#or is losing more fragments of herself each time she comes back - how chipped is her soul?

[mindflare]

THE [FIRST] DEATH OF JEAN GREY —— UNCANNY X-MEN #137.

[amonrawya]

The Greatest Gift of All

(Inspired by^ for the people who asked :D hope it was worth the wait!)

*

Long before the war, before Captain America or the Winter Soldier, there was simply Bucky and Steve. At least, that's what history says. But they missed out one very important person, a girl called Y/N.

Women in those times often found themselves with little opportunity, and only two easily attainable pathways in life: wife and mother. But Y/N carved out a life for herself that defied all expectations, and it all started in Brooklyn.

She dived headlong into scuffles, usually next to Bucky in defence of Steve. Regardless of the opponent, Y/N stood by them both, and often held her own quite impressively.

Her dress style borrowed from more masculine cuts, and Y/N was never seen without her cap. A lot of people had a problem with this, but she shut them up fairly swiftly.

Everything about this girl drew Bucky in, a battle he fought with little effort. They reveled in each other, flaunting their love at every opportunity. More than a few were jealous that the rough and tumble girl got the best looking boy in town. 

In a way, before even coming of age, they started an adult life together. The three of them moved into a flat. Y/N and Bucky took hard labour jobs, or anything they could get. They had little room to be picky. 

Both managed to hook steady summer jobs at the local docks. They used most of their money to keep a roof over their heads, buy food, and pay for Steve's medical needs. He attended art school, and sold his work every now and then; but physically, he was in no condition to work.

The war appeared on the horizon, just as they started to pull themselves an inch above the poverty line. Y/N saw it coming, the inevitable. She treasured every second they spent together, and dreaded the day when the draft came.

A lot of the older women she worked with were disrespectful, looking down on her pre-marital relationship with Bucky. They claimed she couldn't possibly understand their grief, despite the fact Y/N had seen Bucky off at the docks that very morning. 

In truth, they already planned on being married, but at the time, they simply didn't have the funds. Bucky promised, once the war ended, that ring would be on her finger.

Except, he never came home. Not properly. The person Hydra gave back to Y/N was damaged and jaded, angry at the world, angrier than she ever saw. But still, they loved each other. Though she never forgave them for stealing away his innocence, for trying to snuff out the light in his soul. A part of him would always belong to them, and she hated it.

Refusing to stay home while they risked their lives, never knowing, Y/N trained as an army nurse, working specially with the Howling Commandos unit.

Then one day, she went out to welcome them back from a mission. Every face looked devastated, but none more so than Steve. His eyes, red-raw and streaming, seemed incapable of rising from the ground. At first, the realisation didn't process, the idea simply incomprehensible. He promised.

Dugan was the one to finally break through and catch Y/N as she fell, holding her as the tears poured. Once he shook off his daze, Steve took his place, sharing in her grief.

Her world fell apart so quickly, with no warning and no mercy. Their commanders celebrated the capture of Arnim Zola, while Y/N and Steve sat, staring at an empty place at their side.

Everyone mourned Bucky, and swiftly after, began to mourn Y/N, too. The loss took a part of her...the sparkle, the happiness, the laugh that lit up her face. It all vanished. She worked hard, looked after them all, but only Steve was able to make her smile. Even then, it looked pained.

So when Steve went down with the plane, the very last shred of Y/N died with him. No tears left her eyes, no screams ripped up her throat. A cold numbness took over, freezing the woman from the inside out. 

V-Day came and went. The Commandos stood and drank to their lost comrades, and Dugan silently drank another...for the loss of a bright, fiery girl who had virtually nothing to lose, and still lost everything.

She spent her days as a robot, doing nothing but going through the motions of badly imitating life. The flat was empty and quiet, yet somehow, bursting with the ghosts of her loved ones. Nightmares plagued her, terrible images of Bucky's body, forever trapped in a freezing hell, nothing but food for the birds. And Steve, his body...was it cast adrift in the ocean? Or destroyed, burnt to ash in the belly of a metal beast. 

They were simple folk before the war turned them into soldiers, into weapons. Before symbols and flags stole away their names, driving them to sacrifice their lives for a greater cause.

Y/N knew their fight against Hydra was important...knew the honour behind their sacrifice. But when it's you left sitting at an empty dinner table, it's much easier to be angry and bitter.

She never married, never settled, bouncing around countries working as an army nurse. The Commandos slowly died around her, each one fading to grey as the curtain drew the show to a close. Each death, each funeral ripped open her wounds, bigger and deeper each time. Until eventually, Y/N let the blood flow freely.

Or at least, that's what would have happened. But one choice, one decision, made by a boy she thought dead in the far future, changed it all.

*

Bucky Barnes struggled to find himself again. His memories were mostly all returned, if a bit hazy and fragmented. He had Steve there to right any wrong recollections, and connect with on their shared experiences. But something always seemed to be missing, a piece of the jigsaw that hadn't been found.

He remembered Y/N. He remembered her clearer than anything. She was glowing like honey in the sun when Bucky closed his eyes and brought her back to mind.

Face covered in muck, hair tousled and streaked with grease from the boats, soot on the very tip of her nose and a cap perched jauntily on her head; wearing the deepest expression of concentration as she aimed a hanful of rotten fish guts at the sleezy Connell boy from Fifth, who decided his opinion on her backside mattered. The image shone crystal clear. Her laughter, rolling out from between curved lips, beautiful and full of mischief. 

It never failed to make him smile. Or cry. Or sometimes, both. He missed Y/N than he thought possible for a human being. 

Bucky often wondered about her life, whether she went on to marry, or maybe even have children. Was she happy? Did she bury him and move on? If they met today, would Y/N even recognise the man he was now? 

More importantly, in his mind, something he both feared and longed to know: would she still love him?

Unbeknownst to Bucky, Steve saw all this. Understood, to a degree, his pain. But he and Peggy never got the chance to bond so strongly. He knew Bucky needed him, but Steve also knew he needed Y/N more.

So once his goodbyes were said, he looked one last time at Bucky, and smiled beneath his suit as he vanished into time.

*

The living room looked exactly the same as he remembered. Bucky's coat, slung over the back of the chair, his sketchbooks strewn around the desk. Every rip and chip. His heart swelled with nostalgia, and pain, thinking of the life they were supposed to have.

What must have been in their heads...running off to fight, so eager to throw everything away. And who was left to stare at empty beds and eat breakfast alone every morning? Y/N.

His chest constricted, hearing the keys in the door, the lock rattling three times before letting her in. His nerve faltered for the briefest second, wondering if he was ready to see her again.

"Who the hell are you?!"

Time's up.

Slowly, he turned, and watched as Y/N's eyes widened, all the bags in her hands falling to the floor with a crash.

"...Stevie?" The name came out as a whisper, nearly inaudible.

He grinned, laughing as tears stung his eyes. "Hey, spitfire. Long time no see."

"Steve!" She launched herself at him, arms wrapping around his neck and clinging on for dear life. 

Catching her by the waist, he swung Y/N around, burying his face in her hair. They held onto one another as if they might vanish if they let go. But after a minute, Steve gently pushed her back.

"How? How are you here? What are you wearing? I don't understand, Steve, they said you died! Your plane went down in the ocean," she stammered, hand on his forearm with a grip like a vice.

"I survived. The serum kept me alive in the ice for seventy years," he said, questioning his own sanity momentarily; standing in the flat again made everything that happened seem like a distant dream.

Y/N frowned, brows knitting together. "What? Did you hit your head? Steve, this is 1945."

"I know, I came from 2023. I'm alive," he said, and saw her mentally backing away, so added, "I'm alive, and so is Bucky."

Her head snapped up, eyes immediately filling with tears. A dozen emotions whizzed through them in a second; disbelief, pain, hope. It shone clearly in her face as she stepped closer.

What did you say?" She asked, voice choked as she brought her shaking hands up to her mouth.

"Bucky's alive," he repeated softly, "and I can send you to him, in the future. But we don't have a lot of time. You need to listen to me, carefully, and do what I say."

She spluttered, struggling for words. "I, but...what about you?"

"I've made my decision," Steve said, and gently took her hands in his, "now, please, listen."

*

Bucky watched the machine, feeling a wave of numbness wash over his insides. Nothing was a better deal than the pain, the cruel sting of betrayal fighting to be felt. But he beat it back, unable to allow those thoughts validation.

Steve gave up so much for him, he fought for years to get him here. Steve deserved this. And no matter how wrong those words sounded in his head, he resolutely stood by them. 

The seconds ticked by, noted by Bruce's countdown. A flash of guilt almost made Bucky explain what was going to happen, explain that Steve left them. Left him. But he possessed no energy to speak, they'd see in a second, when no one appeared-

Zap. A blinding flash of light.

There's someone there.

Bucky frowned, hands falling from his pockets. Did Steve change his mind? Did he...

All the thoughts in his head stopped as the figure stepped down. Too small, too lithe for it to be Steve. Bucky's heart rate quickened, something in his unconscious already registering his recognition. 

The suit fell away, and if he weren't frozen in place, Bucky wouldn't have been standing. A quiver shot through him, nearly buckling his knees. Shock, fear and pure disbelief all delayed his reaction.

Y/N looked around, amazed, but turned to stone as she set eyes on him. Her face went utterly blank, a strangled sound leaving her lips.

Wearing her yard slacks, with a small bag on her shoulder, her face covered in dirt, hair streaked with grease, cap perched on-top, slanted to one side...she was everything he remembered, and his heart tried to leave his chest to go to her. To be whole again.

But fear held him back. She didn't know the things he'd done, the person he became after the train accident. What if-

"Who is she?" Sam asked, glaring as he stalked towards her, an accusation rising on his lips.

Bucky answered without hesitation, or thinking; the question had been asked countless times over the years. It always recieved the same reply. "My doll."

Sam stopped short, glancing between them, the way neither took their eyes off the other. He nodded, brows still closely knit, and backed off.

Slowly, Y/N approached, encouraged by the sound of his voice. She reached out carefully, when she got close enough. Trembling fingers brushed his cheek, and a shudder ran through her. 

"My Bucky..." She said quietly, eyes roaming over his face, a small smile tugging at her lips, "...you're here, in front of me. Alive."

He swallowed dryly, heart thundering away beneath his skin. "I'm different...you don't know..."

No sooner had the words left his mouth that her eyes found the cold metal where his flesh used to be. In reaching to hold it, she'd been taken by surprise.

Gently, Y/N took the hand in her own, examing the limb with a careful gaze. Moments passed, and she met his eyes again. Bucky steeled himself for rejection, for the disgust and horror.

Her hand went back to his cheek, and he involuntairly leaned into it. The warmth seeped into his blood. She stood on her tip toes, the smile on her lips blossoming into a bright beam of sunlight. "You've always been my Bucky, and always will be. Metal appendages and all."

He fell apart and dove down to capture her lips, clutching her to him with the hunger of a starving man. She pulled herself in, hands tangling in his brown locks, and both tasted salt on the others' lips.

So filled with joy his heart could burst, Bucky revelled in the feeling of holding his girl again. Laughing through the tears, he buried his face in her neck.

Thank you, Steve, for the greatest gift of all.

[mor-beck-more-problems]

Creatures in the Woods || Morgan & Dani

TIMING: Current

PARTIES: @surmamort & @mor-beck-more-problems

SUMMARY: Morgan loses control. Dani walks a gray line.

CONTAINS: animal death, references to domestic abuse

The moose died from a blow to the head, bashed in when it hit a tree after being ambushed by a pack of wolves. The broken shards of skull pierced its brain and the bitter fluid that once protected its thoughts of soft meadows and sweet bark leaked out along with its blood and puddled on the ground and fed the soil until the grass wilted with its weight. When Morgan found it a day later, tense with dread, it was the brain-blood smell that pulled her off the trail of the rabbit she was hunting and into the ground. The last thing she noticed was the lullaby of the flies circling its head and the way the gore-slick skull fragments shone in the summer sun almost like porcelain. The last thing she felt was the mouth of death salivating inside her and the plunge of gravity when the ground falls away.

“Nnnnnggghh…” Morgan scraped the soaked ground with her mouth. The fluid made her appetite come alive. She growled, following the trail to the corpse. The wolves had torn away much of the muscle meat, but there were still crepe thin lungs dangling behind its ribs and a fat heart waiting to burst between her teeth. She tore her way through the carcass up and up until she was kneeling in it and tearing the skull apart to get to the brain. It was half eaten by scavengers but what little Morgan’s mouth could find made her moan with relief and a need for more.

Dani felt brittle in every sense of the word. Weak, weak, weak. Dani stood still in the small clearing she’d parked in. It was far enough away from the town’s edge that she felt it a good place to settle, at least until she either found somewhere else, or until she felt herself welcomed back home. It had only been a day, and yet, it felt like an eternity. In the back of her truck were a few different bags. Some with weapons, some with clothes, and some with food. She’d been out there a few weeks already, and while she’d been taught to live off the land in case of emergency, she needed to live quietly. There was a stream nearby that’d aid her in getting her hands on clean clothes.

She moved along the trail that seemingly only her feet traveled as she pursued the bubbling stream. She could hear it from where she was, but she could hear something else. Ahead of her laid a dead moose, its organs spilled from its insides-- or, what was left of them. It was picked clean, a crow to roadkill, all aside from its hide. It was ripped from the inside, blood smeared against the grass. It was so red. So was the individual ahead of it, bent over, hands gliding against sinew, fingers picking, digging for more. Dani felt her heart in her throat as she drew her crossbow and charged an arrow into the slot of it. She pulled back and leveled it with the zombie’s head, only to falter as she got a better look. Morgan Beck. Of fucking course. Dani watched as the woman dug for the moose’s brains, her fingers picking cleanly as if she’d done it before, or as if it were foreign and she was trying to be careful, the hunter couldn’t tell. It’d be easy, she realized. To kill Morgan now. She could end it here. The back and forth, the way that Dani’s skin crawled every time she saw her… It could all end here. The only issue? As soon as Morgan’s face flashed before her, Bex’s did too. The desperation in her friend’s face, the love that’d shown. Not only on Bex’s, but Morgan’s, too. The way that their care for one another was palpable. Dani felt like she was going to be sick, and not because of the gory scene laid out before her. She kept the bow raised out of her own protection but looked around them. Would Morgan try to attack her? She swallowed thickly before she pushed through the trees, closer to her. “Morgan,” Dani said, her voice leveled and careful.

There was only so much fluid and viscera Morgan could find. She tore the moose open, screaming with frustration. “NNrrrrggg!”  More. The ache. Feed meat. Eat death. She heard a sound and looked, sniffing and licking her lips. She was a mess of blood from her nose to her feet. Patches of moose fur cand bone chips stuck to her clothes and bristled in the hot wind as she crept forward. She growled. Somewhere, there had to be more. More meat. More death.

Dani stared ahead at Morgan as she turned, gore dribbling from her chin. It was caught in her hair, at the lapel of her shirt. She was… disgusting. The hunter swallowed thickly. The urge to shoot, to put Morgan down, numbed her fingertips and clawed at the back of her throat. She couldn’t, though. Every time she thought about it, the documents with her father’s name attached appeared. Each time she met Morgan, she’d known her to be unlike what she’d been taught about zombies, but this…? She was playing right into stereotypes and a part of it made Dani’s chest ache. She took a step back. “Morgan, what the fuck?”

Morgan shambled forwards, her mind beyond any language besides hunger. Death’s appetite needed more than an abandoned carcass could provide. Noise meant food. More. Eat. When she could get her hands around the noisy body and eat the pieces, maybe then it would be enough.

“Fuck,” Dani grunted as she stumbled backwards. Morgan moved towards her, mirroring that out of a horror film. She glanced over her shoulder. They were going deeper into the woods now, away from the stream. The clothes she meant to wash were left behind in a bag dropped at her side. She should kill her, she should just do it, the hunter thought. But Morgan wasn’t herself. Dani had seen Morgan. This was not her. What was she supposed to do? It was clear now that she was starving. Dani would need to get her something to eat. “Over here,” Dani decided to say as she moved off in the opposite direction, closer to the stream. Hopefully there’d be deer there, or maybe another moose, or literally anything.

The body moved and Morgan lunged. Her hunger drooled in her open mouth, teeth bared, but the only thing she caught was the air. She stumbled and followed the body. It wasn’t a quiet body. The grass and twigs screamed under its feet. Squirrels scattered up the trees. Morgan reached for them. What moved could die. What died could feed. But they escaped and Morgan grunted with desperate frustration and then there was nothing but the tall moving body ahead and the sustenance it promised.

Dani easily evaded Morgan’s lunge with a step backward. Immediately, the zombie became distracted by a few squirrels that scurried near the trunk of a tree. As Dani watched her, she felt the pit in her stomach grow. Ever since she’d found out what her father had been killed for, the idea of hunting had left a bitter taste in her mouth. Morgan before her, clearly not herself, only deepened the wound. Had her father died like this? Helping one of the many fae he’d been forced to experiment on? She blinked back the sudden anger that ripped through her and turned towards the stream, hitting a stick she’d picked up against a tree to gain Morgan’s attention again. The stream was a quiet trickle, and as Dani looked around, she saw nothing at its bank. A little further, they’d have to go a little further. She made sure to maintain a careful distance between herself and Morgan.

A guttural scream came from Morgan’s blood-stained mouth as the body evaded her. Her staggering steps grew quicker, angrier. There was life under her fee and the shrieks of feathered flying meat and in the rushing river. It splashed in swimming meat unseen. It panted in the distance on fur covered backs of meat that ran.But Morgan knew none of this. All she wanted was death. She would cannibalize herself for it if she could, her stomach clenched so desperately. But she would take the body dancing in front of her. She lunged, teeth bared, and caught the edges of Dani’s clothes.

Dani had seen starving zombies before. She’d taken care of them with chicken wire and a dagger into the brain. She knew all the steps. She could easily hide Morgan’s remains, but there was no way she’d do that, not when Dani knew how much this… zombie meant to Bex. She knew it was dangerous, too, what she was doing. For a moment, the hunter wondered what Bex would think, seeing Morgan like this. Could Dani hold it up in front of her, explain to her that this was what she was trying to protect the world from? But as much as Dani didn’t want to admit it, this was still Morgan Beck, brought to the brink of her existence as a zombie due to her hunger. What had happened? Dani wanted to know, but felt it futile. She was a monster-- the kind of creature that Dani’d been taught to slay, so why was she helping her now? Irritation festered, licking at her skin, once Morgan lunged at her. She shoved her shoulder into the zombie at her advances and side-stepped once again. “You’re making it really fucking hard to hel--” Dani froze at the sound of something. A deer. She saw it with her own two eyes.

Morgan only knew the pull of hunger. The body shoved her back, tripping her to the ground, but once there, she began to crawl. Her reach was short but her urge was swift. She clawed at the body’s clothes salivating for the closest thing to relief she knew.

Dani wanted to remark how pathetic Morgan looked. She wanted to be cruel, to be as callous as the brunette had been in the thrift store, but everything that the hunter wanted to say fell short on a venom filled tongue. She pressed her lips together and turned her attention to the deer. If she left Morgan out here, how long would it be until she found someone incapable of taking her down? Or… helping her? Dani took a deep breath as she aligned the bow with the deer and let the spring go. The arrow shot through, and the deer kicked up for a moment before making an awkward run towards the stream only to fall to its demise.

Morgan was trying to gnaw through the body’s clothes when the sound of fresh meat falling tore her attention away. It was big and fresh and red where it was pierced. It was motionless. It was silent as death. It was hers. She scrambled across the ground until she reached it and tore in. Her blunt teeth pulled up more soft hide than meat, but her hands wrenched the red spot open so the death meat could spill out. She couldn’t open it fast enough. The tissue went down so well, soft and soothing as love. She stopped once to choke down a liver. Once again to crack open the skull. The gray meat was the best meat. She ate it so desperately she ended up smearing some on her face trying to fit all of it through her mouth at once.

Time means nothing to hunger or death, and so it felt like nothing at all for Morgan to gorge herself until all the good flesh was picked from the bones and she fell over, sated.

But time means a great deal to people, and so when the rest of Morgan surfaced, the first thing she noticed was the new tint to the sky. Hours had slipped past her in a few hazy moments. The second thing she noticed was the blood and flesh staining her hands and nails, and the taste of raw flesh l in her mouth. Trembling, she looked down at the horror show splayed across her curled up body. If she could slip under again, if she could stop thinking, if she could not know-- but she did. Too well. Morgan screamed. “No, no, shit, no…” She tried to wipe her wet hands but there was hardly any part of her still clean.

Immediately, Morgan seemed drawn to the deer. At least it had worked. Dani watched silently as the zombie clambered towards her meal. The way that Morgan ripped open the deer with such ferocity, she wondered what kind of harm could be done unto a human. She wondered how far she would’ve gone, should it have been somebody not immune. It was clear that the zombie was not in her right mind. Dani had seen gore. She had seen death. She had pressed others’ organs into the stomachs until help came. She had seen brain matter and loosened veins and sinew and bone. She’d seen it all, but not like this. Dani swallowed down the bile in her throat and gave Morgan a moment of peace, willing herself to look away. It was sickening, allowing the zombie to exist like this, to not end it. But her father and what he’d died for, as well as Bex’s face, it all flickered before her. Weak, weak, weak. Jeanette’s voice rang loud. She gripped the crossbow tightly until the sound of Morgan’s fingers squishing through the meat of the deer had ceased.

Dani heard Morgan’s scream and it made her jump. Unprepared, she drew her bow again and took a step back. Morgan was searching herself, probably for her humanity. Dani watched her carefully, and even though she couldn’t see her face, she knew that the zombie was scared. She hated herself for doing this, for allowing this, but she had to. She couldn’t kill Morgan Beck. Morgan Beck was a zombie, but she… Dani clenched her jaw. She knew that the sight of her would be less than ideal, but it’d only be a matter of time until the zombie turned around. She instinctively lowered her bow and set it on the ground, lifting her hands. The last thing she needed was for Morgan to tell Bex she had pointed a bow at her in her greatest time of need. It went against everything she had learned, and against everything she knew, but she did it. With trembling hands, she held them up to where Morgan could see them, the sleeve of her own shirt shredded from Morgan’s desperation. “Morgan.” It was like last time, only softer. There was no anger, no rage. It felt weak in her throat, the words. They felt twisted and gutted.

Morgan jumped at the sound of her name. Her body hunched to hide itself, but it was no good, she was drenched and dirtied all over. When she saw who had called her, panic flooded her body. She scrambled backwards into the stream, panting and whimpering and struggling to hang onto any thought beyond No, please, I don’t want to die. No, please… She was screwed. She was thinking like prey and she’d lost her bag with her knife and her phone and she couldn’t concentrate and she was so, so screwed. But this is just what Odell had hoped for when she strong-armed all the butcheries in the county to stop selling to her, wasn’t it? At last she managed to say, “What do you want from me?” She just barely managed to keep her voice even, but she was kidding herself if she thought she could come off as a threat like this.

The shock and fear that splintered across Morgan’s features should have gone ignored, and Dani knew it. She should have felt nothing but contempt for this woman, this zombie. But the contempt did not come. Nor did the anger. What Dani felt was relief-- relief that the deer had been enough to satiate the monster in her. The bow was still on the ground, and though she had her dagger strapped to her forearm beneath her sleeve, she had no intent to actually use it. Morgan scrambled backwards and Dani stayed glued to the spot. She had no energy to fight, even if she wanted to, even if it came to that. Another flicker of Bex, another flicker of her father. She took a deep breath, but all she smelled was blood, and it was so red. “No, nothing.” She stayed put. “I…” Did she dare admit what she had done for Morgan? It wouldn’t matter, and Dani wasn’t sure if she cared whether or not Morgan understood what had happened. “I found you all fucked up. You kept trying to eat me or some shit, I dunno.” She shrugged. “I--” She looked towards the deer, bones and hide melting into the water. “Shot that for you.” She pursed her lips. “Then you came to.” Dani tried her best to keep her voice level.

Nothing Dani said to Morgan sounded plausible. But there was a deer, ravaged clean. Something in the bit of her stomach wanted to fall down and lick the hide, just in case, but it was just a whisper, and she could tell it no. Behind the deer was a trail of blood. And Dani’s clothes looked like they’d gone through a shredder on one side.

Had there been anyone else in between. Morgan couldn’t sense any aftertaste of human and she didn’t have any intrusive thoughts that felt strange but maybe she was too scared to know for sure, maybe she had already washed down the taste with all that deer. Morgan stood slowly and took another defensive step back. As much as she knew she shouldn’t take her eyes off an opponent, the smear of blood that led back through the woods held her gaze firmly.

“What was I--um--” Her voice was small and stammered so badly she had to stop and try again. “I remember a rabbit. I was hunting a rabbit. But I was me,” she added quickly. “I wasn’t like this, I was trying to catch it before I got like this. I haven’t--” Her voice broke again. “The butchers won’t sell to me anymore. Not anymore in the county. I tried. I did. And rabbits aren’t so filling but I didn’t want to lose it being picky but then--” She searched her mind. What had happened then? “There was something. Something big and half eaten and beautiful and I know it was an animal but I don’t remember what kind. Do you know if I-- if I might’ve done something to someone? In between?” She couldn’t live with wondering, and no one would tell her the truth like the slayer who hated her.

Dani kept her gaze on Morgan. Despite having helped her, maybe against her better judgement, she was a hunter. She had fought against her purpose. It felt wrong. She felt her skin tickle with the wrongs she committed in not taking Morgan down when she saw her that way. There’d been no telling whether or not Morgan had gotten to a human prior to their coincidental meeting, but Dani had to trust that what she’d done was the right thing. Not so much for Morgan, but for Bex. For the memory of her father, too. Still, Dani kept her hands where Morgan could see them. She felt silly. No matter how wrong it felt, Dani couldn’t kick the feeling that there was some part of it that’d been right, even if it was something she’d wrestle with in her days to come. “The butchers?” Dani raised a brow. So that was how Morgan got her… sustenance. That’s what she had meant by not being like what Dani thought-- not being animalistic, not like now.

The hunter could see the fear and the frustration on Morgan’s features. It was loud, even to somebody like Dani who normally wouldn’t care. As Morgan rambled, Dani continued to search the zombie’s features. Her gut continued to twist. Whether due to the smell of blood that laid thick and heavy in the air, or because she was allowing Morgan to explain herself. Finally, Dani pulled her gaze away and allowed it to settle onto her shoes. They were caked with mud and dirt, but it hadn’t ever been anything she cared too much about. “I don’t know, Morgan.” The name felt weighted differently on her tongue than before. The malice was gone. Exhaustion followed. “It was a moose that I saw you snacking on, you know. When I first came up on you.” She bit the inside of her cheek. “I led you here because deer typically are down this way. It seemed like the best option.” Despite knowing how to kill zombies and that being her priority, the texts, and everything else that Dani had learned from, told her how to satiate, how to bring them to. She supposed scribes included that information due to their own conscious being flooded with guilt due to the idea of being accomplices to murder, even by word of mouth. “I can’t tell you if you killed anyone. I wouldn’t know.” I hope you didn’t, because then what the fuck am I doing here?

Morgan’s face crumpled at Dani’s non-answer, but she nodded and did not argue. A moose fit the description of the blurry creature she remembered, but she was only half sure and maybe that was only because she didn’t want to be a monster someone had a reason to hunt down. She waited for Dani to go on. To explain how she couldn’t be too careful. How, now that Morgan was conscious and could be ashamed of herself, she should tell Dani how right the hunter was before she received a quick shot to the head. But there was only silence between them.

Finally she turned her gaze away from the bloody path and back to the hunter. “Why did you bring me back?” She asked.

Everything was quiet now, aside from the sound of the gurgling stream, swallowing and spitting past the corpse of the deer that laid against the cool rush of water. She made a note to move it after they were done here. Dani tensed at Morgan’s question. She had an answer, but it felt… wrong, explaining that it had been for Bex. A part of it had been, but her father had been involved, too. If she hadn’t approached either Jeanette or Lauren prior to this meeting would Dani have reacted the same? She inhaled sharply through her nose and looked up at the sky, taking note of the birds that fled in a hurry from the top of one to another. “It felt wrong. Killing you. Like that.” The words came out stiff and her voice sounded small. After a moment, the hunter finally leveled her gaze back to Morgan’s. “I’ve seen you. Maybe not like you are right now, but when you’re…” Almost human. “Not… covered in blood.” She tested out the words, but they still felt wrong. “It seemed wrong.” She nudged a rock just next to her foot with the toe of her shoe as she looked back down. “And, I guess… for Bex?” It felt odd, passing up on her obligation for others. Would it have been what her father would’ve done? She had nothing to offer either Jeanette or Lauren, she realized. They had lied to her about her father, about how he had died. No matter how many times Jeanette’s voice hummed in her ear, she knew it to be wasted.

Morgan gave a bitter laugh that came out like a sob. It must have been a while since Dani had talked to Bex, or Bex was too generous to tell her new slayer friend how upset she really was with Morgan. She wasn’t sure how much she could believe that this child soldier of a hunter was suddenly having a change of heart, but she did understand what it meant to do something for someone else. And just how fickle that could be. Would Dani regret sparing her if Bex ever said, oh I'm never talking to Morgan again? Would she come back to finish the job and take the question off her conscience? The longer Morgan stayed, the closer she came to testing that out.

“Good to know,” she said flatly. “Are you going to tell her about this?”

Dani was exhausted. There was no denying that. She wondered if Morgan could see her lethargy. The laugh that escaped the zombie caught her off guard and she took a small, tentative step backwards before she halted. She swallowed thickly and looked at Morgan once again. “Am I going to tell…” Dani thought for a moment. It would benefit her. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe Bex would be compassionate to Morgan’s situation, maybe it’d backfire. Dani hadn’t thought about telling Bex, not until Morgan brought it up. As far as she knew, it would be better that Bex didn’t see somebody who she cared about like this. At their lowest, at their most detrimental. “No.” She shook her head slowly. “It’s not my shit to tell. I’m a hunter, not a gossip.” She lowered her hands finally and crossed them against her chest. She dug her fingers into her forearms. “Why did your access to the butchers get taken away?” Dani had known very little about how zombies sustained themselves aside from eating living, breathing, innocent humans. At least, that’s what had been fed to her. If Morgan was telling the truth, then it meant she went against every urge she had to tear into a random human’s skull. It meant that all this time, she’d been telling the truth. Hell, the zombie had even admitted to hunting rabbits.

Morgan’s laughter spilled out a little easier this time and sounded even more defeated. “I tried to talk Bex into leaving her parents’ house. And then when her mother came by to gloat about taking away my office and my job security, we got into it and I tried to make it so she couldn’t hurt Bex for a while. But that seriously backfired and now--” She splayed her arms out, showing what she had so easily been reduced to.

Satisfied that she wouldn’t have her head cleaved off in the next few minutes, Morgan knelt in the stream and started rinsing herself off as much as she could. “She warned me. Both of them. But I figured I’d lost everything enough times over to learn how to deal.” But she hadn’t been a zombie with a conditional grip on her humanity for any of those other times. As bad as things got when she was alive, she’d never been put in a place like this.

If Dani weren’t so concerned for the words that came out of Morgan’s mouth, then she might have found it odd that they were able to have a conversation like this. At the end of the day, the two of them cared for the same person. Bex had become increasingly important to Dani, and ever since she’d almost lost her to Frank… Dani would do virtually anything to protect her. To protect anyone she cared for, really. Bex was strong, there was no doubting that, but it had become apparent that she thought she deserved to be hurt, and it was now obvious to Bex who the other perpetrator was. Her mother.

“That’s where Bex is now, right?” Dani ground her teeth. She could hear it in her ears and feel it in her jaw, the anger she put into the movement. “After--” She wasn’t sure if she should mention this, but Dani kept replaying Morgan’s expression then, and even now. One thing was for certain, Morgan Beck cared for Bex. “After Frank attacked her, after I got her to the hospital. I got thrown out of the hospital and Bex started to cry about how she couldn’t be found by her. I figured it was her mom, but I didn’t…” She felt disturbed. Was it right airing this information to Morgan? Though, she’d already been so much with Bex’s mother. Dani dug her fingers deeper into her forearms. “I didn’t know how bad it was.” Frank wasn’t Bex’s only concern. What kind of mother was she to hurt somebody who genuinely cared for her daughter? What kind of things did she hold against Bex?

Morgan stopped washing. “Frank what?” But why? There was no reason to use him to keep Bex in line. And stars above, she was with a boy even more closeted than she was. Wasn’t that torture enough? It didn’t make sense. Morgan realized too late that she’d revealed how out-of-the-loop she was, but that was bound to come out sooner or later, wasn’t it? She looked down at the blood still caked under her fingernails and felt the weight of her helplessness all over again.

“Wouldn’t make much of a difference if you had. Bex is too scared of this happening to someone else to let them in. And you hunters never lift a finger against a human no matter how horrible and dangerous they are.” She went back to splashing her face clean. Her warbled reflection in the water made her look like someone’s nightmare demon. It was a shame she couldn’t give this face to Odell and make her keep it.

Dani swallowed hard. It felt wrong, airing out Bex’s dirty laundry like this. But Dani had tried to help. It had taken Bex awhile to finally accept her help, but it’d only been recent, and she hadn’t actually gotten to any of the actual protecting parts of it all. “He…” She reached up to scratch idly at the back of her neck. “Stabbed her. She took the knife out.” Dani left alone how odd it seemed that Bex hadn’t relayed any of this information to Morgan, but decided against bringing it up. A wild guess told Dani that the two weren’t exactly on speaking terms, and Dani wondered if that had anything to do with Bex leaving with her, especially when Morgan had begged for Bex to go with her. “Bex said that it’s her ex-boyfriend.”

Morgan’s words struck Dani, but she swallowed the urge to bite back. She had no energy to do so. She’d been drained. Lauren and Jeanette’s words lingered, as did that fucking Prince song. It was on a constant loop. The distraction Morgan brought was welcome, believe it or not. “Yeah, well..” She trailed off before picking back up a moment later as Morgan stared into the water. “It’s in the code. We’re not meant to hurt humans.” Dani thought about her father. Despite him being a hunter, he’d been human, but they took him out regardless. Dani felt a pang of anger and it began to fester. “But I’m starting to figure out not all hunters feel that way. Frank is one, but he tried to kill Bex, so.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “She asked me… to protect her. Or be around her more. I don’t know.” It felt like a lifetime ago that Bex had asked such a thing, even if it’d only been a few days.

“Your hunter code is just a way of keeping things simple and shirking off responsibility for your actions. I’ve met a few of you by now and I haven’t found one decent hunter who wasn’t thinking for themself and using their own ‘code’ whether they admit it or not.” Morgan said, finally calming down enough to feel angry. She stood up from the stream, knowing this was as good as it was going to get, and started trudging out of the water. “No offense, but if your code says I deserve to die more than Odell Ochsenstein, I think it’s pretty bullshit.”

When she was back on solid ground she stopped and gave Dani a good long look for the first time. “Are you going to? Protect her? Because from over here, it looks a lot like everyone who’s ever beaten and used her is a hundred percent whole-grain human. What’s your plan for that?”

“I don’t do that,” Dani snapped. She carded a hand through her hair and took a deep breath. The hunter squeezed her eyes shut. Getting into an argument with Morgan wouldn’t help the situation. Bex was clearly in more trouble than Dani had originally thought, and by helping Morgan, Dani had uncovered just that. “I don’t do that. I don’t-- I don’t want to be like that. I only…” She swallowed thickly. Why couldn’t she push her father out of this? She hadn’t even known him, but she knew his stupid smile, and the cruel way in which he died. He had tried to help others, not even humans. Was she more his daughter than she was Jeanette’s? Despite never knowing him? “That’s…” She cleared her throat. “I’m not trying to kill you anymore, so.” She knew it didn’t solve for the time she had.

Morgan’s question made Dani’s skin crawl. “Of course I am.” She knew the implications. Frank was a hunter. Her mother was human, or at least that’s what Morgan had implied. Dani didn’t actually know any of that. “She’s…” Dani took another deep breath. “Important. To me. To other people.” Dani picked at the fabric at the hem of her shirt for a moment before dropping her hand away. “There’s a community of us. They’ll know what to do. But I won’t kill him. I’ll make it impossible for him to hurt her again, but I won’t kill him.” Dani looked up at Morgan evenly. “I’m afraid that Bex might try. She doesn’t know what it means to kill someone.”

Morgan wasn’t very comforted by what Dani had to say, but it had been so long since she’d felt soothed she wasn’t surprised. She shook her head. “You mean you’re not trying to kill me right now. Because I’m a well of useful information and you don’t want to make Bex cry. If I gave up everything I knew, if you called her up and she said she kinda hates me now for how badly I screwed up, that would change. Because I’m not a person to you. I’m something that used to belong to Bex.” She started walking back the way she’d come. The one good thing about her demon zombie self was that she knew how to leave a good trail home.

“Do your best to keep her hands clean,” she called over her shoulder. “Because, murderer to murderer, we both know she doesn’t deserve to learn how to carry someone’s life on her conscience.”

Dani steeled herself against the cruelty that Morgan provided. Logically, the hunter knew that Morgan did not owe her kindness. Dani didn’t even want it. Not really. What she wanted was to not see her mother’s gaze, but it was embedded now, even in Morgan’s features. Weak, weak, weak, weak. Dani closed her eyes and tried to focus on the beat of her heart and the way it felt in her throat, in the tips of her fingers, in her ears. She could hear Morgan’s footsteps fade, and only then did she open her eyes. The young hunter watched as the very thing she should want to put into the ground walked away, following the carnage she had created. Unable to provide an answer, she reached down for her bow and turned on her heel, moving toward the deer’s corpse. She dragged it out of the water and started back towards her truck. Morgan Beck was wrong. She had to be.

[kassysyd]

Marbles - By The Amazing Devil: A Lyrical Analysis

 Forewarning: Before we start this analysis, I just want to tell you all that this song first made me smile, then made me laugh right out loud (on a public bus) and then it smashed my heart into a thousand sharp broken pieces. Once I realized what it was actually about, I broke down and cried openly – Now when I listen to it, I feel all of those emotions all at once, and that hurts.

  This song tells a story about loss and love, but so very much more than that.

 It’s about meeting someone and spending a lifetime loving them only to lose them slowly as agonizing, fading fragments of their mind slip away. It’s about celebrating the memories that you have built together, of shared jokes and fond mistakes, of knowing someone intimately that their stories are also your own.  It’s holding each other tight as dementia steals away the other half of your soul, but still having hope in the darkness because you know that you are not alone. 

This song reminds us of everything love should be, and one day when I am old and my memories are fading, I can only hope that someone pulls me just as close and tells me that there is hope. 

  I’ve held your hand since nineteen seventy-nine

You were in a band - still am - yeah but back then you had hair and your smile was so sublime

And I chipped my teeth on every joke you cracked

 The song starts with a cheerful tone; a conversation between an old couple, who have been together for 40 years, as they recount the story of their life together. He was young and ‘sublime’ and she fancied him for his full head of hair and pretty smile. You can hear the bantering, overlapping flow of their conversation that comes from their intimacy. They talk of supporting each other, of jokes, and music, and years passing by. She laughed so hard at his jokes she ‘chipped her teeth’ each time (figuratively speaking).

 You used to buy me scotch - still do - yeah but now too much is never enough

To take me back to that dance hall where you got thrown out cos they thought you were drunk -I wasn't -

You couldn’t lie then and you sure as hell can’t lie to me now

 The conversation soon sees them move back into specific memories; a night at a ‘dance hall’ where he bought her scotch (still does) and then got kicked out because they ‘thought you were drunk’, which she charmingly calls him on ‘can’t lie to me now’. This is illustrative of their shared history, laughing over stories from long ago, and habits that even now continue (buying her scotch). It shows how close they still are, how they can read each other’s lies, know the truth of each other and still come out amused.

 You stole the best years of my life

I’ll give them back

You got fat

And you’re the thigh-high hemline I just can’t stop staring at

 They’re teasing each other (‘you got fat’), then expressing their appreciation for each other (you’re the thigh-high hemline I just can’t stop staring at). Back and forth they recount what they mean to each other, the good and the bad that comes with years of intimacy.

 I will wait and hope

Your eyes aren’t rivers there to weep

But a place for crows to rest their feet

 This stanza, for the first tie, they sing together. Their voices pulling together as age and time weary them and create wrinkles around their eyes (crows feet). But instead of sadness they ‘wait and hope’, reassuring each other that their trauma is shared, and not to ‘weep’.

 I will wait and hope

And rest my head at night content

Knowing where my marbles went

 They repeat together that they ‘will wait and hope’ the repetition serving to reinforce their determination stay strong together. The third line is a play on the cliché ‘I’m losing my marbles’ which alludes to dementia and age-related memory loss, this is the first time the audience realizes what the song is about, their loss. But, in changing it to ‘knowing where my marbles went’, they reassure each other that their memories aren’t lost, they’re carried by the other.

 The flat we rented was a palace for my queen

If by palace you mean that asbestos and beans from a tin, and the gin that we brewed in the bathtub

You sang ‘do you think I’m sexy’ And oh god I really did

 Their story continues in this stanza. They share with us a glimpse into their humble lives. They live in an unsafe apartment (asbestos) that they rented, where they scraped by on simple meals (beans) and brewed their own alcohol ‘in the bathtub’. It’s clear that it is a god memory, their tone is joyful because although they didn’t have much, they felt like they lived in a ‘palace’ and he treated her like a ‘queen’. They’d sing to each other; she was flirtatious and sweet, and he would respond with desire. They were happy even though they didn’t have much.

 You’d swoon, you’d sigh, working shifts till we cried

Oh if one more guy calls me darling then I

Swear to you and to god I will murder them all, all the bastards applaud when I show that I’m flawed

You’re not flawed darling, you’re just a little under-rehearsed

 However, not all was easy for them. The next stanza gives us a more realistic look the difficult lives they led, as they worked ‘shifts till we cried’, and she got hit on and harassed. She recounts men calling her ‘darling’ and goading her, applauding when she failed. Together they sing “I will murder them all” then he reassures her that even when she fails, it’s not her that is flawed, it’s just a momentary lack of preparation. Instead of giving into the pain and anger, he helped her make light of the unfairness of life, a world cruel to women.

 And I’d get in. And for some reason, you’ve painted the kitchen lime green

And I'd sink to the floor, what’s the point anymore

And you, you’d reply with a glint in your eye

(And you, you’d reply with a drink in your hand)

Saying ‘I don’t know, but I’m here, I’m all yours, dear heart don’t cry’

 A memory hits her, a time when she got home and he’d ‘painted the kitchen lime green’ and she just couldn’t cope anymore. Life was just too hard. She’d sunk to the floor, desperately asking him ‘what the point anymore?’. But he’s singing this part too, because there were times that it was him sinking to the floor begging her to tell him why he should go on. They held each other together through the years.

 And each time they’d reply to the other ‘I don’t know, but I’m here, oh dear god, dear heart don’t cry’- each time neither knew what to do,  only that they loved the other and couldn’t bare to see them cry. This beautiful mirroring of sentiment shows that, in fact, they did know exactly what to say. That just to express their love was enough; to show their imperfection honestly and reassurance that they would be there, always ‘I’m all yours’.  Because they are imperfect, human and flawed, and very much in love.  

 I’ve loved you, for a hundred years

Certainly fucking feels like it

The minute I met you the colours of my life begun to pour

I’m scared of the dark

 Here he uses hyperbole to expresses how it feels to him to love her – ‘loved you, for a hundred years’, but she makes a joke about it, trying to lighten the mood ‘certainly fucking feels like it’. But he doesn’t let her, telling her that when he met her his life flooded with ‘colour’. She can admit her feelings then, her fear of losing herself, and because he was comforting her, she can tell him that she afraid of the dark.

 The ‘dark’ is powerful symbolism for the unknown, loss and death, a place without identity and time. While ‘colours’ symbolise the bright memories that they made together. She is scared because her ‘colourful’ memories are fading away and she will be left in the ‘dark’ alone.

 And now, even though you’re mad and these memories won’t stay, it’s okay

Cos now I get to meet you for the first time every single day

 But he continues to reassure her, that he knows she’s scared, but that it will be ok. He will love her even when she does not remember him anymore. When every day that he will spend with her, will be like the first time they met. And he will love her just as much.

 I’ll wait and hope

Your eyes aren’t rivers there to weep

But a place for crows to rest their feet

 I’ll wait and hope

And rest my head at night content

Knowing where my marbles went

 And I will wait

And I will wait

And I will wait

And hope

 The song ends with the word hope, because that is what they give each other. Through their difficult lives, they have been there patiently waiting. And they will continue to be there, holding each other together through the years.

[firesoulstuff]

@smoaknsnow6​ messaged me asking for Steelhacker 1. Things You Said at 1am

Zari settles herself into the mattress, her head in Nate’s lap and his fingers beginning to card through her hair. She’d missed this while she had been in the totem with her ancestors. She’s been back for nearly two years now, but still, sometimes her mind brings her back there in peaceful moments like this and she remembers to cherish it.

Which is probably why she’s losing her game.

This is what they do at night. She plays on her switch, he watches a documentary on deep space or some other science topic; something he’s interested in but doesn’t already know everything about. Sometimes she watches with him, sometimes not, it never really matters. So long as it’s the two of them she’s happy.

“Hey.” He says after awhile, and when he doesn’t immediately continue she pauses her game and cranes her head up to look at him. “Do you remember that talk we had in the lab a while ago? While we were working on the alien tech?”

.

.

“Ugh, where is Ray when we need him?” Nate asks as she returns, a mug of steaming coffee in each hand. “I swear, we’re never going to figure out how to unlock these things, never mind use them.”

“Hm.” She hums, and that’s all she has to offer, her expertise may be in hacking but so far when it’s come to these weapons she has been utterly useless.

So, she offers him his coffee.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

She takes a sip of her own coffee and claims the seat beside him, laying her mug to rest and then picking up a chipped piece of the casing.

“Are we still voting no on smashing them?”

“Ask me again in another hour.”

She chuckles, still turning the tiny fragment over in her fingers. While she’s doing that he takes a long, greedy sip of his coffee and nearly moans, which only has her grin widening.

“Oh man.” He says, lowering his mug but not yet relinquishing it. “Seriously. When I die, you are not allowed to make coffee this good for your next boyfriend.”

She laughs, “Don’t worry, my next boyfriend won’t have a secret stash of Ray Palmer’s favorite coffee grounds to steal from.”

He eyes her, probably trying to determine if she really went into the special stash he keeps for Ray’s visits. She did, and she knows he can see that clearly, but he keeps on drinking.

“Easy, Babe.” She warns him, still smirking slightly. “We need you awake, not off the walls.”

He hums, “I don’t know, I think off the walls Nate might be the best thing we haven’t tried yet.”

“Yeah, well I think off the walls Nate is the same Nate who broke our last time courier so...”

“Ok.” He says, unimpressed, and flipping her off.

They work well past midnight, going on 1am as well as their third round of coffee by the time Zari really starts to feel the fatigue hitting her. She’s taking a break from the weapons right now, searching instead through the files of kids the aliens abducted; looking for commonalties in their day to day lives that could have lead them all to that playground at two in the morning.

“I can’t believe none of these kids parents knew they were gone until the next morning.” She mumbles, “I mean, I know I’m not gonna be a perfect mom but if our ten-year-old sneaks out of the house in the middle of the night, I’m gonna know about it.”

He chuckles, looking at her with a grin before shaking his head and returning to whatever he is doing with that screwdriver.

“And how do you propose to do that?”

“Simple. Second-story bedroom, alarms on the front door and first story windows.”

He snorts again, “We live in a two story house now?”

“If you want to live on the ship forever that’s fine by me, kid’s definitely not sneaking out in that scenario.”

He’s grinning at her, still laughing under his breath.

“No,” He says after another second, “We are not living on the ship forever. Maybe for a little while after we get married, depends.”

“On what?”

He shrugs, and it isn’t lost on her how casual this conversation is. They’ve talked about this kind of stuff before, to an extent, but it was before they were a couple. When they were just friends. The two of them and Ray mostly, but sometimes the others, would talk during these late night work sessions about their own futures. They would say things like “on a mission I’m going to meet a girl” or “I’ll bring my family back and go off to live with them, maybe see you losers on the holidays. Your holidays.” They didn’t always mean everything, 9/10 times they didn’t.

This is the tenth time.

Yet, it’s just as easy as the other nine.

“Couple things, I guess.” He says, “How long it takes us to decide between 2022 and 2044, cause we both want our parents around. And how soon after we get married we want to start trying for a baby. Dammit.”

He lets his screwdriver clatter to the floor when it slips violently from his hand. She watches it fall, her eyes lingering for only a second, and then she flips to the next file in her stack.

“I mean it’s probably the sooner the better on both those fronts.”

“How do you figure?” He asks, reclaiming his screwdriver and she takes another sip of her coffee while doing some mental math.

“Well, I’m 38, which is kind of late in the game to start having kids but not like, unheard of. That aside the kid will take nine months, not to mention trying could take a few. I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea of having a baby after 40 but that’s what we’re looking at. Plus every time we talk about kids there’s more than one so if we’re going that route we’re either adopting or we’re having them close together because I am not having a baby after 45. Sorry but I am drawing the line there.”

“Don’t worry” He snorts, unfazed by her long explanation. “I don't care if you have them or we adopt them but we are at least in the process of having the last of our kids by the time I’m 45, and technically I’m a year and five months older than you.”

“Hmm, technically you’re 26 years older than me.”

He glares at her, he always hates when she brings that up.

“What?” She asks, feigning innocence.

“Don’t say that.” He chides her, and she laughs.

“What??” She mocks, “I’m just saying-”

“You are not... You’re trying to make me sound gross.”

.

.

After that the conversation had kind of dissolved into a “fight” over which of them farts more in bed. He does, for the record.

Ok, she does, but she’s never admitting it.

“Yeah.” She says, “What about it?”

“I don't know.” He shrugs, “I was just thinking... when you said we should get started soon on some of that stuff... I mean my mom doesn’t work and a lot of her good friends are dead, and we’ve been thinking about telling her about time travel for awhile. I was just thinking maybe she could come with us to 2044, get a nice apartment in Seattle. The opposite side of Seattle from where we would live but-”

Zari laughs, cackles actually, and so Nate starts laughing too.

“What?” He asks, tightening his arm that’s been draped loosely around her. “I’m serious.”

“I know.” She says, “And I’m all for it, but the problem is if we live on the opposite side of the city from her that means we live on the same side as my parents, and there’s two of them.”

He shrugs, undeterred. “Then we live on one side of the city and put my mom on the side where your parents live, and that way all three of them can plot against us.”

She keeps laughing. She can just picture that. His mom and hers, meeting up on Saturday mornings for coffee or something else, talking about her and Nate and workshopping new ways to invade their privacy.

“Ok, that’s one problem solved. What about the second one?”

Nate shrugs again above her. “Depends.”

“On what?”

He looks down and meets her eyes, and suddenly she feels his hand worm it’s way into hers; something small, round, and metallic clutched inside.

“Will you marry me?”

[oathkeeper-of-tarth]

I keep seeing something about writing three lines for a WIP? Posting three lines from three fics? Anyway I’ve seen it so many times at this point it’s become one big GO WRITE SOMETHING YOU ABSOLUTE NINNY for me, so here I am with three short-ish (~600 words each) segments from three tragically neglected WIPs that have nothing to do with each other. Very rough and rusty, but I hope you still enjoy these glimpses.

1. Bispearl week “swords” prompt ficlet I didn’t manage to finish back then, or: Bismuth and Pearl invent rubber ducking.

The first few swords were a disaster.

The Forge was rudimentary still - early days - didn’t look like much, but it was a start. Bismuth did her best: all of her hard-won knowledge, scrounged up information not meant for her or her kind, going towards building what she thought they would need to get weapon production up and running. Materials gathered at a great risk - Snowflake had chipped her gem during the last of the supply runs! Tools for Bismuth to try to replicate and experiment with, and a raided armoury with a wide variety of weapons for Bismuth to learn from, to suit every possible rebellious inclination. All arranged to enable what she judged might be a sensible workflow.

She decided to go with a simple, plain, straight-edged sword to start with - mid-length to her, meaning a dagger to some and a hefty two-hander to others. The sheer variety already present in the rebellion was half of its charm and point, wasn’t it just? And Bismuth wanted so very badly to fan the flames of it, to do everything she possibly could to see it, to see all of them, flourish and persevere and come out on top for once.

Bismuth tried, and tried, and tried again. Considered her mistakes, weaknesses, what she knew (or, doubt never failed to creep in, thought she knew) she was supposed to be doing and achieving here.

And failed.

The first blade that at least looked right shattered in her hands when she tried to force its tang through a guard and into a handle to put the whole thing together. The rest of its batch became hopelessly crooked when she quenched them.

She crushed the latest useless ingot she’d clearly gotten ore ratios wrong for in her fist and tossed it against the wall with a frustrated cry.

And of course, of course, that was the moment Pearl chose to walk in.

“Bismuth?”

Her voice was filled with concern as she inched closer from the entrance, but there was a glint in her eyes that made it clear Pearl would not be deterred.

So, figuring she had nothing to lose, Bismuth allowed her shoulders to sag and let her misery show.

“I’m not cut out for this. Literally.”

Pearl snorted, hopping up onto the anvil with a deliberate and highly unconvincing casual air. “Tell me about it.”

Bismuth sighed, rubbing the back of her neck with a tiredness she wasn’t sure she was supposed to be capable of, and leaned next to her.

“I ever tell you of my first actual visit to a forge?”

Pearl shook her head.

“Wasn’t that long ago. I took the chance and snuck into a weapon production plant when the hematites weren’t around. Me and the other bismuths had been working on some training grounds right next to it and I’d wanted to see one for so long, so one day I just went for it. And it was... Well. The last time that place had seen a bismuth was when it was being built. I didn’t even fit in there, Pearl. I was too big for the bellows and too small for the anvils, and I could barely walk around the quenching baths they had set up. It was all just… wrong. The whole place was screaming at me, telling me I didn’t belong there and couldn’t if I tried.”

“You’re still trying, though, despite that,” Pearl pointed out, and swept an arm out to seemingly encompass the entire Forge. “And look at all of this! You’ve been working so hard to make it your own.”

2. That HDM/Daemon AU that desperately needs updating - I AM SO SORRY - but here’s some actual (distressing) plot from the underground resistance meeting.

Pearl led Rose to a chair at an empty table near the wall, but didn’t sit down herself. Instead, she went over to the centre of the room where someone had brought out a projecting lantern and several small reels. Aristobulus stood tall at her side, stretching his long neck, and Pearl squared her narrow shoulders and cleared her throat.

The room’s attention was fully on her within moments. Pearl wasn’t what one would ever call a commanding presence, but there was an odd air of almost-imperiousness to her now that made both Rose and Neshu want to stop and listen - not their usual inclination at all.

“As you’ve no doubt heard, 37 people have been arrested by the Consistorial Court of Discipline in the last two months, including two of our own,” Pearl began. “After a cursory sentencing for heresy, all trace of them had vanished. We have now found records of the fates of some of them. I will warn you that these recordings are…” Pearl’s hands folded on each other nervously, “extremely distressing.”

At her nod, someone dimmed the lights and the projection started with the flick of a tiny switch, and all the murmuring that Pearl’s grim warning had prompted died down.

The silent scene hanging in the dusty air seemed to be the inside of a highly advanced laboratory, mostly taken up by strange devices Rose couldn’t fathom a purpose for. The only occupants of the room were a woman a little older than Rose herself, and two dour-looking men in long white overcoats, suggesting some sort of doctor or scholar.

Both the woman and her kestrel daemon were strapped into a particularly large and ominous-looking contraption, with odd metallic coils surrounding the bird. As one of the men approached and expertly plugged in the connectors on a series of cables, the coils started to vibrate and rapidly heat up - enough to emit a glow visible even in the grainy monotone of the recording.

Before their eyes, the kestrel seemed to take on a glow, too, thrashing about as much as the restraints allowed. But then its body started to elongate, its shape twisting and stretching in ways that should have been impossible, losing wings but gaining countless insect-like feet, the beak looking more like mandibles by the second.

Then- sparks, and sudden darkness, and the horrifying experiment cut short by what appeared to be a power outage, with the recording cutting out soon after.

The room was deathly quiet as the projection lit up again. The scene changed, but the same woman was the focus of the projection, now struggling against half a dozen uniformed guards.

The kestrel - back in its original form, it seemed - fought valiantly, leaving deep gouges for many of the guards to remember him by. His human kicked and bit and struggled. But ultimately it was in vain, and they were outmatched and outnumbered, and soon enough thoroughly overpowered and shoved into separate chambers of yet another machine.

Silver grates closed and locked behind both of them, while a similarly silvery guillotine shone above and between them menacingly, and seemed to hum in anticipation.

Pearl looked down at the floor - she had to have seen the recording before, and looking at her and the way Aristobulus was subtly nudging his head against her hand, Rose felt a dawning fear she, too, knew what was coming.

The blade came down.

The woman didn’t die, and the daemon didn’t disperse into so much dust. But they both looked like they wished they had as they were dragged away in opposite directions, without even a whisper of strained bond between them.

Rose struggled to force her fingers, clenched tightly in Neshu’s mane, to relax their grip even a bit.

The scene changed again, and no matter how much she wished she could, Rose didn’t look away.

3. The huge, huge Pearl/Rose fixit-ish fic that I started as an attempt to deal with the gag order mess when ASPR was still fresh. In this excerpt: some Rose/Pink sky arena angst that probably makes a lot more sense in context.

She still looks the part of the fierce rebel leader as her solid, quartz-heavy fists smash into the perfectly hewn pink stone over and over and over again (just the pink, only ever the pink). But her diamond-hard knuckles don’t bruise, don’t bear a trace even as the first floating insignia cracks and shatters into haphazardly hovering fragments.

And why would there ever be any mark left on her? She is, after all, just a spoiled, untouchable princess in disguise, playing a losing game that’s costing lives, making others dance a deadly dance to her self-indulgent little tune. And she could declare herself bored of it, give it all up and abandon them to horrible fates and go home whenever she wanted to in order to be relieved of this burden she clearly wasn’t ready for after all, such a shame... and they wouldn’t even know…!

The weight of the thoughts sends her spiralling back down to the pockmarked floor of the Arena, her landing nothing approaching elegant. A voice she knows she can’t possibly be hearing because its owner is in a (pink, always pink) bubble, hidden away, calls her a coward and a traitor.

She kneels in the ruins of her own making and wonders if Bismuth had a hand in carefully carving out what she has just smashed to pieces. If Bismuth would have cheered her on in this highly symbolic bit of destruction, in what is obviously a very defiant, political act with no practical or tactical purpose but with such a clear and pointed message. Everyone will readily believe that - why would they not?

Everyone except Pearl.

Pearl, who she has now so unthinkingly cruelly reminded of her station, reduced her (reduced them both!) to what they have supposedly been working on growing past and leaving behind. And for what? Because she was terrified, in that moment, that Pearl would find out the truth? That, inevitably, no matter how many Homeworld bases she snuck into and how many of the Moonbase’s systems she scoured, she’d find no trace of Bismuth anywhere, and she’d turn to Rose with those eyes large and shining with betrayal…

Just like they were earlier today, after I forbid it and I order you to stop.

The illusion and the beautiful make-believe are as broken as the symbol - the symbol of her - and how can she even think of considering herself any different from White now, demanding and taking and having her way, draining colour and will and personality to make way for the obedience due a Diamond? Pearl had gone so still, in the wake of the Order, all of her gestures, from nervous to exuberant, gone without a trace, posture stiff and perfect. It all seems a negligible step away from an empty smile on a newly bleached-white face and perfectly poised, outstretched arms; from being faced with an eerie automaton in the place of someone she dared to consider a friend.

She- oh, she wants to call herself Rose but she can’t, she’s not, she’s failed at that every step of the way so far. Pink curls her pristine hands into her fanciful dress nobody sensible would think to fight a war in, and cries, useless miraculous healing tears that couldn’t ever hope to begin fixing what she has so carelessly broken.

[chiclet-go-boom]

fracture: cui bono

The next time their link tears itself open, he’s awake and in control. And so, apparently, is she.

She looks better. Calmer anyways. The tear tracks on her face are long gone and the strain he still sees hides under what could easily be mistaken for quiet exhaustion. He doubts anyone else would notice. This time she’s crouched on one knee, a long carbon chisel in her hands and black grime streaks her face and clothing. Working on something it seems.

He sees her dart a look at him out of the corner of her eye so he takes another bite out of his bowl, and flicks the page on his datapad to advance.

She scrapes the tool a few times on something overhead that he can’t see, muscles in her forearms flexing but its a half hearted effort at best. She seems to realize it too and tries again, harder.

The minutes drag on as she chips away at metal and residue and after three pages where he realizes he has no idea what he just read, he considers leaving. The bond opens whenever it wants to but this is much too soon after last time and what he feels is still too close to the surface for comfort. She’s trying to ignore him too but sitting so near, listening to her move around in his space, impacting on his senses with her presence…  enduring it, waiting for the universe to unsync them seems cruel and he’s not even sure anymore if he means to himself or to her.

His food is suddenly unappetizing and he shoves the bowl out of the way, picks up the datapad and stands, scraping his chair on the floor. He can read these reports elsewhere on the ship. Where it’s quiet, where she is not, where maybe he can concentrate.

“You’re going?” she blurts without warning. She still doesn’t look up but she stops scraping, lowering the chisel bar to her knee like a weapon.

“Yes. I can’t think with the noise you’re making.”

“Please. Please don’t. I want. I want to ask you something.”

He blinks, long and slow. “Really, Rey?”

“Yes, really. I’ve been… I’m trying to work up to it.”

“Okay,” he says finally, nonplussed. “Ask.”

She exhales loudly once, and then again. She turn on her knee to plop down, sitting cross legged in her filthy clothes, with dirty hands and some unknown fear lurking in the lines of her face. She puts the tool across her lap and wraps her fingers around it as if bracing herself.

She looks up and he’s caught then in the color of her eyes when he didn’t mean to be. She looks determined.

She looks scared.

“Why did you do it?”

He takes a slow breath. “Why did I do what, Rey? Why any of it? Why all of it? You’ll need to be more specific.”

“You know. You know what I mean.”

“No. I don’t.”  And he’s never going to get tired of that phrase for the way her eyes always narrow and her mouth always compresses when he says it. The twist in his heart is a little ugly but he likes that it makes her angry. It helps keeps both of them on track.

“Fine,” she snaps. “Why did you lure us into that trap? What did you even gain out of it?”

“That’s not your question.”

She half shrugs, a tiny roll of her shoulder. “Answer it anyways. Why? It’s not like we were there trying to liberate an entire carrier stashed in cold storage or anything.”

He tentatively brushes his thoughts over hers and yes, she’s hiding something but mostly he just feels her hardening determination to face him. Face it, whatever it is. He runs a hand through his hair then tosses the datapad onto the desk, clattering it against the bowl. Fine. If she wants to do this, he can let her. But he’ll do it his way.

He walks over and folds himself easily to the floor just in front of her, crossing his legs as well and draping his long arms over his knees to hang down so near to her hands that his knuckles nearly brush her clothing. The change in perspective is electrifying. He used to do this with Skywalker. Asking. Answering, knee to knee on the ground, as if sitting in the dirt would add extra purity to the exchange.

“No, just records that you were told would lead you to smuggled arms and ammo storage caches in that sector.”

“Yes. So what was the point? It’s so… so small to you. What did it matter?”

He thinks about what he wants to say. She has to know the answer to this and this isn’t what she really wants to ask. Even she can’t be this naive.

He looks into her eyes, so close and so bright and trying to be so guarded against him and realizes… perhaps she can be. When would she have had a chance to learn?

“General Hux,” he decides to offer, “is not as interested in crushing the fragments of the Resistance as I am. Too focused on consolidation and expansion in the now, and not on how to prevent what the future can bring. But he really doesn’t have a choice in the matter so when I yank on his chain, he indulges me. If we had leaked the coordinates to, oh, that command carrier you mentioned, even if it was as real as the nose on your face and under tissue paper guard with antiquated lock codes, the Resistance would have ignored it. Rightfully. You couldn’t man it, for one thing. You certainly can’t afford the fuel for it. Unless you’ve taken to plundering the minds of shady traders in backwater markets full time?”

She narrows her eyes at him and he softens his gaze. “Ah, well. Perhaps not. Well then, no matter how juicy that might seem to you, some worthy amount of... largeness, whatever that might means, Organa would never have taken that bait. But smuggler caches? She knows those. She knows those intimately and how many there can be in a tiny area and how much they can often hold. It was perfectly tailored to what you need and Hux does know what he’s doing when it comes to enticing his enemies to stick out their necks.”

She leans towards him unconsciously. “We lost good men in that fight. To that trap.” That’s closer. That’s a lot closer to her actual question, he can feel her emotions spike under the surface of it.

Kylo shrugs. “So did we. Men, at least, although I wouldn’t swear to their particular goodness.”

“So you spent all that effort to flush us out into the open, for what? The death of eight men in an underground bunker and handful more in the streets? That has to be a waste of the First Order’s time.”

“It could have been less, but no, you chose to save your friend. You do realize if you’d picked either of your other options the numbers would have been so much more in your favor.”

She grits her teeth on the blistering return he just knows she wants to make. He lets her work through it. Watching her, memorizing her, he thinks that she really needs to eat more and sleep more. She’s much too thin. He wants to reach out and wipe the dirt off her face, off her chin. His fingers twitch with the urge and he stills them with effort.

“There are times,” he muses quietly, “when I am reminded how inexperienced you are, and how little you understand about how war games are played and for what stakes. Why aren’t you asking your commander about this?”

She does growl at him for that which makes him smile. Still so fierce. He will miss that if she loses it somewhere, her apparent infinite capacity to want to attack him regardless of odds. Then the thought of why that appeals to him wipes the smile off his face and he shakes his head to dispel it before it has a chance to latch on.

“They wouldn’t talk me about it,” she admits grudgingly, “I asked and they said… well, it doesn’t matter what they said. Apparently they can give me orders that I need to follow but the rest is not for me to concern myself with. Even when it goes so horribly, completely wrong.”

“So here you are, asking me.”

“You’ll tell me the truth, won’t you?” she shoots back.

“Yes,” he breathes. “I am and I will. I could lie to you, but I don’t want to.”

She shifts at that and something helpless moves through her eyes. His throats closes on the feeling that flashes between them and he swallows it down. His hands clench and release. “You’re not always right,” she says in a near whisper, as if reminding herself of it.

“Maybe. But I’m not always wrong. But… as for what you didn’t actually say, it’s stupid on their part. Your command. You’re not a soldier and the Force will give you knowledge your average trooper will not have. Not even counting how you can find me through it, even if all they believe is that you have something that will tell you where I am on a battlefield. And I bet you my grandfather’s saber that you haven’t said anything different to them about us and what we are to each other.”

“There is,” she says a little forcefully, “no us, Kylo Ren. And you don’t have your grandfather’s saber to bet, I do.”

He shrugs and keeps his hands on his knees. “Yet I’m looking right at you, Rey. You had a question and you came to me to ask it. And maybe one day I am going to kiss you or you are going to kiss me but… no bet, I take it?” He thinks about pulling her onto his lap though, curling her in his arms while they talk, letting the image of it dominate his thoughts.

She flushes in answer, although whether its for the words or the longing he’s projecting he can’t be sure.

“I haven’t told anyone either. We,” he says quietly, “are. What we are, I don’t know any more than you do, but something.” He flicks his fingers in a negating motion, not exactly sure what he’s pushing away when all he really wants to do is pull her in. “Maybe enemies, but I don’t think so.”

“Maybe,” she whispers back. She looks to her hands gripping the forgotten chisel, flexing her fingers. “I don’t think so either. Something.”

He takes a deeper breath, leaning back because suddenly he knows he’s going to move towards her in two more heartbeats and he’s not ready for that. He will never be ready for that. “I, however, am not stupid nor am I in your chain of command. So yes, if you want to know, I’ll tell you exactly why the First Order bothered to seed that intel and even what we got out of it. Hux can stretch himself even more creatively the next time I send him after you.”

“I would... yes. Please.”

His scavenger, always starved for knowledge, for understanding and desperate enough at this point to come to him to find it. Why are they not feeding her? His mother, at the very least, should be handling this better.

“Can we start with the understanding that the Resistance is a former shade of itself? I don’t want your exact complement numbers, even if I thought you’d share them, but can we both agree that the First Order overwhelms what you can bring to the field now by an order of several magnitudes?”

She nods after a moment.

“Good. So let’s start there. We are large and at the moment you are tiny. This makes you hard to find, hard to spot, hard to pin down. If you did the smart thing and all scattered in as individuals, you’d simply disappear. I might find some of you with effort but the Resistance itself would be gone in every meaningful sense. Only to rise, of course, decades from now stronger again and with more teeth for the waiting and the building and this war will erupt all over again. So that is my priority - I want all of you dead, as fast as possible, to keep that from happening. I let myself get distracted by Skywalker on Crait. Now I’m paying the price for it.”

He holds up a finger as she opens her mouth. “Your command knows this. But scattering isn’t in their best interests because in staying together, perhaps they can still accomplish something meaningful in the short term. There’s only so much time left before the old guard is gone. So while it would be smart to disperse, Organa appears to be opting to keep fighting, trying to leverage what she still has while she can still oversee it. And the First Order as a whole does not turn particularly quickly although let’s also take it as agreed that I can move an entire planet’s resources faster than your General probably thinks I can. Regardless, the takeaway here is that while you are desperate, you’re also fast and hard to catch.”

“I feel like I should be taking notes,” she says.

“You probably should, but that’s on you. So my General makes a bait that is juicy enough to tempt your General out of the hole she’s… well, holed up in and makes it small enough that she feels it can be taken with minimal or no losses, coming out the other side with enough resources that will make a difference to the Resistance as it exists now. In, out, done. And your command snaps it up and sends you and your friends into. So it’s a trap. And you lost, what, eight men you said?”

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen. A single squad of soldiers. That is nothing to the First Order but a heavy blow to the Resistance. So that’s one reason why - disproportionate losses. Every man or machine or weapon you lose, you will have difficulty replacing. Attrition is your enemy, not mine. Which is why your commander probably wishes greatly that you had gone to save the eight men walking into the jaws of the trap, regardless of your friendship to the traitor.”

“I wasn’t leaving Finn to die!”

“I know. I was hoping he, or someone like him, perhaps your Best Pilot? I was hoping for one or both of them to be there to make sure you that you couldn’t make a better, more logical choice. Want more?”

Her cheeks are pale and her lips are tight out but she nods. She wants knowledge, even though it’s painful and he approves. He half closes his eyes and listens to her mind sway as she absorbs this lesson. This is closer to her question. Something to do with her friend.

“Good. That was actually a secondary objective, by the way. Another secondary objective was again, disproportionate effort. The Resistance committed much more to that little scrub skirmish than the First Order did and as it was your primary operation, there not much else the Resistance could potentially accomplish at the same time. Tying up your resources, even if you had sustained no losses, was good for us in an objective sense. And of course we then knew exactly where most of you were.”

He warms to his topic, leaning back in again. She mirrors him and he really, really wants to take her hands in his.

“Our major objectives were, in order, to drive home that your intel going forward could very well be compromised, meaning the Resistance will be much less likely to trust anything coming from any single source. Which means you’ll be bogged down in trying vet everything about anything that comes your way before acting on it. This will be paralyzing. Your entire organization will be more cautious, less active, will reach out less often and with less confidence, for fewer rewards. You’ll grow slower. I will have more time to find you.”

Rey looks a little pale and Kylo finds himself nodding along as he sees her take that in, even if she’s only seeing all of this exactly how its been laid out to her.

“And in last place,” he finished quietly, “for what we were trying to do, is simple demoralization. You did take losses, and fairly heavy ones for what you have. Those who are being sent out to do the dirty work may start distrusting their orders, be reluctant to act on them in the field, may be more likely to desert if they are told to do something that seems too risky. And your command now knows that you will sacrifice people to save just one. This will make you... unreliable.”

“I am not! Finn is my friend, they understand that. I wasn’t going to leave him there to die.”

“Perhaps. But as I said, secondary objectives. The Jedi have no attachments, Rey. The Jedi code forbids you to have attachments. But you do. You feel strongly for your friends. Yet that code that the Resistance holds so closely to the Light requires that you must always act for the good of many, or for as many as you can. That you chose instead to save just one person, a friend, and left others to die will speak much more eloquently than anything you say with words.”

If she was pale before, now she looks stricken.

“That’s your question, isn’t it, Rey?” he says softly in the spreading silence. “Why won’t they tell you what went wrong. Why don’t they trust you.”

She scrubs at her face then, hiding her expression, and the dirt streaks even more. Everything around her is tinged with hurt and a sudden misery. “How can you do all of this? How can you know all of this?”

This time he doesn’t want to deny either of them. He reaches out cautiously, slowly. Takes the barest edge of her fingers in his to weave them together. And she permits. Oh, she permits with her breath trembling out just as his does and even in this slightest of touches, she tightens her fingers as if to feel him more.

“I’ve been a political prisoner in one way or another most of my life, Rey. And I used to be where you are, knowing only what you know, trying to live under a set of rules that I didn’t understand and couldn’t follow. And now here I am, on the other side and maybe your enemy, and the Dark has been a very thorough teacher. And -- I’m Leia Organa’s son. Who do you think I learned it from first?”

He has time to lift her stained fingertips to his lips, a chaste almost touch that he can see reflected in her eyes before the world divides and she shimmers, is gone.

[rheesus]

corpse party! — richie tozier (two)

pairing: richie tozier x reader

warnings: panic attacks, mentions of murder, gore, horror, occult and paranormal happenings

— part two of ?

( see part one )

i wont do all 5 chapters since chapter one is entirely based on seiko and naomi who are beverly and eleven sooo yeah! if you want to know what would happen to them and you don’t know the story of corpse party well, watch a gameplay or something laksjshddh 

something soft and wet had landed on y/n's cheek as she laid unaware of her surroundings. whatever was running down her face like tear drops seemed to have woken the class representative up. her e/c eyes batted opened and met to the view of a ceiling that had a clear whole through both the top of the building and the floor between that and the floor she laid on, next to that was a broken light fixture, flickering intensely with its last life.

"so, you're one of the new victims, huh?" an unfamiliar make voice echoed from behind her. the voice alone sent a wave of chills throughout her entire body as she turned and let out a ear piercing scream, she scrambled away, looking up at a boy no older than 17 - the lower part of his body seemed to sway like flames but his whole being had a blue ethereal glow to it.

from out in the hallway she could easily hear two voices calling her name in worry; richie and ms byers. if not for the boy in front of her, she would've smiled at this revealation. the boy's eyes seemed to wander in the direction of their voices and he gave a bittersweet smile.

"wow, stuck in the same space with not one, but two people you know? you're lucky." 

"w-w-" 

"that luck wont last long, i mean - look what happened to me!" the boy had laughed but not in a way that emitted happiness or amusement. his eyes now wandered to the floor, where a pile of bones and some ripped clothing laid.

“what do you mean?” the teen girl boldly said, though her thoughts didn’t match her tone. the ghost just shrugged. 

“you’ve been dragged here against your will. it looks like an abandoned school but it’s hell. you’ll either die horribly or eventually, you’ll kill your friends and die horribly. no matter what, it’s just pain twenty-four fuckin seven.”

 y/n had gulped down her fear in hopes to ask more before something came barrelling through the door and the ghost had fled at the sight and sound.

richie tozier and their beloved ms. byers. 

the first thing that happened upon seeing each other was the tears and smiles of relief before ms byers wrapped the class rep in a tight embrace, richie had squatted down next to her. his grin only widened when she turned to playfully glare at him.

"of all our friends i could be stuck with and i get stuck with you?" the boy rolled his eyes and ms byers had chuckled.

“if you ask me, richie was more worried out of—”

“anyways, it’s good you’re alive.” richie cut the lady off, smiling and ignoring the way his cheeks warmed up. y/n had smiled too, hugging ms. byers again. their happiness was, however, short-lived. the building had started to shake violently and a loud scream rang out through the building — one of filled with the pain and suffering. and who it belonged to was a familiar person to the three.

eleven hopper. 

the very thought that one of her classmates and friends were in danger made y/n’s stomach churn and her mind to run wild with negative thoughts. soon those thoughts became to overwhelming to the point where the teen girl couldn’t help but lose her breath. ms. byers could sense her distress and cupped her face in her hands, 

“y/n, focus on me. it was probably nothing,” she gave an encouraging smile, “probably the wind.”

“but you heard it, right? that was el. our el.” ms byers sighed. richie looked around the wrecked classroom, chewing on his lip nervously.

“ms byers, stay here with y/n and i’ll go look for eleven—”

“no! you stay here with y/n where it’s safe and i will find eleven.”

“stop it! no!” the two looked back at the h/c, her breathing was still erratic but she persisted in talking, “you can’t leave, i just found both of you.”

the kindly teacher had done nothing but give a genuine, sweet smile, “you’ll be fine. i’ll bring eleven back here safe and sound. promise.”

not allowing y/n or richie to protest, ms. byers had left the classroom. the two students stared at the door for what felt like hours. y/n had moved her head towards the corpse of the boy she had talked to. near his the bones of what used to be his hand was nearly touching a card of some sort. she crawled to it and took it into her possession. in fine black print were the words.

derry boys high school

steve harrington 

d.o.b.: 16 april 1996

grade 12 

y/n had let out a shaky breath before stashing the id card in her jacket pocket. she looked back to the door ms. byers had left from and mumbled words of hope under her breath.

please, be okay.

joyce byers had found herself in a classroom worse off than the one she left richie and y/n. one half of it was collapsed in, leaving nothing but a black abyss. she would’ve gone up the stairs but she could hear a wicked voice giggle in her head, “unwise to go upstairs, teacher.”

and so she stayed on the same floor. she had taken five steps in before a blue boy had appeared before her, a bored expression across his face. his mullet was a mess and he glowed. 

“teacher! you stopped cowering with the two in the other classroom, huh?”

she looked at the boy in annoyance. what did he mean by cowering? joyce bit her tongue and gulped, “i heard one of my student’s scream and i’ve set out to find her.”

“i see... regrettably,” he spoke lowly, “that won’t be possible. this school exists in a nexus where multiple dimensions overlap. it’s a single closed space in a sea of closed spaces. in other words, even though you may be in the same school as your screaming student, you and her occupy different dimensions... which means you two can never meet.”

“if one of you should die, perhaps your body... or spirit may move from one space to another... you can find a way of traversing the planes freely as they do,” ms. byers didn’t know why but the way the boy spoke the word they, sent a chill running down her back. the blue boy continued to talk to her, “consider this fair warning: even if you should find the exact spot from which your student’s screams emanated... she herself may not be there and if she’s not there’s not a thing you can do about.”

the boy spoke smugly but there was no indication in his expression that he meant to be. joyce’s eyes were filling up with tears of desperation, “but i heard her scream!”

“it is true other children have arrived here not long ago and by all appearances seem to be your students,” the boy shrugged, “but as i explained, time and space is fragmented here and it doesn’t behave like you assume — you say you heard a scream. that may have taken place a few minutes ago or perhaps in another space hours previous or maybe an echo from the future, who’s to say. or maybe with the phenomenon as it is; it’s possible two closed spaces can have some influence on each other.”

the young woman had clenched her teeth. this young boy was doing her head in. all she wanted was to find eleven and verify her safety, “it doesn’t matter! i can’t go on and ignore an antagonising scream like that! step aside!”

she charged at him and he disappeared. ms. byers had missed the glowering expression he gave her. she had looked around the room for any clues or hints that her student was near but to no avail. as she went to leave the classroom, a supernatural force pull her back in, slamming the door fast. materialising in front of her was the same boy she had just talked to except her glowed red with nothing but malice and hate in his lifeless eyes.

“step aside?! why don’t you fuck off!” his voice was now no longer monotone, but angry at her. the ground had started to shake once again. too focused on the earthquake, ms byers had failed to notice the shelf filled with cutting supplies slowly falling towards her body. the shelf itself was too heavy with the combined force of wat was pushing it down and so it caused her to topple too.

she felt the bones in her back all crack at once and her skin was being sliced. was it the scissors or the scalpels or the glass that was worse? she couldn’t tell it was all too painful to bear. the angry teen started to talk again, “in all the world, the most vile and untrustworthy are you schoolteachers. all you give a shit about is your own well-being! you’re not worried about your students! you’re just worried about being held responsible if something should happen to them!”

joyce couldn’t worry about his rant, only how much the weight was hurt her, “youre all the same... every single one of you! and i won’t be taken in by your lies!”

this caught her attention. taken in by lies? 

“when you see a problem among your kids, you just keep your distance because you sure wouldn’t want to get involved! have to keep up appearances, right? you just pick out the problem children and chip away at them until they drop out or get expelled! you’re not disciplining them — you’re just raging at them! there’s no teacher ever that’s actually cared about their students!” 

with what little energy she had, ms byers spoke up bravely, “-you’re... you’re wrong.” 

this angered him more and the weight on her back grew more heavier, she let out a yelp of pain as he continued raging, “all of your students are destined to starve to death here if they don’t succumb to this hellhole and kill everyone! it’s the only possible outcome. they’ll all die meaningless deaths like me! and they won’t be thinking of you when they take their final breaths i’ll even pass on a message as they die so — any last words?”

the woman used her energy to glare up at him menacingly, “d...don’t touch those children.”

the teen boy snorted than laughed maniacally like she’d said the most wicked joke, “come again.”

“spare my students... please don’t hurt them.” for some reason this angered him more and more, “please! i beg of you don’t harm a hair on their... goddamn... heads.”

her voice faded out but her thoughts didn’t. 

please please be safe, my sweet students.

  richie had finally stopped looking at the door to turn and look at y/n. minutes had passed and no sign of eleven or ms byers could be seen. y/n suddenly stood up, legs wobbling slightly but nonetheless she bravely stood, walking to the door.

“we have to go find ms. byers.” she mumbled. she soundly drained and tired.

“no way, ms. byers said stay here so—”

“we have to go find ms. byers!” her tone caused richie to flinch, “i just have a bad feeling... we gotta go search for ms. byers.” 

the boy sighed and shook his head.

“fucks sake, fine. but we leave a note for her. do you have pen and paper?” y/n produced a pen but shook her head without any paper. richie messily written a note on the teachers desk and sighed again, “alright lets get the fuck out of here.”

this was so long holy fuck-

anyways i finished writing this at 1am and i’ve scared myself writing so congrats! here’s chapter two! and if you want to be apart of the tag list, i ask or just like the post i made abt it or if i forgot you please tell me oksejhdhdhd

taglist — @dovageidys @the-internet-is-a-scary-place @schwankyblock @musicalsandbooks 

[magically-strange]

Reunited

Strange Magic Week 2017 - Canon Divergence Theme

AO3 link

A year ago, Marianne thought she knew what true heartbreak was.  She had cried and wallowed, convinced that her pain was beyond measure. 

How miserably foolish, because now, kneeling here in the dirt, at the edge of a cliff, staring down into a dark, dusty void where a mighty castle and its equally mighty king had fallen only moments before sunrise, she realized…

…hell, that pain hadn’t even come close to this.

It was as if a falcon had ripped a chunk from her breast with its razor-sharp talons and she was bleeding a river from the wound.  Her frozen shock gradually melted into tears pattering the uncaring ground, and she found herself longing to fade with the waning night that had shown her such wonders.

As the cruel morning grew, so did her despair, for it was a reminder of the endless slew of days she would continue to face alone.  To think, she once had the gall to believe she was stronger that way.  Oh, the irony!  She was as fragile and tragic as frost on a wilting lotus.  

It was all her fault.  

Why?

Why hadn’t she listened?

She really was stupid.  

So, so, so STUPID!!!

If she’d gotten back, as he’d warned her to, he wouldn’t have had to slow down his momentum.  Both he and Dawn would’ve made it out safely. But no, she just had to be all stubborn and heroic!  Never counting the cost, just acting without thinking it all through!  And she’d finally paid the ultimate price for her recklessness.  

She’d…killed him.  

The one person she never thought could’ve existed, who had challenged her, accepted her, protected her, and of course, exceeded her expectations, though she’d teased otherwise.

But she’d lost him.  

It was all the worse that he was an innocent soul.  Yes, he had abducted her sister, but only in retaliation to being wronged first and trying to prevent mass chaos.  She honestly couldn’t say that her kingdom would not have done something similar, had they been in his place.  Damn the senselessness of it all!

When Dawn approached and gently touched her shoulder in comfort, she was quick to conceal the majority of her woe so she could embrace her, beyond grateful to the heavens that she was free from that cursed spell.  And though she was happy for Dawn and Sunny as she watched them take hands, she loathed herself for feeling the slightest twinge of jealousy.  

Their love was blossoming at last.  Hers had ended before it could begin.  

It just wasn’t fair.

Unable to bear it, she pulled away from her sister’s arms and gazed mournfully down into the pit one last time.  For what reason, she did not know.  Survival would’ve been impossible, and nothing but grey, lifeless fog stared back up at her.  She took a deep breath, despite how much it greatly hurt her to do so, and swayed to turn…

…but she paused.

.

.

.

She could’ve sworn she’d heard something.  Something unusual amidst the waking forest and the grief-stricken whimpers of the goblins in the mixed crowd behind her.  

It sounded…like a distant cough from….  

No.

It couldn’t be.

She was just hearing things.  

…Yet she still had not moved an inch.

Daring to hope that fate would be kind to her just once more, she crept to the edge of the cliff and tilted her head to hear, silencing Dawn’s inquiry with a wave of her hand.  

For several long, terrible moments, she heard nothing but her own breathing and the rapid drum of her pulse in her ears.

Sorrow tightened its fist in her stomach and she began to yield…

-but then it came.

Her heart shot straight up through her throat and into her very brain at the faint, but unmistakable voice calling for help from below.

Caught up in an immediate cyclone of emotions and energy she could neither name nor control, she acted upon pure instinct and threw herself from the ledge, shooting into the chasm like an arrow.  Thankfully, some semblance of logic gripped her mind before she could blindly dive into the fog concealing what she knew to be at least massive chunks of jagged rubble.  She spread her wings to catch herself and descended more slowly into the unknown.  

Once past the fog, visibility improved, but only just.  She was surrounded by immense clouds of dust and black, towering shapes of debris, stone, or root; she could not tell in the dim light.  

Her panic rose when she realized she had not heard the voice again.

“BOG?!  BOG, CAN YOU HEAR ME?!”

She tried not to flinch at the sound of her harsh echo bouncing through the abyss, making it seem all the more empty.  The following seconds were the longest of her lifetime, and she prayed she was not going mad.

Please, please, please!  Oh, please!!!

“…Marianne?!”

!!!

“Marianne, i-is that you?!”

A joy she had not known since the day she first learned to fly erupted within her chest at the far off, but blessed answer.

“BOG!  BOG, WHERE ARE YOU?!”  Marianne screamed, spinning about, trying to pinpoint the origin.

“Here!  Marianne, I’m here!”  

Selecting a seemingly northward direction, Marianne carefully, but urgently, made her way through the murk and gloom.  Lower and lower she flew, coughing on dust and occasionally calling out to make sure she maintained her path.  

Bog’s voice grew louder and closer, and eventually, she saw what appeared to be the floor of the trench. She reached out with the toe of her boot to test its stability: it gave way beneath her foot like sand.  It was not soil, but mounds of splintered wood. She was nearing the center of the wreckage.

Randomly, she was struck by the awful supposition that Bog might be mortally wounded; that she would find him only to lose him all over again.  She shook the offensive fear away.  No, she was being paranoid.  He sounded too strong to be badly hurt.

Venturing further, she soon caught sight of something white in the distance.  Picking up speed, it was revealed to be the skull that once marked the entrance to the castle, tilted on its left side, and half crushed under a mountain of dirt and broken bark.    

Breath too stolen for speech, Marianne raced to alight upon the dead face, eyes raking over the horrible cracks and chips in the bone, when suddenly, a hand, scaled and clawed, shot out through a narrow gap in the clenched teeth with such abruptness, she gasped in surprise, but was almost instantly grabbing and tugging at it to wind the whole arm around her.  

“Bog!  Oh, Bog!”    

Fresh sobs of pure, insurmountable elation sprang forth at the sound of Bog’s relieved laughter from within, and for what could’ve been a millennium, they awkwardly, but no less passionately held each other tight.    

“Marianne,” Bog managed to say after some time, “I-I can’t get out.  It’s too heavy, an’ I sprained my other arm.  Can ye help me?”

Reality crashed over Marianne like a felled tree, and she blushed as she entangled herself from Bog’s grasp and wildly looked around for an avenue of escape from his prison. Briefly, she considered going back to the cliff to gather assistance from the crowd, but she was far too impatient for that, not to mention seriously reluctant to leave Bog’s side.

Think!  There’s gotta be a way!

“Bog, your staff!  Do you still have it?”

“…Yes, why?”

“I’ve got an idea! Stick the top of the staff though the hole; about halfway out!”

Bog did as he was instructed, and Marianne seized the iron weapon just below the decorative crown.

“Now what?”  Bog asked.

“When I tell you, push the jaws open as hard as you can.  I’m gonna try to use the staff as a kind of lever to help you.  Got it?”

“Alright, I got it!”

“Ready?”

“…Yeah!”

“One…two…three!  GO!”  

It was difficult, knowing that their angle was off, and that her weight wouldn’t do her any favors, Marianne was forced to pull up on the staff instead of push down, using her wings to give her extra force. She could hear Bog grunting and straining inside the mouth, but the dull scraping sounds of bone sliding against bone egged her on.  The shattered, wooden remains of Bog’s home trembled from the gradual movement and rolled off the obscured cranium, lightening their load by degrees. Marianne pulled harder as she saw the mossy teeth parting.

Yes, yes!  Almost there!

What happened next, nearly scared her so bad, her hair turned white.  There was a deafening snap, and she felt the rod jerk unnaturally towards her.  She had not broken Bog’s royal staff, fortunately, only the top of the skull.  The weapon carved a vicious path through the brittle bone like glass.  

At the unsteady lurch, the dilapidated stump fragments cascaded down like a mudslide, but Bog was faster.  Fighting against the current of rubbish, Bog wriggled himself through the impromptu opening Marianne had created, and was free.

For a beat, the two just gaped at each other, one in gratitude and tenderness, the other in awe and rapture that she was lost in those beautiful sky-blue eyes again.

“Thank ye, Marianne.”

“Bog!”  Marianne breathed, dropping the staff and rushing to cup his thin, prickly cheeks, scanning him in vain for injuries.  “Oh, thank goodness!  Are you okay?!”

He nodded and smiled at her with his crooked fangs.

“Yes.  Yes, I’m fine; wings, shoulders, head…all good, Tough Gir-!”

Hearing his favorite nickname for her, Marianne tossed all sense of decorum and pride to the wind. She cut him off by throwing herself into his arms and kissing him as if there was no tomorrow.

But there would be, and as Bog shyly returned her kiss, she knew there would be many, and they would spend each and every one of them together.

[secretlystephaniebrown]

Time’s Running Out: Golf

I'm back from RTX with an update! Hope you guys enjoy it!

Summary: The Reds and Blues; and their respective Freelancers, find themselves stranded on a strange planet named Chorus. Secrets, lies, and the unexpected seem to lie around every corner, and there might be even larger threats looming over the horizon.

They’re possibly even less ready for Chorus than Chorus is for them.

Pairings: Lots of friendships, Suckington, Yorkalina, Chex, eventual Yorkimbalina, possible others.

Start

Previous

Ao3

There was a nervous humming in Felix’s veins, and it wouldn’t die down.

They’d gotten away.

They’d infiltrated his people.

They’d outsmarted him.

He’d been played, by Foxtrot of all people.

The taste in his mouth was sour at that.

Foxtrot, back in the day, was a bumbling idiot with aspirations of heroism. Oh, he was fast enough on his feet, and good at his job, and lucky in his own way. If India hadn’t been so found of him, for whatever weird reason, Felix was sure that the guy would have been dead long before he and Locus had joined up.

He’d lasted a long time. Longer than any of the other Foxtrots. Foxtrots-13, 14, and 15 had all been pain in their asses, rapid in succession, and each less competent than the last. Felix had killed 14 himself on a mission to stop the idiot from giving away their position. Not that he’d told the others that. Killing a teammate was generally frowned upon, even in the down and dirty of black ops work.

India must have known that 12 had survived though. She’d been the one to tell them he was dead. Some sort of backroom trade, Felix guessed. He wondered what Freelancer had given their group in exchange for a lock-picking jokester.

He wondered what had happened to his eye. Foxtrot had laughed it off when Felix had asked, ducking the question every time. Felix had noticed, but not pressed. Now, he had to wonder, knowing that he was dealing with a Freelancer.

And not just any Freelancer—Felix had looked him up. New York. Infiltration specialist—of course he was—and, shockingly, in possession of a powerful AI fragment.

That, at least, would probably appease Hargrove for them not catching this. He wanted fragments badly. So much of Freelancer tech had gone missing in the aftermath of Washington blowing the place to hell and back. Including most of the A.I., which Washington had claimed had been incorporated into the Meta before he destroyed it.

But the Alpha was still unaccounted for, among others.

Felix thought about prying the A.I. chip out of Foxtrot’s head—maybe he’d use a knife, that would be fun. A present for Hargrove. Maybe he’d get a bonus.

Although, really, hearing Agent York scream as he did so would be bonus enough.

And maybe those two friends of his.

“Hey Carolina. Hey Tex.”

Yeah, Felix was going to have fun with them, too.

“We have confirmation, sir!” One of the men said. “We have a match for the two soldiers!”

Felix lunged forward, grabbing the datapad out of his hand. It had taken them long enough. Why did they work with so many idiots? You’d think Hargrove would be able to afford better people, if he could afford Felix and Locus’ rates. “Definite match for the fuckers who’ve been raiding our bases,” he muttered, glancing at the security footage. Teal armor that changed color, and black armor.

“That’s correct, sir.”

“We thought there was only one of them,” Felix said, fingers lingering on the image of the soldier in black armor. “But she’s got a camo unit, doesn’t she? Well then,” he grinned to himself, “at least this should be interesting.” Fighting Locus with that unit was no challenge, but Felix knew Locus inside and out. He could predict his every move; it had been years since Locus had surprised him. The guy was hilariously easy to read, and to play.

But this one was a whole new player.

“Agents Texas and Carolina of Project Freelancer,” Locus said, and Felix didn’t even glance up at his sudden appearance. “The top two soldiers the project produced.”

Felix rolled his eyes and didn’t point out that Foxtrot had literally given them the names. Instead, he pulled up the dossiers provided, and began to poke at them, sorting through the information. Hargrove’s information on the Freelancers was wonderfully thorough. The man had taken his time combing through all of the Freelancer personnel files to put everything together.

God only knew that Locus had spent enough time obsessing over Agent Washington’s to tell Felix just how thorough they were.

He’d already looked at Agent York’s, and been frustrated to find that it offered little to no more information than the file they already had, from the old days. When Felix and Locus had joined Black Ops, they’d been promised that their old lives would be burned until there wasn’t a trace left of who they’d used to be.

It looked like they’d been just as thorough with Foxtrot.  

“This should be fun,” Felix said softly to himself, examining the breakdowns and statistics and profiles of Carolina and Texas. “What did Control say?”

“They want Agent Texas alive,” Locus responded. Felix’s head snapped up, curious.

“Did they say why?” There was an itch there. The way she had moved when she’d attacked him was unmistakable. Felix was fast, Felix was very fast, and he’d dodged her hits, but the amount of raw power she packed into her punches was terrifying. It was like Locus, but even more dangerous up close. She hadn’t learned to pull back, to fight from a distance. Up close and personal was how she liked it, brawling and punching.

Felix loved a challenge.

“No,” Locus said, and there was a distinct lack of curiosity there that was aggravating. He hadn’t fought her. He hadn’t seen. Maybe if he had, he’d be more curious, but he’d been fighting Carolina and preoccupied with Washington, too busy to pay attention to the top of the leaderboard, fighting Felix below. “I made arrangements. Everything should be in order.”

“Well,” Felix shrugged. “Hopefully we won’t need them. Time to make the call?”

“Yes,” Locus nodded. Felix turned to walk away, and Locus fell into step beside him. It was as natural as breathing, the two of them walking perfectly in sync.

“Think they’ll take it?” Felix said, turning his face towards the sky, where the ship was hovering. He couldn’t believe that Hargrove was offering those idiots an out. But then again…

There were four Freelancers with them, even if one of them was Foxtrot. That did change things.

“Foxtrot knows we uphold our bargains.”

“But he’s also got that fucking stupid hero complex,” Felix snorted, thinking of the way the guy had gotten along with Kimball. A regular meeting of the idealist’s club, right there. “Think he’s outgrown that?”

“The Simulation Troopers never desired to be involved in this conflict,” Locus said, instead of giving a straight answer. That was probably a “no”, then. “And Agent Washington is a sensible man.”

Felix rolled his eyes at that comment. “Wonder how the boss intends to get his hands on Texas if we let them go,” Felix mused. There was no way that Hargrove would just let her go, not if he’d ordered them to spare her should things turn to combat again.

“It is not our concern,” Locus said. “Focus, Felix.”

“You focus,” Felix snapped. It was childish, but he didn’t care. He hated it when Locus got like this. “Let’s report back to the generals and then fucking get this over with.”

Kimball had lost soldiers before.

Kimball had lost a lot of soldiers before.

The war had killed Kimball’s parents, her brother, her teachers, her neighbors. Her first girlfriend, the man on the street corner who sold apples that he picked himself. It had killed every single branch of her family tree, until she was truly the only Kimball left on Chorus. Soldiers under her command, the generals that had come before her, her comrades in arms. They had died and each death left her with a longer list of people to grieve and more voices in her nightmares.

Losing the Reds and Blues wasn’t any worse than those deaths. Not technically. 

But it was a sucker punch to her chest, stealing her breath away like the war had stolen her childhood. Like the Federal Army had stolen the Reds and Blues.

Felix was leaning against the wall, cradling his ribs the way he always did when he was injured but didn’t want to admit it.

She should force him the infirmary, she knew. She should thank him for trying, for working hard to bring them back. She should tell him it’s not his fault that Locus gunned them down. She should go visit the troops, press hands on shoulders and tell them it will be alright.

But she can’t.

They were hope, they were heroes. They had filled this camp with an optimism that Kimball hadn’t felt since she was barely an adult and pledging herself to a cause she didn’t fully understand.

And more than that, they were her friends.

She’d never talk to Tucker by the algae pond again. She’d never get him to finish the story of how he got his sword, or get to look at those photos of Junior he’d been promising. She’d never yell at Grif for eating too much in the cafeteria again or try to get Simmons to actually talk to his squad or walk in on Caboose talking to the vehicles.

She’d never be able to ask Harris what it was about that old lighter he liked to play with on his bad days. What it meant, what the story was, was there anything she could do to help?

She’d never asked before, respecting his privacy, and now she regrets that, because the lighter is probably destroyed or in the hands of the Federal Army, along with his body, to be thrown in some inglorious unmarked grave for enemy combatants.

The hatred sears bitter and hot on her tongue. It makes her want to scream, knowing that she will never know what they were thinking, never be able to ask. She will never see Tucker’s expression melt into relief as he throws himself at Washington and Kaikaina. She will never get to hear the thick Southern accent that Grif so loved to mock. She will never meet Caboose’s best friend.

They are all dead, murdered, all for a war they didn’t want to be in. For a war she had dragged them into.

She feels shaken to her very core, and she turns her face to the sky, apologies to the dead lodged in her throat.

She turned and walked away, leaving Felix and his injuries for now. He won’t mention it later, she knew. He was too professional. But he’d be hurt. He’d rib her for it later, and she’d let him. He was her friend as well as employee. She should be stronger, should comfort him. They were his friends too. Particularly Harris and Tucker.

But she didn’t have it in her.

She went to her private quarters, locking the door behind her. She waited for two minutes to make sure that no one is there, listening.

Then, and only then, when she was sure she couldn’t hear breathing on the other side of the door, did she rip her helmet off her head and throw it hard across the room, allowing it to slam against the wall.

“Damn it!” She screamed, everything in her chest shaking, as if threatening to fall apart.

This was not how it was supposed to be. How could it? How could they all be dead? Caboose’s smile, Grif and Simmons’ banter, Tucker’s flirting, Harris’s terrible jokes, they all were gone, and nothing she did could bring them back.

She sat down hard on her bed, fisting her hands in her hair, pulling as hard as she dared. Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes, but she held them in, refusing to cry. She would not cry, because then the cadets would know she’d been crying, and then it would spread further and further, a wave of sorrow and moroseness swallowing the camp because Kimball couldn’t be strong.

A sudden though struck her, unexpectedly; she wanted to talk to Harris about this. Which was impossible because he was dead, but somehow, she knew that he’d understand this. On some level, he’d get this. She remembered that old look of grief that he’d get when talking about the others, the ones he couldn’t save, the ones that Locus had—had gunned down—

She sat on her bed as long as she dared, struggling to keep her breathing steady, even as the rest of her body shook so hard with sobs she dared not voice that she felt like she was coming apart at the very foundations.

Kimball had lost soldiers before.

She had lost friends before.

She had lost all hope before.

Surely, she told herself, lying through her metaphorical teeth, this time was no different.

Tucker spent the night sandwiched between Kai and Wash. They were all in armor, and it was an uncomfortable mess. The angles poked and the helmets clanked against each other when they shifted, but none of them dared get out of armor, not when they might be attacked on a moment’s notice.

But they were here, and alive, and Tucker really couldn’t bring himself to care about the rest of it right now. They hadn’t been tortured, they weren’t hurt, they were fine. He gripped both of them, never intending to let go, and they gripped back just as hard.

“Missed you,” Kai muttered, burrowing into his back while Wash pressed their helmeted foreheads against each other.  

The Reds—the non-Freelancer Reds that is—were all sticking together on one side of the camp. Tex and Church were sitting next to each other. They weren’t even touching, they were just… sitting. Tucker wondered if they were talking at all. Caboose sat on Church’s otherside, and he was talking, that was for sure.

Carolina was standing on one side of the camp, talking with Epsilon. The crazy doctor lady had approached her, and was talking animatedly, while Carolina and Epsilon seemed bemused.

York was leaning against a wall, talking to Delta and watching Carolina with that old, weird expression he got sometimes. Tucker would never understand him.

Thinking about York reminded Tucker of Felix and lies again, and he just tried to focus on the way that Wash was breathing.

None of that mattered right now, because the three of them were safe, and together again. If Tucker closed his eyes, he could pretend they were back in Valhalla, in the base, back home. He could pretend he’d never been a Captain, never been to war again, never heard the words “Freckles, shake!”

Behind him, Kai squeezed his waist tighter, and started to snore

When morning came, Felix and Locus called with an offer. Wash tried to send them away.

Even after everything, after all they’d gone through, Wash wanted to send them away. He wanted to stay behind, to fight, with Carolina and Tex. Even though he knew he’d die on this planet, that they would never see him again, he wanted to stay behind.

They were going to fight about that later, Tucker vowed to himself. Because they were never leaving him behind again. Kai gripped Tucker’s hand hard enough that the bones in his hand creaked, and he knew she was in complete agreement with him.

They weren’t going to be separated again.

It was the three of them, why couldn’t Wash get that? They wouldn’t be fine without him, any more than he and Kai had been fine without Tucker. Because they hadn’t been. Kai and Wash had both been very vocal about that, when they’d found each other.

But it didn’t come to that. Wash didn’t leave them again.

Instead, Tucker had an idea.

And even as Felix slid the knife home between the plates of his armor, even as Kai and Wash both screamed his name, even as Tucker fell to his knees, blood staining his armor, he knew it was a better idea than Wash leaving them behind again.

[aliceslantern]

Nocturnal Memory, a Kingdom Hearts fanfic-- chapter 8

[ Dying takes a lot out of you, it's true, but when Demyx wakes up for the first time since his fight with Sora nothing's right. His memories are fragmented and he's missing his true name. And he's not the only one. An incomprehensible mystery and an inevitable war make him question what, exactly, he would do to become whole, and reclaim the music lost to him.

on FF.net/on AO3]

Demyx only barely stopped himself from saying "Oh, you've got to be kidding me," out loud. If Leon noticed his frustration, he didn't say anything.

Yuffie also had a scowl on her face when she got closer. "Squall, I swear to—"

He held up a hand. "Yuffie, you really need to grow up. You said you wanted a break from patrol. Well, here it is." He crossed his arms. "In order for this to work you have to get along. I fully expect you to be civil. You are both adults. Now act like it."

She snorted. "Yeah, alright."

They all went together to the first site, an aqueduct to the far side of town. The pipes and pump were broken, and as a result the water source was hundreds of meters belowground. Demyx could feel the distant humming in his bones; it didn't help his growing dread. He would rather do a lot of things than spend a whole day with someone who wanted him dead.

Once Leon was gone, they both stared up at the top of the aqueduct rather than look at each other. The stone was crumbling in places, and the green paint was washed out and chipped.

After a long moment, he tried to quell his racing heart. Demyx's palms were sweaty, and it wasn't just from the warm day. He dried them on his jeans. "So, uh," he began.

"I really don't want to talk to you," she said. She popped off a metal maintenance panel of the first pump and looked at the machinery. He saw the small set of hydraulics and wiring. With a bit more violence than was really necessary, she used a wrench to pry out the corroded pieces and yanked out the rotted wiring. "Just do whatever you're supposed to."

"I mean I don't really know what I'm supposed to do."

She rolled her eyes and pulled some new pipes out of the toolbox. "Of course not."

"Look, I'm not happy about this either—" He felt the blood rising in his face. "But maybe we should listen to Leon?"

She scoffed. She clipped the ends of the wires where they were broken. He wasn't sure of the state of the power. If she wasn't careful she could really hurt herself.

"Um," he said. "You've been trained how to do this, right?"

Yuffie huffed. "What, do you think I'm stu—fuck." She'd slipped with her wire cutters. She shook out her hand.

"…Cut yourself?" He asked.

"I'll cut something, alright," she said. She took off her wrist brace. The blood had already begun to well in her palm.

Demyx almost didn't want to ask. "Are you okay?"

"Fine."

He reached out. One thing he had recovered was an ability to heal. "Let me see it."

She took a step back. "You're not touching me."

"I can fix it."

"It doesn't need to be fixed."

He paused. "That's kind of bleeding a lot."

She studied it with an impassive expression. Red splotched onto the ground. "I'll go to Aerith. I don't trust you."

"And waste time going all the way back to town? Let me see it."

She glared at him. After a long moment, she turned her gaze away. "Fucking fine."

Demyx took her hand. Without the brace it was small, but strong and heavily callused. The cut fit right against her lifeline. He gathered some water in his hand, held it over the palm, and began to heal the damaged tissue. She flinched and jerked but did not take her hand away. It was a beautiful heal, he had to say; there wasn't even any scar. But she did not thank him. She tugged her brace back on and picked the wrench back up.

It took her about an hour to fix the pump. In the meantime he reached for the water underneath. He expected there to be a certain amount of blockage—either by fallen stone or other debris—and he wasn't wrong. It felt like plant matter or something otherwise light; it took him a while to draw it up because it required a lot of water pressure in the small stone pipe. Demyx was able at last to clear the way; by that point his stamina was about gone. He didn't want her to know that he was tired. His knees were shaking.

With a final crank of the wrench the tiny pump started moving again. "That should work," she said brusquely. "Well, don't just stand there, be useful."

Demyx tried. The water fought him, almost like it knew he was tired, and he felt a stinging pain in his arm muscles. How am I supposed to do this all day?

They moved onto the next one in silence. He preferred the quiet to the antagonism, but he could feel Yuffie simmering and often she cut glares at him. They followed the same routine—thankfully this one was a little easier on him, though there were more mechanical problems—and broke for lunch. He sat facing the town, legs dangling above a ground hundreds of meters below. He found he didn't mind the height. Demyx expected Yuffie to stay far away from him, but she surprised him by sitting only a few meters away, eating takeout noodles from a plastic container.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" She said neutrally, and gestured to the town.

He could see the moldering old castle and the blue rock in the distance. He guessed that it could be conjectured by some as beautiful, but he felt nothing towards the town other than a gaping homesickness. "I guess." He had nothing more to eat and wasn't sure what to do with himself.

"Funny how close it was to being gone forever, huh," she added.

He got the message. She was not trying to be friendly. "Look," he said, wondering if he should say this when so close to a ledge. "I know I've done some bad things. And I know my actions are not excusable, et cetera, whatever. But it looks like we have to work together for who knows how fucking long, so can. You. Not."

A moment of silence. She did not look angry. Demyx didn't know how to interpret the look on her face.

"To be fair…" Why was he still talking, "We've all done our fair share of shitty things, but I'm over it and I'm just trying to move on with my life, what's left of it. So leave me alone. Or at least shut up about it."

They stared at each other a long moment. Yuffie wore that same odd expression. Her eyes, he noticed for the first time, were not brown like he thought, but a dark shade of violet. She didn't look away, so he didn't want to either. His eyes were starting to water from not blinking. She broke the staring contest first and turned away, nose in the air.

"You're pathetic," she said.

Demyx tried to come up with some quick reply, like, well you're not a whole lot better, or something in that vein. The comment got to him in a way that he couldn't quite define. Because she was absolutely right.

He picked up the scraps of his lunch and tucked them back into the small bag he'd brought. He felt her gauging his reaction. It wasn't that he couldn't take an insult—oh boy, he could, he knew from experience—but that phrase had dredged up a forgotten stickiness. Fuck. Not now. Please. He gripped the wall for support, trying to play it casual, but firecrackers of pain were exploding behind his eyes. Demyx had to stay conscious. He couldn't afford to lose his shit. He could do that later, in the privacy of his own room in the weighty loneliness of the castle.

A cramped city, dingy and old, something with wooden parapets. He clung to consciousness, clung to the now, leading to a strange sense of doubled-vision. Bright banners. Sullen people, fast-moving crowds, being chased by… who? Or what? Not Heartless. This was human.

"We should get a move on," he heard Yuffie bark.

Humans. More than one, less than a few. Older than him but only by a little. He was not alone, he was in a group. Being chased for… stealing? Not food, though there was hunger.

Demyx no longer saw Yuffie's face. It was like the ground had been ripped up from under him. The sharpness of the pain worsened. He wasn't fast enough. He got grabbed up by the ankle. A knife that was cold and shimmery. Getting dangled above the first level of the city. Something about a punishment for dirty thieves. The necessary epithet, "You're pathetic." And then being dropped.

He did not regain consciousness before he hit the ground in the memory. He felt it all in stunning technicolor, ripping through a banner that saved him but only barely, flopping still too far onto the ground. Bones broken, in total: three ribs, the left radius and ulna, a fractured skull, and a femur. Lying there, disoriented and unable to breathe, just in time for the police to arrive.

Waking up for real because of a stinging slap. She'd actually hit him.

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

Demyx's body seemed too heavy for him. He sat down and put his head in his hands. His cheek burned from her slap. "I don't know what they told you." He spoke like he'd never heard words before. "My memories—"

"Yes, I know, I was told. Your fucking memories."

"Quit yelling."

"I'm not yelling."

She wasn't. Now he had a real world migraine, bright and needy, rendering daylight into sharp arrows of pain. "I need a minute," he said, and to his horror his voice quavered.

"We've already wasted enough time."

"Shut up," Demyx said. He tried to breathe through the pain and get his body to heal it away. He focused on nothing at all and held his breath until it started to recede. He took a long drink of water. He wanted to try and figure out what he'd seen, but he couldn't do that with her breathing down his neck. "What's… what's next? Where do we have to go?"

"Towards one of the pumps in the south."

He stood on shaky legs. "Then let's go."

Home at last.

The castle had never been so welcoming before. At least it was quiet. His head was hurting again. Demyx just wanted to lie down and sleep; he felt the exhaustion all the way down to his bones. He wasn't sure he could do this, day in and day out. Something had to give. Maybe if he talked to Leon about it—

And then what? Give her the satisfaction of knowing she'd gotten to him? He would have to get stronger with time. At least, he hoped.

The walk back to his room seemed particularly long and his body dragged him down. He didn't want to stop and rest for fear that he would be unable to get up. His eyes were hot and sore with fatigue. He idly traced a hand down the molding of the hallway.

Up ahead he saw a previously collapsed passage had been cleared, leaving behind a raw tunnel of pure earth. Aeleus must have been here earlier today. Compared with the delicate architecture of the rest of the castle, it seemed like a gaping maw, but according to the map, it would get him back faster.

As he passed through the halls, he heard voices. Aeleus must still be working. Demyx didn't mind talking to Aeleus, mostly because there was absolutely no pressure to say anything, so he decided to keep on walking through.

Dilan and Aeleus were working in tandem, with Aeleus clearing the debris and fixing the supports and Dilan managing all the dirt and dust. "Well, if it isn't our little maintenance man," Dilan said smoothly. There was a shattering crack as Aeleus cut some of the rock; Demyx flinched. "What was it like, working for the committee?"

He debated, and decided that Dilan would probably enjoy hearing about his misadventures. "Oh, it was just great. I'm exhausted and my partner treats me like a pariah."

"So, basically another day on the job, eh?"

Demyx rolled his eyes, and then paused. "I guess so, now that you mention it."

With another crack the passage was cleared. Sweat dripped down Aeleus's face, and he swiped at it absently. "Are you feeling alright?"

"I'm fine. Just tired."

"Glad to know you're about in fighting shape," Dilan said. "Heaven knows you might need to be."

Demyx blinked. "What?"

"I could use rest as well," Aeleus said. "Once I secure this spot, I say we all go eat." He stomped and pressed his hands against the wall. The earth shifted and shuddered above them. Demyx swallowed, but nothing more than a faint trickle of dust came down. "That should do it."

"Very nice work," Dilan said condescendingly. "Though it's a shame about the architecture. What lovely hand-carved molding."

"If you want artistry, you work on it yourself," Aeleus said blankly.

There was something familiar about going back with them. Like Dilan had said, it was like the old days, though they were all different. They had good intentions now, or at least, Demyx hoped they did. He was fairly sure that none of them meant any harm. But at the same time, minus Xemnas (Xehanort, whatever, whomever), could they all make the jump to "good" so quickly? What about everything they'd done—the Heartless, the manipulation, the controlled takeovers? The casualties that had to come with all that? The trauma they'd inflicted to others? A lump stuck in his throat.

And what good were they actually doing? Giving people water and fixing up the town seemed like something good. Still, Demyx didn't exactly feel satisfied with his day's work. Maybe it was because Xehanort was looming, but it seemed odd to him that they hadn't really moved on with their lives like they used to anticipate they would. Then again, some of them had spent nearly eleven years in the Organization, so maybe there wasn't even much to move on with. Ienzo and Demyx might have been younger and able to forage a new path, hypothetically, but the others? What did they have left?

And what about Lea? Demyx hadn't seen hide or hair from him in a long time. "Where is Lea?" he asked them.

"Off gallivanting with that Keyblade, I'd wager," Dilan said. "Loves playing the hero. It's kind of ironic."

"He's repenting," Aeleus said, but like usual he didn't expound upon that thought.

"Aren't we all," Dilan said dryly.

"It's different, for him."

"Well, believing hard enough isn't going to stop the enemy," Dilan continued. "And with the way this is all going… who knows?"

"Is it bad?" Demyx asked. Part of him really didn't want to know.

"How can it be good?" Dilan turned to face him. His black braids were caked with rock and dust. "How can it be good when we have an enemy who can see three steps ahead of us at all times? It's the most we can do to survive. Might be best to quit while we're ahead."

"We must survive," Aeleus said. "It's all to do."

"Right you are. I don't suppose you have any opinions on the matter?"

Demyx thought. "Aeleus is right. I just want to live. But I… I can't fight him. I don't even know if I can help."

"I'm sure you have something valuable to contribute."

"That's not what I meant," Demyx said. "I don't want to get sucked in again. Not now that I have a choice."

That stunned Dilan into silence. Finally, Aeleus said, "I suppose that's a wise thought."

Night and the sleep of the dead. He was down for the count for about twelve hours, and woke up disoriented. He half expected to wake up in his bed at the Organization's castle. But no, he was only in the small room on the small hard bed in Radiant Garden.

He went through his morning routine. He needed to do laundry. (When you only had four shirts you did an awful lot of laundry.) He was so tired so early in the morning that he struggled with the coffee percolator for a quarter of an hour, and then finally decided it would probably just be easier to shell out a few precious munny in town. Demyx shouldn't be late anyway. Well, what did it matter? Yuffie was going to be mad at him late or early.

But when he got to the spot they'd agreed upon yesterday he found Cid in her place. "I hope you brought some for me," he said when he saw the cup in Demyx's hand.

"…Didn't think of it," he answered lamely. But he was relieved. He could only hope this new arrangement would be permanent. Before he could even finish the thought, Cid added,

"I'm only with you for today. There was a pretty bad surge last night. You know, of Heartless. Yuffie's injured pretty bad. She and Leon both."

Like he cared. Still, he felt an involuntary swell of concern. Probably more for Leon. "Will they be okay?"

"They're in good hands. I've seen a lot of gross stuff, but nothing Aerith can't fix." He adjusted his goggles and leaned in. "Once I even saw her reattach a hand. It was amazing. Kid had full coordination and everything. Within an hour she was out playing again."

Demyx shuddered. "There's no risk for them, you know, to become…"

"Heartless?" Cid finished. "No, fortunately. Burns, more like, from one of them artificial types."

"…Oh."

"Well, look at us standing around gossiping. Let's get to work."

Another long, exhausting morning. Demyx thought he should probably talk to someone about why he was so damn tired. Maybe he was getting sick. Being stuck in the castle was like being in a vacuum, probably. Cid was pleasant and chatty and he could tell a great dirty joke, but Demyx felt weaker and weaker.

"Is there a bug going around town?" He finally braved himself into asking. "Like, a cold, the flu, something?"

Cid shrugged. "Not that I know of."

"Mind if I sit for a minute? Using my powers still wears me out."

"Go right ahead." Cid pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. "I had quit for a long time, but right now it's been so stressful that this is the only thing that helps." He offered the pack to Demyx.

He took one. The taste was different than he remembered, but the burn in his lungs was soothing and he felt a little better.

"Didn't picture you as a smoker," Cid said.

"Only every once in a while." He'd seen his fair share of party scenes as a member of the Organization—both voluntarily and because of reconnaissance. Mostly he just liked watching the people, the dancing, the music… he exhaled a cloud of smoke.

"You good, kid?"

"…Yeah. Just… thinking, that's all."

Demyx took another long drag and ground out the butt. The music. He had to start looking for the music.

[sickficsbypyroyoshi]

Pyro’s archived fics #3: Calvin’s stomach bug

I wrote this six years ago, way back in 2011! The characters are based off people I’ve known in real life, and the main character is me with a different name. For some odd reason, I wrote this one in first person present tense instead of third person past tense. Why, I have no idea.

As soon as I step into the store, I know a long, dull night awaits me. I normally work mornings, doing maintenance on Fridays and Saturdays and prep on Sundays and Mondays. Tonight, I’m working my first overnight in a year and a half, because I need to boil out the deep fryer in the kitchen. It’s a lengthy, tedious procedure that takes hours and needs to be done once or twice a year.

As a ritual before I clock in, I look at the set up to see who I’ll be spending the next eight hours with. Sylvia, the overnight manager, some chubby guy who I’ve worked with for three years yet have never spoken to, and Calvin, who I’ve liked for some time now. This comes as a pleasant surprise.

I have a boyfriend, but due to the huge physical distance between us, I never get to see him anymore. Plus, the initial spark that occurred when we met was starting to fizzle out. I don’t cheat, so while I won’t actively pursue Calvin, that won’t stop me from appreciating him anyway.

I loiter in the break room for a few minutes, waiting for ten o clock to roll around before making my way up front to punch in. I then saunter into the kitchen where Calvin is, taking a moment to sweep my eyes over him. He’s caucasian, approximately 5’11’’ or 6’ with a slender build, yet not skinny. He has brown eyes, shaggy brown hair, a laberet piercing, and the holes or ‘tunnels’ in his earlobes are just slightly smaller than mine. (I can stick straws through my ears). I then tell him that I’m going to be a vital inconvenience, and explain the procedure that I have to complete. He responds with a simple, “That’s fine.” and doesn’t say anything else.

The next couple minutes are spent gathering all the necessary supplies I’ll need. I deposit them in the kitchen and then make my way back to the sink, which is divided into three compartments. I fill one with water and the other with water and delimer. I then add bleach to it, which results in acid that will strip off any sort of build up in seconds. Moseying back into the kitchen, I put my ipod in and go to work on the vats, draining all the oil. Beside me, Calvin is doing a half assed job scraping the excess ice from the hanging freezer. He seemed rather unfocused, like something might be bothering him. “So, how do you like overnights?” I ask, getting his attention. “They’re okay. Kind of boring though.” he replies. “That’s true. At this store, anyway. I used to do overnights for two years. They were kind of dull here, but overnights at the old store were the best. There were lots of bizarre conversations and nights when we’d simply sit in the break room and burn a couple. As baked as we’d be, we were still ten times more competent than most of the people working here now. Isn’t that pathetic?” “Yeah, it is.” Calvin says, then walks away when an order pops up on the screen.

I unscrew the heating element from the vat, removing it with a special tool so I don’t burn myself. After that, I pour water into the vat, adding a third of a jug of degreaser. “Now for the fun part. Waiting!” I blather to myself. I’m about to zone out when Calvin addresses me. “Could you do me a favor and get breakfast stock?” he asks. “I suppose.  Are you in a lazy mood tonight?” I inquire. “No, I’m just not feeling that great. I feel like shit, actually.” At those words, a small pang of excitement courses through me. It could end up being nothing, or I could get a show at some point tonight. I never want anybody to be sick, but I secretly hope that the second option is the one that occurs. Concealing my feelings, I simply say, “Oh. Okay.” and venture into the walk in freezer to get the stock. After I get it all and put it away, I go back to work, but now I’m the unfocused one. All I can really think about is Calvin puking right there in the kitchen, with me beside him as it happens. Maybe he’ll even puke right on me, nailing me right between my boobs. That would be so exhilarating. I bite my tongue and try to block out these thoughts, because I don’t want to get myself off at work.

I decide to leave him alone for awhile, doing my work and trying to think about things that bore me, such as politics, my taxes, and football. Looking over in his direction, I sense that the chance he’ll give me a ‘performance’ seems to have increased a bit. I can visually tell that he doesn’t feel good, and seems to be more scatter brained at this point.

The monitor above the assembly line beeps, and an order for 10 McChickens and 10 McDoubles appears. After dropping some product, I go over to help Calvin make the food. “Bleh. Mayo is so disgusting. Who would want extra mayo on anything?” I cringe as a shove a McChicken with extra extra mayonnaise towards him. Calvin makes a noise of disgust and backs away from the table for a moment before seeming to get things back under control. I raise a brow. “Are you alright?” I ask him. “I don’t know. I guess, for a second there I thought I might puke.” he replies. “Hmm. Well if you have to, go ahead. I’ll be back here to cover you.” I try to say as nonchalantly as possible.

After a while, I glance at the clock and discover that it’s half an hour past midnight. Sylvia is up front getting flustered, the pudgey guy in back booth is listening to some crappy generic rock, I’m absentmindedly chipping away at the vats, and Calvin is now sitting on the oven with his head in his hands. He makes a moaning sound and stands up, right as a crowd of intoxicated customers wander into the store. Both of the girls are giggling hysterically about something, and one of the guys loudly announces that he has to take a big dump and walks off into the bathroom right as Calvin gags audibly.

As soon as I hear that sound, my excitement returns and literally punches me in the face. This is it, I think to myself. It’s got to be. And I’m right, of course. Calvin leans over the reach in freezer, seemingly trying to vanquish the inevitable. He retches and covers his mouth, but it doesn’t prevent anything. Luckily, I have very fast reflexes, so I send the garbage can sliding in his general direction. It bounces off the freezer just as Calvin loses it, gagging once more before sending the first wave of half digested food into it.

My eyes widen, half from excitement and half from surprise. Another order pops up, but I pay zero attention to it, instead completely focused on what’s going on directly in front of me. Calvin is hovering over the garbage can, gripping the sides and copiously throwing up into it. Each wave is rather voluminous, which is just the way I like it. He doesn’t make a whole lot of noise other than minimal retching between heaves. In fact, he’s much quieter while gagging than I could ever hope to be.  I feel hot, and I notice a tingling sensation between my legs, which starts off barely there but increases rapidly. I want to put my arms around him, actually getting to feel each heave and convulsion firsthand. I want to run my inch long talons through his hair and position myself behind him in such a way that his ass would grind against my crotch with each retch. Yet, I know that if I did either of those things, I might as well walk around with a huge neon sign declaring, “I’m an emetophile!” So I stick to watching, trying my hardest to retain a poker face the entire time, and keeping my mouth tightly clamped shut to prevent myself from making any noise.

Sylvia pokes her head into the kitchen, “Hey guys are you going to make tha- oh god, is he puking?!” she gasps and turns pale, like she was about to get sick herself. “Why yes, Sylvia, he is.” I state. “Oh my...” she trails off and retreats back up front.

As much as I want to keep watching intently, I realize that someone will have to make the order. I make it as quickly as possible, trying to keep Calvin in my peripheral vision. I hear a couple retches punctuated with a few more waves of puke splashing into the bottom of the garbage can, and then it ceases just as I assemble the last sandwich. After he’s done, Calvin remains hunched over for a few seconds before spitting out some excess mucus and standing up.

I feel even hotter now, and begin to wonder if I may need a change of panties, as my current pair was now a bit wet. I’m fighting the urge to touch myself, and if I uselessly stand here any longer, I fear that someone might catch on to me. When Calvin unsteadily walks out of the kitchen to get himself a glass of water, I take a very quick look into the can for a closer view of what he produced. The puke itself was orangish brown in color, and I could recognize some french fry shards and other fragments of a free McDonald’s meal, including bits of meat and slivers of shredded lettuce. It was running down all four sides, and a lot of it had landed in an empty pickle container.

Since I didn’t want anyone to realize what I was doing, I went up front. Sylvia, who apparently doesn’t do well with gross things of any kind, still looks a bit freaked out and quietly says, “...You can go home, Calvin...just please don’t barf on me. Maybe Evelyn could give you a ride.” “I could definitely do that. I’ll just need to get my stuff.” I say, then tell Calvin to wait for me.

 I quickly gather my purse, then the two of us go outside, where I lead him to my vehicle. “I shall now give you a ride home in the back of my serial killer van!” I point a clawed finger at my method of transportation, a large, beat up industrial van with the words, ‘serial killer van’ spray painted on the side. “You’ll have to ride in the back because there’s too much crap in the passenger seat, but there’s a small sofa in the back so you can lay down if you want.” I inform and open the rear doors. Calvin climbs inside and immediately flops down on the sofa. I lock the doors and get in the driver’s seat. Despite being 21 years old, I’ve only had my license for a few months, and freely admit to being far from a great driver. As a matter of fact, I drive like an idiot while totally sober, so I’m not sure what would happen if a certain distraction were to take place in the back. I decide not to tell Calvin about my lack of driving experience and instead ask him where he lives, which turns out to be across town.

“Okay. Let us go then.” I mumble to myself and start up the van. It’s a bit of a bouncy ride, so I can’t help but wonder if he’ll make it through the whole thing. After a few minutes I ask how he’s holding up, but I don’t get a reply. Glancing behind me, I see that he’s collapsed across the sofa, staring at the wall and looking generally miserable, which makes me feel a little guilty about being aroused by this. I’d like to make him feel better, but there isn’t anything I could do.

Just as I’m about to face forward again, he suddenly sits strait up. “Stop the van. Please.” “Okay,” I respond and steer the vehicle over to the side of the road, hearing the back doors open right as it comes to a halt. I don’t want my passenger to think that I don’t care about his well being, so I jump out of the driver’s seat and walk around back. Instead of getting out of the van, Calvin is perched on the edge, on his hands and knees, with pre heave saliva dripping out of his mouth. Just as I take another step towards him, he explodes, sending a waterfall of liquified food onto the pavement, and onto my work boots. Before I can move, my feet take another splashing. Thank god my work boots are both rubber and knee high, otherwise I’d have barf in my socks.

I don’t feel so aroused anymore. Instead, my caring nature takes over. I extend a hand and gently caress his shoulder, not in a sensual way, but more in a motherly way. Though I realize that doing so probably doesn’t help matters any, he still might appreciate it.

Over the course of the next minute, Calvin hurls up several more waves before stopping. When no more appears to be forthcoming, he sits back, wiping his mouth off. “Done?” I ask. He nods, still looking rather sick and uncomfortable. I take this time to look down and assess the soiled footwear situation, realizing that it’s become worse: I’m standing in a sizable lake of puke. “Hmm. Maybe I shouldn’t have stood so close.” I back up a few feet. “Well Calvin, my feet sure have taken a nasty punishment. But hey, at least these are just my work clothes.” “I’m sorry...I didn’t mean to puke on you.” Calvin says apologetically before retreating back to the sofa. “Don’t worry about it, I was just joking. Trying to make you feel a little better. You are going to be okay, right?” I ask. I really do care about him, I just don’t show my emotions easily.

Calvin contorts his face momentarily before speaking. “I’ll be fine. I still feel kind of nauseous though.” “I’m afraid there isn’t much I can do about that, but if you want, I can quickly mosey over to that gas station and get you a bottle of water. Or a Sprite, whatever you’d prefer.” I offer. I don’t even wait for him to respond before deciding to go. I need to scrub my boots off anyway.

Ten minutes later, I return with clean boots, some water for Calvin and a Coke for myself. “How are you feeling?” I inquire. Calvin sighs. “About the same. I still feel sick, but I don’t have to puke again. At least, not right now.” Without thinking, I clamber into the back of the van and sit beside him on the sofa. “Sit in front of me. I give awesome back and shoulder massages.” I inform, putting my hands to work. “Feels good, doesn’t it?” “Yeah...don’t you have to go back to work though?” Calvin asks, sounding drowsy. “Ugh. Don’t remind me. I think they can manage half an hour without me. Plus, you’re sick. I want to at least try to make you feel better.” Looking like he can barely keep his eyes open, he turns towards me. “Thanks Evelyn...you’re a really nice person, taking care of me like this. In the past hour, I’ve thrown up in front of you twice. Didn’t that disgust you at all?”

I remain silent, yet thinking, ‘Oh, you have no idea. Seeing you lose it like that actually severely aroused me, and I was on the brink of orgasm back in the kitchen. Truthfully, I wanted to hump you right then and there, but that would have been extremely unprofessional. I also feel more attracted to you now that I’ve ever been.’ Of course, I keep those thoughts to myself. “No,” I finally say. “No it didn’t. I have a very high tolerance for that sort of thing.”

I feel pressure on my left side, and see that Calvin has fallen asleep and is leaning against me. It feels nice, and in turn makes me content. I usually despise sappy romantic crap, but this is one of those moments I wouldn’t mind having a repeat of. I actually feel ready to doze off myself, and completely forgetting that fact that I need to go back to work, I close my eyes. Before drifting off, I make a mental note to call my soon to be ex boyfriend and give him that talk.

[denise8691]

Finding her own way: Becky Lynch, identity, and wrestling

Part one of why the Lasskicking heroine is WWE’s greatest character.

by andrewmswift@andrewmswift  Jul 4, 2017, 5:30pm EDT

There are a number of great questions that all humans struggle to answer at one time or another: Why am I here? What am I doing? What’s the point of it all? What happens after I’m gone?

But there’s one great question that stands above the rest:

Who am I?

This question of identity leads to a process that everyone undergoes throughout their lives. Indeed the act of trying to “find yourself” is a universal human experience in the fragmented, immense, confusing world of the 21st century.

Too frequently “identity” in terms of WWE characters is boiled down to two-dimensional gimmicks lacking nuance and depth. (A certain scene from GLOWdefinitely comes to mind.) Seemingly part of the impetus behind the “Reality Era” was an attempt to flesh out characters in relatable, human ways that could help better bond the audience with respective performers.

Ideally, all WWE characters would come equipped with substantial backstories that explain why the character acts a certain way in any given scenario. But the world is far from ideal, and many WWE Superstars flit in and out from one week to the next, used in service to whatever desired plot at the expense of actual character development and growth.

The old adage is that the best wrestlers are simply themselves turned up to 11. This no doubt is true, but a helpful corollary is copying a performer’s real life motivations into their kayfabe persona. As we’ll see, few wrestlers in WWE more accurately track the performer’s personality with their character’s narrative than Becky Lynch.

In this era of rewrites and last minute switches, consistent, linear character growth is all too rare. It is thus completely remarkable that Lynch has not merely managed to stay on the same arc for several straight years but also provide value-added depth on a weekly basis. This consistency and clarity in purpose make The Lasskicker WWE’s greatest character.

Core truths

In WWE’s developmental brand, a renewed emphasis on layered characters seemed to reemerge in recent years. And there are no better examples of this sort of depth than the Four Horsewomen of NXT: Charlotte Flair, Sasha Banks, Bayley, and Becky Lynch.

What initially made the Four Horsewomen so beloved in NXT—long before Revolutions or Evolutions—was their portrayal of complicated, nuanced personas that were natural outgrowths of the performers themselves. But it also must be noted that the group meshed so well with each other because the roles each had filled were inherently complementary to the other three.

Legacied, pedigreed, and coldly ruthless Charlotte claiming superiority due to birthright—and trying to hide the fact that her drive was so strong because she feared people would believe she didn’t deserve the name.Zealotous, righteous, chip-on-her-shoulder, chaotic good, “built on self-success” Sasha Banks shouting from the rooftops that she was the hero of destiny for a movement—a movement she believed could not and would not (and perhaps should not) exist without her at the vanguard.Wholesome, determined, innocent Bayley, who was unprepared for the cutthroat world of WWE and only through repeated failures at the hands of the other three Horsewomen learned to toughen her spine and fulfill her lifelong dream.

And then there is Becky Lynch. At first glance, the clear coherency of the other three and their natural interplay with each other are undercut by Becky’s numerous and wildly different gimmicks. Is she a stereotypical Irish lass—complete with emerald green outfit and aggressively lame jig? Is she a headbanging punk rocker with a prickly, cynical edge? Is she a steampunk pun queen who adorably battles cans of pineapple? Is she a near-sociopathic purveyor of violence and destroyer of innocence? Is she a virtuous and loyal friend whose goodness is rewarded time and again with betrayal?

Who is Becky Lynch?

The answer, of course, is all of the above, and there’s a very simple reason for the seemingly incongruent whole. At her core, Lynch is someone who experienced great loss at a very young age, and is desperately trying to hold onto what she regained while remaining pure of heart.

Characters in the world of professional wrestling have forever been defined by two categories: babyface (good) and heel (evil). But for a long time now this view has been outdated. With the intention of making its characters seem whole and realistic, WWE long ago largely shifted the domain of good and evil from black-and-white personas to a body of actions. Though too often un- or underexplained in storyline, the idea is to present characters that are relatable, whether good or bad, via motivations that are common to viewers.

Each character in WWE struggles with the flaws of others. But in works of fiction, it is frequently the complex struggle of humans with their own flaws where narrative beauty is found. The same is true in WWE, and that sort of internal struggle (the classic Hero’s Quest) is something that best binds characters and performers with the audience.

Like most others, the character of Becky Lynch has an overriding tragic flaw: she has experienced immense heartbreak, and is forever afraid of any relapse into despair and apathy.

In fact, the seesawing nature of Becky’s path is perhaps the journey of any of the Horsewomen that best fits with Reality Era use of the performer’s real-life backstory. It’s well known that WWE appropriates their performers’ real lives to add to their characters. But few characters in WWE are as finely tuned with their actual life than Lynch. As previously noted, her disparate gimmicks seem, on their own, incongruous with each other.

But this reading fails to see a larger truth: the story of Becky Lynch is the story of someone trying, and struggling, to find their way in the world—and for very good reason.

Origin stories

Becky’s story did not begin in July 2015 when her, Charlotte, and Sasha Banks were called up to the WWE main roster. Hell, her story did not even begin with the infamous jig she did during her NXT debut in June 2014. The story of Becky Lynch began long ago, when the then-Rebecca Knox was barnstorming around the world as a legitimate wrestling prodigy. She began her training to be a wrestler at the very young age (especially for a woman) of 15 and made waves worldwide—but stepped away from the business due to a head injury before she even turned 20.

Adrift for years after her ostensible retirement, she got an acting degree and landed more than a few parts; she studied to be a clown; she worked as a personal trainer; she was a flight attendant for over two years. Becky wanted to do anything possible to find herself after seemingly losing her true passion. But her heart forever remained with wrestling. Despite denying the truth for so long, she couldn’t shake the bug of the squared circle.

She was always a wrestler, even when she wasn’t.

Every part of who Becky Lynch is today—the resilience, the fear of isolation and loneliness, the desire to make it her own way, stems from the apparent heartbreak of her far-too-early retirement. The intensely emotional character we know today, who wears her heart on her sleeves at all times, is a combination of this exodus and her inherent manic, quirky energy. When it seems that misfortune has ended your dreams at 20, even the slightest hint of a second chance compels one to pour everything in their heart into the endeavor—and to do everything possible to make sure this resurrection does not go to waste.

It’s entirely understandable—coming-of-age struggles in our teenage years stick with us for the rest of our lives, regardless of what context we stumble into. Our formative experiences are buried deep inside our subconscious, guiding our motivations and informing our reactions to the world around us.

Becky Lynch’s journey is the story of an identity crisis—following your dreams, only to have them torn from you in seemingly definitive fashion to the point of resignation. What follows is the road back—the expanse of which forever after defines your very self. It is a narrative about remembering and fighting for who and what you are.

While it’s mostly a positive story, there’s more than a hint of melancholy in the idea. It is unrealistic to pretend that Lynch’s saga of continuous betrayal and trauma has not weighed a heavy toll on her mind, and furthermore it is doubly unrealistic to imagine that a natural human response to that backstory is always doubling down on being innocent and good. As seen onSmackDown Live in recent months, her frustration at times appears to be on the verge of boiling over.

Moreover, this wistful nostalgia can also easily be used against Becky—either by manipulating her into becoming a tool to be used for the nefarious purposes of others, or by blinding her from the truth of those around her.

The Becky Lynch we currently see onSmackDown Live is undeniably a fiery ball of positive energy. But just how “good” is The Lasskicker, though? Surely her run since the call up in July 2015 has been universally on the side of light, and frequently she has come across as the most pure character on all of WWE television. The sadly online-only promo she cut after Mickie James interfered in Becky’s steel cage title match with Alexa Bliss last January is almost certainly the most heartfelt and best babyface promo in the entire company for a number of years—but also hints at an eternal inner struggle.

Mind-blowing that this clip was not broadcasted over and over on the blue brand. Moreover, it’s a strange fact that some of Becky Lynch’s greatest work has been in online exclusive interviews. Presumably the creative direction should stress including those moments on WWE’s actual television programing, but even here we see the interplay between character and performer.

It makes sense that a character/performer like Lynch would hustle and grind in literally any way possible to make herself more whole, more coherent, to better round and ground herself. TV, online exclusives, social media—the platform doesn’t matter. Becky Lynch is going to do whatever it takes to present her character in a way that gets across the truth of her soul. She simplyneeds to do this—not just for the audience, but herself as well.

In this way, it is easy to see how Rebecca Quin’s real-life Bexile bleeds into the character’s motivations—and it’s yet another reason why Becky Lynch is WWE’s most honest character today.

This never-say-die fighting spirit has contributed a great deal to her positivity so readily displayed these days. But the memories of the years of heartbreak, and the desperate grasping of this second chance, could also potentially be fostering a darker, more cynically destructive side:

I don’t know what it’s going to take… but I’m willing to do it.

In that quote, we see Lynch’s frustrations bubbling up, but still she remains righteous. If (and when) she does eventually fall from the heavens, it will be wholly understandable given everything the character has gone through.

And it would not be the first time she has fallen from grace in WWE.

Despite her debut victory over Summer Rae on June 26, 2014—a match that is more remembered for her aforementioned jig, and Sasha Banks and Charlotte utterly taking the piss out of said jig in the background—Lynch struggled early on, falling short several times to then-NXT Women’s Champion Charlotte. In the process, she had formed a bit of kinship with another “lovable loser,” Bayley.

But it was Banks, who soon broke away from Charlotte, that saw an opening in the impressionable mind of Lynch. In an iconic piece of NXT continuity, Becky approached Sasha in the locker room on October 16, 2014, to criticize The Boss for attacking Bayley. But it was Lynch who ended up getting a parting piece of advice from Banks: “Maybe you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself, what you need to do, to make it to the top.” Just as Banks had looked forlornly into the mirror over a year prior when Summer Rae gave her very similar advice, the troubled Lynch purposefully stared at her own reflection.

Only one week later, when Banks continued to assault Bayley after defeating her in a match, Lynch ostensibly came to The Hugger’s aid. The Boss scurried out of the ring, and Becky helped Bayley up, even giving her a slight hug. But when Bayley stepped forward to challenge Sasha, Lynch revealed her true intentions.

After attacking Bayley from behind, Becky raised the arm of her new “mentor” before sneeringly looking back at her naive former friend.

Imagine this. You are a prodigious talent that has your dream crushed due to circumstance at age 20. Finally, finally, a full eight years later, you get a second chance and begin to make good on your promise—only to find that the game has become “more fierce,” the competition that much stronger.

You’ve made it after such a long road back, but then you begin to discover that you are not as good as you once were and that others are better. You fail, repeatedly.

Enter a charismatic figure, who once maintained a similar overly-sunny disposition as yourself, preaching an “alternate” route to the glory that you surely deserve after all your trials and tribulations. The notion that your dream is once again slipping away from you, but if you only changed just a little bit, you could truly have it all—it’s a ripe cauldron for manipulation.

Becky Lynch, who told Alexa Bliss two years later that she “watched far too much TV and I listened when they told me, that if I believed in myself, I could be anything that I wanted to be,” is and always will be a believer—someone motivated by halcyon ideals and righteous passion. It is why she can inspire such loyalty among the WWE Universe—despite subpar booking and narrative drift, the chants of “BECKY! BECKY! BECKY!” remain as strong (frankly, stronger) as ever.

But that strong sense of belief can manifest itself in different ways. As noted, she has experienced true heartbreak and immense struggle, meaning that her intense passion is forever at danger of bubbling over into fear, despair, and anger.

In that moment, looking into the infamous Full Sail mirror, with failure weighing heavy on her mind, she wanted to believe the truth that Sasha Banks claimed to offer her. She wanted to believe that it would end her struggles and bring her the greatness for which she was always destined.

The decision to attack Bayley doesn’t make Becky a bad person. Yes, it made her a heel for the time being, but it’s ultimately wholly consistent with her core self. Sasha simply knew what buttons to push to chip at Becky’s soul. With Becky suffering consistent setbacks, Sasha’s manipulation was well crafted in order to succeed. And succeed it did, to the point where Becky was so twisted that by December 18, 2014, she would cheerily state she was going to end Bayley’s career like a downright sociopath:

The only thing that’s changed, is my ability to see what’s in front of me. Yeah? Sasha Banks opened my eyes to what it takes to get to the next level of NXT. Yeah? My eyes were opened, to the fact that smiling, and having the fans cheer, doesn’t mean anything when I am losing week, after week, after week. My eyes were open to the fact that, if I want to get anywhere, the only person I can rely on—besides myself of course—is Sasha Banks. And so I hope Bayley’s little starry eyes are open, so that way she can look into my big brown eyes and see the person that’s gonna end her career—permanently. Cheers Devin!

Her tone of voice is utterly consistent with everything the character has done and said before and after. That she scoffs when Devin calls it a “change of attitude” is telling: to Lynch, her frame of reference remains the absolute same as always. Sasha Banks didn’t “change” Becky Lynch in any fundamental manner; she merely persuaded her to view her place in life differently.

Can’t stop, won’t stop

Becky’s time as Sasha’s sidekick could easily be viewed as nothing more than a continuation of her kayfabe failings, but this ignores a crucial bit of context. Before coming under Sasha’s wing, Lynch was a featured player but clearly below Banks, Charlotte, and Bayley in NXT’s Women’s Division. But once she joined with The Boss, she was forever cemented as the final Horsewomen of NXT—regardless of wins or losses in storyline.

(It’s the sort of worked-shoot notion that makes most of Becky’s programs so compelling—she was elevated in storyline and in reality. She’s very much like The Miz in this constant ability to blur the lines.)

Indeed, this growth in stature eventually put Lynch in a position to famously shed off her skin as Sasha’s lackey during the Fatal Four-Way NXT Women’s Championship match at TakeOver: Rival on February 11, 2015. But unfortunately for Lynch, she did not came away with the gold—her former mentor did instead.

Now adrift from Banks, it would not been a surprise to see Lynch once again founder. Instead, she won a number one contender’s match for Banks’ title April 22, 2015 by fortuitously pinning Bayley while she was locked in Charlotte’s Figure Eight. Her exasperation upon winning the match seems innocent enough, but when placed in the context of the character, Lynch’s reaction to the idea of gaining an opportunity through what can be charitably acknowledged as a fluke victory is brilliant: utter shock and delight at getting a chance she never expected to have, both in the larger storyline and the match itself.

She would face Sasha Banks at TakeOver: Unstoppable on May 20, 2015—and though she did not win the match, she accomplished something far greater during her performance of a lifetime. (Based on ringwork alone, Banks-Lynch fromUnstoppable is almost certainly the greatest women’s match in WWE history and easily one of the company’s greatest matches this decade.)

Becky uncovered a certain truth during theUnstoppable match that to this day still guides the character’s arc: life is, well, unstoppable. We can be aware of how we came to be in a certain spot, but getting lost in the past and how things seemed destined to be at one time is an easy way to lose the present and future. Instead, life is “the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come.”

Venerating yourself and the idea of what should be yours at the expense of reality is more than appetizing, and it’s what led to Becky falling under Sasha’s wing. But it’s this trait that Lynch cast off during her performance that night in Full Sail. This realization, this understanding, prompted the character to undergo a transformation of sorts, from the arrogant cynic to the unabashed dreamer.

When the final chapter of Becky Lynch the character is closed, that May 2015 night in Full Sail will forever remain her most defining moment. But why?

In that night, in that match, Becky finally accepted the power of her journey. She accepted the path of her life. She accepted who she was. She accepted her exodus, and what’s more accepted that despite getting a second chance, things would not come to her because of some vague destiny—she would have to work endlessly for every little thing in her career. She finally accepted the beauty in her struggle and road back.

Sitting in the ring, crying, the NXT Universe serenading her with her theme song—those tremendous few seconds were a cathartic moment for the character and quite probably the performer as well. While nursing the left arm that Banks had thoroughly worked over, she washed out the remaining pangs of exile with her tears and entered a new chapter in life.

Becky knew there was no guarantee she’d ever have another title match in WWE. She vowed that night to make sure that would not be the case.

There are few better demonstrations of genuine emotion in wrestling history.

But it would be far from the last time that Lynch captured the hearts and minds of an audience through her struggles.

Bext: Betrayals and opportunities on the main roster

https://www.cagesideseats.com/wwe/2017/7/4/15639746/finding-her-own-way-becky-lynch-identity-wrestling

[glass-ladybug]

all the exposition of the vamp au

Sophomore year /sucked/. Everyone was on Mae to 'make plans', 'grow up', and 'turn in her assignments on time'. Whatever. That was utter bullcrap. School didn't hold any interest for her anymore, and she couldn't really remember a time when it had. Well, first-grade was pretty nice. Macaroni art pictures and all that. Everyone being friends, and that one kid who ate a leaf and got sick. Ahh, yeah. Good memories. Mae pondered on the thought for a moment. Maybe school would be better with more friends? Well she had Lori M., ((is ., right?))of course. And Selmers! Always Selmers. But, Lori was eleven-turning twelve in February, as she liked to remind Mae- and all Mae did with Selmers was write awful ((CHANGE MAYBE?)) poems. Yeah, they hung out, but they weren't really... BFF's or anything. Who /cared/ if she put in effort, anyway? She didn't. Yeah, her mom and dad wanted her to go to college, but for what? What was the point? There wasn't anything she wanted to do. No job that called out to her, no big dream to live up to. Just Possum Springs. Mae shoved her beat up text books into her locker, leaving it open behind her as she walked away. Thinking was a chore. School was a chore. Anything other than eating and sleeping was a /chore/. She hefted her bag onto her hip, dragging her feet behind her. Science class was up next. Well, Mr. Chazokov had taken to calling her his 'best worst student', so, even though she hated the class, she had /that/ accomplishment to dwell on. Absently clutching her bag, Mae flung open the door to come face to face with a girl. Dark hair, dark eyes, and a rather frightening expression. Mae looked at her, tilting her head slightly as she studied the girl's face. What was her name? Bella? Brooke? Breanna? Something to that extent. The girl scowled at her impatiently, as if expecting something. Ah! Wait! /Bea/. The girl spoke through gritted teeth. "Are you gonna get out of the way or not?" "Huh? I-, wait, uh-" Mae's muddled brain foggily rose to attention as it attempted to comprehend the words, only dimly processing the situation. Bea pushed past her roughly, her shoulder jabbing Mae in the arm as she disappeared down the hallway at a brisk pace. Mae, still unable to focus on the world around her, took a hesitant step into the classroom, nearly sinking into her chair as she tossed her backpack to the floor. Mr. Chazokov ran a hand through his rapidly graying hair, before giving an audible sigh. He spoke calmly, but the underlying tension was obvious to everyone but Mae. "Beatrice has just received some.... unfortunate news. She likely has no ill will towards you, Miss Borowski, so I hope you do not hold a grudge." Mae nodded vaguely, indifferent to the world around her. Everything was gray. Gray, gray, gray, like the color of the sky on a rainy day, the flash of steel on a knife, and the bitter look in Beatrice's eyes. She didn't like the gray. Mr. Chazokov rattled on, using a marker to illustrate the topic, and point at the important parts. Mae found herself focusing on his lips as she tried to decipher the slew of words he was spewing. All the sound in the room faded to a dull pulse, beating loudly in her head. It pounded on, and Mae's eyes began to slip out of focus as all the objects around her took the form of shattered glass, fragments of what were once people, or chairs, or desks becoming itty bitty particles. Everything around her was inhuman, and terrifying. A heap of broken parts. Mae was alone. Alone with the shapes. The smashing in her head increased in volume, and it took all of her draining willpower to not scream. How did the masses of shapes not react? Why weren't they in pain like she was? Wait. A /new/ noise had joined in. Mae lifted her head from her hands slowly, her knuckles turning white from the stress, bursts of agonizing pain exploding in her head. The noise was gibberish, but felt oddly familiar. Every sound was muffled, as if she'd been shoved underwater and held down. Mae's body crumpled under the assault of noise and shapes. /Mae/. The sound whispered. /Mae./ She didn't respond. She didn't have the energy to. /Mae./ The voice increased in volume, and bits and pieces of the shapes flung together, almost forming a tangible object. "Mae!" The voice yelled, and Mae blinked widely to see the concerned face of.... Selmers? The racket had dulled to a faint pulsing, like that of a heartbeat. Selmers put a hand on Mae's shoulder, clearly uncomfortable. "Alright, uhh, shit. Do you know what happened?" Mae gave a blank stare in response. Selmers shifted slightly, her heavy lidded eyes filled with concern as she stared at her friend. Mae felt limp, and drained. "Okay, apparently not. Think you can stand?" Mae cocked her head to the right, fumbling to find the words that sat dully on her tongue. "You... You're not in this class?" At least Mae didn't think she was. She couldn't really remember right now. Selmers sighed, breathing though her nose. "No, sweetie, I'm not. C'mon, stand up." Her voice was strained, and overly patient. Mae wondered if she'd done something wrong. Selmers lifted her by the arm, holding the dazed girl to her side. Mr. Chazokov held up a hand. "Girls, wai-" Selmers quirked an eyebrow slightly. "She needs help. We'll be back. Or we might not be. I'll let you know." Obviously not wanting to fight out the situation with the bulky, stubborn girl, Mr. Chazokov relented, waving them out the door. "Get well soon?" A kid in the back feebly offered, his voice wavering with confusion. --------- "So." Selmers said, her legs kicked up on the plush chair Mae was lying in. "Did I scream?" Mae asked, scooting forward. "Yeah, a little bit. I only came in at the end, so I dunno." "Oh. Cool. Why were you in there?" "Turning stuff in." "Oh." Mae leaned back, sinking into the plump cushions. "How's your head?" "Eh. Could be worse." Mae glanced around the nurse's office, the vibrating in her head a constant force. The room smelled distinctly of disinfectant and lemon pledge, the lights far too bright against the chipped white walls. It consisted of a refrigerator with a few ice packs, the torn and frayed leather chair Mae was sitting in, and garish 'Get-Well-Soon' posters lining the walls. Budget-cuts. Possum Springs didn't have a whole lot of money, but hey, at least the football team had /brand-new uniforms/! Mae wanted to kick the ass of every council member. "Then again," Mae said, "it could definitely be better." "Would a poem help?" "I dunno, man. Sure." Selmers cleared her throat, and began to recite from her notebook. ((IDK throw a poem here when u think of one. sunrise vs sunset or smth)) "Niiiice." Stretching, Selmers lifted herself up. "You should go home." The buzzing noise decreased in volume, and Mae closed her eyes. "Yeah. Probably." Selmers wavered, walking out the door hesitantly. "I'll see you tomorrow." Mae shut her eyes a little more forcefully. "See ya, Selma." And with that, Mae was left alone in the decrepit, sorry excuse for a room. ---------- "Mom, really. I'm /fine/." Mae groaned, tossing her bag to the side. Mae's mother looked harrowed, pursing her lips. "Sweetie, I know high school is difficult to get used to-" Mae shot her an irritated glance. "I was just feeling sick. It's, like, a 24-hour bug or something. I'm all better now, see?" She stood up a little straighter, plastering on a false smile in order to placate her mother's fears. Being back home had lessened the potency of the noise- after a few hours, it was nearly unnoticeable, yet she was still a bit shaken. The attacks had occurred before, but this was the most severe of them all. Whoever had chosen to call them 'attacks' should be given a medal. That's exactly what they were: attacks. A war inside her head, where her both parts were violently beating each other. Some days it was hard to tell who was winning. That still didn't mean she wanted to be stuck inside, though. "I'm gonna go hang at the library. Get some stuff done." She wasn't. Mae had the full intention of sitting up on some poor sap's roof, and flinging stones at passing cars and bikes. Fighting a losing battle, Mrs. Borowski set a plate down at the table. "Alright, hon. I'll drop you off. It's too cold to walk." "Mom, you don't-" Mae's mother leveled a stare at her daughter, before grabbing her car keys off the table. Sighing audibly, Mae obliged to follow. She could just walk somewhere, anyways. ---- Possum Springs' weather was cool, and crisp. Late November was filled with crisp leaves, the prickling of cold wind, and the foreboding knowledge that there would soon be frost on the ground. The Historical Society building loomed over the boxy little houses of the town, built with crumbling brick and mortar, weathered with age. Its roof had become a nesting place for crows, and its three floors held shelves upon shelves of dusty books. Mae trudged up the stairs, grunting as she yanked open the bulky wooden doors that led into the library. The inside of the library felt as if it was under a spell. The entire room was swathed in a deep blue light, columns and walls painted with constellations and stars, giving the area an ethereal feeling, like a dream. A plump man sat at the counter, fiddling with a stack of library cards. "Anything I can help you with?" "Just looking." Mae's eyes drifted over the selections of books, wondering why she'd come in anyway. Suddenly, the heavy oaken doors flew open forcefully, and a gust of wind fluttered the papers on the secretary's desk. A tiny figure, scrawny and small burst through the entranceway. The man gave out a rather forceful glare. Lori M. gasped, shocked, and guiltily sprinted to Mae's side, making her footfalls as light as possible to avoid further attention. "Hi -huff**huff*-Mae!" She whispered, exuding excitement. The eleven year old's mousy brown hair bounced in a fluffy flurry around her, and she tucked the dull strands behind her ear. The kid was bundled up, wrapped in a downy maroon sweatshirt and scarf. "Hey. Outta class already?" Lori looked at Mae quizzically, tilting her head. "It's 4 pm, Mae." "Ah. Right. So, what are you here for?" "Need a book for school. Also, your mom said you were here!" She beamed widely. "Cool, cool. What are you gonna get?" Lori's eyes illuminated happily, and she latched on to Mae's arm. "You already know." Lori was right. Mae probably did know. The kid was an aspiring horror movie director, and could pull off an excellent blood-curdling shriek, as she had demonstrated many times before. Odds were she was picking out a book on fake blood, or something. Lori pulled the older girl down a series of twists and turns, maneuvering her way between shelves as she came to a stop in front of a dilapidated array of books, each worn and musty to a varying degree. Lori knelt down, patting the spot next to her on the carpet. "These are my favorites. The Witch Trials of Salem, the History of Horror, Dracula..." "Are these, like, the Harfest reject books?" "Oh, /ha-ha ./ They're classic literature!" "Whatever, kid." Lori affectionately traced a finger over one's cover, musing through her selection. "Why don't you get something?" "I'm not that big of a reader." Lori looked aghast. "But it's /horror/! How can you /not/ want to read books abut gore and dead people?" "...Good point." Mae sat down next to her friend, scanning the variety of aging books, most of them in poor condition. It didn't look they'd be cleaned or taken care of in several years. They must not have gotten checked out very often. Lori seemed happy with her selection, entitled: 'Frankenstein: Man, not Monster'. Mae ran her hands across the books, before, suddenly, her fingers met empty space. Where another book should've been, there was a thin, tight gap between the last book and the woodwork. "There's something.... missing." Lori frowned, not looking up from her book. "Well, it's a library. People are allowed to check things out." Mae nodded uncertainly, pushing her fingers gently into the dark space. "Yeah, I guess." In the tiny, cramped gap between the books and the wall, Mae's fingers brushed against something. Between the slats of wood, there was a hollow only slightly bigger than her hand, as if someone had just scooped out the wood, leaving an indent several inches deep. Shoving the books beside her against the opposite wall, she wedged her hand in further, searching for whatever it was the space held. Her fingertips met a flat surface, cracked, and papery. Mae groped around in an attempt to pull it out. It didn't budge. "Lori," She said tenatively, "help me get this out of here." Hesitantly, the girl pulled her eyes away from the printed pages. "Get what-" Mae grabbed a few books, tossing them to Lori. "Here." She continued to yank away stacks without care, and Lori nervously fought to organize them. "Uhhh, Mae, *huff**huff, can we really-" "Got it!" Mae murmured happily, dislodging the object from the books and wood, pulling it onto her lap. "It's a book..." Lori sighed wearily. "A /hidden/ book!" Mae protested. Inside, she felt a little disappointed. The stout, withered old book was unassuming, its cover bound in old, hardened leather, and any type that may have once embellished it had long worn away. She flipped it over. "There's no barcode. Do you think I can check it out?" Lori shifted from side to side. "Uhh. Maybe?" Mae had a feeling that whoever had stuffed the book back there probably didn't want it found, though why they hadn't hidden it better was beyond her. She figured that if taken to the front desk, she'd never see the it again. So she tucked the book under her jacket, nestling it against her side. "Sorry for ruining your shelf." "Oh. Uh. It's okay?" Lori said, tenderly sliding the books back into position. "See ya tomorrow." Mae said guiltily. "See ya!" Lori smiled. Mae stood up, making sure to clamp the little book to her side as she surreptitiously walked out of the building, and into the cold afternoon. --------------