#sacrifice tw
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
ihadtried · 9 months ago
Text
I saw another person talking about something similar and need to know how common it was.
My example under the cut
When I was in highschool we had a lock in weekend themed around persecution. One night we did a game of manhunt but instead of neutral teams it was “hunters” and “Christians”. Yes it was exactly what you think. The Christians ran and hid while the hunters dragged them back to “jail”. One boy was given a Bible and he was the “Preacher”. If one of the “Christians” found him, they could either choose to stay with him and be safe, or go back out to find more Christians and bring them to safety too. But they weren’t safe if they left him. The Christians won if they found and all saved each other, and the hunters won if they found the huddle of Christians. (I believe some of the Christians tried to convert the hunters and got dragged away for it. But we had been taught that sometimes missionaries died so it was a risk they understood. In fact I also remember a separate conversation being asked if I was willing to be the first missionary that died to make way for the next who would “save” the lost people)
Honestly we got wayyyyy to into it. The kids who were the hunters were a group of boys on the fringe of the youth group: I remember them changing into dark clothes and tying bandanas around their faces (we did a regular version of manhunt every year so sometimes people would bring darker clothes).
I remember running but being caught, sobbing as they dragged me back to the building and asking if I would betray the other Christians. The game ended early because kids were getting hurt/scratched from trying to get away or literally being dragged. That wasn’t an exaggeration.
51 notes · View notes
bingerzone · 9 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
BTW after he told me that I spent the next few hours doing a doodle page of the concept while he watched.
Tumblr media
51 notes · View notes
a-reader-and-a-writer · 1 year ago
Text
A Father's Love
Tumblr media
Day 28 with Alt 30 Silent Treatment @ailesswhumptober's event
52 notes · View notes
nyf-archive · 1 year ago
Text
@never-surrender asked | [SACRIFICE]: the sender cups the receiver's face tenderly to distract them, right before shoving them out of the way (to safety) and facing an attack alone in order to buy the receiver enough time to escape.
Her skin has split over her brow, blood has trickled into her eye and all down the left side of her face. A few bones have most certainly been broken. It was getting harder to breathe. This was her Father's doing. The man had shifted into a Nightwalker before their eyes, a huge and twisted creature. Was this what he was doing all those years while she was passed around like an heirloom? Making deals with whatever he could manage. He looked now like this hideous creature, and he was set on killing her and all of her companions now. The woman made for her violin, but saw that it was broken into thousands of tiny little pieces.
There was still magic left in her. She could feel it coursing through her body, was ready to take the man who did this to her, to finally be free of the nightmare that he was. He is that incarnate, now. His shadowy form looms over her, and for a moment, she is paralyzed with fear. She can feel the blade in her collar, can feel the blood seeping out and oozing down her arm that fateful night. Before he decided to sell her like some common livestock. The stench of blood fills her senses, and unbeknownst to her, tears cascade in rivers down her cheeks. Nox is stunned, the creature's hand pointed at her as if ready to attack in the next moment.
But it never came. She could see the purple radiance of Gale's magic lingering in the sky, dissipating the beam of magic that was intended for her. Pulled only briefly from her fear, can she see Halsin is now in front of her. His hand is warm upon her cheek. Pale lashes flutter in recognition of his healing seeping into her bones. His words fall upon deaf ears. All Nox knows is that the tears fall faster now. Has she doomed them all? He said he would protect her, but she didn't want that to be until death do they part. There is a choked sound as she grasps desperately onto his hand, head shaking as she realizes what he's doing, but it is a moment too late.
His other hand has taken her by the waist, and before she can stop him, he's tossed her to Karlach who holds her fiercely in her arms.
"HALSIN! HALSIN PLEASE! NO!" Her voice cries out for him, immediately her hands trying to pry the tiefling's arms from around her, she watches as the elf begins to glow, the radiance of his light and of nature around him swirling to life. She's half carried, half dragged away from the scene as the earth begins to crumble away at their feet, plates shifting and splitting the earth between them and what fate would have awaited them. She screams his name over and over again, doing anything she can to get out of the hold. No. She didn't want to lose anyone else! She couldn't!
"HALSIN!" Her voice cracks, she begs to be released, but Karlach is finally able to get a hold of her, hugging her tightly as they run, whispering apologies to her as she hugs her close. The changeling cannot contain her emotions as she clings to the barbarian. This was agony. This was torture.
This was worse than death itself.
2 notes · View notes
askthemysterkids · 1 year ago
Note
Who would be willing to sacrifice themselves if it ever comes down to it?
I believe Coraline would. I can see lots of arguing in the moment but I believe that she would be willing to sacrifice herself.
I can also see Raz or Lili being willing to. Raz would lead to a slap from Lili before (potentially) a hug. Raz would try to stop Lili but end up giving a "I love you."
Anyways, cue the others trying to stop the sacrifice from needing to be made.
4 notes · View notes
eruden-writes · 2 years ago
Note
i do occasionally dip into "snuff" fics when i need something more intense. i'm not big on physical dismemberment exactly, but i lean a little to the left with being, idk, assimilated? consumed?
this sort of thing rides the line between revulsion and fetish. sometimes, when you've been going through a bunch of shit (for me, chronic pain) there's a bit of an appeal of tapping out and handing it over to an infinitely powerful being (ideally while getting dicked down by it too)
@opensourceslut (this is my partner, tagging so she sees)
We have had one incident where she was like "eat me" during sex while I was biting her. It only happened once and she says she's not into vore.
I understand and feel the release of control. I just don't feel the same about being literally eviscerated and killed, though I know others like the idea/concept in fantasy. Honestly, posting the question, I just wanted my partner to see she wasn't alone in fantasies like that.
Anywho, posting this so my partner sees it.
4 notes · View notes
bamsara · 1 month ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
i have so many dream/nightmare related comic scenes I havent posted. anyway hold this real quick
9K notes · View notes
pidgydraws · 7 days ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
🩸 And Nothing Else Matters 🩸
7K notes · View notes
tsuutarr · 2 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
The hero didn’t really think much of you when he first saw you. After all, you're just a pretty little saint that grew up with praise inside the gleaming walls of a church, never knowing any suffering. He doubts you’ll be able to keep up with him during his journey to save the world.
All of his initial disdain for you disappears when he begins his journey with you. You’re funny, you’re kind, you’re generous. Your healing ability from the gods isn’t the only thing that seems to heal him – just your presence, just your laugh, just you. You make life – his journey – a little more bearable.
So how – how could they? You’re his light, you’re his everything, and yet… They want to sacrifice you? That’s why you were chosen to be his partner for his trip? And you’re just standing there, unwilling to fight your fate.
“I’m okay with disappearing,” you murmur, wiping his tears away with hands that are turning to stone. “If I can save your life with my own, then I’m satisfied.”
But he’s not. He’s not satisfied, not when you’re not by his side. When he sees you turn to stone, your skin replaced with beautiful white marble, he vows to do anything to bring you back to his side. 
Using the power of the gods, he turns back time again and again and again so he can save you – so he can be with you.
But you meet the same fate over and over and over again. Again and again and again.
…Then who cares? Who cares about this shitty world when it’s without you?
The next time you return to consciousness, the world is in disarray, covered in murky fog and the smell of blood. The next thing you know, you’re being pulled into a warm embrace.
“You’re alive…” the hero says, hugging you close. His warmth is suffocating. “Yes… I should’ve done this from the start instead of turning back time…”
“W… what’s happening?” you ask, heart feeling too heavy, like stone, in your chest. “What did you do…?”
“Nothing, everything, anything.” He nuzzles your neck, savoring your warmth. It sends chills down your spine. “Anything to have you by my side. Even if it means destroying the world.”
3K notes · View notes
l-just-want-to-see · 2 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
pjo/hoo/toa + the cycle
The Lightning Thief / Growing Sideways, Noah Kahan / Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, Ilya Repin + Saturn Devouring His Son, Goya + Saturn, Rubens / The Blood of Olympus / The Family Jewels, MARINA / The Last Olympian / The Sea of Monsters / The Family Jewels / Orestes Pursued by the Furies, Bouguereau / The Hidden Oracle / Apollo and Marsyas, Manfredi / In The Blood, John Mayer / The Sea of Monsters / The Combat of Ares and Athena, Jacques Louis David / The Family Jewels / Mark of Athena / The Combat of Ares and Athena / The Lightning Thief / Family Line, Conan Gray / Cronos and Rhea, Schinkel / The Lightning Thief / The Blood of Olympus / In The Blood / The Last Olympian / Chronos and His Child, Romanelli / Desireé Dellagiacomo / The Lightning Thief / Family Line / The Fallen Angel, Alexandre Cabanel + The Last Day of Pompeii, Bryullov / The Blood of Olympus / The Outcast, Botticelli / Glass, Irony and God, Anna Carson / House of Hades / Family Line / The Last Olympian / The Lament for Icarus, Herbert Draper + Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Roman School + Minerva and Arachne, Houasse + Venus Induces Helen to Fall in Love with Paris, Kauffmann / The Last Olympian / Hadestown / The Lightning Thief / apple, Charli xcx / The Last Olympian / I Would Leave Me If I Could, Halsey / The Sea of Monsters / ? / LET YOUR DAD DIE ENERGY DRINK, Lavery and Corrigan / The Last Olympian / Eat Your Young, Hozier / The Last Olympian / Orpheus and the Bacchantes, Lazzarini / The Blood of Olympus / Susan Smith, wych elm / Orpheus and the Bacchantes / The Burning Maze / ? / The Tyrant’s Tomb / Perseus Freeing Andromeda, Veronese / Abduction of Psyche, Bouguereau + Bacchus and Ariadne, Van Loo / The Tower of Nero / The Tower of Nero / The Tower of Nero
2K notes · View notes
lotussart · 2 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
Sacred
1K notes · View notes
a-reader-and-a-writer · 1 year ago
Text
Don't Go!
Tumblr media
Day 26 with Magical Injury for @ailesswhumptober's event
34 notes · View notes
ozzgin · 2 days ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
content: gender neutral reader, noncon!, gore!, mutilation!, captivity
Yandere!Artist is not quite an artist by profession. His skill of trade can be immediately guessed in the way he so masterfully handles a scalpel. He hacks, and cleaves, and stitches right back up.
He's saved many souls, and his competency as a surgeon has never been doubted. One could say he's had a lot of practice with the less fortunate...patients.
It started with anatomical drawings; idly tracing over his used textbooks, untangling the thick vessels connecting the liver tissue. This can't be all, he thought at the time. It looked bland, it looked fake. He needed a different kind of muse.
Oh, he's gained a lot of experience since. It took many bodies to perfect his artistry, but now he can finally return home, sit back, and admire his work adorning every wall.
Then he found you.
A different kind of fascination enthralled his soul. He wanted to learn all there is to you, know you better than anyone else. Special little thing, too innocent and naïve for this world. Worry not, you could never be in better hands than his.
"Oh, it's an ugly one."
Your lips are curved into a pout, soft sobs spilling out of your mouth in hiccups. Through tears, you can discern what's left of your leg. Right above the knee, the flesh is torn, sliced choppily and exposing the bone, with clusters of fat glistening among the pooled blood.
He glances at the axe that tarnished your skin.
"You left me with no choice. How many times must I explain myself to you?"
He tucks a few hair strands behind your ear.
"Do you truly believe that the world out there is any better than here? I'm saying this out of love and concern. If you wished to have a walk, or go somewhere, I would've accompanied you.
If you're going to be sneaky, I have no choice but to discipline you."
You nod, in a daze, ears ringing from the shock. Upon reflection, it might have been a poor idea to try and escape. All the way to your hip, there's a prickly numbness, a wet warmth. You stare at his slender hands as he tucks a thin strip of cloth into your gash.
Before reaching for his surgery kit, he eyes the scenery once more: the steady streams of blood branching across the tile, the femoral artery gushing and spasming against the improvised bandage. Your face is pale, and your gaze hollow. He must confess, you're particularly beautiful in this moment, resting against the wall, your damp lashes reminding him of a Madonna painting.
"Perhaps...might you give me a moment?"
He quickly hops on his stool, and twirls a brush between his fingers.
"Don't worry, I'll be quick. Just the sketch, I promise."
He gently dabs the canvas, observing you in raw adoration. Every detail must be considered. Every stroke must be calculated.
"Afterwards, I'll patch your precious leg back. You'll be as good as new in a few days.
And hopefully wiser, if you want to avoid it in the future. I can't do miracles. This will leave an ugly scar."
Lesson learned. Your nose wrinkles with a sniff, yet you obediently straighten your back.
"Is this alright," you ask meekly, referring to your rather poor attempt at posing.
"Perfect."
Tumblr media
481 notes · View notes
covenunited · 2 years ago
Note
"Tancred, you little FUCK!"
|| @painforcain
Closed Starter | @painforcain
Tumblr media
“Oi! I am anything but little!” Tancred shot back, arms crossed flippantly as he glared at the vampire. “And you had it coming. You married a witch, after all, and we’re mostly known for being vengeful assholes! You brought this misery on yourself!”
The misery in question? Cain was currently drugged up and being chained up to a marble slab. The nice thing about visiting Virginia was that he knew of at least five highly active cults in the area, one of which was very keen on sacrificing monsters to demons instead of wasting innocent humans or animals. Cain was about as monstrous as they came in his eyes. Of course, one could argue that Tancred himself was monstrous for even thinking of such a plot, but he was enjoying the prospect of freedom and revenge far too much to let morals bother him now.
He smirked down at his captive husband victoriously. “Besides, knowing you, you’ll figure a way out of the deal eventually. Perhaps your new master will simply grow tired of you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, dear ex, I have to go find the true love of my life and let him know that we are both finally free of you. If you have any final words for me, I suggest you make them quick.” His smirk became a condescending sneer as he ended his gloating speech.
1 note · View note
phantomrose96 · 6 months ago
Text
Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 2
(Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 1)
Chapter 2, because @ciestess voiced an idea that absolutely consumed my entire mind and I could not rest until I made this
...
Danny’s eyes tracked the swing of gunfire raining bullets across the horizon. Tucker reloaded, crouched, dodged left and pivoted, another blast of bullet confetti launched through a gaggle of zombie heads. He tossed the magazine and reloaded. Click. Ching. Danny flinched when a zombie smashed a hammer clean through Tucker’s head.
 “God. Fucking…” Tucker pulled out of his hunch. He unclamped his fingers from his controller like bug legs unfurling. He extended the controller to Danny, bouncing it in his grip. “Your turn.”
“Huh?” Danny asked, as if he hadn’t been watching Tucker’s game the whole time.
“You. You’re up. I died.”
Danny accepted the controller, reloaded the screen, and jogged about a hundred feet forward before the first horde of zombies took him out football-style from the left. The death screen rolled.
“Oops,” Danny said.
“Not your best work.” And Tucker took the controller back. Tucker shot a few spare glances to Danny while the level restart loaded in. “Is it Vlad?”
“No. Well, yes,” Danny answered, flopping back into his normal position on the Foley attic armchair. Tucker’s mom had planned to toss it ages ago, before it became Danny’s chair. “But at least he left when my parents went all zombie mode into the basement.” Danny picked absently at the scabs of leather flaking from the armrest. “It was just weird.”
“I don’t mean this as an insult, but it’s definitely not the first time your dad’s gotten some math wrong,” Tucker said. “He blows up like three things a week doesn’t he?”
“He does. But he doesn’t care when he gets that math wrong. This one was like I broke something important.” Danny’s expression soured, and he picked a leather flake clean off the chair. “Vlad did, I mean.”
“Does any of the math actually work?” Sam offered from Tucker’s desk. She leaned an elbow around the back of his chair, head tilted to Danny. A pencil dangled from her loose fingers, nib-half worn to the History of an Invention report she was actually working on. Tucker had half-assed his earlier in the day about the palm pilot. Danny had not done his. “Like, it’s all crackpot theory, right? Do ghosts even follow math?”
“I think they follow some math. It’s not magic that makes the ecto-bazookas work, or the Fenton-phones work, or—well the thermos DIDN’T work—until I made it work.”
The unspoken thing Danny had been not-quite-saying hung in the air. He said it this time.
“So I’m wondering if I did it. Like the Fenton thermos. And now maybe they’re gonna do the math all over and realize the missing piece of the equation is one half-ghost son.”
“Well the order is backwards, for starters,” Sam said. “Thermos worked because you pumped ghost-energy into it. How would you have done that to the portal? You were human when you walked in.”
“Sam’s right. What do you think you brought to the table exactly? Button-slapping abilities?” Tucker loaded up the next level. “It was their portal, and their math, and it worked. There’s a million-billion kinds of math and they probably just forgot one thing.”
Tucker took a headshot and died. Mechanically, he handed the controller back to Danny.
“Yeah, probably.”
“Ask Vlad. He’s got a portal.”
“Like Vlad’s gonna tell me.”
“Just promise to be his diligent little son minion or whatever. He’s easy. Wait, let me do the next level. You know I like the cyberpunk levels.”
“It’s not your turn,” Danny said, reeling the controller just out of Tucker’s wiggling grasp.
“I’ll let you do two in a row for your next turn.”
Danny knocked Tucker away, distracted just long enough for a zombie cyberbeam to launch from the horizon and take him out through the head.
The screen washed sepia. Danny stared at it. You died.
Danny hadn’t really meant to stay the night at Tucker’s place. They’d just gotten really far in Man vs. Zombie, and Sam had gone home, and Danny was just resting his eyes between his turns with the controller.
So when he woke to the bright strip of sunlight beaming into his eyes through the attic skylight, his first thought was Fuck.
He was awake, here, morning, school. Fuck he had not actually done his History of Invention report, despite the stupid amount of grief it had already caused him this weekend. He pulled his face out of the armrest, now pineapple-patterned from the decaying leather, and pawed for his phone fallen on the floor. If it was still early enough, he could maybe still afford to desperately half-ass something before sixth period science.
He flipped his phone open. A text from Jazz. “Don’t come home. Make up an excuse.”
“…Fuck,” Danny whispered, through the sensation of his heart launching itself into his throat.
He scrambled upright, whole body shaking at the mercy of adrenaline shock so soon after being pulled from dead sleep. His mouth was dry, teeth unbrushed, wearing his old clothes from yesterday, report not done, Don’t come home, Don’t come home, Don’t come home.
They knew. He’d fucked it up. Somehow they knew. The math. Something. And it had to be with guns blazing, because Jazz would not send that text if they’d taken the “We accept you” angle.
Were they coming for him? On their way here? Tracking by his phone? Did they like Mrs. Foley enough to not SWAT-slam her against the wall when she opened the door for them so they could come capture the ghost pretending to be their son?
Fuck.
Danny was upright. Danny was standing. Danny was shaking. Danny wasn’t actually sure what the next thing was he was supposed to do.
Tucker’s ball of blankets rustled from the couch. “Mmph?” he asked, articulately.
“I have to. Go deal with my parents, I think,” Danny said, because any plan felt a little better than no plan. “I think they know.”  
Danny was a ghost. Danny was gone. Tucker sat upright, alone, blinking himself awake. He was staring at the You Died sepia screen still displayed on monitor, now burnt into the plasma of the tv.
Danny paused with his human hand slick on the Fenton front door. The gears in his mind turned as his plan quickly unraveled into no-plan. He had no plan, right? What was his plan? Handle this Man vs Zombie style—open the front door ready to dodge wide, because both zombies and parents liked to camp behind closed doors with bazookas at the ready?
“—absolutely absurd, and entirely unscientific, with no probability of being true. It goes against everything we know about neurology.”
Oh, Jazz. Was Jazz enough of a bazooka-deterrent? Probably not. Knowing his parents.
Danny turned the knob. His heart hammered. If bazookas, dodge left.
The first thing he noticed was in fact the no-bazookas. It was what he was most looking for. And so it was Jazz’s expression he did not notice until second—whites of her eyes wide, snapped to Danny, with a look that would be accusatory if worry hadn’t won that battle. Her cheeks were pale. Her hair was unbrushed.
He noticed his parents third. Compulsively, he rocked back onto his right foot, still outside the doorway, still outside the threshold of the Fenton family household.
Seeing his parents tired was of absolutely no shock-value to Danny. It was at least a twice-per-month tradition to see them haul themselves up from the basement sweaty and glaze-eyed at 7am, babbling excitement about some new ecto-spectral-hoozy-whatsits whose concept had shimmed into their minds at 8pm and now existed, fully operational, 11 nonstop hours later.
So it wasn’t the exhaustion on their face. It wasn’t the stagnant smell of sweat or the paleness of their faces or the stains on their clothes.
It was the way they looked at him. Like their whole world had fallen apart with his foot passing over the doorstep.
“Danny,” Jazz said, choked, a break in the silence. “Things are…! A little weird here. So maybe, if you wanna just get to school, I’ll finish clearing up—there’s a misunderstanding Mom and Dad have with their math. I am state finalist in Math League and have been studying college-level calculus in preparation for school applications so I’ve offered to help them fix their math, or prove to them—”
“Danny,” Maddie said, an echo of Jazz, but it felt worse. Danny scanned her hands for anything pointed enough to be a weapon. They were empty. “Danny can I just ask you something honestly, just quickly? Jazz is right. I’m just trying to clear up an issue with our math. And I won’t be mad. Whatever the answer is, I won’t be mad. I just want an honest answer.”
She stepped closer. Danny fought the urge to match her with a step backwards. Her eyes roved over him in a starved way, looking for something.
“Were you there when the portal turned on?” she asked.
“No, I wasn’t,” Danny answered. He wasn’t sure what to do with his face to make it look convincing. “It just. It needed some time to boot up, or something, right? That’s what you two said.”
“That was our guess ,but we don’t really know. The security tapes are wiped. We tried to make them EMF-resilient but a very, very strong blast of EMF could still corrupt them.”
“Yeah. I mean the portal’s gonna do that, right? When it turned on? Ripping open the Ghost Zone that’s—gotta be huge EMF.” Danny’s focus bounced between his mother’s eyes. “Just a guess. I really don’t know. I was in bed, already, whenever the portal started working.”
Left eye. Right eye. Why was she looking at him like that? Like she was sad. Was this part a trick? Make Danny let his guard down, go hey Mom need a hug? and that’s when the bazooka-whipping starts? It made his ribs feel scratchy. Stop looking at me like that.
“Have you felt anything weird at all, since the portal started working? Any gaps in your memory? Any parts of you that don’t feel right? Is there any part of you that feels like it’s changed in a way you can’t explain?”
She reached a hand out. Danny instinctively recoiled.
“Uh, yeah. They taught us about this in health class. They call it ‘puberty’ there.”
“Danny,” Jack said, and his voice was scratchy from disuse, from a long and uncharacteristic amount of time spent not speaking. “Did you die in the machine?”
A beat. A moment. Like when the zombie sends a hammer through your head.
“I’M alive!” Danny declared with a crack in his voice, with hands slammed to his chest. “Look at me. What are you talking about?”
“It’s the only math that works,” Jack continued, his words like chalk, his voice too dead. He looked too much at Danny. “If one of you two walked into the portal, and died in it. And I don’t think it was Jazz.”
This was bad. This was weird. Danny had ghost powers, sure. ‘They can’t kill me I’m already dead,’ was a funny joke sometimes. But it was funny as a joke. He was a ghost sham, really. A faker, a LARPer, whatever Tucker had called it. He was a human who was just kind of a freak now. More of a freak than he already was. He looked dead, for someone who was super-duper still alive.
He’d buried that worry, already. They weren’t allowed to bring it back.
“Look… at me!” Danny continued, mouth dry. He threw his arms wide. “Look how super alive I am! I’m awake! Using energy! Eating food and sleeping with my human body. I’ve got flesh and blood and bones and stuff! I’m not a ghost-expert but ghosts don’t have that.”
This was weird. This made Danny feel like something was scratching to get free from inside his rib cage. It twisted his entrails. Sure Tucker and Sam had thought he was dead, for those first horrible few minutes, but then he changed back to a human and the nightmare ended there. Jazz never called him dead. The ghosts called him freak and halfa and whelp, but never ‘one of them.’ That was his whole thing: being different from the ghosts who became ghosts by something so normal as dying.
He was not dead.
“If you died in the portal, your ghost wouldn’t have been ripped out of your body. It would have been allowed to stay, and then you’d be…” Jack hesitated. “I don’t know what you’d be, but you wouldn’t be alive.”
“Dad,” Jazz said, and she stood herself bodily between Danny and Jack. “What an absolutely messed up out-of-line thing to say to your son! You don’t know that! Dad you’re tired, and just because you weren’t able to solve your math problem in one night doesn’t mean you get to treat Danny like this! I said I’d help you with your math! Now apologize to Danny.”
Jazz looked over her shoulder to Danny, her expression falling at the sight of Danny’s face.
Danny backed up over the door threshold. He shook his head. “I’m not comfortable with this. This is weird. I’m gonna go to school now.”
“Danny, I promise they’re just—”
Danny turned on heel. No backpack, no change of clothes. He took to the street without a single school supply and moved, and moved.
It was supposed to be guns-blazing. Molecule by molecule. Headshot you died. He’d prepared for that this whole time, in the shower, in his dreams, in his daydreams in class. He’d duck and dodge and explain himself over and over until they understood him.
Danny wasn’t sure he was capable of explaining himself anymore.
Danny knocked the heavy iron knocker. He was in ghost form, as a threat. He wondered if he still smelled like yesterday’s sweat now that he wasn’t wearing yesterday’s clothes. Now he was wearing the clothes he died in.
No one answered the door. Danny phased himself in.
“Vlad!” he called, and his words echoed along the slope of the two elaborate winding staircases that twirled and met at the top like caduceus. Gold-plated banisters. A security camera buried somewhere in the ceiling, no doubt.
Danny phased into the library. His eyes roved the three stories of bookshelves wrapping the perimeter like a sheath. Gaudy. Audacious. Like Vlad would ever read that much. Danny racked his brain because some something in here was the secret to opening Vlad’s laboratory. Jazz had told him. Some gold something to be touched, and pressed down, or pushed up? Or it opened to a button. Or a keypad, maybe.
Danny spat a curse. He was being stupid. He was frazzled. He wasn’t thinking straight.
He dove into the floor below. Intangibility was the only key he needed.
The sheetrock was cold, even when he wasn’t touching it. The darkness was so piercing it made static jump in his vision, some weird trick of the brain Jazz had explained where, in the absence of all light, the brain hallucinates its own. It came with a sensation of pressure against his eyeballs, and a complete disorientation of direction, and he simply just kept going down.
Danny emerged into a wash of cold air. Cold like metal was cold. The low lights of dials and clicking machines were bright to his eyes previously dunked into the pitchest nothing. He drank it in, eyes grateful for light no matter how little, inner ear grateful for orientation that had left his head swimming and his stomach tight.
His feet tapped down to the stone ground, and the air that breezed past him was chilled.
“Vlad!” Danny called again.
Nothing.
He moved by the floor lighting, which ran in trim along the perimeter of the laboratory rooms. It lit things from beneath, made machines gaunt and specimens into sharp geometries of darkness and flesh. It made the Fenton lab feel warm in a way Danny had never considered it warm.
His feet clacked. His breath puffed.
“Vlad!”
He followed light, followed a wash of green miasma percolating from some far room and catching on the particulate of water and dust that disturbed with the air currents. Danny disturbed it too, walking through, wearing its shade of green which his shadow robbed from the wall behind him.
“Vlad. I swear to god Vlad.”
He crossed the threshold of the portal room, where the dusting of green ambience became a medallion wash of golden-green coating, painting every surface of the room. The Fenton lab was one single expansive room, portal anchored into the far wall and facing all the dead and empty air in front of it. This was different. A much smaller room, walled on all sides save for the simple doorway, and each surface reflected the color back deeper and heavier. It was like a fishtank in the wall of an aquarium lit radiant aqua-blue by all the lights within, but green instead, pure ecto-green.
Danny approached the open portal. He stared into its placid swirls, mesmerized, and scared of it, in a way he hadn’t previously felt about the portal in the Fenton basement.
“Ah, seems the cat is a good mouser after all, it dragged you in my boy.” The words came sing-song. They came spine-shivering for Danny, who felt them like hot breath on his shoulder and reeled back, pivoted, fire crackling to life in his palms.
Vlad stood at the doorway, a solid 20 steps from Danny.
“Vlad.”
“So I’ve been hearing.”
“I need you to explain the portal.”
“Ah, I see you’ve spoken to your parents.” Vlad stepped in, washed in the ecto-green which muddied his ruby red eyes. He held his hands behind his back, cape trailing, a smirk on his fanged face. “Last I heard they weren’t taking the news very well.”
“What news. What did you tell them?”
“Me? Nothing. In fact, very kindly for your sake I even tried to drive them away from the answer but… We know how stubborn your parents can be.”
“What answer?”
“That you’re dead, Daniel.”
Shock washed like ice down Danny’s spine. It sent prickles like spider legs across his skin.
“Well, I suppose there’s still chance for some doubt. It could be Jazz. She could take the fall for you, if there’s any benefit to that at all.”
“I’m a halfa. We are halfas,” Danny said.
“A silly made up word by a silly child,” Vlad mused, and the light smile left his lips. “We are dead.”
“I’m not dead,” and Danny’s words were small, and they were childish.
“You are. I am. Embrace it. It’s nicer this way.” Vlad took a few steps closer, lionously tall in his saunter, feet clacking the ground. “It’s very freeing. After you’ve died already what is there left to fear?”
“I’m alive.”
“You’re a dead body with its soul still stuffed inside it like a Christmas goose. A lot of things in your body don’t work anymore, but ghosts don’t work right anyway and it is, for all its defiance of nature, a perfectly symbiotic relationship.” Vlad’s smile brushed his lips again, warm. “It’s nice to share this with you. Isn’t it nice to share things with people?”
Danny’s heart was beating too fast in his chest, and it was a human heart, a human beat. “I’m not dead,” he declared.
“Your wounds heal quickly because the ghost piloting you only needs to remember form. It stacks cells back into place and calls it good. You’ll endure fatal injuries as you no doubt have many times in your fights, but they’re trivial because physical trauma is not what kills a ghost. It’s what creates one. You’ll necrotize in places but it’s okay, because you’ll carry on, and it will bother you only if you let it bother you, if you’re too sentimental about the puppet you’re still inside.” Vlad closed in closer, neck craning to appraise Danny. “Ghosts love a facsimile of life so you will keep your heart pumping, your lungs breathing. You’ll eat and you’ll sleep but you’ll find you won’t perish if you don’t. It just won’t be a good time if you want to keep occupying your flesh form. Take better care of it. You won’t get another.”
“You’re psychotic. And you’re wrong.”
“I have all the math to prove it.” Vlad leered from over Danny’s shoulder. He circled the boy, knocking Danny’s balance, who still on a hair trigger stood ready to fight. The light from the ghost portal painted Vlad’s face like the phases of the moon as he moved. “Did your parents explain that part to you properly?”
“No, because they didn’t get the math right.”
“Oh they’ve gotten it right. This time. It only took them two decades longer than it took me.” The portal rolled like static, and its fizzling pattern crashed like an ocean wave across Vlad’s cape. “No amount of man-made power is sufficient to drag the entire fabric of the Ghost Zone up against our own, tear a hole through it, and anchor it to a stable frame. It requires something with a pull on the Ghost Zone, a strong pull, and that thing is a human life at the moment of an extraordinarily violent death.”
Danny backed a step away from the portal, from Vlad, but the walls boxed him in. He swam in its green light.
“You stepped in and you turned the portal on, that’s what you thought, right, Daniel? Pressed a careless button on the inside and now here we are. Silly parents for not finding that button first.” Vlad’s face hardened. “No. Jack and Maddie knew about the button. Maddie explained it to me over the phone. What engineer designing and building their own portal would forget the location of the on button? They’d pressed it from the outside. It didn’t work. And so you pressing the button was not the important part. It was you dying to the electrocution that clicked everything right into place. And while your ghost should have been torn from your lifeless corpse and pulled to the Ghost Zone you instead pulled the Ghost Zone here. Your ghost got to stay put. You opened the portal. You became the undead freak you are. And now we’re here.”
Danny’s eyes bounced between Vlad’s. His cheeks felt hot, like he was enduring an accusation of wrongdoing. And he had none of the knowledge to refute what was being said.
“You’re messing with me. You’re wrong,” Danny shot back. He thrust an arm out, drenched in the fog of the portal. “If the portal needs a person to die in it then explain your portal! Are you so casual about it? You killed someone? You’re admitting to murder and you think I won’t do anything about it?”
Anger flashed like a storm across Vlad’s face. His aura swelled, pressing down with a pressure on Danny as Vlad halted and cast his shadow clear across Danny, coating the back wall. “The killing of other people with the wanton carelessness of half-baked machines is the domain of Jack and Jack alone. I’ve brought no such harm onto anyone else.”
“Then how do you have this portal?”
“This portal? This portal that I’ve had for 20 years? Which I opened when I solved the piece of Jack’s broken math that he was never able to solve until this morning?” Vlad stalked closer, hunched, imposing. Danny stepped back. “My boy Daniel you’ve had it so easy. You had it so simple. A truly clean break. So clean so lucky. A single lethal dose of electricity and it was already over. I’m jealous. You never even suffered.”
Vlad stepped closer, striking distance, arm extended. Danny flinched, but Vlad only swept his cape around, clenched in his fist, and pivoted to approach the portal.
“Put out of your misery before it even started.” Vlad slammed his fist against the portal rim, and the explosive metallic clang bounced through the rooms. His laugh belted out. “I should have been so lucky.”
19. Vlad Masters was 19. A sophomore in college. A man actively in the midst of sabotaging his social life to chase a woman who was already deeply in love with Vlad’s best friend who he hated more every day. He wasn’t sure what he ever enjoyed about Jack’s bumbling ineptitude, or his loudness, his brashness, his poor social skills, his bad breath, his mullet. Maybe Vlad had gravitated to Jack because deep down he loved how superior it made him feel to surround himself with the likes of Jack Fenton… And now, he hated how enraged it made him to watch Maddie’s eyes skip past his to focus on Jack Fucking Fenton again and again and again and again.
But surely there was hope still. Surely it was a matter of time before the rose-tinted glasses fell away and Maddie saw bumbling and inept and every such word in the basket when she looked at Jack. There’d come the day she tested the waters with Vlad to complain about one of Jack’s little quirks, and they’d find solace together in all the things Vlad was that Jack wasn’t, and all the things Vlad had that Jack didn’t. And he’d be gone, back to bumble elsewhere, and it would be just them.
The day didn’t come. It wouldn’t come. And maybe Vlad needed to change himself for Maddie. If he listened to her and Jack’s ghost ramblings, if he could put Jack in his place and solve the things Maddie couldn’t, it would show her. She’d understand.
Because that was the thing about Jack. His math was never right. Enduring Calculus 1 with Jack was all it took to prove this to Vlad. How many times he’d caught a single error on a single line for Jack, like a dropped stitch that would unravel the whole sweater. Every problem, without exception. Jack only passed on his homework grade with Vlad’s help. On his tests, he failed.
So Vlad was staring at Jack’s equation, full of bogus math, which Vlad knew was wrong because Jack had penned it, and Vlad had not yet fixed it himself.
“I’m telling you Jack, it won’t work.”
“Bogus V-man it totally will!”
It wouldn’t. But Vlad wouldn’t fix it for him. Not yet. Vlad would let Jack embarrass himself first, fully in front of Maddie, watching on, judging. Vlad would solve it for her. After. Once Jack had made a fool of himself for the hundredth time since college began.
He leaned in to study the portal frame. The gears were turning in his head already. He didn’t hear the whir of the power source catch.
19. Vlad Masters was 19. A tube ran down his nose and into his lungs, supplying oxygen for lungs which were failed by a diaphragm sloughing itself away. He was poisoned from the outside-in. Irradiated by ecto-energy none of the nurses or doctors could fully understand. It damaged his DNA. First obvious in the skin of his face where the blisters of his ecto-acne drained and sloughed. “Acne” was the wrong word. An unkind word. They were boils where the blast had cooked his skin, microwaved his cells. The skin on his body blackened over time. Organs decayed. Vlad Master read a lot about radiation sickness. He knew everything he had to expect.
Jack and Maddie had stopped visiting. They were dating now. It was on their last visit they’d told him, and Vlad hadn’t taken it well, and he’d perhaps burned a few bridges with the words he chose. It was deserved. Considering what Jack did to him.
He’d found the error in Jack’s math, by the way. Errors, but all the rest paled in impact compared to the lambda. The ecto-energy. The necessary ecto-potential to pull the Ghost Zone here. How stupid. How idiotic. For Vlad to die to a machine so botched in its construction.
When Vlad was released from the hospital, it was not because they’d cured him. It had been because there is a certain cruelty in making a 19-year-old live the last of his days bedded down in a white-walled room with just his books, his equations, and no one coming to visit anymore.
He was released with bedrest instructions. Vlad did not heed them. In his beater car, every cell of his body aching, he drove. At the materials lab, he disconnected his oxygen tank and moved through the lab space with the tube dangling loose from his nostril. No one was Vlad Masters’ friend. No one cared to stare long at his ugly boil-ridden face. No one stopped him as he hauled sheet metal, and supports, and bolts and wiring and resistors and power tools, checked out with a valid student ID, from the lab. The lab inventory room would not be seeing these back.
It was a prep bunker, buried beneath a vast lot of empty Wisconsin land, that Vlad hauled his materials. He and Jack had discovered it as freshmen. Poked through its bowels with flashlights and quipped and laughed over how eerie it was. Deep beneath the sheetrock, boxy rooms carved out of walls of stone. Shelf upon shelf of dusty canned foods, and shotguns sealed in cases fastened to the walls. The locks had rusted with water damage.
His arms ached until they throbbed, dragging beams of metal across the stone floor, scratching chalk-mark stains into the ground. His skin sloughed, inflamed, burning to the touch. Vlad didn’t bother to rest, because these injuries would never heal anyway. He hauled, and welded, and wired up his circuitry and resistors with a care and caution Jack would never have bothered to practice. He checked it against his math by flashlight. He took naps on the cold stone floor and woke with deep purple bruises on every part of his body that had pressed against the ground.
His appetite left him. His lungs filled with mucus. The boils on his face had spread down to his chest, his shoulders. The touch of his shirt chafed them, so he worked without one, a figure of skeletal rib ridges jutting from tight skin that bloomed with the projection of his shadow against stone walls.
He knew why Jack’s math was wrong.
A silly mistake. A stupid mistake. Anyone with half a mind for the paranormal should have realized the Ghost Zone was not so easily at your beck and call. Not without chumming the water with something it would rise to feast on.
And in that violent death, what would happen to the ghost? It would stay, wouldn’t it? If it successfully anchored the Ghost Zone to the portal it stood inside, then by definition the ghost would stay?
And was that death? Yes, in a way. But it was a death one would get to keep living. As opposed to the death Vlad was headed for, whose coldness and finality scared Vlad more than anything he could put to words.
He’d fixed the oxygen tank back to himself. He couldn’t work without it, hauling it about on a little dolly with him, back and forth, while he fetched and affixed the last of the plating he needed to craft the frame of his silent soulless portal.
He’d stolen a generator from the sports storage shed. It was meant to be enough to power the portable stadium lights they hauled onto the fields for late games, an absolute obelisk meant to cast light across an entire football field.
Surely, it contained enough power to kill one simple human.
Vlad fixed the last bolt in place. Jumper cables clamped generator to portal wiring. It was a pure skeleton. A paltry thing, like the bones of something already picked clean. Built in haste, sloppy, by a 19-year-old whose fingers were too inflamed to clutch a wrench any longer.
He could have asked Jack for help. Maddie. But he wouldn’t let them have this. They had to solve the portal on their own. They didn’t get to know his hard work. They did not get to save him.
Vlad would save himself.
A ghost anchored to a body. What was that? What monster was that?
Vlad moved. He coughed mucus from his lungs. It made it hard to breathe. So he moved slowly, and crouched, bony jutting angles, painted blotchy purple, all bruises and skin, sloughing away.
He crouched, because the portal he’d constructed was not large enough to hold him standing up. He bowed inside it, a small thing, a pathetic man of little life. He wheezed. He hurt. His eyes burned.
And he held in his hands the remote to flip the generator switch, and connect the circuit, and bring to life the math Vlad had so kindly corrected out from under Jack’s grip.
Vlad did not. Because throwing the switch would kill him.
Deep in his animal brain, his dying brain, he knew this intimately. It filled him with a drowning fear like paralysis. He did not want to die.
He would die if he did nothing.
It would be this one throwing of the switch which could save him. Which would burst the portal to life right through his heart. Electrocute it out of its rhythm, slaughter him like a pig on spot and… maybe… hopefully… drag the Ghost Zone here. And whatever he was, dead, would stay.
And whatever he was, dead, would be better than this.
Vlad held the remote in his clammy hands.
And from within the humming skeleton of his portal, his fingers caressed the on button.
The portal sung its happy contentment, mused in its healthy green aura, staining all the slabs of rock wall. Danny swiveled his head, recognizing now the bunker this had been before it had been a laboratory.
“I’ve harmed no one, Daniel,” Vlad concluded, his voice too measured for the horrors it had spilled forth. Too calm against the blossoming terror its words had wrought across Danny’s face. “I opened the portal to save myself. You’re lucky, Daniel. It was because of my fast thinking that your father is not a murderer. I took that honor from him.” Vlad’s head tilted to the side, suddenly sympathetic. “Although, you’ve maybe made the title whole for him.”
Vlad reached out, Danny shot away.
“Dad didn’t kill me,” he choked. “I did this to myself.”
“How lucky Jack is, to always dodge responsibility for his actions.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Of course you don’t. If you believed me, you’d have to accept you’re not wriggling out of this. There’s no denial you can bring home to your parents. If you believe me, then this is reality.” Vlad smiled, a playful glint to his fangs. “I suppose I should have more sympathy. I quite like being this way. It is so much nicer than wasting away to death, like I was. But you. You were healthy before this. This killed you, and it didn’t save you from anything.” Vlad cocked his head. “Such tragic fates, both of us, due to the carelessness of Jack Fenton.”
Danny shook his head. His heart beat—his human heart beat—all too fast in his throat. It made him sick. It made him feel like the walls were closing in around him. This was Vlad’s doing. Vlad’s trap. Vlad’s prison he’d been forced to join.
"That's not true. I'm not like you."
“Of course not,” Vlad said, sweetly. “How sweet denial is. Deny it if you like. Call me a liar. But if you ever want to come to terms with what your father did to you, consider coming to me. I understand you in a way no one else will.”
Danny gave no response. He gave no acknowledgement of Vlad’s words. He took to the air, phased himself up through the sheetrock that had been packed atop the doomsday prepper bunker. Up through the mansion, which had been built atop the portal beneath it, and not the other way around. Into the open sky, he breathed fresh air not stagnant and damp beneath the ground, bathed in light pure white from the sun and not tainted green like the bowels underneath him.
And he flew back toward the portal that made him, leaving Vlad with the portal from which he’d made himself.
...
(inspiration post from @ciestess)
957 notes · View notes
eruden-writes · 2 years ago
Note
Regarding that sacrifice fantasy I kind of do understand where your partner's coming from...? Though in my case, I'll admit it's a bit more blurry where I'm supposed to be in this kind of imagery (either the sacrificed or just a spectator), but I do get the aesthetic of it...? I'll admit I'm not sure if it's exactly the same one as your partner (mine is more about, like... Mind-breaking/body-splitting pleasure during the sacrifice), but in any case, I feel like part of it is like... Extreme loss of control, but in the name of worship/devotion to whoever is losing said control? Which makes it more alluring? Idk if that makes sense
(and tbh, I'm in the ace spectrum, so idk if that plays into it, since for me there's an aspect where the aesthetic and implications kind of trumps the lore visceral horny)
@opensourceslut (this is my partner, tagging so she sees)
Yeah, I understand the appeal of worship/devotion and the extreme loss of control. And logically I can understand the whole death aspect being like an ultimate release, but it's not appealing to me personally.
I was also just hoping to reaffirm to my partner there's people out there who get it or relate, since she's tried talking about this fantasy with others and it didn't get the reaction she expected.
1 note · View note