#on the outside this alien looks like some guy named greg but on the inside?

[newvegascowboy]

Personally when it comes to aliens i think you're going to get a lot of independent convergent evolution because there's only so many ways to do things the most efficiently but how fucked up would it be if we make contact with an alien race and they look like humans. I'd love it.

[feverinfeveroutfic]

chapter twenty nine: drink your poison

“your heart beats faster, you cannot breathe; you're feeling nervous inside. you feel the passion, it makes you seethe; you feel the temperature rise!” -”deadly nightshade”, joey belladonna

All summer long, Sam traded in between hanging out with Alex and Joey. That whole tour between both bands proved to be one of the best she had been on before: the one with Stormtroopers wasn't nearly as eventful as those three months. They not only had showers and rooms of their own courtesy of the record label, but so much more was happening between herself and the two of them.

It all hinged on her riding with either band to the next stop. If she rode with Testament, she stayed the night with Alex; if with Anthrax, she hung out with Joey. She dared not swap rooms with either one, either, given Alex was always there by her side and Joey was a night owl now with the booze mostly out of the picture.

Meanwhile, there was the artistry. As far as she knew, Scarlett was a patient lady. But she always made art whilst next to either of those two men and among either of the quintets, with either her journal or the canvases she bought back in Raleigh. Charlie kept those old ink drawings she had made for them on the previous tour at the front of their van so everyone saw them upon the drive by.

She made paintings of all five men from Testament along a string of five days in between gigs in Oklahoma City and Kansas City, in which both bands didn’t play a show. She completed the painting of Louie literally five minutes before they had to go on in Kansas City, but he had insisted on taking it out there onstage with him. Prior to the curtain lifting for them, he picked it up and, careful not to make the still wet acrylic paint that made up his hair bleed onto another part of the canvas, he carried it flat in both hands as if it was a tray of dinner. Sam and Alex watched from the back of the van at his running all the way to the back doorway, to which one of the stagehands held it open for him.

The two of them glanced at one another once he went inside: by the time she stood there off to side, she realized what he had done to the painting and propped it up right behind the drum kit with a camera pointed down at it. Every so often during that gig, the display behind them switched over to that camera and Sam’s painting was showcased for everyone in there to see. Indeed, over the next string of shows there in the Midwest, the five of them had put their paintings right behind their respective places on stage: Chuck kept his portrait as well as the drawing that Marla had made for him for Christmas on a stool right next to him.

Even when they head banged, they made sure those pieces of art never moved out of their places.

All the while, if there was one band whom she missed, it was the Cherry Suicides. As the Midwestern stint came to a close in early September and they headed out to the Pacific Northwest in time for Alex's twenty first birthday, Sam realized she hadn’t heard a word from Zelda or if the four of them were even still together. All she heard about was the new album named for her but that was where it all started and ended.

She never saw them there at any show up to that point.

But if anything, she and Belinda met a whole other myriad of people along the way, especially Overkill and Vio-lence. They all seemed to be on the fringes of music as well: whenever they had a stop somewhere, some other band was playing that night and they were filling out full arenas with their makeup and enormous hair. There Sam and Belinda walked about the streets of Des Moines, Iowa in their ponytails and their dark clothes compared to the literal look of modeling there up on stage. There was one band that the two of them had developed a fancy for, Skid Row, all because they seemed the least dolled up out of all of them: front man Sebastian stood there at the stage with his black jeans and long luxurious blond hair with a powerful voice that could be heard from clear across the vast floor. But it all felt so alien to the both of them, and they sought comfort in their friendships with the thrashers.

There came a point, when the whole circus headed back out to the West Coast and she had difficulty believing that the whole thing was in fact real given the sheer extent of everything, especially once she found out Slayer was on the tour with them that all of it was in fact happening. She and Belinda finally met them after what felt like an eternity: these four men wrapped up in rich black leather and with longer hair than Anthrax and Testament themselves put together.

The bassist Tom was a big chunky Hispanic boy with long inky black hair and a big goofy smile plastered on his face.

“Heard a lot about you girls,” he told them both as part of his greeting to them. “You girls and those other crazy girls from Rhode Island, is it?”

“Yeah, the Cherry Suicides,” Belinda had said.

“You’re the artist, right?” he asked her. “The girl who made the paintings of Testament and the drawings for Charlie?”

“I’m an artist but no—“ Belinda gestured over to her right behind her. “—those were all from my lady here, Sam.”

Sam herself leaned forward and Tom flashed her a wink as a result.

She sat there on the plane on the way out to Seattle and she wondered where else she could go from there. Perhaps around the world for real that time. She had never really been to the Emerald City before, not even when Anthrax toured up there the first time around in the two summers before, especially since they had a curfew and the hotel was right outside of the city as well. Portland, she had been to with them, but never Seattle: only the outskirts and the inner part of Tacoma.

It would be the first time Slayer toured there as well, and Testament had gotten as close as Yakima and Spokane themselves. Seattle seemed like such a strange place to her, all tucked away in that particular corner of Washington. No one went up there unless they were willing to live within the rain and fly a plane. But apparently, there was a whole scene of music going down up there, one that reflected the entire thrash movement to an extent given it was all away from the world and radically different from everything else.

Soundgarden were a mere sliver of it all: Charlie had invited the two girls with him to see another band there, one who were about to release their big debut in the coming months, yet another quintet called Mother Love Bone.

They left the plane, followed by the airport, and the bunch of them stepped out to the cool afternoon: where it was still very much summer everywhere else despite it already being autumn, a fine gray marine layer courtesy of the Puget Sound sank over the entire region and beckoned an early season rain just in time for the evenin. Sam ran her fingers through her hair as she peered up to the gray sky overhead: Alex joined right next to her with his eyes squinted and his lips parted a bit. The color washed out from his face so he resembled to a ghost of sorts, a young spirit ready to walk the streets alongside the Puget Sound. A faint drizzle began to fall over them once a piece of cloud covered the sun overhead.

Slayer had already left for their hotel, but Greg and Eric joined the two of them there at the curb: their black clothes only added to their ghostly appearance. A cool breeze blew their hair back a bit so they resembled to the very wisps of clouds right over them. Sam thought back to the Day of the Dead ceremony back home in New York City, except they had no hoods over their heads; Alex turned to her with his eyes squinted a bit and his skin looking as milky as ever right there.

“It's utterly lovely here,” he said in a low voice as he adjusted the skull ring on his right hand.

“Yeah, even here right at the city's rim, it's just beautiful,” she added.

“I hope it rains even more tomorrow,” he declared with a little raise of his eyebrows.

“Hey, yeah! You can have a little Seattle rainstorm for your birthday, Alex.” She glanced about the deserted parking lot before them. Across the way stood all manner of tiny shops and places that made her think of the casinos back down at Lake Tahoe and in Reno.

“It kind of reminds me of Carson a bit,” she said, “in a sense that there's not really many people here.”

“Not nearly as wet and soggy there, though, I'd assume,” Chuck joined in from behind her.

“Nah, it's not even remotely close to being like this,” Sam assured him as she adjusted the strap on her overnight bag and on the courier bag Alex had given her.

“So who're you staying with tonight?” Greg asked her; and she realized that she still owed him an encounter just to satisfy the bet with Alex himself.

“I'm gonna be with the five dicks from New York,” she replied right as Belinda walked up behind her, and she gaped at her.

“Five dicks from New York, I'm calling that from now on,” Belinda said and Eric laughed out at that.

“And I assume we're the five dicks from California,” he cracked.

“And Bel and I are about to see five dicks from Seattle tonight, too,” Sam added on top of that, which brought a laugh out all of them.

“There's Charlie!” Belinda pointed up the sidewalk.

“Alright—we'll see you guys later—” Sam threw her arms around each of them as well as Louie as he came up right behind them; she held Alex a few seconds longer just to feel his softness a bit more. Even though it was his twenty first the next day, she hoped that he would take it easy on the alcohol when the time came for him. She wanted that softness to stay intact with him.

She then let him go and she followed Belinda up the sidewalk in order to meet up with Charlie and Frank, both of whom took them to their hotel at the base of Capitol Hill. A quick shower for both girls and a change into their clothes and both men knocked on their door once more.

Sam ran a hair brush through her hair as the two of them conversed about the whole scene there in Seattle right behind her.

“So where'd you hear about these guys, Char?” Frank started them off.

“Aurora told me about them,” Charlie replied, “she talked to me while we were in North Carolina about this band out of Seattle that would probably take the whole glam thing to the next level because they're just huge in their sound. Like they have some genuine soul to them. None of that cheese that we've been seeing a lot lately. She told me they're a little bit punk influenced, too—think that might have something to do with it.”

“Cool—what're they called again?”

“Mother Love Bone. She also told me that they're bit of a supergroup around here, too: formed from three other bands—I wrote them down because I wanted to check them out while we're here in Seattle, too.”

Sam turned around right as he took a piece of paper out from his back pocket.

“Green River, Skin Yard, and Malfunkshun—Malfunkshun spelled phonetically.”

“Sounds like they know how to party up here,” Belinda noted.

“That's what Aurora told me,” Charlie said as he tucked the paper back into his pocket. Sam brushed her hair a bit more and then she spritzed a bit of perfume onto her neck.

“I love that smell on you, Sam I am,” Frank told her.

“I got this when we were in Des Moines,” she said, “courtesy of Bel here.”

“It fits your body chemistry like a glove, Sam,” Belinda pointed out. “Like you just climbed right out of the shower.”

“So you girls ready?” Charlie asked them.

“Yessir,” Sam replied as she picked up her purse from the top of the table there and slung it over her shoulder.

They headed out of there right as the fine Puget Sound drizzle fell over their heads. Charlie led them over to the far end of the sidewalk when something across the street caught Sam's eye. She looked over at a guy in the cushions of the bay window of a coffee shop with his sleeve rolled up his arm, past his elbow. Belinda followed her gaze as well.

Frank sniffled and sneezed right then, but the sheer sight of that man there in the window only added to the thought that ran through her mind at the moment.

The shine of the needle. The sticky darkness that resided inside of there. He gritted his teeth at the vile feeling through him.

“Holy shit,” Belinda muttered right into her ear.

It was right then Sam knew that they were in deep from that point onward.

They crossed the street, away from that coffee shop and up the pavement to where the band in question was playing that night.

Frank continued to sniffle and sneeze a bit as they made their way inside of there. The four of them congregated on the edge of the room because everything else before them had a dark veil over it and no way out of there in one piece. Something smelled of burning iron and a chemical but nowhere in there was a fire place.

“There's a lot of drugs around here right now,” Charlie noted as they backed up towards the doorway.

“Yeah, it's making me sneeze like crazy,” Frank said as he rubbed his nose.

“What's that smell?” Belinda asked them as they nestled together in that only safe spot of the room, right near the door and within the stream of fresh air: the one place without a trace of drugs to be found.

“Someone smoking cocaine, I think,” Frank said, “I would know because I tried crack recently. It smells just like someone burning up metal—meth and heroin both smell like that, too.”

Lucky for them, Mother Love Bone took to the stage up front there. Even from clear across the room, Sam could make sight of the five of them: the two guitarists near the edge of the stage. One with long smooth hair down past his shoulders and soft features, and the other with his face hidden out from view. The former made her think of Alex in a subtle fashion, from the depth of his eyes to the shape of his nose: he missed that gray stripe and he lacked Alex's sensual edge as well. The bassist strode up behind them with a big bright purple crushed velvet cap with a lacy ribbon wrapped around the crown there and a plain white sleeveless shirt. She couldn't see the drummer and she didn't have to, either, not with that big bold frontman there at the front, with his long blond hair down to his waist and streams of glitter all around his eyes.

“Hello, Seattle!” he declared into the microphone. “This first song is for all you people! All you people there at the back there!”

Sam and Belinda glanced at one another in surprise.

“We are Mother Love Bone! I am L'Andrew the Love Child and this is quite the cornucopia of delights up here—love rock awaits you, people!”

It hit both girls like a tidal wave, more so than the very stench of the burning cocaine and heroin before them: the vents on the ceiling took the whole cloud on the floor there so they could breathe better. Where every other person before them burned those drugs away into their lungs, the four of them stood there in the doorway and relished in the fresh air that came in from behind them and the music before them.

His voice seared into their minds, much like how Joey's voice stayed with them. Almost immediately, she thought of Joey himself. The whole band reminded her of Joey and Alex, from the powerful, extravagant voice to the rich and strong guitar work. Their songs wormed their way into her mind as well: she knew she would be hearing “This is Shangri La” in her head for days on end from that point onward. The stench of marijuana caught their noses, which in turn made Frank cough more, but it came as a relief to both Sam and Belinda, especially with the rain outside picking up into something one step beyond a drizzle.

“They're fun as hell,” the latter remarked.

“I know, right?” Sam said right into her ear.

He threw his blond hair forth as if it was a genuine mane and then he lifted his head to show off the glitter underneath his right eye.

“Zelda would like them,” Sam told her, to which Belinda nodded her head with her eyes wide.

“Kinda like how she would like Skid Row, too,” she added, and Sam nodded.

Even though it was a tough crowd before them, both girls found themselves dancing a bit at one point. There was that one song at the end “Heartshine”, where Sam pictured herself nestled in between both Joey and Alex. Her love and her friend with benefits. Both of them had her heart.

There was no way she could pick and choose between the two of them because it wouldn't be fair to either of them.

She thought of herself dancing for both men: her hips about in a circle for them both and her breasts high and perfect for them as well. Their hands on her skin to top it all off, too.

The four of them were practically outside in the rain at that point because it was all too much for them to bear in there. But lucky for them, that was the final song and Andy bode the delirious crowd before them a big hearted and jovial good night: at that point, he had put on round white glasses with purple lenses and a big tall dark blue hat upon his head as if he was Mickey Mouse.

“That crowd was just awful,” Charlie said, “but I really liked them, though.”

“I did, too!” Sam added as they began on back down the street towards their hotel. The rain had waned back into a fine drizzle at that point and albeit with the incoming darkness.

“I'm gonna need another shower after that,” Belinda confessed.

“Yeah, that was insane how much drugs were in there,” Charlie agreed with her, and he turned to Frank. “How're you doing right now?”

“A sniveling sneezing mess,” he replied as he rubbed the tip of his nose.

“We'll all clean off and then have dinner,” Charlie declared as they crossed the street yet again. They passed the coffee shop on the other side of the street once more: the man who shot one up his arm was still there in the bay window, except his eyes were closed and even through the dim evening light, Sam could see his pale complexion.

It took them a full hour to shower off, one after the other, and at that point, it was almost nine o'clock in the evening.

“Happy birthday, Alex,” Sam declared as she dried off her hair and let it hang over her shoulders.

“Happy birthday, little man!” Frank proclaimed. “He's finally old enough to drink now.”

For the rest of the evening, she thought about what to do for him that next day, especially since they had to play a show there in Seattle right after Anthrax and Slayer's sets in that respective fashion. Belinda didn't have her leather working tools onhand, either, but that strap that the two of them had crafted for him held up well in the last two years however. Neither Scott nor Dan had any ideas as to what to do for him other than give him a cake after the fact, either: and Joey was out of the question at that point himself.

At one point she caught Anthrax's set and Joey held that white Flying V guitar upon his body once again as if it was a complete extension of him. That time around, he wore a black billed hat with the word “Injun” scrawled on the inside there. She hadn't even seen him all day at that point, either: to see him there made her wonder if he had an ace up his sleeve at the time. At the end of their cover of “Antisocial”, he glanced over at her and showed her and Belinda both that definitive lopsided grin.

They rounded out their short set with an extra large and loud rendition of “Gung Ho!” that ended with a little dual solo from Joey and Dan both, and someone in the audience throwing something at Scott. He ducked down as the jug landed on the stage right next to Charlie's drum kit.

As they left the stage, Joey leaned forward into the microphone.

“Don't be throwin' cider at our man Scott, now,” he taunted the person there and a few people in the crowd clapped at that.

He then padded off of the stage last and greeted Sam with a big open lipped kiss.

“Whoa,” Belinda breathed, and Joey laughed at that but he dared not let it get to him.

“Come with me,” he beckoned both girls, and he led them into the backstage area.

“Eric!” Belinda called out right then; thus she ducked away from them but Joey led Sam onto his dressing room. She left the door slightly ajar but he was quick to bring her to the corner behind the door. Slayer were taking to the stage as he slid his tongue into her mouth and his hands up the curvature of her back.

“I've treated you so poorly,” he said to her in a low enough voice for her to hear over Slayer's intensity.

“No you haven't,” she vowed to him. “You just have a little problem with alcohol is all. I don't want you anywhere near it ever again.”

She took the hat right off of his head and placed upon her own.

“Adorable,” he complimented her as Tom let out a high pitched shriek that made her stop right in her tracks. It made her think of hell on Earth itself.

“Tommy screams like a demon sometimes,” Joey told her, nonchalant.

“If you're the Devil, I'm proud to be a part of it,” she said.

“Nah, Sam, you know us. We're not really into the whole Devil thing—they just seem that way is all.”

“But still. If you're the Devil, I'm proud that to be a part of the whole thing.”

Joey's bottom lip trembled at that.

“Make love to me,” he begged her in a low voice. “Make love to me—please.”

“I'll do something even better for you,” she told him as she put her lips onto his, and then she moved down his neck to his collar bones. Joey held still as she moved down his hot body, all the way down his chest and towards his waist. He shuffled around and pressed his back to the wall: she lifted the bill of the hat from her forehead so she could have a better view of what was there.

She tugged down his shorts and gave him a gentle soft kiss right underneath his waist. She thought of giving him a vampire bite like she did with Alex, but he appeared to enjoy the feel of her lips there more than anything.

“Yeah, that's the spot right there,” he breathed at the soft delicate feeling under his belly button, “—ooh yeah—yeah, right there.”

She tugged his shorts down a bit more. Her tongue on his skin and within her mouth would do him justice.

She could tell he wanted it.

She started out small from the head and then she moved inward to his body, as far as she could stand it. But of course the tip reached the back of her mouth and she coughed and gagged at the feeling. She let go of his firm skin and coughed better.

“You alright?” he asked her.

“Yeah—it’s just the first time I gave a big ass blowjob standing up like this.”

Joey chuckled and he tucked his hands behind his curly head. She looked up at him with her eyebrows raised.

“You look like you’re about ready to sing some lounge stuff,” she told him.

“Lounge—I lounge around and kiss asses all day is what I do best,” he said. She tried it again and that time she got it for real. Joey groaned in his throat as she fondled the smooth curvature of his hips and his thighs with the tips of her fingers. He tipped his head back and gave her yet another soft pleased little groan.

“Yeah, nice li'l deep throat there,” he muttered, “yeah—yeah!” His chest heaved at the feeling and he treated her to soft little whimpers as a result. She was blowing him on Alex's birthday. Something about it gave her a feeling that she could do literally anything from that point onward.

She ran her tongue along the taut skin when she noticed Joey was about to come right there. She held onto him and he gasped at the feeling.

“Fucking hell—you're—you're—you're gonna kill me!” he stammered.

“Not if you can help it, big boy,” she teased him. Joey came right in her hands right there and he fell down onto the seat of his pants, out of breath and dizzy. He fell onto his side and Sam shook her hands about to get it off of her skin.

“Joey?” she called to him. He was out like a light right there.

She bowed out of that room in search of a bathroom just to wash her hands. Right there at the other end of the backstage area, she spotted that door and she ducked in there without a moment's hesitation. She washed her hands with that soft smelling soap and then she ducked out of there once again, only for her to run into Alex and a little brown bottle of Seattle's own in hand.

“Hey!” he greeted her with a mischievous grin.

“Hey!” she retorted back to him.

“Where you going?”

“Back to Joey's dressing room. But it is your birthday after all.”

“Indeed it is!” He took a sip of beer and the crowd erupted into applause for Slayer.

“How was your day?” she asked him once the noise out there died down a bit for them to hear each other.

“Oh, it's been fun! Chuck and Tiffany took me out to lunch at the top of the Space Needle and then we went to this one place right outside of town... did you know there is an actual sound garden up here?”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it's this big metallic sculpture that's fenced off but they took me to it. I don't think it might be open tomorrow because it's Saturday. But—it's definitely another thing we gotta do together when the time comes, Samantha.” He took another sip from the bottle. “Come on, I'll take you back to Joey's room.”

He took another sip before he walked in there with her, and he spotted Joey on the floor right behind the door.

“Is he alright?” Alex asked her.

“Oh, yeah. He just—had one too many is all.”

“Oh, shit.” He tipped the bottle back into his lips.

“By the way, how's it feel to legally drink now?”

“Excellent,” he confessed. “I dunno if I'm gonna do it a lot tonight, though, especially since we're going on after Slayer.”

“How many so far?”

“Just a couple,” he told her with a wave of his hand. He kicked back the brown glass bottle and took a big swig of its contents. He set it down before his body and showed her a little smile. Even though he stood still, she could tell that he had had a few at that point.

“Alex,” Sam said in a low voice: she could see it in his eyes as they drooped a bit.

“Samantha—Samantha? Samantha.” He bowed his head a bit and continued to show her a smile.

“Just exactly how much is 'a couple', Alex?”

“It's enough, I can tell ya that.”

“Alex.”

“Samantha.” He let out the biggest belch right there, one that made her retract back a bit.

“Your ancestors back in the home country felt that one, Alex,” Greg called from right outside the door.

“Oh, no, pardon me—that came right outta—outta my ass.”

She giggled at him and he giggled back at her. She moved in closer to him. Joey was unconscious right there but it didn't stop her from moving in closer to Alex.

“You gonna—you gonna—you gonna—what're you gonna do?”

“Kiss you—”

Her lips grazed up against his; he held the bottle out from his body so she could have more space for him.

“That's good, yeah,” he said in between embraces.

“We might have a cake ready for you, baby,” she whispered to him.

“This is better than any cake, my dear artist,” he retorted back to her as she put her hands on either side of his face. “Hell, yeah—hell yeah! Hell to the yes! Fuck—fucking hell—”

He pulled back and shook his head about a bit. Slayer picked it up once again out there; Sam eyed the pale washed out look of Alex's skin and she thought of that man in the coffee shop on the way to the Mother Love Bone show.

“You're not going to puke again, are you?” she asked him, concerned.

“Nah,” he assured her. “Well, I might but I won't do it on you, though. I promise. I promise, I promise, I promise.”

She giggled at him and the droopy look of his eyes.

“Alex—you're so cute when you're a little bit tipsy,” she told him.

“I'm—I'm—I'm as loose as a pussy when I've got a few in me, lemme tell ya...”

She giggled at him.

“Let's see—you're going on in a bit. There has to be a way to rid of the booze without you barfing it up.”

“I'm probably gonna have to barf anyways,” he told her. “There is some bread over there.”

“Bread and crackers under the vanity mirror,” she said as she made her way over to the mirror in question.

“Bread and circuses,” he said with a hiccup. She handed him a handful of oyster crackers as he took a seat on the small dusty couch on the other side of the room, away from the door and away from Joey's unconscious body.

“I wanna have fun with you,” he confessed with a hiccup.

“We are having fun, though,” she pointed out. “It's your twenty first birthday, Alex. It's all about having fun! You only turn twenty one once in your life after all.”

“That's right, right? You only turn—” He swallowed. “—a certain age one time, don't ya.”

He let out a whistle and looked on at her, dazed.

“You alright?” she asked him.

“Yes! I feel like I'm about ready to fall right to sleep, though.”

He took another sip from the bottle and then another bite of oyster cracker. He practically swallowed it whole.

“Well, chew it, Alex,” Sam was scorn.

“Just melts in your mouth,” he pointed out with his mouth full, and he took another couple for himself.

“Keep eating it, though. It should absorb it up inside you. You're gonna be on soon.”

“By the way, we're gonna make another album for you, my darling artist,” he said in a broken voice once he swallowed it down.

“We will, too,” Joey blurted out right then, and Sam and Alex looked over at him. He was still unconscious but by some sheer magic, he had said that out loud without a shred of irony. The two of them looked at one another: Alex rubbed the exhaustion out of his eyes.

“What's Testament's new one going to be called?” Sam asked him.

“'Souls of Black',” he said in a hushed voice. “At least, that's what Eric told me. He wants us to play on Clash of the Titans. Like if we get it done in time, we can get it there.”

“And when's that supposed to be?”

“Uh—next summer, I think? I think? I dunno. I can't really think about things too much.”

“Well, you boys better get on it soon,” Sam encouraged him.

“Yeah, that's the plan anyways,” he told her. “Once we're done here, we mosey on into the studio and run like hell. I think it's gonna be formidable, Samantha. We're as tight as we've ever been.”

“Tight like a tight pussy?” she joked to him.

“Tight like a tight pussy, yes!”

He popped more crackers into his mouth.

“You ought to record something after you've had a couple,” she suggested, “you know just to see what you can make out of it. It'd be true psychedelic metal right there.”

“I don't really know if I can, though,” he confessed with a soft chuckle. “I don't know if that's not really something you can do when you're off your rocker and three sheets to the wind.”

“What about three sheets to my wind?” she asked him as she crawled closer to him and hovered right above his body.

“Oh, my, Samantha—”

“Was that 'oh, my' said in amazement or were you calling me yours?”

“You're good,” he remarked with those eyebrows raised up again. She put her lips onto his, and she tasted the salt from the crackers as well as the hops from the beer.

“I'm gonna need a drink after this,” he confessed to her.

“You are drinking, though,” she insisted.

“No, drink of water,” he corrected.

“I see. Well, drink your poison, baby.”

“Drink your poison and get nasty wit' it,” he cracked and she giggled some more.

“Alex!” Eric's voice floated from outside of the room.

“Oh, shit, I gotta move!” he said as he stood to his feet and rubbed his eyes. “Thank you for the bread, too—that actually helped me out a bit.”

Sam stood up herself but then Alex stopped her right in her tracks.

“Samantha?”

“Yes?” She turned her attention back to him as he lounged there in the doorway with a lax look to his deep eyes.

“Tonight—go to bed and dream of a beautiful gray stripe,” he said as he ran his index finger over that little tuft on the crown of his head.

“I always do, baby,” she assured him with a wink. “Go give 'em hell.”

He ducked out of there and back to his band: he still had his balance right then. She hoped that the bread really helped out and he would keep it together that evening as she made her way to the spot behind the door. She adjusted the bill of the hat and stooped down for him.

“C'mere, Joey—c'mere, baby—” She scooped him off of the floor and lifted up his head for a better look into his face. She set a hand on his forehead and pushed the hair out from his eyes. He opened them a bit and showed her a little dimpled grin.

“There he is,” she said with a smile herself; with her free hand, she took off her hat and set it upon the dark curly crown of his head. “There's my little Injun boy.”

[pastelwitchling]

hey if you're still taking prompts, how about alex being nervous about introducting forrest to his brothers, and greg at first being surprised because he thought he and michael were a thing but after alex tells him more of their history and how much michael and maria hurt him, he’s fully supportive of alex dating forrest and is glad that alex has someone who makes him happy? love your writing btw.

***

               “Don’t be nervous.”

               “I’m not nervous.”

               “You’ve fixed that collar three times already,” Alex said, trying very hard not to laugh as Forrest blushed in the passenger’s seat. “You’re nervous.”

               Forrest dropped his hands, fidgeting nervously with his rings instead. “Maybe we should go back. I need to change. I just realized I’m wearing way too much black. How could you not tell me I’m wearing this much black?”

               “I think you look sexy in black,” Alex said.

               “I’m meeting your family, Alex,” Forrest said. “Sexy is not the way to go when you meet your boyfriend’s family.”

               “You’ll have to forgive my lack of boyfriend etiquette then – I’ve never given a crap to what I look like around Wyatt Long.”

               “And that’s why I love you,” Forrest said. “But your family’s different.”

               “How come?”

               “Because I’ve met your friends, and they always give me a look like they can’t believe I’m still around,” he said dryly, and Alex’s smile dimmed. “I really don’t want to get that look from the other Manes men.”

               “And you won’t, okay?” Alex promised him. “I’ve already told my brothers all about you. I’m pretty sure the only thing that’ll startle them is if I show up with someone else. Now,” he covered Forrest’s hand with his own. “Are you ready?”

               Forrest was looking out the window, scanning Gregory’s home and the closed door, but his hand turned under Alex’s and gripped his fingers. “Uh…”

               “You know I’ll date you either way, right?” Alex teased. “If you don’t want to do this –”

               “What, so Alien Guy can say he’s met your brothers and I haven’t?” Forrest scoffed. “No. Nice try, Manes. I’m meetin’ ‘em.”

               This time Alex did laugh. “Well, you’ll see. They’ll love you as much as I do.”

               “And how much do you love me?” Forrest asked, brow raised.

               “Enough not to kiss you in front of my brother’s house,” Alex said as he leaned in to hover his lips above Forrest’s. And despite what he said, he did peck Forrest’s lips before moving back.

               “Okay,” Alex said. “Come on, let’s get through this together.”

               Alex saw Forrest visibly swallow and follow him out of the car. It was heartwarming, to see the guy who never feared anyone, who never seemed concerned about anything, actually look nervous to meet his boyfriend’s brothers. Alex tried not to read too much into it, but his heart couldn’t help but do a flip as he thought about being so precious to someone.

               Alex knocked on the front door, and instead of Gregory, Flint was the one who answered. He pressed his lips together in an awkward sort of smile at the sight of Alex, but when his eyes turned to Forrest, his lips pursed.

               “This him?” he asked, gesturing at Forrest with his chin.

               Alex’s shoulders fell. “I told you his name, Flint.”

               “I thought you were joking,” Flint confessed and turned his back on them as he went back inside. Alex and Forrest followed, and Alex closed the door behind them.

               “Greg!” Flint called. “Alex and his boyfriend are here!”

               “Was – uh – was that a good start?” Forrest said quietly when they were out of earshot.

               “From Flint?” Alex scoffed. “That was basically the red carpet.”

               “Alex? You here?” Clay emerged, his dark hair tousled as if he’d spent hours running his hand through it. A habit both he and Alex had picked up from their mom. “Hey, bro,” he said, engulfing Alex in a one-armed hug with a beer bottle in his other hand.

               “Clay,” Alex said and stood beside his boyfriend. “This is Forrest Long.”

               “Clay Manes,” Clay shook Forrest’s hand, brows furrowed as he took in the historian’s entire appearance. “You’re not what I expected a Long to look like.”

               “Yeah, well,” Forrest chuckled, and Alex was glad to hear a genuine relief in his voice when he spoke, “none of you are really what I expected Manes men to look like.”

               “Manes men,” Clay sighed. “There’s a phrase.” He patted Alex’s arm and gestured to the large open window at the back of the room. “Greg’s out back with the grill. Come on.”

               As they followed Clay, Alex nudged Forrest’s arm, raising a brow at him, silently asking how he was holding up. Forrest nodded as if he wasn’t at all worried, though Alex couldn’t miss the way he pressed their shoulders together as they stepped out into the backyard.

               “Oh hey,” Gregory said, smiling over his shoulder at Alex and Forrest, then doing a doubletake. “Oh… hey.”

               “You heard that, right?” Forrest muttered low enough for only Alex to hear as Gregory assigned the grill to Flint, and wiped his hands with a rag as he came up to them. “You heard that?”

               “Hey,” Gregory said and wrapped his arms around Alex for a tight hug before Alex could reassure his boyfriend of anything. When Gregory looked to Forrest, Alex was relieved to see his expression nothing short of kind and welcoming. “Hi, I’m Gregory, nice to meet you.”

               “Nice to meet you, too,” Forrest said, glancing at Alex. “Uh – if you need help with the grill, I’m pretty handy.”

               “Yeah?” Gregory clapped his shoulder. “Cool. Then can you – uh – take over from Flint? I love the guy, but he burns whatever he touches.”

               “I heard that!” Flint called.

               “Kind of the point!” Gregory called back and began to lead Alex back into the house. “We’ll be right back with some drinks.”

               The others waved them off, but Alex caught Forrest’s eyes before he was pulled inside. There was concern there, a jealous kind of concern that Forrest usually wore whenever the topic of conversation was about to turn into someone else. Alex wished he could promise him that he was going to come right back to him, but the door had already shut and Gregory was already talking.

               “He seems nice,” he said as he opened the fridge.

               Alex placed a hand on his hip and tilted his head. “Go ahead,” he said. “Whatever you want to say, better get it out now.”

               Gregory shrugged. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

               Alex considered this. “Good.”

               “Except –”

               “There it is,” Alex chuckled, and Gregory huffed a smile.

               “It’s just that… I thought you and that cowboy guy – what’s his name? – Michael were a thing,” Gregory said. Alex couldn’t detect any judgement or critique in his voice; only concern for his brother’s happiness. “Is that over already?”

               Alex sighed and crossed his arms. “It was never really a thing to begin with. Not after he started dating Maria.”

               “Maria,” Gregory’s brows furrowed. “Like… Maria DeLuca? Your best friend Maria – that Maria? Wait, I…” he shook his head. “Your friends didn’t know you liked him?”

               “They knew,” Alex nodded slowly, considering how to best approach this conversation. He remembered a time when it used to kill him to talk about Michael and the way he’d chosen someone else because it was easier; the way he and everyone else had turned their backs on him because… well, he still didn’t really understand why. He guessed it was better not knowing than to just assume that he didn’t matter to these people that were meant to love him.

               But now, things were different. Now, Alex could tell Gregory how Michael had told him to come back only to go to Maria instead, and how Maria had promised him it had meant nothing (a blatant lie), then of Michael’s rejection of him because he was associated with too many painful memories – and the most it did was leave a sting in his chest.

               “What about the song?” Gregory asked at the end of it all. “The one you sang at Open Mic Night, I mean… that was about Guerin, wasn’t it? What’d he say to that?”

               “Nothing,” Alex shrugged, and oddly enough, he felt like he wanted to laugh. “He never stuck around to hear the rest of it.”

               Gregory shook his head. “Alex –”

               “It’s okay.”

               “He’s an asshole,” Gregory said. “I can’t believe I…” He pointed his beer bottle at the open window where Forrest was showing Clay and Flint how he grills the steaks, and asked, “What about him?”

               Alex laughed. “What about him?”

               “Is he good to you?” Gregory asked, and Alex smiled despite his red cheeks. “Because if he’s saying some of the crap Guerin’s said to you, then –”

               “Greg, look at me,” Alex said gently. “What do you think?”

               Gregory inhaled slowly as he took Alex in, and – slowly – the tension in his shoulders and the hard lines of his frown softened. “I think… I’m just relieved to know you’re done with macho cowboys.”

Alex scoffed. “As long as he doesn’t date any of my friends, he’s perfect.”

“Bar’s pretty low then.”

               “He’s also a poet.”

Gregory whistled appreciatively. “Nice touch.” He tilted his head at Forrest outside his window. “Well, hey, I like him.”

               Alex turned to look at Forrest as Gregory handed him two bottles, and as he watched his boyfriend laugh with his brothers, his heart expanded in his chest.

               “Yeah,” he said, his voice softer than he could help it being. “Me, too.”

***

A bit out of character, I know, but still fun.

[mimik-u]

Flower Child (Chapter 13): Blue (III)

Goodness, I'm nearly a year and a half late, but here we are—Chapter 13 of "Flower Child." First of all, I want to give my sincerest apologies for the delay... I mentioned this at the start of my fic "Facets," but the simplest and truest story is that my muse for writing Steven Universe and, well, writing in general petered out for a long time and has only recently returned. But, because it has recently returned, I wanted to begin to make good on a promise I made to you guys so many months ago—that one day, I would finish this story. So let's do this. <3 I'm ready now. 

(1) I read through the previous twelve chapters, lmao, and half-loved and half-hated my writing, but the point of that exercise, beyond getting acquainted with the plot of "FC" again, was to also do some quick grammar and flow revisions, so a few of the previous chapters should read just a little better than maybe they had before.

(2) Fun fact! Chapter 13 is pretty interesting because some portions of it were actually written over a year ago; it was an incredible challenge for me to work with what I had as a 2019 writer versus what I've learned as a 2020 writer.

(4) Someone asked on Tumblr a long time ago if there was a playlist I worked with in writing this story...

(5) And finally, and most importantly, this chapter is incredibly heavy, dealing with themes of suicidal ideation and extreme depression.

Please be cautious while reading if these are topics that are triggering to you!

i.

The shiny, black town car eased to a stop at the pull-through entrance of the hospital, drawing the gazes of passerby on the sidewalk. An older lady in a wheelchair, a group of what appeared to be college kids in scrubs, a scraggly-looking patient who’d obviously escaped the confines of his room to light a cigarette—they all stopped and stared as the back door of the overtly fancy car was pried open from the inside out, as a metal cane preceded a woman who quite looked like she needed it.

Blue Diamond unfolded into the light of day, trembling.

Because it was hard.

It was so hard.

To be here.

(To be.)

She wanted to collapse where she stood, dissemble and dissolve away one piece of herself at a time; she leaned heavily on the head of her cane and lit upon the sole pair of eyes that weren’t looking at her—or, really, her Lincoln. The man named Greg Universe stood next to the automatic doors with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, staring at the ground, all but boring a hole into it. When the sliding doors opened and closed at his backside, they appeared to be ripping into him, piece by miserable piece.

“I’ll call when I’m ready,” Blue murmured to her valet before shutting the door and slowly hobbling over to Greg.

Clank.

The onlookers glanced away as the town car drove off, resumed their lives and cared not for yet another broken person in their midst. The hospital was full of them as it was. Perhaps they were even broken themselves—very probably they were.

Blue Diamond did not care to know.

Clank.

I’m betraying her, she thought, she was always thinking. I’m leaving her behind. I’m betraying her. I’m—

Clank.

The clanking did the trick, catching Greg’s attention and only half-holding it. He lifted his head slowly and mustered a smile that must have been agony. It wobbled on his lips and very nearly disappeared in his bushy beard. It pulled at him—all over. He looked like a Picasso gone wrong, an abstraction of a man stretched too far.

“Hey, just in time.” He gave a shaky little laugh that rather sounded like a sob and then somehow kept talking, his entire physiognomy alive with his nerves. “Steven’s so excited to see you again. He hasn’t stopped talking about ya since this morning, which is kinda nuts because he was so tired yesterday, but this is a good thing, and so we should really go up and see him now because—”

She cut across him; it was a quiet act, a merciful one. “Greg.”

It was just his name, a singular syllable, a sound, but even that was enough.

Mr. Universe’s face fell into geometric disarray.

“No use hiding it, huh?” He half-wept, half-laughed again, scrubbing a hand over his face and bringing up his shirt to soak up what was left.

“No,” Blue Diamond whispered, her hands tightening on the head of her cane. “It’s scrawled all over you, I’m afraid.”

“Figures,” he said hoarsely. “I’m a mess.”

“No more than I am.” She pried one of her hands away from the other and gestured loosely at her entire body with a wry smile. “If you’re a mess, then I am a dereliction.”

It wasn’t a contest; it was the truth.

Four years of grieving had wasted her.

Blue Diamond was skeletal.

Broken.

Greg took this in and considered; his smile that really wasn’t a smile resolved itself into a quiet, aching sort of frown. It tugged his face downwards; it tugged at the hollows of her chest. She’d seen him only a little over a week ago, and yet today, he looked as though he’d aged a hundred years in the span of eight days. There were bags under his eyes and sunken dunes in his cheeks.

There was a little boy in a hospital bed.

There was a disease.

It was killing them both.

“How do I do this?” He asked the ground. “How did you—” But he stopped short; his breath hitched.

It was a highly personal question after all.

It was no short wonder that Blue’s cane didn’t snap beneath her grip.

“How did I do it?” She returned softly all the same. The slight breeze stirred the strands of hair poking out of her silvery braid.

Greg nodded mutely, the desperation in his face tangible. She could reach out if she wanted and touch his hurt, the very heart of it, and all of its dimensions. (She didn’t want to.)

“To be entirely truthful,” she murmured, “I’m not sure that I ever did.”

ii.

It was nearly one o’clock in the afternoon, and it was also 2:38AM, the very moment when a police officer had the audacity to come to their door and tell two mothers that their daughter was dead, gone, and never coming back. His expression was a gathering bruise, and his words were like bullets, striking right between the ribs.

Blue Diamond couldn’t breathe.

In the darkness, she sat on the edge of Pink’s bed and dragged every mouthful of air inwards like it was painful; her chest heaved with the awfulness of it, the punctured horror of leaking lungs.

Her child was dead.

Oh, God.

Her child was gone.

Why, oh, why, oh, God, my God?

And she was never coming back.

Goddammit.

In the coagulated darkness, Blue clutched her daughter’s favorite sweatshirt close to her chest; it was black and ratty, full of holes and little tears. A small alien logo perched on the chest, grinning up at her from depthless eyes.

They used to fight over this particular number.

Constantly.

“You’re a multibillion dollar heiress.” Blue would pinch the bridge of her nose and try not to raise her voice above an acerbic whisper. “Would it inconvenience you to buy some nicer clothes?”

Pink was unsparing in her retorts, wicked and witty, face upturned in a haughtiness to match her mother’s own. 

“Would it inconvenience you to get off my ass, Mother? It’s just a sweatshirt.”

“Pink!”

And on and on. 

The fabric was cold between Blue’s long fingers, still scented with Pink’s favorite perfume.

They were going to bury her today, mere hours from now.

Last week, they’d been fighting over this shirt.

On and on and never again.

The funeral… mere hours from now… less than three… but how could that also be true when it was only 1:52AM and Pink Diamond was coughing her last, strangled breath on a dirty pavement outside a bar on 9th Avenue?

Blue Diamond hadn’t been there, but she forced the words on the detective’s report to come to life in the theatre of her mind’s eye anyway. By the time the paramedics had arrived, Pink was all but gone; she gasped, and she coughed, and her brown eyes marbled in one final supernova of emotion. They tried to resuscitate her, but the damage was too extensive.

She’d fought back, the officer had said. (He thought it was a consolation to them.)

The proof was caked in her nails and scratched all over her arms, but it’d been three against one.

She was a lion, and they were men; she was a twenty-one year old girl, and they were men.

In the darkness, unraveling, Blue Diamond’s face dripped onto the sweatshirt, onto the alien smiling up at her with a black sliver of a mocking grin. She did not register—she did not care to register—the slow creaking of the door opening inwards.

Amber light strained from the hallway to find and reach and touch her but didn’t quite make it. 

Yellow Diamond was a shadowy figure in the doorway.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” she scolded, and yet, she moved into the room anyway—the hypocrite—her sharp heels muffled in the carpet. Stiff and forbidding, she came to stand in front of Blue, arms crossed over her chest, a frown crossed over her face. “It’s not healthy for you, Bl—“

But Blue cut across her. It was not a kind act; it was a precise incision—cold and surgical—three inches long and just as deep. “Our daughter is dead, Yellow.”

The shadowy figure recoiled but did not bite.

Even now, Yellow couldn’t bear to be seen as vulnerable, couldn’t bear to give one damn inch.

“I know that, dammit,” she muttered to the wall. “Dammit—do you not think I know that?”

But Blue had no pity for her, no shred of any emotion left except for the vicious tangle of grief; it tangled in her fingers, which sunk deep into Pink’s shirt, and it tangled in her cold eyes, leaking down her pale face and salting her anemic lips.

“Then act like it,” she hissed.

The exhortation bruised the air.

It demanded a reaction.

On its hands and knees, it begged for a response.

And yet, the shadowy figure said nothing. She didn't move her clenched fists.

She could not face Blue in the eyes.

Coward.

Hypocrite.

(Mourner.)

(Mourning.)

She simply left, staggering out of the room on precariously high heels, and Blue simply stayed, conflating the hours and the days and the minutes.

Later that day, they buried their daughter in a mausoleum, a gazebo—in a cemetery slathered in golden sun.

iii.

Greg explained the details as best as he could on the way up to Steven’s room. It was hard to find him a kidney because his blood type was O negative, which meant that he would only be able to receive a kidney from a Type O donor. And though he’d been on the waiting list for months now, and though he’d recently been moved to the top of the list given his worsening condition, it was still anyone’s guess as to when a kidney would become available.

(“If,” he could barely choke out, “we can even get one at all.”)

After slowly making their way across an expansive skywalk, they finally arrived at a pair of double doors labeled Truman Ward. The sun pierced through the tall glass windows and lit upon Blue’s sunken face, and Greg’s red eyes, and her metallic cane, and his wobbling lips—as though it was doing them a favor by doing so.

Greg reached behind her and pressed a button on the wall, alerting someone on the other side to their arrival.

“Listen”—he ran his hand along the back of his neck as the doors slowly parted open in welcome—“I’m going to go back to the room for a bit and see if I can get some paperwork done. Feel free to stay as long as ya’d like. Visiting hours don’t end ’til eight.”

Blue stared at him. 

Every moment—every hour, minute, and second with this child was precious nowadays, and here Greg was, lending her time out of his own.

She felt the gift of what he was offering deeply.

(She could have never found it in herself to be so generous with Pink.)

“Thank you.” She swept a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “I… I appreciate you allowing me to visit him.”

But he only shook his head and urged her through the doors with a pinched smile.

“If he’s happy that you’re here,” he shrugged, “then I am, too.”

And with that, he waved a last goodbye, and the doors folded to a close again with her on the other side of them.

Room 11037.

Walking became a monumental task as the clinically white hallway stretched out before her, lengthened by her mind, twisted and contorted into an obstacle she had to surmount.

It should have been just a hall.

Clank.

The memory of Pink burned bright behind her eyelids, stained there permanently by principle but stamped in starkly with assistance from the harsh fluorescents overhead. She was laughing, always laughing, in these flashbulb reminiscences, her freckles coalescing and then expanding across the bridge of her nose like the bellows of an accordion.

Clank.

But it wasn’t just Pink, though it always would be.

Clank.

It was Steven now.

Clank.

A ghost she chased, as opposed to the one who perpetually haunted her (who mercifully, who cruelly stayed.)

Clank.

But he wasn’t a ghost just yet, right? He was still here and still fighting—did that not count for something? Didn't his heartbeat, the very state of its continued existence, teach her to hope?

Clank.

But hope was such an awful word—so empty, brimming with meaningless sensationalism.

Clank.

(Maybe it was the vestiges of her long dead religion, but she wanted to hope anyway.)

Clank.

Hope was such an awful word.

Clank.

Room 11037. 

The door was decisively closed. 

A tall woman with bicolored eyes leaned against it, her dark lips corkscrewed into a frown.

Blue Diamond vaguely remembered her from the cemetery but couldn’t quite place a name. She could place an expression, though, and was surprised to name the one on this stranger’s face as disdain. Disdain rolled off this mysterious woman in waves, from the resolute clench of her jaw to the iron way that her arms were folded across her chest. It burned in her eyes. It seemed to languish inside of her, seething just under a facade of smooth skin.

She was a monolith of quiet loathing.

Blue squared her rounded shoulders in a manner she thought to be composed; her hands trembled on her cane nonetheless.

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” She asked it quite politely, even as the walls were harsh and white around them. She used to command rooms by the authoritative nature of her voice alone, and now she struggled to keep it together long enough to face a singular woman in front of a singular door.

“It’s not you specifically,” the woman replied, impressively put together, admirably composed. If her electric blue eye was cold, the brown one simply burned. Both were bruised underneath with tired shadows. “It’s what you stand for. It’s about the morals that Diamond Electric doesn’t have.”

“You’re an activist,” Blue surmised quickly, almost flippantly. Activists were challenging DE all of the time, and activists were always losing. Before Pink… she’d largely assumed that these sorts of protesters simply had no logical case. After Pink, she had had much more consuming thoughts on her mind than petty lawsuits against their multibillion dollar company.

“A Crystal Gem,” she corrected tersely, “but that’s not what I want to talk to you about.” Her gaze slid subtly to the doorway behind her, and Blue understood her at once.

“Steven,” she whispered.

The woman nodded.

“Steven,” she agreed, and her voice cracked as she said it, splintering into thousands of little pieces and struggling to regroup. When she swallowed to compose herself, it was almost as though she was swallowing the shards. “He likes you, and I can’t… I won’t begrudge him that.”

In the way that she said it, it was almost like she was convincing herself most of all.

“There is an implicit but there,” Blue parried softly. “You won’t begrudge him that, but.”

Again, the woman nodded, the gesture slow and measured, as though she was working something out in the tiny motion. When her squared chin came up again, her mismatched eyes were bright, intense with quiet pain.

“But don’t hurt him.”

It was a reasonable demand, but the implication behind it stung immediately and anyway.

She inhaled sharply and scrambled to defend herself, to salvage the punctured wound, but the damage was already done. Her voice came out more broken than it did cold.

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“Maybe not intentionally,” the Crystal Gem said, shaking her head. “Most people never really intend to hurt someone… but it happens. We get caught up in our emotions. We get selfish. We get distant. And then we hurt people.”

It struck Blue Diamond at that very moment that she hadn’t even deigned to ask the woman’s name.

“So, all I’m saying is don’t hurt him.” She unfolded herself from the door and stepped aside. “He likes you.”

iv.

Two days after the first anniversary of Pink Diamond’s death, a doctor shined a light in Blue Diamond’s glassy eyes and waited for a pupillary response. When he received one—an involuntary but nonetheless reactive blink—he unceremoniously clicked off his pen light and straightened up into the unfriendly darkness once more.

In the sparse incandescence bleeding in from the hallway, Yellow Diamond cut a shadowy figure by his side, her usually tidy hair rumpled from all the times her fingers had become ensnared in it that day.

Her tie was loose, and lines had already begun to etch themselves beneath those hawklike eyes of hers.

Soon, they would become permanent fixtures, marked there by time and age and grief.

For now, though, they were only suggestions.

Hints of what was to come.

(So many sleepless nights.)

(How many haunted days?)

“Well?” Though the CEO tried hard to strangle her voice into a whisper, the sharpness of the syllable was still the loudest sound in the room. Subtlety had never quite been this woman’s strong suit; she wielded her words as though they were gavels to proclaim on the heads of all who dared to cross her path.

“Catatonic depression,” the doctor replied, just as succinctly, replacing his pen in the pocket of his lab coat. “The staring, the lack of movement, the loss of appetite, the elective mutism. All textbook symptoms that point to the fact that your wife is still grieving, Mrs. Diamond. Frankly, I’m worried for her health.”

The shadow on his left scowled at this diagnosis, and she fidgeted, and it was apparent by these two idiosyncrasies alone that she was scrounging deep for some incisive rebuttal against the truth that laid like a breathing corpse directly below her. 

“Then what, pray tell, do you intend to do about it?” Her voice exceeded its former intentions of quietness. “That’s the problem. Now what’s the solution?”

“Well, I admit her to the hospital and start her on an intravenous Lorazepam treatment. It’s a sedative. It’ll assuage some of her anxiety and relax her muscles to prevent spasming.”

“Yes, and then?”

They were talking about her as though she wasn’t even there.

It was a fair enough assessment.

“And then what, Mrs. Diamond?” The doctor stared at her incredulously, shoving both of his hands in his pockets. “With all due respect, I can treat your wife’s physical symptoms from sunup to sundown, but that’s not touching the heart of what is truly debilitating her. She’s grieving, ma’am, and she needs psychiatric treatment beyond what I can provide as a private doctor and you can provide as her spouse. We discussed this the last time I was here.”

“And the time before that—yes, I know,” Yellow Diamond laughed humorlessly, the sound half-mad in her constricted throat. “Because you stand there, like an imbecile, and tell me that there’s no underlying medical cause to this?!”

She jabbed an accusing hand at Blue Diamond, whose oceanic eyes were wide open and unseeing, silent tears slipping from the corners of them and falling sideways across her face. There was an untouched tray of food on her nightstand. There was a lankness in her unwashed hair. There were pill bottles accumulating like a grotesque collection next to the alarm clock.  

And there was an air, an atmosphere, an oppression of silent decay.

The funereality of it was undeniable.

An uncomfortable wooden chair stood next to the bed where Yellow Diamond had been sitting vigil for the past two nights since they had visited the cemetery on the day of the anniversary. 

Blue Diamond’s keening sobs had sliced the autumnal air.

Her daughter was dead.

Gone.

Never coming back.

She stared at nothing, it seemed to Yellow and the doctor; she languished in the visions of Pink that seized across her mind with every dripping second of consciousness. 

“Depression is an underlying medical cause, Mrs. Diamond.” 

The doctor’s voice softened. 

Minimally.

For the first time since the house call had begun, his lanky silhouette jerked a little, as though he wanted to place a hand on the CEO’s shoulder, but thought better of it upon seeing something forbidding in the other’s expression.

“And she’s tired, ma’am. You both are.” Look at you, his rust colored eyes seemed to say. You’re both historical wrecks to a long dead ghost. “You can’t take care of her alone…  moreover, you shouldn’t have to.”

But the doctor had finally overstepped one prying comment too far, and he must have known it immediately, because he took a step back from the golden eyes glowering at him in the darkness of that dusty bedroom.

Yellow Diamond’s entire face transformed, twisting itself into facets of shattered rage.

She was feral.

(Wounded.)

Apoplectic with fury.

(Grieving, she was inconsolable.)

Dangerous.

Goddammit, she was on fire.

“Do not ever deign to tell me what I can and can’t do when it comes to my wife,” she snarled, all pretense of quietness long gone, devoured in the hurricane of emotion. “Get out! OUT!”

“Mrs. Diamond, please—“

“I SAID OUT! OUT!” She shrieked, harshly shoving his shoulder with the flats of her palms. “GET THE HELL OUT!”

The doctor did not need telling again; he fled the room as the force of Yellow Diamond’s dismissal stoned his back.

Blue blinked slowly as a shaking hand suddenly clasped her arm in the wake of the carnage, the imprint of a steel wedding band carving itself into her flesh.

That hurts, Yellow.

She blinked again, the words swelling on her tongue and dying there unrestfully.

That hurts.

v.

The warnings of Steven’s guardian standing sentinel on top of her frantically beating heart, Blue Diamond turned the knob to Room 11037 and pushed inwards until the door reluctantly gave way to a sight she had forgotten to steel herself for in-between the guilt of moving on and the agonizing action of doing so.

Steven himself.

Dwarfed in a hospital bed.

A mere wisp of the boy who had sat with her on the balcony only three days ago and stuffed his face with little chocolate cakes.

Her prodigious mind working far ahead of her paralyzed body, she frantically tried to recall his text from yesterday, what it had said about his condition, if it had indicated anything about his current state at all. But he had only told her that he had passed out and ended up in the hospital again. The boy had said nothing about the extensive tubing and the wires that ribboned and scissored his entire body in streaming colors. Lines crisscrossed each other and tumbled over and under and around his blankets. 

She saw the bottom of an empty catheter bag at the edge of the bed.

And the bruises like angry embers pulsing up his arms.

Somehow, amongst all the other things she was absorbing at precisely the same time, she noticed that next to a vase of elegantly arranged sunflowers, there was an inelegantly arranged tray of hospital food.

Untouched.

He had texted not a word about the yellow pallor of his skin.

He had used exclamation points—exclamation points!—to indicate his excitement.

Blue Diamond could not shake the notion, the very absurd idea, that he had lied to her somehow, had drawn her here under false pretenses.

(This was not the truth. She had estimated at what she was getting herself into and crossed the line into getting herself into it anyway.)

“Hi,” Steven Universe said sheepishly, his cheeks flushing darkly. He was caught, and he knew it. “It’s good to see you again, Blue.”

The seconds dripped between them.

The heart monitor on the wall counted them out.

One…

Blue’s plump lips parted slightly.

Two…

Her hand shivered on the head of her cane until the sound of it rattled the clinically quiet room.

Three…

She couldn’t do this again.

She wouldn’t grieve for another dead child.

One had been too much—one had almost killed her. 

Four…

God, and there were still days where she wondered if it still would.

Without thinking, desperate for relief, Blue turned away and braced her free hand on the door, drawing in harsh, ragged breaths that scratched at her beaten lungs, that bled them anew until they were leaking.

Who was she to believe that she wasn’t falling apart at her seams? How delusional was she to hope that a boy with a flower would be the difference between her saving grace and her inevitable dissolution? Was she so naïve to overlook the contours of his illness and think that his determination would be enough to save him from the eternal truth of this world? Was she so weak?

Death didn't discriminate between the old and the young, the sinner and the saint.

Pink Diamond was only twenty-one years old.

Steven Universe was a child.

“Blue!” Steven pleaded. “Wait, please don’t go. I—”

“I cannot look at you, Steven Universe," she cut across him, her voice low and fractured. Hot tears stood in her eyes, suddenly blurring her hand against the smooth door. “I’m sorry, but I cannot bear to see…”

“Can’t bear to see that I’m dying?”

He didn’t just refuse to mince the word; he stabbed it into her back so remorselessly that she gasped sharply. She glanced down at her chest and half-expected to see it lodged there, poking out, her beating heart speared on its tip.

“People can skirt around the word all they want,” Steven laughed bitterly, “but there’s no other word for it… without a kidney, I’m gonna die soon, Blue Diamond. I’m dying right now. I think I’ve been dying all this time. And everyone… all they wanna do… is look away from me. Pearl, Garnet, my dad…”

He sniffed.

“They keep looking away, and I’m so tired of it… I-I’m exhausted.”

The door felt cold against her palm.

Icy.

On the balcony, two days ago, she accused Yellow Diamond of shoving their daughter away in a drawer with the rest of her useless items.

In an arctic hospital room, Blue Diamond was ready to consign a boy to the same grave her daughter was buried in… 

… but dead children couldn’t talk.

Dead children couldn’t be tired.

They were simply dead.

“So, please, Blue Diamond… please don’t look away.”

The seconds dripped between them.

The heart monitor on the wall counted them out.

One…

Her eyes were wide with the horror of everything, of it all, the senselessness, the depravity, the nihilistic revolutions of this awful, uncaring world.

“I had a daughter once,” she whispered to the door. “Her name was Pink Diamond, and she was… she is… my everything. She had a smile wider than this planet could ever hope to contain… and she very much liked to laugh.”

She had never talked about Pink to anyone other than Yellow before.

Even evoking her name felt like blasphemy.

Two…

A second passed, and no lightning fell from the sky to strike her dead; she supposed her own self-flagellation was the punishment and the eternal damnation alike.

“I looked away. Yellow and I both did. She wanted more from life, and we wanted to contain her life into… into a little box that could fit on the shelf with all our other trophies. She was our accomplishment, you see, our legacy.”

Three…

Blue Diamond’s hand fell away from the door, so she could bring it up to her mouth in a futile attempt to dam the sobs that racked her shoulders.

Four…

“We looked away. The night that she… she—” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word aloud. She wasn’t brave like Steven. “We thought she was in her room, and I didn’t tell her that I loved her that night because we had argued… I thought I’d get the chance the next day or the day after that because we argued all the time. It was normal for us.”

On and on and never again.

When was the last time Blue Diamond had said those three words to her daughter?

These past four years, she had scoured her brain for the answer, but the answer was as elusive as the phrase was from her mouth.

For the simple truth of the matter was that she hadn’t said it very often.

In all her vast intellect, she had always assumed that it was assumed.

Implied.

Understood.

You’ll never let me grow up, will you?

I love you, she could have said.

You’ll never let me grow up, will you?

I didn’t want you to, she would have replied then. I wanted you to collect dust with all the rest of our awards and certificates. I wanted you safe, where I could see you. I wanted to quantify the entirety of your life and itemize the particulars. I wanted you to always be mine.

I love you.

I looked away.

An oxymoron.

A tragedy.

Five…

“So if I look at you, Steven Universe,” she murmured, screwing her eyes closed tightly against the pain, “really look at you, then I have to face that truth again—that I loved someone once… and I looked away… and now she’s… gone.”

And that was the immutable truth of the matter, the conclusion she circled around to no matter how many times the Earth continued to revolve away from the day since Pink Diamond had last existed on this world.

Four thousand revolutions later, and this would still be what it came down to in the end.

Her daughter’s blood was on her hands, staining them crimson, veining her lifelines with the guilt and the awfulness and the unbearable, crucifying shame.

And her daughter’s blood cried out, You’ll never let me grow up, will you?

And every time she so much as looked at her own palms, that was the only echo she saw written across their hollows.

Those last words.

Unanswered.

Unfinished.

Undoing and undone.

Six…

“But… I’m not gone yet,” Steven argued softly. His voice fought to be heard over all the machinery keeping him alive. “I’m here.”

He must have moved because blankets shifted somewhere behind her.

Dead children didn’t move.

Dead children weren’t here.

They were simply—

Seven…

Eight…

Nine…

Ten…

Do it, she commanded herself.

Look at him.

But Blue Diamond was frozen, and she was statuesque; she was a calcification barely anchored on the foundation of her cane. One false move and she would crumble entirely. 

The safest bet on her own survival was to limp away and dare not look behind her lest she turn to salt and dust. 

Someone else could clean up the carnage.

That woman who stood at the door—she’d do it—Greg Universe and the boy’s other guardians, too.

Don’t hurt him, that same woman had also said. He likes you.

Eleven…

Twelve…

Thirteen...

vi.

It was wash day. 

For nearly a year and half after Pink Diamond died, Yellow would force Blue out of bed every few days for a bath or a shower—usually a shower because it was becoming increasingly hard for the CEO to lift her wife in and out of the tub.

Today was a tub sort of occasion, though.

Date night with the Diamonds.

The presence of death was always with them, though, an intrusive third wheel.

With a slight groan, Yellow lowered herself into the warm water behind Blue, steam rising around their naked skin like curling smoke. Once upon a time, this used to be a favorite pastime of theirs, a chance to reacquaint themselves with each other and their bodies… but now the gesture was simply hygienic in purpose, asexual and quiet.

It was always quiet in the Diamonds’ penthouse suite these days.

Silent.

“Is it too hot?” Yellow asked, her voice as gentle as she could wrangle it. Somehow, at the same time, it was still edged with the trappings of harshness. “I can add some cold water?"

She waited briefly for a reply that would never come.

Blue stared limply at her knees, pulled up awkwardly as they were to her chest. Her sensitive skin had already reddened in a couple of places where it was touching the water. There were pink fingerprints wrapped around her armpits where she’d been handled into the tub. 

“I think it’s too hot. You’re getting a rash.” A well-manicured hand flashed out from behind her ear and knobbed the far left tap. There was a quick murmur and then the steady hiss of cold water.

“There,” she humphed satisfactorily. “This’ll feel better.”

The running stream answered its assent.

Blue Diamond did not say a word.

She hadn’t in days now, maybe even weeks; time was irrelevant to her, and the words would not come. 

There was only a dullness in her head, numb and numbing, like an icy compress coiled tightly around her thoughts.

Yellow didn’t think so, but this was better than the alternative; this was the far superior solution to the problem, the pain, and the pervasiveness of the ghost who was their daughter Pink Diamond.

Because when the analgesic of her own catatonia faded, and some of the feeling tried to seep through, her chest would unfailingly tighten, a vice squeezing hard upon her weary heart.

She couldn’t breathe.

Her child was dead.

“I…” 

The sound came from behind her, guttural and choked, as though the speaker was fighting hard against the noise and losing the war.

“I’m so tired, Blue.” 

It was an admission, and it was a copout.

Both of them knew that Blue Diamond wasn’t registering a single word.

She heard them—yes, this was true.

But they came to her—they landed softly—like distant echoes; she did not feel the pain of them, the visceral agony; at the present moment, she did not even feel her own pain, the grief and the scalding water and the grief.

Because it was always the grief she was trying to repress.

Everything else was just ancillary.

“You don’t know, goddammit, you can’t know, how exhausted I am.” Yellow Diamond’s voice shattered in the tub.

And her entire body hitched.

As though to keep that from breaking, too.

“You exhaust me, Blue Diamond. You exhaust me every single day. And you don’t even know it, goddammit. Who are you? What the hell have you become?”

The question was delivered to her backside, where it slipped down her tall, curving spine and into the water, splashing there with the delivery of the tap. With a violence that was almost cruel, Yellow reached from behind her again and flung it back into an off position.

There was quietness then.

It was so still, that it was disquiet.

It was always quiet in the Diamonds’ penthouse suite these days.

Silent.

Blue continued to stare blankly at her knees.

There were red patches on her skin.

Her child was dead.

After a moment’s hesitation, her breath heavy on the back of Blue’s long, slender neck, Yellow Diamond gathered her silvery hair gently in one hand and grabbed the comb on the side of the tub with another.

She was careful as she maneuvered its teeth through damp, lank strands.

She always was.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Blue.”

That was what Blue Diamond’s note would say merely a few months later.

I’m sorry and I’m sorry and I’m sorry.

Love always, Blue.

But that was the crucial thing, wasn’t it?

Sorry was not enough; love was not enough.

Because if love had been enough, Pink Diamond would still be alive. 

vii. 

In a hospital room pierced through with golden sun, Blue Diamond turned around and faced the light of day, her heavy braid swinging along with the slow, deliberate motion. 

She wasn’t looking away, Steven Universe.

She was staring straight at him—at his sunken face and his tubing and at the catheter bag and at the sunflowers.

The boy was dying, but he was not yet dead.

It wasn’t much.

At the very least, though, it was something.

He was not gone, even if he was going.

He was here.

In this moment, in this very ephemeral second.

The heart monitor on the wall attested to that; it counted his heartbeats; it pleaded with her to have hope.

(Hope was such an awful word.)

“Those are beautiful flowers,” she whispered. Her cane clinked against the tiled floor as she carefully drew closer to observe them better.

Their petals were tall and spiky, assaulting the air with attentiveness and regal magnitude.

They vaguely reminded her of Yellow.

With a light finger, she tried to prop up one that was beginning to droop beneath the weight of all its brethren, but the moment she withdrew her touch, it fell again, sighing listlessly. 

Poor thing.

“But not quite as pretty as that hibiscus you bequeathed me.”

Steven’s eyes, edged with the trace remnant of his tears, were wide and dark, full of velvet and silvery stars.

“You don’t still have it, do you?” He asked, incredulous and rather pleased.

He played a little with his hands on top of his blankets. 

He tried to tamp down his hope for an affirmative with an unconvincing casualness.

Blue Diamond’s smile bruised her lips.

“I placed it on my nightstand, sweet boy, so I could look at it everyday.”

It took a second, but the irony of that word choice was not lost on either of them.

viii. 

Yellow Diamond placed the failed suicide note on her nightstand for Blue to see and know that she saw. They didn’t talk about it afterwards.

How could they?

What was there to say?

It remained there for a few days afterwards, shriveled and guilty-looking next to the alarm clock; every time she opened her eyes, she would see it and feel its quiet condemnation. She would close her eyes against its glare and wait for sleep or numbness one to wrestle her into the dark. 

One day, she woke up, and the paper was gone again. 

The realization drew a frown across her wrinkled face.

When she thought about getting up to search for it, and mustered the appropriate will to get out of bed, apparently, many days had passed in the interim.

A month.

She only recognized this upon surveying her bathroom on her way to the toilet; she couldn't find her shaving razor anywhere.

One night—the day, the month, the year undetermined in the abscessed haze of her mind—a dull ache throbbed through Blue’s hip, growing in intensity and sharpness with each passing second that she laid on the wounded area.

There was a part of her, not entirely inconsequential, that invited the pain. For after all, suffering was the only victory the woman had left in the entire world; she wrestled with it nightly, and she embraced it. She made it her new lover and exchanged an oath that only death would do them part. She didn’t shoot herself, or cut herself, or swallow a handful of pills that would surely do the trick.

She laid on her bad hip and convinced herself that she deserved it.

But that night—whatever night that it was—the agony was unbearable, pulling at her all over.

With a groan that wasn’t voluntary, Blue wrested herself into some semblance of a sitting position and looked for her phone so that she could call Livia for an ice pack, but it wasn’t on the bedside table as it usually was… and since it wasn’t in its usual position, she had no clue where she had last left it.

If she wanted relief, she would have to brave the kitchen herself.

She wanted relief, and the guilt of it half-immobilized her.

So she sat there for a couple more minutes still and endured the stabbing ache before finally coaxing herself upwards into the dark night of the bedroom. 

Assuming her cane in one hand, Blue crept silently towards the door and out of it, where the hallway stretched out before her like a cavernous tunnel, all the lights extinguished. 

Even the telltale glow of lamp warmth that usually emitted from the study across the hall was gone out, which meant that Yellow had likely succumbed to sleep on the couch within. 

A twinge of something bothered Blue’s sternum at the thought.

She limped forward anyway and all the same, lifting her cane off the floor to keep from making noise; the wall was her guide in its stead, the pads of her long fingers moving along its smooth planes until she reached the end of the archway, where she immediately intuited that she wasn’t alone.

In the moonlight that wept into the living room through the tall windowpanes, Yellow Diamond was a stark figure sitting on the edge of the couch, leached of all her color. Her blonde hair, her silky pajamas, the leathery musculature of her corded neck—all of it was leveled by blinding whiteness.  

Illuminated.

Vulnerable.

Exposed.

When her wife swallowed, she could see every line in her powerful jaw working through the peristaltic motion. 

In the shadowed hallway, Blue Diamond stood still, even though the sharp pain in her hip demanded attention.

For this  moment, this night, this moonlit haunting did not belong to her—even though most of them usually did.

She understood, somewhere in the mire of her own head, that to disturb this scene would be sacrilege. So she watched, and she waited.

Yellow Diamond was holding something between her sharp, angular hands.

With a jolt, she realized that it was Spinel, a stuffed pink cat who had been Pink’s favorite companion once upon a time. Her left ear was still stained from the tea Yellow had once accidentally dripped on it during a princess tea party.

Washed it though they had—several times over—the spot was stubborn; Spinel had been permanently marked.

“S’okay, Momma,” Pink had only said, grinning up at them both from gapped teeth. She had hugged the toy to her chest. The affected ear brushed against the side of her freckled neck. “That just means she’s one of a kind."

Yellow’s fingers were wrapped around the cat’s plush stomach tenderly; she stared at it from depthless, ancient eyes. 

It struck Blue Diamond—then and there—that she wanted something more from this vignette; she wanted Yellow to say something. Selfishly, she desired a confirmation for what she had already so trenchantly inferred.

She wanted, she desired, she longed, she needed to know that her wife was broken, too.

It was a horrible hunger, an itch that felt terrible to scratch.

But Blue Diamond was voracious.

Sometimes, maybe even oftentimes, she could be cruel.

After a long while, though, Yellow Diamond only placed the cat down on the coffee table and stared out into the irradiated night with her hands templed below her sharp chin, lost in silent thought.

She looked older than she ever had in all of their collected years together.

She was only fifty-four.

ix.

They talked—for a long while—as the sun slipped away from the sky, sunset coming in fragments through the slats in the window blinds. 

Blue Diamond held Steven’s hand, the one that didn’t have so many IVs in it, and rubbed smooth circles against his wrist.

“Pearl does that, too,” he smiled at her softly through hooded eyes when she began. “It’s nice.”

They talked about everything, and they talked about nothing.

He told her about his favorite show, which seemed to be about morose breakfast items from what she could vaguely surmise, and he talked to her, very quietly, about his disease.

It was rapidly progressing, far more quickly than his nephrologist had anticipated.

“Those chocolate cakes we shared on your balcony,” he admitted with the air of a child waiting to be scolded, “I may have accidentally puked them up in your toilet. Sorry..."

“It’s of no consequence,” she returned with a small, sad smile.

And this was very well true.

She wasn’t the one who had to clean it after all.

They talked about everything, and they talked about nothing.

Blue told him about the sunrise yesterday, how all the colors had seeped together in a swirl of delicious color, and she talked to him, very quietly, about Pink.

“In the best of possible ways,” she mumbled, the sound caught in the column of her throat, “you remind me of her sometimes. She smiled at everything, even when there wasn’t exactly something to be smiled about.”

“That’s a very pretty way to put it.” Steven wriggled a thumb from beneath her palm to stay it against the side of her hand.

“Yes,” she nodded gently, “I suppose so.”

When it was time for her to leave—a team of nurses had come in to administer Steven’s evening medicines and check his vitals—she pressed a kiss against his forehead.

Very light and very soft.

“You didn’t look away,” he whispered against her cheek as she withdrew. His breath was sickly sweet with disease. “Thank you, Blue.”

She froze, meeting his eyes.

There was hesitancy, and there was consuming grief.

The scribble of guilt.

Scrawled all over her face.

“I wanted to, though,” she breathed. “If we're being technical... if we're being fair... I think the impulse counts against me.”

“But you didn’t.”

Steven’s chapped lips tilted into the beginnings of a smile.

“And that’s what matters, right?”

She brushed a stray curl off of his clammy forehead and thought about Pink and Yellow and all the things she did and didn’t do.

She loved them.

She looked away.

“Yes,” she told Steven Universe. 

Yes.

x.

Alone, Blue Diamond slowly crossed the skywalk, her silvery hair crowned in all the colors of the sunset, a phone pressed against her ear.

Her cane struck the tiled floor with each shuffled step forward.

Clank.

The dial tone droned rhythmically—bzzt and bzzt and bzzt.

Clank.

She felt her heart work its way up her throat, clambering up its fleshy rungs. The immensity of what she was doing transformed her nervous system into a network of beating, pulsing neuroses.

She was ready for this, and she was not.

She could do this; she half-hoped that she wouldn't receive an answer.

Clank.

And then—

“Blue?” Yellow Diamond’s low voice threw its instinctive panic across the line. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Because this was new.

And yet, achingly familiar.

So many years of having not sought Yellow out—all those weeks, days, and months—were well-established patterns that were not easily overturned and undone.

All those collective hurts—hundreds of them, thousands.

Four years of misery sat between them like four hundred thousand miles.

Blue Diamond swallowed thickly, stopping dead in her tracks as the spillage of people continued to swarm all around her like a package freed of its contents: doctors and patients and sundry other visitors. She was the eye of their storm, and yet, she was just another broken person in the midst of so many other broken people. She was separate from them, and yet, she was their intimate kin. The contradiction seemed untenable, unworkable like all the rest.

Her fingers tightened on the head of her cane.

“I’m… I’m fine, Yellow,” she began. “Please don’t worry. I just had to… I wanted to tell you something. Are you busy?”

On the other end of the line, somewhere in a giant, yellow skyscraper at the edge of Empire City, there was the sharp intake of breath.

And the hesitant beginnings of a fearful reply.

It was a start, though.

And that was what mattered, right?

Yes, Blue Diamond thought to herself.

Yes.

[morphoportiswrites]

Riots. - Chapter Two: Please...

Summary: After finding Bane wounded and dying in Gotham City Hall, you have to make a decision. Your friends or him?

Pairing: Bane (TDKR) x Reader

Word Count: 2022

Warnings: Lots of swearing

Author’s Note: So here it is, the second chapter! I hope it’s not too boring? I really know how to drag things on, don’t I? Hahaha! (Also tumblrs formating is pissing me off. XD) And again: English is not my first language.

(Y/NN = Your nickname) (Found the gif on giphy!)

Chapter Two: Please...

Bane's grip was awfully tight around your neck and you were a 100% sure, even in his weakened state, this man was able to break it with one simple and swift move. For a split second you thought about ways to free yourself from his hand but another thing you were pretty sure about was, that he'd catch you by your hair.

“Seriously? I'm just trying to help you, man”, your mouth complained before your brain could actually rate the words coming out of it as a teensy bit inept. Nice. Way to get yourself out of this mess. To be honest, you had never been someone to shut their pie hole when situations required it.

Bane's eyes practically shot daggers at you. Stare still. Somewhat furious... but there was something else in them. Something you couldn't quite place. Fear? Pain? Confusion?

Bane was confused. What initially had triggered his reflex to defend himself, that no one could be trusted and everyone was just out to get him... there  was nothing of it in your eyes. Assessing your motives, something told him, you meant every word you said. It was odd and frankly he was surprised by himself when he felt the muscles in his arm and hand shift.

You felt his fingers loosen and were able to pull away. Not trying to panic, you breathed in and out. In and out. While rubbing your neck. You could still feel the pressure of his fingers on your skin. If there was one feeling you hated, it was that of being physically restrained or downright inferior. Honestly, you had assumed this was the last time of you being cheeky in a situation like this. He could have hurt you so easily.

Now it was your turn to look somewhat confused and you were about to speak when you heard footsteps moving quickly down the stairs in the large hallway of the entrance. One pair halted in the door frame of the room you recently occupied and you turned your head around to see who it was. “You were right, Y/NN. An absolute waste of time and energy. Maybe a couple of pieces of furniture but too big and heavy to actually keep this a short time visit”, Cable, who's given name was actually Greg, admitted.

Told you so, crossed your mind for a moment but being sassy was not the major priority right now. “Look what I found though...”, you uttered and nodded into the direction of the almost lifeless body laying in front of you. Cable not being able to see what you meant, came closer.

“Shit! Is that... Bane?”

“Yes, and-”

“Fuck!”, he crossed the rest of the room and came to a halt next to you. “Wow, someone beat him up well”, a bemused snicker escaped Cable's lips.

“I need your help.” Another confused look.

“With what?”

“We need to get him out of here”, matter of factly.

“Excuse me?!... No, this... nah”, Cable pulled a face and lifted his hands in a defensive motion.

“He needs help or he'll die, Greg!”

“Sorry doll, but this is too risky for me... getting caught with him... and to be honest... he already looks fucking dead.” In any other situation you would have not let his degrading nickname for you slip past.

“That's because he's dying, you stupid fuck!”, you felt your face getting heated.

Cable put on his helmet and shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe it's better that way”, it seemed like he thought that now was his turn to sound matter of factly, as he put on his motorcycle gloves.

There it was. Your breaking point. The anger rushing from your head through your whole body, had you up in no time, when you both heard a voice yelling his name. It sounded urgent. Maybe someone from the group had turned on police radio and they weren't far.

In just one or two seconds more, a whole lot of things happened. Inside your head at least. In milliseconds your mind raced through your memories and replayed moment after moment you had spent together with the group. Things had been nice at the beginning. Nice and simple. You all had had the same goal. Or so you had thought it seemed. Sure, none of you was a saint in all of this but was this group still what you initially had joined it for? Were you all still on the same page? Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor? The last couple of heists had ended pretty violently and you had done nothing to prevent or stop it. You were as guilty as them.

Was that still you? What had happened to the girl calling people out on their bullshit? Even physically fighting for people who needed help? Fighting school yard bullies, mobsters, men who couldn't keep their hands to themselves?

So much more rushed through your mind. Situation after situation that had you made feel more and more alienated and cut off from the others. Had you overthink and doubt everything you were doing. Into all of this you felt fury pouring in. Was that guy in front of you still that chill dude you'd hooked up with a few times? Right now he was a bit too chill for your taste. If you thought about it, you had never gotten to know any of them, really. Who was to say Greg hadn't been a complete ass before, already? But refusing to help someone who was dying? This was it.

“Piss off.”

“What?”

“You heard me right, Greg. Piss off”, you almost spit in his face. Another cold shrug of his shoulders and he was gone out the door. A couple of moments later, the sound of engines could be heard and every other second if faded away gradually.

Your eyes fell back to Bane's face. Okay... you knew where to get him, you only needed a plan to get him out of here. Preferably as fast as possible. The sirens of police cars could be heard far in the distance of the city. Turning your gaze from the man's eyes, yours scanned the room yet again. This time for something that could be of use but nothing seemed obviously helpful in your endeavours or trigger an idea.

Quickly your feet carried you out of the room, the building and to your motorcycle. Without thinking twice, your hands opened the hatch at the back of the small trailer that was connected to your bike and emptied all the stolen valuables on to the street. So, now you knew how to transport the masked man. Just not how to get him down here. His injury was probably way too severe for him to waste too much strength on carrying his own weight.

“Think, think, think!”, you said out loud and gave your forehead a few good pats. Again your feet started moving. It had always been like that since you had been a child. Either your feet knew where to lead you or walking helped you to get your brain into motion as well, ideas flooding in. This time they made you pace up and down next to your bike. And you were about to give up on their stimulating support this time and go back inside, when your feet made you trip over something and fall hands first down on the pavement. Looking back at what had caught your two fellas attention, your eyes spotted a rolled up rug. You knew you could always count on them.

This morning you had taken the rug from the house of a guy who had the walls of his home plastered with photos of himself. The only face you found was a movie poster from The Big Lebowski right above a cosy sofa with a rug in front of it that tied the room together. You had to take this thing with you just to simply fuck with this wannabe playboy. It had been more of a meta joke to take it but you never thought the sight of a rug could've made you feel inspiration, excitement and relieve. You quickly got up on your feet again.

Bane hadn't expected to see your face ever again when you had left, so he did what this cruel world had made him exceptionally good at. Surviving. He knew his chances were small, certainly non-existent, but if he'd be able to block out the pain, as his mask partly did for him and as he was trained to do in greater detail and intensity all his life, he might could get a few blocks away from here. There he would die in the darkness, hidden from the world, he was sure. Anything was better than being in the hands of the police. Getting thrown in a cage again.

As he was about to slip into some kind of trance, to disassociate himself from the pain in his body, he felt something from the outside pulling him back. A physical impulse. And a voice. Muffled. The voice started sounding clearer as he shifted his mind back to reality again, clinging to the pain to guide him back. “Bane!”, he opened his eyes to the sound of his name. And there it was again. The face of that girl.

And there he was again. You exhaled deeply with more than some relieve. The moment you had seen him with his eye lids closed, you had feared the worst. Feared? What kind of thought was that? And what was he to you anyway? A terrorist? Scratch that. Someone who was about to die infront of your eyes and you couldn't let that happen, could you? No matter who he was.

“I'm really sorry about this...”, you apologised in advance for the increase of pain he was going to feel from what you had in mind. You rolled out the rug next to him, fuzzy side down. This way it would function as a poor excuse of a stretcher you could drag across the sleek marble floor and thus be able to get someone his weight out of here. “You've got to help me a bit to get you onto this thing”, you explained. For a moment you could see the hesitation in his tense body, the suspicion in his eyes. The sirens of the police cars cut through the silence between the two of you. Definitely closer than before. You held out your hand to grab. “Please...”, a whisper. Almost pleading.

Heavy breathing grew heavier as Bane's hand grabbed yours. Luckily you weren't opposed to work heavy physically and nature had you made with a bit of counterweight anyway, so you weren't pulled down by his. Together you managed to get him on the rug, his agitated breathing was the only sign of pain you could read off of him, and you wasted no time to pull on it. It wasn't as easy as you had wished it to be, with all the rubble specking the way out. Tomorrow you'd definitely have sore muscles but that was a ridiculous price you were willing to pay to get both of you out of all of this. Alive.

The stairs were the short way but no option, so you played it safe and dragged him down the long wheelchair ramp at the outside. As soon as you reached the back of the trailer and hold out your hand another time, Bane's already held on to it. Either way he had realised how close the cops were now or... no, don't you think like that, Y/N! You scolded yourself while you helped the man who was easily a head taller than you and built like a brick wall into the vehicle. With a few quick movements you fastened the top cover to hide Bane from eventual encounters with the officials and other folk, and hopped onto your bike. A good and precise kick to the starter and you fled the scene.

______________________________________________

Taglist: @markusstraya

[dammit-stark]

good ol’ cousin sam

I‘m rewatching Spiderman: Homecoming and I just realized that the P.E teacher’s name is Mr Wilson so now allow me to present to you my theory that this Mr Wilson is the legendary Sam Wilson’s underperforming cousin... this was originally a head canon but I gotta admit this became not-a-headcanon many, many words ago

no pairing - - 2.3k words

While the family favorite Sam joins the Armed Forces to fight for his country, the other Wilson cousin- let’s call him Raymond, Ray to his friends and family- goes to a local community college and receives a degree in physical education.

Sam’s a few years older, has been climbing the ranks in the military for a few years before Ray even gets into college, and he continues to fight while Ray passes math tests and writes essays that get torn up with red pen. Ray graduates middle of his class. 

The whole family comes to the graduation, except for Sam who’s stuck overseas. Sam sends a real nice congratulatory card anyway and Ray tacks it up on his dresser right next to the card from their Nana who passed and above the picture of the whole family ten years prior.  

Too soon, cousin Sam gets discharged from the military with full honor for some unfortunate freak accident that leaves him injured and itching to fly. Almost all the details surrounding the accident are classified, leaving all their nieces and nephews guessing after supernatural means or clandestine alien attacks. Their imaginative guesses leave Sam trying not to break out into hysterical laughter and Ray rolling his eyes over and over again. Sam missed being home. Ray just likes that the whole family is back together again, complete and whole and good for the soul. 

Ray starts coming back home on the weekends for a few weeks to make sure his cousin is doing alright.

At Auntie Glinda’s, they watch football and eat Uncle Greg's homemade chili as if they were teenagers again. It’s like any other weekend for Ray. It feels weird for Sam, who hates having his feet on the ground and his hands in his lap, but there’s nothing anybody can do about it. He puts on a smiling face, does his best to slip back into the family, but it’s all a little too forlorn to fit right, like the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle had a rip in it and the picture is just barely incomplete.

Sam refuses to watch Top Gun when little Billy so sweetly asks. He helps Auntie Glinda with dinner, but makes himself scarce otherwise. Ray notices, but doesnt know what to make of it.

After a few weeks, Ray stops coming by in all his free time, spends some time at his apartment, gets a cat named Hammy, joins a gym. Sam doesn’t need him. In fact, Sam up and leaves for DC, as independent and ready to move as ever. Before he leaves, he tells Ray that if he was gonna be grounded, he couldn’t imagine not at least trying to help others, whatever that means. Ray just smiles and nods and tries to imagine himself outside of New York. He just can’t see it.

Again, they part ways; things are good.

Then, around the same time that Ray gets his first job at a public school in the center of Queens, Sam meets Steve Rogers.

It’s not the best job in the world, a lot of the kids mouth off and tend to complain when they play anything that isn’t dodgeball, but it’s a job and it pays the bills. On Fridays, Ray orders himself a pizza from the Domino’s down the street and he gets take-out from the Thai place by the school every Wednesday. He’s not saving children in a third world country somewhere like his cousin always did, but he’s happy enough and that’s all that matters.

Out of the blue one day, Ray gets a job offer for a teaching position at a private school for gifted teenagers. He doesn’t remember ever applying for the position, but it comes with a pretty hefty pay raise and an office that doesn’t smell suspiciously like a festering rat problem, so he accepts the offer.

Completely coincidentally, his promotion coincides with the rise of Queens’ Amazing Spiderman on the public’s (and the Avengers’) media radar. Ray had watched in awe as the news revealed the first footage of their local vigilante. Another superhero? A lot of people complain, but Ray doesn’t mind. He never really had a problem with spiders anyway. Birds had always irked him, something about the freakish wingspan and their frail yet powerful little bodies, but spiders were always fine. He spends the night after learning the moniker of Queens’ new hero holed up in his bedroom under the covers watching Spider-Man compilations on his laptop. Late at night, when his brain slows down and he sees that red suit when he closes his eyes, Ray finds himself imagining Sam’s face beneath that mask. 

Cousin Sam just so happens to move back to New York around the same time, too. Another complete coincidence. He starts coming around and visiting about once a week or so. Thai night turns into burger night with frequent guest appearances by Sam, food courtesy of the family diner down the street. The nice family have his and Sam’s order down pat within a month.

Once everything settles and Ray gets used to the promotion, he decides the job’s actually pretty nice. The kids are generally less athletic and less enthusiastic than at his old school, most too busy with their nose stuck in a book or worrying over the state of their manicure to go after the dodgeball, but they’re attentive and for the most part are too afraid of failing his class to dare sassing him too much. Once a week he has to supervise a detention, but considering that it’s a school full of suck-up geniuses, detention is usually pretty barren. At the very least his college debt is nearly paid off. That’s cool.

The same day that one of his students, Pete, stumbles into class with a black eye and a wicked limp for probably the third time, Tony Stark shows up at school.

The rumors about his presence flutter incessantly in the Teacher’s Lounge like the words themself has sprouted wings and were determined to bother each and every person in the room. The science teachers sound like they‘re about to pass out from excitement. Raymond himself doesn’t really get what the big deal is- Tony Stark is just another person. Sure, he had a big shiny suit and he fought crime or whatever, but his cousin Sam fought for the people of the country, too, but you don’t see people wigging out over Sam’s sheer presence.

Ray really just wants to eat his lunch, that’s it. He had picked up a chicken salad sandwich from the bodega under his apartment before heading to work that morning and Nancy made the best chicken salad. A quiet lunch unfettered by gossip. That day, Ray learns that history teachers are surprisingly interested in gossip considering their coursework was based on 200 year old facts.

The last thing Ray expects when he gets back to his not-rat-infested office after lunch is for Tony Stark to be waiting for him. It’s quite a turn of events.

“You’re Tony Stark,” Ray says dumbly from the doorway of his own office. He’d just spent half his lunch being forced into a one-sided conversation about the recent advancements of StarkTech upstate, something about unprecedented, unimagined technology that the market itself isn’t ready for. One man did that alone, tinkered in his office at two am and all but broke the stock market with the sheer power of his brain. This man is standing in Ray’s office. It’s weird. 

Inside, Tony Stark is leaning back in Ray’s creaky office chair, his feet propped up on the desk next to a precariously tall stack of physicals that Ray hadn’t taken the time to peruse through.

Tony Stark peers over his orange tinted sunglasses to reveal a devilish black eye that he seems entirely unperturbed by. He lets his feet fall to the ground with a thud and his face is entirely serious, “Coach Wilson, right?” He says, “Come on in. Take a seat. I won’t bite.”

Ray inches forward, eyes narrowed. There’s a billionaire in his office, beckoning him in, and he doesn’t know why. This wasn’t something that happened to him every day.

As Ray sits, Tony rises from the office chair to peruse the degrees hanging on the wall. Ray remembers one of the science teachers gushing about how Tony Stark went to MIT or some super fancy college with an acronym or something. Tony flicks the bobblehead on the shelf beneath the frames and Wilson can’t look away.

Neither of them says anything. Tony watches the oversized head bobble on the bookshelf as Ray watches the mysterious billionaire. The quiet aches. 

“That chair has awful lumbar support by the way,” The billionaire says suddenly, picking up an old baseball cap and sniffing it carefully. His hands are always moving. Ray sits back in the chair himself, but doesn’t say anything about it. The furniture creaks.

“Mr Stark,” Ray says eventually, “Is there something I can do for you?”

“Actually,” Stark says, turning around, his face serious for the first time since he’d stepped into the office, “I believe there’s something I can do for you.”

Ray realizes then that Stark’s suit is wrinkled, a possible stain forgotten at the hem of the graphic tee shirt. Every description ever given about Tony Stark has provided an image of pristine carelessness, of confidence and ease. Tony Stark’s hands can’t seem to stop twitching. It’s kind of unsettling.

“Have you watched the news lately?” Stark asks.

“I’m more of an ESPN guy myself.”

Tony hums thoughtfully, glances over at the wall of community college degrees for a second time.

“From what I’ve gathered, your cousin is Airman First Class Sam Wilson. He visits you every other Wednesday, checks in on you,” Ray skin prickles. Suddenly, Tony looks like steel, “Is this correct?”

Ray just nods.

“An incident occured in Germany. Your cousin was involved.”

Ray had long been told tales of his cousin’s heroics. Sam usually told them with an air of modesty, a dash of pride. Tony doesn’t spare him the expense.

“Was he injured? Is he okay?”

An out-of-place expression of hilarity traverses Tony’s face And he all but laughs, “No, no. Our, um, friend Sam is fine, scrapefree for the most part actually,” His eyes go weird and unfocused for a moment before returning to Ray like a laser gone haywire, “Unfortunately, he was caught on the wrong side of things. For an indefinite period of time, he will be in prison. Mr Wilson, your cousin is a criminal.”

No. Ray’s cousin was no criminal. No way. Sam joined the army, went off and fought somebody else’s battle instead of getting a degree, instead of living a safe life. He has a big heart with this wretched piece of PTSD shoved between its plates of steel. Sure, things got a little twisted after the whole thing with his friend up there in the sky, but he would always be a good man. Sam Wilson was a hero. Not a criminal. Tony Stark was supposed to be smart, not slanderous, and definitely not wrong. 

“I think you’re talking about the wrong Sam Wilson.”

Tony’s hands twitch, “No, no, I think I’ve got the right one.”

A silence befalls them.

“I don’t believe you,” Ray accuses. Just because Tony Stark was a billionaire with an ego didn’t mean he could just waltz into somebody else’s office and defame their cousin right to their face, “You’re lying.”

“Tell me,” Stark says, “How is it you think you got this job? All on your own?”

Ray stares.

“Yeah, no,” Tony wipes a finger along a dust covered bookshelf, circles the office again. It’s a pretty small office. He paces over his own footsteps as he continues, “Sorry to break it to you, but you were all part of the plan. Wilson’s plan. But he- he messed up.”

Tony looks hurt. There’s a crack in the facade, a break in the airwaves. Ray’s so used to coaching emotional teenagers through the inevitable products of sleep deprivation and hormones every day, he spots it from a mile away. Tony continues like it’s nothing, a tendril of something else, not pain or betrayal or some drama that’s far beneath his celebrity status. God, Ray’s so tired.

“Where’s Sam? He demands, leaning forward against his desk, “Did you do something to him?”

“Sam Wilson is currently located in the most secure prison in the world. In the middle of the Atlantic. Otherwise undisclosed. Confidential, you have to understand.”

Ray’s eyes are narrowed dangerously on Tony Stark.

“What could he possibly have done?”

Ray isn’t thinking about himself anymore, he doesn’t care if he got his job through improper means or through hard work or through whispers up a chain of command. He just wants to know what happened to his cousin. He wants to know what happened to the good, caring, hard-working man that he had deigned to call family.

“Look,” Tony supplants, hands waving animatedly as his feet finally remain still, “It’s all very complicated. He broke some laws, defied the UN. It’s where he belongs, he put himself there,” Tony only looks distantly sorry, a regret misplaced from another dimension of time maybe, “In the end, he lost his title.”

“What title? I know for a fact that my cousin hasn’t been in service in years.”

Tony just stares, eyes narrowed, “Do you not know?”

Ray remains quiet, and then Tony’s eyes grow. He takes a seat opposite Ray, hands gripping the ledge of the metal desk as he peers into the confusion flashing across Ray’s express, “Oh my god, you don’t know.”

Ray crosses his arms, and Tony has to hand it to him, he’s certainly an indignant man, “I know everything I need to know about my cousin, Mr Stark. You don’t need to come in here and tell me things that don’t need to be said. I’d like it if you left.”

Tony’s grip tightens. He looks… confused, maybe a little out of place, suddenly uncomfortable or maybe doubtful or maybe they’re one in the same, but he makes no move to rise, “How do you not know?” The silence is enough, “Raymond,” He says seriously, “Sam Wilson is- was- an Avenger. He went by the codename Falcon. He had gone on nearly fifty missions with us. He lived in the Tower most weekends. You didn’t know?”

Ray doesn’t believe it.

While he was here, in the middle of dingy ol’ Queens with a bachelor’s degree from an unassuming college and a neatly laid out weekly menu, Sam was off in Manhattan lounging around with billionaires and saving the world over and over again. Then again, maybe it isn’t so out of the question, it’s just… a lot at once.

“Why are you telling me this?” Ray demands. His head is starting to hurt. Who would have thought that megalomaniac superheroes could be worse to deal with than moody, brainiac teenagers being forced to exert themselves physically for a grade?

Tony shrugs, “Why do you think?” He’s nonchalant, at ease, a line of platitudes expressed over his face before he finally says, “We’re really shorthanded with all the dissenters. I wanna offer you a job.”

“Wait- what?”

Tony looks more than a little smug, “Let me tell you about a kid named Spider-Man.”

[morphoportis]

Riots. - Chapter Two: Please...

Summary: After finding Bane wounded and dying in Gotham City Hall, you have to make a decision. Your friends or him?

Pairing: Bane (TDKR) x Reader

Word Count: 2022

AO3: Riots. - One / Two

tumblr: Riots. - One / Two

Warnings: Lots of swearing

Author’s Note: So here it is, the second chapter! I hope it’s not too boring? I really know how to drag things on, don’t I? Hahaha! (Also tumblrs formating is pissing me off. XD) And again: English is not my first language.

(Y/NN = Your nickname) (Found the gif on giphy!)

Chapter Two: Please...

Bane's grip was awfully tight around your neck and you were a 100% sure, even in his weakened state, this man was able to break it with one simple and swift move. For a split second you thought about ways to free yourself from his hand but another thing you were pretty sure about was, that he'd catch you by your hair.

“Seriously? I'm just trying to help you, man”, your mouth complained before your brain could actually rate the words coming out of it as a teensy bit inept. Nice. Way to get yourself out of this mess. To be honest, you had never been someone to shut their pie hole when situations required it.

Bane's eyes practically shot daggers at you. Stare still. Somewhat furious... but there was something else in them. Something you couldn't quite place. Fear? Pain? Confusion?

Bane was confused. What initially had triggered his reflex to defend himself, that no one could be trusted and everyone was just out to get him... there  was nothing of it in your eyes. Assessing your motives, something told him, you meant every word you said. It was odd and frankly he was surprised by himself when he felt the muscles in his arm and hand shift.

You felt his fingers loosen and were able to pull away. Not trying to panic, you breathed in and out. In and out. While rubbing your neck. You could still feel the pressure of his fingers on your skin. If there was one feeling you hated, it was that of being physically restrained or downright inferior. Honestly, you had assumed this was the last time of you being cheeky in a situation like this. He could have hurt you so easily.

Now it was your turn to look somewhat confused and you were about to speak when you heard footsteps moving quickly down the stairs in the large hallway of the entrance. One pair halted in the door frame of the room you recently occupied and you turned your head around to see who it was. “You were right, Y/NN. An absolute waste of time and energy. Maybe a couple of pieces of furniture but too big and heavy to actually keep this a short time visit”, Cable, who's given name was actually Greg, admitted.

Told you so, crossed your mind for a moment but being sassy was not the major priority right now. “Look what I found though...”, you uttered and nodded into the direction of the almost lifeless body laying in front of you. Cable not being able to see what you meant, came closer.

“Shit! Is that... Bane?”

“Yes, and-”

“Fuck!”, he crossed the rest of the room and came to a halt next to you. “Wow, someone beat him up well”, a bemused snicker escaped Cable's lips.

“I need your help.” Another confused look.

“With what?”

“We need to get him out of here”, matter of factly.

“Excuse me?!... No, this... nah”, Cable pulled a face and lifted his hands in a defensive motion.

“He needs help or he'll die, Greg!”

“Sorry doll, but this is too risky for me... getting caught with him... and to be honest... he already looks fucking dead.” In any other situation you would have not let his degrading nickname for you slip past.

“That's because he's dying, you stupid fuck!”, you felt your face getting heated.

Cable put on his helmet and shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe it's better that way”, it seemed like he thought that now was his turn to sound matter of factly, as he put on his motorcycle gloves.

There it was. Your breaking point. The anger rushing from your head through your whole body, had you up in no time, when you both heard a voice yelling his name. It sounded urgent. Maybe someone from the group had turned on police radio and they weren't far.

In just one or two seconds more, a whole lot of things happened. Inside your head at least. In milliseconds your mind raced through your memories and replayed moment after moment you had spent together with the group. Things had been nice at the beginning. Nice and simple. You all had had the same goal. Or so you had thought it seemed. Sure, none of you was a saint in all of this but was this group still what you initially had joined it for? Were you all still on the same page? Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor? The last couple of heists had ended pretty violently and you had done nothing to prevent or stop it. You were as guilty as them.

Was that still you? What had happened to the girl calling people out on their bullshit? Even physically fighting for people who needed help? Fighting school yard bullies, mobsters, men who couldn't keep their hands to themselves?

So much more rushed through your mind. Situation after situation that had you made feel more and more alienated and cut off from the others. Had you overthink and doubt everything you were doing. Into all of this you felt fury pouring in. Was that guy in front of you still that chill dude you'd hooked up with a few times? Right now he was a bit too chill for your taste. If you thought about it, you had never gotten to know any of them, really. Who was to say Greg hadn't been a complete ass before, already? But refusing to help someone who was dying? This was it.

“Piss off.”

“What?”

“You heard me right, Greg. Piss off”, you almost spit in his face. Another cold shrug of his shoulders and he was gone out the door. A couple of moments later, the sound of engines could be heard and every other second if faded away gradually.

Your eyes fell back to Bane's face. Okay... you knew where to get him, you only needed a plan to get him out of here. Preferably as fast as possible. The sirens of police cars could be heard far in the distance of the city. Turning your gaze from the man's eyes, yours scanned the room yet again. This time for something that could be of use but nothing seemed obviously helpful in your endeavours or trigger an idea.

Quickly your feet carried you out of the room, the building and to your motorcycle. Without thinking twice, your hands opened the hatch at the back of the small trailer that was connected to your bike and emptied all the stolen valuables on to the street. So, now you knew how to transport the masked man. Just not how to get him down here. His injury was probably way too severe for him to waste too much strength on carrying his own weight.

“Think, think, think!”, you said out loud and gave your forehead a few good pats. Again your feet started moving. It had always been like that since you had been a child. Either your feet knew where to lead you or walking helped you to get your brain into motion as well, ideas flooding in. This time they made you pace up and down next to your bike. And you were about to give up on their stimulating support this time and go back inside, when your feet made you trip over something and fall hands first down on the pavement. Looking back at what had caught your two fellas attention, your eyes spotted a rolled up rug. You knew you could always count on them.

This morning you had taken the rug from the house of a guy who had the walls of his home plastered with photos of himself. The only face you found was a movie poster from The Big Lebowski right above a cosy sofa with a rug in front of it that tied the room together. You had to take this thing with you just to simply fuck with this wanna be playboy. It had been more of a meta joke to take it but you never thought the sight of a rug could've made you feel inspiration, excitement and relieve. You quickly got up on your feet again.

Bane hadn't expected to see your face ever again when you had left, so he did what this cruel world had made him exceptionally good at. Surviving. He knew his chances were small, certainly non-existent, but if he'd be able to block out the pain, as his mask partly did for him and as he was trained to do in greater detail and intensity all his life, he might could get a few blocks away from here. There he would die in the darkness, hidden from the world, he was sure. Anything was better than being in the hands of the police. Getting thrown in a cage again.

As he was about to slip into some kind of trance, to disassociate himself from the pain in his body, he felt something from the outside pulling him back. A physical impulse. And a voice. Muffled. The voice started sounding clearer as he shifted his mind back to reality again, clinging to the pain to guide him back. “Bane!”, he opened his eyes to the sound of his name. And there it was again. The face of that girl.

And there he was again. You exhaled deeply with more than some relieve. The moment you had seen him with his eye lids closed, you had feared the worst. Feared? What kind of thought was that? And what was he to you anyway? A terrorist? Scratch that. Someone who was about to die infront of your eyes and you couldn't let that happen, could you? No matter who he was.

“I'm really sorry about this...”, you apologised in advance for the increase of pain he was going to feel from what you had in mind. You rolled out the rug next to him, fuzzy side down. This way it would function as a poor excuse of a stretcher you could drag across the sleek marble floor and thus be able to get someone his weight out of here. “You've got to help me a bit to get you onto this thing”, you explained. For a moment you could see the hesitation in his tense body, the suspicion in his eyes. The sirens of the police cars cut through the silence between the two of you. Definitely closer than before. You held out your hand to grab. “Please...”, a whisper. Almost pleading.

Heavy breathing grew heavier as Bane's hand grabbed yours. Luckily you weren't opposed to work heavy physically and nature had you made with a bit of counterweight anyway, so you weren't pulled down by his. Together you managed to get him on the rug, his agitated breathing was the only sign of pain you could read off of him, and you wasted no time to pull on it. It wasn't as easy as you had wished it to be, with all the rubble specking the way out. Tomorrow you'd definitely have sore muscles but that was a ridiculous price you were willing to pay to get both of you out of all of this. Alive.

The stairs were the short way but no option, so you played it safe and dragged him down the long wheelchair ramp at the outside. As soon as you reached the back of the trailer and hold out your hand another time, Bane's already held on to it. Either way he had realised how close the cops were now or... no, don't you think like that, Y/N! You scolded yourself while you helped the man who was easily a head taller than you and built like a brick wall into the vehicle. With a few quick movements you fastened the top cover to hide Bane from eventual encounters with the officials and other folk, and hopped onto your bike. A good and precise kick to the starter and you fled the scene.

______________________________________________

Taglist: @markusstraya

[e350tb]

Steven Universe: Ruby Stars - Chapter Ten

(Special thanks to @real-fakedoors for proofreading this!)

Sledgehammer

Two jet fighters roared over Wilmingmore.

Clancy frowned as he watched them soar through the dawn sky. Not having slept well, he decided to get some coffee before Bracknell woke up and went out for an early breakfast. He had just driven back into the factory parking lot when he'd seen the jets, silver streaks against the reddish-blue sky. They were headed due south, and he wondered if they were bound for Beach City. Perhaps they had cameras attached, and they'd be taking pictures for Colonel Bradshaw - he wouldn't be surprised if they were.

He was just about to head inside when he heard another growling roar, this one far closer to the ground. He turned to the parking lot entrance - a convoy of olive drab army trucks rumbled through the gate, pulling up in front of the factory. Shouted commands filled the air as soldiers piled out of the backs, assembling in the empty car park - behind them, a jeep rolled in, pulling up in front of the bewildered agent.

Colonel Bradshaw climbed out of the back, joined by Major King. The major handed the colonel a folder, which he promptly handed down to Clancy.

"What the hell is this?" demanded Clancy.

"The situation's changed, Agent Miller," Bradshaw replied, "We have orders from on high."

Clancy looked over the unassuming manila folder, emblazoned by the golden and navy accents of the Presidential Seal. That, he thought, certainly couldn't be good.

"The gem situation has become untenable," continued Bradshaw, "We've had the fire at the rail depot, an attack on a public mall, the worm destroying our chopper, the assault on Captain Clark..."

"Poor man," said Clancy, entirely unsympathetically.

"...not to mention the abductions and the loss of that Barriger kid," finished Bradshaw.

"Barriga, sir," corrected Major King.

"Yes, thank you, Ernest," nodded Bradshaw, "Point is, we need to bring this situation under control."

Clancy let the words sink in, his tongue soured with the bitterness of their meaning. No, this was not good. Not good at all.

That being said, Clancy had been in the game long enough to know when to argue outright and when to… persuade. Men like Bradshaw don’t take well to defiance, he had learned that the hard way. The only realistic option he had was to try to appeal to reason.

He cleared his throat and feigned something that sounded like deferential disagreement. "With all due respect, sir, the situation is under control. As I advised you, the Crystal Gems have it..."

"The Crystal Gems have hell, Agent Miller!" snapped Bradshaw, "How many more people are gonna be dragged into space while they have things under control, huh? How many more government artefacts are they gonna steal?!"

"We have no evidence that they stole that Ruby, Colonel Bradshaw," growled Clancy, struggling to keep the venom from his tone.

"Well then, who did, Agent?" demanded Bradshaw.

Clancy didn't reply.

"No more, Miller," snarled Bradshaw, his eyes narrowing, "I'm taking control of the situation. That folder details Operation Sledgehammer. I have a mandate to bring Beach City and the surrounding area under military law..."

Clancy opened the folder, reading the contents. His face paled - they couldn't seriously be thinking...

"...as well as to either capture the Crystal Gems," finished Bradshaw, "Or terminate them with extreme prejudice."

Steven laid out the rug and put down the picnic basket.

He and Connie were out in the forest, about a mile away from Beach City. It was a lovely morning - there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the sun shone brilliantly through the canopy of trees. While he continued to set up the picnic, Connie checked the weather on her phone. There didn't seem to be any change in the forecast - the sun would shine all day.

It was a good chance to finally scale things back for a day and focus on themselves.

Connie was just about to close her phone when the news app flashed quickly.

No-fly zone enacted over Southern Delmarva due to hijack threat, POTUS says.

As if on cue, the silence of the forest was broken by the dim roar of a fighter jet. Connie looked up, watching it roar through the deep blue of the sky and off into the distance. If she squinted, Connie could just about make out its shape - it had a pointed nose like a dart, and a pair of wings towards the back of the fuselage. It was long gone before she could make out any more details.

"Huh," she muttered.

"What is it?" asked Steven.

"Nothing," shrugged Connie, "Just saw a plane."

She sat down as Steven handed her a sandwich.

"So, things have been pretty hectic lately, haven't they?" she said.

"Mm-hmm," nodded Steven, taking a bite out of his sandwich.

He swallowed, clearing his mouth.

"I'm just glad Sadie's getting used to everything," he added, "But I hope she talks to her mom soon."

"I don't know," mused Connie, "I'd be pretty mad if it was me. I mean, it'd be like..."

She thought back to Stevonnie's dream on the jungle moon base and smirked.

"...if my mom actually was Yellow Diamond."

Steven chuckled.

"Wow, that'd be weird," he said.

"I know, right?" replied Connie, "Can you imagine my mom as an alien dictator?"

She picked up her phone and held it to her ear.

"No, Doctor West," she said in an impression of her mother, "If that patient isn't ready by the time I arrive I'm gonna have you shattered!" She lowered her phone. "Okay, Connie, I need you to be ready for tennis practice in an Earth hour." She raised the phone again. "Shattered, I tell you! Shattered!"

The two burst into laughter. Steven wiped a tear from his eye.

"Aw, I shouldn't laugh," he admitted, "But hey, funny's funny."

Suddenly, they heard a thump and a rustling from the bushes. Steven glanced over - he saw nothing.

"What was that?" he asked.

"Squirrel?" shrugged Connie.

Steven got up, walking carefully towards the bushes.

"It could be hurt," he said, "I just want to make sure it's okay."

Connie's phone beeped. She picked it up; the news app had flashed again.

Martial law instituted in Beach City and Crossroads areas. Army command advises all citizens to return home immediately.

"Uh... Steven?"

Steven wasn't listening. He leaned down next to a bush, carefully pushing the branches aside.

"It's okay, little fella," he said, "We'll make sure you're feeling better, and we'll give you a name! You can be called San..."

He pushed aside the last branches.

"...dy..."

Connie's eyes widened as she took in the tall, blue figure crouched behind the bush.

"...Lapis?"

Peedee watched warily as a column of army trucks rumbled onto the boardwalk. Each of them found a spot to pull up and deposit their cargoes of heavily armed soldiers. It was surreal - it was like one of those old films about America being invaded, but this time, the occupying force was their own army.

A jeep screeched to a halt outside Fish Stew Pizza. Nanefua and her bodyguards were already stepping out to meet the blue-uniformed officer that jumped out the back.

"Mayor Pizza," he said officiously, "Major Ernest King, U.S. Army Air Force. On behalf of the Gem Task Force, I've been asked to inform you that we are taking over the running of this town, effective immediately."

"Under whose authority?" demanded Nanefua.

"Under the authority of the President of the United States," replied Major King, "Furthermore, Colonel Bradshaw would like to brief you immediately regarding the situation with the Crystal Gems. Please be present in your office in half an hour."

He saluted crisply and climbed back into the jeep. It sped away before Nanefua could reply.

The Mayor shook her head and crossed her arms.

"Rude," she muttered before walking back towards the restaurant.

Peedee furrowed his brow and turned on the radio. Perhaps that would explain what was going on.

"...am Lieutenant-Colonel Bradshaw," a voice said, his voice light and slightly Southern, "Gem Task Force, United States Army. As of this morning, the townships of Beach City, Ocean Town, Charm City and Crossroads are being placed under martial law under the orders of the President. I assure you that this is being done in a humane and professional manner."

An ear-splitting crash filled the air. Peedee jumped and looked up the boardwalk.

A tank had sunk turret-first into the boardwalk, which had splintered under its weight. The commander was standing in the hatch, looking sheepishly from left to right.

"Uh... nothin' to see here, folks," he said.

Greg had just finished washing down a car when they came.

Two armoured vehicles screamed around the corner. Greg stepped back in shock as the lead vehicle rolled on top of the car, crushing it beneath the treads. The commander leaned out the hatch, looking at the wreckage - he grinned mischievously.

"Ha! Nice," he said.

"Nice?! That was somebody's car!" exclaimed Greg.

"Yeah, well, you got bigger problems, Mac," shrugged the commander.

The rear hatches of both vehicles opened and a squad of soldiers emerged. Boots clicking loudly on the pavement, they swiftly took positions around Greg, encircling him on all sides. He swallowed - everywhere he looked, he could see somebody pointing a gun at him.

"Uh... I think you've got the wrong guy?" he said nervously.

"Greg Universe?" replied the commander.

"Uh..."

"Yeah, thought so," nodded the commander, "You're under arrest by order of Colonel Bradshaw and the Gem Task Force."

"But... why?!" exclaimed Greg, "What have I done?!"

"Heck if I know, Mac," grunted the commander, "But I hear the Colonel wants you pretty bad."

He smirked unpleasantly.

"Unless you don't wanna come?"

Slowly, Greg put his hands behind his head.

"Yeah, okay, I-I'll come quietly..."

Sadie watched from the top of the lighthouse as the army vehicles rolled into and around Beach City. She clutched the rail with shaking hands, listening to the radio.

"With your help, we will see the Crystal Gems apprehended safely. Remember, the army is here to help. Thank you."

The radio switched off, replaced by the tones of the Emergency Warning System. Jenny switched it off and joined her next to the rail.

It had supposed to be an easy day. The band had met at the lighthouse to talk about their next song (Sadie was still pretty into the werewolf idea), and while that meant trying not to trip over Ronaldo and ignoring his 'True Werewolf Factoids', the atmosphere in the old building was lovely. The sun was shining high in the sky, and looking over Beach City in the brilliant sunlight was quiet relaxing.

At least it had been, until the tanks rolled in.

Sadie could see them rolling across the beach, cutting off access to the Temple. They seemed to be stopping a few hundred metres away from the Temple itself - Sadie wondered if they were waiting for the Crystal Gems to surrender. Not very likely, she thought.

"Man, this is surreal," muttered Jenny, watching a helicopter land in the town square.

Sadie nodded.

"Why now, though?" asked Jenny, "The Gems have been here since, like, forever. If they'd wanted to start something, they would've done it years ago. Where were they when that big green hand showed up and we had to evacuate? That at least would have made sense."

"Something must've changed," mused Sadie.

She thought back to the wrecked helicopter in the Beta Kindergarten. Surely that couldn't have been it? It had only been one helicopter, and they'd saved the crew, hadn't they?

Distantly, she heard loud boots on the stairwell. She turned to the window, and moments later a few soldiers entered the lantern room. She glanced to Jenny - they nodded and headed back in.

The leader of the soldiers, a man in a blue uniform, was talking politely but firmly to Buck, Sour Cream and Ronaldo.

"...this lighthouse has been appropriated for use by the military as an observation post," he was saying, "You will need to vacate the premises."

"But I live here!" exclaimed Ronaldo.

"We can talk about compensation when the crisis is over," replied the officer, "But you'll need to leave. We need this building for use against the Crystal Gems."

"Use against the Crystal Gems?"

Ronaldo crossed his arms.

"I'll have you know that I used to be a Crystal Gem," he declared.

The officer and his troops exchanged glances.

Five minutes later, the officer shoved a handcuffed Ronaldo into the back of his jeep. He turned and nodded to the other kids.

"Sorry for the disruption, kids," he said.

He climbed into the jeep and drove away.

"Dang," said Buck.

"So," asked Sour Cream, "What do we do now? I mean, we can go to my place, but I kinda don't think I'm up for anymore song-writing..."

"We can go check in with Nana," suggested Jenny, "She's the mayor now, so she'll know what's happening, right?"

"Unless she's been arrested too," said Sadie darkly.

"I still don't get why they're doing this now," said Jenny, scratching her chin, "It just doesn't make any sense..."

Sadie thought back. She remembered the Delmarva Centre and the incident with the corrupted Quartz...

"OSS! Stay back!"

A man stepped through the dust, carrying a crowbar. Sadie's eyes widened.

It was Clancy Miller.

Sadie narrowed her eyes.

"Clancy," she growled.

"This is Captain Wayne Clark of the Gem Task Force!"

Pearl rolled her eyes.

She, Garnet, Amethyst and Peridot watched as the loud, angry captain bellowed into his microphone. He certainly seemed confident, which might have had something to do with the squads of troops that surrounded the Beach House, backed up by a half-dozen tanks. She wondered if they actually intended to attack the Temple.

"We have you surrounded on all sides!" the Captain thundered, "If you do not come out by sundown and surrender yourselves to our custody, we will be forced to assault your base with extreme force. I repeat, you have until sundown to comply!"

"What does he think he is, a cowboy or something?" asked Amethyst.

"He looks nothing like a cow," added Peridot dismissively.

"He's definitely confident." Pearl turned to Garnet, frowning. "Do they have a chance?"

Garnet shook her head.

"Not in a direct battle," she replied, "None of their weapons could penetrate the Temple door. We wouldn't even have to fight them."

"I get the sense there's a 'but' coming up, G," said Amethyst.

Garnet nodded.

"They seem willing to use our allies to get to us," she said flatly. "The humans in town. Greg. Connie..."

Pearl's hands flew to her lips, covering the tiny gasp that escaped her lips.

"Steven," she whispered.

Garnet only nodded, looking particularly severe as she gazed out of the window.

Beside them, Amethyst fidgeted uncomfortably. "I-I mean, they wouldn't actually do anything to the humans, right Garnet? They're supposed to protect them - like Greg and Connie are both humans! They couldn't just attack them, right? And Steven, too..."

"Steven isn't exactly human," Peridot corrected, though her usually poindexter attitude seemed awfully bitter.

Pearl looked about ready to draw swords, so Garnet raised a hand to stay their worries.

"There's a number of possibilities... I can't know for certain how this will play out. But we need to plan."

"There's a gem who wants to escape Homeworld," said Lapis, "I'm trying to help her."

Lapis' return had been met with laughter and hugs from Steven, which was understandable - but Connie had been less ecstatic. It seemed strange to her - Lapis had left because she was afraid of the Diamonds returning. Why, then, would she come back? And why would she recommend another gem come here? It just seemed too good to be true.

That having been said, it'd didn't look like Lapis was lying. Connie had learned the facial tics that people sometimes made when they weren't telling the truth, and Lapis had none of those; and there certainly wasn't any sign that she was brainwashed or anything. Still, something about this made her feel uneasy.

"Lapis, that's so nice of you!" exclaimed Steven, grinning broadly, "I'm sure the Gems would be thrilled to have her!"

Lapis smiled.

"I hope so," she replied, "I mean, they might not be glad to have me, after everything that's happened..."

"Water under the bridge," chuckled Steven, "You get it? Water? Because... because you do water stuff?"

Lapis laughed.

"No," she said.

"Well, I'll explain it to you one day," shrugged Steven. “C’mon, we’ve got to go back to the Temple right now! Peridot is there, and she’ll be so --”

“No!” Lapis flinched away like Steven had hit her. “N-no, I can’t face her. Not… not yet. We should help this gem first. She stole a ship and is just waiting for a signal to come down to the surface… I didn’t know where might be a good place?”

Connie tapped her chin, thoughtful. "Well, away from the army, at any rate."

She winced as she heard another fighter jet scream overhead.

"How about the warehouse?" asked Steven, "They probably won't look there, right? The only things there are Mr. Smiley's stash of old wrestling magazines!"

Connie nodded.

"That might work," she agreed, "Okay, let's go set it up for... Lapis, who was this gem again?"

"Seraphinite," replied Lapis.

Greg winced as the soldiers shoved him roughly to the office floor. He looked to his left, and found himself next to Doug and Priyanka - he swallowed and grinned nervously at them. Thankfully, they seemed more focused on being angry at the military officers than being angry at him.

"Major King's bringing the last one up now," one of the soldiers said.

"Good," nodded Bradshaw.

He was sitting behind the Mayor's desk, Clancy Miller and Philbert Bracknell behind him. The former looked as though his temper was threatening to burst through the dam of self-control - Bracknell, for his part, just looked confused. In front of them, Nanefua paced angrily, giving Bradshaw a piece of her mind.

"You have no right to detain my townsfolk," she snapped, "They haven't done anything wrong!"

"That's for me to decide, madam," replied Bradshaw, "I have orders to neutralise all threats. Other countries would've handled this in a far more violent fashion, and..."

"That doesn't make you right!" growled Nanefua.

The door opened. Major King marched into the room and pushed Ronaldo onto the ground next to Greg - for his part, he seemed to be slightly less forceful than the other soldiers. Slightly.

"Ronaldo?" quizzed Greg.

"I'm a person of interest!" said Ronaldo excitedly.

"Alright," said Bradshaw, standing up, "Douglas and Priyanka Maheswaran, Gregory Universe née DeMayo, and Ronaldo Fryman alias 'Bloodstone...'"

Ronaldo beamed.

"...you are charged with association with treasonous alien elements," he continued, "You will detained until..."

"Warrant," snapped Doug.

"I beg your pardon?" asked Bradshaw.

"Warrant," Doug repeated, "Where is it?"

"My warrant," snapped Bradshaw, "Is the power vested in me by the President of the United States. My warrant is my oath to the people, who I am sworn to protect."

He turned to King.

"Where are their kids, anyway?" he demanded.

"If you touch a hair on Connie's head," thundered Priyanka, leaning forward, "I swear..."

"...you'll go to prison for assaulting an officer," grunted Bradshaw.

"We couldn't find them, sir," replied King, "I've got men looking for them now. I've ordered them to use discretion to prevent..."

"Discretion?" snapped Bradshaw, "Does this look like the time for discretion?"

"...they're kids, sir," said King.

"They're a national security threat," replied Bradshaw, "I understand it's not easy, but I need Steven and Candy..."

"Connie, sir."

"Thank you, Ernest - Steven and Connie in custody."

Major King swallowed.

"Yes sir," he said, "I'll... I'll handle it myself, sir."

"See that you do."

King saluted and left the room.

"Now, we have a conundrum," said Bradshaw, scratching his chin, "We got a couple of Crystal Gems who aren't coming out of their hole. We need to coax them."

He turned to Greg and grinned.

"I think I know just how to do that," he continued, "Bracknell, take the other three to the town square - I'm sending them to Fort Raleigh for detainment, you're gonna make sure they make it intact."

Bracknell turned to Clancy, who nodded.

"Don't rock the boat, Bracknell," he whispered, "I'll sort this out as soon as I can."

Bracknell swallowed. A couple of soldiers barged into the room, pulling Priyanka and Doug to their feet. Greg watched as they were dragged out - as they left, he just about saw Priyanka mouth something to him.

It's not your fault.

He sighed in relief as Bracknell escorted Ronaldo out of the office. Nanefua shot the agent a dirty look as he left.

"And where," she demanded, "Is Fort Raleigh?"

"West," replied Bradshaw, "Clancy, grab Mr. Universe. We're going down to the beach."

Clancy furrowed his brow.

"The beach?" he replied incredulously, "You're not seriously thinking of..."

"If it gets 'em out, Miller, then yes."

"Sir, that breaks just about every protocol in the book!" exclaimed Clancy, "You can't..."

"What the President doesn't know, won't hurt him," replied Bradshaw.

Watching the malicious smirk play at the Colonel’s lips, Greg felt his stomach drop.

Sadie marched up the street, the Cool Kids struggling to keep up as she purposefully made her way to Barb's house. Her face was set into a deep scowl. They encountered Onion going the other way - he gulped when he saw Sadie and quickly crossed the road.

She opened the fence and marched to the front door. She knocked three times, with a lot more force than was probably necessary.

The door opened.

"Sadie?" Barb gasped, "You came back?"

"I need to talk to Clancy," replied Sadie, her fists clenched, "You have his number. I'm calling him... and then I need to go again."

She sighed, calming down slightly.

"I'm sorry, I just... I'm still not ready to talk."

There was a long silence as the Cool Kids caught up.

"Uh... apart from that, though, how's it going, Ms. Miller?" asked Sour Cream.

Clancy sat in his car, waiting for the soldiers to finish bundling a handcuffed Greg into the back of the Colonel's jeep. It wasn't so much that Greg was struggling - they'd blindfolded him, and he couldn't find his way into the car. The soldiers were trying and failing to direct him, and their sergeant's face was starting to look something like a swollen plum as he watched his troops fumble. It'd have been funny if the situation wasn't so serious.

His phone rang. Clancy grit his teeth and turned on the bluetooth speaker - now simply wasn't the time.

"Agent Clancy Miller?"

"What the hell is the army doing here?!"

Clancy winced. That was Sadie's voice.

"Sadie, uh, this-this isn't the time, I-I'm very busy..."

"Yeah, I noticed. Why are they going after the gems? What did you tell them?!"

"I told them to leave it well enough alone!" snapped Clancy, "It's not my fault they can't listen to their own advisors!"

The Colonel jumped into the jeep and it started. Clancy grunted, driving along behind him.

"Look, this is a really bad time," he said, "I'll get them out of here, but I need time..."

"What, you're just gonna give them the Crystal Gems?" demanded Sadie.

"They can't take 'em in a straight fight," replied Clancy, "You know..."

"So you'll just let other people get hurt! Just like you always do!"

Clancy winced.

"I'm working on it," he replied, "I... it's hard, okay! Talking to Bradshaw's like talking to a brick wall, and if I push too hard, he might... he might figure out I'm covering for you."

There was no reply, so he continued.

"They already think I know where the ruby is," he continued, "One step out of line and they could find me out. They could find you out! I-I want to help people, I want to stop them for from getting the Gems, but... but I won't do anything that leads them to you."

He sighed.

"I don't know if I can save everyone," he finished, "But I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I couldn't save you. I've done enough to hurt your family."

He pulled up at the end of the road, just in front of the slope up to the lighthouse.

"Look, I have to go," he said, "Just... lay low until this is finished, okay? I'll work it out."

"Clancy, you... I can't..."

He looked up. Bradshaw had climbed out of the jeep and was walking towards him.

"Sadie, I gotta hang up," he said, "I..."

Bradshaw leaned against the window. He was grinning now, like a shark who had just cornered his prey. Clancy furrowed his brow - what was he so happy about?

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a phone, pressing a button on it and pulling it to his ear.

"You didn't seriously think we wouldn't have bugged your phone, did you Clancy?"

"So, Sadie Miller."

Sadie's shivered as she listened to the voice on the other end of the line. It maintained the facade of military protocol, but there was a hint of grim, sneering satisfaction. She glanced over to her mother on the other side of the kitchen table - her face was set in a frown.

"I imagine you have my ruby," he said.

"It isn't yours," replied Sadie, trying hard not to sound as nervous as she was.

"Oh, but it is, Ms. Miller, and you're gonna deliver it to me," replied Bradshaw, "Or Clancy here is going to be in a bit of trouble..."

Faintly, Sadie could hear a dull thud and a cry of pain.

"And what if I can't?" asked Sadie.

Barb gritted her teeth and mouthed a reply. Don't tell them.

"Oh, I believe you can," said Bradshaw, "In fact, I believe you can take that ruby wherever you want. Ain't that right, 1GK?"

Sadie's blood ran cold.

"How long have you known?"

"I've suspected since the fire at the depot," explained Bradshaw, "But I knew after you drew your weapon in a public mall at Wilmingmore... oh come on, Clancy, you're a secret agent, you wouldn't tell me if you suspected me of something..."

Sadie swallowed.

"So what happens to me?" she asked, "If I give myself up?"

There was a long pause.

"I'm not at liberty to say."

Sadie closed her eyes and nodded.

"If I come," she said, "You leave the Crystal Gems alone. You let Clancy and everyone else you've kidnapped go. You leave Beach City and never come back. Got it?"

"Sadie, no!" exclaimed Barb.

"...deal. Half-an-hour, outside the Temple. Come alone."

The Colonel chuckled.

"I look forward to making your acquaintance."

The line went dead. Sadie collapsed into her chair, rubbing her forehead.

"Sadie!" exclaimed Barb, "You can't give yourself up! I'm not letting you..."

"Mom."

Sadie stood up.

"I've just had dumbest idea in history," she said, "And it's really dangerous, and I'm probably gonna have to wing most of this, because I haven't thought it through..."

She took a deep breath and offered Barb a shaky smile.

"...and I'm gonna need your help."

Barb stared for a just a moment, as if processing what Sadie had said. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a smile.

"That's my girl," she said.

Lapis paced back and forth in the warehouse, occasionally looking up into the afternoon sky. Connie watched her dubiously - she knew Steven trusted her completely, but she couldn't help but feel that something was distinctly off about her behaviour.

Quite suddenly, they heard a rustling outside the warehouse. All eyes fell on the door, which started to groan ominously.

"What's going on?" asked Steven, "Who is that?"

The door flew open with a loud crash. A squad of about six soldiers, led by a man in a blue uniform, burst into the warehouse, weapons drawn. The blue uniformed man advanced on the three, shouting a warning.

"My name is Major Ernest King!" he shouted, "I have orders to take Steven Universe and Connie Maheswaran into custody. Do not resist!"

"What?!" exclaimed Steven, "But we're innocent!"

"Where the heck is your warrant?!" demanded Connie.

Lapis narrowed her eyes.

"No," she said, "You can't be allowed to ruin this."

"This is a military matter, ma'am!" snapped King, "And... wait, you're a gem..."

Lapis raised her arms. The sea by the warehouse began to rise into the air, like a gigantic tsunami in slow motion. The soldiers looked up in horror as the foamy water twisted and formed into a giant fist, ready to smash down upon them; Connie's eyes widened as she realised that she and Steven were also in its shadow.

"Lapis, no, don't hurt them!" shouted Steven, running up to his friend.

Lapis turned to him, her face twisted into a dark scowl. For the briefest moment, Connie swore she saw a speck of white in her pupils.

"I'm sorry, Rose Quartz," she snarled, "But I won't allow anything to stop Seraphinite."

A sonic boom filled the air, shattering windows for about a mile around. Connie would have given it a lot more thought, except for the fact that it was swiftly followed by a much closer boom as the fist of water came down. She heard shouts and scream, a few scattered shots rang out, and then she was consumed by water. For a minute, she struggled desperately for breath, thrashing in the endless blue void.

Then, mercifully, she fell into darkness.

[gokinjeespot]

off the rack #1156

Monday, March 20, 2017

 It's the first day of spring but you would still think it's the dead of winter here in Ottawa. I hear it snowed in Vancouver recently too. I don't consider spring starting until I can't see anymore snow on the ground around our neighbourhood. I figure that will be the middle of April this year. I've already seen a robin at our house though. We put up a bird feeder last fall and it attracts many birds. Mostly house sparrows but we see finches, juncos, nuthatches, chickadee-dee-dees and our favourites the cardinals and woodpeckers. The male cardinals are bright red-orange and the females are a mocha coffee colour. We have had downy, hairy and pileated woodpeckers come and feed. Watching the birds outside our window is like watching fish swim around an aquarium. Very calming. Until the undesirables show up. Starlings and squirrels snark up a lot of feed and scare away the little birdies. The squirrels have gotten so brazen now that I have to go outside to shoo them off the feeder. I used to be able to do that just by banging on the window. Stupid squirrels.

 We lost one of the greatest comic book artists on March 18 when Bernie Wrightson succumbed to cancer and passed away. I have always been a bigger fan of the art side of our hobby and Bernie's art gave me goosebumps. His pen and ink work was stunning. Rest in peace Mr. Wrightson.

 Punisher #10 - Becky Cloonan (writer) Matt Horak (art) Frank Martin with Guru-eFX (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). I'm disappointed in Matt. This whole issue takes place at a sea port in Newfoundland and he didn't put one Canadian flag in any of the panels. Even a little one would have been nice. It looks like another dire situation for Frank but the bad guys screwed themselves. You'll see the obvious giveaway, but maybe I'm wrong.

 Uncanny Avengers #21 - Gerry Duggan (writer) Kevin Libranda (art) Dono Sanchez Almara with Protobunker (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). If there's a fill-in artist who makes me just as happy to read this book as when regular artist Pepe Larraz draws it, then it's Kevin Libranda. I liked how Deadpool found a way to defeat the Red Skull's Professor X powers. I wonder if they're going to bring back old Charles.

 Batman #19 - Tom King (writer) David Finch (pencils) Danny Miki, Trevor Scott & Sandra Hope (inks) Jordie Bellaire (colours) Deron Bennett (letters). The art in this issue is pretty awesome. Part 4 of "I Am Bane" has the big bad guy wading through Batman's rogues gallery one by one. Almost every Bat villain you can think of get's his licks in. odd that there are no women. I was also bothered by the fact that they're all loose inside Arkham asylum. How are they going to be get back in custody? The last page leads into the inevitable final battle between Bane and Batman and I want to see who wins. Like I couldn't guess.

 American Gods #1 - Neil Gaiman (writer) P. Craig Russell (script & layouts) Scott Hampton (art) Rick Parker (letters). I started a list of books I want to read after the Snail closed because I found myself with a lot of extra time. American Gods by Neil Gaiman is on that list. I've been told what the premise of the book is so I had a bit of background going into reading this first issue of the comic book adaptation. Reading the comic book is going to enhance my reading of the novel when I get around to it because I will visualize Scott's depictions of the characters in my head and they are very nice ones. The back-up story "Somewhere in America" by P. Craig Russell (script & art) and Lovern Kindzierski (colours) was a hot piece of erotica about unsafe sex. This gets added to my "must read" list.

 Totally Awesome Hulk #17 - Greg Pak (writer) Mahmud Asrar (art) Nolan Woodard (colours) Cory Petit (letters). This hasn't been a solo book for the last few issues with Amadeus hanging out with his friends but I am still enjoying it. This issue is a good place to start as the team has to figure out a way to save themselves and some civilians from being eaten by aliens. You could call these guys the Asian Avengers because what happens in this issue gives them something to avenge. If you jump on here you won't want to jump off until you read the next issue.

 Batwoman #1 - Marguerite Bennett & James Tynion IV (writers) Steve Epting (art) Jeromy Cox (colours) Deron Bennett (letters). Kate chases after a mystery woman from her past after dealing with a terrorist in Istanbul. I like how she's teamed up with Julia Pennyworth.

 Kill or be Killed #7 - Ed Brubaker (writer) Sean Phillips (art) Elizabeth Breitweiser (colours). This issue features Dylan's ex-girlfriend Kira, now with purple hair instead of red. I'm glad she's still hanging around because boy does she have problems. We start off during a session with her therapist and get a lot of background. I love this kind of stuff because it makes the characters more engaging. Kira might need an emergency session after she decides to do something stupid at Dylan's place.

 Monsters Unleashed #5 - Cullen Bunn (writer) Adam Kubert (art) David Curiel & Michael Garland (colours) VC's Travis Lanham (letters). Okay, Kid Kaiju comes through to save the world from the Leviathon Mother, showing up all the Marvel super heroes. I guess that's why he's getting his own book. Look for it to hit the racks on April 19. Unless it's drawn by an artist that I really like I will take a pass. The Kid's creations are more suited to fans of action figures or Saturday morning cartoons than an old coot like me.

 Super Sons #2 - Peter J. Tomasi (writer) Jorge Jimenez (art) Alejandro Sanchez (colours) Rob Leigh (letters). This is great. I don't know why but I love really well written comics about young super heroes like this and Champions. Maybe it's because I can't let go of being a kid. Damian and Jonathan have to deal with Super Lex in order to get a lead on Kid Amazo, the very bad boy they're after. Everything doesn't go smoothly and then, uh-oh, their dads find out about what they're doing. I can't wait to see what happens next.

 Wild Storm #2 - Warren Ellis (writer) John Davis-Hunt (art) Steve Buccellato (colours) Simon Bowland (letters). This 24 issue series is very ambitious and there are a lot of players involved. If I was a new reader I would be wondering who are these people? Some people work for International Operations (IO) and some people work for Halo. The two organisations don't like each other and they're both after Angela Spica, the Engineer. I hope that helps with getting into this story. One of my favourite things from the old series was the Door which could transport people to different places. I think we're introduced to a new Door this issue and she's a lot better looking than Lockjaw.

 Ms. Marvel #16 - G. Willow Wilson (writer) Takeshi Miyazawa (art) Ian Herring (colours) VC's Joe Caramagna (letters). I like this story about a malevolent computer virus and it looks like Kamala can't defeat it. That is until she gets a clue from her old pal Bruno. I can't wait to find out how Doc.x gets deleted.

 Superman #19 - Peter J. Tomasi & Patrick Gleason (writers) Patrick Gleason (pencils) Mick Gray (inks) John Kalisz (colours) Rob Leigh (letters). Part 3 of "Superman Reborn" looks like it might resurrect the pre-New 52 Lois and Clark. I hope not. That would confuse me to no end and then I would get annoyed and stop reading these amazing Superman books. Patrick draws the creepiest Mr. Mxyzptlk ever. I wonder if they're going to do the saying the imp's name backwards thing?

 Guardians of the Galaxy #18 - Brian Michael Bendis (writer) Valerio Schiti (art) Richard Isanove (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). I love these issues featuring one team member. Angela's up this time around and it's a beautifully drawn fight scene between her and some alien bounty hunter. The issue ends with a major threat heading for Earth. It starts with Th and rhymes with anus.

 Spider-Man #14 - Brian Michael Bendis (writer) Sara Pichelli (art) Justin Ponsor (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). Nothing serious between Miles and Gwen despite what the cover shows. This is one of those issues that annoy Bendis detractors because nothing really happens. The heroes hop from one dimension to another and each wind up in different ones by the end of this issue. I can easily forgive because of Sara's art.

 Mighty Thor #17 - Jason Aaron (writer) Russell Dauterman (art) Matthew Wilson (colours) VC's Joe Sabino (letters). The gods of Asgard and the Imperial Guard of the Shi'Ar finally come to blows in part 3 of "The Asgard/Shi'Ar War". Meanwhile Thor can't seem to win much in the challenge of the gads against the Shi'Ar gods Sharra and K'ythri. Mjolnir is sure getting a workout though. This book is not only chock full of action but it's visually stunning as well.

 Amazing Spider-Man #25 - Dan Slott (writer) Stuart Immonen (pencils) Wade von Grawbadger (inks) Marte Gracia (colours) VC's Joe Caramagna (letters). I wish you didn't have to pay $9.99 US for this one issue starting off "The Osborn Identity" story. That's a bit much for one comic book don't you think? Sure you get a bunch of back-up stories but none of those really matter to the main story. You do get 40 pages of Stuart and Wade goodness though, so why couldn't they have printed just that and charged $4.99 US? As you can probably tell Norman Osborn is back so the Green Goblin can't be far behind. I did like the team-up with Mockingbird with a hint of Peter and Bobbi possibly becoming more than friends. Here are the other stories that pad this issue. A fight with Clash by Christos Gage (writer) Todd Nauck (art) Rachelle Rosenberg (colours) VC's Travis Lanham (letters) which has the old "it's not what you think" twist at the end. A silly Tsum-Tsum story for the younger readers by Jacob Chabot (writer) Ray-Anthony Height (pencils) Walden Wong (inks) Jim Campbell (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). Thank Thor that was a blessedly short 6 pages. A Parker Industries mishap at their Shanghai facility by James Asmus (writer) Tana Ford (art) Andres Mossa (colours) VC's Travis Lanham (letters). A young Spider-Man story about a boy and his dog by Hannah Blumenreich (writer & pencils) Jordan Gibson (inks) Jordie Bellaire (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). Some Aunt May gags by Cale Atkinson which were even sillier than the Tsum-Tsum story. And finally to ease the pain of having to buy an overpriced comic book, the return of another Spider-Man nemesis. One thing that "The Clone Conspiracy" did was bring back Otto Octavius, Doc Ock. He now has a youthful body thanks to Miles Warren's cloning process. So meet The Superior Octopus by Dan Slott (writer) Giuseppe Camuncoli (pencils) Cam Smith (inks) Jason Keith (colours) VC's Joe Caramagna (letters). He's bad-ass now plus he's got Hydra backing. Here's a prediction: Somewhere in the future Peter and Norman have to team up to fight Otto and Hydra.

 Archie #18 - Mark Waid (writer) Pete Woods (art & colours) Jack Morelli (letters). This issue proves that love is blind. Archie and Veronica have nothing in common and should not be together. Betty and Dilton Doiley are more compatible. I wish I was Dilton Doiley.