last loss had come later.

So many losses. And he had survived them all. He had found a way to push the torrents of feeling down, to fight his way back to dry land rather than letting the current hold him under. Otherwise, he would never have survived.

Inhale for four.

Exhale for four.

Inhale.

Exhale.

The flow didn’t stop. But it slowed. The memories came in jagged bursts. Not a current, but the fitful expulsions of a broken faucet.

“Focus,” Kirill urged, and Elias did. He focused on his breath—inhale, exhale. He stared into Kirill’s pale eyes and imagined himself staring down his grief.

But Kirill said, “Sammy,” and Elias saw his son’s face. No amount of focus on his breathing could banish the memory of those eyes or those pudgy child cheeks.

“I’ll start with the little fingers,” said Kirill. “They hurt the most when they break.”

And then, “The locations of your safehouses. With addresses.”

His memory lurched. The river surged down its new path. The images hovered half-formed in Elias’s mind, like vomit struggling to come up.

But if Elias couldn’t stop the flow of memory, maybe he could choose where it went. He couldn’t keep Sammy out of his mind, so he stopped trying. He thought about those cheeks, about his dark and solemn eyes. Those hands, with their perfect fingers Kirill kept threatening to break. A small face contorted in fear.

“The safehouses,” Kirill said. Still colorless, empty of feeling, but Elias imagined frustration lurking underneath. He imagined it because it made him feel like he was winning. He needed to feel like he would win, like he could win, or he would stop trying.

Safehouses. House. Safe. The little house he and Lisbeth had owned together. Her with her hands on her swollen belly, looking doubtfully down the basement stairs. He’ll fall as soon as he starts walking. We should keep the basement door locked—get a padlock and just never open it. We never go down there anyway. Him telling her she was being ridiculous to close off an entire room of the house, an entire floor. He said it with a smile on his face, so she’d know he was joking even though he wasn’t, because he never knew what would hit her wrong these days. He felt a tiny squirm of unease in his belly, gratitude that she had been the one to say it and not him, because he had been eyeing those stairs with trepidation for weeks now.

“Clever,” came Kirill’s impassive voice. “Now show me your network. Where do your people hide themselves?”

His people, his family, his son. He kept Sammy’s dark eyes fixed in his mind—the best memories, the worst, anything with enough emotion to keep the current from changing course.

But Kirill’s words lodged themselves in his mind. His network. Hiding. He pictured cabins hidden deep in the woods—

But there had been a different network once. And a different kind of hiding, one he hadn’t thought of as hiding. He had thought they were all family, and all they needed was each other, and it was as simple as that. He hadn’t understood the danger that had driven all his mothers and fathers to buy a hundred acres out in the middle of nowhere. Not until the danger had come knocking with a lit match in its back pockets.

For decades, since long before the loss of Sammy, he had held those memories at bay. He had forced them down, burying them deeper and deeper, piling more and more dirt on top. He had buried them the way none of his family had gotten the chance to be buried. They had burned instead.

The memories came out in his nightmares sometimes, once or twice a year, no more than that. The memory of fire, the stink of burning wood and burning flesh. Or, more rarely, happy dreams—chasing frogs in the marsh, picking flowers in the meadow, he and his hesitant shadow. He and Max, who Kirill had called the ghost boy.

Was his face really that blurry in Elias’s memory now? Had Elias buried the memory of him that deeply? He hadn’t thought so. But Kirill had sifted through his memories with the deft skill of a long-time prospector panning for gold, and Max’s face was the one thing he couldn’t see.

If there was enough emotion in the memory of Max for that, there was enough emotion in that memory to hold his thoughts in place.

All he had to do was let it in.

Kirill wanted his network. But his family had functioned in much the same way. Protecting each other, using their abilities for the good of the whole. Keeping the children safe and oblivious. That long-ago home—that was his network. That was the network he would give Kirill.

Kirill wanted safehouses. He wanted to know where Elias’s people hid. They had hidden in houses they had built themselves, in a wilderness of marshlands and overgrown meadows. The electricity had gone out with every storm. Sometimes it had taken weeks to come back on. They had eaten canned food and built fires for warmth, and huddled together under hand-sewn blankets, everyone all together in one house. to conserve heat.

They had lived like animals, Max had said later—We’ve been living like animals all our lives. Even before we had to run. I’m tired of it. Aren’t you tired? But Elias had never seen it that way. He hadn’t felt deprived,  except for brief sharp pangs on those trips into town, glimpsing children who treated going to the movies or out for ice cream as ordinary.

He had never felt embarrassed by his hand-sewn clothes, not like some of the others had. The kids in town had blue jeans that looked like the ones in the movies, and shirts with cartoon characters on them. But Elias had pants rugged enough that he could climb the tall tree at the center of the marsh and never tear them. He had picked out the fabric for his favorite shirt himself, and sat with Mama Charisse in her living room as she had sewn it without using her hands to move the needle and thread.

“Your network.” Kirill’s voice was distant now, faded, compared to the vibrancy of Elias’s memories. Even so, Elias felt the pull of the current guiding him closer to the present day, closer to Kirill’s voice.

Thinking about his home wasn’t enough.

So Elias unburied the dead.

Mama Charisse hadn’t been what the outside world would have called his real mother, the one whose body he had grown in and pushed his way out of, the one he had shared a house with when he wasn’t sleeping over at Max’s house. That hadn’t mattered to him. Every adult had been his mother or his father. Every child had been his sister or his brother. It confused him, in the books he read and the movies he watched and the families he saw in town, how small the families were, and how many walls they placed between each other.

 He had called his real mother by her name, the way he did with all the others—the adults had wanted that way, hadn’t wanted divisions based on blood. She had been Mama Jessie. She had smelled like oranges and sunlight and could make plants turn green in the middle of winter with just one touch. She had died screaming, like all the others, when their home had burned.

Max had wanted to go back to look for survivors. Elias had said no. He had said PERI could still be there, waiting for them to come back. And that might have been true. But it wasn’t the reason for Elias’s refusal. Elias hadn’t wanted to risk seeing the charred bodies of the dead.

He remembered Mama Jessie’s arms around him, the smell of her, the roughness of her hands. All the things he had buried for so many years, so he could sleep without nightmares. Those first few weeks after they had run, he hadn’t slept, because he had seen her dying every time he closed his eyes, her and all the rest. And if he didn’t sleep, he couldn’t take care of Max. He had buried the dead so he could tend to the living.

He pictured his father, Papa Graham, with his bushy beard and his long, long legs. Elias’s eyes had always been too serious, or so everyone had told him, but Papa Graham’s eyes had always been smiling. He smelled like the cigars he bought in town and smoked when he thought Mama Jessie wasn’t looking.

And then there was Max. The ghost boy.

They had been born the same week of the same year. The family had called them twins. Mama Kelly had called them photo negatives of each other, one with black hair and black eyes, the other with pale, pale eyes and hair so light it was almost the white of snow.

They had shared a crib as babies, on the days when their parents couldn’t get them to stop crying. Max had stopped crying when Elias was there to take care of him, or so the family legend went. Elias had stopped crying when he had Max to take care of.

They had talked in full sentences to each other before they said a word to anyone else. They had learned to crawl together, walked together, steadying each other with chubby hands firmly clasped together. They had been two halves of the same person. First twins, mirrors, photo negatives. Then, once they were old enough to explore, they were no longer mirrors but opposites, each of their differences perfectly complementing the other.

They had both been serious—too serious, Mama Kelly had said—but in different ways. Elias had been the protector, Max the one who needed protecting. Elias was the hard shell, Max the soft, defenseless creature inside.

The adults had shaken their heads over Max, wondering who he would be what he would do when he no longer had Elias to rely on. It hadn’t been until years later that Elias had realized their worries had been misplaced. They should have asked themselves what Elias would do when he no longer had someone to protect.

He would set out to protect the whole world—that was the answer. Or as much of it as he could reach.

Maybe what he had created hadn’t only been a response to Sammy’s death after all.

The adults hadn’t needed to worry about Max. Max had grown beyond Elias in good time. He had formed his own opinions, gained the strength and the conviction to make his own decisions. He had been the one to let go first, not Elias. It had been Elias who had tried to hold on. Elias, in the end, who had struggled to let go.

The memories of their last fight were the ones that came into his nightmare most frequently. But today, Elias unburied the deeper memories. Like wine or cheese, they had grown all the more potent from their years in the dark.

Like Elias urging Max to climb a tree after him. Elias didn’t shimmy up trees as a natural instinct, the way some of his more reckless brothers and sisters did. He had studied the tree at the center of the swamp for weeks, climbing up little by little and then back down again, a little further every day. Gauging its weaknesses, formulating his plan of attack. He had shared his acquired knowledge with Max, but Max preferred to stay on the ground.

Maybe Elias should have let him. But he had been a child, and he had wanted to share the view. And eventually, he had talked Max into it. Max had never been good at saying no to him, in those days. Elias hadn’t realized his mistake, not until he was safely on the ground again, staring up at a wide-eyed and terrified Max.

He’d had to call Papa Oleg in the end, and asked him to bring a ladder, like someone in a book calling the fire department for a cat caught up a tree. He had apologized to Max for not knowing how to get him down. That, in his mind, had been his failure—and an unforgivable one. It was his job to get Max out of any trouble he could get him into.

That early failure had done nothing to inoculate him against his more permanent failure later.

He lingered on the end of the memory, the feeling of his small arms around Max’s shaking body. After a moment, he realized the flow of memory was less like a rushing river now, and more like being immersed in a small and warm natural pool, out of the flow of the current.

The current had stopped. Without Kirill’s reminders, the sharpness of the emotion had faded.

Kirill must have noticed. Why hadn’t he said anything?

Elias let the memory fade. It drained away, leaving him out of breath from all his work digging up graves.

Kirill wasn’t sitting across from him anymore. He had his back against the wall. His eyes wide and desperate. In those eyes, Elias saw—only for a second—the eyes of a small boy trapped up a tree.

“A clever strategy.” Kirill’s voice was thin and thready. If it was part of a persona, Elias could figure out what.

“I can see you still aren’t ready to cooperate,” Kirill said in the same tone. “I may need to put you in a room with your son after all.”

The threat lacked sharpness. Kirill’s voice wobbled, an overcooked noodle where a knife should have been.

He stumbled out the door, leaving a startled Elias alone.

Elias had won a victory. He just wished he understood why.

---

Tagged: @cakeinthevoid @suspicious-whumping-egg

Ask to be added or removed from taglist.

[miltonlibassistantn1fan]

ROBOTS WITH CHRONIC ILLNESS. ROBOTS THAT NEED TO STAY HOOKED INTO THE GRID OR RLSE THEY SHUT DOWN IN A FEW MINUTES. ROBOTS WHO CAN'T TRAVEL BECAUSE THEYRE HOOKED INTO A BANK OF BATTERIES

ROBOTS WHO OPERATE WAY ABOVE HUMAN PROCESSING AND COGNITION SO THEY INTERRUPT AND ANSWER QUESTIONS BEFORE YOUVE ASKED THEM

DO YOU HEAR ME CA. YOU HEAR ME....

[cozylittleartblog]

Columbo and the Knight (1984)

put me in the universe where Columbo ran through the 1980s and had a crossover episode with Knight Rider. I think they deserved it, and I am not just saying that because they're my two favorite Old Shows. @telebeast wrote a little fanfic blurb about it and I HAD to visualize it into a comic (which is also the longest comic I have finished thus far at five pages...), so writing credit goes to them.

Autism W!

[novicedraws]

I'm so normal about them

[anna-scribbles]

calling all miraculous fans who watched anime in middle school

PLEASE tell me what you think adrien’s favorite anime is. bonus points for characters you think he would relate to / want to be friends with

[furious-blueberry0]

The Force does not actually make the future, it does not build it, it does not write it, it just predicts it.

The Force looks at the actions of the living beings that live in the Galaxy, and predicts what some of those choices are going to lead to in the end.

Even considering Seers, the Force probably didn't just decide "Hey! You're going to see everything I do!" it's just good (or bad) luck that a poor soul was born more in contact with the Force than others, and so could see all the predictions the Force made better than others!!

This is why a vision is never going to be true 100% of the time, because it is a future not wirtten in stone, it can be changed, sometimes the change is accidental or sometimes it's desired, but again, it happens because of the actions of the individuals! Sometimes it does not even change! Because the Force predicted that someone would know of that future, and would do exactly the actions that were going to lead to that end, and there was nothing they could do!

The Force is not some some entity who decides what to do on its own, it's a field that binds the galaxy together, everything it does is not part of any plan, it just makes it happen based on the actions of the individuals of the galaxy.

A person is not just a pawn in the grand scheme of things, it is their choices that are going to determine their future, not a pre-existing future.

What I'm trying to say is, I hate the idea of the Force being an actual entity (or worse, similiar to the Christian God) but it's just something doing its job by keeping all the galaxy alive.

[windmills123]

on my puter :3

[omnicom]

Pokeshipping Week 2024

Day 4: Kokuhaku Tegami (JP Love Confession Letter)

There was a notable bit of editing I had to do when I went from sketching to lineart for this one. A bit of anatomical re-structuring, you could say. 😅 Chalk it up to poor planning, I guess.

Summer vacation is just around the corner, and Misty is choosing now to confess her feelings?? How can she leave things hanging for a whole month?? Here's hoping no one's hearts give out in the interim...

Art © Crumpled-Hakui

Like what you see? Want art like this of your own? Check out my art commission post here and send me an email or private message! Thanks for stopping by!

[r0semultiverse]

Dan Da Dan mangaka is a homestuck fan

My partner was looking up the Dandadan manga just for fun or whatever and sent the magazine/book page that looks a bit different in the anime and immediately I felt an eerie sense of familiarity...

Obama going into space on a special mission remind anyone else of a certain piece of media?

At first I was like surely Dandandan has been out for some time before getting an anime adaptation; so, it's probably just coincidence... right?

Oh how wrong I was... truly, we can never escape it. We cannot fight the Homestuck.

[melit0n]

Nobody talk to me

📸: metalmusemedia on insta

[whump-me]

Obscure: Chapter 20

Chapter 20 of Obscure, novel-length interrogation whump about a rebel leader who can erase memories with a thought, an interrogator who can see inside his subjects’ minds… and the connection they share that neither of them suspects.

Masterpost | the Mind Games universe | Read the completed novel on Patreon

---

Kirill

Elias was grieving. Kirill had known it before he had walked into the room. The memories were a thick fog, rich with color and emotion, the antithesis of the obscuring fog Kirill had lived in for so long.

The images were familiar, the same ones he had seen over and over in the interrogation room. The difference now was that Elias was no longer trying to hold them back.

Kieran could have pushed the memories away until they were nothing more than static. It would have made it easier to focus on the Elias of the present moment, who currently wavered in his vision like the shimmer of pavement on a hot day.

But he didn’t shove the memories back. Too many of them were his, after all. He would take this last chance to savor them. Even the worst ones.

He sat on the bed next to Elias. Elias immediately jerked as if an electric current had run between them. His face grew tight with pain. The memories turned from grief to anger, all clenched fists and raised voices and tightness in his chest.

Kirill deserved that. That and more.

“Do you remember when I got stuck up the tree?” he asked.

“You know I do. You’re the one who plucked the memory out of my head.” Elias’s tone was dismissive. He might as well have been talking to a stranger.

 “That’s not how it works. Your subconscious shows the memory. I didn’t know what was there until you showed me.” But that wasn’t what Kirill was here to say. “Do you remember what you did before Papa Oleg got there?”

“I remember that I failed,” said Elias. “I couldn’t get you down.”

“You talked to me,” said Kirill. “You told me it would be okay until I believed you. I was shaking so hard I thought I would fall out of that tree and break my back. You calmed me down.”

The torrent of angry memories kept coming. “What does it matter?”

“I wish I could comfort you like that now.”

Anger became white-hot fury, his heart compressing in his chest like coal turning to diamond, words screamed in anger that couldn’t be taken back. “You had the chance to make a choice, and you did. Forgive me if I don’t particularly care whether you’re here to make me feel better before your bosses drag me downstairs to be cut open.”

At first, Kirill thought Elias was remembering the cluster of cabins in the forest. Then he realized the memories were his own. He knew because he could see the PERI team that had shown up when he had left. Elias had never seen that team.

Kirill hadn’t seen what the team had done. But he knew the cabins were gone.

Home was gone.

The home he had shared with Elias. The home Elias had been to him.

It could never be recaptured. He had been a fool to think otherwise.

“The cameras are off,” Kirill said, with a nod up at the ceiling.

Elias’s face was expressionless. “I’m not interested in reminiscing about childhood.” He held his hand out. “You may as well take me downstairs to the labs.”

“That’s not what I’m here for.”

“I heard what you said to my son,” said Elias, “but you were wrong. You won’t convince me to change my mind.”

“I know,” said Kirill. “That’s not what I’m really here for.” He shifted uneasily on the bed. The mattress was nearly as hard as the chair in the interrogation room. “I have a question for you. Or… call it a proposal. Please… I know you won’t want to, but hear me out.”

Elias said nothing.

“If you ever make it out…” He swallowed. “I’d like you to consider working together to rebuild your organization.”

Elias burst out laughing.

Kirill had never heard the man laugh before. Not since he had been Max. At the jarring break in Elias’s solemn demeanor, Kirill jerked to attention. His hands leapt up onto his lap like kittens who had heard a clap of thunder. The pale hairs on his arms stood on end.

Elias’s mouth was twisted in a parody of mirth, but his eyes were cold.

“I’m not sure which part is funnier,” said Elias when he had recovered control of himself. “That you think I would trust you—you, of all people—or that you think there’s a chance I’ll ever make it out.”

“I know you wouldn’t find it easy to trust me,” said Kirill.

“You tortured my son in front of me. You used the information I gave you to destroy the very network you’re offering to help me rebuild.” Elias’s lips stretched further in a joyless smile. The expression made him look like a rotting corpse, like the flesh was peeling back from his skull in a time-lapse. “But by all means, yes, I’ll trust you to help rebuild what you destroyed.”

“PERI offered you a job,” said Kirill. “After you’ve spent fifteen years undermining them and poaching their talent.”

“Rescuing children, you mean.”

“They’re extending the same amount of trust to you as I’m asking you to show me,” said Kirill.

“And they shouldn’t be. If I were a little less honest—or maybe just a little less tired—I would take the offer and do everything I could to work against them from the inside, for as long as I could until I was discovered. What would be the downside? I’m ready to die anyway.” His shoulders jerked upward in a spasmodic shrug. They sank, and sagged, and the rest of him sagged with them. “But I don’t have it in me to do that. I have very little left in me. You took it all.”

“People can change how they see the world,” said Kirill. “They can change their mind about who they want to work for, and what they want to work for. About what matters to them.” He paused. “About who they are.”

He regretted the last part as soon as he said it. If Elias repeated his earlier question, if he asked Kirill who he was, Kirill was just as unprepared to answer as he had been back in the interrogation room.

But he should have known Elias wouldn’t ask. He should have known Elias didn’t care anymore.

“I know,” Elias said. “I saw it happen thirty years ago.”

“I’m ready to change again,” said Kirill.

He waited for Elias to ask why he was finally ready to make the choice Elias had demanded. Because for this, at least, he had an answer.

He was ready because when he had walked away from the cabin, he had finally seen what he really wanted. He had seen what mattered to him when he couldn’t be what was necessary. When there was no one to desire anything from him but the trees.

He wanted home.

He wanted the home that had been burned in front of him.

He wanted the home he had given up when he had let go of Elias’s hand.

He wanted his best friend back, the other half of his soul. Even if it couldn’t be the way it was. Even if he had to make his own decisions now.

He wanted not to be alone anymore. Because he had never realized, until that moment in the woods, that he had always been alone. For everyone he had ever known since leaving Elias, he had been a mirror, and a mirror didn’t feel companionship. A mirror felt nothing. A mirror was only a means for someone else to feel something.

He didn’t know what else he wanted. And he couldn’t begin to answer the question of who he was. But it was a start. It was enough for him to throw away everything he had attained over the past thirty years. That had to be worth something.

But Elias didn’t ask the question. Elias said nothing at all.

He looked into Elias’s eyes, and saw nothing but an opaque barrier. His old friend was in there somewhere, he knew. But all Kirill saw was a stranger. Maybe because it had been too long. Or maybe because that was all Elias wanted him to see.

Looking into Elias’s eyes, he knew it was too late.

It had been too long.

He had gone too far.

Elias would never trust him. Elias should never trust him.

“Let’s not argue about it,” said Elias. He sagged backward against the wall, like he couldn’t hold himself up anymore. “There’s no point. Even if I were stupid enough to trust you, what you’re talking about will never happen, because I won’t make it out of here. My son made his offer, and I made my choice. I’m going down to the labs—and after fifteen years of fighting PERI, I know exactly how unlikely it is for anyone to make it out of there, alive or otherwise.”

Kirill said nothing. He looked away.

There was nothing he could say. Because he knew, with utter certainty, that Elias was wrong. And he couldn’t admit that aloud.

Elias would escape before the night was out. Before anyone came to take Elias to the labs, the power in this wing of the building would go out, and Elias’s door—and Elias’s alone—would automatically open. The hallway would be empty for ten minutes. Long enough for Elias to get a head start on his escape, if he was resourceful. And Elias had evaded PERI for fifteen years. He was resourceful.

He couldn’t say any of that. If Elias knew the escape opportunity came from Kirill, he wouldn’t trust it when it appeared. He needed Elias to trust it. He needed Elias to take it.

So he stayed silent.

“No more halfhearted attempts at comfort?” Elias asked, with a cool raise of his eyebrows. “Have you figured out that it’s pointless, or are you simply tired of pretending to care?”

Elias had mistaken Kirill’s silence for a lack of emotion. There was nothing Kirill could say to the contrary without giving away the truth—or else coming across as offering an empty protest. Silence was safest, so Kirill chose it once again.

“I shouldn’t have worried about what I might have done to you by taking too many of your memories,” said Elias. “Obviously, those memories didn’t make as much of a difference as I thought. If they had, giving them back would have turned you human again. You would be feeling something right now about what was going to happen to me.”

Kirill said nothing.

“Do you know what they do in the labs?” Elias challenged.

“I know.” He paused. “But if you make it out—”

“If I make it out, I’ll remember what you did,” said Elias. “What you did to me, and to everyone who trusted me, and to my son. If that unlikely event ever happens, you should hope our paths never cross again.”

Then, with his mouth slightly open as if he had been about to say something else, Elias paused. A slight frown came across his face as he eyed Kirill. Kirill fought the urge to check his collar for crookedness, to run his tongue over his teeth to check for something caught there.

“What is it?” asked Kirill.

“No mask,” said Elias. “You’re not trying to be anyone this time. That might be a first.”

Kirill almost said it wasn’t the first time. He hadn’t put on any of his personas when he had gone into that room to hurt Elias’s son. They had been beyond that at that point. But before he could speak, he realized he was wrong. He had still been trying to be what PERI needed.

Now he was beyond that, as well.

He wasn’t even trying to be what Elias needed from him. He knew that was a lost cause.

There was no sense in repeating what he had already said about wanting to change. Elias had already shown he wouldn’t believe him—and it was for the best, anyway. It would make the final part of his plan that much easier.

Kirill slipped on the ill-fitting persona for Elias for the last time. He lifted his chin and gave Elias a cruel smile. Acting didn’t come as effortlessly to him as it once had, but he had practiced cruelty enough that those expressions were stored in his bones.

“Why would I?” he asked. “I’ve already got what I need from you.”

The steady flow of memories, which had never stopped since he had set foot in the room, turned angry again. Good.

“And now that you have what you need from me,” said Elias, his voice filled with the same steady calm Kirill had grown used to hearing in the interrogation room, “you can’t threaten my son anymore. Your superiors wouldn’t approve of you taking revenge on one of their resources, now that you won’t get anything for it.”

“What do you mean?” Kirill asked, even though he already knew. “What would I want revenge for?”

His heart sped up in anticipation. It was working. He might not have his old acting abilities back, but he still knew how to evoke emotion.

“For this,” Elias said.

He held up his wrists, dotted red with electrical burns. The metal bracelet was gone. Kirill had removed it when Elias had given him everything.

Elias met his eyes.

Kirill made a token attempt to look away. Even if it had been a real attempt, he didn’t think he could have managed it. The bond between them was too strong. Elias slipped into his mind quickly and easily, and just like that, the fog took him.

His last clear thought was of relief.

He opened his eyes. He didn’t remember when he had closed them.

He didn’t remember… anything.

He was in a small room. Maybe twice the size of his old room from when he had first come here. When had he come here? Why had he come here? He didn’t… he didn’t remember.

But he remembered his work. He knew who he was, and what he was here to do. He clung to that like a lifeline as thick white fog pressed in on him.

A man stood in front of him, watching him with dark eyes that held immeasurable sorrow. Memories rolled off the man, filled with people Kirill didn’t recognize. Every person had a blurry smear where their face should have been.

“Where… where am I?” Kirill asked.

“You must have gotten turned around,” the man said. He sounded like he was about to cry. “I don’t know you.”

---

Tagged: @cakeinthevoid @suspicious-whumping-egg

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[miltonlibassistantn1fan]

I wonder if angels would fall in love with spacecraft and satellites. I wonder if they'd pine for them from afar while flying through space. I wonder if they'd follow satellites we don't retrieve out into deep space.

I wonder if they'd sing with the satellites that continue to transmit to an Earth that can no longer hear them.

I wonder if they'd cry and wail when the satellite goes silent and beg to hear its voice again. They'd want to touch the side so badly but fear burning a hole inside.

They'd follow the corpse around for centuries, singing and hoping one day it would sing again to them.

Gently

Oh so gently.

They'd rip a piece of their holy light out of their chest and stuff it in a pin sized burnt hole in the satellite near important capacitors. Near the battery. Near cables that had broken from radiation and dust.

They'd hover their hands over the beautiful shining solar panels. They'd pray and cry begging them to wake again. To sing again.

Eventually they'd wake. They'd embrace, wing against wing and sing into the void, burning like a binary star.

[eparch]

Isgarren is an Idealist (and Mabon is a Cynic)

This was originally going to be part of a longer post I'm working on, but I decided it warranted being its own.

And yes I know the title sounds insane! But in the grand scheme of SotO's narrative, Isgarren is an idealist at heart wearing a cynic's armor, and Mabon is a cynic at heart wearing an idealist's mask.

And Isgarren is an idealist because you kind of have to be one to dedicate yourself to 10,000 years of protecting a world that doesn't even know you exist.

And one of the only things we know about him from before his ascension was that he tried to go help the mursaat fight Zhaitan anyway even after Sidony decided against helping them. Most of what he calls his mistakes were also born from his attempts to help others - taking in Eparch and ascending Waiting Sorrow being the biggest examples. And still he keeps helping others. Still, no matter how many times his attempts to better the world led to another "mistake", led to his own exile from his kin, led to the deaths of people he loved, Isgarren still kept doing it because he believed in doing good no matter what.

He figured out at some point that the Elder Dragons were vital to Tyria's magical ecosystem, so he turned his efforts to fight for the good of Tyria outward, especially once Eparch gave him reason to think all kryptis were threats. He wasn't going to step in with the Elder Dragon wars until it literally threatened the destruction of all Tyria not because he didn't care, but because he had faith in us.

Keep in mind that in the personal story, the Commander and Trahearne successfully united the world to fight Zhaitan. Isgarren had seen this before. He saw Sidony unite all the other elder races to fight Zhaitan, only for them to suddenly betray each other and leave the mursaat and Forgotten to die on their own. The Pact succeeded where the elder races failed. Why wouldn't he believe in the strength of mortals at that point?

Not to overuse and refer back to my favorite conversation in SotO too often, but Isgarren doesn't save farms not because he doesn't care, he doesn't save the farm because he knows the Commander will be there to have his back and do it while he takes care of the dragon minion.

Isgarren, for all his faults and his grumpy and bitter attitude, is an idealist.

Mabon called him naive for a reason. He even calls his own choices naive.

And speaking of Mabon...he's a cynic at heart.

This might seem contradictory to the way he is characterized as an optimistic and positive force among the Wizard's Court and for the Astral Ward (and he is), moreso than Isgarren being a hidden idealist under his sour armor, but consider that Mabon's entire character rides on his idea of atonement.

In his journal from shortly after his ascension, he doesn't remember what he was like before it. He just remembers that his own people are cruel and evil. He assumes Isgarren is avoiding him because he's afraid of him as a violent mursaat and never truly trusted him at all (when this could just as likely be because Isgarren is feeling guilty of the ascension wiping Mabon's memories, but that's just me speculating). He assumes that he must have been just like all other mursaat and he must have been a terrible person himself. So he must atone. And atone he does for 10,000 years.

Isgarren tells you, when you ask him about Mabon, that Mabon was not like other mursaat when they first met.

In SotO, Mabon's arc starts shortly before we meet him. Asthenes is attacking him mentally the whole time, but he puts on his outward mask of idealism and strength to save Dagda and Lyhr and to lead the Astral Ward while Isgarren is missing.

Knowing the Wizards, knowing the Commander, wouldn't we have found some way to save him too? If we knew? If we had realized? Isn't that what the Wizards and the Commander do? Wouldn't we have just made it possible to save Dagda, Lyhr, and Mabon?

Mabon didn't want to die, but he felt at that point "there is no other way this can end" and he outright asks us not to hesitate "when the hour arrives." He doesn't bother to ask for help with his own possession because he thinks he's beyond saving, and he needs to save the others first.

He also notably meddles with Tyrians more than Isgarren does. Many of the Astral Ward's recruits are his specifically. He travels to Tyria frequently to meet people and experience the world "on the ground", so to speak. Compare this to the historical mursaat modus of sitting back and manipulating an entire society unseen.

Even when it's someone Isgarren (and Uenno) recruits like Frode, it's not until Mabon involves himself that they heal and find their place in the Astral Ward.

That's not to say he didn't believe in mortals at all, just that as part of his trying to be a better person than he believed himself to be, he ended up taking it upon himself to help those he felt no one else would.

Finally, it's notable to me that both Isgarren and Mabon attempt to distance themselves from their races in some manner, and they both go about it in very different ways.

Isgarren made himself blue so he might be mistaken for a djinn at first glance but he still takes great pride in being a Seer. He wants to be seen as part of the rest of Tyria despite sitting above it, but will happily answer your questions about Seers.

Mabon hides his wings to be less threatening, but he's still very obviously a mursaat at first glance. He's still other from the rest of Tyria, but he distances himself from the other mursaat so much that he considers his own race extinct with Lazarus's death.

And somehow, it's so very fitting that these two found each other and created the Wizard's Court together.

[middle-earth-mythopoeia]

Yes, there are gay characters in Tolkien’s books

There seems to be an entrenched view among Tolkien fans that Tolkien did not write any gay characters, and that by interpreting any of his characters as gay you are going against what he would have wanted. Homophobes obviously believe this very strongly, and have always been hostile towards queer fans and queer interpretations of Tolkien’s works. Many members of the LGBTQ community also believe that they’re contradicting canon when they interpret Tolkien’s characters as gay—the only difference is they don’t mind doing so.

But is it so against canon to interpret any of Tolkien’s characters as gay? The assumption that Tolkien did not write gay characters hinges on his Catholicism, but I’m going to explain why this is flimsy reasoning.

First, it should be noted that Tolkien didn’t leave any writings expressing his views on homosexuality, so there is no evidence one way or another. But it seems relevant that Tolkien was good friends with W.H. Auden and corresponded with him over multiple decades. They first met when Auden listened to one of Tolkien’s lectures at Oxford and was inspired to learn Anglo-Saxon. Auden loved Tolkien’s poetry and prose and defended LOTR from critics at a time when it was seen as an unserious work in an unserious genre. Did Tolkien know Auden was gay? We don’t know for sure. But there’s at least a chance that he did: the secret of Auden’s homosexuality is one he “loosely kept”, according to an article in the Guardian.

So, Tolkien was friends with a gay man whom he may or may not have known was gay. But are there gay characters in Tolkien’s books? Unfortunately for the homophobes, even if you believe that Tolkien opposed homosexuality on principle, that still doesn’t mean no one in Middle-earth is gay. Actually, no one in Middle-earth is Catholic. I mean that literally, in the sense that Catholicism does not exist in the time period Tolkien wrote about, but I also mean it in the sense that Tolkien’s characters need not adhere to the tenets of his religion, even if it’s not named. Why would they?

It shouldn’t be controversial or surprising to point out that writers can, and often do, write characters that live very different lives from their own. Needless to say, Tolkien didn’t condone the actions of the antagonists of his work, but what about the protagonists? Are we to believe that all of them act in an unfailingly Catholic way at all times? In Laws and Customs of the Eldar, it is strongly implied that (especially in their younger years) Elves do have sex for pleasure and not just to beget children, something that is discouraged by Catholicism. That’s just one example.

(Please note that I’m not arguing that Tolkien’s Catholicism had no influence on his writings, because he explicitly said that it did. I’m saying that Tolkien’s characters themselves are not Catholic and do not necessarily behave like Catholics. So even if you think that all Catholics believe homosexuality is wrong, it has no bearing on Tolkien’s stories.)

Another line of reasoning goes that homosexuality is too taboo for Tolkien—but I have to wonder if people who believe this have read his books at all. The Silmarillion is full of taboo subjects. Túrin and Niënor marry, not knowing they are brother and sister; they find out the truth, and that she is pregnant, and they both commit suicide. Eöl’s relationship with Aredhel is one that, even if it didn’t start out as controlling and abusive—although I suspect it did—it clearly ended up that way, and depending on your interpretation of the text, he may have raped her. Celegorm attempts to force Lúthien to marry him, which would also involve rape, and there is a passage that implies that Morgoth also intends to rape Lúthien. Neither incest, rape or abuse are too taboo for Tolkien—neither are suicide, torture or mass murder, as the rest of the Silmarillion shows.

I don’t want anyone to take this in bad faith: I’m not saying that being gay is comparable to incest, rape or abuse, and I’m part of the LGBTQ community myself. What I am saying is that Tolkien clearly did not shy away from certain subjects, including sexual taboos, simply because they’re taboo. If you’re going to argue that none of Tolkien’s characters are queer because it wasn’t accepted at the time, that’s very unconvincing given the other subject matter in his books.

There is another reason why I think there are gay characters in Middle-earth, and it has to do with Tolkien’s inspirations. It’s well understood by Tolkien fans that you can see echoes of other mythologies in Tolkien’s works. But which ones? When Lúthien brings Beren back from the Halls of Mandos, there are obvious parallels with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice—though the genders are reversed, and Lúthien succeeds where Orpheus did not. There are parallels between Túrin and Kullervo. There are numerous examples of this kind of thing throughout the Silmarillion and LOTR. Even the name Middle-earth clearly has its roots in the Norse name Midgard. There are some influences that Tolkien explicitly acknowledged, like the Kalevala and the Völuspá, and some that Tolkien scholars have only theorized about. While there are some scholarly articles on Tolkien and the Aeneid, one thing I have never seen anyone discuss is the parallel between Beleg’s death and the story of Nisus and Euryalus.

In the Aeneid, Nisus and Euryalus are a pair of friends and lovers who are fighting for Aeneas in Latium. Nisus, the older of the two men, is said to be a skilled javelin-thrower and archer. Nisus proposes a night raid on an enemy camp, and Euryalus insists on going with him. During the raid they kill many men in their sleep, collecting some of their armor as loot, as was customary. But when they leave the camp, the glint of light on a helmet taken by Euryalus is seen by a group of enemy horsemen, who capture and kill him before Nisus can stop them. Nisus is distraught and kills many of them in retaliation, ultimately dying beside his lover’s body. (In some versions, it’s a stolen belt, not a helm—but the constant motif is the glint of light that reveals Euryalus to the enemy.)

There are so many similarities with Beleg and Túrin that it cannot be a coincidence. Beleg and Túrin also fight side by side, first on the marches of Doriath and later when Túrin is an outlaw. They are very loyal to each other, and clearly love each other. Like Nisus, Beleg is known to be a great archer. Meanwhile, although it does not feature in Beleg’s death scene, Túrin is associated with a particularly significant helm. There are differences too: Túrin’s captivity is the reason for Beleg’s raid on the Orc-camp, whereas Euryalus is captured after the raid; both Nisus and Euryalus are slain one after the other, whereas only Beleg dies in the raid on the Orc-camp. But there is still the overarching parallel of the night raid, in which the enemy guards are killed silently in their sleep; the raid’s connection with an attempted rescue; the chance moment that leads to the tragic death; the imagery of the flash of light; and the distraught reaction of Nisus and Túrin when they see that Euryalus and Beleg are dead. Tolkien read the Aeneid as a student and so would have been familiar with its contents.

There is also the fact that in some versions of the story Túrin kisses Beleg on the mouth in this scene. Although kissing someone on the mouth has not always been a romantic gesture in all cultures and time periods, the clear parallels to the scene in the Aeneid lead me to think that it is in this case. Whether you see the relationship between Túrin and Beleg as romantic is up to you—all that I’m trying to do is show that it’s a legitimate interpretation.

Ultimately, like I wrote here, I don’t think you need permission from anyone in order to interpret Tolkien’s stories the way you want to. If you want to interpret one of his characters as gay, you don’t need to cite obscure plotlines from the Aeneid to justify it. But I do take issue with the idea—which is so pervasive in the fandom—that Tolkien’s stories must not have gay, or bisexual, or trans people in them, and that any interpretations to that effect are against canon. At the end of the day, Middle-earth is supposed to be our world, and guess what? Queer people exist.

[lasagna-with-teeth]

Thinking about making a priest watch porn for the first time and he's all shy and flustered, he keeps trying to look away and avoid the sinful thoughts - but he keeps glancing back at the screen, unable to resist the temptation. <3

[invinciblerodent]

Hitting the "not interested in this post" button over people's endless navel-gaze-y catastrophizing about how "discouraged" and "critical" they're feeling over Veilguard should be an Olympic sport, and brother, I'd bring home the gold

(thank you for the plethora of undodgeable, untagged spoilers btw, bunch of terminally pessimistic dicks)