#so essentially now that shes an adult he's organized to have her own a large sum of the stocks for his corp
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yellowocaballero · 4 years ago
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Jon's Trapped in Temporal Time-Out: A TMA Time Travelling Tale
Sasha was tipping some whiskey from her secret flask into her tea when Tim poked his head into the breakroom and announced that he had found a corpse.
Sasha and Martin, hunched over their paltry lunches and pathetic lives situated upon a rickety metal breakroom table and equally rickety metal chairs, stared at him. 
“Like,” Sasha said finally, “a human one?”
Tim shrugged. “Humanoid? I didn’t want to poke it and see if it was fleshy, so I guess the jury’s out.”
Hm. Sasha put her flask away. The day was no longer boring, so it was unnecessary. 
The most relevant questions ought to be asked first. “Should we tell Jon?”
“He might throw a bitch fit about how corpses are unhygienic, so no?”
Martin drained his tea and stood up from the rickety metal chair, resigned. “I’ll get the broom.”
I kept on bitching about how much I dislike the beginning scenes of TMA time travelling AUs so my friend @lazuliquetzal​ (who wrote the best TMA time travelling fic in the fandom) told me to put my money where my mouth is. It’s nowhere near her level, but in my defense it’s probably even stupider than Reflection. 10K of stupid under the cut. 
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Sasha was tipping some whiskey from her secret flask into her tea when Tim poked his head into the breakroom and announced that he had found a corpse.
Sasha and Martin, hunched over their paltry lunches and pathetic lives situated upon a rickety metal breakroom table and equally rickety metal chairs, stared at him. 
“Like,” Sasha said finally, “a human one?”
Tim shrugged. “Humanoid? I didn’t want to poke it and see if it was fleshy, so I guess the jury’s out.”
Hm. Sasha put her flask away. The day was no longer boring, so it was unnecessary. 
The most relevant questions ought to be asked first. “Should we tell Jon?”
“He might throw a bitch fit about how corpses are unhygienic, so no?”
Martin drained his tea and stood up from the rickety metal chair, resigned. “I’ll get the broom.”
****
There was, indeed, a corpse in the Archives.
More specifically, in the stacks. The worst place to die, or least be dumped. Sasha had to admit the logic of it: it was the darkest depths of the library that Martin had informed her was ‘somewhat creepy’ and ‘kind of ominous’ so ‘please stop sleeping there you’re going to give me a heart attack’. After Martin flipped on a few lights that were never flipped on (apparently Elias was a cheapskate, which explained the breakroom) they could all gawk at the corpse to their heart’s content. 
Very kindly and thoughtfully, Tim asked Martin if he wanted to stay out of the library and maybe to ‘tell someone’ or something. Both Sasha and Tim had mutually and silently agreed that Martin seemed the type to have a delicate constitution. Granted, he hadn’t seemed the type to win Magnus Anarchist every month by breaking into abandoned buildings with absolutely no shame, so maybe he was the kind that surprised you. 
But Martin had just looked a little unimpressed. “Do you seriously think this is my first corpse? I went to university.”
That somewhat intimidated Sasha, who abruptly worried that she had missed out on an essential university experience again. “Is that a typical university experience?”
Martin paused a beat. 
“Uh,” he said, “yeah, sure, of course. Hazing, you know.”
“Is that what hazing…?”
“Fraternities.”
Tim, from where he had been standing at the entrance to the stacks snapping on the sterile gloves he had liberated from the cleaning supply closet, looked delighted. “You were in a frat too, Martin? What kind of hardcore frat had corpse hazings? Was it the Sigma Gammas? My frat always thought they were way too crazy, but we were a business one -”
“You know what,” Martin said, “let’s just worry about the corpse.”
After Sasha tied her hair in a ponytail and Martin snapped on his own gloves, they awkwardly approached the aisle where Tim had been trying to find a reference book for Jon. Sasha was worried that they would have to hunt for it a little, or that there would be a bad jump scare, but when they found it she saw that it wasn’t subtle at all.
It was sprawled on the ground, face mashed into the cheap and somewhat gross carpet. Sasha approached it with absolutely no hesitation, which Tim and Martin gladly let her do, and squatted down to get a better look at the figure. 
She definitely needed to make a coroner’s report. She was the objective expert in coroner’s reports. 
 “Tim, can you run back and get one of Jon’s silly little tape recorders for my coroner’s report?”
“Did you just see that on the telly?” Tim asked skeptically. “Because if you did -”
“Oh, here one is. That’s really convenient!” Martin grabbed one off the shelf and pressed play, letting the tape roll. “Good idea, Sasha. We need proof to Jon that we were researching.”
Probably...not what Jon meant for them to be researching, but Sasha liked to believe that it was the intent that mattered. She pulled a pencil out of her pencil skirt pocket, poking the figure thoughtfully. “Report by Sasha James, Archival Assistant.” There, now it was work. “At 1:30pm today, Tim Stoker discovered a corpse in the Archives, thereby referred to as John Doe -”
“Do we have to call it John Doe?” Tim complained, standing next ot her and crossing his arms. “Then we have too many Johns, it’ll get confusing.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sasha said dismissively. “Ours is Jon, this guy’s John. Completely different.”
“Sasha, I’m not sure that’s how words work.”
“What are you, an English major?”
“Yes! I was an editor for a living!”
“Sorry if I don’t listen to guys who were fired from book editing school -”
“Uh,” Martin said, “have we checked to see if he’s actually dead?”
Sasha and Tim fell silent. Sasha looked at Tim. Tim shook his head. 
“Seriously, mate?” Sasha asked, unimpressed. 
“I didn’t want to touch the corpse!” Tim cried. “So sue me! It’s not as if he’s moving!”
Pussy. Sasha gently reached out and pushed aside a little of the corpse’s very long and pretty curly hair. What was that, 3C? Jesus, that had to be work. Sasha was 3A and the amount of hair care products she owned was insane.
She waved her hand at the boys for silence and put her thumb against his pulse, concentrating hard. Martin quietly walked over and crouched down too, eyeing his chest. 
“I don’t feel a pulse,” Sasha said finally. 
“Also, uh, I’m not a doctor,” Martin said, “but he’s definitely not breathing.”
“I told you,” Tim said defensively. “You just look at the thing, and you go - yep, that’s a corpse!”
“Corpse appears to be an ethnically ambiguous adult man with very nice hair,” Sasha said loudly. Martin helpfully held out the recorder to catch her voice better. “Maybe 190cm. Incredibly skinny - potential cause of death. He’s dressed in...some very ratty clothing. Potentially homeless.”
“It definitely smells,” Tim said, pinching his nose. Sasha didn’t blame him - the clothing was an overlarge green hoodie, ratty and threadbare, and his jeans weren’t any better. His boots were worn and soft leather. “Maybe he’s a homeless guy who snuck in and died?”
“That’s so sad,” Martin said softly. “Also a little gross.”
“Have some respect for the dead, guys,” Sasha said, as she poked the dead guy with a pencil. “Tim, go flip him over.”
Tim held his hands up, stepping away. “I couldn’t possibly. Martin loves flipping people over.”
“This again?” Martin asked, frustrated. “This is just like when you made me handle the Rawlings case because you’re scared of the suburbs!”
“They have too many eyes, Martin!”
“I am surrounded by cowards,” Sasha noted for the recorder. Nothing for it, then. Sasha carefully straightened, wobbling on her heels, before solidly wiggling her hands underneath the corpse’s chest. He was cold - dead a while. 
It was surprisingly difficult to flip over a limp adult man. Sasha was strong, but the corpse’s flesh was weak, and he was all floppy. Eventually Tim got over himself long enough to help her, making a very disgusted face the entire time, and they were able to finally get a good look at the man’s face.
Abruptly, upon seeing it, they all quieted. 
There was something about seeing a man splayed out on the ground that was a little funny, if you worked for the Magnus Institute and had probably encountered a Leitener two years ago and lost all empathy. No more impediments in the search for science. But there was something very different about looking at a person, who had a nose and lips and a very ratty hoodie, and knowing that it was no longer a person. Just a lot of cloth and meat and blood and organs and nice hair that once was a person, back when things were easier and the world was a little less harsh.
But maybe Sasha was caught by sentimentality: after all, the corpse looked a little like Jon.
Judging from the stunned faces of her compatriots as they all bent around the figure, they all thought the same thing. Tim’s jaw was open, and Martin’s hand was covering his mouth in shock. 
“Man,” Tim said. “This sucks. And it’s really creepy.”
“He must have been really gorgeous,” Martin said. “That’s so sad.” 
Actually, Sasha tilted her head and took another look. He had sharp and severe features, elegant and striking. A large and thin, sharp nose, and equally sharp lips. His face was just as sharp and gaunt, as emancipated as the rest of him. He had strange scars trailing up his neck and curving around his jaw, but it just kind of accentuated the intense atmosphere. 
It was probably a pretty stupid thing to focus on, but in her defense it wasn’t really the face of a homeless guy. Well, maybe. Hot homeless people existed.
Sasha frowned. She’s only met one other person this hot. 
“Hey,” she said, “doesn’t he look like Jon?”
Both the men titled their heads. 
Finally, Tim said, “Nah, he’s hotter.”
“Agreed,” Sasha said. “I think the scars really do it.” 
“Uh, guys,” Martin said. 
Sasha grabbed her tape recorder out of Martin’s hands, resuming her coroner’s report. “Subject appears to be in his thirties. Weirdly attractive, but that’s probably not as important as we feel it is.” She looked down at his hands, carefully using her pencil to push up the sleeve. “What looks like an aged and badly healed burn scar on his right hand. Supports homeless guy evidence.”
“Knife scar over his throat,” Tim quietly observed. “Someone tried to kill this guy.”
“Guys,” Martin said. 
“Well, I guess this is the point where we worry about body disposal,” Sasha said, straightening. “I think Elias could handle this discreetly and professionally, but that might involve letting Jon know. And I don’t think any of us want that kind of stress in our lives.”
“So, are we not even pretending to want to call the cops, or…?”
“Listen to me!”
Both Tim and Sasha shut up, somewhat guiltily. Martin had straightened too, fists balled, looking firm and determined and resolute - everything that Martin wasn’t, really. Martin lived unsure of himself, never expressing his own feelings or ending every opinion with an “I don’t know, maybe, that’s just my thoughts, what do you think?”. 
So Tim and Sasha paid attention, and when Sasha nodded encouragingly at him he seemed to find further courage. Solemnly, with the air of a wise man by the side of the road, Martin said, “This guy isn’t hotter than Jon.”
Christ. Sasha takes it all back.
 Tim propped a hand on his hip supportively as Sasha rolled her eyes. “Look, mate,” Tim said, “I know that you think Jon’s the hottest person in existence, and maybe objectively he’s fine as hell, but once you know him for longer than three months he loses all attractiveness. It would be like being into the DMV clerk. The really pretentious cousin at all of your family reunions who tries to explain your own job to you. The dude in your English class who thinks he invented feminism.”
“That was you,” Sasha said. 
“I am the objective expert in Jon,” Martin said firmly, shutting down the dissent. “He’s, like, my muse, okay? And can I say, as I have spent so many long hours memorizing the curve of his jaw - that’s the same jaw.”
If Sasha had a retort to that, or if Tim wanted to judge Martin for his taste in men further, neither of them had a chance. There wasn't an opportunity to say anything more, because the corpse opened its eyes. 
Sasha’s first thought was this: wow, what green eyes. 
Sasha’s second thought was: the fuck?
His eyes didn’t focus on her, or snap anywhere. They drifted a little lazily, fixed on the right, but the man was undoubtedly aware. His fingers twitched, he tilted his head from left to right, and his left hand - doubtlessly the hand that still felt texture - clenched the thin and cheap rug. The man’s jaw slackened a little, as if in surprise. 
For their part, the Assistants frantically looked at each other, all conveying the exact same thought - you said he was dead!
Sasha froze to her spot, petrified. She could handle corpses, or coroner’s reports, or mysteries. Sasha was intelligent, unkind, firm, socially incompetent, and a Libra. She could handle the dead, but the living? Sasha had no idea what to do with alive people.
But Tim did. He hesitated two moments, reeling back in shock, before he abruptly composed himself. He crouched down to the guy, and modulated his voice to sound calming and firm. “Hey, don’t strain yourself. Are you alright? Do you hurt anywhere?”
The man turned his head in Tim's direction, hiding his expression from Sasha, but she saw Tim’s eyes widen. Martin, standing closer to his feet, wrung his hands - clearly torn on what to do, uncertain how to help. Martin always hated being uncertain how to help the most. Which was pretty unfortunate, because Martin always wanted to help, and Martin was always uncertain. 
“Can you speak?” Tim asked gently. “If you can’t speak, go ahead and knock on the floor for me, okay?”
“If we pack him into your car, we can say that we found him on the street,” Sasha piped up. As much as she distrusted NHS, and as much as the NHS refused to touch anybody who had ever stepped foot inside the Institute, they could hardly refuse somebody if they just lied their ass off about it. “They’ll have to treat him then, right?”
“We could make it so much worse if we move him,” Martin said quickly, just as strangely firm. “We need to take our chances with 999.”
“We don’t even know if he’s injured,” Sasha pointed out, somewhat optimistically. “Maybe this whole thing can just, like, not be a problem.”
Yeah, Sasha definitely preferred corpses. 
The man was opening and closing his mouth, before he coughed wetly. Sasha clinically noted that it was the first time she had seen his chest move. As Tim reached forward, murmuring gently, and helped the man sit up, she saw that his chest didn’t move at all.
“Alright, let’s try to get you up.” Tim helped the man shift so he was leaning against the bookcase - uncomfortable, but a better position if he started coughing up blood. “We should fetch you some water - Martin, I don’t think he has any injury like that, he just seems out of it. His eyes aren’t focusing on me at all.”
Strangely, the man scoffed at that. The sound made him cough again, but the derision was unmistakable.
The derision was extremely familiar. 
When Sasha looked at Martin his eyes were wide behind his glasses, and she knew that he had heard the same thing that she did. 
Finally, with a raspy and hoarse voice, the man said, “Well, isn’t this fucking fun.”
Everybody stared at him. His voice...different, definitely, with a less posh accent and strained vocal cords scratching his tones. But when Sasha glanced at Tim, she just knew that he was remembering when Jon had insisted on coming into work with a terrible cold and Martin had to bully him home. He had sounded eerily like…
“Is this your idea of a joke?” the man said. 
Tim, from where he was crouched next to the guy, turned his attention back to him. “I’m a funny guy, but last time I checked head injuries aren’t a joke.” He tracked his finger across the man’s eyes, frowning when they didn’t follow. “You definitely have a concussion, mate. If you can walk, we need to -”
“Lord, alright, I get it.” The man raised his burned hand and clumsily rubbed his eyes. “You’re mad at me, I’m sleeping on the couch, whatever. Is all of this really necessary?”
“Uh,” Tim said intelligently. “Mate, I’m not your boyfriend.”
The man waved his other hand in Tim’s direction as he pressed his fingers into his eyes in exhaustion. “I’m hardly speaking to you.” Tim’s jaw dropped in shock as the man angled his face upwards, the crown of his head jamming uncomfortably against the metal shelving. “In my defense, I was doing the best I could with the resources you gave me. It’s water under the bridge. I’ve forgotten about it already! So let’s just get back to our eldritch hellscape.”
Everybody stared at each other. 
“We should move this into the break room,” Martin said. “There’s tea there.”
“Oh, don’t be rude,” Jon said, “making Martin into a caricature of himself. You like Martin, you told me so.”
“Counterpoint,” Sasha said weakly, “the bullpen has Jon. And I really don’t want to explain this to Jon.”
“I don’t even know who this one is,” the man said. “What? Not going to tell me?”
“Okay, like, fucking rude, but whatever.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking to,” Tim said firmly, reaching out and putting a firm hand on the man’s arm. The man didn’t recoil or jerk away, just looking down in vague surprise. “But they aren’t here right now. You’re in the basement of the Magnus Institute, alright? I’m Tim Stoker, at your service, and these are my coworkers. I think you have a brain injury. If you can walk, we need to get you -”
“I can’t eat here,” the man said, but he made no effort to remove Tim’s arm. He moved his other hand, pressing it against Tim’s own, as if they were friends. “Cutting me off from my Knowledge -” it was capitalized, Sasha could hear it “ - chaining me to my desk, for - what? You’re not even answering me? Come on!” The man’s voice raised, and for the first time Sasha could hear something ragged in it. “Don’t give me the silent treatment!”
“Jon.”
It was Martin, standing at a distance from the man - from all of them. He was wringing his hands again, shoulders hunched and tense, but his expression was caught in that same mysterious firmness. 
The man didn't react. Not in surprise, not in shock, not in unrecognition. He just scowled a little, ignoring all of them. 
“Jon,” Martin said, louder. “This isn’t solving anything. Don’t be stubborn.”
“I’m not the one being stubborn, Martin,” Jon - Jon?! - muttered, folding his arms. Like an infant. Like, hypothetically, something Jon would do. “I just don’t think omniscient fear gods should be petty.”
Everybody looked at each other. 
“This needs tea,” Martin proclaimed finally, and everybody nodded in silent agreement.
Every nodded in agreement - even, strangely enough, Jonathan Sims himself. 
****
This plan had a few complexities. 
The first complexity was dealing with Jon - their Boss - himself. In an act of cunning psychological warfare, Martin had gone ahead of them and used his endless and infinite subtle acts of manipulation to guarantee that Jon wouldn’t interrupt them. This situation was already Quite A Bit, nobody wanted to babysit their boss. 
Who Sasha frequently felt as if she babysat a bit. Having the youngest person in the office be the very rigid and authoritarian boss was objectively a little funny. But you know what’s not funny? Transphobia. 
Eventually Martin came back and waved them forward, and Tim gently yet firmly dragged the man upwards and put a hand on his back. 
“Do you mind if I touch you?” Tim asked. He sounded resigned about it - barely expecting Jon to respond. “Let me know how you want me to guide you.”
“Oh, it’s whatever. If you’re going to play it this way.” Jon easily looped his arm through Tim’s, who didn’t bother to mask his shock. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Sasha went ahead of them, watching Tim walk Jon down the aisle - hah! - with his arm looped through his elbow and a hand on his back. It was exactly the kind of care and meticulousness that Sasha always saw in him when it came to others. He literally walked grannies across the street. It was horrendous. She got second-hand embarrassed whenever she saw it.
Tim was loudly, extremely, messily kind. He was a person who adopted lost causes, like young men too grumpy to make real friends and women who only knew academia and never people. Sasha told him that once he got his teeth into something he never let go. It would get him into trouble one day. Maybe it already had. 
Sure enough, when Sasha opened the library door for them and peeked her head into the hallway, she saw that Jon’s office door was very firmly shut and locked. Even more incriminatingly, she heard his cute little theater drama monologues starting. Tim had found Jon’s theater aspirations very adorable and he had tried recording them to put on his Snapchat and maybe get him discovered by an agent, but unfortunately the videos made Tim’s phone bleed. They had given Martin ten pounds to taste the blood. Man would do anything for ten pounds, but seeing as they all worked this job that probably applied to all them. 
A workplace made out of people who always picked ‘dare’ in truth or dare. It was kind of a miracle they were still alive. Sasha was a little uncertain how she had survived to thirty five, actually. 
Once Sasha gave the all clear, Tim was able to bring Jon (Neo-Jon? Nega-Jon? Dark Jon? Mean Jon? No, that was just Jon) into the bullpen. Softly narrating what he was doing, he pulled out a chair and lowered Jon into it. 
Homeless Jon hasn’t been blind for very long, Sasha noted clinically. Long enough that he seemed more mildly irritated by it than anything else, but instead of orienting himself or testing out where he was he just kind of slumped in his chair. 
“Jon - uh, the Boss is taken care of?” Tim asked Martin, who was rapidly bustling into the bullpen with four cups of tea that he seemed to be under the impression would help. Tim had sat Homeless Jon in Martin’s chair, which seemed to fluster Martin a bit. 
“Uh, yeah. Gave him a normal statement to get his guard down, then five of the - you know, weird - statements and said that he has to go through all of them today. He’ll be in there for an hour at least.” 
Sasha frowned. “After two he gets a headache and gets bitchy.”
“Three o’clock exactly,” Tim said solemnly.
“Oh, leave off,” Homeless Jon said, “it wasn’t that bad.”
Everybody double taked and looked at each other significantly - which was quickly becoming their predominant mode of communication in a ruthless act of ableism. But Martin just held out a cup of tea, faltering as he clearly stopped to wonder the easiest way to give it to him. 
“Can you hold out your hands, Jon? I have some tea for you. It’s hot, so be careful, okay?”
“If the tea’s spiders I’m going to take it out on Annabelle,” Weird Jon said, but he held out his hands anyway and let Martin put the mug in them. He sniffed it cautiously, checking for spiders, before taking a cautious sip. 
To Sasha and Tim, Martin said, “I know, he’s going to fall asleep after two. I mean, it might be because I drugged his tea a little -”
Weird Jon spat out his tea back into the mug. 
“ - so we shouldn’t be interrupted,” Martin said brightly, clapping his hands. “Now! I think it’s time for explanations, don’t you?” He turned his mighty gaze upon Thankfully Blind Jon, who was occupied carefully holding the tea away from himself. “Drink your tea, Jon.”
Jon drank his tea. His expression twisted. “It tastes just like his.”
Everybody looked at each other. Tim mouthed the word ‘time traveller’ very clearly. Both Sasha and Martin nodded. It was the obvious explanation. 
“An explanation now, please,” Martin said pleasantly. “If you’re a time traveller, you can tell us. This is a safe space.”
Jon-from-the-future’s expression harshened in creases. He hadn’t once relaxed, expression permanently tightened in annoyance and disgruntlement. It was ridiculously Jon. 
Definitely a time traveller. You didn’t work at the Magnus Institute without secretly spending your life deeply hoping you run into a time traveller. Every researcher upstairs secretly prayed to discover the majesty. Everyone in Artifact Storage eagerly gathered around mysterious clocks and dared each other to touch them. Sasha, Queen of Truth-or-Dare, was the undisputed expert in making other people touch weird clocks and recording their reactions.
“Fine,” Super Time Traveller Jon said. “I know this is what you want. Statement of a stupid punishment by the pettiest little color in the evil crayon box. Recorded by the Archivist, in situ. Statement begins.”
Wow, Jon still had his job in the future? That’s a surprise. 
Martin was mouthing the word ‘evil crayon box’ to himself, looking increasingly concerned. The forgotten tape recorder, clenched in Sasha’s fist without her even realizing it, clicked and whirred. 
Then the Archivist began to speak. 
***
In the hazy amber of a memory, there exists an office.
You can see it clearly in your mind’s Eye, even now. You could likely navigate all of it blindfolded - which you now see that your god has the intention to test. Every corner of it is known to you, in the most subtle and mundane of ways. There’s a dust bunny in that corner, never tidied. A mysterious stain on the far right ceiling. The faint smell of blood, just under the vents. The hot waft of tea; your hands wrapped around a mug. 
Through these lonely offices, ghosts roam. They cling to desks and chairs; lingering in favorite mugs or in forgotten hair ties. A metal file cabinet holding neat rows of clothing, blood-stained jackets abandoned. A whiteboard with stubborn flakes of dried marker, forgotten handwriting clinging to life. These imprints no longer evoke terror or grief or pain. They are as familiar as the bloodstains and tea. Even death, eventually, is familiar. After long enough in a nightmare, it becomes indistinguishable from reality. 
There is nothing unfamiliar in the Magnus Institute.
Nothing save these voices, emerging from nothing. Every one of your six million senses have been cut off - your hundred eyes reduced to none. You are cognizant only of two familiar voices, and one unfamiliar one. A firm hand, with calloused fingers from leafing through aged paper. A creaky desk chair - Martin’s, undoubtedly, always squeaking as he fidgeted in distraction. The air tastes the same as it used to back then, before the AC broke and no repairman would step inside to repair it. Daisy did, eventually. Three familiar voices, rendered unfamiliar by the harsh tides of wind and cruel plastic hands. 
You are afraid of very little, these days. In this world that you’ve built, there is nothing that can harm you. The twisted little puppet strung up in his tower has been long since been disposed of, and the awful and terrifying future has settled into a gentle present. The apocalypse grows tedious after a while, and the buffet of fears start tasting a little samey.
But if anything could frighten you, this would. If anything would petrify you, it would be Tim’s kind smile, which died a year before Tim did. If anything could freeze you to your chair, it would be the sight of Sasha with red-rimmed eyes asking why you never even noticed that she was gone. 
The sanctuary of memory corrupted. A mental place of safety infiltrated. A mind turned inside out, exposing its vulnerable flesh to the world. 
There is nothing else this could be but your own personal hell. 
Your loyal servant crouches on bended knee, giving this final prayer to you. He asks, humbly and with great reverence, one simple question:
Why couldn’t this have waited until after I got my milk?
***
The spell ruptured.
It was almost tangible, like a change in air pressure making your ears pop. Sasha blinked harshly, rubbing at her ears and trying to soothe strange ringing. Tim exhaled heavily and Martin screwed his eyes open and shut harshly, as if he was seeing spots. 
The only person unaffected was Weirdly Christian Jon, who was slumped in Martin’s chair with his arms folded over his chest. He was still looking at the ceiling - speaking to whoever he had been addressing this entire time. 
“Just one day,” Jon was saying. “Just one day! It was going to be a nice day! We had decided to take a day trip to the Flesh garden and have a picnic! My darling and beautiful husband was going to make us a cake! ‘Walk down to the Hell corner store’, my husband says. ��Pick us up some Eldritch milk’, he says. ‘Why do I have to do it’, I says, ‘I’m in the middle of something’. ‘We need cake for bridge night with the girls and I’ll divorce you if you don’t do it’, he says. I didn’t even change out of my nightmare pyjamas! What did I ever do to you? How are you still upset about the eye thing?”
Sasha and the Assistants, still digesting the extremely disturbing monologue, let him talk. Sasha was caught up in how it felt exactly like Jon’s little drama monologues. Granted, he had obviously gotten a lot more practice - guy could go to Broadway - but the weird lilting and falling sing-songyness was just the same. And he only ever did that for the very weird ones. The ones that they were pretty certain were actually true. 
So that probably meant at one point in the future, if Jon was speaking about the Archives as if they had worked there for years. Probably during the apocalypse. Which was happening. Which Jon had...built? Like, as a personal thing, or in a metaphor for capitalism and the human race? Definitely the capitalism thing - Jon was prone to flights of filing-induced passion that sometimes accidentally resulted in a stapler flying and punching a hole through the wall, but she couldn’t even imagine him even purposefully punching someone, much less being the Antichrist. Unless it was one of those things that just happened to you, like a rare genetic defect. 
“Seriously. What was the alternative here? Endless horrorterrors, everybody screaming all the time? It was boring. You eat one Statement about somebody standing in line at a slaughterhouse conveyor belt and you’ve eaten them all. I didn’t do it because I didn’t like you, although for the record I don’t. But you have to admit that having Eldritch Lidls are much more practical than just having a bunch of people lying around screaming all the time. It’s not as if I don’t have other eyes, I hardly miss them. There’s no chocolate cakes in the swirling vortex of mankind’s worst nightmares!”
Okay. They had to find a way to engage with this guy. He was completely ignoring them, probably because he thought that they were mean ghosts. Sasha was only one of those things, and it was hurting her feelings. Judging from the expression on Tim’s face he was thinking the same thing. 
Or - wait, Sasha knew that eyebrow. That was the ‘please please please tell the apocalypse has zombies’ eyebrow. Great. 
But Martin was just looking thoughtful again. Sasha was pretty proud of him - it was probably very difficult for the poor man to remain coherent in the face of the crazy time-traveller who was definitely hotter than their already objectively unfairly hot boss. 
“Jon,” Martin said, cutting Jon’s tired rant about how eggs benedict were much better these days, “Uh, I have an idea? Maybe you can’t get out of the - nightmare by bargaining with it. Do you know how to normally escape these things?”
Jon angled his head down and frowned in Martin’s direction. So far Martin seemed to be the only person who could shut Jon up, which was a hilarious turnaround from normal life. Sasha hadn’t heard anything about Martin being a sad little ghost, but it was hard to believe that Martin was a survivor in the zombie apocalypse. 
“You go through the statement and you walk through it,” Jon said, in a very ‘duh’ kind of way. “Give the statement, highfive corpses, whatever.”
“Right, right.” Martin wrung his hands, biting at his lip. “So maybe it’s like that. Maybe instead of asking to be let out - you just have to walk through it. Like - like it’s a maze. Does that make sense? I’m not sure, it’s just an idea.”
Jon pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing. “Right as always, Martin.” Everybody’s jaw dropped, and Martin squeaked. “Fine, fine. Let’s...interact with the evil ghosts.” Jon gestured out with his arms, in a very ‘come at me bro’ gesture. “Go ahead and shoot. Hit me with how much you hate me and how disappointed you are that I never amounted to anything and started the apocalypse.”
Finally! Interrogation time! 
But before Sasha could finally find out if global warming had killed the world, Tim jumped in. “Are there zombies in the apocalypse?!” Tim cried, way too excited. “Is it like the Walking Dead? Or is it more Last of Us?”
Jon squinted in Tim’s direction. “Define zombie.”
“...hunger for human flesh, shambling, gross looking?” Tim rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you still haven’t seen any zombie movies.”
“I’m omniscient, I’ve seen every zombie movie,” Jon lied blatantly. “I just think that you’re - you know, stereotyping. Sometimes people are the undead and eat humans and they’re - they’re very normal people.”
“Yeah, Tim, be sensitive,” Sasha said gleefully. She put the tape recorder on Martin’s desk, deciding that she would definitely need a transcript of this interview later. Also maybe ask more questions about that omniscient thing, but she was sure Jon was just exaggerating. If you asked Jon today if he was the smartest person on Earth he’d probably say yes. Jon wasn’t even the smartest person in the room.
For good measure, she drew out her little notebook from her pencil skirt pocket, flipping through it looking for a clean page. “The Archives have never gotten a time traveller before. This is unprecedented in its history.” Well, she really didn’t know what Gertrude had gotten up to, but she dearly hoped it wasn’t this. “Do you have any warnings? Desperate messages from a ruined world, that kind of thing?”
“I’m not a time traveller,” Jon said flatly, “so no.”
Everybody stared at him in abject pity.
“Mate,” Tim said sympathetically, “it’s 2015. You’re a time traveller.”
“No, I’m in a pocket hell dimension in a period beyond time and space,” Jon corrected arrogantly. “Time travel doesn’t exist.”
“The apocalypse exists but time travel doesn’t exist?” Martin cried. “That’s so unfair! Like, give us something, you know?”
“Your life is very hard,” the extratemporal reject said. 
Typical Jon. A classic case of time travel and here he was denying it. Sasha crossed her arms, upset that they were wasting time debating temporal physics when they could be talking about zombies. She was a historian and had priorities. “Your denial ain’t cute, mate. You’re just wasting all of our time.” Jon opened his mouth, but Sasha steamrolled over him. “You want evidence, right? Do you need to, like, touch my face? Make sure that I’m not a sexy ghost?”
“That’s a stereotype that nobody actually does,” Jon said. 
“Insensitive as always, Sasha,” Martin condemned. 
“How else are we going to prove it to him?” Sasha said, somewhat defensively. “It’s not as if we have any evidence that we’re not sexy ghosts.”
With utmost care and incredible gentleness, Tim reached out an open hand and gently smooshed it into Jon’s face.
Jon slumped in his seat, arms folded, unimpressed. 
“No mortal who is not my darling husband has dared to touch me since I became the Antichrist,” Jon said.
“I don’t know,” Tim said, withdrawing his hand and looking at Sasha. “What’s more unbelievable: Jon as the Antichrist or Jon with a husband?”
“Jon’s gay?” Martin cried, face beet red. “Gay Jon? Gay Jon real?”
“So, like, how do you get the Antichrist gig?” Sasha asked as she silently passed Tim a fiver. Her queerdar had never been so wrong. “Is it like an adventurer quest you can do or would you call it more of a rare genetic disorder thing?”
“Definitely rare genetic disorder.”
“Then does that mean that our Jon also has the Antichrist gene?” Tim asked, alarmed. “You’d never think so just looking at him! It’s always the quiet ones.”
“No, this makes sense,” Martin said.
Tim stared at him. “So, is that, like, a negative for you, or a positive…?”
Martin’s silence was incriminating. 
“It’s a positive,” Jon said helpfully, startling everyone. They had conveniently forgotten not to talk about one very horny man’s very horny crush in front of sad grumpy time travelling crush. “He’s into it.”
“Wow, Jon,” Tim said, “what would your husband say?”
In a completely pointless show of sass, Jon rolled his eyes. “My useless husband is likely much more concerned with how I managed to get trapped in a nightmare dimension on my way back from the Hell corner store.” He waved a hand absently. “So, if we can hurry this up? Get started on the whole torturing me thing? Right now you’re just on track to annoying me to death.”
“We annoy you to death now!” Tim exclaimed, as Martin’s eyes boggled. “Isn’t that more proof for the time traveller theory?”
“It wasn’t annoying,” Jon said curtly. “I secretly enjoyed it. I always felt a little bad that I wasn’t included. Or wouldn’t let myself be included.”
That, abruptly, made everyone feel a little bad. Not guilty, seeing as Jon neither wanted nor deserved their affection, but just kind of bad. Future Jon didn’t seem any happier than regular Jon. Sasha liked to imagine that if she was trapped in an indeterminate period in time and space in a post-apoc hellscape, she’d at least be having fun.
Everybody looked at each other, equally a little uncomfortable. Tim was the one who finally took control of the situation, as the self-appointed Jon & Everyone Else mediator. He had taken up the mantle years ago and worse it with pride, and occasional exhaustion. 
“Look,” Tim said, as reasonably as possible. “Let’s just say, hypothetically, this was super cool and awesome time travel. Let’s also say maybe this was completely baller and you’re from a post apoc future where everyone wears leather.”
“That’s just Melanie.”
“Put it down as one person who wears leather in the future!” Tim cried, and Sasha obediently jotted it down.”But let’s just put all of this in a hypothetical situation where you aren’t...uh, in a bad dream? So would there, hypothetically, be a way to stop the apocalypse or something?”
Jesus christ. What a try-hard. 
Sasha crossed her arms, glaring at Tim. From next to her, Martin looked just as peeved. “Seriously, dude? Like we can just up and stop capitalism?”
“I don’t want responsibility for stopping the apocalypse,” Martin protested. “I can barely navigate the bus system. What if the Terminator comes after my mother or something?”
“You’ll be a bit better off, frankly,” Jon said. Martin nodded, conceding the point, before looking faintly disturbed. 
“But he said that he caused it,” Tim protested. “Maybe the power of friendship can fix this? I mean, the apocalypse is cool, but I feel like this is the part where we’re all badasses and we fight evil or something.” Tim’s eyes widened. “That’s what the Magnus Institute is for. To stop the apocalypse!”
“Every day I feel a slight sense of emptiness due to my internalized guilt about your death, but you are usually wrong about things,” Jon said flatly, which seemed to both perk Tim up and depress him slightly. “And no. There’s nothing you can do. There’s no one event that precipitated the apocalypse; no rules of engagement. You are puppets on strings, indulging in the fantasy of free will. Yes, Sasha, the apocalypse is capitalism.”
Everybody stood in slightly depressed silence over this. Sasha, personally, was a little relieved. She really didn’t have to deal with the whole ‘preventing the apocalypse’ thing. She’d rather spend the finals days of the world in hedonism, frankly. 
Really, the unique providence of the millennial was to live your entire life half-way convinced you were in the twilight years of the world. This hedonism and apathy was second nature. Or maybe the apathy was a Leitner - Sasha had lost track of that too. 
“Aw, man,” Martin said, summarizing the abstract and complex feelings deftly and succinctly. “This sucks.”
“Yeah, this blows,” Tim agreed. “So should I buy my muscle car now, or later, or what?”
Then Martin and Tim started arguing over fuel efficiency in the apocalypse, and Jon royally checked out of the conversation. Sasha imagined that he was internally having a bit of a Saving Private Ryan moment where flashbacks of bombshells exploded behind his eyelids or whatever the fuck. The important thing is that everyone was distracted, and Sasha could finally check up on their most important gambit of the day: making sure Jon wasn’t bothering them. 
Sasha listened carefully for the sounds of Jon’s little theater monologues, and caught only faint hints of sound. She slipped past everyone into the hallway and approached Jon’s office door, pressing her ear against the cheap wood. But she didn’t need to worry: he was still reciting away, oblivious to the actual interesting shit that was happening outside his door. Jon was a delicate plant, you couldn’t stress him out too much or he would die. Hopefully Martin’s drugged tea would kick in soon -
But Antichrist Jon’s head jerked towards her, directly behind him, and Sasha saw his unfocused green eyes fixate directly on her. No, not on her - on the door, or something beyond it. For just a second, his eyes flared a sharp and toxic green. 
“There you are,” Creepy Jon hissed. 
Well, sorry for leaving rooms without telling him, but she hadn’t thought that he even noticed, much less got resentful about it. But Weird Jon was standing up with no hesitation, and effortlessly swerved around Martin’s desk and stalked into the hallway. For the first time, his expression looked a little dangerous. It was bizarre and off putting, like seeing a ragged yet murderous two meter kitten. 
He reached out an arm and let it trail across the wall, stopping short when he felt it hit wood instead of plaster. Tim and Martin surged forward to stop him, yelling warnings, but Sasha quickly stepped back. She never impeded the timeless march of science and progress. Sasha had done far worse in Artifact Storage for knowledge. 
Jon brushed his hand down the door until it hit the doorknob and angrily twisted it, heaving the door open with unnecessary force. Tim and Martin spilled into the hallway as Angry Jon stalked inside, and Sasha eagerly hung in the door frame for a front row seat into the drama. 
“This is your fault,” Jon intoned dangerously, directly in the face of a deathly affronted Jon. 
In the spirit of the First Directive, Sasha heroically stretched out an arm and prevented Tim and Martin from spilling into the office. It was the right call. Jon stalked forward into the office, hair whipping in a nonexistent wind, expression obscured but undoubtedly thunderous, advancing on the terrified Archivist, as -
He tripped over a chair left carelessly in the center of the office, rocketing forward to land flatly on his face. 
Beside her, Martin went white as a sheet. “Oh no.”
Simultaneously, in complete and total unison, Jon and the Archivist yelled, “Martin!”
****
Jon and the Archivist sat across from each other, exuding waves of pure mutual hatred.
Tim had quickly helped the Archivist up, moving the chair forward and getting him situated there. The Archivist’s mood was not improved by any of this. Which was difficult enough to handle by itself, if manageable. Sasha knew how to manage grumpy time travelling blind Antichrists who had gotten lost on their way to the corner store.
She even knew how to handle their boss, who was extremely grumpy about being harassed by a random homeless person with nice hair. Jon hated statement givers at the best of times, much less seemingly homeless ex-corpses. Or, well, Sasha didn’t know if he was an ex-corpse, but he was certainly an animate one. 
They were both being so annoying about it Sasha was trying to determine if she should change their nicknames to something more derogatory. Thing 1 and Thing 2? Too long. 
Both of them were very grumpy about the fact that Martin had pushed aside the chair for guests in front of Jon’s desks when he deposited the drugged tea, accidentally moving it close to the center of the office. Jon had known this because he saw it happen. The Archivist had known this because he, apparently, knew Martin very well. 
Today had really been a bonding experience with Sasha, Martin, and Tim. Their skill at silent communication had reached borderline telepathy. They all looked at each other significantly as the Jons were caught in their mutual dyad of hatred, silently commiserating over the fact that their one goal had been spoiled by the greatest wildcard of all. Sasha privately liked to consider herself somewhat of a wildcard, but she was depressingly aware that the entire Archive team was composed of wildcards. Maybe that’s why half of them didn’t survive the apocalypse. 
It was a little unlikely that Jon was a survivor/instigator in the zombie apocalypse, actually. Dude definitely would have bit it if he wasn’t cheating with Antichrist powers. Now, if Sasha had Antichrist powers, this whole game would be looking very different -
“Boss, this is a statement giver,” Tim hinted desperately, hands clenched so hard on the back of the Archivist’s chair that his knuckles were turning white. “Remember what Elias said about statement givers? About how we can’t harass them?”
“I was in the middle of a recording and this man was unnecessarily confrontational,” Jon said crisply. Sasha caught her eye jumping frantically back and forth between the two, trying to reconcile them. Honestly, if it wasn’t for Martin’s horny surety, she wouldn’t have realized that they were the same person at all. The Archivist’s most defining attribute was his big and fluffy hair, and Jon was sadly lacking in the nice hair department. That fade and twists were the shackle around his ankle. So was the sweater vest, baggy tweed jacket, and ill-fitting.“He’s lucky I’m not throwing him out.”
Martin, who looked as if he was having his tenth gay crisis of the morning, didn’t seem to hold the same opinion, but he was king of bad taste anyway. 
“Remember what Elias said about harassing confused, blind statement givers? Remember that? Boss?”
Jon looked confused. “He didn’t specify the community of people with disabilities.”
“It was implied? Jon?”
“The optics would be terrible,” Sasha said, before snickering. Martin stomped on her foot. She stomped on his back, which definitely hurt a lot more. “Look, Jon, sorry about all of this. He was just - uh - really insistent that he talk to you -”
“I think if our visitor hassles Jon then maybe, objectively, you can say that Jon brought it on himself,” Martin said, in a daring show of anti-Jon sentiment.
This act of subtle rebellion was the first thing that broke the Archivist out of his cycle of hatred. He threw out a hand, bowling over Jon’s desktop cup of pens and sending them tumbling over the desk. Sasha saw him specifically orient his hand to do so. “Thank you, Martin! Your understanding of paraphysics is always immaculate.”
“Wow, really?”
“Stop complimenting my assistants,” Jon hissed, frantically diving to save his pens. “And stop - gesticulating over my desk! You did that on purpose!”
“Harassing the blind, Jon!”
“You don’t even need to tearfully blame me for how I ruined your life,” the Archivist said flatly. “You existing in my vicinity is torment enough.”
“That’s what I keep saying,” Sasha said, before pausing a beat. “I meant the first part, ha ha ha, obviously -”
“This man is a very normal statement giver who will be leaving any minute now,” Martin jumped in, “so there’s really no reason for us all to fight, when you think about it -”
“If you all don’t get out of my office, you are all fired -”
“You are listening.”
Everybody stopped talking at once, staring at the Archivist. He was still staring intently ahead, straight into his counterpart. Jon was hiding it, quite badly, but he was unsettled. He hadn’t even acknowledged that he and the man looked alike - the thought undoubtedly running through his brain and soundly dismissed - but it was clearly rattling him. But there was something else that was scaring him too - maybe the Archivist’s green eyes, so foreign from his own brown? His intense and furious expression, like cut glass? The particularly strange and heavy feeling in the air, prickling down the back of Sasha’s neck?
He hadn’t even stopped the recorder. 
“You are here,” the Archivist continued calmly. “You were listening in. Why you were listening in on him, and his regurgitated aftertaste of Statements, I do not know. I felt you, and I came to you. We cannot forsake each other. Do not hide yourself from me.”
The effect was immediate. 
The Archivist’s neck snapped forward, so harshly he cracked his head on Jon’s desk. Strangely enough, Jon screamed too, holding a hand to his temple as if he was suddenly pierced by a blinding headache. Tim immediately bent down to check on Archivist, making sure that he hadn’t hurt himself, as Martin bustled around the desk to check on Jon. Jon batted his hands away, scowling, so he was just fine. But the Archivist didn’t groan, or stir, or moan. He just lay there, still and limp, and when Tim shook him he didn’t even tense. 
The air was heavy, a tang of metal in her mouth like the crackle before a storm, and Sasha couldn’t fight a shiver. But she couldn’t take her eyes off Jon, either: the way he stared at the Archivist, hand on his forehead, eyes wide and growing wider. 
“Dad…?”
When the Archivist stirred, the spell was broken, and Jon’s mouth snapped shut so quickly it was as if he had never spoken at all. He turned his head and moaned, eyes opening uselessly. They were back to their usual toxic green, no flaring or flashing. 
“Mar’in? Where…”
“I’m here,” Martin said quickly, and ducked around the desk to grab the Archivist’s hand and squeeze. For just a second, Jon looked a little jealous. Sasha had the sense that Jon had never been mothered than anyone other than Martin and Tim, and the prospect confused and frightened him so much he reacted aggressively to it. “Everything alright? You hit your head.”
“How many eyes?” the Archivist asked weakly. 
“...physically, or functionally?”
But the Archivist just ran his burned hand over his smooth hand, kneading it and feeling the skin. “Still gone. Damn it.” He straightened, grimacing and spitting out a stray tendril of hair out of his mouth. “So it’s true…”
“So what’s true?” Tim asked urgently. “Do you finally believe us about the time travel thing? Because man, I have so many questions -”
He didn’t get the opportunity to say anything. The Archivist reached out a hand, fingers brushing against his shirt, and the Archivist’s hand abruptly clenched on the fabric. Tightly, roughly, the Archivist pulled him down and extended his other arm, and caught Tim in an awkward and lopsided hug. 
Tim carefully straightened him and returned the hug, gracing the Archivist with the patented Perfect Stoker Hug, and the Archivist buried his face in Tim’s shoulder. His chest didn’t heave, and his breath didn’t catch, but the element of desperation was pungent and unmistakable. 
“You were right,” Jon whispered. “We messed it all up.”
“Sure, yeah, totally!” Tim said, clapping the Archivist on the back in a masculine, yet sensitive way. “So, does this mean the zombie apocalypse is totally a-go, or…”
“Sasha,” the Archivist said, and Sasha chose to ignore her own personal distaste for hugs and being touched so she could step forward and hug him too. 
He clutched onto her just as tightly as he had Tim, which surprised her a little. Jon and Tim had probably been best friends in the future, and Sasha couldn’t imagine her and Jon ever truly being close. He respected her as a colleague, but that was probably because Sasha purposefully left her manuscripts around the office and aggressively used as many big words in front of him as possible. Jon had always been an obstacle to her - innocently stupid at best, malicious at worst. To think that he would grip her so tightly…
With meticulous care, the Archivist separated from her. His expression was crumpled, and for the first time Sasha saw something over than aggravation or impatience in Jon’s face. Relaxed and soft, he looked like a different man. No - he was a different man, it was just apparent. The change softened his sharp lines into something a little friendlier; his striking exterior melting into something pretty instead of imposing. 
Slowly, he raised his hand a little to tangle it in her hair. He frowned a little, gently tugging at it and feeling it spring back into place. “So it was curly…like mine…”
A lot of little hints snowballed into one strange and foreign realization. “Do you not remember me?”
“Dolls stole your identity,” the Archivist said apologetically. 
“Like credit card fraud, or -”
“Metaphysically.” He paused guiltily. “I mourned you as an abstract concept?”
“Like I’m every woman in Hollywood?” Sasha screeched, outraged. This was not trans rights. “Alright, royally fuck that. Feel my hair, mister. Full permission to touch it. Feel that? You call that abstract?” The Archivist shook his head, eyes wide, and Sasha gently moved his hand to rest on the top of her head. “Taller than you in eight cm heels, remember? You asked me how I walked in them, and I said -”
“ - Barbie’s Princess Charm School,” the Archivist said automatically, eyes widening. “I do remember.”
Martin clearly waited around to be tenderly embraced, and was disappointed. 
The Archivist stepped away from Sasha, expression creased in furious thought. “So it’s real. So far as anything’s real, I suppose. But I don’t understand how -” the Archivist’s eyes widened, and he snapped his fingers in realization. “The manhole!”
Everybody stared at him. 
“I’m sorry,” Jon said pleasantly, “what is going on -”
“I was walking down the street, and I remember hearing city work!” the Archivist said brightly. “They were doing their monthly ‘clearing the gators out of the sewer pipes’ maintenance! And the Beholding told me that there was an open manhole, and I said oh it’ll be fine, I’m a demigod on Earth, I don’t fall down manholes - and then -”
The door to Jon’s office dramatically crashed open, and everybody jumped straight in the air. Jon, whose office had seen two more incredibly theatrical entrances than usual today, immediately bristled and opened his mouth to earn them all another harassment complaint, before he abruptly shut his mouth. 
It was Elias, their miniature and unspeakably boring boss extraordinaire. He stood in the doorway, one hand clutching the doorframe, suit jacket askew and chest heaving. Had he ran down here?
“Is someone here?” the Archivist asked. 
“Uh, yeah,” Tim said, stepping forward cautiously. “It’s our boss, Mr. Bouchard. Elias, we’re taking a statement, can we help - ?”
“How did that get here?” Elias asked, voice strangely tense and coiled. “How did you - not even I could -”
“That makes sense!” Martin cried, thumping a fist on his open palm. “Elias wants to time travel just as much as everyone else in the Institute!”
“I’m sorry,” Jon said, pathetically behind, “time travel -”
“Did the time traveller sensor alarms in the basement go off?” Sasha asked, surprised. “I thought only Artifact Storage had those.”
“Uh, Mr. Statement Giver, are you okay?” Tim asked, but it was already too late.
The Archivist had turned to face Elias, expression unreadable. Sasha felt that crackle again, weighing down the air, and she saw the Archivist’s hair puff and frizz slightly with a green crackle. His neon green pupils shone again and spun, like an infernal wheel. 
“What’s wrong, Elias?” the Archivist mocked, as energy coursed through him. “Upset that Mama has a new favorite?”
And Sasha saw in that moment that the Archivist, who possessed the most inhuman green eyes she had ever seen, had eyes the same shade as Elias. 
“Oh, man,” Sasha said, “is Elias a time traveller too?”
“Only in the most mundane way. Can’t even get a little bit of special attention, Elias? Sad!” It was second-hand thrilling to watch someone mock their boss, living the dreams of everyone in the room. Even if it was a little weird how much Jon seemed to hate this guy - nobody hated Elias, just like nobody liked him, and nobody had any strong feelings at all besides unpromoted women.
 At the door, Elias’ expression was slack in - amazement? Was amazement the right word? He was staring at Jon as if...words didn’t even describe it. At least in any way that Sasha wanted to think about. 
“Mr. Bouchard, I swear I can explain,” Sasha, who could not explain, said hurriedly. “We found this corpse and we were going to tell you, but -”
But the Archivist cut her off, as if nothing was less important than explaining himself to Elias. “Did you want to know how to stop the apocalypse, Sasha?”
Sasha froze. Martin and Tim did too. Jon, who nobody had actually bothered to brief since he was kind of the fifth most important person in the room, dropped his pen. “Uh,” Sasha said, sweating. For the first time she understood the possible upsides of not knowing something. “I mean, if I have to, but you said that it was inevitable -”
“Oh, yes. But, just once every one or two centuries, a man comes along who fancies himself fate.” The Archivist raised a hand, eyes spinning and spinning, as Elias stood frozen in the doorframe. “I’ll be honest, Jonah. This isn’t to save the world. That’s so last year. I just really fucking hate you.” Something cracked in the air. “Ceaseless watcher, smite this -”
The door slammed shut. Sasha heard Elias lock it behind him. They all stood around as footsteps quickly echoed through the Archives, and another door slammed. Which was probably being locked too. 
They stood in silence, the Archivist having clearly heard the slams. He let his hand fall, but the energy didn’t cease crackling around him. He didn’t look resentful or disappointed - just thoughtful. 
“Everything in due time, I suppose. I guess it is pretty unfair to get to smite that man twice,” the Archivist said thoughtfully. “I’ll give someone else a turn.” His mouth twitched wryly. “You know, Sasha, there’s one other way to prevent the apocalypse.”
“Is it work?” Sasha asked tiredly. 
“You may kill the man who arranged the dominos,” the Archivist intoned, before hanging his head towards a petrified Jon. “Or you may kill the man who toppled them over.”
Sasha stared at Jon. Jon stared back, frozen like a deer in headlights.
Martin silently passed Sasha a penknife from Jon’s desk. 
“I’m very qualified for this job,” Jon protested weakly.
“Queen of feminism, I very much support you,” Tim said quickly, putting himself in between Sasha and Jon in a heroic display of stupidity, “but, maybe, killing your boss to take his job, is perhaps, maybe not that much of a great idea, just a thought?”
“The job’s being the Antichrist,” the Archivist pointed out, crossing his arms. 
“The direct action against sexism, xenophobia, and transphobia is very admirable,” Tim said, eyes held up as if he was placating a tiger, “but think of it this way - if you kill the Antichrist, then you become the Antichrist, like in - uh -”
“Pokemon,” Martin volunteered. 
Tim snapped his fingers. “Pokemon! So you shouldn’t -” He halted, turning back to Martin. “Pokemon? Seriously? That’s becoming champion -”
“A - alright, alright! Everybody stop!” Jon shakily stood up, brushing aside the empty tea mug right next to him. “That’s enough of all of this! I may not know what’s going on, or who this man is, or why he looks like me -”
“Hm,” Martin said, eyeing the empty tea mug. 
“ - why he looks like a homeless person, why he barged into my office and insulted me, why you are all defending this atrocious behavior, why you are calling it the work of time travel, which does not exist and you have no proof for it anyway -”
“Jon,” Martin said, watching Jon’s arm tremble, “maybe you should -”
“Shut up, Martin!”
“Don’t be rude to him!” the Archivist snapped. 
“You’ve been rude to him twice today!”
“I’m allowed to be rude to him! He’s even ruder to me! I’m the nice one!”
“ - and you were glowing in my office, which is just frankly rude,” Jon continued viciously, steamrolling over the Archivist. “You gave me a terrible headache, you hugged my assistants very inappropriately for the workplace, you made my boss walk in before trying to smite him, you encourage violence against my own person in revenge for a job that I definitely deserve -”
Both of Jon’s arms were shaking, and Tim’s eyebrows were slowly raising. “Boss, you should sit down, I think -”
“ - I want an explanation!” Jon yelled, slamming the desk. “And I’m not going to stop until you tell me what’s going on!”
Then Jon passed out. 
Everybody watched it happen. Everybody, save perhaps the Archivist, had noticed that it was about to happen: at first a tremor, then a shake, and then a final collapse. Like a marionette with his strings cut, Jon slumped over and crumpled solidly on the floor. 
Everybody stood in disaffected silence. Martin carefully stepped over and prodded Jon with his foot. “Out cold.” He shot a considering gaze at the empty tea mug. “Sorry, guys. Looks like I accidentally used the delayed action sedative.”
"It’s alright,” Tim said magnanimously. “At least that problem is solved now. Maybe we can convince him this was a bad dream when he wakes up.”
“If he insists it was real, we’ll just ask him for evidence and refuse to believe him without it,” Sasha suggested. 
“Isn’t that kinda gaslighting?” Martin asked. “Isn’t that, you know, a little morally dubious -”
“You did drug him,” Tim pointed out.
“I mean, hardly the first time?”
“Maybe Martin should be the Antichrist,” Sasha said thoughtfully.
The Archivist’s face was doing something extremely interesting, yet inscrutable.
“I really don’t want to be Antichrist, though,” Martin said apologetically. “Does it even pay?”
“Jon did say it was a job…” Sasha said, already considering herself in the role. “Do you guys think I’d be sexier as the Antichrist? Be honest.”
“Yes and completely,” Tim said immediately, before realizing that he said that too quickly. “I mean. I’d never objectify you. I respect women. But -”
“Oh, I see how it is,” Martin said, throwing up his hands. “When you think being the Antichrist is kind of hot it’s normal and M/F of you. But when I do it, then it’s ‘gross’ and ‘get that away from me’. Great double standards, guys.”
“It’s not the fact that it’s a guy,” Tim protested, “it’s the fact that it’s Jon -”
“Oh, when you think being the Antichrist is kind of hot then it’s normal and cis of you,” Sasha said heatedly, “but when Tim respects trans women, then it’s ‘gross’ and -”
“I respect all women,” Tim said, equally heatedly, “but I do want to acknowledge the systematic marginalization of trans women within the community, especially trans women of color like yourself -”
A hoarse wheeze echoed through the office.
Everyone froze, terrified by the haunted sound, but after a second Sasha realized it was the Archivist - Jon - who was laughing. 
They had never heard him laugh before. He was practically wheezing with it, bent over with his hands on his knees, with a strained cackle that fizzed with static around the corners. He was smiling broadly, his grin splitting his cheeks, for the first time that Sasha had ever seen. 
He straightened and threw his head back and laughed too, a greater belly-laugh that was so hysterical and fragile and free that it struck something strange and raw in Sasha’s heart. He rubbed his face with his hand, still laughing, and eventually broke into coughs. 
“I understand now,” Jon said, when he stopped coughing. “I thought that you had deposited me here in revenge. You had sensed that I was happy - that the green skies were beautiful, that your large eye seemed kind that day - and that you found it a waste of emotion. But that wasn’t true, was it? It must have been an accident. I’ve never been happier to hear these idiots arguing, and you’ve lost me like a toy behind a bookshelf. The strange stupidity of it! I’m enchanted.” He sombered a little, expression falling from hysterical glee into a soft and resigned happiness. He held up his hand, feeling the crackle of electricity run across his palms. “But you See me now. The foolish man brought you down upon us, and I intercepted your lightning bolt. His eyes, mundane and paltry, are closed, and you feel my consciousness in replacement of him. I can feel you already - my Eyes opening, the Reality that we built together calling me back. When your infinite grace re-aligns with every one of my atoms, forming the fabric of my world, I’ll snap back.”
Just like that?
Sasha had thought that there would be an...adventure, or quest, or something. At least a research binge. Some kind of heroic group effort. But the Archivist was a stretched rubber band, held tightly and out of position, and after long enough straining against its center it had to snap back. A telly flickering in and out, blaring the song of a dead channel. 
“Do we have time to group hug or something?” Tim offered weakly, undoubtedly thinking the same thing as she was. “Last goodbyes? Anything?”
“Howl’s Moving Castle moment?” Martin asked urgently. “I’ll find you in the future, right? We’re still together there, right?”
“Martin,” Jon said, strangely fond, “we were never apart.”
Martin turned a unique shade of red. 
But it was Sasha who Jon turned to, face angled to the sound of her voice. His expression was still distantly fond, but there was something strange in it too - a wry recognition, a subtle knowledge, a faint recollection of a joke that only he knew. 
“Sasha,” Jon said, “so long as you’re brave, and buy ten fire extinguishers and hide them around the office, things will be just fine. Buy twelve fire extinguishers, just to be safe. And don’t ever go inside Artifact Storage again. Not even for Alicia’s birthday party. If it’s a choice between worms and Artifact Storage then choose worms, the scars add a certain appeal. I cannot stress enough, not even if you lose your jacket in Artifact Storage -”
“Are you sure you don’t have anything to say to me?” Martin asked desperately, almost crying. Sasha, personally, wanted to circle back around to the worm thing. “Sad goodbyes? Waving a handkerchief? I thought you said I was alive? Don’t you have anything?”
Jon rolled his eyes. “Goodness, Martin, if you insist. There is something I’ve been meaning to tell you. In fact, I do believe it’s about time.” 
Martin’s mind clearly projected very loudly ‘I’ve been in love with you this entire time’ in blatant wish-fulfillment. Everybody held their breaths. 
Jon drew himself up to his full, imposing height, and sternly looked at all of them. “I’m tired of holding my tongue about this, Martin,” Jon said finally, and Martin qualified. “For the last time, I don’t load the dishwasher wrong. I load the dishwasher correctly. It’s you who’s always insisting that the cups go on the bottom. It’s a freakish way to live your life, and I’ll never forgive you for -”
Static blared in Sasha’s ears and overwrote her mind, and she screamed. The sensation was a pickaxe driven into her ears, an unforgivable rip and tear, and she heard her screams echoed in concert. 
Then the pain abated, and was gone. 
Sasha, Tim, and Martin were left standing in an empty office, accompanied only by the unconscious figure of their boss. There was nothing left of the Archivist, nor any suggestion that he had ever been here - just a drained mug, some scattered pens, and a lingering sense of malaise and confusion. 
Everybody looked at each other, feeling strangely and uniquely connected. It was hardly Sasha’s strangest Magnus Institute experience, but maybe it was the funnest. 
“Well,” Tim said finally, “at least one day this week wasn’t boring.”
“Yeah, I didn’t even have to get drunk today.” Sasha sighed. “We definitely have to gaslight Jon about this.”
Martin was already carefully lugging Jon onto his chair, arranging him so his arms were folded on the desk with his cheek resting on his forearm. “We’ll pretend it was just a weird dream.” He propped his hands on his hips, satisfied. “Hopefully this convinces him he needs more sleep.” Martin gasped in sudden realization. “Maybe he becomes the Antichrist because he needs more sleep! Guys, I have a great twenty step plan for saving the world.”
“Oh, come on, we said that was too much work.” Tim shrugged and opened the office door, holding it open and gesturing for them all to come out. “I think if we just friendship Jon to death, all of our problems will be solved.”
Martin just shrugged, following him out. They really did have paperwork that they needed to get back to. “Both are vital components. But...hey, it’s not weird to put the mugs on the bottom rack, is it? There’s not really that much of a difference, right?”
“Mate, you’re a fucking freak.” Tim looked backwards at Sasha, who was still standing in the office, dazed. “Sash, you coming? Let’s go day-drinking.”
“Yeah,” Sasha said, “in a sec.”
He shrugged and left the door propped open, and Sasha heard their bickering fade slowly as they walked down the hallway. 
But she couldn’t help staring at Jon sleeping at his desk, chest falling in and out, inhaling and exhaling slowly through his nose. His short, carefully maintained hair and meticulous fade. His baggy tweed and ill-fitting slacks. The subtle and shameful kind of earnestness, the desire mixed with fear mixed with hope mixed with genuine desire for a better future. He just wanted to be happy, to not be afraid anymore. He seemed weirdly human, when compared with his inhuman self. Or maybe it was the other way around. 
The tape recorder on Jon’s desk was still running. Sasha squinted at it, taking a second to listen to the staticy hiss. It was familiar, in the strangest possible way. It felt familiar -
Sasha reached out and grabbed the tape recorder, stuffing it in her pencil skirt pocket. “Just remember,” Sasha whispered, “I’d make a great candidate for Antichrist.”
She ran to go catch up with her coworkers, shutting the door behind them and leaving Jon sleeping contentedly in his office, head pillowed on his arms, dreaming strange and comforting dreams.
545 notes · View notes
honklore · 4 years ago
Text
landslide | karl jacobs
(kindergarten teacher!karl, single mom!reader, oh no karl’s apartment gets flooded so he has to stay at his best friend from high school’s house who also happens to be the mother of his favorite student, karl just being soft and sweet and a great friend, um talk about the baby daddy being a loser essentially, the beast team is there playing the role of karl’s friends from school, graham is the sweetest child, slight angst, fluff, friends to lovers, SOFT KARL, warmth, comfort, romance coded but very light)
listen to: landslide by fleetwood mac, never grow up by taylor swift, growing up by river run north, rainbow by kacey musgraves
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Karl helps one of his kids press their palms onto the wall. When they release their palm, pink paint remains, making a sort of leaf to the tree branches painted onto the wall.
“Now write your name,” Karl advises another kid, whose orange paint had already dried.
“G-R-A-H-A-M,” the boy writes out with a large permanent marker. “Can I take a picture? For my mom?”
All the rest of the children begin to shout their agreements, also wanting to bring home a picture for their parents. Karl grabs his yellow Polaroid camera and takes a picture of each handprint.
He keeps all of the pictures in the chest pocket of his denim jacket. “Okay, guys— to the sink! Whoever has the cleanest hands gets to help me pass out snacks!”
“Why are we having snack time so early?” It’s Graham that asks, the little one always eager to be around Karl.
Karl ignores the boy’s paint covered hands poking at his clean jacket, and answers him as politely as he can. “Mr. Jacobs forgot his lesson plans today, so we’re going to watch a movie instead.”
“A movie?” Graham’s eyes widen.
“Yep,” Karl giggles. He crouches down to Graham’s level and whispers, “You wanna pick it?”
“Nature Nut!” Graham cheers almost immediately, causing Karl to wince.
Ah, yes, the wonderful little DVDs of a lonesome man teaching the watcher about bugs and weird types of slugs. Karl actually has the entire collection, and Graham happens to adore them just as much as Karl did when he was a kid.
“Alright, go wash your hands and I’ll get it started.”
It’s a little girl named Hana who cleans her hands the best, so she passes out organic fruit gummies to everyone while Karl puts in the DVD.
While they watch the video, Karl checks his text messages.
There’s one from Chris: “I’ve already got Chandler on the couch. Sorry, man. You can have the floor, but it’s not gonna be comfy :(“
Right. Karl forgot that Chandler lives in the same complex as him. His apartment is probably just as flooded as Karl’s is. Now if the landlord would just answer his calls and help him... maybe this situation wouldn’t be so stressful.
Karl didn’t forget his lesson plans; they’re just submerged in his bedroom with everything else Karl has left lying on his carpet. And maybe it’s his fault for not buying more storage bins, but a studio apartment can only hold so much stuff.
Serves Karl right for doing his lesson plans at home instead of at the school like most of his fellow kindergarten teachers.
He lets out a quiet sigh, careful not to disturb the children. He only has a short list of friends left to ask, and while he doesn’t think they’ll mind him asking, he really hates to put anyone in that position.
Besides, most of his friends have roommates or significant others and Karl doesn’t want to ruin their routine. He’d hate to intrude. And he could always sleep in his car for a few days, but the amount of stuff he had to pack because of the flooding has barred any chance of a good night’s sleep.
The video ends, and Karl gets the kids seated with coloring pages until their parents arrive.
One by one, he I.Ds the parents and tells the kids goodbye, helping them put on their coats and take home whatever library book they picked out earlier.
Finally, there’s only one kid left, and Karl is a bit embarrassed of his hyper-awareness to Graham. It’s not even his fault, really. Graham just has a beautiful mom, who happens to be Karl’s beautiful friend, and sometimes Karl gets eager to see you during pickup time.
Whatever. It’s no big deal.
The kindergartener already has his coat on. His curly brown hair is almost unruly as he continues to work on his coloring sheet.
Karl pulls at the hem of his sage sweater sleeves and wonders if his hair looks okay. Maybe he should invest in a little desk mirror; or maybe that’s vain.
“Hey, Karl! Sorry I’m late!” You rush in, holding on to your leather messenger bag. You fix your glasses before they fall off the bridge of your nose, and Karl is so focused on the movement that he almost forgets about your child.
Until said child is scolding his mother. “Mom! You have to call him Mr. Jacobs! It’s rude to call him Karl!”
“Your mom is an adult,” Karl reminds Graham (as soon as he finds his voice.) “Since she isn’t a student, it’s okay for her to call me Karl.”
Graham pinches his lips together, and then shrugs. “Fine. Mom, we watched Nature Nut today.” He runs up to you and wraps his arm around your middle. “Can we go to the park and look for slugs?”
“Sure,” you giggle. “But we need to get home soon, okay, Bud? I have to make dinner and then we have to clean up the mess we made last night.”
Graham turns to Karl and smiles naughtily, like the trickster he often is. “Mom said I could tear up her papers last night. She said it’s There-pee.”
“Ther-a-py,” you emphasize for the five-year-old.
Karl studies your face, and he can tell that you seem a little more stressed than usual. “Therapy, huh?”
You smile sheepishly. “Well, when your son catches you tearing up old love notes, you have to let him in on the fun, right?”
“You are a team,” Karl acknowledges. He wants to ask more; wants to dig into your heart and extract whatever is hurting you, but your son is standing between the two of you, waiting for him to say goodbye. Karl clears his throat and picks at his sweater again. “Anyways, uh, text me tonight? Let me know you two got home safe. And, I’ll see you both tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” you breathe. You smile at him and then take Graham’s hand. “Thanks, Karl. I’ll text you.”
Karl spends the night at a motel down the road. He texts a few of his friends and hopes for good news in the morning, or at least a confirmation from his landlord.
When you text him, a little selfie of you and Graham, holding up what looks like microwaved s’mores, his heart grows fond, and he forgets about his own problems for a moment.
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Life has never been very easy for you. From the get-go, you have always been destined to fail, growing up with an absent father and an overworked mother. With a dead-end dream like yours (writing, of all things), it’s no wonder you clung to what little breaths of freedom you had.
He was handsome and bold, with a carefree smile and brown eyes that mirrored the sun. The lead singer of a band, with a voice like chimes. And you fell just as hard as one of your many protagonists. Perhaps the mistake always lay in the fact that you put too much fantasy into reality. You have always romanticized the littlest things, and that comes back to bite you more often than not.
You never expected one: to get pregnant your senior year of high school, and two: have to go through it alone.
Of course, most people you come to love leave eventually. It’s something you have always remembered; something that sticks in the back of your brain like gum to the bottom of your child’s Spider-man skechers.
Graham is the only constant in your life. Though you’ve been blessed with a decent job editing for a webazine company, and you can work from home more often than not, Graham is the real thing that keeps you alive.
He’s the most precious boy, with brown curls and big brown eyes. He favors his father, and though that should deter you, it reminds you of innocent days, and it gives a new meaning to brown eyes. Graham is not his father, and he never was.
Graham certainly got his love of learning from you. Though he likes science more than writing, you adore how eager he is to always get to school. It helps that Karl is his teacher.
Karl’s been your friend since freshman year of highschool, when the two of you both took the same creative writing class the local university offered. Though the two of you had differing end goals, you often studied together and encouraged each other. He was there when you found out you were pregnant, and he was there when you found out you’d be raising your child alone.
Now life comes full circle, and you see him twice a day. You could go out on a limb and say he brightens up most mornings, but you would still give that slot to your son.
Karl is standing at the doorway now, greeting all of his students and helping them take off their book bags and coats. He’s wearing monochrome today: red pants, a red sweater, and red shoes.
Graham lights up almost immediately, and you are thankful today that you decided to dress Graham in his red t-shirt. “Mom! We match!”
“I know,” you grin, squeezing his hand.
Karl glances at Graham, and then you. His cheeks showcase that same pink hue they always do, and while it should clash with his red garments, it doesn’t. “Hey, Karl.”
“Hey,” he grins, cheeks full at the sight of you two.
Graham spreads his arms and waits for Karl to help him take off his jacket. “Do you see that we match, Mr. Jacobs?”
“Yo, that’s awesome, Little Man!” Karl gives Graham a fist bump that seems to appease him, and you wait for Graham to run to his friends before addressing Karl.
“How have you been?”
Karl sighs. He brushes his hair away from his eyes. “Okay. My- uh- my studio apartment flooded so I’m staying at a motel until my landlord can get me estimates on when I can come back home.”
“That sucks,” you frown. “You know, if you need a place to stay, I have a pullout couch in my office. And obviously, Graham wouldn’t mind.”
Karl pales. “Are you serious? I didn’t mean to suggest anything, Like I know you work from home and you need your office.”
“And you’ll be at school until three,” you say. “I’ll work then. C’mon, Karl. I don’t like knowing one of my friends has no place to stay.”
Karl bites his bottom lip and scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll drive over after I check out of the motel.”
“Great!” You smile. “I’ll order pizza.”
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"Graham, clean your room," you say, struggling to push your desk against your office wall. "We're going to have a guest for a few weeks."
"Mom," Graham whines, "They aren't going to look in my room."
You begin to take the cushions out of the spare couch to start setting up the pull-out bed. "Mr. Jacobs is coming over, Graham.  Don't you want to show him your collections?"
Graham's brown eyes grow wide. "Mr. Jacobs? You didn't tell me he was coming!"
"He's going to be staying with us for a little bit, okay? So I need you to be on your best behavior."
“Can I show him my worms?” Graham asks, alluding to the compost bin in the small backyard of your townhouse.
“Yes,” you say, thankful that he isn’t putting up much of a fight toward cleaning. You’re also thankful he isn’t asking any questions, as Graham always seems to have a few at the top of his tongue.
Graham cleans up his room quickly. You know for a fact that he’s just shoved all of his toys under his bed, but it’s enough until the weekend, when you’ll have more time to help him organize.
The little guy hoards rocks like no one’s business. You curse the day Karl decided to teach the kids about geodes.
“Wanna help me make up Mr. Jacobs’s room?” You half-yell, while grabbing spare bedding out of your linen closet.
Graham’s little footsteps are head before he answers, and soon he’s at your hip with a quick, “He can have my Frozen pillowcase!”
You hesitate to tell Graham that his Frozen pillowcase is currently on one of your pillows, but just you can’t give your guest a dirty pillowcase. “That one is in the wash, Buddy. Why don’t we give him your Spider-Man one?”
“So he matches my pajamas!” Graham is easily pleased, and he even takes one of his stuffed bears to add to Karl’s made-up bed. (“So he doesn’t get scared at night.”)
By the time the pizza arrives, Karl is just behind, so you keep Graham busy with a slice of cheese and a glass of diet pepsi (only half of a can, and only because it’s a special occasion) while the two of you bring in Karl’s stuff.
He surprisingly didn’t bring much, and when you ask about it, he grimaces. “My studio is pretty small so a lot of my stuff was on the ground and got mildewed. Other stuff was in bins so I just left it there. I only need clothes and my lesson plans, anyway.”
“Well, here’s the desk and bed. It’s not much, but there’s a lock on the door in case Graham ever gets too inquisitive — bless him — and curtains so the stupidly bright sun won’t wake you too early.”
“Those both sound like personal experiences, Y/n,” Karl teases. He takes off his jacket and throws it on the bed. “Yo! Spider-Man?”
“Graham picked it out,” you say. “He also relinquished one of his bears to keep you safe in the middle of the night. His words, not mine.”
“He’s so cute,” Karl mentions offhandedly. The fondness in his tone takes you back a bit. Not because the phrase isn’t true, it’s just that most people find your son annoying before they find him endearing. The change of tone is nice.
“He is,” you say. “And he’s dying to show you his room after we eat dinner.”
Karl gives you that same lopsided smile he often had in high school. Part of your brain shifts to his personal life, and you wonder why Karl himself isn’t in a romantic relationship. Not that he has to be, but the both of you are getting older, and Karl has always been one to express a fondness for having his own family one day. Maybe he just hasn’t found the right person.
It isn’t until Graham is peacefully in bed — after a very chaotic reading of Goodnight Moon by yours truly, and an argument that Mr. Jacobs cannot, in fact, sleep in the same room as him — that you actually have a chance to show Karl around the house.
“Here’s the guest bathroom. Graham almost always uses the bathroom in my room because he likes looking at the big tub. He will beg you to play with him, but if you’re busy don’t feel guilty telling him no. He knows what no means and he’s good about playing by himself.”
Karl giggles. “Okay. I don’t mind playing with him, though.“
You show him around the kitchen, where you left little spaces for him in the pantry. You show him the garbage bags and the T.V. settings and the list of compostable ingredients. “And also, please come and go as you please. Like, I completely understand that you’re here temporarily and you aren’t a babysitter or anything like that. I don’t expect you to be in charge of Graham any time outside of school.”
Karl blinks. “But if you ever need time away, you can ask me. I don’t mind babysitting.”
“I know,” you smile. “But Graham is my kid. I don’t need time away from him.”
You’re lying. Karl knows it. You’ve been in this single parenting thing for five years and you aren’t about to reach out for help now.
“Anyways, if you have any questions just ring me or ask me,” you say. “I’ve got to get to bed. Goodnight.”
“Thanks, Y/n.”
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Karl thinks it’s sweet the way Graham insists on making his own breakfast.
You’re already up when Karl gets out of his (temporary) bedroom with his clothes tucked under his arm. You’re busy arguing with Graham. “You can’t fry your own omelette for the last time.”
Karl quirks an eyebrow at your exasperated face. You look stressed beyond belief, even though the day has just begun.
Karl tosses his clothes back in his room and walks into the kitchen. “Hey, Graham! Do you want to show me your rock collection?”
Graham spins on his sock-clad heels, eyes bright at the thought of seeing his teacher. “Mr. Jacobs! Yes! Let’s go!”
He grabs Karl’s hand with ease, leaving you room to finish making breakfast.
Graham’s room is fairly simple. The small wooden bed is covered in a green quilt, and beneath that, frozen-printed sheets that certainly don’t match. He has a tub of stuffed animals shoved against a small dresser.
Karl gets distracted by the framed picture on top of the dresser. It’s a picture of you and Graham’s father, a few months before you got pregnant. He’s smiling, and you’re holding up a peace sign. It makes Karl feel a bit sad, knowing that Graham’s dad never stayed around to see how wonderful he turned out to be.
Then again, a lot of people in your life left as soon as they found out. In high school, no one wants to be friends with a teenage mother.
Karl reckons that if he had a family like this, he’d never take them for granted.
Graham pulls out a gemstone. It’s a murky green one that Karl has let him take home from class. “Do you remember this, Mr. Jacobs?”
Karl grins. “Yeah, bud. Thanks for keeping it so safe for me.”
Graham beams. He grabs Karl’s hand and pulls him towards his dresser. “Can we match? I want to look like you.”
Karl feels his heart swell. He wants to smother the young boy in affection, but he doesn’t want to cross a line. He’s your friend, sure, but he’s also Graham’s teacher. He can’t coddle Graham more than the other children. He already has a godchild to coddle. “I’m wearing yellow today. Do you have any yellow clothes?”
“Let’s look!” Graham yanks open one of the drawers and begins pulling out the articles of clothing one by one. “No, no, no... Here!” He finds a pair of yellow overalls, folded amongst the mess he made. “I’ll wear these!”
“Let’s clean up first, okay?” Karl grabs the overalls. “So it’s clean when you come home from school.”
Graham, looking like the last thing he’d ever want to do is disappoint Karl, begins to pick up each shirt with obvious intent. He tries to fold them, and does a somewhat decent job, so much so that Karl leaves it, thinking you’ll find it endearing rather than annoying.
He really loves that about you. He likes your patience with Graham. You’re so young, and in reality, he squashed so many early dreams of yours. No matter your lot in life, you never blamed your child. Karl thinks that’s why Graham is so open, so adaptable, so endearing.
He helps Graham get dressed and leaves him in his room so that he, himself, can get ready.
When he emerges from his shower, hair wet and clothed in yellow, he smells something amazing.
He doesn’t want to intrude on your morning with Graham. He already feels too indebted to you already.
“Have an omelet,” you say. Wisps of hair cover your face. You place a plate down in front of him.
Graham is already eating his omelet, slowly, while flipping through a picture book. He sounds out words he recognizes, but stays silent the rest of the time.
Karl takes out his phone and scrolls through his instagram feed just as your own phone begins to ring.
“Shit,” you curse, and then immediately apologize to Graham. You press the red button and tap anxiously on the tabletop.
“Everything okay?” Karl asks.
You run your hands over your hair and let them rest on the back of your neck. “Yeah is just—“
The phone rings again, and this time you pick it up. “What do you want? ... Why would you tell me that? ... Why should I care? ... Please stop contacting me, okay? Goodbye.”
You slam the phone down and leave the room. Karl watches you disappear down the hallway, sniffling.
“Mommy is upset,” Graham says. He looks at Karl, lip quivering. “At me?”
“No, Buddy! Of course not!” Karl reaches over the table to ruffle Graham’s curls. “Never at you.”
“When we tore up paper, she was crying.” Graham fiddles with his book page.
Karl wonders why your ex’s actions are being brought up five years later. Last he heard, you had fully healed from the breakup long before Graham’s first birthday. But now he’s about to be six, and you're suddenly upset?
He’ll have to ask you about it soon.
“Are you ready to go to school, Buddy?”
“Yeah!”
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You cradle your face in your hands and try to ease the tears back in. You’ll never get this article proofread and sent if you can’t see the keys.
The door opens, and Graham runs in just in time for you to finish wiping your eyes. “Hey, kiddo! How was school?”
“Mr. Jacobs let us finger paint!” Graham holds up his palm, covered in dried paint, and grins brightly. “Can I have gogurt?”
“Yeah bud. Why don’t you put something on the T.V.? You can have your snack in the living room today.”
“Yes!” Graham takes blueberry gogurt out of the fridge and — after getting you to tear it open — runs into the living room. Sneakers and backpack still on.
Karl trails behind, clutching a messenger bag to his chest. “What’s going on?”
You sigh and close the laptop. The manuscript will have to wait. “Ben called. About a week ago. His girlfriend is pregnant. Called me to tell me he wasn’t going to leave her— like that would heal what he did to me. Then he called this morning to tell me they’re engaged.” You burst into tears then, and you feel so pathetic for doing this in front of your old schoolmate, that you hide your face behind your palms and allow your shoulders to shake. “Why weren’t we enough? Why wasn’t I enough?”
Karl scoots one of the chairs in front of you and sits, leaning his elbows on his knees. “Hey. Look at me.” With gentle hands, he grabs your wrists and pulls them away from your face. “It is not your fault he left.”
“But it has to be me in some way,” you retort. “He must not have loved me. Something, because now he’s going to raise her child after he left mine. Graham deserves a dad.”
Karl places his forehead against yours. The two of you used to do it all the time in school, mostly with immature giggles in the spaces between, but now it’s heavy with intention. “Graham has not felt even a little bit unloved in your care. You are all he needs, okay? You’re amazing.”
You nod, head still pressed to Karl’s. “Yeah. Okay. Sorry for getting too emotional, there.”
“Be as emotional as you want,” Karl says. “I’ll be here to balance you out.”
Your heart stutters at the words, like maybe they mean something more than he’s letting on. Of course it’s stupid to think Karl Jacobs would ever even consider you, but just the knowledge that he cares makes your soul feel a little lighter.
“I’m a mess,” you stutter, bringing your fist up to wipe at your nose.
“Nah,” Karl grins. He runs the pad of his thumb across your cheek and grins. “You’re alright.”
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“It’s snowing!” Graham wakes Karl up by jumping on his chest.
Karl sucks in a breath, winded at the sudden weight, and grabs the boy, lifting him off of his chest and onto the mattress. “Hey, Buddy. Let’s not jump on sleeping people, okay?”
“Okay,” Graham says. He’s already lost interest in Karl, now crawling off of the bed to open the blinds. “Come look at the snow!”
“I see!” Karl rubs his tired eyes and checks his watch. “We might have a snow day, Graham.”
“Yes!” Graham pumps his fist into the air. “Let’s go tell mom!”
You’re sitting on your bed, chewing on a red licorice rope and flipping through a fashion magazine. You look up when Karl and Graham enter.
Karl likes seeing you like this: the domesticity of seeing you in the morning, lazy and true. His chest sparks when he thinks this may be one of the only moments he can capture you like this, so he intends to commit the sight to memory.
“Did I hear snow day?” You grin at Karl, childlike wit in your own eyes — the same as your son’s.
“Looks like it.” Karl rolls up the sleeves of the sweater he slept in. “You want pancakes? I make some mean chocolate chip pancakes.”
You shift your gaze away from his arms and clear your throat. “Uh, yeah. Just let me get dressed and I’ll help—“
“No need,” Karl insists. “Enjoy your quiet time. Graham and I will make the most delicious pancakes you’ve ever tasted.”
“With lots of chocolate chips!” Graham shouts.
You give him a pointed look. “But not too many.”
Graham huffs. “But not too many,” he repeats.
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Momentary splashes sound from your bathroom, followed by Graham screaming “It’s a dragon! Run for cover!”
Karl giggles from his place on the couch. He’s got mushroom-patterned socks on, and he’s tucked up into the cushions, nursing a can of Monster. “How does he still have so much energy?”
You sigh and pull your beanie down over your forehead. “You’d think a snow day would tire him out. Thanks for constantly carrying him up the hill, by the way. I know you’re a teacher, but sometimes I forget how good you are with kids.”
“I do have a godson,” Karl reminds you.
“But Tucker is a baby,” you say. You only know the baby’s name because of Karl’s constant snap stories about him.
“Most babies and kids want the same thing. Affection and attention.” Karl scoots over to the edge of the couch and pats the cushion.
You sit next to him. “I guess that’s true. You’re really good with Graham. He’s not this open to other adults.”
Karl is clearly blushing now; you can see his pink cheeks even in the light of the television. “He’s great in class, always helping the other kids.”
“He wants to impress you,” you say. You pop open a can of orange soda and take a sip. “He thinks you’re just the coolest guy.”
Karl laughs and shakes his head. “Didn’t you hear, Y/n? I’m handsome and cool.”
“Oh, of course,” you nudge his shin with our own sock-clad foot. “How could I forget? Mr. Ladies Man in high school.”
This makes Karl blush even harder, because he most certainly was not a ladies man in high school. In fact, he was a nerd in all senses of the word, part of the debate club with a few other boys. He had a few dates here and there, but nothing ever stuck.
“Shut up,” he mumbles. “My time is gonna come.”
“Hasn’t it already?” you ask before you can really process your own words. But of course he knows that he’s grown into his face, right?
Karl is positively handsome, eyes bright and lashes long. He’s so warm and comforting to you. He must be just as comforting to everyone else.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re handsome, Karl,” you say plainly.
“You mean that?”
“Of course I do,” you say. “Why would I lie?”
Karl opens his mouth, perhaps to call you out. To tell you you’ve been too honest, but he’s interrupted by your son.
“Mom! I’m ready to get out now!”
“I should go,” you say, still looking at his eyes.
“Yeah,” he says. His sweater has small spots on the shoulders where snow has fallen and since melted. He shivers.
“You should take a shower. You’ll catch a cold.”
“Okay,” he whispers. “Yeah, I’ll do that.”
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Chandler comes over the following Saturday night to hang out with Karl, and you’re surprised at how much he truly hasn’t changed since high school.
He’s still got infamously perfect eyebrows, and his voice is still monotonous despite its humor. “Nice place.” He raises his brows as he looks around.
“Who are you?” Graham is sitting at the kitchen table, watching Minecraft playthroughs (kid-friendly ones you’ve watched through yourself) on your phone to entertain himself while you clean.
“I’m Chandler, Karl’s friend.”
“This is Mr. Jacob’s friend from school,” you say, detailing your words so they’re easier for your son to digest.
Graham stares at him for a moment, not quite judging but not quite accepting either. “Okay. Do you want to see my rock collection?”
Chandler looks genuinely excited, and accepts before you can come up with an excuse for him. Graham tells Chandler to stay in the kitchen while he grabs all of his rocks.
“How have you been?” you ask the taller man. “Like, with the flooding and everything?”
“Well, I’m on a couch at Chris’, which is good since he doesn’t charge rent. But that means I’m near Tucker, and that baby has some lungs.”
You laugh. “I remember when Graham was a baby. I was so young, and my mom told me it was my responsibility to wake up and take care of him whenever he cried in the middle of the night. I was so pissed at her for making me do that, but those were some of the best nights to bond with him.” You realize you’re ranting and shake your head. “Whatever. Baby screams are loud as hell.”
“You can say that again. I’ve been talking to my friend Jimmy about taking his spare room and paying rent. I dunno how many more sleepless nights I can take.”
“Why would you need to pay rent if you’re just crashing?” You wipe down the kitchen table to keep yourself busy.
“Didn’t Karl tell you? Our landlord is in heaps of trouble because the pipes weren’t up to code and that’s why they busted. The damage is basically too expensive to fix, so we’ve got to find new places.”
You stop cleaning. “Karl didn’t tell me that.”
“Oh.” Chandler scratches his brow. “He probably didn’t want to worry you. He feels really bad that he’s stayed with you this long.”
“It’s only been a month or so,” you counter. “Besides, Karl’s a great housemate. He cleans and keeps Graham occupied. Plus, now I have someone to watch corny game shows with.”
Chandler grins. “Oh. Okay, I get it.”
“Get what?” Karl, finally out of the shower, steps into the kitchen and immediately tackles Chandler in an energized hug.
“Nothing!” Chandler’s voice cracks
You shoot Chandler a weird look, and change the subject. “Where are you guys going?”
“To play video games at Jimmy’s.” Karl says, and the thrill in his voice makes you think of high school. Of the debate team bus rounding the corner. Of you standing there, waiting to congratulate him with a big hug and a frosty from Wendy’s.
You miss it. “Have fun, okay? I’m probably going to tuck in as soon as Graham does, so just let yourself in.”
“You’re leaving?” Graham comes in, and his arms are filled with smooth and rough stones and gems he’s both found by himself and bought at random general stores while traveling.
“Not before I see your rocks!” Chandler says with so much enthusiasm, you think he’s telling the truth.
Graham giggles and drops the rocks onto the ground. Of course, he wants your guest to sit on the floor and count rocks. You’re almost embarrassed.
“ ‘ Okay, Y/n?” Karl laughs at your expression. Then he places his arm on your shoulder, thumbs the skin of your upper arm.
And once again, it’s high school. It’s senior year graduation and Karl is the only one who congratulates you. It’s his comforting touch, him coming over in the middle of the night after you texted him a picture of your first sonogram. It’s that same comforting touch. That little “I’m here,” and it melts you on the inside, leaves you in a shell of an eighteen girl again. Scared, and worried, and a little less alone.
“Yeah,” you manage. “I’m okay.”
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The television plays Cartoon Network reruns on a low hum. Karl is curled up in a blanket, nursing a bottle of water and thinking over Chandler’s words.
You’ve liked her since high school, dude.
Which is a complete lie. Seriously, Karl didn’t have a crush on you in high school. He would know if he had a crush on his best friend. You’ve been his friend since freshman year, and that’s all you’ve ever been.
Now in college, it was different. In college, Karl was alone in a dorm with Chris, and you were one of the only people from high school he stayed in contact with. In college, he would bring you your favorite snacks and drinks, and other things you would forget to buy because you were a part-time student and a full-time mom. In college, you would pull all-nighters with him, working on your exams while Graham was asleep, then using energy drinks to get through the next day.
Karl even remembers the time your mom caught the three of you fast asleep on your rug, with unopened monster cans and an empty milk bottle beside you.
Throughout your entire pregnancy he was warned not to stay friends with the pregnant girl — it’d be too much for him, he wouldn’t want to become the new father, and all kinds of other stuff people would mumble to him when you weren’t around.
But you never expected him to be anything other than your friend. You never asked him for the help he gave — though you thanked him always — and you never once assumed he’d take the role of Graham’s dad.
And now… now he finds himself wishing you would.
“Mr. Jacobs?” Graham creeps up without him even realizing.
Karl jumps, sets his water — and thoughts — aside. “Hey, Bud. It’s really late. What are you doing up?”
Graham sniffs, and Karl realizes that the boy is crying. “I had a nightmare.”
Karl holds out his arms before he can think, and lets the five-year-old crawl into his lap. He wraps them both in his blanket and turns the television up just a little more. “Was it scary?”
“You left.” Graham says, voice less watery, like he doesn’t know the weight of his words. He’s focused on the rerun of Adventure Time that’s playing. He’s not even remotely interested in his nightmare now, with his tears dried up, and his eyes drooping back towards slumber.
“I’m going to leave one day,” Karl says, because he thinks it’s important that Graham knows.
“You should stay with me and Mom,” Graham says. He yawns. “We like you so much!”
Karl’s heart stutters. He tries not to think about it.
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When Graham’s bed is empty the next morning, you freak out. He’s always in his room in the morning. Even if he wakes up before you, he stays in and plays with his toys.
You’ve already got your phone out, and your mother’s number called, when you walk into the living room.
Relief floods your system. Karl and Graham are asleep on the couch, snuggled up serenely like they didn’t just cause you to have a premature heart attack.
You hang up before the call to your mom can go through and stand there, watching the two boys sleep. Graham has both his arms wrapped around Karl’s forearm. It’s such a sweet picture that you take out your phone and snap one.
The flash is on.
Karl scrunches his nose and winces. “What the–”
“Sorry!” You whisper. “You both looked so cute, I couldn’t help it.”
Karl smiles, still sleepy, and finally opens his eyes. He peers at you, stormy green under fluttering lashes and you’re almost intimidated into looking away. “He had a nightmare.”
“Oh?”
“About me leaving.”
“Oh.” You frown. “I’m really sorry about that. I keep telling him that you’re moving out soon, but I don’t think he fully understands.”
Graham stirs. You reach down and pick him up. Your knuckles brush across Karl’s warm, sweater-clad chest and you suddenly wish you could cuddle with him, too. You shake the thoughts away and focus on your drowsy son. “You’re staying at Grandma's for a few days, remember?”
Graham rubs his eyes and perks up. “And I’ll see her cat?”
“Yes,” you confirm. “But we’ve got to get you dressed because she’s coming in a few minutes.”
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“Karl Jacobs!” Your mom’s voice embarrassingly rings through the apartment, and you realize Karl has taken it upon himself to open the door. “Y/n told me she had a temporary roommate but I never thought she would finally ask you!”
“Oh my gosh…” you mumble, buckling Graham’s overalls and hauling him up into your arms. “Mom! His apartment flooded so he’s staying here. Don’t be weird about it.”
“But he’s so handsome,” your mom coos. You’re concerned she might reach forward and pinch Karl’s already ruddy cheeks.
“Thanks,” Karl laughs. “But she’s right, I’m just squatting until I can find a new place.”
Your mom harrumphs. “Well, I don’t see why you can’t stay here forever. Y/n doesn’t even use that office room. And even if she did, the two of you could just share a room.”
“Mom!” You plunk Graham into her hands and grab his overnight bag. “You have to leave.”
“Did I say something wrong?” She sounds worried, but there’s an undisclosed mirth in her eyes that makes you think of your freshman year, when you did have a crush on Karl.
“You said everything wrong,” you say, kindly pushing her out. “Have a good time, Graham. I love you! As always, Mom, call if you need me to come get him.”
“Yeah, right!” She yells over her shoulder. Graham is already giggling, so you close the door with confidence.
You turn back to your roommate. “I’m sorry about that, Karl.”
“It’s fine.” He smiles, but it’s reserved. “But speaking of me finding a place… I know Chandler told you that I can’t go back to my own apartment. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
“It’s okay,” you say. You want to say “You can stay here as long as you want, and long as you’ll let me keep you,” but that would reveal too much, and you don’t want to lose the one good friend you have.
“And I was thinking I should move out soon anyway.” Karl pulls his sweater sleeves until they cover his hands. He’s hiding. He’s shielding himself the same way he did in junior year, when he got turned down by his crush to go to the prom. “I don’t think it’s good for Graham to get this attached to me if I’m just going to leave.”
“Oh,” Your sleeves are too short, but you want to shield yourself too. “Yeah, that’s… that’s probably a good idea.”
Karl stands there for a beat, like he’s waiting for you to say something more. Like he hasn’t just taken your heart and pushed it aside. Like this hurts a lot less than it actually does.
But any word out of your mouth would be tearful. It would be honest. It would ruin everything. “I’m going to go on a run.”
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There’s a cricket outside that won’t stop chirping against your window. You blame it for your insomnia, choosing to ignore the anxiety of eventually losing Karl. It feels so horribly childish, since you’ll see him when you drop Graham off at school. And you’ll see him whenever the two of you go out for coffee on weekends.
But you won’t see him in the kitchen, reaching for the pancake mix so his shirt rises up and you can see the dimples in his back. You won’t see him humming along to the radio while he works on his lesson plans. You won’t feel his warmth when the two of you stay awake, nursing spiked lemonade and giggling at the commentary videos you find on YouTube.
He’ll just be Karl again. He won’t be home anymore.
Startled by the realization, you get out of your covers and rush to your door.
It opens before you can even reach for the doorknob, and there’s Karl in his pajamas, biting his lip and avoiding your eyes.
“I don’t want you to leave,” you say, just as Karl confesses,
“I love you.”
You open your arms and he dives in, face pressed into the space where your neck meets your shoulder. Warmth envelopes you and the scent of pine fills your nose.
Karl is timeless. Youthful glory and childish pride. He’s a pinch on the side and a push on the swings. Like a rock that actually skips on the first try. Like shoes that you can slip on when they’re still tied. And he’s here, in your arms, squeezing you like you’re something valuable enough to lose. He’s confessing love like you aren’t the worst possible candidate for his heart.
“I can’t offer you much,” you start, but Karl bumps his forehead against yours, boyish and playful — football fields and bright red lockers and secret notes on bathroom walls.
“I’ve known you for years, Y/n,” Karl’s voice is a low rumble. Green grass eyes blinking at you like you’re something to second glance at. “I know what I’m getting into. I want you. I want Graham. I want everything this is, and everything we’ve been for the past month. I don’t want this to end.”
You close your eyes, because his are too honest. He’s open and vulnerable and gentle — a child on the first day of school, ready to make friends. You take a deep breath, try to remember what you were like on your first day. Rosy cheeks and shy glances. Knobby knees and a trusting heart. You reach out for whoever you once were — the Y/n with a heart open and willing to be loved. “I don’t want this to end either. I’m in love with you, Karl.”
His grin lights up your world in its entirety. Gold flecks in emerald green disappear as he smiles, too thrilled to keep his eyes open. And when he kisses you, warm lips against cold ones, you feel like a puzzle has just slotted into place.
It would only make sense that you would grow to love the boy you grew up with.
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ninjakitten1699 · 3 years ago
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More Oni headcanons that I wanted to add on
to @ambrosial-tea post but I forgot until now!
There are different tribes of Oni as stated in the last post. Aka Oni (Red), Ao Oni (Blue), Shiro Oni (Pale/White), and our Kuro Oni (Black/Dark).
We don’t know too much of the Dark Oni we got but we do know that Oni were originally intended to be guardians between Material Plane and Spirit World when the two began overlapping (possibly The Grasslands/Departed, and Cursed Realm before they began separating). Put a tribe of Oni on the Material Plane for a couple years and they’d splinter into subraces of Oni and become more corrupted by the years. Dark Oni became one of the tribes corrupted.
Aka Oni are the most common type of Oni with their dark red colors, large size, and toughness. They’re slightly bigger than the rest of their kin, more violent, unfocused, and pursue immediate satisfaction, disregarding long drawn out plots and schemes. They’re mostly known for strength too.
Ao Oni are known for their unnatural cunning and aptitude for magic, smaller than their red kin but larger than pale, and have different shades of dark blue. They’re the ones you’d catch calculating and meticulously pursuing lofty goals like power and knowledge.
Shiro Oni are known for their aloofness and connections to the spirit realm. They’re the smallest of the main three tribes and the fewest of members. They vary from pale white to light gray. (They may as well adopt other Oni who share their colors and hopefully teach them their ideals.) Pale Oni would rather keep things in balance between the material plane and spirit world as the ancient Oni intended. They guard their locations but will adventure for artifacts of the spirit world and mend balance. If we take that into account perhaps they are another reason why Realm travel is difficult to Oni who try to cross through the any of the realms involving afterlives.
While Oni have no concept of gender since they have both reproductive organs, they also have no concept of sexualities either. Honestly they just didn’t have a name for it when one didn’t feel the need to have sex or when another felt more attracted to the same sex aspects of their partner. (If anything, their type of relationships or way of thinking would be looked up upon because they felt closer to their spirituality and their true selves.) Again they sometimes don’t mate for reproduction but just for the vibes of their partner.
They probably didn’t have a name for having multiple partners at the time either. If one Oni wanted to be a part of what the other two had and they were content with the feel of them, then it was okay. Plus more hands to help raise the cub personally. (Essentially that’s what PolyGarm would basically be. They make Garm happy, they’re happy with him, and Lloyd would basically have more than two parents. At this point Lloyd would just have more dads and Koko is just the one good mom he deserves.)
The second Oni learn what kisses are and how they work, they find it just as addictive as they do with other acts of affection.
Oni are more closer to their family than they are to strangers because in most Oni’s belief, strangers brought suffering to the family. In turn they displayed their family’s name first before their own, showing pride in them and hoping to intimidate any strangers with ill intent towards them.
Speaking of Oni names, they don’t usually have any but when they do their names would be what positive traits the parents wish the child to take on. For example, a son could have “Akihiko”. “Aki” meaning “bright” and “hiko” meaning “boy/prince”. They could want him to be someone brighter than they ever hoped for. For a daughter, “Asuna” with “asu” meaning “tomorrow” and “na” to “greens” or “apple tree”. Maybe the parents are hoping the Oni daughter would lead them to a more plentiful day. And then there’s the family names. The most famous ones are “Hideyoshi” and “Ishikawa”. We’ve heard of these names and the history behind them, I wouldn’t want to come across any of their descendants that carry their name with honor.
Ironically “Harumi” is actually a name for a female Oni in some home brewing lore. One of her meanings is “govern/rule” and “beauty”. Goes to show how far she would take her name literally.
Shiro Oni/Pale Oni don’t have names, but it’s because they don’t want to be too close to the material plane while they guard the spirit realms. They would refer to themselves and each other as “that/this one” instead like how gargoyles in the old days would. If they come up with names, it’s for the sake of working with others on the material plane, but even then it only happens when they really trust the people around them.
Oni have a large appetite that could put the Pythor and the Anacondrai to shame. They could honestly compete against the Great Devourer and other wyrms.
An Oni’s pair of horns are a sign of honor. No pair of horns are alike, not even the closest siblings’ horns look the same. They all have their differences. Their horn length is their pride. Having them sawed off is quite literally shameful to the owner of them but they did do something to deserve it.
It’s possible that some Oni were confused at Garm’s horns not being there at first but they hear about the first time they grew out of his head he quite literally broke them off and bled for a good long while to the point of passing out. (Blood vessels actually go throughout the antlers/horns in animals which is why they aren’t busted right off easily. Why wouldn’t they to Oni horns?) Come to find out it was the FSM’s hate for Oni that made Garm hate himself and how he looked so Garm had them filed down to his scalp or small enough to hide in his hair. It honestly almost hurts the Oni’s look on the FSM even more but hey who hasn’t he hurt? It takes a couple more decades and some therapy before he finally let’s go of his internalized self hatred and trauma that he grows out his horns and finally has pride in himself like most Oni already do.
So it’s not uncommon for Oni to live among other races, whether secretly or not, due to their shapeshifting abilities, however sometimes they’re immediately shunned when their true form slips out. Unless they proved otherwise to the most accepting of inhabitants, they’re allowed to stay. By then they’d have a hybrid appearance with their horns out, either out of their kindness to ease the others’ fear of them or for their own personal benefit.
Oni that do live on their own choose to live in the wilderness or in the mountains. If living in society but still wanting some sort of solitude, they’d either be closer to the outskirts or deep in the downtown where you’d either have to ask directions to specific people to find them or already know where they are. Hence Mistaké with her small tea shop and Wu being able find her.
As stated before Oni have no problems with Half-Oni at all. They’re just welcoming another cub into the pack and it’s just the fact that they are a child of an Oni who fell in love with another humanoid. Although there are some cases of Oni being chased out by the other race with their cub in their arms and they just run until they find the closest tribe. They’d be welcomed into the tribe and the cub is basically adopted by them.
Again half Oni isn’t a problem to them, but they do have a problem with any particular wizards experimenting on Oni breeding with any other humanoids. The know it’s not the parents’ fault neither is the cub’s. If neither parent want nothing to do with them, then the half Oni cub is taken off of their hands by another Oni who was grieving at a loss of a cub (or the realization they couldn’t have any) or a pairing who wouldn’t mind another. The cub won’t have a terrible environment, the parents won’t have to unwillingly interact with the child until they resolve their own issues or they wish to visit and see them grow.
Meanwhile, those wizards will never know peace again until the day they die, even other tribes, who they could be at war with, will catch wind of what happen and help in taking them out. By the time those wizards die, even the Pale Oni who have no ties with Omega or any other tribes won’t be forgiving to them. They won’t do anything too harmful to them, but they will lead them to the terrible part of the Cursed Realm and those wizards proceed to stay there until they fade out of existence entirely.
Enough angst there and let’s go back to fluff. I bet Oni would love dice. Like not even for games but for the click-clack sound. (“Lloyd. They’re metal dice. You cannot have—.” “Shiny sparkly metal bits make pretty sounds! :D” “Garmadon please tell your son not— Not you too!” “Wha~ It does sound pretty.”)
Y’all know how like adult lions play with their babies? They pretend to be hurt and that the cub is super strong to help build up their confidence. Hear me out, Oni do that too. Big goddamn Omega really be taking hits from tiny little cubs, Mistaké be playing with little Garmadon and playing dead on him, then Garm just does the same thing for little Lloyd. (“Koko, sweetie, help. It’s the battle of the century in here. Help, save me. He’s too powerful!” “*tiny war cry*”)
Someone makes a baby Oni cry one time and boy it’s absolutely over. It’s on sight for that person. I’m telling you On Sight!
Oni can purr loud enough to the point where it rumbles in them like a motor and that’s how cubs feel their parents’ purring. Then there’s baby Oni just babbling and the adult Oni just pretend to have a whole conversation with them. Don’t get me started on them playing soft flute music to help the toddler Oni sleep.
We probably only got a few words out of Omega when they first appeared because we were hearing them through human ears. Lloyd’s Oni brain would click on and translates what he knows while Garm in full Oni form can get full sentences out of Omega.
Oni are willing to learn a different language if it helps others understand them and their intentions. Now let’s just think of Lloyd connecting to his Oni side of the family (since let’s face it, the Oni are going to be around longer than most of his friends are) through teaching them sign language.
They also try to teach him their Oni tongue but he can only grasp a few words at a time easily. When he finally learns the language, next thing you know he’s going to be cursing and only Oni will understand. Some (aka Mistaké) want to scold him and others (*cough*Garmadon*cough*) find it hilarious.
Garmadon’s Oni-Dragon hybrid brain wants him to decorate his significant others and now I think of Oni just sharing the precious items they hoard with their mate. Wait till they figure out they can make jewelry and have their significant other wear it.
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unkownknowledge · 3 years ago
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OC: CHAOS GOD OF THE VOID, GIOTA
story I'm still working on your requests don't worry, I just wanted to make a few character sheets since I'm not focused enough rn. I'll finish it when I take my meds though I promise.
And this isn't an oc for any show, rather a character from a multiversal mythos I'm making
also, an important term to understand this: 1 god year=5 billion years
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Description:
Giota is a very hot and cool Giota stop changing the text! Atleast change your style of writing so the reader can undead immediately Aw but wheres the fun GIOTA
Fine mister fun police, I'll write like this then. And I'll be cooler than you
Young man I wil... forget it, back on track:
Giota is a shapeshifting god of chaos, void, technological progress, freedom, and being a dramatic bitch.
Hey! I'm not a bitch!....maybe a little
When appearing before mortals he'll often take on the form the viewer imagines when they think of a god of chaos would appear as. Often times when the user knows the basic descriptions of Giota from the 'book of tales' will see him as a angel like statue of bones with numerous cracks, no face, and organ pipe wings.
When meeting with gods outside his domain or when he must meet mortals in a set form, he will take on simple, 10ft tall humanoid form with bone skin, a cracked mouth that cracks more when he speaks, two different colored eyes, and longer than floor length black hair. One of his eyes will be crying water that burns upwards, while the other cries fire that flows downwards. In this form he wears a black trenchcoat, green turtleneck, and purple dad pants.
What the fuck are dad pants?
You know, those usually brown pants that are kinda jeans but soft and actually comfortable.
YOU BITCH MY HUSBAND LIKES JEANS AND HIS PANTS ARE SOFT!
YOUR HUSBAND HAS MARSHMALLOW THIGHS! LITERALLY! OF COURSE HIS PANTS ARE SOFT!
Inside his own domain, or if he's feeling especially done with whatever poor bastard made him upset, Giota takes the form of an innocent ten year old child with soft white steel skin, mile long black hair made of silk, and black eyes made of diamonds. In this form he wears pajamas for to big for him, his mouth leads to a dark void, and he carries around two plushies: a bunny made of roses from his mom, and a plush of his adult form from his husband. Of course he becomes an adult if they do anything adult, so please don't start.
Regardless of his form, even when it's based on the perspective of others, he always wears a large knitted infinity scarf his husband made for whenever he wanted to hide away.
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Powers:
Cool ones
I mean, he's not wrong...
(I should make an ice themed character)
Giota, as a god, has numerous powers related to his domains.
powers of freedom:
inspiring presence- while most gods or beings of power inspire mortals and lesser beings of power to kneel down or bow, Giota’s presence inspires all beings to rise up, to do anything, to do whatever they want, to become the best they can be. this can be used to inspire allies to carry on. However Giota can also let this power run rampant, and free the mind of any shackles, and while this sounds good it really just means removing all morals and causing mass violence, and if he lets it run rampant while in the same dimension he lets it then all life will mutate into eldritch monstrosities of decadence and selfishness. According to him this is to show that balance must be kept between chaos and law.
the torch of liberty- among Giota’s duties as a god of freedom is to liberate the populations of ‘doomed realms’ that have been enslaved. essentially, if a planet in a universe is ruled purely by either law or chaos then the entire universe can be effected, in the case of law it can result in the entire universe becoming one collective conscious. while it’s not common that enslaved worlds occur, however when they do they are the most dangerous of law worlds. to combat worlds like this gods of freedom are given torches that free the minds of the enslaved and bring down holy fire upon the enslavers in the form of the collective will of all the freed people.
powers of technological progress:
cybernetic god-many god-years ago Giota was severely wounded by a rogue god of flesh and a rogue god of metal, to the point even he could not regenerate it. to stop him from dying a cult of his granted Giota cybernetic enhancements. these enhancements integrated into Giota’s flesh as it regenerated and became enhanced in turn by Giota’s divinity, and Giota’s divine power was enhanced then by the cybernetics, resulting in a self sustaining growth in power. while he gladly used this to stop the rogue gods, and once again to destroy an old one, he feels being that powerful would upset the balance of power, so he sealed it in a time lock in time with the seasons and time of day in the void. his power increases from mid day to mid night, and from the end of summer to the end of winter. in the minute of exactly midnight at the end of winter, Giota becomes, in both this multiverse and the old, the most powerful being to exist.
self evolving knowledge- because his position as a god of technology is artificial his powers in it are very weak, being able to only grant full sentience and sapience to machines. he can also create minor miracles of technology, such as summoning a clockwork toy(which he does often)
hey man did you really have to bring up the whole getting my ass kicked thing?
yes, now shut up before I bring up what you sing in the shower
....fucker....
powers of being dramatic:
yeah that wasn't a joke. Giota is the god of being over the top, stylish, and over all flair. in other words, being dramatic
personal sound track- he can cause any song he wants to play when he does anything.
lights, camera, ACTION!- whenever he wants, Giota can cause a bright, sparkling light to emit from his body or behind himself.
my favorite is that one bad bitch’s theme. what’s her name again?
Ragyo Kiyurin?
that's the fucker! terrible taste in morals, but damn does she know how to enter a room.
...can I put sigh when it’s supposed to be me sighing?
powers of the god of chaos
Chaotic existence- for Giota to even exist is, in and of itself, a paradox. he comes from a timeline that never existed, that was on a set path, yet he exist, and he changed the course of the timeline. when he became a chaos god he became a paradox within a paradox, he existed yet did not. to attempt to change any aspect of his being, to take in any part of his being, is to know that which is not there to know, to understand that which is not there, you have to be able to comprehend the very essence of nonexistence to even bare a hair of his getting in your mouth. such a thing easily drives all things that try insane, to the point that every part of their conscience believes that it does not exist.
overwhelming power-chaos gods are only once a multiverse, and with the title comes pure power. such power could turn an infant into an indestructible warrior, however since Giota was already at that level on a mortal scale, and already capable of taking on powerful gods, this power sets him among the highest echelons of divine might.
powers of the god of void
key to nonexistence- the god of the void is the only being who can open the bridge between that which exist and that which does not
rapid regeneration- the void god has an innate ability to regenerate from nearly all damage, even if they are ground to a fine paste. this regeneration is enhanced by the cybernetic enhancements.
speed of darkness- the void god has an innate speed that surpasses light, Giota’s already superhuman speed was enhanced by this.
spear of not- the void god is the sole being in existence and non existence who can wield the spear of not, a finely forged weapon. it is not special beyond being enchanted to withstand godly power and a ‘security lock’ enchantment, however it is still a very well made weapon.
blah blah blah, enough about what I was handed, tell them about my mortal abilities
as Giota just said, and as I’ve brought up before, Giota is extremely powerful even without his powers, he also used to be two other mortals that were less powerful. but over all these were his powers, which he still has.
leather skin- while it might appear or feel like something else, Giota’s skin is exactly like leather armor. this comes from how he was raised as a child to be a powerful warrior and his skin was tanned into hide and treated while it was still on him.
adamantine bone- Giota’s bones were also replaced by an adamantine skeleton when he was a child.
super sonic speeds- during his training as a child, he was taught to be able to surpass the sound barrier on foot.
superhuman strength- his training also trained his body to carry ten tons, however as a mortal he improved that strength to the point he could exert enough force to blast away entire cities by blinking. This power did not come easy.
flight- after training with some monks late in his life, Giota was able to walk on the air, essentially he could fly at the same speed as he could run.
agility- he was trained as a warrior and assassin, so Giota’s training included advanced maneuverability training, including wall running, sneaking across tripwires, etc.
weapon master- Giota is a master in all weapons and various forms of martial arts.
he also has reciev- hey man you good?
I-I’m fine! d-don’t write that I’m crying! 
you...wanna talk about it?
…no...
is it about your mom?
…maybe...
alright take your time.
anyway Giota has a very useful piece of equipment, the cloak of maternity- despite it’s name, it’s actual a cloak that leads to a pocket dimension where Giota carries his weapons and toys. It is called the cloak of maternity because his adoptive mother gave him after he became a god-bounty hunter, she even designed it to help him hide away from people. it even has a designated snack pocket.
_____________________
BIO:
Giota was found by his adoptive mother after he destroyed his timeline, as punishment, or perhaps in an attempt to redeem him, she turned him back into a baby. something Giota happily accepted.
After this his life went on as a mortal’s would, only in the realm of divinity: he went to school, went into college, graduated, then entered the workforce. granted the workforce he entered was bounty hunting divine criminals. it was easy for him to get into, after all everything from his past life transferred over to this one, it wasn't long before he was hunting even the deadliest of criminals. while his mom was very supportive, it was still difficult for him to keep in contact with her as he did before moving out, and being a bounty hunter was hardly a sociable job. it wasn't long before Giota fell into depression, and then to drugs. for twenty three god years his life was an endless cycle of contract killing, payment, and wallowing in chemical joy. But at the end of all blinding lights, there is a welcoming darkness.
Giota had become the personal bounty hunter of the god of law and time: Ceerus. one day while leaving after receiving a contract, he met the god’s child, a boy his age named Dyalta.
It was thanks to Dyalta that Giota ever kicked drugs, or got out of depression, and thanks to Dyalta Giota managed to find happiness in anything other than a syringe.
Even the reason he found love.
rise to godhood
Giota became a god after an old god, named the Red slaughter, destroyed the entire universe. this was a catalyst for Giota, who had died previously, to return with his newly awakened god powers. I don't want to go into to much detail in this aspect as I intend to write it at some point.
_____________________
hey man you good yet? 
a little bit. Dyalta came by and gave me some cookies.
that's good buddy, I’m gonna describe your personality ok?
alright.. I’m gonna go home now.
alright man, take care.
_____________________
personality
do note that this is a bit hard for me to do. I’m more used to just writing a character. I’ll just post two short stories here to try and get his personality across. I made them in school last year.
ok so after looking at it the second one is twelve pages long. so I’m gonna post that elsewhere on here. to give context: this is after a wedding between Dyalta and Giota was interrupted. if you’d like to see more about him then feel free to interact or request him.
elavator story
Giota shifted uncomfortably to make room for his soon to be father in law as the man stepped into the lift.
“Soooooo…” Giota pressed their floor “wonderful, um, siege we’re having.”
Ceerus just keeps his eyes on the door “sure.”
“So how's the uh, wife?”
Ceerus sighed “locked in a tower, that we are invading.”
“Mhm, yup.”
‘Maybe I should try calling him dad.’
“So what did you think of my swordsmanship d-dad.”
Ceerus visibly restrained himself “it was fine ten- Giota.”
The elevator stopped, probably because of security.
“Oh maker damnit,” Ceerus tries rewinding the shut off, but it doesn't work “and it’s godproofed!”
“This reminds of this one time me and Dyalta wen-”
Ceerus put his hand to Giota’s mouth “if you end this story in anything less than fully clothed I will end your fake hide.”
Giota scratches his head nervously “Well I didn't, but Dyalta lost his shirt and well,” Giota notice Ceerus drawing his blade “b-but it was for a sword fi- wait bad wording, it was for a-you know- assasination thing!”
Ceerus sighed and sheathed his sword “look, you dusting mongrel, I don’t like you, you pretend to like me, let’s just try and not kill each other and maybe by the end of this, I won’t flay your ass at the altar.”
Well atleast now they both agreed on something: this was going to be a long crusade.
________________________________________________________________
ok that's that! not a very good character sheet but hopefully it got enough across to be interesting. I’ll end this off with some quotes I want him to say but have never gotten the chance to write out:
“hey Ceerus how’s the kid? oh thats right! in my bed, waiting patiently.” following Ceerus being exceptionally annoying.
“you know something? I try to be nice, I always smile, always banter with my targets. you know, try and be friendly. but then some RED MOTHERFUCKER, POSSESSES MY HUSBAND, WAKING ME UP FROM ETERNAL SLUMBER, AND NOW I ONCE AGAIN HAVE TO CLEAN UP THE GOD’S MESSES!”
*crying into Dyalta* “and then he said my clothes were stupid,” *sobbing* “I tried really hard on these!”
“this multiverse, to us gods, is wet paper mache. so easy to break, one wrong move and POP,” Giota flexes his finger and causes an ocean to split open for a solid ten seconds, “the very fabric of reality is gone. and you. you insuferable MOTHER FUCKERS have the AUDACITY TO COME IN HERE, AND TEAR IT ALL TO SHREDS! well assholes, if this reality is paper mache to you, and I’m stronger than you, take a wild gues as to what you are to me.”
(tagging: @storytravelled, @3lectro-heart, @genshin-obsessed)
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catsnkooks · 4 years ago
Text
Mandalorian Elegy
Commander Cody x Obi-Wan Kenobi
summary: Obi-Wan heads to the Mandalorian countryside to aid the Fett family farm to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the city. He expects a few months of hard, simple labor, but his plans complicate when he finds himself falling for the simple hardworking farmer instead.
rating: G
word count: 1.9k
warnings: none for right now!
a/n: i got sucked into this bc @new-anon makes too good art.....i love it
click here if you want to be added to my taglist!!
here it is on ao3!!
next chapter
Obi-Wan tugged his suitcase closer to his legs as he watched another car roll down the dusty road. It was only the third one he’d seen since he’d arrived and that was about, oh, thirty minutes ago. He didn’t mind the quiet; it was refreshing, actually, after so many years living in the city. Boga, his trusty service husky, sat beside him, watching the car disappear down the road. He stroked her head and she broke into a happy grin, her tail beating a rhythm into the concrete floor of the train station waiting area.
“What do you think, girl?” he asked her. “Quite different from the city, hm?”
Just then, a truck pulled to a stop in front of them, and a man jumped out of the driver’s side. He waved to Obi-Wan and he waved back.
“Are you Mr. Fett?” he asked, standing and shouldering his backpack.
The man laughed, and Obi-Wan decided right then that he quite liked it. “Please, call me Cody. Mr. Fett is my dad. Are you Mr. Kenobi?”
Obi-Wan smiled and held out his hand. “Yes, however, I must now insist you call me Obi-Wan.”
As Cody came closer, Obi-Wan studied his host. He was just slightly taller than Obi-Wan, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, showing off deep bronze tan skin. He had on a wide-brimmed hat, shielding his brown eyes from the sun. What Obi-Wan found most peculiar, however, was the thin scar that curled around his left eye.
Cody extended his hand and grasped Obi-Wan’s in a firm, warm grip. “Nice to meet you, Obi-Wan. I'm sorry I'm late. There was a little bit of an emergency. And who is this?” He knelt down beside Boga, who sniffed his upturned hand then smashed her face against it.
“That’s Boga.” Obi-Wan grinned at Cody’s laughter as Boga jumped into his lap to lick his face.
Cody stood again after giving a few more pats to Boga and motioned to Obi-Wan’s suitcase. “Is that everything?”
Obi-Wan nodded. “Just the essentials.”
While Cody loaded Obi-Wan’s suitcase into the back of the truck (with just one arm, Obi-Wan noted, impressed), Obi-Wan took a seat in the passenger side, convincing Boga to sit in the middle. Cody climbed into the driver’s seat and, giving a reassuring pat to Boga, started the engine and drove them away from the train station.
Obi-Wan listened intently as Cody described the Fett family farm. They had a mix of almost everything: beef cattle, chickens, pigs, ducks, and a few horses. His younger brother, Bly, was dipping his toes into plant farming and had a sizeable garden and a greenhouse. It all sounded so homely to Obi-Wan.
In turn, Obi-Wan told him about his life in the city. He nodded along politely as Obi-Wan described his work with his organization, how he worked most of his life helping those displaced by war or other conflicts. He laughed when Obi-Wan described Boga’s favorite activity in the park; chasing the squirrels.
Soon, they arrived at a large farmhouse; wood paneling with a wrap-around porch, large windows, and a brick chimney at the back. A younger man with short-cropped blond hair stood in front of the front door. Obi-Wan assumed it was one of Cody’s brothers, based on their similar appearances.
Cody parked the truck and killed the engine, allowing Obi-Wan and Boga to step out. Boga hopped out of the truck and eagerly sniffed along the perimeter her leash allowed her. Cody grabbed Obi-Wan’s suitcase from the bed and motioned him forward.
“This is where I grew up,” Cody said. “It’s not much, but it’s home.” Obi-Wan knew he was trying to stay humble, but he could detect a little pride in his voice. He nodded toward the other man who was coming off the porch to greet them. “That’s my little brother, Rex.”
Rex scoffed and punched Cody in the arm. “Not so little anymore.” Indeed, they were about the same height and build. If Obi-Wan didn’t know any better, he would assume they were twins. Rex held out his hand to him. “Nice to meet you. I'm surprised you didn’t run screaming as soon as you met this idiot here.”
Obi-Wan laughed at their brotherly antics. “Oh, I'm quite enjoying myself so far.”
A boy popped his head out from the house. He had the same complexion and dark hair as Cody, though his fell in gentle curls down his face. He turned to yell into the house, “Dad! The city slicker is here!”
Cody sighed next to Obi-Wan while Rex went up to the boy and put him in a headlock. “That’s Boba,” Cody explained, looking exasperated. “You’ll have to excuse him, he has chronic teenager syndrome.”
Obi-Wan smiled and nodded sympathetically, remembering how Anakin was as a teenager. “Weren’t we all like that in our teenage years?”
Cody smiled ruefully. “I think I was a little more behaved.”
“No, you were worse.”
Obi-Wan looked up as another man stepped out of the house. He assumed this was their father, Jango Fett. He was perhaps a few years older than Obi-Wan, though a life of hard work and war had weathered his features to make him look much older. Obi-Wan could tell where the Fett brothers got their resemblance. He nodded to Obi-Wan and held out his hand.
“Jango Fett,” he said, succinct.
“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Obi-Wan said, clasping his hand. “Pleased to meet you, sir.”
He wrinkled his nose at Obi-Wan’s epithet. “Just Jango is fine, son. Now, come on in and get comfortable.” He turned and made to go in the house, but first pointed a finger at Boba, who Rex had released from a headlock. “Be nice.” Boba just huffed and rolled his eyes.
Obi-Wan walked into the house. It was just as homely on the inside as it was on the outside. Simple wooden furniture and decorations indicative of a rural, farming lifestyle dotted around the rooms and a large staircase dominated the area, leading up to the second floor. Obi-Wan was shown to his room (right beside Cody’s so if he ever needed anything, he was handy) with Cody insisting on carrying up his luggage for him, and was told to come down to the kitchen for lunch when he was done.
Boga made herself comfortable on the bed while Obi-Wan unpacked their things. He put his clothes in the drawer and set his few knickknacks on it, arranging them to his liking. He pulled out his phone and plugged it into the outlet beside his nightstand, sighing at the lack of service. He would have to ask Cody later for the Wi-Fi password, but for right now, it was…freeing to be away from the hustle and bustle of the wider world. He set out Boga’s bed beside his own (though it would be fruitless because she always found herself on Obi-Wan’s bed eventually) and put on her harness, deciding to leave her leash unclipped and sitting on the dresser. She followed behind him as he made his way down the stairs and into the kitchen.
Obi-Wan knew Mandalorian food smelled wonderful, based on his experience in Little Keldabe in Coruscant, but it was nothing compared to the smell of home-cooked food. His mouth watered and his eyes stung just a little from the scent of heavy spices in the room. Even Boga whined at the delicious smell coming from the stove.
“We thought we would start off easy with you,” Cody said, offering a plate to Obi-Wan as he sat down at the table. “Didn’t want to kill you on the first day.”
Obi-Wan chuckled. “I appreciate it.” He took a bite out of the dish and groaned. It had been too long since he’d had anything this good. The spice wasn’t overwhelming, probably very tame to Mandalorian standards, but it still warmed his face. He noticed Boba looking disappointed over his own plate, and laughed. “Oh, don’t worry; you’ll get me one of these days.”
Conversations flowed easily as they ate. Jango talked about the day-to-day duties around the farm while Cody explained the logistics. Obi-Wan told them about his organization, what they did, and how they could help while he was stationed here. Boba left halfway, complaining about boring adult talk, and said he was going to go find Din. When they finished, he helped Cody wash the dishes, listening closely as Cody told him about his newest project.
“I found her while I was looking for a lost calf,” he said. “She’s beautiful. Gorgeous color, nice build, and her mane is so soft. I don’t know if she belonged to anyone before, but she’s pretty wild. It was a miracle I could get her into the lot.” He motioned out the window with a soapy brush. “I want to get her saddle broke before the fair. She’s already taking the halter well and if she’s feeling good, I can lead her around. But she’s kicked me more than once if I try anything else.” He sighed and rinsed off a cup, looking forlorn.
Obi-Wan nodded. “I suppose things like this take time. But, if you're half as stubborn as she is, I think you’ll get it.”
Cody turned to Obi-Wan, surprised shortly before he gave him a small smile. “Thank you.”
Obi-Wan fought down the blush that he knew was invading his cheeks. He could not think about how adorable his host looked after Obi-Wan had complimented him. “Of course.” He cleared his throat. “Have you named her?”
Cody sighed again and shook his head. “No. Rex keeps telling me not to in case I can’t tame her. If you have any suggestions, I’ll take them.”
Obi-Wan hummed. “I'm sure I could come up with something.”
Suddenly, there was a crash from the other side of the kitchen. Both men whirled around and found Boga shamelessly cleaning off the leftovers. Obi-Wan shouted at her and pulled her out of the kitchen and outside while Cody laughed, clutching his stomach with a wet rag. Obi-Wan apologized but Cody waved him off.
“At least let me make it up to you?” he asked. “I may not have cooked many Mandalorian dishes, but I can follow a recipe well and I’ve been told I'm a good cook.”
Cody tilted his head, considering his offer, and then nodded. “Alright. But next time we put the leftovers up first.”
---
Later that night as Obi-Wan laid in his bed, listening to the crickets and frogs chirp outside of his window, he considered the events of the day. It was definitely…different from what he expected. Sure, he had done his research before he had even considered coming, but nothing could compare to actually experiencing it in Obi-Wan’s book. Part of him considered he’d spent too much time around Satine and her cohort.
He wrinkled his nose at that, turning around in bed and wrapping an arm around Boga, ever faithfully by his side. He had called her once Cody gave him the Wi-Fi password, as he knew she worried about him. He’d told her about the train ride down and his initial glimpse of the farm, how her description of her homeland hadn’t really prepared him for what to expect. She’d laughed and only then confessed that she actually hadn’t spent that much time in the Mandalorian countryside.
“But Satine,” he’d said, frowning “in your book you said—.”
She’d waved him off. “You know everyone embellishes a little in their autobiographies.”
Yes, he supposed he’d spent far too much time in the city. It would do well for him to be out here, in the fresh air and the vast fields.
And with farmers with strong, tan arms and brilliant smiles and dark hair that curled softly at the edges and eyes so deep, you could get lost in them.
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im-totally-not-an-alien · 4 years ago
Text
Final Fantasy prompts no 53
1. Cloud is immortal and has lived for tens of thousands of years. He has watched his friends and enemies get reincarnated over and over again. He would always interfere and save the day when things got bad, prompting legends and myths of a golden haired hero with glowing blue eyes who swore to return whenever the world was in peril.
But thats not the end.
He took great care to find his friends and keep an eye on them, watching over them as a guardian angel of sorts. When he came across Sephiroth again, he expected a battle, but seeing the dull eyes of a broken teenager staring up at him as he layed battered and bruised by his own parents? It made him realize that Sephiroth wasn't born evil.
The blond added Sephiroth to his list of people to protect.
Cloud often removed Sephiroth from the abusive households he was born into by exposing the parents for their crimes and harassing them as an anonymous individual.
Once the silverette was out of the home he would manipulate circumstances so that he would come to live with Zack or one of his other former friends.
Once he hit a certain age, he would find people Sephiroth was romantically compatible with and play puppeteer until one of them married the silverette. Cloud had done this so many times that he practically became an expert. Strangely, in the recent past lives the marriages ended in amicable divorce. He didn't know what he did wrong, so the blond began expiramenting with Sephiroths "types" again, trying to find a perfect match.
This life however, Sephiroth refused to so much as hold hands with someone romantically and Cloud is about ready to rip his hair out in frustration.
The man walked down a busy street, thinking about what to do next when Sephiroth himselfed grabbed his arm.
Startled, Cloud stared up at him.
"It's you." Sephiroth muttered reverently, as though he couldn't believe his eyes.
Cloud never made contact with these people, he had learned his lesson after the fifth time he lost Zack. He let them live out their lives, only interfering to stop something negative from happening. The blond never showed Sephiroth his face since his ninth life.
So how did Sephiroth know who he was?
2. Cloud nearly giving Denzel "The Talk"
3. Denzel accidentally calling Cloud "Dad", calling Tifa "Mom", and Marlene "my sister" until he was eventually like, screw it, and called them that without hesitation
4. Denzel got in trouble at school for beating up a group of boys that were bullying another kid.
He gets suspended and Cloud takes him out for an awesome ride on Fenrir as a reward, followed by fighting lessons from both him and Tifa, then ice cream.
5. Au where Hollander was murdered by Hojo long ago. Degradation is running rampant through Shinras SOLDIER program, killing several and weakening many more.
Genesis is determined to find a cure, after all, his life is on the line. He's eventually cornered by Angeal and Sephiroth, who pull the truth out of him, and begin aiding him in his search.
They discover AC Cloud, who is from a different dimension/timeline whose very body contains the cure.
Cloud was no longer human, and had developed new organs of unknown purpose, his body having disposed of the unnecessary organs such as lungs, gallbladder, and pancreas, and modifying the ones it kept, such as the digestive track. The catch? Now he needed to feed on large amounts of natural Mako every month to survive.
Genesis sees no problem with this and asks for the blond to save them. Cloud, however, refused, not knowing what was happening to him and knew spreading it would be the bad idea of the century.
Genesis doesn't take "No" for an answer.
Hojo finds out the blond was essentially a second Jenova and had a mini lifestream inside him and becomes desperate to get his claws on him.
6. Jenova haunts Clouds dreams, filling him with dread. Not because she was tormenting him, no. It was the opposite.
In the dreams, she held him like a loving mother. Her gentle embrace warmed him, her soft words brought him comfort, made him confide in her. That's why he was afraid.
Cloud was beginning to love her, and it terrified him.
7. Zack Fair is hereby prohibited from using any form of glitter or glue.
Why? It's Classified.
8. Au where Lazard freed Zack from under the nebilheim mansion, but also dragged him outside, leaving Cloud behind.
He lied to Zack when he woke up, telling him the infantryman was dead. He believed that Zacks chances of survival would be infinitely higher if he left the boy behind, which he would never do if given a choice. So Lazard made that choice for him.
So Zack made it to Midgar on his own.
Cloud was found by Sephiroth months later. The blond had no fight left in him and tried to merge with the other Sephiroth clone, unfortunately since his cells were mutated, Cloud could not merge with Sephiroth.
The silverette had planned to abandon this failed clone until Cloud nuzzle his face against Sephiroths gloved palm. From then on out, Cloud followed Sephiroth everywhere, doing the cooking and the laundry or whatever he could to make himself useful. He would beg the former General not to abandon him, as everyone else had done in the past.
That, admittedly pulled on his heartstings a bit. Sephiroth had also been abandoned and betrayed by his two closest friends. By the company and people he foolishly devoted his entire life to.
So Cloud stayed. His master taught him how to fight, how to care for his gear, and they bonded over shared experiences and silent companionship.
It was during that final battle, where Zack and AVALANCHE slew Sephiroth, that Cloud, hidden somewhere out of sight, swore vengeance against the man who pretended to be his friend, who he believed abandoned him and left him to rot in that hellhole after he had sworn for years that they'd get them both out, that he would save Cloud, (Cause that's what heros do!) only for him to murder the first person other than his mom to ever care about him.
Clouds body held both S and J-cells, and though they may be mutated, he could still call for Reunion. Something Zack couldn't sense due to him being an A-type SOLDIER instead of an S-type like himself.
The blond could cultivate the summoned J-cells and make them multiply under his care. He knew the best revenge was patience, after all, so long as Cloud lived, Sephiroth would never truly die.
All he had to do was stay hidden. Know one could know of him, not that they were looking for a supposedly dead man, even if they were, they would never find him in his hidden underground bunker since no one with more then three brain cells would go near the Northern Crater.
9. Sephiroth drops blatant innuendos and pickup lines all throughout his fight with Cloud, but the blond thinks he's just imagining it.
Seph actually manages to escape that time, but after the fight, his friends point out all the questionable things the silverette said.
Cloud wasn't sure if he should be relieved that he wasn't hallucinating it.
10. Tifa caught Denzel and Marlene "interrogating" a doll that was tied to a tree.
They were hitting it with sticks and yelling, "Who's your source?!" At it.
Needless to say, Reno is no longer allowed to around the children without adult supervision.
11. Kunsel began fiddling with a laser pointer, absent-mindedly tracing large slow circles on an opposing wall. He kept thinking back to all the laser pointer related incidents from the past few weeks until he noticed, much to his horror, that a few of his fellow SOLDIERS in the mess hall were tracking the little red dot with laser focus.
Pun intended.
12. Aerith had long since faded into the lifestream where she belonged, but that's not what this story is about.
Thousands of years have passed since the events of MeteorFall, and Gaia is nearly overflowing with mako energy.
Cloud felt as Gaia began remaking her WEAPONS, and couldn't help but wonder as to why. After about a year of searching he found Vincent again and asked him.
The truth was disturbing. Gaia's lifestream had outgrown the planet, and was preparing a new Omega WEAPON to suck the life out of this one and travel back to the "Mother planet"
Cloud eventually found out about Gaias plans for him by eavesdropping on conversation between Gaia herself and the Cetra from the "Mother planet". You see, Cloud has a unique relationship with the planet. He was modified using Jenovas Eldrich powers, and over time, developed his own. The blond allowed Gaia to use his body/very being as a sort of ward against all things Eldrich, and has worked spectacularly well.
Gaia planned to keep him alive as she traveled through the cosmos. That wouldn't be a problem, no the problem was that she planned to encase him in crystal and keep him there for the rest of eternity. When the Cetra mentioned breeding him so that other planets would have a ward, he nearly gagged.
He told Vincent about everything and admitted he was afraid. The only reason he remained sane all these years was because he could travel and have new experiences. He couldn't do that if he was trapped.
Vincent suggested a rocket, to which the blond revealed that Gaia herself always sabotaged the rockets and space programs. For obvious reasons. They were stuck and didn't know what to do now that it was literally them against the world. So when Vincent suggested reviving Mako energy and the SOLDIER program until they could find a way off of Gaia, Cloud didn't dismiss it.
13. Another summoning gone wrong Au where Sephiroth, Zack, and Cloud who are in the normal modern universe and are lovers in a poly relationship, decide to mess around with a spellbook Zack picked up in a shop. They were saying spells out loud and making fun of them, they also did the wierd little ceremonies and made "potions" and had a good time.
Nothing happened, until they woke up the next morning to the chocobo frantically patting them awake with his hands, stunned silent.
There, in their king sized bed, were their trans-dimensional alter-egos, done up with swords and pauldrons and...is Sephiroth wearing a fetish outfit? Said silverette poked his alter-ego with a ruler a few times to confirm he was out cold.
What were they supposed to do now?
14. Final Fantasy 7 and LoZ: Breath of the Wild crossover
Cloud lands in a new reality, but he's too focused on trying to fight the new breeds of monsters and surviving the desert heat to ponder the situation for long
And then there's all those things that keep trying to electrocute him...Clouds not having a good day.
On the other hand he has plenty of things to take his anger out on.
Also, Cloud meeting a horse! Which are critically endangered on Gaia!
15. Genesis finds Cloud post DoC and begins taunting him, but gasps dramatically when he learns the blond has never tasted Banoran apples/apple products. He drags Cloud along to get a taste. Weirdly, they get along.
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austarus · 4 years ago
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Harry Wells x Reader Crisis of Infinite Wells (Part 5 of 5)
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**A/N: The picture/edit/gif does not belong to me. 
*It’s finally over! This took multiple showers to get it right even if I had everything planned out and outlined. But goodness is it over. I’m possibly going to take a break for a few weeks since my summer uni work is now killing on top of medical scribe classes. Yeah, my mental health is really being pulverized this summer. Trying to learn how to drive on the highway to the city too since I’m moving to the city. But ugh, I just don’t want to do anything other than watch Tik Tok, make fics, read fics/books, and sleep ;-; Big thanks to @natsukitakama​ for translating all the French that happened with Sherloque and a big thanks to @mintchipcupcake​ for letting me know her view on neural frequencies for Harry. Thanks to @crazythoughtsandlove​, @sarah-i-khel​​, @countlesswells​, and @multiwells​ for supporting me. I could not have done it without you guys!
I hope everyone has enjoyed this series and went down the lane of feels. Please remember to comment and reblog, it helps us content creators so much so we can keep on creating.
Part 1    Part 2    Part 3    Part 4    
Word Count: 5732
“Nn,” a tired noise left your throat. Clearing said throat, you licked your dry lips as a yawn escaped you. Instinctively, you covered your mouth with the back of your hand. You languidly moved your limbs to cuddle into a pillow even further. Your phone laid beside you on the bed in silent mode. Breathing in gently, your senses registered a certain kind of musk that usually clung to a particular person. A dull ache echoed through your body as every organ began to wake up for the day. Your eyelids remained shut as a brisk of sunlight filtered through the blinds. Everything felt so foggy, but goodness was the rest well deserved. After all, you hadn’t been sleeping well once you found out that your idea had been perfectly sane and in the works. And it did work. You blinked a few times, giving up on going back to sleep. Another yawn left you. You were still in the clothes that you had worn yesterday, locks in a tangly mess. Adjusting your body to lay on your back, your mind recognized that you were indeed not in your room or in your home. You frowned as you gazed up at the ceiling. What the hell? How did I get in Harry’s room? I thought-
“Allen, I didn’t ask for your help.”
Harry! Perking your head up at the familiar roughly-toned voice, your body drifted to the side a bit as dizziness coursed within your being since you had bolted upright on the bed. You failed to recognize how your legs had been tangled in the sheets from your deep slumber and fell off the bed when you got up with haste. The cold concrete floor greeted you mockingly in comparison to the softness of the bed you were just on. Your body further protested when it absorbed the impact. Groaning, you shuffled off the floor on wobbly legs heading out of the room on socked feet. You didn’t care if you looked like a chaotic mess or that you were in your socks. Only one thought rang in your mind as you grew close to the frustrated voices. He’s here!
“You said you needed someone to watch your back and I was the only one available.”
“Yes, watch my back from the coms, Allen. From the Labs. Not someone to speed around the entire property. It was a delicate instance that I could have handled myself! And what do you know, you triggered most of the sensors and traps set.”
“You looked like you were in a bind!”
“Help me, Barry. Save me, I can’t handle a little reconnaissance without your speedster abilities. Not.”
“How many times have I told you not to touch my stuff?”
“What are you talking about, Cisco?”
“You played with my tech again! What is it up with you Wells and tampering with my things?!”
You walked in with hurried steps right as Cisco had his outburst; the haze of sleep had left you all together when you had rounded the corner. The boys stopped when you entered the Cortex abruptly out of breath. Your eyes scanned around, head moving from side to side. But you only saw Barry and Cisco and Nash as you seemed to be frozen in place. Your heart dropped in your chest at the absence of Harry, eyes sparkling as you had casted your gaze downward. Grueling thoughts had swirled through your mind as the growing whole of doubt further widened in your chest. The voice you had heard came from Nash, not Harry. Reality had picked you up and thrown you into Central City’s lake of cold water. Harry’s not here. He’s- I- He’s not coming… Your pursed your lips, whispering a little apology for barging in on the three’s argument. Nash moved his gaze to his gloves fiddling with it when he saw the sadness flicker through your eyes. With a somber expression, turned around on the spot and collided with a very solid body with a very sturdy chest. Instantly, arms encased your being at the collision, a deep voice cut through the silence. A voice that thrilled your insides.
“I finally caught you, my love.”
Swallowing thickly, you slowly looked up to see those gentle baby blues that rested behind black-clear frames. The dark-haired man cupped your face gingerly as you gathered the strength to speak. “Harry?”
“I’m back.”
A tear trickled down from your eyes, cascading down your flushing cheek, no longer wanting to be bound within your glassy eyes. Harry softly smiled down at you with his own glimmering eyes, his thumb wiped the tear that fell, but his touch caused more to fall. A whimper escaped you as you pressed your head into his chest, sobbing quietly in relief with your arms tightly holding him. The taller man took in a breath, fighting his own tears before he placed a kiss to your forehead. Harry whispered soothing words while rubbing your back as you cried into him. These past couple of weeks had been rough for everyone, but rougher on you and him. Barry and Cisco elbowed each other that the King and Queen of the Underworld have finally reunited and of course made bets on who knows what. Nash rolled his eyes at the two. Jesse stood be the door, watching her dad and you reunite. Her dorky dad and his sweet as a button girlfriend. The young speedster had a pack of tissues at the ready with a wide smile on her face. Tilting to the side, she waved at Barry and Cisco and Nash. Jesse looked oddly at Nash, observing him eye you and her dad for a moment before turning his gaze to meet her eyes. The other Wells doppelganger nodded at her, briefly seeing all the things and qualities that Harry would ramble about regarding his daughter. Nash’s heart gripped in his chest, but truthfully there was a glimpse of happiness for you. He was learning to be content with your happiness. The boys made eye contact with Harry, who only nodded at them as they decided that it would be best to leave you and Harry and Jesse alone. Barry sped them out of the Cortex.
Pulling away, you rubbed your puffy red eyes only to see a tear fall from Harry as he watched you. His eyes ran over every detail of you as if he had been seeing you for the first time in his life. You gripped his face with both hands and pulled him close. He rested his forehead against yours as you wiped his single tear. The both of you closed your eyes and just relished in each other’s presence. Breathing gently with each other and calming any doubts the two of you had. He was here and you were in his arms. The pent-up anxiety that had been increasing since the Crisis had finally burst.
“You’re here.”
“I’m here,” Harry nodded at your stumbling voice from all the crying. “I’m not going anywhere.” The two of you collected yourselves, a lovestruck look crossing your eyes.
Jesse held a pack of tissues up to you when you and her dad had pulled away. You sheepishly smiled at the young Wells. “I decided to drop by as well, can’t miss out on the Hades and Persephone reunion.” You giggled at her while whipping your tears and blowing your nose, knowing Cisco had essentially looped her into shipping you and Harry with those names. The speedster pulled you into a huge hug, giggling with you.  
“I missed you too Ms. Jesse Quick,” you gave her a squeeze. Harry couldn’t keep the smile off his face. Both his girls were with him. His daughter and the love of his life. His heart felt utterly in bliss.
“Thank you for bringing him back,” Jesse whispered, pulling away with a smile. You knew that look in her eyes, the same emotion she had held when she had initially found out what Devoe had done to Harry. How he used Harry as a guinea pig and lost himself as a result. You returned the smile, feeling Harry’s large hand find your smaller one and holding it firmly. Glancing down, you intertwined your fingers with his before looking up brightly at him. The three of you glanced at each other as a wave a serenity passed over you three before Jesse bid you farewell as she headed to the break room because of her grumbling stomach. Thanks to her increased metabolism from being a speedster she’s due for speedster protein bar that Cisco’s come up with.
Walking through the corridor, Jesse entered the break room with furrowed eyebrows as her green eyes landed on an unfamiliar person. The dark-haired Hispanic was typing away on the couch when she looked up to see the young speedster. Papers and articles were plopped beside the young adult.
“You’re Allegra, right?” Jesse quired, hands in her jacket pockets.
“Yeah, who-”
“Great, I’m Jesse Wells. You’re just the person I was looking for.” Allegra’s frown deepened but deemed that this was the Jesse Wells you had mentioned to her. Harry’s daughter. Two irreplaceable members of Team Flash. The UV meta figured that the speedster was no harm, especially since Jesse seemed to be around her own age. “We need to talk. I know this great bar we could go to.”
“Wait, what-”
Allegra wasn’t able to finish her sentence as Jesse had sped them away to a bar in a torrent of yellow-green lightning.
***
Harry had ushered you back to his room and away from prying eyes because he knew that if Cisco and Barry came around you and the scientist would not hear the end of it. Plus, as much as Harry was balanced now, he currently preferred to capture your full attention inside the bedroom rather than outside. Especially with Nash still around the labs.
The two of you found yourselves cuddling into each other on the bed. Harry’s head rested close to yours while you slipped off his glasses and kissed his nose before threading your fingers through his hair. The Wells doppelganger let out a content sigh at the simple gesture of affection, but one he deeply enjoyed, while shutting his eyes for the moment. His arms rested comfortably around your waist; your figure pressed close to his as if he was afraid you were an illusion that would escape him. He had already discarded his black jacket, leaving him just in his classic black short sleeve shirt and dark wash jeans. Reopening his baby blue eyes, Harry plucked his glasses out of your hand to twist his body over to the side and tossing them onto the counter. Turning fully to you with a lovestruck smile and half-lidded eyes, he slowly leaned in with every intention of kissing you till your lips were red and swollen.
“Wait you can’t kiss me yet!” You moved your head back slightly to which Harry frowned irritably because he’s been holding back from kissing you silly in the Cortex. … Amongst doing other shamelessly pleasurable things to show you just how much he missed you.
“Why not?”
You simply took out the vanilla bean flavored chapstick from your pocket and apply it to your lips. Harry watched you smack them a few times and wondered if you were either tempting him even more or testing his patience or both. “Now you can kiss me.” Harry had quirked an amused eyebrow at you. “What? I wanted it to be perfect. Plus, you know I bite my lips when I get too wori-” You pouted at your boyfriend, who instantly shut you up with needy kiss. Without words, the kiss showed you just how much he had missed you and that his patience was running thin.
Your brain froze for a second before responding. His lips smacked against yours before Harry pushed his tongue into your mouth, yearning for your taste. You gasped, fighting him for a bit before giving in. His fingers had crawled up under your shirt, rubbing soothing circles on the skin. Your hands had rested on his face, pulling him impossibly closer as the smooches continued to heat up. The air in the room felt as if on fire but you wouldn’t have it any other way. Nipping on his bottom lip, you kissed Harry with just enough passion as your body moved to lay on top of his. His hands retreated from under your shirt to fold themselves on your lower back. Your hips pressed down against his own, feeling every part of his body meld with yours. Ragged breathes left the both of you as you continued to make out, biting and licking and sucking at each other. Harry’s hand snuck down to smack your ass causing a yelp to fall off your lips. You pulled away for air, your lungs exhausted and your head was spinning. You were met with a cheeky smirk while you pouted at your boyfriend with a frown. He licked his lips wickedly once more before leaning up to kiss your swollen lips while you adorned a flushed expression. A sight he took great pleasure in seeing on your face. And only he can elicit that kind of reaction from you. His lips tingled delightfully from the sweet chapstick on your lips.
“When did you even get here?” You asked once you regained control of your breathing, fixing your hair to the side as the two of you laid back. Harry resting on his back while your snuggled beside him, your head pressed to his chest as you listened to his racing heartbeat. You shifted your gaze to eye him with one hand against his chiseled chest. Harry sighed, collected his thoughts before tucking a piece of stray hair behind your ear as he spoke up. His arm was firmly wrapped around you.
“Last night. Jesse and I found you asleep on Sherloque’s lap.”
“How-…What’s with look?”
“What look? I don’t have a look.” Harry spoke quickly as if he’d been caught red-handed.
“Harry, yes you do! You have a look for almost everything. Everyone does.” You teased him a bit before turning to the more serious thoughts that had kept you up. And it showed. Harry can see it clear as day on your face. You had not been sleeping well without him. He couldn’t sleep either without you. “Anyway, what took you so long?”
“I- We… When I woke up Jesse had been monitoring my vitals, keeping me hooking up to a life support system. She was crying, wouldn’t let me go and saying how she was scared to death. Scared that she lost me for a second time. Every single day she would check on my vitals and try to talk to me. Jesse wouldn’t leave my side, going over all my vitals as my consciousness fully set into my body. We had collaborated everything, but…”
“But?”
“I was feeling weak when she took me off the life support. So, she quickly synthesized a blood sample to do a blood transfusion, just like you showed her, to flush out anything that had been hiding in my body from the Crisis and the neural separation. My vitals and cells returned to normal. It worked fast; I won’t deny that. Speedster blood and everything. Once I was feeling moderately better, we tried the last session.” Harry pointed to his head with a free hand, baby blue eyes twinkling with such knowledge and intellect that was rightfully his. “I’ve got it all back. Everything.”
You grinned up at him, “I told you, if anything Jesse would be the one to figure it out.”
“My pride and joy.”
“So, what went wrong? I-I mean, why didn’t it work the first time 2 years ago.”
“Well, Jesse had profusely voiced her irritation that Marlize had done a sloppy job after she looking over the blueprints and all the notes, but Marlize had also neglected the fact that I’m from another Earth- or in this case dimension. My neural frequency is at a different interval in comparison to everyone on Earth-1. A unique signature for each Earth, if you will. That’s why I was able to retain basic functions, but not reach my full potential regarding intelligence and neuron firing. And it’s a good think the dark matter didn’t leave any neural scars or that could have been a complication since the brain doesn’t do well with regeneration.”
“Look at you talking all science-y again. It worked; Jesse fixed you.”
Harry pulled up one of your hands, kissing the knuckles. “You’re the one that figured out how to bring me back. Back to my daughter, back to you, back to my family.”
You dropped your gaze, feeling the heat rise in your cheeks from his intense and adoring gaze. A bashful smile returning to your lips as your eyes met his. “I told you so.” You pressed your lips against him in triumph. Harry hummed against your lips before you pulled away.
“You’re not going to let it go, are you?”
“Nope,” you deadpanned with a cheeky grin. “Now I can admire you while you ramble on about physics and math that I’m totally clueless to and tend to tune out just to hear your voice.”
“Wait, you don’t actually listen to me explaining things?”
“… A little.” You sheepishly responded to which Harry retaliated by running his fingers over your sides. Your fiendish sides that always betrayed you. A giggled bubbled from your throat. “Harry, don’t you-” But the scientist paid no mind to you as he continued his carefully planned assault on your sides. Snorts and little laughs flood out of your lips as cringed and attempted to move your body away from his hands. A toothy grin crossed his features at your shrieks, his fingers ran over every ticklish area on you. Flopping onto your back, Harry’s tickle attack subsided as his heart flipped many times over. He watched your chest rise and fall as your giggles gradually quieted. You gazed up at him with stars in your eyes, his own were full of adoration and love but… with a certain other emotion hidden behind us. A thought struck you.
“By the way, where’s Sherloque?”
“Babe, he left. Said he had some business to take care of on his Earth- well, dimension actually.”
“Oh, I hope everything’s ok on his end. …I heard about Renee and everything.”
“He’ll be fine. Sherloque just needs his mind to mull over a few things.”
“I hope he finds what he’s looking for…” you whispered, to which Harry oddly looked at you, wondering if you knew, before the look behind his eyes shifted. You caught onto the sudden, but subtle change.
A particular glint sparkled in Harry’s eyes as you trailed off, one that had you hypnotized. One that you knew all too well as he towered over you on the bed. Those lust-filled eyes that pulled you in like a riptide. Harry licked his lips, leaning down with half-lidded eyes. Then a pesky thought hit you causing you to push against his leaning chest which had Harry inwardly grumbling.
“Wait, Harry, I haven’t washed up!”
“I figured, I had Jesse go out and buy you a few things. Those skin care products and face wash you idolize so much. She probably set them in the bathroom already.”
“The avocado and cucumber facewash? And the hydrating facial cleansers? With the pomegranate-berry face cream?”
Harry nodded, but kept you firmly beneath him, “If you can stand to hug me after I came back from Gorilla City- after all the shit they did and threw at me, then I think I can stand being around you in the clothes you’ve worn from yesterday and unfreshened up.”
“Yeah, not your best moments.” You teased him and slithered from underneath his grasp, hopping off the bed.
“Hey!”
He watched you step into the bathroom. God, I love you. Harry went on his phone, staring at the picture you and he took on New Year’s as the water ran in the bathroom. Maybe now wouldn’t be the best time no matter how many times Jesse’s been pestering me about it. Coming back, you dove right into his side and cuddled him close with a jubilee smile on your face. Harry swears his heart melted for the 100th time that day.
“If you want to… do stuff later, we’d have to do that back at my apartment after I shower and everything,” you traced patterns with your finger over his chest. “And so, no one interrupts and…. Yeah…”
“Definitely want to ‘do stuff’ later.” You blushed at his wink and how he wiggled his eyebrows. Babe, you’re going to need to shower after that too. Leaning in Harry caught your ear between his teeth before whispering all the dirty things and positions he wants to put you in. “I’m going to make sure my name is the only thing you remember tomorrow morning, my sweet, sweet Persephone.” Covering your face, you resisted the urge to scream in frustration at this man’s level of teasing. Knowing he had impeccable patience for the nightly activities to come later. Harry knew the exact effect he had on you, how he can make your body scream in ecstasy as he’d show you just how capable he is in loving you. Blow out a puff of air, you calmed yourself and hormones. Your thirsty side would need to wait until you two went home.
“Harry?”
“Hm?” He blinked out of his thoughts and gave you a quizzical look.
“Do me a favor and flex.”
Harry blinked at you for a moment before sitting up and flexing. You won’t deny that your thirsty thoughts took over for a bit again when you reached up to run your fingers over the toned muscles. Before you could do anything else Harry’s strong arms wrapped around you as he snuggled his head into your chest. Soft. Your cheeks turned a rosy color as you felt him kiss your exposed chest from all the rolling around in bed.
“I don’t think I’m needed anywhere else today,” you mused, ruffling his chaotically messy locks. He breathed you in like a man taking a huge breath of air before diving into the depths of water.
“Perfect, because for the record, I wasn’t going to let you out of my arms all day.”
You chuckled and kissed his forehead, “Neither will I.” Shutting your eyes, the both of you slowly drifted off in each other’s embrace.
***
Sherloque sighed to himself as he stepped out of the dimensional portal into his home. The detective adjusted his coat around him. It was cold and empty again, but at least he had arrived safely again. Everything was still in place. His mind could not help, but to wander before he left you in the hands of Harry and his daughter.
(Flashback)
“Eh bien il était temps,” Sherloque remarked with a confident smirk. Harry and Jesse strolled closer to the detective with Harry rolling his eyes at him. Sherloque’s eyes landed onto Jesse, who only smiled at him politely. Jesse’s dealt with HR before so she likes to think she can handle another of her father’s doppelgangers. But she won’t lie, she’s a bit curious on what her doppelgangers are like. “You must be Jesse Quick.”
“That I am, nice to meet you…”
“Sherloque. And likewise, your father ‘as talked so much about you. ‘ave-” Her father had sent the detective a hard and threatening look, meaning that Sherloque should likely think twice before deciding to psychoanalyze and deduce Jesse. The Wells doppelganger chose his next words carefully, “-’ow was it?”
“I got it all back, minor headaches, but nothing else out of the ordinary,” Harry shrugged, knowing what Sherloque had been referring to and rubbed his temple as his eyes fell to your slumbering form. Your chest rose and fell with each relaxed breath.
“Right, well it was nice meeting you, Sherlock,” Jesse unfurled her arms, mentally plotting something vengeful.
“Sherloque, it’s French.”
“Yeah, cool, whatever,” She shrugged, not really caring before speeding off to scare Team Flash in their respective homes that she’s back. Especially Cisco and Barry, who Harry’s told her to get back at them good.
“She’s finally asleep.” Harry moves to pick you up from the couch and Sherloque’s lap. His arm hooked under your legs while the other held you around your lower back. Your head lulled into Harry’s neck, unconsciously breathing in his scent. He had already decided that a bed would be much more comfortable than a couch.
“You should zhank Nash for zhat,” Sherloque stood up, following the Harry to leave the Speed lab. The chaotically dark-haired Wells spared his counterpart a glance as a snort left his lips. “After all he’s zhe one zhat slipped a sleeping agent into ‘er drink. I called it drugging, ‘e ‘ad opposing zhoughts to zhat, as you can imagine.”
Harry remained silent, knowing he would have to thank Nash eventually for watching out for you these past couple of weeks in his absence. Especially when you had been sacrificing every moment of sleep to ensure everything had gone according to plan. Entering the familiar layout of his old room, Harry gently placed you on the bed and pulled up the thick blankets to keep you warm. Your boyfriend took a seat beside you, but across your sleeping form, leaning down to kiss the crown of your head. Sherloque smiled fondly at you and his doppelganger as he stood beside the end of the bed. Tout comme Hades et Perséphone des mythes grecs.
“Will you be sticking around? We can use all the help we can get with Bloodwork and Eva,” Harry asked, turning his head to the detective, a hand was in his lap while the other had linked his pinky with your own.
Sherloque blew a puff of air, his eyes glancing around before looking to you and Harry. He pressed his lips into a hard line before speaking up, “Actually, I must return ‘ome, zhere are… a few zhings zhat I need to take care of. Somezhing zhat your petit fleur ‘ad said to me.”
Harry raised an eyebrow but left it alone, it had been a matter between you and Sherloque. The two nodded before Sherloque used his extrapolator to leave Earth-Prime, throwing once last look to this Earth’s ironic ‘reincarnation’ of Persephone and Hades.
(End Flashback)
Sherloque only tipped his head lower before your words echoing in his already distracted mind as his feet carried him out of his home and to his Earth’s Central City’s precinct. The rain lightly cascaded down onto the city, a rough breeze howling past.
-“You deserve better. You really do, Sherloque. Love will find you.”
“Easy for you to say.” Sherloque snorted, blowing on his tea.
“Hey, head up,” You found yourself sitting beside the now cynical man as you wrapped your arms around him in a comforting hug. “It could even literally run right into you one day when you least expect it.”-
Il est facile pour vous de dire, petite fleur. Sherloque sighed. Je souhaite secrètement qu’il avait été avec vous. Quelles sont les chances que je puisse rencontrer un bel esprit comme vous dans ma dimension?Sur ma terre?
The detective was relieved that the Earth-1 Renee had had mercy on his being and not demanded money from the detective, instead wishing to go back and to never see him again. Typical, yet unlike his other ex-wives that have been milking him for any penny that he owns. Why he always chased after the same women was always a question that his mind and heart clashed with his desires on it. Sherloque’s eyes blurred slightly then refocused, he was still lost in his mind as his feet picked up the pace. His shoes tapped against the cold, wet surface of the concrete path. The taller man quickly collided with a shorter body, his chest lightly stung from the impact as he took a step back and ready to scold the other person. Sherloque’s eyes widened as he felt his world stop. Lo and behold your doppelganger had crashed right into him. The detective blinked a few times, speechless.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry.” You picked up his fallen hat, patting off the water that had gotten onto it from its fall into a shallow puddle. You rambled, “I can’t believe I did that. I’m such a ditz, I promise- If only I was paying more attention to where I was walking and not my phone- and honestly I can be really oblivious-”
Sherloque processed only half of the words that came out of your mouth while his mind went into its deductive phase. Your eyes were red and puffy from crying, hair knotted, possibly from rushing to work this morning. The detective faintly smelled dimethyl disulfide, ketones, toluene, and other chemical compounds that are used on cadavers. You worked with dead organisms, particularly humans. He deduced that your rumpled lab coat that stained with old blood and chemical burns and sagged shoulders from the weight of your bag. You had been fired from a research facility belonging to a medical institute. Picking up on the clues, you had been framed. A scapegoat to the recently missing human cadavers from your long nights at the labs. Long nights spent on carefully analyzing tissues and cells that have not yet degenerated. A means to collecting and keeping those samples viable for regeneration of the spine, brain, and heart. Organs that scarcely regenerate themselves after scarring or attack from autoimmune diseases.
“-What’s your name?”
“(Y/N) (L/N), I’m a biomedical scientist. I uh- sorry, I don’t know any French, I think that was it?”
“Oui, it was.”
Peut-être... L’amour n’a pas besoin d’être avec une Renée.Peut-être qu’il peut venir de quelqu’un d’autre- quelqu’un de précieux qui peut rendre la pareille à l’amour que j’aspire.Cela peut prendre soin de moi comme je le ferais pour eux. Your doppelganger stood worriedly in front of him. For some reason, the dark-haired Frenchman look vaguely familiar. Sherloque saw that there was nothing but kind intentions behind those glimmering eyes. A spark of light illuminated within your doppelganger’s eyes when yours met his. The similarities between your Earth-Prime self and the one that stood in front of him were impeccable, as were the differences… He could read your personality, little details that indicate the kind of person that you are. But he voiced none of his deductions. It was then that Sherloque had made his decision.
The tall Frenchman picked up the umbrella you had dropped from the force of the collision. He ensured that it was not broken before handing it to you. Taking his fedora, Sherloque smiled keenly at you as he gestured with his head for you to follow. “Come along, petit fleur, I require your expertise for a crucial case. Lives depend on it.”
“But I’m-”
“Currently free since you’re now out of work judging by your sullen eyes. Yet zhey twinkle wizh zhe desire for somezhing… more than the basic lab life.”
You directed your gaze back up at him with guilty, but curious eyes at his deduction. “That’s amazing, how…?”
Sherloque tilted his head at you before he held a hand out to you. For some odd reason Sherloque felt that this time would be different. Things would be different. The way you made his heart thrum warmly in his chest. C’est ce que ressentent Nash, Wolfgang et Harry? Quand vous les regardez avec ces yeux pétillants d’intellect et de générosité? “Come, our clients await.” He watched you hesitate before wordlessly setting your hand in his with curiosity filling your mind. The detective observed you as he placed a gentle kiss on your knuckles then tugged you along with him.
L’amour est une chose mystérieuse. La petite fleur pour laquelle j’avais une étincelle de sentiments avant d’être aveuglée par une autre Renée... Cette fois, je serai prudent avec mon cœur.Cette fois, j’apprendrai à aimer cette petite fleur qui m’a déjà intrigué.Cette fois, je vais poursuivre le bonheur et le changement avec un autre qui n’est pas Renée.Cette fois sera différente
French Translation:
Tout comme Hades et Perséphone des mythes grecs - Just like Hades and Persephone from the Greek myths
Il est facile pour vous de dire, petite fleur - It is easy for you to say, little flower -
Je souhaite secrètement qu’il avait été avec vous. Quelles sont les chances que je puisse rencontrer un bel esprit comme vous dans ma dimension?Sur ma terre? - I secretly wish that it had been with you. What are the chances that I can meet a beautiful spirit such as you in my dimension? On my Earth?
Peut-être... L’amour n’a pas besoin d’être avec une Renée.Peut-être qu’il peut venir de quelqu’un d’autre- quelqu’un de précieux qui peut rendre la pareille à l’amour que j’aspire.Cela peut prendre soin de moi comme je le ferais pour eux. - Maybe… Love doesn’t have to be with a Renee. Maybe it can come from someone else- someone precious that can reciprocate the love that I yearn for. That can take care of me as I would for them
C’est ce que ressentent Nash, Wolfgang et Harry? Quand vous les regardez avec ces yeux pétillants d’intellect et de générosité? - Is this what Nash and Wolfgang and Harry feel? When you look up at them with those sparkling eyes of intellect and generosity?
L’amour est une chose mystérieuse. La petite fleur pour laquelle j’avais une étincelle de sentiments avant d’être aveuglée par une autre Renée... Cette fois, je serai prudent avec mon cœur.Cette fois, j’apprendrai à aimer cette petite fleur qui m’a déjà intrigué.Cette fois, je vais poursuivre le bonheur et le changement avec un autre qui n’est pas Renée.Cette fois sera différente - Love is a mysterious thing. The little flower that I had a spark of feelings for before being blinded by another Renee… This time, I will be careful with my heart. This time, I will learn how to love this little flower who has already intrigued me. This time, I will pursue happiness and change with another that is not Renee. This time will be different.
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thekavseklabs · 3 years ago
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💣 ⛈️ 🦄
This got loooooong because I wasn't sure which muses you wanted me to do it for so i did them ALL and put it under a readmore!
💣: A stress headcanon
3: Just... Look at them. Everything stresses them the fuck out. But let's focus on something specific- they're seriously germaphobic, and have NO coping mechanisms for this! They are always, always stressing about what they're touching and what is touching them and what they're breathing and oh god oh shit where is the hand sanitizer they need to DRINK IT-
C: Now, C struggles with this tendency to dehumanize strangers, but if they don't do that? If they awknowledge youre a person? Oh boy. They are so anxious about what people think of them. Are you scared of them? Do you hate them? Do you know what they've done? Are you going to hurt them for it? They are freaking out.
Vynathr: The man is rarely more stressed than when he is in a crowd. So many sights and sounds, he is surrounded, his back exposed, his movement limited, and he can't process any of it. He's terrified that he'll hurt someone somehow, or that the crowd will become violent. It will leave him frazzled for the rest of the day and the next morning too.
Spades: I don't talk about it often but Spades has an empire of his own to lead! He's always busy, and when he's not working he's thinking about work. Slowly taking over larger and larger areas, extending and expanding his forces, keeping loyalty and keeping all at arms-length. He's about one bad day away from exploding from the stress and work of it. Someone give the poor boy a massage and a snuggle.
Xavier: Being an alcoholic and a pathological liar leading a crew of pirates is... Not always a fun time. He has to handle all of the smart and responsible things to do, keep a budget for food, and keep them all from getting killed while lacking any healthy coping mechanisms for dealing with all of this. Man is on the world's shittiest glamorized rollercoaster and there is no end to the loops and spins.
⛈️: A sadness headcanon
3: Their feeling of being unworthy and unwanted has persisted through their life. They have considered many times the sum of their actions. They know that dying will not fix anything, only make it worse. Or worthless. But they know that if they succeed in their experiments, they will become a core- and at times, they wonder if those downsides they have heard of are downsides at all. Wouldn't it be nice if their sins were erased by the warp of time whem they are gone?
C: C has never been pet on the head. Never had a parent to do so, never a loved one. Even in verses where their mother is alive, she does not love them to do so, and neither did their babysitters. The closest they've come is a friendly pat on the arm from an opponent after a good fight. They long for touch more than anything in the world.
Vynathr: He remembers being a kit. Remembers being cradled in his mothers arms as she tried to hide him from their slave masters, remembers the horror in her eyes. Remembers the sounds of screams. He remembers as well the feeling of her hand in his short hair, her beautiful hum, her well wishes. Her fingers which seemed so large clutched in his little hands as his unsteady paws carry him across the floor in his first steps, supported by her patience. He remembers being loved when he was nothing. He knows that now that he is something, he must be something bad, because no one loves him.
Spades: He was in love before he ran to earth. He never got the chance to say so, and would never go back to try. If asked, he would not tell you the name of this individual- only that he knew that he was loved in return. Perhaps this was what stung him the most. Oh, how he misses that fool of a boy. He hopes he's okay, wherever he is now.
Xavier: He had a little sister. One of his many necklaces he wears at all time is actually a locket, containing two pictures of them. The first is them looking excited, grinning with their arms around each other. They seem to be at a party or dance of some kind. His sister is holding a wrapped box. The second is them snuggled together, his arm around her. She's asleep, and he looks content, nearly asleep himself. There are two larger adult figures half out of frame on each side, arms wrapped around the children. The lighting is dim in both. He misses these moments more than anything, and cries over the locket often.
🦄: A physical health headcanon
3: They are just, physically gone to shit. They have Marfan syndrome with moderate to severe damage, an eating disorder, severe dietary issues, an exremely weak immune system, insomnia, and periodic bouts of severe illness. Not to mention old injuries from experiments that act up at times, and in fantasy verses, the red plague/consequences of blood magic gone severely wrong. They are typically quadriplegic, and this is less serious but they're pretty nearsighted too. They look like death warmed over at all times. God help them.
C: You would think that a cyborg would be in stellar physical health. You would be wrong. They have bouts of a strange illness called Reversal, in which their body malfunctions due to their unusual diet. It involves fever, chills, spasms, hallucinations, abdominal and throat pain, and vomiting at times- said vomiting is dangerous to others considering they essentially eat time-and-space-warping acid formed from pure life force. 0/10, would not reccomend.
Vynathr: He has gigantism, however, he's very lucky in that it has pretty much only affected his height. His face (and specific facial features), hands and feet are proportional, as are his organs. He doesn't suffer from muscle weakness (obviously... Look at him), double vision, the sweating, restricted movement, none of it. Extremely lucky indeed. He does suffer from hearing issues, and his puberty was delayed. Due to the differences in how humans and kei grow, I will note that the abnormal growth did not begin until after he left the "kit" stage, which took a very long time for him. The growth ended in his lower 20s. He does have various other physical health stuff i could talk abt but I thought I'd get specific about the gigantism this time.
Spades: Spades is farsighted, and this does impact his ability in combat. His depth perception is also slightly off at times. He struggles with eating at times, and requires occasional doses of Progressive Energy- you know, that spacetime warping acid formed from pure life force. Very fun. It gives him fevers sometimes, the rare occasional spasm, but thankfully not the rest of C's illness. He uses a cane, leg braces, or crutches sometimes, depending on severity of pain and stiffness in his bad leg that day.
Xavier: The man is at his peak right now, but that could end at any time. He smokes, drinks, and does various drugs- at some point that is definitely going to impact his health, if he doesn't get injured first. He suffers a few bodily aches as well due to old injuries, such as stiffness and pain, occasional limited range of motion from a bad dislocated shoulder he once got on the battlefield. He has tinnitus and headaches at times as well, and there's some shrapnel in him. That's not even getting into the whole missing hand and the struggles that come with that.
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bopinion · 3 years ago
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2021 / 27
Aperçu of the Week:
He who goes his own way grows wings (Zen wisdom).
Bad News of the Week:
"Small measures, big impact" is the headline of an article on the Tagesschau website about a study by the German Institute of Economic Affairs (Institut der Wirtschaft / IW) that shows four ways Joe Sixpack could reduce his personal carbon footprint. And the numbers are impressive. If German households threw away only half the food they do now, that would save 6 million tons of CO2. A fifth less meat consumption would save almost 10 million tons. Buying one-fifth less new clothing per year would save as much as 12 million. And eliminating domestic flights in favor of rail would save another 2 million tons.
Wow! So why am I telling you about this under "Bad News"? Because these numbers are far less impressive in a different context. Because they would only reduce the CO2 footprint per capita and year by 0.6 tons from the current level of about 11 tons. But to limit global warming to the generally accepted minimum target of 1.5 degrees Celsius, a reduction to less than one ton would be necessary. And not even a complete renunciation of meat, throwaways, fashion and air travel would be enough to achieve this.
In order to spare future generations this enormous sword of Damocles, not only are many radical cuts in our accustomed everyday comforts necessary, but also a fundamental paradigm shift in practically every area of life - from consumption to mobility to the world of work. Driving to the organic market in an electric car and taking the old glass to the recycling center won't be enough. And not even Bill Gates will surprise us next week with an invention that converts greenhouse gases into a clean energy source at the push of a button. Likewise, Elon Musk's Mars colonies will be a little while in coming.
So what it would take first is radical honesty. The admission that all these small, well-intentioned symbolic measures, such as abolishing plastic cups for coffee-to-go, are simply by far not enough to maintain a planet worth living on. But there is no alternative. It's a shame that humanity's change management has failed in almost every significant task in history. The problem is quite simply the prioritization. For example, the military budget of the USA alone would be sufficient to sustainably abolish hunger worldwide - three times over. Or a single month's profit on Wall Street to end child labor and give all children access to education. Who knows, maybe if one of those children from Uganda had attended a school instead of slaving in a mine and had been given a hot lunch instead of malaria, he or she would become the genius who has the crucial idea for the miracle at the push of a button. But we idiots will reliably know how to prevent that. Congratulations!
Good News of the Week:
The pandemic has once again proven how important the so-called "state capable of acting" is for the well-being of its citizens. Especially in contrast to failed states such as Mali, Afghanistan or increasingly Haiti. An essential basis of a such capable state is its financial strength, in order to be able to cope with crises of any kind or, ideally, to prevent them from arising in the first place (social peace etc.). These crises must increasingly be seen in an international context - from Corona to climate.
The financial scope, in turn, is determined by the balance of expenditures and revenues - and the latter are fed almost exclusively by the taxes levied by the states. And this issue, too, must increasingly be seen in an international context, since companies, unlike citizens, are literally boundless in their tax-relevant actions. Which, to put it mildly, gives them room to maneuver - or more clearly: to avoid taxes. As a result, the well-known representatives of Economy 2.0 such as Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook have come in for criticism.
Therefore, the news from the summit meeting of the G20 finance ministers in Venice yesterday can be absolutely welcomed: after a long struggle, an agreement had been reached on a global minimum tax for large corporations. An agreement providing for a 15% minimum tax is to be implemented as early as 2023. Under the umbrella of the OECD, 131 countries have already agreed to this - including the key heavyweights in this respect, above all the USA.
One aspect in particular is worth mentioning: companies are to pay taxes not only in their home country, but above all where the profits are generated. This benefits emerging countries in particular. On the other hand, companies will no longer benefit fully from doing business in low-tax countries, as the difference will then be levied at the company's legal domicile. Sounds good. And fair.
Personal happy moment of the week:
The day before yesterday was my daughter's high school graduation. After her 18th birthday, the second big step into the adult world. And the proud dad wavered between melancholic and tears of joy. There she is on stage getting her "certificate of maturity" - the world is open to her. I was also particularly pleased with her confident demeanor from organizing the event behind the scenes to making speeches to the audience up front. And the respect she received: from classmates, but also from teachers and even from other parents. Yes, the world really is open to her. You go, girl!
I couldn't care less...
...that England will lose to Italy tonight. After all, the final of UEFA Euro 2020 will be played in London - and the famous "Wembley goal" still has an effect... ;-)
As I write this...
...we are waiting for the next storm and hailstorm. And we know that we are much better off here than for example in the northwest of North America. Who still doubts the man-made climate change: look out of the damn window!
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elisaphoenix13 · 4 years ago
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Before The Dawn (Ch. 1)
Tony was quiet but Cassie understood why. He just lost his entire family and half of his friends, and only Diana had survived the snap the adults were talking about. When Tony saw Cassie, he asked about Scott and Steve had told him that he was missing and her mom and stepdad were either out of reception range or victims. So Tony had her pack her things and took her Diana with him after he recovered from his near month in space.
That was how she found herself in the backseat of his car and on their way to a new house he said he bought, with only the radio to fill the silence and Diana's periodic cooing. Cassie didn't feel it was the right time to strike up conversation and that it was best to leave Tony to his thoughts for now, and she kept herself entertained with either a book or playing with the baby. When Diana started fussing though, Cassie immediately reached into the diaper bag between them and grabbed what she needed to make her a bottle.
A water bottle, formula, and a baby bottle were all fished out and she carefully poured formula and water into the bottle before closing it tightly and shaking it. Just like Stephen showed her. Cassie loved helping him with the baby so she asked him to show her how to do things so she could help when he needed it. She was glad she did because Tony needed it now more than ever. He wouldn't need to make as many stops and maybe they would only need to make one before they got to the house they were going to.
Diana quiets immediately when Cassie offers her the bottle and the baby drinks hungrily as Cassie holds it. She was getting hungry herself and Tony seemed to read her mind because he briefly caught her eye in the rearview before he looked back at the road.
"We'll be there in about half an hour. Think you can hold out?" Tony asks.
"Is there food there already?" Cassie asks.
"No. It will be delivered tomorrow but there's somewhere close to the house we can drive through."
"I can wait." Cassie nods.
Tony answers with a nod and Cassie pulls the bottle away when Dia is finished with it and sticks it back in the diaper bag. She keeps her entertained with some toys and then eventually a teething ring and before Cassie knows it, Tony is pulling into a drive thru and asking her what she wants and then putting the bag of food in the passenger seat before he's driving away again. It was another ten minutes before he was pulling onto a gravel road and the sound of crunching under the tires drew Cassie's attention out the window and the scenery around them.
The first thing she saw was the enormous lake. It was too cold to go swimming but maybe when it warmed up, Tony might distract himself and take her out. She didn't keep her hopes up though. Tony was hurting and depressed and needed time to mourn, just like the rest of the world, and Cassie knew he had to have that time. She did too. Her dad was missing as well as her mom and stepdad...and it was possible they met the same fate as half of the world. For all she knew, she only had Tony and Diana.
Tony parks and turns off the car before he gets out to open the back door and unbuckle Diana to pull her out. "Don't worry about our bags just yet. Can you get the diaper bag and the food?"
"Yeah." Cassie nods and gets out of the car and grabs Diana's diaper bag before she closes her door, and the bag of food from the front seat before following Tony inside. "Where is Dia sleeping?"
"Her own room. Everything should be set up. I'll have one of the baby monitors in my room." Tony responds. "Go ahead and eat. I'll take her up and lay her down after I change her."
Cassie hands him the diaper bag when he reaches for it, and then sits at the table with their food as he disappears up the stairs. As she bit into her chicken nugget, Cassie looked around the cabin and almost frowned when she noticed that it was only furnished with the bare essentials. At the tower, it always felt like a home because it always had something personalized lying somewhere. But here? There wasn't a pile of books in the corner, there wasn't a completed lego structure sitting on an end table, no baby toys strewn about…
She decided she needed to help change that whether Tony liked it or not. Maybe she didn't have anything of Stephen's, Peter's, or Harley's, but she had her things and Diana's. She would help make this a home too even if it wouldn't be the same as the tower.
Tony returns downstairs and sits across from her and then pulls his hamburger out of the bag. "We'll get the other bags when we finish eating. You can go find a room you want." He frowns. "Uhh...you don't need help with taking a shower or anything do you?"
"No. I can do it myself." Cassie says and finishes her last chicken nugget.
Tony visibly sighs with relief. Cassie had a feeling he wasn't comfortable with the possibility of having to help her but she was old enough to take care of herself.
She waits until he finishes his dinner and then they go back outside to grab their bags from the trunk and she carries hers in and upstairs. All of the doors were open except for one and she figured that was Diana's room. So she looked into the nearest one, glad that it wasn't the master bedroom, and went in to put her bag on the bed. She takes her time unpacking and putting her things away, takes a quick shower, and then goes to bed. She didn't fall asleep straight away though. That was when she took the time to cry for her parents. For the family she found in the Avengers. Cassie was lucky Tony was willing to take care of her.
She cried herself to sleep.
When Cassie woke up the next morning, the first thing she heard was Diana crying but figured Tony would be tending to her soon enough and got up to get ready. By the time she had gotten dressed and brushed her hair, Diana was still crying and Cassie frowned as she left her room. She checked the master bedroom and found Tony asleep in bed and after some quiet investigation when she snuck in, she discovered that he had forgotten to turn his end on. Cassie decided he needed the sleep since even she knew he was notorious for staying up for hours or even days, and she snuck back out of the room and closed the door silently behind her.
Cassie then walks into Diana's room and finds the six month old baby sitting up in her crib with tears rolling down her cheeks. When the ten year old steps closer, Dia calms down a little and holds her arms up as Cassie lowers the railing to the crib and hiccups when she picks her up.
"Are you hungry Dia?" Cassie asks and takes her over to the bed in the room to change her.
The changing table was too high for her to use so the bed was her next option. Cassie grabs the plastic keys for Diana to play with while she changes her diaper and gets her dressed, and when she was done, she picks her back up and leaves the room.
"I think your Daddy has some baby food for you. Want to try some apples?" Cassie giggles when Diana babbles in response and takes her down to the kitchen to put her in the high chair.
Once she was certain the baby was secure, Cassie looked through the diaper bag that had been left in the living room and pulled out a little glass container of pureed apples and blueberries. She fed Diana about half of it and then cleaned her up and took her out of the highchair, and then carried her over to her swing in the living room. She didn't see it the night before but she didn't see the high chair either so Tony must have set them up for a brief moment of distraction. Once Diana is buckled into her swing, Cassie goes back over to the diaper bag to make her a bottle and gives it to the baby and turns on the tv to a preschool show to keep her occupied.
Cassie had taken to watching how Tony and Stephen (and even the boys at some points) took care of her and made note of every single thing. But now that the baby was taken care of for now, she had nothing to do but wait until food was delivered so she could have breakfast. Cassie put the jar of baby food in the fridge for later and as quickly as she could, she went up to the room to grab her coloring book and pencils, then ran back down to sit in the living room at the coffee table to color since she knew it wasn't a good idea to leave a baby unattended.
It was another hour when Tony finally woke up and came stumbling down the stairs. Both Cassie and Diana looked over at him and the man glanced between them before sighing in relief.
"How long have you been up?" He finally asks and Cassie shrugs.
"About an hour."
"Shit...and you fed her and everything? I woke up and realized that I never turned on the monitor--" he stops rambling and rubs his eyes. "Why didn't you wake me up?"
"You needed the sleep." Cassie says easily. "When will the food be delivered?"
"Uh...should be any minute now actually." Tony steps over to pat her head. "Thanks for taking care of her. Think you can watch her for a little while longer? I want to get Friday up and running."
"Uh-huh."
Tony sighs and crouches down to kiss Diana's forehead and he disappears into the garage where Cassie assumed he was going to set up his lab. True to his word, the food delivery came about fifteen minutes later and Cassie brought it all in and put it away, pulling out a large bowl to put on the counter and set the fruit in it. Once that was finished, she poured herself some cereal and took it back into the living room after putting the milk in the fridge and ate at the coffee table. Diana happily babbled at her cartoons as Cassie ate, and when the girl was finished she got up with her bowl and even took the baby's empty bottle from her to wash and put away.
As she was setting the bottle on the drying rack, Tony walked back in and Cassie pointed to the fridge. "I put the food away."
"You did?" Tony raises an eyebrow and opens the refrigerator to look inside and finds it stocked and organized. "Guess I know who the boss of the house is."
Cassie giggles and puts the step stool away and returns to the living room as Tony finds the coffee and sets about making himself coffee and breakfast. She knew he would probably only willingly make himself food today, but she would make sure he ate no matter what. She wanted to do her dad and Stephen proud and make sure Tony took care of himself.
"Cass? Did you eat?" Tony asks.
"I had cereal!" She calls back as she colors in a flower with her orange pencil.
"What did you give Dia?"
"Half a jar of baby food and some formula."
"How do you know to do that?" She hears him mumble to himself but doesn't answer him. "Uhh...I think I'm almost done with Friday." He says a little louder.
"I can watch her. It's okay." Cassie responds.
"It's just for a little longer. Promise." Tony says as he pours himself some cereal.
It became apparent to Cassie after that day that she would be just as responsible for Diana as Tony was.
If not more.
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lucidpantone · 4 years ago
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Hi :) Idk whether you're the right person to ask but I like your blog and asks and you're quite popular so I think it may get more attention. Here's the thing. In my real life I have never met anyone with depression/bipolar disorder (that I know of). So my experience/knowledge is very much based on the internet/movies/TV and well, SKAM and its remakes. I am aware that SKAM doesn't portray MI 100% real because it's still a show (or at least I think so, dont quote me on that!). However. Recently, I stumbled upon an interview somewhere on the news with a psychiatrist about bipolar disorder. She said she has been working with many patients with it. And she said that bipolar is not really manic vs depression. She said (and claimed that ALL of her many patients agreed with her) that bipolar looks like this: 94% of time severe depression, 3% mania, 3% 'normal' life. I have to admit that this really shook me. And I think you will agree it's a completely different scenario that SKAM or wtfock or SKAM France portrayed. I'd love to hear your opinion and also I'd be very grateful if you published this so more people who have more experience/knowledge on the subject can speak out too. Thank you! 😊😊😊
hey!(disclaimer this is super long) So funny enough I can kinda help answer some of this anon from my own experience but not from a medical experience or from the experience of the person who suffers from bipolar disorder. I have commented before that my roommate of 2.5 years has bipolar disorder and tho we don’t live together anymore living with him I got to experience first hand what those ups and downs that the Even character talks about 1st hand. Take into mind MI’s manifest differently for everyone no one manifestation will be the same. For example a study ran by a psychiatrist examining a sample group of people living with Bipolar you need to closely exam the participants. Are these participants homeless? or come from unstable families or environments? Then a continuous state of manic depression is also being influenced by environment. Environment plays a big part in how an MI impacts you. Why do you think routine is so essential for a lot of people, it creates stability so without knowing the nuances of the study I would just take that study as one of many studies and ultimately try to consume a large number of research findings to form the most informed opinion. Ok so personally from my experience living with my old roommate no he was not always depressed or suffering from an episode. I would say for the most part he was a functioning adult but yes they were aspects of his bipolar that effected his normal life. My old roommate was diagnosed at 17 when we moved in together he was 30. So he knew his disease really well. My old roommate was also an avid recreational drug user but he would not mix his meds and party stuff. He knew better by 30 as he had done that a lot in his 20′s and came to realize thats when he lost control. 
So for the most part this was the routine of my roommate’s MI he would be good for awhile and take his meds and everything would be fine for the most part.Then he would decide to stop taking his meds usually it was triggered by a festival/concert in town or something along those lines. Then he would never get back on his meds this would last for a little while and then he would spiral. My roommate was very aware that without his meds it wouldn't take long to start exhibiting signs to the point that I could tell when something was off. Yes the manic episodes were irrational and disorganized but my roommate was pretty harmless to anyone else manic he was just super high on life for example he woke me up at 2am once because he just “needed” to go for a run. Or he brought a white school chalk board because he would get these urges to write on our walls and his gf would freak so he brought this chalk board and put it on the wall and when he was manic he would go to town. He also wanted to spend money like crazy. Luckily he was a trust fund kid so he had it but he would go in and buy a ton of shit he didn't need. Now when he was down its was different sometimes he was down because the recreational drugs would exhaust his brain and then all hell would break loose coupled with the bipolar.I wasn’t sure if he was manic or just down off synthetics or a bit of both. I did witness an organic depressive episode once tho and for my roommate he would get really nasty. Like say shit that was super hurtful to get under your skin and also he would hate anything and everything and god forbid you said something like its a “pretty day” he would be like “I hate this day. f*** the sun”. It would usually be a 2 week down period but the most intense portions of his episodes were only a 2-4 days because then my roommate would cave and call his therapist (he has been in therapy his whole adult life) and they would create a new “plan” and that means his meds. It would take about two weeks for the meds to finally regulate him and then he would be fine. A lot of my roomies episodes were self induced because he would stop his meds but when he was on meds he was fine he had moments he was blue but nothing he couldn't manage. So personally I would say every 6 months for two weeks he would experience an episode but once again it was self induced. Also my roommate was 100% responsible for triggering himself at times via his partying. He is not an idiot he knows the consequences he has had bipolar since he was 17 he knows how his brain works(he is highly aware that he is someone that will live medicated for the entirety of his life) I just think human nature gets the best of us sometimes. However I will say my roommate is one of my closest friends. I love that kid. He is married now and just had a kid. He doesn't party anymore but you know organically he will one day have an episode but for the most part once you live with him you sorta of get use to it. Its just something that happens every few months. So just plan ahead and learn to communicate a lot but once again my roommate is 30 he doesn't hide his bipolar he owns it he will even tell new friends like “hey one day I may be acting weird its probably my bipolar flaring up” (like its fucking allergies or something) but he is so use to it by now he has been living with his diagnoses so long. So you just know as his friend that eventually you will catch him during a time when it’s flaring up. Also for me I got to know him well enough I also knew when it was happening. They are signs but once again for the most part we just lived day by day like normal as long as he took medication. Oh and for my roommate personally he has only ever experienced 2/3 “dark” episodes meaning he checked himself in for his own personal safety. I hope this long explanation helps!
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otterknowbynow · 4 years ago
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Gotcha Day (1/3)
The catalyst for Team Voltron adopting a dog might be an offhand demand from Lance, but let's be real: several of them are very much on board with this plan.
Written as part of Gentron Week 2020 as a combination of the prompts "Adopting a Pet Together" and "Cultural Exchange", in two three parts.
Part 2 Here | Part 3 Here | Also on ao3
“Listen, Kaltenecker needs a puppy friend,” Lance says one evening. Keith blinks and props himself up on his elbows from where he’s been lying on the couch. He turns his head toward where Lance is sitting on the floor, trying to remember if there was any context for this in previous conversation, but he doesn’t think so. All five paladins are in the lounge, which seems to be why Lance has brought it up, despite the fact that he and Pidge are currently deeply engaged in some kind of fighting game with tiny laser-blasting spaceships. If it were a bit more realistic, it might be good flight training for the lions, Keith thinks. 
“Does she?” asks Pidge, pressing a few buttons in such quick succession that Keith has no idea what they were. Glancing at the screen, he’s not sure what they did, either. 
“Of course she does,” Lance says, not looking up from the screen in front of him. His fingers still moving rapidly on the controller in his hands, he continues. “Who among us has experience with bovine needs? Me, I do. Who among us can read her body language and tell you what those needs are? Me, I can. Therefore, I can tell you: she needs a puppy friend.” 
“And this would have nothing to do with you wanting a puppy for yourself,” Keith says flatly, sitting up all the way now. This might be interesting. 
“Definitely not,” Lance agrees, sticking his tongue halfway out of his mouth and holding his controller to one side as his ship on the screen executes some kind of quick maneuver around Pidge’s. 
“I don’t think it’s a terrible idea,” Shiro says mildly from a couch across the way. He’s still looking down at whatever he’s been reading on his tablet. Keith isn’t sure if it’s the tone in Shiro’s voice that gives him away or if he’s just remembering all the times he heard Shiro talk about getting a dog back at the Garrison, but it sure seems like he thinks it’s a better idea than just not terrible. 
“You planning on raising this puppy yourself?” Pidge asks skeptically. 
“I’m planning on all of us raising this puppy together,” Lance says decisively, and apparently he’s equally decisive in-game, because there’s a trilling victory sound from the screen in front of them and Pidge’s shoulders drop before she hits a few buttons on her controller. 
“Rematch,” she says, and Lance nods. 
“I don’t know, raising a puppy is a lot of work,” says Hunk thoughtfully. It’s clear his mind is only half on this conversation, though, since he hasn’t looked away from the small white devices in front of him that he’s been working on for the better part of an hour. 
“Seems like you should talk to Coran,” says Shiro mildly. “Seems like he’d be best equipped to handle the situation.” 
“You don’t think I can handle one puppy?” Lance asks sharply, looking up from the screen for half a second just to direct a glare at Shiro. 
“Oh, handling the puppy won’t be the problem.” Shiro grins, and Keith huffs a small laugh to himself. 
“Of course it won’t,” says Lance irritably, this time still zipping his little ship around the screen, tongue out to one side again in concentration. “I can handle a puppy in my sleep -- I could handle puppies, plural, in my sleep.” Keith snorts at that, remembering a foster he had who raised a new puppy while he lived there.
“I’m pretty sure sleep loss is part of the deal,” he says before he can stop himself. Not that he would want to -- Lance can’t just be spouting inaccuracies when they’re talking about bringing in a whole-ass animal they’ll be responsible for. 
“It’s a figure of speech, pal.” He would probably be more irritated if he weren’t mid-game, but Pidge seems to be gaining the upper hand and all his focus is on that. Shiro clears his throat before continuing. 
“What I was saying is that Coran would know where we could go about finding a puppy out here -- in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not exactly in a position to visit the humane society or research a local breeder or anything. Coran could probably figure out where to go and give us some idea of what kind of, uh, dog we could really even hope of finding.” 
“That’s fair,” offers Hunk. “We don’t want to end up with some weird alien puppy without even any guidance from someone who’s, like, familiar with at least a reasonable variety of weird alien puppies.” 
“You got me there,” says Lance, and Keith is puzzled by the irritation in his tone until he realizes Lance is talking about his match with Pidge, who has dropped her controller and leaned back on her hands swinging her knees a little side to side and looking very pleased with herself. 
“I sure did,” she says, grinning. “Best two of three?” 
“Definitely.” Lance hasn’t even put his controller down, and waits for her to pick hers up again before apparently starting a rematch. “Anyway -- that makes sense, but as you all can see, I’m occupied, and can’t go ask him, so…?” He trails off, raising his eyebrows, even though he’s still looking determinedly at the screen instead of around at any of them. Keith snorts. 
“You expect someone to go running off to talk to him right now?” he asks derisively. Sometimes, it sure does seem like Lance thinks he runs the world. 
“Uh, I think someone is,” says Hunk, nodding toward the doorway, where Shiro is standing midstep, looking back at the rest of them with his eyebrows raised, as if he paused only when Keith spoke up. 
“Yeah, I’ve got this, guys,” he says. “It seems like I’m the best person to talk to him anyway, considering I’m the --” 
“-- fearless leader, space dad, you speak for the trees, et cetera, et cetera,” says Hunk, nodding as he turns back to his work. 
“Pretty sure I speak for the trees at this point,” Pidge puts in, fingers still moving quickly over her controls, eyes on the screen.
“I was going to say I’m the responsible adult, but fair enough,” Shiro says, shrugging, and turns back to walk out into the hall, presumably to find Coran. 
“Well, okay then,” Keith says softly, and lies down again, since apparently that’s settled. 
--
As they walk into the main hall of the recollection center, Keith has the creeping feeling he’s been here before. It takes him a moment to place it. The decor is different, for one thing: all sleek white couches and light blue accents. But as Coran leads them past several doors with large windows on either side and large signs written in glowing Altean script, it hits him that this place reminds him of the space mall where they found the replacement scaltrite lenses. 
“...it’s changed a bit, of course,” Coran is saying as they make their way down the corridor, navigating around small groups of various humanoid and non-humanoid creatures. Most of them are aliens Keith can’t identify, but he does see a few olkari families, and at one point someone who’s clearly a member of Slav’s species. “But the general principles are the same -- I got in touch with my Unilu contacts and they redirected me to the Venri contingent -- ever since the recollection center split off from the original swap moon, they’ve been in charge of running it here -- and they sent the new coordinates.” 
“So, what is this place exactly? Where are the dogs?” Lance asks, looking around as if puppies might start spilling out of the doorways around them at any moment. 
“It’s not just full of dogs, Lance,” Keith says, shaking his head. “Weren’t you listening when Coran went over all of this? Recollection as in they collect everything living that isn’t where it’s supposed to be and offer it up for trade, like -- like that space mall, apparently, but for things that are like...alive.” 
“Essentially, yes!” Coran says enthusiastically, gesturing around them at the whole of the space as they make their way toward the end of the row of storefronts. “Plants and fungi and animals of all sorts, from various corners of the universe, all collected here for redistribution! Apparently as the swap moon became more commercialized, they needed a space like this, one where some more...specialized shopkeepers could maintain living things. They also seem to have kept its location -- and its mere existence -- under wraps, which is especially good for us. We don’t exactly want to advertise to the empire that we’re active in any area they’re in.”
“If they’re trying to keep organisms alive from all sorts of different environments, they’ll need a lot of energy,” Shiro says. Keith glances over at him to see he’s stopped walking, frowning off into the middle distance. “And yet they’re keeping the place a secret? They must have a quintessence supply that’s off the charts.” 
“Oh, yes,” says Coran, his own step faltering as he turns to reply. “There’s a whole board of managers whose job it is to keep quintessence coming in and keep everything secret.” 
“It’s not that secret, though, if we found out where it is.” 
“I -- well, not everyone has the contacts I have!” Coran finishes with a smile, though Keith thinks there’s definitely something forced in his tone. “Besides, that’s why we’ve got the others back at the castle monitoring things from their end. We should be fine.” Shiro nods slowly, still frowning, and they start making their way toward the end of the corridor again. 
“Should be,” Keith mutters, following at the back of the group. The whole place feels a bit shiftier than it did before. 
--
“How exactly are we supposed to be setting up some kind of animal nursery when we don’t have any idea what kind of thing they’re going to be bringing back?” Hunk’s question echoes through the open air of the room Allura’s led them into. It’s bare, for the most part, easily the size of a small warehouse, with a ceiling just as high. Katie frowns -- that concern echoes the thoughts she’s been having ever since Coran suggested they prepare for the new arrival. Arrival of what? 
“Oh, well, there are things we’ll need no matter what!” Allura says brightly. “And if nothing else, we can start worrying about the basics -- they’ll need light, well, unless they end up with a cave-dweller, and food...unless it’s something that photosynthesizes, in which case we’re back at the light…” She trails off, frowning. “Well, we can start with decor, at least! Pick a color scheme!” Hunk is looking at her blankly, and Katie blinks, realizing she’s doing the same. Shakes it off. 
“We can work on putting together a system with adjustable outputs,” she offers, grinning at a relieved Allura. “It’ll be fun,” she continues, bumping against Hunk’s elbow with her shoulder. “Try to figure out what kind of nutrient combinations we can manage in different states of matter -- Allura, do you have any idea of what kind of thing they’re most likely to bring back? If we have a starting point, we could probably actually manage a number of contingencies for different energy sources, feeding behaviors, oxygenation needs…” Allura nods quickly. 
“I can get you a list, absolutely. I’m sure there are only four or five species Coran would be comfortable with, although there’s no accounting for the others, and of course we don’t know what the center will have --” 
“-- just get us those four or five,” Katie says, looking around the room and trying to imagine how they’ll divide the space. “Hunk, we’re gonna need to start talking construction.” 
--
“As you can see, we have a wide variety of domestic creatures available at the moment, though not many specimens of each.” The Venri staff member leading them through the facility glides across the floor on six neatly-swishing tentacles. She speaks in clean clipped tones, which Keith appreciates for their clarity if nothing else. He’s a bit impressed she can project as loudly as she can considering she barely comes up to his waist, but apparently Venri are small but have mighty lung capacity, or something. In any case, the others seem to be more interested in the fenced-off runs they’re surrounded by, each containing a different sort of creature. 
Some of the enclosures have small ponds, or are small ponds, as in the case of one containing some kind of aquatic animal that looks a lot like a bat, or like a bat would if it were scaled instead of furred, with enormous fins instead of wings. Others of the cages look a lot more like ordinary dog runs -- and, to be fair, others of the creatures look a lot more like ordinary dogs. There’s one like a whippy all-black german shepherd in the corner whose eyes keep emitting some kind of pink smoke in little bursts. In one of the stacked cages for smaller creatures that they pass, right at Keith’s eye level, is a group of labrador retrievers in perfect miniature, so small he could hold three of them in the palm of his hand, emitting little play growls as they wrestle with their fellows. He watches them for a while, wondering what it would be like to have a pocket-sized pup, until he realizes the others are halfway across the row of runs, the Venri indicating various creatures as she continues her pitch. He half-jogs over to rejoin them. 
“Now, did you all have a particular species in mind? If you’d like, you’re welcome to tell me about your living situation -- whatever it may be -- and I can recommend one for you.” She looks around at the four of them expectantly. Keith looks from Coran to Shiro and back again. It’s definitely not his place to take the lead here. But it’s Lance who jumps in. 
“Oh, we’ve got quite a bit of space,” he says airily. “That’s certainly not an issue. We’re hoping to get a puppy who will get along with our cow, maybe give her some companionship, cultivate that interspecies friendship and all that.” The Venri's eyes grow wider and wider as Lance continues. “After all, what’s the point of a dairy cow without a puppy, you know?” 
“A...did you say a dairy cow? Where did you say you’re from again?” 
“We didn’t,” says Shiro, taking a well-placed step so he’s standing between the Venri and Lance. 
“We’re looking for something in the canine category,” says Coran brightly, gesturing toward the row of runs that includes the shadowy german shepherd, now crouching near the front of its run and emitting glittery aqua smoke from its mouth as it looks at them silently with solid black eyes. 
“Do you have a particular biome in mind?” The Venri looks up at him expectantly, holding one thin hand over her tablet, ready to type. 
“Oh, I rather think --” Coran cuts off suddenly, eyes wide and fixed on one of the runs. Keith follows his eyeline and sees a small furry brown shape curled up in the corner, covered in little white speckles. Whatever the creature is, it’s tucked itself firmly against the wall of its enclosure, so he can’t really discern anything about its shape, nor why it seems to have grabbed Coran’s attention so strongly. 
“Coran?” Shiro asks, frowning. Lance, meanwhile, is darting his eyes back and forth between the brown lump and Coran, eyebrows lowered sharply. Keith sees him open his mouth to say something -- probably a strong objection to anyone else getting to pick their puppy -- and knocks into him with his shoulder, muttering a “shush” under his breath. Lance huffs once at him, but shuts his mouth. 
“Is that a white-spotted hyrassie?” Coran breathes quietly after what feels like an eternity of silence.
“Oh, absolutely,” says the Venri, and she’s smiling for the first time since they’ve entered the runs.  
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larryfanficwriter98 · 4 years ago
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Chapter Seven
*Fake It Until You Make It Real*
Sorry for the twenty days without an update. My good friend Depression is here visiting and she brought her besties Anxiety and Insomnia with her...so it's been a real party over here.
Harry was jumped wildly and spun around with his spatula in his hand ready to attack the person that decided sneaking up on him in the morning while he sang along to TLC ‘No Scrub’ was a good idea. However, when he was able to focus on who the person was, he saw Louis bent over laughing his ass off into his hand to keep from waking the kids that were still sound asleep. Harry glared at the younger man blushing in embarrassment as he turned back to his stove turning over his bacon.
“I could have hit you with my spatula Louis.” Harry complained.
“Oh yes…that would have caused real damage.” Louis teased, “The kids asleep?”
“Passed out still. I think we’re good for a few more minutes.” Harry said stepping away to grab a mug and hand it to Louis, “Electric kettle over there.” Louis took the mug and moved over to the kettle and opened the drawer that had every tea type imaginable. Louis was still shocked Harry had so much tea and was so organized about it. Though the organized part wasn’t as shocking now that he had seen Harry’s entire house, everything had its place and was organized, and it was a drastic difference compared to his own place where nothing was in its proper place because he didn’t remember where that proper place was anymore.
“So, our parents…how are we dealing with that?” Louis asked.
“I’m taking Halloween weekend off; I was thinking we all meet up here. My family and you family, the kids go trick or treating and us adults who want to cook stay here and make a large dinner. What do you think?”
“A large family dinner on Halloween? You’re either really confident or really stupid.”
“Both. What? Don’t think it’s a good idea? Come on this is a nice neighbor. Most of the houses give out the expensive stuff.” Louis laughed as he sipped his tea, “I think it’s a good idea. I always make graveyard pudding cups then let the kids pick out their top like gummy worms or tombstone chocolate models or candied ghosts. Needless to say, I am the favorite house on the block, and I have hot beverages for the parents if it’s cold.” Louis stared at him before he laughed.
“You’re that house huh? Geesh.”
“We’re that house.” Harry said grinning at him, “Can you get the fruit salad out of the fridge? And the smaller bowl beside it.”
“Of course. How long have you been up for?” Louis asked opening the fridge pulling out the large serving bowl of cut up mixed tangerines, kiwis, blueberries, strawberries, and grapes. He set the fruit bowl on the counter then grabbed the smaller bowl that was clear-yellowish color with diced something inside of it.
“About two hours. I’m an early riser most mornings.” Harry explained as he placed the pancakes on a large serving plate and the bacon and sausage on another serving plate then put them in the oven to stay warm. Harry came over to stand beside him and took the smaller bowl and poured the contents on the fruit before stirring, “Don’t get your underwear in a knot it’s a lemon and honey dressing that compliments the fruits with chopped mint. It adds flavor.” Harry said chuckling.
“It adds flavor.” Louis mocked, “You and your fancy cooking and fresh ingredients. You make me sick.” Harry laughed as Louis walked away and headed to the living room to check on the kids. He decided to gently wake them up and let them know breakfast was ready relieved when they woke up in a good mood with growling bellies.
“Go wash your hands, brush your teeth, and empty your bladders if you have to then come right back down.” Louis said gently watch as the groggily headed upstairs, Freddie with his overnight backpack that had his things in it. He headed back into the kitchen and grabbed the finished fruit salad bowl and set it in the middle of the square table.
“I should tell you to not do that and let the kids handle it, but considering Maddie is clumsy in the mornings I’ll let it slide.” Harry said coming up beside him with the two serving plates.
“They can set the table for lunch.” Louis said rolling his eyes playfully before heading back into the kitchen to grab the four plates, two glass and two kids. He set the table, so he and Harry were facing each other, and the kids were facing each other like they did with dinner last night.
“Milk or juice this morning for Freddie?”
“Probably juice the only time he likes to drink milk with his breakfast is when he has cereal.” Harry came up beside him with a pitcher of juice that he poured into the kids’ cups just high enough that it wouldn’t spill over the edge during the grabbing action by children. A few minuets later the kids came down more awake than when they had headed upstairs and sat down at the table with their now filled plates of cut up pancakes, fruit, a bacon strip, and a sausage link. Harry and Louis made their own plates and sat down digging into the delicious food.
****
After breakfast, the kids went on a Scavenger Hunt for something Louis wasn’t allowed to know about. Maddie and Freddie had both dressed up as scavenger hunters for the occasion and were both very adorable in Louis’ opinion. Especially when they pretended the dogs were wild animals they had to escape from. Louis was currently lounging on the couch with his legs in Harry’s lap as he graded some papers, Harry looking over some papers and occasionally rubbing near his shins and ankles.
What are you looking at over there?” Louis asked laying his stack of papers on his stomach to look at Harry.
“Lawyer papers.” Louis sat up keeping his legs in Harry’s lap and moving closer, so his arm rested on Harry’s shoulder.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah, I just want to be prepared…I don’t want to be blindsided by anything because I didn’t read the updated case papers.” Harry explained looking at him with a tired smile, he shifted to better face him with his arm resting on the back of the couch and his other hand resting between his knees, “What about you? How’s grading going?”
“Oh, grading is fine. It’s tiring but it’s fine. Each year is in the same class, so I only have one set of papers to grade since each year is different work.” Louis explained, “So what are they doing anything?” Louis asked when a loud giggle came from upstairs.
“They’re on a scavenger hunt for the ring box. Maddie asked if she could find it yesterday, so I hid it and made it into a treasure hunt for them. It’s an easy distraction and it makes them feel involved in the engagement process. I took a parenting class by parents online a few years ago that has a whole bunch of tips and tricks from other parents who want to and have formed better relationships with their children as they grow up. The one thing they all emphasized on was making the children feel needed and included in everyday lives. Like with setting the table, it makes them feel included in the dinner process. Helps them with responsibilities and such. Some kids it helps with emotion control. I still go back to website from time to time when I need help with Maddie or just to see what new parents are doing or asking about.”
“So, you’re not always perfect.” Louis teased making Harry laugh as he shook his head.
“No not always.” Harry said looking at him with a soft look on his face, “Are you worried about anything? With the court or marriage or anything?”
“I think I’m most worried about what my nonexistent relationship with Freddie’s father might impact your case, but there’s nothing we can do about that. I know logically it affecting your case is very slim, but still. It’s there. I don’t want that to ruin your chances.”
“It won’t. My lawyer even sent me an email explaining that it most likely be brought up by her lawyer as a way to make you look bad, but your relationship with your son and with Maddie will outweigh that by tons. Especially if Maddie talks with my lawyer about you and says she likes you. He has it on recording that she doesn’t like Hannah’s boyfriend.”
“What do you mean by recording?”
“It’s just a standard interview with the child to get their response on things. He asks her a few questions about what she thinks on certain things and uses it as evidence. Hannah’s lawyer done it as well and has the same recording which looks bad for Hannah considering the things she said. He wanted to do the same with Freddie, but I said no. The lawyers can’t question the child without the parent’s permission, but I don’t want Freddie dragged into this. Now when it comes to the custody hearing when we’re married and living together, they may challenge to do so just so the court knows he likes us being married and likes living with Maddie. That kind of stuff. But again, with him being so young he isn’t able to be questioned without our- well your say so.”
“What type of questions? Would I be able to read them before they’re asked?”
“Yes and no…They have to give you the list of questions before hand and get your approval. Anything you disapprove of you can tell them not to answer. However, it has to be done the same day as the meeting. They have to be in the same room to make sure you don’t influence his answers. With him being younger than Maddie they will most likely question him in a playroom setting and with you in the room but not close enough to influence anything. My lawyer is a father himself, if he thinks at any point Freddie isn’t understanding or just isn’t ready, he’ll end the questioning and they’ll scrap it.”
“Then I’m okay with them questioning Freddie closer to the court date. I want him to get…settled with this new arrangement first, but if your lawyer thinks it’ll help and if Freddie is okay with it then I’m okay with it.”
“Louis you don’t have to do that-“
“I know I don’t, but I want to help. It’s why I’m here after all isn’t it.”
“You’re here to marry me and essentially play the role of the at home papa who has routine work hours that means Maddie won’t be home with a nanny. You’re not here to make your son be questioned by lawyers.”
“I’m not making him do anything. We’ll ask him when it get closer to the time and if he doesn’t want to then we don’t allow it. Where did all that making them feel included speech go off to?” Louis teased.
“My wisdom only comes in short bursts on my days off…unfortunately you’re stuck with average Harry at the moment.
“What a shame. Smart Harry is way hotter.” Harry laughed pinching his leg making Louis jump and quickly hit the hand away.
“I’ll tell my lawyer the next time I speak with him that you’re thinking about it. He wants to meet you at some point anyway, I figured next weekend since I’m on nights we can plan for a meeting over breakfast before I go to bed.”
“Sounds good. We’ll plan like a Saturday breakfast meet up and then while you sleep, I can hang out with- damn Zayn gets Freddie…huh I’ll be free this weekend.”
“Lucky you. Whatever are you going to do with a whole weekend of freedom.”
“Well, I am moving soon so I guess I’ll be organizing things. Maybe go down and see my family for a few hours. Get drunk in the comforts of my home. Who knows? I could just laze around naked all weekend.”
“I hate you. God do I hate you.” Louis laughed resting his head in his hand as he stared at Harry, Harry stared at him mirroring him by resting his head on his hand as well. His amused expression turned soft after a few seconds, “How hard would you slap me if I kissed you?”
“Extremely hard.” Louis said chuckling.
“Like a cheek slap or a chest slap?”
“Probably a cheek.”
“Worth it.” Harry said before he was leaning in and pressing his unbelievably soft and very warm lips against Louis’. His hand that had been resting on the back of the couch cupped the side of his face while the hand that had been resting between his knees squeezed just above them. Louis had his hand raised and primed for the slap he had threatened him with only for it to end up curled in the hair on the back of his head instead. When the slap didn’t happen, Harry leaned further in and deepened the kiss while his hand slid into Louis’ hair pulling him in closer. Louis will forever deny that he got hard within ten seconds of snogging, he didn’t care what his body did, it didn’t happen. He would also deny the fact that he so easily complied with being laid down with Harry above him as if they were teenagers. Because that definitely didn’t happen either. Another thing he would deny was how fast snogging led to grinding considering they were in fact adults…not teenagers.
“DADDY! LOUIS! WE FOUND THE TREASURE!” Maddison shouted from upstairs.
“Funny so did I.” Louis laughed and decided making good on his promise was definitely worth it as he slapped Harry on the shoulder.
“That didn’t happen. We are not fucking teenagers.” Louis said as they quickly sat up and adjusted themselves on the sofa to hide their erections that would dispute his teenager claim. Harry turned to the stairs just as Maddie and Freddie came reached the bottom and ran towards them.
“You found it then huh?” Harry asked.
“Yupp.” Maddison said happily as she handed the box to Harry who dramatically turned so Louis’ wouldn’t be able to see the rings as he made a show of opening the case and inspecting the rings.
“Yeah, these are it...see this one is Louis’ because it’s smaller and this one is mine.” Louis watched as Maddie took one of the rings then came over to Louis and he laughed as he watched Maddie kneel upfront of him and grabbing his hand, “Mads I’m suppose to do that.” Harry said.
“Hush daddy I’m busy getting you a husband.” Louis covered his mouth with his other hand to contain his laughter, “Loulou...” she addressed him seriously.
“Yes, my love?” Louis asked.
“Will you marry my daddy?” She asked, big green eyes looking up at Louis who grinned widely.
“I would be honored to marry your daddy.” Louis said watching as she slid a silver ring on his finger with an elegant and simple gold loop, “very beautiful, what do you think?” he asked smiling at her as she tilted her head.
“I think it’s missing a few diamonds.”
“I’m not much of a diamond man I think your daddy did perfectly. Besides diamond rings are for weddings not engagements.”
“Also, the wedding bands are picked together, the engagement rings are simpler design since they aren’t worn long. Especially in this case.” Harry said leaning over to gently pinch Maddie who giggled leaning away from him.
“Okay you’re turn Freddie.” Maddie whispered though they could still hear her loud and clear. Logic of a child. Freddie grabbed a thicker band that was the same design as his but was in rose gold. Louis watched as his son got down on both knees and grabbed Harry’s hand and asked the same question Maddie had asked him but using the term ‘papa’ instead.
“I would love to marry your Papa Freddie.” Harry said grinning when Freddie none too gently pushed the ring on his finger. Harry grinned over at him then leaned over and pressed a very chaste and quick kiss against his lips. Louis grinned pressing his hand against Harry’s cheek before turning to the kids.
“So how about we convince Harry to go to the dog park before the weather gets bad?” Louis suggesting looking over at harry when the kids cheered and started asking loudly and climbing onto Harry’s lap wildly.
“Alright! Alright!” Harry shouted playfully, “We’ll go to the dog park.” He said glaring at Louis.
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abigailnussbaum · 4 years ago
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The Umbrella Academy, S2
I was pretty underwhelmed by the first season of The Umbrella Academy, and if it weren’t high summer with hardly any new TV to be seen, I might not have bothered with the second one. But to my surprise, season 2 of The Umbrella Academy is a massive - and, to my eyes, deliberate - improvement on the first. It’s not great TV by any stretch, but it’s engaging and fun to watch, and you find yourself caring about the characters and wanting to follow along with their story, all things that the dour first season failed to achieve.
My fundamental problem with the first season of The Umbrella Academy is that the show failed to convince me that its core family was worth saving. The basic premise of the show - seven superpowered children raised by an abusive tyrant who saw them purely as instruments to be deployed, and played psychological games intended to grind down their independence and prevent any chance of their feeling a stronger loyalty to one another than to him - is obviously a rich and evocative one (albeit also one that requires a depth and complexity of writing that very few superhero shows evince). But the premise of the first season - the surviving Hargreeves children, reunited at their father’s funeral, have to find a way to overcome their differences and move past their difficult upbringing or the world will literally end - kept bumping up against the simple fact that I didn’t want this family to endure. The Hargreeves were so mean to one another, and seemed to have so little affection for each other, that I couldn’t make myself believe they wouldn’t be better off just going their separate ways.
The show itself seemed to realize this, because it ended the first season with the Hargreeves’ dysfunction and inability to honestly address how badly they’d mistreated one another ultimately being the cause of the apocalypse, and with the siblings deciding that their only possible course of action was to reset their lives and rebuild their relationships from the ground up. It was the show tacitly admitting that the Hargreeves family was unsalvageable, and while that’s a bold storytelling choice, the writing just wasn’t there to support it. I finished the first season feeling rather fatigued with both the story and the characters, and uninterested in watching them relive their lives.
The second season feels like a soft reboot of that premise. The trip through time on which the first season ended is retconned - instead of sending their consciousnesses back to their childhood selves, the Hargreeves instead end up as their own adult versions in the early 1960s. The apocalypse they fled 2019 to avoid and were hoping to prevent by reliving their childhoods and repairing their relationships from first principles is essentially forgotten. Instead the Hargreeves focus on preventing a different, new apocalypse scheduled for November 25th 1963, and once they succeed at that, 2019 is altered in unspecified ways that prevent the end of the world from happening.
Most importantly, the Hargreeves suddenly feel like a family. A dysfunctional family, to be sure, whose members have to figure out how to relate to one another now that the abuser who shaped and poisoned their relationships is finally gone. But there is a suddenly a lot of affection between the siblings, even if most of it is expressed through teasing and needling at one another’s weaknesses. In S1, the Hargreeves felt like people who genuinely had no interest in knowing one another. In S2, they feel like people who don’t know how to relate to each other, but want to figure it out.
You see this in a lot of other things that the second season does to respond to frequently-voiced complaints about the first season. In S1, everyone hated how domineering Luther was and how badly he treated Vanya, so almost the first thing he does in S2 is apologize to her for his failings as a brother, and acknowledge that a large portion of the fault for her breakdown falls on him. Everyone was a bit weirded out by the Luther/Alison ship, so it gets barely any play in S1 (though with a bone thrown to the shippers right at the end). Everyone was charmed by Klaus and Diego, so they both get major storylines (and Diego, in particular, is softened and made more vulnerable, the better to take advantage of David Castañeda’s charisma). Everyone wanted more of Ben, so he becomes more vocal and even gets to interact with characters besides Klaus. Everyone got tired of Alison namechecking a daughter that we had no intrest in, so she barely comes up even though Alison is not only separated from her by a distance of sixty years, but last saw her in a world that was being destroyed by a meteor impact. And everyone came away from the first season saying “no way Vanya is straight”, and lo, she is not straight.
It’s an approach that you see in other Netflix shows - Stranger Things, in particular, is practically defined by its responsiveness to audience complaints, with each season overcorrecting in the direction of whatever reaction was most loudly expressed over the previous one. Ideally, you’d want showrunners to have a strong enough sense of their characters, story, and world that they don’t need the audience to function as a cowriter, but in the case of The Umbrella Academy, these changes are mostly to the good. I might have liked the darker story the show seemed to be telling in the first season, about a group of abused children who genuinely don’t like each other but also can’t relate to anyone outside of their family, but the writing wasn’t there for it. The lighter, softer version of The Umbrella Academy delivered by S2 actually works, so the show should stick with it.
It certainly helps that the second season shoulders several topics that I wouldn’t have expected the show to be able to address with any amount of grace. I have to admit that I cringed when I realized that Alison, trapped in the South in the early 60s, had joined the civil rights movement, because superhero stories do not have a great track record dealing with social justice, much less real-world movements. But the handling of this issue ends up being smarter and more effective than I could ever have hoped. It’s still a side-story to the main event of preventing the end of the world, but in the scenes and episodes that do place it front and center, the show is unflinching. The depiction of the lunch counter protest that Alison and her group organize, and of the vicious hostility they encounter for such a small, simple demand, is unsparing. It establishes both the depth of the hatred and violence that the protest arouses, and the impossibility of resisting “peacefully” against a system the views any assertion of your humanity as an act of violence.
I was also a bit concerned over the placement of Alison, in particular, at the center of a story like this. Obviously, as the only black member of the Hargreeves family, her experience in the 1960s would be unique, but she’s also a character who has been established as being too powerful for her own good, and having abused her power in order to dehumanize others. Placing her in a situation where she is being dehumanized because of her race felt like creating a fruitless tension, where Alison might feel reluctant to use her powers despite the fact that she is all-but powerless against the greater system of white supremacy. But again, the season manages to thread the needle, showing both the allure and the limitations of Alison’s mind control abiliites in the context of Jim Crow. I didn’t love the implication that Alison would almost immediately start misusing her powers once she decided to use them to open doors that racism had closed to her, but the show also makes it clear that her anger is justified, and her targets deserving.
By the same token, I heaved a great sigh when the season introduced Harlan and I realized that he was neuroatypical, because it felt almost inevitable that some aspect of the strangeness that follows the Hargreeves around would result in him being “cured”. But that didn’t happen! The season treats Harlan like a valuable and loved person who doesn’t need to become more “normal” for his life to be worth living. And though he does end up needing to be cured, it’s not of his autism, but of whatever Vanya does to him when she saves his life. I kept expecting the the moment when Harlan would turn to his mother and start speaking, and the fact that the season kept refusing to go there feels almost miraculous.
So yeah, the whole thing feels like a breath of fresh air, and as if the people at the helm are thinking a lot more deeply about their story, what works in it and what needs to be changed for it to work, than I would have said at the end of the first season. It’s still not an amazing story (part of the reason we’re able to spend so much time on subplots like Vanya’s romance with Sissy, Klaus’s cult adventures, Alison’s activism, or Diego and his conflicted relationship with Lila, is that the spine of the season is fairly perfunctory) but it does enough with the characters that I found myself genuinely interested in their relationships and eager to see how they would develop. I’m not used to shows rebuilding themselves like this, and it’s refreshing to see that even in the streaming era, that can still happen.
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Iris Publishers - Current Trends in Clinical & Medical Sciences (CTCMS)
Pain Physical and Emotional
Authored by Andrew Hague
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Introduction
Only the fourth option is acceptable, and this paper will show that it can be done. Unfortunately, the other three options are too common. There are three components in the body that are always found together. If one does not work, the other two cannot work. They are the nerves, veins and arteries. Repairs must suit all three components. Veins and arteries carry blood. If there is no blood at a place in the body, that place cannot be healed. Blood is the life support liquid. In humans even maintaining its temperature is essential.
Nerves carry signals to the brain which is the body’s control centre.
Every cell in the body is connected to the brain. The language of the nerve network is pain. From a finger pulling back from a hot surface to the workman stopping to eat, messages flow to the brain and action is taken to keep the body operating. If a message is unable to reach the brain, harm will continue with consequences that can be disastrous. If pain continues and the brain is unable to make a repair, the person suffers. The body’s operating system depends on the requests for help being answered and, like an unanswered telephone, will continue ringing until it gets help. It is that perpetual pain that is the subject of the essay.
Masking the Pain
Drugs can switch off the brain either drastically or slightly. They are never a remedy. Ethanol, a popular poison known as alcohol, has been used by humans since fermentation was discovered by early farmers. Interestingly, reports of animals being allowed to drink alcohol show that the animals also like to be inebriated [1]. If alcohol was originally reserved for celebrations, it eventually became a crutch to carry people through their daily life. Compounding this inadequate answer to a problem is the fact that dependency on the escape or mask becomes addictive.
Worse, whatever the trouble the person wanted to avoid becomes more difficult and they enter a downward spiral (Figure 1). [2] Archaeologists investigating the Neolithic ages, 7,000 years ago, found poppy seeds used medicinally. Before the poppy is ripe, the seed pod can be cut to allow a latex to ooze out and be collected. Observe babies, they put everything in their mouth. Little imagination is required to accept that humans discovered the use of the poppy as an anaesthetic. Poppies are the raw material for opium from which heroin, methane, codeine and thebaine are derived and the synthetic forms of oxycodone, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, and other semisynthetic opiates.
The Opioid Crisis
In the American Civil War, the Union Army used 175,000lb (80,000kg) of opium tincture and powder and about 500,000 opium pills [1]. During this time of popularity, users called opium “God’s Own Medicine”. Opium’s anaesthetic and addictive powers were well known by the 20th century. Britain had used it to profit from China by forcefully cultivating poppies in India and militarily pushing them on the Chinese [3]. By 1840 there were 10 million Chinese opium addicts; largely due to illegal British imports. Sales were sustained by the users’ addiction.
In the late 1990s, around 100 million people or a third of the U.S. population were estimated to be affected by chronic pain [4]. Lower back pain, arthritis, post-surgery pain and cancer were the usual causes of pain and without a cure the patient wanted escape. Pharmaceutical derivatives of opium were the low cost, highly profitable answer to demand. When the pain relievers were launched, they were claimed to be non-addictive. That was soon found to be untrue. “An investigation by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs detailed the financial ties that exist between opioid manufacturers, advocacy groups, and medical professional societies.
The report exposed patient advocacy groups and professional societies spending millions of dollars to promote messages and policies favoring the interests of the pharmaceutical industry [5].” The patients were addicted to the drugs [6]. Every day, more than 130 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total “economic burden” of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.
Death
100 million American adults live with chronic pain, many of them with pain so bad it wrecks their work, their families, their mental health and their lives. There are no hard data on how many people with chronic pain die by suicide every year. But there are inferences. The suicide rate among people with chronic pain is known to be roughly twice that for people without chronic pain [7]. Being unable to cure the cause of pain and having a prescriptible anaesthetic for home use available, the doctors put the patients on an addictive drug. When the government saw the folly, they passed laws restricting the amount of opiates (anaesthetics). That left people in pain, doctors in guilt and still no answer [8]. The drugs intended to make life tolerable were doing the opposite. They gave patients a way to kill themselves when they had realised they had two choices: live in pain or die [9]. The doctors were in contact with the patients, not the pharmaceutical companies. The referenced articles are heart breaking (Graph 1 & 2).
 Learn to Live with It
Is this possible?
Cure the Cause of the Pain
This is possible and available now. Medicine can be seen in two groups, what can be cured by drugs and what cannot. The pharmaceutical cures include antibiotics and vaccinations. There are also the anaesthetics described above. If the purpose is pain blocking during surgery, then the benefit is clear with the expectation that the pain will pass as the wound heals. What cannot be cured by drugs includes diabetes, cancer and the brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Diabetes is more debilitating than painful, so it does not grab the emotive headlines that cancer does. It is the pain from cancer that often alerts the patient. Medical advice is to be checked regularly for cancer and if it can be caught early it can be removed. Maybe it can by selective poisoning of the cancer cells or by targeting with radiation, both methods with side effects. The chemo-radiation cure rate varies from low to dismal.
Cancer
CellSonic has the only known cure for cancer. I made the discovery almost three years ago. The technology uses a nonsurgical, irreversible electroporation whilst simultaneously applying a short duration, high pressure pulse to the tumour. The explanations, protocols and procedures are already published [10] (Figure 1). When I received the report from the doctor with this photo, I was shocked. We seldom see cancer. It is usually inside. Here a breast tumour has spread to the skin. This is stage 4 cancer, the stage at which most oncologists have ceased trying to stop the cancer.
The lady had lost faith in the usual chemo-radiation methods. They didn’t work and had cost her a fortune. Word of mouth led her to a CellSonic specialist who was not advertising that CellSonic can treat cancer, but the specialist had previous experience and knew that only CellSonic could help. The doctor asked the lady about the pain on a scale of 1 to 10. She replied 14. It was agony. He gave her one treatment and the pain went away. It is not clear how quickly the pain was quashed, whether it was immediate or within hours. It was also reported that the scales of scabs started to dry out. The doctor was both pleased and perplexed. The result was better than he expected, and he asked for my opinion. I told him that the result was predictable as we know from cancer cases going back almost three years. There are no side effects. On the third day, the patient feels different. The load on their immune system is greatly reduced and this translates to feeling better.
I said to the doctor that he had shifted from cancer to plastic surgery but to not rush into anything. See if the scabs fall off. Will the tumour, causing the swelling, dissipate or need removing surgically? Now benign, there is every chance that the tumour will be removed by the immune system. He should also be aware that with the pain gone from the breasts, she may become aware of other pains hidden by the predominance of the breast pain. In other words, could the cancer have spread to other organs which have not yet been treated? With such visually obvious damage, there had been no scans. Thus far, there are no further reports of cancer elsewhere.
We await the next report
Cancer is the replication of mutating cells. Researchers in England have measured the permittivity of tissues and found cancer to show 9.6 and healthy tissue 3.2 on their scale with nothing in between. The CellSonic pulse delivers a high voltage electromagnetic field lasting less than a nanosecond combined with a short duration pressure pulse causing the replication to switch to healthy cells. Laboratory research on cells in Austria four years ago found the same results. No drugs are used and must not be used. The cancer cells should be in good condition so that they respond to the magnetic field. An attempt in Belgium to cure cancer patients failed. The ensuing discussion with the doctor revealed that all the patients were fully loaded with chemotherapy making their cancers unresponsive. He assured me that it would be impossible to find any cancer patients in Europe who were not on chemotherapy.
Non-Cancer Pain
The traditional view of physiotherapy is that it teaches a few simple exercises and by pressing with fingers some pain can be alleviated. Worse than that, a physiotherapist is said to be inferior to an orthopaedic surgeon. Whether that was ever true, it certainly is not now. Instead of pressing with fingers, the physiotherapist has a new tool in CellSonic that performs non-invasive surgery, does not use drugs and has no side effects. Patients come in bent and walk out straight. Quite apart from the benefits to patients, the status of physiotherapy is enhanced, the business improved, and earnings increased. With their knowledge of the anatomy, all a physiotherapist needs to master the new technology is a few minutes training on how to operate the machine and then they are working inside the body from the outside.
Cellsonic VIPP (very intense pressure pulses) damage or provoke. This is a simplification because the complete explanation is complicated. Damage is done to infection, germs are killed, calcifications shattered, and blockages released. Provocation is the stimulation of the immune system to make a repair by bringing stem cells to the site, increasing vascularization and blood cells. Muscles are enhanced and nerves repaired. Additionally, and very simply, the replication of mutant cells is stopped, and they then only replicate healthy cells. In other words, cancer is stopped without drugs, non-invasively and without side effects. It takes a physiotherapist five minutes to realize that they can do more than they were trained to do. Quite apart from curing cancer, which is the easiest treatment to perform, an athlete can be given a 13% improvement in performance. A geriatric marooned in bed with a catheter and pressure sore can be restored to mobility and dignity. Half the population all of whom have lower back pain can be relieved. What cannot be done easily is to placate orthopods who sense that physios have encroached on their patch.
CellSonic has no apologies. The story of CellSonic is one of discovery. It started with breaking kidney stones with sound waves forty years ago. This is now done in all hospitals of the world and millions of patients have been treated safely. Since then the technology has changed, the machines became smaller, weaker, hand held and cost much less. New applications were reported by users, usually doing something that was not recommended but they thought they would try it. The fact that CellSonic has no side effects made everything possible. This is unique in medicine where all drugs have side effects. Gone is the notion that the body is the sum total of its chemistry. The pharmaceutical industry still has an important role to play but it is no longer the only force in medicine.
Back Pain and Arthritis
rely on reports from users of CellSonic for confirmation of the effects of the technology. Here is one from Poland: Below I’m sending a short report from Neuromedyka Clinic in Żyrardów in Poland. Jarosław, 41 years old patient with a heel spur. Mr. Jarek had a very big problem with his leg. He felt a strong pain even he doesn’t walk. We did 3 treatments to solve his problem. It took us 4 weeks. After 1st treatment he doesn’t feel significant improvement, but he decided to take all treatments. After 2nd treatment he felt much better only pain appears after all day when he walked. I called him today, it is 4 weeks after last treatment and asked him how he is feeling? He said that he doesn’t remember that he had any problems with his leg. He feels great.
 Vipp for Treatment of Calcaneal Spur and Fasciitis
The next report is from India. Bony spurs on the heel of foot may be a cause of pain in individuals, which may increase in intensity after prolonged periods of rest. Walking, running or lifting heavy weights may exacerbate the condition. These spurs are a result of repeated stress due to which calcium deposition occurs. Similarly, plantar fasciitis is a condition that occurs in individuals, commonly due to prolonged standing. The condition is due to inflammation at the site of insertion of ligaments into the bone. Pathologically, micro tears, collagen breakdown and scarring are observed. Pain is the main feature of plantar fasciitis, which is usually most severe on taking the first step after prolonged periods of rest. Both conditions, commonly being associated with constant stress on legs and feet, treatment comprises of pain-relieving medications, lifestyle modifications and physiotherapy exercises.
A new treatment modality utilizing CellSonic VIPP technology has shown improvement in both conditions, as seen in patients treated at StemRx Bioscience Solutions Pvt. Ltd. 5 patients with spur/fasciitis were given a total of 3 sessions of VIPP treatment. First and second sessions were given at an interval of 3 days, while the 3rd session was given a week following 2nd session. 200- 500 shocks were given at intensity level 2-4. Pain relief was the immediate effect noticed. At 3-4 weeks follow-up, all patients were pain free and had improved comfort in walking ability. All patients have stopped pain medications. “It is amazing to see positive results in a short period of time. Being a non-invasive, drug and side effect free procedure with no hospitalization requirement, CellSonic VIPP is a hit among patients with calcaneal spur/fasciitis”, says Dr. Mahajan.
In all the cases, drugs are not used, nerves are repaired, vascularization improved to carry oxygen and stem cells of the right type to the right place in the right quantity and infection killed without anti-biotics (Figure 4). Lower back pain could be the predominant pain world-wide (Figure 5). Usually one CellSonic treatment is enough for permanent relief. The ultimate test on spine repair is a severed spinal cord. I am now aware of three cases, one in Hyderabad on a girl whom I met so I can vouch for the authenticity and two cases from Dr Mahajan in Mumbai whom I know well and have watched him treating patients.
Spinal Cord Injury Patient Treated with Cell-Based Therapy and Cellsonic VIPP
The patient had a road traffic accident and sustained injuries in his spine in September 2017. He was paralyzed below the waist and was bedridden since the accident. He did not undergo any major treatment at his home country. He was brought to our hospital on a stretcher. With cell-based therapy and CellSonic VIPP plus neurorehabilitation, the patient was able to stand with the help of callipers within a month of treatment. This is tremendous improvement as the family was told that the boy will remain bedridden. He had developed bed sores due to lack of movement. With the combination treatment of cell-based therapy and CellSonic VIPP in the wound area, we could accomplish rapid healing of the sores. Overall the improvement is very encouraging. After few months of follow up, we will look to publish this case. We have few more cases in the pipeline, and we hope to publish them in reputed journals after the required follow up period.
Emotional Pain
Physical pain causes emotional pain. It is a downward spiral. The body is healed by the immune system which depends on a positive frame of mind [11]. The expression, Mind over Body, cannot always apply. I have heard it used with reference to cancer so it may be possible to think yourself well but for the general population it is not an easy remedy. People have emotional states that range from fragile to robust. For some, a day of sky covered cloud with no sign of the sun brings on doom. For others, they can emerge from battle in a war zone and continue their lives as though nothing dramatic has happened. Somewhere between these two extremes are most of us. The trick is to find what makes you smile. Not to laugh or be giddy. Just something that is pleasing, and you find yourself saying, “If it could always be like this!” You then have something to aim for because those pleasant times are repeatable.
I cannot think of anyone I have known who has been on drugs (anti-depressants) to shift them away from the gloom end of the spectrum who has been able to permanently achieve equilibrium. If at first the drugs improved the patient’s outlook, before long they were damaging the brain’s emotional balance. The factors involved are the amount of the dose and its duration. When a patient says they are on a low dose and believing it is not causing dependency they are not realizing that every day a piece of their brain becomes permanently inactive. The damage is accumulative. The drug may help them to struggle on, but it is preventing a cure.
The human brain evolved to cope with life’s swings. Our emotions exist for a reason. Combined with memory, they are a protective mechanism. I have often been tempted to write an article entitled, “Blame the brain” and when I assemble my thoughts, I found I was entering taboo areas such as religion and politics. My purpose is to help, and the measure of success is more people recovering. If my conjecture is taken to be critical of some beliefs, then I cannot help and will avoid the subject. You must work out for yourself what avoids friction.
We are gregarious. Who would choose to live alone? Has a hermit an enquiring mind? Do they ever smile? Those around us depend on us as we depend on them. Be amenable. Within a range of moods, all people are the same and I say that knowing people from all around the world. Only the ignorant can be xenophobic.
You must exercise [12], eat the right food [13] and never smoke, drink alcohol or take narcotics. If you damage the brain, all is lost [14]. When people continue to use opioids beyond what a doctor prescribes, whether to minimize pain or induce euphoric feelings, it can mark the beginning stages of an opiate addiction, with a tolerance developing and eventually leading to dependence, when a person relies on the drug to prevent withdrawal symptoms [9]. Writers have pointed to a widespread desire among the public to find a pill for any problem, even if a better solution might be a lifestyle change, such as exercise, improved diet, and stress reduction [10-12]. Opioids are relatively inexpensive, and alternative interventions, such as physical therapy, may not be affordable [13].
I have put the key words of the above quote in bold: a pill for any problem. And that is the problem. Medical practice has created the problem. From the Opium wars inflicted on China in the 19th Century to the present-day Opioid Crisis, the people suffer because they allow themselves to be weak and ignorant. Doctors who take a stance can be ridiculed and even banned from practicing.
Causing Happiness
CellSonic has been used on many people for enough years to observe a phenomenon I do not yet understand, it makes them happy. As reports flowed back to me, they almost always said that the patient enjoyed the treatments, looked forward to another treatment and the spouse also would add that the patient felt happier. It assumed this was the charm of the doctor and almost painless, quick treatment. Eventually, as the stories accumulated, I had to accept that there was more to it than a smiling doctor. The effect was most noticeable where many shocks were applied and had to be repeated every few days on such as gangrene, kidney failure or the severed spinal cord. CellSonic pulses were making the patient feel happier.
I do not know whether we have a non-pharmaceutical cure for depression. At some stage it will be worth gathering some depressives who are not on medication and treating them. The hypothesis is that it does to the brain what exercise does and, importantly, carries nothing into the brain that can destroy connections or cause blockages. This is the next frontier or at least one of them. Other projects for CellSonic are diagnosing cancer harmlessly
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rejectclone · 4 years ago
Text
I’ve been meaning to update the mini bios for my OCs, it took me some time to try to condense their core aspects and backstory stuff into smaller paragraphs but I’m finally done!
NAME: Jared Clements
AGE: 28
GENDER: Male
SEXUALITY: Bisexual
RACE: White (is of Hispanic descent)
OCCUPATION: Detective/Deputy
ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Good
SHORT BIO: Who was once one of the greatest detectives in Neo York City’s police branches, now a shattered former shell of himself after the Incident. Physically and emotionally mauled from the explosion that killed his partners and his reputation, he now ruminates at the station, plotting for his revenge against the criminal organization that led to his fall. Formerly known to be the most kind and upbeat member of the station, he has become cold and callous to everyone, but the new recruit might pull him from his self-imposed darkness.....
NAME: Devon Cox
AGE: 25
GENDER: Male
SEXUALITY: Straight
RACE: ‘White’/Ambiguous (HEAVILY mixed, but he identifies mostly with being Italian)
OCCUPATION: Trainee Officer, former illegal bloodsport boxer
ALIGNMENT: Neutral Good
SHORT BIO: The bastard son of a seedy bookie and a mother who clearly did not take good care of herself, along with being the only mute member of his family, he was deemed a unwanted child. Eventually, his parent’s actions caught up to them one night out, and as they were slaughtered, their son was left alone at home. Soon adopted by his uncle on his father’s side, he was essentially forced to ‘repay the debt’ by becoming a bloodsport fighter, regardless if he wanted to do it or not. As a adult, the illegal ring has fallen due to on-going corruption, he is now again left alone as his corrupt uncle got hauled off to prison. Left to his own devices and lamenting his actions, he now wants to pave his own path by repaying his own debts by joining the NYPD. Unknown to his new coworkers, he has spilled blood numerous times and won’t hesitate to do what must be done in some situations.....
NAME: B055 M4N
AGE: 24 in 4027 (BEFORE DEATH) 80 in 4083 (POST RESURRECTION)
GENDER: Male
SEXUALITY: Straight
RACE: White
OCCUPATION: Lieutenant
ALIGNMENT: Lawful Neutral
SHORT BIO: He was supposed to be the next gleaming star in the NYPD’s legacy of lieutenants, all from the same bloodline spanning across decades...... until he was assassinated at his induction ceremony in front of the general public. Ironically, his fate was not sealed there, as a week before his induction, he was coaxed into signing up for a ‘organ donation program’, to a incredibly specific experimental medicine company. He never expected his corpse to be used in a unethical program to create a supercomputer, devised of a human consciousness instead of a AI, to ensure that it will have a good stance on logical proceedings of organization and the law, and will not suffer from conflicts of interest. Unfortunately for him, the total conversion to a machine was semi-successful, as they could only resurrect his head...... Now doomed to be a severed head in a jar filled with PFC and the inability to speak (well, at least without using text-to-speech), he has been forcibly instated to be the permanent boss of the station. His true appearance is a facade to essentially everyone, as the ‘higher-ups’ creates false non-existent lieutenants to be instated every few years to keep the act going, except a very select few know of his current situation.
NAME: Lydia Hall
AGE: 25
GENDER: Female
SEXUALITY: Lesbian
RACE: White
OCCUPATION: Psychiatrist, uses ‘personal nurse’ as a cover
ALIGNMENT: True Neutral
BIO: She is considered to be one of the ‘greatest’ newer psychiatrists to ever grace the continental US, but nobody expected her to suddenly disappear off the face of the earth, upon getting a ‘promotion’ one day. Unknown to almost everyone, she was coerced into the psychological monitoring of one of the company’s most experimental projects, the undead severed head turned database at the local NYPD station. His previous care taker had to be laid off due to ‘concerns’, and thus she now must monitor him on a near daily basis, cleaning out his tank, making sure he is still sane, and to just stay there to entertain him basically. She never expected her career to be basically reduced to a personal nurse, and yet here she is. Unfortunately for her, the true nightmare unfolds when a certain hazmat wearing being stumbles into the picture.
NAME: Lawrence Grey
AGE: 47
GENDER: Male
SEXUALITY: Straight
RACE: White
OCCUPATION: Geneticist
ALIGNMENT: Neutral Evil
BIO: A famed scientist who has been working for ages for a experimental medicine company. He was renown for his research in advancing certain projects, some more well received than others however. A overall stoic man, his coworkers reluctantly follow his command, never fully knowing what he thinks of them. Dedicated to his work, the higher-ups gave him access to a incredibly hidden cloning program, regardless if he wanted to work there or not. Not wanting to bond to his ‘projects’, he continued his intimidating aura, until one of them in particular piqued his interest. It would have been better if the clone never showed any promise however, as the impeding transport to another lab will lead to his escape, and his ‘father’s’ coma.....
NAME: [REDACTED]
AGE: [REDACTED]
GENDER: [REDACTED]
SEXUALITY: [REDACTED]
RACE: [REDACTED]
OCCUPATION: [REDACTED]
ALIGNMENT: [REDACTED]
BIO: ……………… he wasn’t meant for this world. The forced byproduct of a illegal cloning procedure, made to be a rejected failure on purpose. As for why? The higher-ups of the organization believed that the more malformed and sickly the clones are, the higher the chance they might carry new genes that can cure said sicknesses. The #439th clone to be made, he seemed to be another waste of flesh and blood. If it wasn’t for his ‘caretaker’, he would’ve been euthanized after a month. Desperate to ‘spare’ this subject, the caretaker demanded him to be transferred to another laboratory base, as rumors began to spread that the project has been leaked to shareholders. That fateful night, he was given a technologically advanced hazmat suit to conceal his inhuman appearance, and was shipped off to his new ‘home’. Alas, as fate would have it, the hovervan he was in along with his ‘father’, crashed, leaving him to wonder aimlessly in the pouring rain, hiding in a alleyway until he was spotted by two odd looking officers, trying to close-off the crash site. He was taken in to the station, where somebody claimed it was his ‘son’. Taken up to the lieutenant’s office, much to the confusion of many, this clone will blend into daily happenings of the station.
NAME: Ren Nakamura
AGE: 22
GENDER: Male
SEXUALITY: Robosexual
RACE: Japanese
OCCUPATION: Future heir to the head of a crime syndicate, doubles as a criminal lawyer as a cover
ALIGNMENT: Lawful Neutral/Evil
BIO: The next in line to his family’s criminal syndicate legacy, he is reluctant at first, but must come to terms to what he must do. Raised up to be cold and unrelenting towards his underlings and other syndicate bosses, he will never back down from a fight, always striving to be on top. However, nobody really expected him to come up with a plan to undermine other syndicates, by actually studying criminal law and becoming a legitimate defense attorney in order to coax his clients into exposing future plans (in which he will immediately inform his father of...). Recently he was assigned a personal body guard, who has a ‘unique’ physical composition and will surely make a great hitman. The two of them go along quite well, considering their popular opposites in personality.
NAME: Deangelo Moore
AGE: 25
GENDER: MALE
SEXUALITY: Gay
RACE: German-American
OCCUPATION: Cybernetic hitman, uses ‘criminal lawyer’ as a cover
ALIGNMENT: Lawful Evil
SHORT BIO: Neither fully man nor machine, this once respected art dealer has gone fully into the seedy underbelly of Neo York. As a escapee convict test subject from a experimental ‘liquid metal’ cyborg program, he is a con man on the run, until as fate would have it, he was accepted as a personal ‘body guard’ for one of his former clients’s son. With no real home to go to anymore as his public reputation has been disgraced, he now gleefully takes in stride that he is a ‘ghost’ among the populous, a potentially unstoppable killing machine who is only curbed by his greed and urge to be respected by other powerful beings. His former life now gone, he now works for his employer as if they were blood relatives, and even agreed to do a surreal operation, to directly siphon information from other rival ‘organizations’ by acting.........as public criminal lawyers who defend them..........
NAME: ‘John’ (he was never properly named by any of the scientists, so he named himself. His ACTUAL name is Specimen - 1257)
AGE: 21
GENDER: Male
SEXUALITY: Straight, but questioning
RACE: Literally nothing
OCCUPATION: Chemist, radiobiologist
ALIGNMENT: True Neutral
BIO: After two nuclear wars ravaged the Earth, odd things will happen to all sorts of life. This is one of them, a human who has the unfortunate pleasure of having their physical composition be mainly nuclear radiation. Much about his early past is kept under wraps by the US government, who sent him away as a infant to a remote chemical research base in Alaska, in fear of him being the next nuclear detonation. Left without proper social interaction and is just seen as a genetic anomaly, it left him with a warped view of life. With incredibly poor socialization skills but a surprisingly large scientific intellect, he has been reduced to hidden-away lab worker, who’s aware of essentially being a captive but is shocking content with it. After all, if he were to be released, the genral public wouldn’t take too kindly to a mannequin-like being with stark white skin and exposed green goo leaking out of his facial orifices, with a near constant glowing aura.
NAME: ‘Mark’ (he was never properly named, and this is just a name given to him by ‘John’. His ACTUAL name is Specimen 1258)
AGE: 21
GENDER: Male
SEXUALITY: Literally doesn’t care at all
RACE: Literally Nothing
OCCUPATION: Convict, former hitman
ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Evil
BIO: What’s more strange than one severely irradiated human being with physical nuclear radiation as flesh and blood? His red colored doppelgänger. With a past even more shrouded in mystery, this ‘man’ seems to originate from the wastes, the former parts of the US that were scarred from the previous two wars. Claiming to be the next step in human evolution, he is incredibly cruel and harsh, and when introducing himself to the criminal underworld as the ‘best’ hitman, he was severely feared by many. Even other rival hitmen who genetically or cybernetically augmented themselves saw him as a legitimate threat to themselves, as after all, he’s a actual living biohazard. They all chipped in together to pin him against who they believe is true my IMMUNE to him, another ungodly hitman with a liquid metal composition. The plan worked, as letting him just step foot into NYC triggered radiation alarms, thus exposing him to the government for the very first time. After a short stint at a supermax prison, he was given a deal: stop irradiating the guards and convicts, and we’ll move you to a more private place where you can do basically almost anything you want. The place in question? A remote research base in Alaska.....
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