#the program crashed FIVE TIMES Tumblr posts

[wispscribbles]

❄️ Remember to bring blankets for your recon mission ❄️

[ruvviks]

"Colton and Akiyama have a long and rich history, having worked together for Arasaka since their early twenties— Colton as director of the SERPENT projects and Head of Special Programs, and Akiyama as recruiter and quality control manager across all of the corporation's Night City facilities. The two disliked each other from the start and from an outsider's perspective only rarely saw eye to eye; but if anything their rivalry was a challenge, a way to keep each other sharp, and one of the only ways they could have some fun in the megacorporation's grasp. Years later, the two reunite at Club Bodytalk following the incident in spaceship Elysium and the fall of Cobra Cybernetics. Surrounded by the victims of the projects they once ran, their heads are forcibly turned into the direction of their past mistakes— their guilt connects them and it forges a bond of understanding they can't get with anyone else, and while they cannot erase their past they can ensure that no one else ever has to go through any of that again." ↳ andy belongs to @mojaves, template here [x]

taglist (opt in/out)

@shellibisshe, @florbelles, @ncytiri, @roseeway, @stars-of-the-heart;

@lestatlioncunt, @katsigian, @radioactiveshitstorm, @estevnys, @adelaidedrubman;

@celticwoman, @rindemption, @carlosoliveiraa, @noirapocalypto, @dickytwister;

@killerspinal, @euryalex, @ri-a-rose, @velocitic, @thedeadthree;

@kanos, @swordcoasts, @ordinarymaine, @claudiawolf

[mudpuddless]

Northern Cody with yellow wellies based on this post by @rochenn

[bugsandcoffee]

I swear gimp exists to drive me insane

[northwestofinsanity]

These professors and their PowerPoints with embedded videos and massive graphic size, man... (This one wasn't even close to the file size of the one I had last week, and it still caused trouble)

[llama-head]

My new semester is abt to start and I didn’t take any sims pics….welp

[adviceformefromme]

FIVE THINGS I HAD TO CHANGE IN ORDER TO HEAL MY LIFE...

1] I had to delete social media. Exclusively Instagram. IG was consuming my life, the constant posting, the energy I was receiving was not in anyway positive. I knew my time was being wasted on the app and I couldn’t seem to help myself. It was an addiction. I first started deleting the app each day and reinstalling each time I wanted to check it. When got sick and had to have an emergency surgery last summer I knew in order to heal and stay mentally sane I HAD to delete the app. I have not gone back since. This singlehandedly removed so much toxicity out of my life. 

2] I quit watching the news / reading the news. Those nightmares, those fearful thoughts, all programmed into my subconscious day-by-day by the repeated messages of fear and worry. And while my heart breaks for what is going on in the world, it was bringing me down - without any purpose. So I removed myself. 

3] I got real serious about my connection with God. This transformed me. From someone who struggled with saying the word ‘God’ to Now knowing the love and guidance is something I receive daily, the transformation has been real. This looked like working with a spiritual coach, daily prayers, listening with intent during mediation to any messages. I started 1 hour mediations listening to God and although mostly silent the wisdom would pour in always from above. 

4] I changed my diet. I quit carbs. This single handedly changed my life. No more extreme hunger even though I just ate 2 hours ago, no more carb crashes. I removed all the carbs and started a protein and veg diet with some fruits. I invested in a juicer, I started studying nutrition. I also quit alcohol. Learning about balancing my hormones through removing glucose (carbs, starches, sugars) has impacted me in ways I never knew possible. 

5] I started running. As someone who works from home, it was very easy for me to be completely stagnant all day, and believe my dog walks were equivalent to exercise. In order to keep a healthy flow of blood, and maintain heart health, I needed to give my heart some work. This meant running. I started running down the road and back with many breaks in-between. I now run on the treadmill in the gym 3-4 times per week along with a little resistance training. When you start to show your body love, your confidence grows, you sleep better, your energy is replenished. It’s a win win. 

With every one of these five steps. It took a while. I didn’t just stop eating carbs. I quit and I went back and realised going back to the old way wasn’t working. My relationship with God took time, I would skip my meditations and then realise how much I benefited from them. I had to delete and re-install instagram multiple times a day. The point being, sometimes you got to slip-up. But make sure you’re falling forward. 

[rboooks]

DC x DP: The Adoptive Son

Danny Fenton gets lost in the Infinite Releams and without the Infinite Map, he has no hope finding his way home.

After wandering for weeks, he quickly realizes his human side is dying from lack of food and stress. With a heavy heart, he crashes lands in a new world, desperate for rest.

A new world that was seemed to behind in terms of technology. But he's not afraid of helping the world catch up if it means finding a way home.

He crashed in the middle of nowhere forest and after three days of walking by foot- too worn out to fly- he comes across Gotham.

Taking a page out of Vlad's book- as much as it makes him feel sick- he possesses people to get himself set up in the new world. He needs to find somewhere with enough money that he can build a S.O.S for his friends to find him.

And he needs resources to survive.

He finds a wealthy family who is so invested in breaking each other apart they didn't notice their sudden ease in wanting to adopt Danny.

Seemingly overnight, the Crowne family went from slowly collapsing to once more being at the top due to their adopted son Danny Crowne's genius mind. Despite his young age, his adoptive father allowed him to turn the family business from fashion design to medical and technical advances.

At age fourteen he sat within the board meetings slowly but surely taking over and raising the company's stocks and power.

They developed the first heart pumps, made leaps and bounds in cancer treatment, and created software and computer programs that and their prosthetics were the most advanced in the world.

There were rumors that the head design for all engineering projects- including the prosthetics- were all done by Danny Crowne. They were never confirmed.

Even business deals done by the Crownes were suspiciously so far in their favor many believed they were making deals with the multiple families of Gotham's underbelly.

That was also never proven.

Despite all the whispers about him, Danny Crowne was considered one of the brightest minds in Gotham. Everyone who spoke to him claimed he was a soft-spoken gentleman and was even compared to royalty from his regal composition.

Personally, Bruce has always had a bad feeling about Danny Crowne. He knows the boy is off in some way, all his Instincts scream danger when he's around.

At first, he was ecstatic to hear the Crownes had also adopted an orphan from a poor background. It had been a few years after he had gotten his ward, Dick. Despite it being five years since he first accepted Dick into his home, his ward had not made any friends besides Barbara Gordon. None of the elite children gave Dick the time of day pass making passive aggressive comments about him.

Then the news of Danny Crowne broke, and everyone knew he had practically been picked off the streets after the CPS had forced him into the juvenile hall as the only place that had space for him.

Just like Dick.

He had hoped that a similar past would help the two boys bond. He had tried pushing Dick into speaking to Danny, and had gone out of his way to personally invite the young man to a party he threw for all of Dicks classmates.

The first thing Danny Crowne did upon arriving at his house was step away from the crowd and study Bruce's home wiring. Dick later told him Danny made him feel strange, like the other boy would be one the loons they stopped during the night.

Bruce, stop pushing for their friendship.

Time moved on, but Crownes only grew in power, and by the time he took in Jason, Danny Crowne inherited his family assets after his adoptive parents mysterious deaths.

They began to look into Danny after Nightwing had discovered a trail of dangerous experiments from shell companies that all led back to Crowne Co. Jason also mentioned that a lot of street kids disappeared after Danny Crowne had turn his sights on them with a new charity program his company ran.

No one knew what happened to the kids and no one in the legal system seemed to care.

Bruce thought about the Crownes rise to wealth and felt sick. Had Danny been running a trafficking ring since his adoption? Had that escaped Batman's notice for four years?

Despite the fact they were still at eachother throats, both Bruce and Dick agreed to work togther to bring Danny Crowne down. How?

Simple.

Danny Crowne was openly bisexual and, according to Jason, who was half-raised by working girls, his eyes always followed Dick around the room.

Operation Honey Pot was a go.

(Danny didn't mean to stay here for four years but had built himself a home, and no natural portals were opening. He figured he could secretly construct his while helping abused kids find safe ways out of the city and start new lives. Technically illegal, no one had batted an eye when the kids vanished, so he figured getting them somewhere safe was more important. Indeed Batman had better things to do than track down kids in better foster homes. He test-ran the homes himself before placing the children. Yes, overshadowing made him feel bad, but he rather experienced the house before overshadowing the social workers into legalizing the stay under new names. He was sick of them sticking kids in juvenile halls just cause other foster homes were "out of jurisdiction".

At least his charities helped the age out kids succeed in life.

Now why was handsome Dick Grayson winking at him??? Gosh, that made him more nervous than all the lessons Clockwork forced him to take back when he was training to take the Ghost Throne. The classes helped him become one of the best CEO in the world, but they were also the reason he got into this whole mess to begin with. At least he looked regal when he spoke. )

( Part 2 ) (part 3)

[comicsandconstellations]

| Programming |

A comic? From me? Magic.

Honestly, this idea has been plaguing me for a while, so I decided to just sit down and draw it. Please excuse this quality, my Procreate crashed trying to finish this so it has had to be coloured slightly differently than how I wanted.

I feel like Echo would have been so against leaving Crosshair, especially after they found out about the chips.

Also, did anyone tell him that they couldn’t confirm he was the Algorithm? Like, Rex knew and when Echo gets out of it, he thanks him for coming back, but like, the rest weren’t there to rescue him. Their mission was to shut it down, it just happened to be him.

Before anyone comments on the armour not being correct, translating it into a comic is hard, and I always draw Echo with Fives vambrace so that’s why it’s not his official set. Honestly, I just loved making this (insert me screaming at my iPad while it crashed multiple times) so maybe I should live up to my namesake and make more comics. (I have lots of joke ones in the works, I mean like proper ones like this.)

Anyway, sorry for ranting, the issues making this has frustrated me.

Hope you enjoyed

[captainsophiestark]

Unexpected Guest

Dick Grayson x Reader

Masterlist - Join My Taglist!

Written for my personal fic writing challenge for 2024, Sophie's Year of Fic! Featuring a new fic being posted every Friday, all year long :)

Fandom: DC

Summary: Dating a vigilante sometimes leads to a few false alarm scares, but Dick Grayson couldn't be happier with how well his partner rolls with his crazy family.

Word Count: 1,410

Category: Fluff

Putting work into an AI program without permission is illegal. You do not have my permission. Do not do it.

Crash!

My eyes shot open at the sound of a noise from the living room of the apartment I shared with my boyfriend, Dick Grayson. The man in question still snored peacefully next to me, annoyingly, but a quick glance at the clock told me why. It wasn't quite 5am, and Dick had been out patrolling until one in the morning. I listened carefully for any other noises in the apartment. I didn't want to wake my poor boyfriend up unless I absolutely had to.

After a few minutes of nothing, I heard another crash followed by a tense voice and what sounded like hushed swearing. This time, I didn't hesitate to roll over and whack Dick on the chest, hard.

His eyes shot open and he was half sitting up when I managed to throw a hand over his mouth to keep him from giving away that we were awake. My wide eyes must've tipped him off to something being wrong, because I immediately saw him shift from sleepy to ready for action.

Slowly, I dropped my hand from his mouth and leaned in to whisper in his ear.

"There's someone in our living room. I heard two crashes and someone swearing."

Dick nodded once, then motioned with his hands while mouthing 'stay here'. He hopped off the bed, grabbing his escrima sticks from where he'd thrown them onto the dresser, then stalked towards the door with catlike grace and stealth. After a minute, I decided I couldn't just let him go alone, superhero or no, so I grabbed the bat I kept by my side of the bed and followed after him.

Dick popped out the door, and after a moment without hearing anything, I followed, bat at the ready. I found my boyfriend with one hand on his hip, weapons down, staring into the kitchen. I followed his gaze to find none other than Jason Todd in our kitchen, a mixing bowl and some eggs in front of him and a look with a significant lack of guilt on his face.

"What? I was after somebody and it dragged me all the way to Bludhaven. I needed a place to crash that was closer than Gotham."

Dick and I both shook our heads. As the oldest of a very high number of siblings, his apartment had become a second home base for every single other batkid. When we'd finally moved in together last month, he'd warned me I needed to be prepared for things like this.

"Glad you know to help yourself, Little Wing," said Dick with a sigh, waving one tired hand to Jason before turning and heading back to bed. I squeezed his shoulder and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek as he passed me, then headed into the kitchen with a smile.

"My tax for you making me think I'd have to fight off an assailant with a bat at five in the morning is my own serving of whatever you're making," I said, taking a seat on one of the kitchen island stools. Jason raised an eyebrow at me.

"You're not going back to bed?"

"Nah. Unlike Dick, I got to bed at a somewhat reasonable hour last night, so the adrenaline dump isn't threatening to put me to sleep. I'd rather hang out with you, especially since you're a better cook than Dick and I combined. I'm not missing out on that."

Jason snorted, cracking an egg and resuming his cooking all the same.

"Dick contributes nothing to your combined cooking score," he said. "I'm pretty sure he's burned cereal before."

I laughed. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're right. He's gotten better though. We watch the Food Network and look up recipes to make together, and I can trust him with way more than I used to be able to."

"If you could teach him anything it'd be a miracle," said Jason with a snort. I just hummed, trying to pick up some new skills of my own as I watched Jason cook.

"To be totally fair to him, I once forgot what I was doing and strained soup because I was on autopilot for pasta."

Jason barked a laugh, unable to hold himself back, and looked at me with a grin and a raised eyebrow.

"Really?" I nodded. "That's pathetic."

I just shrugged. "Yeah. But at least there's not a lot of places to go but up, after that."

"I guess so."

Jason and I chatted as he cooked and I watched, keeping our voices low so Dick could sleep—although, after the night he'd had, he'd probably sleep through a train in our living room. After breakfast, Jason decided to go down for a nap on the couch, passing out almost as soon as we'd put the last few dishes in the sink. I just smiled, threw a blanket over him, and wandered back into the bedroom to find Dick.

It was late enough in the morning now that my boyfriend was officially up and about, stretching by the bed with his hair still a little messed up from sleeping. I grinned and flopped down against the headboard as he crossed the room to the dresser to pull out clothes.

"How's Jaybird?" he asked. "Still a good cook?"

"Still a great cook. And he's good. He seems a little wiped out from patrols and stuff, though. He's taking a nap on the couch right now."

Dick smiled and shook his head. "I get up and he goes to sleep. Typical."

"Clearly he's avoiding you."

"Clearly."

Dick and I shared a smile, and then he sighed.

"I'm going to take a shower. Hopefully Jason will be up by the time I'm out, because I actually have things to do today."

I smiled, shifting on the bed to pull the covers over myself. "I'm sure you can be quiet if he's not. Wake me up when you're out of the shower, okay? A post-breakfast nap sounds too good to resist right now."

My boyfriend laughed. "Alright, will do. I'll wake you and Jason up when I'm out."

"Mhm. Good luck with him."

"Thanks, I'm gonna need it."

I closed my eyes, getting comfortable and ready for my nap, but before I drifted off I heard Dick's shuffling footsteps crossing the room to stand by my side of the bed. A second later, he sat down next to me, the bed dipping under his weight. I cracked an eye open to squint at him.

"What do you want?"

He grinned at me and chuckled.

"Don't worry, I'm not going to interfere with your nap. I just... I wanted to say how much I appreciate you, and how good you are with my family. They mean the world to me, but I know having vigilantes dropping in at all hours of the day and night can be a little much to deal with. So thank you for being so wonderful about it, and about them."

I sighed, sitting all the way up and propping myself up on my hands to look Dick in the eye.

"Dick, I love you. And I love your family. Sure, it took a little getting used to some of the vigilante stuff, but the longer I know them the more I love them. You don't have to thank me for anything. They're my family too."

Dick absolutely beamed at me, wrapping one arm around my back and pulling me in for a kiss. I immediately reciprocated, tangling one hand in the hair at the nape of his neck. I smiled into the kiss and a moment later, Dick deepened it. We were right on the edge of escalating into something more, but both thought better of it at the last moment.

"I should take a shower," he said, still looking a little reluctant as he pulled away.

"Yeah, and you should stop interrupting my nap."

Dick snorted, rolling his eyes as he finally stood and headed for the bathroom. I grinned after him as he went, flopping back down onto my pillow only as Dick closed the bathroom door.

I took a deep breath and sighed, a smile on my face, as I closed my eyes for the second time. I heard the water start in the bathroom, and a faint smell of breakfast still hung in the air. I was surrounded by people I loved dearly, and who loved me right back. No matter the scare Jason had given me when he'd shown up, I couldn't ask for a better start to my morning than this.

****************

Everything Taglist: @rosecentury @kmc1989

DC Taglist: @luv-ghostie

[skzdarlings]

bodyguard: the first guard | part five | chan/reader

masterlist.

(part one of the previous story.)

part one | part two | part three | part four | part five | tba

( read on AO3 )

A sequel to the Bodyguard. Miroh’s daughter is assigned a bodyguard of her own. The past is confronted when old friendships and new enemies are pushed to the brink.

pairing: bang chan/reader content info: sequel to the bodyguard (felix/reader). this is a new reader perspective. this chapter contains explicit sexual content. this chapter also has a content warning for descriptions of torture and dehumanization, plus the aftermath of trauma, themes of identity loss and healing. the previously established story dynamics are prevalent. chapter word count: 10,200 words.

enjoy <3

-

B E FO R E

Felix returns to the base and he is scrutinized, as expected.  They all want to know why he was taken, what the enemy wanted, how he escaped.   Felix has never played so many sides all while obfuscating his real objective.  Alone, he guides himself through the venomous viper’s pit that is this war: Miroh and his enemy, Miroh and the world. 

Where it concerns the enemy, Miroh will always intervene.  He sees the enemy as the antithesis to the house of Miroh.   A rich, spoiled fool, holed up in his golden cave, oblivious to what he has and the work it takes to acquire it.  Miroh is jealous. Miroh is hateful. 

Those are emotions that Felix can manipulate.  He learned it from the best. 

“It was an ambush,” Felix tells him.  “They knew I was going to be there.  They were waiting for me.”  He uses his reputation, formed by Miroh, against Miroh.   

Felix would never lose a fight.  Felix would never fail a mission.  Felix would never surrender.    Felix is a reflection of Miroh so he presents the most flattering image. 

“What information did they want?”  Miroh asks. 

Felix can see the gears spinning in his head.  What could the enemy be seeking so determinedly to lay a trap for Miroh’s asset?  Oh, Miroh has a suspicion.  Felix can see it, because he knows exactly what it is.   

“They asked about Project Twenty-Three,” Felix says.  “I told them I had never heard of it.  Even if I had, I wouldn’t tell them anything.” 

Project Twenty-Three.  Chris has vented about it to Felix.  It is a cyber mission, striking against the enemy’s tightly guarded servers.  It intends to blackout the grid and lay virtual traps while they re-calibrate, compromising not only the enemy but everyone else on that grid: civilians, their homes, their hospitals, their shelters. 

It is a significant job for its scope and because it is the first time a mission will be helmed by Miroh’s daughter. 

Miroh’s daughter, Chris says, intends to sabotage the operation. 

It is Felix’s worst fears coming true.  Miroh’s daughter rebelling against Miroh is doomed to be a catastrophe.  She will inevitably go down and when that blaze tears through the sky, Chris will crash and burn in a similar inferno.  He is too blinded by proximity, too idealistic to see how it is impossible to truly destroy a man like Miroh. 

No one but classified personnel are supposed to know about Project Twenty-Three.  Miroh’s daughter let it slip to Chan, who let it slip to Felix.   As far as Miroh is concerned, Felix should not know about it.  As far as Miroh is concerned, Felix is telling the truth. 

As far as Miroh is concerned, someone is leaking highly sensitive data to the enemy. 

“I’m smarter than that, though,” Felix says.  He appeals to all that haughty vanity and says, “I was trained by the best.  Of course I got away.”

“Of course,” Miroh says.  Where before, he was wary, his guard comes down. 

Felix can sneak in.  Felix can lay his attack. 

“What else did they say?” Miroh asks. 

“I overheard them,” Felix says.  “They’re going to try and kill you.  And it’s going to happen inside your house.” 

The trap is laid.

-

P R E S E N T   D A Y

Miroh only put one soldier through a reconfiguration program.  And it wasn’t me.  It was you.   

Chan looks at you as if you shot him even though he was the one who fired at you.  

The words land with more violence than a bullet. 

It can’t be true.  That is your first reaction: denial. He is lying or he is confused or something, something, something. Anything but whatever he just said. 

He tries to step towards you.  You look at him and think of the First Guard: him in that corridor, a hand around your neck.  He fought just enough to make it real, the way you and Changbin sometimes fight, but it never went too far, did it?  You think back to that first fight in the ring.  You commended yourself for lasting so long, but that should have been a hint.  You would not have lasted a round with the First Guard on a good day, never mind after fighting several others.   He never came at you with the full brunt of his fatal capacity like you would expect, like you should have considered at the time. 

His eyes in the van, the tilt of his head.  

Trusting as your car stopped an inch from his body. 

His hands out like you were a wild, unpredictable animal, a weapon, something lethal he had to contain.   It’s me, he said.  It’s just me.  As if you knew who that was.

He does the same thing now.  You wrench away from him.   

“No,” you say.

He says your name but it doesn’t sound like a name; it sounds like begging, it sounds like please, it sounds like desperation, painfully barbed on his tongue.  You half expect him to start bleeding from the mouth. 

“No,” you say again.  You jerk away even though he has stopped reaching for you.  You feel a phantom hand on your chest and on your head, a cold fire in your veins. 

You slam shoulders as you dart past.  He says your name again, this time like an alarm, only barely short of a scream as he chases after you.  You get as far as the door before he catches you, his hand wrapped around your bicep and your name a weapon on his lips.

“Stop it,” you say.  It isn’t loud but it is brutal all the same. 

He lets go as if you electrocuted him. 

You look at him.  He stares back, all that begging in his dark eyes. 

“You can’t – you can’t leave,” he says.  His panic bubbles into frustration and he says, “You just told me off for doing that, didn’t you?”

You think of him on that rooftop, not even blinking at Miroh’s dead body, like he couldn’t care less, his eyes rivetted to you alone.   

“Do you trust me?” you ask. 

You think he would rather get hit.  A moment of pain, a scar to join the others. Instead, he has to endure the intensity of your eyes, suffer whatever fucked up expression is haunting your body, and then he has to let you go. 

You do not look at his face when leaving.  You don’t want to see this side of him.  There are already too many versions of him in your head, just as there are too many versions of yourself. 

The denial does not last long.  You walk through the brisk night, destination nowhere.  The sky feels too big.

It’s preposterous, isn’t it?  You are in your body right this moment, looking at the world with your own eyes.  How can anything be wrong inside?   But even while attempting to convince yourself otherwise, you know the truth.  It has been long unfurling in the back of your mind.   You have not felt like yourself for days, maybe weeks, maybe the entire three months since this downfall began. 

You don’t even remember what it means to feel like yourself. 

All the nightmares, the visions, the flashes of dreams that feel more like memories – maybe memories is exactly what they are.  So suppressed it feels like watching a movie rather than your own life, but your story regardless.   Sifting through those fragments feels like searching through rubble in a collapse. How are you ever expected to find a person under that much annihilation? 

When it happens, Changbin said, what feels like a lifetime ago.  When it’s just you and you’re trying to decide who you want to be, not who your father wants you to be…  When you’re trying to remember everything and you can’t decide what was real and what was just training and what was Miroh…”

A sob rips out of you.  You have cried more in days than you have in years.  You cover your face and fall into the dark of your closed eyes.  You see your friend, not a fragment or broken memory, but a whole person.  The scar on your palm twinges, reminding you that you are real and here. 

Remember me, he said. 

That was the very first thing you did.   You saw him on that rooftop and you remembered something.  Him, younger, bleeding, emerging from a fog of smoke.  He lifted a weight off your chest.  He made you a promise. 

You try to chase the memory of that dream, try to hold the image of him in your mind, but it moves like water through a sieve.  It’s like he’s standing right there, just in the corner of your eye if you could only turn your head to look.  But you are trapped in place.  Pinned down, a weight on your chest. 

You lose track of time under the stars.  You are too numb to feel the cold.  Only when the sky purples with the very earliest streak of dawn do you move.  You look at your feet as you walk and it feels like someone else is moving you.  You know it’s just exhaustion, a trick of the weary eye, but a shudder moves through you.   

You don’t want to think about it.  Whenever your mind starts to go there – to that room, to that hole, to the cell – it backs away screaming.  It is probably why you can’t hold any picture for longer than a second. 

A small part of you still rebels, insisting it isn’t true because it’s can’t be true, but you know intrinsically that it is. 

This confirmation solidifies when you get back to the room and find Chan still awake, sitting in a chair with his head in his hands. 

He lifts his head.   You can’t hold his gaze for long, swallowed up by the dark depth that sees something in you, far beyond the surface, buried so deep you can’t find it. 

You turn away.   You climb into bed. 

It isn’t an escape.  You know that, even as you close your eyes and shut out the world.   It’s all waiting for you there, your subconscious caught in a perpetually crashing tidal wave.  

You fall asleep, ready to face the nightmares. 

-

It feels like swimming against an acidic current.  You push through but it bears down; you struggle but it burns your skin, sloughs down to the clean marrow.  Pieces of you are lost to the tide.  You try to catch each flaking sliver of personhood but then your arms are full and you can no longer swim.

You are going to drown. 

“Let go,” says a voice, colder than the water.  “This will all stop.  Just let go.” 

Just let go.  Just let your skin unravel.  Just let the tide take it away.  You will never get it back.  You will be a living corpse, a half-consciousness puppeting your bones. 

You decide to drown.  You slip further and further into the blackness behind your lids.

“Hey, it’s me!  I’m coming!” 

Changbin.

You can hear his footsteps as he thunders towards you, but you can’t see him.  Your eyelids are so heavy, as if being held shut by a hand in the water.

Another hand reaches straight through the corrosive cold and seizes your face in a desperate grip. 

“Wake up,” Changbin says.  He taps your cheek repeatedly, a little harder each time, a little more frantic.  “Hey, wake up.  Please.  Please wake up.”

It feels like he is prying your eyes open.  One moment there is nothing but darkness, then Changbin is there.  He looks like he did when you last saw him, grown, fight-ready, a little scar on his face.  It bleeds more than such a tiny mark should.  A droplet hits your cheek, burning hot compared to the water. 

“It’s me,” he says. “Hold on.  Keep your eyes open.  Don’t go.  I promise I’ll get you out.” 

Don’t go.  Don’t go.  An echoing reverberation that circles the wooden beams high above your head.  You look there, staring at the ceiling as your lungs slowly fill with oxygen. 

The ceiling shatters in a spray of splinters, the world vanishing in a cloud of grey smoke.  Changbin is gone and your father stands over you, keeping that weight on your chest with a press of his fist. 

“You’ll thank me one day,” he says, and plunges you back under water.  Ice cold currents and electric hot fire twine in and around you in an unfathomable vice.  Your vision flickers as you twitch and flail, avoiding one sensation to succumb to the other. 

“Don’t go,” Changbin says.  “I promise I’ll get you out.” 

Another bolt of lightning slices through you. 

“Just let go.”  A cold and clinical voice.

There is a war between those voices.  Time passes slowly as you volley in the current, slamming into one or the other. 

In the bubbling frenzy, you hear a whisper.  

“Let her go.”  That is not Changbin.  That is not your father.  It’s too soft – soft, until it’s not, until it sounds like speaking through an open chest cavity, heaving up its heart with every cry.  “Please,” the voice begs.  “Let her go.” 

“Thank me,” your father says.  He stands with his back to you, angled just enough you can see the gun in his hands.   You can’t see the person on the receiving end.  You just know it’s a soldier.  You just know it’s a boy. 

You have to stop it.  The thought overwhelms you and you reach for the gun, but your hand never makes contact, splashing through cold water. 

“Subject recognizes control,” says that clinical voice.

There is a hand on your chest.  It pushes you back under water. 

You are alone in the current and the corrosion and the cold.  The hand pushes you deeper and deeper into the endless darkness under you.  

You are going to drown.  You are going to let yourself drown. 

“You don’t want to do that,” you say. 

Your father still has a gun in his hand.  It is pointed at that boy. 

“Subject— Control—”

You need to get that gun.  You need to swim.  You need to see him.  You need to save him. 

You finally let go. 

-

You open your eyes. 

Unlike in your dreams, it’s fast.  You jolt awake in a cold sweat.  The ceiling is unmoving, the air cool and dry from the motel’s cheap, noisy air conditioner.  The blinds are closed but the neon light outside the window creates a fuzzy square halo.  It brightens the room just enough to see  the outline of everything clearly.  

That includes Chan.

He is still awake.  If this was just one night ago, you would tell him to get into bed and sleep because you can’t have him tired for the mission.  But now, you find yourself staring back at him, at his bare and open face, his tired eyes and the uncomfortable tension in his shoulders.   

When you went to sleep, he was sitting on that same chair in the corner, and it looks like he hasn’t moved once.  He’s been waiting for you. 

He’s been waiting a lot longer than one night.   If she ever came back to me, he said, revealing years of hope, of watching, waiting for you to break through your conditioning and show him a sign.  He was never brainwashed, just trapped in a precarious situation, bound to a bargain with no way out that didn’t compromise you.  He could have saved himself at any time but it wouldn’t have mattered.   

“You were never reconfigured,” you say. 

“No.” 

The question and answer breaks a dam.  A flood of questions pour to the front of your mind, overwhelming you, taking you back to your dreams where you almost drown – again and again.  You remember the report, stating too much recollection could trigger some kind of breakdown.  Yes, you could ask Chan to tell you everything, to string together all those gaps in your nightmares, but you already know that would not help.  It would either feel like a story about a girl you do not know, or it would just throw you deeper into the whirlpool.

You let those questions turn over themselves like a crashing wave.  When it settles, you ask the one question that remains.

“Were we friends?” 

He doesn’t answer right away.   He leans forward, puts his elbows on his knees and clasps his hands under his chin.  He is impossibly strong but right now he looks too weak to support himself.

“No,” he finally says.  His eyes dart to the floor.  “No, we weren’t friends.” 

He looks at you and you fall into the unspoken story within his eyes.  You have been conversing without words since you met.  He has been looking at you with that wanting tilt and desperate stare since he stepped into the ring. 

You remember a fragment from a dream.   Him, younger, his face ravaged with tears and his mouth open on a muted shout.   It would be easy to mistake that as him being tortured, his pain that palpable.  But your memory is not of his suffering, just his watching, just his waiting.   

All this time, he has been waiting.  

“Did you love me?” you ask. 

This answer comes faster, but rougher as if guarding against vulnerability.  His voice is low.

“Yes.”

A phantom spark fires up your arm, straight into your heart. 

“Did I love you?” you ask.

He holds your gaze, though it feels like he is looking just a little past you, seeing something you can’t see.  Then again, maybe he doesn’t see it, maybe he is just searching, and maybe he comes up empty.  Because when he answers, his voice is airy, and the word is like a hiss of pain, like getting hit in the chest and all the air leaving the body at once.

“Yes,” he says.

You feel the weight of that hit too.  Wavering under the force of it, you blurt, “I don’t remember.” 

“I know,” he says.  He drops his head into his hands and rubs his palms over his face, scrunches his eyes shut tight and shakes his head.  “I know.”    

You want to go to him.  You are not sure where the urge comes from because, despite what he said, you have never loved like that.  Is it something buried inside you, something that remembers?  Maybe it’s just you, who you are now, the person who has spent the last few days with this man at her side.  His proximity has been a confusing comfort from the start.  Maybe it’s a memory or maybe it’s just him. 

You stand before thinking it through.  He doesn’t even notice, a sign this competent soldier is very far gone, his face still buried in his hands.  When you touch his shoulder, it catches him off guard, both arms jolting as if stung. 

He looks up at you, his hand instinctively flying to the one you rest on his shoulder.  He clasps it, holds it there, presses it down like he needs convincing it is real. 

He meets your eyes.   You do not know what you look like; you just know it hurts him, that it makes everything so much worse. 

A child-like sob punches out of him.  His eyes close tight, his face going red as he fights to hold it in.   He cried earlier and it looked like the typical outpouring of stress and hurt, but it did not look like this. 

After that first sob, reminiscent of the little boy he never really was, years of torment come tearing violently out of his chest.  Flashes of memories melt with the sight, his young face twisted as he wails, that muted shout filled in with his voice now. 

He holds his forehead, doubles over.  When you see the top of his head, those other images fade away.  It is just him, here, now.  Whoever he is, he has been good to you.  Your hand is still on his shoulder and he is still clinging to it. 

“Chan,” you whisper.  You’re not sure if he hears it, but his breath catches when you nudge him upright.  You are certain he can’t see very well through his tears, but he looks up anyway. 

When you climb into his lap, wrapping your arms around his neck, he does not hesitate to throw his arms around you.  His hands find your back and he presses you so close, it feels like he is trying to push you right into his heart.  He puts his face in your neck where he fights to steady his breathing. 

You touch the nape of his neck.  You shiver at his long exhale. 

You feel miserable and choked for a myriad of reasons.  For him, everything he as endured and lost.  For you, who doesn’t even know what she lost at all. 

“I’m sorry,” he says.  His breathing is less laboured, though his voice sounds sore.  He exhales again, some tension leaving his shoulders where you rest your hands. 

You squeeze those shoulders and lean back to look at him.  His expression is more than a little abashed, gaze uncertain.  You are not good at smiling but you try, even though you think your brows are furrowed and his sorrow is reflecting back through your eyes. 

“Thought we agreed to stop apologizing,” you say. 

His laugh is as weak as your smile, but certainly there.   You touch his face with your scarred palm, feel the curve of his jaw where that wound runs sharpest.    You think you can only touch him because of that scar.  You used to balk at the sight of someone else’s tears, even deride them.  You don’t remember being a lover.  You didn’t even realize you had a friend until it was too late.

You might not know who you are, and you might not know how to describe how you feel, but you certainly understand it feels different, and you certainly know what kind of person you do not want to be anymore. 

So you do not rip your hand away.  You curl a tuft of hair behind his ear. 

“I just—”  You trip over your own words, wishing you were a better speaker, more personable and warm than your stiff recitation.  “I can’t be that person,” you say.  “I don’t know what person I will be, but I’m not – I can’t—”

“I know,” he says, sincere.  He is holding your waist and he gives it a small squeeze, a reassuring touch that moves through you with a burst of warmth.  It simmers in your bloodstream when he smiles – his eyes still sorrowful despite the dimple in his cheek.   “I don’t wish you were someone else,” he says.  With a wince, he says, “I wish I was.” 

Your stomach twists in an awful knot.  You think of all that blood on his hands.  Despite his efforts to keep it away from you, you feel it on yourself.  You have to close your eyes to push away the flood of images, unsure which are imaginative fabrications and which are potential memories.  You just know he looks too young to have that kind of red on him. 

You open your eyes and look at him.  His eyes are open but his gaze is faraway, lost in thought.  You touch a tendril of curly hair, feel it under your fingers like you have the past couple nights.  He looks at you with eyes that have already shared multiple conversations. 

“I wish you hadn’t suffered,” you say.  “I don’t think anyone should suffer that way.  I don’t think the ends justify the means anymore.  But also I—” 

Even while your heart is changing inside, getting those words outside is a different struggle entirely. 

Chan looks at you with that tilt to his head, that questioning brow, his eyes a lot softer with his curiosity.  Your breath is jagged, a messy gasp as you gather yourself.  You look away, wholly incapable of maintaining eye contact.

“I got in the car with the First Guard,” you say.   “Not with some other version of you.  This soldier.  This Chan.”   You look down at your hands, absent-minded in the way you move them, from his shoulders down to his chest.  “This is the man I trusted,” you say.  “The one I still do.”

Your eyes lift.  They meet his.  His expression is a mix of confusion and amazement. 

His lips part with a question, but it gets caught.  He stares a little longer, then he asks, “Why?”

An unexpected laugh bubbles and bursts right out of you. 

“I have no idea,” you say, giving in to that bubbly feeling, letting it fill your chest and lift you up like a safety raft.  “I don’t know anything at all.” 

You realize there is something freeing in that thought.  No, you don’t know who you are.  No, you don’t know what is going to happen past right now.  You have to save your friend.  You have to end your father’s business.  Everything else, the becoming of you and the world and your place in it, is unanswerable.  You can’t find blueprints or scour maps or form battle strategies.  You don’t know where the water leads.  You just have to swim. 

“Maybe it doesn’t even matter,” you say with a shrug.  “I don’t know.  Nothing about yesterday, nothing tomorrow—”

“Just right now,” he says.

His voice is a little lower.  Just right now.  That was the pact you made the other night. 

Your whole body comes alight, waking from the ice cold state it has been frozen in.  It warms under his palms on your hips and where his dark eyes roam. 

“Just right now,” you repeat as softly.  You look at your hands again, realize more consciously how intimately they rest on his chest.  Rather than retract, you swipe your thumb across the exposed strip of skin where his flannel is buttoned askew.   “Maybe that’s all I need to know.” 

This right now feels different than before.  You don’t blame his emotional reaction to your earlier intimacy if it was an affect of all his memories, all he had lost, and all he was.  You think your straightforward trust in him – not in spite of his identity, but because of it – has shifted things again.  Your hands on his chest and your words in the open seem to have changed the shape of this whole room. 

“I’m the First Guard,” he says.  His eyes drop to your mouth then back up.  “You’re Miroh’s daughter.” 

“Yes, you are,” you say.  “And no, I’m not.”  You see the shiver that moves through him when you run your hands up his chest and curl your hand around the back of his neck.   You feel his thighs get tense under yours, his whole body reacting.  “Say my name,” you say.

When he does, it is not like a weapon or alarm, but spoken in a way that makes you feel like you have never heard your name spoken properly before that moment. 

You kiss him first and this time it lands deliberately, catching him mid-breath and stealing the rest of it.  When you start to lean away, to see if it’s all right, he puts his hand on the back of your head, curls his fingers in your hair, and draws you right into him, stealing back that breath with a desperate kiss. 

In a way, this is familiar to you.  You always liked and used sex as a grounding exercise.  You feel present in your body, regardless of how floaty and detached you felt before.  From the tingling top of your head to the curling of your toes, you feel every inch of yourself, alive and hot. 

But it feels different too.  You were always eager to chase the high, to reach the final destination with little care for the journey.  You realize, maybe, it is about the becoming, itself.

“Chan,” you say, squeezing his hips between your legs when he runs his hands under your shirt.  You climbed into bed still wearing your pants and shirt, wishing differently now as you rock your body against his. 

You buck a little eagerly, sensations going to your head quicker than intoxication.  Chan brings you back down, shushing you gently, guiding your open mouth back to his.  He kisses you slowly, touches you like he is memorizing every contour.   You make a sweet sound into his mouth, cupping his face as you kiss him back. 

“Can we—” you start.

“Yes,” he says.  “Yes, yes.” 

You stand on shaky legs and strip your bottom layers away.  The few seconds apart are dizzying, the whole world around him fuzzy as that neon yellow light leaking into the room.   Because he is staring at you, looking dazed and dishevelled, it takes him longer to unbutton his jeans than it did for you to remove your pants altogether.  You climb back onto his lap and do not help at all, distracting him with another kiss. 

A kiss always felt like a waste of time, but you think you could content yourself with just kissing him forever.   Slow or fast, gentle or needy.  

You are kissing when he gets inside you, gripping your bare thighs with a possessive hold that will feel tender tomorrow.   You luxuriate in the pleasure and the pain, your body yours, shared with him, reciprocated in turn.  

Whatever else existed – or could exist – ceases to matter for a time.  You come together and come apart in each other’s arms, chests pressed together, hearts racing against each other.  You tug his hair and pull his face into your neck, moaning under the press of his teeth and the heat of his lips. 

“Mm, fuck,” he groans into your skin, clutching your hips even tighter, rocking up into you while you roll down against him.  His gentle curse has you whimpering, his mouth on your throat making you shake.  “Mm, get all tight when I bite you, you know,” he murmurs, and leaves no time for argument or embarrassment because he nips at your neck again.  You do exactly what he said, clenching around him with an involuntary shudder. 

“Fuck,” is all you say.  He breathes a laugh against your skin. 

You clutch his shoulders when he gathers you and stands, moving the couple small steps towards the bed where he lays you out.  You are apart for only seconds, but you feel so cold and empty that it is almost terrifying.  When he shucks his jeans and gets back on top of you, you unbutton his shirt with shaking fingers, body in convulsions from the angle he is fucking you.   

You have never been fully alive in your body until right now. 

You come while he fucks you and you come again, when he puts his hands on you, like he really does need to feel every inch of you with his searching fingers.  When he keeps touching you, you are so stimulated you slap his chest, making him smile at your loss of words. 

 You lay in a tangled heap, your legs twined together.  Your shirt is gone and his is unbuttoned, your cheek on his chest as he lays on his back.  You let yourself be a little lulled by the cadence of his breathing.

Your eyes eventually wander.  You realize the sun has joined that neon light, the fuzzy halo around the window now a clearer glow.  The day is beckoning.  It brings you back to reality, to the world outside this re-shaped room. 

“I know I need to face it eventually,” you say.  “I don’t know what will happen. But right now – I can’t be distracted from the mission.  I need to rescue Changbin.  I need to stop my father.”

Miroh is dead but everything he did haunts you, like a ghost around every corner.  You can’t afford to confront the other ghosts, including your own. 

“Whatever happens after right now,” you say.  “I guess I’ll see.” 

“I understand,” Chan says.  He is caressing your spine, fingertips stroking up and down the slope of your back.   He scratches a little at the nape of your neck, making you hum in contentment.  “Really,” he says.  “I know things got crazy earlier but… I think right now… I can do right now.”

You look up at him.  He smiles down at you, dimples digging into his cheeks.  You have to look away, because you just promised yourself no distractions, but that smile causes a flush of warmth that goes beyond the physical. 

“Well,” you say with a sigh, patting his chest.  “Maybe by then you and me will be friends for real.” 

You feel his body stiffen, shoulders dropping, the hand on your nape freezing.   You look up to see his face, a questioning brow quirked.  He is returning the expression, though his countenance is a little more drole. 

“What?” you say. 

He answers with a firmer grip on the back of your neck.  He rolls you over, onto your back, keeping your head lifted in his hand.  The length of his open flannel drapes over your warm skin, a soft tickle as he leans down and kisses you.  It starts gentle but doesn’t last, his tongue parting your lips and the hot, needy press of his mouth pinning you to the bed and his arms.   You kiss back but hardly keep up, dizzy with breathlessness as he licks into your mouth, as he chases down the breath of you, as he keeps your lips on his for as long as he possibly can. 

Then he leans to one side.  His breath tickles your neck before he kisses just below your ear.  He whispers, “I don’t want to be friends.” 

He looks at you with a far too innocent dimpled smile.  You think Chan might be a bigger threat to your well-being than the First Guard. 

“Okay,” you say, breathless.  “Noted.” 

-

You open the blinds.  Once the room is full of sunlight, you revert to soldiership and work on your next strategy. 

There is no doubt the Miroh corporation is floundering in a state of panic.   They are not only dealing with the loss of its boss and heir, but also destabilizing insider attacks on various sectors while vulnerable.  On top of everything else, stocks have plummeted and investors are running for their lives and their wallets. 

You and Chan have watched the company as well as the social reaction.  With different leaks and financial fallouts, especially given Miroh’s connections to governmental and military divisions, it is no surprise that different stories have been cycling through the news.  You have kept an ear on the radio and an eye on tv stations. 

As you scour blueprints and map your next manoeuvre, you have the news playing at a low volume in the background.  They are currently reporting the combustion of a Miroh facility.  Their research and sources have led them to deduce it is an inside job.  

That much is fairly obvious as no one else could do what you and Chan are doing, though you are not suspects.  The media believes you are dead, that both you and your father were assassinated at the same time.  You are not sure if the company honestly believes you died, that the First Guard killed you then disappeared without Miroh to corral him, or if they reported that so they could kill you without a fuss in the future. 

There are no reports on Chan, of course.  No one outside of Miroh’s world even knows he exists. 

The major suspects are disgruntled investors and former employers, so far mostly scientists and research assistants given the targeted facilities.  With some of the government leaks, there are also theories that some deals with legislators went sour and resulted in a target being painted over the name Miroh. 

This seems to the angle the current report is taking.  At first, you are only half-listening, as the news reporter does not mention anything you have not heard before. 

Then you catch the latter half of a sentence you are not expecting.

“—of greater potential concern as this latest attack was on a military base.”

Both you and Chan whip your heads up at the same time. 

You have not attacked any military bases. 

“Turn that up,” you say.

Chan is already on his feet and moving towards the bed where the remote was discarded.  He turns up the volume on the television and you both watch the report. 

It is not impossible that a domino effect could ripple from one facility to the next.  The more attacks you make – targeting all the little chinks in Miroh’s armour – the more likely it is that certain institutions will collapse entirely on their own.  Either people will chase the money, like a lot of former investors, or they will abandon course altogether.  Eventually, Miroh’s world will eat itself alive, with or without your help. 

But you have so far only targeted a couple smaller research facilities.  Yes, there have already been consequences, but not enough that a totally unrelated military base on the other side of the country would spontaneously combust. 

You stare at the screen.  That base is big.  It isn’t going down without a fight.  No one outside of the house of Miroh would have dared target it.  No one else would have known how. 

“Changbin,” you say. 

Chan puts a hand on your shoulder, squeezing reassuringly.  You look at him then at the television, at the story unfolding rapidly in front of you. 

“It’s him, isn’t it?” you ask.  “It has to be.”

There might be just enough chaos in the ranks that if a solder of Changbin’s calibre was being held, something might fall wayside and he would have an opportunity to escape.  

You are just not sure he would try.   Changbin has obviously undergone changes of his own, all seeming to stem from that final confrontation with Lee Felix before the enemy went down and took his world with him.   Changbin clearly decided once and for all what was really important to him.  Changbin has always played the game carefully, but in the last few months he repeatedly put himself between you and your father.   He intercepted multiple interactions with Miroh’s men, altercations you dismissed as nuisances at the time but shudder to realize the weight now. 

Changbin threw himself in the middle, again and again, painting a bigger and bigger target on his back.  He seemed resigned to his demise.  For that reason, you are not sure how much he would fight even if given the opportunity.  He seemed whole-heartedly certain he would be left behind, no matter what happened. 

You curl your hand into a fist, digging your nails into your scar.  There was so much you should have told him.  If he knew that you were willing to fight this hard.  If he knew you would find out the truth.  If, if, if—

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Chan says. 

You look at him just as he kneels down beside your chair.  He takes your hand, the one with the scar, and unfolds it carefully. 

“Kicking yourself won’t save him, yeah?”  Chan says. 

“Yeah,” you say with a huff. 

The report continues.  It details this attack as being an inside job as well.  Supposedly, according to rumours breaching the walls, multiple people have gone missing, but their identities have not been given to the press.  Hearing that, you become marginally more hopeful that Changbin is among them.  The company would not report their supposed missing persons because they are most likely prisoners being held in less-than-legal circumstances.  Changbin would be that type of prisoner.  

The fight is ongoing.  He could still be there. 

“It’s a lead, at least,” Chan says, echoing your thoughts. 

“Maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong place this whole time,” you say.  You have been targeting the science sector when maybe your father kept it all in the military house after all.  Maybe after the initial pass through that research facility, he was moved onto a more secure base, given his background as a former child soldier of the special-ops program. 

Well, if that is the case, their extra security did not work.  Of course it didn’t work.  It’s Seo Changbin.   You could laugh at their idiocy. 

“We need to find out either way,” you say. 

You manage your expectations for now, but as you sit at the table and change course to plan an entirely new strategy, it is with a hope as clear and bright as the sunlight.

-

It is a lot of driving to the military base.  You will get there at nightfall the next day if you stop only sparsely. 

You and Chan are swift in packing and climbing back into that car.  You take turns sleeping and driving, though the last leg of the journey is spent on edge.  You are braced and ready for a fight, all that determination exacerbated by the very real possibility that you are about to see Changbin again. 

What will you say to him?  What will he say to you?  You wonder how much he knew about the reconfiguration.  Clearly, he knew something, if not the specifics, as he went to great lengths to keep you away from your father. 

You thought Changbin had saved you on an emotional level, but you realize now how it crossed into every sphere of life.    

You close your eyes while Chan drives.  You see Changbin on that rooftop, saying he will not leave you behind.  It was the first hit that shattered the glass around you.  Miroh had so carefully built that clear coffin around your consciousness, and Changbin smashed right through with the sheer brute force of his friendship. 

You glance at Chan.  Miroh did everything in his power to make sure you forgot about him.  Bang Christopher Chan, the First Guard.  Someone you loved and who loved you.  Your father would have focussed on that.  He would not have seen anything. 

Why would he care about a friendship?  What does that word even mean to a man like him?  He would have looked right past Changbin.  He spent all that time wiping Chan from your mind, that he never thought to look for anything else. 

Your body gets cold as you remember – something.  You close your eyes.  You are standing in front of Changbin.  He’s young, in his late teens, about the age you would have been when they reconfigured you.  He is looking at you with uncertainty.  You feel an uneasiness looking back at him. 

Don’t you know me? he asks.  He pulls a face, makes some dumb noises, waves his hands.  Then he frowns.  Changbin can be funny, but he turns it off in a second, as deadly as the rest of them.   So much anger floods his eyes, they look black with the focussed intensity of his fury.  You know me, he says.  Think.  Remember me. 

You see a slant of moonlight, a windowpane, a streak of blood.  Remember me. 

You feel a weight as it is lifted off your chest.  You hear him shouting your name.  You hear him running. 

You know me, he says. 

You flinch – in your memory? – right now? – and a piercing wail floods your mind.  You don’t want to go towards that scream.  You can’t go there. 

It’s me, he says.  Hold on.  Keep your eyes open.  Don’t go.  I promise I’ll get you out.

“Changbin,” you say. 

“Hey, hey, baby, hey—”  That is Chan.  He is shaking your arm.

Your eyes pop open. 

You have never had flashes of recollection while awake.  It feels like a bigger adrenaline rush than waking from a nightmare, very little to divide your mind from reality. 

You take a few steadying breaths while Chan rubs your shoulder.  He was driving but the car is now stopped on the side of the road.  You did not even feel him braking. 

“What happened?” he asks when you are settled enough to speak.

“I don’t know,” you say.  “I just—I was thinking.  Remembering.  Not like that.  It’s complicated.  I just—”

You close your eyes.  A teenage Changbin is still standing there, looking at you warily. 

You know me. 

I know you.

“Changbin,” you say, choked up.  You blink your eyes open and take another breath.  “I’ll be okay,” you say.  “We can’t stop for long.  Let’s get back on the road.”

Chan does not look convinced, frowning as he stares into your face.  You blink at him, then narrow your eyes into a squint.

“Did you call me baby?” you ask. 

He clears his throat and turns back to the steering wheel.  Looking out over the dashboard, definitely not at you, and with the tips of his ears more than a little red, he says, “You’re right.  Let’s get back on the road.”

In spite of everything, you find yourself smiling. 

-

It is only natural that you are waylaid at the very last minute, right on the cusp of sunset as you approach the vicinity of the military base.  Not only is your path to finally rescuing Changbin obstructed, but it is halted by the most asinine, mundane nonsense in the world. 

Soldiers, agents, entire convoluted military operations – those you can easily take.  Minimum wage workers, on the other hand, are impossible combatants.  More grizzled than the worst of ancient servicemen, they blink at your pleading with a harsher chill than a mob boss.   You are certain this gas station attendant has seen some shit because he is not remotely inclined to assuage anyone’s anxiety. 

“The till is down,” he says with an icy tone, face pinched unpleasantly.  “It’ll be back up in a minute.” 

He goes back to talking to his manager on the phone, smacking his computer till at random intervals.  It does not exactly inspire confidence. 

While you and Chan have been getting by with theft and subterfuge, you do everything in your power to not draw attention.  That means you pay for gas as many stations have security cameras that log and report drive-offs and defaults. 

That means you are stuck in this line with several other customers while the hapless cashier whacks his computer.

The little bell above the door rings as Chan steps inside the shop. 

“What’s taking so long?” he asks. 

“I want to hit him,” you say, pointing to the disinterested cashier.  “He’s never gonna get that thing fixed.  We have somewhere to be, we can’t just stand here all day—” 

“Ah, ah, ah, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Chan says soothingly.  He interrupts your rant as you were raising your voice.   Not that it matters because the incompetent cashier is not paying any attention. 

“I’ll take care of it,” Chan says.  “You just have to know how to talk to people, yeah?” 

The cashier paid you absolutely no mind when you tried to complain.  He gave you a nasty look and ordered you to get to the back of the line.  Chan, on the other, receives a quick onceover and a blink of seeming approval. 

Chan leans on the counter and smiles a devastatingly charming smile, those dimples blinding.  The cashier puts the phone on his shoulder and looks at him expectantly.    

“Hey there,” Chan says. 

“Hello,” the cashier replies, coolly but not as rudely.  “The till is broken, sir.  We’re going to have to wait for a repair.”

“You know, I’m pretty good with my hands,” Chan says.  “I bet if you let me under there, I could figure something out.” 

The cashier blinks at him.  One blink, two blinks, three.  Then he hangs up the phone and opens the gate to let Chan behind the counter. 

You cross your arms and roll your eyes. 

Chan, perhaps unsurprisingly given his necessary breadth of skills, helps the useless cashier get his dumb register running again.  You all but throw the money at his stupid pretty head before marching away. 

“Thanks, Wolfgang,” the cashier says, using the made-up name Chan gave him.

“No problem.”  Chan winks back at him.   “Have a good day, uh—”  He squints at the name tag, gives it only a sparing glance as he steps out the door.  “Hyunjin,” he says.

The door swings closed and you continue on your way. 

-

Fortunately, you have no more preposterous interludes.   You approach the base differently than the facilities, especially because you have not been able to do a proper sweep.  However, that should be fine given the entire operation here has already been massively destabilized.  All the main assets have moved along, either because of imminent danger or because the media now has its eyes on its actions. 

Either way, you get inside without much fuss.  You stick together for longer, not trusting the dark corridors and labyrinthine tunnels. 

It is a lot emptier than anticipated.  The fight seems to have ended some time in the last couple hours.  There is an eerie, unsettled feeling, like a house abandoned in the middle of a meal.  Unlike the dusty underground hovels at the research facility, this place is still breathing.   You are not sure what it will cough up. 

“Still think he’s here?”  Chan asks, likely coming to the same conclusion as you: that even if Changbin was here, he has probably moved on.  He has either escaped and gone of his own volition or he was caught and reprimanded and has been relocated. 

“Maybe,” you say with a sigh.  “Maybe not.  But it’s still a lead.  Treat it like one.” 

You finally split up to cover more ground, agreeing to reconvene at the central warehouse in half-an-hour. 

Maybe Changbin is no longer in these walls – maybe he was never here at all – but there might still be answers.  You suspect there are questions too, because you cannot imagine who outside of the special-ops program would have both the calibre of skill and necessary intel to pull of an operation like this.  Someone reached right into the heart of this base and yanked at its ventricles like it was nothing.  And if not to escape, then why?

It has to be Changbin, you tell yourself, even while a sense of wrongness creeps under your skin.  It is the same odd, unsettled feeling you get when you think about the night the enemy died – specifically when you think about that security system somehow being wiped after the house burned down with everyone inside it.  It is that strange discombobulation, where the answer is probably simple and right in front of your face, so blatant that its absence haunts and distracts you.

You are distracted with thought.  Maybe that is why you make your first mistake.

You turn a corner and crash right into someone.  You are shocked because you did not hear their approach.  Even distracted, you should have heard footsteps in an empty corridor, especially in heavy combat boots.  You are quiet but you have unique bodily control that even well-trained soldiers cannot replicate.  No one else can walk that quietly.

It is clear the same startled reaction ripples through their body. 

You draw guns at the same time, firing with equal speed and precision.  You also both duck at the same time.  Smooth as a dance, you whirl around each other, firing and re-loading until they do a spin-kick and knock the gun aside.  

As you fight with your hands, you only catch glimpses of your opponent.  They are dressed all in black but not in Miroh’s uniform, a balaclava pulled over their face and head.  They are very slender, but they land a hit like someone twice their size. 

Your second mistake is your own fault.  You underestimate them based on their build and it earns you a good right cross. In the ensuing dizziness, they make a break down the corridor at an alarming speed.  It leaves you reeling more than the hit. 

“What the fuck,” you say, staggering after them. 

This person does not work for Miroh, that much is obvious.  It also definitely isn’t Changbin.  This person has the completely wrong build, opposite of Changbin in almost every way.   No, it isn’t your friend, but it might very well be another prisoner.  They might have an idea of what happened.  They might know if Changbin was here and where he went. 

The thought propels you into a determined sprint.  You cannot follow sound as the person is good enough to keep their footsteps low, but you are just as skilled so they likewise do not see you coming. 

They coincidentally head straight for the central warehouse.   The warehouse previously functioned as a pseudo-armory, but it has already been completely cleared.  It is two levels, the top floor a balcony walkway overlooking the main warehouse floor. 

The warehouse is empty except for the intruder. The person seems to be deliberating.   They remove their head covering for a second, long enough to catch their breath.  You see a flash of black hair and a hint of a masculine profile before you are spotted.   The man tugs the fabric back over his head. 

He leaps right off the balcony. 

It is too high for a normal person to jump without breaking a leg.  Naturally, you run to the railing to look over.

Your adversary is a step ahead of you.   He is dangling there, waiting for you to approach so he can swing back over and knock you down.  You skid across the balcony level, the metal walkway rattling under your weight. 

You don’t stay down for long.  Another fight begins, a back and forth tussle that makes you think you need more training.  The past day has been more than a little hectic, but you should be able to take down even a well-trained soldier. 

He does another spin-kick, a solid roundhouse that knocks your mask right off.   You stumble sideways while the mask clatters across the balcony before spilling right over the ledge.  It is a long descent before it smacks the ground. 

You ground your footing, assuming a defensive stance with a swift upward swing.

“Who are you?” you ask.

At the exact same time, the man says, “You.” 

That prompts another question, a bigger question, why on earth this stranger would recognize you in this context.   You cannot even think about your question, however, because the man abruptly flies at you with twice the verve as before.  Caught off guard, at first you struggle to defend yourself.   When he finally swings too wide, giving you an opening, you do not waste the opportunity. 

You tackle him, fully and bodily, arms around him as you charge the balcony.   You shove him right over the railing.  It is not so high that he’ll die, but you don’t want to kill him anyway.  You need to ask him questions – like did he do all this and how and why?  Are there others?  Is Changbin among them? 

You grasp the railing.  You are prepared to swing and jump over but you stop short at what you find.  The man, who should be nursing a fractured leg right about now, is instead getting to his feet.  He looks a bit dizzy, shaking his head and rubbing his temple, but he is otherwise unscathed. 

You just stand there for a second, gawping at him like an animal. 

That shielded face finally lifts, eyes finding yours across the space.   His head cocks, seemingly a dry and irritated, Really?

You launch yourself off the balcony, landing heavily but safely.  You absorb the shock and straighten, not taking your eyes off this man for a second. 

“I’m not interested in hurting you,” you say. 

He scoffs, pointedly looking down at your uniform. 

“I don’t work for Miroh anymore,” you say.  “I’m just trying to blend in.” 

“You?” he says.  It is so far the only thing he is willing to say.  His voice has a darker, deeper tone, scratching at the back of your head, but his monosyllabic replies do nothing to help place him. 

You want to say more but he doesn’t let you, jumping back into action.  You huff in aggravation, wanting to shout, we’re on the same side!   But he is fast.  You expend your energy just keeping him at bay.

Your stamina is fairly well-matched, just like everything else.  You move around the warehouse, kicking and punching and flipping around each other, losing track of minutes. 

A sheen of sweat breaks under your uniform.  He is slowing down too.  There is just one difference: he still has his gun. 

He gets you behind the knee and puts you on your back.  Before you can retaliate, he draws his gun and points it at your face. 

You freeze, staring down the barrel.  You slowly lift your eyes to him, just in case any sudden movement convinces him to fire.  So far, he is holding, though you are not sure why.  If he truly wanted to avoid detection, it would have been in his best interest to kill you and move on. 

He hesitates.  His hand is steady but his eyes are darting around inside the masked fabric. 

Your eyes continue to wander up, up.  Your heart leaps when you see Chan approaching on the balcony, silent and serious, gun in hand.  He has a longer-range weapon, not a little pistol like you and the adversary.   He takes aim from his perch but you shake your head.

You know Chan can make the shot, that he could get the man through the head and not so much as graze you under him.  But if this man dies, his answers go with him. 

“No!” you shout at the same time the gun goes off. 

You wrap your legs around the man’s midsection and yank him to the side.  You roll, one over the other until you are pinned once more.  You are both unharmed.  With the head covering, it is hard to tell if he is frazzled.  He certainly whips his head around quickly, trying to see where he dropped his gun. 

You spot it at the same time.  You glance at each other then bolt, stumbling over one another as you charge the discarded pistol. 

Chan jumps down off the balcony.  He takes more of a running leap, jumping forward rather than just down.  It gives him far more momentum so he hits the ground and tucks into a roll, riding the wave of that momentum until he is in the middle of the room. 

Chan reaches the gun first.  He kicks it out of the way and comes at the adversary with his bare hands.  He may not understand why you wanted to save an enemy who had you pinned under a gun, but Chan must trust there is a reason because he fights to incapacitate rather than kill. 

It is a good fight, but the man is already tired from fighting you. 

And you are good, but Chan is better.  If he could not beat you, only tie, then he cannot beat Chan. 

Sure enough, it takes a few more moves before the man is on his back.  Chan, still wearing his half-mask, straddles the man’s chest, pinning his arms at his sides and his body to the floor.  He draws a knife out of a thigh holster for good measure.   

“Got him,” Chan says.  “Who is this guy?”

“I have no idea,” you say, jogging over to them.  “That’s what I want to find out.”

“Let me go,” the man says, wriggling uselessly under Chan’s weight.   “I have nothing to say to her.”

“I told you already, I’m on your side,” you say.  “Or at least I’m not on Miroh’s side.”

“Whose side are you on?”  Chan asks with a jerk of his head. 

“Mine,” the man answers.  “Now let me go.  I have a job.”

“We have a job,” you say.  “We’re the ones who have been taking out the facilities so far.”

That gets the man to stop squirming.  He looks at you through the narrow eye slits in his balaclava, eyes darting to where you stand behind Chan. 

“You?” the man asks, seemingly his favourite word. 

“Yes, me,” you snap.  “And who are you exactly?” 

“One way to find out,” Chan says.  He does not wait for any further acknowledgement, ripping the man’s mask right off his head.  It is not a cruel or violent action, more a casual shrug of his arm than anything.  You are not expecting to find anything more than the scowling face of a stranger.   

You and Chan freeze.   

Staring back at you, with his hair returned to its natural pitch, his dark eyes narrowed in an intense glare, and a face full of unmistakable freckles, is a former agent of Miroh’s special-ops program.  One of the last and a traitor, not to mention supposedly dead. 

“You,” is what you say.

You do not know what else to say to Lee Felix. 

[myveryownfanfiction]

18+ MINORS AND THOSE WITHOUT AGE IN BIO DNI

tags: @illiana-mystery, @iobsessoverfictionalmen, @obeydontstray

warnings: swearing, fighting (training)

AN: I think this is my first Logan fic. No Deadpool and Wolverine spoilers but I need to write for this man. Feels were felt and yeeeaaahh.

Dirt flew as the explosion shook the room. Logan passed me on the right, looking at me over his shoulder. I nodded as colossus and storm cleared a path through sentinels.

“on your left.” Pietro called as he sped past. I rolled my eyes and pushed on.

“Watch your right speedy!” I called back as a sentinel popped up. Kitty phased through the sentinel and it came crashing down. “Good work kitty! Colossus! Logan! Fastball special!” Logan nodded and cut across jeans path.

“how many more of these are there?” She panted, hand pressed against her forehead.

“professor said there would be about ten. And they can respawn depending on how fast we move so…” I shrugged. “Give or take I say we have five minutes before the last five come back from behind.” Jean nodded before Scott grabbed her arm and tugged her out of the way of the falling sentinel.

“watch!” Kitty yelled. She grabbed my arm and I felt a chill go through me as she phased. A sentinel went down around us and kitty led me out of the carnage.

“dammit!” I turned at the sound of pietros voice. All ten sentinels were standing.

“dammit!” I hung my head and Logan wrapped his arm around my shoulders. The danger room deprogrammed and Charles came in.

“good work everyone.” He said, looking at me. “Not bad for a first run (Y/N). Remember to keep your eyes on all the possible threats.” I nodded.

“yes professor.” I said. He nodded to me and waited as Logan directed me out of the room.

“everyone survived (Y/N).” Charles said, making me turn back. “Count that as a win. Not everyone comes out of the first run with a full team. Ask Logan.” I looked over at the man next to me and he nodded.

“my first run, rogue was the target.” Logan admitted. “It’s programmed to deprogram when a kill shot is taken. I didn’t even know it had happened until the danger room fell apart around us.” Charles nodded.

“ask rogue if you don’t believe him.” Charles added before leaving the two of us alone.

“it’s just a little hard to believe you didn’t know.” I said. Logan laughed.

“fastball special.” He said. “I couldn’t hear anything against the wind. It’s why I won’t do the fucking thing when I’m in the lead.”

“that’s understandable Logan.” I squeezed his arm as we started walking again. “And honestly commendable.” Logan leaned his head against mine and smiled at me. “It does make me a little disappointed that you will do it for me though. Or when I’m running right next to you.” Logan laughed.

“You can take care of yourself.” Logan teased. “And I know that. I’ve been working on that.” He said softly.

“I know.” I leaned against him more. “And I appreciate that.” Logan turned and kissed my head. “So next time…” I trailed off, running my hand down my face. “Fuck. I have no idea what to do to prepare better.” I mumbled. Logan squeezed my shoulder.

“you’ll figure it out.” Logan assured me. “I know you will.”

“at least one of us thinks that.” I laughed as we stopped by his room.

“now…” Logan jokingly threw me over his shoulder. “You smell like shit. Let’s clean you up.”

“Logan!” I cried as he opened his bedroom door and headed straight for the bathroom.

[t-saan]

Update- Since this was so well recieved, there is a part 2 of this on my blog now.

I really like the idea that Gul Dukat spent a lot of his time just...recording messages for any possible circumstance that might occur on the station? And they still pop up at random moments?

Life on DS9 must be interesting in general, because of what the Cardassians left behind.

Imagine:

You are a humble Starfleet ensign, maybe a shuttle engineer, maybe a record keeper, stationed there just because. You know really little about the whole deal with Cardassians, Bajorans, occupation, Dominion and all that.

On your first day of work, you see that your console is in Cardassian. You try to change it and it doesn't work. You ask your supervisor. They tell you that all consoles are in Cardassian.

You are trying to replicate a bowl of soup in the middle of the night. No big deal. You try to add more salt to the recipe. Suddenly, you have the gleaming visage of Gul Dukat in your face, loudly announcing which recipes in the replimat are best and most patriotic in his opinion. You can't turn it off, or turn it down. He goes on for twenty minutes.

Every time you try to get your replicator to make hair spray, it gives you a jar of Cardassian issued military-grade tinted hair pomade.

Gul Dukat is no longer in command of DS9. It is a Bajoran station with Starfleet presence. Gul Dukat is on the station every other week. You've heard Commander Sisko comm him to ask how to change the AC settings in his office.

There are five different surveillance devices in your quarters. Sometimes you talk to them when you get lonely. Sometimes they talk back.

You go to a holodeck one time, on your off day. The system crashes and pulls up a Cardassian repetitive epic program. You live through five lifetimes of dutifull Cardassian life before someone manages to unseal the door. By the time it ends, you are surprised every time you touch your face, missing its ridges. You also miss your eighty Cardassian children.

You want to have a pair of trousers tailored. The tailor begins talking about the changes in fashion since the end of the occupation. In the middle of his monologue, you realize he had been talking in Cardassian the entire time. Your Universal Translator was off.

[hannibals-favourite-meal]

An a/b/o fic with maybe Bruce Wayne or Arthur curry, where they have been searching for their omega for most of their life, and when they are fighting a villain fem reader comes in and helps them, I was thinking that reader she has telekinesis or something and, she helps them and they are blown away by her, never thinking that their omega could be a hero as well

.⋆｡Crashing Waves｡⋆.

alpha!Arthur Curry x plus size reader

He has been looking for her for his whole life and she arrived just in time

Warnings: a/b/o, true mates, hero!reader, omega!reader, violence against robots, reader is shorter than Bruce and Arthur (but who isn’t), implied smut WC: 1.4k

6k Follower Celebration Bingo

Library- @hannibals-favourite-meal-library

Even after serving as Atlantis’s king for five years now, Arthur doubted he would get used to the searing smell of salt that constantly clung to everything around him. It burned his nostrils even when he was lounging around the JL tower and part of him wondered if he would ever be able to properly scent out his mate while the sea constantly invaded his senses. Though even before he claimed the throne, he wasn’t exactly successful on that front.

He felt like he had searched everywhere for his omega, the biological urge deep down in his chest driving him to scour every inch of the earth for them. But they had eluded him and even if his parents (themselves being true mates) assured him that the right omega would appear when the time was right, he remained alone with the smell of the sea. 

Arthur was almost glad, at times, for a good fight. Smoke, sparks from his trident, even blood gave him a break from the usual salt that surrounded him, temporarily cleansing his pallet so to speak. But maybe not today he thought with a wince.

Hundreds of broken robots surrounded him, the never-ending wave of enemies only getting thicker as his exhaustion began to mount. Batman was somewhere deep in the crowd, attempting to override their programming as Arthur tried to keep him safe enough. New enemies were always a pain in the ass but this one was definitely levels above the other newbies they fought. And Arthur was already fantasising about what he’d do to the skinny little white guy as soon as he got his hands on him, that is if Batman didn’t get to either of them first.

“Is there any way to hurry this up!” He shouted above the screaming of gears and failing electronics. 

“This would go faster if you stopped hitting them at me.” The Bat growled as he hit yet another firewall in their programming. Arthur took another swing of his trident, knocking away a flying robot that had gotten way too close to his partner’s head for comfort. It let out a high pitched whine as it was launched into the horizon.

“This would be faster if you didn’t type in the wrong code to begin with!” A batarang screamed past his ear, landing right in the huge glowing eye of the robot hovering just over Arthur’s right shoulder. Oil sprayed from its side, coating Arthur’s hair. 

A deafening roar sounded through the empty field as another shipping container rose from the ground, releasing even more robots. Batman turned back to the computer, his fingers flying over the keyboard all while the swarm closed in around them. “This is gonna hurt.” Arthur cocked back his shoulder and raised his trident, maybe he could knock out a few rows of them before they got too close and he’d have to switch to his fists. 

Just as he readjusted his grip to throw the trident into the thickest grouping of robots, everything went silent.

The now frozen robots hung in the air like someone had just paused time, though they still whirred and whined, their huge red eyes glowing even brighter. Then, with little more than a sharp click from somewhere to his right, they were pulled backwards, the mechanical bodies slamming into each other as they were forced together into one huge sphere hundreds of feet off the ground. 

“What the fuck?” Suddenly, the sphere crumpled like tin foil, the metal warping and collapsing until all that was left was a flat sheet of wires and dying LEDs. It slammed into the earth, disappearing behind the long grass as Batman’s screen turned green.

“Great timing there bats.” But Arthur’s tone held no bite, not when the salty smell of the ocean and ozone slammed into him. 

Immediately, every nerve in his body came to life, buzzing like he was drunk but his mind was clear, clearer than it ever had been before. A figure was walking through the grass, elegantly avoiding the mangled carcasses of their battle. As she approached, her scent became stronger and Arthur could now smell the subtle hint of something flowery like a warm spring breeze. 

The light of the sunset made her practically glow as she moved, her thick curves and perfect dips highlighted by a tight catsuit that looked like it was pulled straight from his teenage fantasies. 

“I hope I didn’t show up too late.” Her voice floated around him and Arthur’s knees buckled. 

“You’re right on time.” Her e/c eyes met his golden ones and he watched as her nose turned up and she took a deep breath of his scent. Her heavy chest hitched and her own scent turned sweeter. His stomach flipped as something deep inside him stretched awake for the first time in what seemed like years.

“Y/N. What took so long?” Batman crossed his arms as he looked down at her, his jaw ticking in anger. Yet her expression never faltered, in fact she glanced at Arthur with a raised eyebrow. Her smile was bright, shining with something ethereal. 

“Oh I don’t know, maybe the fact that you gave me a coded message with the coordinates instead of being a normal person and sharing your location with me? I may have psychic powers but I suck at math dude.” 

“That was you?” Arthur hadn’t noticed that his body was moving on its own until he finally spoke again and she had to crane her head almost all the way back to make eye contact with him. Warmth unlike anything he had experienced before bloomed through his chest as she leaned towards him, fluttering her lashes up at him.

“I have a lot of tricks better than that.” Her scent was almost overpowering now but all he wanted to do was drown in it. Y/N’s shoulder brushed against his pec and something snapped.

The world tilted on its axis and he suddenly knew what his parents were talking about when they said that the moment they met, nothing else mattered. “Omega.” 

Her body sagged into him as she breathed out an almost inaudible “alpha”. His trident dropped unnoticed to the ground. 

“I’ve finally found you.” She fell easily into his arms, like they had been made to hold her. She pressed her face as close as she could get, her words muffled against the thick armour but he could hear her clearly all the same. 

“You stole my line,” he whispered into her hair, breathing her scent as much as he could, “I’ve been waiting for you for so long. Who knew I’d find you after you saved my life?” Her giggle made his heart swell with affection and pride.

“You’ve obviously been looking in the wrong place.” Y/N looked up at him as he cupped her full cheek with a massive hand, guiding her face upwards. His eyes dropped to her lips.

“I could say the same about you.” He leaned down and just as his lips were about to touch hers-

“Alright that’s enough,” Bruce snarled, “need I remind you both that there’s still a villain we need to deal with.” 

Y/N never looked away from Arthur, in fact she wound an arm around his neck and tugged him even closer. His alpha roared to life, hyper-focusing on the softness of her curves beneath his hands. “You go ahead, I think my alpha and I have done more than enough heavy lifting for the day, we have better things to do.”

“I’m going to regret asking but what exactly is more important than dealing with a potentially global threat?” Arthur smirked, catching on to the game she was playing.

His right hand dropped from where it was resting on her wide hip down to the plump cheeks of her ass. “I’m going to rip her clothes off and fuck her brains out right in this field. So unless you’re into that stuff-“ she slapped his chest at that, “-then I suggest you move on, Bats, cause right now, nothing is going to stop me from claiming my omega.”

“You two are disgusting.” He grumbled and walked off, finally leaving the newly discovered mates alone.

“Now where were we?” Arthur purred before Y/N yanked him down and finally kissed him, making the smell of the ocean explode around them.

Her scent had been haunting him for years, etching itself into his mind and suddenly, Arthur loved the smell of salt again because it meant that he finally had his omega.

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[esamastation]

Shizuroth, part five.

-

Sephiroth looks panicked. 

Genesis looks him over with an experienced eye, swiftly and with increasing concern.

Defensive stance with his back to a wall and the Restroom's only exit clear in sight. His face is pale - well, it's always pale, but now he looks practically grey. Shadows under his eyes, wide eyes, mouth slack. Well, for Sephiroth, anyway. The man has a resting face of a statue carved by the thirstiest of hands, and sometimes Genesis wonders if he has a partial facial paralysis, so little does it change. But he can tell the difference between Sephiroth with a resting face and Sephiroth with a spooked face.

"Sephiroth," Genesis greets him.

"... Genesis," Sephiroth says, and it doesn't sound even vaguely irritated. Mostly he sounds confused.

How concerning!

Side effects, then, bad ones. He'd managed to get out of Injections without being held back, so they're not physical. Mental.

No outward aggression, his pose is subtly defensive, shoulders ever so slightly curled in, holding his PHS in both hands. Was he messaging someone? Unlikely, with Sephiroth, he must've been reading something, trying to distract himself, misdirect whatever is going on in his head. Or…

Or it's that… other side effect.

Genesis had been gearing up to annoy Sephiroth back into sanity, but with this new information he quickly changes tacks. Sephiroth isn't about to lose it - he already did. "I heard you were locked up in injections for a full day. How bad was it?"

Sephiroth hesitates and his fingers tighten around the phone. Then he looks down. Demurely?

What?

"Three times the maximum dose," Sephiroth says.

Oh. "What, are they trying to kill you now?" Genesis asks incredulously. "See how far they can push the envelope before it bursts into flames? Questionable indeed is the wisdom of a professor, by the Goddess." Sephiroth's doses are already the highest in the program.

Sephiroth looks at him weirdly. "... Well, my heart did stop," he says finally. "Apparently."

Genesis makes a face. "Condolences," he says, wincing sympathetically. That was always the worst. "What's the damage?"

"I'm fine," Sephiroth says quickly.

"Ha! My friend, legend shall speak of this day," Genesis points out, motioning around them, at the restroom. "Of the greatest warrior - holed up post-op in the Restroom. You scared the poor Third Class who was here, he sent out an SOS."

Sephiroth scrunches up his nose at that, mouthing that, SOS. "And so you're here to save my soul?" he asks bitchily.

Heh, already he's starting to feel better. And to think Lazard panicked about Angeal not being in Midgar to take care of it. Little does he know - Genesis is the best at this.

"I shall be your hero of dawn at this hour," he agrees and steps closer. No defensive reaction, so he dares to reach out. "It's alright, my friend - we've all been there."

Sephiroth looks uncomfortable with Genesis' hand on his arm but doesn't try to knock it off. "I…" he says and then glances down at Genesis' chest. He looks resentful.

Being such a big man, he does small and defensive poorly. It's like watching a dragon curl in a corner. Tragic and kind of terrifying.

"Feel like you got a hole in your head?" Genesis says knowingly. "All your thoughts rattled, memories all up in the air? Any idea about how much you lost?"

"I'm fine -"

"Last year I came out of the labs and I couldn't recite half of the dialogue from LOVELESS!" Genesis admits bluntly. "It was unbearable, I was beside myself for a week - I had to re-memorise the whole thing."

Sephiroth looks confused at that, giving him a wary look. "That's…" he trails away, uncertain.

"A common side effect. Happens to everyone, to some extent," Genesis assures him easily. Honestly, he thought it happened most to Sephiroth. He has the personality of a man chemically lobotomised… like a lot of the early SOLDIER candidates. "Mako gives and Mako takes. In the wake of these crashing waves, we do our best to fill in the broken flood barriers of our minds. So. What is the damage?"

Sephiroth hesitates. "It's… nothing I can't figure out on my own."

Obviously, and even if he couldn't, it wouldn't matter - Shinra didn't keep them on Mako for their brains or their wit. Sephiroth could lose his mind and become a drooling idiot, and Shinra would still pump raw force into his veins, so long as he did their bidding. Which is honestly a shame - Sephiroth, when he could be annoyed into it, had a poetic sense of humour and came across as an intellectual.

"My friend, fates are cruel," Genesis says, shaking his head. "But we need not face their winds alone. What can't you remember?" He was obviously trying to look up something, after all.

Sephiroth looks away, his eyes troubled, and hides behind the PHS. "... My room," he admits finally. "I can't… figure out where my room is."

Genesis carefully doesn't laugh at that. It's not funny. It happens to a lot of fresh SOLDIER, and it's never not hilarious, watching baby Thirds bumbling around like lost ducklings - but it's not funny now. Sephiroth must be seriously distressed. He doesn't know how to get home!

A snicker manages to slip through, and Sephiroth glares at him, hard. "Apologies, apologies, my friend," Genesis says and grins. "Happens to the best of us. Apparently! Did you not check your key card?"

Sephiroth scowls and digs around his pockets, bringing our four key cards. He looks at them with embarrassed frustration and Genesis picks out the one to his private room. "Here - the floor and room number is written right here."

"... Ah," Sephiroth says.

Oh! Genesis didn't know Sephiroth could blush!

Oh… oh, that is terrible, that's utterly horrible.

Genesis clears his throat. "Come, my friend, let me escort you to your dwelling," he says and motions grandly to the door. "Where we shall partake in that awful tea you favour and lament our pride lost!"

Sephiroth, still looking a little flushed, makes another bitch face at him and then allows himself to be herded out of the sanctuary of the Restroom.

Genesis despairs.

This man, this most devastating of individuals, tall and broad and proud and terribly handsome, isn't supposed to be cute!

-

I have decided that Genesis has the emotional intelligence brain cell and that's how he convinced bunch of SOLDIERs to defect with him; he's the wine mom friend.

Also watch me headcanon SOLDIER lore up the wazoo...

[anachronisims]

How to EFFECTIVELY Use Empty Standby List to Reduce Flashing and Crashing

This tutorial is for TS2. Obviously. This is virtually the last "chapter" of advice for the Pink Flashing Survey Report (still forthcoming as a single readable thing but posted in bits and pieces over the last six months). PS it's a lonnnnnnng post. Ctrl+F "tldr" for the very short version once you open the cut.

"Part 1" of the Empty Standby List ("ESL") tutorial was already written comprehensively with screenshots by Digi at her wordpress. Following Digi's tutorial will get you set up with ESL as a routine automated background task your computer runs, typically every five minutes.

@gayars set up two instances of the routine, each running every five minutes, staggered two/three minutes apart. In other words, task 1 runs at 12:00, task 2 runs at 12:03, task 1 runs at 12:05, task 2 runs at 12:08, etc. However, I found that this negatively impacted the graphical performance of my game, notably by having the ESL task window flash over the game window, which I had never seen before, nor since reverting back to a single 5-minute task routine.

Anyway. Go do Digi's tutorial if you haven't already; I'll wait.

Background on Why this Matters

So, now your computer will be wiping the standby memory every five minutes. The thing is, this won't be able to have much impact on your game unless you wait to let it wipe before you do a major loading action.

Major loading actions are, in general order of strain (most to least strenuous):

Loading a full neighborhood.

Loading a large (3x4 or bigger) populated lot.

Loading a large unpopulated lot.

Loading actual CAS, if you have a lot of non-defaulted CC.

Loading a medium (3x3) populated lot.

Loading a medium unpopulated lot.

Loading a small (2x3 or smaller) populated lot.

Loading a small unpopulated lot.

Loading CAS catalogs from within a lot (e.g. using FFS clothing tool, "Change Appearance" on the mirror, shopping for clothes/trying on clothes on a community lot).

Turning up your lot view settings (generating other lots' lot imposters within your current lot)/panning the camera around.

You should already be doing at least all medium- and large-lot loading with the Lot View Settings Juggling Method, and “uint LotSkirtIncrease” removed from your userstartup.cheat - otherwise whenever you load a lot you are compounding the strain by also having the neighborhood load at the same time.

Using Resource Monitor Effectively

If you watched the Jessa Channel tutorial on flashing, she recommended downloading a third-party RAM usage monitoring software. This is unnecessary. For purposes of reducing your crashing, all you need is the native Windows program "Resource Monitor" that she also recommends.

To open it:

Click the Windows symbol/start menu.

Begin typing "Resource Monitor."

Click Resource Monitor when it shows up.

Once it is open, get to the useful information:

Click the "Memory" tab.

Make sure the "Processes" and "Physical Memory" subs are fully open, as above.

Sort by "Commit (KB)."

Each time you reopen Resource Monitor, it should restore your last view settings, so you won't have to repeat these steps.

While Resource Monitor is still open, "Pin" it to the taskbar so it will always be readily accessible.

Right-click the icon on the taskbar.

Click "Pin to taskbar."

If it says "Unpin from taskbar" you have already done this step :)

Now comes the monitoring part. You will focus on the dark-blue "Standby" block of the bar graph on Physical Memory.

Every fifth minute, when the ESL task runs, this will flash down to 0 and then pop up to about 30-75, depending on what you are doing. It will go higher faster if you are doing stuff, obviously, and hover pretty low if your computer is just sitting still. TLDR the remainder of this tutorial: only take stress actions when Standby is below 100.

As we all know too well, TS2 has a 4gb RAM limit. The problem is, TS2 seems to count the memory that is in standby, too, not just the committed/working set. Thus, before you take a major loading action (that is going to push up to 1.5gb into Standby), you need to wait for Standby to wipe so the game doesn't accidentally think it's using more memory than it is. Got it?

This is how much RAM my game is using when my neighborhood opens, pretty closely zoomed in on any particular lot. If it is zoomed out further - like a whole city block - both committed and working set are easily over 2.2gb. When I pan around the neighborhood, it continues going up. Portions of the hood that go back out of view seem to get relegated to standby, but yes, my game has crashed just from looking too much at my neighborhood from too wide an angle. Unless I slow down and let ESL run before moving on to the next section.

Six months of diligent Resource Manager monitoring has resulted in substantial reductions of crashing and flashing on my first hood view load and first lot view load. It is not 100% guaranteed, but it cuts it back to Very Playable Levels. And when I have tested the theory by purposefully not letting ESL run before a stress point, it always flashes and/or crashes within the next couple minutes.

SO! Here's what I do when I'm launching my game.

Because of overheating concerns, I always fully shut down my computer when I'm not using it for more than an hour. If I have been playing and experience a flash or crash, I will restart before trying again. @infinitesimblr, a survey Respondent who reported virtually no flashing or crashing despite a vast CC catalog, also recommends restarting between using Bodyshop or SimPE and the full game. I have found it may make a difference with Bodyshop (which I use too rarely to make a pseudoscientific claim) but that I have found basically no impact going from SimPE to the game. YMMV.

Immediately after Windows is done loading, I open Resource Monitor and wait a few minutes. Often background updates begin running and the Standby bar goes crazy - sometimes filling up the entire available RAM - and I just let it sit and do its thing. (Usually I start the computer right before my kid's bedtime so I am not actively waiting on it or anything. Go take a shower or make a sandwich or drink some water, like you did in the old days when the game itself took 20 minutes to load.)

Once the standby bar levels out and is consistently peaking no higher than about 250mb between ESL wipes, after the next ESL wipe, I will launch the game. (Usually between logging into Windowsat the beginning of storytime and checking Resource Monitor before we go do tuck-in, it is reliably hanging out below 100 unless a big TS4 or Windows update was downloading.)

Reminder: do not delete thumbnails anymore prior to launching the game. I also have turned off RPC's clear caches option and have observed faster loading times with minimal increases in crashing.

After the neighborhood selection screen comes up, wait for ESL to run again before opening your neighborhood.

If you have continue to have more than VERY sporadic hood load flashing after taking these steps, you should try launching into a subhood if you have one, then pivoting to the main hood if that's where you're playing that session after yet another ESL wipe. If that doesn't help you simply need to thin out your hood or accept the flashing. (I ended up deleting about 25% of my deco trees and 10-15 outer-lying lots that will be re-placed in a subhood.)

After the hood is loaded, navigate to the lot you want, but DO NOT actually load that lot until ESL runs yet again. Ditto for CAS - Do not select "Create New Family" until ESL has run again.

Play should be proceed as normal at this point. You probably don't need to alt-tab back to Resource Monitor again unless your sims are going traveling or you are changing play lots.

BONUS TIP #1: You can put a shortcut to the ESL routine on your desktop and push it manually (just double click the icon) if you don't feel like waiting once the game is loaded. I have had imperfect results with this vs. just waiting the five minutes, though, because the game wants to run through some stuff and flush it. But it's an option for you to experiment with.

BONUS TIP #2: If you have a really deep clothing/hair CC catalog, try to avoid using the FFS clothing tool option where you select every outfit for the sim, and their hair and makeup, at the same time. Instead, choose individual outfits by type and use the regular mirror option to change appearance (or SimBlender has it, I think, so they can do it where they already are).