#never forget that we were built for survival. every little thing you do to build that upward momentum makes a big difference.

[mechatronophilia]

true, there is control in self destruction. remember that we're capable of so much more.

[sebastianswallows]

The Little Death — 10. Something more than immediate joy

— PAIRING: Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen x Bene Gesserit!Reader

— SYNOPSIS: A Bene Gesserit gets left behind in the Arrakeen palace. When Feyd becomes the Planetary Governor, he finds her there in hiding. The Harkonnens don't traditionally keep them as truthsayers or concubines like other Houses do, but Feyd might have a use for her. After all, he's never had a Bene Gesserit of his own before.

— WARNINGS: none

— WORDCOUNT: 2k

— TAGLIST: @elf-punk @lowlyloved @pomtherine @slytherins-heir @babyofneptune @localravenclaw @missbingu @wo-ming-bai @torossosebs

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfilment of our designs. — Leadership Secrets of the Bene Gesserit

When she was done tending to Feyd she tried to start her morning but found she hardly could. Still a little dizzy after the night before, and weak and sore, she thought to take a shower but remembered that they were on Arrakis. She’d have a better chance of trying to bathe in gold. Water was more available in the palace than among the natives, even in Arrakeen, but they were all subject to restrictions. All of them except the ruling class. Feyd offered to let her wash with him when he saw how dour and upset she was as she scrubbed her body clean with a rough cloth — a suggestion he made with ample delight — but she wasn’t ready to be so close to him again.

“Are you sure?” he asked, cocking a smooth brow.

“Yes, thank you,” she muttered, feeling bitter that he even offered. She would not find herself in his debt, not for physical comforts at least.

Her mind was still reeling from his viciousness and love throughout the morning. He had been merciless in taking her, and to her shame, he noticed how much she enjoyed it by the end. She was never supposed to enjoy it… At least that wasn’t her plan. It terrified her to think that maybe it was his. And then, as if she hadn’t been confused enough, he’d melted before her like a globe of snow when she sat in his lap to paint his teeth all black. She was quite relieved when he left her for the day, but not before placing a chaste kiss on her forehead. His lips felt softer than she thought they should.

Meditation was ruined as well. All her thoughts kept turning to him, to herself, to what they’d done together, to how she submitted. It was all going according to her plan for survival — he liked her and he seemed to like her more and more each day. She should have been happy because with each humiliation she was closer to getting off that planet, maybe even rejoining her Sisters. So why wasn’t she happy…? Why wasn’t she even satisfied with herself and instead felt a disappointment? Every way she turned her thoughts she met a wall built by herself and which she was too scared to pull back down. It was a decision her mind almost made for her that she should wander off outside the palace and into Arrakeen. She knew the lay of the city and could navigate it even blind if need be, even though she hadn’t been there more than a dozen times throughout her stay. I have to be somewhere that doesn’t remind me of him, she thought, justifying it to herself.

The streets of Arrakeen had the quality of being loud and quiet all at once. The stilted Fremen speech had adapted among the city dwellers to something more descriptive, more precise, bordering on rude and yet eminently practical. Low voices carried far between those square stone buildings and the noise of animals and pottery filled in all the empty spaces. The market drew her in by being the noisiest, perfect for forgetting and losing herself in a crowd. With her black robes and the veil around her head, she could pass through unseen, without drawing any glances. Raw artistry surrounded her from every side, simple things with quite elaborate designs, ordinary objects vastly different from anything found now within the Harkonnen-held palace but frail, and temporary, and weak. Nothing caught her eye, but nothing had to. She wasn’t there to buy. But she stopped when something glinted on a seller’s table that snagged on her memory and pulled her in. As she approached, a shadow swathed in black among a sea of grey and brown, she realised why the little broken items were so familiar to her. They were scraps from when the Atreides were there. Leftovers picked up after the sacking… Stolen, perhaps, but certainly with no owner now.

“What does the lady want?” the merchant asked in his weak, raspy voice. Only his eyes were visible, bright blue from between threadbare rags.

“Nothing,” she said, still looking at his wares.

“Cheap,” he said. “One Solari for ten.”

“No, thank you.”

“Twenty.”

“I don’t barter,” she said, shocking him into silence.

Still, she stayed and looked, her eyes traversing the items on their own as if her mind had her own design. Memories of her past life came to her just from the gentle glint of a spoon, its handle beautifully ornate with little silver waves, or a hair comb with two teeth missing, or a half-filled bottle of perfume. She wondered if she’d ever see such things again, items small and beautiful just for beauty’s sake, bright and coloured and loved. She was sick already of Harkonnen black... But these thoughts were unworthy of a Bene Gesserit, and she pulled herself away before the merchant could tempt her into spending her paltry sum of money on a useless thing. And she was in mid-step when she noticed from the corner of her eye a square and greenish thing that had often appeared in her nightmares as a girl. She stopped, head turned toward it to confirm what she was seeing, and remained transfixed.

It was difficult to barter its price down once the merchant saw her interest, and she was reluctant to use the Voice over so small a thing, but she bought it in the end for a fraction of what it was worth, even though it missed its poisoned needle. It was a Gom Jabbar, or more specifically the box that went with one. Impossible to say if it belonged to the ladies Jessica or Margot or to someone else, but it was hers now, and she walked back to the palace with a new spring in her step.

Feyd had asked for one of these at their first meeting, and as she got to know him she learned just how much he enjoyed pain. Their first night together with her between his legs came back as a dizzying flash in her mind and made her blush. She could return to that again now, return to that sense of power over him — and make him happy too. A part of her was also privately excited to see just how he would react. How long he’d last.

She hid herself in some small room upon arriving, far away from the shouting and the crying that came along with the Harkonnen household. And there in dark and silence she took it out, placed her hand in it, and felt the still familiar burn. She had to try it out before she presented it to him. Find out if it worked. Find out if it hurt just as badly as it used to. This is just what he needs, she thought, and perhaps what I need too. The agony ran up her arm, singing her nerves, setting her skin on fire, and settled like a swarm of butterflies at the back of her head. Her body sang with the instinct to pull her hand away — and she could, she could at any time. There was no Gom Jabbar at her neck, no Reverend Mother there. But there was something about knowing that it wasn’t real, something about knowing that she was safe while doing it that made her addicted to the feeling. Her eyes stung, her heart stuttered, and a cry fought its way out of her throat. It was decadent, being able to cry out with no one there to hear it…

When she greeted Feyd that evening in his quarters, he paused at the sight of her. The expression on his face gave her perverted joy.

“Hello,” he greeted gently, slowly letting the doors behind him close. “Good day?”

“You can say that…”

“You’re smiling. Glowing, even…”

She sat upon the windowsill, leaning in a sapless pose against the wall, and watched him as he watched her while he moved across the room. He took his blades out first and placed them on the table, as he often did, and started to undo his armour.

“Let me help you,” she said.

“I thought that sort of thing was beneath you,” he murmured as she came close.

She smiled as she began to pull the straps away, first at his arms and then his chest and then around his waist.

“I only do it,” she whispered, “because I want to.”

“And why do you want to?”

“Do you check your spice for the perfect shade of orange?”

“I have it checked for poison.”

“No you don’t,” she laughed.

“No, I don’t, but perhaps I should.”

She pulled his armour away, smiling — because she knew he was more delighted than suspicious.

“Sit on the bed,” she said softly, brushing a hand across his naked shoulder. “I have a gift for you.”

He seemed to choke on hearing that and a thought like a cloud passed over his mind. She wondered if he had any bad associations with gifts — because he seemed to — but she was in far too good a mood to worry about that now. Feyd listened to her and sat down, and waited with a knot in his throat for her to come back to him in her veil of vaporous black. She didn’t show him what she had until she was right in front of him, kneeling, with the little thing she had hidden in a drawer by the bed.

“You asked me for something on the day we met. Something I can give to you now. Something I think you deserve…”

“You’re awfully vague for someone so happy,” he said archly, leaning back on his strong arms. “Well? What is it?”

“If you’ll be petulant, you’ll get nothing.”

“You better give it to me before I turn petulant, then.”

“Incorrigible…” she muttered.

Feyd didn’t seem too sure he would enjoy her gift until she unfolded the towel she’d hidden it in and revealed the small metal box. He recognised it immediately and his face turned from a frown to a smile to a look of wonder.

“I thought you said —”

“I only found it today. Left by the Atreides, I believe.”

She tilted her head slightly as she looked up at him. He was like a child getting a long-desired birthday present, and she couldn’t help but want to coddle him. And what a dour present it was… To anyone other than a Harkonnen it would’ve been an insult, even an ill omen, or at least exceedingly strange. Not to Feyd though. He reached out for it, his pale hand suspended in the air for just a moment, then pulled away.

“Does it still work?”

“It does.”

“How do you know?” he asked, then paused to look into her eyes. “You tried it,” he noted with a grin. “Did you enjoy it?”

“Not as much as you seem to,” she smirked. “In fact, not much at all. It brings back… uneasy memories.”

“We’ll make new memories together, then.”

How sweet he is, she thought, when he gets what he wants.

She placed it on the bed beside him with her hand above and looked into his eyes. He’d done it before. He knew what followed. He swallowed the knot in his throat and took in deep breaths, steeling himself the way he would before a fight in the arena.

“Do you want to put your hand inside it?” she whispered.

Feyd kept his gaze fixed on the little thing as if he expected a scorpion to crawl out of its mouth. If he were capable of it, he would have blushed.

“How long do I have to keep it inside?” he asked in a rough low voice.

She reached into her dress again, moving as slowly as a snake, and then, in a motion that was deceivingly calm as if she did it every night, she took out a slender blade.

“As long as you can,” she said, holding the edge against his stomach. “That’s the game.”

Feyd’s eyes moved to the knife against his skin and then he looked at her and giggled. He placed his hand in the box and licked his lips, his pale eyes staring her down from above.

[kohakhearts]

so two weeks ago my kneecap spontaneously dislocated. no one really knows whats up with that. i get raised eyebrows and “but what did you do”s every time someone sees my splinted leg and asks what happened. so the orthopedist says this stays on for six weeks. then, you can do physiotherapy and we’ll hope this never happens again.

ok, great. so the good news is i CAN put weight on it. the doctor in the hospital gives me a pair of crutches, smiles at me like it’s not 6am and i haven’t been sitting in the er all night, says Just In Case. that’s great too.

the bad news?

i live on the third floor of a building with no elevator.

the building i work in has three floors and one elevator on the opposite side from where we’re located, which can only be accessed with a special key anyway. oh, and there’s construction going on this summer - so actually, the elevator isn’t even going to be accessible. plus, it doesn’t go to the third floor anyway, which is where my classroom is, at the end of the hallway.

that’s fine, though. i take public transit to and from work every day. at least the metro stations have elevators, right? well…14 out of about 70 stations in the city have them. i’m lucky that my local one does - the station i transfer at for work doesn’t have one to the platform i have to transfer to. the one i leave work from has three flights of stairs from the platform to the terminal.

so, keeping in mind i have to go up and down the stairs at work by the whims of my children and supervisors, and the staff room where i have to eat my lunch is on a different floor than my classroom, i’m averaging 20+ flights of stairs every single day. and cannot bend one of my knees, which is at the end of each day about as swollen as it was the day i dislocated it. my doctor prescribed me a month’s worth of naproxen, which my pharmacist was shocked by. she said, usually you only need this for a week. until the swelling goes down.

but the swelling is managed with some ice here and there anyway. so i’ll live. what really hurts is when i’m on the bus - because my commute to work involves two busses and two trains each way - and people trip over my leg because they just aren’t paying attention. i am at the mercy of kind strangers who notice and stand protectively over my leg, when i am lucky enough that upon boarding a bustling bus someone even gives me their seat. otherwise, i’m forced to stand on one leg to avoid putting too much force on my injured one each time we hit a bump.

(three times since my injury i have been the only person to offer my seat to another person with limited mobility on the bus, which every time the person in question has denied while everyone else’s eyes remain down and mouths remain shut.)

and lets not forget - i live in a city where everything is built atop huge fucking hills. at the top of one is the hospital. just below that, my university’s campus and student clinic.

am i just complaining for the sake of complaining? a little bit. but mostly i am thinking about how the inaccessibility around me is actively making it more difficult for me to heal from what is, spontaneity aside, a fairly common injury. i can’t quit my job. i need to attend my appointments. were it not june, i’d have to go to class. i am incredibly lucky to have friends who are willing to help with groceries and laundry, which would be particularly difficult for me due to the number of stairs i’d have to climb with my hands full, but if i didn’t - those are not things i could stop doing for myself and expect to survive for six weeks either, especially when i’m working 40 hours a week with 2+ hours of commuting a day.

anyway. maybe there’s not a lot the average person can do to help people with limited mobility. but giving up your seat on the bus is a pretty good first step and always has been.

[sleeping-on-cracking-ice]

Hi, I have an idea for Chishiya if it's okay! He have something going on with Kuina's friend, and after she didn't came back from a game everyone thought that she died, but she actually just left (she didn't want to become too attached to Chishiya maybe?) and 1 month later the militants found her and Chishiya is rather cold toward her because she left him without saying anything. Happy ending if possible, please

Thanks for requesting, here you go. Enjoy! 🥰

Home | Shuntaro Chishiya

{Alice In Borderland Masterlist}

Character(s): Chishiya (ft. Kuina, Niragi)

Summary: You run away from the beach, but soon were found by the militants again. Chishiya, your closest companion, is mad when you return for not saying anything.

Warning: mention of sexual harassment, swearing, grieving, heavy angst

Word Count: 4.8k

*reader is female

Author’s Note: I’m sorry if the ending is a bit cliché, but I really enjoyed writing this one!

“I’m so sick of this shit Kuina. She’s gone. What the hell do we do now?”

Chishiya and Kuina sat on the top roof of The Beach. Their legs were dangling over the edge, above the groups of people who sang their hearts out over the loud music. They couldn’t be down there themselves, not that night.

“It’s so unfair,” Chishiya grumbled, rubbing his stained eyes with his hands. “I hate how everyone just moves on like nothing happened.”

Kuina sniffled, trying to control her runny nose as she listened to Chishiya’s pained words. “Look Chish, it was going to happen to one of us three at some point, it just happened to be Y/N.” Kuina tried to keep her voice stable, but the occasional voice crack gave away her sadness.

“Yes I know, but it still hurts so fucking bad.”

You hadn’t returned from your game. You hadn’t returned back to Chishiya and Kuina. You hadn’t returned home.

*******

“Oi Y/N! Slow the hell down!”

You heard Kuina yell out to you from down the hall. You laughed at her desperate attempt to catch up while Chishiya walked at his own pace watching you guys.

“Why are we suddenly having a race?! We have all day to get down to the pool!” Kuina called out. You stopped in your tracks and turned around to face her. “I want to get down there before the sun comes out and everyone wakes up! Don’t you want to have it just for us three for a while?”

“I suppose so,” Kuina breathed out heavily.

Chishiya’s lips pulled up into a smile as he watched you too bicker. “Oi you two. Be quiet. People in these halls are still sleeping,” he said.

Kuina turned to Chishiya and pulled a mocking bored face towards him. “Well you’re fun this morning,” she muttered in a sarcastic tone.

All three of you made your way to the pool on the bottom floor of The Beach, tripping and shoving each other playfully while giggling. You hardly ever did this together, because Chishiya always slept until noon, so you were excited about having the pool to yourselves before the sun came up.

When you reached outside, your chatters and the sound of your bare feet on the pavement broke the silence of the night. You hoped that Hatter kept the windows closed to his suite because you knew if you woke him up he would come down and beat your asses for being awake so early.

You looked over towards the pool that was still lit up with underwater neon blue lights from the night before. You’d think that they would shut all the lights off at least to save a bit of electricity, but apparently not.

Kuina had thrown her towel down carelessly on a nearby deck chair and was now chasing after Chishiya, who powered his short legs to try and escape her.

“Chishiya you’re going in the pool! You can’t chicken out forever!” she yelled as she caught up to him and wrapped her strong arms around his waist.

You could tell the years of martial arts training paid off for Kuina as she lifted Chishiya into her arms like he weighed nothing. “Bitch, put me down! I don’t want to go in the pool! Why is that such a crime!?”

You doubled over in laughter as Kuina held the cat-like blonde in her arms, him squirming more violently as she got to the side of the pool.

“Goodbye!” she yelled and dropped him into the pool. His screaming cut off as he was submerged into the water. You walked over and placed your stuff down, listening to Kuina and Chishiya bickering in the background.

It was a shame that you were planning on walking out on these guys. But in a world like this, the bad moments really outweighed the good ones.

“Alright you’re next!” you heard behind you, making you snap out of your short daze.

“Wait, no!” you bellowed as Kuina repeated the same thing she did with Chishiya. This time, it was his turn to laugh at you.

“Jesus christ woman. The fuck got you so lively this morning?” you laughed at Kuina, who gracefully dived into the pool to tease you two.

You felt Chishiya tuck his chin on your shoulder gently, taking you by surprise. “I guess we got to act as happy as we can now. Our five day visa ends tonight.” Chishiya mumbled to you two.

The air around the three of you suddenly became stiff at the mention of the games. You lifted your hand and placed it on Chishiya’s damp hair. “It’s alright, it was a fun and relaxing five days while it lasted,” you said cheerfully.

“Don’t say that like as if you’re going to die,” Chishiya scolded you. “You won’t die, none of us three will.” He was trying to reassure himself that he would come back from his game with you all happy and healthy waiting in the lobby for him. He hoped for that exact reality every time he had to leave you to restore his visa. He panicked even when you were ten minutes later than usual. It was a constant battle with anxiety when it came to caring for you in a world like this.

But unfortunately, while Chishiya was willing to fight against the growing anxiety that came with loving you, you didn’t want anything to do with it.

You and Chishiya have been as tight as two peas in a pod since Kuina introduced you. Kuina and you happened to meet at a diamonds game that was further in the centre of the city which was where you appeared in the game. She was nice enough to take you back to The Beach, because she thought that your intelligence and gentle personality would be useful.

But the plan of using you for Kuina and Chishiya’s own personal gain went out the window when both of them built a strong connection with you. They tried so hard to stop it, but in the end, they decided to make you an addition to their little manipulative games with the others. A mysterious duo became a peculiar trio.

That’s when Chishiya began to notice other things he felt.

He began feeling an irrational attachment to you, always wanting to be around you and always wanting to make sure that you were safe. You began noticing his additional little quirks as well, as soon you both fell for each other, without the other knowing of course.

Kuina obviously knew, as she was incredibly observant. She always kept her mouth shut though, wanting to see the drama play out in front of her. It was entertaining at times.

“You two are cute,” she gushed at you and Chishiya, holding a cheeky smile on her face.

Chishiya tucked his face into your neck to hide his blush, but it only made your heart skip a beat. “Shut up,” he mumbled into your skin.

You sighed heavily as he kept his place there, snaking his arms around your waist. This was honestly normal. The closer you’ve gotten with Chishiya, the less shy he’s been to convey physical affection. You loved and hated it at the same time, because you knew the more he made your heart race, the harder it would be to leave him.

At times you thought you’d rather deal with his cold and untrustworthy personality, like how he was when he first met you. It was easier to dislike him then, but now that his real personality has shown through, you realized how good of a person he actually seemed to be.

Chishiya never became close to someone, because he knew it would be hard to pull away when he needed to use them for his own survival. So he’s just always chosen to keep everyone at a distance.

You on the other hand, you hadn’t fallen down the deep whole of caring fully for someone in this world, but you knew you were about to stumble off the edge.

While Kuina and Chishiya waited to renew their visas, you waited to run away from the stress of waiting for your friend’s potential deaths.

******

You, Kuina and Chishiya trudged down the steps that led to the lobby. Hatter had called everyone to meet there a few minutes ago to prepare for the games. Hearing the familiar bell ring throughout the so-called paradise made your heart weaken. It was calling you to your end, every single time.

The trio of you took your usual place towards the back of the lobby, leaning against the cement walls and looking over everyone’s heads. How weird it felt, that by the time you gathered here next, the number of people would reduce by a couple dozen. It made your stomach sink in remorse. You truly were nothing more than soldiers fighting a war that wasn’t your own.

You looked down at your own feet, beginning to feel guilty about your plan of running away. The people you would abandon, the friends who would miss you. And even they can’t come find you, but you knew it was for the best. For both you and them.

You felt something tickle your hand. You glanced your eyes down to see that it was Chishiya, trying to sneak his hand into yours as Hatter began his booming speech across the crowd. You looked up to the blonde’s face, but he was focused on Hatter. You smiled sadly and accepted his hand into yours, earning a soft squeeze from him.

Kuina placed her head on your shoulder, leaning closer towards you. It was as if they knew, and they were trying to get you to change your mind. You felt tears building up in your eyes, but quickly wiped them away with your hoodie sleeve before anyone noticed.

Damn. You were never going to forget them.

******

Chishiya sat in the leather lounge in the lobby. He had just arrived back from his spades game. Wasn’t too difficult, for him at least.

Only now he was stressing inside, leg bouncing up and down on the carpet quickly. He knew you wouldn’t return for a good while, but yet he always was worried about you. No matter the situation.

Niragi didn’t help the situation. He strolled over earlier with a few of his militant mates and roughed Chishiya up for a bit. He honestly wasn’t in the mood for their antics, so he didn’t fight back much. They eventually got bored and walked away.

There hardly was anyone in the lobby, it was strangely quiet.

Chishiya looked towards the entrance to the lobby where a small group of people just walked in from. He recognized them as the group Kuina was placed with, so he stood up from his seat and quickly made his way over.

He managed to spot Kuina walking by herself at the back of the group. Chishiya let out a relieved sigh and strolled up to her. “Thank god you’re okay,” he said, giving her a short hug. “You too,” she replied.

They walked back over to where Chishiya was sitting beforehand and sat down. “Do you know who Y/N went with?” Kuina asked.

“No idea, I had to leave with my group before hers,” he answered.

They both sat in silence for a while, hearts squeezing in on themselves from tension.

As group after group piled into the lobby and moved to go to the back pool to celebrate their wins. While their hearts and minds were overflowing in joy of surviving, Chishiya’s and Kuina’s slowly became heavier and heavier with grief.

One of the last groups finally came back, being a few hours later than everyone else. Chishiya searched the small crowd for your familiar face, but didn’t see it.

“Kuina,” he started with a tense voice. “Don’t say it,” she immediately cut him off. “Don’t say anything Chish. She’s fine, I know it.”

That became harder and harder to believe the later into the night it got. Soon enough, no one was left in the halls and the lobby, either gone to bed or stayed out in the pool area.

Chishiya didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t feel anything. His body was tired from the constant tensing, the constant anxiety.

He stood up abruptly and looked towards Kuina, who had her head in her hands. He gave her a sad smile, and reached his hand out to help her up. “Come on, let’s go to the roof like old times,” he smiled, fighting the tears building up in his eyes.

*********

When they reached the top of the building after climbing many annoying flights of steps, Chishiya tilted his head back to feel the wind blow around his head. He opened his eyes and saw the galaxy of stars above him. ‘So weird,’ he thought to himself. ‘In a horrible place like this, such beautiful things can still exist.’

Kuina and Chishiya sat on the edge of the roof, feet dangling off the edge. Complete silence took over them. Neither of them knew what to say.

Kuina broke her gaze off the staggering height of the drop below them and glanced at Chishiya. He was staring straight ahead of him, hoodie covering his face so she couldn’t see what he was looking at.

“Chish, are you okay?” Kuina asked quietly, leaning forward to try and see his face. It felt strange to her, having Chishiya be completely silent for a change. Usually he would be making a smartass comment or a teasing joke towards her or Y/N. It was like the happiness in him had drained out.

He didn’t answer for a short moment, but then he turned his head to look at Kuina in the eyes. Kuina was taken back.

Chishiya had pools of tears cascading down his pale face, mixing with the sweat that he still endured from the game. He let out no sobs and no cries. Just dry, empty tears running down his cheeks like doves flying down the edge of a cliff.

“No, I’m not okay,” he muttered to her. “This fucking sucks.”

*******

It had been a few weeks since your death, not that there was a huge difference at The Beach from your disappearance. Everyone carried on like normal, everyone except Kuina and Chishiya.

They became secluded, more than usual. Kuina spent most of her time in the hotel’s gym, trying to distract herself from everything that happened. She wanted to get stronger so she could win games, she knew that’s what you would have wanted.

Chishiya however, he wasn’t taking your death well at all. Chishiya lost his fire, his headstrong attitude and snappy remarks. He kind of disappeared himself, but only his body stayed.

He felt stupid at times. What would he have expected? Of course you died, knowing his luck. He began irrationally thinking, believing that the world took you away because he didn’t deserve someone as warm-hearted as you. He felt cheated almost. It was like the universe had you dangling on a string in front of him, and when he finally had the courage to reach towards you, it yanked you away out of his view.

When he was having particular hard days, he would lie on his bed in his room for hours, not bothering to get up for food or the bathroom. He felt numb inside, he honestly thought nothing would be able to hurt him anymore, because he’s endured the worst of his emotions.

The mirror in his room was smashed, due to his own doing. He broke it a few days after the incident, screaming into the stuffy air of his room and throwing one of his makeshift knives at it. He watched in pain as it crackled and crumbled under the impact, seeing his own reflection fall into a million pieces, much like how he was feeling at that moment.

He had never experienced this kind of hurt before. He always thought other people were being dramatic when they broke down crying after hearing their significant other or friend didn’t make it back to The Beach. He thought that it should’ve been expected, that they shouldn’t be surprised that it happened. But he guessed you never know what another person is feeling unless you experience it yourself.

But god, does he wish he didn’t, because it hurt more than a thousand knives to his cold, stone heart.

**********

One day, Chishiya was standing on the edge of a balcony that looked over the entrance to The Beach. He enjoyed standing up there because he loved the spectacular view of the ocean. It reminded him of his real home, when he used to ride his bike down to the beach with his friends and swim in the water for hours. He missed life when it was so easy for him.

The breeze was cool on his skin, giving him goosebumps. It felt refreshing and somewhat free, a small taste of bliss for him. His eyes were shut as he listened to the crows screech in the distance and the ocean waves hit the shore. The sound of nature rang in his ears, making his endorphins swirl in his brain.

It was a good break every now and then from the usual melancholy emotions that swarmed around him, keeping his happiness locked down in chains. While he was on that balcony, actually breathing fully and normally for once, his demons decided to let loose of the chains that held his sweet happiness trapped.

Chishiya opened his dark eyes and glanced downwards towards the bottom level and saw something that caught his eye.

A group of three militants seemed to have a young woman in their grasp, one of them being Niragi himself. Chishiya watched as they tried hard to hold the smaller person at bay, as she was thrashing around trying to escape.

He frowned, confusion painting across his face. That girl, she looked oddly familiar.

Niragi told the militants to bring her around the side of the building, where a small alley was located beside the entrance. Chishiya knew that’s where the militants dragged people to kill them off, they were planning on killing her.

Chishiya wondered what she did that was so bad. Hatter hardly ever gave the order to kill someone, unless the situation was betrayal or anything worse.

He moved himself along the balcony towards where the commotion below him was occurring. He wanted to hear what they were saying, because who knows what shit Niragi gets up to without Hatter knowing. It seemed a little too suspicious to be dragging someone to their death in broad daylight, especially where everyone could see.

Chishiya heard slight fragments of what they were yelling: “You thought- … run away?!” Niragi screamed in his psychotic voice. “Let go of-...! …could have just left me there!”

Chishiya felt his heart drop. That voice, it was all too familiar. How could he have forgotten what your voice sounded like.

He lifted his head and stared forward in shock. That couldn’t be right, you’ve been dead for weeks!

He thought for a second, trying to come to a possible conclusion with the horrific yells in the background of his mind. How is it possible you could still be alive?

That couldn’t be you, it just couldn’t be. Chishiya shook his head and chuckled. “The fuck am I thinking? Great, now I’m hallucinating. No one told me that was another stage of grief.”

He turned his body to walk back inside to look for Kuina, until he heard the young woman getting attacked yell again, this time, clear as day.

“Chishiya! Kuina!”

That was it. That was definitely you.

Chishiya lifted his legs and began sprinting towards the staircase inside. There was no doubt in his mind that that wasn’t you. The way you said his name was too real to not be you.

He tripped and stumbled down the stairs, almost falling flat on his face on one flight. He had to get there before you were dead, for real this time.

As he pushed his entire body weight against the entrance doors to the hotel, he pulled a small knife out his white hoodie pocket. He had made it out of glass from his broken mirror, considering that Hatter wouldn’t allow him to have his own weapons.

Your screams were much more prominent now, more desperate sounding and more fearful. The sound pierced through Chishiya as he made his way quickly around the side of the hotel.

There you were, being pinned against the wall by two militants while Niragi held the barrel of his rifle against your chest, right over your heart.

Chishiya yelled out, which probably wasn’t the best idea considering his current situation. It was three tall men with guns against a small, frail man with a makeshift knife.

“Chishiya! The fuck you doing here?” Niragi asked with a cheeky smirk on his face. God, Chishiya wanted to punch him so bad.

“Let her go Niragi, you don’t want this to get ugly do you?” Chishiya threatened, holding his glass knife out.

Niragi laughed along with the other two militants. You still struggled against their grip, seemingly more calm with Chishiya distracting them.

“How cute ‘ey? Little blonde twink coming to save the love of his life, how sweet of you.” Niragi pressed, pushing his rifle harder against you just to push Chishiya’s buttons.

“If you haven’t noticed Chishiya, she ran away! She never died like you thought she did! She ran away from The Beach, she ran away from you!” 

His words were like bullets in Chishiya’s chest. He felt belittled and mocked, he hated it.

“Shut up! She wouldn’t do that!” he yelled frustratingly.

“Oh really?! She wouldn’t?! Then explain why we managed to find her strolling the streets of Tokyo! Not a scratch on her, and she seemed smart enough to run away when she saw us.”

Chishiya’s scowl dropped on his face. He looked at you to see if you would deny it, but you had stopped struggling against the two men and hung your head low, not looking into his eyes.

He shook off the hurt he felt from this fact. He had to focus on getting you away from Niragi before he took time to think about other things.

“Niragi please. Just let go of her, I promise I’ll make it up to you,” Chishiya begged. He felt small, never has he ever begged for something in his life.

“Hmm? How though? I was just about to have some fun with her before I killed her off. Why should I give that up just because you want me to,” Niragi spat at him. Your eyes widened in fear and you thrashed around in the grip that the militants had on you, panicking from Niragi’s threat.

Chishiya thought for a second. He would honestly give anything to bring you over to him. “My cards. You can take credit for every card that I collect for a couple of months. If Hatter or Aguni asks, just say I’m slacking. I’ll take any punishment they throw my way.”

You saw Niragi consider it before lowering his weapon off of your torso. You breathed out heavily in relief.

“Fine, but don’t expect me to do this again. You can’t bribe me with everything you sneaky fuck.” Niragi growled. The two militants let go of you and followed him out of the alleyway and into the entrance of The Beach.

You leant against the wall, staring at Chishiya as he stared down at the ground below him. The air between you two was tense. You could tell he was mad, Chishiya was always silent when he was incredibly angry.

“Chish, I-”

“Don’t talk to me. Just come.”

Don’t get me wrong, he couldn’t have been happier to see that you were alive and well. But the betrayal he felt from the fact that you ran away from him greatly outweighed his happiness.

He walked briskly ahead of you, you didn’t dare walk next to him or too close to him. He was scaring you a bit, and you wanted nothing but to sprint to your own room and hide from the rest of the world.

You were embarrassed and also frustrated you were caught. Trust Niragi and his cocky ass to find you.

Chishiya stopped in front of his own room, opened the door and gestured for you to walk inside. You hesitated before slowly making your way through the door. You hated how tense it was, it was the complete opposite of what you usually felt when you were around Chishiya.

You sat down on his bed, sitting in an awkward position and looked towards Chishiya. It was complete silence as he was frozen at the door, back towards you and holding the door handle harshly.

“What the fuck Y/N?” he mumbled. It was almost inaudible, but you could hear pain in his words, which made you immediately feel guilty.

“What the fuck was that? You ran away!?” he turned and yelled at you, tears building up in his eyes.

You flinched as his loud voice. You had never heard him yell in anger before, usually he kept his calm. You looked down to the ground, feeling your own eyes fill with hot tears. You felt like you were back in high school with your parents screaming at you for running away from home.

“I THOUGHT YOU DIED!” he shouted louder, “DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH PAIN YOU PUT KUINA THROUGH?! HOW MUCH YOU PUT ME THROUGH?!”

You couldn’t breathe. Pain and suffering dripped off his words like rain on a roof, coming together and creating an atmosphere that held air that was unbreathable. You suffocated on the oxygen, making you choke and cause tears to begin running down your cheeks.

“Why!?” he cried. “Why did you run!? There was no reason, me and Kuina could have protected you if you were too scared! Why did you think that running away was the only option!?” Chishiya stumbled closer to you, almost tripping over his own feet.

You flinched heavily as he placed his cold hands on your shoulders roughly. They were shaking from trying to hold your sobs in.

“WHY DID YOU LEAVE-” “Chishiya!” you interrupted him by snapping your head up to meet your eyes with his. His face dropped as he saw the sadness behind yours, replacing the wonderful and cheerful happiness that once swam in your eyes like dolphins in a sea.

“I l-love you,” you mumbled out between your shaky breaths. “That was the problem Chish. I-I’m in love with you and it hurt too fucking bad to know that you could disappear out of my reach at any moment. I ran because I didn’t want to watch you and Kuina die!”

Chishiya’s own hands shook violently against your shoulders. He gazed into your eyes which were red and puffy from your tears. They were shining more now than they had ever before.

“You don’t have to leave Y/N,” he whispered, still trying to control his own breathing. “I want you here, next to me. Not out there, because when you’re out there, I can’t be with you.”

You nodded and smiled sadly. Chishiya pulled his hand from your shoulder and cradled your face gently. He swiped his thumb over your cheek to get rid of the tears there. “I love you too, but I can’t be without you.”

A grin crept onto your face as you looked into his eyes. You felt safer than ever in his arms, why did you think of ever leaving?

Chishiya wiped his own tears with his hoodie sleeve and put on a happier smile. “You want to know how pathetic I am without you?” he giggled and held your hands in his.

“I almost threw myself off the top of the hotel the night you didn’t come back. Kuina had to tackle me to the ground to keep me away from the edge.” he laughed at himself.

You chuckled along with him. “Imagine if you did! What a shocker it would’ve been if I came back and Kuina saw me alive after you killed yourself because you thought I was gone!”

You both sat on Chishiya’s bed and laughed at each other. You had to do it, humour is best in times of stress and anxiety.

*********

You opened your eyes slowly, only to be met with the blinding light of the sun seeping through the blinds. You hissed and turned your head the other way.

Chishiya chucked at your reaction, making his chest that was underneath your head vibrate. “So cute,” he muttered to himself.

You pushed your face deeper into his chest and breathed in his scent. It felt good to be back with Chishiya. It felt good to be home.

Author’s Note: oKaY so this ended up being a lot longer than expected. Please send in some requests if you have any! 🥰🥰

[dreamerstreamer]

Speak Your Mind

Pairing: GeorgeNotFound / George x f!reader

Summary: Usually, you left George feeling tongue-tied, but apparently not today.

Word Count: 3.8k

A/N: requested by an anon who wanted a cute, clumsy george story! another anon wanted something similar, so i hope you both and all enjoy <3 this was inspired by this quote by lemony snicket :)

George slipped into his chair with a slight groan, nudging his mouse with his elbow as he took a sip of water. He watched as his screen came to life, glancing over at the time. It was still kind of early, and he had a few hours to himself before his scheduled stream.

I could probably just play by myself for a while, he thought to himself, setting his glass down to his left as he opened up Minecraft. He reached across his desk, grabbing his headphones and settling them over his head. It’s been a while since I’ve played in a hardcore survival world. 

But then his gaze flickered down to a particular server, and he found his cursor automatically clicking on it, almost like clockwork. In an instant, his avatar was standing on the Prime Path, the blocky world rendering into view around him. Shifting his mouse a few times, George smiled and opened up his inventory.

He spent a few moments sorting everything out, quietly humming to himself. A few seconds later, something popped up on the bottom left of his screen, his gaze darting over to catch it.

[y/n]: hi george!

[y/n]: how are you doing?

George’s heart almost immediately stuttered in his chest, and he spent a moment or two simply staring at the two lines of text.

He couldn’t believe just how much power you had over him.

The two of you had been friends for a long time now—nearly as long as he had been friends with Dream, even. The two of you had met almost entirely by accident, having simply been jokingly trapped together on a random server by one of the admins for a few hours. Under any other circumstances, George probably would have felt awkward to hell and back, but the two of you had just instantly hit it off together.

You were kind and cheerful, while he was practical and goofy. He loved your optimistic innocence, and you lived for his sarcastic quips. While the two of you had never met in person, both of you had most definitely seen each other’s faces before, and George would never forget the first thing he said when he saw your face.

“Woah. You’re really pretty.”

He had blurted it without warning, surprising even himself at his own words. Your face had flushed while you immediately turned off your face cam, letting out a quiet whine. “George, you can’t just say that!”

He remembered sputtering in his chair, then sending an earnest smile at his monitor. “But it’s true!”

“George!”

The image of your cheeks plastered with an embarrassed, sheepish grin and your wide, shining eyes would forever be ingrained in his mind.

Years later, that picture hadn’t changed a bit, still as clear as ever in his head, but the feelings he held for you had transformed. It didn’t happen quickly, nor did he ever want to admit it, but he was incredibly aware of it—almost too aware of it.

You made his cheeks hurt from how much he smiled around him. You filled his stomach with butterflies just with a single giggle. You made his ears turn bright red whenever you made a sly joke.

The three little words sat at the back of his head at nearly every hour of the day, and he just knew that one of these days, he was going to tell you what they were.

Hopefully.

With a smile on his face and a million thoughts swirling around his head, all of them beginning and ending with you, he closed his inventory and began to type back a response.

GeorgeNotFound: i’m doing good haha

[y/n]: i’m happy to hear that! <3

His breath caught in his throat. A heart—you had sent back a heart. He could feel his own heart seize in his chest at the sight of two simple symbols on his monitor screen.

Oh god, he was so screwed.

He walked forward a bit, his head still spinning with thoughts of you and that stupid heart as he contemplated what he should do next. An idea popped up just then, a small wave of anxiety creating over his head. With shaky hands, he began to type.

GeorgeNotFound: wanna join vc 2?

A moment ticked by, and George chewed on the side of his cheek. Then, your username appeared in the corner of his screen.

[y/n]: okay! i’ll be there in a sec :)

A smiley face. His own lips curled upwards to match the smile emoticon as he entered the voice channel, patiently waiting. A few moments later, something caught his attention from the corner of his monitor. Turning, he flinched as your avatar jumped down and landed in front of him, briefly turning red from the fall damage. A split second later, he heard a familiar ping.

“Boo!” you chirped, your voice echoing in his ear as bright as day. He felt warmth blossom in his chest just at the sound of a single syllable spoken in your voice.

“What a grand entrance,” he said teasingly, unable to hide the fact that he was grinning while he spoke.

“You know me,” you said, giggling, “I always have to make a big show of things.”

“I sure do,” he said, secretly thinking to himself.

But I wish I knew you better.

“Woah,” you suddenly breathed, something like awe seeping in your voice as your character stepped forward. “I feel like we haven’t talked in, like... forever.”

He blinked, shifting his mouse slightly toward you. “We talked yesterday.”

“No,” you said quickly, your pitch raising, “I mean like, talk talked. You know, over call or something?” Your voice grew quiet. “I missed hearing your voice.”

George wanted to throw a pillow across his room. Cute. “Well, I’m here now,” he said softly, chuckling, “so you get to hear it all you want.”

He heard you cough, but it was slightly muffled. He wondered what you looked like right now, and he half-wished that you two had your face-cams on. “Now that you’re on the sever,” you prompted a second later, suddenly sounding normal again. “what do you wanna do?” 

He thought for a moment, the wheels in his head turning. “Well, I kind of wanted to work a bit more on my house.”

“Oh, you mean your new house? The one you were building during the, uh—” You paused, searching for the right words. “—big battle?” 

He could imagine you making fake air quotes with your fingers, and he laughed, thinking of your scrunched up face. “Pfft, yeah. That’s the one.”

“I haven’t seen it yet,” you admitted, some rustling coming through his headphones. “Do... do you mind showing me it?”

He smiled sheepishly. “No, not at all. But I’m not a very good builder, I hope you know.”

You let out a brief shout, and he jumped in his chair. “Nope! Illegal!”

His eyebrows knit together. “‘Illegal’?” he parroted.

“Illegal,” you said in an affirmative tone. “It’s illegal to be mean to GeorgeNotFound. Even by GeorgeNotFound himself. Sorry I don’t make the rules.” Before he could even think of a response, your character began jumping up and down on his screen. “Now, show me the goods! I’m sure it looks great.”

He was pretty sure he was just a puddle in his chair, now. You were just far too much for his poor heart. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could take of this before he lost his mind.

Shaking his head free of thoughts of you, he pressed the W key and watched as he moved forward down the Prime Path and over a hill. “Here, follow me. It’s a bit far from the rest of the server’s homes, but I kind of like it.”

You hummed, thoughtful and soft as the two of you jumped your way over a few hills. “I get you. I mean, we all need our space. I think having your home being more far away is just cozy. Quaint. Probably not going to get robbed by Tommy. It’s a win-win situation!”

He snorted at your words. Probably not going to get robbed by Tommy was a positive he would never pass up. “I’m glad it’s not just me who thinks that.”

It was then that a splash of red among a horizon full of browns and greens came into view. You let out a soft gasp as his hobbit-hole house came into view. “Sooo,” he began, clicking his mouse, “ta-da! Here it is! I know it’s not much, but it’s pretty okay, I think?”

A cry of awe flew from your lips. “Are you kidding me? Your house is so pretty!” You ran forward, your eyes wide as you gazed at the hobbit-style home. “It’s so round and cozy and—oh, the mushrooms!” Your avatar jumped up and down, punching at the air towards his house. “You even added a little moat with a bridge!”

A certain sincerity flooded your voice as you added, “George, don’t lie to me and tell me you suck at building. I love your house.”

He felt his heart melt at your eager tone. Just how endearing could one person be? 

“Can we go inside, can we go inside?” you asked, your voice growing bolder as you turned to look at him expectantly. 

A bashful smile shot across his face, even though he knew you couldn’t see him. “I—ah, I haven’t actually built the inside yet,” he admitted shyly.

You let out a soft squeal, your avatar running around the screen with a hop. “If you want, we can build it together!” you offered. “I know you’re not super confident in your building skills, but I’m more than happy to help out!”

His heart melted. You were so kind. Too kind, really. How could he say no?

“I would love that,” he said. He moved inside the house, revealing the hollowed out, blank space that would serve as the interior of his house. “So, as you can see, it’s still a work in progress.” He glanced back at you. “Where should we start? 

There was a slight pause. “Hmmm.” He could imagine the way you scrunched your nose as you thought, your fingers tapping against the nearest flat surface as you did so. “We could make most of the inside out of birch planks,” you began, “and have some dark oak details. You know, so there’s some really neat contrast between the light and dark parts of your house.”

He could hear you growing giddier and giddier with each passing second. “And we can also add some red and white carpet to match the mushroom aesthetic! Oh, that would look so good! “Your character turned to look at him, a block of birch wood already in hand. “What do you think?”

His heart beat a little faster. I like you, he thought, clear as a bell. I really, really like you, that’s what I think.

“You what?”

He froze.

Oh my god. Did I just say that out loud?

Your voice filled his ears, quiet and shaky. “Um. Yeah.”

A second passed in awkward silence. Then another.

If a Minecraft skin could blush, George’s face would be a tomato.

“I, um,” he stammered, his eyes darting every which way in search of an excuse to leave the call. Just then, his gaze caught on the glass of water he had set to his left. He barely gave himself even a second to think about what to say before he started rambling, speaking in a single, blurted breath.

“I just um spilled water all over myself and wow it’s about to get all over my set-up and that would be really bad so I’m just uh gonna go now okay great bye—”

Before he could embarrass himself anymore, he found himself pressing the ‘end call’ button and closing the window, hanging his head in his hands as he let out a long groan of despair.

Why did he do that? How did he do that?

Groaning again, he slammed his head into his desk, turning to press his cheek into the wood as he stared at his keyboard. 

He was an idiot—a big, fat idiot.

In the corner of his eye, he watched as his phone screen lit up. It‘s probably a message from [Y/N], his brain helpfully supplied. She’s probably confused as hell.

“Not helping,” he muttered to himself, sitting up once more.

Well, there was really only one thing he could do now, and that was to get help. Fortunately for him, he knew two people he could definitely ask for advice. Unfortunately, he had a feeling he knew how this conversation was going to go.

Sighing, he opened up Discord again on his monitor.

He was sure things could only go downhill from here.

“You what?!”

George grimaced. He was right. This was a terrible idea. “You don’t have to rub it in my face,” he grumbled.

“I’m—” Wheeze. “I’m not rubbing it in,” Dream explained between gasps for air, “it’s... it’s just that it’s funny.”

George pursed his lips. “I don’t know about you, but that sounds like you’re rubbing it in.”

Sapnap’s voice cut through Dream’s laughter. “Okay, okay, Dream, you’re not helping. Gogy here is having, as Tommy would put it, ‘women problems’, and he needs some help.”

All of a sudden, Dream’s laughter stopped. “If I’m being totally honest,” he said, “I’m not really seeing the problem here.”

There was a beat of silence. “How are you not seeing the problem?” Sapnap said. You could hear the frown in his voice. “George just prematurely confessed his feelings to [Y/N].”

“Yeah, and?”

Another beat of silence.

“What the heck do you mean, ‘and’? That’s the problem!”

George sighed, sinking down in his desk chair. “Dream,” he muttered into his headset, rubbing at his temples, “just spit it out.”

“Look,” he began, “I’m just saying that here’s no advice we could possibly give you, because there’s only one solution.”

“Which is?” Sapnap prompted.

“You just have to tell her outright how you feel.”

George’s jaw dropped and he scrambled to sit up. “No way I’m doing that. Nuh-uh, no thanks.”

Sapnap made a noise of approval. “No, wait—Dream does have a point.”

George felt a stone of uneasiness drop into his stomach. “You’re just saying that because you want to see me make a fool of myself.”

“No, no, nonono, I’m telling the truth!” Dream cried. “Seriously, what other options do you really have? Pretend that you never said anything and just act like nothing happened to confuse her and hope that she forgets?”

“Pretty sure that’s called gaslighting,” Sapnap mumbled.

George glared at his monitor, knowing full well no one could see him. “Not helping.”

“Ignore her for the rest of eternity?” Dream continued. “You’ve already declined six of her calls!” There was a pause, then he carried on. “George, seriously. I want the best for you, and I’m not kidding when I say this is the only viable option, really.”

He stared down at his lap, his hands shaking where they lay. “What if,” he began, “she doesn’t feel the same?”

“Well, tough luck then, Gogy,” Sapnap said bluntly, “You’re just gonna have to suck it up and move on like the rest of us.”

George pressed his lips into a thin line. While it wasn’t exactly the nicest way to put it, he supposed Sapnap was right. “What if...” He swallowed. “What if I’m not ready?”

A soft sigh came from the other end. “George,” Dream said, his voice sincere, “believe it or not, but no one’s ever ready, really. But if we all waited until we were ready, then we’d be waiting for the rest of our lives.”

George fell quiet. A strange sense of comfort fell over him as he let Dream’s words soak in. Mustering up a deep breath, he smiled.

“Okay. I’ll call her back tonight, alright?”

Sapnap let out a hoot, the sound of clapping filling his headphones. “Let’s go! Get ‘em, Gogy!”

“You really need to stop calling me that.”

“Nah. It’s funny.”

Before George could retort, Dream stepped in. “Remember buddy, no matter what happens, we’ll be here for you, okay? Don’t let your fear hold you back. Hell, you know what? Don’t let your—” Dream suddenly cackled, his voice wheezing into his mic as he sputtered, “Don’t let your dreams be dreams, George!”

George let out a groan, barely able to hear himself over the deafening sound of Dream’s wheezing. “Oh my god, I’m hanging up.”

“Good luck, Gog—”

It was at that moment that he clicked the ‘end call’ button, the sweet sound of silence washing over him. Leaning back in his chair, he stared up at the ceiling, the tiniest of smiles gracing his lips.

Maybe calling his friends wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.

George stared at his monitor, the dark screen reflecting a mirrored image of himself. His hand opened and closed on his lap, itching to hold onto the mouse.

It had been two days since he’d blurted the words he’d been procrastinating saying for the last god knows how long. 

Every time he closed his eyes, he could only see fluttering shots of you. You, with your mouth agape, staring at your screen with your headphones sliding down your neck. You, frantically texting on your phone about everything that had just slipped out of his mouth. You, with your face inevitably twisting in disgust at the thought of someone like him liking someone like you.

I’m not ready, he thought, his reflection blinking back at him.

That’s exactly why you’re going to do this, his reflection said back as his hand moved to his mouse, hovering over it.

You suck, he thought.

The monitor smiled back at him as he moved his cursor. I know.

His screen burst to life, Discord already open and waiting for him. George moved his cursor to hover over your username, his palm starting to sweat. Clicking, he reached over to his keyboard and began to type.

GeorgeNotFound: hey! did you wanna video call?

The moment he hit enter, he ripped his hands away from the keyboard like it was made of hot coals, wiping his hands on his pants. With bated breath, he waited, staring at the green circle accompanying your profile picture. Suddenly, his screen moved.

[y/n] is typing...

His heart leapt into his throat.

[y/n]: okay!

He exhaled a sigh of relief through his nose, his mouse moving to press the hit ‘video call’ button. A few seconds passed with the ringtone echoing through his headphones. A moment later, the ringing stopped and your face filled his screen, the familiar set-up of your room fading in at the corners. His heart swelled at the sight—both with affection and anxiety.

“Um, hi!” you said with a shy smile, your gaze darting away from the screen as you waved at the camera. Despite your bright demeanour and cheery tone, he could practically feel the tension in your shoulders the moment he laid eyes on you.

“H-Hi,” he said back, swallowing as he mustered up a shaky smile. Your gaze flickered to his for a brief second, and in that moment, it almost felt like you two were actually looking at each other in real life. Then you looked away again and something in his chest cracked.

“How are you doing?” he asked slowly, trying to prompt a conversation. “It feels like we haven’t talked in forever.”

Your lips quirked as you tilted your head at him. “We talked, um, two days ago.”

He ignored the embarrassment flaring up on his cheeks. “I mean like, see-each-other-talk talked.” He paused, then adding in a near-whisper. “I missed seeing your face.”

Your rosy lips parted in awe, and he was almost certain that he was never, ever going to forget that expression of yours.

“And, um, h-how—how are you, George?” you stammered out with a shaky voice, curling up a little in your chair. “Are you doing okay?”

George opened his mouth, then shut it. Whenever people asked him if he was okay, his mouth always defaulted to “fine” or “good” or “okay”. Rarely did he ever find himself telling the truth. But now, as he looked at your shy, bashful face, he knew what he had to do. Straightening up, he looked his webcam dead in the eyes.

“I,” he said, “am really, really nervous right now. Like, nervous out of my mind.”

You blinked, finally turning to face him directly at last. “Really?”

He nodded, his anxiety slowly falling away. “Yeah. Do you know why?”

Recognition flickered through your eyes, and your cheeks grew hot once more. “Why, George?”

He took a deep breath, steeling himself, and smiled.

It’s now or never.

“I like you, [Y/N]. A lot. What I said earlier was true. It wasn’t some bit, and it wasn’t just some spur of the moment thing. I really do like you a lot, and I would like it if you would be my g—”

He almost choked on his own words, oh-so very aware of just how hot his face was. “And I,” he began again, squeezing his eyes shut, “would love it if you would be my girlfriend.”

He couldn’t look—he couldn’t. He missed seeing your face, he really did, but he knew that if he looked now, he would only be met with disappointment. You, with a frown on your face, only deepening with each passing second. You, with guilt in your eyes for not reciprocating his feelings. You, with your soft lips mouthing four words he wish he didn’t have to hear. 

I’m so sorry, George. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so—

“I like you, too.”

His eyes flew open, his mouth agape.

Those were not the four words he was expecting to hear.

He lifted his head, his gaze taking in every inch of his screen. A bright, glowing smile was plastered across your face, your eyes crinkling at the corners.

“For real?” he breathed, disbelief wracking every inch of his being.

You nodded, a laugh tumbling from your lips and lighting up his insides. “Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.”

George felt a smile of his own creep across his face as he ran a hand through his hand, something happier than joy rushing through his veins. 

Oh god, he thought, wanting to scream it from the top of the nearest building. I like you, I like you, I like you. I like you a lot lot.

“I like you a lot lot, too.”

He froze. Did I say that out loud, again?

Your grin widened. “Yes.”

For a second, he almost shriveled up in shame. But then he shook his head and laughed, basking in the warmth of your smile.

A few days ago, he might have been embarrassed. But now? 

Well, if it was with you, he supposed he wouldn’t mind speaking his mind more often.

[heliads]

Time Can Heal (But This Won’t) Chapter Three: Bloodstains

You’ve been a lone demigoddess, daughter of Hecate, ever since your home of Hellas sank beneath the waves centuries ago. You loved the Darkling until he crossed you and you fled the Little Palace. Now you’re disguised as a mere cartographer. Can you face him again, knowing what he’s done?

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There was no way around it, no way to avoid it. Like it or not, you would be returning to the only place you’ve ever truly called home since you left behind the sinking shores of Hellas, past a people who would never rise again. You had seen Os Alta built, walked the newly constructed halls of the Grand and Little Palaces with the Darkling before you knew enough to run from him. This is where you’ll be going- not to a new future, but a chance to drown in all the memories you’ve tried so hard to forget.

However, you’ll have to survive the journey to Os Alta first. You’re not here as an esteemed guest or prisoner, you’re here as a double, a lure. Someone who can be killed so that Alina Starkov walks out alive. You know this as well as your ice-eyed Darkling who rides next to you, who thinks nothing of you but that you share a name with a woman he thought he could manipulate. That is all.

So you force your gaze away from the Darkling and back towards your hands, which grip the reins of your offered steed. You mentally catalogue the scant few weapons you had on you before you were dragged along after Alina- two knives, a medium length dagger, and the small pistol all First Army soldiers were forced to have on them. You’ve never particularly cared for guns, though- they’re dirty, loud things, nothing compared to the damage you could wreak with a syllable from your tongue. Then again, if it came down to it, you’d rather have a pistol in your palm then risk using your magic in front of the Darkling. In the end, you’re here to stay hidden, not reveal yourself in the most dramatic way possible.

That being said, you can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. You’ve learned long ago to listen to the voices that whisper past your ear, speaking of dangers lurking in the woods and ill-intentioned beings who wait for women who walk alone. Some are remnants of past protection spells, and others are shades from the Underworld who’d managed to conjure up some corporeal strength and warn you of an attack. You are the last living Hellenid to walk the earth, and so they feel duty-bound to protect you. Through you, your people live on, and so even the dead watch your back.

So when the voices come, you listen. Your eyes flicker shut for just a second as you listen, past the thump of your heart and the pattern of horse hooves on the dusty ground. The carriage rolls noisily some distance in front of you, and then you hear it stop. Around the bend, you hear the disgruntled mutterings of the guards even though they’re too far for a human ear to pick up. A tree has fallen down, blocking the path. You know it’s a trap even before the shots ring out.

You hear the choked screams of men falling with arrows through their throats and eyes and begin to panic. They’ve come for Alina Starkov, the Sun Summoner who could damn the Fjerdans to a lifetime under Ravka’s watchful eye. They’ve come to kill her. You sense the Darkling rearing his horse beside you, and his stallion picks up into a canter. You don’t have to say a word, just listen to his commands to his men. There are more men attempting to circle behind you and pick you off, you can distract them and the remaining attackers trying to get into the carriage.

A Heartrender turns to you, gesturing for his fellow Grisha to follow you. “Come, Alina! We have to get you to safety!” This command is far too loud for any self-respecting Second Army soldier to ever utter, but to the Fjerdans, it is nothing out of the ordinary. Ravka already swears by its legions of witches, why shouldn’t the ice-haired drüskelle believe themselves above the pathetically obvious Grisha? They follow you without a second thought.

You wait a minute, listening to the sound of boots crashing through the forest floor after you, then jump down from your horse in one swift motion. Your knives appear in your hands and you sprint towards your attackers, knocking them down again and again. You slam the hilt of one knife into a Fjerdan’s nose, and you can hear the bone shatter as if it was your own. Light flashes off of the Grisha steel blades as you slash and stab, drawing blood without taking a break. 

A small part of your mind gleefully notices the way the Fjerdans are running towards you now, drawn towards the sunlight reflected by your knives. They think you the Sun Summoner now, all because of metal polished to a shine. And why shouldn’t they? You have enough power to tear this continent in half, to let the sun pierce the planet’s very core. Why shouldn’t you be feared? Why shouldn’t you be the Sun Summoner yourself?

The man in front of you cries out, and you come back to your senses. Your eyes follow your knife, twisting in his windpipe, and you withdraw it hastily. You wipe the scarlet blood on the grass before turning to fight another Fjerdan attacker, but none come forward. You realize that they’re all dead, either by your hand or by the Heartrenders. Although, you notice with a sickening twist, most are killed by you. You’re supposed to be a shy First Army soldier, and you’re not exactly playing your part quite right.

Across a clearing, you see the Darkling helping Alina to her feet. She looks stunned, most likely due to the body of a Fjerdan lying at her toes. It’s been sliced perfectly in half- so he’s used the Cut. No wonder she looks as if the world has just been exposed for being woven from nightmares. She glances over at you and blanches even further. Shame twists in your gut as you realize your hands are covered in blood, none of it yours. You were borne of a race of warriors, fighting has been in your history for as long as Hellas has stood. To Alina Starkov, however, this is a massacre like she’s never seen before. You carefully sheath your knives again once you’re sure there’s no blood left on them.

You stare at the bodies, forcing your eyes to remember every last detail. May your gods or their Saints watch over them, wherever they may go. You don’t have enough coins to place under their tongues as per the Hellan tradition, although even if you did you couldn’t risk drawing the Darkling’s attention with such a specific ritual. Instead, you burn their faces into your mind. Memories and legacies were how your people retained their power, and being forgotten was a large part of how they crumbled away. At last you can remember these men.

A voice sounds from in front of you, and you look up hastily. “Do not pity them. They attacked the Sun Summoner, your friend.” The Darkling stands before you, something strange in his eyes. You’ve seen this look before, a few centuries ago. You had been careful to hide the true extent of your magic from him, perhaps knowing even then that he would want nothing more from you then the power you could give him.

In that long ago instant, you had let go, allowing your spells to run wild as stallions through the air. You were attacked, yes, but you had used it as an excuse for true bloodshed. It had been so long since you had truly tested your limits, always making sure to hide what you truly were, even from the other Grisha. You wanted to see what you could do, just this once. Even then, you were just scratching the surface, but the wash of inky emerald over the scene threatened to drown out the world. Bodies dropped, trees were stripped of bark, entire buildings crumbled despite the strongest of foundations. 

The few other Grisha present looked at you with true horror, but not the Darkling. No, he looked at you as he does now, with a sort of hunger that could consume entire countries and never be filled. He saw no girl or lover, he saw a weapon. He saw you standing before him, pulling a blade from your chest and offering him the hilt. He’d take it, not caring (or even relishing) your blood still dripping from the blade. The things he could do with you were unimaginable even in your worst nightmares, and it would never be enough. The worst part is that you thought you might go along with it, that you’d be willing to watch the end of the world with him.

This is how the Darkling looks at you now, a weapon ready for the taking. You remember hastily that he’s likely expecting something of you, so you duck your chin and do your best to summon up the modesty expected by the likes of Y/N Stassov, mapmaker and nothing more. “It’s just, well, a lot of death.” The Darkling inclines his head. “Maybe. Where did you learn to fight like that?” You don’t like this line of questioning, where it could lead. “The First Army. Sir.”

The Darkling’s lips quirk at the last minute honorific. “I’ve seen no First Army mapmaker who could take out a dozen Fjerdans with a pair of knives. Maybe I should send some of my soldiers to learn from your generals.” You panic, sure he’s testing you, then realize that he’s joking. Ridiculous. You force a smile. “I think they’re probably fine with their heartrending and all that.” The two of you have begun walking back to the horses now. The Darkling mounts his steed, then looks back at you. “Maybe so.” When he takes off, you’re not sure which scares you most- him figuring out who you are, or the idea that he would not look for you at all.

The Darkling calls for the party to take a respite that night, waiting until the moon shines low in the sky for everyone to tie up their horses and rest in a long-abandoned barn. Alina runs over to you as soon as she gets off of her mount, flinging her arms around you in gratitude. You can tell from the hammering of her heart whenever she looks at the Darkling that she hasn’t forgotten his use of the Cut, and probably won’t for a while.

“Saints, Y/N, I’m so glad you’re here. I couldn’t do this alone.” You can sense the eyes of the Darkling and the other Grisha on your back, and you know what’s expected of you. To them, you are no more than an otkazat’sya mapmaker, someone utterly unworthy of their Sun Summoner’s company. They’ll leave you to make your way back to Kribirsk when Alina is safe at the Little Palace, and they no doubt expect you to make her path easier.

So, you smile, smoothing back an errant piece of her hair into place. “That’s a lie, and we both know that. If you can punch an irritating officer or survive the Fold, you can ride a horse to Os Alta. Promise.” Alina rolls her eyes. “It’s not like that.” You raise an eyebrow. “It totally is. Believe me. Now come on, chasing after you all day is exhausting. I intend to go to sleep right now.” Alina grins. “That sounds good to me.”

Despite your weary eyes, you can’t seem to fall asleep at all. Alina sleeps next to you, the few Grisha lookouts stand unmoving at their posts. Eventually, you get sick of tossing and turning and staring up through the rotting beams through the barn roof. You stand, making your way quietly out of the barn. If the sentries see you, they do not stop you. Evidently, they trust you enough to let you walk around, or they view you as useless enough to not stop you from trying to run. Either works for you.

You don’t go far, just outside of the doors lying at odd angles on their hinges. You take a seat on a rusting metal bench, leaning back against the faded paint of the barn walls. You stare up at the sky, eyes tracing the constellations. Somewhere up in the night, there were once heroes and monsters, prideful queens and stubborn kings whose stories were famous enough to warrant them a place amongst the stars. You’ve been looking for them for a while, though, and know that the skies are empty of all souls who were once cast up there. It’s just another reminder that you are well and truly alone. The last remainder of a long dead culture.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” You startle, turning to see the Darkling walking out of the barn beside you. You manage to cover up your surprise with an apology. “Sorry, I didn’t think I’d woken anybody.” The Darkling shrugs. “You didn’t. I was already awake.” This feels somewhat surreal- here you sit, a false face and a fake history as a farmer turned soldier. Here stands the Darkling, looking just the same as always. It makes no sense, though- why would he keep seeking you out? Why would the general of the Second Army keep looking for an otkazat’sya soldier? He must know you, somehow. There’s no other explanation for it.

The Darkling clears his throat. “Thank you for speaking to Alina. I appreciate your words.” You dismiss the gratitude with a lift of your shoulder. “She’s my friend. I couldn’t exactly make her feel worse, could I?” The Darkling turns to look at you now, familiar quartz eyes seeming to tear you in two. “You could. You could have refused to play along with the role of double, you could have refused to fight by her side, you could have done your best to turn her away from us. You did none of that.”

You raise an eyebrow. “I could have resisted a team of the most skilled Grisha in all of Ravka? I intend to keep my life.” Something almost like a smile appears on the Darkling’s lips. You’ve seen this look before, in sunset afternoons and deepest nights. It’s so familiar that it seems to cut at you like a knife. You almost want to call out to him now- know me, please. Remember me. If you look close enough, you will see the woman you pretended to love. We could pretend again, if we wanted to.

You silent the murmurings, and he speaks again. “All the same, it was appreciated.” You turn back towards the sky, partly to take in the sight of the night sky again and partially to hide the smile giddily appearing on your own face. How is that after all this time, all these hurts, he still has this effect on you? “Well, I want her to have some good memories after this. I���ll be shipped back to Kribirsk, I don’t really want to leave on bad terms.”

The Darkling remains silent for so long that you’re worried you’ve said something wrong, opened up too much. A simple mapmaker would never confide in a centuries-old Shadow Summoner, he must suspect something. Surely, hopefully, he does. But instead, he turns to you, a softness present in his eyes that wasn’t there before. It rounds the edges of his quartz gaze, making it easier to fall hard and fast. “You aren’t going to leave for Kribirsk. You’re staying in Os Alta.”

You stare at him, night sky forgotten. “What? But I’m no Sun Summoner.” The Darkling laughs quietly in the night. “No, but few of us are. I have a personal guard, the oprichniki. I would like you to begin training with them once we arrive.” The sentence is phrased so casually that it almost floats by you completely undetected. The monumental weight of the words, however, is enough to shake you whole. The oprichniki are not Grisha, so you would fit in, but they are the Darkling’s special guards. Only the toughest and bravest of fighters are selected, certainly not a mapmaker who’s best skill is pretending to be a Sun Summoner.

You tell him as much, so stunned by this that you forget to hold your tongue. When you remember who you are and who you’re doing your best to pretend you’re not, you wish you had remained silent. For some reason, however, the Darkling doesn’t seem taken aback by this momentary lapse. Instead, it just makes his lips twitch even more. He is most certainly hiding a smile. “I saw you fight, Miss Stassov. If you can do that without any of our training at all, I’d say you’re a good candidate.”

You lean back against the barn wall. “Oprichnik. Me.” You whistle quietly, letting the sound echo in the night air like the call of a dove. The Darkling inclines his head. “You are free to turn the offer down at any point-” his smile grows at your raised eyebrow- “Although it is not an offer I take lightly. You have potential. Besides, keeping you in Os Alta will be a support for Miss Starkov.”

You furrow your brow. “I thought you would want to separate her from her old life, not keep having ties to it.” It’s what the Darkling would do when you knew him. He would have cut out another mapmaker without a second thought. The Darkling considers this. “Perhaps. But if she feels too alone, she may draw in on herself and feel unwilling to use her power at all. You have your merits, Miss Stassov. Perhaps more than you see yourself.”

You barely hear him when he goes back inside the barn. He has always had this ability to disguise his footsteps, letting the shadows cloak him in sound as well as in sight. For once, it doesn’t trouble you. Instead, you’re troubled by the future ahead of you. If you were an oprichnik, a guard loyal only to him, there would be even more chance of the Darkling finding out that you were Hecari, the woman he’d loved and who had run from him, feigning death rather than stay by his side and fear his knife.

Being near him, though, it makes you think back to every moment you’d shared. Could it be possible that you had misheard? Would the man you know, the man drenched by moonlight who makes offers of joining the ranks of the oprichniki to mapmakers he’s barely met, truly want you dead? The answer is yes, you know that. But your heart whispers differently, telling you that you could be wrong on this. You’ve always trusted your whispers, the ghosts of the past. The only problem is that these aren’t Hellenid spirits now, they’re your own. Longings for what might have been, what you left behind. 

In the end, you retreat back inside the barn. When you sleep, you dream of a quartz-eyed boy, dark-haired and smiling before he thought to use you.

series tag list: fave @underc0vercryptid​, @hotleaf-juice​, @aleksanderwh0r3​, @kaqua​, @nemesis729​, @imma-too-many-fandoms​

[katnissmellarkkk]

General #7

Hiiii! Okay, well I bet you thought I forgot about this! Or, more than likely, you forgot you even requested this back in Decemeber. But never fear, my child. I remembered and have been thinking of this fic and what to write for months. 

And so I’m so sorry, I’m a total perfectionist and I started and discared like 3 ideas for this before deciding on this oneshot sooo if this sucks, I’m at least comforted by the fact that I accomplished something in writing this itself? That sentence made zero sense but... I’m tired 🤷🏼‍♀️😅.

Prompt : General # 7 :

“Is that blood?” 

“Yes but that doesn’t matter right now, what does matter is-” 

“You are literally bleeding.”

Anyways, thank you for the prompt and here we go! 

Whispers Of Light

I don't know exactly how I got roped into this. How exactly Delly Cartwright, Peeta's best friend—and alright, my friend now too—managed to convince me to help her and Leevy and about three dozen other members of the community with sorting boxes.

Sorting boxes. Organizing contents. Decorating with "found treasures".

The type of activities Prim loved doing with our mother. The type of activities I refused to do after my father died, to punish my mother for her depression.

The type of activities I now kick myself for walking out on, that I'll never be able to take back. I'll never be able to get those moments back with my sister. I'll never know what those hours between her and our mother entailed, because I chose to exclude myself, just so I could hold onto my petty anger for something that was out of all our control.

Maybe that's why I agreed to help Delly and the others with sorting through boxes upon boxes of debrief, of the items that scarcely survived Twelve's bombing almost two years ago. Maybe I only agreed out of guilt, both for never doing this type of endeavor with my sister and for being the direct cause of the bombing itself.

But whatever my reasons were, I agreed to help nonetheless, and I always follow through my promises. If there was one part of me forged in the war, if only one minor aspect of me was amplified in the smoke and haze and blood of revolution, it was the importance of keeping your promises, against all odds.

The dire consequences of a broken promise has long lasting aftereffects, beyond anything either Haymitch or I wish to dwell on.

"Katniss!" Delly calls, holding up an old, half-ripped paper book that is completely void of a front cover. "Look! I think this book is from the old Apothecary Shop!"

I squint at the dusty, decimated item, not entirely convinced. "I don't think so?" I murmur, unable to even decipher the words on the now melted, conjoined pages. "I'm pretty sure my mother kept the only apothecary book in her family?"

Kanon Bagley turns to inspect the battered item in his girlfriend's hands as well. "I don't think this is a medicinal plant book, Dells," he says sheepishly, a small smirk playing on his lips.

She gives him an incredulous look. "What do you mean medicinal?"

I peer up at him too, not comprehending his meaning any more than Delly. "What kind of plants do you think are in here?" I ask, taking the nearly destroyed object myself and flipping through the worn pages again, seeing odd herbs that neither of my parents ever mentioned or had on hand. "These don't look like the poisonous ones my father told me about?"

Kanon bites back a laugh now and I can't help feeling a little perturbed. As kind and soft-spoken as he usually is, I'm foreign to the feeling of him laughing at me. "What?" Delly snaps at him before I even can.

He still chuckles though, in spite of both our nasty glares. "You guys, it's a book of plants that'll get you high."

It takes a full minute for the meaning to dawn on me. Long enough that Leevy and a couple guys I used to go to school with come over to inspect the book as well. Long enough that they confirm Kanon's assessment just as I realize we're talking about plants that'll make you feel akin to how the morphling made me feel while confined for I killing Coin.

While everyone else snickers—and Delly full on chortles—I pass the book back to Kanon, sliding out of the crowd and moving towards a brand new box of savaged items.

It's not that the mention of plant-based drugs is a trigger for me. It's not something I ever truly gave any thought to before, to be honest. My father likely knew of them but it's not like he was about to bestow that kind of knowledge on his eleven-year-old and my mother perhaps felt it was inappropriate to mention.

No, it wasn't the subject in itself that hit a sore spot for me. But like so many times before, it's where the subject led my mind. It's where the topic took me back to.

Snow's Execution Day. The day I chose to kill President Coin instead. Being thrown back into my old tribute room. Getting high on the morphling.

Trying to forget all that I'd lost. Trying to forget my little sister becoming a human torch before my very eyes. My district engulfed in flames. The ambiguous loss of my best friend.

The connection between me and Peeta that I believed then would be permanently severed. That I believed then to be irreparable.

I suppose I believed then I was irreparable too.

And I miss Peeta suddenly, even more than I already did. Because he always knows what to say when my thoughts turn dark, when I'm suddenly triggered out of the happy, every day events and suctioned backwards to a war torn bird with her wings clipped.

But he's not here to talk me down or scare away the ghosts haunting my mind. He's not here to comfort me or even shoot me a supportive glance. No, he's at his very busy business today.

Peeta's bakery—the Mellark Bakery—has only proven to withstand the test of time these past few months. Since someone accidentally burned down the place, with nothing more than a croissant and a fancy Capitol toaster, the rebuilt bakery has been nothing but a success.

And also extremely time-consuming, I grumble internally, as I begin to pull out stuffed toys that once belonged to dead children.

"If any of those are still intact, we can donate them to the community home," Leaf John says as he opens the box across from me.

"And what exactly are we supposed to be use as decorations from these boxes?" I murmur, peering into another cardboard container, full of half-charred papers and cloths.

The general idea of today, as Delly had pitched it to me last week, was to help the community of Twelve finally sort through these boxes, donate what we could to those in need and decorate the new Justice Building with the leftover contents inside.

Somehow though I can't imagine pinning up terrible drawings of plants that'll inebriate you or headless teddy bears is going to bode well with the district.

Delly rolls her eyes in my direction—a whole new kind of response that I never thought I'd be receiving from the girl who skipped through the town square until she was fourteen years old—before nodding towards boxes on top of the ladder. "We're decorating the Justice Building with the surviving photos from those boxes, Katniss."

"Oh." Then why am I sorting these grimy, dirt-covered playthings? Why didn't anyone give me more clear instructions on today?

And why has it taken almost two years for Twelve to get a group of people together to organize the surviving items from the bombing?

I have no idea how Peeta's managed to get two bakeries built in the time it's taken for thirty-eight of us to come to the Justice Building and look through fifty cardboard boxes. And if I'm being honest, I have no idea why I'm even still here helping. I'm clearly not contributing much to the event. There's definitely more than enough volunteers without me.

And, of course, I could be at the bakery right now. Without a doubt, I'd be of more service there than I am here, digging through dusty knickknacks. I could be helping Peeta and Thom and the other part-time employees, exerting more knowledge and authority than I have here.

After all, Peeta did say the bakery was partially mine. In his mind, at least.

The ulterior motive of getting small, fleeting moments with my boyfriend, of basking in the feeling of safety with him beside me, of the occasional stolen kiss or hand squeeze when no one is looking, runs through the back of my mind.

And sways my decision immensely.

I open my mouth to tell Delly and the others that I'm about to head out, that they clearly have it covered here and I'm just in the way, when at the worst possible second, Leevy kindly murmurs, "Katniss, do you mind starting on the box on the ladder? Seeing if any of the pictures are in decent enough shape?"

I hesitate for a long moment, realizing immediately my predicament. It'd be rude to leave right after someone just essentially assigned me a task. I did agree to be here today, to help out with this tedious project. Leaving right now would only come off as rude and inconsiderate.

This is the reason I never did enjoy group assignments in school. The longer I'm here, the more I'm rediscovering this fact about myself. The division of the workload, the bore of the standing around, not knowing if you're doing the right or wrong thing, the lack of total control.

But I still nod after waiting a beat too long and agree with the nicest flare in my tone I can manage.

I'll go through the one box at the top of the ladder and then subtly make my exit afterwards. The image I unintentionally conjured up of Peeta and the bakery is still pulling at me, making me anxious to get back to him, to see him again even though we were together only three hours ago.

Since we officially became a couple a few months back—though Haymitch scoffs at that notion, claiming we've been together since Peeta first started sleeping over in my bed—I've found myself growing far more clingy to him than I ever could have anticipated. I hate when he leaves for the bakery in the mornings now, even as I still revel in the solace I find inside the woods. I look forward to his return home every night. More than even look forward to it, I'm usually at the bakery around the closing hours, helping him clean and inventory, asking him when he's coming home. Maybe looking somewhat unconsciously flirtatious as I say it.

I grab the box sitting on the ladder's top stair and pull it open, easily maintaining my balance one rung down, the same way I maintain my balance on a tree branch while hunting.

Inside pours out a plethora of photographs, mostly of Twelve's now past citizens. Near the top of the pile I see images of Greasy Sae's daughter, Dolly. The mother of her granddaughter. The daughter who died of croup a few years before the war.

Those photos must belong to Sae, I realize. Which means more of her items are probably scattered throughout the boxes here. And despite the fact that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she'll tell me not of be impractical, that if she's made it two years without these things she doesn't need them now, I still make a mental note to return her lost items. If nothing else, I make a mental promise to give back to her the photos of her daughter.

I know better than anyone what kind of comfort photographs of the deceased can provide.

As if in line with my thoughts, as if I alone manifested it somehow, the next image that catches my eye is one I entirely do not anticipate.

It's a shiny photo, on the kind of glossy paper my family could never afford. In the image is a blonde man with broad shoulders and a tall build. Wrapped in his embrace stands a petite girl, with long blonde curls and mascara accentuating her already long lashes. The couple both have eyes that match the color of the sky and are dressed up in some of the nicest clothes in all of Twelve. A white dress with lace. A gray suit with a black vest. The pretty girl wears jewelry and lipstick and there's a familiar glint in the male's eyes and I find myself mesmerized.

And I can't pretend I don't see my boyfriend in both of their faces. I can't pretend Peeta isn't the spitting image of both his parents.

He has his mother's smile, I realize with startling assurance. I never saw the witch smile personally, at any point in my life so I suppose I wouldn't know where he got his charming, sweet grin from.

The mannerism looks so out of place on his mother. The kind smile Peeta has, the one that could light up a blackened sky, doesn't bode with the woman in the picture, even on her wedding day. The charming smile doesn't fit with what I know of the woman's character. With what little about her Peeta chooses to share.

But I'm even more surprised to find how much Peeta has come to resemble his father. How much Peeta has grown to favor the now deceased man.

The last time I saw the baker—the original baker, that is. Haidon Mellark—before the Quarter Quell, I resented the fact that Peeta wasn't as tall or as broad as his father. I privately believed if he'd inherited those traits, he'd be even more likely to win the games again and I could worry about him less.

Peeta was always taller than me and was always remarkably strong, after working in the bakery since childhood. But his father was a whole different level. Haidon Mellark, I'd forgotten until now, had a body that could only rival my own father's.

And as it turns out, Peeta did inherit Haidon's physicality. He just also happened to be a late bloomer. Like his mother, I imagine, staring at her tiny frame in the picture.

The change in Peeta's form occurred so gradually I barely even noticed until a couple months ago, when I woke up with my head against his heart and abruptly realized just how broad he had become. Until I couldn't even reach to kiss his jaw on my tip toe. Until he started laughing at me and had to lift me up in order to properly embrace the way I like.

"Katniss?" I hear Delly beckon, trying to bring me back to reality. Trying and failing, that is. I hear her but only in a vague, distant sense. My mind is still stuck on the image in my grasp. Still stuck on the novelty that I managed to find a remembrance for the boy who still at times questions if his memory is full of lies.

"I still cry about my family and somedays I can't even remember their faces."

I never even considered the possibility of finding a token of Peeta's departed family here. It never occurred to me, the potential finds in this box at my fingertips, that I could take home to my boyfriend. I never imagined finding him something to hold onto when the inevitable dark day came again like a storm cloud, full of thunder.

I'm so entranced what this could mean for Peeta, so lost in my own little world, that I'm barely even hanging onto the ladder. I'm definitely not as steady as I should be, standing near the top rung.

And I'm definitely not steady enough to hang on when Delly gives it a rough shake, trying to catch my attention.

/

The boxes break my fall. Sort of. Kanon and Leaf John had taken the liberty of placing the empty cardboard, already looked through and emptied, beneath the ladder.

Falling headfirst into a large, void box is better than falling plainly onto the filthy, concrete tile floor. But not ideal. Not as helpful as falling into a box of surviving clothes or toys would have been.

Delly apologized profusely for shaking the ladder. She'd even begun to cry when she noticed the blood seeping from my forehead.

Thankfully Kanon was there, as I didn't have the energy to console her much. I don't even know how I managed to cut my head at all, but it stung a fair amount and it provided me the excuse I wanted minutes prior, to escape the group project and head for the bakery.

Even after the fall, my mind still was cemented on the newfound treasure. My first instinct was still to show this memento to Peeta as soon as possible.

Kanon though, like a good friend, insisted on walking me home, despite my many protests that it was unnecessary, that I was just fine, that I could walk home blind if I had to. He insisted, foiling my intention to walk directly to the bakery and not wait for Peeta's return home, which still remained hours away.

Kanon was surprisingly stubborn when he felt strongly about something and I chose to relent, to give in and allow him to accompany me back to what used to be Victor's Village—where he now resided with Delly, inside Peeta's old home—without much fight.

Fighting for your independence and autonomy doesn't exactly present you as rational when there's a bloody gash in your forehead.

"Doesn't that hurt?" Kanon asks as we make out way up my porch.

I look up, maybe a little startled, from Mr. and Mrs. Mellark's wedding photo. "My head?"

"Yeah," he says carefully, looking at the blood like it's a mutt in an arena.

I shrug, doing my best not to indicate how dizzy I actually feel. Either from the fall or the blood still dripping out despite my attempt to plug the wound up with old cotton rags someone sorted into the trash box. "I've had worse."

He chuckles, a little sardonically. "Yeah, so have I."

I thank him for walking me home—for it was as inconvenient as it was sweet—and close the door slowly behind me, before leaning my ear against the wooden frame, waiting. Waiting for him to climb the steps down from my porch and make his way back to the Justice Building. Waiting for him to be far enough out of sight that I can sneak back out without him also trying to accompany me to the bakery.

It's not that I don't appreciate Kanon and Delly and all of my other friends' concerns. It's the fact that I wish to bestow a likely loaded item upon my boyfriend and I really don't need an audience to do it.

It's not the easiest feat, to slyly time it so Kanon won't hear me opening and shutting my front door again. And it's probably not my smartest plan, to walk alone along the rocky cobblestones and the uneven concrete, with a less than level head and body.

But I make it to the back door of the bakery still, just as I knew I would. It takes three times as long, but I make it there nonetheless.

Still clutching the photograph of his parents between my fingers too. Still with the same primary focus on my mind. To give him a token of remembrance, a token of the imperfect family he lost so tragically, that he still greatly missed, even when he can't say their names. Even when he can't conjure up their faces.

"You don't remember your family?"

"Sometimes I do... I'm not so sure other days. My memory isn't exactly top notch, if you know what I mean."

I push open the heavy-weighted back door, using all the energy my body can muster up. To my relief, Thom is already in the back room, sweeping flour off the floor.

"Hi, boss," he greets slyly as I walk in, barely glancing up at me. I shoot him an over-the-top eye roll, though I can't help smirking myself at the stupid nickname, when he beckons Peeta. "Hey, your girl is here!" He yells loudly. Too loudly to be packed with customers at the counter.

I take that to mean the daily rush has come and gone. Which would be very convenient, as it means I can present Peeta with my finding that much faster, without having to worry about his business—or our business, as he teasingly calls it—being held up.

I hear the sound of my boyfriend's quiet laughter from the front. The sound that I akin to my father's singing or my sister's squeal of delight. The last sound still alive that can make my heart do a flip.

But it dies out the second he peaks his blonde head into the back room. The moment his baby blues, the same color as both his parents', meet my silver ones and then trail upwards.

Almost as if remembering the gash in my head, I reach to my forehead, to ensure the makeshift cloth bandage is still in place.

"Katniss?" Peeta says, his eyes looking far more nervous than I anticipated. Which I can only take to mean the red liquid has seeped through the plain fabric. "Is that blood?"

I don't want him to focus too heavily on that fact though. Like I told Kanon, I've had much worse injuries in my life. Me and Peeta both have.

Just look at his prosthetic leg.

"Yes," I reply easily, before moving closer to him, pushing the glossy photograph towards him. "But that doesn't matter right now. What does matter is-"

"You are literally bleeding."

I sigh, feeling slightly perturbed now. "Peeta, look," I insist, thrusting the image of his parents towards him, waiting for it to take anchor.

And it does. It takes a beat longer than I expect, but it happens nonetheless. I watch silently as the image captives him, as the shiny photograph takes him back to a time when this exact location was the only home he'd ever known and this business was run by the two people inside the picture.

He touches the photo, as if to test it's realism, before looking up at me in disbelief. "Where did you find this?"

"The Justice Building today. Inside the boxes, with all the things lost in the bombing."

There's a long pause as Peeta process this. The silence makes me antsy, finding myself abruptly uncertain of what could be going through his mind.

Finally, he whispers softly, "I never thought I'd see this picture again."

And the awed, tender smile that spreads across his face swiftly encompasses me in its warmth.

And I suddenly don't even feel the gash in my head anymore.

/

Read The Rest On AO3

[endcant]

Making My Own Post™️ because im not indigenous, and because the post that spurred this on was about Palestine as well, so i don’t want to derail it. that said, it does have me very emotional because i grew up in the central valley of california, and i do my best to pay attention to the land i’m on and the people who know it best. i think that anybody who really cares about the land that america encompasses and learning about what it was like before it was devastated by the arrival of white people would be able to understand my frustration.

i love the valley now, even in its dry and wounded state, because it is where i grew up, but it is obvious that the land was far, far healthier when it was in the care of the indigenous people of the area. that is because the ecosystem was maintained by and for those people.

i’m not indigenous, so i don’t presume to have any better knowledge than what was shared in the other post (which you really should check out before reading on), but what @omusa-inola and @dojense shared was the same as what i learned in my own personal research. the valley used to be home to black oak forests, which were maintained by the indigenous people that live there. black oaks are huge trees which provide essential shade from the intense central valley sun. black oaks also build a root network that nourishes other plants that the indigenous people of the area (including the miwoks, but also other tribes) relied on prior to the destruction of the oaks.

there is a very small black oak grove near where i used to live (that is now being threatened by kudzu, sadly) and standing underneath the cathedral-like shelter of a black oak’s sprawling branches and seeing what grows in their shadow really contextualizes the struggle of the valley. it’s obvious if you open your eyes and look. things grow easily under the black oaks. they don’t elsewhere. meanwhile, white people struggle to grow non-native crops under the direct sun, in huge monocultural fields, by dousing them with water daily. white people act like the valley is dry and barren by nature now, but it doesn’t have to be. it wasn’t before.

if you read that other post, you might be finding it clear that genocidal action and ecological disaster absolutely go hand in hand. both play into each other. california is just one example of that. the healthy, abundant ecosystem that worked for the valley, that was maintained by and for the indigenous people, was destroyed. the oaklands were chopped down, taking the livelihood of the indigenous people with them— all in order to make way for the white way of life. even now, surviving native plant and wildlife continues to die off every day as farms till to prepare for another season of stripping the soil of water and nutrients for profit, and even as farms are torn up and replaced by houses and apartments for the ever-increasing number of those who want to strike it rich in the golden state. public schools in CA continue to refuse to teach the truth about the indigenous people of the region, denying their importance and existence. sacred & historic sites are torn up because they’re worth so much more to capitalism if they’re replaced by a shitty apartment building or whatever.

the disturbed land of the valley is not only home to crops and densely-packed little houses, but it is also home to viciously invasive and highly flammable grasses that literally didnt exist in california before white people brought them over in bags of grain and crop seeds. the native plants that do manage to sprout up between the strawberries and almond trees are destroyed by tilling, but the tilling literally perpetuates the life cycle of these invasive grasses which choke out other life, suck the nutrients and water out of the soil, and then die on top of it in a dry, flammable heap. those invasive grasses also dominate the yellow, barren cow pastures between the orchards, and the black-burnt shoulders of the highways.

it’s confusing and mind-numbing to try to understand how California keeps making ecologically devastating decisions while maintaining the reputation of a Good, Liberal State. at least it was that way for me, until one of my visits to the black oak grove during that period of my life where i was struggling to grow my own food to eat. i saw how easily life springs up under the shadows of the trees even in the heat of a valley summer, and remembered that white people tore all of those life-giving trees down to plant rows of crops to sell off and to build labyrinths of identical houses. the answer is that the state of california is just another part of the capitalist colonial government that exists to perpetuate itself and kill everything and everyone that stands in its way, even until there is no california to rule over, burnt to the ground and then swallowed by the pacific.

no one has cared for the land better than the indigenous people who colonizers set out to erase. dont forget the damage that is done, because colonizer governments with no attachment to the land will never fix the ecological disasters they benefit from, even if that government is california, which brands itself as the most climate-conscious and progressive state. i encourage other americans to research the land you live on to learn what it was and who took care of it before it became built cookie-cutter houses, lawns, and factory farms. listen to the voices of indigenous people around you. it will be frustrating and saddening to learn what has been destroyed, but we have to learn.

anyway. #landback

[mylordshesacactus]

A Writer’s Guide To Hurricanes, I Guess

I realized with a bit of chagrin that, while I’ve spent years bitching about how it drives me up the wall that nobody (in fandom or, in fact, mainstream media) has a goddamn clue how hurricanes work and yet insists on portraying them anyway...I’ve never actually tried to help by explaining what they’re actually like.

So, here’s a genuine, non-sarcastic, good-faith attempt by a Floridian to help you guys who might want to write this stuff at some point understand it, just a little.

So here we go, chronologically in terms of the storm’s progress.

The storm itself is the least of it.

This is the thing non-hurricane places don’t....get.

You can see a hurricane coming. You can watch it. You have, in fact, no choice. I need to reiterate this.

You have no choice but to sit there and watch a hurricane coming.

I’ve actually talked a lot in another post about what that feels like, and why hurricane parties are a thing. But try to imagine what that feels. Just...try. You have to sit there, for about a week, watching the wrath of God bear down on you.

You watch it come and you hope the path changes. You hope it veers off back into the Atlantic, of course, but you also--you hope it hits somewhere else. You know wherever it goes people will die and you hope it goes somewhere else. And you feel kinda bad about it; but you also don't because these are just facts, this is a fact of hurricanes, they will go somewhere and people will die in that place and all of us hope it goes Somewhere Else and if it does, we know that the people Somewhere Else are praying frantically that it gets back on course and hits us instead and we understand.

(And when it does change course, when it doesn’t hit you, you almost feel....cheated? Because you spent so much time and energy preparing and fearing and coming to terms and accepting and bracing and then it--doesn’t happen.

And the guilt of praying it would go Somewhere Else is nothing compared to being disgusted with yourself for actually feeling disappointed that you were spared the apocalypse this time.)

The wind is different.

If you listen to weather reports on hurricanes you’ve absolutely heard the phrasing “sustained winds of X miles per hour with gusts up to Y” without really thinking about what that means.

Now, of course everyone’s been in windy conditions. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly how the hurricane is....different, so I’m just going to describe what it’s like.

The wind always comes from one direction. There’s no being “knocked this way and that” or whatever; the wind comes from the direction the wind is coming from. Always.

(If you’re near where the center of the storm passes, this direction will slowly change as your position relative to the eye changes. But it changes over a matter of hours--like the angle of the sun.)

The wind is a constant, unrelenting force. There’s no....there’s no dips in the wind. It never lessens, it only spikes and then returns to baseline. In a normal windstorm, no, it’s not that the wind ever stops blowing, but...there’s an ebb and a flow. A hurricane is a wind tunnel in which every so often someone revs the engine and there’s a few seconds of higher wind, but it never drops below where it’s set.

(The wind will snake under plywood and storm shutters; it will rip them clean off, if you haven’t screwed them in properly. Screws, not nails. The wind makes deadly projectiles of anything not fastened down. Plywood and storm shutters can be broken, by anything travelling fast enough. It is standard procedure, if you have lawn furniture or anything else not secured that doesn’t float, to carefully lower that furniture into a pool--if you have one. It will stay untouched, and won’t be flung through your neighbors’ plywood.)

This is why hurricanes take down so many trees, why they do so much structural damage. Buildings in hurricane zones are built to withstand high wind, and most trees in these areas can survive high wind too or they wouldn’t have survived so long. But there’s only so much that nature and engineering can do about sustained high winds, without a moment’s rest, for hours, unending, no respite...

In landfall footage--ie, the stuff you see on the news--you likely see this effect in the palm trees-watch how instead of tossing, they’re just bent. It never lets up. In the instances where a bent tree violent bounces back before bending again, trust me--that’s not a letup in the wind speed. That’s the tree having been bent too far, and springing back from the sheer pressure on its internal structure. That’s the tree being stronger than the wind--for now

It’s mostly not like the TV reports.

There’s a reason I referred to “landfall footage” above. News broadcasts, for a lot of reasons, focus on the storm at its worst. The highest storm surge, the highest winds, the most brutal damage, occurs where the eye wall first crosses from being over water to being over land.

(Remember--by the time a storm “makes landfall,” everything for miles around has been experiencing the storm for hours already. “Landfall” is when the EYE of the storm first hits land, not when the storm “arrives”.)

But hurricanes are...vast. Look up satellite footage of hurricanes. Really look at it. Look at how much sheer area they cover.

Most places do not experience landfall-level disaster. That’s why, when people evacuate--well, when residents evacuate, the tourists and recent transplants tend to panic harder--you’re basically always evacuating to someplace that will still have vanished under that mass of swirling clouds. Evacuation sites are still inside the hurricane, but wind speed, storm surge, etc--everything drops dramatically even a few miles from the eye.

On a related note, the eye itself rapidly starts shedding power the moment it’s no longer over open water. Generally, the simple act of making landfall instantly drops a hurricane at least one category in severity. Hurricanes are eldritch gods; they rise from the sea and from the sea they take their power. Cut off from it, they starve.

Do not think for a moment that just because you’re “only” experiencing Cat 1 winds that this storm can’t kill your ass dead. Do not underestimate what the death throes of a dying god can do.

Storm surge isn’t high waves, and it isn’t rain.

Storm surge is the actual sea level rising. The entire ocean being dragged onto land by the power of the storm.

Particularly wet and slow hurricanes might--rarely--drop enough rain to cause flooding. However, that’s unusual; most places here can handle heavy rain. The rain isn’t the problem.

(Slow hurricanes are killers on another level. It’s everything I’ve already said about the unrelenting brutality of the wind, coupled with the fact that--as, again, the vast majority of the storm has been raging for hours by the time it “makes landfall”, and hurricanes draw power from the Eye being over the water--it now has hours upon hours of fully-fuelled destruction before it begins to weaken by being cut off from warm water. It doesn’t weaken, it just....keeps going. And the storm surge is present that entire time.)

I’m just gonna direct you to this NOAA diagram on how storm surge works.

The northeast quadrant is the strongest.

This isn’t a proper subheading it’s just something I rarely see people not from Florida acknowledge. 

No matter where the storm is coming from or what angle it hits at--the northeast quadrant is the killer. You do everything in your power to avoid being caught northeast of the storm.

In hurricane-prone areas, the threat is felt year-round.

All the major intersections? Our stoplights aren’t hung on wires from wooden poles--those blow down too easily. They’re bolted to thick metal pipes, “hurricane-proof”. Major roadways that are above floodlines are labelled as evacuation routes.

Things like that.

Hurricanes make their presence known long before the disaster begins.

You start to get “hurricane weather” days--days--before it hits. The sun is out, the weather is fine except for a...

Well, a constant, low-level breeze, with much less variation in angle and direction than usual, fewer gusts, but still primarily a natural breeze. And then you go outside and you look up at that cheerful blue sky and it’s already there.

They’re called cloud bands. You look up and the entire sky is just fluffy white clouds, racing at speed in one direction...

(The breeze, in those early few days, is light. Present, but light. The clouds are always, always racing as if before a gale. There’s a pervasive, eerie wrongness about this, looking up--the clouds moving much, much faster than the wind that should be driving them.)

A hurricane is not a thunderstorm.

This is the cardinal sin and the clearest, most common misconception. Hurricanes are not thunderstorms. In fact it’s actually very rare to have lightning or hear any thunder at all during a hurricane, compared to an average summer storm in hurricane-prone areas.

People often portray hurricanes as basically....the worst storm they can remember, but bigger, and badder, and worse. Hurricanes aren’t just big and intense, they’re....different. They’re something different.

Hurricanes are...quiet.

Except that they’re not.

You know when people talk about the wind howling? Think of the most intense storm you’ve ever sat through. Think about the sound of the wind.The way it whistles through leaves. Hold that experience in your head.

Now forget it. This is different.

Hurricanes don’t sound like that. Hurricanes are....

The sound a hurricane makes is a howl, yes. It makes palm fronds and grass steps and leaves whistle like a rapier scraped against a sheathe, yes. But you barely notice those shallow details, because the sound a hurricane makes is below that, stronger, more powerful.

Hurricanes moan.

Hurricanes are the entire world around you slowly and steadily fraying at the seams, and it moans, low and deep, agonized and hungry, and it never stops. Never. Not until it’s over.

Hurricanes are a world ending.

The storm passes, and the hurricane has only begun.

Do you think people stock up as heavily as they do, with generators and nonperishables and such, for--what, for a few hours of wind and rain, however alive?

No.

Because once the tempest is past, now you have to...exist.

You will not have power. If you were in a very, very lightly-affected area, you might have cell service. Most of your neighbors have evacuated. Many roads can’t be used because they’re washed out, or there are trees or power lines down across them.

It’s very common to lose water pressure. Common practice in hurricane-prone areas is to fill your bathtub with water before the storm--so that, when you lose water pressure, you can use a bucket to flush your toilet. Because those conditions, assuming you’re in an area that can be repaired and not rebuilt, can take weeks.

Weeks without running water, a flushable toilet. That gets grim fast. You brace for the storm. You prepare for what follows.

A hurricane is an eldritch abomination.

Hurricanes are alive.

Hurricanes are Old Gods.

Sitting through a hurricane is not like sitting through a bad storm or like sitting through a tornado, which is fast and unstoppable but then it’s over like it never existed save for the destruction left behind.

In order to get a clearer understanding of just how much the universe is vast, how much it does not, cannot, even notice you enough to want you dead because you are so small it would not comprehend you as possessing an existence if it tried--you would have to go to space.

And while the world moans around you and something out there, alive, growls at a frequency you can’t hear but you feel--you don’t cuddle for warmth during a hurricane. You just don’t.

You keep the generator running outside in the lee of the house where it won’t kill you all with gas fumes, connected via wires that snake around through a cracked door somewhere it won’t get blown open. You make sure it doesn’t run out of fuel, that it doesn’t get water blown into anything important. You use it to power a TV first--to keep the weather report on. You power lights second, if it’s a decent one. You can’t afford one powerful enough to run your refrigerator; you ate the ice cream before this started.

You play games. We’re human; it’s what we do. We play games in the face of our own helplessness. But while you play, you listen. You can’t not.

It’s always there. The world creaks on its hinges. You feel the edges threatening to dissolve. If you sit for a moment and are quiet, that ever-present moan is there, something ancient and powerful on a scale outside your comprehension. There is no cozy comfort of being bunkered down safe against the storm, not here.

There is no “safe” against this. You sit still and quiet and bear witness.

And when the sun rises in the aftermath, you’re surprised to find the world--even a wrecked and altered world--still exists. It shouldn’t. You were there when it ended.

And--and I cannot emphasize this enough--there’s no fucking thunder.

[rosy-cheekx]

Aesthetic prompt- song: "in hell i'll be in good company" by the dead south; vibe: steam off a warm drink, heavy rain on windows; color: cool gray, bronze, red :)

Took me long enough! This fic is months in the making, but I am so excited to finally be able to answer this prompt. This is chapter 1 of probably 3!

A Phoenix Razed

Chapter 1- Rebirth

---

3 days since Great Yarmouth

Tim’s hands encircled the paper cup in his lap. The cup was small, he noted; he could clasp his fingers together easily. Or maybe his hands were just big. The tea was dark, way over-steeped, and the herbal scent bloomed out in waves alongside the rising steam. There was no sugar, no milk, none of the usual accoutrement Tim used to take tea. Just harsh, bitter, black.

It’s what you deserve.

Tim rolled his eyes at his internal monologue, drama queen, and sipped the beverage. Agh, still hot? He sucked in air through his teeth, startling Martin, who he’d forgotten was beside him.

“Tim?” He snapped his eyes up from where they had been resting on the book, lips moving to form words Tim hadn’t been listening to. “You alright?”

“Hmm? Oh. Yeah, burnt my tongue.” Tim’s words sounded like a shrug, slumped and uninterested, now out of his reverie.

Silence stretched between him and Martin. Or, Tim wished it was silence. The only sound was the low static of the EEG, a rainbow of wires between the machine and Jonathan Sims’ scalp, shaved to accommodate the electrodes. What Tim wouldn’t give for any level of sound other than what they experienced right now. Any less, and there would be an answer to the question, “Will Jon ever wake up?”, and more would mean his heart was working, or lungs, or any other number of body parts to which machines were attached, waiting for any sign of response.

It’s your fault he’s like this.

It should have been you.

Tim exhaled and sipped the tea again, more careful this time. It was still hot—he was pretty sure the burn on his tongue made it feel even hotter—but he tempered his expectations and swallowed a sip of the bitter liquid, letting the raw flavor coat his throat.

“-there’s not much point to this, huh?” Martin asked, slipping a tattered bookmark between the pages of the book he had been reading—he was hoping to annoy Jon with poetry into waking up with Tennyson’s Ulysses—and letting it slip from his lap to the bed, green cover stark against the yellowish-white of the thin blanket.

“I don’t know, Marto, doctors said he might be able to hear us. Maybe dear Alfie will bore Jon back to life,” but Tim’s words lacked the bite and humor that was meant to be there.

“Don’t-” Martin warned softly, shaking his head and pushing his reading glasses through his fringe of curls. “He’s not…he’s still alive. He’s just lost.”

“You’re right,” Tim nodded, placing a hand on Martin’s shoulder lightly before pulling it away as he felt the round of Martin’s shoulder twinge under his touch. “You know what I mean.” He rubbed at the bandages that wound around his abdomen, letting himself indulge in the ache of raw skin and muscle and fat, the hiss of pain atonement for his sins.

Martin sighed, a slow, burdensome sound. “Yeah, I do.” At his words, Martin’s phone rang, and he looked at the caller ID before shoving the phone deep in his pocket, ignoring the call as he did so. “Listen, Tim, you know I’d stay longer if I could-”

“No, I get it, Martin.” Tim stood as Martin did, grabbing the IV bag by his chair for support. “Duty calls. I must away, my love.”

Martin scoffed, the pale sound muffled and diminished by the emptiness of the room. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Try to go on without me.” His voice dropped the light in it as he placed a hand on Tim’s. His hands were freezing, Jesus. “Seriously, Tim, if you need me…”

“I’ll call.” Tim waggled the phone in the pockets of the linen pants the hospital had provided. “Promise.”

--

“I hear the Great Grimaldi’s in town.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I know.”

He wished the moments after were fuzzy. He wished he could chalk his memories up to delirium or carbon monoxide poisoning. There was the detonator, small and squat in his hands. There was Grimaldi, or Nikola, or whatever that thing was. And there was Jon, kneeling, eyes piercing him in a way he had never experienced before. A moment of true lucidity amongst the madness of the Unknowing.

Tim had pressed the button, resigning this to be his final image, his final memory. The things in the world he hated most, all splayed out in front of him, with the promise of all the things he loved waiting for him. A win-win, really. Go out with a bang, leave a mark on the Stranger, cause some errant destruction, and finally see Danny again. The Stranger would never forget the Stoker brothers, that would have been for sure.

But the combustion and the flames had swept over him like a hot wind. He felt the flames lick the sides of his face, felt smoke choke his lungs, felt impossibly hot ash and air swirl around him in a tango. The building had crumbled around him and Tim had been unable to move, forced to witness every last nanosecond of the chaos he had caused.

And he reveled in it. He had won; he had beaten the Stranger. To know he had avenged the deaths of Danny and Sasha was prize enough.

None of it made any sense. He shouldn’t have survived.

How had he survived?

-

5 Days After Great Yarmouth

“Tim.”

Basira was in Tim’s room, wheelchair parked in the corner and sitting in a visitor’s chair. Her body was tense and still, reminiscent of a panther in some documentary he had watched with Jon. Ready to strike? Or run?

“Basira.” Tim’s voice was careful. “Martin said you weren’t up for visitors today. Glad to see you’re okay.”

“Save it.” Basira’s hands were fisted in her robe, the white and yellow one matching Tim’s, declaring them both as patients under observation. Tim frowned, pulling his IV behind him to sit on his bed, wincing as he bent and adjusted himself. “Daisy’s gone, Jon is…whatever he is. I survived because I was smart.”

Her voice was low and sharp, accusing him of…something. Tim felt blood boiling under his skin, as he waffled somewhere between furious and confused. “Excuse me?” He said pointedly, voice measured, squeezing tight the paper cup of tea in his hand.

“Tim, how are you not dead?” Basira gestured with her hand. “Your burns were all superficial. You broke your arm in the collapse, but you managed to survive the fire.” She shook her head and smoothed the fabric that lay there with her hand. “You and I both know you shouldn’t be alive right now.”

Tim took a steadying breath, though it did little to conceal his frustration. “So what, you think I’m fucking magical or something?” He could feel the heat and pitch rise in his voice. “You think I’m like...like those freaks we read about in the statements? Like-like Jon or Elias or like fucking Nikola?”

Basira opened her mouth to speak but Tim cut her off. “You know why I was there, Basira. For Danny. For Sasha. You bloody well know none of this was supposed to happen.” He gestured in the general direction of where Jon lay, dead to the world. “The audacity to assume I-”

“Tim!” Basira cut in, interrupting his increasingly desperate tone. “Look!” She pointed down. Following her gaze, Tim saw the paper cup he was holding. The cup of tea was steaming. No, it was boiling. He could hear the roil of the water, see the bubbles blossoming on the surface. On instinct, he yelped, tossing the cup of bitter black tea across the room, hitting the sink on the far side of the wall squarely. He winced as the liquid splashed across the mirror, the cup rolling to a stop in the basin.

“What the fuck?” He wiped his hands on his robe. “How the hell did that happen?”

“Did it burn you?” Basira asked, eyes passing over him studiously.

“Ah…” Tim turned his right hand over, checking for any splash marks or blisters on his palm. “No.”

“Are you sure?” Basira asked, raising her eyebrow. At Tim’s irritated roll of his eyes, she folded her fingers together.

“You know that’s not normal, right?” It wasn’t a question.

Tim nodded, voice stolen from him as he processed her words. “Are you trying to say I’m fireproof or something?”

Basira shrugged. “I dunno. Sounds weird enough to be right. I’d say ask Jon about it, but obviously…that’s not happening quite yet.”

“This is so fucked,” Tim mumbled, scrubbing a hand down his face in exhaustion. “I hate this job.”

--

Tim was walking in a black room. Kind of. It wasn’t black, really, nor a room—just the concept of space, devoid of color or light.

Tim was somewhere and it was dark.

He picked a direction and walked. The space he was in was hot, a dry stale heat pressing in on him from all sides. It was like that prickling heat from being too close to a campfire, where the heat should singe your leg hairs. It should have been painful. He should have been sweating. But he felt…good. Great, even. He felt alive and awake and ready.

He walked for what felt like hours in this dreamscape, not knowing where he was going. He had realized he was dreaming around the point where he noticed he was more floating than walking, being guided like a character in a low-res video game. There was something in the back of his mind nudging him forward, coaxing him along some predetermined route.

Suddenly, he stopped. There was something in front of him, maybe four meters away. He couldn’t see it, but he could sense it. This spot in space was the source of all the heat in this room, the warmth surrounding him that was more accosting than comforting. The feeling surrounding him was all-consuming and it made him feel…all sorts of things. Righteousness, anger, betrayal, pain. They were all the emotions he had been feeling at Great Yarmouth, built up upon each other, each idolized in their own way. They were the feelings he had chosen to worship when Jon had stopped being his friend and started being his enemy, when Sasha had been discovered to have never been, when he had looked Nikola in its eyeless face and pressed the detonator. It all felt good to feel.

All of a sudden Tim was struck with a sudden knowledge. If he accepted this heat, this painful destruction, he would never need to worry about being hurt again. He could protect himself, the loved ones he had left (if he still had any), and burn the hearts out of anyone who dared hurt him or his ilk. No one would ever leave him again except on his terms. He understood what the Lightless Flame meant, what it promised, what it could give him in return. He would be able to live on the destruction of those he deemed unworthy of the love of the pyre, those who had so much to lose. Like he had had, once. Like Danny had had. Like Sasha. They had had the world before them, and it was stripped away. The Stranger had the potential to take over the world and he had destroyed every last bit of success it had. And it felt good. He could chase that feeling again and again and again with a family that knew what it was like to love and lose and destroy.

All he had to do was take it in.

-

7 Days After Great Yarmouth

Tim woke up gasping for air. He could feel an icy hand on the back of his neck, colder than anything he knew, dragging him back into reality. He opened his eyes, wincing at the harsh light of his hospital room and yes, he was in his hospital room, not a great expanse of nothing nothing nothing, searching for answers. He reached a hand to the back of his head and felt a frozen rag, dripping icy water down the back of his neck, down his spine.

A nurse was at his bedside, a thin woman with dark blonde hair, checking his vitals with a delicate hand. “Welcome back, Mr. Stoker. You gave us a scare, there.”

“Wha-”

“Your monitor was beeping like mad last night. Said you had a fever of 42, but the machine was probably broken. Thermometer put you more at 40, but still, concerningly high. Gave you some fever reducers and a cool rag, kept an eye on you. Are you feeling any better?”

Tim rolled his neck, hearing his joints crack as he did so. “Uh-” He took stock of his faculties. He felt great, actually. No pain, no stiffness, just a tingling warmth spread throughout his body. Something about that felt...right. But he wasn’t sure why. “Yeah, fine.” He pulled the rag out from under his neck and noticed, for the first time, he was naked.

“Sorry,” she smiled apologetically at the flush that spread across his face and neck. “First rule of fevers: tight clothing comes off. It seemed to have done its job though. You were out for a whole day. According to our thermometers, your temperature’s gone back to normal, but we’d like to keep an eye on you a bit longer, especially with your injuries. They don't seem to be infected, so the fever might have been a latent trauma response to the explosion.” The woman shrugged, her smile light. “Our bodies do crazy things to keep us safe. Even when it hurts.”

“A-apparently so,” Tim nodded softly, squeezing his hands into fists, feeling the nails dig into his palms. At least this wasn’t a dream. He rested his head against the pillows propped behind him and sighed heavily.

The nurse left eventually, when there were no more monitors to check and Tim had promised eight ways to Sunday to press his call button if he needed anything. He settled back into his pillow, listening to the steady beep of his heart amplified on the monitor. The TV droned low in the background, newscasters revisiting today’s tragedies. Had they been on the news when it happened? Tim huffed and shook his head. Not if Elias had a say in it. Probably chalked it up to a gas main.

He grabbed the remote strapped to his bed, and flipped through the channels aimlessly, looking for something interesting…or at least to lull him back to sleep. Kids programming, soap operas, more news, interior design—wait. Tim flipped back to the news channel. Demolition of an old primary school. The reporter spoke to a heated young woman, round cheeks framed by wild curls, who spoke to the camera about the memories and traditions the school represented, how unfair it was to lose such an important monument to the history of her town.

“A shame, isn’t it?”

Tim started at the voice, whipping his head to the door, gripping the remote tight in his hand. The woman standing in the doorway of his room was short and wide, hair cropped close. She wore a grey tank top and black shorts, revealing tattoos of flames licking up the backs and sides of her calves. Something about her face was odd. A little too smooth? The grin on her face seemed wider than normal smiles were meant to be, drooping a little too low.

“Pardon?” Tim managed, grip on the call button tight, even if there was…something keeping him from pressing it.

“About the school.” She pointed to the television as she crossed the threshold, crossing her legs as she sat in the cushy visitor’s chair next to his bed. “So many childhood memories, so many job opportunities, so many opportunities for self-improvement-” She spat the word with malice. “Truly some of my favorite forms of destruction.”

Tim stared at her dumbly. “Do…am I supposed to know who you are?” Her returned chuckle burned him from the inside.

“Oh,” she crooned, more to herself than to Tim. “For keepers of the Eye, you are all so stupid. I am Jude Perry and I serve the Lightless Flame. And, if I’m right, you do too.”

[realm-sweet-realm]

Sammy and Jack. “Can we stay like this forever?”

Crisis of Faith, chapter 2

Sammy didn’t dream of Jack again until his next crisis of faith, and Sammy’s faith was very difficult to break. It had begun while Sammy, now a lost one made of fluid ink, was hiding in a wall, watching as a severely ink-infected woman raved.

“Mother, why do you punish me!?” she shouted as, with all the power left in her body, she tried to force open the padlocked doors of the women’s washroom. Her veins, prominent due to age and leanness, were a pitch-black web on her skin, and her wiry muscles had wasted away to bone.

Sammy had, on Joey’s command, overseen dozens of ink infections by now, and knew that there was nothing unusual about Emma Lamont’s case of it. Every single victim he had overseen had held some kind of delusion. Some believed that they were being poisoned by the government or their enemies, or that they were developing a mental illness. A very common one, however, was that they were receiving some sort of punishment, test, or reward from an all-powerful being- either God, or from a seemingly random entity that they’d decided to treat as one.

What if... Sammy’s beliefs were no different from this madwoman, screaming at the ghost of her mother?

Sammy moved on to check on the other infection victims. Even if Bendy wasn’t to be worshipped, the thought of ascension was all that kept him going. He sacrificed people on Joey’s command because the ink had told him to. He wrote his scriptures because he believed they were meaningful. He led the lost ones to Bendy and away from the lies their voices had told them because he truly believed that his voice had been the truth, and it seemed to give them hope, too.

Sammy passed  through the prison of ink creatures as he made his way to Joey’s sanctuary, where he now slept. A Charley was repeatedly banging its head against the bars of its cage. Lost ones wept. Ink stained every surface, making the brightly-lit room feel suffocatingly dark. Sammy was glad to phase through the wall into Joey’s sanctuary, where he could lie down on the couch and rest.

All this had to be leading to something. He couldn’t take it otherwise.

---

Sammy woke to the feeling of someone softly shaking him awake. He opened his eyes to see Jack, tears in his eyes and that disarming smile on his face.

“Hey. How are you feeling?” Jack asked gently.

Sammy, with a bit of difficulty, sat up and realized that he was in a hospital room, complete with an IV in his arm. He felt very weak, but also lighter- like a burden had been taken off of him. “Awful,” he admitted.

“Well, you want some good news? The ink is gone. All of it. You still have a lot of organ damage, but it’s nothing they can’t fix in a couple weeks. In other words, it’s over, Sammy. You’re gonna be okay.”

It took Sammy a half a minute to even process that. Once he did, though, he broke into tears of relief and hugged Jack as tightly as he could.

“Thank you. God, thank you for making me come here. You saved my life.”

Jack hugged him back. “Hey, I didn’t make you do anything. I know this took a lot of courage for you. And... I’m really glad you did it. I was so scared when I found you in your sanctuary. You were so sick... I thought I’d lose you. Sammy, I think I love you. But... we can talk about that later. Right now, you need to rest.”

“I love you, too.” Easiest words Sammy had ever said.

After a little more chatting, Jack left. Sammy wandered over to the bathroom to get a look at himself in the mirror. Admittedly, he didn’t look great. He looked like a person who’d narrowly survived a life-threatening illness, because that’s what he was. His skin was still pale and sunken, and he was still pretty gaunt, but the black veins, the bruise-like purple splotches on his skin, and even the staining in his mouth and his long, blond hair- it was gone. When Sammy woke, he would have given anything to see his human face again.

---Two years later---

As often happened whenever Sammy decided to play his banjo, a small crowd had gathered around him. Today, the crowd consisted of three lost ones, Jack (of course), a moderately ink-infected woman, and one of their last healthy men. The song Sammy was playing was "I’ll fly away.” He wasn’t singing it today, but he had sang it for his followers in the past, simply replacing the word, “God’s” with “his,” since “Bendy’s,” unfortunately, was two syllables.

“You know, it’s amazing how you can remember music like that,” said David, the only non-infected person in attendance. “I'm already forgetting the words to my favourite songs since it’s been so long since we’ve been able to just turn on a radio. How do you do it?”

Sammy would have smiled if he still had a mouth. “Well, a part of it is just natural ability,” Sammy admitted. “But. I have a secret to tell you. A part of it is faith. Faith can do great things. Collective faith in Bendy is the reason that we are the largest organization in this dimension. This village was built on faith. Faith keeps us united! Faith keeps us safe! And... faith allows me to to see into the old world every night when I close my eyes. I hope that all of you one day achieve that absolute belief that something in this world is good.”

“Heh. I’m trying. But all I have are nightmares of Bendy,” a lost one complained.

“Well, keep trying. Believe in his benevolence.” With that, Sammy got up and left for bed, patting Jack on the head on the way out. If only they knew that he used to be plagued by those same nightmares.

---

Sammy’s dream came in to form. He was on a bus, sitting next to Jack. Outside their window, snow was falling gently over a pretty,  snow-covered forest. For a while Sammy just sat in peace, holding Jack’s hand and enjoying the scenery.

“Excited to see your parents again? I know I can’t wait to meet them.”

Sammy nodded. “I can’t wait.” Sammy had always wanted to introduce Jack to his parents. He remembered that there was a strong reason why he hadn’t done it while he was alive, but he couldn’t remember what it was. “My Dad is going to love you. You’re a lot like him, you know. Do you remember why we didn’t do this sooner?”

“Because I’m a man,” Jack answered, totally calm.

“Oh!” Sammy had forgotten a lot about the outside world since his transformation, but nothing so big as the existence of homophobia. It was kind of alarming that the ink was affecting his brain that much. “God. I’m so... forgetful. I’ll just have to introduce you as my musical partner or something. It’s unconventional, but they've seen me do weirder.”

“You  know, Sammy, it’s like you got new lease on life after the ink incident. I love that. But yeah, you’re forgetting things left and right!” Jack teasingly jabbed him with his elbow.

“Yeah... Hey, can I tell you something?”

“Of course,” Jack said. Sammy worried what Jack would think, but looking into those calm brown eyes, he trusted him to not to react badly. And it would be nice to have one person he didn’t have to lie to.

“This is a dream. In the real world, I never got help for my ink infection, and now me and dozens of other people are trapped a dimension full of monsters. I’m holding a large band of people together by convincing them to collectively worship one of them. And you,” Sammy took a deep breath, “you’re there, too. But you haven’t had a coherent thought in years. I keep hoping that one day, we’ll make it out, and I’ll be able to confess to you and we’ll actually build a life like this. So... I’m forgetful because that ink is affecting my mind, and I’m happy because this world is my escape. And because you’re here, of course.” Sammy couldn’t meet Jack’s eyes. He’d probably just made himself sound like a lunatic.

Jack turned Sammy’s head to look at him. “Hey. I believe you. And... that sounds really rough. I wish I could help you.”

Sammy smiled. “Thanks. But you've been helping me all along.” Sammy laid his head on Jack’s shoulder. Maybe once the bus stopped, they’d get some hot chocolate and look at some shops before seeing his parents. It would be nice.

---

Sammy was violently shaken awake by a trio of searchers. More were behind them- as though half the village had crammed itself into his bedroom.

“Bendy is here!” one of them yelled. “What do we do?”

That was a good question. Sammy reached for his axe, but then he stopped. This was, according to the gospel he’d been feeding them, their saviour. “Go out to greet him,” Sammy instructed, trying not to sound as hesitant as he felt. “Bring him offerings of bacon soup. Bring everyone, even the Boris clones- they used to be human, too.”

The crowd of lost ones dispersed. Sammy watched with bated breath from the balcony of his lost-one village home as a massive crowd- lost ones, searchers, people both infected and healthy, and their three Boris clones- gathered along the ink river. Dozens of cans of bacon soup were placed along the river bank as an offering. Bendy stood on the other side of the river. Their drawbridge lowered, but Bendy decided instead to walk on the ink’s surface like the God they treated him as. The crowd gasped and made way. Bendy took an ink-infected man in one arm, stroked his cheek, and bit his face off.

Screams filled the air. People ran in all directions. Sammy was frozen for several seconds before he took action.

“Everyone! Run for cover! We have displeased him! I repeat, run for cover!” Sammy's booming, demonic voice covered the great distance it needed to. Upon seeing the people run and Bendy chase after them, Sammy himself slammed shut his doors and windows and listened in horror to the screams.

When it was over, all he could think to tell his people was that they needed to reconsider how they were paying tribute to the ink demon. If they changed their methods just a little, then the demon would be helpful instead of violent, and they would be freed.

To Sammy’s mixed relief, they actually believed it.

---

eleven years went by. Within the first three, every single flesh-and-blood person in the sketch dimension was infected, killed, or both, and became a lost one.

Their minds were rotting. Increasing numbers of lost ones struggled to remember anything about themselves or the outside world. Wandering aimlessly or resting in ink puddles, they were helpless as zombies.

But not Sammy. Sammy remained- comparatively, at least- as sharp as a whip, and told the lost ones tales so vivid about the outside world that they could almost taste its brilliance and freedom. Sammy only wished that Jack- the real Jack- could understand any of it.

There was nothing to do about that but what Sammy had been doing all along: keep the community together. Keep the lost ones moralized and sane. Figuratively and literally dream of a  better world. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sammy didn’t want to forget a thing about the real world, but little pieces had fallen away, bit by bit. In his dreams, there were now places he couldn’t visit because he didn’t remember what they were like. His reflection in the mirror had become a human-shaped blur as he forgot his appearance. The same thing had happened to the faces of people he used to remember clear as day. One day, he would forget it all, too- just as everyone else had.

It was hard to keep hope.

One of Sammy’s dreams found him walking down a beach with Jack at his side. Sammy knew that the two of them had relocated at some point, but he didn’t know to where. His American geography was rather fuzzy at this point.

“Can I vent to you about the other world?” Sammy asked.

“Sure,” Jack said. Jack was one thing that Sammy’s memory hadn’t gone fuzzy on. Sammy still remembered every soft curve of his face, every freckle, every detail. His dark brown hair was starting to grey, but not because Sammy remembered him that way- it had been many years, and growing old together was part of the fantasy.

“Bendy came to the village again today. He killed a few lost ones and then left. People are losing faith in me and I don’t know how to get it back. And to make matters worse, a false prophet is going around saying we should worship the angel instead! She’d enslave us if we did that!" Sammy chucked a baseball-sized rock into the water, then composed himself a bit. “And you know, we’re all going to be mindless drones eventually. I’m thinking... maybe I won’t fight the false prophet. I could leave the village, hide in a vent, and spend as little time awake as possible. Ink creatures can sleep for days, you know. What do say? Can we stay like this forever? Enjoy this world until I lose my mind like all the rest?” Sammy took Jack’s hands and looked desperately into his eyes.

Jack hesitated, but by the look on his face, Sammy already knew what his answer would be. “I’m sorry. You know I have to say no. The lost ones need you.”

“But why am I the one who has to stay strong for them? I’m sick of it.”

“Because you’re the one who can. I know it isn’t fair, but you’re the reason they’ve been protecting each other. And it sounds like if you leave them now, they’ll throw themselves at Alice. Do it for them. And if you can’t bring yourself to care about them... do it for me. The real me. You still love him, right?”

“Of course...” Sammy probably would have done this sooner if he didn’t care about the well-being of his searcher friend.

Jack put a hand on Sammy’s shoulder. “I don’t know how, but you’ll get out some day. And in the meantime, I’m here.”

Sammy tried to think of some objection, but he couldn’t. He muttered a “thanks” and kept walking along the beach. Jack followed. It was, if nothing else, a beautiful night, and he might as well enjoy it.

“Jack... tell me what I look like. I don’t care that it’ll just be something you made up. Tell me anyhow.”

[letterboxd]

Siren Song.

Undine writer-director Christian Petzold talks to Reyzando Nawara about modern-day mermaids, Tinder culture and finding the magic in life.

“Love stories always change. A kiss in Berlin 1933, for example, is not gonna be the same kiss in Berlin today, right?” —Christian Petzold

“If you leave me, then I’ll have to kill you.” Undine’s threat to her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend Johannes, after he has told her that he has met someone else, seems at first like an over-the-top reaction to the breakup. But it is a curse that Undine must fulfill, for she will become human only when she falls in love with a man who is doomed to die if he is unfaithful to her.

From Splash to Ponyo to The Lure to Song of the Sea, mythical water spirits, usually female, sometimes horse, have powered many film plots. The sixteenth-century European myth of Undine, in particular, lies behind many screen adaptations of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, though the Danish writer was not the first to popularize the fairytale in his century. Decades earlier, around 1811, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué of Germany had produced his romantic novella, Undine.

And it is to Germany—specifically modern-day Berlin—that writer-director (and fellow German) Christian Petzold transports Undine in his contemporary magical-realist take on the myth. There, she does not take the form of a mermaid or siren, but a beautiful young woman (played by Paula Beer), who works as a historian at a museum, where she guides tours of Berlin’s architecture and its reconstruction. The breathtaking cinematography, by regular Petzold collaborator Hans Fromm, crystallizes both the romance and the beauty of Berlin, while Petzold’s leads root every scene in reality, even as aquariums explode and giant catfish drift past.

Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski fire up the streets of Berlin in ‘Undine’.

Water may be the dominant element in Undine, but Beer and her co-star Franz Rogowski bring fire to their scenes together. Where Beer brings charisma and intensity to the titular role, Rogowski, as Undine’s new love interest, an industrial diver named Christoph, offers charm and sweetness.

In the frenzy of Parasite’s world domination, it is easy to forget that Petzold’s previous feature, Transit, appeared in two of our 2019 Year in Review lists—the 50 highest-rated films and the highest-rated international films—and was one of the top romance films of the 2010s. His riveting Phoenix is still his highest-rated film on the platform—one of many to center a complex female character in search of love at a time of personal and/or political crisis. In Undine, Petzold does it again, a welcome departure from other adaptations, including the Colin Farrell-starring Irish romantic drama Ondine (2009), that have mostly told the myth from the perspective of its male characters. Petzold also revises the fairytale, by giving Undine a chance to try to emancipate herself from her curse.

We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Petzold about his fascination with water, the magic of Berlin history, modern dating and of course, his ongoing collaboration with Beer and Rogowski.

Spoiler warning: this conversation contains plot details regarding the ending of Petzold’s film ‘Transit’ (2018).

Your movie is inspired by the myth of Undine, but you reinvent it by giving it some modern twists. How did the main narrative for the film come about? Christian Petzold: I think the idea of the story first came to me around twenty years ago when I had a project in Germany. It was together with Claire Denis and also Kathryn Bigelow, and everybody had to make a ten-minute short film for a project based on the museum near the Rhine River. I had written a little dialogue—oh, by the way, Steve McQueen was also part of the project—and it was the scene that we can see in the movie in the first few minutes where Undine’s boyfriend, Johannes, said that he doesn’t love her anymore and that he wants to leave her and she said to him, “If you leave me, then I’ll have to kill you.” Then she goes back to work, and later when she comes back to try to find him again, he isn’t there—so she knows that she has to kill him now.

Then when I made Transit with Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, I told them after a very lucky and happy time of shooting, that I had written a short story and wanted to make a 90-minute feature movie out of it together with them. I wanted to keep working and making movies with them because we’ve had an amazing experience together in Transit. This was basically the start of how the movie and my collaboration with these two actors came about.

Paula and Franz are actors who didn’t come from the basic German acting school; their backgrounds are dance and theater. But they both have so much curiosity about cinema—when I met Paula for the first time, for example, she told me that she had bought 50 movies by Alfred Hitchcock and wanted to see all of them, and to me, this is the best kind of school to learn about cinema.

So to some extent, Undine is a spiritual sequel to Transit? Yes, you’re right. It has so many things to do with Transit. Marie, Paula’s character in Transit, finds her own death in the sea—she’s drowned. And Franz’s character, he’s waiting at the land, hoping that she may come back from the land of the dead. So I said to them, “Okay, the next movie is gonna be about a woman coming out of the sea and going to the land to search for love and also about this young man who is a diver, who is going underwater, to find love as well.” So to some degree, it’s a sequel, you’re right.

Beer and Ragowski in ‘Transit’ (2018).

You mentioned earlier that you had a great experience working with Paula and Franz in Transit. Can you tell us what it was about these two actors that you thought would capture the story you wanted to tell in Undine? Paula is a very young actor—she was 23 when we started Transit, and she was around 24 when we made Undine—but when you’re filming her, she has this ability to make her characters much more mature beyond her real age. In one second, she’s 45 years old, with a whole experience of someone who’s had a hard life and has gone through so many bad things, then one second later, she’s thirteen and innocent. And to have that kind of ability—to go from one point to another—is just really fascinating to me. I’ve never seen other actors do this before in my life.

Franz was a dancer, and if I remember correctly, I think he was also in a clown school for a circus, so he can do everything with his body. It’s unbelievable what he can do. He has this amazing physicality that I admire and haven’t seen before in other German actors. When they’re together sharing a scene, they dance with each other. And this is the thing that I like so much about them and the thing I need in Undine, because I need actors who can float from one scene to another as if they’re dancing underwater.

In literature and pop culture, the myth of Undine has been mostly told from the male perspective. You reframe the narrative, to give Undine the opportunity to maybe emancipate herself from both the male figure in her life and the curse. Tell me more about that choice. Two or three years ago, I had a retrospective in New York, and I had the chance to see some of my previous movies again—[laughing] I’ve actually never done it before, revisiting my own movies. And at that time, I realized that I’ve always tried to rewrite the stories centering on women, which were made by men in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, from another perspective: the perspective of the women.

When I was in Venice for the first time, Claude Chabrol [was] in the same hotel as me, and he had a Q&A. I wanted to say hi and tell him how great he was but I couldn’t do it because I was very young and too shy for those things. I heard what he said when asked why in his movies, the women are always the main characters. His answer was, “Men are living, women are surviving. And cinema is about surviving.” It was such a fantastic answer.

All the movies I [have] made, including Undine, are about surviving. Undine wanted to survive her curse—she tries to, every time, since centuries ago. In so many iterations of the myth, Undine always has to go back into the lake and to the life the curse has set for her. I really wanted to zoom in on that, to liberate the character of Undine from the myth and the curse.

In the movie, Undine works as an historian at a museum, and in her tours, she talks about Berlin’s architecture and its reconstruction throughout the years. How is this related to the romantic aspect of the movie? Everybody says you can take a love story and put it in the sixteenth century or the nineteenth century, and it’s always gonna be the same kind of love story. But I think that’s not entirely right. Love stories always change. A kiss in Berlin 1933, for example, is not gonna be the same kiss in Berlin today, right? Therefore I want to take the historical aspect of Berlin architecture and its reconstruction to tell the story of two young people in Berlin nowadays, to see the evolution of both this love story and the myth of Undine itself.

What’s the significance of all the buildings Undine mentions in the movie? The buildings serve a very important role in the movie because Berlin is between two rivers on an island, and the city is built on dried-out swamps, so the element that Undine is coming from, which is the water, is destroyed in Berlin. It doesn’t exist anymore. And therefore Undine doesn’t have any habitats, so she has no choice but to adapt and to live on the land.

In some way, I always think that the modernization in Berlin erases history, and when there’s no history, there’s no magic, which means magical creatures like Undine won’t exist. That was the main idea of the architectural elements in the movie.

Is that also the reason why there are two locations in the movie: Berlin, and the small town where Franz’s character, Christoph, works and lives, which is still full of swamps? To show that in this small town, magic still exists? That’s a good question. The romance and the myth of Undine is a part of German and European history. It’s a unique enchantment. But in Berlin, where modernization and civilization keep growing and changing, there’s no enchantment anymore. So I want to show how in this small town where everything is still kept as closely natural as possible, the enchantment and the charm of Germany are still there.

There’s a beautiful and romantic poem by Joseph Eichendorff that says, “You must find the right world, so everything can sync again.” To me, that line encourages us to find the magic of the world back. We live in this world surrounded by retro buildings and retro behavior and retro music, but it’s all actually just an illusion of magic. The real magic, that’s something that we have to find—either by movies or camera positions or poems or even by preserving the naturality of a city. And the Undine myth actually has a lot to do with this.

Another thing that fascinates me about the movie is how the dynamic between Undine and Johannes, in some way, reflects the state of modern dating. Is this something that you also wanted to capture when you wrote the script? [Laughing] Funny story, when Paula read the script for the first time, she told me that she liked it so much because the story reminded her of Tinder and modern dating. And on some level, it’s true; part of Undine is about modern dating. I always think that in the era of dating apps, everything gets much simpler—you meet someone, you have sex (or perhaps not), and if you feel like this someone is not handsome or beautiful enough for you, you can keep scrolling until you find someone new. So, dating right now is like going to the supermarket.

Johannes leaving Undine to be with another woman, who for him is better-looking than Undine, reflects the culture of Tinder. And the line I mentioned earlier, “If you leave me, then I’ll have to kill you,” is the opposite of that kind of dating life. And Paula, who hates Tinder, loves that line a lot. Some of the actors are on Tinder, I’m sure, and that’s understandable. Actors are sometimes very lonely because for six to eight weeks, they are deep inside of a character, and when they’re on break, they’re in some sort of “black hole of loneliness”.

Writer-director Christian Petzold.

Undine being a water nymph, of course, makes the water element very important in this movie. But water has actually been heavily featured in some of your previous features as well, like in Yella, Barbara and Transit. Can you tell us why you find water fascinating? I’ve seen a documentary by Agnès Varda, and in [it] she said, “The place where one element is touching one another is the place where cinema builds its stories.” That’s why she loved the beach, because on the beach, there’s water and there’s the earth and there’s also wind, and they’re touching each other. So to her, the beach is the perfect place where you can tell a story.

For me, however, the reason I like featuring water or the other elements in most of my movies is because it has something to do with seeing my characters coming from one element then going to the other elements; to see them act and react in a new and sometimes uncomfortable place. Also, when you see pictures or paintings, so many of them are about people looking deep into the sea. I always feel like that kind of painting is actually about a desire. And most of my movies, at [their] core, are about desire. That’s why water is so important to me. Deep under the water, there’s the place of desire.

What’s the first movie that made you want to become a filmmaker? The first movie I loved very much as a kid was The Jungle Book, but the first movie that made me want to become a filmmaker was by Alfred Hitchcock, The 39 Steps. I was fourteen or fifteen years old when I saw the movie for the first time, and I loved it from the first moment. The movie is about a man and a woman who are bound by handcuffs, and they don’t like each other, but because they’re on the run, they have to communicate and come to an understanding. And the love story starts because of that communication, not because of looks, and I love the movie so much for that reason.

If you could program a double feature with Undine, what movie would you pick? Good question. I would say The Night of the Hunter. Also maybe Creature from the Black Lagoon or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or The Son’s Room by Nanni Moretti. These are the movies that I would recommend for a double feature with Undine.

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‘Undine’ is in theaters and available on VOD in the US now.

[vintagedolan]

mixtape | track ten

| masterlist | faceclaims | playlist |

Indiana’s mental health class was in her first semester in the pre-med program. Abnormal Psychology, PSY 249, in a stuffy room in a building on the far side of campus. She’d hated it. College was supposed to be challenging, her program was supposed to be the most rigorous, and yet the class was a breeze. They went through condition after condition - depression, PTSD, anxiety, schizophrenia. The inner workings of the brain, the chemical imbalances, the medications that would help people come back to themselves. She passed the class with a 101%, stowed the knowledge in a seperate folder in her brain for safe keeping, and moved on at the end of the course. But she kept one piece of paper out, one piece of knowledge that didn’t make sense.

Voluntary Emotional Detachment. It was a relatively new idea in the world of psychology, seeing that many of its characteristics could fall under depression. That wasn’t what confused Indy. No, that came when her professor lectured on the voluntary portion. 

“Emotional Detachment is a useful tool sometimes, when it’s used purposefully. For example, if you have a toxic family member in your life, you may voluntarily emotionally detach yourself from them. It’s a defense mechanism, especially during times of trauma. You’ll find yourself numb, unable to feel even if you wanted to. It happens with loss sometimes as well, where you can’t feel the gravity of what you’re losing. Your mind knows what it can withstand, and sometimes, it pulls back. It shields you from the cruel world we live in. It protects.”

Indy had scoffed in her seat, so loud that her professor looked at her and frowned, which was enough to have her blushing red and keeping her head down as she scribbled notes for the rest of the class.

It was the one time she’d ever been reprimanded by an academic authority. Professor Upton pulled her aside before she could escape out of the lecture hall doors. 

“Ms. Cross. You seem like a bright girl, but I don’t appreciate the disrespect.”

“I’m very sorry professor, it won’t happen again.” Indiana had practically stumbled over the words to get them out, her palms sweaty on her backpack strap as she held it on her shoulder.

Indy had a million explanations, but she knew that her professor didn’t care to hear them. And they were lies anyway. The true reason she’d scoffed was something she didn’t want to share.

It was because her professor had made it seem so easy, to just turn it off. Emotionally pull the plug, to sever your ties to someone.

She’d scoffed because if her brain had the capability, and it hadn’t moved to protect her when her mother died, shielded her from the aftermath of unimaginable pain that she’d endured, she wasn’t so sure that she was at all intelligent after all. 

But she understood why now. 

It was because her mother dying had made sense.

Not in the grand scheme of things. Not in a karma driven universe - there was no justifying losing a light as bright as Nicole Cross in a world that had checks and balances, a world that cared. 

But physically, it had made sense. 

Nicole’s cancer started in her pancreas. Stage III when they found it. 13.3% survival rate. And it spread like wildfire. Indiana threw herself into her books, looked for anything, some medical breakthrough that someone had missed. She looked into drug trials, she looked into synthetic pancreas research. All the while, her mother’s cancer took over cell by cell, multiplied and multiplied the way cells are built to. And when it reached her brain, it took over her brainstem. 

When it got to that point, Indiana heard the four words that she would never forget.

“She’s done. We’re done.”

They had echoed out, bouncing off the bleached linoleum, making a cold room even colder. Her father’s voice had never sounded so unfamiliar, and she was glad that her mother was sedated when she broke down. There was no detachment, only raw, searing pain unlike anything she had ever experienced. She sunk to the floor, ragged sobs finally breaking free when she realized what she’d known was coming was finally happening.

The fight was over. It was time to let go. 

Charlie hadn’t cried. No, Charlie stood still as stone in the corner of the room, eyes unblinking as she stared at the shell of her mother in her hospital bed and willed it to be a dream, a nightmare that she would finally wake up from. 

And then, she remembered where she was. She remembered who she was. And she picked her little sister up off the floor and held her in her arms, like she always had when Indiana was hurting.

 Without the vital cues from that little piece of Nicole’s brain telling them to, her heart stopped beating and her lungs stopped asking for air, and she died. 

And it made sense.

This didn’t make sense. His words made no sense.

There was no one to hold Indiana Cross now, and she had a new set of four words that would haunt her.

“I can’t do this.”

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

Six days. Grayson’s thoughts ate him alive for six whole days. He lived through the odd limbo that the world seemed to find itself in on the days between Christmas and New Years. A pause in the spin on the axis, a time to reflect on everything the year had brought, and what the next one had to offer.

Even in his daze, Grayson could only remember one other December he’d tried to hold onto so hard. 

His father’s face was at the forefront of his mind, but not the images that he wanted to see. All he saw was a look of disappointment in his eyes with each hour that Grayson’s lips stayed pressed together while Indiana rested, oblivious in his arms. He towed the selfish line of wanting to enjoy the last days he had with her while his guilt threatened to drown him with every breath he dared to take. He hid it well, as he always did when he really needed to. They had their date nights, with movies and postmates since he still didn’t want her out in public with him. They stayed in the tiny house again to enjoy nature, snuck into Jet’s a few times. He smiled when he was supposed to, went through the motions that were expected of him. It had worked for him before, for videos, for time with friends when all he wanted to do was sit in his room and speak to no one. The only person he could never fool was Ethan, who kept his distance, but stayed close enough to keep his eyes on him. He thought he had everyone but his twin fooled.

But Indiana noticed. Indiana always noticed. 

Nicole had called it the curse of intelligence when she was younger. 

“Sometimes,” she’d said. “When you know too much about how the world works, how people work, you see things you aren’t supposed to. You understand things you aren’t supposed to.”

Indiana was 12 at the time, sitting on the other side of the kitchen table. 

“What do you mean mom? How can you know too much?”

“You’ll know one day. You’ll see.”

The way she’d said it made Indy sit her fork down, her stomach suddenly tight. 

And now she’d seen.

On New Years Eve, Indiana Cross leaned in to kiss her boyfriend as the clock struck midnight, on her couch in her apartment, with her picture frames on the shelf over their heads and the sound of fireworks outside her window.

Grayson didn’t lean in. 

He leaned back, and he spoke.

“I can’t do this.” 

Indiana took a breath. In. Out. Filled her lungs and emptied them again.

She’d noticed. But she hadn’t let herself believe it. She’d pushed every little nuance she’d seen, every time that Grayson’s eyes didn’t catch the smile he tried to put on his face the last few days- she’d pushed it to the back of her mind and justified it. He was just worried about leaving, he was just stressed about Bekah like she was, he was just tired. She’d seen every sign and she’d justified it. 

She swallowed air, her throat painfully dry.

“What?”

“I can’t do this, I’m sorry.”

Indiana did what she always did, what she’d always done her entire life when anything didn’t make sense, when anything went slightly off track. 

She tried to understand why. 

She racked her brain for everything that she’d done, every syllable she’d spoken, and every movement she’d made since that first day at Frazier outside, with him in his green pants on the bench, and her with two Jet’s coffee’s in her hands. 

Her fingers were cold as she pressed her hands together. There was a finality in his tone that had her chest tight, her ribs pressed together, muscles pushing on bones and squeezing everything until she felt like she was going to suffocate. She opened her mouth. 

“Oh.”

Grayson had his head in his hands, leaned over his knees on the couch. He shook in an unfamiliar way, like he was choking, and it took Indy a moment to realize that he was crying. 

She felt like she was in a dream, watching what was happening to her from the outside. It was like slow motion as she watched the girl on the couch curl in on herself, her walls reconstructing at ten times speed - he’d been so gentle with each brick that she didn’t even realize they’d been taken down. He spoke after a moment of heavy silence.

“I love you, but we can’t. I can’t do this to you.”

Her brain refused to process it, refused to even try to dissect it, and she spoke the only word she seemed to be able to find.

“Oh.”

“Indy I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, I should have said something sooner, I wanted to, I’m an asshole for waiting this long.”

She swallowed and wrung her hands together.

“When is your flight?”

His tears streamed faster somehow as he blinked.

“Tomorrow afternoon. We have meetings on the 2nd.”

In. Out.

“What time?”

Grayson looked up. Indiana was sitting straight up, head up high. The only thing moving were her hands, which she kept squeezing together over and over. It scared him, to see his once bubbly girl so still while his tears continued to fall. He couldn’t read her. 

“I’m not sure, I’d have to check. Dee, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

She smiled her hospital smile, the one she used when she got bad news, and it was somehow worse than if she’d yelled at him.

“Indy.”

“It’s okay. C’mere, it’s okay.”

She opened up her arms for him, and she didn’t even seem to notice that they were shaking ever so slightly.

Grayson’s eyes were too blurry to see the quiver. He was fighting himself again, wagering whether sinking into her arms would only cause more damage in the long run. But he knew how it felt to be there, and he wagered that it would be worth whatever hellish guilt it was sure to bring later. So he leaned in, and just a single touch from her had him sobbing again. He pressed his face into her shoulder with so much force that she fell backwards a bit, and suddenly they were intertwined with him above her on the couch.

His pain was physical. She could feel it, in the way his body shook and paused when he tried to suck in a breath that his lungs desperately needed, the wet hot air soaking through her shirt with every exhale he choked out. His tears were warm, the salt already stiffening the fabric that soaked them up. Her hands found his back, and she lifted a finger to his skin before she paused. 

She didn’t know what to write anymore.

Instead, she moved her hand to his hair, scratching at his scalp, holding him steady. He was heavy against her and she closed her eyes, felt him there with her, took in the weight of him. 

“Shhhh. It’s okay.” We’re okay. “You’re okay.”

Her words only made Grayson cry harder when he realized what she was doing. He came back to himself for a moment when he realized that all the shaking wasn’t him. He could feel the way she held onto him and shook, so subtle that he could tell she was fighting it. His stomach churned at the thought of how bad her pain must be if it was causing a reaction in her body, and he moved to push himself up.

“Indy.”

She clung to him, panic breaking through the protective numbness that had taken hold so quickly. If it was the last time she was going to get to hold him, she’d hoped it would have lasted just a bit longer. 

But she took a deep breath and she let him go, forced her arms to release him.

It hurt worse to see his face again, see the pain in his puffy eyes. She reached back out for him, swiped her thumb across his cheek to catch a tear. Her fingers got distracted in the feeling of his scruff, and she scratched over it for a moment, indulging herself, willing herself to remember the way it felt on her fingertips.

“It’s okay.” It was a reflex to her, and she couldn’t stop herself from saying it.

“It’s not though. Indy, it’s not okay. I’m hurting you.”

She didn’t have a response to that. Her eyes fell to her lap, picking at her fingernails. 

“I’ll be okay.” It was a lie, but she would have said anything to bring some of the light back to his eyes. Her pain she could manage, but his was her breaking point.

“Please don’t do that. Please don’t pretend on this.” He brought in a shaky breath, blowing it out quickly.  

In. Out.

“What do you want me to do?” 

“I want you to scream. I want you to be pissed at me, I want you to be mad that I waited this long to tell you! You haven’t even asked why,” he cried. Indy wondered for a moment why it always hurt more to see boys cry. It seemed to be more painful for them somehow - heavier. 

“I think I know why.” 

He sat up a bit more at her words. Waiting.

“It was a chance thing, you being here. Us meeting. Your life is entirely different than mine, and you have your people in LA. There’s… I mean there’s plenty of girls there who don’t have the stuff I have. Class, work -” Her voice cracked at the end, Grayson’s outline blurring just a bit as she looked up.

“No. No no no, hey,” he stopped her, hands hovering over her for a moment before he gave in and rested them on her arms, holding her without fully pulling her in. “It’s not that. I promise you, it has nothing to do with anyone else. I want you, I don’t want anyone else. But I know you, and your dreams are here, and I’m not gonna take that away from you.”

Indiana’s confusion only grew. She’d only heard one thing he’d said.

“You want me?” Her voice sounded pitiful, even to own ears. 

“Of course I do.” He spoke it like it was the only possible truth, and a flicker of hope rose in her gut, fighting it’s way up. “Indy of course I do.” 

“Then… why?” 

“Remember when we went to LA?”

His words brought back a flood of memories. The two of them kissing in the ocean, the secret beach, sleeping in his bed with his green wall, piggyback rides around the house, the late night Cudi drives.

“Yeah.”

“You remember how much you hated it there? How bad you wanted to come back home? And what did I promise you?”

Indy couldn’t find her voice. Her brain was otherwise occupied, watching her memories being drug through dark ink, staining them. 

“I promised you I would never ask you to leave New York.” He finished it for her. “And I meant it. But I can’t stay here Indiana, no matter how bad I want to.”

“Your life is in LA.” She repeated her words from earlier, monotone and unattached. Her heart fought with her, begged her to tell him everything. Tell him that she was going to start working at Jets and start therapy so she could fly out to see him. Tell him that she was halfway through her UCLA application essay that she’d been working on on nights he fell asleep before her. Tell him that she’d drop everything and follow him anywhere. 

“You’re the most giving person I’ve ever met. You give so much to everyone but yourself. But I’m not letting you give up your life for anyone, especially not me.”

She wanted to be mad that he assumed that she would. But there was an understanding, a sadness in his eyes that reminded her that he knew her better than she had ever realized. 

“We could make it work.”

He looked like he wanted to believe her. 

“You deserve someone who is here for you.”

“You’re here for me.” Her mouth was starting to outrun her mind, a dangerous game that she usually couldn’t stop once it had begun.

“You deserve someone who is here to celebrate your accomplishments every day, not someone in a different time zone on the other side of the country.”

“We could make it work.” It was more of a plea that time, and she saw it register across his face, the pain it caused him. 

“Indy.” 

“People do long distance all the time, we could do it.”

“We aren’t long distance people,” he said, but Indy’s mind was already running.

“We could set up a facetime schedule, and you wouldn’t have to visit that much, I’ll be busy with school anyways. And if we hate it, then we can stop. We just have to try, we’re never gonna know unless we try it.” 

Grayson was silent for a minute, which was enough of an answer. He’d known this was coming. Ethan had warned him that it would happen, that Indiana would try to reason her way through it. He’d told his brother that he had to be confident in his choice or he’d get swayed off course.

Grayson wasn’t sure he’d even be confident in his choice to remove himself from the best person he’d ever known. But knowing that in the long run it would be better for her was the only thing that let him cling to the last bit of resolve he had. 

“Indy.”

Her lip quivered, and he felt his heart crack. 

“Please,” she said.

“C’mere. Just c’mere.”

It wasn’t a surrender, but an offering of comfort. Indy knew it would hurt her later, but she didn’t have the willpower to resist it. She crawled into his lap, and the last of the numbness that had started faded away. In his familiar arms, she lost her last semblance of control.

She crumpled into his shoulder, broken sobs shaking her frame as she clung to him, let him hold her as she wrapped herself around him, as if it would somehow make him stay. 

He rocked her as she sobbed, accidentally pressing a kiss to her shoulder before he realized what he was doing. It was torture in the rawest form, worse than he could have expected to be the cause of her pain. 

“I’m so sorry Indy, I’m so sorry,” he whispered to her over and over, hoping she believed him. She pressed her face against his neck to keep her eyes closed, pretending for a moment that everything was fine.

“I love you.” 

The tears returned to his eyes, and in a moment of weakness he turned and pressed a kiss to her hair, her temple. His lips had missed her. 

“I love you too Indiana Cross.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

Her finger traced against his back. F-O-R-E-V-E-R. She wished she could erase it somehow when his breath caught in his throat again. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and he shook his head.

“You have nothing to be sorry for.” His voice was muffled by her skin, seeing that he was unwilling to lean back from her.

“I know this is hurting you too,” she said, and was met with the feeling of more of his tears on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“The only thing you did was make me love you too much. Don’t be sorry for that.”

The way her heart squeezed wasn’t natural, and though she knew the phenomenon wasn’t as everyone said, she was sure it skipped a beat in her chest. She squeezed him tighter to her, like she had so many times. She synced her breathing to his, laid her head on his shoulder, committed the sound of his heartbeat to memory. 

Their tears dried out over the next hour, the numbness of acceptance starting to blanket over them. Neither of them dared to move a muscle, Grayson especially. All he did was rub his hand over her back, up and down the same as he had been since she climbed into his lap. They both knew that moving would mean having to figure out what to do next. 

It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. Indy wasn’t sure, and she was scared to look at a clock, to see her fleeting time left with him wasting away.

“Did you pack your bag already?” Her voice was too loud even though it was barely above a whisper, pulling them back into the reality they wanted to avoid.

“Yeah. It’s at home.” 

Indy could see it in her head, his Jersey room, quiet and waiting for him with his orange duffle on the bed. But her stomach filled with a wave of nausea as she realized what it meant.

“So you have to go home.” 

Grayson’s hand paused on her back. She was holding her breath.

“I… I didn’t know if you would want me to stay.” It was the first time he could remember not knowing what to say to her. 

Her arms tightened around him, her breathing getting a little bit more ragged. He ran his hands over her back quickly, desperate to soothe her.

“Shh, shh hey, I’m staying. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yet.” She whispered, and he squeezed his eyes shut as he flinched. “Sorry, that was harsh.”

“Not undeserved,” he said, turning and resting his cheek against her shoulder. “I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have. So whatever you need, I’ll give it to you.”

Indy sat up. Her eyes had settled a bit, her tears washing the jellyfish blue into a shade of navy that Grayson didn’t recognize. It made his breath catch in his chest. 

“Whatever I need?”

“Whatever you need.” 

She looked at him, and her head tilted to the side just slightly. A small smile tried to make its way to her face, but her lips quivered. 

“Could you kiss me?” 

He paused, watching her fight off her tears with a deep breath. 

“Is that what you need?” 

“Just… just one. I didn’t know, you know. That the last one was gonna be the last one. And we’re here, and I just thought, that maybe - ” 

He kissed her. For the first time, he was hesitant. He kept his hands to his sides, not wanting to push anything too far, not wanting to make anything worse somehow. Indy barely reacted either, too nervous to do something wrong. 

They pulled back from each other, breathing shallow, nerves taking over as they tried to figure out what to do. 

“Thank you,” Indiana said. 

Grayson swallowed hard, watched her eyes as they flickered between his own. 

And then they were kissing. Really kissing, chasing the taste of each other like air at the end of a sprint. His hands went to her face, holding her to him as her hands went to his torso, bunched up his shirt and tried to pull him into her, closer somehow despite the fact that they were already touching everywhere that they could be. The desperation was palpable, in the way their hands roamed and fell back into their familiar patterns. Indy sucked in the first real breath she’d taken in since the clock had struck midnight, breathed him in as best she could, trying to lose herself in him like she always had. But her mind wouldn’t shut off, reminding her that it could really be the last time she had him like this. 

He felt her tears, first on his thumb that was holding her cheek, and then against his own skin. It took all his willpower to pull back from her lips. She let him, her breathing shaky as she tucked her face back down into his neck.

He picked her up effortlessly, standing up from the couch and moving them to her room. The Cudi vinyls seemed to mock him, especially when he laid down and stared up at them on their small shelves. Indy didn’t move an inch, staying wrapped around him, laying on top of him when he rested back against the pillows. 

Time moved quickly, and Indy still avoided the clocks, scared to see what had already passed. 

Grayson wanted to hear her voice. Wanted her to talk to him, wanted to commit every single thing she said to memory, but he wouldn’t ask. She had given him enough. 

He closed his eyes, focused on the feeling of her fingers over his shirt, tried to make out what shapes she was drawing like he always did. He felt her hands travel up higher, up his neck to his skin, scratching over his beard.

Her fingertips were gentle as they moved up, over his lips, around his cheek to his eyelids, down over his nose, then to the other side of his face. She traced the pattern a few times, and Grayson waited until she was on his nose to speak.

“What’re you drawing?”

“You,” she said. “Memorizing.”

He didn’t know how he still had more tears to make, but they started to fall anyways, down the side of his face over his temples. 

“I’m sorry,” was all he could say.

“I know. I wish you could stay just a little bit longer.” 

“Me too.”

He traced a heart on the back of her arm.

“I love you too.”

The truth of it was, she didn’t know how to not love him, and that was the scary part of it all. She couldn’t imagine a world where she didn’t love him with everything she had in her. 

She didn’t know who she was without it anymore.

“If you ever change your mind, I’ll be here you know,” she said. He took in a deep breath, pressing a kiss to her hair. 

“I’m not gonna do that.”

Her heart sank.

“That’s not fair,” he said. “I can’t ask you to do that, to wait for me. I’m not going to string you along, that’s cruel. Once I’m back in LA, I want you to move on.”

Indy shook her head against him, burying her face in his chest. 

“No.”

“Indy.”

“No.” Her brain refused to process it, to imagine a single scenario where she felt anything good without Grayson by her side. She knew it wasn’t healthy, and she vowed to never tell anyone but in that moment, she reserved herself to be miserable every minute that she wasn’t with him. 

“I know it’s not gonna be easy, but you deserve to be happy. And I’m sorry that I’m gonna make that harder, but you’ll find somebody who can love you better than I do.”

“Does that mean you’re going to just move on when you get back to LA? Just forget about me?” There was a spite in her voice that she didn’t like hearing in her own voice. But Grayson didn’t flinch. It was almost reliving to him. He was getting what he deserved, what he’d earned for breaking her heart. 

Her anger meant she cared.

“Indiana I’m never going to forget you. If you think I could, I was an even worse boyfriend than I thought.”

“No, don’t do that.” She pushed off his chest and sat up. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to make me think that the last three months were bad. That’s the last thing I have to hold onto. Those were the best months of my life, you don’t get to take that.” 

Grayson didn’t have an answer. 

“Okay.”

“You made this decision for the both of us, I don’t get a say in it. So I’ll hold onto it as long as I fucking want to. You don’t get to tell me I have to move on.”

“Okay.” 

“Okay then,” Indy said, reaching up to wipe a tear away. She sucked in a breath and pushed it out through shaky lips, trying to hold herself together.

“Sorry.”

Grayson shook his head. “Indiana you can be mad at me. You should be mad at me.”

“I am mad at you.” 

She knew it wasn’t in the way that he meant. Because she wasn’t mad that he’d broken up with her. Because deep down, under all the pain and all the love and all the worry, she knew he was doing it for her. He was doing what she would never have the guts to do, even if it was the right thing.

No, she was mad at him for infiltrating every single part of her. Every thought, every muscle, every cell of her body contained him. Every hope she had for her future was molded around him. He was there in everything. His curls were in the dreams she had about her future children. His smile in the back of her mind every time she closed her eyes. His eyes, bright and green, always there.

“Do you want me to leave?” There was no malice in his tone, only genuine concern. 

She pondered it for a moment. Thought about what it would look like, for him to actually walk out the door and never come back through it.

“No.” 

“Okay. Then I’ll stay.”

“I can drive you to the airport. So Ethan doesn’t have to come into the city.”

“Okay. I’ll tell him.”

“Okay.” 

They stared at each other for a moment, staying very still, waiting for one of them to make a decision. 

“We should probably sleep.” Grayson checked his watch. “It’s 4am.”

“Okay.”

Another pause. Another moment of uncertainty that they’d never had to navigate.

“Do you want me to take the couch?”

She shook her head, and with a sigh, she gave in. Grayson could finally breathe again when she settled against him, pushing her hand up under his shirt, running her fingers over his ribs. He wrapped her up in his arms tightly, focused on the feeling of the weight of her on him.

And he closed his eyes. 

His alarm went off at 9:45. As soon as it sounded, Indy turned her face into his chest, a new wave of tears coming forward as the realization hit her

It was time to let go.

He just held her and kissed her head for as long as he could. She didn’t know if she’d slept. If she had, it was only for a few moments. She’d kept waking up, reminding herself that he was still there. 

They barely spoke. No one ate breakfast. He hadn’t brought a change of clothes, and parts of his shirt were stiff from the saltwater of both their tears. It took all the strength he had to keep it together when he closed the apartment door behind him for the last time. 

She took his hand in the elevator, and his tears fell, making his cheeks even colder when they walked outside. It felt odd, for him to climb into the passenger seat with her in the driver’s as they continued down the road. His mind was flooded with memories, with doubts. He couldn’t stop picturing the smile that would spread across her face if he told her that he’d changed his mind, that they could try. 

He fought it, kept his mouth shut, reminded himself that this was his decision and he had to deal with the repercussion of it. 

Indy was quiet too, evidence of her earlier decision to not hurt him anymore than she already had. She didn’t want to make it any harder on either of them. No matter what, she still loved him, and she didn’t like to see him hurting. She kept herself superficially distracted, focused on the colors of the cars that passed, and the number of the exits on the highway. 

The airport had never come quicker.

Grayson’s chest tightened when they pulled off. He couldn’t ignore it anymore, couldn’t push it down and stay strong like his dad had always told him to. An image of him hugging her goodbye over her console came to his mind, and he panicked.

“Would you want to come in? Like park and come in? I know you hate airports, and you can say no. But… I’d like to give you one last good hug before I go.” 

She merged into the lane that led to the parking as her tears began to fall. He ran his thumb over her hand until they got out. They found each other again behind the car, Indy linking her arm around his and holding on as tight as she could as they walked. She was ten times more anxious than the last time she had walked into an airport, her usual pertifying fear of Grayson being on a plane the least painful part. 

It was hard to keep her sobs quiet but she bit them back as best she could. Grayson heard them, shifted so he had his arms wrapped around her as they walked. Her eyes were blurry with tears but she noticed the bright yellow and orange bags before she spotted Ethan. He gave her a sad smile that she did her best to return. From the look of pity in his eyes, it was even worse than she thought. 

Her vision was obscured by Grayson, who moved in front of her. She clung to the front of his jacket with both hands, unable to look him in the eyes. She didn’t know if she could handle it. 

“I don’t want you to go,” she whispered, tears so full that they dripped off her chin and onto her shirt. 

“I’m so sorry.” His own eyes burned as he watched her. But her next words caused the worst pain he’d felt in a long time.

“Can we have a redo?” As her voice shook, his last barrier fell, and he was sobbing - the kind you try to choke back and keep quiet as he crushed her against him, burying his face in her hair.

“Not this time baby. Not this time.” 

They weren’t sure how they could cry harder, but they did. He swayed as he held her, tight and warm. Ethan wiped his own tears away with his jacket sleeve as he checked the boarding time on the tickets. 

“I love you. So much,” she said. 

“I love you too. I’m so sorry. If you ever need me... “ he trailed off, unsure if his offer would only hurt them both more down the road. She understood what he meant, and she took a deep breath. In. Out. 

“Right now, I need you to turn around, and I need you to walk away, or I’m never going to be able to let you go.” 

“Okay.” 

He didn’t move. She finally looked up at him and held herself together, determined to look at his face in person for the last time without the distortion of tears. 

“Take care of yourself, okay? Be safe. Be happy. I’m always gonna love you.” Her voice was as steady as she could make it, and that somehow hurt him worse. 

“Forever,” he whispered, and then he was kissing her. He wrapped her up in his arms as tightly as he could, held her to him until he forced himself away, only keeping a hold of her hand. 

Ethan, always in tune with his brother, seemed to recognize his cue. 

Indy nodded and squeezed his hand one more time, and then she let him go, their fingers tracing over one anothers until they fell away, the distance too much.

A numbness spread over her body as soon as he let her go, and she watched from her spot as he disappeared down the hallway and into the security line.

She didn’t remember getting back to her car. But somehow, she managed to crawl inside and lock the doors before she crumpled forward onto her steering wheel.

[luciesbabyboy]

The Letter.

Something momma and me wrote together, the background to this is fact, the solution is pure fantasy. But OMG this was such fun to write together.

Steve came home to an empty house after 21 days working away. It had been the longest stretch working away and he was completely broken. His wife had sent him a message earlier saying she was sorry she wouldn’t be there when he got home from his flight, but not to worry she would be home at 9pm, she was just having coffee with an old friend.

He made himself a cup of tea and sat down on the sofa and flicked on the TV. His eye was drawn to the fireplace and an plain white envelope with “Darling, please read me” written in his wife’s handwriting

Having picked it up he returned to the sofa and gently prised open the envelope, his nostrils caught the sent of his wifes perfume and he smiled at the thought of her. He opened the letter and began to read.

 “Darling,

First, let me tell you how much I love you and how proud of you I am for everything you do. You make me feel so loved and our time apart is only made so much better when we are together. However, I’m really worried about you. I know you’re not telling me the whole truth about the hours you are putting in, but I know as you read this letter that you are completely destroyed mentally and physically and its will take you days to recover. But you’re not recovering, you’re surviving, you’re not eating properly, you’re not getting the sleep you need, you’re not getting any exercise, you’re waking up, going to work, eating crap to feed your depleted energy, you’re working 15 hours a day and 7 days a week and you’ve just done this for 21 days. How you’re not in hospital I really don’t know.

 What you have done at that business, is beyond remarkable, you’ve single handed built it to an extremely successful, profitable business, but you have to look after yourself. If you don’t I fear you’ll self implode. I’ve seen you when you come home from a tough period away and I can tell you’re just minutes from going down the drain. How you recover enough to face another week is beyond me.

 We need to get you back to where you were mentally and physically 4 years ago, cooking and eating great healthy food, loving life, exercising and reading....remember how you used to soak up books, almost a book every week, and we used to sit listening to classic alums on the record player. Now you just sit down and because you’re exhausted you don’t engage with much. I understand, but we used to have so much fun, we’d spend time with friends and family or just being on our own.

 I know you’re at breaking point, and I fear that any day I’m going to get a call from your work saying you’ve had a heart attack or a mental breakdown. Thats why, this week, I contacted your CEO and she agrees with me. Again she is amazed at what you have achieved for the company and the group, but she agrees that you’re on the verge. The business will cope, you’ve built the foundations, you have got the staff in there running it, you now need to step away and relax.

 So from this weekend, with your bosses blessing, you have a 10 week leave of absence. We have 10 weeks to reset you, to get you back into a mental state that gives me confidence that you’ll not kill yourself before your next birthday.

 And I know exactly how to rest you “little man” 😊

 On the other side of this letter is a 10 week program to take you back to basics, to allow your brain and body to dump all of that stress and then to slowly build you back up. You will, if you agree, give up all responsibilities and I will make sure you are looked after like the gorgeous little man you are.

 Weeks 1 & 2

                Regressed to a 9 month old. Momma will take care of your every need, she will bathe you, feed you, clothe you, read you bed time stories, cuddle you, change your nappies, love you unconditionally.

                During this period, you are not allowed to walk, talk (9 month olds can’t do either), you communicate by using your hands and either crying or babbling. Just like a little baby. You are allowed to crawl around the house, but you are to use your nappies for their true intended purpose. No phones or computers and no tv except early learning tv like sesame street and in the night garden. Early bed times and day time naps. Me feeding you with a spoon, having all your drinks in baby bottles. Millions of cuddles on the sofa.

 Weeks 3 & 4

                My little man is now a proper handful as a 2 year old: You can toddle around the house and can use big words, but you still need momma for cuddles and everything else in weeks 1 & 2. You’re still not able to use the toilet, you can watch a few more interesting things on tv and you can play with lego and cars and colour with crayons. Your food is a less babyish, and you love food time and getting all messy with eating with your hands. You need to ask momma for everything you need, even though you can reach the counter top, cookies and treats are off limits without asking. Time out on the naughty step if you get caught doing something momma has said you can’t.

 Weeks 5 & 6

                Oh my, what a cute little 3 year old you are. So independent, but so naughty, trying to do things yourself and getting into all kinds of scrapes. Momma still has to tie your shoe laces and get you dressed and you still have problems with the potty, so momma is keeping you in nappies for a little while longer. But you’re old enough now to let momma know when you need to go poopy. Where she can undo your nappy and sit you on the big boy potty and wipe your cute little bottom after, and put you in a fresh nappy. You’ll be in a lot of trouble if you forget to tell momma you need to go number two and momma will smack that poopy bottom and make you sit in a dirty nappy to remind you what a dirty boy you are. We can now watch Disney cartons together and you’re learning your abc’s and numbers so well. You still need nap times, and momma needs to still take you for a bath, but can leave you to play with your bath time toys.

 Weeks 7 & 8

                 6 months older and such a handful for this momma. You’re getting much better at potty time, so momma has decided to let you wear pull ups. You need to tell momma when you need to go potty and she will pull your trousers and pull ups down and sit you on the big plastic potty. Little boys who are potty training still need nappies at night and you’ll be wrapped up tightly in a big fluffy nappy after bath time every night. Of course I’m sure you’ll forget about needing to go potty which is why momma will constantly ask you if you need to go, however if you say no and then wet your pull ups, you can expect momma to pull those down and put you over her knee for a well earned bare botty spanking. Momma is going to be strict with you and any rule breaking will result in a red bottom and corner time. But now you’re older you can help momma bake cookies and cakes and she’ll let you lick the spoon. Lots of cuddles with my little man and you can help momma around the house. You’ll look so cute in just your Spider man pullups and dinosaur t-shirts. It makes momma’s job of checking you for wetness so much easier

 Weeks 9 & 10

                Oh my you’ve grown up and momma is getting you ready to go “back to school” You’re nearly fully potty trained with only the occasional wetting accident. So momma has gone out and bought you some proper big boy briefs. They have lots of cool designs on them. Spiderman obviously, I’ve got several pairs of them, some other marvel prints and some basic plain colours so you can feel like a big boy when we go out. Momma is still going to ask you if you need the potty, especially if she sees you doing your little potty dance. As you’re bigger now, you have lots more responsibilities, you are big enough to put away your toys after play time is over, you can read books by yourself. You help momma clean up the house and do the laundry. And you can help her big person cooking. We have put the big plastic potty away in the cupboard and now you’re using the big boy toilet all by yourself and wiping our bottom properly after poopies. Momma is so proud of your journey to being a proper little man, but understands you still get into mischief. You sometimes still have little wet accidents in your big boy pants and that means momma will turn that cute little bottom of your red and put you back in a nappy for the rest of the day as punishment. You can go the whole night without wetting your night time nappy, but momma knows you sleep more soundly having one on, so she still gets you properly wrapped up for bed every night.

So that’s it my love. I need you to be better, to get you’re head in the correct space you can be a proper functioning adult. We’re going to have so much fun over the next 10 weeks. I’ll take you to the park, we’ll go for picnics and walk the dog and feed the ducks. You’ll get an allowance to spend on sweeties at the shops if you’ve been a good boy. You’ll get to go shopping with momma and she’ll make sure your bottom is checked when we’re out for wetness.

 Now the bad news. You’re not allowed any alcohol for the whole 10 weeks. You have to do everything momma says without questions. Any breaking of my rules will result in you getting a proper hard bare bottom spanking. You are never allow to touch your nappy at any time or play with what is in it 😊 Which brings me to “Mommas needs” Obviously momma has needs, that only a grown up can provide, seeing you naked 4 or 5 times a day as I change your nappy, or bathe you, or even when I turn that tight little butt of yours over my knee will inevitably make momma hot in all kinds of places. Therefore momma is going to need you to fix this her whenever she needs to satisfy her needs. I will take you out of your nappy and you will be allowed to be a proper man, then straight after we’ll go back to our plan.

 If you agree to this plan, and giving me full responsibility for you over the next 10 weeks, just send me a text with a “Baby emoji” and the words “I’m ready momma”

Love you so much baby boy.

 Your darling wife.

 He let this sink in for a moment, and an emotional wave came over him. He felt so loved in that very moment that he started to cry, all the stress that had built up was too much for him. With tears in his eyes he reached for his phone and sent the message his wife needed to see.

 His phone immediately buzzed back with a heart emoji and 10 seconds later buzzed back again with the following message:

 “Finally and you’re not going to like this one little bit. When I get home, I want you standing in the corner in just your underwear. I want you to get a high backed chair from the dining room and place it in the middle of the lounge. You will also need to get the paddle, the hairbrush and the cane from under the bed. I know you have constantly lied to me about the hours you are doing and I know you’ve been going back into work when you said you are tucked up in bed. So I’m going to really punish you for this behaviour so you remember what happens to naughty boys who lie to me. This is not going to be a normal spanking where I turn your bottom red and then we make love afterwards. I’m going to teach you a lesson through your bottom that you will hopefully remember. If you end up sobbing and begging me to stop then I know its working, but only I will decide when the punishment is over. You will be so thankful to be put back into nappies tonight to protect a very sore bottom when you sit down over the next few days. I’m sorry baby, but I have to show you that lies and sneaking around are not good for our relationship and I’m only doing this for your own good. Love you, see you in 30 minutes. Don’t disobey me or it will 10 times worse.

[dingoat]

[I mulled over a few possible options for this one, heh, but after some chatter with @cinlat I realised I could mush some of my ancient Ahuska backstory with half baked future plans with vague species lore/headcanons and string it along into something roughly story-shaped. The whole thing wound up a lot more somber than I’d anticipated, but at least I can always count on Crow to soften the mood!] ---

For the better part of three weeks, she’d been dwelling. What had started out as the most unexpected news conceivable had led to a flurry of unanswerable questions; was the news welcome? Was she excited? Did she care? Did she want anything to do with it? But that had all rapidly died down into a sullen simmering of nerves, as Ahuska struggled with something she genuinely never thought she’d have to face.

She had a family. She’d been raised well, and loved, as far back as she could properly remember. Did she really want to go back further, did she need to know anything about where she’d come from? The thought of being connected to Bothawui in any way made her feel ill, but Crow had gently reminded her, over and over, that this changed nothing.

She was Mando’ad, where family is built on more than bloodline, and having surviving relatives from a life she couldn’t even recall changed nothing.

Having a twin brother changed nothing.

Except that it clearly meant something to… him. And the older one. Two brothers, with families of their own, who’d reached out to find the sister they’d thought they’d lost with their parents. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know them, but…

“Crow?” Ahuska tapped his arm with a single hesitant finger, but he’d already turned to seek her out. They were more in tune with one another than ever.

“Mmm?”

“I think I… I want you to meet my family,” she mumbled, eyes slipping to the side.

Crow grinned his softer grin. “Ahhh, I think we’ve already been through that part of the relationship. Was a couple years ago now, at least?”

She felt her ears grow warm, but her eyes turned back to him. “With me, I mean. I want you to come with me to… meet the family I haven’t met yet. I don’t know if I even want to call them that yet, I guess, I doubt they’ll want to either once they’ve met me…”

“Oh, psshh,” Crow made to wave away her worry with a flick of his hand. “You said the whole reason they found out you existed was from holos of the business down at the Ve’lora place, right? Not like they haven’t already got some sort of clue about the life you live, and they still reached out.”

“It already feels so weird, though. They’ve known about me… all their lives. They… knew me, a-and mourned me? They missed me, and I’ve just never known… it’s like they’re strangers, who call me a sister. It’s fethin’ weird.”

“I know, I know. And if they’ve got half a brain between them they’ll realise that too. All you gotta do is meet them, say hi to them and their… uh, heh. Hey. What are baby bothans called, anyway?”

“Huh? What, I… I don’t think he told me any of their names, I don’t even know how many kids he said they each had…”

“What? No, I meant like… y’know. Do you call them… uhhh, like how little cathar are kits, and…”

Every one of Ahuska’s nerves abruptly vanished, and the series of blinks followed by a hard stare made Crow immediately realise he’d made one of those mistakes.

“Sorry, sorry, I just figured…”

“Babies,” Ahuska said, her tone completely flat. “Baby bothans are babies. Not cubs, not fawns, not kits…” her snout wrinkled a little at that.

Crow’s manner was meek, but the way he squinted at her made it clear he was still trying to work out where exactly the problem lay. “Okay but… don’t… wouldn’t there be some word you use for them…?”

“What, like ik’aad?”

“Yeah, exactly!” Crow brightened as Ahuska offered the comparison, then immediately ducked his head as her expression grew harder still.

“Like ik’aad. The Mando’a word that literally translates to ‘baby’?”

Crow’s grin wavered, sensing a trap. “Ye-es…?”

“Not likaya? Not pe’ninr?” Ahuska continued to watch Crow carefully as she offered the Mando’a for kitten and puppy.

“Well. No. Of course-”

“Of course not!” Ahuska snapped over the top of him, with an emphatic gesture of both hands to drive her point. “Likaya literally means baby cat. Not baby person. Not baby human, or bothan, or even cathar, it’s the word you use for a little cute wobbly baby animal that meows before it opens its eyes. You wouldn’t call some random Mando kid likaya if we were talking in Mando’a, would you…?”

“I… guess not…” To the unfamiliar, it would look as though Crow were simply still grinning, but Ahuska knew the way it’s quality shifted that he was in fact frowning on the inside.

Ahuska took a slow breath, pinching the bridge of her snout. “And just the same, the bothese for ‘baby cat’ and ‘baby person’ are two totally different words. One translates to kitten, in basic, and the other to baby. Just baby. There’s nothing fancy, nothing cute about it, grown-ass men and women aren’t bucks and does or stallions or vixens, and I’d be willing to bet that there’s a good chunk of cathar out there who hate the way the better part of the galaxy pretends their own native words for their kids translate to ‘baby cat’---!!”

Despite her efforts to calm herself, Ahuska’s pitch and volume had rapidly increased, her gestures had grown more emphatic, and her attitude was positively simmering. Crow didn’t even need to tune into the beat of her heart to know he’d struck a hard nerve, but he wasn’t exactly sure how to handle it.

“Okay, okay,” he said quickly, lifting his hands in an effort to make it clear he was willing to concede. The crease of his forehead knit a little deeper. “I just would’ve thought, of all people, you might… find it kind of cute, at least? Like the way Nines…”

She shot him a look that made him shut up quick smart, then immediately made a visible effort to cool herself off.

“Let me… try and explain it another way,” she said, speaking slowly, her gaze focused inward. “One time when I was little, nine or ten years or something. I was on a trip with my buire, we had to spend the night in an Imperial settlement. We were checking in to some accommodation, just on the outskirts where it was quiet, and… you know buir’ika was a chadra-fan, right? Well, they had me and her go around to the back somewhere, and wait a while in another building. There was a nerf there, a couple of tauntauns, I think a big old varactyl even... one of the tauns had a fawn so that’s where all my attention was. I thought it was excellent, like, some special treat for me, buir’ika sure acted like it was. Anyway, it was a while later that nuvhu’buir… ah, that’s what I called Jinn, yeah? She came round to where we were with all our stuff, a few extra blankets and things, and we built ourselves a bed right there in the hay and spent the night there. I knew she was mad about something, but she never said why, at least not ever to me. I remember falling asleep hearing her and buir’ika talking really quietly together, and I was wondering why she was so upset. Didn’t make any sense to me at the time, since I thought it was… pretty much the best thing ever. I was too little to get it.”

Crow listened quietly, and when Ahuska paused, he didn’t say a word. He just watched her, offering his full attention, and waited for her to go on.

“They made us sleep in the damned stables. It was years later I looked back and realised that. They probably would’ve let nuvhu’buir stay up in a proper room, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with that. Stables, me and buir’ika, just because of our damn faces. So no. No, I don’t appreciate it when people joke about me going to a vet rather than a doctor, or offer me ‘treats’ for being a ‘good girl’. It’s not cute, it’s gross. And that goes hand in hand with asking if my species have litters, or if our babies are called foals, or if we go into heat. Ugh.” She made an ugly scowl at that. “Rule of thumb? If you wouldn’t ask a Mirialan the same question, it’s probably rude as hell to ask a Bothan. Or, y’know. Literally any other sapient species.”

Flushed, Ahuska found herself glancing off to the side, feeling oddly unburdened to have let it all out, and yet also heavy for having to unload to Crow. She knew he meant nothing by it, that of all the beings in the galaxy his intentions were utterly pure. She’d never forget the way he deflected those stuffy noblewomen on Alderaan that time.

She felt his hand envelope hers. “Did you want me to talk to Nines, and get her to let up a bit on the way she-?”

“Nayc,” Ahuska found the answer came easily, even if she couldn’t quite articulate why. “Not to me, anyway. I want to say it’s different, but it’s probably not, really. I dunno. Just maybe give her a poke if she starts on any other bothans with ‘Puppy’, yeah?” “It used to bother you a lot though, didn’t it?”

Ahuska stared out at nothing for a while.

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Still sorry.”

His chin came to rest over her head, and she closed her eyes as she let her face rest against the comforting curve of his neck.

“I’m sorry too. Not your fault the galaxy is the way it is. I’m just… a little wound up right now, I think. I’m nervous about this.” “Shhh,” he soothed gently, and she let her face fall against the hand he brought to her cheek. “You don’t need to make an excuse for yourself. I asked you something stupid. Can’t promise I won’t again in the future, but I’ll always be ready to listen to you. Mmkay?” Ahuska found herself nodding against his palm. “‘kay.”

“And I’ll be right there with you, meeting those other relatives of yours. And if they turn out to be bastards? I’ll find a totally not-xenophobic way to give them a piece of my mind.”

She made a little snort, and let her arms wrap around him. “And that’s why I love you.”

[maxwell-grant]

Odd-ish question. Imagine, if you will, that a new The Shadow film or prestige TV Series is being made. In your head, what's the trailer?

I gotta say, it was rather disheartening to learn in film school that most directors/producers/showrunners don't actually get to have much say in how their work is promoted, because, at least as far as I know, that stuff is outsourced to a separate team. I mean, I get why this happens, it's ultimately for the best, but it's still kind of a bummer to me personally since I do like making trailers and teasers (I do make my living as an editor and all).

I'm not gonna get too into what I imagine said trailer to be like, because it's one of those things I'd rather keep to myself until I get to make something of it, but I will talk a bit about how I think a marketing strategy for a new Shadow film or series could be like.

First and foremost, I think anyone who wants to tackle The Shadow, even just to promote him, has gotta understand what about the character works, what influenced his creation, what's he got that can be promoted, what can grab audiences, what can get them to stay, and so on. "Fandoms" nowadays rule the way media is consumed and sustained, and you see it especially in modern cartoons that live or die on the audience's devotion. That is one of the reasons why I made this blog, because I want the character to thrive again and I want to provide people with a catalogue of information they can dig into.

The Shadow was, for a decade and then some, arguably the biggest crimefighter of American media, figurehead of not just one but TWO mediums, and the only reason he existed at all was because Street & Smith's marketing ploy for a faceless narrator turned out far more successfully than they could have anticipated. That he's survived the total downfall of American pulps and decades of mismanaged adaptations, as still one of the most famous of all pulp heroes, is testament to how strong the original concept still is, the appeal the character held. I made this post partially to highlight that.

And first and foremost, is to build up the character. Take advantage of the fact that the general audiences only have the vaguest idea of what this guy is like, and treat him not like an old character making a comeback, but like he's about to debut for the first time. As I mentioned prior, 1930s radio audiences were enthralled by The Shadow not just because he was the most interesting part of the stories he was promoting, but because he was completely unlike every other narrator in radio at the time, a hissing disembodied voice taunting and cackling malevolently, taunting and daring you.

Think of the marketing strategy for Godzilla 1998, and the waves it made as, instead of just plastering images of the monster front and center, they built up the idea of Godzilla through ads like these, instilling in your head the concept of an unfathomably large monster trodding it's way into the city and wreaking devastation with every footstep, even if you couldn't see what it actually was. It was a particularly genius move because even at this point, most Americans had at least a slight idea of what Godzilla was, or they were at least familiar with the concept through parody or pop culture osmosis. So what the marketing did was break down and fragment the Godzilla concept, and gradually put it back together under the heads of viewers. The movie sucked, mind you, and that reinforces my point: It didn't turn a profit based on it's stellar critical reputation or a prior American following for Godzilla, it turned a profit because the marketing was that good.

Joker is another example of a movie that managed to do well by essentially "re-selling" you it's titular character and through incredible marketing. IIf the idea seemed beyond stupid and unnecessary to most people at first, the Joker trailer did such a fantastic job at selling people on the concept that it immediately turned a lot of heads around. In fact, the trailer was so good, I suspect most people who went into the movie already had made up their minds on it's contents based entirely on the trailer, but I digress.

The film dissassembled the Joker bit by bit, both in marketing as well as it's story, and gave each of it's pieces it's own story. From the laughter as a replacement for tears, to the clown paint starting off as a form of confinement until it replaces the face of the broken man within, to even elements such as the green hair, gaunt physique and fondness for colored suits, all of these got a story, all of these had a "hook", all of these were given significance separate from the history of the character as a franchise supervillain, all of these were made interesting in ways people would be interested in learning more about. Why does The Joker laugh? Why is crying? What's "Arthur" like? What's he gonna do on the show? What the hell is this film going to have to do with Batman?

It got people talking and asking questions, and that's exactly what you want your audience to do. Even for a character as old and overexposed as the Joker, the movie still succeded, at least in marketing, in presenting as if we were going to see him for the first time, to the point all the film needed to secure it's Batman connection was just the name.

And Street & Smith was doing this even back then, when they were in the middle of transitioning The Shadow from radio narrator to pulp crimefighter. They started putting out shows where The Shadow would take a more active role, they started getting him to show up in other programs, they put out this contest where they gave out small lines where The Shadow told a detail about himself, and listeners had to piece it together. The radio show was told as if The Shadow was a real, active person, and this was something carried over to the pulps. This was, mind you, before Walter Gibson got to touch the character, but it shows that right upfront, Street & Smith knew how to market this character effectively, through mystery and build-up. I think there are ways to do that nowadays even besides the usual avenue of teasers and trailers.

And if I was going to make a trailer, if I was in charge of designing a marketing strategy or video and so on for The Shadow, this is what I think needs to be emphasized.

None of the promos show his costume in full. We get glimpses of it, like a slouch hat and red scarf abandoned in the middle of a square as a public ad, intense eyes leering over an urban landscape for a poster. A popular podcast gets hijacked in the middle of an ad break for The Shadow, and they act like nothing happened. An entire teaser goes by, and in it, all you see from him in costume is a hand with a Girasol Ring. We don't know who is the actor who's gonna be playing him, we hear laughs in the ads but never a speaking voice. A different rumor is confirmed every week.

The trailers show us scenes of agents interacting, policemen looking for him, criminals hurting others only to run terrified. All sorts of cryptic remarks, or terrified statements. We get an image of Harry Vincent standing on a bridge with gloved hands holding him, and to people unfamiliar, they think The Shadow's about to throw this guy off a bridge, and the fans know better.

Some people think this is all unnecessary, I mean, they know who The Shadow is, he's a 30s radio vigilante who inspired Batman and who Alec Baldwin played once. He's got a girlfriend named Margo, he shoots people. What's the point of all this?

And then The Shadow starts to show up a bit more, and he does the things that people seem to forget he's capable of, for good and bad. And gradually, the trailers and teasers and ads start to unveil just how little general audiences really know The Shadow. And, hopefully, they start wanting to learn more.