#not to make it about ME in the sightless is just like. its easy to see the processes of ethic cleasing of natives

[demonstars]

i feel really passionate about not giving up hope. i've seen people die before being medically dead because hopelessness got to them. being alive is more than just sharing what constitutes the basic of a culture, is learning from the people alive that carry it. so like.. if you have palestinean friends, palestine support groups, etc.. just learn from them, not because they will disappear, but because they are to be treasured

[kingconia]

VICE HOUSEWARDENS WITH MC, WHO IS BLIND, BUT, SOMEHOW, FEELS AND KNOWS EVERYTHING

warning: Ortho is excluded for an obvious reason, and I consider Ruggie to be a vice.

Trey Clover. ❤️

— Trey is absolutely surprised, when he sees you for the first time. It is not like he had never seen a blind person before, but there is something alarming in a fact, that a student without magic and sight, is left all alone in the NRC;

— He might be a little awkward around you, but he is still respects you, and will never points out at your possible insecurity. Hits Ace a few times, when he openly reminds you about being blind;

— ...When he finds out that you are not helpless, and in fact might be more attentive than all of them, he is speechless.

•

Trey glances over his shoulder, instantly finding you in the havoc that first-years had made in his kitchen. He has no trust in this kids, and it is quite dangerous place for you. So, he tries to look up for you wordlessly.

”Ace,” he calls for a redhead boy, sighing, when he almost drops a bowl with flour on the ground, ”pass me a few apples, would you? They should be somewhere here.”

Ace smiles at him crookedly as he starts walk around, squinting, while trying to find mentioned apples.

”Eh... Where are they?”

Trey turns, planning to guide him himself, when you are suddenly raising your cane, the tip of it moving in the direction of a basket with red apples.

”Ace, I think, they should be here,” you remark softly.

Neither Ace nor Deuce find anything extraordinary in your act, which makes Trey realise that it must be not the first time you do so. But he is astonished!

He examines you once again, and as he stares right in your colourless eyes that almost never blink, Trey is sure: you don't see anything. That it is not a lie.

...Perhaps, you are not without a magic as others think you are?

Ruggie Bucchi. 💛

— Alright, I am sorry, but Ruggie doesn't give a fuck if you are blind. It is not about bullying—he wouldn't do that—but he will not try to pamper with you either;

— And as soon as he realises that you, in fact, are highly aware of everything around you, Ruggie is even more comfortable around you;

— But! Your instincts are reminding him of beastmen—he had seen a few of them, who were just as blind as you, and you act suspiciously a lot like them—and so, he starts having a very strange theories about you.

•

Ruggie holds his breath, and as his back straightens, he is ready for attack.

In his homeland, he is considered to be one of the most dangerous beasts, a natural predator. He knows how to stalk his prey, how to stay out of its sight, and how to bring food back home. So, of course, watching after you, shouldn't be a—

”I know you are hiding on the tree, Ruggie.”

Urgh. Just how you always know where he is?

Here you are, sitting on the bench under this tree. And Ruggie, who stands atop of it, too high to be heard, shouldn't be noticeable even for a usual humans. Even he made a sound—but he didn't!—how could you say that it is him? Unless, you are feeling his scent, just like a beastman would...

Ruggie keeps his silent. Maybe, it would be easier to trick you this way, and then...

”Ouch!”

Almost when he touched your shoulder, you easily hit him with your cane.

”Ruggie,” you sigh. ”I thought, you are better than his.”

Rubbing his hand, he can only murmur a quiet:

”Sorry.”

...His belief that you might be half-beastman are getting more and more rational with each passing day.

Jade Leech. 🩵

— Jade is somewhere between acting all gentlemen around you, and searching for a way to use your disability in his advantage. Nothing personal, though;

— When he realises that his calculations are completely wrong, and you are not so easy to crack, Jade is impressed. What a good challenge you are;

— Jade might get an idea that, perhaps, you are lying to everyone... And if so, he is about to catch you on this lie.

•

”Remind me, please... Had you been sightless from the very young age?” Jade asks casually, pouring tea in your cap; for a third time in this morning.

You nod with a gratitude, and your hand easily moves to your right, where the pot with sugar is located. Jade told you where it is, when you first started having a breakfast together.

”I had been born this way, yes.”

As you put one cube in your tea, Jade hastily moves the pot to an opposite side of the table. Waiting. His eyes pierces in yours, trying to notice some strange signs. Anything.

”How complicated it must be.”

There is always a possibility that you just have those colourless eyes, which helps you to lie to other. Perhaps, you are as mischievous as he is, after all.

”Well. I think, it would be harder if I lost my sight earlier in life,” you smile.

Your hand flawlessly moves to the new location of the sugar. Jade hums in the disappointment.

...Once you will crack.

Jamil Viper. 🧡

— When he hears about you for the first time, he can't help but huff about how irresponsible headmaster is, if he allows you to walk around these dangers so easily;

— Much later, he becomes your close friend, and with that, he finds out about your talent. Jamil had never seen such things before, he thinks you are a miracle;

— But he will accept it without any side thoughts. He trusts you, and overall, Jamil is simply glad that you are not as enamoured in this world as he first thought you are.

•

Jamil knows you are coming from a ringing knock of your cane in the corridor. And, so, he rushes to the doors, opening it widely, still with apron around his waist.

”Good afternoon, Y/n.”

”Hello, Jamil,” you hum, slowly stepping in.

It is a secret for Jamil why some of his classmates are thinking that you are lying about your blindness—or use a secret magic for moving around—when a little evidences of it are always here.

He can say it from the way you never make sharp on inaccurate movements—he had only seen you running with Grim on your hands—and move slowly, though, gracefully. Or how you relay a lot on you cane.

”I had prepared a few pastries for you,” he exclaims quietly. ”From the Scalding Sands.”

You might be independent, but Jamil still thinks you struggling sometimes.

”I can smell that,” you smile. ”Thank you.”

But it is not a problem. He will make sure to help you from time to time.

Rook Hunt. 💜

— Oh! Oh! Rook can't hide his curiousity when he hears stories about you;

— As someone, who relays a lot on his senses and instincts, Rook fully understands what helps you through your blindness;

— So, if anything, he thinks you are a lot alike! Rook constantly helps you to develop and sharpen your senses by taking you on walks around the forest, or asking about what you feel in certain rooms.

•

”Incroyable!” Rook sighs out delightfully, eyes sparkling as he stares at you. ”You are such a talented person, ma flèche!”

Another little laugh escapes your lips, and Rook can't help but feel proud of how happy you are about these dates of yours.

He wants you to feel equal with others, but even more, he desires for you to know how much better you are, than the most.

”Ah, you are flattering me, Rook,” with a free from a cane hand, you rush to wave him off. Then, you frown suddenly, tilting your head on the right. ”Ah... I think there is another bird, Rook. Behind you, on the left.”

As soon as you warn him about it, Rook swiftly turns on the told direction. A mere second and arrow flies past you, hitting a target easily.

”Parfait!” He praises you again. ”You notice things even quicker than I do!”

As your cheeks blush furiously, Rook only smirks.

If you only know how special you are!

Lilia Vanrouge. 💚

— Lilia is a war veteran, so, he is not surprised by your abilities. He had seen a lot of his old comrades losing their sight in the battle, and slowly learning to live with consequences of that;

— But, he finds it impressing either way. Especially, considering that you are just a mortal. It is fascinating how strong and brave your kind can be;

— And, Lilia loves how you are always aware of his presence, never being scared of his sudden appearances, like others usually do. It is rewarding!

•

”Ah, aren't we going to be late?” Cater sighs, shifting from one leg to another, while scrolling through the Magicam. ”That's ridiculous.”

You hum, pressing your shoulder to the wall, yawning.

”Why are we even waiting?”

”What do you mean why?” Cater frowns. ”We can't go without Lilia... And I don't know where he is, but dude is really late.”

It is your turn to frown now.

”Cater, Lilia had been here for another five minutes,” you say. ”Just look up.”

Cater is suspicious at first, but then, as he does what you told him to do, a terrified help escapes his chest. Lilia is, indeed, here. Hanging from the ceiling, smiling cryptidly.

”Hello, love,” he flashes a smile at you. ”And hello there, Cater.”

”Hi, dear,” you wave at him. ”Well... Can we, please, go now?”

Cater sighs. His face is still pale, when he hisses out:

”You both of you are awful. Period.”

Lilia only chuckles at that. Well, aren't you just a perfect match?

[breannasfluff]

Eldritch Teaching

The situation with Sky and Wild is unacceptable, not just because Time had to put on the cursed mask again. They are heroes; the embodiment of courage. He’s supposed to be the leader, yet the group is falling apart around him. Goddesses, where’s Malon when he needs her?

Time clutches the Fierce Deity mask, but his gaze is focused on the ground.

“Hey, Time.” Warriors drops down next to him. “Thinking about the mask?”

The mask. Rather than answer, Time groans and drops the mask, putting his head in his hands. The mask stares back; sightless and judging. The marks on his face tingle, even if it’s only a memory.

“What am I going to do?” Warriors doesn’t have the answer, but Time is exhausted.

“What do you want to do?”

“I want—” That’s the problem. Time wants to put the mask on. It’s a low throb, so mild it’s easy to ignore or explain away. A hint of fondness for Wild has him bristling. Not because it’s unfounded, but because it doesn’t come from him.

With a sigh, Warriors changes tactics. “Do you remember anything from wearing the mask this time? I mean, you handled the situation okay.”

If handling it meant cursing every skewed decision he’d made, then sure. Still, he nods. “I was aware of it a little, but it hurt.” He gives a soft snort.

“Mortal bodies aren’t made to house deities, even cursed ones. But he must have felt this was important because normally I’m sort of…pushed to the back. When I put the mask on it’s like I’m floating in a void. Somewhere neutral. Sometimes there’s a vague emotion, but I’m—stuck.” He turns haunted eyes on the captain. “What if I can’t remove the mask?”

“Why would that be? It’s always come off before, right?”

“True,” he nods. Then his gaze falls on the mask, still in the dirt. “But what if he doesn’t want to? What if…the Deity doesn’t let me go?”

Warriors stiffens at his side. “Can that happen?”

“I don’t know.” That’s the problem, Time never knows when he’s dealing with the mask. It’s a necessary evil, but sometimes he wonders how necessary it truly is. “But every time I put it on, I’m scared it will be the last.”

“Fierce Deity said he could help Wild,” Warriors points out.

“I know.”

“But?”

The captain knows him too well. “Fierce likes Wild. I can—feel it. Emotional bleed-through, or something. It makes me like him. Wild likes Fierce—more than me, at least. If I put the mask on and Fierce helps Wild, why would I—he ever take it off? The cub would be ours. What more is there?”

“His.”

“What?”

Warriors’ gaze is hard. “His cub.”

“That’s…what I said?” Time’s confusion doesn’t lessen at the look on the captain’s face.

“Well,” he says as he picks up the mask, “I guess the question is which is worse: Fierce Deity, or Wild fighting the heroes?”

There’s no question when those are the two choices. Time will do anything to keep his boys safe—even if it means losing himself. He takes the mask back from Warriors and tucks it in its bag. “Well, I guess it’s time Wild and I had a chat.”

Warriors’ attention is a physical pressure on his back as he leaves. “Be careful, old man.”

Somehow, Time doesn’t think caution will save him at this point.

Read the rest here!

[tinylittletv]

A Rift Between

Miraak/Blind!Reader.

I rewrote this because it’s been a few years and I don’t like the old one, and this time I plan on continuing it!

For as long as you could remember, it has always just been you and your father working on your farm. Well, for a while it was just you working on the farm. The labor wasn’t easy nor was it short but you enjoyed this life. Greeting your father with a smile whenever he comes home from his travels. He was never one to stay in one place for long, that only changed after you had been born. But, you’re an adult and very capable of taking care of yourself. It took some convincing but in your early adulthood you convinced him to return to the road while you stayed home. Happy to tend to the land and the animals.

Since the day you came into this world, you were blind. The world is a mystery to you in a way that only you will understand yet never really seek to change. You can see the world, albeit, in a different way. It doesn’t limit you or stunt your life. After all, you’ve never had sight, what on Nirn could you be missing?

The closest city being miles away had you living isolated, but you enjoyed it. No one to bother you or your animals.

And the walk to the city to sell your wares is always enjoyable.

Having enough to live comfortably and always saving up to prepare your father a fresh, large, home cooked meal for when he returns. Always with a tale on his lips to tell. Of course, he would exaggerate a few things, painting the world in a large and exciting light.

But…

His last trip...you didn’t like it.

He had come home, muttering and whispering to himself, you being but an afterthought and the food even more so. Picking at little as he flips through a book. He has come home with books and papers before. So, what is it about this one that had his attention? During the night, you’d hear him rummage for a pen and paper, scribbling away before ripping up the freshly used paper. Cursing and grinding his teeth.

This went on for days. You delayed your trip to the city to try and care for your father as you fear he is sick, or has been struck with madness.

These worries only seemed to confirm your fear of madness as this night he stormed into your room. Quickly you sat up from your bed, opening your mouth to say...something before you felt the book he had brought home being dropped on your lap. It was heavy and it smelt old and inky. You scrunched up your nose for only a second before you went to push the large, heavy book off. Only to have your muttering father grab the back of your head and force you to face the book. Being so close, you could hear what he muttered.

“Just look at the damn thing! Look at it speak! Those dark secrets that crawl through your brain. They know, they know too much! The words won’t shut up.”

He sounded mad.

He grabbed your face, forcing you to face him, letting you know that he was growing angry. At you, at the book. “Focus you stupid child! Look at the book and tell me! Tell me it’s dark, black words and promises of knowledge.” You didn’t try to get out of his tightening grasps as tears bubbled in your eyes. He was mad! Mind tossed about! You stuttered, “You know I can’t read what is written down.” You stated, placing your hands over his, hoping to bring some sanity back to him. But he pulled his hands away, scratching at his chin; Hearing his nails against the scruffiness of his beard. “I know, but maybe blind eyes can see what crawls through the pages and into the mind.” He got off your bed, mumbling about how you should stay put and read and he’ll go get something to write with. Wanting you to tell him what you’d see in the book.

Your tears fell, rolling down your cheeks as you shook with only worry.

He was mad, your poor father has gone mad!

And this book was to blame.

You face the heavy literature in your lap, the worry for your father only being matched by the quickly growing anger for this book. You may not know what is bringing him this madness, you will rip this book to shred to rid him of its burden. You tossed the book open, quick to grab a chunk of the pages before suddenly, something thick, warm and smooth wrapped around you before you felt a pull. One that was too strong for you to fight and to fast for you to fully understand what was happening.

You felt yourself falling, only given a moment to brace for impact. Hiting hard ground, nearly knocking the wind out of you.

Of course it wasn’t a normal book, of course magic had to be involved.

By the divines you will strangle whoever wrote that book and rip it to shreds once you have your hands on it. You got up, pushing yourself onto your feet, dusting off and straightening up your nightwear. Wherever you were, it smelled like an old library and fish. You could hear the faint sounds of books and paper fluttering. Taking a few careful steps forward, you had to think of a way out of here, knowing well that you were no longer in your room. But this place sounded rather vast and empty, it may take a bit to find the way out. Hopefully, magic wasn’t needed, you don’t know a thing about the arcane arts.

A few more steps before a voice boomed above you.

“Mortal”

You turned your sightless gaze upwards.

“You dare use your hands to try and rid Nirn of one of my...many black books?” The voice was masculine, deep, and slow. “I’d burn it if I must.” You stated, calmly as you spoke only truth. “Such written words have driven my father mad, if your book is the cause, I will leave only shreds of it behind. Hell be my punishment if I don’t.”  The being gave a chuckle, just as deep and as slow as his voice.

“Mortals cannot handle the pool of knowledge when they peek into my books. Madness will fall to those...who....are burdened with what they...are not meant to know” He sounded rather proud of that fact; and it made your blood boil. “Then I demand to know the owner of these books, so I can send you to an unwelcome afterlife.” here you do not stutter as you stand your ground. Ready to take on, whoever this was.

For a minute or two, there was no answer. This being thinking on if you should even know that fact, but seeing you so proud and determined, had him play with many plans and ideas into his head.

You hear him inhale, “Little mortal, I am...Hermaeus Mora.”

For a moment, you were taken off guard, not expecting to have this be the fault of a deadric prince. He seemed to catch your surprise, chuckling darkly as you shook your head and returned to just being angry at him. You don’t care who this was, he was driving your father mad, therefore, he’s going to pay. “Rid my father of your madness.” You demanded, not backing down as you kept facing him, an expression showing how you will not be intimidated. But it was all you could do, knowing that in this moment you are at a disadvantage and the prince of knowledge knew that too.

But he was more than amused by you, and there was little he could do that he normally would to any other mortal. After all, you are blind, anything written down here is useless to you and just killing you won’t be as fun. After all, not everyone makes such a...humble demand. Normally they beg or plead. For power, for knowledge. But you, you seem to be a bit of an oddity.

And Mora, he is such a collector of oddities.

Maybe he’ll keep you.

“Mind your tongue...mortal. I am the master of this realm...your life is in...my hands.” You could tell he was being smug. So very smug. “I will be loose with my tongue, you are no master of me.” Your voice echoed with challenge and determination. You will not watch what you say, nor will you be polite.

But, it seemed he plans on answering your challenge as you feel the ground under you disappear, sending you falling yet again. Landing this time, one a pile of books that you end up knocking over. That hurt. For a moment you were still, back aching from that sudden fall. Only slowly sitting up and rubbing your tailbone, moving to sit on your knees before you hear the sound of a book closing and someone getting up from their chair.

Footsteps moving closer to you before they stopped, just shy in front of you as Mora spoke again. “Keep an eye on this one...Miraak.”

[eleanorfenyxwrites]

@guqin-and-flute​ I hope you don’t mind that I jumped in on this one? It happened to hit my inspiration bone just right so I wrote a quick one-shot while procrastinating my college assignments.

(Edit: now on my AO3, titled, “You’ll Have To Trust Me”)

--

In retrospect, Nie Mingjue supposes, he should have known that it would just be their luck - his luck, really - that they would run into something like this.

Leave it to Jin Guangyao to find the perfect excuse for the three of them to get away from the overwhelming crush of their duties for a night only to just so happen to walk right into a fucking trap that has conveniently left himself and Lan Xichen blinded and Jin Guangyao apparently untouched.

Oh not that he’ll ever get Lan Xichen to believe it was a trap, of course. It was an ‘honest mistake’ as far as he’s concerned, which he’s currently reassuring Jin Guangyao of throughout all the other man’s outwardly anxious fretting.

“Er-ge are you really sure you’re alright? You’re not hurt anywhere?”

“A-Yao -” Lan Xichen’s voice is soft and warm and even though the kindness isn’t even directed at him it still feels like a warmed blanket around Nie Mingjue’s shoulders. Lan Xichen is just...like that. “I promise I’m alright, not even a scratch.”

There’s a pause and then a tentative, “Da-ge?” from much closer than he would have expected. He doesn’t flinch though. He won’t give Jin Guangyao the satisfaction.

“What?” he replies, his tone as curt as Lan Xichen’s was affectionate. He can practically feel the disapproval radiating off of Lan Xichen in response but that isn’t anything new with their new..situation. Nie Mingjue has already made his peace with the fact that he is likely going to spend the rest of his life upsetting his oldest friend in some way or another.

“You’re injured.”

“I know that!” 

“Mingjue-xiong? You’re hurt?” Lan Xichen suddenly pipes up and Nie Mingjue knows that the only reason there’s not an accompanying rustle of clothing and a gentle touch on his arm is because Lan Xichen is as sightless as he is at the moment and likely afraid to move too much.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. Will you let me look at it?”

Nie Mingjue instinctively pulls his injured leg closer to himself and away from Jin Guangyao, biting his tongue instead of groaning when something grinds under the skin in a spot where he’s pretty sure nothing’s supposed to actually move.

“It’s fine. We just need to figure out how to break this fucking curse before something comes and eats us,” he grunts once he’s sure he can talk without screaming, dull flares of pain dragging up and down his entire left side, from toes to shoulder and back down again.

“Mingjue-xiong just let him look at it,” Lan Xichen sighs. “We’re not going anywhere for awhile anyway until we figure out how to do this safely.”

Nie Mingjue holds out in silence for another two minutes (he counts) before he relents with a nod. For a long moment he’s able to maintain the hope that Jin Guangyao wasn’t watching him to see it, but then there’s a quiet shuffling and small, cool hands are lifting the suspiciously sticky fabric of his trousers to take a look at his leg.

“What’s wrong? How bad is it?” Lan Xichen asks when Jin Guangyao sucks in a gasp and Nie Mingjue glares into the middle distance that he can’t fucking see because this spirit that Jin Guangyao just had to chase tonight blinded them and now he’s broken his fucking leg because of it. And he’s still somehow the only person in the world who doesn’t trust the oh-so-accommodating, oh-so-polite, oh-so-obsequious Jin Fucking Guangyao, so the chances that his accusations of trickery and malicious intent will be listened to are little to none.

He’s pissed, basically.

“That fucking HURTS Meng Yao!” he snaps, his voice too loud and sharp in his frustration at the burst of pain from whatever Jin Guangyao had just done to his leg. His hands go still and this time the quiet gasp comes from Lan Xichen.

“Mingjue-xiong,” he chastises as Jin Guangyao’s hands slowly pull away from his skin.

“It’s alright, er-ge,” he demurs and that tone gets under Nie Mingjue’s skin even more, that kicked puppy tone, that ‘I’m used to the world not respecting me’ tone that he always uses to get his way with Lan Xichen. Whether he does it on purpose or not (Nie Mingjue fucking knows he does) it’s exactly the right way to get Lan Xichen’s sense of propriety involved and suddenly Nie Mingjue is the one in the wrong for using his old name rather than his legitimized one. As if that name isn’t a slap in Jin Guangyao’s face all on its own, but no one but Nie Mingjue even seems to notice that bit. “His leg is broken and it’s gone through the skin. I need to go find something to make a splint with, I’ll do my best to stay within earshot.”

“Alright A-Yao,” Lan Xichen murmurs. “We’ll stay right here.” His smile is audible despite their circumstances and Nie Mingjue takes a deep breath in, squeezing his unseeing eyes shut. His anger won’t find a home here - not with these two as his companions practically drooling on each other with all their gooey affection in their own little world - but he doesn’t want to take it out on Lan Xichen anyways. He’s got quite a few things he’d like to take out on Jin Guangyao, but that would only end up hurting Lan Xichen as well, and his childhood friend doesn’t deserve that.

Jin Guangyao’s footsteps retreat through the underbrush, growing fainter and fainter until there’s nothing to hear but the wind through the trees.

“Mingjue-xiong,” Lan Xichen starts, his lecturing voice out in full force.

“Don’t. I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, Xichen! I know! I got it, it was just a slip of the tongue! Is your precious A-Yao the only one here allowed to make ‘an honest mistake’?!”

“Alright.”

They lapse into silence then, Nie Mingjue still breathing too fast and too hard but unable to stop. He’s angry, he’s in pain, and he’ll never admit it out loud but he’s afraid. Ever since he had woken up in the Scorching Sun Palace to find Lan Xichen defending Meng Yao so fiercely he had known he couldn’t count on Lan Xichen’s protection from the other, which meant that if he was to keep himself safe from Jin Guangyao’s scheming mind and murderous hands he would have to always maintain the upper hand. He can’t do that while injured and blinded and with Lan Xichen similarly incapacitated, the pair of them suddenly entirely reliant on Jin Guangyao.

It would be so easy for Jin Guangyao to arrange for an unfortunate ‘accident’ and get rid of him. He’d watched the man murder with the intention to frame someone else for his deeds. If he was willing to do it once, who’s to say he won’t be willing to do it again?

He’s on his own, and he honestly can’t say he enjoys the feeling.

“A-Yao?” Lan Xichen calls a few quiet minutes later, startling him out of his spiraling thoughts.

“I’m still here, er-ge,” comes the faint call from some distance away and Nie Mingjue hears a few dry leaves rustle as Lan Xichen shifts his weight, presumably turning in his direction even though he can’t see Jin Guangyao out in the trees. “It’s difficult finding sticks that are both as long as da-ge needs and as strong and also straight enough to be a splint. Are you both still alright?”

“Yes. Take your time,” Lan Xichen replies and then things are quiet again.

“You can’t really think this is a coincidence,” Nie Mingjue finally mutters, low enough not to carry too far beyond their spot. “Xichen, please. Just entertain the idea that this is all on purpose.”

“I can’t, Mingjue-xiong, I’m sorry.” And he really does sound remorseful about that, because of course he does. “I trust A-Yao. Accidents happen on night hunts all the time, and we three are not infallible. I am only relieved that he remains unaffected by this curse so that we have hopes of getting out of here safely.”

“And just why do you think he wasn’t affected?” Nie Mingjue can’t resist asking, beginning to become desperate to understand Lan Xichen’s way of thinking that can keep him from becoming in the least bit suspicious.

“We shielded him from it, of course.”

“I didn’t!”

“You did, Mingjue-xiong. You and I both.”

Nie Mingjue mentally replays the last moments before the world had gone dark. They’d been pursuing the spirit as it fled back towards where it had come from, all three of them running as fast as they could over unfamiliar, heavily wooded terrain. He’d seen the spirit whip back at the last moment, diving towards them rather than back into a stone hut nearly completely crumbled under moss. He remembers shouting for Lan Xichen to watch out and -

Yanking Jin Guangyao behind himself as he skidded to a stop next to Lan Xichen just in time for the spirit to slam into both of their chests and knock them all backwards.

He remembers the moments after that as well, his vision fading quicker than a candle guttering out. He had shoved Jin Guangyao at Lan Xichen just before everything had gone completely dark and his momentum had carried him over the edge of a small ravine. He had been the only one to fall into it, the others had joined him almost immediately after, but under their own power. 

Nie Mingjue growled low in his throat and pounded a fist against the soft earth beneath him once, irritated with himself for the moment of weakness; for his instinct to protect Jin Guangyao being stronger than anything else in him when it came right down to it.

He can’t admit to it.

“He’s smaller than us and he was lagging behind while we ran. We were in his way when the spirit turned and he couldn’t get around us, that’s all there is to it. We weren’t protecting him.”

“Alright,” Lan Xichen agrees far too easily and it’s clear by the tone of his voice that he knows Nie Mingjue is just trying to save face. He both loves and hates that knowing tone, as well as the fact that Lan Xichen doesn’t press him to tell the truth that they both know.

Nie Mingjue is thankfully saved from any further humiliation by footsteps returning through the brush and he sits up a little straighter, breath quickening again as he braces himself for the pain of having his leg shifted and splinted that he knows is imminent.

“I was looking for a crutch but nothing around here is sturdy enough for you, da-ge, you’ll probably have to lean on er-ge to walk,” Jin Guangyao supplies as he comes closer, stopping a few steps away. There’s the clatter of a few sticks being set down on the ground close to his leg and he forces himself not to flinch away from it. The movement would only hurt and it won’t stop what’s about to happen, so he holds himself still with a grim determination.

Jin Guangyao settles down near him again and his hands are back on his skin, his touch still featherlight and cool as he shifts his trousers up over his knee but now there’s a slight trembling in his fingers that Nie Mingjue can feel when the man places a hand flat on his shin just below his knee.

“I’m sorry, da-ge,” he whispers for Nie Mingjue’s ears alone. He doesn’t have a chance to reply before he’s letting loose a primal shout of pain that he has absolutely no control over whatsoever. He bites out a litany of swears next, his head swimming and unseeing eyes brimming with tears as the nearly unbearable flare of pain settles again.

“Mingjue!” Lan Xichen shouts and there’s the sound of movement from his direction.

“Over here, er-ge, take my hand. Don’t get too much closer or you’ll hit his leg.”

“A-Yao, give me one of his hands.”

There’s a bit of shuffling, the touch of two shaking fingers under his wrist, and then Jin Guangyao’s hesitant touch is replaced by the anxious surety of both of Lan Xichen’s surprisingly warm hands wrapping around his palm. He curls his fingers tightly around Lan Xichen’s palm in return, both to reassure him as well as to have something to hold onto as Jin Guangyao starts getting his leg splinted, every single touch against his skin like a line of throbbing fire. Somehow it hurts more when he can’t see what’s happening, can’t anticipate the next touch.

The fire starts to ease as he realizes Lan Xichen is passing him some of his own qi, two of his fingertips pressed firmly against the pulse point on his wrist. The thread of it is soothing, silvery blue where it slips along his meridians. It leaves the scent of fresh pine and the peculiar crispness of mountain air in his nose and on the back of his tongue in its wake as it chases away the sharpest pains and soothes the duller ones into a manageable ache.

None of them talk while Jin Guangyao methodically binds his leg and Lan Xichen tends to his pains as best as he can. When it’s finished Nie Mingjue hears Jin Guangyao murmur for Lan Xichen to stop before he exhausts himself too much to travel.

“I need you both to listen to me very carefully,” Jin Guangyao says, his tone perfectly even.

“Yes yes we know, you get to order us around to get us out of here - how lucky for you,” Nie Mingjue snaps, patience worn down to the absolute thinnest it’s been since he had been driven to threaten Jin Guangyao’s life in Qishan.

“No, I meant...well, yes. But..” Jin Guangyao sighs then, a heavy, world-weary thing. It’s been a very very long time since he’s heard Jin Guangyao - normally so silver-tongued - become tongue-tied over anything. He sounds exhausted.

Nie Mingjue is..dismayed but not surprised to realize that he can still be manipulated so easily by the other even when he can’t see him. Not that he’ll ever let on, of course, but that doesn’t mean the twinge of guilt at being part of the cause of that exhaustion isn’t real. “Let’s just get out of here first, I suppose. I have something to tell you when we return to the inn, and you’ll both have to listen to me. You’ll have to trust me.”

“We trust you, A-Yao,” Lan Xichen replies instantly. Both Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao’s silences speak volumes about what they think about that, but they both wisely say nothing. If there’s one thing the pair of them can agree on anymore it’s that Lan Xichen should be allowed to keep up his optimistic illusions about the world for as long as they can be maintained. He should always get to believe the best in everybody like he wants to.

Getting Nie Mingjue standing and propped up against Lan Xichen’s side for the return journey leaves him sweating and trembling but upright, and able to walk. Lan Xichen holds his free hand out to hold Jin Guangyao’s belt, Jin Guangyao warns them of any obstacles in their path, and Nie Mingjue does his best not to pass out.

They follow Jin Guangyao in this way back the way they had come, and while Nie Mingjue is constantly braced for something else to go wrong, after a small eternity they finally manage to return to the inn without further injury.

They agree to gather in Lan Xichen’s room, Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue sitting on the bed and facing Jin Guangyao’s general direction, and Jin Guangyao begins to talk.

“Just trust me,” he reminds them once again. “There are a few things you should know.”

----

In the morning, a scrap of post is sent from the smallest, cheapest inn of a small town that sits precariously on the edge of the forest on the far border of Lanling. The letter is bound for the heart of the territory under the control of the Jin’s, and Jin money is spared for the extra expense of ensuring it will arrive as quickly as it can. 

The letter will reach Jin Guangshan in the afternoon just in time for his usual break for tea, and Jin Guangshan will sit on his throne in Jinlintai to read Jin Guangyao’s report that the plot Jin Guangshan had devised has worked to perfection, that Qinghe Nie will no longer be a threat to his position. That he is retreating to Gusu to ostensibly grieve with his remaining sworn brother while doing his best to gain whatever secrets he can from their library to further secure their position at the top of the world.

Shortly after the letter begins its hurried journey to Jinlintai, three heavily cloaked figures - two tall, one short; one limping, one supporting, and one guiding - quietly slip away to begin their own journey in the opposite direction, bound for the safety that only the Gusu Lan can provide to shelter them while they plan just what, exactly, the three of them are going to do next.

[eyayah-oya]

My Brothers

66 FOLLOWERS!!! Thank you to everyone who has followed me and stuck around as I mess around with Star Wars and the Clone Wars.  This fic is for you all!

Also, I’ve had this story idea rattling around in my brain since last Saturday.  I hope you all enjoy and I’m sorry in advance.

Rating: T

Pairing: none (maybe Rex/Echo if you squint)

Warnings: canon typical violence and death (I’m sorry a named clone gets killed off screen ToT)

Ao3 link

           Echo let his blaster fall to the ground from his numb fingers.  The Empire had sent Crosshair after them again, with five full squads of troopers, trying to terminate the traitors.  They’d finally managed to subdue them all, including Crosshair, and had removed his chip.  All that was left was waiting for him to wake up and help him deal with being under the control of an evil regime.

           Hunter, Tech, Wrecker, and Omega gathered around Crosshair, just like they had done for Wrecker when his chip had activated, and waited.  And suddenly, Echo found he couldn’t stay there a second longer.  He had other duties to attend to.

           The small clearing the Empire had cornered them in was covered in the bodies of fallen stormtroopers.  If Echo blocked out the past year, he could even believe that these were squads of shinies and that the rest of his brothers would be at a camp nearby, mourning the loss of the ones killed in action.  But the Empire destroyed everything good left in the galaxy and left behind flimsy illusions of a perfect society.

           Rather than pay any kind of attention to his team—because they weren’t quite family, not really—Echo moved to the closest stormtrooper, clad in the new, weaker armor the Empire supplied its army with.  He knelt down in the blood-soaked dirt and pulled off the trooper’s helmet, needing to see their face.

           The clone that looked up at the starless sky with blank eyes couldn’t have been older than eight.  They had probably only just been deployed before the Order went out and the galaxy fell.  Echo brushed his fingers over their eyelids and closed them.  “Nu kyr’adyc, shi taab’echaaj’la, vod’ika,” he whispered.  Echo wished he knew their name.  Instead, he slipped the tags from around their neck, emblazoned with their CT number, and placed them in his hip pouch.  There wasn’t anything he needed in there at the moment, and it was more important that these brothers be remembered.

           Echo moved to the next one and repeated the process. Again.  And again.  Some clones were older, like Rex or even Echo himself.  Others were obviously shinies, sent to die for the new Empire.  Most fell somewhere in between.  All of them carried the face that Echo had spent his whole life looking at, a comforting familiar that he no longer could indulge in. None of the clones he had teamed up with shared a clone’s face.  The only one that Echo had seen since they’d left Kamino was Rex.

           Force, Echo missed Rex.  He wished Hunter had taken Rex up on his offer and they could have gone off and actually made a difference in this awful galaxy.  Maybe Echo could have helped save his brothers instead of slaughtering them.

           But.

           Standing among the bodies of his dead brothers, Echo felt like wailing.  Like crying. Like giving up for once in his short, pathetic life.  He hadn’t felt this way since Rex had told him exactly what had happened to Fives. And Hardcase.  And Kix.  And Jesse. And the rest of the brothers that Echo loved and fought beside.  They were all gone.

           When he’d been rescued from the Techno Union and realized the full extent of what they’d done to him, Echo had sworn he would never hurt another brother again as long as he lived.  He’d already been the weapon used to kill countless numbers of clone troopers (and Echo really didn’t know how many brothers had died because of the information the Techno Union had dug out of his brain), he refused to be used like that again.

           Echo stood in the middle of a clearing, surrounded on all sides by the bodies of the brothers he had helped kill to save one.  How many could he have saved if he’d just spoken up to the rest of the Bad Batch?  How many would still be alive if he’d had the courage to present his own tactics instead of relying on Hunter’s?

           The next bucket he pulled off revealed a face that was more familiar to him than all the others.  This was a vod he knew personally.  His hair had been shaved down, but from the tan lines on his head, it was obvious he had had a mohawk for years.  There was the cute scar on his lip from when he’d sparred Commander Cody and bitten through his lip.  Echo had laughed with Fives and congratulated the shiny on lasting longer than usual against Commander Cody.

           There wasn’t a speck of 212th gold on Wooley’s armor.

           They’d stolen his mind, his free-will, his identity, and Echo had stolen his life.  He’d killed the adorable floofy-haired kid with the most lethal tooka eyes in the entire GAR and a wicked right hook.  The one who loved stories and songs from far off planets and could weave the most incredible tales around the fires after a battle.  His sightless eyes gazed up at the stars he’d loved so much.

           With a silent sob, Echo fell to his knees and pressed his forehead against Wooley’s, cradling his body as best as he could without a hand. “Ni ceta, vod’ika,” he rasped as tears streaked down his cheeks.  “Ni ceta. I’m so sorry, Wooley.  I should have saved you.  I could have saved you.”

           There was nothing but the still-warm skin of Wooley’s forehead pressed against his own.  No shaky breaths or snarky comebacks or easy forgiveness.  Nothing but the soft murmur of Hunter’s voice as he assured the others that Crosshair would be alright.  Nothing but Echo’s own gasping sobs as he mourned the lives he had taken with his own hands.

           “Echo?”  Omega’s voice startled him, and he nearly reached for the blaster he’d dropped before he registered that she wasn’t a threat.  “What are you doing out here?”

           “It’s nothing, Omega,” Echo said, his voice rougher than usual.  “Just gathering intel.  You should go check on the others, make sure they’re holding up alright now that they have Crosshair back.”

           “I’m sure they’d all feel a lot better if you came and joined us,” Omega suggested.  She sounded worried.  Echo didn’t have the heart to turn around and comfort her, knowing she would see the tears on his face.

           “I’ll come back when I’m done.  He’ll probably be waking up soon anyway.”

           For a moment, there wasn’t any sound behind Echo, but he refused to turn and look.  Someone had to be the voice of reason for the Bad Batch, even if they didn’t listen very often, and he couldn’t do that if they saw how broken he really was.  Not even sweet Omega.

           A gentle, small hand settled briefly on his shoulder, and then Omega walked away, picking her way carefully through the dead bodies. Echo let out a shaky sigh and set Wooley down on the ground again.  As gently as he could, he closed Wooley’s eyes and ran a finger down his cheek.

           “Nu kyr’adyc, shi taab’echaaj’la, ner vod’ika.  I’m so sorry, Wooley.  I will do everything I can to free the rest of our brothers.  Haat, ijaa, haa’it,” Echo vowed softly.  He wore Wooley’s tags around his neck, rather than putting them in the pouch with the others.  Echo wanted—needed—the weight to keep him grounded even as he continued to mourn and honor the brothers he’d killed.  Dread and grief weighing down his every step, Echo moved through the remaining bodies, removing their helmets and collecting their ID tags so he could remember every one of them.  There were a few more brothers he recognized from the 212th and the 327th, though he hadn’t ever been as close to them as he had to Wooley.  It still hurt, looking at these men whom he’d loved and cherished, knowing that he was the one that had killed them. Knowing that he was responsible for them dying as slaves of the Empire.

           At some point, Echo heard Wrecker’s joyful yell, Tech’s babbling lectures, and Hunter’s quiet reassurances.  Even Omega chattered excitedly.  Crosshair must have woken up, then.  Echo didn’t move to greet him or welcome him back to the world of free-will. Instead, he focused on his task. There were only a few left, and then . . .

           And then what?  What would Echo do?  He had the commlink Rex had slipped him before he’d left them on Bracca, but could he really abandon the Bad Batch now that they were all reunited?

           Yes, Echo realized.  Omega was the only one that he would miss extensively.  He just didn’t belong with these off-color clones. He might not really belong anywhere, but he had a duty to his brothers and to Rex.  His last true brother.  Echo would try to contact him.

           But first, Echo couldn’t leave his brothers like this. Left rotting in some forgotten clearing on some forgotten forest moon in a forgotten sector of the galaxy.  It felt . . . wrong to leave them like this.  Echo knew there was a shovel among their gear on board the Havoc Marauder.  It would be difficult, but he could bury them.  Give them each a proper send-off.

           It was a good plan.  Echo knew that the others wouldn’t understand.  They’d be angry with him, probably try to make him change his mind.  Maybe even tell him that these “regs” weren’t worth the effort it would take Echo to bury each of them.  Especially since he only had one hand.  Handling a shovel would be difficult, but he would do it. For his brothers.  Regardless of what the squad said or complained about.

           With a final, murmured Remembrance, Echo stood and made his way back to the ship.  Tech probably kept the shovel in the cargo hold with the rest of the gear they didn’t use as frequently.  Most likely with the other survival gear he’d dubbed “unnecessary until necessary”. Echo knew that feeling very well.

           As cluttered as the cargo hold was, it actually didn’t take Echo very long to find the shovel, and soon, he walked back down the ramp to go find the best place for a mass burial site.

           “What are you doing?” Tech asked, and Echo stopped in his tracks.  “Why do you have our shovel?  Is there some kind of specimen that would be beneficial to take with us?”

           Echo’s grip on the shovel constricted and he very carefully didn’t look at the others.  “Just a little bit of maintenance and storage,” he answered, voice tight with anger. “Don’t worry about it.”

           “Is there something wrong with the ship?” Hunter asked.

           “No, there’s nothing wrong with the ship,” Echo answered, a bit shorter than he’d intended.  “Relax. I have everything under control.”

           “Oh, great,” Crosshair drawled, and Echo had to fight to keep his shoulders from climbing to his ears.  He’d forgotten how caustic the sniper could be.  “We’re taking orders from the reg now.”

           “What’re you talkin’ about?” Wrecker boomed.  “Hunter’s still our Sarge!”

           Echo decided it would be better just to walk away. Until a soft, sweet voice halted him in his tracks.

           “Echo, are you going to be digging holes for the stormtroopers?”

           “Don’t be ridiculous, Omega.  That would be illogical.  Echo wouldn’t spend time burying a bunch of stormtroopers, especially as he doesn’t have two hands and can’t hold the shovel properly,” Tech scoffed.

           More machine than man, Echo sighed heavily. He turned around and faced the Bad Batch for the first time since they’d managed to take down Crosshair without killing him.  They would see the red, sore eyes and the tear tracks down his grimy cheeks.  They’d see Wooley’s tags, standing out against the dark paint of his armor.  As much as he should be worrying about showing them that vulnerability, Echo had reached his breaking point.

           “Yes, Tech, I am going to bury them.  It’s the right thing to do,” he said slowly and evenly, desperately trying not to lose his temper.

           Tech heaved an annoyed sigh, like Echo had been placed on this team specifically to bother him.  “Again, that is illogical, Echo.  The Empire will send someone out to dispose of the corpses, or the wildlife will eat them before anyone else arrives.  We will need to move shortly to avoid detection, especially since they’ll know we have Crosshair once they see this failure.”

           Failure?  Echo swung the shovel off of his shoulder and dropped it to the ground.  “Is that what you see?  A bunch of failures that we merely disposed of?” he growled softly.

           Wrecker gulped and muttered a not-so-quiet “uh-oh” while Hunter’s eyebrows raised in surprise.  Omega looked like she wanted to hug someone, maybe somehow prevent this fight, and for a moment, Echo regretted starting anything.  She was the bright star left in his life, but he was fighting for all the other bright stars that he’d murdered.  He needed to say this.

           Crosshair didn’t actually say anything, and Echo couldn’t help but be relieved at that.  He only had to deal with Tech.

           “Well—yes,” Tech fumbled, clearly confused as to why Echo was clarifying anything.

           “You know what I see?” Echo asked.  He didn’t wait for an answer.  “I see my brothers that we killed to save yours.  I see my brothers that I swore to never harm again, murdered by my hand.  I see men who had as much choice in their actions as Wrecker or Crosshair, killed simply because they were in our way while we saved Crosshair.”

           “We didn’t have a way to save them all,” Tech argued back. “Besides, they’re just regs. Crosshair is a modified clone who would be more dangerous in the hands of the Empire than any other average clone. It was logical to rescue him above the others.”

           “Tech—” Hunter tried.

           But Echo snapped.

           He pulled Wooley’s tags from around his neck and held them out, a vicious snarl on his face.  “Do you know who these tags belong to?  Of course, you don’t.  These tags belonged to my little brother.  Wooley from the 212th.  I watched him grow up from when he was a just a little shiny, rescued from the Separatists who had been planning on selling him to the Trandoshans to be hunted down for sport.  I watched him learn how to fight from Commander Cody himself until he could hold his own for several minutes.  Wooley had a stupidly adorable, fluffy mohawk and the best tooka eyes in the GAR that he used liberally on General Kenobi to get him to go to medical.  He loves music and stories and the stars.  And I killed him.  I shot my little brother, my vod’ika, so you could save yours.

           “I’ve killed hundreds of my brothers, men that I served proudly beside for two years, to save your brother.  I swore to never harm another brother, and I broke that promise for you, just so you could save Crosshair.  And now, you want me to just leave them here to rot?  For the Empire to find?”  Echo shook his head with a sharp, bitter laugh.  “No, I’m done.  I refuse to turn my back on my brothers and if you can save yours, then I can save mine. Get Crosshair and Omega out of here and lie low so the Empire doesn’t find you, but leave me here.  I’m saving my brothers, this time.”

           He leaned down and picked up his shovel.  Really, he had no idea how he was going to dig fifty graves with only one hand, but he had to do it.  He had to try.

           “Echo,” Omega whimpered and he couldn’t help but drop to his knee and hold his arm out towards her.  She immediately rushed into his hug and Echo held her close for a moment, dropping his shovel back to the ground.  “Don’t go, please?”

           “Omega, I don’t want to leave you,” he said softly.  “But my purpose is elsewhere in the galaxy. Hunter and the others will keep you safe, but right now, I have a duty to save my brothers and I intend to do it. I can’t do my duty if I stay with the Bad Batch.”

           “What if we came with you?” Omega sniffled.

           Echo locked eyes with Hunter, and then Tech and Wrecker. Crosshair didn’t even bother looking up. “These guys are your family, Omega, and they need to do what’s best for you.  You shouldn’t have to experience war, and that’s exactly where I’m going. I’m a soldier and a weapon that any rebellion against the Empire could desperately use.  That’s what I was made for.”

           “You’re not—” Hunter started, and Echo could see the desperation and uncertainty in the Sergeant’s eyes.  “You’re not just a soldier or a weapon anymore, Echo.  You have a place with us.”

           “I’m a droid,” Echo said.  He gently nudged Omega back and pressed his forehead against hers for a second before giving her a little push towards the rest of the Bad Batch. He stood up and looked at the other clones, so unsure of what to do in this kind of situation.  “I was turned into the ultimate weapon against my brothers, and Tech said it himself.  I’m more machine than man now.  All I’m good for is doing menial repairs on the ship and being sold for credits.  I was “just a reg” before I became a prisoner of war, and you wouldn’t have even given me a second look if I wasn’t torn apart and put back together again.  I’m just a replacement that can be used when one of you isn’t able to fulfill your duties. A stand-in.

           Echo took a deep breath.  “I need to fight against this Empire the best way I can, and I need to save my brothers. That is my mission now.  I will fulfill my duty.”

           “But you can’t go,” Omega said, and there were tears glistening in her eyes.  “Echo, you’re a part of my family and I just got you.”

           “Omega, you’re a part of my family, too.  But you know that we’d do anything to save our family and I have a whole galaxy filled with my brothers who all need to be saved.”  Echo reached into one of the pockets on his belt and pulled out the secondary secure communicator he had built just in case.  “I’ll always be there for you, Omega.  I’m only one call away, and if you or the rest of the Batch get into trouble, I’ll come and help.  But I need to do this.”

           She took the comm in trembling hands, then with a sob, threw her arms around Echo’s legs and shook.  “I’ll miss you so much, Echo.”

           “I’ll miss you, too, Omega.  But don’t worry, I’ll keep in touch as much as I’m able to.  And we’ll see each other again.  I know it.”

           Echo let Omega hug him for as long as she needed as he ran his fingers through her hair soothingly.  He would miss her a lot.  In fact, she reminded him a lot of Ahsoka when she was a youngling at the beginning of the war.  Naïve and just wanting to prove her own worthiness.  Eventually she stepped back, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand.

           “I understand why you need to go,” Omega said with a watery voice.  “I’ll call you every day, okay?”

           He chuckled.  “Maybe not every day, but as often as we can both manage.  I promise.”

           Hunter stepped forward and put his hand on Omega’s shoulder. “Echo—“ he began, but Echo held up his hand.

           “It’s alright, Sarge.  Just—take care of her and each other.  And if you’re ever stuck in a situation, give me a call and I’ll come help.”

           “Are you sure we can’t convince you to come with us? There’s plenty of room for you.”

           Echo shook his head.  “You saved your brother.  It’s time I saved mine.  And you need to do what’s best for Omega.  Taking her into war zones would be a terrible idea.”

           Hunter stared at Echo for a long time, likely trying to figure out if there was any way he could convince him to stay, but Echo held firm. He didn’t belong with the Batch. Never really had.  They were good for a temporary posting, just to help readjust since Rex was busy with the war and dealing with the loss of so many brothers before everything went to hell.  Echo was ready to get back into the thick of the fighting.

           “Wrecker, go grab Echo’s gear and whatever rations and medical supplies we can spare,” Hunter ordered.  He turned back towards the rest of the Batch.  “Tech, get Crosshair on board and start up the engines. We need to get going as soon as possible in case the Empire returns.  Omega?  You should probably go get strapped in for takeoff.”

           The Batch scrambled to obey, though Echo noticed both Wrecker and Tech giving him uncertain looks.  Little brothers were always the same.  They always wanted to make sure they were doing the right thing and looked to their ori’vode for advice and help.  Hunter had filled that role for so long, but Echo had carved out a tiny space for himself, too.  As much as Echo wanted to help them, he had his duty.  And he could only really help them if they actually listened to his advice. But it didn’t hurt to leave them with a few last suggestions.

           “Hunter, don’t trust Cid.  They’re only looking out for themself and will likely betray you if it’s profitable enough.  Find someone you can really trust and have them teach you how the galaxy works so no one else can take advantage of you.  And take care of yourself and the others.  Especially Omega.”

           Hunter nodded and saluted Echo.  Echo gave a weak grin and returned the gesture before he picked up his shovel once again.  He had work to do.

           It didn’t take long for the Havoc Marauder to take off, and he watched the ship silently until he could no longer see them before turning back to the field of white, broken bodies.  His hand slipped into his belt pouch and removed the secure transmitter Rex had given him before they’d parted ways.  Without hesitation, Echo flicked it on and called the only saved frequency.

           “Rex?  Yeah, I’m gonna need a pickup.  Got room for one more in your little rebellion?”

             (Hours later, and after Echo had finally finished burying the last body, Rex’s ship touched down in the clearing.  The door slid open and five notes were whistled out of the opening.  It was a call Domino squad had come up with while on Rishi and one that he and Fives had continued to use in the 501st.  The only person left that would know that tune was Rex.  Echo grinned and returned the whistle.  Seconds later, a shape that was definitely not Rex barreled out of the ship and into Echo’s arms.  Ahsoka was taller than he remembered, and a lot more weary and sad.  But she was alive, and that’s what mattered most.

           Echo looked over her montrals and grinned at Rex, who leaned against the ship and just watched him reunite with his long-missed jetii’ka vod’ika.  The Empire may have taken everything good out of the galaxy, but a few small pockets persisted.  They had hope and they were willing to fight for it.

           “Let’s go save our brothers,” he said, arm wrapped around Ahsoka’s shoulders as they walked back to Rex.  Echo only paused once to look back at Wooley’s grave.  He would not be forgotten, and Echo would make sure that for every life he took, he’d save two more.  It’s what he owed them.  It’s what his brothers deserved.

           Nu kyr’adyc, shi taab’echaaj’la.  Not gone, merely marching far away.)

[ardenssolis]

@assortedsnacks​ said (inbox):

the instant the dull glow of their eyes meet, the serpent simpers, apophis nestled somewhere deep within the closed, jagged cavity where another ozymandias's heart should be. the puppeted, pulseless corpse curls a terrible rictus from beneath its ragged hood. ' ... since you're my favorite, i'll tell you. isolation, and the dark. that's what cracks you right open. that's what finally lets me take you over. the greater the radiance, the deeper the shadow. no matter how much you love those precious people, like your brother, your mother, your children and wives and best soldiers and servants, you're still separated from them. forever. how long do you think you can go before you start to forget? the sound of their voices, their heights, their scents, the shape of their eyes, and then finally their faces, along with the rest of them. maybe you're doing a fine job out here, but the minute i enter your body, a battle between the souls begins. yours, as brilliant and radiant as you'd imagine it to be. mine, sightless, soundless, a black hole. you know how those work, right? not even light from the sun can escape, it's just too oppressive. which means little by little, you start to lose grasp. 

‘you start to forget others, and even start to forget yourself. all those memories you take so much pride in... end up being my weapons to do you in. it hurts to forget and be forgotten, doesn't it, ram-chan ~ ? but that's just how memory works! a day, a week, a year, a century, or even a millennium surrounded by my nothingness, and the most you'll remember is the fact you've got some kinda divine, royal duty to fulfill, isn't that special? isn't that too easy to twist to my own whim?! really now, even as a demigod, you're seriously still too human! loathing old age and craving a thing like immortality only proves that. by the way, you know? not even ra comes at me on that stupid ship alone. i'm sure it's cause he's terrified of facing me all by himself night after night. i'm way out of his league, after all. the same way egypt was never actually exterminating me, it was just afraid! afraid because i only need to win once, and then it's all over! ' just as it was for the "rider" who could have been, the one who did not give up, but had given in.

     THIS BLACK SEREPENT SICKENED him to no end, and though they told a tail of mistreatment and betrayal at the hands of the other gods, it was hard to believe such tales when they were so vicious in their attempts at making others miserable. They took joy out of the chaos they sowed, watching with a malicious grin when another was brought low into similar depths of despair. Even now, that was their intent and they sought to remind Ozymandias of his weakness – of how no pharaoh was outside of his grasp no matter how great and powerful they were. The closer to the sun they became, the greater their influence became. Eyes narrowed sharply, hands clenched into fists at his side. They were trying to drag forth the slightest flicker of uncertainty from him, those golden eyes bright and intense even while they uttered their cruel words with no attempt at stifling their cruelty. ❝You would find that I am not so easily influence, Nameless One. You may slither about my person, wrap yourself around my heart, but I would not make it easy for you.❞

     He would not succumb as he had in that distant war so long ago when his soul had been coated black, the brilliance of his shine now something cold and dark – a sun in perpetual eclipse that would never quite dissipate. ❝I will never forget them. Those I love will forever remain nestled within my very soul. After all, my existence is not like yours. I am not bound by an empty darkness, forever lost to my own thoughts on a regular basis.❞ If anything, time lost meaning when you were not bound by it. Servants could, after all, appear anywhere at any given moment. Three hundred years ago, a thousand, years in the future – it would all be akin to waking up from a long sleep. You died, but it didn’t feel that way. His story would always feel fresh and new to him in comparison. ❝Stop trying to drag me down to your level as if we are equals. Amongst the pantheon, you will always be the loathed one – the one none pray to and grant power to. Even now when the presence of gods has faded, you are one of the only ones who still remain.❞

     Sad, alone, hated….

     ❝You will never win. But by all means, keep trying. I will enjoy seeing you fail each and every time.❞ Ra might have needed to protection of the other gods during his descent through the Duat, but Ozymandias was far greater than even them. They both shared the same traits, yet it was because they did that the Sun King was aware of his own shortcomings as well as his own strengths. The body the other puppeted was not ‘him’ in particular, but another – a lesser who had forgotten who they were and what they represented.

     They were not the same.

[jellydishes]

i was tagged by @cartadwarfwithaheartofgold with wip wednesday! tagging @the-temple-of-sacred-asses, @storybookhawke, and @robot-thighs

first up is a piece of Its Just A Jump And A Twist, an ongoing time travel story wherein a post inquisition leliana gets to go back and time to redo origins:

The first time this wheel had turned, a much younger Leliana had found herself weeping in a corner of their temporary camp barricaded behind bookcases. She'd had her hands over her mouth, trying to muffle herself so she wouldn't disturb her companions. It hadn't been the death alone that had twisted her belly up in knots until she had to cry or scream or else would burst with it, but the very act of being in the tower. Of wandering claustrophobic halls choked with blood and fear that had thrust her right back into a different place, a different torture room at the hands of someone who had sworn she would always be there to protect her. A fallen mage just within view through a gap in the barricade looked at her with Tug’s sightless eyes, and Leliana had retched behind her hands.

That was when cool hands had curved over her own, freezing Leliana's roiling thoughts long enough to lift her head and stare until the person crouched before her had resolved itself into Amleda Tabris. Amleda and her hesitant, crooked smile and the warmth of comforting words Leliana could no longer remember. She remember how warm they had felt, though, pushing the earlier chill in her chest back until she could breathe again. Amleda had always done that for her, whenever a chance-caught glimpse of red hair or some combination of words made the whole world shake loose beneath her feet, leaving nothing left but Leliana and old scars. And somehow, that space came to include Amleda, too.

And then it didn't.

Back then, Leliana had obeyed an impulse she couldn't have named at the time, one that moved her to brush her lips across Amleda’s in a soft, hesitant kiss. Had breathed out, once, then she realized. Remembered. And made to pull back and pull away because Amleda wasn't responding. Wasn't moving, wasn't speaking or laughing with her or doing anything but staring wide-eyed, her mouth hanging open. Leliana's hands had come up to wrap around her belly, and that must have been when some lever was finally pulled in Amleda’s brain, because she had lurched forward and brought their mouths crashing together again, and for the first time.

Their first kiss. A brief moment of beauty shared in a place of despair. And she was, the weight of decades pressing her into a floor that knew none of it as she stared at that spot. The ghost of flustered, shared laughter echoed in her ears. She could almost hear the quiet, nearly whispered, “I have enough space on my shoulders to carry one more worry, if you want to let go of it for a little while…”

A noise at her back, boots over loose stone and half-dried blood. Leliana didn't turn away. She should have, but at that moment she felt unbearably weary. Too much time had been lost that could never be regained, no matter what year she was in. Memories of dead women who still stood beside her, looking back and forth between the empty corner and Leliana’s dry eyes. Leliana opened her mouth, then let it fall shut. “Have I ever told you about that warden?” She croaked after several long moments.

“The one who died?” Amleda asked cautiously, and she had every right to, Leliana thought, not without irony.

“The very same. I saw-” Leliana's mouth twisted up at the corner in a poor imitation of a smile, or a laugh that never came. “Certain things remind me of her,” she said instead. “Sounds. Places. It is all too easy to…”

She'd almost said remember, but thankfully Amleda finished, “Imagine what happened? I know how that goes. Dangerous snare to go sticking your hand into, believe me. Start off trying to imagine what it had been like for them, if you could have stopped it somehow, and then it's fourteen years later and you've wasted more than half of your life trying to relive one day.”

Leliana’s throat tightened. Amleda was talking about her mother, Adaia Tabris. Adaia. Leliana was caught once again by another memory, this time of a red stripe etched across glittering eyes and down the angles of her cheeks, a hoarse, laughing voice promising to tell her children's children of what Leliana had done for her this night. A warm hand clasped around her wrist, in the way of warriors, and then she had been gone.

Leliana had never known if Adaia had kept that promise. Back when Amleda had been alive to ask, it had seemed too… self-serving to ask, as if she were trying to insert herself into a life that didn't need one more presumptive human, and then it had been too late.

Leliana closed her eyes, then opened them. “And, what do you do then?” She asked. Her voice wobbled traitorously, and she hated it in that moment. “When you've wasted your entire life looking backwards?”

Somehow, Amleda’s hand had found its way into Leliana’s gloved one, and there it stayed. Neither curling her closer or pulling away, and gradually Leliana relaxed. “You breathe,” was Amleda's quiet answer. “You get up and you breathe and you put one foot in front of the other until you can't do it anymore, and then you do it some more.”

“What if I can't? What if it stays with me all the days of my life?”

“Then you live for them, too. Get up and breathe and put one foot in front of the other, and if you can punch a pissant or four on your way down, then that's what has to happen. I certainly won't shed a tear.”

“How do you know?” Leliana was laughing all the same, and rugged free a questionable handkerchief to scrub at her eyes so she wouldn't have to look Amleda in the eyes.

“Because it's me,” Amleda said, and Leliana’s heart froze. “I carry my mother with me, the same way I carry Neleros and everyone who's come and gone from my life. Same way you do. We all carry our burdens. Mine just feel like an obligation. How about you?”

Leliana swallowed hard. In that moment, she wished for nothing more than a release from this conversation. “I hide,” she said in a voice that was so strained that it emerged as a rasp. “I seal the memories away in a box and bury it where no one, not even myself, will ever find it.”

A silence ensued. Amleda’s hand still curled loosely in her own, and Leliana couldn't bring herself to move for fear of Amleda pulling away, or turning into dust. Of none of this having been anything but the cruelest joke since the beginning. “I thought you said you were a storyteller.”

“I am.” Despite herself, Leliana turned a curious expression on Amleda, which was a mistake. Amleda was tired, streaked with soot and fluids best not thought on, but her eyes were fixed on Leliana, and she couldn't look away.

“Storytellers don't bury uncomfortable truths, do they? They remember the hard ones, too, the ones with barbs that rip and tear and hurt because sometimes hurt is what people need to realize they are still alive and able to fight and laugh and live. Battle cries from everyone who isn't alive to do it themselves. That's you. You wage war on their behalf, and you can't do that if you're too busy choking from swallowing your own secrets.”

Leliana stared at her until Amleda’s beautiful brown skin blurred in front of her. She let out a small, unwilling sound when Amleda wiped her tears away, and stood up on her tiptoes to kiss the corner of Leliana’s mouth. “Stick with me, we’ll get you remembering sunshine again,” Amleda promised. “That's what we do, right? We’re the heroes of this operation.”

second up is a bit of a thing for tma where gerry gets to meet his dad via even more time travel fuckery:

Gerry eased out a breath and drew in another that shook and rasped on the way down. "Look," he started to say, stopped, then tried again. "I'm not going to say that any of this bullshit equals out on some great cosmic abacus in the sky, but someone like you should have the chance to know that what you did mattered. And I don't know if I'm the one to do that. I never had the chance to know you."

Eric was quiet for several moments. "But you know yourself, right? You had the chance to learn who you are and who you wanted to be. That's what I want. Wanted, I guess."

"You're not listening." Something small and sharp and raw dug between his ribs and made his voice come out sounding odd to his own ears. He didn't know why he had this urge to make Eric understand, but he did. "I don't know if it was worth it. What's the point if small and petty people like her win and people like you lose?"

"You mean like us. But… you don't sound small and petty to me. You sound like someone who struggled and kept struggling but didn't stop trying, anyway. Hard to call a heart like that small." Eric fell silent again, his brow furrowing in thought. Then he added slowly, "I let her win, because I couldn't stop loving her. Seems like you beat me on both those counts."

[slasherholic]

warnings for this chapter: gore and death, mentions of abuse

Read chapter one here!

End of the Line | Michael Myers x Reader | Chapter Two

You make it thirty steps before the blackness bites you.

Your foot catches on some stiff piece of metal and your brain can’t catch up with the rest of your body to realize why you’re suddenly laying face-down in the dust on your stomach, why your legs aren’t still pumping, your arms not still pistoning—and then, all at once, it hits you.

You’ve tripped.

If you weren’t such a small and frightened animal you would start to cry again. But that’s not what frightened animals do, screams your lizard-brain, frightened animals run. So get up. Get up and keep running.

You do. You barrel back into the unknown. If Michael’s footsteps are still behind you you can’t hear them over the blood rushing to your ears, sweeping through your skull, dizzying your vision in a sickening way. A sticky hot wetness drips down your back from where he cut you but you don’t care about that right now. Run. Run.

You run for a long time. Until reason tells you that you’ve left Michael far behind—but reason currently has no place in your oxygen-starved thoughts. The sound of his breathing still rings in your ears and your mind is plagued with a terrible prophecy that your next stumble will be headlong into his chest. That he will lunge out from the blackness and seize you and it will all be over.

Hugging the wall, you dash around another corner—

—and there, at the end of the corridor, you can’t believe it. You think your mind is playing some cruel trick, so you keep looking down the hall, keep stumbling towards it, but no, there is no trick, it’s really there—

—a light.

Making the hallway before you not black but rather a shade of grey, like an old-fashioned photograph. And somewhere around the next corner must be its source.

You are a moth drawn to a flame. Nothing matters but that light.

Tearing through the dusty hallway, you see now what’s been tripping you—toppled desks, scattered all up and down the corridor, their metal legs jutting dangerously out.

Oh, comes your realization. It’s a school.

The corridor is a cluttered wreck of disrepair. Every classroom door you blitz past is boarded up with nails and planks. The paper on the walls peels like a bad sunburn. Wires hang down from broken panels in the ceiling.

And now, you understand what that suffocating must-smell hanging like a stiff blanket overhead is—the reek of abandonment. Michael has brought you to an abandoned building. There does not exist a more perfect hunting ground. Scream as loudly as you want because nobody will hear you, run in any direction you please because you are a rat in a maze, a fish in a barrel—escape was never a possibility in the first place. 

But you don’t think about that right now, only about the light. Reach the light. Reach it before it fades. You tear around the corner—

—the light is blinding.

Wincing, your forearm shoots up to shield your eyes from the horrible strain.

“Stay the fuck back.” Barks a voice. “I’ve got a knife.”

And you nearly topple over in shock. Raising one hand to cover the beam, you blink past it, heart racing in your chest.

Three wide-eyed faces gawk back at you from behind three flashlights, all of them trained on you like rifles. The guy in the middle—the only guy—wasn’t lying about the knife. He holds it out across his flashlight in the sort of way that a police officer might hold a gun, but he doesn’t have the look to complete the image. With his dirty-blonde hair collecting around his shoulders and studded black leather jacket, the knife-guy looks more likely to get arrested himself than to be the one doing any arresting.

He leers at you like you’re a convicted felon anyway.

“You see this?” He continues, swishing the knife a bit. “I don’t wanna use it—don’t make me use it. You just take it easy and stay right the fuck there.”

You hardly hear knife-guy’s words. What your brain clings to instead is the fact that there are People. You are not alone in the darkness. There are people in this building. 

The realization makes your pounding heart soar and for a second your head is in the clouds and all you can think is maybe I won’t die tonight after all.

To knife-guy’s left is a short and trim Mexican woman with thoughtful eyes like black pools, the biggest you’ve ever seen. She clutches tightly at his bicep with one bony hand and stares across the hall at you like you’ve sprouted a second head. The tall girl on the right must be some sort of athlete, with strong legs and golden-tan skin and a high brunette ponytail. She gawks like she’s just seen a ghost—or like she might be giving up her own ghost at any second.

Nobody moves for a moment, and in the end you just stand there, looking each other up and down.

And then some cold and bitter voice in your head reminds you, these people are lined up for a slaughterhouse. 

The hopeful thoughts in your head crash like a fiery trainwreck. Your eyes go round and horrified.

Graphic images assault your brain, of cuts so deep that you can see yellow fat and sinewy muscle and bleach-white bone, of dumbly gaping mouths, of dead, unfocused, cloudy eyes, sightless—the look of a corpse. You see in your mind’s eye that look on the faces staring back at you and your racing heart does a flip-flop into your stomach; you clench your jaw shut tight and think about not throwing up. Please don’t throw up. Please don’t throw up.

“Listen lady,” Knife-guy says, breaking the silence, sweeping his hair out of his face with his elbow. “We don’t want any trouble, alright?”

Too late for that, you think.

“If you’re trying to screw with us it just ain’t gonna work, yeah? So I’ll cut you a deal; you turn around, we turn around, we go our separate ways, and then we pretend we never even saw each other. That sound fair?”

Panic flares in your belly and all the moisture is sucked from your mouth.

“No!” The plea leaves you before you can even think. The tall girl on the right utters a little gasp at your outburst, jumping like she’s been burnt.

“No, no you don’t understand.” Your words are desperate; you hold your hands up in front of you like you actually are a convicted felon, just because it seems like the right thing to do; knife-guy seems to think it even more now.

“I’m not gonna hurt anyone. I promise, alright? But please, please, you have to listen to me—”

“Jesus!” Knife guy clutches his knife tighter. “I’m trying really hard not to be an asshole right now, okay? I don’t wanna be that macho douchebag that yells at girls, but honestly lady, you sound like some sort of nut! And believe me, we don’t want any of—”

“Oh Travis, honestly, quit it!” The short girl, silent as the grave until now, hisses sharply, elbowing Knife-guy in the ribs. Knife-guy shoots her a little look of what the hell dude, which she ignores.

“There’s something wrong, dammit—I mean, look at her!”

You assume she’s talking about the look of horror sprawled across your face, or about the cold sweat clinging to your reddened cheeks, or the fact that you must look like something that just came crawling out of the woods.

But then, you feel it again. You feel it trickling down your lower back, down your side, making your shirt cling to your skin, wetting the hem of your pants. And oh, that’s right. You’re a bloody mess.

Now, the pain registers. Your salty sweat stings the wound in an agonizing way. Paling, you reach gingerly beneath your armpit, toward your back, dreading the inspection, but doing it anyway. You need to know.

Your palm meets the cotton. You whimper, because your shirt is soaked-through.

Pulling your hand back, trying not to tremble too hard, you glance down at your fingers. They’re coated all the way to your palm in dark, shining red.

Michael cut you deep.

“Holy shit.” Travis breathes, his jaw tightening. You blink up at him again, fighting tears now.

“I’m—I’m not gonna hurt you, okay?” You stammer. “But please, you need to listen to what I’m telling you.”

You pause to lick your lips and swallow and the silence in your stead is horrible, as if every breath is being held.

“This isn’t a prank, it isn’t a joke—you guys need to get out of here right now, and I mean now.”

The silence stretches on; the short girl, the tall girl, the knife-guy—Travis, the short-girl called him—they all gawk at you as if you’ve spoken in tongues.

Then, chaos.

“Fuck that.” Sobs the tall-girl, her voice breaking. “Fuck that, I’m so not staying here. I can’t believe I let you guys talk me into this, we could have gone to see a movie! Let’s find Ashley and Josh and go.”

“Wendy, come on! She’s just trying to freak us out!”

“Well it’s fucking working, dude!”

“Both of you cut it out!” The short girl hisses, her volume a near-whisper. “Keep it down! Travis, for god’s sake, she’s telling the truth—you seriously think she did that to herself?” She eyes you anxiously, her gaze lingering on the blood eating through your shirt.

“...how did it happen?”

Her words twist something in your gut and you grimace. No, you can’t answer that—you can’t even think about that. You’re going to be sick.

But the short girl stares at you like you’re about to divulge the cure to cancer, and she isn’t going to leave it alone. So with a shuddering breath, in a voice so frail you can hardly hear yourself, you choke out the barest-bones answer you can muster.

“There’s someone else in the building.”

Your dread is a virus and the virus is contagious. The tall girl—Wendy—wilts visibly, terror overtaking her features. You think she might faint. Travis goes deathly silent, his expression hardening. The short girl chews her lip like a wad of bubblegum.

Good, you think. Great. They believe you. Now let’s get moving, please and thank you, because you simply can’t stay here any longer. Michael will not have given up the chase so easily. Any moment, the ghost-white of that awful mask is going to breach the dark. You know it. You can’t stay here. You need to get moving again.

But the short girl still isn’t satisfied.

“Who?” She asks, tears shimmering in her big brown eyes. Her words hang on her lips. “Who’s in the building?”

Your heart beats as fast and hard as if Michael’s hands are around your neck this very moment. 

Will they believe you? If you look these people in the eye and tell them the honest-to-god truth about who is lurking and stalking and hunting his way through these unlit corridors, will it tip the scales swinging in their heads hopelessly back into disbelief? Will they tell you to get lost, and to take your sick, twisted, poor-taste-of-a-joke with you, and what kind of a person pokes fun at something like that, anyway?

“It’s—he’s—”

You never get to finish. A sudden scream rips like shrapnel through the air.

The faces behind those blinding flashlights go paler than sheets. The blood in your veins runs cold. 

It is a bloody, piercing sound. It seems to rattle the walls around you. It goes on and on and on. When it cuts off it is abrupt and final and all the sound in the building is sucked away with it.

A cold, sneering voice in your head whispers, Well they’ll have to believe you now, won’t they?

Michael’s found someone.

~

He knows the hallways well. Even in the dark.

He stands at the intersection with the broken water fountain on the ground and does not move except to fill his lungs with air, listening. The girl had been loud; her footsteps carried far. He followed the echo and hunted her easily.

Now the echo has gone silent.

Looking down, staring at the floor beneath his boots, he sees them; shoe prints. Sitting freshly in the dust. Hers.

He does not need the girl’s sounds. Only her prints.

Studying them, he knows that she did not turn off here. Knows she kept on going down the hall. Toward the locker rooms.

He lifts his head and looks into the dimness after her, breathing the stale air deep into his lungs.

The hunt will be over quickly; the girl is running in a circuit.

Taking the left, stepping over the broken water fountain, he walks silently down the hall. The heat at his hips throbs, impatient. His thumb rubs back and forth across the handle of his knife. 

The girl will not see him coming. Not until it is too late.

He will grab her by her hot neck. Will let her twist in his hands. Will make her—

...

—he stops. Listening.

Hears footsteps.

Turning in a slow circle, looking over each shoulder, he searches the hall. Sees a set of double-doors. Listens more. Grips the knife harder, watching and waiting, breathing the stale air...

The doors swing open.

...and it is not the girl.

There are two of them. Two with flashlights. They keep on walking down the hall and do not look in his direction. Do not notice him standing across the way.

He watches them go. The heart in his ribs pulses steadily and rhythmically. The urge comes—follow the prey.

He follows.

He will have the girl later.

He will have her for a different urge.

~

You have never seen so much blood. Not even on Michael.

It shimmers starkly against the faded-blue lockers, streaking down in heavy wet lines toward the floor, pooling between the divots in the tile like tiny rivers, which trickle outward, extending their reach down the hall.

To your right, Wendy slaps her slender-fingered hand over her mouth. She sucks in big gasps of air and her shoulders shudder violently.

The short girl—Diane, you heard Travis calling her—stands next to Travis, her arms wound so tightly around his waist that if she squeezes any harder you suspect she might bisect him.

Travis just stands there. Shining his light at the gore. Entranced.

Your mind is blank as you yourself drink in the mess—blank and numb, thoughtless.

But when the smell of it hits you the tide of nausea comes racing back towards the shore.

You are no stranger to the tang of blood but this differs from the stench that clings to Michael when he comes home from a hunt. That smell is mixed among the salt of his sweat—muted by the scent of him—and the result is more primal and heart-pounding and less knock-you-on-your-ass dizzying.

But this smell is raw and undiluted. Straight from the source. It drains all the color from your face. It threatens to bring you right down to the floor.

You place a hand on a clammy locker door to keep from staggering.

“Look.” Diane whispers.

She untangles one arm from around Travis’s waist, raising her flashlight, shining it at the floor behind the puddle. You see what she’s pointing at. Bootprints.

The pattern on the sole is unmistakable. They are Michael’s.

They lead ten paces down the hall where they stop in front of a closed door. Squinting, you can just barely read the painted black letters on the door, letters which may have once read “Boy’s Changing Room.”

“Those aren’t Josh’s.” Travis breathes, squeezing the leather grip of his hunting knife tighter.

To your right, Wendy’s gasps become sobs. She collapses suddenly back against the row of lockers, their doors rattling harshly. You wince; Michael’s going to hear her.

Travis and Diane are on her in less than a second.

“She’s dead.” Wendy gasps. “She’s dead. We have to get out of here—”

“Christ, Wendy, stop it.” Travis hisses. Shoving his flashlight into Diane’s hand, he kneels at Wendy’s side, quick to clamp his hand over her mouth.

“You cut that out right now or you’re gonna get us killed.”

“Breathe,” Diane adds, sinking down to stroke Wendy’s hair.

Wendy tries to breathe, but it’s more of a blubbering in the end.

“You don’t know that, anyway.” Travis continues. “She could be alive right through that door, bleeding out. No way are we leaving until we find her.”

“She’s not.” You state.

Travis whips around. His scowl says it all.

Getting to his feet, he plucks his flashlight out of Diane’s hands and stands up rigidly straight. He shines the beam right in your face and you wince, wrinkling your nose at the brightness.

“Yeah lady? Alright, prove it; I don’t see a body.”

The tough-guy act is only skin deep. Blinking past the blinding beam at Travis’ face, you can see he’s tenser than a wire. He knows you’re right. He knows his friend is dead. He just doesn’t want to admit it.

You eye him sternly and hold your ground.

“I’m just being realistic; that’s a lot of blood.”

Travis’ nostrils flare, and all of a sudden he is walking across the hall with lurching strides.

The man approaching you is not small by any means—Wendy is taller than him, but only by an inch. His jacket is thick and puffs out around his arms, making him wider at the shoulders than he probably is, but his stature is sturdy, and his figure is close enough to Michael’s to plunge you into panic-mode.

Your limbs lock up habitually. You brace against the locker for hurt.

Travis stops at an uncomfortable distance from you, the leather of his jacket nearly grazing your chest. His breaths come heavily through his nose and you can feel them beating down on your face, hot and shallow. 

“You had better tell me right goddamed now,” He whispers through grit teeth, “What the fuck is in this building with us.”

The tightness in his voice is enough to unlock your limbs, enough to bring you out of your submissive trance, enough to make your lizard-brain realize that the man standing over you with a knife in his fist is not Michael, not even close—he’s just some college kid. Just as scared for his life as you are.

You don’t try to mask the hopelessness in your eyes as you finally spill.

“Do you know who killed all those people in Haddonfield last year?”

It’s a rhetorical question. Everybody with a working television or radio knows. Everyone who bothers to pick up their newspaper from their driveway in the morning knows. Everybody in the entire god-damned state knows. Hell, the entire god-damned country knows about those murders. It was all over the national news stations for a week into November, delivered each morning by a solemn news anchor:

And now, an update on the grisly string of murders which took place just last week in Haddonfield, Illinois—unofficially dubbed “The Babysitter Murders.”

The Haddonfield police department released an official statement this evening identifying the primary suspect in this ongoing case: Michael Audrey Myers, psychiatric patient and former Haddonfield resident, who escaped from government-mandated care on the night of the 30th.

Travis seems to hold his breath. When it comes out again it makes his upper body shudder. He knows, alright.

“Wait—” Wendy stutters, her frail voice cracking hard. “Wait, but I thought, didn’t they catch that guy?”

“They didn’t.” Diane pronounces quietly, shaking her head slowly. Her eyes are glued to the blood on the floor but they look unfocused and distant, like her mind is elsewhere.

“I’m following the Myers case for my thesis, and no, they never caught him.”

Travis’s invasion of your personal space finally relents. He steps back and begins pacing between you and Diane, his brow scrunching up in thought. He reaches up with his arm to wipe his hair out of his face.

“Okay, so you think it’s Myers,” He begins. “But come on, how do you know? How do you know it isn’t just some other freak? I’m sure there are plenty of real sick fucks out there, all I’m saying is that there’s no way you can know for sure it’s—”

“Guys?” 

Every head whips toward the changing room, and every flashlight follows.

There, peering tentatively out from behind the door where Michael’s boot prints lead is another tear-streaked face, a college-aged kid, no older than nineteen. The grey hood of his too-big hoodie is drawn up over his head.

“Josh!” Diane whispers.

Josh studies you sheepishly, his glossy eyes round and anxious. Then, he sees the blood. His eyes squeeze shut tight in an instant and his forehead lolls toward the door frame, knocking against it with a dull thud. His entire body begins to heave with silent sobs.

Diane shoots up from Wendy’s side like a rocket, tip-toeing around the gore. Reaching Josh, she embraces him in a tight hug, and Josh buries his face eagerly into the nook of her neck and only shakes harder. Diane caresses the frizzy ringlets around his ear and shushes him.

“If you saw anything,” She whispers, “You have to tell us. We need to know what happened.” 

“Is she dead?” Wendy sobs up from the floor, her slender fingers still clamped over her mouth.

“I-I don’t really know, man.” Josh chokes out. “It happened so fast. We were just coming to find you guys, a-a-and she saw the court, she tried to go check it out, b-but when she opened the door she got—she got—”

He gives a strangled little whimper and shakes his head weakly, burying it back into Diane’s shoulder, done.

She got grabbed, you finish in your head. It’s not a guess—it’s a fact. You don’t need Josh’s commentary to piece together what happened here.

Looking back at the smeared blood on the lockers, you see now where Michael did it, where he smashed this Ashley girl’s face into the aluminum doors, leaving divots and dents behind in the metal. At some point, Ashley had started screaming.

You drop your gaze to the heavy splatter of dark red on the tile again. 

She screamed, until Michael slit her throat.

“He followed me in there.” Josh sniffs, jerking his thumb at the locker-room door. “I ducked in a locker and he walked right past—but then he stopped and just stood there, like he was—I don’t know, waiting for something. Or—or listening for something.”

Josh wipes his nose on the sleeve of his hoodie.

“I was so scared, man. I thought I was dead.”

You listen to Josh speak and the unease in your stomach twists.

“Where did he go?” You ask. Josh eyes you warily.

“Um. I dunno, he just kinda… left.” 

All the hair on your neck stands on-end at that. You know how Michael’s mind works—at least to some extent—and you know how he hunts. And you would bet your life on the wager that he hasn’t gone far at all.

Your eyes dart up and down the hall and you squint past the reach of the flashlights, into the edge of the looming blackness. Josh’s words play like a tape recorder in your mind: She saw the court. She went to check it out. You squint at the closed doors leading to the basketball court. Your breaths shallow.

Oh; that’s where Ashley is.

“No offence or whatever, but who the hell are you?”

“She’s just some lady we found.” Travis answers for you. “Look, did you see him kill her, man?” Travis grabs Josh suddenly by the shoulders, shaking him like it’ll knock the sense back into him. “Come on, you gotta remember so we can get outta here. Where is she?”

You point an accusing finger at the basketball court.

“I think she’s in there.”

Everyone with a flashlight trains it at the doors. Another strangled sob leaves Wendy. Thick red handprints glisten wetly on the beige wood, just above the door handle.

Travis eyes the gore for a moment. Then, knife at the ready, he approaches the double doors.

It is for a wickedly selfish reason that you do not utter some warning of he’s still in there, moron, and your friend is dead, and you’ll be next. It is for a reason more potent than the fear of stumbling blindly through the darkness again; a reason more powerful than the fear of being alone in this desolate place. A reason that you are ashamed of for even thinking, but one that your lizard-brain—the part of you that cares only about your own continued survival, and to hell with everyone else—gurgles gleefully: If Michael kills them, maybe I’ll get to live.

And if not, then at the very least you can make a break for the exit while he’s busy sheathing his knife in their guts.

You look silently on as Travis carefully, carefully, nudges the door open with his shoe.

The room inside is just as abysmally dark as the rest of the school. Travis, hovering on the edge of the door frame, not daring to step foot beyond the hall, shines his flashlight around to inspect. It’s a basketball court alright, and surprisingly uncluttered. Sets of stadium bleachers line the walls on either side and loom like metal giants. Travis shines the light all around its periphery, illuminating every dark corner. There is no Ashley to be found—or Michael.

But there is more blood. A trail of it, leading out across the court, wrapping around the bleachers, disappearing from sight.

“Travis, no.” Wendy whimpers. “You can’t—oh god, please Travis, don’t go in there—please don’t. Please don’t.”

“Yeah,” Diane quickly agrees. “I think the best thing we can do for her now is to call the cops. Travis, he could still be in there.”

Travis looks anxiously back over his shoulder at her. He swallows like there’s a lump in his throat.

“Look. There’s no fucking way in the world I’m gonna leave her here with that psycho. Not until we know. This place is empty, alright? So as long as you guys stay close behind me... that fucker isn’t gonna get anyone else. I promise.”

Guilt flares in your gut. Your eyes fall to the floor. You can’t look at him. You know that not a single person standing in this hall will live to see the sun come up.

For simple fear of being left in the darkness again, when everyone shuffles into the court, you do too. Beams from all four flashlights rove the walls like spotlights. Every head is on a swivel. Travis is at least right about one thing: the room is huge and empty. There’s no way that anything could sneak up on you in here, not a housecat, not a tiger. Not even Michael.

The thin trail of blood disappears behind the bleachers—your heart pounds in your throat as the group draws nearer. The silence weighs like a heavy blanket.

Reaching the corner of the bleachers, everybody peers around the bend. You squint into the dimness.

There, suspended five feet off the ground, swaying sedately back and forth—a figure.

Travis shines his light up at it.

It is the limp body of a woman. She hangs from her neck by a length of climbing rope dangling down from the ceiling.

Somewhere in the background, Wendy starts to wail. “Oh god. Oh god. Oh my fucking god.”

The body turns, slowly. When it turns all the way around you can just make out the messy red ruins of her throat beneath the rope, slit quite literally from ear to ear.

Reality stares you in the eye, gape-mouthed and grotesque, and it will not let you look away. You drink it in and all your thoughts, even the lizard-brain thoughts, are silenced.

You study the blood seeping from the gaping gash in Ashley’s neck. You watch the way it drips down her sternum, how it eats in splotches through her white tube top, the garment pulled half-way down her chest, exposing her breasts on one side. You look all the way down to the puddle of glistening blood beneath the body and watch the droplets trailing off the slender ankles, dripping to the floor and making tiny ripples in the deep, dark red puddle beneath.

When your thoughts finally return you realize all at once that you have never witnessed Michael commit a murder. You have never had to see him plunge his knife into a screaming, crying, terrified body, but oh, you can picture it so vividly, can hear the pleading and the begging, can imagine Michael twisting the knife deeper, can see him tearing a life away with the ease of one kicking sand over a fire to snuff it out.

You know that will change tonight.

You know other things too, things that make nausea bubble up your throat, and you know before it happens that you are going to vomit, but not because of the body.

You know that Michael is a monster; you know it like you know that grass is green. You know what you are to him and you know that you should despise him for it. You know that you should want to see him burn—and a part of you does. A part of you wants nothing more in the world. A part of you wants to be the one who lights the match.

But there exists another part of you which sits like a gaping black hole right in the middle of your chest, and when the hole is open—which is most of the time—you feel cold and hollow and empty on the inside, and when it is closed you feel complete again, if only for a short while.

You know that the hole is need. And the need wants only one thing.

Standing here, staring up at the reality of what Michael is, of what he does, of what he will do to you tonight, even now, the hole in your chest still needs him like lungs need air.

He will kill you and it will not make you need him any less. Will not make you want him any less.

And as terrible, twisted, perverted, fucked-up as it is, it won’t make you love him any less, either.

It was Michael who held you down and cut open the hole in your chest; and now Michael is the only one who can fill it.

The bile rises up your throat and you are sick.

[tinydooms]

Prompt - Evy has a nightmare, Rick hears her and comes to check on her. She asks him to stay. They talk about Hamunaptra and recall the first time they met. He holds her as she drifts off to sleep and he falls asleep too

Okay, so this prompt is months old, and I hope this Anon still checks out my page from time to time, because I’ve finally written this story! Many thanks to @sweetfayetanner and @sheahoneygoth for the beta. :-)

Not If It’s You

Cairo, November 1922

Evie lay across the altar, her left wrist still manacled, watching as the undead priests held Rick down. He struggled against them; he was strong, but they were stronger. Another approached, holding a stele in its bony hands and laughing. Evie screamed and thrashed; her legs were stuck, only one free from its chains. She couldn’t pivot and kick at the mummies, couldn’t save him. 

“No!” she screeched. “Rick!”

Rick struggled, reaching for his sword, but the mummy had closed in. It hefted the stele and let it fall. The enormous slab of stone landed hard on Rick’s torso; there was an awful crunch and Rick’s breath rushed out of him along with a stream of blood and gore, his eyes springing open in pain and horror.

Evie screamed and screamed, struggling against her bonds, thrashing. But Rick lay still on the stone floor, blood dribbling from the corners of his mouth, blue eyes sightless, dead. Evie wailed--No, it didn’t happen like this!--Rick was dead, he was dead, he was--

“Evie, wake up! Come on honey, it’ a bad dream, wake up--”

Evie leaped awake, sitting up with a cry in her own bed at home in the Zamalek house. Someone had switched on her bedside lamp, though she didn’t register it at first. Cold sweat soaked her pajamas and her heart felt as though it was about to leap out of her chest. Gasping, Evie rubbed her hands over her face, the image of Rick’s dead eyes and bloodied mouth still too close for comfort. 

A warm hand touched her shoulder; Rick’s hand, gently squeezing. 

“Easy, honey,” he said. “It was a nightmare. Are you awake?”

“Oh, god,” Evie said, and almost fell off the bed in her hurry to wrap her arms about him. 

Rick, kneeling beside the bed, caught her and pulled her into his lap, settling down on the mattress. Evie clung to him, her face in his neck, shivering. Rick was warm and solid and alive in her arms, his arms snug around her, one big hand stroking her hair as he rocked her. 

“It’s okay,” he said softly. “Whatever you dreamed, it’s not real. You’re safe. It’s okay.”

Evie nodded. She felt vaguely silly, clinging to him like a child, not a grown-up woman of twenty-five, but she didn’t let him go. Instead, she breathed in his new-familiar scent and tried to relax.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered at last, raising her face from his neck. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t,” Rick replied. “I was coming back from the bathroom and heard you crying. Do you...do you want to talk about it?” 

Evie rubbed her hands over her face. “I feel a little sheepish. I dreamed of...of Hamunaptra.” 

Rick nodded, waiting, and after a moment EVie pressed on. 

“I dreamed that you were fighting the priests, his priests; they knocked you down and held you and--” she hesitated and Rick squeezed her hand. “And they killed you. They dropped a stele on you and you died, and I could do nothing to save you.”

An odd look passed over Rick’s face. He bit his lip and nodded. “That’s not unusual, dreaming that you can’t save your companions--”

“Not just my companions,” Evie said. “You. They killed you and I couldn’t bear it--I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you. 

In the dim lamplight, Rick blushed, color washing over his face. Evie was so surprised that for a moment she forgot her own sorrow and reached to touch his cheek. 

“Is that so unusual to you?”

Rick flashed her a tiny sideways smile and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, I’m not used to being…”

“Cared for?” Evie supplied when he hesitated. 

“Loved,” Rick replied.  

Evie sat back and looked at him. In the handful of weeks since their return from Hamunaptra, Rick had become indispensable to her, a quiet, steady presence both in her home and at her library. Kind, dependable, funny, she loved him more than she would ever have imagined she could love anyone. It had never occurred to her that maybe this was all new to him, as well. Rick, watching her, felt his stomach clench. 

“Have you never been loved before?” Evie said at last, and at least her own nightmare seemed to be forgotten. 

“I--no. Not like this.”

Who on earth would have loved him these last few years, when his hands were filthy with war and his life in shambles? Evie’s face was a study; she looked bewildered. Rick rubbed the back of his neck again, embarrassed. 

“I was...in a bad place after my last battle. A real bad place. I’d had a bad couple of years even before the War, and then they made me join the Legion and sent me to Gallipoli, and I just kind of stopped being a person, if that makes sense. It was easier to be a soldier, to live one moment at a time. And afterwards, I just fell apart; I could barely live one day to the next and I didn’t--there isn’t room for any kind of relationship when you’re in that kind of place. I didn’t want to burden anyone.” 

Admittedly, Rick had had the occasional willing partner before he had broken down completely, but he had known better than to lean on any of them. He had been alone for so long, he had stopped even hoping that it would change. But here was Evelyn; she had dreamed about him, had been so disturbed by his imagined death that she had screamed herself awake. Evelyn, who smiled whenever she saw him, and kissed him, and was his friend as well as the girl of his dreams. And he was so afraid of losing her, of scaring her off. 

“You’re not a burden,” Evie said, shaking her head. “People need to lean on each other; it’s in our nature. And I know it’s stupid to dream about Hamunaprta, especially since it was a mistake of my own making. It’s not a real horror, like what you and Jonathan went through in the War.”

Rick stared at her. “Evie, it’s not a competition. Hamunaptra was a fight for our lives, and it wasn’t any less scary than the War.”

Evie thought of Jonathan, haunting the corridors of their English house at night, afraid to sleep because of the nightmares, of waking Rick up the other night and seeing the tears wetting his lashes. She looked at Rick’s hand wrapped around her own and back at his face.  

“Will you stay with me?” Evie asked. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

“Yes, if you want,” Rick said, trying to ignore the way his heart was racing. Sleep, they were going to sleep, not...just stop right there, O’Connell. 

Rick stood and shook out the blankets as Evie punched the pillows into shape. Watching him, Evie was once again struck by the oddity of him, this big strong man who was so soft and gentle with her. Rick had told her a little about his life before the War, how he had been raised by a single mother and then unceremoniously dumped in an orphanage when she died. And now there was the admission that he had fallen apart after the War. He had had a hard life so far--how was it that he was so loving?

“May I ask you a question?” Evie asked as Rick slipped into bed beside her. 

“Of course.”

Evie curled into his side, twining herself around him with one arm around his chest and her foot on his. “Where did you learn to take care of people?”

She felt Rick smile into her hair. “My mom. And then later at the orphanage. I was this big tall kid and the smaller kids looked to me to protect them from bullies.” He shifted, settling into the bed, and began to stroke Evie’s hair. “I knew how I wanted to be treated. I was so homesick, you know? I was just a kid myself. I wanted my mom and it seemed the best way to deal with it all was to look out for the others, to try to help them feel a little better.”

“And who looked after you?”

For a long moment, Rick was silent. “Nobody looked after me.”

There it was again, that sense of loneliness that she often got from him when he talked about his past. Evie squeezed him, trying to put a lot of unsaid things into her embrace. 

“There’s a Greek play,” she said. “I can’t remember who wrote it at the moment, but there’s a pair of lovers and one of them is going through a rotten time, and he says to the other that he can’t imagine why they would love him enough to stick with him. He says, ‘it’s rotten work’, and the other replies, “Not to me. Not if it’s you.’ Do you understand?”

Rick nodded and rested his forehead against hers. For a long moment they leaned against each other, and it should have been weird, breathing in each others’ faces like that, but instead it was only wonderful. Rick kissed her cheek. He wanted to stay here with her, like this, forever. 

They sank back towards sleep together, snugged together under the blankets, and this was medicine to both of them. This was safety; this was home. They would support each other for the rest of their lives.  

[stephanieritaclark]

Whumptober 2021 - Day 1

No. 1 - ALL TRUSSED UP AND STILL NOWHERE TO GO “You have to let go” | barbed wire | bound

This is a bit of a reversal for characters in a fun dark fantasy story that I will probably never finish. It was kind of a mistake to write it from the blind character’s perspective, but I didn’t have time to rewrite it from another’s.

Survival

The room was pitch black. Demons had blinded Allison at a young age, but she could tell, through her vision turning shades of gray, when a place was bright or unlit. She had followed her companions into a building with no light, and for once, she was the one with an advantage in their environment. No one else would notice any silent demons if they came, not as quickly as she would.

Allison could hear the shuffling of six other people near her. One had brazenly gone barefoot, but everyone else wore boots that scraped against dirt and dust along the crumbling concrete floor of the dilapidated skyscraper.

The closest was light-footed Sam. His footsteps would have gotten lost among the other sounds had she not been listening for him.

“Right next to you, Al,” he announced himself before he touched her shoulder.

Allison gave his hand a pat, and he took a step away. They had been working with each other for long enough that they knew what each other needed, and she did not yet need a guiding hand.

With no concerning sounds, Allison stepped forward, holding out her hands before her to feel around the room and make a mental map of the room. They had been exploring and fighting for hours, and they needed a break. It would be best to familiarize herself with the place as best she could while everyone discussed whether it would be a good place to make camp.

Allison knew it would be a mistake to camp, but it would be just as dangerous to keep searching for the Sentinel Salamander guarding the place while everyone was exhausted. She had only mapped a fraction of the room by the time she heard a distant squeak, and she snapped her hands to the guns holstered at her hips.

“Quiet, everyone,” she whispered.

Everyone’s feet went still, and Allson listened. She turned her sightless gaze around the room.

On the day of the Eclipse, their world died. The sun had disappeared behind a dark cloud forever, and demons had risen from the bowels of the Earth to slaughter those living on the surface. Few people had survived the attack, and when their scars had healed, they had realized that they had some strange ability that gave them some hope of surviving the Eternal Night.

Allison saw bright colors floating high above them. She lifted her guns toward them. The tips of them glowed as brightly as they did, thanks to them being made from demonic tissues, and she fired at them.

They emitted an annoying screech, and the lights dimmed as they fell out of the sky.

Allison killed five of them this way.

“More evil bats, huh?” Joshua said from across the room.

“Seems they’re a fan of this place,” Laura with the raspy voice said.

“There has to be something worse, right? Something bigger and grosser? Other than the Salamander.”

“Where the hell is that thing, anyway?” Randy asked from the left. “Could the reports have been wrong?”

“You haven’t noticed the building getting warmer the further we go down?” Allison asked, tilting her head to the side.

“A little?” Sonja said from somewhere to the right. “Now that I think about it, it’s not as cold as it was.”

“I thought it was just the lack of wind.”

Allison huffed a soft laugh. Her teammates were always so quick to dismiss the details as if they were not important. The slight differences meant everything in fighting the demons, and she supposed it was her role in their dynamic to make sure they paid attention to them.

After the bat demons, they realized they needed to move deeper into the building just in case the Salamander had some kind of hive mind with the demons within the building.

It was a famous theory that major elemental demons could communicate to lesser demons and even control them. If it was true for the Salamander, then they needed to move on because it had discovered their location thanks to the bats stumbling onto them, and they needed their rest. They had been fighting and searching for too long.

After they located a hole in the floor, they pulled out their flashlights and inspected the floor below them. It looked intact beneath them, so they brought out their climbing gear and made their way down. Allison was among the last to go. Being blind, even with her special abilities, put her at a great enough disadvantage that they would not dare to leave her alone.

Once everyone was on the floor, they did a quick sweep of the area, and they found a large room that would be better for taking a rest.

“Looks like some meeting room,” Randy said. “You know, like in the movies?”

Allison nodded. She had seen a few of those in her childhood before the Eclipse. It was smaller than the other space had been, and it was easy enough to make a mental map of. There was a collapsed table in the center of the room, and broken chairs were throughout the space. As far as she could tell, it would be more difficult for a monster to get inside.

She sat in a spot in the corner, and she sighed, leaning against the dusty and grimy wall. Sam sat near again, announcing his presence.

Everyone was silent as they rested, and Allison kept a keen ear out for anything wrong happening around them. It must have been fifteen minutes of much needed rest before she heard scraping and shuffling above them. She frowned as she reached out to put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. The man stiffened, and she knew he was on alert as well.

There were soft gasps as they noticed the sounds as well. Allison reached for the guns holstered at her hips, and there was more shuffling as the others reached for their own weapons.

“Oh, shit,” Sam whispered. “Don’t move, Al.”

She did not question. She merely did as she was told. It was not until she could smell something burning that got a clue why.

“Everyone, out to the open!” Randy called.

Sam grabbed her arm, and he helped guide her as everyone exploded into action. They left behind a metallic screech from a demon as they left. The larger, more open space they had dropped into it was much warmer than it had been a moment before, and Allison spied bright lights ahead of them, climbing out of the ground.

“No, they melted the place!” Laura cried.

Gun fire sounded all around her above the pounding of her heart in her ears, and Sam allowed her to press herself close to his side. Allison might have had an advantage the others did not in the dark, but that advantage meant little when she risked hurting one of them by accident. It would help if they could all wear armor made of demonic tissues, but it was a rare to find materials that were solid like metal. She would have to wait for an opportunity.

Allison looked around them, paying special attention above them, to help them in any way she could, but all she could tell was that they were large and none of them crawled from above them within the room. 

Then, she noticed one preparing to jump toward them, wriggling its lower half like a cat.

“Sam, three o’clock!” she shouted.

The man released her arm to aim his weapon, and he shot it out of the air. Its cries joined those of the demons surrounding.

“Why are there so damn many of them?” Joshua cried over the cacophony of battle.

Allison wished not for the first time that she could be more helpful, but all she could do was cling to Sam’s side and look for any sign of—

Another cat-like demon was ready to pounce toward them, but someone shot it down. As she turned to keep looking, there was already another jumping toward them. She cried Sam’s name, and she felt him turn.

But it was too late. She felt the bright yellow light fill her vision. An overwhelming heat caressed her skin. Claws dug into her arms, and the weight of the demon sent her falling backward. Sam was not the resistance she would hope to meet behind her, and he cursed as the three of them fell.

Allison struck the ground, but she flung out her arms, hoping to find Sam. The yellow light passed her vision, and the creature gouged out chunks of her flesh as it went sailing forward with the momentum of the jump. Sam also slipped out of her grip as she scrambled, and there was a sharp pain in her shoulder as his weight dislocated the bones. With a scream, she scrambled with her other hand to reach for the horrible weight on her arm.

The others in their group screamed their names.

“What’s happening?” Allison cried. “Sam?”

“You have to let go,” Sam said.

“What?”

“Al, you’re hurting yourself. Let me go. I can’t climb up.”

“What? What are you—”

“You’ll lose your damn arm! Just let me go!”

An ache joined the palpitations of her racing heart. Allison felt the pain in her arm growing stronger and stronger, and she realized she was clenching her hand around something—around Sam, she realized.

“No!” she screamed, even as she sobbed over the pain.

“You have to, you idiot!”

Allison just needed to flip onto her stomach, and she could grab him with her other hand. It would relieve the pressure until the others could—

She screamed at the sharp, stabbing pains in her shoulder as she attempted to roll over, and she could only continue lying on her back.

“Forget about your stupid promise to protect me!” Sam shouted.

“No!”

Yet as she laid there, she wondered if there would ever be a large enough lull in the fighting for someone to get over to them and help. There were so many demons, so many dancing yellow lights all around them. The sounds of the bullets were deafening. Her shoulder hurt. It was a worse pain than she had ever felt.

Her body betrayed her in the worst way.

As another jolt of pain coursed through her, Allison’s hand flung open. The weight left her. Sam screamed, and she heard it grow quieter and quieter as he fell down however many stories. As she scrambled to her knees, arm hanging uselessly at her side, she listened for a thud, a sign that Sam had fallen a survivable distance, but it was too noisy.

Another weight slammed her from the side. Yellow light filled her vision, and claws ranked through her skin. She reached for a gun to fill her usable hand, and she screamed as she emptied the slip into the creature—even after its light dimmed.

Allison laid there, sobbing beneath the dead demon, until someone pushed him off her. She heard someone shouting her name, but there was so much noise, too much shouting and shooting.

There was a sharp pain in her neck, and that was the last thing she experienced before she never woke again.

Full Masterlist here

[yankyo]

Can we please have some comfort for all that hurt? ;u;

Yes! Yes, you may!

Accident - Part 2

Warnings: Mention of abuse, blood 

   Chamie was acting weird, it wasn’t that he was trying to help, no that wasn’t it, but you could see an odd look on Beetlejuice’s face as the clone was being lectured and Chamie seemed to droop even lower as he looked at the charred remains of his attempt at cooking. And then as the mess in the kitchen was being situated, Chamie was found in the living room attempting to vacuum. It was an honest attempt and you were flattered again that he was trying to help, but you couldn’t help but grimace at the state of it. You certainly didn’t have the money to replace it this month, not when your rent was due and feeding so many new mouths left you a little strapped for cash. Speaking of, you were already running a little too late for work this morning, so even though you wanted to stay and take care of the situation, you had to rush to get ready and run out of the door yelling goodbyes as you went - Chamie wasn’t anywhere to be found and as much as you wanted to assure him that you weren’t upset and make sure he got his goodbye kiss, you resolved to make it up to him when you got home.

   Work was long and boring, a day of dealing with frustrating customers and pasting a smile on your face as you pretended to be listening to them ramble about whatever coupon they were so certain should be working and just how rude the other cashier had been to them last time - you were pretty certain it had been you, but then again, you really didn’t care. No, you were too busy thinking about Chamie’s sad face as he looked at his feet, just taking the lecture without even attempting to fight back. It hadn’t been the first time, but you hadn’t really noticed it before. No matter who it was, once someone started to yell at Chameleon, he seemed to almost shut down, his shoulders hunching and his ears drooping as he just let them take out their anger on him. The only time you had ever seen Chamie fighting back was during the little mock fights he had with the others during game night and even then, it wasn’t really shouting. Despite all the time you had spent with them, how was this the first time you really noticed this? Was there other ticks you had overlooked? Other little signs things weren’t entirely alright with the group of demons you loved so dearly? The thought made your heart ache and it was all you could do to just stay at work and not rush back home to your lovers.

   After what seemed like an eternity, you were finally off the clock and rushing back to your car with a new ball of yarn to replace the one Chamie had messed up this morning. You would sit him down and have a talk about this morning and make sure everything was alright with him, and definitely smother the cute clone with kisses and make sure he knew just how much you really appreciated him, how you appreciated all of them. Your plans for the night were optimistic, but as you pulled up to your home and stepped out of your car, you could hear shouting from the driveway. A chill went through your veins, unsure of what was happening but from the yelling, you could be certain it wasn’t anything good.

   “My books! Why would you even mess with them?”

   “We’re going to have to clean up your mess again!”

   “The kitchen is covered in bubbles, you idiot! What did you do?”

   “What is going on?” You cut in, tossing your bags to the side as you pushed through the gathering of demons to find what they were swarming around and the sight just broke your heart. Chamie was curled into a ball, his arms locked around himself and his grip on his arms so tight you could see blood beginning to stain his sleeves. His hair was a swirling mess of purple and blue with a flash of grey that made you want to cry. “Get back from him, give him some space!” The clones blinked at you, looking down to their comrade as if just realizing how bad the situation had gotten, giving you space to lean in and try to pet Chamie’s hair to get his attention. As you moved closer, the clone raised his head, his eyes glazed and sightless before fear filled them and he stuck out as if trying to fight off his aggressor. You couldn’t help the pained yelp, falling back as you instinctively grabbed the wound, blood welling up through your clenched fingers. Yellow flashed through Chamie’s hair as his eyes seemed to clear before bleeding back to blue, to purple to a dark color you had never seen any of them wear before: black. He gaped at you, looked to his own hand as if it were a separate entity entirely before he reached out for you once more, looking so sorry you thought he would burst into tears right then and there, but before he could touch you the other clones swarmed around you both. Chamie was shoved back as you were dragged into someone’s arms, more shouting and hissing at the cowering clone before Chamie bolted away, half running on all fours as he fled deeper into the house.

   The clones clamoured around you, half dragging you into the bathroom to rinse out the bleeding wound on your arm. Ren took charge of the situation, calling for Bee to get the medical kit for him as he gingerly checked out your wound, sighing in relief after a moment.

   “Thank goodness, you won’t need to get stitches.”

   “What happened today, why was everyone yelling at Chamie?” You couldn’t care less about your injury, no, you needed to know what had lead to Chamie lashing out like that. You knew he hadn’t been attacking you, but something else, something he was clearly terrified of. Chamie would never have hurt you, none of them would, you knew that. The question made Ren wince, as if ashamed of his actions now that he had calmed down but instead of answering, he instead busied himself with tending to your injury,

   “Chamie half destroyed the house,” Jazz, on the other hand, didn’t hold back. “The kitchen is filled with bubbles, he fucked with the washer and dryer, pretty sure half of your clothing is ruined, and he messed with our shit.”

   “He put up the puzzle I’ve been working on all this time.” Jay was pouting in the corner, but you could see a guilty light shining in his eyes. “But all of us jumping on him like that wasn’t right. He doesn’t do well with shouting...” the clones all fell silent, a chill going through them all that stopped you from pressing any further. It wasn’t until Ren finished wrapping your arm and Beetlejuice stepped through the group around you to inspect the job that the silence was broken.

   “I should really clean up the mess...” Ren started shepherding the others out the door, “Someone needs to go find where Chamie holed himself up in.”

   “I’ll find Chamie.” There was no room for negotiation in your tone and the clones didn’t seem surprised, though Beetlejuice didn’t move from his place in front of you.

   “When he gets like this, it won’t be easy to get through to him.” It was phrased like a warning, but Beetlejuice looked resigned, as if this were something that he had tried to fix but knew that he couldn’t. “He might lash out at you again, and next time he might not recognize you in time.”

   “I’ll be alright.” Even if he did lash out, you weren’t scared. Chamie needed someone to reach out to him with kindness, needed to know that you weren’t angry at him. “Ren, can you handle the laundry? Bee and Wasp, clean up the mess in the kitchen, Jazz, Cici, and Jay can put their things back in order how they like it.” The clones nodded and Beej stepped back finally, closing his eyes and focusing for a moment.

   “He’s holed up somewhere cramped and dark. Pretty musty.” You thought to where in the house Chamie would feel the safest and your heart sank with the answer.

   “I’ll be back.” You kissed Beej on the cheek, giving him a reassuring smile before you headed up to the attic. Your attic was tiny, more of an extra storage space than anything, but a person could fit up there if they stooped, and Chamie could definitely curl into a tight enough ball to cram himself into even the smallest space. Your fears were confirmed at the sight of a trembling black and white ball stuffed up against the wall, black and white hair swirling violently. “Chamie? Baby, it's me.” As you crawled in closer, you could hear the muffled crying grow louder in response to you. “Chamie, it’s ok, I promise.”

   “No it isn’t!” Came the responding wail, anguish clear in his tone. “I hurt you! I ruined everything! You hate me!” You could hear his bones creak in protest as he curled in tighter on himself, even his flexibility was being pushed to its limits.

   “I don’t hate you, look, I’m all patched up, you didn’t ruin anything. The mess is already being cleaned up and everything.” Instead of trying to touch him again you settled down with him. “I could never hate you.” Despite your words, he continued to cry, heart wrenching, body shaking wails that made you want to gather him up in your arms and never let go. Between his sobs, he spoke, the words almost unintelligible, but you strained to understand him,

   “Monster..... useless... ruins everything.... she was right....” The last part caught your attention,

   “Can I touch you?” You asked, the ball jolted, but he didn’t respond, so you laid a gentle hand on his back, slowly rubbing back and forth. Though he didn’t relax in the slightest, Chamie shuffled closer to you, his head almost in your lap now. “Is....” You paused, almost afraid to ask this question for fear of hurting Chamie more than he already was. “Is that what Juno told you?” His trembling worsened, but he raised his head slightly to place fully into your lap.

   “She... Juno... She didn’t really like any of us, but...” His shuddered, his eyes tightly shut. “She hated me. I... I wasn’t supposed to exist, I was wrong. Demons aren’t supposed to feel and making something like me was just another sign that Boss wasn’t what she wanted him to be. When she was angry at boss she would make him bring me out and she would...” He trailed off with another shudder, his hand reaching behind himself to touch the small of his back, a sign you had seen once before but hadn’t asked what it meant. Slowly, watching him to make sure he was ok, you reached out to tug up the edge of his shirt over his back, your heart breaking at the sight. Each clone had their own scars, Beetlejuice as well, but this was bad. There was a gnarled, nasty looking scar from countless injuries as if someone had slammed something into his back countless times over the years, and it wasn’t just in one place either.

   “Oh Chamie,” you pulled him in closer and despite his shaking, Chamie let himself be pulled into a hug that he returned after a moment. The demon clung to you tightly, laying his head on your shoulder as he continued to cry. "I'm going to kill her. I'm going to find whatever sandworm ate her, drag her pieces from its belly to out her back together, figure out how to resurrect a dead demon lady and then I'm going to throttle her to death." Murderous anger was a feeling you never thought you could feel, but ever since you had heard of Juno and what she had done to your demons, you didn't doubt that you could have ripped that bitch apart with your bare hands if she were to stand before you. "Chamie, listen, Juno is nothing more than a bitter old bitch who liked nothing more than to make other people miserable because she had nothing better to do with her life. She was wrong about Beetlejuice and she's wrong about you." He raised his head slightly, but wasn't meeting your eyes so you continued on. "You're such a good boy that cares so deeply for everyone around him, and I'm so happy to have you in my life. You knew that I was going to do laundry today and tried to get it done for me, you knew today I had to clean up and brought out the vacuum, even if you messed up a bit you still tried and I'm so proud of you for that. I'll show you how to work everything next time and you'll do an amazing job because you're so smart and attentive that it just blows my mind that you're with me." Watery eyes finally met yours, a streak of green cutting through his hair.

"Really?" He asked weakly, you couldn't help it, you cupped his cheeks and kissed him softly.

"Really." Another tear escaped him, but a small, wobbly smile curled at his lips.

"I don't think you could pull body parts out of a sandworm. That'd take a really long, really strong fishing pole."

"Hell, I'll tie a rope around my waist and dive headfirst if I gotta." He laughed now, hugging you tighter.

"No! Sandworm spit is so gross! It smells and clings to you like a jelly!" He stuck his tongue out at the thought, making a disgusted sound.

“I’ve gotta do what I gotta do to defend my baby boy.” This time he kissed you, his cheeks still wet with tears but a laugh still at his lips.

“Thank you.” He murmured. “But I prefer my babes sandworm spit free.” He pulled you into his lap now, his arms wrapped around you and his head on your shoulder, much like how he would cling to his stuffed animals at night. “Babes?” He paused, swallowing hard as he seemed to be trying to gather the words he needed. “I love you.” Your heart skipped a beat, tears gathering in your eyes now too.

“I love you too, Chamie.”

[edmund-valks]

Ilandreline - Soul Food

(( The Call - A Compound Beginning - Just One Cookie ))

She had nothing left to eat, a realization prompted by the sensation of fingernails scratching in an empty pouch.  A giggle escaped her.  There was something comical about running out of food in this vast wilderness.  "I could eat the plants."  That was her voice, wasn't it?  "They won't feed me, though.  They're made of nightmares and failure.  That won't do."

After realizing again her food pouch was empty, Ilandreline looked around.  Something about this place… She shook her head.  "Too hungry to think straight."  Her fingers wrapped around nothing in the little bag where she'd kept the last of her cookies.  "Wish those plant-things could help."

She reached for her water, settling for a drink now that there were only crumbs left to eat.  Squeezing the last drops into her mouth, she wondered what it would be like to die of dehydration at the end of her journey simply because she'd become so disoriented from a lack of food that she hadn't bothered to leave the Paths.  "Hah!  That would be some serious chump shit, wouldn't it, Granny?  Granny?"  She looked around, frowning at the emptiness where Aurelaine had been.  "Where'd you go?  Oh, there you are."

The old elf said nothing, merely sighed.  That was probably fair.  Ila wasn't exactly doing the family proud at the moment.  "Look, I know it's sad -- pathetic, even! -- but you have to admit it's funny.  Me dying, I mean.  Like this.  Right at the door out.  Hilarious!"

Maybe it wasn't that funny, now she thought about it.  More disappointing than funny.  That hurt, in a strange way.  She was used to disappointing her mother, but disappointing Granny Laine was something else entirely.  Maybe she should find a way not to do that?

"Would it be better if I, you know, left?  That way you wouldn't see it, right?"  She was beginning to suspect that wasn't really her grandmother at all.  Maybe it was a ghost.  Maybe it was a hallucination.  But would either of those be able to mimic the displeasure on her face so well?  She didn't know, ghosts were a Von thing, not an Ila thing.  "Whatever, it should work, I guess.  Or something.  Better to die where the dead go than here, where I'm like ninety percent sure they're just eaten.  Better than dying at a door I forgot to open then."

Again, the nagging feeling that there was an answer she was missing.  And again if fell away quickly, drowned out by the rumble of a stomach and the ridiculous situation she'd found herself in.  "Fuck it, let's just do the blood thing, plenty of that around here."  Someone laughed aloud -- it didn't sound like her, it was a bit high-pitched, kinda manic -- while Ila looked around for a plant to chop open.  There weren't many, for some reason.  This area seemed strangely barren, like if someone had cleared it intentionally.  That was odd.  Or was it?  She couldn't remember anymore.

Oh well.  No plants didn't mean no blood.  She had plenty.  Not just in her body, either!  Chuckling to herself, Ilandreline grabbed a large bottle from her pack, removing the stopper.  The iron-tang of its contents filled the air, tickling her nostrils with warm memories of a full belly.  Delicious.  Maybe if she drank the whole thing then-

No!  You're supposed to be doing something with this!  Nodding at the voice in her head, she stumbled around, emptying it as carefully as the wobbling terrain would allow.  Who authorized such an unstable plane?  She wanted to have words with them.  Or she would later, once her thoughts cleared up a bit; this haze was frustratingly hard to shake.  

She blinked bleary-eyed at her handiwork.  A circle… and now what?  Oh, right, some symbols of… uhhhh… similarity, right?  Making here like there and there like here and something big in the middle to represent an open conjunction of adjacent planes.  The blood was a perfect reagent because it was also a pun -- the places were joined because they started to bleed into one another.  A cackle from somewhere, probably her grandmother, who had decided to be invisible again.  That was her right, of course, but it got frustrating to be laughed at by someone you couldn't see.  Seemed rude somehow.

"Whatever, let's light this candle and uh… wait, there aren't any candles.  I… what was I supposed to use to…?  Oh, right!  Obviously."  She positioned herself over the central rune, giggling like a girl at the absurdity of everything.  Knife in hand, she opened her jacket and lifted her shirt out of the way.  While activating a circle normally didn't take too much, this wasn't a usual sort of rite.  Muttering something untranslatable in her family's Shath'yar dialect, Ilandreline slid the blade into her side.

The pain brought unexpected clarity.  Hissing through clenched teeth, she had a moment of recognition, one she did her best to cling to.  The life she gave to this work had to be placed here and here, with the proper invocations.  The words spilled out with only minimal slurring, the extensive practice Aurelaine had insisted on paying off in her moment of need.

This was indeed the exit, her planned destination and point of egress to the Shadowlands.  Despite being mostly delirious, she felt the work forming around her.  Through her?  Yes, that.  Black fire froze her arteries, leaving the pins-and-needles of lost sensation in its wake.  The symbols written in blood -- hers and others -- blazed holes in the non-space she’d traverse, like projector film melting in the lamp’s heat.  There was screaming somewhere, her throat sympathetically echoing the rawness of the cry.  Colours inverted around her, scintillating motes dancing in her vision, the darkness agonizing in its brilliance until-

There was light all around her.  Even with her eyes squeezed tight, she could feel its insidious heat trying to burn its way in.  But there was a certain firmness of ground around her, perhaps to all of reality, and that was what mattered.  Sightless, her fingers grasped at her belt to where she’d left her goggles hanging, exhausting what little energy she still possessed to replace them on her head.  Only then did she dare look to see what had happened, where she was.

Despite the smoky blackness of the cut-crystal lenses, there was more brightness than she would ever be comfortable with.  It didn’t hurt, not yet, but it ached.  She found herself staring at an endless blue sky overhead, with vague awareness of white stone around her, glinting gold.  Blood -- her blood -- pooled around her, providing a coolness the horrible sunlight never could.  Did she need to stop that?  Had she cut too deep?  It didn’t matter, she didn’t have the strength to cauterize herself at this point.

Wild laughter bubbled up from somewhere.  No, not somewhere, from inside her.  After a moment of wrestling with it, she stopped, though the inclination remained waiting behind the barrier of self-control.  “What a fucking joke,” she said, voice weak even inside her own head.  “Travel a billion non-miles or whatever only to die alone in a sun-scorched hellscape of a temple plane.”

“No, you will not die here.”  The words came from somewhere she could have seen if she’d been capable of moving any longer.  “You have not journeyed in vain, stranger.  There will be questions for you, when you are well enough to answer, but not until then.  Rest easy, child, knowing that the Kyrian will not let further harm befall you.”

The who?  She got as far as saying “What in the Endless Dark is a Kyr-” before her consciousness gave out entirely.

[insomniac-dot-ink]

The Unmaker

genre: modern horror fairy tale

words: 2.8k

summary: a young woman encounters a unicorn in an alleyway

It was closer to midnight than it was sunset and my phone was ringing. The apartment was unlit and smelled of the burnt cheese on toast I made for dinner. The ceiling was a swamp of shadows and I couldn’t remember if I put on pajamas before I got into bed that night.

My cheap IKEA bedside table vibrated violently and I reached over with sightless fingers. Normally, I wouldn’t answer such calls, but it was closer to midnight than sunset and this had to be the fourth call.

 “What?” I slurred into the receiver.

“Lilly?” A voice asked in a hush. “Lil, girl, you’re a virgin, right?” I cracked my eyes open and clenched my jaw, “What? Are you calling me just to ask--” “You have to come over here.” Katie Reynolds said slowly. “Like, right outside my apartment, right now.” I glanced down and realized I was still in my rumpled jeans no doubt making topographical maps of my skin. “I literally cannot imagine what you need me for at this hour… And how that’s related to my sex life?” “It’s cool, dude,” she whispered slowly. “But you have to come see this. Remember our classic beasts class? Remember about harvest moons?” I sat up properly and started reaching for a grungy bra I flung to the side earlier or else a heavy enough sweater. “Uh, yeah?” “It’s the harvest moon. It’s by my apartment. Oh shit, gotta go,” something crumpled in the background and Katie squealed, “just get your ass over here!” I fumbled my way out of bed and toward the dresser to put myself together. My tangled hair wasn’t important but my mouth tasted like you could forage for mushrooms in it from the grittiness alone. It hadn’t been an easy few months since I had been kicked out.

I brushed my teeth in lazily circles while I walked around the small apartment and found my shoes on opposite ends of the room as a clearly divorced couple. I got them back together and was out the door and onto the street just as a hazy layer of rain started to come down.

I had sold my car when the first rent payment had been due, but Katie only lived a few blocks from me. It was a Tuesday so the streets were practically empty except for a few cars with their brights on high and the city riff-raff wondering the nooks and crannies of the night. Nameless people passed at a fast-walk and the sky was bulky with heavy clouds. The yellowed street lights appeared faded and unreal through the mist as I walked.

I turned left onto Katie’s block and narrowed my eyes as the sheen of water seemed to grow thicker there. I looked behind me and then back to the street lamps on the block, and then back, the lights seemed to be more subdued on Katie’s block, like their light didn’t quite reach the ground.

I took a deep breath and kept walking.

With every step I took the air seemed to get slightly more shadowed and more hazy from the drizzle. I put my hood up over my damp curls and there was a certain hush in the air: quiet and electric all at once.

“Katie?” I whispered as I came up to the first side street. “Kate?” I stopped as I heard a series of muffled sobs. Someone was sniffing and silently crying to themselves.

I hurried to the next side street where the choked crying grew louder. I turned and found Katie in the middle of the alley with her face in her hands. She was wearing her regular gym clothes and a high golden ponytail with a hundred bobby pins stick to the side of her head.

But she was slumped over. Her generous height reduced to nothing and she was shaking slightly. I put my hand out to pat her but hesitated, “Hey,” I said instead, “it’s Lilly. I’m here.” She peaked through her hands and her mouth was fixed in a pressed frown. She nodded over to the end of the alleyway. The excitement from her original phone call was gone, but there was an urgency to her movements.

I turned quickly and there was a soft glow coming from the end of the short alley. Two hulking trash bins the color of pine needles and green wine bottles sat on either side of the dark street. The concrete led to a couple of black trash bags with slashes down the side.

The area itself was breathlessly dim and there was something thick and textured about the darkness there. Unnatural.

The light was sucked from the air and concentrated on the figure tucked behind one of the huge trash bins. A soft silvery light echoed from the corner-- a rainbow in one color and arches of pale glow that shimmered in the air and hung before me.

I took one hesitant step forward as I remembered what our Classical Beasts professor said: during the harvest moon often classic creatures will be drawn to their historical homeland. They remember feeding there in ancient times and return ritualistically.

My heart stuttered in my chest and skin crawled like ants climbing up my arm. “Hello?” The word barely left my mouth and I slowly rounded the corner of the bin. 

A figure came into view and I gasped with a small shudder from my very core. It wasn’t big. It was delicate as a glass figurine in your grandmother’s cupboard and only came up to my waist in height.

The creature was slim and breakable-looking with fur the color of winter mornings and white so white it hurt. It was like looking at the negative of a photograph, it was white but in all the wrong ways. It’s fur glowed softly and its hooves were silver and gnarled.

I would never have called it a horse. It’s legs were too thin and face too fragile, long and regal and with a curling lovely white main that fell over it’s round eyes. They were intelligent eyes with a pink sheen and stars caught in them.

It’s horn was long and straight and wound round and round into an ugly looking point. It slowly raised its head and a tin can was hanging from its lips.

It was grazing as it would have centuries ago when this area was a clearing or a field. Trash lay around it in heaps where it was feasting on rotten meat and broken eggshells. I covered my nose as something foul wafted up in the air.

“H-hello.” I tried to remember my etiquette, but it was hard when I was stuck with a look from a massively ancient and powerful creature. I gave a small bow, “I am Lillian Oke. It-it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

The creature kept staring and it’s left ear twitched.

“I was raised, um, not to believe in things like you.” I said with a tremor to my voice, “you were… against god's creation as they said. I was raised Mormon like that.” I tried to explain, as if I had to justify myself. “But I think you’re beautiful.”

I added the last part, but somehow I wasn’t sure I believed it.

“I am a virgin,” I announced to no one. “I was saving myself, before, um, I left the church. Or, well, they left me.”

It kept staring with it’s unblinking gaze and the slight movement of its lips as it chewed on the tin can in its mouth. “So… can I have a wish?” I asked slowly, steadily.

The unicorn must have reached something hard as a loud crunch shuttered through the small space. “Please?” I offered.

Another fraught moment passed and I could still hear Katie crying behind me. Weeping her heart out. I wondered if she had tried to make a wish.

The unicorn, slowly, lowered its head down.

I didn’t know what to do at first as it offered its head to me. Something primal told me to run, to turn around and bolt like a scared rabbit out from under the wheels of a car. This creature's eyes were the starry headlights and the horn was the windshields. But I wasn’t a rabbit.

I was a human. And I was worthy.

I fumbled forward. The stench of rotting meat became sharper and almost made my eyes water as I approached. The terrible wrong glow filled my vision and made me squint. She bowed her head down lower and my hands shook as my fingers slowly reached for her horn.

“I got kicked out by my family recently,” I whispered, “for the church thing and… a lot of things. But I think I was unhappy for a while even before that. Maybe I’ve never been happy.” I confessed to her elegant soft ears, “so this is my wish.” I grabbed onto the horn and it was cool to the touch, perfectly smooth, and seemed to tingled up my arms with an electric pulse. “I want to be happy.”

The unicorn gave a slight snort and pawed the ground. I held onto the horn for a hard moment and the pearl-soft surface seemed to warm under my fingers. “I want to be happy.” I repeated more strongly, “I want to be-- Ow!” I let go as the horn began to burn.

I almost fell on my ass as I backed away from the creature. I checked to make sure my hands weren’t burned, but they seemed as they always did. I looked up again as the unicorn lowered her head and bit down on a broken beer bottle.

Her teeth were charcoal black and twisted like corkscrews.

“Come on,” Katie reached for me. “We gotta get out of here.” Tears were slipping from my eyes without me noticing and I watched as the unicorn gnawed on chunks of glass with its twisted teeth and black spit. I turned, grabbed Katie’s hand, and ran.

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

The sidewalk beat hard against my sneakers and the rain came down in sheets as we entered back into Katie’s block. The street lights were almost all flickering or completely gone out by then and Katie was shivering. “I have to go home,” she said as she looked toward me. Her eyes were red-rimmed and unfocused. “I have to check on my mom.” “Okay?” She looked down at her feet, “I know I shouldn’t have.” She reached for her phone, “but I figured if the wish was for someone else, it would be fine?” I nodded and Katie frowned at me. “I hear you.” I finally said and turned back to my own apartment. “Call me when you get there and let me know if everything’s okay.” “I’ll try.” She looked over her shoulder. “Are you happy with your wish?” I just nodded slowly. “Thanks for calling me.” I said and there was something lighter about my chest, like a weight had been lifted from it.

“Sure,” she said and put her head up. “And Lilly?” “Yeah?” She sniffed and wiped at her face, “I hope it works out alright.” 

“Yeah.” I walked in the opposite direction as I left Katie who I had known since we were roommates freshman year and somehow it felt strangely final. A slammed door behind us.

I don’t remember getting home that night, but I did manage to kick off my jeans this time and collapsed into bed.

I smiled into my pillow as I started to drift off. I could be happy after this.

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

My chest was even lighter the next day. A tune was playing in the back of my head and I sat up quickly instead of waiting to force myself awake like most mornings. I stretched and it was only when I lowered my hands that I shrieked. I yelled from deep inside my chest and threw my hands far away from my face. “No, no, no.” I ran to the restroom to look in the mirror.

I slammed into the bathroom door and held both my hands up into the light. I screamed again. Half of my pointer finger was gone and sticking out of the top of the knuckle was some sort of pale silvery shard.

“Oh no, fuck.” I cursed at my missing finger and slowly reached for the shard in its place. I put my finger along its sharp edge and sucked on my bottom lip. It was smooth like glass and seemingly weightless on my hand. “Ah fuck.” There were sayings about wishing on unicorns, but it didn’t feel like the time or the place to start googling them.

Instead, I went back to my pants and fumbled to get my phone out. It was at 7% battery and I used my left hand to flick open Katie’s number.

“Katie?” I said as she picked up on the second ring.

I heard a loud sniffle, “this isn’t a good time.” I gulped, “your mom?” She let out a heavy breath, “meet me at the school. Professor Masterson should be in his classroom today.” She made a strained sound, “I’m sorry Lilly.” I swallowed thickly, “was that not a unicorn last night?” She sniffed, “No.” She said softly, “I think it was.” She hung up the phone after that. I dug up the thickest pair of gloves I could find.

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

Professor Masterson was standing behind his desk with his glasses almost hanging off his nose and the lines on his face looking like canyons written in ink. He had that strain to his expression that he always wore every morning of every class I had attended.

Katie texted me that she was about to be late.

It was a hundred-seat classroom that was empty that day and the bright fluorescent lights overhead were almost pedestrian and slightly uncomfortable.

I looked left and right before jogging down the lecture hall stairs that led to the pit of the room. I wet my lips, “Professor.” I called weakly, “Katie Reynolds said you could meet with us today?” He glanced up and his expression somehow managed to tighten further before he looked back down at the text in front of him. “Did you learn nothing from my class?” He murmured and I looked down at my right hand.

“I’m a virgin,” I said softly. “All the books agree--” He shook his head, “your friend is going to be in a lot of trouble.” “I know.” I whispered, “but I think…” I reached for my hand, “I might be too.” His eyes went wide as the glove ripped off and there was a larger shard sprouting from my hand. The shiny white fragment was longer and sharper now and more of my finger was gone.

“Tsk,” he turned away and strolled over to the white board. “Do you know the other names for the unicorn?” I hung my head, “The protector of maidens?” He seemed to snarl, “The Unmaker according ancient Summerian.” He said slowly and purposefully wrote “The Unmaker” on the board, “The Reality Warper according to physicists.” He continued, “The breaker of matter according to poets.” He scrawled in his messy handwriting. “A protector, yes. Obsessed with purity. But purity… Ancient Chinese texts ironically sometimes refer to it as The Corrupter as well.” I looked down sheepishly at my corrupted hand. “But a wish granter.” He shook his head in disgust and looked down at my hand. “They were here long before we could write though. Long before humans learned to walk and long before this planet even existed.” He said in a hush. “And they do not understand humans in any fashion.”

I clenched my good hand, “alright, I fucked up.” I said sourly, “I wasn’t in a good place. Can you help me or not?” The professor faced the board, “What did you wish for?” I took the last final steps into the pit of the classroom. “To be happy.” I held up my hand and the entirety of my right pointer finger was gone. “What is it turning me into?” “Something that can be happy.” He whispered without looking at me.

His words echoed in my head: Unicorns do not understand humans in any fashion.

The silence that followed was all-consuming.

“What is it turning me into?” I repeated and somehow found that I couldn’t cry. I blinked and rubbed at my eyes but the tears weren’t coming. They never would again.

He turned back to me. “I don’t know.” I looked back to my hand and watched in slow horror as more of my finger receded into nothing and more of something else appeared there. “But if I were you I would make calls to who you need to make calls to before the end of the day.”

My chest was even lighter than before and I realized it wasn’t my depression disappearing. But perhaps the process of being slowly unmade was always going to be painless one.

[gracethegriffin]

Cathedral (1983) -  Raymond Carver

"Cathedral (1983) - is a short stories collection written by Raymond Carver who is one of the most influential writers of the late 20th century. It is not the most special book I have come across so far, butthe most interesting masterpiece I have a chance to read. I actually stumble on this sarcastic but hopeful stories while flicking through books in a coffee shop. As I picked the book, there was something about its name that touched me, and lived up the word Cathedral, those stories are as well-structured and wondrous as the principal church of a diocese. The book is not a page turner that you can devour it in one day and done with it. A bunch of short stories combined together will fill your mind with curiosity of how vague and strange those are, as example it took me considerable time to read a book from cover to cover. Let's take a look at Raymond Carver, the father of this book. He was a American man lived in the mid-20th century who worked a number of low-paying jobs for bread and butter. Therefore, it's easy to understand why his works contain quite amount of blue-collar and lower-middle-class characters which he was acquainted with while growing up and as Ray Anello wrote in a Newsweek article “of all the writers at work today, Carver may have [had] the most distinct vision of the working class. Before this work, he had already publish two lean but grim and mercilessly sad working class stories but he went easy on this one with sanguineness vibe you will catch on after contemplating the book over and over. Raymond's style of writing is interesting, Raymond picked a small piece of life - penurious, desperate, sensitive, ect - observed it under the microscope, found its darkness, and turned it to valuable piece of art. As I have learnt, writing short stories are actually somewhat harder than the long ones, for the author has to cut out all the meaningless details, just left the most essential point and still moves the reader. In Cathedral, Raymond had left symbols here and there, just one or two each story, and like playing the scavenger hunt game, find out these keys will help you understand the story better. Anyway, I still have to read quite amount of literature analysis websites to read between his deeply irony lines. Take the story that the book named after - Cathedral - for the instance. To cut a long story short it tells the story of the narrator when his wife's blind friend paid a visit and help the man finally see the world. The narrator is so oblivious with his disdains blindness and so blind of his limitation in sight that it prevent him from enjoying his life as well as compassionate for his relationship. He can see, he can hear, but he can't observe, he can't listen. And other characters features are filtered through the perspective of a narrator that make the stories more ironic. The narrator think that he can see is much more better than the blind man, but he utterly fail when the blind man asked him to describe the cathedral, at this point, is not he just as incapable as the man who is blind? And as he actually draw the cathedral in his mind on paper, eyes closed, under the sightless man instruction, he finally see it in his mind. Like other stories, Raymonds didn't specific about what he see, but we can deduce that as a cathedral offers a place to religious for worshiping and finding solace , the narrator’s drawing of a cathedral properly help open his mind, unlock the door to the world. This book is, yes depressed with the crude face of life but with his ironic pen, the Cathedral is brimming with life more than ever. I have a really good time reading this astonishing book and hope that you will find this review encourage you to step into Raymond Carver’s world."

Overall, this is the book review I wrote to take part in a competition of my  Communist Youth Union of the Faculty of Library and Information science (this is so mouthful). And I have no prize :(

[accidentally-a-writer]

you’re running out of time

Hello yes, remember when Stand Back was fluffy? Yeah that time is over now. As always, this is for @stegekay who has been working her ass off lately and running the Non-Stop Marathon, and juggling writing and talking to me in the meantime. Show her all the appreciation guys. 💖

... 

Laurens knocks before entering, seeing that Alex is indeed awake by now. “General Washington will join us soon, he assures, he’s been caught in his endless cycle of work and replies.”  

“As he’s too want to do,” Alex mumbles sleepily, shifting on the chaise, still looking a little uneasy. “Should we two just take supper now?” 

“I’m sure he won’t be long Alexander.” Laurens plops next to him and grins, exhausted. “It’s been a Hell of a day.”  

“Yeah I can see that,” Alex lets his head tilt back. “Maybe we should eat anyways, you don’t feel so good.” 

“Hey, stay out of my emotions, brat,” Laurens chuckles. “Let’s wait for your guardian to join us, he really did seem contrite he couldn’t come sooner.” 

“I’ve no doubt that he’s sorry to miss supper, I just wish he wouldn’t miss it at all- I know he’s working John, but tonight he promised- do not call me a child, I know how I sound.” 

“See? What use am I in our conversations when you can tell so easily what I’m about to say?” 

“Most frown on speaking to oneself.” 

“Conceded.” Alex grins at him, and Laurens grins back. “Come, perhaps we can convince Washington to retire sooner if we bring you to be a constant irritant as you are.” 

“Oh ha ha,” Alexander says sarcastically. “He told us to stay in here.” 

“I made it just fine,” Laurens stands and pulls Alexander up with him. “Besides, I’m a lieutenant colonel, I can protect you for the five minute walk it takes to get to His Excellency’s office..” 

“Oh I most assuredly do not trust you to do so,” he teases. “But should my guardian choose to reprimand us we shall indeed use your excuse to the maximum, a distinguished soldier as you are.” 

“Quite. Allons y, petit lion.” Laurens opens the door and bows dramatically, ushering Alex from his room, the wards. 

Alexander huffs at the nickname and shakes his head, crossing the threshold unassumingly. As soon as John follows he collapses. 

“John?!” Alexander’s eyes widen and he tries to catch him but it happens so quickly, he’s already on the ground. Alexander sinks next to him. He was fine, they were just talking- “John? What’s- John what’s wrong?” 

A hand settles on his shoulder, too close to his neck, and Hamilton feels the cool metal of a dagger placed at his neck. “He’s outgrown his usefulness.” 

The voice sends a violent shiver down Alexander’s spine, and absolute dread fills his core. He feels… he feels wrong. It feels wrong again. So wrong, he feels weak and he can’t breathe and he can’t access his magic- where’s Washington? 

Alexander heaves a breath to scream and- 

The dagger is between his lips before he can utter a sound. “None of that now, I’d hate to mark up a pretty thing like you, but I will. I’ll cut your tongue out if I have to, understand?”

God he can’t stand having the man so close to him it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts- 

“I won’t ask again, pet, understand?” 

“Y-yes,” Alexander says, jerking his head in the affirmative. “John- what’ve you- what’ve you done to him?” 

Where’s Washington? Alexander knows the man should be feeling his absolute terror right now, shouldn’t he be coming? 

“Oh, he’s fine. Mostly. I might’ve slipped him a bit of a poison but it’s an easy spell to undo the effects.”  

The man hauls Alexander up, finally (thankfully) removing the dagger from his lips. He casts a mere glance at Laurens and sends him through Alexander’s door, suddenly bound and gagged. 

“Can’t be too careful; the boy could wake up and ruin the surprise prematurely.” 

“Sur-surprise?” What does he want? Where’s Washington?!

“Yes, for your father-” 

“The general is not my-” 

“Shh, I didn’t tell you to speak.” Alexander’s head spins with the Dark magic and confusion both. Why hasn’t Washington come to help him? 

“He’s blocking your bond, obviously.” Davies chuckles, startling the boy in his grip. “He doesn’t want you to feel his fear; ironic, hm?” 

He feels himself being pulled and it hits him then; this man means to take him. 

“Oh, do not fight me now pet, I so am not in the mood.” Any ability to scream or thrash in the mage’s grip dies with the order, and Alexander is left to scream at the wall of a bond. Surely, surely Washington will come soon anyhow. 

Davies drags Alexander through the maze that is their home, and Alexander cannot help but to let his eyes linger on every detail; what if this is the last time he sees it? 

When he’s out of the house, and therefore out of the last of Washington’s protective wards, Davies stops them. 

“Right, now you may scream for your father.” Oh, there's no way Alexander is doing that, that is so clearly meant to be a trap- 

Agony rips through his veins, all encompassing and everywhere. It feels like it’s eating him inside out, like his blood’s been replaced by fire and he can’t stop the screams of pain from exploding from his throat. 

“You either scream when I tell you, or I make you.”  

Alexander barely hears the mage over his own throat ripping as he spasms in the dirt. The wall in the bond comes crashing down and Washington’s own terror and panic crashes over him. 

/Alex?! Alexander what’s wrong?! Where are you?!/ 

He can’t answer, the pain is so mind-numbing all he can do is scream and scream and scream and scream. 

He feels Washington though, he feels him spatially and emotionally. Frantic. 

The pain fades but its aftershocks are still excruciating. Alexander feels that grip on his arm again, hauling him up and against the man’s chest. His hand snakes around his neck and Alexander doesn’t need the dagger there to feel just as threatened. 

He’s dragged away from the door just as Washington burst through it, fear shining clear as day in his eyes. 

“Let him go,” he gasps, chest heaving. His arms jerk forward, desperate to hold his ward. “Whatever you want, you can have, just let me-” 

“I have what I want.” 

Washington chokes on his breath - not a sob, it isn’t a sob, he needs to keep it together - at the mage’s words. He has his son, he’s going to take his son, Washington is going to lose his son. 

“I- There must be something else, anything else that you want.” 

“Do not try and dissuade me from my prize, Washington. You know as well as I that there is nothing in the world worth more than this little angel full of untapped power.”

Washington releases a shuddering breath, Davies’ proximity unnerves him too but it is nothing compared to the growing nausea at his words. He’s going to take him. 

The air stirred around Washington, cracked with power he dare not release with his ward so close to his intended target. 

“Control yourself, General. I’d hate to have this one meet a painful end so young.” Alex feels himself jerked closer to Davies’ chest, his head forced up so his throat is bared to Washington and he is rendered disconcertingly sightless. 

“Release my ward and you may go,” Washington rumbles, splaying his hands non-threateningly. “We won’t follow.” 

“You won’t follow my initial transportation regardless,” Davies smirks. 

“And why is that?” 

“Because Lieutenant Colonel Laurens is upstairs dying from Ryeinstere poison.” Washington blanches, and the stab of fear Alexander feels from him makes him squirm in the mage’s grip. “Now, there’s no one allowed in little Alex’s room without his express permission hm? Only you and the Colonel. So if you do not tend to him soon, he’ll almost certainly choke on his own vomit and be no more than a corpse by the time you return.”

Washington couldn’t breathe. He either lets this man take his son or- or he’ll take another one. 

/Save John./ The voice slams into his head, reminding him just how enormous the loss will be if Alexander is taken. He’s his Bonded, his child. To lose him will be agony- /Please, please don’t let him die because of me./ 

/Alexander-/ 

“Make your choice now, Washington. You don’t want me to lose my patience; this is going to be the last time you see the whelp after all.” 

“Please,” the plea bursts from Washington’s mouth unbidden. What good will begging a man like this do? “Please don’t take him, please, anything else, I’ll- I’ll surrender.” 

Alexander makes a strained protest, silenced immediately by a sharp ‘Hush!’ from the mage. He’s enjoying this, the most powerful man in the colonies, apparently, begging him. 

“I like you begging… do it again.” 

Washington falls to his knees, without hesitation. Davies jerks Alexander’s hair to see; it sends a jolt of despair through Alexander’s core to see his guardian reduced to kneeling at the feet of this madman. 

“I beg of you, please don’t take him,” Washington was above no form of degradation if it meant Alexander might be safe at the end of it. “Please… please, I beg you.” 

Davies hums, grinning down at Washington. “Moving, truly, General.” Alexander feels the hand in his hair begin stroking. With his other Davies tosses a vial in front of Washington. The antidote, Alexander guesses. “But no.” 

Dark engulfs both the mage and Alexander, wrapping them up and pulling at his very soul and oh God it hurts. What hurts more is hearing Washington scream for him and then… nothing. 

They land in the front garden of a huge estate, warm and beautiful and so wrong. 

Washington’s side of the bond screams in agony, in loss. Alexander sobs as he struggles with his and his father’s grief. 

Rough hands snatch at his jaw, strangling his cries. “Shut up.” 

“Let me go, pl-please, please let me go.” 

“I said shut up!” Alexander is thrown to the ground by the blow to his face, his cheek splitting on Davies’ ring. Davies tears at his hair, forcing him up onto his knees with a cry, hands scratching at the vice ripping at this scalp, trying to relieve the pressure. “No more tears for Daddy,” Davies hisses, “from now on I am the only thing that matters to you.”