#they let you maintain your skills while producing something that did not exist until you started!

[belligerentbagel]

realised while assembling this that wow you were REALLY hanging on by a thread for much of last year

lived, though ✌

[you-did-well-moon]

Werewolf!Seonghwa meeting his mate

Type: werewolf au, fluff, angst kinda felt bad writing this

Pairing: Werewolf!Seonghwa x Witch!female reader

Word count:  2,939

A/n: O o f . All i really have to say is to once again excuse my poor photo shopping skills. I really like this y/n and wooyoung and san be clowning >:( also please don’t be afraid to talk to me i need friends who don’t call my dogs dead rats. You know who you are. 

TW: Insecurity, insulting of reader, loneliness, putting down of witches word wise and society wise. 

You walked at a leisurely pace as the grass of the damp forest floor swayed and danced with you, seemingly reaching out to you by gently curling over the edges of your boots. An easy smile tugged at your lips at the comfort the forest brought to you. 

The trees whispered kind words of praise slightly bending towards you offering their own sense of protection. The mischievous childlike winds carried those words softly caressing your face with it’s refreshing touch and playfully tugging at strands of your hair swirling around you gleefully when you giggled. 

There was no mockery from humans or entitled jabs thrown by other magical beings. A sense of belonging existed within you when in the forest. It was cruelly ironic how you neither belonged with the humans or the other magical beings. Werewolves believed you were bad luck, and the vampires treated you like a pet for them to order around. Even the fae did their best to avoid you.

In the forest, you were safe, a feeling you didn’t get to enjoy very often. Loneliness didn’t plague you with it’s vile harsh hands. In the forest, you were surrounded by life, life that didn’t grow disgusted just by the mere sight of you.

 You tugged your hood lower over your eyes traveling through the forest knowing it like the back of your hand after practically living your whole life there. You usually didn’t go this deeply into the vast forest, but you were looking for a herb you needed in order to complete a potion you were making for a vampire. Unlike others of her kind, she was relatively nicer. Quiet but temperamental, and so harshly against what she was. Truly believing she was a monster when you had continuously told her otherwise. 

You still couldn’t help feeling empathy for the fledgling, remembering what you went through when you first found out what you truly were. Months spent ignoring the buzz at the base of your spine, and the soft but firm voice in the back of your head urging you to mutter the words of a spell no other being can say. To make a potion no other being could even dream of producing not having the touch of a witch. You promised yourself you would only indulge her for a little bit, yet you unnecessarily continued to drag it out.  

The potion’s effects were rather simple, but it was complex in both the making and ingredients involved. It hid the eerie red eyes and terrifyingly sharp fangs of a vampire, but it only lasted for about a month. You had just run out of leaves from the dodder plant, and you needed at least 13 of them.  They were the last herb you needed after letting the potion soak in the moonlight for exactly four hours. 

A happy gasp tumbled out your lips at the sight of the mentioned plant wrapped around the trunk of a poor tree, feeding and living off of it. You really didn’t find any amusement in the irony of it. You hiked the strap of your bag further up your shoulder as you walked closer to the plant cooing at it. 

“Look how pretty and lovely you are. Do you mind if I take some of your leaves I really need for a potion. I won’t take many, just a little, I promise.” You spoke in a soft and high pitched tone, much alike to how one would talk to a grumpy child. Even the mean plant keened at your voice and request, leaning towards you.

A small smile tugged at your lips as you softly thanked it and did your best to to cut the leaves from the plant as carefully as you could with the scissors you brought with you. 

You placed them in a jar skillfully placing it back inside your bag once you got the amount you needed. You thanked it again lightly caressing it before standing up ready to go back to your little cottage. 

Instead, you froze when a very recognizable sound rang throughout the woods. A howl. You cursed yourself under your breath unease pooling at the bottom of your stomach making your body unbearably stiff. 

You silently kneeled down to dig your fingers into the soft dirt under the grass of the forest floor exhaling in defeat when you felt the mark of what could only be werewolf territory. You were so distracted looking for the herb, you didn’t notice you had walked right into the wolves’ jaws. You felt like a fool. 

A small part of you knew that howl was because whatever wolves owned this area had sensed someone break through their defenses without permission. You almost scoffed rolling your eyes. What great defenses they had. Wolves and their stupid territorial tendencies. You had walked right in without problem, and you hoped to get out in similar conditions. 

Still, you couldn’t help but hope that maybe, just maybe, the cry from the furry creature was for something else. Not for a wicked little witch walking into their space unannounced. You gulped harshly clutching the strap of your bag nervously as you whipped around. 

You tried walking as silently as you could at a fast stride hoping against all odds you’d make it out without any run-ins with the dogs. In the end, it seemed like fate was against you when you heard the irritating yips and haughty huffs of what could only be werewolves behind you.

You clenched your jaw keeping your composure and ignoring them continuing steady to your original course feeling pathetic for essentially running away. You really didn’t want any trouble today, but you felt your patience running thin when you heard the wolves let out sounds in what oddly sounded a lot like laughter, now feeling both humiliated and mocked. 

There really was no way to avoid confrontation, especially when you heard the unnatural sound of cracking bones meaning they were shifting, and looking for a fight. You wondered how bored they had to be to poke at a witch when they did everything they could to avoid your kind. 

“Oh look Wooyoung, it’s a witch, don’t get too close or she’ll give you frog legs'' The pair erupted into loud aggravating laughter making your teeth grit as you maintained your composure. 

“She’s actually not ugly for a witch” You felt your lip curl up in disgust. How dare they speak as if they knew anything about you or your people. They knew what it was like being looked down upon for being born what they were, yet they did the same to you. It was an endless cycle of hate, and frankly you were sick of it. You just wanted to live peacefully, but you knew that wasn’t possible. 

“Don’t be stupid, it’s probably just potions or something. Witches aren’t that pretty, there’s no way”  Anger was surging through you making your insides boil as you pressed your lips in a thin line. Of course, you were used to this kind of degradation and mockery, but you had always been able to leave the situation without looking back. Right now however, you were trapped, left with no choice but to hold your head high and deal with the insults being thrown at you by people you had never met in your life. 

You felt frustrated tears prick at your eyes scolding yourself for being so sensitive. “Easy San, don’t want the witch cursing you and stealing your first born” You groaned knowing no matter what you did, they would keep bothering you. You didn’t think they would stop following you even when you left their territory, so you set your shoulders and narrowed your eyes whipping around. They wanted a reaction, they would get one. 

“Play with me little wolves, and you won’t like what happens.” You stated darkly, conjuring an orb of light in your dominant hand. It was harmless, a little trick you learned for when you needed to see in a dark place or investigate something, but they didn’t know that. You didn’t want to hurt them, you just wanted to scare them a little. Exhaustion dragged you down, and you just wanted to get home. 

You were in a little bit of a rush. The potion had to be delivered by the next day from tomorrow, and you still needed to let the potion sit in the sunlight after adding your newly acquired herb. 

Being able to face them, and you were able to see their youthful faces. You were also able to see them step back, fear swimming in their once bright and playful eyes. It made you swallow against the bile traveling up your throat making you sick to your stomach. Even when you tried your damn best, you were still the bad guy. 

 “Y-you wouldn't dare hurt us. Our pack would never rest until they found you and tore you to pieces” his shaky voice made guilt flood you, but it was either protect yourself, or let those entitled dogs walk all over you. 

You felt the forest bristle as the tension between its two guardians, and you momentarily felt bad. But you really couldn’t, not right now. You just had to scare them a little, so you could return to the safety of your cottage without any more trouble than necessary. All you wanted was to get them off your tail. 

You stepped closer maliciously grinning, “Try me mutt”. The evil smile on your face felt forfeign and ugly, but if it got the job done, it would have to do. As you took a step closer to the pair, a shout echoed throughout the forest. You stood frozen still in shock and feeling ashamed while a figure tore through two trees coming to an abrupt stop in between you and the two wolves. Great, another wolf. You didn’t stand a chance. If you died, at least you were surrounded by the forest, the only living thing that had ever shown you any kindness.

The figure was harshly whispering to the pair that had been giving you a hard time. You didn’t have any enhanced hearing, but you could still make out his words.

“I’ve told you idiots time and time again never to provoke a witch and the first thing you do on your first patrol is the exact opposite-” You don’t have the heart to keep listening. You, a kind and bright being, had been reduced to a ghost story to strike fear in the young hearts of others. 

 The newcomer’s back was turned to you, but you could still feel the waves of power rolling off of him. Not an alpha, but close to it. 

“Keep your pack in line beta, or i'll do it for you” You tried your best to remain confident, but if they tried hard enough they could hear the slight lilt in your voice.

The figure finally turned around meeting your eyes. and a loud growl ripped through the air making everyone lean back from the older wolf. Right now, it didn’t matter to Songhwa what or who you were. All he knew was that you were his, his mate, and that you were scared. 

He was so focused on you, all his senses instantly attuned to you. He could see the nervous shake in your hands, the uneasy tremble of your lips, and the fear and regret in your eyes. 

“She trespassed territory Seonghwa, what else were we supposed to do?” one of them whined. A low rumble racked Seonghwa’s chest. 

“What was she doing when you found her” he questioned, his tone anything but happy. You had let your little light orb disappear long ago, now just standing there hands clutching the strap of your bag. The two didn’t answer his question knowing he would only grow angrier by their answer. 

“I asked you a question, are you really disrespecting your beta?” he huffed out, eyes still trained on you. Anger swirling in his irises, but something else you couldn’t quite place. You felt a strong pull towards him, and although a small part of you was smart enough to know what you were to him, you didn’t want to accept it.

“S-she was walking away” a louder growl than the last one made your heart lurch to your throat, but oddly you weren’t scared of him. Instead, you wanted to get closer to him, but shock basically glued your shoes to the grass underneath you. Even with the angry set of his eyebrows and clenched jaw , the expression on his face tight, with the soft light of the setting sun shining on him he was stunning.

His narrow pointed nose and round soft but intense eyes. Your entire being was being pulled towards him, and the more you resisted, the more the little voice in the back of your head pushing towards him. A feeling you had never felt before surged through you. It was much alike to fire, warm and protective but passionate and exhilarating. Even if strange, it felt right. 

Meanwhile Seonghwa was livid, absolutely furious. He could not forget the scared look in your eyes when he was running towards you being able to sense the unease in his younger pack members and being the closest. He had known. He was fully aware you were his when he first laid eyes on you, but he had wanted to talk some sense to Wooyoung and San before dealing with the unstoppable feelings he would soon have to face. 

He had been waiting for you for so long, he didn’t want to scare you off, but it seemed the troublesome pair had already done enough of that.  When he first heard your voice and his wolf had run out of patience, he couldn’t stop himself from turning around to face you. As he took in your fearful but strong stance, your pretty eyes, his whole world shifted.

He was so in tune with you, San and Wooyoung didn’t have to tell him anything for him to know they had probably said some hurtful words to you. They said you had been walking away without a fight, so they must have said something to get you this defensive. His wolf was growling for just one punch, but he decided he would deal with them later when he wasn’t so emotional.  Right now, he just wanted to get closer to you and comfort you. 

He sighed, hand reaching up to pinch at the bridge of his nose as he momentarily turned to look at the mischievous pair, eyes softening when he saw the regretful look on their faces. 

“I’ll talk to you back at the house” he kept his tone curt and harsh still mad at them for the hard situation they put him in. They quickly nodded mumbling an apology before scurrying in the direction of the house. 

He looked at you noticing the hesitancy in the slope of your mouth, your eyes not meeting his. He took a step towards you, and you took a step back. 

“Are you scared?” he asked not wanting to get closer to you no matter how much it pained him to do so,not wanting to make you uncomfortable. 

You nodded but looked up to make eye contact with him taking in a shaky breath. “Not of you” His chest rumbled contentedly and a bashful smile broke out on his face making you smile softly at just how affected he was by you. “I’m more scared of the situation. I’ve never heard of a witch being a werewolf’s…” 

“Mate” he finished looking down. You humed in agreement the word making a shiver rack through your body. Hearing it made it all the more real. Strangely, you didn’t want to run away screaming. The small voice in the back of your head was telling you to do the exact opposite, and you had long ago learned to trust that voice. 

Seonhwa was terrified of you rejecting him. He knew the other kinds weren’t the nicest to witches, which he had always immensely disliked and found pathetic because who were they to put another kind down when they were all the same at the end of the day. Some turned into large horrifying predators and others drank blood to survive. You merely had magic by your side even helping people with your potions and spells. 

You saw the doubt in his eyes, the crease between his eyebrows and it made your heart sink. Seonghwa was so lost in his thoughts he didn’t hear your light footsteps making your way towards him. You took his hand in yours cradling it gently, and giving it a small shake. 

The contact made sparks run up both your arms as he looked up surprised to see a gentle grin on your face. “Y/n, my name is Y/n”. He smiled, shaking his head at your sudden confidence. “Seonghwa”. 

You reached out to smoothen the crease between his eyebrows with your thumb, hand falling down to cup his face a purr shaking his chest at your warm touch. You smirked, shaking your head and turning around to walk away. A surprised sputter came from behind you at the abrupt loss of contact making you snicker. “H-hey! Will I see you again?” 

You continued walking as you turned around to flash him a bright smile, “This time tomorrow in the same spot, don’t be late.”

You felt his eyes linger on you as you walked out of his sight, and you decided that perhaps fate wasn't so cruel.

[thelastspeecher]

Spirit Touched - Chapter 3: Little Warrior

Chapter 1   Chapter 2   Chapter 3   Chapter 4   Chapter 5   Chapter 6   AO3

Holy heck, look at this.  A regular update TWICE in a row!  Here’s some more smol Zuko for you all.  Some smol Zuko and a bit of the Northern Water Tribe.

Again, this fic is inspired by @muffinlance‘s fic Salvage and fanart that @agent-jaselin did of it.

——————————————————————————————

              “I hate laundry again,” Toklo muttered as he scrubbed a dirty shirt.

              “It was nice to have hot water,” Panuk agreed.  Enough time had passed that Toklo was no longer giving Panuk the cold shoulder for not telling him about his brother.  Panuk had tried to hide how relieved he was when Toklo finally started up a conversation with him again.

              Zuko hadn’t bothered to hide his relief.  He’d been the only person Toklo would talk to for a while.  Given that most of Toklo’s interactions with him had changed due to his young age, it was obvious the firebender wanted someone, anyone else to be the subject of Toklo’s attention.  Panuk looked over at the toddler in question.

              Since becoming four years old, Zuko had been unable to heat water or dry clothes.  Apparently, those tricks required more skill than someone his age had.  He had been relegated to scrubbing again, but after falling into the washtub three times, demoted further.  Now, he handed Toklo dirty clothes and Panuk clean clothes.

              At least, that’s what Zuko was supposed to be doing.  At the moment, his arms were out before him, a tiny flame hovering above his cupped hands.

              “I’m working,” Zuko said quickly, noticing Panuk’s eyes on him.  The flame disappeared, his arms fell to his side, and he stood.  He toddled over to Toklo, took the clean shirt from him, and brought it over to Panuk.

              “Why have you been doing that so much?” Panuk asked as he inspected the shirt for holes.

              “I’m a firebender.  I’m supposed to firebend,” Zuko said in a sulky tone.  He went over to the pile of dirty clothes and brought a pair of pants to Toklo.

              “Aw, don’t get upset, Zuko,” Toklo said.  He patted Zuko’s head, wetting his hair.  “We’re just not used to you doing that particular kind of firebending all the time.  Is it like meditating?”

              “Not really.”  Zuko sat down again.  He kicked the backs of his heels against the floorboards, seemingly without realizing he was fidgeting.  “It’s an exercise in control.  One of the first that firebenders learn.  I need to make sure I maintain control of my inner fire, even while I’m stuck like this.”

              “What sort of other things do little firebenders learn?” Panuk asked curiously.  Discovering the shirt to have no holes, he hung it up to dry.

              “If you’re a regular firebender, some easy forms to generate fire, but mostly just manipulating fire that already exists.”  Zuko scowled.  “If you’re Azula, forms used in combat,” he muttered, crossing his arms.  Toklo handed him the cleaned shirt.  Zuko took it and brought it over to Panuk.

              “I wonder if the Chief would let you do any of those forms,” Toklo remarked as Zuko handed him a pair of socks.  “I mean, you can’t cause as much damage as you could when you were bigger. Right?”

              “I…don’t know,” Zuko said after a moment.  He crossed his arms again, his lower lip jutting out in a pout.  “I’m certainly not coordinated enough right now to do advanced or intermediate forms.  But even beginner forms can produce a lot of flames.  Especially if the firebender lacks control.”

              “But you have control,” Panuk said.

              “Yes.”  Zuko looked at his feet.  “…For the most part.”

              “If you do the forms you mentioned that just involve controlling fire, not making it-” Toklo began.  Zuko’s head whipped up.  He scowled at both crewmen.

              “Why do you want me to do actual firebending forms so badly?” he snapped.

              “Watching a baby firebender dancing around the deck would be adorable,” Toklo said.  Panuk nodded. Zuko’s scowl deepened.

              “But the Chief probably won’t let you practice,” Panuk said.  “You’re a little kid now, but we’re still on a very flammable ship.”  He thumped the wooden boards with a booted foot for emphasis.

              “I’m not a little kid,” Zuko mumbled.  His fingers twitched.

              “Go run around the deck for a bit,” Panuk instructed.

              “No.  Why?”

              “You’re fidgeting again.  The Chief said that you need to run off your extra energy, remember?”

              “But-” Zuko started.

              “Seal Jerky could use the exercise, too,” Toklo put in.  Zuko sighed, but stomped away.

              “Smart,” Panuk said with a nod.  “Turning into a kid made him even more attached to the dog.”  Toklo grinned.

              “I have my moments.”

----- 

              Zuko sat on the deck, idly playing with Seal Jerky as the members of the crew did actual work around him.  He’d prefer to join in, but according to Hakoda, none of the tasks were ones he was allowed to do.

              “Ahoy, the boat!” a voice called.  Zuko’s head jerked up.  That voice didn’t come from anyone on the Akhlut.  He got to his feet and hurried to the side of the boat.  Unfortunately, he was too short to see anything.

              “I got you, little prince,” Ranalok said, lifting Zuko and propping him on his hip. Zuko’s instinct to argue angrily against the humiliating moniker was wiped away by what he now saw.  A ship, also Water Tribe by the looks of it, approaching.

              “Is that…?” Tuluk asked, joining Ranalok and Zuko.  Bato came over as well.

              “It is,” said Bato.  “That’s a ship from the Northern Tribe.”  He glanced at Zuko.  “Wonder if they’ll have any healers.”  He cleared his throat.  “Ahoy!” he called back in response.  Faint cheering echoed across the water, as the sister tribes rejoiced at reunion.

              Hakoda was fetched, and the Akhlut waited eagerly until the ship from their sister tribe was close enough for the boarding planks to be laid across.  Zuko got Ranalok to put him down, then hid behind Bato’s legs.  He didn’t enjoy giving into childish urges, but at the moment, he didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

              The first person to board the Akhlut was an elderly man with a severe face. Zuko peered around Bato’s legs curiously.

              “My name is Master Pakku,” the man said, bowing to Hakoda.  “Myself and some other members of the Northern Tribe set off to assist in the rebuilding of the South Pole.”

              “Chief Hakoda,” Hakoda replied, inclining his head in return.  Pakku nodded.

              “Your children told me of you.”

              “My…”

              “Sokka and Katara.”

              “You met my son and daughter?” Hakoda asked.  Pakku nodded again.

              “As well as the Avatar.  I’m more than happy to tell you about their stay at the North Pole.”

              “Please,” Hakoda said.

              “Do you have a cabin where we can speak in private?”

              “Yes.  Follow me.” Pakku followed Hakoda only a few steps before he caught sight of Zuko watching from behind Bato’s legs.  Zuko quickly hid again, but it was too late.

              “You have a child on board?” Pakku asked, aghast.  “This is a warship, is it not?”

              “Nuktuk is a special case,” Hakoda said.  Zuko fought back the instinctive scowl at the fake name.

              “We found him in a Southern village that had been completely destroyed by the Fire Nation,” Hakoda continued.  The lie had been spoken so many times by now, it came out without hesitation.  “He was the only survivor.  Whatever soldier found him chose not to outright kill him, just wound him.  Most likely because he’s, well…”  Hakoda turned to Zuko.  “Nuktuk, come say hello to Master Pakku.”  Reluctantly, Zuko emerged from his hiding spot.  He walked over to Pakku and bowed.  Pakku crouched down to look more closely at him.  Sympathy and understanding sparked in his ice-cold blue eyes.

              “Ah.  We have some children sired by the Fire Nation brutes, as well,” Pakku said after a moment.  He stood. “Why have you not dropped him off at a village to be cared for?”

              “We were unable to return to our own villages to have him be cared for by Water Tribe.  And given his trauma, we thought it best to not leave him in some Earth Kingdom town.”

              “You’re probably right,” Pakku said after a moment.  He smiled at Zuko.  The smile felt forced and cold.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Nuktuk.  We have women aboard our fleet who will be more than happy to take care of you.”

              “Do you have healers?” Hakoda asked.  Pakku nodded.  “Excellent. While I speak with Pakku, could someone bring Nuktuk to be looked at by a healer?”

      ��       “I think someone would be willing to wrangle the kid,” Bato drawled, eyeing Panuk and Toklo, who just now had come to the deck to see what the commotion was about.  Panuk strode over to Zuko and picked him up.

              “Of course, Chief,” he said.  Hakoda and Pakku disappeared into the chief’s cabin.  “Come on, Nuktuk.”

----- 

              The healers Zuko was brought to were all women, something that befuddled him. Didn’t the Northern Water Tribe have male healers?  The Southern Water Tribe did.

              Zuko was instructed to remove his outer clothes and then gently placed in a tub of water.  He laid back, keeping his breathing steady, hoping against hope that they might find out what was wrong with him.  Being a toddler wasn’t something he enjoyed.

              “Hmm,” said the woman bending the glowing water in the tub.  She’d introduced herself as Yugoda.  “Nuktuk, you’re a bender, aren’t you?”

              “Yes,” Zuko said.  Responding to the fake name was humiliating, but he’d become resigned to it at this point.

              “You don’t seem to be a waterbender…”

              “He’s a firebender,” Panuk said.  Yugoda stopped bending.  She stared at Panuk.  “He’s a, um…” Panuk leaned in to whisper.  “War bastard.”

              “I figured that out just by looking at him,” Yugoda said dismissively. “We have some at the North Pole as well. But none of them firebenders.  They all pass away before their first birthday, once the dark winter starts.”

              “…Oh.”  Panuk cleared his throat.  “Well, Nuktuk’s special.”

              “Evidently.”  Yugoda resumed bending.  Being surrounded by water was harrowing, but somehow, Zuko felt his eyes beginning to close. “Ooh, looks like someone’s due for a nap.  Don’t worry, I can finish checking him over while he’s sleeping.”  Zuko snapped his eyes open, only for them to drift shut again as he dozed off.

----- 

              “I’ve never been so glad to pack more than I need,” a voice said.  Zuko’s eyes opened.  He sat up.  “Oh! Hello, Nuktuk!”  A young woman entered Zuko’s field of vision.  She beamed at him.

              “It’s about time you woke up,” said Bato’s voice.  Zuko looked over.  Bato was sitting nearby, cross-legged.  “You slept during the healing session and being carried off the boat and everyone pitching tents and dinner.”  Zuko looked around.  As he slowly woke up, he could now tell he was in a tent.

              “Yugoda said that the healing session might have caused you to sleep deeper and longer than normal,” said the woman.  She smiled apologetically.  “Sorry.” Zuko’s stomach rumbled.  “I’ll go get you something to eat!”  The woman dropped the clothes she was holding and left the tent.

              “That’s Yuka.  She’s got a kid your age back at the North Pole,” Bato explained.  “The second she saw you, she insisted on watching you.” Bato nodded at the clothes Yuka had dropped.  “And adjusting some of her kid’s clothes to fit you.  Just before you woke up, she was telling me how she packed clothes for her kid, only to realize she didn’t need them, since he was staying behind.”

              “…I’m getting more clothes?” Zuko asked, deciding to respond to the last thing Bato mentioned.

              “Yep.  Water Tribe clothes, not the Earth Kingdom stuff we bought.”  Bato leaned back.  “Hakoda had me watch you, just to make sure Yuka didn’t try to steal you or anything.”

              “Would she do that?” Zuko asked quietly.  After a moment to think, Bato shook his head.

              “Probably not.  But better safe than sorry.”

              “What were the results of the healing session?” Zuko asked.

              “Yugoda’s talking to Hakoda about that right now.  Oh, and he wanted me to remind you to be on your best behavior.”

              “I always am!” Zuko protested.  Bato snorted.

              “Sure.  But in this case, best behavior means acting like a regular toddler, okay?  Don’t say or do anything that would make anyone think you’re something other than a Water Tribe four-year-old,” Bato said.  Zuko looked down at his lap.  “Not saying anything is an option, if you have no idea how someone your age talks.”  Zuko nodded silently.

              “I heard you like sea prunes,” Yuka said, entering the tent again with a plate of the aforementioned food.  She handed it to Zuko.  “Eat up! A growing boy like you needs a full tummy!”  Bristling at the cloying and condescending tone, Zuko nevertheless did as he was told.

----- 

              Yuka worked fast.  By the time Zuko finished his dinner, she had finished altering an entire outfit to fit him.

              “I can dress him, if you’d like,” she offered.  Bato shook his head.

              “Nuktuk can dress himself.”

              “…Oh.”  Yuka deflated.  She recovered quickly, beaming at Zuko.  “You’re such a smart boy!”

              “Would you mind turning away?” Bato asked.  “He likes privacy.”

              “Oh, of course.”  Yuka and Bato turned away, allowing Zuko to dress himself without being watched.

              “Done,” Zuko said, once he had pulled on the last article of clothing. Yuka squealed.

              “You look so much like my little boy, Kota.  Except for your hair…”  Yuka patted her lap.  “Come here, Nuktuk.”  Zuko looked at Bato, who shrugged.  Reluctantly, Zuko walked over and sat in Yuka’s lap.  “A young warrior like yourself can’t have such messy hair,” Yuka said.

              Zuko’s hair had been getting long lately.

              “It’ll only take me a second to fix that up for you,” she continued, pulling Zuko’s hair back.  “And…done! Now you’ve got a proper warrior’s wolf tail.”  Yuka patted Zuko’s head.  “No one would be able to tell you weren’t full Water Tribe.”

              Something uncomfortable uncurled in Zuko’s stomach.  Hakoda popped his head into the tent.  He did a double-take at the sight of Zuko in Water Tribe clothes and with a Water Tribe hairstyle, but masked his surprise quickly.

              “Bato, Nuktuk, come with me.”  Zuko hopped off Yuka’s lap.

              “Nuktuk, what do we say?” Bato said, stopping him from leaving the tent. With a soft sigh, Zuko turned to Yuka and bowed.

              “Thank you,” he said.  Yuka beamed.

              “No problem.”

              “Now, let’s see what the chief has to say,” Bato said.  He took Zuko’s hand and led him out of the tent.  The two walked through the sea of tents that had been pitched for the night, allowing the sister tribes to spend time together.  The women from the Northern Water Tribe cooed at Zuko as he walked past, commenting on the “little warrior”.

              Zuko wasn’t sure whether he preferred “little warrior” or “little prince”.

              He and Bato arrived at Hakoda’s tent and entered.  Hakoda and Kustaa were waiting for them.  Kustaa raised an eyebrow at Zuko.

              “I like this new look for you, nephew,” he commented.  Zuko flushed.  Kustaa patted a spot next to him.  Zuko walked over and sat.  Bato sat next to Hakoda.  “Healer Yugoda told us what she was able to determine from her healing session, as well as what all she healed in you.”  Zuko swallowed nervously.

              “And?” he asked.  Before he could get a response, someone entered the tent.  All heads turned to the man stepping inside, Pakku.

              “Master Pakku, we were going to talk with Nuktuk in private,” Hakoda said. Pakku sat across from Zuko.

              “I know.”  His eyes bored into Zuko.  Zuko met Pakku’s steely gaze in return.  “I wanted to speak with Nuktuk as well.  Yugoda just told me that he is spirit touched.”

              “We were hoping to tell Nuktuk this ourselves,” Hakoda said firmly. Pakku raised an eyebrow.

              “I think he knew he was spirit touched without me saying so.”

              “Master Pakku-”

              “I received word from an old friend some time ago,” Pakku said, talking over Hakoda.  “He informed me that he had lost his nephew at sea.”  A chill passed through Zuko.  “He was hopeful that his nephew may have been able to save himself; the boy was very stubborn and strong, after all.  Though every day that passed, he felt less and less certain.  All he could do was pray to the spirits.”  Pakku placed his hands in his lap and leaned forward. Zuko sat straight, fighting the instinct to lean back.  “He’ll be pleased to find that they stepped in.”

              “What are you trying to say?” Hakoda asked.  Pakku continued to stare at Zuko.

              “You need to contact Iroh, Prince Zuko.”  A stark silence fell.

              “Master Pakku, this is incredibly-” Hakoda started.  Zuko leapt to his feet.  His hands, clenched in fists, burst into flame.  The fire in the lamp lighting the room surged.  Pakku merely straightened, satisfied to have been proven correct.

              “How do you know my uncle?” Zuko snarled.  He heard Hakoda and Kustaa sigh.

              “It’s a very long story, Your Highness.”

              “Don’t call me that.”

              “If you insist, Prince Zuko.”          

              “Just- just Zuko,” Zuko said quietly.  The flames wreathing his hands faded.  The lamp dimmed, returning to normal.  He sat down.  “I’m not a prince anymore.”

              “Hmm.”  Pakku looked Zuko over thoughtfully.  “Then what are you?”  Zuko looked away.  “The women in the camp are calling you a ‘little warrior’.  That seems an apt enough description.”  Zuko felt his face turn red.  “Regardless of your title, you need to write to your uncle.”

              “…No,” Zuko whispered.  Pakku’s eyes narrowed.

              “He is beside himself with grief, boy.  He has the right to know you’ve survived, regardless of your own embarrassment over your current situation.”

              “I can’t.”

              “Either you tell him or I do,” Pakku said firmly.  Tears sprung to the corners of Zuko’s eyes.  He hurriedly wiped them away, trying desperately to feign a casual air.  “Will you write to your uncle, telling him you’ve survived with the help of the spirits?” Zuko shook his head. “Really?  You won’t tell your beloved, grieving uncle that you are alive?” Pakku snarled.  Hakoda stood.

              “Master Pakku.  It’s his decision to make, and his decision alone.  You may contact his uncle if you feel you can do so without risking lives or safety.”  Hakoda gestured for Pakku to stand.  Pakku got up. “Please.  Let us have our conversation with Zuko in private.” Pakku reluctantly bowed.

              “I will write Iroh for you, then, little warrior.”  He exited the tent.

----- 

              “Bato…” Hakoda started.

              “I can keep an eye on him,” Bato confirmed.  He followed Pakku out.  Hakoda turned to Zuko.

              “I can’t write to Uncle!” Zuko burst out.  The tears he’d been holding back began to stream down his face. Hakoda strode over to the young boy and sat in front of him.

              “I understand,” he said softly.  Kustaa was patting Zuko on the back, but the gesture wasn’t calming him whatsoever.

              “No, you don’t!”  Zuko covered his face with his hands.  “I- I want to.  I miss Uncle. And if I write the letter, then I can cut out the humiliating details.  But I can’t write to him.  I can’t- I can’t write to anyone!”  Kustaa’s gentle pats stopped.  He and Hakoda exchanged an uncertain look.

              “What do you mean?” Hakoda asked, keeping his voice calm.  Zuko pulled his legs to his chest and buried his face in his knees.

              “I can write.  But only- only some things.  And I can’t write it very well.  I physically can’t write to Uncle and explain what’s happened to me.”  Hakoda nodded slightly, feigning an unperturbed air. This wasn’t good news.  It was the opposite.  But it was in line with what Yugoda had told him.

              “Yugoda told me that the way the spirits touched you disrupted your chi.  She felt that it might reduce certain capabilities of yours until you are balanced again.”

              “How do I get balanced?” Zuko asked, his voice choked with tears.

              “I don’t know.  Yugoda could only do so much.”  Hakoda thought back to the very first thing the healer had said.

              “Maybe if I had been there when he was first burned, I could have done something,” Yugoda said, visibly distraught.  “But when one heals, the body is set in that way.  It can only be righted by reinjury.”

              “What are you referring to?” Hakoda asked.

              “The damage caused by his burn.  I cannot rid him of that scar, nor restore all abilities of his ear and eye. Nuktuk will have to learn to adapt to his handicap.  I’m sorry.”

              Hakoda hadn’t realized until then that some part of him hoped a waterbending healer could do something for Zuko’s burn.  He had never seen waterbending healing in action; it seemed magical. How could magic like that fail?

              But it was for the best.  It would only serve to distress Zuko further if he woke up to an unblemished face and unencumbered sight and hearing.  Yugoda’s failed attempt to heal the old wound would be kept a secret from the boy.

              For now.

              “Great.”  Zuko raised his head.  He wiped away the tears spread across his face.  “I was put in water again for no good reason.”  Guilt twanged in Hakoda’s heart.  Of course the boy was hesitant to be submerged.  An adult that barely survived drowning in the ocean would avoid the sea.  To a child, it might feel torturous to be submerged in even a small pool for healing. Hakoda hadn’t considered that.

              He should have.

              “Not quite.  She did heal a few injuries that you apparently still had from going overboard,” Kustaa said.  “As well as some scrapes and bruises from your time on the Akhlut.  The most prominent injury she healed was what she called ‘a rather stubborn concussion’.  Once you’ve gotten a full night’s sleep, you should feel much better.”

              “…I suppose that’s good,” Zuko said begrudgingly.  He rubbed his eyes, stifling a yawn.

              “You should probably go to bed,” Hakoda said.  Zuko yawned.  “Little warrior.”

              “Don’t call me that,” Zuko muttered.

              “Why not?  It’s what you are.”  Hiding his serious thoughts behind a playful smile, Hakoda flicked the short wolf’s tail Zuko’s hair had been put into.  Zuko scowled at him.  “You’ll be sleeping in this tent with me tonight.”  Hakoda nodded at a corner, where he had put the pile of furs that had become Zuko’s bed while he was a toddler.

              “Okay, Chief,” Zuko mumbled.  He yawned again.  Kustaa stood and pulled Zuko to his feet.

              “Come with me.  Let’s have you hit the latrines before bed,” the healer said.  Zuko nodded.  Kustaa exited the tent, Zuko toddling alongside him.

              Hakoda let out a tired sigh.

------ 

              Iroh,

              I know how you desperately hope that the spirits intervened when your nephew was lost at sea.  As such, I am glad to share the news that they did.

              During our journey to our sister tribe, we came across a Southern ship. On board was a boy, clearly Fire Nation, with a large burn on the side of his face.  Our healer informed me the boy was spirit touched.  As a leader of my Tribe, I take care to interact with spirit touched individuals and determine why the spirits intervened in their lives. After speaking with the boy, my suspicions about his identity were confirmed.

              Your nephew, Zuko, is alive.  The crew of our sister tribe’s ship has taken care of him as though he were their own, and he seems pleased enough to be with them.

              Our sister tribe asked that I not give you their location, for their safety. I must acquiesce to their request for the sake of tribal unity.  But you may know that they have been traveling along the Earth Kingdom coast. The same coast you were traveling along when Zuko went overboard.

              The boy seems very invested in maintaining his dignity.  That may be something to keep in mind, should you cross paths with him.

              Best,

              Pakku

                The letter trembled in Iroh’s hands.  He stared down at the loosely elegant handwriting of his old friend, unable to believe what he had just read.  Zuko…was alive?

              “Thank you, spirits,” Iroh whispered, his head bowed.  He had been ridden with guilt since the events at the North Pole, when his inaction had resulted in a young woman giving her life to save the Moon Spirit.  That guilt, combined with the grief over losing Zuko, had caused him to part ways with the Wani, its crew, and the Fire Nation as a whole.  The knowledge that the spirits hadn’t held the incident against his family was humbling.

              Starting my own tea shop will have to wait.  Iroh tucked the letter into a pocket.  …But that doesn’t mean I can’t visit someone else’s.  Tracking down Zuko will require the kind of planning I can only get while enjoying a nice ginseng.

[tmariea]

New Constellations

Written for the ATLA Big Bang 2020!! Hosted by @atla-bigbang

Rating: T

Type: Gen

Summary: "Every star in the sky is another sun somewhere out there, farther away than we could ever imagine."

When Zuko is banished from the Fire Nation, he leaves with a ship, an impossible task, and a newfound fear of his own element. As he's offered the chance to learn navigation by the stars and the myths that weave constellations into the sky, he has a chance too, to learn how to appreciate fire once more and how to look at the world in a different light.

Warnings: panic attacks, anxiety attacks, off-screen character death, grief, healing wounds

Much thanks to @cianidix and her amazing artwork, make sure to check it out!!  And to @vandrell for cheer reading and aiyah, constellayetion, and burnt_oranges over on AO3 for their dedicated beta work!!

Chapters: 1 of 2

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Three weeks out from the Western Air Temple, twenty one days of sailing away from the islands that Zuko had always called home, he woke in a cold sweat.  This wasn’t a rare occurrence these days.  These nights when he’d jolt awake in his hard metal ship’s cabin, face aching, feeling like he was tearing apart at the seams from dreams of Father’s hands, of Azula’s pleased laughter as she had watched Father read the proclamation of his banishment.

Zuko had gotten used to turning toward the wall and curling into himself, where he would tremble either until he dropped back into a fitful, exhausted sleep, or the rising sun would beat him to it.  Tonight something extra roiled in his stomach; maybe the fish they had eaten for dinner wasn’t agreeing with him.  He levered himself out of bed and stumbled toward the door.  A turn of the crank, and he was out into the dark hallway.  There were no windows here to cast light on his unsteady steps, and so he continued until he hit the wall, slumped into it, and turned right.

Why don’t you make a light for yourself, firebender?   The voice in his head sounded a lot like Father, and was just as demanding, just as disappointed.  His stomach gave another unsteady lurch, and he had to stop for a moment and hunch over in the corridor as he fought for control over his breath.  Finally, Zuko moved forward again, shuffling along with his shoulder to the wall until he came to the doorway out onto deck.

The door swinging forward was a visceral relief, as the cool night air hit his face.  Zuko slipped out and let it shut quietly behind him.  He didn’t even spare a thought for if any of the crew might be watching as he dashed to lean over the railing near the prow.  Here the wind chilled the sweat that had collected at the edges of his bandage, and his stomach finally settled as he breathed in the scent of salt air slowly.

He felt better out here in the cool and the dark, where no one could look at him, or if they did, where he couldn’t see the looks on their faces.  The stars trailed thick and bright down to the horizon to meet the water, broken here and there by the dark shape of a cloud.  This was better.  Looking at the stars didn’t hurt.

Wanting to be beneath the night sky, firebender?  When your fire is at its lowest?  Disgraceful.

There was a flash of cloying heat through his core as he started to tremble.  It started in his lungs and spread outward, his breath came raggedly with no chance of control this time.  That was right, wasn’t it - Zuko was a disgrace as a prince, a son, a firebender.  Disgraced dishonored no fire no home no hope.  He clung to the rail as he slipped down to his knees.  He pressed the right side of his forehead to the metal, feeling the cold from the point of contact, and the pulsing pain as his skin stretched.

The waves washed against the metal of the hull, the stars wheeled overhead, and some time later Uncle came to gather him up and bring him back to his cabin.  He didn’t even have the energy to answer Uncle’s questions, much less yell at the crew members who had undoubtedly alerted him.

He could still see the window from his bed, and the stars beyond.  Uncle stayed with him, a hand over his as he sat beside him in silence as the stars slowly faded into dawn, and Zuko finally dropped off to sleep

Zuko lost a few days to fever after the incident on deck, as his already strained and healing body was overwhelmed.  Only another week later, Uncle looked up at him over breakfast and suggested, “Prince Zuko, I believe it may be time to resume your fire bending training.”  He ran hot and cold all over again, but did his best to keep it off his face.  He knew, he knew, that he was supposed to be able to do this.  If he didn’t he was a failure.

If nothing else though, perhaps he could delay.  “I don’t think I should be firebendending with a big wad of flammable bandaging on my face.”

“I never knew you to be quite so concerned with safety nephew,” Iroh mused, with an expression that was far too knowing for Zuko’s liking.  He continued, “No matter, I agree that it might be too soon to run katas or practice sparing.  We will start with meditation.”

There was no good excuse Zuko could think of in response to that.  He managed a small nod, and then tuned out the rest as Uncle began to go on about needing a strong foundation in the basics.

Later that same day he found himself sitting across from Uncle in his quarters, posture ramrod straight like all his previous teachers had insisted on, hoping the tension in his back would prevent him from flinching.  He had to do this.

“I believe it will be best to return to the very basics.  For both you and me; it’s been some time since we practiced together,” Uncle spoke softly, already readying himself for meditation.

Zuko tried to think about the last time he meditated with Uncle Iroh.  It must have been before Uncle left for Ba Sing Se, when Zuko was just learning to meditate to a flame for the first time.  By the time he had returned, Zuko had been expected to have the skill and discipline to manage his own daily meditation.  The memory was still there, though, of the first time – together they sat cross-legged on the floor in a sitting room on the ground floor of the palace.  The doors were thrown open wide and the summer’s heat and the sound of whirring cicadas drifted on the wind.  Uncle had told him to feel the warmth on his skin, to hear the rhythms of the world around them but let them flow away.  Then he had held up a small flame in his hands and asked Zuko to breathe to its rise and fall –

Uncle’s next words drew him back to the present, “I would like you to make the flame, and I will walk us through a basic sequence.”

As he remembered, Zuko had forgotten to maintain the tension in his back.  So he was unprepared to catch himself as his eye widened and mouth contorted into a grimace.  “I’m not a child, Uncle.  I can meditate without your guidance,” he said with more vitriol than he truly intended.

Uncle Iroh didn’t rise to the bait, only held out a hand in an ‘after you’ gesture.

Zuko cupped his palms together, pressing the sides of his hands together tightly to stop them from shaking.  He couldn’t tell Uncle that he couldn’t do this, but it wasn’t as if it mattered; he would see for himself.  How can you call yourself worthy to be a Prince of the Fire Nation the voice in his head that sounded like Father sneered, and the rest of him could hardly help but agree.  It was as if every time he thought about his inner fire, about producing a flame – just a small one Zuko can you not even do that? – his mind skittered away, blank and unable to hold onto the intention.  The space above his palms remained cold and empty.

Finally Iroh let out a mighty sigh.  Zuko dropped his hands and looked up to see a frown on Uncle’s face.  “For today we will change places, then.”  He lifted a hand and a small fire flicked into existence, no larger than a candle flame and so tightly controlled that it barely wavered.

It didn’t matter.

Zuko felt heat roar from his head and down his arms, down through his stomach.  It was a sickly, scalding kind of heat that left tremors in its wake and tightened his lungs in its grasp.  He scrambled to his feet and stumbled backwards, not stopping until he hit the metal wall of the cabin.  It was cold and hard against his back, comforting and terrifying in equal measure; there was nowhere else he could go.  The rest of his senses caught up with his rabbiroo-quick heartbeat, and he focused immediately on Uncle’s face, searching for his reaction.

Uncle had put out the flame, and at first only looked shocked.  Then his expression contorted into worry – and why wouldn’t it?  A crowned prince who wouldn’t bend, who tried to run from his element?  But there was no anger.  Zuko watched and waited silently, waiting for the anger, but it never came.

Uncle Iroh broke the silence first.  “Prince Zuko, we need to talk about this.”

Zuko’s heart sped up again, and his limbs tensed to back away further, but he was out of space.  Instead he shook his head vehemently, before catching himself and snapping, “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“I believe that there is.”

He screwed his face up into the most impressive glare he could manage with only one eye and leveled it at Uncle Iroh, willing him to back down.  Uncle failed to look intimidated or impressed, only shifted slightly to make himself more comfortable.

There was a lump forming in Zuko’s throat.  He couldn’t do it, couldn’t, couldn’t let the words out that he was afraid and a failure and doomed to never reclaim his honor.  If he did they’d be real.  He swallowed hard, clenched his jaw until he was sure he wouldn’t start crying, and then tried one last time.  “Uncle, please.”

Uncle Iroh sighed, and Zuko couldn’t help but notice the way his shoulders slumped as he did.  “Alright.  Another day then.  But, Prince Zuko, when I say another day I do mean that.  I’ll leave you to collect yourself.  But will you join me on deck for tea in a little while?”

There was nothing Zuko could do but give a small, tight nod.  He watched as Uncle stood with a groan and a joking mumble about old joints, before he left the room.  He watched until the door closed and the latch spun shut, and then sank down the wall and let out a shaky breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

The night after the bandages came off, six weeks away from home, Zuko crept back out onto deck again.  This time, he didn’t have any bad dreams as excuse.  At least that meant that he felt less frayed at the edges than the last time, if only just.  It meant he could dart from the shadows near the door to the catapult platform, and finally out to the railing, hoping no crew would be the wiser to their addition to the night watch.

He settled himself into a cross-legged seat and turned his face up to the sky, a mirror from earlier in the afternoon.  He had come out to the deck after Uncle had told him he wouldn’t need to reapply the bandage to his eye.  He had wanted to feel the sun on his face, his whole face.

He hadn’t expected it to feel like he was burning again.

The sound of the wind and the waves was barely audible over the rumble of the engine, but he could feel the cool night air on his cheeks and imagine the spray.  Even during the daytime, he was accustomed to the breeze off the water cutting the warmth of the sun.  He had been unprepared for his healing wound to feel like it was suffused with unbearable heat.

After he had ducked inside, after Uncle had found him and sat quietly with him until his breathing evened out again, the ship’s medic had explained that burn wounds and scars were more susceptible to sunburn than the rest of his skin.  That was all, nothing more, it was perfectly normal.  Just like the fact that sounds from the left were muffled now and sight badly blurred, creating a dizzying distortion when he tried to use both eyes.  Just perfectly normal.

Zuko had spent the rest of the afternoon pacing his cabin like a caged tiger-dillo, resenting sunlight for the first time he could remember, and Uncle and the medic for not warning him before he went outside.

But here in the dark it was only coolness, and looking back towards the tower of the ship it wasn’t as if he would be able to make out details with two good eyes anyway.  Lately, the night sky had been so much kinder to him.

Zuko settled his hands on his knees and took a deep breath in and held it for a count of six seconds before letting it back out again.  He could still do meditation breathing exercises even if he couldn’t manage a flame.  He was only sometimes good at letting thoughts and sensations come and go, but tonight he sank into it with the relief of a moment to just stop thinking.

So much so that he didn’t notice that he had company until the light of a lantern fell on his face.

If asked later, Zuko did not jump, nor did he eye the lantern warily before reminding himself that the fire was contained behind glass.  Perfectly safe and separate.  The sailor holding the lantern looked really no different from the rest.  Standard issue armor, clean shaven face, dark hair in a top knot.  Zuko had been told names on his first day, but he didn’t remember any of them.  He could blame being delirious with fever and pain, but it sounded like too much effort to make excuses when he just didn’t care.

“Prince Zuko, I didn’t expect to meet you out here,” the sailor said, and gave a reasonably deep bow.  He did not shape the flame as he was holding an odd assortment of scrolls and books, a writing kit, and some kind of metal contraption under his arm, in addition to the lantern.

Zuko drew his back up as tall as he could make himself and tilted his chin up in a way that he hoped would appear as if he was looking down his nose at this interloper, despite the fact that he was still sitting in casual robes directly on the metal deck.  “State your business, sailor,” he said.

“I am ship’s Navigator Zhu Yan, sir.  I am here to confirm our course towards the Northern Air Temple.  My apologies if I disturbed you; I did not expect to find anyone else out here.”

Zhu Yan did not leave immediately as Zuko would have preferred, and it took him a moment to realize that the sailor was waiting for either another question or a dismissal.  “As you were.”

The man bowed again, and headed for a small table which was set up a short ways away and started unloading the contents of his arms.  Zuko considered going back to his meditation but the movement in the left side of his vision kept drawing his attention.  He had become unused to seeing anything from that side.  Now it was only just too blurred to be able to make out what Zhu Yan was doing through the night’s darkness, but the lantern light flashed off of something on the table as he moved it.

Thoughts of meditation abandoned, Zuko turned his head to see what was catching the light.  It was some kind of circular contraption made of metal that Zhu Yan set down before he flipped through several pages of a book on the table.  He then wrote something on a scroll before picking up the contraption again to look through it.

The next time he placed the contraption down, he glanced toward Zuko and called, “I would be happy to answer any questions you have, sir.”

Zuko could feel the heat in his cheeks; he wasn’t supposed to be caught staring like some commoner.  His traitor mouth didn’t seem to care, as he blurted out, “Why are you navigating at night?” and then twisted his lips into a tight frown before he could ask anything else.  Tsk tsk Zuzu that sounds like a stupid question.

Zhu Yan seemed to pay no mind as his face lifted into a smile, as if completing a pair of opposing theater masks.  “There are several navigational methods approved for use by the Fire Nation Navy,” he began, as if he was reciting a set of instructions verbatim, “I am trained foremost in celestial navigation.  I am proficient in navigating by the sun, but I prefer to navigate by the stars.”

A citizen of the Fire Nation who would eschew the sun for the stars?  Zuko’s first instinct told him it wasn’t supposed to be like that, and his second reminded him that he had been just the same lately.  He looked up at the sky, and felt a sting in his heart that with both eyes open the stars blurred into an indistinct curtain of darkness and faint light.  He closed his left eye and breathed out in resignation as the stars condensed back into their own focused points.

“Do you enjoy the stars as well, Prince Zuko?”

Zuko hardly knew how to name his strange mix of feelings on the matter, so he simply nodded.  He could tell that Zhu Yan watched him for a few minutes more, waiting for the next question that never came.  Eventually, the navigator turned back to his task, and Zuko watched until it seemed like he was engrossed enough to slip away without notice.

Uncle Iroh cornered Zuko over dinner the next evening again.  He was starting to get the feeling that he should start taking meals in his own quarters.  Currently Uncle was waiting expectantly after saying, “Navigator Zhu Yan said the two of you spoke last night.”

This was a fact.  This was not a question.  Thus, Zuko didn’t feel bad at all about leveling a stare at Uncle and waiting until he got the hell to his point.

Iroh sighed gustily, disappointed that Zuko hadn’t taken the bait, and said, “He’s offered to teach you navigation if that is something you might have an interest in.”

“Why would I have any interest in learning navigation?  I’m here to find and capture the Avatar, not become a naval officer.”

“It does the mind good to pursue different skills, Prince Zuko.  After all, the flower that draws no nutrients from the soil will never bloom.”

Zuko groaned and fought the urge to bury his head in his hands.  “I don’t particularly care.  I’m not interested.”

“I will let Navigator Zhu Yan know that is your decision,” Uncle said, and turned back to his dinner with the kind of nonchalance that left Zuko incredibly suspicious.  He set down his chopsticks and waited for the other sandal to drop.  Iroh took another bite of fish stew and chewed contentedly before continuing.  “Of course, if the Avatar has managed to hide himself for 112 years, I would suspect he has quite mastered the skill.”

This time, Zuko gave into the impulse to smack himself in the face.  He immediately bit down on his tongue to hold back a whimper as his still-tender scar protested the rough treatment.  “Fine,” he snapped.

“Wonderful!” Uncle exclaimed in that booming voice of his that he liked to use when he got his way.  “Zhu Yan has said you can start as soon as this evening if you wish.”

They did not start that night, because this was Zuko’s ship and he was the one who gave the orders of when he wanted things done.  They did start the following night, because Uncle had given him a silent disappointed look that morning.

Several hours after sunset, after most of the crew except the night watch were off duty for the night, Zuko walked out on deck to find that Zhu Yan had already set up at the small table from the last time, but now with the addition of an extra cushion.  He stood as he heard Zuko approaching and bowed with a smile.  “Prince Zuko, good evening!  I’m glad you were interested in learning more about navigation.  Shall we sit?”

Zuko nodded his permission and settled at the table, with his new teacher following across from him.  There was barely a beat of silence before Zhu Yan began.  “To start, we have several tools that are the most commonly used.  Of course, we do have our standard maps,” he patted a few piled scrolls, “and then the star chart maps as well.”

The star charts seemed to be in the large bound book that Zuko had noticed the last time they spoke.  Despite himself, he was curious about maps of the stars; he’d never seen anything like it before.  He scowled at Zhu Yan as he seemed to pick up on his interest and flipped through the book until he found a map.  He turned the book in Zuko’s direction and pushed it closer so he could see a page with an inked black circle filled with dots and connecting lines.  There was a pull of curiosity in Zuko’s chest that made him want to look up and see if he could see any of the patterns for himself, but he bit his tongue.

“Each map will show the constellations visible in the sky from a given place and a given time of year.  They travel across the sky each night like the sun does during the day, but they do move by the seasons as well.  The constellations we can see in the fall are different than the ones we can see in the spring, and so forth, which is why the book is quite large.”

Zhu Yan flipped through a few pages, showing the names of places and the times of year they corresponded to.  Zuko recognized that the maps had a certain kind of beauty, but each looked so much like the last, and so many of the beautiful things he’d known had proved useless.  He didn’t think he was dedicated enough to try to learn the difference between one map and another, when he still had doubts that it would help him find the Avatar.  Instead, he pointed to the device which had caught his attention the last time they spoke.  It was a brass circle, empty in the center except for four spokes and an arm attached to the center which could spin.  “What’s that?”

“That is an astrolabe.  With it we can measure the angle of a set of stars to the horizon, and use that to determine our current location and where we need to go.  I thought we might leave that for later, though, since it does require some calculations.”

“How would you navigate if not with the tool for it?” Zuko asked, scowling in confusion.

“When in familiar waters, you can navigate by knowing the stars and their place in the sky, without even needing to use astrolabes or mathematics, the same way people have navigated for generations before us.  I thought it might be more enjoyable to start there, by learning some of the stars and the constellations they belong to, since I find it easiest to know them by their stories.”

Zuko didn’t understand.  The way he had always been told, new instruments and technology was supposed to make a task better, make the Fire Nation better.  “Those tools must have been invented in the Fire Nation, right?”  From everything he’d been taught about other nations, they had nothing remotely advanced enough.

“Oh, yes, of course.”

“Then why would you want to use an old outdated method?” Zuko asked, tension building in his voice.

“It’s always worth keeping a good tradition alive, I think.  It connects us to our history and our ancestors.  I find our myths to be quite an enjoyable tradition, so I like to fall back on them when I can.”

“We made something better, so why would you want to go backwards?”  He’d always been taught that the Fire Nation was the smartest, most advanced nation in the world.  That it was their duty to bring their greatness, their prosperity, their advancements to everyone else.  What did it mean that even their own people chose to still follow old ways?

Of course you would ask these questions, it is only fitting for one without honor.

Zuko stared at his hands, clenching into fists so tight he could feel his nails digging in to try to ward off the drop in his stomach that the voice in his head always caused.  He nearly didn’t hear when Zhu Yan responded.

“I don’t see it as going backwards.  I find it valuable to learn both, and to learn the best situations to apply each.  Besides, while the astrolabe does provide greater mathematical accuracy, you can see at many ports of call that other sailors are still successful using only the star charts and stories.”

Other sailors.  If only the Fire Nation had this technology, Zhu Yan was implying that sailors from other nations could still be equal to them.  That couldn’t be true, it couldn’t.  Zuko leapt to his feet, refusing to follow that thought any further.  “Our progress is what makes the Fire Nation great!  How can you choose to ignore that?  I won’t learn it.”  He made sure not to look back at Zhu Yan’s expression as he stormed back to the inside of the ship.

The next time Uncle Iroh decided to press the issue of meditation, he arrived at the door to Zuko’s cabin with an unlit candle and a set of spark rocks.  The wash of shame that coursed through Zuko’s body was so intense he thought for a moment that he would be sick.  “I don’t need that.  Go away!” he shouted.

However, he wasn’t willing to slam the door in Uncle’s face, which left him to watch as Uncle came into the room anyway and set the candle and rocks down on the low table.

“Sit,” Iroh told him in a voice that brokered no argument.

Zuko sat stiffly on his knees, feeling hot and cold all at once at the memory of the last time they had tried.

“As your current firebending master, I don’t believe that is an acceptable answer.  Many soldiers who have been wounded in battle have found they needed to begin from the ground up.  I have even employed this method in the past with some of them personally.”

“I wasn’t wounded in battle,” Zuko snapped.  “I was taught a lesson because I’m a disgrace.”  That’s right, you have no claim to anything honorable soldiers do.

“Regardless of if you were on a battlefield or not, you were done harm by firebending.  If you are determined to regain your skills, I would like you to try this.”

Zuko nodded, tight lipped.  No matter how much he denied it, he still felt the bite of anxiety as Uncle picked up the spark rocks.  It must have shown in his face because Uncle said, “Take a breath, Prince Zuko.  This fire won’t be under anyone’s control.  The only fuel it has is the candle wick, and it cannot leave that.  It cannot hurt you.  Say it please.”

“The candle won’t hurt me,” Zuko repeated with as little feeling as possible, scowling at the ridiculous request.  He knew that.  He had been around candles and lanterns since, it was fine.  He did know that, so why was it so hard to feel it?

“It’s a start.”  Uncle struck the spark rocks.

Zuko bit the inside of his lip hard as the small flame came into being on the wick.  He had still flinched, but at least this time he hadn’t been sent reeling back into the wall.

Uncle’s smile was big, bigger than Zuko felt he deserved.  “Very good.  I want you to watch the flame as I walk us through the sequence, and we’ll go from there.  Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes, fine.”  Zuko readjusted his seat into a relaxed lotus position and took a big breath in, eyes on the natural flicker of the candle flame.  “Let’s start.”

Zuko paced up and down the hallway that led to the deck, tense with frustration.  Just the same as Uncle Iroh had been willing to hear no argument about meditation practice, he similarly had insisted that he did not give up on learning navigation.  Zuko didn’t want to continue.  He saw no point in learning from someone who disregarded the greatness of the Fire Nation.  That would not help him regain his honor.

He’d told Uncle as much, had thought that was a good argument.  Why should he listen to someone so dedicated to something old and outdated, something which should have been left behind?  Uncle had only said that meant they needed to reach a compromise.  He had also insisted on an apology.

Zuko pressed the heels of his hands into his forehead and tilted his head up towards the ceiling with a groan.  He did not want to apologize.  Why should he have to apologize for defending the greatness of their nation?  It wasn’t his fault the navigator had backwards ideas!  But Uncle would be upset with him if he didn’t, so he didn’t have much choice but to push open the door and head out onto the deck where Zhu Yan was seated at his normal table.

Zuko stopped a reasonable distance away, in case Zhu Yan was angry with him, and said, “Lieutenant.”

The man looked up from his work, the expression on his face made unreadable by the light and shadow from the lantern.  Zuko couldn’t decide if that was better or worse.  He swallowed against the sudden twisting in his stomach and bowed with the flame.  “General Iroh has suggested I should apologize for causing you offense and walking out on our lesson,” he said stiffly, words he’d been rehearsing in his head all evening.

“Thank you for your apology, but it is unnecessary Prince Zuko.  I’ve been called sentimental by plenty of men before.”

Zuko was sure he had said worse things than ‘sentimental,’ but there had been a small part of him that had worried how Zhu Yan would react, which was now breathing a quiet sigh of relief.  He barreled forward, “I’ll keep learning navigation, but only if you teach me the astrolabe and the calculations.”

“That I can do.  Would you like to sit?”

“Another night.”  He wasn’t sure that he was up for much more.  He waited for Zhu Yan to nod his acknowledgement before turning back toward the hold.

He did hold to his word and return the next night, and then a few nights a week after.  Zhu Yan was proficient in the new methods, proven as they successfully arrived at the Northern Air Temple, and then turned sights towards the Eastern.  The new methods also did prove to be a lot of numbers and memorization.  Even without the stories, Zuko still needed to memorize stars and constellations and charts.

Zhu Yan kept to his word about leaving it at that for a few weeks.  The first story happened to coincide with when Zuko was struggling to remember a particular constellation.  He could never remember the shape of the two triangles that came together at a point, almost like an hourglass, or how to find it in the sky.  He had nearly reached the point of giving up looking for it when Zhu Yan began, “When the world was young and spirits roamed the world freely, there was a spirit named Ezi.”

Zuko clenched his jaw against the sudden rush of irritation.  Even if he didn’t care about stupid spirit tales, at least if he said nothing it would get him out of searching skies and maps that were starting to blur even in his good eye.  He turned a page in the star chart book and did his best to look absorbed in it as Zhu Yan continued.

“Ezi lived beneath the earth and sea; she was the heart of the fires within the world, the heat that gave them life.  She watched over the swirling currents of molten stone, yellow like sulfur and orange like the sunset and deep red like a ripe chili pepper.  This was her artwork and her design, a dance and an ever-moving painting all in one.

“While Ezi thought her own works of art must be the most beautiful in the world, she still loved the stories she heard from the Earth whenever she drew new pieces of stone into herself and melted them into her grand work.  The Earth showed her the shapes of crystals and the outlines of plants and animals that had become marks in stone.  It also told her of other spirits, of Air, and especially the Ocean.  The Earth said that the Ocean had currents that danced just like hers.

“Ezi was overcome with jealousy and curiosity.  How could this Ocean create something comparable to her own work?  She begged the Earth for more stories, and it brought them with every new rock that she folded into herself.  She learned that the Ocean was so cool to the touch that creatures could live within it, could add colors she had never even known existed.  She listened to stories of grand structures of coral, which looked like stone but was a living creature.  She learned that the Ocean could even take images and reflect them back on its surface.  

“Soon, Ezi became obsessed with the Ocean, began to dream of things she had only ever known as fleeting shadows or whispered tales.  Soon, it was enough that she hardly had attention for her own dance, and she decided she had to see the Ocean for herself.  She begged the Earth to help her reach the Ocean, and the Earth drew her to a place where it grew thin and brittle.  

“Ezi sent her currents through the cracks until they met something like she had never felt before.  It was nearly freezing, and wet and unknown.  She rushed forward to catch a glimpse of where she had finally met the Ocean, but it only lasted a second.  As the temperature dropped, she felt all the bits of stone and metal slip from her grasp as her heat could only keep them warm enough to dance for so long.  It wasn’t enough.  Ezi gathered more currents and pushed further until she touched the water again, looked at the ocean floor for the briefest second.  This time, there was movement, a creature she recognized from prints in stone but this was more than just an image, and moved faster and more gracefully than her own currents.  

“Ezi knew then that she couldn’t stop.  Every time her warm currents met the cold ones of the Ocean they fell from her grasp, and every time she gathered more to push on for just one more look, for just one more chance to take in a different kind of masterpiece.  She kept working, kept moving up through the bits of Earth that solidified into a mountain under the water, until one day there was no more Ocean left around her.  Instead, for the first time, she met the air, and there learned that she could look down on the Ocean and its constant dance still.  To this day, Ezi still takes advantage of any chance to see more of the Ocean, and any time she finds a place where her currents can dance between, she leaves behind a new kind of artwork.”

“What’s the point of the story then?  Why should I care about some spirit that made a volcano however many years ago that’s supposed to be?  It’s not relevant to me,” Zuko snapped.

Zhu Yan’s face took on an expression like the owlcat that got the cream.  Zuko did not have a good feeling about that look.  “Well, I know you are good at finding the Ocean constellation, yes?  This story helps us remember that the constellation for Ezi can always be found beneath the Ocean.”

Zuko let out a frustrated growl, stood from the table and left without another word.

They fell into a routine as Zuko’s first summer away from home came to a close.  Zhu Yan continued to supervise Zuko as he worked on his measurements and calculations, ready to offer correction or advice.  Whenever he felt the silence had stretched too long (a far shorter period than Zuko would consider an unbearable silence), he would point out a new constellation and launch into another wild spirit tale of how men built the first boats from grand turtle shells, how great hunters and warriors had been immortalized in the sky, or how the spirit of justice dispensed her judgements from behind an impartial porcelain mask.  Zuko would keep his head in the maps, and when Zhu Yan would look back for his reaction once the story ended, he would resolutely scowl or roll his eyes to remind him that all of this was unworthy of a Fire Nation Prince and the advancement of their civilization.  Eventually, Zhu Yan stopped looking, and Zuko stopped having to pretend he hated the tales.

Sometimes, he even enjoyed them.

One evening Zhu Yan began, “Prince Zuko, have you ever heard the tale of how the constellation The Dragon came to be in the sky?”

Zuko looked up from his page of numbers to see Zhu Yan standing near the railing, eyes on the horizon, no doubt looking for the constellation which had prompted the question.  “I bet you’re going to tell me.”

“Ah, you know me too well.”  Zhu Yan turned around and leaned back on the railing so he could be heard over the waves against the hull of the ship and began, “When the world was young, dragons were tasked with the guardianship of fire, just as the badgermoles were to preside over earth, or sky bison the air.  For many generations they kept their elements only to themselves, until there was born a dragon named Druk.

“Druk was a curious and energetic dragon when he was young, always quick to ask questions or think of grand new games.  As he grew, his curiosity became cunning and a penchant for trickery.  Druk could be counted on to cajole any dragon into giving him the best parts of their hunt, or to sneak away with the best treasures, especially when they didn’t belong to him.  He could convince anyone of the wildest, most unlikely stories, and be counted upon to be laughing from an inconspicuous distance whenever there was trouble.

“But if there was one thing that Druk loved more than a good trick, it was humans.  He tired easily of dragons, who lived their long lives so slowly.  Humans, for all that their lives were simple when the race was young, lived with such urgency and bravery.  They had no wings or claws or teeth, but they built tools and took on the most improbable challenges.

“More often than not, Druk watched the humans fail.  Although they tried so hard, they were so fragile.  Other beasts would stalk them in the dark, they would fall easily to the cold or they would succumb to illness from raw food.  So Druk went to the elder dragons and petitioned that they should give some of their fire to humans.

“The council told him that humans were too young and too small to be trusted with such a great responsibility.  After all, fire requires control to wield without causing harm, and the elders did not believe the humans would be able to do this.  They forbade Druk from giving fire to humans, and warned that the consequences of every trick he’d ever played would come back on him doubled if he disobeyed them.

“Druk went away from the meeting, not defeated but scheming.  He thought for weeks, wondering how he could get out from under the watchful eyes of the elders, who had hardly let him out of their sight since.  Finally, he came upon the idea for a race.

“Not only was Druk confident that he was the cleverest dragon, he also believed he was the most nimble too.  He proposed the idea, as something to occupy himself with if he could not go to the humans anymore, then spent the next weeks leading up to the race planting a word here or there that the elders had gotten so old and slow.  How he doubted they could even get off the ground anymore.  If there is one truth about dragons, it is that they are vain, and so just as Druk had planned, every elder was lined up at the start on the day of the race.

“The dragons took to the sky with a mighty roar and rush of wind from their wings.  The elders were larger than Druk and he knew they could outfly him in time.  So instead he twisted and turned in the air, darting here and there, under and over wings and tails and long dragon bodies, all the while taunting the racers to follow him and beat him if they could.  When Druk was finished, all of the other racers had tied themselves into a grand knot of dragons that sunk clumsily to the ground.  Druk laughed as he sped across the finish line and beyond, finally free to grant his fire to humans so they could keep themselves safe and warm.

“Between his tricks and cleverness, Druk was able to stay with humans and teach them what he knew of fire.  He was amazed at the things they began to create – strong tools and bricks for their homes, delicious food, beautiful glass and pottery.  But as with all things, Druk’s luck came to an end.  When the dragons found him, they debated what his punishment should be, and decided that he should have to live as far from humans as possible.  And such, with the help of the spirits who had first entrusted dragons with fire, Druk was placed as a constellation in the sky.  When his judgement was passed down, he only laughed, for this was fit for his last and greatest trick.  Although he would be far apart from humans, he could still watch them from the sky for eternity.”

As per their silent agreement, Zhu Yan turned back towards the sea when he was finished with the story, leaving Zuko behind him staring at the constellation and imagining it dancing in the sky.  The picture stayed with him all through the rest of the lesson, and in his dreams, he saw dragons shaping metal and glass with their breath.  The next morning at meditation practice, Zuko was still absorbed in wishing he could have met the dragons.  He hardly noticed that Uncle Iroh had lit the candles with his own fire rather than the spark rocks, until the same moment that he realized he hadn’t flinched away.

By the time autumn had begun to march on towards winter, Zuko was gaining some level of confidence that he could identify most constellations in the sky, could measure them and do the calculations he needed to pinpoint his location on a map.  He had also heard more myths than he had thought possible for one person to keep in their head.  “Why do you care enough about all of these myths to have them memorized?” he asked one evening, when the sea air was a bit too cold, his eyes straining to focus in the lantern light, and his heart only too aware of how long they’d been far from home.

“Everyone loves a good story!” Zhu Yan looked toward Zuko for confirmation and sighed as he met the corresponding glare.  “But, in all seriousness, and if nothing else, this is the one for you to remember.”

“Another story?” Zuko groaned.  “Why is the answer to every question another story?  You’re just as bad as Uncle with tea or proverbs.”

“I promise it’s less of a story than something to think about.  So we know that Agni is the spirit associated with our sun, yes?  Well, every star in the sky is another sun somewhere out there, farther away than we could ever imagine.  Every one of them is Agni’s brother or sister or sibling.  The constellations and their stories are important to me because being under the stars is like being under the light of a thousand suns.”  Zhu Yan turned his face up to the sky as if to try to feel the light.  “Why wouldn’t we want to find a way to connect ourselves to that?”

Zuko didn’t have an answer, and for once, didn’t have a disparaging comment either.  The stars were suns far away?  Did this mean that when he liked being under the stars it didn’t mean he was a disgrace as a firebender?

Almost as if he could read his thoughts, Zhu Yan continued, “That’s one of the reasons I love the Fire Nation, and firebending.  Since firebending comes from the sun, when we bend we’re also as close as we can be to the stars.”

Zhu Yan fell uncharacteristically silent after that.  For the rest of the evening’s practice, hardly another word was spoken. Zuko found himself forgetting his earlier complaints, instead enraptured by the thought of light and heat and fire so far away he could barely see it.

After they packed up and parted for the evening, Zuko returned to his quarters with energy humming in his veins.  He sat himself cross legged in front of his meditation candles and took a deep, steadying breath inward.  Firebending came from the breath, Uncle always said.  And according to Zhu Yan, it also connected them to the sky.  How could that be so bad, to hold a piece of a star in his hands?

Zuko let out his breath and drew in a new one, trying to feed his inner fire.  It had been so long, he had almost forgotten the pleasant trickle of warmth along the skin of his hands.  Another, and he held his palms up in front of him, and watched as a tiny spark bloomed an inch above his skin and grew into a small, but real flickering flame.

[diegosclownshoes]

the s2 plot finally kicks off in this part as the agent and five finally meet and make wonderful first impressions on each other. this part is also reads more like a fic than the last (which you should def read before this for it to make sense if you haven’t bc it sets up the whole scene), since it’s p dialogue heavy, and pretty much all from the agent’s pov, but it’s still more on the draftish, notesish side. also some of the original scenes bw five and elliott are gonna be retconned since the agent’s already answered most of his questions about crop circles and whatnot when she revealed where she came from.

The agent find herself standing face to face with the stranger from the picture, now practically burning a little square down onto her skin through the pocket of her jeans. Elliott’s standing behind him mouthing what the hell is going on, and between the disbelief that boy in the picture has actually, finally shown up, the day has finally come, and the panic over what to do with Elliott, the agent does little more (well actually nothing more) than stand there with her lips parted and not a single word on her tongue.

A beat passes as the boy maintains eye contact while he lifts the mug to his lips, taking a drawn out sip, and only breaks it once he steps forward out towards the open area of what’s now the makeshift research/office space where they’ve put together any and everything that they could get their hands on related to the strangers (does it count if the agent knows them from a picture?) who appeared in the alley after the agent..

“Hm. This Colombian?” he asks, turning back around to face them. He looks far too nonchalant about all of this for the agent’s liking, and she has half a mind knock the coffee out of his hand, even if it means her favorite mug breaks.

Before she has the chance to respond, however, Elliott hastily moves forwards before answering back, “It’s my own blend.” The agent quickly grabs him by the arm and tugs him back into the kitchen, the butter knife that he’d grabbed after the boy’s intrusion clattering to the floor.

“Excuse us just a second,” she grits out, dragging Elliott further back until they’re stood up against the counter where the forgotten groceries lay. “What are you doing, oh my god. ‘It’s my own blend’,” she says, doing a (pretty poor) impression of Elliott. “What, are you gonna tell him the recipe now if he asks?”

“What am I doing,” Elliott hisses back. “What are you doing? Because if I’m not mistaken, that’s the same guy from your picture, and this is what you’ve been waiting here for since the moment you got dropped into that alley!”

The agent quickly glances at the boy, who’s poking around their setup, turning over newspaper clippings and fiddling with the machinery, and doesn’t seem to be paying them all that much attention. “That doesn’t mean that you just tell him everything he asks about! We don’t even know what he’s here for or if that little teleportation trick is all he’s got! And also, isn’t it just awful convenient how the one person we’ve been waiting for shows up last, and how he ended up literally knocking on our door?” She again looks back at the boy, who stops reading whatever journal it is he’s picked up and looks back, arching a brow at her. She scowls back.

Elliott sighs. “Well maybe if he got the chance to speak he’d tell us what he’s here for anyway.” He pauses, then frowns. “No harm in being too careful though,” he agrees, pulling open the drawer under the counter and grabbing a (much sharper) knife before the pair make their way back over to the boy.

He gives Elliott a ‘really?’ look as he sees the knife in his hand, but nontheless ignores it before he asks, “Have you ever heard of Area 51? Roswell?” And honestly the agent can’t help the snort she lets out at that. Who knew letting Elliott keep his conspiracy theory crap mixed in with her research would ever get that reaction out of someone.

“Please, you honestly expect us to believe that you’re from another planet? Which one, home to the alien race of vertically challenged boarding school runaways?” The agent crosses her arms and scoffs but before she can say anything else the boy’s once again blinked and now stands directlyfront of her, and she quickly leans back to steady herself.

“Well,” he says, smiling thinly, “If there were such a planet then you’d no doubt be a citizen there yourself, so let’s both of us ignore that comment for now,” and okay, the agent realizes with a little feeling of indignance, he does have an inch (or two) on her. Still, she doubles down on an overly saccharine smile of her own.

“Alright, let’s,” she says back, and silently hates the sense of relief she feels once he steps back. Behind her Elliott, ever the peacekeeper, clears his throat.

“Um, what my niece over here meant to say is that, while there certainly is reason to believe in extraterrestrial life which exists beyond the limits of our own universe, and beyond our comprehension, you and all the other anomalies we’ve seen don’t seem to to fit into that, uh, narrative. So don’t go trying to avoid the question at hand.” The agent gives him a funny look; which question at hand have they even asked at this point? The boy, on the other hand, quickly leans forward again.

“Which others?”

*

Elliott quickly explains phenomenon that occurred during the five energy surges they’d witnessed together, and the consequent flashes of blazing blue light that  had appeared alongside them each time before depositing a figure into the alley. Somewhere in the middle of his explanation, he’d set down the knife, and the agent hopes that it wasn’t a mistake (she’s confident in her own special power, but if the boy teleports before she has a chance to use it then it won’t be of much use at all).

The boy frowns, brows furrowed. “Did you get a good look at any of them?”

“Yeah, a couple of them. There was the first one, which I saw alone, because, uh my niece wasn’t here at the time.” Before their guest has a chance to ask what he means by that the agent quickly cuts in.

“There was that freakishly big crybaby,” she adds, and the boy turns to face her.

“Crybaby?”

“Yes, a crybaby, a person who cries often, and is thus referred to as a cry plus baby. You know, you should quit playing hooky, otherwise you’ll miss out on more than just those oral comprehension skills you’re lacking here.” And okay, she should feel kinda bad for taking jabs at a teenager but he’s also had her feeling unsettled since the moment he walked (or rather, blinked) in. Before he can respond (most likely with a threat, which. Shocker) Elliott jumps in, breaking up the hostile air.

“He kept coming back to the alley and sat around for hours wailing someone’s name, a woman’s name, it was uhh-”

“Allison,” the agent supplies.

“Yes! Allison.”

The boy frowns (the agent bites her tongue before she makes a comment about his face getting stuck that way). “Luther.”

“Well,” she says instead, “Whoever it was, they all came scattered over the past couple years. No two at the same time. The last one was in September.”

The boy lets out a sigh of relief. “So my family’s alive,” and okay, what? The agent’s eyes widen in part shock and part confusion as he continues. “Shit.I think I stranded them here. Now listen to me-"

"Elliot. My name's Elliot. And this," he gestures towards the agent, “Is-”

“None of his business,” the agent says coolly, crossing her arms.

“Alright, fine. Elliott and None Of His Business, I got ten days to find them and save the world. Now, I need your help to do that,” he says, the last part directed at Elliott. No surprise there, the agent thinks, going for the more guileless of the two. Although it’s not as if she would have done any different herself. However, she once again interjects. Knowing Elliott, he’ll reveal something to this guy before he even asks about it, and she’s not sure she wants him knowing how much they know any more than they need to let on. For now at least.

“You know,” she says, quickly making her way over to one of the desks pushed up against the wall, pulling open one of the drawers and producing a newspaper clipping, “This mugshot looks a lot like arrival number four.” That’s a lie, because she knows for a fact that that is exactly the last arrival, had held the clipping up beside the blurry picture given to her by The Handler and confirmed it at least ten times. But he doesn’t need to know that just yet. She offers out the clipping and he immediately snatches it out of her hands, eyes racing across the picture.

“Diego,” he breathes out, before looking up from the paper and directly at her. She feels a pang of guilt at the look of extreme, almost manic relief in his eyes, when she knows there’s information on all of the rest of, what she knows now to be his family, sitting there in their office.

And then his words truly hit her; in her scramble to make sure Elliott didn’t blurt anything out, she’d almost forgotten that first part where he said he needed to save the world and just. What? Is that a part of her mission? Is she supposed to help him do that too? And why didn’t The Handler ever mention that? She wants to ask him more but has no clue where to start, and before she gets gets the chance to ask (or to be more accurate, splutter incoherently for a second), someone else speaks up first.

“So that’s helpful then,” Elliott states more than questions, looking almost eager to be of more use.

“You have no idea,” is all the boy says, and before the agent gets a chance to ask him wait, hold up, let’s go back to that saving the world bit, he folds up the snippet of paper and disappears with a soft zap. The agent and Elliott both turn to face each. other. Almost a minute passes and then-

“Well that was something.“

[capricornus-rex]

Two Sides of the Coin (18)

Chapter 18: Altering It Further | Jidné Sheedra x Cal Kestis

Summary: Hell-bent on exacting revenge and retrieving the Holocron, the dreaded Darth Vader is now on the hunt for the young Jedi Knight, Cal Kestis. Under the assumption that he still possessed the artifact, while fueled by the intrigue of the boy’s strength and skill with the Force, the dark lord hires the bounty hunter, Jidné Sheedra, to track him down and have him delivered alive. However, the task becomes a trial for young Jidné, as she faces a conflict that tests her beliefs of a scarred past she had hidden for so long.

A/N: Look it @berenilion another Vader chapter ;w;

Also tagging @silver-is-in-too-many-fandoms @stellar-trinity @justtinfoley @peterwandaparker @calgasm @queen-destenie @ayamenimthiriel @calsponchoemporium​ @fallenjedii @cal-jestis​ @sweeetteaa​

Also in AO3

Tags: Fem OC, Jidné Sheedra, Force-Sensitive! Fem OC, Bounty Hunter! Fem OC, Jedi! Fem OC

Chapters: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 – 16 | Previous: Part 17 | Next: Part 19 | Masterlist

18 of ?

A black, high pyramid tapering upwards marked the desolate, volcanic landfill that is Mustafar.

Jidné piloted the Scarab close to the transport shuttle’s tail, led by the Sixth Sister in her specialized TIE Fighter.

Jidné didn’t even realize that she’s held her breath even after getting through the atmosphere, the turbulence on her end was light, but the eeriness of the landscape captivated and frightened her at the same time—concentrating all her attention to the castle sitting by the edge of the black plateau. A single stream of glowing, red-hot lava resembling a waterfall accentuated the structure’s ominousness.

All three ships occupied the open hangar, albeit being a wide space. Jidné alights the Scarab and joins Cal’s side while he’s held by one Stormtrooper in the other.

Subtly using the Force, Jidné curled her fingers and willed the hool of Cal’s poncho to rise and cover his head. She was careful enough to make it go unnoticed by the Stormtrooper, but of course, it took Cal by surprise to feel his hood suddenly moving on its own. He turned his head to the only possible culprit—though she still didn’t look back to him, she couldn’t.

“The hot air here’s gonna make your head feel like it’s scorching,” Jidné mumbled through her cowl with the coil covering the bottom half of her face. She bobbed her head closer so her voice is still within the redhead’s earshot, making her more audible over the sound of the geysers spewing the said hot air.

Not once did she turn her head to face him as she spoke.

There was no response from him. She isn’t expecting one anyway. Understandably so, she immediately put herself in the mindset that Cal was furious with her. Though, he himself seems to contradict. His gentle surprise caused his eyes to remain on her, studying her feature and expression—the languidness on her face gave off the illusion that her laughter was a thing of the past, her dejected eyes slowly blinking and her head panning by the inch as she surveyed the castle and the landscape around it.

Cal, Jidné, and the rest of the Stormtroopers followed the Sixth Sister to the main door unprompted.

“Inform Lord Vader that we have the boy and that the bounty hunter is with us,” the Sixth Sister commanded the scout trooper manning the terminal.

“Copy!”

The scout trooper presses the button and spoke through the microphone head, relaying the exact words of the Sixth Sister. The door rumbled open seconds after the scout trooper concludes his announcement and they continued to follow.

The outside of the castle was one thing, but the inside was another story. Something about the interior made Cal and Jidné’s skins crawl—an alien feeling that they can’t describe, but somehow know of.

The Dark side of the Force.

The Sixth Sister has led them to the receiving chamber where Darth Vader meets those who wish to see him; on one side, there was a large rectangular slit on the wall facing the volcanic view outside, and in the other, was the door connecting the foyer and Darth Vader’s chamber.

All of them waited there. Even Jidné and Cal can feel the red Twi’lek tensing up.

The heavy creaking of the door caused everyone in the foyer to turn away from the window, smoke was spilling through once it went ajar, from a thin slit to a gradually gaping space until it revealed the tall figure, darker than the obsidian on which his fortress stands.

There mere sight of him shook the two young Jedi to their very cores. The monotonous breathing that filed the room has pierced its way to the hearts of everyone present and made their stomachs sink as if anchors had been tethered to them. The cool, poised façade of the Sixth Sister seemed to ebb, both Cal and Jidné sensed it, but the feeling’s mutual.

Darth Vader acknowledges the Inquisitor, Jidné—who he still believes to be a bounty hunter—and the prize in question, the Jedi boy Cal. He marched along the narrow bridge connecting the door and the foyer. As per custom, the Sixth Sister lowered herself to her knees as the dark lord approaches them. The closer he got, the more profuse the trembling became for the two young Jedi; only then did both of them truly have processed just how lumbering Vader was in size and the authority he imposed in his every step, in the slightest tilts of his helmet, and the blood-red glint of his mask’s eye sockets.

“My lord,” greets the Inquisitor.

“Rise,” he lowed rather disinterestedly. A slow sideways wave of his hand and the Twi’lek was quick to obey.

The Sixth Sister stepped aside to present the Jedi boy and the bounty hunter by his side. The Sith Lord stepped closer, Jidné’s elbows buckled closer to her sides while Cal’s already-clenched fists closed even tighter. As much as they wanted to avert their eyes to spare themselves from the terrifying sight of his mask, they couldn’t. In the end, they had to roll their eyes up in order to look at him in the eye, or at least through the pair of convex bumps that gleaned red when the light hits.

“Well done, Jidné,” Vader hummed.

Vader gestures at one of his personal bodyguards in that foyer—a Shadowtrooper: their armor was a glossy, jet black, perfectly blending in with the background whilst having a cloaking device that will mask their entire person. The Shadowtrooper approached one side of the room and what sounded like the latch of a trunk opening, he produced a storage canister—same as the one Jidné received for her upfront payment—he then activated a podium that erected from the floor at the touch of a button of his gauntlet for him to settle the container down. Performing a series of button patterns, he set off the lock to reveal that only a half filled the inside.

“That could only cover my fee, not the bounty price,” Jidné pointed out, maintaining character.

“Were you expecting a thicker stack? Or a second canister?”

“You don’t hear me complaining, m’lord,” Jidné blurted. “I was just stating the obvious.”

“Do not concern yourself over something that’s been considered done and covered. After all, you have accomplished what my two Inquisitors failed to do,”

She didn’t respond to the commendation, though Vader perceived her head hung low as she drew a heave of breath as a reaction. He then turns to the boy. The tension at Nur ran fresh in both of their minds—however, Vader was fueled by his recollection of the entire inconvenience that transpired in that stronghold.

Cal gets himself hauled forward to Vader, the Stormtrooper struggles to push the boy towards the large, lumbering figure that is the dark lord of the Sith.

For once, the dark lord has the opportunity to examine Cal without any lightsabers clashing angrily against one another. His blank, empty eyes stared right into the boy’s eyes—more alive than his could ever be—and Cal attempted to keep a brave face, despite repressing the shuddering that’s trying to break free from his body.

“Now, you will surrender the Holocron,”

In Cal’s mind, everything made better sense now. He turned to Jidné, and then to Vader. He managed a small smirk right in front of the dark lord.

“I don’t have it,” he muttered.

“Liar.”

Cal shakes his head whilst the smirk on his face grew.

“I really don’t,”

Vader’s head jerked to the girl, searching confirmation from her indifferent expression—he sensed that Jidné knew something as she continued to keep her head low and her eyes away.

“Then you’re hiding it somewhere,” insinuated the Sith lord. He looks at Jidné. “Tell me what he has done with the Holocron.”

Silence spoke on Jidné’s behalf. She rolled her eyes to Cal’s direction, avoiding Vader’s.

His short-lived patience is now spent. He hoisted his hand in level with Jidné’s neck, the air rumbled within the two Jedi’s radius, a heavy glom wrapped around them—Cal could feel its weight on him, but it was Jidné who had more of the receiving end.

She started to struggle in breathing, the gulps that she swallowed all lodged in the middle of her throat, the veins on her neck were pulsing as the muscles around it tightened. Jidné clutched her neck, hoping that rubbing it would make it go away—instead, she continued to gag, short breaths did not sate her lungs. Her eyes finally trailed up and found the root cause—Vader’s gloved hand is positioned into an open grapple directed in front of her. It didn’t take long for her to submit on her knees—in a moment, on one knee, and then the second in the next—her hand was still on her neck, clawing off a non-existent grasp asphyxiating her.

Darth Vader doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon… not until either of them talks.

“LET HER GO, SHE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!!!” Cal raised his voice against Vader, though that didn’t convince him and continued to strangle the girl.

Again, Cal took his voice to its peak, so much so that the words strained his chords, “THE HOLOCRON IS DESTROYED!!! I DESTROYED IT—NOW LET HER GO!!!”

The suffocating ripple of the Force coiled around her neck finally vanished into thin air. Jidné inhaled the deepest that her lungs could take—the biggest one she’s ever done in her entire life! She exhaled in coughs and fully collapses to the ground as she felt like her spine had turned into liquid. She breathed a few more time to reset her pattern before pulling herself back, little by little.

“Jidné…? Are you okay?”

It was a subtle nod that she did to reply to Cal. Her panicked heart still raced until she mentally willed it that she’s still alive and breathing.

“You…” Vader trailed off. “Destroyed it?”

“I’ve seen and remembered enough names when I opened that Holocron. If you kill me now, you will never get a single one of them!” Cal snarled.

Perhaps in a way to rub it in his face, Vader leaned closer to Cal until a mere inch of space divides the two of them.

Vader purred, proud of himself that he had outwitted the boy, “But I can get it out of you.”

“What are you going to do with him?” Jidné inquired, still trying to keep in character.

“That is not of your concern. You should concern yourself more with the second half of the bargain,”

Darth Vader promised the second payment to Jidné if she stays until Cal is brought to the torture chamber. The simple mention of that word made Cal’s heart beat twice at a time. He has only seen the machine when inactive in real life, he’s seen it at work but only in his Force vision of Trilla’s memory—he could think of a hundred ways how it would feel if it was he himself strapped to the machine.

The Shadowtrooper adjusting the canister an inch forward was supposedly a prompt for Jidné to take the money, but she didn’t want to take it. Blood money, she thought. Seconds later, Vader notices her hesitation.

“Is there something else, child?” Vader inquired.

“N-No… my lord,”

“Then take it,”

She clenched her fist to eradicate the trembling. His invitation for the girl to take the money was a trick challenge he’s imposed—should the Sith lord notice the fumble in her hands, his suspicions would immediately be proven true.

Eventually, Jidné’s fingers wrapped around the handle and pulled it away from the podium. She still could not will herself to look at Cal in the eye, presuming that she had truly betrayed him—if only she could freeze time, she would’ve shouted it until her voice reaches the very foundation of the building that she has fallen for him and that she doesn’t want to do this anymore.

Jidné slowly turns around, her back against everyone else, as she was dismissed by Vader himself so she can return to the hangar to hide away her bounty.

“I shall expect you in the torture chamber soon, Sheedra,”

That stopped Jidné in her tracks. Her grip around the handle tightened until her palms swelled. Ever so slightly, she bobbed her head to the side, one inch shy of showing her face over her shoulder.

“Understood.” She huskily replied, a dreary tone rasped as she spoke.

Eager to leave, she continued to walk away and succeeded in hiding the tears streaming down her cheeks as she takes every step.

[rosiedoestumblr]

This fandom has a Joe Trohman problem.

Listen, because I’m pretty tired of this bullshit:

If you think you are a Fall Out Boy fan, and you’re out there on Twitter with your shitty little profile picture of fucking Pete Wentz or something, saying hurtful, critical things to a member of Fall Out Boy, you’re not a fan. You’re a piece of shit and we don’t want your kind here.

Let’s make something very clear:

Fall Out Boy would not exist if not for Joe Trohman.

And we can leave out the fairly trivial, ‘He met Patrick’ reason, because that automatically makes Patrick the focus, as if Patrick is the only thing that matters in this band. Some of you are probably thinking, ‘Well, he is?’ and you can also kindly fuck right off. Then fuck off some more.

Joe had the original idea to form a pop-punk band.

Joe was the person who’d drive around picking people up and forcing them to go to band practise.

Joe maintained the early website.

Joe scoured websites and forums to find people to add to mailing lists and pushed the word of mouth that made them popular in the first place.

Joe made Fall Out Boy fucking happen on a day to day basis while Patrick was writing songs and keeping them to himself during the recording of TTTYG, because he didn’t think it would last and he didn’t want to share his best work with the rest of the band, and Pete and Andy others were in other bands entirely.

Before the hiatus, it was becoming increasingly clear that Joe wasn’t being allowed to contribute to the writing and was really unhappy. He felt pushed out, “Like [he wasn’t] even in Fall Out Boy.” He talked about it interviews and was then shot down because the rest of the band denied it was true, or he’d ever said it. He was the only one who didn’t deny it. It happened not once, but twice. 

His mental health, which he’d struggled with since childhood, was suffering. He had two breakdowns in a year. The songs he was able to contribute to on Folie a Deux were cut at the last minute, and you love those songs - Pavlove? Lake Effect Kid? Yeah. Those ones. Listen to the fucking guitar parts.

When they came back from hiatus, those exact fucking problems - which he had talked about and which had then been denied - were suddenly accepted and addressed, because of how patently clear it had become to the band that he was being treated unfairly and hadn’t had the confidence or communication skills to fight his own corner. Patrick said himself that it wasn’t until he got to see Joe in The Damned Things that he really recognised his talent - even though he’d been in Fall Out Boy with him for all those years.

These are facts. These are acknowledged by the band. They are indisputable.

You can pretend it didn’t happen all you want, but it just makes you look like a delusional twat.

And you know what Joe was doing, prior to the band getting back together (given that people still ask what The Damned Things is, well into the album cycle, I doubt some of you do)? He  was the fucking frontman of With Knives. He was getting to stand front and centre and take ownership, and guide the lyrics and music for a band. He even fucking sang. 

And that was exactly when he was asked to come back to Fall Out Boy: when he had a project of his own that he had some control over.

But he gave that up and came back. And he came back because he was promised that he’d be treated better and it would be worthwhile and he’d be allowed to contribute - that his contribution was wanted and valued - and he came back because he loves the band he started and he loves the band members he grew up with.

And you know, it worked out okay for an album or two. Ish. Prior to Mania, he said how he hoped their next album would be more guitar-driven, he was excited for it. But it’s clear that by the time Mania was being produced, the emphasis of contribution had slipped again. And maybe he’s okay with that, maybe he’s resigned to it, but you should watch some interviews if you want a clearer sense of how he felt at that time.

They played the London show on the anniversary of his mother’s death, by the way - three years after he couldn’t come to the UK shows in 2015 because she’d just passed. That must have been pretty hard, no? But he was there and he did it.

So, don’t you fucking dare claim Joe doesn’t care about this band. Don’t you dare take a pop at him because you’ve taken his words - which have already been condensed by a journalist - out of context, and use them to fluff your Perfect Patrick Pillows in which Patrick is a fucking saint and the rest of the band exist to prop him up. Frankly, go fuck yourselves, because we are well aware that you’re fawning over the work Patrick is doing with other artists, right now, without a second thought for it being a slight against Fall Out Boy.

But Patrick isn’t at fault, here - if you’re one of the little pigs attacking Joe over what he does in his free time, you are. You’re a fake fucking fan.

And you know what? Patrick would hate you for it. He’d think you were a little asshole, because he remembers the way people like you treated him, when he did his original solo work. He knows from experience how fucking hurtful it is for people who pretend to be fans of Fall Out Boy to turn on you when you express yourself in your own way.

He would not stand for this bullshit, either, but he’s not able to tell you this, because you creeped him off social media already.

The fact of the matter is this:

If members of Fall Out Boy - particularly Joe and Patrick - do not get to spread their wings in the way they need to, creatively, there will eventually be no Fall Out Boy.

Artistically, they’re different people. Methodically, they’re different people. If it’s not possible for both of them to satisfy their creativity all the time in the same band, then there has to be a way for those ideas to be shared with the world, or the band they work on together with cease to exist.

That’s what The Damned Things is for Joe. 

That’s what Sect is for Andy.

Joe loves doing The Damned Things, and with one of his childhood heroes to boot, and he has gone out of his way to say - on film - how much he learned from Patrick over the years and how that has influenced this band. 

The Damned Things is what will keep Fall Out Boy possible.

This band is Joe’s baby, an expression of his own identity, talent and personal struggles with his mental health, and he deserves this fandom’s support the way he’s supported and sacrificed things for the band we love, all these years. 

If you can’t even do that, why are you still here?

So, before you go on your little spiteful Twitter tirades about Joe, who made Fall Out Boy happen and ensured it continued, and gave up everything he wanted to do, to help bring it back, take a step back and realise you’re becoming someone Patrick Stump wouldn’t like.

Is that what you fucking wanted?

[turtle-steverogers]

Code: WTF (1/3)

hey, so here’s a little three part fun fic involving fbi agents and russian spies! (with just a little angst) enjoy!

warnings: a small depiction of death, but it’s not super bad

ship: platonic ralbert, platonic spalbert, soon to be sprace

word count: 1927

editing: ofc not

-

Making decisions, Albert has come to realize, is not his forte.  Granted, he’s generally good at helping others make decisions- he’s got that sort of innate way of looking at the whole picture, which is good when you’re trying to help someone sort through different situations.  But he can never seem to apply this strong suit to himself.  

Like when he was thinking of career paths and he’d spend hours at night staring at his ceiling and wondering whether or not he wanted to commit himself to a world of chance and danger and join the FBI.  Because, wow, had that been a dream of his ever since he watched his first James Bond movie at nine years old.  There was something thrilling about watching that action- seeing how he could use his sharp problem solving skills for something bigger than himself.  He wasn’t sure if he was ready to pledge himself to something that seemed almost like a life sentence, but he also was never one to run from a challenge.  So...after a couple years of college and a bachelor’s degree in engineering, he started studying for his Phase I assessment.  

It was grueling.  The entrance exam was no easy task and it only got harder from there with the ‘Meet and Greet’ and Phase II written assessment.  Not surprisingly, though, he had made it through and soon he was off to Quantico, where he was tested against his own willpower for upwards of 21 weeks.  It was tough, but he made it through with flying colors.  

Shortly after his 28th birthday, on a sunny and almost too hot July morning, he’d been trying not to let a giddy smile spread across his face embarrassingly as Director Larkin swore in his class- awarding them with their badges and credentials.  The smile did break through however when Larkin had looked directly at him while speaking of “Those most fit and impressively accomplished” and winked.  But he was proud of himself.  Sue him.

After the ceremony, Race- his roommate during Quantico whom he’d grown particularly close to- had handed over some suspicious looking store brand lemonade in a shitty, plastic cup and bumped their shoulders together, smiling as he raised his glass.  Albert mirrored his grin and clinked their glasses together.

“To the dream.” Race had said, taking a sip.

Albert drank too, and echoed, “To the dream.” 

Now, three years later, he’s finding that his bad decision making skills are still very present as he stares at the shelves of brightly colored cereal boxes, trying to decide what he wants this week’s breakfast to be.

As a Senior Special Agent, it’s very serious reconnaissance work.

Just as he’s reaching for a box of Dark Chocolate Crunch Cheerios, Race materializes next to him, looking a little tight around the eyes as he places a couple cans of Progresso soup into their basket.  

His movements are calculatedly casual, but Albert knows him well enough to know his stress tells.  The way his shoulders are just slightly raised, ready to launch into motion at the first sign of trouble.  The tense of his jaw and the slight scrunch of his nose- as if he’s smelling something off.  Bad.

“Hey, Al,” Race says, straightening.  Even his voice is that sort of forced casual it gets when he’s inwardly freaking out about something, “Do you remember our trip to Morocco?”

A shiver runs down Albert’s spine and he gives himself credit for only hesitating for a moment before recovering.  Morocco is their personal code for ‘hey, someone is definitely following us, so we either need to dip or do something about it.’

“The first or second trip?” Albert asks, his words just as rehearsed.  

And that’s their follow up code.  The first trip means it’s an unknown party; the second trip means it’s someone affiliated with whatever operation they’re currently assigned to.

Really, it’s counterintuitive to even ask, because they haven’t been on any major assignments in nearly a month now.  Director Larkin had given them both time off from the big stuff after their last operation had gone decidedly south when they lost a couple of the DEA guys they’d been teamed up with in a surprise shoot-out against the drug corporation they were tasked with bringing down.  

It was jarring to say the least, and neither him nor Race complained too much when Larkin had suggested laying low for a while.  It was the first time they’d ever lost their own men on a mission and in such a gruesome way.  Some arterial blood had sprayed Albert in the face, getting on his tongue and clogging up his nose.  He doesn’t remember much after that.  Race says he dissociated big time.  Albert doesn’t really care.  He just knows that he still can’t eat tomato sauce on his pasta, because the red of it still looks too much like--

Yeah, no.  Alfredo sauce is a new favorite in the Dasilva-Higgins apartment.

“First trip.” Race says, watching as Albert carefully puts the Cheerios box in the basket.

The sudden feeling of being watched pricks at Albert’s neck and he resists the urge to look behind him.  

“When’d you first notice?” Albert asks, dropping his voice lower and motioning for Race to follow him as he moves down the aisle, still trying to look nonchalant as he grabs a random box of Fruity Pebbles.  The gun that’s tucked into the waistband of his jeans becomes a noticeable weight against his lower back.  It’s a comforting weight, if not a little disconcerting.  But that’s basically in their job description.

“On the way here,” Race says, following Albert’s lead and plucking a box of shitty granola bars off a shelf behind them.  As long as they look busy, they look normal, “Noticed him walking behind us around the time we passed Suffolk.  Was wary, but didn’t think too much of it until I saw him lurking by the bananas while I was getting some apples.”

“Didya get a look at him?  Any discernible features?”

Race shrugs, eyes darting over Albert’s shoulder, then to the side, “Not really.  Short, I’d stick him around 5’4”?  Dark hair and eyes.  He’s wearing jeans and a leather jacket, kept his hood up.”

Albert hums, “And you last saw him by produce?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Albert says, “Come on.”

They forgo the rest of their shopping list and hurry to check out, trying to maintain a sort of ostensibly relaxed appearance.  Just as they’re leaving the market, turning the opposite way from which they came, Albert’s neck prickles harder.  His stomach swoops a little and he hesitates, waiting for the right moment to turn around and grab the collar of the offending party, pulling him into a nearby alley and pushing him against the bricks.

He hears Race curse, but doesn’t look at his field partner as the guy against the wall’s hood falls away.  For a moment, Albert’s stunned, instinct falling short as his gaze sweeps over the guys face.  

And as shocking as it is, it’s comforting in a way.  Because even after eleven years, Albert would know those brown eyes and sharp features anywhere.  

His grip on the guy’s collar slackens and he feels his shoulders slump a little, “Spot?”

Spot grins, “Heya, Al.”

XXX

“Wait, so you know our stalker?”

It’s probably the millionth time Race has asked that since they’d dragged Spot back to their apartment on 14th street, taking a few cautionary side roads just in case.  Now, they’re gathered in the kitchen, each of them settled in with a beer even though it’s arguably too early to drink.  

Whatever, Albert thinks, It’s five o���clock somewhere, right?

Besides, what else are you supposed to do when the guy you’d been best friends with until he allegedly fell off the face of the earth, shows up in your life again by stalking you while you’re grocery shopping.

Yeah, Albert deserves a drink.  And he’s technically not on the job right now-- ok, he and Race are always ‘on the job’, but he’ll digress.

“Yup,” Spot answers for Albert, taking a swig of his beer, “best buds since Lindsay Hartman splashed punch on him during ninth grade homecoming, then pushed him into the refreshments table where I was getting a sandwich.”

Race shoots Albert a bewildered look and Albert shrugs, “I was kind of a dick back then and I was going through a gay panic, so I brought her to the dance and then accidentally blurted out that I thought her brother was hotter than her during the slow song and...well, ninth grade wasn’t the best year for me.”

“Clearly,” Race sounds amused, but he’s obviously still too shook up by Spot’s existence to jab Albert too hard.  

Albert can’t blame him, either.  It’s inherently bizarre to have your current and past best friends standing in the same room after thinking you’d never see one of them again.  

“Albert never mentioned you,” Race says, looking at Spot.  He’s got his ‘agent face’ on- studiously taking in all of Spot’s mannerisms, while not wavering his gaze from his eyes.

“Wouldn’t expect him to,” Spot says, unbothered, “We lost touch after high school.”

“More like you disappeared unexpectedly and never answered my phone calls or texts and I thought you died, but I couldn’t find anything on you since you were off the fucking grid.” And yeah, maybe Albert’s a little bitter, because he and Spot had been closer than close, but during their second year of college, Spot transferred to some school somewhere in Europe and never spoke to him again. 

Spot looks a little guilty now, but he still manages to be the dick Albert always knew him to be and says, “Tomato, tomahto.”

Albert rolls his eyes, “What even happened to you, man?”

“That’s actually what I’m here about,” Spot says.  A shadow passes over his face and he suddenly looks sharper- rougher, “I- uh, there’s, uh, some...trouble regarding...things...”

Race and Albert exchange a look and Albert can see the words, well, that’s vague, bouncing around in Race’s head.

“What kind of trouble?” Race asks.

“So,” Spot starts, then stops, shaking his head, “This is a bit of a crazy story, but anyway.  I moved right?  Overseas?  And I ended up, um, getting into a bit of a...situation.”

Wary now, Albert places down his beer and crosses his arms, “What kind of situation?”

“I kind of got recruited by the FSB?”

The shocked silence is almost palpable.

Race recovers first, “The Russian intelligence agency?”

A pause, “Yeah, that’s the one.”

Albert can’t handle this.  This is too much.  Too weird. 

He scrubs a hand over his face, “You do know what I, what we-” he gestures between himself and Race, “-do, right?”

He knows Spot knows.  He needs to ask, anyway.

“Yeah.”

“So, you’re telling a couple of FBI guys that you’re part of the FSB?” It sounds weird to Albert’s own ears.  He laughs a little, because really, he has to.

“Well...yes.”

“This is fucking weird,” Race states, pointing out the obvious, “Anyway, is there more to your so-called ‘trouble’? Or are you just now realizing the moral wrongness of being an American in the Russian spy network and want some sort of atonement?”

Spot seems to have an internal battle with himself before he mutters something that sounds like ‘fuck it’, “Albert, you’re my next mission.  I’m supposed to kill you.”

“Oh,” Albert says, frowning down at his crossed arms.  Then, Spot’s words process, “Wait, what!?”

-

hehehe we love an russian fbi drama

thanks for reading, chiefs

hmu to be added to my tag

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[growingingreenwood]

FOLLOWER SUBMISSION:

Hello,I would like to share my HCs if I may (not an english native speaker so sorry for the long-windedness and mistakes):

1. Oropher is an "Awakend One" or AO

- and him and a sister of Elwe, Olwe (who are identical twins* but Elwe was the taller even before Melian's influence) and Elmo,

were the first to follow the instinct to combine their Feäs to create a baby, so Thranduil is the first born Elf.

*I love to think the whole "twin-thing" started with them.

Thranduil is only the eldest "first born" by a few hours, because other couples almost immediately followed Oropher and his wife's example.

2. When the Sindar lead by Oropher came to the Greenwood, the Silvan elves refused to let them join them, because they feared to

become a "lesser" people in their own home (like the Noldor did with Sindar, Men and and others),but they gave them "Amon Lanc" to settle there - so they where neighbors first.

Each group learned to appreciate the other's knowledge/wisdom and the trust and love grew.

The Silvan and Sindar saw that Oropher is a good leader who always puts his people's wishes and needs first, plus alot of the Silvan elves were his friends back in Cuiviénen, too so they finally allowed the Sindar to join them but only if Oropher took on the mantle of the combined peoples' King.

4. Oropher desperately wished to return to the peaceful life he remembered from the early days at Cuiviénen so becoming King was actually a sacrifice he made so his Sindar-followers could join the Silvan.

The woodelves put that condition on the refugees joining

them, because they just want to live their lives in and with the forest and not have to deal with the Noldor, Dwarves or Men. So Oropher (after him Thranduil) is elected King in order to deal/trade/communicate/fight with that "outside world"

often utilising the more experienced immigrant Sindar, and only the Silvan if necessary (like in the wars).

Silvans step up to the task if there is a need for it - they are wise and kind, they just don't want the outside worlds unnecessary wasteful conflicts and greed to dictate their simple, slow way of life and they also are fiercly independent.

5. Silvan don't want to maintain a "grow-bigger-faster-richer-more powerful society" - Silvan's just want to do what they enjoy -

but some enjoyments produce tradeable goods and of high quality,too, because the elves who create them do it with love and

dedication, but in their own time.

So the responsibility of the king is to harness what the Woodelves are willing to sell and by trade gain enough treasure to trade with the outside world for goods they do not produce themselves.

Both Oropher and Thranduil are really good at this - and there is great mutual love between king(s) and their people.

6. After Thranduil is elected king and the Woodelves' final move northward - the new King, after enchanting the forest and the river (something he learn from Melian) as a defence against Sauron's forces, sought the northern Dwarves' help to carve out a Fortress as close as his limited means could get him to a replica of "Menegroth" - partially paid with a percentage share of all the ores and gems that they unearthed in the process - indeed this proved to make both sides reasonably rich  - that's why the Woodelves party decked out with gems in "The Hobbit".

Also just like in Menegroth of old - Dwarves and Elves combined there skills to create the Woodelves' last protection against the Darkness haunting the forest.

7.Not  a HC just a rant, but one thing I wish people (especially PJ and Co.) would understand is, that:

Of all the elven realms the Woodlandrealm is the most open to the mortal-/"not elven-" world:

e.g.Trade with Esgaroth and beyond, the Woodsmen villages, Radagast's dwelling, maybe even trade with Erebor and Dale (including the raft-elves  routinely sitting and feasting at a table in the Great Hall of Lake Town)

In contrast:

Imladris is open but hidden - entrance only VIP on a need-to-know basis.

Lothlorien's border are practically sealed - Ring and Marchwardens only granting entrance on special occasions (and by law not to Dwarves.)

- indeed for Mortals of Rohan and Gondor Lothlorien is a mythical place of Evil.

I'm not even bashing here, each realm has their own way of ensuring their safety, fair enough, but to then go and try to potrait the Woodelves and Thranduil in particular as isolationist xenophobes is just annoying and insulting. ( - and worrying because it seems to me that people are always eagerly jumping onto the "lesser, less wise/ more dangerous" betiteling as permission to "dehumanise/de-elvenise?" the Woodelves - "lesser" meaning "inferior" meaning "of lesser worth", "expendable" or even "evil" in their minds - mirroring a IRL problem - such a bad aftertaste in fanfics and movie adaption.

Mithlond seems open but is a place of depature and maybe trade for Elves but mortals don't seem to go there, not even the nearby hobbits*

*though that's the hobbits' thing, isn't it, to not stray far from home.

Going to end here, it's so long already and the HCs somewhat character-sue-ish I admit, but charcters who get so unnecessarily bashed all the time, as Thranduil and Oropher are - often to generate more angsty man-pain for their son/grandson in fanfiction or to justify Th.Oakenjerk-centred storytelling in a movie titled "the Hobbit", deserve to be special snowflakes in my head at least.

What do you think?

Growingingreendwood reply:

Ahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!! I love all of these!!!!!! Some of your Headcanons are very close and very similar to my own, which is always amazing and exciting!!!

You're the second person now (or perhapes the same person??) To headcanon that Oropher married one of Elwé 's sister's and it's safe to say I've officially adopted it myself. But I never thought about Thranduil being the FIRST 'born elf' to exist and honestly the idea fills me to the brim with excitement.

I enjoy that we both headcanon the Silvan Elves to be really stand-off-ish to the Sindar originally, until it was proven to their satisfaction that the Sindar would respect their way of life and not force them to change. And that eventually the Sindar were INVITED to join their society. And that Oropher was CHOSEN as their King because they had grown to respect his leadership.

I always headcanoned that the #1 job Thranduil saw himself (and father before him) having as a King was protection and guidance, NOT to 'rule' them.

I also believe the Silvan Elves require all if their leaders to be chosen, rather than for them to just take the throne after their father dies. So while there is a VERY VERY good chance that while Legolas would be elected King after his father, it's never a for sure thing.

I love the depth you thought out exactly HOW the Woodland Realm gets their income for trading. It was so interesting to read!!! And I might have to write a little fic about it cause the idea is so precious to me.

I also deeply appreciated your rant about people seeming to always try and come up with way (or excuses) for them to be 'lesser elves' than the rest in middle earth. It's actually something I bring up quite often in my fic writing.

(As in written from the Silvan Elves point of view about how negatively the other realms often veiw them. And it is often shown to be one of the main reasons that the Woodland Realm vanishes into itself and very little contact with the other realms aside from their nearby allies.)

Thank you so much for your thoughts!!! I loved them!!!

[sky-whale-creations]

Imperfection and Immolation

There exists a town on the far off shore of Israthel and in that town lies a very, very wealthy family, one that had the most beautiful children. And it is this family, the Blackstone Monarchy, that took the island of Israthel from the shining beacon of heavenly fire to the smoldering ruins it is now. From their perfection sprang a terrible flame that would refuse to be snuffed out.

You see, the island of Israthel was home to the high arts. It was an island brimming with artisans and craftsman of all sorts. It was home to many art galleries, studios, theaters, and had vineyards that stretched on for miles and miles.

It was a lynchpin of trade and layed between some of the largest and most powerful kingdoms. Everyone clambered for a place to dock and trade, somewhere to wait out the great storms of the sea, relax, and enjoy the splendors of civilized life while out on the ocean.

Israthel was a wondrous place. It had food and customs that stretched across kingdoms and held many famous festivals. The most notable festival was the festival of fire, the Lantern Festival. The many great artists and craftsman would come together and send their wishes up into the air, taking their passion and love and letting it light up the sky. It was a festival of joy, one of love and prosperity, and it was held by the wealthiest family on the island.

The family that held the festival was the Blackstones. They were merchants and the wealthiest patrons on the island. They believed, foolishly, that they were perfect.

They had a beautiful, expansive estate.

They had many works of art, ranging from paintings to sculptures.

And they had beautiful, talented children.

The children of the Blackstone family possed a number of desirable traits. They were healthy, brilliant, quick witted, and skilled in the arts.

The youngest daughter was skilled in the art of apiculture, the keeping of bees. The bees were vibrant and full of life. They had received only the best care and the youngest daughter would ensure that herself. After all, the Blackstone bees were instrumental in the maintenance of their vast gardens, which was the grandest feature to the estate.

The gardens were, to put it how so many had phrased it, perfect.

There were beautiful trimmed hedges, a wide open courtyard, and a sickly rainbow tapestry of pale, muted flowers, like their lifeforce was frozen before they could reach their full radiance.

Every inch was sculpted to perfection and not a single blade of grass was out of place.

For being a garden, a place to celebrate the beauty of nature, it was a deathly, artificial place. It was cold, empty, and hollow.

The gardens had no soul. And the youngest daughter hated it.

How could her poor bees, these beautiful perfect creatures, have their worked sulled by the grim upkeep of the gardens? Their life giving work, their work that can produce the most splendid of things, was being squandered to maintain the unnatural, irreverent, and disgusting gardens.

The perfect daughter hated the perfect landscape, so clearly one of those things was not as perfect as the Blackstones had thought. They decided that it was their daughter who was imperfect, a crass assertion that would not be entirely without merit. She was imperfect, but so are all living things.

The youngest daughter held within her a flame, a sort of passion that grew well past the outline she was supposed to live within. She had a passion about her, a spark of life that lived within her, one that was vastly dissimilar from her family and was very much like all the artisans and craftsman of the island.

And yet, rather than nurture her spirit, her family demanded her to change.

They took her from her bees and forbade her from ever stepping foot near the gardens, lest she tear it apart like the devil child she is.

They trapped her in every possible sense.

When she spoke out they scolded her.

When she pleaded to seek the arts they denied her.

When she snuck out to be with her bees they punished her.

She was stifled, choking, and longing to be free.

And then the Lantern Festival began. The day where the great artists of the island take their passion and set it free. The most beautiful, joyous, happy, splendid festival that made the twisted, unnatural gardens breathe a breath of life.

It was on that day that everything went to hell.

The Lantern Festival was held in the gardens, the place where the imperfect daughter was forbidden to enter.

But forbiddance could never stop the spark of life that dwelled within artists.

A painter needs their canvas.

A sculpture needs their clay.

And the imperfect daughter needed her bees.

And there was no better time to acquire those things than when everyone was up in arms and having a good time. So the imperfect daughter planned to sneak out to be with her bees once more.

When sunset came and it was time to release the lanterns up into the air and the festival would be in full swing. She would steal a lantern and take it to the hive, hiding her bees inside. By opening and closing the seal on the top she could safely and stealthily move them and so she could set them free, all without a single soul knowing.

She snuck her way to her bees and carefully lead them into her lantern. She could only fit a few without anyone noticing, but it was enough to know some could be free. As she finished and began to sneak away to the town, she was stopped by her family. Deciding that, clearly, she just wanted to participate in the festival, they excused her actions. Much to her dismay this meant going to the gardens, the last place she wanted to be.

As they marched her to the gardens she protested, struggling to get away. This did not please her father, who thought she was finally making a turn around. It was only made worse when he forced her to participate in the lightning of the lanterns.

The imperfect daughter fought and tried to resist, but adults can easily over power a child, especially when they do not care for their emotions.

Her father ripped the lantern from her hands and her mother kept her at bay.

“Now dear, we are going to have a fun time. You don’t want to ruin the festival, do you?” her mother cooed as her father struck a match.

“It’s time you participated in the festival! Whether you like it or not, you can’t hate these gardens forever” her father said, gesturing to the dreadful gardens that his daughter could certainly hate forever.

The father held the match to the seal, setting it ablaze.

As the lantern rose up through the air there was a great whirring sound, a noise that echoed through the vast estate.

The daughter looked up in terror as she saw the only thing she truly loved go up in smoke. Her heart stopped.

The lantern floated up as her bees, now on fire, rained down over and around her, but never once harming her. They glowed like embers, brilliantly red and orange and yellow as they swirled around her, dancing across her body and surrounding her in beautiful, gleaming light.

And then something peculiar happened. Something more horrific than watching the only things you love burn before your eyes and something more surprising than discovering they were miraculously ok. The bees, rather than swarm and fly about wildly as one might expect, began to attack the garden, igniting it almost instantaneously. The bees seemed to multiply, flooding through the vast gardens with ease, burning the dreadful bushes and wretched flowers alike.

The Blackstones had tried to smother the ember inside their daughter and in doing so awakened an inferno.

The imperfect daughter was no longer afraid of her father or was forced to be ashamed of who she was. The world was burning down and she no longer felt afraid of anything. Everything she hated, along with all that she loved, was burning around her.

And she loved it. Oh, she loved it.

She could feel all of it. She sensed the flames just as she had for her bees. They were one and the same. It was kind, playful, and inviting to the young girl. And much worse than that, it was obedient.

She held an outstretched hand towards her mother and father. The embers glistening in the black smoke swarmed towards her command, like a thousand blazing darts. The swarm washed over them like a wave of pure fire, lapping against the cliffs. They were utterly consumed, engulfed in the heat and chaos.

And the destruction did not stop there.

The swarm would continue to raze every single inch of the island until there was nothing left, only ashes and soot and dust.

The island burned.

And it was no more.

No towns, no gardens

No artists, no festivals

The desolate, charred landscape only features were mounds of ash.

But within those ashes lied an ember, a faint, glistening spark in the gloom.

The ember grew and grew, sputtering intensely as it struggled to keep itself alive.

From the ashes, something was born. Something dreadful rose up. A single hand reached up from the weak flame, pulling out of it a body as intense and as scorching as the sun. It’s hair was long and flowing, bellowing with smoke and it’s  skin was red hot metal.

Arlana, the goddess of fire, was born, forged from the ashes of her former life.

As she surveyed her landscape and her new life, she felt a familiar presence. Lingering embers began to rise from the ashes as small bees, covered in soot, flew up to greet her.

Her old life was gone, nothing more than bad memories and cinders.

As she looked out over the wastes a single desire burned in her mind, searing itself into her heart, and igniting her very soul.

She would purge the world of its perfections, of its lies too good to be true.

She would burn as bright as the setting sun and engulf the world in flame.

Such is fate

And such is her will.

[the-walnut-gallery]

Saioumota Week Day 6 - Sleeping

Camping Skills - AO3 

@saioumotaweek

Darkest Dungeon AU - though hopefully it can still be enjoyed if you don’t know the game! 

Momota, Saihara and Ouma pause their expedition to camp, a momentary respite from the horrors surrounding them all.

The flame roared and crackled on the floor in front of them, thankfully the logs they had carried through these ruins had caught alight without much resistance and now kept the room somewhat warm and lit. It was a relief to take a break from carrying the torches around constantly in the hopes of avoiding any ambushes and the horrors of the dark.  

Saihara pulled his cloak around himself tighter, the room was warm from their campfire but the underground chill still made its way through the crumbling walls around them. He kept his beaked mask on his face as he counted the vials around his belt, checking his inventory for the remainder of the quest ahead. He would remove it when he slept, it acted as mostly protection from his own blights that he made and carried as opposed to any plagues that may lie under the manor. He had seen plenty of unmasked people make their way out of the crypts un-ailed, and plenty of people taking all the necessary precautions who still ended up diseased in some way or another.  

He was grateful now that he had prepared extra for this mission, he still had plenty of stunning grenades, filled with gas that could burst into sound and light on impact, and plague grenades, filled with a liquid that produced noxious vapors. Then there was the buffing and healing, more vapors that could embolden fighters and bring out their strengths, and medicines that couldn’t heal for a lot, but could provide some comfort to his allies. The dagger ached in his pocket, it was rarely used in favor of his other abilities that could bring them advantages, but sometimes brute force was the only way and as their situation got more desperate it was more and more likely that it would need to be used.  

He really wasn’t sure if his healing supplies would be enough for the rest of the dungeon. He was never the designated healer, four of them had embarked on this mission but now only three of them sat around the fire. He’d told the other two that they should leave once one fell, but they had insisted that they could still push on. He understood that if they left now it may feel like her death was in vain, but it would be much worse if they all died there. Somehow their sanity remained mostly intact, still allowing them to make decisions with clarity.  

Their fourth ally had been Angie Yonaga, an ever-faithful vestal to her God Atua. She had been quirky and enthusiastic, an always welcome addition to a team to keep spirits and health high. Even those who did not believe could not deny her skill and devotion. That’s why it had been hard on them all as they watched the skeletal arbalest take aim and hit her dead on with its bolt. They’d fought hard to protect her as she laid on the ground at death’s door, but before Saihara had a chance to administer his battlefield medicine she’d bled out. It had not been a fitting end for the cheerful girl, left lying on the broken paved ground in her own blood, but it was the end she had.  

He finally shifted his mask down to his slim neck, content with the numbers of chemicals he had remaining and took note of the activities of the others. Ouma ran cloths and worked tools into his gun expertly, cleaning and maintaining it to keep it at peak performance for what they had left to conquer. He had earlier set up lines of wire and bells around the doors of their safe room to prevent a nighttime ambush while they rested. Perks like that were certainly comforting as lethargy began to overtake them. Gold eyes couldn’t help but note that the smallest of them had barely taken any food from their rations despite them having had enough for a full meal each. Momota had tried to force him to take more but his appetite had been lacking. The plague doctor wondered if it was the stress beginning to get to him. He’d dodged a lot of physical attacks, swords swinging in his direction, but he had been struck by the wine of the bone courtiers and entranced by the gestures of acolytes a few too many times.  

Then there was Momota, clad in heavy armor and bandaging his wounds. His armor offered him protection but eventually the blades made their way to his flesh, cutting and slashing. His helmet had been placed to the side for their camp, unable to sleep with it on. He appeared antsy, as if there was something he wanted to say but didn’t know how to say it. Finally, he stood, the clanking of metal catching the attention of the two other boys.  

“We’re already more than halfway through this dungeon, it's been rough on our way to this point, sure, but we’ll push onwards. Once we finish scouting this area it’ll open up the path for all of us to keep moving on through these ruins and together we’ll eventually defeat the darkest dungeon there is! The secrets of this manor cannot be kept from heroes like us, and sometimes heroes need to lay down their lives for the good of others. Yonaga would not be sad to know that she met her end like this, she would be proud that we’re able to keep going and proud that she was part of something as big as this.” He bowed his head at the end of his zealous speech, sitting back down and placing his sword to his side, regarding the loyal blade fondly.  

Saihara couldn’t help but think about how far Momota had come, he still remembered their first dungeon where they had been accompanied by another vestal and a different highwayman, both had perished on other quests over time. Momota had been trembling at the sight of the skeletons and ghouls and abominations that appeared before them. Since he had been able to control his fear of the unholy enough to even give a speech at a time like this. A smile made its way to Saihara’s face for the first time in a while, the memory clearing his mind and reminding him of how far they had all come. Even Ouma seemed to be feeling a little better after hearing those words, finishing his gun maintenance, casting his alert gaze around the room to ensure there were no other openings that needed trapping.  

Though worry still gnawed at the back of his mind, how could it not? The fire began to flicker at a greater frequency as it started to pitter out, giving way to darkness. A loud yawn escaped the crusader, stretching his muscular arms upwards in exhaustion.  

“We should get some rest, our stocks will hold for the rest of this dungeon,” Momota spoke, checking their shared bag of what they still held in their supplies. Their last remaining shovel sat beside the bag, and they hoped it would be enough to take down any walls they still had left to break.  

“The traps are all set, nothing will get through these doors tonight,” Ouma spoke for the first time since they settled, voice carefree but eyes fixated on the remaining flame. Momota bit his lip, his concern for the sneaky boy boiling in his gut.  

They had both heard how his last quest had gone, though he appeared to have recovered now. They had all been through terrible things, had friends die both in front of them, watched as people broke down and lost their final shreds of sanity, they had all been witness awful things. But Ouma and his previous party had laid eyes on something worse than horrific, something far outside of human comprehension even. Though they did not know the details, the others from that party refusing to talk or think about it further, not wishing to recall those memories, they knew it had been bad.  

Yonaga herself had told them both that while she had been praying in the abbey to Atua she had seen an unusual face enter the holy place. Ouma was not one for religion, usually making his way to the gambling hall after a quest and mocking Momota for his losses, or trying to entice Iruma to play with her best trinkets on the line. He had stumbled into the abbey and responded to Yonaga’s greeting with incoherent ramblings and nonsensical accusations. He would have caused a scene had there been more people. He had laughed incessantly at her whenever she attempted to speak and yelled that he ‘had not killed her, it had only been an accident’ despite their mission having had no fatalities, and told her all about his candle making abilities that, in reality, did not exist. Finally, he left her and locked himself in a penance chamber, the sharp noise of leather hitting flesh ringing out from the heavy door, until he had recovered. His attitude had caused her distress, so she had stayed in the abbey until he emerged, tired but sane.  

“Are you alright?” Saihara gently asked him over the dying the fire.  

“Hunky dory! Why wouldn’t I be?” a familiar grin crept across his face, finally shifting his attention away from the fire, breathing light.  

“We should all be honest with each other, it will be hard to continue as three so we cannot keep secrets right now. It could be deadly.” Saihara kept his gaze hard, knuckles whitening as he clutched the thick material of his black cloak.  

“You don’t need to tell me, I’m the most honest person here!” he sat up straight, insisting it was true to the chuckles of the others.  

The trio shuffled closer together, sleeping far apart from each other would only lead to them each feeling cold and alone, in these times it was more beneficial to know that others were near and to be able to wake them quickly, worst comes to worst. Amongst the silence though, their warrior of light could not let the issue pressing in his mind lie.  

“What did you see?” he quietly asked, turning his attention to Ouma, who blinked back innocently. “On your last quest, what was it you all saw?” A few beats of silence passed between them, before a response finally filled the air.  

“A creature that,” his mouth was dry, the words catching against his teeth and tongue uncertainly, “a man that takes those who perished in these dungeons.”  

“Takes them?” Saihara felt a chill travel down his spine despite his warm attire, would that man be able to take Yonaga too, then?  

“The Collector, it looks like a man with a skeletal head, but underneath the coat,” his voice died out into panicked gasps, Momota opened his mouth to speak, to calm him but he continued on, “he could call forth those who had perished, they would fight for him, a collection of, of heads,” stuttering and breathing heavy he struggled to continue on, “heads that still lived, heads that screamed and souls that fought.” Momota wrapped his strong arms around the small boy’s shaking form, attempting to offer a physical comfort to quell the horrors of the mind.  

“More reason why we must heal this afflicted land,” Saihara mumbled, pulling himself closer into their huddle, ignoring the paranoia building within him. The trauma of experiencing such a thing was clearly great if it could cause someone as strong willed as Ouma to crumble and whimper, and in all likelihood the only reason he was willing to share this with them was the fear that it could return while in their presence. Knowledge was power.  

“Does it only take the heads of the dead?” Momota asked hesitantly, truly knowing the answer already but desperately wanting to be wrong.  

“I think so, but they don’t have to be dead before it finds them,” he whispered darkly. “If anyone were caught by it, then they would end up inside that coat,” he paused, breathing slowing and body returning to his own control. They didn’t need to know what exactly was inside that coat, and Ouma didn’t seem ready to elaborate. They hoped to never know what was inside that coat.  

“Courage, men. We shall prevail,” Momota gave final words of comfort to the two, allowing Ouma to nestle his head against his own unprotected neck, and Saihara’s arm laid heavily across them both, body curled up against Ouma’s.  

“Look at you,” Ouma drawled out playfully, “all ready to knock some skulls!”  

“Let us save this energy for tomorrow,” Saihara sleepily yawned, encouraging both the boys to settle down to rest.  

They would need all the energy and courage they could muster to finish this overwhelming task with their handicapped numbers. At least, no matter what happened as they continued on, they would be together in victory or defeat.  

[junck-ritter]

hunlarpfag asks:

​Do you know anything / have sources about what kind of "training" or level of expertise the very average guy could have with swords or other weapons, let's say kind of late 15th century germany? I mean obviously we have to differentiate between various kinds of peasants, towns people, full citizens, nobles, etc but it's as good of a conversation starter as any

I know a little. There’s big problems getting reliable information on it but there is a bit. I have read a lot into this but definitely not extensively. I will try to summarise what I’ve found so far.

This is gonna be a huge post, but it’s a huge question. If you read this whole thing you will have a pretty good idea of why fencing manuscripts never appeared until mid 1300s-1400s, as well. It may not be 150% correct, but I’ve substantiated everything to a reasonable standard and would love to hear counterpoints if anyone has any.

I would say that the level of training and conditioning that medieval and early renaissance people had would hinge on a few axis. The first one which remains quite constant through this whole period is social class. 

You had peasants at the low end, nobility at the high end, and through the middle of the spectrum there were monastic classes and as the 14th and 15th century rolled on, an emerging middle class of city-dwelling proto-modern people, who did modern things like own their houses, have professions, and do things for fun in their spare time.

Before the rumblings of the renaissance started to make their impressions on physical culture around 1350+, the approach to physical training altogether was pretty poor for anyone outside the nobility. The reasons are complex but in summary it looks something like this:

The monasteries had a very influential position in terms of cultural transmission and dissemination of knowledge. They were the ones who were reading and writing most of all, and a non-trivial amount of cash was tied up there. They were also responsible for schooling of anyone but nobles.

Their primary concern was spiritual. If you accept Hegelian dialectic theory, in this period there was a swing of the pendulum as far away as possible from the excesses of Rome. Things like gladiator/olympic games were considered paganistic idolatry, and a reckless obsession with the worldly body to the detriment of the spirit. Physical education was not part of the 7 arts taught at universities traditionally.

Physical health was not totally disregarded of course, except maybe by some monks wanting to live an ascetic lifestyle. The prevailing idea seemed to be fitness to do your duties was good, but excess was a bit too much like worship of the material body. This is probably what made it OK for knights etc. to train, as it was a duty.

Peasant class generally didn’t produce much demand for physical culture. They would participate in festivals watching or joining in with dances and acrobats, but since armaments weren’t commonly available to them, fencing etc. would not be too common. Probably a little wrestling and stone throwing, but even then it was only on holidays and festival days. The social standings of the peasant class didn’t afford them much room to take up strenuous training programs for their own enjoyment usually.

In those earlier days the knights and nobility would be educated in a completely different way. From around the age of 14 they would be taught reading, proper speech, etc. Eventually taking up riding, dancing and some acrobatics. As time went on and they became a squire they’d do pretty hardcore military training. There was an expectation that a knight could mount their horse, in armour, without assistance of a stepping block or even using the stirrups. A knight should also be able to “hang” from their horse to pick things up from the ground, and would be expected to participate in competitions of physical prowess.

The nobility would also be training their riding and pursuit skills in the hunt, and this tradition stretches all the way back to ancient times. Hunting was considered extremely important part of military preparedness, and of course, the peasant class had no access to this activity and would be punished if they committed themselves to it. (Sidenote, there were eventually organised movements rebelling against this tyranny on theological grounds, and they gained some amount of momentum in the early renaissance, opening up the hunt a little more to classes under the nobility)

The Annales Lamberti of 1075 written by a Hessian, comments that the peasant class is generally unfit for military service, in contrast with professional soldiers. This might seem quite obvious, but the contrast was stark enough for some thinkers to suggest that using levies was un-economical. This is much earlier than the time period we are dealing with, but hold that thought because I will contrast it as we go on.

As time rolled on through the 14th and 15th centuries, things changed. Economics were different in the later middle ages and early renaissance. True city life started to exist for really complex reasons I myself only have a basic grasp on. I will summarise the changes that happened within the scope of physical and martial training as best I can:

More people began to live in cities. Their standards of living improved, population density increased, people began to have more free time and with it, excess resources at their disposal. This is the so-called “Burgher” class. With this, came a demand for recreational activities, and a market for them.

Guild system started to gain more and more influence on city life, while the influences of the clergy and state relatively dropped. Things started to decentralise and be driven more by market than by planning, including laws etc.

Reading and writing became less the domain of the monasteries. Important developments like paper and printing meant more people could benefit from reading and writing. There was in general an explosion of books on secular topics in conjunction with these developments, physicality and military topics were part of that. More people were generally getting themselves educated.

In the urban centres, there was special demand for certain kinds of physical activity. People didn’t have as much room for recreational shooting or running or swimming so there was increased demand for specialised activities which could be practised in smaller spaces. Fencing was one of those.

Along with these changes, universities started offering more physical activities to their content. Along with the spread of written information, fetishisation of the old hellenistic and roman athletic competitions and gladiator events became popular among the middle class. I.33 has been theorised by many to be connected to university fencing. One of the earliest known fencing fraternities can be traced to 1386 at Heidelberg university. By the year 1487 the first imperial license was granted for fencing.

In the middle of the 15th century Vittorino de Feltre founded a school which exemplified the idea of “L'uomo universale” - The universal man. The idea was that a human should take care of themselves holistically, mind/body/spirit all as one, which is in contrast to the approach of the monastics mentioned earlier. This was a relatively new idea at the time inspired by classical civilisation (again probably spurred on by more people having access to classics) and this is reflected in the activities carried out at the school, which included discus and shotting stones, javelin, wrestling and running, as well as fencing and mock battles.

At some point around the 1430s, The Ritterspiegel was written. This might be our best single source for how a knight was expected to be trained in 15th century Germany. It details that the knightly class were expected to be good at 7 things: Riding, swimming, climbing ropes and ladders, shooting crossbows, jousting, wrestling and jumping, and courtesy/table manners/dancing.

Basically, a knight in active military service would have usually been incredibly physically fit, training all these things as part of their job. Fighting ability is hard to quantify exactly, but we know that knights prized taking their opponents without killing them, and without resorting to projectile weapons, with sources from France indicating the latter fairly directly. It is totally likely that knights in active service would be good with hand to hand confrontation.

As the middle ages progressed, middle classes would participate in almost all of the “knightly” activities with the common exception of the tournaments. There is even some evidence that middle and lower classes used equipment similar to that which knights would train the joust with at times.

During the 15th century, particularly in Germany, a formalised system of town watch matured. As urbanised people had more and more exposure to physical training, more excess resources, and political situations within the empire changed (think free cities + feuds etc) the idea of using the citizenry as a defense force became viable.

This developed to such an extent, it became quite common that physical training and the maintenance of basic arms was a requirement for citizenship. Initially guilds would provide the central organisation for maintaining town armouries and training which would be called into action by ringing bells and raising flags when shit was about to go down. It is entirely likely that guys like Paulus Kal would be working in this kind of environment.

At this time the peasantry in the country started to mimic the civic defense organisational structure of the cities. Sources for this are naturally more scarce but the evidence we have seems to point to defense organisation of the country being less organised and less equipped than the cities (duh).

The next shift to happen was citizens being responsible for their own training and organisation. As the 15th century was drawing to a close, people living in urban centres would be expected to keep their own weapons in their own house, and be ready at short notice to present for duty. Citizens were obliged to buy their own gear, and in an emergency men would need to rally in the square while women, children, and the infirm would barricade buildings and prepare for firefighting.

At this point training was a little decentralised. Households of a street would be managed by an officer who was responsible for that street, each of whom would report to a quarter master for each district of the city, who in turn would be answerable to the captain of the guild (one, Peter Falkner, left us a fencing manuscript in the 1490s)

The normal equipment of this time for citizens on duty would vary from town to town and year to year, but most commonly it would be expected that a citizen could, when asked to, present themselves in a breastplate and simple helmet, with a polearm, a spear or probably more commonly a halberd, and a crossbow or gun. Many would also have owned swords as they were legal for citizens to carry. Polearms and projectile weapons were either forbidden from day-to-day carry, or were a mark of somebody looking to cause trouble, while a sword was a perfectly fashionable and acceptable weapon to carry with you everywhere (unless you were unlucky enough to be born a Jew, Woman, or non-citizen)

In the 15th century the Fechtschule, often coupled with a shooting competition, was a somewhat regular occurrence, and these activities were popular leisure activities for Burgher class which provided an added benefit of military preparedness, and so they were supported or at least tolerated by the state. 

Of course shooting competitions grew more and more in popularity while fencing phased out of favour. We can read the complaints of P.H. Mair and J. Meyer about the dying breed of skilled fencers, most opting to practise their shooting instead.

What this kind of points to is we had a relatively short window in history where “common” middle class people were making themselves proficient with medieval weapons and fencing. Prior to that, fencing was of course practised, but firstly, we have no records of it, and secondly it was probably largely the domain of the upper classes of society, where fencing on foot was almost certainly of secondary importance to finesse in riding, use of the lance. and broader military concerns.

It would seem that in earlier periods, folk traditions of wrestling, boxing, and stick-fighting occupied the peasant classes, but comments from contemporaries indicate their viability as a fighting force was severely limited by their general fitness (and perhaps by extension the competence and methodology of their fighting education). This tradition seems to have continued with the lowest classes of society into the early renaissance, but as time advances, the middle class urban human comprises a greater segment of society as a whole, and certainly of people engaged in fighting arts. While we see a reasonably consistent body of artwork and literature about military and tournament deeds, information of the practical points of fighting is very lacking until the 15th century.

So I will reiterate on the point at the very beginning. The likelihood that someone in late medieval and early renaissance time had any exposure to physical or martial training, pretty much depends on their class. The 15th century is of peculiar importance and the effects of that can be seen in the record of information we have on fencing, wrestling, and so on. 

We can be almost certain that the way nobles and citizens were trained for “fighting” was quite different. It is tempting to group fiore, vadi, and the “blume des kampfes” into a noble military tradition while Liechtenauer and the other German and English treatises may have supported a burgher class (despite commentaries on Liechtenauer making lofty claims about their fighting system being the secret and sole property of the nobility) - we of course have no direct evidence for that. But the duality for sure existed.

As for peasants, fuckin’, I’ll conclude by saying it would really suck to be born one of those guys.

[osmw1]

Poison-Wielding Fugitive   Chapter 5

See, I’ve decided on the request already, but I just can’t shake the fact that I’ll be battling monsters off my mind. Can I really fight in a battle out of the blue? All I can do is use Poison Release and throw swamp toxin. I don’t have any weapons beside that.

‘Is it a weapon you desire? If so, move somewhere you will not be seen.’

What are you trying to do? As per Veno’s instruction, I walked behind the town hall and made sure that no one was watching.

‘Good. I shall take it out now.’

As soon as I saw the gleaming in front of me, a sword and armor simply appeared with a thud.

“Wh-what the hell?!”

I blurted out loud before I even realised. No, I understand that it’s something Veno did, but how it suddenly happened is astonishing.

“…”

It was some Western-looking sword and armor. Though I haven’t seen the real deal before, I’m well-acquainted with ones from videogames and manga. I gently pick it up. I imagined it to be rather heavy, but it was a light as a stick.

Flyiron Sword +4 Quality: Superior Required level: None Bonus effects: Flyweight An alloy sword made with outstanding metal ores. Light as a feather so that it can even be wielded by a complete novice. However, the weight is inconsistent.

Smoke Armor +3 Quality: Fine Required level: None Bonus effects: Smoke Magic armor crafted by solidifying smoke. Though it is smoke, it is solid and light. However, beware that it is not impervious to water.

Robe of Concealment +3 Quality: Fine Required level: None Bonus effects: Cloaking; Reveal Resistance (Low) A robe able to camouflage its wearer. Woven to disguise ordinary users. Made from the skin of monsters with high concealing abilities. Resistant to revealing magic and grants disguising capabilities.

You can tell this is equipment with a focus on being lightweight. Even I can equip this no problem. The armor, though… feels weird to the touch. Kinda like a beanbag chair? It’s a very odd texture. However… everything is nicely decorated and you can tell it is quality.

‘Equip this and you shall be fine.’

… exactly as I was thinking. Won’t deny that. But there’s a few things I want to point out, if that’s alright.

‘What is it?’

Where did you take this out from?

‘Ah. I have employed Compression Storage Magic on those items. I can rather easily retrieve anything stored. The lot who casted Forced Possession Summoning are unlikely to be able to detect this amount of magic.’

Judging by his words, these items that Veno had held on to from the beginning must be good stuff.

‘I, too, am a dragon. It is more or less in our nature to maintain a collection. If we could return to my lair, I would show you my hoard. Unfortunately, I am uneasy about that.’

So, I get that he’s telling me to equip the sword and shield, but who did it come from?

‘Before I had Forced Possession Summoning casted on me, challengers recklessly come for to fight, get defeated, and I plunder their goods. Is that not obvious? They were carrying fairly good equipment, so I applied storage magic and forgotten about it.’

In short, then, the estate of nameless heroes?

‘I had not killed them. Merely stripped them of their property.’

Sure, this stuff is quite helpful, but shouldn’t I just sell it all off for the money?

‘Think carefully, you fool. You would be a man who cannot be mistaken as anyone strong, selling expensive-looking equipment and goods, and turning it all into money. What do you think barbarians—these fools who are devoted to only their desires—would do to you?’

Well, yeah. It’s not uncommon to hear of robbers that specifically target people who are travelling abroad. It would be rather dangerous if I simply sell off Veno’s possessions.

‘In any case, I have nothing of the sort at hand. You should not only rely on what I have either. Anything better than what you currently hold has level requirements. If not, it is mass-produced swords and spears at best. Furthermore, I do not have that much of stock since it is rubbish, aye?’

So, to a dragon, normal swords and spears and other weapons are trash? He only takes what’s rare, eh? Well, I’ll just use what I’m given.

I first put on my armor and then draped the robe on top… it seems like it should’ve been a nice fluffy robe, but it feels more like linen. The surface of the robe is also changing colors. It’s light and helpful too. I tie the sword and belt given to me to my hip.

‘Then I will store the clothes you have worn until now.'

The suit, shirt, and trousers I had been wearing suddenly disappeared, as if they had warped space-time. Only the armor and robe was left. … but why did you store my clothes?

‘So that you can freely go into combat. I also want to give you a bow and arrows. However, I have judged that it is too early for you to use what I have in stock.’

Ah, yeah… for someone like me with no combat experience, a bow or crossbow would be better. I’m not certain if I can hit anything at distance, but ranged combat is powerful. I could even smear poison on the arrowheads.

… well, not much I can do about it since I can’t equip it anyway. Honestly, having never fought before, there’s a limit to what Veno can do for me. There’s a limit to how I can use Poison Release too, right? I mean, all I can do is chuck it at a target. Since I’m weak, I’ll have to somehow connect my strikes…

‘It seems like I can somehow use Compression Storage Magic on your items too. You need not carry so much of your belongings.’

That skill is really convenient, huh? Well, no reason not to use it.

‘Humans, too, can use magic like this if they are a high-ranking magician. It seems like it does not exist in your world though… was it not inconvenient?’

So sorry, but the Japan I lived in doesn’t have any magic that handy. Or rather, nothing so extremely expedient. Where do the items go if the owner dies?

‘Obvious it gets scattered by the corpse.’

… what? It feels like I’ve caught a glimpse of an RPG or something where monsters drop weapons or items.

‘By the way, this spell does have a few peculiarities to it. Of course, there is a limit to how many one can store at a time, but as well, items will continue to deteriorate, and can be interfered with while in holding. A skilled user, though, would be able to indefinitely keep ice without it melting. Well, one could always use magic to create more ice, but still…’

How good are you then, Veno?

‘Do not look down on me, aye? I could swallow up this entire village and still have space left over. But, well, there are limitations, so it would be impossible for me to store away the whole village right now.’

He did say his mana has been strained. It otherwise wouldn’t be much of a hardship for him. Still, having that much capacity is a boon.

‘Aye. Anything that you can carry on your back would be easy, but beyond that would be, for the time being at least, a spot of bother. On the other hand, I promise I shall keep your items from deteriorating to the best of my abilities.’

Don’t mind if I take this convenient item box magic. Well, now… I’ve finished my preparations and I said I’ll try my hand at adventuring, so let’s go try picking some flowers. I take the request off the bulletin board and, as Veno instructed, headed back the way Arleaf and I came from.

I’m simply going back the same way, but… there’s an ominous, maybe uneasy feeling in the air? I wouldn’t be surprised if a monster were to pop out any time. When Arleaf was here, it wasn’t like this at all. Maybe it’s because I’m all alone?

‘I am here, no?’

Veno, huh? A self-proclaimed dragon who is talking in my head doesn’t really soothe this feeling of isolation. He did prove his existence by giving me weapons though.

‘If you are feeling lonely even with me… does not that mean that you are a lonely person?’

… I’m going to pick my battles. I ignore him and put my feelers out. If this were a game, then I’d probably be worse than a lv 1 villager. There are only simple fields around this area so there might be a small fry or two roaming about. Random encounters would be scaled to the level of the character in a videogame, but this is real life. Enemies lv 30 or 40 might pop out all of a sudden. Suppose the villagers around here are all at least lv 35. It would be an instant checkmate for me. It might be better for my chances of survival if I target easy monsters and strike swiftly.

‘Calm yourself. You have my support. I will use my knowledge to tell you whether a monster you face is dangerous or not.’

That’s convenient, but a fight safe for a dragon wouldn’t necessarily be safe for a human. Again, I have no combat experience.

‘You are certainly helpful to me by focusing on your surviving. However, how you do not place trust in me is aggravating. I would like for you to not to get carried away with ridiculing me.’

As I was walking with vigilance… A monster’s name appeared with a blip in my field of vision.

Chrome Yellow Poisonwhip

It’s a monster that looked like nothing more than a vine growing in a nook on the path. The vine itself is reasonably thick.

This thing wasn’t here when I was with Arleaf. But it’s got a damn long name. The name is so hard to remember that I’d even forget if this were a videogame.

‘Ah, that is an easy one. Part of the ecology, but the tip of the vine will first try to spray venom to weaken its opponents, wrap itself around them, and turn them into fertilizer.’

That right? So? Is it something a lv 1 can beat?

‘Even I cannot determine any and every human’s fighting capabilities. But, it would be wise for you to try launching a surprise attack on it and cutting it down with your sword.’

Will I be alright? Even with the advice, I’m not fully sure about my own specs or the performance of my weapon.

‘Fortunately, if you conceal yourself to the best of your abilities, I believe your disguise will not be seen through. Pretend like you have not noticed it and calmly walk up to it. Before you are engaged by it, swing your sword while you run past from behind.’

Gotcha. Perhaps due to the effects of my Robe of Concealment +3, the Chrome Yellow Poisonwhip doesn’t fully notice me. I pretend to be calm and walk up to the tree that the Chrome Yellow Poisonwhip is entwined to. It senses my approach and waits for its chance to take me by surprise. Before I let the Chrome Yellow Poisonwhip get the drop on me, I dash out without pausing and pass behind it. Like a kid swinging a stick at the air, I brandish my sword. The tendril of the Chrome Yellow Poisonwhip was extremely easy to sever. A clean cut. The part still entwined to the tree turned limp and frail and rolled onto the ground.

The Chrome Yellow Poisonwhip’s tendril screeches out as I make contact with it.

“Seems like you cut all right,”

I mutter to the Flyiron Sword +4 while looking at the blade.

Maybe because it’s amazingly light and cuts well, it’s rather easy to wield. It cuts as well as a fresh boxcutter on a piece of paper. I was merely pretending to be a samurai or something but it went so well. As its final act of resistance, the Chrome Yellow Poisonwhip crooks its neck like a snake and sprays its toxin at me.

While I quickly dodge its attack, the Chrome Yellow Poisonwhip flops limp and became still. And then it says here that I earned 12 EXP. My experience of RPGs tells me that anything more than 1 or 2 is wicked. By MMORPG standards, that was a higher-level monster.

‘It seems like you have emerged victorious for your first battle.’

It doesn’t feel like I’ve fought a lot though… There would’ve been some kind of victory fanfare when a battle ends in a game, but in reality, it’s like this. Still, winning is winning. At the very least, I’ve still defeated a living monster.

‘For your first battle, fighting an easy monster like this is best. Experience outweighs anything else. Plus, I get a better understanding of your skills.’

Since I’ve experienced my first battle, I’ll go check my status. How much ‘til I reach the next level? Looks like I’m 80% of the way there already.

‘Oi. Do not lose focus. Are you listening?’

To level up from lv 1 to 2, I need 14 EXP in total, huh? I wonder if I can level up from fighting one more? I succumb to an impulse to search for another monster.

previously: /ch001/ /ch002/ /ch003/ /ch004/ /ch005/ /next/ (full list of translated chapters) (discussion thread) (support Average Translations)

[quranreadalong]

A TALE OF TWO CITIES KINGDOMS, PT 4/4

Despite describing Josiah as a king promised by YHWH and one of the greatest monarchs to ever live, the Bible offers only the following line on his death:

While Josiah was king, Pharaoh Necho king of Egypt went up to the Euphrates River to help the king of Assyria. King Josiah marched out to meet him in battle, but Necho faced him and killed him at Megiddo. 

The phrasing is (probably intentionally) vague, but what appears to have happened here is that the Egyptian army was originally in the area trying to help Assyria hold off the Babylonians, who the Egyptians recognized as an even greater threat than Assyria itself had been. But the Assyrians lost, and the pharaoh moved his forces north. The Bible doesn’t make it clear why Josiah was involved in this situation, nor why Josiah was opposing the pharaoh or even trying to stop his forces from continuing onwards in the first place. The Book of Kings is based on real people, but often distorts the circumstances of their lives, so it’s possible that Josiah was executed by Egypt for infringing upon territory the Egyptians considered theirs or something of that nature. Regardless, Josiah died, and his religious fervor died with him. All of the remaining kings of Judah after him, right up until Judah’s fall (three of whom were his sons, the fourth was his grandson) are described in the Bible as heretics.

It’s clear that the population wasn’t particularly interested in abiding by the dead Josiah’s rules once he was gone. Idols of other gods, like the goddess Ashera, continue to be found in archaeological sites dating to after Josiah’s reign. And like Hezekieh’s evidently aborted religious reforms, Josiah’s successors had bigger problems to worry about than enforcing monotheism. The threat they faced was no longer Egypt or Assyria. It was Babylon.

In the year 605 BC, the armies of Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the allied forces of Egypt and the remnants of Assyria at Carchemish in Syria. The Egyptian army promptly ran in terror right back home, and the Assyrians were finally, utterly defeated. Now Babylon had essentially uncontested control of the region, and its leader had big plans.

Nebuchadnezzar … sought to gain complete control over all the lands to the west. [His forces] marched down the Mediterranean [coast], laying waste to the rich Philistine cities.

It was Josiah’s grandson Jeconiah (or “Jehoiachin”) who was unfortunate enough to be in charge during the time that the Babylonians were menacing their way towards Judah. The Bible grimly records what happened after that, presenting it as YHWH’s judgement:

At that time the officers of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon advanced on Jerusalem and laid siege to it, and Nebuchadnezzar himself came up to the city while his officers were besieging it. Jehoiachin king of Judah, his mother, his attendants, his nobles and his officials all surrendered to him. ... he took Jehoiachin prisoner. ... removed the treasures from the temple of the Lord and from the royal palace ... carried all Jerusalem into exile: all the officers and fighting men, and all the skilled workers and artisans—a total of ten thousand. Only the poorest people of the land were left.

Contemporary Babylonian records just say that Judah was conquered and made to pay tribute, so the number of people taken into exile here is probably inflated. But whatever happened around 597 BC, that was only the prelude to an even worse day.

Nebuchadnezzar appointed Zedekiah, the uncle of Jeconiah and son of Josiah, to rule the newly-subjugated province of Judah. But Zedekiah, having learned not a goddamn thing from the previous 100 years of Jewish history, decided to rise up and join an anti-Babylon alliance. Babylon responded as you might imagine: in the year 587 BC, virtually all of Judah’s important cities were ruined until only Jerusalem remained. 2 Kings 25 says that the capital endured a famine and the upper class fled from the city, leaving it to its fate, but Zedekiah and his sons were captured; he was taken captive and his sons were killed. The Babylonians conquered the city and burned large parts of it, including the Temple, then took a huge part of the population as captives. This was the last day of Judah. It would never be an independent state again.

There were only a few bright spots in the total destruction of Judah. One, Babylon was not Assyria. It did not resettle the depopulated areas with captives from other lands, as Assyria had done to Israel. Two, while the number of exiles was in the thousands and possibly the tens of thousands, there were still plenty of Jews in Judah, just as there had been plenty of Israelites left in Israel. (However, continued unrest within the province drove even more people out of Judah in the next couple of decades, usually to Egypt.) And three, the exiles were not all living in total captivity and misery, as the captive Israelites presumably had been a century before. Some lived comfortable lives in the city of Babylon, while others established new settlements in undeveloped lands throughout the Babylonian Empire. Jewish communities were able to stick together.

That meant that when Babylon itself collapsed only two generations later, falling to the Persians, the exiled Jews had not only retained their identities and traditions, but had expanded upon them and created the basis for what would become the Judaism that we know today. Past prophets and kings who had advocated for YHWH-only monotheism were retroactively declared righteous and truthful, and Judah’s fall was seen as a result of the population’s refusal to go along with their “reforms”. Judah’s salvation, therefore, required the implementation of those reforms.

And because the Persians had wisely allowed the exiled ruling class of Judah (now called “Yehud”) to return to the province and govern it, the YHWH-only exiles were now the arbiters of religious authority. They decided what the “right” religion was, and they decided who practiced it... and who did not. That led to conflict with the people of the former Kingdom of Israel when the returnees began to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem:

When the enemies of Judah and Benjamin heard that the exiles were building a temple for the Lord, the God of Israel, they ... said, “Let us help you build because, like you, we seek your God and have been sacrificing to him since the time of Esarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us here.” ...the heads of the families of [Judah] answered, “You have no part with us in building a temple to our God. We alone will build it for the Lord, the God of Israel, as King Cyrus, the king of Persia, commanded us.” 

The Samaritans were seen as foreigners and not real Jews, and they weren’t included in the new religious movement. The Bible goes on to portray them as villains who tried to stop the temple from being built, though the project succeeded despite their maneuverings. And they weren’t the only ones to be harshly reminded of their place:

Within the three days, all the men of Judah and Benjamin had gathered in Jerusalem. And on the twentieth day of the ninth month, all the people were sitting in the square before the house of God, greatly distressed by the occasion and because of the rain. Then Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, “You have been unfaithful; you have married foreign women, adding to Israel’s guilt. Now honor the Lord, the God of your ancestors, and do his will. Separate yourselves from the peoples around you and from your foreign wives.”

In the new version of Israel and Judah’s history, which would not be fully completed and assembled as the Bible we now have for centuries after the exile, the land’s woes had started with Solomon marrying foreign women and allowing them to seduce him into idolatry. That meant that men who repeated Solomon’s “sin” had to be brought in line. The archaeologist Israel Finkelstein believes that most of these “foreign” women were Edomites whose people had settled in the Beersheba valley and who posed an unacceptable risk of making their husbands and children accept religious pluralism. So they had to go. The days of the last Judean kings’ religious and social tolerance were over. Josiah and Hezekieh’s reforms had failed because their successors hadn’t bothered to enforce them, but the new ruling class made sure not to repeat that mistake.

Something else was over. After the Persian conquest and the return of the exiles, the monarchy headed by the House of David was no more.

the Davidite family played no [further] role in the history of Yehud. At the same time, the priesthood, which rose to a position of leadership in exile … maintained its prominence because of its ability to maintain group identity. Yehud [had] a dual system: …governors who were appointed by the Persian authority [and] priests. Lacking the institution of kingship, the Temple now became the center of identity of the people of Yehud.

The priests continued to produce literature to codify new religious rules and update the old stories to make their moral messages reflect the priests’ own beliefs. The Book of Leviticus was written in post-exilic times, Aaron became a major figure of Exodus, and Numbers was updated to emphasize the role of priests--specifically Levites--in society.

And by this point, with religious and social authority so completely centered in Jerusalem, their vanquished northern neighbors were nearly written out of the history of the land. Israel became an accidental breakaway that was once rightfully ruled by Judah; Israel’s kings were idolatrous and sinful; Israel’s people were now foreigners removed from YHWH. All of the accomplishments and successes of Israel over the centuries of its existence were stated to have come to nothing, and the nation utterly perished by YHWH’s command. Judah, though, had survived, and had to devote itself utterly to YHWH and his laws because of that.

As a result, the only “kings of Israel” that most people now know are the guys who likely never ruled Israel in the first place, namely Saul, David, and Solomon, the latter two of whom are the ancestors of the ruling house of Judah. Pour one out to the forgotten Kingdom of Israel.

⇚ previous day | next day ⇛

[poorquentyn]

Considering Spielberg is your (second?) favorite director, do you have any kind of ranking of his filmography? (If so, I hope you give Empire of the Sun the high marks it deserves. It's the quintessential Spielberg film! A boy's own adventure story that gets eaten alive by a war drama!)

*rubs hands together*

Ok, so, only ones where he was in the director’s chair; none of even those producer’s credits where you can feel his indelible stamp on the final product, so no Goonies, Gremlins, Poltergeist, or Back to the Future. Even then, I’m leaving out a lot, so honorable mention to Lincoln, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me if You Can, War of the Worlds, The Color Purple, Bridge of Spies, the two worthwhile Indy sequels…

10. Jurassic Park

Start with the gaze upon himself: Jurassic Park as a $63 million self-portrait released on the exact tipping point of his career. John Hammond and Steven Spielberg’s miracles are one and the same: one brings dinosaurs back, the other convinces us they’re real. One uses DNA, the other uses CGI. When the characters stare in wonder, they’re meant to mirror our own at the imagery; when Jeff Goldblum mutters “that crazy son of a bitch actually did it,” he’s speaking for an entire industry once again forced to up its game by a Spielberg Miracle.

Our protagonist, however, is shitty with computers, so Alan Grant terrifies a child the old fashioned Jaws way: with a prop (a raptor claw) and his imagination. Hammond whisks him away from that to a world where one can press a button and make yourself appear on screen, mirroring how Spielberg has done the same with Hammond as his craft has evolved from malfunctioning sharks to CG velociraptors. The heart of the film comes when this giddy wonder in the possibilities of “we have the technology” is soured and our author avatar is left disillusioned and afraid, eating ice cream in a room full of merch he’ll never sell (but Spielberg will), telling Laura Dern about how he started off with a flea circus. That, right there, is a metaphor for moviemaking, and specifically Spielberg’s brand of it: pulling invisible strings to make us think that impossible things are real, to make belief believable.

Above all, Jurassic Park is afraid for the kids. Another perfect metaphor for the meta-tastic whole comes when the T-Rex crashes down through the car roof, only glass separating him from devouring the children; their hands are desperately keeping the monster behind the rectangular transparent plane, on the screen, even as Spielberg/Hammond’s tech is so real it threatens to burst right through. “He left us!” one kid wails about the character representing the studio weasels. “But that’s not what I’m gonna do,” Alan Grant whispers, half in shadow, blue eyes ablaze with a promise he didn’t know he was going to make. He can’t keep it. There are monsters in the kitchen. Spielberg’s next movie, released only a handful of months later, is Schindler’s List.

9. Duel

Such a seam scratches the tape; rewind, start again. Where did this begin? On TV, in the backseat of a car, backing out of the garage. Duel is the world’s most accomplished demo reel, cinema stripped down to its bare minimum to let the director’s preposterous surplus of talent shine through. It’s about a man (named Mann, both appropriate and touchingly pretentious) who pisses off a truck driver we never see, who then chases our protagonist with lethal intent, and that’s it.

And that’s all Spielberg needs. What follows is the future, a steel-shod gauntlet of precise camera angles and insidious sound design that builds the bridge between the B-movie and the blockbuster. By the end you feel spent but sated, as if every possible creative drop has been wrung out of the slim scenario. It’s nothing more nor less than the finest Roadrunner & Coyote episode imaginable, to the extent that George Miller was clearly reaching back to it for inspiration again and again in Fury Road. Indeed, while Duel is set in the modern day, Spielberg needs no trickery to make the antagonistic truck look positively apocalyptic.

It’s such a vivid example of the medium’s unique possibilities that you have to stop to remember that it was made for TV. And then you stop to think that he was only 24, same age Welles was when he made Citizen Kane. Lofty comparison, I know, but Duel proves it’s not what your movie is about, but how it’s about it that counts. Spielberg made it look easy, and so everyone followed. The road goes ever on and on…

8. Munich

…until it doesn’t. No exit.

Munich is the culmination of Spielberg’s Blue Period, his great here-comes-another-bloody-century trepidation, punctured by Stanley Kubrick’s death and 9/11. The former gave birth to A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and the movies about closing doorways and agonized faces that followed. The latter palpably haunted Spielberg’s projects in its wake: even Minority Report, a script written years earlier and adapted from a decades-old story, was uncannily timely in its portrait of overreaching security and law enforcement built to placate (and control) a population reeling from loss. Then came the director’s outright Twin Towers Trilogy: The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich, addressing the event from different angles and through different filters. Of course, the intriguing and emotional setup in The Terminal’s opening minutes, framing post-9/11 bureaucracy as fluid chaos eating away at the state from within, quickly gives way to disappointing inanity. And while I maintain that War of the Worlds is absolutely perfect as an on-the-ground recreation of 9/11 as an alien attack for the first 50-60%, things go downhill fast once Tim Robbins shuffles onscreen.

Munich is the one that actually has the courage of its convictions, in large part because it’s about the director and protagonist alike breaking down in tears and admitting they don’t know what to believe anymore. Every set piece unfolds with a quiet chill and ends with you contemplating mortality. It’s a deliberately non-thrilling thriller. The ideology dissolves, not in neat bromides but in the day-to-day realities of ending human beings. Revenge fills you with fire, hot and bright, and then turns sour in your mouth. Narrative strands cross and recross, and the film’s inciting event, murder before the world’s watching eyes, sinks into that abyss known as Context.

By the end, you don’t even know what you’re fighting for anymore but your family, and you’re haunted by the knowledge that your kids will be fighting the same damn fight. The last thing to be corrupted, then, is the dinner table. Our protagonist begs to break bread with his handler, and the final word of the Blue Period is “no.” The camera tilts over to the Twin Towers, their loss contextualized as just another curl of a horrorshow helix, and the exorcism is complete. The anger and grief has largely vanished from Spielberg’s work since, as he’s settled into a comfortable John Ford mode. He left his questions here, unanswered.

7. Minority Report

If A.I. was Spielberg’s 2001, a millennia-spanning epitaph for humanity and a glimpse of what we leave behind, Minority Report (following the Kubrick trajectory) would be his Clockwork Orange, stepping down from the stars to gaze with cold horror on the things we do to one another with power. In the future, three young seers see crimes before they happen, enabling the state to lock people away for crimes they haven’t committed in the name of wiping out crime for good. Indeed, this fleet fluid fever dream makes explicit visual reference to Clockwork’s Ludovico scene (see above). In Spielberg’s memory machine, though, the image of an eye forcibly kept open by metal claws takes on a meaning beyond social and political analysis, though those are certainly still in there. It’s something more spiritual: Minority Report is about divine sight in a postmodern age.

Our protagonist’s rival went to seminary, his own men tell him they’re more priests than cops, but Tom Cruise’s John Anderton can’t bring himself to recognize the Spielberg Miracle at work here. The larger moral revelation of the “precogs,” the framing of their ability to see crimes before they happen as a techno-noir version of Biblical prophecy, is lost on Anderton because it can’t bring his son back. For him, that the future is known points to the futility of human existence. If there’s no free will, if we’re all doomed to perpetually fall in a fallen world, what’s the point?

And then one of the precogs asks him: “Do you see?” So begins the murder mystery that will see him accused of a future murder, that of the man who ostensibly killed his son. Anderton chooses mercy, only for the man to grab and pull the trigger because it’s all a setup to prevent Anderton from learning the truth about the precogs: they, too, are children stolen from their parents, all our characters trapped in a Möbius strip of loss they can only watch unfold, again and again, as if on the film’s countless screens. The images have been manipulated to hide the truth, the divine vision sullied by contact with the greedy exploitative systems of the Blue Period. But our detective finds the truth, and an existential triumph in making the right choice even if he can’t change the outcome. I’ve always taken the happy ending, a startling glimpse of green after a movie of blues and grays that look etched in stone, as just another vision. Closure is there, your family is there, in the future, in the past, just out of reach, smiling back at you. It hurts to look, but even as your eyes are torn out and replaced, you can’t look away.

6. Raiders of the Lost Ark

Well now, see, this one’s a tad criticism-proof by design, being as it is smelted and shaped to get under your defenses. “Disarming” seems like a strange choice of defining adjective for this most white-knuckled of action/adventure movies, but for all the staggering moviemaking skill on display, Raiders is ultimately a puppy shoving its nose under your hand. Given the slightest opportunity, it will make you love it. Fun is its religion, so deeply felt and communicated is the generous desire to entertain, rooted in the pulp serials that first lit the fire in its makers’ bellies to create.

And that fire again burns hot and bright, which is Raiders’ other secret magic trick: underneath all the cleverness, the jokes within jokes and setpieces spilling into ever more elaborate ones, the sense that every single moment was designed to make the rest of the genre look paltry and stingy by comparison, what happens at the end is nothing less than the very specifically Old Testament God stepping in to fry Nazis’ faces off. It’s the Ghostbusters trick of grounding helium-high hijinks in metaphysical forces that are not in any way kidding around. Our action hero, at the climax of the movie, is simply the one who (in an inverse of Minority Report) is smart enough to look away. So many Spielberg movies boil down to a shaft of divine light, and sometimes the light burns.

Then came the bizarre, hallucinogenic Temple of Doom and the sturdy, winning Last Crusade and that fourth one we don’t talk about, but they’re all in some way reactions to the nigh-flawless original. All you can do is go back, wearing the leather deep, Indy ageless, his eyes blazing shut against the light.

5. Empire of the Sun

Equally criticism-proof, but for the exact opposite reasons. This is the one no one can quite explain. Spielberg isn’t telling; he might not have any more idea than the rest of us. It shares certain themes with the rest of his work, especially regarding how children process the collapse and change of their world, but the similarities are strictly on paper. It feels different. I don’t what it…is. What it’s for. What it means. These sound like bad things, but they’re not. Empire of the Sun is utterly arresting, every bit as much as those canonized Spielberg classics of which anyone can explain the appeal. It’s just that it unfolds like a dream, and I’m left grasping after it in the same way. It might be one of the more accurate adaptations put to film in only that it feels so much more novelistic in its thrust and tone than most.

What can be pinned down is a series of images and sounds about the fall and occupation of Shanghai by Japan in WWII, told from the perspective of the naive sheltered son of a British emissary. Our hero is played by Christian Bale, in what might be my favorite child performance. To the extent that Empire of the Sun is about anything beyond the experience of watching it, it’s about his breakdown, and that’s what grounds the dreamlike style: we’re watching a bubble burst. Death and decay unfold out of the corner of his eye, like a memory he can’t quite bear to fully recall. His childhood vanishes when he shrieks surrender at anyone who will listen, trusting the rules to snap back into place and the world to make sense again, only for the collapse to continue unabated.

It’s made out of smoke and corners and quiet sadnesses. It’s runny, like an egg. I dream about it sometimes. You should watch it if you haven’t.

4. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

*harrumphs, wipes eyes* so um uh my name is Emmett, you see, and it begins with a….an ends with a….shut up.

That’s the point, though, of the movie: identification so strong that it almost kills you. E.T. is love, that’s all. All of it is here, from pure warm glow to heart stopping loss, swept up in imagery and sound that seem to positively hum with rich rueful feeling. Much has been made of how much of the movie is shot from a child’s POV, but everything about the movie operates on kid-logic. ET himself, for example: botanist or pet? Both. The connection he forges with Elliott swirls all such categories together. Elliott needs this, is yearning for love so badly, and even when it hurts, he’s more alive than he was before, with Dad gone.

But what makes E.T. different from, say, Star Wars and Harry Potter is that our hero only gets a taste of this other world, his fingertips brushing against magic as he passes it in the night. The gold-and-purple-brushed cinematography and the ecstatic, eternally swelling score sweep the profound and mundane together as one, bike rides and trick-or-treating and a psychic connection with an alien, yet the narrative eventually teases them apart like a sad parent forced to tell their kid that the dog is dead, and what “dead” means. ET returns to life, the definitive Spielberg Miracle…and then he leaves. Elliott will go home to his melancholy, frustrating life. School is still hard. His emotions still confuse him. Dad is still gone. The final shot of his face is not one of wonder, but maturation. It’s the moment Elliott grows up, and it’s the very definition of bittersweet.

What do you do, when you’ve loved and lost? You go home, you play with your toys, you send letters into Weird Things and Such SF Monthly, you make movies in your backyard, and you watch the skies….

….until they come back.

All of them.

3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I smiled just typing the words. I whispered them to myself, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This movie is a lil shining red ball dancing in my eyes; it is glee given form, a rainbow-colored pony ridden by a Willy Wonka-suited Care Bear on twenty tabs of LSD. The last half-hour, all glowing light and warm noise, earns the cliche: it makes you feel like a kid again, in the best possible way. After a movie’s buildup of wonder and terror, the sight and sound of a colossal lit-up mothership cheerfully BWAMMing out a melody is so cathartic that it’s impossible to sit still.

As with Raiders, though, it’s worth digging into the movie’s layers to understand where that light is coming from, and what it costs you to look at it. Close Encounters is a movie about communication, of course, from the alien lights to the translator forever accompanying Francois Truffaut (a filmmaker who knows a thing or two about capturing kid-logic on screen). It’s a movie about the fragility of family life in the face of the unknown, hence that devastating scene around the dinner table: something’s wrong with Dad, a subject near and dear to the director’s heart.

But above all else, it’s a religious movie, the religious movie. It’s about rushing upwards, and leaving all else behind. Roy Neary sees a divine light in the sky, and can’t reconcile it with the life he was living. He obsessively recreates his vision in idols, chases it across the country, driving his wife and children away in favor of his fellow prophets: here are my mother and my brothers. And the sting in that gorgeous symphonic ending’s tail is that it’s so good that Roy sheds this mortal coil to join them in the heavens. Spielberg has said that if he made it now, he wouldn’t have let  Roy get on that ship. And when you look at E.T. or the movies he made from Schindler forward, it’s clear why: in joining the interstellar flock, the man-child left his family to the wolves. By the time Roy/Eliot came home, his skin had sagged, his hair had gone white, and his children were waiting for him with eyes that cut.

And what do their movies look like?

2. A.I. Artificial Intelligence

The ultimate deconstructed fairytale; a honeyvelvetacid-glazed gaze into a heart-shaped abyss; Kubrick a darkwinged angel looming over ET’s crib, brushing a final tear away from his metallic eye…

So does Steven Spielberg, our flesh and blood Peter Pan, grow old and tell the children he lied. The monster is inside the house, inside your head, and inside the stories. At the core is a child’s innocent love for his mother…programmed in him, by her, a debt she cannot and will not repay. “His love is real, but he is not.” Pinocchio but for robots, A.I. takes its sci-fi trappings as a launching pad for a guiding philosophical question: “if a robot could genuinely love a human, what responsibility would that person hold towards that mecha in return?” The boardroom exec who poses that question pauses, almost bashful to ask the next one in a room full of people who treat the abuse of robots like a joke or a PowerPoint presentation, and then proceeds: “it’s a moral question, isn’t it?”

It is indeed, and for David’s adoptive family, the answer is none. He is abandoned, and chases his Blue Fairy and his happy ending across the apocalypse. As his fellow robots are torn apart to the cheers of the crowd in front of him, as his entire environment upends his hardwired fairytale logic into a sleazy neon-and-smoke nightmare, as his companion Gigolo Joe warns him presciently that “they made us too smart, too quick, and too many…they hate us because they know that when they’re gone, all that will be left is us,” David keeps looking for the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real boy so Mommy will love him again. He has no choice. His brain literally will not let him do otherwise. There is no will to power here, no core he can call upon to upend his puppet masters’ plan and prove himself Human After All. All he has is love, and they’ve used it to enslave him: at journey’s end, he finds his maker, who reveals that everything post-abandonment was staged to test if his love held. It did, and as such that love is now a corporate-approved field-tested quality-assured Feature that can be passed onto the hungry customer. This is not a Hero’s Journey, because you are not a person. You are a thing, and this is a product launch. David sees a dozen faces like his, stretched on a rack and ready. There is a row of boxes. They have David’s silhouette on them. All of a sudden, one starts to rattle and shake…

In the face of this existential horror (“my brain is falling out”) David promptly chooses suicide, whispering “Mommy” as he jumps from the statue he saw in his first moments. Down in the void, he finds the Blue Fairy and prays to her for millennia, but she cannot answer his eternal plea. She is a statue. An image, nothing more. She crumbles into a thousand pieces in his arms. He finds his mother, too. She is a fake, a digital mirage. Future robots create a simulacrum of her, as David himself was a simulacrum to replace her comatose son, designed in the image of his creator’s dead son…and of course, he cannot tell the difference. He gets his happy ending, on the surface. Underneath, what’s actually happening is that he’s an orphan who will never grow up being shown a movie and told everything is going to be all right. He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts…

…but it doesn’t matter how much he wants it, that is not his mother and his mother never loved him. We know these things even if he doesn’t. He claps because he believes in fairies, forever, eyes and smile frozen, waiting for them to appear, any second now. This is Spielberg showing you a brain on Spielberg. David followed Story over the waterfall’s edge, and now has only time’s vasty deep into which to shout “I love you” and convince himself the echoes are his make-believe savior and his long-dead mom. There is only the water that swallowed up Manhattan, and then the world, and him with it…

Wait.

There’s something in the water.

1. Jaws

To borrow from Alien, the closest thing it has to a peer: Jaws’ structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. You could just call it the perfect movie and walk away, except that if you try the floor tilts up beneath you and down you go into the mouth, the most abyssal maw in imagination’s history, and those black eyes roll over to white and you beg for more.

Run down the pedestals at the Movie Museum: Citizen Kane wants you to breathe in a life. Rashomon wants you to question how storytelling works and what Truth actually is, or if it exists at all. Jaws wants to eat you. Not the characters, you. That’s what Spielberg figured out how to do, and the entire industry reshaped itself around copying him: tonal immersion so absolute that he could make the audience feel anything he wanted, on a dime. Hitchcock played your spine like the devil on a fiddle; Spielberg is a rainbow-wigged mad scientist strapping you on a rocket to the sun. He created his own genre, and it’s the one that still dominates the medium in every corner of the globe. With a shark. A shark that, as a prop, did not fucking work.

Details? How do you pull one strand out of a web like this one? I can only say “perfect” so many times, but I mean it. Shot for shot, line by line, beat by beat. Every domino falls. The calm moments and the funny ones and the frantic blood-soaked ones, everything is earned. As with Raiders, the highest compliment I can pay is that other movies taste like shit for a month afterwards. When I hear the word “craftsmanship” I do not think of cars or cabinets, I think of Jaws. It feels hewn.

The numbers came later. The myth, the legend, the pale imitations, the bad sequels, the ripple effects, all secondary. What Jaws is, is sensation. It cannot have been made, surely, it hatched. It was never launched. It will never fall. Smile, you son of a–

[robertbassweb]

How to Manifest a New Job Using the Law of Attraction

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How to Manifest a New Job

How to manifest a new job is a question that many people ask each and every day.

Looking for a new job shows there is little or no satisfaction with the actual circumstances and sometimes we feel we need to start “a new life on a new town”.

But we have to be aware if the need of a new job is due to a lack of personal satisfaction, a poor vision of the future or simply the need to hide away.

Why is it important? Because the Law of Attraction asks you to thank what you have as a first step. Yes, you have to be thankful for your actual job.

If you do not have any, things become easier.

    Manifest Job Meditation

Even you have a job or not, the first step on how to manifest a new job is practicing gratitude.

Gratitude for your actual job (if you have one), gratitude for your personal skills, gratitude for your abilities and for what you can give through a job.

Yes, we need to set an intention and we have to focus on what we can give to other people through our job.  How can we help an organization, our coworkers and the customers?

That way we start vibrating at the right frequency.  Remember, what you give is what you receive.

So doing this, you start manifesting a new job with the right foot.

    Manifestation Is All About Your Energy

The meaning of materializing is to acquire the energy of what it is that you desire to really feel, and afterwards being, living and counting on that experience so that you can allow that experience to become your reality.

The crucial to manifesting is to really feel the energy of what you intend to experience.

The Universe is always bringing you experiences that match your power– whether you are mindful of it or not.

When you’re sending out low-vibe power right into deep space, you’ll draw in negative outcomes.

But when you send out high-vibe energy right into the Cosmos, you’ll draw in the outcomes you prefer.

Without exception, the World will certainly supply you the individuals, experiences, as well as results that match your vibrational regularity.

So it is essential to be familiar with your power as well as assumed in all times so you can remain aligned with the Cosmos.

    How to Manifest a Job Quickly

With all that being said, there is a 5 step technique to manifest a new job I priorize.

It is really powerful if you apply it correctly.  I said before that the first thing needed is the right sense of gratitude, the right intention and the right vibration.

In this way you will begin to put into practice the law of attraction properly aligned.

Your mental images will be in perfect harmony with your feelings, sensations, intentions and desires, which makes you vibrate at the appropriate frequency for your manifestation.

How to manifest a new job is a question of control of your senses, your thoughts and your emotions, like any other type of manifestation.

Now, you must remember that trying to manifest something starting from the feeling of lack is the worst thing you can do.That is why it is so important to establish a clear intention of what you can contribute to your manifestation and generate that feeling of gratitude and joy for what you are about to do.

It is not about fooling the Universe or worse, fooling ourselves.

You must be sincere and honest with yourself. It is understood that you want a new job to improve your income, your personal satisfaction and your lifestyle.

But you know well that this will be given in addition. Your goal is happiness so, from now on, create that happiness in advance.

    How To Manifest A New Job Using These 5 Simple Steps

Now you are ready to start your manifestation labour.

Everything is in the right place.  You feel the joy, you imagine all the good things you can offer to your new job and you are ready to start.

So here are the 5 steps to use on how to manifest a new job.

  Decide what you desire

The initial step to manifest your dream job is deciding what you want.

It’s difficult to reach your goal if you do not have one. Start with your ” why. ” Why do you intend to make a career change?

What is it concerning your existing job that you don’t like? Shift your viewpoint as well as open yourself approximately new possibilities.

Brainstorm options so you can locate the intersection of what you appreciate as well as are excellent at.

This might be an excellent time to discover an advisor or coach to support you and hold you answerable.

Think of what you would certainly like your life to be like five or 10 years into the future.

Test out professions by offering, signing up with a board, or beginning a side hustle.

When you have actually determined your goal, compose it down, and share it with the individuals close to you.

There is a solid correlation between pronouncing our goals and also completing them.

  Think extra deliberately

Manifesting your dream work making use of the Law of Attraction needs deliberate thought.

As opposed to just responding to your current situation, become more purposeful regarding what you think and also really feel.

Once you’ve determined your goal, technique envisioning how you’ll really feel when you’ve reached it.

For instance, if your dream job is to end up being an expert writer, imagine just how it will feel to finish that initial manuscript, authorize your very first publication offer or make the New york city Times bestseller listing.

These positive ideas will certainly aid you to create your future instead than stay embeded the here and now.

  Emphasis on the future

To discover your dream task, you ‘ll need to concentrate on what you desire instead than what you don’t want.

When you dread your work life, it’s simple to be taken in with ideas like, “I actually dislike my job, ” “Why am I wasting my time at this firm? ” or “I actually wish to leave this harmful work setting.”

By concentrating on what you do not desire, you are actually enhancing your present circumstance.

Instead, focus on your ultimate goal. Change those negative photos with positive ones like, “I like my work, ” “I ‘m enjoying every minute at this company, ” or “I like working in such a supportive work setting.”

If you can move your thinking, you will be much more likely to manifest the future you prefer.

  Construct a scene

A short mini-scene that might only take place if you’ve obtained your brand-new task.

You might jump out ahead into the future, and claim that you have actually been called by the employer to train the brand-new recruits since your work is remarkable.

As well as he wants more employees like you.

Or you could see on your own in your chair, enjoying yourself while doing what you enjoy. Maintain the scene brief so you don’t obtain shed in thought.

Either rest or relax, close your eyes, take a breath deep, luxurious breaths, enabling your body to relax.

Do it over and also over, on a loop, up until it begins to really feel actual.

Really feel the emotions, consist of all the senses you can, sight, odor, sound, taste, feel. Whatever relates to your scene.

Replay the scene till it starts to really feel so actual. You’ll know you’ve done this properly, when you appear of it as well as are shocked to find yourself still where you were physically.

  Release

When you appear of it, allow go. You have actually done your component.

Let it go and enable the seed you have grown to take origin as well as expand in its very own method, as well as its very own time.

This is vital. It doesn’t matter exactly how much time passes. Time as well as room are nothing to the imagination.

So there ya go. Currently you understand exactly how to materialize a brand-new job.

    Law of attraction job success stories

Back then when I dabbled in freelance screenwriting, I keep in mind someday, after an extended period of writing nothing,

I was unexpectedly gotten rid of with the desire to create. I had no concept what I was misting likely to blog about.

Only that it would certainly be something dark, abrasive, single place, marginal cast.

I stood there. Sure I really felt the suggestion take a hold of me. Indeed I really felt the enjoyment of having actually written something like that.

Moments later, I got a phone call from a customer, who had actually gotten my number off a person else who really did not also like my job.

Her words to me were “I need something dark, sandy, one area, just 3 personalities.”

Nearly exactly what I had claimed! Plus, the customer liked the ended up work.

It can be that very easy. As very easy as enjoying your wish when it turns up, knowing it’s done. I have had numerous experiences where I produced a brand-new gig on the area, or switched over tasks.

So you can trust me on this. I understand what I’m speaking about. Often it’s split second. Various other times it takes “time.” Yet one thing is specific whenever, this jobs.

Not real. I most certainly did. Keep in mind; I let the concept take a hold of my mind.

In my mind’s eye, I was already writing. I was delighting in the feeling of being associated with such a project.

I did all that with MY CREATIVITY.

Now you know how to manifest a new job using the Law of Attraction.  Go get it now!

    How to Manifest a New Job FAQ

How to manifest a new job with the Law of Attraction?

Just how To Use The Law Of Attraction In Your Job Browse Believe favorably.

Deep down favorably not simply externally. …

Rely on you. Do not allow others bring you down. …

Align what you think and also what you do to what you want. …

Know you are going to get a work. …

List what your perfect job is. …

Visualize doing that task. …

Do not allow yourself to end up being dissuaded.

Can you actually show up anything you desire?

” The simplest means to show up anything is to be clear about what you desire. Don’t offer the universe combined signals … as well as act. Pursuing your goals is essential.”

You ought to additionally stay receptive. Ask the universe wherefore you desire and also watch out for signs of accomplishment or success.

Just how do I ask the universe for a work?

7 Actions You Definitely MUST Take Whenever You Ask The Universe For Something

Action 1– Make Sure, Be Specific. …

Step 2– Ask And Let It Go. …

Action 3– Be Patient. …

Step 4– Expect Indicators. …

Action 5– Trust That Deep Space Knows Ideal. …

Step 6– Send Reminders Now And Then. …

Action 7– Be Thankful.

    Resources:

If you are serious about the Law of Attraction  and you want to manifest a better life of yours, download our free manifestation guide.

After reading the guide, I will send you information and exercises I never share on public.

Download Visualization for Manifestation Free Guide

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