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comeandreadawhile · 3 years ago

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Laying Low

Quick snippet of being in hiding for Caleb, Depa and Grey.

Caleb pov, some Depa/Grey

Being on the run came with a list of limitations four parsecs long, like nights-long sessions spent planning and worrying and planning again, or a persistent bellyache you couldn’t be sure was from the strain or steady depletion of food supplies. For the first time in his life, Caleb didn’t mind being coddled when the chance presented itself. It sold the act better.

“Kanan, keep close to me,” his master crooned as they made their way through the morning market, reaching the hand not holding their basket back toward him as he lagged behind a few steps. She couldn’t be faulted for being over protective these days.

“Yes, Mom,” he complied, taking her hand and a fistful of her cloak, looking every bit a civilian child.

The odd thing about playing a part, he thought, was how much opportunity it afforded you. Before, his master rarely bestowed physical affection with the same frequency as verbal praise, but now she squeezed his hand as a comfort without a thought. He’d lost his braid out of necessity, but she still combed her fingers through his hair before bed the way other mothers did with pride in her eyes. Despite the braid’s absence, she still tugged his hood further over his face when it slipped as they walked.

“Good news, we’ll have some leftover funds this month.”

Grey.

Grey had come to find them, after Depa had grabbed Caleb and ran. The day being a blur may have been in part to the Force—granting his master speed in their flight, having leant to an impressive Force jump and the second drop in Caleb’s stomach that hour—and adrenaline. After meeting new clones who had as much idea of what was happening as they did, and spending days dodging through the trees, Grey came to find them. Himself, on their private comm, not the blankness that had taken over the rest of their men; other than to tell Caleb not to worry, Gray wouldn’t say what happened with them before they fled the planet in a stolen ship.

His armor was back at their current hideaway, wearing instead a cloak that matched theirs and a thigh holster over the civilian garb Depa had been proud fit him.

“That’s good,” Depa replied easily, “We can build our savings a bit.” She paused at a stand to look over produce for the week, Grey guiding Caleb out of her path as she moved down the table.

“Delia! So good to see you!” A voice called, and Depa smiled charmingly at the stand’s owner.

“Good morning, I see the jogan fruit arrived,” she pointed out. The man scratched his beard and gave a relieved sigh.

“Finally! I was wondering if the shipment had been jacked, but—“ Caleb readily checked out of the conversation, leaning into Grey as the man’s thumb drew circles where he held Caleb’s shoulder. Somehow Grey not wearing gloves anymore was weirder to Caleb than the man not wearing armor. Caleb looked around, observing the other market goers doing their shopping before the heat of the day picked up, waving at a couple of the children he’d managed to make friends with.

Grey homeschooled him as part of their cover, partly because Caleb was currently ahead of the civilian curriculum for his age, and partly to avoid a paper trail. Among their neighborhood though, Caleb had managed to befriend a few kind children to play with while Depa chatted and made friends with equally kind parents while running errands. The war hadn’t terribly impacted this planet, most never having seen a clone without their helmet, so Grey could walk around without much fear of being labeled a deserter of the empire. As the empire spread its influence and troopers made their way planetside, nowadays Grey kept a scarf or a kerchief tied about his neck.

Caleb tuned back in when he heard his name—or his ‘public’ name, rather.

“Is that so? Kanan seems mighty grown to only be turning twelve!” The man looked at him in disbelief that Caleb knew to be kind teasing. He nodded appreciatively while Depa hummed proudly.

“He likes to think so. He’s grown up so quickly,” She said, and Caleb had to wonder at her meaning. She continued with a small grin, “Kanan is not so grown that he doesn’t want cake for his birthday.”

Grey leaned down to his ear and stage whispered, “Stay little so we get more cake!” He was rewarded with a true laugh from Caleb and a good-natured ‘hmph’ from Depa. After handing credits over to the chuckling vendor she leaned down to Caleb.

“I will make you as many cakes as you want, even when you are grown,” she said, pausing a moment to look at Grey before amending, “Within reason.” She pressed a kiss to Caleb’s head before adjusting his hood and settling their basket back in the crook of her arm. She straightened up and bid the vendor a good day while Caleb smiled to himself. Most boys his age seemed sick of doting mothers and kisses, but he couldn’t be happier to have them. He was, luckily for them, still small for a fourteen year old, and could pass off being a couple years younger with relative ease; Grey and Depa never missed a chance to remark about his still boyish features whenever he brought it up.

He was pulled from his thoughts by Grey hefting him up onto his hip, another thing he was still small enough for no one to question, and Caleb wound his arms around the man’s neck with practiced ease. Grey nodded to the stand owner and followed after Depa, slipping his free arm around her waist once caught up. Being in hiding afforded as many opportunities as it imposed limitations.

“Did you have anything in mind for breakfast, dear?”

“Nothing in particular. Did you, love?”

“Mmm, there are still some pastries left over from yesterday.”

Caleb turned his head to join in, “Those were good!” They had been, pleasantly; not having their food provided for them meant learning how to cook with what they could get ahold of. Depa nodded her agreement.

“They were; your father is getting quite the hang of baking,” she said warmly, and Caleb felt Grey puff up a bit at the praise. “But, if we’re willing to use some of the eggs, I can make us some flatcakes and we can save the pastries for after latemeal tonight.”

Caleb had been put in charge of minding the eggs they’d picked up anyway, excited at the prospect of warm eggs and flatcakes when they arrived home and content with the quiz Grey was giving him as they walked. They’d made one last stop to pick up fresh milk for the week, declining the offer of a delivered milk can in lieu of two smaller churns and privacy, and every time Caleb failed a question the freezing metal was pressed to his neck and arms through the cloak. While Caleb was of the mind Grey could’ve easily toted the bigger milk can home, and a delivery would’ve been normal enough, Depa and Grey felt better safe than sorry.

Today was washing day, and as the small apartment they were in for the time being had a large back balcony, open to the sky but walled to the world, it was inevitable Caleb and Grey would get into a suds war after breakfast. Caleb couldn’t wait. They always came in sopping wet once the clothes were on the line, and Depa would be holding towels out in the entryway and shaking her head smiling.

Depa suddenly stopped in front of him and in a fluid moment she turned and leaned into Grey in what would’ve looked like a kiss between the hooded figures, taking one of milk churns into the basket as they exchanged quiet words. As she leaned away she gestured vaguely in the direction they’d been heading and taking the eggs from Caleb. He saw the troopers approaching the second Grey had lifted him up again.

“Dad—?”

“We’ll see you at the house then, love. You sure you’re alright with the groceries?”

Are you sure you’ll be alright by yourself?

“Oh yes, dear, I shouldn’t be long. I’ll see you and Kanan at home.”

I will be fine. Keep Caleb safe.

Depa calmly continued on the path they’d been walking, and Grey hurried away with Caleb down a side road. Caleb heard them, felt them in the Force approaching his mother. “Excuse me ma’am—“ came the mechanical, stoic voice as Grey rounded another corner.

Grey’s scarf had fallen down, but Caleb’s arms about his neck did enough in a pinch.

They wouldn’t know Depa, had no way of knowing the woman out with her family was a Jedi.

They rounded another corner and Caleb was jostled as Grey adjusted him higher.

No one seemed to be following them, but why stop Depa?

Another street passed and with his heart in his ears Caleb was holding on to his mother’s presence in the Force while he could. He could feel it slipping from him, in the way that told him she was making herself inconspicuous.

They didn’t go directly home, taking side road after alley after back way.

Grey didn’t put him down once they were in the door. Once the milk was in the conservator, he sank to the floor with Caleb. He ran his hand through Caleb’s curls and pressed their foreheads together. Taking a breath that filled his entire chest, Caleb realized they were both shaking; on his exhale, Grey squeezed him tighter.

“Did they see you?” Caleb ventured.

“I don’t know, son.”

Caleb tucked his head against Grey’s shoulder. He should let go and go pack in case they needed to get out fast. He should release his worry into the Force and fill his belly with pastries in case he needed to run with a clear head.

Grey pressed his mouth to Caleb’s temple. “I will keep you safe if things go south,” he said, a solemn vow. “If she isn’t back in half an hour I’m getting the credits and taking you to the ship.” Caleb nodded. As much as he hated the thought of leaving her, Depa’s priority had always been keeping him safe, and Grey was just as protective.

They sat in silence after that, listening for anyone coming up on the apartment and relaxing when approaching footsteps passed. Caleb was searching for Depa in the Force all the while. Grey kept an arm under him and unholstered his pistol after the first set had passed them by.

The half hour mark was getting closer and Caleb was drawing from Grey’s steady resolve to remain calm.

He didn’t feel any large numbers moving towards them, didn’t sense danger but their men in Kaller hadn’t felt like any—

“Mom,” Caleb uttered seconds before the door opened and a breathless Depa dropped their basket in the entryway, bolting the door twice before hurrying to them. Grey dropped his pistol and Depa fell into him, letting him hold onto her as she took Caleb’s face in her hands.

“Mom—“ did they follow you? Are we safe? Are we leaving? Caleb wanted to implore in that single word.

“Shhhh,” she hushed him, folding him into her arms and resting her head atop his. “They were looking for someone else, a local smuggler. Wanted to know if I’d seen them.” Caleb felt Grey wrap his arms around them both and was grateful for the embrace. He melted against Depa and relished in the warmth of her.

Grey adjusted them so Depa could lean against him with Caleb nestled between. “Do you think they recognized any of us?” Caleb felt Grey’s quiet timbre rumble against his side.

Caleb felt Depa shake her head, “I doubt it, you and Caleb left before they should’ve been able to. Our conversation was very brief, the time I took getting home was winding roads and doubling back.” Grey nodded in acknowledgement. “We’re probably safe here for a little while longer.” Another nod.

Caleb took a shuddering breath, relieved and finally truly calm. Depa was home and they were safe. That only left one pressing matter for the morning then…

“Mama?”

Depa gave him an amused hum before answering, “Yes, baby?”

“Can we please have breakfast now?”

Caleb was gently jostled as Depa and Grey chuckled against him and Depa pressed one of those treasured kisses to his curls, “Yes, baby.”

The flatcakes were met with almost twin hums of sweet-toothed appreciation, and afterward the family in hiding went about the rest of their day as they’d planned: with suds being thrown around the balcony after morning lessons, and warm towels scrubbed through dark curls. Caleb watched, bundled in warm towels, as his mother dried his father’s cheek before he leaned down to kiss her, watched her giggle in a way she never had at the Temple before squawking that Grey was dripping cold water on her, to go in and get changed while she snuggled towel-swaddled Caleb on the sofa.

Caleb noted—not for the first time and far from the last—was how much opportunity and freedom not being confined to who you were before afforded you. As Grey rejoined them in dry clothes and discussed plans for Caleb’s birthday while he prepped lunch, Depa combed her fingers through Caleb’s drying hair while they chatted. He’d bring them bits and spoonfuls to try and Caleb would venture that Grey’s brothers would be entirely put off or entirely jealous of the trio’s new life. Caleb was happy to have him in it.

Depa gave him his afternoon lessons, on star charts and hyperspace lanes, while Grey cooked—and it no longer took Caleb by surprise to think of the feeling in his chest as being home.

#star wars #caleb dume #kanan jarrus #depa billaba #commander grey #post #the clone wars #pre Star Wars rebels #tcw

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x-pair-o-dice-x · 3 years ago

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i definitely didn’t start write this in the past four days because i procrastinated, haha, why would you think that? anyway, here’s my secret santa gift for @random-tinies!!! i have both art, and a fic for you!!

now, for the fic..

apologies if they’re a bit out of character, i don’t know much about writing them all that much yet,, fkdmdkmdkdmd.

quick warnings: soft vore, unintentional fearplay, fear of death, digestion mention(none happen!!), probably inaccurate pirate information.

—————————

now, dream wouldn’t say he was a pirate, exactly.

honestly, all he did was travel around the sea sometimes, do some minor crimes(most not even out in the ocean!), hunt down the occasional treasure, and have a couple wanted posters. really, he’d just say he was a criminal, that just happened to occasionally operate in the big blue sea.

his mother, though? she was a pirate. and a damn good one, he had to say.

the feared captain of the deep blue, they called her. one of the most infamous pirates known in the esempi region. there was hardly any other pirate around that matched her skills.

he just called her puffy, though.

technically speaking, he wasn’t biologically her son. but really, out in the sea, blood didn’t matter as much as bonds did. and the moment she had found him stowed away on her old ship, before she was as big as she was now, years and years ago, she knew he had potential.

and, well. seeing as he was now her first mate, he supposes she must have been right.

their crew had grown since then — not by much, mind you, but no one really minded.

one of the most early ones was her other son, someone who went by the name foolish. as the months go by, he comes and goes, staying for a couple days before heading off to who knows where. the only person who seemed to know where exactly he went between the weeks he was away was puffy herself — and she didn’t seem particularly keen on telling anyone, either. that’s alright with him, though. dream knows enough about having a background he would frankly like to leave behind, he wasn’t about to pry.

then there were george and sapnap, two people he got very acquainted with, seeing the various months he spent on the run from him. cons of technically being a wanted criminal: you’ll get bounty hunters on your tail pretty much every week. pros of being a wanted criminal: you can take those same bounty hunters, and make them a part of your family. it took a long while, but eventually, the two came around to him — and now, they’re a part of the journey.

..well, currently, george isn’t part of this particular journey. he was a fucking coward (affectionate), and would have rather stayed home doing.. whatever it is a george does when he’s home alone.

and then, there was skeppy.

......dream honestly didn’t know skeppy’s deal.

he doesn’t mean that in any bad way, of course, it’s just. he has absolutely no clue where he even came from. literally, he just kind of, showed up one day. swears not even puffy knows anything about skeppy.

and, even weirder, it seems skeppy knows sapnap? like, foolish, that would make some sense, who knows what the fuck he does when he’s not around. george, he could see, if he squinted. but.. sapnap?

granted, he doesn’t know much about sapnap’s background, but he didn’t seem like the type to hang around people like skeppy. the guy had practically no sense of preservation(well, neither did he, but he’d like to pretend it’s better than it is), and pulled pranks every five seconds. sapnap was a hothead, but a loyal one, too. it just seems like they’d bash heads every now and then, with skeppy getting on one too many nerves.

and don’t get him wrong, they do fight, occasionally; but.. it seems more lighthearted than anything.

well, dream supposes it wasn’t any of his business. if they ever want to share their backstory over a campfire, he’ll be glad to listen, but he won’t pry.

no matter how much he really wants to.

back onto the topic at hand(did he have a topic to begin with?) — adventure!

the crew was currently out on an expedition, following a map that puffy had... borrowed, for a bit. the map didn’t exactly say what it led to, but puffy had a feeling it would lead to something worthwhile.

and so, they all had set off. barring george and foolish, of course, for aforementioned reasons.

they were out in the middle of the sea, on a spare ship — their main one had gotten a bit beat up on their last journey, and needed to be left behind for repairs. while it was a shame to leave behind the beloved ship, it was probably for the best — they had enough trouble manning the ship with their usual five members, maybe six if they were lucky. with the much smaller ship, four people was just the right amount to keep her from sinking.

as long as nothing went terribly wrong, they should reach their destination in no time! it’s already been a couple of days since they had first set out, if they keep up the pace, they should be arriving in just a couple more.

the sky was a little gray and cloudy, but it shouldn’t be too much trouble. they’ve bested storms before, on their main ship, even if one were to strike now, they’re experienced. they’ll make it through just fine.

——————————

alright, uh. couple hours later, and.. the clouds look just... a tiny bit worse.

well.

maybe just a bit more than a, well. a bit.

“uh, dad?” dream spoke up, turning his head to puffy, who tilts her head slightly towards him from her position at the wheel. “is it just me, or does the sky look a bit..”

“i see it, duckling.” puffy interrupts. she looks about five seconds from gripping her hands right around the wheel, but her voice is just about calm. he can only catch a hint of it being anything other than that. “hopefully, we can leave this area before it hits.”

“and, if we can’t?”

“well,” puffy taps her fingers on the wheel. “this ship has survived a bunch. not as much as our big guy, but it’s had a decent amount. we’ll be fine.” even as she says that, though, her mouth was pressed into a thin line.

dream hummed, but left it at that. he turned back around and looked for how his other crew mates were faring.

sapnap is all but leaning over the edge of the ship, staring out at the sea with an unreadable expression.

skeppy is, frankly, nowhere to be seen. that would be concerning, if it were anybody but skeppy. he just makes a mental note to be careful for any hidden tricks around the ship.

he decides to go up to sapnap — the guy looks troubled, almost. he could probably use a distraction. they both could, really.

“you good, man?” he says, causing the man to startle. wow, sapnap must have been really deep in his thoughts, he wasn’t even trying to hide his footsteps.

“oh, hey dream.” sapnap said, relaxing his shoulders.

“must have been thinking pretty hard there, that’s new.” he grinned, resulting in a harsh punch to his shoulder.

“fuck off, dude.” sapnap glared at him, though the effect was ruined with the smile he gave him.

“hey, i don’t want you to ruin your mind with all those thoughts going around, could mess up your perfectly empty brain!” dream shrugged with a wider grin, before dodging some more punches.

“i am going to fucking kill you if you don’t stop.” dream laughed.

“good luck, then you’ll have an angry pirate captain on your tail.”

sapnap stuck his tongue out at him, causing dream to laugh harder at him.

the two sobered down a bit after that, sapnap going back to looking at the swarming clouds in the sky.

“looks like a storm is brewing.” sapnap said.

“oh really? i couldn’t tell.”

“dream i will kill you. i almost succeeded before, don’t test me.”

dream snorted. a brief silence followed.

“it.. kinda looks like it’s gonna be bad. like.. really bad.” sapnap spoke up.

dream paused.

“i.. i think we’ll be fine.” dream said slowly. sapnap turned to him with a raised eyebrow.

“well- okay, fine is a strong word. but i know we’ll make it out, if worst comes to worst.” dream amended.

sapnap turned back to the sea. the apprehensive look was back on his face.

“hey.” dream nudged his friend. “we’re gonna be okay.”

sapnap glanced back at him. he paused, before giving him a small smile.

“and hey,” dream continues, “on the one percent chance we do die — unlikely, by the way — i give you full permission to kill me again.”

sapnap huffs out a laugh at that, giving him another punch, softer than before.

“i’m going to hold you to that, you know.”

“wouldn’t have offered if i was going to back out, pandas.” dream grinned at him.

sapnap gives a grin back, before looking back at sea again, looking lighter than before. dream’s own eyes softened.

yeah, they were gonna end up fine.

——————————

so uh.

things... weren’t going fine.

like, not even in the slightest.

you know that storm? the one that wasn’t too bad?

yeah no, it.. it got worse. way, way worse.

dream tightened his grip on the sail’s mast as the ship lurched, as lightning cracked, and thunder roared. by the gods, this might be the worst storm he’s seen yet, though he has to admit, he hasn’t seen many. at least, not out at sea.

puffy’s holding on to the wheel like her life depends on it — and it does, all of their lives depend on it — she’s trying her best to gain back control of the ship, but judging by the desperation on her face, it isn’t going so well.

the ship lurches again as another wave crashes onto the ship, one large enough to splash him with the salty water. he finds his eyes laying on skeppy, grasping onto the door to the captain’s office for dear life — dream’s not gonna bother even asking why he was in there to begin with, he’s pretty sure he knows the answer, not that it really matters anyway.

he searches for the final member of his crew, and finds sapnap holding on to the ropes climbing up to the crow’s nest — he must have been up there right before the storm hit, dream thinks. shit, that is a terrible place to be in any sort of storm, especially one like this.

none of them had any warning when the storm hit. at one point, everything was fine, they were set on course to be out of the area before things could escalate. the next? chaos, utter chaos. no one could get to a safe spot, no one could prepare.

all they could do was hold on and hope.

the ship lurched once again, a particularly large wave hitting the poor vessel, and- he hears a gut-wrenching, terrified scream, and he turns his head just in time to see sapnap fall just out of sight, out of the boat, into the water. he could barely hear the splash under the clamor of everything else.

“SAPNAP!” dream cried, a hand reaching out, as if that could save him.

nononONONONO-

“MAN OVERBOARD!” puffy shouted, looking around with wide eyes, but no one moved to do anything. they couldn’t, really, not if they wanted to join him. then that would just be two bodies to worry about.

that didn’t change the fact that dream desperately wanted to jump in after him — he can’t lose a friend, he just can’t. he doesn’t want to have to break the news to george, he doesn’t think his heart could take that. please, please, please, prime, let his friend live, through whatever miracle that exists, let sapnap live-

suddenly, a loud, haunting cry echoed through the atmosphere, piercing through the storm.

dream’s heart stopped.

that was a siren.

he wasn’t even aware they were in siren territory, shit shit shit.

they really were as good as dead, now, if they fell into the water.

(he doesn’t think about what this might mean for sapnap, he doesn’t think about it he doesn’t think about it he doesn’t-)

another shriek shatters his thoughts, one much louder than the previous. shit, were there two of them??

puffy seemed to be going through the same thought process as him, but before they could even do anything about it, the ship lurches again, and he has to hug the mast as tight as he could to keep himself from falling off — he swears that the ship did a ninety degree angle then, if not close to it. that’s not comforting at all!

before they could even think about relaxing, he hears-

“LOOK OUT-!” skeppy shouts, and dream looks just in time to see a large wave, one bigger than the entire ship towering over them, before suddenly he finds himself hit with a crushing pressure, his grip on the mast slipping, leaving him stranded underwater, with no way of knowing where the surface is, no way of getting to any sort of safety, no way to escape the sirens in the waters with them-

he opens his eyes, only just ignoring the way the salt burns his eyes, and looks around, trying to find something, anything that could help. he catches movement from his peripheral, and as he turns, he finds himself looking at something big headed his way(a siren, his mind fills in, considering the fins and the tail), with something else swimming around just behind it. from the looks of things, he’s only just about as tall as it’s finger.

and dream has just enough time to think ‘oh, that’s bigger than i thought it would be,’ before the siren opens their mouth, not slowing down a beat, and he gets snatched inside.

immediately, his mind panics, especially since he’s still surrounded by water- but he’s given no time to adjust, as the siren immediately tilts its head back, and he’s only able to think ‘shit-’ before he’s swallowed down with a quick gulp.

all around him is a crushing sensation, forcing all the air out of his lungs, not letting him take a breath. it feels like an eternity before he’s squeezed tighter than before, only to get plopped into some sort of chamber. he takes a deep breath as soon as he’s able, trying to catch his bearings.

it takes a second of rest before everything fully sinks in.

he’s inside of a siren.

he was eaten, by a siren.

he was in it’s stomach.

he was gonna die he was gonna die he can’t die not yet please-

belatedly, he realizes puffy and skeppy are still out there, sapnap too. there’s no one else in here, they might’ve gotten away — or maybe the other siren has them, god he hopes it didn’t. he’s not sure being stranded out in the sea, in siren territory, is any better than just getting killed by one, but at least with the former, there’s a chance of survival.

him, though? there’s no escape. there’s no feasible way he could live through this, not when he’s in the belly of the beast. literally.

gods, puffy, sapnap, skeppy, please live, please get away. i couldn’t stand it if you died with me.

he felt the siren moving again, felt the walls crush him slightly, before suddenly, he saw something else fall into the stomach with him.

no, not something.

someone.

they were coughing, and instantly, he zeroed in on their long hair, once fluffy, now soaked.

no.... no, please prime, no........

“dad?” he croaked out, and he watched with a heartbroken expression as green eyes met blue in the soft light of the chamber.

“..hey....” puffy spoke softly, giving dream a wobbly smile.

immediately, he shot over to her, throwing his arms around her. she hug him back tight, as he rest his head in the crook of her neck. he was only just able to hold back his sobs, though he couldn’t stop his breath from hitching every other second.

“it’s okay, duckling,” she mumbled, resting her hand in his hair, scratching at his scalp in an attempt to calm him down. “it’s okay, it’s alright.” she kept muttering sweet nothings to him, as if that could help the situation any.

the two startled as something new happened, as their surroundings started to vibrate slightly. as he pulled away from the embrace, it only took him a moment to realize what it was.

purring. the motherfucker was purring.

before he could think any harder about that, the walls moved again, and someone else fell into the stomach with them.

he could tell immediately who it was, what with the bright blue hoodie.

“hey skeppy, welcome to hell.” puffy muttered sarcastically, causing dream to snort despite himself. even skeppy let out a good chuckle at that, and while it did sound strained, overall, the guy looked relatively calm about the situation.

“well, looks like the gang’s all here.” skeppy said, leaning back onto the walls.

“except for sapnap,” dream mumbled, bringing his knees to his chest. “do.. do you think he’s..” he stopped himself. god, he didn’t want to think about what might have happened.

“knowing him?” skeppy said. “he’s fine, no doubt about it.”

“if he hasn’t.. hasn’t drowned yet,” dream said, spitting out the words, “there’s still sirens about. there’s.. he..” he hugged his knees tighter, puffy reaching out, and rubbing circles on his back.

“there’s no way he drowned,” skeppy said, crossing his arms. “he wouldn’t let something like that bring him down, that would just be embarrassing.” he chuckled, as if having he was privy to a joke the other two weren’t. “seriously, if he let water be the thing to bring him down, i would drag him out of limbo just to make fun of him. i’d straight up just learn necromancy, and i’d never let him live it down. he’ll never know a day of peace.”

dream huffed out a laugh, puffy giving a snort herself.

a silence followed afterwards, skeppy trying to get more comfortable, while dream and puffy simply sat and waited. the purring hadn’t stopped, and.. purring? really? he wasn’t aware sirens could purr. prime, he bet it was satisfied at having been able to catch them as a meal. he bet it was enjoying their terror. well, maybe not skeppy’s, he didn’t seem all that scared. dream wasn’t even sure anything could faze the guy at this point. that in of itself scared dream, if only slightly.

he looked around at his surroundings out of boredom — or at least, what little there was. he fully realized that there was, in fact, a light source, if a bit dim — it came in the form of small little freckles of light, scattered all around the walls, giving off a red lighting, as if the walls really needed to be even redder. the light seemed to increase wherever they touched it, but only slightly.

it felt like maybe five minutes had passed, before puffy spoke up.

“where is sapnap? it didn’t take too long for- for the siren to catch us,” puffy said, “you’d think he would have joined us by now.”

“..well, uh. there was another siren,” skeppy pointed out.

“great,” dream snapped out, almost pouting, “so we don’t even get to die together as a whole crew, he gets to die alone.”

god, what was george gonna think? what was foolish going to think? will they ever know what happened to them? or were they just going to disappear from the world quietly, with only two people to wonder what had happened, never to find out.

prime, he hated this. they just had to go through that storm, they just had to go on this expedition in the first place. now, they were going to..

“wait- hold on,” skeppy said, sitting up. “who said anything about dying?”

dream stared at him blankly.

“we...... we’ve been eaten by a siren.” puffy said, staring at skeppy with the same look. “we’re in it’s stomach. skeppy, man, in what world does that not equal death?”

“do you see us dying, though?” skeppy said, as if they were the crazy ones.

“we’re gonna be- we’re gonna be digested, skeppy!” dream said, voice raised. “that’s not a quick death! and even if we aren’t, by some miracle, we’ll suffocate!”

“we won’t, though.”

“wh- how would you know that?!” dream threw his hands up.

“i know these guys.” skeppy said simply.

dream froze. he could feel puffy pause beside him.

“you.... you, know, these sirens..” dream deadpanned.

“yep.” skeppy said, popping the p.

dream paused, trying to take in the information.

skeppy.... skeppy knows sirens. and.. those sirens that he knew just.. happened to be around when they were almost killed by the storm.

i........

in.... in all honesty, part of him isn’t surprised. this sounds like a skeppy thing, just casually befriending man-eating beasts. like. okay then. this is happening now. this is fine.

“yeah.” dream says, exasperated. “yeah. sure. okay.”

“so.. we’re gonna be okay?” puffy asks cautiously.

“we’re fine, we’re in his brooding pouch — a second stomach, one for storing young hatchlings.” skeppy said, as if this was the most common of knowledge.

“..yeah. and, sapnap.. he’s in the other siren’s.. pouch?”

“he’s fine, without a doubt.” skeppy said.

dream’s shoulders relaxed unconsciously — he wasn’t even aware they were hunched. they.. if skeppy was right, they were gonna be fine. they were gonna be okay. they were gonna live.

god, he hoped this wasn’t one last prank. that would just be cruel, even for skeppy.

even as the thought comes across his mind, he mentally shakes it away — no, skeppy wouldn’t do that. he knows when to hold off on the jokes, when things are serious. he may not have a filter most of the time, but this would just be crossing a line.

so.. that meant skeppy really did know these sirens. dream briefly wondered why he never told anyone, but then he realized it wasn’t the most causal of topics to suddenly drop in a conversation. “hey guys, just so you know, i’m actually friends with two terrifying beasts that are known to take out entire flees of ships with little effort. also, we’re out of gapples.”

yeah. like that would have gone well.

not that this went any better, either.

well, he supposes that they would just have to trust these sirens, and hope that they wouldn’t suddenly turn on them, or that skeppy didn’t mistake some random siren as his friends.

god, he hopes sapnap is alright.

———————————

it feels like hours pass before something changes. dream had gotten used to the subtle swaying of the stomach, occasionally hearing purrs or faint siren chirps. the moment he felt it still, with only the slight churning of the walls, he was on edge.

he could hear the sirens talking to each other, though he could only assume that’s what it was, as he couldn’t understand the various trills and whistles that they made.

suddenly, as the chirps quieted down, the walls squeezed tight around them all. dream struggled in a panic, before finding himself in that crushing sensation from earlier. before he knew it, he was getting spit out into a hand — a giant hand, he found he was hardly bigger than one of it’s clawed fingers.

carefully, he found himself getting brought down to the ground — a dock, he realizes, one not too far from the town their crew resided in. the village the dock was from was abandoned, a ghost town. he never really understood why, but he supposes he doesn’t need to, all he needs to know is that no strangers would pop in unexpectedly, no one would panic at the sight of the large siren in front of him.

the first thing he notices about the siren is it’s eyes. a brown, almost red iris, with a light red sclera. it’s almost haunting, really, if it weren’t for the fact he could practically feel the kindness radiating from it’s eyes. he could feel part of his shoulders relaxing slightly despite himself.

it(they?) had red fins at the sides of their heads, as if those were their ears. and as his eyes trailed up, he could see.. horns? on the top of their head. half of their face was a void black, fading to a freckled peach. they had puffy brown hair, as well, and it didn’t even look wet, despite him knowing that they had to have been underwater recently, there’s no way it could have dried in the past few minutes. was a siren’s hair just like that?

before he knew it, the siren had coughed up his other two companions, one looking more disheveled and wary than the other. you’ll never guess who was who.

“hey bad!” skeppy grinned up at the siren. the siren- bad, he guesses(an odd name, sure, but he’s seen weirder), chuckled good naturedly at him.

“hello, geppy!” bad smiles softly at him, before turning turning to the other puffy and dream. “and hello, you two. i’ve heard a lot about you guys, and i’m so sorry our meeting had to go like this.”

“uh-” puffy stumbled. “it’s alright, and i do have to thank you for getting my crew out of that storm. despite the.. unconventional methods, to say the least.”

the siren winced. “sorry, sorry! i wasn’t thinking much when i first did it, i’m so used to doing it with skeppy, i didn’t think twice.”

dream ignored the look puffy gave skeppy(who had simply shrugged in response), and asked, “where is sapnap?”

at this, bad’s fin-ears went flat, and they gained an apprehensive look on their face.

dream paled.

“he- he isn’t dead, is he? prime, please, he can’t be-”

“no!” bad all but yelled, “nonono no! he’s fine, i promise!”

dream stared at the siren. “..but...?”

bad looked away briefly.

“just, give me a second.” they said, before letting out a low trill.

dream shared a look with puffy. even skeppy had an unreadable expression, glancing at the two briefly.

suddenly, something else emerged from the water. it was smaller, far smaller than bad was, with their torso being as tall as bad’s head. they had a blue-ish pattern on their face, their ears looking similar to shark fins. they had dark blue eyes, with black hair being held up by a white band-

..wait.

..wait a minute.

“s..sapnap?”

the- the siren in question winced. “..hey, dream.”

dream stared, trying to process everything that has happened in the last few hours.

“you’re.. you’re a siren.” dream said.

sapnap nodded, not bothering to talk.

“and.. you knew about this?” dream turned to skeppy.

“yep.” skeppy gave a thumbs up.

“i- okay. okay.” dream sighed, putting his head in his hands. “just- give me a second.”

so. sapnap was a siren. who.. could turn into a human, he guessed. alright. alright.

so his friend was a creature known to sink entire navies, known to kill thousands of sailors, all with little effort.

in all honesty, he was surprised skeppy wasn’t one, too.

......

briefly, he turned to skeppy. “are, are you also..?”

“nope,” skeppy said, popping the p. “‘oops, all human!’ here, folks.”

alright. ignoring whatever weird joke skeppy made.

one of his best friends is a siren.

does this.. really change anything?

he’s still sapnap, isn’t he?

he’s still the same hothead, still the same hunter he befriended.

so he can turn into an overgrown fish. that would just make their little manhunts all the more fun, wouldn’t it?

he’s still sapnap.

he’s still his friend.

he’s.. still staring down at them apprehensively.

like he’s worried that they wouldn’t accept him now that they know.

like he’s worried that dream wouldn’t accept him.

oh, not a chance in hell, you’d have to pry me off to get rid of me at this point.

“so, did you like, get turned into a siren a la vampire?” dream smiled up at him.

sapnap let out a startled laugh.

“i- what?” he asked, confused.

“you heard me,” dream grinned, “are you some sort of siren-vampire, or were you just born like this?”

“i was born like this, what are you even-”

“so we don’t have to worry about you getting burnt in the sun? no need to worry about random stakes impaling you?”

“dude, what are-”

“so there’s no point getting worked up about you getting forced to turn into a siren every full moon? no allergy to silver?”

“dream, that’s werewolves, what are you on right now-”

“what, i’m just listing reasonable worries!” dream laughed. “c’mon, you’re still part of the crew, we gotta know what we’re dealing with here, don’t want to accidentally kill you with garlic, of all things.”

dream expected a retort, but paused when he realized the siren wasn’t replying. he looked up, and saw sapnap looking at him with a vulnerable expression.

“i’m.. you still want me to be a part of the crew....?” sapnap asked, ears pinned back.

“of course, man! this-” dream gestured at sapnap, “this doesn’t change a thing! you’re still my friend, pandas.”

sapnap looked as if he was about ten seconds away from tearing up, but he still looked a bit wary, glancing somewhere behind him. dream turned, looking at his dad, who had been silent, watching the exchange unfold.

puffy stared back at sapnap, before stepping up to him.

“sapnap,” puffy started, “to me, it doesn’t matter what you are. i wouldn’t care if you were some world-killer, you’re a part of this crew. and, as long as you want to be, you will always have a place in this family.”

she looked up at bad as well. “this goes for you, too, if you’d like. you clearly know these two, and i’m sure they’d vouch for you. if you ever want to, you can join us in our crew. after all that happened, that’s about the least i could do to thank you.”

sapnap stared at her with a watery look in his eyes, while bad considered her.

“well, i have been told stories of all of you from these two.” bad said. “and, i have to say.. i wouldn’t be opposed to it.”

immediately, skeppy threw up his hands, letting out a woop. “HELL YEAH, BAD’S JOINING US FOR CRIMES!”

bad snorted, murmuring a quick, fond, “language”, as everyone else let out a chuckle.

informing everyone else(as in, two other people) about the.. developments would certainly be an event, but dream’s sure that things will go fine.

for now, though, he was content with just hanging around for a bit. george wasn’t expecting them back for at least a couple more days, he could wait for just a bit.

#mcyt g/t #mcyt gt #my art #my writing #tiny!dream #tiny!skeppy #tiny!puffy #giant!bad #sizeshifter!sapnap #shifter!sapnap #vore tw #a fishy situation au #the secret ending is that rocks fall on them and they all die the end /j #if you aren’t like two other people in the ss discord you will not understand this reference kfnfkdmdkdj #writing the banter was actually really fun;; usually i write stuff where the characters are strangers;#it was neat writing a scenario where most of the characters already know each other!!#i hope you enjoy this!!!! sorry it took so long; it was mainly the procrastination jdmdkdmdkdmdkdm

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orphicrose · 3 years ago

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The Only One

Rick x Reader Fanfiction

Summary : life is strange in the rick and morty universe, as we all know. But things get just that little bit weirder when Rick meets you. Something seems oddly familiar with you, but for once In his life he has no idea why. So he searches from reality to reality to try and see if he had met another version of you, only to realise there where none. You where the only one. That’s when it finally hit him…

This is inspired by a song from Rick and morty that I think is beautiful https://youtu.be/epiOcz3HXNo

I accidentally got carried away and wrote too much, so I will probably just do a part 2 so it’s not to much to read if anyone is interested <3

_________________꧁♥︎꧂_________________

Humans are such fragile creatures, always have been and always will be. You knew that, but you refused to surrender down to it. Not wanting to be included In whatever earth had to offer, so you ran away. And not like how a silly fourteen years old runs away from home, Hah… no.

You left the fucking planet, not leaving behind a single trail or speck of dust for someone to follow you with. Your intelligence and ambition was all you needed to carry yourself through life. Travelling the infinite void of space, soon making a name for yourself. For good and for bad. An ordinary person couldnt even dream nor comprehend the things you’ve experienced or seen. And that’s just how you liked it. Being different. It was truly a gift to be intelligent.

And then there was rick, high IQ and normally not happy about it. Seeing his intelligence as a curse. Rick hadn’t seen it all, it was impossible, but he thought he had seen enough to make a valid opinion on life.

It’s pointless.

Such a bitter man with a bitter view on everything, including himself. You see, when you have an overwhelming amount of knowledge weighing down on your mind, you can go two ways. The first being ricks way, not caring about anything since he has seen how big the universe is and doesn’t see a point.

Then there’s your way, feeling blessed to be able to see things that no one else can, and finding a new reason to live every single day.

You two where polar opposites, but also the same. You where both alone in a universe you felt didn’t need you anymore.

The day both of your worlds collided should have been written down in the history books. It was the day both of your beliefs where almost questioned. Wondering whether fate really does exist.

————————————————

Out of the many things you have done, you’ve never visited the same place twice. Making everyday an adventure, as much of a cliche as that sounds it’s true. Not only that, but you seem to have people after you almost everywhere. For your intelligence, or for revenge. But there is one particular spot you cannot get enough of. Finding yourself there when you lose yourself.

It’s an isolated planet in the middle of the andromeda galaxy. It’s a newly ‘emerging moon’ as you like to call it. In fact, you pretty much founded this planet, since its a recent creation. This also means there is no intelligent life yet evolved, so it is safe for you to do what you please.

You go there often, to watch the two suns set over its small horizon and the thousands of stars come into view. Giving you time to reflect on your life. To appreciate it, but not to regret anything. The stars are far to beautiful to bring your mind to anything negative. The planet itself seems to project the meaning of peace and tranquillity even without life. Maybe that’s why it’s so comforting.

Your thoughts where leaving your mind, as you held your eyes closed. Feeling the breeze brush through your hair gently. That beautiful, genuine smile found its way to your face without you noticing. You where to lost in the feeling of relaxation.

But that soon came to an end. That euphoric state was snapped out of you when you noticed a bright light coming towards you. Getting bigger and bigger in just seconds. Until it became more clear, it was a spacecraft of some sort. A poorly built one to say the least. You sat and watched, mesmerised, as the flames from the object slowly engulfed it. Burning in the atmosphere. Finally hitting the ground, you shook your head and sighed. Being brought back into reality.

The flames took a second to fade after the ship had crashed. And it was clearer to see, it was the stereotypical UFO. The type you’d see in cheesy ski-fi films. But it had encryptions written in English. Which was very unusual, especially for it to be in this part of the galaxy.

What was even stranger was that it didn’t have even the slightest burn mark to it’s metal. Your vision of it became clearer and clearer the closer you got, slowly creeping past the incredibly green trees towards it. But just before you got too close, a figure fell out of the vehicle. Swearing like a drunken sailor.

This is what really messed with you, it was a human. You gasped quietly, not being able to remember the last time you saw one. A mix of feelings rushed over you; confusion, fear, excitement? You couldn’t help but stare, his unique blue hair bounced as he picked himself up, not even bothering to dust off the dirt on his lab coat.

“Fuck! You fucking piece of shit spacecraft. You’ve really done it this time Rick you fucking…” he didn’t finish his sentence, as he kicked the lump of metal. Screaming at the top of his voice.

“Fuck!”

You caught a small glimpse of his face, and recognised him. But you weren’t sure where from. You had met millions of people over the years so he could really be anyone. But there was something so compelling about his character. Something that felt like you where being pushed towards him. Or pulled, by a red string perhaps. Something that was just telling you to interact with him.

You stayed hidden behind a rather tall tree, still collecting your thoughts and questioning whether you should help him. Rick had slumped himself against the ship, putting his hands to his face and grunting. Pausing his breakdown for a second to take a sip from his flask, then proceeding to carry on.

He stayed like this for a good few minutes, before you had decided to approach him. Your curiosity and questions where burning at the edge of your mind. You just had to investigate. Keeping a hand on your weapon tucked neatly in a pocket behind your back. You slowly walked towards him, not even being able to speak before he noticed you.

A gun had been pulled to you, aiming directly between your eyes

“What do you want? I’m not in the mood so just tell me in advance if I should shoot you or not..” his eyebrows furrowed, looking at the hand tucked behind your back.

You rolled your eyes, putting your hands up in surrender. Just how you remembered humans to be. Aggressive and impulsive.

“Calm down, I saw your ship crash. Thought you where in need of some assistance. And put that gun down, god…” to your surprise, he did. With a loud grunt he put his gun back into his pocket and turned away. Usually, he probably would’ve shot on site. And who’s to say he still won’t, but right in this moment he is too preoccupied to care.

“God doesn’t fucking exist…” he mumbled “and I definitely don’t need any assistance!”

You raised an eyebrow at him, watching him as he attempted to fix his broken ship. Opening the lid to the engine and being greeted by a storm of smoke. Now Seconds away from another breakdown.

“Are you… okay?” You hesitantly asked, daring to inch closer to him. Probably was the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. He threw the wrench down at the engine as he exploded.

“No, I’m not fucking okay. I lost my grandson, the entire galactic government is after me, I broke my portal gun and I just crashed my ship into a planet with no helpful resources to fix it.!” His speech sped up, and he went dead silent when he stopped talking. Clearly regretting telling you anything. He is usually good at keeping his mind together and keeping his problems to himself. But he had so much adrenaline pumping through his blood, he could barely concentrate.

“I’m, i’m sorry for your loss” is all you managed to get out

“What? Oh no, my grandsons not dead. I just left him somewhere and forgot exactly where…” he spoke slightly softer, still grunting as he tried to analyse his engine.

There was a small silence while you processed everything he had just said. Moving closer to get a look at his engine, you shook your head.

“You’ve burnt it out…”

“Yeah, no shit smart ass” he bit at you

You rolled your eyes and snatched the spanner from the place he had dropped it. Not using it to fix his engine, but you pulled out a small metal box from your pocket instead. Fixing a few pieces together. Rick stood there and watched with a puzzled look on his face. Moving his eyes from the gadget, then up to get a look at you.

His eyebrows softened as he took in your features, the creases in his forehead disappeared. A rush of a strange feeling replaced the adrenaline, not being able to pinpoint what it was but he didn’t like it. He could only describe it as his heart softening, and getting lost in a place that was familiar to him. Thats what he felt when he looked at your eyes, reflecting off of his.

“Hav-have we met before?” He said in a much calmer tone

You placed the gadget on the engine and pressed a small red button on the top, looking up at him.

“I don’t think so?” The box moved around the engine, like a shield. Fixing it effortlessly, Ricks eyes darted from you, to the engine, then back to you. Now with amazement written all over his face.

Deja vu was the only state good enough to describe what he was experiencing. You broke the silence by holding a hand out to introduce yourself.

“I’m y/n”

It took a quick second for him to respond, still trying to process your face and remember how he knows you.

“I’m… Rick” he finally shook your hand.

“Rick Sanchez..”

That name was oddly familiar to you. Like you’d heard it in a dream. Or it was a loved ones name in a past life. You felt like you had heard it before, in a very distant memory. But no recollection of the connection.

“That seems…familiar” you tilted your head, squinting your eyes at the old man who gave you the same look.

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you knew me. I am the smartest man In the universe”

#rick sanchez #morty smith #rick x reader #x reader #fanfiction #fantasy #fanfic #headcannons #spacecraft #rick and morty #ocs #a lot of words #a lot of work #comedy #romance

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yesimwriting · 4 years ago

Text

Searing Starlight (chapter two)

A/n Chapter twooo!! I cannot believe the support I’ve been getting on here im so excited to share my six of crows/shadow and bone fics with y’all!

Lmk if you’d like to be tagged when I update this story!! And just letting y’all know I take requests so if you have an idea you’d like to see me attempt feel free to comment it or send it in :))

At least Kaz’s claimed ‘wraith’ (which is such an odd thing to just have) is a girl, and a seemingly kind one at that. She was quick to find me, body pressed into wooden shelves and glass bottles, and subtly gesture for me to follow her. It had been difficult to keep track of her flighty form through the crowd, but I think there was a point in her strange raveling, to make sure no one was following me.

She’s not particularly talkative, but she doesn’t seem bothered by me. She tossed me a random oversized shirt to pull over my dress when she saw how I kept adjusting the fabric and crossing my arms. That was kinder than she needed to be. I think I’ll like her.

“So you’re a wraith,” I manage, breaking the nervous silence, “Like a full time, constantly on-call wraith.”

The question seems to puzzle her, dark eyebrows drawing together. “Yes.” The corner of her mouth twitches up slightly, a smile. “A full time, constantly on-call wraith.” She hesitates, perfect stance adjusting. “What were you doing before?”

Great. This question. “Nothing important.” It’s not a fair cop-out. Especially since she answered my question. “I um...I’m indentured to Rollan Kenya.”

I watch her reaction to the name. Some know of him. Some revere him. Some loathe him and everything he’s associated with. “His religious interpretations are controversial.”

“If you think what he says to the public is bad you should hear what he says in private.” I push myself further into the chair I’m in.

Something strange flickers over her features. “I can imagine.”

Shaking my head, I hope I’m ending this conversation. “What’s your name?”

A hesitation. “Inej.”

I nod once, “I’m y/n.”

“Do you need water, y/n?”

I scratch my still exposed knee. “That’d be nice. Thank you.”

She’s quick to leave, feet making no noise. A minute later she returns with a cup. I have no reason to suspect her, but I still sniff the cup before taking a cautious sip. I wonder if Anya made it back home. I wonder if she’s worse off for it.

Before I can fall into a pit of debating despair, the door to the room Inej took me to squeaks open. On instinct, I snap my gaze towards the door, tensing. The first person I notice is Kaz, entering the room with a determination too intense for this time of night. Jesper is quick to follow, and I drop my stare. I’ve never had to interact with anyone I’ve lied to after taking their money.

“Are they gone?” Inej asks, clearly accustomed to such brooding tension.

Kaz nods once, “It took too much convincing--the Inferni’s more than she’s letting on.”

I’m literally in the room. “I’m not--we’ve spoken two words to each other, sorry my abilities didn’t come up.”

He turns towards me with a deadly grace. My grip on the cup tightens. What the hell is wrong for me? How deeply instilled is that god complex Kenya wanted in me? It must be as part of me as my name if I felt comfortable enough to speak that way to Kaz Brekker.

I keep my eyes on his cane, waiting for some kind of physical retaliation. “Maybe the grisha hunting you would appreciate your sense of humor more.”

It’s a bluff. He needs me. He’s desperate for something that can mimic a Sun Summoner. Still though, I’m not in the mood to poke a bear with a stick. “Speaking from experience,” I clear my throat awkwardly, “They tend not to.”

“Then I suggest you begin explaining before I decide I’d rather take my chances and you lose your worth.”

Maybe if I hadn’t spent the last eleven years of my life with Kenya, his words would haunt me. I keep my expression set, but the lanterns in the room flicker. “It’s not as impressive as they’re making it seem--Inferni can produce fire, regular, red, bright fire.” I pause, feeling energy in my palms. “I can do the same, but I can also,” I extend a flat palm, “Do this.”

I focus my energy on restraint, forcing the fire on my skin to remain there, covering my palms in a cold, blue glow. “It’s still fire, just blue--and that matters to them because blue light is the only kind you can use in the Fold.” Do they know anything about the fold? “Kenya, the man I’m indentured to, believes that this ability makes me eligible for Sainthood. He specializes in collecting people he thinks are eligible for Sainthood.” The low flame coating my palm licks upwards as I remember what disappointing Kenya means. “And if you don’t meet his standards, he’ll find a way to make sure you do. That’s why the grisha want me. He made me more and they believe that if they give me to someone who can give me an amplifier I’ll be able to produce enough blue light to protect an entire fleet.”

“What do you mean ‘he’ll find a way to make sure you do’?” Inej’s voice is cautious. An attempt to be respectful.

I drop my palm, letting the fire disappear into nothingness. “I wasn’t born with the ability to control the blue light so well--It’s difficult enough to produce for longer than two seconds let alone keep it from burning everything in sight. By the time I ended up in Kenya’s control he had learned that certain stimulants. Some scientists are working on a more grisha-targeted kind, but Kenya has managed to work with the generic well enough.” Hands shaking, I wipe the condensation off the side of the cup and hold out my wrist. Using the condensation, I begin to wipe at my wrist and forearm, smearing my makeup and revealing the needle bruises. “The key is withdrawals.”

Thoughts of begging Kenya, crying and screaming for another fix as he promised to give me that as soon as I showed some control of my abilities, make the shaking in my hand worse. I clasp my hands together, squeezing them in hopes of hiding the signs of withdrawal.

I stare at the ground, not wanting to take anyone’s reaction in. I handle pity as well as I handle kindness.

“Do you think you could produce enough blue light for one ship?”

Looking up, I take in Kaz’s measured expression. I’m glad he’s sticking to business. I’d rather that than deal with unpacking all of that with a group of strangers that don’t care if I live or die.

“I could try.” I’ve never tried to protect anything that large. “Even if I can, it doesn’t mean a voyage like that will be safe.”

“There’s no real safety in the Fold,” he replies easily. Realistic expectations. That will make this easier. “No one finds out about her--especially not Pekka Rollins.”

I pull my arm towards my body, glad for the opportunity to hide the bruises. Signs of my weakness. The worst part was always the way Kenya would speak to me after. Pathetic. Weak. Trapped within the restraints of my flesh.

“Who’s Pekka Rollins?”

Kaz briefly turns his head in my direction. “No one that will ever concern you.” He ignores my annoyed huff. “We’ll use the Inferni to get to Alina Starkov.”

Alina. Alina Starkov. “What do you want with Alina?”

At that, the room seems to drain. I feel weirder than when they were seeing my abilities.

“You know her?” Jesper’s surprise reveals more than Kaz wants him to. I don’t miss the glare he receives.

I half-shrug. “We were in the same orphanage for awhile.”

“How did you get to Ketterdam?” I don’t trust Kaz’s urgency.

“I don’t remember, I was a child and I--I hit my head that night I think. I just woke up and I was with Kenya.”

“How well do you know Alina?”

There was a point in time in which she was my best friend. We learned how to braid hair by practicing on each other, we would draw maps together, and I was the only one who knew about her crush on Mal. “Not that well.”

He takes a step forward, eyes almost squinting. The touch of distrust is evident on his face. “If you’re lying I’ll find out.”

I owe Alina at least this. “Well then it’s a good thing I’m not.”

I’m not naive enough to believe that I’ve convinced him, but his intense gaze does not remain on me. I’m relieved when his attention is off of me, but he’s only moving on to start planning the riskiest thing I’ve ever done.

Taglist: @ambrosia-v-black

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anxious-logic · 3 years ago

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"You're Okay" Chapter 2

@analogicalweek

Day 2: Crushes/Confession

Ship: Romantic Analogical (Logan/Virgil)

Warnings: Food mention, one swear

Ao3 Rating: T

Word count: 1,115

Summary: Logan had been acting strangely recently. Xe hadn’t been such a workaholic, and had seemed distracted during classes. Virgil didn’t think they’d ever be complaining about any of that, but the behaviors were so unlike Logan that they were getting worried.

Virgil shifted in their chair, sneaking a glance up at Logan. Xe gave a quick smile as Virgil met xir eyes before looking down at xir notebook once again.

Virgil bit their lip as they pretended to read the assignment on their computer screen. Logan had been acting strangely recently. Xe hadn’t been such a workaholic, joining Virgil at meals and for study breaks with far less pushback than normal and being on xir phone far more than usual. Xe’d seemed distracted during classes, not answering professors’ questions or participating in debates with jackasses who hadn’t done the readings but pretended they knew what they were talking about. Virgil didn’t think they’d ever be complaining about any of that, but the behaviors were so unlike Logan that they were getting worried.

They jolted in surprise as their phone vibrated with the alarm. “Break time,” they said quietly to Logan, who nodded and wrote a few more numbers in xir notebook before putting xir pencil down and flipping the notebook closed.

“Coffee?” xe asked.

Virgil glanced at their surroundings. “Sure?” It had been a few hours since their last cup, and it was only four in the afternoon, but that was still later than Logan usually had caffeine.

The two of them gathered their various items, shoving computers and pencils and notebooks and textbooks into their backpacks. As they moved out of the library, Virgil tried to calm their anxiety about what was going on with Logan.

If xe wanted to talk to you about it, xe would, they reminded themself. And xe’s not that out of the ordinary, xe’s still functioning fine, there’s no need to worry.

They started counting their breaths as they walked to the coffeeshop, trying to distract their mind. They ordered their usual, an iced small oat milk mocha with a bit of caramel (fight them, they had a sweet tooth) and followed Logan to a booth in the corner.

“Are you adequate?” Logan asked quietly as they put their bags down. “You seem anxious.”

Virgil shook their head. “No- I mean, yes, I’m anxious, but not that bad, and I’m fine.”

Logan leveled a disbelieving look at them.

“Really, I’m fine. Actually, I was going to ask if you were doing okay, because you’ve been acting weird recently, and I want to make sure my best friend is happy and healthy.”

Logan stopped what xe was doing, staring at Virgil with wide eyes. Xe didn’t say anything, frozen.

“Um? You okay?” Virgil asked nervously. “Is your system updating or something?” Not their best work, but xe was acting weird, weirder than normal, and they weren’t sure what to do.

Logan startled as both of their names were called from the counter, and quickly stood up. “I’ll go get those.”

Virgil watched as xe rushed away. Was it something they said? They’d just expressed concern about Logan’s wellbeing, right? They didn’t think they’d said anything offensive, but maybe, but they couldn’t figure out what it might have been, or maybe they’d said something that reminded xem of something else?

“Here you are,” Logan said as xe set down a cup in front of Virgil. Virgil nodded in thanks, their hands coming up to fidget with the cup and straw.

“To answer your question,” Logan said as xe slid into the booth across from Virgil, “I am… adequate. Recently, I… came to a realization, and I am merely working out how to rationalize and work with said realization.” Xe was choosing xir words carefully, appearing to think through each one before speaking.

“...Okay.” Virgil paused, trying to figure out how to word their reply. “Would you… feel comfortable telling me what this realization was, and maybe I could help you out?”

Logan ran xir finger around the rim of xir mug, watching it intently. “It has something to do with feelings.”

Virgil nodded. “I can help with those. If you want me to,” they hastily added.

“Specifically, romantic ones.” Logan flicked xir eyes up to Virgil.

They opened and closed their mouth a few times, their brain rapidly circling through and discarding possible responses. They’d been expecting something about high anxiety, or unusual happiness, or worry about something out of xir control. Romantic feelings hadn’t been anywhere on their radar.

“Well- um, that’s good for you,” they managed to stumble out. “Um- sorry, I’m trying to figure out exactly what to say.” They ducked their head and took a few gulps of their drink. “Uh, do you want to do anything about them?”

Logan tilted xir head. “It is my understanding that that is the typical reaction to romantic attraction, is it not?”

Virgil tilted their head back and forth. “It can be. But you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

Logan sat back in the booth. “Hm.”

“Does this person like you back?” Virgil asked after a moment.

“I’m not certain.” Logan’s mouth twisted. “They seemed to indicate attraction when we first met, but it has been quite some time since then, and they have been incredibly respectful of my boundaries and lack of reciprocation thus far.”

Virgil tried to shake away the vague sense of familiarity that they felt at the new information. “Well- if they did at one point, they probably wouldn’t say no if you asked them out now. And if they do, then it would pretty much just be the same situation as when you first met, but reversed, right?”

Logan narrowed xir eyes in thought. “I suppose so. Thank you, Virgil.”

Virgil nodded, picking up their coffee as they went to grab their phone from their backpack.

“Virgil?”

They looked up from where they were fighting with the zipper on their bag. “Hm?”

“I recently developed romantic feelings for you. Would you like to go on a romantic outing with me?”

Virgil almost choked on the mouthful of coffee in their mouth. “I’m sorry, what?”

Logan frowned. “I’m sorry, perhaps I misinterpreted your advice. I apologize if this makes our friendship uncomfortable-”

Virgil shook their head frantically. “No. No no no, that’s not what I’m saying, you're okay, I just- I didn’t know you were asking about me so I had no idea that was coming. Uh. Sorry.” They put their coffee down on the table, folding their hands in their lap. “Yes, Logan. I would very much enjoy a romantic outing with you.”

Logan’s face lit up with one of the widest grins Virgil had seen on xir. “I very much look forward to it.” Xe let out a little giggle.

Virgil had the fleeting thought that they wanted to see that smile, hear that delighted laugh, for the rest of their life.

please reblog if you liked this!

#analogicalweek2022 #analogical #ts virgil #ts logan #romantic analogical #virgil sanders #logan sanders #sanders sides fanfiction #sanders sides fanfic #i can write sometimes

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lokilickedme · 3 years ago

Text

The Way

I’m writing horror again. I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason. And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly. Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note: I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you. But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed. It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case. We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to. There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did. If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us. We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew. Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care. It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE. There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish. As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me. I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

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This is, regrettably, a true story. Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

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They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway. Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption. Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances. We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks. Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well. You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave? The one who died under mysterious circumstances? That one.

He left the way he always came in. Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking. She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998. I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband. He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live. It wasn’t bad. He’d tell you otherwise. The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it. I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times. But now I know. That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back. It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway. This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

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It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of. The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon. My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other. James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him. Perception bias, he said. Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly. We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe. We meant it. He made people nervous. He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know. It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones. We were the smart ones, in retrospect. I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family. But mostly the congregation. It was always more important than anything else. And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking. Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right? The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition. They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home. Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed. God’s not like that. And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it? I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain. A moral code, yes. But isn’t that what God is, really? Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us. But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result. Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned. And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water. The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow. He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest. So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay. I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that. Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself. It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day. The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that. It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further. Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different. What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person. I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then. You were just weird, or you weren’t. And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking. But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to. He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known. And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now. I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult. There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it. My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later. My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though. He took the easy way. He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

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December 22, 1998. Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us. The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work. We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years. The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires. Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making. He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot. Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time. I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother. He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior. The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong. Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult. It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

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My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation. They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise. I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son. I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy. She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather. Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much. He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders. My grandmother couldn’t swim. We could make another Ruthie, he said. But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice. I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy. I was never close to him. But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me. I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life. But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak. I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear. And I felt bad. I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized. My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying. Granddads are supposed to be fun. Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam. And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him. She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on. She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown. That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next. How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand. It affected her. She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it. And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for. He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad. The homestead. The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived. A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives. James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for. She’d wanted us all to stay. We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said. That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be. We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke. It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me. James was dead, had been for years. Robbie was dead now too. Dad was gone, so was granddad. Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them. We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life. And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts. Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land. And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew. The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it. It was just an old grave. The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground. My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it. He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line. It was a cool jacket. Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era. He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door. To this day I can’t sort it. It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness. It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for. It was cold. I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it. And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said. He’s in his house. I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told. He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants. There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do. And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point. He said he didn’t know. He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important. Something tells me it was. Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again. He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow. I’m sorry.

What do we do? I asked him. I’ve never felt more blank. What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother. I remember thinking that was a good idea. Robbie would know what to do. He always did. Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them. He would get on it, whatever needed doing. He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut. I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

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It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it. Someone you saw just yesterday. Someone who was alive. Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow. And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from. The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life. I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him. I never saw him. I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van. I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with. And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that. Some days it helps. And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped. I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

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For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill. Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable. We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm. Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office. There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down. And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice. By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

----------

No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose. The end report was obtained two months later. It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue. There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death. His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life. There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery. He was a secretive person, intensely private. He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family. He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep. There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box. He simply hadn’t woken up to use it. Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said. He was melted, literally. It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say. He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me. I’ll go with you if you want to go. But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead. I never saw any proof that he was gone. He just wasn’t there anymore. There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

----------

Dad was different from that day on. He’d always been stoic, terse, strict. My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years. The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him. He was nicer suddenly. Mellow. Kind. After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny. The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before. He and I became friends. I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it. But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again. And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again. He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him? She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished. Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes. I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager. I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well. She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority. She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me. I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down. I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever. It changed me forever. That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either. She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me. It was the first of several disownings over the next few years. I got used to it. We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk. It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

----------

A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together. It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him. The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there. I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric. James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end. The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it. I don’t know why. It was dry.

He was gone.

----------

David and I laughed a lot that day. James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted. And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me. He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him. He was unknowable and therefore unbindable. But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub. I’m not sure what it went to. Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on. There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it. Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before. Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved. David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his. I told him to take it. It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something. One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

----------

My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived. After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge. He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another. There had been several more on the floor around the bed. My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone. Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how. Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with. My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing! We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common. Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation? Dad was the only one that spoke to them. They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that. My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

----------

The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it. Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

----------

The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us. There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway. There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret. In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring. We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death. We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me. James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway. The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

----------

We never felt safe on the hill again. Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession. She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice. We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness. But we knew she was evil. We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right. But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself. She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive. The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife. He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails. He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat. One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death. She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming. She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies. Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come. At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized. She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load. She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

----------

We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house. The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would. She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it. The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to. They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out. I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her. She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently. No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face. It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment. That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are. I can’t do that. I won’t let her win that way. I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name. I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away. My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said. He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered. But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

----------

Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking. He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west. The way we were going. And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

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oxzebi997 · 3 years ago

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Day 19 Coruscant Guard

This chapter is inspired by this fic

Read it on AO3

Rule 1: your paint is your shield, deviations get you noticed.

Jek was… jealous. Standing on the bridge of the Venator class Star destroyer surrounded by clone soldiers with decorated armor and custom paint jobs and patterns. He and Rys wore almost completely blank matching sets of armor, only Thire had any kind of distinction, a few small patches of crimson around his middle. These matching patterns were a camouflage on Coruscant, for the safety of them and all their Guardsmen vod, but here in the field, they stood out like a sore thumb.

Jek felt so out of place and noticeable that he barely noticed when the ship went under attack.

Rule 6 The only people allowed to know your name are your brothers.

The Jedi they were assigned to had been busy with holo calls reporting position and progress from the moment they stepped onto the Venator, and there were far too many men aboard the ship, (every one of them twice the height of this apparent Grand Master,) for him to notice the Guardsmen who followed him diligently.

When Separatist forces attempted to shut down the operation, General Yoda told his men to retreat, taking only Thire, Rys and Jek with him to the moons surface. They filled in the small escape pod and sat in relative silence, he would never admit it but Rys was nervous. He was used to being on solid ground, not plummeting through an unknown atmosphere, he hated this.

“Your names, I wish to know.” The tiny Jedihumphed softly, “so busy, I have been, failed I have, to get to know you three.”

Rys froze in his seat, he noticed Jek did the same, they both cautiously looked sideways at their Lieutenant, who made a very quick decision. Trapped in a little pod in the vacuum of space, it seemed in this one instance that protecting his vod meant breaking a rule.

“I’m … I’m Thire, sir. This is Jek, and Rys.” He didn’t indicate which of them was which, but the Jedi glanced at each of them when his name was spoken.

“Yoda, I am. Glad to meet you, sorry I am, that this meeting has become a battle.” He smiled, and - swung his feet back and forth under the chair he was sitting on?

Rys thought the shape of this creature was odd enough, but the speech pattern and behavior was even weirder. No wonder the Jedi usually kept this one planetside.

Rule 5: Helmets on at all times

Fox had warned them before they left, “follow every order, keep yourselves alive.”

He had been there on Geonosis, he knew that the field was different from Guard work, Thire knew well enough that he’d be glad to know they were all safe, even if they’d broken the hard learned rules of Senate duty.

“Remove your helmets, your faces I wish to see.” The little general had spoken as they sat, Thire hissing quietly at the pain shooting through his leg.

He gave the lead, as the three glanced among one another.

“Not much to see here, we all share the same face.”

If Thire had felt uncertain when he’d been injured, now sitting here cornered, outgunned and now he didn’t even have the usual protection of his helmet, he was practically shaking here he sat, but he held it together for his men.

Stories had come back to Coruscant from brothers on shore leave, from soldiers being transferred to the Guard; of the Jedi. It was a mixed bag, some of the Jedi were too comfortable on a battlefield, some of them were tranquil and warm, some were awful and cruel.

Still, watching as the General used his lightsaber to turn a blaster rifle into a crutch for Thire, while telling them that in his eyes, through the Force, they were different from one another. He smiled at them and handed over the cleverly built new tool.

Rule 4: The Jedi won’t help

Rys had seen firsthand the heartache on transfers' faces when they realized how different things were on Coruscant; he had never imagined it was more than just shell shock.

Yet this Jedi had told the three of them to stay out of sight and be safe, while he ran around like some kind of horror flick monster tearing through the droids like flimsy. He was amazing to watch, but it made Rys feel a little sick, this is what Jedi are capable of.

General Yoda destroyed whole tanks and platoons with little effort until the Rollie’s showed up. One shot from the rocket launcher and it was over.

——

“Commander.” Thire saluted some, still walking on the blaster-crutch, “we’ve got a report if you’d like it.”

“I already read your report, are you keiffing kidding me?? An entire battalion of droids? One Jedi and three men and you took out a whole battalion??”

“It was a wild day, Fox.” He sat heavily while a medic was sent for.

“I guess so. But you made it back in one piece, more or less. And that’s all I cared about.”

“Better tell the other two, they’re scared shitless because of how many of your rules we had to break out there.”

“Is that right?” A little grin crossed Fox’s face, a grin that only an ori’vod could wear “well I won’t see either of them for a few rotations. So I’ll just have to let them sit in it.”

“That Yoda’s something else, he was kriffing weird, Fox. Nothing like the stories about any of the other Jedi.”

“Yeah? What are you getting at?”

“I don’t know, better safe than sorry but, that one might be an exception to the rules.”

#clonetober2021 #star wars #star wars tcw #ao3 writer #clones #lieutenant thire #clone wars rys #clone wars Jek #master yoda #commander fox

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rggzy-reads · 2 years ago

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It’s been a hot minute since I read it, but I gotta catch up eventually- so let’s start with The Truce at Bakura! An overall impression of this book- weird, and does some good stuff and includes some fun lore, but loses me at parts.

A quick story summary, so spoilers for this Star Wars book from 1993 if you care:

Picking up directly after Return of the Jedi, the Rebel Alliance intercepts an old messenger shuttle from Bakura, an imperial-ruled planet on the far edge of the galaxy near the Unknown Regions. News of Emperor Palpatine’s death has not spread there quite yet, and they’re requesting backup for an external invasion. Leia, Luke, and Han decide this may be a good way to flip a relatively important imperial world, so they take a fleet to help out. Lots of politics and interactions with the people on the world later, they finally end up battling the Ssi-ruuk: a species of aliens that look like velociraptors and enslave sentient species to drain their life essence into combat droids and ships. A team-up, or the titular “Truce” is what it takes to drive off the Ssi-ruuvi forces, but the Alliance is also able to defeat the Imperial forces that try to double cross them.

As this is the book that sets the tone for my reading journey, there’s a lot to unpack- first, I really liked the lore drops in this one. There’s implications early on that Leia is looking to restore the “Old Republic” (it’s what they call the Republic before the Empire, I don’t think it’s related to the KOTOR series, though the implications of that would be pretty crazy), but also that Luke is looking to make a new Jedi Order even though he’s still pretty focused on military expeditions at this point. The other wild thing that happens in this book is that a Force Ghost Anakin appears to Leia, as she’s still freaked out about the fact that he is her father, and hasn’t accepted it as Luke has. Super cool moment, and it’s one that I would like to see explored in Canon eventually.

Alright, why do I think this book is weird but fun then? Kathy Tyers does a really good job of dialogue in this book, I found conversations between the main three of Luke, Leia, and Han to flow well, and she gets the way they all push each other’s buttons and pester each other down really well. The weirdness starts in a trend that more Star Wars authors will follow- a love interest character for Luke, in this book her name is Gaeriel. Her presence glitters in the Force for Luke, and she distrusts him because she went to imperial university and doesn’t like Jedi or whatever because of it. It’s just a weak tension that gets resolved once Luke force heals her grandma, and then nothing happens between them.

The other weird part of this book? The ssi-ruuk. It’s not like a saurian species in Star Wars is all that weird, it’s just the fact that they really only appear in this book, and the technology they use involving the force and hypnotism, there was something in the descriptions of their ships that made it feel like a mismatch in the Star Wars universe. I guess anything from the Unknown Regions is going to be weird, but setting up their ambitions of a galaxy-wide invasion and taking care of it by the end of the book lowered the stakes quite a bit.

Overall, this book is fun! It’s strange, it’s weird, it’s seemingly important for lore (and will be referenced later), and is probably only about 300 pages or so. If you get your hands on it I would recommend to read it and see how you feel about some of the weirder elements.

#Star Wars #star wars legends #truce at bakura #star wars books

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aquaticrunner · 4 years ago

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Edmund Pevensie Imagine

Edmund Pevensie x Female Reader

Quick Summary: The story is set in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Y/N has been chosen to be a part of the crew, however she doesn’t feel like people respect her (other than Caspian). Then, she meets Edmund and Lucy and things start to change.

Word count: 3887

When I had been chosen to be part of the crew on the Dawn Treader, I had been ecstatic. But now, I could not be more bored. It was extremely difficult being the only girl, especially when all the “harder” jobs had been given to the men. The only good part was being one of the few people Caspain truly trusted. He let me speak in all the meetings, and trusted me with the more secret information. However, he was the king which meant he didn’t have time to notice how the rest of the crew treated me when he wasn’t around. It wasn’t just the fact that I was a girl. It was that I was younger, and had climbed the ranks faster than most. It made a lot of people mad. A few had even questioned my skills, claiming that the only reason I was on this trip was because Caspian fancied me. That could not be further than the truth. I earned this spot and I knew that. Now, I just needed to show everyone else.

Sounds of shouting suddenly interrupted my train of thought, and I rushed out of my small cabin and up the stairs to see what the commotion was. Everyone seemed to be crowded around one edge of the ship. I heard grunts and sighs as I shoved my way to the front of the group, gasping when I saw Caspian in the water with 3 other people and couple of the crew. Caspian grabbed onto the platform lowered to him, his arm around a girl who looked similar to my age. I rushed to meet them, grabbing a couple blankets from a small bin on my way. I handed them to Caspian and he smiled at me and handed one to the girl. The girl took the blanket and held her hand out to me, “Hello! I’m Lucy.”

I smiled and shook her hand. “I’m Y/N. It’s nice to meet you.” Lucy and Caspian stepped off the platform together and I took a couple steps back to allow them some room. “That was thrilling!” I heard Lucy say.

Caspian was asking her how she ended up in the water when someone shouted his name. We all turned to see who it was and I lost my breath as he came into view. He was striking. Even soaking wet, I could tell that he was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen. His dark hair and gorgeous eyes made me feel weak in the knees and I took a shaky step back to lean on the railing. Caspian walked over to greet him, wrapping another blanket around his shoulders. I shook my head, urging myself to get rid of these thoughts. Nobody else around here respected me. Why would this boy be any different? Still I couldn’t stop my eyes from following him as he walked past me, overhearing bits of their conversation.

“Didn’t you call for us?” Lucy asked, her voice laced with confusion and excitement. I could almost hear the smile in her voice.

Caspian shook his head, and the boy shrugged in return saying he was just glad to back. Back? I thought, He had been here before?

Again my thoughts (and my eavesdropping) were interrupted by the last member of their group being brought aboard the shipping and screaming like he was being murdered and we were doing nothing to stop it. I stood up straight so that I could see better and watched him flop across the deck, screaming the whole time. The crew laughed as he continued to scream and Reepicheep tried to calm him down.

“Perhaps we could throw him back?” Reepicheep suggested. I smiled at the joke and watched Lucy shove the boy she was with as he seemed to consider it. “Edumund!” She shouted. Ah, so that was his name. It was almost as he pretty as he was. Did I really just think that? Wait, why do those names sound familiar?

“Men!” Caspian shouted, and we all made our way to be in front of Caspian as he stepped up onto a small raised platform. “Behold our castaways! Edmund the Just and Lucy the Valiant, High King and Queen of Narnia.” My eyes widened a fraction and I remembered exactly who they were. These were 2 of the kings and queens of old. Everyone began to kneel and I quickly followed suit. I raised my eyes just a fraction, and saw the pair smiling at each other. They seemed genuinely happy to be back in Narnia. “Alright everyone, it’s time for a meeting! Captain Drinian and Y/N, please join me. Everyone else, back to work.”

I quickly stood and followed Caspian and the others to the Captain’s quarters. My heart swelled, happy to be reminded that Caspian truly did trust me and want me here. However, I knew it would only last a short time during the meeting and then I would return back to my quarters to read or sew. I was a horrible sewer, however, the rest of the crew refused to acknowledge this fact simply because they didn’t want to give me any other job. My heart longed to chart maps or help sail. I wondered if things would change now that Lucy- Queen Lucy- was on board.

I walked into the meeting and stood behind the Captain in the small room to make room for Lucy and Edmund. Caspian laid out a map, explaining what he had accomplished these past three years and what our current mission was- to find the Seven Lost Lords who fled to the Lone Islands and vanished.

“What’s East of the Lone Islands?” Lucy asked. I smiled, knowing what the Captain was about to say.

“Uncharted waters,” He explained. “Things you could barely imagine. Tales of sea serpents and worse.”

Edmund and Caspian both laughed, and Caspian said that was all he had to share with us for right now. We left the room quickly, the Captain returning to work and Lucy saying she wanted to go check out their room. I bumped into Edmund on my way out, and muttered a quick apology before rushing to my small room in the corner of the ship. I blushed at the thought of Edmund’s hand accidentally brushing my side. I let this thought linger for only a moment before I remembered it was completely inappropriate. I grabbed the small basket full of clothes from outside my door that the crew had left there and grabbed my sewing kit. I sighed, someday I’m going to do more than sew, so much more.

The next day began with even more excitement. It seemed that Lucy and Edmund’s arrival had livened up the crew and after weeks of being at sea, everyone was starting to get excited again. I laughed as Caspian and Edmund clashed swords in a friendly fight. They were fairly evenly matched and the fight ended in a tie, with each of their swords against the others chest. Everyone cheered as the match came to an end and the Captain shouted at everyone to get back to work. I sighed, and took a large breath of fresh air before I had to return to my stuffy room. I turned to go, but someone caught at my arm and I quickly looked to see who it was. “Hold on Y/N,” said Caspian who motioned for me to follow him before letting go of my own. I allowed myself a small sigh of relief and followed him over to where Lucy, Edmund, and their odd cousin were talking.

Well, Lucy and Edmund were talking. Eustace was shouting again about how we had kidnapped him and held him against his will. “Kidnapping is it? Funny, I thought we saved your life.” Caspian smirked and Eustace bumped into him, still on a rant. “You held me against my will!” I rolled my eyes as I drowned him out, my attention switching to Edmund who was even more stunning than he was yesterday. I’m not sure how it was possible, but with the button up and fancy attire being switched out for some looser clothes, he was transformed.

I was stirred out of my thoughts by someone shouting. “Land Ho!” I cleared my throat and followed Caspian as he rushed up to the top deck to get a closer look at the horizon. We had finally come across the Lone Islands and it was hard not be excited about that. “Strange,” Caspian remarked. “Not a Narnian flag in sight.” “But the Lone Islands have always been Narnia’s.” Replied Edmund, taking a turn to look through the telescope. I waited for him to pass it to me, but he handed it back to the Captain instead who closed it and returned it to its place. Ah, so he’s just like the others. And here I thought he might be different because of his sister. “That’s suspicious. We should be careful.” I added. Caspian nodded, and I smiled. At least I had one person on my side.

Edmund finally spared me a glance, though it barely lasted for even a second. “I say we prepare a landing party. Drinian?”

Drinian looked at Caspian before awkwardly turning back to Edmund. “Forgive me Your Majesty, but the chain of command starts with King Caspian on this ship.”

I smirked as Edmund just nodded. He looked shocked, and I couldn’t say I wasn’t a little glad. Now he too knew how it felt to be brushed off. “We’ll use longboats.” Instructed Caspian, “Drinian, pick some men to come ashore. Y/N, you’ll come too.” My heart fluttered. “Really?” I asked in astonishment. I was finally going to get a chance to prove myself. Caspian looked confused at my reaction. “Of course. How could I leave one of my best fighters behind?”

A few minutes later I was in a longboat, rowing towards the island. A couple men spared me odd glances, as if wondering why on Earth a girl who’s only job on this ship was to sew their clothes was there. But, Lucy smiled at me and I ignored them, happy to finally have someone else on my side. We reached the edge of the island and stepped out of the boat. Well, most of us anyway. Eustace was having some trouble and Reepicheep thought the best way to help was by shouting at him. Lucy rolled her eyes and shouted, catching everyone’s attention, “Listen! Where is everyone?”

We all stopped to do as she said and realized what she was saying. There was absolutely no one in sight. No one in the streets or making noise anywhere. This was starting to get even weirder. We walked through the streets, as the town remained silent save for a few birds squawking in the distance. Suddenly, a loud bell rang from the church a little ways down the street. Caspian instructed Reepicheep to stay with Drinian’s men while Eustace, Lucy, Edmund, Caspian, and I continued on, instructing him to send a party if we weren’t back by dawn.

We headed towards the church, Eustace lagging behind. I rolled my eyes as he ran toward us telling us we should just turn back. Edmund looked at him, unsure of what to do with him. “Do you want to come here and... guard something?” He asked. I stifled a laugh as he said yes, saying something about what a logical idea that was. Caspian reluctantly handed him one of his daggers and the four of us went inside the old church, leaving Eustace behind. It was dark inside the church and it looked like no one had been there in quite some time.

We searched the building until Edmund shouted that he found something. We all went over to him, eager to see what he had found. It appeared to be a book full of names. “Who are all these people?” Lucy asked. “And why have they been crossed out?” Edmund added. We looked to Caspian, who had a grave expression on his face. “Slave traders.”

Suddenly, the church bells began to ring again. Men began to appear from all over, sliding on ropes with weapons in their hand. “Watch out!” I heard Caspian shout. I immediately pulled out my sword, jumping in front of Edmund before a man with a gross, long beard could hit him in the back. I knocked him out quickly and Edmund looked at me in shock. “Thanks.” He said. I rolled my eyes, and kept fighting.

For a while it seemed like we were winning until- “Aaaaaah!” A loud scream rang through the room and we all turned to see what had happened. A man had walked through the door, Caspian’s knife held against Eustace’s throat. “Unless you wanna hear this one scream like a girl again, I’d say you should drop your weapons.” Lucy dropped hers immediately, while I looked to Caspian to follow his lead.

“NOW!” The man screamed again. Reluctantly, the said of us put down our weapons as well. The men around us quickly chained us up, and without weapons fighting back seemed useless. “Get off me!” I heard Lucy scream. I struggled as two men held me down, putting chains around my wrist. The man tossed Eustace to one of the other men, and slowly walked towards Lucy. “This one and the other boy, take to the market.” Next, he made his way towards me. “And what do we have here?” He raked his finger across my face and I cringed at his touch, spitting in his face. He immediately pulled back, anger pulling at his features. “Take her to the dungeon! Those two as well!” He ordered, gesturing at Edmund and Caspian.

“Listen to me!” Shouted Caspian, “I am your king!” They ignored him and quickly we were hauled off, Edmund and Lucy shouting to each other the whole time. Finally, one of the men got sick of it and punched Edmund in the face, knocking him out.

They threw us into two cells, one for Caspian and one for Edmund and me, with nothing but walls and a small bucket of water. Edmund woke up shortly after and nearly scared me to death when he jumped up suddenly. “Where are we?” He demanded. “Calm down.” I said, “We’re in the dungeons. Caspian has been trying to get out, but so far it hasn’t worked. Will you sit down? You’re hurt.” He huffed, but sat down anyway. “Look, your forehead is bleeding.” I said.

“So? I’m not some weakling who can’t take a hit.” I rolled my eyes, “Fine, then you can deal with your wound yourself!” I yelled, refusing to cry. This was the worst situation I’d been in so far and all I had wanted to do was help him. He sighed and I watched him put his head in his hands, immediately pulling it back when he accidentally touched his wound. He licked his lips, then looked at me sheepishly. “Okay... I”m sorry. Can you help me?”

I nodded and slowly walked over to him. I ripped a piece off my sleeve and dipped into the bucket with water. I gently touched it to his head and he stiffened for a minute before relaxing. I cleaned it as best as I could until the bleeding stopped. “There. That should do until we get back to the ship.” I said. He let out a small smile and a thank you. As he looked into my eyes, I found it hard to look away. They were so beautiful and- Bang!

I jumped as Caspian began banging on his window with a rock he had found. Thanks for ruining the moment Caspian. I took a step back from Edmund and his mesmerizing eyes and tried to refocus on the situation. We were trapped and we needed to get out. “It’s hopeless,” We heard a voice say from the shadows of Caspian’s cell. “You’ll never get out.” It said again. “Who’s there?” said Edmund, standing up again.

Caspian walked over to see who it was, “Lord Bern?” I gasped. We had found one of the Seven Lost Lords? In a dungeon? Suddenly, we heard screaming from outside, and I changed my focus as Edmund looked out the window in our cell. “What’s happening?” I asked. “I’m not sure.” He responded.

“Where are they taking them?” Asked Caspian, looking out his own window. “Keep watching.” Replied Lord Bern. The boys watched until whatever was happening seemed to be over. Then, he began to explain what it was. He talking about something called The Mist, how it had appeared and nobody knew what it was. “If they don’t sell you to the slave traders,” he said, “You’re likely to be fed to The Mist.” “We have to find Lucy!” said Edmund, “Before it’s too late.”

I’m not sure how long we were there before someone finally came to get us. They led us out of the dungeon, up the stairs, and out onto a courtyard. My eyes took a minute to adjust to the light before I realized there was a fight going on. It was Drinian and the rest of the men! We realized this was our chance to escape and used the distraction to our advantage. We started fighting back immediately and quickly took down the guards, using their keys to take off our chains. Once the people in the village realized we were winning, they joined us in our fight as well. We walked out of the village victorious and even had another man join us on our journey.

The crew welcomed us back with a large dinner, and a small celebration after. Almost all of the men walked up to Edmund and Caspian, congratulating them and telling them what fine swordsmen they were. I sat at a table by myself in the back of the room, still unrecognized. I reminded myself recognition wasn’t why I was here. It was to help people. However, I couldn’t help feel a bit angry at everyone for not even admitting that I was actually useful. “Hey.” I looked up, hoping to see Edmund, but rolled my eyes when I realized it was only John. “What do you want?” I asked. He was a few years older than I was, about to turn 20 in 6 months. We had lived in the same village when we were little, but I couldn’t stand him. “Just wanted to congratulate you.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Really? You wanted to congratulate me?” It seemed too good to be true. “Oh yeah,” He said, “Congratulations on doing such a bad job on the mission that nobody even noticed you were there.” I felt my anger rising. I quickly stood up and shoved him away from me. He just laughed, making me even angrier. I stormed off, more hurt than ever, and slammed my door shut when I got back to my room.

A couple minutes later I heard a knock at my door. No way. If John came all this way just to tease me some more I- “What?” I shouted when I opened my door. However, I paled when I realized it wasn’t John, but Edmund. He raised his eyebrows and threw his hands up in mock surrender. “I just came to talk.” I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came out. Instead, I just gestured for him to come in, shutting the door behind him. Once I had gathered my courage, I turned to look at him. “I’m really sorry Your Majesty, I thought you were someone else.” He cringed, “Please don’t call me Your Majesty. Edmund is just fine.”

I smiled, “Alright. What did you want to talk to me about?” He rubbed his hand behind his neck, and smiled shyly. Okay, it’s fine. Keep it together Y/N. Just a cute boy, sitting in your room... who also happens to be a king. “Well, I wanted to say thank you for earlier.” He said. I smiled, “You already said thank you.” He hesitated, “Well, I wanted to say thank you again. And to apologize.” I crinkled my face in confusion. “Apologize?” “Yes, well. I don’t think I’ve been very kind to you.” I said nothing and motioned for him to continue. “When I first arrived on the ship, you had nothing to me yet I ignored you. I’ve seen the way people treat you on the ship and instead of choosing to be better, I acted the same. For that, I truly am sorry.” I felt like my heart was going to burst out of my chest. How long had I known him? Maybe a day or two and already it felt like there was something pulling me to him. There was certainly no question that I was going to forgive him. However, I could probably tease him a little first.

“Well... I’m not sure I’m ready to forgive you yet.” I said. Clearly, he didn’t see that I was teasing because his face immediately fell and he stood to leave. “I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t forgive me either.”

“Edmund, wait.” I grabbed his arm without thinking to stop him from leaving and we were standing so close I could feel his breath. “Um... I just meant that I, uh.” Apparently I forgot how to speak. “Y/N...” He whispered and once again, I felt drawn to him. I felt myself moving closer until- “Y/N?” Edmund and I jumped apart as John poked his head into my room without knocking. I ran into the wall and cursed my small room. “Look I actually wanted to say-” He paused as he noticed Edmund. “What are you doing?” John asked. “Nothing! I mean- get out! Why would I want to talk to you?” I yelled. “No, it’s alright.” Said Edmund, “I should go anyway. I’ll see you later.” And with that, he was gone. I cursed John ever being born.

“What do you want John?” I asked, annoyance showing plainly on my face. He smirked, “I just wanted to say you hit like a girl.” I grabbed the nearest object to me, a pillow, and threw it at his face. He managed to shut the door just in time and the pillow hit the door harmlessly. I locked it behind him before sinking down to the floor. Was Edmund going to kiss me? No, that’s ridiculous. He barely knows me. Still, I couldn’t help thinking about it.

There was a knock on my door once more and I sighed, pulling myself up from the floor. If it was John again, I swear. I opened the door, and immediately my thoughts were put on hold as I caught sight of the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen. “Y/N, I’m sorry I just couldn’t leave without doing this.” And then, his lips were on mine. Edmund was kissing me. And I was kissing him. Unbelievable. We broke apart slowly, like the world was moving in slow motion and we were the only two people in it. “Wow.” I said, and he laughed with relief. “Y/N, I kind of think you’re amazing and... I’d really like to get to know you better.” I smiled back at him, “I’d like that.”

#edmund pevensie #edmund pevensie x reader #narnia edmund #chronicles of narnia #prince caspian #narnia #narnia imagine #imagine #fan fic writing #edmund pevensie imagine #edmund pevensie fanfic #edmund x reader #voyage of the dawn treader #lucy pevensie

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resident-fungi-fren · 4 years ago

Text

Rainy Gays

Summary: Virgil hosts a radio station with Janus, and since it’s the only station that runs in their small town, just about everyone listens to it.

He still didn't expect one of those people to be his soulmate.

Ships: Intruxiety (Virgil and Remus) and hints at Roceit (Roman and Janus)

Read on Ao3

Chapter 1 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Good morning gaybies and gentlethems, you’re listening to Rainy Gays Radio, and we’re your hosts, I’m Janus,”

“And I’m Virgil, clearly the superior host, and that’s why it’s my turn to talk about the weather. Let’s see, looking outside, there’s some clouds, oh shit is that a bird? Nope, false alarm, it’s just another cloud. Rude little shits, pretending to be birds. That’s false advertising. Anygay, it’s supposed to rain later this week, so we really will be rainy gays then.”

“Wow, what an original joke Virgil, you totally don’t use that one every time it rains.”

“Nope, never in my life, shove off Janus.”

“Why Virgil, I’m wounded. I thought we were friends, and now you betray me? I never thought you’d be the one to stab me in the back, my dearest friend, how can I go on without you?”

“Perish.”

“Well, just for that, I’m not paying for coffee later. You can buy your own latte.”

“Rude, how dare you revoke my caffeine privileges, and on today of all days!”

“Wow, what a subtle transition into today’s caller topic, you’re a master of subtlety.”

“Shut-“

“No. Today’s topic is what everyone’s talking about. The new drink over at [INSERT COFFEE SHOP NAME HERE], the only coffee shop in town, and therefore the lifeblood of said town.”

“What would we do without it?”

“Perish.”

“Bite me, you’re not allowed to use my tactics against me.”

“I just did darling~. Now listeners, here’s your chance to burn no more than ten minutes and call in, tell us all about your thoughts on the new drink, Virgil dear, remind me of the name?”

“Black Hole Latte, I think it’s supposed to be blackberry or somethin? I haven’t had my coffee yet today, is it showing?”

“Yes dear, you look like shit.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“Anytime darling. You know the drill by now, we’re taking callers starting, now.”

“Here’s our first caller, that’s quick, people must be extra bored today. You’re on air now, spill the tea. Or the latte.”

“Hey, it’s Thomas, have either of you tried the latte?”

“Not yet”

“Negative Thom-a-roony.”

“Well, it’s not bad, it’s definite blackberry, but honestly I’ll be sticking with my usual, I’m not a huge fan of branching out.”

“You gotta mix it up sometimes, keeps things exciting.”

“Indeed, variety is the spice of life.”

��Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind, but for now me and my regular coffee are going to chill in the nice safe bubble.”

“You know man, that’s such a mood.”

“Thank you for calling Thomas, lovely to hear from you again.”

“Anything to burn a little more time away from work. Speaking of which, I’ve gotta go there now. Later!”

“See ya. Say, we’ve known Thomas for a few years now, does anyone know what he does for work?”

“Of course we do, he’s uh, hmm, actually, I don’t think we do. A real enigma, that man.”

“Yeah, he’s a real tough walnut to crack.”

“Here’s our next caller, you’re on air now.”

“Hey kiddos!”

“Hey Pat”

“Hello Patton, aren’t you at work right now?”

“Yeah I am, but I just wanted to let you both know how proud I am, you’re doing great! And I tried the new latte on my way to work, it’s super yummy! I think you’d like it, Virge, it’s got some nice fruity notes! Just make sure you don’t drink it too late or you’ll never sleep!”

“Will do Popstar.”

“That’s all, love you both!”

“Love you too Pat”

“I do as well.”

“See you both later tonight!”

“And that was our resident puffball, Patton.”

“At least she didn’t drop another pun, I’m not sure how many more Logan can take.”

“Yes, we might have been in need of a new soundboard tech had Patton not resisted the temptation to pun.”

“Oh shit there’s been another caller waiting.”

“Oh dear, sorry for the wait, you’re on air now.”

“Really babe, keeping the sole provider of coffee waiting?”

“Oh it’s just Remy.”

“Just Remy? Careful Virgil, or you’ll be getting decaf for the next week.”

“Please forgive my sins, oh merciful coffee god.”

“Relax, I didn’t call just to blackmail you. I just wanted everyone listening, which we all know is pretty much anyone, that if I hear any shit about my new latte I have no qualms about putting you all on decaf for the next two weeks, so think carefully before you call.”

“Remy, I do think that’s considered censorship, which is in fact, illegal.”

“So is fishing off a giraffe in Idaho, that didn’t stop me then, and this won’t now.”

“Wait, you went fishing off a giraffe? In Idaho? When exactly did that happen?”

“A story for another time, I’ve got a coffee shop to run, later babes.”

“Alright, later-“

“Oh, one more thing, some weirdo came in and ordered it and poured in half a bottle of green Gatorade, and it was the most interesting thing that’s happened all day.”

“Did you say Gatorade?”

“I did, and now I’m saying bye, see ya, sianara, farewell, later bitch.”

“Wait who- and they’re already gone. Well, now I know there’s someone new in town, no one here would ever add anything to one of Remy’s coffee.”

“Excellent deduction Virgil, you should start a true crime radio.”

“You’re right, I should.”

“That was sarcasm, you’re not allowed to quit on me now.”

“Yeah yeah I know, but a guy can dream.”

“Dreaming is for the weak and the innocent, and you are neither.”

“I’d get mad but you’re right.”

“Did you just admit that I was right?”

“Oh look a new caller, how convenient-“

“Virgil answer me damnit- hello you’re on air now.”

“You know, I thought the coffee was good and all, but it was much better once I added my usual shot of Gatorade.”

“Did you just say- oh dear I think Virgil might need a trashcan.”

“Wow Virgil, do always make that wonderful gagging noise? I’d like to see what other noises you can make, with that lovely voice~”

“Dear random stranger, I think you broke my co-host, and possibly my back as well, seeing as I just fell out of it”

“Is that what that thump was? I was almost concerned for a moment.”

“Who the hell puts Gatorade in their coffee?!?!”

“Oh Virgil, glad to see you’ve recovered.”

“Don’t you play innocent, I will end you on air.”

“Wow, the sexual tension between the two of you is reeling right now.”

“Uhh, no thanks. Janus and I go way back, there’s no romance there, plus, we’re not soulmates.”

“Yes, Virgil is a dear friend, and while I love him, it’s purely platonic, and we’re happy with that.”

“Cool cool, does that mean Virgil’s single?”

“That’s what you got from that?”

“Yeah, you sound like you’re pretty hot.”

“I think you broke Virgil again, Gatorade stranger.”

“Oh, my name’s Remus! Though Virgil can call me whatever he wants, lover, dear, daddy, all acceptable.”

“Dude, you’re on the radio.”

“Oh, I’m very aware of that fact emo.”

“How do you know I’m emo?”

“You sound like it Gerard Gay.”

“Fair point.”

“As riveting as this conversation is, I think my brother is gonna stab me if I keep talking, so bye for now!”

“Why is your brother- and he’s gone, okay.”

“Final caller, you’re on air now, please don’t flirt with Virgil again”

“Is that what he did? I’m so sorry about my brother, Remus has zero filter.”

“Dude it’s fine, surprisingly we’ve gotten weirder calls.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, one time we got a telemarketer for a lingerie company.”

“That is weird, but trust me, doesn’t even touch on what Remus is capable of.”

“Good to know.”

“If he turns out to be a frequent caller, will you keep calling to apologize? You do have a lovely voice, so I wouldn’t be disappointed with the arrangement~”

“Oh I, um,”

“Stop flirting with the callers.”

“Callers? Do you do this often?”

“Only when they sound like a sunrise personified.”

“I’m hardly a sunrise, but yes, I wouldn’t be opposed to calling in again, Remus’s contributions aside.”

“Oh my god, I know the show is called Rainy Gays, but please stop flirting before I vomit again.”

“Apologies Virgil, we’re almost out of time anyway. Any chance I can get a name before we have to go, my dear?”

“Oh, Roman, my name is Roman.”

“A name fit for royalty~”

“Janus I swear to god-“

“And that’s all the time we have, for now, tune in later for your daily traffic report and water cooler conversation.”

“We’re not done talking about this-“

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Virgil glared at Janus as he packed up, the smug bastard smirking every time their eyes met. They had no right, looking so self-satisfied, how dare they flirt so smooth when Virgil was cursed to be an eternal gay disaster?

He huffed, and Janus snorted, and he threw them a glare.

“You could at least pretend to be sorry.”

“But Virgil, that would be a lie, and I would never lie, it’s a blatant mark on my character!”

“We both know that’s a load of bullshit.”

Logan walked out of the sound room, rolling his eyes. “With the way you two carry on, it’s no wonder the listeners think you’re romantically involved.”

They both gasped and spluttered, grievously offended. “How dare-”

“Just try not to flirt with the callers so much? You’re both incorrigible.” He straightened his tie, and slung his bag over his shoulder, heading out. “Don’t forget to lock up, we don’t want another raccoon breaking in.”

“Logan, don’t say such things about Virgil, his eyebags and crummy food choices don’t warrant name-calling!”

Janus just smirked when Virgil hissed at them.

“Plus, his hissing is distinctly cat-like.”

“You little-” was all he got out before he threw his balled-up scarf at them, which they caught with ease. Smug bastard.

He ruffled through his bag, then his coat pockets, then his bag again. He sighed, and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Have you seen my keys? I can’t find them, and Joan will skin my alive if I lose another set.”

Janus sighed and pinched the bridge of their nose. “Virgil, have you ever considered getting a keyring? Or something to keep track of them?”

“Hey, I do! I got the stormcloud one, remember!” He protested sheepishly, “but then I lost that too. It’s with my keys, wherever those are.”

“Virgil, you are a disater, how are you still allowed to live on our own?”

“I have you and Pat as neighbors.”

“Fair enough, your keys are hanging on the key rack, right where you hung them up when you got here.”

“Oh.” He sheepishly proccured his keys, and then held the door open for Janus once they were ready, and the two headed home together.

“You taking the bus?”

“Not today, it’s quite nice out and I have the energy for it, a walk will be good for me, and for you too, a little vitamin D won’t kill you ya know.”

Virgil gasped dramatically, feigning offense. “Exxxxxcccuuussseee you! That bright motherf***er,” he pointed to the sun, “is absolutley trying to kill me. Skin cancer, sunburns, heatstroke, cataracts? All from the sun!”

“Virgil the sun doesn’t have an vendetta against you, it has one against all of humanity.”

“Bold of you to assume he’s human!”

The voice came from behind them, making them both jump, and Virgil couldn’t help what blurted out of his mouth, truly it wasn’t his fault.

“MOTHMANS LITTLE HOE! WHo the F*** STILL SNEAKS UP ON ME!?!?!”

He spun around, and dropped his jaw as he layed eyes on the most drop-dead gorgeous man he’d ever seen. Was showing that much skin even legal?

The man gasped and looked down at his wrist, and his eyes widened before he looked back up at Virgil, grinning. “Well well well, looks like you’re my soulmate, Gerard Gay!”

Virgil sighed, “f*** me and my big mouth.”

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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago

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Lilo and Stitch Crossover Arc: “Rufus” (Kim Possible) Better and Worse (Paid for by WeirdKev27)

Aloha all you happy people! It’s back to Kauai for the third of my look at LIlo and Stitch’s crossover episodes! This retrospective was made possible by WeirdKev27, who had the idea for it and paid for me to review these episodes. You too can buy reviews for only 5 bucks a pop. Just go to my ask, Direct Messages or discord.

Now with my plugging out of the way, this one, out of all four is the one I looked forward to the most, and out of the four shows in this crossoverathon to make the trip to the Kauai, this one is hands down my faviorite.

Kim Possible was just damn good and having rewatched a handful of episodes and the movie (Easily one of my faviorite Disney movies and the best DCOM, I will not back down on either), I can say it holds up every bit as good as it did in the early 2000′s. Frankly like Danny Phantom i’m surprised I never thought to get to it till now. But no time like the present: The show proper is a fun super spy sendup, but still feels unique: Instead of i’ts Teen Superspy working for some knockoff of MI6 or S.H.I.E.L.D., Kim is self employed, simply helping people because it’s the right thign to do and not for any reward with the help of her bumbling but loveable sidekick and future boyfriend Ron, though the romance angle wasn’t overplayed with the two, just hinted at here and there, enough to make it plausable for Ron to realize he has feelings in the movie and for Kim to return them and frankly it’s probably the best handled “Friends to lovers’ plot i’ve seen in a children’s cartoon. I”ll get more into that if I hit my stretch goal for it on patreon, more on that at the end of the review, but while it has no baring on this review I still felt it worth noting as that trope is NOT easy to pull off.

Point is, the show was smart, funny, engaging and had two great characters, a tremendously talented voice cast, and more anchoring it. It was a treasured part of my adolsence. It also had one of the only succesful “Save our show” campagins from fans i’ve ever seen. Despite So The Drama having been written as a finale and having reached Disney’s episode count, fan demand for a fourth season was so incredibly high we got one and it’s to this day one of the very few Disney shows to live past three seasons as a result. The show is in full on Disney Plus, along with the movie, which I HIGHLY recommend and hope I get to talk about, and the recent live action remake movie which .. is not bad. Not GREAT but the leads do make a good kim and ron, paticuarlly my boy Sean Gambone as Ron, and for a live action remake it really does get the spirit of the show.

But obviously we’re not here to talk about the show proper, though I REALLY want to now, but instead it’s crossover. So far the crossovers for Lilo and Stitch have been, much like said live action remake, OKAY, but nothing amazing, often shoving in sideplots related to Lilo and Stitch proper we didn’t need, forced morals and not really having a good amount of character intraction. The good news is this crossover DOES fix a lot of that.. the bad is that it also has some new problems, and still falls into some of the same traps the other episodes have. See what I mean with the full review under the cut!

We open at night, with Lilo and Stitch playing hide and seek. Adorably though Sttich dosen’t quite get the hang of it and proudly announces where he is. However things are quickly interupted when he’s kidnaped by a mystery ship out of the blue. It’s a good hook to start with, leaving us wondering who it could be...

And thus, if you hadn’t gone into this episode knwoing it was a crossover, giving us a hell of a reveal with a cut to Dr. Drakken being the one to kidnap stitch!

Look I love this Doofus. He’s easily one of John DiMaggio’s best roles, up there with Jake and Bender, and the one along with Bender that cemented his career. as one of voice acting’s finest. He’s just so loveably incompetent, over the top and quick to bicker with Sheego, which leads to some of the funneist moments in his home series as she’d either skewer him good or he’d shove his boot in his mouth and help her point instead of his own. He’s just such a great character and he not only fits neatly into Lilo and Stitch’s world, but the writers clearly get him perfectly. We get a hilarious bit where, fed up with Hamsterviel, who he’s teamed up with, he simply fakes the radio going out, adjusting the dials purposfully to make it come in buggy something I GUARANTEE he put in for SHeego and I gurantee she saw right through. His plan is to create a clone army of Stiches.. meaning Hamsterviel’s big evil plan.. is a copy of someone else’s.

Lilo goes to Jumb and Pleakly, the latter of whom has been collecting magazines adorably. Lilo plans to go after Stitch but Jumba says she can’t go on dangerous missions without him and to get a professional and this part.. does not work for me. Most of the time Jumba ENABLES Lilo’s behaviors and while not wanting an 8 year old to run out into the night is a good call, he also suggests getting help.. instead of you know GOING WITH HER WHEN IT’S LIGHT. It sounds more like Nani’s idea... it fits her more to not want Lilo to run out and to want to get help versus Jumba whose admant about keeping secrecy yet very lax on things, and you know would BE concerned that his prized creation was suddenly stolen and actually think about it. He’s just so horribly out of character it hurts.

And Nani’s absence really hurts the episode. See the last two, as much as I missed the lovely and talented Tia Carrere’s presence, didn’t really need her, though still could’ve included her: she could’ve made a cameo at the start since Lilo was there to visit her and she woul’dve made a better target for Spats than trudy, with Oscar fighting Jumba instead, allowing us some crossover interactions instead of having Jumba argue with a random asshole the episode wrote in. But it’s minor stuff. Here though? Her being the one to tell Lilo not to go would’ve made more sense: She’s protective by nature, and while she’s let go more since the movie, it’d make sense for her NOT to want Lilo to blindly chase after someone who beat stitch of all beings, as well as for her ot be the one to later tell Kim not to let lilo be involved. It’d be stronger coming from her sister and surrogate mother than Pleakly and it would’ve been a better arc to have Nani let Lilo off the leash so to speak and accept she needed to save kim. Instead she’s just gone for no reason and Jumba is grosly out of character and i’m disapointed.

That said the setup is the best and most intergrated so far: Pleakly sees an article about kim so he reaches out to her via a message on her site, while Lilo is stubborn about not being help.. obnoxiously so to the point it hurts the episode. While her being inscure about someone else saving Sttich would be fine, the episode never adresses that and instead just has her say she can because shut pu instead of accepting help. The episode would’ve flowed better if instead she accepted kim but Nani had Kim push her away, and thus create more problems. More on that in a bit.

But as I said this setup is great: it uses BOTH shows for once isntead of feeling like the first two, and honestly the next one judging by the blurb on the wiki, where its just “Hey x character visits Kauai”, here it blends both: The two main villians team up, and Kim is logically called for help since that’s what she does and they don’t want to risk lilo’s saftey. It’s good stuff.

So our other heroes enter the episode, on a ritzy jet as Kim’s dad had an old college friend with an airline. I admit the episode weirdly downplays Kim’s penchant for getting rides, getting a helicopter that appears to be a touring one and getting this one via her dad instead of the usual person who owes her a favor. IT was a neat part of her character: that she got help from people she already helped on adventure’s we hadn’t seen to establish she can’t drive herself yet and to show she’s an experinced heroine with a lot of history before the show started. I also like how a handful of episodes after season 1 had returns from people we HAD seen before or linked to them, a clever way of having callbacks.

It’s simple stuff Kim is ready for the wrold saving mision and ron hopes to get a vacation in. Nothing too out of the ordinary.

So the next day Lilo tries to go it solo but is spotted before she can leave, while Pleakly has built a.. photo colloage of Kim’s face on the wall...

... no wait i’m getting paid for this. Nevermind.

It is funny as it is unsettling though and Kim arrives and Pleakly faints.. Ron also arrives doing fake kung fu moves. This episode gets ron about half right... they overdo it a bit on the shenanigans, but Will Freidle’s natural charm and talent mean that even standard ron bits coughed up by a cat onto a page and used for this script still work simply because he’s that good at delivery.

We also get the who’s on first bit you all knew was coming as Kim asking what’s the Sitch confuses lilo and i’ts .. pretty funny. Again you could see it coming from a mile away, but Daveigh Chase and Christy Carlson Ramano really sell the hell out of it and we get a nice runner after of Kim misprouncing his name and trying NOT to say her usual catchphrase.

She also gets filled in on the alien thing... and while she admits i’ts a lot to swallow, she also admits she’s seen weirder. And given this episode would, by airdate (ignoring the one for So the Drama as that aired before the last batch of season 3 episodes but continuity wise takes place between seasons 3 and 4), take place around the same time as the season 3 intended finale “Team Impossible”, by this point she’s seen vengeful fishteens mutated by a horrifying summer camp, a rogue gentecist who basis her crimes against nature on a beanie baby knockoff, magical monkey based kung fu, a magican egyptian amulet, killer robot’s resembling teenage girls, a body swap episode, a plan using a barcode to destroy the internet, an attack on canada, a giant poodle, a complicated time travel plot, a trucker with a mullet, her sidekick getting turned into a surprisingly competent supervillian, and draken’s plan to use his rap career to promote brainwashing shampoo. And that’s just a handful of the things I was reminded of on the episode list. So yeah, this isn’t THAT much of a stretch. Oh and lest you think Kim never encountered aliens the series finale was an alien invasion by aliens Draken had pissed off earlier in the season. Suprised Lilo didn’t you know have Stitch and the family army pitch in. Maybe Leory and Stitch was going on at the same time?

Point is she’s in but goes with Pleakly in trying to keep Lilo out of it. And here’s yet another place the episode missteps: Kim’s REALLY patronizing to Lilo, treating her like she can’t do anything and later ignoring her advice when she brings up the current later, something that ends up getting Kim caught. The latter part especially bugs me since Kim normally listens to her clients pretty well, and had she doubted him could’ve at least asked Waid since she contacts him in the same scene. Speaking of which THAT’S why I feel her patronizing “not now kiddo” atittude dosen’t work: her spy master IS a child, her brothers have helped out multiple times, and the incident I mentioned from where she met her younger cousin who idolized her at an old west town was understandable: Her cousin was getting into dangerous stuff and throwing herself out there recklessly with no regards to her own saftey and impeding the mission with her well meant antics. Lilo.. knows who their looking for, knows the island well, and knows stitch’s weaknesses. And she goes from being annoyingly hostlile to kim to helpful, so it makes kim even more obnoxious for not accepting said help. It’s just.. draining as when this part of the plot ISN’T in play, Kim is fine. She’s her usual self.. not AS well written as the parent show, a bit too reliant on her catchphrases, but still not half bad and Christy Carlson Romanao, like Fredle helps paper over the weaker bits of the script. She’s not even out of character in her actions, as she does have a tendency to think she knows everything or undereistmate people.. the problem is it’s written poorly enough she comes across as insufferable, and unlike the show, where she actually learned something here.. she just learns to work as a team? When she does on a regular basis with Wade and Ron?

It’s just so frustrating because they almost had it just right, but instead just had to try and put some half assed moral about teamwork in there. They broke from the formula of having an experiment of the week but they still just HAD to keep to their own formula. And look Kim Possible has it’s own formula.. but it used that to great effect, often using the episode’s plot to shake it up in fun ways, and the plots were still diffrent enough and the villians bold and intrestin genough that it didn’t grate. This is starting to grate. And I do remember good and intresting episodes of the show.. but i’m starting tor ealize why I don’t remember NEARLY as much of Lilo and Stitch as I do the other shows it’s crossing over with: it’s so bolted to the formula they all just sorta blend together. It’s really fucking disheartning to realize something you loved so damn much as a kid just.. isn’t as good as you remember. And with these other shows.. I don’t have that as much. I accept proud family’s fault, Jake Long actually seems MORE intresting than it was at the time, and rewatching kim possible it’s excellent, same with recess coming up. I really need to watch more Recess. The most disheartining thing about this arc is the crossover just shows how BETTER the other shows were. Lilo and Stitch wasn’t a BAD show, and it isn’t here.. but it’s a mediroce one. it has a good premise. but it feels like they just don’t break away from the premise enough. This just... hurts a lot to type and realize. I really loved this show and movie as a kid and while the movie likely still holds up this.. this just dosen’t.

I need a moment... i’m breaking open the glass case containing my emergency patrick stewart clip excuse me...

youtube

That.. I needed that.

So before the bicker sisters can head off, we get our goofy comedy subplot: Jumba thinks Rufus is one of his experiments, one that could destroy the universe if not cancel and is highly unstable. As for why this one wouldn’t of worked out, I get why: it’s TOO powerful. Stitch is a weapon of mass distruction in a cuddly package, but he’s also easily deployable, kind of like Wolverine if he was in the body of a cartoon mascot. Having the THREAT of destroying ap lanet is fine and good for the long term but it does you no good if you can’t control it and i’td just destroy you too.

So he and Pleakly try to steal rufus without telling Ron why after Ron naturlaly refuses to sel land a chase insues. So while the boys and gender fluid person have their comedy plot, the girls head to where stitch was taken and find Draken’s glove.... they know it’s his because he put a note saying “return to dr. draken, his mother gave it to him”. That’s just.. fucking precious. And entirely in character. So kim aranges a ride, and dives into the ocean, but finds lilo in her parachute, and tries to send her back despite LIlo offering valuable advice both about the area , the current I mentioned earlier, and about stitch, i.e. Draken’s base is underwater (something Kim didn’t realize which feels odd for her), because Stitch can’t swim, something I genuinely forgot.

So while Kim sends Lilo back, or rather intercut with that but I choose to compress plots for my own convinence we cut back to Drakken and Shego. And I WAS worried that Shego wouldn’t show up, she wasn’t in the synopsis or anything and was delighted to find that nope she’s here. Drakken just isn’t the same without her.. I mean I liked the recurring subplot in season 4 where other villians would break her out, that was great, but in the end the two need each other. I may not ship them romantically but as a comedy team one just needs the other: Drakken needs Shego to cut down his ego and Shego needs someone to snark at and complain about. Sullivan and DiMaggio just had perfect chemistry and it’s easy to see why Drakken and Shego went from just another part of the Rogue’s Gallery to Kim’s arch enemies.

Which is why I am sad Gantu and 625 don’t show up for this one. I mean I can buy it: Hamsterviel likely is doing this on the sly to see if he can find a better minon, but the two sets of villians have similar dynamics and i’d love to see Shego and 625 dunk on their bosses together. It’s a really big missed opportunity but I do get it as they may of just nto been able to fit the two together or it may of been hard to block a lot of scenes iwth the human sized drakken and the giant sized gantu. So unlike a lot of missed opportunites in the other episodes, this one I at least can understand.

We get some GREAT banter with the two though. Out of the four guest characters in this one the crew really got Drakken and Shego down and the two bicker like any episode of Kim Possible, with Shego pointing out the massive bill on Stitch’s cage and how Drakken’s tried cloning about five times now and it’s never worked, and of course how he’s 50 50 splitting with a hamster bellow his station. Seriously why get rid of Gantu and 625 but keep the annoying rodent, I don’t get you episode.

Of course while they quack quack bicker bicker Stitch escapes and Shego gives chase. Sadly we don’t get a fight between the two like we did with Jake, another missed opprotunity but Stitch getting out of her grasp by licking her is objectively funny. Stitch finds he’s underwater though and gets recaptured.

Kim gets captured for the first time shortly after as the current caught her, but luckily she has kimunicator gloves and calls waid to call ron. Meanwhile Ron finally catches rufus back and Jumba explains the situation.. but Ron understandably dosen’t want to give up his buddy especially since Rufus has shown no signs of being a planet killer before. He’s not mooncake... althought i do think those two could hang. God now I just want a final space kim possible crossover to wash this out of my mouth.

So it’s down to Lilo, the really not all that ambigiously gay their pretty darn gay duo, and Ron to save the day. Lilo finally gets to do what she kept asking kim to do: use jumbas hot rod car spaceship thing to go down under the sea, and they send Lilo and Rufus in since hteir small enough to get in and suriive the pressures. Our heroes arrive and Drakken is nonplussed.. only for Lilo to prove WHY she can keep an alien in line by freeing stitch from teh leash drakken has him on using kim’s grapple gun, and then frees kim. The good guys win and the bad guys loose and the base starts to self destruct.. eh they’ll be fine. They still have the movie to get to.

So time for the wrap up: Stitch sniffs Rufus and confirms what the audience knew... that he’s a naked mole rat not an experiment. Which didn’t make sense to begin with for either show: Jumba’s archive should’ve been able to scan him or something (And if not he could build something to do that), and Kim Possible not only implied from day one Ron had Rufus a while, long before the rain of the pods, but A Stitch in Time outright confirms Ron bought him years ago in middle school. It just makes no sense and while it thankfully dosen’t take up a ton of the episode it still takes up too much.

But with that our heroes prepare to part on good terms but Pleakly decides to celebrate with Luau. Kim’s repsonse “Well I can do anything...”

And we get a gratuitous luau sequence! I do love a job that allows me to type the phrase “Gratuitous Luau Sequence’ They clearly ran short and we just get a good minute of everyone doing hula dances for no reason. I mean.. you could’ve done a quick gag with the experiment who was mistaken for Rufus... who I now realize given the finale was befriended by someone. I’m headcanoning now Kim and Ron came back for that one and Kim had him sent to space as part of one her dad’s projects where he and earth would be safer and he could help with space missions or something.

Final Thoughts: As you could tell I had mixed thoughts. As a crossover this melded things better, had a more original plot and the actors from Kim Possible brought their a-game.. but once again some disapointing characteteriztion and downright stupid decisions really let the episode down. These episodes just depress me every time and I’m looking forward to being done.. which given how excited I was going into this.. yeah. Like all of these despite their flaws I recommend checking it out if you like Kim Possible, if nothing else than for some extra drakken shego banter but.. keep your expectations low.

Next Time on Kim Possible: A team of spiteful assholes who are in a way repsonsible for Kim’s Career try to shut her down. It’s the intended finale episode outisde of hte movie people buckle up.. or you would if I was doing any of these. Though I should do “Team IMpossible” at some point.

On the finale of these crossovers: The Recess Gang are the final visitors to Kuai as Lilo must find and stop a lazy monster... no i’m not guest starring too.

Tommorow: Another kev one this time by patreon as I put two similar episodes of a show or franchise against each other and ask “Who Did It Better?” This time it’s two episodes of Celebrity Death Match, original versus revivial may the original.. probably win.

If you liked this review, please consider supporting my patreon, YOU CAN FIND THE LINK TO IT HERE. For just 2 bucks a month you get access to my discord, to pick a short each time I do one of my shortstravaganzas, and acess to my Patreon exclusive reviews! Next month I intend to do one for the show whose crossover gets the most likes within a week of it’s relase. Proud Family has already passed American Dragon so you have a week to get it ahed. And if you like Kim Possible, help me reach my 25 dollar stretch goal! At that i’ll review So The Drama, along with the Recess and Proud Family Movies. So check it out and i’ll see you at the next rainbow.

#lilo and stitch the series #lilo and stitch #kim possible #ron stoppable #doctor drakken #shego #Lilo Pelekai #Stitch #experment 626 #jumba jookiba

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