#the family thinks stanley is dead or disappeared entirely | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

darkesttimelinestuff · 4 years ago

Link

7,713 words

Mature

Men make houses. Women build homes. –Proverb.

Come come, come out tonight. Come come, come out tonight. –Sherry, The Four Seasons

***

Oh, Halloween. How it coaxes all from their shells, a come-hither seduction of ghouls and their admirers. Whether one chooses to be a witch or a princess, a criminal or a cowboy – to paint their face and knock on doors, to drink until they are but pumpkins, mouths filled with their pumpkin guts – it is all done under the otherworldly spell of the undead, the souls that ascend from their place in the basement to play marionette games with the dolls who inhabit the first floor.

Fox Mulder has, over the years, made an exceptional doll. Spock, then Captain Kirk, then Spock again. Several years of him doing nothing but sitting alone and staring out the window, ignoring the pull of a fairy costume resting in a trunk in the attic. Even then he had been a prime target; Halloween souls feed on elation, but will take misery in a pinch. His misery tasted sweet like a tootsie pop. The saints love tootsie pops, all the waiting and the work. The sinners prefer Reeses.

There were others when the memories began to fade. Han Solo. Han Solo. Paul Stanley from KISS, though his first girlfriend ended up wearing most of the makeup. Han Solo. Doctor John Watson, although years later he would grit his teeth and mutter I should have been Holmes. Serpico at a Hoover party, the last one he went to. No one got it. Then Han Solo every year he chose to celebrate after, and by then he finally had Princess Leia at his side.

The halloween of 2016, he slips into his finest costume yet.

Fox Mulder. Hopeless romantic.

On one arm, he carries a bag that is filled with good wine, cheap wine glasses, and assorted fruits, cheeses, and fancy chocolate. He has convinced his partner that the actual contents are a P.K.E. meter (a psychokinetic energy meter, for those who have not seen the documentary Ghostbusters), a thermographic camera, an audio recorder, sage, a lighter, his gun.

On the other arm, or underneath it, is his partner. Who is unsure about such open gestures of affection while they are technically on the clock, even after all the years of steaming up their steakouts, but is not stopping him, and is possibly even snuggling back as the October chill descends.

“This is not a love story, Scully,” he warns, pulling her closer as they follow the long, winding pathway up their destination. Her body heat is his favorite temperature, even when it’s ice cold. “It is a story of lies, obsession, betrayal, and murder.”

“I think I’ve heard this one.” She bumps his arm with her shoulder and smiles up at him, her lips wine deep under the bright moon.

Their shoes are silent on the stone and disappear under the layers of fog that curl and cozy around them like amorous smoke. He tugs her closer still, filling his nose with the woodsy scent of her shampoo.

“The early 1960s, Scully. Free love was just a storm a’brewin in the air, and sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll were waiting on the doorsteps of American counterculture, waiting to be invited in. Doo-wop was still a prominent feature on family radio stations. The Beatles had yet to write their own songs, and Paul McCartney wouldn’t smoke his first joint until 1964. It was a wholesome time, Scully. You would’ve loved it.”

“I loved Rubber Soul,” she argues.

He rubs her shoulder. “But it wasn’t all sock hops and sweet Jackie Kennedy. We were fighting a war with Russia, a war of discovery, and losing to the success of Sputnik. The U.S. invaded Cuba, got their asses kicked, and were the laughing stock of the world. In the veins of America, in the buses and lunch counters, the streets and in the schools, thrummed the blood of a movement. The Civil Rights movement. The early 1960s was a time of immense change.”

They were getting closer and closer to the scene where it all took place: a sprawling, overly-windowed ranch style home, its angular roof sloping into flatlands. In the quiet darkness, the cars and the rest of the world all celebrating miles behind them, the house appears white, almost bleached. But when the sun comes out it will reveal its truth: baby pink painted wood.

“And situated in all of this madness, this time between tumult and revolution, hatred and love, was a woman named Sherry Battersea.” She hmm’s. That means Mulder, I love your stories. Keep going.

He does.

They arrive at the front door – solid mahogany, undistressed. The steps leading up to the porch are made from brick, unhassled by the years of disuse. With the moon hanging overhead, vines creeping onto the roof, and the glare of (assumed) white bathed in midnight blue and the shadows of trees rustling above, it looks absolutely– “Isn’t she beautiful?” Mulder whispers, moving his hand to Scully’s waist.

Precisely.

***

It’s all a bunch of phooey, if you ask him.

Didn’t expect that, did you?

He spent weeks finding the right place. The runner ups were all either too far away, too haunted, or not haunted enough. He wanted something with history, something still alive in the hearts of believers – but nothing verifiable, and nothing with a real reputation.

He wanted a pretty lie. Most ghost stories, he will begrudgingly admit, are indeed pretty lies.

He found the Battersea house on a subreddit dedicated to paranormal encounters, and this one hadn’t even managed to get twenty upvotes. He was number twenty. The Battersea home is in Virginia, which heavily swayed his opinion in its favor, and from the pictures posted the years of abandonment had not left it dangerous, which put it above two other options off his list. Making love to Scully while the roof collapses over their heads is a fantasy he put to rest many moons ago, about the time he realized they could just do it on a bed.

They roam the house with their flashlights, Mulder’s low voice playing in her ear as he finishes his story. “Sherry’s husband returned from war, but he never returned to her. She made this home for him and he wouldn’t even grant her the decency of staying the night.”

The biggest draw of the place had been its pristine condition. No graffiti stains the wood-paneled walls; the rooms were all intact. The interior design is a certified blast from the past, from the richly carpeted floors and textured rugs to the lucite furniture, pops of neon that splash under their flashlights. It is colorfully but rather tastefully decorated. It reminds him a bit of a movie set, which is another place he has been thoroughly laid by this woman.

As they move through the house, however, he realizes with mild disappointment the utter lack of haunting thrill. Nothing shifts in the night to give them pause. No dirt or dust to brush away, no holes in the walls or rot in the furniture. It doesn’t even smell old. It all feels more like a vacation home, some sort of themed romantic getaway, and they’re wading behind the scenes with the power turned off.

It’s not what he planned, but he’ll take it.

“Miss Battersea was a fashionable lady, keeping up with the times faster than they could come to her. She had a leopard skin pill-box hat before Jackie O had a leopard skin pill-box hat, and was dead by the time Bob Dylan could think to write a song about it.” Oh, that long, mid-century sectional couch. It might be white or a gawdy turquoise color. Whatever it is, he’s going to have her there. “She was a smart woman, too. The head of all of her many bookclubs. All of the books you see in here are hers.” His runs his beam over behind the couch, where the entire back wall is lined with books, and they move along. “And there are more in the den.

“She did everything she could to make her husband love her. She danced to his favorite records. She cooked for him and did his laundry. She cut her skirt an inch shorter with each passing trend.” They stand side by side, halted in the kitchen doorway. He turns his head and lets his eyes dip into her blouse. “I’ve been very appreciative of your new work wardrobe, by the the way.”

“Mulder,” she chastises, pulling her shirt down for better access. He laughs loudly at that, places his hand on the small of her back and leads her through the kitchen.

“She was driving herself crazy, trying to make him love her the way she loved him. And oh, did she love him, her sweet Maximus Battersea.” More wood paneling, and modular, pastel appliances that appear as if they haven’t aged a day since their prime. In the middle is a solid island with a geometric vase of dead flowers. This is where he’ll lay out all the food. Should’ve gotten flowers, he mopes to himself, but remembers that Scully doesn’t have a lot of patience for them. “They were high school sweethearts, and when he was 18 he was drafted off in the Korean War.

“Something was wrong when he came back. He got a job at some juicing plant working the machines, but showed a savvy for bossing people around that made itself known to the owners. He moved up quickly to supervisor and then warden. He and his little wife then bought this house, and Sherry made it her life’s work to take good care of it. Not a speck of dirt to be found.” Even to this day. They both marvel at the cleanliness. “Dishes were done as soon as they were used. Food was on the table for when he got home, still hot enough to serve. But he never got home to her at night. He would spend his nights at the bar, and then he became a favored customer at the Grand Major Hotel.”

“Oooooh. I would’ve killed the bastard,” Scully whistles, opening up a cabinet and standing on her tiptoes to peer in. He steps in behind her and lifts her up, chuckling when she screams and elbows him in the chest.

“Hmm, I know you would,” he mumbles in her ear, smacking a little kiss underneath it. All the glassware in the cabinet, chipless and clean as a whistle, clinks and jingles while she moves her hand through it. “You’re a jealous monster. So was Sherry Battersea.”

He’s making some of this shit up. He doesn’t know if she liked to read or if she was all that beautiful a woman, but the details make the story. “I’m not jealous,” Scully snorts, and he bites her neck as punishment for her blatant lie while dropping her back on her feet.

He wonders, as he pins her against the counter, if she’s caught on to his plans. He sets the flashlight down in front of her and snakes his arms around her from behind. “One night, he did come back to this big old house. But he was with someone else.”

“Oh, I would’ve killed him,” she repeats, tilting her head to get his lips on her neck. His nose brushes her cheek and he grins; she definitely knows. “I would’ve killed her.”

“And that’s what she did,” he says, kneading her hips. “They were on the couch, still mostly in their clothes. She snuck up from behind, and with all the power of her rage, she pushed one of her many bookcases right on top of them, crushing them to death.”

“I would’ve waited until they were naked. More humiliating.”

“Jealous. Monster.” Mulder says fondly, breaking away to grab her arm. “Now they say that Sherry Battersea remains in this house, long after she was convicted and put to death. She gave her life to building a home. It’s fitting that she give it her death as well.”

“And that’s what we’re here to investigate?” She says, narrowing her eyes.

“We’re here to say hi to old Sherry,” Mulder lies, urging her along. Neither of them are scared, despite of their previous history with ghosts. He’s not sure if Scully even remembers. That house had not been a pretty lie. It had only been filled with ugly truths.

On their way up the stairs, pausing at each creak even though the foundation is craftful and sturdy, a tune plays in his head. “Sherry… Sherry baby…” he sings, letting his voice go comically high. It’s too loud in the quiet house surrounded by nothing, and Scully turns around to slap a palm over his mouth.

“That’s a bad Frankie Valli impression,” she says, arching her eyebrow. “Want me to make it better?”

He kisses her palm. She takes it away and continues her charge up the stairs. When she’s far away enough, he finishes the line in his ghastly falsetto, voice cracking.

“Sherry, won’t you come out tonight?”

Come come, come out tonight. Come come. Come out tonight.

***

In the den on the other side of the house, a lightbulb flickers. The glow it casts under the lampshade is a soft, pinky red, the color of a deep blush. The winds caress the house with the sigh of a new lover. There is a soft scritching noise, a click of a record sliding into place. Static, and then…

Sherry, Sherry baby! Sherry, Sherry baby!

***

“I was listening to particle physicist Brian Cox on the radio the other day, talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson,” Scully says, sipping coffee from her thermos. She shivers a little in her suede jacket and Mulder regrets not finding somewhere a little warmer. Temperatures are at an all time high this fall in Virginia, but it’s still uncomfortable. He plans on warming her up anyway. “He’s a Professor at the University of Manchester and works on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. You’ve probably listened to him before on a podcast. He tackles a lot of different concepts in science fiction. Frankenstein, for instance.”

“Corpse reanimation is my favorite,” Mulder says. “I know a lot about it.” She pets his hair and hands him her mug. He drinks from it gratefully. Another thing to regret. He hadn’t brought his own mug.

“Specifically, he was saying that ghosts could not exist because of what the collider tells us. You know what it does. It essentially uses a network of very complex, high-powered magnets – the largest, most expensive machine in the world – that are continuously switched on and off to send particles flying at almost the speed of light. The purpose of it is to find out what everything is made if. The particles collide and emit smaller particles, which we can observe, along with their interactions with other particles.”

“We used it to discover the Higgs Boson particle, which tells us how particles get their mass. The God Particle. It was a discovery over half a century in the making.”

“Mostly, yes. The argument was that if ghosts were real, they would emit particles that should be detectable in the Large Hadron Collider, and those particles would be able interact with the particles that make us up.”

Mulder’s silent for a moment, thinking. “What if the LHC isn’t powerful enough to detect those particles?”

“Mulder.” She licks her lips and angles her body towards him on the couch, looking into his eyes. Incredulity is still her best look. “This machine has been able to reconstruct temperatures and states of matter that only existed a microsecond after the birth of the universe, before it changed states. It is a very powerful machine.”

“But it still hasn’t answered everything,” he points out, shrugging his shoulders. “I mean, we still know nothing about dark matter. And dark matter is called dark matter because we know nothing about dark matter, only that it could explain why galaxies might contain less mass than what we’ve calculated.” He nods at her, taking another sip. “Maybe all that extra mass is a bunch of ghosts. Bet you never thought of that.”

“Mmm. Your souls in the starlight.” He scoots closer to her, slowly sliding his arm behind her on the back of the couch. When he leans forward, she says, “Mulder, maybe we should split up.”

“What?” He says, not pulling back. There’s enough light coming in from the windows that he can see her clearly, her noble profile shadowed and unshadowed as he moves towards her. He smells her perfume… and pine sol. “Now why would we do that? Last time we split up during a case like this you shot me.”

“I didn’t shoot you. You shot me.” So she does remember. She’s still talking when his lips are close enough to brush hers. “But how are we gonna catch this ghost sitting down?”

“Well, we don’t have to be sitting down.” He kisses her, a chaste, sweet little thing. He pulls back an inch and kisses her again. And again. And again. “We can.” Kiss. “Stop sitting.” Kiss. “Anytime you want.”

“Mulder.” Kiss. “Where’s the ghost?” Kiss. “Where’s Sherry?” Kiss. She’s folding under his body weight, falling back into the remarkably undusty cushions. She cups his jaw in her small hands and kisses him for real, chasing the flicker of his tongue with her own. She stretches one leg behind him, lets the other fall off the couch.

He groans and shifts so that he’s nestled between her thighs. There is – so much he loves about kissing Scully. In a lot of ways he’s learning her all over again after the time they’ve spent apart. Her face is thinner, he can trace her bones with his fingers, but not that sickly thin it had been the day she walked out. Her hair got its shine back. She tastes like a day at the office, her coffee and Cliff bars and the Burt’s Bees lipstick she wears during the cold weather.

But. Kiss. Her hands are bunched up in his shirt, very much like she’s prepared to rip it off of him. But this is is going too fast. Kiss. He forces himself to break away, taking his hand out from under her blouse.

Trying to control her breathing, pupils dilated, she lifts her chin and licks his lips. “So you want me to shoot you this time around?”

He laughs and moves off of her, giving her space her to sit back up and fix her wrinkled clothing. He winces and struggles to rearrange his wayward dick. Men’s pants are so tight now. He misses the freedom of the 90s.

“I uh. So here’s,” he pauses, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “Here’s the thing. There is no ghost.”

She blinks slowly. He wants to move a lock of silky red hair out of her eye, but keeps his hands to himself as she thinks things through. “You brought me to an abandoned house to… what? Make out with me?”

“Well, no. I mean yes. But I have…” All these years and this stuff still makes him tongue tied. “Libations. And… mood music.”

She raises her eyebrows, but her eyes are softer. “The Monster Mash?”

“The Prince version, yeah.” He leers at her. “It was a graveyard smash.”

“Oh my god,” she groans, letting her head fall back on the cushions.

“Think about it. The way I see it, Halloween is our holiday, right? Mr. and Mrs. Spooky.”

“No one ever called me Mrs. Spooky.”

“I did. All the time.”

She smiles. “I guess it beats the time you set me on fire for Valentine’s Day.”

“I don’t want to kill the adrenaline here,” he says, partially damning himself for ruining it so early. He lost a good amount of blood to that kiss. “There could absolutely be a ghost here. I’m just saying this isn’t my most reliably sourced case.”

“Are any of them?” She sighs, but she reaches out to pat his shoulder. “Go grab us some libations and make me forget this conversation.”

He ducks down to kiss her cheek. “Yes ma’am.”

Taking his bag of goodies to the kitchen, he pulls out the wooden cutting board he brought along to serve everything and all of the bags of pre-cut cheese, crackers, fruit and meat. He hums while he works. Hm. Hm hm. Hm hm. Hm hm. Hm. And it starts over, the notes twanging loudly in his mind. It is almost as if he could hear it being played through the walls – he feels it from the outside, rather than in his head. He blames it on his massive erection. He takes out the wine glasses and fills them up high enough to placate Scully and make his mother roll in her grave. Vineyard folk are serious about their wine.

He gets a good look at the kitchen as he works, transported back into a time he doesn’t know very well. The cottages on the Vineyard never kept up with any particular trend, opting instead for the timelessness of colonial whitewash and brown trim. They changed out maids and nannies like they’d change the air filters, and neither Teena nor Bill put effort into upkeep. Neither cared much for fidelity either he grimaces, and immediately feels bad for doing so.

If there is any truth to the tale, he aches for people like Sherry who gave their all and never knew when to take it back. He gets it. Sometimes you fixate on people. He had been a victim of it more than once, and now he’s the one waiting for the one he loves most to come back home.

He grabs the cutting board and the wine glasses, balancing them carefully, anchoring the stopped bottle in his armpit. The second bottle of wine and the dessert he’ll save for later are left on the counter. He hums his way back to the living room, his woman still sprawled out on the couch, waiting for him, and he forgets about Sherry.

Behind him, in the kitchen, there’s a flutter in the cabinets, sounds of gently moving ceramic. A pleasant, almost feminine noise, like tinkering laughter. Then there’s the pop of a cork.

The bottle moves, sliding to the end of the island. Then it rises into the air, bobbing up and down as if being carried by invisible hands.

Over the sink, the bottle upends. The glug-glug-glug of sweet red flows into the pipes. Just one glass’s worth.

The air is warmer, somehow.

Like a full body flush.

***

He sweeps her over the creaking floorboards, her cheek pressed to his chest. The cold has left them. His phone sits on the sleek, white coffee table, and his Elvis tunes play, his Dylan, some acoustic hits. She nuzzles in closer and hums along to Roberta Flack, Sinatra, that Cher song they both like so much.

“Why don’t you believe in the ghost, Mulder?” She murmurs, a little sad.

“I don’t know that I’m against the idea of her existing,” he says into her hair, closing his eyes. They turn. Sometimes he dips her, sometimes he spins her, but they spend most of the time just like this: as close as possible, eyes closed, careful not to bump into any of the furniture. “I just need more proof these days.”

“Well,” she says. “I’ll believe for the both of us then.”

He lifts his chin from her head, surprised. He pushes her away to search her face. “You believe in Sherry?”

“You had me with that dark matter point,” she shrugs. “If souls… did exist, they would most likely exist as a form of matter we haven’t discovered yet.”

“Dana Scully, but you are tipsy,” he chuckles, pulling her back to him. “If you believe, I believe. Sherry Battersea is alive and with us.”

“Why’d you bring us here if you didn’t think it was haunted?”

He thinks about this, rubbing his hands up and down her back. “We’ve got a long way to go, don’t we Scully?” She looks up at him, cocking her head. “You haven’t…. Moved back yet.” His thumbs caress her waist. “Into our home.”

Her face falls. “Mulder–” she tries to step away, but he holds onto her, shaking his head.

“It’s okay, Scully. Scully, I’m not mad. I’m not asking you to do anything before you’re ready.” He presses a kiss to the center of her forehead, smoothing his hand down the length of her hair. She closes her eyes. “But I thought maybe… if I could recreate… not an exact replica of the good old days, because we were always getting our asses kicked, but something tonally similar, it might help. Show you that I appreciate you and that… I miss you, and that I’m so fucking grateful that…”

She saves him by wrapping her arms around his neck and bringing him in for a slow, mind-melting kiss.

There are none of the cobwebs that decorated all those places in their youth, not like he’d been hoping. The shadows that float across the room are all accounted for. There is no fear. It is not quite like the old days, but he remembers this: holding her hips as they move above him in the dark, the rise and fall of her upturned breasts, the underside of her chin when she tosses her head back and gasps. She rides him into the couch, the sweltering sheath of her body spreading warmth from his cock to the tips of his fingers and toes. He watches her face in the shadows again, how her expressions undulate in the moonlight. She still keeps her apartment, but she’s come back to him in every way that matters.

In the kitchen, a bottle breaks. A tray of dark chocolates hits the wall at full speed.

“Did you hear that?” Scully breathes, furrowing her brow but not stopping, refusing to stop their decades-old rhythm. His hands slip around to grip her rear and he shakes his head. Wind rattles the windows, a howling, devastated screech that neither Mulder nor Scully can relate to.

***

“…Mulder,” Scully frowns, her nude form wrapped up in a fleece blanket he’d brought in from the car. She sits on the floor in front of the middle bookcase, running her fingers over the titles. “You said this place was abandoned, right?”

He’s dozing on the couch, KO’d from sex and the little bit of wine they’d had. “Mmm,” he rubs his cheek and yawns. “Yep. No one lives here.”

“I just find it odd that a place that’s been abandoned for so long shows so few signs of disrepair. In fact…” she runs her hand over the books again. “This place is cleaner than my own. You’re absolutely sure no one lives here?”

“It’s condemned,” he says. “Government says it’s no longer fit to live in.”

“That’s… weird.” She pulls out an old pulp romance novel and flips through the pages. “It seems perfectly habitable.”

“It might have something to do with the plumbing. There are all sorts of strange, outdated Virginia laws that classify a place as livable –” he’s cut off by a sharp yelp and a thud. He sits straight up and peers over the couch. “Scully?”

“I’m okay,” she groans, massaging the back of her head. “A book fell and hit me from the top shelf. But it hit me hard. Jesus, it feels like I got pelted with it.”

He climbs over the back of the couch to join her on the floor, and she laughs when he pecks and pats the top of her head.

“I have just the thing to make it better,” he says, standing back up.

“Again? So fast?” She sounds impressed. Excited. He shoots her a look.

“I was offering more wine, Scully. But ouch.” Her cackling follows him into the kitchen.

The sight that greets him freezes him cold. That extra wine bottle rests in a million shiny pieces, and what was once a glaringly yellow wall bleeds dark red with the wine streaking down to the sideboards. “Scully?” he calls out hoarsely, approaching the scene with caution.

“Shit!” she screams. His stomach drops with fear and he darts back out into the living room to find her huddled under hundreds of fallen books. “What the hell?”

“Scully!” He drops to his knees beside her, throwing book after book off to the side and clutching her face in his hands. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“Not bad, but I’m beginning to see why this place might be condemned. The bookshelf just rattled and all the books fell off. Maybe there’s something wrong with the foundation.” He helps her out of the pile and they both move away, far back from the shelf.

“Rattled?” he asks, alarmed. “Like it was being shaken?”

“I thought it might be coming from the walls,” she posits, but that doesn’t sit right with him. Anxiety begins to gnaw his stomach into pits.

“You don’t think,” he starts and stops, biting his lip. He wants to put his clothes back on. The chill is coming back. “You don’t think that…”

“Think what, Mulder?”

“That… something was trying to push the bookshelf? On purpose?”

She looks at him, startled. “What? Like a ghost?” He nods his head, shrugging, and she angrily clutches the blanket around herself, turning her back to him to pick up her clothes. “You just told me you didn’t believe there were any ghosts here.”

“You just told me you did,” he argues, following his own garment trail.

“Mulder,” she whines, pulling on her bra. “I don’t actually – I was just…”

“You were lying?” He asks, pausing with his shirt over his head. The hurt catches him off guard.

“I wasn’t lying, I just… I’m so…” she sighs, doing up her fly and buttoning up her shirt. “I never know how you’re feeling these days, and…” she doesn’t finish. He nods slowly, a hot wave of dejection flooding his cheeks. There are traces of ancient anger he wants to pull from, that’s the easier path, but he can’t bring himself to do it.

“I never needed you to lie to me, Scully, and I certainly never asked you to,” he says roughly. He turns away from her to pull on his underwear, jeans, and jacket. He ignores her attempts at apologies and walks in long strides to the kitchen. “Come look at this,” he calls to her flatly.

Just when he thinks he’s pushed past the resentment of her leaving and the guilt at having made her leave, all of the other feelings are brought to the forefront. The shame. The fragility. He’s spent the last several months trying to prove to her that he can make it on his own – that his need for her doesn’t stem from an inability to function without her, but the irrefutable fact that they work so much better together – and the whole time she’s been… what?

Seeing him as a fucking child? Wearing kid-gloves in all of her interactions with him, holding back her opinions in fear of setting him off? Oh, Jesus. Is this why she won’t move back? She thinks he’s not ready?

“Here.” Side by side, they stand in front of the stain on the wall, mindful of the smushed chocolates and shards of glass.

“Maybe they fell?” Scully guesses weakly, at least having the decency to look contrite.

“They fell? At fifty miles an hour?” Maybe there is some anger he can pull from. “Unlikely. Didn’t you tell me you felt like that book had been pelted at you?”

“Yes but Mulder that could be anything. You said yourself the house was condemned.”

“Yeah, but–” he bends down to inspect the chocolate on the floor, picking one crushed morsel up to show her. “This looks… this looks like it’s been stepped on, crushed by something. What kind of foundational issue would cause that?”

She looks at it and sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Let’s split up,” Mulder says. “Take the top floor. I’ll take the bottom. It’s what we came here for anyway, right?” And he leaves her alone in the kitchen.

***

The den drastically departs from the design ideal of the rest of the house. Under his flashlight he spots leather rock chairs, worn and overstuffed, plain walnut bookshelves and orange shag carpets. He looks through the books and the desk drawers, searching for anything personal. Photos, journals, receipts kept, anything that might give him any insight into Sherry Battersea and the lonely, lonely house she kept. No luck.

There is a large stack of records sitting next to a hefty Champion record player, dressed in supple red leatherette. He flips through them. The Big Bopper. Fats Domino. The Lennon Sisters. More and more of the same ilk – an Elvis Christmas LP he’s pretty sure is the real deal, and which he shamefully considers sliding under his coat. He then inspects the player itself, lifts the arm to see the stack of singles underneath it. He lets the arm fall back into place.

It begins to play.

He yelps, stumbling backwards and collapsing onto the rock chair as the music plays loudly enough to fill the house.

Sherry! Sherry baby! Sherry! Sherry baby!

Mulder clutches for the back of the chair and watches in terrified fascination as the entire den comes to life. The lamp flicks on and casts the room in its soft pink light, turning brown into different shades of red. Warmth trickles in from the air vent and all in his body he feels the electric hum of a machine coming to life. He knows instantly that means every other room in the house must be waking up in the same way. Scully he thinks, attempting to jump to his feet.

He’s knocked back on his ass. “What the–” he tries again, and the shag rug slithers out from underneath the desk, coming at him like a cautious snake.

Sherry! Sherry baby! Sheeeeeeeeeeeeerry bay-ay-by! Sherry, can you come out tonight?

“Scullllllaaaay!” He shouts, but he’s no match against The Four Seasons bleating from the – not from the record machine, but from – everywhere, what –

Why - don’t - you - come out? Come out! To my twist party! Where the bright moon shines!

The rug does just that, rises up, twists back and forth like wringing water out from a cloth. Still moving slowly it comes up to his feet, and he brings his legs up and hugs his knees close to his body, expelling an embarrassing squeak that would give Frankie Valli a run for his money. The rug continues its ascent, sliding up his legs, like – like a caress - gentle – warm – not like a rug, but like –

Like a human.

Mulder kicks his legs out with as much force as he can muster and the rug drops to the floor with a muffled poof. Then he’s leaping out of the chair and throwing open the door, giggling crazily when – he swears he feels it – something invisible tugs at his shirt, at his pant legs and hands.

He runs out out of the den into the open hallway like a scene straight out A Hard Day’s Night, and it’s just as he suspected. All the lights are on, and the Battersea house is thrown into full technicolor, much more vivid than he could have imagined. The lucite chairs are the brightest reds and blues he’s ever seen on furniture in his life, the sofa and the tables and the cleanest, starkest white. The light from the bulbous chandelier sparkles and spins. That pine sol scent – and then something else – Shalimar? – the alien-looking Philco television set on its tall thin stand, some old Gunsmoke episode. Then the channels flip and flip and it’s the Twilight Zone, and he’s being shoved by the air over to the couch. “Scully!” He yells again, laughing, merrily going along with the phantom guide. How is this for proof of a spirit world? This has got to be the single strongest case for the existence of poltergeists ever experienced. “Scully! Come here!”

“Mulder!” Scully screeches, straight from the gut.

Three gunshots go off.

His laughter corks in his throat, his heart drops to his stomach. Mulder races into the kitchen, faster than the grip that vies for him. The wine has been scrubbed from the walls, the glass swept from the floor. Something delicious simmers on the stove, and as he darts past the island he notices a bottle of vodka and a carton of orange juice pouring into a metal mixer. No body performs the action. They float in the air and the liquid comes out in steady, even streams.

That’s his drink. He shudders and hops up the stairs, taking two at a time. Scully’s voice has died out but he can still hear it pounding in his head, along with the never ceasing with your red dress on! Mmm you look so fine! and his ragged breath. “Scully!” He yells again, throwing open every door as he comes to it. The towels in the bathroom, the shower curtain, all rip themselves from their places and slither and slide after him, licking at his ankles and tripping him up. Gold and copper tubes of lipstick chase behind him, leaving behind perfect lip imprints on the walls.

When he gets to the bedroom, he finds Scully bound and gagged to the four poster bed, screaming into the pillowcase stuffed in mouth. “Scully,” he hisses, falling to his knees in front of her, pulling out the gag and deftly untying the knots around her ankles and wrists.

“That crazy–” she coughs and struggles underneath him, making it impossible to get her unbound. “That crazy bitch –” “Stop moving–” but she won’t, she’s writhing and wrestling until he has to cover her with his weight, yelling at her all the way. “Crazy fucking bitch!” She screams. When she’s free from her ties she shoves Mulder off of her and hops to her feet, tearing through the bedroom like a hurricane. “Where the fuck did she put my gun–”

“She took your gun?” Mulder panics, ripping through the room with her. “Scully, did you–” he sees it, three bullet holes in the corner of the ceiling. “Did you shoot the house, Scully?”

“You bet I fucking shot the house!” She screams. “Aha!” She pulls out the gun from the nightstand, cocks it, and tries to run out of the room.

“Scully,” Mulder grabs her by the shoulders and pulls her to him, ignoring her struggling. “Scully, I’m thinking this is an extremely malevolent, extremely powerful poltergeist. You cannot shootpoltergeists–”

She whips around, turning on him and backing him into the wall. “Malevolent? Did she drag you by your hair into the bedroom and tie you to a bed, Mulder? You look suspiciously unharassed.”

He licks his lips and stutters. “Uh, no. That has not been – that has not been my experience.” She raises both eyebrows and crosses her arm, waiting for him to continue. He rushes on. “I think Sherry’s still here, trying to take care of her husband.”

Scully steps back, eyes widening in shock. Her mouth opens and closes. Slowly, quietly, she asks, “Are you saying… the… poltergeist… is trying to seduce you?”

“And kill my mistress? Yeah,” he huffs a laugh and wraps his arms around her stunned and silent frame, letting his body relax against hers for just a minute. He’s getting too old for this kind of exertion. “Oh, god. You scared the shit out of me, Scully.”

“Sorry to cause so much stress, Mr. Battersea,” she grumbles, burying her nose in his neck. He nuzzles her hair and she lifts her head, slotting their lips together in a sweet, relief-filled kiss. If she’ll forgive him his affair with the carpet, he’ll forgive her everything. She pulls back, shaking her hair out of her face and straightening out her shoulders. “Now how do we get rid of this thing? What’s all in that bag you brought?”

He freezes. Shit.

“Mulder, no,” she says, horrified.

***

They slink down the stairs, Scully first, gun first, just in case. The breath of the house is soft, deceivingly calm. The music has been shut off. No objects float in the kitchen, the stove is turned off. Nothing tries to pull Mulder out of his clothes, or Scully into a closet.

“I think our little display back there pissed her off,” Mulder says grimly, staying close behind Scully.

“You’re my husband,” she bites out, straightening her shooter’s stance. “I kiss you whenever I want.”

They pause before entering the living room, looking at each other.

“That’s where it all happened,” Mulder whispers, nodding his head at the door. “If we go out there…”

“Should we just make a run for it then?” Scully asks, biting her lip. He bites his lip, too, and they meet each other’s eyes. He nods slowly.

They take off, pounding their feet against the hardwood and running as fast as they can, Mulder’s hands barely grazing Scully’s shoulders, but they never stood a chance. Floorboards are snatched almost from under their feet; chairs and tables go hurtling through the air. They drop down, Mulder curling his body over hers and shielding his head when bronze ornaments chuck themselves off of their stands, decorative mirrors drop to the floor, sending their shards flying.

From every molecule of the house, Frankie Valli’s falsetto warps into a deep, unsettling baritone.

Come come. Come out tonight. Come come. Come out tonight. Come come. Come out tonight.

“Say a prayer, Scully,” Mulder groans, wincing when a piece of glass whizzes past his head and scrapes up the back of his hands. She begins to frantically mutter one under her breath, but it’s useless. The storm doesn’t stop.

“Sherry,” Mulder tries. “Sherry!” He says louder. The music ends, but the the violence doesn’t. “Sherry, I know you were hurt!”

A woosh of a sigh is expelled from all the air vents. Objectiles drop straight to the floor. Mulder takes a deep breath and rolls off of Scully, who chokes and coughs into her arm.

He keeps going, not exactly sure what he’s saying. “Your husband was a selfish man who didn’t treat you the way you deserved. You loved him. You gave him everything. You cleaned up every mess, you paid every bill, you did everything he asked of you and it still wasn’t enough.” He swallows, pressing his bleeding hand to his stomach. “He still wouldn’t come home to you.

“It wasn’t your fault, Sherry. People who love you don’t do that to you. People who love you know that you aren’t perfect and come home to you anyway.”

The house is so quiet it is almost as if his soft, soothing voice has lulled it to sleep, and for a moment he thinks it has. Water drips from the air vents, from the windows, single, silent tears of condensation.

Crumpled next to him, Scully is sniffing. He glances at her, worried, but she’s smiling through her tears, sliding her hand through debri and dust to wrap around his. He smiles back, surprised to discover that he’s crying, too.

But she’s suddenly yanked away, screaming as those invisible hands drag her by her ankles and toss her onto the couch. “Scully!” Mulder yells, getting up to run toward her.

He’s tripped by an orange shag carpet.

“It’s not you, Sherry, it’s me,” he whimpers, frantically wriggling as the carpet begins to roll up with him inside of it. He groans and drags himself across the floor with his hands, carpet and all. The Philco set buzzes past him in the air and he shouts. “Watch out, Scully!”

He doesn’t see where it lands, but it the sound it make is a sickening smack, a bludgeoning soundtrack. “Scully?” No response. “Scully?”

He groans, dragging himself with agonizing slowness until he’s at the couch. Propping himself up his arms, his legs still wrapped in the rug, his mouth waters in fear and his stomach tightens at the sight of her, pale and silent, with one patch of bloody red hair staining her temple.

He checks her pulse, is relieved to find it faint, but still there. He kicks and pounds inside his trap until it’s beaten slack and stupid, and lifts himself onto the couch.

“Scully?” He lightly touches the spot where she’s hurt and she jerks her head and groans. “Oh, thank god.”

“Take me to dinner next time,” she winces, feeling the wound for herself and hissing out when she brushes the most tender part. She sits up, he pulls her hair away to give her better access. “I probably need to go to the hospital for this.”

“Well let’s try and get you there, partner.” One hand on her back, the other on her shoulder, he tries to help her up, but is interrupted with the sound of… “Scully. Scully, shit.”

“What?”

“Scully, the bookca–” SLAM.

***

She hauls him out of the dead and empty house, panting with the exertion and the throbbing pain in her head.

“I think–I think she went back to sleep,” Mulder yaps manically. “I think that put her to sleep. Reenacting the – the crime.” “We’re not dead, Mulder,” she grunts. Another foot down the driveway. “I just wish we were dead.”

“I think we better call an ambulance, Scully,” he says, resigned. “I don’t think either of us can drive.”

They call the ambulance and wait. Scully plops down beside him, wincing as the morning sun reflects off the ugly pink wood and cuts into her blurry vision. “This sucks, Mulder,” she sighs, squeezing her fists into her eyes.

“God, I know. This was a terrible idea. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“How are you going to help me move with two broken ankles?” She sighs again, shaking her head. “I’ll have to hire somebody now.”

He beams at her.

***

All the spirits rejoice and return to their graves for their year long sleep.

***

Girl, you make me lose my mind!

#fanfic #xfiles fanfic #the x files #txf #wtfmulder #mulder #scully #mulder and scully #mulderxscully #halloween #haunted house #spooky #msr

8 notes · View notes

fictionfromafar · 4 years ago

Text

Unmissable International Crime Fiction Novels from April 2021 onwards

1 April

The Untamable by Guillermo Arriaga

MacLehose Press

A gripping coming of age thriller of vengeance and destiny set between Mexico City's murderous 1960s underworld and the bleak tundras of Canada's most remote province. By the BAFTA-winning screenwriter of Amores Perros.

Yukon, Canada's far north. A young man tracks a wolf through the wilderness. In Mexico City, Juan Guillermo has pledged vengeance.

1 April

Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Sam Marissa

Harvill Secker

Five killers find themselves on a bullet train from Tokyo competing for a suitcase full of money. Who will make it to the last station? A bestseller in Japan, Bullet Train is an original and propulsive thriller which fizzes with an incredible energy as its complex net of double-crosses and twists unwinds to the last station.

15 April

Silenced by Sólveig Pálsdóttir, translated by Quentin Bates

Corylus Books

After a turbulent few years, Guðgeir Fransson is back with the Reykjavík police force and is called on to look into the suspicious suicide of a young woman in a cell at the Hólmsheiði prison. On the surface, it looks like a straightforward investigation. As he digs into the dead woman’s past, he unearths links to a man’s disappearance more than twenty years ago.

My review of The Fox:

15 April

We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day by Ivana Bodrožić, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac

Penguin Random House

Nora is a journalist assigned to do a puff piece on the perpetrator of a crime of passion–a Croatian high school teacher who fell in love with one of her students, a Serb, and is now in prison for having murdered her husband. But Nora herself is the daughter of a man who was murdered years earlier under mysterious circumstances. And she wants, if not to avenge her father, at least to bring to justice whoever committed the crime.

15 April

How To Betray Your Country by James Wolff

Bitter Lemon Press

Following on from the acclaimed debut novel Beside the Syrian Sea, this is the second title in a planned trilogy about loyalty and betrayal in the modern world. An authentic thriller about the thin line between following your conscience and following orders. James Wolff is the pseudonym of a young English novelist who “has been working for the British government for the last ten years”.

22 April

Trap for Cinderella by Sebastien Japrisot

Gallic Books

A beach house at a French resort is gutted by fire. Trapped inside are two women - one rich and the other poor. Only one of them survives, burnt beyond recognition and in a state of total amnesia. Who is she, the heiress or her penniless friend? A killer, or an intended victim?

29 April

Geiger by Gustaf Skordeman

Zaffre

The landline rings as Agneta is waving off her grandchildren. Just one word comes out of the receiver: 'Geiger'. For decades, Agneta has always known that this moment would come, but she is shaken. She knows what it means. Retrieving her weapon from its hiding place, she attaches the silencer and creeps up behind her husband before pressing the barrel to his temple.

29 April

Facets of Death by Michael Stanley

Orenda Books

Detective Kubu, renowned international detective, has faced off with death more times than he can count... But what was the case that established him as a force to be reckoned with? In Facets of Death, a prequel to the acclaimed Detective Kubu series, the fresh-faced cop gets ensnared in an international web of danger—can he get out before disaster strikes?

29 April

The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jonasson

Michael Joseph

Una knows she is struggling to deal with her father's sudden, tragic suicide. She spends her nights drinking alone in Reykjavik, stricken with thoughts that she might one day follow in his footsteps.

So when she sees an advert seeking a teacher for two girls in the tiny village of Skálar - population of ten - on the storm-battered north coast of the island, she sees it as a chance to escape.

13 May

Seat 7a by Sebastian Fitzek, translated by Jamie Bulloch

Head of Zeus

Psychiatrist Mats Krüger knows that his irrational fear of flying is just that – irrational. He knows that flying is nineteen times safer than driving. He also knows that if something does happen on a plane, the worst place to be is seat 7A. That's why on his first plane journey in 20 years – to be with his only daughter as she gives birth – he's booked seat 7A, so no one else can sit there. If no one is sat there, surely nothing will go wrong.

My review of Passenger 23 :

https://fictionfromafar.tumblr.com/post/643950323513311232/passenger-23-by-sebastian-fitzek-passenger-23-by

13 May

The Assistant by Kjell Ola Dahl, translated by Don Bartlett

Orenda Books

Oslo, 1938. When a woman turns up at the office of police-turned-private investigator Ludvig Paaske, has accepted a routine case to find evidence of a cheating husband but soon enough his assistant Jack Rivers has been accused of murder. Rivers is no angel, and Paaske must dig deep to find out what’s going on. The secrets he uncovers go all the way back to 1920s Norway when smugglers, pimps and racketeers ruled the Oslo underworld.

20 May

Summertime, All the Cats Are Bored by Philippe Georget, Translated by Steven Rendall

Europa Editions

It’s the middle of a long hot summer on the French Mediterranean shore and the town is full of tourists. Sebag and Molina, two tired cops who are being slowly devoured by dull routine and family worries, deal with the day’s misdemeanors and petty complaints at the Perpignan police headquarters without a trace of enthusiasm. Out of the blue a young Dutch woman is brutally murdered on a beach at Argelès, and another disappears without a trace in the alleys of the city. A serial killer obsessed with Dutch women?

20 May

Oxygen by Sacha Naspini, Translated by Clarissa Botsford

Europa Editions

Laura disappeared into thin air in 1999, at eight years old. She was found in a metal container, fourteen years later.

Luca is having dinner with his father dinner when they are interrupted by a visit from the carabinieri, who take his father away. Luca can only watch the scene unfold, helpless. The charges brought against esteemed anthropologist Carlo Maria Balestri are extremely grave: multiple counts of abduction, torture, murder, and concealing his victims’ bodies.

27 May

The Waiter by Ajay Chowdhury

Harvill Secker

Disgraced detective Kamil Rahman moves from Kolkata to London to start afresh as a waiter in an Indian restaurant. But the day he caters a birthday party for his boss's friend on Millionaire's Row, his simple new life becomes rather complicated. The event is a success, the food is delicious, but later that evening the host, Rakesh, is found dead in his swimming pool.

27 May

The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed

Viking

Mahmood Mattan is a fixture in Cardiff's Tiger Bay, 1952, which bustles with Somali and West Indian sailors, Maltese businessmen and Jewish families. He is a father, chancer, some-time petty thief. He is many things, in fact, but he is not a murderer.

So when a shopkeeper is brutally killed and all eyes fall on him, Mahmood isn't too worried. It is true that he has been getting into trouble more often since his Welsh wife Laura left him. But Mahmood is secure in his innocence in a country where, he thinks, justice is served.

10 June

In the Shadow of the Fire by Herve Le Corre, translated by Tina Kover

Europa Editions

The Paris Commune’s “bloody week” sees the climax of the savagery of the clashes between the Communards and the French Armed Forces loyal to Versailles. Amid the shrapnel and the chaos, while the entire west side of Paris is a field of ruins, a photographer fascinated by the suffering of young women takes “suggestive” photos to sell to a particular clientele. Young women begin disappearing, and when Caroline, a seamstress who volunteers at a first aid station, is counted among the missing, her fiancé Nicolas, a member of the Commune’s National Guard, and Communal security officer Antoine, sets off independently in search of her.

10 June

The All Human Wisdom by Pierre Lemaitre

MacLehose Press

In 1927, the great and the good of Paris gather at the funeral of the wealthy banker, Marcel Péricourt. His daughter, Madeleine, is poised to take over his financial empire (although, unfortunately, she knows next to nothing about banking). More unfortunately still, when Madeleine's seven-year-old son, Paul, tumbles from a second floor window of the Péricourt mansion on the day of his grandfather's funeral, and suffers life-changing injuries, his fall sets off a chain of events that will reduce Madeleine to destitution and ruin in a matter of months.

15 June

The Transparency Of Time, Leonardo Padura, translated by Anna Kushner,

Bitter Lemon Press

Mario Conde is facing down his sixtieth birthday. What does he have to show for his decades on the planet? A failing body, a slower mind, and a decrepit country, in which both the ideals and failures of the Cuban Revolution are being swept away in favor of a new and newly cosmopolitan worship of money. Rescue comes in the form of a new case: an old Marxist turned flamboyant practitioner of Santería appears on the scene to engage Conde to track down a stolen statue of the Virgen de Regla—a black Madonna. This sets Conde on a quest that spans twenty-first century Havana as well as the distant past to uncover the true provenance of the statue.

My review of Havana Fever:

https://fictionfromafar.tumblr.com/post/631759758177746944/havana-fever-written-by-leonardo-padura

24 June

The Wrong Goodbye by Toshihiko Yahagi, translated by Alfred Birnbaum

MacLehose Press

In a nod to Raymond Chandler, The Wrong Goodbye pits homicide detective Eiji Futamura against a shady Chinese business empire and U.S. military intelligence in the docklands of recession hit Japan. After the frozen corpse of immigrant barman Tran Binh Long washes up in midsummer near Yokosuka U.S. Navy Base, Futamura meets a strange customer from Tran’s bar. Vietnam vet pilot Billy Lou Bonney talks Futamura into hauling three suitcases of “goods” to Yokota US Air Base late at night and flies off leaving a dead woman behind. My review:

https://fictionfromafar.tumblr.com/post/641412317374988288/the-wrong-goodbye

24 June

Sleepless by Romy Haussmann, translated by Jamie Bulloch

Quercus

It's been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she's wanted nothing more than to live a normal life: nice flat, steady job, even a few friends. But when one of those friends, Laura von Hoven - free-spirited beauty and wife of Nadja's boss - kills her lover and begs Nadja for her help, Nadja can't seem to be able to refuse.

29 June

Black Ice by Carin Gerhardsen

Scarlet

January in Gotland. The days are short, the air is cold, and all the roads are covered in snow. On a deserted, icy backroad, these wintery conditions will soon bring together a group of strangers with a force devastating enough to change their lives forever when, in the midst of a brief period, a deadly accident and two separate crimes leave victims in their wake.

1st July

The Darkness Knows by Arnaldur Indridason

Harvill Secker

A woman approaches Konrad with new information and progress can finally be made. But as Konrad starts to look back at the case and secrets of the past, he is forced to come face to face with his own dark side. In What the Darkness Knows, the master of Icelandic crime writing reunites readers with Konrad, the unforgettable retired detective from The Shadow District.

1 July

Resilience by Bogdan Hrib, translated by Marina Sofia

Corylus Books

Stelian Munteanu has had enough of being an international man of mystery: all he wants to do is make the long-distance relationship with his wife Sofia work. But when the notorious Romanian businessman Pavel Coman asks him to investigate the death of his daughter in the north of England, he reluctantly gets involved once more in what proves to be a tangled web of shady business dealings and political conspiracies. Moving rapidly between London, Newcastle, Bucharest and Iasi, this novel shows just how easy it is to fall prey to fake news and social media manipulation.

8 July

The Therapist by Helene Flood, translated by Alison McCulloch

MacLehose Press

A voicemail from her husband tells Sara he's arrived at the holiday cabin. Then a call from his friend confirms he never did. She tries to carry on as normal, teasing out her clients' deepest fears, but as the hours stretch out, her own begin to surface. And when the police finally take an interest, they want to know why Sara deleted that voicemail.

13 July

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro translated by Frances Riddle

Charco Press

After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.

My review of Betty Boo:

https://fictionfromafar.tumblr.com/post/633225446612484096/

15 July

The Basel Killings

Hansjörg Schneider

Bitter Lemon Press

It the end of October, the city of Basel is grey and wet. It could be December. It is just after midnight when Police Inspector Peter Hunkeler, on his way home and slightly worse for wear, spots old man Hardy sitting on a bench under a street light. He wants to smoke a cigarette with him, but the usually very loquacious Hardy is silent—his throat a gaping wound. Turns out he was first strangled, then his left earlobe slit, his diamond stud stolen. The media and the police come quickly to the same conclusion: Hardy’s murder was the work of a gang of Albanian drug smugglers. But for Hunkeler that seems too obvious.

20 July

The Double Mother by Michel Bussi, translated by Sam Taylor

W&N

Already shown as a serial on Channel4’s Walter Presents (as The Other Mother), four-year-old Malone Moulin is haunted by nightmares of being handed over to a complete stranger and begins claiming his mother is not his real mother. His teachers at school say that it is all in his imagination as his mother has a birth certificate, photos of him as a child and even the pediatrician confirms Malone is her son. The school psychologist, Vasily, believes otherwise as the child vividly describes an exchange between two women.

22 July

Girls Who Lie Eva Bjorg AEgisdottir

Orenda

When single mother Maríanna disappears from her home, leaving an apologetic note on the kitchen table, everyone assumes that she’s taken her own life … until her body is found on the Grábrók lava fields seven months later, clearly the victim of murder. Her neglected fifteen-year-old daughter Hekla has been placed in foster care, but is her perfect new life hiding something sinister?

My Review of A Creak On The Stairs:

https://fictionfromafar.tumblr.com/post/631717704661942273/

22nd July

The Doll Yrsa Sigurdardottir

Hodder & Stoughton

It was meant to be a quiet family fishing trip, a chance for mother and daughter to talk. But it changes the course of their lives forever. They catch nothing except a broken doll that gets tangled in the net. After years in the ocean, the doll a terrifying sight and the mother's first instinct is to throw it back, but she relents when her daughter pleads to keep it. This simple act of kindness proves fatal. That evening, the mother posts a picture of the doll on social media. By the morning, she is dead and the doll has disappeared.

5 August

The Soul Breaker by Sebastian Fitzek, translated by Jamie Bulloch

Head Of Zeus

He doesn't kill them, or mutilate them. But he leaves them completely dead inside, paralysed and catatonic. His only trace a note left in their hands. There are three known victims when suddenly the abductions stop. The Soul Breaker has tired of his game, it seems. Meanwhile, a man has been found in the snow outside an exclusive psychiatric clinic. He has no recollection of who he is, or why he is there. Unable to match him to any of the police's missing people, the nurses call him Casper.

12 August

Cold Sun by Anita Sivakumaran

Dialogue Books

Bangalore. Three high-profile women murdered, their bodies draped in identical red saris. When the killer targets the British Foreign Minister's ex-wife, Scotland Yard sends the troubled, brilliant DI Vijay Patel to lend his expertise to the Indian police investigation. Stranger in a strange land, ex-professional cricketer Patel must battle local resentment and his own ignorance of his ancestral country, while trying to save his failing relationship back home.

August date TBC

Skin Deep by Antonia Lassa, translated by Jacky Collins

Corylus Books

The corpse of an elderly millionaire is discovered brutally scarred with acid burns. Her young lover is the chief suspect but the authorities admit they are baffled. It will take the intervention of private detective Albert Larten to explore all the complexities of desire, and ultimately reveal the truth.

19 August

Come Hell Or High Water by Christian Unge

MacLehose Press

The first in a new Swedish crime series featuring Tekla Berg – a fearless doctor with a remarkable photographic memory

With 85% per cent burns to his body and a 115% risk of dying, it’s a miracle the patient is still alive. That he made it this far is thanks to Tekla Berg, an emergency physician whose unorthodox methods and photographic memory are often the difference between life and death.

30 September

Night Hunters by Oliver Bottini

MacLehose Press

The fourth in the Black Forest Investigations - by the four-time winner of the German Crime Fiction Award. Over the course of several days one hot summer, a female student from Freiburg disappears, a father is murdered in a brutal attack, a teenage boy drowns in the Rhine in suspicious circumstances. It soon becomes evident to Chief Inspector Louise Boni and her colleagues at Freiburg's criminal police that the three cases are connected - and that others are now in terrible danger. Including Boni herself.

07 October

Lemon by Kwon Yeo-Sun

House Of Zeus

Focusing on the unsolved murder of teenage girl, this literary crime novel offers insights into gender, class and privilege in Seoul, and marks the English-language debut for award-winning Korean author, Kwon Yeo-sun.

In the summer of 2002, my big sister Hae-on was murdered. She was beautiful, intelligent, and only nineteen years old. Two boys were questioned, but the case was never solved. Her killer still walks free.

12 October

Bread: The Bastards of Pizzofalcone

by Maurizio de Giovanni

Europa Editions

Sometimes it takes facing a formidable adversary to truly know one’s worth. The Bastards of Pizzofalcone may have found just that: when the brutal murder of a baker rattles the city, they are ready to investigate. There’s nothing they wouldn’t do to prove themselves to their community. But this time the police are divided: for the special anti-mob branch, the local mafia is doubtlessly responsible for the crime, but the Bastards are not so sure and think there may be another reason for the murder of the renowned artisan, whose traditionally baked bread attracted customers from far and wide. A rivalry between the policeman and the magistrate is formed, one that, in the end, will extend to more than just their work lives.

12 October

The Corpse Flower by Anne Mette Hancock

Crooked Lane Books

It's early September in Copenhagen, the rain has been coming down for weeks, and 36-year-old journalist Heloise Kaldan is in the middle of a nightmare. One of her sources has been caught lying, and she could lose her job over it. And then she receives the first in a series of cryptic and ominous letters from an alleged killer.

28 October

Inertia by Camilla Grebe

Zaffre

Inertia is an eerie psychological thriller from the award-winning Swedish bestselling author Camilla Grebe. When 18-year old Samuel finds himself at the centre of a drug deal gone wrong, he is forced to go underground to escape the police and an infamous drug lord.

October date TBC

The Commandments by Oskar Gudmundsson

Corylus Books

On a cold winter morning in 1995, Anton, a 19-year-old boy, met a priest outside Glerárkirkja in Akureyri. After that, he was never seen again. Two decades later a priest is found murdered in the church in Grenivík. When the police investigate the case, they finds that a deacon has also been executed inside Akureyri.

28 October

Cold as Hell by Lilja Sigurdardottir

Orenda Books

Icelandic sisters Áróra and Ísafold live in different countries and aren‘t on speaking terms, but when their mother loses contact with Ísafold, Áróra reluctantly returns to Iceland to find her sister. But she soon realizes that her sister isn’t avoiding her … she has disappeared, without trace.

As she confonts Ísafold’s abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend Björn, and begins to probe her sister’s reclusive neighbours – who have their own reasons for staying out of sight – leads Áróra into an ever darker web of intrigue and manipulation.

28 October

The Rabbit Factor by Antti Toumainen

Orenda Books

What makes life perfect? Insurance mathematician Henri Koskinen knows the answer because he calculates everything down to the very last decimal.

And then, for the first time, Henri is faced with the incalculable. After suddenly losing his job, Henri inherits an adventure park from his brother – its peculiar employees and troubling financial problems included. The worst of the financial issues appear to originate from big loans taken from criminal quarters … and some dangerous men are very keen to get their money back.

2 November

Bricklayers

Selva Almada

Charco Press

Oscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito, somehow fell in love. Brickmakers begins as Pájaro and Marciano, Ángelito’s older brother, lie dying in the mud at the base of a Ferris wheel. Inhabiting a dreamlike state between life and death, they recall the events that forced them to pay the price of their fathers’ petty feud.

My review of Dead Girls:

https://fictionfromafar.tumblr.com/post/642554449326489600/dead-girls-charco-press

4 November

The Night Will Be Long

Santiago Gamboa

Europa Editions

When a horribly violent confrontation occurs outside of Cauca, Colombia, only a young boy is around to witness it. But no sooner does the violence happen than it disappears, vanished without a trace. Nobody claims to have seen anything. Nobody claims to have heard anything. That is, until an anonymous accusation catalyzes a dangerous investigation into the deep underbelly of the Christian churches present today in Latin America. The Night Will Be Long is a dark, twisting thriller filled with moments of humor and pain--a story that will stick with readers long after they turn the last page.

11 November

The Shadows of Men by Abir Mukherjee

Harvill Secker

When a Hindu theologian is found murdered in his home, the city is on the brink of all-out religious war. Can officers of the Imperial Police Force, Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee track down those responsible in time to stop a bloodbath? Set at a time of heightened political tension, beginning in atmospheric Calcutta and taking the detectives all the way to bustling Bombay, the latest instalment in this 'unmissable' (The Times) series presents Wyndham and Banerjee with an unprecedented challenge.

#crimeintranslation #crime fiction #european literature #latinamericancrimefiction #Nordic noir #Japanese crime fiction

2 notes · View notes

gorogues · 5 years ago

Photo

Spoilers for Flash #750!

You can see a few preview pages here, here, and here. There are so many pages in the issue that it’s tough to choose which ones to include here.

This was definitely worthy of a milestone issue. There are multiple stories: one set in the present, a Len solo story which is sort of set in the Johns era, a pre-Crisis Sam story, a New 52-esque Speed Mind story, a Golden Age Jay story, and one about Wally's new role. Plus, of course, a bunch of gorgeous pinups.

To get things out of the way, unfortunately it is definitely confirmed that Commander Cold is dead. Steadfast and Fuerza are alive but off to do other things, James is locked up in a cell again, and the other Rogues are loose. David Singh appears and is surprisingly nice to Barry, and it's confirmed that he and Hartley are still together and doing well. Roy appears briefly and is now 100% confirmed to be in current continuity (technically his previous appearances were in a holiday issue, which are often of dubious canonicity, and he'd seemingly appeared twice in Zandia but at least one of his 'appearances' there was a Psych illusion). And Iris is working on a story about how the Flash has helped people and inspired them, so we see flashbacks of Barry saving the day from various Rogues and Grodd.

Then Godspeed shows up, and lures Barry to the Flash Museum so Paradox can confront him. Paradox airs his grievances, and tells Barry to give up being the Flash or see everything he cares about destroyed. Paradox sics August on Barry, and the story ends in a cliffhanger, undoubtedly to be continued next issue. It's notable that August is surprised to learn of the future Flash who was killed by Paradox, and perhaps that'll play into him turning on his boss in the story to come...at least if his desire for atonement is real, and he's actually upset to see any version of Barry killed. It's possible that he thinks he can play along and save Barry from Paradox even if he has to beat him up a bit.

Then we've got the Len solo story by Johns and Kolins, which is shown above. As always, Kolins is great with the little details which don't even figure into the story but add a lot. We see the Stanley Cup stashed in Len's filthy apartment, as is tradition. And Len's got a computer now, which is interesting. Some of Lisa's stuff is stored in his closet, and he's got a yearbook photo of the Rogues. And later in the story Jai is wearing a turtle shirt, which must be a nod to the long-rumoured plan that he was supposed to become the new Turtle before Flashpoint (you may recall that he was depowered in Flash: Rebirth and resentful about it, and Eobard claimed that one of Wally's kids would ruin his life). Jai and Irey's appearance tells us that this isn't quite in proper continuity or is set during the Brightest Day era -- but if it was set during Brightest Day, Wally wouldn't necessarily think Len's actions were directed specifically at him, since Barry would be around too. And even the yearbook photo fudges things a bit, since we wouldn't have a costumed Lisa and a youthful Roscoe around at the same time, barring a retcon. Though Johns does love his retcons, so you never know.

The Len story is great and a lot of fun, and shows much of what we love and maybe also dislike about that era of Len. As always, he over-indulges on the beer even as he otherwise decries drug use (although in fairness, he doesn't say anything about drugs in this story), but that is one of his flaws and probably one of the remnants of an abusive upbringing steeped in booze. Johns seems to be throwing a little shade at the New 52 Rogues with the line "Guys who can snap their fingers and make a snowstorm because of some meta gene, how do you respect that? When I hold that gadget in my hand, it means something." Agree or disagree with that statement -- I don't think it's necessarily right or wrong -- there's no question that the meta Rogues were very much at odds with the Rogues of the Johns era. And you may recall that Johns depowered New 52 Len as soon as he got a chance to; it's pretty clear he didn't like that development.

Wally's interpretation of Len's actions is very interesting and completely understandable from his POV, but of course he's misread the situation entirely. Obviously he doesn't know Len as well as he thinks he does. He'd be correct if it was quite a few other Flash villains (including some of the other Rogues), but he assumes the worst of all of them and we've seen before that sometimes he's wrong. But the Len of that era deliberately cultivated misperceptions of himself and the other Rogues to get people to underestimate him or keep them off-balance, and ultimately he's probably got himself to blame for Wally's misunderstanding. I don't think Len would mind Wally misunderstanding him for the reasons mentioned above, but maybe Wally would treat him better if he truly understood Len's motivations. Food for thought.

It's also nice to see Chyre and Morillo too, who are very much missed. Chyre's been name-dropped in the Rebirth era, but I'd like to see him and Morillo actually appearing again, even if just occasionally.

The Sam story is pretty cool and has a lot of Silver/Bronze Age simplicity and weirdness to it, and wouldn't be out of place in the published stories of that era. So I admire that Wolfman and Rossmo were able to capture those aspects in it. The issue doesn't contain something from every era of the Flash, but this story covers the Silver/Bronze Age era wonderfully.

The Jay story is really interesting; it's otherwise a very Golden Age-inspired story with the Thinker, but then Eobard puts in a surprise appearance, taunting Jay that he'll be forgotten in the future. It's a very Eobard thing to do, although unusual to see him taking an interest in Jay. And obviously it foreshadows Jay's disappearance from this Earth/continuity from the New 52 until recently. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how Jay is used now that he and the JSA seem to be back, and wonder if Eobard will continue bothering him. Obviously Eobard's primary grudge is with Barry, but of course he's messed with other members of the Flash Family as well. And messing with the Flash Family in general may become a hobby of his with the [spoilers for comics in May] development that he's creating his own Reverse Flash Family.

The Wally story is partly an epilogue to the Flash Forward series and partly a prologue to the upcoming Generation Zero issue on Free Comic Book Day. In it, Wally observes different versions of continuity: the pre-Flashpoint history and the post-Flashpoint history, side by side and seemingly both still in continuity. Or, if not still in continuity, then still existing together. Presumably he (or someone else) will deal with that to streamline continuity, but the question is, will both versions still remain, get merged into one, or will something else happen entirely? We may not find out until FCBD and beyond.

So all in all, this was a great issue, and fitting for a milestone. It was great fun to see the various stories, pinups, and variant covers, and so nice to see a classic Johns-Kolins story about Len, a spotlight on Jay, and an era-appropriate story featuring classic Sam. It's also good to finally get some answers about lingering questions in current continuity like the fate of James and Commander Cold and the missing Forces users, even if we're not always happy about the developments. I do think Henry's killing was weirdly abrupt and has been handled as something of an afterthought so I'm not thrilled about that, but it is good to get confirmation and some finality to it. Hopefully he isn't completely forgotten after this.

67 notes · View notes

s-oulpunk · 5 years ago

Text

Vendetta (3/3) - Stenbrough

Chapter Summary:

“I’ve been thinking, maybe we should leave sooner.”

Bill blinks slowly. “Sooner?”

“Yeah, if we get everything packed. No point in waiting, right?” Robert grins at him over the mess of boxes. “You said it yourself, you hate this shit hole.”

Bill chews nervously on his lower lip. “How ss-suh-soon?”

“Tonight?”

TW: Violence, Non-con, Kidnapping, Manipulation, Mentions of rape, Guns

Read on AO3

Part Three:

The Disappearance of Robert Gray:

At the same time Robert Gray is watching the life flicker in and out of Stanley Uris’ eyes, and Bill Denbrough is scavenging his room for items to bring on his cross country road trip, the remaining Losers are pulling up to a tall, looming apartment building.

Eddie wrinkles his nose at the sight. “This place? Are you sure?

Richie nods. “I’m positive.”

“I don’t like it,” Eddie murmurs. “There’s something...off about it.”

“It has awful design flaws,” Ben says, kicking his bike to the ground with a scoff. “You would think even a child murderer would have some fucking taste.”

“Really?” Eddie huffs. “That’s what’s important? The fucking murderer’s fashion sense?”

“We don’t know he’s a murderer for sure,” Mike says, picking his words carefully. “We might be wrong.”

But there’s something deep in their bones that tells them they’re not.

“C’mon,” murmurs Bev, who has been suspiciously quiet the entire trip over. “Let’s get this over with.”

“What exactly do you guys expect to do?” Eddie hisses, hurrying to catch up with his friends as they climb the staircase to Robert’s floor. “It’s not like he’s gonna leave anything just lying around in his apartment. You’re gonna have to tear that thing apart, and then your fingerprints will be all over it. And then what? And then he finds you and, boom, you’re dead!”

Ben glances at him curiously. “I dunno if that’s how it works.”

“It is, trust me,” Eddie says. “Now, do you guys really-”

Richie turns sharply, nearly sending the teenagers behind him toppling to the bottom of the staircase.

“Eddie,” he hisses. “You knew what you were getting yourself into. You can either come or you can stay behind, but do not try to stop us.”

Eddie holds his hands up in a weak surrender. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “You just have to be cautious.”

“I know that!” Richie exclaims incredulously. “But we don’t have the fucking luxury-”

“Rich,” Mike cuts him off sharply, one hand coming to rest on Eddie’s stiff-as-a-board shoulder. “Surely we don’t all need to go into his apartment? Isn’t there anywhere else we can look?”

“There should be storage down in the basement,” Ben pipes up.

“Great, Eddie and I will look down there,” Mike says, already steering Eddie back down the stairs. “We’ll meet back out front, alright?”

Despite his previous anger, Richie looks almost nervous as he watches them disappear around the banister. “Are we sure that’s a smart idea? Splitting up like that? Isn’t that horror movie 101?”

“We’ll cover more ground that way,” Bev says. “It’s smart.” When Richie still doesn’t appear appeased, she sighs softly. “This isn’t a horror film, they’ll be fine. Now c’mon, we don’t know how much time we have.”

As the trio continues their trek up the stairs, Mike and Eddie can be found poking their way around the lobby. The basement door is fairly easy to find, a dark green door placed firmly against the back wall. Only problem, it’s firmly locked.

“We must need a key,” Mike says, softly jiggling the handle.

Eddie furrows his eyebrows, tongue darting out to wet his lips nervously. “I think I can get in.”

Mike turns to him hopefully. “You can?”

“Yeah. Just wait a second.” Eddie disappears around the corner, reappearing a moment later with one of those cushy lobby chairs. “Okay, stand back.”

“Wha - Eddie, no!”

“Why not?” Eddie asks, sounding genuinely confused.

“Why? Because you can’t!” Mike exclaims. “First of all, you’re about to collapse under the weight of that thing. Second of all, there’s no way it’ll work! It’ll just cause a mess and draw attention to us!”

Eddie doesn’t drop the chair. “Do you have a better idea?”

To be fair, Mike does not have a better idea.

“Alright, fuck it,” Mike huffs. “Give me that.”

Eddie hesitantly hands over the chair. Mike wrestles with it for a second before swinging it around and bringing it against the door, just under the doorknob, with a thud.

The door starts to splinter under the weight, but so does the chair. And it’s still not enough to actually get inside.

“Shit, okay. Stand back.”

“Why? What are you-” Eddie cuts himself off with a shriek as Mike gives the door one good kick. It jostles the door enough that a harsh push leaves it swinging open. “Jesus christ, man.”

“It was your idea,” Mike says with a shrug.

The basement is cold, cold enough to make Mike physically shiver, and smells vaguely of damp mold. Mike quickly decides he doesn’t like it.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Eddie murmurs. “I mean, could they at least put a light or something down here? I’m gonna fucking kill myself walking down these stairs.”

“There’s one at the bottom of the stairs,” Mike says, even though he isn’t truly sure.

Luckily, he’s proven right after a successful amount of fumbling alongside the wall. There’s a small light switch just to the left of the stairs, and it bathes the basement in a dull, cold light.

“There are so many boxes,” Mike murmurs.

“Yeah, that’s what people put in basements,” Eddie says, voice high and snippy.

“Right, but,” Mike’s eyes flit over the contents, “how do we know which ones are Roberts?”

This makes Eddie pause. “I - I think they’re labeled.

“Some of them,” Mike murmurs. “Some have the room numbers.” He glances nervous at Eddie. “Do we know Robert’s apartment number?”

Eddie shakes his head. “Richie said he was on the third floor.”

“Well, that’s something,” Mike mumbles. “Look through anything labeled from the third floor. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Eddie nods dutifully and drops to his knees, popping open the nearest box. Mike crosses to the opposite side before doing the same. By the time they meet in the middle, they still haven’t found anything worthwhile.

“At least we know what a million random people’s family photo albums look like,” Mike sighs.

“This is stupid,” Eddie grumbles. “There’s nothing about Stan here!”

“Maybe the others had better luck upstairs,” Mike says.

“Maybe.” Eddie sighs as he reaches for the last box. “I can’t wait to get out of here.”

“Yeah, me either.” Mike peers curiously over Eddie’s shoulder. “What’s in there?”

“Just a lot of fucking tissue paper.”

“What the fuck?” Mike leans over, pulling handfuls of tissue paper out of the box. “That’s not - Who the fuck would do that?”

“A psychopath,” Eddie grumbles.

“But, it doesn’t - Wait! There’s something here!” From amongst the tissue paper, Mike reveals a simple looking key.

“Do you think it’s Robert’s?” Eddie asks.

“Dunno,” Mike says. “Could be. Or it could just be some random person’s key we’re stealing.”

“I’m willing to take that risk.”

As Mike and Eddie struggle to open the basement door, three stories up Bev is picking the lock to Robert’s front door.

“Hurry up,” Richie whispers. “We can’t let anyone see us.”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Bev hisses. “It’s not exactly the easier thing in the world.”

“You’re doing great!” Ben insists.

“Thank you,” Bev says, trying not to preen too much in light of the compliment.

“You are doing great,” Richie says. “But also we don’t have a lot of time and-”

“I get it!” Bev snaps. “Just relax, alright? We won’t get caught. And if we do I have the perfect cover story, we’ll just say - Got it!” She gives the door a gentle push, watching with a sort of pride as it creaks open.

“Marsh, you genius!” Richie grins.

“Oh, where would you be without me?” Bev says with a teasing smirk.

Ben shuts the door behind them, the quiet click of the lock sounding not unlike a nail in a coffin.

“What are we looking for exactly?” Ben asks.

“Anything that might lead us to Stan,” Richie says. “It probably won't be lying around, we’ll have to dig. So be careful. Don’t mess anything up too much, okay? Looking at you, Haystack. I’ve seen your room. It’s a mess.”

“Right,” Ben says. “But how do we know what leads to Stan?”

Richie shrugs pathetically. “You’ll just...know.”

“That’s a terrible answer,” Bev says with a roll of her eyes. “Just keep your eyes peeled, okay?” Ben nods and slips into the bedroom. “Hey!” he cries out a moment later. “Guys, come look at this!”

When Bev and Richie meet him in the room a moment later, they’re met with the sight of boxes upon boxes piling up on themselves.

“He must be moving,” Ben says. “It might make it easier to look through everything.”

“Thank God,” Richie grumbles. “Maybe Bill will be able to pull his head out of his ass once he’s gone.”

Bev lets out a huff in agreement. “I don’t want that creep in our town anymore.” She nods towards the boxes. “C’mon.”

Only half the boxes are packed, but they’re still a massive hassle to get through. Filled to the brim with clothes and bedding, they take forever to search, and yet there’s nothing of interest in them.

“Maybe we were wrong,” Ben mutters. “There’s nothing in any of these.”

“There’s plenty of stuff that hasn’t been packed yet!” Richie insists. “There’s - There’s still - There are still a lot of places he could be hiding something!”

Ben glances nervously towards the door. “We don’t have a lot of time-” “We have to take the risk!” Richie says. “We can’t just abandon Stan-”

“I didn’t say anything about abandoning Stan!” Ben snaps. “We’re all his friends too. But we won’t be any help to him if Robert catches us.”

“We’ll keep a lookout,” Bev says. “I’ll go first. Someone switch with me in a few minutes.”

If they were lucky, Robert would have a window overlooking the front door, but his apartment is on the opposite side of the building. Instead, Bev goes out into the hall and overlooks the banister, leaning down to star at the spiral staircase below her.

Meanwhile, Ben and Richie are tearing apart Robert’s apartment.

“Why are you looking in the kitchen?” Ben hisses. “There isn’t going to be anything there!”

Richie continues to dig through the drawers. “This is the last place anyone would look!”

“Yes because it makes no sense-”

“Just go check the bedroom again!”

They’re in no position to be wasting time arguing, so Ben goes. Richie’s already checked every crevice of this damn room, but Ben doesn’t mind re-checking. A new pair of eyes never hurt.

The closet is already mostly cleared out. The cabinets are filled with useless junk. And his bedside table has nothing but reading glasses and an old, half-dead alarm clock on it. All perfectly innocent.

But Ben has no doubts that Robert is the reason Stan has disappeared. The man always made him feel cold, like someone had just replaced all the blood in his veins with ice water. So, in a last ditch effort, he ducks down and reaches his hand under the bed.

It’s mostly dust bunnies and trash - old candy wrappers and the such - but a small brown box stands out amongst the garbage. Ben swipes it up as quickly as he can, and settles down with his legs crossed and back against the bed before carefully popping it open. He isn’t sure what he’s expecting, but to say that he’s let down is an understatement.

The only thing in the box is a small camera.

With a huff, Ben closes the box and shoves it under the bed. So much for that idea.

Ben’s halfway out the door when he realizes how strange it is to hide a camera under one’s bed. Surely something so innocent could be placed somewhere more convenient. Of course, it could have been something he had packed and had simply accidentally kicked under the bed but…

Ben snatches the box back into his arms as quickly as he can. With bated breath, he turns the camera on.

“Oh, fuck,” he whispers. Then, as he scrambles to his feet and practically throws himself across the apartment, “Rich! Richie! Richie, look at this!”

Just down the hall, Beverly is half considering grabbing a cigarette. Smoke alarms be damned. She’s never been so bored in all her life.

She’s just starting to toy with the idea of keeping watch out front when someone starts to ascend the stairs. She can’t see them clearly at first, just a human shaped blob at the bottom of the stairs, but as he gets closer, he becomes painfully recognizable.

Bev risks a glance down the hall. Robert’s door is still wide open, and the shuffling inside is clear as day. Before she can second guess herself, she raises her arm in a friendly wave and shouts out, “Robert!”

It catches his attention, and she can only pray it catches Ben and Richie’s as well. She scurries down the stairs, stopping him just a flight below his floor.

Robert grins at her. “Beverly, right?”

“Mhm, that’s me! What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” he gestures just up the stairs.

“Shit, no kidding!” Bev says. “Do you like it? My aunt and I are thinking about moving.”

“Oh, well that’s great!” Robert exclaims. “You’ll like it here, it’s cozy.”

Bev hums, doing her best to appear interested. “Just what we’re looking for.”

“Would you like to come in?”

Shit. “Ah - Better not. Wish I could, but I’m just on my way out now.”

Robert nods. “Well, it was very nice to see you.”

He only manages to make it one more step before Bev turns on him again. “Wait! I - Uh - I have more questions! About - About the laundry room. Do the machines work?”

Robert gives her a weird look. “Do they - Of course they work. Why wouldn’t they work?”

Bev shrugs. “Half the washing machines in my old building didn’t work. Guess I’m paranoid now.” From over Robert’s shoulder, she can see Ben and Richie scrambling over each other as they make their way frantically down the stairs. “That’s it. You just reminded me because you’ve got something,” she gestures vaguely, “On your shirt.”

For the first time, Robert appears almost nervous. He chuckles awkwardly as he fumbles with his arms, hurrying to cover the browning spots. “Had a bloody nose earlier. I’ll be sure to wash it out.”

Bev grins. “Cool.”

Ben and Richie come to a halting stop right behind Robert, Ben fumbling with something behind his back.

“Mister Gray,” he says, plastering on a polite smile. “Nice to see you again.”

“Oh, you as well,” Robert says. “Helping Beverly with house hunting?”

Ben nods. “Yes sir.”

“Well, that’s very sweet. I’ll be sure to see you around, kids.” With a wave, he disappears up the stairs.

Mike and Eddie are waiting for them just outside the front door, looking almost as stressed as Bev feels.

“Thank fuck, you’re okay,” Eddie blurts out. “I was so-”

“Clubhouse. Now,” Bev says, effectively cutting off his rambling.

The last time they were in the clubhouse, Bill had thrown his notebook at Richie’s face. It leaves a bad taste in the air. And though none of them mention it, they’re all thinking about it. His notebook is still lying there, dusty and alone, on the floor. None of them pick it up.

“What did you find?” Bev asks, settling down on the floor. The present Losers settle around her, forming a small circle.

“Mikey and I found a key!” Eddie says. “Mike, show them the key!”

“I’m getting there,” Mike says with an amused smile, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes like it used to. He fishes around in his pocket, leaving Eddie to bounce impatiently beside him. Finally, he tosses the key into the center of the circle. It’s nothing too spectacular, long and spindly and a shade of charcoal black, but it still manages to capture their attention.

“We don’t know where it goes,” Eddie says, eyes wide with wonder.

“We don’t even know if it’s Robert’s,” Mike adds with a soft sigh.

“What kind of person leaves a key in a basement?” Richie says, scrunching up his nose.

“Maybe it’s a spare or something,” Ben shrugs.

Richie rolls his eyes. “Yeah, but even then, why wouldn’t he just leave it in his apartment?”

“Because he doesn’t want guests to find it,” Bev says softly. Then, louder, “Bill goes over to his apartment, right? If this key does lead back to Stan, he doesn’t want to risk him finding it.”

“Yeah, okay, sure,” Mike says. “But we still don’t know where it goes.”

“Actually, we might.” Ben’s hands tighten around the camera. “We - Um - Well-”

“Everything on there is fucked up,” Richie interrupts, loud enough to make his friends jump.

“Yeah,” Ben says, face flushing. “But - Um - It might have some hints about where Stan is.”

“Show us!” Bev shouts hurriedly.

Ben clicks on the camera.

The violence in the photos is nothing like the violence on TV. There’s no perfectly smeared blood, painted on by the makeup department. There’s no leading actor, defiance sparkling in their eyes even after a good old punch to the face from the villain. All there is is a boy, scared and alone. There’s blood - God, there’s so much blood - and there seems to be a new bruise with every photo. Eddie actually gags a handful of times.

“Jesus Christ,” Mike mutters.

“There was blood on Robert’s shirt,” Bev whispers. “He was just - He was just with Stan. We have to - We have to go! Right now!”

“Does anyone know where these are?” Ben asks pleadingly. “The walls are old, we need to find-”

“Neibolt!” Eddie blurts. “That creepy house on the outskirts of town! Fuck, why didn’t we figure it out before? No one would look there! It would be the perfect place to hide him!”

“Are you sure?” Richie asks, eyes wide.

Eddie swipes the camera from Ben, quickly skimming through the photos. “Well, no, but I’m almost sure. Maybe there are other hints - Oh. Fuck.”

“What?” Bev’s at his side in a flash. In his hands, Stan has disappeared from the photographs. Instead Bill is looking up at the camera, wide-eyed and faux innocent, as sticky white strips coat his face. “Oh, fuck.” She snatches the camera from Eddie’s hands. “We probably don’t need to look anymore.” Eddie nods, still looking lost and rather frightened. “You said - Um - You said Neibolt house, right?” Eddie nods again. “Great. Let’s go.”

The Losers scramble to their feet, reeking of nervous energy as they climb the ladder one by one. Bev goes last, loving tucking the camera and Bill’s notebook into the far corner of the clubhouse before following the boys out into the world awaiting them.

As the Losers are peddling their bikes across town, Bill is ascending the stairs of the same apartment building they had only just vacated. He had stopped knocking long ago, and simply slips the key out from under the cheerful welcome mat before letting himself inside.

Robert’s in the kitchen, loading plates and utensils into carefully labeled boxes. Bill sidesteps around him, offering a grin as he hops up to sit on the barren counter.

“Aren’t you gg-guh-gonna need any of this stuff before we leave?”

“Eh, I’ll leave a few out,” Robert says with a shrug. “But I have to pack them sometime. Hey, pass me those bowls, will ya. Make yourself useful.” Bill rolls his eyes, but does as he’s told. “Thanks. Hey, some of your friends were here today.”

Bill furrows his eyebrows. “They were?”

“Well, not here here. But here, in the building. I ran into them in the hall. Your little redhead friend? Beverly? Apparently she’s moving.”

“I didn’t know sh-she was moving,” Bill murmurs.

“Oh?” Robert eyes him carefully. “Does she know you’re moving?”

“Well,” Bill squirms in his seat, “No.”

Robert hums softly. “Hang on. I’ll be right back.”

Bill kicks his feet gently as he waits for Robert to return. The apartment, which Bill had come to think of as his one steady constant in life, looks completely different. Everything in life is always changing so goddamn fast, half the time Bill can’t even keep up. But the apartment has always been there. It’s always looked the same. Same beige walls, same hardwood floors, same obnoxious green couch. But now even that is coming apart. It looks almost like an alien planet with all the boxes strewn about. Still, Bill can’t help but feel that this may be for the best.

“Hey,” Robert says, tossing aside a small, empty box as he re-enters the room. “I have a surprise for you.”

Bill’s eyes snap up to meet the older man’s, wide and curious. “Yuh-Yuh-You do?”

“Mhm. Close your eyes.”

Bill feels himself deflate. Because he knows what that means. First will come the hands on his hips, then the fingers working at the button of his jeans, then-

“Hold out your hands.”

Or maybe not.

Something soft and plush meets Bill’s palms. His fingers curl around it instinctively, bringing the object close to his chest. “Can I oh-open my eyes now?”

Robert barks out a laugh. “Yeah, go ahead.”

Bill’s eyes flutter open. In his hands sits a plushie turtle, eyes wide and cartoony, and fins thin and droopy. It’s a little dirty, and some of the stuffing is spilling out of a rip between the shell and the neck, but there’s no doubting what it is.

“Huh-Holy shit,” Bill whispers. “This wuh-wuh-was Juh-Juh-Geor-Geor - Fuck - Georgie’s.”

“Yeah? I thought it might be. I found it in the woods the other day. Figured I’d do one last routine search before we left.”

Bill turns his gaze back to Robert, even if he’s a little blurry through the wall of unshed tears glistening in his eyes. “R-R-Really?”

“Mhm. But this was all I found.”

“I don’t understand h-huh-how we could have mm-muh-missed it,” Bill says. “We’ve ll-luh-looked there a thousand tt-tuh-times.”

“Must’ve just missed it.”

“Thank you,” Bill says. “Really, th-thank you. I didn’t think I wuh-would ever get any part of him back again.” A grin wide enough to split his face tugs at his lips. “And I r-r-remember this little guy so well, Georgie used to b-bruh-bring him everywhere. He was his favorite.” He pulls the turtle closer, wrapping it in a protective hug, as he stares up at Robert. “I dd-duh-don’t know how to thank you.”

Robert lets his hand drop down onto Bill’s thigh. “I can think of one way.”

He’s barely had time to blink before Bill is hopping off the counter and dropping to his knees.

Bill’s always quiet afterwards, and this time is no different. But he feels less cold inside, as if the turtle is physically offering him warmth. He can’t help but think it’s filling some Georgie-sized hole in his heart.

Robert doesn’t seem to notice Bill’s silence. Or, if he does, he doesn’t care enough to act on it. He returns to packing boxes as if nothing happened, letting Bill sit silently with his back against the kitchen counter.

The silence isn’t uncomfortable per say, but it’s definitely not the same warm silence that surrounds Bill and his friends. It’s thick, as if Bill could cut it with a knife. In fact, it almost feels as if that’s the only way to get through it.

Robert, however, must speak words as sharp as a knife, because a moment later he says, “I’ve been thinking, maybe we should leave sooner.”

Bill blinks slowly. “Sooner?”

“Yeah, if we get everything packed. No point in waiting, right?” Robert grins at him over the mess of boxes. “You said it yourself, you hate this shithole.”

Bill chews nervously on his lower lip. “How ss-suh-soon?”

“Tonight?”

“Tt-Tuh-Tonight?” Bill splutters.

“Mhm. Better than staying here any longer, right?”

“I - I haven’t said buh-bye to my friends yet,” Bill says. “I can’t jj-juh-just - I can’t just ah-abandon them like that.”

Robert sighs heavily. “Bill, you need to allow yourself to think about yourself sometimes. You shouldn’t live your life worrying about your friends, you need to remember what’s healthy for you.”

Bill squirms, teeth sinking harshly into his lower lip. “I sh-should still say bye.”

“You can call whenever we make our first stop,” Robert shrugs.

“It’s nuh-not the same.”

“Alright, kid, it’s up to you, but if I were you, I would want to get out of this shithole as fast as I could.”

“Yeah,” Bill murmurs. “I guess.”

“Tonight?”

Bill hugs the turtle tighter. “Yeah. Tonight.”

Robert grins. “I think this will be good for you. You’re going to be so much happier once we get out of this place.”

Bill nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I - I ffff-fucking hate it here. The sooner w-wuh-we leave the better.”

Neibolt is, to put it nicely, disgusting. The front lawn is overgrown with weeds so thick it’s nearly impossible to walk through them. They catch on the Losers’ socks, doing their best to pull them down to the ground with spindly plant claws. The house itself is worse. Dust can be seen even through the cracks in the boarded up windows, and the wood around the door has decayed so much it’s a shock the door hasn’t fallen clean off its hinges yet.

“We’re gonna die in there,” Eddie bemoans. “The roof is gonna collapse on us. We’ll suffocate on the fucking dust. We’ll never make it out.”

“We’ll be fine, Eds,” Ben says. He softly intertwines their fingers, squeezing once. “We’ll make sure you come out alive.”

Eddie still looks shaken up, but he murmurs a quiet, “Thank you,” and then doesn’t say another word as Bev pushes the door open.

The inside of the house is worse than the outside. Spiderwebs the size of their heads cling to the ceiling, wallpaper peels from the walls like old hangnails, the entire house smells overwhelmingly of mildew. Eddie can’t help but scuttle minisculely closer to Ben.

“God, is this really where Stan’s been for the last month?” Mike murmurs, looking around in a sort of horrified amazement.

“Oh yeah, I was totally expecting him to be set up in a fucking five star hotel,” Richie snarks. Mike shoots him a sideways glance, earning himself a soft, “Sorry.”

“Everyone spread out,” Bev says. “Ben and Eddie, you stay on this floor. Richie, check upstairs. Mike and I will check the basement.”

Richie salutes her. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Will Richie be okay by himself?” Mike asks, watching as Richie disappears up the stairs. “Maybe Ben and Eddie should go with him.”

“He’ll call for help if he needs it,” Bev says. She shoots Mike a sideways glance. “Are you okay going into the basement? Because you can switch with-”

“No, I’m fine,” Mike says. “The basement can’t be worse than the rest of this shithole.”

The basement does, however, have an actual door. Not a decrepit moldy one they can kick down, but an actual door complete with a lock and everything.

“The key,” Bev whispers. “Do you have the key?”

“Yeah,” Mike scrambles for the key. “Yeah, I have it. It’s right - right here.” He slides it into the lock with surprising ease, a cold settling over him as he turns it.

The door opens with a creak, and though it seems as if it echoes throughout the entire house, no one comes running.

The bottom of the stairs is pitch black. It activates Mike’s fight or flight response, sending cold chills down his back and making his breath shake with every exhale. It feels like walking into an alternate dimension.

“We need a light,” Mike whispers, because whispering feels like the right thing to do right now.

“I think I saw one,” Bev whispers right back. “Just hang on.”

She scurries away, returning with a lamp less than a minute later. When she switches it on, the light is dim, barely illuminating a foot in front of them, but it’s better than nothing. She clutches it in her right hand as she descends the stairs. In her left hand she grips Mike’s hand, squeezing hard enough to leave little half-moon marks with her nails. Mike doesn’t mind though. His hold on her hand is just as tight.

The stairs feel like a death sentence. As if once they descend them they’ll never truly come back up. And maybe that’s true. Maybe a part of them, that last shred of childhood innocent, will die down here. They’ll come back up different people. Still, they continue on.

For a second, once they’ve reached the bottom, they do nothing but stand there and squint into the darkness. The thought of being swallowed up by the darkness is almost worse than merely descending the stairs.

But Mike forces himself to make that first step forward and from then on, armed with their trusty shitty lamp, they brave the darkness.

“Stan?” Bev whispers. “Stan, are you down here?”

“Stanley?” Mike says. “Stan, it’s - it’s us. Mike and Bev. We’re - We’ve been looking for you.”

“The others are here too,” Bev says. “Upstairs. We’ve all been - been looking.”

Their words, however nice it is to say them, are not answered. It makes the cold basement air seep deeper into their sink, crawling its way into their hearts.

“I’m sorry we didn’t find you soon enough,” Mike says, voice cracking. “I love you.”

“I don’t think he’s here,” Bev murmurs.

“But that - But that doesn’t make any sense,” Mike says, voice rising with every word. “He was - He was supposed to be h-here. We - I don’t - Where is he, Bevvy?” Sobs bounce off the walls as he finally crumples, knees hitting the dirty, blood-stained floor.

“I don’t know,” Bev says, quick to comfort her friend. “I don’t know, Mikey. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was so sure he was here. I was so sure-” She stops suddenly, feeling not unlike the wind has been knocked out of her. A scream is stuck in her throat, lodged just behind her tongue. She needs desperately to get it out, to tell Mike, but it refuses to budge.

“But he has to be somewhere,” Mike says, shoulders still shaking. He scrubs furiously at his eyes, hoping it lessens the tears. It only makes them dribble down between his fingers. “He can’t just - He can’t be gone. He can’t-”

Bev screams. She screams so loud, Mike shoots to his feet, the tears pushed to the back of his mind as his defense mode takes over.

“What?” he cries out. “What is it?”

Bev points a shaky hand, gasping for air as she struggles to find the words. Finally she decides on simply, “Stanley!”

Mike nearly breaks his neck trying to see where she’s pointing. There isn’t much visible through the darkness, but there is no doubt that the vague outline of a person can be seen laying on the floor.

“Shit,” Mike whispers. “Shit!” He scrambles to the person’s side, his breath catching in his throat as the face becomes clear. “Stan! Stanley! Oh, holy shit. Can you hear us? Stan?” He goes to shake his shoulder, but Stan’s body is limp and unresponsive. And when Mike pulls his hand away, it’s slick with a sticky, deep red substance.

“Oh my God,” Bev whispers. She sounds broken, completely shattered. Mike wishes he could put her back together again. If he could, he would. Even if it meant spending years painstakingly gluing every miniscule shard into place. But he thinks there may simply be too many shards and not enough years.

“Stan,” Mike says. “Stan, c’mon. Talk to me, please talk to me.” He presses two fingers to Stan’s neck, trying his best to stay calm despite how Stan’s head lolls to the side. “C’mon, Stan,” he murmurs. “Please. Please, please, please.” A heartbeat pounds under his fingertips. It’s faint, but there’s no doubt that it’s there. Mike turns to Bev with wild eyes. “We need to get him to a hospital.”

“Wh - He’s okay?”

“Absolutely not,” Mike says, already struggling to get Stan in his arms. “But he’s not dead yet either. C’mon, help me carry him.”

He looks worse in the light.

He’s almost entirely covered in blood, the substance still oozing from more cuts than Mike can count. His hair, which is usually so cared for, is a matted mess on his head. He’s covered in grime and dirt, and his clothes, which are the same ones he went missing in, have been reduced to shreds of fabric clinging to his malnourished body.

Mike lays him down on the porch, resting his head in his lap. He rakes his fingers through his mess of curls, doing his best to brush through the tangled mess.

Richie’s on his other side, struggling to keep his glasses from fogging up as he clings to Stan’s hand and babbles on about the past two months. Mike isn’t sure what he’s saying, he suspects Richie isn’t even completely sure, but it seems to be keeping him from spiralling, so who is Mike so stop him?

“We need to get him to a hospital,” Eddie says, eyes wide and full of terror. “We need - We need to call an ambulance.”

“We’ll run to the nearest house,” Bev says, already halfway to the gates. “Ask to use their phone. The rest of you, stay with Stan. Don’t let anything happen.”

“We’ll keep him safe,” Ben promises, because Mike and Richie are too preoccupied to answer. “He’ll be okay. Promise.”

Bev offers them one last wistful glance, before disappearing down the sidewalk. Eddie catches up with her quickly, and soon they’re sprinting down the road. Ben watches until they’re out of sight, a sick, twisting feeling panging in his gut.

He goes to sit in front of the porch, not caring if his pants get dirt on them, and rests his hand on Stan’s chest, watching its shallow rise and fall. His touch is gentle, as if he’s worried Stan might fall apart. But, honestly, with the state he’s in, Ben wouldn’t be surprised if he did fall apart.

All he can think, as he watches the empty street before them, is, please hurry.

The hospital sets them all on edge. But Eddie more so than the others. All his life he’s hated the smell of hospitals. It makes his stomach sick. But he’s learned not to voice this to his mother, who will only use that as an excuse to keep him there longer.

Still, the hospital never seemed like more than a minor nuisance. Somewhere he had to go to please his mother, but was never truly a threat. Today, though, the hospital has never seemed more daunting.

Stanley is just down the hall, locked behind a heavy, ugly grey door. Eddie doesn’t know what’s happening, none of them do, but judging by the horrified faces the nurses made upon seeing him, it isn’t good. They’ve been there for nearly an hour, bathed in a heavy silence, when Eddie finally speaks up. “We should call Bill.”

His voice, though soft as a whisper, feels ear-shatteringly loud. It makes all the Losers look at him, and in their eyes he can see the same exhaustion and fear he feels himself.

He half expects them to argue. They haven’t been on the best of terms with Bill lately, anyway. But no one does. Not even Richie, who looks like he’s just about ready to combust every time Bill’s name is brought up.

“I’ll do it,” Mike offers. “You guys wait here.”

“No,” Eddie insists, stumbling to his feet. “I’ll do it.” Mike still has blood on his clothes. Mike has been staring at the same spot on the wall for the past forty five minutes. Mike deserves to rest. “I’ve known Bill since we were kids. The news should come from me.”

Mike nods, already slumping back down in his chair.

Eddie hates to leave his friends. He hates to walk these halls himself. He hates the small possibility that he could miss an update on Stan. But someone has to go.

The phone is just down the hall, but by the time he reaches it, he feels like a lifetime has passed. He punches in Bill’s number wearily, hand feeling heavy with the effort.

“Huh-Hello?”

Eddie breathes a sigh of relief. He wouldn’t have been able to handle talking to Bill’s parents at the moment.

“Hey, Bill,” he says. “We - Um - The Losers and I are at the hospital.”

“What? Wh-Why?”

“We - Um - We found Stan.”

Bill has spent every moment since getting back from Robert’s throwing all his belongings into his old, ratty suitcases. The sight of his room growing slowly emptier is tying his stomach up in knots. He wants to leave, he does. But he’s never travelled further than Portland, and even then he couldn’t have been older than nine.

The world is so big. He could travel forever and ever, and still always have more to see. It’s terrifying. But the thought is thrilling too. He wants to see Los Angeles. He wants to go to New York. He wants to travel to Australia. He just wants to get the fuck out of Derry.

But he does wish he could say goodbye to his friends. He had hoped there would be time today, but he’s supposed to meet Robert back at his apartment in just under a half hour. It just won’t be a possibility.

It’s sad, but he tries his best to shake it off. They would only try to talk him out of it anyway. They wouldn’t understand.

The turtle - Bill can’t remember its name and he can’t bear to make up a new one - sits on top of his dresser. It has the biggest eyes Bill has ever seen, and he can’t help but be reminded of the puppy dog look Georgie used to give him when he wanted just one more bedtime story or just a little bit of Lucky Charms.

With a sigh, Bill scoops the turtle into his arms, cradling it safely against his chest. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find you. I tried, I ss-swuh-swear.”

The turtle, much as is expected, does not reply. And if he were going to, he would have never had the chance, because the phone rings right at that moment.

Bill stumbles down the hall, nearly tripping over two separate boxes, in his haste to reach the phone. “Huh-Hello?”

“Hey, Bill,” Eddie’s voice floats through the speaker. “We - Um - The Losers and I are at the hospital.”

“What?” Bill cries out, panic flooding his veins. “Wh-Why?”

“We - Um - We found Stan.”

Air catches in Bill’s lungs, pushing down on his chest and choking his windtunnel. He’s suffocating, drowning in a sea of emotions he doesn’t quite understand, yet he still manages to squeak out a soft, “What?”

“Yeah. He - He-” Eddie sniffles on the other end. “It’s not good, Bill. I don’t know - I don’t know if he’s gonna-”

“He’ll be okay,” Bill says automatically. “He’s gonna be fine, Eddie. Stan - Stan’s strong. He’ll make it.”

“Yeah,” Eddie mutters, voice still sounding heavy with tears. “Yeah, okay.” He sniffles again. “Please hurry.”

“I’m on my wuh-way,” Bill promises.

The hospital is across town, and by the time Bill reaches it his legs are burning. But he pays it no mind, simply tossing his bike to the side and rushing inside. The other Losers are clumped together in a waiting room, not a peep coming from any of them.

Eddie sees him first, and before Bill can blink he’s throwing himself into his arms and burying his face in his neck.

“Thank God you’re here,” Eddie whispers. “I was so worried you wouldn’t pick up, and then I wouldn’t have had any idea what to do. I didn’t know how else to reach you. But I needed to tell you-”

“It’s okay, Eds,” Bill murmurs, squeezing him tightly. “It’s oh-okay now. I’m here, and Stan’s gonna be ff-fuh-fine.”

Over Eddie’s head, he can see the other Losers watching him. Their gaze makes him feel impossibly small, and he can’t help the shame that spreads throughout his body.

“I’m ss-suh-suh-sorry I wasn’t there,” he says.

“It’s okay,” Mike says. He looks exhausted, clothes drenched in blood and movements sluggy, but he offers Bill a soft smile nonetheless. “You’re here now.”

Bill nods silently, whatever words he wanted to say now trapped in his throat.

“I like your turtle,” Bev says. She sounds just as tired as Mike, but her voice still carries a light hearted teasing tone.

“Oh.” Bill flushes. “I didn’t - I just huh-ha-happened to be holding him when I got the call.” It’s more than that. It’s irrational, but he can’t help but think the world is going to be a little better whenever he’s holding that turtle. And he suspects his friends know that, but if they do, they don’t say a word.

He moves to sit next to Richie, hands clenching and unclenching by his sides. Eddie, sensing the explosive possibilities of this conversation, quietly slips away and cuddles into Ben’s side.

The silence is painful, but it’s clear Richie isn’t going to be the one to break it. Despite how much he likes to talk, he keeps his mouth glued shut and his eyes, which burn with fiery anger behind his glasses, continue staring at the opposite wall.

“I’ve b-been a real asshole,” Bill says.

“Yeah,” Richie seethes. “You have.”

“I’m sorry,” Bill whispers. “You didn’t deserve eh-everything I d-dih-did to you. I shouldn’t have thrown that buh-buh-book at you.”

“Yeah, well,” Richie squirms in his seat, “I shouldn’t have said all that shit about Georgie and Stan.” He glances Bill out of the corner of his eyes. “So I guess we’re even.” Richie turns to face him fully, pulling his legs up against his chest. “I’m sorry too. Things have been shitty lately.”

“Yeah,” Bill murmurs. “Ss-Sup-Super shitty. Hey, where are Stan’s pp-pah-parents?”

“They’re talking to the police,” Richie says, gesturing wildly at the empty doorway. “Down the hall.”

“Do you know wh-wha-what happened to him?”

A swift knock against the doorframe interrupts whatever Richie may have been about to say. A nurse with a sweet smile is standing in the doorway. “He’s awake now,” she says. “He may be a little groggy, so give him space. But you can see him.”

Stan’s parents are already in the room, dotting on him quietly. His mother, Andrea, is softly gripping his hand, while his father, Donald, sits in the stiff chair beside him, whispering things Bill can’t quite hear. But he supposes they’re not his to hear anyway.

Richie doesn’t seem to have the same concerns about personal space, and rushes to Andrea’s side as fast as he possibly can.

“Stan!” Richie crows. “You’re okay! Holy shit, you’re okay!”

Stan hums quietly, and the sound sends a jolt through Bill’s body. “I dunno ‘bout okay.”

“You had to get, like, a million blood transfusions,” Richie rambles. “Did you know you and Ben have the same blood type? He gave blood for you. Now you have Ben’s blood inside you. How does that make you feel?”

“Very grateful Ben’s my friend,” Stan replies sleepily.

“I’m just glad you’re okay,” Ben says. He’s fidgeting awkwardly, but there’s no doubt he means what he says. “I love you, man.”

“Love you too,” Stan says.

“We have to answer a few more questions for the police,” Andrea says, lifting Stan’s hand to her lips to gently kiss his knuckles. “Are you gonna be okay if your dad and I step out for a second?”

Stan must nod, because a moment later Andrea’s pressing a kiss to his forehead and Donald’s squeezing his other hand as they rise to their feet. The Losers descend upon Stan, talking a million miles a minute and not bothering to stop just because their sobbing makes anything they say unintelligible.

Bill hangs back, guilt eating as his stomach. He wasn’t there. He should have been there. Why wasn’t he there? He should have-

“Oh, Bill, I’m so glad you’re here now.” From this close, the tears in Stan’s parents’ eyes are clear as day. They make Bill’s heart constrict, and he almost can’t find the energy to respond.

“Mm-Muh-Me too,” he chokes out.

Andrea presses a kiss on his own forehead, muttering something half-heartedly about him growing up just so damned fast, and scurries out the door. Donald waits a moment longer.

“Your friends told me you’ve been looking for Stan,” he says.

“Yuh-Yuh-Yeah,” Bill says, not quite able to meet Donald’s eyes. “But I didn’t - I wasn’t th-th-thuh - I couldn’t ffff-fuh-fih-fih-”

Donald claps him on the shoulder, and it’s so dad-like that Bill nearly lets out the sob hiding in his chest.

“Thank you,” Donald says. “You’re a good kid, Bill. If you ever need anything, you come to me, alright?” Bill nods, speechless. “Good. Now go see Stan, I’m sure he missed you.”

He leaves without another word.

The walk to Stan’s bed seems to take a thousand years, and yet he’s at his side within the blink of an eye. Mike and Bev part for him, letting him fall back into his slot in their group, and it almost seems normal. They’re all together again, their own little family. But it’s not normal. Normal doesn’t involve a hospital bed, or the tears in his friends’ eyes, or the scars that litter Stan’s skin.

Bill let them down, but now he has to chance to fix it, and he isn’t going to fuck it up.

“Hey,” Bill says softly. “How ah-are you fff-feeling?”

But Stan isn’t looking at him. Instead he’s got his eye on the turtle still gripped in Bill’s hand, watching the slight sway of its tiny, stuffed body with hawk-like intensity.

“Stan?” Bill murmurs.

“Give me that,” Stan blurts, suddenly looking a million times more awake. He shoots up into a sitting position, ignoring the wince of pain on his own face and the cries of protest his friends let out.

“I - What?” Bill says, feeling rather stupid.

“Georgie!” Stan insists, as if that makes any more sense. “I need him! Give him to me!”

“I dd-duh-don’t - What-”

“The turtle!” Stan says, starting to squirm uncomfortably now. “The fucking turtle!”

“I - Oh - Yuh-Yeah, sure.”

Bill hands the turtle out to Stan, who snatches it out of his hands as fast as he possibly can. His body visibly relaxes once he’s got his hands on it, and immediately the rest of the Losers have been completely forgotten. All he can do is stare down at the turtle, as if its sad, droopy body was the most magical thing he’s ever seen.

Bill looks to his friends, hoping they might have some sort of answer, but they look just as confused as he feels.

“Hey, Stanley,” Mike murmurs, managing to recapture Stan’s attention. “What - Um-”

“What the fuck was that?” Richie asks, never one to worry about being polite.

“He was down in the basement with me,” Stan says softly, eyes back on the turtle. “Made me feel safe.”

“And you named him after jj-juh-juh-Georgie?”

“I thought it would be a good way to preserve his memory,” Stan says, like it’s just that simple.

Bill feels like he could cry. His parents had barely had a funeral. Just a small memorial at the local church, even though none of them really attended anymore. The pastor had lamented how Georgie was in a better place now, and how they should use this moment to find peace of mind.

But Bill never felt peaceful. He left feeling angry. Angry at the pastor for not understanding. Angry at his parents for not caring. Angry at himself for not trying hard enough.

He still doesn’t feel at peace with it, exactly. Sometimes he fears he never will. But right now, in this moment, as he watches Stan run his fingers over the turtle - Georgie’s - shell, he thinks maybe he could feel okay someday after all.

“I’m ss-suh-sorry I wasn’t there,” Bill says. “Wh-When they found you.”

Stan glances up at him curiously. “You weren’t?” It’s not angry, or malicious, but it still stabs Bill through the heart. He shakes his head. “Oh, well, I don’t remember much of it anyway.”

“Do you wanna know where he was?” Richie asks suddenly, teeth grit in frustration.

“Yes,” Bill says, at the same moment Stan pleads, “No!”

Richie falls silent immediately, despite how hard it obviously is for him. Bill can see his jaw moving inside his mouth, desperately trying to keep himself busy before he blurts out the wrong thing. Richie may not care about personal space, or being polite, but he cares about Stanley.

Still, Stan seems no less distressed.

“No,” He keeps saying. “I can’t - I don’t want to - I can’t think about that - that place. It was cold, and gross, and wet, and cold. I didn’t - I didn’t - I didn’t like it! I - I don’t - I can’t-”

“It’s okay,” Bev insits, voice soft as silk. She tucks one of Stan’s hands between her own, squeezing tightly. “It’s okay, we won’t talk about it. You’re okay.”

“Yeah,” Richie murmurs. “I was - I was just.” He sighs heavily. “We won’t talk about it if you don’t want to, Stan. We never have to bring it up ever again if you don’t want to.”

Stan turns to look at Bill, eyes wide and unblinking.

“Yeah,” Bill says. “W-W-We can just pretend nothing happened. If you want.”

Stan sniffs, eyes returning to the turtle. “I missed you guys,” he says. “I thought about you all the time.”

“We thought about you too,” Bill says. “We looked eh-ever-everywhere for you.”

Stan fiddles with the turtle, watching with quiet amusement as its head flops from side to side.

“I’m sure I’ll tell you someday,” he whispers. “But not - not now. I - I c-can’t-”

“That’s okay,” Beverly murmurs, noticing the wetness clinging to his eyelashes. “Take your time, alright?” Stan nods, letting Bev gently wipe beneath his eyes with the pad of her thumb.

Stan looks up at Bill. From this angle he looks almost childish, with his wide eyes and Georgie the Turtle in his arms.

“You aren’t really going to leave with him, are you?” he asks, sounding terrified of the answer.

Bill feels like the wind has been punched out of him. Stan looks desperate for a response, silently pleading for Bill to say something, anything. But Bill couldn’t say anything if he wanted to. Everyone is staring at him, all equally as confused and undoubtedly angry.

“What - What’s he talking about?” Eddie asks.

Bill doesn’t look at him. He can’t look at him. Because he knows what he’ll see if he does. And he doesn’t think he’s ready to face the betrayal on his friend’s face quite yet.

“I - Um - I-” His voice falls flat. There’s nothing to say.

Stan seems to realize what this means, and lurches up to grab Bill’s wrist. “You can’t go with him!”

“Nuh-No, I-”

“Bill-”

“I’m-”

“Mister Uris.” The detective stands in the doorway, notebook in hand. “I’m going to have to ask you some questions about Mister Gray.”

Bill swallows thickly.

Stan shrinks away, as if trying to shield himself behind the Losers. “Can it wait?”

The detective looks apologetic. “Sorry, kid. We need to get your statement as soon as possible. We can call in one of your parents if you want.”

Stan hesitates. “No. No, I don’t - I don’t think I can-”

The detective nods, as if he understands exactly what Stan is trying to say. “I’m going to need everyone to exit the room.”

Ben squeezes Stan’s shoulder, careful of his injuries. “We’ll be right outside, okay?”

“You’ll be okay,” Bev reassures him.

Richie kisses Stan’s temple, which is very un-Richie like. But nothing seems quite right today, so what’s one more strange thing?

Bill feels frozen. The rest of the Losers are stumbling out of the hospital room, murmuring their goodbyes and reassurances on their way. But Bill can’t quite get his legs to move, eyes still glued to the marks decorating Stan’s face.

“Bill,” Mike’s voice whispers gently in his ear. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Bill lets Mike drag him away - drag him out of Stan’s grasp. Mike’s hand is warm around his wrist, fingers pressed firmly against his pulsepoint. It’s a reassurance that someone is there, that someone cares for him, and it pushes the air back into Bill’s lungs. He thinks he’s been waiting for that push for a long time.

The door has barely closed behind them when Richie is shoving Mike out of the way and forcing himself into Bill’s personal space. “What the fuck, Bill? You’re fucking leaving with that creep?”

Bill’s first instinct is to fight, to defend himself. But the funny thing is, Richie’s right.

“I need to go,” Bill says.

“What the fuck, no!” Richie cries out. “You are not going anywhere until you explain yourself. What the fuck is happening?” “Richie!” Bill snaps. “I have to go.” Richie quiets down, but still doesn’t back down, eyes fiery behind his coke-bottle glasses. “I’ll b-b-be back.”

“And you’ll explain?” Richie asks.

Bill nods. “S-Suh-Swuh-Swear.”

Richie hesitates, as if unsure whether or not to trust him. Then he steps aside.

The other Losers don’t say anything as Bill marches down the hall, shoulders squared and head held high.

The bike ride home gives him enough time to think over his inkling of a plan, and enough time to decide whether or not he could actually go through with it. By the time he reaches his front door, he thinks he could.

His parents aren’t home, which makes it all that much easier to open the safe in his parent’s walk-in closet.

Bill has only seen the gun a handful of times, but feeling it in his hand is something different entirely. It’s heavier than he thought it would be, and it feels wrong in his hand. But that doesn’t stop him from loading it with bullets, shoving it into the waistband of his jeans, and clamoring back onto his bike.

The door to Robert’s apartment is closed. Locked too, which is unusual for nights when he knows Bill is coming over. But it doesn’t matter. Bill simply takes the key out from under the mattress and unlocks the door.

Inside, Robert is watching TV. Bill’s barely entered the threshold before he’s gotten Robert’s attention.

“You were supposed to be here hours ago,” Robert says, a hint of frustration in his voice. Bill grits his teeth. It’s this that causes Robert to catch wind that something has changed. “Is everything okay?”

“They found Stan,” Bill says, speaking slowly enough that his tongue has a chance to mold every syllable before he even has the chance to stutter.

“Oh,” Robert says. He doesn’t sound surprised. He sounds more like he’s trying to figure out how he should respond. “Well, that’s-” “That means I’m ss-stuh-staying here,” Bill spits out, as if he can’t keep it in a minute longer.

“I was going to say that’s good,” Robert says with a frown. He leans forward, elbows resting on his knees. “Billy, surely you can’t be serious. Just because they found Stanley, that doesn’t make this town any better. This place is still a shit hole that chews people up and spits them out. If you don’t get out now you never will. This town doesn’t care about you. This town doesn’t care about anyone. This town killed Georgie.”

“You kk-kuh-killed Georgie!” Bill screams, brandishing an accusing finger in Robert’s face. “Georgie cared about me! Georgie loved me! And you fucking killed him!”

Robert, the bastard, has the audacity to look scandalized. “What in the hell gave you that idea?”

“Are you denying it?”

“Wh - Yes!”

“I know you did it!” Bill shouts. “I know you did! I can’t ff-fuh-fucking believe I ever trusted you!”

Robert scoffs. “Billy, you’re being ridiculous. C’mon, we have to leave tonight. We can stop by your house to pick up your stuff.”

“Why?” Bill snaps. “Why do we have to l-luh-leave tonight? Because you can’t huh-hide anymore? B-B-Because the police are after you now? Stan’s talking to them rrr-right now, they’re gonna be here within the hour.”

“Billy-”

“Don’t call mm-me that! I’m not leaving with you! I’m staying here!”

With a snarl, Robert lunges forward. He manages to catch Bill by the throat, fingers flexing against his windpipe, and while Bill’s eyes pop in surprise, Robert turns them around and slams Bill down against the couch.

“Like hell you are,” he snarls. “Your little friend comes back and suddenly you’re all high and mighty? Suddenly you’re better than me?” He tightens his fingers, grinning as Bill’s eyes widen and his hands start to claw at Robert’s fingertips. He waits until Bill’s chest starts to heave before relaxing his hold again, keeping his fingers loosely around Bill’s throat so he can feel every movement as Bill coughs and splutters in his grasp. “You know why I had to take Stanley away, don’t you? Because he thought you were his. His to put his hands on, his to kiss, his to fuck-”

Bill screws up his face and spits up onto Robert’s face. “I’m not yours either.”

Robert glowers, not even bothering to wipe his face. “We’ll see about that.”

Then his hand is moving away from his throat, slipping down, down, down, until it’s at the button of his jeans. And Bill wants to push him off, but Robert’s free hand has his wrists pinned above his head, so all Bill can do is thrash uselessly.

“What’s wrong, Billy?” Robert teases. He momentarily forgets about Bill’s jeans in favor of slipping his hand under his shirt to rub at the soft flesh of his stomach. “This is hardly the first time you’ve done this. Why get cold feet now?”

“Fuck you,” Bill sneers. He twists his wrists in Robert’s grasp, but to no avail. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

“Awe,” Robert says. “Actually I’m gonna fuck you.” Then his hand is back on the waistband of Bill’s jeans and he’s tugging hard as he tries to get them down past his hips.

But he’s interrupted by an earth-shattering thud as something heavy hits the hardwood floors.

For a moment Robert just stops, completely frozen. He’s so still that Bill almost wonders if time has stopped altogether. But then he leans down, hand falling away from Bill’s jeans, only to return with the gun in hand.

“Billy,” Robert says slowly. “What the fuck is this?”

Bill squirms in Robert’s hold, heart thundering in his ears. He’s going to die. He’s so sure he’s going to die. But he’ll be damned if he lets Robert see that. “It’s a gg-guh-gun, genius.”

“It’s a guh-guh-guh-gun,” Robert mocks, making Bill recoil. Robert’s never made fun of his stutter before. But he supposes he doesn’t really know the first thing about Robert. “Yeah, I can fucking see that.” The cold metal of the barrel presses firmly against Bill’s temple. “What the fuck is it doing at my house?”

Bill bares his teeth. “Take a wild ff-fuh-fuck-fucking guess.”

Robert gapes at him, and Bill hates that he can’t tell if his shock is genuine or not. “After all the kindness I showed you?” The safety clicks off. “Now, Billy, that’s just rude.”

“Kindness,” Bill drawls, voice high and mocking. “You can’t call ah-anything you did me kindness.”

“Sure I can! I just did!”

“Asshole!” Bill screams. “I hate you! I fucking hate you!”

“Yeah, well, you better find a way to get past that,” Robert says. “We’re gonna be roommates, after all.”

“In your fucking dd-dreams,” Bill hisses. “I already told you, I’m not going wuh-with you. You’re going to have to kill me.”

Robert fakes an over exaggerated pout. “But I was starting to like you so much.”

The hand around Bill’s wrists slips away, and Bill’s own hands twitch with the urge to hit Robert. But he’s got a gun against his head.

Robert does not seem to notice the twitch in Bill’s hand, instead too focused on gripping Bill’s face. He squeezes his cheeks, forcing his lips to pucker. Robert wastes no time in diving down, kissing and licking his way into Bill’s mouth.

Bill instinctively pulls away, but there’s nowhere for him to go. He’s only pushed further into the couch, Robert’s hold tightening against his cheeks.

Bill’s brain is scattered. Robert is dangerous. Robert is going to hurt him. Robert is bigger and stronger than him, there’s no way he would stand a chance in a fight. But he has to do something.

His hand moves as slow as it possibly can, to avoid catching Robert’s attention. Although Robert seems pretty distracted, attention focused on shoving his tongue as far back in Bill’s throat as he possibly can.

His other hand has noticeably relaxed against the gun. It gives Bill enough of a chance to wrap his fingers around the barrel and rip it free of Robert’s hand.

Robert barely has a chance to pull away before Bill is smashing the gun against his temple. Robert’s head rockets backwards, and his hands come up to scramble against his forehead, allowing Bill to fumble his way off the couch. He lands with a crash on the floor, but is back on his feet in record time.

Robert’s forehead is bleeding, sticky red blood dripping from between his fingers, but Bill pays it no mind. Why should he?

“You’re disgusting,” Bill snarls.

Robert laughs. Fucking laughs. “I’m disgusting?” Blood drips into his smile. “You let your brother go out alone that day. You led Stanley to his doom.”

“Shut up!” Bill yells. “I did not! I dd-duh-dih-dih-didn’t-”

“You killed Georgie!”

“Shut up!” Bill’s points the gun at Robert’s chest. His finger presses against the trigger, but he doesn’t pull it. Not yet. “You killed Georgie! You killed huh-him and then convinced me that you could fucking relate-”

“Oh but I can relate.” Robert leans forward, blood-stained teeth still on display. “I did have a brother. And I also killed him.”

“I didn’t fucking kill my brother!”

“Well he would still be around if it weren’t for you,” Robert says simply.

Bill takes a deep breath in through his nose. “I hate you.” Robert cocks an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

Bill nods. “You murdered my brother. You kidnapped my boyfriend. You made me suck your dick.” He cocks the gun. “Now I’m gonna fucking kill you.”

Robert scoffs. “You don’t have the fucking guts.”

Bill closes one eye, aiming the gun. “Try me.”

Bang!

Blood squirts from his chest, spraying Bill across the face. Robert’s body skyrockets backwards. He lands in a crumpled heap against the back of the couch, moaning softly. He struggles to sit up, to move at all, but still he remains crumpled. Bill shoots him once more in the foot, just for extra protection.

“If my aim was gg-guh-good, I’ve hit your lung,” Bill says casually. “You’ll drown in your oh-own blood. If my aim was bad, you’ll bb-bluh-bleed out. Either way, I’ll sit here and watch the whole thing.”

Bill walks his bike back home. His arms still hurt and he doesn’t have the energy to ride. He knows he has to get back to Stan as fast as possible, but he would be lying if he said he didn’t need this time to clear his head.

Not that it matters. By the time he returns to the hospital, his head is still reeling

“Bill!”

Bill blinks. Once. Twice.

Ben is standing in front of him, eyes shiny with concern. “Are you okay?”

Bill nods slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I-I’m fine.”

“Where did you go?”

“I just - um - I just had to tt-tuh-take care of something,” Bill says. “Don’t worry ab-about it.”

“What’s on your shirt?”

“Nn-Nothing.”

“It looks like blood.”

“Ben. Don’t worry about it.” Bill isn’t sure what it is - if it’s the sudden steadiness of his voice or the blood that he didn’t work hard enough to scrub out of his face - but Ben backs down. He returns to his spot between Beverly and Eddie, allowing Bill the opportunity to scurry to Stan’s side.

“Hey,” Bill murmurs. “How ah-are you feeling?”

“Less drowsy,” Stan says.

Bill busts out a laugh, despite the fact that nothing he said was really that funny. “That’s good.”

“Sorry I took Georgie,” Stan says. “You can have him back if you want.” Despite these claims, he still clings to the turtle like a toddler clinging to a favorite blanket.

“That’s okay,” Bill says. “I th-think you need him more than I do.”

Stan stares up at him with wide eyes, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bill says. “Hey, can I ss-sit here?”

Stan nods, shuffling over so Bill has enough room to crawl into bed with him.

“I was really worried when you didn’t come back,” Stan murmurs. “I thought maybe you left. With him, I mean.”

Bill shakes his head. “I won’t leave. Prom-Promise.”

Stan studies his face, as if checking for any trace of a lie. After a few seconds he seems satisfied, and cuddles closer to Bill. “Where were you?”

“I jj-juh-just had to take care of something,” Bill says. “I didn’t mm-mean to be gone so long.”

“Is everything okay?” Stan asks.

Bill offers him a smile, a real one this time. “Yeah, everything’s okay now.”

Stan hums. “You just look tired.”

Bill chuckles. “I am a luh-little tired.”

“Why don’t you go to sleep?” Stan says.

“But-”

“I’ll still be here when you wake up.”

Bill isn’t so sure, but he doesn’t have much room to argue. He is fucking exhausted. Before he can talk himself out of it, he tucks his head against Stan’s chest and allows his eyes to flutter shut.

Bill’s awoken by a hand shaking his shoulder. The contact nearly makes him leap out of his skin, but when he looks up, it’s only Beverly.

“We have to go,” she says. Bill glances at Stan, which must be enough information for Beverly because a moment later she continues, “He’ll be okay, his parents are staying here with him. We can come back tomorrow.”

Bill nods slowly.

He presses a soft kiss against Stan’s forehead, smiling softly as he shuffles in his sleep, before trailing after Beverly.

“I told the rest of the Losers to go on ahead,” Bev says, her voice quiet.

“Oh?” Bill says, as if that doesn’t fill him with an unreasonable amount of dread.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Bev says. “But I didn’t want the group to overwhelm you.”

“Oh.”

Bev shoots him a sideways glance. “Did you forget your entire vocabulary when you were sleeping?”

Bill fights back a blush, silently grateful they’ve made their way outside by now so Bev can’t see the red in his cheeks. “Nuh-No, sorry. What did you want to tt-talk about?”

“You were supposed to tell Richie where you were going,” Bev says. “He’s really upset.”

“I’ll ah-apol-apologise in the morning.”

“And tell him the truth?”

Bill shrugs. “I’ll at least think of a good lie.”

Bev laughs, her voice seeming to continue endlessly as it echoes through the quiet Derry streets. “Yeah, alright.” She pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket. “Want one?”

“I’ll just take a huh-hit off yours,” Bill says with a teasing smile.

Bev smirks. “Fair enough.” She lights one of the cigarettes, shoving the box back into her pocket before bringing the cigarette to her lips. “So,” she takes a long drag, “Are you gonna tell me where you were?”

She passes the cigarette to Bill, who brings it tentatively to his own lips. “Probably not.”

“Okay.” She waits until after her second hit to continue, “Did it have something to do with Robert?”

Bill shrugs.

“I really am sorry,” she says softly, glancing up at Bill sympathetically as she passes him the cigarette again. “I know you wanted him to be someone else.”

“Yeah, well, he ww-wuh-wasn’t that person,” Bill says. “Never was. No u-use complaining now.”

“Was?” Beverly asks. Bill clamps down harshly on the end of the cigarette. “Bill, what did you do?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bill says. “It’s over now.”

Bev is silent for a moment. Bill is just starting to think she’s dropped it when she says, “You should have at least changed your shirt. You’re lucky none of the nurses saw.”

“There wasn’t time. I had to gg-guh-get back to Stan.”

“I think he appreciated that,” Bev murmurs.

The back of their hands brush together. Bill doesn’t think anything of it, but Bev reaches out and interlocks their fingers.

“Whatever you did,” she says. “I’m sure he had it coming.”

“Yeah,” Bill mutters. “He did.” He squeezes her hand tightly. “I love you, Bevvy. I don’t know if I tell you that en-enough. But I do.”

Bev grins over at him. “I love you too.”

“You ww-wuh-were right,” Bill says suddenly. “Th-That nuh-night at Stan’s. I wasn’t rr-really sick. Rr-Ruh-Ruh-Roh-Robert hh-huh-hah-had-”

“I know,” Bev says. “I - We - We found his camera. With all the pictures of you.”

“Fuck. I know I sh-sh-shouldn’t have ll-luh-let him. But I duh-duh-didn’t know - I couldn’t jjj-just-”

Bev squeezes his hand again, tighter this time. “It’s not your fault.” When Bill doesn’t reply she continues, “You didn’t know any better. You couldn’t have - Bill?”

Bill has stopped suddenly, their intertwined hands making her jerk backwards. They’re in the middle of a crosswalk, right in the middle of a road, and the idea that a car could come barreling down the street at any minute makes Bev’s heart race. But there’s hardly anyone out at this time, so she pushes that concern to the back of her mind. She has bigger fish to fry.

“Bill?” she murmurs, shuffling closer to him. “What is it?”

Bill sniffles quietly. “I’m rrrr-ruh-really sorry, Bevvy. Th-That I lied to you.”

“It’s okay,” Bev insists. “You didn’t know-”

“I think I ah-al-always kind of knew,” Bill mumbles. “Ss-Somewhere in the bb-buh-back of my mind. I knew I sh-sh-shouldn’t let him ffff-fuh-fuh-fuck me. I - I jj-just - I didn’t-”

Bev throws her arms around his shoulders, holding him at tight as she possibly can. The feeling makes him crumple, folding into her like an old piece of paper in the wind.

“It’s okay,” Bev murmurs, rubbing his shaking shoulders with the palm of her hand. “It’s okay. It’s alright. It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”

“Bb-Buh-But what i-if it wasn’t,” Bill forces out, the words only making his sobs come harder. “What if - Wh-What if you ww-wuh-were too ll-luh-late? I dd-don’t know what I ww-wuh-wuh-would’ve done.”

“But we weren’t,” Bev says firmly. “We weren’t too late. Stan’s okay. You’re okay.” She squeezes him a little tighter. “You know I would never let anything happen to you. I would’ve gone after you, if you had gone with him.”

“Not me!” Bill cries out, pulling away to fix her with a gaping look. “Stan! Wh-What if - What if he dd-dih-didn’t mm-make it.”

“He did make it,” Bev says, hands moving to cup Bill’s cheeks gently. “There’s no use torturing yourself with alternatives.” She gently wipes the tears under Bill’s eyes with the pads of her thumbs. “And Stan wasn’t the only one hurt. You’re worth something too, Bill. We all would have gone looking for you.”

Bill shakes his head. “You sh-shouldn’t rrr-risk something like that ff-fuh-for me.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Bev scoffs. “There’s no way in hell I would let that creep take you away from me.”

Bill chews slowly on his lower lip. “Promise?”

Bev draws one of her hands away from Bill’s face, holding out her pinky. “Pinky promise.”

It makes Bill laugh. It’s just a strangled, watery chuckle, but it’s better than nothing. So Bev counts it as a win.

Bill interlocks their pinkies. “Thank you.”

On the day Stan is released from the hospital, Bill goes to visit him. It isn’t very different from the previous days, the Losers have been by Stan’s side nearly every hour of every day, but the change of scenery is nice. And they’re alone this time, which makes Bill’s palms sweaty and heart race.

The other Losers have already visited Stan, bringing little welcome home gifts upon their arrival. Bill has his tucked under his arm. It’s not as pretty as Mike’s, who got him a little potted plant for his windowsill, or as useful as Richie’s, who got him a container of pepper spray and a small pocket knife, but Bill thinks it’s just as good. He hopes it’s just as good.

Andrea greets him at the door, her smile bright and warm.

“Hello, Bill,” she says. “Stanley’s up in his room.”

“Th-Thank you,” Bill says, offering a smile that he hopes mimics the kindness of her own.

“Are you staying for dinner?” Andrea asks as she softly shuts the door behind him.

“Oh, I dd-duh-don’t know,” Bill says. “I don’t ww-wuh-want to bb-bother you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, we have more than enough. Just think about it and let me know, okay?”

Bill has to admit it sounds nice. Much nicer than the thought of going home to sit in silence and suffer with his own thoughts, despite his parents sitting directly next to him. Stan’s parents are strict, but they’re also warm. Even from the outside, Bill can’t help but crave their kindness.

“Okay,” He says. “I’ll ll-let you know.”

Andrea nods, satisfied. “Go on, then.”

Bill all but runs to Stan’s room. He throws the door open, startling Stan, who had been reading on his bed, with Georgie the Turtle placed carefully on his lap.

“Sor-Sorry,” Bill says, cheeks flushed red.

“That’s alright,” Stan says, though his eyes are still wide and alarmed.

Bill closes the door behind him, much softer this time, and crosses the room to perch cautiously by Stan’s side. “Wh-What are you rr-reading?”

Stan flips over the book to reveal The Hobbit in curvy letters across the front. “Ben got it for me,” he says. “Offered to switch it for something more recent but,” Stan shrugs.

“Oh, you u-used to read this wh-when we were kids,” Bill says.

“Mhm. I lost my copy a few years ago. So this is-”

“Can I kiss you?”

Stan blinks, his mouth curving into a small O shape.

“Um - Sorry,” Bill says with a little shake of his head. “Ww-Wuh-We - We don’t - I’m sss-sorry. I sh-sh-shuh-shouldn’t have - Let’s just - For-Forget it, yeah? Um - I - Um - huh-have ss-something for you-”

“Bill,” Stan says, reaching out to grasp the front of Bill’s flannel. “Shut up.” He studies Bill’s face closely. “You still like me?”

Bill nods, despite the fact that he’s pretty sure his heart has completely stopped. “I tt-tuh-told you, I th-think I’m in love ww-with you.”

Stan’s cheeks flush pink. “That was so long ago. I guess I just thought - I dunno.”

“I’ve waited ss-since we were kids,” Bill says. “I could wuh-wait a few more months. Although I wish I dd-duh-didn’t have to.”

“Yeah,” Stan murmurs. “Me either.”

From this close, Bill can see every detail of Stan’s face. All the little blemishes and imperfections. Bill thinks they’re beautiful.

Most of the bruising has gone away by now, but there are still a few nasty scars lingering around. Those Bill hates, but not because of Stan. Never because of Stan. He hates that he, Bill Denbrough, is the reason they’re there. He hates that he did this to Stan. That he forced him into this life.

“We don’t huh-have to do anything you don't ww-want to,” Bill says quietly. “But I do love you.”

“Yeah,” Stan murmurs. “I love you too.”

And Bill thinks that’s enough for now.

One of Stan’s curls has fallen into his eyes. Bill doesn’t think much of it when he reaches up and tugs at the curl, watching it bounce back into place. Bill thinks Stan’s curls are beautiful, and he’s about to tell Stan as much, only when he looks back, Stan looks terrified.

“What - What’s wrong?” Bill asks, alarmed. Stan opens and closes his mouth a few times, as if he can’t quite find the words. Or he’s found the words, but just can’t force them out. “Stan?”

“Noth-Nothing,” Stan blurts out. “It’s - um - nothing. I’m - I’m sorry.”

“It’s nn-not nothing!” Bill insists. “What’s wrong?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Stan murmurs. Tears are starting to gather in his eyes.

Bill raises his hand to brush Stan’s curls out of his eyes, something about how he’ll always be here for him poised on the end of his tongue, but freezes when Stan flinches away.

“Do yy-yuh-you not want me to?” Bill asks. Stan shakes his head, refusing to meet Bill’s eyes. “Okay.” Bill draws his hand back, curling it against his chest.

For a moment it’s quiet, a thick silence blanketing over their forms, then, “Robert used to do that.” The words are quiet, barely audible, but they still feel earth-shattering to Bill.

Despite this, all he can find to say is, “Oh.”

Stan curls in on himself, forehead pressed firmly against his knees. “I just want things to go back to normal.”

Bill wants to reach out and touch him. Wants to wrap his arms around him and pull him close to his chest. But he doesn’t know what else will set him off, so keeps his hands to himself.

“I know,” Bill mutters. “They will, eh-eventually.”

“No they won’t,” Stan says immediately. “Things will be okay eventually. We’ll grow, we’ll heal, shit like that. But things will never be normal again.” He lifts his head to fix Bill with a piercing stare. “We’ll heal, but we won’t forget.”

“Yeah,” Bill whispers. “But we’ll have each other.”

That makes Stan crack a smile. Even if it’s only a small one, Bill still feels like he’s climbed the world’s tallest mountain.

“Yeah,” Stan murmurs. He reaches out and intertwines their fingers, his smile only growing at how easily they slip together. “Yeah, we will.”

Bill squeezes Stan’s hand three times. I love you. Stan returns the gesture with three squeezes of his own. I love you too.

“Do you think he’s still out there?” Stan says. “Robert. The police haven’t found him yet, and I just keep thinking-”

“He’s not out there,” Bill blurts out, before Stan can start to spiral.

“But - But - What if he - What if - What if he comes back for me?” His voice is small, and his eyes have taken on a terrified, almost childlike appearance.

Bill squeezes Stan’s hand harder. “He ww-won’t.”

Stan squirms in his seat. “You can’t possibly know that.”

Bill thinks about Robert, all cut up into a million different pieces, buried in a couple dozen shallow graves behind his creepy apartment building. “Trust me.”

“The police still haven’t found him,” Stan repeats weakly, like he’s struggling to put together the last piece of a puzzle.

“No one’s going to fff-find him,” Bill says.

For a moment Stan doesn’t say anything. He just stares up at Bill with those wide, terrified, eyes and Bill starts to worry he’s going to have to tell Stan exactly what he did. But then Stan nods slowly and murmurs out, “Okay.”

Bill leans closer, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. The kiss seems to relax Stan, seems to make him forget about the fearful way his heart beats, so Bill presses another one to his forehead. Then his nose. Then between his eyes. Then his cheek, and then his other cheek.

Soon his pressing kisses wherever he can reach, tackling Stan onto the bed as Stan shrieks with laughter. Bill knows he should be careful, knows Stan’s parents are just downstairs, but Stan’s grinning brighter than Bill’s seen in a long time, and who would Bill be to take that happiness away?

He continues to place kisses wherever he can reach, until Stan puts his hands on either of Bill’s cheeks, stilling him mere inches away from his face.

“You’re a good guy, Bill,” Stan says. “You know that, right?”

Bill can’t help but bark out a laugh. “Th-That’s nice of you to say.”

“And that you did the best you could.”

That makes Bill pause. “I - Um - Th-Th-Thank you.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t find Georgie,” Stan says suddenly. “The real Georgie.”

The atmosphere in the room has taken a complete 180. The thought of Georgie makes Bill’s chest burn, as if there’s a fire inside, burning his insides and licking at his heart. Still, “It’s nn-not your ff-fau-fault,” he tells Stan.

“It’s not yours either,” Stan says. “You know that right?” Bill nods, even though it’s not necessarily true. Stan must see through his lie because he offers Bill just about the saddest damn smile he’s ever seen and says, “He would be proud of you, if he were here now.”

Bill chuckles, though the sound is void of joy. “I dd-duh-dunno ah-abou-about that.”

“It’s true,” Stan says. “You tried so hard to find him. And me. And you didn’t let Robert break you.”

Bill still doesn’t know how true that is, but Stan’s voice is so firm and sure of itself, that he doesn’t dare argue.

“Thank you,” he murmurs.

Stan wraps his arms around Bill’s shoulders, making the skin he touches turn hot and fiery.

“We - We can take it slow, right?” he asks softly.

Bill nods. “Y-Yeah, of course. I - Um - That’s bb-better for me too, any-wuh-ways.”

His words make Stan’s eyes turn sad, but he still forces a smile onto his lips. “If nothing else, at least we have our extremely specific trauma to bond over.”

Bill barks out a laugh, leaning down to bury his face in Stan’s neck. “Yeah, tt-truh-try finding another couple that connected.” The words have barely left his mouth before he’s pushing himself away from Stan again, using his elbows to support himself as he hovers above him. “Is - Is that oh-okay?”

“What, that we have shared trauma? I mean, there’s not much to do about it now.”

“No! Us bb-being a couple.”

“Yeah,” Stan grins. “I like the sound of that.”

“Cool,” Bill says, a matching grin of his own spreading across his face. It’s only then that he notices how he’s dropped down so, once again, the tips of their noses brush together. “So - Um - Wh-When you said tt-take it sluh-sluh-slow-”

Stan’s leaning up to capture his lips in a kiss before Bill can finish his thought. It’s different than their first kiss, more chaste, but just as good. Bill has thought about this nearly every day for the past two months, he can hardly believe it’s real.

Stan’s lips are still just as soft as he remembers. They move against his enthusiastically, and his hands gently grip his shoulders, as if he needs something to steady himself. The thought only makes Bill kiss him harder, pushing him into the pillow beneath him.

Bill could stay here all day. Kissing Stanley Uris is not unlike the feeling you get on those fall days, when it’s still warm out but the wind is just starting to set in, and the leaves are starting to turn red and orange and all sorts of bright colors. The feeling you get when you wake up one day and realize the world is beautiful after all.

“Are you staying for dinner?” is the first thing Stan asks when Bill pulls away.

“Yeah,” Bill says through a laugh. “Yeah, I’ll st-stay as long as you want.”

Stan grins up at him. “Good.”

“Oh! I have sss-something for you!” Bill exclaims. He rolls off of Stan, scrambling for his notebook at the other end of the bed. “I wr-wrote you something.”

Stan’s eyes light up. “Yeah?”

“Mhm.” Bill collapses next to Stan, failing to hide his grin when Stan immediately cuddles into his side. “You can rr-read it now, or I can ll-luh-leave it here for you to read ll-later.”

“Will you read it to me?” Stan asks.

Bill hesitantly sends him a sideways glance. “Are you ss-sure?”

It’s easy for him to get tripped up when he reads, and he knows it can be frustrating to hear him stutter out every syllable for an entire story. His classmates would get fed up with him after only a single paragraph from their textbook. Nonetheless, Stan nods.

“Yeah,” he says.

So Bill reads to him.

And as he reads, he knows Stan is right. Things won’t ever be normal again. They can’t go back to the way things were before.

But he also knows things are going to be okay someday. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, it might not be anytime soon. But someday.

He thinks he can wait for someday.

#bill denbrough #stanley uris #beverly marsh #mike hanlon #ben hanscom #eddie kaspbrak #richie tozier #stenbrough #the losers club #georgie denbrough #stenbrough fanfic #stenbrough fanfiction #the losers club fanfic #the losers club fanfiction #IT fanfic #IT fanfiction #reddie #benverly

22 notes · View notes

mebongster87 · 6 years ago

Text

The real villains and the real heroes of Season 8: predictions and foreshadowings

Back when the character posters for Season 8 was released, a few folks in the JonSa fandom speculated about how Daenerys, Euron Greyjoy, and the Night King, were shown to be seated on the Iron Throne with the Stanley Kubrick glare. Here are the pictures of what I am talking about.

Kubrick stare is a typical characterising feature of villainy. Given that Euron Greyjoy, Daenerys Stormborn, and the Night King all sport this, it is safe to say that Team Storm are the main villains.

The Crypts of Winterfell teaser provided us the real heroes of this season and they are these three:

Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, and Arya Stark, poised to face the threats of Ice and Fire with their best weapons, and are the real heroes of Season 8 and the story at large.

Longclaw for Jon, Sansa has her wits and charm, intelligence, and realpolitik, I mean I could go on but you get the point. Last but not the least, Arya Stark, newly minted Night King Slayer, with her Valyrian steel dagger, with which she killed the NK and Needle.

Thanks to Arya being the NK Slayer, this picture makes a whole lot of sense now and I believe we will have Jon and Sansa take down the other two villains in the story. 3 villains vs 3 heroes.

Daenerys Stormborn:

The show actually teased that Jon and Sansa will stand against Daenerys Stormborn back in Season 6.

The S06E09 Battle of the Bastards Inside the Episode commentary by David Benioff, where he says:

“If you are one of the Lords of Westeros or one of her potential opponents in the wars to come, and you get word of what happened here in Meereen, you have to be pretty nervous because this is an unprecedented threat. You’ve got a woman who has somehow formed an alliance where she’s got a Dothraki horde, a legion of Unsullied, she’s got the mercenary army of the Second Sons, and she’s got three dragons, who are now pretty close to full-grown. So if she can make it all the way across the Narrow Sea and get to Westeros, who’s gonna stand in her way?”

over shots of Daenerys about to destroy Meereen and burning people, is immediately followed by this shot of Sansa and Jon, from the tent scene, prior to Battle of Bastards, where they discuss how to defeat Ramsay (another villain).

Sneaky.

In Season 8 so far, we have seen Sansa go toe-to-toe with Daenerys, either by making her displeasure known in feeding the “greatest army the world has ever seen” with the limited food and resources that Sansa has managed to gather for the North, or derisively asking “what do dragons eat anyway” or outright defying Daenerys in Jamie’s trial. I do not see this abating in the upcoming episodes. Sansa knows that the Dragon Queen is a threat to her home, her family, and the entire North and she will be using her smarts and political prowess to outplay Daenerys.

Jon, on the other hand, will be the one to go fight Daenerys in a Dance of the Dragons 2.0. Whether Jon kills Daenerys remains to be seen. The show has buried enough clues to allude to this happening. I have written about it here and here and I think there is a strong possibility that Jon kills Daenerys, irrespective of your beliefs in those alleged leaks.

In fact, these lines from ADWD, Jon XII, may have foreshadowed this:

Burning shafts hissed upward, trailing tongues of fire. Scarecrow brothers tumbled down, black cloaks ablaze.

"Snow," an eagle cried, as foemen scuttled up the ice like spiders.

Jon was armored in black ice, but his blade burned red in his fist. As the dead men reached the top of the Wall he sent them down to die again. He slew a greybeard and a beardless boy, a giant, a gaunt man with filed teeth, a girl with thick red hair. Too late he recognized Ygritte. She was gone as quick as she'd appeared. The world dissolved into a red mist. Jon stabbed and slashed and cut. He hacked down Donal Noye and gutted Deaf Dick Follard. Qhorin Halfhand stumbled to his knees, trying in vain to staunch the flow of blood from his neck. "I am the Lord of Winterfell," Jon screamed. It was Robb before him now, his hair wet with melting snow. Longclaw took his head off. Then a gnarled hand seized Jon roughly by the shoulder. He whirled …… and woke with a raven pecking at his chest.

Here we have Jon armored in black ice, which is very reminiscent of Daenerys’ dream from ASOS, Daenerys III:

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper's rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened.

Jon kills Ygritte, a love interest, and Robb, his kin/cousin within the same dream. Daenerys is both a love interest and his kin/aunt.

Jon has also been referred to as the “shifting shadow” from Daenerys’s chapters...ASOS, Daenerys II.

“Sometimes she would close her eyes and dream of him, but it was never Jorah Mormont she dreamed of; her lover was always younger and more comely, though his face remained a shifting shadow.“

Melisandre in her visions sees Jon as a shifting shadow as well:

“The flames crackled softly, and in their crackling she heard the whispered name Jon Snow. His long face floated before her, limned in tongues of red and orange, appearing and disappearing again, a shadow half-seen behind a fluttering curtain. Now he was a man, now a wolf, now a man again.”

-ADWD, Melisandre I.

What’s interesting is that the show actually uses a “shadow” to allude to Jon.

Notice the focus on the shadow of Jon, right before he goes to behead Janos Slynt, someone who betrayed Ned Stark and was an enemy to House Stark. And dare I say, this reminds me of the shadow of Jamie from Bran’s visions right before he shoves the sword in the back of the Mad King Aerys.

Since Jon and Jamie are foils, Jon could end the story as a kinslayer and Queenslayer, just as Jamie started the story as the Kingslayer. We shall see whether it does come to pass or not. Additionally, Jon has refused to kill a woman twice before (Ygritte and Melisandre), maybe he ends up having to kill a woman this third time. Notably, Ygritte was a love interest, Melisandre tried seducing Jon, and now he is in a relationship with Daenerys.

Euron Greyjoy:

I would’ve loved for Theon to be the one to take down Euron but since he is dead, someone else will have to step up to bring this guy down.

Could Jon be the one? Or Arya?Or Yara?

Since both Euron and Daenerys have been associated with “Storm”, here are some clues that I found that I thought were interesting.

This next part is just wild speculation on my part.

Euron is introduced to us in S06E02 Home, where he kills his brother and King Balon Greyjoy and these are some of the things he says...

And this is what Jon says before he gets crowned KITN in S06E10 The Winds of Winter...

Littlefinger needles him in the crypts before Jon leaves for Dragonstone in S07E02 Stormborn and says this...

While Daenerys Stormborn has been associated with storms, Euron has been called the Storm and in this same episode called Stormborn, we see both Daenerys and Euron but not the Night King. Interesting don’t you think?

In fact, LF’s line could be applicable to Jon being the last best hope against either or both of these two “Storms”.

In fact, I think we may get a Daenerys Stormborn and Euron Greyjoy “Storm-Storm” alliance mainly because of this throwaway line from Yara while she is captive in the Silence at KL in S08E01...

to which Euron replies:

Now on the surface, this may seem that Yara, an ally of Daenerys is confident of Daenerys’s win over Cersei and Euron, who are current allies. To which Euron talks about sailing his fleet elsewhere??To Dragonstone maybe??? I believe the show is cluing us to the fact that Euron could possibly switch camps. I mean he is wild, unpredictable and who knows what his next move is?? However, he wants to marry the most beautiful woman in the world and just wants to side with the winning team.

In the promo for Episode 4, we see Euron going down on his knees and looks like he is proposing Cersei. If Cersei rejects his proposal, maybe he will switch sides over to Daenerys, whom he thinks has a better chance of winning and is the most beautiful woman in the world.

However, in the subtext, do we really think Daenerys’s side is the winning side????

If she is the main antagonist, then she has to lose, right? So what could this mean....that Euron switches Cersei’s camp and goes over to Daenerys’s camp thinking he is picking the winning side, only to end up on the losing side, when Daenerys finally loses.

Euron is a wild card and hopefully, next episode provides some solid clues regarding what’s going to happen.

There is also this scene from S07E05 Eastwatch, where the maesters of the Citadel are discussing Bran’s letter about the AOTD and one of the maesters mockingly says...”Don’t forget the prophet Lodos, who said that the drowned god will rise up and destroy Aegon the Conqueror”

Prophecy twist is when Aegon the Protector aka Jon Snow who has risen from the dead, destroys the Drowned God aka Euron Greyjoy.

Or the Drowned God aka Euron Greyjoy allies himself with Aegon the Conqueror come again aka Daenerys Stormborn to attempt to destroy KL???? It remains to be seen.

Why will Jon need to kill Euron??? Maybe just maybe Euron will be involved in kidnapping Sansa to KL. And Jon has already said (to LF) “Touch my sister and I’ll kill you myself”. That Chekhov’s gun is still waiting to go off.

I can’t help but think that the scene in the godswood in S08E01 Winterfell, in front of the heart tree, when Arya and Jon reunite and they talk about Sansa and Jon says that “I am her family too”, Arya says “don’t forget that” is foreshadowing for Jon to remember his first vow after he was brought back from the death that he made to Sansa...”I won’t ever let him touch you again, I will protect you, I promise”. Jon’s vow to protect Sansa will come into play in a moment when Sansa’s safety and her life is compromised. If Euron/GC come for her, then Jon’s vows to protect Sansa are applicable here as well.

This Jon/Arya scene then transitions to a shot of KL, where we think Sansa will get kidnapped to, and then we have shots of Cersei and Qyburn, the Golden Company with Euron and, finally we have scenes where a “sister” is held captive by Euron. And who comes to rescue his “sister” Yara?? Theon, who is a foil to Jon...I think these are interesting scene transitions. Again, since it’s rescuing one’s sister, it could be that Arya is the one who comes to rescue Sansa, together with Jon, and ends up being the one to kill Euron.

Having said all of that, I am really not sure. Mainly because I don’t think the show will let Jon kill both Euron and Daenerys. That’s a bit much for one guy, even if it’s Jon. And this is primarily where I think Arya may play a part and be the one to kill Euron. If Jon kills Daenerys, then Arya will kill Euron, again the objective remains the same, protect Sansa. That shot from the crypts teaser where Sansa is flanked by Arya one on side and Jon on the other side, with their weapons drawn in a protective stance, makes me think that both Jon and Arya will have to protect and save Sansa at some point.

Or the show could give this kill to Yara, Jamie, or even Brienne, who knows. Like I said, this part is pure speculation on my part so I could be totally wrong.

And finally Cersei Lannister:

I am counting on the show giving us a Sansa vs Cersei showdown, I feel like those two characters need to meet to complete the YMBQ story arc.

If the kidnapping plot does not happen, Sansa could come to KL to parlay with Cersei to strike up an alliance to take down Daenerys and defend the 7Ks.

These character posters have the same energy about them. Two Queens.

The show has been teasing us a Stark-Lannister alliance through its promos and teasers.

I could see Sansa and Cersei forming an alliance together to defeat Daenerys’s forces. The Golden Company will fight on behalf of Cersei and Sansa against Daenerys’s (and maybe Euron’s) armies.

In terms of Cersei’s demise, I am not putting too much stock on the Valonqar prophecy being actually true. Yes, Cersei has to die eventually, but D&D are Lena fanboys and I don’t think they will give her a gruesome on-camera death. In fact, I think Cersei will commit suicide or maybe poisoned.

When cornered, Cersei has either always managed to pull out an ace in the hole and outwit all her opponents in one fell-swoop like she did with House Tyrell in S06E10 when she blew up the sept

she turns suicidal and threatens to do something rash.

Case in point:

1. She was willing to poison herself and Tommen with the essence of nightshade poison at the Battle of Blackwater Bay when all looked lost until Tywin came and saved her.

2. When Tywin was forcing her to marry Loras, she threatened to “burn our House to the ground”.

The only thing Cersei loves is her children, Jamie, and her throne. The fact that she is drinking wine again means that she probably is no longer pregnant. Jamie, if he ends up with Brienne, is gone from her. Her throne is under attack from Daenerys’s forces. All of these may just force her to do:

Foreshadowing from S03E10 Mhysa, where she is talking to Tyrion to give Sansa a child so that she may have some happiness.

She does not have any more children left, so she may just throw herself from the highest window in the red keep.

Joffrey and Myrcella were poisoned, Tommen committed suicide by throwing himself from his window. Maybe Cersei will do the same. We shall see.

Thoughts and comments??

#jonsa #got meta #GoT S8 speculation #jon snow #sansa stark #anti daenerys #anti jonerys #euron greyjoy #cersei lannister #sansa stark is the younger and more beautiful queen #house stark for the win #jon x sansa #arya stark

687 notes · View notes

hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 5 years ago

Text

Spider-Man 1994 and Me

I have no idea how I first discovered Spider-Man the Animated Series. I know it wasn’t the first Spider-Man THING I ever encountered. That was some other Spidey show but I’ve checked them all and have no idea which one it was. But as a kid I didn’t know there was more than one show. I didn’t even know Spider-Man was more than a cartoon!

So I conflated the then current 1994 cartoon with whatever show I’d seen and by extension with Spider-Man as a whole.

To me back then Spider-Man WAS that show. The idea of comics, movies, video games and everything else never occurred to me and when I did discover them in my mind they weren’t the ‘real’ Spider-Man.

The ‘real’ Spider-Man was this show.

Thing is I never knew when it was on. I just knew it was on Fox Kids the cable channel. And my family didn’t have cable. So I spent a long time hoping and praying every weekend that maybe my folks would take me to one of our family friends or relatives who did, and that they would have Fox Kids in their package and that Spider-Man would be on when I was there.

Everyone in my family and at school I was hungry to see that show, and so they got me a VHS collecting 3 episodes for my birthday. They also taped one and a half episodes from a Saturday morning show that aired the cartoon before I had to go to Greek school.

As a result of what I can only describe as playing those tapes on loop I can practically quote ‘Night of the Lizard’, ‘The Sting of the Scorpion’, ‘The Menace of Mysterio’, ‘Make a Wish’ and ‘Attack of the Octobot’.

Whilst the latter two episodes are not well regarded, and I sympathise as to why (they’re basically a subpar adaptation of ‘The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man’), when I was the target demographic they really spoke to me.

And not in a ‘kids don’t know taste’ kinda way. The plot concerned Spider-Man visiting the bedroom of a kid who was a huge Spider-Man fan, hanging out with them, confiding his secrets to them, going on an adventure with them and ultimately that kid restoring both Spider-Man’s memory of himself and resolve to BE a hero.

Can you spell ‘wish fulfilment’?

During one fateful trip to a family friend’s house (who always had the best stuff) I caught the two episodes which are probably the lasting legacy of the whole show, ‘The Alien Costume’ Parts 1-2.

For all young and impressionable viewers I think these episodes left an indelible mark on them, along with the follow up episode.

Try if you will to imagine yourself NOT knowing Spider-Man wears any other kind of costume besides his red and blue one. Then imagine the idea of Spider-Man...as the bad guy. Not just the bad guy...but scary. Then imagine he’s made bad, and made scary because his clothes are literally making him that way and forcing themselves on him, even when he doesn’t want them to. Then imagine seeing an even badder, even scarier Spider-Man, but you don’t get a good look at him. you just know he’s ‘out there’.

Now imagine you are like 6 years old seeing all that.

For me and new Spider-Man fans like me, our experience with the black costume and Venom was about as close to what the original readers of the 1980s went through as possible.

What helped make these episodes so impressionable was the fact that my mind was filling in the blanks for what the ‘evil Spider-Man’ might look like.

Then a while later, by complete chance at an entirely different friend’s house, she showed me a video that had the fabled third part of the story and so, like every 90s kid, I became entranced by Venom!

And you know what, he was everything my childhood imagination had dreamed up and more. This wasn’t just a scary looking guy, with a scary attitude; this was a guy who was literally stalking our hero. As a kid you might’ve felt a certain comfort from Spider-Man. He was older than you, he was the hero and he was powerful. You either wanted to be him, or wanted to befriend him. But in this episode, suddenly he was as scared and as vulnerable as you were.

Following those three episodes I spent a lot of time alternating between fear and fascination for Venom and the black costume, and I longed to see those episodes again somehow, even when I eventually did get to see the show more regularly.

That happened when my family had to move in with my grandparents for 2 years, although I also caught the debut of Black Cat before that. Since Felicia was in whatever Spidey cartoon I first saw waaaaaaaaaay back I sort of knew the character and liked her.

Anyway, back to my grandparents, during that time they got cable and eventually Fox Kids. So finally one of my childhood dreams was fulfilled and one day I taped a marathon of Spider-Man episodes beginning with the last half of the second part of the epic Spidey/X-Men crossover and ending during the first half of the first half of the also epic Spidey/Daredevil crossover!

Again, I rewatched this almost religiously and since I didn’t quite understand the magic of the remote, I wound up sitting through the ads too and thus I’m still compelled to invest in the Chelsea Building Society and the 1997 Christmas catalogue.

Not long after I rented a VHS from Blockbuster (remember those?) containing the Alien Costume/Venom episodes and soon committed those to memory too.

Finally in now being able to watch the show regularly almost everyday I wound up seeing every other episode too, and seeing them like 5 times or something.

The first of these episodes I really remember was the incredibly dumb ‘Partners’ wherein I was happy to see Felicia and Scorpion again, and got introduced to the Vulture for the first time. Also I got introduced to Silvermane but he was less than dignified in the episode. If you’ve seen it you will know what I mean.

Among the most impressionable were the Carnage centric episodes and Secret Wars stuff. But I still fondly remember one morning seeing Spider Wars part 1.

Mind = blown.

Aunt May is dead. Green Goblin and Hobgoblin are together. New York is wrecked. Everyone hates Spider-Man, even Robbie! And this is all because of...Spider-Man!?

Another Spider-Man!

Another Spider-Man combined...with Carnage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It helped that, though I didn’t realize he was a different character, I’d recently gotten a toy featuring the Spider-Ben costume and so when Spider-Carnage in an incredibly similar costume showed up, suddenly what I’d regarded as a dumb alternate costume action figure became startlingly relevant.

And the hits kept coming.

There’re even MORE Spider-Mans?

Spider-Man with Doc Ock’s arms!

Man-Spider!

And who is this blonde Scarlet Spider dude?

Ben Reilly and this whole storyline wound up being more important to me than I realized as around this time the Clone Saga was being reprinted, thus I was picking up my first Spider-Man comics off the back of recognizing both the Scarlet Spider and Spider-Ben costumes.

The next night I saw the final episode.

Of course I didn’t know it was the end. I thought for sure there was more coming and if I obediently watched enough of the reruns someday I’d see the fabled (and totally imaginary) next episode where Spidey finally reunites with Mary Jane.

However else I felt about the episode at the time, the story bears the distinction of introducing me to Stan Lee himself as he made his greatest ever cameo in the episode.

At the time it was confusing and surreal. The idea of anyone actually CREATING Spider-Man, or fiction in general, was a foreign concept to me. It grew more surreal as via osmosis I gradually began seeing this ‘Stanley guy’ in other places...except he was REAL, not a cartoon!

After being frustrated by the lack of follow up, and being bored by having seen the show so many times over, I began to...not exactly grow out of the show but began to sour on it a bit.

And upon entering the comics, realizing the show was actually based on THEM and regarding every deviation from them as ‘wrong’, I began to actually hate the show.

For the next 10 years or so I longed for another Spider-Man show, a better and more accurate one.

I went back and forth between disliking and lightly enjoying the show until about 2012.

I might not have many kind things to say about the Marc Webb Spidey movies. But after several years of distancing myself from Spider-Man and pretty much comics in general, the hype for the movie got me back in the mood and slowly but surely I disappeared back into the rabbit hole and this time got in deeper than ever before. Part of that was rewatching the show in it’s entirety from start to finish.

Initially I noticed the flaws, but then that last episode hit me. And over time, I fell in love with the show and see the worth it had beyond it’s flaws.

Quite apart from introducing Spider-Man and his world to me, it ‘educated’ me on the character in ways that actively helped me navigate the comics when I eventually did start to read them.

And looking back, there’d never been a more spiritually faithful take on Spider-Man ever before that show. It wasn’t a cartoon show using a comic book character, it was a comic book cartoon show!

So on this day, I thank you Spider-Man 1994. I wouldn’t have loved this character without you!

#Spider-Man #spider-man the animated series #Spider-Man 1994 #spider-man tas

33 notes · View notes

nautiscarader · 6 years ago

Text

Nautiscarader's Wendip Week 2018 3: Combat

Dipper, Mabel, Wendy, Soos and Melody team up to rescue their friends. A brawl is surely brewing. Rated T for some mature innuendos and implications.

I'm gonna come out clean here: this fanfic is two years old. It has originally been written for "Seductive" prompt during Wendip Week 2016, except that year I got heavily depressed and barely finished three prompts. However, when I re-read it a few weeks ago, I discovered it was pretty much finished, and it fitted the "combat" prompt as well, so I decided to reuse it. I do hope you will forgive me that.

Wendip, Soos/Melody, Mabifica (mentioned), T, 4,5k

(Read on ao3) (read on FF) (masterpost)

Through deceptively calm waters, a medium-sized, white trawler cut through the thick fog that might have otherwise discouraged other sailors from going forward, but it was nothing to the ones aboard this particular vessel. For once, none of the passengers were actual, trained sailors, and more importantly, they were all determined to arrive at their destination as fast as possible, with one clear intention in their minds: to rescue.

Dipper Pines stood by the steering wheel, which was one just from the name. The fog wasn't a problem for the on-board GPS, though a skilled eye was still necessary to watch out for rocks or other debris. This is why Mabel, Wendy, Soos and Melody all stared ahead giving their captain warnings about oncoming danger. Or rather, they would have if any danger lied ahead. As far as anyone was concerned, it was a straightforward, almost boring route. But they all knew that something in these very waters was an obstacle so formidable, that even the combined minds and strength of both Stanley and Stanford Pines couldn't defeat it.

Of course, no one aboard had thoughts that ghastly. Communication with the Stan o' War II was cut off a bit more than a day ago, and it took all five of their closest friends and family less than few hours to gather resources, travel to, rent a boat and leave from the same port Stan and Ford sailed from almost a month earlier. Mabel insisted on taking the wheel - after all, she has spent last week or so preparing their welcome-back party, and awaited their tales more than anyone else, with the same curiosity and enthusiasm as if she was still thirteen.

But after she steered the ship in a manner so fast and reckless it almost sabotaged the entire trip, the feisty eighteen-year-old was delegated to climb to the only mast of their ship and from her non-existent crow's nest look further than anyone on board, whilst her brother took her place.

And sure enough, it was Mabel who spotted a small, rocky island and a wooden boat next to it on the horizon before it appeared on the radar.

The five adventurers gathered all at the bow, staring into the lessening fog, expecting to see their grunkles' ship in ruins. But to their surprise and relief, when their boat reached the shore, it became obvious the ship was not damaged in any observable way.

Mabel readied her grappling hook, Wendy stayed on the board with her rifle, which she traded temporarily for her usual axe, and watched as the slightly older Pines twin shot her way to board the ship, landed swiftly on her feet, strode to the door of the cabin, and kicked the door to confront any enemies hiding there. But again, there wasn't anyone inside. The electronic devices were still on, recording the same position for the last twenty four hours, and nothing in the room indicated any signs of fight or accident that might have happened.

Mabel gave the other four signal, and they all followed her, about to see what hid in the bowels of the ship. However, that search gave them no more information on what happened to their grunkles than the previous one. Food crates, spare weapons and scientific instruments, all seemed intact.

This time, it was Dipper, who ventured forward along the island's minuscule coast and found an obvious place their grunkles would surely be in: a passage wide enough for more than two people, located between the two pillars that formed the majority of the rocky island, leading to an underground cave.

- Alright, guys. Me and Soos are going in. Don't follow us, it is dangerous in there. - Dipper stated matter-of-factly, giving nod to Soos.

He turned his back when three voices loudly protested.

- Woah, woah, woah, Dipper, what makes you think you can give us orders? - Mabel threw her arms in the air. - Yeah, Dipper, rule one in horror movies: don't split up. - Wendy accompanied her. - Or do you think that just because we're women you can leave us here and do the bravey-brave things yourselves? - Melody added mockingly.

Dipper sighed.

- No, it's nothing like that! - he responded - We don't want anything happen to you... - Oh, sure, and how many times we had to save your sorry arses? - Mabel barked back - We don't have the Y chromosome, "y" as in "Why would you think you're any better than us"? - For the record, I just think it's better if we get eaten than you guys - Soos interjected, which made Melody give the tiniest of gasps at the supposedly romantic gesture of her husband, until Wendy gave her a less-than-subtle nudge in the ribs.

The lumberjill stepped forward to separate the bickering twins.

- Guys, guys, listen - Wendy pushed them aside - Dipper, dude, I know you don't want to risk our lives, but if we want to save Stan and Ford, we need all the firepower we can have. As in, you need us. And we need you two.

Dipper looked deeply into his girlfriend's eyes, then into his sister's, and let out another deep sigh.

- How about this: if we don't return in an hour's time, you will follow. But you will also radio for help before that, understood?

It was time for Wendy, Mabel and Melody to exchange knowing looks, and with grimaces of reluctance still on their faces, they all nodded. Wendy and Melody gave their lesser halves kisses, Wendy fixed the rifles on Dipper's back, and with that, the two slowly walked down the narrow rocky corridor (which proved easy even for Soos). Once the lights from their torches disappeared, the three women quit their act at once.

- So... we wait twenty minutes and then we go in, right? - asked Melody - Right. - Wendy and Mabel responded, readying their weapons without so much as thinking of an answer.

The next third of an hour passed almost instantly. With no contact from the boys, three gals followed their steps, and entered the dark seashore cavern, expecting to be the rescuers of the rescue team. They thought that the walls would get more and more narrow, but the cavern slowly turned into an angled, helical corridor, which after a few dozens of yards became a staircase with occasional straightened lumps of rock and dirt working as steps or landings. The group moved silently, until Mabel pointed her torch at the sandy floor.

Melody was about to scream, but Wendy quickly covered her mouth; the beam of light revealed an old, dusty backpack with the remains of its owner still attached to it. The white bones shone in the light, bringing more questions than answers.

- That's not... is it? - asked Melody with a trembling voice. - Nah, it's too old. - Wendy quickly reassured her - But guys must have seen it. Why didn't they turn back? - Because they're morons?

Melody and Wendy exchanged a concerned look, agreeing with Mabel's decision. They hurried up, following the boys' footsteps, afraid of what could wait for them behind next turn. Their worries came true almost instantly, when Mabel's boot bumped into a metallic, rectangular object, turning it briefly on.

- Look! It's Ford's!

She picked up a tablet which for the last few years served Ford as his new, slightly modernised journal. The screen was cracked, and the battery was almost dead, but his writing was still readable. Wendy and Melody flocked around Mabel, trying to read Ford's notes.

- A "song"? A "trance"? - she read - What is going on? And what's an "iren"? - Dipper!

Before she could turn her head, Wendy rushed forward, screaming for her boyfriend. Melody followed her, leaving Mabel running last in line, trying to read without tripping over rocks.

- "...bird-like creatures, with claws and feathers, known throughout history for... using their voices to lure men"?!

She tossed the tablet into her backpack and run down the rocky corridor, towards the dim green aura coming from its end. Mabel armed her grappling hook and sprinted past her friends, and entered a large cave, ready to confront her opponents.

- Alright, you leave our morons a...lone?

Wendy and Melody arrived a second later, and were equally astonished by what they saw inside. They were greeted by eight pairs of eyes, though only four of them human. The rest belonged to large, scale- and feathers-covered creatures, with beaks and clawed appendages. The brief description from Ford's notes gave the gals a lot of mental images of what the sirens could be doing to Soos, Dipper, Ford and Stan.

"Having fun" wasn't one of them.

- Mabel! Wendy! I thought you'd never arrive!

Dipper waved at the three flabbergasted young women standing by the cave's entrance, examining its decor. They expected sacrificial altars, human skulls used as bowls and cups, or other ghastly elements. Instead, they noticed a huge flat screen TV, emitting the green light they saw before; Soos, together with one of the sirens stared at it, playing a video game, seemingly unaware of the women's arrival. Another siren was sitting with Dipper amongst a huge pile of multicoloured comic books and trading cards. In the back, they noticed a jukebox, snooker table and several comfy chairs, occupied by the two oldest missing adventurers, as well as two more sirens.

- Hello, ladies! - Stan shouted, sipping from what looked like a glass of whiskey. - Didn't expect you here! Care to join us? - Mabel! Wendy! Melody! - Ford looked from up the old, dusty tome he's been reading, putting it on the table. - What brings you here?

The three women once again looked at each other, trying to form a cohesive answer, which given the bizarre circumstances wasn't exactly easy.

- Uhm... To... Rescue you? - Melody begun sheepishly. - Yeah, that's why Dipper and Soos went here. - Mabel pointed to the boys in question. - And we also went to rescue them as well, since, well, they are who they are. - Rescue? - Dipper stood up - Can't you see, we're not in any danger. Come on, tell them, Isobel!

He gave his siren partner a quick nod to her feathered arm, and dragged her from her seat to face Wendy. The distinctively red-beaked creature gave what otherwise might be called a polite smile, though it hasn't improved Wendy's mood at all, and the fact that Dipper was already on first name terms with her definitely hasn't made her lower her rifle.

The other three sirens followed her and flocked to the first one, until she spread her wings and bowed to the newcomers.

- Greetings, brave ladies! Welcome to our humble abodes. - she spoke in a sing-song voice. - My name is Isobel, and these are Mathilda, Ettiene and Fallaise. You have nothing to fear from us. - Oh, yeah? - Mabel retorted - Then why did you lure them all here? - Oh, we didn't lure them! - the siren called Isobel replied - These two gentlemen simply lost their way in the mist, and had to rest. And what would you you prefer: sleep in the boat, or in a nice cave by the fire with all the commodities? - And what about Dipper and Soos? - Wendy joined Mabel, doing another step forward, towards the blue- and yellow- beaked sirens. - The younger ones were weary as well. They are not as skilled sailors as their old... ehm, more experienced friends. - she corrected herself - And what else to offer them than some modern ways of entertainment?

A loud cheer reached the group, causing the sirens and the humans to look at Soos, waving his arms in the air.

- Yes! I got the first place! - he turned to Melody - Did you see this, honey?

Still staring at him, sirens didn't notice Mabel pushing their feathered bodies aside to walk through the barrier they created to reach her brother.

- Dipper, you can't be serious! They are sirens! - she shouted into his ear - They always lure people in. Not just people, men! - Oh, come on, just because they, unlike you, understand our hobbies doesn't mean they are automatically bad!

This was the last straw for Mabel. Her eye twitched, but she remained composed, and simply walked around the room, examining various bits of the odd décor. She circled the cave twice, returning to the same place she started from, with a sly grin on her face.

- These sirens are evil, exhibit A! - she shouted, grabbing the controller that used to belong to the blue siren - This one might looked like a skilled gamer, but behold! Her controller wasn't even connected to the console!

The siren shot her a cold stare, while Soos was stilled absorbed by his avatar on screen, waving a shining trophy with a congratulatory message written in broken English.

- And these - she took the cards Dipper was clutching in his hands - They might look like the originals, with the protective cases and stuff... but they are mere reprints of the originals!

She ripped the card from the foil, exposing the modern back tucked behind the old-looking one.

- And I would be very surprised if these bottles really contained a two-hundred-year old whiskey... - she said taking a healthy sip from the bottle.

The next moment taste and fumes of the alcohol burned through her throat, causing her to spit the entire gulp.

- Okay, maybe that was real.

As if on cue, the four sirens hissed, and four hypnotised men grabbed and shook their heads, as if they just woke up from a hangover-induced sleep.

- Mabel, what is going o- The Sirens!

Dipper screamed and ran towards the rest of the group, secured from the front by the three women. His grunkles swiftly grabbed two empty bottles of whiskey, expanding the armory brought by Wendy and Mabel. Unable to find anything for of her own, Meody resorted to Wendy's axe she held rather clumsily in her hands, never having to use one. Four feminine creatures bristled their hair- and scaled-covered heads and circled the adventurers, trapping them in a corner.

- Kids! We've been kidnapped! Uhm, elder-napped. Napped! - Grunkle Stan shouted - They lured us in with the promise of fair retirement system. I should have known that such a thing doesn't exist! - And then they've kidnapped us too! - Dipper added. - Yeah, no kidding. - snarled Wendy, keeping her eyes on the four creatures. - Uh, Wendy aren't you glad that we're alive?

A very short and sharp turn of her head gave Dipper an answer in a form of cold and angry "I-told-you-so" look, silencing him for good. Wendy readied her double-barrelled rifle when a red siren opened her beak-like mouth.

- Give us our men back - she hissed, stretching her wings. - Never in our lives, you feather-brains. - two bullets fell into the chamber with a metallic "click" - You wanted to steal my boyfriend! - My brother! - And my hubby! - Melody added, steeping in front of Soos, who took the entire situation with surprising calm, perhaps just because he was still going to use the controller as his weapon. - Ladies, I do hope you remember us. - Grunkle Stan peeked his head through the front row, only to tuck it back again when the red Siren opened her jaws again. - Curses! - she hissed - All we wanted were some male friends, who would help us, poor girls be like true nerds! Do you know how difficult it is to be mainstream if you're a woman in those times?

Mabel stepped to the despondent-looking siren, who took her fake glasses and smashed them with her claws.

- Really? - Mabel scratched her head - Do you mean it? You just wanted to belong? - Mabel, I wouldn't trust them! - her brother shouted from the corner. - Yeah, says the one who trusted them. - Wendy snickered. - So... you didn't want to hurt them? - Mabel asked once again, lowering her grappling hook slightly. - Of course! - sang another one - How else would we then use them and feed to our future babies?

Silence fell in the cavern, as all eyes, human or not were now pointed at the green Siren.

- I shouldn't have said that, should I? - There is a reason we don't send you on scouting missions, Mathilda. Attack! - screeched the red-beaked one, and at once the four sirens launched themselves at the humans.

Many things happened at the same time.

First, a loud "Duck, Mabel!" boomed through the cavern, followed by absolutely deafening sound of Wendy firing her rifle. She missed, only narrowly singing the feathers on one of the Siren's head. Her actions, however, were more than precise. The echo of her shot made the rest cover their ears and confuse her opponents for long enough to start their escape.

At least two of the monsters around them begun shrieking, which Wendy assumed was the sound that took control of her friends' minds. Wendy grabbed her boyfriend by the collar of his shirt and rushed to the exit, slamming the closest siren in the beak, ending her song. She turned around to see if Dipper kept his hands over ears, and was quite happy to see his beaming smile, meaning that he understood her plan.

She couldn't say the same about Soos, who had to have his ears covered by Melody, resulting in her using her feet and elbow to parry sirens' attacks, which was, nonetheless, surprisingly effective, even if she could use the actual weapon in her hand.

Using her grappling hook, Mabel found her way to grunkle Stan's back, piggy-backing him to the exit. The same person that just a few minutes ago complained about being weak and left alone, dashed trough the wings and claws of the enemies as if his age did not matter at all.

Ford was the only one who kept his own hearing under control, at least on the other side of his metal plate. With one hand to operate, he used his slightly faulty laser pistol to defend their position, but with their wings, the Sirens were able to prevent the adventurers from reaching their destination. Their initial advantage diminished greatly when the group were separated; Dipper, Wendy, Melody and Soos made it to the tunnel entrance, leaving the rest still fighting.

- We have to keep them occupied! - Ford shouted, wrestling with one of the sirens, steadily advancing to the exit. - Grunkle Ford, do you have any tools with you? - Mabel asked, as she swung above the heads of the sirens, firing from her grappling hook one by one to keep herself mid-air. - I only have this, but what why how would that help? - he reached into his pocket and threw his Swiss omni-knife towards Mabel, when the trajectory of her flight coincided with his position.

One look on Mabel's face told Ford that his great-niece not only had a plan, but also told them what to do.

- Stan, we need to buy Mabel some time! - he shouted, hoping his brother would understand at least part of his words amongst the shrieks.

He did, and the very next moment Stan let go of his ears, ripped his shirt in half and with a roar he rushed towards the sirens. Meanwhile, working under the pressure of time, Mabel fidgeted with the knife's satellite setting, and jammed it into the video cable of the television screen.

- Come on, you ugly chickens! I sacrificed myself to worse monsters than you!

He was about to feel the pain of the claws on his chest, and the soothing, hypnotising melody of their voice in his head, but then, amongst their uproar, a new, much louder voice filled the cavern, gathering the sirens' attention. They all turned, and gathered around the flickering, booming TV.

The paused racing game was gone, and instead a much more rapid and violent one was being played, bringing the attention of not just the sirens, but humans as well, who at least temporarily ceased fighting with them.

- You know, I'm starting to feel ignored... - Stan grumbled. - And it was a pretty decent shirt! - What is the meaning of this? Who- who is playing that? - screamed one of the sirens, pointing to the screen.

A young, blonde face appeared in the upper corner of the screen.

- "It's me, WatchMeCry and this is another EXTREME(TM) and AWESOME(C) episode of my Heroes of Duty letsplay!" - the young man waved his hands towards the camera.

Somewhere above the crowd, Wendy noticed Mabel, swinging on the rope from her grappling hook, with a elongated device in her hand.

- Quick! While they're busy! - she gave command to Stan and Ford.

Allured by the screaming and whining of the streamer, the sirens flocked to the screen, completely oblivious of the fact that his exaggerated style of playing, cursing and reacting to the game were clearly staged. Mabel swiftly fell to the ground, leading her grunkles to the rest of the group, equally baffled by the young man's pitiful gameplay.

- Do people really watch it...? - Wendy raised her brow in disbelief. - I don't really play games, and even I know he sucks. - added Melody - That's the whole point!- explained Mabel, silently pushing the group out of the cavern - He has to be so horrible, so he can play more, do crappy commentaries and tell unfunny jokes!

As if on command, the sirens roared into laughter, following the blonde gamer's series of insults about his virtual opponent's mother.

- Brilliant, Mabel! That will keep'em interested for good. - Wendy cheered. - No it won't! - interjected Ford, interrupting Wendy's speech, and taking his futuristic device from his great-niece - Mabel, great work, but we have to make sure these monsters won't lure any other bystanders, like they fooled us! I should've known they wouldn't have a complete proof of Ziemann's hype-othesis... - he scratched his head in embarrassment. - First of all, grunkle Ford, it's on autoplay, they still have more than seven hundreds hours of his videos, and he keeps pumping them out daily. - Mabel continued - Secondly, once they find that this guy sells his face on t-shirts, and allows donations just to show a silly message on screen, they won't need anything else. Just look at them!

The fours sirens gathered around the TV screen, passing their snacks around, commenting about the gamer's hair, his unmistakable manner of screaming and his almost childish approach to losing, and the way he trashed his controller around the room. The once mighty monsters, now completely mesmerised by their own weapon left only long shadows on the cavern's walls.

- But... their lives may put others at risk! - continued Ford, unabashed by that sight - Lives? Grunkle Ford, what lives? - Mabel spread her arms - Let's face it, these sirens ain't gonna sire anything for a long time.

The adventurers looked at each other, exchanging the nods, agreeing with Mabel's plan.

- But just to be sure, let's block the exit with a hu-uge rock. - Mabel winked.

The small port tavern in the town of Orstan had very few customers this time of year, so the late night arrival of party of seven, each demanding food and drink initially astonished the owner. But when the oldest two started spinning the tales of their sea adventures, the barman himself joined their table and listened to the wild and colourful stories.

Not all people around the table listened as eagerly as the barman or Mabel, who kept asking Ford to re-tell the same fight with double-headed shark again and again. Dipper Pines sipped the soda from his beer mug, staring into the foam forming on top of it, and only when Wendy gave him a quick nudge he realised she's not been listening to Ford and Stan as well.

- What's wrong Dipper? - I feel horrible, Wendy. - he groaned under his breath - How could I fell for the sirens trap? I've read about them! I knew their weapon! - Dipper, don't be so hard on yourself. - she put a hand on his shoulder - You guys have been hypnotised, you couldn't do anything... - Yeah, but that easily? - Dipper sighed again. - I told you that you mean a world to me, and no other girl would do the same to me... And Soos promised that to Melody in church. And we were both bamboozled by those four.

Wendy snickered, spilling ale from her mug.

- Okay, first of all, no one uses that word anymore. And secondly, look at Melody.

She pointed to the opposite side of the table, where the other shop assistant at the Mystery Shack curled in Soos' arms ready to fall asleep if not for Stan and Ford's story.

- Does this looks like a couple that is about to break up because of this? - No... - Dipper answered, and flinched, when he felt Wendy's arms closing around his stomach. - Yeah, and neither will we. - she gave his ear a gentle kiss. - So... you're not angry at me? - Dipper, you gawked at that beaked bitch as if she was the next wonder of the world, and she would have babies with you, of course I'm angry. - she kissed him again - But that doesn't mean I can't forgive you. After all, you're just a man. - Hey, what was that supposed to mean? - Dipper turned his head around and met Wendy's face beaming with a smile. - Why don't you show me?

Her low, alluring voice caused Dipper to spill his drink again, but this time, he grabbed Wendy's mug, gulped down a bit of heavy alcohol, and let his girlfriend drag him to their room.

Half an hour later delightful stories told by Ford and Stan turned into singing contest of loud and obnoxious shanties that drove Mabel mad. And with both Soos and Melody as well as Dipper and Wendy gone to their respective beds, she gulped down another mug of beer, hoping it would make her asleep here and not have to be sandwiched between their noisy rooms.

- I wish Paz was here...

The whole premise for the story was, of course, the "fake gamer girl" cliche, and often associated with it mistakes like disconnected controller/turned off console/lack of cartridge often shown on some poor photoshops that were supposed to market that demographic.

Isobel, Ettiene and Fallaise are names of three Hagravens from The Elder Scroll games; they appear in Bloodmoon, Morrowind's DLC and later in Dragonborn, Skyrim's DLC.

"WatchMeCry" is, for those who have been living under a rock - just like those Sirens - a parody of "colourful", shall we say, streamers like PewDiePie.

Ziemann's "hype-otheosis" is a joke on famous, (currently) unproven Riemann's hypothesis.

Orstan is a parody of a port town in Oregon called Orford.

#wendip #wendipweek #wendip week #wendy x dipper #dipperxwendy #gravity falls #dipper pines #wendy corduroy #nautiscaraderfics #combat

8 notes · View notes

mostlydeadwriter · 3 years ago

Text

The People in the Trees

By Jennifer Stanley

Pt 9

Back in Kele’s tent, covered in fur, Zi-yeh was hot, covered in sweat. The loud banging had stopped, so had the screaming, it had been quiet for a while. Zi-yeh slowly crawled out from under the pile of furs, she stood up on shaking legs. She started to cry seeing her dead family around her, she quickly walked by them, trying not to look at them. She exited the tent looking around, she didn’t see any of the strange men so she walked out into the village. Blood was all over the ground, along with arrows, knives, broken pottery. She walked toward her family's tent, she looked up at the sky to avoid seeing bodies of the dead.

Zi-yeh only got half way to her tent before she saw the body of her father Diablo, not far from him was her uncle and grandfather. She realized her entire family was gone, the girl fell to her knees sobbing. Once she had no tears left to cry, she stood up and continued walking, she got to the tent of Liluye the medicine woman. She pulled back the curtain and walked in, on the floor in front of her feet was Eknath Liluye’s son. She stepped around him, going further into the tent, she saw Liluye’s body, she had her herb bag in her hand. At the back of the tent were the bodies of Onawa and her son Elan who were being treated by Liluye. “My whole village is dead and gone. What am I to do?” Zi-yeh cried.

Zi-yeh sat on the floor for what seemed like forever, she thought out loud, “Grandfather Kele would get revenge.” she said. Thanks to her cousin Ela, the story of Keta’s vengeance was in her mind, she had the herbs she needed but she needed the staff of a medicine man and fresh blood. She walked back to Liluye and pulled the bag of herbs out of hand, she left the tent. She headed toward the tent of the medicine man Biminak, he laid dead in front of his tent, his staff sat at his side and he held his knife in his hand. Zi-yeh bent down picking up the staff and the knife.

Zi-yeh walked to the end of the village into the woods, she took a deep breath hoping not to run into any of the strangers that killed all her people. By the time she made it to the river the sun had set and the moon was full in the sky. She knew she wouldn’t be able to find any animals to sacrifice, the only blood she had was her own. She took the knife poking the tip of the blade into her skin and pushing down she let the blood drip in a bowl she pulled from the herb bag. When she had enough blood, she cut a strip of cloth from her skirt wrapping it around her wrist. She opened the herb bag taking out a sprig of sage, bark of cinnamon and a sprig of thyme and some dirt.

Just as Keta had done she put the herbs in the bowl using a rock to smash the herbs into the blood making a paste. Zi-yeh put her fingers in the paste and rubbed it all over her face making a death mask. She stood up and picked up the staff of the medicine man, she walked out into the water stopping when she was knee deep. She stopped for a minute to think of the chant Keta had said, they came to her quickly. “Brave, powerful God Itzcoliuhqui, hear my call for vengeance, send your dark warriors to do my bidding and curse those who killed my people. I am your servant, in this life and the next use me as you wish. Just give me the vengeance I seek.” Zi-yeh yelled. For the longest time nothing happened, she started to doubt the story was true and that she had done the ritual for nothing.

The water turned ice cold around her, turning from black to purple around her, she saw a figure form in the water in front of her. A dark growl of a voice said, “I will grant your vengeance and then you are mine.” The figure gave Zi-yeh no time to answer before dark shadows like people rose from the water. The girl followed the shadow figures to the campsite of the strangers, she watched as they tore the men apart leaving nothing but bloody body parts behind. When all the men were dead and the camp destroyed the shadow figures disappeared leaving Zi-yeh alone. She made her way back to her village, she went to her family's tent.

She took off her blood covered skirt and her shirt, put on a clean sleep dress and crawled into her bed and lay down. But before she went to sleep she heard the same growl of a voice she’d heard at the river. “Zi-yeh, you are mine.” She looked up seeing a dark figure with the face of a demon looking down at her. Before she had time to scream, the figure reached into her chest pulling out her heart and her soul pulling her into damnation. Her lifeless body remained on the bed. Zi-yeh learned the vengeance could be had but at the cost of her everlasting soul.

#horror story #my writing #writers on tumblr #original writing #original work #original content #the people in the trees

0 notes

butcanyoujustimagine · 6 years ago

Text

Once Upon a December PII Moana

Summary: Eleven Years Later, Moana still hasn’t regained her memory and an unsuspecting visitor shows up.

Eleven years—that’s how long it had been since the day I was brought into foster care. Eleven years since I was found on the side of the road. Eleven years since my entire life probably changed for the worst. I wasn't always an orphan.

I looked down at the locket that had been hanging around my neck for those eleven years. Made of gold and encrusted in what was probably platinum and adorned with emeralds, sapphires, diamonds and pearls, I saw the words, ‘together in Paris’ engraved in elegant script in the metal. I held it close to my chest and closed my eyes longingly. Someone was waiting for me there, hopefully. The only question was who. Who was waiting for me in Paris?

Looking up at the Soldier making a speech to the rededication of Honolulu, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at him. Everybody clapped and I scoffed.

“They can call it Kalakauakulanakahale, but it’ll always be Honolulu! New name, same empty stomachs!” I groaned.

“You could be arrested for saying that, Moana,” Mrs Kim said. “You need to learn to watch your mouth.”

I crossed my arms and rolled my eyes. “They tell us times are better, but newsflash, they’re not. Can’t cook an empty promise in an empty pot! A brighter day is dawning, it’s almost at hand! The skies are blue, the walls have ears, and one who argues mysteriously disappears!”

Everyone chorused after me. “Hail our brave new land!”

I ducked out of sight when a Soldier came walking towards me. He had no doubt heard my outburst of sarcasm.

“Honolulu is lovely. A city on the rise.” Someone said.

“It’s really very friendly,” my brother Dmitry Romanov shout.

“If you don’t mind spies,” my other foster brother Dylan O’Connor said.

“We love to stand in bread lines, to get our mouldy bread!” A stranger added.

“We’re good and loyal comrades and our favourite colour’s red!” The people cheered.

I popped out from behind the wall. “Now everyone is equal, and professors push the brooms. Two dozen total strangers stuck into two small rooms. You hold a revolution and this shit’s the price you pay!” I scoffed.

“Mahalo iāʻoe no nā lono!” Someone shouted. (Thank you for the rumours!)

“Thank god for all the gossip that gets our asses through the day!” Another person added. I nodded my head in agreement.

“HAVE YOU HEARD!” a girl shouted running towards us, waving a flyer in her hand like it was a flag of some sort... “THERE’S A RUMOUR IN HONOLULU! HAVE YOU HEARD WHAT WHAT THEY'RE SAYING ON THE STREET?”

“What?” I asked.

“All though the King did not survive, his youngest child may be still alive.” She whispered.

“The Princess Auli’ilani?” I asked, in shock. I couldn’t believe it. It was probably just some rumour.

She shushed me. “But please do not repeat.”

“It’s a rumour, a legend, a mystery. Something whispered in an alleyway or through a crack. It’s a rumour, that’s part of Hawai’ian History,” Dmitry said.

Akea Ngata, a big buff Maori guy from New Zealand looked down at his phone. “It says he royal Grandmama will pay a royal some, to someone who can bring the princess back.”

I heard a man muttering something under his breath. He was old, had grey hair and a beard. His skin had sunken in from the lack of food. Stress had taken its toll on him. “Honolulu was lovely when the United States and Royalty were in. I called myself a Senator as I had been elected. I hobnobbed with the Royals and then a change of luck. The was dead, State and Federal Senators fled and now comrades now we’re stuck!” He walked off. Why did that man look familiar? Did I know him from somewhere?

“I’ll see you back at St Anne’s,” I said to them. My brothers nodded and we all went our separate ways.

“A dollar for this painting. It belonged to Royalty, I swear!”

“Count Akamai’s Pajamas, comrade buy the pair!” Another vendor hollered to tourists and locals alike.

“I found this in the Mansion, initialled, with an ‘A’ it could be Auli’ilani’s, now what will someone pay!” someone hollered.

Looking over, I saw a young man dressed in sunglasses and a hat turned away towards any sight of cameras.

“How much for that music box?” He asked. He was British, and yet his voice sounded so familiar to her. Where did she know him from?

“Tom, are you sure this going to work?” asked a much young younger voice. He was dressed in the same attire. A black polo shirt, khaki shorts, and a pair of nice shoes. Or what the rest of the world called sneakers, runners, or trainers.

“There’s more to being a Princess than wearing a Tiara and a prop! How do you even know it’s the real bloody thing?” asked another guy. Why were they all dressed the same?

“Tom, we should get out of here. This isn’t a good idea to be here without security,” a much younger voice said. He had to be fourteen, maybe fifteen years old. “You know what mum’ll say.”

“I’m doing what the doctor said. If she really is an amnesiac, maybe this’ll help jog her memory,” the first one pointed out.

“We still don’t know if it’s real or not.” said the last one.

“The music box? It’s a genuine Kawananakoa, I could never part with it!” The vendor pleaded. There was a mischievous twinkle in his eyes and it reminded me of an old foster kid I knew long ago.

“Two cans of beans, comrade?” asked the oldest boy.

“Here,” he said. Soon, there was a flock of people chasing after the Street Vendor.

Then, I heard a loud noise that reminded me of a gunshot. I screamed and cowered against a brick wall. “NO!” I cried out in horror. “No, please!”

The soldier who made the speech jumped out and helped me up. Looking into his brown eyes, they were filled with kindness and compassion. Something I had never seen from any soldier before. “It was just a truck backfiring, comrade. That’s all it was. Those days are over now, neighbour against neighbour. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Oh, god, you’re freezing. There’s a tea shop just around the corner, let me…”

I cut him off. Though his eyes might’ve been kind, growing up in foster care and on the streets of O’ahu had taught me one thing: DON’T TRUST SOLDIERS! They could be part of the Secret Police. “No thank you,” trying to push away, his muscular body stopped me from running.

“What’s your hurry?” He asked me, this time his tone a bit more serious.

I swallowed my fear. “I need to go home - my family’s waiting for me,” I said.

“Oh, then let me give you a ride!” He smiled. “It’ll be much quicker than walking.” He opened the door for me and we got in. “Where are you going?” He asked me as he started the car and drove through the streets of O’ahu.

“St Anne’s Home for Troubled Souls,” I responded.

He laughed. “You don’t have an accent!” He laughed. “I thought they were all foreigners and men!”

“I was born in Hawai’i and I’m the only girl,” I responded. At least, I assumed I was born in Hawaii.

Soon, after a bunch of awkward silence, we made it to St Anne’s. Towering over the beautiful landscape was a mansion all boarded up and in need of a paint job. The roof was probably caving in and so were the floorboards. It was very haunted by the ghosts of fallen Polynesian Warriors, a Kahuna who hated everyone who wasn’t Polynesian, dead nuns and priests, lunatic doctors who did terrible things to their patients, dead patients, and murder victims. But still, living here was better than being homeless.

The next day, I was looking out the window at the ocean. A cigarette in my hand, I didn’t care that it would give me lung cancer in the long run. I longed to sail on the ocean and go to worlds unknown. At least that would get me out of Hawaii.

“MOANA, В АВТОМОБИЛЕ В АВТОМОБИЛЕ!” I heard my foster brother Dmitry Romanov shout at the top of his lungs and my thoughts were pulled away from my unknown past and future. (MOANA, THERE’S A CAR IN THE DRIVEWAY!)

“Chết tiệt, đó là gia đình hoàng gia Anh!” My other brother Stanley Dai whispered. (Damn, it’s the British Royal Family!)

“De jeito nenhum!” Andre Carvalho cried. (No fucking way!)

I ran towards the door and saw my brothers bolt towards the one window that wasn't boarded up. If it were true, I had to fucking see this. I pushed my way through my brothers and saw a black limo parked in the driveway. A man with brown curly hair, dressed in khaki shorts and sunglasses came out. “Is that your cousin?” I heard Dylan O’Connor ask Dmitry.

“I think so,” Dmitry whispered.

We could hear what they were saying through the glass window. “Why would she live here, Mum? Here of all places?”

“Auli’i was fond of causing trouble,” Tom shrugged. “I remember that from when we were little?”

“Why does he seem so familiar?” I asked the boys.

“Because he’s been on the cover of every single bloody magazine to date,” Akea said in a ‘duh’ tone.

I rolled my eyes, but he was right. The Crowned-Prince Thomas and his little brothers Harry and Sam walked to the front door and rang the bell. Dmitry got up and opened it.

“Hello, St Anne’s Home for Troubled Souls, why is the Crowned Prince of Great Britain knocking on our door?” He asked. His thick Russian accent shining through.

“I’m looking for someone,” Tom said. “Someone who’s supposed to live here. She doesn’t go by the name anymore, but her name is Auli’ilani. Everyone calls her Auli’i for short.”

Dmitry scoffed. “Up the hill, you can find the graves,” he began to shut the door.

“WAIT!” Tom hollered. “Wait! She might go by the name Moana.”

I perked up. All the eyes turned to me. Why did he want me? Me of all people. Hell, I considered smoking a past time, I worked for a crime family, I didn’t do well when it came to authority and I was a professional procrastinator. Why did he want me? I wasn’t cut-out to be a Princess—let alone a Queen.

I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I walked over to the door, dressed in nothing but sweatpants, one of my brother’s hoodies, and miss-matching socks. “What do you want, Mas?” I asked.

“Did she just call you Mas?” asked the youngest boy who came flying out of the car and running up towards us.

“BE CAREFUL! YOU MIGHT TRIP!” I hollered. I couldn’t help myself. Having to raise me made me a compulsive caretaker.

“Why’d you call me Mas?” Tom asked, a bit in shock.

“I dunno, just felt right,” I said. I grabbed a cigarette from my hoodie’s pockets. “Want a smoke?”

“Happily,” Tom smiled. I handed him a cigarette and he lit his and mine with a lighter with his family crest engraved on it. I had no doubt it was custom made. He was next-in-line for the Throne, he could afford stuff like that.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Now, why’d you just call me ‘Mas?’” Tom asked me. “I’ll only ask this once.”

“Sounds like you’re threatening me, but let me tell you one thing, Your Royal Pain in the Ass, I’ve met people a hell of a lot scarier than you,” I told him with a smirk on my face. “I’m not scared of you. I’m not scared of any of you.” I looked outside and saw one of the Royal Guards walking towards Kahuna Hill. “CAN’T YOU FUCKIN’ READ!? IT SAYS ‘KEEP OUT’ FOR A FUCKING REASON!”

“What do you remember?” asked the Queen of Great Britain, a bit shocked at my outburst at one of their guards. “What do you know?”

“Know of what?” I scoffed.

“Your past,” Tom said. “What do you know of your past?”

I sighed and looked out at the ocean my ancestors had sailed thousands of years before. Everything felt like clouds of mist. Every time I close my eyes I try to remember, but nothing comes back to me. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t even know my name.”

“How’d you not know your own name?” The young boy asked me. He seemed in shock, and he had every right to be. Not many people respond with ‘I don’t even know my own name.’

“The doctors gave me a name at the hospital...Moana. They told me I had amnesia and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it.” I sighed.

“What do you remember?” Tom asked me. “Let’s start there.”

I sighed and stared off into the vast ocean once again. “Well, if you insist. They said I was found by the side of a road. There were tracks all around and for the first time in a hundred years, it had recently snowed. In the darkness and cold with the wind in the trees, laid a girl with no name and no memories but these. Rain against a window. Dirty sheets upon a bed. Terrified of the nurses that were whispering overhead. ‘He said to call the child Moana. Give the child a hat!’ I don’t know a thing before that.

Travelling the back roads. Sleeping in the woods. Taking what I needed and working when I could. Keeping up my courage and foolish as it seems, at night all alone in my dreams. In my dreams, shadows call. I see a light at the end of a hall. Then my dreams fade away. But I know it all will come back, one day.”

“Nossa irmã perdeu isso,” André whispered to someone. (Our sister’s lost it.)

“I dream of a city beyond all compare. Is it Paris? Paris. A beautiful river and a bridge by a square. And I hear someone whisper, ‘I’ll meet you right there.’ In Paris, Paris.” I snapped back into reality. No one wanted to hear the sob story. “You don’t know what it’s like,” I snapped. “Not to know who you are.” I felt tears come to my eyes. “To have lived in the shadows and travelled so far. I’ve seen flashes of fire, heard the echoes of screams but I still have this faith in the truth of my dreams. In my dreams, it’s all real and my heart has so much to reveal. And my dreams seem to say. Don’t be afraid to go on, don’t give up hope, come what may. I know it all will come back, one day!”

“Она потеряла его. Она ушла.” Dmitry said. (She’s lost it. She’s gone.)

“Those days are long over now.” I sighed, drying my eyes. “Go, have a nice day. Sorry, you came all the way out here for nothing. Enjoy searching for someone who’s dead.”

Tom then pulled out a music box. “This belonged to her,” Tom said. “Do you recognise it?”

“It’s a fake, Tom!” groaned Harry. “Give it a rest, Tom!”

It wasn’t the fact that it made with platinum, gold, silver, and diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds. It wasn’t the fact that it was in pristine condition. It was the fact that it had a little wave sticking up at the top that caught my eye. It was a keyhole it had on the side and an inscription.

Hui pū ma Paris. it said. That translated into: together in Paris—the same thing it said on my necklace. I carefully took the box from the Crowned Prince and placed my necklace into the hole. Turning it three times to the right, it opened. A song began playing. But I didn’t pay attention to that.

Looking up at the house where the Royal Family was slaughtered, I bolted out the door and ran upstairs.

The shouts and screams of my brothers could be heard from behind me, but I didn’t care. Going around Kahuna Hill and avoiding Murder’s Hideaway, I made my way to the old house. Pushing open the door, I felt a flood of memories come back to me.

I heard the music box still playing, the lyrics came back to me.

Dancing bears painted wings Things I almost remember And a song, someone sings Once upon a December Someone holds me safe and warm Horses prance through a thunderstorm Figures dancing gracefully across my memories

“Something’s not right.”

“Shut up, Moana. If they wanted to do something, they would have done it by now.”

“Sit on your mother’s lap. Akea, stand next to your father. Smile for the cameras.”

Far away, long ago Glowing dim as an ember Things that I used to know Things I used to remember And a song, someone sings Once upon a December

“Yeah, I don't know how I got to Hawaii, Your Majesties. All I know is that I’m here and these people are my family. I guess I’m related to you through Queen Victoria.” Dmitry explained. “MOANA! MOANA, IT’S NOT SAFE TO BE IN THERE!”

Before coming out, I pulled the bag of diamonds I had kept on me for years and kept it in my hand. “Okay, so I’ll humour you. If I really am the Princess, I’d be dead. The government would’ve already found me. I mean, I’m living here. How do I know this isn’t some prank set-up by Dmitry?”

“Ever since archeologists stated they didn’t find your body, we’d been looking for you. We managed to track you down through a bite mark…” the Queen said.

I cut her off. “That can be inaccurate,” I said. “In fact, one of the leading people in bitemark analysis stated that it isn’t accurate and shouldn’t be used as evidence in a court of law,” I pointed out. “A bite-mark analysis means jack-shit to me.”

“We know that,” Tom said. “From your many trips to the emergency room, they have your DNA on record from blood tests doctors have run on you…”

“Wow, isn’t your family Royal Stalkers,” I scoffed, gripping the bag of precious stones closer to me as if one of my brothers would come up and take it out of my hand. I sighed and looked over at the British Royal Family. “So go on after you hacked into my medical files. What did you learn?”

They were shocked by my outburst. I don’t think anyone has talked to them like that. “Well, uh, we learned that you have a specific type of anemia that ran within the Hawaiian Royal Family, hemolytic anemia?” Tom asked.

“It’s mild, I don’t need to take medication. The doctors presumed I had a bone marrow transplant sometime before I entered foster care,” I said. “I have the scar on my hip from an injection.”

“Your mother gave you the injection, your blood type is also RH-null,” Tom said. He was looking at his phone.

“Okay, Your Royal Creepiness, even if I am the long-lost princess, when the government finds out, I’d be dead faster than you can blink? How the hell am I not dead now?” I asked, a little shaken that he knew all that about me. I’d need to talk to their hackers, see if I could learn a few things from them.

“Because they don’t know about you or you have an ally in the government,” the Queen said. Her accent sounded posh and she was dressed in a fancy knee-length dress that wasn’t meant for running around the property. It had to be expensive too, though I didn’t have a degree in fashion. “They’re probably covering for you.”

I rolled my eyes and scoffed. “Why are you really here? Is it for charity work?” I asked. I’d had enough of them trying to convince me that I was a dead person. She died along with her family, that needed to be accepted by people like me. “I can’t break an old woman’s heart for money. I can’t do that to the grandmother. I can’t do that to the extended Hawaiian Royal Family.”

“All of which agree that you’re her!” the youngest pointed out. He was jumping down excitedly. “You have to be. You have the same coloured eyes!”

“It’s called heterochromia,” I sighed. “It’s not life-threatening. It’s just cool.”

“Please, Moana,” Tom pleaded with us. “Give us a chance. We’ll help you earn your memory back. You won’t have to go through life knowing something missing. You must wanna know who your parents are.”

“According to you, they’re ‘King Keanu Kawananakoa and Queen Ashley Kawananakoa,’” I scoffed.

“Why are you so reluctant to believe?” Harry asked me.

“Because it’s completely BS! It sounds the plot of a shit romance novel! This is real life. I’m a poor girl from Hawai’i who grew up in foster care and was forced to raise herself. I’m a convicted criminal and a recovering opiate addict,” I snapped. I choked back my tears. “Even if I did go with you, how the hell will I get out? How will you get papers, not just for me, but for the rest of us? I’m not leaving them behind.”

“Go with them, Moana!” Dmitry blurted. “Go, it’ll be good for you!”

“Dmitry, are you nuts!” I snapped. “One word that the Princess has been found I’m floating in the Thames!” I felt tears starting to roll down my cheeks. “I just wanna live a normal life with my family or as normal as it’ll ever get for an amnesiac. I’ll be at the scrutiny of the media if I go with you. I’ll tarnish your reputation and make you lose public approval. Nobody wants a convicted criminal on the throne!” I dried my eyes and looked up at them. “I don’t wanna be the cause of your downfall. I already have enough grief on my conscious, I don’t need the downfall of an empire to be on it too.”

My cigarette was finished and I threw it to the ground. The weight of the world was slowly falling on my shoulders as reality hit me. I was being told that I was the long-lost Princess of Hawai’i who had gone into a fug state after I had witnessed the death of my entire family and escaped their massacre. Why me? “Can’t you prank somebody else!” I snapped.

“Look, Moana, I overheard some soldiers talking and soon they’ll be a warrant for your death issued. You leave with us or you die,” Tom said. He seemed in pain that he had to say that.

I stumbled back onto Akea who somehow managed to not fall back onto the ground. “You mean I’ll be dead soon?” I asked. “Oh, fuck. It’s only a matter of time until they find me in London.”

“That won't happen,” the Queen assured me. “We have the best security forces in the world.”

“In a matter of respect, Madam, the whole reason why I'm in Hawai’i is that of your Security forces,” Dmitry said. “It says so in my file.”

“Show it to me when we get back to the house,” the Queen ordered. Dmitry nodded his head.

“I don't wanna be in the public spotlight,” I responded. “I don't want my every fucking move scrutinised by the media. Look, Royal Pain, you can have anyone you want in the world. People would happily go on a date with you. Please, find someone else.”

Tom grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to him. Looking into his chestnut brown eyes, I felt myself getting lost in them. That wasn't a good sign. The prince had minty breath that smelt almost heavenly. I felt myself tensing up and not being able to look into his eyes like I should.

Fine,” I sighed. “Then I’ll go.”

#royal!tom #royalty #family #siblings #foster care #anmesia #tom holland imagine #tom holland

5 notes · View notes

back-and-totheleft · 3 years ago

Text

"Vietnam as it really was"

Oliver Stone sprang up in bed and found fear staining his sheets. A dream had startled him awake. He was 16 years out of Viet Nam, but in the dream, "they had shipped me back. Somehow they found me at the age of 38 and sent me back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror." That was two years ago. Now Stone, who earned a Bronze Star and a MASH unit's worth of physical and emotional wounds in the jungles of Viet Nam, has transformed his war experience -- the bad dream he lived through for 15 months in 1967-68 -- into a film called Platoon. With craft, crackle, a little bombast and plenty of residual rage, he has created a time-capsule movie that explodes like a frag bomb in the consciousness of America, showing how it was back then, over there.

Begin with a birth: a baby-faced soldier, Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), is delivered from the womb of a transport plane into the harsh light of Viet Nam. He will find death soon enough: four patrols in the film, four wrenching revelations. On Chris' first night patrol he watches, paralyzed with fear, as the enemy approaches and another new boy dies. On a second patrol the platoon enters a village that might be My Lai; anger goads Chris to spit bullets at the feet of a petrified Vietnamese, and before the day is over the group's leader, Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), has seen to the slaughtering of villagers before the entire place is torched. During a third battle, Barnes tracks down a woods-wise sergeant, Elias (Willem Dafoe), who had interrupted Barnes' massacre, shoots him and leaves him for dead. On the final patrol Chris flips into heroism or psychosis, wipes out a nest of North Vietnamese and confronts the demon he has almost become. End with a murder -- the last of too bloody many.

Welcome to the old nightmare -- the one neither Stone nor the 2.7 million American soldiers who went to Viet Nam can shake. Welcome back to the war that, just 20 years ago, turned America schizophrenic. Suddenly we were a nation split between left and right, black and white, hip and square, mothers and fathers, parents and children. For a nation whose war history had read like a John Wayne war movie -- where good guys finish first by being tough and playing fair -- the polarization was soul-souring. Americans were fighting themselves, and both sides lost.

Platoon pushes the metaphor further, thousands of miles away from the "world," into the combat zones of Nam. Platoon says that American soldiers -- the young men we sent there to do our righteous dirty work -- turned their frustrations toward fratricide. In Viet Nam, Stone suggests, G.I.s re-created the world back home, with its antagonisms of race, region and class. Finding no clear and honorable path to victory in the booby-trapped underbrush, some grunts focused their gunsights on their comrades. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army (NVA) were shadowy figures in this family tragedy; stage center, it was sibling riflery. Stone's achievement is to pound and hack this theme into a ripping yarn about a good man, an evil man and an Everyman -- a young, romanticized Oliver Stone -- suspended between them with his life and ideals in the balance. In vivid imagery and incendiary action, Stone's film asks of our soldiers, "Am I my brother's killer?" The answer is an anguished yes.

And a resounding "you bet" to the question, Can a ferocious movie about an unpopular war, filmed on the cheap with no stars and turned down by every major studio, find success, controversy and the promise of an Oscar statuette at the end of the tunnel? In its early limited opening, Platoon is already a prestige hit, and the film shows signs of becoming a blockbuster as it opens across the country over the next three weeks. It has captivated intellectuals, movie buffs and urban grunts -- astonishing, across-the-board appeal for a hellacious sermon. It has ignited a fire storm of debate, from political swamis and Viet vets, on its merits as art and history. It is the fountainhead for a freshet of Viet Nam exploration: We Can Keep You Forever, a BBC documentary about the mystery surrounding MIAs, will be aired Wednesday in 21 U.S. cities, and this spring will see two new movies set in Viet Nam, The Hanoi Hilton and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. In a movie season of Trekkies, Dundees and dentist-devouring houseplants, Oliver Stone has proved that a film can still roil the blood of the American body politic. Platoon the picture is now Platoon the phenomenon.

It is a picture first and foremost, a series of pictures that lodge in the mind with other indelible images of war. The prop wash from a landing helicopter blows the tarpaulins off three bodies, their shrouds torn off, their makeshift graves defiled. In the village, after the slaughter, the soldiers carry Vietnamese children on their shoulders -- G.I. Joes, big brothers to the kids whose village they have just destroyed -- and the soldier who bashed a man's head takes a tourist snapshot of the holocaust. More than any other film, Platoon gives the sense -- all five senses -- of fighting in Viet Nam. You can wilt from the claustrophobic heat of this Rousseauvian jungle; feel the sting of the leeches as they snack on Chris' flesh; hear all at once the chorus of insects, an enemy's approaching footsteps on the green carpet and Chris' heartbeat on night patrol. The film does not glamourize or trivialize death with grotesque special effects. But it jolts the viewer alive to the sensuousness of danger, fear and war lust. All senses must be alert when your life is at stake, and Oliver Stone is an artist-showman who can make movies seem a matter of life and death.

Until Dec. 19, though, when Platoon opened, Hollywood had thought the picture a matter of indifference. It had taken Stone ten hungry years to get the project going. "For two years in the late '70s," says Producer Martin Bregman, "I banged on every door in California to get it done, but at that time Viet Nam was still a no-no." Tom Berenger, the film's showcase psychopath, imagines that "it must have made Stone feel like an old man, carrying the project around for so long. He said it broke his heart." Then something interesting happened: people went for Platoon. Most critics were impressed, many were impassioned, and even those who trashed the picture helped make it the season's top conversation piece. Soon long lines were forming outside the movie's Times Square flagship -- at lunchtime, on weekdays, in the hawk bite of a January wind -- and after midnight in early- to-bed Hollywood. In 74 theaters on the Jan. 9-11 weekend, Platoon averaged more than $22,000, the highest per-screen take of any new film.

In the industry, Stone's old colleagues and fellow directors have laid on their benedictions. Woody Allen calls it a "fine movie, an excellent movie." Says Steven Spielberg: "It is more than a movie; it's like being in Viet Nam. Platoon makes you feel you've been there and never want to go back." James Woods, who starred in Stone's previous film, Salvador, calls him an "artist whose vision transcends politics. Everyone from the ex-hippie to the ex-grunt can be moved by Platoon. And his passion isn't bogus -- he doesn't play Imagine at the end of the film to break people's hearts." Brian De Palma, who filmed Scarface from a Stone script, sees him achieving a volcanic maturity in Platoon: "He has now channeled his feeling and energy into a cohesive dramatic work. He's an auteur making a movie about what he experienced and understands. Seeing Platoon get through the system makes the soul feel good."

With its critical, popular and insider acclaim swelling, Platoon began to shoulder its way toward the front rank of Oscar favorites. By now it would have to be counted as the front runner, and Hollywood is furrowing its back with self-congratulatory pats for making this big bold message movie. To Stone, Hollywood's claim of paternity for Platoon must seem a rich joke. He and Hollywood both know that Platoon -- like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, The Boys in Company C, The Killing Fields and nearly all the serious movies about the war in Southeast Asia -- secured its major financing from foreign producers. "It was a picture we wanted to support," says John Daly, chairman of Britain's Hemdale Pictures, which also produced Salvador. "We respect Oliver's passions. Besides, he spent only $6 million on Platoon" -- about half the budget of a typical Hollywood film.

The typical film, though, does not provoke a political free-for-all. Many conservatives have taken up arms against Platoon. In the far-right Washington Times' Insight magazine, John Podhoretz castigates it as "one of the most repellent movies ever made in this country." The film, he says, "blackens the name and belittles the sacrifice of every man and woman who served the United States in the Viet Nam War (including Stone)." Politicians are eager to return the salvos. Former Senator Gary Hart, aware of the electorate's fondness for presidential candidates with movie credentials, campaigns for the film by urging that "every teenager in America should see Platoon."

Now ask a man who's been there: David Halberstam, who covered the war for the New York Times and, in The Best and the Brightest, documented two Administrations' slides into the Big Muddy. "Platoon is the first real Viet Nam film," Halberstam proclaims, "and one of the great war movies of all time. The other Hollywood Viet Nam films have been a rape of history. But Platoon is historically and politically accurate. It understands something that the architects of the war never did: how the foliage, the thickness of the jungle, negated U.S. technological superiority. You can see how the forest sucks in American soldiers; they just disappear. I think the film will become an American classic. Thirty years from now, people will think of the Viet Nam War as Platoon."

Neither Sly Stallone nor Oliver Stone can put the whole picture of Viet Nam on a movie screen. There were 2.7 million stories in the naked jungle. Each veteran has his own view of the war, and each will have his own vision of Platoon. More than a few are disturbed by its presentation of a military unit at war with itself. Says Bob Duncan, 39, who served in the 1st Infantry at the same time Stone was in the 25th: "He managed to take every cliche -- the 'baby killer' and 'dope addict' -- that we've lived with for the past 20 years and stick them in the movie about Viet Nam." Says another veteran, Nick Nickelson, 43: "I hope this doesn't bring back those old depictions. God help us, I don't want to go back into a closet again."

Other vets deny the prevalence of dope smoking and the depiction of military officers as either psychos or cowards. But John Wheeler, 42, a veteran who is president of the Center for the Study of the Viet Nam Generation in Washington and chairman of the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Fund, argues that "there were drug cultures; there were green lieutenants. Stone wanted to clean out the festering part of the wound. The next Viet Nam movie may be the one that tells the whole truth: that we were the best-equipped, best-trained army ever fielded, but against a dedicated foe in an impossible terrain. It was a state-of-the-art war on both sides. But Platoon is a new statement about Viet Nam veterans. Before, we were either objects of pity or objects that had to be defused to keep us at a distance. Platoon makes us real. The Viet Nam Memorial was one gate our country had to pass through; Platoon is another. It is part of the healing process. It speaks to our generation. Those guys are us."

Listen to these guys, and you may suspect that Platoon is not so much a movie as a Rorschach blot. But that is part of the caginess of Stone's approach. The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that when a good film is also a popular film, it is because of a misunderstanding. Platoon could very well be misunderstood into superhit status. The army of Rambomaniacs will love the picture because it delivers more bang for the buck; all those yellow folks blow up real good. Aging lefties can see the film as a demonstration of war's inhuman futility. Graybeards on the right may call it a tribute to our fighting men, in whatever foreign adventure. The intelligentsia can credit Platoon with expressing, in bold cinematic strokes, Stone's grand themes of comradeship and betrayal. And the average youthful moviegoer -- too young to remember Viet Nam even as the living-room war -- may discover where Dad went in the 1960s and why he came home changed or came home in a body bag.

"In any other war, they would have made movies about us too. Dateline: Hell!, Dispatch from Dong Ha, maybe even A Scrambler to the Front . . . But Viet Nam is awkward, everybody knows how awkward, and if people don't even want to hear about it, you know they're not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up." So wrote Michael Herr in Dispatches, published in 1977, a year before the first spate of Viet Nam dramas. (The mid-'60s had offered a couple of World War II wheezes disguised as topical films: A Yank in Viet-Nam, so poorly received that it changed its name to Year of the Tiger, and John Wayne's hilariously wrongheaded The Green Berets, with its famous climax of the sun setting in the east.) 1978 brought three pictures -- Coming Home, The Boys in Company C and The Deer Hunter -- that touched on Viet Nam, and the following year Francis Coppola released Apocalypse Now.

Trouble was, most of these films were not about Viet Nam. Coming Home was a disabled-vet love story -- The Best Years of Our Lives with Jon Voight in the Harold Russell role. The Deer Hunter was . . . well, what was it? An incoherent parable about male bonding through Russian roulette. Bats and beautiful, it stood like Ishmael on the prow of its pretensions and declared, "Call me masterpiece." Apocalypse Now was fine as long as it accompanied its doomed, questing hero (played by Martin Sheen, Charlie's father) upstream on the River Styx; then it fogged off into fantasyland with Marlon Buddha. Only Company C, a standard-issue war film about recruits betrayed by their incompetent officers, spent much time in a Nam combat zone. But it really resided, with The Green Berets, in the twilight zone of World War II gestures and bromides.

Hollywood (and not just Hollywood) refused to see that Viet Nam was different. All the old givens -- beau geste, military master plans, unswerving belief in the officer class -- were fatally irrelevant to a guerrilla war. Forget the World War II narrative line of tanks and tactics, which moved with the ponderous sweep of a Golden Age Hollywood plot. Viet Nam, set in jungles without beginning or end, was a flash of episodic, aleatory explosions; it was modernism brought to war. And a new kind of war demanded a new look at the war-movie genre. Platoon fills the bill. It is a huge black slab of remembrance, chiseled in sorrow and anger -- the first Viet Nam Memorial movie.

Though Platoon is a breakthrough, it is not a breakaway. The film is traditional enough to connect with a mass audience. In its story line it holds echoes of Attack!, Robert Aldrich's 1956 psychodrama, in which a World War II infantry company is torn by a mortal struggle between two officers -- one messianic, the other deranged -- while a young man's loyalty hangs in the balance. Platoon's narration, in the form of Chris' letters to his grandmother, is often as stilted and redundant as silent-movie title cards. When a naive new boy shows Chris a photo of his sweetheart, you just know that, in the best '40s-movie fashion, the guy's a goner.

There are darker currents, too, of a passive racism. The black soldiers are occasionally patronized and sentimentalized; they stand to the side while the white soldiers grab all the big emotions. And the Vietnamese are either pathetic victims or the invisible, inhuman enemy. In the scheme of Platoon (and not just Platoon) they do not matter. The nearly 1 million Vietnamese casualties are deemed trivial compared with America's loss of innocence, of allies, of geopolitical face. And the tragedy of Viet Nam is seen as this: not that they died, but that we debased ourselves by killing them.

Of course, Platoon need not be every possible Viet Nam film to be the best one so far. It is enough that Stone has devised a drama of palpable realism that is also a metaphor for the uncivil war that raged in the U.S. and can flare up anytime in any family. Indeed, at the film's molten core is the tug of wills between two strong men, outsize figures of shameless strutting charisma, for parentage of their platoon and for their new recruit, Chris. Barnes, the staff sergeant, could be Chris' legal father; Elias, the romantic renegade, could be a spiritual father, even after his death. They are like Claudius and the Ghost wrestling for Hamlet's allegiance.

Both men are legendary soldiers who have survived long years in Viet Nam -- Elias by a kind of supernal sylvan grace, Barnes by simply refusing to die. Elias is Jesus crossed with Jim Morrison. He will literally take a load off Chris' shoulders, or share a fraternal toke with Chris through the barrel of a rifle, or moon over the night stars, or smile ingenuously at his killer. He is hard to know and harder to destroy, a creature of Stone's wild literary sentiment. Barnes, who says of some fresh corpses, "Tag 'em and bag 'em," has no sentiment at all. When he pulls a steaming metal shard out of a wounded G.I.'s side, it seems as much to display his expertise as to relieve the man's pain. He will do anything to achieve his objective: lead a suicide mission or send his rival on one; murder a village woman in cold blood or taunt his men toward murdering him. Chris, who feels an irresistible kinship to both men, says they were "fighting for possession of my soul." The film's most controversial question is, Who won?

At this point, readers who have not seen Platoon are excused for the next two paragraphs. The others, the grizzled vets, can ponder Chris' motives and actions at the film's climax. He believes (and we know) that Barnes has killed Elias in the jungle. He has already considered taking murderous revenge and been told, "The only thing that can kill Barnes is Barnes." On his last patrol, Chris' suicidal resolve turns him into a mean, obscene fighting machine -- a rifle with a body attached, as reckless as Barnes, as resourceful as Elias -- and he leaves half a dozen NVA in his wake. Now Barnes finds Chris and is ready to kill him when a blast knocks them unconscious. Later Chris revives and finds the injured Barnes ordering him to get a medic. The young man lifts his weapon and, when Barnes says, "Do it," does the bastard in.

In the movie theaters, this illegal shooting usually gets a big hand. Righteous vengeance. Good guy kills bad guy. It is the kind of movie catharsis that may make Platoon a megahit. But can Chris or the audience take moral satisfaction in this deed? Which "father" has he followed? Has Chris become like Elias, back from the grave to avenge his own murder? "You have to fight evil if you are going to be a good man," Stone says. "That's why Chris killed Barnes. Because Barnes deserved killing." Or has he emulated his enemy? Has he become Barnes in order to kill him? Stone has another answer: "I also wanted to show that Chris came out of the war stained and soiled -- all of us, every vet. I want vets to face up to it and be proud they came back. So what if there was some bad in us? That's the price you pay. Chris pays a big price. He becomes a murderer." A good man, and a murderer? It is a tribute to Platoon's cunning that it can sell this dilemma both ways, and a mark of Stone's complexity that he can argue either side and believe both.

The dichotomy was bred in him. Stone was born in 1946, the only child of a Jewish stockbroker and the French Catholic girl he met just after V-E day while serving as a colonel on Eisenhower's staff. Lou Stone wrote a monthly newsletter about economics and politics; his son describes the style as "right-wing Walter Lippmann, a view of the world every month. My father believed that life was hard. The important thing was to make a living." Jacqueline Stone was just the opposite: inexhaustibly sociable, the original bete de fete. "My mother loved movies," Stone says, "and every Monday I'd play hooky, and we'd go see two or three movies. From the start, I had the contradiction in me: my mother's outgoing, optimistic, French side and the dark, pessimistic, Jewish side of my father."

The Stones lived in Manhattan town houses and Stamford, Conn., homes; Oliver went to Manhattan's tony Trinity School and the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa.; he summered with his maternal grandparents and spoke French before he learned English. (From Viet Nam, Oliver would write his grandmother versions of the letters that Chris reads in Platoon.) At five he composed skits for a marionette show, casting his French cousins in the parts. At seven he wrote stories. To earn a quarter for a Classic comic book, he would write a theme each week for his father. And at nine he started work on a book, 900 pages about his family and his life.

Oliver stopped writing the book when he was twelve; the family stopped when Oliver was 16. "The news of their divorce came as a total shock," Stone recalls. "The Hill School headmaster was the one who told me. And when they were divorced, my father gave me the facts of life. He told me that he was heavily in debt. He said, 'I'll give you a college education, and then you're on your own. There's literally no money.' "

Lou Stone never recovered financially. "And yet," his son says, "I think his reversal helped push me to leave my privileged childhood behind. I finished Hill and spent a year at Yale, but I saw myself as a product -- an East Coast socioeconomic product -- and I wanted to break out of the mold. Then I read Lord Jim. Conrad's world was exotic and lush; it exercised a tremendous allure for me." It also propelled Oliver into a teaching job at a Chinese Catholic school in a Saigon suburb. It was 1965, the year a half million Yank soldiers landed in Viet Nam, and Stone was 18 years old. "I woke up in Asia," he says, "and it became an orphan home for me. It was everything I thought it would be: the heat, the green seas, the bloodred sunsets. In Saigon, the G.I.s from the 1st Infantry Division were just arriving. There were guys walking around with pistols, no curfews, shoot-outs in the streets. The place was like Dodge City."

Itinerary for a young wanderluster: on a merchant marine ship from Saigon to Oregon; in Guadalajara, Mexico, writing 400 pages of a novel; back to Yale, then dropping out a second and last time to concentrate on his writing. The book was now 1,400 pages. "It started out as a boy's suicide note -- not that I was going to commit suicide, but I was very depressed. It was Jack London- type experiences in a Joycean style. Totally insane, with great passages of lyricism here and there. I thought it was the best thing since Rimbaud. And when Simon & Schuster rejected it, I gave up. I threw half the manuscript in the East River and said, 'My father is right. I'm a bum.' I felt the solution was total anonymity. I had to atone. So I joined the Army. They'd cut my hair, and I'd be a number. To me the American involvement was correct. My dad was a cold warrior, and I was a cold-war baby. I knew that Viet Nam was going to be the war of my generation, and I didn't want to miss it. I must say, my timing was impeccable." If the young man had failed as Rimbaud, he might make it as Rambo.

Nope. "My first day in Viet Nam," Stone says, "I realized, like Chris in Platoon, that I'd made a terrible mistake. It was on-the-job training: Here's your machete, kid; you cut point. You learn if you can, and if not you're dead. Nobody was motivated, except to get out. Survival was the key. It wasn't very romantic." Each of the three combat units he served in was divided into antagonistic groups, as in the film: "On one side were the lifers, the juicers ((heavy drinkers)) and the moron white element. Guys like Sergeant Barnes -- and there really was a sergeant as scarred and obsessed as Barnes -- were in this group. On the other side was a progressive, hippie, dope- smoking group: some blacks, some urban whites, Indians, random characters from odd places. Guys like Elias -- and there really was an Elias, handsome, electric, the Cary Grant of the trenches. They were out to survive this bummer with some integrity and a sense of humor. I fell in with the progressives -- a Yale boy who heard soul music and smoked dope for the first time in his life."

Most of Platoon's starkest events come from Stone's backpack of Viet Nam memories. "I saw the enemy for the first time on my first night ambush," he recalls, "and I froze completely. Thank God the guy in the next position saw them and opened up. The ensuing fire fight was very messy. I was wounded in the back of the neck -- an inch to the right and I'd have been dead -- and the guy next to me had his arm blown off." He emptied his rifle clip at a man's feet, as Charlie does in the movie. "He wouldn't stop smiling," says Stone, "and I just got pissed off and lost it. But I did save a girl who was being raped by two of the guys; I think they would've killed her. I went over and broke it up. Another kid -- he's like Bunny ((Kevin Dillon)) in the movie -- clubbed this old lady to death and then kind of boasted about it. We killed a lot of innocents."

The battle at the end of the film was based on a New Year's Day skirmish less than a mile from the Cambodian border. "They hit us with about 5,000 troops that night. They laid bombs right on top of us; we dropped bombs right on them. It's possible that our high command was using us as bait to draw the Viet Cong out so we could inflict heavy casualties. We lost about 25 dead and 175 wounded; we killed about 500 of them. Their bodies were scraped up by bulldozers, just like in the movie. For that battle our platoon was on the inner perimeter, but two weeks later we went back into the same area and got hit by an ambush, like the one that gets Elias. We took about 30 casualties, and I don't think we got one of them."

For all the horrors of his season in hell, Stone admits he got what he went for, as a budding artist ravenous for material in the raw: "I saw combat at the ground level. I saw people die. I killed. I almost was killed. Almost immediately I realized that combat is totally random. It has nothing to do with heroism. Cowardice and heroism are the same emotion -- fear -- expressed differently. And life is a matter of luck. Two soldiers are standing two feet apart. One gets killed, the other lives. I was never a religious person -- I was raised Protestant, the great compromise -- but I became religious in Viet Nam. Possibly I was saved for a reason. To do some work. Write about it. Make a movie about it."

It would take Stone almost a decade, until 1976, before he could write the script of Platoon, and another decade to put it on the screen. But first he had to take his high, wired act on the road. The same month he arrived back from Viet Nam, he was busted for carrying an ounce of marijuana across the Mexico-U.S. border, and called his father, saying, "The good news is that I'm out of Viet Nam. The bad news is that I'm in a California jail, facing five to 20." Stone says his father helped get the charges dropped. "That was my homecoming," he says. "I got a true picture of the States. I hated America. I would have joined the Black Panthers if they'd asked me. I was a radical, ready to kill." Back home his mother noticed the change: "As a little boy he was impeccable. He had his valet; his closet was immaculate. But when he returned he was a mess, always leaving things on the floor. He was a different boy."

And now an unsolicited testimonial: "I know it sounds corny, but I was saved by film school." He enrolled at New York University on the G.I. Bill. "To be able to study movies in college, it was any movie buff's dream. It was cool too, like studying to be an astronaut. Martin Scorsese was my first teacher. He was like a mad scientist, with hair down to here. He was someone on an equal wave of nuttiness. And he helped channel the rage in me." Stone made a short film for Scorsese's class called Last Year in Viet Nam, about a vet wandering the New York streets; in another, Michael and Marie, Oliver's father played the victim. "Oliver was alienated, sarcastic and brooding," says his film-school friend Stanley Weiser, who is collaborating with Stone on a script about Wall Street crime. "A real macho man who carried the torture of Viet Nam with him but never talked about it."

In 1971 Stone graduated and married a Lebanese woman working at the Moroccan delegation to the United Nations; they divorced five years later. He wrote eleven scripts in his spare time, directed a low-budget Canadian thriller called Seizure, and in 1975 got an agent through the graces of Screenwriter Robert Bolt. A year later, as the tall ships clogged New York harbor, Stone sat down and wrote Platoon. "Essentially what I wanted to say was, Remember. Just remember what that war was. Remember what war is. This is it. I wanted to make a document of this forgotten pocket of time. I felt Viet Nam was omitted from history books. Like a battle I fought in during the war: a lot of people got hurt that day, and it wasn't even listed as a battle by the Army, as if they didn't want to admit the casualties we suffered. The script I wrote is pretty much the one I shot ten years later. But no studio wanted to make it; it was too 'depressing' and 'grim.' So I buried it again, figuring that the truth of that war would never come out because America was blind, a trasher of history."

A wild man who becomes a witness: that was Oliver Stone reborn. As he scythed his way through the Hollywood jungle, Stone earned the rep of a specialist with a social agenda. Four of the scripts that bear his name -- Midnight Express, Scarface, Year of the Dragon and 8 Million Ways to Die -- cataloged the seductive evils of the drug trade. Stone's third feature as writer-director (after Seizure and, in 1981, The Hand) laced his usual hip rants on pharmacology with a smart, anguished newsphoto montage of one more Third World nation torn by civil war and shadowed by the looming hulk of American weaponry. This was the gallivanting political melodrama Salvador. Stone dedicated the film to his recently deceased father. "I remember one conversation we had right before he died. He said, 'You'll do all right. There'll always be a demand for great stories and great storytellers.' So finally he forgave me for going into the film business."

In Salvador, Stone was learning to wind the cinematic mechanism until it coiled with productive tension, both on the screen and on the set. "Working with Stone was like being caught in a Cuisinart with a madman," James Woods opines. "And he felt the same about me. It was two Tasmanian devils wrestling under a blanket. But he's a sharp director. He starts with a great idea, delegates authority well, scraps like a street fighter, then takes the best of what comes out of the fracas." Says Dale Dye, the Marine captain who hazed Platoon's actors to firm them up for filming: "Oliver thrives on chaos, throwing together a crew of such diverse backgrounds and ideologies that there's constant friction. It's the kind of energy he thrives on." Platoon's star, Charlie Sheen, 21, found the director "brutally honest. Which is why we clicked. After a scene he'd say, 'You sucked' or 'You nailed it.' That's just my style."

Right now Stone is Hollywood's hot new guy. He is even entertaining the improbable idea of a Platoon TV series. But don't expect Stone to direct Indiana Jones III. Says Stanley Weiser: "Oliver's been around the block ten times and won't be seduced by money. He's not an easy lay." Stone and his second wife, Elizabeth, 37, look the family-album picture of swank domesticity in their Santa Monica home. They swore off drugs a few years ago, and now seem addicted only to each other and their little son Sean. "Success and Sean have made Oliver much mellower," Elizabeth notes. "But he's still a compulsive worker. Always reading or writing, he simply loves ideas. He's filled with them, and he's thrilled with them."

One suspects that the old troublemaker will find new trouble spots in the political landscape; the soapbox spieler will continue his spellbinding harangues. His mind and moral sense are too restless to relax in the glow of celebrity and the promise of statuettes. But for the moment, Oliver Stone has found for himself the one plot twist he would never have put in Platoon: a happy ending to his Viet Nam nightmare.

-Richard Corliss, Time magazine cover story, Jan 26 1987 [x]

#oliver stone #platoon #the vietnam war #time magazine #cover story #ptsd #richard corliss

1 note · View note

minijenn · 7 years ago

Text

Crystal Falls: Reaching Out

Ye ye ye ye ANGST!!! Hey tbh this is the most can do seeing as how the next actual canon chapter of UF is mostly fun humor (with some nightmare fuel thrown in I guess) so I gotta satisfy my craving somehow. Still, can you believe it took me only three days to push this whole thing out? I was fucking MOTIVATED HAHAHA Now if you wanna know more about the context behind this AU, you can find all that here. And with all that outta the way, let’s get rollin with the (incredibly dark fair warning) angst storm!

Crystal Falls

Reaching Out

The concept of a “normal childhood” was a completely foreign one to both of the Pines twins, just as it had been to their uncles before them and to every other human born either into the conquest-hungry legacy of planet Earth or into the rebellion that had risen up to thwart one such conquest. The twins found their roots in the latter camp, even if their actual birthplace had been on Earth as opposed to the mostly peaceful Homeworld that had become their own home after their parents’ death. “Because where else were the next seeds of justice and peace to be raised but on the very planet we all swore our lives to protect?” Ford often boldly claimed throughout the twins’ younger years. Stan would usually just offer a playful scoff at his brother’s melodrama, Dipper and Mabel chuckling in amusement before running off to go play with Steven under the Crystal Gems’ lax supervision. And for the first few years, that’s what it was like; crystalline days, star-speckled nights, rousing tales of courageous battles gone by, laughter amidst streets filled with Gems bemused by their antics, comfort, happiness, friendship, family, and most of all, peace. Peace so hard fought for, so hard won. And of course, not at all destined to last.

Because when the twins were only five years old, that peace was shattered for them both the very same moment the glass of one of the shack’s windows shattered one night when they were asleep. The very moment it did, Stan and Ford were already on high alert, rushing to grab the confused, groggy younger twins and whisk them away to safety without even explaining what they were really running from. The threat soon made itself obvious, however, when the family emerged into the night, only to be adamantly pursued by a sizable group of masked figures. By their odd, militaristic outfits, it was clear that they weren’t Gems, and later the twins would find out exactly what their uncles had known from the moment this all began: that these assailants were Earthlings, sent to destroy the very last remnants of the rebellion left on Homeworld. In other words, them. A task that, against all odds, they unquestionably succeeded in in the worst of ways.

All it took was one tiny moment, one perfectly aimed shot at Stan’s exposed back for him to go crashing down, momentarily paralyzed by the blast as Dipper fell out of his arms. Despite his uncle's desperate attempts to convince him to flee, the young boy was just as stunned as he was, though more out of fear than anything else as their pursuers made their fast, final approach.

Ford has already ran ahead of Stan with Mabel in tow, but he stopped and turned back around in an instant upon hearing Dipper’s distressed, pleading cry. Without hesitation, the former rebel began racing after the Earth loyalists as they started hauling his nephew away, despite his best attempts to struggle against them and Stan’s best attempts to move and stop this horrific kidnapping before it could even begin. Likewise, Ford shot after the assailants, trying his best to get a clean shot in that wouldn't end up harming Dipper. Tears had already started forming in Mabel’s eyes as she remained secure in Ford’s grip, while her brother was being stolen away from her right in front of her own eyes. Yet both of the twins, even as young as they were, had a dreadful feeling about how all this was going to turn out. And those fears soon came true as Mabel noticed Dipper reaching out his unrestrained hand to her, his eyes wide and wet with terror as his captors refused to relinquish their hold upon him. She extended her arm back out to him, the distance between them far too great for them to even come close to intertwining. Then, in a flash of what seemed almost like magic, the Earth loyalists disappeared into the night, taking Dipper right along with them.

Ford’s blaster hit the ground the moment they all vanished, his eyes wide with shock as he tried to figure out where they might have gone. But all the while, Mabel kept her arm reaching out, a tight sob escaping her as she realized her brother might never meet it again.

For seven years, she kept on reaching for him. It it was only after he finally returned that she found he had stopped reaching back.

“When are we going to find Dipper?” Mabel asked almost constantly within the first 24 hours after his abduction. Stan and Ford could only offer her the terse answer of “soon” as they continued discussing the matter with Rose, Pearl, and Amethyst, all of their voices in hushed, anxious whispers that neither Mabel nor Steven could really hear.

“When are we going to find Dipper?” Mabel asked after a week had passed. By now, almost all the Gems in Crystal Falls had gotten in on the intensive search for the missing boy, all of them more than happy to do anything they could to help two of the humans who were instrumental in saving their world. Things had been largely fruitless so far though; the Earth loyalists had been very smart in covering their tracks to the point that even the most astute Gems couldn't find so much as a trace. But still, Stan and Ford refused to let their mournful niece lose hope that her brother would be returned to her safe and sound. And so once again, they answered “soon” before tucking her into bed for what would no doubt be yet another sleepless night.

“When are we going to find Dipper?” Mabel asked after a month, an exasperated,almost frustrated sigh escaping her along with the question. This question had been a constant every single day now, usually aimed at Stan or Ford or one of the Crystal Gems. And as time went on and the bags under her uncles’ eyes grew darker and deeper and the Gems of Crystal Falls slowly began winding their search efforts down, the answer started to turn from a “soon” to a “we don’t know”.

“When are we going to find-”

“We’re not gonna find him!” Stan slammed his fist down on the table, his expression and tone rife with both grief and anger. A year had passed, a year that had felt like 20 to Mabel, and even if she was still only 6, the weight of just how incredibly long it had been since she had seen Dipper, since they had been happy and together was not lost on her. And yet, for the first time in 365 days, her fretful curiosity was not met with positivity or uncertainty. It was met with a no.

Needless to say that Ford was quick to counter his brother’s harsh reply with sharp disapproval, and soon enough they had launched into a fierce argument. Mabel simply curled herself into a tight ball, hugging her knees to her chest as she dolefully listened to her uncles fight, something that had become a very common occurrence over the past year. She was only half paying attention to their squabble as she settled into her own morose thoughts, but what she did pick up from their unrestrained argument unnerved her to the bone.

“It’s time to stop kidding ourselves, Ford! If he was still here on Homeworld we would have found him already! Chances are those lunatics probably dragged him off back to Earth a long time ago!”

“W-well, then we’ll build a ship! I’ll get Rose, Pearl, and Amethyst to help us! Maybe even recruit some of the other more technologically inclined Gems. We’ll go to Earth a-and bring him back, and-”

“And what?! You honestly expect us to survive ten seconds on Earth when we’re at the top of their most wanted list?! If Greg was still around, then maybe I’d think about it, but on our own? It’s a suicide mission for sure.”

“But we can’t just forget about Dipper, Stanley! Who knows what those… those barbarians have done with him?!”

“I haven’t forgotten about him! The kid’s pretty much the only thing I’ve been thinking about for the past year, but he’s not the only thing we have to protect around here. We gotta think about Mabel now, Ford. They already took one of ‘em; we can’t let them have them both.”

Ford’s half of the argument finally faltered at this, his shoulders sagging in defeat as he turned away bitterly, clearly fighting back tears. Stan let out a long, guilty sigh as he glanced over at Mabel, whose eyes were overflowing with questions about everything she had just heard. And while it had taken almost a year, Stan realized he had finally worked up the nerve to start answering some of them.

Explaining the concept of death to a child who had spent almost her entire life on a planet populated by beings who were practically immortal would have been a hard enough undertaking as it was. But explaining that such a thing could have happened to said child’s very own brother was something else entirely. And it was because of that, that Stan was completely unable to keep tears out of his eyes as he slowly, gently explained to Mabel that he believed the worst had happened to her brother, that their futile search was at last coming to an end, that their family was now forever fractured as a result. That, more than likely, Dipper was dead.

Except no, he wasn’t.

But he might as well have been.

Because from the very moment Dipper had been brutally torn away from his family, his entire life turned upside down in the most horrific of ways. As soon as they had gotten out of Stan and Ford’s immediate range, the Earth loyalists had wasted no time in showing just how ruthless they were by throwing their young captive to the ground roughly and binding him tightly before he could even think of trying to run away. From there, a very long, downright perilous journey commenced, one that Dipper was essentially dragged along the entire way for by his callously cruel captors. All too quickly, the familiar greenery of Crystal Falls started to fade out into the barren, yet mysteriously lovely crystalline scenery of Homeworld that lay beyond the sector’s borders. Needless to say that Dipper was overwhelmed with curiosity and fear about where these loyalists were taking him, but any meek attempt on his part to ask any questions was met with jeering silence, hateful warnings, or even the occasional hard slap or kick. Clearly, his uncles had underplayed just how malicious the Earthlings were in all their light hearted war stories; because these people were wicked, downright heartless even, in ways that Dipper had never in his young life been exposed to before.

As their lengthy trek dragged on into days, even his homesick tears were only met by mocking laughter, his pleas for freedom receiving only cold denial. But even so, Dipper held onto the hope that Stan and Ford would come after him; that they’d beat these brutes back and bring him home to be safe and sound with Mabel once again. Certainly there was no question that they’d come, that they’d find him, that they’d all be reunited as a family once more. Perhaps they were already on their way even as the Earth loyalists continued pulling him across Homeworld’s dry, empty landscapes. He just had to be patient, to keep on hoping, and soon enough they’d be there. He just knew it.

Eventually their travels came to an end as they reached what ended up being a rather well hidden tunnel that led deep underground. Dipper had never really been afraid of the dark, but there was no denying the sudden terror coursing through him as he was shoved into this foreboding darkness, almost as if something inside of him knew that if he went in there, he wouldn’t be coming back out. The trip through the tunnel didn’t last too long before it ended at a large, square room, all four of its towering walls oddly composed of large mirrors, with a small opening in the ceiling high above providing the room’s only natural light. Dipper couldn’t make sense of this bizarre set up as he was shoved into it, the wall to the tunnel closing off behind him and leaving him cornered alone with his captors.

And if he had thought things had been bad before, this was where everything became unimaginably worse.

In a sense, it was almost as if the Earth loyalists didn’t know they had captured a mere child based on how they treated him. Because the unprovoked, merciless beating they gave their young captive in those first few hours would have been horrific enough for an adult. But for a child, it was so, so much worse. Dipper was completely powerless to stop any of the senselessly aggressive blows landed upon him by the much larger adult loyalists, each one of their attacks carrying some kind of venomous slur: “Rebel scum should have been mutated with the rest of them.” “Filthy traitor, just like the rest of his disgusting family.” “If only we’d gotten the girl too, Cipher would have rewarded us twice as much.” And so on and so forth for what seemed like ages until it finally stopped, though it hardly felt like it was over. Dipper could barely move at all as he lay in a crumpled heap on the ground, his own blood pooling around him as he tried to block out the triumphant laughter of his captors, tried to ignore the biting pain that was everywhere, tried to imagine his family breaking that wall down, rushing in and sweeping him off to warmth and safety and away from this waking nightmare.

A nightmare that simply refused to end.

Almost as soon as the beating ended, the interrogation began, though it was nothing better. If anything it was worse, seeing as how the loyalists kept hounding him and hounding him with questions he simply didn’t have any answers for. “Where is the leader of the rebellion?” “Are there more of you filthy rebels out there?” “What kind of weapons are your uncles holing up in that base of theirs?” “How many of those pathetic Gems are allied to your side?” And again and again and again, endless questions that made no sense to him, ones he couldn’t even think to come up with anything for in his battered state that only got worse as he was physically punished for each and every wrong, unknowing answer.

And so it went on like this for quite some time. It was hard to keep track of time in this minimal mirrored space, but Dipper tried in the rare moments whenever his captors weren’t abusing him. By his estimation from the light pouring in from the ceiling, several days had passed, probably more, and still no sign of Stan, Ford, or anyone making even an attempt to save him. But even so, despite how terrible things were, he was still hopeful. Maybe they were just having a difficult time finding him; perhaps they were searching the entire planet over, all in a desperate attempt to learn where he was being held. So he continued to carry that hope, forced it to be the only thing he thought of when the loyalists lay their unforgiving hands on him.

But hope could only get him so far.

Days started to turn into weeks and the loyalists were clearly starting to get impatient with the lack of information they were getting from their young captive. Miraculously, the beatings had lessened, though only because they had realized that they’d probably end up killing him if they kept at it with as much frequent intensity. But the loyalist leader was adamant. He often complained about having been assigned to simply “babysit some rebel brat”, and it was clear he was growing tired of such a doldrum lot. And though the other loyalists warned him against it, he soon decided to take matters into his own hands.

He stormed into the cell lividly one day, a long knife in his hand as he caught Dipper wistfully staring up at the light from above. The leader sneered coldly, quickly catching the boy’s attention and prompting him to scramble to his feet and back away in a fearful, feeble attempt to put some distance between himself and his captor. “Aw… what?” the leader scoffed, his leering smirk hidden behind his concealing mask. “You think your uncles are gonna come swoop in here and save you? Please.” The leader laughed darkly as he suddenly kicked Dipper cleanly in the stomach, knocking him back roughly before he grabbed him by the front of his shirt and forced him up to his level. “Face it, kid: those has-beens aren’t coming for you. And can you really blame them? Look at you? Scrawny, weak, pathetic. Who would even want you? If we were back on Earth, then you’d have been somebody’s target practice by now. You’re a waste, just like this entire worthless planet is. But hey, if you wanna keep staring up at the sky with that pointless hope of yours, then be my guest! In fact…” the leader’s voice dropped low and sinister as he lifted his knife, eliciting a small, fearful whimper out of Dipper as he held it dangerously close to his face. “I’ll even help you get a better view!”

In a movement so fast Dipper couldn’t have even seen it coming, the leader lashed his blade out, its sharp tip catching the upper half of his face before swiping across his eyes in a swift, fluid movement. The boy was powerless to hold back an absolutely agonized scream at this, pain overwhelming his every sense as the leader carelessly dropped him with a sadistic chuckle, watching him writhe in anguish as the heavy wound poured with thick, dark blood. In a pathetic attempt to block out the pain, Dipper closed his cut eyes as much as he could, sobbing miserably as he forgot about everything else but the anguish, so deep and so unbearable that it eventually ended up sweeping him into the void of unconsciousness altogether.

He didn’t know exactly when it was that he opened his eyes again; but when he did, he was met with nothing but both lasting pain and the sight of complete and absolute nothingness. There was no color, no shapes, nothing. And yet, he could still feel the ground below him, could hear his own sharp, panicked breathing as clear as day. So why couldn’t he see?

And then it struck him. The memory of a knife ripping across his eyes. His sight being torn away from him at that horrible moment. The blood still stuck to his face from the wound running almost entirely across his face. The incredibly crippling fear that he would never see anything ever again.

Stan had used a word for such a condition before, but Dipper was hard pressed to remember it. Blonde? Blunde? Blind? Blind sounded the most correct out of those, so that was what he went with to describe the unfamiliar sensation, but it still hardly helped him feel better. Because now, all he could do was weakly pull himself up to sit and try to feel his way around, grasping at nothing but empty air before finally reaching the smooth surface of one of the mirror walls boxing him in. As he touched it’s cold exterior, Dipper couldn’t help but feel as though something else was wrong too, aside from the horrific fact that his eyes seemed to no longer work. For the first time since he had gotten here, the room was completely silent. No sound of jeering loyalists, or threatening footsteps or anything else really. His non-existent vision was useless in giving him any actual information, but as far as he could tell without it, the loyalists were gone. He waited in silence, unable to tell how much time had passed anymore with all sense of light now stolen away from him, for those footsteps to return, for their wicked mocking to resume, for the pain he had grown so accustomed to by now to continue but… it never did. He could have waited for years and they never would have returned. And after about what felt like a month or so, Dipper finally allowed himself to feel some form of relief from that.

That relief was short lived however as he realized that the loyalists had essentially abandoned him in a prison he had no power to escape from even when he did have his eyesight. But now, as blinded and weak as he was, he was even more trapped than ever before. The only way he managed to actually survive was through the small constant trickle of water that came in through a pipe installed at the corner of the cell. As far as food went, it was rather sparse for the first few weeks, with the only thing he had to rely on being the scraps of bread he had wisely managed to save from whatever meager helpings the loyalists had thrown his way. Still, as time went on and that supply started to run out, he quickly began to fade. His injuries, while slowly healing on their own, were still not properly treated and his stomach was filled with only a deep, aching hunger that the tiny scraps he was trying his best to preserve could not satisfy. But still, he knew he had to hold out; Stan and Ford and Mabel were coming to save him, he had to keep reminding himself. They were coming to save him and take him home and he didn’t even care if he wouldn’t be able to see them because just hearing his sister’s voice again would be enough.

And so he sat tight in that cell, sitting directly under the light from above, his unseeing eyes staring off at nothing as he spent his empty time repeating that hopeful mantra to himself over and over and over again. “They’re gonna come…” he began in a whisper, his voice hoarse and shaky from a lack of use but even so he kept going. “They’re gonna come find me… They’re going to save me… T-they… they do want me… They’re coming… They’re on their way here right now… T-they’ll be here soon… I… I know it...”

Many days were spent like this, with him whispering these gentle, but comforting promises to himself, desperately clinging onto the idea that they were real, that they would come true. That they were more than just an empty, meaningless dream.

His energy soon started to wane more and more each day as his stock of food grew dangerously low. With not even enough strength left to remain sitting up, he eventually resorted to lying in place, though his self-reassurance didn’t stop. Occasionally, whenever he’d fall asleep, he’d find himself back home in Crystal Falls, bright and happy and colorful as he sat at the dinner table with Mabel, Stan, and Ford, all of them laughing warmly as they ate deliciously to their hearts’ content. And then, he’d open his eyes once again and be met with absolutely nothing once more, his heart and hopes sinking lower and lower every single time.

However, it was during one of these wistful dreams that his usual empty routine was abruptly interrupted. Upon feeling something unfamiliar brush against his leg, Dipper flinched awake, instinctually glancing down only to bitterly remember sight was no longer a privilege he had. So instead, he reached down, feeling his way as he often did until he made contact with the small, brightly chirping creature who had happened to invade his cell. The more he felt this seemingly amicable being out, the more he realized its bumpty round hardened surface felt… familiar. In fact, the more he thought about it, this thing seemed to be exactly like the small, friendly Geodite creatures that the forests of Crystal Falls were littered with. The thought of home was enough to elicit a small smile from Dipper as he forced himself to sit up, despite the painful protest his starving stomach gave him, so he could properly greet the first real semblance of company he had in quite some time.

“Hey there, little guy,” he began, his voice still rather weak as he allowed the friendly Geodite to crawl into his lap as he continued stroking it. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you? I know what that’s like… How did you get in here? Did you climb down from all the way up there?” The Geodite, seeming to understand, let out a bright chirp in response, one that Dipper couldn’t help but let out a small laugh at. Even though it wasn’t much, the very thought of not being so alone anymore managed to brighten his spirits just a bit. But at the same time, it also made him think of something else, something he hadn’t before. Something that could very well finally end up being his ticket out of here. “Wait… you came from up there…” he nodded upward, wishing so much that he could see that promising beam of light once more. “That means… you could go get help! Quick! Go back up there and find my Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford! A-and Mabel too! Especially Mabel… I… I miss her so much… I wonder if she misses me too…”

The Geodite interrupted his pensive thoughts with an excitable chirp as it suddenly lept from his lap, scurrying away until the only thing Dipper could make out were its clattering footsteps as he began walking against one of the mirror walls. It stopped somewhere above him, chirping encouragingly this time as Dipper frowned and shook his head sadly. “I… I’m sorry… I can’t see you… o-or anything really…” The Geodite simply chirped again before its skittering continued until it gradually disappeared into silence, leaving Dipper to morosely realize that he was left alone once again.

Or so he thought; for just a few hours later, the Geodite finally returned, though it wasn’t alone. Several more seemed to follow it, all of them cheerfully “singing” as they made their way down to Dipper, who was admittedly confused as one of them seemed to push something towards him. It was only as he picked the object up and felt out its soft, smooth, sweet-smelling texture that he excitedly realized exactly what this was. “Fruit!” he gasped in shock, not hesitating to take a generous first bite. Its immediate sweetness filled him with immeasurable relief as he realized that he was actually going to have something resembling decent food since his capture. Yet the Geodites weren’t finished yet, for as he gave them his wholehearted thanks, they presented him with even more pieces of fruit, as well as nuts and even a few vegetables. Needless to say that Dipper was quite confused as to where they had ascertained all this food from seeing as how such plants (or any plants really) weren’t native to Homeworld, which left him to assume that a terraformed sector, much like Crystal Falls, couldn’t have been too far away from wherever his underground cell was. But even so, the Geodites didn’t stop off at one delivery; they kept their self-started food service going, supplying Dipper with as much food as he could hope to eat.

It took a little time, but eventually his energy, as well as his drive returned to him, inspiring him with the motivation to try and finally find a way out of his cell. Even if he was essentially stumbling in the dark, he still walked along the perimeter of the room, feeling his way against the glass walls in the hopes that one of them wielded a door. Unfortunately, there were all completely seamless, with no apparent exit in sight which only left him with one other option: trying to break the glass itself. And so he tried and tried and tried and tried but it never seemed to so much as even crack. Even throwing one of the willing Geodites into it did nothing to dent his longtime prison. After weeks and weeks, his escape efforts started to diminish along with his hope. Even if he did have suffice food and water and company, he still lacked the one thing that he was yearning for the most, something that he hadn’t known for so very long that he was starting to forget what it even felt like: freedom.

Every now and then he’d give himself that reminder that his family was still out there looking for him, but that was starting to become less and less frequent as the days went by. When the Geodites first came to him, he’d pass the time by recounting what stories he could remember from before his capture, stories of him and Mabel and all the fun they used to have together but as time went on, those stories started to blur within his memory. He held no question in his mind about Mabel and his connection to her or Stan or Ford, but the specifics seemed to be fading away as months passed on into years. And as those years came and went so too did the hope that he’d ever step foot out of that cell.

But certainly, he tried to reason with himself amidst empty days only occasionally broken by a Geodite generously delivering him his next meal, they were still looking for him.

Certainly, he rationalized as his blank, blinded eyes stared at the ground in front of him, his mind starting to forget what things like color, light, or even his own sister’s face even looked like, they would be coming any day now.

Certainly, he thought as he lay down to sleep only for his once hopeful dreams of home gradually stopped altogether, they would find him.

Certainly… he realized, tears starting to fall from his clouded, ruined eyes as his heart broke and his hope finally died, they had abandoned him, just like everybody else.

And that’s exactly what he believed for the next three years, his heart turning as cold and hard as the unyielding mirrors all around him. Until the day they finally did come.

Which only made his heart turn even colder.

Seven years.

Seven years he had been gone, six of which she had presumed him to be dead. She had given up hope, just as her uncles had, of ever seeing him again. He had been captured and killed, far too young true, but killed nonetheless. That was it, wasn’t it? End of story, nothing more to tell. Except it wasn’t the end.

Because here he was, standing right before her. Her brother, so long thought to have died a tragic, undeserved death, had been alive all these years, hidden away deep underground miles away from Crystal Falls.

For Mabel, there couldn’t have possibly been anything more miraculous than this.

And yet… for as much as this was so unquestionably Dipper, she found that there was so much about him that… wasn’t. He was so much gaunter and paler than he should have been, his hair an overgrown, scrubby mess and his clothes much too small for his now 12 year old body. But then there were his eyes, which had struck her to the core when she had first seen them. Grey and cloudy and unfocused as opposed to the warm, alert brown they should have been, the deep, wide mark of an old, settled scar discolorating the skin around them almost like a mask. Eyes that carried such a haunted, lost look to them that it completely chilled her in every way. Eyes that seemed to be set in a perpetually piercing stare in nothing in particular at all. Eyes that, as she quickly found out, had been completely and utterly blind for the past several years as he sat in this cold, hollow prison all by himself, waiting for help that never came.

Tears of relief and sympathy flooded her eyes as she rushed to embrace him, but on instinct he flinched away from her touch. His panicky manner became even more apparent when he heard Steven and Lapis speak up, his blindness barring both of them from his perception as he tried and failed to place voices to faces and faces to names. Mabel tried to ease him, tried to calm him down, but this attempt was only met with a kind of hostility she hadn’t been expecting. Dipper’s anxious manner soon turned fierce as he addressed her, not looking in her direction as he spoke to the open air and harshly accused her of forgetting about him, of leaving him to rot alone in this cell while she lived the safe, free, happy life he had never really known. Mabel could scarcely believe what she was hearing, and as much as she wanted to argue that not a day had gone by in which she hadn’t thought about him, hadn’t hoped against hope that he was somehow still alive and that they’d somehow be reunited once again, she didn’t. Instead, she simply took his hand and slowly led him out of the cell that had been his home for the past seven years, giving him his first taste of renewed freedom that, from here on out, would only ever be tentative at best.

“You stopped?! What do you mean you stopped?! How could you just… just stop looking for me?!”

“Cut us some slack, kid! Its been seven years! Can you really blame us for expecting the worst after those Earthling wackjobs took you?!”

“Yes, I can! You just gave up completely! Did you even wonder what they did to me down there?! What I’ve been through the past seven years of my life?!”

“We don’t need to wonder, Dipper. W-we can see… And we’re sorry if we threw in the towel too early, but-”

“You’re sorry? I spent over half my life buried underground, nearly starved to death, and went blind, and you’re just sorry?!”

Once again, Mabel found herself curled up into a small, fretful ball, her knees snuggled under her shawl as she silently sat on the sidelines while her brother and uncles duked it out in by far the most vitriolic argument she had ever seen. Really, if she had to pick a side in it, she would have certainly been on Dipper’s, mostly because she had always felt some small inkling in her heart that giving up the search for him had been wrong somehow. And even though that inkling turned out to be right, things still were far from blissful and happy like she had always dreamed they would be if her brother ever returned. In fact, things were anything but that as Dipper, Stan, and Ford continued to fight, their argument echoing brutally throughout the shack. Even Steven’s comforting hand on her shoulder did little to ease her worry, which only spiked upon hearing her brother’s intentions of going off-planet.

“W-wait… you’re what?” she finally spoke up, sitting upright in her seat as she looked to him with wide eyes.

“You heard me,” Dipper answered coldly, still looking at nothing as he responded. “I’m leaving. I’m not about to stay here and be a prisoner on this planet or in this family anymore! I want to be free for a change. And I know I’ll never, ever be that here.”

“Dipper, that’s absurd,” Ford remarked incredulously. “You can’t leave Homeworld to openly traverse the depths of space on your own. You’re much too-”

“Much too what? Young? Blind?” Dipper challenged crossly, his hands in tight fists at his sides. “I don’t see why any of that matters, seeing as how I’ve been on my own for the past seven years and managed to survive just fine all by myself!”

“Kid, don’t be stupid about this,” Stan scowled authoritatively. “You wouldn’t last two seconds out there, not with all those Earth ships roaming around everywhere. Besides, you said so yourself; you’ve been gone for seven years. As far as we’re concerned, you’re gonna stay right here and make up for all that lost time.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” Dipper asked harshly. “Do you really think we can all just go right back to being some perfect, happy little family again after you guys just forgot about me!?”

“Dipper, w-we didn’t forget about you…” Mabel said, her voice fragile as she stepped over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, frowning as he flinched from the unexpected contact. “We just… we… we didn’t know that you were… we-”

“You didn’t care,” he cut her off coldly, his blinded eyes set in a fierce, unforgiving glare as he pulled his shoulder away from her. He said nothing more as he turned and started feeling his way towards the door. While Stan made a move to try and stop him, Ford held him back, shaking his head sadly as he watched his battered, broken, bittered nephew leave as he placed the blame for his years upon years of endless suffering upon them all. Which, in so many ways, was a perfectly sensible thing to do.

But even so, Mabel hurried after her brother, intent on keeping him from disappearing from her life once again. Because even seven years later, she was still reaching out for him, even if she knew, deep down, that her extended hand had found him far too little and far too late.

Mabel knew she should have been happy for Dipper as she watched Steven heal his longstanding blindness, but the only thing she could do was frown as that healing spit worked its magic. As Dipper flinched back, closing his eyes and covering them out of surprise first before he slowly opened them once more. As he gasped, his returned brown eyes widening as they finally saw again for the first time in seven years. As tears started to well up in those eyes at how overwhelming it all was as he finally looked over to her in complete shock, as if he was seeing her for the first time ever.

Which, in a way, he was.

And in that moment, the way he smiled at her, the way he said her name with such awe and happiness in his voice, truly made her think that perhaps things might finally turn out alright. This feeling only grew as they mutually embraced, tears in both of their eyes now as the sheer triumph of the moment spoke louder than any words could. This was it, Mabel though with a contented sigh. This was exactly what had been missing the past several years. This was how everything was supposed to be.

Except it wasn’t meant to last.

Because all too quickly their hug disbanded, all too quickly Dipper glanced longingly back at the ship he had been trying to steal just moments ago, all too quickly Mabel remembered exactly why she had been hesitant about Steven healing him in the first place. Because with his vision restored, now there was absolutely nothing stopping Dipper from leaving, this time on his own accord.

As Steven and Lapis both put forth efforts to try and coax him into staying, Mabel could only stand there in silence, shellshocked by how quickly everything had been unfolding. They had only just found him yesterday, but here he was, set to be taken away once more. She couldn’t really blame him for wanting to leave though, there was no way she could have; because if their roles had been reversed and she had been trapped in one place for as long as he had, then she likely would have wanted to chase freedom just as much as he did.

Perhaps if she had at least some of his boldness, then she would have boarded that ship with him. Perhaps if it was just the two of them, with no friends or family or anything else on Homeworld to worry about, she would have joined him in sailing through the stars, both of them finally together like they should have always been. Perhaps she would have… but she didn’t. Instead, she only watched, tears in his eyes as he departed, knowing that the chances of her ever seeing him again were small but at the very least he was alive and free as opposed to the alternative she had grown up believing was true. Still, that didn’t stop her from reaching her hand out after his ship as it drifted higher and higher into the atmosphere, before it disappeared from view entirely.

Only this time, he didn’t reach back.

Dipper had known, from the moment he touched down on Homeworld again, that this was a bad idea. That certainly he’d be followed here, that he’d lead those Earthlings right to the very place where his family still resided. And while he didn’t really have his doubts that Stan and Ford would be able to fend off a few kids from Earth, he did start to worry when Lapis ended up being the one to first discover him and his wrecked ship in the forest of Crystal Falls. He supposed he should have counted himself as lucky that it hadn’t been Mabel, for certainly she would have dragged him back to the shack to tell Stan and Ford everything that he knew, something that he was far too uncomfortable to do so soon after returning. Fortunately, Lapis was much more patient with him, and through that patience, an unexpected bond began to form.

Even before his initial capture, Dipper had never gotten close to any Gems, including even the Crystal Gems who lived essentially right next door to his family. Even though they were practically everywhere, he had never really had any interest in befriending any of them, mostly since a large majority of them seemed to be so emotionally dry and distant. Lapis, however, was a stark exception to that, an example of a Gem who wore her metaphorical heart on her sleeve as well as her open curiosity, something that Dipper couldn’t help but relate to. And so the unlikely pair steadily developed a genuine friendship, with Lapis coming by every day as Dipper continued repairing his crashed ship. As almost therapeutic as their peaceful time together was though, he knew it wasn’t meant to last, for as Lapis professed her hopes that he would stay on Homeworld, Dipper found that his growing guilt and dread would no longer let him remain silent about the threat he knew was soon to come. And after telling Lapis about his perilous escape from Earth first, she urged him to go divulge it all to his family, knowing that they would need such pertinent information if they ever wanted to keep Crystal Falls, or Homeworld as a whole, safe. But how could he just go and tell them that he had led this threat right to their door? How could he admit to his uncles that they had been right all along? How could he apologize to Mabel for leaving her again, which was exactly what he had every intention of doing once this disaster was said and done?

But in the end, he did go and tell them, if for no one else than for Lapis. His resolve to remain professional nearly melted as Mabel rushed up to him, throwing her arms around him in a hug that she never thought she’d get to have again. Yet as much as he wanted to return her embrace, he didn’t as he instead forced his manner to remain cold and unmoved while he stoically warned his uncles of the coming Earth invasion, watching stonefaced as their initial reaction rose into frantic panic. Then, with his message delivered, he slipped out once again, his refusal to let himself fall back into his own family just as staunch and hardened as ever.

And once again, he completely missed his sister’s outstretched hand as he walked out, her heart reaching after him in the hopes that he would stay with her this time, but knowing that was far too much to hope for.

“Well, well, well… looks like things just got a lot more interesting…”

Dipper gasped as he found that the very first thing he was met with upon pulling himself out of the crashed ship’s wreckage was the pitchy voice of the demon who held domain over the entire Earth and all its vast empire. The very demon he had risked life and limb to escape from during his flight from that chaoitc planet, who should have been back on Earth seeing as how he had merely just sent two of his cronies to do his work for him. Yet now, Pacifica was nowhere to be found while Gideon simply stood by, fuming at how Bill was apparently ignoring his proposal to make a deal to take out the Pines family, as well as Steven and Lapis, who had been unfortunate enough to get caught up in all this. But instead, the demon’s singular eye now held focus on Dipper, who couldn’t deny the flash of terror that struck him as that imposing triangular form cast an oppressive shadow over him.

“Hey there, Pine Tree! I was wondering where you ran off to. Guess my hunch about you crawling back to this boring ol’ hunk of rock was right, huh?” Bill began quite effervescently, though as he noticed Dipper attempting to back away, he was quick to reposition himself right behind the boy in a flash. “Whoa, not so fast, kid! You don’t wanna miss out on what could very well be the best deal you’ll ever make, do ya?”

“W-what?” Dipper asked, not having the context to really know what the demon was talking about.

“Hey!” Gideon shouted in sudden outrage as he sent Bill an appalled glare. “I was the one who summoned you here, Bill! I thought you were gonna make a deal with me!”

“Oh, yeah, I was gonna do that,” Bill shrugged nonchalantly. “Until a much better alternative came along.” The demon’s tone dropped low and sinister as he pointed his cane over at Dipper, who was still completely lost amidst this unknown turn of events. “So… see ya, Gideon!” With another flick of his cane, Bill managed to completely take control of Gideon’s amulet, resulting in his own telekinesis being used against him to fling him far away from the Kindergarten crash site and freeing the demon up to get back to business. “Now, Pine Tree, where were we…?”

“L-Leave him alone!” Mabel shouted as Bill started circling her brother almost threateningly. The only reason she hadn’t ran over to pull Dipper away herself was because of the steady hold Stan had on her arm, keeping her held back just as much as she had been held back the first time he had been stolen away from her seven years ago. Only now, with a threat so much more dangerous and unpredictable as Bill Cipher, her complete inability to do anything to help Dipper felt so, so much worse.

“So listen up, Pine Tree, cause I don’t like to repeat myself,” Bill said as casually as ever, ignoring Mabel’s fearful cry. “You may not know this since you’ve been all blind and buried for so many years, but back on Earth, I’m pretty much the most powerful guy around. Time manipulation, the ability to change anything and anyone with a blink of an eye, endless amounts of magic your feeble human brain couldn’t even hope to comprehend, you know, the works! But here on silly old Homeworld, things are a bit… different. This planet’s outta my hands, which is something I plan on changing pretty soon, but for now, I kinda can't interact with this place physically without a vessel. So I need a little… help, if ya catch my drift…” s on edge as he already was by the dream demon’s mere presence alone, Dipper slowly shook his head, finally realizing just how fast his heart was pounding as he tried his hardest to reconcile his complete and utter terror. Still, Bill simply sighed in exasperation and rolling his eye before he explained. “My drift is this: you let me possess you, let me take the reins and sit in your control seat for a while, so I can finally get rid of what’s left of your stupid, annoying family! Heck, since you’re so un-Pines compared to all the rest of them, I’ll even let you walk away with your life when it’s all said and done as my way of saying thanks! Sounds like a pretty good plan, doesn’t it, kid?”

For a moment there were no words that Dipper could find to describe just how absolutely appalled he was by this incredibly gruesome idea. The fact that Bill Cipher, of all the beings in the universe, wanted to use him as a tool to destroy his own family, that he wanted him to agree to let such a thing happen? It was beyond twisted and cruel. In fact, he was so shocked by it that he couldn’t even properly express anything but absolute dumbfoundment at it when he finally did manage to respond to it. “I… I don’t understand…” he choked, shaking his head once more. “W-why… what makes you think I would ever say yes to something like that?”

“Why wouldn’t you say yes to something like that?” Bill retorted calmly. “Think about this for a sec, Pine Tree. These three?” he threw a hand out towards Mabel, Stan, and Ford. “They let a bunch of Earth squares steal you away when you were only 5 years old. And then what did they do? What did they do while you were beaten and battered almost constantly for weeks on end? What did they do when someone ran a knife over your eyes until you were completely and totally blind? What did they do when you were left for dead in that empty cell for seven years with nothing but a bunch of dumb old rocks and your own pathetic, unfulfilled dreams to keep you company? Oh, that’s right! They did nothing!”

Dipper shuddered at this, hating to admit that every single thing the demon was saying was true but knowing in his heart that it was. He had languished, suffered, hoped in vain for so long that they would come for him, but they never did until after all the hope he had left in him had long since died. And even then, they had only managed to stumble upon him on accident. Stan and Ford had even said so themselves that they had stopped looking for him only a year after his disappearance. This was something he had thought about frequently, ever since he had been set free, and every time he did, it only made him ache with the belief that his own family had cared so very little about him that they had just given up on him completely. And really, it was a large part of the reason he had already given up on them.

“Really, kid, it only makes sense,” Bill continued, fighting rationality upon seeing that his manipulation was seemingly working. “I mean, you don’t even wanna be part of their family anymore anyway, so why not just do yourself a favor and lighten this whole ‘rebellious legacy’ load off your shoulders? At least then, you wouldn’t have to keep running away all the time.”

“Dipper! Don’t listen to him! Please” Mabel cried once again, pulling against Stan’s grip, though it held fest, lest she break free and throw herself into the same danger her brother was in.

“Seriously, kid, he’s lying to you!” Stan shouted adamantly, wanting to believe that, despite all of the abuse he had been through in his young life, that his nephew was smarter than this. “You really think he won’t off you the second he’s through with all of us?! Because that’s not how that psychopath works, believe us.”

“Stanley’s right,” Ford agreed, the immense worry in his otherwise tight expression. “Dipper, you can’t trust him, he only wants to-”

“Hey, how about you three butt out for a sec and let Pine Tree decide here?” Bill cut their pleas off sharply before turning back to Dipper. “See what I mean, kid? The only thing they care about is saving their own hides. That’s exactly why they never bothered to look for you even ten minutes outside their own backyard. Guess they didn’t think you were worth the effort.”

“No, we did think you were worth it, Dipper!” Mabel protested fiercely, though she kept at it as Dipper finally glanced over at her, clear conflict filling his expression. “I never wanted to stop looking for you! I always hoped that you were still alive and out there somewhere and I was right. A-and I know you’re mad at us for taking so long to find you, but you can’t do this. Please, Dipper… I-I can’t lose you again, not like this…”

Dipper could still scarcely even think of what to say amidst being pressed on all sides, but for what seemed like ages he kept his frightened, anxious, uncertain gaze on Mabel, who could only meet it with tears after she finished her appeal. She desperately hoped that it would be enough to sway him against such an awful deal, that he’d staunchly turn Bill down and finally come to stand with his family once more. Yet… it really didn’t seem to be enough, for instead of keeping his sights on her, he gradually glanced over to Lapis, who had simply been standing along with Steven in tense silence this entire time, neither of them having the faintest clue about what to do to stop this. As Dipper made eye contact with her, the most the blue Gem could do was softly shake her head, her eyes wide with unabridged terror at the thought of losing the boy she had just grown so close to like this. And yet, it was only as Dipper saw that terror that he realized what would happen if he said no to the demon’s twisted aspirations. Even if he refused, then Bill would always be able to find someone else, someone much more willing even, like Gideon for instance, to carry out his sadistic plans. And then, none of them, no one on Homeworld at all, would be safe, including his family, including Mabel, including Steven, including Lapis. No one would be able to stop the insane demon from doing whatever violent, demented thing he wanted, including destroying anything and anyone who stood in his path of conquest and chaos. If he said no, then there would be no telling what might happen.

Which was exactly why he had to say yes.

“So, kid, have you made up your mind yet?” Bill asked with faux boredom. “Because I’m a very busy demon, what with ruling my own intergalactic empire and everything, and I haven’t got all-””

“I’ll do it,” Dipper spoke up, squaring his shoulders and putting on his bravest face as he thought about exactly what this would entail for him. Even so, he had a plan, one that was only really tentative at best and one that would only really lead him to even more suffering than he had already known, but at least this time, it would all be on his own terms.

Needless to say that the reaction to his staunch agreement was intense. Mabel was the first to lash out, finally pulling herself out of Stan’s hold as a loud scream of protest tore from her. Lapis wasn’t far behind, her wings summoned as she rushed forward, tears forming in her eyes as she hurried to try and stop this deal from going through by any means necessary. Unfortunately, while Bill didn’t have much power on Homeworld, he did have enough to erect a blue fiery barrier, one that easily barred Mabel, Lapis, and anyone else from breaking this arrangement while still giving them a front row seat to it all.

“Yeesh, so much drama with you rebels!” Bill rolled his eye caustically. “I gotta admit, I’ll kinda miss that about you chumps… but not for long! So, Pine Tree, are you finally ready to get even for all those long years of abuse and abandonment? Cause if you are, then all it takes is just one simple handshake…” At this, the demon held his hand out, blue flames sparking over it as he presented it to Dipper, who simply looked between it and Bill himself with cold acceptance. He was ready for this, whatever it was, he told himself. He had spent seven years in blinded emptiness, how could this be much worse than that?

And yet, he still looked over at the pair who had rushed forth in vain to try and save him, both of them looking to him tearfully and still begging him not to go through with this. His resolve nearly crumbled upon meeting Mabel’s miserable expression, but it came back to him when he saw Lapis’. For seven years he had dreamed of nothing but freedom, and now, he was going to give that freedom up, more than likely forever, just to save the two people he was still absolutely certain he cared about.

It was probably the most worthy sacrifice he could think of, if he was perfectly honest with himself.

So, with a deep breath and closed eyes, he took the demon’s hand, allowing his own to be pulled down in shake that locked everything in place. And from there, everything seemed to happen all at once.

The very first thing he felt was pain, pain that was so fierce and so intense that it made the anguish of having that knife torn across his eyes feel like a mere scratch by comparison. But as the pain died out, as all his senses died out really, they were replaced with something else, something that seemed to overwhelm every single fiber of his being: power. Or at least he thought it was power, because what it really was was something far beyond what his mortal mind could even begin to comprehend. In fact, the only things he knew of it were that it was rich, strong, tantalizing, chaotic, uncontrollable, and his. But it wasn’t really. Rather it belonged to the miasmic, sinister, unquestionably insane entity that was quickly flooding his consciousness, splitting it cleanly in half and brutally pushing him aside as it easily took control of everything, all while he was left adrift inside his own completely ravaged mind, desperately trying to recover from the shock of it all before it was too late.

Mabel let out a tearful gasp as the wall of fire finally fell, allowing her to see that Bill was gone, but Dipper was still there, his eyes still shut and his body rigid and unmoving as she hurried over to him, Lapis following not too far behind. By the time she had almost reached him, however, he started to do something she hadn’t been expecting: laugh. As the laughter rose in volume and grew more manic, she realized that it was indeed in Dipper’s voice, but at the same time, it was also Bill’s. Both voices were completely unified as his laughter rose to triumphant levels, his eyes opening to reveal that one of them was still a natural, normal brown, while the other was sharply slitted against bright, piercing, glowing yellow, telling Mabel only one thing. That the worst had indeed happened. That her brother had been taken away from her yet again, only this time, she would never get him back. That he wasn’t even Dipper anymore, that he couldn’t be with with someone like Bill running wild and free inside his mind. Bipper… she concluded briefly, the name sounding so very wrong, even inside her own mind. Still, she was so heartbroken by what was happening that she couldn’t even allow herself to feel any form of betrayal towards him for what he had just done. Even if that betrayal was something that the newly dubbed “Bipper” was more than happy to remind them all off.

“Ah, now this is more like it!” he exclaimed proudly, his voice still a twisted mix of Bill’s and Dipper’s, though there was clearly more of a demonic edge to it. “It’s been so long since I’ve needed one of these flesh sacks that I almost forgot what being inside one of them is like! Still, I owe you one for being so nice and compliant about all this, Pine Tree! So,” his demented grin grew as he began to lift off the ground, blue flames curling up upon both of his hands as he hovered over his targets with sadistic glee. “What do you say we get started, huh? Oh, that’s right! You’re probably still trying to pull your measly human mind back together after having so much limitless cosmic power crammed into it all at once! Well then, don’t worry, kid! You just sit back, relax and enjoy the show. I’ll take it from here…”

Bipper let out another absolutely wild laugh at this, his yellow eye sparking with murderous intent while his flames grew larger as he prepared to rain them down upon his unprepared foes. Stan and Ford and Steven were all absolutely shellshocked by what they were seeing, none of them scarcely able to believe it while Lapis let out a harsh, broken sob at how far Dipper had fallen. But all Mabel could do was reach out to him once more, tears refusing to leave her eyes as she hoped that somehow, someway, this twisted nightmare would finally end, that she’d wake up and he’d be there and they’d be happy again, just like they had been so many years ago.

But of course, no matter how much she reached, it was never to be.

For suddenly, right before Bipper could bring his flames down, they abruptly died out, much to his apparent surprise. “Huh?!” he glanced at his hands in shock, clearly trying to bring the flames back only for him to suddenly go flying back in mid air towards the entrance of the Kindergarten behind him. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing, kid?!” He let out a sudden anguished shout at this, his limbs struggling to break free of some kind of invisible bondage as his expression changed from confusion to absolute raw fury. “For almost my entire life I’ve always been somebody’s prisoner,” he began fiercely, Dipper’s voice clearly starting to overpower Bill’s. “I practically grew up inside a jail cell I couldn’t even see. I missed out on everything my life should have been! And even after I thought I was finally free, I didn’t even get to enjoy it before your stupid forces came along and captured me all over again! But no more; I’m through with being trapped and tortured everywhere I go! Now it’s your turn to be locked away and forgotten, Bill! Let’s see how you like it!”

With another harsh shout, he pulled himself back even more, a blue glow igniting around his hands, one that transferred to the rocks surrounding the Kindergarten’s tunnel entrance. “Whoa! Wait! P-Pine Tree, stop!” Bipper gasped as the other half of him realized exactly what was about to happen here and fought in vain for control against it. “W-what about your revenge?! This is your one chance to take out your neglectful family and you’re completely wasting it just to put me away?! Don’t you realize you’re doing the exact same thing to yourself!? You’ve lost it!”

“No,” he replied to himself coldly, his expression a resolved glare as he looked to both Lapis and Mabel, finally smiling just the slightest bit as his hand moved to bring the rocks down on his telekinetic command. “I haven’t.”

“Dipper!” Mabel cried in an absolute panic as the impending cave in began, the rocks falling hard and heavy before him. The Kindergarten itself was closed off completely on the inside, with its one entrance also being its only exit, and Bipper had brazenly, intentionally landed on the wrong side of the momentous pile of rocks. Meaning that once all of them fell, he’d be trapped inside indefinitely, something that Mabel couldn’t let happen, but was ultimately completely powerless to stop.

“Augh! Stupid kid!” Bipper shouted in blind rage, his limbs trembling wildly as he desperately tried and failed to wrest back control. “This wasn’t the deal! When I take control back from you, I’m gonna make you wish you were never born!” The other half of him simply let out a soft, almost accepting sigh at this, his fury dissipating into calm acceptance of his fate as he closed his eyes, not wanting to see that final look of desperate anguish on Mabel’s face as the last of the rocks fell. “Too late,” he muttered calmly, mentally preparing himself for the nearly endless internal conflict to come. “I already do.”

And just like that, he was gone, the final rock falling as Mabel collapsed to her knees with a broken sob, her hand still held out, just like it always was, for the brother who had just condemned himself to an eternity of imprisoned torment. The brother who had given away every part of himself, including his highly sought after freedom, just to save her life. The brother who would certainly never be able to reach his hand back to her now, even if he wanted to.

She missed him.

She thought she had missed him before, when she was but a teary-eyed five year old who kept thinking that he’d come home “any minute now”. She thought she had missed him after he had taken off on that ship to parts unknown, presumably never to return. But now? Now she missed him so much that it almost physically hurt her. Because now she could go down to the entrance of that Kindergarten at the edge of the sector literally any time she wanted to. Now she could place her hand against that impenetrable rock wall, she could imagine him on the other side of it, wrestling against the demon he had let into his mind with every ounce of resistance he had in him, she could whisper her tearful promises to find a way to help him, no matter how it might take. Promises that were largely more wishes than they were actual promises.

Still it seemed that her and Lapis were really the only ones who were making any kind of effort to do something about Dipper’s plight. The Crystal Gems were clueless when it came to a being as tricky and enigmatic as Bill Cipher, the Fusions’ Logs offered literally no assistance, and most frustrating to Mabel, Stan and Ford seemed to be very hands off about the whole thing. One night, not too many weeks after Dipper had trapped himself and Bill away, her frustration finally exploded into full on rage as she shouted at her uncles, fiercely demanding why they seemed to be doing nothing to even try to help their own nephew, why they were seeming to be giving up on him all over again. Their rebuttal was that they wanted to help Dipper, they really, really did, but they simply didn’t know enough about Bill and the extent of his abilities to do anything that would be safe for the good of Homeworld at large. As it stood, the merciless demon who had single handedly conquered Earth had finally been subdued and sealed away, inside the body of a twelve year old who had locked them both inside a barren Kindergarten, true, but sealed away nonetheless. Which meant that for now at least, the planet was safe.

But that was far from good enough for Mabel.

Despite how much of a failure Lapis’ attempts at helping Dipper had been thus far, Mabel couldn’t help but admire how hard she was trying. The blue Gem had researched extensively on the mysterious demon, had tried to terraform around the Kindergarten, had even gone as far as to fuse with the brutish Jasper into the massive, merciless Malachite in the hopes of decimating that rock wall, a plan that had only left Lapis with more scars than successes when it was all said and done. And even if none of her ideas were working, Mabel wished that she had even a fraction of the blue Gem’s verve, because as things were, she felt so completely useless. Dipper had saved all their lives, perhaps even all of Homeworld itself, and what did he get as a reward for his courageous selflessness? Yet another prison for him to rot away in, this time with a cellmate who was the complete and utter embodiment of hatred and chaos itself. And what was she doing to help free him from that prison? Nothing, just as Bill had accused them all of. She was doing nothing to rescue her brother from his horrendous situation, just as she had done nothing to rescue him seven years ago. The truth of it was she was failing him in every sense of the word. Because as much as she wanted to help him, she didn’t even know where to start at all. She didn’t know how to break that massive stone wall keeping him locked away down. She didn’t know how to kick the vicious demon he was currently sharing his body with out. She didn’t know how to bring him home once and for all, to get him to finally stay with her, to convince him that they were still a family, no matter how many times they were torn apart.

She didn’t know how to help him; which meant that the only thing she could do instead of try was what she had always done: keep reaching out for a hand that never seemed to reach back.

He could feel it.

Day in and day out, it pounded heavily against the back of the half of his mind he still had some semblance of control over. It coaxed him, begged him to open that door, to let the floodgates go down, to let that rich, endless power now afforded to him just flow through him completely unfettered. To just let go, to end his pointless vigil and let himself finally be free to do whatever he could possibly imagine. The power tugged on his very soul, it seemed, hounding at him to be used, demanding to at least let the other, much more wild and malicious half of his consciousness use it if he wasn’t going to.

It absolutely terrified him.

Mostly because it was something that Bill had absolutely no qualms about taunting him with almost constantly as they shared their prison that was his body, which was trapped inside an even larger prison that was the Kindergarten. Fortunately, whatever half of him that was now the demon negated his former need for food, water, or even sleep because the Kindergarten itself was completely desolate and devoid of all signs of life except for him. Even then, he barely felt alive as he sat in once spot, in one of the larger holes in the hollowed out walls he had claimed as his own moments after locking himself away. And there he stated, largely unmoving as he resumed the very same stance of waiting for nothing that he had grown so used to during his first bout of captivity. Only now, he didn’t expect to be saved; in all honesty, he didn’t want to be saved. Because if he was saved, then so was Bill. And all at once, everything he had thrown his life away from would be worth nothing at all.

Still, even if he had managed to subdue the demon physically, that didn’t mean keeping him bound mentally was anything close to a simple task. Every second of every day was a struggle for control, one that he only narrowly managed to maintain the upper hand in. Bill would try almost ceaselessly to escape his ridiculously determined vessel only for Dipper to somehow reign him back in every single time. It didn’t take long for the demon to grow desperate, and as he did, so too did his tactics. Even though he had little to no control over their shared body, his still had a potent presence inside their mind, the connection between their consciousnesses being more than enough for him to get his messages across. In his most petty fits of rage, Bill would often press nightmare after nightmare upon Dipper, filling them with the most unspeakable horrors both imaginable and unimaginable, things that would have easily and utterly broken the average human mind upon so much as a first glance. But what the demon underestimated was that he was dealing with a mind that had already been broken by years of untold horrors all their own. And in its place stood a wall of indifference and determination so strong and sturdy that even a being as powerful as Bill himself was having a hard time putting a dent in it.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t stop trying. Because even if he knew Dipper held little struggle against him, Bill could tell that he was struggling with the immense power they both had access to, though Dipper even moreso now because of his well-maintained control. And while it infuriated the demon to no end that a mere human child was in a better position to use his powers than even he was, Bill knew he could use this struggle to his advantage.

“When are you just gonna give up already, kid?” he asked, their voices still intertwined as they echoed through the otherwise dense silence of the Kindergarten in an almost ethereal way. “We both know you wanna use it, so why don’t you? It’d be a way better use of your time than just sitting around here doing nothing all day.”

“I think you know exactly why I’m not going to use it,” he replied coldly, evenly, just as he always did whenever the demon attempted this, which was very often. “Because if I did, then you’d probably be set free. Which is not something I’m about to let happen now, or ever.”

“Geez, well sorry for asking, ‘Mr. Warden’. I just couldn’t help but notice that its calling to you a bit… stronger than usual… You really sure you don’t wanna answer that call? It’d be pretty disappointed if you just left it hanging, you know.”

“I don’t care. I’m not using it. I don’t need it. Now could you just be quiet for a change instead of trying to wear me down, which isn’t working by the way. I’m trying to concentrate.”

“Aw, what’s the matter, Pine Tree? Thinkin’ about poor little Shooting Star again? You sure tend to do that a lot, even though I don’t get why. Honestly, if I were you, I’d be angry at her instead of worried about her like you are. Especially since her life should have been yours.”

He flinched at this, his eyes widening somewhat as his brow furrowed in confusion. “W-what do you mean?”

“What, you mean you can’t see it? Oh, that’s right, you won’t let yourself use any of my-or should I say--our powers for some stupid reason. Well if you did, then you’d be able to take a glimpse at any number of alternate realities that split off of our own. And I’m not lying to you when I tell you there’s one where Shooting Star was captured that night instead of you. You wanna take a quick peek?”

His heart sank at the very idea of any reality where Mabel went through even half of the pain he had endured. After all, he had been hurt so deeply and so profoundly in so many different ways that he wouldn’t wish that kind of anguish upon anyone. Except for Bill maybe. Especially since the demon didn’t seem to care about his already quite loud internal protest against this. “Too late! Here ya go, Pine Tree! Enjoy what could have been!”

Dipper gasped as his mind was abruptly whisked away into the dreamscape, allowing him to watch as an inactive observer as an entirely different version of his life played out before him. All at once there he was back on that fateful night seven years ago, where any chance he once had at living a normal life had died right along with his freedom. And yet, instead of the Earth loyalists nabbing him and taking off, they managed to get ahold of Mabel instead. Dipper felt a bitter chill run through him as he watched his younger self reach out for his abducted sister as she disappeared into the night, presumably never to be seen again. A year past, one that he spent in worry as Stan and Ford searched high and low, all the Gems of Crystal Falls lending their aid to try and find Mabel but they never did. Dipper begged, pleaded against his uncles as they finally called off all their search efforts, knowing that any hope of getting her back again was incredibly slim. Yet over time, he began to accept that painful truth as well, as much as it hurt his heart in every conceivable way to think that he’d never see his sister again. And so, as a way of bracing himself against that pain, he forced himself to move on, to keep on living his life, because certainly, that’s what Mabel would have wanted.

And so he did. He watched with wonder as his childhood played out in a much better way than it actually had. He lived in warmth, comfort, and peace with Stan and Ford, their care for him immense as they both knew he could have been lost just as easily as Mabel had been. Never once did he want for anything; he was always well fed, well bathed, well rested, and well loved. Stan taught him how to fight while Ford brought him up with all of the scientific knowledge he had in his arsenal. He craved knowledge, thrived in it, sought every opportunity available to him to learn more just to satisfy his curious nature. His days were spent in free, cheerful exploration, Steven often at his side as they ran through the streets and woods of Crystal Falls, building friendships with most of the Gems who lived there and uncovering the mysteries that lay beyond its limits. In time, Lapis showed up to Crystal Falls, just as eager to learn as he was and together in their pursuit of knowledge, they were unstoppable. And they years went by in their quiet way, unfettered in their peacefulness and bliss as he lived his life, embracing every second of it and reveling in the amazingness of the complex, yet beautiful world all around him. A world that he had never gotten to see much of with his own eyes as they had been blinded so long ago. A world that he could have had just as much as Mabel did. A world that he wanted, that he felt robbed of, that he should have had and why didn’t he? Why had he been the one who had been taken away? Why had he been the one who suffered through so much senseless torture? Why had his life been stolen away from him before it had even really begun?

And most of all, why couldn’t he do anything to change it?

But he could… The tug at the back of his mind reminded him. He could change it if he really wanted to. He could bend time, warp it to his favor, make the clock reverse to the point that he could actually have the peaceful, coveted life that had just played out before him. He had that power now, it was all his. And accessing it would be as easy as simply opening up that door and letting it all flow in.

As he considered opening that door for the first time, somewhere, on the other half of his consciousness, Bill Cipher laughed triumphantly, knowing that it would only be a matter of time before his impressionable young vessel caved completely. And then, there would be no one who could stop him.

The Kindergarten’s implosion could be heard and seen all across Crystal Falls, even as far as the abandoned ship near the lake. The moment they all realized what it was, Stan and Ford had already started setting off, the Crystal Gems hurrying not too far behind. And though she had been ordered to stay behind at the ship with Pacifica and Steven, Mabel refused to simply wait by while her brother suffered any longer. Which was why she raced after them, running across town without a single stop, all the way to the ruined remains of the Kindergarten. And the sight she found there was more than enough to make her blood run completely cold.

There he was, floating high above Stan, Ford, and the Gems trying to stop him, his entire body aglow with blue flames as he let out a dark, malicious laugh. Gone was all the calm control Dipper had had when he had sealed them both away, for though it had taken him months, Bill had finally gotten the control he had been so fervently vying for. Already the demon had taken some of his anger out on his vessel for his lengthy imprisonment, if his bloody nose and chest were any indication, but even so his manner was wild and unrestrained as he rained his vengeance down upon those below without a single sign of hesitance or restraint, triumphantly taunting them all the while.

For a moment, the most Mabel could do was watch all this chaos unfold from her distant vantage point, tears streaming down her cheeks as she felt all sense of waning hope fade away. She knew that Dipper had fought for so hard and for so long to keep Bill at bay, more than likely putting himself through endless amounts of anguish and agony every step of the way. But in the end, his fierce, courageous struggle still hadn’t been enough. In the end, the demon had still won, he was still having his long awaited revenge, he was still poised to destroy her entire family, Dipper included.

And after years of doing nothing, that was something that Mabel was not about to let happen.

“Hey!” she shouted, boldly rushing forward into the fray. The moment they realized she was there, Stan and Ford tried everything they could to hold her back, but she pushed past her uncles this time, running right up to her possessed brother, glaring up at him with all of the ferocity and righteous fury she could muster. “Get out of him already, Bill! Now!”

“Well, well…” Bipper began with an intrigued grin as he drifted down a bit, Bill still clearly in control as his yellow eye flashed twistedly. “Look who we have here… Glad to see you could make it, Shooting Star! I was thinking I was missing one out of the set, but nope! Guess the family’s all here, finally together again! Isn’t it just sweet?”

“Shut up!” Mabel growled, her hands curled into tight fists at her sides. “I don’t know how you beat Dipper back and broke out but that doesn’t matter, because you’re going to get out of his body and leave all of us alone!”

“Oh yeah?” he asked challengingly. “And what makes you think that? What makes you think I’m not just gonna burn you and your stupid uncles to a crisp before doing the same thing to the rest of this worthless planet?”

“I know you’re not gonna do that because somewhere in that body, Dipper’s still there, I know it,” she retorted, her manner still brazen and resolved. “And I know he would never do that.”

“Ha!” he laughed mockingly at this claim. “Then clearly you don’t know your own brother that well, kid. He just spent the last several months trying his best to resist using our immense cosmic power, and you wanna know the only reason he finally gave in? So he could take your happy little life away from you so he could have it instead while you’d be tortured and imprisoned for years on end just like he was! You call that selfless? Or noble? Or heroic? Cause I sure don’t!”

Mabel’s determination finally shaken away into shock upon hearing this, her eyes widening as she tried to make sense of what she had just heard. “W-wha… n-no! That… that’s not true! H-he wouldn’t… you… you’re lying!”

“You wish I was, kid,” he scoffed coldly. “But go ahead and tell her, Pine Tree! Tell her all about how you were ready and willing to roll back time and flip your fates around! I’m sure she’d love to hear about how much you don’t care about her!” A gasp escaped him, tears starting to well up in his eyes as his other half was finally allowed some control. Guilt was written all over his expression as he looked down at her, telling her all that she needed to know that the demon had, against all odds, been telling the truth. “M-Mabel… I… I didn’t… I was just�� I never wanted you to-” He let out a sharp cry of anguish as control was viciously ripped away from him again, his remorse turning into a smug grin. “See, Shooting Star? He can’t even bring himself to deny it because it’s true! He was gonna throw you under the bus just so he could take everything you’ve ever known and loved for himself! Some brother he turned out to be, huh?”

Mabel said nothing for a moment, a few tears finally escaping her as she thought about just how horrible it all was. It was true: Dipper really had wanted to swap their fates around, to put himself in her peaceful place while she took his own horrific one. He had gone through so much agony in his life that she couldn’t even begin to imagine going through all of that herself, much less somehow surviving it like he had. And yet… for as terrible as this truth was… she still couldn’t find it in her to be angry at him like Bill clearly wanted her to be. She couldn’t be, no matter how hard she tried, because when it came right down to it, he had every single right to feel that way. He had been beaten, blinded, abandoned, brutalized, and yet in the end, in that deciding moment when he had been given a chance to exact his revenge against the family that had wronged him, he hadn’t. Instead, he had turned the tables, trapping both himself and Bill away and remaining strong in his vigil for as long as he had been able to hold out. He had saved them all, even when he really hadn’t been obligated to, even when he could have saved himself so much more easily. And in Mabel’s eyes, that selfless, sacrificial act far outweighed whatever small, overall insignificant moment of selfishness that had led him here.

“D-Dipper… I… You… W-what happened to you was… it was so unfair…” Mabel began waveringly, desperation in her eyes as she looked up at him tearfully, hoping that her brother could hear her beyond the demon controlling his body. “I haven’t stopped thinking about how unfair it all was from the minute we first found you in that cell… Pretty much every day I ask myself why all this happened to you instead of me. B-because if I could have, then I definitely would have swapped places with you in a heartbeat. You didn’t deserve what you went through. You were just a kid, we both were. Heck, we still are. And its so wrong that you’re the one who has to keep going through all these terrible things because… b-because of me… So… if you wanted to switch our lives around, or, heck, even if you wanted to just get rid of me altogether… t-then… then I’d understand that… Because you deserve so much better than what you got… You always have… and you always will…”

Bipper scoffed haughtily at this attempt at an appeal, his eyes rolling as he began buffering it off. “Oh give me a break, Shooting Star. Like any of your schmaltzy apologies are actually gonna-” He suddenly trailed off, his tears returning as sadden sincerity filled his expression. “M-Mabel, no… I… I never… I don’t want to change things around like that… I thought I did, b-but… but I was wrong… It’s true, my life has pretty much been… well, the worst, but I’d never, ever wish any of that on you… I just… I… The only thing I want is for all of this to finally end…”

“And it can,” Mabel smiled warmly, reaching her hand out to him once more. “You’re stronger than Bill is, Dipper, I know you are. You held out for so long now that you’re practically a pro at handling crazy murderous demons! And you wanna know why I know that? Because you’re my brother; and fighting back and being totally awesome is something that runs in our family, whether you like it or not.”

He let out a small, genuine laugh at this, and Mabel felt her heart begin to soar as, for the first time in years, he began to reach his hand back to meet hers. Yet before they could connect, it was stopped once again, this time by his other hand as a fierce struggle for control again. “N-no! Don’t listen to her! I’m not about to let a bunch of sentimental family garbage ruin everything I’ve worked so hard for!” His other half resisted fiercely though, pulling past this restraint as he continued reaching out for Mabel, his hope finally returning to him after years and years of it being gone. “Well I’m not about to let you or anything else keep me away from my sister anymore! So face it, Bill. This is over. And you’ve lost!”

And with that, their hands finally connected, years and years of separation and grief ending in one moment of sheer love and triumph. The demon let out a wild screech of defeat as suddenly, without any warning of all, he was shoved straight out of his longtime vessel, back into his triangular form as he shot back into the open air. As Stan, Ford, and the Gems hurried after Bill and eventually forced him to retreat, the blue glow surrounding Dipper faded, his shared power gone as his eyes closed and he collapsed right into Mabel’s arms. She held onto him tightly, mostly out of fear that he’d be taken from her again if she ever let him go, as he trembled uncontrollably, his body and mind both in shock over just how much it had been through over the past few seemingly endless months. But even so, she was there for him, rubbing a hand over his back gently in an attempt to soothe him as she whispered gentle reassurances to him all the while.

“It’s ok, bro-bro,” she said softly, ignoring everything else going on around her as she reserved her attention solely for him. “Everything’s gonna be alright… it’s over now… You’re safe… you’re free… And that’s exactly how you’re gonna be from here on out… I promise…”

Dipper said nothing in response to any of this, mostly because his mind was still struggling to pull its ruined parts together again as it recovered from Bill’s incredibly toxic presence within it. But even so, he showed his appreciation for her comfort by slowly, shakily lifting his arms to return her embrace as he buried his face into her shoulder, knowing that this was perhaps the first time in seven years that he truly felt like he was no longer alone.

And even though tears were still running down her cheeks through it all, Mabel couldn’t help but smile, joy unlike any she had ever experienced before flooding her every sense. Because for the first time in seven years, through pain and scars and grief and guilt and everything else, he had reached out to her once more. Even if time couldn’t take back any of the things that had kept them apart in the past, they were finally together again.

And for both of the Pines twins, this was more than enough.

40 notes · View notes