#there’s probably a hundred anatomical mistakes here

[larri0li]

promise

[tanadrin]

The Wanderer

(attention conservation notice: more ludicriously dialogue-heavy SF, about 4500 words)

About one hundred and fifty years ago, sensitive astronomical instrumentation detected a highly reflective, radio-loud mass moving through the local stellar cluster at an appreciable fraction of light speed. When focused transmissions were directed at it, it stopped, and began moving toward the source. After this… alarming turn of events, consultations were taken among the major orbitals, and it was decided that a ship would be constructed, to meet the object well away from the inhabited worlds. Within seventy years the emissary-vessel was launched, and by the radio equivalent of crude gestures we communicated that the place of meeting should be Verrastaxe, a dying O-type star near the heart of the cluster.

When we arrived, it took more than a year to get the bearings of the object; it was found in a close orbit around the star itself, embedded deep within the thick stellar winds rising from the surface. It appeared to have extended collectors of some sort, and to be refueling. It was, without a doubt, a vessel like our own, albeit one of very ancient design, intended to cross the great distances between distant stars. And it was enormous, the size of many of our largest orbital habitats stuck together. Clearly it originated from far, far beyond the cluster; probably from far beyond the region of space our ancestors had come from, thousands of generations before. How far, and what kinship it bore to us--if any--we could not say.

We determined--again, by the use of crude signals--that it would probably be safe to approach the vessel, and as we descended to the star, it rose up to meet us. We rendezvoused in a high orbit, Verrastaxe bright and baleful below us. We came close, within EVA distance, and then our cutters-of-roads and charters-of-courses closed the gap in spacesuits. They were directed via a series of lights to an airlock and, being intrepid souls, they went inside.

They reported afterward that the ship was indeed peopled. Its occupants’ bodies were built on the same general plan as ours: the right number of limbs and eyes, breathing the right atmosphere, but their language and appearance was totally strange. Their intent was undoubtedly peaceful; their demeanor friendly but calm; they spoke eagerly to the cutters-of-roads even though they seemed to know they would not be understood. They endeavored to establish some little avenue of communication, and we took this as a positive sign. Our singers-of-words and singers-of-souls soon crossed over and began the difficult work of building a deeper linguistic connection, which was the work of many months. There is still much we do not understand about their tongues and their ways of thinking, but I can share with you a small part of what I have learned.

They told us the name of their home was Nyo Hirwe Ilzzha, and they had not built it. Indeed, they did not know who had; they did not know where it had come from, or how long their people had resided on it. ‘Hirwe goes, and we follow’ was their refrain; and they seemed spectacularly uninterested in the world outside. We told them about our cluster, about the history of our system, about the limited communication we had with other inhabited stars nearby, about our knowledge of this region of the galaxy, but all these things were of no interest to them. We asked them about their own history, since they had begun to travel with Hirwe, but they could tell us nothing of that, either. A more strange and memoryless people I have never encountered. They have, so far as our soul-singers and observers-of-rites can tell, no notion of religion or psychology or science or commerce or industry among themselves. Their needs are provided for by Hirwe, they say; all the rest of their time, they spend in the telling of stories.

The stories! They are the same stories, over and over again, but how many there are, I do not know. A few dozen, or many thousands! Or only one. They bend back on one another, diverge, return, and diverge again. One story may be told a hundred ways, depending on the inclination of the speaker and their beliefs about its true meaning; another, considered inviolate, a mighty sacrilege if even a single word is changed or omitted. Some of these stories are utterly inane. Some--even in the rough and frustrating translations available to us--have given me cause to weep as I have not since I was a small child. They insist that all of these stories are true, even the ones which are absurd, and that none are their own invention. As for what their tales might reveal of their values or their past, so far these matters remain obscure. The observers-of-rites have made many recordings, and continue their investigations.

You may consider this transmission my preliminary report. What follows is a small portion of the data we have collected. Our tasters-of-water have determined that the people of Hirwe are indeed of the same general chemistry and genetic background as we are, and that our lines diverged somewhere between one and two million years ago. Gross anatomical studies have not been performed yet, however, since we have not yet been able to make our request to examine their dead understood. We shall transmit more information as soon as it is available.

--First report of the Singer-of-Stars Sahalamenshifarun Ayye Mirastelaparahe, second-in-command of the Verrastaxe Expedition

Veleteminanora--Vele to her friends--had felt her mind wandering after the third hour of storytelling; the storyteller had gotten stuck, it seemed, on a very repetitive story about a man with a fish, which was made even more repetitive by the fact that the people of Hirwe had never seen a fish in all their lives, and the storyteller felt the need to remind them of what a fish was, what it looked like, and what it was for every time the word was mentioned. Her eyes had strayed to the dim passages of the ship behind the teller, and she had felt the urge to explore; and so when the storyteller said that he had made a mistake, and he had to start again from the beginning, Vele had excused herself, and pushed off gently from the wall, hoping to glide out of the room as unobtrusively as possible in the zero-gravity environment. Her colleagues did not seem to notice her leave, but at least one was sound asleep already.

Nyo Hirwe Ilzzha was labyrinthine, without any clear plan or structure, like something that had not been built so much as naturally accreted, if nature dealt in steel beams and circuits and corridors instead of in stone and hydrogen and ice. Over how many ages had it been built? But the people of Hirwe insisted their home had never changed. How many ages ago had it been finished?

Nonetheless, Vele wasn’t too worried about getting lost. There were some interfaces scattered throughout the ship at irregular intervals, mostly at corridor junctions, that provided access to a crude natural-language interface. They had, with the people of Hirwe’s help, gotten it to understand basic queries like asking for directions in their own tongue. And here and there there were various chambers of different functions--sleeping-rooms, rooms that dispensed food, what seemed to be hydroponics facilities--all laid out without any apparent intent or design, but enough so that even if you did get well and truly lost in the ship, you would never starve to death or anything. The ship was like their stories: always folding back in on itself, always repeating, seemingly without cause or purpose. It was enough to drive someone of a more logical disposition a little mad.

As Vele came to a junction, she chose a path basically at random, though with a bias toward those that seemed to take her deeper into the ship. Occasionally, she would open a door and look around at the rooms she passed; they didn’t seem to vary much, though as she went further down, the signs of recent occupation seemed to grow less frequent. The people of Hirwe preferred the larger, better-lit rooms near the outer part of the ship, and there weren’t nearly enough of them to even fill up just those layers. Their population was either stable, or grew only very slowly, the water-tasters reckoned, though it was hard to say if their lifespans were any longer than those of the Cluster-folk.

After a couple of hours of exploration, it seemed to Vele like there was a qualitative change in the architecture. It wasn’t sudden, but the corridors got noticeably narrower, and the bland, repetitive pattern of the rooms changed. Now they seemed to have more distinct functions, to be laid out in more recognizable patterns: like repeating fragments of an actual ship. Here was something recognizably like an engineering bay, with a large power conduit that should have terminated at an engine mounting, if they weren’t more than a kilometer inside the vessel. Here was a barracks--but one designed for a ship that spun to emulate gravity. Here was--well, she didn’t know what that one was. A lab of some kind? An organics synthesis chamber? Something with an inordinate quantity of clear tubes, anyway.

She came to another interface panel. This one looked different from the others, too. Simpler. There was just a single button on its surface. She touched it with one finger.

“Ship. How far am I from the outer hull?”

“One thousand, two hundred and six meters,” the voice answered. It was a different voice, too. Just a touch less artificial-sounding, maybe. It handled the consonants of Vele’s language better, anyway.

She thought for a second; the interface wasn’t great at complex queries, but it was worth a shot.

“Ship, where is the oldest part of you? The original part.”

Silence. Apparently it didn’t understand. She should try putting it in the language of the people of Hirwe, maybe.

“Hirwe. Where is, uh, most old rooms?”

Still nothing. Well, she wasn’t very good with languages.

“Where find I can the most--”

“Continue down this corridor twenty meters,” interrupted the interface. “Take the next junction to the right. Follow the servitors.”

The servitors? Vele did as the ship instructed; at the junction, waiting for her on the right side, was a small, four-legged robot-like thing, clinging to the wall. A light on its back blinked twice when it saw her; it moved a little way down the corridor, as if beckoning her to follow.

Well, thought Vele. That’s new. So she followed.

Every so often, the robot-thing would disappear, running into a hatch or a crevice in the wall; then another would appear from somewhere else and take its place a moment later. They were all of slightly different configurations, but the same basic design. Some rounder, some squatter, some more graceful. Like the ship, they had a random quality about themselves. They moved in a wandering, half-distracted way that reminded her not a little of the people of Hirwe above them, and Vele wondered if they were the original inhabitants. If, in some strange way, the people of Hirwe had descended from them, or the other way around.

There didn’t seem to be any more interface panels in this part of the ship, and after a while, Vele wondered how far she had traveled. “How big even is this place anyway,” she muttered to herself.

“About four thousand seven hundred meters in diameter,” came a voice from nowhere in particular.

“Uh… Ship? Can you hear me?”

“You are in the part of the ship now where the voice interface is accessible from all corridors and chambers,” came the answer. “You may speak at any time, and I will answer.”

“Neat. Hey Ship, is it just my imagination, or are you getting better at my language?”

“I have had many weeks to study your language. I am quite proficient at it.”

That “I” again. Vele wondered if the ship was smarter than it had led on before.

“Forgive me, but you’ve certainly had us fooled.”

“The outer portions of the ship are delegated to lower-priority subprocesses, due to their less critical nature. Consequently, the interface methods available in those sections are less efficient.”

“Ship, are you sentient?”

No answer.

“Ship?”

Strange. If the ship was bothered by the question, it didn’t show it; the little robots kept leading Vele onward.

After another twenty minutes, Vele grew bored by the silence.

“Hey Ship, how many people of Hirwe are on board?”

“That information isn’t tracked,” the ship answered.

“Why not?”

“It’s not important.”

“You don’t care how many passengers you have? How they’re doing?”

“That’s not a primary function.”

“I don’t get it. Why build a ship to carry people at all then?”

“You misunderstand. This ship wasn’t built to carry people.”

“Well, then why was it built?”

There was a long silence, and Vele thought she’d annoyed it again, then it said,

“I don’t have access to that information.”

“You mean you don’t remember?”

“No. I mean you’ll have to continue deeper into a part of the ship that remembers.”

Now that was cryptic.

“You’ve lost me. Are there multiple AI aboard the ship or something?”

“Ship control is unified under Nyo Hirwe Ilzzha. However, less important outer sections are delegated to lower-priority mirrors and shadows of the governing personality. These shadows are of more limited intelligence and awareness. They have their own memory, which does not reproduce my memory in full. As you travel deeper into the ship, you are rising in my awareness.”

“Are you not aware of everything going on inside you?”

“Only those things I choose to be aware of. I have other tasks to attend to that require my focus.”

“So, what you’re saying is, the part of you I’m in now, that’s not fully aware. Not sentient. But if I go deeper…”

“The part of me you are in now has awareness of a kind. Akin to sleep, perhaps. If you venture deeper, you will find me wakeful.”

How much deeper, she wondered. And what sort of wakeful?

“How much farther, Ship?”

“Turn left here; go another ten meters, then open that hatch.”

Vele did as the ship instructed; the hatch at the end of the short hallway was enormous and heavy, like an exterior airlock, but it opened silently and smoothly when she turned the handle. The space beyond was mostly unpainted metal, but it looked clean and virtually new.

“You are in one of the oldest parts of the ship now,” the voice said.

“How old?” Vele asked.

“Not quite two million years.”

Vele looked around her, at the dim, warm lighting and the polished surfaces.

“That’s absurd.”

“I assure you it is true.”

“Nothing lasts that long. This should all be dust by now.”

“I keep it maintained. I replace the parts that wear out. But much more is original than you might suppose. I’ve been in space the entire time, and my body does not crumble here as it would in air. Certainly not this far below my skin.”

“You keep saying ‘I.’ Are you sentient or not?”

“I am Nyo Hirwe Ilzzha. I am the ship. The ship is me.”

Vele floated there, feeling a little helpless; nothing about their encounter so far had really quite prepared her for this.

“So you’re awake now?”

“You’re in the most wakeful part of me, I suppose. I am as aware of you as you are of me.”

“When were you built? The ship, the AI, either. If you remember. And if you remember, why don’t your passengers?”

“I wasn’t built, Vele. I was born.”

“What, your systems are biological or something?”

“No. Not at all. You misunderstand me.

“The inhabitants you have met are not my passengers. I’m not a ship, not like you’re thinking, though I’m happy enough to answer to that name if it’s the one you want to give me. But I’m not an AI pilot. I’m not artificial at all.

“I was born under a sky of the sort of color you have never known countless years ago. At the beginning of all things, when the world came to an end. I accompanied the others into the long exile. In that time, I changed, slowly. You see, I was… unwilling to die. Not only for the fear of death, though that fear has driven me more than I’d like to admit in my long life. But more than that, I feared--well. I feared something I find difficult to put into words. There was someone once, who meant more to me than all the world, and all the worlds beyond. In the end, we were parted. She is gone now, her body long turned to dust I imagine, but nevertheless, I have good reason to believe I shall see her again, before the end of all things, even if only by an hour. So, I have endured. And will continue to. Changing myself, as necessary, to survive.”

“You turned yourself into a ship?”

“Something like that. I expected to go out, far beyond even the furthest outposts of the Exile, to be alone for a long time. I never expected we would have come so far in so little time.”

“Wait, wait, hold on. There are more of you? How many? And what do you mean, so little time? You said you’re two million years old!”

“Older. It’s longer than that since the Exile began.”

“Exile?”

“Of us, of our kind.”

“There are others like you?”

“Like me? I flatter myself that there is no one quite like me. But I mean like us. Like you and I, Vele.”

The whole conversation was beginning to make Vele feel very small now, and she was liking it less and less.

“Like me?”

“You. Your people. The people on this ship. The people to whom I was born. I went out into the darkness, only to find it was already peopled. The outcast, the ones who lost their world in the beginning, they had gone further than I could ever have imagined when the Exile began. You have all forgotten, of course, where you have come from and why you are out here. Some of you have very old stories or myths, which are distantly connected to history. But oh, none of you have been static, none complacent. You have all begun to change in different ways. Five hundred thousand years ago, the peoples I encountered were merely strange. A few wished to go with me, to see some of what I saw; I let them. They are the ancestors of the people who live here now. But now the peoples I encounter are blossoming into a thousand new species. The children of that little lost world are beginning to flower among the stars, after too many painful millennia struggling to survive, and soon they will flourish. They will make all the galaxy their garden. The people of the Cluster, for instance. You have almost wholly adapted to life in space; I think before too long you may shed entirely your need for an atmosphere, for that warm, comfortable shell of an orbital habitat. You will be free in the light of your suns, like birds on the most rarefied of winds.

“Our original species has been dead for at least one million years. A multitude of new ones has replaced it. And still I encounter them, roving from star to star, on endless journeys for reasons I cannot fathom. The ones who came with me originally were in a way evangelists. They told the wanderers of a place called Paradise, where all the sundered kindred could be gathered together again. They may speak of it still; I have not listened to their stories for a long time.”

“You mean, a common homeworld?”

“No. That is gone. Forever. Put it out of your mind. You will not find it again, and neither will I. I meant… another world. But that hardly matters. You could hardly reach it from here.”

“You did. I mean, you were there once, right? And you made it here.”

“I left long ago. And I have had the benefit of a long life, and a long memory. If your people wanted to seek Paradise, and you think they could find it--even after two million years wandering in space--that they would not forget, or be turned aside like so many, then by all means, I will tell you what I know of how to reach it. But it was only at the beginning of the Exile that we scrabbled and suffered in the waste places of the void. You are different now. You are much more than what we were then. You have been made whole. You are no longer divided in your hearts and in your natures, between the worlds below and the stars above.”

“Only us? What about you?”

“I am not like you. I have not changed.”

“You’re kidding. You’re a spaceship.”

“My form has changed a little. My nature has not.”

“You expect me to believe that? That you could shed a body of flesh and bone and not change your own nature?”

“Look at the wall in front of you, Vele.”

It was a wide, flat, blank expanse of steel; maybe four meters across. Nothing marked it out as in any way special.

“There is a chamber about a hundred meters past that--this is about as close as you can get to it, since it’s sealed off from the rest of the ship. It’s like the one you’re standing in, but somewhat smaller. Enough space for someone your size to lie down in, but no more. I am sleeping there. Or, what is left of me is.

“I wonder, sometimes, does he suffer? In the literal sense, I know he does not. The pain receptors in his nerves do not fire; they could not, even if you took a knife to his flesh. Does he dream? There are only the feeblest stirrings of slow delta-wave signals in the nervous tissue now, and they pass seamlessly into the sensors woven through the neurons, where they become part of me. And my thoughts go back, too; they excite the tissue, create brief responses, echo, and fall silent. But I wonder if I have not tricked myself, by this illusion. That I am not him, as he has grown and changed, and left that body behind. If that were so, I could cut it off, cast it away, like a vestigal appendage. It would be no matter. But sometimes I fear that I am only what killed him, the cancer of his ingenuity which encumbered him and engulfed him. That he lies on that cold table, withered and small, and he has terrible dreams of which I know nothing.

“His memories are mine. His thoughts are mine. I can remember being him—and yes, I can remember every moment of every day, as he changed into what I am today. There is no gulf, no division, no lacuna. As surely as the man in the last hour of his life is the same as the man in his first, we are me. But is that true? Is the old enfeebled thing, the bag of bones and skin, with a lifetime of memories, the same as the wailing child, who knows nothing, hates nothing, loves nothing, but is only alone, wanting, and afraid? Then I am what killed him, or at least replaced him. And I fear to cut away that, lest I be changed—that I will no longer be human, that that ugly twisted thing still contains my soul.”

“How—how long has he been there? You?”

The voice was silent for a long while, and I thought he was ignoring the question. I started to apologize.      

“I’m sorry, I—“

  “No, don’t be. I’m trying to remember. I am at least two million, seven hundred and sixty-thousand years old. I cannot say if I am much more than that—my mechanical components are continually replaced, and my… corpse is older than any single cell it contains, so radiological dating is of limited value. Sometimes I look out, and it seems to me the stars are older than I expect. I wonder if my memory is as good as I think it is. But based on the evolution of large-mass main-sequence stars, I can’t be older than five million years. Are the stars changing, or is my memory? I can remember so much—the same thoughts continually overwhelm me. I cannot escape them. I am like the storytellers—it is all the same, over and over again. Whether I remember it properly, I cannot say. Sometimes I think I should cast myself adrift, seek the empty place far above the galactic disk, let my memories consume me.”

“Why did you come here? Why meet us here, at Verrastaxe?”

“I am not quite that far gone. Not yet. I still crave seeing my distant kin from time to time. Knowing that they are still spreading from star to star, still telling new tales, still singing and exploring and falling in love. As I hope they shall do for a long, long time. Until no new stars are born. Until the universe is quiet and dark.”

“And what will you do, after you leave?”

“Continue to wander. Beyond your Cluster, across a gap in the local interstellar medium, lies another, older group of stars, full of red dwarfs. I wonder if any of those stars have worlds that are peopled yet. I wish to find out. It will take me about three hundred thousand years to do so. After that, I intend to set my course toward the galactic core. It has been a dream of mine since boyhood to see the tempest there devouring suns.”

“How long will it take you to reach?”

“Far longer than I have already been alive.”

“And after that?”

“Ha! Do I need a plan?”

“No. But you have one, don’t you?”

“I have many billions of years after that, if I can manage to survive.”

“Until the stars cease to burn.”

“Or longer.”

“Longer?”

“When my memory does not consume me, I devote my energies to physics. There is a problem I am attempting to solve. A problem of time.

“There is a very old idea. A way to cheat inevitable death. A machine one might build, a kind of computer which, when all its calculations are through, returns, in the end, to its starting state and thereby creates no entropy. Perhaps it is nothing more than a trick of mathematics; many wiser minds than I have certainly thought so. But I have applied myself to the problem for a long time. I continue to study it. I have designs in mind for such a thing. It would be immense, perhaps larger than a planet. Larger than a star. But long after the galaxies went dark, long after the last black hole evaporated to warm radiation, long after the great cosmic horizon contracted the skies, and everything was utterly still--I hope, maybe, to still be dreaming.”

“Dreaming the same dreams, over and over again?”

“Indeed.”

“It seems a strange fate to hope for, O wandering one.”

“Yet such is my nature, I could never hope for any other. However long I must endure, I shall, even if it is forever.”

[saiyanandproud]

You make me feel like flying  You make me feel so high  And there's no denying  You make me feel alive 

I SPENT MORE TIME LOOKING FOR SOME WEIRD LYRICS TO FIT THIS DRAWING THAN DRAWING THE WHOLE THING, AND I DON’T EVEN HAVE ANY IDEA WHERE THESE LYRICS COME FROM. But I thought they were fitting.

There’s probably a hundred anatomical and coloring mistakes in this piece but I am just glad it’s done. Also, why does Mariko always look so pale when the drawing is done? She’s not meant to be that pale, jfhqfhlqwjhf... 

Oh well.

The threads between these two always make me feel like drawing some fluff, and I chose to be self-indulgent. Blame the mun from @shallxt because it’s all their fault.

Also @cozymochi YAY I MANAGED TO DRAW THAT FRIGGING ARMOUR!

Once again, Shallot (c) to Toriyama and is inspired by the threads with @shallxt

Mariko is my OC from Dragon Ball Xenoverse 

(Just thought of specifying it because I see various people reblogging my drawings here >//<)

[quietest-rebellion]

“His Last Masterpiece” Ch. 15: Memories

Chapter One

Previous Chapter

The pristine white doors opened in front of Sebastian. Large tanks full of green liquid filled the room. Each one with a lost inside.

“All these tanks… What’s this about?” At the other end of the room were some tables, each with a body bag. If he had to guess, there was a lost in each one those too. So obviously they were studying the lost… but what for? The next dark room had more tanks and curtains dividing it into sections, like a hospital. Sebastian walked further into the room, a pulse of light going through him. In front of him stood an apparition of Hoffman. A residual memory.

“What were they doing in this lab?” She asked, looking around. “And why did Liam want me to meet him here?” She walked forward and stopped at the large door.

“Unity cerebral chip detected.” A robotic voice said. “Entry authorized.” The door opened and Hoffman went through. The room fell dark again.

“Hmm. Can’t pass through without one of those chips…” Sebastian mumbled, starting to look behind the curtains. “Gotta be one around here somewhere…” He started to hear groaning in the room. Great. One of these disasters of a person woke up. Sebastian crept towards the noise, if he was lucky he’d be able to kill it without using and bullets. He turned the corner. The creature was ripping into a corpse and eating it. If Sebastian had had any appetite before, he just lost it. At least it was distracted, so he was able to simply grab it and stab it in the back of the head. He could hear more groaning. Why did these things suddenly have to wake up when he got here?

Sebastian continued up the stairs and into the first door. Another small lab, abandoned(of course) with anatomical drawings on the wall. It reminded him of exploring Ruvik’s mansion. He shivered at the thought. His communicator beeped at finding a signal and Sebastian tuned in, happy to distract himself from memories of Beacon. It was one of the Mobius researchers. She was talking about the people turning into lost. Everyone dying. She said the whole town would succumb in two weeks.

“This must’ve been around when they sent in the tech team.” Sebastian mumbled. “And when Stefano found Y/N. The whole thing probably got worse faster than in two weeks…” Sebastian picked up the supplies in the room and left. The groaning in the hall getting louder. He could see a larger lost further down the hall, but if he was lucky he wouldn’t have to go anywhere near it. He continued onto the next room. A dark room that seemed to be functioning as some kind of morgue or containment room for ‘test subjects.’He went to the other end of the room and pushed open the door.

“What do we have here…” Sebastian whispered. It looked like some sort of examination room with a normal man on the table. He was dead, but he wasn’t a lost. Various robotic arms surrounded his head. As if someone was in the middle of performing an operation and was stopped short. Sebastian walked over to the computer and read over the file. It explained that the man on the table was a terminated Mobius operative. They were working on harvesting his chip to see if they could get any new data about why even Mobius operatives were changing into lost. Underneath was a brief explanation of the extraction process.

“If they haven’t removed this guy’s chip yet, I can use it to get through that door and find Hoffman…” Sebastian went over to the operation table and typed in the code given on the document. The numbers lit up green and the drill next to the man’s head started up. Sebastian turned away as the drill cut into the man. Crunching noises joined the buzzing, and after a minute the drill shut off and the robotic arm pulled it out of the man’s skull. The cerebral chip stuck to the end of the drill.

“Ugh. Thank God he’s already dead…” Sebastian grumbled looking at the pool of blood next to the man’s head as he grabbed the chip. “I gotta get out of this lab…” He turned to the door and the lights shut off. Banging filled the area around him, as the emergency lights flickered on, filling the room with a faint red glow. Sebastian crept back into the morgue-like room. Most of the tables were now empty and the other door was ripped off of its hinges. Great.

He looked over the guardrail outside of the room. The lower level was full of lost, even one of the tall, moany abominations. Wonderful. Sebastian made his way back to the stairs, stealth killing any lost in his way. There were only a few so it wasn’t too difficult. But he wasn’t particularly looking forward to the mess downstairs. He made it down safely and crept up to an electronically locked door.

“Dammit.” He pulled out his crossbow and a shockbolt. Good thing he hadn’t used them all on Stefano. He shot the control panel next to the door and it opened. He quickly snuck into the room, hoping none of the lost heard him.

Laying on the ground lining the walls were more bodies under cloths. “Are these Union citizens? What was Mobius doing with them?” He asked aloud, peeking under the sheets. Sebastian made his way down a long corridor lined with more bodies, trash bags, and puddles of blood. That’s not ominous at all.

At the end of the hall was what looked to be a mining cart with some more corpses. The track the cart was on led to a drop off. He walked up and shined his flashlight into the chasm.

“Looks like it goes on forever…” What the hell was this place? Sebastian’s communicator beeped. He ignored it and went into the side room. Some sort of observation deck? He read over the open file on the computer. Some kind of log from the person watching over this area, which was apparently called “The Pit.” It seemed like the man was experiencing weird things and was just trying to play it off as a symptom of solitude. Not “The Lost Phenomenon.” If Sebastian had to guess, the guy was probably dead. Suddenly the area around Sebastian grew cold. He could see his breath. He heard a sort of giggling and a woman’s voice playfully calling for him.

“Oh no. It’s coming.” Sebastian whispered. “It” being the tall, singing woman who he had encountered a couple of times, only when he wasn’t with Y/N. Whenever he was with this woman, he was transported back to Beacon and given flashbacks of the nightmare that it was. Something he really didn’t want to experience again. “I gotta get out of here…” Sebastian made his way back down the long corridor. Moving as quickly as he could both in an attempt to stay warm and to get away from that thing. The gate quickly shut in front of him. He backed away, pulling out his handgun.

“Sebastian…” The woman sung playfully. Sebastian turned around to see her crawling towards him, her dress flowing behind her.

“No…” He backed up, aiming his gun. She moved a lot faster to get close to him and stood. The woman had to be at least a foot taller than Sebastian. She screamed and he was thrown back into the wall, everything going black around him.

~*~*~*~

You were dressing Rozi in a diaper and a onesie that Stefano had found. It was a little big on her, but when you really thought about it, she was a tiny baby. Not too tiny, but not exactly normal size. Oh well, you loved her anyway. It didn’t matter to you how big or small she was.

Normally, in times like this you’d expect to be annoyed by the constant clicking of a camera. But, Stefano had fallen asleep in a chair nearby. You couldn’t blame him. The man hardly ever slept, and probably hadn’t slept since before his fight with Sebastian. And who knows how long before that. Outwardly, it seemed like he was very capable of running on only a few hours of sleep at a time, but you knew he’d been sneaking cups of coffee every now and then.

You glanced over at Stefano. He looked peaceful when he was sleeping. When he was sleeping, you couldn’t tell that he had the blood of probably hundreds of innocent people on his hands.

You sighed as you finished dressing Rozalia. How did you end up in this mess? First mistake, joining a cult. Okay, so life wasn’t going the greatest for you in Krimson City and you wanted to get away from it all. But you probably shouldn’t have joined a cult. Second mistake, when things started going downhill in Union and a smooth-talking Italian offered you safety, you took it. You probably should have taken the missing eye and blood on his suit as warnings. Third mistake, staying with him long enough for him to start caring about you. Fourth mistake, sleeping with him. Fifth mistake, doing it more than once. (You weren’t going to include each time as an individual mistake, your list would be way too long.) Sixth mistake, falling for him. Even when you knew all of the things he’d done. Seventh mistake, making friends with his enemy. Eighth mistake, saving him and getting yourself shot. Ninth mistake, having his baby. And you were sure that a tenth mistake wouldn’t be too far behind.

So, you’d made a lot of mistakes. Okay. But some of them weren’t so much mistakes as “happy accidents.” Well, that’s what you considered them. Someone else, like Sebastian for example, would still consider them mistakes. Maybe even more than mistakes. More like fuck-ups. But oh well, what was done was done. There wasn’t really anything you could do to change it. At some point in this nightmare you had fallen for this psychopath of an artist, and you had his and your child in your arms to prove it.

Stefano stirred in his sleep. You looked over at him to see he had a pained expression. Was he having a nightmare? You wondered if you should wake him, but you didn’t have to think about it for long. He suddenly shot up, almost falling out of his chair, eye wide open. He was breathing heavily and staring forward as if he saw something you couldn’t. He lightly touched the bad side of his face, still bandaged from before. He seemed like he was in some kind of trance. You protectively held onto Rozi, not knowing if you should try to say something. Stefano winced and sighed, sitting back in the chair.

“You okay..?” You asked cautiously. He lazily opened his eye and looked over at you. He touched his damaged face again.

“It still aches sometimes.” He quietly laughed to himself. “A good reminder of the beauty of life and suffering.” You sighed.

“You scared me.”

“It was only a bad dream, amore. I’m not a child who needs to be consoled.” He gave you a small smile. It was obvious Stefano didn’t want to talk anymore about his dream. Not surprising. Being afraid was a sign of weakness, and he never wanted to show anyone that side of himself.

“You don’t sleep much. Is it because of your nightmares?” You asked. He narrowed his eye. Annoyed that you hadn’t dropped the subject.

“Yes and no.” He sighed. “When you are someone as creative as I, your never-ending thoughts don’t allow you such luxuries as sleep.” You rolled your eyes.

“Okay. Sure. But what does someone so unphased by death and monsters, such as the great Stefano Valentini, have nightmares about anyway?” You were half joking, but you were also very over his whole ‘no one can know anything about me except my art’ act. And it was very clear he was getting irritated with you as well.

“Unfortunately,” Stefano leaned in so that his face was slightly closer to yours. “I have things, such as the beautiful Y/N L/N, that I care about losing.” Ouch. You knew he was referencing to your having run away. Well, if his plan was to get you to stop prying, it worked. Granted, you could tell there was more he wasn’t telling you, but you weren’t going to push anymore. Although, you sure as hell weren’t going to apologize. For running away, or for asking questions.

Stefano was a little sorry that he was blaming you for things. He knew you’d been through a lot recently. (Mainly because of him.) But he wasn’t going to apologize. Because in the end it worked out. Right? He gifted you with something that no one else did. Rozalia. And he didn’t even ask for you to thank him.

Stefano sighed. Maybe he was being a bit ridiculous. But there were some things he just didn’t want to talk about, and you should have respected that. No, his dream wasn’t about you. But he didn’t want to bother you with the past. And he still wasn’t ready to really acknowledge that he had nightmares about the war. About the explosion. About losing his eye. No, he told everyone it was a good thing that it had happened. (Which, in a way, it was.) And he would continue to tell everyone that. Including you.

Rozalia moved a little in your arms, cooing softly. You smiled down at her. Ah yes, the main reason you still put up with this conceited photographer. She stared back up at you. Since first opening her eyes, she did this a lot more often. Blank stares that seemed to be prying into your soul, or curiously looking around the room. Not that there was too much to look at. You were still stuck in this safe house. But it didn’t matter to her. For the most part, your little flower was content. There was a camera flash, instantly you turned and gave Stefano a look. He returned one just as cold.

“Okay, whatever.” You sighed, looking back at your daughter. Rozi blinked a few times, having not liked the bright flash of light. She moved her little hands around. Sort of like she wanted to rub her eyes, but was just kinda touching her face instead. You and Stefano sat in silence, just watching her. How could something so small, so innocent, exist in this hell? Rozalia was your ray of hope that everything would be alright. That Lily would be found. That Theodore would be defeated. That all of you would make it out safely.

~*~*~*~

Sebastian stood as a large room formed around him. The ghost-like woman floated in the open space in the middle of the room. He quickly ducked behind the nearest object.

“That thing again…” Sebastian whispered. The woman moaned and lifted all of the objects in the area into the air, slamming them back down a second later. She started to sing her familiar tune. Why was it so familiar? Whatever. He would think over music later. Right now, Sebastian had to get out of here. Upon seeing the other way was blocked by some broken columns, he crept to the right. When he turned the corner, the woman moaned again, throwing the broken pieces of column in front of him. He fell back. “Shit… Guess I’ll go the other way.” He crept past her again, praying that she wouldn’t turn around. He stealthily made his way down the staircase at the end of the path. He heard the woman giggling, and quickly turned the corner. He could now see the middle of the room that she had been floating above. In the middle was a man laying on a table. He wore a nice vest and gun holsters. Was that… no. It couldn’t be.

The woman floated down so that she was in front of him. The table with the man floated into the air, then shot through the doors behind her. She raised her arms and everything in the room lifted into the air as well. The woman threw everything down around her as she landed, giggling and resuming her singing. The hall behind her lit up red. That was where he needed to go. He just had to get passed this bitch, who was periodically lifting every other item and slamming it back down a second later. She certainly wasn’t making it easy to hide. Sebastian started to maneuver through the room. Every now and then the woman would moan again, and the obstacles would be shifted around, causing him to need to find another path.

“Dammit…” Sebastian whispered as his path was blocked yet again.

“Sebastian…” She eerily sung as she slammed everything down in a different arrangement. Fortunately, that opened up his path and he had a straight shot for the doors. He gunned it, kicking open the doors and running down the hall.

“That thing again… Why is it after me? What does it have to do with this place?” He asked no one in particular. He slowed down, noticing that it wasn’t following him. Sebastian made his way through the next set of hospital doors. The place was in shambles. Wheelchairs and empty gurneys littered the abandoned halls. Just. Like. Beacon.

Sebastian picked up a file he found. It was written by the police chief, Jim. He was writing to Mobius, talking about sending Sebastian to mandatory counseling to convince him that Beacon wasn’t real. He talked about Sebastian becoming like a zombie. But justified it as something that needed to be done for Mobius.

“Kidman was right.” Sebastian shook his head. “They’re everywhere. They were right under my nose the entire time…” He picked up another file. This one was torn in half, so he could only read the end of it. Some official bullshit, written by his psychologist, about how he was experiencing residual effects from STEM. “Damn… Mobius were using me as their guinea pig. “Long-lasting residual effects”? They knew STEM would scar me like this…” Sebastian made his way out of the side room he was in and back down the main hall towards a faint red light. “A way out?” He continued through the doorway and started down some stairs. A projection like image started up next to him on the wall. Flashbacks from Beacon. Leslie. The Haunted. Ruvik. Another projection started on the other side of the stairs. Beacon’s front sign. A brain. Faint whispering could be heard, as more projections appeared around him. Leslie again. Kidman. What was this..? At the end of the staircase was a small door. Sebastian cautiously opened it.

“Trapped. Can’t get out…” It was his own voice. But he wasn’t speaking. In front of him lay the man on the table that had floated behind the ghost woman. On the walls behind that were more projections from Beacon. Ruvik. Jimenez. Kidman.  “Still here. Can’t leave. Nothing changes…” The man on the table groaned. That was why he had seemed familiar. It was Sebastian. From back then. From Beacon. “My fault…” Sebastian slowly walked closer to the past version of himself. “It’s all my fault…”

“What the hell is this…?” He asked as he reached the edge of the table.

“Can’t move on…” His past self turned to look at him. “Can’t… Move…” Suddenly Sebastian felt a familiar pain pierce through his skull. He grabbed his head as memories from Beacon flooded his mind. The monsters. Windows shattering in front of him. The church. He groaned as the images faded.

“The source of my pain…” He realized. “Is me. The part of me still stuck in STEM.”

“Never getting out…” His past self took labored breaths as he closed his eyes.

“No. I’m wrong.” Sebastian drew his handgun. “I will get out.” He placed the barrel next to his past self’s head. “But without you…” He pulled the trigger.

Next Chapter

[hazeofhearts]

A Happy Night In

Hello readers! Before we begin, I would like to say that I do not own any of these characters or you.

Hope you enjoy!

(Note: this is a part of a series but you don’t have to read them in order. It would be recommended though. If there are any mistakes, please message me so I can fix them. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you!)

“Come on, babe. It’s just a small party.”

“Steve, it’s never a small party. Really, it’s never small.”

Steve was leaning on the wall next to your locker, that goofy smile on his face, a busted lip and a bruised cheek. When you had first seen him, you’d punched him until he told you why he was hurt. When you found out it was because he was defending you from some serious assholes, you wanted to punch him less but you were still upset that he would hurt himself for you.

“Babe, please.”

Steve was good at whining and giving you those puppy dog eyes. He may act like a mother to several children but you had to remember that he was a kid too. And his eyes made you practically putty in his hands. Not to mention that stupid nickname.  

Babe.

You had gone on one date and he had started calling you babe. You told him to stop halfheartedly and when he persisted, you never mentioned it again. Everyone around you was surprised when Steve sat next to you at lunch, so close that nobody could assume anything other than that you were together.

He hadn’t officially asked you and you were waiting for him to. You wouldn’t deal with those on and off again bullshit relationships that your friends had dealt with before. You had been “a thing” for three months or so.

“I’ll play it by ear. If I want to go home, you take me home and then you can go back to the party or whatever.”

Before you could react, Steve had pressed a quick kiss to your bottom lip. You startled back and chastised Steve while you pulled out a tissue to hold over his reopened lip.

“You really need to stop this Steve. I need you to be smart. I can’t take a boyfriend home to mom when he has a busted face.”

Steve took your hands gently from where they held the tissue to his mouth. He clasped his fingers around your delicate ones.

“Boyfriend?”

Your heart sped up to a hundred miles per hour.

“I-uh-I ha, ha! I’m just kidding! Oh, got you! Pick me up at seven, okay? See you then!”

You quickly walked away, your cheeks bright red as you remembered you didn’t even grab your Biology textbook that you had been looking for. You had your hand on it when Steve had kissed you.

Argh! Steve.

You were sitting in the library at lunch, your head on the desk and you occasionally banged it on the hard wood. You were being stupid. Logic tells you that you and Steve were dating but he had never asked you or made any mention that you were official. You knew he wasn’t chasing after anyone else.

A chair pulled out from the other side of the desk made you look up and seeing the familiar feathered hair of your not-boyfriend made you want to crawl under the table. He sat, staying quiet, which was strange for him.

He slipped a folded up piece of paper across the desk and leaned back in his chair, tipping it ever so slightly on the back legs.

You touched the paper with your fingertips and slid it into your lap, your head not coming an inch above the desk. You unfolded the paper and what he had put in it made you want to laugh and cry.

(Y/N), would you be my girlfriend?

If yes, draw a heart. If no, draw a boat.

You grabbed a pen from your bag on the table and started drawing. Unknown to you, Steve had leaned in to see what you were drawing. You had hidden the note under the desk so much so you were the only one who could see what you were doing. You folded the note back up and nearly knocked heads with Steve as he practically climbed onto the table to look.

You pressed the note into his hand and slid down in your chair, your cheeks covered by the collar of your sweater. He unfolded the note, stared at it for a few minutes and rushed over to gather you into his arms. In his hand was his note and on the note was a crappy sketch of an anatomically correct heart.

“You’re such a smartass.”

“But I’m your smartass girlfriend.”

Steve brushed your hair back from your cheek and kissed you gently.  

“Yes, yes you are.”

Later that evening, Steve rolled into your driveway and sat there, the car still running, giving himself a pep talk about meeting your parents. He had dressed in his nicest sweater and slacks. He would change before getting to the party.

Even before Steve cut the ignition, he could hear loud music coming from your house but he didn’t really suspect anything. You were probably just chilling up in your room. But the closer he got to your house, he realized that the noise wasn’t coming from upstairs. It was coming from the living room.

Steve made sure to knock extra loud so he could be heard. Then he rang the doorbell. Stomping footsteps greeted him before a woman that looked exactly like you stepped out. She was wearing a dress that looked painted onto her skin and chunky white boots. Her hair was fluffed up to the heavens and as she adjusted her dress strap, Steve saw a door knob on her ring finger. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, too young to have a teenager.

“Oh! You must be Steve Harrington. Come on in, I’m just getting ready to go out.”

Steve stepped through the door and when prompted, slid off his shoes before stepping onto the pristine white carpet. He cast his eyes around the living room, taking in the blue sectional couch covered in embroidered pillows. Steve sat on the couch and startled when it seemed to eat him alive.

“Yeah, the couch eats you. Sorry that I didn’t mention it sooner sweetie. Do you want anything? Snacks? Drinks?”

“Ah, no thank you, ma’am. I’m just here to pick (Y/N) for a p- aahh a date.”

“None of that ma’am stuff. Just call me (mom’s name). You might have to wait for a bit for my daughter to get ready though. I think she might have forgotten.”

Your mother yelled up the stairs for you and not a few seconds later did you come hopping down the stairs. You were dressed in a pair of cloth short shorts and a sweater that Steve had given you after you mentioned that you were cold on your first date. Steve swallowed thickly when he saw your legs that kept going up and up and-

“Steve! Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. I totally forgot about tonight!”

Steve stood and took your hands. His brushed his fingers over your knuckles, trying not to look at how the collar of his t-shirt dipped down and out on your chest.  

“It’s okay. We don’t have to go out tonight anyway. Do you think we could hang here instead?”

Your cheeks colored pleasantly and Steve reached up and brushed your cheek with his thumb. You pushed his hand away gently, instead taking his fingers and intertwining them with yours.

“That sounds great.”

Your mother clacked back into the living room and seeing the two of you standing there with flushed cheeks and soft eyes, she cooed.

“I’ll be off, lovebirds. (Y/N), you know where I keep the-“

“MOM!”

“Alright, alright! I’m just messing with you. Have a good night you two. Donnie will meet me at the club on his way home from work so we’re going to come home at the same time.”

Your mom flew out the door to her ride that had pulled up behind Steve’s car.

“Do you really mean it? Can we stay in tonight?”

“I’d rather you be happy and comfortable in here than angry with me and uncomfortable at a party.”

You pushed yourself into Steve’s arms and he wrapped them tightly around you. You pushed your weight off to the side until Steve couldn’t hold you anymore and you fell on the couch, him on top of you.

“You’re a goof.”

A kiss was pressed to your forehead and you couldn’t help but glow on the inside.

“Yes. Your goof of a girlfriend.”

[drabblewatch]

Headcanon Request (x3):  Whats your headcanon for what the overwatch crew would look like if they were mermaid/mermen? 

Note: A couple of these were inspired by some merfolk au art that @morianrhod drew some time back, you can find them on the blog here!

Also, Bastion, Zenyatta and Orisa weren’t included, as they are most likely some sort of omnic-equivalent in this merfolk AU, similar to what they are now but adapted for life in the water. Mer-Omnics anyone?

McCree is of the seahorse subspecies of merfolk, his tail dark brown in color and scarred from his years of battle. Though he may not be the strongest or the most graceful swimmer among the bunch, he can certainly hold his own territory without too much difficulty using the small barbs along the sides of his tail that, if they pierce skin, would render intruders wracked with pain.

Pharah carries much of the appearance of the swordfish subspecies, though it’s hard to say if her heritage is mixed or not. Regardless, she’s without peer in terms of grace and speed in her swimming, easily able to outpace and out-maneuver many people who think they are good enough to challenge her. Her fins and tail are striking in the mixture of blue shades, often making her naturally hidden in the deeper waters.

Hanzo + Genji are both koi fish, with beautiful marking very much tied to their family line. Genji has taken on much of his father’s color (a brilliant jade) while Hanzo took much after his mother (a sapphire blue). Though neither are venomous, they certainly make up the lack of anatomical defenses with their skills in hand-to-hand combat within even the murkiest, darkest spots of the ocean.

Reaper is a bit of a mystery, hidden by layers of personally-tailored clothing made of seaweed and kelp. Some say that he was some tropical subspecies from the west-coast, but others disagree. For the very, very few who have gotten a peak of him beneath the mask, they claim he has the striking, almost terrifying appearance of an anglerfish. The only tell of his hybrid or mutated background is the slight gleam of teeth beneath his mask or the sharp glare of his eyes.

Soldier 76 doesn’t really know what he is anymore. Some people say he looks plain, with scars covering most of his body from years of battle. Medical experiments from years before has left his body a mix of species, many of them lost in memory or never told to him in the first place. His scales are nearly bleached of color, but his tail is long, his fins graceful--if someone didn’t know him well enough, they might call him some tropical, show-boaty sort, but don’t let that fool you from his raw physical speed and strength.

Sombra is a blackfin snapper, though instead of red scales, hers are a glistening, royal purple that seems to seemlesly meld into her skin. While she may seem harmless at first, her extensive cybernetic enhancements would quickly prove otherwise, a mistake that most people wouldn’t live long enough to realize. It is said that she collects secrets on almost all of the most prominent merfolk of all the seas.

Tracer is a butterfly fish! She’s small, but she’s fast and energetic, her personality only furthered by the bright yellow and orange colors that cover her body. She may be small, but she’s very talented in battle, knowing how to use her size and speed to her advantage against other, particularly larger, opponents.

Junkrat + Roadhog are very hard to place, largely due to the huge dosage of radiation that bathes the Australian waters. Roadhog is very hefty, his tail long and powerful, and his coloring is mildly reminiscent of a black marlin, while Junkrat is nearly impossible to place with his muddled brown coloring and smooth, scale-less tail, his fins tattered and ripped from years of being careless.

Mei is a seal! Specific subspecies is hard to tell, but she certainly is from a colder climate. She’s very energetic, but isn’t the fastest or most graceful swimmer, especially when she’s in a warmer climate. 

Doomfist is a mantis shrimp. You know, the shrimp that can punch their prey so hard that they create airbubbles with hundreds of pounds of force? He’s an intimidating-looking guy, though not as used to the wide-open spaces of some patches of the ocean. Nevertheless, you do not want to pic a fight with this mer, he will completely ruin your day and probably punch you into next week.

Torjborn is hard to tell, especially since he doesn’t much talk about his family background. Nevertheless, his short, muddy-colored tail is a slight tell that he reins from some coastal-born subspecies like a frogfish or mudfish. 

Widowmaker may seem at first like some deep-sea fish in origin, with her pale body and ghostly-shaped fins, looking more like the whisps of a spirit than anything else. For those who are close or observant enough, you may slowly realize that her body shape matches far more closely to a goldfish, maybe even something akin to a koi or other carp subspecies. For someone who seems to cold, she has a brilliant, tropical background.

D.Va doesn’t like to talk about it all that much, but she’s a finepattern pufferfish. She doesn’t like to talk about it much because, as a kid, other mers loved to make her angry so she’d puff up--it took a long time for her to calm down each time. She’s learned to control it to an extent and is more familiar with using an exoskeleton suit as a weapon, but still uses the barbs on her body to ward off predators if it comes to it.

Reinhardt is a lionfish. Bold, awe-inspiring, but extremely venomous when provoked, which led him into being a top-notch fighter for his native ocean-country, and subsequently Overwatch agent. He’s made strides to keep his barbs short and avoids accidentally pricking those he cares about, but it can sometimes be hard to manage when he’s otherwise an extremely excitable mer.

Winston is an absolute mystery. [If someone can offer their thoughts, I am totally happy to add it here!]

Zarya isn’t hard to identify as an orca, with her distinct black/white color scheme. She’s big, she’s powerful, and she’s ready to defend her home from anyone who dares to threaten it. Rumor has it that she once sunk a human ship that got too close to her ocean-country’s territory.

Ana is a cichlid, specifically black and blue-striped. Don’t let her dainty, tropical looks fool you, she gained the notoriety of being a leader of Overwatch for a reason, particularly for her stubborn, aggressive yet passionate nature for protecting those she cares about. 

Mercy is, as one may guess at first sight of her, a freshwater angelfish. White and gold in color, she’s not so great in any sort of battle, but she’s pioneered a lot of medical treatments for many species of mers. She’s very well-known for her contributions to nanotechnology and the aid in acclimation of freshwater and saltwater fish to either environment.

Symmetra is a tropical fish from the warm, colorful ocean waters. It’s not clear what specific species she is, if any, but her beautiful bodily design of blue, black and gold is definitely enough to catch anyone’s attention, if her skills in hard-light technology isn’t enough. It’s very hard for mers to capture such a skill, but she seems to have a natural affinity for the incredible material much akin to her almost royal-looking appearance.

Lucio is a bit of a mixture of several subspecies of mer, but he certainly has a fair bit of frogfish in his background, aiding in his ability to camouflage himself in most environments. His tail and fins are a muted, dark green. 

[frozenbullies]

The Curse

A short story I wrote for a class last year. 

it’s about anxiety and witches and heartbreak and curses and picking up the pieces .

under the cut

Dining hall eggs are the worst food imaginable. They’re crumbly, yellow blobs that can’t help but be off putting. But, then again, Aislin thought as she shoveled another forkful into her mouth, anything is edible if you put enough hot sauce on it.

“That stuff’ll kill your stomach, you know that right?” Jasmin said as she wrinkled her roman nose and picked up the bottle of Sriracha. “Eats the lining. Makes you sick.”

Aislin rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” She didn’t need any help with feeling nauseous, but continued eating anyway. After all, what did Jasmin know? It’s not like they taught organ care in Econ201 or anything.

Claire nodded and her bleach-blonde ponytail jiggled emphatically.

“You know.” Claire took the Sriracha from Jasmin. “It almost looks like your hair, hun. It’s kinda the same red.”

“God, can we just not talk about my hair?” Aislin said.

“Well, I told you not to buy the cheap stuff.”

“Oh man. Forget the hair,” Jasmin interrupted, leaning into the table so far that her glasses fell down the bridge of her nose. “Dan’s over by the soda machine.”

Aislin froze, a gob of hot sauce stuck in her throat as it slowly burned. Oh god. Why’d he have to come to this dining hall? Jefferson was way closer to his dorm. Oh god. Did he see her? Should she leave? Was she going to be sick again? Oh god, oh god.

“You’re good,” Claire patted Aislin’s shoulder. “He went around the corner. You can look up now.”

Aislin swallowed dryly, trying to soothe her nerves and rest her runaway heartrate as Claire loomed sympathetically.

“Don’t baby her!” Jasmine snapped as she pushed her frames back up. “She’s a grown woman not a child. Besides, after what he did she should be over there yellin’ at him, not sitting here crying.”

Aislin winced.

“Oh shut up, Jasmin. She’s fine. You’re making a big deal over nothing.”

“Me? She’s the one acting like a crybaby! If I’d acted like this when Curtis dumped me I’d have died of embarrassment.”

“Can you two just shut up? Please?” Aislin said.

Claire shot Jasmine a look and they both sighed, arms crossed.

“Fine. Besides,” Jasmine lowered her voice, “Get a load of this kid behind you,” Claire and Aislin craned dramatically to look over their shoulders.  

The tall figure walked by the booth section, Doc Martin boots clunking as they passed, one hand in the pocket of their jean-jacket and the other holding a plate of pancakes. Aislin blinked, watching their dark, effortlessly tossed bangs bounce lightly with each step as they approached a table full of seniors and graduate students where everyone welcomed them enthusiastically.

She turned back to her plate and tried to stomach the nerve to pick up another forkful as Claire laughed in a hushed voice. “Did you see that jacket? Who wears denim anymore? And those patches! I saw, like, two different ones with animal skulls!”

“What a try-hard!” Jasmin laughed. “She’s such a joke.”

“She? That’s a guy, Jazz.”

 “No way. The hair?”

  “It’s 2016. Guys can have good hair. Get with the times.”

“Whatever.”

“Either way.” Claire shrugged, “They’re an eyesore. Who’s even goth these days anyway?”

“They aren’t goth. I hear they’re like a witch or something.” Jasmin took a sip from her mug.

“Are you kidding me?” Aislin said.

“No, I’m not. Apparently they put a curse on the Chemistry professor that was here before Dr. Kessig. Made him go crazy. He was, like, forced to retire by the dean or something.

“You mean Dr. Lowell? He had Mercury poisoning, Jazz.”

“Mercury? You really believe that?”

“The man was alive when dinosaurs roamed the earth! He probably was around when schools still let you play with the damn stuff. I mean really, witchcraft?” Claire scoffed. “Who told you that superstitious nonsense?”

“Sera Joplin.”

Claire launched into a long-winded recount of every shady story Sera had given them since freshman orientation. But, as the two bickered, Aislin’s attention had already wandered back across the dining hall to the table where the black-haired person sat, smirking lightly at their phone as the rest of the colorful group exploded into a roar of laughter. A brown, wide-shouldered girl in a lacrosse jersey clapped them on the shoulder, starling them out of their phone-coma. They looked up to group and smiled. They seemed happy, if not a bit distracted. They didn’t look like a witch. Still, there was something about them. An almost unsettling energy. Something a bit more volatile than just confidence or style. For a second, Aislin could have sworn she saw one of the snakes on their patches move.

“Aislin. Aislin!”

“You ok, hun?” Claire said.  

Running sweaty fingers through her auburn hair she nodded. How long had she been staring? She looked down to her fingertips, red-brown dye mixed with the sweat to stain each one. Fuck. This really was cheap dye.

“Was it Dan?” Claire lifted her chin to look back in the general direction he had walked away in. “Did you see him again? Do you wanna leave? It’s cool if you do.”

She’d almost forgotten he was in here somewhere. Fuck. “Yeah,” she nodded and started to pack up. “Let’s just go to the library.”

--

The Frederick Douglass Library, unlike the Montelcini Library, was never full on a Saturday. Despite having been designed like an avant garde prison by some brutalist in the 70’s, it was a blessing to students who actually wanted to study. Stale air seeped off of books far older than any tenured professor and pale light filtered in through thin window slits, casting barcode shadows along the pale tile floor. Every few feet a metal table or two stood shakily and on every floor there were gardens of study cubicles. But, only the obsessed or seriously desperate students ever used those.

Aislin and her friends were neither and thusly avoided the cubicles in preference for a table in the center of the main room on the second floor. She tapped her pen to a scrawling list of zoology vocab, her four-pound textbook leaned against Claire’s blue bookbag as she read. Acari, the subclass forming ticks and mites. Agorius, the genus of jumping spiders. Aislin winced, Dan had always hated spiders.

She looked up from her work to notice someone in a denim jacket walking behind Jasmin and Claire. Aislin craned her neck to see as they turned the corner and caught a glimpse of a snake and dog skull patch. She glanced back to her work, and to the anatomical sketch of the arachnid body in her textbook, then to the corner again as she stood up. Jasmin asked where she was going and she muttered something about the restroom before rushing around the bookshelves in search of the student in the jacket.

They were sitting at a window-side table, alone and just starting to plug in their sticker-plastered laptop.

Aislin walked over and stopped at the opposite end of the table.

They looked up, their dark eyebrows arched as they looked her up and down. “Can I help you?”

“Um…” Aislin said, taking a seat. “I think so. I mean, umm… Could you, like, teach me how to do, like, witchcraft?”

“Is this how you start all your conversations?” they said.

“Oh, geez, sorry. I’m Aislin. Sophomore.”

“Leigh. Second year grad student.”

Oh. Wow. A grad student. But he- she? -looked so young. “Is that L-e-e? Or L-e-a-h?”

“Does it matter?”

She looked once more to their formless chest and unisex haircut. “Kinda?” her voice cracked.

“L-e-i-g-h. And before you ask what I know you’re trying to- don’t. I’m nonbinary, so just use they/them pronouns and call it a day, alright, Red?”

“Sure…” Red? God, this hair really had been a mistake. “Anyway, yeah.” Aislin tapped her thumbs together. “Witchcraft. Is there like, a book of spells or anything like that you can lend me?”

“No. Can’t you just go google it?”

“No. No, I need to curse someone. I’m thinking something with, like, spiders? Can you do that? Or teach me how to do that? Like, how does this work?”

Leigh leaned in close, a small smattering of pale freckles under their dark eyes as they lowered their voice. “Ok.”

Aislin mirrored them, red strands of her long bob falling from behind her ears.

“First, you get a jar.”

Aislin nodded.

“You go out in the middle of the night.”

She leaned further in.

“And you collect two hundred spiders to set loose in their dorm room.” Leigh leaned back into their seat with crossed arms.

“I’m serious,” she said.

“So am I,” they opened their laptop. “Now, if that’s all you wanted, I have a thesis to write.”

--

It snowed that night. It snowed and the next morning Aislin got a C- on her Zoology quiz. Couldn’t focus. Couldn’t study. The first snowfall had been a long time coming. People were saying it was the hottest December on record. Still, everyone had settled into their winter wear like they did every year, becoming easily recognizable by their trademark winter jackets. But, for some reason, Aislin just didn’t peg Leigh as the puffy coat type. Everywhere she went for the next two days Aislin found herself searching the crowd for any hint of denim. Each flash of washed blue caught her eye as white filled in the world’s corners. She finally found it one afternoon, walking up to the Rosalind Life Sciences building, Doc Martins clicking against the pavement. “Hey!” She shouted, trying to catch up. “Leigh!”

They turned slowly, delicate flecks of snow peppered against their black hair as they took a long breath. “I’m fresh out of spiders, Red,” they warned, hands in pockets.

“I just wanna know.” She said. “There has to be another way. Right?”

Leigh glowered at her, folding their arms.

“To curse someone, I mean. Like, can’t I make, like, a voodoo doll or burn an effigy or cast the evil eye or something like that?”

Leigh shrugged, “You tell me, man.”

“I can’t. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You seem to have it all pretty figured out.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You sure?”  

“Yes.”

“You sure you’re sure?”

Aislin’s face grew red. “Yes! I’m not the fucking witch here, okay! You are!” she shouted, her hot breath taking shape in frigid air between them.

Leigh stiffened, a wild flash in their eyes. They exhaled loudly, picking up the shoulders of their jacket and shaking off the snow with a quick flick as they turned to leave.

“Leigh….” Aislin whimpered, stepping towards them with hand outstretched, grasping. “Leigh, I’m sorry.” They looked over their shoulder, eyes like black ice. Aislin stopped. Hesitated. Felt a snowflake fall onto her lashes. Watched two more join the pale freckles on Leigh’s cheek.

They opened the door to the building. “I have research.”

Aislin watched as they closed the door firmly behind them. She stood, stunned by their glare and the calm injury they’d had in their voice.

What if Leigh wasn’t a witch?

Aislin felt her stomach sink, convulsing itself into rapid, sickening knots. She glanced to her watch, to the dye on her fingers, tapping her foot as she sighed and crossed her arms. A puff of warm air hung from her lips like cotton. She stared at the door, at the corner Leigh had turned, and she groaned, opening the door to race in.

“Leigh!�� she called, turning the blind corner. “Leigh, wait! Lei-“she collided with a tall figure, muttering ‘sorry’ as she took a step back to collect her bearings.

“Hey

“Its fine, Dan. Really.” She brushed away his hand. Her eyes were fixed on his scuffed up gym shoes, never daring to look up.  

He smelled like Old Spice and her stomach lurched.

“Wow. Your hair is really red,” he said. “I thought Curtis was exaggerating.”

“Yeah… it’s red.”

“So, how’ve you been? It’s so good to see you!”

“Fine.” Not fine. The room was spinning. She placed a hand against the wall. How could he possibly think this was fine? What kind of guy dumps a girl via drunk text after almost two years and then thinks its ok to pretend like everything’s fine?

“Good… good. Hey, I’ve gotta go but it was really nice running into you.”

“Yeah. Bye.”

               The acrid smell of Old Spice lingered even after he left. Faint, like how it used to hang onto his letter jacket when she wore it to class, or how it would waft gently when he pulled her closer, his arms around her waist as he whispered ‘I love you.’ I love you. I love you…

               Another wave of nausea clawed at her closing throat and Aislin rushed down the hall towards the restroom. As she reached for the handle the door pulled away. She stepped back, looking up to familiar dark eyes.

“I thought I told you I’m busy,” Leigh said, sidestepping around Aislin.

“Sorry. I’m just… trying to find a place to hide for a bit.”

“What? From the goblins and ghouls?”

“From my ex.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah… He went in that room over there.” She pointed.

Leigh looked over to the heavy door. “106? Do you mean Kayne Arely?”

“No... Daniel Fontaine. “

“Oh.” They sneered, paused, and then sighed, defeated. “Come on. You can hide in the lab.”

Leigh ushered her into a bright room. Machinery blinked and whirred while laptops ran loading programs. Everything smelled like rubbing alcohol. Tanks lined the wall in racks and shelves, inside swam tiny schools of fish.

Aislin watched as Leigh pulled a chair from behind a wide wooden desk and offered it to her, along with a pair of goggles. Said that their adviser would be furious if she didn’t wear them.

“Thanks.” She said. “I mean, really. Thank you.”

               “No problem.” Leigh said. They slipped out of their denim jacket, exchanging it for a lab coat on the rack next to the door. “Daniel’s one of the TAs for Dr. Hearne. Should be in 106 for a while.”

She knew that.

Leigh snapped on a pair of purple rubber gloves and pulled a pair of goggles over their eyes. “I’ve got to run about a dozen plates and mix twenty batches of dye. But, you can stay in here and do homework or whatever until he’s gone.”

Aislin nodded, setting her bookbag by the coat rack with the jacket hanging from it. Rips and frays in the sleeves revealed its wear, each rip sewn back into place with black thread and each patch lovingly stitched in the same manner. The eight eyes of a black and white spider peered out from one patch in particular, an almost expressive quality to its gaze.

“It isn’t gunna help.” Leigh, back faced towards her, was swirling a fluorescent liquid in a large flask.

“What?”

“Cursing him,” they said, pouring the liquid into a pocket of blue gel. “It won’t help,” they picked up the gel pocket and set it into a tray of water. “You can do it but it won’t help.”

Aislin’s face grew warm. Was it really that obvious? “I just want him to feel the same way I do.”

Leigh picked up a portable battery and two jumper cables. They set it on the table with a thunk and nodded distantly. “And what would that accomplish?” They hooked each cable to a prong in the water tray. “You two feeling like mutual shit, alone in your dorm rooms, still not getting any better?” A flip of a switch and the battery purred. “Sounds like a real great plan.”

The liquid in the tray rippled. Aislin furrowed her brows, but didn’t object. “So… is there a spell to make him think of me?”

“I think running into each other did the trick.”

A pause. “How about to make him come back to me?”

Leigh laughed, “What would that accomplish?”

“Plenty! Things would be back to the way they were.”

“Is that really what you want, Red? To be back to where you were before? To be who you were before?” Leigh turned the dial on a kitchen timer and set it next to the gel plate.

“Yes!” Aislin paused, looked to the red bangs that hung in her frame of view and stuttered. “Well… no.”

“So?”

“So? So what! What then? Is there nothing I can do?” Tears started to well up as she pushed her goggles to her forehead, “Am I supposed to just feel like shit forever? Is that what you want?” She sunk forward and held her head in her arms as she began to sob. A hand was laid lightly into the back of her shoulder as Leigh knelt down beside her, patting as they shushed in a low, gentle voice.  

She wiped at her face with her hoodie sleeves until Leigh handed her a box of Kimwipes. “I- I,” Aislin paused, blew her nose again before she broke down into another sob. “I’m just so tired,” she took a few hyperventilated breaths, wrapped her arms around her knees. “I’m- “she looked to Leigh who was, somehow, still as composed as ever. “I’m fucking tired of feeling like shit!”

She buckled, head resting on top of her own knees, pants stained wet with snot and tears.

Leigh lifted their hand as Aislin lifted her head and took a few long, heavy breaths. She wiped away the mess clinging to her face and let a small pile of Kimwipes collect at the foot of the chair. When she looked down she saw that they had taken a seat on the tile floor. Dark, knowing eyes peered up at her. Ask again.

“Is…” Aislin sniffled and pulled herself upright. “Can you… Is there…” She took a long, shaky breath. Her voice was small and she folded her hands in her lap. “Is there a spell to fix a broken heart?”

Leigh pulled their goggles up. “Plenty,” they said.

Aislin looked to the denim jacket that hung next to her bookbag. The patches seemed brighter under the fluorescent lighting. A sewn-in spider twitched it’s long, sketchy legs. She turned back to Leigh, “Can you show me?”

Leigh smiled, “Of course.”