#sorry if I put an outside link on my posts they won't show up in tags

[lexirosewrites]

I keep trying to send you something for SS but it keeps getting reformatted and an error comes up. I'll try to send in multiple parts.

I'm sorry that this took so long to answer, but I was trying to find the best way to post your submission because all three posts came in formatted a bit wonkily and I wanted to make sure everyone could read the full story properly, so I put them all here as text in order to make it easier to follow! Hopefully that works easier than linking all three posts together💛

⬇️ NSFW steddie ficlet below

PART 1

Here's a little something for Slick Sunday O!S A!E: Steve hasn't gotten off in a while. It's not for lack of desire, he's been woefully single but honestly too busy to do much about it. The issue really has been he hasn't really felt like getting off solo. The few times he's tried lately, mostly when he's in bed for the night, didn't really go anywhere. He'd take his cock in his hand, dip his fingers in his pussy for some slick as lube, determined to rub one out but after a few minutes his erection would flag and he'd just give up and go to sleep.

Until today, where he's finally horny enough that he's SURE he could get off, and he wants to SO badly. unfortunately he's currently at work and he can't go anywhere because it's a busy day, he's by himself and has to man the register.

And technically he needs to walk around and organize things but he's staying put behind the register because he's hard as rock, and his boxers are slick soaked.

He's so embarrassed and he glances at the clock willing the customers to leave. He's panicking during transactions sure they all smell his desire, and even if they can he knows it's socially impolite to point it out. He hopes his blockers are doing a good enough job he needs to switch them out soon.

PART 2

Finally the store is empty and Steve is about to turn the sign so he can go on his lunch break, finally, and speed on home for a change of underwear and quick crank.

But the front door makes a little digital bells sound, indicating someone else has arrived. nononono go away GO away GO AWAY!!!!!!

Steve glances up to see it's Eddie and he's half relieved and half nervous. Relieved since it's Eddie, whom he’s been crushing on for quite a while, and nervous because he's SURE he won't be able to leave anytime soon since Eddie tends to stick around when he comes to visit Steve at work. He's sure to want Steve to walk around with him and Steve really wouldn't be able to hide behind the counter anymore.

"Hiya Steeeevie! You guys get any new worthwhile flicks?"

"Uh maybe. Check the new releases."

"Haha well yeah I'm going to, just wanted to know if you have any recommendations!"

"Nothing comes to mind, sorry."

"You're sweating, somethings up with you. You alright?"

"Fine, uh. I'm fine AC's been on the fritz. I'll go check the thermostat in the back."

"Ah that sucks. I'll go with you, see if I can tinker with the unit and get it working better!"

"There's no need. someone will come tomorrow."

"Good :Eddie sniffs the air: oh wow. it smells SO nice in here today."

ohcrapohnomyblockersarewornout!

"Oh uh..."

"Wait, it's. It's you. You smell great Steve, wow. I don't usually smell you."

"My uh, blockers must need to be switched out, thanks for letting me know. I'll go in the back real quick and do that" It's a plausible excuse but embarrassing enough he won't be followed.

Steve starts toward the back room determined to reapply his blocker patch and will his erection to flag before he has to face Eddie, again.

"Oh! I'll just wait out here you go replace your patch and I'll get out of your hair soon I promised Wayne a movie night."

Steve, not knowing what to say, rushes into the back.

PART 3

"Go down, go down. please. Eddie's right outside"

Oh Eddie's right outside?

It's like his cock is mocking him the way it does a desperate little twitch at the thought of Eddie standing outside the door. Beautiful, Eddie with his soft doe eyes, and his cropped top, showing off the trail to what is probably a huge alpha co— Now's not the time for horny thoughts!

"Uh Steve? you alright in there? you've been in there for a little bit?"

What if Eddie was waiting outside the door and thinks he's rubbing one out in here?

Oh no! oh no!

If anything it just makes Steve gush even more.

Imagines Eddie asking if he needs a hand—

"Fine!!! I'm fine!"

But the door handle is turning, and Steve curses the lack of locks.

Steve automatically turns around to wave him off.

They meet eyes and Steve can tell the moment Eddie sees his bulge because Eddie stops short and his eyes bug a bit, and he instinctively sniffs the air around him(This is it! this is when Steve finally dies of embarrassment, he just knows it!!!)

"Oh man you're soaked. Do you have a change of clothes in the car, I could get for you?"

"I don't, l used them when we decided to go swimming last week. I'm just going to go, uh die of embarrassment be right back."

"Don't be embarrassed, you don't need to be. I shouldn't have come in without knocking. I've been there before, pent up and no way to get rid of it, l once popped a boner in the middle of a grocery store. I was terrified the staff would think I was into cauliflower. "

Steve can't help but scoff a little laugh at Eddie's nervous ramblings.

"Cauliflower huh? Would have taken you for more of a cucumber man"

SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP

"Well yeah I guess don't want to be too predictable, and that's just low hanging fruit, well, vegetable really. Uh Why am I still standing here? You're sweating so bad, you smell fantastic wow. I'm just putting my foot in my mouth here."

Steve stares at him blushing "You think I smell good?" he giddily asks.

"You smell fucking amazing. And just look at you. You're packing some serious heat there, huh? Um, not to be too forward but wouldyoulikesomehelpwiththatSteve?"

Steve nervously smiles and asks for clarification "slow down a bit. what did you say?" please be what I thought you said!!!!

Eddie gulps but steps forward into Steve's space.

Gulps and takes a deep breath through his nose, his pupils dilating. "I said, would you like some help with that,omega??"

Steve gulps and feels himself start to gush even more, slick trailing down the inside of his thighs, Eddie seems to notice the way he glances down hungrily.

"PLEASE! :Steve clears his throat: I mean. Yes! I would. I really would. Let me lock the front door."

[c-cw-f-saeko]

tell me your name (tesso and seonhee headcanons 2/3)

they moved out of the way so i could take a picture of mt. fuji -> loose recreation of this image 

hi !! i thought i’d finish this tesso and seonhee (separate and together) headcanon masterpost. it covers their individual backstory, how they met and how their relationship grew.

btw i made another headcanon masterpost about the liumang here 🤩 it wouldn't be a bad idea to read it before this one !

i warn that this is the ultimate yapping session LOL so it's long and very image heavy OOPS! there are more than 30 images, i wanted to add more but will stop there for now. check the bottom of the post for some straightforward headcanons (and a TLDR).

also, please pretend the entire timeline makes sense.....i won't beat myself over ageless characters not fitting 100% with documented events 😭 (imo seonhee is 34 and tesso is 37 currently) nvm my guess for seonhee but tesso is surely 37

also, the two fics i wrote heavily tie to this (don't mind the last one). i won't say you need to read them to understand, but i recommend reading them (BC I COOKED!) it'll be linked when needed.

- wang tielin

not completely accurate because he shouldn't have his scars but i'm too lazy to re-do the texture from scratch... sorry tielin 💔

birth name is wang tielin

born in japan. lived in the countryside with his uncle for the longest he could remember.

vowed to his childhood friend to live on the straight and narrow no matter what (hahaha)

a promise to keep was to become rich and share with their family when they grow up.

went to school just because, but had no plans nor dreams in particular. never stirred trouble.

was always kinda bland, but made an effort to become and dress "cooler" after coming to kamurocho (look at the fit please 😭 it was definitely a phase). this is part of the stuff tesso left behind (including his real name). would've preferred no one he knows today met him during that time.

zhao tried time and time again to make tesso show him pictures of him when he was younger but tesso claims to have none. zhao even got seonhee on the task and was ready to put down a good chunk of cash to make it happen. unfortunately for him, tesso was a nobody that truly came out of nowhere according to the geomijul (seonhee just lied 🤩 sorry tianyou).

-> long before the liumang

he came from some city in the country side where nothing really happens. his aunt and uncle took care of him and sent went to school. he was expected to take on his uncle’s restaurant since he was helping out from time to time and that’s what his uncle wanted anyway. 

how can i put it… as long he found a way to feed himself and have a roof over his head, he didn’t have a goal to attain (like a goal career or whatever). he had no aspirations as in “i guess i’ll live” 😍 

though, he had a close friend called liwei. they spent most of their time at school and outside together doing whatever. unlike tesso, liwei had big dreams of finally making it out go the “boring” countryside and establishing himself in a big city, becoming the wealthiest person of his family to provide for his parents. he had a passion about going to especially kamurocho because it was the complete opposite of their current lives. tesso's response to liwei was mostly -> “i support you!” he kinda admired liwei for having determined ambition. 

-> a bit before the liumang 

though, liwei ended up getting killed because a hit was ordered by a bunch of strangers on seemingly the wrong person. not a lot of clues were left behind, but tesso was adamant about it being a mistake since the two of them always swore on being on the straight and narrow (ironically).

so, tesso decided to leave his hometown in the countryside to find out what happened, who killed liwei and how the mix-up happened in the first place.

it lead him to many big cities (like kamurocho) though he navigated a bit clumsily with his words (talking a bit too carelessly about “i’m looking for such such that killed such and such, not knowing the type of place he was getting into), tesso ends up getting jumped by the local chinese mafia at least twice 😭 the clues he finds leads him into yokohama and bro gets jumped again 😭

all to figure out the true culprit was guys from yokohama's chinatown and going up front to them was the worst idea ever. instead, he joins the liumang (at first for refuge as outsider chinese people were vulnerable to trouble between seiryu/liumang and liumang/chinatown). then, in hopes of giving another meaning to his life and eventually seek justice for liwei’s murder.

-> in the liumang 

won't go too much in detail here, but tesso ends up being recruited personally by zhao as a liumang officer through a fight - given the exploit of him being able to scratch his jacket with his claws (and zhao scratched his face across his nose and cheeks with his sabre 😍)

- sakura, the number one hostess

long ago in kamurocho, seonhee used to be an hostess called sakura. remnants of the jingweon mafia rejected by mainland and local koreans (that later formed the geomijul) survived  the best they could with low-level information dealing. they used cabaret clubs to get info out of the local population. 

moving left and right with her mother, it was lucrative enough for her to be able to fend for the two of them — even if it was temporary, she would be doing it until they’d be able to find some sort of stability. 

eventually, the cabaret club was disbanded due to more prominent gangs taking over kamurocho, basically forcing the geomijul out of the city (to later end up yokohama).

in the move, the geomijul was very unstable; most members falling into despair as they were forced out of of home one more time.

seonhee was one of the few people to step up to rally the remaining people together. if they were wavering in the faith of surviving their predicament, the geomijul wouldn't even survive. she did everything she could to make sure fellow members wouldn't walk astray and find them a new home.

being one of people that proposed lodging the geomijul between the seiryu clan and the liumang and reprise their information dealing activities. it was through her sheer determination and in the success of securing the geomijul in yokohama that seonhee was made leader (despite being that young and a woman) jumping over all the oldheads.

fun fact, after leaving the cabaret club, she vowed to herself to never do that type of work ever again.

- meeting for the first time in kamurocho

bro came dressed like that to the luxury club 😭 first timer spotted!! fresh meat here!!!!!!

one promise he made to himself was to realize one of liwei’s dreams, no matter how futile it was. so, he gathered most of his money and decided to light it up for one night in kamurocho in his honour. he ended up going to the first cabaret club he laid eyes on - the one owned by the geomijul.

given the way he was dressed (lol) and the fact he had never been in the city before, seonhee (the number one hostess at the time) was tasked of  tending his table. she usually handled the most "suspicious" customers. 

that's what she thought at first, but past their initial talk, she really did find out he was just young random dude trying out the cabaret clubs for the first time. 

“is it your first time here?” “yeah, there isn’t stuff like this where i live” and so on. funny enough, he turned the conversation back on her a lot so she could ramble about the city and the type of work she did (life in the countryside is boring and uneventful anyway). it caused her to indirectly talk about the geomijul — tesso couldn’t know, her words still applied to the cabaret club dynamic. “the streets are competitive so we are working hard to stay on top!” and how teamwork was the most important thing at the end of the day, etc.

they had a good time talking and tesso was glad to find out city girls were so friendly. he had the impression that he’d be eaten alive, but he was doing ok so far. 

he touched briefly on the real reason he visited kamurocho (thought to himself it would defeat the purpose to not mention it). though, seonhee was smart to not make him linger on the subject by proposing to toast in his honor. tesso agreed, he was there to celebrate and she had made the right call. 

[sorry for the lack of continuity here but i can't being myself to write more atm. will evetually expand that part into a fic.]

- meeting for the second time in yokohama

tesso was always one of the officers zhao relied on the most. for example, he was leading the men sent by zhao after nanba through the city.

so, after mabuchi's overturned coup-d'etat and seonhee taking over the liumang, zhao named tesso as the most reliable man under him and could definitely provide great support in mending the geomijul and liumang together - zhao assured seonhee she could rely on tesso to bridge the two factions.

seonhee was quick to recognize tesso right away, thinking hard about where she had seen such a familiar face before - and the options were very little. it didn't take long for her to realize that it was the same guy she met at the cabaret club years ago. she thought about playing it cool and pretending they never met before, "he probably forgot anyway" and it's not like she looks exactly the same as she did. but she couldn't really shake off the possibility of him remembering. still, she plays it off in front of zhao

for as long as tesso remembers, the geomijul was a very secretive organization and most liumang didn't even know who the boss was and what they looked like. so he rolled with the assumption of having never met them before. so, of course, when he officially met seonhee for the first time, he didn't recognize her. at least at first 😭

- the underworld post mabuchi

because of fusion of the underworld, there was a lot of re-structuring to (such as combining certain cashflows, identifying businesses to assign new leaders to look after them, etc.) it was challenging especially after mabuchi basically left the liumang in shambles and with a lot of defecting members.

tesso helped out sorting out the mess with seonhee personally; it was easier to go through everything with someone that new the ordeal from top to bottom (thanks to zhao). the little time they had was dedicated to fixing the whole organization. at that time, seonhee relegated a lot of leading responsibilities to joongi while tesso did the same with his subordinates.

that's all it was; hours in a corner of the geomijul (usually in the middle of the night) sorting through hundred of files.

at first, it was awkward. tesso had never seen who led the geomijul before and the reality was very far from this expectations. starting at the fact he didn't even thought the geomijul had a woman at its head because of the rumours running the liumang. a detail zhao never bothered bringing up before they met.

zhao's funky and malleable nature was replaced by something more rigid, stern at times but always stood on business. it was different, but tesso went along with it. her style was definitely gonna bring the liumang and geomijul back on its feet.

still, he spoke to her with the same clumsiness as he did with zhao. distant in his words, just like a subordinate should be to its leader. she didn't mind, especially when she did most of the talking anyway.

that's how their routine was at the start: meet, sort documents, leave — there wasn't anything else more to it.

but, something didn't feel quite right.

the more he heard her talk, the more he was sure to have met her before. the words she used, her tone... it felt so familiar. and he had plenty of time to think about it. there was no doubt, she definitely was that girl from the cabaret club...

he kept it to himself and vowed to pretend he's mistaken. the last thing he could do was to bring it up first and be wrong. he would continue to behave the same as he ever did. given their circumstances, he could assume she had left her old life behind as well.

though, irony seeped from his pores, it was stronger than him. the coincidence was a bit humorous; the two of them meeting again with different names and under these unlikely circumstances. he kept his stun under wraps - or at least tried to.

from lingering gazes when she wasn't looking to the way she held herself, tesso recalled the selfless woman he met long ago in kamurocho. despite the heavy facade she always wore, she played it off well, how, in the midst of her words, always passed others before herself.

even with her bolder style, and it's not like she changed much: she was still as beautiful as ever and had that unwavering aura fit of a born leader.

perhaps, he had made his realization too obvious.

ever since zhao presented tesso to seonhee, she knew they had met before. thus, sat quietly with the intent of pretending she was someone else. however, tesso's demeanour changed out of the blue. he seemed a bit more awkward and careful in his words.

though, seonhee resigned on pretending. "tesso? is that how you call yourself these days?" shortly followed with his real name. she asks, chuckling a bit. perhaps, he could've picked something more subtle. he did abandon his birth name for this alias he wasn't really sure whom give it to him. but it doesn't really matter. it just meant was a completely different man now.

it was a bit ironic; they are able to have to shy laugh about it, the ice is starting to melt between them.

- the bridge between the geomijul and yokohama liumang

overall, the union between the geomijul and liumang was welcome by its members. given the situation they both were in - one left without a leader and the other very vulnerable to outside threats. it was worth leaving residual animosity behind and cooperate for the sake of keeping yokohama safe.

so, antagonists to seonhee taking over after zhao were far and between - mainly geomijul oldheads (like seo hancheol 😍 rip bozo) and the few remaining mabuchi enjoyers (like zheng because yes in this timeline bro didn’t get banished out of yokohama).

so, not only did tesso assist seonhee in the merge of the two groups, but he kinda became for the liumang what joongi is for the geomijul: the first commander under the leader and first rep for the liumang. so, in case of trouble or any reference needed from geomijul members, they could ask him if needed. tesso is known to get along with younger folks (canon) so it helps a lot!

overall, the underworld is structured like this:

- factions subordinates (tesso and the geomijul)

yeona calls tesso liumang oppa 😭 she's the one that got tesso to read manga

i feel like yeona would get along well with these two LOL she can get info on joongi from tesso since they work on another level (joongi hides his cringy side from his subordinates). also, she tends to tease seonhee a bit about not being single anymore 😭 in a little sister-big sister type of way. bc like it's not like they ever announced anything, but yeona just picks up on vibes like that 😭 there's banter between seonhee and her, but it's in good faith!! there are so little women in the geomijul, so yeona made sure to stick with

"seonhee unnie, that's your boyfriend isn't it?" she didn't say that, but her eyes kinda did 😭 yeona always knows when something is up about her big sister. this whole exchange happened while tesso was reading his notes LOL 😭

well kinda... because now that seonhee is taken, han-sama (joongi) can stop worrying about seonhee's relationship status.

- advisor to advisor (tesso and joongi)

"Tha- That's not possible! She couldn't have a boyfriend! Some random man from who-knows-where!?" (direct canon quote istg 😭)

"some random man from who-knows-where" that's literally what tesso was to joongi for awhile. 

of course, he knew tesso was one of the closest subordinates of zhao. but he wanted to dig out his history as much as he could before even asking zhao about it. surprise came when he didn’t find much out of the geomijul surveillance system — there was no way to know for sure how nor when he got in the city. however, joongi was adamant about not asking seonhee about it just yet. 

sure, tesso and seonhee never announced they were together (for a very long time). but joongi picked up the smallest changes of seonhee's demeanour and her mannerisms. she tried her best to conceal it, but nothing went past his eye. and it was very clear to him... seonhee was indeed dating that random man.

at first, it was veiled concern but joongi believed seonhee could do better. he thought seonhee could aim for someone more or at least just as good looking than him (im sorry LOL but exhibit A) and someone as refined as her and not so… contradictory in looks and personality (tesso looks rough with a lot of distinctive features but is rather simple). so, first impression wise, it was off to a rocky start. 

despite being the two most important members of the geomijul and liumang, joongi and tesso didn’t really get along. tesso thought joongi was arrogant and preferred dealing with his subordinates instead (like yeona with whom he was able to work well with). 

“don’t mind han-sama. he’ll get over it eventually…” tesso still has no clue what she means by that

the impression of tesso and joongi not getting along wasn't setting a good example for the fellow geomijul and liumang members. while tesso was unsure about the whole thing, joongi struggled moving on for a bit. even seonhee wasn't sure of what was going on between the two.

it took yeona telling on joongi's business back to seonhee for her to set the record straight. no one knows for sure what she has said, but their short discussion was followed by a shy apology from joongi, blaming the geomijul's eternal lack of trust of others for his behaviour and vowed to be as reliable as ever. actually, that was a move from seonhee where she wouldn't let a reason so petty cloud joongi and tesso's relationship further. it was better if tesso didn't know (lol).......

in joongi's opinion, there was too many red flags or dubious points about tesso and couldn’t figure out where nor when they even met (as seonhee never mentioned him before). so, everything came to him as a surprise. 

deep down, the hurt joongi felt was because seonhee didn’t tell him about it first when they shared pretty much everything. he took it as a sign of being unworthy of her trust. understanding it didn’t come from malice, joongi slowly opened up to tesso - it was iffy at first, there was still moments when he was a bit rude despite him. it took time, but joongi trusted seonhee in her decision and agreed that tesso wasn’t so bad after all (“albeit a bit goofy and doesn’t have a presentation as neat as I do”). all that mattered at the end of the day was seonhee’s wellbeing and she seems happy. bro got over himself…

- relationship ladder

(i'm not gonna extend myself too much on this but) the particular thing about them is how the closer they got, the place to work on business changed as well.

this is the fish shop next to eomoni's vow 😭

it started at the corner of the geomijul but surely became eomoni's vow (which is just my first fic LOL) - right at the time when the city was as calm as ever and the liumang and geomijul were combined together. members were more comfortable walking the streets so the need to remain miles of tunnels under the surface wasn't as needed.

still, they usually met in the middle of the night to work on stuff, but just end up eating and drinking the hours away. they got in the habit of playing mahjong against each-other singing karaoke on rare occasion (amongst other things).

next location is qing jin.

omg bro with the three piece suit 😭

it's upgrade from eomoni's vow since the top floor has a dress code 😍 you have to be put together to get in there so dresses and dress shirts are a must.

tesso debated for awhile before inviting her. it was a bit of a bold move, but he knew qing jin would be more of her taste (more spacious, luxurious and an entire different palate) AND it was still very private.

tesso actually picked the artwork (see the tomato picture below) and the room divider is from lin lin

they went a few times, and that was then tesso told seonhee about zhao's apartment complex and eventually advanced the idea to share a spot there. won't go over the details again LOL but you get the idea 🤩

knowing she'd be coming, tesso leaves her sweets 🥹 he's usually more busy on foot (you know assassination quests 🤩), but will drop by before she does if he has other stuff to do for the day.

seonhee definitely spends more time there since she doesn't have to be out carrying missions out on the streets and enjoys the privacy. it's seemingly normal when compared to the gloominess of the geomijul and restaurant row.

- trip to kyoto

this is basically the fic i wrote last year - tesso and seonhee go on a trip to kyoto. (PLEASE READ IT I COOKED!!! 😭) the fic in a nutshell:

i am kidding of course

despite being a higher ranked officer with more responsibilities, he’s always stuck at the “uhhhh taking some time off like that kinda feels unfair” but was bullied convinced by zhao to take some anyway. yokohama had been peaceful for awhile now and his subordinates could run well without him around for a few days.

so take the bullet train to osaka only to come back three days and four nights later. notably, they visit the nonomiya shrine (the shrine of love woooooooohooooo, no it is actually!), tesso dedicates her a poem and they stay in a machiya.

funny enough, i managed to make 3d models pretty close to the original drawings (iykyk) so it's fun!

pretty!!!!!!!!! 😭

- miscellaneous

funny thing they do -> rock paper scissors and they talk to each-other the native tongue of whoever wins for a day. seonhee tends to win often; she's just built like that.

during yua's first year at seiryo, tesso and seonhee attended the parent-student meeting together in place of her uncle (yua's legal guardian at the time). to meet sawa-sensei (yes she lived).

negative trait

tesso : can be too passive | seonhee : lacks humility

positive trait 

tesso: dependable | seonhee: diligent 

strength against the other

tesso: resistant to dominatrix energy | seonhee: resistant to tianyou

their weakness coming from the other

tesso: her cute mannerisms | seonhee: him calling her a specific petname (b......ba......omg i can't [dies of cringe])

serious complaint about the other

tesso: sacrificing health for the sake of fashion | seonhee: sleeps too little

unserious complaint about the other 

tesso: lacks stamina | seonhee: grandpa mannerisms at 37

random quirk

tesso: can fall asleep anywhere | seonhee: rarely laughs from her the pit of her stomach

karaoke? 

seonhee: enjoys anything from koda kumi | tesso: either tone deaf or decent, nobody knows… won’t do anything more than adlibs

hobby they got because of the other

tesso: skincare | seonhee: gardening

seonhee enjoys growing tomatoes, amongst other things. on his part, tesso grows nappa cabbages somewhere on a rooftop in restaurant row (mostly for kimchi ofc).

hobby they don’t share

tesso: shopping | seonhee: running

hobby they tried together for the first time

dancing (thank you yagami)

seonhee is pissed bc yagami made them do something really hard as a tryout. it's not easy, but it's simple at least so they managed!

thing they do when sick

tesso: eats lemons like oranges | seonhee: drinks tea with every single aromatic she can find (ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, peppercorns, etc.)

last thing they fought about

seonhee being frustrated at tesso’s reluctance to take over the liumang, leading her to talk ill of zhao’s ways of leadership. though, seonhee is too proud to apologize first and they didn’t talk to each other for two weeks. even zhao and saeko picked up on the fact they were kinda avoiding each other. 

one thing they struggled with

(especially tesso at the start) treat each-other on equal footing. he was kinda confused at how to behave, whether to be or to not be subservient, like.....

not that it was his second nature, but that's what he used to for the longest time. so, he didn't mind at all.

seonhee was a bit frustrated at the need to spell it out, but it was better that way. at least, everything was clear between them from that point on.

for zhao's costume party [i'll write about this later? maybe?]

(actually seonhee convinced tesso but) they did matching costumes of leon kennedy and ada wong from RE.

TL;DR: i think there are moments when seonhee shares more of herself to someone on equal footing, moments where she's more vulnerable and has room to step away from her idolized self.

i think there are moments when tesso has to put himself first, moments when he must learn to not overextend himself at his own expense.

despite the unlikely circumstances and complicated conditions, i think they would be able to do that together. tesso and seonhee are polar opposites on so many things and i think they can learn a lot from each-other.

i'll make another post with all different outfits they had soon because the volume of models i made 😭

next headcanon post is either going to be ichitesso on dondoko island or yua.....idk yet........

and yes in my book miku was on dondoko island LOL

and before you ask, yes i smoke crack! thank you for coming to my ted talk!

[nottoxicfr]

So…

*steeples fingers*

FFXIII Rosegarden. I must know the inspiration aside from FFXIII being AMAZING (and my childhood) and also RWBY for the same reasons.

Scratch that, I must know everything. This is a crossover I never knew I needed.

I’m sorry this took so long! Seriously, my bad. If you have any questions, please tell me. I promise I won't take three months to answer this time

This will be long.

For inspiration, the short story is that I have a lot of Final Fantasy-RWBY AUs, for basically all the Final Fantasy games I think of regularly (7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16) and even in the scope of Final Fantasy 13, I have a 13-1 and a 13-2 and a 13-3LR AU. I also have a KH AU I've been working on.

This'll just be the Final Fantasy 13-1 AU, though I’ll link the other story details when I post them.

Just to run through a few things, just to set a baseline of how the world works. This is a Remnant where the world increasingly reveals elements from Final Fantasy 13, rather than a true crossover.

For example, the l’Cie and the Fal’Cie are the same idea in concept. The l’Cie are branded servants of the Fal’Cie, mechanical deities serving the Gods themselves. However, in this story, the l’Cie are a fairy tale to even Ozma, which means he only has a strange idea of what they actually are. Only l’Cie really knows what being a l’Cie entails.

A l’Cie is:

Someone who has been branded with a tattoo by a Fal’Cie, essentially the sign that they’ve been given a quest and a vision (a Focus) of what they have to accomplish

The tattoo slowly grows, setting a time limit for their quest. As it grows, the l’Cie also gains the ability to harness magic

However, if they fail to accomplish their task in time, they will be transformed into a monster, a Ci’eth

Someone who is branded naturally attracts Grimm to them, which makes traveling more difficult

Oscar is aged up here a bit, just a year younger than Ruby, and this takes place during a pseudo-Beacon Arc time period.

Oscar is the first l’Cie of the story. His brand is on his neck, under his bandage wraps. His Focus, his quest, is to awaken the slumbering Fal’Cie hidden around Remnant. They were put to sleep when the Brothers left Remnant and, for some reason, they’ve judged it time for them to awaken.

Outside of being a L’cie, he’s just a regular guy at this point and that makes it hard for him to get where he needs to go. For this reason, he hires Ruby to help him get to Forever Fall Forest, which is where he thinks the Fal’Cie he needs to awaken is.

The first arc takes place in Vale, where Oscar’s tremendous bad luck causes a trip that should only take a few hours take several days, which pushes him up the edge of his time limit. Naturally, this puts him in a bad mood, which makes him and Ruby have some friction between them. The situation is somewhat smoothed over when Oscar shows Ruby some magic and he vaguely explains that he needs to get to Forever Fall soon or he’ll die a miserable death.

Ruby distracts him for a little while by talking to him about her Team and asking him about his life. He worked on a farm for most of his life, his aunt died recently, and he’s always wanted to see the world. They fight several packs of Grimm as they hike and Ruby contemplates calling in reinforcements because, for some reason, Oscar insists he’s on a time limit.

They arrive in Beacon where they meet up with WBY and Team JNPR briefly, only to hop on a wagon heading to Forever Fall. Oscar is, at this point, seemingly kind of sketchy. To be fair to him, he’s basically dying.

The arc resolves when Oscar and Ruby plummet down into a sinkhole and find the sleep Fal’Cie of Forever Fall, Behemoth, who brands Ruby simply for being nearby. Now, aside from being paid, Ruby has been dragged into this race to awaken the Fal’Cie, much to the frustration of Oscar. He doesn’t feel comfortable with that, but there’s not a lot he can do but beg an uncaring Fal’Cie to unbrand her.

On the upside, Oscar is given an extension of his time limit and a new vision. He needs to go to the floating city in the sky (Atlas) next, which is where he needs to find the twin Fal’Cie sleeping there.

Ruby is branded as the second l’Cie. She has a brand at her collarbone, hidden under her shirt. Her Focus is to awaken the slumbering Fal’Cie as well, although she also catches further glimpses into the future that put an emphasis on encroaching darkness.

This starts the second arc, Atlas, or the journey to Atlas.

It kicks off when Ruby essentially runs away without telling anyone, under the assumption that once Oscar and her finish their quest, she’ll come back and explain everything. It’s not a very good plan, but she’s understandably occupied by everything that’s going on with her life right now. Ruby and Oscar try and fail to rent a car because they’re both underage. Following this, Ruby tries to buy them tickets directly to Atlas, which doesn’t work because travel to Atlas has suddenly jammed up. Instead, they have to take an indirect route from Anima (the Mistal continent) to Mantle, which takes a few more days but that’s fine.

Yang is, understandably, incredibly distressed that her sister seems to have given up her dreams of being a Huntress to chase after a boy she met three days ago. She reports this to Qrow, who tells Ozpin, who tries to get an understanding of what happened. Yang tells Ozpin about the weird stuff that she heard Oscar and Ruby talking about before, which entails something about Fal’Cie and l’Cie and the Kingdom of Atlas. 

She suspects Ruby has joined a cult and is, again, incredibly distressed.

As stated before, the words l’Cie and fal’Cie are like myths to Ozma. They’re messengers of the Gods and assistants to their angels and, most importantly, they’re almost synonymous with great change. Not good or bad, just big changes in the world. This rings alarm bells in Ozpin’s mind, though not to the point of overreaction.

Ozpin asks Yang to take Team WBY and go after her sister, just to make sure she’s alright and to try and bring her and Oscar back. Ozpin wants to speak with both of them over this supposed l’Cie business. Qrow says he’ll do some scouting ahead to search for them, hopefully, to wrap this whole thing up quickly. He’s not too fond of the idea that some kid swept Ruby away from Beacon.

Ozpin informs his inner circle about all of this, just to keep them updated. It seems like Ruby and Oscar are headed to Anima and then to Atlas, they’re talking about l’Cie stuff which is crazy because, etc…etc… He wants Leonardo to investigate Oscar Pine, he wants Ironwood to try and bring them both in and most importantly, Ozpin just wants to talk.

The lack of details makes Ironwood have a bit of an overreaction. The l’Cie are agents of change in the world and, with the Vital Festival on the horizon, it seems more likely to him that these “l’Cie” are probably going to cause a negative effect. He mobilizes some of his elite forces to capture Ruby and Oscar, as well as putting out wanted posters on Scrolls that these two people are wanted for questioning. It’s a bit of an overreaction, but in his mind, it’s better to be cautious when it comes to mysterious things that haven’t been heard of since Ozma was a child.

Leonardo reports this to Salem soon after, having defected to her not that long ago. Just as troubled by this reappearance of a fairy tale from her childhood as Oz was, she tells Cinder to go find them. She can kill one of them, but she needs the other one to question about what’s going on.

To summarize:

Yang, Blake, and Weiss are chasing after Ruby and Oscar from Vale. Qrow is also looking for them as a bird.

Ironwood told Winter and some of her troops to go to Mistral and cut them off. He also made wanted posters for them.

Salem told Cinder to go find Oscar, who told Roman to spread the word and find them.

Meanwhile, Ruby and Oscar’s air ferry to the port crash lands because, apparently, l’Cie magic disagrees with technology. They have no idea they’re being chased until Ruby sees a wanted poster on her Scroll, detailing that Oscar is a potential terrorist and Ruby is either an accomplice or a hostage. This causes Ruby to freak out and summon her Eidolon, essentially a summoned spirit meant to assist a l’Cie in the quest. She and Oscar have to subdue it before it attacks the people on the crashed ferry, because a freshly summoned Eidolon is naturally berserk.

Her Eidolon is Carbuncle, which basically takes the form of a giant wolf-cat when it is going berserk and is much smaller after being tamed. It has the ability to produce elemental dust from a gemstone in its forehead and is, generally, more of a support Eidolon.

They have to run now because Carbuncle managed to destroy a hefty part of the ferry while it was attacking them, which upgrades them from potential terrorists to probable terrorists, even if it’s only on accident.

This is as far as I’ve written properly because I’ve also been writing a dozen other things. As I said before, I have a lot of Final Fantasy AUs. However, I do have vague details on how things progress from there.

Ruby and Oscar run into Yang, Blake, and Weiss just as they arrive in the port town where they have to board a boat. They end up getting into a fight, Ruby verbally and Oscar physically, because of the miscommunications involved. It’s hard to explain being a l’Cie to someone who doesn’t have the context of apparently sleeping Gods under Remnant. For the most part, Oscar’s part of the fighting ends up being running away and casting magic, which baffles all three of the Huntresses (because of genuine magic) and ends up casting a Thunder (Thundara) spell too close to Blake. This knocks her out.

They board the boat, just barely managing to escape from Ruby’s teammates and there’s a climactic moment where Yang has to watch the boat depart without being able to chase after them. WBY makes plans to keep up the pursuit as soon as they can, with Qrow flying ahead to Mistral.

When Ruby and Oscar get to Mistral, where they’ll board another ferry to go to the north and then get on a boat, there’s a scene that plays out similarly to when Snow rescues Lighting and Hope in FF13.

Winter corners Ruby and Oscar in a plaza with her troops, putting handcuffs on Ruby, only for Yang to show up on a motorcycle and rescue both of them. Blake and Weiss provide supporting fire and they all escape to the rooftops to get away. This puts Mistral on high alert, which shuts down the air ferry, complicating matters significantly. Still, Ruby and Oscar are grateful they weren’t captured. At this point, Ruby’s brand is halfway developed.

They all talk things over and, although WBY don’t necessarily believe everything they’re saying, they decide to help them get to Atlas. Yang also frets over Ruby’s tattoo-brand, which feels relaxingly normal to the group.

While all of that is going on, Cinder begins to make moves towards Atlas, planning to take advantage of the chaos the l’Cie are causing to damage Atlas and capture them. Salem is contemplating what to do about the awakening Fal’Cie, who is purging the overpopulation of Grimm in the world.

Oscar summons his Eidolon, Pegasus, which can turn into a motorbike with wings.

Ruby falls off of Atlas, but is saved by Oscar in a Bullhead.

When they get to Atlas and awaken one of the Fal’Cie there, WBY gets branded as l’Cie. It’s kind of like a spreading curse, and eventually, it will reach JNPR too. That comes later on though.

One of the Fal’Cie is located under Mantle, Vulcan, and the other one is located on the under side of the island of Atlas, Venus. WBY is entirely branded by Vulcan, and Winter and Penny are branded by Venus (though this isn’t something RWBYO is aware of).

There’s only one more Fal’Cie to awaken after this, which is located in Vacuo.

-Oscar awakened the Mistral one

Ruby and Oscar awakened the Vale one

Ruby, Oscar, Yang, Blake, and Weiss awaken Vulcan, which awakens Venus

The last one is in Vacuo. JNPR and Oscar will end up awakening it by falling into a ravine (Woo!)

The final stage of the story reveals that the Fal’Cie want to harvest the collected souls of Humanity so they can use that power to evolve into a God themselves and follow after their creators. They despise Humanity and resent having to serve the inferior creations of the Brothers. Everyone takes a stance on what to do about that, though the main characters decide to fight that. This goes against their final vision, which tells them they are meant to assist in harvesting the souls of Humanity. This is called Humanity's Fall!

Pyrrha does get stabbed in the process and possibly dies, which relates to the RWBY x Final Fantasy 13-2 AU. I love interconnecting these things.

I love talking. If you have any questions or ideas about anything, please ask. Please. Again, my bad. It's been a rough few months.

[gloriousburden]

Hey, you don't have to apologize at all! <3 We all have our lives. Also, it is up to you to decide when you wish to answer or if you wish to answer some asks at all! This is supposed to be your space, so def take all the time you need!

I'm happy that I helped you put some thoughts into words, too! And like always, I agree w all you say!! Also, for the Sylvie shapeshifting part — there's a post on it (if I find it I'll send it to you), and sadly, it is true. I didn't connect the dots before, but now it makes further sense with how they use her character, too. It is stated multiple times in the series by Mobius, and in general they kept highlighting the fact that she's a female counterpart. I shouldn't be surprised, but I always am in the end 😔

And another point you made — for Ragnarok, I saw your rb and. Man. When I tell you my jaw DROPPED at that scene — like ... It's awful. I hope that we won't have that one day, even if that feels far away. None of you deserve this. Putting such lines is very harmful, because (other than the fact that it's just straight up disrespectful, racist and ignorant) while the film itself is fictional, it still has influence in real life and people could take that and think it would be fine, to belittle and mock others. I've learned about your culture and am still learning, and with everything that has transpired, things like this make everything worse. It's so widespread, too, the misinformation. Of course, the best weapon to this is to be respectful, open, informed, and curious about everything, but still, such lines should not be accepted at all. You have already stated it very well. Thank you for that.

Sorry you had to see that, Thor would never. Bruce either, that cannot be Bruce, I revoke him ... Oh, and I'm definitely up for listening to your points on this. I'm very curious about it. I'd also love to learn more about your culture!

(Including your other ask here as well)

Hey! I checked out a few of her posts about it. Is this it? [Link]

In all honesty, I’m not too sure about the shape-shifting thing. But… I assume her being able to shape-shift as well as the enchanting stuff would’ve made her too “OP” (not that they really care about that) and not “distinctive” enough from Loki lol. As for her being strictly female and not fluid… man, I don’t know. I guess they wanted to focus on female rep (which they’re not really good at either) instead. They already see Loki as male, so they treated both of them as only being female/male with the ‘Sex:Fluid’ thing being an afterthought to “please” fans. Basically:

‘OKAY SHUT UP YOU’VE GOT IT! WE THREW IN A FILE SAYING HIS SEX IS FLUID DURING THE CREDITS, BUT HE IS SHOCKED WHEN A FEMALE VARIATION OF HIM SHOWS UP! Uh… it totally wasn’t an afterthought or anything, haha…”

🤦🏻‍♀️ so stupid.

Female counterpart… the writing and handling of Sylvie being female felt misogynistic to me. Okay so Loki cannot call her out on her own flaws (because how dare a female character have flaws), but also she’s automatically stronger and is so “badass”, but also she has no depth and there was little thought put into her backstory. I can straight up say that as a female that I do not want to see robotic female characters with absolutely no depth, and no flaws! Instead of them correcting the misogynistic mistakes they’ve made in the past with making a strong female character, they make her robot like because I guess that’s easier than giving a female character depth.

I feel like a good example of a well written female character is Mikasa from Attack on Titan. She is strong, but also has depth. She loves Eren, but has a personality and motives outside of that. She has weaknesses, and is not immune to struggling. She’s one of my favorite female characters, and I think more should be written like her. Anime/Manga are notoriously BAD at handling female characters, but in Attack on Titan (though there are still flaws of course), they feel real. They aren’t just there for fan service, or just to shut up female audiences with no actual care put into any part of it.

Lol sorry I deleted the RB Because I felt no one saw it, but thank you so much for reading it!

[Link] for context.

I really do appreciate you taking the time to learn about my people, and our culture. Thank you for seeing us for who we are, outside of all the hatred. It truly does mean a lot, as I’ve been discriminated against throughout my life.

I also want to point out that the joke isn’t JUST beyond disrespectful to my OWN culture, but it is disrespectful to any other culture that’s cultural clothing includes headscarves. So many people who proudly wear their headscarves (and any other cultural clothing for that matter) are targeted in hate crimes and It’s just really gross to me that they chose to mock them. It fuels hatred and ignorance. It alienates people.

A lot of people when talking about anti Roma racism mainly talk about the G word (Gypsy), but there are more important things to me than that. Like the fact that Roma children are ethnically targeted in hate crimes by non Roma ADULTS and AUTHORITY FIGURES throughout Europe, but primarily in the Balkans where a lot of us reside/have ties to.

Politicians openly spew hatred against us, with little to no repercussions. They want my people to assimilate, but when they attempt to, they are mocked and just overall treated like garbage. There’s no winning. They want them to strip themselves of our culture. Of our traditions.

I will not get into it on here a whole lot as it is absolutely vile, but my people were targeted during the Holocaust and experimented on in horrific ways. How were they targeted? Nazi scientists studied our features, and how we dressed.

That’s why jokes about how we look or how we present ourselves really are not funny. It reflects real life.

I believe I said this in so many words on the OG post, but the weirdest part to me of all of it is how little sense it makes for Bruce to make that joke to Thor. Like it was just Mark Ruffalo going out of his way to be hateful towards us once again. Thor doesn’t pay much mind to the joke if you watch the scene.

It’s funny because Thor (after his banishment), has almost always been respectful towards other groups of people from what I can remember at the top of my head.

He was respectful towards humans when he was casted out to Midgard, and he CLEARLY tolerates them to a certain extent if he’s willingly in a relationship with one, as well as willingly associate with them (The Avengers.)

‘You can’t kill an entire race..’

‘You think yourself above them?’

Thor is supposed to be open minded for an Asgardian, so.. this really was just Mark Ruffalo and his racism again. And I know he portrays himself as being aware of and deeply caring about social issues, but I guess that awareness and care excludes Roma. That’s what makes it worse. What also makes it worse is the MCU’s history of racism against us. A lot of people have talked about this on here, but the white washing of MCU Wanda/Pietro. As well as Joss Whedon’s racism towards us.

Thank you for the ask! Once again, feel more than welcome to send another any time 😁

[ofmdsalt]

Hey, I really liked your take about how Ed could have gone on a self discovery journey instead of ending up with Stede so I'm curious, how do you view Ed and Stede's relationships? TBH my interpretation is that lots of people in the fandom need to like...stop putting romantic love on this pedestal and understand that self and platonic love is equally important and media always skews our perception and the importance of romantic love in negative ways (I mean, there are literally academic articles written about stuff like this). And sure! a big part of fandom is the shipping! and a big part of the show is their eventual relationship! but idk like sure its nice to see and read but in irl I know lots of friends who fell into toxic and dangerous relationships because they were unhealthy and needed some growth and I've even lost a few friends to relationships that me, and our other friends, disapproved of. Some of those friends have even come back years later to apologize while others just unfortunately lost their entire support networks (friends, colleagues, and family) and still are in those relationships. Which like yeah in fandom i love the "us against the world" mentally but irl doesn't work that way. idk sorry for rambling, but would love to hear your thoughts.

sorry i left you on read for so long, anon! had to think this one through a bit.

so for those who don't know, they're talking about this post that i made. that was immediately screenshotted and taken out of context by implying that i said Ed needs to be 100% perfectly healed before going into a relationship. which is. a take. i won't go much into it, but this is a perfect opportunity for me to expand on that!

what i love in fandoms are long winded character studies. so a fic focused more on an individual person where the relationship (if there is one at all) is secondary. i've written such stories before because sometimes i like exploring an individual character and getting to know what makes them tick. what i wanted to get into with the post linked above is why do we immediately assume that a relationship between Ed and Stede is going to 'fix' them? both of them are in a period of flux within their lives. Stede has lived in a hetero marriage that was, as far as we can tell, fairly miserable and detached for both parties.

he then leaves them (lbr, abandons is a better word for it) to play pirate and put himself and others lives at risk because he does not know anything about the world he's gotten himself into

then we have Ed. a man who's reputation precedes him but who is also strangled and suffocated by this image that he's in. he's Blackbeard first and Ed second.

i can really resonate with both these characters and their struggles to understand who they are and need to be seen as who they want to be. it's a tale as old as time in terms of identity. and then when you add the complexities of a relationship into the mix of Stede realizing he's gay and Ed seeing that he doesn't need to be Blackbeard (but who is he really without Blackbeard?) it makes i all the more interesting

and then season 2 happens and packs in a whole lot of unearned character development due to budget cuts and a slashed screentime.

their relationship was never going to be perfect. no relationship is. but if that's how Ed reacted when Stede abandoned him, Ed should honestly be given the time to reflect on who he is now beyond Blackbeard. beyond being Ed&Stede, a romantic relationship. because the constant hammering home of 'it's the Ed and Stede show' reduces the complexities of these characters to a point where they no longer exist outside of each other. and i think that's really disheartening

why not give Ed a chance to discover himself? why not have him assert that he scared himself during his bender at the beginning of season 2? if he reacted that poorly to Stede's rejection, what will happen if they do break up? i think it's perfectly fine to ask and wonder if Ed should be by himself for a bit.

realizing you're not ready for a relationship can be a big moment of growth for people. knowing how to be alone, how to comfort yourself, how to be by yourself is good and healthy. and it's totally up to all of us to decide when we are ready to be in a relationship again.

i just wish this fandom didn't hit so many over the head with the assertion that Ed and Stede must be together no matter the cost. because sometimes that's not the best way forward and there's nothing wrong in taking more time to find yourself

[notafunkiller]

This is my first time here. I believe we've interacted on other SM & I've always enjoyed your level headed approach. For my two cents:

As someone who is closer to Sebastian's age than most of his fandom, and have experienced relationships in my late 30s-early 40s, what they exhibit is NOT a 'mature' relationship. You do not go from one relationship where you are photographed w someone's hands up your pants and 6 months later always make sure to walk with enough space between you & your partner to drive a truck thru, or use something convenient like bags, a phone, a dog or just fiddling w your hat, to avoid holding their hand while they hang off your arm or hold your finger like they're pulling a tired child. Or hardly EVER be photographed alone. It's off.

I also think much of what is taken as her 'baits' (i.e., liking things in NYC, or a designer, or following a pregnancy yoga instructor) are made out to be SO much more than what they are - someone following something they like, not bc it's a 'signal' as to the 'status of a relationship'. TBH, I don't see AW putting that much thought into it. Her public persona through her interviews and what others have said about her professionally (Charlie Hunan and Guy Ritchie in particular) is that of a vain, selfish, shallow person w no work ethic. It's hard to imagine someone like that spending time looking for ways to 'bait' SM. She's not some 'evil genius'.

Not that she DOESN'T stalk his - and her ex's - SM and anyone they're involved with. She's been caught out too many times for ANYONE to deny that. That shows, again, a very vain, selfish and INSECURE person.

Personally, I think this was something very casual on Sebastian's part. When you're over a certain age, the drive for a 'relationship' isn't paramount in your life, not when you have something as major as his career and being on the brink of what an actor like Seb wants and deserves - recognition. And, right now, it would seem that's where he's at. All of this nonsense about how he 'must' be in LA w her - the unscheduled pap capital of the world - is just that, nonsense. The last time there was even a HINT of them being in LA together (I'm talking with something besides a single 'spotting' on DM that never got posted) was a photo from October that DIDN'T show her & was from so far away, you couldn't be sure it was Seb. That's so far outside the law of averages as to be impossible. But, of course, someone like AW will use him, his co-stars, his family members, his friends, for attention to herself. It's what she's done her entire career and that's that.

Sorry for the long ask. I tried to encapsulate all the convos into one. 🤣

Hiii

Thank you and please don't apologize for writing long messages.

I agree completely that it is NOT a 'mature' relationship or how a mature relationship should look like. And you can't change so fast, as you said.... plus the distance and the fiddling, and it has nothing to do with privacy.

And yes, he is hardly ever photographed alone by paps. Especially in New York. It's very off.

I think what she baits is content with his shoe, his back, his arm or even his voice, but she cannot fully display him.

The rest aka the pregnancy yoga instructor or designers? I did not even think about it.

"what others have said about her professionally (Charlie Hunan and Guy Ritchie in particular) is that of a vain, selfish, shallow person w no work ethic."

I remember this! Guy Ritchie cut her off so much because he was disappointed in her performance, and I know Charlie was upset about it too.

(I went to look for the links: here and here, so I won't be accused of spreading lies again)

"When you're over a certain age, the drive for a 'relationship' isn't paramount in your life, not when you have something as major as his career and being on the brink of what an actor like Seb wants and deserves - recognition. And, right now, it would seem that's where he's at. All of this nonsense about how he 'must' be in LA w her - the unscheduled pap capital of the world - is just that, nonsense."

Thank you for saying this because many people make it look like it's a tragedy, for example, he doesn't want to get married and how he must change his mind. And how he has to marry AW.

It's absolutely disrespectful to him as a person (with his trauma, life experience, values and beliefs) and it also shows how they infantilize him and see him (without even realizing) as puppet.

Many are so obsessed with his location and where both of them live. It's like they're trying so hard to project onto him and them in general.

It's actually kinda scary and dangerous, too, especially knowing that he had to move from his previous apartment in NYC to another and that they exposed the address of the house Ale and him stayed in during the pandemic (I think).

And it's even pointless bc guess what? He travels most of the time.

And again, PR relationships = common, and I can't believe how some people do not know this.

(Benefits are different for both of them.)

[paix-trop-moignon]

Every Kaeloo Season 1 Episodes RANKED

Disclaimer: I am so terribly sorry that I put this out so late than I intended. Outside stuff is making things busy for me and in turn had made projects like this overdue. I won't make a complete schedule for the other rankings as a result, so make sure to check back to the blog for any updates on the next one.

Also, if you wish to rank episodes of Season 1, I have a link here to form your own tier list, but only if you have watched the season in it's entirety. I will mention how to watch the show during the beginning of my review, so look out for that. But until then:

Season 1 Tier List (made by me!): https://tiermaker.com/create/kaeloo-season-1-episode-tier-list-15328649

What if you have The Backyardigans, with the slapstick of Ed Edd n Eddy and Tex Avery cartoons. The zany comedy of Spongebob. And the social satire of South Park and Gumball.

Combined with an art and animation style of Rayman and…Fanboy and Chum Chum…?

That is what I would describe Kaeloo!

The 2010 CG French cartoon by Remi Chapotot and Jean-François Henry, that was formed from a pilot short back in 2007.

I discovered this wonderful, wacky, sometimes weird show from TV Tropes back in 2017, and then 5 years later in December 2021, I immediately became obsessed with it. That same year, I was obsessed with Rise of the TMNT since April and would not stop getting hyped up until I calmed down months later. And then the cycle continued with Kaeloo, and now here we are lmao.

I have been wanting to do something to commemorate this series for a while, until I decided on an idea. To celebrate Season 5 coming perhaps this year, maybe? I came up with a plan to form my thoughts on each season by ranking their respective episodes from worst to best. I will do a little season overview to lay out the quality of how they handle the characters, writing, and animation. And then the episode rankings will be where I will sum up my thoughts.

Now I have done this episode ranking format before. Back in 2020, I posted a Mao Mao Season 1 ranking on my respective Mao Mao fanblog. It’s still decent, but the problem was that, aside from my favorite episodes, the other tiers have the episodes ranked by episode airdate order rather than personal taste. And that I could have laid out my reasons as to why they were in the tiers I placed them. One day, when I get back into Mao Mao, I will properly fix that tier list.

But back to Kaeloo, this is going to be the most fun and most exhausting ranking series I ever have to do. The fun part is rewatching every single episode again, almost like a sense of nostalgia from watching them the first time. But the exhausting part is getting through the episodes that were just plain boring or drive me up the wall.

Regardless, I know that despite the hardships that will appear, this will still be the most interesting project I will ever do.

IMPORTANT NOTE: this ranking/review will contain some spoilers, so please read this if you have watched Season 1 and all of Kaeloo in its entirety. You can watch the show available on Canal Plus to support the series legally. Make sure that your VPN is strong enough to access, because if not, I recommend getting a stronger one. For Season 1, the English Dub is available on Dailymotion along with the original French Dub being fansubbed by fellow Kaeloo fan, RandomnessUnlimited. However, as of writing this, there’s only 15 episodes posted so far. So it’s either sticking to the original or English Dub. If you stick to the English Dub, prepare for your ears and your soul to shrivel up the moment you hear some obxnoxious, annoying voices. But if you can stomach that kind of torture, then you’re all set!

So of course, we are starting with Season 1! But first, a little overview:

Quick Skim

Kaeloo Season 1 was interesting to say the least. If you have been into a long-running show, and go back into the first season, you’ll notice how many changes that happened from the past to the present. Season 1 is sort of like this. Like the characters and plot have still stayed as the show moved on, but the format and writing style had changed.

This season goes for a more formulaic plot, like shows like Phineas and Ferb. Where Kae wants to play a game, Cat doesn’t wanna play a game but changes his mind to cheat and beat up Quack-Quack, Stumpy tries to win but fails, Cat beats up Quack, Kae turns into Bad Kaeloo and beats him up, and then epilogue.

Boom, rinse and repeat!

That may get kind of tiresome, but thankfully, they do manage to work around the formula and have a couple of episodes play out differently while keeping the main plot around.

The setup for this season and the show in general is just neat. Kaeloo is basically a parody of one of those preschool shows you’ve seen as a kid, think of Dora the Explorer and The Backyardigans. Where “the cast are best friends, explore new worlds, and learn morals along the way, and have fun uwu~!”. Kaeloo slaps that in the face and warps that concept with a twisted edge to it.

Instead, the main cast, while friends, would sometimes bite each other in the back and throw each other off with insults or violence. There’s a character who gets whacked with a mallet to being blown to bits with a goddamn bazooka. And it has some absurd adult jokes and actual—mind you—actual swearing that would make your eyes wide hard. And I love it! I understand that those examples, along with the mean-spirited tone might not be everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s understandable. But I, like other people, truly appreciate Kaeloo for what it is. Being a rather morbid show joking off shows like Dora, that also doubles as a goofy slapstick comedy.

I see the humor of the show divided into 5 core elements. Its character driven, with some black comedy, surrealism, social commentary, and slapstick. These are what makes the comedy of Kaeloo so great. Of course not every joke hits, but the ones that do truly hit. It mostly works off of the characters and how they would act around the situation they’re in. There’s a saying that when you make such interesting characters, you can put them into any scenario and it would just work. And thankfully that applies to the cast of Kaeloo, specifically the main four. Speaking of which…

In this season, there’s no other characters, no talking sheep, no talking objects! Just four wacky characters, living in an equally wacky world.

Kaeloo, Stumpy, Quack-Quack, and Mr. Cat are an all-around neat set of characters. If you were to watch any episode from this season alone, you’d pretty much get the gist of them. They all bring their cards out to the table about who they are, what they’re like, and how they play off against each other. Most of the time in the wrong ways (looking at you, Cat). Now this season doesn’t have any strong character development. There are bits of backstory revelations involving characters like Cat and Quack for example, but that’s about it. And that’s perfectly fine, as while I do dig that a ton, I don’t mind it when the story gives that a back seat and let’s the characters just vibe in their own way.

For my opinions of the quadruple this season? Hmm… I don’t want to make this section too long since the ranking will be longer and I will continue to share my thoughts on them during that time. So I’ll try and keep this brief!

Kae and Quack are both okay. For being the title character, Kaeloo’s not so bad. I like how even when she seems to be generally nice, there are moments where her faults come to light, mostly comes from her bring bossy to the buddies. She has a few shining moments here, a handful of which are great, and I’ll discuss them when we get to it! But overall, especially from rewatch, it wasn’t enough to make me fully invest in her. I do prefer how she is handled in the later seasons, where despite her being more irritating at times, I love how there’s some moments where she tries to improve herself. But here, she’s decent, but not my favorite. The same can be said for Quack-Quack, providing some funny visual gags with the way his body functions, his obsession with yogurt, and being just a straight-up god in general. He’s a bit better than Kae this season but didn’t really leave any major impact on me.

However, on the other hand, Cat and Stumpy carried this season for me! Mr. Cat is just probably one of the best characters in the entire series, can we all just admit it? Well okay, I guess this was a given already. Yes, he’s a complete jerk who’s grumpy and also a sadistic schemer, but I also love him. There’s more to him than just him being “the sadistic bully”, since he’s revealed to be a very intelligent guy and also have rare occurrences of caring for Kae and the buddies. Both of these qualities are expanded on in the later seasons and to great effect that helps his character as well, but that comes way soon. As for Stumps, I also love him. He may be my number two, but he’s still amazing! Stumpy makes me laugh with whatever action he does. Constantly having his bad luck affect his chances of winning a game while constantly raving on for his love for video games and comic books. I relate to this guy somewhat since we share similar hobbies, and that’s one of the reasons why I adore this funky lil’ dude.

As for other stuff, the animation’s pretty good. While it being a CG cartoon during the early 2010s is nothing new, the fact that it emulated squash and stretch into this form was something special. It’s a reason why I said that this show was like Fanboy and Chum Chum at the beginning, since that show and Kaeloo were the early forms of using this sort of animation technique, especially in television. It wasn’t until we had movies like Hotel Translyvania that fully kicked off this trend, and I’m rather happy for that. For Season 1, the animation is still impressive. I did spotted a few errors, but it’s too be expected, and thankfully it’s shown only rarely. There’s some neat character expressions and some surprising action sequences here that still holds up. Of course, the later seasons did improve these two points, but I want to give this season some credit where credit is do.

Oh yeah, and the music’s a banger, Franck Marchal really nailed it. Many of the OSTs in this show are so memorable, a few of them got stuck in my head. Really do hope the series gets an official soundtrack one day.

Alright, so the overview is done! I didn’t want this to be long since the ranking itself will be, so hopefully I will shorten them a bit for the rest of the seasons.

So, let us finally get the ranking over with to determine my complete thoughts on Season 1!

We’re going from “JUST AWFUL” to “JUST AWESOME” rather than going from F-S Tier. I just like it that way. Case you’re wondering, “JUST AWFUL” is where an episode is just so bad, I consider it to be my least favorite. Period. Will not watch ever again. “JUST AWESOME” is of course the episodes that are my absolute favorite and will continue to watch them whenever I can. And the other tiers, Bad, Okay, Good, and Great, are exactly what it says in the tin.

Now that’s settled, let us properly begin! Starting with…

Bad Tier

Okay so thankfully, there’s only two bad episodes in this season, which is good for me at least. They aren’t awful per say, but are still badly written overall. So, with that said, my least favorite episode this season is:

52. Justice Masters

Mr. Cat Gets Relaxation Challenge: impossible

This sucked butt.

Now Cat had done some pretty heinous stuff before, but here, he hadn’t, at all. Okay maybe he did lied about jumping off a cliff to garner sympathy from the quote-on-quote “Justice Masters” but that’s about it. All he wanted was to just relax from all the stress he’d been having, but the Legion of Superdoops decided to make things worse!

Kae and the buddies being these superheroes to keep Mr. Cat relaxed seemed interesting at first, but just became unbearable as the story continued. They finally seem to get the memo and created a beautiful spa to make Cat happy, only for it to fumble hard when it became a freaking death spa on the poor cat. Again, if Cat did something ruthless in this episode, then it would be kind of funny? But he didn’t so, it wasn’t!

I did like the hero references, one or two gags, and Kae’s gratuitous Spanish. But that’s it.

It sucked, moving on.

51. Goodbye Mr. Cat

I too would be like the narrator sobbing over Cat’s farewell…well supposed farewell to be exact.

This episode had a rather interesting concept that would have been so perfect, not only for a sweet emotional payoff, but a nice character moment for Cat!

But however, the biggest problem was the way how it was handled.

The tension of getting Cat to stay wasn’t really there for me. It seemed so from the first part but then it fumbled over by the second half. The twist was creative, I’ll give it that, but it came in too early and was just there to be yet another “Cat gets boo-boos from Badka moment”. Speaking of which, Mr. Cat beating up the buddies after everything they done to try and help him was not great either. I know that he’s a jerk and all, but still. We have seen that he does care for them, but in a subtle way at least.

Honestly, I think Grown Ups and Bye Bye Yogurt handled this similar premise better, especially the former because of the aforementioned detail of Cat showing signs of caring for his friends.

Overall, not an awful episode, but the execution could have been so much more.

Okay that’s it for the bad episodes, and now for the mediocre ones!

Okay Tier

Yeah, there was a surprising amount of mid in this season. The bottom half are the ones that are boring, while the top half are decent at best. So we’re starting with…

50. Peace Man/Peace

This episode started off with Cat smelling his stinky armpits and ends with him getting violated with kisses from Badka…..w-what…?

Yeah, that’s like the only two highlights from this episode that I actually remembered, and not in a good way. This one was just boring. I pretty much have nothing else to say about it, aside from those two moments that are the most cursed of all of Kaeloo!

Oh, and Cat swearing, goated moment.

Overall, just skip it, moving on.

49. Hopscotch

A game of hopscotch and religious symbolism sounds kind of intriguing, but it wasn’t to me at least. It’s boring.

A few jokes were decent, and I liked Quack’s evolution from angel to demon.

That’s all I put in from my notes, it’s just fine.

48. Teachers

Teachers is a little better, but still mid.

It’s just not really that funny, but the character moments were neat. Cat’s odd diagnosis involving Kae and Badka’s internal conflict was weird. I know it was meant for laughs, but I dunno.

Eh, it’s also alright, I guess.

47. Magicians

I thought this episode was boring the first time I watched it, and it’s still boring upon rewatch, wow, surprising!

The suicide scene, for starters, was not great.

Stumpy’s “what doesn’t exist” thing was admittingly funny, but it didn’t go anywhere. Cat’s magician drip was neat, and I liked the dance scene but that’s it.

Just Stumps in denial and magician shenanigans, alright.

46. Circus

Yet another episode that was boring from first time and rewatch, but slightly better.

I like a few of the performances, and the jokes, but yeah, that’s about it.

45. Catch the Mailman

Okay, you know the drill, boring before, boring again. When Cat showed up, things got a little better. I also liked the mailmain strike scene, that got a laugh out of me. I also liked Badka attempted to be funny, that was cute. Either way, it’s a’ight.

44. Ecologists

I thought this ep was super boring when I first watched it, but now? Eh, you know, it’s kinda decent. Some of the jokes, mostly on protecting the environment did made me laugh, and yeah it’s not bad. Still might not go back to watching it, but I’m at least glad I have it another shot!

43. Cops and Robbers

Okay, this one is mid, but kind of high?

I thought the twist of what happened to Quack’s yogurt was confusing at first, but I rewatched the episode again for any clues that made some sense. And alright, it was fine at least, but could have been better. Also Cat using the “serious case” as a means to screw over Quack is kind of odd? Like he wasn’t involved in the crime at all, and instead ended up getting arrested anyway for another crime, bruh.

I will admit, the car chase scene was the highlight, it’s a lot of fun and funny too! Though I find it weird that Stumpy can drive here, and then many episodes later come Driver’s Ed, where he doesn’t know how to drive. Either this ep came after that one for there’s some continuity errors!

Uh, what’s else, what else? Umm, I like Cat’s scream when the banana got shot up his nose, it made me laugh hard due to how ridiculous it was. I dunno, Cat screaming would make me laugh sometimes lmao.

So yeah, my thoughts for this episode are all over the place, so to sum it up, it’s still decent.

42. Golf!

This is one is okay, but I do have an issue with it due to the character inconsistencies. The biggest one being Kae cheating, and Cat being dumb enough to believe her while Stumpy managed to not fall for her lie. Huh? I can kind of see it from a detail of Kaeloo having faults of her own and not liking when she’s wrong when she actually is. I don’t mind if that was the point, but it was still odd to watch.

Aside from a few visual gags and jokes, this one’s still mid.

41. Tennis

Okay this one is a bit of fun. I like how Cat becomes Kae and Stumpy’s coach and then later favoring them as a part of him cheating. I can see why since Quack-Quack’s pretty much a god in this game, and this little detail would be brought up again somewhat in Season 2’s Baseball. The only difference here is that Kaeloo refused to cheat to win. Also, a few visual gags and the slow-motion jokes were funny.

Overall, not bad ep.

40. Figurines

It’s insane how this went from playing with figurines to an incident where you sign a contract from the Devil to gain voodoo powers, amazing. Cat being Quack’s servant from the voodoo fiasco was the highlight, hilarious stuff. Also, Kaeloo making her and Cat’s figurines kiss…think of that as you will 😉.

But yeah, it’s still decent, but entertaining at least.

39. Treasure Hunt

Yeah, this one isn’t that bad either. Cat’s various traps made for some intense moments and fun gags. Also Kae, no offense, but I kind of agree with Stumpy here. A picture of your face as the surprise is kind of lame. Overall, not bad of an episode!

38. The Thing From Outer Space

I can’t believe that Quack-Quack would throw away his adopted child/pet for some yogurt. Man…

This episode’s strength is the quote-on-quote “thing from outer space”, and it got intriguing as to what this thing really is, and the twist of it’s revelation was a good one, won’t spoil it here. Also the music choice for this one is nice.

Wish it could have been a lot funnier, but this one is still not bad of a watch.

37. …

Okay, I have a confession to make. I know you will not like this, but I have to say it upfront. This is my opinion, and it’s alright if you disagree with me and my thoughts. So read this clear when I say that the episode I put in this tier is…

37. Courtroom Drama

Yeah, that’s right. Courtoom Drama is mid.

Now, I know some of you guys are looking at me and saying: “House, have you been smoking candyweed? You cannot be serious!” Don’t worry, I am completely serious.

I knew about how much this episode is hated by some fans of the show, and I was in sort of the bandwagon at first. But the more I rewatched it, the more I began to realize that it’s kind of okay. But why do people hate it so much? Simple: the ending itself. Where Kaeloo turned out to be faking her sadness of leaving Smileyland to trick Mr. Cat into confessing his crime, who in turn attempted to be genuine.

I can see why this can be angering to some, but upon realizing it, I didn’t think it was that awful of an ending. To be fair, while Mr. Cat did try his best to make it up to Kaeloo, he did bait her and the court into making her guilty using Bad Kaeloo as an example. So while the punishment he got was really harsh, I will admit, I still think he kind of deserved it.

Aside from that, the rest of the episode was surprisingly fun. There were some gags I laughed hard at, like Stumpy as the judge and Cat’s fake as hell flashback to the crime scene which I’m sure was meant to emulate Kae’s daily life.

So to add it up, it’s a decent episode. I can greatly understand why you guys hate it, and that’s okay! I am fine with your opinions on this one as long as you’re fine with mine’s. Plus, there are episodes of the series that I consider to be waaaay worse than this one, especially an episode that I despise the most. Also there’s another episode later down the line that has somewhat of a similar ending to this one, but not great. We will get to those two points eventually, I’ll let you know. So again, I think Courtroom Drama is alright, but if you hate it, more power to you.

36. Doctors and Nurses/Doctors

Oh my lord is that title card nasty, ewww! Like I understand that it’s meant to represent the episode about a character being sick, but STILL, IT’S SO GROSS!

*takes a deep breath* Okay, I’m cool.

The hospital jokes were admittingly funny and strangely accurate. Cat was entertaining, as always. And poor Stumpy, my boy dead and nobody even cares, man…

Not a bad episode, overall!

35. Detectives

This was a kind of a fun time. I liked how it made fun of detective movies and did a take on how old school and modern advanced detectives handled cases. The revelation of the mystery is admittedly odd and doesn’t really make any sense, but I’m sure it’s meant not to be taken seriously, and I can accept that. Also props to Kae’s VA man, he really nailed that deep voice, bruh. Once again, decent, but not bad.

Okay, so that was rather lengthy, but let’s finally get to the good stuff!

Good Tier

34. Simon Says!

Now this one ain’t so bad. This is probably one of the eps in the show where Cat is at his cruelest, robbing Kae of her money to forcing Quack to strip, jeez my dude.

A few jokes were decent, the one with Kae’s lisp comes to mind. And the opening short at the beginning was pretty cute.

That’s it, good stuff!

33. Super Powers

This is the most anime the show has ever been.

I thought that the buddies would get their own powers, hence the title, but instead they get it from these training cards. So, this whole episode feels more like a Yu-Gi-Oh parody if anything, with some notable references to boot, which are neat.

Major F to Stumpy, Quack’s just too unbeatable. Oh, and Cat too, he suffered a lot here.

So yeah, it’s not bad.

32. Art Class

As an art lover myself, I was impressed with the jokes surrounding how art is treated in the critical viewpoint and in the topic of currency. I digged it. Also, I actually was amused as Kae whenever she said that Stump’s art is trash and I said out loud “Yo, just look at your art!”, haha!

Good episode, wished it was more funnier though.

31. Hide N’ Hunt

This is one of the few episodes that proves that this show is an early form of Squid Game.

The problem with this episode for me is the clone thing. A few moments, they seemingly have a mind of their own, like with Stumpy’s clones for example. But most of the time they’re like holograms or something where they just repeat whatever their original host is saying. Having all three of them talk at times can be a bit confusing and annoying, kind of wish they handled them a bit better.

Aside from that, it’s still good, not much else to say.

30. Baby-Sitting

Oh boy oh boy, it’s the episode where we get some full on Kaelat, finally!

I thought this episode was okay first time, but upon rewatch, heh you know, it’s kinda funny! So this is I assume the first episode of the series to have 2 plots of sorts, and the results are rather mixed. Okay, the Kaelat First Date Fling was boring. It didn’t really add much in my opinion, aside from some interesting character lore, and for Kae and Cat to have a moment together at least. Also Cat attempting to uh…do that certain thing was kind of amusing at first watch, but nowadays it’s really awkward and I don’t like it.

Although, Stumpy attempting to “practice babysit” Quack was funny though, and the highlight for me. And it also had a rather funny ending.

So a weak B-plot with the Kaelat “date”, but the A-plot made up for it, so it’s not a bad outing!

29. House/Papa-Maman

Oh my gosh I’m in a Kaeloo episode, dreams do some true!

Joking aside, what I really like about this episode is not only the jokes involving this not-so-perfect family, but also an analysis involving the group dynamics between them. Kaeloo gets some harsh truths when she realizes how far she had gone into the game, forcing Stumpy and Quack-Quack into the roles they didn’t even want to, which causes them to leave. Mr. Cat’s actions as the father didn’t help either, which many fans including me speculated that it’s in turn due to how he was treated by his own family. And less said about the certain couch scene between Cat and Kae, the better.

This leads into me saying that I’m not a fan of Kae and Cat’s “romance” in Season 1. I assume the intention was that they aren’t as close as expected. This in turn causes one of them to make the other annoyed or uncomfortable. And scenes like the kiss scene in Peace Man and this episode’s couch scene really made things awkward. A similar conflict resides in the buddies’ relationships with each other, where the broken family seems to reflect on the fact that there’s some issues within them.

But then, there’s the ending. Kaeloo realizes what she’s done and goes to apologize to Stumpy and Quack-Quack for her behavior. They then forgive her, and Stumpy even offers Kae his game controller when she asks him for it. It made me say “aww” aloud whenever I rewatch this moment. It makes me appreciate the series for the fact that while it is mean-spirited at times, and that the buddies due tend to get into disputes, they still do care for each other. The later seasons greatly exemplify this, especially Kae and Cat’s relationship, but that discussion will be saved at a later date.

Overall, while it’s not my favorite Kaeloo episode, I still think it’s special to me because of these aforementioned reasons. Still has some nice jokes, and that sweet ending that puts this higher on my list.

…Also, what in the hell was up with that title card in the French dub?

28. Hot-Cold

Aside from the suicidal visuals which I did not like, this was rather fun!

It was sweet of the buddies helping out Stumpy with his first date with Ursula, even when their attempts where kind of disastrous, but again, their hearts were in the right place and thankfully things seem to turn out well.

Also, I got a major vibe from Season 4’s All Alone. Mainly because of the details from the beginning of this ep, like Kae playing by herself, Cat mentioning the alley cat parties. Interesting stuff, unsure if this was some crazy ass foreshadowing or not.

Overall, neat stuff!

Great Tier

Alright, now we finally reached the episodes I thought were great! Not my all-time favorites, but still a close second.

27. Reading Books

This one was pretty funny! I know some people would be mixed over the scenes involving the porno mags, but I think they aren’t that bad. I think they go well with the little humorous feud between Cat and Quack over them. It reminded me of those old school 40s/50s cartoons such as Tex Avery. And as a massive fan of his stuff plus the fact that cartoons like this were an inspiration to Kaeloo, I am greatly impressed!

What I am not impressed with is the ending where Kae checked out Cat’s “goods” when he turned into a book at the end. I did get the intention of the joke they were making so I can understand. But bro, this was considered the first Kaelat moment? Wow.

Also, poor Stumps man, the earlier eps didn’t treat him so kindly, but it’s a given really.

Overall, I liked it a lot, not bad.

26. Trap-Trap

A simple one, but still neat. Quack-Quack’s yogurt withdraw was the highlight, which made for some funny jokes and admittedly creepy moments, especially that ending, oof.

Also the Kaelat “hug” was cute and funny, nothing else to say, it’s great.

25. TV News!

I personally relate to Kae when it comes to heavy topics on the news. And while it’s tough seeing reports on something so tragic, it’s still what I and other people have to take into consideration. Regardless, I still feel bad for her.

For some levity, there were some good jokes, Cat is amazing as always, Stumps as well.

So yeah, great ep!

24. Astronauts

This was a really fun episode. Okay, I had a few problems like that certain slur Alt!Stumps said, and of course the ending where the buddies prank Stumpy over that nightmare he had.. Should have ended with him during his therapy session, tbh.

Other than those problemas, I still liked it!

The concept of the main cast meeting their other selves in another dimension is a concept I like, and it has been brought up more in future episodes, and even a story in the official comic. A few fans had also got into making ideas for it, and I do wanna get into it too one day.

So it’s still great, despite the cruel twist ending.

23. Spies

Spies isn’t the strongest of the roleplaying episodes, nor is it my personal favorite (Season 2 Ranking for more info), but I still digged it!

The highlight was obviously the truth serum scene. I am sure that this scene was just crumbs of character lore, headcanons, and theories for the fans, including me, to tear into. Pretty sad stuff, though Stumpy’s truths were treated as comedic though.

I loved the jokes, including Stumpy’s attempts of being the traitor and constantly failing.

Still great, overall!

22. Para-Normal/Paranormal Stuff

Ghostbusters references, I see what you did there, Kaeloo crew!

This is kind of an underrated episode, in my opinion. I admired the supernatural shenanigans, and the boss battles, being an obvious nod to Ghostbusters. It also has a few concepts that I’m sure was brought up again in Season 3’s The Door, like the journeying to a world within one’s head or something like that. Maybe that’s just me, but whatever, fun romp.

21. Guess Who

Really funny stuff! Fun gags, a neat game concept, and of course, Stumpy and Quack’s emotional and compelling breakup arc. Truly a breathtaking experience.

20. Danger Survivor Island

I thought this episode was good, and nothing else the first time I watched it. But overtime, I grew to like it a lot more, and I see why other fans too!

The selling point here was Kae, where her selfishness on how the “Danger Island” should be from her way by making it cutesy, rather than how it’s intended. This causes her to be voted out of the game in the end, which feels like a nice change of pace since this time around she’s in the wrong.

I loved the gags, especially the voting drawings! Quack-Quack could draw so well, amazing stuff.

Not a personal favorite, but I still love it!

19. Gangster Poker

Now this was neat! Cat was a nice antagonist, very ruthless though regarding him pulling a ransom on Kae and he got a well-deserved punishment.

Stumpy being Cat’s sidekick was neat, along with the funny gags of him constantly nicknaming him. And then he pulls the betrayal plan to become the boss only for that to fail badly. I love it. Also, I love the scene of Kae and Cat yelling at each other’s names, kind of adorable.

Side note, I feel like this episode gives out a hint towards Cat’s backstory, but maybe that’s just me.

All in all, great ep.

18. Happy Rotter

Not a Harry Potter fan, but even then, I still think the parody of the series is not bad!

Though, a problem I have is Quack-Quack’s trauma, as his backstory along with the death of his parents were introduced here. The way they handled it was mixed to me, since they used it as a running gag and eventually a Chekhov’s Gun at the end to defeat Cat. It’s a fine use of black comedy but I don’t know, I’m just not a fan of it.

On the plus side, the gags were funny, the spells were pretty creative, and of course, Mr. Cat’s goth outfit! Peak drip right there.

17. Me-No-Nopoly

I got nothing much to say about Me-No-Nopoly, other than it’s a banger. The jokes are neat, and Quack realizing that he wants his friends back rather than being a corrupt king was sweet. Also, episodes like this and Season 4’s Your Rubber I’m Glue should be a reminder to never make Mr. Cat play God/king. Keyword: never.

16. Quest for the Wholly Gruel

I would love to place Wholly Gruel in my Awesome tier, if not for one thing: Nazi Cat. *sigh*

Now I do get what they were doing here. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Indiana Jones, which is what the episode is obviously parodying, but the first and third movies had nazis as the villains. So, the concept of having Cat being a villainous nazi is the intention I can understand, but still, it can be hard to stomach. Especially when he has the red band, and the symbol that resembles the swastika, and the book burning joke. That’s fine if you’re alright with it, but I can really understand why others don’t love it.

But thankfully, that’s like the only big problem I have with the episode. Everything else is really good!

The gags here make me laugh hard. Stumpy was the highlight, as he is unaware that he is putting his friends in real danger while he’s using the Gruel in wanting the prehistoric people drawings to die. Amazing. It is kind of cathartic, considering Kae locked him in the cavern earlier without him giving her a second thought.

Also the animation is really neat, aside from this weird lighting issue, the facial expressions and the action sequences are just awesome!

Fun Fact: this episode was featured at the Annecy Festival from 2011, in 3-D. Yeah, you heard me, 3-FLIPPING-D. Those lucky dudes! Also the Very Special Episode was also shown in Annecy in 2017, but not in 3-D. Kind of wished it did, since the animation from that ep was also great, but story for another day. Man I cannot wait to talk about Season 3, aargh!

Anyway, if not for Nazi Cat, then this would have been an easy S-tier. But hey, it’s placed at a high A, so it’s more of an honorable mention at least.

Alright, now we can finally get to the episodes that I really loved, the Just Awesome tier, AKA the placement for my favorite episodes, period.

So let’s get it rollin’!

JUST AWESOME

15. Streetball

Streetball is great because Mr. Cat raps and it’s epic, that’s it!

Okay but for real, the songs in this one is just great, easily top tier. Cat’s rap like I mentioned is again, epic. And the rap number with the main four is neat too, they didn’t need to make it, but they did and I love it.

I really loved the jokes here, Cat once again doing whatever he can to cheat his way though and Stumpy attempting to be this hip basketball player. I do relate to him when it comes to playing the game, it’s nice to watch, but man can it be hard sometimes.

So yeah, it’s a banger, especially because the songs are bangers.

14. Once Upon a Time

This was a total riot. Not only are the shades of fairy tales being graphic nice, but Stumpy’s own fairy tale story was just great. It’s exactly what imaginative 10 year olds would think of and I love it. It’s so goofy, and nonsensical, but it’s Stumpy, so you should know what you’re expecting.

It’s hard to believe that this episode got a sequel episode from Season 3, and while I loved that one too, I gotta give props to the OG.

13. Musical Chairs

Okay so funny story. When I first watched this episode, I considered it to be decent, with a few gags I loved.

But now? Upon rewatch, this is one of the couple of episodes in the whole show to make me laugh hard. That’s probably a me thing, but damn it, this one was just a riot!

We have Cat being freaking extra over cheating his way to beat Quack-Quack. One example has Stumpy tripping Kae with his foot, and then you have Quack-Quack getting chased by Mr. Cat, who’s driving a car while attempting to slice him with a chainsaw. The moment I saw this scene, I just lost it. The fact that my dude decided to use a car, as opposed to just running was just incredible.

And then it gets wilder. Stumpy bonds with the leftover chairs, to the point where some almighty force grants him his wish to make them alive, which evolves into a full on revolution for their rights! And then this causes Cat and Quack to team up to take them down, but they’re defeated anyway.

This episode was just a straight up wacky experience, but hey, that’s Kaeloo for ya, and I love it so much. I’m so happy I gave this episode another shot, definitely will rewatch this again sometime!

12. Grown Ups

Weird to place this one on this specific tier, but I ended up loving it more than I thought. This is where we see that Cat cares for the buddies, and they do it in a subtle way where even if he acts like his usual self, the goal of him trying to bring them back to their old selves is surprisingly sweet.

The different bad futures each of the buddies partake lead into were interesting and had a few funny gags. I mean Quack becomes a literal god, not surprising to be honest, haha.

So yeah, really loved this one, even if others might not see it, which is perfectly fine.

11. Time Travel

Hands down, one of the most underrated episodes of Kaeloo. I just love this episode for the character interactions. I mentioned before that this type of comedy is what makes the show neat, and I just loved the buddies just vibing along in their time travel shenanigans. The Bob the Duck Skewer plot does die down early, but that’s a small complaint.

Also Kaeloo’s future is kind of horrifying, I ain’t gonna spend my time there, no thanks!

This episode has a special place in my heart overall, don’t mind rewatching it when there’s a pretty sunset like what happens in this episode. Dunno, whenever I look at the sun setting from my window, I just think of this episode.

10. Driver’s Ed

The DMV sucks, and everyone knows it. I’ve seen a few shows do their own roast on how horrible that place is, so far The Looney Tunes Show. I’ve yet to watch Megas XLR, but that one clip of Coop destroying the DMV repeatedly is just hysterical. And I think Kaeloo’s take on it is also great.

You have jokes on how driver’s ed would be like to some people, from the anxiety to those kinds of teachers. Good lord was Cat ruthless to Quack this way, jeez. You root for Stumpy here, and it was nice seeing him get somewhat of a win, even if he still crashed. And again, it’s weird that he needed driving lessons here, where in the early episodes, he can learn how to drive! How does that make sense!?

Whatever, it’s a banger, really funny and enjoyable.

9. Prison Ball

Ah yes, the very first episode of Kaeloo! I can see this as a classic episode and for a good reason.  It’s a great introduction to the characters and how their quirks play off here. Cat doing his usual trickery against Quack, Kae trying to keep the peace while vibing, and Stumpy thinking the prison ball game is an actual prison.

I think Red Light, Green Light is stronger, but this is still a nice first impression to start off with.

8. 1, 2, 3 Soleil!/Red Light, Green Light

Ah yes, the original Squid Game!

But yeah, I love Prison Ball, but this to me is the real introduction to this show and the characters. I find it really neat how this was a remake of the OG pilot, just improved the animation along with adding a few new jokes to add in time, like that hilarious opener with Stumpy, and Quack-Quack being happy that he’s flying for a few seconds. So far, I’ve seen shows like Regular Show played this straight, and Phineas and Ferb doing this with a unique spin by making their pilot episode a musical. That’s something I really like about this concept, letting us know that these shows have evolved over time.

Okay I’m just rambling, it’s overall a great one.

7. Market Vendors

Market Vendors is on the list of Kaeloo episodes that make me lose my mind of laughter. In case you’re wondering, that has yet to be done since most of them are too hard to rank.

So for this one, it’s just funny all around. Well, aside from the ending, which still is funny, specifically that once certain light switch gag. But in hindsight, I feel like it’s kind of awkward to laugh at sometimes regarding recent news events over related incidents.

Although, the rest of the gags are neat! Stumpy’s attempts to bring in customers was cute. And I love how Cat evolved from customer to security guard to robber, insane growth level.

6. Cowboys and Indians

Cowboys and India—wait. COWBOYS YOU SAY!?!? Okay okay, story for another time, aka Season 2 Ranking.

Okay, going in, I heard that this episode was racist. And while watching it, I was sort of confused until it got to the scenes with Stumpy as the Indian. And yeah, it was not great. But thankfully, unlike Nazi Cat, it’s not for too long and is thankfully overshadowed by the main plot.

Which, in my opinion—IS FREAKING AWESOME!

Cat is an incredible antagonist, major kudos to his VA for bringing in the menacing and badass vibes. Plus the action here is nice, and aside from the Indian scenes, the rest of the jokes are neat too.

Not sure if the Stumpy Indian scenes were like the only racist parts in the episodes, let me know if there were some I missed. But aside from those scenes, it’s goated, really loved it.

5. Prince Charming

Okay, so I’m going to put plenty of all-caps here and also a bit of swearing, so if that’s alarming to you then I am sorry but this episode and my number one spot had moments that were so incredible, that I must put my words in uppercase. Okay, here I go…

*deep breath*

HOLY FUCK IS THE FIGHT SCENE SO FUCKING GOOD WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK

WE HAVE CAT USING A BAZOOKA AND A CHAINSAW WHILE FIGHTING QUACK-QUACK, WHO ONLY USES A SWORD AND HIS BARE FISTS.

THE WAY HOW THE FIGHT WAS CHOREOGRAPHS, IT’S SIMPLE DYNAMICS YET SO DAMN COOL.

WHY ARE THE FIGHTS THIS SEASON SO GOOD, WHAT THE HELL.

AAAAAAAAHHHHH I LOVE FIGHT SCENES SO MUCCCCCCCHHHH.

*clears throat* Okay I’m good.

Anyway yeah, it’s goated. It also has simple stuff like Stump’s misadventures within Fakebook which is also hilarious. I liked Kae as Quack’s squire and the Sphinx scenes, and Mr. Cat’s “oh yeah” face.

BUT THAT FIGHT SCENE MAN, HOLY HELL.

4. Air Pockets

Okay I have no idea why this is called Air Pockets, kind of a weird title. But with that aside, this is also a funny as hell episode. I loved the jokes regarding what’s like being in an airplane, along with some dark humor that’s shocking (like the terrorist scene for example, oof) but also admittingly hysterical, mostly with Cat being the sadistic, entertaining pilot.

And wow, first Stumpy managed to drive a car by learning from video games, and now a plane? I guess the moral is that video games can make you learn to control transportation!

(Warning: do not attempt unless it’s proven true)

3. Tea Party

Tea Party is just funny. I mean really, really, really funny.

The character-based comedy is strong here with neat conversations and running gags. You feel sorry for Kaeloo here, but also fear her the moment she finally snaps. Lesson learned: never disrupt Kae’s tea party. There shall be mighty consequences for all who oppose…

But yeah, excellent stuff!

2. Bye Bye Yogurt

I can’t believe that this episode made me feel sorry for an expired yogurt. I don’t know how it managed to do that, but here we are.

I gotta say, a few of the sequences here animated so well. From the buddies doing their typical fun, to Stumpy’s creative way of getting in danger, to the ending where Quack-Quack says goodbye to Yogo’s spirit. It was a little emotional, and how it was handled without any dialogue as the music swells was a nice touch.

Also, Mr. Cat being nice during the funeral? To cheering up Stumpy about his grandmother’s funeral to giving Quack-Quack a gift? Now that’s good stuff.

Definitely a great one. And while this one was top tier, my number one pick is even better…

NUMBER ONE!!

1. Scaredy Cat

Okay so warning, I will once again use all-caps and excessive swearing so be warned…

*deep breath*

THIS. EPISODE. ROCKS!!!!

BEST EPISODE OF THE ENTIRE DAMN SHOW, FULL STOP, NO LIE.

THE ANIMATION, HOLY FUCK, THE ANIMATION.

I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS SERIES STARTED OUT IN 2010, THAT IS SO IMPRESSIVE. I’M NOT A SUPER ANIMATION ANALYST BUT IT’S STILL COOL TO SEE THIS SORT OF STYLE EMMULATED SO NICELY. WHY DOES SEASON 1 HAVE SUCH GOATED ACTION AND FIGHT SCENES. I MEAN SEASON 4 PEAKED WITH THE ANIMATION, BUT THIS EPISODE? THIS WAS JUST TOP TIER.

ALSO STUMPY DANCING WITH THE ZOMBIES TO THE THRILLER PARODY, TO THE ENDING REFERENCING THE MUSIC VIDEO.

AND MR. CAT. OH MY FUCKING GOD, MR. GODDAMN CAT WAS IN HIS PEAK. HE WAS JUST AN ABSOLUTE BADASS. LIKE WE KNOW HE CAN MANAGE USING LETHAL WEAPONS, BUT IT’S MOSTLY ON QUACK-QUACK. HERE?? WE SEE HIM TAKE DOWN A HORDE OF ZOMBIE YOGURTS AND TRY TO MANHANDLE A ZOMBIFIED QUACK AND BADKA. YEAH YOU HEARD ME. BAD KAELOO. I WANNA SEE CAT FIGHT LIKE THIS AGAIN, IT’S BEEN 13 YEARS BRO, I WANNA SEE HIM DO THIS STUFF AGAIN.

IT'S JUST PEAK. SIMPLY PEAK. BEST EPISODE OF SEASON ONE BY FAR, I LOVE IT SO MUCH AAAAAAHHHH.

……okay that was a lot of uppercasing.

Final Thoughts

Kaeloo Season 1 isn’t my favorite season of the show. It’s by no means a bad season, far from it! It’s still a good season overall, but it’s one where I don’t have complete hype for compared to the other seasons.

Season 1 had some really good humor, character moments, and some impressive animation. But I thought it suffered a bit from having a couple of plots that didn’t invested me, some jokes that I didn’t laughed at or didn’t aged well, or not every character bit winning me over. That’s probably in part due to the number of episodes that were just mediocre. Only 2 episodes were bad and only 16 episodes where mid. That may seem a bit disappointing, but I’m completely fine with it! I’m thankful things didn’t end up worse. I much rather have a sea of mid than a sea of garbage. And at least said sea of mid is still tolerable to watch!

On the bright side, the episodes that I thought were great, are still great. It honestly wasn’t annoying to try and yearn for the best parts when watching Season 1 in order. Maybe slightly boring, I will admit, but the binge was still worth it.

So to conclude, Kaeloo Season 1 may be a bit rocky, but I still think this season is really darn good. Bunch of classic episodes to be rewatched here, won’t mind doing so sometime.

SCORECARD:

BAD EPISODES: 2

OKAY EPISODES: 16

GOOD EPISODES: 7

GREAT EPISODES: 12

AWESOME EPISODES: 15

EPISODES RANGED FROM BAD-OKAY: 18

EPISODES RANGED FROM GOOD-AWESOME: 34

ALL EPISODES IN TOTAL: 52

SEASON 1 RANKING: 8/10

Now here's the tier list in it's entirety!

Well would you look at that, lots of okay ones but lots of favorable ones! What a good way to start this ranking marathon!

Now join me sometime in March where I shall get through…Season 2…oh boy, this season…

[foreverapocalypse]

INTRO

Hello! Welcome to this account... Uh, I don't really have a big need to make an intro for this? Unless it gets super popular, which I will then be making a whole new account just for the AU instead of just a new blog, and then an intro will go there or whatever.

Only necessary information is that I am a part of a system so therefore I may disappear for long amounts of times, I go by any pronouns but Eye/Eyeself would be preferred for this specific account. For the sake of no confusion I'm going by an entirely different name on this account, which will be Calypso! I say for the sake of no confusion as I am a WTNV Fictive, and that will help me separate myself from this AU as well.

Onto what this account is!

This is a small blog I'm making to keep hold of random information dumps, fanfic updates, and whatever about a WTNV AU I've made! I will post links to new Fics I make relevant to the AU, quick posts saying when those Fics have update, and small infodumps about things in the AU I dont really want to just throw into a google doc.

I have a bit of hope for this to get popular, but since I'm not an artist of any kind and very slow with updating things, I worry it may not. But regardless! I just want to have a place to show it off, so this is the place now!

I will have NO DNI LIST HERE!!! I believe they are stupid and useless, and that you should not expect others to be curating your online experiences. If you come to my account and I find problems with you or the way you act towards me or others, then I will block you myself with no further warnings or questions. This won't be me condemning you against reading about my AU or creating things for it, but rather just a declaration that I don't wish to further interact with you directly.

Sorry for being chatty, but yeah! Hopefully you guys enjoy what I end up showing off here! OH! And feel free to send me asks, especially if you have any questions about the AU, or even just about this post in specific for now.

Though, to leave you off.. here are some warnings below for stuff this AU may contain, outside of the basic gore and NSFW you may expect from an apocalypse AU, because I want people to be safe while viewing this AU and to not accidentally trigger themselves. This is also a boundary I am setting, in a way.

Some Fics I create about this AU may have a possibility of containing more genuinely dark themes, such as rape, abuse, or things people can find more triggering than their counterparts such as animal gore and child death. I will ALWAYS properly tag and warn for these things, and I want this to be a warning for you to ALWAYS check the warnings I put out on some posts or fanfics.

Not every dark theme I incorporate into my Fics will be explicitly shamed or otherwise displayed as bad, depending on the POV you will be reading from. This is not an excuse to come on to my accounts and view these as glorifying anyones actions. I expect my readers to have their own moral ideals already fixed up, and therefore not need me to explicitly state when or why something is wrong.

Do not come onto my account to accuse me of harming others, do not come on here to accuse me of supporting harm to others. I will block you without question, and I will not engage in arguments over these things.

[kodzukenmaaa]

୨୧the rules: please take a minute to read the terms and conditions for coming or browsing my blog!

PLEASE KEEP THIS IN YOUR MIND BEFORE ASKING!

↳˳⸙ OVERVIEW !

DNI if you're racist, sexist, support the current genocide that is currently happening in Gaza, mysogynistic, etc.

Please no repost, plagiarizing, & translating, etc.

This blog is not spoiler-free I don't think I'll put a Spoiler tag either :(

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↳˳⸙ WRITING !

if you want clarification on something, please send me an ask!

i'd prefer not to write readers with a specific race, religion, disorder.

Idk if I want to write a smut, but safe to say my blog is still SFW

I'm sorry but I won't be writing MxM or FxF I'm really sorry. (Me being a girl I dont identity or am I a male am more comfortable in writing female reader. I also don't know how to write FxF. sorry!)

i'm will NOT be writing professor x reader, step brother and sister, yanderes, incest/stepcest, adult x minor, hate speech, anything discriminatory, domestic abuse, teacher x student. Etc.

↳˳⸙ HOW TO REQUEST !

Please be nice.

I only write a character x reader.

Please don't ask the reader to have specific hair color, eyes, skin, etc. I'm keeping it neutral, is that weird? Idk.

No cheating or affair.

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PLEASE don't spam requests and asking me when will I post your request. Honey it takes time for me to write.

I don't write characters x oc.

↳˳⸙ BLOCKED !

There's could be a lot of reasons why i block people, but it's usually because you annoyed me at some point or so.

i also start to block if i you have blankless blog but for some reason you keep showing up on my dash spam liking bc that annoys me. REBLOGS IS MUCH MORE IMPORTANT

I'll block spam-likers too BUT I'll send you message as a warning first if you keep continuing to spam liking me I'll block you. I'll warn you twice.

Spam reblogging is much, much better.

I'll block you if you support the genocide. When someone said "Oh it's raining outside" and the other one said "No it's not" IT IS NOT your job to decide which one is right, YOUR JOB is to check the window to see which one is right.

notes. © property of kodzukenmaa 2024. all rights reserved. likes and reblogs are well appreciated

[redjaybathood]

the question was since deleted, I presume, because i don't see it in my comments - but the sentiment is popular.

I mean, in the context of the post, when i was talking specifically about giving russians a platform - emigration in this case is already past-tense, deed done. and here is the thing: not playing a victim is a great start. there's two great and recent examples, if you'd like:

Anastasia Trofimova with her documentary "russians at war", (it's one article only but the issue here is much deeper) and

Lera Abova with her casting in Netflix's live action One Piece (linking here to my twitter thread, sorry, didn't see any publication on the topic).

In both cases, them being russians is what allowed them to receive benefits. As a Ukrainian, it's mind-boggling to me that the world doesn't really think about "well, what should they do?" and instead just rolls over the question - they don't need to do nothing! Or they lob this question at Ukrainians: hey, what do you want them to do? It's never: hey, let's ask russians outside of russia what do they think they should do to combat russian imperialism. Or, if you do ask, it's still "nothing" as the answer, because hey, it's not their problem (for them it's a feature not a bug), it's ours.

So, to sum it up, the world at large builds up a false dichotomy: if you do not give russians a platform (by their benefit of being russians, with the consequences of still perpetuating russian imperialism), you just want them to die off or something.

But yeah, what I do dream of them doing is, working against russian imperialism in any and all its forms; acknowledging the privileges and benefits that being the titular nation of empire brought them (i mean, y'all generally all for demanding the same of white people overall, or for empires like UK - it just somehow evades russians); acknowledging that their past actions or inaction is what brought today's into being; that's like a bare minimum and it won't cost them anything. They don't even have to worry about the scary russian government they escaped so hastily just when the sanctions or mobilization hit: they are outside of its reach. That's the whole point of emigration.

But even the russian opposition, the vocally anti-putin ones such as Yashin or Navalnaya or Shulman - they're still incapable of that. What's to say about russians that keep quiet, or, at most: peace! we're not putin! but Crimea is not a sandwich, you know.

I can count on the number of one hand russians I know that are truly against russian imperialism - and believe me, being part russian, and being involved in russian spheres for most of my life, my formative years, i know a lot of russians. More than the average guy reading this post; - most of them are in Ukraine (and have been there for a while, leaving russia specifically because they chose to become a part of Ukrainian society instead of russian, because they chose to cut the ties with russia so thoroughly, especially the economic ties - no taxes, no VAT paid). One is still in russia, even. One is joining up to fight russia in combat - not for russia, against russia, you get? Don't tell me that they cannot do nothing. I know for a fact that they can do it. You are looking down on them saying that they can't.

I, however, look down on those who says they can't. Because for sure they can advocate for russia and russians, they for sure can be used to prop the great russian culture narrative and special place russians have in western (or japanese, if we again remember One Piece) consciousness - they can, in short, bring harm. but they can't bring good? then yeah, put your decision to show a russian whitewashing movie on an International movie festival off, for a decade or two, when it can be viewed through academic lenses of "let's see how russians made their propaganda". and no, don't cast a russian as a genocide victim/revolutionary, claiming that it's being russian that makes them a great fit, or claim that Ukrainians are xenophobic for being in horror of both.

i think that, for a lot of people who defend russians with "not all russians", "it's all putin", "it's just their government, they personally aren't in the trenches" when you talk about how dangerous it is to platform russians (not to mention, offensive) - a lot of the sentiment is coming from people being really infantile. they're not willing to take the responsibility for their government - they don't vote, or don't vote locally, or revenge-vote (like choosing third party in us presidential elections even if they know it's going to help trump win, again), or some other shit. or they were the part of the problem themselves - like with the usaians becrying xenophobia towards russians now, like it's the same what they did to anyone looking vaguely-middle eastern now (it's not) - and their unprocessed guilt over it, their own shittiness is projected towards us, ukrainians. they don't improve their own society, but it's always makes them feel better about themselves to protect russians (projecting themselves onto them) and punish ukrainians (projecting themselves onto them, again, just a different part of themselves)

fun times to be ukrainian. but then again, when isn't it?

[jmeelee]

CHAPTER 2        [Read Chapter 1 here]

As soon as the sun kisses the shore of the Black Lake, Derek and his pack simultaneously rise from their seats around the common room, heads cocked in a distinctly lupine way, bodies answering a supernatural call Stiles and Lydia can not hear.

“I’d give anything to shift again,” Erica whines. Her body screams run: balled fists, hunched shoulders, muscles taut.

“It’s alright,” Boyd consoles. He reaches out, plants a huge hand on the back of her neck, blunt fingertips rubbing gentle circles into the fine blonde hairs at her nape. Isaac sways closer to her, brushing her sweater-clad shoulder with his own. Derek places one hand on Isaac’s forearm, below the rolled-up sleeve of his white button-down, and the other hand on Boyd’s broad back, completing the circle. Erica closes her eyes, whole body relaxing with a soft exhale. Everything, from their silent, comforting gestures to Boyd’s tender tone, broadcasts their connection, the bonds of devotion and friendship between them. Jealousy rears its monstrous head, spitting fire and scraping talons along the inside of Stiles’ rib cage, hoarding every affectionate gesture. You used to be that close to Derek; you should have Derek’s trust and love.

He buries the feelings and memories unearthed by the intimate scene, and falls back on his standard, reliable line of defense: being a sarcastic asshole. Stiles leans into Lydia’s personal space and mock whispers out of the side of his mouth, “That was kind of creepy.”

Lydia smacks him in the chest, hard, without sparing him a cursory glance.

Derek drops both hands from Isaac and Boyd like they’re on fire, and crosses his arms over his chest, directing angry eyebrow at Stiles. “You always knew how to ruin a moment, Stiles. Glad to find nothing has changed.” Derek is a sarcastic asshole, too, a trait Stiles likes to imagine he is at least partly responsible for. Derek stalks to the common room door, throwing it open for his friends to pass through. “Everyone knows the plan?” Five heads nod. “Good. It’s time to go.”

Derek’s decision to shed his skin and become something other never surprised Stiles; Derek had been questioning his place in the magical world before he’d ever received his Hogwarts letter. He hadn’t minded listening to Derek bemoan the lengthy, arduous process—mandrake leaves, electrical storms and all sorts of impossibly unique tasks. What he did mind was Derek’s new transformation skill came with more than additional body hair; it came with Erica, Boyd and Isaac, who, in Stiles’ loudly-voiced opinion, embodied the worst aspects of Ravenclaw House.

“You don’t even know them.” Derek had spit the words at Stiles’ feet in the Entrance Hall. Scores of voices, distorted and distant, filtered through the heavy doors of the Great Hall, a chaotic soundtrack to the dissolution of their friendship. “As if your Gryffindor girlfriend is any better?” Derek jeered. “Or Scott McCall?”

Stiles saw red. “Scott’s more puppy than snake, and you know it! And for the last time, her name is Lydia and she’s not my girlfriend!”

“Whatever.” Derek had run a thick-fingered hand through his hair, pulling at the roots in frustration, causing it to stick up in all directions. Stiles took grim satisfaction in the chaotic locks, so opposite from Derek’s usual polished exterior. “If you have a problem with my friends, than you have a problem with me.”

“Fine! If your obnoxious, revolting Ravenclaws are so important to you, go sprout a tail and piss on trees with them, and leave me and my friends the hell alone.” Stiles sneered, and uttered the words that would haunt him for almost two years. “That way I won’t have to see it.”

Derek sucked in a breath, turning hurt, wild eyes on Stiles’ stone-cold face. He’d clutched his Charms textbooks to his robe-covered chest. “So much for always. You were full of shit, as usual.” He’d spun on his heels, and marched away.

Now, as everyone drifts out of the common room, Stiles is rooted to the spot, a terrifying stray thought freezing the blood in his veins; if they fail tonight, Stiles will never get the chance to see Derek in his wolf form. Lydia heads for the door Derek holds open, but pauses when she realizes Stiles isn’t following her.

“Stiles, what is it?” she asks, raking shrewd eyes over his immobile form.

Even half hidden by a mask, Stiles can tell two bushy eyebrows are raised in question above Derek’s green-gold eyes, his fingers grip the door so hard they turn bone-white. Derek’s face will always be a Marauder's Map to Stiles, spilling secrets, no matter how much time passes. Derek thinks Stiles has second thoughts about helping him, but that isn’t the case. The brick wall Stiles erected around his heart to keep Derek at bay has been cracked and crumbling from the start, patched together with stubbornness and spite, and tonight, regret for all the time he’s wasted claws at the mortar.  

Stiles looks to Lydia, blinking fast, mouth gaping but no words spilling forth to express all the what if’s bottle-necking in his throat. “I know,” she says, firm but gentle, and the rare softness in her voice dispels his panic, “but you’ll get the chance.”

Derek glances between them, mouth tight. His shoulders fall. “Come on, guys. We have a long night ahead of us.”

*****

They tiptoe through hidden corridors, avoiding detection from portraits and professors, and skirt along the outer walls of the castle, flying past Hagrid’s hut on fleet feet. It amazes him there isn’t a path worn permanently in the grass leading down the hill past the Whomping Willow. He and Derek traipsed this exact route countless times, courting adventure—and a fair share of trouble—over the years. They broach the shadowy tree line as sunset slips from the sky, where thick spring foliage swallows the last of the warm, dying rays. Stiles shivers, partly from the temperature drop under the leafy canopy, and partly from the ominous feeling of the Forbidden Forest settling into his bones. The reasons this place is off limits to students have never felt more consequential.

Boyd and Isaac lead the way down the dark path, conversing quietly, dead leaves and twigs snapping under their loafers. Derek and Lydia walk together, heads bent close, rehashing the plan yet again. The familiar scents of damp earth and Lydia’s perfume wafts toward Stiles on a cool, fragrant breeze. Glimmering eyes follow their progress from hollow tree trunks, as Stiles lags behind the group, with Erica keeping pace.

“I stand by what I said,” she declares, boldly.

Stiles rolls his eyes, side-stepping a gnarled tree root. “And what was that, exactly? When you told me I looked like a wart-faced toad during the Yule ball?” Stiles smirks. “Or was it when I scored higher than you on all my O.W.L.’s, and you told me to eat slugs?”

Derek quickly glances back when Erica laughs, loud and carefree. Be nice, he mouths. Stiles isn’t sure which of them he’s admonishing.

“Neither.” She playfully punches Stiles in the shoulder, with a bit more force than necessary. “In the common room tonight, when I said you were supposedly the best wizard Hogwarts had seen in ages. I still can’t believe someone so clever could be dumb enough to drop his best friend like a sack of potatoes.”

Stiles bristles, eyes grimly focused on a lone grey squirrel scampering up the bark of a tree, loudly announcing to the world that it’s late for bed. “I’d call it a ‘mutual dropping’.” He makes air quotes. “Derek didn’t like Scott and Lydia, and I didn’t like you three. Still don’t.” Stiles bites the inside of his lips. “It was better to part ways,” he says in a softer voice. “Not all childhood friendships last.”

A rude noise escapes from under Erica’s mask. “Well that’s bullshit. Did Derek actually say he hated Lydia or Scott? Did he ever utter those words?”

“Well no, but—”

“Because he didn’t. He doesn’t. He resented the time you were spending with them. He’s not like you, Stiles. Derek doesn’t make friends easily. People don’t flock to him like they do to you.” She appreciatively eyes Derek's pert backside. “Despite how good looking he is.”

“Don’t try to distract me with Derek’s perfect butt. We hate each other, and Boyd and Isaac don’t tolerate me either. There was as much bad blood on your end as there is on mine. You three think you’re better than me, better than everyone.”

She scoffs. “Don’t tell me you buy in to the rubbish about our house placements determining our personalities. If someone has shown me kindness, I return the favor. You’re not my favorite person at Hogwarts, I’ll admit, but that wasn’t always the case. In third year, I tried to be your partner in potions.”

“What?!” Stiles’ incredulous eyebrows can rival Derek’s. “You did not. I’d remember.”

“I thought you were smart and funny. I thought we could get top marks in class if we worked together. I certainly didn’t think I was better than you. You didn’t even notice me. So I thought, why waste my time liking this guy if he only cares about himself?”

Stiles stops walking, turning to face her fully in the feeble light of green glowing insects and a waxing crescent moon. Overhead, branches bang against each other like drumsticks in the hands of a giant. “I don’t only care about myself.”

Erica pauses, contemptible smile full of sharp white teeth beneath her gold mask. “Oh, sorry. You, Lydia Martin and Scott McCall. Derek Hale didn’t make the cut.”

He sucks in a noseful of wild herbs and rotting wood. “That’s so unfair.”

She takes one step closer, a pine cone splintering under her foot, chin jutted high and feet planted wide. “When we all started to spend more time together, I asked Derek why he hung around with you; you were so self-involved. Do you want to know what he said?”

“Not really, but I’m guessing you’re going to tell me anyway.” All around them, the cacophony of the forest falls silent; no buzzing insects, no hooting owls or the flutter of unseen wings, no foraging of animals in the detritus. The eerie silence lends itself to Erica’s ominous admission.

“He told me, Stiles is the most loyal friend in the world.”

Stiles stares at Derek’s back, growing further away with each heartbeat. His fingers itch for his wand, for the orange and purple ropes of a Carpe Retractum, something to force the distance between them to close. “It was a mistake.” The whispered confession loosens something in his chest. “I’ve missed him every day.”

“Hey guys!” Boyd pivots, squinting in the low light and yells, hands cupped around his mouth. “Hurry up! It’s right here.” He points to a trailing canopy of moss.

Erica pushes Stiles forward. “Maybe tell the guy? Before we all get trapped in the Faerie Realm and dance ourselves to death.”

They march on, but a few yards from the rest of the group Erica grabs Stiles’ shoulder, halting his progress. “And Stiles?”

“Yeah?” He doesn’t think he’s imagining the softening of the hard lines around her mouth when she looks at him. It’s minute, but a spark of hope ignites in his chest.

“Derek missed you too.”

*****

Lydia digs the invisibility cloak out of her satchel. “You don’t have to do this,” Stiles tells her, grabbing hold of her forearms and bending down slightly to peer into her eyes. They’ve been over the plan a hundred times, but he still needs her to know. “You could stay out here, go for help if we don’t return.”

She shakes her head, strawberry-blond tresses trailing along her shoulders. “Who else is going to save the day if you fuck this up?” She throws her arms around his shoulders and squeezes him tightly.

The cloak falls over her head, removing her from sight. “So, Stiles?”

“Yeah?” He answers the disembodied voice in front of him.

“Don’t fuck up.”

Isaac reaches out, pushes through a thick canopy of vines hanging from an old, tall oak tree, and Stiles shudders as he steps over the threshold of a world outside their own—a strange and wonderful twilight kingdom. A reverent hush falls over their entourage.

Stiles has never witnessed anything like it—and he’s grown up with magic. A silver forest stretches ahead of them, as far as the eye can see. When they’d been in the human world, the moon was almost new, a sliver of pale yellow light, but now a full moon leads them down a narrow footpath. Under the moonlight the pure silver leaves sparkle and dance like musical chimes. Stiles hears the sound of violins far in the distance, so faint he wonders if he’s imagining them. Stiles spins in circles, eyes darting from one gleaming branch to another.

A warm, fragrant breeze scented with jasmine fills the air when they draw clear of the silver trees, and come to a dazzling forest of gold. Thousands of gold leaves catch the light of the moon, turning the world to bright golden day instead of silver night. The music is clearer now, closer, and Stiles catches the sounds of many different instruments playing a beguiling tune.

“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” Stiles says, fighting a euphoric smile.

Derek steps beside him. “Just wait.”

Finally, they cross into another forest, far more stunning than the others, where glittering diamonds cluster on every leaf. It’s as though all the stars in the heavens rained down to rest on the leaves.

Stiles can’t help himself; he laughs, overcome with delight. Every time a diamond catches the light the moon shatters hundreds of tiny rainbows over the entrancing world they’re traveling deeper and deeper into. Stiles stretches out his arms, watching them play on his skin.

He cups a few in his palm, holds them up for Derek to inspect, like they’re kids again, discovering magic together. “Look.”

Derek never takes his eyes off Stiles’ face. “Beautiful,” he says.

Stiles drops his hands to his sides, sobering. “Derek, I owe you an a—”

“I need to tell you something,” Derek says at the same time.

They blink at each other. “You first,” Stiles says.

Derek reaches up and plucks a sprig of diamond off a low-hanging branch. “What if… I think I…”. He sighs, tossing the priceless jewels away. “When we came here, the first night, I felt like you do right now; overcome. I try my best, all the time, everyday, not to think about you, but when I saw this I…”

His rainbow-dappled mask turns toward Stiles. “I wished you could see it. I wished you could be here with me. I swear, I never said it out loud but… here you are, all the same. What if my wish brought you here? Put you and Lydia in danger? If something happens, and we can’t leave, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Derek.” Stiles steps closer. “You didn’t bring me here. I brought me here. And I should have been here”-he gestures between them-“all along.”

The music grows stronger, drowning out Stiles thundering heart, and all at once Derek and his pack turn toward the sound, the same unsettling hive mind behavior from earlier in the night.

One second, they’re alone, then Stiles blinks and a handsome man stands before him.

At first, all he can register is silky black hair, a strong jaw, gentle, piercing eyes a kaleidoscope of green-gold-blue, but the harder Stiles looks, the more his appearance changes. Every time he blinks, it’s like starting all over again. Stiles shakes his head, trying to clear it, as the man steps up to him and bows deeply, taking one of Stiles’ hands between his ice-cold fingers. “Ah, you’ve brought a guest tonight,” the King says, eyes playful but shrewd. He kisses the captured appendage with plush lips, and the feeling of a thousand tiny ants crawling beneath his skin ripples out from the spot.

“You must be Stiles.”

[cg29fics]

Gone. Update!

Hello 👋 After a near 2 month wait I thought it was about time I put the next chapter of Gone up here.

Thank you to all who are reading along, whether it be your first time or you originally read when I posted on FFNet/Ao3.

I was previously having lots of problems with links, posts not showing in the feed, and other issues. Hopefully all fixed now but if you are reading along you may have missed updates so you may want to check out the links for previous chapters.

If you’d like to be tagged for this or other Fics please let me know: @janetm74 @drileyf @katblu42 @misstb2 @psychoseal @weirdburketeer @alexthefly @thundergeek59 @burningcowboyhoagietaco @dragonoffantasyandreality

Previous Chapter - 29: Operation.

Chapter 30: Allies and Confessions

The Hood landed on a small private airstrip, did his final checks, climbed out of the plane, and was greeted by one of his many contacts, who had previously proven himself valuable.

“I've acquired transport for you sir.” The man said, leading him to a nearby car.

“And the other arrangements?” The Hood demanded.

“I've arranged a base which is relatively close to Good Hope Hospital. The computer systems that you asked for have been set up and I have brought someone in who can use them to hack into the hospitals security systems. They reckon they will have access by time we arrive at the base.” The man responded.

“Good, good!” The Hood replied.

The man smiled. “You will also be pleased to hear that I have a colleague, who has done some private work for me in the past, and works at the hospital. She has been assigned to the team that is directly looking after Virgil.”

The Hood beamed at this news. “You are right. I am pleased! If everything works out the way I planned, and I finally manage to get my full revenge; then I will see that you are handsomely rewarded!”

“Thank you, sir. I won't let you down!”

“Make sure you don't! Now, take me to this base of ours and fill me in on this woman we have working for us on the inside.”

… …

24 Hours Later:

The Tracy's all sat quietly watching Virgil sleep, he had taken the previous day’s news about the extent of his injuries, and the amount of time he would take to recover well. Although they had all guessed that he was hiding how he had really felt. As Virgil continued to sleep, the door opened and Doctor Emily Sanderson, who they had previously met, entered followed by Nurse Andrews, who had initially spoken to Scott and John when Virgil had first been brought in.

“Hey Doc,” Scott said, standing up from his chair. “Where's Doctor Sylvia?”

“He’s just taking a short break,” Nurse Andrews answered with a smile.

“I just need to run a few tests on Virgil,” Doctor Sanderson added.

“Oh, okay.” Scott responded with a look of worry.

“Don't worry, it's nothing serious, all routine tests,” Nurse Andrews reassured.

Doctor Sanderson looked at the family. “I'm sorry but it's a little bit crowded in here. I just need to ask you to wait outside for a moment while I do these tests.”

“Can one of us stay with him?” Scott pleaded.

“Of course!” Doctor Sanderson replied.

Gordon, John, Alan, Jeff and their grandma made their way out of the room while Scott slipped into the chair next to Virgil and took his hand in his. He watched both the doctor and the nurse closely, he didn't know why but all his warning signals were going off in his head, something wasn't quite right, he didn't know what, but he was damned sure not letting anything else happen to his little brother.

…

Meanwhile:

The Hood observed the computer screens in front of him, which were now showing live images from inside of the hospital, he grinned when the man who was operating the camera brought up the live feed from inside Virgil's room. The Hood could see Virgil being tended to by a nurse and a doctor, while his brother sat next to him. “This is fantastic!” The Hood pointed to one of the women who was in Virgil's room with him. “And this is her?” He asked. “The one you were talking about?”

“Yes sir.” The man who had collected him from the airstrip answered. “She's the one who also managed to set up the hidden surveillance in his room.”

“They are International Rescue, how come they haven't detected it?” The Hood questioned.

The guy behind the computer smiled with pride. “It's my own invention sir. Don't worry, they won't find it.”

“Mm… You better be right,” The Hood responded. “Now, when do I get to meet this woman?”

…

As soon as Doctor Sanderson and Nurse Andrews had finished what they were doing and had left the room the rest of the family piled back inside, re-took their seats, and continued to watch Virgil sleeping. Another two hours passed by before Virgil began to stir, from another nightmare.

Scott leant forwards and slowly stroked his hand on his brother’s head. “It’s okay Virgil, it’s just a nightmare.” He consoled, watching Virgil’s eyes begin to flutter. “That’s it. Open your eyes for me Virg. We’re all here… Nobody is going to hurt you!” Scott continued soothingly.

Virgil mumbled some words under his breath which they couldn’t make out and then eventually opened his eyes. “Scotty.”

“Yeah, it’s me… We are all here with you!”

“Bad dream,” Virgil yawned.

“Yes, we could see!” Scott replied. Looking to his father Scott got the nod he was waiting for and then continued. “Hey Virg, we have all noticed that these bad dreams are happening a lot! We’ve all been talking, and you know that we are all here for you… So, why don’t you try and tell us all what they are about? Hopefully, by talking about them, you can then stop them.”

Virgil sighed. “They won’t go!”

Jeff took a hold of Virgil’s hand “Of course they will!”

Virgil felt a tear drop from his eye which his dad instantly wiped away. He knew he needed to tell them about what the Hood had confessed to him when he had been held captive, but he had no idea where to even begin. Virgil felt more tears begin to run down his face.

“Seriously Virg, talk to us,” Alan pleaded with tears of his own.

Virgil breathed out slowly. He could never deny his baby brother anything, especially when he was this upset. So, Virgil began to slowly talk. He told them everything that the Hood had confessed to him. He told them how the Hood had sworn revenge on Jeff, how he had stowed away and honed his powers until he was ready to take his revenge. Virgil then looked at them all as fresh tears streamed down his face. He began to tell them how the Hood had confessed to causing the Avalanche, with his powers, that had killed their beautiful mother. Then how the Hood had finally taunted him by planting the visions in his mind and making him relieve that day again and again. Then leaving them, ingrained in his head, as a nightmare, cursing him every time he slept. Then finally, how the Hood had taunted him with the fact that the dreams would remain until the day he died.

…

Meanwhile:

The Hood offered a seat to the woman in front of him, which she gladly took. He pulled up his own chair and surveyed her. “So, I’ve been told you have direct access to Virgil Tracy.” The Hood questioned.

“Yes, that’s correct. I was originally assigned to the team that’s looking after him.” She replied.

“So, you can get me direct access to him, without his family being there,” The Hood probed.

“Absolutely,” She responded confidently.

“Good, then I’d like to strike tomorrow!” He added.

“No problem at all sir,” She smiled confidently.

“Good!” He said standing and walking towards the door. He turned back towards her. “And please, call me Balah Gaat!”

Chapter 31. Evil Intentions

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

In Search of Lost Screws (RQBB '21)

Here at last is my entry for the 2021 Rusty Quill Big Bang!

Fandom: The Magnus Archives Rating: T Word count: ~30k Warnings: Chronic Illness, Mild Body Horror, Internalized Ableism, Canon-Typical Spiders, Mention of Canon-Typical Suicidal Ideation, Alcohol Other tags: Cane-user Jon, EDS Jon, Canon-compliant, Season 5, Set in 180-181 (Upton Safehouse period) Characters: Jon Sims, Martin Blackwood, Mikaele Salesa (secondary), Annabelle Cane (secondary) Relationships: Jon/Martin Summary: While staying at Upton House, Jon and Martin accidentally break their bedroom’s doorknob, and can’t get back into the room until they fix it. Meanwhile Jon tries not to break into literal pieces without the Eye, and also to pretend he’s having a good time as he and Martin lunch with Annabelle, parry gifts from Salesa, and quarrel about whether Jon’s okay or not. He's fine! It's just that the apocalypse runs on dream logic, and chronic pain feels worse when you're awake. Excerpt:

“Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?” “I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here.” “Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.” “Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?” Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice. “Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him. “Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.” “Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.” Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?

Huge thanks to @pilesofnonsense for hosting this event; to @connanro for beta-reading; and to @silmapeli for their amazing illustration, whose own post you can find here.

If you prefer, you can read this fic instead on Ao3. I won't link it directly, since Tumblr has trouble with external links, but if you google the title and add "echinoderms" (my Ao3 handle), it should come up!

Crunch. “Oh god. Shit! Oh god, oh no—”

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

A clatter, then a noise like a small rock scraping a large one. Jon’s heart plunged; halfway through his question he knew the answer.

“I—I broke it? Look, see, the whole thing just—take this.” Martin tore his hand out of Jon’s and dropped the severed doorknob in it instead. Then he dropped to the floor, diving head- and hands-first for the crack between it and the door as if that crack were a portal between dimensions. Jon closed his eyes and shook this image away, hoping when he opened them again he could focus on what was real.

He should have known this would happen from the moment they left for breakfast. Every time he’d opened that door its knob felt a little looser. Why hadn’t he warned Martin? Well, alright, he didn’t need powers to know that one. He just hadn’t thought of it. Been a bit preoccupied, after all. And even if he had thought of it, that was exactly the kind of conversation he’d been shying away from all week. Watch out for that doorknob; it’s a little loose, he would say, and yeah, probably Martin would answer, Oh, thanks. But there was a chance Martin would say instead, Why didn’t you tell me?—and all week Jon had obeyed an instinct to avoid prompting that question. All week he had made sure to enter and exit their room a few steps ahead of Martin, and hold the door open for him. Martin probably just saw it as Jon’s way of apologizing for their first few months in the Archives together, and once that thought occurred to him Jon had started to look at it that way himself. Maybe that’s why he’d forgot this time.

“Nooo-oooo, come on come on!”

“I don��t think you’ll fit,” Jon said, when he looked again and found Martin trying to wedge his fingers under the door.

(Martin used to leave Jon’s office door open behind him—perhaps absentmindedly, but more likely as a gesture of friendship and openness, which the Jon of that time would not suffer. Sasha and Tim, n.b., only left his door open on their way into his office, when they didn’t intend to stay long; Martin would leave it gaping even if he didn’t mean to come back. Every time Jon had sighed, pulled himself to his feet, and closed the door behind Martin, drawing out the click of its tongue in the latch. And a few times he’d closed the door in front of him, so as to exclude him from a conversation between Jon and Tim or Sasha that he, Martin, had tried to weigh in on from outside Jon’s office.)

“What are you looking for?”

“The—the screw, I saw it roll under there. It fell down on our side. Oh, my god, it was so close—if I’d reacted just half a second earlier, I could’ve?—shit.”

“Oh.” Jon huffed out a cynical laugh.

“I can’t believe it. I broke Salesa’s door! He welcomes us in to an oasis, and I break the door. Oh, god—I’ve broken an irreplaceable door, in a stately historic mansion!”

A few more demonstrative huffs of laughter. “No you didn’t.”

Martin paused. He didn’t get up, but did turn his head to look at Jon. “Yes I did. It’s right there in your hand, Jon—”

“I should’ve known. Check for cobwebs, Martin.”

“Oh come on.”

“This can’t be your fault—it’s far too neat. This is all part of Annabelle’s plan.”

“Do you know that?”

“W-well, no. I can’t, not here. I just—”

“Yeah, I don’t think so, Jon. Pretty sure it’s just an old doorknob.”

“Did you check for cobwebs?”

“Of course there are no cobwebs. A spider wouldn’t even have time to finish building the web before somebody wrecked it opening the door!”

“Then what’s that?” With the tip of his cane Jon tapped the floor in front of a clot of gray fluff in the seam between two walls next to the door, making sure not to let it touch the clot itself.

Martin rolled over to see where he was pointing, and almost stuck his elbow in it. “Ah. Gross. Gross, is what that is.”

“Christ, I should’ve known this would happen. I did know this would happen,” Jon reminded himself—“just ignored the warning signs because I can’t think straight here.”

“It doesn’t mean anything, Jon. It’s a corner. Spiders love corners. I mean, unless you can prove the corner of our doorway has more spiderwebs than anywhere else in the house—”

“Well, of course not. You forget she’s got her own corner somewhere, which we still haven’t found by the way—”

“So, what, you think Annabelle Cane lassoed the screw with a strand of cobweb.”

“Not literally? She could be sitting on the other side of the door with a magnet for all we know!”

Martin peered under the door again with an exasperated sigh. “She’s not.”

“Not now she’s heard us talking about her.”

God, what a delicate web that would be, if all he had to do to avoid the spider’s clutches was reach a door before Martin did. Perhaps if he’d knocked first that’d have saved him. Maybe Martin was right. How could Annabelle know him well enough to foresee this mistake? Most of the time he hated people opening doors for him, after all.

Why do people see someone with a cane and think, Only one free hand? How ever will he open the door!? They don’t do that for people with shopping bags—not ones his age, at least. Letting another person open a door for him felt to Jon like… defeat, somehow. Like admitting the dolce et decorum estness of this version of reality all nondisabled people seemed to live in where he couldn’t open doors. And that version of reality horrified him. Not so much the idea of being too weak to open them—that sounded merely annoying. Like knocking the sides of jar lids on tables and swearing, only with doors. He had beat his fists against enough Pull doors in his time to figure he could live with that. It was more the idea of becoming that way. Letting his door-opening muscles atrophy ‘til it became the truth.

But sometimes you just let a thing happen, and forget to hate it. That was the thing about pride. Sometimes your convictions and your habits stop fitting together—you believe Fuck this job with all your heart, but still tuck in your shirt when you come to the office. And then you fly back from America in borrowed clothes, and pop in at the Institute like that on your way to Gertrude’s storage unit, and that’s what changes your habits. Not the knowledge you can’t be fired; not your now-boyfriend’s plot to put your then-boss behind bars. A thirdhand t-shirt with a slogan on it about how to outrun bears.

On his way out this morning the doorknob had felt so loose in Jon’s hand he almost had told Martin about it. But Martin had been full of let’s-go-on-an-adventure-together-style chatter—like when they’d left Daisy’s safehouse, only, get this, without the dread of entering an apocalyptic wasteland—and listening to him put the door out of Jon’s mind before he’d had time to interject.

Their first day here—or at least, the first they spent awake—Jon had inadvertently taught Martin not to accept invitations from Salesa. The latter had bounded up after Martin’s lunch in linen shirt and whooshy shorts and was, to Martin’s then-unseasoned heart, impossible to deny. So Jon had spent thirty minutes on a creaky folding chair, lunging out of his seat on occasion to collect a ball one of the other two had hit wrong, and trying to keep Salesa’s too-bright white socks out of sight. He’d pretended he preferred to sit out, knowing Martin would worry if he tried to play. But he hadn’t done as good a job hiding his boredom as he thought. “Thanks for putting up with that. Sorry it went on so long,” Martin had said as they re-entered their bedroom. “I just couldn’t say no to him, you know? For such a cynical old man he’s got impressive puppy eyes.”

“It’s fine? You know me, I don’t mind… watching.”

“I just mean, I’m sorry you couldn’t play. How’s your leg, by the way? Er—both your legs, I guess.”

“It’s fine. They’re both fine. I didn’t want to play anyway, remember? I don’t know how.”

“Sure you don’t,” Martin replied, words tripping over a fond laugh.

“I don’t!”

“Come on, Jon. Everyone knows how to play ping-pong.”

Martin had turned down Salesa when he showed up the next day in khaki shorts and a pith helmet with three butterfly nets, without Jon’s having to say a word. More emphatically still did he turn him down when Salesa mentioned the house had an indoor pool, and offered to lend them both antique bathing suits like the one he had on, “Free of charge! A debtor is an enemy, after all, and in this new world I have no wish to make an enemy of” (sarcastic whisper, fingers wiggling) “the Ceaseless Watcher who rules it. I have nothing to hide from you,” he’d alleged, for the… third time that day, maybe? Each morning Jon resolved to count such references; he rarely missed one, as far as he knew, but kept forgetting how many he’d counted.

But Salesa was a salesman, and over time his efforts had grown more subtle. He stopped showing up already dressed for the activity he had in mind, and instead would drop hints at meals about all the fun things they could do if only they would let him show them. Martin loved how the winter sunlight caught, every afternoon around four, in the branches of a tree visible outside the window of their bedroom. “Ah, yes,” Salesa had agreed when he remarked on it one morning. “Turning it periwinkle and the golden green of champagne.” (He poured sparkling wine—the cheap stuff, he said, not real champagne—into an empty juice glass still lined with orange pulp. Over and over, without once overflowing. The oranges weren’t ripe enough to drink their juice plain yet, he said. But they’d still run out of juice first.) “If you think that’s beautiful”—he paused to swallow bubbles come up from his throat, waved his hand, shook his head. “No. On one tree, yes, it is beautiful. But on a whole orchard of bare trees in winter”—he nodded in the direction of Upton’s orchards—“the afternoon sun is sublime. You can see how the twigs shrink and shiver under its gaze; the grass rustles with a hitch in its breath as if it fears to be seen, but with each undulation a new blade flashes gold like a coin,” &c., &c.

“Wow. Sounds like you really got lucky, finding such a nice place to, uh. Sssset up camp?”

Jon knew Martin well enough to hear the judgment in his voice; if Salesa recognized it then he was an expert at pretending not to. “And it's only a two-minute walk away,” he’d said, instead of taking Martin’s bait. “It would be such a shame for my guests not to see it.”

“Oh, well. Maybe in a few days? It’s just, we’ve been outside nonstop for ages. It’s nice to be between four walls again. Besides, we don’t know the grounds as well as you do—and the border isn’t all that stable, you said? Right?”

“It is if you know how to follow it! I could accompany you—show you all the best sights, with no risk of wandering back out into the hellscape by mistake.”

“We’re just not really ready for that, I don’t think. Right, Jon?”

“Mm.”

“Are you sure? If it were me, a foray into a beautiful natural oasis would be just what I needed to convince myself that my peace—my sanctuary—is real.”

“If it is real,” Jon couldn’t stop himself from muttering.

Salesa remained impervious. “You would be surprised how difficult it is to feel fear in a place like that. I don’t think that is just the camera.”

“We‘ll think about it,” Martin conceded.

“Yes—you should both think about it. I am at your disposal whenever you change your mind.”

And so on that morning they had narrowly escaped. Would they had fared so well today. The problem was, on these early occasions Jon had interpreted Martin’s No thankses as being, well, Martin’s. But after a few more of Salesa’s sales pitches Jon began to second-guess that.

“Is it warm enough in here for you both?” Salesa had asked them last night at dinner. “I worry too much, perhaps. I only wish the place took less time to warm up in the morning. At breakfast time, in sunny weather like we've been having, I’ll bet you anything you like it’s warmer out there than in here.”

“It’s alright; we’re not too cold in the mornings either. Right, Jon?”

“Hm? Oh—no.”

“Perhaps we three could take breakfast out there, before the weather changes.”

“Ha—that’s right,” Martin had laughed. “I forgot you still had that out here. Weather changes. Brave new world, I guess.”

Salesa smirked and shrugged. “Well, braver than the rest of it.”

“R…ight. ‘We three,’ you said—so not Annabelle?”

“Mmmmno, probably not her. I have tried taking spiders outside before; they never seem to like it much.”

Nearly every day, here, Jon found a spider in their bathtub. The first time Martin had been with him. Martin had picked the thing up with his fingers and tried to coax it to leave out the window, but by the time he got there it’d crawled up his sleeve.

“Excuse me.”

Martin pulled back his own chair too and frowned up at him. “You okay?”

“Just needed the toilet.” He tried to arrange his mouth into a gentle smile. “Think I can do that on my own.”

The other two resumed their conversation the moment Jon left the dining room. Before the intervening walls muffled their voices Jon heard:

“I suppose that does sound pretty nice.”

“Pretty nice, you suppose? Martin, Martin—it’s a beautiful oasis! What a shame it will be if you leave this place having done no more than suppose about it.”

“It is a bit of a waste, I guess.”

“You wouldn’t need to sit on the ground, if that’s what concerns you. There are benches everywhere.”

He’d been just about to cross through a doorway and out of earshot when he froze, hearing his name:

“Oh, ha—not me, but, Jon might find that nice to know,” Martin said. “Thanks for.” And then silence.

Was that the whole reason he kept declining invitations to explore the grounds? To keep grass stains out of Jon’s trousers? Martin was the one who’d sat down on that godforsaken Extinction couch; why did he think—?

Not the point, Jon told himself as he sat on the toilet and set his forehead on the heels of his palms. He tried to watch the floor for spiders, but his eyes kept crossing. The point was that if—? If Martin was lying about wanting to stay inside—or, more charitably, if he was telling the truth but wanted that only because he thought Jon would have as dismal a time out in the garden as he had at ping-pong—then…?

He imagined holding hands with Martin while surrounded by green. Gravel crunching under their feet. Martin smiling, with sunlight caught in the strands of his hair that a slight breeze had blown upright.

“And if you get too warm,” he heard Salesa tell Martin, as he headed back into the dining room, “we can move into the shade of the pines! You know, they don’t just grow year-round? They also shed year-round. The floor under them is always carpeted in needles, so you need never get mud on your shoes.”

“Huh,” Martin laughed. “Never thought of it that way.”

“But of course there are benches there too,” Salesa added, his eyes flickering up to Jon.

As Jon hauled himself into his seat he asked, in a voice he hoped the strain made sound distracted ergo casual, “So, what, like a picnic, you mean.”

Not a fun picnic. Not very romantic, since their third wheel was the first to invite himself. Salesa neglected to mention how much wet grass they would have to trek through to get to his favorite spot; that there were benches everywhere didn’t matter since they couldn’t all three fit on one, so they ended up sat in the dirt after all—and n.b. it required a second trek to find a patch of dirt dry enough to sit on at this time of morning. Jon was so sick with fatigue by the time they sat down he could barely eat a thing, though he did dispatch most of Martin’s thermos of tea. His hands shook and buzzed, and felt clumsy, like they’d fallen asleep; he ended up getting more jam in the dirt than on Salesa’s soggy, pre-buttered toast. He felt as though the rest of his flesh had melted three feet to the left of his eyes, bones and mind. Eventually he elected to blame his dizziness on the sun. When his forehead and upper lip started to prickle, threatening sweat, he stood up and announced, “It’s too hot here.”

Or tried to stand, anyway. One leg had oozed just far enough out of its joint that it buckled when he tried to stand; indigo and fuchsia blotches overtook his sight. He pitched forward, free arm pinwheeling—might have fallen into the boiled eggs if Martin hadn’t caught him. “Jon! Are you okay?”

God, why was Martin so surprised? This must have been the fifth or sixth time he had asked him that question since they left the house. One time Jon had bent down to brush dirt off his leg and Martin had thought he was scratching his bandages. So he asked him were they itchy, had they started to peel, did they need changing again, were they cutting off his circulation (no, not yet, not yet, and no). How could someone be so attentive to imaginary ills and yet miss the real ones? At another point, an enormous blue dragonfly had buzzed past, and instead of Did you see that? Martin had turned around to ask Are you okay. Now, on this fifth or sixth occasion, for a few seconds of pure, nonsensical rage he wondered how Martin dared stoop to such emotional blackmail. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Jon thought; aloud he snorted, as in malicious laughter. His throat felt thick, like he might cry.

“Fine, I’m just—sick of it here.” He pulled his arm free of Martin’s and overbalanced. Didn’t fall, just. Staggered a little.

“Should we move to the shade? We could try to find those famous pines, I guess.”

Jon sank back to the ground. “What about Salesa? Do we just leave him here?”

“Oh. Right,” said Martin. Salesa had eaten most of Jon’s share, and drunk both Jon’s and Martin’s shares of wine. Now he lay asleep in the dirt, head pillowed on one elbow, the other hand’s fingers curled round the stem of a glass still half full. “I guess, yeah? I mean he seems to know the place pretty well, so. It’s not like he’ll get lost out here.”

“We might, though.”

Martin sighed. “True. Should we just head back to our room, then? Maybe get you a snack.”

“Not hungry.”

“A statement, I meant.”

“Oh. Alright, sure,” Jon made himself say. “That sounds like—sure.”

So then they’d headed back, and only Martin had a free hand, and Jon was too tired by that point to distinguish his mind’s vague warning not to let Martin open the door from his usual pride on that subject—and that kind of pride never does seem as important when it’s your boyfriend offering. So he’d dismissed the warning and, well, look what happened.

When he got up from his knees and turned round Martin frowned at Jon. “Are you alright? You’re sat on the floor.”

Jon frowned, too—at the seam between the floor and the hallway’s opposite wall. “I was tired.”

“You hate sitting on the floor.”

“I sat on the ground out there,” Jon said, with a shrug that morphed into a nod in the direction they’d come from.

“Yeah, under duress,” Martin scoffed. “In the Extinction domain you wouldn’t even sit on the couch.”

There was something odd in Martin’s bringing that up now; somewhere, in the back of his mind, Jon could hear a pillar of thought crumbling. But he lacked the energy to find out which of his mind’s structures now stood crooked. “I think this floor is a lot cleaner than that couch,” he said instead, with an incredulous laugh.

“Even with the cobwebs?” Martin didn’t wait for Jon’s answering nod. “Fair enough,” he said, one hand on the back of his neck as he twisted it back and forth. He dropped the hand, sighed, cracked his knuckles. Looked at Jon again. “Yeah, okay. Guess we don’t have to deal with this right now. Let’s find you another bedroom first.”

“Maybe that’s just what Annabelle wants,” Jon muttered, deadpanning so he wouldn’t have to decide whether this was a joke.

Martin snorted. “I’ll risk it.”

Find was a generous way to put it; in fact there was another bedroom only two doors down. By the time Jon got his legs unfolded he could hear the squeak of a door swinging open down the hall. When he looked up, Martin said as their eyes met, “Nope—bed’s too small. You good there ‘til I find one that’ll work?”

“Seems that way.” Jon tried to smile, relief warring with his usual If you want something done right urge. In the quiet moment after Martin neglected to close that door and before he swung open the next one, Jon made himself add, “Thank you.”

“Of course. Oh wow,” Martin said of the next room, in whose doorway he’d stopped. “This one’s a lot nicer than ours. It’s got a balcony. Wallpaper’s pretty loud though. D’you think that’ll keep you awake?” Laughingly, “I know you don’t close your eyes to sleep anymore, so.”

“How loud is ‘pretty loud’?”

“Sort of a… dark, orangey red, with flowers?”

Jon shrugged. “I won’t see it at night.”

“Oh, god. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Should we do this one, then?” Instead of closing the door, Martin swung it the rest of the way open, then strode back to Jon’s side of the corridor, arm already outstretched. Jon managed to stand before Martin could reach him, but, as it had done outside, his vision went dark for a few seconds. He felt Martin’s hand on his shoulder before he could see his frown.

“You alright?” Martin asked yet again.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“It’s just—you don’t usually blink anymore, except for effect.”

“Oh.”

Out there, none of the watchers blinked. At first, soon after the change, Martin had asked Jon to try, “Because it just feels so weird. Like I’m under constant scrutiny. Literally constant, Jon. You get why that feels weird, right?” (Jon had agreed—sincerely, though he wondered why Martin needed to ask that question in a world whose central conceit was that being watched felt weird. He’d also chosen not to point out that his scrutiny, like that of Jonah Magnus, was not, technically, constant, since he did sometimes look at other things. But he still rehearsed this retort in his mind every time he remembered that conversation.) Turned out it was hard to time your blinks properly when your eyeballs didn’t need the moisture. He’d forget about it for who knew how long, then remember and overcompensate by blinking so often Martin at first thought he was exaggerating it on purpose as a joke. It got old fast, in Jon’s opinion, but even after he learnt Jon didn’t intend it as a joke Martin still found it funny. “You’re doing it again,” he’d say every time, shoulders wiggling. Eventually Jon had asked him,

“You know you don’t blink anymore either, right?”

“Oh god, don’t I?” When Jon shook his head, with a smile whose teeth he tried to keep covered, Martin squeezed his own eyes shut and pushed their lids back and forth with his fingers. “Ugh—gross!” And for the next half hour he’d done the whole forget-to-blink-for-five-minutes-then-do-it-ten-times-in-as-many-seconds routine, too. After that they had both agreed to pretend not to notice the lack of blinking. Jon figured he couldn’t hold it against Martin that he’d broken this rule though, since Jon himself had broken it first, on their first morning here:

“You blinked,” he had informed Martin as he watched him stir sugar into his tea. Martin, who had not only blinked but broken eye contact to make sure he dropped the sugar cube in the right place, replied with a scoff,

“Didn’t know it was a staring contest.”

“No, I mean—”

“Oh! I blinked!”

“…Right,” Jon said now. “I’m—it’s nothing.”

Martin sighed. He closed his eyes, but probably rolled them under their lids. Jon used the inspection of their new room as an excuse to look away, but took in nothing other than the presence of a large bed and the flowered wallpaper Martin had warned him about.

“‘Kay. If you’re sure.”

Taking a seat at the foot of the bed, Jon looked down at his grass-stained knees and prepared himself to ask, Look, does it matter? I’m about to lie down anyway, so, functionally speaking, yes, I am fine.

“So, you’ll be okay here for a bit while I go figure out what to do about the door?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. I’ll come check on you as soon as I know anything, yeah?”

“Of course.”

“Although—if you’re asleep, should I wake you up?”

“Yes,” Jon replied before Martin had even got the last word out. He heard a short, emphatic exhale, presumably of laughter. “Wait—how would you know, anyway?”

“Oh. Yeah, good point.”

Jon looked down at his shoes. His fingers throbbed in anticipation, but he figured he should spare Martin the horror of getting grass stains on a second bedroom’s counterpane. The first shoe he pulled off without untying, since he could step on its heel with the other one. But he had to bend over to reach the second one’s incongruously bright white laces, biting his lip when he felt his right femur poke past the bounds of its socket as between a cage’s bars. On his way back up his vision quivered like a heat mirage, but didn’t go dark. He scooched himself up to the head of the bed. Made sure to face the ceiling rather than the red wallpaper.

A few months into his tenure in the Archives, Jon had discovered that if you close your eyes at your desk, even just for a minute, you can trick your whole body into thinking you’ve been gentle with it. But that trick didn’t work anymore. Out there, this made sense; interposing his eyelids between himself and the world’s new horrors couldn’t push them out of his consciousness, any more than it had helped to close the curtains at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin’s sentimental attachment to sleep had baffled him, as had his insistence on closing his eyes even though they’d pop back open as soon as his body went limp. Here, though, Jon sympathized with Martin’s wish. He too missed that magic link between closed eyes and sleep. Probably he should just be grateful for this rest from knowing other people’s suffering? The thing he had wished to close his eyes against was gone here. But now that most of his bodily wants had synced up with his actions again, it felt… wrong, like a tangible loss, that he couldn’t assert It’s time for rest now by closing his eyelids. That it took effort to keep them joined. Jon even found himself missing the crust that used to stick them together on mornings after long sleep.

That should have been his first sensation on waking, their first morning here. After seventy-one hours his eyelids should’ve been practically super-glued together. Instead, they’d apparently stayed open the entire time. It wasn’t uncomfortable—he hadn’t woken up with them smarting or anything. Hadn’t noticed one way or the other; after all, when not forced awake by an alarm, one rarely notices the moment one opens one’s eyes in the morning. He just didn’t like knowing that he looked the same waking and sleeping. It didn’t make sense. The dreams hadn’t followed him here, so what was he watching? He could see nothing but the ceiling.

He rolled over, hoping to look out the window. Doors, technically. Between gauzy curtains he could make out only wrought-iron bars and the tops of a few trees. A nice view, he could tell; when he got his second wind he was sure he’d find it pretty. For now he wondered how much more energy debt he had put himself in by rolling over.

Drowning in debt? We can help!

How had he not foreseen how horrible it would be inside the Buried? The inability to move or speak without pain and loss of breath—“Just imagine,” he muttered sarcastically to the empty air, as though addressing his past self. “What might that be like.” He’d lived for years with the weight of exhaustion on his back—heavier at that time than it’d ever been before. And he knew how it felt to risk injury with every movement. What an odd frame of mind he must have lived in then, to think his magic healing wouldn’t let him get scratched up down there. Had he thought it would protect him from fear? I must save my friend from this horrible place! But also, If I get stuck there forever, no big deal; I deserve it, after all. There seemed something so arrogant about that now, that idea that deserving pain could somehow mitigate it. That because monsterhood made him less innocent, it would make him less of a victim. How could he have thought that, when he’d known pulling her out of there didn’t mean he forgave her? He should apologize to Daisy for—

Right. Nope, never mind.

He began to regret rolling over. If he planned to stay on his side like this for long, he shouldn’t leave his shoulder and hip dangling. He could already feel their joints beginning to slide apart. But his body had started to drift to that faraway place from which no grievance ever seemed urgent enough to recall it—neither pain now nor the threat of greater pain later. Nor the three cups of tea he’d drunk.

After he and Martin had fallen asleep on Salesa’s doorstep, Jon had vague memories of being led up the stairs to their bedroom, though he remembered neither being shaken awake nor getting into bed. Just a seventy-odd-hour blank spot, followed by pain of a kind he had thought he’d left behind.

It wasn’t that watchers couldn’t feel pain, after the change. They could, but it was like how real-world pain felt through the veil of a dream. Your actions didn’t affect it as directly as they should. In the Necropolis Martin had asked him, “How exactly does a leg wound make you faster?” If he’d had the courage to answer, at the time he would have said something about his own wounds not seeming important now that he had to tune out those of the whole world. That wasn’t it though, he knew now. Pain just worked differently out there. When Daisy attacked him, it had hurt—but the wound she left him hadn’t protested movement. Not until he and Martin entered the grounds of Upton House. You could bear weight on an injured leg just fine out there, because it wouldn’t hurt more when you stood on it than otherwise.

Sometimes, when his joints slid apart while he slept, he could still feel it in his dreams. Up until 13th January 2016 (for months after which date he dreamt Naomi Herne’s graveyard and nothing else), his sleeping mind used to craft scenarios to explain its own pain and panic to itself. Running from an exploding grenade, staying awake through surgery, that sort of thing. But over the years, as the sensation grew familiar, his dreams about it became less urgent, their anxieties more mundane. He’d shout for help from passing cars, then feel like he’d lied to the stranger who opened their door to him when it turned out running to get in the car hurt no more than standing still.

Even before the change, it’d been ages since he’d had to worry about that. Since the coma, Beholding had fixed all these accidents, the way it’d fixed the finger he tried to chop off. They wouldn’t reset with a clunk, the way they had when he used to fix them by hand. It was more like his body reverted to a version the Eye had saved before the moment of injury. When he tried to pull open a Push door he’d hear the first clunk, followed by about half a second of pain, then after a gentle burst of static—nothing. Just a door handle between his fingers that needed pushing. If he tripped on uneven pavement he might still go down, but his ankle wouldn’t hurt when he stood back up, and the scrapes on his hands would heal before he could inspect them. Here, though, in this place the Eye couldn’t see, Jon lacked such protections. He didn’t have the dreams either? And that was more than worth it as a tradeoff, he was sure. But it still smarted to remember that pain had been his first sensation waking up in an oasis. Not birdsong, not sunshine striped across linen, not the warm weight of another person next to him. He knew he’d come back to a place ruled by physics rather than fear because he’d woken up with gaps between his bones.

“Jon? Are you awake?”

“Hm? Oh. Yes.”

“Cool.” Martin sat down on what felt like the corner of bed nearest the door. “I think I know how to do this now.”

“How to put the doorknob back on?”

“Yeah. God, I still can’t believe it twisted clean off in my hand like that. With no warning—like, zero to sixty in less than a second. I mean, can you believe our luck? The thing’s perfectly functional, and then suddenly it just—comes off!”

“Er…”

“Oh, god, sorry—I didn’t mean—”

“What? Oh—hrkgh”—Jon rolled around to face Martin, hoping the little yelp he let out when his leg slopped back into joint would sound like a noise of exasperation rather than pain. He found Martin sat looking down at the severed doorknob which poked up from between his knees. “No, Martin, of course not, I know—”

“Still, I’m sorry about—”

“No, it’s—it’s fine?”

On that first morning, Jon had managed to get his limbs screwed back on properly without making enough noise to wake up Martin. He’d limped out of their room and down the hall, pushing doors open until he’d found a toilet, whereupon he sat to pee and marveled that the flush and sink still worked. It was bright enough inside that he hadn’t thought to try the light switch on his way in—too busy contorting his neck to look for the sun out the window. On his way out, though, he flicked it on, then off. Then on again and off again. How could it work, when there was no power grid the house could connect to? Automatically Jon tried to search his mind’s Eye for a domain based in a power plant or something. Right, no, of course—that power did not work here.

When he got back to their room he found Martin awake. “Oh—morning,” Jon told him with a shy laugh.

“It—it is morning, isn’t it,” Martin marveled. Then he asked if Jon could hand him the map sticking out of his backpack’s side pocket. (What good are maps when the very Earth logic no longer applied here, after all. But Martin was rubbish at geography, so Jon still had to provide the You Are Here sign with his finger for him.) Jon grabbed the map on his way back to bed, and was about to tell him about the miracles of plumbing and electricity he’d just witnessed—not to mention the bathtub he’d admired on the long trek from toilet to sink—when Martin frowned and asked, “Why are you limping?”

“Am I?” Jon had shrugged, then cleared his throat when the motion made his shoulder audibly click. “Daisy, must be.”

“No, Jon. That’s the wrong leg.”

He slid both legs out of sight under the blankets and handed Martin the map. “It’s nothing. It just… came off a bit. Last night."

Before Jon could add It’s fixed now though, Martin said, “I’m sorry, what?”

Jon had assumed Martin understood the kind of thing he meant, but that he’d misled him as to its degree—i.e., that Martin objected to his talking about a full hip dislocation like it mattered less than what happened with Daisy. So he’d said,

“No, sorry, not all the way off—”

And Martin just laughed. “What, and you taped it back up like—like an old computer cable?”

“Sort of, yeah? It—it does still work, more or less.”

“Right, of course. No need to get a new one, yet; you can just limp along with this one. No big deal! Just make sure you don’t pull too hard on it.”

“I mean.” By now he could sense Martin’s sarcasm, his bitterness; that didn’t mean he knew what to do with them. So he'd said with a huff of laughter, “I can’t just send for a new one. That’s—that’s not how bodies work. You have to….” Wait for it to sort itself out was the natural end to that sentence. But he hadn’t been sure he could say that without opening a can of worms.

“Wait so… what actually happened? Are you okay?”

Only at this point had Jon recognized Martin’s response as one of incomprehension. What happened exactly? he had asked, too, when Jon told him the ice-cream anecdote. Did no one ever listen when you told them about these things?

“Nothing. Never mind. It’s fine.”

“Oh come on.”

“It’s. Fine! It’s not important.”

And then for days Martin kept alluding to it. Like some kind of reminder to Jon that he hadn’t opened up, disguised as a joke. Every time something came out or fell down he’d mutter, “So it came off, you might say.” Eventually they’d fallen out over it, and now neither one could come near the phrase without this song and dance.

“Don’t worry about it, Martin,” Jon assured him now; “I’m over it.”

“…Uh huh. Well, putting that to one side for the moment—I think I can fix this?”

“Oh? Great!—”

“—Yeah! It should be simple, actually. I think I just need to replace the screw that fell out? I mean, there doesn’t seem to be anything actually broken, just, you know,” with an awkward laugh, “the screw lives on the wrong side of the door now. But if we can just put a new one in the door should be fine.” He looked to Jon as if for help plotting their next steps.

“I—I don’t, um. Think we have one.”

Martin’s shoulders dropped; the corners of his mouth tightened. “Yeah, I know we don’t have one, Jon. I just mean, we need to find out where Salesa keeps them.”

“Oh!” Jon replied, in a brighter tone. Then he registered what this meant. “Oh. Right.”

“Y…eah.”

“Any idea where to look?”

They checked what seemed to Martin the most obvious place first. Salesa used one of the ground-floor drawing rooms as a sort of repository for everything he’d left as yet unpacked—all the practical items he hadn’t been able to repurpose as toys, plus some antiques he’d been too fond of or too nervous to part with. Two nights ago, Salesa had noticed the state of Jon’s and Martin’s shoelaces, and insisted they let him replace them with some from this little warehouse. “Please, come with me; I’ve nothing to hide. You can have a look around, see if I have anything that might help you on your journey….” As he said this he’d counted to two on his fingers, as though listing off attractions they should be sure not to miss.

Jon watched Martin perk right up at this. All week Salesa had kept pleading with them to tell him about any luxuries they had wanted while touring the apocalypse, so he could try to find something to fulfill those wants. “Well, I—I don’t know about luxuries,” Martin had ventured the third time this came up. “But I do think we might run out of bandages soon, so. If you’ve any extra?”

“Of course, of course, yes, how prudent of you, always with one eye on the future. Must be the Beholding in you.” (Neither Jon nor Martin knew what to say to that.) “But there will be plenty of time for that. I meant something for now, while you are here, while you don’t need to think of things like that.” And sure enough, each time Salesa had come to them with presents from his little warehouse (booze, butterfly nets, more booze, antique bathing suits, &c.), he’d forgot about Martin’s homely request for gauze and tape. Martin insisted they change the dressing on Jon’s leg every day; by now they’d run through the bandages he brought from Daisy’s safehouse. So when Salesa suggested they accompany him to his repository, Martin said,

“Sure, yeah! That sounds really helpful.” (Salesa clutched his heart as though he’d waited all his life to hear such praise.) “Er. The things in your warehouse, though. They’re not L—um.” Leitners, Martin had almost called them. “You don’t think they’ll develop any… strange properties, when we leave here, do you?”

“Of course not,” Salesa had answered, stopping and turning all the way around in the corridor to face Martin with a frown. “Martin, I promise, only my antiques are cursed—and even then, not all of them.” He’d resumed the walk toward his little warehouse, but turned around again and held up a hand, as if to preempt a question. “There are, indeed, yes, some items out there, touched by the Corruption, which can pass their infection on to other things they come in contact with. But, no,” he went on, his voice fighting off a joyous laugh, “no, the only item I have like that does almost the opposite.”

“Oh.”

Salesa nodded, but did not turn around this time. “Strange little thing. It’s an antique syringe that, so long as you keep it near you, repels the Crawling Rot. I like to think it helped dispatch that insect thing Annabelle chased away. But if you try to get rid of it,” he added in a darker tone, “all the sickness, the bugs, the smells, even stains on your clothes—everything disgusting that it’s kept away—they remember who you are, and they hunger for you more than anyone else. The man who sold it to me….” He shook his head ruefully, hand now resting on the door.

“Was eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Jon muttered.

“Something like that, yes,” said Salesa, as he jerked open the door.

Jon hated the way his and Martin’s shoes looked now. He hadn’t had to put new laces on a pair of old, dirty shoes since he was a kid, and the contrast looked wrong—the same way starched collars and slicked-back hair on kids look wrong. Jon’s trainers were gray, their laces a slightly darker gray, so these white ones wouldn’t have looked quite right even without the dirt. Martin’s had once been white, but their original laces were broad and flat, while these were narrow and more rounded. The replacements’ thin, clinical white lines looked something between depressing and menacing. Too much like spider web; too much like the stitching on Nikola’s minions. When they came undone on this morning’s walk, Jon had made sure to tread on them in the mud a few times before tying them back up. Poor Dr. Thompson’s syringe must have retained some of its power here, though, because they still looked pristine. Jon wondered if it had no effect on spiders, or if without it this whole place would have been draped in cobwebs.

Martin seemed pleased with their haul, though. Despite Salesa’s amnesia on the subject, his little warehouse held more plasters, gauze, medical tape, antibacterial ointment, alcohol wipes—the list went on—than one man could ever use. In a strange, raw moment Jon liked to pretend he hadn’t seen, Salesa had wrung his hands as his eyes passed over this hoard. His lip had quivered. He’d practically begged Martin to take the whole lot away with them. “What harm will come to me here? And if it does come, what good will it do, protecting one lonely old man from skinned knees and paper cuts? The two of you—where you are going—the gravity of your mission!” At this point he’d seized one of each their hands. “Everything I have that even might help, you must take it. Please.”

“I—yeah,” Martin stuttered. “This is—really helpful, yeah. We’ll take as much as we can fit in our bags.”

Salesa had let go their hands by this point, and crossed his arms. “Right, yes, bags, of course, the bags. Are you sure you don’t want my truck?”

“Oh, well, thanks, but I don’t think either of us knows how to—”

“To drive a truck?” Salesa uncrossed his arms and began to reach for Martin’s shoulder. “I could teach you—”

“It won’t work without the camera anyway,” pointed out Jon. “We have to walk.”

Martin sighed. ”That too. ‘The journey will be the journey,’ as Jon keeps saying.”

“I said that once,” Jon protested.

No such success on this return visit. They found a small pile of miscellaneous screws, one of which Martin said would work (though it was the wrong color, he alleged, and had clearly been meant for some other purpose), but the screwdriver they needed remained elusive. “I mean, I can’t be sure they’re not in here—the place is as bad as Gertrude’s storage unit. We could spend all day here and still not be sure—”

“Let’s not do that,” said Jon, pushing an always-warm candlestick with a pool of always-melted wax out of Martin’s way with his sleeve for what felt like the hundredth time.

“No arguments here.”

“Where to next?”

“I guess it makes sense that they’re not here. This room’s all stuff Salesa brought, and why would he bring home-repair stuff when he didn’t even know where he’d wind up.”

“Except for the screws.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t look like he keeps screws here, remember? There’s just a couple random ones lying around, like he forgot to put them away or something.”

Jon peered between the clouds in his mind, trying to catch sight of Martin’s thought train. “So you’re saying the screwdriver should be…?”

“Somewhere less… frequented, I guess? They’ll probably still be wherever they were when Salesa found the place.”

“Not somewhere that was open to the public, then.”

Martin sighed. ”I mean yeah, probably. Not that that narrows it down much.”

“Somewhere… banal, less posh.”

“Not sure how much less posh you can get than this place. But yeah, I guess. Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?”

“I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. Odd that his eyes weren’t immune to dust, when leaving them open for seventy straight hours hadn’t bothered them. And why didn’t the syringe keep dust away? In Dr. Snow’s day (not far removed from Smirke’s, n.b.), Jon seemed to recall that dust had been used as a euphemism for all waste, including the human kind Dr. Snow had found in the cholera water. It was like how people today use filth—hence the word dustbin. And hadn’t Elias once called the Corruption Filth? Jon opened his eyes and watched Martin swirl back to full color. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here,” he concluded.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.”

“Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?”

Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice.

“Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him.

“Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.”

“Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.”

Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?

“Oh—I know,” Martin said, clicking his fingers and pointing them at Jon like a gun. “We passed a shed this morning, remember?”

Jon squinted. “Not even remotely.”

“No yeah—on our walk with Salesa. I tried to ask him what it was for, but he kept droning on and on. By the time he stopped talking I’d forgot about it.”

“Huh,” said Jon, to show he was listening.

“That seems like a good place to keep screws and all, right? If it’s so nondescript you can’t even remember it.”

“Sure.”

“Great! Are you ready now, or d’you need to sit for a bit longer?”

“I’m ready.” This time he accepted Martin’s hand, not keen to trip on something cursed.

“Anyway, if we don’t find them and Salesa’s still out there, we can ask him on the way back.”

Jon’s heart shrunk before the prospect of inviting Salesa to be the hero of their story. Please, Mr. Salesa, save us from our screwdriver-less hell! They would never hear the end of it. It would inevitably remind the old man of the countless times in his youth when he’d been the only man in the antiques trade who knew where to find some priceless treasure. Let Salesa open their stuck door and they’d find Pandora’s bloody box of stories behind it. He winced and let out a grunt as of pain before he could stop himself. “Let’s not tell him, if we can help it.”

“Of course we should tell him,” Martin protested. “We can’t just leave it broken like this.”

“But if we can fix it without his help—?”

“What? No! Even then, he’s our host. We have to tell him. It’s his door, he deserves to know its—I don’t know, history?” Martin sighed, shoving one hand in his hair and holding out the other. “If he’s got a doorknob whose screw comes loose a lot, he should know that, so he can tighten it next time before it gets out of hand. I mean, we’re lucky it only chipped the paint when it—when it fell off, you know?” (Jon, for his part, hadn’t even noticed this chip of paint Martin referred to.) “And—and suppose he’s only got this one screw left,” tapping the one in his pocket, “and the next time it happens his last screw rolls under the door like this one did.”

“And what is he supposed to do to prevent that scenario? There aren’t exactly any hardware stores in the apocalypse.”

Big sigh. “Yeah, fair enough. I still think we should tell him. It just feels wrong to hide secrets from him about his own house, you know?”

“Fine,” sighed Jon in turn. ”Should we tell him about the scorch marks on the window sill as well?”

“No?” Martin turned to him with an incredulous look. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“I mean—I was, but—”

“Please tell me you get how that’s different.”

“Enlighten me,” Jon said wearily.

“Seriously? Of course you don’t tell him about the?—those were already there! If we’d put them there, then yeah, of course we’d need to tell him.”

“So it’s about confessing your guilt, then. Not about what Salesa makes of the information.”

“I mean, I guess?” Martin looked perplexed, lips drawn into his mouth. “Actually, no. Because those are just scorch marks, they don’t—you can still get into a room with scorch marks on the windowsill, Jon.”

“And yet if you’d left them you’d tell him about it?”

“Well yeah but if I told him about it now it’d just be like I was—leaving him a bad review, or something. It’d just be rude. ‘Lovely place you have, Salesa. So kind of you to share your limited provisions with us refugees from the apocalypse. Too bad you gave us a room whose windowsill could use repainting!’”

Jon laughed. “Yes, alright, I get it.”

Martin’s sigh of relief seemed only a little exaggerated. If he hadn’t wiped pretend sweat from his brow Jon might have bought it. “Okay, that’s good, ‘cause”—when Jon kept laughing, Martin cut himself off. “Hang on, were you joking this whole time?”

“Sort of?”

“Were you just playing devil’s advocate or something?”

“I mean—not exactly? For the first seventy or eighty percent of it I was completely serious.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. It was just—fun. It felt nice to take a definite sta—aaaa-a-aa.” Something in Jon’s lower back went wrong somehow. An SI joint, probably? The pain caught him so much by surprise that when he stepped with that side’s leg he stumbled forward.

“Whoa!” Martin’s hand closed around his upper arm. Jon yelped again, from panic more than hurt this time, as his shoulder thunked in its socket. “Jon! Are you okay?”

“Don’t do that,” Jon hissed, trying lamely to shake his arm out of Martin’s grip. It didn’t work. The attempt just made his own arm ache, and produce more ominous clunking sounds.

“I—what?”

“It was fine. I don’t need you to catch me.”

Martin let his arm go. “You were about to fall on your face, Jon.”

“I’d already caught myself—just fine—with this.” He gestured to his cane, stirring its handle like a joystick.

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“I don’t know, look?”

“It’s not—?” Martin scoffed. “Look when? It’s not like a rational calculation. I can’t just go ‘Beep. Beep. See human trip. Will human fall on face? If yes, press A to catch! If not, press B to’— what, stand there and do nothing? It’s just human nature; when you see someone falling that’s just what you do. I’m not going to apologize for not calculating the risk properly.”

“Fine! Yes, okay, you’re right. Forget I said anything.” Throwing up his free hand in defeat, Jon set off again—tried to stride, but it was hard to do that with a limp. Even with his cane, he couldn’t step evenly enough to achieve a decisive gait.

It was fine, Jon reminded himself. He’d had this injury (if you could call it that) a thousand times before. When it came on suddenly like this it never stuck around long. Sure, yeah, for now every step hurt like an urgent crisis. But any second it would right itself as quickly as it had come undone.

“No, no, I understand! Point taken! Note to future Martin,” the latter shouted from behind Jon, voice troubled by hurried steps; “next time let him fall and break his bloody nose.”

Trusting Martin to shout directions if he went the wrong way, Jon pressed on, rehearsing comebacks in his mind. Is this not a boundary I’m allowed to set? You don’t let me read statements in front of you. Isn’t that part of human—isn’t that my nature, too?

Oh, yes, human nature, that must be it. You didn’t lunge after Salesa at ping-pong the other day, did you? I saw you opening doors for Melanie when she got back from India. You stopped for a while, did you know that? You all did, everyone in the Archives. And then—it’s the strangest thing!—you all started up again after Delano. Maybe you lot don’t see the common factor here; people always do seem to think it’s more polite not to notice.

So what if I had broken my nose? You nearly broke my shoulder, catching me like that. Does that not matter because you can’t see it? Because it wouldn’t scar?

They were all too petty to say aloud. Too incongruous with the quiet. He could hear his own footsteps, and Martin’s, and the clank of his cane’s metal segments each time it hit the ground, and a few crows exclaiming about something exciting they’d found on his right. Nothing else.

“Looks like Salesa went inside,” Martin shouted from behind him.

Jon stopped walking and turned around. “What?”

“Left a couple things out here, but yeah.” Martin jogged to catch up with him, from a greater distance than Jon would have expected given how much limping slowed him down. He must have veered off course to inspect the clearing Salesa had vacated. In one hand he carried an empty wine glass by its stem, which he lifted to show Jon.

“Huh.”

“Yeah.” When he caught up with Jon, Martin stood still and panted. “Guess it won’t be as easy to ask him about it as we thought. If we don’t find what we need in there,” he added, glancing demonstratively to something behind Jon.

Following Martin’s eyes, Jon finally saw the shed. Nondescript boards, worn black and white by the elements. Surrounded by hedges three months overgrown.

Turned out it wasn’t a shed anymore, though—Salesa had converted it to a chicken coop. “Explains the boiled eggs,” shrugged Jon.

“God, they’re adorable. Do you think it’s okay to pet one?” Martin crouched in front of a black hen with a puffball of feathers on top of her head. (Martin called her a hen, anyway, and Jon trusted his authority on animals other than cats). “I don’t really know, er, ch—hicken etiquette,” he mused, voice shot through with nervous laughter.

The black hen sat alone in a little box, and didn't seem to want attention. A little red one they’d found strutting around the coop, however, ventured right up to Martin and cocked her head, like she expected him to give her a present. While Martin cooed over her and the other chickens, Jon went outside and laid flat on his back in the grass under a tree. “Take your time,” he shouted. “I’m happy here.”

Sure enough, when Martin emerged from the coop and helped him stand back up, whatever cog in Jon’s pelvis or spine he had jammed earlier was turning again. And by the time they got back to the house, Martin had talked himself into the idea that maybe all the house’s doorknobs that looked like theirs came loose a lot, and Salesa had taken to keeping the screwdriver to fix them in, say, the hall closet, or in their toilet’s under-sink cabinet.

“I think we’re gonna have to find Salesa and ask him about it,” concluded Martin, when these locations turned up nothing they wanted either.

“If you’re sure.”

Jon sat down on the closed toilet seat. Hadn’t that been what he said just before the last time he sat down on the lid of a toilet before Martin? He’d dutifully turned away, that time, as Martin undressed, wanting to make sure he knew he’d still let him have some privacy. But then, of course: “Where should I put these, do you think? —Er, my clothes I mean.”

“Oh. Um.” Jon had turned his head to look at the stain on Daisy’s ceiling, for what must have been the tenth time already. “I can hold onto them if you like.” Which then meant Martin had to get them back on before Jon could undress for his own shower and hand him his clothes. As he’d piled his trousers into Martin’s hands a tape recorder fell out of one pocket and crashed to the floor, ejecting the tape with Peter’s statement on it. “Shit,” Jon had hissed and ducked to the floor to pick it up, trusting the slit in his towel to reveal nothing worse than thigh.

“Shit,” Martin echoed. “I hope that wasn’t your phone.”

“No—just the recorder.” Still on the floor, Jon clicked its little door shut and pressed play. Sound of waves, static, footsteps. He switched it off. “Seems alright.” Thank god, he stopped himself from adding. Jon didn’t want to lose this one, this record of how he’d found Martin, in case he lost him again. But he didn’t want Martin to hear the sounds of the Lonely again so soon, either. That was why he’d stayed with Martin while he showered, rather than waiting in the safehouse living room. He wouldn’t have insisted on it, of course. He didn’t exactly believe Martin would disappear again? But long showers were such a cliché of lonely people, and steam looked so much like the mist on Peter’s beach, and when Jon asked how he felt about it, Martin said that thought hadn’t occurred to him,

“But as soon as you started to say that, I.” He’d stood with his teeth bared, half smiling half grimacing, and bringing the tips of his fingers together and apart over and over. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Heh—it scares me too now, if I’m honest. That’s… a good sign, I guess, right?”

They had come a long way since then, Jon told himself. They were more comfortable with each other now. On their first morning here, they’d showered separately, but after (Martin’s) breakfast Jon’s irritation had faded and he had resolved to pretend along with Martin that this was a holiday. So they’d got to use the enormous bathtub after all— the one at whose soap dish Jon now found himself staring as he sat on the lid of the toilet. When the heat made him dizzier, as he’d known it would, he had relished getting to rest his cheek on Martin’s arm along the rim of the tub, where it had grown cool and soft in the few minutes he’d kept it above the water.

“Let’s have lunch first,” Martin said now; “you’re getting all….” While he looked for the right word he dropped his shoulders and jaw, and mimicked a thousand-yard stare. “Abstract, again. Distant. People food should help a little, yeah? Tie you back down to this plane a bit?”

“Probably,” Jon agreed, smiling at Martin’s tact.

But to get to the kitchen they had to pass through the dining room—where they found Salesa snoring in a chair at the head of the table. “Let’s just ask him now before he gets up and moves again,” maintained Martin. Jon shrugged his acquiescence and leant in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. Why hadn’t he used the toilet before letting Martin lead him here?

”Um, Mikaele?” Martin inched a few steps toward him, but a distance of several feet still gaped between them. “We have something to ask you, if that’s—hello? Mikaele?”

A likely-sounding gap between snores—but nope. Still sound asleep. Salesa sighed, licked his lips, then began to snore again.

“Mikaele Salesa,” called out Jon from his post at the door, rather less gently. “Mikaele Salesa!” He turned to Martin, meaning to suggest that they eat now and trust the smell of food to wake Salesa, but stopped himself when he saw Martin creeping timidly toward Salesa with his hand outstretched.

“Sorry to disturbyouMikaele,” Martin squeaked out, so quickly that the words blended together. He gave Salesa’s shoulder the lightest possible tap with one fingertip, then snatched his hand back with a grimace of regret as Salesa’s own hand reached up, belatedly, as if to swat Martin’s away. “Oh, good, you’re—”

Salesa interrupted with a snore. Martin sighed and turned to Jon. “What d’you think? Should I shake him?”

Jon pulled out a neighboring chair and sat on it. “No need for anything so drastic. Try poking him a few more times first.”

“Right.”

Once he’d tired of rolling his cane between his palms Jon bent down to set it on the floor. He’d learnt his lesson about trying to hang it on the back of these chairs, though in this fog it had taken several incidents to stick. Every time it ended up crashing to the floor, when he scooched his chair back or when Martin tried to reach an arm around him. Then again—he conjectured, bent halfway to the floor with the cane still in his hand—if he did drop it, that might wake Salesa.

Two nights ago Jon had got up to use the toilet, and knocked his cane down from the wall on his way back to bed in the dark. It crashed to the floor; Jon swore and hopped on one foot back from it, imagining the other foot’s poor toenail smashed to jagged pieces as it thumped to life with pain. Meanwhile he heard rustling from the bed, and Martin’s voice, querulous with sleep. “Jon? Jon, what’s—happened, what—are you.”

“Nothing it’s fine go back to”—he’d hissed as his knee decided it had enough of hopping—“don’t get up, just. I’m gonna turn on the light, if that’s alright.”

“What fell? Are you okay?”

“The cane. I knocked it over in the dark.”

“Oh.”

He got no verbal response about the light, but guessed Martin had nodded.

From a distance his toe looked alright—no blood, anyway, so he could walk on it without risking the carpet. Jon picked his cane up from the floor and steered himself to the foot of the bed, where he sat down. His toenail had chipped, it looked like—only a little, but in that way that leaves a long crack. If he tried to pick it straight he’d tear out a big chunk and it would bleed. But if he left it like this it would snag on the sheets, on his socks, until some loose thread tore the chunk of nail off for him. What could he do for this kind of thing here? At home he’d file the nail down around the chip, then cover it in clear nail polish, and just hope that’d hold out until the crack grew out and he could clip it without bleeding. But here? A plaster would have to do, he guessed. They had plenty of those now.

Jon hated bandaging, ever since Prentiss—in much the same way that Martin hated sleeping in his pants. He’d had time to learn all its discomforts. How sweaty they got, the way they stuck to your hairs, the way lint collected in the adhesive residue they left. Didn’t help he associated them with that time of paranoia. They didn’t make him act paranoid, understand; he just habitually thought of bandage-wearing as what paranoid people do. It made an echo of his contempt for that time’s Jon cling to his perceptions of current Jon. On his first morning here, when the ones on his shin where Daisy’d bit him peeled off in the shower, he hadn’t bothered to replace them. After all, the bite only hurt when something pulled on it or poked or scraped against it, so he figured his trousers would provide enough protective barrier.

“That healed fast,” Martin had remarked, when he noticed the undressed wound in the bath—and then, when he looked again, “Yyyyeah I dunno, I think you might still want to bandage that. We don’t want dirt getting in there.”

“Do I have to?”

“Humor me.”

When they got back to their room he’d let Martin dress it himself. Martin had sucked air through his teeth. “This is days old—it shouldn’t be all hot and red like this.” According to him these were early signs of infection, which would get worse if they didn’t take better care of it—i.e., keep the wound freshly bandaged and ointmented. Jon refrained from pointing out that when the cut on his throat had got like that he’d left it uncovered and been fine. But he did ask what worse meant. “Really bad,” testified Martin. “I had a cut on my finger get infected once. Really disgusting. You don’t want to know.”

Jon smiled at him, raised his eyebrows. “After Jared’s mortal garden I think I can handle it.”

Martin smiled too, but wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “There was pus involved.”

“Oh, god! How could you tell me that!” gasped Jon, hand to his chest.

“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it also hurt? A lot? And it can make you ill. So we should try to avoid it, yeah?”

He’d tried to disavow the disappointment in his sigh by exaggerating it. “Yes, alright.”

“Don’t know why you’d want to leave it exposed anyway. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Well, sure, when you do that,” Jon had muttered, flinching away. As he asked the question Martin had lightly tapped the skin around the gash through its new bandage. A second or two later Jon added, “Less than when I got it? It’s hard to tell; it’s… different here.”

With a sigh that caught on phlegm and irritation, Martin asked, “Different how?”

He hadn’t been able to answer then, but he knew now, of course. It hurt the way things do when you’re awake. Not with the constant smart and throb it had when he’d first got it, but, it snagged on things now. Had opinions on how he moved. When he bent his knee more than ninety degrees, that stretched the skin around it painfully. Also if he knelt, since then the floor would press against it through his trousers. And stepping with that foot felt odd. Didn’t hurt, exactly, but sort of… rattled? Like a bad bruise would. This all seemed so small, compared to the moment of terror for his life that he’d felt when Daisy bit into him—that gaping wound in his new self-conception, which his healing powers had sewn up so quickly. The ritual of bandaging it every evening seemed so otiose, so laughably superstitious. He despised the thought of adding another step to it.

While Jon went on examining his toe, Martin asked, “What was the... thumping. It sounded like.”

“Oh—no—I didn’t fall; it’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“No—yes—stop, it’s nothing, don’t get up. I just forgot I left it on the—leaning against the doorwall” (he hadn’t decided in time whether to say doorway or wall and ended up with half of each) “so I walked into it, er, toe first.”

“Oh,” Martin said again. Jon could hear him subsiding against the pillows behind him. “It came down?”

Big sigh. Jon’s fingernails met his palms. He set his foot back on the floor, and when his hip whined in its socket he clenched his teeth and kept them that way. In his mind he heard days’ worth of similar jokes. When he couldn’t get a jammed jar open: So you’re saying it wouldn’t… come off? When they got back their clean laundry: Can you believe all those grass stains came out?—oh, sorry: that they came off, I meant. Always with an innocent laugh, like Jon’s original phrasing had been just, what, like a Freudian slip, rather than something perfectly comprehensible that Martin had refused to engage with, taken from him, and rendered meaningless on purpose. “No it did not,” he snapped, “and I would appreciate it if you’d quit throwing that back in my face.”

“Whoa, uh. O…kay. What’s… going on here exactly?”

“You—?”

His heart plummeted; his face stung with embarrassment. Came down, Martin had said—not came off. He’d just been confirming that Jon’s cane had fallen down.

“Oh, god—nothing, never mind. You did nothing.”

“Well that’s obviously not true.”

“I just—I thought you’d said ‘came off.’ I thought you meant, had my toe ‘come off.’”

“Oh,” said Martin, yet again. When Jon turned to look he found him still blinking and squinting against the light. “Do you… need me to not say that anymore?”

“Not when I—?” Not when I’ve hurt myself, Jon meant. But Martin hadn’t done that, so this grievance didn’t actually mean anything. He’d been seeing patterns where there were none, and now that he’d seen through the illusion Jon knew again that Martin never would say it like that. “No, it’s fine. Do whatever you want.”

Martin turned the tail end of his yawn into a huff of false laughter. “Nope. Still don’t believe you.”

“Everything you’ve said makes perfect sense with the information you have. It’s all just—me. Being cryptic again.”

“Okay, uh. Are you waiting for me to disagree? ‘Cause, uh. Yup—you’re still being cryptic. No arguments there.”

Jon just sighed, really scraping the back of his throat with it. Almost a scoff.

“Sooo do you wanna fill me in, or.”

“No?” With an incredulous laugh. “Well, yes, just.”

He hadn’t known how to start from there, while so tightly wound and defensive. It seemed cruel to raise such a sensitive subject when Martin sounded so eager to go back to sleep. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hear Martin whimper apologies. Didn’t want to deal with how fake they would sound. They wouldn’t be fake; he knew that. But they would sound fake, which meant it would take an effort of will, a deliberate exercise of empathy, to accept them as real. He wasn’t in the mood to hear yet another person say I’m sorry, I didn’t know; much less to respond with the requisite It’s okay; you didn’t know. It would take a strength of conviction he didn’t have right now.

“Y—you don’t have to explain it tonight? I’ll just, I’ll just not use that phrase anymore, and maybe in the morning you’ll be less in the mood to lash out at me for things that don’t make sense.”

And what was there to say to that? It had taken Jon three tries to force out, “Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Good night, Jon.”

“Good night. I still need the light, for.”

“That’s fine. Just turn it off when you come back to bed.”

“You won’t wake him up,” a new voice interjected.

Annabelle. Jon couldn’t see her, but he had learnt by now to recognize that voice, with its insufferable upbeat teasing inflection like every sentence she said was a riddle. He caught a glimpse of movement, then heard the click of her shoes on the floor. She must have poked her head round the doorway at the far end of the table while she spoke, then scuttled off again. At last he got a good look at her, as she put her blonde-and-gray head through the closer door.

“He’s a very heavy sleeper,” she informed them, with a smile and a shrug. “You can shake him all you want; it’s not going to work.”

Martin cleared his throat—trying to catch Jon’s attention, presumably. But Jon feared Annabelle would vanish again if he took his eyes off her. Not that he wanted her here, either, but?—he at least wanted to know which direction she went when she disappeared.

“What are you doing here, Annabelle.”

She shrugged two of her shoulders. “Just offering you some advice.” Then she used the momentum from the shrug to push herself backward, out of the doorway back into the corridor. Before the last of her hands disappeared off to the right, she waved to both of them.

“Well, how about some ‘advice’ about this, then—”

“She’s already gone, Martin.”

“Seriously? God—which way did she go?” Jon pointed; Martin bolted down the hallway after her. “Oi! Annabelle!”

“Shhh!”

“Annabelle! Do you know where Salesa keeps the—”

Jon did his best to follow him, praying all his limbs would go on straight this time. “Don’t!”

“What? Why not?” he heard, from the other side of the wall. Thankfully he could no longer hear Martin’s pounding footsteps. He overtook him in the hallway, just about able to make out his face around the dark swirls in his vision. “She’s as likely to know as Salesa, right?” Martin continued. “And it’s not like she’d lie about it. I mean, what would be the point?”

“I just don’t think we should give her any kind of advantage over us,” Jon snarled. The attempt to keep his voice down made the words come out sounding nastier than he intended.

Martin scoffed. “You don’t think maybe this is a bit more important than your stupid principle about not accepting help from her?”

“Is it?” Jon took hold of Martin’s sleeve, having just now caught up to him. “The new room’s fine. It’s even nicer than the old one, right? We could just stay there.”

“I already told you, Jon. I’m not just gonna leave it like this.”

“’Til Salesa sobers up, I meant.”

“If we have to, yeah, but—? All our stuff’s in that room. The statements’re in there.”

“I just don’t think we should show her that kind of vulnerability,” Jon hissed, shifting from foot to foot in his eagerness either to sit down or go somewhere else. “I don’t want to give Annabelle something she can use over us.”

“How does this make us more vulnerable than we are eating her food?”

“It doesn’t, alright? That doesn’t mean we should add more to the pile!” He watched Martin shrug and open his mouth, but cut him off in advance: “Last time we had this argument you were the one maintaining she was dangerous.”

It was on their first night here—their first awake here, anyway. They’d been heading back to their room, Martin lamenting that he’d not packed anything to sleep in when they left Daisy’s safehouse. “Won’t make much difference to me,” Jon had shrugged at first.

Martin had shaken his head, grimaced at something in his imagination. “I hate sleeping in my pants. It’s just gross. Dunno why anyone would choose to do it.”

“How is it gross?” Jon had laughed. He’d expected to hear some weird thing about its being unsanitary for that much leg to touch sheets that only got washed every two weeks, and to argue back that in that case shouldn’t he sleep in his socks. Disdain for the body seemed damn near universal, and yet manifested so differently in each person whose habits Jon had got to know up close. Georgie had heard that underarm hair helped wick away the smell of sweat—so she let that hair grow out, but shaved the ones on her stomach for fear they’d smell like navel lint. And Daisy, a woman who used to sniff her used-up plasters before throwing them in the bin, would spray cologne in the toilet every time she left it. Jon had enjoyed getting to know which of bodily self-contempt’s myriad forms Martin subscribed to.

But this turned out not to be one of them. Instead Martin explained, “It’s so sweaty. Like sitting on a leather couch in shorts, except the leather’s your other leg? Ugh. I hate waking up slippery.”

“That’s why I put a pillow between mine,” laughed Jon. “Suppose I will miss Trevor’s t-shirt, though. Now that I don’t have to worry about showing up in people’s dreams like that.”

“Oh, god, right—what is it? ‘You don’t have to be faster than the bear’—?”

“‘You just have to be faster than your friends,'” Jon completed, in the most sinister Ceaseless-Watcher voice he could muster. Martin snorted with laughter.

And then they’d opened the door to discover Annabelle had done them a fucking turndown service. Quilt folded back, mints on the pillows, and a pile of old-timey striped pajamas at the foot of the bed. “Huh. Cree…py, but convenient, I guess. Least they’re not black and white, right?” Martin unfolded the green-striped shirt on top, then handed it with its matching trousers to Jon. “These ones must be yours.”

“Mm.” Jon let Martin hand him the pajamas, then tossed them onto the chair in the opposite corner of the room (from which chair they promptly fell to the floor). The mint from his side of the bed he deposited in the bin under the bedside table.

“So who’s our good fairy, d’you think? Salesa, or.”

“Annabelle,” Jon hissed. “Salesa was with us all through dinner.”

Martin nodded and sighed. “Yeah.” He sat down on the bed, still regarding the other set of garments—these ones striped yellow and blue—with a puzzled frown. “God, I’ll look like a clown in these. You sure I won’t give you nightmares about the Unknowing?”

But Jon said nothing, still hoping he could avoid weighing in on Martin’s choice whether or not to accept Annabelle’s… gifts.

“It’s probably Salesa’s stuff, at least. Not Annabelle’s. I mean,” Martin mused with a brave laugh, “he’s got a lot of weird outfits on hand apparently.”

“Unless she wove them out of cobwebs.”

“That’s not a thing,” Martin groaned, making himself laugh too. “Spider webs aren’t strong enough to use as thread.”

“Not natural ones, maybe,” Jon said with a shrug and a careful half smile. With no less care, he turned the sheets and counterpane back up on his side of the bed, restoring the way it’d looked when he and Martin made up the bed that morning. Stacked the frontmost pillow back upright against the one behind it. Punched it a little, more as a way to break the silence than because it looked too fluffy. Then sat down in front of them and put his shoe up on the bedside table so he could untie it—glancing first at Martin to make sure he didn’t disapprove.

“I mean, I guess,” Martin mused meanwhile. “Not sure why she’d bother, though. Maybe it’s”—with a gasp and a smile Jon could hear in his voice—“maybe she’s put poison in the threads, and that’s why yours and mine are different. Mine’s got—I dunno, some kind of self-esteem poison, like, a reverse SSRI, to make me feel like you don’t need me, so when she kidnaps you I won’t try to save you. And yours….”

As Jon pulled off his now-untied shoe one of the bones in his hip jabbed against some bit of soft tissue it wasn’t supposed to touch. He gasped and dropped his shoe. It thudded on the floor.

“You alright?”

“Fine. Some kind of dex drain, probably.”

“Ha.”

After a silence, Martin spoke again: “Are you sure you’re okay staying here for a bit? Sorry—I kinda bulldozed over your objections earlier.”

Jon finished untying his other shoe, then paused to think while he shook the cramp out of his hand. “No,” he decided. “You didn’t bulldoze, you just…questioned. And you were right to.”

“Still, I mean. It might not be a great idea to stick around here with the spider lady who’s had it in for us since day one. Have you re-listened to the tapes from the day Prentiss attacked, by the way, since you got them back from the Not-Sasha thing?”

“Right—the spider, yes.”

“Yeah, exactly! You wouldn’t even have broke through that wall if it hadn’t been for the spider there!”

Jon nodded and scrubbed at his eyes, trying to muster the energy to match Martin’s tone. This was an important conversation to have, he knew. And a part of him shuddered with recognition to hear Martin talk about those tapes. He had re-listened to them—first at Georgie’s, one night in the small hours as he cleaned her kitchen, thinking clearly for the first time in months and trying to pinpoint the exact moment his thoughts had been clouded with paranoia, so that he might know what signs to look for if something else tried to infect his mind like that. And then again after Basira found the jar of ashes. That time he’d just wanted to suck all the marrow he could from the memory of Martin with his sensible corkscrew and his first answer to Why are you here, even if it did mean having to hear himself ask if Martin was a ghost. A few weeks later, however, after Hilltop Road, he’d done a fair bit of obsessing over the spider thing with Prentiss, yeah. He just wished he could remember what conclusion he’d come to.

All he could remember was going for those tapes yet again only to find them missing from his drawer. But he’d been chasing phantoms all day; it was late at night by then, and when he’d dashed out to tell Basira his fear Annabelle had stolen them, stolen his memories from him just like the Not-Them had, he’d stood there over her and Daisy’s frankenbag for what felt like an hour, mouth open, unable to utter a sound. It felt too much like going to wake up his grandmother after a dream. So he’d told himself to sleep on it—that he’d probably left the tapes in some other obvious place, and would find them in the morning. And when he remembered his panic, the next day at lunch, and checked his drawer again, the tapes were back, right where he expected them. He’d dismissed it as a dream after all. But no—Martin must have borrowed them. He must’ve been worried about the Web, too.

“It’s… it should be okay. I don’t think it’ll be like that here.”

Martin sighed. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“That thing where you just—decide how something is without even telling me why you think so. I mean it’s one thing out there, when you ‘know everything’” (this in a false deep voice) “and can’t possibly share it all, but here? When you’re just guessing, like everyone else? Why don’t you think it’ll be like that here? And what does ‘like that’ even mean?”

“I'm sorry—you’re right—I just mean, I don’t think she has her powers here. Based on what Salesa said about the camera, and on what happens when I try to use my powers….”

“Salesa just said the Eye can’t see this place, though. What about that insect thing he said found its way in?”

“I mean.” Jon shrugged. “We managed to find our way here without the Eye’s help.”

“Yeah, but if the Web has no power here then how could she have called me on a payphone? She had to have known where I was to do that, yeah? And she couldn’t know that from here unless the Web told her to do it, right?”

“Maybe? We don’t even know if the Web works like that.”

“Told her to do it, made her want to do it, gave her the tools to do it, whatever. You know what I mean. Look—we know the Eye’s not totally blind here, since it can still feed on statements. Right?”

Jon wondered now how either one of them could have been so sure of that. “Apparently,” he liked to think he had said—but more likely he’d replied simply, “Right.”

“So then by that logic the Web still probably likes it when she—I don’t know, when she manipulates people here. It probably still gets, like, live tweets from her about it. How do we know it can’t use that information to weave more plots around us?”

“If that’s even how it works,” Jon had replied again. “The other fears don’t work like that—they don’t plan, they just.” He tried to sort his intuition into Martin’s live tweet metaphor. “The fears just like their agents’ tweets, they don’t… comment on them, o-or build new opinions on what they’ve read. It boosts the avatar's… popularity, I guess? Their influence?” Jon hadn’t even logged into Twitter since before the Archives. “But unless the Web is different from all the other fears, it doesn’t—it’s not her boss. It doesn’t come up with the schemes, it just.”

“Isn’t it literally called the ‘Spinner of Schemes’, though? The ‘Mother of Puppets’?”

And Jon couldn’t remember what he’d said to brush off that one.

“Of course she’s dangerous,” Martin said now. “I just don’t see what sinister plot of hers we could possibly be enabling by asking her where to find screwdrivers.”

Jon scoffed. “She’s with the Web, Martin! The ‘Mother of Puppets,’ the ‘Spinner of Schemes’? You’re not supposed to be able to see how the threads connect. Anything we ask her gives her another opening to sink her hooks into.”

“So what, you just don’t want to owe her a favor?”

“Yes?” Jon blinked—on purpose, needless to say. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I mean—why do you think she’s here, Martin, ingratiating herself with us?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the one place on Earth that hasn’t been turned into a hell dimension?”

Jon snarled and set his head in his free hand. The dizziness was coming back. “In her statement Annabelle said the trick to manipulating people was to make sure they always either over or underestimate you.”

“Okay,” granted Martin, as though prompting Jon to explain how this was relevant.

“She’s trying to humanize herself,” he maintained, scratching an imaginary itch behind his glasses. “We shouldn’t let her.”

“I mean, she is physically more human here.”

“Is she? She doesn’t seem to be withdrawing from the Web; she’s not—like this.” Jon turned his wrist in a circle next to his head.

“Yeah but she’s been here for months, right? Maybe she’s passed through that stage.”

A bitter huff of laughter. “So you’re saying she’s reformed.”

“No. I’m saying the fact she’s not all—loopy here doesn’t necessarily mean she still has any power.”

“She’s got four arms and six eyes, Martin!”

“And you sleep with your eyes open and summon tape recorders, Jon!”

“Well,” mused Jon with a wry smile, “not on purpose.”

“That’s my point! You’ve only got—vestiges here, yeah? I’m not saying we should trust her; I don’t wanna be friends or anything. I’m just saying I don’t think the actual concrete danger she poses here is what’s making you hate the idea of asking her for directions.”

“What about that insect thing Salesa said she chased off. Does that not sound spidery to you?”

“We don’t know that! Maybe she waved his syringe at it.”

Jon took a deep, shaky breath through his nose. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to bring up this next part; he feared it might make Martin too afraid to stay here any longer. “I think she’s plotting against us.”

Blink. “Well, yeah. Of course she is. She’s been plotting against us for—”

“Here, I mean. I mean, I think that’s why she’s here. She’s been hiding from the Eye on purpose so she could lure us into her trap with her spindly little”—Jon thought of the earrings that dangled from Annabelle’s ears like flies, swinging with her every sudden movement. Unconsciously he struck out with his hand as if to catch one, closing his fist around empty air. “Without my being able to see either her or the trap. At best, she’s here gathering information about us so she can report it back to her master.” He pictured the thousand spiders he’d seen birthed during Francis’s nightmare crawling back and forth with messages between here and the nearest Web domain—

“I thought you said the fears didn’t work that way,” pursued Martin—

“And every little thing we tell her is one more thread she can use to pull on us.”

“Okay, but, even if you’re right, ‘Hey Annabelle, our doorknob’s busted, can you help us find the tools to fix it’ isn’t actually a fact about us.”

“But that’s just the best-case scenario, Martin! The worst-case scenario is that she predicted we’d get locked out of our room, or even loosened the screw herself—”

“Not this again—”

“—because she knew we’d have to ask her for help, and wherever she tells us to look for the screwdriver is where she’s laid her trap! Think about it—this couldn’t happen outside the range of the camera, right? It would only work in a place where I can’t just know where to find something. That’s the only scenario where we’d ever ask her for directions.” Martin sighed, crossed his arms, rolled his eyes. Jon looked right at him, hoping to catch them on their way back down. “What if her plan is to trap us here forever so we can’t go stop Elias? What if by trusting her with this, we give her the tools to keep the world like this forever?”

Again Martin sighed. He bit his lip, at last seeming not to have an argument lined up already.

“I can’t actually stop you from going after her”—Jon heard Martin scoff, but pressed on—“but I can’t take part in this.”

“You sort of already did stop me, Jon.” He lifted his arm, pointing vaguely in the direction she’d gone. “We can’t catch up with her now.”

That wasn’t quite true, Jon knew; Martin had chosen to stop and listen to him. Instead of pointing this out in words Jon smiled, meekly, and reached for Martin’s hand. “Guess that’s true. Are you, er, ready for lunch now?”

His answering scoff sounded fond, indulgent, rather than incredulous. “Yeah, alright.”

With Martin’s hand still in his, Jon turned around—an awkward business, while holding hands in such a narrow passage—and began to walk back towards the dining room. At the end of the corridor stood a tall, thin, many-limbed figure, holding a water carafe, a stack of glasses, and four steaming plates of food.

“You boys getting hungry?” As she stepped toward them her shoes clacked against the floor. How had they not heard her approach? And what was she doing back at that end of the corridor?

“How did you—?”

“I have my ways. I’ve brought lunch for you both, if you’re amenable.”

“Oh—well, thanks, you’re, you’re just in time, actually.” Jon didn’t dare look away from Annabelle Cane long enough to confirm this, but suspected Martin had directed that last bit at him as much as her. “Can I help you with those?”

Annabelle managed to shrug without dislodging anything from the four plates in her hands. “You can take the napkins if you want,” she said, extending toward Martin the forearm from which they hung.

Jon sat back down in the chair he’d left at a haphazard angle—though it felt weird, since he usually sat on the table’s other side. He thanked Martin when he handed him a napkin, and allowed Annabelle to set an empty glass and a plate of food in front of him. It was a pasta dish, with clams—from a can, he reminded himself. A can and a jar of pasta sauce. Couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes to put together.

“Salesa’s still out of it,” observed Martin. “Don’t think he’ll make too much of his.”

“A shame,” Annabelle agreed. She set a plate down in front of the sleeping Salesa anyway. “Maybe the smell of food’ll wake him up.”

“Are you going to eat with us?” Martin asked, as he and Jon both watched her deposit a fourth plate across the table from them.

“I may as well. We do still have to eat to live here, don’t we?” Jon could tell she meant this comment as an invitation for him to join their conversation, but he didn’t intend to take her bait. “Besides,” Annabelle went on, “this way you’ll know I’ve not saved the best for myself.” With one hand she picked up her own plate again; another of her long, thin arms reached out to take Jon’s plate.

He dragged it to the side, out of her reach. “No, thank you.”

“Alright. Martin,” she said, looking over at him with a patient, patronizing smile. “Will you switch plates with me?”

“Oh, my god,” Martin groaned into his hand. “Sure, why not.”

Something small and gray skittered across the table toward her. For half a second Annabelle took her eyes from Martin. Her nostrils flared; one of her eyes twitched; Jon heard a stifled squawk from behind her closed lips as she swept the skittery thing over her edge of the table. He made no such effort to hide his scoff. Did she think she could play nice, by declining to hold little spider conversations in front of them? That they’d think she was on their side as long as they couldn’t see her chatting to her little spies?

“Thank you,” Annabelle sing-songed meanwhile, returning her gaze to Martin. “You’re sweet.”

On their first morning here, after showering and then shuddering back into their filthy clothes, Jon and Martin had barely left their room before Annabelle dangled herself in their path, with cups of tea (Jon refused his) and an offer to show them to the pantry. From this tour Jon had concluded that all food in this place was tainted by her influence. And he didn’t actually feel hungry at that point? He remembered Martin remarking on his hunger before they’d both fallen asleep, but Jon had felt only tired. Surely that meant he still didn’t need food here, right? It’d been like that before the change, after the coma—he’d needed sleep and statements to keep up his strength, but could function just fine without… people food. So he’d resolved to accept nothing offered him here—or at least, nothing Salesa and Annabelle hadn’t already given him and Martin without their consent. No tea, none of Salesa’s booze, no use of the huge industrial washing machines, no food.

That resolution lasted about nine hours. He knew because on that first day time still felt like such a novelty he and Martin had counted every one. Once he’d tried and failed to compel Salesa—once he’d heard him give a statement and managed to space out for half of it, rather than transcending himself in the ecstasy of vicarious fear—Jon started to grow conscious of his hunger. After two hours he felt shaky; after four he started picking quarrels, first just with Annabelle when she showed up with snacks, then with Salesa, and then even with Martin; after six he felt first hot, then cold. Finally around the eight-hour mark he was hiding tears over an untied shoelace, and figured it was worth finding out how much of this torment people food could solve. He sat through dinner, flaunting his empty plate—then stole to the pantry for something he could make himself. Settled for dry toast and raisins. “Couldn’t you find the jam?” Martin had asked him.

“Didn’t think of it,” Jon lied, once he’d got his throat round a lump of under-chewed toast.

“You want me to get some for you? That looks pretty depressing without it,” Martin said, with his eyebrows and the line of his mouth both raised in a pitying smile.

“Better make it one of the sealed jars.”

“What, so Annabelle can’t have got to it?” Jon nodded, chewing so as to have neither to smile back nor decide not to. “You know she made the bread, right.”

Of course she had. Jon dropped his head onto his fists. “Fuck.”

“What did you think?” mused Martin with a laugh. “That Salesa just popped down to the supermarket?”

“I don’t know—that they’d taken it from the freezer, maybe?”

“I mean, that’s possible,” Martin granted with a shrug. “Should I get you that jam?”

Big sigh. “Fine.”

In reality he’d stared up at the row of jam jars in Salesa’s pantry for a full ten seconds before deciding not to have any. He feared spiders would spill out of the jar onto his hand as soon as he got it open. But he also feared he might not be able to open it at all—only hurt himself trying. Way back in their first year in the Archives together, Martin had once seen him struggling to get open the jar where he kept paperclips. Jon hadn’t realized he was being watched—or, that is, that Martin was watching him. In the Archives the sense of someone watching was so omnipresent one soon lost the ability to distinguish Elias’s evil Eye from other, more mundane eyes. Anyway, after three minutes’ effort and nothing to show for it but a misplaced MCP joint in his thumb, Jon had given up on paper-clipping the photos Tim had pilfered for him to their relevant statement and begun hunting through his desk drawers for a stapler instead. And then a high-pitched pop above his head made him startle so badly he gasped, choked on his own spit, and flung the picture in his hand across the room like a paper airplane.

Around the sound of his own cough he could hear Martin shouting Sorry, and Tim and Sasha laughing on the other side of the wall. Martin’s laugh soon joined theirs, though it sounded desperate, sheepish. He dove after the photo Jon had dropped, and then, when he came back with it, explained, “Got the paperclips for you.”

Jon frowned. “This is a photograph, Martin.”

“No, I mean—?” His laugh came out like a whimper; he picked the unlidded jar up an inch off the table, then set it back down. “Here.”

Okay, so, not exactly an auspicious start, but, it still became a thing? Martin opening his paperclip jar. At first he’d wished he could just remember not to seal it so tightly; he could get it just fine when he stopped turning it earlier. At least when the weather hadn’t changed since the last time he opened it. But then when they all started leaving the Archives less often, and the break-room fridge filled up with condiments that all seemed to have twist-off lids… he’d kind of liked that? Martin would hand him the peanut-butter jar, with its lid off and pinned to its side with one finger, before Jon had even finished asking for it. This seemed to be the pattern behind all his early positive impressions of Martin: the jar lids, the corkscrew, the way he managed to make mealtimes at the Institute feel like proper breaks. Martin had seemed like such an oaf to him at first—clumsy, absent-minded, always seeming to think that if he professed enough good will with his smiles and cups of tea and I know you won’t like this, but, then no one would notice his impertinent comments and all the doors he left wide open. All the dogs and worms and spiders he let in. He’d seemed to Jon the human embodiment of a fly left undone—more so than ever after the morning he’d walked in on him wearing naught but frog-print boxer shorts. But he had this easy grace with things that needed twisting off. Banana peels, bottle caps, wine corks, worms.

And then when he came back after the Unknowing Martin was never around. Jon and Basira and Melanie all lived in the Archives, like Martin had two years before, but by that point he wasn’t on Could you open this for me? terms with any of them. But he hadn’t needed people food anymore, and if he subluxed a joint it would heal instantly anyway. So he’d just struggled and sworn, feeling stupid for shrinking from the pain even after having chopped off his own finger. And it got easier with practice. By the time he and Martin reunited, he’d got so used to it that sometimes he’d hand jars to Martin already unlidded. Martin hadn’t seemed to notice. Finally, one evening a day or two after that row they had over the ice-cream thing, Jon had opened a jar of pasta sauce (he’d taken up people food again at Daisy’s safehouse, if only to make their time there feel more like a regular holiday), and reached out to hand it to Martin—then paused and retracted the hand that gripped the jar, remembering his promise to be more open about.

“This is, um.” He’d glanced up at Martin, then back to the floor as the latter said,

“Huh?”

“This is one of those things that’s got better since the coma. Since I became an avatar. I can, um. I can open jars now? Without.” He’d almost said Without hurting myself, then remembered that wasn’t technically true. Deep breath. “Without lasting harm. It—it hurts for a second? But the Eye heals it instantly. That's why I’ve been.”

“Oh,” Martin said, seeming to stall for time as he absorbed this information. He accepted the jar which Jon again held out to him, and turned it around in his hands, eyes on its label. “Yeah, I—I noticed, you’re really good at opening jars now,” he went on with a laugh. Again he paused, and blew a sigh out of his mouth. “Right. Okay. Thank you for telling me?”

“I’ll try and be better about….”

Martin nodded, turning back to the stove and beginning to stir sauce into the pasta. “Yeah. I, uh—I didn’t know that was why you used to need me to open them for you?” Since the other night’s argument, Jon had gathered as much. He nodded too. “I thought you were just, heh, you know. Weaker than me.”

“I mean, I am—”

“Well yeah but you know what I mean.”

“I do. I should’ve told you.”

“No, I—actually I think you’re in the clear on that one, if I’m honest. I just—it’s just weird? I thought I was done having to” (another blown-out sigh punctuated his speech) “having to reframe stuff I thought was normal around some unseen horror. Sorry,” he added when he’d finished beating sauce off Daisy’s wooden spoon; “that’s probably not a great way to.”

“No—it’s fine?”

“Suppose it sounds like an exaggeration, now, after all we’ve.”

Mechanically, Jon nodded, without deciding whether he agreed or not. Around an awkward laugh, he confessed, “‘Unseen horror’ might be the nicest way I’ve ever heard anyone describe it.”

“Er. Yikes? That sounds like you might need some better friends, Jon.”

“Maybe,” he conceded, laughing again. “I—I just mean, it’s nice to hear something other than?” Jon paused and pushed his little fingers back the hundred or so degrees they each would go. First the left, then the right. Other than what? Well, doubt, for a start. Though most of the doubt he heard from outside himself was implicit. Careful silence from people he told about it; requests people made of him seemingly just so he’d have to tell them he couldn’t do that; impatience, bafflement, suspicion from strangers. Why are you out of breath, the woman behind the Immigration desk had asked him at O’Hare, as if breathlessness incriminated him somehow. But that wasn’t the response he’d subconsciously measured Martin’s phrase against. What he had in mind now was more like… bland support. Hurried support. Assurances quick and dutiful, yet so vague he could tell the people who gave them were thinking only of the mistakes they might make, if they dared to acknowledge what he’d said with any more than half a sentence. The I’m sorry you’re in pain equivalents of Right away, Mr. Sims.

That was it—unseen horror was an original thought. Martin had put it in his own words, rather than either borrowing Jon’s or using none at all. “Other than a platitude.”

So at Salesa’s when Martin came back with the jam jar he handed it to Jon. Jon made a show of trying to open it, but could feel his middle finger threatening to leave its top half behind. It frightened him, in a way he’d forgot was even possible. For such a long time now, pain had just been pain? He’d grown so unused to the threat it held for normal people. The threat of actual danger, of injury. He’d set down the jar on the table in front of him, and crossed his arms in front of it.

“Can’t get it, huh?” Martin asked; Jon shook his head.

How much danger, though, he wondered. Earlier that day, after he and Martin got out of the bath, his left index finger had popped out while he was buttoning his shirt. It still ached when he used the finger, or thought about the cracking sound it had made—but didn’t throb anymore without provocation. Not much danger there; not even much inconvenience. He supposed if he hurt his middle finger too then he might have some trouble with his trouser button the next time he had to pee? Right, yes, what a cross to bear. I hurt myself doing x; now it hurts to do x. But it already hurt to do x, didn’t it? Didn’t x always hurt, before the change? Why did he so fear to face an hour or a day where it hurt more than usual, but not so much I can’t do it?

“So you’re saying it won’t… come off?”

“Ha, ha.”

“Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”

“What if I open it and it’s full of spiders?”

Martin had smiled, rolled his eyes, pulled the jar toward him, and twisted its lid off with a pop. “See? No spiders in this one.

“While you’re here, Annabelle,” Jon heard Martin say, “I don’t suppose you know anything about where Salesa keeps his screwdrivers?”

Annabelle tapped her chin and said, very pleasantly, “Hmmm. Perhaps they’re where he left them after the last time something broke.”

Martin’s lips drew closer together. “Yeah,” he nodded, “probably. Any idea where that might be?”

“Perhaps he keeps them next to whatever screw comes loose most often.”

“And do you know which screw that is?”

She shook her head, though who knew whether that meant she didn’t know or merely that she didn’t mean to tell him. “Perhaps he only uses the item when he’s alone,” she said, with a shrug and a sly smile.

“…Ew.” Annabelle cackled like a school kid pulling a prank. “Right, great,” sighed Martin. “Thanks a lot. Forget it. You done, Jon?”

Jon glanced sleepily down at his plate. Only half empty, but cold by now. “Yes.”

“Nice of you to grace us with your presence, Annabelle,” Martin said, sliding his and Jon’s plates toward her side of the table.

Instead of energy, lunch gave Jon only a slight queasy feeling—like one gets from eating sweets on an empty stomach.

“God”—hissed Martin, with clenched fists, as they ambled back to their room—“‘Perhaps he keeps them next to the screw that gets loose most often.’ Yeah, figured that out already, thanks! Can you even believe her? Sitting down to eat with us, as if she’s all ready to help, and then the best she can do is,” he paused and straightened, then said with a finger to his chin in imitation of Annabelle, “‘Oh, hm, guess he only uses it alone. Oh well!’”

“Don’t know what else you expected.”

Martin sighed, his arms crossed now. “Guess I should’ve done what you asked after all, since that accomplished nothing.” After a moment he went on, “Least it wasn’t a trap, right? I tried not to give her anything she could use against us.” With a smile Jon could hear without looking at him, “You notice how I pointedly didn’t offer to help clean up?”

“No, I didn’t,” Jon confessed, laughing a little.

“No?!” Again Martin paused on his feet, frowning, incredulous. Jon wished he wouldn’t; standing still made him dizzier, took more effort than walking, like that poor woman in Oliver’s domain. Daniela? Martin shook his head at himself. “Ugh—then who knows if she noticed, either. I thought I was being so obvious!”

“I mean—”

“Wait, hold up, let’s double back.”

“Are you going to go back and tell her it was on purpose?”

“No, just”—he echoed Jon’s laugh—“no, of course not. I just wanted to try that wing’s toilets next. Didn’t want her to see which way we were going.”

“Oh.” By this time Martin had turned around and started to walk the other way; Jon hung back. “Er. I thought—I thought we were going to our room first.”

“What, the new one you mean?” asked Martin, turning his head around to look back at him.

“…Yes,” Jon decided. Until this moment he’d forgot about that, and been daydreaming of their original bed.

“Sure, if you want. Do you need a break?”

“I… I think so, yes.”

Martin turned the rest of the way around, shuffled toward Jon and looked him over, with a concerned frown. He took his free hand between his fingers and thumb, brushing the latter over Jon’s knuckles. “Yeah, okay. You still seem pretty out of it. How are you feeling?”

“Not great,” answered Jon, though he smiled in relief at Martin’s willingness to change the plan for him.

“Food didn’t help?”

His stomach seemed hung with cobwebs; his mind, like a large room with half its lights burnt out. His light head seemed attached to his heavy, aching body only by a string, like a balloon tied to an Open-House sign. He still needed the toilet. “Not really?”

“Yeah, thought not. You need a statement, huh.”

Jon shrugged, avoiding Martin’s eyes. “Probably.”

In the interim bedroom Jon sat down at the edge of the bed, bent down over his legs, and untied his shoes, wondering why his life always came back around to this. His hip got stuck like a drawer that’s been pulled out crooked, so he had to lever himself back up with his arms, trapping fistfuls of counterpane between thumbs and the meat of his palms. It made his hands cramp, but that helped—the way it would have helped to bite his finger. When he’d got himself upright again he sat and blinked for a few seconds, hoping each time he opened his eyes that his vision would’ve cleared.

Martin sat down next to him and put his hand on Jon’s arm. “You’re blinking again. You okay?”

“Just… kind of dizzy? It’s an Eye thing.”

He let Martin pull him towards him until their shoulders touched. “Yeah. Makes sense. Nap should help. Statement’ll definitely help.”

“Right.”

They agreed to lie on the bed rather than properly in it, not wanting to have to put the covers back together afterward. Jon set his head on that squishy part of Martin’s chest where it started to give way to armpit, knowing to angle himself so the scar tissue pressed the hollow part of his cheek rather than anywhere bonier. It was normally dangerous to lie half on his back, half on his side like this, but he’d lately discovered he could use Martin’s leg to keep his hip from falling off. He could feel the muscles in his shoulder twitching and cramping, whether to pull the joint out or keep it in who could tell. But it’d be fine as long as he shrugged the arm every few minutes.

All the ways they knew to spend time in each other’s company had come together in Scotland, where he’d had none of these worries. Even after the change, on their journey, with nothing but sleeping bags between them and desecrated earth, he’d borne only the same aches he’d been ignoring since he read the statement that ended the world. Jon imagined lying next to Martin like this on the cold stone of a tomb in the Necropolis, surrounded by guardian angels’ malicious laughter. Not feeling the cold, or the grain of the stone against his ankles and the bandage on his shin—just knowing it was there, like when you watch someone suffer those things in a movie. Less vivid even than a statement about lying on a tomb; in Naomi Herne’s nightmare he’d felt the stone in her hands.

“Hfff, okay—ready to get back to it?”

“Mrrr.”

“…Jon, are you asleep?”

He shrugged his hanging shoulder. “No.”

Nose laugh. “Come on, wake up.”

“Mmrrrrrrr.”

“My arm’s asleep.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It won’t wake up ‘till you get up off of it, Jon,” said Martin, gently, between huffs of laughter.

“Hmr.” Jon rolled away to face the wall with the window, freeing Martin’s arm.

“Do you want me to go look without you?”

“Okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mhm.”

Cold air washed over his newly-exposed arm, ribcage, side of face, the outside of his sore hip. It was cold on this Martinless side of the bed, too. He rolled back over into the shadow of his warmth, but that still wasn’t as good as the real thing. Maybe he could pull the covers halfway out and roll himself up in them.

“Aaagh, no—Jon”—Martin’s cool hand on top of his as he tried to hook his fingers round the counterpane— “we’re trying to leave the room the way we found it, remember?”

“Hmmmrrgh.” He consented to leave his hand still when Martin’s departed from it. A few seconds later, a rustle against his ear, the smell of smoke and old clothes.

“Here.”

Jon crunched the jacket down so it wouldn’t itch his ear. “You won’t need it?”

“Probably not.”

“Hm.”

“I’ll be back for it if I have to go outside again, yeah?”

“Okay.”

In his mind’s eye they trudged into the wind, hand in hand. It blew Martin’s hood off his head, and inverted Jon’s cane like an umbrella. He shrunk himself further under Martin’s jacket, relishing the new pockets of warmth he created as his calves met his thighs and his hands gripped his shoulders.

“Ooookay…! Wish me luck?”

“Good luck,” managed Jon around a yawn.

Martin had been right about the wallpaper. Not only was the red too bright to look at comfortably; it also had the kind of flowered pattern just complex enough that every time you look back at it you’re compelled to double-check where it repeats. Every fourth stripe was the same as the first, right? Not every second? And that weird little scroll-shaped petal—he’d seen that one too recently. Was it the same as?—No, that one was a bud. He pulled Martin’s jacket up so it covered his eyes.

They’d put their jackets through the laundry with everything else, their first day here, but that hadn’t got the smell out. Enough time had passed between the burning building and their arrival here for the smoke to embed itself permanently into their jackets and shoes, like how duffel bags once taken camping always smell like barbecue. And everything they’d ever shoved in those backpacks still had some of that odd, sour, Ritz-cracker smell of clothes left unwashed too long.

Daisy used to smell like smoke and laundry, too, once she quit smelling like dirt. It was the smell of the old green sleeping bag she’d zipped up to Basira’s. She said she’d have showered it off if she could; she didn’t like it. To her it was a Hunt smell—it reminded her of her clearing in the woods. But there weren’t any showers in the Archives. She’d point this out every time, in the same wry voice, so Jon was sure she’d intended the metaphor. No showers in the Archives: you couldn’t hide your sins in a temple of the Eye. This had comforted Jon—or maybe flattered was the word, though he knew her better than to think she’d have done so on purpose. He just wasn’t sure he agreed. He’d hid his sins pretty well from himself, after the coma. It was easy; you just had to lose track of scale. No one could remember all of them at once, after all. Others had had to point the important ones out to him.

Were those footsteps he could hear out there? Not Annabelle’s—? No; her clicky shoes. These were blunter. Could be Salesa, awake at last, come to invite them to play a game with him. “How do you two feel about… foosball?” he would say, drawing out the last word in a husky whisper. Only then would he swing the door wide open to reveal himself in a shiny jersey, shorts, and studded shoes. He set his fists out before him and turned them in semicircles, pretending to manipulate the plastic rods of a foosball table. Jon curled still more tightly into himself at the thought of Salesa’s face, how his showman’s grin would crumple like a hole in a cellophane wrapper when he realized the fun one had gone and that he faced only the Archivist. “Oh—hello. Jon, is it? Where has your lovely Martin gone?”

“Oh, uh. Martin needs a screwdriver to fix our door, so I.”

He watched Martin march his silent way slowly, solemnly down a corridor that grew darker, grayer, vaguer with every step until the webs that lined its every side and hung in laces from the ceiling began to catch on his shoes, his belt, his glasses.

“I let him go off alone.”

Jon’s whole body flinched. He gasped awake—oh shit. How had he just let Martin go? He had to—couldn’t stay here—find Martin—keep him out of Annabelle’s clutches—

Stick-thin bristling spider legs tapped the floor of his mind like fingers on a table. Find Martin. Jon instructed himself to sit up, swing his legs over the side of the bed and reach down to grab his shoes. He twitched one finger. See? You can do this. In a minute he’d try again and be able to move his whole arm, push himself up onto one hand. Find Martin.

Also probably go to the toilet. With an empty bladder his head would be clearer, he could figure out which direction to look first.

After Hopworth, while he laid on the couch in his office waiting for the strength to throw himself into the Buried, Jon had imagined Martin and Georgie and Basira and Melanie all stood around that coffin, wearing black and holding flowers. Denise? No, it definitely had three syllables. A scattered applause began as Jonah Magnus emerged from his office, closed behind him the door printed with poor dead Bouchard’s name, and stepped up to the podium. Georgie, not knowing his face, began to clap; Melanie stayed her hands. Elagnus’s shirt, hidden behind suit except for the collar, was striped in black and white. A ball and chain hung from his sleeve like an enormous cufflink. He opened his mouth to speak, and a tape recorder began to hiss.

“What are you doing here?” asked Basira.

“Never underestimate how much I care for the tools I use, Detective. I wouldn’t miss my Archivist’s big day.”

“So they just let you out for this.”

Elias shrugged with false modesty. His chain jingled. “When I asked them nicely.”

“How did you even know he was dead?” interposed Melanie. “Basira, did you tell him about the—”

“She didn’t have to,” said Elias, raising his voice to cut Melanie’s off. “Nothing escapes my notice, and I like to keep an eye out for this sort of thing.”

“Well—it’s—good to see you.” Tim’s voice. Unconvincing, even then.

Jon steeled himself to hear his own voice stammer out, “Yes—y-yes!” but heard nothing except the hissing of the… tape. Yes, that was the wrong tape—the one from his birthday.

“Anyway. Somebody mentioned cake.” Elias jingled as he arranged his hands under his chin.

Tim scoffed. “They didn’t serve cake at my funeral.”

“I preferred going out for ice cream anyway,” pronounced Martin, his arms crossed and his nose in the air. Jon pushed himself up on shaking hands. Find Martin.

They had gone for ice cream at John O’Groats before the change, while living at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin had apologized on behalf of the kiosk for its measly selection—no rum and raisin. Jon pronounced a playful “Urgh,” assuming Martin had cited this flavor as a joke. “I think I’ll manage without that particular abomination.”

“Wait, what? Why did you order it at my birthday party then?”

Jon stood still with his ice cream cone, squinted into space, and blinked. “I did?”

“My first birthday in the Archives, yeah!”

“Huh. That’s… odd.” Martin placed a gentle hand on Jon’s back to remind him to resume walking. “I suppose I must have been—huh. Yes,” he mused, nodding slowly as his hypothesis came into focus between his eyes and the ground. “I must still have thought I was tired of all the good flavors at that point.”

He heard Martin scoff a few steps ahead of him. “What, and now you’re happy with plain old vanilla?” Then he heard arrhythmic footsteps thumping toward him from Martin’s direction; he looked up to find Martin reaching his napkin-draped free hand out toward Jon’s ice cream cone. “You’re dripping again,” he explained.

Jon mumbled thanks and shrugged a laugh. “I-I’ve, uh. Come back around on most of them.”

“Except rum and raisin?”

“No—I’ve come around on it, too, just, uh.” He tried to make the shape of a wheel with his ice-cream-cone-laden hand. It flicked drips of vanilla across his shirt. Martin came at him with the napkin again. “Thank you. I just disliked that one to start with.”

“…Right. Okay, so what revolution occurred in your life before the Archives that overturned all your opinions on ice cream flavors?”

So Jon had told Martin about that summer when his jaw kept subluxing. He’d used that word, assuming Martin was familiar with it already—incorrect, as he knew now. Presumably Martin had gathered from context that Jon meant he’d hurt his jaw, in some small-scale, no-big-deal way whose specifics he’d let slide as an unimportant detail. But then as the anecdote wore on he must have begun to feel the hole in his knowledge. And lo, at last Martin had invoked that dread specter the clarifying question.

“Okay but so your grandmother had no problem with you basically living off ice cream all summer?”

“Well, she did when I could chew. But not when it was that or tinned soup.”

“Ah—right. ‘Cause you hurt your… jaw, you said?” Jon nodded. “What happened exactly?”

“Oh. Uh. Happened? Nothing, just my—I was born, I guess. Just part of my genetic condition; I happened to get it especially bad in the jaw that year. I-it’s much better now, though,” he hastened to add when he noticed Martin’s frown.

“What genetic condition? You never told me you had one.”

“Didn’t I?”

At the time, the anger in Martin’s answering scoff had surprised him. “No, Jon, you never said.”

“Oh. Sorry? I—I mean, you’ve seen me with this for years—I just?—thought you knew.”

“Seen you with—what, the cane, you mean? I thought that was Prentiss!”

Jon glanced to the doorway to double-check that was where he’d left his cane.

“What? No,” he had mused. “Of course not. I’ve had this since….”

“But you never used it.”

“No—surely, I—”

“Not once before Prentiss.”

Even as he’d said the words, Jon’s memory of that time had returned to him and he’d known Martin was right. Before Prentiss attacked the Institute he’d brought his cane with him to work in the Archives every day, and every day left it folded up in his bag. All out of an obscure notion that if he’d used it before Elias and before his coworkers, they’d take it as a plea for mercy, an admission of weakness or incompetence. God, he was naïve back then. He’d used the cane often enough back in Research; why hadn’t he worried Tim and Sasha would find its new absence conspicuous? That they’d worry just as much about his refusal to use it? The whole thing seemed even more stupid, too, now that he knew Elias must have noticed the change. How it must have pleased him, to see his shiny new Archivist so obsessed with proving he was fit for the job.

“Yeah but,” Jon pursued, instead of voicing any of this, “Tim never—?”

Martin nodded and shrugged. “I don’t know; I figured Tim didn’t get them in the legs as much as you did. I didn’t see you guys after the attack, remember? Not ‘til you got out of quarantine.”

“Right, no, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry,” said Jon mechanically, already consumed with the question he asked next. “Martin—did you think it was the corkscrew?”

From Martin’s sigh Jon figured he’d been expecting this question. “Kinda? At first, yeah. Half for real, half just—you know, as a habit? Like, ‘Look, a way to blame yourself!’” He splayed out his hands, rolled his eyes.

“Yes—I do that too.” Jon barely got the words out above a whisper; he couldn’t not smile, but fought to keep it from showing teeth. A muscle under his chin spasmed with the effort.

“But then I noticed you switching sides with it a lot, so, yeah. I knew it couldn’t be just that.”

“Really?” He waited for Martin’s answering shrug. “You’re the first person who’s ever noticed that. Or at least commented on it.”

“Sorry?”

“No—it’s.”

This attempt to communicate a similar sentiment, Jon recalled as he reached for his shoes, hadn’t gone as well as the one a few days later (over unseen horror &c.). Beholding had at that moment presented him with the image of a fat, hunched woman in shorts. She shuffled forward a few steps in a queue at Boots, next to him, and shifted her weight so the cane in her right hand supported her nearer leg. He felt a strong impulse he knew wasn’t his own—one born partly of resentment, part exasperation, part concern—to tell the woman that was bad for her shoulder, that she should switch hands too. But knew if he tried she’d either pretend she hadn’t heard it, or tell him off for criticizing her. Jon didn’t know what she would say more specifically; the Eye didn’t do hypotheticals. It had given him no more than this single moment of preverbal intuition. After the change he could have sought out other conversations Martin had had with his mother, and they might have given him a pretty good idea. But he’d promised Martin not to look at things like that.

He managed to dislodge a finger while tying his shoe. The other shoe he’d pulled off without untying; in a fit of impatience he tried now to shove his foot into it as it was. No good—he got the shoe on, but it just made the other index finger, the one he’d hooked into the back of the shoe behind his heel for leverage, pop off to the side too. Jon was afraid to find out what shape it would end up in if he pulled his finger back out of the shoe like that, so he had to untie it after all, one-handed. Then carefully extract his finger. It sprung back into place as soon as he removed the offending pressure (namely, his heel), but he still whimpered and swore. The corners of his eyes pricked with indignation when he remembered he still had to pee.

In this case, for once, Beholding had told him the important part: that that was why Martin had noticed. Had he noticed Melanie, too, Jon wondered, when she got back from India? She would switch hands sometimes, too—but, of course, without switching legs. He wondered if that had picked at the same unacknowledged nerve of Martin’s that his mother’s habit had. It had bothered Jon, too, but in a different way. He’d resented it a little, but also felt humbled by it, the way he always did by others’ discomfort. Getting shot in the leg seemed so big? Like such an aberration. So uncontroversially important—probably because it was simple, legible. Georgie could convey its hugeness to him in three words. She got shot. Obviously there was more to the story than that; there were parts he could never��

Well, no. There was a part of it he felt he should say he could never understand: that she’d kept the cursed bullet because she wanted it. In fact he was pretty sure he did understand that. But he didn’t have the right to admit it, he didn’t think. And no reason to hope she would believe him if he did. The second he’d learnt the bullet was still in there, after all, he and Basira had rushed to dig it out. Surely, from her perspective that could only mean he didn’t and could never understand. Or maybe he just wanted her to see it that way—wanted her to get to keep that uncomplicated resentment of his ignorance. It made his perspective look stupid and ugly, sure. But the truth made it look self-absorbed and pitiful. The truth was that until Daisy insisted otherwise, he’d assumed only he could see his own corruption and assent to it: that the others must not have known what they were doing.

Then again, maybe even if Melanie knew that, she would see only that he had underestimated her. Maybe it didn’t matter how much she knew.

Melanie switched off which hand she held her white cane with now, too. But that was probably healthy? Jon knew no more than the average person about white-cane hygiene. He just remembered feeling the floor drop out of his stomach when they’d got coffee together during his time in hiding and he had seen her switch her original, silver cane from hand to hand. Part of him had wanted to scoff or rationalize it away. How much could the shot leg hurt, really, if she still noticed when her arms got tired? But another part of him shuddered at the thought one arm alone couldn’t compensate for the weight her leg refused to take—that she had to keep switching off when one arm got weak and shaky from supporting more weight than it should have to. It wasn’t that he hadn’t experienced pain or impairment on that scale. He had, though the thought of a single injury sufficing to cause it still made him feel cold inside. It was that he kept seeing proofs, all over, everywhere, that the parts of his life he’d only learnt to accept by assuming they were rare weren’t rare.

Leitner hadn’t made the evil books; he’d just noticed they were there. And then had his life ruined by their influence, like everyone who came across them. Jon had had no time and no right to deplore the holes Prentiss had left in him and Tim, because on the same damn day he learnt someone had shot the previous Archivist to death. Alright, so it was him, then, right? Him and Tim—just doomed, just preternaturally unlucky. Tim, handsome face half-eaten by worms, estranged (as Jon then assumed) from a brother who seemed so warm and accepting in that picture on his lock screen; Jon, saved from Mr. Spider only by his childhood bully, now fated to take the place of another murder victim—and also half-eaten by worms. But no; he and Tim had got off lightly. Look what had happened to Sasha the same fucking night. The very thing whose influence convinced him the world had it out for him? Had killed Sasha. Literally stolen her life. How many lives around him got stolen while he mourned his own?

“I want you to comment on it,” Jon had managed to clarify. But Martin had scoffed as he stood in the foyer of Daisy’s safehouse, hopping on one foot to pull off the other shoe:

“Yeah, well. You haven’t exactly led by example on that one.”

“How could I?”

He accepted Jon’s scarf and long-discarded jacket, hanging them up beside his own. “Gee, I don’t know—commenting on it yourself?”

“On… switching which side I used the cane on.”

“Don’t play dumb, Jon. On this ‘genetic condition’” (in a deep, posh voice, with a stodgy frown and fluttering eyelashes) “you’ve apparently had this entire time. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“I thought you knew, Martin! Why would I mention it in a childhood anecdote if I didn’t think...?”

“Well I didn’t know, okay? You never told me. You never tell anyone anything about what’s going on with you, you just—you just make everything into another heroic cross to bear.”

“That’s not—?” He wanted to tell Martin just how little that made him want to say about it. But he guessed Martin was really talking less about the EDS thing, more about how he’d spent their whole first year in the Archives pretending to dismiss the statements that scared him. How he’d sent Tim and Martin home when he’d found out about Sasha. How he’d stayed away from the Institute even after his name got cleared for Leitner’s murder. “What do you want to know.”

“Why you never—?” In a similar way, Martin seemed to reconsider his initial response. “Yeah, okay, right. Object-level stuff, yeah?” Jon nodded and wanly smiled. “Okay, so. What’s it called?”

After taking a minute to ditch his shoes, wash the sticky ice-cream residue off his hands, and drink some water, he’d sat down on the couch with Martin and told him its name, what it was, what it did. What does that mean, though, Martin kept asking, so he’d explained how it applied to the anecdote about his jaw. Martin asked why it meant he needed a cane.

“Be…cause all my joints are like that.”

“Yeah, but why does it help with that? What is the cane actually for, is what I’m asking.”

Jon hated being asked that question. “It—it means I don’t fall over when one of my joints stops working? A-and… also makes walking hurt less. I suppose.”

“So, when they’re working right, that’s when you don’t need it?”

“No—yes?—sort of. Now sometimes I just need it when it’s been too long since I had a statement. I get sort of. Weak.” Quickly Jon added, “But I don’t need it for stability so much since the coma.” He’d shown Martin how now, when he pulled out his finger, the Eye would just sort of erase that version of reality—how the dislocation wouldn’t snap back, but simply cease to exist. As if his body were a drawing on which the Beholding had corrected a mistake. He put his palms together behind his back, in the way he’d been told one couldn’t without subluxing both shoulders, and told Martin to watch how the hollows between his shoulder bones vanished. He opened his jaw ‘til it jarred to the side, and told Martin to listen for the static.

But Jon had never shown Martin how these things worked before the coma. Martin had no reference for this kind of thing; he understood only enough to find the sights unsettling. “That’s—no, that’s okay, I’ll”—he stuttered as Jon fumbled with his kneecap in search of a fourth example—“I-I get it. I’ll take your word for it.”

“I just thought.”

“No, I—? I don’t need you to prove it to me, Jon.” (The latter nodded, blushing, trying to smile.) “I get… I’m sorry. I guess I get why it’d feel easier not to say anything if? If you think it’s either that or have to convince people it’s a thing.”

Again Jon nodded. He suspected Martin wasn’t through talking yet. But Martin still wasn’t looking at him, eyes squeezed tight against Jon’s party tricks. So, to show he was listening, Jon said, “Yes. Er—thank you, Martin.”

“I just don’t like it when you hide things from me.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You could at least ask if I want to know about them, yeah?”

Even at the time, Jon had doubted this. If they’d had this conversation after the change, he might have pointed out to Martin that when you mention something the other person has no inkling of, you make them too curious to decline your offer of more information, even if afterward they’ll admit they wish you’d never told them.

“Or ask me if I even recognize what you’re talking about, the next time you start going on about some childhood anecdote where you incidentally had a dislocated jaw. Honestly, would it kill you to start with, ‘Hey, did I ever tell you about x’?”

“No, it wouldn’t. You’re right. I’ll try. What… kinds of things did you—? For the future, I mean. What kinds of things did you want to make sure I tell you about.”

Martin sighed, in that way he did when he thought Jon was going about something all wrong. But after a pause to think, he did ask, “About this, or in general?”

“Either—both—first one, then the other.”

“Okay. I guess… I want to know when you’re hurt, mostly. Like—I can’t believe I even have to say this—that’s kind of important, actually? How am I supposed to know how to behave around you if I never know whether you're secretly in pain or not?”

This seemed weird—both now and at the time. Jon figured he must be missing something. If Martin thought he only needed the cane because of Prentiss then, sure, that might have affected how he imagined Jon’s discomfort to himself, but? Wasn’t the cane itself an admission of pain? Why did Martin think he owed him more than that—that he had owed him more than that at the time, no less? Did he not realize how fucking private that was? What a surrender of privacy the cane represented?

But, no, he reminded himself now; nondisabled people don’t realize that, unless you tell them about it. Repeatedly. Over and over. It only seems obvious to you because you lived it already.

“Er.” At the time he’d just shown Martin his teeth, with the points of his left-side canines joined. Nominally a smile, but more like a show of hiding the grimace beneath than an actual attempt to hide it. “That’s harder than you might think? Technically I’m always….”

“Oh.”

“Sorr—”

“—What do you mean, ‘technically’?”

“I’m—not always aware of it?” He disliked that phrase, in pain—how it implied a discrete and exclusive state. One could not be in Paris and at the same time in London; similarly, most people seemed to assume one could not be in pain and also in a good mood. In raptures. In a transport of laughter. That when one admits to being in pain, one implies that’s the most important thing they’re conscious of.

“Well that doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, I know—‘if a tree falls down in a forest’—blah blah blah.” With a gentle smile to acknowledge he’d picked up this mode of speech from Martin. He turned his wrist in circles so it clicked like an old film reel. “Philosophically speaking, if you’re not aware of pain, you can’t be in it. Maybe ‘technically’ isn’t the right word.”

“Oh yeah ‘cause that’s the angle I want to know about this from.”

Jon sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. I just mean, it doesn’t always matter to me.”

“Well it matters to me,” Martin scoffed.

“Yeah—I’m getting that. Is there any way I can explain this that you won’t jump down my throat for?”

Martin sighed, groaned, pulled at his hair a little but made himself stop. (He doesn’t pull it out, Jon knows—he just likes having something to grab onto during awkward conversations. Usually emerges from them looking like a cartoon scientist.) “Okay, yeah,” said Martin. “I get it. I’m sorry too.”

“I mean—when you get a paper cut, that hurts, technically, right?”

“Well yeah, a little, but that’s not the kind of—”

“But just because you notice that hurt doesn’t mean?” He paused to rearrange his words. “You’re not going to remember it later unless someone asks why you’ve got blood on your sleeve.”

“Y—eah. Sure.”

“Is that…?”

“When you’re suffering, then. I want you to tell me that. And—whenever something weird happens? Like, before it stops being weird and you talk to me like I’m stupid for not already knowing about it.”

“What if”—this far into his question, Jon worried it might come off as a smart-alecky, devil’s-advocate thing. So he paused, pretending he needed time to formulate its words. “What if I haven’t decided yet whether it’s weird or not.”

“That in itself is pretty weird, Jon.”

“Fair enough.”

“I want to be part of that conversation. I want you to trust me enough to bounce ideas off me! It’s not like—? I mean why wouldn’t you do that?”

Jon had shrugged and grimaced, hands in his trouser pockets. “Not to worry you?” he’d suggested. But as he bit his lip and shimmied down from the bed Jon knew now that that was the sanitized version—and probably, if you’d asked him a day before or afterward, his past self would have known that too. Most things you told Martin, he’d either ignore them completely or latch onto them, refuse to let them go, and interpret everything else you said in the light they cast. Jon had learnt not to raise any given topic with him until he was sure he wanted to risk its becoming a long, painful discussion. This was part of why he hadn’t kept his promise, he told himself as he turned their interim bedroom’s doorknob. Why he’d said so little about anything weird that had happened to him at Upton House.

“Martin?”

“Oh hey, Jon—you’re awake.” Martin glanced in his vague direction but stayed bent over his work, so Jon could not meet his eyes.

“You found the screwdriver.”

“Yeah! And a screw that matches better, see?” He fished the first one they'd found out of his pocket and held it up next to the door for comparison. Jon supposed they looked a little different—bright yellowy gold vs. a darker gold. “They were in the library, of all places. There’s a little box full of ‘em that he keeps right next to his reading glasses, apparently. Guess he must break them a lot. How are yours, by the way? Any bits feel loose?”

Dutifully, trying to keep his dazed smile to himself, Jon pulled off his glasses. Folded and unfolded each arm, jiggled the little nose pieces. He shook his head. “Don’t think so. You can have a look yourself though, if you like.”

“Remind me later. Should’ve brought the whole box, probably,” Martin said, voice strained as he twisted the screw that last little bit. “There!” His open mouth broadened into a smile. “Time to see if it worked. You wanna do the honors?”

Jon shook his head, breathed a laugh through his nose. “You should do it. You’re the reason it’s fixed.”

“I mean, yeah,” shrugged Martin as his hand closed round the doorknob, “but I’m also the reason it broke.” It opened with a click. “Ha-ha! Success! Statements—our own clothes—our own bed! Er. Ish.”

Something tugged in Jon’s chest; he’d forgot the statements were why Martin thought this quest so urgent. He lingered at the side of the bed while Martin rummaged in his backpack, remembering for once to toe his first shoe off while standing.

“Man. Looks sorta underwhelming now, after the other room, huh?”

“Least our wallpaper’s better.”

“Tsshhyeah, and our view.”

Jon didn’t turn around, but surmised Martin must be looking out at that tree he liked. “Is it four already?”

“Uhh—nearly, yeah. You were out for a while; took me ages to find that damn thing. Here you go,” announced Martin as he slapped a zip-loc bag full of statement down on the bed.

(“So they won’t get water damage,” he had answered a few days ago, when Jon asked him why he’d individually wrapped each statement like snacks in a bagged lunch. “What? It’s not like we have to worry about landfills anymore. If I put them all in the same bag, you’d take one out and not be able to get it back in.”)

“What happened to my jacket, by the way? And yours?”

“Uhhh.”

“Right, okay,” Martin laughed; “I’ll go get them before I forget. I’ll put this away too, I guess” (meaning the screwdriver still in his hand). “Don’t wait for me, yeah? I don’t mind missing the trailers.”

Jon smiled. “Sure.”

As Martin hurried off, Jon sat down to untie and pull off his other shoe, threaded the lace back through the final eyelet from which it’d come loose, picked up the first shoe and untied that one, then stood up and set them by the door next to his cane. Both hips and all ten fingers behaved themselves throughout. As he walked by the vanity he grabbed the coins he’d removed to do laundry the other day and stuck them back in his trouser pocket. Useless, of course, but he’d missed having something to fidget with. He squatted down and peered under the vanity for the hair tie he’d dropped, for the fifth or sixth time since he’d misplaced it. Didn’t find it. That was fine; he had another one around his wrist. His knees felt weak, so instead of standing back up he crab-walked to the foot of the bed and sat down with his back against it. Straightened his legs out before him on the floor. Then he dug the coins from his pocket and counted them. Yup—still 74p.

Danika! Not Daniela—Danika Gelsthorpe. God, he would never forget one of their names out there. Never underestimate how much I care for the

“I'm back. What’s down there? Did you find the screw?” asked Martin as he hung their jackets up behind the door.

Jon shook his head. “Forgot about it. I was looking for that hair tie.”

“Well you’re on your own there; I’m done finding things today. The screw can wait,” Martin laughed—“he’s got a whole bag inside that box in the library. Do you need a hand getting up?”

He let Martin help him. Both knees cracked; the world’s edges went dark for a second. “Thank you,” he said, and it came out more peremptory than he’d meant it.

“Statement time?”

“Right. You don’t mind? I can wait ’til we’ve both had a rest, if you don’t want to be in the room while I.”

“No, I’m alright; I’ll stay here.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you hated statements.”

Martin shrugged. “Not these ones so much, now that. Heh—they’re almost nostalgic, if I’m honest. ‘Can it be real? I think I’ve seen a monster!’”

“They are a bit,” agreed Jon, looking down at the plastic-sleeved statement and making himself smile.

“Go on. Seeing you feel better will make me feel better too.”

That made it a bit easier to motivate himself, Jon supposed. From the moment he’d lain down on the bed he’d felt like he was floating on gentle waves—like if he let himself listen to them he could fall asleep in seconds. But that wouldn’t make Martin feel better. And no guarantee it would him, either, once he woke up again. He rearranged the pillows behind himself so he’d have to sit up a little; this might help keep him awake, and it meant he could rest his elbows on the bed while he held up the statement, rather than having to lift them up before his eyes. It made his neck sore, a bit, this angle, but that was fine. That might help keep him awake, too.

He sighed, readying himself for speech. Then heard a click, and felt a familiar buzz and weight against his stomach. The tape recorder had manifested inside his hoodie’s kangaroo pocket.

“Statement of Miranda Lautz, regarding, er… a botched home-repair job. Heh. Seems appropriate. Original statement given March twenty-sixth, 2004. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.”

[Image ID: A digital painting of Jon and Martin on an old-fashioned canopy bed with white sheets and orange drapes. Jon sits on the near side of the bed, reading a paper statement. He frowns slightly, looking down at the statement in his hands; he wears round glasses perched low on his nose. He’s a thin man, with medium brown skin dotted by scars left from the worms, and another scar on his neck from Daisy's knife. His hair is long and curly, gray and white hairs among the black. Jon sits supported by pillows—several big, white, lace-trimmed ones behind his back, and one under his knees. His right leg is slightly crossed over his left ankle, on which a clean white bandage peeks out beneath his cuffed, dark green trousers. He wears an oversized red hoodie and red-toed brown socks. Sat on the far side of the bed, next to Jon but facing away from both him and the viewer, is Martin—a tall and fat white man with short, curly, reddish brown hair and a short beard. He has glasses and is wearing a dark blue jumper and gray-brown trousers. Past the bed on Martin’s side, the bedroom door hangs ajar; in this light, it and the wall glow bluish green. On the near side, though, the light grows warmer, the orange canopy behind Jon casting pink and brown tints onto the white pillows and sheets. End ID.]

It seemed to be a Corruption statement, or maybe the Spiral. Possibly the Buried? A leak in Ms. Lautz’s roof caused a pill-shaped bulge to appear in her kitchen ceiling, about the size of a bread loaf. Water burst from it like pus from an abscess (as she described it. Nothing else Fleshy though, so far). Ms. Lautz repaired the hole in her ceiling, but every morning a new one reappeared somewhere else. Sometimes they appeared bulging and pill-shaped like the first one; other times she found them already burst, covering the room in water shot through with dark specks like coffee grounds.

Jon wished he’d refilled his empty water glass before starting to record. His mouth was so dry that every time he pronounced an L his tongue stuck to its roof. At this point he’d welcome a hole to burst in it and flood his mouth with water. Then again, he did still have to pee.

Eventually she and her spouse hired someone to find out what was wrong with the roof. She described hearing boots tramping around up there for half a day while they checked out all the spots where she and Alex had reported leaks. The inside of Jon’s trouser leg pulled at the bandage on his shin, making it itch. The repair men told Ms. Lautz it’d be safer and barely any more expensive to replace the whole thing. The ring and little fingers of Jon’s left hand were starting to go numb from having that elbow too long pressed against the bed. Miranda and Alex thanked the roof people and sent them off, saying they’d think it over.

He began to regret crossing his legs this way. He’d balanced his right heel in the hollow between his left foot’s ankle and instep, and in the time since he’d arranged them that way gravity had slowly pushed his foot more and more to the side, widening that gap. By this time he was sure it was hyperextended—possibly subluxed? It hurt already, and, he knew, would hurt more when he tried to move it. This rather ruined his fantasy of heading straight for the toilet when he finished reading.

Martin was right; these old statements seemed positively tame, now. He knew he owed it to Ms. Lautz to engage with her fate, but?

No. No buts. Whatever hell she lived in now, it looked just like the one she was about to describe for him, only worse. You can’t even pretend you’re sorry she’s living out her worst fear if you stop in the middle of reading that fear’s origin story. Never underestimate how much I

Once the repair men had left, Miranda Lautz wandered into her kitchen for lunch. She found her ceiling bulging halfway to the floor, with the impression of a face and two twisted arms at its center. Like someone had fallen through her roof, head first. Jon’s stiff neck twinged in sympathy. Miranda screamed and strode to the other side of the house in search of beer, figuring she'd find better answers at the bottom of a bottle than in her own head. When she got back to the kitchen with them, the beer bottles didn’t know what to do either, but said—

“God damn it. Not ‘ales’—‘Alex’. Obviously.”

He let the statement’s pages flop over the back of his hand, let his head tip backward until the top of it bumped against headboard and his eyes faced the ceiling. That settled it, then, didn’t it. If he had the Ceaseless Watcher looking through his eyes, he wouldn’t make a mistake like that—and he certainly couldn’t change position while recording. On top of his more substantial regrets, Jon had spent their whole odyssey before they came to Upton House ruing that he’d sat at the dining-room table to read Magnus’s statement, rather than on the couch or the bed. The chairs at that table had plain, flat wood seats—no cushion, no contouring for the shape of an arse. When he opened the door to the changed world, the cataclysm had preserved his bodily sensations at that moment like a mosquito in amber. He’d had a sore tailbone and pins and needles down his legs for untold eons. Right up until he and Martin crossed from the Necropolis onto the grounds protected by Salesa’s camera, where his tailbone faded out of awareness and his head filled up with cotton.

“Ohhh. ‘Alex’. Okay, that makes a lot more sense,” laughed Martin meanwhile. Jon could feel Martin’s shoulder bouncing against his. “She must’ve written it in cursive, huh.”

“I can’t do this right now, Martin.”

“Oh—okay, yeah. You rest; I’ll finish it for you.”

Jon closed his eyes and let air gush out from his nostrils. But you hate the statements, he knew he should say. Wouldn’t this make it easier, though? To let Martin have out this last bit of denial first?

The tape recorder in his pocket still hissed, still warmed and weighted down his stomach like a meal.

“Thank you,” he said.

The operator on the phone said she and Alex should wait for the ambulance to arrive, rather than try to free the man in the ceiling by themselves. Jon turned his neck back and forth, hoping Martin couldn’t hear its joints’ snap/crackle/pop. He picked his elbow up off the bed and shook out his hand. But when the paramedics cut the ceiling open, only a torrent of water gushed into their kitchen—water flecked with a great deal of what looked like coffee grounds. A day or two later the roof people called, to ask if they’d decided whether to have the roof repaired or replaced. They assured her none of their employees had gone missing. At the time of writing, Miranda and Alex still hadn’t decided what to do about the roof. A week ago, they’d found a squirrel-shaped bulge in their bedroom ceiling; they’d packed their bags and come to stay with Alex’s sister in London.

“Right! That wasn’t so bad.” Martin set the statement down and stretched his arms over his head. “Huh.”

“Hm?”

“Oh, I don’t know, just—it’s been a while. Thought it might feel, I don’t know, worse than that? Or better, I guess, since the Eye’s so ‘fond’ of me now.”

“I don’t think they work here.”

“What?”

“The statements. The Eye can’t see their fear.”

“Oh.” Jon could feel Martin deflating. He let himself avalanche over to fill the space. “You don’t feel better, do you.”

“No.”

“Maybe it’s just—slower here, like it’s taking a while to load or something. Remember how long the tape recorder took to come on last time? It was like—you were like— ‘“Statement of Blankety Blank, regarding an encounter with”—Oh, right,’ click.”

That was true. The tapes had known Salesa would give a statement before it happened, but with these paper ones they’d seemed slow on the uptake. Martin had also sworn the recorder that manifested to tape Mr. Andrade’s statement was a different machine than the one Salesa’d spotted that first morning. Jon wondered which machine the one in his pocket was.

Not relevant, he decided. He shook his head in his palm, stroking the lids of his closed eyes. “No—if they worked here I wouldn’t be able to stop in the middle of one.” As soon as he said it he winced, bracing himself for argument.

After the change he remembered wailing to Martin about how he couldn’t stop reading Magnus’s statement—how its words had possessed his whole body, forced him to do the worst thing any person ever had, and forced him to like it, to feel Magnus’s triumph as they both opened the door. Martin had pressed Jon’s face into his clavicle, rubbed his nose in the scent of Daisy’s laundry soap, covered the back of Jon’s head with his hands. Tried to interpose what he must then have still called the real world between Jon and what he could see outside. He’d said over and over, I know, and We‘ll be okay. Jon had known that meant he wasn’t listening, and yet still hadn’t been prepared for the argument they had later, when he mentioned in sobriety the same things he’d wailed back then.

“Hang on”—Martin had pleaded—“no, that can’t be true. I’ve been interrupted in the middle of a statement loads of times—and I know you have too.”

“By outside forces, yes, but you can’t decide to stop reading one. Believe me, Martin, I wouldn’t have—”

“Tim did.”

“No, he didn’t—”

“Yes he did! He was gonna do one and then Melanie—”

“No, Martin, I’ve heard the tape you’re talking about. Tim introduced the statement but didn’t actually start—”

“He did so! He read the first bit, and then stopped. ‘My parents never let me have a night light. I was—’”

“‘Always afraid, but they were just’....” Behind his own eyes he’d felt the Eye shudder and throb with gratitude. Just that sort of stubborn, it had seemed to sing, in a bizarre combination of his own voice with Jonah’s with Melanie’s, which doubled down when I screamed or cried about something, instead of actually listening.

“Yeah,” said Martin, forehead wrinkling. “And then he said, ‘This is stupid,’ and stopped.”

“You’re right.”

Jon still had no satisfying answer to that one, and cursed himself for having opened that can of worms back up again. It had been Tim’s first-ever statement, he reminded himself, and maybe Tim had never intended to get even that far. Maybe he’d been waiting for someone to interrupt him, as Melanie eventually did. Even out there, the Eye couldn’t really show him things like that. He could find out what Tim had said—could look it up, as it were—and what he’d thought, but motivation was a bit too murky, multilayered, complicated. It wasn’t real telepathy? The vicarious emotions the Eye gave him access to worked in broad strokes, generalities—just like common or garden empathy. Sure, he could imagine other people’s points of view more vividly, now that he could see through their eyes. But he still had to imagine them to life, based on the clues around him and what emotions those clues stirred in him. It didn’t work well for situations like this; he could hear Melanie’s footsteps and feel Tim’s reluctance to read a statement, but that was it. Enough to concoct plausible explanations; not enough to pick out the truth from a list of them. Plausibilities were too much like hypotheticals.

In the timelessness since that argument with Martin, though, Jon had also wondered whether it mattered if Tim had read the statement before recording it. He didn’t have footage, as it were, of Tim doing so; either the Eye had more copies of the statement’s events than it needed already and so had deleted that one from storage, or, conversely, perhaps it could no longer see versions of it that relied too heavily on the pages Mr. Hatendi had written it on, since Martin had burned those. But Tim’s summary, before he started reading. Blanket, monster, dead friend. It was bad, sure (like the assistants’ summaries always were, a ghost of past Jon interposed). But it sounded like the summary of a man who’d read it with his mind on other things. Inevitable and gruesome end. How he tried to hide; he couldn’t. Not at all like that of someone skimming it for the first time as he spoke. He did rifle through the papers though? So Jon couldn’t be sure. The suspicion ate at his mind, especially here. Could he have kept the world from ending just by—reading Magnus’s statement, before he went to record it? The way he used to way back at the start, before he trusted himself to speak the words perfectly on the first try? You didn’t mean to record it, did you? No, I’m sure you told Melanie and Basira you were just going to

“Guess that makes sense,” Martin said now. “So, you’re still feeling…?”

“Not great?”

“Yeah.”

“I… I feel human, here.”

“Oh wow. That’s—”

Jon told himself to put the hope in Martin’s voice to bed as soon as possible. “I know I’m not—not fully.” He allowed a smile to twitch the corners of his lips, flared his nostrils around an exhale that almost passed as a laugh. “Most humans don’t spontaneously summon tape recorders. Or sleep with their eyes open.”

“Yeah, but still, you don’t think maybe—?”

Again Jon hastened to cut Martin off. “A-and even if I was, it’s. I know that should be a good thing? But—”

At this point Martin interposed, “Should be, yeah! You don’t think it might mean you could—I don’t know, go back to normal? If we stayed here for a while?”

“Maybe? I-I might stop craving the Eye so much, but we’d still have to go back out there eventually, to face Elias, and. To be honest with you, Martin?” He huffed a laugh out, bitterly. “My ‘normal’ wasn’t exactly...”

“Right.” Martin sighed. “So you mean you feel like you used to, as a human. Which was…”

“Not great.”

“Right.”

“I haven’t been very well, here.” Jon shrugged for the excuse to duck his head. He could feel himself blushing, the heat spilling from his face all down both arms. Good thing the tape recorder in his pocket had gone cold.

Next to him, Martin puffed air out of his cheeks. “Yeah, I know.”

“I’m dizzy and confused without the Eye, and it—it can’t fix me here? When I.” He drew in breath, lifted his heel off his ankle and set that leg to the side, letting its foot roll into Martin’s shin. Bit his lip and scrunched his nose in preparation. Flexed the other foot’s toes, trying to isolate the lever in his ankle that would—there. Clunk. Then a noisy exhale: “Jyyrrggh. When that happens,” he choked out, voice strained by both pain and nerves. “It’s like before I became an avatar. I have to fix it myself, and it doesn’t just.” Magically stop hurting, he hoped went without saying; already he could hear Martin sucking air through his teeth. It made Jon’s cheeks itch. “Shouldn’t have let myself get used to a higher standard, I suppose.”

“What? No—of course you should have. Did you think I was gonna say that?”

“No, of course not; I just meant—”

“You deserve to feel healthy, Jon.”

“Do I? Health is clumsy, it’s callous, it, it lets terrible things happen because they don’t feel real—it can’t imagine them properly, can’t understand what they mean….”

“Okay, first of all, ouch.” Jon snarled a laugh at that, without knowing whether Martin meant it as a joke. “Second of all, that is not why you—why the world ended, okay? Especially, ‘cause, you weren’t ‘healthy’ then. You read Elias’s bloody statement because you were starving, remember?”

“Hmrph,” pronounced Jon, to concede he was listening without either confirming or denying the point.

“And thirdly, you’re not ‘callous’ out there? You don’t”—a scoff interrupted his words. “You don’t ‘let things happen because they don’t feel real’—that’s sure not how I remember it. Okay? I remember you crying for—god, I don’t know, days, maybe? Weeks?—about how you could feel everything, and couldn’t stop any of it. That’s the thing we’re hiding from here, Jon, so if you don’t actually feel any healthier here then what even is the point?”

In a voice embarrassment made small Jon managed, “I mean? I’m still kind of having fun.”

“Really? You don’t seem like it—”

“Not today, maybe—”

“Right, yeah, no; spending all day trying to fix a doorknob isn’t exactly—”

“But I don’t want to leave yet. I should still have a few good days left before the distance from the Eye gets too….”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” For a few seconds he tried to think of something better to say, then gave up and told the truth, though in a jocular voice to hide his self-consciousness. “Always was the person who got ill on holiday.”

“Oh, god, of course you were—”

Voice growing higher in pitch, Jon pleaded, “It didn’t usually stop me from enjoying it?”

“What about America?” laughed Martin. “Did you still enjoy that one?”

“Of course not—I got kidnapped.”

“I mean, yeah, but you were pretty used to that too by then, right?”

“God.” Jon sniffed, crunchily, reeling back in the snot he’d laughed out. “Besides. That was a business engagement.”

Martin acknowledged this comment with a quick Psh, as he turned himself around on the bed to face Jon a little more. “Can I trust you to”—he stopped.

“Yes.”

“No, let me—that wasn’t fair; I can’t ask you that yet.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Martin; I didn’t—”

“Of me, I meant, it wasn’t fair.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I’ve been ignoring your distress all week because I wanted it not to matter.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘distress,’” pointed out Jon. “Plus, I have been sort of, er. Secretive, about it.”

The exasperation in Martin’s sigh was probably meant for him, not for Jon, the latter reminded himself. “Yeah, but you’re not subtle. I can tell when you’re hiding something. It wasn’t exactly a big leap to figure out what. But I told myself it was temporary, and that you were acting like.”

Jon laughed preemptively. “Yes?”

“Like a little kid in line for a theme-park ride.” Again Jon laughed—less at the comparison itself than at how much Martin winced to hear himself say it. “I’m sorry. I should’ve taken you more seriously.”

“And I should have told you what was going on with me.”

“Yup,” concurred Martin at once.

“I know you hate it when I keep things from you.”

“I do—I hate it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry too.” Martin waved this away like a fly. “I just—you said you think we’ve got a few more days, before it gets too much or whatever.”

“Yes.”

“Can I trust you to tell me when we need to leave?”

Jon tried not to answer too quickly, knowing vaguely that that might sound insincere. “Yes,” he said again, after pausing for a second. “You can trust me.”

“Okay? Don’t try to spare my feelings, or anything like that. Like—don’t just go, ‘Oh, well, he’s having a good time. That’s fine; I don’t have to.’ Yeah? ‘Cause I won’t have a good time if I’m worried you’re secretly suffering.”

This Jon did know; it sent a thrill of recognition down his spine, as he remembered their first day’s ping-pong adventure. “Right. I’ll do my suffering as publicly as possible.”

“Uh huh.” Martin’s arm tightened around Jon’s shoulder. “Just don’t worry about disappointing me? I mean, sure, I like it here, with the whole ‘not being an evil wasteland’ thing, but I’d much rather be out there with you happy than with you than spend one more minute in paradise with her.”

With a smile, Jon replied, “That might just be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Yeah, yeah. Come on. We’ve got a job to do.”

“I suppose we do.”

As they walked on out of the range of Salesa’s camera, Jon glanced backward one more time and thought, Yes, that makes sense—but couldn’t quite recall what he had expected to see. It was like when you look at a clock, and tick Check the time off your mental to-do list, then realize you never internalized what time it was. “Pity,” he mused.

“What?”

“It’s, er, going away. That peace, the safety, the memory of ignorance.”

“That’s… Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Do you remember any of it? W-What Salesa said? Annabelle?”

“Some, I think. It’s, uh… do you mind filling me in?”

“Wait, you need me to tell you something for once?”

“I guess so. It’s, er… it’s gone. Like a dream. What was it like?”

After a pause Martin said, “Nice. It was… it was really nice.”

“Even though Annabelle was there?”

“I mean, yeah, but she didn’t do anything,” shrugged Martin. “Except cook for us. That was weird.”

“She cooked?” Jon watched Martin nod and smile around a wince. “And we let her do that? I let her do that?”

With a scoff Martin answered, “Under duress, yeah.”

“Huh.” Jon twirled his cane in circles, wondering why he’d thought he would need it. “Well, she didn’t poison us, apparently.”

“Nope. And believe me, we had that conversation plenty of times already. Er—maybe just let me put that away for you before you take somebody’s eye out, yeah?”

Jon nodded, folded his cane and handed it to Martin, then made himself laugh. “Was I… a bit neurotic about it.”

“About Annabelle?” Again Jon nodded. “Oh, we both were. We kept switching sides—one day I’d be like, ‘But she’s got four arms, Jon!’ and the next you’d be like—”

“She had four arms?”

“Yup. And six eyes. But your powers didn’t work there, so we thought maybe hers didn’t either? Never did find out for sure. God—you remember the day we got locked out of our room?”

“Er….”

“So that’s a no, then.”

“Sorry.”

Martin’s lips billowed in a sigh. “No, don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”

“So… what happened? Who locked us out? Was it Annabelle?”

“No, no, no one locked us out. It was just me, I uh—I sorta broke the doorknob? God, it was awful. Went to open it and the whole thing just came off in my hand, like” (he made the motion of turning a doorknob in empty air, and imitated the sound Jon figured it must have made coming off) “krrruk-krr.” Jon fondly laughed; he could imagine Martin’s horror at breaking something in a historic mansion. “It was just one screw that came loose, though, so you’d think, easy fix, right? Except the bloody screwdriver took forever to find. Turns out Salesa kept them in the library, of all places.”

“S-sorry—what does this have to do with Annabelle?”

“Oh—nothing ultimately, just.” Martin grimaced at his own recollection. “God, we had this whole argument over whether to ask her about it, and when I finally did can you guess what she told us?”

“What?” managed Jon; his throat felt small and weak all of a sudden.

Martin put a finger to his chin, and blinked his eyes out of sync. “‘Perhaps he keeps them next to something that breaks a lot,’” he recited, with an inane, self-congratulating smile. For a fraction of a second Jon could recognize it as Annabelle’s I’ve-just-told-a-riddle expression. But the memory faded and he could picture her face only as he’d seen it in pictures before the change.

“O…kay. And was that… true?”

“I mean, yeah, technically. Useless, though. And after we spent so long agonizing over whether it was safe to ask her….”

Jon allowed himself a cynical laugh. “Are you sure she didn’t orchestrate the whole thing?”

“Ugh—no, it wasn’t her. We had this conversation at the time. You made me check for cobwebs and everything.”

“And you… didn’t find any?”

“Of course not, Jon; it was a doorway.”

“Right. Doorway, yes.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling better? You still seem a bit….”

“No, I’m—I feel fine, I just can’t seem to. Retain anything concrete about… where did you say it was? Upton House? God that’s strange, that it would just be….”

Part of Jon felt tempted to deplore it as a waste of space, on the apocalypse’s part. These stretches of empty land were one thing, but a mansion? Couldn’t they at least get a Spiral domain out of it?

“I mean, not really. He told us all about it, remember? With the magic camera?”

“Right, yes,” Jon agreed.

“Well, we got it all on tape, if you want to listen to it later.”

“Yes, that sounds—all of it?”

“Well not the whole week or anything. It just came on whenever it thought it was important, I guess.”

“So not the part about the doorway.”

“Nope.”

“Pity.”

[bumbershots]

Mistletoe & Wine

A/N: Hello this is my collaboration for @goldenbluesuit very well put together Christmas song fic challenge. It’s my first time participating and my first time posting my writing here as well (I’m sort of new, I have no friends) so, I’m kind of nervous and English is not my first language (sorry for any mistakes) thanks to my boyfriend for being a Brit so he could help me with the “slang” and for reading this about fifteen times and listened to Mistletoe and Wine by Cliff Richard throughout the entire week with me lol. Thanks for  taking the time to read this :) If you want to befriend a twenty six year old Aries, or just send me an ask click here.

Word count: 2.8k

Summary: Harry meets a woman that is not here to stay, he will need to decide if that will keep him from making the most of the very few days they have together or dread the imminent separation.

It was raining when her flight landed in London. The kind of rain that doesn't pour heavily, instead it settles over the city for days. And although she can't afford to take a cab, she steps out of the airport just to stare at the endless grey of the sky and wrap herself in her coat because of how cold it was. After a few more minutes she goes back inside to find the way to get out of there on the tube, she knew it to be possible after all the research she's been doing since the age of twelve on the internet.

Soon enough, the man she approached to ask for help, confirms that a train is leaving in a few minutes and she can easily get off at Hammersmith, he even helps her buy the ticket and recommends to get an oyster card if she is going to use London's Underground often. But she doesn't know, she relishes in the element of surprise that is surrounding her life for the next 3 weeks. It excites her to an unfamiliar degree to see people come and go into the carriage, it almost makes her miss her stop, but she manages to get off just in time, her hands clutching the heavy suitcase that contains all her nicest and warmest clothes. She follows the crowd up the stairs and out of the station, the busy street revealed before her is straight out of those books she restlessly studied at school, people wearing trench coats and long scarfs hurry in hopes to avoid the rain and then a red double-decker bus passes by. The cherry on top.

The spontaneous decision to spend Christmas in England instead of her home country was made months ago, on the night of her birthday, although her closest friends would say that she's been dreaming of it since she read Harry Potter. No one gave her a hard time for it, in fact, almost all her friends and family members went to the airport to wish her a safe trip. Her grandmother was cheeky enough to slip a twenty pound note when hugging her goodbye.

Every day of the first week went by in a blur, visiting museums, galleries and walking around the city, getting soaked in its beauty and the endless rain. By the beginning of the second week, a bit tired of the scarce options from the hotel's breakfast, she ventured out, burying half of her face in the scarf she bought the day before at Primark, her feet guiding her almost out of instinct to the little cafe at the end of Hercules road. The place is warm and the menu seems to have it all for a very fair price. After a couple of minutes the Full English wins, she iterates the order to the woman behind the counter and adds a cup of tea handing over the money.

"Get a seat love, I'll bring it over." The elder lady says making the girl smile and thank her before scampering across the room to sit by the window at the four seat table tucked in the corner.

It doesn't take long for her food to arrive and for her to dig in, feeling kind of full almost at the end, she slows down then, a trick her father passed down on her. Let it settle in for a few minutes before going back at it. Works every time. She gets lost on the daily life happening before her eyes, the people walking by, some in a rush maybe to get to work, others in a rush to get to the shops early and buy presents. She could easily tell the difference between one and other. The elderly couple walking to the market, slower than anybody else, arms linked and without a care in the world. A girl around her age doing "the walk of shame" elicited a smirk on her lips. Good for her.

"Do you mind if I take a seat?" She almost missed the question by the stranger standing there. "There's no empty seats elsewhere I'm afraid, I won't bother you." He was right, in the span of thirty minutes the place was full to the brim with families, the three seats at her table the only ones free so, she nodded and even managed to smile in a friendly way. Unfortunately for her, the green eyed stranger did the same, a sweet dimple on his left cheek more prominent than on the right one and she had to eat a spoonful of beans in an attempt to hide her blush.

Two weeks in the country, almost two weeks, and the best looking man on it decides to show up on a greasy spoon cafe when she's eating what's left of her sausages and beans. His food is delivered by the same lady from earlier, of course it is something that looks healthy. The sudden need to fly away from the place pops in her head, it's not a bad one, he doesn't even know her name. She wants to know his. She remembers how he said he wouldn't bother her, it's almost disappointing, she wants to be bothered.

The situation seems to be straight out of a rom-com, she is cutting the banger in little pieces, as if the formula to spark conversation with the mystery guy keeping her company is hidden in them. But after five minutes she sighs quietly, knowing that her own shyness won't let her even glance at him again. She will have to do her best to remember him and observe from the corner of her eye until the last piece of minced pork is consumed by her. And maybe she will gush about how gorgeous he was with her friends once she is back home, describing his shiny emerald eyes for them, sharing a sigh when she recalls how dreamy his accent was and squeal upon the memory of his raspy voice.

Ten minutes later her last bite is chewed and swallowed, the cup is empty as well. She's about to grab her coat draped on the back of her chair. "I'm going to have to break my non-disturbing you promise but... um, that's a sick cardigan." His voice doesn't sound confident as before, he even clears his throat, but his eyes never leave hers.

"Thanks, my grandma knitted it for me." She forgets about her coat and straightens out a bit for him to appreciate the colourful patchwork and extends her left arm to show the over-sized sleeve. Her companion hums in approval. "She hates it."

"What?" His green eyes widening in disbelief and she just shrugs.

"As soon as I put it on she went on and on about how horrible it was, the wrong proportions and how it all seemed better off in her mind." They share a giggle and don't notice that their empty plates have been taken away and the place is no longer swamped by people. "But I like it, I like it a lot, does a good job keeping me warm." And makes her look lovely, he thinks but doesn't say.

Instead he licks his lips before speaking again. "I'm Harry." He offers his left hand and she quickly eyes the cross tattoo.

"I'm a tourist." She says before adding her real name, earning a deep chuckle from him before letting go of his hand.

The set of circumstances in which she met Harry is dreamy for sure, but something about him made the set of affairs so real. When he asked about the places where she'd been the scoff afterwards and the roll of his eyes made her ask what was wrong about them. But he didn't answer, with a shake of his head and a deep sigh he asked for her phone number. The promise to show her the real London lingered in the air as they parted ways outside of the corner cafe.

Her heart raced at the very sight of him outside Borough Market the following morning. "Morning love, alright?" he greeted her before hugging her tight and quick. It was so genuine it made her wonder if she really just met him the day before. "Do you like doughnuts?"

"Who doesn't?" she says with that grin he worries will wait for him in his dreams.

"Wisest words ever spoken." Harry's arm is wrapped around her shoulders, guiding her on their quest inside the huge market.

The early morning is spent too soon, Harry guides her to talk to the stall owners, they are so passionate about their produce, most of them willing when possible to give them a sample. The highlight is the stop at Bread Ahead, they buy more doughnuts than what she thinks they need. They eat them all while sharing a Monmouth coffee. Harry shares with her stories about almost every stall they passed by. "I'm not a fan of red meat, and oysters." She keeps record of it, basking in his lovely anecdotes that seemed to summon the sun from it's hiding place. "We're granted a sunny day in winter!" He celebrates and it's impossible not to join him. "Let's go to Richmond Park."

Of course she nods in agreement and follows him down the street where he parked his car before she gets in the passenger seat. The stranger danger alarm, should've gone off in her head. But there was something about him, like he was holding her in place. As she heard Harry speak about his job, it started to make more sense in her head. Harry was a lot like this country, foreign, new, exciting and hers for the next few days. He made that clear when they parted ways at the end of the day.

"Come home with me for Christmas." Harry asked her on what would be the beginning of her last week in London, while having a picnic on Primrose Hill.

"With your family?" Her eyebrows were shot up when he nodded, fighting back that deadly smirk of his. "All your relatives will be there?" He nods again and she scoffs completely agitated. "Don't be daft Harry!" She voices out her feelings borrowing an expression of his.

He laughs and it's impossible for her not to join him, her face growing hotter by the second. "I don't want to go without you, and mum will love to have you there," that's what she fears.

"I don't know Harry, might be weird." He disagrees right away.

"It's close to Liverpool, we could spend a day or two over there." The past week he's been trying to learn as many things from her as possible and if he chooses his words carefully he can convince her. "Pay a visit to Anfield, The Cavern." His fake nonchalant attitude makes her roll her eyes, "Strawberry Fields is there too, you know?" She agrees and he kisses the back of her hand to mask the proud grin on his face.

In the past, she was always careful not to let a partner know how deeply she cared about them. The thought of being vulnerable made her lose her mind, thinking it was a sign of weakness. But seeing Harry drive through the English countryside, singing at the top of his lungs to Mistletoe and Wine by Cliff Richard and smiling just for her. It made her want to tell him, but not even all the words in every single language ever spoken by humanity could be enough to give him an idea of how much she cares for him.

There hasn't been a proper kiss between them, it puzzled her at first. Because his gaze seemed to be constantly directed to her lips. But then there was all the touching, holding hands, tucking her to his side when walking, his tender touch before hugging her goodbye. And the way he was always running his hands through her hair.

"She's a friend," he introduces her to his mum Anne and sister Gemma, after saying her name, chewing on the word like it's that mint gum he carries in his purse everywhere he goes. "Was a bloody tourist when I first met her but now... she's a proper Londoner." She doubts it, but she agrees on them being friends and she likes it, a lot.

They help Anne and Gemma to set the table and the finishing touches for dinner. Only three more family members show up and she chastises Harry for making her believe that all of his offspring was going to attend. That's how they usually spend Christmas Eve back home, she explains.

It saddens him, the thought of her going back to her home country in five days time. All the way across the Atlantic, six hours behind him. It's almost unfair.

"Tell me more about it," Harry's curiosity is genuine, thinking that he would love to know more about her traditions. Perhaps even be lucky enough to share them someday.

"We don't have these," she regrets taking a tube of brightly coloured paper. "We have piñatas though." She adds proudly and Harry's jaw hangs open in surprise.

"No fucking way!" He is immediately told off by his mum as they all take a seat at the table. "I thought that was only allowed for birthdays."

"There's no rules for that!" She takes the Christmas cracker out again and Harry takes it from the other end. "So, I just pull it?" He nods and it makes a noise revealing the present.

"You get the crown." Harry unfolds it before helping her fix it atop her head. "And the little toy, what is it?oh... I get the joke!" His family groans, his sister hiding her face in hands, but all she sees is the glint in Harry's eye before he reads. "Who's Rudolph's favourite pop star?"

"I don't know," she's the only one that was going to ask him. And she really wanted to know.

"Beyon-sleigh!" Harry watches in delight how the girl before him snorts at the silly and not so funny joke.

"That was awful." She confessed.

"Agree, next year we'll make our own. Riddles only." His mum adds and Harry protests right away but is shushed by Gemma's voice reading out loud the riddle from her cracker.

Next year, she will probably be spending the day with her numerous family, she thinks. Harry will be here again, telling awful jokes, pulling away Christmas crackers. Perhaps he will bring another person with him. She tries to push the poisonous thoughts down with a big gulp of wine. Only succeeding when Harry's left hand rests on her knee, his thumb rubbing circles on her skin exposed by her ripped jeans while he listens to his sister talk about her podcast. It marvels her how he is there, for everybody.

After dinner they play family games and Harry makes a fake tantrum after his cousin Chloe claims his companion for her team.

"She's mine!" He argues, his long arms embracing her easily. She ends up joining the other team, but the quick kiss she bravely gave to his neck before he let her go, confirmed the words he spoke.

There is a three step process Harry follows to know he's fallen in love. If he finds himself talking about them with every living soul, if he does something they like just because it makes him miss them less and finally if he takes them home to meet his mum. He knows that for the past few days, there was no other topic to discuss with him than the girl sitting beside him in the sofa. He's been drinking tea every morning, just because it reminds him of her. He watches her talk to his mother about how much they like Rod Stewart and knows that he's in too deep.

It should bother him, because she will leave. And all these moments spent, will be just distant memories for him to torture himself over and over again. He wants to feel the angst of knowing that maybe she will forget him, maybe she has a partner back home. He gives up on trying to feel miserable, agreeing with that song from earlier. It is a time to rejoice in the good that we see, a time for living and believing.

Right now all he sees is her, he sighs before tucking her by his side, her brown doe eyes meeting his briefly before sneaking an arm around his waist. She continues to chat with Anne and Gemma even after the rest of the guests leave, still holding onto him. Harry can see the fondness radiating from his mother and sister for the girl in his arms. He sees trust, and he smiles thinking of a new beginning.

What a beautiful sight.

[the-mad-starker]

Paint My Wings With Your Heat

Mads💗:  wingfic! Wingfic! I'm very excited to write this with @starkerkeyz​ and what should've been a one-shot got… a whole lot longer. But that seems the norm. Hope you guys enjoy the intro!

Keyz 💖: Wingfic has been so fun! I’m glad it was brought up in starker and that Mads agreed to rp it with me. This one-shot definitely grew but I think you’re all going to love it!Tumblr note: also check out Keyz's awesome moodboard in this post!!

WC: 3898

(AO3 Link)

Also check out Keyz's awesome moodboard in this post!!

Notes: ABO dynamics, intersex omegas, wing kink, in-flight fucking, knotting, courting, soulmate au

💗💖💗💖

Tony rubs at his nose and squints harder at the screen. His nose has been tickling at him on and off and endlessly in between ever since Peter stepped out for- something. He isn’t sure what. Or when, really. But he does know that this code's going to work for him by the end of the night or he would sacrifice DUM-E to Thor for inspiration. 

Tony smiles at the thought of Thor playing fetch with his boy and then rubs his tickling nose and turns his head to the side. He isn’t sure why (he's actually in the middle of reading that, thanks) but then his eyes land on the feather. 

It’s a soft gray and white. It looks innocent enough except that Tony can smell the enticing scent of omega and mate from a mile off. 

It makes his blood quicken in his veins and Tony snatches it up before he can think better of it. He runs the oils over the tips of his fingers and shivers from the low sheen left behind. He nearly touches those same fingertips to his wrist when he gets ahold of himself. 

Peter’s left him a beacon feather. 

Or, more probably, he’s accidentally shed one, not knowing the significance. It can be hard to realize how potent a reaction the scent can have on an alpha, especially if it’s an omega’s first mating season. 

Like Peter’s.

Tony puts the feather down (reluctantly) and pointedly wipes his fingers on his pants instead of his body. 

He needs to be respectful. Peter probably has no idea what that signaled to Tony. How very tempting it would be to accept that kind of offer and roost away with Peter all season, fucking him full of their fledglings for the year. Gods. Peter would make the best mother to Tony’s young.

But he needs to know what he's getting into. 

Tony could… show him. If he wants. Play mating flights could be performed in any one of the gyms. Play mating could be done here, in the lab. 

It could be done as soon as Peter gets back. 

Tony glances at the feather. Touches it. Licks his lips and strokes a single fingertip down the shaft. 

He’ll put it on the table. Peter is young and naive about some things, but he deserves the option to choose to learn. Tony hopes he says yes with an adjustment of his pants. 

Outside the lab, Peter peers in through the clear glass walls. His wings rustle around him nervously and he's fiddling with one of the primary feathers.

He lets go of it once he realizes what he's doing. It's a bad habit Peter has but he's always messed with his feathers instead of preening when he gets nervous.

He feels like he has the perfect excuse to be nervous though. He's shed his very first beacon feather and even though he thinks it's so… mediocre looking, he left it right on Tony's lab table.

Peter experiences a roller coaster of emotions when his boss finally notices the feather but then his heart sinks. Tony had handled it like it was… offensive. Barely touching it and wiping away any residual oil on his pants.

He can literally feel his heart sink all the way to his stomach then down through the soles of his feet and even further than that. His wings droop but then he fluffs them up, trying to cheer himself up.

He doesn't want to smell upset or anxious. Maybe… Maybe Tony's just not looking for a mate. Yet.

That's what he tells himself when he reenters the lab, carrying the paperwork he retrieved earlier.

He holds it close to his chest, tucking his wings even closer to his body. He's gotten better at maneuvering around the lab, but he still has an embarrassing tendency to knock something over.

"I got the reports," Peter says with a cheerful chirp. "Made sure they sent the right ones this time, Mr. Stark."

Maybe he could… just slip the beacon feather back into his pocket or something…? Minimize the embarrassment he already feels.

“Peter!” Tony says his name like he’s been caught doing something wrong. 

He swivels around in his chair and flares his wings out automatically, alpha to omega, exactly like he’d been planning not to do. He's supposed to bring the topic up calmly and professionally, not present his interest immediately like a rutting alpha with no manners. 

Peter almost drops the reports at the presentation but his grip tightens so much that his knuckles turn white. The bright colors of Tony's wings have always mesmerized him and he gapes stupidly in response to the display.

His own wings flutter but he's too shocked to do anything else.

Tony brings his fiery red wings back to heel, the bright gold coloring flashing at the tips of his primaries like metallic paint as they curl forward and around his body. 

“Well. Um. Sorry about that, Peter, but I wanted to mention, I think you accidentally left this in here,” Tony says as he picks up the beacon feather delicately. He holds it out to Peter and hopes his eyes don’t show how much he wants to eat him up. 

Peter's eyes drop to the offered feather.

Accidentally… The words are there on the tip of his tongue, an outright denial that there isn't anything accidental about it. But he bites his lip because if Tony's trying to give him a less embarrassing out, he should take it.

He reaches for it, intent on tucking it away apologizing profusely but the look in Tony's eyes makes his breath catch. He's never seen that look before and his brows twitch, trying to decipher it.

The alpha keeps talking though and Peter perks up in attention.

“And, well, I don’t know how much you know about beacon feathers,” Tony hadn’t known anything. His father and mother hadn’t thought it important to teach an alpha. “But they’re really important. And they can… They can affect an alpha. Make them want you. And I just wanted to make sure you knew about that so you didn’t leave them and attract an alpha you don’t want, you know?”

Tony’s pupils dilate as he goes on. His voice doesn’t change to reflect his inner lust; he’s too practiced at controlling himself.

Peter nods dumbly, fingers closing around the tip of the beacon feather. He still doesn't tug it, waits for Tony to release it since these delicate things are so fragile.

He's not sure where this conversation is going but there's an undercurrent of something coming. Something exciting.

“And I wanted to offer, entirely optional, if you needed or wanted a mentor for a play mating session, or to run a practice mating flight with, I wouldn’t mind helping you out. This will be your first season, right? I want you to be prepared and comfortable.” Tony says and thinks I want you to be mine. 

He doesn’t think that’d go over very well. He’s halfway convinced Peter will be disgusted by this offer of play mating. 

Peter is so young and beautiful; ripe and fertile and ready for the picking. 

Tony wants Peter to have all the tools he needs to pick the best alpha to father his fledglings every season. 

The offer is even more shocking than Tony's abrupt presentation.

Peter feels… faint. The papers slip from his arm and falls, scattering all over them.

"Oh, God," Peter bemoans, dropping to the floor and scrabbling to pick them up. His face flushes a cherry red.  "I'm– I'm so sorry, I'm so– clumsy. I–"

“It’s okay, kid. Here, I’ve got you.” Tony hops out of his chair and then pops down to begin scooping up the papers, thinking Peter was mortified with his offer. He’s clearly read the signals wrong. Damn. Damn, damn, damn. 

No matter how old you get, rejection is always embarrassing and Tony could feel his cheeks heating as red as his wings. 

Peter’s wings settle around him, the very bottoms pooling around him on the floor. His heart is beating so fast and he almost thinks he made the whole thing up in his head.

Tony, proposing playmating? To him? Practice flights?

Abruptly, he jerks his head up with the realization that he hasn't answered the man.

"It will be my first… season…" Peter says shyly. 

“I don’t want you to feel nervous about it. The TV shows can make it seem intense, and it is, but it’s also… well, the poets and the scholars all talk about how beautiful and natural it is, but honestly? It’s pretty damn fun, too. And I just want you to be comfortable going into it.” Tony schools his expression and sets the papers on the desk and out of the way. 

He keeps his wings to himself and very pointedly doesn’t touch the younger man. No pressure. Peter can reject him with no repercussions. 

Peter fights against the urge to use a wing to cover his face. He shouldn't… His end goal is to have Tony as a mate, not as a mentor. But then again… Maybe… Maybe he could prove how good of a mate he could be and maybe then Tony would want him…?

"I think I'd like that, sir," Peter bites his bottom lip, "If you, um, don't mind… You don't have to either, Mr. Stark… I could… learn on my own or…"

There are local groups that help guide omegas like him. Group flights and classes… He shudders at the thought of attending them and would probably rather just… not fly at all.

His crush on his boss is too strong. His wings and his heart won't let him get caught by anyone else.

It takes Tony longer than it should to register what Peter means. His eyes widen and his wings mantle hopefully, eager for this sweet smelling omega. 

“I don’t mind. I like teaching you.” Tony says with a smile. 

Peter learns everything he sets his mind to faster than anyone else Tony’s had the chance to work with yet. He’s incredible and such a kind soul on top. 

“Whenever you want, just let me know. I’ll teach, but you lead.” 

There. Break up the power structure between them a little and maybe Tony wouldn’t feel so guilty. Peter’s of age but he’s so young (this is his very first season!) and Tony doesn’t want to corrupt him. 

He does sort of wish he could take the feather back though. Maybe make a necklace out of it. Treasure it, when Peter picked some other alpha closer to his age season by season. 

Peter's wide-eyed by then. He drops his eyes, mind racing.

What does he want…? Is it really just as easy as Peter opening his mouth and telling the older man, "Sex. I want to know about sex. I want to know about alphas and not just about alphas but about you–"

The color in his cheeks deepens and he squirms.

He dares a peek at the older man. This is entirely embarrassing. It's taken them months to get used to each other and Peter's never been so shy around Tony but of course, revealing his feelings and being completely misunderstood… It'd bring him down but his heart's beating in excitement.

"I don't know what I want," Peter admits. Besides you. "I don't know how the mating flights work or even… What attracts an alpha? These–" He holds up his poor, rejected beacon feather. "Is it… Is this one not good? Shape? Color? Oil's too… I don't know. Why didn't you… like it?"

He wants to know what Tony likes but he can't outright ask him. He looks at him, hopeful for answers.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Tony says immediately. 

He isn’t sure what gave the kid that impression. It’s one of the most distracting things in the world; it actually managed to pull Tony Stark from his work in under 5 minutes. 

Tony extends a hand and trails a knuckle up the shaft, wings rustling as Peter’s oil rich pheromones sink into his callouses like a perfume. Tony inhales deeply and feels the urge to run the golden edges of his wings across Peter’s still attached mating feathers for more.

Peter's hit, suddenly and unexpectedly, with a jolt of arousal when Tony touches the feather. Even when it's no longer attached to him, this simple act feels indescribably intimate, as though Tony's touching him directly.

He presses his wings even closer to his body, trying to trap the rising scent of arousal. He doesn't know if he's succeeded.

“It smells- you smell- really good,” Tony parts his lips and drops his hand before he tries taking the beacon feather for himself. “But I can’t keep it when you don’t know what it means or what it’ll do to me.”

He’d start following Peter around, tailing him with the instinct to collect more feathers and keep any rivals away. He’d get the urge to scent him, the urge to rub their wings together. It would be like Peter tying Tony to himself with a rope until the feather loses its scent or the season hits and Peter accepts or rejects him. 

Somehow, Tony doesn’t think Peter wants a shadow in his forties with bad knees and bad memories following him around like a horny, winged puppy.

Peter's breath has turned shallow and subconsciously, his wings fan out around him. The subtle scent of aroused omega starts to taint the air and he blushes when he catches it. He can't undo it though so looks from Tony to the feather and back again.

He bites his lip again, wondering if he may be going too far. But they've just agreed to do this so maybe not?

Tony’s eyes snap from the feather to Peter’s lips. His wings rustle and shift into a half spread, nearly vibrating in anticipation. 

"What can it do to– to alphas?" Peter manages not to outright ask about Tony but that's essentially the question.

He knows these feathers are left for potential mates, but his senses as a mature omega have only recently sharpened. All the… scents are still confusing for him to interpret. His feathers aren't pretty, at all. He has, previously, bemoaned the fact, so sure that the dull whites and greys would do nothing to attract a mate like Tony.

But maybe, he's wrong. The way Tony eyes the feather makes his chest tighten and his insides want to melt. He wants to offer the feather, wants to tuck it into Tony's dark hair and just have it known that this alpha is his.

The strength of those thoughts are almost terrifying in its intensity but to Peter, it feels right 

“Oh, Peter.” Tony stands up straighter at the smell of aroused omega combined with that innocent question. He watches him intently, shoulders rolling and eyes lidding in calculation. All at once, the half spread of his wings goes from inviting to predatory, the metallic gold color at the ends of his wings promising to envelop the smaller gray-white of Peter’s own. 

Tony’s wings quiver for the hunt.

“It will make me want to court you. Remind me of you, tempt me. All through the day.” Tony’s voice has gone dark and warm. He wants, very badly, to pin Peter down and show him what his mate scent has done to him.

Peter leans in close like Tony's very words lure him in. His lips softly part, his heart picking up speed cause he very much likes the picture Tony's painting.

“I’ll want to follow you around. I probably will, since we work together. I’ll want to provide you food, and since we’re so close, I’ll actually do it, too. I’ll touch you.” Tony’s bigger, golden primaries stroke through Peter’s, feathers interlocking and dragging through each other. Tony’s eyes were almost all black with his arousal.

The only reason Peter hasn’t clued in on Tony’s response is his inexperience with scenting on the alpha/omega level and the fact he hasn’t looked down at Tony’s groin. 

Peter shudders in clear ecstasy. His wings have felt so sensitive lately. It has to do with the shedding and that mating season is so soon… He may not know much about mating habits, but his body seems to know something.

The muscles flex, making the individual rows of feathers fan out more. It makes it easier for an alpha to spread his scent, easier for Tony to leave his own oils along Peter's whites and greys.

“I’ll want to touch you all the time. If we didn’t work together, it would just be an urge I felt whenever I smelled the feather. A growing bond. But since we do work together,” Tony’s voice is even deeper now. Husky. “I’ll probably be unconsciously scenting you. Touching you whenever you’re in reach.”

He drags his golden edges against Peter again. A part of him wishes he really was dipped in paint so that he could leave streaks of gold claim behind wherever he touches. 

“I’ll be compelled to. The more compatible we are, the stronger the urges. The more beacon feathers you give me,” Here Tony’s voice nearly broke with longing. “If you give me any more, that is. They would have a compounding effect. More feeding. More nesting. More touching. More everything.”

Peter shivers at the words. It's almost a promise …

He wants all that. Everything. The courting, the scenting… He'd give every single beacon feather he had just to have Tony look at him. But he only has the one in his hands.

With a pounding heart, he looks at his mentor with a blush on his cheeks.

"Are we compatible, Mr. Stark…?" He asks and he can't bear to look Tony in the eye. He shakes his head profusely. "Y-You don't have to answer that. That was probably so awkward."

He thrusts the beacon feather at the older man.

"You can, um, keep it if you want," Peter forges on. "There isn't anyone– I mean, if you're going to… teach me… I want to give it to you… If you want it…"

His ears must be such a bright red color but besides feeling embarrassed over his fumbling words and actions, Peter feels like he's in the clouds. Just a slight twitch of his muscles and his wings spread out in offering, hoping…

Tony looks at the feather with yearning. He shouldn’t. He gets obsessive as a personality trait and with such easy access to Peter, he’ll be scenting him and getting the urge to mount him non-stop in the weeks to come. 

That thought has him remembering his offer about practice flights and play mating with a twitch of the tent in his pants. He could imagine pinning Peter down and surrounding him with Tony’s red and gold wings, enveloping him in Tony’s alpha dominance and posturing. 

If play mating is still on the table, then he needs to consider Peter mature enough to make his own decision regarding who he gives his beacon feathers to. 

Plus, the kid looks so hopeful with his big puppy eyes and fluffy grey-white feathers. 

“We’re compatible.” Tony plucks the feather up out of his grasp before he can think better of it. He’s never liked lying to the people he likes. 

The relief that washes over him feels like a cool waterfall. The confirmation of what he's hoped for since he became an intern here sends him back to cloud nine.

They're compatible and Peter wants to step forward and get a good scenting in. He wants to learn Tony's alpha scent. It's only fair now that he's becoming familiar with Peter's own emerging omega scent.

He feels giddy with excitement, but that all changes with the next thing the alpha does.

Tony runs the coveted feather over his wrist and then his throat. He sighs softly. Peter’s mate scent was so invigorating from off of his own skin. 

Tony looks at Peter with eyes nearly swallowed by pupil.

All that bubbly excitement turns to molten hot heat when the alpha trails his feather over his skin. That… That has to mean something, right? His brain just short-circuits because using Peter's feather like that… it seems almost indecent.

Peter stares back, breath caught, nose tickled by the scent of something that turns his brain to mush. His wings quiver with a slight tremble and they've never done that before.

“Peter. Thank you for this. I want to make sure you’re prepared. Anything you need, I’ll get it for you. Any questions, I’ll answer. Your first season is going to be amazing.” Tony says, taking it upon himself to make it so. For Peter.

"I–" 

Peter isn't even sure what to say because he may not be in heat yet, but it feels like he's on the very verge. Every breath he pulls in, he recognizes more and more the situation he's found himself in. 

And it excites him.

But it also terrifies him because he has absolutely no idea what he's doing.

Tony advances a step and then brings his other foot level. His wings spread out, red and gold spilling around them like a curtain of feathers. He wants to knock wings with the young omega, wrestle and rub their scents together until he could maneuver Peter down and under him, where he belongs. 

Tony’s wings shake with leashed need. The golden tips tremble in coiled anticipation.

The air is spiced with a deeper scent, something dark and rich– different from an omega's. It makes Peter feel hot, almost burning and he fidgets in place, wings spreading even wider to dissipate some of the heat blooming inside him.

He's smelling Tony, Peter realizes, and it's with a dawning sense of horror that he feels his insides turn molten and he's going to–

"T-Thank you, sir," he chokes out. "I trust you– I… Thank you! I need to… go pick up the equipment from floor 60."

Tony fans his wings out in mirror to Peter’s; shifts his weight onto the balls of his feet. The painted gold ends of his primaries trail the ground. They shake from the shivery omegan need flavoring the air around them. 

Expectant. 

Ripe.

Peter takes off in a sprint towards the open balcony doors. Who needs the elevators when they can free fall towards the necessary floor? Flying too much during the workday would tire anyone out, but Peter thinks this is necessary. 

He needs the biting cold of the rushing wind to cool him off before he actually slicks up right in front of his boss.

Peter either isn’t thinking or doesn’t realize what he’s done (or doesn’t know how to fly indoors because he’s a good boy that follows the rules) because he stays on foot.

Tony’s body comes alive with the chase, sudden and unstoppable with the need to hunt his potential mate down and lay his claim. His skin tingles and flushes and between his legs his cock grows thicker in excitement. 

There’s no way Tony can hold back. No stopping the all consuming instinct thrumming through every vein, bone and muscle. In less than a second it’s like he had become a force of nature. 

Tony scoops his wings through the air and launches after his young mate. 

[ehenyeoongg]

A CONTRACTUAL MARRIAGE

Pairing: CEO Lee Taeyong x Kang Jiyeon  Word count: 1.7k

Synopsis: She recently found out that she was pregnant with his child. But towards the end of the contracted marriage, she noticed he was acting more hostile towards her. After the contracted marriage, she decided to keep the baby a secret, until her best friend decided that her break up was not a good enough excuse to not attend the party she had organised for Jiyeon.

"Chaeyeon! Where did you get it?" I asked my best friend who held a beautiful strapless blue midnight gown up.

"I asked my mum about it. She said she would love to see you in it. Sister, your body is perfect for it. It's like she actually made the dress for you." She over exaggerated. I thanked her and changed into the dress. It was loose, and hid the small baby bump that had begun to form a month ago. She did my makeup and helped me choose my jewelry. When we were ready, we got into the white limousine waiting for us outside.

I scrolled through Instagram as we were on the way there and a post caught my eye.

[KIM MINHEE AND LEE TAEYONG SEEN TOGETHER. WHERE IS MRS. LEE?]

I switched my phone off and placed it in my bag. Soon, we arrived at the venue. I got out of the car and the cameras started flashing immediately. Reporters asked questions and I ignored them and continued walking as bodyguards helped control the crowd.

We walked into the room and I noticed people were staring at us. God, why is everyone looking at us? Is it the dress? The makeup?  It must've been the posts.

I looked around and two people caught my eye. There he is, and with another woman. Why should I care? It's not like he ever loved me anyway. I looked away and excused myself to go to the washroom but Chaeyeon pulled me back.

"Hey beautiful, where are you going? I helped you with your makeup and dress, you better not mess this up." she walked off.

I turned around and noticed that he was gone from his place beside Minhee. I looked and saw him walking quickly towards me. I turned to walk away but he followed me and pulled me into an empty hallway.

"Why are you here?" He asked, his hand gripping my wrist tightly.

"It's my best friend's party and hasn't our contract ended already? You don't have to pretend to be a caring husband anymore. We're over, you said it yourself. You didn't want anything to do with me anymore." I snatched my hand away before walking off.

"Jiyeon!" he shouted after me.

"You're already with another woman, why care about me?" I heard his footsteps and quickened my pace as he caught up with me.

"Minhee? Jiyeon, No," He held me by my bare shoulders and turned me around to face him, "She told me you'd be here and I agreed to attend. I was looking for you all over Korea, but couldn't find you. Where were you?" I kept quiet.

"Kang, No. Lee Jiyeon. I care for you. I love you." his warm hands held mine.

"Love? The day we met, you-"

"The day we met. Yes, I followed you, but I wasn't stalking you. You were drunk, I just wanted to help you return home safely, but you refused to tell me where you lived and I had to bring you over to my place. Then you walked straight to my room and.. You know the rest." He took in a deep breath.

"Jiyeon, if anything you are the best wife in the world. I'm sorry if I hurt you and if I was cold toward you. I was just scared that someone would steal you away from me and use you as my weakness. I'm sorry I wasn't truly honest about my feelings towards you. Before you came into my life, I didn't know the meaning of joy, happiness or love. But during our entire relationship, all you did was open my eyes to everything. You turned my life so colorful even my hairstylists can't argue." he pointed to his red hair. It had been white when I met him, then blue. When I saw him with his red hair, I thought his head was bleeding.

"Jiyeon, I'm sorry." I wiped away the tears on his cheeks that fell as he spoke. He pulled me into a hug and I hugged back as he rested his head on my shoulder.

“I-”

“Marry me, Jiyeon. For real this time, no contract.” I looked up at him with tears in my eyes and nodded.

"Let's go, the party's starting." Mark appeared suddenly. Taeyong nodded, and I was about to follow the younger boy out, but he pulled me into his arms. He wiped my tears away and held my face as he looked into my eyes.

"Wait, promise me you won't ever leave me again?" I nodded.

"Promise." I kissed him and he gave me another kiss.

"And you'll put this back on?" there was a ring on his pinky finger. I threw it away into the river that day, where did he find it? I nodded and smiled at him as he took the ring off and put it on my ring finger. We walked back into the room, my arm linked through his.

Minhee looked surprised to see us.

"Hey, lovebirds." Chaeyeon invited us to a table. Doyoung sat beside her.

"Let the show begin." Taeyong gave a questioning look as the pair turned to face the stage where Mark was standing on.

"Good evening everybody. I hope you have all had an enjoyable time today and I am sad to say that this gathering has come to an end. Oh, but before we end, shall we watch a clip?"

The lights dimmed as a few people brought in a projector and screen up on stage and set it up. Two figures stood in a hallway. The smaller figure looked like a girl. Minhee?  Her voice blasted through the speakers.

"I told you to ruin them. I even paid you. How much more do you need to get rid of her? I'll pay you everything. Just separate Lee Taeyong and Kang Jiyeon! Kill her if you have to!" She shouted at the person standing in front of her and the clip ended.

There were murmurs all over the room.

"As you all know, a few accidents have occurred over the past few days, which our dear Mrs. Lee has been involved in. So, after countless nights, my team and I have been searching for the culprit."

I turned in Minhee's direction as she stood up. The car accident, kidnapping.. Everything was all planned by her?

"No, that wasn't-I.. Taeyong.." she slowly walked closer to our table as a few detectives burst through the double doors and ran over to her. Taeyong's eyes burned with fury as he stood up from his seat glaring at her.

"Now, Ms Kim. What do you have to say to defend yourself?" Doyoung stood in front of Minhee. "You harmed two lives when you put Mrs Lee in danger. And remember, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law." Wait, how did he know? I gave Chaeyeon a glare and caught Taeyong staring at me with an open mouth when I looked away from her.

"Two?" he asked.

"Surprise?" I said.

"You're pregnant!?" 

"Yes, she is." Minhee hid a smirk. "But I don't think she will be any more," She broke free from the detectives holding her down and ran toward me with a knife in her hand. Taeyong pushed me out of the way and she stabbed him instead. I watched as her eyes widened and she pulled away.

"TAEYONG!" he fell to the floor as Minhee ran away with the detectives chasing her.

"GUARDS!" Mark shouted and some guards ran after her as I sat on the floor with Taeyong's head on my lap.

"Take care of the baby, I-"

"What are you saying!? You're not gonna die. The wound wasn't that deep. All you need is some stitches." Mark interrupted him.

"You ruined my one chance at acting heroic, Mark Lee. But it hurts like hell, help me get up."

THREE YEARS LATER

"Jagi! Not in front of the kids." I said and he pulled away from me before turning to face Taehyun and Chae Ah. He helped me out of the pool and shook his head. Water from his now green hair splashed all over me. We walked to the barbeque grill where Doyoung and Chaeyeon were grilling some meat.

"Taeyong, can I have some lettuce?" Doyoung pulled on Taeyong's hair.

"Ha ha. Very funny." Taeyong laughed sarcastically while passing the bowl of lettuce to him.

"Appa!" Taehyun ran over to us.

"Taehyun, don't run by the pool." he slowed down and I watched as he slowly toddled over to us.

"For you." he pasted a plaster over Taeyong's scar on his lower abdomen. The plaster had a doodle of a smiley on it.

"Thank you." he gave Taeyong a kiss on the cheek before running off to play with Chae Ah.

"Let's get this party started!" Mark and Johnny walked into the backyard with some more meat. Lucas cannonballed into the pool and the water splashed onto the two children.

"Ah! Leg cramp! Taehyun! Save me!" Taehyun jumped into the water to save Lucas. Chae Ah cried and Ten picked her up, giving her a lollipop. She stopped crying as soon as she put the lollipop in her mouth.

"A drama queen, just like her mother." Ten said.

"Yah! Since when was I a drama queen?" Chaeyeon scolded Ten and was about to run after him.

"Jagi, it's not good for the baby.." Doyoung pulled Chaeyeon back, his hand resting on her stomach. More boys came from the beach to help grill the food and play with the children.

"Weren't we supposed to surprise them together?" Chaeyeon whispered to me and I shrugged.

"Taehyun!" Lucas walked to her with Taehyun on his shoulders. She tiptoed and whispered into Taehyun's ears.

"It's a secret, okay.." He shrugged and bent down to whisper in Lucas' ear.

"WOOHOO! WE'RE GETTING A BABY SISTER!!" Taehyun and Lucas danced around excitedly.

Chae Ah cried again. "I don't want a baby sister.." her pout reminded me of her mother.

"You're not getting a baby sister, sweetheart. The baby in mummy's tummy is a boy!"

"I don't want a boy.. I want a puppy.." To console her and stop her crying, Ten pretended to be a puppy which made her face light up.

"Woohoo!" Someone suddenly lifted me up and jumped into the pool.

"Lee Taeyong!" I resurfaced above the water and someone cannonballed beside me.

"Lee Taehyun!" he swam to us and clung to Taeyong's arm.

"Who taught you to do that?" he pointed his finger at Lucas. They need to stop hanging around each other.

!image credits to owner!